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354: ‘Get Me to the Fainting Couch’, With John Moltz

 

00:00:00   you have a safe in your house? If you do, what do you keep in it? I'm gonna say something that is

00:00:06   probably could come back to regret. We do have a safe, and last I checked, it is not locked.

00:00:13   That's the problem with having a safe. We have two. One of them is locked, and the other one,

00:00:20   yeah, but the other one is the one that we've been using for years. We got—oh, it's a long story,

00:00:24   I'm not even gonna go into it, but yeah, that's the problem with having a safe is, like, when you

00:00:27   want to get into it, you don't want to have to go through all the trouble unlocking it, so you just

00:00:30   leave it unlocked. It seems like such a good idea when you become a responsible adult to keep things

00:00:36   like passports and—because, you know, I don't use my—I'm not James Bond, I don't use my passport

00:00:42   very often. Keep that in there and, you know, other, you know, truly, truly, inarguably important

00:00:48   papers. But, you know, and then it turns out you do take your passports in and out, you know, and

00:00:54   you need them sometimes, and, you know, maybe it's easier to just have a very heavy box.

00:00:59   I think—I don't know, I'm kind of keen on stashing things in weird places.

00:01:07   Yeah, but anyway, this Trump thing is fascinating to me. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it,

00:01:14   but it is—in some ways, it is the most bananas Trump story of all time, which is something,

00:01:21   right? I mean, because that's, you know, we're talking about a man who's—that's his middle

00:01:25   name is—you're not going to believe this. But basically, I don't know, what do you think is

00:01:31   going—like, why does he have this stuff? Why did he take it with him?

00:01:35   He's the kind of—I mean, he is definitely the kind of guy, though, that goes to a hotel and

00:01:38   scoops up all the towels as he leaves, right? I think it could be just as simple as that.

00:01:42   He scooped up everything that he thought had any kind of value in order to sell it or

00:01:49   grandize himself. Or hoard it, you know? Like, because you remember—and I think the New York

00:01:55   Times included it in their story, one of their, you know, numerous stories this week. But Maggie

00:02:00   Haberman, who's been on the Trump beat for the Times since 2015, when he first started running,

00:02:06   one of the reasons she got the job as the Times' lead Trump reporter on the campaign trail was that

00:02:15   she'd been following him, like, I think she was at the New York Post and a couple other New York

00:02:19   papers. She went from being a New York reporter who covered Trump to being a national reporter

00:02:25   when he became a national figure. And so she knows what she's talking about, but like she said—and

00:02:29   you've seen pictures of his Trump Tower, Fifth Avenue office. It's not quite like that TV show

00:02:34   Hoarders, but it was cluttered with memorabilia. He kept things. Apparently, one of his prized

00:02:40   possessions is a pair of Shaquille O'Neal sneakers, and like, she described it in the

00:02:46   report as, you know, it was so cluttered with memorabilia that it was kind of difficult to walk

00:02:51   around, you know, to sit in front of him. I think that the answer is kind of simple in that he's a

00:02:57   lunatic. He is—he's a crazy person, and that's what some of us have been saying all along, right?

00:03:06   It's not, "Oh, I have liberal politics, and he's going to institute conservative politics,

00:03:12   and therefore you say things like, "Oh, he's a lunatic." Like George W. Bush was not a lunatic.

00:03:18   Definitely not. Dick Cheney, not a lunatic. I mean, it—wrong, I think. I disagree on certain things.

00:03:26   I think in hindsight they were clearly wrong on like the Iraq War, but I think it was in some more

00:03:32   or less a good faith effort to do what they thought was the best for the U.S. national

00:03:36   interests. You know, they're not lunatics. Wrong, warmongering, possibly you could just say—you

00:03:43   could even say bad people, you know, that their intentions were immoral, but not lunatics. Trump,

00:03:51   I think, that's the whole problem is the man is a lunatic. And I think that the people who like him

00:03:59   or who just hate the liberals, you know, that want to own the libs, and they just so dislike

00:04:05   liberals and they're so into the Fox mindset that the only thing that really matters is owning U.S.

00:04:10   liberals, that if the guy is sticking it to the liberals, he's their guy. And that's it. And they

00:04:16   sort of have a mindset when people say, "Listen, this man, look at what he's doing. He's a lunatic."

00:04:20   They think something like this. Nobody likes a lunatic. Nobody would vote for a lunatic to

00:04:29   lead a country. We like this guy, and we'd like him to lead the country, therefore he's not a

00:04:35   lunatic. He can't be. He's a very stable genius. And you just can't understand his level of genius.

00:04:42   He's playing 12-dimensional chess. I don't know the names. It's the same way that I don't know

00:04:46   the names of the rules of grammar, but, you know, like when you take Philosophy 101 in college,

00:04:51   there's a name for that fallacy, you know, like that five-step—there's some kind of name for it,

00:04:56   and it's, you know, but there's a big hole in the logic, which might be that your entire premise that

00:05:03   no one would support a lunatic for president is wrong, right? And if you look back at a lot of

00:05:09   historical figures who are universally deemed as being madmen lunatics, they had popular support.

00:05:18   Yeah. Well, and Boebert's another one, right? I mean, Boebert's another—a person who is

00:05:22   absolutely off the deep end, who, you know, her supporters think, "Oh no, she's great. She's,

00:05:27   you know, she's getting in there and she's making changes." No, she's just like flailing around like

00:05:34   a mad person. Right. Luckily, freshman congresspeople from Colorado don't have access

00:05:42   to the nation's holiest of holy top secret nuclear secrets. But somehow I think in his lunatic mind

00:05:51   that over the years there were some of these things that came to his desk, and then he was like,

00:05:55   "I'd like to take this up to the residence," and they're like, "Well, sir, you know, actually the

00:05:59   stuff in these red folders we really should just keep here in the Oval Office." And who knows?

00:06:03   Maybe they don't even show them those in the Oval. Maybe those are, you know, they're talking about

00:06:07   some of these things that you're only supposed to even have eyes on them in a "secure facility."

00:06:12   I presume the Oval Office counts as a secure facility, but maybe they only look at those

00:06:17   down in that room in the basement of the White House, you know, with the Situation Room. But

00:06:22   as the president and head of the executive branch, you do have the right to declassify

00:06:27   classified stuff, and I guess you have the right to take it up to the residence. And I think he just

00:06:31   stuffed it in a sock drawer. It is seemingly universally agreed that one of the things he had

00:06:37   was the letters, handwritten letters he got from Kim Jong-un. I think he just, I don't think he

00:06:43   wants to sell it. I think he wants, he just wants to have it. It's a crazy mine. And he's like,

00:06:48   "Nuclear code." And I know it would be juicy and awful. I hope it's, I actually hope it's not true.

00:06:53   I hope it's just crazy and just hoarded the stuff even though it's illegal. I hope he gets in all

00:06:57   sorts of legal trouble for it. I don't want to believe that he was hoping to hand it over to

00:07:03   the Saudis or something like that, but I also would not be shocked, right? Would you have to

00:07:07   get to the fainting couch? No, no, no. I mean, but I don't think—

00:07:15   That's a terrible thing. It's completely believable.

00:07:16   But I also think that to go that path, you have to attribute to him more thought than I think goes

00:07:23   into it. I think he's just a crazy person and he's like, "This is so cool, right? I've got like,

00:07:28   I've got like this, the greatest secret documents about our nuclear system, something, something.

00:07:35   That's mine. That's mine now. And that's it." It's the converse of him taking stuff into the

00:07:43   toilet and flushing it down, right? It's like, "I don't know what this is, but it looks bad.

00:07:48   I'm flushing it down the toilet." Did you see that Maggie Haberman has photos?

00:07:53   Yeah, I was like, "Those are real?" Who sent those? The cleaning crew? Is that how they got those?

00:08:03   I guess, but that, you know, she reported this months ago. And it's, you know, it's a—to get

00:08:10   a little serious here, a little bit serious, as the Trump thing ended, to get it put our media

00:08:16   critic hats on, there's a repeated criticism both of reporters, like from the Post, the Washington

00:08:23   Post and New York Times, who have books coming out about Trump or have had them come out.

00:08:27   Woodward's had several. And former Trump administration officials who are on the

00:08:34   same side of the fence, who have books coming out or had books coming out. The argument of,

00:08:39   "Why didn't you say these things at the moment if you were so concerned about his damaging the state

00:08:47   of the country and the world, as opposed to waiting until you got a book deal and then the

00:08:52   stuff comes out two years later?" And, you know, I don't know what to say about that because I can

00:08:58   imagine, you know, wanting it. I'm not sure. Honestly, I'm not that sure how much difference

00:09:03   it would have made, particularly towards the end when they controlled both houses. I mean,

00:09:09   they weren't going to—they controlled the Senate. I mean, they would have blocked anything

00:09:12   that happened. So, you know, the guy already got impeached and nothing happened. So, what else

00:09:20   would have come down on him?

00:09:22   Right. And you can argue that the Ukraine impeachment, which again looks a lot worse now

00:09:28   than when it happened, but in the way that you couldn't—if you scripted all of this the last

00:09:36   seven years as a TV series, you just—it would have to be done like Dr. Strangelove style as a farce

00:09:42   and categorized on whichever streaming channel picked it up as comedy. You'd have to.

00:09:50   Because of—just everything comes back and it's like, well, this isn't realistic at all,

00:09:56   that the country—of all the countries in the world, the one that the lunatic president tried to

00:10:03   blackmail into digging up dirt on his political opponent before he gave them military aid that

00:10:12   everybody agreed we needed to give them would, as soon as the guy was out of office, get invaded

00:10:19   by Russia. Which was exactly the scenario that had everybody agreeing, you know, we need to supply

00:10:27   the Ukraine with some aid because, you know, this other guy Putin is also a lunatic and it seems

00:10:32   like he might invade. And that's the one country he held hostage for political dirt?

00:10:38   Yeah, there was somebody posted something from The Onion. I mean, of course, you know, like,

00:10:43   you keep finding things from The Onion that approved—that have come true, but it was something

00:10:49   about the hat-check person or the coat-check person at Mar-a-Lago wondering if anyone's

00:10:53   going to come and collect this briefcase full of nuclear goods. So I kind of agree, though,

00:11:04   that whatever you want to say about the Ukraine impeachment, it was maybe borderline. I really

00:11:09   do think it was an impeachable offense because I really think that trying to get political dirt is

00:11:16   truly impeachable. I do. But after the insurrection, the fact that they still didn't impeach him right

00:11:25   on the spot— Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's it. We're sending those articles over again

00:11:30   because we're voting yes now. If they didn't impeach him then, then I agree that somebody

00:11:35   like Defense Secretary Mark Esper piping up right on the spot to say, "I just got fired and I need

00:11:43   to tell you this man is a lunatic and he's trying to—he's really, it seems to me like he's trying

00:11:50   to start a trumped-up war, no pun intended, against Iran in the hopes that it'll make the country

00:11:57   distract." And I don't think—how is that going to have more of an effect? So I kind of feel like,

00:12:04   yeah, you probably should have done that, really, like, just in case it would have made a difference,

00:12:09   but holding it for your book probably isn't that big a deal. But anyway, Maggie Habermann reported

00:12:14   months ago because somebody else sort of got the story too and she had it so she put it out—her

00:12:18   book isn't out yet—that Trump—everybody knows this by now—that Trump had a habit of ripping up

00:12:24   paper and then flushing it down the toilet, but apparently sometimes not flushing.

00:12:30   Not at all, yeah, really, boy. And then somebody else got more on this story last week and so

00:12:37   Maggie Habermann released another report before her book, but with pictures she had obtained,

00:12:42   which again, like you said, immediately I think, "Holy crap, somebody has pictures." And then you

00:12:47   can zoom in. It certainly looks like his handwriting. That's the Sharpie, the all caps,

00:12:54   does look like his handwriting. I mean, if I work there, you know, I mean, I don't know what the

00:12:59   security's like. I guess you could take—can you take your phone in? I guess. Well, I guess we now

00:13:03   know you can't? I don't know. That was a good—that's always been a question to me. What, you know,

00:13:08   do you—if you're like a butler, you know, in the White House, do you get to carry your cell phone

00:13:13   around? It's—I don't know. I just don't know. But somebody had pictures and, you know, she's

00:13:19   obviously staking her reporting reputation, you know, that these are real and that somebody took

00:13:25   pictures of ripped up paper. And I will say for anybody out there who isn't aware of this, hasn't

00:13:30   googled it, hasn't seen the pictures, I will assuage any worries in your mind. The pictures

00:13:35   do seem to be clear toilet water. Yes, yeah. It looks like he was just flushing paper down.

00:13:43   Yes, not like he was doing his business. Boy, if you like—if you really wanted to make sure it

00:13:49   went, no one was going to get it. Right. Yeah, you should have mixed it all together. Yeah.

00:13:56   A little bit of number one, a little bit of number two, and a little—just the whole thing. A little

00:14:00   top secret information. Some damaging deal that you just concocted. But it is—

00:14:07   What do you think he has—the list that came from the FBI was kind of funny, because there's

00:14:18   all this serious stuff where it's like this stuff was labeled, you know, whatever the codes are for

00:14:24   the holiest of holies, top secret stuff. Some of the stuff was just regular top secret. Some of it

00:14:28   was just confidential, but all boxes of stuff. Other things, seemingly for whatever reason,

00:14:34   you know, it leads your imagine—you know, let your imagination run wild. They're just like box

00:14:38   17A, you know, and they don't even tell you what's in it. And then they're like,

00:14:43   something about the president of France. Yeah.

00:14:50   What's that? Apparently there were hacked emails. I saw somebody post that, and again,

00:14:55   this is something that I read on Twitter, so I don't—who knows if it's how true it is, but

00:15:00   that guy, Jack Przobek—I can't, I'm not sure how to pronounce his name—but he somehow got

00:15:06   these hacked emails that were macrons and gave them to the Trump people. And then like the next

00:15:16   day or, you know, shortly thereafter was allowed into the White House press. Well, oh man. See,

00:15:22   yeah, now I didn't know that. Now it makes a little bit more sense, and it also makes sense

00:15:26   why he would consider that a souvenir. Yeah, right. I mean, you know, and I would think that,

00:15:33   like any mob boss, he wants leverage. But it's like his imaginary leverage, right? And the other

00:15:41   thing too I always come back to is—and I know that he, bizarrely, and again, you can't make this up,

00:15:47   before he got into politics, he was a well-known occasional figure in pro wrestling, which you

00:15:55   really can't make up, but I've always thought that professional wrestling really does explain Trump's

00:16:01   view of how the world works. It's not quite fake, but it's also just, you just say what you want to

00:16:10   happen and then that happens. If the plot line is that the other guy wins the title because the ref

00:16:17   got distracted and looked the other way and our hero got hit over the head and lost his championship

00:16:24   belt, that's Trump losing his presidency. The hero who lost his belt can just sort of stamp his feet

00:16:30   and get the crowd behind him and then steal the belt back and now he's the champion again, right?

00:16:37   He thinks everything works that way. You just say what you want to happen and it happens and

00:16:41   nothing is really based on actual cause and effect. It's like he thinks you can screen write the whole

00:16:49   world, which is sort of how pro wrestling works, and that's why people like to watch it. Most

00:16:53   people understand that that's fiction. I'm trying to remember that magazine. I used to subscribe to

00:17:00   this years ago. I ran through the late 80s into the early 90s, I think, and they went after Trump

00:17:06   a lot. It was a funny, funny magazine. Oh, it was Graydon Carter's thing. I can't believe I

00:17:11   forgot it either. Yeah, but anyway, somebody posted a clip from that from 1989 and it was Trump

00:17:19   saying something about, even back then, saying that he should be the one to negotiate some sort

00:17:26   of nuclear treaty. Yeah, like the START treaty. The S-P-A-R-T, yeah, nuclear treaty. Because

00:17:33   he said, "You can learn that nuclear stuff in like two hours."

00:17:36   And then he said, "In fact, I think I probably already know it all."

00:17:41   Oh, now I gotta find Spy Magazine. Spy Magazine, yeah. Yeah. That was because I kept thinking

00:17:51   secret and I knew that wasn't right. Yeah, but that's right. You had it filed under S.

00:17:55   And probably filed about as accurately as Trump filed all this stuff.

00:18:03   In these boxes. Oh man, what a bananas story. And it's just sitting there. I like it. I like too,

00:18:12   when he announced the raid, that he snuck into his statement, "My beautiful home." "My beautiful

00:18:17   Mar-a-Lago." Like they've sullied it. Like the FBI came in and shit all over the carpets.

