MacBreak Weekly 883, Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for MacBreak Weekly. Jason, Andy and Alex are all here. Hail, hail the gang's all here and there is absolutely no news. You know what that means? It's going to be a really great show. Why you should be cleaning your Apple Watch band. We talked a little bit, not very briefly about new versions of Mac oss. Are we getting close to a Gold Master in the passing of a legend in the business? It's all coming up. Next on Mack Break Weekly!

(00:00:30):
[00:00:30] This is twi. This is Mac Break Weekly episode 883, recorded Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023, the P one of thesis. This episode of Mac Break Weekly is brought to you by Fast Mail, reclaim your privacy, boost productivity and make email yours with FastMail. [00:01:00] Try it now free for 30 days at fastmail.com/twi and by discourse, the online home for your community discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate anytime anywhere. Visit discourse.org/twit to get one month free on all self-serve plants. It's time for Mac Break Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Apple and as we inch our way [00:01:30] into September, there's less and less news, but that's okay. I have people who can make it up as we go, including Jason Snell from six colors.com just off his time

jason Snell (00:01:41):
From Apple. I'm hearing breaking news. Yes. No, there's nothing. Sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:01:46):
No invite. No invite yet.

jason Snell (00:01:48):
Not yet. It wouldn't come if it's when we think if the events when we think it is. We won't get those until one. By we you mean me, I guess next week

Leo Laporte (00:01:55):
We think it's September 12th, so yeah, you would get it probably on the 29th [00:02:00] or 30th. Yeah,

jason Snell (00:02:01):
They usually do two weeks notice if you're going to be there in person. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:05):
Hello? Jason also here with us from WG in Boston or as they just call it now G B H because no one needs the w Andy not coming.

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:14):
Yeah, well the traffic report here is well light traffic. We saw a guy on one of those three wheel motorcycles a half hour ago, but that was a long time. Hey, there's Mrs. Stellar. She has, oh, she's walking. She's walking her dog.

Leo Laporte (00:02:30):
[00:02:30] It's a small town

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:31):
I think the dog was in.

Leo Laporte (00:02:32):
It's a small town.

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:34):
I mean the dog was lost. It was on the face grouper, but I'm glad she found the dog. I don't know what the specials are. The cafe across the street. A lot of smoothies I think are,

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
There's not a lot to say.

Andy Ihnatko (00:02:48):
I have nothing else to contribute to this week's show unfortunately, but I try to do my part. Thank you. If I get any more news on the smoothie front,

Leo Laporte (00:02:56):
You are on the second floor, so you actually do have that helicopter view [00:03:00] of a beautiful New England town in the late summer. Pretty much. Exactly,

Andy Ihnatko (00:03:06):
And my writing desk is right next to a huge window and so it's like, if anything, it's amazing that I'm not on one of those neighborhood apps because I would be the person who's like, oh, at the optician's place, they're supposed to get their recycling out, but it looks like their bar's overflowing. They're the [00:03:30] guy only comes on Tuesday. What He's

Leo Laporte (00:03:33):
Think the aboard and Mr. From Office hours, doc Global, Mr. Alex Lindsay. Hello, Alex.

Alex Lindsay (00:03:41):
Hello. Hello.

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
Your color is good. Did you get some sun today?

Alex Lindsay (00:03:45):
This week? This week, yeah. I was outside

Leo Laporte (00:03:48):
You some mantan

Alex Lindsay (00:03:49):
Over the weekend. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:50):
It looks like you might've done some yard work

Alex Lindsay (00:03:52):
Working on the pool. I don't do a lot of yard work, but I do spend a lot of time trying to keep my pool clean, so that's usually

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
The thing. That's why we do not [00:04:00] have a pool.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:02):
It's so nice when it's clean.

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
It is, but then you have to clean it. The hot tub, at least I can drain it and that's a good way

Alex Lindsay (00:04:09):
Start. I've gotten good at the water

Leo Laporte (00:04:11):
Is fine

Alex Lindsay (00:04:12):
That I'm next to a whole bunch of pine trees and so it's just like this constant attack, so it's almost, I've got a lot of tools for it though. I've gotten very good at it, but

Andy Ihnatko (00:04:20):
Oh, that's crazy. So you come out of the pool like smelling like a freshly polished wood floor. That's great.

Alex Lindsay (00:04:26):
It really does feel like that sometimes. So

Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
Alright. [00:04:30] In the past at Tech TV when stories were light and shows were long, we would often resort to,

Alex Lindsay (00:04:40):
You need to like wind.

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
We would often resort to bits of cleaning your mouse ball, things like that. We are now reduced to that here, but the modern mouse ball is your apple watchband, and according to nine to five Mac, apple watchbands are [00:05:00] covered in bacteria.

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:03):
All watchbands. To be clear, mine, every watchband, including the Apple

Leo Laporte (00:05:07):
Watch band, this is Hey folks, this is from the Advances in Infectious Diseases Journal, which really should be called the Adventures in Infectious Diseases, but that's all right. That's all right. Different 12 researchers from the prestigious Florida Atlantic University, which I think is above a gas station in beautiful

Andy Ihnatko (00:05:28):
Jackson, Florida Man reports,

Leo Laporte (00:05:30):
[00:05:30] The study consists of bands for the Apple Watch and other wearables made from rubber cloth, leather, plastic, gold, and silver. The goal was to find a between the material of the wristband and bacteria buildup, which is not even a logical sentence, but okay. Right off the bat, the study found 95% of all bands warned obviously not from the store, but had been warned by people contaminated with all kinds of dangerous bacteria. The most common staphylococcus S P P [00:06:00] found on 85% of the bands. However, that was not unexpected said researchers. What was found more notable was the 30% prevalence of the pseudomonas areosa, a type of a germ that c, d C says can cause pneumonia infections in the blood and more. 60% of the wearables tested contained e coli. Do not wear your watch to the restroom, I guess, or if you do wash it, so what did I do yesterday?

jason Snell (00:06:29):
So wash [00:06:30] it.

Leo Laporte (00:06:30):
I washed my band. I

jason Snell (00:06:31):
Did do that

Leo Laporte (00:06:33):
And I took an old toothbrush

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:36):
And

Leo Laporte (00:06:36):
I scrubbed the in interstices and I was tempted to dip it in alcohol. It is titanium. It should survive a solvent. Does it feel better

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:44):
Now? Do you feel

Leo Laporte (00:06:46):
More? Yeah, I'm so much more healthy.

Andy Ihnatko (00:06:48):
Yeah. As Jason reminded me before the show, I did read the paper and the paper didn't specify Apple watches. They have a photo of all the things they tested. A couple of 'em are obviously Apple [00:07:00] watches, but all they're basically saying is that if there's something that you wear every single day that you sweat into, maybe you should clean it every once in a while and just dunk that. Do you can take the band off, just dunk the band in 70% alcohol or Lysol, you're good, but I have to, if I were writing this headline, if I had to do this, wouldn't you just have to go for local TV station local news just before the break headlines [00:07:30] is your Apple watch killing you? Tune in. I was scientific research for,

jason Snell (00:07:36):
I mean we really boil this down, right? Clean your watch band, you monsters, okay, just clean. If you've got the stretchy kind like the fabric, those start to get really dusky After a little while, you

Leo Laporte (00:07:50):
Kind of know what I just weightless smells you clean, hang them up,

jason Snell (00:07:54):
Wipe the plasticy ones down. Just clean your watchband every so often. [00:08:00] Do you good monsters

Alex Lindsay (00:08:02):
As someone who used to spend hours cleaning horse stalls and then just go in for lunch and then go back out and do it. All I

Andy Ihnatko (00:08:08):
Can say is, yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte (00:08:11):
I don't think I've ever been sickened by my watchband, but there's always, apparently this is not news to Apple because support document 2 0 4 5 2 2, how to Clean Your Apple Watch has all the deets you need. This has been around for a couple of years. Is it okay to use a disinfectant [00:08:30] on my Apple watch using a 70% Isop Propyl alcohol wipe as Andy recommended 75% hel alcohol wipe or Clorox disinfecting wipes. Gently watch the exterior surfaces of your watch. Now, this works with the solo loop, the sport band, the Nike sport band, the OSHA band or the metal band do not use on fabric or leather bands. Do not use bleach or hydrogen peroxide. Avoid getting moisture in any openings.

Alex Lindsay (00:08:56):
Now, I will admit the reason, that's just good advice in general. The reason I don't have a fabric band [00:09:00] is because I was afraid that they would smell, but can't

Leo Laporte (00:09:02):
You throw them in the washing machine? You probably could, but

Alex Lindsay (00:09:05):
I was like, oh, that's, it's going to be a big mess

Leo Laporte (00:09:08):
There. Study didn't

Alex Lindsay (00:09:09):
Mention one

Leo Laporte (00:09:10):
As the widely ignored issue of dirty digital crowns. Apple, however, has an important note on that. If the digital crown gets stuck or won't move, it's time to clean it. Check. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (00:09:27):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:09:29):
Check for debris [00:09:30] and wipe down your Apple watch. If you find substances around the digital clown crown, they didn't mention which substances

Alex Lindsay (00:09:37):
Clean it. I wonder if you swim in a pool with it if the chlorine

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Oh yeah, probably disinfects it. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (00:09:42):
See, don't,

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:44):
There's another story that confused the hell out of me because again, bad headline that's saying Apple issues warning about Don't sleep with your head, your apple near your iPhone.

Leo Laporte (00:09:55):
Oh dear. That's scary.

Andy Ihnatko (00:09:56):
Yeah, and it was just, oh, by the way, when it's charging, [00:10:00] they pointed to some sort of tech note somewhere on the site that happens to mention that yes, it's going to get a little bit warm while it fast charges, so maybe don't hold it in your mouth while you're charging or something like that. It was nothing related to actually what the headline made you think. I'm like, okay, I feel as though I would've heard about this if there was a thing where for God's sakes, don't charge it on your nightstand because that's, that's when the goblins come in. They opens the portal to David [00:10:30] Bowie coming in and stealing children and

Leo Laporte (00:10:31):
As the New York Post,

Andy Ihnatko (00:10:32):
Although be cool to meet David Bowie

Leo Laporte (00:10:34):
Points out, do not put your iPhone in a dryer at the laundromat because well, things could go wrong dramatically. Watch, boom, holy come. That was in Spain when God is on your side opening scene to an action movie. [00:11:00] Of all the things I was expecting to happen in the video that wasn't even in the top 20, it was caused by a clipper lighter. Do not leave lighters in your clothing

Alex Lindsay (00:11:12):
In the dryer. Yeah, that would be

Leo Laporte (00:11:15):
A little butane. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:11:16):
My guess is that would, if you're unlucky enough, it would come open, it would fill, it would evaporate, take as and then it would be really powerful. That's

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
The worst kind, right?

Alex Lindsay (00:11:30):
[00:11:30] You could use that in a movie.

Leo Laporte (00:11:32):
Yeah. It's the vapor that really just as a tip that's really explosive of any kind of, does that

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:37):
Volatile, does Apple have a stated opinion on iPhone cases made of oily regs?

Leo Laporte (00:11:44):
They make a wonderful Molotov cocktail.

Andy Ihnatko (00:11:48):
You get a pretty good high off of it. I'm just saying if it's bad for the phone, I was afraid this's going to hurt the oleophobic coating on the screen.

Leo Laporte (00:11:55):
Okay, so we've learned two things here. Do not sleep with your head next to your charging iPhone [00:12:00] and wash your gosh darn watch band if nothing else. I think that was worth watching today's show or listening, wasn't it after all.

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:10):
See you next week. See, good show everybody.

Leo Laporte (00:12:13):
Really.

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:13):
We did a lot of good today, honestly.

Leo Laporte (00:12:15):
That's pretty much it. Wow.

Andy Ihnatko (00:12:19):
Yeah, it's funny. It's funny because this is the week where suddenly everybody has an explosive, not in the literal way, new iPhone [00:12:30] rumor and it's like, yeah, it's because you work for a phone store in Iowa and you got some press materials that you're not supposed to talk about and it's always nothing content, but it's everywhere and tricks you into thinking that hey, well, oh no, there isn't. Hey, well, oh no, there isn't.

Leo Laporte (00:12:49):
How about this beta six of Sonoma macOS 14 for developers, they call it the release candidate.

jason Snell (00:13:00):
[00:13:00] Really? I mean, I don't know. macOS has generally only been released in October, right, so

Leo Laporte (00:13:07):
They got some time.

jason Snell (00:13:08):
Is this the release candidate? I don't know. It doesn't feel like it.

Leo Laporte (00:13:12):
How about the seventh beta of iOS 17 and iPad OSS 17? That's got to be it, right? I've only gotten a couple of iOS. I did the public beta on my iPhone and I only have, I think twice have I had updates. They [00:13:30] don't update the public beta as much as the developer beta. Is that right? Or we don't know.

jason Snell (00:13:36):
Yeah, usually once it releases, they usually do. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:13:41):
It's pretty stable.

Alex Lindsay (00:13:42):
Pretty stable, yeah. Yeah. I've had the screen become unresponsive a couple times and I had a problem where the messages you start typing and then you wouldn't see your response. You can just type into space for a little while and messages. I think those are the only two big things that I've [00:14:00] had so far. I've

Leo Laporte (00:14:00):
Had blank widgets, which clean up after a while and there was one thing that would crash it every time, but I can't remember what it was now. I guess it didn't do it enough.

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:14):
Do they have battery optimization on lock right now? Usually, that's one of the few things that's a bad thing about signing up for public beta. They have battery optimization, but they haven't fine tuned it yet, so you might lose like 45 minutes to an hour off your runtime.

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
I haven't really noticed that, but

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:29):
That's [00:14:30] just a general thing.

Leo Laporte (00:14:30):
It's got so much battery life. Yeah. One thing

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:34):
Though, done a really good job with this.

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
Yeah. This tells you how good a job they did. The one thing people didn't like was that the end call button was moved to the right and now it's back in the middle. Yeah. Wow. That's why we do the beta testing, right?

Andy Ihnatko (00:14:54):
Yeah. That could have screwed up a lot of people though. That's like I wonder.

Alex Lindsay (00:14:59):
I'll tell you, [00:15:00] it reminded me of one other bug it called the last person I called over and over. Oh, that's a bug and over again. Fortunately it was a good friend of mine, but it just kept on calling time. We were in the hotel setting up for Seagrave and so he just kept on calling his phone over and over and over again. I mean every 30 seconds it would just call. Every time I'd hang it up, it would wait for a second then call again, but I haven't seen that since the last update.

Leo Laporte (00:15:28):
I wonder, I bet it's a little harder [00:15:30] these days for Apple to test phone features because I don't know about you, but I mean obviously you're a little different, Alex, you actually phone people, but I rarely call or talk

Alex Lindsay (00:15:39):
Very rarely on purpose

Leo Laporte (00:15:42):
Only by accident. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (00:15:45):
There's only a handful of people that can call me unscheduled. Don't text first. There's this thing that I thought my kids were crazy when they did that. Text me before you call. I'll tell you if it's okay to talk, and now I'm totally that way. If we don't have a meeting, I kind [00:16:00] of expect you to text me before, is this a good time? And then I go, yeah, yeah, sure, but calling me straight out, you've got to be pretty close.

Andy Ihnatko (00:16:06):
Yeah, you need some time to spin up. Just boot up your own social software for handling out a phone call. It's difficult and also it's also kind of too bad that Apple

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
Is the introvert's complaint. I know

Andy Ihnatko (00:16:20):
Exactly. Like if someone asks you, if you're working with somebody on a project, they text you and they ask a question, it's perfectly fine to say, wow, [00:16:30] that's a good question. Let me take a look at that and get back to you as opposed to on the phone it's like, okay, why don't you hang up this call so I can go take a look at it? Oh no, that's okay. I'll stand by. Why don't you take a look at it right now? It's the worst and I'm like, well, I could come back to you in eight seconds. I could come back to you in eight hours. I don't think I want to keep the phone on quite that long, but it is too bad that Apple isn't looking at better phone features.

