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246: ‘Loan It to Nien Nunb’ With Matthew Panzarino

 

00:00:00   How you doing? All right. Yourself? Great. Really? Well, I'm all right.

00:00:06   It's like a Woody Allen line. I know we're not supposed to talk about Woody Allen anymore,

00:00:17   but Woody Allen. I went back to being honest. Well, you know what? Yeah, exactly. There's

00:00:23   so many. You know, I know that Mike Michael Jackson is the celebrity of the moment who

00:00:31   because of this HBO documentary, there's a serious and, you know, correct discussion

00:00:39   about, you know, hey, what do you know? We've got his legacy. We're allowed to music and

00:00:45   we still listen to his music. Yeah, exactly. Can you still play Michael Jackson? That's

00:00:48   the wrong way to phrase it. I guess like, can you personally I think is like the right

00:00:52   way to phrase it. Like, can you personally justify it? You know, I think that's the question

00:00:56   we're all having to ask ourselves.

00:00:58   Right. I was out with friends over the weekend and we were at an establishment and you know,

00:01:03   they were playing Michael Jackson music. I didn't even really notice it because Michael

00:01:08   Jackson music to me is just one of the, you know, you just hear it all the time. I wasn't

00:01:11   really thinking about it, but somebody was like, Ooh, kind of awkward. And then, you

00:01:14   know, it is, but it's like, do you want, so do you even want to play it? Let's say you

00:01:17   want a restaurant, do you play Michael Jackson music? If you know, you just don't want to

00:01:21   people thinking about stuff like that.

00:01:22   But on the other hand,

00:01:23   it's some of people's favorite music of all time.

00:01:27   It's a tough decision, you know?

00:01:30   - Yeah, it's hard to think with music and movies,

00:01:32   because, you know, creative works in general,

00:01:34   because we attach our own memories to those things

00:01:37   and our own meanings to them, which is good.

00:01:40   That's how art should be.

00:01:41   You know, we sort of attach things that happen in our lives

00:01:45   or people or memories or whatever to them,

00:01:47   and, you know, they become greater

00:01:49   than what they were created for. Like, the person who sang the song had their purpose,

00:01:54   their reason for singing the song, but it may mean something completely different to

00:01:57   us. So, I think it becomes much harder to like, to then think about how to separate

00:02:01   those things. With somebody living, I think it's almost easier, because you're able

00:02:06   to say, "Well, I don't want this person who did these horrific things to continue

00:02:10   to benefit, you know, from this relationship." But I don't know. It's a tough one.

00:02:17   And then there's, you know, yeah, like let's say someone like Kevin Spacey, you know, who's it was so

00:02:22   The allegations against him were so significant and compelling that they literally took a movie

00:02:30   What was the name of that movie? I forget it was a Ridley Scott movie

00:02:33   Where he played like John Paul Getty. I

00:02:35   Mean it was like it it didn't have the name wasn't very evocative of the subject matter

00:02:41   so I can't recall. But the movie was effectively in the can and was only a few weeks out from

00:02:47   coming out and they re-shot the movie with a new actor, Christopher Plummer, in the role.

00:02:54   Which is remarkable. And I remember watching the movie, which is a spoiler. Well, I guess because

00:03:03   they took him out of the movie, I didn't face any sort of moral conundrum over whether to watch the

00:03:07   the movie. So I guess that's not a spoiler, but I watched the movie and it was immersive enough

00:03:14   because Ridley Scott is super, super talented. One of my all time favorite directors that I,

00:03:20   I tried to watch thinking, can I tell that this was reshot without plumber? Like everything,

00:03:27   you know, like single shots of plumber as opposed to two shots with him and other characters.

00:03:33   And like, Oh, the wig is different. Well, not the wig, but just the shots,

00:03:37   You know like how many of them are two shots where you can tell you know?

00:03:40   Oh, huh either. He is in the room with the other actors or they've sufficiently done

00:03:47   Special effects to convince you he's in the room with the other actors

00:03:51   And how many of them are it's a one-shot on his character cut to the opposite angle on the other characters

00:03:57   and they just took shots where they were playing against spacey and

00:04:02   and use, you know, and then I see what you're saying. If you keep your eye open for that and

00:04:07   you just kind of if you've ever edited even just edited video, not like serious films,

00:04:11   you kind of know what that's like. If you try to just edit a conversation where there's,

00:04:16   let's say three shots, there's one with both characters, one on Michael or Matthew and one on

00:04:22   John and then you intercut between those three shots. But I got lost. The movie was good

00:04:33   enough that I got lost to keeping track of it, which is, you know, the way it should

00:04:36   be. But there were some where I could tell. I don't think this was supposed to be so

00:04:40   one shot, A shot, B shot. I think there should have been more of a master shot, but eventually

00:04:45   you lose it.

00:04:46   - Right, right, yeah.

00:04:48   You sense like the tempo of the conversation says,

00:04:51   "Hey, there should be some sort of, you know,

00:04:53   kind of establishing shot

00:04:54   relating to characters one another, but it's not there."

00:04:57   - Right, and then what else was Spacey?

00:04:58   With Spacey, there was the whole thing

00:05:00   where he was the star, co-star, I should say,

00:05:02   of "House of Cards."

00:05:04   And they had one season to go when the scandal broke

00:05:09   and, you know, he was alive at the end of the last season

00:05:13   and then they just decided he was dead

00:05:15   to do the last season and didn't seem to go very well in terms of popularity. But what

00:05:23   to do? They also, they're caught between a rock and a hard pace. I don't know. I

00:05:30   tend to, I've mentioned this on the show before, I tend to disassociate the artist

00:05:34   from the art. And so like, I have no problem watching Kevin Spacey movies, but I also understand

00:05:41   they're not making new Kevin Spacey movies. I don't have a problem listening to Michael Jackson

00:05:46   music, but yeah. I don't think there's any hard fast rule for me. I mean, I think a large part

00:05:53   of it for me is sort of, you know, I listen to the way people think about it and the way that they

00:05:58   talk about it and how it feels to them. And I try to always work from that angle. And I know

00:06:04   it's weird because like the older I get, and I don't think this is purely just age, but

00:06:10   it is certainly an experience based thing. But the older I get, the less likely I am to just

00:06:16   say things. You know, you know what I mean? Right? Like you get you just become more cognizant of

00:06:21   powers the wrong word. You know, we do have some sort of small power in the in the platform that

00:06:28   we you know, that we have in terms of media or whatever the case may be. But even just as a

00:06:33   person on a person to person basis, you have some sort of power based on like your reputation or,

00:06:38   you know, your cache with your friends or audience or whoever it is you're talking to.

00:06:43   And I just think that as I get older, I realized that when I was younger, I was really full of

00:06:49   shit. And, you know, it's just like, you know, we're all we're all full of it to some degree,

00:06:53   because we're figuring it out as we go. You know, sometimes we're saying things about what we

00:06:57   believe, and we're figuring out what we believe as we're saying it, you know, it's not like we've

00:07:02   spent hours pondering this thing and have like a concise opinion on every matter, right? We're all

00:07:07   figuring things out as we go. I just figure I just find out like as I'm older, the more I like,

00:07:12   instead of taking a hard fast, you know, opinion on things, or even making sure that I have all of

00:07:17   these opinions ready, I just listen more and talk less about those things, you know, and that I

00:07:22   think is one of those topics that I still am doing a lot of that. I just don't know. You know, I don't

00:07:27   know, I don't have any sort of hard fast rule. I think there are some things that I still enjoy

00:07:31   personally, but that I would never go like, Oh, I still watch this. You should too, you know,

00:07:36   I would never do that about those things.

00:07:39   Trenton Larkin Yeah, I kind of, there's a part of me,

00:07:43   I don't want to get in trouble. There's a part of me that thinks the whole, the best thing going on

00:07:53   to me is the cultural change at a very deep level across multiple industries. And it's spreading like

00:08:00   wildfire to every industry, which is that when people do bad things to others, the people

00:08:08   who had the bad things done to them should be have a venue to speak up, report it, have

00:08:14   it dealt with in a fair way. And, you know, almost all of these things have been it the

00:08:24   root problem. I don't want to say one's a bigger problem than the other, like the bad

00:08:29   Bad behavior is bad behavior and should be punished. But the structural problem is that

00:08:33   in all of these industries, there was so much set up to keep people from reporting it. And

00:08:41   if they did report it, report it to bury it and punish them or something like that. So

00:08:47   as to send a message to other people who suffered similar harassment or abuse or whatever it

00:08:55   is, you know, to send the message to keep quiet and like the dam has burst on that and

00:09:01   I got them finished or maybe the dam has, you know, severely cracked and there's spouts

00:09:06   of water coming out and it's inevitable that the rest of it's going to come down. And I

00:09:10   think that's a good thing. I feel like sometimes people, you know, the, the sort of want to

00:09:17   shaming you for watching Woody Allen movies is a little bit sanctimonious and it's the

00:09:22   person telling you that trying to inject themselves into the story of where's they really had

00:09:27   no no part in it. You know, but virtue signaling right to some degree. Yeah. Right. Like if

00:09:35   you don't want to watch Woody Allen movies, that's, you know, to me, that's, that's the

00:09:38   line that I, I, I wouldn't feel comfortable crossing is it's telling other people not

00:09:42   to enjoy Woody Allen movies or Michael Jackson music or Kevin Spacey movies or what have

00:09:46   you, but certainly as a personal choice, it might be. Yeah, I think that's valid. Yeah.

00:09:52   mean, I don't feel that imposing your worldview on other people is ever the right way to go. But

00:09:59   I think certainly in terms of moral or ethical issues, it's in fact the worst thing you could do.

00:10:05   Pete: Yeah.

00:10:05   Jai: It's actually harmful because it does not create any sort of lasting, you know,

00:10:13   change of lens for that person. So, if you're like, "Oh, hey, here, let me explain why I don't. Let

00:10:18   me kind of give you my POV on this and let me explain why it's problematic or why I have a

00:10:24   personal issue with it or my personal connection or whatever." And that is far more likely, I think,

00:10:30   to end up with a scenario where you have somebody going, "You know what? My lens is a different

00:10:37   color now." Or it's shifted in its angle or viewpoint rather than some sort of thing where

00:10:41   you're shaming somebody because I think you end up having, it ends up having a lot of negative effect.

00:10:47   and while you may cauterize the problem in the near term, it doesn't cure the infection or whatever,

00:10:54   if you want to call it. Yeah. Update from the control booth. The movie was called

00:10:59   All the Money in the World. That was the Ridley Scott film where they raced Kevin Spacey and

00:11:04   replaced him with Christopher Plummer. Not surprised they didn't remember the name.

00:11:09   Yeah, that's actually not a very good title, in my opinion. A little generic. Almost sounds like

00:11:13   James Bond movie, like one of the Brosnan Bond films. Could you trick…

00:11:22   Theme song by Ariana Grande. How many people could you trick into believing that they saw

00:11:29   a Brosnan Bond film called All the Money in the World? I'll bet you get a lot of them.

00:11:34   You might get me. 30, 40 percent.

00:11:36   More. There were at least two that were close to that.

00:11:42   that. Oh my God. I hope there's somebody from like Eon Productions who's listening, who

00:11:48   listens to the show and they're like, "Damn, that would have been a good title."

00:11:53   If only.

00:11:57   We just hit the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which is…

00:12:03   Yes, we did.

00:12:05   crazy. I certainly never heard of it in 1989 or 1989. I forget when I heard of it though.

00:12:15   I believe it was, what was the app before Netscape? Was it called Mozilla?

00:12:21   I forget what it was called. Mosaic? Mosaic. That's it. Mosaic. So I remember Mosaic like 1.0.

00:12:29   Obviously there were other people who were on it before that, but 30 years since.

00:12:34   to your job. - Netscape was my first browser.

00:12:36   I'm almost positive, and once again, I can't pinpoint it,

00:12:41   and I think I probably could if I sat down

00:12:44   and talked to a bunch of people,

00:12:45   or not a bunch, but a few key people, you know,

00:12:49   who sort of introduced me to it,

00:12:51   but it had to be about '92 for me, maybe '91.

00:12:55   Simply because that was when I got my first modem.

00:13:00   - Yeah.

00:13:00   What I remember, and I've said this before on the show,

00:13:03   a good thing I wasn't, I was very young at the time, so maybe I'd be forgiven. But I would have

00:13:07   been, I would have been eating a lot of my own claim chowder on the future of the web.

00:13:12   Where I thought that the web, I thought it was an interesting demo. This is in the mosaic era,

00:13:21   but I was like, but it was so slow that I was like, who the hell would ever use this? Because

00:13:27   everything I was doing on the internet was all terminal based. You know, you would open up a

00:13:31   Z term Z term was the app on the Mac where you could dial in to the school modems and

00:13:36   Even if you didn't have a great modem

00:13:39   Even if you had like a 9600 baud modem or even 2400 would be 2400 was like slow enough

00:13:45   We're even if you had a clean connection and you if you were a good typist, you could probably out type the buffer

00:13:49   9600 was like got it. If you got a clean phone call

00:13:53   Everything you did was fast and that to me was the most important thing. I was you know

00:13:59   simultaneously a Mac native Mac app UI snob for all of my regular computing and

00:14:06   a total terminal snob for

00:14:09   Internetting for lack of a better right because it was fast and it just seemed like this is what

00:14:15   And it was also what the internet at the time was was built for it was built for these pure text connections

00:14:21   But then you could like log in and the longest part was just waiting for the modem to connect

00:14:25   type Elm

00:14:27   All of a sudden the whole screen was filled with your email

00:14:29   You could see everything that was new and then you could just sort of down arrow right arrow return

00:14:34   You know a couple of keys, you know

00:14:35   If you only had like three new messages you'd be in and out and you'd be done

00:14:38   And whereas like if you tried firing up mosaic at the time

00:14:42   Like you'd watch even if you had a clean connection, you'd watch every page paint in

00:14:48   Yep, top to bottom or interleave

00:14:53   Line over line it'd be like ah 50% of the lines we've surrendered them now

00:14:57   We're gonna go back and render the other 50% didn't wasn't that what we did with we had like was it?

00:15:02   GIF or JPEG that had the you could be in G. I believe now. This is before PNG

00:15:08   It was no energy wasn't invented yet PNG was invented in the mid 90s

00:15:12   The I don't want to go on a long sidetrack on it, but the backstory of PNG is that Eunice?

00:15:18   What's you know Wow Christ they used to be a big computer company started with Una I

00:15:23   Was gonna say UNICEF, but that's the charity, but yeah, I don't know it was a company that held a pound my data

00:15:30   Thanks

00:15:31   There was a company that held a patent on the GIF format, and they never enforced it

00:15:36   I will put a link to the Wikipedia era though Jeff. Let's see what they say

00:15:43   but anyway, they held a patent, but they didn't enforce it and so

00:15:47   The various web browsers used it because it was very efficient for certain images that JPEG wasn't for

00:15:53   Mm-hmm

00:15:55   And then it took off and all of a sudden

00:15:58   They they had a very strong interest in enforcing the patent before it expired and it was such an old thing that it was

00:16:05   It it was expiring soon and so ping was sort of a let's save the internet and come up with a replacement for ping that

00:16:14   Is unisys that's the name of the company

00:16:16   - Gotcha.

00:16:18   - Sorry for all, I apologize to every listener

00:16:20   who thought of it instantly and was dying

00:16:22   while I waited for it.

00:16:23   Somewhere out there is somebody who also knew

00:16:26   all the money in the world right away

00:16:27   and wanted to ring in.

00:16:30   So I've got two strikes. - Yeah, exactly.

00:16:32   - Somebody's ready to stop listening to this episode already.

00:16:35   - I bet you get a lot of the tweets

00:16:36   where people aren't done listening and they're like,

00:16:38   they're tweeting you in the name of things.

00:16:40   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:41   I don't mind, I don't mind keep tweeting them, that's fine.

00:16:43   - No, yeah, that's totally fine.

00:16:44   - I actually enjoy it.

00:16:45   - I'm like an engaged audience, right?

00:16:46   - Exactly.

00:16:47   It is a reason though, I probably should host a live show

00:16:51   all the time with an audience so they can shout answers

00:16:53   at me.

00:16:54   (laughing)

00:16:55   I guess the answer, I guess some of the shows do

00:16:56   the IRC thing and people type answers, but.

00:16:59   - Yeah, I can't remember what it,

00:17:01   I was filming an episode of the computer show one time,

00:17:05   well live one, the computer show by Sandwich Video, Adam.

00:17:10   - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:13   And Adam Lizagor, and it's a great show, super fun.

00:17:18   And he was very kind and did a live show in SF

00:17:21   and I was one of the non-jokey, serious straight man guests

00:17:26   that they had on the show.

00:17:28   - How did they miss this?

00:17:30   - I don't know.

00:17:31   I don't know if you weren't, you probably weren't in town.

00:17:32   It was in SF.

00:17:33   It wasn't in any particular event or anything.

00:17:34   - Was it recorded?

00:17:35   But did it ever air?

00:17:36   - I don't think they did.

00:17:37   I think he recorded it for posterity

00:17:39   but not for release kind of thing.

00:17:42   But you'd have to ask him or I'd have to check.

00:17:44   But I don't think it was ever released.

00:17:46   It wasn't that kind of thing.

00:17:47   It was like, hey, let's do a live show.

00:17:49   And they had the host there.

00:17:51   It was a lot of fun.

00:17:53   Matt from June Oven was on there,

00:17:58   and myself, and pardon me, the other guest, I forget who.

00:18:03   But it was fun, it was a lot of fun.

00:18:07   But while we were on the stage,

00:18:11   the hosts, you know, very straightforwardly asked me, I can't, I'm gonna even forget what

00:18:17   it was, but I think it was something so simple, like, HTTP or URL or something, you know,

00:18:23   like, what does that stand for? What does that mean? You know, the answer, the answer

00:18:27   was wrong. It was so embarrassing. Like, I was I was dying. I mean, I, you know, it is

00:18:35   what it is. But it was so funny to me later, especially because I was like, a room full

00:18:40   of nerds, I mean, uber nerds who came to a, you know, a faux computer show, a comedy about

00:18:47   a show that never existed in the 80s, or in the early 90s. And I gave them the wrong answer. But

00:18:54   it was it was a lot. It was correct me if I was dying. It's like my nightmare, you know, you're

00:18:59   in front of a highly technical audience, and you're supposed to, you know, have some sort of

00:19:02   acumen and you somebody asks you a fairly simple question in your mind just goes, whoop. It's the

00:19:09   the best.

00:19:10   - Anyway, 30 years of the web.

00:19:11   Do you see there was a group of people who remade

00:19:13   the original browser, which was written by Tim Berners-Lee

00:19:18   on the next workstation.

00:19:20   It was sort of-- - So nice.

00:19:22   - Do you know that?

00:19:22   You didn't know that?

00:19:23   The original-- - No, no, I did know that,

00:19:25   but I didn't know somebody had remade it for this.

00:19:26   - Oh, they recreated it.

00:19:27   - Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

00:19:28   - Well, I'll have to--

00:19:29   - I saw somebody tweeted a picture of the actual workstation

00:19:32   which was cool.

00:19:33   - Oh, that is cool too.

00:19:34   But they remade it in the web,

00:19:36   like using modern web technology

00:19:37   so you could play with it right in your web browser.

00:19:41   And it's a pretty good--

00:19:42   - Do they have BOD settings?

00:19:44   - No.

00:19:45   - Give people a real feel?

00:19:46   - No, 'cause I think the idea was that next workstations

00:19:49   at the time were all hooked up to university networks.

00:19:52   But even the university network was so slow.

00:19:54   That's what drove me nuts about Mosaic.

00:19:56   I was like, this thing has no future.

00:19:59   - I know.

00:19:59   I mean, people were like, oh yeah, I had a 14.4 modem.

00:20:03   I'm like, no, no, that's thousands.

00:20:05   Let's talk in hundreds.

00:20:06   Jared: Classic. But yeah, I mean, I think it was a certainly a world where everybody was trying to

00:20:17   understand and the only, the only movie from the era that even got it remotely right was

00:20:24   essentially made to be a comedy, which is Hackers. I mean, I feel that they just got so much right

00:20:28   with that movie. And it was not really meant to be a serious movie at all. And in fact,

00:20:33   got a lot wrong. But like the ethos was, wait, hackers or sneakers? Hackers? No, no sneakers,

00:20:38   for sure. Like that era was was a little bit before that. But I, I think in terms of like the

00:20:44   the emergence of the web as a populist enterprise, not a thing for nerds or enterprise, because

00:20:50   technically sneakers is about an enterprise, you know, skunkworks project, right? It's it's not

00:20:56   about users or consumers. And I think that the first like, big for me, the best big like, movie

00:21:02   that got how the web was going to relate to like teenagers and hackers who would go on

00:21:07   to essentially build the world's largest companies on the internet was hackers for

00:21:12   me.

00:21:13   That was…

00:21:14   Pete: Did you see that the Captain Marvel website was designed to sort of, because the

00:21:20   Captain Marvel movie, which I haven't seen yet but I'm looking forward to, it seems

00:21:23   like it's a good movie, but I think it takes place in like 1995 or so.

00:21:28   And so they made the film's official website look as though it were like a GeoCities website

00:21:35   from 1995.

00:21:37   But then, I think it was the first person who pointed it out that I have to say it did

00:21:41   kind of offend me.

00:21:42   As somebody who made websites back then and used to sweat the details like using what

00:21:48   was a debabilizer, which was like the ultimate way to crush every possible bit out of a GIF

00:21:56   without losing any of the actual colors.

00:21:58   Like if there was a vague,

00:22:00   like an eight byte metadata field that was optional,

00:22:03   it would strip it out, you know, just to save the byte.

00:22:06   - Right.

00:22:07   - The Captain Marvel website is like totally,

00:22:10   even though it looks like a 1995 thing with the blink tags

00:22:14   and it's low res GIFs and stuff like that,

00:22:17   it's like gigantic.

00:22:19   It's like a 20 megabyte download.

00:22:20   (laughing)

00:22:21   Downloads all of the--

00:22:23   - Would you take it a week and a half?

00:22:24   (laughing)

00:22:25   - Right, no, it never would have finished.

00:22:28   No modem connection in history

00:22:31   has ever stayed up long enough.

00:22:32   - Has it ever stayed up that long?

00:22:33   - At least in that time, to download all of this.

00:22:35   And there's no computer that could have run it.

00:22:37   There was no, nobody had like a computer

00:22:40   that had enough RAM to render one tab

00:22:43   that would have been that complex.

