The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:22 ◼   ► So here's the funny thing about the theme song.

00:00:24 ◼   ► is a month ago, Adam was on the talk show

00:00:29 ◼   ► and we're talking about the show itself

00:00:31 ◼   ► and the name of the show

00:00:32 ◼   ► and should I have changed the name.

00:00:33 ◼   ► And Adam had the idea

00:00:35 ◼   ► that I could have just changed the name to anything

00:00:38 ◼   ► and it would have avoided some controversy

00:00:40 ◼   ► and he'd still listen to it

00:00:41 ◼   ► even if I had called the show Picking Boogers with John.

00:00:44 ◼   ► And as the week went on, I went back to that

00:00:46 ◼   ► and I said, "You know what would be funny

00:00:48 ◼   ► is if you and some of your Hollywood big shot friends

00:00:51 ◼   ► could put together a little gimmicky 15 second theme song

00:00:54 ◼   ► for the show, presumably pretending as a gag that the show is called Pick and Boogers with

00:01:00 ◼   ► Jon.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Adam took this and ran with it with your pal Alex Weinstein, right?

00:01:06 ◼   ► Yeah, Weinstein.

00:01:07 ◼   ► Weinstein.

00:01:08 ◼   ► I went out to all the big hitters first.

00:01:12 ◼   ► No one was available.

00:01:13 ◼   ► I went out to Elfman.

00:01:15 ◼   ► He couldn't do me a favor.

00:01:16 ◼   ► He's done too many favors.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I went out to John Williams who did Star Wars.

00:01:20 ◼   ► I don't know if you're familiar.

00:01:23 ◼   ► None of those guys were available, so I called my pal Alex Weinstein, who was on par.

00:01:30 ◼   ► It actually turned out well.

00:01:31 ◼   ► It worked out well.

00:01:32 ◼   ► I was serendipitous because I'm working on a project with John August.

00:01:37 ◼   ► You haven't mentioned to your guests.

00:01:39 ◼   ► Sorry yet, but we're on the Skype with John August right now.

00:01:43 ◼   ► I'm working on a project.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Hey, John.

00:01:45 ◼   ► Hey.

00:01:46 ◼   ► We're working on a project together that required some music as well.

00:01:50 ◼   ► And so I was able to get two pieces of music in one by having Alex compose something for

00:02:01 ◼   ► the John August project and then tack on some lyrics, some vocals.

00:02:08 ◼   ► I helped out with the vocals for Picking Boogers with John.

00:02:13 ◼   ► And I think it turned out okay.

00:02:15 ◼   ► It turned out pretty rockin'.

00:02:16 ◼   ► rocking. Yeah, a few months people will hear the other use of that melody and

00:02:21 ◼   ► something that Adam and I are working on, so that could be great. Yeah, well here's

00:02:25 ◼   ► the thing though, it's gotten out of control. The idea was we'd do it, it

00:02:28 ◼   ► would be a one show would open with it and ha ha, now the talk show has a theme

00:02:32 ◼   ► song and it's this goofy thing. And I thought it was great and a lot of people

00:02:37 ◼   ► you know laughed at it, loved it, but here's the thing, it's gotten out of

00:02:39 ◼   ► control. It is, for three weeks in a row, it has been the number one single in the

00:02:44 ◼   ► iTunes store in Germany. I had no idea where the it has sold one copy outside Germany. My mom bought

00:02:52 ◼   ► it. And it's been the number one single in Germany for three weeks. And everybody who listens to the

00:03:00 ◼   ► talk show in Germany is mad now that the show doesn't open with it every week. Yeah. And I

00:03:05 ◼   ► don't know what to do. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you wouldn't think a 15 second little jingle would

00:03:09 ◼   ► be a top single but you never know Germans have their own taste yeah

00:03:12 ◼   ► attention attention spins get shorter and shorter it's it's out of control so

00:03:19 ◼   ► here it is it's back and and you know I want to thank Alex Weinstein for the

00:03:23 ◼   ► great work on it's sandy thanks for the vocals and I don't know what to do I

00:03:26 ◼   ► guess I guess the new show is pickin boogers with John this week it's pickin

00:03:31 ◼   ► boogers with John's because we like as you said we have John August with us

00:03:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Matthew 4 Happy to be here.

00:03:37 ◼   ► I don't even know.

00:03:38 ◼   ► I have nothing for both of us.

00:03:39 ◼   ► John Gruber's not going to say so, but it's very exciting for him too.

00:03:44 ◼   ► It is very exciting.

00:03:46 ◼   ► Matthew 4 Adam, how long have I known you?

00:03:48 ◼   ► I've known you for a year now?

00:03:50 ◼   ► A little while.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I think so.

00:03:52 ◼   ► That's when we've been internet friends.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:55 ◼   ► Matthew 4 Yeah.

00:03:56 ◼   ► And again, it's the serendipity of living in Los Angeles.

00:03:58 ◼   ► My former assistant, Match, met Adam at a party, said who they were working for, and

00:04:02 ◼   ► we had lunch.

00:04:03 ◼   ► And that's the great thing about living in the same town.

00:04:05 ◼   ► can do things like that.

00:04:10 ◼   ► Also, it's living in a town where the tech community is sort of comparatively small to the entertainment industry.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And so you sort of know, I feel like we know a lot of the same people.

00:04:19 ◼   ► It's sort of a small embedded community here.

00:04:24 ◼   ► Definitely.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Especially in the community that actually makes software, which you do.

00:04:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:33 ◼   ► And so about a year ago we did FTX Reader and I wanted a video that had Adam's kind of feel.

00:04:34 ◼   ► So we did it ourselves.

00:04:35 ◼   ► We didn't invite Adam in to do it, but we sort of used some of his, I don't know,

00:04:42 ◼   ► his style.

00:04:43 ◼   ► It's sort of the dried roll style that Adam does.

00:04:45 ◼   ► And it's been a pleasure now to actually get to work on something for real with him

00:04:50 ◼   ► and not just ape his style.

00:04:52 ◼   ► It's been a really fun project, too.

00:04:56 ◼   ► The best way I can describe it is exactly the name of Adam's production company, Sandwich

00:05:00 ◼   ► Video.

00:05:01 ◼   ► Right?

00:05:02 ◼   ► It's a style of itself, a sandwich video.

00:05:07 ◼   ► Like if you said, "Hey, I've got a new app and I need to make a sandwich video for

00:05:10 ◼   ► it," if you lowercase sandwich video instead of capital with a trademark, you know what

00:05:15 ◼   ► you're talking about.

00:05:16 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Yeah.

00:05:17 ◼   ► The list of orientists is the other good choice.

00:05:19 ◼   ► You just use his name as an adjective and you're set.

00:05:22 ◼   ► Pete Turner Yeah.

00:05:23 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:05:24 ◼   ► I was so flattered when you, I think you did that one time and it floored me.

00:05:29 ◼   ► But the software that you make is to serve our industry,

00:05:34 ◼   ► and specifically mostly for screenwriters, correct?

00:05:40 ◼   ► Definitely.

00:05:44 ◼   ► So we have FJX Reader, which is an app for the iPad

00:05:44 ◼   ► and for the iPhone.

00:05:48 ◼   ► It was just one of those scratching your own itch.

00:05:49 ◼   ► We had these Final Draft files that there was no way

00:05:51 ◼   ► to read them on your iPad.

00:05:53 ◼   ► You could see them in Dropbox, but you'd open them

00:05:55 ◼   ► and they'd be gibberish.

00:05:57 ◼   ► And Final Draft was very slow in making an app for it,

00:05:55 ◼   ► So we just made our own app.

00:05:57 ◼   ► And the second app we did was Bronson Watermarker, which is, I needed to watermark some scripts.

00:06:04 ◼   ► And this was an app that didn't exist the way I wanted it to exist.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And so we made it.

00:06:09 ◼   ► And it's been fun to be able to put those out in the world.

00:06:12 ◼   ► And it's hugely useful.

00:06:14 ◼   ► And it's like, and your team that helps you make this stuff, design and code it, is

00:06:21 ◼   ► really great at it, just making simple, elegant, supremely useful software for people like

00:06:29 ◼   ► you.

00:06:30 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the goal, just to keep it.

00:06:32 ◼   ► I wanted to build software that you never had to look at instructions.

00:06:35 ◼   ► You could use it once a month and you never have to relearn anything.

00:06:38 ◼   ► And so I try to just keep buttons away from it.

00:06:43 ◼   ► So, for talk show listeners who don't know, John is a super successful screenwriter, movie

00:06:52 ◼   ► director. I mean, just some of the movies you've worked on. You directed the movie,

00:06:57 ◼   ► that wrote and directed The Nines. I mean, I don't think we have time to list all the

00:07:03 ◼   ► movies you've written, but Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Big Fish. I don't know.

00:07:10 ◼   ► What else? What are the big hits?

00:07:11 ◼   ► John: Go was my first movie.

00:07:12 ◼   ► Pete: Go, of course.

00:07:13 ◼   ► John; Yeah, people.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Pete; Love that movie so much.

00:07:15 ◼   ► John; People of a certain age will remember Go, and that was the first thing we got produced.

00:07:18 ◼   ► Pete; How in the world was that title still available?

00:07:20 ◼   ► John; I don't know.

00:07:22 ◼   ► I was, we were very lucky.

00:07:23 ◼   ► And the weird thing about title protection is you can actually have multiple movies with

00:07:27 ◼   ► the same title.

00:07:28 ◼   ► It's not like an app store app where like once there's one Angry Birds, there can

00:07:31 ◼   ► be no other Angry Birds.

00:07:33 ◼   ► Titles are controlled by the MPAA, and you can register a title that you are about to

00:07:38 ◼   ► make a movie, and other studios can challenge you on that title. But you can have multiple

00:07:43 ◼   ► movies with the same title. It does happen. And Go was available at the time we started

00:07:48 ◼   ► shooting the movie. When we were doing the 9s, we had to go through a title fight over

00:07:52 ◼   ► the other movies that had 9 in the title. So the whole nine yards. There was a movie

00:07:56 ◼   ► called 9, which was an animated movie.

00:07:59 ◼   ► Section 9.

00:08:00 ◼   ► Section 9. There was the Rob Marshall directed musical of 9. But we were the first person

00:08:04 ◼   ► get in on this level, we were the first thing to register. And so we negotiated with the other

00:08:09 ◼   ► people and we got our title. And we just—

00:08:11 ◼   ► By the way, a really cool movie. I don't know if I've said—

00:08:14 ◼   ► Oh, thank you.

00:08:14 ◼   ► —if I've told you that in person. I watched it. It's on Netflix, correct?

00:08:18 ◼   ► Yeah, which is a great way to watch it. So, you know, if you're up at two in the morning

00:08:22 ◼   ► and you feel like watching a movie, you can watch that and be confused and perplexed for a while.

00:08:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's—

00:08:27 ◼   ► Probably a great movie for the talk show audience with—I'm presuming there's a lot of video game

00:08:32 ◼   ► fans in the audience. It's a, you know, I think it's right up the alley of the sort of nerds who

00:08:38 ◼   ► like the stuff we do. Yeah, it's a thinkers movie. Definitely. It's got a movie where you watch it

00:08:44 ◼   ► and then you go on Twitter and your first tweet is, "I just watched this movie. I don't know if

00:08:47 ◼   ► I liked it, but I'm thinking about it." What about with the nines and the title protection? What

00:08:52 ◼   ► about, was there any, anybody putting up an argument about making like two sequels to seven?

00:08:59 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:09:00 ◼   ► You know, the other numbers, the eight could fit in there someplace.

00:09:03 ◼   ► Yeah, stuff happens.

00:09:05 ◼   ► It's another head in the box.

00:09:06 ◼   ► It's a head in the box.

00:09:07 ◼   ► And actually, our title art for the U.S. market does that thing that 7 does where the E's

00:09:13 ◼   ► are actually 9's.

00:09:14 ◼   ► And I'm not crazy about what they did, but you have very little control over that thing.

00:09:19 ◼   ► But they're trying to draft off the 7 the way 7 used, the 7 as the V in 7.

00:09:23 ◼   ► We used the 9 as the E in the 9's.

00:09:27 ◼   ► The other thing.

00:09:28 ◼   ► I just know that – I don't know how much of this is news to the people who listen to

00:09:33 ◼   ► the show, but I know that the people who listen to my show are huge fans of Markdown, the

00:09:39 ◼   ► little text format thing I put together a couple of years ago for writing for the web.

00:09:45 ◼   ► I think it was one of the first times you ever wrote to me as a reader during Fireball.

00:09:49 ◼   ► It was way back in 2004.

00:09:52 ◼   ► I certainly recognize your name.

00:09:54 ◼   ► You said, "Look, the whole industry runs on – the screenwriting industry in Hollywood

00:10:01 ◼   ► runs on this app called Final Draft."

00:10:05 ◼   ► And it's sort of like the Microsoft Word of screenplay writing where it's big and

00:10:10 ◼   ► it's entrenched and nobody really likes the app.

00:10:15 ◼   ► And man, wouldn't it be great if you could do the screenplay writing what Markdown did

00:10:19 ◼   ► for web writing and just get it all out of the way, use whatever simple text editor you

00:10:24 ◼   ► want and do something like that.

00:10:28 ◼   ► And we noodled a couple ideas, but I couldn't really think about it.

00:10:30 ◼   ► But anyway, you took the idea, though, and have run with it.

00:10:33 ◼   ► And it's a real thing now, right?

00:10:35 ◼   ► Yeah, it's called Fountain.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And it really drafts off a lot of the ideas of Markdown, which is it's a plain text format

00:10:41 ◼   ► that you can write in any text editor, any device, anywhere.

00:10:43 ◼   ► You can write it in email.

00:10:45 ◼   ► But it's just a way of laying out the text on the page that feels really natural.

00:10:50 ◼   ► And then there's very simple algorithms for converting from that to something that looks

00:10:54 ◼   ► like a real screenplay.

00:10:56 ◼   ► And so I used some of the ideas behind that to do Scrippits, which is a little way of

00:11:00 ◼   ► showing little bits of screenplay in a blog post, which is something I needed for, again,

00:11:05 ◼   ► I do the stuff that I actually need.

00:11:07 ◼   ► In my blog, johnox.com, I wanted to have these little bits of screenplay, and I created this

00:11:12 ◼   ► little format for doing that.

00:11:14 ◼   ► I should need to give credit to Stu Maskiewicz, who runs the ProLoss blog, who I think is

00:11:19 ◼   ► friends with Adam as well, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Same that odd intersection of tech and

00:11:26 ◼   ► the film industry that there aren't very many people in this intersection so much.

00:11:33 ◼   ► The number is growing, but I think you and he and I sort of share that commonality.

00:11:39 ◼   ► Yeah, so he was working on the same kind of idea, and we just joined forces and sort of

00:11:45 ◼   ► merged the standard and figured out what would work best for most writers.

00:11:50 ◼   ► And so we launched Fountain, and people seemed to really like it.

00:11:54 ◼   ► And who, on your team, how many people are on your team?

00:11:57 ◼   ► Three people. So there's me, there's Nima Youssef, who's our coder, and Ryan Nelson, who does all the art and graphics

00:12:01 ◼   ► and makes things look lovely. And really, it's three part-time employees, because I'm mostly a screenwriter.

00:12:08 ◼   ► I'm mostly doing other stuff, but I oversee these projects.

00:12:12 ◼   ► Nima is a full-time student, but he does this on his off hours.

00:12:17 ◼   ► And Ryan does all the stuff for the blog, and then I have him do these products as it comes up.

00:12:21 ◼   ► So Ryan's first project was, when I hired him, was to do less IMDB,

00:12:26 ◼   ► which was a plug-in for Safari and for Chrome that makes IMDB look less terrible.

00:12:31 ◼   ► And he was able to get that going, and I saw there was opportunities to fix the other things in the world that annoyed me.

00:12:39 ◼   ► What's the deal with IMDB and why does it get more terrible as the years go on?

00:12:44 ◼   ► I think the Google problem, where if you remember, if you look at the old screenshots of Google,

00:12:50 ◼   ► there were only two ads and the first things you saw were the results you wanted.

00:12:55 ◼   ► And they just keep shoving more and more stuff at the top of the page and they push down the results you really want.

00:12:58 ◼   ► I think people are probably clicking on some of those ads.

00:13:03 ◼   ► And because they're clicking on the other stuff, they feel like they can push down the credits and everything else that you probably really want to see.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And they just keep loading the pages fuller and fuller.

00:13:10 ◼   ► And most of the job of our plugin is just to use jQuery to hide the stuff that we want

00:13:15 ◼   ► to hide.

