Upgrade

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:08 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode number 50.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by igloo, an internet you'll actually like.

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00:00:26 ◼   ► Type more with less effort.

00:00:28 ◼   ► It is the Relay FM anniversary this week, and my name is Myke Hurley, and I am joined

00:00:33 ◼   ► by Mr. Jason Snell.

00:00:35 ◼   ► Hello, Jason.

00:00:36 ◼   ► It's a special week.

00:00:37 ◼   ► We've got upgrade number 50 on Relay anniversary week, and we didn't even plan it that way.

00:00:43 ◼   ► That's just how it worked out, which is cool.

00:00:45 ◼   ► And we also have Clockwise 100 later in the week.

00:00:47 ◼   ► We do, which we did plan a little bit.

00:00:50 ◼   ► We skipped a week in the summer, and people are like, "Why did you skip a week?"

00:00:52 ◼   ► The answer is because we wanted number 100 to land on the birthday week.

00:00:57 ◼   ► That's why. Simple. There's some Relay News that we should talk about that's related

00:01:03 ◼   ► to your interests and mine and presumably many of the listeners. You want to talk about

00:01:08 ◼   ► that?

00:01:09 ◼   ► We have a bunch of exciting stuff happening throughout the week, but maybe the most exciting

00:01:12 ◼   ► is today we announced two new shows for Relay FM. We have Top Four, and Top Four is hosted

00:01:19 ◼   ► by Marco and Tiffany Arment, and every episode, it's not necessarily going to be weekly,

00:01:24 ◼   ► on a very loose schedule, kind of whenever they would like to do an episode they are

00:01:28 ◼   ► going to do an episode.

00:01:30 ◼   ► And top four will basically be the two of them ranking and putting in order and talking

00:01:35 ◼   ► about their favourite four of a certain topic.

00:01:38 ◼   ► The first episode is their four favourite video games.

00:01:42 ◼   ► I have heard a later episode about another pop culture thing that I won't spoil right

00:01:46 ◼   ► now.

00:01:47 ◼   ► And I think the show is absolutely fantastic.

00:01:49 ◼   ► I'm so happy that they wanted it to be a part of Relay because it's a lot of fun to hear

00:01:54 ◼   ► people do this kind of stuff and to rank and talk about their favorites because you find

00:01:57 ◼   ► maybe some stuff that you didn't know about as well as as I have been wanting to shout

00:02:03 ◼   ► at my podcast player to tell them my favorite things are to the point where I have actually

00:02:07 ◼   ► now just given those the two of them my lists. The best my favorite thing about the show

00:02:14 ◼   ► though, is Marco and Tiff are married and you get to hear the banter, which is fantastic,

00:02:20 ◼   ► between a really great married couple. And the entertainment that you can get from that

00:02:25 ◼   ► is just fantastic because they have a really great kind of shared sense of humor and it

00:02:29 ◼   ► comes across and it's very, very charming. So that's top four. But we also have another

00:02:35 ◼   ► new show that we launched today and launched being a perfect pun. And Jason, would you

00:02:39 ◼   ► like to explain Liftoff to all those people?

00:02:41 ◼   ► >> CHAD - Sure.

00:02:42 ◼   ► Liftoff is what some people had referred to as space and cider as an inside joke.

00:02:47 ◼   ► >> MATT - I'm pouring one out for space and cider.

00:02:49 ◼   ► >> CHAD - It turns out that b-side that Stephen Hackett and I did where we talked about space

00:02:56 ◼   ► the week that the Pluto flyby happened, that was sort of our stealth, not sort of, you

00:03:03 ◼   ► know, to gauge whether we wanted to do that regularly, to talk about space stuff.

00:03:08 ◼   ► And the reaction to it was far better than I ever expected, I have to say.

00:03:13 ◼   ► I expected it to be kind of like lukewarm, or people being like, "Look, we don't want

00:03:17 ◼   ► to listen to you guys talk about space."

00:03:19 ◼   ► And instead, there was this whole, like, all these space fans came out of the woodwork,

00:03:22 ◼   ► and they're like, "Yeah, more space!

00:03:24 ◼   ► Talk about more space!"

00:03:25 ◼   ► In fact, we even heard from somebody who basically is a rocket scientist who said, "Your blurb

00:03:30 ◼   ► says, 'You don't have to be a rocket scientist,' but apparently, you can be.

00:03:34 ◼   ► You just don't have to be."

00:03:36 ◼   ► So yeah, so we decided to do it.

00:03:38 ◼   ► So it's called "Lift Off," and we're going to do it fortnightly, which is a word that

00:03:42 ◼   ► you British people like, and I love too, because it literally just means every 14 nights, just

00:03:49 ◼   ► smash that together.

00:03:50 ◼   ► It's fortnightly.

00:03:51 ◼   ► Every other week.

00:03:52 ◼   ► So that's the plan right now.

00:03:54 ◼   ► And it's me and Steven Hackett, because it turns out that we discovered that we're both

00:03:58 ◼   ► space nuts since we were kids and have both been to like NASA social events where we've

00:04:03 ◼   ► watched things shoot into, well, attempt to shoot into space. Mine got there, Steven's

00:04:09 ◼   ► didn't, but it did rocket off the launch pad. And so yeah, and we think there's always

00:04:14 ◼   ► interesting stuff happening in space. So we're going to try to do it every other week. And

00:04:18 ◼   ► we are also planning on having some special guests who we, I'm not going to name because

00:04:22 ◼   ► we haven't approached any of them yet, but we have been compiling a list. So we're

00:04:25 ◼   ► going to be cranking into gear about topics and setting it all up and programming it a

00:04:31 ◼   ► little bit more now that we're rolling now that we're off the launchpad but I'm excited

00:04:35 ◼   ► about it and the art for that by Frank by ForgottenTowel is spectacular. If you haven't

00:04:41 ◼   ► checked it out it's a space mission patch and it's beautiful and I hope we can find

00:04:46 ◼   ► a way to actually make patches based on the artwork because it is a beautiful thing.

00:04:52 ◼   ► There is a very strong possibility that that will occur. I know a guy who knows a guy who

00:04:56 ◼   ► can do patches. The best thing to do to see the artwork is

00:05:00 ◼   ► to go to the blog post which is in our show notes at really.fm/upgrades/50 and if you

00:05:05 ◼   ► click on the artwork there you'll get a full res version and you'll be able to see the

00:05:09 ◼   ► design which is incredible that I can't, my brain can't fully comprehend because it just

00:05:16 ◼   ► looks real and I don't completely understand how ForgottenTale was able to manage this

00:05:23 ◼   ► and...

00:05:24 ◼   ► Ah yeah, it's amazing.

00:05:27 ◼   ► a master of textures, I think, because the texture, the spacesuit texture is just, it's

00:05:34 ◼   ► incredible. So I'm legitimately more excited about the icon than I am about the podcast,

00:05:40 ◼   ► and I'm really excited about the podcast. So I love that people are loving the icon

00:05:45 ◼   ► too. So yeah, big week, big week.

00:05:48 ◼   ► Indeed. But we do have some follow-up as well as there being follow-out.

00:05:52 ◼   ► Yeah, so I wanted to start with a little related to podcast stuff, just a nice note, I thought,

00:05:58 ◼   ► from our friend TropicalCIO. He is, I believe it's a he, a CIO in the tropics, and says,

00:06:06 ◼   ► "Have you ever talked about how you have seemingly competing podcast networks yet get along so

00:06:11 ◼   ► well? It's a cool example for others." So, which I'll just say, thank you. Podcasting

00:06:15 ◼   ► Podcasting is a small community. I feel like there is more we can accomplish together than

00:06:23 ◼   ► like separately. I think we do the world of podcasting a disservice by trying to, like,

00:06:30 ◼   ► I don't know what, attack other podcast networks and say terrible things about them. And, you

00:06:35 ◼   ► know, I think we all have different, all the podcast networks have different things, different

00:06:40 ◼   ► approaches, different reasons for being, and you know, so that's my take on it.

00:06:47 ◼   ► As somebody who has a podcast network and then has shows on a different podcast network,

00:06:51 ◼   ► you know, I think we all work well together, and that's a good thing.

00:06:56 ◼   ► Anything more about that from you, Myke?

00:06:57 ◼   ► I don't see the incomparable as a competitor.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Like it's just not a thing that comes into my mind.

00:07:02 ◼   ► I love the incomparable shows, you know, like it doesn't really, there's nothing in my brain

00:07:07 ◼   ► where it's like, "Ah, Jason!" Like, because I feel that we have a very, like...

00:07:13 ◼   ► Well, the topics are different. I have more than one time had somebody approach me and

00:07:17 ◼   ► say, "What about this podcast or The Incomparable?" and I've said, "Have you talked to Myke and

00:07:21 ◼   ► Steven?" So that's also happened where I thought, "I think this sounds more like this than like

00:07:27 ◼   ► that." But I think even, like I was on Twit yesterday, right? And when I talked to Leo

00:07:30 ◼   ► Laporte about tech podcasting, he doesn't go, "Oh, well, we're not going to mention

00:07:33 ◼   ► Relay." He's like, "Oh, Relay? I didn't-- I mentioned that Christina and I both have--

00:07:37 ◼   ► because I was on with Christina Warren on Twit yesterday and I mentioned we were both

00:07:42 ◼   ► on Relay and he's like, "Oh, Relay FM, that's relay.fm and you can go there and

00:07:45 ◼   ► Christina, what's your show called?" and all that, right? So again, I feel like, you

00:07:49 ◼   ► know, all of us are, we're not at the point where we're trying, I think we're all trying

00:07:54 ◼   ► to be professional and elevate the medium and/or the format for those people who got

00:07:59 ◼   ► mad when I called podcasting, a medium, the format, the little sphere we're inside. You

00:08:05 ◼   ► know, I, I, is it, it's a competition in a way it is because we're competing for your time and, um,

00:08:10 ◼   ► but I, you know, that's, that's sort of as, as much as I, uh, as much as I think about that.

00:08:15 ◼   ► I, like, I mean, you know, again, I consider at least the incomparable and relay like cousins.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Sure.

00:08:24 ◼   ► That's how I look at that.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Sure.

00:08:26 ◼   ► What's next in the follow-up?

00:08:27 ◼   ► Next follow-up is listener Florian who, um, mentioned that we talk about third-party

00:08:33 ◼   ► watch faces on the Apple Watch, I think we mentioned that last week, and he just chimed

00:08:37 ◼   ► in to say, "It's not just about Apple's control, the watch faces of many brands, and in fact

00:08:43 ◼   ► clock faces," right, because Apple found this out with the Swiss train station clock that

00:08:49 ◼   ► they had that was actually in violation of a trademark. These are generally protected

00:08:54 ◼   ► so that if Apple allowed third-party developers to do watch faces, they would have to do probably

00:08:59 ◼   ► a fairly careful analysis of trademark law and potential violations or it could get very

00:09:07 ◼   ► messy and I think it's a good point. I think Apple could just push that out to the developers

00:09:12 ◼   ► but they're going to get in a situation very easily where they're going to be given takedown

00:09:15 ◼   ► notices and things like that. But I thought that was a good point that watch faces is

00:09:20 ◼   ► a super tricky area and certainly my favorite watch face for the Pebble when I had it was

00:09:25 ◼   ► something that for the most most of the time I had it was an unlicensed

00:09:29 ◼   ► trademark infringement so I can see that as an issue but I think it's also that

00:09:34 ◼   ► that watch face is super important and Apple wants to control it and right now

00:09:39 ◼   ► I think Apple's still getting a handle on what it wants the watch to be and it

00:09:42 ◼   ► wants the faces to do and it's a lot easier to just keep it all in-house when

00:09:47 ◼   ► you're still figuring it all out which I think is still even with watch OS 2 it's

00:09:51 ◼   ► still happening. When I first read this piece of follow-up it didn't make sense

00:09:54 ◼   ► to me it was like well you know they have the same problem for people using

00:09:57 ◼   ► like the Nike logo in an app right but then the more I thought about it the

00:10:02 ◼   ► more I realized that it was probably easier to detect by looking at it a

00:10:07 ◼   ► copyright infringing logo of a major company but I don't know if many people

00:10:13 ◼   ► could look at a watch face and be like that's a Rolex one you know like the

00:10:17 ◼   ► actual placement of all of the parts on the watch face right because I assume

00:10:21 ◼   ► that that's what's protected, right? Not just the brand name because then it wouldn't make

00:10:25 ◼   ► any difference, but the actual design of the watch face. So that would be a lot harder

00:10:30 ◼   ► to tell apart from stuff that is protected and stuff that isn't, I think.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And they could say, you know, you agree that you are not in violation, etc., etc., but,

00:10:40 ◼   ► you know, it's problematic. And I agree, it's more problematic because if I look at what

00:10:49 ◼   ► was in the Pebble Face Store when I was using it, they were all violations. They were all

00:10:55 ◼   ► either characters or logos or things that were styled to look like other watches and

00:11:02 ◼   ► things like that. So if I was Apple, I would, I think Apple's doing the right thing and

00:11:07 ◼   ► opening up the complications first on their faces. I would like to see Apple continue

00:11:13 ◼   ► to release new faces and work on that because I've reviewed a bunch of them on Six Colors

00:11:17 ◼   ► And you know, I think there could be more faces.

00:11:21 ◼   ► I'll put it that way.

00:11:22 ◼   ► I think Apple could make their faces more flexible or have there be more faces.

00:11:27 ◼   ► I'd like to see that continue.

00:11:30 ◼   ► We got a bunch of feedback, by the way.

00:11:31 ◼   ► I mentioned in passing about the book that was written about sort of Apple while Jobs

00:11:36 ◼   ► was gone.

00:11:37 ◼   ► And I didn't mention its name because I had forgotten its name.

00:11:40 ◼   ► That happens.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And it's Infinite Loop, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes, but that's the book.

00:11:46 ◼   ► you have to buy a used copy basically, or at least I did. I bought a copy that had been

00:11:52 ◼   ► sold by a library somewhere, donated to some company that then strips them and resells

00:11:58 ◼   ► them. Now I've got a copy that I haven't read yet. But that just for people who wanted that

00:12:04 ◼   ► was the one that keeps getting recommended as when John Syracuse and I were talking about

00:12:09 ◼   ► like the untold story of the any added complexity of that period where Jobs was gone, that that's

00:12:14 ◼   ► a pretty good example of a book on the subject.

00:12:18 ◼   ► Cool.

00:12:19 ◼   ► The next thing that we have is from Jason Becker in response to the kind of, I'm trying

00:12:28 ◼   ► to think of the word, but like the elusive bing bong from Apple Maps that you had last

00:12:34 ◼   ► week.

00:12:35 ◼   ► Not to be confused with another bing bong who we'll be getting to later in the show.

00:12:40 ◼   ► Yeah, Jason Becker says that he got the Bing Bong sound

00:12:43 ◼   ► in navigation on even in iOS 8.4 or 8.0.4 or whatever it is,

00:12:48 ◼   ► when on a phone call over Bluetooth.

00:12:51 ◼   ► I think the sound has been in there.

00:12:53 ◼   ► I just never heard it or rarely heard it.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And then it was just coming out of my phone speaker

00:12:56 ◼   ► while we were navigating, while we were driving.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And I still haven't replicated that.

00:13:00 ◼   ► Although I haven't tried very much

00:13:02 ◼   ► 'cause I haven't been navigating now that I'm home.

00:13:04 ◼   ► So the Bing Bong remains elusive, but I liked it.

00:13:06 ◼   ► I would love a mode that doesn't talk to me

00:13:08 ◼   ► just makes the little noise as I'm driving just as a little cue. Although my Apple watch

00:13:12 ◼   ► does that too, but if there are other people in the car, it's useful. We enjoyed it. We

00:13:16 ◼   ► started shouting it out when the Bing Bong stopped being played by the phone. We all

00:13:20 ◼   ► just would shout it out in the car. We did it. We made our own sounds. This is what I'm

00:13:27 ◼   ► saying. Steven Hamilton wrote in about Apple Pay in Australia and sent us a link to a story

00:13:31 ◼   ► that basically he says fraud is very rare. We've had chip, pin and NFC for years. Apple

00:13:36 ◼   ► Apple Pay is struggling because Apple wants to take a certain percentage of the transactions

00:13:40 ◼   ► and that's what they take in the US.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Apparently the transaction skimming charge is less already in Australia, so they don't

00:13:48 ◼   ► – so this would make – if Apple took what they take in the US or I believe the UK, they

00:13:54 ◼   ► would be taking a larger share than in Australia of that little bit.

00:13:59 ◼   ► So they're trying to get them to take a smaller cut and we know how that goes with Apple.

00:14:04 ◼   ► So it sounds like this is still going back and forth in Australia.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Although my understanding is if you go to Australia with an Apple Pay device set up

00:14:11 ◼   ► in the US or the UK, it'll work at all those NFC terminals.

00:14:15 ◼   ► But this is about setting up Australian banks, Australian transactions with Apple Pay.

00:14:21 ◼   ► And they're slow because of the...

00:14:25 ◼   ► Apple has less...

00:14:26 ◼   ► How do we put this?