00:22:45   It's sort of a cheat.

00:22:49   Like I don't even know if you could make,

00:22:51   if you use 1995 markup, would it work?

00:22:55   Would it still look like that?

00:22:56   I think it would.

00:22:57   It just speaks to me of,

00:23:00   they should have just found some old timers

00:23:02   who typed all their HTML by hand.

00:23:04   - Yeah, they were really dedicated, right?

00:23:05   - Right.

00:23:06   Anyway.

00:23:08   - Have you seen "Captain Marvel?"

00:23:09   - No, I told you I haven't seen it.

00:23:10   - And we probably shouldn't talk about it this soon.

00:23:12   Well, you haven't seen it anyway, so we won't talk about it.

00:23:14   But yeah, it's really good.

00:23:15   I thought you enjoyed it a lot.

00:23:16   - No, it seems like a good premise.

00:23:17   I love the idea that it takes place in 1995.

00:23:21   Anyway, I'm looking forward to it,

00:23:22   but I have not seen it.

00:23:24   Yeah, yeah. I really wanted but completely spoiler free that I think I'll put this out into the universe but I really feel it is one of the first I mean it's certainly one of the first superhero movies but and certainly the highest grossing movie ever to examine to sort of put on screen.

00:23:42   And I speak about this from a distance, but have read and listened to talk to other people about it. But it sort of puts a, the female internal life onto the screen in a way that is very, very interesting. It's a very emotionally driven superhero movie that is not about, you know, how a person's physicality can affect the world, but instead how they feel and think, you know, and putting that on screen in a way that is not

00:24:11   It's, you know, almost painterly in its application of the way that it does that and

00:24:18   certainly not in the very straightforward way that, you know, you normally see a male

00:24:25   superhero interact with the universe or the world and you go like, "Oh yeah, I can see

00:24:30   what he feels or how he thinks or whatever."

00:24:33   You know, it's very, very interesting.

00:24:35   But I'll just put that tidbit out there.

00:24:36   It's cool.

00:24:37   I loved it a lot.

00:24:38   Why don't I take that perfect segue of the 30th anniversary of the web and tell you about

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00:27:20   I've got a lot of other stuff to talk about. I was thinking I would save the Disney stuff

00:27:28   for the end. Sure. But this is going to turn into America's favorite Disney podcast

00:27:35   by the end of this. I have so many questions to ask you and so many things to say.

00:27:43   Let's run through some news. So what else do we have here? WWDC dates were announced earlier

00:27:48   today. We're recording on Thursday, March 14th. No surprises at all. June seven or three to seven.

00:27:55   A lottery for tickets that starts today runs for a week. A little bit shorter window this time,

00:28:04   but by like one day or something. Yeah. It's like last, not too much last year. I keep track of

00:28:10   of this last year they announced today they announced on March 13th and it didn't start

00:28:15   till June 4th and I think there was a little bit more of a window for signups for for lottery.

00:28:21   I think what they've figured out is that people who want to go most of them sign up are probably

00:28:28   already signed up right now four hours after it was an they don't need to give them so

00:28:32   much time right right like there's other people a little bit there's other people who I guess

00:28:37   are waiting for permission from work. But in some ways you can sign up for the lottery

00:28:42   before you get permission and get the clearance after you win the ticket.

00:28:49   Same location.

00:28:50   I will tell you, just speaking from personal experience, sometimes getting clearance for

00:28:53   these things is an effort. And so why would you do that if you don't know if you can even

00:28:57   go?

00:28:58   Right.

00:28:59   How would you go for it?

00:29:00   And I get it, they are non-transferable. It's not like you've got a golden ticket you can

00:29:03   just hand off to somebody. I think they're non-transformable. I mean, you'd have to,

00:29:06   you know, it's like if I'm going to ask for an exception. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and there's

00:29:12   more students slots this time, 350 or so. Oh, I didn't see that. Yeah. That's good to

00:29:18   know. Uh, I enjoyed that part last year. Uh, they had a, uh, I spent more time inside last

00:29:26   year than two years ago. That last year was the second year at the San Jose convention

00:29:32   center or whatever the person's name was on it. And inside the entrance, as I recall,

00:29:38   you know, they, they also had a new fangled like RFID type entrance thing where you would

00:29:47   take your badge. I think they even put it on a nice little snap, you know, thing that

00:29:51   you could extend and then it would be like, welcome, John. And you'd come in and there

00:29:57   was a nice little thing that sunlight, you know, but that was like where they had the

00:30:03   Ethernet connections, etc. for fast downloads of all the betas, because they don't let

00:30:08   you do those over the Wi Fi for for obvious reasons, even though they have very good Wi

00:30:11   Fi there. I think part of the reason it's very good is they don't let people download

00:30:15   six gigabyte betas of Xcode over the air. So there's an area where you can plug in

00:30:22   and they have Ethernet cords and Thunderbolt cords and probably USB-C cords for whatever

00:30:28   MacBook you have. And they also had the AR area. Do you remember this? Remember they had a couple

00:30:35   of games last year? That's right. You know, and unsurprisingly, the students were very interested

00:30:42   in those AR games. And they were also very good at them. Remember there was one where it was like,

00:30:46   I think it was like Jenga blocks effectively, and you had like a virtual like slingshot on your

00:30:51   phone and your goal was to knock over, sort of like a game of ping pong, two people across

00:30:57   from the table from each other. But instead of hitting a ball at each other, you were

00:31:02   shooting balls at their blocks. And there was this one kid who looked like he was like

00:31:06   12. He really might have been 12. And he was like an ace. If there was an ESPN version

00:31:13   of this game, he'd be on it. And it's crazy because the game just came out like a day

00:31:17   before. They were actually like the Apple people who were staffing the table. They saw him playing

00:31:24   and they ran to get one of the other staffers who I guess was the best among their staff.

00:31:31   Like you got to see this kid. It was all very fun, but the kids definitely bring up the energy level.

00:31:38   They do. And I think it's also a good sort of concession to the fact that if you're going to

00:31:45   invite a chunk of the development audience to come and sort of get them excited about this stuff.

00:31:51   Why not, students? I think it's a great idea.

00:31:52   Pete: Yeah. So, it's good. They've regularized everything from the announcement date to the week

00:32:01   that it is. Everybody expected June 3 to 7. There were telltale signs in the

00:32:06   public filings for public spaces in San Jose where, I think it actually even said Apple,

00:32:13   which I guess is a no-no, but it's the worst-kept secret in Apple, on Apple's annual calendar,

00:32:21   just for various reasons. But yet—

00:32:23   Jared: Which isn't, I don't know, I think it's not necessarily a bad thing.

00:32:28   Ted, you know?

00:32:29   Ted, I think that a large portion of the reason they keep it secret is that just, you know,

00:32:36   things can change, right? And then everybody's like trying to read into the change, but—

00:32:40   - Right.

00:32:41   - Once you have it locked, announce it.

00:32:43   - Right.

00:32:44   They just, you know, there's some part of them,

00:32:47   it's, you know, the old saying, I'm sure you know,

00:32:52   if you've probably heard it from your dad,

00:32:54   measure twice, cut once.

00:32:56   - Right.

00:32:57   - I think with a lot of these things,

00:32:58   Apple is like measure 100 times, cut once.

00:33:00   You know, like they're not going to, you know,

00:33:04   they have X, Y, and Z that they definitely want,

00:33:06   hope to announce in WWDC.

00:33:09   And unless they are that, you know, a hundred percent convinced that there'll be at least

00:33:14   an announceable shape, they're not going to announce WWDC. Like they might, you know,

00:33:18   like if something happened and, you know, Federighi had to say, look, I hate to say

00:33:24   it, but we're not going to be able to announce iOS 13 on June 3rd. We can't, you know, X,

00:33:29   Y, just something's not right. Something will not be ready. They would, they would postpone

00:33:32   WWDC, you know, there was that one year, like way back, like 2006 or 2005 or something where

00:33:38   they did cancel or postpone it to like August or something, which was very strange. But

00:33:44   those were, it's almost a different era at Apple. I also love the way they don't

00:33:53   announce that there's going to be a keynote. That's a separate announcement, usually

00:33:57   like a week before they're like, "Tim Cook will host a keynote to kick off WWDC."

00:34:04   - Oh, were we supposed to believe

00:34:06   that Tim might've been too busy,

00:34:07   that he's got other things going on or?

00:34:09   (laughs)

00:34:11   - That one, and again, Apple PR,

00:34:14   who you and I both have good relations with,

00:34:17   but they don't like to explain themselves.

00:34:20   And they're also ready for you to ask them

00:34:24   to explain themselves, and they always have pat answers

00:34:27   of, that are more than, they don't just say,

00:34:31   ah, no comment, they've got like an answer,

00:34:33   but it is effectively no comment.

00:34:34   My guess is that they do that

00:34:39   just for the pure publicity of getting a boost,

00:34:45   getting a little pre-WWDC boost into the news cycle.

00:34:50   - Sure.

00:34:51   - But it always cracks me up

00:34:52   when it's like at the top of tech meme

00:34:53   that WWDC keynote over Monday, June 3rd.

00:34:57   - Yeah, my reaction is how did they get,

00:35:00   how did they get Tim Cook?

00:35:02   - As somebody who runs a conference.

00:35:04   That's my joking response.

00:35:07   It's like, oh man, how'd they get Tim Cook?

00:35:09   - Again.

00:35:10   - His schedule's so busy.

00:35:11   I can't even get him to come to our conference.

00:35:12   - How'd they get him again?

00:35:15   - Yeah, yeah, again.

00:35:16   Every time, man.

00:35:17   They're playing favorites.

00:35:18   - All right, and imagine how weird it'd be

00:35:20   if there were no keynote for WWDC.

00:35:22   Everybody would be like, what the hell's going on?

00:35:26   - Yeah.

00:35:27   - This is nuts.

00:35:28   If they just started with the technical state of the union

00:35:30   it's showing up Objective-C and Swift code on slides two minutes.

00:35:36   I would love it. I would love it. That'd be amazing. Like CNN is there going expecting the

00:35:43   big corporate news and they're like, wait, what API what? Right. In theory, that would be, you know,

00:35:50   the way to do a developer conference keynote, you know, the I always say that's the best way to

00:35:54   think of the State of the Union, the State of the Union is like the technical keynote.

00:35:58   That's right. You know, it would work for the audience. It would not work for the CNNs of the

00:36:05   world. Yeah. I mean, and then, you know, the thing is, yes, there's a different sort of, like, the,

00:36:13   I don't know, inside, inside baseball on some of this stuff, which you well know, but some audience

00:36:18   members might not know is that they kind of consolidated press for a lot of their events.

00:36:23   So a lot of these events, WWDC has always, to some degree, been that way, because it's the one,

00:36:27   it's one thing, right? It only happens one place always does. But a lot of their events, they've

00:36:31   taken a lot of international press and people that would have normally maybe had their own events in

00:36:36   their own cities, hosted in an Apple store, or, or hosted, you know, kind of tell it, tell it,

00:36:42   telegraphed or whatever. What do you call it? Oh, my gosh, you know, conference, teleconference,

00:36:48   Dan, or whatever. They brought them all in person, which is great. You know, I think that's fine.

00:36:52   And why shouldn't people around the world, Apple's a global enterprise, iPhone goes on sale in every country right away. Why shouldn't they have all these international press there. But it certainly has changed the mix a little bit and press and certainly of course, in this new era of Apple, the mix of press has changed significantly.

00:37:10   But the audience makeup at those things is by nature always going to be these nerds.

00:37:16   And for a lot of you will see the tweeting patterns.

00:37:19   I mean, you and I follow a lot of these folks and we are these folks to some degree, you

00:37:23   know, and so you'll see the tweeting patterns.

00:37:25   You'll see people going like, "Oh, here's the corporate jumbo, you know, like all of

00:37:29   this stuff.

00:37:30   And oh, here we go.

00:37:31   Retail update."

00:37:32   Like people around the world are sort of like taking the numbers, even, you know, my staff,

00:37:38   reporters. They're taking those numbers, comparing them against previous numbers, writing analysis of

00:37:42   that, okay, here's the growth curve, and you know, etc, etc. Right. But the people in this audience

00:37:47   are like, hey, give us the stuff, man. Like, you know, they start to get excited the moment they

00:37:51   see something announced on stage that they see that they could maybe integrate, take advantage

00:37:55   of, you know, or sort of build, you know, something with that's their, that's their thing. So it's an

00:38:01   interesting audience. I always like it, I enjoy it. It's a different energy than, say, an iPhone

00:38:06   um pure press event right sure exactly um yeah if they telegraphed the thing it would that would

00:38:14   take them right back to like the 2400 baud modem era telegraphed it yes that would do it did it did

00:38:23   yeah maybe you should have flown from asia over to galibornia because if you don't know morse code

00:38:30   i'm sorry all of our remotes are via teletype this year so no i've told this story on the show

00:38:34   before, but last year, it must have been the phone announcement because it was in the Steve

00:38:40   Jobs Theater and they supplied the foreign, I don't know how many languages, but it's certainly

00:38:48   at least Chinese, I think, maybe Japanese too. But a couple of the foreign language people got

00:38:55   little in-ear pieces like you get it like the UN. And so they were sitting live in the Steve Jobs

00:39:04   theater, but they were getting a live translation of what was being said on stage. And there was

00:39:09   some sort of, I don't know if it was a malfunction or just it, they were poorly set up, but they were

00:39:14   turned up too loud and it was too loud to be in their ears. And so they took them out and I don't

00:39:21   blame them. I wouldn't put something too loud in my ears, but they took them out and it was loud

00:39:25   enough that they could hear it just holding next to their ear. But it also meant that while you

00:39:29   were sitting in the audience, you heard these this like, why do I hear like electronic Chinese

00:39:35   language? What do who's doing this? And then, like you turn around, it'd be like, I thought it was

00:39:39   over my left shoulder, and then all of a sudden, it's over my right shoulder. And I'm like,

00:39:42   what the hell is going on? I really thought somebody was doing like a FaceTime call. And

00:39:45   I thought it was very rude turned out. It wasn't. It wasn't rudeness at all. It was just like a

00:39:50   technical thing. But it really it emphasized, right? Just how many of the members of the press

00:39:55   really are from around the world at these events. And that did not used to be the case.

00:40:00   Jared: That's true. And then one of the byproducts of people being around the world is that they are

00:40:05   interpreting, many of them stream it or are, you know, kind of producing videos live. And so,

00:40:11   they will translate for their audience live and they have no compunctions about translating it

00:40:15   full volume right next to you. It's great. Like, I have no problem with them translating

00:40:23   live because I think they're definitely they're providing the same service we are, you know,

00:40:28   is just sometimes a little difficult to hear over them. It's a lot of fun having everybody there,

00:40:34   though. I love the fact that it's international community and it's people that I wouldn't get to

00:40:39   interact with from the press, even though we're in the same industry and same business and they're

00:40:43   writing for a very similar audience, just in a different language. I love being able to, like,

00:40:47   talk to them and interact with them and get their viewpoint. And they're always so enthused about

00:40:52   being there and talking to people in the US. So it's a lot of fun. It's actually quite

00:40:58   a different vibe than it used to be where you'd see the same people sort of in every

00:41:04   event. So that aspect of it is really, really cool to me.

00:41:07   Yeah. We were at—we probably talked about it the last time you were on the show—but

00:41:10   you and I sat together for the Brooklyn event in October, and there were a lot of retail

00:41:16   employees from around the country who'd been invited. And some part of Apple has always

00:41:23   filled seats with Apple employees. If their watch team has a big announcement, some number

00:41:29   of people from the Apple Watch team get to attend the keynote.

00:41:32   So, famously last year in the September event when Jeff—why am I drawing a blank on his

00:41:43   the C COO, Jeff Williams came on stage. He got a super enthusiastic amount of applause from one

00:41:52   section of the theater. And that was the watch team. And you can't blame them. But it was a

00:41:55   little weird when you were there. Like, why? Why are those people so nuts for Jeff Williams?

00:41:59   Yeah. But like the

00:42:03   Jared Ranere was about to announce his collab with Pitbull, his new single. Yeah.

00:42:07   - Yeah.

00:42:07   - The enthusiasm of those retail folks in the audience

00:42:11   though was different and more palpable

00:42:13   because none of them had ever seen a keynote live.

00:42:15   They obviously got selected by being the good employees

00:42:20   who maybe were there a long time,

00:42:22   but were enthusiastic about Apple stuff.

00:42:24   And they were, some of them were sitting right behind us

00:42:26   and they were just, their enthusiasm was so palpable.

00:42:28   And it's like you and I just sit there and sort of have a,

00:42:30   we don't clap at press events thing.

00:42:33   And there's people behind us going absolutely nuts,

00:42:35   not like in a phony way. And I, you know, just made it a cool thing. I like WDC, you know,

00:42:43   because it is unique. It's there is no other even, you know, the Brooklyn thing was in the Academy

00:42:48   of Music, and it's a beautiful venue. And they've they've done this thing where they go around the,

00:42:52   you know, country these days for certain of their special event. But nothing compares to having like

00:42:57   five or 6000 people in a room. It's it and most, most of them just being attendees, you know,

00:43:03   and every year now it's a ton of first time employees or attendees, not employees, attendees.

00:43:08   The energy level is just not comparable to any of the other events.

00:43:14   Did you go to you don't go to the annual shareholders meeting, do you?

00:43:20   No, no, I've never been either. A I'm not a shareholder. I guess I could get a press pass.

00:43:26   I don't know. But it's just you can get a press pass. But yeah, I'm not a shareholder.

00:43:31   nothing. It doesn't seem worth a cross country trip. There's no because it's just not I don't

00:43:34   write the finance angle much. And I whatever I do, I'd rather just read a summary of somebody who

00:43:40   knows more about it than I do. But somebody who went, who's just a DF reader, but was really happy

00:43:47   to go because I think this is the first year where they held the shareholders meeting in the Steve

00:43:52   Jobs theater. And Oh, cool. Yeah. And so that it is a cool thing to see. I mean, it is a gorgeous

00:43:58   theater and it is unlike anything I've ever seen. So I could see why somebody, you know,

00:44:05   if it weren't cost prohibitive to make the trip and I were a shareholder and I'd never been to

00:44:10   the Steve Jobs Theater, I'd be interested to do it just for that. But anyway, this reader

00:44:14   sent me a picture from his audience. He was like, I've always heard that the screen is amazing here,

00:44:19   but this is, you know, this looks like 640 by 480 projection. And it's hard to tell from an iPhone

00:44:24   photo, but it really it certainly wasn't the screen that they use at the press events.

00:44:28   It was a it was clearly projected, you know, there's sort of that look,

00:44:33   share of a projected image, and projection, yeah, from projection. And the screens that they have

00:44:40   now are like LEDs, or OLEDs, or I don't know, some kind of thing that the screen itself lights up.

00:44:45   So I don't know what the reason is, but they, they cheaped out on that for shareholders,

00:44:52   apparently unless this photo was tremendously misleading along with this DF reader's eyes.

00:44:57   So anybody out there…

00:45:00   They broke out the Mac classic projector.

00:45:02   Well, I just wonder when he said that and he wrote. And I know that I've raved about the

00:45:09   display technology in the Steve Jobs theater and the audio quality. And I just wonder how many

00:45:15   other Daring Fireball readers went to this and thought, "What the hell is Gruber raving about?

00:45:20   This screen looks like it cost 50 bucks.

00:45:25   What is going on with this guy's eyes?

00:45:28   Oh, man.

00:45:30   That's funny.

00:45:31   All right.

00:45:33   WWDC.

00:45:34   Nothing else to say, though, other than dates.

00:45:37   The other Apple thing, which is breaking news, coming out tonight and will be out by the

00:45:42   time this show is out, is Apple has a new TV commercial about privacy.

00:45:48   And then you have a piece in TechCrunch with a preview of it.

00:45:51   - Yeah, yeah, it's,

00:45:54   you know, been marketing privacy stuff for a while now.

00:45:58   I really don't think it's a, you know,

00:46:00   any secret to anybody that they view this as

00:46:02   a tool for marketing now,

00:46:05   as well as an internal, you know,

00:46:08   belief framework, whatever you wanna call it.

00:46:11   - Yeah.

00:46:13   - Certainly there's been, over the years,

00:46:15   They've had a natural inclination towards privacy and protecting users' data and that

00:46:25   sort of thing.

00:46:26   But it was only a couple of years ago that they really started to try it out as a marketing

00:46:30   tool and sort of positioning tool both in terms of personal speeches, things that Tim

00:46:35   Cook said, interviews and then also of course marketing.

00:46:39   Obviously there's big marketing efforts.

00:46:43   Apple had a big billboard at MWC with the iPhone, you know,

00:46:47   touting its privacy features and things like that.

00:46:49   Right. It was like what it was. Cause, but cause that's in Vegas,

00:46:52   it was like a, what, what happens?

00:46:54   No, no. MWC is in Barcelona.

00:46:57   Oh, well they had one in Vegas too. Oh, okay. Gotcha. It was like, what happens?

00:47:01   I didn't see that one. On your iPhone stays on your iPhone, you know,

00:47:03   playing off the, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

00:47:06   Catchphrase of this, of the city.

00:47:09   Yeah. It makes sense. Um, but anyhow,

00:47:12   They've been doing that for a while now. So this is a primetime TV commercial. It's going to be on their YouTube channel by the time you hear this.

00:47:18   And then, of course, you can see it in my piece. But the actual commercial is airing on primetime TV. So, you know, evening, wherever you are in the US.

00:47:31   That's going through March Madness. And then it's going to be airing, I think, worldwide after that in select regions.

00:47:39   But it's a you know, it's a big buy. It's an ad buy for them that they would normally buy it is an iPhone commercial, right at its core. But it's just the point of it is basically instead of Hey, here's the new iPhone, you should buy it because of the camera. It's here's the new iPhone, you should buy it because privacy. That's the sort of

00:47:58   sort of. And not to spoil it, but it's a commercial, so I don't mind spoiling it.

00:48:02   But it basically it doesn't tell you upfront it's an iPhone. You don't see people using

00:48:06   iPhones. You instead see people are in real life situations like using a public restroom

00:48:12   or a woman putting on makeup in a car and the guy next door is staring at her and she

00:48:17   just rolls the window up, you know, to get a little privacy. It's just a whole bunch

00:48:21   of maybe three, four second vignettes of places in real life where you might want a little

00:48:28   privacy in the public space and what people do to do it. Nothing's really hysterical,

00:48:35   but they're all vaguely amusing. But you're like, "Where's this?" I think part of

00:48:38   the gimmick of the ad is the first time you see it, where's it going? Who is this for?

