Upgrade - 299: My Gut Says Yes and No

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

There's a raft of media news this week, as Spotify removes a popular podcast from the ecosystem and Apple TV+ makes more content deals. We've got questions about the future of podcasting and whether Apple is committed to a video subscription service for the long haul. And when that's done, Myke at the Movies skips school and steals your dad's car to watch "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Save Ferris!

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 299 today's show is brought to you by pingdom linode fully and uni pizza ovens my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley we're at the end of the 200s now. I know. Can you imagine it? Who would have thought this day would have come? Maybe everybody. Hashtag Snell Talk question this week comes from Alex. We're a very podcast-focused episode today. Lots of podcast talk.

So I thought I'd have a podcast-related Snell Talk. And Alex asks, how do you feel about people referring to either an episode of a podcast or the podcast itself as a, quote, pod? How do you feel about people referring to either an episode of a podcast or the podcast itself as a quote pod how do you feel about pod um it's not a phrase i use i i don't want to be one of those people who tells people what words to use i don't know i don't want to be one of those people i was like no here's another person calling a pod again you know

i i don't know who that person was but they're they're very angry uh and also i don't know what so uh do what you like call it what you like call it whatever um it's pretty arbitrary i think calling an episode of the podcast a podcast is also confusing, but I do that all the time, right? I got to edit the podcast. Do I mean the episode? I mean, the right way to do it is there's podcasts and there are episodes. You could also say we call this a show a lot, which is not even like a podcast. I do show and episodes.

That's what I go with. Yeah. If you want to call it a pod, whatever. That's, you know, sometimes I say it as a joke. I'll, you know, cast in the pods and all that it's fine it's fine i i feel like people should say what they want but it's not a word that i'm going to use my friend and co-host tom gahan the thoroughly considered podcast calls the podcast the pcast uh i don't like that at all that's what he does uh thank you to alex for

that whatever you can't tell him what to do, but you know. I hope you enjoyed this Snell Talk seg in the middle of this pod on the pod. On the waves. Thank you to Alex for sending in that question. You sent out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and it may be included for a future episode. We have a big media episode today.

There's a bunch of apple tv plus related news we're going to talk about spotify and joe rogan and podcasting in general and we have a mic at the movies at the end ferris bueller so so we're rounding out the 200s in style jason that's right we got it we have a like a list of things we have to talk about before we get to 300 i guess and so we're going to pack it all in here. I wanted to sum it up, especially because of all the Apple TV Plus news. Upstream is going to be quite long today. And I think some people sometimes skip upstream,

but I think they shouldn't today because it's mostly Apple focused. They should never skip it. Yeah, I agree that people should never skip upstream. But we give you the option. Yeah, that's why we put the chapters in. Some people love it. It's up to you. But there's a lot of apple tv plus news today so that's why i thought i'd

mention it for the record episode 199 we took a deep dive into apple's forthcoming video service and we made predictions about what it will cost and how their content purchases would roll out plus google gets back into podcasting i think this is the time before the time where they most recently got back into podcasting why does that happen every time why does on the 99 episode both apple does a bunch of stuff in tv and then some company gets into gets deeper into podcasting what happened on episode 99 jason? Oh, let's consult the Sacred Scrolls of Antiquity. It was a similar thing. Episode 99, I got a new mechanical keyboard.

We talked about writing and Scrivener. And, oh, the iPad keyboard that doesn't turn the iPad into a laptop. Fascinating. And we talked about Comic-Con, apparently, so that's interesting. So yeah, we've evolved. That one's less parallels. It is episode 300 next week. We have a very

upgrade topic planned, which Jason came up with. We're both very excited about that. Yeah, it's one of my dumb ideas. As Jason is wont to do. They're not dumb. They are exciting and weird and interesting. It's a very upgrade topic. But alsoason is want to do they're not dumb they are exciting and weird and interesting there's a very upgrade topic but also we wanted to do uh an extended ask upgrade of next week kind of get some meta questions you know so it's a it's a hundred episodes since we've done this

so let's talk about the show a little bit so if you have any questions about upgrade itself um or you know kind of i, especially about podcasting. Again, if there's stuff that you want to know, hear me and Jason talk about. But most of the time about the show, you have questions about that, then just send them in. You can either tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade or if you're in the Real AFM members Discord,

just use the question mark AskUpgrade in the message that you send and they will all be included in a spreadsheet that we collect to choose from. So that's that. Jason, before we leave follow-up today, I wanted to look at maybe some follow-forward. I don't know.

We're a month away from WWDC now, so in like four episodes' time or something will be the WWDC episode. Right. Which is both exciting and interesting, but that was kind of what I wanted to bring up. I realized today it's kind of around this time that I would be making lots of plans, you know, both exciting and interesting, but that was kind of what I wanted to bring up. I realized today it's kind of around this time that I would be making lots of plans, you know, and I don't really have any to make, nor do I even really know how I'm going to handle the week.

It's going to be very different. I feel like I need to have a plan for how to handle everything that I don't currently have. And I just kind of wanted to check in with you to see if you've had any thoughts, like, you know, we're a month away. How are you feeling about the upcoming WWDC? Do you even remember it's happening? Well, I don't. That's the funny thing is I'm not really thinking about it, partly because it is so far away now.

I think what's going to happen is next week, I'm going to feel weird about the fact that it's not happening because that's been traditionally when it's happened the last few years is first week in june so that's going to feel a little bit strange the other thing going into all this is that you know i i am physically present at almost every apple event and this is weird because I have nothing, I don't know what I'm going to do. It's so different and outside of my realm of experience, we have to actually figure out how we're going to cover it and how we want to do that because we're all just sitting in our chairs at home watching this. So I'm also trying to temper my enthusiasm a little bit, given that we have them working on

all sorts of other things, other projects. They just released the iOS version that's got the COVID-19 tracing API in it and things like that. So there's a lot of other stuff going on, and that makes it feel different. So i i don't know i i'm not super excited about it yet but it does feel like the we we're turning to that time um and you know i i notice everybody's getting out in front of it with their uh everybody had on their calendar for late may to start doing their wish lists stories uh which is funny because we've got a month to do them but people are like well nope, nope, I'm doing it now. I'm doing it in May.

So that is nothing puts you in the spirit of WWDC than everybody posting their wish lists on their blogs. So, you know, I'm going to get there. You mentioned 13.5. It's out now. Obviously, the biggest thing that iOS 13.5 included was the contact tracing API that health authorities could take advantage of. It's not been met with great aplomb yet. There's been 22 countries are on board. Only a small

handful of them are actually publicly known. It has not been stated which countries in the complete list are on board. I think Germany is one of them. There was a small list. I'll put a link in the show notes. And I see that you've put in a note that you saw Switzerland had a test go out, right? Yeah, apparently Switzerland is working using the API. And somebody tweeted us earlier today saying that it's a test, but they're actually on the case of using the google apple api right yeah germany switzerland latvia and estonia are currently the countries

that are named to have actually this came from a report from reuters they're the only countries that have publicly said that they're doing it uh and there are four states in the u.s that are on board more states in in America have actively stated they will not adopt it, which is 17, than they're currently stating to adopt. There's still a lot up in the air about this. And I still stand kind of firm in my thinking that a lot of decisions will be changed, right?

Like a lot of decisions that seem to have been made or have been made will be changed. A lot of countries are not ready with an application like my own right like super late right um so that might be one reason why there isn't been a ton of uptake yet and i also think a lot of countries are going to wait until the second like movement of this right where it's where it's even more just built into the system as opposed to you needing to adopt the API into your application. So we'll see. I mean, it's slow going.

It's an incredibly political issue. But hopefully we'll see. I think I still stand in my thinking on this. Hopefully a lot of countries will still adopt this technology because it's available to them and it's probably a better option than them doing it themselves. So that's that. Apple is apparently,

according to a report in Bloomberg from Lucas Shore and Mark Gurman, looking to buy and have apparently already made some deals to get back catalog content for Apple TV+. According to the report, Apple wants to buy up content

to increase the catalog of their service for probably some very obvious reasons right now that stuff isn't being made. And they have not only been taking pictures from studios, but according to this report, have done some deals. We don't have any details about what they've bought or who they're buying it from yet, but this is an interesting move obviously there is a halt on tv production right now which would be a clear indicator as to why you might want to give more to your customers right if you can't make content get the content that exists there's the pipeline right where there are things that have been shot that are in post-production.

And we've talked about how that's slower than usual because people are at home, but there is a pipeline for it. There is. Yep. And then there's like this gap of no live action stuff being shot. And what's really funny is behind that, there is writing. There is a lot of writing going on because the writing has continued during this period of everybody being locked down but the shooting hasn't and the shooting is going to

come back now but there's going to be a delay there's going to be a gap and it's not going to be the stuff that comes out in the next four months right three months it's going to be the stuff that comes out right after that because the stuff that's going to come out in the next few months was already shot. So that's what everybody, I think, who's involved in scripted content is fearing, is if you don't have a lot of it, especially like Apple, if you're Netflix, you could probably just rearrange the launch dates a little bit and stretch things out and make everything a little bit thinner and get through it. But if you you're apple you may find yourself with some unfortunate shortfalls and it's an even more of an issue for apple than maybe some of their competitors because later on this year

they have to convince people to start paying for this because apparently according to this bloomberg report 10 million people have signed up with 5 million actively using the service and I wonder how many of those 5 million are not paying any money for it right now I reckon pretty much all of them and if Apple don't have content and you would expect that they were hoping to say in November, hey, season two of For All Mankind and The Morning Show, they're starting. But that's probably not going to happen, right? I can't imagine that they have enough there

or will have enough there to put those shows in front of people. And even if they do, my understanding is that they were in the midst of shooting For All Mankind and I think maybe Morning Show, I don't even know. So even if they do,

they probably are going gonna have to do something like do part one of season two and and do like five episodes and then stop and then you'll have the second half and that's not great either because you've you know it's like again like 10 million doesn't even seem it doesn't seem like a huge amount of people for what apple have available to them especially if only five million i mean i also want to actively using means like i haven't watched an apple tv plus show in a while but i will like i'm keeping it and i would have i would be paying for it now because there's content that i will want there's stuff on my list like i still want to see mythic quest especially because

everyone's been really praising the quarantine episode like right i've seen unilateral praise for that so i want to watch the whole show and the quarantine like zoom Like, I've seen unilateral praise for that. So I want to watch the whole show and the quarantine, like Zoom episode that they did. Well, sorry, group FaceTime, I'm sure. I can't imagine it was actually Zoom that they were using, but we'll see.

I mean, I don't know. But you've got to assume that Apple are feeling a pressure of getting people to sign up for this service. Like, they do not want that to go away. They want to continue offering something which is of use. And back catalog content seems like a good option.

They didn't do it before, I think, for reasons just like, no, we want to just be HBO. We build prestige television of our own, right? But they didn't want to do the back catalog stuff. But now, what's available now? This is the question, right? If they would have started out, maybe they could have got some interesting stuff, right? Maybe they could have put in the bid for Seinfeld or whatever, right?