00:14:28 ◼   ► There are fewer reasons that Apple can use for leverage with their negotiations with

00:14:32 ◼   ► Australian bags apparently, which is interesting. So thank you Stephen. And it

00:14:35 ◼   ► seems like it's stalemate with the four big banks, like there's been a lot of

00:14:39 ◼   ► news in the last 24 hours about this, basically that the four big banks aren't

00:14:43 ◼   ► moving. So whether Apple Pay ever comes to Australia, who knows. So John wrote in,

00:14:50 ◼   ► upgrading John, and said he was thinking about comparing Jack Dorsey's return to

00:14:57 ◼   ► Twitter like Steve Jobs to Apple and about killing the APIs and things like

00:15:01 ◼   ► that and all of this but he says but then what happened? He said then Steve

00:15:06 ◼   ► Jobs killed the licensing program of Mac OS because the cloners were making

00:15:09 ◼   ► better and cheaper computers to Apple so I read this as a careful what you wish

00:15:12 ◼   ► for about having Jack come back to Twitter because remember when Steve

00:15:17 ◼   ► Jobs came back he didn't come in and say hey let's open this up he said let's

00:15:20 ◼   ► close this down to which all our reply is yes Steve Jobs did do that but then

00:15:26 ◼   ► what happened next is Apple released the iMac so Apple shut down the other

00:15:30 ◼   ► hardware and then it got to work creating really great Mac hardware of its own and has

00:15:35 ◼   ► been on an uptick ever since. And that was sort of our point with Twitter, is Twitter

00:15:39 ◼   ► shut down most of this stuff, or at least put it on a kind of like "there's no point

00:15:43 ◼   ► in you investing in this, don't worry about this software, don't make new software, just

00:15:47 ◼   ► forget it" and then did essentially nothing. And that's the difference, in my mind, is

00:15:53 ◼   ► like, where is the iMac of Twitter software? Even the OK stuff that they're doing is not

00:16:00 ◼   ► that, like, full justification for getting all of the innovative developers out of the

00:16:05 ◼   ► platform. I also heard from some people kind of offline saying, so I'm not going to name

00:16:10 ◼   ► names, but I heard through the grapevine from a few different sources that Twitter is having

00:16:15 ◼   ► a bare of a time hiring developers, especially for its desktop applications. And I think

00:16:18 ◼   ► one of the reasons is all the qualified developers who really know the Twitter API in and out

00:16:24 ◼   ► are the ones they screwed when they made their API decision. So those people have a negative

00:16:30 ◼   ► feeling toward Twitter. And then also I get the impression that there's a bad

00:16:34 ◼   ► reputation that a lot of people go into Twitter engineering for

00:16:39 ◼   ► the app development and then they leave and are frustrated

00:16:42 ◼   ► as they head out the door. So it's a difficult situation so I hope

00:16:47 ◼   ► they turn it around. I hope that there's a some serious change there. But I would

00:16:50 ◼   ► love to see the iMac of Twitter clients. I would love to see that. Also a bunch of

00:16:55 ◼   ► people mentioned that I didn't mention TweetDeck and I should throw that in

00:16:59 ◼   ► there. I didn't mention TweetDeck because my mother told me if you can't say something

00:17:02 ◼   ► nice about something you shouldn't say anything at all. TweetDeck works for a lot of people,

00:17:05 ◼   ► it totally doesn't work for me. It's a weird web view inside a Mac window. It's a column-based

00:17:11 ◼   ► thing where the window size never snaps to the columns so you get these weird half columns

00:17:16 ◼   ► that you're side scrolling through which is really awful. And it's a dashboard. It's great

00:17:21 ◼   ► if you're a social media manager and you want eight panes up and full screen and it's like

00:17:24 ◼   ► show me what's happening on Twitter right now. And I never considered Twitter something

00:17:29 ◼   ► as much as I'm on Twitter. I've never considered Twitter a front and center thing. Twitter

00:17:33 ◼   ► is a little box on the side of my window that I bring up look at and then dismiss and tweet

00:17:39 ◼   ► deck feels to me like it's not designed to that at all tweet deck is your command central

00:17:44 ◼   ► for Twitter. And that's great. I think if I were a social media manager, I'd use it,

00:17:48 ◼   ► but I'm not and it totally doesn't work. Not only as an app do I not like the way it's

00:17:53 ◼   ► built but its premise doesn't work for me. So I didn't mention it, that's what I would

00:18:00 ◼   ► have said.

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00:20:53 ◼   ► So next up today, we have a little topic that you were referring to in our notes as the

00:20:58 ◼   ► odd couple.

00:20:59 ◼   ► Huh, yeah, so before we started, we started talking about this subject and I decided halfway

00:21:05 ◼   ► through we should save it for the show. So here it is. The, this is not super, people like this

00:21:12 ◼   ► stuff. I'm not sure I'm super excited about it, but I know people like it, so I thought I would

00:21:15 ◼   ► talk about it. There were some tweets going around today with pictures of Steve Jobs's desk, which I

00:21:20 ◼   ► thought were funny because the people, tweeted by people who you might expect are people who

00:21:27 ◼   ► Apple products appeal to. And a lot of those people are people with a design

00:21:30 ◼   ► bent and they're very, they want everything just so. I would imagine

00:21:34 ◼   ► somebody like CGP Grey would be in there like, I'm sure there's nothing on his desk.

00:21:38 ◼   ► He may not even have a desk. I don't even know how that would work, but it's possible.

00:21:43 ◼   ► And Steve Jobs' desk was a mess. It had a computer on it. They made multiple photos from a few

00:21:48 ◼   ► different years. There's, there's crap all over the desk. There behind him is a bookshelf with

00:21:52 ◼   ► with all this junk in it and there's stuff on the floor

00:21:55 ◼   ► and there's cables everywhere and it's a mess.

00:21:59 ◼   ► People are like very disappointed in Steve Jobs,

00:22:01 ◼   ► which is kind of harsh because the guy's not around anymore

00:22:03 ◼   ► to defend himself but I laughed at it

00:22:05 ◼   ► because I remembered when John Syracuse came into my office

00:22:08 ◼   ► at Macworld one time and his response was very like,

00:22:12 ◼   ► ah, you got all this junk around here everywhere.

00:22:14 ◼   ► How do you live like this?

00:22:15 ◼   ► Like an animal.

00:22:16 ◼   ► He did not actually call me an animal

00:22:18 ◼   ► but I know he was thinking it.

00:22:22 ◼   ► And yeah, my office was messy.

00:22:24 ◼   ► My office would tend to just build up junk.

00:22:26 ◼   ► And then I would finally have a moment like,

00:22:29 ◼   ► God, I can't take it anymore.

00:22:30 ◼   ► And usually on a Friday afternoon,

00:22:31 ◼   ► I would put everything into the recycling

00:22:32 ◼   ► and into the garbage and I'd bundle everything up

00:22:34 ◼   ► and I'd put stuff in the computer recycle

00:22:36 ◼   ► and I would be back to square one, but often quite messy.

00:22:39 ◼   ► It's absolutely true.

00:22:40 ◼   ► 'Cause I get focused on what I'm doing

00:22:43 ◼   ► and the other stuff is like, I'll deal with it later.

00:22:45 ◼   ► And then things just pile up.

00:22:47 ◼   ► But what I wanted to say is I think all the people out there

00:22:50 ◼   ► who are freaking out about Steve Jobs' desk

00:22:51 ◼   ► would be proud of me, at least for what is on my desk right now. So I have a Thunderbolt

00:23:00 ◼   ► hub that I got when I had my MacBook Air as my primary computer before I bought the iMac.

00:23:06 ◼   ► And so the idea was I plug in the MacBook Air, one cable plus power, and it drives my

00:23:11 ◼   ► external monitor that I had and my, you know, gigabit Ethernet and audio out and just everything

00:23:16 ◼   ► else is connected, USB, it's all connected from the Thunderbolt hub, all I have to do

00:23:20 ◼   ► is plug the Thunderbolt hub into the MacBook Air. Work great. Then I get the iMac and I

00:23:24 ◼   ► think well I don't need the Thunderbolt hub anymore because all those ports are on the

00:23:27 ◼   ► back of my iMac. But I got the iMac that's on the arm. You've seen it. You've been in

00:23:31 ◼   ► here. You've seen it. I have. I've been riding in there. Um, the, uh, so, you can plug everything

00:23:40 ◼   ► into the iMac on the arm, but what you get is this iMac that's floating in space and

00:23:44 ◼   ► then like ten cables coming off of it. And you can channel them and all, but it's a big

00:23:48 ◼   ► bundle of cables. And I thought to myself, "Well, you know what I should do is just attach

00:23:55 ◼   ► the Thunderbolt hub, because then all the cables are off the desk or at the back of

00:23:59 ◼   ► the desk where the Thunderbolt hub lives, and all I have are a couple of cables, the

00:24:04 ◼   ► power and the Thunderbolt cable, coming out of the iMac and running to the back of the

00:24:08 ◼   ► desk." So I did that, but the Thunderbolt cable I had wasn't long enough for me to move

00:24:14 ◼   ► the Thunderbolt hub somewhere where I couldn't see it, so it sort of sat on top of my speed

00:24:18 ◼   ► speaker on the back of my desk next to the foam orange brain actually which is still

00:24:23 ◼   ► right there. So in the last couple of weeks I've made some advances I bought a long thunderbolt

00:24:30 ◼   ► cable it's a white thunderbolt cable for bonus nerd design nerd cleanliness. Oh nice work.

00:24:37 ◼   ► I should explain I'm gonna say it here the Felix Unger people because this is a reference

00:24:42 ◼   ► that you didn't get. The Odd Couple play a movie, a TV show. Neil Simon wrote the original.

00:24:50 ◼   ► It's about two guys who have to live together and one of them is a slob and one of them

00:24:54 ◼   ► is a neat freak. And in this scenario, John Siracusa is Felix Unger and I am Oscar Madison.

00:25:00 ◼   ► This is what I'm saying. So I got a white Thunderbolt cable to match the white power

00:25:05 ◼   ► cable that comes out of the back of the iMac. They run off the back and it's a long cable,

00:25:10 ◼   ► So I bought some Velcro and attached my Thunderbolt hub to the metal bar that's sort of most of

00:25:17 ◼   ► the way down on my adjustable desk.

00:25:20 ◼   ► And that's where the Thunderbolt hub lives.

00:25:22 ◼   ► So from most angles, you can't see any of the cables that are running into it.

00:25:28 ◼   ► And the desktop is completely clear.

00:25:30 ◼   ► And from the desk, you just don't see it.

00:25:31 ◼   ► The two little cables run over the edge and are never heard from again.

00:25:35 ◼   ► And then below there, there are cables that run into the power and the ethernet and all

00:25:38 ◼   ► of that.

00:25:40 ◼   ► And I had velcro left over, so I took my little USB audio interface that I use to attach my

00:25:44 ◼   ► microphone that I talk through every day, and it's got little knobs on it for volume

00:25:47 ◼   ► and all of that, and I attached that to the underside of my desk too.

00:25:52 ◼   ► So now I feel like a real professional, because I've got audio equipment attached to my workspace

00:25:57 ◼   ► all the time.

00:25:58 ◼   ► But it's just velcroed in there, and I can rip it off and take it with me if I need to.

00:26:03 ◼   ► That required me to move the button that adjusts my desk up and down, which I did.

00:26:07 ◼   ► So what's on my desk now is there's the speaker which has got the Relay FM commemorative wooden

00:26:13 ◼   ► block and the orange brain on it.

00:26:17 ◼   ► And I've got, like my iPhone is sitting here right now, and I've got this blue metal box

00:26:21 ◼   ► that's my mute button that I keep thinking I may actually also want to velcro to the

00:26:25 ◼   ► bottom of the desk but I'm out of velcro right now.

00:26:28 ◼   ► So what I'm saying is you should be proud of me.

00:26:30 ◼   ► I don't have a pile of things on here.

00:26:32 ◼   ► I've got color-matched cables.

00:26:33 ◼   ► They run off the end of the desk.

00:26:35 ◼   ► I've got a cable management solution.

00:26:38 ◼   ► This is as good as it's ever gonna get.

00:26:40 ◼   ► So yeah, so you should, maybe I'll take a picture of it

00:26:45 ◼   ► so that when I start piling junk onto this desk,

00:26:48 ◼   ► I have deniability, I can just show people the picture

00:26:50 ◼   ► and say, no, no, this is what it looks like.

00:26:52 ◼   ► - Oh, we need a picture for the show notes too.

00:26:54 ◼   ► - I guess I will take a picture for the show notes,

00:26:55 ◼   ► but I think it's, yeah, it's funny.

00:26:58 ◼   ► I didn't know I had that in me to be so,

00:27:03 ◼   ► I don't know, so careful about this stuff, let's say,

00:27:06 ◼   ► that I would be like, oh, let's make it a white cable.

00:27:08 ◼   ► That would be perfect.

00:27:09 ◼   ► But I did that, that's what I did.

00:27:11 ◼   ► So it looks nice.

00:27:12 ◼   ► It's nice to have, since it's on an arm too,

00:27:15 ◼   ► to lift the iMac up and have the big wide open space

00:27:18 ◼   ► below it, it's nice.

00:27:21 ◼   ► - So just over a year ago, before I started Relay,

00:27:26 ◼   ► I basically went through and did a big overhaul

00:27:31 ◼   ► of my physical space here.

00:27:34 ◼   ► Changed everything up and did what you did.

00:27:38 ◼   ► Not to the level that you did it in Velcro,

00:27:41 ◼   ► anything to anything, but I got like, you know,

00:27:44 ◼   ► those Velcro cable ties.

00:27:46 ◼   ► - I have some of those right now.

00:27:47 ◼   ► - And I did a bunch of that kind of stuff

00:27:49 ◼   ► to make my whole workspace look a bit better.

00:27:52 ◼   ► But over time, I've been adding more and more things,

00:27:54 ◼   ► and right now, the desk itself is in a better,

00:27:58 ◼   ► like, situation than it's ever been.

00:28:00 ◼   ► It is generally cleaner than ever

00:28:02 ◼   ► because of the way that I've arranged it

00:28:04 ◼   ► and everything's kind of got its place

00:28:06 ◼   ► and I have a monitor now as well as having the TV

00:28:10 ◼   ► for the games consoles and I have like a two max system

00:28:14 ◼   ► going on and I'm very happy with it and it's very nice.

00:28:18 ◼   ► But the cable situation down the back there is a nightmare

00:28:22 ◼   ► and I can't even, it's gotten to the point now

00:28:25 ◼   ► where it's so bad, I don't even know how I could begin

00:28:29 ◼   ► fix it. It's that kind of scenario I've got going on right now. It's kind of to

00:28:34 ◼   ► the point where I don't think I can do it. I think I need someone to come and do

00:28:39 ◼   ► it for me because it's at that point where it's just beyond my help and

00:28:44 ◼   ► assistance. I've got it into this mess and there is absolutely no way I can get

00:28:49 ◼   ► it out of it. Periodically I take my... so in our living room, which again you've

00:28:53 ◼   ► seen, you know there's a big... we got a big TV and then there's like the

00:28:56 ◼   ► receiver and their video game consoles and all this stuff and twice this summer

00:28:59 ◼   ► I have because we got a new TV as we talked about and because I got the Xbox

00:29:05 ◼   ► One I've done the teardown and reconnect at least some large percentage

00:29:12 ◼   ► of the stuff and I'll tell you every time I do it I come out with like three

00:29:17 ◼   ► or four cables that are not connected to anything and I say to myself why where

00:29:21 ◼   ► did this come from? Why is this here?" And probably I disconnected one side and thought

00:29:29 ◼   ► I would get around to disconnecting the other and didn't or couldn't find it. And then later

00:29:33 ◼   ► I would just keep plugging those in thinking they went somewhere, which they didn't, and

00:29:38 ◼   ► eventually think like, "Oh, these don't go anywhere, but I don't know where they're plugged

00:29:41 ◼   ► into on the other side," and so then disconnected them. And then they just sit there for a while,

00:29:46 ◼   ► and just sort of hanging, not connected to anything, why are they there? And then the

00:29:51 ◼   ► next time I pull something on they go, "Oh, this is not connected to anything." And then,

00:29:56 ◼   ► yeah. So cables are the worst. They are the worst. I think it would be, other than all

00:30:03 ◼   ► the extra work it causes, I think people should like every six months, they should disconnect

00:30:08 ◼   ► all their cables and then reconnect all their cables. Just because you will, I swear you

00:30:15 ◼   ► will find cables that you'd be like, "I don't need this cable. Why is this even here?" And

00:30:19 ◼   ► And I think that would be a smart move.

00:30:21 ◼   ► I think I need to do that.

00:30:23 ◼   ► I think I need to burn everything down and start over again.

00:30:28 ◼   ► With that kind of stuff, I got...

00:30:29 ◼   ► Change your name.

00:30:30 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Just shut it all down.

00:30:32 ◼   ► The cables are too bad.

00:30:33 ◼   ► But I feel like in that scenario, I have to then...

00:30:35 ◼   ► I can't work the whole day because it's going to take me that amount of time to get everything

00:30:41 ◼   ► back into some sort of sanity again.

00:30:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:30:46 ◼   ► right now below my desk here are in decent shape because I've only been in

00:30:51 ◼   ► this space with this stuff for a year and I don't have that many things hooked

00:30:56 ◼   ► up because I only have the one computer and all of that but still it'll it'll

00:31:00 ◼   ► it'll accumulate I'm sure of it I literally was pulling out HDMI cables

00:31:04 ◼   ► going like oh I didn't know I had an extra HDMI cable oh here's another

00:31:08 ◼   ► Ethernet cable I just I don't know why I got back there but it was back there so

00:31:14 ◼   ► yeah cables they're the worst one day Myke one day everything will be decabled

00:31:18 ◼   ► we'll live in a we'll put on our jumpsuits and and go to space and there

00:31:25 ◼   ► will be no cables all well we'll just have max with one port mm-hmm sure we

00:31:30 ◼   ► could do about it anyway that's a cable it's got a cable just one just just one

00:31:34 ◼   ► cable and ever was the only allowed one cable you choose one thing it's a grim

00:31:39 ◼   ► future you're describing so we have an interesting show today in general

00:31:43 ◼   ► because our tech topics are mini topics.

00:31:46 ◼   ► We're completely throwing out the normal format.

00:31:49 ◼   ► We have one more mini topic, then we're doing Ask Upgrade.

00:31:52 ◼   ► Then we have two Myke at the movie kind of things.

00:31:55 ◼   ► We have the full on-- - Yeah, we have Myke

00:31:56 ◼   ► at the movies and then we have bonus Myke at the movies.

00:31:59 ◼   ► - It's Myke went to a movie yesterday.

00:32:01 ◼   ► It's the-- - Yes.

00:32:02 ◼   ► - It's the-- - He just has to talk about it.

00:32:04 ◼   ► - It's not as catchy at vertical, but it is one,

00:32:09 ◼   ► nevertheless. - Yes.

00:32:10 ◼   ► - But you had some mini topic follow out, I think,

00:32:13 ◼   ► that you wanted to do now?

00:32:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, I have one really quick mini topic,

00:32:16 ◼   ► again, about ATP 130, the Accidental Tech Podcast,

00:32:20 ◼   ► maybe you've heard of it.

00:32:21 ◼   ► And they were talking about Alphabet and Google,

00:32:23 ◼   ► and then this came up when I was on Twit yesterday too.

00:32:26 ◼   ► I just wanted to share really briefly

00:32:28 ◼   ► my experience from IDG.

00:32:31 ◼   ► So IDG was founded by a guy, Pat McGovern.