00:18:23   That's what he wants people to think. You do wonder, though. You really wonder what

00:18:32   ... And again, we've gotten these books from defense secretaries and off-the-record comments

00:18:39   from Joints Chief of Staff and these perspectives at the highest levels. But I really do think

00:18:45   probably the best stories come from the actual working class people. Like whoever took those

00:18:50   photos of the ripped up stuff in the toilets in the White House. The staff. Oh yeah, those are

00:18:55   the people who should be writing books. Yeah, just like you said, the doorman at Mar-a-Lago.

00:19:01   You just know that he's seen some stuff. Like some real stuff. He's probably got leverage on that guy,

00:19:09   too. Oh man. Also, I don't even want to tell you, I'd even give the money to the Trumps. I would pay

00:19:16   the money to the Trump Media Corporation to get a tape recording and listen to it of Eric Trump

00:19:24   calling his father to tell him that 40 FBI agents have showed up at a warrant and are going,

00:19:32   getting everything they want out of Mar-a-Lago. Is that how it happened? Is that what happened?

00:19:37   Yeah, it was Eric. Because he wasn't there. I knew that. Right. He wasn't there. He was

00:19:40   up in Bedminster, I guess. You know, because the weather's miserable in August in Palm Beach.

00:19:46   Nobody his age is still in Florida. Yeah, but it did come out that they strategically planned

00:19:52   the raid for when he wasn't there. And I think the fact that it was a Monday, you know, because they

00:19:57   knew the place was mostly closed or whatever. But yes, it was reported as fact that it was somehow,

00:20:02   I don't think Eric was there per se. I don't know, you know. But he heard first. Right. The first

00:20:07   person, you know, somebody there realized, well, we better call the boss. And the first person they

00:20:12   got a hold of was Eric, who I guess was at work somewhere in the vast Trump organization. And it

00:20:21   was Eric Trump who called his father to let him know. And I would just love, oh, God, I would pay

00:20:26   so much money. I would just make it my ringtone. Every time my phone rings, I would turn the ringer

00:20:34   switch up so I could hear it. Dad! Dad! Dad! It's me. And then he says, "Who?" Anyway, let me tell

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00:24:07   Lots of stuff going on in our real world, right? I guess.

00:24:11   What we talked about wasn't real world. Well, I don't know. Sometimes it doesn't seem like it.

00:24:20   Lunatic former president who still has support of his party, who's acting like he's going to

00:24:25   run again, has stashed the nation's nuclear secrets in a basement at a resort. Or do you

00:24:35   want to talk about system preferences and Matt hoods? I'm not sure what the bigger mess is.

00:24:40   We probably should talk about system preferences though.

00:24:42   So here we are. I guess if there's a theme of the episode, here we are mid August

00:24:47   and all this stuff, this is the time when to me, July is sort of la dee da, you know,

00:24:53   all that fun stuff from WWDC is still, it's all fun and it's okay if it's buggy.

00:24:59   And then August is like, Hey crap, this stuff's supposed to ship soon. Let's get real about it.

00:25:04   Right? Because here we are middle of August. I'm guessing just on history, ever since Apple moved

00:25:10   the iPhone schedule from like June in the very early years to September, most people,

00:25:17   a lot of people even who listen to the show may not even remember the days, the first like what,

00:25:21   four years when iPhones came out in like June, but ever since they moved it to September,

00:25:28   it's been like the first or second week of September, they did this, they kept that schedule

00:25:33   during COVID when everything was remote. So I don't think it's very hard to predict that

00:25:38   they're probably going to have the iPhone event on Wednesday, September 7th, or Tuesday,

00:25:46   September 13th. Now I follow this stuff because I try to look at the flights, I figure I'm going out

00:25:52   there. But the reason I say Wednesday is that if it's that week, the Monday is Labor Day. And

00:25:59   traditionally, I don't think Apple's ever held an event. They like to hold them on Tuesdays,

00:26:02   generally, for whatever reason, that's their PR scheme. But they won't hold it on a Tuesday,

00:26:08   if the day before is like a holiday like Labor Day. I don't know if that's for their benefit,

00:26:13   if it's being gracious to the people that like me in the media, so nobody has to

00:26:17   travel on a holiday or combination of everything. A friend of the show, Renee Ritchie, reminded me

00:26:23   that probably in the old days before it was at their own facilities, it was probably a union

00:26:27   thing too, right? Like if you're holding the event at like a union facility, you can't tell those

00:26:32   guys to come in on a Monday. The other thing they will do if you look historically, I think they

00:26:37   started September's in 2012. Is that when Steve Jobs died? I forget.

00:26:45   That event was on a weird schedule because it was the first one to move to the fall, but at least

00:26:57   since 2012, it's early September. But they also won't hold it on a Tuesday if the Tuesday is

00:27:02   September 11th. And again, nobody at Apple PR has ever told me why. I think for our lifetimes,

00:27:09   no one's going to hold some sort of let's have fun event on September 11th. So anyway,

00:27:14   I feel like it's probably either going to be Wednesday the 7th or Tuesday the 13th.

00:27:20   That's coming up. That's like, you know, what, three, four weeks from now. So iPhone's getting

00:27:24   real. Our friend, everybody's friend, I mean this sincerely, the undisputed king of Apple

00:27:29   rumor reporters, Mark Gurman has reported recently that iPad OS, what number are we at? 16.

00:27:37   16. Will not debut alongside iOS 16 in September, but they're going to push that back to October

00:27:44   when the Mac, yearly Mac OS updates typically shipped. I think the reason why for anybody who's

00:27:50   been using the betas over the summer is it's pretty clear, a little bit behind. But anyway,

00:27:55   that stuff's all getting real and we could talk about all of it. Which one do you want to talk

00:27:59   about first? You want to talk about the Mac? I guess that's what we let off with, so probably

00:28:07   ought to. So I'll say this, I'll start with this. I think overall, as this year's annual updates

00:28:15   have settled in, I kind of feel like it's a relatively thin year. Like I don't, and I don't

00:28:23   mean this as a complaint. I think some people really wish that every year Apple could just blow

00:28:27   our minds away with major new tent pole features on every platform or some kind of major new feature

00:28:34   that's on all the platforms. That's just not how stuff works. Sometimes you need incremental years,

00:28:40   but overall it feels like an incremental year. And I...

00:28:44   I, the only beta that I have installed is, and it is in particular because it looks the most

00:28:50   different, is iOS. And I think, I mean, I think at least, I mean, it's not just cosmetically, but

00:28:57   like the lock screen makes a big difference because obviously that's something that you

00:29:00   interact with every time you open your phone. So that one seems to me a little big anyway.

00:29:06   Yeah. And then of course the center, nope, center stage is not the right word, stage manager. I will

00:29:12   never get this dual use of stage. Again, it's just like you with spy and secret. It's all filed under

00:29:20   S stage. I, I, I was Nevins, Nevina that game stage. Oh, what the heck was it called?

00:29:27   You know, doing it, I'm doing it again, but for a while I kept saying the name of that.

00:29:32   Yeah. So I, we can knock the Mac out of the way first because the, the two big changes on the Mac

00:29:41   that, that spring to mind is system preferences is now system settings. And it's more than just

00:29:48   a name change, which is good. I think that they held off on renaming preferences to settings

00:29:55   when they redid the interface, you know, it, it, it feels fair, looked shaky right from the initial

00:30:03   beta at WWDC and meant enough to me that I actually brought it up on stage with Jaws and

00:30:10   Craig Federighi at my live show two days after, you know, it debuted. And I, I still, it's probably

00:30:18   one of my favorite segments of that whole show. Cause I thought it was, I thought Craig Federighi's

00:30:23   response was really interesting. I don't think, I still don't think I agree with him, but I thought

00:30:30   it was as good, like, what do you, you know, I don't think I quite asked it like this, but one,

00:30:37   one way to paraphrase my, my question when I first saw it, what are you thinking? And,

00:30:45   and anybody who didn't watch that segment of the show, I I'll, I'll make a note to myself. I'll

00:30:50   put a link and I'll put a link that jumps right to that segment of, of the show. But he had a

00:30:57   good explanation, which I, again, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but that it's more than

00:31:02   just, Hey, this is what settings looks like on iOS. iOS is the one with a billion users or over

00:31:10   a billion users and the Mac should seem more familiar to them. So let's make the Mac settings

00:31:18   look as much like iOS as possible. That's a factor. He admitted, you know, familiarity is

00:31:22   something in mind, but that basically they thought system settings had grown from 20 years ago when

00:31:30   Mac OS 10 debuted to the point where it was much more simple back then. And now some of the panels

00:31:36   in the modern system preferences have views within views and sometimes views within views,

00:31:43   within the views. Right. Yeah. Right. And then some of them, I never know exactly how to get out of.

00:31:48   Yeah. You know, and, and a lot of times I think anybody listening who's ever done anything with

00:31:55   like the privacy and security panel where it's like you go into privacy and security,

00:32:00   and then there's accessibility in there. And that was my initial reaction when seeing that they had

00:32:06   basically scrapped the whole thing and pulled over the settings from iOS was that, well,

00:32:11   I always had trouble in there. Like I always had trouble finding things even when I went and when

00:32:16   I organized the icons alphabetically. I, you know, don't always remember exactly what one thing is

00:32:23   called. And then, then I'm still searching through this long list of things, looking for the

00:32:27   particular icon that makes me go, Oh, it's that one. Or, and then, you know, and then over time

00:32:33   they'd change the icons a little bit. And so, you know, that doesn't help that much anyway. And so

00:32:39   every time I go in there, I feel like I'm, I spend a solid 15 seconds at least, which doesn't seem

00:32:45   that long when you say it like that, but seems like a long time when you're just looking for a

00:32:49   freaking icon, trying to find the thing that I'm looking for. And so I was like, well, you know,

00:32:55   maybe this would be for the better and it doesn't seem like maybe that panned out. One of the things

00:33:02   I've been slow to learn doing the gig that I do, you know, is I, when you have a good tip,

00:33:10   you can't repeat it often enough to the audience. And I think like, Oh, I told people about that

00:33:17   a while ago. I shouldn't tell them again. Cause every time I have like one of my favorite tips

00:33:22   for iOS or macOS and I'm like, ah, you know what? I'll tell people again, even though I know it

00:33:27   brought this up before I get all sorts of emails from people saying, Oh my God, that's the most

00:33:31   amazing tip I've ever gotten. So let me tell everybody my favorite tip about system preferences.

00:33:36   Before it goes away.

00:33:39   Right. Just in time for it to go away, which is that in system preferences, you open it up,

00:33:45   you go up there to the menu bar and go to view. And the second little section there is, or it,

00:33:51   yours is probably says organized by categories. And then you go one item down, it says organized

00:33:57   alphabetically. Right. And it just read number. It just reorders all the preferences and it does

00:34:02   away with the two with three groups. Yep. You know, you tell people this and they're like, what?

00:34:08   And it's not like it's not hidden, you know, really? I mean, it's in the,

00:34:15   it's in the views. It's right where you'd expect it to be.

00:34:17   Well, I do think I don't want to get off on a sidetrack about it, but I do think that it,

00:34:22   it, it speaks to the fact that the menu bar has been sort of forgotten. I was going to say

00:34:31   devalued. It de-emphasized is a lack of, is maybe the best way I can put it. It, it, to me,

00:34:38   defines the Mac interface. It is the one it's one thing that is absolutely unchanged since 1984,

00:34:47   which is a long run that the top of your screen on the Mac is a menu bar and it's file

00:34:55   edit. You know, that some of these menus have been the same for close to 40 years. And as an,

00:35:03   and windows copied it mostly, you know, the big difference is that they put the menu bar in the

00:35:10   windows instead of at the top of the screen. And it, you know, it fits the metaphor, the

00:35:15   windowing metaphor of windows versus Mac, where the app is a window as opposed to just having

00:35:21   whatever, but still it's fundamentally the same. It's a great organizing principle for

00:35:27   complex software and, or, or even simple software, right? Like text edit, which is a great app,

00:35:34   right? It, and it is sort of a canonical example of like, if you wanted to introduce somebody who'd

00:35:40   never used the Mac to the basics of the Mac, just have them explore text edit to sort of get a feel

00:35:47   for how a Mac app should work and look like and be organized and do something that everybody can

00:35:53   understand. It's just a way to make text documents with simple styles. But for complex apps, like,

00:35:58   you know, professional apps like Photoshop and BB edit and Xcode, right? The final cut,

00:36:06   some of the most complex apps, apps that you actually can pay hundreds of dollars to take

00:36:11   courses to learn because they're so complex and do so much organize everything through the menu bar

00:36:18   that, you know, and you can put much used features and toolbars and expose them in other ways,

00:36:23   but that everything you can do is somewhere in the menu bar and it's organized, you know,

00:36:29   the way like a library is organized in sensible ways, you know, like, oh, if it has something to

00:36:34   do with saving or opening, it's in the file menu, right? And, you know, the view, like,

00:36:40   changing which things are on screen, go to the view menu. It's so great. But I feel like overall,

00:36:45   the trend has been towards putting things in the window and toolbars and that people just have sort

00:36:52   of gotten out of the habit of poking around the menu bars. Right? I don't know. But anyway.

00:36:58   I mean, maybe that is an effect of using mobile devices which don't have menu bars.

00:37:04   Right. And I think, yeah, and I think that trend started in the early, before the iPhone. I think

00:37:10   the whole Mac OS X era sort of shifted towards putting more stuff in toolbars, you know, and

00:37:16   the Mac toolbars of that early Cocoa era were great, you know, and they had cool things like,

00:37:22   and they still do, that you can customize them and reorder the way that the things work. But they

00:37:27   sort of shifted to, you know, and I think it probably is friendlier, you know, and I think

00:37:32   it's a better way to expose the most used features to the most typical use cases. But I think it's,

00:37:40   you know, I definitely think the mobile era of not having menu bars has accelerated it.

00:37:45   Yeah. Yeah. I think Microsoft came up with the ribbon well before the mobile, I mean,

00:37:51   the real, you know, well before the iPhone. Yeah, but the ribbon, yeah, but...

00:37:55   And I don't, I hate the ribbon. I absolutely hate the ribbon. Every time I bring it up and

00:37:59   think about it, you know, I mean, I consider it sort of a usability nightmare because every time

00:38:03   I go in, I never find like, oh, all the things on the ribbon are nothing that I want. They're never

00:38:07   the thing that I'm looking for. And, but every time I bring it up, people say, oh no, you just

00:38:12   got to, you got to try it more. You get it like you're not using it, you know, so.

00:38:14   It, the ribbon versus Cocoa toolbars is a good direct comparison though of the philosophical

00:38:23   differences between the companies, right? So, so Apple's Cocoa toolbars only had room for,

00:38:30   at the most, maybe 10 icons, right? I mean, there's options to like view small icons.

00:38:38   I guess you could cram more in there, but for the most part, and by default, like with default

00:38:42   toolbar settings, you know, maybe fewer than 10 buttons up there. Whereas the ribbon was like,

00:38:50   how much stuff can we fit in here? Including making some of the controls like L-shaped,

00:38:56   you know, like they're like Tetris pieces so that they can get more stuff in there, which again,

00:39:04   it's not to my liking, it's not to my taste, but I get how some, that's why some people love Windows

00:39:10   and love Microsoft's philosophy of sort of maximalist interface, right? Like put as much

00:39:17   in there as possible. Anyway, that's my tip of the day, go to the view, organize alphabetically.

00:39:24   And, and as I said, I've, I've tried it that way too, and it doesn't seem to improve it for me.

00:39:29   You still do. The search has gotten better, but it's still, and I think, and I think,

00:39:36   I think that's what I use mostly on iOS. So I think I'm just going to end up doing that much

00:39:42   more on, well, anyway, it's more than just a stylistic change of whether it looks like

00:39:48   a traditional Mac app system preferences or looks a lot more like iOS with this new system settings

00:39:55   and macOS 13 Ventura, Ventura, Ventura. We were saying it on the rebound slightly more Ventura,

00:40:05   I think, and somebody wrote in to complain. So I think it's supposed to be Ventura.

00:40:10   Yeah. I was saying, cause it was Jesse, the body venture, speaking of pro wrestlers who

00:40:15   turned into politicians. Can you believe, you know, tell me him becoming the governor of Minnesota

00:40:20   27 years ago, wasn't, wasn't a sign of the future.

