Upgrade - 50: Bing Bong

Episode Date: August 17, 2015

This week Jason cleans off his desk and we follow up on Google’s new Alphabet. Then it’s time for Myke to go back to the movies with 1983’s “WarGames” and as a special bonus, Pixar’s “Inside Out."

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 50 today's show is brought to you by igloo and internet you'll actually like lynda.com where you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by industry experts squarespace build, Build It Beautiful, and TextExpander from Smile. Type more with less effort. It is the RelayFM anniversary this week, and my name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hello, Jason. It's a special week. We've got upgrade number 50 on Relay anniversary week, and we didn't even plan it that way. That's just how it worked out is cool and we also have clockwise 100 later in the week we do which we did plan a little bit

we skipped a week in the summer and people are like why did you skip a week the answer is because we wanted number 100 to land on the birthday week that's why simple uh we there's some relay news that we should talk about that's related to to interests and mine and presumably many of the listeners. You want to talk about that? We have a bunch of exciting stuff happening throughout the week, but maybe the most exciting is today we announced two new shows for Relay FM. We have Top Four, and Top Four is hosted by Marco and Tiffany Arment. And every episode, it's not necessarily going to be weekly. It's on a very loose schedule, kind of whenever they would like to do an episode, they are going to do an episode.

And top four will basically be the two of them ranking and putting in order and talking about their favorite four of a certain topic. The first episode is their four favorite video games. I have heard a later episode about another pop culture thing that I won't spoil right now. And I think the show is absolutely fantastic. I'm so happy that they wanted it to be a part of Relay because it's a lot of fun to hear people do this kind of stuff and to rank

and talk about their favorites because you find maybe some stuff that you didn't know about as well as I have been wanting to shout at my podcast player to tell them what my favorite things are to the point where I have been wanting to shout at my podcast player to tell them what my favorite things are to the point where I have actually now just given the two of them my lists. My favorite thing about the show though

is Marco and Tiff are married and you get to hear the banter which is fantastic between a really great married couple and the entertainment that you can get from that is just fantastic because they have a really great married couple. And the entertainment that you can get from that is just fantastic because they have a really great kind of shared sense of humor and it comes across and it's very, very charming. So that's top four. But we also have another new show that we launched today and launched being a perfect pun. And Jason, would you like to explain Liftoff to others? Sure. Liftoff is what some people had referred to as space and cider as an inside joke.

I'm pouring one out for space and cider. It turns out that B-side that Stephen Hackett and I did where we talked about space the week that the Pluto flyby happened, that was sort of our stealth, not sort of, you know, to gauge whether we wanted to do that regularly to talk about space stuff. And the reaction to it was far better than I ever expected, I have to say. I expected it to be kind of like lukewarm or people being like, look, we don't want to listen to you guys talk about space. And instead, there was this whole, like, all these space fans came out of the woodwork and they're like, yeah, more space, talk about more space.

In fact, we even heard from somebody who basically is a rocket scientist who said, your blurb says you don't have to be a rocket scientist. But apparently, you can be. You just don't have to be. So, yeah. So, we decided to do it. So, it's called Liftoff. And we're going to do it fortnightly, which is a word that you British people like. And I love, too, because it literally just means every 14 nights.

It's just they smash that together. It's fortnightly. Every other week. So that's the plan right now. And it's me and Stephen Hackett, because it turns out that we discovered that we're both space nuts since we were kids and have both been to, like, NASA social events where we've watched things shoot into, well, attempt to shoot into space. Mine got there. Stephen's didn't, but it did rocket off the launch pad. And so, yeah, and we think there's always interesting stuff happening in space.