00:32:34 ◼   ► He started Computerworld,

00:32:35 ◼   ► he turned this into International Data Group,

00:32:38 ◼   ► and it grew, and they added more media brands,

00:32:41 ◼   ► but then over time he added investment and research

00:32:44 ◼   ► and invested in all these international versions of IDG

00:32:49 ◼   ► where they're in China and they're in Europe

00:32:51 ◼   ► and they're in Africa and they're in Asia, the rest of Asia.

00:32:54 ◼   ► And he was one of the first Western businesses

00:32:58 ◼   ► to go into China.

00:32:59 ◼   ► I believe one of the first Western businesses

00:33:01 ◼   ► to go into Vietnam in the last 20 years, 30 years.

00:33:05 ◼   ► And so he built this business.

00:33:07 ◼   ► And I wanted to mention it because I see relations to this in Alphabet, which is you've got a

00:33:13 ◼   ► founder or in the case of Google founders, and they create a thing.

00:33:17 ◼   ► And then over time, the thing is much bigger than it was when it began.

00:33:21 ◼   ► And you had that moment where you're like, how do we structure this?

00:33:24 ◼   ► And this is definitely what Pat McGovern did.

00:33:26 ◼   ► When I worked at IDG, he was the chairman.

00:33:31 ◼   ► And so there was a board of directors, and then he hired basically a president, a CEO

00:33:37 ◼   ► of the overall IDG.

00:33:40 ◼   ► But everything under that was different businesses.

00:33:42 ◼   ► They were companies and they had presidents.

00:33:46 ◼   ► And this strikes me as being similar to what Google is doing, where that business has grown

00:33:52 ◼   ► up.

00:33:53 ◼   ► It's no longer Larry and Sergey are at Stanford and they've got an idea for a search engine,

00:33:56 ◼   ► right?

00:33:57 ◼   ► It's come a long way.

00:33:58 ◼   ► some point, you know, if you're Larry and Sergey, there are two things you could do.

00:34:02 ◼   ► You could say, you could have the discipline to say, "We've started to make some money.

00:34:06 ◼   ► I'm going to take some money out and invest it in this other thing that I want to do."

00:34:11 ◼   ► But instead they're like, "Well, let's just use Google's money to build this other thing,

00:34:15 ◼   ► and it'll be part of Google. It won't be our money, it'll be Google's money. Let's just

00:34:19 ◼   ► keep it all in the one business instead of making some other businesses." And so they

00:34:22 ◼   ► did that, and they kept doing that, and they bought other companies, and they created these

00:34:26 ◼   ► crazy lab divisions and it was all just part of Google. And over time, and this is the

00:34:31 ◼   ► story that they seem to be telling now too, is over time, especially the last few years,

00:34:36 ◼   ► they've realized it kind of doesn't make sense because as we said last week, there's Larry

00:34:40 ◼   ► and Sergey's playground and there's sort of what we think of as base Google. And I know

00:34:44 ◼   ► John Syracuse has said, I'm just going to call it Google forever, but I think I, given

00:34:51 ◼   ► my experience at IDG it's like there is some freedom to run your own business

00:34:56 ◼   ► and I think that this is what Sundar Pichai is going to get and I think this

00:35:01 ◼   ► is what Tony Fadell has with Nest and I think that over time ideally you'll see

00:35:05 ◼   ► that from Google Ventures and from the the labs projects and other stuff that

00:35:11 ◼   ► they're doing that they will see of see themselves more as the standalone

00:35:14 ◼   ► businesses that are part of a family with a shared ownership but that are

00:35:19 ◼   ► allowed to chart their own course at least a little bit. Now this all comes

00:35:24 ◼   ► down to what the founders want, what the what the guys, Larry and Sergey in this

00:35:27 ◼   ► case, want. Because there the you know over my time at IDG the interference

00:35:35 ◼   ► slash supervision from above varied a lot. There were times when we were very

00:35:40 ◼   ► much pushed together and said you know you all need to do this even though it

00:35:45 ◼   ► doesn't really benefit you because it benefits the group as a whole. But there

00:35:51 ◼   ► were other times when that didn't happen and that was all within IDG's media

00:35:55 ◼   ► group, the publishing group. We never got feedback about how the research company

00:35:59 ◼   ► IDC did its job or what happened with Ventures. In fact, Ventures was kept at a

00:36:05 ◼   ► distance because they would invest in companies that we would cover. So I

00:36:10 ◼   ► wasn't even aware of what they were investing in, it was just completely

00:36:13 ◼   ► separate. So it's going to be up to Larry and Sergey about how they play this, but I

00:36:19 ◼   ► think the best solution here is, and what I hope they do, is let the businesses be the

00:36:25 ◼   ► businesses and really just let Alphabet be a thing that transforms what we thought of

00:36:31 ◼   ► as Google before a week ago into thinking of Alphabet as stuff that Larry and Sergey

00:36:38 ◼   ► own, along with the investors who have no control. Nice trick. And that within that

00:36:46 ◼   ► are a whole bunch of different companies, including Google. And that just because Google

00:36:49 ◼   ► does something doesn't mean that Nest will follow along, and just because Nest does something

00:36:53 ◼   ► doesn't mean that that is only in the best interest of the Google search engine. So we'll

00:36:57 ◼   ► have to watch it, but it kept resonating with me that this is the sort of thing that happens

00:37:02 ◼   ► when you have founders who have this huge business that keeps growing in all these different

00:37:06 ◼   ► areas and you have to make some decisions about how you segment them and how you manage

00:37:10 ◼   ► them because it gets too complicated. So, anyway.

00:37:14 ◼   ► You mentioned the investors there. The investors remain the same though, right? Because…

00:37:19 ◼   ► Well, okay, so right now the Alphabet holding company, which is coded as Google on the stock

00:37:26 ◼   ► market, owns everything, right? So, first off, it doesn't preclude them from spinning

00:37:33 ◼   ► things off, right? They could spin off Nest if they wanted to. They could. And give the

00:37:40 ◼   ► stock, you know, give a... translate the stock out to the Nest people. I am not an investor,

00:37:45 ◼   ► I'll just say that. But they could do that. They could do that. And the way they've structured

00:37:48 ◼   ► their stock is interesting in that all of the stock that's been bought up when they

00:37:53 ◼   ► went public that made them a whole lot of money, Larry and Sergey still have control.

00:37:57 ◼   ► They have the voting, the majority of the voting shares, which is a brilliant thing

00:38:01 ◼   ► that they did because they didn't want to lose control of their company. I think

00:38:04 ◼   ► Steve Jobs may have given them some advice there. So they can kind of do what

00:38:08 ◼   ► they want and the stock will get pummeled if the stock market doesn't

00:38:11 ◼   ► like it but there's nobody who can like take over the board and say you're fired

00:38:15 ◼   ► we're bringing in new management to run Google. So over time it wouldn't surprise

00:38:20 ◼   ► me if they perhaps took more steps to separate some of their businesses but

00:38:27 ◼   ► for right now yeah it's one in the end all of these companies have the same

00:38:31 ◼   ► owner but they're being run separately and the question is how separately are

00:38:36 ◼   ► they really being run because I like I said I saw it both ways at IDG. I don't

00:38:41 ◼   ► know if it's my general kind of tendency for these things especially Google

00:38:46 ◼   ► related things but on the face of all of this I believe it all makes sense to me

00:38:53 ◼   ► like I can see my like let's imagine in ten years time Relay has 60 shows right

00:38:59 ◼   ► because we just can't stop I can see a world where we would have like spin-off

00:39:05 ◼   ► networks instead like you know let's say that we ended up with 10 tech podcasts

00:39:10 ◼   ► and then we had 10 podcasts about movies and 12 about video games like I can see

00:39:16 ◼   ► a world where like we would say oh and then you know this is where you go and

00:39:19 ◼   ► get that stuff even if it was just like real AFM tech and it lived at this web

00:39:23 ◼   ► do you see what I mean like I can understand that like I can see from a

00:39:27 ◼   ► founder's point of view, like if your business continues to grow and grow and

00:39:31 ◼   ► grow to the point where it doesn't make sense anymore then you might want to

00:39:34 ◼   ► like restructure things so you're able to focus on the places you want to focus

00:39:39 ◼   ► on because if it gets to the point where I'm like I'm totally done with tech I

00:39:43 ◼   ► only want to do video games but yet all I keep getting is this tech stuff like

00:39:47 ◼   ► why don't I just put somebody else in to do that and then I'll just go to do

00:39:50 ◼   ► video game stuff but I remain with the same level of control that I had before

00:39:54 ◼   ► I just don't have to care about any of the stuff that I don't want to care about

00:39:57 ◼   ► But as long as the tech shows keep making the money then they'll keep paying for whatever other stuff

00:40:03 ◼   ► I want to do because I have these ideas in my mind of like things I would like to do in the future

00:40:08 ◼   ► like just other little projects and I see like

00:40:12 ◼   ► Relay and the money the income that I make from relay helping me afford to do that at some point, you know

00:40:17 ◼   ► Well another example. I mean obviously the difference between

00:40:22 ◼   ► certain kinds of podcasts is very much less than the difference between

00:40:26 ◼   ► a search engine and a self-driving car. But it's on this

00:40:29 ◼   ► continuum. I was going to use as an example, there was a podcast network

00:40:33 ◼   ► called Earwolf

00:40:34 ◼   ► and they hired their own some ad sales people to sell ads for their

00:40:39 ◼   ► podcasts

00:40:39 ◼   ► and at some point they realized that that was a totally different kind of

00:40:43 ◼   ► business but also a successful business with a lot of growth

00:40:46 ◼   ► and that's so that's mid-roll media which just got bought by

00:40:51 ◼   ► uh, by uh, Scripps and that's where our friend Lex Friedman works.

00:40:54 ◼   ► And, um, you know, that's what they did is that the guy who founded

00:40:59 ◼   ► Earwolf said, let's essentially split this in two and it's, I think it's

00:41:04 ◼   ► the same company or they're, you know, two companies share with a, with a

00:41:08 ◼   ► shared single owner, but that was what they did is they said, Oh, this is

00:41:11 ◼   ► two things, not one, it started as one thing, and then it got big enough

00:41:14 ◼   ► that they realized, well, this thing to grow and improve actually needs to

00:41:18 ◼   ► be you know be its own thing and not just attached to this other business

00:41:22 ◼   ► that we've got that's one of the reasons business is so hard business is tough

00:41:25 ◼   ► man and then as of today they're a whole new thing as well yeah oh sure they got

00:41:30 ◼   ► my stuff they're working yeah they're working on world domination over there

00:41:34 ◼   ► too yep the Netflix for podcasting Jason you've got that going for us yeah yeah

00:41:40 ◼   ► the Netflix for old episodes of podcast that you now can't listen to unless I

00:41:44 ◼   ► just but I love this fast company title that the title for the poster to put in

00:41:48 ◼   ► show notes is how the Netflix of podcasts we've been waiting for, who was waiting for

00:41:52 ◼   ► that? Who was waiting for that? Who was waiting for the Netflix of podcasts? I like the concept,

00:41:59 ◼   ► so what I like about the concept, and Alex mentioned something about this, what I like

00:42:02 ◼   ► about the concept of what they're doing is right now it's very hard to gain a new audience

00:42:08 ◼   ► for a podcast, especially like a one-off or a miniseries, and so I think they're envisioning

00:42:14 ◼   ► this as being a place you could release audio content almost like an audible where you could

00:42:18 ◼   ► say look all subscribers have access to this new special from a comedian or this new you

00:42:24 ◼   ► know six episode mini series from an npr person that you really like and you get access to

00:42:29 ◼   ► all of it just by being a subscriber i i think there's something interesting there it it

00:42:33 ◼   ► strikes me as being more like audible than like what we think of as podcasting today

00:42:37 ◼   ► but it's still you know audio content spoken content um i would imagine that when you talk

00:42:41 ◼   ► about Deezer and Spotify and companies like that that are music services that are now

00:42:48 ◼   ► starting to think about spoken content as well, they're thinking the same thing too.

00:42:52 ◼   ► So it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see where that all goes. In the meantime,

00:42:56 ◼   ► we will continue to release our podcasts on RSS where you can listen to it with anything

00:43:02 ◼   ► and it's simultaneously released worldwide and all of that good stuff that comes with

00:43:05 ◼   ► being a podcast.

00:43:06 ◼   ► Yeah, the piece that we may have missed from this story is what Wolf is doing is taking

00:43:10 ◼   ► the back catalogs of some shows and putting them behind a paywall effectively. You can

00:43:14 ◼   ► still listen, my understanding is you can still listen to the new episodes, but if you

00:43:19 ◼   ► want the back catalogs, they'll be behind a paywall, which is, and they have Marc Maron

00:43:23 ◼   ► right at the very top of this and he's been doing that for a long time.

00:43:26 ◼   ► Yeah, he was using Libsyn's service and may still be, and Libsyn, you pay them and they

00:43:30 ◼   ► give you an app and they can gate your content and you have to pay a subscription fee and

00:43:35 ◼   ► then you get access to the old content that's older than whatever, five weeks or ten weeks

00:43:39 ◼   ► or something like that. It's a little similar to what Ricky Gervais did with his podcast

00:43:44 ◼   ► where after a little while they went down off the internet and were sold as audiobooks

00:43:49 ◼   ► on Audible and iTunes. That kind of thing. And so this is what they seem to be doing

00:43:55 ◼   ► too is you, like with Audible, they want you to have a subscription and then you have access

00:44:00 ◼   ► to this stuff including old episodes of podcasts and stuff like that.

00:44:03 ◼   ► So there you go.

00:44:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Should we take a break for Ask Upgrade?

00:44:08 ◼   ► It's that time already!

00:44:10 ◼   ► It is.

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00:46:30 ◼   ► Okay, so our first Ask upgrade this week comes in to us from Jacob and Jacob asked, and he

00:46:36 ◼   ► asked this of you, Jason, have you tried AT&T's wifi calling on iOS 9 yet?

00:46:42 ◼   ► And my answer was no.

00:46:45 ◼   ► I have since turned it on but not tried it.

00:46:47 ◼   ► But I did turn it on, got the warning saying, you know, "911 services, your emergency services

00:46:53 ◼   ► may not be available and tell us what your address is and are you sure you want to do

00:46:58 ◼   ► this?"

00:46:59 ◼   ► And I went through all of that and then it said, "This service will be available soon,"

00:47:02 ◼   ► and then took me back to the settings screen with it turned off.

00:47:04 ◼   ► And I thought, "Oh, that's weird."

00:47:06 ◼   ► And I turned it on again and it turned itself off.

00:47:08 ◼   ► And I thought, "Okay, that's weird."

00:47:10 ◼   ► And then I turned it on again and then it stayed on because I think that was the, you

00:47:14 ◼   ► know it would be on soon and then finally my account was flagged or

00:47:18 ◼   ► whatever as being able to turn that on and then I turned it on and I have not

00:47:21 ◼   ► used it so have you used it? Never fear Jacob, Myke is here. So EE here has

00:47:28 ◼   ► Wi-Fi calling and has had it for a while I don't know why I never had it enabled

00:47:33 ◼   ► I think that it's the the it's gotten better with iOS 9 I'm not a hundred

00:47:38 ◼   ► percent sure why it has worked or why it hasn't but anyway I was on a call I was in my

00:47:43 ◼   ► co-working space the other day and I was on a call and my phone died and iOS 9

00:47:51 ◼   ► popped up to say hey this call failed it didn't say this exact words but it's

00:47:54 ◼   ► something this effect that call failed would you like to turn on Wi-Fi calling

00:47:57 ◼   ► and I said yes I was fine I would like to do that so I turned it on and now

00:48:02 ◼   ► whenever I'm on a Wi-Fi access point I have EE my network name in the top I

00:48:08 ◼   ► have two bars and then in between the EE and the Wi-Fi logo it says Wi-Fi call

00:48:13 ◼   ► always which annoys me I wish wasn't there but I so now my understanding is

00:48:20 ◼   ► that I get better reception where as a Wi-Fi access point and I haven't noticed

00:48:25 ◼   ► any difference at all it works seamlessly I haven't had any dropped

00:48:29 ◼   ► calls recently it happens every now and then so I assume it's working pretty

00:48:34 ◼   ► well but I liked that it popped up at that moment that was that's great user

00:48:39 ◼   ► experience right there. Like the call failed and the phone knows that there is

00:48:44 ◼   ► a solution to make this better that I didn't know about so it pops up. Because

00:48:48 ◼   ► this is the thing that I think about quite a lot, especially looking at these

00:48:51 ◼   ► iOS devices now. As they are getting older and more mature they are becoming

00:48:57 ◼   ► infinitely more complex. And so many features now are enabled and people will

00:49:04 ◼   ► never find out about them because why would they know? You know, like something

00:49:09 ◼   ► will be enabled and nobody knows where to find it or nobody knows it exists and

00:49:14 ◼   ► the Apple tips app just drives everyone crazy so you end up in a scenario where

00:49:18 ◼   ► people don't know about certain features that their devices have and that's just

00:49:22 ◼   ► the way it is and that just feels like such a an annoying you know it's like an

00:49:26 ◼   ► annoying thing but I don't know how you get around it without completely redoing

00:49:30 ◼   ► everything every time and you can't do that sometimes you have to just add

00:49:33 ◼   ► features in but you end up in a scenario where it becomes you know more and more

00:49:38 ◼   ► complex to try and work out how to do these things. It's just a way of the beast, I suppose.

00:49:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but I like that, and that's the idea, right, that you surface new features by saying,

00:49:48 ◼   ► "Oh, it seems like you were trying to do something. It's clippy. I've noticed that your

00:49:52 ◼   ► collar's dropping. Would you like me?" But there's a good instinct there of saying, "This looks like

00:49:57 ◼   ► a job for a new feature that you haven't turned on yet. And, you know, would you like me to turn

00:50:01 ◼   ► it on now?" My phone does not say that. I have Wi-Fi calling turned on, and it doesn't do anything.

00:50:07 ◼   ► it just is showing me two dots, AT&T, and a Wi-Fi symbol. That's it. I don't know.

00:50:14 ◼   ► Maybe I don't have... it says I have Wi-Fi calling, but maybe I don't. I don't know.

00:50:19 ◼   ► Who knows? The magic of Wi-Fi calling. Yeah. The next question comes from Lee.

