00:00:06 ◼ ► It's like a Woody Allen line. I know we're not supposed to talk about Woody Allen anymore,
00:00:17 ◼ ► but Woody Allen. I went back to being honest. Well, you know what? Yeah, exactly. There's
00:00:39 ◼ ► about, you know, hey, what do you know? We've got his legacy. We're allowed to music and
00:00:45 ◼ ► we still listen to his music. Yeah, exactly. Can you still play Michael Jackson? That's
00:00:52 ◼ ► way to phrase it. Like, can you personally justify it? You know, I think that's the question
00:00:58 ◼ ► Right. I was out with friends over the weekend and we were at an establishment and you know,
00:01:03 ◼ ► they were playing Michael Jackson music. I didn't even really notice it because Michael
00:01:08 ◼ ► Jackson music to me is just one of the, you know, you just hear it all the time. I wasn't
00:01:17 ◼ ► want a restaurant, do you play Michael Jackson music? If you know, you just don't want to
00:02:17 ◼ ► And then there's, you know, yeah, like let's say someone like Kevin Spacey, you know, who's it was so
00:02:22 ◼ ► The allegations against him were so significant and compelling that they literally took a movie
00:02:35 ◼ ► Mean it was like it it didn't have the name wasn't very evocative of the subject matter
00:02:41 ◼ ► so I can't recall. But the movie was effectively in the can and was only a few weeks out from
00:02:47 ◼ ► coming out and they re-shot the movie with a new actor, Christopher Plummer, in the role.
00:02:54 ◼ ► Which is remarkable. And I remember watching the movie, which is a spoiler. Well, I guess because
00:03:03 ◼ ► they took him out of the movie, I didn't face any sort of moral conundrum over whether to watch the
00:03:07 ◼ ► the movie. So I guess that's not a spoiler, but I watched the movie and it was immersive enough
00:03:14 ◼ ► because Ridley Scott is super, super talented. One of my all time favorite directors that I,
00:03:20 ◼ ► I tried to watch thinking, can I tell that this was reshot without plumber? Like everything,
00:03:27 ◼ ► you know, like single shots of plumber as opposed to two shots with him and other characters.
00:03:51 ◼ ► And how many of them are it's a one-shot on his character cut to the opposite angle on the other characters
00:04:02 ◼ ► and use, you know, and then I see what you're saying. If you keep your eye open for that and
00:04:11 ◼ ► you kind of know what that's like. If you try to just edit a conversation where there's,
00:04:16 ◼ ► let's say three shots, there's one with both characters, one on Michael or Matthew and one on
00:04:22 ◼ ► John and then you intercut between those three shots. But I got lost. The movie was good
00:04:40 ◼ ► one shot, A shot, B shot. I think there should have been more of a master shot, but eventually
00:05:34 ◼ ► from the art. And so like, I have no problem watching Kevin Spacey movies, but I also understand
00:05:41 ◼ ► they're not making new Kevin Spacey movies. I don't have a problem listening to Michael Jackson
00:05:46 ◼ ► music, but yeah. I don't think there's any hard fast rule for me. I mean, I think a large part
00:05:53 ◼ ► of it for me is sort of, you know, I listen to the way people think about it and the way that they
00:05:58 ◼ ► talk about it and how it feels to them. And I try to always work from that angle. And I know
00:06:04 ◼ ► it's weird because like the older I get, and I don't think this is purely just age, but
00:06:10 ◼ ► it is certainly an experience based thing. But the older I get, the less likely I am to just
00:06:16 ◼ ► say things. You know, you know what I mean? Right? Like you get you just become more cognizant of
00:06:21 ◼ ► powers the wrong word. You know, we do have some sort of small power in the in the platform that
00:06:28 ◼ ► we you know, that we have in terms of media or whatever the case may be. But even just as a
00:06:33 ◼ ► person on a person to person basis, you have some sort of power based on like your reputation or,
00:06:43 ◼ ► And I just think that as I get older, I realized that when I was younger, I was really full of
00:06:49 ◼ ► shit. And, you know, it's just like, you know, we're all we're all full of it to some degree,
00:06:53 ◼ ► because we're figuring it out as we go. You know, sometimes we're saying things about what we
00:06:57 ◼ ► believe, and we're figuring out what we believe as we're saying it, you know, it's not like we've
00:07:02 ◼ ► spent hours pondering this thing and have like a concise opinion on every matter, right? We're all
00:07:07 ◼ ► figuring things out as we go. I just figure I just find out like as I'm older, the more I like,
00:07:12 ◼ ► instead of taking a hard fast, you know, opinion on things, or even making sure that I have all of
00:07:17 ◼ ► these opinions ready, I just listen more and talk less about those things, you know, and that I
00:07:22 ◼ ► think is one of those topics that I still am doing a lot of that. I just don't know. You know, I don't
00:07:27 ◼ ► know, I don't have any sort of hard fast rule. I think there are some things that I still enjoy
00:07:31 ◼ ► personally, but that I would never go like, Oh, I still watch this. You should too, you know,
00:07:43 ◼ ► I don't want to get in trouble. There's a part of me that thinks the whole, the best thing going on
00:07:53 ◼ ► to me is the cultural change at a very deep level across multiple industries. And it's spreading like
00:08:00 ◼ ► wildfire to every industry, which is that when people do bad things to others, the people
00:08:08 ◼ ► who had the bad things done to them should be have a venue to speak up, report it, have
00:08:14 ◼ ► it dealt with in a fair way. And, you know, almost all of these things have been it the
00:08:29 ◼ ► Bad behavior is bad behavior and should be punished. But the structural problem is that
00:08:33 ◼ ► in all of these industries, there was so much set up to keep people from reporting it. And
00:08:47 ◼ ► as to send a message to other people who suffered similar harassment or abuse or whatever it
00:09:01 ◼ ► I got them finished or maybe the dam has, you know, severely cracked and there's spouts
00:09:06 ◼ ► of water coming out and it's inevitable that the rest of it's going to come down. And I
00:09:10 ◼ ► think that's a good thing. I feel like sometimes people, you know, the, the sort of want to
00:09:22 ◼ ► person telling you that trying to inject themselves into the story of where's they really had
00:09:27 ◼ ► no no part in it. You know, but virtue signaling right to some degree. Yeah. Right. Like if
00:09:35 ◼ ► you don't want to watch Woody Allen movies, that's, you know, to me, that's, that's the
00:09:42 ◼ ► to enjoy Woody Allen movies or Michael Jackson music or Kevin Spacey movies or what have
00:09:46 ◼ ► you, but certainly as a personal choice, it might be. Yeah, I think that's valid. Yeah.
00:09:52 ◼ ► mean, I don't feel that imposing your worldview on other people is ever the right way to go. But
00:09:59 ◼ ► I think certainly in terms of moral or ethical issues, it's in fact the worst thing you could do.
00:10:13 ◼ ► change of lens for that person. So, if you're like, "Oh, hey, here, let me explain why I don't. Let
00:10:18 ◼ ► me kind of give you my POV on this and let me explain why it's problematic or why I have a
00:10:24 ◼ ► personal issue with it or my personal connection or whatever." And that is far more likely, I think,
00:10:30 ◼ ► to end up with a scenario where you have somebody going, "You know what? My lens is a different
00:10:37 ◼ ► color now." Or it's shifted in its angle or viewpoint rather than some sort of thing where
00:10:41 ◼ ► you're shaming somebody because I think you end up having, it ends up having a lot of negative effect.
00:10:47 ◼ ► and while you may cauterize the problem in the near term, it doesn't cure the infection or whatever,
00:10:59 ◼ ► All the Money in the World. That was the Ridley Scott film where they raced Kevin Spacey and
00:11:09 ◼ ► Yeah, that's actually not a very good title, in my opinion. A little generic. Almost sounds like
00:11:22 ◼ ► Theme song by Ariana Grande. How many people could you trick into believing that they saw
00:11:42 ◼ ► that. Oh my God. I hope there's somebody from like Eon Productions who's listening, who
00:12:05 ◼ ► crazy. I certainly never heard of it in 1989 or 1989. I forget when I heard of it though.
00:12:21 ◼ ► I forget what it was called. Mosaic? Mosaic. That's it. Mosaic. So I remember Mosaic like 1.0.
00:13:03 ◼ ► a good thing I wasn't, I was very young at the time, so maybe I'd be forgiven. But I would have
00:13:12 ◼ ► Where I thought that the web, I thought it was an interesting demo. This is in the mosaic era,
00:13:21 ◼ ► but I was like, but it was so slow that I was like, who the hell would ever use this? Because
00:13:27 ◼ ► everything I was doing on the internet was all terminal based. You know, you would open up a
00:13:45 ◼ ► We're even if you had a clean connection and you if you were a good typist, you could probably out type the buffer
00:13:53 ◼ ► Everything you did was fast and that to me was the most important thing. I was you know
00:14:09 ◼ ► Internetting for lack of a better right because it was fast and it just seemed like this is what
00:14:15 ◼ ► And it was also what the internet at the time was was built for it was built for these pure text connections
00:14:21 ◼ ► But then you could like log in and the longest part was just waiting for the modem to connect
00:14:29 ◼ ► You could see everything that was new and then you could just sort of down arrow right arrow return
00:14:57 ◼ ► We're gonna go back and render the other 50% didn't wasn't that what we did with we had like was it?
00:15:12 ◼ ► The I don't want to go on a long sidetrack on it, but the backstory of PNG is that Eunice?
00:15:23 ◼ ► Was gonna say UNICEF, but that's the charity, but yeah, I don't know it was a company that held a pound my data
00:15:47 ◼ ► The various web browsers used it because it was very efficient for certain images that JPEG wasn't for
00:15:58 ◼ ► They they had a very strong interest in enforcing the patent before it expired and it was such an old thing that it was
00:16:05 ◼ ► It it was expiring soon and so ping was sort of a let's save the internet and come up with a replacement for ping that
00:18:11 ◼ ► the hosts, you know, very straightforwardly asked me, I can't, I'm gonna even forget what
00:18:17 ◼ ► it was, but I think it was something so simple, like, HTTP or URL or something, you know,
00:18:35 ◼ ► what it is. But it was so funny to me later, especially because I was like, a room full
00:18:40 ◼ ► of nerds, I mean, uber nerds who came to a, you know, a faux computer show, a comedy about
00:18:47 ◼ ► a show that never existed in the 80s, or in the early 90s. And I gave them the wrong answer. But
00:18:54 ◼ ► it was it was a lot. It was correct me if I was dying. It's like my nightmare, you know, you're
00:18:59 ◼ ► in front of a highly technical audience, and you're supposed to, you know, have some sort of
00:19:02 ◼ ► acumen and you somebody asks you a fairly simple question in your mind just goes, whoop. It's the
00:20:06 ◼ ► Jared: Classic. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a certainly a world where everybody was trying to
00:20:17 ◼ ► understand and the only, the only movie from the era that even got it remotely right was
00:20:24 ◼ ► essentially made to be a comedy, which is Hackers. I mean, I feel that they just got so much right
00:20:28 ◼ ► with that movie. And it was not really meant to be a serious movie at all. And in fact,
00:20:33 ◼ ► got a lot wrong. But like the ethos was, wait, hackers or sneakers? Hackers? No, no sneakers,
00:20:38 ◼ ► for sure. Like that era was was a little bit before that. But I, I think in terms of like the
00:20:44 ◼ ► the emergence of the web as a populist enterprise, not a thing for nerds or enterprise, because
00:20:50 ◼ ► technically sneakers is about an enterprise, you know, skunkworks project, right? It's it's not
00:20:56 ◼ ► about users or consumers. And I think that the first like, big for me, the best big like, movie
00:21:28 ◼ ► And so they made the film's official website look as though it were like a GeoCities website
00:21:48 ◼ ► was a debabilizer, which was like the ultimate way to crush every possible bit out of a GIF
00:23:24 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. I really wanted but completely spoiler free that I think I'll put this out into the universe but I really feel it is one of the first I mean it's certainly one of the first superhero movies but and certainly the highest grossing movie ever to examine to sort of put on screen.
00:23:42 ◼ ► And I speak about this from a distance, but have read and listened to talk to other people about it. But it sort of puts a, the female internal life onto the screen in a way that is very, very interesting. It's a very emotionally driven superhero movie that is not about, you know, how a person's physicality can affect the world, but instead how they feel and think, you know, and putting that on screen in a way that is not
00:24:38 ◼ ► Why don't I take that perfect segue of the 30th anniversary of the web and tell you about
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00:25:09 ◼ ► I think it's catching up to people. I think we've all figured out that for an awful lot
00:25:13 ◼ ► of stuff, you shouldn't be thinking that all you need is an app. You need a website. And
00:25:18 ◼ ► I'll tell you what, the best way to make a website, especially if you're not an expert.
00:25:23 ◼ ► But even if you are an expert, even if you are somebody who remembers what I was talking
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00:26:40 ◼ ► do it himself. It's so great. What you need to remember, you can just go there and start building
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00:26:51 ◼ ► And when you do pay, remember this code talk show just T A L K S H O W and you get 10% off and you
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00:27:20 ◼ ► I've got a lot of other stuff to talk about. I was thinking I would save the Disney stuff
00:27:43 ◼ ► Let's run through some news. So what else do we have here? WWDC dates were announced earlier
00:27:48 ◼ ► today. We're recording on Thursday, March 14th. No surprises at all. June seven or three to seven.
00:27:55 ◼ ► A lottery for tickets that starts today runs for a week. A little bit shorter window this time,
00:28:04 ◼ ► but by like one day or something. Yeah. It's like last, not too much last year. I keep track of
00:28:10 ◼ ► of this last year they announced today they announced on March 13th and it didn't start
00:28:15 ◼ ► till June 4th and I think there was a little bit more of a window for signups for for lottery.