(00:16:57):
There isn't a whole lot of different, there are only [00:17:00] a few signature features that Apple has that a Google Pixel phone and vice versa, but one of them is when I switch to test out another phone when I lose all of that call screening that is built into a pixel phone, I miss it. It is so good at saying, yeah, this is nobody I, I'm going to let you know that someone's calling, but I'm going to tell you you don't want to answer the phone or Hey, why not? Instead of answering the phone, you just tap this button and listen to the voicemail message that he or she's trying to leave and if it's a language that you don't understand, [00:17:30] it's like it is, but actually that kind of fits into what we've been talking about because all of these features that I love about pixel's phone app are basically ones that prevent me from talking to people on the phone, so maybe we're still making the same case.

Leo Laporte (00:17:46):
Apple Insider took their life in their hands and so did some unnamed developer who gave them hands-on on their vision despite of course all of the restrictions. They'd agreed to [00:18:00] the developer. I mean, insider didn't have any qualms and they shouldn't because that's a journalistic thing, but I kind of feel like the developer really, you promised man, you promised.

Andy Ihnatko (00:18:12):
Oh God, that is exactly it. I think that especially in a device like this, if there were a device that is causing harm to people and Apple is trying to put the lid on this news story getting out everyone, the sky's the limit, but when it's a pre-release piece of hardware, it's perfectly [00:18:30] fine for Apple Insider to if someone reaches out and say, Hey, you want to spend two hours with this piece of hardware unsupervised and without Apple looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do, they almost have responsibility to do it, but as someone who's, I've signed a bunch of agreements to say that this is not my property, this is Apple's property. I'm agreeing that Apple gets to dictate everything I do with this and 20 of the 20 and a half pages of the instructions are, I don't get to show it to anybody else. Certainly not a reporter. That's [00:19:00] like, again, on these kinds of stakes where it's not as though this is a whistleblower who's trying to get attention to a problem that Apple's trying to stifle. That's no good. You don't do that. I

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
Will also point out that I don't think we learned anything. I don't know. No, we didn't. Yeah, it's everything we've already,

jason Snell (00:19:18):
It's kind of a nothing. I mean the biggest story is that somebody got a hold of one, but his impressions are not really appreciably different than the impressions we all got from our canned demos at Apple during ww [00:19:30] d c week. It's just a different person writing about the same kind of things and without the demo you don't get the Apple demo Here. It's just sort of the hardware and saying, yeah, it looks good, and the iPad apps are just iPad apps and we looked at Safari and it was fine and it's fine as long as, I mean again, it is Apple Insider's job. As long as they didn't induce somebody, right? We're like, Hey, anybody out there want to break their N D A? That starts to get unethical, but assuming somebody that this writer knows came and said, I got this. You can look at it. [00:20:00] That's on the developer who got it, but this didn't change how we look at the Vision Pro. It's just sort of like, oh yeah, it's what we thought it was and it's a developer unit

Alex Lindsay (00:20:11):
Anyway for all of that. The developer undermined the entire developer program. It's not yet and try to get support from Apple now.

jason Snell (00:20:20):
Well, what I would say is Apple, when Apple does something like this, they know this is going to happen. They know this is going to happen, and in fact their best defense for stuff like this is don't include things in [00:20:30] the developer unit that you don't want to leak, that they'll leak. They'll leak. Maybe they won't leak in a first person like this. I think what's extraordinary is that the writer of the story is like, I used it and let me go through my experience. There are other ways to couch this stuff and be like, oh, there's a report that, or we are hearing that, or a developer told us that this thing is the case, but they're going to come out. Right. It's inevitable that they're going to come out. I think you go into it. If your Apple just knowing constrain what's [00:21:00] you want to tell them, don't share it, but some of that stuff is going to leak and it's just like anything that's precious, don't put it in the developer product, just don't do it and they didn't.

Andy Ihnatko (00:21:09):
Anything that doesn't work yet is not going to be in that unit for exactly this reason, so no one can say, oh my God, I turned on that eyeballs on the outside of the goggles. Oh my God, that's terrible. It was a nightmare. Yeah, that's because we only turned it on for one person. Congratulations, you just got caught in the flight trap.

Leo Laporte (00:21:29):
Also, [00:21:30] I think this is another vision pro leak of French tech news website. iPhone Soft says that a source who tried the Vision Pro at one of Apple's public developer lab saw the one terabyte figure listed as storage in the devices settings app. We're really grasping at straws here, folks. Well, but

Alex Lindsay (00:21:50):
We know that there's larger storage available. It's just that it's not necessarily going to be on board. I think that that's the whole thing is

jason Snell (00:21:59):
That's why it [00:22:00] starts at, right? The price was starts at and we all focused on that price,

Leo Laporte (00:22:03):
3,500. It starts at Yeah, you want a terabyte that's going to cost you a little more, I think.

jason Snell (00:22:08):
Yeah, exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (00:22:09):
Although it is interesting to wonder about the architecture of this, and this is why this kind of a number isn't really valuable right now because one of the things that's on a lot of people's mind is how often is this device going to have to phone home to get more data to render an environment or do whatever like that? The idea, if we found out that, oh, but the Apple thought that the base model was going to be 512 gigabytes and they decided [00:22:30] to make it one terabyte instead, that might be an interesting data point about the latency that they were the Apple was experiencing when it had less memory rather than more, but as it is right now, we have nothing to compare it to, so we don't know if that's a lot, if that's going to be how much you get for the base model law or how much it's going to be if you spend an extra thousand dollars, so interesting. This is way too early to get anything interesting out of it.

Leo Laporte (00:22:55):
Did James Thompson get a Vision Pro? Do you know Jason?

jason Snell (00:22:59):
I mean, would [00:23:00] he be able to say if he did, but I don't actually know. He might be able say, I think he went to the developer labs in London. He had a mysterious tweet that was very obvious about going to batter sea, so I think he was in that lab, but I don't know, and if he did, he didn't tell me. Put it

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
Way, so the developers who get knowledge, these are not even allowed to say, you can't come into my house now. You could say that or, well,

jason Snell (00:23:23):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
Right. I have a special room now in my house that you're not allowed

jason Snell (00:23:26):
To. It's locked with a Pelican case in it and you're not allowed in there. Yeah, probably they [00:23:30] could say that James works at home, so you'd have to be one of visiting James in Scotland to get that non together.

Leo Laporte (00:23:36):
Whatever you do, do not go in that room, that door. Do not go through that door. Whatever you do, you can do else in the house. That's a guarantee that door's going to get opened. I've written enough

Andy Ihnatko (00:23:50):
Prompt injection works really well with humans, I find. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:23:54):
Well, and I think for

Alex Lindsay (00:23:55):
Most of many of these, it's these are going to be larger companies that have a room [00:24:00] that they're going to dedicate to this. Oh, yeah, put something in there. That's what

Leo Laporte (00:24:03):
Apple special key card access and all that, and we know who saw it and who was in there and who gave it to Apple Insider, that kind of thing. Wow. Boy, this is so scant when I start with watch your watch band, it's going to be,

jason Snell (00:24:19):
I mean, we could probably kill an hour just talking more about Disney and Apple if we want to do that.

Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Let's do Wes. Let's break first. I did that. I like that. I like your thinking [00:24:30] stranger. I like where you're going. By the way, I hate that story. Is it just me or that? That is an example of August fatigue. There's nothing to say. The speculation even Gruber has fallen for this that Apple might buy. Well, I think he was in E S P N, right? Wasn't that the thinking?

Andy Ihnatko (00:24:53):
That's because the Disney c e o has been fielding questions about selling off units and [00:25:00] he's been protesting that no, Disney is not for sale. However, we are considering selling off units of basically channels that are not streaming content. Things are to have live events like a conventional TV channel, and he specified e s ESPN as something that they're considering, and when you see articles, they're saying, oh, don't do Apple buying Disney. That's not as ridiculous as it might seem. It's like, well, until you wonder how Apple is going to run a theme park, and I don't know if they're going to do that, but yeah, when you consider, if they do decide to break [00:25:30] things up and people just like in a estate sale where people just send upon saying, I'm here to buy the furniture. I'm here to buy linens. I'm here to buy kitchen stuff. That could then Apple could show up at that estate sale and say, I'm going to buy S P N,

jason Snell (00:25:42):
I have a hot take on this, but maybe I should save

Leo Laporte (00:25:44):
It for, let's take a break and then the hot take. Ladies and gentlemen, this is why you listen to this show, Jason Snell's Hot takes

jason Snell (00:25:52):
Got to be a reason.

Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
There's going to be some reason. Andy and aco, Jason Snell, Alex Lindsay, [00:26:00] we will delve into Disney and Apple in just a little bit. There's also somebody put this in and I think it's kind of cool history of presentations, that kind of cool video. We could talk about that too, but first a word from our sponsor, a company, a piece of software I use not just every day, but several times a day. It's great software attaching to a great server and [00:26:30] it solves the problem that I think a lot of people have. My almost motto over the last few years is if you value email, don't use a free service. The free emails, almost everybody's using Gmail, maybe outlook.com, that kind of thing. They don't provide any support because it's free. You're at their mercy and if something goes wrong, you got a problem and the features really are not, you're not defining the features that the user base isn't.

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(00:31:34):
I use Fast, for instance, because I have domains associated with FastMail. I have an infinite number of emails, so every time I sign up for something, I make it be that company at my email, which makes it really easy to figure out who's selling my name. Among other things. I really like it. FastMail is moving email forward with new internet standards and open source innovations that power many email services other [00:32:00] than their own. There are leaders in the open source email movement. They are the gold standard. Reclaim your privacy, boost productivity with FastMail. Try it now free for 30 days, fastmail.com/twit. I have just scratched the surface of the things FastMail can do. It is fantastic. FastMail, remember that name. When it's time to make email yours, go to fastmail.com/twit. We think of so much where there's some support of Mac Break [00:32:30] Weekly, and I thank them personally. I've been using them, as I said, for more than 10 years, and I've been trying to get them to buy ads. I said, you're getting the recommendations for free. I know. Please cut me a little check, would you? And they have, even though they're not rich, they're not Google Rich. So it all started with an August 9th article in the Hollywood Reporter, a Disney sale to Apple. Don't count it out this time. Now, Alex, [00:33:00] Lindsay, you've been saying Apple should buy Disney forever and ever. Does Apple have enough cash to buy Disney? I mean outright?

Alex Lindsay (00:33:10):
I don't, no, they'd have to borrow it, but they could do that or they could do stock transfer. I mean, there's a lot. I mean think that Pixar was bought by Disney with stock, I don't think in some cash, but I think it was a split of those things. I think that's how Steve Jobs ended up with 7% of Disney or

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
Disney's market cap is 156 billion. [00:33:30] Apple only

jason Snell (00:33:31):
Has

Alex Lindsay (00:33:31):
One

jason Snell (00:33:31):
20th, only 50 billion in cash, but they could probably, they're good for

Alex Lindsay (00:33:35):
If they held their breath, if they held their dividend breath for three quarters, they'd have enough to buy Disney.

Leo Laporte (00:33:40):
But I don't like anybody's proposing that they buy Disney outright or even that Disney is for sale outright. It's just that Bob Iger might want to sell parts off that don't make sense.

jason Snell (00:33:50):
Or potentially, depending on how Bob Iger sees the end game, he wants to sell parts off. The theory of the Hollywood reporter article is Iger may want to sell some parts off into places that [00:34:00] are declining businesses, and that might be prepping it for sale to a partner like Apple for what remains, and that would be his exit. Famously can't find a successor, so maybe his successor is handing the company to Apple and running away. But the t h R story, I thought it was a really balanced story because it says right in the headline, we've heard this before, why is it different this time? And there are a few reasons it's different this time. Disney is under stress. Their biggest cash [00:34:30] machine for the last 15, 20 years. E S P N is in decline because cable subscriptions are in decline, and they invested a huge amount of money in launching Disney Plus, which I would say was successful.

(00:34:40):
But they have a bunch of pressure saying, you got to show profit, you got to make more money on this. Even though that was never the original goal, the goal was to stake out the territory and build a product. That would be one of the last ones standing. But the big thesis in that t h R story is the Hollywood Insider who basically says, look, all these entertainment industry companies are now [00:35:00] going to be streaming companies and streaming as technology, and the tech industry has so much more money and power than the entertainment industry that in the end, the tech industry is going to eat the entertainment industry alive. What's going to happen? And that they said something like, in the end, all you're going to get is Apple, Amazon, Netflix and one other streamer will be the only ones to survive because Apple, Amazon, Google, these companies have so much more money and so much more market cap than the entertainment [00:35:30] industry, which we think of as giants like Disney looms large in our minds.

(00:35:34):
But if you look at the balance sheet and you look at the stock and you compare it to the tech giants like Apple, it's not even close. So I think that the most interesting part of the premise is if it's inevitable because of the world we live in right now, that tech companies are going to swallow the entertainment industry whole, there's not a better companion for Disney than Apple because they are two of the most similar companies [00:36:00] culturally in existence. And a lot of what Disney has is stuff that Apple wants. But I think what I see in a lot of the criticism of this when people are like, no, no, it's never going to happen, and I was one of those people 10 years ago, it was like, this is not going to happen. But it's different now. And I think one of the reasons is Apple's a much larger company than they were 10 years ago.

(00:36:19):
They're huge. And also in relationship to Disney, in relationship to Disney and then in relationship to itself as well. And they still have enormous pressure by investors to show [00:36:30] growth. And we can debate whether that's healthy for companies to have endless growth pressure. I think it's not, but that's the way the world works. And so that's where we are. And one of the things that Apple has done is gone into completely new markets that would've seemed ridiculous even 10 years ago, like Apple TV plus. And the fact that an Apple TV movie won an Oscar and they won the Emmy for best comedy with Ted lasso Apple's playing in all sorts of games that they never did before, and they're a size [00:37:00] unlike the company even 10 years ago. And when you start to think about that and think about avenues for growth, I don't think it's unreasonable to say Apple might want to buy a big chunk of Disney and use it to fuel future growth if they believe they can do it.

(00:37:14):
I still don't think it's super likely unless there's a feeding frenzy. And Apple was like, well, nobody else is going to buy Disney. We're going to buy it. But Andy mentioned theme parks earlier and it's like, I don't know, I think theme parks kind of potentially [00:37:30] fit. I don't think it would be an Apple theme park, it would be a Disney theme park, but Apple might own Disney at that point. Apple and Disney are both really good at focusing on the customer experience. The imagineers are right at that same intersection of liberal arts and technology that Apple is. They're very good at focusing on the customer experience and also getting as much money out of the customer as possible in all of those situations. I know it seems super bizarre, the idea that Apple as a corporation might end up owning Disneyland [00:38:00] and Disney cruise lines and things that are like, how is that even possible?

(00:38:04):
But what I would say is the Apple lift today is not the apple that lives in most of our minds. It's already changed so much. It's so huge, and the pressure on it to continue to grow is so great that they are opening up whole new areas. And I think 10 years ago we would've said an Apple movie, what's that? And let alone that it won best picture, but that's where the world we live in today. So I think that it's plausible, but I personally think [00:38:30] I actually understand why Bob Ger might want to sell to Apple. I don't think I can see the case for Apple to spend 150 billion on some of the assets of Disney right now unless it's a situation where everybody in tech is buying the entertainment industry out at which point, Disney and Apple are the best partners.

Alex Lindsay (00:38:51):
And I think some of the timing, it'll depend on some of the strikes as well, because the movie industry, if the strikes continue that are happening in Hollywood right now [00:39:00] until January or February, which some people think could happen, the movie industry will be in a free fall. It's like c o level. People are talking a lot about it right now. It's that, but Apple and Amazon and Netflix actually are in a better position, which they're the ones that are holding the strings to the strike. That's the real problem with the whole thing. And so they're in a really good position. So the timing is really defensive because Disney may be as valuable as is ever going to be [00:39:30] like right now. So that's probably something that Iger may be looking down. The problem is that there's a lot of really valuable assets and for Apple across the entire ecosystem, Ironman and Marvel and Pixar and Star Wars and all those things across the entire ecosystem with ar, vr interfaces, games, educational materials, stickers, everything, those are very valuable.

