Upgrade - 42: Shuttlecraft Wallet

Episode Date: June 22, 2015

Jason and Myke discuss the tough decision facing Apple when it comes to marketing a rumored iPad Pro and recap the Taylor Swift/Apple Music kerfuffle. Plus, Myke asks Jason about buying an Xbox One and a bunch of Wii U games, there's something surprising inside Myke's wallet, and we answer your #askupgrade questions. Finally, "Myke Watches a Movie" returns with the 1989 classic, "Say Anything..."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 42 today's show is brought to you by our friends over at casper squarespace smile with pdf pen pro 7 and mail route my name is Mike Hurley and I am joined as always by Mr. Jason Snell. So long and thanks for all the fish, Mike. Do you have your towel with you today? I have my towel nearby because you always need to have your towel with you. You do indeed.

That's what we learn. Things we learn from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Great book. Yeah. Love it. I grew up with the um the bbc miniseries that they did in the early 80s which is on one level horribly dated and yet sort of like adorably horribly dated um and i i i loved that so much um and and the books and uh And then I had never heard the radio drama before a few years ago, and the radio play is hilarious too. So I love, and you're going to love Douglas Adams

for retelling that story in as many formats as possible. It's like how many different ways could that guy get paid again for telling that story? But that's one of the things I always appreciated about Douglas Adams. My favorite version is the stephen fry audiobook oh oh that's so that's interesting i haven't heard that i haven't heard that i've heard that oh it's so good i've only listened to the original audio the you know the radio plays that they did on the bbc radio oh it's very good all right i'll add that to my collection of every because i you know i i have it in all these formats too that's the other thing about it i've seen it or collected it in all

those different formats oh you trust me you need this one it's excellent and then the subsequent books uh told by martin freeman this book but they were by martin freeman so yeah the connection yeah because he became um 40 42 anyway episode 42 we have to talk about it indeed so we do have some follow-up and follow-out today um upgradian solomon wrote in uh because last week we were talking about you know the utility of a larger ipad and we were talking about being able to have multiple apps on screen and that kind of thing. But obviously there is even more utility in the idea of having

an iPad Pro with an improved digitizer and a stylus made by Apple. We're going to wrap around to this again, which we've spoken about in the past, but I wanted to just bring it up because it seems like all the stars are aligning. If you look at the new Notes app and stuff like that and the tools that are in there um i am very excited about the notion of a large ipad with a pen input i think that that would be really really cool and

solomon mentioned like uh with the surface i think this is you know would be would be nice there is a button on the surface that opens one note you just press the button and it automatically opens one note on the stylus and it'd be pretty cool if you could do that you press a button on the surface that opens OneNote. You just press the button and it automatically opens OneNote on the stylus. It'd be pretty cool if you could do that. You press a button, it opens the Notes app or something, and you could just start scribbling away. Well, you know my feelings about pens. I have a

difficult relationship with pens. I'm not a great... It's my own fault. I'm terrible at handwriting. Penmanship is my worst skill in school. I always got marked down for bad penmanship. My handwriting is, you know, at its best, at its height, it looked terrible. And now with all the years that I've spent not writing with, since I have digital devices, my handwriting now is like caveman scrawl. I would, in college, we would copy edit the pages of the newspaper when we were working on the issues. And as editor-in-chief, especially, I would write on the pages,

like corrections and stuff. And that was sort of, that became legendary of incomprehensible notes on pages. Like, what does this say? Something about a toupee? No, it's nothing about a toupee but uh yeah so i i i have a difficult relationship with pens because it's not the input format for me but uh i i agree one of the real shames of the ipad all along has been

that the digitizer is just not very good it's mean, it's perfectly fine for what it is for fingers. But everybody who has tried, if you ask anyone who's built iPad styluses, iPad pens, they will tell you that, you know, it's problematic. The digitizer is not as high resolution as it should be, and it's not pressure sensitive, which is why they end up building these pressure sensitive Bluetooth pens to sort of read the pressure from the other side. And it would be nice if Apple, you know, even if Apple doesn't come up with its own pen, even if it didn't do that, if it just built into the OS and into an iPad Pro kind of device, you know, a higher resolution digitizer and pressure sensitivity and have it be kind of like, you know, it's resolution digitizer and pressure sensitivity and have it be kind of like, you know, it's there. And either there's an Apple pen that you can get or, or there's a,

you know, it's just a third party opportunity. That would be good because I definitely hear, especially from all the artists out there and having worked with Serenity Caldwell for all those years at Macworld, you know, she made me well aware of this as an issue. And this is one of those cases where Microsoft with the Surface was just way ahead like i think they changed digitizers with the surface 3 and i had heard that it was not as good but surface and surface 2 were um had really good digitizers and that was a way for them to to provide a little more um give them differentiation and i heard from artists who said and famously there was the guy from penny arcade wrote a bunch of articles about it about how um surface ended up being a really great sketch tool because it had better

support for art stuff than the iPad did. And I always read that and thought if I'm at Apple working on the iPad, I'd point to stuff like that and say, this is a market we should probably try to cover at some point because we're doing pretty you know, we're doing pretty well, but you know, we could lose that. That should be our audience, right? That's a creative professional. We, you know, I know we are bigger than that now, but still that's part of Apple's heritage. And why would we not be the go-to? Look at how many people try to use the iPad for sketches now with these pointing tools that are so limited compared to what we could build in and you know maybe the ipad pro we've said this before a lot of our ipad dreams are being invested in the ipad pro i think you know like uh having a new product gives them reasons to add features to the

ios having the i the ipad sales be flat helps too in the sense that it's like what how do we reinvigorate it and so you know i worry that we've invested a little too much uh hope there's a little too much wish casting going into this mythical uh big ipad but uh but yeah it would be great to see just going back to what something you mentioned a moment ago i think if apple put the work in to improve the digitizer and that kind of stuff and the pressure sensitivity they're gonna make their own stylus i think it would be kind of crazy because you would think showing it with the pen in the marketing shots is what sells the device

because i think that has to be more than just big ipad like it has to do something and if this is the one that works with a stylus, that would make sense to me. It depends on if they think that there's a big enough market for that piece of hardware. They could. They could. They could work with a partner too. I mean, they've done that before. They could have demos on stage where they say, we've been working with Pen Maker X here and App Maker X here, or even like we've been working with Paper and look at what we've done with them in the last couple of weeks in the lab using the new APIs and blah, blah, blah. They could do that too.

So I feel like they're levels there. I think you're right. They could do their own thing because they're going to want to demo it and they can sell that in the stores or they bundle it with a device depending on how they want to handle it. it and they can sell that in the stores or they bundle it with a device depending on how they want to handle it. But I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that they could just let it be with partners and highlight it that way. It depends on how important a market that is and whether this is something that they think is integral to this product or whether it's sort

of a thing that a small group of people will be really excited about. So it adds to the strength of the product, but not, you know, because if you want to, you don't want that product necessarily tied too closely to the pen, because I don't know if you want that product to be thought of as the one that comes with a pen or the one that has a pen.

So I think it's a line they've got to walk. If you see what I mean there, like if you go too far down that path, it's like the ipad that comes with a pen and i'm not sure that's the message they want to send either i don't know maybe maybe for people who love pens it's more exciting as the ipad that comes with a pen yeah i think i think that there are some avenues that you're missing for why it would be a good thing to be it's the one that comes with the pen like all of uh you know enterprise and all of education well and if they do you know if this is

where they roll out some undiscovered features of ios 9 that uh there's an ios 9 update that enables you know more digital ink kind of things in apps. And, you know, maybe there's a bigger story there. I just, I feel like there's a spectrum of possibilities here that goes from it being like a full on embrace of pen input to a kind of all the way over to the other end, which is it's there and the people who care about it will be excited about it. But the Apple's not going to make a big deal about it and sort of like, let that be a third party opportunity. And I think in them, you know, in between there are, there are lots of possibilities too. So we'll have to see. I'm not discounting it as, as important. I think it's important. I think it's a question of how hard

Apple hits it and whether they hit that on stage or whether that's something that just sort of like comes in a press release about, oh, you know, or they mention on stage that, oh, well, we've worked with institutions and education and health care and they love it. It just depends on how hard they want to hit it. Because do they think the biggest audience for this is people who are going to be like, yeah, pens? Or is the biggest audience going to be people who are like, woo, big screen. It's cool. And that the fear, because I do think there's a fear there that like if you overemphasize the pen um you're going to turn some people off who are like well but i don't want a

pen i don't want to use a pen so you gotta you gotta modulate that this is by the way this is fun to talk about it this is why um it bugs me when people criticize apple about things that are like implying that apple hasn't given it thought. And this happens a lot on the internet, right? It's like, I can't believe they didn't think of this. It's like, you know what? They thought of that. Because what we're going through now is like a product marketing debate. This is like the kind of thing that happened in Phil Schiller's group all the time, right? And that's a tough job because like this, there's no right answer here. This is complicated.

This is... Yeah, because me and you are both coming at this from different angles and we are both Apple's customers. The advantage we would have is at Apple, we would have lots of research. Although, you know, who says the research isn't conflicting too. And the research isn't, they're probably don't, they probably don't have research that says we asked iPad pro buyers what they wanted. You know, they, they, they could maybe do some of that, but they have to couch it in certain ways that it doesn't give away what they're doing. But they do have some, you know, internal market research that's pretty powerful that they can use for this sort of thing. But it's a, you know, it's a question. How do you market? Let's assume the iPad Pro exists.

Now, that product has the features that are already locked in. Right. That was decided on based on understanding of the market and what they want to target. And that's complicated. And then explaining how you what that product is to the to the public is a challenge because, you know, even if it's literally the same product, how you market it can completely change how people view it. And you risk, you know, I can make the argument that you risk going kind of off the edge if you make it too much about the pen, because a lot of people are going to get turned off. And I guess those are people like me. We're like, well, you know, pen, whatever, but it's not for me. So I guess I won't buy that one. But you also risk underselling it and losing your most important point if you don't talk about it

it's like fantasy apple marketing that we're doing here that's what that's what we're here for uh but there's no way to win fortunately there's also no way to lose so moving on with our follow up this week um so we do have a mic at the movies later on today we're talking about say anything another classic 80s movie from Jason's selection. But I wanted to mention, actually, if we're doing a bit of follow-out, that I did another mic at the movies this week.

How is that possible? How is it possible that you could do another mic at the movies? Because we only did one show this week, and this is it. So how could that be, Mike? How could there be another episode of Upgrade with a mic at the movies? Casey Liss asked me to do one. But Casey Liss doesn't host Upgrade on the Great Relay FM network.

So how would that work? Is Casey here right now? Is Casey out there right now? I don't understand, Mike. I'm sorry, Jason. Do you have other podcasts? Are you on other podcasts with other hosts who aren't me? I am, I'm sorry, Jason. Do you have other podcasts? Are you on other podcasts with other hosts who aren't me? I am, I'm afraid.

I'm sorry to say. I'm sorry this is such a harsh realization for you today. Maybe I should have spaced all this news out a little bit more. I did do me and Jason. Oh, no. JC. I'll call him JC now. Who sent you shells and cheese mike and who sent you a lovely container of manchego who was that was dispatched to you by a

an individual workman just you know who loves you is what i'm saying it's peculiar like the parallels between you and casey in that you both send me cheese. You both want to talk about movies with me. No, I sent you cheese. Casey sent you Velveeta. He sent me processed cheese-like product. Goo in a package. Let's be clear. Mine came from a sheep. His came from, I don't know, an extruder in a

factory somewhere. We spoke about sneakers. Yeah, this is Analog 45, is that right? That is correct. Sneakers. Yeah, this is Analog 45, is that right? That is correct. All right. Sneakers, great movie. I enjoyed it a lot.