00:50:24 ◼   ► Do you have any advice for someone that works full-time but owns their own

00:50:29 ◼   ► website and does some freelance writing and podcasting in their spare time? To

00:50:33 ◼   ► how do you build a following? This is that question huh? Can I can I start

00:50:42 ◼   ► shall I start? You may finish. Lee it's not easy. I kind of I guess over the last

00:50:57 ◼   ► six years nearly have built a great following now to the point where I can

00:51:01 ◼   ► do this full-time and I'm very thankful to everybody that checks out anything

00:51:04 ◼   ► that I ever do but I guess I came from obscurity in the last six years right

00:51:10 ◼   ► like you know it's not like some people like your great self Jason who you

00:51:14 ◼   ► started your own thing now but you have been in the public eye in that scenario

00:51:19 ◼   ► for many years at Macworld right you were you knew a lot of the people that

00:51:23 ◼   ► you know now before you were independent I guess but for a lot longer than I did

00:51:28 ◼   ► And for me, I guess the way that I did it was I found the thing that I liked to do,

00:51:33 ◼   ► not necessarily the thing that I was good at. I kept doing it and I kept doing

00:51:38 ◼   ► it because I liked doing it, right, like I just enjoyed doing podcasting. It's the

00:51:42 ◼   ► thing that I have liked to do and I just kept doing it and the reason I say it's

00:51:46 ◼   ► important is because if you like the thing, if you love the thing, you will

00:51:50 ◼   ► stay awake until 2 in the morning to get the things on that you need to do, right.

00:51:53 ◼   ► So that is part of it, is the finding the thing that you love because it gives you

00:51:56 ◼   ► dedication to continue. Be consistent with it. If you're gonna do a weekly

00:52:01 ◼   ► schedule, stick to the weekly schedule. Otherwise be consistent because people

00:52:04 ◼   ► are more likely to remember you if they see you a lot, I think is another thing

00:52:09 ◼   ► that I have found. And try and find a thing to do differently. So way back in

00:52:14 ◼   ► the day in like 2010-2011 with my first ever podcast, I started bringing guests

00:52:20 ◼   ► on to the show to interview them and also to have them talk about the

00:52:25 ◼   ► tech news with me and my co-host Jason Snell was one of those guests that's the

00:52:28 ◼   ► first way that me and you ever had an interaction and it was basically what it

00:52:34 ◼   ► did was then was it enabled people to find out about the show because they

00:52:39 ◼   ► would link to it or whatever like you know that kind of thing this stuff is

00:52:42 ◼   ► way too common now you know people guesting on podcasts where it wasn't so

00:52:46 ◼   ► much I think five years ago because one thing there wasn't as many podcasts yeah

00:52:50 ◼   ► But what I know that did was that helped give me a leg up because it helped me get a lot

00:52:56 ◼   ► of contacts and that kind of thing.

00:52:57 ◼   ► So I'm not saying follow my exact advice, but try and find a thing that you can do that

00:53:05 ◼   ► sets you apart from other people.

00:53:06 ◼   ► It's a very, very difficult thing to do, but that's the only advice I can give you, I'm

00:53:11 ◼   ► afraid.

00:53:12 ◼   ► I will follow up by saying I think that's great advice.

00:53:14 ◼   ► You said, you talked about consistency.

00:53:17 ◼   ► I think consistency is the most important thing.

00:53:19 ◼   ► I mean, I suppose you could be consistently bad,

00:53:22 ◼   ► but ideally you're doing good work.

00:53:24 ◼   ► You're doing something you like

00:53:26 ◼   ► and that you're passionate about,

00:53:27 ◼   ► and then you need to be consistent.

00:53:28 ◼   ► And if that's being a podcaster, it means, like you said,

00:53:32 ◼   ► it means releasing an episode every week

00:53:33 ◼   ► if you say you're going to.

00:53:35 ◼   ► And not doing, I can't tell you how many podcasts I see

00:53:37 ◼   ► that it's like there's an episode or two,

00:53:39 ◼   ► and then there's no episodes for four months,

00:53:42 ◼   ► and then there's an episode,

00:53:43 ◼   ► and then there's no episodes for eight months,

00:53:45 ◼   ► And then there's another two episodes.

00:53:47 ◼   ► And, uh, that is not a way to build the following.

00:53:50 ◼   ► So be consistent.

00:53:51 ◼   ► If you're, if you're a freelance writer, try to find consistent work

00:53:55 ◼   ► and be consistent in your work.

00:53:56 ◼   ► Um, you know, do turn in consistent work, uh, be on time.

00:54:01 ◼   ► Editors really appreciate you being on time and doing your job, and they will

00:54:06 ◼   ► reward you for being on time and doing a good job by giving you more work.

00:54:11 ◼   ► And that allows you to be more consistent.

00:54:12 ◼   ► And I would say focus is the other thing I would mention, which is, um, building

00:54:17 ◼   ► your own site and freelance writing and podcasting and working full time is a lot

00:54:22 ◼   ► of things I do those three things without working full time.

00:54:25 ◼   ► And I feel like I don't have enough time.

00:54:27 ◼   ► So, uh, one thing you might want to look at is what are the most important things

00:54:32 ◼   ► to you?

00:54:33 ◼   ► What do you really want to focus on and be consistent with?

00:54:35 ◼   ► Because it's possible that you could be more consistent and build more of a

00:54:39 ◼   ► following by not doing a whole bunch of different things but focusing on a few

00:54:44 ◼   ► things so not knowing enough about your situation to say more than that that

00:54:47 ◼   ► that's I think the other thing I'd throw out there there consistency audiences

00:54:51 ◼   ► audiences like it editors who will give you assignments for freelance work like

00:54:56 ◼   ► it I think I think it goes a long way great great advice Jason Jim asked what

00:55:03 ◼   ► our thoughts were on dr. Dre's exclusivity on Apple music so Dre has

00:55:08 ◼   ► written a soundtrack for an upcoming movie called Straight Outta Compton

00:55:12 ◼   ► which is based on the life and times of the NWA. I think it makes perfect sense

00:55:18 ◼   ► right? Of course he's gonna do it you know it's he's an Apple employee. I think

00:55:22 ◼   ► that this is the type of stuff that will really help set apart Apple and will be

00:55:28 ◼   ► a thing that will enable them to continue from the artists and people

00:55:34 ◼   ► that they have working for and with them and the influence that those people can

00:55:39 ◼   ► also have on other people you know mm-hmm so I think that it makes perfect

00:55:44 ◼   ► sense that Dre did the if he was gonna do it anywhere of course it made sense

00:55:47 ◼   ► to do an Apple music and of course it makes sense to give them an exclusivity

00:55:51 ◼   ► especially still during the free period which when is that ending that's got to

00:55:54 ◼   ► be soon ish September September time okay something like that maybe maybe

00:56:00 ◼   ► they extend it if you buy a new phone that'd be smart. God that would be smart wouldn't it?

00:56:04 ◼   ► I don't love exclusivity any content exclusivity like this because

00:56:08 ◼   ► inevitably there's something that you can't get that you want because it's

00:56:11 ◼   ► locked up somewhere else and you aren't gonna switch to their thing but that

00:56:15 ◼   ► means you just can't get the thing that you want. I don't love that but that's just the way it is.

00:56:19 ◼   ► As a consumer I don't love it but I'm thinking of it as a pure business you know makes

00:56:22 ◼   ► sense for Apple to do that. Whether it's the right quote unquote right thing to

00:56:27 ◼   ► do. Of course it makes sense that it would do it.

00:56:31 ◼   ► Blaze would like to know our thoughts that now the YouTube mobile app supports

00:56:36 ◼   ► vertical video. What do we think about vertical videos? So instead of this is a

00:56:40 ◼   ► video being taken in portrait mode with a device. This is a this is our

00:56:45 ◼   ► vertical video vertical. I think that may be the entire reason why I wanted this

00:56:52 ◼   ► to be in this show. I hate vertical video because, you know, most of the devices

00:56:59 ◼   ► that I watch big things on are, of course, horizontal, but the fact is if it's stuff

00:57:05 ◼   ► that's only going to be viewed or mostly going to be viewed vertically,

00:57:09 ◼   ► and people shoot things vertically, I would prefer that we all agree to watch

00:57:14 ◼   ► things in horizontal, you know, in landscape mode. I feel like we're gonna

00:57:18 ◼   ► get to the point where our cameras are going to be so high resolution that you're going

00:57:23 ◼   ► to be able to hold your phone vertically and take a horizontal video in HD. And, you know,

00:57:30 ◼   ► and maybe it's just a matter of how it, you know, how it crops it or how it presents it.

00:57:35 ◼   ► But you know, these kids today with their vertical video, it's so natural to take vertical

00:57:39 ◼   ► video, I have to remind myself not to take vertical video. But you know, if you ever

00:57:44 ◼   ► plan on it being on a TV or something like that or on CNN or something like that. Those

00:57:51 ◼   ► are all formatted for wide. So, you know, but if it's just to send it to your friends

00:57:57 ◼   ► or whatever, then who cares? That's what I think.

00:58:00 ◼   ► >> It doesn't bother me at all. Like, I tend to hold my device in portrait mode. So it

00:58:06 ◼   ► works perfectly. So I think it's great that YouTube are supporting it because if you're

00:58:10 ◼   ► going to do it, it makes sense to watch it that way.

00:58:13 ◼   ► I agree, I agree. Like I said, I think the real solution here is to make cameras that

00:58:17 ◼   ► are good enough that when you hold it in that natural portrait orientation, by default,

00:58:22 ◼   ► it still shoots a widescreen video. But that's not how it works now. So there you go.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Indeedy. Indeedy. So we are now going to approach the first mic at the movies topic this week.

00:58:36 ◼   ► So again, I'll explain this. I've, as we spoke about on Twitter, as we do every now and then,

00:58:41 ◼   ► Jason has assigned me to watch an 80s movie, this time it is WarGames.

00:58:45 ◼   ► I'm going to talk about that.

00:58:47 ◼   ► But yesterday evening I went to see Inside Out and I really want to talk about it with

00:58:52 ◼   ► Jason.

00:58:53 ◼   ► So after we have spoken about WarGames, we'll be talking a little bit about Inside Out.

00:58:57 ◼   ► I just have some thoughts and feelings that I wanted to share with Jason.

00:59:02 ◼   ► So let's talk about WarGames.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Okay, so the idea here is that I try to pick a movie from the 80s that you haven't seen.

00:59:07 ◼   ► That seems to be what we've fallen into.

00:59:09 ◼   ► And although your discussion of the new Arment podcast with the top fours made me want to

00:59:18 ◼   ► have you watch High Fidelity, which is a great movie and it's about a guy who makes lots

00:59:24 ◼   ► of top five lists, it's not from the 80s.

00:59:28 ◼   ► So for now I'm sticking with the 80s.

00:59:30 ◼   ► And so you hadn't seen War Games, which is not on my list of my 10 favorite movies or

00:59:37 ◼   ► anything, although it's a movie I like a lot.

00:59:38 ◼   ► think it might be on John Syracuse's list, but it is certainly a key film in

00:59:45 ◼   ► terms of the depiction of early kind of computer nerd stuff. I would say

00:59:53 ◼   ► it's the, if not the first, one of the first, like truly a movie about

00:59:58 ◼   ► being a personal computer nerd. It's from 1983, directed by John

01:00:05 ◼   ► Adam starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy and Dabney Coleman, among others.

01:00:11 ◼   ► So before I go in with my usual what I knew about this movie before and then

01:00:18 ◼   ► maybe talk about how I felt about the movie, we should thank friends of the

01:00:22 ◼   ► show, the great Smile Software. Oh do we have a friend? We do indeed. We do indeed. It's been a

01:00:28 ◼   ► while but Smile Software are here again, they're a great friend. And also Greg from

01:00:33 ◼   ► smile he DMed me he was very excited we were talking about war games today so I

01:00:39 ◼   ► thought I would have this whole segment brought to you by smile because I knew

01:00:43 ◼   ► they were excited about the thermonuclear war that ends the world

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01:04:00 ◼   ► Thank you so much to Smile for their support of this show.

01:04:05 ◼   ► So should we do this?

01:04:07 ◼   ► Hello, greetings Professor Falcon.

01:04:11 ◼   ► Oh, he's turned into the computer. I was worried this was gonna happen. So, War Games.

01:04:16 ◼   ► Shall we play a game? Let's get to that in a minute.

01:04:20 ◼   ► Okay. I knew nothing at all about this movie.

01:04:22 ◼   ► I figured. Like, not one thing. I didn't have any pop

01:04:27 ◼   ► culture things that I knew came from it. The "shall we play a game" stuff that you just

01:04:31 ◼   ► mentioned I know comes from it now, right? But I didn't know that. I knew it was a very

01:04:36 ◼   ► popular nerd movie and I knew that Matthew Broderick was in it because I

01:04:41 ◼   ► opened up IMDB because I always have IMDB open when I'm watching these movies

01:04:45 ◼   ► so I can write down the characters names because I always forget them and I love

01:04:49 ◼   ► Matthew Broderick I think he's great. I really enjoyed this movie you did it

01:04:55 ◼   ► again. That's good. I really liked it I really did I have some notes in the

01:05:00 ◼   ► middle of my discussion today about 80s movies in general but yeah this was

01:05:05 ◼   ► another great one. I think again like some of the other movies that we've spoken about

01:05:09 ◼   ► it had some plot issues which I'll get to but overall I found it very enjoyable it was

01:05:17 ◼   ► a lot of fun and I kind of liked the overall kind of messages that it was giving out which

01:05:23 ◼   ► we'll talk about. So let's go through the movie. It begins in a very windy and mystery

01:05:30 ◼   ► location. Oh yeah this movie has a very surprising beginning when we rewatched it for the Incognito

01:05:35 ◼   ► comparable, a bunch of us said, "Wow, I forgot that whole beginning part is there," which

01:05:40 ◼   ► is it's out in the middle of, I don't know, South Dakota or Louisiana or one of those

01:05:45 ◼   ► other frigid northernmost states. Louisiana's not up there, Myke. Reference. And there's

01:05:53 ◼   ► like a secret door that leads to a secret location that leads to like a missile silo

01:05:58 ◼   ► where they're launching or theoretically launching nuclear missiles, right?

01:06:03 ◼   ► Yep.

01:06:04 ◼   ► movie you expected to see right? Not at all actually because it's very serious

01:06:09 ◼   ► uh and and Leo from the West Wing is there. Sure never seen the West Wing. Oh Myke well that's a

01:06:20 ◼   ► that's another thing entirely. Yeah we're not gonna do that because we'll be here forever but

01:06:24 ◼   ► that's actually on my list of shows to watch. TV shows I tend to like very light-hearted TV shows

01:06:31 ◼   ► in general. Me and my girlfriend are, well it's her first time but I'm

01:06:37 ◼   ► rewatching the American office right now. I like that show a lot. So we are

01:06:43 ◼   ► kind of, we go into this lab, it looks like it's a house initially, right, that

01:06:48 ◼   ► these two guys go into these big briefcases. It turns out to be this lab. And they pick up

01:06:54 ◼   ► revolvers, they put bullets in the revolvers. I didn't know why they were

01:06:57 ◼   ► doing this, it didn't make sense to me but it like makes sense in a bit, and there you

01:07:02 ◼   ► go into this like control room and my first thing I noticed which was really weird to

01:07:07 ◼   ► me, so you go into this control room, so it's big like vault doors, lots of vault doors

01:07:11 ◼   ► in this movie, they must have got some sort of discount somewhere, there's vault doors

01:07:15 ◼   ► everywhere, these huge thick doors, there's a sign on the wall of the outside of the vault

01:07:21 ◼   ► room which it lingers on for just a second which says "Anyone urinating in this area

01:07:27 ◼   ► will be discharged. Like I wonder like in the set designer like in their mind why

01:07:34 ◼   ► they decided to include that. Like why include that? That may have thought it

01:07:38 ◼   ► was a joke and then they and then it turns out it ended up in the movie. Just

01:07:44 ◼   ► very just a very peculiar inclusion you know? Yeah. But it was there we had it.

01:07:49 ◼   ► Okay. And then effectively what I find out and what you find out is that there

01:07:56 ◼   ► these guys, there's two guys in this room and they're sitting in front of these big

01:07:59 ◼   ► control panels and they're doing a bunch of tests and things like that. They are

01:08:03 ◼   ► in command of nuclear warheads and there is a siren and there's this whole scene

01:08:09 ◼   ► which I love this scene, right? So there's this siren that goes off and this siren

01:08:15 ◼   ► gives out some message and then some codes and there is then this whole big

01:08:20 ◼   ► scene of the two of them working in tandem. They must have gotten this from

01:08:24 ◼   ► the actual procedures. This must be similar to all the kind of thing that

01:08:27 ◼   ► happens because it's so interesting and feels so right. There's two guys, they

01:08:32 ◼   ► each write down half of the code each that's given out. It's like they

01:08:37 ◼   ► write down or they write down the whole 10-digit code or whatever it is. They

01:08:42 ◼   ► write down on these like acetate like all these laminated pieces of paper with

01:08:47 ◼   ► these pencils that can be wiped off. Then they each go over to this cabinet and

01:08:54 ◼   ► they have a combination each to unlock this this little cabinet. They open these

01:08:58 ◼   ► cabinets and they bring out these plastic things which they break open.

01:09:01 ◼   ► When they break them open they each take out this piece of paper that's inside

01:09:05 ◼   ► and they unfold the piece of paper and each of them has half of the code which

01:09:10 ◼   ► they have to independently verify to each other that is correct. They then

01:09:14 ◼   ► like flick a bunch of switches and that kind of thing because they're verifying

01:09:19 ◼   ► at that point that they have received an actual real code that is not a test that

01:09:23 ◼   ► they are to launch the nuclear weapons.

01:09:25 ◼   ► They each get their keys.

01:09:28 ◼   ► They put their keys in.

01:09:29 ◼   ► They flicked a bunch of stuff.

01:09:30 ◼   ► And then it all kind of one of the guys

01:09:32 ◼   ► starts to crack and he wants to get somebody

01:09:35 ◼   ► on the phone. Right.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And you can see the doubt in his eyes

01:09:39 ◼   ► because he's uncomfortable with the idea

01:09:41 ◼   ► of having to kill all these people. Right.

01:09:43 ◼   ► And he's like, oh, can you just get

01:09:46 ◼   ► somebody on the phone for me?

01:09:47 ◼   ► I need to speak to someone.

01:09:48 ◼   ► And this other guy is like,

01:09:49 ◼   ► this isn't protocol.

01:09:50 ◼   ► This isn't protocol.