00:40:24   I know. Not necessarily a good one, but I mean, and he was not so bad.

00:40:29   I would trade him. Oh my God. And Arnold Schwarzenegger was, I think, an excellent

00:40:37   governor of California. Christ. I would have, I was surely the best Republican governor I can

00:40:42   think of. Oh, he was great. I mean, I'm not saying I agreed with everything and you know,

00:40:46   well, it's a real shame you could, cause I feel like he could have gotten elected instead of

00:40:50   Trump. It's just that damn, damn rule about being born in Austria. Yeah. So it's more than just the

00:40:56   look of it. It's there's, there's right from the get-go, there's some serious fit and finish

00:41:01   problems with system settings on the developer betas of macOS Ventura. And I brash what I brought

00:41:07   up on my live show. And I mentioned specifically that the trackpad, classical trackpad preference

00:41:13   panel has some really cool, they're like videos or animated GIFs or something. I don't know if

00:41:18   they're actual, but they look like videos that show a human hand making the complex gestures,

00:41:23   like, so then if you're like, what do you mean a three finger pinch? And they're like, oh,

00:41:28   do this. And it's like, oh, if you do this, you'll get, you know, expose mode or, or whatever

00:41:33   happens. And that all of those niceties were missing. And he said, yeah, he knew what I was

00:41:37   talking about and said, well, that's on our list. That's the thing about these summer betas is it is

00:41:42   a legitimate excuse to say these are betas. Right. Right. That's why I assume a lot of these things,

00:41:48   well, you know, a lot of these things that are just obvious glitches. Well, some of them are

00:41:54   glitches and some of them seem to be more, I mean, I guess I would define them as growing pains as

00:42:00   opposed to glitches where you are taking an iOS element and shoving it into Mac OS and they're,

00:42:06   they're not compatible, at least currently anyway. I mean, they, you know, it works technically,

00:42:13   but it does not look pretty at all. And, and it's not a thing. It doesn't seem, it seems like you,

00:42:18   you would have to redesign the entire control in order to make it work right on Mac OS. And that

00:42:23   hasn't been done yet. Right. And I think it goes back to 2007 and the original iPhone or, you know,

00:42:31   2006 when Apple spent the whole year creating what would be the original iPhone and deciding what the

00:42:38   interface would look like. And it didn't, it looked Appley, but it didn't look Mac-like really at all.

00:42:47   I don't know that there was really anything in original iOS 2007 that you'd say that looks

00:42:55   exactly like the Mac, you know, the, it used a different font even it was all in the system

00:43:02   font was all Helvetica at the time. And the Mac was Lucida Grande, Grande, they're talking about

00:43:07   something I'd never learned how to pronounce, but famously most famously, I would say I almost like

00:43:12   iconically instead of check boxes, they had these now famous little pill shaped left, right sliders

00:43:20   that would turn green when they're on and off, which if you just think about that control

00:43:24   specifically, why did they not use check boxes? And I think, I think there's a couple of reasons.

00:43:30   I think one reason is check boxes on the Mac and windows and every GUI system I've ever used tend

00:43:37   to be very, very small buttons. It's just the nature of them and making them bigger would be

00:43:43   weird. And the fact that they're small works because a mouse or a track pad is a very precise

00:43:53   pointer. Right. And again, if tossing out tips that are, have an expiration date on the Mac,

00:44:02   on the Mac in any good UI, the label of a check box is a clickable part of the check box. So if,

00:44:10   if there's like you're in a preference and there's a check box that says use Bluetooth,

00:44:15   if you click on the words, use Bluetooth next to the check box, that will toggle the check box too.

00:44:21   So it's actually a bigger clickable target than you might think. And it's a great little affordance

00:44:27   that's been in the Mac interface as long as I can remember. There's no downside to it. So even if

00:44:32   people, most people have no idea that you can click the label, it is bigger than it looks, but

00:44:38   they, you know, the iOS layout, it didn't cause it's so up and down, right. And almost everything

00:44:45   you do on the iPhone is held vertically. You know, it made sense. And so these little sliders

00:44:52   instead of check boxes, much bigger, fatter fingertip size shape that you can just tap to

00:45:00   move. But the other thing about them is you don't, you can't, you don't have to tap them.

00:45:05   You can just slide the actual little slider, which is cool, right? Like one of the, right?

00:45:11   Jon Streeter You're going to make it, make it cool.

00:45:15   Dave

00:45:19   Well, like you think back to the first year with the iPhone and it's like, what did we do with our

00:45:20   iPhones? Why did we love them? There was, there was no app store. And it's like, well, I can remember,

00:45:26   I did, I read, I used Safari a lot and, you know, loading web pages over the edge network.

00:45:33   Jon Streeter But even back then, yeah, we were doing limited web pages, right? Because,

00:45:37   yeah, because bandwidth was so bad.

00:45:39   Dave Right. Remember m.twitter.com, which was actually...

00:45:45   Jon Streeter Yeah. And I forget what the ESPN, I remember checking baseball scores on

00:45:48   some reduced version of ESPN's scoreboard.

00:45:52   Dave Yeah, I forget the URL for that one. I definitely had it bookmarked because it loaded

00:45:56   great. m.twitter.com was so minimal that it didn't even include avatars. It would just say,

00:46:05   instead of saying molt and having your robot avatar, it just said molt, right? Because the

00:46:11   avatars would...

00:46:12   Jon Streeter Yeah, that was an asset that had to be downloaded. And that was, that took too

00:46:16   long over edge.

00:46:17   Dave It took way too long. But it was, it was great. But we used the web. And then for the most

00:46:22   part, we just played with the interface. We just slid buttons. And we scrolled things that were

00:46:31   scrolling and we sat there for a year saying, "This is amazing. You just put your finger on it."

00:46:35   Jon Streeter And we did pull down to refresh on whatever.

00:46:38   Dave Yeah, yeah. Tweety. I don't know if that was the first year, but it certainly...

00:46:41   Jon Streeter Yeah, no, probably not.

00:46:42   Dave But whenever Lauren Brikter invented pull to refresh for Tweety,

00:46:45   I remember just pulling to refresh.

00:46:47   Jon Streeter Oh, yeah, you do it over and over and over again.

00:46:49   Dave I wasn't interested in seeing more tweets. I was just interested in feeling the pull to

00:46:56   refresh animation and thinking, "Boy, he really nailed all of the..."

00:47:00   Jon Streeter Yeah, it was like one of those, it was a fidget tool, you know? I mean, it was...

00:47:05   Dave Yes.

00:47:06   Jon Streeter I can't remember what it's called.

00:47:07   Dave A fidget, yeah, a fidget spinner or whatever, you know? But that's,

00:47:11   that is, I, but I think fidget tools are, I love to do, I like to click my pen. It dries, of course.

00:47:18   Jon Streeter Oh, yeah.

00:47:18   Dave Reason, reason number 47, I work alone

00:47:22   and have a door on my office is I like to click, I like to click a pen. I like a clicky keyboard.

00:47:32   Fidgeting is, it's a human thing. It's, you know, if you don't like to fidget with anything,

00:47:37   God bless you, you know, you don't have to do it. But, you know, I need something...

00:47:40   Jon Streeter You might be a robot.

00:47:41   Dave Right, but I remember like just going shopping and I'd be in the line at the supermarket

00:47:46   and just playing with the interface and just playing with the sliders. And that was cool.

00:47:50   It showed off the interface. But anyway, that's what I'm going is they redid everything. They

00:47:55   didn't use any pop-up menus, no menu bar, no pop-up menus. Everything was like full screen

00:48:02   things. They were all, every user interface element was sort of redesigned from the ground up

00:48:08   for touch. And it made sense to do that. And the converse is not quite equivalent. Like

00:48:17   desktop style UI controls do not work on a small pocket touchscreen phone. They really don't. And

00:48:26   I think that's part of the reason Windows Phone never took off before the iPhone, even though they

00:48:31   didn't have a touchscreen, they used a stylus because they used these user interface style

00:48:37   controls that needed precision, which is why they used a stylus. But I just don't think it worked

00:48:43   well mentally. It was too backwards thinking. The converse isn't quite true. You can put iOS style

00:48:49   controls on a desktop interface and it's not like, "Oh, I can't even use this because it's

00:48:54   literally too small for me to accurately poke." Because you have the precision pointer, you can

00:49:01   use a bigger, fatter, sloppier button shape. But it's still, it's not right though. It's not right.

00:49:09   It doesn't make it right. And it's sort of like... I mean, that was one of my huge complaints about

00:49:14   Windows 8 was that all of the things that they made in order to make it touch ready,

00:49:22   and then they slapped it on Windows because Windows was going to be there, you know,

00:49:26   it was going to be both on touch and on the desktop. Everything was too big on the desktop.

00:49:32   All the controls were too large. And we've talked about this before, but they would have one

00:49:39   settings thing that was really for touch, and then in the background, you could still get the

00:49:44   control panels. Right. It really did seem at the time... And that's the most interesting version

00:49:48   of Windows I can remember in my career writing during Fireball because I thought it was

00:49:53   fascinating what they're doing, and they came up with a different look. But it just seemed so clear

00:49:57   to me that they should have bitten the bullet and forked it into its own new OS. Okay, Windows isn't

00:50:03   going anywhere. We're as committed to it as ever, but here's our new operating system that's meant

00:50:11   for touchscreen devices, and let it be there what iPad OS is to Mac OS. Fundamentally different in

00:50:20   certain ways. And yes, people are going to bitch that there should just be one operating system.

00:50:25   Shut up. Right? It doesn't work. You know, you can't have it all. You can't have it touch...

00:50:31   Yeah, right. I don't think it does. And I... Well, it doesn't seem like... It seems like this

00:50:37   proves the point. Yeah. But anyway, the Twitter thread, there's a fellow named Nicky Tonski,

00:50:43   and I will put this in the show notes. I'm actually... I'm 100% going to link to it on

00:50:47   Daring Fireball, but haven't yet. Just... It's a well-illustrated... It's... I actually think

00:50:53   sometimes a thread on Twitter is just a terrific way of posting things like this, because Twitter...

00:51:01   You know, the thread view is pretty good on just about every client I use. And Twitter does make

00:51:08   it really easy to paste in screenshots and screen recordings even, you know, because some of the

00:51:15   things in his thread are movies. It's so easy. I don't know... It's so much easier than writing

00:51:20   a blog post and trying to get all that stuff in there, yeah. Right. My CMS isn't necessarily

00:51:25   optimized for making it as easy as possible to paste images and screenshots. I know newer ones

00:51:30   like Medium probably make it easier. But still, there's like the... You have to upload the file

00:51:36   somewhere and get the URL. And Twitter, you just paste it in. It's just a... It's so easy to make

00:51:42   an illustrated little thing like this, where he just sort of went through and found... I mean,

00:51:48   it just looks sloppy, right? It's just unfinished. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of... Like I said

00:51:56   earlier, there's a lot of different things going on here, and it's hard to... You couldn't point

00:52:03   to any one particular problem and say, "Well, if they fix this..." Some of them look like legitimate

00:52:10   images, bugs. But also, there's so many design problems. Yeah. Just controls that don't look

00:52:16   fit and finished and buttons that are in... Like going back to Federighi's thing about views within

00:52:24   views, one of the problems with the old system preferences is that the shape of the window

00:52:28   doesn't... You can't just grow it to make it longer. And one of the... And I think it was

00:52:32   an astute observation by him that because of the phones and iPads and touch, people are used to

00:52:38   scrolling and putting things in a long vertical list if there's a lot of stuff to list. People

00:52:45   intuit that now. And you can make panels now that instead of trying to fit everything on screen in

00:52:52   this window that has to fit on the smallest Mac screen, like a 13-inch laptop, with the size

00:53:00   scaled up, right? Because you can scale up a 13-inch laptop to not have that many points on

00:53:07   screen. And there's no scrolling. And so if there's a subview, like going inside privacy to

00:53:15   accessibility and inside accessibility to allowing screen recording, and now here's a list of the

00:53:21   apps that you've permitted to do screen recording, and there's only room to show like four at a time,

00:53:27   and you have to scroll this little tiny box within a box just to see which app is bitching about not

00:53:33   having permission to do screen recording even though you need it to or something like that.

00:53:38   Well, you could just put them all in a big scrolling view and you scroll down and you can

00:53:42   make room for these things, which sounds good and it is a good idea. But now it's like as illustrated

00:53:48   by Nicky Tonski's thread, there are some subviews within views where there's like a done button at

00:53:53   the bottom and it's half cut off. So I guess you can click it. He doesn't actually say,

00:54:00   can you click the top of the button? I would presume from my experience using gooeys that

00:54:05   when you experience a bug like that, if a little bit of the button's available and you click the

00:54:10   little bit of the button, it'll still work. But no, he doesn't. He doesn't want them there,

00:54:16   I think. Yeah, looks like it, but it does not feel to me. And I know how long I know Apple has great

00:54:24   and lots of engineers, although famously, I think we all know that having lots of engineers doesn't

00:54:30   help you shift one project faster. There's the mythical man month, which sort of proves that you

00:54:37   can't just, it really is in some regards like trying to throw more women at the problem to

00:54:43   have a baby born sooner. It's like, no, you can't really speed that up.

00:54:54   But they do have talented engineers. I know they care, but it does not look to me at mid August

00:55:01   that this looks like it's going to be tip top shape by, let's say the end of October.

00:55:06   Like, no, it really does. It really does not. And I'm really,

00:55:10   why do you, I don't know. Why do you think that is? I mean, they just, they didn't have enough time

00:55:17   or, but I don't, I don't understand exactly why this would be, I mean, it, and it happened before,

00:55:25   right. I mean, but it, you know, in a much less critical application because when they did news

00:55:33   and somewhat, what was the other thing? I can't remember. They did, they did a few things when

00:55:37   they first demonstrated news and stocks are, are like, they're the same app. Really. There's,

00:55:44   if you there's like Steven Trout and Smith has dug in, you know, like you can kind of see how

00:55:49   they're the same app. It's just that news is general news and stocks is stock business,

00:55:54   specific news and stock tickers. News and stocks. And I forget the other catalyst apps,

00:56:01   home, home was one that was sort of a, a, a back wall still. It's not really, but home.

00:56:06   When those, when those first came over, they were, and then they're still not perfect, but they were

00:56:11   much clunkier. They were surprisingly clunky. Let's put it that way.

00:56:15   NatH - But even home, which I don't like, no, I really don't. I don't, I really don't feel

00:56:20   like they've nailed the metaphor, the organizing metaphor for the app, which is a challenge.

00:56:24   Jim - It's better in the beta, but on, you know, the iOS beta anyway, but it's not, yeah,

00:56:30   it's not like a, it's really not a favorite of mine.

00:56:32   NatH - I don't mean to be dismissive or snarky about it because I think it's very difficult,

00:56:37   but you know, that it, and as the user interface designer in me doesn't have an answer for it,

00:56:43   an easy answer, I think it would be a mountain of work and a great achievement to, to do a new

00:56:48   version of the home app that has an organizing principle that is visually cohesive and makes

00:56:54   sense for all the various things that you, that, that the home app can do. But it's like the home

00:57:00   app on Mac, I have problems with it, but it doesn't seem sloppy. It's not like things are

00:57:05   only half visible or the controls pop off to the side, you know, or that the label for a control

00:57:14   is separated by inches from the button that toggles it, right? Because that's one of the

00:57:19   things that's so weird in settings because the Mac screen is fundamentally wide, not tall and skinny.

00:57:26   And so a lot of these things that make sense, even on the biggest iPhone ever, Apple's ever made the

00:57:30   13 Pro Max Plus, you know, whatever the current monster size iPhone is, when you're holding it

00:57:37   vertically, it's not that wide, right? It is actually a very narrow screen from left to right.

00:57:44   And so, you know, you can have a left justified label and a right justified switch that toggles

00:57:51   that setting, and they're not that far apart. Whereas on, in, in Mac settings in Ventura,

00:57:57   a lot of the labels are so far apart that it's almost hard to visually tell they go, you know,

00:58:04   which one goes with which. And that's, it's, my eyes have gotten so much better, but that's with

00:58:09   my retinal detachments, that sort of telling which lines go across is still a little, it's always,

00:58:16   it's going to be tricky for me for the rest of my life. It just, I kind of need alignment help.

00:58:21   If they were just right next to them, like they were checkboxes, wasn't an issue.