(00:39:57):
They have probably run most of their value. [00:40:00] Disney by overusing them has probably run most of their value out of that system. So the problem is is that can Disney actually continue to make the kind of money it's been making in the past and it's starting to falter because where do you take Marvel now? Where do you take Star Wars now? Where do you take those things now they're not clear that there's an end product there that, not that it won't be valuable. The question is will it be has as guaranteed as it was before? And that's becoming unclear. So I think that everyone's starting to not quite [00:40:30] hit on all cylinders. And so I think that if you're looking at that, you have to be kind of worried. Also, if you're doing location-based ar, you're doing all kinds of other stuff, there's no better place to do that than a Disneyland.

(00:40:42):
So if you wanted to add value to something and have it be like, Hey, if you're using an iPhone, all this other stuff is available at Disneyland. That is a pretty, it's a great r and d space because of the way that Disneyland is built in Disney World. But Disneyland, I mean the way it's built, you can see [00:41:00] people using it all. There's a lot of things about it because it's a known product and it's something that Apple could really take advantage of. So I think that in a lot of ways Disney is more valuable to Apple than it is to Disney. And so because they can use it as a magnifier in a way that Disney can't do by itself,

jason Snell (00:41:19):
That's the argument for tech companies to buy these companies is that the tech companies have an engine of money and for the Apple, it's the iPhone that the standalone entertainment companies just don't have. And [00:41:30] so you look at what Disney can do and they are now constrained by everybody saying, how are you going to make money? Instead of, we're going to spend billions in order to establish Disney Plus, it's now how are you going to make money? How are you going to deal with linear TV like E S P N going down? And Apple is like, well, we got all that money from the iPhone.

Alex Lindsay (00:41:47):
Don't ask us and we can sell. Apple could just sell more iPhones and make it worth buying Disney. If all of those Disney products and everything else suddenly were mostly just you got all the special stuff on the Apple [00:42:00] platform that were related to those things, it's worth it by itself. I think the biggest problem Apple would have is actually antitrust. It is will cinch up so many things for Apple that because it's two different markets, I think that they might be able to do it, but they're under so much pressure right now. I think people could see an end run here of Apple really closing, especially that sub 18, that they're already at 87%. They could bump that a bit higher with all of those product lines. So that's the thing that I think Apple [00:42:30] has. I think it's a very valuable purchase. I think it's probably 50 50, maybe 30 50 that they would actually do it. Apple's never done more than I think Beats. I think Beats is the biggest one. They did three and a half billion. It's a huge cultural. Disney as Jason said, is probably the closest to Apple and culture in many, many, many ways. And so it'd probably be the easiest one. You have a C E O that is ready to leave. So it's not like he's going to be trying to figure out how he remains in play already

Andy Ihnatko (00:42:58):
Left once,

Alex Lindsay (00:42:59):
So he's already left [00:43:00] once. So you already have, so there's a bunch of things about it that make sense. Obviously it's just such a, everybody, I think just about every time someone's done this, it hasn't turned out well. So I think that that's the biggest problem is that Apple would've to prove that they can do it better than everyone else, which they do often. But Apple has generally resisted large purchases because of trying to assimilate the culture has been difficult.

Andy Ihnatko (00:43:23):
Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Beats because that's one of my stumbling blocks in all this. I think one of the reasons why the Beats [00:43:30] acquisition worked and got Apple into streaming music services is that they didn't just buy a headphone manufacturer and a fledgling startup music service. They've also bought Dr. Dre and they bought Jimmy Iovine who came in saying, we have the knowledge of this industry that is major place. I should point out, ran away as quickly as they could from the company. They took the cash, they had [00:44:00] an office, but again, but they didn't show up. Well, they both contributed to the launch. They weren't, it's not as the launch.

(00:44:09):
They were around long enough to make sure that Apple knew how to run that business. One of my problems I have imagining Apple's, a wide acquisition of Disney is who at Disney can basically bring aboard, here is how things work at Disney. Here is why. No, you are not going to treat Disney cast members on the theme parks that [00:44:30] way. Just college kids who come in and work for three weeks and you can fire them at will. These are people that are there because they love Disney, and we both benefit from that and we also know how to exploit that correctly. So you're not going to basically say that just because your ability to shut down certain workers in your Apple stores worked there, that's how you're going to help the, that's how you're going to keep control of the people that are the last interface between a five-year-old child and their parents having a great time at our theme parks.

jason Snell (00:44:59):
I would think [00:45:00] that if Apple would make a purchase like this, they would know that one of the things they were doing is entering areas they don't know about and lean on the executives who run those parts of Disney to be the experts and join whatever the team is to do that. And my example would be everybody likes to talk about the early days of Apple TV and they say, oh, you mean Carpool karaoke and Planet of the apps? It's like, well, that was the, no, I don't mean that because that was the objective lesson of them as people who don't know [00:45:30] anything about TV or the entertainment industry throwing something against the wall. What they did do, that was the smart thing after those two shows were in process was hire the two guys from Sony who run Apple TV to this day. And those guys are entertainment industry experts.

(00:45:47):
They're the subject matter experts. They work for Eddie Q, but it's very clear that Eddie Q, although he's thinking about strategy and who knows, may be thinking about buying Disney right now, he lets those guys [00:46:00] run that division and they're the experts. And so they've listened to the subject matter experts. And it's one of those examples where although there are all those stories about, oh, Tim Cook doesn't want you to swear on TV or whatever, the truth is that Zach and Jamie, the guys who run Apple tv, the Sony executives formerly they're doing their thing and they know how to do it and they've been successful with it. So I think that could potentially be the model. The other thing I would throw out there is I think it's an interesting [00:46:30] thought exercise, and I don't know where I come down on this, but okay, 150 billion.

(00:46:37):
If they said to Zach and Jamie, here's a hundred billion dollars and in a year or two we want Apple TV plus to be Disney plus, they couldn't do it. They couldn't do it in four years, they couldn't do it in eight years. That would be the reason you buy something, whether it's Disney or Paramount or something else, is you want to really grow your streaming service [00:47:00] and growing it with no catalog and no intellectual property, bit by bit, year by year, show by show isn't growing it fast enough for your purposes and that's why you would make a big sale. So that would be my argument, but I doubt they would make the mistake given how they behave with TV Plus, if they did suddenly come in and say, we want to micromanage how the poorest paid people at the parks division are managed, yeah, that's going to be a disaster. But I'm not sure that that would happen.

Alex Lindsay (00:47:28):
And even with [00:47:30] Beats and with other things that Apple's taken over in the past, it usually was a pretty light step at the beginning. It's like where we're going to figure this out for a little while and then we're going to start doing stuff. And again, I think they probably leave. I think Apple's interest in Disneyland for instance, is going to be more about how do we add ar extra phone tools? They probably wouldn't touch how the Disneyland works because Apple's pretty good at knowing that you don't always know exactly what makes something successful and not successful. So I think that, and they've been pretty good at that kind of thing of not messing with things [00:48:00] unless they can figure it out. So I don't have any real concern that Apple would do anything odd with that. I think that it's mostly just could they figure out how to assimilate the overall Disney culture into the Apple culture and just all the people and everything's just with any of these, there's just a lot of politics and a lot of people who have, when you merge it, who gets to run this division versus that division and is it an Apple person?

(00:48:25):
Is it Disney person? And it's two massive ships [00:48:30] getting merged together. And so I think it's just the overall culture and I would say more executive culture than the Edge that they'd have to figure out who goes where to make that happen. But I do think that, again, the advantage for Apple, as Jason said, the advantage for Apple to fill up, suddenly you have an entirely full subscription service

Leo Laporte (00:48:53):
That

Alex Lindsay (00:48:53):
Has got all the bits and pieces that it needs and E S P N. And so I think that that's [00:49:00] so valuable to Apple. And I think that Apple and Amazon, they don't have to make money selling movies. This is all like Glow. Someone was talking about Prime, someone asked, when are you going to get rid of Prime? There was something that I saw and someone asked me, I was like, never. I'm never going to get rid of Prime. Do you see how many books packages come into my house? There's no way I'm going to get rid of Prime. And that's the point. Amazon is giving me video with my delivery and Apple has got [00:49:30] products and this whole side angle of it makes it. That's why all these technology companies are going to do so well. And again, I do think a reckoning is coming because even for me, I'm looking at how many times am I actually going to these subscription services? And the reality is I'm not going to Disney very often. I'm not going to Max very often. I'm spending most of my time in Amazon, apple, Netflix, and I'm not sure if it makes sense to keep all of these subscriptions.

Leo Laporte (00:49:53):
I think that you guys are forgetting the mess that Uncle Mo made at cruises. I think Godrick is just not the greatest [00:50:00] mascot for parks and a t N is just, wait a minute, I'm confusing this with succession. I'm sorry. That's a different show. Some of this comes from, and by the way, this is again the article from the Hollywood Reporter by Kim Weber and Alex Weran. It comes from ER's book The Rite of a Lifetime in 2019. He wrote, I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would've combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously. I believe that Bob Iger really wants this. I [00:50:30] do not believe that Apple does. Look at the size, these dots on the article are fantastic. The size comparison of Big Tech, and you could add Google and Microsoft and the others to the size comparisons of these media companies, Netflix, Comcast, Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox Paramount are tiny compared to this.

(00:50:50):
I think Apple could reasonably say we would like the streaming library of Disney Plus maybe we'd like because we want to get into sports E S P N. But Tim Cook has always [00:51:00] said historically that the biggest, the reason he doesn't do big acquisitions is the culture clash. He says it's very hard to combine cultures, and as much as Disney is a similar culture, there are two different unions for Park employees. For instance, apple doesn't like unions. There's also, and you Glancingly mentioned this, the F T C would absolutely sue to stop this. I mean, there's not even a question about it. Whether they would win is another matter, but Microsoft's [00:51:30] gone through hell with their Activision acquisition and yeah, it'll probably end up going through in the long run, but it was not fun. And I don't think Apple has a real taste for going back to court after their epic

jason Snell (00:51:43):
List. I dunno. I mean, I just look at the Disney acquisition of Fox where they divested of some stuff, and that was a huge overlap. I think that this would even not have the overlap that Microsoft and Activision has. So maybe I'm, I'm sure politically there would be [00:52:00] fallout from this, but I honestly can't see how they would stop it because there's so little overlap between the two companies.

Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
There's another speed bump that the Hollywood reporter brings up, which is the shareholders. The uproar from Disney shareholders would be insane.

Alex Lindsay (00:52:25):
Only the uneducated ones. I mean, Disney's about as good as, I mean this is a good time to sell. [00:52:30] The waters could get a lot rougher.

Leo Laporte (00:52:34):
That's true. I mean, the succession analogy isn't completely wrong because you really have kind of an old school media company and a new school technology company. And that was kind of the thesis of all four seasons of succession was that old media is dying and tech, big tech is taking over. And how we incorporate

Alex Lindsay (00:52:54):
That. I think one of the big problems is that Disney undoubtedly has an enormous [00:53:00] amount of value right now, but the question is, is content going to continue to be valuable in itself? And it's very unclear that it will be. And so that content is, we may be going through kind of a hyperinflation of content where the stuff that you were sitting on may not be nearly as valuable 10 years from now or five years from now, or three years from now than it is now. But

Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Then why would Apple want?

Alex Lindsay (00:53:23):
Because the Glow, all of those things, while we may not care about that individual piece, but it attached [00:53:30] to the platform, is very valuable to Apple because again, you have all of this IP that you can use inside of your platform. You have all this IP that you can use inside of your marketing. You have all this IP that you can go through that system and you have things that, again, each piece isn't valuable, but filling out your entire catalog is. So having a wide catalog is valuable to Apple, wider than what Apple TV Plus has right now. And E S P N just keeps giving if you're looking at live, because live is the one thing that you can [00:54:00] still making money. So there's a lot of things that are there. So I think that, again, the content in itself isn't valuable. The magnifier of it being attached to Apple's, all of other apple's, other products that make it valuable for Apple and don't know, I don't even know who else could extract that value from Disney as efficiently as Apple could. Again,

Leo Laporte (00:54:25):
I agree that from Disney's point of view, this is a match made in heaven. I just don't think it's the same. [00:54:30] I think Tim Cook is going to need a lot of persuading.

jason Snell (00:54:32):
Yeah, it's a tougher call for, I think all of the stories and all the discussion about this make a pretty decent case for why this might be something Bob Iger wants. Why it's something that Tim Cook and Eddie Q want is it would be an enormous gamble. It would be huge. The reason, basically what I keep coming back to, and it's not much of a hot take, but this is what it is, is I think people who dismiss it out of hand don't understand, haven't recalibrated what [00:55:00] Apple is today. Apple has grown so much, it has so much power, it has so much money, it has so much value and there's so much pressure for them to keep growing as they've built that services business. Like the services business is bigger than Apple was 12 years ago. I mean, they feel pressure to grow and at some point the only way for them to grow is to be more than they are today.

(00:55:26):
And that is the wild card here for me is [00:55:30] today's Apple, apple of the 2020s. Does it say, sure, we will become an entertainment powerhouse by making these acquisitions or does it look at its competitors in the tech space and say they're all going to buy this stuff so we might as well? Or do they say, no, it's overpriced, it's not worth it. We'll pick some stuff off later when they're selling it for parts. I think that that's a fair argument. That's why I'm not convinced, [00:56:00] but I would say if you dismiss it out of hand, I think you should pay attention to how Apple has changed the last decade. I don't believe Apple of 2014 would do anything like this, but Apple at 2023, wow. It is such a different company that I think you can't rule it out

Alex Lindsay (00:56:17):
And just the value you have a good

Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
Piece. By the way, in Mac World last week, apple buying Disney isn't the fairytale it once was. When you're as big as Apple, you need to get creative

jason Snell (00:56:25):
Fairytale, huh?

Leo Laporte (00:56:26):
I get it.

jason Snell (00:56:27):
When you

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):
Need to get [00:56:30] creative in order to seek growth, so that's really the question is what is the problem Tim Cook has that this would solve

jason Snell (00:56:38):
And it's supercharging the services business and adding a whole bunch of other new businesses that they think they can generate a lot of revenue and profit out of using their flywheel of their ecosystem. That would be

Leo Laporte (00:56:50):
Argument. Their biggest problem right now is this flywheel spinning really fast with momentum from the iPhone, but they've got to keep that going. They got to find the next thing [00:57:00] and honestly it ain't Vision Pro, but it's not the Apple car.

jason Snell (00:57:04):
The investors want growth and the biggest growth right now isn't services. So they're saying, well what if Disney plus and Parks even and cruises or whatever and other kind of entertainment that's very profitable, what of these are things that can help us point to a number and say, look at how profitable we are. Look at our huge growth in revenue.