Did you like it? Spoilers? Okay. Just listen. People can listen to Analog if they'd like to hear it. All I'll say is you may feel better about all of this when you listen to how i felt about that movie okay that's all i'll say all right if you didn't like it that's gonna make dan moran sad that's one of his favorites too uh well dan will have to listen to dan okay all right good that's good follow-up

good to know other podcasts are available that have mike at the movies which was invented here it's okay i like that i like that that's spreading. I like the hashtag AskUpgrade. I like that it's sort of such a good idea originated here on Upgrade that Upgrade is exerting its influence on other podcasts. I'm going to take it like that. That was actually what Casey said at the start of the show. There are a bunch of things that come from this show, like follow-out is one, verticals are another.

We have the hashtag feedback system. This show is a trendsetter. We're innovators, another. We have the hashtag feedback system. This show is a trendsetter. We're innovators, Mike. We are innovators. We really are. So this is why people listen, I think. Innovation. Hashtag innovation. Oh,

I had some follow-out too. Oh yeah? Speaking of Casey Liss, I wanted to do some follow-out about Accidental Tech Podcast, which is a small boutique podcast about technology featuring three people that you've never really heard of. And all they do is talk about programming all the time, so it's not widely listened to because they spend all their time talking about Objective-C and Swift and curly brackets and square brackets and things. Anyway. But Jason, I thought we were talking about Swift today. We are talking about Swift today.

More popular Swift. Anyway, ATP, you may not have heard of it, but they did an episode, episode 122, where they were talking about John Syracuse's wallet. And he told this story because he has a huge a huge wallet apparently and keeps it in his backpack and then they told the story about how he left the backpack at my house which he did and that made me laugh that i was you know listening to them talk about um leaving john leaving his backpack at my house which is totally true we said goodbye and everybody piled into that little that uh well not little car but there were too many people to fit in that car. That was effectively a little car.

Yeah, well, it turned into a little car. We were going to get an Uber, and then everybody said, no, we can fit. And we said, well, theoretically, you can fit in there. And then we're cleaning up and stuff, and then knock, knock, and it's John Syracuse that's appeared at my door again to get his backpack, which is just laying right there on the floor. He knew exactly where it was. So did he lose it, or did he just leave without it? I'll leave that as an exercise for the listener. But I just wanted to ask, do you have a wallet and how big is it and what's in it? I'm curious. I wanted to do some wallet comparison. I know vital stuff, but I'm curious. Wallets are a source of eternal frustration for me.

I have one and I hate it. And I've never liked any wallet I've ever owned. I keep a few cards in there, like a few credit cards and stuff. Well, we have debit cards, one credit card. I have some ID. I have a pass for my co-working space I keep my glasses cleaner like a little microfiber cloth in there

I have some Canadian dollars and I have some euros so I have like one bill of each so if you find yourself in Canada that is exactly the reason this doesn't happen to me so much anymore.

This sounds like a really weird start to a story. But when I used to fly into the U.S. for cheaper than I do now, because these days I tend to get better flights, I would find myself flying through Canada a lot. And I would end up in a Canadian airport where i would need to buy food and it would always be a palaver trying to get money to pay at the airport so it basically just came to the point of i one time went to like an atm that was in the airport took out some cash and have kept some in my wallet in case it happens again. I don't even know where to begin. First off, I want to give you extra credit for people, you know, we joke about you being hovering over the Atlantic and losing a lot of your Britishisms

because you talk to so many Americans on a regular basis, but you just use palaver and that is as British as it comes. so good for you. I was going to say good on you, mate, but that would be if you were Australian, which you're not. So thumbs up to that. Again, I'll just say for efficiency's sake, do you literally keep Canadian money in your wallet because otherwise you may pass through Canada and have forgotten to put it back in there. And so all the rest of the time, for like 99% of the time, you're carrying around Canadian money

just because the moment you take it out of the wallet is the moment that you're going to be passing through the Toronto airport and need to buy some, you know, I don't know, maple syrup on poutine. It's basically like Schrodinger's dollars. Okay. You know, but now it's also, I just keep, it's one like schrodinger's dollars okay you know but now it's also i just keep it's one

bill followed up um usually i have some dollars in there as well but i have quite a few dollars left over from uh the san francisco trip so they have all been taken out now and they're just waiting on my dresser until i go back in either september or october but you've got your emergency canadian money in there regardless. Emergency money. How much is it? Is it like five or ten? I think it's a ten, and I have 20 euros in there as well for the same reason.

Same reason, because you may pass through some place that uses euros if you go through Ireland or you go through anywhere, you know, Germany, something like that to switch planes. Okay. That's a fascinating detail that you have canadian money in there but i don't like my wallet it's just not very nice is it is it a bifold or a trifold

it's a bifold okay good yeah only john syracuse seems to have the trifold um my wallet story is that i have i uh i have a black leather wallet that uh i think my wife bought for me, replacing a wallet that she bought for another black leather wallet. She bought for me like 15 years ago that had finally fallen apart. I used to wear my, have my wallet in my back pocket, but in my twenties, I started to have a hip pain and it turns out that I actually have really slight hip dysplasia that had never been diagnosed and does run in my family. So and so I, I actually have really slight hip dysplasia that had never been diagnosed and does run in my family. But the hip pain was bad enough that I started putting it in my front pocket because the back pocket, it was actually kind of painful to have anything in my back pockets.

I did that for a little while. And then I decided that, like John Syracuse, I was like, I'm just going to put this in my backpack most of the time. And I don't need the wallet most of the time. And I don't need the wallet most of the time. So the funny thing is, the wallet my wife bought for me comes with the little mini wallet, little shuttlecraft. I don't even know. I think you're supposed to put things in it

that you... I don't even know the purpose of the little thing, but it's like a little bifold thing inside the big wallet that you can put your ID in. I don't even know what's supposed to go in there do you know what i'm talking about the little window area yeah well this one has it's like a removable thing it does have a little window thing but it's like yeah i have one of

those it's like a little little uh probe spaceship that comes out of the mothership and lands on the planet right you send the small wallet out yeah exactly so the big one stay big wall stays in orbit small this is turning into like, I'm turning into Merlin Mann right before our eyes here. This is, okay, anyway, anyway. That's other follow-out that we're not going to do. So that one, the Shuttlecraft wallet, is now my wallet.

So I decided as nice as that other wallet was, I took like four things and put it in a little tiny shuttlecraft wallet. So I've got like a credit card. I think I've got my credit card and my ATM card, my driver's license, and like my medical insurance card. So that, again, if they find me bleeding by the side of the road, they, you know, will pay for my hospital or whatever. And that's basically it. Sometimes I'll stick a bill in there

although i generally don't even carry cash um and this is what fascinated me about that they're asking john about the wallet because i'm on the other extreme john's got like his library card in there and some like i don't know for all he had like the the my favorite was the business card of his barber the hairdresser right you can put that in the you could actually put that in the and it's his barber who retired that was the best part is that not only was it pointless before but now it's extra pointless um so i just went i just kind of divested myself of all that stuff and and every now i've got a little stack of cards i actually had that wallet too the big wallet is is on my um on my armoire uh in a basket full of miscellaneous stuff. So if I need to

fish out my loyalty card, although every loyalty program just lets you put in your phone number, so you don't actually need the card number, but I can dig that stuff out if I need to have it. But I was fascinated that what a time to be alive with a wide range of human experiences. Everything from John Syracuse's giant wallet over here to people who don't have giant wallets on the other end, I guess. Anyway, I was fascinated by that. And now I know that you have Canadian money in your wallet. That's great.

If Guy English ever needs a loan, if Renee Ritchie ever needs a loan, they can come to you. They can call me up. It's got the queen on it, right? It's got to be practically. Does it have the Queen on it? Or does it have some mysterious Canadian celebrity that nobody's ever heard of?

No, and they have more modern pictures of the Queen. Oh, so it's older Queen, not like coronation era Queen. No, no, no, she's still 25. We're going for old Queen. Old Queen or no Queen. I like old queen. Like Bohemian Rhapsody. Back when Freddie Mercury was still alive, yeah.

Let's take a sponsor break now. Just one last thing. When we were in San Francisco, Ren took a picture of the two of us and said that it was like looking at father and son. And I'm getting really concerned about this like our humor is now starting to divert that's because your beard your beard makes you look that much older that's why she said that i'm your prematurely gray-haired

son and you're the anyway uh yeah the you know mike i am i have really enjoyed this part of the conversation which has been extremely bizarre. I can't wait for the email from somebody who says, stop having fun on your podcast. I don't listen to it to hear you guys have fun. Get to the serious business. But we'll get to the serious business. Don't send us that angry letter because we'll get to the serious business in a moment after this word from our friends at Smile. Right, Mike?

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for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. Yay. So, this, well, yesterday, right, as we record this. There's a show, there's an episode that's like upgrade 41.9 that will never exist. you and i were like rubbing our hands together we're like oh yeah we're in our document we're like we're gonna really give it to apple we're gonna we're gonna back taylor swift we're gonna say why apple you know doing a doing a free trial by um not paying anybody for it was uh was a questionable

practice and uh then the story just totally turned around at the end of the day. Probably while you were asleep, although your sleep has been so bad lately. Maybe you were awake then. No, I was asleep. You were asleep then. The whole story turned around. So you went to bed thinking that this show was going to be about one thing. And then it's totally changed overnight while you were sleeping.

Because Eddie Cue appeared on Twitter and reversed things. I guess we should back up. But it's just such a dramatic change. Yeah, we should kind of give a little bit of background to understand what's happening for anybody that isn't aware. So when Apple unveiled their music service at WWDC, they said that they were going to be doing three months free. Everybody was going to get it. The first three months of Apple Music were going to be free. In the same event, they were talking about being fair to

artists and offering paid services and not free services because they feel like people need to get paid. And they were talking a lot about independence and stuff like that that since then there has been some grumbling about the free trial period but it's been mainly um ignored and and after doing a like just seeing people on twitter you know saying that there have been some of some small indie labels and stuff like that that have been complaining about it but then out of the blue on sunday, so Sunday the 21st, Taylor Swift writes on her Tumblr blog a very well-written open letter to Apple pointing out why she believes that the free period for Apple Music is unacceptable because it is a three-month trial where no artists will be paid during that period of time. That is what Apple decided to do. Basically, you can imagine the internet caught fire.

As the day went along, there was a lot more reports coming out and people were reminding others about the fact that Apple were paying an extra 1.5% or something because of this free period, which is kind of... Yeah, well, okay.

So I'll stop you there just to say, because I heard this from people too. What Apple said is that the agreements they were reaching with labels were for a bigger percentage than what other streaming services do. Like, yeah, from 70 to 71 point something percent. Somebody did the math and figured out that, you know, that it would take a long time to get that money to have that offset the freebie. But the way Apple described it was so weaselly because it was sort of like, well, we negotiated a higher rate in part to be in part because we were asking for a longer period. I don't know how linked to those

really were or if that was just one of the things thrown in. So I feel like they didn't say, well, this is why. It was more like, well, that's one of the reasons why. And I think that's Weasley. I don't think there's a direct clear linkage. So we shouldn't assume that that's the reason that they're paying a higher percentage. It may also be for other things that they negotiated. It may be because labels are wary of dealing with Apple, and so Apple needed to give them more in order to grease the skids. There are lots of reasons why they negotiated that rate. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there. It's not necessarily a trade-off of like, well, give us three months free and we'll give you.