00:13:16 ◼   ► We're not – we don't really do massive things to the page other than just get rid

00:13:21 ◼   ► of all the stuff that you don't want to see.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Sort of like Instapaper just for IMDB pages and live as the pages load.

00:13:28 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Or like that reader button that Apple has in Safari that sort of strips away everything

00:13:32 ◼   ► else.

00:13:33 ◼   ► Right.

00:13:34 ◼   ► Do you guys remember the original IMDB interface?

00:13:36 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:13:37 ◼   ► I don't.

00:13:39 ◼   ► The original IMDb interface was not—it wasn't even a website.

00:13:43 ◼   ► It was an email service.

00:13:45 ◼   ► You—Adam, you were probably like six years old.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I was six.

00:13:49 ◼   ► I don't remember that.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I say—

00:13:51 ◼   ► This is like '95, '96.

00:13:52 ◼   ► I was in college, and my senior year, I loaded up on all these—I had gotten all my computer

00:13:56 ◼   ► science stuff out of the way, and I had all these free electives, and I loaded up on film

00:14:01 ◼   ► classes.

00:14:03 ◼   ► And so this is like probably '96, '95 into '96.

00:14:06 ◼   ► And the IMDB interface was you'd email – I forget what the address was, but there was

00:14:11 ◼   ► an email address.

00:14:12 ◼   ► You'd email and in the subject, you'd put what your query was.

00:14:15 ◼   ► And two seconds later, you'd get an email back with what you wanted.

00:14:20 ◼   ► So if you put like a person's name in, you'd get their credits.

00:14:24 ◼   ► If you put a movie name in, you'd get the information about the movie.

00:14:28 ◼   ► And it was so tremendously helpful for writing – you'd watch – like I had these classes

00:14:32 ◼   ► where we'd watch a movie and then you had to write like a two-page paper on the movie.

00:14:36 ◼   ► I'm always terrible at remembering character names.

00:14:38 ◼   ► I can remember actor names, but you can't just—I took a class on Western.

00:14:42 ◼   ► You can't just keep calling the guy John Wayne.

00:14:43 ◼   ► You've got to use the character's name.

00:14:45 ◼   ► You would just email the, you know, Rio Bravo, and then you'd get everything about it.

00:14:49 ◼   ► It was so unbelievable.

00:14:50 ◼   ► It was like a command-line interface to IMDb.

00:14:53 ◼   ► Pete: Yeah.

00:14:54 ◼   ► Well, I love that IMDb basically started because that guy—and I just looked his name up,

00:15:00 ◼   ► Colin Needham—he started it as basically a database of hot ladies in movies.

00:15:06 ◼   ► That was his original intent.

00:15:09 ◼   ► And then it grew to what it is.

00:15:11 ◼   ► And for film geeks in the early 90s, it was a godsend because I used to, you know, up

00:15:16 ◼   ► until when I was in college and we got the internet in our dorm rooms, I just would consult

00:15:22 ◼   ► my whatever it was, Leonard Maltin's Guide to Movies, which was basically just like an

00:15:27 ◼   ► encyclopedia, like a one volume paperback, and you would go through it with a highlight

00:15:32 ◼   ► and just code everything that you'd seen.

00:15:35 ◼   ► That was IMDB.

00:15:36 ◼   ► Did you guys do something similar?

00:15:42 ◼   ► How did you ever track your movie view?

00:15:43 ◼   ► So one of my very first jobs, I went to a two-year graduate school program here in LA

00:15:48 ◼   ► for film.

00:15:49 ◼   ► And the summer in between, I was working as an intern at Universal.

00:15:51 ◼   ► And one of my jobs was Variety and The Hollywood Reporter would run movie reviews or sort of

00:15:57 ◼   ► like movies in production reviews.

00:15:59 ◼   ► And one of my jobs was to type all that information into this database that was specifically Universal

00:16:04 ◼   ► database so that they could look up credits.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And it was basically creating Universal's own version of IMDb

00:16:12 ◼   ► because the real IMDb didn't exist yet.

00:16:15 ◼   ► And it was so fraught with peril because I'm literally just trying to type these people's names into these things

00:16:17 ◼   ► to make sure I'm coding all these fields right.

00:16:22 ◼   ► And it was a very tedious job, but they paid me for it.

00:16:24 ◼   ► It's incredible that it still is the standard, that people haven't just bypassed.

00:16:28 ◼   ► Sometimes I bypass it and go to Wikipedia if you don't want all the cruft.

00:16:31 ◼   ► but really nobody has done it better. I know, um, um,

00:16:36 ◼   ► I'm trying to think of the name of, I think it's called letterboxed,

00:16:39 ◼   ► the site that is more of like a social movie watching,

00:16:44 ◼   ► sharing, um, site for like,

00:16:48 ◼   ► just collecting all the movies you'd viewed and rating them and, uh,

00:16:52 ◼   ► con you know,

00:16:54 ◼   ► commenting on them and recommending them and everything letterboxed with no E at

00:16:58 ◼   ► the end. And, um, oh, it's one of those companies. The ones that there's a valid

00:17:03 ◼   ► offer. Yeah, it is. But it's like a, it's a younger startup. It's not like a, it's not

00:17:08 ◼   ► like a web 2.0 missing vowel startup. And it's a cool, it's a well-designed site. I

00:17:14 ◼   ► do. The problem is I don't really have the time to dedicate to filling in all of that

00:17:19 ◼   ► information. I think if it had come out when I was in high school, I would have been all

00:17:22 ◼   ► on it all the time.

00:17:23 ◼   ► And Amazon owns INDB, and it always struck me as weird, or at least they did own it,

00:17:29 ◼   ► I mean, they sold it at some point, but it always struck me as weird that they didn't

00:17:34 ◼   ► do more with it, or that it, you know, Amazon feels like they keep iterating and they keep

00:17:38 ◼   ► improving sort of how they're doing stuff, they keep tracking what people are using,

00:17:42 ◼   ► what they need, and INDB hasn't grown that way.

00:17:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:17:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:17:48 ◼   ► Look, I don't even know what they could do.

00:17:49 ◼   ► I mean, it's just, it's one of those things that I'd be happy if it stayed the way it

00:17:52 ◼   ► it was in in 2000 in 2002 though for forever yeah you just need basic

00:17:58 ◼   ► information I want to know where something was shot and now I can't ever

00:18:01 ◼   ► find that damn information because there's like there's a giant animated

00:18:07 ◼   ► overlay of I don't know it could even be a car I don't even think they're movie

00:18:11 ◼   ► specific ads anymore yeah I just thought of something just right now wouldn't it

00:18:17 ◼   ► wouldn't IMDB integration be a natural fit for Siri? Yes, it would be. Yeah. Siri,

00:18:24 ◼   ► what movies did John August write? Done. And then, you know, a nice little formatted,

00:18:30 ◼   ► tokenized, you know, panel. So, do you think that there's somebody at Apple,

00:18:36 ◼   ► somewhere at Apple, they're building a competitor to IMDB because they're not

00:18:40 ◼   ► going to use Amazon's information for it? Right. I wonder, why not? They use Yelp. I

00:18:46 ◼   ► I mean, I guess the difference is that Yelp is a small company and Apple is clearly the

00:18:51 ◼   ► sun and Yelp is the planet revolving around the sun, whereas Amazon and Apple are both

00:18:57 ◼   ► competing stars.

00:18:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Well, everything on the iTunes movie store has all this metadata associated with it.

00:19:06 ◼   ► I mean, I wonder if just hidden behind the curtain of all of that metadata is the full

00:19:11 ◼   ► set of metadata for every movie.

00:19:13 ◼   ► They just own it.

00:19:14 ◼   ► They just don't reveal it.

00:19:15 ◼   ► because they go through licensing periods where they'll—like, the nines will be available for

00:19:19 ◼   ► rent through Apple for a while, but then it won't be available for rent for a while based on the

00:19:24 ◼   ► licensing agreements. So, they obviously had all that information in there. There's this little

00:19:28 ◼   ► flag saying, like, "This is available." So, they probably do have a lot more than we think.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah. That's like with the James Bond movies. They're like whack-a-moles.

00:19:36 ◼   ► Every once in a while—you know, some of them are always available. Some of them are only available

00:19:40 ◼   ► for like two weeks in February, and then there's like one in the middle, like one of the Roger

00:19:46 ◼   ► or not Roger, more the Daltrey. One of the Daltrey ones is like never available.

00:19:52 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Daltrey.

00:19:53 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Yeah.

00:19:53 ◼   ► **Ezra Kleinman** Daltrey.

00:19:54 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** I think it'd be awesome if Daltrey were James Bond.

00:19:56 ◼   ► **Ezra Kleinman** Yeah, that would be great.

00:19:58 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Different movie.

00:20:00 ◼   ► **Ezra Kleinman** People are campaigning for Idris Elba to be the next Bond, which I think

00:20:05 ◼   ► It would be quite amazing.

00:20:07 ◼   ► It's time.

00:20:08 ◼   ► It's 2012.

00:20:09 ◼   ► It's time we had a black bond.

00:20:10 ◼   ► A black British bond.

00:20:14 ◼   ► Because I think that the qualifying characteristic has nothing to do with … certainly not your

00:20:22 ◼   ► … because I know there was a minor controversy that … what's his name?

00:20:27 ◼   ► The current one is blonde and not dark haired.

00:20:29 ◼   ► Daniel Craig.

00:20:30 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

00:20:31 ◼   ► Yeah, Daniel Craig.

00:20:32 ◼   ► It certainly doesn't matter what color your skin is.

00:20:33 ◼   ► All that matters is that you're badass and cool.

00:20:36 ◼   ► British.

00:20:37 ◼   ► And British.

00:20:38 ◼   ► Of course.

00:20:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:40 ◼   ► Capable of class, but also capable of kicking ass.

00:20:43 ◼   ► Class was kicking ass.

00:20:44 ◼   ► It's James Bond.

00:20:47 ◼   ► But yeah, and getting back to what you guys were saying with Stu and you guys, that there's

00:20:52 ◼   ► – and I do think – I can actually – it just seems natural, and I'm glad to hear

00:20:56 ◼   ► you guys are working together.

00:20:57 ◼   ► I presume that I shouldn't even bother asking.

00:20:59 ◼   ► You can't talk about what you're working.

00:21:00 ◼   ► We'll just find out later when it's done.

00:21:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:03 ◼   ► It's going to be great.

00:21:05 ◼   ► Understood?

00:21:06 ◼   ► But I'm not surprised at all that you guys get along swimmingly and are collaborating

00:21:09 ◼   ► because you guys do have the exact same mindset, which is you're primarily working on motion

00:21:16 ◼   ► pictures, movies, that type of cool stuff.

00:21:18 ◼   ► But you guys both have done the same thing where it's like, "Hey, I need this app

00:21:22 ◼   ► that does a thing.

00:21:23 ◼   ► I'm just going to go make it."

00:21:24 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:25 ◼   ► If the tools suck and you need a better tool and you're fascinated by what makes the

00:21:29 ◼   ► tools better, then you're going to go, especially this day and age where it's so accessible

00:21:34 ◼   ► to do so. I mean, the barrier to starting a software company and making your own apps, like Jon has done 10 years ago, was a lot different.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Yeah, we wouldn't have done it if it weren't for the App Store. If we had to release it ourselves and figure out how to build credit cards

00:21:50 ◼   ► and how to do returns and all that stuff, that would have been, we just never would have done it. Or we would have done the smaller version that we would give away for free.

00:21:56 ◼   ► the smaller version that we would give away for free.

00:21:59 ◼   ► But this isn't really profitable for us yet, but it makes it kind of worth doing, at least.

00:22:04 ◼   ► Is it a good calling card? Like, is FDX Reader fairly popular in the industry?

00:22:09 ◼   ► Yeah, I think screenwriters tend to use it, and they definitely have used it over this year before Final Draft came out with their own thing.

00:22:16 ◼   ► So yeah, people do use it. And we found a lot of people in the industry who use Highland

00:22:23 ◼   ► Highland to convert fountain stuff to,

00:22:28 ◼   ► Highland is the app that we're in beta right now

00:22:32 ◼   ► that converts PDFs to fountain or to final draft files.

00:22:35 ◼   ► So you can take a PDF, throw it at Highland,

00:22:39 ◼   ► it'll melt it down to its base elements.

00:22:41 ◼   ► So we find people who are using that stuff and enjoying it.

00:22:44 ◼   ► Is it a calling card?

00:22:47 ◼   ► I don't know, because honestly,

00:22:48 ◼   ► most people who, in the industry,

00:22:49 ◼   ► have no idea that I make these apps,

00:22:48 ◼   ► They have no idea that I've had a blog.

00:22:53 ◼   ► They have no idea that I have a podcast.

00:22:54 ◼   ► I'm just the writer who wrote that thing.

00:22:56 ◼   ► And that's okay.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Again, what Adam was saying, there's actually not a lot of

00:23:02 ◼   ► overlap between the techie and the movie people.

00:23:05 ◼   ► And so the union of those two sets is pretty small,

00:23:09 ◼   ► and that's why we tend to all know each other.

00:23:13 ◼   ► I wanted to ask you, Jon,

00:23:15 ◼   ► you share a lot of your experience

00:23:16 ◼   ► and everything that you've learned about writing scripts

00:23:20 ◼   ► professionally.

00:23:23 ◼   ► And did you ever have the impulse not to do that?

00:23:27 ◼   ► I feel like most screenwriters kind of want

00:23:28 ◼   ► to play it closer to the chest.

00:23:31 ◼   ► I always think back to when I was a kid growing up

00:23:34 ◼   ► in Colorado, and I didn't know there

00:23:35 ◼   ► was such a thing as screenwriting.

00:23:37 ◼   ► And I would see movies, and I liked movies,

00:23:39 ◼   ► but I didn't really have a sense that they were written.

00:23:41 ◼   ► And the very first movie that I saw that I realized, like, wow,

00:23:44 ◼   ► somebody actually probably wrote that was War

00:23:45 ◼   ► the Roses. I watched War of the Roses, I loved it, on videotape. We rewound it and I started

00:23:50 ◼   ► like writing down everything people said. And I said, "Oh, well, that was all planned.

00:23:54 ◼   ► There must have been like a script, like a play behind this." And this sounds so naive,

00:23:59 ◼   ► but this was, you know, the 80s, the only thing I could find was like Premiere magazine.

00:24:04 ◼   ► That was the only sort of popular movie magazine. And so, I really had no idea that there was

00:24:09 ◼   ► such a thing as a screenplay. And so, then I finally was able to find the published book

00:24:14 ◼   ► of "Soda Brooks, Sex, Lies, and Videotape," and he has the whole screenplay there. So

00:24:18 ◼   ► I'm reading the screenplay while the movie's playing, and I'm like, "Oh my god, everything

00:24:21 ◼   ► they're saying, everything that's happening, it's written down here first. This was the

00:24:25 ◼   ► plan for making the movie." And it sounds so naive, but I just didn't know how it

00:24:29 ◼   ► all worked. So I always think back to, if I were that kid now, where would I look for

00:24:34 ◼   ► that information? I look online, and I just want to be that source of information if it's

00:24:39 ◼   ► helpful for some kid who otherwise wouldn't have exposure to stuff.

00:24:43 ◼   ► And when you did discover that there was something called script format that was very standardized,

00:24:51 ◼   ► written in Courier, and fairly minimal, I remember being disappointed by that.

00:25:01 ◼   ► Like that there's not more flourish and personality in a script.

00:25:04 ◼   ► That it's bare bones.

00:25:05 ◼   ► Yeah, screenplays are a tough form.

00:25:08 ◼   ► My undergrad degree was in journalism, so I was used to this really structured form

00:25:11 ◼   ► of writing that you're only allowed to do certain things. In a screenplay, you can only

00:25:14 ◼   ► talk about what you can see and what you can hear, and all the other senses are gone. But

00:25:21 ◼   ► within that, you have a lot of possibilities. You can describe worlds in really amazing

00:25:26 ◼   ► ways. You can make a movie on the page. And so, it's frustrating if you think about it

00:25:31 ◼   ► like, "Oh, I have to write a script." It's liberating if you think that I'm writing a

00:25:34 ◼   ► movie. And as long as you keep, you're always in your head, you're seeing the movie that

00:25:37 ◼   ► you're writing, it's a great art form.

00:25:40 ◼   ► My first movie that I ever read was not a script, it was a novelization of the movie

00:25:45 ◼   ► Karate Kid Part 3.