But I feel like at this point, most of the bingeable popular shows, they're tied up somewhere. Look, there's a bigger issue here. I talked about this a little bit on um tv talk machine last week it's actually the last episode of the current iteration of tv talk machine because tim goodman who is my co-host for that is a tv critic and he retired from being a tv critic and he's doing something else now and doesn't want to talk about tv which i totally understand but it makes it hard to do a tv podcast when he doesn't want to talk about tv it's hard yeah it's like if you were like you know what forget it i'm moving to do a TV podcast when he doesn't want to talk about TV. Yeah, it's like if you were like, you know what, forget it.

I'm moving to Microsoft. You'd be like, well, that's going to be a problem. No more computer talk. Let's not talk about computer technology anymore. Abacus is in notebooks only. Yeah. So, well, I mean, the notebook addict, it's right there. Anyway.

I could do it with you anytime. The point I made in that, and it was, I feel like Apple needs to decide, really decide if it's in or if it's out. And it has played it. I know they're spending billions of dollars on content and they did this big launch. wants to do this or not, if it really wants to be a content provider, or if it just wants to be an ecosystem and a kind of channel provider for other people's content. I don't know if Apple, Apple has been splitting the difference on that. And I think the challenge is they may need to decide what they want to be. I mean, they are an ecosystem and a channel provider because of who

they are, but do they also want to be this other thing? And Amazon has taken that path. Although Amazon product is different, but it's similar in that it's not a pure product. That's just like Netflix, right? Amazon is prime and it's a whole bunch of different stuff. And they've got a catalog and they've got originals. Apple similarly has an ecosystem and the TV app works, whether you have Apple TV plus or not. And they've given them the gifts of Apple TV to a bunch of people who buy their products, and who knows, maybe that will continue,

especially given the pandemic. Who knows? Oh, that's an interesting point. Right? That it's like, oh, we're not going to make the money. What we could do is give them another year. Give them another gift, yeah. That's a really good point, Jason.

I hadn't thought that. For six months or a year or whatever. Because then the money won't go down on the earnings reports because they'll continue doing the accounting for it exactly and they can say something about how with the with production issues in the pandemic they'll extend it but it doesn't change this this basic point which is oh they wouldn't say that they would say something like we want to continue giving everybody good content at home right they'll spin it that way yeah we want to give them gifts and thank them because it's very important. But the truth is that

it's the pandemic. So here's the thing. Apple could have bought the catalog stuff they didn't. They're like, well, we don't really want to do that. And their approach to content has been more like HBO. We want to be HBO. It's just a few things, but they're curated and they're very nice. But HBO

had a catalog. HBO had a huge catalog of movies and had built a big back catalog of originals. And Apple has none of that. So they deferred. They deferred. Now they're apparently doing this, according to this report, to buy original or to buy catalog content. It's going to be weird. What does it mean? What are they? And then the big problem I see is the TV app. And everybody's got their favorite thing that they hate about the TV app. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about how when you use the TV app, I know that Apple gives itself some extra promotional space.

But the bottom line is when you go to the TV app, the Apple TV Plus service is like a peer to every other streaming service. every other streaming service and and to get to apple tv plus content you can't like i use my apple tv and i've got a netflix app and a hulu app and an amazon app and i know that you can get some of that stuff through the tv app but a lot of it you can't um netflix like it's not doesn't play ball with that so i use the apps i actually am one of those people where the future of TV, it turned out it was apps sort of. But there's no Apple TV Plus app, which means that the one service that requires me to open an app and then go find it is Apple TV Plus. It's the platform owner. And on one level, I want to applaud Apple for saying, you know, we are a conduit to all services and we're not going to overly favor our service.

And yet on another level, it's like, guys, if you're serious about this, there should be an Apple TV plus app at the top of the screen, not an Apple TV app, TV plus service app that takes you directly to a place that is completely devoted to that. And the top level of the TV app isn't. And it's, and I think it's all of a piece, which is they can't decide, are they the ecosystem? Is this just a little fun add-on

and they're not really trying to compete? In which case they're spending billions of dollars on a little kind of fun add-on. Or are they really trying to massively grow the subscriber base, the paying subscriber base of Apple TV Plus? And I don't think this is an interesting indicator, the idea that they might be buying other people's reruns,

other people's old movies. But I think the sign that this actually happens is a purchase. I think we'll know if Apple is really in on this if they buy something. And it doesn't necessarily mean that they need to buy CBS Viacom, although they could, or Sony Entertainment if it's for sale, or something else like a movie studio or something like that, a small movie studio. And it doesn't mean that if they don't do that, they're not in on this, but I think that that would be the clearest sign that they're in on it. It's a realization that they need to step up their library and their original game a lot. And maybe it's not the right decision. Maybe the right decision for Apple is to back off or just have, maybe they want the middle ground. Maybe they want to be present, but not really compete with

the others. I don't know. I bet you that the people they hired to work on apple tv plus all over the world not just in la but all over the world did not get hired to be a you know a loss leader adjunct to a tv app streaming strategy i'm not sure the billions of dollars that they're spending on content and the deals they're making with stars uh are can withstand that in the long run so it's a weird for me i still am in this place where i think apple strategy here is very strange we're like if you're going to spend the money it's almost like if you're going to spend the money you got to spend lots more money otherwise why are you spending the money at all they have been spending lots and lots of more money though right like i i think that this segment has proved that they keep

doing more more more signing more people more content deals more deals but they're but they're up against netflix uh hbo now peacock is coming uh amazon prime like you can tick off all of the media giants that are also doing this and i don't even though i know apple is spending billions of dollars making deals but are they really competing you look at the numbers that have been reported for apple tv plus like they're giving it away and they don't they they don't have that many people signed up. And I think they have not yet had the show, the breakout show. Right.

I haven't had it. And I still believe it's possible for them to do it because they're spending the money, right? Like, again, I agree with it. It's not as much as other,

but they're not spending nothing. And, and I think for them with what it looks like they've been doing over the last six to eight months is getting first look deals in with everybody, right? So there is the possibility that they are getting ready to spend a ton of money, but they're waiting for the scripts, but they're trying to lock people down. I don't know. But I think that right now,

their plan has completely fallen over. Well, yes. If you're in this super low volume, but high quality, and it's a nice add-on, and we're going to build, and we're going to build a catalog, and then you have a content shortfall like this,

it does make things harder. There's no doubt about it because they don't have the bench that Netflix has where like, you know, Netflix has, how many originals does Netflix release in an average week? It's a ridiculous number. It's very easy for Netflix to look at what it's planning. And they've said, like, it's not going to be a problem for us. And you know, it really isn't because it's like an accordion or something. You can just take the summer and just go, and now it goes to the end of the year, right? They can just do that.

Apple can't do that, right? Apple is going to hit a gap here. And it's going to be, as you pointed out, exactly the wrong time. I'd be fascinated to see what they've bought. I'm really intrigued to see if they've done these deals that bloomberg is reporting that they've done what is it like i'm really keen to see like what have they bought that they think is worthwhile like is it tv is movies where's it coming from yeah my guess my guess is movies probably easier to get movies than tv right and it gives

you that hbo vibe i do believe that the old hbo which is going away now sort of with the hbo max thing that the old hbo approach is kind of apple's guiding star that they want to be high quality lower volume but talked about and prestigious and hbo also had a movie library so it's like you throw that in and there are a bunch of movies that you can get. And you can imagine them integrating that into their apps and stuff where if you go to a movie or search for a movie or even featured in their movies interface when you're looking to rent a movie and they've got the ones that are just free, like what Amazon does with Prime, where there are movies you can rent and buy, and there are also movies that are just free and you can browse those so that would be my guess my other theory that i had back when we were 100 episodes ago when we

were debating this is they could do a thing where it's like things that are thematically linked to their originals so you know can you get uh i don't know uh west wing and pair it with the morning show or uh or get battlestar galactica and pair it with for all mankind. Cause they're from, you know, they're, they're kind of thematically similar or they share some connective tissue of some sort.

But, um, my guess is that it's, it's movies. Although again, I will say, I think that they should just seriously consider buying something that, that I know it would be very dramatic CBS,

like CBS Viacom. Yeahom yeah like or viacom cbs i guess is what they are because then they get they get comedy central and they get mtv and they get um and they get cbs and they get all the the star trek stuff and they get the good wife and the good fight and all that they get all the all your ncis and csis like the the good extended universe right it's the one. You get live football. You also get TV stations that they don't want. But times are weird, right? Maybe you just...

I mean, actually, there's a precedence with Fox, right? Fox, yeah. They just buy what they want and spin off the rest. They could also buy all the pieces and leave the broadcast stations just sitting out there. And the news division. And just they just sit out there and they're part of some other company that is not owned by Apple. I think they could do that. I don't think they will, but I think they could. And it just, it feels to me like if they really want to go all in on this, that's what they need to do. And they don't seem

to want to go all in on this. I'm not saying that they need to. I'm saying that they could, and they seem to have chosen not to. Firecomom don't they have a bunch of music too are they just tv i don't know i don't know that's a weird business that whole story about them getting segmented off of cbs and then put back in uh who knows yeah super weird but that i mean you've you've mentioned viacom cbs on this show a bunch of times it's like that's probably the one right well it's the biggest one that's kind of freestanding and is not owned and none of the other big players can buy it because of you know of regulations there's no way they would be allowed to buy it right comcast at&t they can't come in and be like we'll have that one too or disney right they yeah they can't come in and be like, we'll have that one too, or Disney. Disney, right.

Yeah, they can't. Apple did buy something. It's a movie by Tom Hanks. It's called Greyhound. It's a World War II battleship drama written by and starring Tom Hanks. Fill in the pipe. Fill in the pipe. It was supposed to be released on Father's Day in the theaters,

and it was decided that it wouldn't be, and that it then got shopped around. And Apple put up the $70 million needed to get 15 years worth of rights. This is from Sony. And it now is the first Tom Hanks movie to debut on streaming. Yeah, think about it this way. $70 million reportedly for this. That's basically Apple saying, well, do you think you're going to get 70 million at the

box office for this movie in a normal world and what do you think you're going to get now which is nothing and sony wants to sell it because sony doesn't have room in its schedule for it and they go to tom hanks and tom hanks is like all right we'll do it and it's it's a funny world because this is probably more money for everybody involved in this movie than they would have gotten in the normal world. I think when, if it got released, but fewer people will see it, which is interesting.

Um, also it's Oscar eligible because it had a scheduled release date, but it didn't get released. Yeah. So it's, it's Oscar bait. Two. And you know what?

Tom Hanks, World War II movie. Um, I didn't even know this movie existed, and I will watch this movie. I think this sounds great. I love Tom Hanks, and he has made some very, I mean, he wrote this. He cares very much about certain subjects and pours his heart into them. You saw it with From the Earth to the Moon and with the Steven Spielberg World War II series. What, The Pacific, he produced that. And Band of Brothers, which was right on the heels of Saving Private Ryan. I mean, there's, you know, this is a passion project for him that also,

I think is right in his wheelhouse. So I'm looking forward to seeing it. And I guess I'll watch it on Apple TV+, which is, that's good. There's a lot of this going on right now. I think the question is, is this the new world or is this just contingency planning because of the old world ending? And we don't know yet because we don't really know what theatrical is going to look like in the future. Is there stuff like this that's not tied to a franchise and isn't an enormous budget movie, was already kind of on its last legs in movie theaters? And even when movie theaters come back,

this stuff may not do that, especially when you've got streamers who are really hungry for content. And the people who are more likely to watch streaming are probably demographically a better match for these kind of movies because they're a little bit older and they're not going to movie theaters as much.