00:48:43   And then the closure is, "Hey, if you want privacy, you care about privacy in real life,

00:48:48   you should care about it on your phone," or something like that.

00:48:50   - Exactly, and it's one of those ads

00:48:52   where the product really isn't in the commercial until--

00:48:56   - No, nobody has an iPhone out in it

00:48:58   throughout the entire commercial.

00:48:59   It's all about real life scenarios,

00:49:00   and that to me is the interesting angle.

00:49:02   Like it is amusing, it's a couple of things

00:49:04   that are kind of funny, but the underlying premise to me

00:49:09   really emphasizes how we've collectively

00:49:13   have gotten into this mess where our digital online lives

00:49:17   such a privacy nightmare is that in real life, it's sort of intuitive, you know, like the one,

00:49:25   you know, it's, you know, silliest form of privacy, but there's one where there's just a line of

00:49:30   urinals in a public restroom and one's being used and a guy is sort of absentmindedly walking up,

00:49:34   realizes he was going to take the one right next to the guy, and then just backs over and takes

00:49:39   one, you know, two spots away. Right. You, you, you don't even think about things like that. You

00:49:45   just intuitively think, "Oh, I'll take this one because it'll give me the most privacy

00:49:48   while I do it." And it's not so obvious online. And then in fact, as we've seen more and more,

00:49:59   a lot of it is insidious and you need to be like an expert level network wizard to even

00:50:08   figure out what's being tracked. There's no way that a normal person would even

00:50:14   realize how cookies are being used to get you the ad for the pair of boots you searched

00:50:22   for on Amazon on a movie preview site a week later.

00:50:27   It's not intuitive.

00:50:29   Yeah, the systems experts that build these systems are building them.

00:50:36   And you could, I think in many ways you could argue that their intent isn't necessarily

00:50:43   to obfuscate the fact that your information is passing through several hands before it,

00:50:49   you know, causes this effect or whatever the case may be. But the product, the result is

00:50:55   that. The result is that it obfuscates that stuff. So, it makes it completely unaware

00:51:00   to the normal person. And in many cases, not all, but many cases, they are intending to

00:51:06   obfuscate it because it doesn't do them any favors to explain it to you clearly. Just

00:51:12   sounds creepy, you know? You know, and to make a super obvious point, throughout history,

00:51:21   until very recently, your privacy could be regulated using just your natural senses,

00:51:29   you know, your sense of vision, your sense of hearing, you know, if you're in a restaurant,

00:51:35   and you're telling somebody something private, you regulate the volume of your voice in a

00:51:39   a very natural way without thinking about, you know, you just kind of know, like, "Hey,

00:51:46   there's somebody at the table right next to me. I'm going to speak to this in a lower

00:51:50   voice because I'm saying something I want to keep private." There is no way that your

00:51:56   five senses really help you online in terms of keeping track of that and what's being

00:52:00   stored and what's not and what's encrypted and what's not.

00:52:04   you know, and I think,

00:52:07   - Yeah, I mean, there's the closest thing that we have

00:52:09   to that kind of ESP is a network monitor, you know,

00:52:13   and most people don't know how to install those,

00:52:15   don't even know what they are,

00:52:16   and then even if you know what they are,

00:52:18   it's still a pain to use one,

00:52:20   and then you have to be able to interpret them,

00:52:22   and once again, they do their best to obfuscate,

00:52:25   you know, that traffic.

00:52:27   - Right, it's, you know, so technically you are using

00:52:30   your eyes to look at the output of the network monitor,

00:52:32   but it's a cerebral action to understand it

00:52:35   and to process it and see how to do it.

00:52:37   Whereas knowing to lower your shades

00:52:41   when you change your clothes or knowing to lower your voice

00:52:44   when you're speaking a secret, it's not cerebral at all.

00:52:48   It just comes naturally unless you're some sort of idiot.

00:52:51   I think it's a good ad.

00:52:56   I think it's a good ad and I think it's interesting

00:52:57   that Apple's doing a push around it.

00:53:00   And I know a lot of people out there aren't

00:53:02   quote unquote sports ball fans,

00:53:04   but like a big March Madness buy is pretty big

00:53:06   and it's a good way to reach a very broad audience.

00:53:09   It's certainly one of the most popular.

00:53:11   - It's a good 18 to 24 demo audience,

00:53:15   people with buying power, purchasing power.

00:53:17   So there's a lot of savvy that goes into these buys,

00:53:20   but that they would put, instead of the camera

00:53:23   or some other feature, screen,

00:53:27   that they would put privacy in that slot

00:53:29   is an interesting, certainly an interesting display

00:53:32   of how strongly they believe that that is

00:53:34   a differentiating factor for them.

00:53:37   You know, I don't know, I mean,

00:53:40   we don't have to discuss the ins and outs of all of it here,

00:53:43   but I absolutely think that people will,

00:53:46   and to some valid degree, you know, point out that,

00:53:49   well, I'm just gonna point it out,

00:53:53   taking an ethical or moral high ground

00:53:55   and making it a product feature is a,

00:53:59   a dangerous maneuver.

00:54:01   'Cause then you have to sort of, you have to back it up,

00:54:04   you have to realize that if you're gonna pitch this

00:54:08   as a product, that product has to work right, right?

00:54:10   It has to be consistent.

00:54:12   And they certainly, there's very many cases you can make

00:54:17   for the efforts that Apple has made to sort of

00:54:20   put the money where their mouth is

00:54:24   and certainly make effort to make sure

00:54:29   that their product decisions and sales decisions

00:54:34   and relationship with the consumer aligns well

00:54:37   with that message, right?

00:54:38   So they definitely do.

00:54:40   They're not just, it's not complete BS in other words.

00:54:43   But there's a, this spot for instance,

00:54:47   very, very closely associates the concepts

00:54:49   of privacy and security.

00:54:51   They're separate, but they're interrelated obviously, right?

00:54:54   And they've had some issues recently with like the FaceTime bug that allowed that kind of like eavesdropping thing, obviously unintentional, patched, you know, they apologized, etc. But then you have things like, you know, Facebook kind of being able to ship this sort of spyware or malware app. malware may be a little strong, but definitely spyware app on the App Store.

00:55:18   scattering of bad actors using the Enterprise Certificate Program to ship gambling apps,

00:55:24   other things that Apple doesn't allow on the store to iPhone users at scale. We're not talking about

00:55:30   just one example, but hundreds of thousands or more people. So they've had recent incidents that

00:55:36   have pointed out that it's not perfect. Their stance is not perfect. It's not a completely

00:55:43   pristine wall that they're offering. But I think, personally, I do feel that, you know, there's

00:55:52   still a major difference between a company that has a situational loss of privacy, either via a bug

00:55:57   or whatever, while having a system systemic dedication to privacy, and that most of the rest

00:56:03   of the ecosystem that exists out there operates as like with this invasion of privacy as a service

00:56:09   model. And there's a significant difference between those two things, between a company

00:56:14   that's willing to back up their stance, and to make honest and genuine and significant efforts

00:56:20   to keep user data private and to keep that data secure, of course, to then ensure the privacy.

00:56:25   And then, you know, a lot of what the rest of the industry does. Basically, you know, stating

00:56:31   privacy as your mission is still supportable, even if you have bugs, but attempting to ignore that

00:56:37   that you host the data platforms that thrive on this stuff is a little bit of

00:56:42   prestidigitation on their part. But I still think that they have a they have a leg to stand on

00:56:47   basically in this in this regard. I mentioned on my last episode with Renee, I won't go into a long

00:56:53   rant on it again, because it was a good rant on the last episode. But basically that to me,

00:56:57   the elephant in the room on Apple's pro privacy slant is very specific. And it's their it's their

00:57:04   deal with Google to make Google search the default search in Safari. And, you know, that's

00:57:10   a very tightly held secret. Neither company is I don't think officially revealed it.

00:57:15   But like Goldman Sachs has estimated it that last year, it was like $9 billion. And that

00:57:20   for this 2019, it's going to be like 12 billion or something like that. It's a lot

00:57:26   of money. And it's very hard to say, to me, there's there's a hole in the argument

00:57:32   or if they say we value your privacy and Google doesn't.

00:57:37   And I know they're not calling Google

00:57:38   or anybody else specifically out by name in this ad,

00:57:40   but they're certainly implying that every,

00:57:43   there's sort of an everybody else that isn't.

00:57:46   Yet we're going to take $10 billion

00:57:48   to give them the default web search,

00:57:50   which is one of the ways that they track you

00:57:54   and what you're searching for and they keep you logged in.

00:57:56   And when you log into any Google service

00:57:58   and they encourage you to log in just for using web search,

00:58:02   I'm not saying it makes them hypocrites, but it makes them at least partial hypocrites.

00:58:09   And just the thing that occurred to me after that episode, before this episode, but only

00:58:14   shortly enough before the episode that I searched for it for five minutes, was just to put $10

00:58:21   billion a year, because let's just call it that for the sake of argument, if it was estimated

00:58:25   at 9 billion last year and 12 billion this year, let's just say right now it's up to

00:58:28   10 billion a year.

00:58:31   does that compare to what these companies pay in corporate income tax? And Apple pays

00:58:38   more than anybody in corporate income tax. They paid something like $15 billion. So Apple

00:58:43   almost makes enough from Google to cover its corporate income tax. Google has had a very

00:58:49   flux the last three years, they got hit hard by the repatriation. So they paid a bigger

00:58:54   lump sum two years ago. But like in 2017, they only paid like $5 billion in US corporate

00:59:02   taxes. So they pay more they pay by what I'm looking at over the last few years, they pay

00:59:08   more on an annual basis to Apple to make Google search the default Safari search, then they

00:59:15   paid to the US government and corporate income tax, like a lot more, maybe arguably around

00:59:22   double. So that just puts it in scale just how much and the other thing I looked up is

00:59:27   Google last year, they had a record breaking year for revenue, they had 130 some billion

00:59:32   in revenue, and paid Apple roughly 10% of their revenue. Or at least they're paying

00:59:39   them this year, roughly 10% of last year's revenue to make to keep Google search the

00:59:44   default search in Safari, which puts it in scale and I think tells you just how unbelievably

00:59:52   profitable the iOS using audience is to Google in terms of how they make money from web ads.

01:00:01   **Matt Stauffer:** That's right. Yeah, it's insanely valuable

01:00:05   to them. I mean, it's like propping the door to your house open with a diamond because

01:00:11   it's that important that you get air. You know what I mean? It's nothing to that,

01:00:14   diamond is nothing to them compared to the diamond mine that they have. I mean, I think there's a

01:00:19   absolute argument that when it comes to Apple adjudicating what should be considered

01:00:26   a societal norm when it comes to the use of personal data on smartphones, if it's going

01:00:32   to be the absolute arbiter of what flies on the world's arguably most profitable application

01:00:38   Marketplace it might as well use that power to get a little bit more feisty because that make their living on our data, you know

01:00:45   So, you know, I don't know I think there's absolutely an argument for that

01:00:50   Hey while we're on this there was a story that broke and follow it closely because I just had a lot of other stuff to

01:00:56   Read but there was a story that broke that Facebook is under an actual criminal

01:01:00   investigation

01:01:02   did you see anything about this for privacy violations and that the if this was like in the Eastern District in New York and

01:01:08   and that two US cell phone manufacturers were like listed as like witnesses or something like that.

01:01:16   And I had a couple people say, "Do you think this is Apple? Do you think this is about like back

01:01:22   when Facebook was built into iOS?" And I was like, "I don't think it's Apple because it seems to me

01:01:28   like this is something different. This is like some kind of co-marketing deal where Facebook

01:01:32   was paying companies to allow them to collect data that was never prompted the user, even in

01:01:42   an obfuscated way to get their permission. It was like they made a deal with company X so that

01:01:48   Facebook was able to track certain things that a user used on company X's phones. But this thing

01:01:55   that was announced about it doesn't say who the companies are. So I don't know. And there aren't

01:02:00   that many US companies that make cell phones? I mean, there's Motorola. I'm trying to think

01:02:05   who else? I don't know. I feel like it's a story we have to keep our eyes on. We don't really know

01:02:10   much about it yet. Yeah, I don't know much about it either. I know. I've got people tracking it,

01:02:15   but I haven't personally been tracking it. So I don't know. I did know that it happened,

01:02:19   but that's about it. Yeah. We'll file it away for future episodes. All right. Let's,

01:02:24   well, I guess we could keep going with the Boeing thing. Do you want to talk about the

01:02:29   the Boeing thing. Are you an airplane nerd? I am a little bit of an aviation.

01:02:33   All right, let's go with the Boeing thing and then we'll take a break. You know, it's

01:02:36   tragedy. So it's hard. You know, on the one hand, I wanted to say this, you know, to anybody

01:02:40   if you know, happened in Ethiopia, the latest crash, so it may not be anybody listening

01:02:44   and knows anybody, but it's a tragedy. And I feel a little guilty nerding out on this.

01:02:49   Like it's a bug, you know, like the FaceTime bug that you mentioned, bad bug, really bad

01:02:55   bug. Nobody died. You know, we're talking about a thing here that left a couple hundred

01:02:58   people dead. Let's just acknowledge that that's a tragedy. But as nerds, I find the story,

01:03:05   the more I read about the story of this, the more fascinating it is as a tragedy of human

01:03:11   error. When I first saw it, when I first saw the story, I saw that another plane had crashed.

01:03:20   The first one was, where was the first one? Indonesia or something? I forget. But you

01:03:25   a second foreign somewhere else around the world is Boeing 737 Max 8, which is their latest model

01:03:31   for a single aisle passenger plane, meaning it's small enough. Mostly I'm guessing almost everybody

01:03:38   listening to this has been on a 737 or an Airbus 320 or 321. Just a typical single aisle plane,

01:03:46   three seats on the side and coach two seats on each side and first class or business.

01:03:51   Second one had gone down and because it was the second time since October a lot of places around the world

01:03:58   Just sort of hit the panic button and said, okay, let's ground these planes

01:04:01   And the FAA in the US didn't and Canada didn't

01:04:05   And the FAA is kind of considered the gold standard for this sort of thing around the world

01:04:13   At least in my opinion there I was talking to Ben Thompson is also an aviation earner and he agreed

01:04:18   And so it's a little weird that everybody else didn't follow the FAA lead, but instead

01:04:23   they grounded them while the FAA was still saying, we, we, you know, we think this is

01:04:27   okay.

01:04:28   And Boeing was still saying, we think this plane's okay.

01:04:34   But as more and more,

01:04:35   Yeah, and the FAA has always been aggressive.

01:04:38   It falls across all kinds of regulatory things.

01:04:41   I mean, anytime you ask yourself a question about, you know, why does some nonsensical

01:04:45   thing happen with air travel or planes or grounding or delays. It's usually, you know,

01:04:50   because the FAA is being overly cautious, right? They're typically known for being relatively

01:04:54   conservative, right? And the reason, you know, and, and the results show it air travel historically

01:05:01   has been a very safe way to travel. Famously, everybody knows that statistically to go from

01:05:06   point a to point B in a motor vehicle on the road, no matter what type of motor vehicle,

01:05:12   have a way higher chance of being injured or killed way higher than you do in air travel.

01:05:16   It's really the safest way to go from point A to point B statistically. But psychologically,

01:05:22   if for obvious reasons, you know, putting yourself into an aluminum tube, 30,000 feet

01:05:28   in the air is not exactly something we're hooked up to accept psychologically by evolution.

01:05:34   You know, if you're up in the air, more than a few about to die, you're you're in big trouble,

01:05:41   alone 30,000 feet. So psychologically, and you know, I, so I'm not making fun of anybody

01:05:46   who has flight anxiety. I tend not to. But I totally understand it. It is easily one

01:05:53   of the most understandable phobias from even a rational sense just because it just seems

01:05:58   crazy. But the long story short of this is that Boeing really put themselves as, as I

01:06:08   I understand it, Boeing put themselves in a bad hole because they were developing the

01:06:11   787, which was a bigger plane, um, and decided to develop it in a different way for Boeing,

01:06:19   where they outsourced a lot of it as opposed to doing it in house and thinking that would

01:06:25   save money. And it was, it didn't, it led to all sorts of delays and delays cost them

01:06:32   money, tons of money. So it ended up costing them a lot more and the 787 was very late.

01:06:38   And because of that, they sort of got like the moneymaker is the 737. And I think most of us

01:06:47   who fly frequently know that most of you're way more likely to end up on a 737 or A320

01:06:53   size plane than you are a bigger bird 747. - Yeah, there's a fuel efficiency and route length.

01:07:00   Yeah, and just how many passengers they expect on the plane. They're not going to fly an

01:07:03   empty plane. They're only going to use those big ones when they can fill the seats. And

01:07:08   who knows, maybe on a lot of them, it'd be easier to fly two smaller planes than one

01:07:12   bigger plane to get everybody from city A to city B. But the 737 has long class has

01:07:19   long been Boeing's big moneymaker. And but they sort of let it languish while they were

01:07:25   wasting all this money on the 787 and in the meantime their arch rival Airbus has come

01:07:31   out with a new 320, the 320 Neo I believe it's called, which has bigger engines. The

01:07:38   bigger engines make it more fuel efficient. I believe it, I believe the exact number is

01:07:43   14%. So if you replace like a regular, you know, the previous 320 with the new 320, you

01:07:47   save 14% on each trip on fuel, which is super significant, you can imagine.

01:07:55   And in the meantime, Boeing didn't really have anything and really was originally planning

01:08:00   to do a ground up. We're going to make an all new airplane to replace our 737. Who knows,

01:08:05   they probably would have come up with a new number for them. But their single engine or

01:08:09   single aisle, which is something I hadn't really thought of before, but it's a great

01:08:12   way to describe this class of plane, the single aisle passenger plane, they they decided we're

01:08:18   too late, you know, like we don't have enough time to do this Airbus is killing you know,

01:08:23   taking our business and this is our most profitable thing. And so they're like, well, what can

01:08:26   we do with the 737 to, um, to get a new 37, 737 into this with the fuel efficiency, uh,

01:08:38   that led them to put bigger engines on a 737, which in turn changed the aerodynamics of

01:08:42   a plane that wasn't originally designed for it and notoriously as sort of low wings and

01:08:48   doesn't really have a lot of room. And the other x factor is that to keep costs down.

01:08:57   This is something I had no idea about that pilot certification is such that you can come

01:09:00   out with like a new 320 that like the 320 neo if a pilot is already certified on the

01:09:05   previous 320 the 320 neo is sufficiently similar that they count as certified on the neo. And

01:09:13   If it's new, too new and too different, and the pilots all have to be recertified, that's

01:09:18   a big cost for the airline because they've got to spend all this money to get all of

01:09:22   these pilots certified on a new plane.

01:09:24   And so this and this is where it all went bad for Boeing.

01:09:27   I think they they put this software MCA as some kind of automatic control system in that

01:09:36   way, modified the, you know, the flight pattern of the plane automatically to somehow make

01:09:41   it fly more similarly to previous 3737s? And can you take it from here?

01:09:48   Yeah, I mean, the automated software was a it absolutely was a a pilot assist feature. Right?

01:10:10   Right. And the pilot assist feature was a, I think it was mostly like an altitude related feature.

01:10:19   Yeah, I did read that.

01:10:20   So, yeah.

01:10:22   And an angle of attack.

01:10:23   Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And you're basically what you have in a plane is like, there's a,

01:10:29   there's the most efficient way to fly it. And then there's like the safest way to fly it. And usually,

01:10:34   you know, you're somewhere in between because you want to, you don't make your flight efficient,

01:10:37   but you want to make it, you know, you also want it to, you know, come in safely. So there was,

01:10:45   like, the, they analyzed the flight pattern of the crashed jet, and they looked at it at takeoff,

01:10:52   and they looked at the Lion Air crash. And they saw that they basically showed similar fluctuations

01:10:59   in height, like vertical, what they call them oscillation or fluctuations in height. And they

01:11:04   basically were able to, once they looked at the wreckage and analyzed it, they were able to do

01:11:11   that, take that and satellite tracking and understand that they needed to investigate

01:11:15   further and that it was very likely this software package that was, you know, the issue and the

01:11:21   pilots reported on the Ethiopian Airlines flight reported flight control problems to the aircraft

01:11:28   controller before they came down. But the computerized system that they put in place was a

01:11:34   it was supposed to basically assist them

01:11:37   in keeping the proper altitude to get the proper lift,

01:11:40   but what happened is after,

01:11:42   if it decided that it was not working right,

01:11:46   it would just cut out,

01:11:50   and then they couldn't take proper control over it.

01:11:53   - Yeah.

01:11:54   I got an email from somebody who obviously knows

01:11:56   exactly what he's talking about.

01:11:57   He wrote his PhD dissertation on the complexity

01:12:00   of commercial airline cockpits.

01:12:04   And it was a super, super interesting email.

01:12:06   But like one of the things he said is,

01:12:10   as you might expect, this is probably no surprise to you,

01:12:12   but like a sensor on an airplane,

01:12:14   a faulty sensor, a sensor that has, you know,

01:12:18   like it needs a complete fleet wide recall.

01:12:21   The difference might be 99.99% accurate versus,

01:12:26   or success rate versus 99.999% accurate.

01:12:31   Like this is, it's not like, you know,

01:12:33   it's like a one in 10,000 thing,

01:12:34   one in 10,000 is unacceptable in the airline industry. And one of the problems with this

01:12:38   MCAS system is that it was relying entirely on one sensor to detect the thing that it was trying to

01:12:45   detect and that one sensor people are suspecting may have a higher than acceptable prosperity to

01:12:52   give an erroneous result. Yeah, basically the MCAS given the very, very tiny amount of like

01:13:02   Difference that it saw that was like a 20 degree difference an angle of attack

01:13:06   Between the left and right sides of the plane and so it basically kept taking the yoke out of the pilots hands

01:13:13   Yeah

01:13:13   And pushing it forward like pushing the nose down and then they basically had to keep yanking the the yoke back up forcing it

01:13:20   Yeah to come back up

01:13:22   So the other thing that this this guy's email said and I haven't read this anywhere else and he said this is speculation

01:13:26   And so this could you know, this could be wrong and who knows so, you know, this is a podcast so it's alright

01:13:31   But on on most other commercial airliners one of the one of the ways to just to to disable all

01:13:39   Autopilot features is to just pull back hard on the yoke you pull back hard enough on the yoke and all autopilot

01:13:46   Oh, you don't yeah, you don't want me to take in control anything autopilot related turns off, you know

01:13:51   And then there's switches and he thinks that with this MCS thing. It's only a switch

01:13:57   Got it. And so yeah that oscillation specifically cover controls trim

01:14:03   I believe and is basically it if they'd have known I don't think they even knew that's what the

01:14:10   Conclusion is so far that they didn't even know the MCS was causing the problem, right?