00:25:52 ◼   ► My mom bought it for me at the, you know, whatever the equivalent of the Barnes and

00:26:01 ◼   ► Noble at the time was.

00:26:03 ◼   ► I read the movie before I saw it.

00:26:08 ◼   ► And I just remember, I mean, like the novelization of a movie is way more intricate, nuanced

00:26:15 ◼   ► than a screenplay is even.

00:26:18 ◼   ► But I remember like having, like the way that you wrote down every line from War of the

00:26:24 ◼   ► Roses, I definitely went through that experience of finding out that there was somebody called

00:26:31 ◼   ► a director and that they didn't make movies in real time and shoot them all in order.

00:26:38 ◼   ► And so then just figuring out shot selection and figuring out how this angle follows this

00:26:45 ◼   ► one and this one, and being a kid and recreating all those things.

00:26:49 ◼   ► And then similarly being disappointed when you figure out that so much work goes into

00:26:55 ◼   ► it and a lot of it is very mundane.

00:26:56 ◼   ► I remember when I first met Steven Spielberg, and I'd made other movies before then, but

00:27:02 ◼   ► like, "Oh my God, it's Steven Spielberg."

00:27:04 ◼   ► And then I saw him on the set and realized, "Oh, he's just working really hard."

00:27:10 ◼   ► So I was disappointed for a second, but then I also realized, "Wow, you know what?

00:27:13 ◼   ► I can work really hard."

00:27:15 ◼   ► And that was encouraging there, too.

00:27:18 ◼   ► When I first learned the format of what a real screenplay looked like, and like you

00:27:22 ◼   ► said, Adam, it's all in Courier, still is, to this day, all looks like it came out of

00:27:25 ◼   ► a typewriter, I had the opposite reaction.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I thought that was super cool, because to me, I drew the immediate analogy to source

00:27:32 ◼   ► Code, that it's not like a novelization.

00:27:37 ◼   ► I remember, and I had the similar experience where the first time I ever read a movie was

00:27:41 ◼   ► the Star Wars novelization.

00:27:44 ◼   ► And I just assumed that that's what they started with when they made the movie.

00:27:48 ◼   ► And it's not.

00:27:49 ◼   ► I think the analogy between the screenplay and source code is very good.

00:27:53 ◼   ► It's—

00:27:54 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:55 ◼   ► And that's what's cool about Highland and Fountain and everything is that it takes

00:27:57 ◼   ► that even further.

00:27:59 ◼   ► It parses out everything that's been presented uniformly for so long, and just makes data

00:28:04 ◼   ► out of it.

00:28:11 ◼   ► I really like that.

00:28:12 ◼   ► Yeah, my frustration has been that the screenwriting apps have tended to want to show you the finished product

00:28:13 ◼   ► right at the very start.

00:28:18 ◼   ► And so you worry so much about making all the margins look good and making it look like a screenplay as you're typing.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Whereas really, most of the work I'm doing for the blog and for everything else, I'm just in text mate.

00:28:25 ◼   ► I'm just worried about the words rather than what it looks like.

00:28:30 ◼   ► And so to break those two things apart, you know, it's just the same way we don't, you know,

00:28:34 ◼   ► back when I was doing magazines, we weren't typing into PageMaker.

00:28:40 ◼   ► We were typing into Word Processor and then sending the stuff over to QuarkXPress or PageMaker.

00:28:43 ◼   ► We weren't worried about the layout at the time.

00:28:48 ◼   ► And this gives us a chance to do that.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So before we move on to talking about the week's news, one more question would be, with

00:28:58 ◼   ► all the stuff you're working on, it is all very Apple-centric. Is that just a reflection

00:29:02 ◼   ► of scratching your own needs because you're using an iPhone and you're typing your stuff

00:29:09 ◼   ► on a Mac, or is it a reflection of pretty much how the industry works?

00:29:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it's definitely scratching my own itch, because we really should be making like Bronson

00:29:18 ◼   ► watermarker for the PC.

00:29:23 ◼   ► Because for a while we were trying to buy Google ads for it

00:29:24 ◼   ► and trying to target people who might want watermarking stuff.

00:29:27 ◼   ► And 95% of the people clicking through were on a PC.

00:29:30 ◼   ► And so clearly if we made the PC version of it,

00:29:34 ◼   ► we'd be selling PC copies of it.

00:29:36 ◼   ► But I just don't want to do it.

00:29:38 ◼   ► I just don't want to spend the time to figure that out.

00:29:41 ◼   ► Nima doesn't want to code it.

00:29:44 ◼   ► Ryan doesn't want to do the art for it.

00:29:45 ◼   ► And so it's the luxury of, "That's just not really interesting to us."

00:29:45 ◼   ► and so someone else will make the version for that.

00:29:50 ◼   ► Now, Windows 8 might be interesting enough to code for,

00:29:53 ◼   ► and so that's something we'll consider.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And maybe there's a reader app that we'll want to make

00:29:57 ◼   ► for the Microsoft tablet or for this Google thing,

00:29:59 ◼   ► and we'll see if maybe there could be more interesting.

00:30:04 ◼   ► But it just looks like a big bag of hurt

00:30:06 ◼   ► to try to make these other new applications

00:30:10 ◼   ► for these new platforms and have to support them,

00:30:11 ◼   ► have to deal with PC users and all this stuff that's not us.

00:30:16 ◼   ► I mean, it's dog fooding.

00:30:20 ◼   ► We're using the stuff that we're building every day.

00:30:22 ◼   ► This is a dumb question, but is Final Draft cross-platform?

00:30:25 ◼   ► It is, yeah.

00:30:28 ◼   ► It's both PC and Mac.

00:30:29 ◼   ► And some of the frustrations with it,

00:30:32 ◼   ► and some of the reasons why they can't innovate

00:30:34 ◼   ► is because they have a lot of users on both platforms

00:30:36 ◼   ► who are using old copies or using old system software, and it's tough to get them to upgrade.

00:30:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it really is a lot like Word, I think, and where a lot of ways Microsoft got hemmed

00:30:49 ◼   ► in by Word was that so many people are just mailing these .doc files around, and you've

00:30:53 ◼   ► got to be able to open them whether you're on an old version of Word or not, and it slowed

00:30:58 ◼   ► them down in terms of how they can move it forward.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Yeah. That's one of the advantages of Fountain is that it's just text, and so I know that

00:31:04 ◼   ► 50 years from now, you'll be able to open that file because it's just text, and it doesn't

00:31:09 ◼   ► really care about what application created it, and that helps.

00:31:12 ◼   ► Dave Asprey Right.

00:31:13 ◼   ► Philosophically, it's exactly the same as markdown, where the input is just plain text,

00:31:17 ◼   ► and the idea is you don't need to boil the ocean and get a markdown parser in every web

00:31:22 ◼   ► browser because you do the translation to this universal format HTML, and all that anybody

00:31:28 ◼   ► out there ever sees is HTML.

00:31:31 ◼   ► And so the same way with your thing, where you're just spitting out PDFs, and in the

00:31:36 ◼   ► future, if it changes and what everybody interchanges to move screenplay files around changes, you

00:31:42 ◼   ► just write a parser that spits out that format.

00:31:46 ◼   ► Absolutely.

00:31:47 ◼   ► And building the spec, Stu and I had a lot of conversations about, like, well, certain

00:31:51 ◼   ► apps may want to do special things in the file, so we set aside certain kind of flags

00:31:58 ◼   ► and tags that apps could do their own thing with.

00:32:03 ◼   ► If people wanted to do special section stuff or special ways of doing notes or shot lists or whatever,

00:32:05 ◼   ► there's stuff in there that people can use to do their own thing, but we're not going to try to plan that out for them now.

00:32:10 ◼   ► We'll see. It can evolve the way it wants to evolve.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Yeah, philosophically, it's just exactly what I had in mind for writing for the web.

00:32:19 ◼   ► And thank you again for, over the years, you chimed back in a couple times since I had questions.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And it was great to see you talking about the things you would have done differently if you had to do Markdown again.

00:32:27 ◼   ► opportunities, even small bits on choices for formatting. It was great. So thank you

00:32:35 ◼   ► again for that.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Dave: My pleasure. So let's move on to Week's News. So here's one of the things. This

00:32:43 ◼   ► is the new iOS Podcasts app from Apple, which I like, I think, in general. And it seems

00:32:53 ◼   ► there's two aspects to it that people are writing about, and I think they're completely

00:32:58 ◼   ► separate.

00:32:59 ◼   ► The first is what it looks like, in that it has this skeuomorphic interface, and there's

00:33:05 ◼   ► a word that none of us knew two years ago, and now everybody knows.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Pete: Overuses it.

00:33:09 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:10 ◼   ► It knows how to spell it.

00:33:11 ◼   ► I'm guilty as charged.

00:33:13 ◼   ► I'm sure a Google search for "daring fireball skeuomorph" whatever is going to show way

00:33:18 ◼   ► too many hits.

00:33:19 ◼   ► So there's not another way of saying that, so we might as well just say it.

00:33:24 ◼   ► Right.

00:33:25 ◼   ► Meaning taking a real world interface and putting it onto a device where it doesn't

00:33:31 ◼   ► really make sense.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And the skeuomorphism in this new podcast app is that it looks like a 1960s Braun reel-to-reel

00:33:38 ◼   ► tape player.

00:33:39 ◼   ► But that's kind of hidden.

00:33:41 ◼   ► It's not like that you launch the app and that's what it is and you don't have to thread the

00:33:46 ◼   ► reels or anything like that.

00:33:47 ◼   ► That would be stupid.

00:33:48 ◼   ► I would be overboard but

00:33:50 ◼   ► Imagine if if if it like used the accelerometer and if it felt it was being shaped

00:33:55 ◼   ► If you tilt it wrong it would warp the sound

00:33:59 ◼   ► Slow down does it have a thermometer? I think it does the iPhone as a thermometer

00:34:04 ◼   ► You should be able to like stick your finger on though and like and reel it backwards to see if there are hidden messages

00:34:08 ◼   ► So maybe you have tape there do it

00:34:10 ◼   ► I don't mind and like you said it's not like it's in your face

00:34:15 ◼   ► It's you start up and it's a list of your shows or your subscribe to podcasts

00:34:19 ◼   ► The the real to real thing is only when you're actually playing an episode and what else are you going to show?

00:34:24 ◼   ► And if you don't want to see the real to real thing

00:34:26 ◼   ► You just pull down and it shows you the album art for the podcast you're listening to so I I think it's a total win

00:34:32 ◼   ► I think it's a very appropriate use of skeuomorphism. Yeah, I think it's I think it's cute the the

00:34:37 ◼   ► Little the switch between turtle and hair. I couldn't get to operate now

00:34:43 ◼   ► It's a bad choice in terms of target size and yeah, and you sort of want to pull it with your finger

00:34:49 ◼   ► But that's actually not what it is. It's tapping on one of the two, right?

00:34:52 ◼   ► Exactly. I do agree with that. And so I feel like there's some little things they could tweak there

00:34:56 ◼   ► I like the tortoise in the hair. It's a little callback. Do you guys know what that's what that references? What's that?

00:35:02 ◼   ► That's a reference feed. Yeah, and the original

00:35:05 ◼   ► 1984

00:35:08 ◼   ► Macintosh the the control panel which is what we now call the system press had no

00:35:13 ◼   ► words at all. All the entire system preferences had no words. I'll throw a link in the show

00:35:20 ◼   ► notes to it, to a screenshot of it. But it was a brilliant bit of user. It probably went

00:35:26 ◼   ► too far because like the next year or two, like when the system two came out, I think

00:35:31 ◼   ► they added a couple of text labels. But everything was based on icons. You know, like the speaker

00:35:37 ◼   ► was like on the low end was a speaker with one little wave coming out of it. And on the

00:35:41 ◼   ► far end speaker with seven waves coming out of it. The mouse speed was tortoise on one

00:35:46 ◼   ► side, hair on the other. Great icon work by Susan Kerr, who designed pretty much all the

00:35:52 ◼   ► icons from the original thing. I thought that was pretty cute. But yeah, I agree that the

00:35:57 ◼   ► way that you actually operate it doesn't work. You feel like you should be able to

00:36:00 ◼   ► swipe that thing.

00:36:01 ◼   ► I love the design of the buttons though. Even the normal UI Chrome buttons is slightly different.

00:36:08 ◼   ► seems to have, like if you go to that,

00:36:13 ◼   ► that, you know, skeuomorphic tape player,

00:36:15 ◼   ► and you look up at the library button,

00:36:19 ◼   ► it doesn't look like the standard iOS library,

00:36:22 ◼   ► but it looks like it's taken cues from like other

00:36:24 ◼   ► looks like better bots to me.

00:36:27 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

00:36:28 ◼   ► I was gonna say it looks like other better designers

00:36:29 ◼   ► have now like Apple has taken some of their custom UI design.

00:36:32 ◼   ► It's really beautiful.

00:36:34 ◼   ► And even the little check lit buttons for the player controls at the bottom is nice.

00:36:40 ◼   ► And I really like the sensation.

00:36:44 ◼   ► If you go to the...

00:36:45 ◼   ► Oh, wait.

00:36:46 ◼   ► Where am I?

00:36:47 ◼   ► Categories.

00:36:48 ◼   ► Oh, shoot.

00:36:49 ◼   ► I'm lost in it.

00:36:50 ◼   ► Well, if you go to the part where...

00:36:55 ◼   ► Oh, shoot.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Where you're browsing through categories and you swipe sideways on the top there through

00:37:03 ◼   ► the categories. I'm lost in it now. I've got to just throw away this iPhone and get

00:37:07 ◼   ► a new one.

00:37:08 ◼   ► As we talk about how great this app is.

00:37:10 ◼   ► Damn it.

00:37:11 ◼   ► But I know what you're talking about. There's that weird revolving thing.

00:37:14 ◼   ► Yeah, top stations. That's where it is. If you go to top stations and you swipe across

00:37:17 ◼   ► the top to go through the categories, then the bigger album art swipes across. And it's

00:37:23 ◼   ► got this kind of awesome psychological effect where you almost look like it feels like you're

00:37:29 ◼   ► something that's bigger in scale, like 10 feet away. Almost...

00:37:34 ◼   ► Yeah. So what's weird is that that's not in the catalog, that's in your own

00:37:39 ◼   ► live, that's in your podcast, which feels weird. Yeah, so it's, it feels like a strange place for it.

00:37:44 ◼   ► I thought it was cool when I was first doing it. My concern with it as a UI is that I don't know how big it is.

00:37:49 ◼   ► I don't know if I'm going to be swiping this thing forever.

00:37:54 ◼   ► there's no scroll bar to indicate where you are in the position.

00:37:57 ◼   ► No, but I actually disagree. It's not just your podcast, though, because I'm in top stations

00:38:03 ◼   ► and I'm swiping through and here's one in arts for the wedding podcast. I mean, I don't

00:38:08 ◼   ► subscribe to that. That's not –

00:38:09 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:10 ◼   ► What I'm saying, though, is that it's not in the catalog section, so it's not at the

00:38:12 ◼   ► part that feels like iTunes.

00:38:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:14 ◼   ► It's in the part where you have your own list of things. So, it's, you know, if I'm looking

00:38:18 ◼   ► at this right now, I have an upper left-hand corner. I have the catalog button. If I click

00:38:22 ◼   ► that, it's going to do a flip over to what looks more like iTunes.

00:38:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:38:27 ◼   ► I don't understand why there's two entirely different ways to browse iTunes' library

00:38:32 ◼   ► of known podcasts.

00:38:34 ◼   ► One is called Catalog and one is called Top Stations.

00:38:38 ◼   ► It does seem a little—that seems confusing to me.

00:38:40 ◼   ► But it's a general philosophical thing.

00:38:41 ◼   ► I like that it's a separate app now, because it never made sense to me to treat podcasts

00:38:46 ◼   ► like music, because they're not really very much like music.

00:38:48 ◼   ► So having your own app for it makes sense to me.

00:38:51 ◼   ► I the problem I have with it is about sinking and I'm I cannot I haven't found

00:38:58 ◼   ► that single cohesive description that says exactly how sinking is supposed to

00:39:03 ◼   ► work with this app and your other devices your other iOS devices and

00:39:07 ◼   ► iTunes on your Mac it seems like the only way you can really keep your stuff

00:39:12 ◼   ► in sync is to do the old-fashioned thing where you sync your iPhone to your Mac

00:39:17 ◼   ► which you can do now over Wi-Fi, but that's really all that saves you is just

00:39:22 ◼   ► plugging it in by USB. Ever since iCloud, I don't do that anymore. I don't sync my

00:39:27 ◼   ► stuff to the Mac. Well, I did like that. I do like that it when I launched the

00:39:33 ◼   ► podcast app for the first time, it knew all my podcasts. Like, I didn't have to do

00:39:37 ◼   ► anything special to get all my podcasts in that library, but I mean that's not

00:39:40 ◼   ► like that's not like it's not super impressive. That's just like a little bit

00:39:44 ◼   ► impressive.