So we're going to try to do it every other week. And we are also planning on having some special guests who I'm not going to name because we haven't approached any of them yet, but we have been compiling a list. So we're going to be cranking into gear about topics and setting it all up and programming it a little bit more now that we're rolling, now that we're off the launch pad. But I'm excited about it. And the art for that by Frank, by Forgotten Towel, is spectacular. If you haven't checked out, it's a space mission patch, and it's beautiful. And I hope we can find a way to actually make patches based on the artwork, because it is a beautiful thing. There is a very strong possibility that that will occur. I know a guy who knows a guy who can do patches. All right. The best thing to do to see the artwork is to go to the blog post,

which is in our show notes at really.fm slash upgrade slash 50. And if you click on the artwork there, you'll get a full res version and you'll be able to see the design, which is incredible. My brain can't fully comprehend because it just looks real and I don't completely understand how ForgottenTale was able to manage this. Ah, yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. He's a master of textures, I think,

because the texture, the spacesuit texture, is just, it's incredible. So I'm legitimately more excited about the icon than I am about the podcast, and I'm really excited about the podcast. So I love that people are loving the icon too. So yeah, big week, big week. Indeed. But we do have some follow-up as well as they're being followed out. Yeah. So I wanted to start with a little related to podcast stuff. Just a nice

note, I thought, from our friend Tropical CIO. He is, I believe it's a CIO in the tropics, and says, have you ever talked about how you have seemingly competing podcast networks yet get along so well? It's a cool example for others. So which I'll just say, thank you. Podcasting is a small, it's a small community. I feel like there is more we can accomplish together than like separately. I think we do the world of podcasting a disservice by trying to like, I don't know what, attack other podcast networks and say terrible things about them. And, you know, I think we all have different all the podcast networks have different things, different approaches, different reasons for being. And, you know, so that i mean that's my take on it i mean as somebody who has a podcast network and then has shows on a different podcast network you know i think i think we all work uh well together and that that's a good thing anything

more about that from you mike i don't see the incomparable as a competitor like it's just not a thing that comes into my mind like i love I love the incomparable shows, you know, like I doesn't really. There's nothing in my brain where it's like, oh, Jason, like, because I feel that we have a very like. Well, the topics are different. I have more than one time had somebody approach me and say, what about this podcast for the incomparable? And I've said, have you talked to Mike and Steven? So that that's also happened where I thought, I think this sounds more like this than like that. But I think even like I was on Twit yesterday, right? And when

I talked to Leo Laporte about tech podcasting, he doesn't go, oh, well, we're not going to mention Relay. He's like, oh, Relay. I mentioned that Christina and I both have, because I was on with Christina Warren on Twit yesterday. And I mentioned we were both on Relay. And he's like, oh, Relay FM, that's Relay.fm. And you can go there and Christina, what's your show called and all that. Right. So again, I feel like, you know, all of us are, are, we're not, we're not at the point where we're trying, I think we're all trying to be professional and elevate the medium and, or, or the format for those people who got mad when I called podcasting a medium, the, the format, the, the, the little sphere we're inside. podcasting a medium the the format the the little sphere we're inside um you know you know i i is it it's a competition in a way it is because we're competing for your time and um but i you know that's that's sort of as as much as i uh as much as i think about that i like i mean you know again i consider at least the incomparable and relay like cousins sure that's how i look at that sure what's next on the follow-up uh next follow-up is listener florian who um mentioned that we talk about

third-party watch faces on the apple watch i think we mentioned that last week um and uh he just chimed in to say it's not just about apple's control uh the watch faces of many brands as as uh and in fact clock faces right because apple found this out with the the swiss uh train station clock that they had that was actually in violation of a trademark uh these are these are generally protected so that if apple allowed third-party developers to do watch faces they would have to do probably a fairly careful um analysis of uh trademark violation of trademark law and potential violations, or it could get very messy.