01:09:51 ◼   ► And he's like, I want somebody on the phone

01:09:52 ◼   ► before I killed 20 million people and the countdown's going off in the

01:09:57 ◼   ► background and then he can't get anybody on the phone no one will speak to this guy

01:10:00 ◼   ► and the countdown's going down going down and then the other guy draws a

01:10:04 ◼   ► revolver upon him and is like you have to do this turn your key sir there you go

01:10:11 ◼   ► and then what how does it end this got on my head now how does the scene end

01:10:18 ◼   ► And it cuts away, right?

01:10:19 ◼   ► I think that's it.

01:10:20 ◼   ► There is a resolution, it just cuts away, and then the movie begins.

01:10:26 ◼   ► And it seemed really strange.

01:10:28 ◼   ► So you begin, the movie begins, and we're now at NORAD, and that's like, what is NORAD?

01:10:33 ◼   ► It's like some missile defense location?

01:10:35 ◼   ► This is the North American, yeah, this is the central command for the American nuclear

01:10:41 ◼   ► missile arsenal, basically.

01:10:44 ◼   ► in the middle of a mountain somewhere to be protected from nuclear war basically.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And I thought that we were going back in the past, that we'll get back to this later, which

01:10:58 ◼   ► is what I thought.

01:10:59 ◼   ► And then it starts and two guys arrive, they arrive in a jeep to meet a lady who's waiting

01:11:05 ◼   ► for them to take them to a meeting.

01:11:07 ◼   ► And there's this thing, so another massive vault door is starting to close and there

01:11:11 ◼   ► are people jumping through it.

01:11:13 ◼   ► like yeah they're gonna get crushed it's like why would you do that? That seems so dangerous. Like this massive door. Like you are going to be flattened.

01:11:22 ◼   ► But in they go and we are kind of sitting, they're taken to this this group of people

01:11:29 ◼   ► and there are a bunch of people in a room and they are basically talking

01:11:34 ◼   ► about things and they realize that what happened, well that whole

01:11:38 ◼   ► opening scene was a test of those men and apparently like they say I can't

01:11:45 ◼   ► remember the percentage but like a high percentage of the test subjects fail to

01:11:49 ◼   ► launch the missiles right so the whole idea is we've got we've got men in these

01:11:53 ◼   ► silos we give them the the legitimate order to launch the nuclear missiles to

01:11:58 ◼   ► fire on the Soviet Union and a large percentage of them don't do it which is

01:12:04 ◼   ► a problem if you're planning war in the US military in the Cold War. And I think it's

01:12:10 ◼   ► Dabney Coleman who says, "We've got a project to automate this so that humans don't have

01:12:16 ◼   ► to be involved because they have consciences and are worried about not killing people."

01:12:21 ◼   ► And that's problematic. We need to be a little more ruthless as killing machines, apparently.

01:12:27 ◼   ► That's the message here.

01:12:29 ◼   ► Yep, and then basically we have the idea of them saying "take the men out of the

01:12:37 ◼   ► loop". Exactly. Right, so what you need to do is get rid of the men and

01:12:42 ◼   ► basically that's hand it over to computers and this is being said by... I'm

01:12:47 ◼   ► bringing up the character's name now I didn't have... That's McKittrick isn't it?

01:12:50 ◼   ► Danny Coleman? Yeah, McKittrick, yeah that's it. I didn't know his name but I

01:12:54 ◼   ► know his character name. So McKittrick says this and he has been, you know, he has a

01:12:58 ◼   ► system that he wanted to tell them would work and it would be an

01:13:02 ◼   ► automated system and then the idea would be, you know, we all still sit at

01:13:06 ◼   ► the top and we give the order but then once we've given the order, the order is

01:13:11 ◼   ► executed. It doesn't go to anybody else for there to be any doubt, right? We give

01:13:16 ◼   ► the order, the order is carried out and it's apparently the answer to all of

01:13:19 ◼   ► the problems and McKittrick is explaining this to, I guess, people in

01:13:24 ◼   ► the military but seem to be more in the president's camp, like I'm not a

01:13:27 ◼   ► hundred percent sure what these people do. They seem to be agents of some kind, right?

01:13:31 ◼   ► And they work in between the military and the president. And they go and show it around

01:13:37 ◼   ► and the computer is the answer to all of their problems and it's called WOPR. W-O-P-R, it's

01:13:43 ◼   ► an acronym of some description. And it plays war games. That's something that it has done

01:13:50 ◼   ► for many years. It has tested itself by the fact that it understands war and it can judge

01:13:56 ◼   ► everything it can judge who should fire first when they should fire it can

01:14:00 ◼   ► calculate casualties all that kind of stuff it has been crunching all of this

01:14:03 ◼   ► data on learning itself to be able to play these games and then they have the

01:14:10 ◼   ► old general general Berenger I believe played by Barry Corbin

01:14:16 ◼   ► yeah northern exposure another show you haven't seen yep who says I

01:14:22 ◼   ► I wouldn't trust this overgrown pile of microchips any further than I could throw it.

01:14:27 ◼   ► It's like it's a war of ideologies.

01:14:29 ◼   ► Yeah, he's like a Texan.

01:14:30 ◼   ► He's got his chewing tobacco in all the time,

01:14:34 ◼   ► and he doesn't believe all this computer crap and thinks that there need to be military men in the loop here.

01:14:41 ◼   ► It's like a man versus machine type thing.

01:14:44 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:14:45 ◼   ► You know, that's kind of how that works.

01:14:47 ◼   ► That's definitely an undercurrent of society at this time, too.

01:14:50 ◼   ► is what can we automate?

01:14:52 ◼   ► How can computers replace people?

01:14:55 ◼   ► And this is the computers can replace people

01:14:57 ◼   ► at killing people.

01:14:58 ◼   ► All right.

01:15:00 ◼   ► - So it's, you know, this is kind of the way

01:15:05 ◼   ► we leave this scenario, right?

01:15:08 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:15:09 ◼   ► - And it seems like, you know,

01:15:10 ◼   ► they're gonna go with the computer

01:15:11 ◼   ► and they're gonna give that a go.

01:15:13 ◼   ► The guy says, "I'll tell the president about it."

01:15:16 ◼   ► Then we go to our hero, David, who is played by Broderick.

01:15:20 ◼   ► And he is first, the first time we see him he is playing a video game, Galaga,

01:15:26 ◼   ► and I feel it's like a foreshadowing, right? You know, war games, you know, watch out,

01:15:31 ◼   ► that kind of thing, I love that kind of stuff. And he is, realizes he's late for

01:15:36 ◼   ► class and he sneaks into, you know, hightails it to class and he's late to

01:15:42 ◼   ► class to a teacher who is a very peculiar character, the teacher, who

01:15:47 ◼   ► who seems to like sometimes make jokes with the kids,

01:15:51 ◼   ► but the rest of the time just loves giving Fs.

01:15:53 ◼   ► Like he just relishes in giving an F,

01:15:55 ◼   ► makes them come to the front of the class, very strange.

01:15:57 ◼   ► - He's a jerk.

01:15:58 ◼   ► Yeah, that teacher's a jerk.

01:15:59 ◼   ► He is a jerk.

01:16:00 ◼   ► I didn't think that,

01:16:02 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure I thought that at the time,

01:16:03 ◼   ► but now as an adult, I look at that and think,

01:16:05 ◼   ► that's a terrible teacher.

01:16:06 ◼   ► That he like waves people's Fs in front of the class

01:16:10 ◼   ► as he hands them out and sort of mocks them

01:16:13 ◼   ► for being terrible students.

01:16:16 ◼   ► But then again the kids make fun of him too, so that works.

01:16:21 ◼   ► The line is who first came up with the idea of asexual reproduction and Matthew Broderick

01:16:27 ◼   ► who's late to the class says "your wife?"

01:16:29 ◼   ► So he gets sent to the principal's office.

01:16:32 ◼   ► So I have a question for you about principal's offices.

01:16:35 ◼   ► I don't know if you ever visited one.

01:16:39 ◼   ► Only visiting, not sent there.

01:16:41 ◼   ► Look at you.

01:16:43 ◼   ► So in American pop culture, all principals offices look the same.

01:16:48 ◼   ► There's a really big desk and there's a really big bench.

01:16:51 ◼   ► Is that how they look?

01:16:53 ◼   ► You know, I don't know.

01:16:56 ◼   ► I think, yeah, I don't know.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Maybe my, I think our principal's office had their desk and like a couple of, a couple

01:17:04 ◼   ► of chairs.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Not a, not a big, not a big, well, you, you wait at the bench by the receptionist and

01:17:11 ◼   ► and then are sent into the principal's office.

01:17:13 ◼   ► I think that's how that works.

01:17:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that varies from school to school,

01:17:18 ◼   ► but that's not an entirely accurate depiction

01:17:21 ◼   ► of some of the school offices that I saw as a kid.

01:17:26 ◼   ► - So David is taken in to the principal.

01:17:28 ◼   ► We don't see what happens there.

01:17:29 ◼   ► - He's been here before.

01:17:31 ◼   ► He has that moment with the receptionist where she's like,

01:17:34 ◼   ► I think we're all getting a little tired of this.

01:17:35 ◼   ► And he says, yeah, I am too.

01:17:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:17:39 ◼   ► - Yup.

01:17:40 ◼   ► And then basically we go to him leaving school and Jennifer has a motorcycle for a reason.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Well a scooter, I think she's got a scooter or a moped or something.

01:17:51 ◼   ► So Jennifer who he was giving around in class and this is Alice Sheedy who has been in many

01:17:58 ◼   ► other other movies that you might have actually seen like The Breakfast Club.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Yep.

01:18:02 ◼   ► Okay, got one.

01:18:04 ◼   ► And Short Circuit.

01:18:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, yep, so she gives him a ride

01:18:11 ◼   ► on her scooter back to his house.

01:18:14 ◼   ► - Yep, and basically what they're going to do

01:18:19 ◼   ► is he's saying, David's saying that he can help her

01:18:22 ◼   ► with the F and can help her out basically.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And what it transpires is that he is going to

01:18:30 ◼   ► change her grade like he changes his grades

01:18:33 ◼   ► in the school computer, can hack into the school computer.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Now, this is the moment that you probably

01:18:38 ◼   ► have been waiting for,

01:18:40 ◼   ► where I talk about the computer equipment.

01:18:42 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:18:43 ◼   ► - I have zero idea about any of it.

01:18:44 ◼   ► I don't know what any of it is.

01:18:46 ◼   ► I have huge floppy disks,

01:18:48 ◼   ► which I had a memory as a young boy at my uncle's house,

01:18:53 ◼   ► he had these types of floppy disks,

01:18:57 ◼   ► like the huge ones, right, that were actually floppy.

01:19:01 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:19:02 ◼   ► - The actual disk itself,

01:19:03 ◼   ► like the case that it was in was not rigid, right?

01:19:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh yeah, I had those on my first computer.

01:19:10 ◼   ► They were really big ones

01:19:12 ◼   ► and then they were a little bit smaller ones

01:19:15 ◼   ► that were the actual floppy disks.

01:19:17 ◼   ► And his computer in this is some weird computer

01:19:19 ◼   ► that according to Wikipedia,

01:19:21 ◼   ► it's an 8080 microcomputer that's not a brand name,

01:19:25 ◼   ► but given that this movie is in 1983,

01:19:28 ◼   ► that is a probably inaccurate computer for the time.

01:19:30 ◼   ► would be better if it was an Apple II or a TRS-80 or something like that. But it's a, you know,

01:19:35 ◼   ► a big keyboard and a screen with text on it, and he has an acoustic coupler modem, which we're going

01:19:41 ◼   ► out of style at that point, to a modem that, you know, is actually, you know, a box that you just

01:19:47 ◼   ► plug your phone line into. This is the kind where you had your big handset of your telephone and

01:19:53 ◼   ► then you would plug it in, which for stagecraft purposes I think it makes a lot more sense to use

01:19:57 ◼   ► used that in this movie just because you get the exciting things where he's picking up

01:20:01 ◼   ► the phone and hearing the sounds and all of that.

01:20:04 ◼   ► And so it makes sense even though I think they were on their way out or were out by

01:20:07 ◼   ► the time that this movie was made.

01:20:10 ◼   ► So he's got a computer with the screen with text on it and he's got the modem and he's

01:20:15 ◼   ► got the big telephone in his room, he's got his own line, you know, so he can make calls

01:20:20 ◼   ► and pirate software and do stuff like that.

01:20:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that was the other thing that I wasn't familiar with. I knew what it did, but it's

01:20:27 ◼   ► like I've never seen that type of modem before where you actually put a telephone handset

01:20:32 ◼   ► on top of it.

01:20:33 ◼   ► Yeah, and then it's basically got a speaker and a microphone, and it makes the computer

01:20:38 ◼   ► sounds out of the one and listens for the computer sounds from the other computer out

01:20:42 ◼   ► of the other one, and that's how it transfers data. Which you can't, obviously, that has

01:20:48 ◼   ► to be really slow data transfer, and that's why they switched, I never had a modem like

01:20:53 ◼   ► That's why they switched, even the first modem I had was a 300 baud modem, it was a direct connect kind of thing because that was just not...

01:21:00 ◼   ► You couldn't get very much speed on it because you were again dealing with a microphone and a speaker in order to make all the noises

01:21:07 ◼   ► that to transmit data. So they got they got past that really quickly.

01:21:10 ◼   ► So then we

01:21:14 ◼   ► kind of... Jennifer is really unimpressed by this.

01:21:17 ◼   ► She is angry, if anything, about about the fact that he wants to change her grade.

01:21:22 ◼   ► and doesn't want a part of it at all and she leaves but then David changes her

01:21:28 ◼   ► grade from an F to an A anyway. So that you know that continues and then we

01:21:34 ◼   ► end up the next scene we start to see his parents who are very

01:21:39 ◼   ► peculiar people. They are. They eat raw corn. Yeah I don't understand why that happened.

01:21:48 ◼   ► So it's a bizarre part of the movie that I we talked about being

01:21:51 ◼   ► I don't really understand why it's there other than to add some jokes, and I guess it's a commentary on like

01:21:55 ◼   ► West Coast 80s culture that the mom thinks that

01:22:00 ◼   ► You should just eat your corn raw because you can really taste the nutrients to which the dad

01:22:05 ◼   ► Says and I think they kept it in because I mean it's funny the dad says can we just take some pills and then cook?

01:22:11 ◼   ► the corn yeah, but but there's also the butter the corn with a piece of bread which is easy and

01:22:17 ◼   ► Honestly since I rewatched this movie for the incomparable

01:22:21 ◼   ► I that's now how I butter my corn genius. Then you still get the bread afterwards

01:22:26 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly and it goes all over the the the corn cob because it's impossible to butter corn

01:22:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that somebody made a director just that was the way he buttered corn and just wanted to get more people to know

01:22:38 ◼   ► The whole the whole dynamic in the house is amusing because you know in a movie that really wants to streamline

01:22:43 ◼   ► You could take a lot of that stuff out. He says his parents aren't home

01:22:46 ◼   ► They're kind of absent you could just essentially have the parents not be in the movie very much

01:22:50 ◼   ► but instead they are they have their their little quirks and

01:22:54 ◼   ► They make him embarrassed later when they ask about his little friend

01:22:58 ◼   ► Would you like your little friend to come to dinner at a key moment? He has to take out the trash

01:23:03 ◼   ► I mean, which is I think directly referenced in

01:23:06 ◼   ► Galaxy Quest have you seen that no

01:23:08 ◼   ► Myke anyway when Justin Long gets asked to take out the trash in Galaxy Quest

01:23:13 ◼   ► I feel like that is just a direct quote of

01:23:15 ◼   ► um of war games, but uh, so yeah, his parents are quirky and but they both work as as he explains to ally sheedy

01:23:22 ◼   ► So they're not home during the day when he can get up to his computer shenanigans and you know

01:23:27 ◼   ► Like bring a girl into his room without anybody seeing which he does

01:23:30 ◼   ► But later on in the movie, they have no problem with it

01:23:33 ◼   ► Yeah, anyway, yeah, they don't oh, no, she walks in he's in that later scene and he's got like

01:23:39 ◼   ► no shirt on and there's a lot of there's a lot of hilarious embarrassment because you get the sense

01:23:44 ◼   ► that that David doesn't have a lot of experience with girls and Ally Sheedy is is obviously

01:23:50 ◼   ► interested in or intrigued by him and so like the one time she comes into the room and he looks at

01:23:56 ◼   ► his room and he's like ah and he's picking up dirty laundry and underpants and things and

01:24:00 ◼   ► putting them in a ball and throwing them in the corner and then you know he has no shirt on and he

01:24:05 ◼   ► and he has to put his shirt on and all that and it's just it's there's some funny little bits

01:24:09 ◼   ► where he's super awkward around her um which I I which I like I feel like that rings true too.

01:24:16 ◼   ► So that part with the no shirt on is when she comes she comes back to the house like a day or

01:24:21 ◼   ► two later because she wants her grade changed. Yeah she's decided to change it and and she goes

01:24:27 ◼   ► and sees him and and and uh he says come back to the house and we'll change the grade but he

01:24:32 ◼   ► But he can't change the grade because the computer is busy doing something.

01:24:34 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:24:35 ◼   ► It is dialing phone numbers because he had seen in the call on the cob scenario, he's

01:24:40 ◼   ► seen a very intriguing computer ad about the Protovision, which is in a computer magazine

01:24:47 ◼   ► and it was talking about video games like you've never seen before.

01:24:50 ◼   ► And he wanted to play those games now.

01:24:52 ◼   ► He didn't want to have to wait for like later in the year or whatever it was.

01:24:55 ◼   ► So I wanted to ask you, because I've heard you mention on many shows about the ads in

01:24:59 ◼   ► video, in computer magazines.

01:25:01 ◼   ► This was a very intriguing ad, it was multiple page, you had to open up a flap to see the

01:25:06 ◼   ► inside to find out the reveal of the ad.

01:25:08 ◼   ► Was this what they were like?

01:25:09 ◼   ► I assume so, I have no memory of this level of detail of an ad.

01:25:14 ◼   ► I think by the time I was paying more attention they were not doing this anymore.

01:25:18 ◼   ► But it's not outside the realm of possibility that you would get this like, you know, some

01:25:23 ◼   ► software company would spend a lot of money to do a crazy gatefold ad in a computer magazine

01:25:28 ◼   ► to get people excited about it.

01:25:30 ◼   ► But as you said, David is not--David immediately thinks, "Can I, like, steal that?