01:14:15   So they didn't know to switch it off right so they could have but yes

01:14:19   I believe you're right

01:14:20   Like it wasn't this thing where it was kind of connected to the autopilot features where they grab the yoke and yank it and they expect

01:14:27   Okay, I'm back in control of this thing. And in fact, the MCS was still at work, still with its faulty data about about angle of attack, and it's pushing the nose of the plane down. Yeah. And they didn't know to switch it off. If they just switched it off, they could have gained control back. Right. But since they didn't know that it was the issue, they couldn't actually do it. Right. And those oscillations you're referring to on both flights were exactly like 15 seconds apart each time. So they would like take control.

01:14:56   and be like, okay, we got it. And then 15 seconds later, it would dive again. And they were like,

01:15:00   you know, I'm sure they were panicking. I'm sure. Well, probably not panicking because pilots are,

01:15:04   you know, trained, you know, their pilots, because they don't, but they were probably

01:15:07   in aviation called being behind the plane. And that's when you don't understand why a

01:15:11   plane is doing something. And that's what I think the state that they entered into was,

01:15:15   it's you end up in this scenario where you are trying to make corrections for something,

01:15:20   but you don't know the cause of it. Right. But having these, you know, you'd, you'd,

01:15:23   you'd get the plane going back up, and then 15 seconds later, the plane would decide itself to

01:15:29   point the nose down. And then 15 seconds later, the same thing happens. It does look exactly like

01:15:34   a software problem. Like 15 seconds is when it, you know, the scent, you know, the thing goes,

01:15:38   let's take a reading up reading still bad go down. Whereas like they said, like an often form of

01:15:44   oscillation in general, of course, is turbulence, but turbulence doesn't tend to come at exact 15

01:15:49   second intervals. It might be seven seconds, then 20 seconds, then 17 seconds because it's

01:15:57   a natural phenomenon, not something written in software. I thought the yoke argument, and again,

01:16:02   speculation from somebody, I didn't read that in a confirmed thing, but I do think as a user

01:16:08   interface nerd, I think that's super interesting because what is the best user interface for a

01:16:13   Pilot to take control of the airplane from autopilot that that they suspect is gone awry pull back on the yoke, right?

01:16:21   Mm-hmm pull back on the yoke disconnects it, you know

01:16:25   I mean isn't that how I don't really use cruise control a lot on cars

01:16:31   But isn't isn't like when you hit the brake cruise control goes off. Usually it's a break tap

01:16:35   Yeah, and and I don't remember and I mean I've had cars to cruise control for years and I think feel I should know this

01:16:42   But I think some cars most cars perhaps with cruise control if you hit the gas it does not disengage it

01:16:49   It allows you to speed up right and it will fall back to this last setting, right? Yeah

01:16:53   Yeah

01:16:53   That's how my cruise control works is gas you can use to go a little faster than you had it set and then it just drops

01:16:58   You're right back to where you had it set which for me is usually still extremely fast, you know

01:17:02   91 92 miles an hour

01:17:05   But brake is like okay turn off the cruise control

01:17:08   which is obvious sense and you don't want somebody stabbing at the little cruise control button on the

01:17:13   Steering wheel to disable it, you know, and again, I'm not trying to you know, it's an oversimplification to compare driving a

01:17:22   Honda with

01:17:24   Flying a 737 max but still there's that moment of I got a you know, oh

01:17:29   What's your instinct and as a driver you hit the brake and as a pilot you pull back on the yoke?

01:17:33   Especially if the problem is the nose going down

01:17:37   so

01:17:39   it's sort of a user interface problem sort of a corporate planning problem sort of a a

01:17:44   Cheapskate bureaucracy problem in terms of this, you know

01:17:51   The whole reason for this software patch in the first place was to avoid having to retrain

01:17:55   Pilots on this plane that they probably should have had to now, you know, not again

01:18:01   Maybe there's you know, there's nothing fundamental any fundamentally wrong with these planes

01:18:05   but if the pilots had been retrained on them as though they were the

01:18:08   new planes they should have been treated as

01:18:11   It every every pilot would have known what to do how to identify it and what to do

01:18:16   Yeah

01:18:19   yeah, I mean it's

01:18:21   the software assistance is

01:18:24   One of those things that you know, I mean obviously has existed and will existed

01:18:32   or will exist for forever, you know with with aviation, but it is a

01:18:37   There's a reason that we still have human pilots, you know, and there's a reason that almost every aviation disaster that's averted

01:18:46   can be linked almost directly to pilot experience and that you know,

01:18:51   That's that's just this right in the pocket of this thing, you know that happened here

01:18:56   One of the things I read is that Boeing has a reputation in the world of aviation as being a very

01:19:01   Pilot forward company that they've always thought the pilot should be at the center of this, you know that they're not trying to

01:19:07   Obviate pilots, they're they're trying to help them but that they've you know famous, you know

01:19:13   Maybe more than other companies have designed around

01:19:15   We just wanted we're gonna assume that there's an expert pilot at the at the helm at all times

01:19:20   Mm-hmm. Yeah, and how do we augment their ability to keep the the plane safe and you know

01:19:26   know, fly the plane rather than how do we supplant them as a decision maker, which is,

01:19:32   I think, you know, it's definitely an argument for and against in the aviation industry because

01:19:36   they feel that, you know, pilots get tired and they're human and they're fallible and

01:19:40   all of this stuff. But yeah, it's the back and forth over that.

01:19:44   Pete: Right. And then the other thing that looks really damning, and I know it's only

01:19:47   five reports, but the Dallas Morning News found five reports that pilots had filed over

01:19:54   last few months ever since the Lion Air crash in October, flying 737 Max 8 planes in the United

01:20:03   States. And all seemingly with the in the same scenario shortly after takeoff, a bit of a loss,

01:20:11   you know, the nose goes down. And you know, these guys all figured out it's the luckily, I guess,

01:20:17   or, you know, all figured out it was this MCS system disabled it took control of the

01:20:22   plane, everything was right afterwards. But one of the complaints from the pilot called it like,

01:20:28   use the actual word unconscionable that, you know, that the manual that they had for the

01:20:32   plane doesn't really emphasize this enough, you know, that they sort of had to figure it out on

01:20:36   the fly. Which again, speaks to this whole, not that there's anything wrong with the plane,

01:20:44   but that there's something wrong with trying to say this, if you're good on any previous 37,

01:20:49   you're good on this new one. And it really wasn't, you know, and that's purely for financial reasons,

01:20:53   which is a really bad look when it when the stakes are so high. Right. The other conclusion to draw

01:21:02   from this, I have to say, you know, again, it's a bit of speculation, but it's a bad look at the

01:21:07   moment, at least is that like you said, the FAA and my understanding is the FAA has a reputation

01:21:12   of being aggressive on calling for like grounding of a plane or, you know, calling, you know,

01:21:19   doing something, even if it means greatly inconveniencing air travelers, you know, in

01:21:24   the name of safety and that the FAA was last to do it. And Boeing happens to be the US

01:21:32   manufacturer sort of is a bad look at the moment. And I wouldn't be surprised if that

01:21:36   turns into some aspect of the scandal. You know, that if this had been an Airbus plane

01:21:43   with the same problem in those two countries, maybe they would have pulled the trigger on

01:21:47   grounding them sooner.

01:21:48   Jared: Mm hmm. Yeah, that's so true. And you know, it really sucks, you know, that

01:21:56   you have to think this way. This didn't stay in age, but it really does. I mean, you

01:22:00   know, some people who are, and I'm not by any means a Washington insider or nor do I

01:22:06   follow this stuff. But in some people who hear this may be like, yeah, duh, you know, this is

01:22:11   the way the world works. But, you know, the moment like Trump tweeted something about, you know,

01:22:17   hey, this is, you know, we're gonna ground these things or whatever, they should be grounded, etc.

01:22:21   And then the FAA quickly announced that they were doing it. I don't know which came first or

01:22:26   whatever. But the first thing I did was I thought to myself, let me Google who the senators are in

01:22:33   in Illinois where Boeing is headquartered. And they're both Democratic.

01:22:37   Dave: No, you mean--

01:22:38   Chris: Just Democratic Senator.

01:22:39   Dave; Seattle, is it? I thought they were a Seattle, Washington company.

01:22:41   Chris; Oh, I think Boeing Corporation is in Chicago, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, but

01:22:47   you know, it doesn't really matter even if that was the case in this case. But it's

01:22:51   the political and money motivations, you know, behind, "Yeah, keep these Boeings in the

01:22:56   air. You know, that's bad press. We can't have them having that. We'll fix it quietly."

01:22:59   or I'm gonna say something about it

01:23:02   because it'll hurt the other guy.

01:23:04   It doesn't matter.

01:23:04   It doesn't matter if that was the case here.

01:23:06   It always is the case.

01:23:07   - Well, in addition to Boeing,

01:23:10   the other two big corporations that are most direct,

01:23:13   US corporations most directly involved

01:23:15   are Southwest and American Airlines

01:23:17   'cause they're the two that have purchased the most of them

01:23:20   or have the most in their active fleet.

01:23:22   So like for Southwest, you'd wanna look at Texas

01:23:24   where you've got, I know offhand,

01:23:26   you've got Cornrin and Ted Cruz

01:23:28   who are Republican senators.

01:23:29   Although Cruz, I saw that Cruz who heads like a Senate committee on aviation was calling

01:23:35   for them to be grounded before the FAA actually said it.

01:23:38   So I'll just point that out that from what I've seen about that, I don't think there

01:23:44   was an angle there that like Ted Cruz was pushing for them to stay in the air because

01:23:48   of Southwest Airlines being headquartered in Texas.

01:23:51   I think the opposite.

01:23:52   I think Ted Cruz was a little bit ahead of the curve on, you know, let's put these things

01:23:56   on the ground.

01:23:57   Anyway, I don't think Boeing has handled this well in my opinion because Boeing also was

01:24:01   you know

01:24:04   defending it and even to this point and and even you know, they've they're grounded worldwide, but they

01:24:10   didn't get out ahead of this and I all I can think of to compare it to is the

01:24:15   The Tylenol scandal which I don't have in front of me, but do you remember you were probably yeah kid

01:24:20   Oh, yeah, I was but I do remember it probably from discussion later on not at the moment

01:24:26   So I again didn't do the research,

01:24:30   but so I'll speak off the top of my head

01:24:31   and probably get something wrong.

01:24:32   But at some point in the 80s,

01:24:34   at some point in the 80s,

01:24:36   some psychopath working in a factory,

01:24:39   it put like cyanide in a bunch of Tylenol packaging

01:24:42   and people, I think people died.

01:24:44   Not too many, but you know,

01:24:47   but it somehow it was quickly determined

01:24:51   that these people had all taken Tylenol

01:24:54   and Tylenol figured out where these packages had come from,

01:24:57   from the serial numbers on the packaging,

01:24:59   and they knew very quickly,

01:25:02   they could have said, just take all cereal,

01:25:04   everything that came out of this,

01:25:06   like let's say plant, take them all off the shelves.

01:25:09   But instead what they did, and very quickly,

01:25:12   is like the CEO of Tylenol said,

01:25:14   "Take anything with the word Tylenol on it,

01:25:17   "of any product from any place,

01:25:18   "take it all off the shelves and destroy it all.

01:25:20   "Just let's get rid of it all

01:25:22   to be as safe as possible, even knowing that that was actually well above and beyond what they

01:25:29   needed. They knew where this guy worked, they figured it out, they could have just taken off

01:25:33   the products that might have been from the place where he worked. But by doing that, it like kept

01:25:41   the Tylenol brand from being tarnished in the least. Like, like, worldwide people were like,

01:25:47   yeah, I can still, you know, even though people had just been poisoned by Tylenol, they bought

01:25:51   the fact that like, you know, with within days of this thing even happening, the CEO is saying,

01:25:56   let's just destroy every every bit of it worldwide. And, you know, you know, and then they

01:26:01   came up with tamper proof packaging, etc, etc. You know, back when I was a kid, you just open a pack

01:26:06   of pills from the store and you didn't have to poke holes in anything. It was right. But famously

01:26:14   considered one of the sages. public relations moves an executive has ever made, you know,

01:26:22   and who knows how many untold millions, hundreds of millions who how much money and Tylenol

01:26:28   product was destroyed. You know, that didn't need to be, but it was all in the name of

01:26:33   let's not forget that whatever many millions or billions of dollars of Tylenol is out there.

01:26:39   I think they even told people to throw the Tylenol out in their home, you know,

01:26:42   if you've got any talent on your home, throw it out. And, you know, it also I think there's a lot

01:26:51   of people who would think, well, that's, that's the risky PR move, right? The risky PR move is to

01:26:56   be there saying, throw it all out, you know, sure. But in hindsight, it's considered, you know,

01:27:03   an active, you know, to borrow a Phil Schiller term courage, you know, and I think everybody

01:27:08   would agree it was and everybody agrees in hindsight, it was the right way to do it.

01:27:12   I can't help but think that maybe Boeing should have been way ahead of the curve, like after this

01:27:18   Ethiopia, this second crash, and saying, Hey, we don't think there's anything wrong with these

01:27:23   planes, but we would like everybody around the world to ground them while we do conduct a thorough

01:27:28   investigation. I can't help but think that that was a better way for Boeing to play this,

01:27:34   especially from everything I've read in the last like 48 hours.

01:27:40   Yeah, I mean it just seems so obvious, you know, that you would just go ground them immediately

01:27:47   until we figure it out, you know, and we'll figure out, we'll help the airlines figure out how to get

01:27:53   you where you need to go, but we can't use these planes. It's just, you know, after even the first

01:27:58   crash, because it's, it was obvious with the first crash that there was some sort of plane fall and

01:28:03   it's like, I don't know, systemic, you know? And that's, it just boggles, it boggles.

01:28:11   Money really screws with people. It really does.

01:28:16   Yeah, there's like an old saying, "Once is chance, twice is coincidence, third time is a pattern."

01:28:22   And I kind of feel with something like air travel, once you get to twice,

01:28:27   You lower that by at least once. I say, yeah, you lower it by at least one, I think.

01:28:33   I think you say two is a pattern and write an act from there.

01:28:37   And I have to say that's as contrary to my initial read

01:28:39   over the weekend when I wasn't really paying attention.

01:28:42   I kind of feel like I, as a non-expert, total non-expert

01:28:47   and not even really an aviation nerd,

01:28:49   although I'm suddenly turning into one with this.

01:28:52   There was a story I linked to,

01:28:55   his name is John Ostrower.

01:29:02   he writes, he's a longtime aviation industry reporter, and he writes his own website now

01:29:06   called The Air Current. And he had a great piece, I linked to it from during Fireball yesterday,

01:29:10   I learned a lot from it. Really, a lot of what I said before was just restating what I learned

01:29:15   from him. But he had a comment, you know, he's well sourced. So he, you know, it's anonymous

01:29:20   sources. But somebody in the aviation industry said that if these two crashes had happened,

01:29:25   one in October and one in March, but the airlines had been Southwest and American, they they would

01:29:31   would have grounded these planes hours after the second one. It was the fact that there

01:29:36   was sort of a bias within the FAA that, "Well, who knows how good Ethiopian Airlines is?"

01:29:42   Like they don't maintain their planes or their pilots are subpar.

01:29:46   And I hate to say that my sort of casual read from the news over the weekend might have

01:29:51   been along the same lines. Like I might have just as a knee-jerk pundit screaming at the

01:29:57   government what to do. I might have had a different take too.

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01:34:31   support of the talk show I don't want to spend too much time on it because I want to nerd

01:34:38   out on Disney but I'm sure you read the Elizabeth Warren let's break up these tech companies

01:34:43   thing. Yeah. And her initial, it was a post on medium and it was, uh, of course, uh, focused

01:34:54   on Amazon, Facebook and Google. Uh, and then, uh, I think she was at South by Southwest.

01:35:00   I think that the, the medium post was timed for that. And, uh, the verge got an interview

01:35:07   with her and asked the obvious question that there's one company that's obviously missing

01:35:11   from that. And she said, Apple, and they're like, What do you want to break Apple up to?

01:35:15   And she said, Oh, yeah. I have a lot of thoughts on this. And I haven't been able to express

01:35:22   it. Number one, a lot of what she's saying isn't really breaking these companies up.

01:35:26   I get it, you know, but like 18, the old AT&T, the old mob bell thing that was breaking up

01:35:33   a monopoly that was taking a nationwide company and breaking it up to a bunch of regional,

01:35:38   much smaller companies. You know what she's proposing in each of these cases isn't really

01:35:44   breaking up with possibly the exception of Facebook which I guess would kind of qualify

01:35:49   as a breakup because I think what you know the gist of her argument with Facebook is

01:35:52   that they shouldn't be allowed to own Instagram and WhatsApp too. And so I guess in the work

01:35:58   component parts they could become component parts again it sort of makes sense. Yeah it

01:36:02   It also seems like the less, you know, it, yeah, it's breaking up Facebook, the corporation,

01:36:08   but not breaking up Facebook, the thing that we think of as Facebook. And honestly, probably

01:36:15   not a bad idea. Like of all of the parts, like I, my thoughts on her advice for these

01:36:21   companies range from, hmm, this Facebook thing maybe ought to be pursued. And, you know,

01:36:31   The Instagram thing, when that was approved,

01:36:34   I forget what year it was.

01:36:35   I know they bought them for the, at this point,

01:36:37   famously good value of $1 billion.

01:36:40   I don't know that--

01:36:42   - It's also known as one Instagram for quite a while.

01:36:45   - What?

01:36:46   - 'Cause that's like, that we use that,

01:36:48   oh, how many Instagrams, two Instagrams?

01:36:51   That's what they bought it for.

01:36:52   - When they bought WhatsApp for 20 Instagrams,

01:36:56   I feel like we as a country at that point

01:36:59   should have known better and that one should not have been approved.

01:37:07   With Amazon, well with Google, she's got this argument, I hate to paraphrase it all, but

01:37:15   basically her problem with Google, I mostly agree with too, which is that they shouldn't

01:37:19   be able to leverage Google search to favor their other properties.

01:37:24   - Right, I mean that's something that,

01:37:26   (laughing)

01:37:28   Stop Open from Yelp has been screaming about for years.

01:37:31   - Yeah. - You know what I mean?

01:37:32   I mean, people have been pissed about that

01:37:33   for a very long time.

01:37:35   And in fact, they have been fined several times

01:37:38   over this scenario where they were taking,

01:37:41   saying like, oh hey, you can pay for an ad

01:37:44   to go above a competitor's thing.

01:37:46   But then they're putting their own listings,

01:37:48   when you just search for a random thing,

01:37:50   you think you're getting the listing that you search for,

01:37:52   where really you're getting something that pays Google.

01:37:54   So they're earning money on both sides of the deal.

01:37:57   - So I'm amenable to that argument and I'm with you.

01:38:01   Like Yelp is a really good example

01:38:03   where that really does seem like what they did to Yelp.

01:38:06   I mean, Yelp is still around.

01:38:07   They haven't put Yelp out of business,

01:38:09   but I do think that they damaged Yelp

01:38:11   in a way that qualifies as traditional

01:38:13   illegal anti-competitive behavior

01:38:16   where they leveraged Google search

01:38:18   to favor their own listings for these restaurants

01:38:20   and encouraged people to rank them and rate them

01:38:23   and do Yelp-like user things

01:38:26   so that Google could build their own Yelp-like service.

01:38:29   But it is, I have to say though, it is hard.

01:38:36   It is a little bit to me less cut and dry.

01:38:38   The analogy in the tech world I think would be

01:38:40   to the Windows, the Microsoft Windows antitrust saga

01:38:44   of the '90s where one of the things they were accused of

01:38:49   was favoring their own office apps over competitors

01:38:53   like Lotus 1, 2, 3, and WordPerfect, and et cetera.

01:38:58   But even that, and I've said this over the years

01:39:02   on the show a lot, even, you know,

01:39:04   I don't have the archive going back far enough

01:39:06   at Daring Fireball to say it,

01:39:08   but even as a strong Mac fan at the time,

01:39:13   and someone who did not see Microsoft's incredible dominance

01:39:19   the industry as a good thing for the industry. I always felt about the whole antitrust argument

01:39:25   because to me, yes, they did take some actions against those apps. You know, to they leverage

01:39:34   the windows monopoly in ways that favored office in certain ways, and there probably

01:39:38   should have been some action against them. But in other ways, I felt like the arguments

01:39:43   against it. We're missing the ways that Microsoft just won in some ways fair and square. Like

01:39:49   it was Microsoft that had the idea to bundle all three to make all three the spreadsheet,

01:39:54   the word processor and what am I missing? What's the third part of an office suite?

01:40:00   Oh, the PowerPoint. Oh yes. Presentation to do all three and bundle them as a suite. And

01:40:07   remember, most of those things were sold by seats back then, and they were very expensive,

01:40:13   you know, like a copy of word was like 300 bucks. And they were the ones who were like,

01:40:18   well, you could pay 300 bucks each for $900 or we'll bundle them all together for $600

01:40:24   or something like that, you know, which, you know, in hindsight, you know, today's world,

01:40:28   you think $600 for a copy of a word processor and a spreadsheet seems like a lot of money.

01:40:34   You know, that was the world we're in then, but you could get this bundle for less. And they did

01:40:38   a lot of work to make them work together so that you could put spreadsheets in your word docs and

01:40:44   PowerPoint and, you know, get a spreadsheet into PowerPoint, etc, etc. That, that having, you know,

01:40:51   a word processor from one company like Word Perfect, and your spreadsheet from Lotus, you

01:40:57   didn't get that integration. There were things Microsoft did that part of the rise of office

01:41:01   wasn't wasn't just cheating. Similarly, with Google search that at some point, you know,

01:41:08   if the best if the whole idea is that if it's truly honest, if they're just being the most

01:41:13   honest search engine, they can be and you type words in the field and hit return, and

01:41:19   they're making their best guess as to what it is you're looking for. It might be another

01:41:23   Google product, right? Right. It's it. Like, it's not easy. It's not easy to say that they

01:41:29   shouldn't ever put other Google products at the top of the search list. It requires nuance, you know.