00:39:49 ◼   ► One thing I think most people don't, even most people who

00:39:51 ◼   ► listen to this podcast probably don't get is that podcasts

00:39:53 ◼   ► actually aren't stored in iTunes. It's not like there's a

00:39:55 ◼   ► file in iTunes that is this podcast that you're listening to

00:39:58 ◼   ► right now. Podcasts are really a subscription. It's a link

00:40:00 ◼   ► in iTunes that someone's clicking and iTunes will grab that

00:40:04 ◼   ► and send it to your phone, but it's not that it's being hosted

00:40:09 ◼   ► there.

00:40:12 ◼   ► And so, it's the reason why, again, it's the reason why

00:40:12 ◼   ► It's different than everything else at iTunes where they literally are sending you a file.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Here there's, you know, this app is remembering that you wanted this thing and then it's

00:40:19 ◼   ► going to look on whatever server for Mule Radio to find this episode and send it to

00:40:25 ◼   ► you.

00:40:26 ◼   ► But this raises an interesting point.

00:40:28 ◼   ► Somebody told me that there's a redeem—somebody—people have been finding a redeem button in the podcast's

00:40:35 ◼   ► app.

00:40:36 ◼   ► Have you heard about—have you heard this?

00:40:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:39 ◼   ► Adam, I don't even know why—I should have just let you guys do the show.

00:40:41 ◼   ► That was my next point. This is great. Yes, that is exactly right. If you go to the catalog,

00:40:48 ◼   ► and I don't think you can make it come up, but it's somehow, when you're in the part

00:40:52 ◼   ► that looks more like the iTunes store, and it actually has the blue bar at the top when

00:40:56 ◼   ► you're in the catalog, that it's like the – and you have an Apple ID at the bottom.

00:41:03 ◼   ► That there was – somewhere in there, there was a redeem button. I don't know if they

00:41:06 ◼   ► took it away through HTML or something, but people had screenshots of it. The idea was

00:41:11 ◼   ► you'd be able to redeem a gift card. An innocuous way of looking at it is that they

00:41:16 ◼   ► just copied and pasted some code for hooking up. How do they display your Apple ID for

00:41:23 ◼   ► store content and then the other apps where you can do that, it makes sense to have a

00:41:26 ◼   ► redeem button and they just put it in there inadvertently.

00:41:30 ◼   ► Hey, maybe this is something cool idea is maybe Apple is going to have like pro-podcast

00:41:38 ◼   ► that you can buy.

00:41:40 ◼   ► Yeah, and then in that case, they probably would be hosted on Apple servers, wouldn't

00:41:47 ◼   ► they?

00:41:48 ◼   ► Just like the rest of the—

00:41:50 ◼   ► The real content.

00:41:51 ◼   ► Yeah, the real content.

00:41:52 ◼   ► Well, that—and isn't that a really interesting idea?

00:41:56 ◼   ► What if you could sell your podcast for a dollar an episode?

00:42:00 ◼   ► It's a mystery to me that they haven't done that yet, especially with this new—like

00:42:06 ◼   ► VHX artists model and the Louis CK model, that's coming.

00:42:12 ◼   ► That's the next wave of distribution.

00:42:16 ◼   ► Apple would be wise to be there, wouldn't they?

00:42:20 ◼   ► Definitely.

00:42:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:42:22 ◼   ► I mean, and so you could do something where you could literally make a TV show and sell

00:42:31 ◼   ► it for a dollar an episode.

00:42:32 ◼   ► Yeah, there's very little difference between a video podcast and a TV show to most people,

00:42:38 ◼   ► especially like most teenagers who are watching all their TV on a laptop anyway.

00:42:42 ◼   ► If it shows up there on iTunes and they can buy it, they'll buy it.

00:42:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, there are probably all sorts of industry restrictions with the unions and

00:42:53 ◼   ► everything for what can be considered a podcast and what has to be sold. Like, for instance,

00:43:01 ◼   ► you couldn't take a TV show that's sold in the iTunes store, call it a podcast, and

00:43:06 ◼   ► distribute it through the podcast section of iTunes and not have all of the unions and the

00:43:18 ◼   ► industry people, the money people, be up in arms about it.

00:43:22 ◼   ► Yeah. The 2008 strike was largely about the worry that the industry will start reclassifying

00:43:28 ◼   ► certain kinds of shows as not really being TV shows but being internet properties, and

00:43:33 ◼   ► therefore we don't have to pay TV show rates to the writers and directors and actors. It

00:43:39 ◼   ► gets complicated because if it's not broadcast for a television, is it still a TV show?

00:43:47 ◼   ► What about like—that's a good topic, and I'm sure we could do the whole show on that—but

00:43:51 ◼   ► what about like with—I thought HBO did something interesting last week with the first episode

00:43:57 ◼   ► of their new show, the new Aaron Sorkin show, Newsroom, where they put the whole episode

00:44:03 ◼   ► on YouTube, which is interesting because it's, "Hey, look, if you don't have HBO yet, here,

00:44:10 ◼   ► watch the whole show in HD, see for yourself, and maybe, you know, if you really like it,

00:44:16 ◼   ► you'll call your cable company and sign up for HBO so you can watch the rest of the season."

00:44:22 ◼   ► But do they have to do anything? Do they have to pay everybody a little bit more because

00:44:25 ◼   ► Do they put it out there on YouTube?

00:44:30 ◼   ► There's usually a promotional content exemption,

00:44:32 ◼   ► so you get a certain window of time

00:44:36 ◼   ► which you can run an episode again

00:44:38 ◼   ► and not have to pay people extra rates.

00:44:41 ◼   ► And so there tends to be promotional ways

00:44:43 ◼   ► you can get around having to do that,

00:44:46 ◼   ► especially if the studio's not making money on it.

00:44:48 ◼   ► They're going to not have to pay back everybody else.

00:44:50 ◼   ► They're not going to have to pay residuals

00:44:53 ◼   ► to everybody else for airing the thing online.

00:44:53 ◼   ► And HBO makes different deals with some people

00:44:56 ◼   ► in other studios as well.

00:44:57 ◼   ► - I'm sorry, go ahead.

00:45:00 ◼   ► - No, so a friend of mine used to run the TV show "Greek"

00:45:02 ◼   ► and the show "Greek" didn't have great TV ratings,

00:45:06 ◼   ► but it had really amazing iTunes ratings.

00:45:08 ◼   ► They like, it sold a lot of copies through iTunes

00:45:10 ◼   ► and that kept it on for an extra year

00:45:12 ◼   ► because they knew they were selling,

00:45:13 ◼   ► they knew they had viewers through iTunes.

00:45:16 ◼   ► And so the studios do look for that

00:45:18 ◼   ► and they're looking for total number of eyeballs.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I feel like a lot of shows have done that, or a lot of networks have done that,

00:45:26 ◼   ► cable networks have done that, where they'll put their first episode of a show out just

00:45:30 ◼   ► to get interest.

00:45:32 ◼   ► But HBO, I don't think, has ever done that.

00:45:34 ◼   ► HBO.

00:45:35 ◼   ► They did it for Girls, which is the show, earlier this summer.

00:45:38 ◼   ► Did you, out of curiosity, have you been watching Girls, or did you watch the season?

00:45:42 ◼   ► I did watch the season.

00:45:43 ◼   ► I'm friends with Lena Dunham.

00:45:44 ◼   ► I just love that show.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Well, that makes me jealous of you.

00:45:47 ◼   ► It's really strange to see.

00:45:48 ◼   ► Like, Lena is a friend, and I've been a friend for a while.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I just see her boobs every week is disconcerting, but I love the show.

00:45:54 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:45:55 ◼   ► Kyle: Yeah, I close my eyes for that part.

00:45:56 ◼   ► No, I don't.

00:45:57 ◼   ► But I really like the show, and it took me a while to figure out, and I keep hearing

00:46:00 ◼   ► this from people, is that it takes them a while to figure out whether they like it or

00:46:04 ◼   ► they hate it or they're ambivalent about it.

00:46:07 ◼   ► But for the last three episodes, I just kind of, there was a light bulb went on, and I

00:46:13 ◼   ► decided I love this show.

00:46:14 ◼   ► If you ever want to feel like a failure, you look at Lena Dunham, who's 25 years old,

00:46:19 ◼   ► writes, directs, and stars in a TV show for HBO.

00:46:24 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:46:25 ◼   ► Dave: Big deal.

00:46:26 ◼   ► John: Big deal.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Anyone could do that.

00:46:28 ◼   ► Dave I made Markdown.

00:46:29 ◼   ► John Well, see?

00:46:30 ◼   ► You accomplished something.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Dave Ten years ago.

00:46:33 ◼   ► John Yeah.

00:46:34 ◼   ► Dave But the thing I want in a podcast app, the

00:46:39 ◼   ► thing I want from Apple is I want them to put my podcast subscriptions in the cloud

00:46:44 ◼   ► And I say, when I say I've subscribed to this podcast, it's all stored in the cloud.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And then whichever device I look at, they know, they all just know which ones I subscribe

00:46:55 ◼   ► to.

00:46:56 ◼   ► Because the way this works is if I subscribe to a new show on my Mac in iTunes today, and

00:47:01 ◼   ► then I go to my iPhone and open it up, that podcast is not in the podcast app.

00:47:05 ◼   ► You have to like sync it.

00:47:08 ◼   ► That's crazy, right?

00:47:09 ◼   ► I mean, isn't that like exactly what Steve Jobs told us a year ago we wouldn't have to

00:47:12 ◼   ► do anymore?

00:47:13 ◼   ► This has been an oversight. You should tell somebody.

00:47:18 ◼   ► I wonder if they rushed it out, because if you look at people,

00:47:21 ◼   ► a lot of developers are installing iOS 6,

00:47:24 ◼   ► and iOS 6 removed podcasts from the normal way

00:47:26 ◼   ► of getting podcasts.

00:47:30 ◼   ► So they wanted to have a podcast app out there

00:47:30 ◼   ► so people could see what it was.

00:47:32 ◼   ► It may just not be everything it could be.

00:47:34 ◼   ► One small example, iOS is in a podcast at double speed,

00:47:36 ◼   ► and if you do that on this, you have to do it per podcast.

00:47:38 ◼   ► it'll always default back to normal speed. Whereas Instacast or when you just did it

00:47:43 ◼   ► through the music app, it would remember that you want to hear everything at double speed.

00:47:46 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: My friend John White complained on Twitter this week specifically about that feature.

00:47:51 ◼   ► He said, "I, John Gruber, talk way too slowly and that I have to be listened to at 2X to be

00:47:56 ◼   ► tolerable." And now he's got to tap that button every time he listens to the show.

00:47:59 ◼   ► But try listening to Merlin on double speed.

00:48:01 ◼   ► It doesn't work.

00:48:02 ◼   ► It won't.

00:48:03 ◼   ► I think it breaks your iPhone.

00:48:06 ◼   ► It like pops the speaker.

00:48:08 ◼   ► They don't even have an animal icon for what Merlin needs.

00:48:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:12 ◼   ► Like, you know how like when you take your iPhone into the store to be serviced and the

00:48:14 ◼   ► first thing they do is shine the flashlight in there to look if the water sensors were

00:48:17 ◼   ► set off?

00:48:19 ◼   ► The second thing they do is check to see if you were listening to Merlin Man at 2X.

00:48:23 ◼   ► And it's like, "Ah, sorry.

00:48:24 ◼   ► We can't help you."

00:48:25 ◼   ► That's a warranty voider right there.

00:48:28 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:29 ◼   ► Oh, I like the icon too.

00:48:32 ◼   ► I like the podcast icon.

00:48:33 ◼   ► I like the color.

00:48:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I do too.

00:48:37 ◼   ► I think it's a good app.

00:48:38 ◼   ► And I also agree with the – in large part, I agree with what Jon just said a couple of

00:48:42 ◼   ► minutes ago that the idea of breaking these things off into discrete apps is exactly the

00:48:47 ◼   ► right way to go.

00:48:48 ◼   ► And every time they do it, it just makes iTunes on the Mac look worse and worse and worse

00:48:53 ◼   ► because it still has almost everything glumped in there.

00:48:56 ◼   ► I think the only thing it has broken off is the Mac App Store.

00:49:00 ◼   ► I think I'm going to stick with Instacast for podcasts for now.

00:49:04 ◼   ► I like it.

00:49:06 ◼   ► I like it on the iPhone.

00:49:07 ◼   ► I don't like it on the iPad, but Instacast for the iPhone works really well.

00:49:10 ◼   ► I like that it lets me stream things if I had forgotten to download them.

00:49:14 ◼   ► It's worked well for me.

00:49:17 ◼   ► What do you use, Adam?

00:49:18 ◼   ► I don't really listen to podcasts.

00:49:21 ◼   ► So, like, oftentimes, if I want to go listen to a podcast, I'll go to the damn iTunes

00:49:32 ◼   ► store and then I'll just, like, stream it from the store, which is a real big pain in

00:49:36 ◼   ► the butt, especially if you're driving or something and it loses your place.

00:49:39 ◼   ► And so, you know, I don't have this sinking iCloud problem, but I can appreciate podcasts.

00:49:50 ◼   ► So like this one.

00:49:51 ◼   ► Well, you know what? I should break in right now. I should do the, I should do our first

00:49:55 ◼   ► sponsor. This would be a perfect opportunity. Cool.

00:49:58 ◼   ► I want to tell you guys about Camera Plus Pro. That's plus with a P-L-U-S spelled out.

00:50:05 ◼   ► It's an app for the iPhone. It launched back in December 2009. And I'm a sucker for these

00:50:12 ◼   ► things. I love camera apps. My beloved Ricoh GRD point and shoot camera, which I've had

00:50:18 ◼   ► I think five or six years. It's finally given up the ghost. It just does not work anymore.

00:50:24 ◼   ► And I don't think I'm ever going to buy another point-and-shoot camera because all I do is

00:50:29 ◼   ► shoot photos with my iPhone anyway. And I love – I'm a super sucker for camera apps

00:50:34 ◼   ► for the phone. I've got a whole page full of them.

00:50:37 ◼   ► Camera+ Pro has a bunch of really cool features. One of the things it does – of course, it

00:50:43 ◼   ► It has photo filters, but it also has video filters.

00:50:46 ◼   ► So all sorts of things ranging from really nice and subtle to super gimmicky.

00:50:52 ◼   ► But when you turn on the filters in Camera+ Pro, they're live in the viewfinder as you

00:50:56 ◼   ► shoot.

00:50:57 ◼   ► Not just for stills, but also for videos.

00:51:00 ◼   ► I don't even know if there's any other app that does that for video.

00:51:03 ◼   ► The UI is super cool.

00:51:05 ◼   ► Just take a look at a screenshot of it.

00:51:07 ◼   ► You'll know exactly what I mean.

00:51:09 ◼   ► The controls have nice animation.

00:51:11 ◼   ► really, really nice. When you edit existing photos, you can pop photos you've already

00:51:16 ◼   ► taken like with the standard camera app in, you get real-time full resolution photo editing.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Even the Photoshop app for iOS doesn't do that instantly. They have 45 different photo

00:51:27 ◼   ► filters and you can instantly, there's always an instant comparison button so you can compare

00:51:32 ◼   ► to the original. Sharing features, you can do simultaneous sharing on multiple social

00:51:39 ◼   ► media sites. You just plug in your credentials for the sites that you use. When you want

00:51:43 ◼   ► to share, boom, you can just share it to them all at once. It's a great app. $1.99, $1.99

00:51:50 ◼   ► on the App Store. And they have a contest. Through July 6th, Camera Plus Pro is running

00:51:56 ◼   ► a Twitter photo scavenger hunt and they're giving away prizes including iPhone camera

00:52:02 ◼   ► accessories and iTunes gift cards. Check out their Twitter account. It's @CameraPlusPro

00:52:11 ◼   ► for more details on Twitter. You can check out more information about the app at their

00:52:16 ◼   ► website GlobalDelight.com. $1.99. Here's the thing. I would love for listeners of the show.