And I think it's a good point. I think, you know, Apple could just push that out to the developers, but they're going to get in a situation very easily where they're going to be given takedown notices and things like that. So, um, but I thought that was a good point that, that watch faces is a super tricky, uh, area. And certainly my favorite watch face for the Pebble when I had it was something that for the most of the time I had, it was an unlicensed trademark infringement. So

I can see that as an issue, but I think it's also that the watch face is super important and Apple wants to control it. And right now I think Apple's still getting a handle on what it wants the watch to be and it wants the faces to do. And it's a lot easier to just keep it all in-house when you're still figuring it all out, which I think is still, even with watchOS 2, it's still happening. When I first read this piece of follow-up, it didn't make sense to me. It was like, well, you know, they have the same problem for people using like the Nike logo in an app, right? But then the more I thought about it, the more i realized that it is probably easier to detect by looking at it a copyright infringing logo of a major company but i don't know if many

people could look at a watch face and be like that's a rolex one you like the actual placement of all of the parts on the watch face right um because i assume that that's what's protected right not just the brand name because then it wouldn't make any difference. Right. But the actual design of the watch face. So that would be a lot harder to tell apart from from stuff that is protected and stuff that isn't. You know, it's I think it could it's it's it's problematic. And I agree, it's more problematic because if I look at what was in the the Pebble face store when I was using it, they were all violations. Yeah, they were all either characters or logos or things that were styled to look like other watches and things like that. So if I was Apple, I would,

I think Apple's doing the right thing and opening up the complications first on their faces. I would like to see Apple continue to release new faces and work on that because I've reviewed a bunch of them on six colors. And, you know, I think, I think there could be more faces. I'll put it that way. I think Apple could make their faces more flexible or make their, have there be more faces. I'd like to see that continue. We got a bunch of feedback, by the way, I mentioned in passing about the book that was written about sort of Apple while Jobs was gone.

And I didn't mention its name because I had forgotten its name. That happens. And it's Infinite Loop. And we'll put a link to it in the show notes but that's the book and you have to buy a used copy basically or at least i did i bought a copy that had been you know sold by a library somewhere donated to some company that then you know strips them and resells them and i got i now i've got a copy that i haven't read yet but um that just for people who wanted that was the one that keeps getting recommended as when John Syracuse and I were talking about like the untold story of the,

and the added complexity of that period where Jobs was gone, that that's a pretty good example of a book on the subject. Cool. The next thing that we have is from Jason Becker. In response to the kind of kind of i'm trying to think of the the word but like the uh elusive bing bong from apple maps that you had last week

not to be confused with another bing bong who we'll be getting to later in the show um yeah jason becker says that he got the bing bong sound in navigation on even an iOS 8.4 or 8.0.4 or whatever it is when on a phone call over Bluetooth. I think the sound has been in there. I just never heard it or rarely heard it. And then it was just coming out of my phone speaker while we were navigating while we were driving. And I still haven't replicated that, although I haven't tried very much because I haven't been navigating now that I'm home. So the bing bong remains elusive, but I liked it. I would love a mode that doesn't talk to me and just makes the little noise as I'm driving, just as a little cue. Although my Apple

watch does that too, but if there are other people in the car, it's useful. We enjoyed it. We'd started shouting it out. When the bing bong stopped being played by the phone, we all just would shout it out in the car. We made our own sounds, is what I'm saying. Stephen Hamilton wrote in about Apple Pay in Australia and sent us a link to a story that basically he says fraud is very rare. We've had chip, pin, and NFC for years. Apple Pay is struggling because Apple wants to take a certain percentage of the transactions. And that's what they take in the U.S. Apparently, the transaction skimming charge is less already in Australia. So they don't. So this would make if Apple took what they take in the US, or I believe the UK, they would be taking a larger share than in Australia of that of that little bit. So they're trying to get them to take a smaller cut. And we know how that goes with Apple. So it sounds like this is still