01:41:37   And we get to Amazon, and her argument with Amazon to me makes no sense at all. This is the point

01:41:46   where to me, her argument belies to me, she doesn't really seem to understand how Amazon works.

01:41:55   She keeps talking about these product platforms or, or something like that. And she doesn't want

01:42:01   Amazon to act as its own store if they're running a product marketplace, you know, which is what

01:42:06   Amazon has evolved into where other sellers, I think we're all familiar with this now that

01:42:11   you search for something on Amazon and you look for who the seller is. It may not be Amazon. It's,

01:42:16   you know, quite often not, uh, you know, that you and I can start a company selling, you know,

01:42:23   coffee cup lids or something like that. And rather than sell them through Matthew and John's coffee

01:42:29   cup lid company.com or in addition to we can sell them through Amazon and when people search for

01:42:34   them on Amazon now, they'll get them through there. But basically, I don't think this is a

01:42:42   stretch. What she's saying is that Amazon shouldn't be allowed to operate its own store, which is what

01:42:47   what most people think of Amazon as.

01:42:49   - Yeah, I mean, the problem with the arguments about Amazon

01:42:54   and to some degree arguments about these other companies

01:42:58   is that when you don't have like a true technical

01:43:03   understanding of what they are and how they do what they do,

01:43:06   I'm not saying that you shouldn't be able to comment on it.

01:43:09   There are certain market forces at play, for instance,

01:43:11   it's somebody who doesn't understand the technical aspects,

01:43:14   but somebody who does understand the fiscal aspects of it

01:43:17   are even more qualified to talk about.

01:43:19   They're like, "I don't care how it's done,

01:43:20   here's why it's wrong," right?

01:43:22   But I don't think it's being tackled that way.

01:43:24   I think when you tackle things on technical merit

01:43:28   or on precise methods of execution of what they do,

01:43:33   your arguments can be often blunted or distorted

01:43:38   or made ineffective by not truly understanding

01:43:41   the way that these things work.

01:43:43   And I think that's one of the sort of benefits to having, you know, people who truly understand

01:43:49   this stuff, write about it and talk about it and kind of analyze it is because they understand that

01:43:54   if you talk about these things, and you have a platform like Elizabeth Warren does, to say, Hey,

01:44:00   maybe these companies are too powerful, we should examine that what what should we do about it,

01:44:05   you need to get your technical arguments correct. Because if you don't, it blunts the efficacy of

01:44:09   your argument. Yeah,

01:44:11   One of her arguments and it's like the most highlighted into the way that medium shows you the most highlighted

01:44:15   Passage in an article the one that's most highlighted

01:44:19   And I don't know if that's because people are agreeing with it or because people are selecting it to say like what the hell is

01:44:23   She talking about is she's saying like hey the government

01:44:26   Busted up Microsoft in in the 90s. Aren't you glad that we get to use Google for web search instead of Bing and

01:44:34   That really wasn't

01:44:39   It's a nonsense sentence essentially.

01:44:41   - It's, yeah, Google A wasn't even a thing at that time.

01:44:46   It was actually all about,

01:44:49   well, part of the argument was about Netscape,

01:44:50   which most, you know, if she said like,

01:44:52   "Aren't you glad we still get to use Netscape

01:44:55   instead of being forced to use IE?"

01:44:58   That would actually be a little bit more accurate

01:45:01   as to what the case was about,

01:45:02   and everybody would be like, "I don't use IE.

01:45:04   I don't use Netscape."

01:45:06   Right?

01:45:07   - Yeah, exactly.

01:45:08   I mean, being the most highlighted thing

01:45:10   makes you wonder whether it's being highlighted ironically

01:45:14   or being highlighted genuinely.

01:45:17   And that kind of statement, like using Google

01:45:20   instead of being stuck with Bing,

01:45:22   A, it's painting Bing as an inferior product,

01:45:25   which I think many people would make an argument

01:45:27   that it is, sure, great.

01:45:29   So we're stuck with Bing.

01:45:31   Okay, well that's the result of what you did to Microsoft,

01:45:36   of what the government did to Microsoft.

01:45:37   know. So anyhow, I yeah, it's it is it's wheels within wheels of how you can pick the argument

01:45:44   apart. Well, I think that's what the point I was trying to make. It's a weak argument. It's like,

01:45:48   it could be the point of the argument is actually worth talking about. But having a weak argument

01:45:53   does it as a disservice? It does the conversation at disservice the the the 90s mentality and

01:46:00   there's a reason for the mentality because it was true for the throughout the 80s and 90s was that

01:46:06   that the important thing was to be the company

01:46:09   making the software that ran on people's and businesses PCs.

01:46:13   So Microsoft is the one who was the most successful

01:46:16   and they made the operating system that ran on your PCs

01:46:20   on your PC, right under your fingertips

01:46:22   and they made these office apps

01:46:24   that ran on your PC right there.

01:46:27   And then the web and Netscape became this big thing

01:46:31   and Netscape had a big IPO

01:46:32   and was getting all this momentum.

01:46:35   And there was a mentality at the time

01:46:38   that the most important thing to control would be the browser

01:46:41   because the browser was the app that ran on your PC.

01:46:44   And it still is important.

01:46:46   We were just talking about Apple and Safari

01:46:48   and how much money they make from Google by having Safari.

01:46:52   And Chrome is certainly a big strategic aspect of Google.

01:46:56   So I'm not saying that browsers aren't important.

01:46:59   But the thing that nobody really foresaw

01:47:01   was that there would be companies like Google and Amazon who weren't running any software

01:47:06   on your computer and were running in the browser. And it didn't matter which browser it was.

01:47:12   Google was Google whether you were using IE or Netscape or iCab. It was, you know, you

01:47:18   typed G-O-O and it filled in and you went to Google and that's where you searched for

01:47:22   everything. And Amazon was there, you know, Amazon worked in every browser. That was the

01:47:27   part of the brilliance of, and again, in hindsight, it seems super obvious, but in the 90s, it

01:47:32   didn't seem obvious, at least at a certain point, until a certain point in the 90s, it

01:47:35   didn't seem obvious that the way the next wave of big corporations was going to come

01:47:41   from service providers that just ran stuff in the cloud that you access from any browser.

01:47:48   Right.

01:47:49   And then when she got to Apple, I think she really missed the, I think she picked the

01:47:56   right part of the company, which is the app store. I do think that if there is an anti-competitive

01:48:02   argument to be made against Apple, and I think there is a good one, it does involve their

01:48:08   administration and control of the app store. Yeah. All the clearly demonstrable ones are

01:48:12   there, you know, the ones that are consumers can feel and see and touch, so to speak, but

01:48:17   she completely missed the boat on what it is. It's she's, she's back to this. Uh, you

01:48:21   run a product marketplace. You shouldn't be allowed. Apple shouldn't be allowed to, to

01:48:25   both control the app store and distribute its own apps on the app store.

01:48:30   Which is dumb. That's the dumbest thing is that they should be allowed that no, it should

01:48:33   actually be the way it should be done. They should put their ops on the store. Everybody

01:48:38   else's absolute store. People would start what they want.

01:48:40   Right. I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, but one argument would be that, yes, they

01:48:44   should put more of their apps in the app store as opposed to baking them in like, you know,

01:48:49   And I think it's a coincidence that Spotify came out this week with their public call

01:48:56   for government intervention into the App Store.

01:49:01   But if you look at Warren's proposal, it wouldn't really help Spotify at all.

01:49:06   That's the thing.

01:49:07   Is it Spotify has come out with this thing very publicly calling for that Apple's App

01:49:12   Store isn't fair.

01:49:13   And what Warren is promoting as a remedy wouldn't really help them at all.

01:49:17   I mean, I like it. Yeah, it wouldn't help them at all. What you're saying. And what

01:49:23   I'm saying is a possible thing is what if Apple Music had to come from the App Store

01:49:27   instead of being built in and not on not just built into every iOS, but literally it's in

01:49:32   one of the foremost prestigious spots in the dock. And then right, you know, you'd have

01:49:38   to download Apple Music just the same way you'd have to download Spotify. But that's

01:49:42   not really Spotify's problem. Spotify's problem is the 30% that they have to pay for anybody

01:49:46   if they were to allow people to sign up within the app store.

01:49:49   The 30% that's mandatory, though the 30% rate

01:49:54   combined with the fact that any in-app digital purchase

01:49:58   of a subscription or something like that

01:50:00   has to use Apple's payment and has to pay 30%.

01:50:07   And so that's the anti-competitive angle is that

01:50:10   if Spotify wants- - And of course,

01:50:12   the argument to the contrary

01:50:14   is that people can buy a subscription to Spotify.

01:50:18   They just can't do it via IAP.

01:50:20   - Right. - You know?

01:50:22   And I think that will be Apple's argument.

01:50:24   And Apple's argument, of course, is we built the App Store,

01:50:27   we maintain the App Store.

01:50:28   If you want to sell things in the App Store,

01:50:31   those are our rules.

01:50:32   If you wanna sell things outside the App Store, you can.

01:50:35   And they could use those things in the App Store.

01:50:37   They could download the app.

01:50:39   But you just can't, the convenience of buying it,

01:50:43   the conversion bonus of buying it in the app

01:50:46   is something we're not gonna let you use unless you pay us.

01:50:49   And that should be the crux of what

01:50:52   Warren should have attacked.

01:50:53   - Right. - And she didn't.

01:50:54   - Right, and I think there's a good argument there

01:50:56   and I think it puts, I think Apple has a defense for it,

01:50:58   but I think it's sort of a, you know.

01:51:01   - Apple's biggest defense is Google.

01:51:05   - Right. - Is Android, ironically.

01:51:07   Right, they're like, you know, on one hand,

01:51:10   Tim Cook could be like, we weighed like billions on the App Store. But he can also say, but we're so tiny compared to Google. They have all the users, right? And it's like taking a revenue number and comparing it against a user number. And there is some sense of irony in the fact that the government is set up not necessarily to play with those revenue numbers, but to sort of pay attention to and reward or whatever you want to call it or punish people based

01:51:40   on the peer user base.

01:51:42   So if Apple's to make an argument that Google actually

01:51:46   is the one that should be examined,

01:51:48   or that they provide them some cover

01:51:51   by providing a platform that is widely accessible

01:51:55   by a major portion of the population,

01:51:57   and not only that, but they also apply many

01:51:59   of the same rules, they have cover there.

01:52:03   That is probably their strongest argument.

01:52:05   - I just feel like fundamentally though,

01:52:08   whole thing. And I've been on this for a while. Like I just think that today's antitrust law

01:52:15   in the US, the EU might be a little better than the United States, but I still feel like

01:52:19   fundamentally the whole thing is still rooted in 100 years ago. I mean, and Warren even brings up

01:52:26   like the, what was she say here? Back when railroads were dominant, there's a quote from

01:52:31   her and you had to get steel and wheat onto the railroad. There was a period of time when the

01:52:35   railroads figured out that they could make money not only by selling tickets on the railroad

01:52:40   by all but also by buying the steel company and then cutting the price of transporting

01:52:45   steel for their own company and raising the price of transporting steel for any competitors.

01:52:51   And that's you know, that is actually something that happened and that actually informs modern

01:52:56   US antitrust law, but that was 100 years ago. And I feel like trying to apply that sort

01:53:02   of logic to these companies which are entirely digital and that these economies are told

01:53:08   these the way that they work is so different is it would be like trying to apply 1804 laws

01:53:17   to those companies in the early 1900s right there right you know how in the world with

01:53:22   the laws of 1800 have foreseen railroads let alone the steel industry yeah the carriage

01:53:28   Law is just not going to fly in a digital marketplace or to evaluate one.

01:53:33   Right. And my favorite example of this in recent law was the Apple eBooks antitrust

01:53:39   case which really, the whole thing just hinged on whether prices were going up or down for

01:53:45   consumers. And I get lots of pushback on this. I've gotten it over the years by saying that

01:53:51   I really think Apple was done wrong here. And it's always from readers who say, "But

01:53:56   The prices were higher and I want to pay $9.99 for books.

01:54:00   But what Amazon was doing wasn't, you know,

01:54:03   Amazon's the one who has a dominant position

01:54:05   in the ebook industry, a monopoly.

01:54:08   They're the ones who, if you talk to publishers,

01:54:10   who are you concerned about in the ebook industry?

01:54:13   They all say Amazon, not Apple.

01:54:16   The whole reason they got into bed with Apple

01:54:19   and made the deals that ended up causing Apple

01:54:23   to lose that lawsuit was because the actual book publishers

01:54:26   were all concerned about what Amazon was doing,

01:54:29   which was artificially deflating prices

01:54:31   to keep competitors out.

01:54:32   And even to the point of selling bestsellers at a loss,

01:54:37   just because they could afford to and others couldn't.

01:54:39   Like Amazon as a company with a huge market cap

01:54:43   and a very high stock price and support from its shareholders

01:54:50   Famously of running as a no-profit business just reinvesting all revenue into the business

01:54:57   could afford to sell ebooks cheaper than Barnes & Noble could Barnes & Noble couldn't sell a

01:55:02   $15 ebook for $9.99 and take a $5 loss on each one Amazon couldn't and they did that's the bullying

01:55:09   anti-competitive behavior

01:55:12   and it's all based on the fact that US antitrust law is

01:55:17   based on the basic idea that if prices go up for consumers, that's bad and if they don't that's good which in

01:55:24   Theory makes sense. But when you think about a company like Amazon that can sell things at a loss when others can't it doesn't

01:55:32   And again, it's all just based on your own distribution versus creation - there's an argument that falls in it's it

01:55:40   It may be in the short run slightly better

01:55:43   for a consumer. But if the, you know, if they, if there's no profit being made by the people

01:55:50   creating the product, you know, then it's now you end up in a position where they get crushed out of

01:55:56   business, or they must deal with Amazon, then who has the stronger antitrust argument, you know?

01:56:01   And, you know, Amazon's basic products that that's not the problem. You know, I mean, Walmart has

01:56:09   every major retailer has house brand products.

01:56:12   - Yep, yeah, Amazon didn't start that.

01:56:15   - You know, and I'm not saying Walmart doesn't do things

01:56:17   that companies consider bullying

01:56:20   from their market perspective, they do.

01:56:22   But it's just not the fundamental problem

01:56:26   that if you're going to go after Amazon.

01:56:29   So I kind of feel like this whole thing is a shame

01:56:31   because I do feel like it is good

01:56:33   that a major US politician, someone like Warren,

01:56:38   right now is perhaps at the height of her influence because she's already been well-known,

01:56:43   and now she's announced herself as a candidate for the presidency in 2020. She has a significant,

01:56:49   you know, number of, she may not be the front runner, but she certainly is in the running.

01:56:53   So something that she proposes like this is going to carry a lot of weight and, you know,

01:57:00   she winds up not winning. If she ends up not winning the nomination, she may never be quite

01:57:06   as influential again. And I kind of feel like so it's good that somebody is looking at this stuff

01:57:12   because I do feel like the government, you know, in the US should be looking at these companies,

01:57:16   all four of them in various ways in ways that they haven't. But I feel like man missing the boat

01:57:22   at these technical levels is just sort of this. It's very, very disappointing to me.

01:57:28   Yep, I agree. Anyway, what I didn't look a lot at the Spotify thing. Yeah, what's the just I know

01:57:34   that part of it is the 30%, which I do think is the key thing to attack if you're Spotify,

01:57:40   but I haven't seen the rest of their proposal. Have you?

01:57:43   Jared Polin No, I haven't read through it in a detailed

01:57:45   way. So I couldn't speak to it as far as what they actually want.

01:57:50   Dave Asprey Right. But the main problem isn't the fact

01:57:52   that Apple distributes apps through the App Store. It's basically the 30% that they want.

01:57:57   Jared Polin Yeah, it's the money.

01:57:58   Dave Asprey Right. Well, and then maybe-

01:58:00   - Which the money is, it's legit.

01:58:03   Apple does earn a good chunk of money

01:58:05   for a product that they don't create.

01:58:07   - But on the other hand, it's,

01:58:10   and Spotify is a smaller company than Apple,

01:58:12   but Spotify is not like some sort of innocent

01:58:16   little two-person garage startup.

01:58:19   And in talking about doing things

01:58:24   that would be popular or unpopular,

01:58:25   I mean, Spotify has spent like $100 million recently

01:58:28   trying to build a proprietary podcast thing

01:58:31   to get podcasts on Spotify into a more Netflix-like thing

01:58:36   where Spotify podcasts are only on Spotify.

01:58:40   Whereas Apple, which embraced podcasts

01:58:45   at a really extraordinary early stage

01:58:49   of podcasts as a phenomenon,

01:58:52   and runs what is still widely considered the,

01:58:57   It is, it's the biggest index of podcasts

01:59:01   and the most popular podcast player,

01:59:03   iTunes and the podcast app on iOS,

01:59:06   has kept it entirely open in a way that it's,

01:59:11   in my opinion, admirable.

01:59:13   They've never made even a step in the direction

01:59:16   of trying to take any sort of proprietary control

01:59:20   over podcasts or done anything that would put

01:59:26   Android or Windows or going back far enough,

01:59:29   Zoom users at a disadvantage trying to listen to podcasts

01:59:33   compared to if Apple hadn't been involved.

01:59:35   - Right.

01:59:38   - And I say-- - Yeah, never.

01:59:40   - I say boo-hiss to Spotify's grab for podcasts

01:59:44   being a proprietary platform.

01:59:46   - I know, I know, yeah.

01:59:48   Well, look, Spotify is a huge company,

01:59:51   in terms of, especially in terms of music

01:59:53   and how difficult that industry is.

01:59:55   their argument is they could have been bigger, which is, it's definitely one way to go. But,

02:00:03   you know, I think that they have, I think, an opportunity to kind of speak in a populist way.

02:00:11   But I think that their argument comes off a little bit like, well, we could have made more money,

02:00:16   though. You know what I mean? But I don't disagree necessarily with their point. I understand where

02:00:21   they're coming from. I think the way that they're making the point is a little bit

02:00:24   you know, business focused and should maybe be a little bit

02:00:29   more populous, 'cause I think they actually gain

02:00:31   more support, but you know, we'll see how it pans out,

02:00:35   how the message goes across.

02:00:36   I think people are starting to get reactions,

02:00:38   we're already starting to see some reactions

02:00:40   from like lawmakers and other entrepreneurs and stuff

02:00:44   who, some of those entrepreneurs feel the same way

02:00:47   as Spotify and have come under the same sort of thumb,

02:00:49   so to speak, of Apple's, you know, kind of arrangement

02:00:53   where they, you know, it's like,

02:00:55   pray that I don't make it harder for you.

02:00:57   You can just do it, you know what I mean?

02:00:59   - My argument would be,

02:01:02   and that to me the way it probably should be in some sense,

02:01:05   is that an app,

02:01:08   if it wants to institute its own payment processing,

02:01:13   should be able to,

02:01:15   but then you're on your own as the developers

02:01:18   and you do your backend and you do the front end

02:01:22   and you take the credit card numbers,

02:01:25   you deal with subscription renewal

02:01:28   and people's in between subscription renewals

02:01:32   if their credit card number changes

02:01:33   because they got a new credit card or whatever,

02:01:36   you deal with all that.

02:01:37   All these things that Apple's iTunes payment thing

02:01:41   handles automatically, you do it and you're on your own.

02:01:44   Or if you wanna use our thing, which is a very easy API

02:01:48   and puts people one fingerprint or FaceTime scan away

02:01:52   from approving the purchase,

02:01:55   and we handle their subscription renewals,

02:01:57   we put our trust behind it,

02:02:01   and people know that they can trust iTunes for this

02:02:05   the way they've trusted it for all their other purchases,

02:02:07   then you'll pay our 30% and see how it goes.

02:02:11   Ben Thompson has argued pretty strongly,

02:02:14   and I think I agree with him,

02:02:15   that if Apple were to do that,

02:02:18   they would probably have to lower the 30% lower it to where I don't know, but that, you know,

02:02:23   in the way that that would be competing against letting app developers roll their own, like having

02:02:28   Netflix be, you know, letting Netflix sign you up, but not pay Apple any tax by but handling it all

02:02:34   on their own, whatever that number would be, would it be 15%? Would it be 10%? I don't know,

02:02:39   it would come down to some other number other than 30% due to competition, which is the way

02:02:44   it's supposed to work. That would be my proposed suggestion to Senator Warren if she's listening.

02:02:54   [laughter]

02:02:54   Jared: Yeah, I think that's absolutely one way to go. I mean, having Apple be the person who

02:03:07   controls both of the, both the framework by which they get sold and the architecture by which people

02:03:13   can enter into continuing financial relationships with

02:03:16   people. It definitely is a bad look, right? Like it's easy to

02:03:20   attack. Whether that's fair or not, I don't know. But it's

02:03:24   certainly as easy to say, Hey, this is a bad thing. Why? Why

02:03:27   does this happen? You know, who should be who could should have

02:03:30   this much power or whatever. But I think there's definitely a way

02:03:36   to look at it where you're like, Hey, what if we what if as a

02:03:42   company, we decided we just didn't need to make this much

02:03:45   money off of this particular segment. And what we'll do is

02:03:49   look at least appear optically, like we are on the side of

02:03:54   entrepreneurs and want to make sure that we're not stifling

02:03:56   competition or whatever. And they basically don't charge you

02:03:59   until you reach a certain size. This wouldn't help Spotify,

02:04:02   right? Right. It would absolutely create this feeling

02:04:05   of like, hey, we were fostering entrepreneurship, and we're

02:04:08   welcoming competition and all of this stuff. At a certain point,

02:04:11   though, once you reach a certain volume or certain intensity of

02:04:15   business or whatever, you know, we, you know, it makes sense for

02:04:18   us to charge you and who could argue with that, right? And I

02:04:21   think that's the way they should go with it personally. But yeah,

02:04:23   what's it called the tax bracket system? Oh, yeah, a tax bracket.

02:04:28   Well, expert tranches, or, but there's a name for it. And

02:04:32   people widely misunderstand it, where people think that if the

02:04:36   the top tax bracket goes to 50%.

02:04:41   But let's just say if you make $10 million or more,

02:04:46   then there's a 50% tax.

02:04:49   The way it actually works is you only pay the 50% rate

02:04:52   on the income from 10 million and over.

02:04:55   - That's right. - Right?

02:04:56   So if you make 10 million and $1,

02:04:58   you don't owe 5 million and 50 cents in taxes.