00:28:21 ◼ ► I think what they've figured out is that people who want to go most of them sign up are probably
00:28:32 ◼ ► much time right right like there's other people a little bit there's other people who I guess
00:28:50 ◼ ► I will tell you, just speaking from personal experience, sometimes getting clearance for
00:28:53 ◼ ► these things is an effort. And so why would you do that if you don't know if you can even
00:29:00 ◼ ► And I get it, they are non-transferable. It's not like you've got a golden ticket you can
00:29:18 ◼ ► know. Uh, I enjoyed that part last year. Uh, they had a, uh, I spent more time inside last
00:29:38 ◼ ► you know, they, they also had a new fangled like RFID type entrance thing where you would
00:30:08 ◼ ► you do those over the Wi Fi for for obvious reasons, even though they have very good Wi
00:30:22 ◼ ► and they have Ethernet cords and Thunderbolt cords and probably USB-C cords for whatever
00:30:28 ◼ ► MacBook you have. And they also had the AR area. Do you remember this? Remember they had a couple
00:30:35 ◼ ► of games last year? That's right. You know, and unsurprisingly, the students were very interested
00:30:42 ◼ ► in those AR games. And they were also very good at them. Remember there was one where it was like,
00:30:46 ◼ ► I think it was like Jenga blocks effectively, and you had like a virtual like slingshot on your
00:30:51 ◼ ► phone and your goal was to knock over, sort of like a game of ping pong, two people across
00:31:17 ◼ ► before. They were actually like the Apple people who were staffing the table. They saw him playing
00:31:24 ◼ ► and they ran to get one of the other staffers who I guess was the best among their staff.
00:31:31 ◼ ► Like you got to see this kid. It was all very fun, but the kids definitely bring up the energy level.
00:31:38 ◼ ► They do. And I think it's also a good sort of concession to the fact that if you're going to
00:31:45 ◼ ► invite a chunk of the development audience to come and sort of get them excited about this stuff.
00:31:52 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah. So, it's good. They've regularized everything from the announcement date to the week
00:32:06 ◼ ► public filings for public spaces in San Jose where, I think it actually even said Apple,
00:32:13 ◼ ► which I guess is a no-no, but it's the worst-kept secret in Apple, on Apple's annual calendar,
00:32:29 ◼ ► Ted, I think that a large portion of the reason they keep it secret is that just, you know,
00:32:36 ◼ ► things can change, right? And then everybody's like trying to read into the change, but—
00:33:09 ◼ ► And unless they are that, you know, a hundred percent convinced that there'll be at least
00:33:24 ◼ ► it, but we're not going to be able to announce iOS 13 on June 3rd. We can't, you know, X,
00:33:29 ◼ ► Y, just something's not right. Something will not be ready. They would, they would postpone
00:33:32 ◼ ► WWDC, you know, there was that one year, like way back, like 2006 or 2005 or something where
00:33:38 ◼ ► they did cancel or postpone it to like August or something, which was very strange. But
00:35:36 ◼ ► I would love it. I would love it. That'd be amazing. Like CNN is there going expecting the
00:35:43 ◼ ► big corporate news and they're like, wait, what API what? Right. In theory, that would be, you know,
00:35:50 ◼ ► the way to do a developer conference keynote, you know, the I always say that's the best way to
00:35:58 ◼ ► That's right. You know, it would work for the audience. It would not work for the CNNs of the
00:36:05 ◼ ► world. Yeah. I mean, and then, you know, the thing is, yes, there's a different sort of, like, the,
00:36:13 ◼ ► I don't know, inside, inside baseball on some of this stuff, which you well know, but some audience
00:36:18 ◼ ► members might not know is that they kind of consolidated press for a lot of their events.
00:36:23 ◼ ► So a lot of these events, WWDC has always, to some degree, been that way, because it's the one,
00:36:27 ◼ ► it's one thing, right? It only happens one place always does. But a lot of their events, they've
00:36:31 ◼ ► taken a lot of international press and people that would have normally maybe had their own events in
00:36:36 ◼ ► their own cities, hosted in an Apple store, or, or hosted, you know, kind of tell it, tell it,
00:36:42 ◼ ► telegraphed or whatever. What do you call it? Oh, my gosh, you know, conference, teleconference,
00:36:48 ◼ ► Dan, or whatever. They brought them all in person, which is great. You know, I think that's fine.
00:36:52 ◼ ► And why shouldn't people around the world, Apple's a global enterprise, iPhone goes on sale in every country right away. Why shouldn't they have all these international press there. But it certainly has changed the mix a little bit and press and certainly of course, in this new era of Apple, the mix of press has changed significantly.
00:37:19 ◼ ► I mean, you and I follow a lot of these folks and we are these folks to some degree, you
00:37:32 ◼ ► Like people around the world are sort of like taking the numbers, even, you know, my staff,
00:37:38 ◼ ► reporters. They're taking those numbers, comparing them against previous numbers, writing analysis of
00:37:42 ◼ ► that, okay, here's the growth curve, and you know, etc, etc. Right. But the people in this audience
00:37:47 ◼ ► are like, hey, give us the stuff, man. Like, you know, they start to get excited the moment they
00:37:51 ◼ ► see something announced on stage that they see that they could maybe integrate, take advantage
00:37:55 ◼ ► of, you know, or sort of build, you know, something with that's their, that's their thing. So it's an
00:38:01 ◼ ► interesting audience. I always like it, I enjoy it. It's a different energy than, say, an iPhone
00:38:06 ◼ ► um pure press event right sure exactly um yeah if they telegraphed the thing it would that would
00:38:14 ◼ ► take them right back to like the 2400 baud modem era telegraphed it yes that would do it did it did
00:38:23 ◼ ► yeah maybe you should have flown from asia over to galibornia because if you don't know morse code
00:38:30 ◼ ► i'm sorry all of our remotes are via teletype this year so no i've told this story on the show
00:38:34 ◼ ► before, but last year, it must have been the phone announcement because it was in the Steve
00:38:40 ◼ ► Jobs Theater and they supplied the foreign, I don't know how many languages, but it's certainly
00:38:48 ◼ ► at least Chinese, I think, maybe Japanese too. But a couple of the foreign language people got
00:38:55 ◼ ► little in-ear pieces like you get it like the UN. And so they were sitting live in the Steve Jobs
00:39:04 ◼ ► theater, but they were getting a live translation of what was being said on stage. And there was
00:39:09 ◼ ► some sort of, I don't know if it was a malfunction or just it, they were poorly set up, but they were
00:39:14 ◼ ► turned up too loud and it was too loud to be in their ears. And so they took them out and I don't
00:39:21 ◼ ► blame them. I wouldn't put something too loud in my ears, but they took them out and it was loud
00:39:25 ◼ ► enough that they could hear it just holding next to their ear. But it also meant that while you
00:39:29 ◼ ► were sitting in the audience, you heard these this like, why do I hear like electronic Chinese
00:39:35 ◼ ► language? What do who's doing this? And then, like you turn around, it'd be like, I thought it was
00:39:39 ◼ ► over my left shoulder, and then all of a sudden, it's over my right shoulder. And I'm like,
00:39:42 ◼ ► what the hell is going on? I really thought somebody was doing like a FaceTime call. And
00:39:45 ◼ ► I thought it was very rude turned out. It wasn't. It wasn't rudeness at all. It was just like a
00:39:50 ◼ ► technical thing. But it really it emphasized, right? Just how many of the members of the press
00:39:55 ◼ ► really are from around the world at these events. And that did not used to be the case.
00:40:00 ◼ ► Jared: That's true. And then one of the byproducts of people being around the world is that they are
00:40:05 ◼ ► interpreting, many of them stream it or are, you know, kind of producing videos live. And so,
00:40:11 ◼ ► they will translate for their audience live and they have no compunctions about translating it
00:40:15 ◼ ► full volume right next to you. It's great. Like, I have no problem with them translating
00:40:23 ◼ ► live because I think they're definitely they're providing the same service we are, you know,
00:40:28 ◼ ► is just sometimes a little difficult to hear over them. It's a lot of fun having everybody there,
00:40:34 ◼ ► though. I love the fact that it's international community and it's people that I wouldn't get to
00:40:39 ◼ ► interact with from the press, even though we're in the same industry and same business and they're
00:40:43 ◼ ► writing for a very similar audience, just in a different language. I love being able to, like,
00:40:47 ◼ ► talk to them and interact with them and get their viewpoint. And they're always so enthused about
00:41:10 ◼ ► you and I sat together for the Brooklyn event in October, and there were a lot of retail
00:41:16 ◼ ► employees from around the country who'd been invited. And some part of Apple has always
00:41:23 ◼ ► filled seats with Apple employees. If their watch team has a big announcement, some number
00:41:32 ◼ ► So, famously last year in the September event when Jeff—why am I drawing a blank on his
00:41:43 ◼ ► the C COO, Jeff Williams came on stage. He got a super enthusiastic amount of applause from one
00:41:52 ◼ ► section of the theater. And that was the watch team. And you can't blame them. But it was a
00:41:55 ◼ ► little weird when you were there. Like, why? Why are those people so nuts for Jeff Williams?
00:42:35 ◼ ► not like in a phony way. And I, you know, just made it a cool thing. I like WDC, you know,
00:42:43 ◼ ► because it is unique. It's there is no other even, you know, the Brooklyn thing was in the Academy
00:42:48 ◼ ► of Music, and it's a beautiful venue. And they've they've done this thing where they go around the,
00:42:52 ◼ ► you know, country these days for certain of their special event. But nothing compares to having like
00:42:57 ◼ ► five or 6000 people in a room. It's it and most, most of them just being attendees, you know,
00:43:03 ◼ ► and every year now it's a ton of first time employees or attendees, not employees, attendees.
00:43:20 ◼ ► No, no, I've never been either. A I'm not a shareholder. I guess I could get a press pass.
00:43:31 ◼ ► nothing. It doesn't seem worth a cross country trip. There's no because it's just not I don't
00:43:34 ◼ ► write the finance angle much. And I whatever I do, I'd rather just read a summary of somebody who
00:43:40 ◼ ► knows more about it than I do. But somebody who went, who's just a DF reader, but was really happy
00:43:47 ◼ ► to go because I think this is the first year where they held the shareholders meeting in the Steve
00:43:52 ◼ ► Jobs theater. And Oh, cool. Yeah. And so that it is a cool thing to see. I mean, it is a gorgeous
00:43:58 ◼ ► theater and it is unlike anything I've ever seen. So I could see why somebody, you know,
00:44:05 ◼ ► if it weren't cost prohibitive to make the trip and I were a shareholder and I'd never been to
00:44:10 ◼ ► the Steve Jobs Theater, I'd be interested to do it just for that. But anyway, this reader
00:44:14 ◼ ► sent me a picture from his audience. He was like, I've always heard that the screen is amazing here,
00:44:19 ◼ ► but this is, you know, this looks like 640 by 480 projection. And it's hard to tell from an iPhone
00:44:33 ◼ ► share of a projected image, and projection, yeah, from projection. And the screens that they have
00:44:40 ◼ ► now are like LEDs, or OLEDs, or I don't know, some kind of thing that the screen itself lights up.
00:44:45 ◼ ► So I don't know what the reason is, but they, they cheaped out on that for shareholders,
00:44:52 ◼ ► apparently unless this photo was tremendously misleading along with this DF reader's eyes.
00:45:02 ◼ ► Well, I just wonder when he said that and he wrote. And I know that I've raved about the
00:45:09 ◼ ► display technology in the Steve Jobs theater and the audio quality. And I just wonder how many
00:45:15 ◼ ► other Daring Fireball readers went to this and thought, "What the hell is Gruber raving about?
00:45:37 ◼ ► The other Apple thing, which is breaking news, coming out tonight and will be out by the
00:46:26 ◼ ► But it was only a couple of years ago that they really started to try it out as a marketing
00:47:12 ◼ ► They've been doing that for a while now. So this is a primetime TV commercial. It's going to be on their YouTube channel by the time you hear this.
00:47:18 ◼ ► And then, of course, you can see it in my piece. But the actual commercial is airing on primetime TV. So, you know, evening, wherever you are in the US.
00:47:31 ◼ ► That's going through March Madness. And then it's going to be airing, I think, worldwide after that in select regions.
00:47:39 ◼ ► But it's a you know, it's a big buy. It's an ad buy for them that they would normally buy it is an iPhone commercial, right at its core. But it's just the point of it is basically instead of Hey, here's the new iPhone, you should buy it because of the camera. It's here's the new iPhone, you should buy it because privacy. That's the sort of
00:48:02 ◼ ► But it basically it doesn't tell you upfront it's an iPhone. You don't see people using
00:48:06 ◼ ► iPhones. You instead see people are in real life situations like using a public restroom
00:48:21 ◼ ► of maybe three, four second vignettes of places in real life where you might want a little
00:48:43 ◼ ► And then the closure is, "Hey, if you want privacy, you care about privacy in real life,
00:49:17 ◼ ► such a privacy nightmare is that in real life, it's sort of intuitive, you know, like the one,
00:49:25 ◼ ► you know, it's, you know, silliest form of privacy, but there's one where there's just a line of
00:49:30 ◼ ► urinals in a public restroom and one's being used and a guy is sort of absentmindedly walking up,
00:49:34 ◼ ► realizes he was going to take the one right next to the guy, and then just backs over and takes
00:49:39 ◼ ► one, you know, two spots away. Right. You, you, you don't even think about things like that. You
00:49:48 ◼ ► while I do it." And it's not so obvious online. And then in fact, as we've seen more and more,
00:49:59 ◼ ► a lot of it is insidious and you need to be like an expert level network wizard to even
00:50:14 ◼ ► realize how cookies are being used to get you the ad for the pair of boots you searched
00:50:36 ◼ ► And you could, I think in many ways you could argue that their intent isn't necessarily
00:50:43 ◼ ► to obfuscate the fact that your information is passing through several hands before it,
00:50:49 ◼ ► you know, causes this effect or whatever the case may be. But the product, the result is
00:51:00 ◼ ► to the normal person. And in many cases, not all, but many cases, they are intending to
00:51:12 ◼ ► sounds creepy, you know? You know, and to make a super obvious point, throughout history,
00:51:29 ◼ ► you know, your sense of vision, your sense of hearing, you know, if you're in a restaurant,
00:51:35 ◼ ► and you're telling somebody something private, you regulate the volume of your voice in a
00:51:39 ◼ ► a very natural way without thinking about, you know, you just kind of know, like, "Hey,
00:54:54 ◼ ► And they've had some issues recently with like the FaceTime bug that allowed that kind of like eavesdropping thing, obviously unintentional, patched, you know, they apologized, etc. But then you have things like, you know, Facebook kind of being able to ship this sort of spyware or malware app. malware may be a little strong, but definitely spyware app on the App Store.