00:58:26   I mean, I worry about, I also worry about like, there seems to be this sort of mishmash of,

00:58:31   of control metaphors, right? I mean, there's, he posts a picture of,

00:58:35   of what looks like two buttons and apparently one of them is a drop-down.

00:58:39   Right?

00:58:40   Well, well, and I'm not sure there is a new control they invented this year,

00:58:47   which is really fun because app in app kit for Mac, where there's a combination push button

00:58:52   with a dropdown on the right so that you can have a push button with a menu on the side.

00:58:57   But I don't think the one in system settings is using that because

00:59:01   it's not, I don't think that any of that's written in app kit. I think it's all Swift UI,

00:59:05   which is part of the, this is the way, this is the, this is the, you know, this is where the

00:59:10   puck is going. I think, again, he didn't say this. I don't think anybody, cause it was a Steve Jobs

00:59:15   quote would, would bring it up, but one way to encapsulate my take on Craig Federighi's defense

00:59:21   of this is this is where the puck is going and we want to get ahead of it. And, you know, we know we

00:59:26   have lots of work to do, but I just, why do it now? Right? Right. Like, I guess that's what you're

00:59:31   asking is why, why isn't this still a secret, secret project in Apple for next year? Exactly.

00:59:36   Exactly. Because I think this, this in between is just a mess. I mean, like if you're going to

00:59:42   change, you know, simple thing like check boxes or now those toggle switches, just do it and do

00:59:51   it across the board. They're all, they're all toggle switches now. Don't like have, well,

00:59:56   we just changed the settings app and now they're toggle switches in the settings app and everywhere

01:00:01   else, they're still, they're going to be check boxes. Right. So I, I, I color me skeptical about

01:00:06   the whole idea, but I'm willing to admit that I'm, I'm a, I'm a bit of a curmudgeon and a

01:00:12   traditionalist on UI design. And I have, you know, I'm more of a Mac by far a Mac person than an iOS

01:00:19   person. So I'm biased a little against the general idea of, of doing this to system settings, but I

01:00:27   try to always have an open mind about it. I really do. And so I'll go with it, but even going with it

01:00:33   and accepting it, this isn't, this isn't, it should be the best possible implementation of this idea

01:00:38   possible. It should be as, and, and, and again, we are complaining about a beta, but, but it's,

01:00:45   it's extremely sloppy for where it should be at this point, right. Presuming that it's going to

01:00:50   ship it by the end of October or, you know, even if it was even later, you know, they've said this

01:00:55   year, they always seem to ship, you know, the, the things they announced for the Mac at WWDC in June

01:01:01   shipped by November. Right. It's, it's supposedly going to ship. I just feels to me like a project

01:01:09   that whatever the point came in, I guess like early May where they're like saying what's in,

01:01:16   what's out this year. This one to me feels like, keep going team. We're behind you on this. This

01:01:23   is the way, but we're going to punt this to Mac OS 14 next year, next year at this point, I expect

01:01:31   this to be precise, have at it. And then they don't say anything at WWDC. And then next year

01:01:38   here, here's the new system settings in Mac OS, whatever they call it, 14. It goes back to me.

01:01:44   This again, I don't have any inside information on this. I'm not getting this from any friends or

01:01:48   little birdies, but just my spidey sense that it's relative. Everything's are relatively thin this

01:01:56   year. And so they needed stuff. And maybe I mean this, I'm not trying to make it crack wise,

01:02:02   but that maybe they've moved this up to have something to show and say is new. And again,

01:02:08   I'm going to, this is going to irritate some people, but I think, and this is informed somewhat

01:02:15   by friends who work at Apple, that I think two years of lockdown and work from home is,

01:02:24   this is when it's caught up to them. And it, you know, like I, and I've commented about this in

01:02:33   some ways and people have objected on the grounds of how can you, a person who's worked at home for

01:02:38   15 years, complain about people at Apple who want to work at home. And I get that. And that's,

01:02:44   but that's why I don't work at Apple, right? Like I never pursued a career like that because I know

01:02:50   I don't want to go into an office every day and I never enjoyed that. But I also fundamentally

01:02:56   believe that it's true that for a collaborative project, collaborating in person is far more

01:03:01   effective than collaborating remotely. I really, I don't think, I don't know that that's ever going

01:03:07   to change in my lifetime. And it certainly, I don't, well, I'm not convinced that, well,

01:03:11   I don't, I've never worked in software development, particularly. I mean, I've done some,

01:03:16   some minor league coding, but I'm not sure that it's the kind of like, so, you know,

01:03:20   my wife worked in a newsroom for years. I feel like a newsroom is a very good example of where,

01:03:26   like, two things that I don't like are actually beneficial. One is an open floor plan,

01:03:32   which I absolutely, I absolutely hate and I think is really, really bad for most kinds of work.

01:03:39   I think it's actually really good for a news organization. And then the other thing is working

01:03:43   in the office. And I would argue, well, I mean, maybe it's slightly different now, even with,

01:03:49   you know, with Slack and stuff like that, but I still think it's slightly better to work in

01:03:52   an office if you're working in a news organization, but I'm not sure that software development is the

01:03:58   same kind of thing when, I mean, do you really need to hear people having a conversation over

01:04:05   the wall? Well, I hope, all right. So, and again, I've opened a can of worms and there's a lot to go

01:04:11   through. So open floor plans, definitely. I get it very bad for a lot of people distraction wise.

01:04:17   And for me in particular, it is, especially if you need to concentrate. And I realized that Apple

01:04:22   Park, you know, there were, you don't hear so much about it, but maybe that's also largely because of

01:04:26   COVID and people haven't been there. But the fact that the old infinite loop campus was largely

01:04:33   organized around everybody having their own office, or maybe in some cases sharing an office,

01:04:38   you know, like me and you would share an office or something like that when it got crowded.

01:04:42   But then, you know, their head count has exploded where they've bought up almost everything in

01:04:46   Cupertino. Anything that looks like an office in Cupertino now is probably an Apple building.

01:04:51   And most of them are older buildings. And, you know, I'm sure that they come in and make them

01:04:56   as nice as they can. Apple has, you know, money to spend. But the open floor plan at Apple Park,

01:05:01   I know is controversial. And people, you know, there were rules originally about you have to use

01:05:06   this is the chair that Johnny Ive wants everybody to use. And again, you know, I get it aesthetically,

01:05:12   that's great. But in terms of, you know, chairs are really personal, you know, they really are.

01:05:17   NatH - Oh, yeah, completely. I mean, and you for, you know, not just you even like

01:05:22   minor comfort level, there are very real reasons why, you know, a couple of different bodies.

01:05:27   Dave - Yeah, yeah, very much so. And so I don't belittle. I think people should spend,

01:05:32   you know, a lot. There's no sponsors this week from mattress companies. But I, you know,

01:05:37   but if you sleep eight hours a day, you should get a really, you should get a mattress that really

01:05:42   that you both enjoy. And that makes you feel good. It makes your back feel good every morning.

01:05:46   You and if you're going to sit in a chair all day, you really are, or even half the day,

01:05:49   if you'd like to stand half the day or whatever you really should, you know, it's really important

01:05:53   for your health to have a chair that's comfortable for you. I get it all with the open floor plan,

01:05:57   and that it's distracting. I think I, my take on this, and this is informed by talking to people

01:06:03   at Apple, I think that that where they're trying to move to where it's sort of a hybrid, hey,

01:06:08   everybody can work from home a couple days a week, but you have to come in a couple days a week,

01:06:12   is trying to acknowledge that for some things, especially for like engineers and programmers,

01:06:18   being able to work from home and not have any distractions and just go heads down on a project

01:06:24   with no distractions other than what your dog or whatever else is in your house. But if you can,

01:06:29   you know, you know, you can probably be interrupted less at home than at the office. And obviously,

01:06:37   you know, your commute turns to zero, which is great.

01:06:40   And I think that's the big thing, honestly, because, and particularly when we've reached

01:06:45   the state where, I mean, particularly in California, where you can't afford to live

01:06:49   anywhere close to where you work. Because it is, you know, working from home, it's very easy to get

01:06:56   distracted. There's laundry, there's dishes, there's dogs, there's kids. There's all kinds

01:07:00   of different, it's not a heck of a lot better than working in the office. It's different kinds

01:07:05   of distractions, obviously. If you have an office at home, it becomes a lot easier because you can

01:07:09   just go in and close the door and lock yourself, which is sometimes what I actually have to do.

01:07:13   But the commute is huge. And particularly for a lot of these people, I mean, you know,

01:07:18   when I commuted up to Seattle, it was an hour and a half both ways. So that's why I stopped.

01:07:24   [laughs]

01:07:24   Tom: Well, and you get...

01:07:25   David: That's why I was like, "Well, I'm quitting."

01:07:27   Tom; The other thing that's so true about human psychology is once you get used to a thing,

01:07:32   it is so much harder to go back than just imagining it in the first place. And you see this every year

01:07:38   with new iPhones, right? If somebody upgrades from a two-year-old iPhone to a brand new iPhone,

01:07:43   and then they go back to their old iPhone because they haven't wiped it yet, it's like, "Ah, crap,

01:07:46   some of this stuff feels slow," right? It's like, "Ah, man, I've really gotten used to how much,"

01:07:50   you know, or the ProMotion display, right? And it's like, you use it like, "Oh, yeah,

01:07:55   that does look smoother." But then you go back to the older phone and it's like, "Oh, man,

01:07:59   now I'm ruined forever." Well, once you've worked from home for over a year in 2020 and 2021,

01:08:07   all of a sudden, the exact same commute, or even if your commute is better than it was in 2019,

01:08:13   because the roads still aren't anywhere near as full in California, in the Bay Area, it still

01:08:20   feels—you feel it in a way that you didn't when it was like, "Well, this is the way it has to be."

01:08:25   I get it. So, I'm not trying to simplify this into any sort of argument that Apple should go back to

01:08:30   the way things were in 2019 with everybody coming into the office exactly like that. What I'm trying

01:08:35   to argue is a very subtle point, which is that I think that for 2020 and even 2021, we didn't see

01:08:43   the effects of work from home on Apple's software because there was—all these ideas were already

01:08:51   in place. And it might have even been more effective to just send—have everybody at home

01:08:58   and just work on these things that are already in place. Most—I think most things that are worth

01:09:04   mentioning in a keynote, almost, if not all of them, have been in the works for over a year.

01:09:11   Every—you know, any new feature on any of these platforms that's worthy of being mentioned in a

01:09:18   WWDC keynote almost certainly has been in the works behind the scenes for over a year. And so,

01:09:25   these years-old ideas, having people at home and having more time to concentrate uninterrupted,

01:09:32   maybe even made them more effective. And that—and there was lots of, "Hey, Apple," you know,

01:09:36   the consensus largely that I saw was, "Work from home is great for Apple. Look, this last few years

01:09:44   of iOS and macOS have been just fine." But I think that the part that's missing is where do the ideas

01:09:53   for the next two, three years come from and not being together as a team and having teams together

01:10:00   to spark ideas and do that sort of improv. Somebody comes up with an idea and it's not

01:10:06   really right, but somebody else can say, "Oh, but and this," or, "What if we did—you know,

01:10:13   okay, just like that, but what if we did this?" And those sort of collaborative, "Oh, yeah,

01:10:19   we should go with it. Let's propose this," you know, sort of things. It's not that they didn't

01:10:25   happen at all over WebEx, but I just don't think they happen the same way. And I kind of feel like

01:10:31   this is the year it kind of caught up to us. And I'll even draw the analogy to inflation

01:10:37   globally in the world, that in the early days of the pandemic, when governments in the U.S.

01:10:43   around the world, you know, pumped money into the economy and sent people checks, just mailed people

01:10:49   money. In Econ 101, you learn that if the government just sends money out, that would

01:10:58   lead to inflation. But it doesn't lead to inflation right away when the economy is so massive, right?

01:11:04   It comes due 18 months, two years later, right? I just feel that this sort of—you know,

01:11:15   and again, it's not like they're totally dry of ideas, but just—

01:11:19   And I think it's possible to put too much, you know, to—it's possible to be tying to—there

01:11:25   might not be—this might be correlation, not causation. It could be just an age of the

01:11:31   operating systems as they exist rather than something due to work from home.

01:11:37   Because there are lots of different—I mean, there are lots of different studies that seem

01:11:42   to indicate that working from home is, well, psychologically better for people and also does

01:11:46   not seem to damage productivity at all. And there are plenty of organizations—obviously, you can't

01:11:52   say the culture of Apple can easily be transferred to work from home model.

01:12:01   But there are plenty of companies that are distributed where people are working from

01:12:08   different locations and working and collaborating on software projects and creating great stuff.

01:12:13   So it's possible to do it.

01:12:15   Right. And, you know, again, I'm not trying to make a simplistic argument against work from home.

01:12:19   And companies like WordPress—famously, Matt Mullenweg is—organized—you know,

01:12:23   it used to just be him, you know? He, like, you know, took on some other project, changed it,

01:12:30   named his version WordPress, and now it's, you know, this—you know, here we are

01:12:35   close to 20 years later, and it's a huge, successful company that's, you know, bought

01:12:41   all these other previously big companies like Tumblr and—I forget what else—WordPress owns.

01:12:46   Successful, thriving, huge chunk of the internet. I mean, like, by some arguments,

01:12:51   a majority share of the internet in terms of, like, what sites people actually use runs on

01:12:56   WordPress, and they have been completely distributed without a central office from day one.

01:13:02   And so I totally acknowledge that.

01:13:05   Yeah.

01:13:06   But Apple's culture, I think, involves the sort of collaborative—some collaboration. And I think

01:13:11   there are—I will also say there are probably a lot of talented, talented engineers and other people

01:13:19   at Apple who could work remotely full-time because maybe where their skill set is and their

01:13:27   personality is and what they're best at doesn't contribute to the benefits of in-person collaboration

01:13:34   at all. You know, that they could just fully be a full member of the team and be more productive,

01:13:40   right? You mentioned productivity. Measurable productivity, getting more done every week,

01:13:47   week in, week out for their career, and they live in Iowa because that's just where they grew up,

01:13:54   and, you know, bought a massive, beautiful house for the cost of, you know—yeah, for the cost of

01:14:02   a parking spot in the Bay Area. Totally get that. I just think, though, that there's some people at

01:14:07   Apple who thrive on the in-person collaborative nature creatively as a spark. And that, you know,

01:14:15   you mentioned newsrooms. You go back, you know, look at, like—I think they actually shot all the

01:14:21   president's men in the Washington Post newsroom somehow. I don't know how they—while they—either

01:14:28   that or it is famously a precise replication, you know, that that—

01:14:32   Oh, it is, yeah. For someone who has been in—I mean, you know, I spent—had been to

01:14:37   the local paper a number of times, and it's almost all that—well, you know, now it's a—I think

01:14:46   they've moved since because they had, you know, like when she first started there in the mid-'90s,

01:14:51   they had just built this big, beautiful facility, you know, akin to, you know, sort of like Apple

01:14:57   building—Apple built Apple Park, and then everyone decided to go back to analog stuff.

01:15:02   Or MetaVrida, like the Metaverse took over or something, you know, like they were immediately

01:15:09   obviated. They had a, you know, they had a big Chihuly hanging in the lobby and, you know,

01:15:14   a cafeteria and everything, and it was just—it was super depressing over the years just to see

01:15:18   it shrink like crazy, and then they finally moved out. But, you know, when they first started there

01:15:23   for the number of years—for the first few years, it was crowded, everybody's desks were a mess,

01:15:29   there was, you know, particularly hers, there were stacks of paper everywhere,

01:15:33   people were yelling at each other over the—the walls were really low, you know,

01:15:37   it wasn't like they were raised cubicle walls or anything, but these were reporters, too, and so

01:15:43   they are by and large a group of fairly gregarious, talkative, in-your-face people, and

01:15:51   programmers are probably not in general.

01:15:54   - Right, right. - Like that.

01:15:55   - No, I— - You know, don't want to, you know,

01:15:57   completely— - But there's different walls.

01:16:00   - Cast everybody in the same light, but still. - Right, and so like if your job is being a

01:16:04   reporter who's more or less on breaking news, whether it's like the entertainment beat or local

01:16:08   politics or national politics, and breaking news is happening, and then being able to shout at your

01:16:13   colleagues and somebody says, you know, "Oh my God, they had torn up pictures in the toilet."

01:16:18   - Yeah. - You know,

01:16:20   "Oh, wait, stop, I gotta stop," you know, and then you can, you know, don't even—don't push the

01:16:25   story yet. - Well, yeah, I mean,

01:16:26   you're working on a schedule where everything is published daily or, you know, now with internet

01:16:32   be published immediately, and if something changes, you want to know right away.