Leo Laporte (00:57:22):
It turns Apple into a correct suit though. It turns it into one of those Korean mega corporations that makes bulldozers, TVs and [00:57:30] microwave s I don't feel like it fits in with Apple to,

Alex Lindsay (00:57:34):
I think there's a lot of integration that's possible cruises. I think the parks and the cruises, I mean if you look at what they want to do, if

Leo Laporte (00:57:40):
They'd else

Alex Lindsay (00:57:41):
Makes sense,

Leo Laporte (00:57:42):
Buy E P n. Yeah, for the content and for sports, that makes a lot of sense. And you know what company, because of the ftc, you could also look down the road and say, well, if somebody's going to buy Disney, they're going to have to spin off parts of it and if it's a media company, they may well have to spin off Disney Plus and E S P N and we could just wait until that happens [00:58:00] and pick those little fruits up off

Alex Lindsay (00:58:01):
The ground. It could be, I just think that if someone asked me What do you want to build? What would you love to build AR assets against? I would say Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel, these are incredible IP for Apple to build for its headset as well as all the things that going to insert into it. I think that the hardest part is the culture clash of just any company taking two companies and merging them together, but I think the math [00:58:30] is there, so it's just a matter of Apple figuring out whether they can get over the culture. This

Leo Laporte (00:58:33):
Is a huge acquisition though. The Microsoft Activision acquisition was 70 billion and people were going like, wow, it's the biggest thing. We're talking almost triple that. I mean this a very, would be a huge acquisition with lots

jason Snell (00:58:47):
Of speed bump unless Bob Iger sells off a big chunk. I mean the premise in the t h R story is that he's going to sell off a, B, C and a B, C news and he might sell off E S P N or part of e espn. He might sell off Hulu [00:59:00] that there are parts of the business that he would sell off and then there would be a slimmer, more profitable Disney that he could either keep or that he could sell to a buyer like Apple. And that again, I think is within the realm of possibility for him. I would also argue that the idea that Apple becomes an unwieldy company that makes toothbrushes and bulldozers sort of went out the window when they started doing TV plus and Fitness Plus and things like that. I mean that services business, that aspect of it is weird [00:59:30] for a hardware and software company. So I think that's what I mean. I think they've been headed in this direction, but that they can't grow that business fast enough necessarily for what the investors want to sell. I

Leo Laporte (00:59:41):
Don't think it's, I

jason Snell (00:59:42):
Don't totally,

Leo Laporte (00:59:42):
There's a good argument that orthogonal because it's basically putting stuff on the hardware that they sell, which is what they've always done with Mac oss and system seven and that you got to put stuff, you can't just sell hardware, you got to put stuff on it and having a content arm makes perfect sense, especially since you could charge for the content and hardware [01:00:00] sales are slowing down. Hardware margins are much tighter. I feel like that's very consonant with what they're doing. I don't think cruises and parks are at all, not

jason Snell (01:00:11):
To mention if you're an, but they're not an intellectual property owner right now. And so I guess that would be the question is do you want to own Star Wars and Pixar and all the Disney stuff and Marvel? Because if you do, the argument would be do you want to let somebody else handle the parks experience and all of that and have it not be you or do you want to exert [01:00:30] complete control like you would and Disney does and have this extended experience where you part even more money from your customer and their wallets? It may be maybe not. Again, I think it's weird. I think it's super weird, but I think we are in weird times where this, I think the core question here is does Wall Street's insatiable need for growth, even from the most valuable and one of the most profitable companies in the world, cause it to distort itself in ways that make no sense. [01:01:00] And I think the answer might be yes, but I think it's super distorted and weird for them to even consider something like this. But they

Alex Lindsay (01:01:06):
Might. I mean the big thing is is that on top of whatever happens with the AR headset, the AR experiences at locations, the next 10 years, you're going to see a big explosion of that and there would be no lab better than Disneyland. So that being able to have phones to tell you where to go, how long the line is, when to get there, how to do, and having all of these services that you could build in, and [01:01:30] you have a place that you own that you don't have to keep on arguing about whether you can do another laser scan of it or figure things out. Or you could put, if they put ultra wide band in the entire Disney, Disney World in Disneyland, about 160 kids get lost a day having something that just, they find them obviously they really

jason Snell (01:01:54):
Good at it and only 150 of them are found. Where are the other No

Leo Laporte (01:02:00):
[01:02:00] Boys. I don't think that that's a big suck of money.

jason Snell (01:02:05):
Yeah, I think I can see the argument. My counterargument would be though, they could also give Bob Iger a cash infusion by licensing and having a strategic partnership about their content and about Apple in Disneyland and they could, the question is, do you need to spend all that money? Don't think, could you be a partner? Mr.

Leo Laporte (01:02:28):
Partner think has signaled he wants to sell it off for [01:02:30] parts. I think that's very clear. He was talking about that at the Allen, Alan and Co. And I think that really there's two choices for him either to do it himself or to bring into big private equity companies buys the whole thing and that's what private equity does. And then they polish it up and they sell off the parts. I think that's the future of Disney. Whether Apple wants to play or not is another matter. And I think there are some parts that Apple might reasonably want to include the content arms, but this is pretty, if this weren't August, I don't think we'd be talking [01:03:00] about this. When I say that, lemme put it that way. I know you Alex always have wanted, I always

Alex Lindsay (01:03:04):
Point out, I've been talking about this. I know

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
You love this idea. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:03:09):
I just see that there's so much value for Apple to that ip, especially if it

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
Weren't so expensive. It's very expensive. That's a lot of

Alex Lindsay (01:03:17):
Money for many companies. Apple is the largest publicly traded company in the world, and so they're

Leo Laporte (01:03:24):
Not historically known for big acquisitions. The Beats acquisition was three or 4 billion. It [01:03:30] it was a fraction. They

Alex Lindsay (01:03:31):
Just peeled a couple dollars off the other edge.

jason Snell (01:03:33):
This is a big pill for them to swallow. It's like a horse pill, so maybe they won't do it. But I will say this, I am not confident in saying even giving the odds that Alex gave for a purchase like this, I have a hard time imagining that by the end of this decade, apple hasn't bought some giant intellectual property library, whether it's Disney or Paramount or something else. I have a hard time imagining that they won't use some of their cash to buy content because right now they've launched the service and it's very nice.

Leo Laporte (01:04:00):
[01:04:00] But isn't the timing bad? I mean, aren't streaming companies bleeding right now? No.

jason Snell (01:04:04):
Well, that's why the timing is good because they're all bleeding and

Leo Laporte (01:04:09):
Going to be Apple survive. But why should Apple build a streaming business?

jason Snell (01:04:13):
Well, they already have it. They've already built it. They're doing it because it's extra revenue and it's very, very profitable. The margins are great and it's part of the whole iPhone revenue flywheel because their investors don't care that they lose money on streaming because they make it up somewhere else. And because they're building a huge business, whereas the tiny Hollywood [01:04:30] companies, their investors are freaked out that they're spending so much money on streaming content. Good point. So huge advantage for Apple. I think they will pick some stuff up, but the question is what's it going to be? But I have a hard time, a lot of the truth of that premise of are they going to eat all of Hollywood? I don't know that, but a lot of the libraries here are going to get snapped up by companies with big wallets.

Alex Lindsay (01:04:51):
I don't know if they need anything other than Disney. I think for Apple, if they bought Disney, they'd be like, okay, that's what done. That's what we have to work with. And then everybody else has to because it will [01:05:00] be, I think a turning point and Hollywood of suddenly everybody kind of figuring things out about what happens next. Because again, the challenge really with the strike is that the strike continues. It keeps on applying leverage to this and it puts a lot of these studios in a really complicated position because they don't really know how to make money outside of releasing the theaters. And if they empty the theaters, the theaters are going to have to find something else to do with themselves and they'll either close or come into a new business and they'll be a lot less interested in movies in 2026.

Leo Laporte (01:05:29):
The story that's [01:05:30] of Strays is a cautionary tale. A movie which came out this weekend did very poorly because they say none of the stars could promote it, which is very, I think, yeah, that's telling there's trouble ahead. It seems to me that as you've already talked about both of you, Alex and Jason, the advantage big Tech has in content is overwhelming. And it strikes me that probably all the content will [01:06:00] be eventually owned by Amazon, Microsoft, apple, Google and Netflix. Netflix. You think Netflix is going to stick around?

jason Snell (01:06:08):
Yeah, I think they've built a wall for themselves that is not going to come down. I think that they're the winner of the Gold Rush and then everything else, all the other Gold Rush stuff happening in the entertainment industry, they all put themselves in a hole and now they've made themselves weak trying to be Netflix and it feels like maybe they're all just going to get bought up by Netflix as

Alex Lindsay (01:06:27):
Competitors. And the problem is Netflix [01:06:30] did what no one else had the guts to do, which is spend 18 billion a year on content. I mean, I talked to a producer a couple of years ago and he's like, well, there's 900 producers and we're 900 short and we're just jamming out incredible amounts of content at a fairly high quality. And so I think that that's the Netflix built that up and now they have a reservoir to sit on for a long because a lot of stuff, I just keep finding new things. There's a new series that was three years old or five years old or whatever, and we start watching it and so [01:07:00] they've got a lot to sit on for It's true, true.

Leo Laporte (01:07:02):
It's a good point. The strike is probably good for Netflix, isn't it?

Andy Ihnatko (01:07:06):
One of the reasons why I dropped Disney Pluses because I realized that it is still possible for me to navigate their entire library and check off the things I want to see, and there's just no sense of surprise or discovery. It doesn't hurt that they make a lot of stuff that I'm just not interested in, but at least with Netflix, if I'm going to keep one, if I'm going to keep one commercial streaming service as something that, Hey, there's a new show that people are talking [01:07:30] about, maybe it'll be on this or Hey, wow, if I keep digging into documentaries, maybe it's going to recommend something that's going to be interesting on a night when I don't know what I want to watch. That's the one that's going to keep, I think Alex is right there. They are the brand right now and everybody else right now is just the, and in addition to Netflix, maybe I'll also have x, a lot of people, I'm auditing all my streaming this month, and the only two that are safe from elimination that have immunity idols [01:08:00] are Netflix and YouTube premium only because so much of my content is through YouTube and I don't want to see any of their damn commercials.

(01:08:09):
Everything else though, Hulu is on the block.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:11):
I've had a couple of times where my credit card, I changed my credit card or whatever, I lost my credit card usually, and my YouTube TV thing goes back to it's the worst premium. Oh my God. And you're

Leo Laporte (01:08:22):
Like

Alex Lindsay (01:08:22):
For two or three days and you're like, oh my gosh, I got to get a new credit card in there because you're just like, it is. I don't even know how, I don't even know how you could watch [01:08:30] that. Is that Apocalyp so frustrating? It's horrible. But I will say the one that we didn't talk about that is the other thing that will probably continue to succeed is YouTube tv. I agree. That's going to be the way there. So when you say that, if there was one that I had to choose from, I'd pick YouTube tv, I'd be like YouTube premium YouTube tv because that is, it's just

Leo Laporte (01:08:47):
Your new cable company. That's your new cable company.

Alex Lindsay (01:08:50):
I mean those two are probably 80% of my viewing are just YouTube and YouTube TV at this point. And so it's,

jason Snell (01:08:58):
Well just [01:09:00] to throw some cold water on that, the stats are that even the replacements for cable, like YouTube TV are going down. Cord cutting is hitting them too. So in the long run, that's all just going to go away and there'll be other ways to do it, but as somebody who subscribed, I subscribe to fuo, but it's the same thing, right? It's a cable replacement for now, but all that stuff is getting drained out of the cable bundle or at least replicated elsewhere. And it's possible for some people that paying for something like a cable bundle will still be the best deal [01:09:30] depending on what you want to watch. But in the long run, it's all going to fade away into nothing. But YouTube itself is huge. And why you can't discount, when we talk about Apple and Amazon and that story that's at Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and somebody else is like, well, no, no, no. Also Google will be there with YouTube at the very least, and YouTube is very different, but it's still huge.

Alex Lindsay (01:09:53):
The level of specificness that you can be in YouTube always kind of amazes me. I'll just search for something. [01:10:00] I think I mentioned before I got really into the Battle of Corp for a little while. I was like, I was watching Henry the Fifth as you do, as you do, and I got into the Battle of Aging Corps and I watched four or five different 15 minute videos that were done about the battle so that I understood what was going on. I was watching Henry the Fifth and I was like, what really happened in this battle? And it was just amazing that five people had spent so much time building, one person had unreal engine people fighting. What the beauty of that showing [01:10:30] you the thing. And I love

Leo Laporte (01:10:31):
YouTube, paid nothing for that content,

Alex Lindsay (01:10:34):
Paid nothing for that content. It free. It was so good. Well, they pay advertising dollars against it. That person's getting, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:10:41):
They pay a fraction of develop that they make on it, they pay to it and they have to pay for the stream, I guess. But it's a lot cheaper than buying Bridgeton. Oh yeah. I

Alex Lindsay (01:10:52):
Mean, pretty amazing. YouTube tried to build their own content where they did all that didn't

Leo Laporte (01:10:57):
Really work. They were smart,

Alex Lindsay (01:10:59):
Didn't, [01:11:00] I don't think they really understood the cost per minute. The cost per minute that they wanted to pay was much lower than what everybody else pays and that they thought that they could make it incrementally better, but really there is YouTube, copper

Leo Laporte (01:11:11):
K Works though, right? Was that a it?

Alex Lindsay (01:11:13):
Yeah, but

jason Snell (01:11:14):
It was a real hidden, and then Netflix picked it up, right? It actually worked better on Netflix because it was the kind of content that Netflix makes, and we see that a lot. That's part of the power of Netflix and why they will survive is Netflix is so powerful that they'll put anything in front of you to a certain degree and you will [01:11:30] watch it. And the best example is Suits a TV show that ran on the U S A network like a decade ago and was available on Peacock for years and years and years, and it is the most watched TV show of this summer. Really? It's just reruns of an old show. And why is it that? Because N B C Universal licensed it non exclusively to Netflix? Netflix, Netflix put it in their promotional spots, boom. It's a huge hit because that's the power of Netflix

Alex Lindsay (01:11:56):
And every time I open up Netflix, I've not opened that show, but every time [01:12:00] there's a woman in a bra on Netflix, they know how to

Leo Laporte (01:12:02):
Promote.

jason Snell (01:12:03):
They know how,

Alex Lindsay (01:12:04):
So

Leo Laporte (01:12:05):
It

Alex Lindsay (01:12:05):
Should be called, and I'm like, oh, I God, birthday suits Move on.

Leo Laporte (01:12:08):
Exactly.

jason Snell (01:12:09):
Zing, take that old TV show that's been canceled for five years.

Leo Laporte (01:12:14):
That's Amy

jason Snell (01:12:15):
Markle show. She was on that show.

Leo Laporte (01:12:16):
Oh, that's right. Reason some people know about it. I've never seen it. I think if you're interested in this, you should be listening to Jason's podcast downstream with Julie Alexander because I'm guessing that you're, a lot of your insight is expressed in this particular

jason Snell (01:12:30):
[01:12:30] Show and she's so smart. We're doing a new episode Thursday. She's an expert at this, and it is a fascinating time to be covering streaming media. Kidding? It is bananas out there.

Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
This is really the topic of the day I just read, and this is completely peripheral, and then we're going to do a break, but I just read that Ronan Pharaoh's, wow, interesting profile of Elon Musk and the New Yorker, Elon Musk's shadow rule, how the US government came to rely on the tech billionaire and is now struggling to reign him in. And it [01:13:00] really reminds me of the sci-fi future where these big tech companies, and in some cases individuals are going to be the global power, not governments. And so in some ways we may look back on this 10, 20 years from now and say, this is Apple beginning to start to dominate in a way that,

Alex Lindsay (01:13:21):
I mean the thing is is that I don't know in that article, he's the one that had the satellites there and they act like he held everybody over, [01:13:30] but he told them for months that he needed someone else to pay for this. I didn't sign up for this. And he finally had to turn it off to get them to pay. And the D o D should have been paying for that from day one or used their own satellites. It was just crazy what our government did there was dumb. And so the fact that they were relying on a commercial entity to provide their services and their satellites for free, it was just a nutty thing for them to do. And I don't even know what thought process was [01:14:00] going on that we're going to allow a commercial entity, we're not going to pay for it. We're just going to hope that it stays there.

Leo Laporte (01:14:06):
Well, as Faroh points out, this is kind of what happened from Reagan on, which is a lot of government stuff was transferred to private industry. What's interesting now, the government's going, oh shoot, we don't have that capability, do we? So

jason Snell (01:14:21):
That story, the fascinating thing about that story is, and it's an example where you can't really count out Elon Musk, despite the fact that his Twitter stuff is a [01:14:30] complete dumpster fire is somebody, whether it was him or somebody at SpaceX, realized that SpaceX had essentially cornered the market on cheap access to space and they got so, so many much money out of it and business out of it from commercial satellite launches and from government stuff. And yet they built this reusable spacecraft and it's so cheap to launch it. And at some point they had that moment, which is, you know what? We can launch this thing so often for so cheap that we have enormous [01:15:00] unsold excess capacity. What could we do with it? And somebody said, why don't we just build a bunch of internet satellites and launched thousands of satellites and they did it.