01:25:35 ◼   ► Can I download that?"

01:25:37 ◼   ► And he proceeds to dial, as he explains to Ally Sheedy, every phone number in the exchange

01:25:44 ◼   ► of Sunnyvale, which is where the--I think it was Sunnyvale--where the Protovision is.

01:25:49 ◼   ► So you know, if it's, you know, 408-222-0000 and then 0001 all the way through all 10,000

01:25:58 ◼   ► servers, hoping to find one that answers with a computer. And so they have a nice scene

01:26:04 ◼   ► where they show, like, they get a pizza place and a laundry and a couple of people and a

01:26:09 ◼   ► couple of no answers. And, you know, it's explaining this concept, which is quaint because

01:26:17 ◼   ► this became known as "war dialing" after the movie War Games. This method became known

01:26:23 ◼   ► as that, named after this. And in fact, when Wi-Fi became a thing and people were driving

01:26:28 ◼   ► around finding open Wi-Fi networks to connect to. That was called "war driving," which was

01:26:35 ◼   ► based on war dialing, which is based on war games. So this movie didn't invent this technique,

01:26:42 ◼   ► but it's the one that made the world know about it, and certainly this is where I learned

01:26:47 ◼   ► about it.

01:26:49 ◼   ► So Jennifer has a very interesting relationship with the computer in the way that she reacts

01:26:55 ◼   ► to many of the things that it does. And she is clearly playing the uninformed

01:27:00 ◼   ► people. Yeah, she's the audience proxy here, yeah. Because, for example, when

01:27:04 ◼   ► he's going through the numbers and he finds some some ones that

01:27:07 ◼   ► are worth trying, you know, he finds some places that are worth connecting to, and they

01:27:12 ◼   ► eventually stumble upon, which would later be found out to be the missile

01:27:15 ◼   ► defense system, basically. David tries to log in and it says "connection

01:27:21 ◼   ► terminated and she goes connection terminated how rude how rude that's a

01:27:30 ◼   ► funny scene though because he well he enters the password wrong and it just

01:27:32 ◼   ► hangs up on him yep she's like huh how rude and then you know there's the whole

01:27:38 ◼   ► thing I think it might be during this whole scene or maybe a little bit later

01:27:43 ◼   ► where the he's able to talk to the computer and a computer can talk back to

01:27:48 ◼   ► him and via this I think that this is over like over selling I can't imagine

01:27:53 ◼   ► this would have been possible you can tell me if I'm wrong about the signals

01:27:56 ◼   ► being able to be interpreted into human voice that seems like it was maybe

01:28:00 ◼   ► over stretching for the time. So the way I always thought of it was that you know

01:28:07 ◼   ► he's got a he's got a box that reads the serial port and does text-to-speech

01:28:12 ◼   ► which is not implausible. There were bad, but you know, text-to-speech, honestly, text-to-speech

01:28:21 ◼   ► has not come as far as you would think. I mean, you can remember how the original Mac

01:28:26 ◼   ► text-to-speech worked. And yeah, the current text-to-speech is better than that, but it's

01:28:30 ◼   ► not a lot better. And this is from this era. So it's not implausible, and I see why they

01:28:35 ◼   ► did it from a filmmaking standpoint, because this way, you're not just reading text on

01:28:39 ◼   ► a screen and he's as he's typing he's saying the words that he's typing and it's like they're

01:28:44 ◼   ► having a conversation so it's a little it's more cinematic what's funny about this and

01:28:48 ◼   ► something that i never noticed until i watched it for the incomparable is that the voice

01:28:54 ◼   ► that you're hearing is actually the actor who plays professor falcon it's a brit it's

01:29:00 ◼   ► a british accent and then it's pro it's hit and it's him and it's processed to sound like

01:29:06 ◼   ► a computer-generated voice. And they do a great job with the processing because it sounds

01:29:10 ◼   ► like a computer-generated voice. But if you listen to it and then you listen to the actor

01:29:15 ◼   ► later you realize that it's his voice and the reason is because he created this computer.

01:29:23 ◼   ► Even though that technically makes no sense. The only way it makes sense is if this is

01:29:28 ◼   ► a stock... If he also invented a text-to-speech algorithm based on his own voice that went

01:29:33 ◼   ► into every box that was, you know, made to do that, which seems seems like that

01:29:39 ◼   ► would be in my head cannon. That'll be in my little fan fiction that I'll write

01:29:42 ◼   ► about more games later. But it is it is a nice touch because it makes you feel

01:29:47 ◼   ► that Joshua, the computers, the whopper, so named Joshua to refer to Professor

01:29:53 ◼   ► Falcon's son, is, you know, is his product, is his thing, because it talks like him.

01:29:59 ◼   ► I feel like that's just an easter egg the fact that it's him yeah yeah but it

01:30:05 ◼   ► once it's it's not even something you're supposed to notice but I feel like it is

01:30:09 ◼   ► tying you it's tying them together like just subconsciously but it's not meant

01:30:16 ◼   ► to be noticed I think other than just subconsciously that that they're related

01:30:22 ◼   ► So during this whole scene, so I love this whole scene with you have Jennifer

01:30:30 ◼   ► Jennifer is here and she's just come for a run which is really weird I love her

01:30:35 ◼   ► character by the way. Oh she's so great. Her character is so fantastic like she

01:30:40 ◼   ► is fun she is very active she seems like a scooter. She goes running. She's like she got a

01:30:47 ◼   ► a kind of tomboy like I don't even know if that's a politically correct phrase

01:30:54 ◼   ► anymore I have no idea she's quite sporty and she feels like she can she

01:30:59 ◼   ► can be a girl but she can also hang with the guys like she feels like she is a

01:31:03 ◼   ► real great role model figure I don't know like there's just something about

01:31:06 ◼   ► her whole character that I really warm to she's very positive very smart and

01:31:12 ◼   ► funny and she's a great foil for David but this whole scene with the two of

01:31:16 ◼   ► them in the bedroom and she like traps him in between her legs when he's trying

01:31:21 ◼   ► to go past and it's your little friend does your little friend want to come to

01:31:24 ◼   ► dinner too yeah and just this whole thing this whole little scene is one of

01:31:29 ◼   ► the things that I just really love about 80s movies I love the music like I love

01:31:34 ◼   ► the music like the soundtrack type music I love the kind of music where it's you

01:31:39 ◼   ► know the music that runs through like the the score right I love the dialogue

01:31:45 ◼   ► between everybody. Everything in general in 80s movies is more innocent and wholesome,

01:31:53 ◼   ► which I like, you know? Because they're just fun movies, like they're not dark.

01:31:59 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I mean, well okay, this movie gets dark, but it gets dark in different ways.

01:32:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking of like Batman, right?

01:32:09 ◼   ► Yeah, well, and these kids that we meet here, right, I mean, they're not perfect, they don't

01:32:15 ◼   ► get good grades, you know, they're skipping school, but at the same time, they're still,

01:32:23 ◼   ► you know, and they're kind of innocent too, and they step in something and they have to

01:32:28 ◼   ► learn about this thing that they screwed up on. I mean, he is logging into people's computers

01:32:34 ◼   ► and changing grades and stuff. He's committing crimes, and yet in so many other ways, he's

01:32:38 ◼   ► completely innocent about the world. And when they play the game and then it's on the news

01:32:45 ◼   ► in sort of the next scene, they have that freak-out moment of like, "Oh my god, did

01:32:50 ◼   ► we do this? What do we do? What do we do?" And they realize how in over their heads they

01:32:52 ◼   ► are, and it's all kind of adorable. Also, it's funny the dynamic between them, because,

01:32:56 ◼   ► you know, she is flirting with him. And it's like, you get the sense that you're starting

01:33:05 ◼   ► from almost zero, like they know each other, but that they don't have any history to speak

01:33:11 ◼   ► of and that this is the thing that causes them to get to know each other.

01:33:16 ◼   ► And that's kind of adorable too, to watch their relationship kind of grow as she learns

01:33:21 ◼   ► about the quirks and then they get put in this, you know, in this shocking thing that

01:33:25 ◼   ► happens to them.

01:33:26 ◼   ► And it may just be selection bias because of the movies that you're showing me, but

01:33:30 ◼   ► I'm very much enjoying all of them for this reason.

01:33:32 ◼   ► You know, like if they could say anything.

01:33:34 ◼   ► I love that movie so much I'd see that again.

01:33:38 ◼   ► And then, so basically there are these nerds at a lab that they go to see, Jim and Malvin,

01:33:45 ◼   ► who are great comedy characters.

01:33:47 ◼   ► Jim is very quiet and angry and Malvin is socially awkward and annoying.

01:33:51 ◼   ► A little broad, little broad these characters.

01:33:53 ◼   ► But yes, this is where you get the backdoors!

01:33:57 ◼   ► Backdoors!

01:33:59 ◼   ► That whole thing where they explain what backdoors are, which is again where most people heard

01:34:04 ◼   ► for the first time about the concept of putting a backdoor in a computer system. It came from

01:34:08 ◼   ► this, from this scene in this movie.

01:34:11 ◼   ► So then it unfolds on montage, effectively, where David is trying many different things

01:34:19 ◼   ► and he's looking at different resources and trying to come up with the password, which

01:34:24 ◼   ► culminates in another scene back in his bedroom. This is where, yeah, this is another scene

01:34:31 ◼   ► back in his bedroom you know basically Jennifer goes to see him he hasn't been

01:34:34 ◼   ► in school for a while like you know like where has he been he's been I actually

01:34:40 ◼   ► think this is the scene where he has his shirt off right it's it's this one or is

01:34:44 ◼   ► it all the same scene anyway and then he kind of going through things he's got

01:34:47 ◼   ► paper all over everything it kind of looks like a man possessed you know

01:34:51 ◼   ► there are things hanging up everywhere that kind of stuff. He's been doing

01:34:54 ◼   ► research we discover he's done he's gone to the library he's got like newspaper

01:34:58 ◼   ► research and he's got like video clips and they watch they watch a video of him

01:35:03 ◼   ► of the guy and Jennifer's like he looks really nice you know it's like a nice

01:35:07 ◼   ► guy and then they read the obituary and find out he was 41 when he died and she

01:35:11 ◼   ► looks at him in the video and says he wasn't that old and he was like he was

01:35:14 ◼   ► 41 David says and then Jennifer goes oh yeah that's old that's old makes me

01:35:21 ◼   ► laugh every time and then they end up working out that Joshua the name of his

01:35:25 ◼   ► son that died in a car crash is the password and they log into the system

01:35:29 ◼   ► and then we have would you like to play a game and then he has lists all of the

01:35:33 ◼   ► games you know there's some there's games like blackjack and tic-tac-toe and

01:35:38 ◼   ► poker it suggests chess a nice game of chess would be nice but then David is

01:35:46 ◼   ► drawn to a very exciting game called global thermonuclear war and basically

01:35:53 ◼   ► they start this game of global thermonuclear war and it sets off alarms at NORAD because

01:35:59 ◼   ► it has woken up the WAPA system which is now simulating that there have been missiles launched

01:36:07 ◼   ► from Russia. Right, and it's a fun scene where, so after he changes the grade, he does a reservation

01:36:16 ◼   ► on an airplane, going to Paris, all these things we can do that are pranks basically.

01:36:22 ◼   ► So here, they kind of giggle and say, "Who do we want to nuke first?"

01:36:27 ◼   ► And they choose Las Vegas, and then they say, "And also Seattle," because they're in the

01:36:31 ◼   ► Seattle area.

01:36:33 ◼   ► That's where they live.

01:36:34 ◼   ► So they think this is going to be really funny.

01:36:37 ◼   ► Cut to NORAD headquarters, the center of the United States nuclear missile arsenal, and

01:36:43 ◼   ► the red alert goes off that there are Soviet missile launches and they're incoming to Las

01:36:47 ◼   ► Vegas and Seattle.

01:36:48 ◼   ► Because they are now using this machine for the actual processing, but now this machine is playing a game

01:36:55 ◼   ► It looks to everybody else like it's real right and then the next day David sees a news report

01:37:02 ◼   ► that basically there was

01:37:05 ◼   ► You know, they reported. Oh, didn't they realize initially there was a

01:37:10 ◼   ► It was a false alarm. So this is what happens and it's very funny

01:37:14 ◼   ► And this is where David's mom says, "You need to take out the trash."

01:37:18 ◼   ► And he flips off the computer, at which point the screens in NORAD go blank, and they're

01:37:24 ◼   ► like, "Huh."

01:37:25 ◼   ► And then the guy runs in saying, "It's a simulation!

01:37:28 ◼   ► It's stopping!

01:37:29 ◼   ► It's a simulation!"

01:37:31 ◼   ► But they've already shut it down.

01:37:33 ◼   ► But the computer guy tells them that it wasn't real, it was the computer, and they discover

01:37:39 ◼   ► that somebody was dialing in from somewhere, but they terminated the call, but it was from

01:37:44 ◼   ► from the Seattle, Washington area, that much they know for certain, but they don't know

01:37:49 ◼   ► any more of that. And this is also at the point where the General goes to DEFCON 3 and

01:37:59 ◼   ► then back to DEFCON 4, which is where that, in a million other movies since then, I think

01:38:04 ◼   ► largely was popularized. It was a real thing, but it was largely popularized the first time

01:38:08 ◼   ► people heard about military DEFCON, which goes all the way up to 1, which is World War

01:38:14 ◼   ► 3, it's in this movie. They've got a nice little sign with all the numbers on it that

01:38:21 ◼   ► they can show you where the Defcon is at the moment, defense condition.

01:38:26 ◼   ► >> But the computer is alive at this point and wants to continue going down this route.

01:38:32 ◼   ► >> Right, so the next day there's all the news stories about how there was a false alarm

01:38:37 ◼   ► and there was almost a nuclear accident and that freaks David and Jennifer out because

01:38:41 ◼   ► because they know that it must have been them who did that.

01:38:44 ◼   ► And what have they gotten themselves into?

01:38:46 ◼   ► - And then, so yeah, the computer calls him.

01:38:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:38:53 ◼   ► - Isn't that a great moment where he's like, no, go.

01:38:55 ◼   ► It's like, I told you never to call me here.

01:38:58 ◼   ► He's like, no.

01:38:59 ◼   ► And it just keeps calling him back.

01:39:01 ◼   ► He plugs it in. - And he plugs the phone.

01:39:02 ◼   ► - We're still playing the game, it says.

01:39:04 ◼   ► He's like, no, no, no, no, it's not me.

01:39:06 ◼   ► Professor Falcon is dead.

01:39:07 ◼   ► To which it responds something like,

01:39:09 ◼   ► oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Professor Falcon.

01:39:10 ◼   ► And it just keeps going because it's a computer and it doesn't understand.

01:39:14 ◼   ► And he pulls the plug on his phone so it doesn't ring.

01:39:18 ◼   ► And he and Jennifer agree to just not say anything and play it cool and nobody will

01:39:23 ◼   ► know and we just won't tell anybody about it.

01:39:26 ◼   ► So now the thing is the government and the military think that, because it can, basically

01:39:33 ◼   ► the simulation continues, they think that David is a spy and that this is actually a

01:39:38 ◼   ► real thing that is happening.

01:39:40 ◼   ► They pick him up at a 7-Eleven with the guys with the--

01:39:43 ◼   ► I love that scene.

01:39:44 ◼   ► There's the guys with the earpieces in them

01:39:45 ◼   ► in the parking lot.

01:39:46 ◼   ► And he's just got his big gulp, or his-- yeah, his big gulp.

01:39:50 ◼   ► And he's walking through the parking lot of the 7-Eleven.

01:39:52 ◼   ► And there's a mysterious guy behind him with an earpiece.

01:39:56 ◼   ► And then a big black car drives up.

01:39:57 ◼   ► And a guy gets out, and he turns the other way.

01:39:59 ◼   ► And another thing drives up.

01:40:01 ◼   ► And he's nabbed.

01:40:02 ◼   ► And they think that he's a terrorist, or a spy,

01:40:05 ◼   ► or something.

01:40:07 ◼   ► So he gets taken to Norad and McKittrick wants to talk to him.

01:40:11 ◼   ► So he takes him on this little walk and he starts talking to him about computers

01:40:14 ◼   ► and stuff like that and then takes him into his office because, you know,

01:40:17 ◼   ► he's trying to be all nice.

01:40:18 ◼   ► And then he takes him into his office and like starts interrogating him

01:40:21 ◼   ► and like grilling him, that kind of thing about what's going on.

01:40:25 ◼   ► And then there's some kind of emergency.

01:40:28 ◼   ► So McKittrick leaves and then I don't know why David does this,

01:40:34 ◼   ► starts playing around with the computer in McKittrick's office to talk to Joshua, as he

01:40:40 ◼   ► calls it, the W.A.V.H. machine. And obviously the receptionist looking through the glass wall

01:40:46 ◼   ► sees him typing on the computer and you know all hell breaks loose. The computer's kind of going

01:40:54 ◼   ► into like it's really going down this route now and it's saying that when it gets to Defcon 1 it's

01:40:58 ◼   ► gonna set off the nuclear warheads so they all come and grab David because they think

01:41:04 ◼   ► that he's up to no good and they throw him away into this like infirmary area in which

01:41:11 ◼   ► David MacGyver's an escape you know he kind of grabs this like a

01:41:18 ◼   ► He rips the panel off the wall and figures out a way to unlock his because he's a good

01:41:23 ◼   ► hacker he figures out a way to unlock the door electronically.

01:41:28 ◼   ► And he sets off through the utility shafts and then ends up sneaking away with a tour

01:41:33 ◼   ► group.

01:41:34 ◼   ► Gets on a bus and escapes out of NORAD on a tour bus.

01:41:39 ◼   ► He hitchhikes his way because also, oh, he has found an address, right?

01:41:45 ◼   ► A classified address for another guy, a doctor.

01:41:49 ◼   ► But he works out that this is probably going to be Dr. Falcon.

01:41:55 ◼   ► Or Falcon.

01:41:56 ◼   ► Professor Falcon.

01:41:57 ◼   ► -Professor Faulkner. -Whatever you call him, fuck the fucker.

01:42:00 ◼   ► So this, um, the NORAD section for me is the weakest part of the movie.