So that's for me is the big question is, I'm not sure whether this is the new way things are going to be or if it's just a weird bump because of the situation we're in right now and my gut says yes and no to that yeah yeah i was going to say a little my gut says a little bit of both right like this isn't exactly how it will be but it'll be more like this than it was before also as well like i mean it's to be weird but like tom hanks is a good person to have right now because the whole world loves him even more yeah exactly also he already had the coronavirus so he's invulnerable he can

shoot any movie now right now anywhere uh but like genuine like he's in the zeitgeist again even more than before because he is very newsworthy at the moment. And I think everyone has remembered how much they love Tom Hanks, except for Max Demkin. He doesn't like Tom Hanks, I found out a few weeks ago. But everybody else is a monster. That's fine. Everybody else loves Tom Hanks. So like, it's, you know, but I actually, I can't wait to see this movie because Tom Hanks

is one of my favorite actors. Like, I think he's amazing. I love him and everything. So I will watch this. I would not have gone to the cinema to see this movie because Tom Hanks is one of my favorite actors. I think he's amazing. I love him in everything. So I will watch this. I would not have gone to the cinema to see this movie though. So this might be a bit of a trolls thing for them. It's like, oh, lots of

people have seen this movie because it's available to them. I wonder how Apple's going to market this if at all. That's what I'm interested about. Am I going to get an email from Apple telling me to activate my TV Plus subscription to watch greyhound right like maybe that apple also have not yet uh announced a release date for this movie um but you would expect i mean let's be real father's day was a very good weekend for that movie to open

and maybe they just go for that right like that's my guess is that it will be a father's day release they'll just literally release it at the same time but they already have that father's day thing um movie documentary about dads which oh boy do you remember that it was uh yeah oh here it is i found it dad's june 19th it's oh it's it's uh bryce dallas howard yep that's it that's ron howard is who you were thinking of who worked with tom hanks on apollo 13c it's all connected um and there yes dad's that's june 21st you know that central park series is coming this week the uh bob's burgers nice it's this week yeah we're gonna have to do an apple TV content update

pretty soon because they are rolling out a bunch of new stuff. Oh, they also... This is really weird. This one's weird. Apple TV Plus is in early development of a series about Gawker. Gawker Media. Ex-staffers Max Reed and Cord Jefferson. By the way, Cord

Jefferson is an amazing name. But anyway, I noticed that he worked on The Good Place. Oh, did they? Fantastic. It's The Good Place and Watchmen, I think. Yes. Cord Jefferson worked on both of those.

Well, Cord worked at Walker before. They're developing scripts about the controversial media company. I'm going to give a quote from Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair. Jefferson and Reid declined to comment, so details are scant, but the series is described to me as a dramedy about Gorka's ascent and

its impact on the media landscape as it transformed from an insidery gossip blog into a major force in the type of journalism that skewers celebrities in the powerful. Interesting. I wonder if they'll do an iphone 4 episode ha like seriously can you yeah but can you imagine that can you imagine apple paying money to produce an episode that talks about finding an iphone 4 in a bar and steve

jobs secret police call right like all of that i would love that they won't do it i'd love it this felt to me like apple trying to find that typical netflix like show like they're also doing a show about we work right like they bought a podcast rights to a podcast i think they want some of that based on real events style that that type type of very meme-y content gets people talking. They also just signed a deal this week with the creators of the, I think this was the HBO docuseries McMillions, which is about McDonald's, for a four-part docuseries. Their only details are that the series is about a, quote,

unbelievable true story of one of the largest scams in government history. So it seems like they're going for some content which they don't currently have but will and it's a lot of this like scandalous real world stuff that we're making into a drama which i don't know what that makes me think of but it reminds me of a lot of stuff that i see on netflix and there's there's a you know you you can't make one kind of show and everybody has learned this right like you can't just make a prestige drama you also need to make comedies and you need to make docu-series and you need to make things

that appeal to different demographic groups and all of those all of those things are going on because um you know like tiger king and the last dance now like these are long-form documentaries that are buzzworthy during everybody being locked down and like i've said this before but like can you imagine saying in the future everybody will be talking about 10 hour long documentaries that they watch at home and you're like that's never gonna happen nobody can sit still for like a 90 minute documentary let alone 10 hours and they're gonna sit at home when they have all sorts of other choices and they're just going to watch a 10 hour documentary. I don't care whether that's about some guy who maybe murdered tigers or some other guy who won a bunch of championships

in Chicago. Whatever, nobody's going to do that. and the fact is they are so uh you got to cover all the bases you got to have your you got to have your snarky based on true story series and you got to have your prestige drum and you got to have your docu-series and you got to have your kid stuff and like and that is a game that apple apple is playing and the animated right apple is playing that game so that's something hbo max launches this week in the u.s which i'm jealous about i would like that content but something that i thought would be interesting which i just wanted to know is that they announced that they're going to be releasing the snyder cut of justice league in case you don't know what this means so zach snyder um had to depart the movie production of Justice League because of a family tragedy.

So Joss Whedon stepped in to finish it. The movie came out, it wasn't good, and everybody blamed Joss Whedon. An online campaign began to hashtag release the Snyder Cut. Some positive, mostly toxic, as these things tend to go. So HBO Max are allowing and are giving the like everything back to zach snyder to recut the movie edit the movie i just want to be clear here the one of the reasons that that a lot of us rolled our eyes at the release the snyder cut people is because there

was this conspiracy theory that there was this amazing zach sder version of Justice League and it was the movie that the studio didn't want you to see. And the truth is, he left in the middle of production. They were going to do reshoots but there was also the original stuff. He did do an early cut that was like four hours long but then he cut. They wanted a shorter movie but like, it wasn't

like the real movie was sitting in a vault and then they conspired to take the movie away from him and bring in Joss Whedon. It was much more like they were working on the typical back and forth and then Zack Snyder and his wife lost a child and they had to go do that, deal with their personal tragedy. They brought in Joss Whedon who did the avengers to uh you know finish the movie and people didn't like it so they're like boy i hear that that zach snyder had this original thing that that might be something but but what they're going to need to do is spend 20 or 30 million dollars making it happen so there was nothing releasing the snyder cut is essentially finishing the snyder cut but but warner brothers and hbo max like they're they're desperate for

more hbo max content so we live in a world where we've got something that's already mostly made or mostly shot anyway that they can throw some money to out of their hbo max development budget they get some good publicity for it they've got this kind of grassroots group of people who are convinced that this is going to be great. And they've got a tentpole kind of thing that they can launch when it comes out. And in fact, they're already talking about how they're maybe not going to release this as a movie,

but as a mini series. So you can imagine like the marketing wheels are already turning. So it's an interesting story. I think it's a one ofof-a-kind series of events that led to it happening but um it is i think a very canny case of warren brothers and hbo max saying um we could get a lot out of giving 20 or 30 million to zach snyder to finish this and release it as an hbo max exclusive so they're going to do it. I'm not sure about the precedent that this could set.

And I don't know how I feel about it. Oh, man. You can take two views on it. One is like big company listening to its fans. The other is you make enough noise and you'll get what you want. Yeah, this is the... So my favorite TV show of all time from when i was a kid was the original star trek and of course it got saved twice by uh letter writing campaigns and save our show campaigns it

was the original save our show campaign and i'm very glad that star trek exists that said every show that ever gets canceled has a save our show campaign now and you know occasionally they succeed and that's great but now that we have to deal with all of them yes and that's annoying and so yes there's gonna be every time a director leaves a movie i can't wait for the all the josh trank fans out there to say fantastic four release the trank cut right they're probably already out there aren't they right because Right? Because he had to change that movie and they brought in somebody.

Like, that's going to just happen again and again. Why don't we do a Dumbledore truthers thing where everybody starts with like a hashtag that they want to CGI a version. They get Michael Gambon back and have him replace the original Dumbledore in the early movies so that there's continuity. Why don't we do that? Like start that as a a thing. It's just gonna, you know, it goes

on and on and on. So, you know, that part makes me kind of roll my eyes. But I think as a business thing, it's a fascinating development. And my guess is that the reality of it won't be as good as the dream, because that's how life works. But more power to

him. We'll see how it to him we'll see we'll see how it is we'll see uh unfettered zach snyder at last and do you want to just rejoice about the hulu app my understanding is that everybody loves that the hulu app is fixed yeah the hulu app was really bad the hulu app got updated last week the hulu app is way better now and i am actually watching more hulu than almost any other streaming service maybe the most of any streaming service in this current pandemic um the fx stuff so disney owning hulu now and pouring all of the stuff from fx networks onto it and that stuff is really good creatively and um and that stuff's all poured in there plus hulu originals plus their catalog it's pretty good it's a pretty good service i really am spending a lot

of time in hulu but their interface was terrible and now it's now it's uh better so hooray for that it's it's it's not even that i would say it's good i would just say it's like every other tv app interface now and that's good enough like because it was way below that before now all we need to do is get now tv updated and then i can be happy because that is the real true terrible, terrible. Hulu's old interface had two side-scrolling tabs on top of each other. And the one that was selected, by the way, that you could see it was because there was a line above the text. It was like an over line. And you didn't really know which was selected.

And how do I get all the way up to the top bar, or am I just in the middle bar? It was really bad, but it's gone now. So there's only one navigation bar in Hulu now. Woo-hoo! Yeah. Today's episode is brought to you by Ooni Pizza Ovens. Ooni is the world's number one pizza oven company. They make surprisingly small ovens that are powered by your choice

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It's one of their really great pizza ovens. Uni also make an awesome app that can help you perfect your dough recipe and give you loads of pizza-making tips. Now, Mr. Jason Snell, you sent me a picture a few days ago of a very nice-looking pizza. Mike, you know, when we got uni as a sponsor i kept bugging you i was like are they gonna send me one are they gonna send me one i want it i want it i want it i want it mike stop hold me back hold me back i i need to get this should i buy it and you're like no i think i can get you them to send you one they sent me one um i like pizza and i like making pizza i've been making pizza for like 25 years now, my own pizza.

It's so much fun. Like it uses the same propane cylinder as my gas grill does. So we just got another one of those, but we ran out and I just moved it from one to the other. It heats up really fast. It gets super hot, like much hotter than my oven can get inside the house. And also it doesn't heat up my kitchen on a warm day. That's really fast. It gets super hot, much hotter than my oven can get inside the house. And also, it doesn't heat up my kitchen on a warm day. That's really nice. It doesn't take a lot of space. Yeah, I've got it on my patio. I put it on my patio when I want to cook. It arrived in a box. I didn't have to assemble it. I had to slide in the pizza stone kind of

thing that's the base of it. But otherwise, it's it is it's the oven you flip down the legs and and there it is and it because it's so hot it cooks really quickly so you slide the you slide the dough on and then i have the little turning peel and you you know it it it cooks the crust and then you kind of like spin it around in there and it's it's like a giant broiler it's broiling on the top and so you end up with really nice crust uh really kind of caramelized toppings and cheese on the top and it's done in minutes which has made me uh make more smaller pizzas rather than one big pizza um so that i can have different toppings on the different pizzas which is also a lot of fun so i've only done it i think three sessions so far So I've got a lot to learn. Only three sessions.