00:52:23 ◼   ► If you guys, I don't want to sell the talk show for a dollar an episode. But I would

00:52:27 ◼   ► love if listeners of the show, if you wanted to say, "You know what? I want to help John

00:52:30 ◼   ► out and want to help the talk show. When somebody advertises an app that costs like a buck or

00:52:34 ◼   ► two bucks, if you have any interest in it, just go buy it. If you want to like throw

00:52:38 ◼   ► $2 at the talk show, don't send it to me. Just go buy the app. I think that would be

00:52:42 ◼   ► like an awesome thing for sponsors of the show. Do you guys use the camera apps on your

00:52:48 ◼   ► phone?

00:52:49 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I do. I use the built-in camera for a lot

00:52:52 ◼   ► of things, but I went through my Instagram phase.

00:52:55 ◼   ► Tim Cynova That phase is over now?

00:52:58 ◼   ► Tim Cynova That phase is largely over now.

00:52:59 ◼   ► Yeah, me too.

00:53:04 ◼   ► But I do find the camera has just become the default sort of

00:53:05 ◼   ► note-taker for me also.

00:53:08 ◼   ► Like, where did I park my car?

00:53:10 ◼   ► I take a picture.

00:53:11 ◼   ► I use it instead of scanning things.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Even just when I used to go off to start writing a screenplay, I always write by hand.

00:53:17 ◼   ► And my old way of doing it, I would write by hand and then I would fax the pages through to my assistant who would type them up.

00:53:21 ◼   ► Now I just take a picture with my iPhone 4S and email him the photos of the pages and he types them up.

00:53:26 ◼   ► It's just amazing to have such an incredibly good camera in my pocket at all times.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Agreed.

00:53:37 ◼   ► I use it for if you need to draw a diagram of a shot list or something.

00:53:37 ◼   ► Rather than scanning, just take a quick note, quick snap.

00:53:49 ◼   ► And I always use the default camera app.

00:53:51 ◼   ► I don't know, it's just so basic.

00:53:56 ◼   ► Adam, do you use any of the shot-making apps,

00:53:58 ◼   ► the ones that let you pick lens sizes on them?

00:54:00 ◼   ► I have Artemis on my phone,

00:54:03 ◼   ► and all the DPs that I work with use it.

00:54:06 ◼   ► But I don't really use it myself.

00:54:09 ◼   ► I think it's cool.

00:54:13 ◼   ► Yeah, well, Jon, one thing you may not be aware of

00:54:14 ◼   ► is that DPs love gadgets and technology.

00:54:16 ◼   ► And for the iPhone, there's really amazing things

00:54:19 ◼   ► for not just film stocks and speeds and that kind of stuff,

00:54:19 ◼   ► But if you're on a location scout, they'll check to see where exactly they are, and it'll come up with, like, this is exactly the time of sunrise and sunset.

00:54:27 ◼   ► Yeah, sun seeker is awesome. I use that one a lot. Yeah.

00:54:33 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is, you know, it lets you know how to plan your day of shooting based on where the sun is going to be, which is a godsend.

00:54:35 ◼   ► Because DP equals director of photography.

00:54:42 ◼   ► Right. And they always want everything to be backlit. So you always have to, like, if you're a director that's trying to please your DP all the time, you're going to have to do that.

00:54:45 ◼   ► If you're a director that's trying to please your DP all the time, then you have to always

00:54:50 ◼   ► plan everything according to optimal backlighting.

00:54:56 ◼   ► Dave: And it uses just the location awareness.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Jonathon: Yeah, and it just maps data and the curvature of the sun's path and everything

00:55:09 ◼   ► over the live image, augmented reality.

00:55:12 ◼   ► It's very cool.

00:55:13 ◼   ► Yeah, so GPS used to have like reference books that could go to, to figure out like latitude and longitude, what stuff would be.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And that's exactly the kind of thing that the iPhone's great at.

00:55:23 ◼   ► Right. And then Artemis is this other app that basically lets you, instead of having a viewfinder, you know, a proper like giant viewfinder that you put different lenses on, it just simulates different lens sizes and different cameras and different film planes and stuff.

00:55:26 ◼   ► So you can just look through the iPhone's camera and see approximately what different lenses are.

00:55:42 ◼   ► what different lens sizes are gonna look like

00:55:44 ◼   ► for shot selection.

00:55:45 ◼   ► - Very cool, sounds awesome.

00:55:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I don't, I've downloaded like,

00:55:51 ◼   ► I think every single one of those,

00:55:53 ◼   ► like shot listing apps and storyboarding apps,

00:55:55 ◼   ► but I've never used one of them.

00:55:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've been used to me there.

00:56:02 ◼   ► - But I like that they exist.

00:56:03 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:56:05 ◼   ► - I'm still a sucker for the filters you apply

00:56:07 ◼   ► on the phone to pictures.

00:56:10 ◼   ► I know that it's a gimmick.

00:56:12 ◼   ► I know that in hindsight, I'm going to look back 20 years from now and wonder why two-thirds

00:56:17 ◼   ► of all the pictures I ever took of my son all look like they were shot in 1964.

00:56:21 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani That's okay though.

00:56:22 ◼   ► I think I don't see it as a gimmick.

00:56:25 ◼   ► I see it as a raising awareness of color correction which is something that the pros have known

00:56:31 ◼   ► about for forever but is just now available to consumers and I think that's a wonderful

00:56:37 ◼   ► thing.

00:56:38 ◼   ► every photo should be color corrected.

00:56:41 ◼   ► Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

00:56:42 ◼   ► - No, almost every photo should be cropped too,

00:56:43 ◼   ► and that's one of the things I love

00:56:44 ◼   ► about the new photo software is that you hit edit,

00:56:47 ◼   ► you can resize and get the shot to actually look

00:56:50 ◼   ► like what you want it to look like.

00:56:51 ◼   ► I think my frustration with Instagram ultimately became

00:56:54 ◼   ► everything is square on Instagram,

00:56:55 ◼   ► and that was liberating for a while,

00:56:57 ◼   ► then it became frustrating after a while.

00:57:00 ◼   ► - And then the textural stuff kind of bugs me.

00:57:02 ◼   ► There's the film scratchy stuff or simulating photo paper.

00:57:07 ◼   ► That kind of bugs me a little.

00:57:09 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah.

00:57:10 ◼   ► I'm much less drawn to that stuff than the actual, like you said, the color correction.

00:57:14 ◼   ► Sometimes a photo, if you just really warm it up, even if it's not way past the point

00:57:19 ◼   ► of realistic levels of orangeness, it just gives it a real emotional feel to it that

00:57:27 ◼   ► you wouldn't get otherwise.

00:57:28 ◼   ► Same thing for desaturation, not just going all the way to black and white, but desaturating

00:57:33 ◼   ► a little bit.

00:57:34 ◼   ► You can really – it's just like a totally different photo.

00:57:37 ◼   ► Yeah, and you get, I mean, in the same ways that these apps, these consumer apps, basically

00:57:45 ◼   ► lead these trends or create these trends in color correction.

00:57:50 ◼   ► Trends in color correction is something that profession like the entertainment industry

00:57:56 ◼   ► has had since, I don't know, I feel like since the days of digital color correcting

00:58:02 ◼   ► or the DI or whatever, every five-year span or whatever has its signature looks that every

00:58:12 ◼   ► commercial…

00:58:13 ◼   ► Is the orange and green one over yet?

00:58:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:58:15 ◼   ► I think that was the Transformers/Michael Bay look.

00:58:18 ◼   ► That was probably the worst.

00:58:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:58:22 ◼   ► It's fun to pay attention.

00:58:24 ◼   ► It's fun to pay attention to these trends though.

00:58:29 ◼   ► I like to color correct my stuff pretty neutral.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I think a colorist's first instinct is always to do something stylistic to it.

00:58:41 ◼   ► But I don't ever want to do that.

00:58:42 ◼   ► I feel like it always kind of dates it and takes it out of the world.

00:58:46 ◼   ► I remember reading about when they did the Criterion Collection restoration of Malick's

00:58:56 ◼   ► Days of Heaven.

00:58:58 ◼   ► And I forget what words were disallowed.

00:59:04 ◼   ► It was like warm was disallowed, but all these things that would have, you know, because

00:59:08 ◼   ► it was all shot, almost all the scenes are outside on these wheat fields where you'd

00:59:12 ◼   ► real tempted to really double it up on the warmth and the sun and stuff like that.

00:59:17 ◼   ► They didn't do any of that.

00:59:18 ◼   ► They kept it really, really good.

00:59:19 ◼   ► Ben

00:59:42 ◼   ► the original one because I never got to see that movie in a theater.

00:59:46 ◼   ► I thought that the new one looked way too neutral for about 30 seconds and then all

00:59:51 ◼   ► of a sudden I was, you know, holy shit, Days of Heaven.

00:59:55 ◼   ► Um, John, August, did you, were you heavily involved in the post process on The Nines?

01:00:02 ◼   ► John: Yeah, with The Nines, we had to pick, you know, people who don't know the movie

01:00:06 ◼   ► The Nines, it's essentially three short films back to back with the same actors in

01:00:10 ◼   ► and so Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis, and Melissa McCarthy.

01:00:15 ◼   ► And each of the three sections has a completely different look.

01:00:17 ◼   ► And so you work with your DP, in this case Nancy Schreiber,

01:00:21 ◼   ► from the outset to figure out, well, what is the look

01:00:25 ◼   ► of these three different sections?

01:00:27 ◼   ► And as a director, you learn that you don't ever try

01:00:28 ◼   ► to tell people how to do their job.

01:00:32 ◼   ► You just describe what it means to you

01:00:33 ◼   ► and let them translate that into their own terms.

01:00:35 ◼   ► So for the first section, I told Nancy that it feels like

01:00:35 ◼   ► two beers in on a warm July night.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And to her that meant, you know,

01:00:43 ◼   ► so we're in the yellows and the reds

01:00:45 ◼   ► and things can be a little bit hazy

01:00:48 ◼   ► and it just feels a little drunk.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And so she had her, then she could figure out how to do that

01:00:53 ◼   ► both in lighting and also in the color correction room.

01:00:58 ◼   ► The middle section was a reality TV show

01:01:02 ◼   ► so I wanted it to feel like it wasn't controlled,

01:01:03 ◼   ► that nothing was really lit, that we were finding all these pieces along the way.

01:01:08 ◼   ► The third section is meant to be a TV pilot that was shot for another network,

01:01:11 ◼   ► and it's cold, and we're in blues and grays,

01:01:16 ◼   ► and it's November in Vancouver.

01:01:19 ◼   ► And even though we're going to be shooting in LA,

01:01:24 ◼   ► I was the only show that ever wanted to look like it was shot in Vancouver.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And so she gets in her head what that means for lighting.

01:01:31 ◼   ► But then we shot test footage and we took it into the color bay, and she worked with

01:01:37 ◼   ► the colorist even before we shot a single frame of our real film to set what those three

01:01:41 ◼   ► looks are.

01:01:42 ◼   ► So even when we got "Dailies" back, it was colored in basically the space that we

01:01:46 ◼   ► wanted.

01:01:47 ◼   ► And so the final color correction ended up being two days rather than three weeks.

01:01:51 ◼   ► That's cool.

01:01:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:53 ◼   ► And you're—

01:01:54 ◼   ► It would have been a totally different movie if it hadn't had the very distinctive looks

01:01:59 ◼   ► to the segments.

01:02:00 ◼   ► Absolutely.

01:02:01 ◼   ► it's absolutely essential to the nature of the movie.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And there's not just…

01:02:05 ◼   ► It's not just lighting.

01:02:06 ◼   ► We shot the first section on Super 16.

01:02:08 ◼   ► We shot the middle section on standard definition video, not HD video, so it really still looked

01:02:13 ◼   ► like video.

01:02:14 ◼   ► And the third section was real 35 millimeter.

01:02:17 ◼   ► It's been a little while since I've seen the movie, but there were quite a few visual

01:02:21 ◼   ► effects as well, right?

01:02:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:02:23 ◼   ► And again, your job as a director is to talk to visual effects artists in ways that they

01:02:29 ◼   ► can interpret and figure out what it means to them.

01:02:34 ◼   ► And so you describe that the atmosphere is sort of thick and has a viscosity to it, but I'm not going to try to

01:02:37 ◼   ► set what those parameters are. Just like, "Give me that stuff. I want things to be lit from within, but figure out how to do that."

01:02:44 ◼   ► And you give them what you can.

01:02:50 ◼   ► But just like what you do a lot with your official effects stuff that you do yourself, Doug

01:02:52 ◼   ► Kreis, our editor, cut a lot of stuff that seems like visual effects was really just our editor being very smart and figuring

01:02:58 ◼   ► how to do stuff on his own avid rather than sending it out to the shop.

01:03:03 ◼   ► Yeah. Cool.

01:03:05 ◼   ► Lots of news from Google this week.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:03:09 ◼   ► I don't know if people like this. To me, that's what the talk show is all about, is just jumping

01:03:13 ◼   ► around from one topic to another. I don't know if some people hate that or not, but

01:03:16 ◼   ► that's my show and that's how we're going to do it.

01:03:18 ◼   ► Well, I don't know. Do you think that probably a lot of people listen just for the news aspect

01:03:23 ◼   ► of it and probably get annoyed with all the conversational inside…well, that wouldn't

01:03:33 ◼   ► be baseball, but inside our industry, that might be annoying, but screw them.

01:03:38 ◼   ► Well, my take on it, especially with the Google stuff, is there's a lot of interesting stuff

01:03:42 ◼   ► and it's worth talking about, but there's no way that my heart would be in it talking

01:03:47 ◼   ► about it for a full hour this week.

01:03:50 ◼   ► I think we can mow through this in about 10 minutes and say all we want to say.

01:03:53 ◼   ► day. Whereas if the show was just about the news, I don't know. It's not at all.

01:04:00 ◼   ► The news is for a blog. The news is for The Verge.

01:04:03 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:04:04 ◼   ► Discussion.

01:04:05 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:06 ◼   ► So, I watched the keynote yesterday. I didn't watch the second one, which was today. And

01:04:11 ◼   ► number one, I don't understand why they do two keynotes. That confuses me.

01:04:15 ◼   ► That's weird.

01:04:16 ◼   ► And every time I say stuff like that, people just accuse me of being, "Well, whatever

01:04:19 ◼   ► Apple does, John Gruber thinks is right, and whatever anybody else does is wrong." But

01:04:23 ◼   ► me it's just clarity of focus like a keynote is here's the messages we want you to come

01:04:27 ◼   ► away with from this big conference we're putting on but they and they do that yesterday and

01:04:31 ◼   ► then they come back today with like a whole new set of them I don't guess was that this

01:04:35 ◼   ► morning's one was that was with Sergei and the glass did it apparently they did that

01:04:42 ◼   ► twice I'm gonna I'll get to that because that was kind of the coolest thing they did but

01:04:48 ◼   ► They announced the Android 4.1 and a couple of the things that it has. The two that really

01:04:54 ◼   ► stuck out to me, they called one Project Butter, which I don't know. It's a little gross.

01:05:00 ◼   ► But Project Butter is, I guess, a reference to making everything as smooth as butter animation-wise

01:05:06 ◼   ► and trying to get everything in Android up to 60 frames per second when views animate,

01:05:11 ◼   ► when you switch, you know, swipe between things or something zooms out or zooms in, which

01:05:17 ◼   ► to me is like a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that all the previous versions were laggy

01:05:22 ◼   ► as hell, which Android supporters have always said, "No, it's not." And yes, it is.

01:05:28 ◼   ► And I still think they're catching up to Apple in that regard. I think that the new

01:05:32 ◼   ► one, just from what I've read about it so far, is that it still doesn't seem like

01:05:35 ◼   ► it's as smooth as iOS. And then the other thing they did, software-wise, that I thought

01:05:42 ◼   ► was interesting is Google Now, which is more or less Siri for Android, where you

01:05:48 ◼   ► talk to the phone and it interprets your voice and then it gives you back these

01:05:52 ◼   ► answers in like Siri, like if it knows what you're talking about, like if you

01:05:56 ◼   ► say, "What's the Yankees score?" It's like, it's not just a list of search

01:06:03 ◼   ► results, it's, "Okay, I know what this guy wants. He wants the New York Yankees

01:06:06 ◼   ► baseball game and there's a game on right now. They're playing somebody else,

01:06:10 ◼   ► else, let me give this in a very format, a perfectly formatted and designed thing for

01:06:15 ◼   ► reporting sports scores because I know that this is what the guy is asking. And it looks

01:06:21 ◼   ► great, I think, and to me, that's right up Google's wheelhouse is that sort of search

01:06:28 ◼   ► and knowing exactly what you mean from just these three words.