01:16:37   - Yeah, and then somebody says, "I've got a source in the mayor's office. Let me call them,

01:16:41   I will get back to you. You keep working on this, but I'll see if I can get somebody on the mayor's

01:16:45   office to confirm or deny," blah, blah, blah. You know, and then there's other people, like,

01:16:49   deep investigative reporters who write, like, sort of, you know, these investigative reports

01:16:55   about long-standing problems with the lead pipes in the schools or something like that,

01:17:00   who would not benefit from working in that open floor plan and get an office somewhere else and

01:17:06   just, you know, go off for six months and do this deep research. I get it, you know. I don't know,

01:17:11   I just—it's just a spitball theory, and it just sort of matches of why sort of seemingly

01:17:17   push system settings this year when it seems like, "Ooh, it's gonna be rough."

01:17:22   - Yeah, yeah. I mean, at least on that we agree.

01:17:25   - Yeah, and I could be all wet.

01:17:28   - It doesn't seem like it's something that they should foist on us.

01:17:32   - I know this firsthand from people I know at Apple, and I've read this, it is a general thing

01:17:40   nationwide and even worldwide as we try to, you know, everybody collectively is figuring out

01:17:48   where do we find the new normal of work from home versus work together in an office,

01:17:55   that managers tend to be way more, decisively more, "I would like to have more people back

01:18:02   in the office, and people who aren't managers are more, I would prefer to keep working more at home."

01:18:08   And it makes intuitive sense because let's say, let's just assume it's not bad managers,

01:18:13   it's good managers. But how do you become a manager who's a good manager and who enjoys

01:18:18   being a manager? I think by definition you're a people person. You thrive on face-to-face

01:18:25   interactions. You feel energized by it, whereas lots of other people, you know, are somewhere on

01:18:32   the introvert scale. And even if they are personable and people say, "Yeah, I love working

01:18:38   with her, and I love working with so-and-so," but those people find it exhausting to interact

01:18:46   face-to-face or tiresome. They don't, you know, they're spending energy on face-to-face

01:18:50   interaction, not drawing energy from it, which is what I think good managers do. So of course,

01:18:56   there's a split on that. But the other perspective that managers have,

01:19:00   good managers, is the team working on all cylinders, as opposed to the individual. I

01:19:11   personally, me, feel productive working from home, and I can see that I'm producing lots of stuff,

01:19:16   but is the team firing on all cylinders? You know, and collaborative stuff is traditionally done in

01:19:24   person. I guess everything's traditionally done in person, but you know, there's a reason movies

01:19:28   are done in person, you know. I don't know. I could be all wet on this. It could have nothing

01:19:35   to do with system settings. It could be that this was gonna—

01:19:38   I just say, the other thing is I feel like we've spent all these years coming up with these remote

01:19:42   communication tools, and we still are facing this, you know, "No, you gotta come to the office"

01:19:49   thing, because it is a traditional work mode. And because it also, I mean, you know, you talk about

01:19:58   managers who are good. There are also lots of managers who are not good.

01:20:01   Pete: Oh yeah, yeah.

01:20:02   Chris: And insist on having people there so they can, you know, stand over their shoulder and

01:20:07   breathe down their neck all the time. And we just, you know, it's like the productivity thing where

01:20:11   if you look at those productivity charts and you look at like how computers have improved

01:20:15   productivity and yet none of that has transferred into improved wages for the people who are

01:20:20   actually doing the work.

01:20:21   Pete; Or more recreational time.

01:20:24   Chris; Or more recreational time, yeah. And so, from that perspective, I find it extremely

01:20:30   frustrating because it just seems like we've made all this progress and yet things don't,

01:20:34   you know, we still have these people who are insisting that they have to be done the same way.

01:20:37   And then the other thing I think is similarly, the commute I think is completely just destructive to

01:20:42   people.

01:20:42   Pete; Yeah, and in the Bay Area particularly, and the real estate situation and the whole area

01:20:50   too. Again, I don't mean to simplify a truly complex thing that, you know, and I also think

01:20:55   though to tie it off, I do think it'll work itself out because fundamentally, and I know

01:21:00   it's dissatisfying in the moment if somebody out there is listening and works at Apple and is now

01:21:07   having to go in three days a week and only, you know, and they're like, maybe you're getting mad

01:21:12   at me because you're like, even doing two days a week or whatever it is, the office is still

01:21:18   annoying to me and those are my least productive two days of the week. I get it if that's your

01:21:24   situation right now in August of 2022, but it will work itself out in the long run.

01:21:28   I still believe this. Our mutual friend Guy English said this, I think it was 2013 on his blog,

01:21:34   but that the single biggest problem Apple faces is talent retention. And that was true then and

01:21:40   that was sort of in the wake of Steve Jobs dying and sort of, you know, for lots of reasons,

01:21:47   everything seemed to be in flux. The iPhone was still explosively growing. What's the future of

01:21:51   the company? The biggest problem they face is talent retention because the fundamental premise

01:21:57   of Apple as a company is that they make the best computing devices and anywhere where they fall

01:22:05   short of that is a problem for them because that's where the whole brand comes from. That's where the

01:22:10   customer loyalty comes from. And how do you keep making the best products and devices, software and

01:22:16   hardware going forward? It's obvious, but you have to have the best people working well together.

01:22:21   I mean, it's not complicated, but if the best people really want to insist that they don't

01:22:30   want to work in the office, they're going to go elsewhere. You know, competition, the market will

01:22:35   sort that out because the talented people are the ones most likely to be able to find gainful,

01:22:41   enjoyable employment elsewhere. Well, as long as Apple sticks to that.

01:22:46   Credo, right? I mean, organizations don't necessarily listen to the market. They like to

01:22:52   pretend that they do. But I mean, Apple could just say, "Well, we're still not going to change,

01:22:58   and we're just going to let the quality of the software decline."

01:23:00   Right. And that's sort of what happens to companies eventually. I mean,

01:23:04   I don't mean to laugh because I hope it doesn't happen to Apple, but,

01:23:06   well, that's just the way it is, right? The band kept playing on the deck of the Titanic.

01:23:16   I don't know. They told us to play till nine.

01:23:18   We can't go off. Glub, glub.

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01:26:02   I didn't make that up! Oh, they leaned into it. Oh, they leaned into it.

01:26:07   Nice. I heard a Vin Scully story. I forget what he told, but it more or less something, something

01:26:12   he was talking about early in his career. What was the most embarrassing thing he ever did? And

01:26:17   something like ship, I forget what he said, like a law, some kind of thing. I don't know what exact

01:26:22   words, but it was clear that he still wouldn't say it while relaying the story, but he accidentally

01:26:28   said "shit" instead of something while somebody hit like a screaming line drive over the third

01:26:32   base. Thought he was going to get fired. You know, he's like, you know, it was like one of his first

01:26:37   years announcing the Dodgers. Nobody said anything. And he was like, maybe nobody heard it. And then

01:26:42   he went out to eat a week later and a guy at the restaurant was like, "I don't know if we should

01:26:46   serve you." And he's like, "Why?" And he said, "Because you put profanity on the airways." And

01:26:50   then they slapped him on the back and everybody laughed, you know, but he was like, "Oh,

01:26:53   everybody did hear." So what else do we got? So we did the Ventura system settings. Stage manager

01:27:00   is the other thing. Now you say you haven't used the Mac or iPad.

01:27:03   I have not. Or the iPad one. Yeah, because I heard the iPad was still rough. So I wasn't ready for,

01:27:08   it's definitely wasn't ready for Ventura. I haven't installed it on spare machines,

01:27:13   but I haven't spent a lot of time with it, but it's clearly rough. And again,

01:27:18   rough enough that I really wonder how good a shape it'll be in by October. Like some really

01:27:23   weird bugs. And I've recognized that these, you know, have to be fixed, but you know how,

01:27:28   like, you can hit again, if anybody doesn't know this, my God, what a great tip, but you hit the

01:27:32   command backtick on the Mac and it cycles through the windows in the current application. So if

01:27:39   you've got three windows open in TextEdit and you hit command back backtick or the tilde key,

01:27:45   it'll cycle through those three windows. Well, on my Ventura installation, the command backtick

01:27:51   doesn't do anything. It just doesn't even whether I have that, that's a recently, and I think that's

01:27:58   in the most recent release, but wasn't in there earlier. Is that right? I believe so. Right.

01:28:02   Yeah. But I got to assume that's just a, that's a bug. They're not getting rid of command.

01:28:08   You don't get to switch windows anymore. You're going to use, right. Sorry. I do think though,

01:28:14   here, the thing that I forget who popped this idea into my head, but it is when you step back

01:28:21   and think about it, the fundamentally thing that's most interesting about stage manager,

01:28:26   I almost called it center stage again. Center stage seems more right. I don't know,

01:28:31   but it's really interesting that it is I've poked around with it enough. And if you watch the

01:28:37   keynote, you know, it was clear enough that it really kind of is the same idea on Mac and iPad,

01:28:43   right? For all the various ways that the Mac OS interface is different than iPad OS,

01:28:47   when you're using center stage, it's pretty similar. It is, you know, as much as it can be

01:28:55   between the two platforms with different concepts of what a quote unquote window is. But I think

01:29:00   it's fundamentally interesting that on iPad, it's sort of a power user mode, right? Like, okay,

01:29:06   you're a more advanced iPad user. You'd like to sort of have multiple apps on screen at once,

01:29:11   and you've got a lot, you know, a couple of windows or apps worth of stuff going on at a time.

01:29:16   Here's an interface to manage this visually that you, you know, it's not on by default, and it's

01:29:23   more complex, significantly more complex than the basic iPad idea of one thing on screen at a time.

01:29:31   On the Mac, it's sort of like a simplified mode, right? Like, okay, you've got a jumble of windows

01:29:38   open on your desktop, and you feel it's cluttered, and it's distracting. Here's a way to sort of

01:29:42   reduce the clutter, and the advantage of it versus spaces for like having multiple desktops is that

01:29:52   you can make a new space, and then the new space is obviously it's fresh. There's nothing in it,

01:29:57   but you can quickly clutter that space up too. Stage Manager is a way that it sort of enforces

01:30:03   a lack of clutter because there's only so many things that you can take out of the strip on the

01:30:09   side. I think that's what they're calling it, the strip. You can only take so many windows out of

01:30:13   the strip at a time, and otherwise things go back into the strip to keep it organized. That's kind

01:30:19   of interesting to me that, you know, that Apple sees this as the same interface works on both

01:30:24   platforms, but on one it's the simplified decluttering mode, and on the other one it's the

01:30:30   power user do more things at once mode. It's also interesting to me that, you know, it might be,

01:30:39   it feels like the sort of shift that might be permanent, you know, that iPadOS on an annual

01:30:46   basis might be more on the macOS October schedule than the iOS September schedule, as iPad sort of

01:30:56   does grow more Mac-like than being a big iPhone-like. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see,

01:31:04   like, I mean, they've struggled with how to define multitasking on the iPad for a long time, and

01:31:10   I feel like they keep trying stuff that doesn't always work perfectly. It doesn't make it as

01:31:18   seamless as it, well, seamless, as easy to understand, I guess, as it is on the Mac.

01:31:24   And I feel like it's getting better slowly, though.

01:31:27   But it is the one platform where they still don't seem to have had their "that's it" moment, right?

01:31:36   Is slideover still a thing? Because I don't see slideover anymore, and every time I've ever seen

01:31:43   slideover, it's always by accident. That's when the thing—

01:31:46   Right, well, right. That's always been my problem. For years, I was just like,

01:31:51   "I'm not going to use multitasking on the iPad. I don't care about it." Even when I'm writing,

01:31:58   I'm fine command-tabbing back and forth between whatever text editor I'm using and Safari or

01:32:04   whatever I'm using to reference. And every time I implemented it, it was always by mistake.

01:32:11   Well, I've told this story before, but it's worth retelling. But my dear mother loves her iPad,

01:32:18   and I'm not throwing my mom under the bus as opposed to my dad, you know, under the trope that

01:32:24   it's the grandmother who's always got trouble. My mom is far more of an advanced computer user than

01:32:30   my dad, which is why she's the one who ran into it. My dad is super simplistic in his computing,

01:32:35   whereas my mom is more immersed in it and does more. But the problem she ran into multiple times

01:32:42   would be somehow Safari got into slide-over mode. And then she'd be in an email, and the email—she

01:32:48   likes subscribing to things like CNN emails, and they tell her what's news, and then there's a URL.

01:32:54   And then instead of what she expected to happen is she taps on the URL, and then she switches to

01:33:00   Safari in full screen, and that webpage opens. Instead, it would pop up in this slide-over that

01:33:06   comes over her email. And she couldn't even—not only did she not want it there, she didn't know

01:33:11   how to make it go away because it didn't have a close button, right? It was like you had to kind

01:33:15   of flick it away, but if you didn't flick quite the right way, it would just jump over to the other

01:33:21   side of the screen. And I remember a couple of years ago, there was actually an option somewhere

01:33:26   in settings—again, I'll never remember where. It's just to go back to the idea that you kind of just

01:33:31   have to search in settings to find something. But there used to be an option to just say,

01:33:35   "Don't ever use multitasking." Which was, I think, at least—again, it was a sign that the interface

01:33:43   wasn't good, that there was an option to turn it off. But at least they acknowledged it and put the

01:33:48   option in. But then they got rid of that option, I guess, a couple of versions ago where they thought,

01:33:54   "Okay, I don't think this is a problem anymore. We don't have to give people an option to turn

01:33:59   it off." But still, sometimes something happens. I don't get as many calls from my mom about getting

01:34:05   in the split screen. I think it's easier to dismiss now somehow. I think maybe the flicking

01:34:10   got a little bit more—let's take a flick that's more generally, that's just sort of in the right

01:34:16   direction as opposed to has to be this particular kind of flick. Well, and I guess the other thing

01:34:21   is in real—not slide-over, but split screen—you can just drag the divider between the two halves,

01:34:27   and if you just drag it all the way over to the side, you just end up with an app in full screen.

01:34:32   And that's so obvious that even if—I think I had to tell my mom to do it the first time,

01:34:39   but it's so obvious that she never—she couldn't forget it because it's, "Here's the thing.

01:34:45   I just touch it and move it over to the side, and now Safari's full screen."

01:34:49   Yeah, but that's the thing is that how does split screen fit in the center stage world?

01:34:58   If they had come up with the center stage—center stage—stage manager, god damn it. This is why I'm

01:35:04   a writer and not a podcast producer. Stage manager, damn it. Stage manager. If they'd

01:35:09   come up with it years ago, would they have ever done split screen? It's just weird because in

01:35:14   center stage manager—I'm not doing it on purpose—they do look like windows, right?

01:35:22   These things, you can resize them, they're stacked, whereas split screen, they don't look

01:35:28   like windows. It's still like one full screen panel with two halves.

01:35:32   BRIAN: Yeah. I'm not sure they would have done it originally because of—just because of the

01:35:37   screen real estate sort of—because, you know, the screens have gotten a lot larger,

01:35:42   since we got—certainly since we got the iPad Pro, but also now that you can plug in an external

01:35:47   monitor and run it. And it seems like it's particularly designed for that, right?

01:36:07   So, you have to have the M1, and presumably the M2 iPads are coming later this year, probably in

01:36:30   October when they might finish the iPad OS. And yeah, people sort of—you know, my idea to maybe

01:36:40   make people happy who really want stage manager elsewhere would be to just say, "Don't support

01:36:44   external displays and just have it on screen." But it doesn't seem like they're going that way.

01:36:50   It seems like Apple is sticking to no M1 or later. And it also seems like the displeasure

01:36:56   over that has died down, but maybe it'll come back up when iPad OS actually ships, right?

01:37:02   Because right now we're only hearing from the self-defined enthusiast crowd who's

01:37:08   installing either developer betas or even public betas. But when it—

01:37:11   I don't think—well, I can't—I think maybe we talked about this the last time I was on the show,

01:37:15   but I feel like it's fine for them to make these decisions, honestly. I don't think—they

01:37:22   make—they largely make these decisions based on what they think works well. And just because you

01:37:28   want to run something crappily on your device does not mean that you should necessarily be able to do

01:37:32   that. I know. That's sort of what I wrote, and as people pointed—I can't remember the examples

01:37:38   they pointed to, but basically, if they don't do—Apple doesn't do many spite features, you know?