(01:15:09):
They've done that with their cheap access to space that nobody else has, and they've essentially created an entire other huge and important company inside SpaceX, which is starlink, and it's all because right now as that article points out, they are the biggest launcher of mass to space this year is going to be SpaceX [01:15:30] followed by China and then the rest of the world with about 10%, and they're using it to build other businesses now so they're dominant in other areas. It's really, somebody did something very smart, but it's also extremely disturbing that this one guy has access to everything on the internet around

Andy Ihnatko (01:15:50):
The world, especially when you consider that starlink is responsible for tripling the number of objects in orbit. Right now up until before starlink, there's [01:16:00] something like fewer than 1800 objects total in orbit, and they alone have added about 5,000 and of course, but they're being good sports about it and saying, oh, well in the US government you shouldn't be allowing Boeing to create their own constellation for competing service because there's not enough room up there for us and any other competitor. It's only logical a bunch of

Alex Lindsay (01:16:19):
Jerks. Well, the thing is, we've been pushing this. The government has been saying we're going to keep on paying for really hard things and then we want everyone else to do the other stuff. We want to outsource [01:16:30] that, and that's been actually pretty cost effective for the government. So the thing is that NASA works on getting to Mars, building the infrastructure. Artemis is the first step to that process of building a station for that, but we don't want deal. NASA didn't want to deal with continually putting up, NASA used to have to deal with, it was a big distraction for them to continue to do the satellite work, and so they got rid of that. We've been using, we used M C I satellites for a long time, so these are commercial satellites [01:17:00] that we would use for communication. One of the problems they had is that if you suddenly had a blackout, if you were out of the United States and there was suddenly a blackout in some of your connectivity, you knew that special operations were somewhere they're doing something because they'd have priority access to those satellites. And so we would buy all this stuff up and it's been something that hasn't, definitely not anything even remotely new. I mean, this is 30, 40 years old of us doing this and the United States puts up, we put up our own satellites, but our satellites are hard, and then we want to keep them secret and [01:17:30] we don't want, but we've commoditized. The other things are commoditized. G P S is basically a government funded technology that was then commercialized, which the government still can use at a slightly higher precision than our phones.

Leo Laporte (01:17:45):
Yeah, let's take a little break. When we come back, we'll find something else to talk about. I'm sure that was a good one though. Thank you, Jason. Our show today brought to you by Discourse. If you go to our forums, [01:18:00] TWIT community, you're using Discourse. When I wanted to set up forums, it was Jono Bacon who convinced me that we really ought to have a place where people could go comment on shows and that kind of thing. I looked at a variety of stuff, but Jono said, don't even look at the other forum software. Look, this is the one Discourse Discourse hosts it for me. They make it easy. It is. The online home for the Twit community should be the online home for your community. I am fully convinced as a [01:18:30] longtime discourse user now for over a decade Discourse has made it their mission to make the internet a better place for online communities by harnessing the power of discussion they've got now, they just added real time chat ai, yes, disk AI discourse makes it easy to have meaningful conversations and collaborate with your community anytime, anywhere.

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Podcasting's all about community. I mean that was the lesson. It's about the community. You build around you and [01:19:00] we want to make sure our community can interact with us in a way that they love and that's why we use discourse. Would you like to create a community? Go to discourse.org/twit. You'll get one month free on all self-service plans. It is open source, trusted by some of the largest companies in the world. It powers more than 20,000 online communities, and I have to say, the hosting at Discourse saves me so much energy that I just let them do it because they [01:19:30] do such a good job. They keep it up to date, they keep it secure. All the new features get added in a prompt fashion. It just works beautifully. Whether you're just starting out or want to take your community to the next level, there's a plan for you.

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There's a basic plan if you want to have a small private invite only community, very affordable. The standard plan, if you want unlimited members and a public presence, we of course use the business plan for active customer support communities. Jonathan B whose developer advocacy lead at Twitch [01:20:00] says, yes, Twitch uses a discourse is the most amazing thing we've ever used. We've never experienced software so reliable ever. I have to say I never really thought about the reliability of discourse except that I've never had a problem. I haven't had to think about it. Our Twich community runs on discourse. This is one of many themes you can use. This is one I like a dark theme, but not only can you choose your theme when you use discourse on the twit.community, you could choose your theme [01:20:30] as you set up your discourse community, and there are a lot of themes that can make it look like whatever you want it to look like.

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A discourse is just fantastic. One of the biggest advantages to creating your own community with discourse. You own your own data. You always have access to all the conversation, history and discourse pledges. They will never sell your data to advertisers. Discourse gives you everything you need in one place with world-class hosted customer support. Make discourse the online [01:21:00] home for your community@discourse.org slash twit, DSE discourse like we're having a nice discourse here, discourse.org/twit. Get one month free on all self-serve plans. I'm such a fan, and if you want to try a discourse forum, go to TWIT community sign up. I think you'll see what a great place it is and it's all running on discourse discourse.org/twit. [01:21:30] I am a big, big fan as an administrator of our discourse instance, and by the way, I do it all by myself. Well, we have a volunteer, Paul, I'm sorry, I forgot you help a lot Paul Holder, but really it's easy to maintain and easy to run.

(01:21:44):
It doesn't take a huge amount of manpower, and I really credit them for that discourse.org/twit. Alright, let's see here. I have a few shorties. This is actually kind of cool. Apple is now, I [01:22:00] guess it's Tesla really is adding Apple shortcuts, iOS shortcuts to the Tesla app, which I think is great. I wish Ford would do this. I wish all manufacturers would do this. Tesla's iOS app with Apple shortcuts means you can write your own command, have Siri, lock your doors, start your car, whatever it is you want to do. You can access the vehicle controls and climb it from the Apple shortcuts app. That's version four point 24.0.

jason Snell (01:22:28):
Yeah, so for example, you could [01:22:30] use your Apple watcher, your phone to use a Siri command to tell it to open the FR or unlock the doors or set the thermostat or there's a lot of things you can do. And then you could also set up automations that are based on triggers. Anything you can do with shortcuts in order to you connect to this, you entered this location, do this thing to the car. It's all, it doesn't look like a reed state. It only writes state, so it'll let you do something like say if the temperature goes [01:23:00] above this inside the car, then turn on the ac. That's not capable in this. That's too bad. There are other apps that do stuff like this that are like scraping the Tesla a p i, but Tesla seems to have finally gotten the news that shortcuts exists after a long time and it'll be useful because there are things that the Tesla app won't let Tesla owners do that on. There's no watch app, for example, so having the ability to run a shortcut or give a Siri command using [01:23:30] a watch when you don't have your phone with you, that's a nice to have. It's a good modern app thing, so it's nice if

Leo Laporte (01:23:37):
They add it. Yeah, I'd love to have it go both ways. Or you could say How much gas is left in my Tesla? That kind of thing would be really,

jason Snell (01:23:43):
Yes. Well, very little. But yeah, the idea of do you need to charge it? And it says, well, no, you've got 80% or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:23:49):
Well, you can do that anyway in the Tesla app will tell you what you're charging. Yeah, you

jason Snell (01:23:53):
Can look at the app, but you can't do it as a shortcut or ask Siri or something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
Right. [01:24:00] Let's see, Mac, oh, this is a weird story, but I like eclectic light.co. They dig deep into the contents. Actually I should say he digs deep into the contents of the Mac oss. He noted that MAC OSS updates for Apple Silicon Max are larger than reported, and there's an easy way to tell. It turns out, I guess that the updates [01:24:30] include the intel content and then there's a second download for the silicon, apple silicon. So for instance, in the case of the 13.5 0.1 update, 500 megabytes for Intel reported as 700 megabytes for apple silicon, but there's a second component only downloaded by apple silicon, which is 1.1 gig. So really apple silicons was 1.8 gigs compared to 500 megs for Intel, [01:25:00] and you can tell that when you use the software update command. This is a command line command, but there's a switch. Include config data, which I played with and it tells you some interesting stuff. Don't know what it means, don't know why we care, but if you've noticed that you're getting these massive updates on your M one and M two max, what's going on? No comment. I guess it would be multiple code bases. Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Lindsay (01:25:30):
[01:25:30] I don't think I would notice if it, you turn on the update and then you go, I just

Leo Laporte (01:25:34):
Let it go.

Alex Lindsay (01:25:35):
You come back then. But there are people you don't really think about

Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
It who bandwidth is constrained or they pay for their bits and those people would probably be,

Alex Lindsay (01:25:44):
It takes a long time. I mean, I definitely am conscious to the fact that I usually start an update before I go to bed and then I sign whatever it needs to sign and then I go do my thing. Yeah,

jason Snell (01:25:54):
I wonder if there's a security issue here where there's a sealed volume or something that has to be downloaded in [01:26:00] its entirety, right? In order for some sort of security, it's signed and sealed. That is different in a way. They did some of that stuff on Intel, but I wonder if there's some aspect of what has happened with Apple Silicon that they have to do a more or a less efficient, let's say, kind of download for some security reason.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:18):
Part of the installation process involves in running something under rev VMs or something like that,

jason Snell (01:26:24):
Or there's a sign volume that they aren't going to update it piece by piece. They're just going to swap in the whole volume, [01:26:30] and so they have to download the whole volume. Even I would be, if some of it changes,

Leo Laporte (01:26:33):
I wouldn't be at all surprised the way A P F SS divides your volumes into these hidden volumes data and system.

Andy Ihnatko (01:26:42):
I mean, the reason why I have an update waiting for me on my MacBook, one of the reasons why I haven't installed it yet is that, oh, I'm visiting someone's house and the power could go out because there are storms coming and the thing that everybody fears [01:27:00] is what if there's something that interrupts a system update right in the middle of it? So they've been getting better and better at preventing that sort of thing from happening, but the idea of let's build the entire thing first, get that stable, and then as a last step we will write it to the volume.

jason Snell (01:27:14):
Actually, the curious, the most curious thing about this report is that you can set up a content caching server so that your one Mac on your house will download the update and then all the other Macs will just download it from that Mac. It's a eclectic feature for eclectic light co, but some people do it. [01:27:30] The second download for Apple silicon won't be cached. It always has to be download. It has to be downloaded from Apple, which again feels like a security thing to me that they're trying to prevent people from setting up a fake image somewhere and having that be downloaded instead. But it does mean that that great caching server you set up is not going to prevent that 1.1 gigabyte download on every computer in your house.

Leo Laporte (01:27:51):
I think you nailed

Andy Ihnatko (01:27:52):
It. It's right. I think we get confirmation by visiting a Macintosh forum and see how upset they are [01:28:00] about something that's happened in the past three or four days. Because anytime Apple's, a lot of the reasons why Apple makes these big changes to the way installations and updates happen is because someone has found a bug or a trick and they want that bug or trick to go away,

jason Snell (01:28:17):
Although this is apple silicon, right? So not Intel where the Macintosh people are, so maybe they don't care, but you're, that's a classic is the Macintosh people find a loophole and then Apple closes the loophole and then they find another loophole. [01:28:30] Inevitably

Andy Ihnatko (01:28:31):
Could be a security thing just in general too. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:28:33):
I think you're right. I think it's a signed blob and that would make perfect sense. By the way, Howard Oakey and Eclectic light.co is an amazing website because he's a painter too, and it's truly eclectic, but this is not it, but I will show you the site. There you go. He also has a series of four paintings by Eugene de Laqua and the story of that, which he published this week as well. So [01:29:00] it's a very eclectic max painting and more. Very interesting. Well,

Andy Ihnatko (01:29:06):
Of course, the payoff is that he has great content in late August, whereas we were talking

Leo Laporte (01:29:10):
About the thing is

Andy Ihnatko (01:29:13):
You can go out on the all season radials until maybe October, but in New England, if you don't switch to the snow tires, I mean you don't want to cheap out on tires. That's all I'm saying. That's where most of your breaking comes from in handling,

Leo Laporte (01:29:26):
And if you want to know, the

jason Snell (01:29:26):
Good news for eclectic is that just when the iPhone comes [01:29:30] out, that's actually the slow period for painting news. So it all works out. It's perfect

Leo Laporte (01:29:35):
Painting the rest of the year in September, it's iPhones, so let's see. I don't know who put this in, but it's really interesting from the m I T technology review, Claire Evans article, by the way, I love the M I T technology reviews. I pay for it on the front. The picture is from the 1987 reveal of the Saab 9,000 CD sedan, [01:30:00] 2,500 people in the audience, they were treated to an hour long. This is Saab an hour long operetta involving 26 foot tall projection screens, a massive course, the entire Stockholm Philharmonic and 50 performers to announce a car. This is the history of the corporate presentation for million dollar slideshow to Steve Jobs introduction of the iPhone.

Alex Lindsay (01:30:28):
I feel like you almost have to start [01:30:30] by looking at Mad Men and watching Carousel. That's what started this idea. It's not history, but the idea, I just find Carousel to be one of the coolest

Leo Laporte (01:30:46):
Pieces of tv. In 1948 with the end of prohibition, Seagram's had an 11 city traveling extravaganza designed to drum up sales for their booze, a two hour professionally acted stage play about the life [01:31:00] of a whiskey salesman, and in it, one of the very first presentation slideshows, hundreds of images of the distilling process set to music projected across five 40 by 15 foot screens. The overall effect is one of Magnificence said one odd witness, so that was, I think maybe one of the first multimedia business presentations, but there's many more in this [01:31:30] really fantastic piece. The

jason Snell (01:31:31):
Timed slideshow thing. Before there was video, they had these timed slideshows plus the stage stuff. If you watched what the last season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she appears in one of these bizarre acted out stage play, but it's an ad. It's so strange. But before we had computers and easily done video, one of the cheap ways to do this was you'd have five 10, I don't even know how many slide projectors, and they're all timed, so you can [01:32:00] do animations, but they're kind of like two frames a second, and you can have things everywhere and program

Leo Laporte (01:32:06):
With French tape.

jason Snell (01:32:07):
By the way, this also goes into the invention of PowerPoint and when that happened, and they actually link to A P D F, that's the initial sort of, I think computers could make slides on the computer and it's like Uhoh, here we go. That's the end of the world for the rest of the next few decades, but businesses always wanting impart information in the technology. They've [01:32:30] used technology aggressively in order to do that, and there was a golden age of corporate audio video synced slideshows. I put a link in there to the apple. There's an Apple video from 1984 that's one of those that you can see that it's a captured, it's essentially captured slideshow, and that was the way you did corporate marketing back then, but until PowerPoint was

Leo Laporte (01:32:54):
Embedded, this will also be of interest to people because it is probably the first time you've ever heard it, the official [01:33:00] Apple corporate song leading

jason Snell (01:33:04):
The, well, I mean for this spot, they did a flash dance parody, is essentially what happened. The amazing thing about the YouTube page, by the way, is that the bottom of the YouTube page, there's a comment that says, oh yeah, my friend recorded that song. Oh, geez. I was the engineer for it. It's unbelievable. But you can see

Leo Laporte (01:33:21):
This is a slideshow. It's not a film.

jason Snell (01:33:23):
It's stacked up slides. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:33:29):
I mean, [01:33:30] we thought Samsung was appalling for their corporate presentations. They just were a little out of date. This is the way it was for years. First PowerPoint was, this was eight years after this.

Andy Ihnatko (01:33:42):
This reminds me of the good old days when Apple would ship out developer CDs because there was no internet back then and they had nowhere enough content to fill out this disc. So one month, I think it was on the one called Phil and Dave's excellent cd, where it's like, oh, by the way, here is we are Apple. Here are a whole bunch of other corporate [01:34:00] songs that we found because we have to fill this. We have room on the CD, and you may as well be embarrassed along with this, and

Leo Laporte (01:34:06):
We had TV commercials in 1984. Why is it that they had to do slideshow? I mean,

jason Snell (01:34:12):
This is going to be projected in a big room and it's super wide screen,

Leo Laporte (01:34:18):
So they didn't have the ability to do, they did that well tape back then. I mean, standard dev didn't translate. You wouldn't want to blow it up to a big screen. I mean, they did mean, we did

jason Snell (01:34:28):
See that this is all 35 millimeter film, [01:34:30] so it's going to be beautiful, huge on a wall in a convention

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:33):
Center also. This is where the Alexes of the day knew how to do this on slide, so therefore, that's the solutions that they would deliver for you.