01:42:05 ◼   ► -Right. -I think... I like Dabney Coleman in this, um, I think he's trying to make it like, uh,

01:42:13 ◼   ► David, he and David are kindred spirits in a way, because they're the computer guys,

01:42:19 ◼   ► they're surrounded by all these military guys. There's this really gross thing where the one guy

01:42:25 ◼   ► is trying to pick up on the secretary that's like what is happening that it's like why

01:42:31 ◼   ► i don't even know why that's in this movie other than that it's a distraction yeah he

01:42:34 ◼   ► needs to be distracted by something the escape the escape is fine i mean i think the reason

01:42:39 ◼   ► he types on mckittrick's keyboard is that he's desperately trying to stop joshua from

01:42:44 ◼   ► continuing the game and he figures this is his opportunity to do it um and he's just

01:42:49 ◼   ► trying like it's like a last-ditch attempt and it totally fails the the part that really

01:42:53 ◼   ► kills me is this is the center of US defense and and it's the missile launch and there's

01:42:59 ◼   ► a school tour where a bunch of kids from school have been brought in their school buses to

01:43:04 ◼   ► take a tour of NORAD. I don't know if that's accurate or not it seems completely ridiculous

01:43:09 ◼   ► to me that there is a school tour but it allows David to slip out with the school which is

01:43:14 ◼   ► what I think why it's there and so he escapes from NORAD but I don't know why there's a

01:43:20 ◼   ► a school tour there.

01:43:23 ◼   ► So yeah, I don't know what a tour is. I feel like they're trying to do some sort of PR

01:43:30 ◼   ► balancing because of the... I don't know, it's just stupid. But it was a good plot device

01:43:34 ◼   ► to get in and out.

01:43:35 ◼   ► Sure, I mean this kicks the plot into gear. It puts David in... David learns the scope

01:43:40 ◼   ► of what's going on, realizes he can't stop it, that the people there won't really listen

01:43:44 ◼   ► to him or believe him and he just figures that he has to get out and find Professor

01:43:50 ◼   ► Falcon basically, that he's gotten information now about Professor Falcon, he used to work

01:43:55 ◼   ► there, now McKittrick's got that job, you know, and this sets David on the--it's a tough

01:43:59 ◼   ► part of the movie because this is all just to kick the plot into gear for the second

01:44:03 ◼   ► half of the movie where they're going to go seek Falcon out and the Whopper is going to

01:44:08 ◼   ► continue the countdown.

01:44:11 ◼   ► And then basically he's, you know, David is a lefty, he's hiked his way out, and he gets

01:44:17 ◼   ► Jennifer to book him a plane ticket.

01:44:19 ◼   ► I love that he is a massively wanted man, but can get on a plane, right?

01:44:24 ◼   ► Different times.

01:44:25 ◼   ► This is, that is one of my favorite things about that section of the movie is he can

01:44:30 ◼   ► show up somewhere, yeah, they don't know it's, he's wanted but they can book a ticket in

01:44:36 ◼   ► his name and nobody knows it and he can just walk in and there's no security and it's just

01:44:43 ◼   ► yeah very different time.

01:44:46 ◼   ► So we basically are a situation where oh yes okay so this is something that I just realized

01:44:54 ◼   ► by looking at my notes.

01:44:55 ◼   ► Jennifer arrives she's there.

01:44:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:44:57 ◼   ► When she gets off the plane.

01:44:58 ◼   ► Yeah she picks him up at the airport she's come down to wherever they are and they're

01:45:01 ◼   ► gonna go find Professor Falcon.

01:45:07 ◼   ► And then, oh, they find Falcon...

01:45:10 ◼   ► Yeah, they go to his island.

01:45:13 ◼   ► And one of my favorite scenes is they get to this island and they're like, "Where the

01:45:15 ◼   ► hell are we in this island and what's that?"

01:45:18 ◼   ► And there's a dinosaur that is flying.

01:45:19 ◼   ► There's a pterodactyl flying around.

01:45:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:45:22 ◼   ► It's a great non-sequitur, right?

01:45:23 ◼   ► That is one of my favorite non-sequiturs in any movie ever.

01:45:25 ◼   ► It's like, "What am I seeing?

01:45:27 ◼   ► Why is it?"

01:45:28 ◼   ► it's a radio-controlled pterodactyl being piloted by the guy who's under an alias but

01:45:34 ◼   ► that we realize is the actual mysterious Professor Falcon.

01:45:40 ◼   ► And Dr. Falcon's crazy.

01:45:43 ◼   ► I love this whole section. So he has been driven, if not mad, he is in such despair

01:45:51 ◼   ► over the death of his wife and son that he's gone into hiding, he plays with his dinosaurs,

01:45:56 ◼   ► And he has, you're right, he is kind of crazy, he has become obsessed with the dinosaurs

01:46:01 ◼   ► and that they went extinct.

01:46:03 ◼   ► And that his thoughts about his contribution to the military industrial complex and the

01:46:08 ◼   ► nuclear arms race and all of that is inevitably going to lead to the destruction of humanity

01:46:17 ◼   ► just as the dinosaurs were destroyed.

01:46:18 ◼   ► And that we will become extinct and this is the dark part of the movie where he basically

01:46:23 ◼   ► makes the argument that, you know, you guys are young and it's a shame that you'll die,

01:46:31 ◼   ► but even if we extended this a little while, your kids would die, because we're all gonna

01:46:34 ◼   ► die, we're all gonna kill ourselves, humanity doesn't deserve to live, I'm just gonna let--

01:46:38 ◼   ► sure I could probably stop the countdown, but I'm not going to, because we don't deserve

01:46:43 ◼   ► to live. Which is, he is in a very dark place. And this is the low point in the movie-- it's

01:46:49 ◼   ► not a bad point, but it's the emotional low point-- is they leave his-- he's like, "You

01:46:53 ◼   ► can stay here," because the last ferry has left the island that he's on, and he's like,

01:46:56 ◼   ► "You can stay here overnight and sleep on the floor if you want," and they're like, "We're

01:46:59 ◼   ► out of here," and they go for a walk, and they, um, and this is like, well, it's a very

01:47:04 ◼   ► sweet scene where they're talking about, they feel like, resigned to the fact that they're

01:47:08 ◼   ► going to die now, that the nuclear war is going to happen, Falcon won't stop it, they're

01:47:13 ◼   ► stuck on this island, and so they had this sort of like, what would they do if they,

01:47:17 ◼   ► you know, what were they going to do if they lived? She said she was going to be on a TV

01:47:20 ◼   ► show with the people from her aerobics class, which is weird. And it's a sweet scene, because

01:47:26 ◼   ► they are opening up to each other and feel like they're going to die, and then they start

01:47:29 ◼   ► kissing which, you know, you feel like, "Hey, the world's going to end tomorrow, we've got

01:47:32 ◼   ► to live for tonight," right? So that's all-- I like this whole little block of the movie

01:47:36 ◼   ► that Falcon is so dark and so weird, and the kids are the voice of reason. They're like,

01:47:41 ◼   ► "No, we want to live!" And he's like, "No, we're all going to die!" It's a real thematic

01:47:45 ◼   ► shift, but I really love it. And I love how dark and twisted Falcon is at this point.

01:47:51 ◼   ► He's not menacing except through inaction. He's written humanity off, and they're trying

01:47:57 ◼   ► to make him believe it and he won't believe it.

01:47:59 ◼   ► However, when they kiss, something happens. When they kiss, something seems to happen

01:48:06 ◼   ► to the plot of the movie in that it just starts to tear into pieces. So, a helicopter arrives

01:48:14 ◼   ► and chases them for way too long.

01:48:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

01:48:17 ◼   ► So this is the flip side of the pterodactyl,

01:48:19 ◼   ► which is they start to kiss

01:48:21 ◼   ► and it's like the last night on Earth.

01:48:23 ◼   ► And then black helicopters come to take them away

01:48:26 ◼   ► back to NORAD because they've realized, I guess,

01:48:29 ◼   ► that they are finding their way to Falcon

01:48:31 ◼   ► and the government knows where Falcon is.

01:48:33 ◼   ► And so they take them all back to NORAD.

01:48:35 ◼   ► And it's essentially--

01:48:37 ◼   ► - Okay, is that what you expect?

01:48:38 ◼   ► 'Cause I couldn't work out where the helicopter came from.

01:48:42 ◼   ► Oh, I assume that they finally figured out that they were traveling, or they just realized

01:48:46 ◼   ► McKittrick had been talking about Falcon and that David had been obsessed with Falcon and

01:48:51 ◼   ► that they know where Falcon is, and some combination of those things. They went to Falcon, Falcon

01:48:57 ◼   ► said, "Oh, they just left here," because they say, like, "Oh, Falcon sold us out," which

01:49:00 ◼   ► is probably not quite it. And we don't know how long it's been. Did they just walk out

01:49:06 ◼   ► the door, or had they been walking for an hour or something and talking?

01:49:09 ◼   ► The thing that I don't get though is that the army guy, the military guy, seemed to

01:49:15 ◼   ► be working with them rather than trying to take them.

01:49:19 ◼   ► Yeah, it's weird. I'm unclear.

01:49:22 ◼   ► Because I was like, where did he get this helicopter?

01:49:25 ◼   ► This is the strange connective tissue here where I think basically what McKittrick has

01:49:29 ◼   ► realized is that the computer is out of control. That they need Falcon, that Falcon is in play,

01:49:36 ◼   ► the kids knew it, that the kids went and found him, and they're so desperate at this point,

01:49:40 ◼   ► they're like, "Let's just bring them all back. Let's bring them all back and talk to them."

01:49:44 ◼   ► And this is what the movie is trying to do. The movie wants to get all of its stars in

01:49:48 ◼   ► one place on one set, which is that enormous NORAD set, so that they can have the end of

01:49:53 ◼   ► the movie. And it's a great end of the movie, but this is the point where they're like in

01:49:57 ◼   ► the screenplay, they're like, "Well..." And emotionally I love the whole island stuff with

01:50:02 ◼   ► them, but there is that moment where they have to sweep everybody up and bring them

01:50:05 ◼   ► to the next part of the movie and this is it. It's with the helicopter.

01:50:09 ◼   ► And Falcon somehow, well they all arrive and he convinces the General.

01:50:14 ◼   ► They're rushed in right and they get to go through those doors that are almost going

01:50:17 ◼   ► to slam them. Yeah.

01:50:19 ◼   ► But they get in just as they're closing the doors.

01:50:21 ◼   ► Oh that actually makes sense what you said now about your theory for it because the lady

01:50:26 ◼   ► is waiting for them. Yeah they're trying to get them in as the

01:50:29 ◼   ► door, she's like you gotta hurry you gotta you gotta get in here now and they they rush

01:50:32 ◼   ► them in there because they've realized they're going in nuclear war lockdown, which I always

01:50:36 ◼   ► feel bad for the people who are wandering around outside the doors because it's like

01:50:39 ◼   ► see you guys. You don't get to come into the vault. But they rush them in there and basically

01:50:45 ◼   ► say, "Gah, what is happening? Fix it." You know, fix it.

01:50:50 ◼   ► So at this moment they're like, they're counting down like the minutes to impact and Falcon

01:50:56 ◼   ► somehow convinces the general to think and not follow the machine and like do you think

01:51:02 ◼   ► this is really happening like an unprovoked attack that they would want to destroy it

01:51:06 ◼   ► like he really asks him to take a gamble with himself right like yeah because the general

01:51:11 ◼   ► believes this is happening like he genuinely believes this is happening as he should in

01:51:16 ◼   ► this well he's responsible for this right like the idea is if I if I don't act here

01:51:21 ◼   ► then I will have allowed my country to be annihilated.

01:51:24 ◼   ► Um, yep, that's a strange thing that Falcon is able to convince him so

01:51:30 ◼   ► quickly. Um, but I don't, I don't know, you know,

01:51:34 ◼   ► like it's just a, it's an odd point for me. So the general

01:51:37 ◼   ► calls off the attack, um, and they have this great scene with,

01:51:42 ◼   ► uh, he is on the line with a bunch of different,

01:51:45 ◼   ► uh, command bases that would be first to be hit

01:51:48 ◼   ► and they confirm to each other that everything's okay and everybody starts to celebrate and

01:51:52 ◼   ► everyone's going crazy and everyone's happy.

01:51:54 ◼   ► But Dr. Falcon recognizes that Joshua is still running and it's trying to find the launch

01:52:00 ◼   ► codes.

01:52:02 ◼   ► So it has not stopped.

01:52:06 ◼   ► Because I assume that the way the computer has seen it is they have attacked us, so now

01:52:11 ◼   ► we must attack them, right?

01:52:13 ◼   ► Because it's still playing the simulation.

01:52:15 ◼   ► But in this simulation America strikes afterwards, that's the simulation that they're playing.

01:52:20 ◼   ► Nobody has made the simulation happen yet, so the computer's still running through its

01:52:24 ◼   ► sequence.

01:52:25 ◼   ► There's this whole scenario where it's trying to find the launch codes, and whilst it's

01:52:29 ◼   ► trying to find the launch codes, everybody then starts to freak out and there's a countdown

01:52:35 ◼   ► as it's getting them one by one.

01:52:37 ◼   ► And then everybody huddles around the machine.

01:52:44 ◼   ► This is like that, you know, you've got to have the movie end this way, but it's weird.

01:52:48 ◼   ► So like everyone's huddling around the machine and Dr. Falcon like clearly knows the answer,

01:52:52 ◼   ► but wants David to do it himself, right?

01:52:55 ◼   ► And he's like, "No, you do it."

01:52:56 ◼   ► And it's like, and then he works out that Tic Tac Toe makes the machine freak out, right?

01:53:01 ◼   ► So he starts playing games with Tic Tac Toe, it's taking too long and they need to get

01:53:06 ◼   ► the machine to like either learn or to overload itself.

01:53:09 ◼   ► And then he says, "Oh, doctor, can it play simulation?"

01:53:12 ◼   ► It's like, "Yes, just enter zero.

01:53:13 ◼   ► Like, why don't you just offer that information up?"

01:53:17 ◼   ► And then the machine starts--

01:53:18 ◼   ► He does have a remarkable lack of desire to move things along, lack of urgency.

01:53:24 ◼   ► Yeah, there's no urgency at all.

01:53:25 ◼   ► Professor Falcon.

01:53:26 ◼   ► Especially when it comes to flying helicopters around.

01:53:28 ◼   ► He will do that for a long time.

01:53:31 ◼   ► The chat room says that they think that Falcon has second thoughts and goes and gets them

01:53:34 ◼   ► in the helicopter and takes them away.

01:53:37 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:53:38 ◼   ► I'd never really thought that, but maybe that's it.

01:53:40 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's it.

01:53:41 ◼   ► But where did the helicopter come from?

01:53:43 ◼   ► Well, Falcon has a helicopter in addition to a pterodactyl.

01:53:46 ◼   ► Exactly!

01:53:47 ◼   ► With a military personnel inside.

01:53:49 ◼   ► That was my problem.

01:53:50 ◼   ► I couldn't work out where it came from.

01:53:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I assume that they sent somebody to talk to Falcon and then maybe it's his helicopter,

01:53:55 ◼   ► maybe it's not.

01:53:56 ◼   ► But I assume that they were at play there.

01:53:59 ◼   ► The tic-tac-toe is set up because it's one of the games that it wants to play.

01:54:02 ◼   ► And we've learned that Whopper, that Joshua is a learning machine.

01:54:06 ◼   ► And so there's this suggestion, and it's clever, that's like, let's have him war game tic-tac-toe.

01:54:11 ◼   ► Let's have him simulate tic-tac-toe."

01:54:13 ◼   ► And what he'll realize is, with two intelligent players, you can't win.

01:54:17 ◼   ► It's always a draw.

01:54:18 ◼   ► It's always a cat's game.

01:54:20 ◼   ► And that's your message of the movie, which is that in order to stop Joshua, you can't

01:54:25 ◼   ► just tell it to stop.

01:54:26 ◼   ► You have to teach it.

01:54:28 ◼   ► And so they have at War Game all of the nuclear war scenarios, and all of them have no winner

01:54:35 ◼   ► because everybody dies.

01:54:37 ◼   ► And there's a great, it's not a montage because it's like this fast-forward computer simulation

01:54:42 ◼   ► thing.

01:54:43 ◼   ► And it's running through all of these scenarios.

01:54:44 ◼   ► It's so great and they all have these crazy names, they all have these like scenario names

01:54:47 ◼   ► of like, it starts here, it starts here, and they all end in winner, none, right?

01:54:52 ◼   ► Everybody dies.

01:54:53 ◼   ► Yeah, there is no winner.

01:54:54 ◼   ► And then it's the own, so basically it then cuts out and the computer comes up and speaks.

01:55:00 ◼   ► Obviously they have one of those talkie boxes there too.

01:55:03 ◼   ► Yeah, it's using the same voice too.

01:55:05 ◼   ► Same voice.

01:55:06 ◼   ► says, you know, basically, it is discovered that the only winning move is not to play.

01:55:12 ◼   ► Yeah, strange game. The only winning move is not to play. That's your message. The only

01:55:16 ◼   ► way to win a nuclear war is to not have one. Everybody celebrates and the movie ends. Now,

01:55:24 ◼   ► what should come next though, is David being arrested for causing this entire scenario.

01:55:30 ◼   ► That is the next part. And maybe being extradited to Russia because they're having to deal with

01:55:35 ◼   ► of this this is the other things all the ramifications because the Russians are

01:55:39 ◼   ► getting like nervous because the Americans keep sending jets and stuff

01:55:43 ◼   ► into the air there is a whole other movie which is not war games 2 as I've

01:55:49 ◼   ► been told on Twitter yeah that you know that should exist which is what happens

01:55:52 ◼   ► afterwards which is David being arrested and being thrown into prison forever but

01:55:57 ◼   ► I did enjoy this movie again from that that there are some parts at the end

01:56:01 ◼   ► which I think of plot problems, but overall this is very enjoyable and you can give me like, you know,

01:56:08 ◼   ► Matthew Broderick in the 80s and 90s in any movie and I tend to love it, you know?

01:56:13 ◼   ► Sure.

01:56:13 ◼   ► I love Ferris Bueller. I wish I would never have seen Ferris Bueller so we could have done it

01:56:17 ◼   ► as part of the show. But like, you know, very quickly what I love about Ferris Bueller,

01:56:22 ◼   ► obviously not originally, is nothing happens in Ferris Bueller. That's what I love about it,

01:56:26 ◼   ► right? That it is just a day.

01:56:28 ◼   ► Accurate. It's just a day.

01:56:30 ◼   ► and that's what I love about that movie. But anyway, War Games. I've really enjoyed War Games.