01:06:32 ◼   ► That's not a very strong brand name though, Google now.

01:06:37 ◼   ► I agree with that.

01:06:38 ◼   ► It's not descriptive in any way.

01:06:40 ◼   ► I think other companies have used the now trademark plenty.

01:06:45 ◼   ► And I mean Google has been playing with voice way before I feel like anybody else was.

01:06:52 ◼   ► And I mean it's cool, it's cool, but I feel like they should have gone with something

01:06:57 ◼   ► a little bit bolder if they really wanted to compete with Siri.

01:07:00 ◼   ► Because Siri is Siri.

01:07:03 ◼   ► Siri is an icon now.

01:07:04 ◼   ► Now is not an icon.

01:07:05 ◼   ► Yeah, Siri feels like a character.

01:07:06 ◼   ► My daughter, who's seven, she does think that a Siri is a real person to some degree.

01:07:11 ◼   ► She associates that as a character.

01:07:13 ◼   ► Who's to disagree?

01:07:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:07:15 ◼   ► She's the person who gives you answers.

01:07:16 ◼   ► So she'll say like, she'll ask me a question I won't know.

01:07:18 ◼   ► She's like, "Well, does Siri now?"

01:07:20 ◼   ► I'm like, "Okay, fine.

01:07:21 ◼   ► We'll ask Siri."

01:07:22 ◼   ► That's pretty awesome.

01:07:23 ◼   ► Do you remember when, I think in the days before iPhone even,

01:07:27 ◼   ► when Google had a phone number that you could call

01:07:29 ◼   ► and ask it stuff, and it would have like,

01:07:33 ◼   ► maybe I'm making this up, maybe I dreamed it.

01:07:36 ◼   ► - I have a vague memory of this, yeah.

01:07:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, you could just call, it was like an 800 number.

01:07:40 ◼   ► You could call Google and ask it stuff,

01:07:42 ◼   ► and then it would, and it had this tone

01:07:44 ◼   ► that was like a doo doo doo doo doo doo,

01:07:46 ◼   ► but it was actually a guy, like it was a human guy going,

01:07:49 ◼   ► doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

01:07:52 ◼   ► They still do that with the Google Voice app.

01:07:54 ◼   ► If you launch the Google Voice app on iPhone and you do a voice search, it's a guy's

01:07:59 ◼   ► voice doing the – I won't try to do –

01:08:01 ◼   ► It's fun.

01:08:02 ◼   ► Whatever it is, it's fun.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Yeah, it is fun.

01:08:07 ◼   ► Which – I mean I know this is like – I'm jumping all over the place here.

01:08:12 ◼   ► But like I watched the Google Glass thing.

01:08:16 ◼   ► Maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves.

01:08:17 ◼   ► I was just basically going to make the point that Google still does have this element of

01:08:22 ◼   ► fun in a lot of their stuff.

01:08:26 ◼   ► Like with how they'll change up the Google logo on the search, on the homepage.

01:08:31 ◼   ► I love that they still have all that stuff, even though, whatever, they're doing dorky

01:08:34 ◼   ► stuff all the time.

01:08:36 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Institutional whims.

01:08:37 ◼   ► Ben

01:08:47 ◼   ► they the maps app for Android I get I think still is clearly ahead of where

01:08:55 ◼   ► Apple's new stuff is because they make they mentioned that they still have

01:08:58 ◼   ► transit information still be built in but they have this cool new very cool I

01:09:03 ◼   ► think compass view for maps where when you do street view if you switch to

01:09:09 ◼   ► compass view it uses the devices accelerometer and I guess what's the

01:09:14 ◼   ► other thing called that's even more precise than accelerometer, the – like when you're

01:09:19 ◼   ► twisting the phone and it can tell exactly what angle the phone's at. Well, we'll

01:09:24 ◼   ► just say accelerometer. You just hold the device around and it gives you the street

01:09:30 ◼   ► view for the angle that you're holding it at, like in terms of showing you a 3D panorama

01:09:35 ◼   ► of the spot.

01:09:36 ◼   ► John

01:09:36 ◼   ► Oh, gyroscope is probably what you're going for.

01:09:39 ◼   ► Gyroscope.

01:09:40 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:09:41 ◼   ► Thank you, Jon.

01:09:42 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:09:43 ◼   ► It just seems like the most natural way to do 360 panoramic street view.

01:09:49 ◼   ► It seems like it's supernatural.

01:09:53 ◼   ► In the way that we used to always have buttons to control stuff, like if you wanted to go

01:09:58 ◼   ► down, you had to hit a down button.

01:09:59 ◼   ► You want to go up, you had to hit an up button.

01:10:01 ◼   ► And the way that the iPhone really was like, "No, you just move it down.

01:10:05 ◼   ► your finger, and if you want to go down on the list, move it down. To me, this is exactly

01:10:09 ◼   ► that sort of just take the interface away from it for a 360 panorama. And I think that

01:10:16 ◼   ► clearly Google's it. It's still ahead of everybody else in that way.

01:10:19 ◼   ► Yeah, the thing I miss most in the iOS 6 maps is Street View, because I find Street View

01:10:23 ◼   ► incredibly helpful for I'm going someplace I've never been before, and I want to see

01:10:27 ◼   ► what it's going to look like when I get there.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Me too.

01:10:30 ◼   ► And Apple has a lot of stuff in the new, but it doesn't have the equivalent of Street

01:10:34 ◼   ► Street View.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Yeah, and I don't know if they're trying to sell it like the overhead view, the 3D overhead view is a reasonable replacement for Street View, or if that's just coming later.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not a bird.

01:10:49 ◼   ► I'm not going to ever experience the world that way, but I do experience it the way it's on Street View.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I remember we rented an apartment in London two years ago, and I wanted to see what was going to be around it.

01:10:55 ◼   ► So I went to Street View, and I could walk up the street and see, "Oh, okay, there's a grocery store right there, and there's a park at the end of the street."

01:11:01 ◼   ► And I had a sense of what it was like before I ever got there.

01:11:05 ◼   ► And that was an amazing thing in Street View that, yes, I can still do it in the browser

01:11:08 ◼   ► here, but I'd love to be able to do that on the phone or on the iPad.

01:11:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:12 ◼   ► Yeah, Street View is, I think, it's less impressive as a demo than the fly-around view

01:11:16 ◼   ► that Apple introduced, but it's way more practical because it is literally, being on

01:11:21 ◼   ► the Street View is exactly your perspective.

01:11:24 ◼   ► I think everybody who uses it has used it the exact same way you did is, "What am

01:11:29 ◼   ► I looking for?"

01:11:30 ◼   ► and then show me okay and then you look up and when you recognize okay this is that corner here i am

01:11:34 ◼   ► so they and they announced two devices they announced the nexus 7 which was not a surprise

01:11:43 ◼   ► this is exactly what the rumors had said it's it's more or less google's version of the kindlefire

01:11:48 ◼   ► seven inch android tablet uh explicitly uh they you know they were very explicit about it it is

01:11:55 ◼   ► meant for viewing content from their Google Play store.

01:12:00 ◼   ► Magazines that you get through Google Play, movies and TV shows that you rent or buy from

01:12:05 ◼   ► Google Play, and ebooks that you buy from Google's Google Play store.

01:12:12 ◼   ► $200 and they give you, for at least a limited time, a $25 store credit with the $200 purchase.

01:12:20 ◼   ► Looks like a way better hardware device than the Kindle Fire, but I thought, here's what

01:12:25 ◼   ► I thought was interesting is it was a super interesting contrast from Microsoft's announcement

01:12:29 ◼   ► the week before where Microsoft preannounced their tablet and seemed to be doubling down

01:12:35 ◼   ► on using it for creation and not just consumption like the meta message was, "Hey, those other

01:12:40 ◼   ► tablets," in parentheses, iPad, "are just for consumption.

01:12:45 ◼   ► Ours is a real PC that you can use for Office and all the stuff you'd – Photoshop, everything

01:12:51 ◼   ► you do on your regular PC you can do on ours."

01:12:54 ◼   ► And they didn't demo anything about renting movies or TV shows, and they didn't announce

01:12:58 ◼   ► a bookstore.

01:12:59 ◼   ► They didn't have anything about getting magazines or newspapers or anything like that.

01:13:04 ◼   ► And Google's was the exact opposite thing where it had nothing at all to do.

01:13:09 ◼   ► They didn't show any kind of apps for doing anything.

01:13:11 ◼   ► It was all about consumption.

01:13:13 ◼   ► I mean, it makes sense.

01:13:16 ◼   ► It's that price point.

01:13:17 ◼   ► People are going to buy a lot of them, aren't they?

01:13:19 ◼   ► And it's people who don't want to buy an iPad.

01:13:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I wonder about the ability to build out that infrastructure to support all that.

01:13:27 ◼   ► Amazon already had all those things to stick on your Kindle Fire.

01:13:32 ◼   ► Google may not have all that much interesting stuff to do that.

01:13:37 ◼   ► And I don't know that my mom is going to understand what that is or is going to want to buy that.

01:13:42 ◼   ► Well, how do you fill it with content?

01:13:47 ◼   ► You buy it through Google, I guess.

01:13:47 ◼   ► they'd have to have their little stores, but do they have enough stuff that's interesting?

01:13:53 ◼   ► And well, any other problem I think that they might be running into is that the Kindle Fire

01:13:57 ◼   ► is actually pretty old, and everybody presumes that Amazon's going to have a Kindle Fire

01:14:03 ◼   ► 2, or I mean whatever they're going to call it, coming probably sooner than later. And

01:14:09 ◼   ► unlike Google, like the Nexus 7 thing had kind of leaked, I don't know, weeks ago. I

01:14:14 ◼   ► I saw it.

01:14:15 ◼   ► It was just everybody just seemed to assume that they were going to announce a seven-inch,

01:14:18 ◼   ► $200 tablet.

01:14:20 ◼   ► Amazon is a lot like Apple in that they know how to keep a secret.

01:14:25 ◼   ► But presumably, everybody just presumes from past experience that they do with the Kindle

01:14:30 ◼   ► what Apple did with the iPod and iPhones and the iPad where once a year they come out with

01:14:34 ◼   ► a new one.

01:14:35 ◼   ► The thing I would think about Amazon is that the second Kindle was so much better than

01:14:39 ◼   ► the first Kindle that however bad the original Kindle Fire is, I'm optimistic that the

01:14:44 ◼   ► second one is going to be pretty competitive.

01:14:49 ◼   ► I think the thing that interests me most about the Nexus 7 is that it feels like it's finally that iPod touch

01:14:52 ◼   ► that was sort of missing. I've been curious about Android, but I've never wanted to buy any of their devices

01:14:56 ◼   ► because I didn't want another phone. And this is something that's Android that I could actually buy and

01:15:00 ◼   ► play around with and see what their maps do, and it's not that expensive.

01:15:05 ◼   ► So for that, it's really interesting. And it's also cheap enough that if you were a tinkerer and you wanted to

01:15:09 ◼   ► build some kind of app that you know would never be allowed to be sold through the Apple

01:15:13 ◼   ► – through the Mac App Store or the iOS App Store.

01:15:17 ◼   ► You could build something for that or some sort of custom application and just buy a

01:15:20 ◼   ► bunch of these $200 things and give them to your employees to do one specific job.

01:15:25 ◼   ► It's cheap enough that it may be worthwhile for that.

01:15:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I totally agree with that.

01:15:29 ◼   ► Because the thing with buying an Android phone is always that you're either signing up with

01:15:33 ◼   ► a contract, which you don't need because you already have your iPhone, or if you buy it

01:15:35 ◼   ► unlocked, they're like iPhones. They're like $600, $500, which seems too much. I agree.

01:15:42 ◼   ► I think anybody who's Android curious to put it—I don't know how else to put it—a

01:15:48 ◼   ► $199 device right from Google with Google software as they intend it. Because that's

01:15:53 ◼   ► the big difference with the Samsung iPod Touch thing, the Galaxy Touch or whatever they call

01:15:58 ◼   ► it, where it's all crapped up with Samsung's stuff that I don't want. I think that the

01:16:03 ◼   ► Android looks best right as Google gives it to you.

01:16:08 ◼   ► The people who right now are buying the Barnes & Noble Nooks and rooting them so they have a cheap Android tablet,

01:16:12 ◼   ► this is what they'll buy to tinker with. And it's a better choice probably.

01:16:18 ◼   ► I'm curious to hold it, because that's my biggest barrier to using the iPad all the time.

01:16:23 ◼   ► It's just still too awkward for me to carry all the time.

01:16:28 ◼   ► I don't know. It's a little bit too heavy. It's a little bit too big.

01:16:33 ◼   ► and I always feel like I'm going to drop it. So, if a slightly smaller – I want to

01:16:39 ◼   ► know what's the maximum size of a tablet that I can be comfortable with just carrying

01:16:45 ◼   ► with me and holding it in one hand.

01:16:48 ◼   ► I forget if I've mentioned this on a previous show, but it doesn't matter because I'll

01:16:53 ◼   ► just repeat myself. But I still go to a real bookstore. I still go – there's a Barnes

01:16:57 ◼   ► and Noble across town in Philadelphia that I still go to all the time. I take my son

01:17:02 ◼   ► there because it just seems like I still think that's the best way to pick a new book is

01:17:05 ◼   ► just go there and browse the shelves and find a book. And one thing that really has surprised

01:17:10 ◼   ► me is last couple times we've been in there, every time there's at least two or three people

01:17:15 ◼   ► at the nook kiosk looking at the nooks. And they seem, you know, a lot of them seem really

01:17:21 ◼   ► serious about maybe buying one right there on the spot. Like when they first put those

01:17:25 ◼   ► nook kiosks in the Barnes and Noble, I really was like embarrassed for them. I was like,

01:17:29 ◼   ► This is – they're just – they've just created a space in their store where no one

01:17:33 ◼   ► is ever going to go.

01:17:35 ◼   ► But I was wrong.

01:17:36 ◼   ► I mean I don't know how many of them they're selling, but there's definitely a market

01:17:41 ◼   ► there.

01:17:44 ◼   ► The other thing Google announced, and this just boggles my mind, the Nexus Q, which is

01:17:50 ◼   ► $299 – I can't even say it out loud.

01:17:54 ◼   ► It's a $299 thing that plays music and video from the Google Play Store, and that the only

01:18:02 ◼   ► way to use it is with an Android phone or tablet.

01:18:05 ◼   ► It doesn't even have a remote control or anything.

01:18:07 ◼   ► You hook it up to your TV set and it sort of does the stuff that Apple TV does, but

01:18:14 ◼   ► it costs three times more and requires a $500 phone to use.

01:18:18 ◼   ► Yeah, terrible, terrible.

01:18:19 ◼   ► Did you happen to watch the video, the promotional video for it?

01:18:23 ◼   ► Some of it. I watched the Verge team. And those Verge guys, by the way, if any of them

01:18:29 ◼   ► listen to this, I'll tell you what, the Verge guys' coverage of Google I/O has just

01:18:32 ◼   ► been unbelievable. I mean, they're just killing it. Google announced a lot of stuff,

01:18:37 ◼   ► and the Verge really sort of helped me not spend my whole day trying to figure out what

01:18:43 ◼   ► it all was. But anyway, they did a video and it—well, what did their promotional video

01:18:47 ◼   ► look like?

01:18:48 ◼   ► Well, it's basically—I mean, it's a really well-made video, but it's like all

01:18:50 ◼   ► about fetishizing the object and it's all about even the guts and they like they show

01:18:54 ◼   ► it being machined and everything and the electronics and the circuitry of it and it's this ball

01:19:00 ◼   ► it's like this science fiction spherical with a light and like a you know it's bisected

01:19:07 ◼   ► with with with cool colored light coming through the center of it but like people don't want

01:19:13 ◼   ► that crap in their house I don't think I don't think that people want that in their

01:19:17 ◼   ► their house. People want like their components to disappear.

01:19:20 ◼   ► And that's why the $99 Apple TV that's just like a very small,

01:19:24 ◼   ► simple, sturdy, rectangular, curved rectangular little box

01:19:30 ◼   ► can can disappear like that. They're trying to make it into

01:19:35 ◼   ► an art object of art. And I don't think that anybody wants

01:19:39 ◼   ► that nobody wants like, especially an electronic ball.

01:19:44 ◼   ► Nobody wants to put that on their table.

01:19:47 ◼   ► - I also think people don't want to hook up

01:19:48 ◼   ► one more thing to their TVs.