And even the Apple statement says, you know, it's one of the reasons, not like the reason. So then basically, as you can imagine imagine the day went on with people taking sides um yes in for and against apple's decision on this uh i don't understand how anybody could take a four position but i guess we'll get to that in a minute um and then very late in the evening what time was it in san francisco uh 8 30 was, you know, I think it was around 8 or 8.30. So 11, 11.30 Eastern time. Eddie Q tweets a selection of tweets, basically saying,

we love indie artists and they will be paid. Don't worry. During that three month period, Apple will pay. And, you know, basically we hear you, Taylor Swift and indie artists love Apple, mimicking Taylor's big uh big thing and then then eddie q made a selection of phone calls to a bunch of journalists yeah talk to bill board talk to recode i think yep recode was one of them uh and basically just kind of saying a few other

little tidbits about all of this and basically just making sure that everybody had heard apple on this and saying that basically it's kind of a bit unclear how much people are being paid. I think you can kind of read between the lines to say that Apple will pay the industry average for streaming during this period of time. Yeah, and that's, you know, it's a little bit of damage control.

I think it's interesting. Indie labels and artists were balking at this all along. I mean, there's so much here, and it's so complicated that it's hard to, if you're not inside in the industry, it's hard to know all the details. It's so many different moving parts. Yeah, there's a lot of it that we can't understand being on the outside. Exactly, exactly.

My impression is that Apple made the announcement of Apple Music without even having deals with most of the labels, which is quite a game of chicken because they're basically saying well we're launching it so are you in or are you out and trying to shift it back and like put pressure on the labels but the labels don't sign then apple launches with some labels missing and that's not good for i think that's worse for apple than it is for the labels not being there. Yep. Because people don't say, oh, X label. They just be like, why is this music not here? Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, there's that whole aspect of it. The thing that got me, I mean, Taylor Swift did this. I mean, she said, look, I'm fine. But I think this is a problem for new musicians and independent artists because this is a bad deal. And she's been really outspoken about this in withholding her album from Spotify. We've talked about it in the past, this idea that we may end up with a situation where music streaming services are more like Netflix than they are now in the sense that Netflix doesn't have new releases. They age a little bit and then they show up on Netflix. And that's because the new releases, they want you to pay to buy them or rent them. And Taylor Swift has done that to great success with her album, 1989, it's sold incredibly well because you have to buy it. I mean, you can pirate it, but you, you can't stream it. You have to buy it. And I think maybe

that that's where this is going to go, where big name releases from big artists may not be streamable because, and that's a little more Netflix-y, but, um, but Taylor Swift knows that she's not, um, she's not the, the, the, the best example here and that she wants artists to be compensated. I think she's really smart and I think she's principled and she has a voice that can carry. Obviously, it happened. Carry further than an independent artist or label or even kind of a grousing record label um can can do she can do she can do some different things and she used she's incredibly powerful just fundamentally yeah she used her pulpit she used her power to broadcast this message

about apple being unfair and what's funny is i heard about this what a week or two ago and when they announced the Apple Music thing, I assumed that Apple was essentially paying for those three months using their cash because they wanted to establish themselves and they got to catch up with their competitors in streaming. When I heard that Apple was just going to the labels and saying, you're going to eat the three months. You know, I thought that that was ridiculous, right? But Taylor Swift is the one who made everybody know that, did you know that this is what's happening? That the most profitable company in the world is asking the

record labels and artists to forego their money for three months so that this company can launch its service and catch up with its rivals? You know, the argument is that it's better for everybody if Apple comes in and succeeds with this because Apple's not going to have a free tier like Spotify. And I can see that argument, but I think it's a better argument to say, you know, you're a giant company that has a lot of cash and you're behind in an area that you want to catch up, pay the money. Like, pay the money. Get behind. If you want to launch this, you're not doing this because you want to save the music industry and you're not doing this because you want to give money to artists. You're doing this because it's an

important strategic business decision for Apple. So you know what? Pay the money. Now, I admit, if they can get to, if they can be, Eddie Cue didn't get where he is by being a pushover, right? He has a reputation for being a tough negotiator on this stuff. And so you could make the business argument that if they can get away with this and play hardball and make everybody pay, the whole music industry pays for Apple to launch its own service, then you could do that. But I would say it looks bad. And I look at that and think, you know, why are you even, why are you even bothering going down this path? This is your

business. You're the one who needs to catch up. You are, you are not an underdog in general. You've got the resources to do it. Just make it happen. Spend the money, make your service come out of the gate looking good, rather than spending your two weeks before launch trying to get every last dime out of these record company execs that you're dealing with. So's like, you know, it's so it's complicated and I see both sides of it. But in the end, what feels right to me is that Apple is trying to build a business in a new area where they're behind and they're trying to make a name for themselves by giving away this free three months trial, which is very smart, I think, on their part. But it seems wrong for them to make it seem like Apple's largesse is the thing that's getting people to try this when, in think, on their part. But it seems wrong for them to make it seem like Apple's

largesse is the thing that's getting people to try this, when in fact, Apple's not actually giving anything away. They've just asked all the providers to give it away for them in order for them to build the business. That just seems wrong to me. So, you know, as you are, I'm a little bit frustrated that we didn't get to have this conversation before Apple reversed the decision on it. I think what's interesting about us having it afterward is that instead the conversation is like, okay, well, obviously Apple either felt like they were losing face or people inside Apple who've been saying all along that this was the wrong approach have gotten, got that moment where they're like, see, see. Um, but regardless,

it is interesting that Eddie, the way Eddie Q framed it was very much like, you're right. We, you know, we respect artists. Um, we'll pay, we'll pay for it. And, uh, that I think that's really interesting. I don't think anybody's out there standing up and cheering like yay record companies get more money and it is true that record companies famously um kind of screw over their artists and the artists don't get a lot of money out of it so it's not like it's necessarily like a victory for the good guys or something like that but it does feel it does feel right and i think that's what what apple was reacting to is being seen as somebody you know apple is a huge company they're not seen as an

underdog who's trying to save music and they didn't want to be seen as trying to uh basically take money out of the hands of artists even though yes they're also taking money out of the hands of big corporations that are record publishers like because if anything, in regards to music, in 2015, Apple is closer to Walmart was in 2001 than Apple is to themselves. Does that make sense? They are close to the old dog than they are to actually what they were then apple has great strength in so many different areas but streaming music isn't one so they need to establish themselves and and you know the i mean taylor swift is interesting because she's got uh her take on streaming in general is like i said before it's interesting

because she's she's looking at a bigger picture here about streaming being problematic. People don't make a lot, artists don't make a lot of money from streaming either. And that's part of the story here too. So I think there is some hope that Apple, you know, is Apple going to change that? Maybe, maybe not. The additional percentage that they're paying is slight. The additional percentage that they're paying is slight. It's not like Apple is going to finally make all the musical artists fine with streaming and the streaming economics.

I think there's a difference, though, in the way that it's happening because Apple is all revenue and it's not advertised. I think there is more money to be made. Yes, I agree. The person, you know, people who did the calculations would say that the percentage that they're giving versus the three-month trial, that map doesn't really add up

for a long time. That's not going to offset the three-month free trial. But the idea that they're going to, Apple's going to push people to think of streaming as something that is paid for, and that there isn't a free tier. And I'm sure the music industry would really love it if the

concept of something beyond something like Pandora, if something like Spotify, where you can pick what you listen to, offers something for free, I think the music industry would love for that to go away. And this be perceived as a premium product you get access to everything by paying and then there would be more money i think they feel like there'd be more money in the pot i mean i still have i still want to say my piece on this though as to why i thought that they were wrong even though now you know it's been reversed they're back in everybody's good books again, I suppose. Fundamentally, my main problem with this is, and I don't know why anybody can't see this,

is work for free for three months. Just do that. Because that's what Apple were asking. Well, I got a rise out of people on Twitter, and I was being fully tongue-in-cheek but i said you know when hbo gives away the season premiere of all their shows twice a year on a free preview weekend in order to get people to get excited they pay you know they're still paying for those shows they don't ask everybody on those shows to work the first show for free and then pay. And yes, that's not a perfect concept, but think about that for a minute. Just because the distributor wants to market their product doesn't mean the

people who made the work that's being distributed forego a salary. And that's essentially what Apple was doing here is that. The other example I would give, and I realize that I have a maybe unique perspective in this, is I get my hackles up a little bit about Apple posing as the benefactor when, in fact, what they're doing is they're just taking the product of somebody else and acting like they're the ones who are giving it to you. product of somebody else and acting like they're the ones who are giving it to you. Because that's actually what happened with Macworld for years, is that when you bought a Mac, you got a deal for like six free issues of Macworld. And the way it was phrased was always a gift from Apple to you. Apple didn't pay for those issues. That was entirely eaten by Macworld. But Apple wanted it to seem like it was Apple's largesse.

But behind the scenes, they just made us give it to them. It was like, you want to be in the box, you give free issues. And that was a good deal. We agreed to it. The thing that always bugged me was Apple wanted to seem like the good guy and leave the impression that it was Apple's. Apple paid for all of them. Apple took money out of its own pocket in order to make this ability or make this available to you.

And I got that exact same vibe from this where it felt like, you know, Apple's being generous with their trial period. But the generosity is not actually Apple's. It's somebody else behind the scenes that Apple's not going to even let you know about. That's the actual person who's doing this and giving it away. And Apple's just basking in the benefits of it. And that set me off a little bit too. I also have no time for the arguments of Taylor Swift is greedy. Like I have no time for that argument because she doesn't need this money as she has proven streaming is not important to her business succeeding right she made that decision i genuinely believe she did this because it is something she feels strongly about like and she has made a difference for other

people because this is not important to her like if she doesn't because because by all accounts, it is still not even known if 1989 will be on Apple Music. Like as Kyle's the Gray in the chat room pointed out, it wasn't on Beats and Beats was fully paid. I think at this point, though, I wouldn't be surprised if part of Eddie's conversation with Taylor when he called her is you've caused us a lot of problems today. We would really appreciate it if you would do us a solid here and we'll pretend this never happened i feel like there might be a little uh little checkmate here of like um you know you can't you can't play the card of well 1989 won't be on apple and here's why and then that will change their mind you kind of don't you kind of have to give it to them and wouldn't that be a coup for apple to say first time on streaming 1989 here it is yeah

and i think that that will happen now but i think i think it has to even even if it's not as good a And wouldn't that be a coup for Apple to say, first time on streaming, 1989, here it is? Yeah. And I think that that will happen now. I think it has to, even if it's not as good a deal for Taylor Swift. But maybe that's part of her calculation, too, is if they'll do this right, then I'll help. I'll pitch in and be a part of this launch and give them a little more credibility because they're asking for people to pay after the three months are over. I was just finding myself getting so angry about this yesterday. Because I was putting myself in the position of, and there are a lot of holes in this argument, so you're just going to have to bear with me metaphorically.

But let's say that Apple decide that they're going to do a new podcasting service and it's going to be awesome, right? It's going to be great. It's going to be everything we've ever wanted. And they contact us and they say, we want you to be a part of it, but you can't have your ads for three months. Right.