00:55:18 ◼ ► scattering of bad actors using the Enterprise Certificate Program to ship gambling apps,
00:55:24 ◼ ► other things that Apple doesn't allow on the store to iPhone users at scale. We're not talking about
00:55:30 ◼ ► just one example, but hundreds of thousands or more people. So they've had recent incidents that
00:55:36 ◼ ► have pointed out that it's not perfect. Their stance is not perfect. It's not a completely
00:55:43 ◼ ► pristine wall that they're offering. But I think, personally, I do feel that, you know, there's
00:55:52 ◼ ► still a major difference between a company that has a situational loss of privacy, either via a bug
00:55:57 ◼ ► or whatever, while having a system systemic dedication to privacy, and that most of the rest
00:56:03 ◼ ► of the ecosystem that exists out there operates as like with this invasion of privacy as a service
00:56:09 ◼ ► model. And there's a significant difference between those two things, between a company
00:56:14 ◼ ► that's willing to back up their stance, and to make honest and genuine and significant efforts
00:56:20 ◼ ► to keep user data private and to keep that data secure, of course, to then ensure the privacy.
00:56:25 ◼ ► And then, you know, a lot of what the rest of the industry does. Basically, you know, stating
00:56:31 ◼ ► privacy as your mission is still supportable, even if you have bugs, but attempting to ignore that
00:56:42 ◼ ► prestidigitation on their part. But I still think that they have a they have a leg to stand on
00:56:47 ◼ ► basically in this in this regard. I mentioned on my last episode with Renee, I won't go into a long
00:56:53 ◼ ► rant on it again, because it was a good rant on the last episode. But basically that to me,
00:56:57 ◼ ► the elephant in the room on Apple's pro privacy slant is very specific. And it's their it's their
00:57:04 ◼ ► deal with Google to make Google search the default search in Safari. And, you know, that's
00:57:15 ◼ ► But like Goldman Sachs has estimated it that last year, it was like $9 billion. And that
00:58:02 ◼ ► I'm not saying it makes them hypocrites, but it makes them at least partial hypocrites.
00:58:09 ◼ ► And just the thing that occurred to me after that episode, before this episode, but only
00:58:14 ◼ ► shortly enough before the episode that I searched for it for five minutes, was just to put $10
00:58:21 ◼ ► billion a year, because let's just call it that for the sake of argument, if it was estimated
00:58:38 ◼ ► more than anybody in corporate income tax. They paid something like $15 billion. So Apple
00:58:43 ◼ ► almost makes enough from Google to cover its corporate income tax. Google has had a very
00:58:49 ◼ ► flux the last three years, they got hit hard by the repatriation. So they paid a bigger
00:58:54 ◼ ► lump sum two years ago. But like in 2017, they only paid like $5 billion in US corporate
00:59:02 ◼ ► taxes. So they pay more they pay by what I'm looking at over the last few years, they pay
00:59:08 ◼ ► more on an annual basis to Apple to make Google search the default Safari search, then they
00:59:15 ◼ ► paid to the US government and corporate income tax, like a lot more, maybe arguably around
00:59:27 ◼ ► Google last year, they had a record breaking year for revenue, they had 130 some billion
00:59:44 ◼ ► default search in Safari, which puts it in scale and I think tells you just how unbelievably
00:59:52 ◼ ► profitable the iOS using audience is to Google in terms of how they make money from web ads.
01:00:14 ◼ ► diamond is nothing to them compared to the diamond mine that they have. I mean, I think there's a
01:00:26 ◼ ► a societal norm when it comes to the use of personal data on smartphones, if it's going
01:00:32 ◼ ► to be the absolute arbiter of what flies on the world's arguably most profitable application
01:00:38 ◼ ► Marketplace it might as well use that power to get a little bit more feisty because that make their living on our data, you know
01:00:50 ◼ ► Hey while we're on this there was a story that broke and follow it closely because I just had a lot of other stuff to
01:01:02 ◼ ► did you see anything about this for privacy violations and that the if this was like in the Eastern District in New York and
01:01:08 ◼ ► and that two US cell phone manufacturers were like listed as like witnesses or something like that.
01:01:16 ◼ ► And I had a couple people say, "Do you think this is Apple? Do you think this is about like back
01:01:22 ◼ ► when Facebook was built into iOS?" And I was like, "I don't think it's Apple because it seems to me
01:01:28 ◼ ► like this is something different. This is like some kind of co-marketing deal where Facebook
01:01:32 ◼ ► was paying companies to allow them to collect data that was never prompted the user, even in
01:01:42 ◼ ► an obfuscated way to get their permission. It was like they made a deal with company X so that
01:01:48 ◼ ► Facebook was able to track certain things that a user used on company X's phones. But this thing
01:01:55 ◼ ► that was announced about it doesn't say who the companies are. So I don't know. And there aren't
01:02:00 ◼ ► that many US companies that make cell phones? I mean, there's Motorola. I'm trying to think
01:02:05 ◼ ► who else? I don't know. I feel like it's a story we have to keep our eyes on. We don't really know
01:02:10 ◼ ► much about it yet. Yeah, I don't know much about it either. I know. I've got people tracking it,
01:02:15 ◼ ► but I haven't personally been tracking it. So I don't know. I did know that it happened,
01:02:36 ◼ ► tragedy. So it's hard. You know, on the one hand, I wanted to say this, you know, to anybody
01:02:40 ◼ ► if you know, happened in Ethiopia, the latest crash, so it may not be anybody listening
01:02:49 ◼ ► Like it's a bug, you know, like the FaceTime bug that you mentioned, bad bug, really bad
01:02:55 ◼ ► bug. Nobody died. You know, we're talking about a thing here that left a couple hundred
01:02:58 ◼ ► people dead. Let's just acknowledge that that's a tragedy. But as nerds, I find the story,
01:03:05 ◼ ► the more I read about the story of this, the more fascinating it is as a tragedy of human
01:03:11 ◼ ► error. When I first saw it, when I first saw the story, I saw that another plane had crashed.
01:03:25 ◼ ► a second foreign somewhere else around the world is Boeing 737 Max 8, which is their latest model
01:03:31 ◼ ► for a single aisle passenger plane, meaning it's small enough. Mostly I'm guessing almost everybody
01:03:38 ◼ ► listening to this has been on a 737 or an Airbus 320 or 321. Just a typical single aisle plane,
01:03:51 ◼ ► Second one had gone down and because it was the second time since October a lot of places around the world
01:04:05 ◼ ► And the FAA is kind of considered the gold standard for this sort of thing around the world
01:04:13 ◼ ► At least in my opinion there I was talking to Ben Thompson is also an aviation earner and he agreed
01:04:50 ◼ ► because the FAA is being overly cautious, right? They're typically known for being relatively
01:04:54 ◼ ► conservative, right? And the reason, you know, and, and the results show it air travel historically
01:05:01 ◼ ► has been a very safe way to travel. Famously, everybody knows that statistically to go from
01:05:06 ◼ ► point a to point B in a motor vehicle on the road, no matter what type of motor vehicle,
01:05:12 ◼ ► have a way higher chance of being injured or killed way higher than you do in air travel.
01:05:16 ◼ ► It's really the safest way to go from point A to point B statistically. But psychologically,
01:05:28 ◼ ► in the air is not exactly something we're hooked up to accept psychologically by evolution.
01:05:34 ◼ ► You know, if you're up in the air, more than a few about to die, you're you're in big trouble,
01:05:41 ◼ ► alone 30,000 feet. So psychologically, and you know, I, so I'm not making fun of anybody
01:05:53 ◼ ► of the most understandable phobias from even a rational sense just because it just seems
01:06:11 ◼ ► 787, which was a bigger plane, um, and decided to develop it in a different way for Boeing,
01:06:19 ◼ ► where they outsourced a lot of it as opposed to doing it in house and thinking that would
01:06:32 ◼ ► money, tons of money. So it ended up costing them a lot more and the 787 was very late.
01:06:38 ◼ ► And because of that, they sort of got like the moneymaker is the 737. And I think most of us
01:06:53 ◼ ► size plane than you are a bigger bird 747. - Yeah, there's a fuel efficiency and route length.
01:07:00 ◼ ► Yeah, and just how many passengers they expect on the plane. They're not going to fly an
01:07:03 ◼ ► empty plane. They're only going to use those big ones when they can fill the seats. And
01:07:19 ◼ ► long been Boeing's big moneymaker. And but they sort of let it languish while they were
01:07:38 ◼ ► bigger engines make it more fuel efficient. I believe it, I believe the exact number is
01:07:43 ◼ ► 14%. So if you replace like a regular, you know, the previous 320 with the new 320, you
01:07:55 ◼ ► And in the meantime, Boeing didn't really have anything and really was originally planning
01:08:00 ◼ ► to do a ground up. We're going to make an all new airplane to replace our 737. Who knows,
01:08:05 ◼ ► they probably would have come up with a new number for them. But their single engine or
01:08:12 ◼ ► way to describe this class of plane, the single aisle passenger plane, they they decided we're
01:08:18 ◼ ► too late, you know, like we don't have enough time to do this Airbus is killing you know,
01:08:23 ◼ ► taking our business and this is our most profitable thing. And so they're like, well, what can
01:08:26 ◼ ► we do with the 737 to, um, to get a new 37, 737 into this with the fuel efficiency, uh,
01:08:38 ◼ ► that led them to put bigger engines on a 737, which in turn changed the aerodynamics of
01:08:42 ◼ ► a plane that wasn't originally designed for it and notoriously as sort of low wings and
01:08:57 ◼ ► This is something I had no idea about that pilot certification is such that you can come
01:09:05 ◼ ► previous 320 the 320 neo is sufficiently similar that they count as certified on the neo. And
01:09:13 ◼ ► If it's new, too new and too different, and the pilots all have to be recertified, that's
01:09:27 ◼ ► I think they they put this software MCA as some kind of automatic control system in that
01:09:36 ◼ ► way, modified the, you know, the flight pattern of the plane automatically to somehow make
01:09:48 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, the automated software was a it absolutely was a a pilot assist feature. Right?
01:10:10 ◼ ► Right. And the pilot assist feature was a, I think it was mostly like an altitude related feature.
01:10:23 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you're basically what you have in a plane is like, there's a,
01:10:29 ◼ ► there's the most efficient way to fly it. And then there's like the safest way to fly it. And usually,
01:10:34 ◼ ► you know, you're somewhere in between because you want to, you don't make your flight efficient,
01:10:37 ◼ ► but you want to make it, you know, you also want it to, you know, come in safely. So there was,
01:10:45 ◼ ► like, the, they analyzed the flight pattern of the crashed jet, and they looked at it at takeoff,
01:10:52 ◼ ► and they looked at the Lion Air crash. And they saw that they basically showed similar fluctuations
01:10:59 ◼ ► in height, like vertical, what they call them oscillation or fluctuations in height. And they
01:11:04 ◼ ► basically were able to, once they looked at the wreckage and analyzed it, they were able to do
01:11:15 ◼ ► further and that it was very likely this software package that was, you know, the issue and the
01:11:21 ◼ ► pilots reported on the Ethiopian Airlines flight reported flight control problems to the aircraft
01:11:28 ◼ ► controller before they came down. But the computerized system that they put in place was a
01:12:34 ◼ ► one in 10,000 is unacceptable in the airline industry. And one of the problems with this
01:12:38 ◼ ► MCAS system is that it was relying entirely on one sensor to detect the thing that it was trying to
01:12:45 ◼ ► detect and that one sensor people are suspecting may have a higher than acceptable prosperity to
01:12:52 ◼ ► give an erroneous result. Yeah, basically the MCAS given the very, very tiny amount of like
01:13:06 ◼ ► Between the left and right sides of the plane and so it basically kept taking the yoke out of the pilots hands
01:13:13 ◼ ► And pushing it forward like pushing the nose down and then they basically had to keep yanking the the yoke back up forcing it
01:13:22 ◼ ► So the other thing that this this guy's email said and I haven't read this anywhere else and he said this is speculation
01:13:26 ◼ ► And so this could you know, this could be wrong and who knows so, you know, this is a podcast so it's alright
01:13:31 ◼ ► But on on most other commercial airliners one of the one of the ways to just to to disable all
01:13:39 ◼ ► Autopilot features is to just pull back hard on the yoke you pull back hard enough on the yoke and all autopilot
01:13:46 ◼ ► Oh, you don't yeah, you don't want me to take in control anything autopilot related turns off, you know
01:14:03 ◼ ► I believe and is basically it if they'd have known I don't think they even knew that's what the
01:14:10 ◼ ► Conclusion is so far that they didn't even know the MCS was causing the problem, right?