01:19:50 ◼   ► If you're gonna have this attached to your TV,

01:19:53 ◼   ► you're probably also gonna have a cable box,

01:19:55 ◼   ► you're gonna have something else,

01:19:56 ◼   ► you're gonna have an Xbox or whatever else feeding into it.

01:19:58 ◼   ► It's just like it's one more, it's not a box, it's a ball,

01:20:00 ◼   ► but it's still one more box.

01:20:02 ◼   ► - Right, right. - I just don't know

01:20:03 ◼   ► anybody who wants it sitting there.

01:20:05 ◼   ► - And it seems like with Apple TV,

01:20:06 ◼   ► the way Apple's been going with it

01:20:08 ◼   ► is to get it more and more out of your way,

01:20:09 ◼   ► and that they realize that the big hump to cross

01:20:12 ◼   ► is exactly that, that nobody wants to hook up anything to their Apple, to their stuff

01:20:16 ◼   ► that they've, in addition to everything else, nobody wants one more box. So we're going

01:20:21 ◼   ► to make it as small and unobtrusive as possible and it's only 99 bucks and it only takes,

01:20:26 ◼   ► you just, one cable just plug the HDMI in and then you're done. Yeah, I did, the one

01:20:32 ◼   ► thing that struck me Adam is that the other thing is in addition to being big and heavy

01:20:36 ◼   ► was the LED light. Like that would kill me. Like why would you want like green glow, glow,

01:20:40 ◼   ► Maybe it turns off when you're playing video.

01:20:42 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:20:43 ◼   ► Maybe it's only music.

01:20:44 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:20:45 ◼   ► They've just taken this opposite tack from disguising or hiding components and they've

01:20:51 ◼   ► tried to create this object.

01:20:55 ◼   ► To me, it's just deeply unsettling that it's spherical and I would always be feeling

01:20:58 ◼   ► like it's going to roll away.

01:21:01 ◼   ► The same way that I look at the Boxee Box and it's sitting on a corner and I'm always

01:21:06 ◼   ► going to be watching it because I think it's going to fall over.

01:21:09 ◼   ► I don't want that.

01:21:10 ◼   ► sturdy, rectangular, small thing that just like, it's just like a puck.

01:21:17 ◼   ► It's I love my Apple TV.

01:21:18 ◼   ► I don't think it's one of my favorite Apple products for sure.

01:21:21 ◼   ► Um, and, and the fact that it basically does this Google, the

01:21:25 ◼   ► Q does exactly what an Apple TV has been able to do for far cheaper.

01:21:31 ◼   ► For all this time.

01:21:32 ◼   ► I think they're just like, they're sort of just like, they're planting their flag.

01:21:36 ◼   ► They're just like getting in the game now.

01:21:38 ◼   ► I'm sure like the next iterations of it are gonna be cooler and everything but well

01:21:43 ◼   ► how would you how would a little kid use it if it requires an

01:21:46 ◼   ► 200 or dollar or more Android tablet or phone to use it? How would a kid use it?

01:21:51 ◼   ► It's not it's not for a kid

01:21:52 ◼   ► It's for you and your fancy corporate friends to share all your favorite music tracks at a party

01:21:57 ◼   ► Our daughter uses Apple TV as her main TV

01:22:01 ◼   ► And so she's never seen normal TV with commercials and stuff because all of her shows are just on her Apple TV and at a very

01:22:07 ◼   ► early age, we started watching Shadows when she was like two and a half.

01:22:12 ◼   ► She could use a little remote and get to the show she wanted.

01:22:16 ◼   ► It's simple.

01:22:19 ◼   ► Does she know how to airplay stuff out from the device and things?

01:22:21 ◼   ► No, nothing fancy like that.

01:22:25 ◼   ► And it's the old Apple TV.

01:22:26 ◼   ► It's one of the old vintage ones.

01:22:28 ◼   ► But we don't have an Apple TV on our main TV.

01:22:29 ◼   ► We have just a Mac Mini.

01:22:32 ◼   ► We've got the Mac Mini that still had the DVD drive, and it works great.

01:22:33 ◼   ► It does most of what we want an Apple TV to do, but it has the DVD drive.

01:22:38 ◼   ► So that's how we play all our DVDs when we need to play a DVD.

01:22:43 ◼   ► You know what I love that I've just been recently using more and more is this software called AirParet.

01:22:47 ◼   ► Do you know what AirParet is?

01:22:54 ◼   ► No idea.

01:22:55 ◼   ► If you have one of the new Apple TVs, basically it just lets you stream your desktop or whatever app from your Mac out to the Apple TV.

01:23:00 ◼   ► and the frame rate is pretty solid.

01:23:02 ◼   ► Like it's, it's, it's, there's, it's not perfect.

01:23:04 ◼   ► It's like maybe 15 frames a second or something.

01:23:07 ◼   ► So you wouldn't really want to watch all your movies on it.

01:23:09 ◼   ► But, um, like I'm, I, sometimes I sit on the couch and I just, I, I'll do like

01:23:15 ◼   ► web, I'll look at web stuff and I mean, there's no real awesome way to send a

01:23:21 ◼   ► YouTube, uh, a YouTube window from the, from Safari on the, on the Mac out to your

01:23:27 ◼   ► TV yet. I know that's coming at Mountain Lion, but for right now, the best solution

01:23:33 ◼   ► I've come across is AirParrot.

01:23:35 ◼   ► Let me interrupt and do our second sponsor break. I'm so happy about this. I did not

01:23:41 ◼   ► plan this out. I'm nowhere near organized enough to make this happen naturally, but

01:23:45 ◼   ► it is the best one-two punch of sponsors that I could imagine. It's Serendipity, because

01:23:51 ◼   ► Because our second sponsor is Olloclip. O-L-L-O-C-L-I-P. Olloclip is a very, very fun hardware product.

01:24:01 ◼   ► It's this three lenses in one dingus that you snap on, you slide onto your iPhone 4

01:24:08 ◼   ► or 4S. It comes with three additional camera lenses, a fisheye, super wide angle, a wide

01:24:15 ◼   ► angle, and a macro lens, and it's all in one. It's this little thing that just slides right

01:24:20 ◼   ► over the corner of your iPhone 4 or 4S. And it couldn't be easier and it has a super

01:24:25 ◼   ► great feel. It doesn't scratch up the phone, doesn't leave a mark. You'd never know

01:24:29 ◼   ► it. There's a bunch of other competing things, these additional lenses you can get for your

01:24:33 ◼   ► iPhone. There's some that you have put like a sticker around the lens and then it's

01:24:36 ◼   ► a magnet and you have to do this. I mean, I'm not putting a sticker on my iPhone.

01:24:39 ◼   ► There's others that require you to put like your phone in a dedicated case. Well, I don't

01:24:44 ◼   ► carry my iPhone in a case. And if I did, I wouldn't want to have a case that was specifically

01:24:49 ◼   ► for camera lenses.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Olloclip is just a brilliant idea.

01:24:52 ◼   ► It's just a little thing that takes advantage of the fact that the lens is right on the

01:24:56 ◼   ► corner of the iPhone.

01:24:57 ◼   ► Just a little thing goes right over the corner, take it on, boom, you've got any of these

01:25:02 ◼   ► three lenses right there.

01:25:03 ◼   ► You just turn it around and flip it the other way and you have another lens.

01:25:08 ◼   ► It fits easily in your pocket.

01:25:09 ◼   ► It's super lightweight.

01:25:11 ◼   ► And you can, if you need it, you just take it right out of your pocket, put it on, it's

01:25:14 ◼   ► and to just use whatever camera app you want, including you could use Camera+ Pro.

01:25:19 ◼   ► It works with anything because it just snaps right over the lens.

01:25:22 ◼   ► And for me, as somebody who I said who, you know, a frequent amateur photographer,

01:25:30 ◼   ► I don't know, an enthusiast, photography enthusiast, who doesn't carry a point-and-shoot camera around anymore,

01:25:37 ◼   ► the one big frustration with using your iPhone as your only camera is that you're a lot more limited

01:25:42 ◼   ► limited in the field of view you get out of the lens. I mean, there's digital zoom, which

01:25:47 ◼   ► is crap. Olloclip really, really helps out with that.

01:25:52 ◼   ► Long time ago, I complained about the fact that there was the fisheye. It ends up the

01:25:55 ◼   ► fisheye is super useful when you're shooting video because it turns the video, which is

01:26:02 ◼   ► sort of a crop on the sensor, into a nice wide angle view. And when you're shooting

01:26:07 ◼   ► you can get these incredible photos from really, really cramped areas.

01:26:14 ◼   ► I actually met one of the creators of the OLLO clip, Patrick, at WWDC.

01:26:21 ◼   ► And he had a photo. He got called up. He was getting on the airplane.

01:26:24 ◼   ► He had a photo in the cockpit of the airplane that he took when he flew out to WWDC.

01:26:31 ◼   ► And it was amazing because you could see the entire cockpit, this super, super cramped little thing.

01:26:36 ◼   ► You can see the whole cockpit at once because he had the fisheye lens on his Olloclip on

01:26:40 ◼   ► his iPhone.

01:26:41 ◼   ► It's available.

01:26:43 ◼   ► You can buy this.

01:26:44 ◼   ► You can buy this in Apple stores, the actual Apple stores, which is tremendous.

01:26:47 ◼   ► You just walk right in and buy it.

01:26:48 ◼   ► They have them.

01:26:49 ◼   ► They're in Best Buy.

01:26:50 ◼   ► They're in Target and even sell them at Sprint stores now.

01:26:54 ◼   ► And you can find out more or buy them online at Olloclip.com.

01:26:58 ◼   ► Tremendous, tremendous product.

01:27:01 ◼   ► I recommend it highly.

01:27:03 ◼   ► Adam: Nicely done.

01:27:05 ◼   ► Ben.

01:27:06 ◼   ► Cool.

01:27:07 ◼   ► Yeah, what do you think, Adam?

01:27:08 ◼   ► Do you think I'm doing better with those?

01:27:09 ◼   ► Adam.

01:27:10 ◼   ► Oh, those are great.

01:27:11 ◼   ► Ben.

01:27:12 ◼   ► I'll tell you my trick.

01:27:13 ◼   ► Here's the trick I came up with.

01:27:14 ◼   ► This just occurred to me after your criticism of my sponsor reads before.

01:27:17 ◼   ► No, and you know what?

01:27:18 ◼   ► It just occurred to me.

01:27:19 ◼   ► I think it literally occurred to me in the shower, like one of those, like, I can't

01:27:22 ◼   ► believe I had a great idea in the shower, is the idea was no matter who's on my show

01:27:27 ◼   ► this week, I do the sponsor reads as though I'm explaining the product to you.

01:27:31 ◼   ► So that was me.

01:27:33 ◼   ► That was me trying to explain Olloclip assuming that—I don't even know if you guys had

01:27:38 ◼   ► heard about it before, but I thought, "Here's me explaining to John August and Sandy what

01:27:42 ◼   ► the Olloclip is and why they might work."

01:27:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I've seen you use it, and I know that you really, really like it.

01:27:47 ◼   ► You have it with you all the time.

01:27:50 ◼   ► I do.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I do.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Because I used to be—and it's a little bit—you're carrying something that you

01:27:54 ◼   ► wouldn't be carrying otherwise, but it's so much smaller than my old point-and-shoot

01:27:59 ◼   ► camera combined with the iPhone that it still feels like I'm unencumbered.

01:28:02 ◼   ► So, something you bring with you when you're going on a situation where you might have

01:28:07 ◼   ► taken your point of shoot, it's in your pocket.

01:28:09 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly. Exactly the scenario where you take it. And you really get some fantastic

01:28:15 ◼   ► photos out of it. You'll get – you absolutely get, "Oh, come on. You didn't shoot that

01:28:19 ◼   ► with your iPhone photos out of it." I don't have much more on the agenda, but

01:28:26 ◼   ► But the one thing that's here's the thing that blew me away about the Google IO keynote

01:28:30 ◼   ► yesterday is like they're getting towards the end and I don't even know what they were

01:28:34 ◼   ► talking about.

01:28:35 ◼   ► And all of a sudden, Sergey comes out on stage with his crazy Google Glass.

01:28:42 ◼   ► I keep wanting to call them Google Glasses, but they call it Google Glass, but it's their

01:28:47 ◼   ► glasses.

01:28:49 ◼   ► But otherwise though, you're saying that they're Google Glass glasses.

01:28:52 ◼   ► You know, and it's…

01:28:53 ◼   ► It's I think it's kind of a code name though because itself itself like self-aware

01:28:58 ◼   ► That they're basically just saying that there is no glass by calling it glass

01:29:02 ◼   ► They're they're basically like that the concept is that the world becomes glass which I kind of like

01:29:07 ◼   ► There's I don't know. It's it's deep on that level

01:29:10 ◼   ► But the thing that blew me away had nothing to do with the glasses themselves. It's that they

01:29:16 ◼   ► He said like this is the reason he burst out on stage seemingly ill-timed

01:29:21 ◼   ► It was that they had a I mean, this is so amazing

01:29:25 ◼   ► They had an airplane flying over San Francisco loaded up with guys wearing stuntmen wearing Google glasses

01:29:31 ◼   ► who were

01:29:34 ◼   ► Broadcasting somehow. I don't know what kind of crazy wireless technology that you get on a little prop plane that

01:29:39 ◼   ► Can get your Wi-Fi to stream from the glasses to the stage

01:29:43 ◼   ► but they were doing it so you could see what they were seeing and then the guys jump out of the plane and

01:29:49 ◼   ► parachute onto the top of Moscone Center.

01:29:52 ◼   ► I mean, it sounds like I'm making this up,

01:29:55 ◼   ► but then they're up there with BMX bikes

01:29:57 ◼   ► doing BMX tricks.

01:30:00 ◼   ► - Like, I watched that video, you sent it to me,

01:30:03 ◼   ► and it struck me that it must have been, I don't know,

01:30:07 ◼   ► it must have been much more impressive for the audience

01:30:10 ◼   ► to actually be there live while this is all streaming

01:30:12 ◼   ► and to get that sparkly, goochie feeling

01:30:15 ◼   ► that you're watching something happen,

01:30:17 ◼   ► streaming live up above you,

01:30:19 ◼   ► Because to the rest of us at home,

01:30:24 ◼   ► it just looked like they had helmet cams on.

01:30:26 ◼   ► There wasn't any impressive UI display going on

01:30:28 ◼   ► in front of their POVs.

01:30:31 ◼   ► It just looked like, you know,

01:30:33 ◼   ► what you can do with GoPro cameras now

01:30:34 ◼   ► is just tack them onto your head

01:30:37 ◼   ► and then do extreme sports, and it's awesome.

01:30:40 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:30:43 ◼   ► I think it's one of those things where you had to be there.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I was struck that it was sort of an impressive stunt,

01:30:48 ◼   ► But it didn't really sell me on what the product was, because the product of Google Glass is

01:30:52 ◼   ► that you're going to have this interface that you, the users, are going to see, not so much

01:30:56 ◼   ► that you're going to be streaming live video, because that's not really the main feature

01:31:00 ◼   ► of what Google Glass is supposed to be.

01:31:01 ◼   ► So I've seen other things, just like what Adam describes, with the GoPro things, and

01:31:06 ◼   ► so they had some sort of backpack that was transmitting that stuff, but that's not really

01:31:10 ◼   ► kind of what they say that Google Glass is supposed to be about.

01:31:13 ◼   ► supposed to be about the way you can overlay information onto what you're seeing.

01:31:21 ◼   ► We weren't getting that.

01:31:22 ◼   ► And it's unfortunate that, I mean, like I said, you had to be there.

01:31:25 ◼   ► It must have been an awesome spectacle for a live event, but it didn't translate so

01:31:31 ◼   ► well to video for us to watch it.

01:31:33 ◼   ► Eventually, it will, I think.

01:31:37 ◼   ► when you really are seeing somebody gracefully fall out of a plane and you really get that

01:31:44 ◼   ► sense that it's their point of view like that movie Strange Days, then it will be spectacular.

01:31:50 ◼   ► But otherwise, it's just pretty commonplace.

01:31:53 ◼   ► And you know, Sergei is not the world's best showman, really.

01:32:01 ◼   ► That's something I actually wanted to kind of talk a little bit about is that now that

01:32:06 ◼   ► that we've seen these … We've had these three huge companies' keynotes in succession

01:32:14 ◼   ► and just looking at the difference between their keynote culture, I think it's pretty

01:32:18 ◼   ► spectacular.