And it'd be like, okay, it would be really great to be on your service, but now I can't eat. Because the problem is, and I think that maybe some people haven't considered this, when you have a three-month period, a quarter of the year, a quarter of the year,

if you think about it that way, you can kind of maybe put in perspective as to how long that is, people are going to cancel their Spotify subscriptions. Beats no longer exists. It's actually negative money for artists in this scenario. Because not only are they not getting paid by Apple, they're not getting their revenues from other services

as well. No one's going to buy their music during this period who has an iPhone because they can listen to it for free. The knock-on effect of a three-month free trial would have been way larger than just people listening to our music on Apple's music service and we're not getting the money for it they would also be losing money on music downloads and

streams from other avenues as well because people would be using apple music instead like there were so many problems with this and i'm very pleased that they have decided to make this decision it just annoys me that they had to go through all of this before they did that and it also frustrates me in the thought that i i love apple as a company and i do not like the thought that they are going into these negotiations and being like you can't touch us i'm not sure that there is anything slimier than a music industry negotiation and Oh, of course. And I feel like everybody who comes out of there needs to get hosed down, and that includes Apple. And I think that maybe is, like I said earlier, you know, Eddie Cue, I think one of the reasons

that Eddie Cue has been successful, from what I hear, is that he's good at that. You know, and now they've got Jimmy Iovine in there too, right? So they've got these people making these negotiations, but the whole thing is is slimy and you know and and yes the labels are screwing the artists out of money and i mean there's there's so many things that are messed up about the music industry but um and so i guess what i'm saying is i agree with you and yet i also kind of have to accept that for Apple to play this game, they have to play this game. And there's Apple in industries where Apple can make their own way.

And that's with technology stuff. But once you get into entertainment, it's harder because there are entrenched players and there is a whole different kind of politics. And Apple isn't, I think, able to play by the same playbook that it uses when it's doing products and doing hardware and software. And this is, I think, a really great example of it. The fact that the Apple TV hasn't come out and that they're still negotiating on the service stuff. The story behind the original iTunes music store launch. I mean, these are all weird, probably kind of gross negotiations going on behind the scenes to make this stuff happen. And, you know, this is in one way, this is a little like, you know, seeing how the sausage is made by having this come out in public is it may be that all sorts of terrible deals are made behind the scenes. In fact, it's almost

certain that terrible deals are made behind the scenes. But this one was either beyond the pale a little bit, or for, you know, for whatever reason in the big, you know, musicians are really upset about streaming in general, because streaming doesn't pay very well. So if streaming is the future, you know, I don't think very well so if the if if streaming is the future you know i don't think anything here has resolved the issue of can musicians make any money like people with hit songs and hit albums don't make money from streaming so you know make make chump change so that that issue is still there so there's all it's just it's complicated and i think that at some point if you're apple you're like, we think we can make the world a little bit better,

but we can't make it much more than that at this point because of who we're dealing with. I do think that's a part of this. I wanted to say, somebody mentioned the theory, and this is kind of a conspiracy theory, but I think it's interesting. The idea that once Apple is up and running with all of this, then stage two is Apple starts providing more access to, basically what they, the conspiracy theory was, then Apple can become its own record label and cut direct deals with musicians and change the terms. And that would be an interesting thing

that maybe could change the economics of the music industry. I'm skeptical of that, which is why I label it as a conspiracy theory, but you never know. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about that that i feel like you don't want to do a publicity stunt for super bad publicity that seems crazy oh i certainly agree with that i don't think this was a publicity stunt at all i think this was i think there's damage control i think i think apple was hoping that they would just make these deals and they'd be able to play hardball and get everybody to agree to the three months free because they want a counterbalance to Spotify and somebody who is on their side in the sense of not offering a free tier.

And that they figured in the end, everybody would play ball. And it turns out that they were pushing a little too hard and that Taylor Swift was the voice that elevated it to the point, got it out in the open. And then they felt like, well, now that it's out in the open, it's not really defensible. So we're just going to have to back off and do some damage control.

I think that's, ultimately, I think that's what happened here. Okay, Jason, I'm getting too sad. So let's move on and we can talk about something maybe a little bit more fun. Yeah, now we got bad blood. I could drop Taylor Swift references all day, but we should.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Are you a fan? I'm from the 80s, and 1989 is a great combination of sort of like love of 1980s music and modern pop stuff. I love modern pop music. Yeah, no, I like Taylor Swift.

My daughter introduced me to Taylor Swift. My daughter introduced me to Taylor Swift. That is a thing that lots of dads say. I keep meaning to listen to that album, though. Maybe I'll wait to see if it comes up. See if it comes up. It's good. I like it a lot. And it's got an Image and Heap song on at the end.

It's like literally all the instruments are played by Image and Heap. And then it's co-written by Taylor Swift and by image and heap and, and, uh, and then it's just, uh, it's co-written by Taylor Swift and image and heap. It's, it's a pretty cool. And she's one of my favorites.

So, uh, that, that was kind of a fun discovery that they collaborated on a, on a track on that album. All right. Sponsor time. This week's episode of upgrade is brought to you by Casper,

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and all of relay fm video games i mentioned this briefly. I ordered an Xbox One last week when Microsoft announced they were going to bring Xbox 360 compatibility by the end of the year. That was sort of enough to push me over the edge. And with kids' graduations coming, I thought that it might make a good surprise gift. So I want to report back on that,

which is I ordered it from amazon uh it's a refurbished xbox one uh i ordered it with gift wrapping got a nice box with blue gift wrapping on it um kids uh got to got to that gift and tore open the wrapping paper and both of them like freaked out i was really expecting it to be like, oh, it's a console, whatever, that they were both like, oh, I can't believe it. They were both super excited, which was great. And my wife and I were thinking of getting them an additional like promise of an additional present.

And we looked at each other and we're like, yeah, we don't need to do that now. It was like, this one hit, this is a hit. We're just going to leave it here. So I've got that set up. I actually haven't bought any games for it yet. I'm open to suggestions. We have Destiny on the Xbox 360.

I might at some point just buy it for the one, just for the upgraded graphics. But I am looking for some good games to buy. Ideally games that a 10, 11-year-old and a 13, 14 year old would play. Although, um, cool, you know, indie-ish games like Journey, those kinds of, uh, atmospheric games for, for, uh, for grownups to play, uh, I'd be interested in too. So if people have feedback or if you have feedback, I would, I would love to hear that. Um, uh, they haven't played it though,

because we also bought them a bunch of Wii U games because we have a Wii U and we got them. My son wanted Lego Batman 3 and he and my wife have been playing that actually the last couple of days. We got Mario Party 10, which is a huge amount of fun. And we played that some. And then we got Splatoon, which is spectacularly good and has been. Splatoon is one of my favorite games of the year so far. It's so good. I love that game so much.

So remind me, so what consoles do you have? All of them. You have all the consoles. Okay. All the great consoles. All the great consoles. Okay, Splatoon, we should play sometime. It's great. It is so... I mean, my son went

from level 1 to level 14 in a day. Because he's just like, I've got to keep playing, I've got to keep playing. But it is super fun. And when we did our Incomparable podcast about... I keep wanting to say Halo. About Portal. I kept talking about how I really enjoyed just making a mess with the goo that comes out of the various Portal things and just like painting the walls of the levels in Portal 2 with all the different kind of goo that come out of little goo dispensers. And so then I see Splatoon and I'm like, oh, yeah.

It's just that's what you do is cover things with paint, cover things with ink. And the game mechanic is really good the multiplayer stuff is good my son's really enjoying the the single player as well it's a it's just a really great game and i love i love that it's you know it's it's the stuff that i love the most about multiplayer stuff which is it's quick they auto match everything unless you've got a bunch of friends that you want to play with they're just auto matching levels um you play for three minutes uh there's a winner and a loser it's based entirely on how much of the map is covered with your color ink at the end which is a great simple way of understanding it and it uses the wii u gamepad to to affect i always get sad when

there are these wii u games that just mirror what's on the screen on the tv screen on the gamepad because um you know if you're going to build a console where the controller has its own screen in it you should take advantage of it and and and splatoon does that too so it checked all the boxes for me i think it's really great yeah it's it is just a fantastic game. I really, really like it a lot. I've been playing it a ton. It has kind of everything a Nintendo game should have in it. It's fun and it's colourful. The music is just superb.

I know. They make a big point of the music in that game. They're adding tons of content. New maps and new weapons over the last few weeks. I think I read this, and I think I got the numbers right. This is the first new brand new Nintendo IP in 10 years? Yeah, I mean, they have the squid thing, right? So it's sort of attached to some character that you've seen before.

Not really. I know where you're going with that i mean i feel like i feel like that is their tenuous connection to the nintendo ip is like hey you've seen those squids like you know it's the squid from mario kart right but really it is completely original um from from all that i can tell it's it's not like you're you know i'll be yoshi you know you're all just these people and they turn into squids when they're in the ink and it's, it's not like you're, you know, I'll be Yoshi, you know, you're all just these people and they turn into squids when they're in the ink and it's brilliant. I mean, it really is brilliant. This is one of those things. This is why, like when I listen to

isometric, I hear this a lot that the, the, you know, there's the talk about the Wii U it's like the Wii U is great. It is not, it is a shame that it's not doing better. Um, although I understand why it's not doing better, but if once you come to accept that what the Wii U is going to do is give you great first-party games and not a lot else, it's great at the first-party games. The first-party games are, like, I'm happy we have a Wii U. I don't feel bad. Not only does it play all the old Wii games, some of which we still play, but the new Mario Kart is great. Mario Party 10 is great. Splatoon is fantastic. The Mario 3D World is good. built to take advantage of that gamepad where one player can play on the gamepad and another player can play on the screen so instead of having to do a zoom out or a split screen two people can just play and they're in the same world but they both have their perspectives which

is a really nice thing that i kind of assumed wouldn't be there because that's a wii u specific feature but it's there which is great so so i like that i really like the wii u i totally get that if you're committed to you know major game releases it's going to be a disappointment because it's not going to get them but like something like splatoon is the flip side of that i feel like where it's like that is why nintendo is good at what they do so something like in regards to that like me and federico were just we just wrapped up our e3 coverage and one of our episodes is about nintendo and what they had to show at E3 and it is not good. They do

not have a lot coming between now and the end of the year that is really that great. I mean, they're big they have kind of two games that are on slate between now and the end of the year which is Yoshi's Woolly World which looks like the cutest video game ever made. It looks amazing. Well, Kirby's Epic Yarn

was a favorite of both Lauren and Julian. They both love that game. Oh yeah. We'll be getting that on day one. You've got to pre-order that with the yarn amiibo. That's what you need to do. We haven't done

the amiibo thing. They have made an amiibo out of a yarn. Yoshi it's an actually made of yarn it's the best i have one on pre-order already uh and um they also have super mario maker oh yeah i've read about that where you make your own you get to make your own levels yeah that is their big game for the rest of the year which is not that is not enough it really isn't enough um for the only basically mario maker kind of looks like a mini game in essence just a game creation game it's not there's not really a lot to it um and i think

that they're gonna they're gonna struggle the the end of this year with the offering that they've got they were supposed to have oh they also got starfox but starfox i'm not that interested in they were supposed to have an incredible looking new zelda game but it's delayed i'm excited about the starfox thing because i i like i like those kind of games. I like the spaceship flying kind of game. Yeah, I would have been excited about it and then they showed it. Oh. Yeah, that's the problem.

In theory, it's going to be great because everyone's been waiting for this game for a long time. It looks like it was made for the GameCube. That is sad. Yeah, it's not good. this is their problem right now they are they seem to be not in a very good uh state with their game gaming offerings which is a shame well splatoon which came out this year is a is a winner that is a that is a legitimately fantastic game and if somebody know, if you have access to a Wii U or somebody who's got it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's, yeah, it's just, you could, and you can play it endlessly.