I've only made, yes, I've only made like six pizzas with it, but there are more pizzas to be made. But it's so much fun. It was super easy to set up. And like, yeah, it makes me very happy. So it's one of my favorite new gadgets. I couldn't be happier. Listeners of this show can get 10% off their purchase of an Ooni pizza oven,

which is up to $50 off an Ooni Coda 16. Go to OONI.com and use the code UPGRADE at checkout. These things are super popular right now. Everyone's after one, so make sure that you don't miss out. Ooni pizza ovens are the best way to bring restaurant-quality pizza to your own backyard. Go to OONI.com and use the code UPGRADE for 10% off. Thanks to Ooni Pizza Ovens for their support of this show and RelayFM. Joe Rogan is being hired by Spotify to make his show exclusive to their platform. You may have heard about this in some of your favorite shows the last week or

so, and it was obvious that we were going to talk about this topic here today because it fits so nicely in the Venn diagram and stuff that we talk about on Upgrade. Both the audio and video versions of this show are joining Spotify, and by the end of 2020, Spotify will be the only place that you can get the Joe Rogan experience. That's not a pun, that's the name of the show. We don't know the price of this deal yet. We may find out later. It's estimated to be north of $100 million, but there could be bonuses, goals, and all that kind of stuff for a multi-year exclusivity deal. This is not an acquisition like Spotify have done with The Ringer and Gimlet.

an acquisition like Spotify have done with The Ringer and Gimlet. They signed Rogan up to a deal. Effectively, Rogan works for Spotify now for as long as this deal lasts, but he still owns the show. So if at the end of the deal he wants to leave, go somewhere else, he can. So there's some slight differences to say like the Gimlet deal, which we may be more familiar with on this show, where they acquired the company and all of the assets. So if everybody leaves Gimlet, Spotify still own all that. It's not the case with Joe Rogan. For a little bit of context, in case you don't know, the Joe Rogan experience is easily the biggest podcast in the world right now. Apparently, approximately 200 million downloads a month, which seems completely accurate, but also millions of views on YouTube as well. So it's video and audio. So, you know, you can see

it battling out against like this American Life and Serial and shows like that, but they don't also have this massive YouTube presence. So huge deal here, right? What is your take kind of top level, Jason? Like what did you originally feel when you saw this news? Well, I mean, it's huge and it's bad for open podcasting. That was my immediate take. A lot of people brush off Joe Rogan. If you're not in the Joe Rogan sphere of influence,

you're like, who is this guy? But seriously, it's either the biggest or second biggest podcast in the world right like it's depending on who's measuring and all that but it's it's huge and he's what this deal really is it's not about even being behind a paywall since it's going to be free on Spotify. What it really is is about forcing people to use Spotify to hear his show. And it's going to get Spotify a bunch of new users because it's the only way they're going to be able to hear the show. And then they're in Spotify's ecosystem. So at that point, it's more convenient to have all your podcasts in one place. So maybe they listen.

They add all their other podcasts in Spotify. And now they're in the Spotify ecosystem. They're not in the open web ecosystem. If you want to use, or the open podcast ecosystem, if you want to use Overcast or Pocket Cast or Castro or anything like that. Or Apple Podcasts.

Or Apple Podcasts. Or any of those. You can't. Or YouTube, which they posted Joe Rogan's show on YouTube too right like that's all gone it's just going to be next year on on Spotify's platforms and that is it's the way I've been likening it is like imagine if there was a website you really liked and they said um now it's only available in our app like it's kind of like that

where we're taking our ball and going home. If you want to read it in a web browser, you can't. We're not going to let you do that. And while you can read it in an app and a lot of people do that, you can also read it on the website. And Spotify is like, you have to be in our app in order to get it.

And it's quite a power move. They're spending a lot of money. I read somewhere like how much money this would be an equivalent of how they'd pay how they pay musical artists for their subscription service but and it's a lot like because the music artists are really angry because spotify doesn't want to pay them very much but uh they're happy to pay joe rogan the difference is that this is an ad play right this is this is a an ecosystem play more people using our app and then they're and it's free so they're gonna they're gonna try to create a sales infrastructure

where they're inserting ads in this stuff and they're presumably the deal is something like they're getting the exclusive and then they are gonna try to make up some of that money by selling ads into it but like it's a so it's a you know it's a, you know, I think it's a huge deal. Well, I've seen reports that like Joe Rogan is able to continue selling his own ads in the show and will continue

to get that money. I haven't seen that confirmed, but. And again, the amount that they're spending, it's all part of the negotiation, right? Does he get to keep

all the ad revenue or some of the ad revenue? If they take the ad revenue, then it's more like a guarantee, which a lot of podcast ad networks do, where they'll say, I'm going to write you a check for this much money. And then it's up to us to sell the ads.

But you just get the money and don't have to worry about our ad sales. But, you know, if they walked away with all his ad revenue, they'd probably have had to pay him more. Right. So they paid him less for the license license but he gets to he gets to keep ad revenue the difference is he will lose some listeners right because some people will just not follow him although i think most people will i think he's gonna lose more viewers than listeners i think there will be a much bigger hit to the youtube audience side the video side than the audio the power of youtube absolutely absolutely the case i've never watched joe rogan really like i've seen clips but i was recommended a joe rogan video on youtube two

days ago and i watched it it was like a 15 minute clip of robert downey jr and i was like oh i want i'm i can't remember it was like about some roles that he's taken and whether he regrets them or not and i was like oh i like robert downey jr i'll watch this but that kind's taken and whether he regrets them or not. And I was like, oh, I like Robert Downey Jr. I'll watch this. But that kind of shows, and that video had 17 million views on it. It was a 15 minute clip because this is the other thing. They do lots of clips, so they don't just have the full version. They have another channel of like clips and those clips get massive amounts of views because like a 10 minute thing is more YouTubey, right? All of that's gone. Like that, I honestly believe is going to be the bigger hit because the YouTube numbers are always going to be bigger than the podcast numbers

because YouTube is just so much bigger. And there's like a lot of people saying, oh, Rogan's had problems with YouTube monetization, right? Oh, YouTube's been demonetizing him and it's one of the reasons he wanted to leave. A few things on this. One, that YouTube money is nothing compared to what he's getting from the ads, which he's including the YouTube numbers in when he's selling them, right? So when he's going out or when his people are going out to an advertiser,

they're not just saying, oh, we're only going to sell you the like 5 million podcast listeners we have. No, they're also saying, and there's another 7 million people here on YouTube that will see this or whatever, right? They're selling the whole thing together. So the ads that are in the shows, it's all getting bumped up by YouTube, right? So yes, he may be losing YouTube ad revenue from demonetization, but it's not that much of a problem because

YouTube, it's like the rising tide lifts all ships, right? Because he has that access to a large audience. But some people think that, oh, he's making the jump because he gets in trouble with YouTube and they demonetize him because the thing about Rogan is he will interview anyone. It's one of the things people like about his show is he could be quite controversial and he'll interview you know bernie sanders but also ben shapiro right like he'll do everyone right he'll interview anyone but i don't see how he is not in a worse position when it comes to this now because he didn't work for youtube didn't work for google. He didn't work for Google. They don't care.

They'll just take his money away if they don't like the content. He is now an employee of Spotify. Anything he does- Is he? I've seen people say that he is, but irrespective. I don't believe it. I believe they have a,

he's like a studio that has an exclusive license agreement with Spotify. Everything he does now will affect- This is going to be important when the apologies happen later. like he will he has much of a more of a reflection on spotify and him are much more tied together than him and google are right because if he does something that is incredibly controversial he is monetarily linked to spotify Like, if there are any PR crises, it affects them, right?

Much more than it ever would have affected Google, because Google were like, we have nothing to do with it. But you've got to assume that he has a contract with Spotify that lists this kind of stuff in it about, you know, these kinds of issues if he is being too controversial. It's like, I just,

what my point here is, irrespective of the details, the idea about him doing this so he finally gets out from under the thumb of YouTube, that's insane. That's like, that's really just a wrong argument. Like, I can't see that, right? Are you following me? Yeah. Like, this is not a play of like, oh, I need my independence. No, no it's not that he's less independent now because he works for spotify in some instances anyway that's just a point that i wanted to make do you think that his listeners will follow him along like do you think that this is going to be worth it for spotify like ultimately yeah in the in the short term i do whether i think it's a multi-stage thing right like they're going to get an influx of users who've never tried spotify for podcasts before that's that's step one um it will

it's not without risk right like if joe Joe Rogan does stuff, that's really controversial, Spotify is going to have to kind of like live it down and deal with it. And there's a non-zero chance that they are going to have to terminate this agreement, right? Like a non-zero chance that, that it becomes such a black eye that they have to walk away. I'm not saying that will happen, but it could happen.

Because especially if they start doing a big ad thing and those ads are being sold on Joe Rogan and he does something that people turn against him for and start campaigning to the advertisers to come off Joe Rogan, right? Like these are the flows you end up going through. And, but yes, sorry to interrupt you. No, the play for Spotify, right?

They want users and there's the ad play, right? They want to build an ad network. This is the one that I've seen a lot of people talk about. They want it to be YouTube, right? They want users and there's the ad play, right? They want to build an ad network. This is the one that I've seen a lot of people talk about. They want to be YouTube, right? They want to be YouTube. And what that means is they want a platform that they control that a lot of people use that they can sell ads into programmatically. And what you'll get is worse ads for less money, but you make it up in volume, great for Spotify, bad for podcasters, most podcasters, unless you've got huge volume. And if they can convince advertisers that Spotify is the place to buy advertising, if you're not in Spotify using their ad system, you're basically out of luck.

And that will potentially harm, I'm not going to say kill, but that will harm the outside of Spotify podcast ecosystem. And you could even end up in a scenario where everybody has to use Spotify's ad system, even if they're not in Spotify or not just in Spotify, because they also have some podcasts that are not in Spotify. But if they're ad supported, Spotify wants to be the ones to sell them. So that's really the risk here is that talk to a YouTube creator about the incredible amount of leverage that YouTube has over their lives why do you think so many YouTube creators now do Patreons like CGP Grey is a good example of that but there are lots it's like well that's a direct connection with their audience

where the money goes from the audience to the creator whereas on YouTube, there's a lot of money to be made if you've got a lot of followers with their ad system. But anything that Google wants to do to you, you have to accept because they own you, because everything is on YouTube. And Spotify looks at that and says,

that's great. We want to have that control over podcasters. Yeah, I want to dig into that a little bit more, that whole ad thing because if there's a thing i know podcast i know this is your business so i believe that like many right look i don't know how much of this is is new thinking but i want to add the detail that i have so i genuinely believe spotify slicing and dicing the ad business. That's what all of this is for. It's what the whole thing's been for.