01:14:20 ◼ ► Like it wasn't this thing where it was kind of connected to the autopilot features where they grab the yoke and yank it and they expect
01:14:27 ◼ ► Okay, I'm back in control of this thing. And in fact, the MCS was still at work, still with its faulty data about about angle of attack, and it's pushing the nose of the plane down. Yeah. And they didn't know to switch it off. If they just switched it off, they could have gained control back. Right. But since they didn't know that it was the issue, they couldn't actually do it. Right. And those oscillations you're referring to on both flights were exactly like 15 seconds apart each time. So they would like take control.
01:14:56 ◼ ► and be like, okay, we got it. And then 15 seconds later, it would dive again. And they were like,
01:15:00 ◼ ► you know, I'm sure they were panicking. I'm sure. Well, probably not panicking because pilots are,
01:15:11 ◼ ► plane is doing something. And that's what I think the state that they entered into was,
01:15:15 ◼ ► it's you end up in this scenario where you are trying to make corrections for something,
01:15:23 ◼ ► you'd get the plane going back up, and then 15 seconds later, the plane would decide itself to
01:15:29 ◼ ► point the nose down. And then 15 seconds later, the same thing happens. It does look exactly like
01:15:34 ◼ ► a software problem. Like 15 seconds is when it, you know, the scent, you know, the thing goes,
01:15:38 ◼ ► let's take a reading up reading still bad go down. Whereas like they said, like an often form of
01:15:44 ◼ ► oscillation in general, of course, is turbulence, but turbulence doesn't tend to come at exact 15
01:15:49 ◼ ► second intervals. It might be seven seconds, then 20 seconds, then 17 seconds because it's
01:15:57 ◼ ► a natural phenomenon, not something written in software. I thought the yoke argument, and again,
01:16:02 ◼ ► speculation from somebody, I didn't read that in a confirmed thing, but I do think as a user
01:16:08 ◼ ► interface nerd, I think that's super interesting because what is the best user interface for a
01:16:13 ◼ ► Pilot to take control of the airplane from autopilot that that they suspect is gone awry pull back on the yoke, right?
01:16:31 ◼ ► But isn't isn't like when you hit the brake cruise control goes off. Usually it's a break tap
01:16:35 ◼ ► Yeah, and and I don't remember and I mean I've had cars to cruise control for years and I think feel I should know this
01:16:42 ◼ ► But I think some cars most cars perhaps with cruise control if you hit the gas it does not disengage it
01:16:49 ◼ ► It allows you to speed up right and it will fall back to this last setting, right? Yeah
01:16:53 ◼ ► That's how my cruise control works is gas you can use to go a little faster than you had it set and then it just drops
01:16:58 ◼ ► You're right back to where you had it set which for me is usually still extremely fast, you know
01:17:08 ◼ ► which is obvious sense and you don't want somebody stabbing at the little cruise control button on the
01:17:13 ◼ ► Steering wheel to disable it, you know, and again, I'm not trying to you know, it's an oversimplification to compare driving a
01:17:29 ◼ ► What's your instinct and as a driver you hit the brake and as a pilot you pull back on the yoke?
01:17:51 ◼ ► The whole reason for this software patch in the first place was to avoid having to retrain
01:18:01 ◼ ► Maybe there's you know, there's nothing fundamental any fundamentally wrong with these planes
01:18:37 ◼ ► There's a reason that we still have human pilots, you know, and there's a reason that almost every aviation disaster that's averted
01:18:56 ◼ ► One of the things I read is that Boeing has a reputation in the world of aviation as being a very
01:19:01 ◼ ► Pilot forward company that they've always thought the pilot should be at the center of this, you know that they're not trying to
01:19:07 ◼ ► Obviate pilots, they're they're trying to help them but that they've you know famous, you know
01:19:15 ◼ ► We just wanted we're gonna assume that there's an expert pilot at the at the helm at all times
01:19:20 ◼ ► Mm-hmm. Yeah, and how do we augment their ability to keep the the plane safe and you know
01:19:32 ◼ ► I think, you know, it's definitely an argument for and against in the aviation industry because
01:19:47 ◼ ► five reports, but the Dallas Morning News found five reports that pilots had filed over
01:19:54 ◼ ► last few months ever since the Lion Air crash in October, flying 737 Max 8 planes in the United
01:20:03 ◼ ► States. And all seemingly with the in the same scenario shortly after takeoff, a bit of a loss,
01:20:11 ◼ ► you know, the nose goes down. And you know, these guys all figured out it's the luckily, I guess,
01:20:22 ◼ ► plane, everything was right afterwards. But one of the complaints from the pilot called it like,
01:20:28 ◼ ► use the actual word unconscionable that, you know, that the manual that they had for the
01:20:32 ◼ ► plane doesn't really emphasize this enough, you know, that they sort of had to figure it out on
01:20:36 ◼ ► the fly. Which again, speaks to this whole, not that there's anything wrong with the plane,
01:20:44 ◼ ► but that there's something wrong with trying to say this, if you're good on any previous 37,
01:20:49 ◼ ► you're good on this new one. And it really wasn't, you know, and that's purely for financial reasons,
01:20:53 ◼ ► which is a really bad look when it when the stakes are so high. Right. The other conclusion to draw
01:21:02 ◼ ► from this, I have to say, you know, again, it's a bit of speculation, but it's a bad look at the
01:21:07 ◼ ► moment, at least is that like you said, the FAA and my understanding is the FAA has a reputation
01:21:12 ◼ ► of being aggressive on calling for like grounding of a plane or, you know, calling, you know,
01:21:43 ◼ ► with the same problem in those two countries, maybe they would have pulled the trigger on
01:22:06 ◼ ► follow this stuff. But in some people who hear this may be like, yeah, duh, you know, this is
01:22:11 ◼ ► the way the world works. But, you know, the moment like Trump tweeted something about, you know,
01:22:17 ◼ ► hey, this is, you know, we're gonna ground these things or whatever, they should be grounded, etc.
01:22:21 ◼ ► And then the FAA quickly announced that they were doing it. I don't know which came first or
01:22:26 ◼ ► whatever. But the first thing I did was I thought to myself, let me Google who the senators are in
01:22:51 ◼ ► the political and money motivations, you know, behind, "Yeah, keep these Boeings in the
01:22:56 ◼ ► air. You know, that's bad press. We can't have them having that. We'll fix it quietly."
01:23:29 ◼ ► Although Cruz, I saw that Cruz who heads like a Senate committee on aviation was calling
01:23:52 ◼ ► I think Ted Cruz was a little bit ahead of the curve on, you know, let's put these things
01:23:57 ◼ ► Anyway, I don't think Boeing has handled this well in my opinion because Boeing also was
01:24:04 ◼ ► defending it and even to this point and and even you know, they've they're grounded worldwide, but they
01:24:15 ◼ ► The Tylenol scandal which I don't have in front of me, but do you remember you were probably yeah kid
01:24:20 ◼ ► Oh, yeah, I was but I do remember it probably from discussion later on not at the moment
01:25:22 ◼ ► to be as safe as possible, even knowing that that was actually well above and beyond what they
01:25:29 ◼ ► needed. They knew where this guy worked, they figured it out, they could have just taken off
01:25:33 ◼ ► the products that might have been from the place where he worked. But by doing that, it like kept
01:25:41 ◼ ► the Tylenol brand from being tarnished in the least. Like, like, worldwide people were like,
01:25:47 ◼ ► yeah, I can still, you know, even though people had just been poisoned by Tylenol, they bought
01:25:51 ◼ ► the fact that like, you know, with within days of this thing even happening, the CEO is saying,
01:25:56 ◼ ► let's just destroy every every bit of it worldwide. And, you know, you know, and then they
01:26:01 ◼ ► came up with tamper proof packaging, etc, etc. You know, back when I was a kid, you just open a pack
01:26:06 ◼ ► of pills from the store and you didn't have to poke holes in anything. It was right. But famously
01:26:14 ◼ ► considered one of the sages. public relations moves an executive has ever made, you know,
01:26:22 ◼ ► and who knows how many untold millions, hundreds of millions who how much money and Tylenol
01:26:33 ◼ ► let's not forget that whatever many millions or billions of dollars of Tylenol is out there.
01:26:42 ◼ ► if you've got any talent on your home, throw it out. And, you know, it also I think there's a lot
01:26:51 ◼ ► of people who would think, well, that's, that's the risky PR move, right? The risky PR move is to
01:26:56 ◼ ► be there saying, throw it all out, you know, sure. But in hindsight, it's considered, you know,
01:27:03 ◼ ► an active, you know, to borrow a Phil Schiller term courage, you know, and I think everybody
01:27:12 ◼ ► I can't help but think that maybe Boeing should have been way ahead of the curve, like after this
01:27:18 ◼ ► Ethiopia, this second crash, and saying, Hey, we don't think there's anything wrong with these
01:27:23 ◼ ► planes, but we would like everybody around the world to ground them while we do conduct a thorough
01:27:28 ◼ ► investigation. I can't help but think that that was a better way for Boeing to play this,
01:27:40 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean it just seems so obvious, you know, that you would just go ground them immediately
01:27:47 ◼ ► until we figure it out, you know, and we'll figure out, we'll help the airlines figure out how to get
01:27:53 ◼ ► you where you need to go, but we can't use these planes. It's just, you know, after even the first
01:27:58 ◼ ► crash, because it's, it was obvious with the first crash that there was some sort of plane fall and
01:28:16 ◼ ► Yeah, there's like an old saying, "Once is chance, twice is coincidence, third time is a pattern."
01:29:02 ◼ ► he writes, he's a longtime aviation industry reporter, and he writes his own website now
01:29:06 ◼ ► called The Air Current. And he had a great piece, I linked to it from during Fireball yesterday,
01:29:10 ◼ ► I learned a lot from it. Really, a lot of what I said before was just restating what I learned
01:29:15 ◼ ► from him. But he had a comment, you know, he's well sourced. So he, you know, it's anonymous
01:29:20 ◼ ► sources. But somebody in the aviation industry said that if these two crashes had happened,
01:29:25 ◼ ► one in October and one in March, but the airlines had been Southwest and American, they they would
01:29:31 ◼ ► would have grounded these planes hours after the second one. It was the fact that there
01:29:36 ◼ ► was sort of a bias within the FAA that, "Well, who knows how good Ethiopian Airlines is?"
01:29:46 ◼ ► And I hate to say that my sort of casual read from the news over the weekend might have
01:29:51 ◼ ► been along the same lines. Like I might have just as a knee-jerk pundit screaming at the
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01:34:38 ◼ ► out on Disney but I'm sure you read the Elizabeth Warren let's break up these tech companies
01:34:43 ◼ ► thing. Yeah. And her initial, it was a post on medium and it was, uh, of course, uh, focused
01:34:54 ◼ ► on Amazon, Facebook and Google. Uh, and then, uh, I think she was at South by Southwest.
01:35:00 ◼ ► I think that the, the medium post was timed for that. And, uh, the verge got an interview
01:35:07 ◼ ► with her and asked the obvious question that there's one company that's obviously missing
01:35:11 ◼ ► from that. And she said, Apple, and they're like, What do you want to break Apple up to?
01:35:15 ◼ ► And she said, Oh, yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on this. And I haven't been able to express
01:35:26 ◼ ► I get it, you know, but like 18, the old AT&T, the old mob bell thing that was breaking up
01:35:33 ◼ ► a monopoly that was taking a nationwide company and breaking it up to a bunch of regional,
01:35:38 ◼ ► much smaller companies. You know what she's proposing in each of these cases isn't really
01:35:44 ◼ ► breaking up with possibly the exception of Facebook which I guess would kind of qualify
01:35:52 ◼ ► that they shouldn't be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp too. And so I guess in the work
01:35:58 ◼ ► component parts they could become component parts again it sort of makes sense. Yeah it
01:36:02 ◼ ► It also seems like the less, you know, it, yeah, it's breaking up Facebook, the corporation,
01:36:08 ◼ ► but not breaking up Facebook, the thing that we think of as Facebook. And honestly, probably
01:36:21 ◼ ► companies range from, hmm, this Facebook thing maybe ought to be pursued. And, you know,
01:37:07 ◼ ► With Amazon, well with Google, she's got this argument, I hate to paraphrase it all, but
01:37:15 ◼ ► basically her problem with Google, I mostly agree with too, which is that they shouldn't
01:39:19 ◼ ► the industry as a good thing for the industry. I always felt about the whole antitrust argument
01:39:25 ◼ ► because to me, yes, they did take some actions against those apps. You know, to they leverage
01:39:38 ◼ ► should have been some action against them. But in other ways, I felt like the arguments
01:39:43 ◼ ► against it. We're missing the ways that Microsoft just won in some ways fair and square. Like
01:39:49 ◼ ► it was Microsoft that had the idea to bundle all three to make all three the spreadsheet,
01:40:00 ◼ ► Oh, the PowerPoint. Oh yes. Presentation to do all three and bundle them as a suite. And
01:40:07 ◼ ► remember, most of those things were sold by seats back then, and they were very expensive,
01:40:13 ◼ ► you know, like a copy of word was like 300 bucks. And they were the ones who were like,
01:40:24 ◼ ► or something like that, you know, which, you know, in hindsight, you know, today's world,
01:40:28 ◼ ► you think $600 for a copy of a word processor and a spreadsheet seems like a lot of money.