02:05:01   - You owe a greater percentage of that $1.

02:05:03   - Right.

02:05:04   But like your first 100,000 is the same rate

02:05:07   everybody pays on their first 100,000.

02:05:10   And if everybody there's like the earned income tax credit.

02:05:12   So like for everybody, whether you're like a billionaire

02:05:14   or not like your first 20, $30,000 or whatever is tax-free.

02:05:18   That would be, yeah, I've seen other people propose that

02:05:23   for the app store where like if you have

02:05:25   a subscription service, you maybe pay nothing

02:05:27   for the first $100,000 and then you pay 10%

02:05:30   on the next 100,000 and 30% on everything above that.

02:05:34   Something like that.

02:05:37   And again, it certainly would create a lot of goodwill

02:05:41   among indie developers and anybody looking

02:05:43   to promote startups and stuff like that

02:05:44   where you can at least get off the ground

02:05:47   and keep 100% or maybe minus credit card fees.

02:05:52   So maybe like the initial rate for the first 100,000

02:05:55   would be like 2.5% or something like that.

02:05:58   reasonable number to cover Apple's credit card processing fees combined with their fraud and etc.

02:06:04   Jared: Yeah, and I mean, in like, that would even sign even like the those two options have to exist

02:06:11   in mutually exclusive ways, you could do both, you could do a, you know, a scale that says like,

02:06:20   hey, you know, for your first bit, this is not that much. And then later on, you could do a sliding

02:06:24   scale where you're like, you know, hey, it's X percent if you do this much business and it's

02:06:29   less or more if you do more, you know, I don't know. There are a lot of options in between they

02:06:34   can't charge and they charge 30%. Yeah, yeah. But that's, you know, it just is very frustrating that

02:06:42   that's not what the finger has been put on, you know. All right, last but not least, let's,

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02:10:21   All right, here we go.

02:10:25   You lucky son of a bitch.

02:10:31   I think anybody who listens to this show for a long time knows one of my obsessions is

02:10:34   Star Wars.

02:10:35   and I think most of you also know I'm a big fan of Disney theme parks, or at least the Florida ones.

02:10:41   Not that I'm not a fan of the other ones, but I've never been to any of the other ones.

02:10:46   But my family loves going to the Disney Orlando area theme parks. And anybody who follows either

02:10:55   of those obsessions knows that Disney is on the cusp of opening major new theme park lands in both

02:11:03   California and Florida for Star Wars and you, you lucky son of a bit, spent three days with them.

02:11:08   I did. I did. It was interesting. It was sort of just like a three-day mouth agape situation.

02:11:21   This was all in California because the California one is A, going to open first and B is where

02:11:28   Imagineering headquarters is?

02:11:29   Jay Haynes Yes. So the way Imagineering works is they had their headquarters are in Glendale, kind of in a business park, they're fairly unassuming group of beige buildings. And then they have facilities in Florida that are largely about maintenance and storage. But then they also have some research institutes, like in Pittsburgh and a couple of other places, but their headquarters are there. So it was sort of a three day jaunt through the process. This is, by the way, very unusual for

02:11:57   Disney. They typically do not do large press kind of, you know, pushes with this stuff, or lengthy

02:12:05   explanations of kind of what they're doing. And, you know, I sort of it was revelatory for a lot of

02:12:13   people that had been there or that had been covering for the company for a long time. Some of

02:12:16   them, you know, were there on this little press tour. I was, there's the Jermaine over at Gizmodo

02:12:24   was on this thing. But he was he's sort of their entertainment writer, you know, the kind of movies

02:12:30   and entertainment things like that is a good writer. I like reading him. But outside of that,

02:12:36   there was almost no tech press. And the only reason that I was even involved with this because

02:12:41   they it was, you know, it's Hollywood Reporter, LA Times, Variety, you know, Variety, exactly.

02:12:49   several theme park, you know, kind of oriented writers from like, travel and leisure and things

02:12:54   like that, right? This is the this is the sort of people that were on this tour. And the only reason

02:12:59   I wasn't even involved is because I do have a personal fascination with Imagineering, how they

02:13:05   kind of operate, you know, functionally, as well as, of course, what they do, you know, in the sort

02:13:10   of business of building themed entertainment and robotics and, you know, kind of interactive

02:13:18   experiences and world building and you know all of that stuff right it's just interesting to me

02:13:23   and there's a lot of tech in that that is used in that industry and even created for that industry

02:13:30   that is just not talked about because they don't talk to the people who care or would understand it

02:13:37   or would you know care to interpret it for an audience or whatever so i've spent about three

02:13:41   years sort of getting to know those folks over there and convincing them that there are stories

02:13:47   that they were not telling that needed to be told or needed to be examined. Basically,

02:13:52   pitching them on this idea that, look, you're doing a lot of stuff in this arena, but you're

02:13:57   not telling people about it. And my major pitch is, you need to hire roboticists and engineers,

02:14:05   software engineers, and, you know, coders and all these people, but they don't know that you have

02:14:09   hard problems to solve. And there's only there's no catnip greater to an engineer than a hard

02:14:14   problem. So it is a that was basically my microbar that I

02:14:19   used to kind of push it this. And that's how I ended up

02:14:21   getting the invite. Basically, it was they were like, Oh, yeah,

02:14:23   you know, we were going to do this thing. We'd love to have

02:14:27   you involved in all this stuff. Everybody else there was from

02:14:29   the entertainment world. So it was kind of fun being the only

02:14:32   person there who's like, Okay, yeah, cool. Could you explain

02:14:35   now that you know, this cat this tool that she's Why didn't you

02:14:38   just use CAD? Why did you use this, you know, in house tool

02:14:41   and all of this stuff. So what did you do with Nvidia to get GPUs to be able to drive this display?

02:14:47   Yeah, basically, there was a lot of I mean, I think, you know, not not to not to telegraph too much, but or, or put too much in words in anybody's mouth, but there was a lot of side eyeing from the engineers who obviously wanted to talk about it. Right. To the PR people like can we please? Can I talk about this? Because I've been living this for for two years, you know, normally they don't let them talk about some of that stuff.

02:15:11   or they're not used to being asked about it at the very least. So that was fun. But yeah,

02:15:16   the gist of it was to step back. It was a three day tour. We started out at ILM in San Francisco.

02:15:25   I don't know if a lot of people know this, but their main headquarters are, aside from Skywalker

02:15:31   Ranch, which is a different facility that does a lot of audio and stuff, ILM's main headquarters

02:15:37   are in San Francisco on the Presidio. They have a facility there that they share with Lucasfilm.

02:15:42   So we started out at essentially Lucasfilm, which is sort of the bottom floor,

02:15:47   talking about the originations of the project and the storytelling and kind of how do you start

02:15:53   building this world and all the decisions there. And then we moved to Imagineering in Glendale on

02:16:00   the second day. And that Imagineering is, you know, obviously where they build a lot of the

02:16:06   animatronics. They have a workshop there where they craft a lot of the in-house stuff that they do.

02:16:10   They have contractors too, but a lot of the main, you know, key ones are done in-house. And then,

02:16:18   on the third day, we actually went and did a site tour at Galaxy's Edge, which is the land that

02:16:25   they're building onto Disneyland. The Star Wars land. Glendale is just north of the sort of hills,

02:16:34   the Hollywood Hills. Basically, you've got Glendale, the Hills, downtown LA, LA proper,

02:16:41   Venice, all of that. And then south of that is Anaheim where Disneyland is. So it's just north

02:16:46   of LA, essentially. It's still LA. So did you guys fly between days one and two? I mean, that's a

02:16:50   long way because ILM is San Francisco and then the other two days are down in Southern California.

02:16:56   Exactly. Yeah, yeah, we flew. I book all my own travel when I go on these things. I don't let

02:17:02   junkets pay for me. I'm kind of a policy of ours. We just don't really do it. Every once in a while,

02:17:08   there's some weird thing where it's like, "Hey, this is our thing and just come," right? And it's

02:17:12   like, "Okay, we'll disclose it." But by and large, we pay for our own travel. So when we flew between

02:17:17   the two, just speaking, this is just a fun side note as an aviation nerd, but flying between the

02:17:23   two, we flew out of Oakland. So we drove, we took a little bus from Imagineering to, or excuse me,

02:17:31   from Lucasfilm to the Oakland airport. And I fly out of Oakland, but not regularly. I usually fly

02:17:38   out of SFO or LAX, depending on where I'm going, if I'm not flying out of Fresno. And Fresno doesn't

02:17:45   have a lot of direct flights to Oakland or a lot of direct flights to—definitely no direct flights

02:17:53   to John Wayne, which is in Anaheim, or the Burbank Airport, which is the one that's

02:18:01   closest to Glendale. But if you fly out of Oakland, you can get a JetBlue flight out

02:18:07   of Oakland to Glendale. And it's, depending on the day, it can be as little as 70 bucks

02:18:13   Wow, the fly, which is great. And that's what it was. So my airfare was full disclosure,

02:18:18   my airfare was $70. I think that's what I swear to God, I think that's what I paid

02:18:21   for an Uber to get from SFO to San Jose last year.

02:18:25   - Seriously, exactly, exactly.

02:18:27   And here's the really cool thing about it.

02:18:30   JetBlue, because of, you know, carriage deals, right?

02:18:35   Carriage deals in airlines, most people have experienced

02:18:38   this at some point, you book through United,

02:18:40   but you're actually flying on, you know, some other carrier.

02:18:44   Or you book through American, but you're on American Eagle.

02:18:46   And whatever, it's a carriage deal.

02:18:48   It's basically like, hey, we know we're not gonna be able

02:18:50   to fill these flights, so we're going to give you the seats to sell too, and we get

02:18:55   a percentage or whatever.

02:18:56   And so you basically are flying on some airline that you didn't actually book.

02:19:00   The majors don't cross over, but a lot of minor carriers cross over with the majors.

02:19:05   So JetBlue has a carriage deal with JetSuite, which is like one of these private jet sort

02:19:14   of group deal things.

02:19:16   I think that's the one Berkshire Hathaway I think has an investment in.

02:19:21   Or if not, Berkshire Hathaway has an investment in one of them.

02:19:23   Yeah, exactly.

02:19:24   There's NetJets, JetSuite, there's a bunch of them.

02:19:29   So anyhow, long story short, I flew private for $70.

02:19:35   Was it nice?

02:19:36   It was fun.

02:19:37   It was great.

02:19:38   I mean, hey, you have your own flight attendant.

02:19:39   It's only 20 people on the plane.

02:19:42   It's very nice.

02:19:44   It's definitely not all broken down and burnt out and everything.

02:19:48   It was certainly a short flight, but it was pleasant.

02:19:51   And it was $70.

02:19:52   So I can't beat that.

02:19:55   And the best part of it, this is the absolute best part, the plane is whatever.

02:19:59   It's nice, but it's a short flight.

02:20:01   The best part is that they have their own terminal.

02:20:05   So instead of going into the airport, you actually go through the regular airport lane

02:20:09   and then sort of circle around and their terminal is just directly adjacent to the airport basically.

02:20:17   They come in, you come in, you drive right up to the terminal essentially, hop out, hop

02:20:24   into the little waiting room there, you talk to the person at the desk, you're checked

02:20:29   in in like 25 seconds, you sit and have some snacks and some coffee and whatever that they

02:20:34   have out there and you get on your plane.

02:20:37   And then when you land on the other side, you literally just pull up to a hangar and

02:20:41   get out and go into the hangar, walk in through the hangar and then exit the hangar after

02:20:46   a little waiting room and get in your cab or car and boom, you're gone.

02:20:51   So it's quite nice.

02:20:52   I think I might get rich now that I know this is how they … I might try that for a while.

02:21:00   It was cool.

02:21:01   So, one day at ILM, one day at Imagineering, one day at the actual park, which is set to

02:21:07   open when?

02:21:08   Jared: So, the opening date is May 31st is for Disneyland and then there's another

02:21:16   date for Walt Disney World.

02:21:17   I don't have it in my brain.

02:21:18   But it's later on in the year.

02:21:19   Pete: I think it's September.

02:21:21   Well, let's call it September.

02:21:27   I wonder how badly they had hoped to hit the May the 4th.

02:21:32   There's always a big thing.

02:21:35   Disney's actually had deals with Lucasfilm for a very long time.

02:21:40   There's been the Star Tours ride since I think the 80s.

02:21:43   Jared Polin August 29th, sorry.

02:21:46   Just wanted to answer.

02:21:47   But yeah, there's been deals for a while.

02:21:49   Jon Moffitt They've long had like Star Wars celebrations

02:21:52   on May the 4th because get it, May the 4th be with you. I'm sure they tried to hit that, but

02:22:00   it's coming up. So it must be—

02:22:03   Yeah, it is. And you know what, to be honest, so the opening date is—to finish out the opening

02:22:08   date conversation, the opening date is May 31st, and both attractions will not be open on that.

02:22:15   And there's two main attractions. And both attractions will not be open on that date.

02:22:20   So they're pushing hard. I mean, they were working around the clock when we were there.

02:22:23   One of the tour folks were telling me, one of the construction managers was telling us that

02:22:30   he left one night at like 5 p.m, 6 p.m, and they got in the next morning at 8 a.m,

02:22:36   and like a bunch of X-wings had appeared. So they're working around the clock pretty much.

02:22:40   Pete: The two places where I've noticed where construction moves really fast is Disney,

02:22:46   where you can take like a week-long vacation and see progress having been made on something that's

02:22:51   under a crane. And Vegas, where stuff goes up in Vegas and it's like, who knows how the hell they

02:22:57   make it happen, but it happens, seemingly, at least to my perspective, happens pretty fast.

02:23:03   Jared: Mm hmm. Money.

02:23:05   Pete: Yeah, I think so.

02:23:07   Jared; Put poor enough money on it, it goes up fast.

02:23:10   Pete; And maybe there's less regular, maybe less traditional union hurdles than in like

02:23:15   big east coast cities like Philly and New York. There's more red tape or something like that.

02:23:21   I feel like down in Orlando, Disney, not that they're cutting corners, but that there's just

02:23:27   not as much urban bureaucracy. And I think Vegas is sort of more of a similar money talks sort of

02:23:36   thing. But anyway, it can happen fast. Just going meta for a second, I do suspect, I suspect

02:23:44   I know there's a big overlap between Apple nerds and Disney nerds or fans, whatever you

02:23:51   want to call it.

02:23:54   I also think, though, that there's probably a lot of people who listen to this show who

02:23:58   maybe are surprised that I'm a big fan of the Disney theme parks because maybe I come

02:24:02   across as being a gruff curmudgeon who would think of standing all day out in the sun,

02:24:10   going around on ostensible kiddie rides.

02:24:14   It wouldn't be my bag.

02:24:17   And I'll just say it's hard to explain, but I would just say that the difference,

02:24:22   if you've never, I think you had to have been to one of their parks to get it.

02:24:27   And maybe you have been and you don't like it.

02:24:29   I can certainly imagine if you really just can't stand being in lines, you're never

02:24:33   going to like it no matter how much you would otherwise.

02:24:38   I just appreciate it as an appreciator of good design in general, or at least thoughtful

02:24:44   Because it's incredible the the depth to with which they design things is just astounding to me

02:24:50   And that's the main reason that I'm a fan of stuff like this

02:24:53   Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think I think there's a lot of aspects to it design is absolutely one major one for me

02:25:00   you know the technology that they are using more and more is

02:25:05   Sharing a lot of edges with you know, the bleeding edge of what you know is out there in terms of robotics

02:25:13   One of the big things that I've been tracking for a long time, one of the big topics is

02:25:24   the arena of HRI or human-robot interaction.

02:25:27   Because I do feel that HRI is going to become an essential learning or an essential investment

02:25:35   for any major company that has any sort of automated or roboticized features or processes.

02:25:44   Because it's already, I mean, in practical terms, just to give people like a grounding,

02:25:48   HRI is used in the field of industrial robotics to give people greater awareness of their

02:25:56   robot co-workers, so to speak.

02:25:59   That greater awareness comes with viewing that robot as an entity.

02:26:03   if you think of it as a personality or a thing that has a, you know, a bit of a personality

02:26:08   or whatever, you're more aware of it. And so you're safer, you know, if the robot arm is moving

02:26:12   around in your workspace, you're more aware of it if you think of it as a, you know, a being,

02:26:17   an entity or whatever you want to call it. It's kind of a weird kind of hippie dippie

02:26:22   discipline in some ways. There's a lot of, you know, Berkeley professors thinking hard about it

02:26:29   and stuff like that. But it is absolutely clear that Disney is one of the foremost world leaders

02:26:36   in HRI because of the way their learnings over decades of the way people interact with creatures

02:26:41   and characters, the way they interact and view animatronics, the way that they partake in themed

02:26:48   entertainment and that kind of thing. So they're doing some fascinating stuff there. And then on

02:26:52   top of that, you have this layer of world building. That design that you were talking about, where

02:26:57   You're able to be ensconced in a thing that transports you.

02:27:02   And the detail, the attention to detail is absolutely fascinating and enjoyable.

02:27:08   I mean, if you want to understand the level of detail that Disney engineers put into things,

02:27:14   or these Imagineers put into things, you just look at the next time you're at Disneyland

02:27:18   or Disney World, look at the railings.

02:27:22   Just look at the different railings they have throughout the park and the way they transition

02:27:25   from one land to another and kind of ease you into this place that you're, you know,

02:27:30   you're leaving one place and entering another and that kind of thing. So this just, it's

02:27:33   just cool stuff like that that I love.

02:27:35   Um, I always like to say I've used this at least some point on the show, but I always

02:27:40   like to say that. So I first went to Disney World in Florida like about 12 years ago.

02:27:47   And before I went, I was kind of looking forward to it, but I'd never been as a kid. My family

02:27:51   never went to Disney World when I was a kid and I didn't go as an adult until our son

02:27:55   was like two and a half or three or something like that. I was looking forward to it. I had been in

02:28:02   Florida before, but we went to and this is like in my 20s or something, but we went to Universal

02:28:06   instead because it seemed like more action packed. I think it was probably the right thing to do

02:28:09   because I was still at an age where I didn't feel too old to go on the fastest roller coaster known

02:28:15   to man. The thing is, is that I until I went to Disney World, I thought the words amusement park

02:28:22   and theme park were completely interchangeable, you know, like, right, like Street and Avenue

02:28:26   or something like that. Whereas when I went to Disney World, I finally got it. I was like,

02:28:31   Oh, I get what you mean by theme park. You know, like when you go into Tomorrowland,

02:28:39   you don't see any of the rest of the park. It's like you're just entirely there, you know, and

02:28:43   you use the words multiple times in this article on the galaxy's edge, the Star Wars world,

02:28:49   controlling the sight lines. And it works both ways. And it seems like one of the newer

02:28:56   trends is controlling the sight ways, the sight lines both ways where the big thing is like,

02:29:01   once you're in the galaxy's edge, you're not supposed to see the red, you don't see Cinderella's

02:29:05   castle or, or I guess that's actually wrong in California. It's not Cinderella's castle,

02:29:13   it's Sleeping Beauty's castle. That's how much of a Disney nerd I am. How about that?

02:29:17   that. But that call we would have had angry emails, but that the entrance is controlled

02:29:24   as well. Right? Like at least in Florida, like as you're walking into tomorrowland,

02:29:31   you see tomorrowland, it's almost like beckoning to you to walk this way. Whereas it sounds

02:29:36   to me like the galaxy's edge thing. It's sort of like, you don't see anything and then you

02:29:41   come through an entrance and it's boom, a big reveal. Yeah, one of the one of the things

02:29:46   they talked about a lot was how to get people from there to here. Like, you know, you're

02:29:52   transporting these people from one world to another, and they're guests on this planet,

02:29:56   which is also, they say, how they'll explain the fact that you're wearing Crocs, right?

02:30:01   Like, you're a visitor. But the basic thesis is like, hey, we're going to create this

02:30:07   feeling of compression. So you compress people down to a finite space, and then expansion,

02:30:14   you open the world back up to them. And so two of the entrances are essentially rock tunnels

02:30:20   that are made to look like they've been laser cut into the rock, you know, by like the

02:30:24   empire or excuse me, the first order or the resistance, you know, and that those rock carved

02:30:34   or laser carved rock tunnels kind of compress down and bring you down to where you're going

02:30:39   through a tunnel and then you have you open up on a vista which is like a frame of film.

02:30:45   These frames of film are open up like oh yeah this is the first time you saw x y or z in the

02:30:51   films that's what we want it to feel like right and then in the the top most entrance which comes

02:30:58   in from Critter Country which is over near kind of Splash Mountain in Disneyland at least in

02:31:04   Disneyland, of course, in Disney World, there's only two entrances, but it is sort of wooded

02:31:09   pathway, you know, that kind of meanders from one wooded country to a different kind of trees,

02:31:16   and all of a sudden, you're, you're in this resistance encampment outside of town, so to

02:31:21   speak. So it's that those areas of transition that they create. Yeah. And they've always, that is,

02:31:27   again, as an appreciator of the experience design, they've done that with the transitions between the

02:31:33   the world's in the parks, at least the better parks, you know, and the better transitions.

02:31:38   Like they even do things like as you're going from one to another and there's ambient music

02:31:44   playing, the speakers are synced up between the two so that when you're in the part where

02:31:48   you'd hear them both, it doesn't sound discordant. They kind of go together. And then all of

02:31:53   a sudden it's like it's just like this weird smooth transition where you're like at Disney

02:31:59   where you can go from Frontierland to the Liberty Square world, and you're transferring

02:32:07   from the Wild West to sort of like, you know, this sort of—it's mostly Philadelphia,

02:32:13   but sort of like a cross between Revolutionary War, Philadelphia, and Boston. But you never

02:32:19   hear a transition into music. It just sort of works, you know?

02:32:23   Yep, exactly. And that that sort of unknown or gentle, unseen transitional thing is what they specialize in. That stuff takes work. I mean, it takes an enormous amount of thought about, you know, where to put speakers and they invented new technology to interleave the sound and all of that stuff. But they're taking basically, you know, 100 years worth of work in this regard, and putting it towards kind of making Star Wars.

02:32:52   physical, which is a very, very interesting undertaking because it's such a well-known

02:32:58   thing. You know, people have been seeing it for decades now. And so they know what it's

02:33:04   supposed to look like and what it's supposed to feel like. That's a lot of responsibility.