They want an additional large revenue stream. And they want to make a monetization platform for audio like YouTube have for video, as Jason said. And this isn't just like, oh, I think this is the case. This is true. So one, they count these large deals in their ad business financially. One, they count these large deals in their ad business financially. They actually adjusted some previous records to move the acquisition of Gimlet from their content arm financially to their ad business financially, because that's where they're going to make money.

So they're saying, oh, this is a cost for that part of the business. This doesn't affect anyone, but it's important to see that because you can see how they value it. They've also spoken on conference calls. Daniel Eck, the CEO of Spotify, said the following, no, there has been no innovation in podcast advertising, and we're working hard on building digital ad sourcing technology, and we'll use that technology to dramatically revolutionize ad experiences of podcast group listeners. I think advertisers alike are very eager for us to get into the space with all of the measurability tools and all of those things that we're bringing to the industry.

To me, I can only read this as, we want to do what YouTube is doing, but for podcasts. And what that means is, so that ad I just did for Ooni, that's not what you're going to hear. You may hear an ad, so that ad I just did for Ooni, that's not what you're going to hear. You may hear an ad like an ad, right? In that place, if I'm in the Spotify system, but it won't be me reading it. You're not going to hear about Jason's experience making the pizzas. You're going to hear some prerecorded thing that maybe I did, but probably somebody else did, like YouTube, right? They want to put ads into shows.

And also those ads may be about a local business to you because they're going to chuck them in there. You may have heard people talk about, and we've spoken about this before, DAI did like insertion. So the ads by tracking and they will insert stuff in. And because you're using Spotify's closed platform, they're going to collect more data about you, right? That's going to's closed platform, they're going to collect more data about you, right? That's going to be a thing that they're going to do because they have the

ability to do that. They can get more information about you. Like Spotify already have some tools like this in place. Like RelayFM shows are in Spotify, right? We did that because we're a business. It'd be wild not to. We want to try and make our stuff available where we can. When we looked at the deal with them, the terms were good. We reviewed the terms. If the terms change, we may not be in Spotify anymore. I don't know. But Spotify have a closed platform and they have data that other places don't have, right?

Like they have breakdowns of age. They have breakdowns of gender. They can tell me, I don't know how this is useful, but people don't listen to Upgrade. What type of music do they like? I don't know why that would be useful to me, but Spotify have a platform that can tell me that. So they have more and they will do everything they can to get more and more data about you so they can target the advertising to you. I don't know if they would succeed if they stay just in the Spotify ecosystem because they would need a lot more of the market

than they already have. And they even would have by bringing Joe Rogan in to make sweeping changes to the business model that affects everybody, right? They can't push in and be YouTube unless they come up with a system, which was what Jason was saying, where if you listen in Apple Podcasts, they also make money. But they can do that. They own Anchor,

right? A podcast distribution hosting company that has the advertising technology created that they're probably using, right? That's what they'll use, where they can have ads put into shows and can have this system. They made it, I believe, just before they got bought by Spotify, but it was part of the play, I'm sure. And I would believe that what Spotify want to do is try and get everyone to use the Spotify branded podcast creation system so they can put ads in and tell you that you'll make money, right? That everyone can make money podcasting now because they're going to spread the ads across everyone. I don't think this is a good idea for a reason I'll get into in a minute, but I also would expect that if you use this system, you obviously have to be on Spotify as

well as everywhere else. But I think some of the terms may say stuff like, you should tell your listeners only to listen on Spotify, right? Don't mention in other places. And for example, on the Gimlet shows right now, they are saying the best place to listen to these shows is on Spotify. And obviously they're being told to say that because it doesn't make any sense. Spotify doesn't offer any additional functionality, but they are being told to do that. So my wife, Idina, listens to a show called Science Versus, and they had like a little ad. It was kind of funny, but there's a little bit of rebellion to it. So it's a science-based show, and the host is saying, you should listen on Spotify. It's the best place to listen to this podcast.

And then the producer jumps in and says, do you have any scientific data for that? And she says no. So they're kind of making a funny joke about it, but that's because their boss told them, you have to say this now because their boss told them. So like, this is the kind of stuff that will be like, they will allow you to use this technology potentially in other places,

but you have to say, listen on Spotify. Again, all of this is just my feeling about this, like my read on it. Now, if they can siphon off enough large players, so advertising agencies, so there are agencies that recruit smaller companies, right? So you'll have a few big agencies. You also have big companies like Squarespace, who, you know, everybody knows Squarespace, but they do it on their own. They have a team. But then you have advertising agencies who work directly with companies like us, and they work with smaller companies that want to advertise in podcasts, but don't have their own teams to do it, right? And I think the big risk there is if Spotify can

convince enough of those large buying companies to work directly with them, that's the big risk. And I feel like that risk is there right now like because spotify can walk in and say that they can be more effective they can have better data and they'll have cheaper prices because they will push the market down so the biggest name in podcasting right now is still apple because they have the huge directory and they have the most popular podcast client so but their approach to this they are not spotify their approach to this, they are not Spotify. Their approach to this is very different. I'm wondering what, if Apple looks at this and says,

this isn't good, we don't like this, and they may or may not do that, what would their response even be? I don't think Apple has one. I mean, I have a suggestion, but I don't think they'll do it because I think what we've seen is podcasting is a very, Apple is a huge fish in podcasting. They're big. They are the big fish in the small pond. But within Apple, podcasting is the tiny little fish in the

enormous ocean. If that follows, Apple is very important to podcasting. Podcasting isn't very important to Apple. That's the truth. People at Apple who work on podcasting are great, but they're a very small group in a division that is not, I mean, well, it is, you know, a more important division than it used to be, but it's a very small group. It's not a core part of Apple's strategy

to do podcasts, right? Because the money that can be made from podcasting is not a business that Apple is in, which is advertising. No, it mostly is there because it makes it helps make the iphone the best place to be to listen to podcasts and that makes the iphone a better product that's essentially and it and it dates from 2005 and decisions made when steve jobs rolled out that new version of garage band and put podcast directories

and itunes and stuff like that like it was it's's a legacy, but it turned into this accidental success for Apple, and they still have it. I don't think that they're going to do much. There are some rumors that they're doing some stuff. We've talked about the possibility of them doing Apple original podcasts, but they're really for their Apple TV Plus shows. There are some rumors.

There was another report from Bloomberg that they are doing this. They have podcasts focusing on their TV shows, and they're also buying podcasts that they think they could turn into TV Plus shows. Very different play to Spotify. It's purely content, is what we assume right now. Right. Yeah.

So here's the thing. If I'm Apple and I look at Spotify, and Apple and Spotify have a bad relationship. Let's also mention that. Spotify keeps calling out Apple and saying that Apple is anti-competitive and that they should be a choice on HomePod and in Siri and all these things. They have had a prickly relationship, these two companies. If I'm Apple, I don't know. I feel like there's not a lot i can do but if i if i really want to spite spotify attempting to take you know take its ball and

go home i would try to identify some of the most popular podcasts that remain and sign a licensing deal with them that keeps them in an RSS feed, which is a weird deal, right? But it's almost like you want to sign a deal that they will be featured on Apple Podcasts or something and basically give them money to not go to Spotify, but not lock them inside the Apple Podcasts app. Because I don't think Apple's strategy is to make a silo inside the podcast app. Because I don't think Apple's strategy is to make a silo inside the podcast app. I really don't think so. But it's possible that they would do it.

But you look at Spotify's strategy, they are not trying to put it behind a paywall. They just want to put it in their app. So Apple, the response would have to be, what can we do to make deals with people so that they don't put their podcast anywhere that isn't an open RSS feed? And we'll call it like featured in Apple podcasts. But what it really means is you can't go to Spotify. That's a weird thing. And I'm not sure anybody could get any like financial backing

from Apple to do it. And yet, that's the move here. That's the counter move that somebody would have to do is basically and it would have to be Apple is say, we want you on our platform. And we want to make sure you don't leave podcasts to go to Spotify. And so let's make a deal. I don't, yeah, like that's the best I could come up with. I like that, but I can't imagine that happening.

Cause I, I, I have a hard time imagining it. All the rumors about Apple podcasts, original podcasts and things like that are, it'll be for subscribers of Apple news or News Plus or TV Plus or Apple Music. There are all of these stories out there that speculate about where does this stuff go if it exists. And those all make more sense financially because they're going to the

bottom line of some service. Whereas Apple Podcasts. Doesn't generate. Like it's not a service. It doesn't generate revenue. And if they wanted to create a service. Guess what? Now it's locked behind a paywall. And it's worse than what Spotify is doing with Joe Rogan. But if Spotify are going to do.

Which is what I think they're going to do. Which is mainly build an advertising platform. It doesn't affect Apple. Because the shows will still be potentially in open RSS feeds. I don't believe that Spotify are trying to lock the entire podcast ecosystem behind their doors.

I think that they like the idea of having that as part one of a two-part plan, but the other part of that plan is building that monetization system. But if I'm Apple, I don't care about part two. You're right. But I really care about part one, because this is Spotify making one of Apple's most popular podcasts, leave Apple podcasts and go to Spotify. And if I'm Apple, that's what I don't like. I don't like that now you can't get Joe Rogan's show on Apple podcasts podcasts and how do i prevent that how do i

prevent that from happening i'm not sure there's a way to do it also like if if you're apple it's like well they can't buy all the shows you know no they can't spotify is going to run out of the money to spend on this stuff so you just kind of wait it out that was the next point i was going to make is maybe your strategy is apple is hey spotify we have way more money than you keep spending your money by you can't buy all podcasts so you've made a very good like clever investment here um but keep spending your money you're going to run out and your ultimate you know they would probably say we know what your step two is which is ads in an open podcast too and we don't care about that so you know that that is and that's the most likely scenario here is that apple continues to do what it has done all along

with podcasts which is be um sort of just take a hands-off attitude they are incredibly powerful but they do nothing i think that right now the podcast industry from the creator's perspective is at the greatest risk of a disruption than there ever has been before. Because of two things. One is Spotify. This platform that they're clearly building because it's going to change if it works and they get what they want and they do what I think they're going to do, which is provide ads for everyone if they want them, it will change the way that advertising works and sounds.