01:40:34 ◼ ► You know, that was the world we're in then, but you could get this bundle for less. And they did
01:40:38 ◼ ► a lot of work to make them work together so that you could put spreadsheets in your word docs and
01:40:44 ◼ ► PowerPoint and, you know, get a spreadsheet into PowerPoint, etc, etc. That, that having, you know,
01:40:51 ◼ ► a word processor from one company like Word Perfect, and your spreadsheet from Lotus, you
01:40:57 ◼ ► didn't get that integration. There were things Microsoft did that part of the rise of office
01:41:01 ◼ ► wasn't wasn't just cheating. Similarly, with Google search that at some point, you know,
01:41:08 ◼ ► if the best if the whole idea is that if it's truly honest, if they're just being the most
01:41:19 ◼ ► they're making their best guess as to what it is you're looking for. It might be another
01:41:23 ◼ ► Google product, right? Right. It's it. Like, it's not easy. It's not easy to say that they
01:41:29 ◼ ► shouldn't ever put other Google products at the top of the search list. It requires nuance, you know.
01:41:37 ◼ ► And we get to Amazon, and her argument with Amazon to me makes no sense at all. This is the point
01:41:46 ◼ ► where to me, her argument belies to me, she doesn't really seem to understand how Amazon works.
01:41:55 ◼ ► She keeps talking about these product platforms or, or something like that. And she doesn't want
01:42:01 ◼ ► Amazon to act as its own store if they're running a product marketplace, you know, which is what
01:42:06 ◼ ► Amazon has evolved into where other sellers, I think we're all familiar with this now that
01:42:11 ◼ ► you search for something on Amazon and you look for who the seller is. It may not be Amazon. It's,
01:42:16 ◼ ► you know, quite often not, uh, you know, that you and I can start a company selling, you know,
01:42:23 ◼ ► coffee cup lids or something like that. And rather than sell them through Matthew and John's coffee
01:42:29 ◼ ► cup lid company.com or in addition to we can sell them through Amazon and when people search for
01:42:34 ◼ ► them on Amazon now, they'll get them through there. But basically, I don't think this is a
01:42:42 ◼ ► stretch. What she's saying is that Amazon shouldn't be allowed to operate its own store, which is what
01:43:43 ◼ ► And I think that's one of the sort of benefits to having, you know, people who truly understand
01:43:49 ◼ ► this stuff, write about it and talk about it and kind of analyze it is because they understand that
01:43:54 ◼ ► if you talk about these things, and you have a platform like Elizabeth Warren does, to say, Hey,
01:44:00 ◼ ► maybe these companies are too powerful, we should examine that what what should we do about it,
01:44:05 ◼ ► you need to get your technical arguments correct. Because if you don't, it blunts the efficacy of
01:44:11 ◼ ► One of her arguments and it's like the most highlighted into the way that medium shows you the most highlighted
01:44:19 ◼ ► And I don't know if that's because people are agreeing with it or because people are selecting it to say like what the hell is
01:44:26 ◼ ► Busted up Microsoft in in the 90s. Aren't you glad that we get to use Google for web search instead of Bing and
01:45:37 ◼ ► know. So anyhow, I yeah, it's it is it's wheels within wheels of how you can pick the argument
01:45:44 ◼ ► apart. Well, I think that's what the point I was trying to make. It's a weak argument. It's like,
01:45:48 ◼ ► it could be the point of the argument is actually worth talking about. But having a weak argument
01:45:53 ◼ ► does it as a disservice? It does the conversation at disservice the the the 90s mentality and
01:46:00 ◼ ► there's a reason for the mentality because it was true for the throughout the 80s and 90s was that
01:47:01 ◼ ► was that there would be companies like Google and Amazon who weren't running any software
01:47:06 ◼ ► on your computer and were running in the browser. And it didn't matter which browser it was.
01:47:22 ◼ ► everything. And Amazon was there, you know, Amazon worked in every browser. That was the
01:47:27 ◼ ► part of the brilliance of, and again, in hindsight, it seems super obvious, but in the 90s, it
01:47:41 ◼ ► from service providers that just ran stuff in the cloud that you access from any browser.
01:47:56 ◼ ► right part of the company, which is the app store. I do think that if there is an anti-competitive
01:48:02 ◼ ► argument to be made against Apple, and I think there is a good one, it does involve their
01:48:08 ◼ ► administration and control of the app store. Yeah. All the clearly demonstrable ones are
01:48:12 ◼ ► there, you know, the ones that are consumers can feel and see and touch, so to speak, but
01:48:30 ◼ ► Which is dumb. That's the dumbest thing is that they should be allowed that no, it should
01:48:33 ◼ ► actually be the way it should be done. They should put their ops on the store. Everybody
01:48:44 ◼ ► should put more of their apps in the app store as opposed to baking them in like, you know,
01:49:27 ◼ ► instead of being built in and not on not just built into every iOS, but literally it's in
01:49:32 ◼ ► one of the foremost prestigious spots in the dock. And then right, you know, you'd have
01:49:42 ◼ ► not really Spotify's problem. Spotify's problem is the 30% that they have to pay for anybody
01:51:10 ◼ ► Tim Cook could be like, we weighed like billions on the App Store. But he can also say, but we're so tiny compared to Google. They have all the users, right? And it's like taking a revenue number and comparing it against a user number. And there is some sense of irony in the fact that the government is set up not necessarily to play with those revenue numbers, but to sort of pay attention to and reward or whatever you want to call it or punish people based
01:52:08 ◼ ► whole thing. And I've been on this for a while. Like I just think that today's antitrust law
01:52:15 ◼ ► in the US, the EU might be a little better than the United States, but I still feel like
01:52:19 ◼ ► fundamentally the whole thing is still rooted in 100 years ago. I mean, and Warren even brings up
01:52:26 ◼ ► like the, what was she say here? Back when railroads were dominant, there's a quote from
01:52:31 ◼ ► her and you had to get steel and wheat onto the railroad. There was a period of time when the
01:52:35 ◼ ► railroads figured out that they could make money not only by selling tickets on the railroad
01:52:45 ◼ ► steel for their own company and raising the price of transporting steel for any competitors.
01:52:51 ◼ ► And that's you know, that is actually something that happened and that actually informs modern
01:52:56 ◼ ► US antitrust law, but that was 100 years ago. And I feel like trying to apply that sort
01:53:02 ◼ ► of logic to these companies which are entirely digital and that these economies are told
01:53:08 ◼ ► these the way that they work is so different is it would be like trying to apply 1804 laws
01:53:22 ◼ ► the laws of 1800 have foreseen railroads let alone the steel industry yeah the carriage
01:53:39 ◼ ► case which really, the whole thing just hinged on whether prices were going up or down for
01:53:45 ◼ ► consumers. And I get lots of pushback on this. I've gotten it over the years by saying that
01:54:50 ◼ ► Famously of running as a no-profit business just reinvesting all revenue into the business
01:54:57 ◼ ► could afford to sell ebooks cheaper than Barnes & Noble could Barnes & Noble couldn't sell a
01:55:02 ◼ ► $15 ebook for $9.99 and take a $5 loss on each one Amazon couldn't and they did that's the bullying
01:55:17 ◼ ► based on the basic idea that if prices go up for consumers, that's bad and if they don't that's good which in
01:55:24 ◼ ► Theory makes sense. But when you think about a company like Amazon that can sell things at a loss when others can't it doesn't
01:55:32 ◼ ► And again, it's all just based on your own distribution versus creation - there's an argument that falls in it's it
01:55:43 ◼ ► for a consumer. But if the, you know, if they, if there's no profit being made by the people
01:55:50 ◼ ► creating the product, you know, then it's now you end up in a position where they get crushed out of
01:55:56 ◼ ► business, or they must deal with Amazon, then who has the stronger antitrust argument, you know?
01:56:01 ◼ ► And, you know, Amazon's basic products that that's not the problem. You know, I mean, Walmart has
01:56:38 ◼ ► right now is perhaps at the height of her influence because she's already been well-known,
01:56:43 ◼ ► and now she's announced herself as a candidate for the presidency in 2020. She has a significant,
01:56:49 ◼ ► you know, number of, she may not be the front runner, but she certainly is in the running.
01:56:53 ◼ ► So something that she proposes like this is going to carry a lot of weight and, you know,
01:57:00 ◼ ► she winds up not winning. If she ends up not winning the nomination, she may never be quite
01:57:06 ◼ ► as influential again. And I kind of feel like so it's good that somebody is looking at this stuff
01:57:12 ◼ ► because I do feel like the government, you know, in the US should be looking at these companies,
01:57:16 ◼ ► all four of them in various ways in ways that they haven't. But I feel like man missing the boat
01:57:28 ◼ ► Yep, I agree. Anyway, what I didn't look a lot at the Spotify thing. Yeah, what's the just I know
01:57:34 ◼ ► that part of it is the 30%, which I do think is the key thing to attack if you're Spotify,
01:57:52 ◼ ► that Apple distributes apps through the App Store. It's basically the 30% that they want.
01:59:55 ◼ ► their argument is they could have been bigger, which is, it's definitely one way to go. But,
02:00:03 ◼ ► you know, I think that they have, I think, an opportunity to kind of speak in a populist way.
02:00:11 ◼ ► But I think that their argument comes off a little bit like, well, we could have made more money,
02:00:16 ◼ ► though. You know what I mean? But I don't disagree necessarily with their point. I understand where
02:02:18 ◼ ► they would probably have to lower the 30% lower it to where I don't know, but that, you know,
02:02:23 ◼ ► in the way that that would be competing against letting app developers roll their own, like having
02:02:28 ◼ ► Netflix be, you know, letting Netflix sign you up, but not pay Apple any tax by but handling it all
02:02:34 ◼ ► on their own, whatever that number would be, would it be 15%? Would it be 10%? I don't know,
02:02:39 ◼ ► it would come down to some other number other than 30% due to competition, which is the way
02:02:44 ◼ ► it's supposed to work. That would be my proposed suggestion to Senator Warren if she's listening.
02:02:54 ◼ ► Jared: Yeah, I think that's absolutely one way to go. I mean, having Apple be the person who
02:03:07 ◼ ► controls both of the, both the framework by which they get sold and the architecture by which people
02:05:58 ◼ ► reasonable number to cover Apple's credit card processing fees combined with their fraud and etc.
02:06:04 ◼ ► Jared: Yeah, and I mean, in like, that would even sign even like the those two options have to exist
02:06:11 ◼ ► in mutually exclusive ways, you could do both, you could do a, you know, a scale that says like,
02:06:20 ◼ ► hey, you know, for your first bit, this is not that much. And then later on, you could do a sliding
02:06:24 ◼ ► scale where you're like, you know, hey, it's X percent if you do this much business and it's
02:06:29 ◼ ► less or more if you do more, you know, I don't know. There are a lot of options in between they
02:06:34 ◼ ► can't charge and they charge 30%. Yeah, yeah. But that's, you know, it just is very frustrating that
02:06:42 ◼ ► that's not what the finger has been put on, you know. All right, last but not least, let's,
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02:10:35 ◼ ► and I think most of you also know I'm a big fan of Disney theme parks, or at least the Florida ones.
02:10:41 ◼ ► Not that I'm not a fan of the other ones, but I've never been to any of the other ones.
02:10:46 ◼ ► But my family loves going to the Disney Orlando area theme parks. And anybody who follows either
02:10:55 ◼ ► of those obsessions knows that Disney is on the cusp of opening major new theme park lands in both
02:11:03 ◼ ► California and Florida for Star Wars and you, you lucky son of a bit, spent three days with them.
02:11:08 ◼ ► I did. I did. It was interesting. It was sort of just like a three-day mouth agape situation.
02:11:21 ◼ ► This was all in California because the California one is A, going to open first and B is where
02:11:29 ◼ ► Jay Haynes Yes. So the way Imagineering works is they had their headquarters are in Glendale, kind of in a business park, they're fairly unassuming group of beige buildings. And then they have facilities in Florida that are largely about maintenance and storage. But then they also have some research institutes, like in Pittsburgh and a couple of other places, but their headquarters are there. So it was sort of a three day jaunt through the process. This is, by the way, very unusual for
02:11:57 ◼ ► Disney. They typically do not do large press kind of, you know, pushes with this stuff, or lengthy
02:12:05 ◼ ► explanations of kind of what they're doing. And, you know, I sort of it was revelatory for a lot of
02:12:13 ◼ ► people that had been there or that had been covering for the company for a long time. Some of
02:12:16 ◼ ► them, you know, were there on this little press tour. I was, there's the Jermaine over at Gizmodo
02:12:24 ◼ ► was on this thing. But he was he's sort of their entertainment writer, you know, the kind of movies
02:12:30 ◼ ► and entertainment things like that is a good writer. I like reading him. But outside of that,
02:12:36 ◼ ► there was almost no tech press. And the only reason that I was even involved with this because
02:12:41 ◼ ► they it was, you know, it's Hollywood Reporter, LA Times, Variety, you know, Variety, exactly.
02:12:49 ◼ ► several theme park, you know, kind of oriented writers from like, travel and leisure and things
02:12:54 ◼ ► like that, right? This is the this is the sort of people that were on this tour. And the only reason
02:12:59 ◼ ► I wasn't even involved is because I do have a personal fascination with Imagineering, how they
02:13:05 ◼ ► kind of operate, you know, functionally, as well as, of course, what they do, you know, in the sort
02:13:10 ◼ ► of business of building themed entertainment and robotics and, you know, kind of interactive
02:13:18 ◼ ► experiences and world building and you know all of that stuff right it's just interesting to me
02:13:23 ◼ ► and there's a lot of tech in that that is used in that industry and even created for that industry
02:13:30 ◼ ► that is just not talked about because they don't talk to the people who care or would understand it
02:13:37 ◼ ► or would you know care to interpret it for an audience or whatever so i've spent about three
02:13:41 ◼ ► years sort of getting to know those folks over there and convincing them that there are stories
02:13:52 ◼ ► pitching them on this idea that, look, you're doing a lot of stuff in this arena, but you're
02:13:57 ◼ ► not telling people about it. And my major pitch is, you need to hire roboticists and engineers,
02:14:05 ◼ ► software engineers, and, you know, coders and all these people, but they don't know that you have
02:14:09 ◼ ► hard problems to solve. And there's only there's no catnip greater to an engineer than a hard
02:14:41 ◼ ► and all of this stuff. So what did you do with Nvidia to get GPUs to be able to drive this display?