Endlessly, if you want to. Because of the different maps and the way that they match up the multiplayer stuff. And it's just incredibly well done. And as somebody who spent a lot of time trying to do multiplayer stuff on the original Xbox and deal with just jerks on the internet who are playing games, that's the other nice thing about the way it works is that it's a good online playing experience from Nintendo, which didn't used to be a thing that you could say about anything ever but it's good it's well matched and you don't have jerks who are uh you know who are messing up your game and you know using questionable names and questionable icons it's all kind of uh safe and fun and everybody's having a good time and i appreciate that a lot yeah i mean the more i've played it the more i'm starting to see the traditional call of duty tactics sure jumping a lot and stuff like that but that's gonna happen yeah sure um but it's that one of the great things about it is you can hide yes you can you can hide me and you can just

do your own thing i mean you can run around and just paint the environment. You don't have to run into the fray. Right. Well, and you could actually argue that one of the nice things about it is that I'm not sure strategically if all you're doing is shooting other people, I'm not sure that that's the best strategy in that game. Right? Because you need to have paint coverage everywhere. And if you're busy just kind of like going after the other players you will you know paint as you do that but uh if your whole team is just doing that you're gonna lose because that's not enough you've gotta because they're

gonna go behind you and they're gonna paint more area than you are and you know if you're hanging out in the middle you're not gonna get that i like that i mean there's a limit to that you're right it is first person shooter tactics after a while but uh you know it's all with paint which i also like it's just you know it's added a little quirkiness and gentleness to it that i think is good what should i what should i look for on the xbox one since you've got all the consoles there has not been a lot um really i mean just in general there have not been a lot of exciting games i'm looking at ori and the blind forest for a journey like that experience people recommended that yeah but i've heard i've heard good things about that game um i mean this is depending on

how serious you want to get uh the new batman game ark. Oh yeah, I've heard about that. Comes out tomorrow. And Polygon, my website of choice for these things, gave it a 10 out of 10. Wow. I have it arriving tomorrow. I am unfortunately then going away for a few days. But I look forward to playing it because that 10 out of 10 is a good score. And that is as good as you can get. And there are not a lot of games that get that.

And Polygon are very tight with their perfect game score. So I am excited about playing that game, definitely. So I'll let you know that. Arkham Knight could be the first really, really big, good game of this console generation. Moving towards the end of this year uh there's going to be a lot more e3 had a lot of really interesting and exciting things and it's going to be some cool stuff for um for xbox there is a game that you would love um uh what is it called? I think something cup. What is the name?

Cuphead. It is hand-drawn animation in the style of Steamboat Willie. Wow. It looks just superb. Oh, I see, I see. Every frame or every animation is hand-drawn um and they've shown this off at two e3s now and it looks just incredible and apparently is a really really fun game to play as well so okay well i may turn to you in the future for more advice about this because we're gonna

start getting into the xbox one now that it's uh now that we've got that we've got one more console than i'd like but you know the we'll start investing in xbox one games um not in xbox 360 games anymore and then hopefully the xbox 360 games that we still want to play will end up cranking through microsoft's thing that they're doing eventually and we'll at some point be able to kiss the xbox 360 goodbye and just play on the xbox one because that's that's always the hurdle for me is you know i don't want to i don't want to add consoles i would prefer to swap in a new console for an old console and i just added one which i'm not thrilled about and i still don't have a ps4 but you know what you're going to do they'll do that hd remake of journey and then i'll feel the pull of the ps4 but you know what you're gonna do they'll do that hd remake of journey and then i'll feel the

pull of the ps4 yep you wait it's gonna happen all right should we move on to uh hashtag ask upgrade great idea let's do that all right so as always our good friends at mail route are sponsoring hashtag ask upgrade who do you want looking after your email? I have an answer for you, a simple answer. Nerds. Email nerds. People who live, breed, eat, sleep, email. Emails being delivered to them all times of the day and night.

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iOS 9 moves search back to the swipe right on the first home screen versus the iOS 8 swipe down on any home screen. Thoughts? It's both. Yeah. Is the answer, which is kind of interesting. I don't know why it's both, but it is both.

You can do the search by swiping uh across to the right or down from the top well so at least in the in the ios 9 beta which you know it's just a first beta at this point maybe there'll be a second soon and everything can change but it looks now like the difference is, if you swipe down, what you get is a search box with your cursor already, you know, insertion point blinking, and your keyboard comes up, and you can quickly type a search. Whereas if you, if you're moving to that page, that earlier page, what you're getting is the Apple equivalent of Google Now, you're getting the smart, you know, like, here's what's going on right now. Here are people that you care about and news that's happening and, you know, context relevant

suggestions. And there's a search box and you can start typing. So I think that's, I think that's the reason they have it in two places is, are you just quickly searching for something or do you want to see this page that is providing you with information so you never need to type anything. I like it. I think it's a nice idea. I don't mind having that on page zero of the home screen. I think that's probably the best place to put it. So I'm okay that they brought it back, given that what's on there is content now and not just a search box. I think the search box, having a search box as page zero is a little bit stranger to me than having, uh, you know, a page of stuff that Apple thinks you might want to see as page zero. I'm happy with it. I've actually found a new, um,

sorry, a couple of pieces of news that were, I wanted to know randomly just by going to that page to search the things. See? It's working already. Seriously. I was going to Foo Fighters concert, but it got canceled because Dave Groff fell off a stage and broke his leg. Yeah. And kept on playing rock and roll. Exactly.

I found out that my concert was canceled via that service. Wow. So sad news for me because I was very, very excited about it. But, you know, it gave me the information that I needed to know. At 747, Captain asked me what airline did I fly from SFO that had onboard Wi-Fi, and it was United. They're on to us, Mike. I know. The 747 captains are on to us.

United. But it wasn't, and you were direct going back. So yes, that's that United. I've been on that flight, the SFO to Heathrow direct on United. Yeah. And I was very happy about it. Interesting.

Interesting. Very happy indeed. Now you know. What else? So we have another question here from jimmy and jimmy has asked if we have tried the knock watch app this is knock is uh an app that allows you to unlock your mac uh previously by tapping on your phone screen but now it has a watch app as well to unlock have you used this i have um i have i have i think it's a great idea and i think adding the watch app makes it that much greater of an idea um although you

know you have to launch the app and wait but it's a good idea made probably better by native version version of it coming with watchOS 2. However, I no longer live, I no longer work in a place where I feel the need to lock my stuff. When I was at IDG and I had like budgets and lists of people who we were laying off and stuff like that, I had it locked. You know, I had my computer locked and, you know, you had to enter in a password every time to get into it. I don't do that here because I'm at home and I'm not concerned about it anymore. If I were still at work, I would absolutely get this and use it because I like the convenience of it. That it's a, you know, it's not quite unlocking because it knows that it's you, but it's pretty close. And I think that's a good idea. And I think this is one of those areas where we're going to see more. I feel like, I don't know what the details are, but I feel like we're going to see more of this from Apple,

that this is going to be one of those areas where Apple pushes this forward is, you know, more biometric stuff to make things more secure without making them more complicated, because that seems to be exactly what Apple is all about. complicated because that it seems to be to be exactly what apple is all about um and then we have kevin uh do your watches feel warm in the morning after charging overnight yes mine does it does feel warm it always freaks me out a little bit i haven't noticed that at all um i so i i don't know maybe maybe my room is cooler than yours and i i honestly i don't know maybe my room is cooler than yours and honestly I don't know I haven't noticed

it's always warm when I put it on in the morning so the charger doubles as a watch warmer or a fire starter depending on how that ends up going I bought that dock by the way I think I bought it during the show last week the elevation dock thing no the the one that's on it's side that comes on it's side by the way. I think I bought it during the show last week. The Elevation Dock thing? No, the

one that's on its side. That comes on its side? Yeah, that's from Elevation Labs. Oh, is that Elevation Lab? Yeah. Yeah, the nightstand. I did buy that. I haven't gotten it yet. But I bought it. Isn't that like the story of Elevation Dock's history? Just that I haven't gotten it yet.

Yeah, I paid for it, but they said they shipped it, I think. So I guess we'll see. I can track my shipment. But I did, because I like that idea. My watch is like sliding around. I could have just taped down the charger or something, but I kind of like the idea.

That fits on my little nightstand that I've got. I think having a place to park the watch at the end of the day is a good thing. So I'm looking forward to using that. It is expected to be delivered today, I'm told. Oh, wow. Look at that. Maybe it could arrive during the show. Imagine. Imagine the possibilities. Like that iPad Air 2 that I bought that arrived during the show last week. Could have a live audio unboxing. Yeah, that would be nothing more exciting than opening a box in audio form. Wrestling of cardboard.

Kyle's the Gray would like to know, have you authored a new Kindle yet? So the story here for Kyle Seth Gray, and that's how you say that name, but you're never going to do it. Kyle's the Gray. Kyle's the Gray. Nope. So Kyle asks this because there's a new version of the Paperwhite, which is coming out toward the end of the month. I don't think it's out yet.

And so the Paperwhite is not the one that came out last year, the Voyage. They kept the Paperwhite around, and they seem to have updated it this time. It's got a higher resolution screen. It's more like the Kindle Voyage screen, although my understanding is the Kindle Voyage screen is still better in some ways, but the two are closer together than they were before. The Voyage is smaller and lighter than the paper white and has these little page turning buttons on the side that you can kind of squeeze and it vibrates a little and turns the page. And the Voyage is more expensive than the Paperwhite. I haven't ordered it because I have a Voyage and a Paperwhite, and I like them both.

And I think my wife basically has received the Paperwhite from me, and I'm happy to use the Kindle Voyage. from me and I'm happy to use the Kindle Voyage. If they, I would be intrigued by a new upgrade to their line that added, you know, physical turn buttons instead of the sort of squeeze turn buttons that they've got now. And you can refer to our whole episode that we did with Scott McNulty about the Kindle back in episode, when was that, like eight or something? Long time ago. But I haven't ordered this because it's just a paperweight upgrade and I've already got the Voyage, which is better than it. However, I will say this. If you're looking for an ebook reader, if you're looking for a dedicated e-ink reader, which I love because they're great for

reading text. They're not distracting because they don't have apps that'll let you flip over and check your email and Twitter and stuff like that. They're simple. They're light. The battery lasts a long time. They're great for reading outside and in. They light themselves now. They've got their own backlighting, so you don't have to strap a book light to them. If you're in the market for something like that, I don't recommend the Voyage because I think it's too expensive for what it is. And especially now, I was already saying you should buy the paper white, but now you should really, I think the paper white is the one to buy. Even though I don't love the fact that you have to tap on the touchscreen to turn the pages, the fact that it is a really nice e-ink screen and it's got its own lighting built into it,

that's the one that I would recommend because the Amazon's library is fantastic. Apparently, there's a, I want to say there's a Nook reader. Is it the Nook reader? There's a, there's a, maybe, maybe not. There's another reader out there that actually sounds like it's better than the Kindle in terms of the hardware. But, you know, Amazon's ecosystem is so good at this point that it's very hard for me to recommend another ebook reader other than a Kindle. But there are other readers out there that are, that are good. But I would recommend the Paperwhite if you're looking for a Kindle, not the Voyage. New Paperwhite looks good in that way. Last question from Nathan.