01:32:19 ◼   ► It's pretty interesting to talk about how the presentation style reflects what's important

01:32:27 ◼   ► to the culture.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Because when I saw this … When I watched the Google one, the Sergey one with the glass,

01:32:34 ◼   ► looked like the crowd was having a really good time.

01:32:37 ◼   ► And then when I see the WWDC keynote and they cut away to the audience, they don't look

01:32:43 ◼   ► like they're having a good time.

01:32:44 ◼   ► I've never been to one, but it looks pretty stiff and nerdy.

01:32:48 ◼   ► And then in the Microsoft one, it's like not even – it doesn't even compare.

01:32:52 ◼   ► It's like a corporate board.

01:32:54 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:32:57 ◼   ► No, I couldn't agree more.

01:32:59 ◼   ► It was an incredible demo.

01:33:00 ◼   ► one of the most incredible demos I think in the history of the entire tech industry that

01:33:04 ◼   ► they had a continuous streaming video first person from somebody jumping out of an airplane

01:33:10 ◼   ► onto the building where the event was being held doing BMX tricks, repelling down the

01:33:15 ◼   ► side of the building to jump into a window on the third floor and then run up all the

01:33:20 ◼   ► way up on stage and shake Sergey's hand.

01:33:24 ◼   ► But exactly what John said where the demo, the idea is, hey, this first person glass

01:33:29 ◼   ► stuff is going to really come in practical in all the ways, the little things you do

01:33:32 ◼   ► in your life. Well, I don't do any of those things. I don't jump out of airplanes. I

01:33:37 ◼   ► don't do BMX tricks on the roof of a building. And I don't rappel down this side of a five-story

01:33:43 ◼   ► building.

01:33:44 ◼   ► Peter T. Leeson But you will. I mean, I think that's what

01:33:45 ◼   ► that's what—no, I mean, like not in a practical sense, but in a—from a different

01:33:51 ◼   ► sense, you will be doing all those things once all those—once we can—like, once

01:33:56 ◼   ► technology exists to actually project those experiences more directly into our field of vision.

01:34:01 ◼   ► But again, I think that it was more spectacular to be in that audience and watch it happen in real time.

01:34:07 ◼   ► It did strike me that if you were a journalist covering a story someplace and a big thing was happening,

01:34:14 ◼   ► if you have those glasses on, whatever you're seeing, you can narrate. And for journalism, that makes a lot of sense.

01:34:19 ◼   ► But for just extreme sports, we already have GoPro and that does what

01:34:25 ◼   ► this did. Yeah. And I do agree with what you said, Adam, that it's a reflection of the

01:34:35 ◼   ► companies. Apple is really hyper-focused on practical applications. And some of the stuff

01:34:45 ◼   ► that they'll really emphasize and double down on isn't really all that impressive. They'll

01:34:50 ◼   ► spend all this time in a demonstration about how you can make, take a bunch of clips you

01:34:55 ◼   ► shot with your iPhone video clips and put them together in iMovie with a theme and make

01:35:00 ◼   ► this little five minute thing with music and nice font and a very stylish credit, premade

01:35:07 ◼   ► credits thing and you can make this little thing that little nugget of video for your

01:35:13 ◼   ► family trip to the lake house up in the mountains feel like a real thing.

01:35:18 ◼   ► And whether or not everybody who has an iPhone and a Mac actually does that and uses iMovie

01:35:23 ◼   ► that way. You at least feel like I should be doing that or I could do that. And they

01:35:28 ◼   ► really, really emphasize here are the things you either will do with this or you might

01:35:33 ◼   ► feel like you could do with it. And I feel like with Google, that doesn't even really

01:35:37 ◼   ► enter the—that doesn't really captivate them. They can't get it up for that.

01:35:45 ◼   ► I find it really, I find Apple's cast of characters really compelling in terms of who they bring up to do each section of the keynote.

01:35:55 ◼   ► That, you know, that they start off with Tim Cook, and obviously he's no Steve, but he's Tim Cook and he's his own character.

01:36:02 ◼   ► And I could watch him and I could listen to him for a while.

01:36:05 ◼   ► for a while and then they bring in Phil who's fun to watch because Phil is as a

01:36:12 ◼   ► character has developed over the years since the 90s or whatever however long

01:36:16 ◼   ► we've been watching him do these presentations and he's gotten all this

01:36:20 ◼   ► confidence and for some reason he was very soft-spoken and sort of Zen this

01:36:26 ◼   ► time around at the WWC and then when and then this new this this guy Craig

01:36:32 ◼   ► Federighi with that magnificent hair and I could watch him do a demo for hours.

01:36:38 ◼   ► I thought he was fantastic and he was like, he was a little nervous, but he really flowed

01:36:43 ◼   ► well.

01:36:44 ◼   ► And then Scott Forstall, who's like basically, you know, more of a, like a brazen sort of

01:36:48 ◼   ► fratty, you know, he's still smart and controls the room, but like he's definitely more

01:36:53 ◼   ► at ease with himself.

01:36:55 ◼   ► And I just, I find this an incredible cast of characters to watch to present the new

01:37:01 ◼   ► new story of the company's development. I don't think any of these other big companies

01:37:07 ◼   ► care enough about working on their cast of characters, especially Balmer and Segei. If

01:37:16 ◼   ► those guys are the front and center, then they've got to overcome the dork factor

01:37:22 ◼   ► before I start paying attention.

01:37:24 ◼   ► Dave: Yeah, with the Apple presentations, there's very clear, and I thought this one

01:37:29 ◼   ► more than almost any other. It just seems so rehearsed, but that there's three acts,

01:37:35 ◼   ► new Mac books, the new Mac OS X Lion, third act is iOS 6, and each act has its own guy

01:37:43 ◼   ► who does that act and nothing else. And then Tim Cook just bookends it like Walt Disney

01:37:48 ◼   ► introducing and then doing a little – or like Hitchcock on the old Hitchcock show where

01:37:55 ◼   ► Hitchcock will be there at the beginning and say a little something, and then you see the

01:37:58 ◼   ► show and then at the end he comes back out just to say goodbye.

01:38:02 ◼   ► I always love when they go to this demo and the little slide that says "Demo" and it's

01:38:06 ◼   ► italics.

01:38:07 ◼   ► It's a very special thing.

01:38:08 ◼   ► And then I've been watching the WWDC session videos and they do the same thing on the slides

01:38:15 ◼   ► for that demo.

01:38:16 ◼   ► And they show you the demo.

01:38:18 ◼   ► It's such a characteristic Apple thing that they're going to do forever.

01:38:24 ◼   ► The other characteristic Apple thing that I like, and I don't know why I like it, but

01:38:28 ◼   ► works somehow is that when they're going to show you a video, a promotional video,

01:38:34 ◼   ► they say, "We made a video. I'd like to show it to you now. Is that okay?" And they

01:38:38 ◼   ► like ask the audience as though, you know, there's any sort of input. There is no buzzer.

01:38:44 ◼   ► It's not like you're there watching American Idol and you get to press a button like yes

01:38:48 ◼   ► or no. But Jobs always did that. He was like, "If you'd like, I'll show it to you now."

01:38:54 ◼   ► and he's already walking off stage and the video's getting queued up. But they still

01:38:59 ◼   ► do that. They did that with the videos that they made at WWDC. I don't know. But it works

01:39:04 ◼   ► somehow. It does feel like – I feel like when I'm out there, I feel like, "Well,

01:39:08 ◼   ► thanks for asking." I would like to see the video.

01:39:15 ◼   ► So the Glass, the Google Glass, I don't know. It is – it's also – the other

01:39:22 ◼   ► Another thing that's really telling about it is clearly, I mean, they're not pretending

01:39:25 ◼   ► that it's a real product yet.

01:39:26 ◼   ► I mean, they're even saying that the only thing they're going to sell is that people

01:39:29 ◼   ► who are at I/O have an opportunity now to pre-buy for $1,500 a developer unit version

01:39:38 ◼   ► of it that'll be out next year.

01:39:40 ◼   ► Like they're already saying it won't be until like sometime in 2013 when you'll even get

01:39:44 ◼   ► your hands on it.

01:39:45 ◼   ► Not nearly, you know, consumerized yet.

01:39:50 ◼   ► And I don't think anybody – I think this is also – I think there are some people

01:39:53 ◼   ► who this is exactly what they love about Google, that Google is willing to say, "Look, here's

01:39:58 ◼   ► the stuff in our labs."

01:39:59 ◼   ► Whereas, can you even imagine if Apple said, "Here's something that we're planning

01:40:04 ◼   ► to make maybe two or three years from now, but you can buy for $1500.

01:40:08 ◼   ► You can get a preview kit of it now."

01:40:10 ◼   ► It wouldn't happen.

01:40:11 ◼   ► I think the way Apple does it is you'll see somebody else do it first like as sort

01:40:15 ◼   ► of a proof of concept and then Apple will come out with a product that does it better

01:40:19 ◼   ► than anyone thought that it could be done.

01:40:24 ◼   ► Well, Apple first has to deny that anybody would ever want it.

01:40:26 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:29 ◼   ► We have no interest in this whatsoever.

01:40:31 ◼   ► And then they'll announce it and say it's available today.

01:40:33 ◼   ► What Glass means and all the attention it's getting

01:40:36 ◼   ► is that there is something there.

01:40:40 ◼   ► There is something in this space that's really interesting

01:40:41 ◼   ► and a lot of people are going to be trying to solve the problem at once.

01:40:44 ◼   ► But I think what it also says is that such interesting things happen

01:40:47 ◼   ► Interesting things happened when multi-touch came into the picture, that now there are

01:40:55 ◼   ► fun ways, including Voice and Siri and Google now, great brand, and Google Glass and whatever

01:41:05 ◼   ► its competitors will be, and then third and fourth and fifth new UI paradigm shifts that

01:41:12 ◼   ► are going to happen in the next few years that the next huge Apple game changer is going

01:41:19 ◼   ► to have.

01:41:20 ◼   ► And that's why I sent you guys that link to that Leap Motion.

01:41:24 ◼   ► That's far more impressive to me than any of the Google Glass stuff.

01:41:29 ◼   ► Or even the—

01:41:30 ◼   ► Well, let's close the show out with that.

01:41:32 ◼   ► Because I honestly hadn't seen that before.

01:41:34 ◼   ► I know you said that people were linking around.

01:41:36 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:41:37 ◼   ► Somehow I missed that.

01:41:38 ◼   ► So tell us about Leap Motion.

01:41:40 ◼   ► Have you seen that before, Jon?

01:41:41 ◼   ► I'd seen it. It looks very much like what the Minority Report future is supposed to be like,

01:41:46 ◼   ► where the computer is recognizing where your hands are.

01:41:51 ◼   ► But in a way that actually is usable and works.

01:41:54 ◼   ► And I remember a few years ago there was a demo at TED, I think,

01:41:56 ◼   ► where a guy was using color-coded gloves or finger cuffs or something.

01:41:59 ◼   ► And that was neat, because he was doing it on a big, huge 12-foot screen or whatever in front of him.

01:42:04 ◼   ► But now this does it without any accessories.

01:42:09 ◼   ► It's just a tiny little brick that sits in front of your monitor, whatever that monitor

01:42:13 ◼   ► is, whether it's a TV or your cinema display or Thunderbolt display or your laptop.

01:42:21 ◼   ► It senses every one of your appendages, your fingers and your hand and your arm and everything

01:42:26 ◼   ► and with a really, really good response rate.

01:42:29 ◼   ► So it feels real time.

01:42:31 ◼   ► And honestly, if you go to that demo, just if the listeners…

01:42:35 ◼   ► I'll link it up.

01:42:36 ◼   ► It'll be linked up in the show.

01:42:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, like if you watch that demo video and you see those guys talking about

01:42:41 ◼   ► it and demoing it in a way that you know, it's not it's not just movie magic.

01:42:47 ◼   ► It's seriously impressive.

01:42:48 ◼   ► And I think it to me watching that demo gave me the same feeling that I got when I think

01:42:54 ◼   ► his name was Jeff Hahn.

01:42:56 ◼   ► Dema demonstrated multi touch on that big on a big plasma display the first time not

01:43:02 ◼   ► Not none of us knowing that two or three years later, the iPhone is going to happen.

01:43:07 ◼   ► All right.

01:43:08 ◼   ► The other thing people could do if you don't want to go look at the show notes, it's

01:43:12 ◼   ► easy URL, leapmotion.com, and you can see their demo video.

01:43:16 ◼   ► It seems hyper-focused on hands.

01:43:19 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like they took the Xbox Kinect and had it just look for fingers in your hands.

01:43:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:43:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:43:26 ◼   ► That's a smart choice.

01:43:27 ◼   ► Well, basically what it is is it's touch without touch.

01:43:30 ◼   ► touching the air to do all these same gestures in but with the added dimension of depth.

01:43:36 ◼   ► And it solves a huge problem I think that people don't if they don't think about

01:43:41 ◼   ► everybody thinks after they saw the iPhone and especially after the iPad I over and over

01:43:46 ◼   ► I still get the emails but everybody thinks that the Mac is going to go touchscreen and

01:43:49 ◼   ► gonna come out with IMAX that you can touch the screen and I know Craig Hockenberry our

01:43:55 ◼   ► a good friend over at Twitter, if I can say it over and over and over again. Just pretend

01:44:00 ◼   ► that your display in front of you is a touchscreen for five minutes and try to keep your arm

01:44:06 ◼   ► at arm's length distance and see how long before you need like a prop or a sling to

01:44:11 ◼   ► hold your arm up. Your arm gets tired. This solves that problem. Like a touchscreen on

01:44:17 ◼   ► a full-size display in front of you, you can't comfortably do it. It's just uncomfortable.

01:44:23 ◼   ► And in addition to the comfort, it covers up too much of the content.

01:44:27 ◼   ► Your hand is covering the stuff that you're looking at.

01:44:29 ◼   ► This really seems like just as a basic concept, it solves that problem where you can keep

01:44:34 ◼   ► your hands at a comfortable angle, not just sticking straight out from your body.

01:44:40 ◼   ► And you can keep a complete view of the display while you make the gestures.

01:44:44 ◼   ► So …

01:44:45 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani Right.

01:44:46 ◼   ► And as long as that sensor, that little sensor box, it sits reasonably close enough to your

01:44:50 ◼   ► where your hands are and is calibrated to the screen in front of you, however big that

01:44:55 ◼   ► screen is.

01:44:56 ◼   ► I'm making a leap here, but I didn't intend that.

01:44:59 ◼   ► But as long as it's calibrated to the screen, then you can really control gestures on any

01:45:04 ◼   ► size screen in front of you.

01:45:07 ◼   ► To be honest, I think that when and if Apple does a big screen solution, it's going to

01:45:13 ◼   ► to have this kind of technology in it, not doing UI through a glass touch display.

01:45:22 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I like your analogy that it is to gesture

01:45:28 ◼   ► UI, like gesture in the air UI, what Jeff Hahn's multi-touch was to light the iPhone.

01:45:36 ◼   ► Ben

01:45:36 ◼   ► Like everybody knew it was cool, but nobody knew it was going to be used in the next huge

01:45:42 ◼   ► consumer device.

01:45:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a definite – I don't know how I missed it.

01:45:47 ◼   ► It's very impressive.

01:45:48 ◼   ► Well, why don't we call it a show?

01:45:52 ◼   ► I want to thank you guys, John August at johnaugust.com.

01:45:57 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:46:01 ◼   ► What URL?

01:46:02 ◼   ► Adam Lisagor.

01:46:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:46:04 ◼   ► What's the best URL we should tell people?

01:46:05 ◼   ► How about that?

01:46:06 ◼   ► Or a lonely sandwich, either one of those.

01:46:09 ◼   ► Sandwich video.com.

01:46:10 ◼   ► Subway sandwich.com.

01:46:11 ◼   ► Subway sandwich.com.

01:46:12 ◼   ► And if you mention Adam's name in any subway, you will get a free – a free footlong.

01:46:18 ◼   ► Yeah, get a footlong of your choice.

01:46:22 ◼   ► So just come in and say Sandy sent me at any subway and you'll get a free footlong sandwich.

01:46:28 ◼   ► And I'd like to thank our sponsors, Olloclip at Olloclip.com and Camera Plus Pro on the

01:46:35 ◼   ► iOS app store.

01:46:36 ◼   ► This has been tremendously fun for me.

01:46:38 ◼   ► Thanks, guys.

01:46:39 ◼   ► It has been fun.

01:46:40 ◼   ► Good to chat.

01:46:40 ◼   ► Good shot.

01:46:46 ◼   ► I want rhythm.

01:46:48 ◼   ► [Music]