02:14:47 ◼ ► Yeah, basically, there was a lot of I mean, I think, you know, not not to not to telegraph too much, but or, or put too much in words in anybody's mouth, but there was a lot of side eyeing from the engineers who obviously wanted to talk about it. Right. To the PR people like can we please? Can I talk about this? Because I've been living this for for two years, you know, normally they don't let them talk about some of that stuff.
02:15:11 ◼ ► or they're not used to being asked about it at the very least. So that was fun. But yeah,
02:15:16 ◼ ► the gist of it was to step back. It was a three day tour. We started out at ILM in San Francisco.
02:15:25 ◼ ► I don't know if a lot of people know this, but their main headquarters are, aside from Skywalker
02:15:31 ◼ ► Ranch, which is a different facility that does a lot of audio and stuff, ILM's main headquarters
02:15:37 ◼ ► are in San Francisco on the Presidio. They have a facility there that they share with Lucasfilm.
02:15:47 ◼ ► talking about the originations of the project and the storytelling and kind of how do you start
02:15:53 ◼ ► building this world and all the decisions there. And then we moved to Imagineering in Glendale on
02:16:00 ◼ ► the second day. And that Imagineering is, you know, obviously where they build a lot of the
02:16:06 ◼ ► animatronics. They have a workshop there where they craft a lot of the in-house stuff that they do.
02:16:10 ◼ ► They have contractors too, but a lot of the main, you know, key ones are done in-house. And then,
02:16:18 ◼ ► on the third day, we actually went and did a site tour at Galaxy's Edge, which is the land that
02:16:25 ◼ ► they're building onto Disneyland. The Star Wars land. Glendale is just north of the sort of hills,
02:16:34 ◼ ► the Hollywood Hills. Basically, you've got Glendale, the Hills, downtown LA, LA proper,
02:16:41 ◼ ► Venice, all of that. And then south of that is Anaheim where Disneyland is. So it's just north
02:16:46 ◼ ► of LA, essentially. It's still LA. So did you guys fly between days one and two? I mean, that's a
02:16:50 ◼ ► long way because ILM is San Francisco and then the other two days are down in Southern California.
02:16:56 ◼ ► Exactly. Yeah, yeah, we flew. I book all my own travel when I go on these things. I don't let
02:17:02 ◼ ► junkets pay for me. I'm kind of a policy of ours. We just don't really do it. Every once in a while,
02:17:08 ◼ ► there's some weird thing where it's like, "Hey, this is our thing and just come," right? And it's
02:17:12 ◼ ► like, "Okay, we'll disclose it." But by and large, we pay for our own travel. So when we flew between
02:17:17 ◼ ► the two, just speaking, this is just a fun side note as an aviation nerd, but flying between the
02:17:23 ◼ ► two, we flew out of Oakland. So we drove, we took a little bus from Imagineering to, or excuse me,
02:17:31 ◼ ► from Lucasfilm to the Oakland airport. And I fly out of Oakland, but not regularly. I usually fly
02:17:38 ◼ ► out of SFO or LAX, depending on where I'm going, if I'm not flying out of Fresno. And Fresno doesn't
02:17:45 ◼ ► have a lot of direct flights to Oakland or a lot of direct flights to—definitely no direct flights
02:18:07 ◼ ► of Oakland to Glendale. And it's, depending on the day, it can be as little as 70 bucks
02:18:13 ◼ ► Wow, the fly, which is great. And that's what it was. So my airfare was full disclosure,
02:19:05 ◼ ► So JetBlue has a carriage deal with JetSuite, which is like one of these private jet sort
02:20:09 ◼ ► and then sort of circle around and their terminal is just directly adjacent to the airport basically.
02:20:17 ◼ ► They come in, you come in, you drive right up to the terminal essentially, hop out, hop
02:20:29 ◼ ► in in like 25 seconds, you sit and have some snacks and some coffee and whatever that they
02:20:41 ◼ ► get out and go into the hangar, walk in through the hangar and then exit the hangar after
02:20:52 ◼ ► I think I might get rich now that I know this is how they … I might try that for a while.
02:21:01 ◼ ► So, one day at ILM, one day at Imagineering, one day at the actual park, which is set to
02:21:52 ◼ ► on May the 4th because get it, May the 4th be with you. I'm sure they tried to hit that, but
02:22:03 ◼ ► Yeah, it is. And you know what, to be honest, so the opening date is—to finish out the opening
02:22:08 ◼ ► date conversation, the opening date is May 31st, and both attractions will not be open on that.
02:22:20 ◼ ► So they're pushing hard. I mean, they were working around the clock when we were there.
02:22:23 ◼ ► One of the tour folks were telling me, one of the construction managers was telling us that
02:22:36 ◼ ► and like a bunch of X-wings had appeared. So they're working around the clock pretty much.
02:22:40 ◼ ► Pete: The two places where I've noticed where construction moves really fast is Disney,
02:22:46 ◼ ► where you can take like a week-long vacation and see progress having been made on something that's
02:22:51 ◼ ► under a crane. And Vegas, where stuff goes up in Vegas and it's like, who knows how the hell they
02:22:57 ◼ ► make it happen, but it happens, seemingly, at least to my perspective, happens pretty fast.
02:23:10 ◼ ► Pete; And maybe there's less regular, maybe less traditional union hurdles than in like
02:23:15 ◼ ► big east coast cities like Philly and New York. There's more red tape or something like that.
02:23:21 ◼ ► I feel like down in Orlando, Disney, not that they're cutting corners, but that there's just
02:23:27 ◼ ► not as much urban bureaucracy. And I think Vegas is sort of more of a similar money talks sort of
02:23:36 ◼ ► thing. But anyway, it can happen fast. Just going meta for a second, I do suspect, I suspect
02:23:44 ◼ ► I know there's a big overlap between Apple nerds and Disney nerds or fans, whatever you
02:23:54 ◼ ► I also think, though, that there's probably a lot of people who listen to this show who
02:24:38 ◼ ► I just appreciate it as an appreciator of good design in general, or at least thoughtful
02:24:44 ◼ ► Because it's incredible the the depth to with which they design things is just astounding to me
02:24:53 ◼ ► Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think I think there's a lot of aspects to it design is absolutely one major one for me
02:25:05 ◼ ► Sharing a lot of edges with you know, the bleeding edge of what you know is out there in terms of robotics
02:25:13 ◼ ► One of the big things that I've been tracking for a long time, one of the big topics is
02:25:27 ◼ ► Because I do feel that HRI is going to become an essential learning or an essential investment
02:25:35 ◼ ► for any major company that has any sort of automated or roboticized features or processes.
02:25:44 ◼ ► Because it's already, I mean, in practical terms, just to give people like a grounding,
02:25:48 ◼ ► HRI is used in the field of industrial robotics to give people greater awareness of their
02:26:03 ◼ ► if you think of it as a personality or a thing that has a, you know, a bit of a personality
02:26:08 ◼ ► or whatever, you're more aware of it. And so you're safer, you know, if the robot arm is moving
02:26:12 ◼ ► around in your workspace, you're more aware of it if you think of it as a, you know, a being,
02:26:22 ◼ ► discipline in some ways. There's a lot of, you know, Berkeley professors thinking hard about it
02:26:29 ◼ ► and stuff like that. But it is absolutely clear that Disney is one of the foremost world leaders
02:26:36 ◼ ► in HRI because of the way their learnings over decades of the way people interact with creatures
02:26:41 ◼ ► and characters, the way they interact and view animatronics, the way that they partake in themed
02:26:48 ◼ ► entertainment and that kind of thing. So they're doing some fascinating stuff there. And then on
02:26:52 ◼ ► top of that, you have this layer of world building. That design that you were talking about, where
02:27:08 ◼ ► I mean, if you want to understand the level of detail that Disney engineers put into things,
02:27:14 ◼ ► or these Imagineers put into things, you just look at the next time you're at Disneyland
02:27:22 ◼ ► Just look at the different railings they have throughout the park and the way they transition
02:27:30 ◼ ► you're leaving one place and entering another and that kind of thing. So this just, it's
02:27:47 ◼ ► And before I went, I was kind of looking forward to it, but I'd never been as a kid. My family
02:27:55 ◼ ► was like two and a half or three or something like that. I was looking forward to it. I had been in
02:28:02 ◼ ► Florida before, but we went to and this is like in my 20s or something, but we went to Universal
02:28:06 ◼ ► instead because it seemed like more action packed. I think it was probably the right thing to do
02:28:09 ◼ ► because I was still at an age where I didn't feel too old to go on the fastest roller coaster known
02:28:15 ◼ ► to man. The thing is, is that I until I went to Disney World, I thought the words amusement park
02:28:22 ◼ ► and theme park were completely interchangeable, you know, like, right, like Street and Avenue
02:28:26 ◼ ► or something like that. Whereas when I went to Disney World, I finally got it. I was like,
02:28:39 ◼ ► you don't see any of the rest of the park. It's like you're just entirely there, you know, and
02:28:43 ◼ ► you use the words multiple times in this article on the galaxy's edge, the Star Wars world,
02:28:49 ◼ ► controlling the sight lines. And it works both ways. And it seems like one of the newer
02:28:56 ◼ ► trends is controlling the sight ways, the sight lines both ways where the big thing is like,
02:29:01 ◼ ► once you're in the galaxy's edge, you're not supposed to see the red, you don't see Cinderella's
02:29:05 ◼ ► castle or, or I guess that's actually wrong in California. It's not Cinderella's castle,
02:29:17 ◼ ► that. But that call we would have had angry emails, but that the entrance is controlled
02:29:31 ◼ ► you see tomorrowland, it's almost like beckoning to you to walk this way. Whereas it sounds
02:29:36 ◼ ► to me like the galaxy's edge thing. It's sort of like, you don't see anything and then you
02:29:41 ◼ ► come through an entrance and it's boom, a big reveal. Yeah, one of the one of the things
02:29:46 ◼ ► they talked about a lot was how to get people from there to here. Like, you know, you're
02:29:52 ◼ ► transporting these people from one world to another, and they're guests on this planet,
02:29:56 ◼ ► which is also, they say, how they'll explain the fact that you're wearing Crocs, right?
02:30:07 ◼ ► feeling of compression. So you compress people down to a finite space, and then expansion,
02:30:14 ◼ ► you open the world back up to them. And so two of the entrances are essentially rock tunnels
02:30:24 ◼ ► empire or excuse me, the first order or the resistance, you know, and that those rock carved
02:30:34 ◼ ► or laser carved rock tunnels kind of compress down and bring you down to where you're going
02:30:39 ◼ ► through a tunnel and then you have you open up on a vista which is like a frame of film.
02:30:45 ◼ ► These frames of film are open up like oh yeah this is the first time you saw x y or z in the
02:30:51 ◼ ► films that's what we want it to feel like right and then in the the top most entrance which comes
02:30:58 ◼ ► in from Critter Country which is over near kind of Splash Mountain in Disneyland at least in
02:31:04 ◼ ► Disneyland, of course, in Disney World, there's only two entrances, but it is sort of wooded
02:31:09 ◼ ► pathway, you know, that kind of meanders from one wooded country to a different kind of trees,
02:31:16 ◼ ► and all of a sudden, you're, you're in this resistance encampment outside of town, so to
02:31:21 ◼ ► speak. So it's that those areas of transition that they create. Yeah. And they've always, that is,
02:31:27 ◼ ► again, as an appreciator of the experience design, they've done that with the transitions between the
02:31:33 ◼ ► the world's in the parks, at least the better parks, you know, and the better transitions.
02:31:38 ◼ ► Like they even do things like as you're going from one to another and there's ambient music
02:31:44 ◼ ► playing, the speakers are synced up between the two so that when you're in the part where
02:31:48 ◼ ► you'd hear them both, it doesn't sound discordant. They kind of go together. And then all of
02:31:53 ◼ ► a sudden it's like it's just like this weird smooth transition where you're like at Disney
02:31:59 ◼ ► where you can go from Frontierland to the Liberty Square world, and you're transferring
02:32:13 ◼ ► but sort of like a cross between Revolutionary War, Philadelphia, and Boston. But you never
02:32:23 ◼ ► Yep, exactly. And that that sort of unknown or gentle, unseen transitional thing is what they specialize in. That stuff takes work. I mean, it takes an enormous amount of thought about, you know, where to put speakers and they invented new technology to interleave the sound and all of that stuff. But they're taking basically, you know, 100 years worth of work in this regard, and putting it towards kind of making Star Wars.
02:32:58 ◼ ► thing. You know, people have been seeing it for decades now. And so they know what it's
02:33:04 ◼ ► supposed to look like and what it's supposed to feel like. That's a lot of responsibility.