To get Google Now-like functionality, would you be willing to give Apple your data if they didn't sell it to advertisers? Interesting question. I mean, if there's a privacy policy and they say, you know, we're not... I would probably not have a problem, but then I use Google and you use Google. So I don't know if you would not have a problem. Is the issue selling it to advertisers? Is it the issue that since it's going to be decrypted on Apple servers, it's accessible to the government? I think there are lots of different issues. not having my information aggregated and sold to advertisers is is maybe not my top issue with having the servers be able to scan my data i don't know i would do it you would do it yeah for the same reasons that i give google my data like i would do it i'd be happy to

do it yeah i got you genuine utility out of it then i would be willing to do it yeah yeah i i i think i i think i agree um and the the the issue here is as nathan said um what if there's a privacy policy and apple says look we're we're gonna we're gonna use this data only to match it up and send it to your devices and all that that said i don't think i think apple're going to use this data only to match it up and send it to your devices and all that. That said, I think Apple is going to avoid this as much as they can and try to do as much on their devices as they can. And then sync data across the devices because the devices are in your possession. They have their encryption keys on them. They talk to each other. Apple doesn't see the data other than as encrypted blobs. And I think Apple is trying very hard to build your little personal cloud of devices

who can crunch the numbers and associate things together and go out over the internet and talk to each other securely rather than having that all happen up in the cloud, which is what Google does. And I think they're pretty committed to that concept, the idea that everything,

like face recognition for photos right now only happens on photos for Mac. But it does happen there. And the face name matches sync to iCloud. So the Mac does the facial recognition work, but all the devices can do a search for a person's face and see those photos. I think Apple really wants that to be the model here. At some point, they're going to need to add that facial recognition to iOS too, but they'll get there. So I think Apple

really doesn't want to have unencrypted or unencryptable data that it can access up in the cloud for lots of different reasons. Okay, Jason, so before we take a look at our movie for this episode, let me take a moment and thank our friends over at Squarespace.

You can start building your website today at squarespace.com. You can enter the offer code UPGRADE at checkout and grab yourself 10% off Squarespace. When you're thinking about finding a place for yourself online, Squarespace is such a great place to try out because

in my opinion, there is nowhere better. They give you all of the power that you need and take away all the stuff that you don't want to have to worry about they can give you a site that's going to look fantastically designed regardless of your skill level you don't need to know any coding they have such beautiful tools and fantastic templates that you can take advantage of to make your website look and feel exactly how you want when i have a little project that I want to do, like my blog, for example, MikeHurley.net, it's a Squarespace site because I just don't want to have to worry about it. I set it once and it's perfect because they have state-of-the-art

technology that can power your site and they also ensure security and stability. You don't need to worry about doing updates or anything like that. Squarespace is trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world. Like, for example, with Relay, we built out our own system for all of our stuff. But we needed a blog and we needed a store. Now, we're not going to do that. That's crazy town. So we just went straight to Squarespace. It's just so simple.

We could get a template that looked really good. We could choose the colors that we wanted. We could put our logo there. And they have great blogging tools, right? And they have great commerce tools. So we're able to sell our merchandise, we have a store, store.relay.fm, you can go there and you can buy stuff, and that's exactly how we wanted it to be, because why have to worry about all of the hassle, when you just don't want to have to think about it yourself, so you just go to relay.fm.store, you can

find our stuff there, it's all powered by Squarespace. Their templates are really great. They look great on all devices. They have responsive design built right in. Don't forget Squarespace have their 24-7 support with live chat and email. They have teams located in New York, Dublin, and Portland who are there to help. They have the cover page, which is the ability to build a great-looking single-page website. So you can have just a Squarespace site that's just one page,

or it can be an intro to your site to give it a different flavor maybe you've got something you want to promote they have rock-solid fast hosting and just so much more like their dev tools if you are the type of person that wants to dig in and tinker around with the code you can do this this is available to you they've adding more functionality to this all the time to really kind of just let you take it even further than ever before. If you sign up for a year, you're also going to get yourself a free domain name, allowing you to choose exactly what you want your site to be called. And Squarespace plans start at just $8 a month. You can start a free trial with no credit card required and start building your

website today by going to squarespace.com. And when you decide to sign up, make sure that you use the offer code upgrade. Not only will you be supporting this show, you will also be getting yourself 10% off your first purchase. Thank you to Squarespace for their support again of this show and for helping us out with RelayFM. Squarespace, build it beautiful. So today's movie is Say Anything. When was this movie released?

Obviously sometime in the 80s. It's 1989, so right at Obviously sometime in the 80s. It's 1989, so right at the end of the 80s, directed by Cameron Crowe, who I think became well-known first for writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

He went on to, I think his most famous movie is Jerry Maguire, which was nominated for a bazillion Oscars and he also made Singles which was really great and he also made what's it called Almost Famous which is actually a great film too

so he's made a bunch of good stuff over the years but this is probably my favorite of his films So why did you pick this movie? Is it a favorite of yours or do you just like it? I don't know it as well as some of the others that I picked, but I do love it. I wanted to stay with the 80s theme. I had a whole bunch of John Cusack movies on my list of things to recommend to you, which I thought was funny. I was looking at it thinking, wait a second, I've got a lot of John Cusack on here. I decided not to make you watch High Fidelity because I made Joe and Dan on the Defocused podcast watch High Fidelity recently.

Also not from the 80s, but starring John Cusack. I thought about Gross Point Blank, also not from the 80s, but starring John Cusack. But I decided to say anything fits with your 80s theme. It is a movie from this period that i i really like i think it's it does some things that are very different from other movies of this genre and type i think that it's got uh i think it's smart and funny and sweet and it does have uh not only a a an incredibly famous scene and image in it but also a memorable quote involving a pen. It's all ticking all my boxes, basically. Yeah, pretty much. So I mentioned before I knew the boombox moment.

Yeah. That was one thing. And this is the first time that... You couldn't identify the song, though. You couldn't identify the song when you said, he's holding a boombox and there's probably something playing. Yeah, I know the song now, though. I couldn't tell you the name, but I know it.

It's In Your Eyes, Peter Gabriel. There you go. Love that song. Love that song. Used to great effect in his movie. Yes. This was the first movie out of all of the ones that we've done on Mike at the Movies that was available on Netflix.

Oh, nice. The only one I didn't have to buy. All right. Or rent. I'm looking out for you there there I don't think it's on I looked on US Netflix it's not on US Netflix it's actually not on UK iTunes

that was where I went first it's just not there to buy or rent but it didn't matter because it's on UK Netflix exactly that was all I needed beautiful

so the movie starts off and it's kind of like you overhear a conversation between some kids yeah i say kids like how are they like these are all they're they're graduating from high school so they're all 18 17 18 19 they're all they're all about to graduate from high school in seattle washington and you hear the words graduation and yearbook so like the scene is set you know where you are you know how old your characters are.

You know what time of their life it is. It's, you know, it's that transition period. I actually think an unusual time to set a high school, you know,

this is listed in like Entertainment Weekly did their list of the best high school movies. But it is a funny place to set a movie because it is set in the summer

between high school and college. High school's over. They are graduating and they have a party and high school is over. Yeah, exactly. That's how the movie starts. And then there's basically a conversation between John Cusack's character,

Lloyd, and his friends, Corey and what's the other girl's name in the movie? DC? Is that her? Or is it somebody else? I don't know. No. Rebecca? No. This is tough. Maybe. Could be Rebecca. I forget who the other one is. Lily Taylor, though, is the important

character in that. She's Corey. Basically, they're having a conversation and lloyd is talking about uh a girl that he likes diane who's played by help me how do you say this first name oh ioni sky ioni ioni the ioni sky ioni sky uh so she basically john john q says character lloyd is in basically really likes her and wants to ask her out but is worried that diane doesn't know him um and you know his friends cory and we're saying for now uh rebecca or we'll say it's rebecca um saying basically you know you you probably have no chance of her she doesn't know who you are like you know we and then they say to him i love this line we don't want to see you get hurt and he says i want to get hurt

i just really like that uh and then basically we know that they're then three of them who are friends uh about to head off to their graduation and then we kind of cut to a car scene with John Mahoney, the dad. Didn't know he was in this movie. Love that guy. Love that guy. Because of Fraser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just love that guy.

Yeah, the dad from Fraser is Diane's dad, Ione Skye's dad in this. And they're basically running through the valedictorian speech that diane is going to be giving right and it's clear that he just he he thinks the world of his daughter and thinks she's going to go on to do great things and everything she can do no wrong to him yep uh and she tells this little joke um about going back like i assume to college or to high school or whatever basically then there's this scene where this uh obvious jock who everybody loves is singing a song terribly singing the greatest love of all the greatest love of all which includes the line they can't take away my dignity which is hilarious because he is it is the least dignified thing somebody

could ever do is sing that song the way he sings it on that stage it's hilarious and then diane gives her speech which goes down okay basically yeah it's not it's not a super hit the line that her father generously laughed at is sort of confusing to people just as you know you could have guessed from hearing it like that's that's kind of strange and not people aren't going to get it and they kind of don't get it. But, you know, she's a valedictorian. She's not widely beloved and the stuff she does isn't widely praised. It's just not – that's not the slot that she's in.

Can I admit at this point that Ione Skye is the person I identify with in this film? Because I was second in my class and gave a speech at graduation and always felt, I mean, her isolation from the people in her school, that feels really familiar to me. So I think that's, I always identify with her when I'm watching this. I feel for her.

And when they're in the crowd, like they go to a crowd scene and there's all these whirring video cameras it's like another thing that i really like because before that they're talking about dating at the beginning of dating is calling someone up to get things started just call them on the telephone there's like a scene where uh lloyd he's a cassette player he's chewing up a tape and i don't know there was just something about that it was really fun like yeah he's like hitting hitting it because it's distorting the music and you have to hit the tape in the in the in the car cassette player yeah and so like this coupled with um some other tropes of 80s movies that are happening like there's lots of musical

interstitials lots of non-diegetic music that's just there yeah that's also a cameron crowe thing because he is an obsessed music nut and actually married one of the lead singers in the band heart and then they got divorced later but he's he is a and singles is like his movie that he made it after this i think is basically like it's practically the the seattle grunge music scene is as important a character as anyone who's in that film so he's music is cameron crowe's are really about the music and so the not only is this an 80s movie with lots of music but it's also kind of cameron crowe being really fussy about like the music it's like he's making a mixtape here in the soundtrack and it's this sort of stuff that makes me i really love 80s movies and i'm happy that we're doing this i'm realizing how much i

love 80s movies going through this this series with you there are just things about them the way they look like the color and like the way that they're shot i just really really love this style of filmmaking that was happening at that time i just really like it it just they make me happy for some reason um the next kind of big scene we go to we start to learn a bit about the father-daughter relationship between diane and mr court yeah it's james, but he's basically Mr. Court. He is. Or Sir, as Lloyd often will call him. And he clearly

would do anything for his daughter. It's like he gives her a car, he gives her a ring, but it is also in this scene where I realize how beautiful Ione Skye is. Yeah, that is the one thing here that,

I mean, she's supposed to be this somewhat dowdy, although, I don't know, I think you could argue that maybe she was, I think the argument is not like the classic 80s argument that she'd just be beautiful if she took off her glasses and put on some makeup or something like that.'s beautiful she is she is absolutely beautiful in this movie i think the argument is that she's just socially isolated that she's completely over mothered you know over parented by her father and she's kind of aloof from everybody she's the brain even you

know lloyd's friends try to talk him out of even talking to her because she's super scary because she's the brain. And we see it from Diane's perspective and she's like totally isolated and sort of okay with it and then ultimately sort of not. But it is funny to have that moment of like, I'm not sure even if she was the brain and had all these other issues and was kind of aloof from everybody socially. she was the brain and had all these other issues and was kind of aloof from everybody socially i'm not sure i buy that that could have been maintained throughout high school given um how attractive ioni sky is in this but let's you know it seems less ridiculous than in some other movies where it's an obviously beautiful woman but she's got glasses on and then she takes them off and everybody goes oh my god we didn't notice because that's ridiculous i don't think i see where you're going with that but i think that the party scene which we'll get to in a bit more detail in a minute shows that everybody thinks she's beautiful

because everyone wants to talk to her well that's true and it's like she's she's never gone to a party she's never been available she's never come off the mountaintop to talk to them and the first thing that happens when they walk in is that a blonde girl just comes over and is like, It's so great. I'm so happy you're here. Let me go introduce you to a lot of cute guys. While Lloyd is being accosted and loses track of her for a while. So, yeah, it's true. But that is, I was right.