01:37:45   And they do do some marketing spite things that are cosmetic. So, like, the one that—it doesn't

01:37:54   seem like lots of people comment on it, and I think because so many people use one of their

01:38:01   personal photos as their iPhone wallpaper lock screen pictures, you know, that they don't use the

01:38:10   default wallpapers. But whenever you buy a new iPhone, the new—the iPhone comes with device-

01:38:18   specific wallpapers. And it—like, if you buy the iPhone 13 Pro, you don't get the iPhone 13

01:38:27   non-Pro wallpapers, right? There's, like, these custom wallpapers just for the device that I guess

01:38:34   Apple thinks are keyed to the actual physical nature, you know, like gold—shiny gold steel

01:38:42   on the iPhone Pro. Well, there's, like, a gold-colored laser-looking wallpaper that's

01:38:48   supposed to match. But in terms of actual features, not just cosmetic things, they don't

01:38:54   tend to do that, like, "Oh, we're going to hold that cool thing just to get you to buy a new

01:38:59   device." No, because their overall mindset is they just—they really don't just want you to buy one

01:39:04   more Apple device, get your money, and never come back. They want loyal customers, right? It's the

01:39:10   same thing I go back to with, like, the seemingly faded conspiracy theory that new versions of iOS

01:39:20   deliberately tank your battery life, right? And there were some versions of iOS over the years

01:39:28   that didn't run great on older iPhones, but I don't think deliberately I think it was just

01:39:34   engineering and just shortcomings, just didn't quite do it. But they—the last thing they want

01:39:39   is for somebody with an iPhone to think is, "Apple really screwed up the OS and tanked my

01:39:46   scrolling performance and battery life. I'm going to go buy a new product from them," right? That

01:39:51   doesn't work that way. Like, the last thing they want you to think is, "Maybe I should look at a

01:39:57   Samsung phone," right? And what would be the best way to get an iPhone user to at least look at a

01:40:02   Samsung phone is ship a software update that ruins their phone. Right?

01:40:05   NatHAN: Just does something and seems deliberate. Yeah, right.

01:40:08   Tom: Yeah. I think they purposefully tanked my iPhone. It's not a way to get someone to buy

01:40:16   another iPhone. It really isn't. The idea that it was, I don't think comes true. And I really don't

01:40:22   think that they're withholding center or stage—I'm going to stop talking about this feature. I am.

01:40:28   Screw it. This is the last time. The new feature. The new windowing feature is definitely not trying

01:40:35   to get you to buy a new $1,000 iPad Pro. I really think that it just doesn't run well on the older

01:40:40   hardware. NatHAN Yeah. I think so, too. I mean, I think of, like, the fact that when you tilt larger

01:40:49   phones, you can get different UI effects. You know, you get more of an iPad type of layout,

01:40:58   so that the icons go in the bottom type of thing. Whereas, you know, with my Mini, if I tilt it,

01:41:03   nothing happens. So that does bring us to iOS 16. So that's one you're running. Now, are you running

01:41:10   it on your main phone or on an old phone? NatHAN I am, yeah.

01:41:26   NatHAN I put this in the notes. I think you probably saw it. But I've installed it on a spare

01:41:30   machine. And I should have probably sent it back by now. But sometimes I've still got my iPhone 13

01:41:36   Mini review unit from last year. So part of my August to-dos is to ship those phones back to Apple

01:41:44   before I get new ones. But that's where I've got the beta running. And son of a bitch,

01:41:49   I fell in love with the Mini again. NatHAN It's because it's the best phone.

01:41:54   NatHAN It's a couple of things. Number one, I have found iOS 16 to be extremely stable for

01:42:00   a developer beta all summer long. NatHAN Yeah. I have not had a problem with it,

01:42:04   honestly. And I installed the first public release.

01:42:08   Dave It has been in very good shape. And I actually like some of the new features. I mentioned

01:42:13   MG Siegler opened my eyes to it. I had no idea. But they've added this feature for haptic feedback

01:42:19   on the keyboard. Did you see? NatHAN Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. I turned that on immediately.

01:42:22   Dave I can't go back. It is like... And on the Mini, to me, the very worst thing about the iPhone

01:42:31   Mini is that my fingers got used to the more generous, larger keyboards. And having the little

01:42:38   bit of haptic feedback, it makes me feel like I'm typing more accurately on the Mini. And just,

01:42:44   I love the size. I love... I've said this many times. I really hope one of my big hopes for

01:42:52   this year's iPhones, which is the sort of thing that for all the things that leak, some things

01:42:57   don't. We know so much about the sizes and stuff like that. But will the pros still use stainless

01:43:06   steel instead of aluminum or switching to titanium or something else? I find the steel to be so

01:43:12   heavy. Why would I want my phone to be heavier? And I know it's shiny. And I guess people like

01:43:18   that it's shiny and that it looks... But the fact that the Mini is aluminum... Because I bought the

01:43:25   iPhone 12 non-Mini two years ago. And I just love the weight. And I was so close to... I should have

01:43:33   bought the Mini. I really should have. And I was right that it's like I'm locked in. I'm going to

01:43:38   be locked in all year. I don't need the extra camera anyway. I didn't need the battery life

01:43:42   either. I never left the house. But the weight difference, even not the size, just the weight

01:43:49   difference between aluminum and stainless steel is so nice. The Mini, it's both smaller and it's

01:43:55   aluminum. And of course, I'm falling in love with it. The year that it's been widely reported for

01:44:02   over a year that they're not going to have a new Mini. And I know that you're a Mini.

01:44:07   I have long been a Mini fanatic. I mean, I had the... So I got the original iPhone SE. I guess

01:44:12   I had gone as far... I kind of forgot this, but I had gone as far as the 7. And then when the

01:44:17   SE, the original SE came out, I ditched the 7 for the SE and have not looked back particularly. I

01:44:23   had that phone for four years until the next, the second SE came out. And then I got that for six

01:44:32   months. And then the 12 Mini came out. Right. And then it's like the longer you go, the more of a

01:44:38   brick it feels like in your pocket because they keep getting bigger and they're using materials

01:44:42   like steel. And it really is... I guess people are... I don't... It doesn't seem like I see a

01:44:51   lot of people using an iPhone Mini out in the world. I still see... I still run into a few.

01:44:57   And then every time I pull it out, people... I get a lot of comments. People are like,

01:45:03   "Oh, I should have gotten that one." I wish you had because then it might have made another one.

01:45:10   I had the spitball theory back in... When these rumors first started that, "Hey, maybe they're

01:45:17   only going to do the Mini for one more year and then the next year they're not because it's not

01:45:21   selling well." And some of those supply chain things that they're like, "Oh, Apple cut orders

01:45:27   for the Mini 12 and... But upped their orders for the Max Pro or something like that." And

01:45:33   people who like the idea that Apple has a Mini size option were like me,

01:45:39   and especially like you. And I know Marco Arment is always on the fence. Oh, man, the Mini.

01:45:47   I had the spitball hopeful idea that maybe coinciding with COVID when stores were closed,

01:45:54   and even when they opened, a lot of people reasonably just were like, "I'm not going to

01:45:58   go to the store. I'll just order online." And you really had to see it and feel it to get, "Oh,

01:46:05   this is so much nicer and cuter and adorable." But I also think that one of the things...

01:46:12   I know Apple's timeline on these, especially iPhones, is so much longer than people think.

01:46:19   The lead time, the decision not to... Assuming it's true that all the rumors are true and there

01:46:24   will not be a new iPhone 14 Mini this year, that decision was made like two years ago. And I don't

01:46:31   know that they had sales data from the 12 Mini. And yes, by all accounts, it has sold disappointingly,

01:46:39   even by Apple's estimates, apparently. We don't know. Apple doesn't... Never, of course,

01:46:43   officially says anything like that. But it seems like that's probably true, that maybe it didn't

01:46:49   sell as well. But even if it had sold better, I don't know that... I think this decision was made

01:46:54   two years ago for some reason. I don't know.

01:46:58   Brian Kardell I'm still hopeful that this is just a device

01:47:02   that they're planning on doing occasionally.

01:47:04   Jim Collison My hopeful idea, and again,

01:47:08   my hopeful idea that maybe once stores got reopened, there'd be like this shocking wave of

01:47:15   people buying the mini-sized phones apparently didn't happen. So maybe this one's wishful

01:47:21   thinking too. But my wishful thought is that maybe the current SE is the last, "Okay, we're

01:47:28   going to give you the home button interface, the touch ID button that you're familiar with and love.

01:47:35   But eventually we're going to move everybody to the iPhone X style. There is no more touch ID,

01:47:41   home button. Everything is a modern, round-cornered, full screen."

01:47:46   Brian Kardell So the next SE will be in the same form factor

01:47:49   as this current mini.

01:47:50   Jim Collison That's my hope?

01:47:52   Brian Kardell Yeah, that's my hope as well. First of all,

01:47:54   I mean, I would love to pay less for it. That was the great thing that I loved about the SE,

01:48:00   really. That was one of the phones that I would just buy outright and pay for it all up front and

01:48:07   never have to worry about it again, whereas everything else I'm like, "Eh, you know,

01:48:10   700 bucks, that's kind of a lot, I think. I think it's that much, right?" Yeah.

01:48:16   Which is another interesting thing, because since they are discontinuing the mini and they are

01:48:20   rumored to be increasing the price, I think it was another Germin thing,

01:48:24   increasing the prices on the Max and the Pro.

01:48:27   Jim Collins Yeah, by like 50 bucks, right?

01:48:29   Brian Kardell Yeah, that their ASP is going to go up dramatically.

01:48:33   Jim Collins Right. Yeah, that the,

01:48:35   supposedly if it's true, the non-Pro models and the big, the other, you know, for anybody who's

01:48:42   not staying up on the rumors, the idea is that there will still be four models, but instead of

01:48:47   the non-Pro having mini and regular size and the Pro having regular and max size, they'll just all

01:48:55   have regular and max and Pro and not Pro. So four phones, two regular size, two max size, and no mini,

01:49:06   but that the Pros are going to go up 50 bucks and then non-Pros will stay the same price,

01:49:11   but that they're already sort of have that $30 carrier fee weird charge that I still don't,

01:49:19   I still don't know what to tell people the prices of those phones. Like which one is the real price,

01:49:24   the one that Apple is saying that's like 800 bucks or the 831 that you get if you don't buy

01:49:30   it through a carrier. It's weird, but well, we'll see. Anyway, my fear about my spitball idea that

01:49:37   maybe the next SE will move past the home button. I have two fears on that. One is that because the

01:49:45   mini is unpopular, or not as popular as Apple had hoped, that they still want the SE to sell

01:49:52   in big numbers and that they fear that if the new SE, if the SE is only the mini, then people won't

01:49:58   want it because they'll think it's too small. And the other thing is that maybe I'm underestimating.

01:50:04   I don't, I, well, I mean, the screen size is larger though. Right. It is, but I don't know

01:50:09   what people, I don't know what it is that, I don't know why more people aren't buying the mini.

01:50:13   So they, I, you know. Well, I think it, I think it's, I mean, I think the SE is popular because

01:50:18   of price for the most part. So it's the cheapest phone that they make and it's still a good value.

01:50:22   And I think the other thing that might be a factor is you get with some older customers,

01:50:30   they still want the Touch ID. Well, but Chris Evans wants Touch ID. He's not older.

01:50:36   Did you see that story? So did you see him at the end of Endgame? He looked pretty old.

01:50:41   Chris Evans apparently was using an iPhone 6 or a 6s and it finally bit the bullet.

01:50:51   He went with like the 12 Pro or something like that, or 13. I can't remember which one he went

01:50:56   with. Everybody was like, why did you get the SE? It's the same phone.

01:51:00   I think he, I think he got bad advice. I think so too. I think somebody led him astray.

01:51:05   But I truly wonder, cause I, you know, clearly even like, I don't know who the least technical

01:51:12   listener of this podcast is, but God bless you and I'm glad you enjoy the show. But whoever you are,

01:51:19   least, least technically minded person who enjoys listening to the talk show with John Gruber and

01:51:27   you're not the sort of person, even you, the least technical listener of this show,

01:51:32   you're not the sort of person who's confused by change to the iPhone, right? You might prefer

01:51:39   Touch ID, but you, you're not confused by having no more Touch ID and swiping up from the bottom.

01:51:45   I worry it's so hard for me to be in touch with how many hundreds of millions or million,

01:51:50   tens of millions of people there are. My mom, definitely, my mom has right now the iPhone SE,

01:51:56   this, this current one, you know, when did it come out? Six months ago or 18 months ago, whenever.

01:52:03   I'm confused on that. Was it a year ago? Yeah. I don't know. Well, a little bit more than a,

01:52:07   a bit more than a year ago. She was due for a new phone. I knew it was coming and she just really,

01:52:11   They come out in the spring. She really just said, she just said, I just want one that works like my

01:52:16   old one. And I was like, this is easier for me and she's fine with it. So that's what she got and

01:52:20   she's very happy with it. I presume eventually they won't offer touchscreen iPhones anymore,

01:52:26   but I don't know how many years away that is. That might be, you know, that might be this,

01:52:30   like part of the new Apple dealing with a billion person user base for this product that they've

01:52:36   kind of got to stick with legacy, fundamental home button. Yes. The current SE came out in March of

01:52:44   this year. All right. Well, no, then maybe my mom has the previous one now that I think about it

01:52:48   because she didn't get it this year. So yeah, she's got the old, the previous SE, but if she

01:52:52   was in the market for a phone now she'd want the SE. Like if she dropped her cracked her phone right

01:52:56   now, she, she would get a SE. I'm not sure. I think my mom has to, has the current one.

01:53:01   Actually. I don't know what you, cause she sent me her old devices. She sent, I got a box full

01:53:05   of old devices cause I can't say no to anything. And one of her previous device was a 6S. And then

01:53:11   the one before that was the 3GS. And, and it's in, it's in beautiful condition because she,

01:53:17   every time she used it, she would turn it off and put it back in the box.

01:53:20   I think it's very hard for anybody outside of JAWS we acts small leadership team to really know

01:53:28   how, how much of the SEs purpose, I mean, clearly the lowest price is a, is a number one, right?

01:53:36   That's, that's the job of the, that's the job the iPhone SE serves in the product line,

01:53:41   but how much of it right now is serving the desire for people to just replace their old iPhone with

01:53:48   one that works exactly the same way and is familiar. And they even, you know,

01:53:54   feel more comfortable with a fingerprint sensor than a face sensor. Right? Like we've all,

01:53:59   I've moved past the face. I mean, the face sensor thing is old news, but you know,

01:54:03   people don't like change, you know? Yeah. I had a conversation somewhere. I think it was in a Slack,

01:54:08   I don't remember who it was with, but someone was like, Oh man, I don't want to get that face ID

01:54:12   thing. Get my face on the internet. That's not, that's not how it works. Right. But you know,

01:54:17   where do you start? Yeah. Start listening 353 episodes ago on John Gruber's the talk show,

01:54:25   890 hours later, you'll be caught up. Actually, I guess that was in person. Cause I think Albert

01:54:30   was with me and we were like, no, no. Doesn't put your face on the internet. Well, anyway,

01:54:37   I fell in love with the mini again and I don't know what to do. I guess I just, I should just

01:54:40   stop. I know I should do it for four years. Like I did. No, I got to send it back to Apple. It's

01:54:45   a review unit. I should have sent it back. This is why it's not worth keeping these damn review units.

01:54:49   Yeah. That's right. Cause you just get tempted by other form factors. The other thing I've noticed,

01:54:55   and even on the mini, I kind of like it. It does seem like one of the under remarked upon changes

01:54:59   in iOS 16 is they're moving more stuff lower on the screen, like, you know, search boxes and,

01:55:05   and stuff like that. And you know, I think clearly it's about, you know, it on the mini,

01:55:10   it's not so big a deal, but on all of these phones, it's just, it's still better though.

01:55:14   Yeah. That's the thing. Even on the mini, once you get used to it, it is better.

01:55:19   Yeah. And it's a, it's a, it's a really interesting change that gets back to the way that on the

01:55:25   iPhone in particular, the physical ergonomics of it matter more than on any other device. And like,

01:55:34   why is the menu bar on the Mac at the top and not the bottom? You know, like in theory, you could

01:55:41   have the menu bar at the bottom and then the menus would pop up, you know, like the windows start menu

01:55:46   is at the bottom and pops up. You could do that. But I kind of feel that the menu bars role,

01:55:51   organizing all the features of whatever app you're using right now makes more sense to,

01:55:58   to most people's minds as a top to bottom organizing principle. And, you know, most

01:56:05   frequent, you know, the edit menu has the cut, copy and paste and undo at the top because they're

01:56:10   the most common things in the edit menu. And then the stuff at the bottom is usually the lead,

01:56:15   you know, look at the bottom of most of your menus. It's the stuff that you tend not to use.