02:33:13 ◼ ► gonna do? Are we gonna pick one of the known planets like Tatooine or Hoth or, you know,
02:33:20 ◼ ► Cloud City or something like that. Or we just go with something new, and they went with
02:33:30 ◼ ► B-A-T-U-U. Which I think was the right decision. Just so that they had the freedom to, you
02:33:46 ◼ ► That they had the freedom to design everything the way they want, and they're not really
02:33:52 ◼ ► Yeah. One of the other things, I think I put this in there, but one of the other things that they
02:33:56 ◼ ► mentioned about why they chose to do that is they wanted people to come in on an even footing.
02:34:01 ◼ ► Like if you know Star Wars to a casual degree, or just barely from whatever absorbed media you've
02:34:14 ◼ ► you need to know all of the lore of this place before you can enjoy it or understand it. And
02:34:20 ◼ ► instead, it should be welcoming to all like they're all we're all starting our adventure together.
02:34:25 ◼ ► Like on day one, when everybody walks in, they're all on the same footing. They know just as much
02:34:30 ◼ ► about this place and about what's going to happen here as anybody else, you know, and that's that is
02:34:36 ◼ ► hard to do with an existing location that you know, somebody who's a more hardcore fan may just
02:34:44 ◼ ► And that is sort of, I think it's the nature of the beast where Star Wars is by the nature
02:34:50 ◼ ► of the franchise as sort of, it's been implied since the very first movie in 1977 that it's
02:35:36 ◼ ► from other angles. And they built it so that it's like a beacon because people are not,
02:35:42 ◼ ► I mean, it's like the greatest, I don't know how much Universal spent to get the rights
02:35:45 ◼ ► to that, but it was great for them because when you go there, half the kids are wearing
02:36:01 ◼ ► it like in the back corner. But it's just not a great entrance. But the second one they
02:36:06 ◼ ► opened at Universal Studios is Diagon Alley, which has a terrific reveal. It is amazing.
02:36:24 ◼ ► London. Very well done. And honestly, there's almost not enough signage. It's almost like
02:36:31 ◼ ► we were like, "What the hell is—where's the Harry Potter?" I get it that London is England,
02:36:36 ◼ ► and it's like, "Is this it?" And then you go through a little thing that you don't—you're like,
02:36:42 ◼ ► "I think we go through here." And you see something—it never seems like there's hundreds
02:36:45 ◼ ► of people coming in around. It seems like just six people going, walking through around a corner.
02:36:49 ◼ ► You go around a corner, and boom, you're in Diagon Alley. And it's a very specific place from the
02:36:57 ◼ ► Harry Potter franchise and just a different way of doing it. It would be like if Star Wars really was
02:37:09 ◼ ► But on the other hand, that would be so limiting because most of the Star Wars worlds, there's
02:37:14 ◼ ► really not that much there, right? Most of the planets we have seen in the movies are rather
02:37:29 ◼ ► Right. And all we really know about it is there's like a bar and there's a place to buy like
02:37:36 ◼ ► spaceship parts. Yeah. And not only that, but it's like literally all it's known for is being crap.
02:37:41 ◼ ► Right. Like Luke wants to leave. Everybody refers to it as a terrible place. You don't want to go
02:37:52 ◼ ► Right, right, exactly. And that's where you end up, you end up having to take really well known places and thematize them, which is sort of anti this modern philosophy that Disney has about these parks is that instead, you should create this thing where you are really building a world and you're not just sort of like taking a theme and slapping it on something.
02:38:13 ◼ ► Now, I will say that this project is a marquee project and has all the best people working
02:38:23 ◼ ► There's plenty of examples throughout the parks and projects that diehard Disney followers
02:40:06 ◼ ► go to three of the four parks, the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and studios. Studios
02:40:12 ◼ ► for the last few years should be the last one you went to because it really was half shut down
02:40:17 ◼ ► because they closed a whole bunch of the major attractions to have this room to build this,
02:40:32 ◼ ► in Hollywood studios in the meantime in a totally unthemed area sort of like the generic
02:40:38 ◼ ► middle of the park area you know and they have like stage shows and every like maybe two hours
02:40:45 ◼ ► there's like a a storm trooper trooper parade led by uh captain phasma and they have some state you
02:40:55 ◼ ► know again like a cheese ball stage where they actually you know Boba Fett on stage which kind
02:41:11 ◼ ► experience, and it's really going to be cool because they've been doing things where they'll
02:41:20 ◼ ► Just two guys in real first order stormtrooper costumes walking side by side, and then they'll
02:41:44 ◼ ► - Yeah, one of the interactions the troopers will do is that they will abduct you or arrest
02:41:59 ◼ ► to the side and then they'll act like they're getting a call from a superior or, you know,
02:42:05 ◼ ► whatever they're like, Oh, we're okay. Well, you checked out, you know, you're okay, you
02:42:09 ◼ ► can move along or whatever, right. But they do all of that. I mean, you know, the folks
02:42:14 ◼ ► that do it well, and that have fun with it, the cast members that do it well, they really
02:42:18 ◼ ► use the most, they get the most out of their tools. So the tools that they give them are
02:42:23 ◼ ► essentially, you know, switches inside the costume with like, pre pre recorded voices, they don't
02:42:30 ◼ ► actually talk. And so that the cast members that utilize those the best and really have fun with
02:42:41 ◼ ► and she loved it. It was just like a highlight for her, you know, they detained her and took a
02:42:49 ◼ ► Well, that's the other thing and like to answer my question from before is why do I John Gruber enjoy it so much part of it
02:42:55 ◼ ► I just enjoy the experience I do I just it's a fun place to be you let yourself go you have fun with your kid you
02:43:04 ◼ ► It's like going to when I go to see Penn and Teller or some other magician and I'm thinking how the hell did they do?
02:43:15 ◼ ► you know, to the side, but the buttons are on the blasters and they could, it's just like a little
02:43:19 ◼ ► mini keyboard where they can push them and then the pre-recorded voices come out of their helmet.
02:43:31 ◼ ► You know, I think there's a lot of that to come. They didn't show us everything. That was one of
02:43:36 ◼ ► the cool things that it's still, it's still going to feel like a surprise to me in a lot of ways,
02:43:41 ◼ ► you know, when I go, even though I've talked to people for hours and hours and hours about it.
02:43:45 ◼ ► And only, I mean, I published, I published like stinking 7500 words on it. But even then I have
02:43:53 ◼ ► pages and pages of notes, right? Because this is just like, I always think of that Austin Powers
02:43:59 ◼ ► quote where he's like, "Oh, that's not my bag, baby," right? He holds up the book. This kind of
02:44:04 ◼ ► thing is my bag, baby. Well, this is it. You know, it's like, it's a confluence of everything that I,
02:44:10 ◼ ► you know, that I find fascinating, you know? And I just, I feel that there's a lot that they're
02:44:16 ◼ ► holding back, A, because they want, you know, they still want some surprises and whatnot, but
02:44:20 ◼ ► a lot of it is going to come in this, just the genuine immersiveness of this land. So they,
02:44:27 ◼ ► they're doing a bunch of things here that they haven't done before. One of them is that cast
02:44:31 ◼ ► members have a bunch of different costumes to choose from. So if they are a cast member that's,
02:44:38 ◼ ► say, running the smugglers run ride, which is the Millennium Falcon simulation, they can choose their
02:44:44 ◼ ► own garments to wear, and then they wear a vest and a hat that identifies them as a sort of crew
02:44:50 ◼ ► member of this smuggling organization. And so that that's their uniform, but underneath it, they have
02:44:58 ◼ ► a set of a couple of dozen different basic pieces that you might wear as a citizen of Batuu. And the
02:45:06 ◼ ► citizens in the village, they get to go in to work every day and they choose from those pieces. So
02:45:11 ◼ ► they say, "Hey, my character wears this kind of pant and a vest and a shirt and all this stuff." It
02:45:16 ◼ ► gives them some, you know, investment in the character and in the fact that they're going to
02:45:23 ◼ ► be role playing. And everybody in the land is going to be role playing. All the cast members
02:45:28 ◼ ► are going to be role playing as villagers. So you can ask them what's going on. You can ask them
02:46:02 ◼ ► euphemisms for employees. I forget, Walmart has something where they call people associates
02:46:17 ◼ ► the parks, cast members. And it sounds corny and honestly, in my opinion, at Walmart, it's
02:46:25 ◼ ► a true euphemism. What's the difference between associate and employee? But at Disney, it's
02:47:00 ◼ ► and you go into detail about the difference between the old hydraulic system and the new
02:47:04 ◼ ► electronic system and how much more lifelike it can be, that just the good old fashioned
02:47:23 ◼ ► right. Yeah, and I think there, there have, they have a, they, there, there's always been a level
02:47:32 ◼ ► of investment in, you know, the sort of experience of Disney that the cast member has, and some
02:47:38 ◼ ► people burn out, some people are there for 30, 40 years, right? And I'm really gonna just divorce
02:47:45 ◼ ► this discussion, even though, you know, it is interrelated. I'm gonna divorce this discussion
02:47:49 ◼ ► from, you know, how Disney treats its cast members and whether or not I can treat them better and all
02:47:53 ◼ ► of that, right? Because they're certainly, you know, employees that have a lot of, they
02:48:04 ◼ ► just through small interactions. And they're sort of empowered in some ways to do that.
02:48:09 ◼ ► So they, you know, my daughter has like bought a toy and lost it immediately. They just replaced
02:48:14 ◼ ► it for her. They're like, you know, we don't, I don't even need to see a receipt here, you
02:48:17 ◼ ► know, she's like, Oh my God, you know, I lost this or, or this broke or was it here? Just
02:48:22 ◼ ► take this, you know, and that kind of stuff is obviously corporate policy, right? Let's
02:48:26 ◼ ► do it. But it's, it's imbued like the invest this idea in the CMs that they are there to
02:48:41 ◼ ► travel. But, you know, you forget like, this may be the only time that this person goes to
02:50:17 ◼ ► So you're putting a lot on an employee that's not paid a whole lot for what they do and
02:53:06 ◼ ► and every creature does a little thing like it makes noise or does a you know creature a world
02:53:19 ◼ ► serious they're really just going all the way with it we'll see how much they dial it back
02:53:23 ◼ ► you know later or how much they change because these things don't always launch and stay that
02:53:27 ◼ ► way as we know but uh it's certainly an interesting bet so one of the things disney's always been good
02:53:33 ◼ ► good at is, like I mentioned sight lines before, where from point A, if you're not supposed
02:53:40 ◼ ► good at are perspective tricks, forced perspective, where, you know, Main Street USA looks like
02:53:58 ◼ ► make that second story look like a full second story from the, you know, three, four, five,
02:54:04 ◼ ► six foot height of an adult or a small child. And then you really, really get up close and
02:54:11 ◼ ► look at them and you can kind of see that's not as big as I thought. The one thing that
02:54:14 ◼ ► is mind blowing about the Pandora in Florida is you get up real close to like those mountains
02:54:19 ◼ ► and rock formats. And it's like, what the hell is this? Like, how did the hell did they
02:54:23 ◼ ► make something this big. And how does it not tower so high that you see it from everywhere?
02:54:30 ◼ ► Like, how in the world is this mostly hidden from the perspective of the other areas of the park,
02:54:35 ◼ ► and you can get right under the base of it and you just feel dwarfed by it? Is some of the stuff in
02:54:40 ◼ ► the galaxy's edge like that? Yeah, the sense of scale is absolutely there. So the towers,
02:54:47 ◼ ► the rock towers themselves are about 135 feet tall at their highest point, which is not small,
02:54:55 ◼ ► you know, obviously. But it is the maximum height, essentially, that they can build them due to
02:54:59 ◼ ► aviation rules in LA. Similar to the—it's basically the same exact height as the castle,
02:55:06 ◼ ► so they can't make it any higher. In addition to that, though, you also have forced perspective
02:55:13 ◼ ► at work. So like some of the domes which are layered, you know, back to front with each
02:55:17 ◼ ► other, the domes in the back that look like they're far away or in fact, only like a foot
02:55:21 ◼ ► behind the other one, but they're smaller, right? So they're still using a lot of their
02:55:25 ◼ ► same old tricks because you know, those work. They're they're tricks based on the human
02:55:56 ◼ ► Florida Park has two entrances. And the new one has three so or the new one, not new one,
02:56:03 ◼ ► but the Disneyland that we're in as three. Yeah. But yeah, it's the so walking you walk
02:56:08 ◼ ► into the land, we walked in is still very much under construction, right? So with that caveat,
02:56:27 ◼ ► That's in one of the engineers viewed that as like a, imagineers view that as like a personal win,
02:56:36 ◼ ► because he's like, "I'm a dad and I've never had a line with a bench in it, and so I'm really happy
02:56:40 ◼ ► I got this line with a bench in it." Because a lot of times when you're the dad, the problem isn't
02:56:46 ◼ ► you the dad and it's not you the kid, it's the fact that you're the dad with the kid on your shoulders.
02:57:04 ◼ ► the sense of scale is there. You're gonna feel it like this is a real living, big city or big
02:57:13 ◼ ► village that I'm in. The buildings are full height. They are not scaled down. And it doesn't feel like
02:57:18 ◼ ► when you get close, like, "Oh, okay, I see what they did here." It's actually full height. A lot
02:57:25 ◼ ► of the park is, or a lot of the land has been built to a way where one of the big problems has
02:57:32 ◼ ► always been like seeing what's going on. And so they built the entire thing on a tiered structure,
02:57:38 ◼ ► which they've never done with any other land. And there's some other lands that have like a
02:57:42 ◼ ► transition, like you're going from here to there, up to down or whatever. But never in this sort of
02:57:47 ◼ ► like sloping tiered way, they essentially built it so that you're always looking over people at
02:57:54 ◼ ► something. So that there's the performers, for instance, of the cast members, when they come out
02:58:30 ◼ ► this and it seems all logical now, but none of the other lands have been built this way.