Leo Laporte (01:34:41):
Right?

Andy Ihnatko (01:34:42):
Can't believe, we haven't talked about bathtubs over Broadway yet is beautiful documentary all about these corporate for the annual sales conference for GM or for Dow Chemical or something. They had so much money to put into this that they would actually pay some of the best [01:35:00] Broadway composers working, hire huge crews to put together the stage production, huge cast. Many of them are who people are going to be huge stars in their own, like Martin Short and whatever years later. And they wrote a complete musical about bathroom fittings. And so this guy who was a producer on the Letterman show, he came across his first corporate Broadway album. He wanted props for [01:35:30] a Dave's record collection segment, but he started getting more and more into it and finding more and more of these because they would say, oh, by the way, and here's a mento of that wonderful week we spent together in Fort Lauderdale. Here's a cast album of this presentation, and they're incredible. It's a great documentary. If you

Leo Laporte (01:35:47):
Want to see it, it's on Netflix, guess what? It's on Netflix.

Andy Ihnatko (01:35:50):
There you go. Of course it is. Bathtubs

Leo Laporte (01:35:52):
Over Broadway. Cheetah Rivera was in it. Wow, that's crazy. Oh, [01:36:00] I know what I'm watching tonight.

Andy Ihnatko (01:36:02):
They got a lot of stars. Again, like Martin Short and other people who are recognizable stars who were saying that their tides were like, if you booked one of these corporate musicals you could eat for the rest of the year, this is going to let you do auditions. This is why everybody wanted to get hired by one of these productions. Wow. I

Alex Lindsay (01:36:21):
Mean, it still happens. I mean, whether it's bands or other people, a lot of these corporate events, especially ones that are a little bit more private, [01:36:30] they bring a lot. And the thing is, they do, the unfortunate thing is you watch, they hire people who are really well known in Hollywood, or they're known as the people who worked on this or the people who worked on that. And then they get them in, and those people look at them as a big cash cow to experiment with things that they've never done before. So they're like, let's do this because it's the thing that's in the back of their head that they've always wanted to do that no Hollywood producer would ever pay for, and they get the corporations to pay for that. And that's still, to this day, is still a hole that some corporations [01:37:00] fall into is getting Hollywood people to do their shows.

(01:37:04):
They usually spend an enormous amount of money for something that probably doesn't have any R O I. And so I think that that's always the challenge there, but it still happens. I mean, you see a level bands, a level actors showing up for some of these things, and so I don't know if it really helps them that much, but I think it's been really interesting to watch. Remember we had those with school, remember when we grew up, I don't know, when I grew up, we would all be [01:37:30] brought into the auditorium and then they'd have these little slideshows about drugs and about other things. Your friend

Leo Laporte (01:37:34):
Zinc.

Alex Lindsay (01:37:35):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so all of those things were built up, and I think the explosion as a talks there, the best thing that ever happened was that suddenly everyone was able to communicate. The worst thing that ever happened was that everyone was able to communicate, and so we went from teams figuring out how to properly communicate to lists in bullet points, which was just the most evil thing ever.

Leo Laporte (01:37:59):
Most of these presentations [01:38:00] were not for consumers in the early days. They were for your Salesforce or potential corporate customers. They really weren't named at consumers, and it wasn't until maybe even Apple where they would start doing these and ostensibly for the press and developers, but they knew that really this was a big event for consumers. I think Apple put these on the map, right?

Alex Lindsay (01:38:24):
Well, apple, but Apple was very careful for a long time to not put them up immediately so you couldn't stream them live. [01:38:30] In fact, if you did, sometimes they wouldn't invite you back. I

Leo Laporte (01:38:32):
Know, I heard that. That's terrible.

jason Snell (01:38:35):
I, I'll believe that's true. It seems like they've never been an urban legend to me.

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
I think it's an urban legend, but I still am not invited to Apple. I remember looking

Alex Lindsay (01:38:43):
At Leo for some reason, Leo's laptop. Leo's laptop was turned around. I just remember Steve looking at Leo and there was this stink eye. What is happening over

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
There? Renee, Richie claims and he knows why. He said, sometime when I'm not on the air, I will tell you I got the story from inside Apple and he's never told me, so [01:39:00] I guess it could be true, but if that's the case, they've got a long memory. That was a long time ago, I

Alex Lindsay (01:39:07):
Think. Well, the problem is that Apple now, at the beginning, what I had heard was that they didn't want to make it available so that the press all had a reason to go out and report it because they all had, if you streamed it, then it was already all out there, so the press suddenly nobody has it out there. Everybody has a chance to do something with it, and so it engaged them and they wanted to make sure the press showed up. Now, there's no problem with that. The [01:39:30] press there, the press is a problem. It's

Leo Laporte (01:39:33):
Around the press we don't

Alex Lindsay (01:39:34):
Need, but now everyone wants to go to Steve Jobs theater and everybody wants to, there's a limited number of seats, and so now it's like who's been there for the longest and everything else, and they still have to have half of 'em available for everybody.

jason Snell (01:39:46):
The clap, the most bizarre one that I ever got walking into an event was I was told no live blogging, because we had done some live blogging. They're like, no live blogging for this. So what we did is I had a text message window [01:40:00] back to the office to I think Peter Cohen who wrote for us at that time, and I literally would just text him what was happening on stage, and then he would then write, he had a news story that he would update as things were announced, but it was written like a news story and not like a live blog. And we were like, what? It's not a live blog. We are covering the news as it happens. Then they'd announced a new product. He'd do a news story saying, apple had also announced this product today, and I'd send him quotes and I was reporting [01:40:30] from the scene, but it wasn't live blogging, and honestly, that was the last time they ever asked anything like that. They gave up At

Leo Laporte (01:40:35):
That point. It was so silly. I mean, I'm sitting there, this was at the iPad event, and there's a row of cameras behind me from C N B C and N B C and c B S just a row of cameras shooting the damn thing, and I just felt disenfranchised.

Alex Lindsay (01:40:49):
But they weren't streaming it. Streaming it. They weren't streaming it, right? Yeah, that was the thing. It

Leo Laporte (01:40:54):
Was dopey, but hey, that's fine. I did my job and that wasn't important. That [01:41:00] was the iPad announcement, which was a pretty darn important

jason Snell (01:41:03):
Announcement. I would make the argument that you were performing a journalistic service, which is trying to break news, and the answer to Apple is, look, if you don't want this to happen, this is what happened with Steve Jobs telling everybody to turn off their MiFis. Remember that It's the same thing, which is here's the solution. Apple provide wifi in the room for the reporters and then we won't use those anymore and stream the thing live and you won't have Leo holding up his laptop. Just do it. Why are you withholding [01:41:30] this stuff? You can't pretend that this is a magic bubble and nothing can reach outside it. We're not going to do

Leo Laporte (01:41:36):
That. Apple loves to do that. They love that they

jason Snell (01:41:38):
Have a code, and I will tell you, I the event they held after Steve told everybody to turn off their MiFis, by the way, for the record, I sat on mine. I did not turn it off, and I kept doing my job. You know what, Steve? I'm doing my job here. I don't care what you are asking. I'm not interested in what you have to say,

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):
Right? We're not their employees,

jason Snell (01:41:56):
But the next

Leo Laporte (01:41:58):
Events we're serving the public

jason Snell (01:41:59):
And [01:42:00] all events thereafter. Immaculate wifi. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:42:04):
So you can be So thanks Jason Snell for Immaculate wifi and for cancer rating

jason Snell (01:42:10):
And for live video thanks to Leo,

Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
The immaculate wifi resection, the fact stream live that is by the rewrite of this anecdote. I love it. I love it. Thank me for that. Actually, it took him many years later to fix that. I'm sorry, but now it's stating your Wikipedia page as we speak,

Alex Lindsay (01:42:28):
And now it's probably [01:42:30] the biggest corporate event. Absolutely. What happens now

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
Towards my point, originally point was it shifted from being for salesman or corporate clients to being aimed at consumers as an announcement, and that I think you can credit Steve Jobs for that. That really was a big shift, and everybody has ever since emulated that.

Alex Lindsay (01:42:50):
I think the problem is everyone's trying to emulate Steve and there's not very many people who are as good as Steve was at it. He did a lot of work, and I think that most executives just don't put the work [01:43:00] into it that he did to make it, plus they

Leo Laporte (01:43:04):
Had better things to announce, let's face it, than most other companies. Microsoft just announced that they're going to do their surface event the day before Apple ships. Its new iPhone on the 21st, and it will be their Steve Jobs clone Panos Pane, who is, in my opinion, incredibly annoying because he's trying so hard to [01:43:30] make this the, and the

Alex Lindsay (01:43:32):
Problem is is that he's going to do that, and then Apple's going to release a movie that looks way better than anything they can,

Leo Laporte (01:43:37):
No, they'll do a movie they've been doing, Microsoft has

Alex Lindsay (01:43:39):
Been they Microsoft doing

Leo Laporte (01:43:40):
Movies live shows. Yeah,

Alex Lindsay (01:43:42):
And I mean, this is the thing that's really changing is that we went from slides to PowerPoint to keynote to, I mean, for many years for nearly every company out there, people would hand us a PowerPoint and we go, or I Google slides or whatever, and we'd go, Hey, we're going to prep this for broadcast, which meant that we were going to convert it to Keynote, [01:44:00] and it was everybody in the event world would just convert everything to Keynote because it would play out of, it would play out better. But that playback now is now turned into, and I think Covid finally pushed through What a lot of us thought is going to happen eventually is just play a movie. Let's just make it clean and fast and we can then answer questions at the end, and I think that the era of the stage performance has probably got less [01:44:30] than five years. I would say conservatively. I would say probably less than two or three. You probably won't see very many stage announcements anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:44:38):
If you're interested, and I guess we'll have to write a sequel to this article, m i t technology review, Claire l Evans. Next slide please. A brief history of the corporate presentation. It's really great stuff. Thank you for marking that. I missed it, and it really is. That's

jason Snell (01:44:54):
My old Matt Hoan is the editor there from Macworld days back in the day and went [01:45:00] to Buzzfeed and now he's the editor at M I T Technology Review. They did great stuff. This is a great article.

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
It is become more of a consumer technology publication. I really love M I T Technology review Now. Well credit to Matt. To

jason Snell (01:45:14):
Matt,

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
Yeah, Matt with one T, right?

jason Snell (01:45:16):
One T. That's right.

Leo Laporte (01:45:18):
Finally Sad News and I know you will all have something to say about it. The second founder of Adobe now has passed John Warnock at the age [01:45:30] of 82. His co-founder Charles Gke, passed away in I think 2021 at the age of 81. Warnock was 82, and whatever you think of Adobe today, and I know a lot of it's complimentary, Adobe, when he started, it was a revolution. I think you agree, Alex. Yes,

Alex Lindsay (01:45:57):
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. And they still are. [01:46:00] I think that Adobe, I mean a lot of us can talk about whether we think the business model is good for us or not about how the subscription model, but I mean what they're in three D, what they're doing in generative AI and then still the Photoshop Premier After Effects and the many other products that they have. I mean, they still are an engine within the industry and they've really been able to continue to build that and continue to stay in front of things and not be afraid to, they bought, of course, our friend Emory's company to keep going. Nice job

Leo Laporte (01:46:29):
Acquisition. [01:46:30] Nice

Alex Lindsay (01:46:30):
Job. Well done. Yeah, well done.

Leo Laporte (01:46:31):
Photoshop was an acquisition too, right? That was the brothers,

Alex Lindsay (01:46:35):
Here's the funny thing, brothers, the Knoll Brothers, they're bouncing around with this little app showing people, this is what we put together. John could see what was necessary and Tom had some of the core stuff there and the two of them together built this incredible little app that really solved a real problem that had the, and what John needed at I L M, [01:47:00] and they're going around showing it. My understanding is they went to Aldis, they went to other people saying, Hey, we've got this little app. And people couldn't understand it and Adobe snapped it right up. There was not any, they understood, Warnock, understood what he was looking at, and that made the company, I mean, for a while, I mean that was really mean. They had other things, but that was, when you think about the nineties and Photoshop just coming out of nowhere and suddenly it's shipping with every scanner. [01:47:30] It's all these other things, and it really set you up to buy Illustrator, to use PageMaker to use other things. And it was just such incredible gateway drug for the entire company. And

Leo Laporte (01:47:44):
Warnock himself was a computer scientist and a mathematician.

jason Snell (01:47:48):
I think he wrote Illustrator, I think he's why we know about Bezier Curves.

Leo Laporte (01:47:54):
He and GKE created Postscript Postscript, which led to PDF D. You wouldn't have laser writers, [01:48:00] you wouldn't have a lot of technology. The

jason Snell (01:48:02):
Entire Mac windowing infrastructure is based on display, postscript, and of course every document in existence is now A P D F, which is the format created out of Postscript. It's the portable document format right out of Postscript by Adobe. So yeah, people can roll their eyes at some of the marketing stuff that Adobe does now and all of that, but so foundational to and remember Postscript in the laser writer, one of the reasons Apple [01:48:30] on the Mac got so big in the publishing industry in the eighties was because of their partnership with Adobe and putting Postscript in the laser writer. And then Postscript sort of went everywhere and that you got the wizzywig concept of publishing where you could see it on screen exactly as it was going to be when it came out of the high quality printer, all of that stuff. That was an Apple, Adobe partnership that led to all of that. And it is rooted in publish. In

Andy Ihnatko (01:48:56):
Fact, the fact that the laser writer was once the most powerful computer that [01:49:00] Apple made, because Steve Jobs immediately saw what Postscript could be. And so we need this printer to be able to run Postscript, and it was just such a tactile thing. Yeah, postscript, I'm one of a lot of people who bought the Red book and the Blue book because they wanted to learn how to code postscript because illustrated things didn't exist yet, but it's like our curve to our line to, oh my God, look at this circle. Everybody. Look at this circle. I just made like, oh my,

Leo Laporte (01:49:30):
[01:49:30] It's, it was a little like fourth. I'm trying to remember. I wrote a little postscript.

Andy Ihnatko (01:49:35):
It was a long time ago. Yeah, the code looked like you would not figure out it nasty anything that was doing nasty. It was like graphics turned into math, turned into asci.

Leo Laporte (01:49:47):
Well, John Warnock was a mathematician. He had a bachelor's in mathematics and philosophy, had a PhD in electrical engineering, all from the University of Utah. His master's thesis was his 1964 [01:50:00] proof of Ethereum solving the Jacobson Radical for Roe finite matrices. His doctoral thesis was the Warnock algorithm for hidden surface determination and computer graphics. And if that sounds obstru, believe me, you wouldn't have a video game today without hidden surface determination. You couldn't calculate all of those surfaces.

Alex Lindsay (01:50:24):
If you really think about the perfection of, because I think that Photoshop really did spark something for Adobe [01:50:30] is that they had, he had, because of his knowledge of Postscript and because of their knowledge of lines, they had kind of had that figured out. If someone had come to them and said, Hey, we've got a drawing program, they can do whatever. They're like, we have that right? Illustrator was the illustrator, 88 I think was the one that I had there, and they had figured that part out. And Photoshop what was complimentary to that and what the Knoll brothers were joining was exactly the compliment to what Illustrator did. And Aldis who I think, if I remember correctly, passed on Photoshop, [01:51:00] ended up getting bought by Adobe.