01:56:35 ◼   ► - I feel like McKittrick and Falcon would go to bat for David and say, you know,

01:56:44 ◼   ► "He caused this to happen, but in reality this was going to happen. The Whopper was a learning

01:56:50 ◼   ► machine. This was going to happen. This was going to happen the moment that we made the decision to

01:56:54 ◼   ► take the soldiers out of the silos and you know because that's part of the

01:56:59 ◼   ► lesson here too is the the having having humans do this thing and that replacing

01:57:05 ◼   ► them with a machine is a mistake but also it's because the humans have a

01:57:08 ◼   ► moral sense of a sort and that's why the people refused to turn the keys in the

01:57:14 ◼   ► silos so so you know it this is an anti-war movie it's also sort of an

01:57:19 ◼   ► anti-technology movie, but sort of not, I think. But anyway, I feel like David would

01:57:25 ◼   ► would probably, because he did, you know, help convince Professor Falcon and, you

01:57:30 ◼   ► know, say and, you know, played some tic-tac-toe and saved the world, that

01:57:34 ◼   ► they'll probably let him off with "we're gonna watch you, you know, no

01:57:40 ◼   ► more modems, and, you know, and just go to college and do something respectable."

01:57:46 ◼   ► or they, you know, or will hire you, but you have to, you know, but no more, no more modems

01:57:50 ◼   ► in the meantime.

01:57:51 ◼   ► >>Yeah. If they let him off, they definitely hired him.

01:57:54 ◼   ► >>I think so. I imagine that's, see, that's the sequel that they should have made is,

01:57:59 ◼   ► you know, it's 20 years later and David is now working as an analyst and discover something

01:58:05 ◼   ► computery that is threatening the world. And that would have been an interesting way to

01:58:09 ◼   ► do that, to do a sequel. Instead, they did a weird direct to video sequel, like years

01:58:13 ◼   ► later that it has no connection and don't watch it it's not I was actually

01:58:17 ◼   ► surprised when people say oh but don't watch the sequel it's like I don't even

01:58:20 ◼   ► consider that sequel a sequel it's just a cash grab from from many many years

01:58:24 ◼   ► later yeah it's a movie with the name war games yeah yeah that's that's it or

01:58:31 ◼   ► whatever it's called the dead code so yeah I enjoyed that one it was another

01:58:38 ◼   ► a great suggestion I think I liked it very much good because again I think

01:58:43 ◼   ► there is clearly a theme that I am I am clearly a sucker for 80s movies of young

01:58:48 ◼   ► love stories in them hmm that is clearly a thing that I like I like 80s romantic

01:58:53 ◼   ► comedies even though this isn't a romantic comedy but it has the romantic

01:58:57 ◼   ► like it has the romance on it. I love it's got the young young love at the time of the end of

01:59:03 ◼   ► the world kind of thing and they bond by doing this crazy thing with computer and all of

01:59:08 ◼   ► that. And it definitely inspired a whole generation of computer nerds with the whole talk of war

01:59:13 ◼   ► dialing and, you know, Protovision, I have you now, and all of that kind of stuff too.

01:59:21 ◼   ► So yeah, but I love that. I love that relationship that they have and it's a fun thing. And I

01:59:28 ◼   ► love that scene where they talk about what they're not going to do because they're all

01:59:30 ◼   ► going to die tomorrow?" And as somebody who lived through that era, let me tell you, you

01:59:34 ◼   ► know, it didn't happen every day, but there were days where you would think, "Are we all

01:59:37 ◼   ► going to die tomorrow?" Like literally the possibility that the human race would extinguish

01:59:42 ◼   ► itself any time was floating around, you know, which is bizarre. And we don't feel that now,

01:59:50 ◼   ► which is not that we aren't capable of doing it now, but it doesn't have that same feeling

01:59:54 ◼   ► as it did in the early to mid-80s.

01:59:57 ◼   ► ladies.

01:59:58 ◼   ► We are running extremely long.

02:00:01 ◼   ► Yes, we are.

02:00:02 ◼   ► But I still want to talk about Inside Out, is that okay?

02:00:05 ◼   ► Yeah, that's fine.

02:00:06 ◼   ► We should do that.

02:00:07 ◼   ► Before we do that though, I want to just thank our final sponsor for this week and that is

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02:02:47 ◼   ► show. Thank you so much to Squarespace for helping us out today. Squarespace,

02:02:50 ◼   ► build it beautiful. So last night I went to see Disney Pixar, their latest movie

02:02:57 ◼   ► Inside Out and I am about halfway through episode 254 of The Incomparable

02:03:05 ◼   ► called You've Ruined Pizza which is great when you've seen it and I'm about halfway

02:03:10 ◼   ► through that but I really loved this movie and I wanted to just share some of

02:03:15 ◼   ► my thoughts with you because I think they're very I think they I come from a

02:03:19 ◼   ► very different background to basically everybody on the panel and that I don't

02:03:25 ◼   ► have kids and I know that Andy didn't but he seemed to also be coming at this

02:03:29 ◼   ► from looking at it in that way as well like looking at it as a effect that

02:03:34 ◼   ► parents can have on children as being one of the key themes of the movie which

02:03:38 ◼   ► it definitely is and I could see that but that was not the way this movie made

02:03:43 ◼   ► me feel. So I'm not a parent right so all that stuff with you know

02:03:50 ◼   ► and it really I can see it there right because I could feel the emotion in it

02:03:53 ◼   ► like the the parts where the like the mom and dad are saying to Riley about

02:03:57 ◼   ► thank you for being so strong for us right you know you can you could see it

02:04:01 ◼   ► at the time like oh that's a problem by the way massive spoilers for Inside Out

02:04:06 ◼   ► and we're not really gonna go for the plot I just had some feelings that I

02:04:08 ◼   ► went to get out so I hope that you've seen it but basically it seemed that a

02:04:14 ◼   ► lot of the discussion that I've heard on the on the great episode of the

02:04:17 ◼   ► incomparable so far is about this effect that parents have on kids and how it can

02:04:22 ◼   ► be to watch children grow and for like the emotions to form but for me this

02:04:27 ◼   ► felt like a very interesting take on mental health that was kind of the way

02:04:35 ◼   ► that I saw this movie and the way that I was watching it because it was kind of

02:04:40 ◼   ► like explaining to me as well and the way that it made me feel was to kind of

02:04:48 ◼   ► be like to say you can balance things like it's okay that all of these

02:04:54 ◼   ► emotions exist and at certain times different emotions will drive you but

02:05:01 ◼   ► it's cool because that's just what's gonna happen and it was very interesting

02:05:05 ◼   ► to me because it was it was I thought it was a really positive message for mental

02:05:09 ◼   ► health to be like these are the five elements that we have in our minds and

02:05:13 ◼   ► no one person is all of them you know except for the bus driver but you know

02:05:19 ◼   ► but we have all of these different elements that make up our personality

02:05:22 ◼   ► and it's totally okay that at certain points they're gonna drive and what it

02:05:28 ◼   ► ended up showing was ones that you think are really bad like sadness actually can

02:05:33 ◼   ► be incredibly important to your life right and the way that that can can run

02:05:37 ◼   ► and you know you see it and I noticed it at the time when they showed that the

02:05:41 ◼   ► mum the mother was being controlled by sadness. Sadness was in the middle of her

02:05:46 ◼   ► control desk right showing for her and like the dad was anger right like

02:05:50 ◼   ► they're that they have these guiding emotions in that Riley had the daughter

02:05:54 ◼   ► had joy but they can change and they can grow and they adapt and I also felt

02:06:02 ◼   ► about like the journey that joy and sadness go on so like they get ejected

02:06:07 ◼   ► out of headquarters genius right stuff like that headquarters very clever like

02:06:12 ◼   ► trainer thought oh yeah those Pixar people are just they really are so smart

02:06:18 ◼   ► the way they think of those little things and the journey that they go on

02:06:24 ◼   ► together and watching how everything gets broken down and how they have to go

02:06:29 ◼   ► through it together and to work out that actually they can coexist and why that's

02:06:33 ◼   ► beneficial. I kind of saw that as like every kid has that happen in their

02:06:38 ◼   ► brains right like that joy and sadness always get lost together for every child

02:06:44 ◼   ► like it wasn't a this is what I took from anyway it wasn't a thing that just

02:06:49 ◼   ► happened to Riley like there is a thing in which all kids go through right they

02:06:54 ◼   ► go through that period or that time where joy and sadness or whatever are

02:07:00 ◼   ► not with them anymore and they're driven by anger for example because there are

02:07:04 ◼   ► these other emotions these other like strong emotions that they have of having

02:07:08 ◼   ► that adventure where they can learn to get back together and rebuild their

02:07:13 ◼   ► personality and the whole idea of the personality is getting broken down and

02:07:17 ◼   ► new ones being grown I imagine like the way that I look at that is that happens

02:07:22 ◼   ► to all of us multiple times in our lives and that different traumas break down our personalities

02:07:29 ◼   ► and allow them to grow again.

02:07:30 ◼   ► Like I think of like breakups in relationships.

02:07:33 ◼   ► They break it down again.

02:07:35 ◼   ► You have that relationship island smashed to pieces and then when you meet somebody

02:07:40 ◼   ► new it grows and it grows differently because this person's different and you grow into

02:07:46 ◼   ► a relationship yourself and it enables you as a whole to change and those kind of big

02:07:51 ◼   ► moments in our lives, smash those islands down, and enable us to rebuild them a bit.

02:07:56 ◼   ► So that's my overall feeling about Inside Out.

02:07:59 ◼   ► >> Yeah, I think it's funny about the parents.

02:08:03 ◼   ► I think some of that is about, as a parent, you're thinking, this is a movie about the

02:08:06 ◼   ► emotional development of a child.

02:08:08 ◼   ► And so when you've got children, you start to think about their emotional development

02:08:12 ◼   ► as a child more than about your own emotional development, especially as a child and becoming

02:08:17 ◼   ► an adult.

02:08:18 ◼   ► I, so I think that's one of the reasons that, uh, you know, as parents, we kind

02:08:24 ◼   ► of took that point of view, I think you're right.

02:08:25 ◼   ► I think one of them, the messages of the film is definitely the idea that, um,

02:08:31 ◼   ► the idea that if you're thinking that the only way for you to be a normal person or

02:08:37 ◼   ► a healthy person is that you are happy all the time, that you are setting

02:08:44 ◼   ► unrealistic, um, expectations for yourself.

02:08:48 ◼   ► and that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than that,

02:08:53 ◼   ► and that some of the richness in life is things that we think of as negative,

02:08:58 ◼   ► and that that's all a part of us too.

02:09:00 ◼   ► And I think you're right, it's a message about mental health and a healthy attitude toward life,

02:09:07 ◼   ► that it's all part of the whole, and that if you decide to categorize it as this is the good part and this is the bad part,

02:09:17 ◼   ► then you're going to be unhappy or unhealthy because you have an unrealistic expectation for life.

02:09:27 ◼   ► It can never be fulfilled and that in fact you wouldn't want a life that was nothing but this.

02:09:32 ◼   ► Because if there are no highs and lows, then everything is just flat.

02:09:37 ◼   ► And ultimately that's the message of the movie, right?

02:09:41 ◼   ► Is that joy and sadness together create,

02:09:45 ◼   ► you know, to use nerdy terms,

02:09:47 ◼   ► create this kind of dynamic range.

02:09:49 ◼   ► Like it's better that the memories are bittersweet

02:09:53 ◼   ► and not just all joyful or all sad,

02:09:56 ◼   ► that it's this combination, which again,

02:09:59 ◼   ► I think that's why it's about a young girl,

02:10:01 ◼   ► is that she's going through this transformation

02:10:06 ◼   ► leads to adults that hopefully, you know, in the adult mind, you have a more nuanced

02:10:12 ◼   ► set of feelings that are all working together and integrated more. But as a child, you know,

02:10:18 ◼   ► you don't start out that way. And so we're seeing her understand about mixed emotions

02:10:24 ◼   ► and about, you know, feeling bittersweet feelings about things. And it's really interesting.

02:10:29 ◼   ► Also Bing Bong is in it. And any parent will tell you that the moment that the imaginary

02:10:34 ◼   ► friend comes on screen you think, "Oh no, something bad is going to happen to Bing Bong,"

02:10:40 ◼   ► because imaginary friends don't last. It's a beautiful thing, but then they fade away

02:10:44 ◼   ► and they're gone. And again, as a parent, you look at this and you think, "This is also

02:10:48 ◼   ► a story about all of these things that you saw in your children when they were little,

02:10:52 ◼   ► that then eventually they all went away because they grew up." So that's another reason that

02:10:58 ◼   ► you view that that way as a parent, I think.

02:11:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't have that crushing sense of dread when Bing Bong came on the screen.

02:11:07 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

02:11:08 ◼   ► I was at the moment like, "Oh no, Bing Bong."

02:11:11 ◼   ► Because how many grown-ups do you know who have imaginary friends?

02:11:17 ◼   ► It's like, "He's doomed, he's doomed."

02:11:18 ◼   ► And he's already been filed away, he's lurking in the background, right?

02:11:23 ◼   ► So yeah, it's a good movie.

02:11:25 ◼   ► It's a really good movie and there's a lot of depth to it.

02:11:27 ◼   ► will be great, you know, there will be books written about the meaning and metaphor in

02:11:35 ◼   ► Inside Out, I think.

02:11:36 ◼   ► >> I cried a lot, Jason.

02:11:39 ◼   ► >> Wow.

02:11:40 ◼   ► It's a great work of art, and Pixar is good at making people cry, too.

02:11:44 ◼   ► But it's a really fascinating piece of art.

02:11:48 ◼   ► >> I have to say that the correlation between time of Pixar movies, you know, like overtime

02:11:56 ◼   ► as more and more movies have come out and crying has there has been an increase in the

02:12:01 ◼   ► amount that they make you cry.

02:12:03 ◼   ► Yeah they've really I mean they've been making people cry since Toy Story 2 I would say but

02:12:09 ◼   ► lately they're there are they definitely are very good at it and they know it.

02:12:12 ◼   ► There's like the whole there's like a whole half hour towards the end of the movie where

02:12:15 ◼   ► I'm crying every three minutes.

02:12:17 ◼   ► Like I'm not like when I say crying as well as I say this like a bunch I don't mean like

02:12:21 ◼   ► tears running down my face but like I'm choked up and there are tears in my eyes I kind of

02:12:26 ◼   ► consider that as crying because it's like you may as well have done that to

02:12:29 ◼   ► me now because I'm on the edge you know you've effectively got me to the edge

02:12:33 ◼   ► so I will call that crying. I saw a link today that they're gonna be making a

02:12:41 ◼   ► little like an inside-out kind of direct to DVD type thing as an extra on the on

02:12:47 ◼   ► the movie and the blu-ray which is cool it's called Riley's first date so I'm

02:12:52 ◼   ► happy about that, that there'll be more kind of stuff, which is great. I hope to see that.

02:12:57 ◼   ► But I wanted to end this show today by asking you, what emotions do you think drive you?

02:13:05 ◼   ► Because we have the mom is driven by sadness, and the dad is driven by anger, and Riley

02:13:11 ◼   ► tends to be driven by joy. What emotions drive Jason Snell?

02:13:16 ◼   ► I can't answer this question. I love that you want to end on this, and I have no answer

02:13:21 ◼   ► for you because I feel like I'm a pretty integrated person and I have all of those emotions.

02:13:25 ◼   ► Well I can answer for myself then I think.

02:13:27 ◼   ► Alright.

02:13:28 ◼   ► I think that I tend to be driven with a mix of fear and joy.

02:13:32 ◼   ► I think that they are like my overriding emotions.

02:13:34 ◼   ► I'm either happy or I am scared of something.

02:13:38 ◼   ► That tends to, because you know I can be a person, I suffer from anxiety, not in a bad

02:13:42 ◼   ► way, but like I get really anxious about things.

02:13:46 ◼   ► Anybody that listens to analog will know that about me by now.

02:13:49 ◼   ► I'm a warrior and I think that I have that combination of being driven by happiness,

02:13:54 ◼   ► but also by fear. Like they are in the driving seat for me, I think.

02:13:59 ◼   ► If I had to answer, I would probably give the same answer as that, which is a lot of

02:14:04 ◼   ► what I do is pursuing things that I want to do them because I feel joy in doing them and

02:14:11 ◼   ► that's definitely a part of it. And then sure, fear is a motivator at times and you need

02:14:16 ◼   ► to realize when it's unhealthy and when it's healthy, because again, with something we

02:14:22 ◼   ► associate as a negative emotion, some fear is good. Fears can spring from, you know,

02:14:28 ◼   ► an alert system that this is something you need to worry about, and other times it's

02:14:33 ◼   ► bad because it's motivating you to make bad decisions or not make decisions when you need

02:14:39 ◼   ► to. So I think that's true, but like I said, I feel like ultimately every time I think

02:14:44 ◼   ► about this I think I've got all of them at the they're all poking at the control panel

02:14:49 ◼   ► they've all got very nice seats around the control panel.

02:14:55 ◼   ► If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode head on over to relay.fm/upgrade/50

02:15:02 ◼   ► if you'd like to find us online there's a couple of ways you can do that you can find

02:15:05 ◼   ► Jason is @jsnell on twitter he hosts clockwise and lift off on relay.fm you should check

02:15:13 ◼   ► both out as well as a whole other host of shows on the incomparable at the

02:15:17 ◼   ► incomparable calm and also Jason writes over at six colors calm and I am I Myke

02:15:23 ◼   ► I am Y ke on Twitter and you can find me and many other shows that we do here

02:15:27 ◼   ► over at relay dot F and you're gunning for me now Snell three shows on relay

02:15:34 ◼   ► now yeah well you know fortnightly it's like half a show every 14 nights and if

02:15:41 ◼   ► If you would like to support our sponsors, that would mean a lot to us.

02:15:45 ◼   ► You can, I'd like to thank them again.

02:15:47 ◼   ► Squarespace, Smile, Igloo, and Linda, they've been here to support this bumper episode of

02:15:51 ◼   ► Upgrade.

02:15:52 ◼   ► But most of all, if you're at this point now, thank you so much for sticking with us.

02:15:56 ◼   ► And we'll be back next week for another episode of Upgrade.

02:15:59 ◼   ► Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow.

02:16:01 ◼   ► Jason Snow - Goodbye, Myke Hurley.

02:16:03 ◼   ► [MUSIC]