going back and forth in Australia. Although my understanding is if you go to Australia with an Apple Pay device set up in the US or the UK, it'll work at all those NFC terminals. But this is about setting up Australian banks, Australian transactions with Apple Pay. And they're slow because of the, with Apple Pay, and they're slow because of the, you know, Apple has less, how do we put this? There are fewer reasons that Apple can use for leverage with their negotiations with the Australian banks, apparently, which is interesting. So thank you, Stephen. And it seems like it's stalemate with the four big banks. Like there's been a lot of news in the last 24 hours about this. Basically, the four big banks aren't moving. So whether Apple Pay ever comes to Australia,

who knows? So John wrote in, upgrading John, and said he was thinking about comparing Jack Dorsey's return to Twitter like Steve Jobs to Apple, and about killing the APIs and things like that, and all of this. But he says, but then what

happened? He said, then Steve Jobs killed the licensing program of macOS because the cloners were making better and cheaper computers to Apple. So I read this as a careful what you wish for about having Jack come back to Twitter. Because remember, when Steve Jobs came back, he didn't come in and say, hey, let's open this up. He said, let's close this down. To which all our reply is, yes, Steve Jobs did do that. But then what happened next is Apple released the iMac. So Apple shut down the other hardware, and then it got to work creating really great Mac hardware of its own and has been on an uptick ever since. And that was sort of our point with Twitter is Twitter shut down most of this stuff,

or at least put it on a kind of like, there's no point in you investing in this. Don't worry about this software. Don't make new software, just forget it. And then did essentially nothing. And that's the difference in my mind is like, where is the iMac of Twitter software? Even the okay stuff that they're doing is not like full justification for getting all of the innovative developers out of the platform. I also heard from some people kind of offline saying, so I'm not going to name names, but I heard through the grapevine from a few different sources that Twitter is having a bear of a time hiring developers, especially for its desktop applications. And I think one of the reasons is all the qualified developers who really know the Twitter API in and out

are the ones they screwed when they made their API decision. So those people have a negative feeling toward Twitter. And then also I get the impression that it's got a bad reputation that a lot of people go into Twitter engineering for app development, and then they leave and are frustrated as they head out the door. So it's a difficult situation. So I hope they turn it around. I hope that there's some serious change there. But I would love to see the iMac of Twitter clients.

I would love to see that. Also, a bunch of people mentioned that I didn't mention TweetDeck. And I should throw that in there. I didn't mention TweetDeck because my mother told me, if you can't say something nice about something, you shouldn't say anything at all. TweetDeck works for a lot of people. It totally doesn't work for me. I don't like it.

It's a weird web view inside a Mac window. It's a column-based thing where the window size never snaps to the columns. So you get these weird kind of like half columns that you're side-scrolling through, which is really awful. And it's a dashboard. It's like great if you're a social media manager and you want like eight panes up and full screen. It's like show me what's happening on Twitter right now. And I never considered Twitter something as much as I'm on Twitter. I've never considered Twitter a front

and center thing. Twitter is a little box on the side of my window that I bring up, look at, and then dismiss. And TweetDeck feels to me like it's not designed to that at all. TweetDeck is your command central for Twitter. And that's great. I think if I were a social media manager, I'd use it. But I'm not. And it totally doesn't work. Not only as an app do I not like the way it's built, but its premise doesn't work for me.

So I didn't mention it. That's what I would have said. This week's episode is brought to you by lynda.com, the online learning platform of over 3,000 on-demand video courses to help you strengthen your business, technology, and creative skills. For a free 10-day trial, visit lynda.com slash upgrade. That's l-y-n-d-a dot com slash upgrade. lynda.com is for people that want to make things happen in their lives. It's for people that have problems that need solving. It's for people that are curious about a hobby or a

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to get you unlimited access to everything. But you're thinking, I'm not sure. Best thing to do is just go and sign up for a free trial. I can give you 10 days to try out lynda.com for free. If you go to lynda.com slash upgrade, you can start your free trial today. Whether you're looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby, or you just want to learn something new, go ahead and visit lynda.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Lynda for their support of this show and RelayFM. So next up today, we have a little topic that you were referring to in our notes as the odd couple. Yeah. So before we started, we started talking about this subject, and I decided halfway through we should save it for the show. So here it is. This is not super – people like this stuff.