I think that it's not going to sound as good. It's not going to sound natural anymore. I think that the advertising rates will go down because they'll be offering kind of a marketplace-like platform like Google, Facebook, YouTube do. And I believe that because of the pandemic, there will be a lot more people willing to make moves that they wouldn't have made before

because the advertising industry is already in flux. And there may be a bit of desperation on everyone's side from big companies in podcasting that will be like, oh, Spotify can make it more effective and cost better for us. We should do it if we're going to get more results for less money. And there may be some large publishers who are like, oh, man, we're really struggling right now. We're going to sign on to the Spotify platform that's guaranteeing us some money. going to sign on to the Spotify platform that's guaranteeing us some money. So, you know, I don't know how I feel about all of this, but I do feel like it is becoming much more significant. I've been able to brush it off a little bit more before, Jason, but I feel like that the

curtain has been lifted off of this advertising thing from spotify and i think that they are going to become a very large juggernaut and it's going to become more and more difficult for people to work out advertising on their own if spotify are making promises that other people simply cannot give right like it is not possible for any podcast company in the open system to provide the data that Spotify will be able to provide. And if they make everybody believe that that will make the ads better, which I don't think it will, then they'll buy. Everyone's going to buy through Spotify. And if that's where the money goes,

where's the industry gonna go so it's a bit doom and gloom i know but i this is where i think we're moving or at least there is a much stronger chance of this happening than there has been before also i'll just throw out that um advertising aside i hate the idea of of walling off podcasts in separate apps because one of two things happens either you use that app at which point hopefully everything that you listen to can go in that app because some things aren't in spotify you have to submit to go into spotify and that means spotify controls your whole interface and if you don't like it you don't have another choice it is just what what it is. And having had this experience, which we did talk about on a previous episode, with an Audible original, which is what Audible calls their essentially podcasts that are behind the Audible paywall. Or you can get to some of them with a Prime account.

But I got so frustrated with a show I wanted to listen to because the Audible interface was frustrating. It was hard to figure out how to queue up episodes and it was totally separate from everything else i was listening to and it's a worse it's a worse experience i mean it's great if you use spotify all the time and love it and everything you want to listen to is in spotify but for a lot of people it's now adding complexity to it should we do some more fun stuff i guess While we can. I haven't got anything more I want to say on this. Like I said, everything's changing. Everything's changing. And we'll see what happens.

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Pingdom from SolarWinds for their continued support of this show and RelayFM. Hashtag AskUpgradeTime Stitch on the RelayFM members discord asked, what are some of your favourite segments that you hear on other podcasts? Not necessarily that you should do it, but kind of ones favorite segments that you hear on other podcasts not necessarily that you should do it but kind of ones that you wish you maybe could steal or just stuff that you

really enjoy jason what about you um the podcast i listen to that has the most segments is the poscast with uh joe posnanski and michael shore and Friends, which is a podcast from The Athletic that they make available on all podcasting platforms. Thank you very much. So I can listen to it. And one of their segments is the one last meaningless thing to end this meaningless thing, which is just completely random things that they do at the end of the show. And it's got a theme song and it's delightful. And I like silly segments. So that's my favorite. We do love a silly segment around here.

One of my favorites are the ones that I'm kind of most jealous of as a producer of podcasts is on My Brother, My Brother and Me. When they go, when they do their ads, it's called the money zone. And they take their ad break by saying, shall we go to the money zone?

And then they have a little song that plays them into the ads. And I mean, their ads are just like so funny and just also really good content, which I also just like so jealous of comedy podcasts. I think we said that before, right? That like comedy podcasts seem to be able to do whatever they want when it comes to ads,

which is wild. But anyway, but I love the idea of calling the ad break the money zone. It's just so smart and is a nice bridge. And it like perfectly fits the themes of their shows. So that's one that as a producer of shows, I'm jealous of. But as a listener of the show, I actually really enjoy the ads. So there you go.

Mark asks, when is the last time you set up a Mac, iPad, iPhone from scratch? Do you prefer this to using data migration? What about you, Jason? I decided to take the 13-inch review unit that I got, the 13-inch MacBook Pro review unit, and not do any migration. It's such a pain, though, because if I want to use it as a real computer with all my stuff on it, I need to actually migrate. And I don't have a good

place to migrate from right now because the only laptop i have is my old macbook air and it's kind of a out of date bad choice for this so i keep i keep meaning to set up one of my review laptops the way i like it and then like time machine backup that laptop so that I can keep that and do a migration assistant restore from that backup every time I review a laptop but I haven't done it so I end up mostly just doing it from nothing and um it gets it's so frustrating to do that but I also set up new laptops more often than most people, right? Because I review them.

But I prefer Migration Assistant and I use that basically whenever possible. But it does take a while. And if you want to get started, you can just bite the bullet. You get started with nothing. And then every time you want to use something, you go, God, that's not here. And then you you have to install it and there's always that bootstrap

moment where it's like i need to install one password to get the password or the serial number for this thing but uh that is on dropbox so i also need to install and you realize you got to install like five things to do the thing you want and that is not my favorite i never do this for my own stuff like i always will migrate from something because i don't want to spend multiple days getting everything right um the 16-inch mac pro review unit that apple gave me a while ago i did just set it up from scratch because i didn't you know i wanted to just get to use it. I didn't want to wait for like two days to transfer it over. And it's a nice enough experience to like tinker around and reboot it from scratch.

What do I need? What do I not need? But I would never do this for like every product that I bought. It was nice to do as a one-off thing. But, you know, when I do eventually buy a laptop for the studio i will migrate it from my current macbook pro that's what i'll do for my own stuff because i'm moving so much data like i don't want to re-download everything from my dropbox again right like i don't want to do that um so i i don't i don't know how people do that for all the devices that they get i know people do it and

they like to do it and like more power to you if that's your thing, but it would drive me bananas to do it. Zaza, also in the RelayFM members Discord asks, how would I go about becoming a tech writer for some of the sites that I love? Is there anything specific in a portfolio that people would look for and how would I even pitch myself or find writing gigs? Jason, I wanted to ask you about this because you've, I guess, come from multiple worlds when it comes to stuff like this, from Macworld to now where you are at Six Colors. And I wanted to see if you had any advice. I have no idea. The advice I always give is that the best thing to have is what we used to call clips, which is samples of your work. And it used to be very hard to get samples of your

your finished work because it means you have to it's that chicken and egg thing you now have to find a place to publish your work yeah you have to have been published to be published and it ends up there's like a chain of things where you have to start someplace small that will take an unpublished person and you have to have samples maybe that you've written that you show them that say well you know here's a sample of something that you've written that you show them that say, well, here's a sample of something that I've written. I always used to say for people who are students, like get on your student, whatever it is,

and newspaper, magazine, whatever, and write there. And then you can use those as an example for the internship you're applying for, the job you're applying for. Like, look, well, I don't have any... At one point, we were taking applicants for an editor job at Macworld and we got somebody who was just out of college, and we asked them for writing samples. And they said, well, did you do anything for your newspaper or magazine or in a class or something? I'm like, no. And I thought, I'm not going to hire you because you showed no

interest in writing publicly in college, and now you suddenly want to be a writer or editor. It's like, seems that was a red flag for me. Um, all that is to say that today you could just write in public yourself. So I would say first thing to do is set up a site, you know, set up a Squarespace site or a,

or a medium blog or whatever not medium place on the internet own it own it even if it's free like though yeah i guess i mean if you're just trying to get a job i don't think it matters but um whatever is easiest set something up and uh and write things that are like the things you want to write just write them and not only will you get better at writing but you will have a thing on the internet to point people to and say, oh, this is a sample of stuff. And then you have to approach people you'd like to write for. And one of the challenges there is that it needs to be a place that has multiple writers. I remember when Dan Morin came to me and I didn't know who he was. And he said, he said, I would like to write. I said, talk to tidbits, because tidbits often would use unpublished writers, new writers, and they didn't pay those writers. And, you know, but it was like visibility. And it was a start. and it was a start. Today, I don't know. It's a much harder, more complicated world, but I think it's got to start with your words in public. So that's really my advice is maybe

write some stuff that is the stuff you'd like to write in your own place, and then go to whomever those sites are that you love and say, this is the kind of stuff I write. I would love to write something for you and see if they give you a shot. But as somebody on the other side of it, I really wanted to see examples and public examples. Something that you put out there is the best. And obviously public examples at a website that has editors that have chosen to work with you and they've published your work is better. But if you don't have that, start somewhere and put your best work forward and maybe even work at it for a little while and get better at it before showing that to those people

who work at the sites that you love. Andrew asks, do you think it would work if Apple made a virtual touch bar on the bottom of the iPad screen for when you were using the magic keyboard to replace a function row well so there's already that kind of magic the quick smart bar quick type thingy that's down there which is super buggy especially when you're using a keyboard like some apps bring it up and some apps don't and I kind

of feel like it's taking up space that I wish it didn't but I would say that that's the precedent is like if apple wanted to make that bar do more stuff when you've got an external keyboard attached they could and this is the case that's like a potential ios 14 feature right that now that they've really embraced even more the idea of this laptop configuration um and they already have the smart keyboard but like this is with the magic keyboard they've done it even more so like they could throw some love that direction and make that

a more refined interface element um that would be is that the touch bar well no but it could be something like that um i i'm not i don't have a lot of hope for it because that current feature is kind of a mess so i'm not sure i mean it could use a lot of work and get a lot of hope for it because that current feature is kind of a mess. So I'm not sure. I mean, it could use a lot of work and get a lot of love. It deserves that, but I'm not sure they're going to give it to it. Yeah, it would be. I mean, there's a couple of buttons there for like cut, copy, paste, but that's it, right? It would be fun to do something with that space if we're going to keep using it.

There could be some more contextual stuff to do. Especially if a keyboard's attached, right? It could be a completely different thing when there's a keyboard attached. Yep, I would like that. That's not a bad idea. Eric asks, do you think that Apple will add

the AirPod Pro's quote-unquote buttons, like the little pressure-sensitive stems, to regular AirPods? The regular ones fit me better, but I miss the controls. I think they will. I hadn't thought of this before before but i wouldn't be surprised if airpods 2 included that little i mean it would just be like for play pause and stuff like that but seems seems logical to me like it feels like

the typical way that apple will do things pro product gets a new feature and eventually it goes to the regular product and then the pro product version 2 gets another new feature do you think so? I think Apple prefers the squeeze thing to tapping your ear they should because it's so much better right so my guess is that yes at some point they'll do that but that doesn't feel like as big a differentiating feature.

So if they decide to make changes and actually redesign the AirPods and not just leave them as they are, but actually change them physically, I would think that they would change to that approach. I think the next version will get smaller, like the regular AirPods will get a bit smaller. Because I don't think it's the pro differentiator. I think it's more just like a feature that they added to the pro product but i think the noise canceling and stuff is really the differentiator so the squeeze squeezing instead of tapping your head in order to do stuff i think um

as a matter of course they'd probably try to add if they did a redesign but that's the question is when are they going to actually redesign that product because they've got you know maybe they just figure it's good enough and they and they're going to keep it the way it is. Who knows? And Glenn asks, what's the best time for a cup of tea? I mean, anytime. I knew you were going to say that. I only put this question in here because I knew you were going to say anytime.

But I did want to ask you. But I mostly have it in the morning. Yeah. It's mostly in the morning and, you know, first thing in the morning cup of tea and my breakfast and it's uh that's that's the best i only ever have tea at bedtime so we can multi if i need to get a bit sleepy but i drink coffee and i drink coffee in the morning and then i'll have some coffee in the afternoon i typically only have like what would be in total four shots of espresso a day. So I'll typically have a double shot espresso drink in the morning.

And I always foam milk and that kind of stuff, cappuccino, that kind of deal. And then I will have either in the afternoon a second double shot drink or I will have two single shots depending on the show breakup that I'm doing. I'll typically have my second coffee before I start recording a show. So I had one before upgrade, but on some days like Wednesdays when I record two shows, I'll have one at three o'clock and one at six o'clock. So I have a bit of caffeine to get me through these podcasts in the most upbeat way I can possibly be. most upbeat way I can possibly be.