02:58:34 ◼ ► And it's always been a big problem for CMs. They got to get from backstage to where they
02:58:53 ◼ ► when they're there, you got to wait in line to see them. You can't see them. So there's
02:58:58 ◼ ► of interesting things like that that they did, which is a first for any land. But like, I will
02:59:04 ◼ ► tell you, the moment you turn the corner and you see the full-size, 100-foot-long Falcon for the
02:59:12 ◼ ► first time, I literally, I said bad words. And it wasn't, I don't generally do that much. Like,
02:59:20 ◼ ► when I'm taking a press tour, I'm not like, you know, Apple show me the iPhone. I'm like,
02:59:28 ◼ ► I don't fall over in awe, you know what I mean? But when you see the Falcon for the first time,
02:59:42 ◼ ► - Yeah, exactly. Everything runs through your mind, you know? All the things run through your
02:59:51 ◼ ► it'll make engine noises, like they're trying to start it up and repair it. It's going to feel
02:59:55 ◼ ► steam and stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. Do you know what, what are they doing with the Star
03:00:02 ◼ ► Tours ride? I can't imagine they're getting rid of it. I mean, in Florida, is that going to be
03:00:06 ◼ ► within the confines somehow? Well, no. So they're not moving either one of them. They're staying
03:00:12 ◼ ► where they are. That's their current, that's their current statement. Right. So I don't know what
03:00:17 ◼ ► their actual plans are. Sometimes they're different than what they say. But what what they said very
03:00:22 ◼ ► carefully is there are no plans this time to move them. So, you know, they're staying where they are.
03:00:28 ◼ ► They're not moving. They're staying, you know, the Disneyland one is staying in Tomorrowland.
03:00:33 ◼ ► So they're just going to keep them there. I mean, you know, what can you do? It's either that or
03:00:39 ◼ ► you move them. You know what I mean? And that's not an easy task. So I think they're basically
03:00:46 ◼ ► just trying to open this thing and see how it goes. Yeah. One of the things it seems to me,
03:00:53 ◼ ► one of the things that bugs me as a Star Wars nerd, let me get a little Star Wars nerdy here
03:00:57 ◼ ► and not Disney nerdy, but one of the things that bugs me about the new Star Wars, the updated Star
03:01:01 ◼ ► Tours is that you go in that you're in, you know, the basic premise is you're in a, like a commercial
03:01:06 ◼ ► sightseeing shuttle. And things go wrong and somehow you're on a mission of racing away
03:01:16 ◼ ► from the Empire or the First Order or something. And you hit hyperspace and you go somewhere
03:01:33 ◼ ► another adventure from one of the other movies and then you hyperspace again and you finish
03:01:37 ◼ ► up and then it's you know there you go get the hell out you know next next group's coming
03:01:42 ◼ ► in and it's cool because they mix it up and it's randomized and so you can go twice and
03:01:48 ◼ ► hopefully you'll have the luck that you won't you know you might you might go three times
03:01:52 ◼ ► and not see the same segment twice that's right which is really nice but as a star wars
03:01:59 ◼ ► nerd it drives me nuts because the whole rides premise is that you're the passengers on a ship having a
03:02:05 ◼ ► continuous adventure that is separated by three jumps to hyperspace, but the segments come from
03:02:14 ◼ ► Traveling through time and space everything it was like all of a sudden you're on Hoth in the Empire Strikes Back
03:02:31 ◼ ► You know the new trilogy with Rey and and those characters and it makes no sense at all
03:02:38 ◼ ► It gets you know, I get it that you know the original star tours because it was from the 80s
03:02:48 ◼ ► At least it made chronological sense in the Star Wars universe and I get that they they didn't want to pick one trilogy
03:03:00 ◼ ► And they certainly weren't going to not have it updated for the new movies as they come out which weird
03:03:11 ◼ ► But it bothers me as a Star Wars nerd what I like from your description of batu the whole land is it seems like the land
03:03:17 ◼ ► Takes place in a consistent consistently in the new trilogy the latest third trill. That's right
03:03:24 ◼ ► timeline. Yes, it's not it's not around us at a specific movie or during a specific movie is a in
03:03:31 ◼ ► that era, right? That's the way they refer to it. So there, I don't believe they're gonna know of
03:03:36 ◼ ► things going on, you know, in that in the movie timeline. And Batuu has already been integrated,
03:03:43 ◼ ► as Disney does, in many of its books, and it's mentioned in the movie already, and all of that
03:03:50 ◼ ► stuff, you know? But it is going to be a part of the universe, and you're going to be in this place
03:04:02 ◼ ► Pete: No, but I think that's the right way to do it, right? I think that putting it in that era-
03:04:20 ◼ ► But I feel like the kids of today are going to be the most excited about the latest trilogy
03:04:27 ◼ ► Let me get really Star Wars nerdy on you here and one of the characters that's an animatronic is Hondo, Onaka
03:04:36 ◼ ► And he was a major recurring character, and it sounds like he's a really cool animatronic
03:04:41 ◼ ► But from your article Hondo is now the proprietor of the Onaka transport solutions and has been loaned the Millennium Falcon
03:04:54 ◼ ► Way Chewbacca is loaning the Millennium Falcon to anybody let alone to Hondo and NACA. I
03:05:11 ◼ ► One of my all-time favorite little characters who who in the world knows why I knew his name because he's got like two lines
03:05:19 ◼ ► Most people will remember was Lando's co-pilot for the Falcon during the climactic battle scene in the return of the Jedi
03:05:52 ◼ ► Why he has they did give it to us it's actually a children's book and I gave it to my daughter but
03:06:06 ◼ ► So there is some sort of in-universe explanation, but that said I completely understand where you're coming from. It's like wait
03:06:12 ◼ ► The animatronic is super stellar though. It's it's very very very smooth. I think that you know, it's as far as
03:06:30 ◼ ► You know in terms of how much it can do and that's the shaman is the shaman is is a pandora and a native pandoran
03:06:47 ◼ ► We had the head a couple years ago at one of our robotics events just the head and they de-skinned it for us
03:06:53 ◼ ► It was super super cool to watch up close. Well, but even when you're watching the ride, it's amazing
03:06:58 ◼ ► Let me say this I've been on the ride and let me take the devil's advocate position and say I totally appreciate and but part of
03:07:20 ◼ ► It makes sense that almost all of the the amazing, you know, look how amazing this is is all in the face
03:07:27 ◼ ► Mm-hmm. And the other thing I'll say well, let me ask you this the two ruts are the two attractions
03:07:35 ◼ ► It sounds from to me from your description that neither one of them is really the a ride and the B ride
03:07:50 ◼ ► they absolutely were double e ticket if if that existed right because they're they're absolutely a
03:08:23 ◼ ► what if we built Star Wars with Star Tours with today's technology and made it interactive, which
03:08:29 ◼ ► is not a small feat, you know, but it's it's also known it's a known quantity, you know, whereas the
03:08:36 ◼ ► Rise of the Resistance is a new thing. There is guest interaction by cast members during the ride
03:08:41 ◼ ► there is you're on foot you're you're on a vehicle that quote unquote, flies, then you're on a
03:08:49 ◼ ► Riding vehicle like you're in multiple venues death star travel from place to place our hangar
03:09:01 ◼ ► Yeah, and so, you know, you're in a hangar you're you're flying on a resistance vehicle. You're in a resistance base
03:09:19 ◼ ► So I don't think that either one of them necessarily are you know? Oh, this is the a ticket is the B ticket
03:09:27 ◼ ► Incredibly popular and I think just as popular different people who want different things
03:10:40 ◼ ► the humans have these big robots that they ride in, you know, like, they have one, they
03:10:54 ◼ ► he takes, you know, he'll stop and he'll take questions from kids about who'll ask, you
03:10:58 ◼ ► know, all in universe, like, you know, how high can you jump? And he's like, well, this,
03:11:03 ◼ ► this, this model, the one I'm in is actually set to a low power mode for the safety because
03:11:14 ◼ ► You know, and it's super, but the cool thing about that sort of thing is they're making
03:11:20 ◼ ► it there's so much more fun that you can have that you never knew you were going to have
03:11:24 ◼ ► that you're not waiting in line for it. You're just there and all of a sudden this guy in
03:11:45 ◼ ► son were in unanimous agreement. It is mind-blowingly immersive. I almost don't even want to say
03:11:56 ◼ ► is and the scope is amazing. The scale, it's just incredible. The Navi River Passage is
03:12:19 ◼ ► It is not, it is very clear difference between the two, which one is the bigger attraction,
03:12:26 ◼ ► if you can only do one, which one you should do. Whereas it seems like in Star Wars, it's,
03:12:30 ◼ ► it's a lot closer call. Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe I don't want to, I didn't, I don't have any
03:12:37 ◼ ► inside info on this, but I think maybe they know that, right? Like maybe they, they understand that
03:12:41 ◼ ► the boat ride is awesome, but if you're going to do Star Wars and you're going to promise this
03:12:46 ◼ ► interactive, you know, kind of immersive world that has to extend to the rides too. And it really,
03:12:53 ◼ ► from I wasn't able to ride the completed ride because it's literally not completed. But from
03:12:57 ◼ ► what we were able to see of the experience that is true of this it is not you don't sit passively
03:13:05 ◼ ► on a boat or on a car and let it you know, rush over through the right yeah, you just you just
03:13:11 ◼ ► you're not sitting there just watching a bunch of animatronics do their thing. You know, that's not
03:13:16 ◼ ► what this is about. It's, you know, multiple characters you're interacting with multiple
03:13:22 ◼ ► experiences that you get to that you get to take part in, you feel like you are part of the
03:13:28 ◼ ► universe, you're, you know, the, the adventures that you're having are in universe and sort of,
03:13:33 ◼ ► you know, feel like they could be in the movie, you know, that kind of thing. And they're using
03:13:39 ◼ ► a bunch of different tech to get it done. So that's not, this isn't the same deal as that.
03:13:44 ◼ ► It's not like, hey, we're taking an existing ride thing, we're putting a new theme on it. And we're
03:13:52 ◼ ► So the bay and the basic description of the Falcon ride seems so cool. It's like you're in the real
03:13:56 ◼ ► Falcon. It's the room, you know, there's the chessboard. It's all to scale. It's like you're
03:14:00 ◼ ► really there. And then in groups of six, they load you in and you're in the Millennium Falcon cockpit,
03:14:06 ◼ ► and then everybody gets roles. Like there's two pilots and two gunners and two, I forget what
03:14:11 ◼ ► else there were. But you all have things to do. And it actually really does interact with the
03:14:58 ◼ ► But you know, right, 30 years from now, when God Star Wars galaxy edge is no longer the,
03:15:04 ◼ ► you know, the main attraction, and it's the end of the night, and you get in and there's
03:15:07 ◼ ► only three of you and there is nobody in the gunner's seats, you're not going to get you
03:15:14 ◼ ► said is instead you have two pilots, two engineers, two gunners. And so each person has a role.
03:15:21 ◼ ► So if the pilot does their thing at the right time, you execute a maneuver and avoid a TIE
03:15:32 ◼ ► has work to do, right? And so they can put out the fire that was caused by the TIE fighter
03:15:48 ◼ ► So they come through battered but you're gonna get through so there's a ride at Epcot called mission space and the basic idea
03:16:00 ◼ ► And there's like a sim. It's a similar, you know, obviously a similar thinking and you know
03:16:09 ◼ ► navigator or something. And there's points in it where you're supposed to flip switches and stuff.
03:16:16 ◼ ► And much like you said about the Falcon stuff, you've got all these switches to flip and you
03:16:20 ◼ ► push buttons and they beep and they bloop and they all feel like real NASA quality switches.
03:16:25 ◼ ► And they must be because they've been there for 10 or 15 years at this point and they're all still
03:16:30 ◼ ► in working order. They're all like serious industrial grade switches. But it's cool because
03:16:35 ◼ ► you can start playing with them before the ride starts. Like you, you, you load in, you put your
03:16:39 ◼ ► seatbelt on and lower your, your harness. And then you can sit there and like bleep and bloop and
03:16:45 ◼ ► flip all these switches. But then there's a certain part in the mission where you're supposed
03:16:47 ◼ ► to do stuff. Well, if you don't do it, not one thing changes. Like you can do everything wrong.
03:16:54 ◼ ► You like, absolutely nothing changes. It makes you feel like something changes. And maybe if you're
03:17:00 ◼ ► a young enough kid and you're not really paying attention, you might think you did something,
03:17:04 ◼ ► but having been on it numerous times, there is no, not one iota changes of what you actually see on
03:17:12 ◼ ► the screen. So it's not very empowering. No, but it makes sense because it seems like that's an
03:17:18 ◼ ► easier way to make a ride where you're loading hundreds of people in an hour. Whereas to have
03:18:40 ◼ ► You can wait for the front, right? They didn't say. They didn't say, but that's good. Okay,
03:18:49 ◼ ► And sit in the front. Do you think they'll make them sit differently? A lot of times at Disney,
03:18:52 ◼ ► don't really let you wait for the front like that. Like they just kind of, I don't know.
03:18:57 ◼ ► I don't know. I think most of the coasters, they let you wait for your spot, but I don't know. Yeah.
03:19:02 ◼ ► It's going to be, that's going to be a Roshan Boeing, I think, amongst your pilot group,
03:19:07 ◼ ► your flight group. If you go, go in groups of six, because then you, you guys can come to a
03:19:13 ◼ ► gentle person's agreement. All right. That is fantastic. I can't wait to see this myself,
03:19:20 ◼ ► although I won't be able to see it this summer because in Florida it won't open till September
03:19:25 ◼ ► or something but I'm still looking forward to it and I absolutely loved your article and honestly