Every time I watch this movie, I'm like, Oh, my God. Ione Skye in 1989. All right. Amazing. I don't like to do this stuff too much but she's so beautiful she's beautiful absolutely absolutely um one this is one of the things that i really like so this scene it's like this really nice calm mood this soft piano music is playing throughout like that is the way that she

is being built and then like jump cut to uh lloyd kickboxing with heavy metal like this is really like yeah these are very different people and then he's basically he's doing this kickboxing routine to build up the courage to call yes um so then he he grabs the phone uh and he calls the house and gets and he gets on the phone with with diane's father and basically talking and he's like i'll take a number from you that's how this usually works yeah because he's trying to explain and maybe like ask his dad to ask ask her dad to ask her out for him or something and and he doesn't know where he's going he's completely at sea here and he's like yeah i'll just give me your number that's how this works i think giving the impression that this happens a lot because he's

like are you the one with the mustang are you the one with this like you know the datsun like he keeps asking and it's like this is how this usually works. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Also, you left out the, we see Lloyd's life, Lloyd's parents, Lloyd's dad's in the army. His parents are absent. They're in Germany. And he's living with his sister, played by John Cusack's sister, Joan Cusack, and her son. And so she's, her son's father has run off. And so her son's father has run off, and she yells at him at one point for being the son's playmate instead of his uncle, which seems kind of mean to me and to Lloyd, too. And then he goes into the bathroom with the phone and calls to try to set up this date with Diane, who has essentially never met him. Is it before this point or after this point

that Diane finds out about the Reed Fellowship? I think it's after, because I think that happens after, that she's at the nursing home and her dad comes to tell her that she's won a fellowship and she's going to be going to England. What an exotic place, England.

Yeah, obviously. Because he then says before, because basically there's a telephone call after Lloyd puts down the phone and it's to tell you that she's got this refellowship, she's going to England. But there's this one other line that I really love where as the conversation is wrapping up

between Lloyd and Mr. Colt, Lloyd says, she's pretty great, isn't she? And then Mr. Colt says, yes, she is. Good luck, kid. Yeah. I liked it because it was kind of just like, she is great. You sound like a nice guy. Good luck. Like, I kind of like that.

That was how I took it anyway. I think it's a cool dynamic, too, that, you know that we've seen that John Mahoney thinks the world of her. And we know that Lloyd thinks the world of her. And this is kind of what one of the main conflicts in the movie is about, is these two guys who think the world of Diane. And they're kind of in opposition because the father has his issues and doesn't want to let her go and has judgment about Lloyd. But this is the one thing that they can absolutely agree on is she's pretty great. And it's a funny moment where you're the proud parent of this girl and a boy calls to ask her out and tells you she's great. What are you going to say?

It's like, yeah, she is. I agree. At this point in the movie until much later they are not in opposition like yeah it's yeah that's right that they're very much like on par with each other and and have respect for each other that's true that's true they they ultimately end up uh it ends up being problematic but it's true they are they they admire they admire diane and and lloyd proves his uh proves his trustworthiness, I would say. And he truly, you know, truly he's not lying when he says she's pretty great. He really

is taking care of her and that he'll take care of her and she'll be back safely and all that from the all-night graduation party. He's absolutely proven trustworthy about that. So then they find out that she's won the Reed Fellowship. I like where he's saying to, like, you know, where Mr. Colt's saying to Diane, you need to admit you're special. Tell me you're special.

And he says about the pyramid, everyone starts down the bottom and you've reached right to the top. I just liked all of that kind of stuff. Because it's more like laying the groundwork of how much he loves her. Yeah. Then later, Dianeoyd's call uh yes and he's basically trying to convince her to go

on a date with him like she's like i'm i'm very busy and he's like are you busy this day you she immediately says i'm busy like forever i'm. And he will not take no for an answer. It's kind of adorable. Are you monumentally busy? I like that. And then she ends up agreeing to go to the party with him after she says that she's going to England. And he says, oh, I went to England for three months. I think this is what probably intrigues her.

He's like, I could give you tips, many tips, English tips, or no tips of any kind. That's right. And then he kind of oversells it where she sort of agrees and he's still trying to sell it. And then he's like, all right, okay. All right. Yeah, it's adorable.

He's, yep, this is vintage John Cusack. It's that Lloyd is so, yeah, he's so committed here and so genuine. So then he goes and picks her up and there's a nice exchange um he's very very uh kind and and uh respectful to mr colt by calling him sir and saying that he'll have a home late and saying i could do kickboxing so i can take care of her and really laying it on um and then they take it they go to the party and that's where like you know everybody goes up to to diane and that's where everybody goes up to Diane, and everyone's really surprised that she's there with Lloyd. Then Lloyd gets given the opportunity of – sorry, the opportunity,

the job of key master, where he effectively will not drink for the evening and must decide who can take their keys at the end of the night so they can drive home. This is a very 80s phenomenon. This is the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, Take People's Keys, Designated Driver thing. This was really emerging in, I believe at one point they show a,

there's an 88 written on a toilet seat. So I think this is supposed to essentially be my high school class that I'm watching here. And this definitely was part of the culture was, whether this really happened a lot, I think is arguable. But this was very, a very 80s thing of like, we're going to have, we're going to have somebody watching or, you know, after my high school graduation, there was a big overnight party at somebody's house. And the whole idea was that you,

you went out there and you stayed there all night and they took your, you know, they took your keys away. And that, that absolutely and that absolutely did happen. So it's funny to see that here. That is a real thing. Very 80s. Something that I do not understand. The career counselor arrives at the party, tells Lloyd that he needs to kind of sort his life out

and needs to go to junior college, pick something, decide what he wants to do with his life. But then she joins the party. She gives him her keys and goes to the party. And I don't understand. How old is she meant to be? Well, Bebe Neuwirth is playing that part.

More members of the Frasier extended family, right? That she was Frasier's ex-wife. And set in Seattle too, man. It's all connected to Frasier, isn't it? So she, I feel like, you know, I always read that as just being that she was one of those high school teachers slash counselors who was perhaps overly friendly with the students.

That's really what I got. Oh, she hits him as well. Yeah, inappropriately friendly with the students and maybe trying to relive her own high school years uh when she should not be and that's just sort of how i read that is that's that's you know she's in mrs evans is a bit inappropriate yep so the first date is done they're basically they they spend the time together he's being very nice looking out for her they gotta drop this kid drop a guy off who doesn't know where he lives and they're driving all morning and they're very very nice he's very gentlemanly they're walking

around they're talking and it's good uh and at this point like i realize how happy this movie is making me like i'm watching it and I just feel really good. I love these type of love stories. These very simple, young love love stories. This part actually reminds me a little bit of Before Sunrise. Have you seen that? I have not seen that. Oh, Mike.

Okay, anyway, we'll move on then. When was that released? Before Sunrise, 1995. Too, anyway, we'll move on then. When was that released? Before Sunrise 1995. Too late. It's too late for the 80s, it doesn't count. But that's Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, it's good. But I know something's going to happen. And I assume at this point that her father will get upset.

There has to be a complication, right? Otherwise, what's the drama here? It's just a nice, pleasant, like a warm blanket. And then I don't actually have a lot of notes between here and way later in the movie, which shows how much I was enjoying this. Because sometimes when I have no notes, it's because nothing's happening.

But I was just like, et up in the movie. So basically, some of this, because this is a really long time. I've just looked. The next note I have is sad breakup. So it's when they break up and she gives him the pen. Oh. So I've got a long time here. So there's some stuff that happens that I can remember.

They have a family meal, which is when it all starts to unravel a little bit. Yep. Because Mr. Court asks Lloyd what he wants to do for a living, and he says he wants to be a kickboxer. And that's the kind of... Kickboxing, sport of the future. Yeah. So at that point, he's like, no, this isn't good. And then the IRS show up, and they're investigating Mr. Colt. Yes.

I think this is one of the things that I love about this movie, is it is such a strange and surprising turn for a movie like this. The complication in the romantic comedy is that one of the partners in the romance, her father is being investigated by the FBI or by the IRS. How strange is that? Suddenly like criminal investigation to ratchet up the familial tension. How strange is that? Suddenly, like, criminal investigation to ratchet up the familial tension? It's just odd. It comes kind of out of left field, and you're like, oh, you know, interesting, and puts him in a whole different light. And not in a way like he isn't truly devoted to his daughter, and not in a way, it doesn't undermine, like, I feel like a modern movie might undermine this in a totally different way, where there's a, you know, he doesn't really love her or whatever.

And it's like, that's not true it's just that other parts of his life are kind of um shady and questionable and uh and it introduces doubt in their relationship which is kind of interesting but it's totally out of left field it's like what the fb the irs is knocking on the door yeah and then you know things continue to go along they're having great dates they're really getting to know each other very well they're becoming very close she kind of like diane kind of goes back and forth a little bit and trying not wanting to get too heavy because she has quite a she she feels the fact that she's her her and her dad are very close like friends they are friends they are well they're all each other has that's that's been up to now the mother divorced the father and moved away and made diane shoes and diane chose her dad and since then they are and we know how removed she's been from high school society so essentially

they are each other's world and that that you know and that is the way that lloyd is threatening that by coming in here. But it's huge. They are their best pals. Yep. And then things kind of move along and she's – Teaches her to drive a stick shift. Yep, which is when things kind of turn for the better because she's like, can we just be friends?

Like she's worried that she's leaving and she's not going to see her dad and that concerns her as well. I like that her dad has a job. I mean, it turns out that that's ultimately important to the plot, but we see him and her and even Lloyd at the nursing home a lot. Yep.

Which, you know, in so many of these films, if the parents are present, it's also unclear if the parents even have jobs because they're always like they're around for things and here it seems the nursing home right it seems realistic right that they would be they would spend time around the nursing home he shows her at a drive in the big circle in front of the nursing home because it's part of her life that's you know that's all part of part of their lives so then they go out one evening they sleep together where they she points out a song to him because he's kind of like it's a nice it's a nice moment where like lloyd is like shivering and she's like what's the matter you called is like i'm just

happy and then she points out uh in your eyes it's on the radio she's like just listen to the song i like this song uh and then one of the reasons is this movie it well the reason this movie is called say anything is because that is a agreement between diane and her father they can say anything to each other and so she tells him that they slept together and he takes it pretty well like it doesn't go crazy. Like you see in many of these movies that you think maybe that's going to be the turning point, but it isn't. He's not happy that she's out all night. Yeah.