So that's it for hashtag AskUpgrade. You can submit questions with hashtag AskUpgrade on Twitter or the question mark AskUpgrade command in the RelayFM members Discord. I will mention again at this point before we go into our break and talk about Mike at the movies to Ferris Bueller.

If you want to become a RelayFM member, we'd really, really appreciate it. You can click a link in the show notes and become a member of and support upgrade right now uh it would be great we are finding ways and finding more and more ways at the moment to make our membership offering better for you the member the listener we've added new content we've added the relay fm members discord and we'd really appreciate it if you became a member. You can find out more at relay.fm membership, but maybe the best thing to do is just to click that link at the very top of your show notes and you can support upgrade right now. So if you do that, thank you so much. And if you're going to, thank you as well. All right. This episode is also brought to you by Linode. Whether you're working on a personal

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upgrade2020 when creating a new Linode account and you'll get $20 credit towards your next project. Once again that is linode.com slash upgrade and the promo code upgrade 2020 for $20 credit. Our thanks to Linode for their continued support of this show and relay fm mike at the movies time and this is a rare mike at the movies

for a couple of reasons one i've seen the movie before many times and love the movie and another rarity is i've seen the movie more than jason has way way more times than way more times i've maybe seen this movie like five or six times i think this was jason's second time second yeah so i mean i'll just say straight off the top like i absolutely love ferris bueller's day off like the reason we picked it because we're like oh let's do a mic at the movies uh let's pick something fun and i find this movie very fun but the real reason i love Ferris Bueller is there are absolutely no stakes in this movie. It is the most easy-watching movie that I can think of. Nothing that can happen to anyone in this movie,

by and large, will affect their life that much. Everyone is kind of... You feel like not only in a better place by the end of the movie, but any drama that happens to them is resolved pretty quickly. and that's one of the reasons that i love this movie i mean other than other than cameron in the car and his dad but he's like super fine about it like immediately right like he thinks it's a good thing that happens when the car is destroyed right like to him it's like brilliant this is exactly what i wanted um and so like and and everything else in the movie where you know he's like

things seem to be affecting him you look at like it's not really affecting him that much right like there isn't any drama in his life until that point where the car is destroyed but he is the one who starts the car destruction anyway it was his choice you know right um david schwab in the discord has said about totoro totoro is a good movie where well it's a chill movie until everyone thinks that the young daughter has died right so like that's you know like it gets pretty serious there uh and yet she's fine Totoro and uh Kiki's Delivery Service are both movies where there's no villain Kiki is more chill than totoro yeah but that's the difference here right is there is a villain in this oh by the way having seen having never seen home alone and

ferris bueller's day off through the 80s and the 90s wild it is funny having seen them both now for mike at the movies no less um oh my goodness they are absolutely from the same person right like it is i kept i kept waiting for more wet bandits things to happen to the dean as he entered the house right like there's definitely a lot of moments where you're like oh oh yeah it's home alone i see i see it now and it's like um oh why is this movie in chicago because john hughes would only make movies in chic. That's why. That's why. It's like a funny thing. That is kind of weird, right?

Like in Mike at the Movies lore, that John Hughes movies, I seem to bring these movies like just randomly. I never saw John Hughes movies when I was a teenager. I never did. Which is funny because my wife, her boyfriend in high school worked at a movie theater. So she literally saw every movie that was released in the 80s, so she has this amazing catalog of knowledge of

80s movies that I don't have. Yeah, including all the John Hughes stuff. So anyway, I watched it, and it's fun. Oh, I think the most important thing that I can add here is... Oh, yeah! That's all I got. this is yes but even though there is a villain

he's a laughable villain yeah we watched this last night with my son who's 15 we're like you'd like this movie the kids skip school yeah uh and uh what he said about five minutes in is okay either this is going to be one of those movies where everything goes really, really, really, really bad at some point and everything, just everything goes bad. Or it's going to be one of those movies where in the end, everything is fine and nothing goes bad and it's super happy. But he's like, and I was like, you're right, kid. It is definitely going to be one of those things. I never really thought of it in those terms. definitely going to be one of those things. I never really thought of it in those terms.

And he said, and there's a, maybe a chance that everything looks like it's going to go horribly bad, but at the very last minute it's all resolved and it's all fine. And I, and I'm sitting there thinking, no, it's the one where everything is fine. That's what this movie is. It's that's the kind of movie it is. And he appreciated it, but he was right that, that there is a moment 30 minutes in where you're like, either this is about to go disastrously wrong or it's never going to go wrong. And this is the kind of movie, which is why we picked it, because it's a movie that is just kind of fun and happy and absurd things happen. And although there are some character moments that are stressful, in the end, it's pretty much a sunny, again, it's a sunny, warm day. The weather's nice. would you why would you be inside you know it's like he just wants to have the the best day he can possibly give cameron

right like that's what it ends up being which is like yes this very sweet thing which you find out because it seems like you know there are points in the movie where you're like ferris is cool but he's kind of a bully towards his best friend right it's kind of how it feels at points like he's making cameron do things cameron doesn't want to do but there is like this dual thing of like one you can see that cameron's kind of getting stuck in a rut a little bit and needs to be like he needs some shaking up right and his friends trying to help him out by like shaking him out of his like funk right but also they're about to go off to college and he is going to miss his best friend who he's probably grown up with right you assume like they've been friends

forever kind of thing and he's going to miss him so he wants to give cameron the best day he can and by the end of it he has right like cameron's like the most senior year kind of movie ever right because you it is that impending end right that they're they're seniors so year kind of movie ever, right? Because it is that impending end, right? That they're seniors, so they kind of don't care, even though the dean's like, aha, I can make you not graduate, which is dumb. But he has to say that because he's the dean and it's his job. But, you know, they're going to leave and they're going to go off to college. And there's, you know, none of them are probably going to be able to spend any time substantial time together like soon it's going to happen soon that this is the end and it's all just kind of hovering over this and it you know

it's just that is definitely very specific time of life life moves pretty fast if you don't stop and look around once in a while you might miss it this is so funny coming from like a teenager right like it's one of the great things that whenever he breaks the fourth wall which is a lot in this movie ferris played by matthew broderick who is just so unbelievably cool in this movie right like the coolest kid in any movie right like i can't think of a cooler kid right like just plays it so well he's so cool um but like the he he speaks with like such experience in his life which is just so brilliant and so funny like i i love it and there are so many elements of this throughout but like even when he is talking later on about like the fact that you know he knows that we're gonna we're gonna move away from each other and then he's talking about sloan played by mia sarah and it's like i'm gonna marry her but we're gonna be she's she's uh she's got

one more year of high school what are we gonna do it's just like all these things are just so funny to me like because in his world he you know this is everything that he knows right and he's the oldest he's been and he's had all this experience so he's got it all figured out right ferris and it's just so lovely like that it's just that feeling of being that age when ever you're still a kid but adult things are happening to you and people are starting to treat you more like an adult and you feel like you've grown up way faster than you actually have or then or you feel like you're way more grown up than you really are because these things start happening to you

and you just think you got it all figured out. It's great. And there are so many wonderful moments in this movie. You know, like there are so many iconic moments, right? Like Bueller, Bueller, Bueller. Right, Ben Stein, who apparently, I knew that Ben Stein's background was in economics and so when he's talking about the laugher curve and voodoo economics and all of that apparently

originally he was going to be an off-screen like a charlie brown kind of adult where you'd hear his voice off screen but not see him but they thought he was hilarious and they he that whole boring economics thing which i love because i love all the reaction shots of the kids sitting in the desks he that's all just him he he wrote that himself uh just listing off economic things to do a boring economic lecture and it's it's so it's so good because you know all the students just don't everybody else is out there our friends are out there outside in the sun having a good time and they are having their souls sucked out of their bodies and he does that great teacher thing of he'll like say a thing and then finish the sentence be like anybody and no one says anything and he just carries on it every single time right and we call this anybody the love a curve right it's like the whole like it's

so it's presented so well and it goes on so much longer than it should, which makes it better. Oh, God. Yep. I love everything about Sloane being broken out of school, right? Oh, my God. Everything about that like 10 minutes is excellent, right? Starting with the phone call, right? When Rooney, the dean, is like losing his mind at who he thinks is ferris on the phone and then ferris calls on the other line right but it's actually cameron pretending to be mr peterson right which

we didn't know that we didn't know that cameron was finally all in on the plan exactly now here he here he is and he's all in on the plan but then he makes the mistake of saying that we'll pick her up and so how are we going to do that? So then they have to get the car. So there's two parts about the slow and breaking out part of her. One is as soon as the nurse comes in the room, she starts putting on her jacket because she knows that Ferris must be doing something. And then the next part when,

because then Ferris has to, like I said, steal the car, right? So it looks like he's an adult and he dresses up as a, I don't know, like a private eye or something yeah he's basically inspector gadget or something at that point yeah so uh yeah i wanted to talk about the thing that struck me this time just one one last part just about that one part it's just a very throwaway line where sloan goes i guess that's my dad yeah right that was just so it's that so it's that kind of family yeah oh yeah so good so good the thing that i noticed this time that i really appreciated is ferris cult the ferris cult yes yes and it's so good because they show it in a limited number of scenes. But one of the genius things that Ferris Bueller does is it's not just that he's cool because, yeah, he's kind of cool.

But he has created this cult of popularity about himself. And he's done it. He's manipulated the school into believing he is a cult figure. So everybody knows him or knows of him. Everybody knows about him. And there's that amazing scene where he calls the payphone and he's basically talking to freshmen. And then he talks to the girl and he's just trying to get these stories seeded so that later we keep seeing more stories coming back about, oh, I heard Ferris did this. I heard Ferris did that. I heard Ferris did that.

We're pulling for you. It culminates in just laugh out loud moments where there's Save Ferris outside Wrigley Field on the billboard. There's a Save Ferris on a water tower. It's so amazing. And we're all thinking of you. And how everybody mentions it. The flowers. Oh, yes.

We're really pulling for your son. We hope he gets better. And they're like, what? Oh, I guess. He's sick. And how everybody mentions it. The flowers. Oh, yes. We're really pulling for your son. We hope he gets better. And they're like, what? Oh, I guess. He's sick. So, and they just move on. It is so amazing. And it's all him. It's all he wants to have this out there because he knows that if he seeds disinformation, basically

propaganda, that it helps him because his enemy, the Dean, is going to be more confused and he doesn't know exactly how it's going to go but that doesn't really matter he just needs to churn the water a little bit and make it all a little confusing and he becomes i mean it's very modern it's very 21st century in fact i said after we watched it i said you know it would be hashtag save ferris now right gosh yes and and but. But it is brilliant and I love it. So that's actually my favorite thing this time is just how perfectly he creates his own image of Ferris Bueller.