01:56:19   And I feel like on the iPhone top bottom was sort of like 15 years ago, more common just because of

01:56:29   that thinking. Whereas as we've evolved and Apple's gotten more, you know, we've all habitualized to

01:56:35   it, they're really sort of thinking like, no, the actual physical ergonomics of putting stuff

01:56:40   towards the bottom is more people will get used to it. And it's, it's more important.

01:56:45   Thumb reachability is more important than the sort of conceptual thinking of putting important

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01:59:17   talk show, no the, just talk show. You save 10% off your first purchase and you can buy a whole

01:59:23   year at once. Go to squarespace.com/talkshow. Last but not least, I wanted to fit in. This is your

01:59:31   area of expertise, the superheroes. I want to know what you think about Batgirl getting...

01:59:37   I don't even know what happened to the Batgirl movie.

01:59:41   It was canceled. But is that the right time? After filming it, I mean, it was not done.

01:59:47   They had done primary shooting on it, is my understanding. And I don't think they had done

01:59:53   any of the sort of after effects or anything like that. But they had enough that they had done

01:59:58   audience testing. So they had shown it to people because that was one of the things,

02:00:04   like, they're saying, "Oh, it only got like 60% or whatever." I forgot how they do the numbers,

02:00:09   like six out of 10, which would be like a D. But it's not uncommon, it's particularly not uncommon

02:00:17   for DC movies to be released with scores that are lower than that. But when they show them initially,

02:00:27   they often get that and then they tweak them and they make them better. And so a movie that is

02:00:33   initially at that stage reviewed as a 60 comes out and it's an 80 or something like that.

02:00:41   An article I'd read provided several examples and I don't remember which ones they were, but

02:00:44   some of the DC Universe ones that were not so bad, many of them are quite bad, in my opinion.

02:00:51   I don't think they've done such a great job to date. So it could have been one of the decent

02:00:57   ones, but they decided that they were going to take a tax write-off instead. And they are...

02:01:02   And they're retooling their view of how they want to do movies and stuff, and I think that's okay.

02:01:09   They have decided they don't want to do sort of lower budget... And it was a lower budget movie,

02:01:15   it was like half the budget of the Batman, and it was just going to be released on

02:01:18   their streaming platform.

02:01:20   HBO Max.

02:01:21   HBO Max. And I think it's fine to redo your strategy, but it seems a little weird to redo it

02:01:32   right in the middle of a movie and not just say, "Okay, well, this is the last one." And then we're

02:01:38   redoing our strategy. Because you have gotten your fans sort of hyped up about, "Here's a movie about

02:01:44   a character that really hasn't been done much or well before and certainly hasn't had her own movie

02:01:53   and it is one of the few that is going to be led by a female and a woman who is of color."

02:02:02   And that's the one that we're going to pull the rug out from under. It's a bad look,

02:02:06   and we're doing it for tax reasons. Doesn't help.

02:02:09   For those who aren't following along with the drama, it's in the context of a major

02:02:17   corporate reshuffling where Discovery has acquired Time Warner, which is the studio in charge of all

02:02:26   the DC franchise and HBO and HBO Max, the streaming service, and CNN, Time Warner, and famously,

02:02:36   David Zaslav is the CEO of Discovery. Which features a lot of reality TV content.

02:02:45   Yeah, right. So it raises concerns amongst fans, people who want either feature-length quality

02:02:53   movies, two-hour blockbuster movies that are good movies, or high-quality streaming content on HBO

02:03:02   Max, and why is the company that makes the Real Housewives reality—I don't even know if Real

02:03:08   Housewives is on Discovery, but shows that are sort of like—

02:03:11   Shows, big shows that I don't watch. How about that?

02:03:13   Reality programming, which is very successful, but is that the right leadership to come in?

02:03:18   Yeah. I mean, when you think of HBO in particular, and we think of what you want the DC universe to

02:03:24   be, even if it hasn't quite reached its best self yet, you don't think of reality TV stuff.

02:03:31   I mean, HBO is kind of famous for making some—a, some incredibly good and thoughtful content,

02:03:38   but also some that's just great spectacle.

02:03:40   Right. Yeah, true. And that's what the brand stands for. HBO is to content what Apple is

02:03:48   to computers. The whole concept hinges on "we make the best stuff." And it's not that nobody

02:03:54   else makes good stuff, but that our stuff is good stuff. And that's—it's quality first,

02:03:59   and then success comes because of the quality and not the other way around.

02:04:03   And, you know, but like famously, very ignominiously, CNN had been spending a year

02:04:09   making a CNN+ news streaming service before the acquisition, and then it launched—seemingly

02:04:18   rushed, I think, because they might have suspected, "Well, if we launch, they can't kill us."

02:04:23   Right. And it'll—I just know lots of people are going to sign up, and then they launched,

02:04:29   and then the acquisition went through, and like three weeks after it launched, the acquisition

02:04:34   was final, and David Zaslav was like, "Yeah, that's over."

02:04:38   That's done.

02:04:39   And there were apparently very few subscribers. I mean, and it does seem—you know, sometimes you

02:04:47   have to try an idea and see. But it seems to me that, you know, lots of people are talking about

02:04:52   the wallet fatigue of paying for ever more streaming services, right?

02:04:58   Well, yeah, I mean, Disney just announced that they're raising their rate as well.

02:05:01   And Netflix possibly raised their rates a bit too high last year that, you know,

02:05:06   a lot of people think that, you know, the last time Netflix is, "Hey, we're Netflix,

02:05:11   we're the number one streaming service, and every 18 months we can just turn the

02:05:14   burner up on the monthly rates," maybe caught up to them, and then it went too high because

02:05:19   the price, you know—eventually you reach the point where people don't want to pay more,

02:05:23   and the competition is getting better and more varied, and there's more services.

02:05:27   But it seems like what people like to spend their money on is entertainment. You know,

02:05:34   Netflix is best known for—they have documentaries and news-ish type things,

02:05:39   but for the most part it's entertainment content. Disney famously, the whole company's brand for

02:05:45   100 years has been about creating family entertainment. It turns out people maybe

02:05:51   don't want to spend extra money every month for news. And also, you know, I don't know—

02:05:59   Well, that's been a problem, obviously, right? Yeah.

02:06:01   Right? It has been a problem for news organizations. But also, too, just to sort

02:06:06   of circle back to the opening of this show. I don't know, you know, the last maybe handful of

02:06:12   years of news? Haven't? Right. Who wants to pay more for that?

02:06:17   What would you like to hear more about? The lunatic in charge of both the nuclear man with

02:06:27   the nuclear codes that keeps flushing things down the toilet?

02:06:30   Well, at least—one point I wanted to make at the beginning of the show is at least

02:06:34   as a lunatic who's always been obsessed with "the nuclear,"

02:06:41   right? That's what he calls the whole area, the nuclear. At least if the worst he did was take

02:06:51   some of the paperwork about it with him in an unsecure way, it sure is better than doing

02:06:56   something inappropriate with the button, right? It makes you wonder how many

02:07:04   times the generals had to sort of slap his hand away from them.

02:07:07   Yeah, like, or just, you know, the—you know the story that, famously, apparently,

02:07:12   he had a red button installed on the desk that he could hit, and then a butler would come in with a

02:07:18   diet coke. And you know how he liked his diet coke? Apparently, everywhere he goes, he gets

02:07:23   his diet coke served the same way, which is unopened. And it comes—I don't know if he

02:07:31   likes the bottle or the can, but whatever it is, it's all—

02:07:33   I think it's the can. I think I've seen him.

02:07:35   Okay.

02:07:36   Yeah, I think so.

02:07:37   And it comes, including at his own steakhouse in Washington, but every time he gets served a diet

02:07:43   coke, it comes sealed and then gets opened in front of him so that he knows—

02:07:49   This hasn't been tampered with?

02:07:51   Well, I do think, again, he's not—

02:07:53   Do you have a taste or two?

02:07:54   He's a lunatic, but he's not stupid, right? He's ill-informed and crazy and incurious,

02:08:02   but he is—but you know, and that—because that's the thing some of his supporters have always said,

02:08:07   is if he's—

02:08:08   All the stuff you want in a president.

02:08:10   If he's not smart, how did he get to be president? And it's true, he's smart and cunning in certain

02:08:17   ways. That's how he's—that's how he became president and how he still is not in jail.

02:08:23   We'll see how long. But he's also, I believe, savvy enough to know that he's very likely to

02:08:29   have his soda spit in. I think he knows. I think most likely it's spit. And I think, you know,

02:08:39   like that scene in Martin Scorsese's casino where the cops are ordering sandwiches from the mobster's

02:08:44   sandwich spot, and they're like, "Ah, yeah, officer, yeah, on the house, no money from you."

02:08:49   And then the mobsters making the sandwiches are spitting in them, and then they wrap them up.

02:08:54   And Trump watched that movie, and he's like, "Yep, see?"

02:08:56   Oh, yeah.

02:08:56   Yeah, he's like, "See? See? That's how they get you. They do that." But anyway, they put a button

02:09:01   on the Oval Office desk, and he could just hit the button, and a guy would come in with an ice-cold

02:09:05   can of Diet Coke and open it in front of him. I bet that they put that button there not because

02:09:09   he wanted the Cokes, but to get the button out for launching the nukes. The man wants a button.

02:09:15   That seems like a really imprecise way to launch nuclear weapons.

02:09:20   Well, but I—

02:09:22   Just a big button. I mean, where are they going?

02:09:25   Could you say—I'll bet they're—I'm not making this up. Don't you think that when he got in,

02:09:29   like, January 21st, 2017, that he was like, "Where's the button?"

02:09:35   Well, yeah, probably.

02:09:36   I'll bet he was, and they're like, "What?"

02:09:37   And who can I—you know, when can I hit it?

02:09:38   Well, yeah, and where's—well, I just want to know where it is in case I need it. And they're like,

02:09:42   "What are you talking about?" And he's like, "You know, like, the button on 'Press Your Luck,' like,

02:09:46   the big red button that I hit to launch the nukes. The nuclear. How do I launch the nuclear?"

02:09:51   And they're like, "Girl, there really is no button. That's sort of a figure of speech."

02:09:55   And he's like, "I want a button." And they're like, "See?"

02:09:58   And what if we got you a button that got you a Diet Coke?

02:10:01   Yeah, and—well, and what if it was like this? They're like, "All right,

02:10:05   we'll put the button on your desk. We'll hook it up to the nuclear eventually. But for now,

02:10:09   that's going to take a while."

02:10:12   If you win a second term.

02:10:13   "That's going to take a while. And I think you'll understand, sir, that, you know,

02:10:17   that's a little complicated." And I think he would nod his head and say, "Okay, but for now,

02:10:22   you can try the button, and it'll get you an ice-cold Diet Coke." And I think that that

02:10:28   might have been so distracting that he never really followed up on the hooking it up to the nuclear.

02:10:32   He was so happy getting Diet Cokes.

02:10:34   Yeah. Anyway, things after that got worse. There was a pandemic. You know, so the news—

02:10:41   Yeah, right, right.

02:10:41   The news has not been something people really wanted to pay for. I give this Zaslav credit.

02:10:46   That's sort of a hell of a way to take ownership of an acquisition.

02:10:50   Yeah, I mean, I know that, yeah, nobody questioned him getting rid of CNN+.

02:10:54   Yeah.

02:10:54   There was nowhere near as much of an outcry as opposed to canceling it.

02:10:58   Because no one was looking forward to that, whereas everybody was looking forward to Batgirl.

02:11:02   Well—

02:11:03   Not everybody, but lots of people. Lots of people were legitimately looking forward to Batgirl.

02:11:06   I think—have you watched Prey on Hulu yet?

02:11:10   We did. We watched it last week, which was—is the—

02:11:15   Prequel? I guess it is a prequel, chronologically, to Predator.

02:11:19   Yep. And I thought it was fantastic. You know, it's certainly, I think, the best Predator movie.

02:11:25   I haven't seen all of them, but the best one since the original, I think.

02:11:28   I liked it. I didn't like it as much as I was hoping.

02:11:32   But I genuinely appreciated the way that it went straight through in the universe where the

02:11:41   Predator situation is real. It was plausible, right? It never got to cockamamie, which is where

02:11:48   all of these franchises tend to go, right? Because that was sort of the appeal of the original

02:11:55   Predator. Speaking, you know, of the former governors Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura,

02:12:00   right? Good way to launch a career in politics to be in a Predator movie. But it was, you know,

02:12:06   it was low—you know, the plot largely hinged on mud, right?

02:12:13   Yeah, yeah. There's always a lot of mud in a Predator movie.

02:12:16   Yeah, but, you know, that cool mud—

02:12:19   These high-tech aliens are flummoxed by mud.

02:12:22   Yeah, but it messed with their infrared eyesight and, you know, and kind of cool, right? I like

02:12:28   Predator 2, which was the one in Los Angeles. Yeah, it's okay. It's—yeah, I think it's

02:12:34   weaker than 1 for sure, but it's a movie you can watch and enjoy.

02:12:37   Yeah, but Prey—so here's a question. I actually don't know. We did watch—the family watched it,

02:12:42   I enjoyed it, I'm glad it exists. It's a neat lower-key way of bringing the Predator series

02:12:47   back to Earth. I recommend it.

02:12:49   Yeah, and I had heard about this movie coming out and was very excited for it,

02:12:53   and then when—but I guess I didn't follow it that closely because it's not a franchise that I'm

02:12:58   super invested in. But when it came out, I was like, "Oh, it's on Hulu." Like, what?

02:13:03   Yeah.

02:13:03   It just went to Hulu? But I thought that—this is an example of, you know, here's a movie,

02:13:10   and I don't think the budget was outrageous. First of all, they weren't spending a lot of money on,

02:13:16   you know, big-name actors because most of these people are not, you know, currently

02:13:21   big-name actors, although I think Amber Midthunder has a break—

02:13:24   Yeah.

02:13:24   —in the future, or whatever.

02:13:25   Yeah.

02:13:26   And it is, you know, the lead is a woman who is a minority, and also, like, you can watch it in

02:13:35   Comanche. There's a Comanche—I don't know if it's a dub, I can't remember, but I think they—I

02:13:40   thought they said they filmed both. Anyway, you can turn on Comanche, which might be the better

02:13:43   way to watch it. We didn't—I was watching it with Hank, so we watched it in English. But—and

02:13:47   I gotta believe that it did super well because the word of mouth about it was

02:13:53   terrific, and I would imagine that Hulu is pretty pleased with the results.

02:13:58   Yeah, but so my question is, it's not in theaters, right? It's only on Hulu.

02:14:02   Right, yeah.

02:14:03   But that seems—it almost seems criminal because it's really—it's so much better.

02:14:06   Yeah.

02:14:06   I want to backtrack on my lukewarm praise. It's just, I was hoping maybe it was, like,

02:14:13   an all-time classic. It's very, very good. I'm so glad that it exists, and it is—but, and again,

02:14:18   I should maybe just give the elevator pitch. It's—some of the predators actually have been

02:14:23   visiting Earth for hundreds of years, and here's one who went to—what year does it take place around?

02:14:29   1710 or 19 or something like that. 1719, I think.

02:14:34   Yeah, so 1719 in Comanche Indian Territory in North America.

02:14:38   Yeah.

02:14:39   And one of the great things—I mean, again, I don't think that—I don't know, I hope it didn't even

02:14:43   get pitched, but, like, if this movie, that premise had been made when you and I were teenagers,

02:14:50   Predator's prequel, Comanche Indian, 1710, and then somebody would have said, "Okay,

02:14:56   when does the white guy come in?" What do we have him come in on?

02:15:00   And save the natives?

02:15:02   Right. And who can we get? Can we get Harrison Ford? How about Harrison Ford is like a pilgrim,

02:15:09   and he's on a boat, and then he comes in and kills them. No, it's just Comanche Indian,

02:15:15   1710, North America, and, you know, terrific cast. It's a really interesting movie. You're talking me

02:15:23   into having fonder thoughts about it than I want. It's really interesting.