Leo Laporte (01:51:04):
They made PageMaker. The hidden surface algorithm was demonstrated in the cover story and the June, 1970 issue of Scientific American, that was computer displays, and it was what allowed you to do solid objects, three D objects instead of those line, those vector tracing objects. So Warnock invented that,

Alex Lindsay (01:51:30):
[01:51:30] Pretty interesting, but I think one of the biggest things is that Adobe has been able to stay relevant. Companies that go that far back really have a hard time. That's true. There's a long, that is a good point, set of wreckage of companies and their software, and I think that they keep surprising. You look at what they're doing with generative AI right now. When they started it, they started Firefly. I was like, oh, this isn't going to work. This isn't nearly as good as Mid Journey. And now they're really solving some pretty hard problems with it in a way that can [01:52:00] be used in commercial work. And so I think that it's not just that he, and that comes always from the, I don't think it always comes from the founders, but oftentimes there's a general culture that keeps moving it forward. So

Leo Laporte (01:52:12):
Warnock worked at Evans in Sutherland in the mid seventies. That's where the roots of Postscript were planted. He worked with GKE at Park, Xerox Park worked there in 1978. This is a telling line, unable to convince Xerox management [01:52:30] of the approach to commercialize the enterprise graphics language for controlling printing. He together with, and Putman left Xerox to start Adobe in 1982. Once again, well done Xerox at their new company that developed from scratch, a similar technology Postscript, and brought it to market for Apple's laser writer in 1985.

Alex Lindsay (01:52:50):
And that's what happens to big companies that Adobe's has been able to not have happen very much to them is that big companies, they're big. They can't understand how that's ever going to become a big market. [01:53:00] They don't want to spend extra resources on it, and they just missed the boat.

Leo Laporte (01:53:04):
His wife, Marva was a graphics designer. He watched her painstakingly using, remember those curve rulers to make Beier curves painstakingly. He said, Hmm, I think we could do better. They invented Adobe Illustrator to automate the manual tasked Marva had to do that was released in 1987. In 91, he outlined a system called Camelot that [01:53:30] evolved into the portable document format, P D F. The goal was to effectively capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of those documents anywhere and view and print those documents on any machine. I think he had the right idea. There is an Adobe typeface named after him. Warnock. I did not know that. I will start using Warnock immediately. He had seven patents, refreshing, really [01:54:00] amazing person and a great pioneer of the industry. And I like to highlight these guys because younger generations often forget where this all came from. And this is a person who did pretty amazing things,

Andy Ihnatko (01:54:16):
Particularly when in an era where you find out, well, wow, who's the CEO of this company and what's their history? And you find out, well, they were an investment banker and that's money. They leverage partial. Exactly. [01:54:30] They run this company because they bought this or they invested early, and now they, because they've been associated with this company for so long, they imagined themselves to have an intimate knowledge of exactly all about this technology. And then there are the companies like Adobe where, oh, well, you know what? The idea of pixels, he invented it. As a matter of fact, he's not. Oh, okay. So he actually helped build all this. Again, all the talk is about Photoshop, but [01:55:00] again, the idea of something as abstract as Postscript and how important that was going to be just here is a common typesetting computing language that you can install on a small office printer like the laser writer, or it could be installed on a huge pre-press systems.

(01:55:17):
And no matter what app you're using at whatever level, if it's based on postscript, and this is what you're seeing as you're laying this out and designing it, by the time you spend $200,000 to have all these copies of this book, [01:55:30] these illustrations run off the press, it will look exactly like what you had on the screen of your $3,000 computer that was revolutionary and the power in a pre-internet age of the ability to be creating newsletters, the ability to be able to create and edit photos on your own without having to have contact with an infrastructure that will essentially in a way prove or disapprove whether they want to be involved with you and this thing you want to publish or not to say nothing of the fact that [01:56:00] it's going to take you four years of technical training before you'll even have the slightest idea of how to prepare this photo for press. That's the sort of technology that I love, where it creates opportunities and solves problems for regular people, not just for people who have access to a printing press.

Leo Laporte (01:56:17):
Rest in peace. John Warnock passed away at the age of 82. He was on the board of directors at Adobe till the end, so he can be credited with the success of Adobe. We're going to take a little break when we come back. [01:56:30] Your picks of the week, gentlemen, if you will prepare those. My pick this week is Join Club twit. It is really becoming more and more important to us as an ongoing business because frankly, advertising which really started us in the beginning has kind of started to fail us, I'm afraid. And the good news is you can support us for $7 a month and we have made sure that there are real [01:57:00] benefits to that. Of course, club Twits, number one, benefit ad free versions of all the shows. You don't need to hear ads because you're supporting us ad free and tracker free.

(01:57:12):
You also get the club TWI discord, which is where some really interesting stuff lives. We have a new event we just announced. Jason Howell is going to sit down with Dan Patterson, who has been a regular for years on twit. Dan is longtime C B SS news reporter. He has done some amazing [01:57:30] things including trained dissidents in some very dangerous countries and how to use technology to protect themselves. That's today five 30 Pacific. On our live stage in the club, TWIT Discord. We've got a photo walk coming up with Ant on August 26th. Stacey's book Club, August 31st, Daniel Suarez and Hugh Howie and a fireside chat to the great Sci-Fi authors, Lou Mariska from twt. So we do these events to, oh, look, Renee Ritchie's going to do a fireside chat. [01:58:00] That's exciting. That'll be November 16th. And there's also something called the Old Farts fireside chat, which sounds as explosive. Jeff Jarvis, docs Surs and I. We'll talk about the old age. That's all. Go down. Zoom in on Renee, Richie,

Andy Ihnatko (01:58:21):
Go back down.

Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Oh, you want to zoom in on these guys? Yeah. Thanks to AI for making us even older than we are.

(01:58:30):
[01:58:30] That's not all. There are shows in the club that don't get published anywhere, but the Club Scott Wilkinson's Home Geeks, we were able to bring that back thanks to the support of club members this week in space, launched in the club, if you will, and is now in public. We also have the Untitled Linux Show, hands on McIntosh with Micah Sargent hands on windows with Paul Ott, the Gizz fizz with Dickie Bartolo and more and all of that because of the support of [01:59:00] people like you Club twit members, seven bucks a month, look what you get. I think it's a good deal and it's a great community. Join us in the Discord. We'll see you there. If you want to join, go to twit tv slash club twit TWIT tv slash club twit pick of the week. Oh, wait a minute, let me pause. Pick of the week time. That's for our editors. Jason Snell, [01:59:30] what do you have for us today?

jason Snell (01:59:31):
Well, I love that Alex mentioned how he likes YouTube and that how there's content on YouTube that you don't see anywhere else. And I actually have been following a series on YouTube that I wouldn't see anywhere else. And I love it. I am not a car guy at all, but I saw a link to this and it's just fascinating. There's a car, a YouTuber named Tavaris, and he found a $2 million McLaren P one for sale on the internet. It had [02:00:00] been completely submerged in floodwaters during the hurricane that hit Florida. And so it was totaled essentially, but it's still a McLaren P one that lists for 2 million. It had been driven about 300 miles, and the first video in this series starts with him hovering his cursor over the buy button at $575,000. Such a deal. Yikes. And it's an ongoing series. There are like eight parts already [02:00:30] where this guy, and again, he's a car YouTuber, he has access to lots of help and sponsors who can help and all that, but still it is enthralling to watch this supercar be taken apart as the water and the sand, their sand everywhere, so much sand and the oil.

(02:00:52):
And they're like, oh, look, it's oil. Maybe the water. Nope, nope. There's the water. Just [02:01:00] invades every part of this. And throughout you've also got this extra little bit, which is our friend, the YouTuber going to really regret spending $575,000 on a submerged non-functional car. And I love it because if you are a car person, you can take that deep dive and be really super into the details of the McLaren. I am not a car person, but I love the spectacle of it. I love the fact that there are these [02:01:30] speeded up sections where they're trying to clean this thing that's just sort of tranquil and beautiful as they try to get all the sand out of it. And the real question is, will it ever run to be determined? Although I suspect it will. He may have to just buy a new engine. He may replace literally, it may become the P one ofthe here before he's done.

(02:01:53):
But I think Ari's just going to, my real question is I want to see the bill at the end of all the stuff that he spent [02:02:00] and also how many views these videos got and how much money he made. But I'm going to guess that he's going to end up with a pretty cool car that will have been worth it, and then he'll probably sell that car and make a profit on that, and he will have created hours of content for his YouTube channel. So anyway, if you're at all interested in this spectacle of the hurricane destroyed car and trying to bring it back to life and how the sand, I just can't emphasize this enough, how the sand gets everywhere. It is a lot of fun. The Tavish flooded McLaren P [02:02:30] one series on

Leo Laporte (02:02:31):
YouTube. He's done eight parts

Andy Ihnatko (02:02:32):
So far,

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
2.65 million subscribers, and the first video had 4 million views. I'm sure he will get his money back, but that's pretty great. Good for you VARs.

jason Snell (02:02:43):
Andy, you've seen this too.

Andy Ihnatko (02:02:45):
And I'm like the first three or four episodes, I've been subscribing to his channel for a while. He does a lot of, and he's not one of these car channels where he is like, Hey, we got this lawnmower engine. We thought, Hey, what if we put it inside a Rolls-Royce? Woo. [02:03:00] It's like, no, he has a lot of resources and he tries to take a wrecked car, wrecked supercar and either put it back the way it was or Well, look, we can't get this engine, so let's see if we can upgrade it because it's been 12 years since the thing was released and the first three or four episodes, I'm like, it's like Jason, we probably have the same thing. It's like we're expecting, oh, it was trashed in a hurricane, so I bet that the house collapsed and it got really, really, the interior's all wet. It's like, no, there's video, there's home security video [02:03:30] of it floating out, floating to the sea floating, and the sand is part of the mixture of the water that's flooding it. And so it's like eight weeks in and it's like, okay, so here is the inside of the inside of the inside of the inside, something we took off at the episode one, and there's sand in there too, and there's

jason Snell (02:03:53):
Sand pouring pouring out of that. I mean, it's kind of like a horror movie at times where it's just like the sand [02:04:00] is coming, it's just where and when and what is the context

Andy Ihnatko (02:04:03):
For the

Leo Laporte (02:04:04):
Horror? I think the newest one is I'm in Trouble. I think the last one is

jason Snell (02:04:08):
I love that he's a good YouTuber. He amps up the drama and his thumbnails and all of that, but it is just what a spectacle, even as somebody who doesn't really care that much about cars. It's a great use of YouTube. And I did this, I told my wife about this, and she's like half a million dollars on a broken car. And I'm like, yeah, but it's YouTube, right? He's seeing all the content and he knows how many ads [02:04:30] and how he's got his sponsors and he will make a meal out of this. And boy has he ever, but so fun to watch in so much

Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
Sand. Very impressive. And now I kind of buy this that I don't need YouTube tv. I don't need H B O. I don't need my cable subscription. I should just be watching YouTube all the time because one of the things, Lisa, and I'll sit down of an evening after dinner, we'll watch a show, but all of this stuff is shorter than a show. I mean [02:05:00] you to make a meal out of it, can you make a meal? Could Lisa and I sit down and say, oh yeah, let's watch part eight of rebuilding the flooded McLaren like that. Like a TV show maybe? Yeah, yeah, a playlist. Can you just watch a playlist and just stop whenever you're ready, stop goes. And then you see how ball balls are made and you've got something else to watch. Yeah, no, you're right. I think this is the future of broadcast. Yeah. Andy and KO pick, by the way, [02:05:30] reiterate this because people are now going, what is that again? T A V A R I S H. So it's youtube.com at T A V A R I S H, and he's got a whole playlist of rebuilding the flooded $2 million McLaren P one. There it is. It's floating. Yeah. The P one of thesis.

Andy Ihnatko (02:05:50):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:05:51):
That is a just chef's kiss to you. Jason S. Snow, Andy Akko, you're big of the week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:05:59):
When I saw Jason [02:06:00] Spic, I had to add a second to mine because my favorite channel on YouTube is probably a couple of mechanics and engineers called Bad Obsession Motorsports. And for 10 years, they have been doing this project where they're taking a vintage 1982 Mini Cooper and say, well, I also have this performance race equipped four wheel drive Turbocharged sports car. I want to put the four wheel drive running gear and the engine [02:06:30] from that into this 1982. And again, it's not a, Hey, woo, we're going to do it with those other channels. It's like, okay, you have no intention of actually building this properly. You just want to get a video out of it and you've got it scheduled for the next eight months. You'll finish it by whatever ways that, no, this has been 10 years because these are two mechanics that their goal is to build is to basically you're watching them build an entire car from the ground up because that's just the starter things.

(02:06:57):
Obviously nothing's going to fit inside all the car, [02:07:00] starting with all the body panels are rusted out, so they have to replace all the body panels then because they don't want to make it. They want it to look like it's absolutely stocked from the outside, so they're not going to lengthen it. They're not going to add a bump in the hood or anything like that. It's like, okay, well, we decided we're going to have to take off everything on the engine. That doesn't absolutely have to be where it is. Okay, now we've got this in the engine compartment, but now it's half an engine. So now it's like, okay, now we have to go to the wrecking yard because we need to find a power steering pump that's [02:07:30] going to fit in the area that we have ready for it. And also things like, well, how do we get the cooling working in this?

(02:07:37):
And well, the original didn't have side impact protection, didn't have power windows, didn't have good air conditioning as the really, really funny side. And the heating system had two settings on, or excuse me, had two settings off and might as well be, and they're super, super funny. You only see an episode like every three or four months when there's something interesting to share, and it's a really [02:08:00] slickly produced show. Again, it's not. And so we ordered a custom bracket from our friends over at blah, blah, blah. So no, three quarters of this job is, and we did find a power steering pump, but now why we have to design and build a bracket to install it, because of course there's no bracket for it. So it's just hugely entertaining. They're up to episode number 38. They're finally up to the point where just like the last episode, they actually started it up for the first time.

(02:08:25):
Now it's all put together, it's all put together, it's painted, [02:08:30] nearly done. But at this point, their troubles are probably just starting because at this point, all they have is a one-to-one scale model of a car. Now they have to not only get the engine running, but also drive it and figure out where they screwed up and things like that. So highest recommendation, I support them on Patreon. Like I don't care that I'm giving you money per month, even though I'm only getting maybe two videos a year. I like the cut of your J Young men. I will look forward to your future operations with considerable interest. That's bad obsession motor sports [02:09:00] on just look for Project Binky.

(02:09:04):
They have other content too. It's pretty good. Fortunately the other pick is really, really simple. I was looking forward to, I'm now at the point where I have a Plex server and I have all my video library are like videos that I've ripped from Blu-ray and D V D myself, stuff I've downloaded from the internet archive, stuff like that. Now I'm at the point of obsession where it's like, ah, wow, there's no subtitle. This Ed Wood movie [02:09:30] doesn't have a subtitle file incorporated into it. Or I downloaded this TV movie from 1974 and it's good, but whoever put it on the internet archive decided to stuff the title box and the metadata with, Hey, get more videos from wacky l public domain videos.com. And every time you launch it, it starts by telling you the title. So this is a free app called Subler. It's a mucker and an editor that will just simply show you all the metadata [02:10:00] and all the meta files that are associated with this video file and let you edit them.

(02:10:04):
So I can go in and change all those titles to what the title should be. So I don't see this little weird ad pop up. I can embed, even if it has a subtitle file, I can download a better subtitle file from a different source, add that in, I can put in the poster art so it's embedded into the actual thing. And when it's all done, it just simply writes it out, it mucks it into a brand new file. It doesn't recompile or tuff it or anything like that, [02:10:30] and it's free and it's still being updated. And it's really simple. It was exactly what I was hoping to find. It is the sort of thing where you find a problem, you're like, I bet there's a really, really simple tool that's making this a lot easier than I'm doing it right now. And there is, it's called Subler

Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
Subler, it's on Bitbucket, but I think if you search for Subler, I think that's sufficient

Andy Ihnatko (02:10:51):
Subler.org, right? I'm sorry, I gave you

Leo Laporte (02:10:52):
A.org. Okay, good. Mr. Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week.

Alex Lindsay (02:10:59):
I'm [02:11:00] just going to show a fun toy. Okay, I like to do this. This is a recommended thing if you're into this, but hopefully we'll get people kind of addicted to thinking about it. At least there are less expensive versions of this, but this is what we call Masonic mic. It's like a dead

Leo Laporte (02:11:13):
Cat. Oh, it's in a dead cat.