As an apparent would be right. Because they seem to have this agreement of, I don't mind as long as you call and she didn't call. Right. So that, you know know this is funny i without giving it too much detail my uh i will say um i have a a family member who had this agreement with their parent um uh an extended family member and uh it went about as well as it does in this movie well i think it didn't go quite as well as in this movie but it's the same thing it's like you can say anything to me we'll talk about it and then you know the first time that this person said oh well you know i had i had uh i had sex at 15 or whatever

um it was sort of like okay the parent can't do that anymore anything but that that is yeah it's just like it's great that you're a cool parent who can be the confidant but at some point you know you may need to be a parent and so it's hard don't promise not to be a parent because you may need to be a parent at some point you may not be able to help yourself but uh yeah it's it's a fascinating relationship that they have those two characters but mr court starts to get jealous at this point because he's not seeing any of diane and she's leaving and that he doesn't like that so he starts to he starts to drive a wedge in but he admits to knowing why he's doing like he has this like conflict of he wants her to be happy

and he says he realizes he's being jealous but he still wants to see her and he's concerned about the irs thing all that sort of stuff um so it leads to there being a breakup and for some reason like he said like diane diane like her dad gives her a pen so give him give lloyd this pen i don't even understand what what that was meant to signify but um i think it's just, it's the cluelessness of the dad that he's just, you know, he doesn't understand how this stuff works and he's living in a totally different world. And he, you know, yeah, it's bizarre.

It's really bizarre. So then there is a very, very sad breakup, lots of tears and lots of driving, walking in the rain. Seattle, you know, very moody. And then Lloyd says, I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen. Yep.

Which is probably the line you were referring to. Yes, indeed. I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen. And there's, you know, I really like that this movie revels in the teen anguish and like really like amps up the melodrama because that is how these things are when you're that age yes yeah it feels like the end of the world and that and it's it's displayed as that in the and it's very i think it's very nicely done because

it's a lot of like crying in the rain is a very cliche thing but it works if you do it and you're aware of why you're doing it. I felt that. I quite liked that. It worked well for me. Then Lloyd is driving around talking into a cassette tape, like a cassette recorder. It seems like he is recording these for Corey. You never really understand that, but my understanding is, like their best friends, one of the things that they do is record tapes to each other instead of writing to each other. And he says about how he thinks maybe he should hang out with some guys, and he tries to do that, like hang out with these group of guys, and they're all just ridiculous.

Yeah, including Joe, who Corey has broken up with a million times. Was the guy who was singing the song. And cheats on her. Exactly. Joe lies. Joe lies. Yep. And basically, like, you know, they're all saying, oh, we can get you girls, that kind of thing.

And he says, if you guys know so much about women, why are you here at the gas and sip with no women anywhere? Yeah, this feels like this is practically what all of High Fidelity is. It's this. This is like a scene that is replayed as the entire film High Fidelity 15 years later. 10, 11 years later, something like that. And he realizes that it was a mistake for him to even try and do that.

Yeah. This has been a terrible mistake. Oh, Jeremy Piven in that scene too young jeremy piven is his uh pal at the party and then he comes back here and and they've worked together in a million things too they're both from chicago so a little trivia is the guy from entourage right yep okay um so then it's kind of like a lot of scenes of Lloyd trying to forget. And he says at one point, I draw the line at 700 and return phone calls.

And like Corey's telling him to give it another go. And then I like this line that she says to him, you know, he's like, you know, maybe I just need to be a guy about this, you know, and just like forget about it and find someone else. And she's like, you're not a guy, be a man. about this you know just like forget about it and find someone else and she's like you're not a guy be a man um then you kind of start to see things like you start to realize at this point that things are falling apart for mr court yeah he tries to buy something with a credit card and it's rejected and they have to like take it away yeah he hides in the bathtub. Yep. And at that point you realize

something is going on here. But at this point, the IRS stuff is very much in the background from when it happens. He just briefly mentions it, that's all. But it is apparent that he either has no money, which is what I thought, that he'd gone bankrupt,

or that they're shutting him down, which is actually what's happening. Then we had the boombox scene. So in an attempt to try and woo, it's his gesture, Lloyd's gesture. He is standing outside of his car with a boombox above his head playing In Your Eyes, the song from earlier in the movie,

but nothing happens. Diane does not react to it then next scene diane is going to visit an irs officer who explains to diane after some prodding that it turns out that mr court has been stealing money from dead people yeah he's been taking inheritances and claiming people are still alive and that kind of thing then she starts to doubt her dad searches the house and finds a chest of cash. I like, so Philip Baker Hall is the IRS guy here. I think this is a cool performance because he's like, he understands the implications of this, right? That this is this young person who's very, by all accounts, very talented and she loves her father and

they've all that they've got and he's trying to break it to her. You know, he's doing his job, but he's kind of breaking it to her gently. Like, he I think it's an interesting scene where he's trying to explain to her, no, really, this has happened. And I know you think the world of your father, but really. And she

doesn't want to believe it, but he's trying to, like, I don't know, he's trying to give it to her straight. It's an interesting, an interesting scene where he's trying to, to explain what do you think is going to happen? She's going to be mad at him and all that, but he's trying to explain it to her. It's, it's very interesting. And then she has to go and see it for herself. I also think this twist is interesting in that, you know, you could argue that what he did was honorable in the sense that he's like, they, you know, they didn't have anybody and, and you know what was i going to do with the money but it's you know it's totally justifiable by him but totally not acceptable in any way and i think that's interesting too that

i think that's how a lot of these crimes get committed is somebody convinces themselves that what they're doing is actually not bad and then they get caught yep and so she finds the money he's got that uh he's got that expensive jukebox that that they've had in the house all this time yep and suspicion and the ring and oh the suspicion and then she finds yeah the box of cash and she goes to confront him she makes him swear to god and he does but then she's like i found the money you lied to me yeah and then she runs away. She runs to Lloyd, who's doing some kickboxing training, some sparring.

She walks in and then he gets kicked in the face and his nose is all bloody. That kind of thing. And basically it starts. Basically, it transpires that she says that she needs him and they're together and then uh mr court gets put in prison for nine months and fined 125 000 and it goes to the scene kind of this is the final scene in the movie where it shows lloyd's car outside the prison and diane's in the car and lloyd is in the is in the prison talking to mr court, you know, saying that she doesn't want to see you, that kind of thing. And then Mr. Court goes crazy, says like, why is she championing mediocrity? Because he says he's going to England with her. And Mr. Court doesn't like this because

he's going to be a distraction. But Lloyd, to his credit, tries to remain to be nice to her like gives a letter and says there's a version of the letter that i've seen which is not the one that's got which where diane says something along the lines of i can't help but love you or something like that um and so he's trying to be nice still to mr court even though mr court is being very mean to lloyd um and then diane arrives just as visiting time is ending and kind of hugs her father and that kind of thing and then gives him a pen yeah and says like you know to write yeah the guards are going to totally take that pen away yep of course this is a stab song with it but yeah symbolism i don't know she even got it in uh I don't know. Let's say it's low security. It's the IRS prison.

It's low, low, low security. They're on a plane together, and Diane is at Riverdale, and the movie is Scared of Flying, and they have this really nice scene where Lloyd's trying to calm her down and saying as soon as the smoking light comes on, hilarious, everything's fine, because

90% of all problems happen within the first five minutes and it's going along going along going along they're looking up looking up it goes bing and the credits roll yep jason snell i love this movie so much i love this movie so so much it's easily my favorite of all of the movies that we have seen wow wow this movie is so much about what i love in the in movies like it is a a ride that does not send you through many hoops uh the the love interests they don't do anything bad to each other that is a real thing that i don't like in in romantic comedies or movies with love interests that there is the point where one of them does something and upsets the other.

That doesn't happen in this movie. They are true to each other. And that's one of the things that I really love about it because their love is, you know, it's meaningful. Well, even when she breaks up with him, she's not breaking up with him because she doesn't care about him. She's got all these sort of external forces and she feels like this is what she needs to do. And she clearly regrets it immediately. Yeah. Because she's listening to his messages and she so wants to pick up the phone and answer, but she feels like she can't.

I don't have a bad thing to say about this movie. Wow. It's about this movie. Wow. It's a good movie. You should check out... Well, you should check out Single sometime. It's from the 90s, so it can't be from Mike watches the movies. But I like that movie. That's a...

Like I said, it's also sort of the story of... It is shot in Seattle in the early 90s. It's practically a documentary shot in seattle in the early 90s it is as it's practically a documentary about grunge happening in the background while the movie is happening in the foreground but cameron crow very music oriented um this is yeah i love i i do i love this movie this is a a great example of a, you know, 80s romantic comedy. The characters are so memorable. They're not like off of the assembly line at all.

They've got their own quirks, but they don't come across as being kind of like showy quirky. They're quirky. They are, but they feel lived in. And like I said, I love the idea of being between high school and college and just sort of dangling and not knowing where you're going in your life. And that's a very interesting point when she's going off to this fellowship, he doesn't know what he's going to do, if he's going to join the army or whatever. And they've got this summer together where all of these things happen. And I don't think you see a lot of films set in that period either.

And it's a really ripe period for that. So there's a movie that this reminds me of that I really love called Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist. Oh, I've heard about that. I haven't seen it. It's one of my favorite movies. It is very music focused. It has John, Michael Cera, that's it michael sarah and um cat dennings yeah yeah it's a great movie it's set over one night it's very very focused on music and it is just

this love story that blossoms over one evening it's really fantastic but yeah i loved this movie i've really loved this movie if if that is one of your favorite movies you really do need to watch before sunrise okay because that's that is also what happens is ethan hawke and who's american and julie delpy who's french meet in vienna and they've gotten overnight before they're they have to get their trains in the morning and they spend the night walking around the city and basically fall in love in that night and he's got to go off and back to his life and his girlfriend or whatever and it's but it's and it's just what happens in that night and it's a that's a classic too yeah that sounds like my kind of movie that's that's

your that's up your alley but i'm glad you like this this is um yeah this is uh, I really like John Cusack. He's been in any number of movies that I love. And like I said, I think Cameron Crowe is really interesting and has made a bunch of really interesting movies. And I'm surprised Ione Skye didn't become a bigger star. Every time I watch this, I think she should have been a huge star. And she wasn't, you know, she wasn't you know she wasn't so beautiful jason yeah it's true it's true i had that i had that moment in oh what was it um i can't remember now i saw i saw some other movie from the 80s not too long ago and i and i thought

i think it was one of ours because i remember you having this similar reaction about somebody else yeah and just feeling like this feels this feels inappropriate and yet you know but this and it's the other thing that's interesting but diane is diane is not um at any point played as you know super sexy that's not the point and i kind of i kind of really like that that they don't put her in they don't put her in in you know scant scantily she's not scantily clad at any point. She's, but she's beautiful and she's dressed like a normal person. And she wears her party dress at that one point. And she's, you know, absolutely glowing at that point. But yeah, it's, you can see why, you know, this is why we go to the movies. We see two interesting, attractive people and they're in

love and what's going to happen. And I mean, that in say anything plus yes we get the the uh the pen scene and we get that uh the boombox scene which is has gone down in history as a classic scene and it's funny the way you people remember it is not necessarily how it actually works in the in the movie because he's he does that and she she sort of wakes up but doesn't react um he calls her from the payphone in the rain, but it doesn't go the way I think people think that it goes. So that's it. Thank you for another great movie. That is it for this week's episode.

If you want to find our show notes, they're over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 42. And we have just a moment to thank our friends again over at Smile, Casper, MailRoute, and Squarespace for helping us out with this week's episode. If you want to catch us online, you can find Jason's work over at SixColors.com. And he is at Jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L. And I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. And we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Mr. Snow.

Goodbye, Mike.