02:33:07   Pete: So, one of the things that they've done is they made the choice, and you even

02:33:11   had quotes from somebody talking about it, where they were like, "Well, what are we

02:33:13   gonna do? Are we gonna pick one of the known planets like Tatooine or Hoth or, you know,

02:33:20   Cloud City or something like that. Or we just go with something new, and they went with

02:33:25   something new. Batuu, is that how you pronounce it?

02:33:29   Yeah.

02:33:30   B-A-T-U-U. Which I think was the right decision. Just so that they had the freedom to, you

02:33:38   know, so that people wouldn't be, "The, the, to continue to, on Tatooine's entrance

02:33:43   is actually on the left." You know?

02:33:45   Right.

02:33:46   That they had the freedom to design everything the way they want, and they're not really

02:33:48   Yeah. Withholding to any one thing.

02:33:52   Yeah. One of the other things, I think I put this in there, but one of the other things that they

02:33:56   mentioned about why they chose to do that is they wanted people to come in on an even footing.

02:34:01   Like if you know Star Wars to a casual degree, or just barely from whatever absorbed media you've

02:34:09   seen of it, you should still have a good time there. So it shouldn't be like a,

02:34:14   you need to know all of the lore of this place before you can enjoy it or understand it. And

02:34:20   instead, it should be welcoming to all like they're all we're all starting our adventure together.

02:34:25   Like on day one, when everybody walks in, they're all on the same footing. They know just as much

02:34:30   about this place and about what's going to happen here as anybody else, you know, and that's that is

02:34:36   hard to do with an existing location that you know, somebody who's a more hardcore fan may just

02:34:41   know everything there is to know about.

02:34:43   Yeah.

02:34:44   And that is sort of, I think it's the nature of the beast where Star Wars is by the nature

02:34:50   of the franchise as sort of, it's been implied since the very first movie in 1977 that it's

02:34:57   a huge galaxy with a gazillion planets and different life forms.

02:35:02   And you know, however many of the various aliens we saw in the cantina in the first

02:35:07   Star Wars movie, it was implied that, you know, it's the tip of the iceberg in this

02:35:11   galaxy.

02:35:12   Right.

02:35:13   Compare and contrast with Universal, which has the Harry Potter franchise and has two

02:35:20   in Florida.

02:35:21   They've got the first one they opened at the one park was the Hogwarts area, which

02:35:27   in my opinion isn't that great.

02:35:29   It's not a great entrance.

02:35:31   It's like the Hogwarts itself looks good from certain angles and looks really flat

02:35:36   from other angles. And they built it so that it's like a beacon because people are not,

02:35:42   I mean, it's like the greatest, I don't know how much Universal spent to get the rights

02:35:45   to that, but it was great for them because when you go there, half the kids are wearing

02:35:49   like Harry Potter robes and stuff. I mean, that's why people are going there. So they

02:35:53   built it, you can see it from anywhere in the park. Because they, you know, they know

02:35:58   that that's what people are coming there to see, you know, people come in and they put

02:36:01   it like in the back corner. But it's just not a great entrance. But the second one they

02:36:06   opened at Universal Studios is Diagon Alley, which has a terrific reveal. It is amazing.

02:36:15   You're outside, across from all this other stuff that everybody knows from Universal

02:36:20   Studios, and they've just built this lot or this street that looks like current-day

02:36:24   London. Very well done. And honestly, there's almost not enough signage. It's almost like

02:36:31   we were like, "What the hell is—where's the Harry Potter?" I get it that London is England,

02:36:36   and it's like, "Is this it?" And then you go through a little thing that you don't—you're like,

02:36:42   "I think we go through here." And you see something—it never seems like there's hundreds

02:36:45   of people coming in around. It seems like just six people going, walking through around a corner.

02:36:49   You go around a corner, and boom, you're in Diagon Alley. And it's a very specific place from the

02:36:57   Harry Potter franchise and just a different way of doing it. It would be like if Star Wars really was

02:37:03   Tatooine and the surrounding area around the cantina or something like that.

02:37:09   But on the other hand, that would be so limiting because most of the Star Wars worlds, there's

02:37:14   really not that much there, right? Most of the planets we have seen in the movies are rather

02:37:19   desolate, right? Jared Polin They are. And even if you go Tatooine,

02:37:25   Well, that's a frickin' desert with like one tiny little city, you know?

02:37:29   Right. And all we really know about it is there's like a bar and there's a place to buy like

02:37:36   spaceship parts. Yeah. And not only that, but it's like literally all it's known for is being crap.

02:37:41   Right. Like Luke wants to leave. Everybody refers to it as a terrible place. You don't want to go

02:37:48   to a place that's known for being awful. Go have lunch at Jabba's Palace.

02:37:52   Right, right, exactly. And that's where you end up, you end up having to take really well known places and thematize them, which is sort of anti this modern philosophy that Disney has about these parks is that instead, you should create this thing where you are really building a world and you're not just sort of like taking a theme and slapping it on something.

02:38:13   Now, I will say that this project is a marquee project and has all the best people working

02:38:19   on it, and this philosophy is very well applied here.

02:38:23   There's plenty of examples throughout the parks and projects that diehard Disney followers

02:38:28   will be like, "Yeah, but they still chintz out on X, Y, or Z," right?

02:38:32   But in terms of this project, no expense spared.

02:38:34   They're really going for it, and I think it's no better property to do it with than

02:38:39   Star Wars.

02:38:40   - Yeah, the other thing too is that they didn't waste time

02:38:45   when they, I've always, at least in Florida,

02:38:47   at the Hollywood Studios Park,

02:38:50   they've had the Star Tours ride for,

02:38:52   I think since like the late '80s, at least the early '90s,

02:38:55   did a somewhat major upgrade a couple of years back

02:39:00   where they didn't really change the ride mechanics

02:39:03   but totally upgraded the actual movie

02:39:06   that you see in the thing.

02:39:10   and much for the better.

02:39:11   It's a much better ride.

02:39:13   And then they added some Star Wars stuff

02:39:19   while they're building this land in an area of the park.

02:39:22   It's like right next to the Little Mermaid.

02:39:24   So it really, it's not land themed at all.

02:39:29   But I think that it's like two extremes.

02:39:32   It's like what's the fastest thing we can do

02:39:34   to just keep some Star Wars going in this park?

02:39:38   And truth be told, the one thing that I think

02:39:41   is very different about what they're doing at Disneyland

02:39:46   with the Galaxy's Edge in California

02:39:49   and what they're doing at the Hollywood Studios in Florida

02:39:52   is effectively they shut down half of the park

02:39:56   in Hollywood Studios.

02:39:58   I think anybody who knows how much of the park

02:40:02   has been shut down for the last few years,

02:40:04   if you were going there and you only had time

02:40:06   go to three of the four parks, the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and studios. Studios

02:40:12   for the last few years should be the last one you went to because it really was half shut down

02:40:17   because they closed a whole bunch of the major attractions to have this room to build this,

02:40:23   whereas Disneyland is still Disneyland. So they added a whole bunch of Star Wars stuff

02:40:32   in Hollywood studios in the meantime in a totally unthemed area sort of like the generic

02:40:38   middle of the park area you know and they have like stage shows and every like maybe two hours

02:40:45   there's like a a storm trooper trooper parade led by uh captain phasma and they have some state you

02:40:55   know again like a cheese ball stage where they actually you know Boba Fett on stage which kind

02:41:01   It kind of makes me cringe.

02:41:06   But then there is cool stuff, and I can't help but imagine it's all a dry run for this

02:41:11   experience, and it's really going to be cool because they've been doing things where they'll

02:41:14   just have two stormtroopers or first order stormtroopers walking on parole.

02:41:20   Just two guys in real first order stormtrooper costumes walking side by side, and then they'll

02:41:27   just come up to people in the park.

02:41:30   one time I was holding a beer and the guy just looked at me, pointed at my beer, and

02:41:34   he just said, "Watch it." They just come up and interact with people. They come up

02:41:41   to little kids and say, "Do you have ID? Show us identification."

02:41:44   - Yeah, one of the interactions the troopers will do is that they will abduct you or arrest

02:41:50   you, so to speak. Not abduct. They're not abducting any children. But they'll arrest

02:41:56   you, especially if you've got a kid. They'll arrest your kid and they'll take him over

02:41:59   to the side and then they'll act like they're getting a call from a superior or, you know,

02:42:05   whatever they're like, Oh, we're okay. Well, you checked out, you know, you're okay, you

02:42:09   can move along or whatever, right. But they do all of that. I mean, you know, the folks

02:42:14   that do it well, and that have fun with it, the cast members that do it well, they really

02:42:18   use the most, they get the most out of their tools. So the tools that they give them are

02:42:23   essentially, you know, switches inside the costume with like, pre pre recorded voices, they don't

02:42:30   actually talk. And so that the cast members that utilize those the best and really have fun with

02:42:36   it. They do have they get give great guest experiences. You know, my kid got arrested,

02:42:41   and she loved it. It was just like a highlight for her, you know, they detained her and took a

02:42:47   picture and all this stuff.

02:42:49   Well, that's the other thing and like to answer my question from before is why do I John Gruber enjoy it so much part of it

02:42:55   I just enjoy the experience I do I just it's a fun place to be you let yourself go you have fun with your kid you

02:42:59   Buy some popcorn and stuff

02:43:01   But I also there's a part of my brain that is constant

02:43:04   It's like going to when I go to see Penn and Teller or some other magician and I'm thinking how the hell did they do?

02:43:07   That and I figured out like with the stormtroopers the buttons are on their blasters

02:43:11   So they hold the blasters not like they're pointing it at you, but that they hold them

02:43:15   you know, to the side, but the buttons are on the blasters and they could, it's just like a little

02:43:19   mini keyboard where they can push them and then the pre-recorded voices come out of their helmet.

02:43:23   But like you said, the ones who were good at it, it is amazing.

02:43:26   Yeah, it almost sounds like they, you know, they recorded it just for you, you know?

02:43:31   Right.

02:43:31   You know, I think there's a lot of that to come. They didn't show us everything. That was one of

02:43:36   the cool things that it's still, it's still going to feel like a surprise to me in a lot of ways,

02:43:41   you know, when I go, even though I've talked to people for hours and hours and hours about it.

02:43:45   And only, I mean, I published, I published like stinking 7500 words on it. But even then I have

02:43:53   pages and pages of notes, right? Because this is just like, I always think of that Austin Powers

02:43:59   quote where he's like, "Oh, that's not my bag, baby," right? He holds up the book. This kind of

02:44:04   thing is my bag, baby. Well, this is it. You know, it's like, it's a confluence of everything that I,

02:44:10   you know, that I find fascinating, you know? And I just, I feel that there's a lot that they're

02:44:16   holding back, A, because they want, you know, they still want some surprises and whatnot, but

02:44:20   a lot of it is going to come in this, just the genuine immersiveness of this land. So they,

02:44:27   they're doing a bunch of things here that they haven't done before. One of them is that cast

02:44:31   members have a bunch of different costumes to choose from. So if they are a cast member that's,

02:44:38   say, running the smugglers run ride, which is the Millennium Falcon simulation, they can choose their

02:44:44   own garments to wear, and then they wear a vest and a hat that identifies them as a sort of crew

02:44:50   member of this smuggling organization. And so that that's their uniform, but underneath it, they have

02:44:58   a set of a couple of dozen different basic pieces that you might wear as a citizen of Batuu. And the

02:45:06   citizens in the village, they get to go in to work every day and they choose from those pieces. So

02:45:11   they say, "Hey, my character wears this kind of pant and a vest and a shirt and all this stuff." It

02:45:16   gives them some, you know, investment in the character and in the fact that they're going to

02:45:23   be role playing. And everybody in the land is going to be role playing. All the cast members

02:45:28   are going to be role playing as villagers. So you can ask them what's going on. You can ask them

02:45:33   about the resistance and about the the first order and what

02:45:37   their feelings are, they might be really circumspect, or they

02:45:39   might confide in you, you know that they're a sympathizer or

02:45:42   whatever. And then of course, you have the first order in

02:45:45   their typical uniforms and and the troopers, and then you have

02:45:49   the resistance in the resistance uniform. So it's it's a nice mix

02:45:53   of things that is very, very thematic and very in world.

02:45:57   You know, there's a lot of companies that have that create

02:46:02   euphemisms for employees. I forget, Walmart has something where they call people associates

02:46:09   is the word at Walmart. And Disney's always called the staff, the people that work at

02:46:17   the parks, cast members. And it sounds corny and honestly, in my opinion, at Walmart, it's

02:46:25   a true euphemism. What's the difference between associate and employee? But at Disney, it's

02:46:31   been a bit more like performing and there's some that are you know famous

02:46:36   you know really are a true performance like the the jungle boat captain where

02:46:41   you really are performing for the whole thing right right but it really does

02:46:45   matter for worse right but I think it's fascinating that for all of the

02:46:50   technological technological advances that are going into this galaxy's edge

02:46:54   stuff from everything from materials to the way they make the animatronics

02:47:00   and you go into detail about the difference between the old hydraulic system and the new

02:47:04   electronic system and how much more lifelike it can be, that just the good old fashioned

02:47:10   just way that they can sort of, to borrow a Walt Disney phrase, to plus it is to make

02:47:17   the cast members more, even more part of the experience on a personal level.

02:47:23   right. Yeah, and I think there, there have, they have a, they, there, there's always been a level

02:47:32   of investment in, you know, the sort of experience of Disney that the cast member has, and some

02:47:38   people burn out, some people are there for 30, 40 years, right? And I'm really gonna just divorce

02:47:45   this discussion, even though, you know, it is interrelated. I'm gonna divorce this discussion

02:47:49   from, you know, how Disney treats its cast members and whether or not I can treat them better and all

02:47:53   of that, right? Because they're certainly, you know, employees that have a lot of, they

02:47:59   give a lot of joy throughout the year and throughout the, have throughout the decades,

02:48:04   just through small interactions. And they're sort of empowered in some ways to do that.

02:48:09   So they, you know, my daughter has like bought a toy and lost it immediately. They just replaced

02:48:14   it for her. They're like, you know, we don't, I don't even need to see a receipt here, you

02:48:17   know, she's like, Oh my God, you know, I lost this or, or this broke or was it here? Just

02:48:22   take this, you know, and that kind of stuff is obviously corporate policy, right? Let's

02:48:26   do it. But it's, it's imbued like the invest this idea in the CMs that they are there to

02:48:35   create an experience for people that, you know, yes, it's money, it's time, it's

02:48:41   travel. But, you know, you forget like, this may be the only time that this person goes to

02:48:46   Disneyland in their entire childhood, and they'll remember forever. Like I wasn't a

02:48:50   Disney kid. My parents didn't know about it or like it or even

02:48:55   care, you know,

02:48:56   It wasn't even on my family's radar. It really was.

02:48:58   Exactly. Exactly. I mean, my dad was like, you know, let's go loot

02:49:01   a shipwreck. Let's go. Let's go to the beach, you know, and all

02:49:05   of that stuff. And that's fine. You know, I thought I was, you

02:49:08   know, I'm complaining. It just wasn't a part of my landscape.

02:49:11   However, like one time when we were on the travel to somewhere

02:49:14   else, they were like, Hey, we got a day. Let's take him

02:49:17   Disneyland, right? We've never been, you know, he's never been,

02:49:20   let's go. And like, I have a picture of me and I remember it,

02:49:23   I still remember the smell of it. I think it was like nine or

02:49:26   something. And I have a picture of me on my dad's shoulders with

02:49:30   a couple of figurines, like a C3PO and an R2. This is just

02:49:35   after Star Tours had opened. And I remember it and it was like,

02:49:40   it stuck with me forever, right? And in some ways, cemented my

02:49:44   love of, of Star Wars in a way, you know, because it was like

02:49:47   Star Wars in real life of its day, right, Star Tours, and then

02:49:51   also of the parks that created this feeling in me, my wife, on

02:49:55   the other hand, went to Disneyland a lot and loved it

02:49:57   and it's sort of a Disney freak. And I did not grow up that way.

02:50:00   I grew into, you know, sort of an appreciation for the company

02:50:03   and what what he had created what what the organization and

02:50:06   created, and its philosophies much, much later. But that may

02:50:11   be a revelatory or massively impactful experience for a person.

02:50:17   So you're putting a lot on an employee that's not paid a whole lot for what they do and

02:50:24   they see a thousand people a day, ten thousand people a day, and they're whatever.

02:50:28   But some small interaction that they may give will absolutely make or break.

02:50:33   You hear about these things over and over and over again.

02:50:35   "Oh, it was the true Disney experience," or "This is why you go," and all of this

02:50:40   stuff.

02:50:41   that make that.

02:50:42   So I'm really, really happy to see them

02:50:44   giving them sort of better tools

02:50:47   and a greater reason to invest in that

02:50:50   sort of interaction with people and all of that.

02:50:53   That's fun to see.

02:50:54   - Yeah, and I really think it goes toward

02:50:57   making the whole area the attraction

02:51:00   as opposed to the area as just sort of a central point

02:51:03   where you ping pong around to various attractions.

02:51:06   I mean, there's very clearly,

02:51:07   just look at the map when you go to the park

02:51:09   And there's a very difference between the older themed areas

02:51:12   and the newer ones where the older ones

02:51:14   you'd go to Fantasyland

02:51:16   and there's 12 different attractions to ride on.

02:51:19   What most people would call rides,

02:51:23   what they call attractions

02:51:24   and because some of them aren't actually rides.

02:51:27   But things you get in line for and wait for a while

02:51:30   and then you experience them.

02:51:31   Whereas the new ones seem to,

02:51:33   and you mentioned it, that the Pandora world of Avatar,

02:51:38   which is at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Florida,

02:51:41   was sort of, I'm sure James Cameron wouldn't want to hear it,

02:51:44   but it's maybe sort of a dry run for the Star Wars stuff,

02:51:48   or at least it came first

02:51:49   in terms of inventing this whole world.

02:51:51   And it seems like they're doing the same things

02:51:53   where all of the food when you're there

02:51:55   is as though you're in that world

02:51:58   and in that camp on Pandora.

02:52:00   The beer is literally,

02:52:03   there's like a green one and a purple one.

02:52:06   And there's one that I like

02:52:07   and one that I really don't like.

02:52:09   I always forget.

02:52:10   - You can never remember which is which.

02:52:11   - I can never remember.

02:52:11   (laughing)

02:52:13   - That's funny.

02:52:13   Yeah, exactly.

02:52:14   All the food is themed.

02:52:16   All of the, and it has a,

02:52:18   you know, people may roll their eyes or whatever,

02:52:20   but all the food has a backstory.

02:52:21   Like this just isn't ribs.

02:52:23   It's like, you know, kudu ribs or whatever.

02:52:25   It's like the animal that Jar Jar rode.

02:52:28   And you know, everybody enjoys killing and eating anything

02:52:30   that has to do with Jar Jar.

02:52:31   But, you know, I think that there's,

02:52:34   there are ways to do that where you honor the fact

02:52:37   you're doing a little world building. And yes, it may on any

02:52:40   individual level, it may seem silly, but it adds up to

02:52:44   something that is greater than some of its parts. I mean, the

02:52:47   the merchandise, for instance, barely has any labeling or

02:52:50   tagging. They just have just enough of a tag to where they

02:52:54   can charge you for it. And you know, it's actually for sale.

02:52:56   Outside of that, it's extremely minimal packaging whenever

02:52:59   possible. It's all themed to the shops. So like you have a

02:53:02   creature shop owner, everything sold in that shop is a creature.

02:53:06   and every creature does a little thing like it makes noise or does a you know creature a world

02:53:12   or star wars authentic uh noise or activity you know so they're just they're taking it

02:53:19   serious they're really just going all the way with it we'll see how much they dial it back

02:53:23   you know later or how much they change because these things don't always launch and stay that

02:53:27   way as we know but uh it's certainly an interesting bet so one of the things disney's always been good

02:53:33   good at is, like I mentioned sight lines before, where from point A, if you're not supposed

02:53:37   to see the other world, you don't see it. The other thing they've always been really

02:53:40   good at are perspective tricks, forced perspective, where, you know, Main Street USA looks like

02:53:47   a two-story town in turn of the last century America, and the buildings really aren't

02:53:54   two stories tall. They're like one and a half stories tall, and they do tricks to

02:53:58   make that second story look like a full second story from the, you know, three, four, five,

02:54:04   six foot height of an adult or a small child. And then you really, really get up close and

02:54:11   look at them and you can kind of see that's not as big as I thought. The one thing that

02:54:14   is mind blowing about the Pandora in Florida is you get up real close to like those mountains

02:54:19   and rock formats. And it's like, what the hell is this? Like, how did the hell did they

02:54:23   make something this big. And how does it not tower so high that you see it from everywhere?

02:54:30   Like, how in the world is this mostly hidden from the perspective of the other areas of the park,

02:54:35   and you can get right under the base of it and you just feel dwarfed by it? Is some of the stuff in

02:54:40   the galaxy's edge like that? Yeah, the sense of scale is absolutely there. So the towers,

02:54:47   the rock towers themselves are about 135 feet tall at their highest point, which is not small,

02:54:55   you know, obviously. But it is the maximum height, essentially, that they can build them due to

02:54:59   aviation rules in LA. Similar to the—it's basically the same exact height as the castle,

02:55:06   so they can't make it any higher. In addition to that, though, you also have forced perspective

02:55:13   at work. So like some of the domes which are layered, you know, back to front with each

02:55:17   other, the domes in the back that look like they're far away or in fact, only like a foot

02:55:21   behind the other one, but they're smaller, right? So they're still using a lot of their

02:55:25   same old tricks because you know, those work. They're they're tricks based on the human

02:55:29   mind, right? But they they absolutely are doing things with scale there that they've

02:55:35   never done before. Like the buildings are bigger, the space public spaces are larger

02:55:39   than any other land. It's 14 acres total. That includes ride space.

02:55:43   Trenton Larkin And is that is that backstage? Is that both

02:55:45   Florida and California? They're both 14 acres. Okay.

02:55:47   Jay Haynes They're both parks are almost exactly identical

02:55:51   in terms of layout and size. About the only major difference structurally is that the

02:55:56   Florida Park has two entrances. And the new one has three so or the new one, not new one,

02:56:03   but the Disneyland that we're in as three. Yeah. But yeah, it's the so walking you walk

02:56:08   into the land, we walked in is still very much under construction, right? So with that caveat,

02:56:14   the scale is enormous. I mean, it's immense. The cue for the resistance ride is,

02:56:20   it's the longest I've ever seen. It's the first one I've ever seen with a bench in it.