Alex Lindsay (02:11:15):
So it's not really a cat. Just in case you're wondering, the cats are okay. No cat was armed. This is, it's

Andy Ihnatko (02:11:22):
An otter everybody, because

Alex Lindsay (02:11:24):
This outer, this outer part of this is there to keep wind from hitting the mic. [02:11:30] So that's the big thing. It's inside of the dead cat. There is a blimp. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:11:38):
There's a blimp within a cat,

Alex Lindsay (02:11:40):
A blimp within a cat. So this protects the mic from Cat. Alright, so then anyways, so you have a blimp and sometimes you just use the blimp and then you put the cat on if it's windy, and then this has a little compartment that pops out. See if I can, what

Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
Does the blimp do if the cat's stopping the wind?

Alex Lindsay (02:11:59):
A lot of times you don't need the cat, [02:12:00] you just need the blimp. You just need to protect it from a little bit. It's

Leo Laporte (02:12:02):
A little bit of protection. And then if it's really

Alex Lindsay (02:12:04):
Protection, and then it also, it's hurricane

Leo Laporte (02:12:06):
Hillary,

Alex Lindsay (02:12:06):
You need the dead cat

Leo Laporte (02:12:08):
And

Alex Lindsay (02:12:08):
The blimp and you would need something around the, because you can't just put the cat around the mic because then there's no structure to it. So take this apart. This is a little structure in here, looks like a little blimp. And then this guy is, there's the mic. So this is the mic here and usually, but I don't

Andy Ihnatko (02:12:24):
Know why she's followed us fly.

Alex Lindsay (02:12:26):
Exactly. And if we take off the wind screen, which you [02:12:30] normally, this

Leo Laporte (02:12:30):
You showed before. I think this looks familiar, shown this one before.

Alex Lindsay (02:12:34):
Did I already do this? That's all right.

Leo Laporte (02:12:36):
I like the of dead cat.

Alex Lindsay (02:12:38):
Yeah, so the of the dead cat, so this is the ambisonic mic that maybe I thought I didn't think I'm really getting into this. So this is why I'm now, this is the Ambia, which is the one that I listed. This is what we call a first order microphone.

Leo Laporte (02:12:54):
It's

Alex Lindsay (02:12:54):
First order am, it's

Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Got capsules pointed in every possible direction, sort

Alex Lindsay (02:12:58):
Of almost [02:13:00] every possible direction. Now the one that now I didn't list there is this is then when you want to go to second order, you end up with a mic like this, which I didn't list there, which is a core, and this is eight of those mics. So this is a second order. Is

Leo Laporte (02:13:14):
This for 360 video? I mean, what would you want this for?

Alex Lindsay (02:13:17):
Well, we're doing it not for 360 video. And yes, you do a lot of VR stuff with it, but what we're playing with it is using it to add ambient to our show coverage. So YouTube now, [02:13:30] as of last week, it's now public. I mean we've been testing it for about a year, but YouTube will now do 5.12 over the top boxes. So if you have an Apple tv, YouTube will do 5.1. And what's really cool about that, you think about, again, ambisonic as a surround sound, but what we've learned figured out how to do is take that ambisonic four channels for the ambi O, and we pipe that in along with our microphones into [02:14:00] a live view. We send that to our San Rael location, and then we take that, those four channels of the ambisonic out and convert it to 5.1. And then we take the mics and we put them right down the center channel, and then we put Theas into the rest of the surrounds and everything else around you.

(02:14:16):
And what you end up with is being able to hear, really have an immersive, and you're going to start seeing us do this more. I think more people are going to start doing it as well because that's a really easy way to, when I say really easy, I mean relatively easy way to package up an [02:14:30] immersive area is to use this. And I think that I'm really excited that YouTube is finally supporting 5.1 publicly and everybody can use it now. It's still just for over the set top boxes. So it's your Apple TVs, that type of thing. But what we found is that the way we're doing it, the technique that we're using means that you can really clearly hear the people talking, but you also feel a lot more like you're there. A lot of times what we're fighting is you [02:15:00] can't use that mic by itself. You can't hear really figure out what's going on. But with the two mics, the two SMM 50 eights on electrodes, you're getting this nice center channel, but then you really feel much more like you're there. And we used to always just have the SSM 50 eights with the Electrosonics and just go back to us, but you lose the feeling of being there. It's hermetic

Leo Laporte (02:15:19):
Like this show, it's very hermetic. You don't hear any background.

Alex Lindsay (02:15:23):
Yeah, especially, and here, I don't know how much it matters, we'd be in a room talking to each other, but I think that when you think about going to [02:15:30] a conference, you want to feel that conference or feel that event. It's too, and so this is what we're kind of playing with right now. And so I think maybe when I started it, I probably talked about the NM B O and then do you mix a little

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
Bit? You're not going to mix it. You're going to just make a little low level mix it in.

Alex Lindsay (02:15:45):
That's the cool thing. The cool thing is because we're having two entirely separate systems, we can bring the ambient up and down based on what we want to do, so we can have you feel it and then we can push it back. We're here

Leo Laporte (02:15:55):
At say graph, and then it gets a little quieter. Yeah, that's

Alex Lindsay (02:15:58):
Interesting. Exactly. Yeah, so it's [02:16:00] a lot of fun.

Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
And what do you use to mix five one sound?

Alex Lindsay (02:16:04):
We're using Pro Tools, so there's a couple different, we have to do an onic conversion from the four channels of the amio, and there's a couple different tools to do that, and one of 'em is d vr. We use a couple different ones to kind of play with it, and so you have to convert that. So we're running that through Pro Tools to do that live conversion. We are looking at some other [02:16:30] tools down the road as we kind of keep going forward, but that's been the easiest one. So we pass it through a little Mac Mini Pro Tools isn't doing anything else, it's just the holder of the plugin. We pass through it, so there's not a lot of work that we're making that we're forcing down Pro Tools section. And then again, it goes through there. The cool thing is, is that a lot of times audio is going faster than video, so this just slows the audio down a little bit and we have to actually delay the video because as it goes through that process, I think we lose, [02:17:00] I think it's like 400 milliseconds. It's almost a half a second as it processes. So then that goes into an F S H T R, which is a little more expensive. So anyway, that's what embeds that and delays the video so that we can line it back up again.

Leo Laporte (02:17:16):
And this is open to everybody. What's the best way to watch YouTube, apple tv, obviously. Do you think that the Google, the new Google video device, the Chromecast with Google video is as good or better or does it matter?

Alex Lindsay (02:17:29):
I [02:17:30] have to admit that I've been in an Apple TV world for so long. It's really hard. I don't really, it's just been an area I decided not to specialize in is trying to figure out what I bought all of while we

Leo Laporte (02:17:39):
All have to specialize in something.

Alex Lindsay (02:17:40):
I was like, I had Roku at one time. I had Roku and Chromecasts and Amazon and all these things, and I just found that I just didn't like using any of the other ones, and so I just ended up with Apple tv, so the newer ones could be really good. I just stopped playing about five.

Leo Laporte (02:17:57):
I quite like actually the Chromecast [02:18:00] and the four K $30 compared to whatever it is, $159 for an Apple tv. I think the

Alex Lindsay (02:18:05):
Hard part is I have 600 movies that I bought from Apple TV with extras, and once you're locked into that, you

Leo Laporte (02:18:15):
Use movies anywhere, can't you? I think most of those will come out. Yeah. Do you get the extras of movies anywhere? I don't know.

Alex Lindsay (02:18:23):
The extras is what I buy. The only reason I buy film, I'm looking

Leo Laporte (02:18:26):
I'll The extras. Me too. With

Alex Lindsay (02:18:27):
You. The extras, I'm like, I'm not going to buy. In fact,

Leo Laporte (02:18:28):
I'm pissed off when it doesn't have extras. [02:18:30] I bought Asteroid City and it doesn't have extras now. Sometimes they come later. Right,

Alex Lindsay (02:18:34):
Exactly. That's why if I don't see Extras, I won't buy the film. I'll just rent it or I'll wait for it to show up on some service or I won't. It's not

Leo Laporte (02:18:41):
Valuable. I want the commentary enough

Alex Lindsay (02:18:42):
To buy. Does

Leo Laporte (02:18:43):
Wess Anderson ever do commentary on his movies? Boy,

Alex Lindsay (02:18:45):
I've done something in the past.

Leo Laporte (02:18:47):
On YouTube. Yeah, on YouTube. YouTube, okay. Thank you. I'm getting rid of everything but YouTube.

Alex Lindsay (02:18:54):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:57):
Thank you Alex. Lindsay, go to office hours, do global, [02:19:00] see the output of all this ambisonic stuff, and

Alex Lindsay (02:19:04):
We'll be talking a fair bit about AM over the next couple of months. So if this sounds at all interesting, get on the mailing list. You can just go to office hours.global and you can get on the mailing list. And

Leo Laporte (02:19:14):
Today's show

Alex Lindsay (02:19:15):
Is emails every day,

Leo Laporte (02:19:16):
IPhone, lidar for photogrammetry.

Alex Lindsay (02:19:19):
So here's how to wave around your iPhone and build three D models out of it. That's

Leo Laporte (02:19:25):
Always, there's a show every day through Sunday and you can participate. [02:19:30] It's a Zoom call if you want to know more Office hours, global and last week's show with your brother, I would be very interested to watch that. The Trinity. That looks

Alex Lindsay (02:19:41):
Really cool. It was so good. I was the camera operator. Hopefully it worked out okay. I built the whole camera thinking I was going to put on a monopod and then ran out of time. We were having some audio, so you had

Leo Laporte (02:19:51):
To hold it.

Alex Lindsay (02:19:52):
I held it for an hour and it's got a battery on it and all it's holding onto a surfboard [02:20:00] out, a little surfboard out for an hour. The middle of my back was just like a rock at the end. You're a good

Leo Laporte (02:20:05):
Camera operator though. I'm liking how you're zooming in, zooming out, getting in there.

Alex Lindsay (02:20:11):
I used a 14 millimeter on my little Sony and it worked out really well. This, so my brother, this is a crazy rig. I mean, I use crazy rigs and then this is at a whole different level than what I do. And there's probably 20 of these or 25 of these in the US in the wild. And so this is [02:20:30] area Trinity and my brother is a Trinity operator or an owner, which is the big deal. So anyway, he was willing to come down. That's really, and we've been talking about showing it for a while, and this is a really

Leo Laporte (02:20:43):
Great conversation. This is a filmmakers camera really right movie?

Alex Lindsay (02:20:47):
Well, yeah, it does all kinds of, it's basically like having a little techno crane that you can do techno crane style shots with. But I think that the interesting thing about the conversation with my brother is that you'll also just see a bunch [02:21:00] of how filmmaking gets done in the conversation. As our members ask him questions, he's just talking about stuff and just kind of working through it. You get this kind of flavor for what it's like because a camera on mate large streaming company piece shows. So he's really moved up. I mean since, I dunno when the last time you saw.

Leo Laporte (02:21:25):
Yeah, I didn't realize that. That's awesome. Good for

Alex Lindsay (02:21:27):
Him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice. He just finished five months on [02:21:30] a series that'll be coming out I think next year.

Leo Laporte (02:21:32):
How exciting. That would be fun. That would be fun to do that.

Alex Lindsay (02:21:35):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:36):
A lot of work, but a lot of fun. Thank you, Alex. A lot of work. Yeah. If you want to hire Alex, you hear all this expertise, it's actually available for sale@zeroninezero.media 0 9 0 Media. Andy anco, when are you going to be on G B H Next?

Andy Ihnatko (02:21:53):
Tomorrow? Oh

Leo Laporte (02:21:54):
My God, the indictments have slowed. Okay. Exactly.

Andy Ihnatko (02:21:59):
It's [02:22:00] 1230 in the afternoon on Eastern Time. Go to WGBH news.org to stream it live. Live or later

Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
On. Okay. Don't get your hopes up, Andy. I understand that there will be people checking into the Fulton County jail during the week.

Andy Ihnatko (02:22:13):
It's entirely possible that this man has done more than four things wrong. Just be prepared. I'm realistic. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:22:23):
Exactly. Thank you, Andrew. I h n a tko.com someday. And Jason [02:22:30] Snell, six colors.com/jason. He does so much. This is the show. I'm the lazy guy. These guys are the overachievers. You do so much

jason Snell (02:22:41):
To you. Host like 90 podcasts, Leo,

Leo Laporte (02:22:43):
Come on. I'm down to six

jason Snell (02:22:46):
70. Okay. 60. Yeah, so check out six scholars.com and also you mentioned it earlier, downstream. Downstream. Downstream, yeah. If you want to know about the weird wacky business of streaming media, Julia Alexander, who [02:23:00] is at Parrot Research and Puck News, and she just knows so much about it. She's really good. That's Relay fm slash downstream,

Leo Laporte (02:23:07):
And you are doing Strange New Worlds with Scott and the Vulcan. Hello?

jason Snell (02:23:12):
Yeah, sure. Love that show. That's a great show. Vulcan, hello. Covered every episode of Live Action News, star Trek, and so we had a good time covering this season of Strange New Worlds. It's a beautiful show. Can't wait for that strike to be over so they can make season three.

Leo Laporte (02:23:27):
Yeah, people were very excited by season two. [02:23:30] It felt like it had really branched out and done some really good stuff.

jason Snell (02:23:34):
Yeah, that's a great, that would be a great starter. If somebody is like, well, I don't know about Star Trek. It's like strange two worlds. It's really a good accessible show for anybody, even if you haven't seen Star Trek, and it really does kind of capture that A modern take on what the vibe of the original Star Trek was, where it's sort of episode to episode. It's not like a prestige drama where every episode rolls into every other episode. It is the episode where this happens, [02:24:00] and this is the episode where that happens and the characters grow and change over time in a modern TV way, but the stories are pretty self-contained and a lot of fun. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:24:09):
Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Andy. Thank you. Alex, thank you for joining us. We do Mac Break Weekly on Tuesday's 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern. Even if there's no news, we find a way to stretch it out and fill out your requisite two hours and 22 minutes of content. Leave

jason Snell (02:24:26):
It to the professionals. Okay. Don't [02:24:30] try this yourself. I

Leo Laporte (02:24:30):
Love it that we started with washing your watch. I think that's just to me that smells like victory. 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern eastern. We don't bury the leader up here. No, no. Top story number one, 1800 utc. You can watch the live stream, which goes 24 7. Some of it's reruns, obviously, that's at Live Twit tv. If you're watching live chat, live in our I R C open to all. You can even use your browser to access [02:25:00] IRC twit tv. There's also a discord, of course, for our club members after the fact on-demand versions of the show at twit tv slash mbb. There's a dedicated YouTube channel. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. In fact, that's probably the best way. That way you get it automatically. You don't have to think about it, audio or video. You can get either one, and I should mention this from time to time, I forget.

(02:25:25):
We have the new logo art that just was done by [02:25:30] the wonderful, talented Anthony is in the store, twit tv slash store, Anthony Nielsen's, I dunno what we would call that, the blob, but it's really nice. I was wearing it the other day. Plus mugs, all that stuff. We don't make any money on this. This is just so that you can show your love. They call it the, Anthony calls it the Color Swirl. I like it though. I think we got those printed [02:26:00] up for the podcast movement so that Lisa and Company could wear that in Denver this week. Twit TV slash store. We pretty much sell 'em for cost. Thank you for joining us. Now, it is my unfortunate and unhappy duty to tell you to get back to work because break time is over.

Mikah Sargent (02:26:20):
Oh, hey, that's a really nice iPhone you have there. You totally picked the right color. Hey, since you do use an iPhone and maybe use an iPad or an Apple Watch or [02:26:30] an Apple tv, well, you should check out iOS today. It's a show that I, Micah s Sargent, and my co-host, Rosemary Orchard, host every Tuesday right here on the twit Network. It covers all things Iost v oss, HomePod, oss watch, oss, iPad, oss. It's all the OSS that Apple has on offer, and we love to give you tips and tricks about making the most of those devices, checking out great apps and services and answering your tech questions. I hope you check it out.