And then he can use that to his advantage it's spectacular and that is a part of this movie that gets better on re-watching because that a lot of them especially the one on wrigley field you miss that if you're not like you can very easily miss the safe side and it's and you've and you've just seen the most amazing scene maybe my favorite scene in the whole movie which is where the dean looks away at the moment that ferris catches the foul ball and ferris and cameron are on the tv in uh in in the the sandwich place or wherever it is and sloan and and they're right there it's like proof this is because this is i don't know if you you have the equivalent of this because most soccer matches football matches in the uk which is the most popular sport there like are on the weekend or in the evening.

But day baseball games, it is a thing about, I hope I don't get spotted. You call in sick to work or school and you go to the baseball game in the day. And then there's this urban legend of, but then they were on the TV or they were on the big screen and their boss saw them and then they were in trouble. And so it's that, is what's happening happening here except that the dean just doesn't look and he looks back at the tv it's so amazing it seems like the obvious part where he's about to get found out right he's like ferris bueller and nope he just slides that one by it's amazing so i love i love that and one of my favorite parts is at the end of the movie all of the flowers in

the hallway which they you barely see because you're at the end of the hallway and you just see it in the distance. But it's all of the flower arrangements that have been delivered because Ferris is dying. He needs a new kidney or something. Yeah. One thing I'm always surprised about

every time I watch this movie is that Jennifer Grey is in this movie. I always forget that Jennifer Grey is in this movie. I know Ferris has a sister, but I never remember that it's Baby from Dirty Dancing. And one of my favorite things about this movie is the fact that Jeannie, who she plays, is never in class. Jeannie is so mad that Ferris skipped school. But every clip of her, she's never in class.

She's in the hallway at the school. She's going to complain to another teacher she's driving past the gym class complaining about the fact that ferris isn't there even though she's not at school it's so good and like the whole dynamic between her and ferris is so great because like she is so wronged right because ferris is like clearly as ferris is the favorite child right because they think he can do no wrong and like there's a moment at the end where like because genie uh she got arrested right because she called arrested for making a false police report about the dean breaking into their house which was not false and he left his wallet on the floor and yet she

doesn't point that out to the cops, I guess. But the whole idea here is that Ferris can do no wrong, and she can do no right. But then there's that moment, right, where she's then messed up the mom's deal, and then outside, she's like, what are we going to do, Jeannie? And the dad's like, we're going to shoot her, I guess.

It's just like the most ridiculous thing, which he obviously doesn't mean, but it's the idea of like she's the problem child she is the problem yeah she is disfavored and and everybody loves ferret but like her the anger that she has is so funny right and yet she doesn't in the end she doesn't rat him out she actually she she helps which is so nice right because it's like even though she she hates him it's that brother sister. It's not the real hate. Exactly.

Her role in this movie is so good. She plays it so well. And then the whole thing with Charlie Sheen is just fantastic, right? That he's like the bad boy in the police station. Yep. But the best part of this movie, my favorite part of this movie,

is the parade. Okay, first off, why is the german parade happening on a weekday who could know are there no good are there no good weekends maybe this is a real chicago thing i don't know but i think it's weird that the german american parade is being forced to happen on a weekday like did they not get a a weekend for that um but yes it is it is great because they uh where's ferris they lose track of him oh he's up there he sings uh donka shane which he does throughout the movie that that song appears and then uh twist and shout of course famous german anthem is one of my favorite scenes

in all movies because it looked like it must have been so fun to make like matthew broderick in that moment must have felt like the king of the world because all those extras all those extras parade they're losing their mind it's like an unnecessary great choreographed dance scene right that's happening but like when they finishes the song and everyone just starts screaming and cheering but you can see like he's a little flush because it must have just been this absolute rush to be in that moment like it is a fantastic scene but and it must have just been so good to make like the amount of extras like i can't yeah even think of a movie where i've seen like that many people in a scene before and it's such a small space like it's really just so good something super weird that

i wanted to ask you about so the garage attendants take the ferrari out for a joyride right yes why does the star wars music play when they jump in the car? I don't know. It's fun. It's adventurous. One, how did they get it? And two, I don't even know if it's the right piece of music. The Space Odyssey theme would have made more sense to me in that moment. It just felt super... Why is Star Wars music playing right now? It's very peculiar to me.

It is a surprising choice. It's a great piece of music, but I don't know if it's the peculiar to me it is a surprising choice yeah it's like it's a great piece of music but like i don't know if it's the one that i would have picked like it was just like a very strange very strange choice um but yeah obviously and then this movie ends in the great fence hopping scene right wait he's right yes which i got i got to explain to julian that this is the scene that's being referenced in spider-man homecoming spider-man simpsons do it family guide does it like this is just if you've never seen ferris bueller you've seen this scene before like it is one of the parodied scenes the great parodied scenes yep

yeah i love this movie i i wanted to i wanted to shout out the dean uh edward r rooney who always jeffrey jones always has his middle name edward r rooney um i love i love him as a villain he is a classic 80s movie villain yes he's less he's awful but he's kind of less offensively awful than something like a william atherton villain like in real genius and die hard i think mostly because he's so inept um also i want to do a shout out to edie mcclurg as grace his secretary who has like eight pencils in her in her hair and she's like removing pencils like white out or something. The white out, yeah. But Jeffrey Jones, like he is, I think a large portion of my delight of this movie

is seeing him get thwarted at every turn and knowing that he, even when he gets the goods on Ferris, he can't do it. Like it's always, it's always ruined. And ruined and the you know he ends up riding on the school bus with one shoe and his thing torn and all of that like at the end and it sits in the next to last row and like it just i love i love that performance it gives the movie some drive because they have you know we can't all be just lying about who they are, the sausage king

at the dinner or at the lunch, right? It can't all be that. They need to have some sort of like pursuit happening. But it's a ludicrous pursuit, right? It doesn't, the stakes, like you said, the stakes are pretty low. I mean, theoretically, Ferris could get thrown out of school or have to repeat his senior year or something like that. But, really it's not gonna happen right but but it's good to have him there as this kind of cartoonish villain to continue to just be through it very much is a cartoon villain right like you you delight like in home alone you delight in him just constantly being destroyed and i love just how hard he's trying like oh it is completely way more than he should to break into the house on personal business because he's got a vendetta against ferris bueller and he just he has to get fair get that i gotta get that guy

right like it doesn't have it's not logical in any way especially that the breaking into the house what is he expecting to achieve by breaking into the house he's gonna go up to bueller's room and prove that he's not in sick in bed to who i don't i don't know to himself but then what is he gonna do with that information right like it's you know he clearly knows he's villain he knows that like ferris has everyone for him right no one's against it well the way i read it is that and i think there's a fine line you have to walk with this character is he's gone around the bend on this one like he has left reality behind he has he's going to pursue this vendetta even if he has to commit crimes he's going to

pursue this he's completely lost it and yet at the same time you don't want it to be like too far that direction because then i think it would get it would get weird so it needs to be realistic ish um while also showing him having like he's obsessed with ferris bueller at this point i think that's a good that that's the good line to walk because that makes it kind of a cat and mouse game, but it also makes it kind of fun to watch him because we know that he's completely lost it in this moment. As he watches the number of unexcused absences

on the computer screen, just go down from nine to seven to four to two. Wonderful movie. It's a lot of fun. It's a great film. It's just a shot of uh of delight yeah and i can say as somebody who lived through the 80s did it look like that oh yeah it did yeah it did that that uh jennifer gray and mia sarah um and right down like the girl in the arcade or the pizza place or whatever it is who turns around who looks like ferris from the back

like oh my god that that is what people look like and what people the stuff people wore and the mom's uh blonde hair with the dark roots and all that it's like yes that is what people look like in the 80s it is so perfectly capturing the 80s so i would love to see a modern day ferris bueller i don't know if it could be done well enough but i would love to see someone try. With like Tom Holland, I feel like Tom Holland would do such a good job as Ferris Bueller. They would never,

it would never be better. And there was a TV show, by the way. Was there? Yeah, in 1990, there was a TV show. But, I mean, do they need to make another Ferris Bueller? I don't know.

I would love to see somebody try to make a movie that felt like this though, right? Okay. Yeah, okay. That's what I would like to see is it doesn't, you don't need to call a Ferris Bueller's Day off. I mean, you could if you wanted to,

but like I would love to see a movie that feels like this in terms of just being kind of like sunny and fun and about kind of rebelling but in a kind of positive fun way and having low stakes and having a sort of silly uh opponent who doesn't really threaten you that that's a like make more movies like this wow jennifer aniston played genie in the tv series wow i'd never heard of this before that's wild yeah it was not successful they did they they got their first 13 episode order and then they were out

and most of it got burned off or no i guess some of it got burned off in the summer one episode of it so yeah yeah yep yep so they did that that was a bad idea that's hilarious and i and i don't think i don't think ferris bueller as a series works right because i mean i could see it maybe as like a netflix series or something but as a sitcom i can't see it because it's the same his same shtick every time i would think yeah and you lose the magic of the movie because eventually you'd have to have something bad happen to him which would undo the good feeling so here's yeah here's my pitch here's my pitch for my netflix series of ferris bueller's day off okay which is um you know money heist i'm familiar with it have you seen that it's like a it's like a

uh bank robbery that happens uh over a bunch of episodes and it's like a bank robbery that happens over a bunch of episodes. And it's like a whole heist over a whole many seasons in a continuing story. It's like, I want to do that for Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I want it to be, we can do a season, maybe two seasons, but it's all just this one Ferris Bueller Day Off. Okay. And every episode is another you know there's the episode where we get 24 but for ferris bueller yes yeah well i mean because that's money heist is basically like 24 for a bank robbery right so yes that's that's my pitch is i don't want to

leave the day maybe it goes into like the weekend or something at the end, but I don't want to leave the day. I want it to be that day. And I want it to be like, let's detail in and we can have characters cross each other. So there can be other shenanigans happening. You know, we'll have Cameron is doing something over here and Ferris is doing something over here. And Sloan is doing something over here.

And the sister is doing something here and they're all going to be like crossing each other. And you're going to have those moments like you have in the movie where it's like wait is that and then you look again it's like no no that wasn't ferris of course it wasn't and and you do one episode that's just in the high school and it's all about what people know about ferris that they don't know like that's how i would pitch it if it was like a ferris bueller tv series but don't make it because it's the movie is great and you're never going to surpass it. But that would be my pitch. Don't make it unless you call Jason.

Call Jason. Yeah, call me. Call me and my good friend Matthew Broderick and we will work out something. Wait, you want Matthew Broderick to play Ferris Bueller? No, he's going to be the – he's going to be – He's going to be the cameo. He might be the dad. That would work.

He might be the dad. But something like that, yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. Next week's episode 300, don't forget send in your meta Ask Upgrade questions. You can send them out with a tweet with the hashtag Ask Upgrade or question mark Ask Upgrade in the RelayFM

Discord. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode, you can find them in your podcast app of choice or on the web at Relay.fm slash Upgrade slash 299. Thanks again to our wonderful sponsors for their support of this show. That is Uni Pizza Ovens, Linode, Pingdom, and Fully.

If you want to find Jason online, go to SixColors.com and he's also at Jason L J S N E double L I am at iMike I am Y K E and we'll be back next time until then say goodbye Jason L goodbye Mike Hurley say Ferris