02:56:27   That's in one of the engineers viewed that as like a, imagineers view that as like a personal win,

02:56:36   because he's like, "I'm a dad and I've never had a line with a bench in it, and so I'm really happy

02:56:40   I got this line with a bench in it." Because a lot of times when you're the dad, the problem isn't

02:56:46   you the dad and it's not you the kid, it's the fact that you're the dad with the kid on your shoulders.

02:56:50   Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And come back with scoliosis.

02:56:55   Right. That's where the bench can really help everybody.

02:56:57   Yeah. And we're all in this together. We're all trying to make it through. But yeah,

02:57:04   the sense of scale is there. You're gonna feel it like this is a real living, big city or big

02:57:13   village that I'm in. The buildings are full height. They are not scaled down. And it doesn't feel like

02:57:18   when you get close, like, "Oh, okay, I see what they did here." It's actually full height. A lot

02:57:25   of the park is, or a lot of the land has been built to a way where one of the big problems has

02:57:32   always been like seeing what's going on. And so they built the entire thing on a tiered structure,

02:57:38   which they've never done with any other land. And there's some other lands that have like a

02:57:42   transition, like you're going from here to there, up to down or whatever. But never in this sort of

02:57:47   like sloping tiered way, they essentially built it so that you're always looking over people at

02:57:54   something. So that there's the performers, for instance, of the cast members, when they come out

02:58:00   out from backstage, they have their own entrance from

02:58:02   backstage, directly to where they're going to do their thing,

02:58:06   like say, repair an X-wing that's, you know, sitting there

02:58:09   in need of repairs, or, you know, maintain the Falcon or

02:58:14   whatever, if it's chewy, for instance, they can come right in

02:58:17   from backstage, they can come into an area where they're

02:58:21   elevated, so people can see them from all around. You know, you

02:58:24   don't have to, you're not crowding in to see what they're

02:58:26   doing or to try and get a glimpse of them. So they built

02:58:30   this and it seems all logical now, but none of the other lands have been built this way.

02:58:34   And it's always been a big problem for CMs. They got to get from backstage to where they

02:58:39   are or where they're performing or whatever they're doing. And there's always that

02:58:43   awkward thing where they're walking and people are trying to meet them or stop them

02:58:48   or say hi or take a picture and they're like, "Yeah, I got to skedaddle." And then

02:58:53   when they're there, you got to wait in line to see them. You can't see them. So there's

02:58:58   of interesting things like that that they did, which is a first for any land. But like, I will

02:59:04   tell you, the moment you turn the corner and you see the full-size, 100-foot-long Falcon for the

02:59:12   first time, I literally, I said bad words. And it wasn't, I don't generally do that much. Like,

02:59:20   when I'm taking a press tour, I'm not like, you know, Apple show me the iPhone. I'm like,

02:59:25   cool, this is neat, you know? Oh, what does this do? You know, I'm not like,

02:59:28   I don't fall over in awe, you know what I mean? But when you see the Falcon for the first time,

02:59:34   in real life, it is, it's intense. It's intense. People are going to lose their minds.

02:59:39   - You came here in this, you're braver than I thought.

02:59:42   - Yeah, exactly. Everything runs through your mind, you know? All the things run through your

02:59:47   mind. And it's cool, man. They're going to have it set up to where it like, you know,

02:59:51   it'll make engine noises, like they're trying to start it up and repair it. It's going to feel

02:59:55   steam and stuff like that. Exactly. Exactly. Do you know what, what are they doing with the Star

03:00:02   Tours ride? I can't imagine they're getting rid of it. I mean, in Florida, is that going to be

03:00:06   within the confines somehow? Well, no. So they're not moving either one of them. They're staying

03:00:12   where they are. That's their current, that's their current statement. Right. So I don't know what

03:00:17   their actual plans are. Sometimes they're different than what they say. But what what they said very

03:00:22   carefully is there are no plans this time to move them. So, you know, they're staying where they are.

03:00:28   They're not moving. They're staying, you know, the Disneyland one is staying in Tomorrowland.

03:00:33   So they're just going to keep them there. I mean, you know, what can you do? It's either that or

03:00:39   you move them. You know what I mean? And that's not an easy task. So I think they're basically

03:00:46   just trying to open this thing and see how it goes. Yeah. One of the things it seems to me,

03:00:53   one of the things that bugs me as a Star Wars nerd, let me get a little Star Wars nerdy here

03:00:57   and not Disney nerdy, but one of the things that bugs me about the new Star Wars, the updated Star

03:01:01   Tours is that you go in that you're in, you know, the basic premise is you're in a, like a commercial

03:01:06   sightseeing shuttle. And things go wrong and somehow you're on a mission of racing away

03:01:16   from the Empire or the First Order or something. And you hit hyperspace and you go somewhere

03:01:23   and you go somewhere that's from one of the movies. And you're getting shot at and

03:01:28   all sorts of danger and cool things. And then it's like hyperspace again, and you have

03:01:33   another adventure from one of the other movies and then you hyperspace again and you finish

03:01:37   up and then it's you know there you go get the hell out you know next next group's coming

03:01:42   in and it's cool because they mix it up and it's randomized and so you can go twice and

03:01:48   hopefully you'll have the luck that you won't you know you might you might go three times

03:01:52   and not see the same segment twice that's right which is really nice but as a star wars

03:01:59   nerd it drives me nuts because the whole rides premise is that you're the passengers on a ship having a

03:02:05   continuous adventure that is separated by three jumps to hyperspace, but the segments come from

03:02:10   Three different trilogies that take place 20 to 30 years

03:02:14   Traveling through time and space everything it was like all of a sudden you're on Hoth in the Empire Strikes Back

03:02:21   And then you're back

03:02:24   you know on the

03:02:26   Attack of the clones or something like that and then you wind up in you know

03:02:31   You know the new trilogy with Rey and and those characters and it makes no sense at all

03:02:38   It gets you know, I get it that you know the original star tours because it was from the 80s

03:02:44   They just stuck to the original trilogy and while it was not as good a ride

03:02:48   At least it made chronological sense in the Star Wars universe and I get that they they didn't want to pick one trilogy

03:02:55   You know for the update because which one would you pick?

03:03:00   And they certainly weren't going to not have it updated for the new movies as they come out which weird

03:03:07   You know which would so I get why they did it

03:03:11   But it bothers me as a Star Wars nerd what I like from your description of batu the whole land is it seems like the land

03:03:17   Takes place in a consistent consistently in the new trilogy the latest third trill. That's right

03:03:24   timeline. Yes, it's not it's not around us at a specific movie or during a specific movie is a in

03:03:31   that era, right? That's the way they refer to it. So there, I don't believe they're gonna know of

03:03:36   things going on, you know, in that in the movie timeline. And Batuu has already been integrated,

03:03:43   as Disney does, in many of its books, and it's mentioned in the movie already, and all of that

03:03:50   stuff, you know? But it is going to be a part of the universe, and you're going to be in this place

03:03:57   while the movie trilogy era is happening, but not at a specific time.

03:04:02   Pete: No, but I think that's the right way to do it, right? I think that putting it in that era-

03:04:07   Jared, off-screen Just specific enough, right?

03:04:08   Pete Yeah.

03:04:09   Jared Yeah, you're within a year or two that, you know,

03:04:12   the span of the movie happens.

03:04:14   Pete Yeah, and I think it's the right move, you know,

03:04:17   I'm of course in the most nostalgic for the original trilogy

03:04:20   But I feel like the kids of today are going to be the most excited about the latest trilogy

03:04:25   And so it makes sense to put it there all right

03:04:27   Let me get really Star Wars nerdy on you here and one of the characters that's an animatronic is Hondo, Onaka

03:04:32   Now I remember him because I watched the animated Clone Wars series

03:04:36   And he was a major recurring character, and it sounds like he's a really cool animatronic

03:04:41   But from your article Hondo is now the proprietor of the Onaka transport solutions and has been loaned the Millennium Falcon

03:04:49   By Chewy for some quote deliveries. All right, let me just say there is no

03:04:54   Way Chewbacca is loaning the Millennium Falcon to anybody let alone to Hondo and NACA. I

03:05:02   Got a real problem. I got a real problem with that

03:05:06   Why isn't Chewie flying the thing and then the next character you talk about is?

03:05:11   One of my all-time favorite little characters who who in the world knows why I knew his name because he's got like two lines

03:05:17   but mean numb who uh-huh

03:05:19   Most people will remember was Lando's co-pilot for the Falcon during the climactic battle scene in the return of the Jedi

03:05:27   Now neen numb is on the other ride though. He's on the resistance attraction, right?

03:05:34   Right. Well, they should have put mean numb as the guy who flies the Falcon because he

03:05:38   Chewbacca maybe would loan it to Neline, you know, let me know

03:05:44   right

03:05:46   Well, there is a book that explains

03:05:49   explains why

03:05:52   Why he has they did give it to us it's actually a children's book and I gave it to my daughter but

03:05:59   it explains why they

03:06:03   This is happening, you know why he has lint in the focus

03:06:06   So there is some sort of in-universe explanation, but that said I completely understand where you're coming from. It's like wait

03:06:12   The animatronic is super stellar though. It's it's very very very smooth. I think that you know, it's as far as

03:06:23   levels of

03:06:27   Complexity the the shaman is still above it

03:06:30   You know in terms of how much it can do and that's the shaman is the shaman is is a pandora and a native pandoran

03:06:38   on the

03:06:39   Navi River ride over in Pandora

03:06:41   Exactly. Yeah, and that Navi shaman is

03:06:44   incredible animatronic absolutely incredible

03:06:47   We had the head a couple years ago at one of our robotics events just the head and they de-skinned it for us

03:06:53   It was super super cool to watch up close. Well, but even when you're watching the ride, it's amazing

03:06:58   Let me say this I've been on the ride and let me take the devil's advocate position and say I totally appreciate and but part of

03:07:05   This is because I read your article and knew it going in the face and head is amazing

03:07:11   But the whole animatronic as a whole is a bit static

03:07:16   I mean, I guess that's a shaman isn't supposed to move but it writes

03:07:20   It makes sense that almost all of the the amazing, you know, look how amazing this is is all in the face

03:07:27   Mm-hmm. And the other thing I'll say well, let me ask you this the two ruts are the two attractions

03:07:32   There's the resistance ride and then there's the Falcon ride

03:07:35   It sounds from to me from your description that neither one of them is really the a ride and the B ride

03:07:41   They both seem like a rides

03:07:44   Yeah, they would both be considered an e-ticket in the old parlance, right?

03:07:50   they absolutely were double e ticket if if that existed right because they're they're absolutely a

03:07:56   a high level of world building, high level of theming,

03:08:01   intense amount of work that went into them.

03:08:05   However, the Rise of the Resistance ride

03:08:08   is significantly bigger in terms of the size,

03:08:13   length, complexity, all of that.

03:08:17   It's the first ride that Disney has done of its kind,

03:08:20   I believe, and the Falcon ride is essentially like,

03:08:23   what if we built Star Wars with Star Tours with today's technology and made it interactive, which

03:08:29   is not a small feat, you know, but it's it's also known it's a known quantity, you know, whereas the

03:08:36   Rise of the Resistance is a new thing. There is guest interaction by cast members during the ride

03:08:41   there is you're on foot you're you're on a vehicle that quote unquote, flies, then you're on a

03:08:49   Riding vehicle like you're in multiple venues death star travel from place to place our hangar

03:08:56   Not a Death Star hangar, but a Star Destroyer hangar Star Destroyer hangar

03:09:01   Yeah, and so, you know, you're in a hangar you're you're flying on a resistance vehicle. You're in a resistance base

03:09:07   You're in a in a cell like a detention cell, you know, you move from place to place

03:09:12   This none of this happens, you know in on a ride, right?

03:09:16   So it is a it is an experience in a way that is different

03:09:19   So I don't think that either one of them necessarily are you know? Oh, this is the a ticket is the B ticket

03:09:25   They're both gonna be

03:09:27   Incredibly popular and I think just as popular different people who want different things

03:09:32   Like if your dream has always been to fly the Falcon, I mean, there's no substitute

03:09:35   You know, you can't see this on an audio podcast, but I just raised my hand

03:09:43   - I just raised my hand and my eyes are watering up

03:09:45   a little bit.

03:09:46   - Right, and that sense of,

03:09:48   (sighs)

03:09:50   - Right, if the less,

03:09:52   - You're gonna be, yeah,

03:09:53   - If the less expansive of the two rides

03:09:56   is the one where you fly the Millennium Falcon,

03:09:58   that's the song.

03:09:59   - Right, exactly.

03:10:01   That's the like, oh cool, we'll do that too,

03:10:04   then yeah, you're in good shape.

03:10:06   - So the difference between Pandora,

03:10:08   have you ever been there?

03:10:09   Have you ever been to the Florida parks?

03:10:11   - You know, no, uh-uh.

03:10:12   - No, so you've never been to the Florida ones

03:10:13   and I've never been to California.

03:10:15   - Exactly. - So we go every year.

03:10:17   So I've been to the Pandora a couple times

03:10:20   and the two, they do this, it's the same sort of formula.

03:10:24   It's an all-encompassing world, surprisingly big,

03:10:26   all these rocks and very immersive,

03:10:28   all the food, all the merchandise.

03:10:30   There's all sorts of stuff when you're not in a ride

03:10:34   that's really technically impressive.

03:10:35   One of the things in the Pandora world that they have

03:10:38   is you know how in that Pandora universe,

03:10:40   the humans have these big robots that they ride in, you know, like, they have one, they

03:10:50   have a real one. I mean, like that there's a real guy in and it walks around. And then

03:10:54   he takes, you know, he'll stop and he'll take questions from kids about who'll ask, you

03:10:58   know, all in universe, like, you know, how high can you jump? And he's like, well, this,

03:11:03   this, this model, the one I'm in is actually set to a low power mode for the safety because

03:11:07   we know there's a bunch of you around here, but if we turned it on, I could jump about

03:11:12   five feet in the air.

03:11:13   Yeah, gotcha.

03:11:14   You know, and it's super, but the cool thing about that sort of thing is they're making

03:11:20   it there's so much more fun that you can have that you never knew you were going to have

03:11:24   that you're not waiting in line for it. You're just there and all of a sudden this guy in

03:11:28   a robot suit comes out, you know. But the flight of passage attraction, they have two,

03:11:34   So part of the formula to two attractions, big land, the flight of passage ride is the

03:11:39   greatest theme park attraction I've ever been on in my life. It is. And my wife and

03:11:45   son were in unanimous agreement. It is mind-blowingly immersive. I almost don't even want to say

03:11:51   anything on the show other than it really does feel like you're flying around Pandora.

03:11:56   is and the scope is amazing. The scale, it's just incredible. The Navi River Passage is

03:12:05   like a boat ride. It's like you're on a really nice version of It's a Small World.

03:12:19   It is not, it is very clear difference between the two, which one is the bigger attraction,

03:12:26   if you can only do one, which one you should do. Whereas it seems like in Star Wars, it's,

03:12:30   it's a lot closer call. Yeah. I mean, I think that maybe I don't want to, I didn't, I don't have any

03:12:37   inside info on this, but I think maybe they know that, right? Like maybe they, they understand that

03:12:41   the boat ride is awesome, but if you're going to do Star Wars and you're going to promise this

03:12:46   interactive, you know, kind of immersive world that has to extend to the rides too. And it really,

03:12:53   from I wasn't able to ride the completed ride because it's literally not completed. But from

03:12:57   what we were able to see of the experience that is true of this it is not you don't sit passively

03:13:05   on a boat or on a car and let it you know, rush over through the right yeah, you just you just

03:13:11   you're not sitting there just watching a bunch of animatronics do their thing. You know, that's not

03:13:16   what this is about. It's, you know, multiple characters you're interacting with multiple

03:13:22   experiences that you get to that you get to take part in, you feel like you are part of the

03:13:28   universe, you're, you know, the, the adventures that you're having are in universe and sort of,

03:13:33   you know, feel like they could be in the movie, you know, that kind of thing. And they're using

03:13:39   a bunch of different tech to get it done. So that's not, this isn't the same deal as that.

03:13:44   It's not like, hey, we're taking an existing ride thing, we're putting a new theme on it. And we're

03:13:49   we're putting some cool animatronics in front of you. It's not that.

03:13:52   So the bay and the basic description of the Falcon ride seems so cool. It's like you're in the real

03:13:56   Falcon. It's the room, you know, there's the chessboard. It's all to scale. It's like you're

03:14:00   really there. And then in groups of six, they load you in and you're in the Millennium Falcon cockpit,

03:14:06   and then everybody gets roles. Like there's two pilots and two gunners and two, I forget what

03:14:11   else there were. But you all have things to do. And it actually really does interact with the

03:14:18   the result of what you get.

03:14:21   Like you have to push buttons at the right time

03:14:24   and you can get, like, you know, I guess that no matter

03:14:27   what, like the Millennium Falcon isn't exploding.

03:14:30   - Yeah, look, your ride, they were very explicit

03:14:34   in that your ride would always complete.

03:14:36   So you're always gonna be, the mission,

03:14:38   the Falcon's mission will always be successful,

03:14:40   I think is the phrase that they used, right?

03:14:42   They don't want anybody getting, you know,

03:14:43   waiting hours to get this ride.

03:14:45   Some guy doesn't do his piloting job out the gate

03:14:48   you crash immediately and you have to get off.

03:14:50   And I know it's laughable for the next 10, 15, probably 20 years that there's going to

03:14:56   be an empty seat.

03:14:58   But you know, right, 30 years from now, when God Star Wars galaxy edge is no longer the,

03:15:04   you know, the main attraction, and it's the end of the night, and you get in and there's

03:15:07   only three of you and there is nobody in the gunner's seats, you're not going to get you

03:15:11   know, you're not going to get blown up.

03:15:12   That's right.

03:15:13   That's right.

03:15:14   said is instead you have two pilots, two engineers, two gunners. And so each person has a role.

03:15:21   So if the pilot does their thing at the right time, you execute a maneuver and avoid a TIE

03:15:26   fighter's fire, great. If you don't do it in time and you get hit, now the engineer

03:15:32   has work to do, right? And so they can put out the fire that was caused by the TIE fighter

03:15:38   blast

03:15:39   By the blaster blast they can

03:15:41   You know your your gunner can shoot it down if he shoots it down late

03:15:46   Maybe you get you know, it's a trap and then we're working together

03:15:48   So they come through battered but you're gonna get through so there's a ride at Epcot called mission space and the basic idea

03:15:55   is that you're on like a

03:15:57   Experimental mission to Mars and there's four of you in each little thing

03:16:00   And there's like a sim. It's a similar, you know, obviously a similar thinking and you know

03:16:06   one of you is the pilot, one's the mission commander, one's the engineer, and one is

03:16:09   navigator or something. And there's points in it where you're supposed to flip switches and stuff.

03:16:16   And much like you said about the Falcon stuff, you've got all these switches to flip and you

03:16:20   push buttons and they beep and they bloop and they all feel like real NASA quality switches.

03:16:25   And they must be because they've been there for 10 or 15 years at this point and they're all still

03:16:30   in working order. They're all like serious industrial grade switches. But it's cool because

03:16:35   you can start playing with them before the ride starts. Like you, you, you load in, you put your

03:16:39   seatbelt on and lower your, your harness. And then you can sit there and like bleep and bloop and

03:16:45   flip all these switches. But then there's a certain part in the mission where you're supposed

03:16:47   to do stuff. Well, if you don't do it, not one thing changes. Like you can do everything wrong.

03:16:54   You like, absolutely nothing changes. It makes you feel like something changes. And maybe if you're

03:17:00   a young enough kid and you're not really paying attention, you might think you did something,

03:17:04   but having been on it numerous times, there is no, not one iota changes of what you actually see on

03:17:12   the screen. So it's not very empowering. No, but it makes sense because it seems like that's an

03:17:18   easier way to make a ride where you're loading hundreds of people in an hour. Whereas to have

03:17:23   it actually be interactive is seems like a genuine technical breakthrough.

03:17:29   Yeah, it is. I mean, each cockpit of which there are multiple, obviously, to get,

03:17:37   you know, otherwise you'd be there all day. Six people at a time.

03:17:41   Yeah, six people at a time. 75 people can get on this today out of 10,000.

03:17:46   I love that you asked how many cockpits they have and they wouldn't answer.

03:17:52   That's exactly-

03:17:52   No, they wouldn't tell me.

03:17:54   That's exactly the way that Disney is like Apple, right?

03:17:58   exactly. Like if I'm like, Oh, cool. Yeah. How many how many

03:18:01   transistors and all like, does that really matter? But yeah,

03:18:06   the the multiple cockpits basically enable them to load

03:18:11   multiple people. But each of those cockpits has to be a

03:18:14   completely independent projection system that reacts in

03:18:16   real time. So it's rendering everything in real time, as you

03:18:20   make your decisions. So each one has to have its own rendering

03:18:23   pipeline and basically render farm attached to it that can make it happen.

03:18:29   I can't wait. I'll be flying the Falcon. I know I'm going to wind up stuck being the

03:18:35   engineer. How long do you think the wait's going to be for pilot?

03:18:38   I don't know. Did they?

03:18:40   You can wait for the front, right? They didn't say. They didn't say, but that's good. Okay,

03:18:46   stand over here and wait with these other 10,000 people that want to be the pilot.

03:18:49   And sit in the front. Do you think they'll make them sit differently? A lot of times at Disney,

03:18:52   don't really let you wait for the front like that. Like they just kind of, I don't know.

03:18:57   I don't know. I think most of the coasters, they let you wait for your spot, but I don't know. Yeah.

03:19:02   It's going to be, that's going to be a Roshan Boeing, I think, amongst your pilot group,

03:19:07   your flight group. If you go, go in groups of six, because then you, you guys can come to a

03:19:13   gentle person's agreement. All right. That is fantastic. I can't wait to see this myself,

03:19:20   although I won't be able to see it this summer because in Florida it won't open till September

03:19:25   or something but I'm still looking forward to it and I absolutely loved your article and honestly

03:19:30   came away from your 6,000 word well illustrated piece with so many questions.

03:19:34   Yeah. I thank you as always for your time. You are @panzer, P-A-N-Z-E-R on the Twitters

03:19:46   and everybody can read your fine work and the work of your staff at a tech

03:19:51   crunch dot com. Anything else you want to, you want to mention?

03:19:54   No, I think I'm good. All right. May the force be with you. Appreciate you.

03:19:58   I really appreciate you as well.