02:15:28   Yeah, I just think they did such a good—I mean, I, you know, particularly because, like I said,

02:15:33   I think it's a franchise that, after the first one, you know, the second one's okay, and then,

02:15:38   you know, it gets really silly and gets, you know, goes downhill severely. I've heard moderately good

02:15:45   things about "Predators," but I've never—I have not seen it yet from 2010.

02:15:49   I know. I've saw it, and it's so bad that I don't remember it.

02:15:52   Yeah, yeah. Like, some people say, "Oh, no, it's not so bad," and other people say, "It's terrible."

02:15:57   So, I mean, I'm probably going to try and watch it just so I can sort of complete, you know—but

02:16:01   the "Alien vs. Predators" ones are absolutely terrible.

02:16:05   Yeah, they are. They really are. It's just—it doesn't seem like there's a story.

02:16:12   It seems like, how can you go wrong with that, right? I mean, you're taking two

02:16:15   cool things and mashing them together. Like, you know, like when you're a kid,

02:16:20   when you get the action figures that are the same size, and you're like, "Hey,

02:16:24   these guys can fight now," and they don't, you know, they never meet up on TV.

02:16:28   I think it comes back to what you hear from everybody who's ever been involved

02:16:32   in the Pixar movie over and over again. It doesn't matter which movie,

02:16:36   which people from Pixar you talk to. They always say, "Story, story, story, story, story."

02:16:42   And that they're famous for inventing 3D animation and turning the whole world of children's

02:16:47   animation from hand-illustrated to computer-animated, and the computers are what was novel

02:16:52   about Toy Story. And they're like, "You know what? That's just a—that's great, and we love that

02:16:56   stuff, and we think it makes for a better movie, but if we didn't have good story, this would be

02:17:00   terrible." And the "Alien vs. Predators" thing really seems like, wouldn't it be cool if "Aliens

02:17:04   vs. Predators" fought? And they're like, "Yeah!" And I think there's VFX people who did terrific

02:17:10   work, and there's—you could look at scenes—you could find scenes in those movies that are top-notch

02:17:15   action scenes and tense, tense, "Oh my god, I don't even know who to root for here, you know,

02:17:20   it's blah blah blah." But another problem with those movies, though, is the same problem,

02:17:24   was they still—they injected humans into it. It's like, "All right, how do we get some people

02:17:28   in here?" Where is it—wouldn't it be cool if the movie was just "Aliens vs. Predators" and there's

02:17:33   no people? Which was like the Wall-E story, the first half of Wall-E, where there were no

02:17:38   characters other than a cockroach and a robot, right? That's really hard cinematically, you know?

02:17:45   John: Yeah, and no dialogue for—

02:17:47   Steve: Right, no dialogue, right. And it's like—but anyway, to go back to "Batgirl,"

02:17:53   it still is an open question of, you know, I guess the problem—I presume the movie is actually just

02:18:02   terrible, that it's so bad that they looked at it and they're like, "This is so bad we should not

02:18:08   even put it on—just on HBO Max," which I think was the plan all along, that it wasn't going to have

02:18:14   a theatrical release. But they already have spent $90 million on it, and the idea is that they can

02:18:23   take a tax write-off on that. And the people who want "Batgirl" to be good, whether it's because

02:18:30   it has a female lead, because they just love DC superheroes, they just want more good superhero

02:18:38   movies. And, you know, why not? If you're a fan, of course you want every movie to be good, right?

02:18:43   No, who roots for a movie to stink? Sure. So you want it to be a good movie, and, you know,

02:18:49   people kind of latched onto this tax write-off, and it's like these rotten corporate bastards

02:18:56   are taking a tax write-off instead of releasing a good movie on HBO Max. I don't think it makes

02:19:01   sense, because it's like I don't think people understand that tax write-offs, they don't get

02:19:05   you all your money back. Like, there is an advantage to it. No, yeah, but there is an

02:19:10   argument to me that, like, you know, it wasn't done, and so they would have had to spend a bunch

02:19:13   more money on special effects and whatnot. But it's not the bulk of it. And the other—I mean,

02:19:20   like I said, that 60% for an early cut is not that bad. You know, I don't know that it's going to be

02:19:30   a—I'm trying to think of, like, the best superhero movie—but, I mean, you know, Iron Man 1.

02:19:36   I don't think it's going to be something where you're necessarily—where universally everybody

02:19:42   is going to think, "Man, that was a great movie." But it could very easily be like,

02:19:48   "That was a solid superhero movie. That was enjoyable, and I didn't feel like I wasted my time,

02:19:54   and we got to see a character that we hardly ever get to see."

02:19:57   - Right. You know, is it as good as the Han Solo movie? You know, which I thought was—I think is

02:20:03   the worst piece of Star Wars material ever to come out. I mean, I—

02:20:06   - Oh, seriously? I don't think it's—I mean, have you heard of the prequels?

02:20:09   - Oh, I lied. - I don't think it's that—I don't think—Dan

02:20:12   famously loves that movie, but I don't think it's that great. I think it's

02:20:17   watchable, but I don't think it's that great. And it's certainly nowhere near, you know—I mean,

02:20:22   but I would put it—I would definitely watch that movie over any of the three prequels.

02:20:26   - I don't know. I just feel like the Batgirl must be bad. And maybe not. Maybe they really—

02:20:31   - I don't—the other thing is I just don't think Zaslav is the kind of guy that I would

02:20:34   trust to make that determination. - I don't know, but I—it is a weird

02:20:38   thing. And the way it played out was on day one, they said very nice things about the directors,

02:20:47   who unfortunately—I don't know their names off the top of my head, but they—

02:20:51   - They're Moroccan, they're two—yeah. - Adil L. Arbi—

02:20:55   - Belgian Moroccan, I believe. - Yeah, and Bilali Fala. And one of them was

02:20:59   getting married, and the other one was at the wedding. - Yeah.

02:21:04   - In—somewhere over, you know, in Asia. That's where they got the news that the movie—

02:21:08   - Right, right. - They spent, like—

02:21:09   - Right after the wedding, they got a call saying, "Oh, yeah, we're not doing your movie."

02:21:12   - "We're not even putting it on streaming, and you don't get to finish it."

02:21:15   - They worked on Ms. Marvel, which I think was a really—you know, was a good show for Disney+.

02:21:20   - Yeah, and I haven't seen that yet. - So I think they—you know, I mean,

02:21:23   that's the only thing that I've seen that they've done that I know of, and did a good job.

02:21:28   - Yeah. - From what I saw, so...

02:21:29   - And there was stuff, other stuff that people were looking forward to in the Batgirl movie,

02:21:34   like, they're—you know, it's the same— - Oh, yeah.

02:21:36   - It's the same way that, like, real science came out at the same time as—what was the other one?

02:21:42   That it's like the same plot. - Oh, yeah.

02:21:45   - Which is the one with Val Kilmer. But, you know, there's—it's like somebody comes out with a movie

02:21:49   about an invisible man, and then some other studio comes out with a movie about an invisible woman,

02:21:53   you know? And that these ideas come up, and it's like Marvel's gone in this multiverse thing,

02:21:59   and DC's going in a multiverse thing, and there's a multiverse in DC where Michael Keaton is still

02:22:05   Batman. - Right.

02:22:06   - And so he's Bruce Wayne—or who knows, I don't know the plot if he's still actively Batman at

02:22:12   age 68 or whatever. - Yeah, I think he's just say, yeah, I mean, maybe they pull him out of

02:22:16   retirement, I think. - Right. But it's, you know, wouldn't that be fun? That's one of the things,

02:22:20   you know, wouldn't it be fun to see Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne again? That would be a lot of fun.

02:22:25   And all of these ideas are in there, and it's, you know, now it's just not coming out at all,

02:22:29   and it does seem—it just seems weird that you don't just let him finish it and put it on HBO

02:22:35   Max and move on, learn the lesson, you know? - Yeah, well, yeah.

02:22:38   - Well, but what seemed to be happening—I mentioned this on Dithering last week,

02:22:42   but it really curious me that on day one when they announced it publicly, they said very nice things

02:22:48   about the directors and the cast, and Leslie Grace is the name of the actress who was playing Barbara

02:22:54   Gordon/Batgirl, that they look forward to working with her again. It wasn't about the quality,

02:22:58   it's this financial situation and that they've incurred $55 billion in debt with this acquisition,

02:23:04   which is, I don't know if you know, that's a lot of money, and that, you know, they're taking a

02:23:07   tax write-up, but they look forward to working with everybody again. And they said all these

02:23:11   nice things, whereas in Hollywood, it's typically a cutthroat business. It's known as being a cruel

02:23:16   business, and you're hot until you're not, and then you're dropped, and, you know, whoever's

02:23:21   in charge, just is just a mean, you know, mean things happen to people all the time. They did

02:23:25   this, but I think what happened, I think very clearly what happened Hollywood-wide is the

02:23:30   unprecedented nature of a movie that's already been shot, $90 million have been spent, it's

02:23:36   nearly finished, and like you've said, the test screenings aren't catastrophic for it just to be

02:23:44   like, "Well, it's gone." We're just, you know, not even coming.

02:24:06   And then they gave it a black and white version. I mean, they gave that movie, which was, in my opinion, spectacularly bad. It was really incoherent. I completely agree. I mean, that really felt like a trip to the dentist. I mean, oh my. A trip to the dentist is shorter, at least. Way shorter. But I watched that one over like three nights, and I was like, "This has got to be almost over," and I'm like, "I'm going to bed for the night." Well, yeah, I mean, I watched the original, and then, you know, and then I kept hearing, "Oh, no, you got to watch the Snyder cut," and I was like,

02:24:36   "I watched the Snyder cut," and I was like, "Well, that was longer." I mean.

02:24:39   I watched the Snyder cut, and that was one I had to watch by myself because my wife would not have

02:24:43   anything to do with it, but I watch, and I'm like, "I'm getting tired. How much is left? Maybe I should just stay up," and I look, and there's still two hours left. I was like, "Oh my God!"

02:24:51   So, yeah, if they released that and gave a couple versions, why not do this? But then what happened

02:24:57   the next day is Discovery had their earnings call, and Zaslav on the earnings call was a lot less

02:25:05   kind, not personally to the directors or the actors involved, but more or less set on the

02:25:10   earnings call. This movie was really, it was beneath our standards. I'm putting words in his mouth, but

02:25:15   shifted from this was all about the taxes and the debt to this movie was beneath the standards of

02:25:22   what we're trying to set for the DC franchise, which is a very different story because I think

02:25:26   what happened is all across Hollywood people are like, "Is this going to happen to me if I do a

02:25:30   project with Time Warner?" Because one thing I think is super true in a creative endeavor like

02:25:37   this—and yes, movies are about making money at some degree in the same way that selling computers

02:25:41   and writing software are about money—but the people who devote their lives to this really,

02:25:45   really care about their work and their craft. And I think in some sense, the Discovery thought,

02:25:52   you know, everybody got paid. Nobody's, the directors got their money and the actors got

02:25:56   paid what they were supposed to get, and I guess because it was going to be streaming anyway,

02:26:00   nobody was supposed to get a share of the box office, right? Everybody got paid, so it's all

02:26:04   good, right? But whereas I don't think they anticipated how the creative professionals,

02:26:08   actors, writers, VFX people, lighting people—

02:26:12   It becomes, yeah, it becomes like, "Here's a thing that we did and now it's not."

02:26:16   Right! And it's like, hey, there are people in Hollywood whose career is miking the set to get

02:26:24   the dialogue recorded and that they take great care in doing it exactly right, you know, and

02:26:31   having the lighting be exactly right. And yeah, this thing you spent a year on, yeah, never even,

02:26:37   nobody's even going to see it. And people are like, "What?" And so I kind of felt like that's

02:26:41   why Zazzalov the next day went to, "Yeah, this one was really bad." So don't worry if you work with

02:26:47   us. We're not going to do this.

02:26:48   Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. I got to make sure that we can still get people to come work for us.

02:26:54   But the—

02:26:55   Yeah, I mean, I don't think we'll ever know for sure, right? I mean, because it doesn't seem like

02:27:01   it's the kind of thing—I mean, maybe some of it might leak out, but it doesn't seem like it will

02:27:05   be—because I don't think they, you know, the people who made it, want it to be released in

02:27:09   its current form because it's probably not great yet, right? It's probably not. The special effects

02:27:15   aren't done. And, you know, and they often, when they, after they do, like, first screenings,

02:27:20   they're like, "Okay, we tweak this. We'll get them back in for reshoots. We'll do a couple

02:27:23   other things, and we'll make a, you know, at least a slightly better movie, if not a substantially

02:27:27   better movie." They don't want people to see it in its current form, so it's not going to get

02:27:31   released. It seems unlikely that it's going to get released and even leaked. So we'll never be sure.

02:27:39   But on the other hand, it certainly did raise my curiosity about what it actually looks like,

02:27:45   you know? Like, yeah, so I don't know. I agree with you, though, that because it's not like,

02:27:50   "Oh my god, it was totally finished," and you could just hit play, or it's, you know, like,

02:27:55   supposedly Kubrick's eyes wide shut. He died, like, 10 weeks before it came out and famously

02:28:02   liked to edit his movies right up to the very end, tweaking. And so, you know, I think most people,

02:28:07   they say it was officially finished, but if he hadn't had a heart attack, he probably would have

02:28:11   made just little nips and tucks here and there before it came out. It's not like that, right?

02:28:16   Like, where it was when he had his heart attack was totally playable in a Kubrick movie. You know,

02:28:21   Batgirl is clearly not in that state, and I don't know what—but it's—damn, the curiosity is so

02:28:27   high about it, right? Because wouldn't you—I would just like to see—can you show us, like,

02:28:32   10 minutes of it? Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe if they get sold again.

02:28:36   What was the worst Batman movie? Remember Joel Schumacher took over the franchise?

02:28:42   Oh, yeah. Well, it was one of the—I think it was the last one of those, right? It was the one

02:28:46   with the—where they had nipples on the— Oh, that was Batman and Robin, where George Clooney

02:28:52   took over the role, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. And no fault of George Clooney's in particular.

02:28:55   He's perfectly fine, but— Yeah, and actually seems like a pretty good idea for Bruce Wayne.

02:29:01   Sure, yeah, I think he—yeah, I mean, honestly, I think Ben Affleck is pretty good. I don't blame

02:29:07   Ben Affleck at all. I think the story—you know, getting back to story—the story was just terrible.

02:29:11   There's a lot of those pictures of Ben Affleck just being, like, sort of exhausted.

02:29:17   Yes, yeah. I mean, he fits into that meme, right? Like, he's this guy who's just, like—and it works

02:29:23   for old Batman. Yeah, yeah, slump-shouldered. He's gotta freaking work with Aquaman now.

02:29:29   Yeah. Oh my god, geez. Oh, we're—

02:29:33   Spilled like Starbucks. Where was I when Christopher Nolan was making these things?

02:29:38   Anyway, that was a great discussion. Thank you, John. I hope you have a good rest of your summer.

02:29:42   All right, you too. People can listen to you. You mentioned The Rebound.

02:29:45   That's— Yep.

02:29:46   That's your podcast where you talk about the nerdy type stuff, right?

02:29:49   Yeah, yeah, and Dan is on paternity leave, so it's just—it's me and Lex for a while.

02:29:54   Yeah, so— And same thing over at Biff. It's me and Guy, while Dan is off.

02:29:59   Who was also mentioned. Guy—that's Guy English, friend of the show. But I'll bet Dan has time

02:30:04   to listen to podcasts, so congrats to Dan. Because he had a big summer, right? He had his next—

02:30:09   Yeah, that's right. Yeah, he released a book and had a baby.

02:30:13   Released a book and had a baby. So, yeah, he needs some time off. I will also thank our sponsor. So

02:30:19   where do people get those podcasts, though? I mean, they could just type Rebound into their

02:30:23   podcast player or Biff into their podcast player, but they're—

02:30:26   Yeah. What's—

02:30:27   Yeah, Biff is at The Incomparable, and you can go to reboundcast.com.

02:30:30   reboundcast.com. I'll thank our sponsors one more time, our good friends at Trade Coffee.

02:30:36   I actually have run out of coffee as we recorded this show, so I can't slurp anymore. Ship Station,

02:30:43   shipping software for whatever you sell, wherever you sell, however you sell, and however you want

02:30:49   to pronounce their name. And, of course, Squarespace, where you can make your next

02:30:53   move with a new website. Thanks, Jon. Thank you.

02:30:56   [