I'm not sure I'm super excited about it, but I know people like it, so I thought I would talk about it. There were some tweets going around today with pictures of Steve Jobs' desk, which I thought were funny, because the people tweeted by people who you might expect are people who Apple products appeal to. A lot of those people are people with a design bent and they're very, they want everything just so. I would imagine somebody like CGP Grey would be in there, like, I'm sure there's nothing on his desk. He may not even have a desk. I don't even know how that would work, but it's possible. And Steve Jobs' desk was a mess. It had a computer on it. There were multiple photos from a few different years.

There's crap all over the desk. Behind him is a bookshelf with all this junk in it, and there's stuff on the floor, and there's cables everywhere. And it's a mess. People were very disappointed in Steve Jobs, which is kind of harsh because the guy's not around anymore to defend himself. But I laughed at it because I remembered when John Syracuse came into my office at Macworld one time and his response was very like, ah, you got all this junk around here everywhere. How do you, how do you live like this? Like an animal? He did not actually call me an animal, but I know he was thinking it. And yeah, my office was messy. My office would tend to just build up junk. And then I would finally have a moment like, I can't take it anymore. And usually on a Friday

afternoon, I would put everything into the recycling and into the garbage and I'd bundle everything up and I'd put stuff in the computer recycle and I would be back to square one, but often quite messy. It's absolutely true. Because I get focused on what I'm doing. And the other stuff is like, I'll deal with it later and then things just pile up. But what I wanted to say is I think all the people out there who are freaking out about Steve Jobs' desk would be proud of me, at least for what is on my desk right now. So I have a Thunderbolt hub that I got when I had my MacBook Air as my primary computer before I bought the iMac.

And so the idea was I plug in the MacBook Air, one cable plus power, and it drives my external monitor that I had and my gigabit ethernet and audio out and just everything else is connected, USB. It's all connected from the Thunderbolt hub. All I have to do is plug the Thunderbolt hub into the MacBook Air. Worked great. Then I get the iMac and I think, well, I don't need the Thunderbolt hub anymore because all those ports are on the back of my iMac. But I got the iMac that's on the arm. You've seen it. You've been in here. You've seen it. I have. I've been riding in there. So you can plug everything into the iMac on the arm, but what you get is this iMac that's floating in space, and then like 10 cables coming off of it. And you can channel them and all, but it's a big bundle of cables. And I thought to myself, well, you know what I should do is just attach the Thunderbolt

hub, because then all the cables are off the desk or at the back of the desk where the Thunderbolt hub lives. And all I have are a couple of cables, the power and the Thunderbolt cable coming out of the iMac and running to the back of the desk. So I did that, but the Thunderbolt cable I had wasn't long enough for me to move the Thunderbolt hub somewhere where I couldn't see it. So it's sort of sat on top of my speaker on the back of my desk next to the foam orange brain, actually, which is still right there. So in the last couple of weeks, I've made some advances. I bought a long Thunderbolt cable. It's a white Thunderbolt cable for bonus design,

nerd cleanliness. nice work. Uh, I should explain, I'm going to say it here, the Felix Unger people, because this is a reference that you didn't get the odd couple, a play, a movie, a TV show. didn't get. The Odd Couple, a play,

a movie, a TV show. Neil Simon wrote the original. It's about two guys who have to live together, and one of them is a slob, and one of them is a neat freak. And in this scenario, John Syracuse is Felix Unger, and I am Oscar Madison. This is what I'm saying. So I got a white Thunderbolt cable to match the white power cable that comes out of the back of the iMac. They run off the back and it's a long cable. So I bought some Velcro and attach my Thunderbolt hub to the metal bar that's sort of most of the way down on my adjustable desk. And that's where the Thunderbolt hub lives. So from most angles, you can't see any of the cables that are running into it.

And the desktop is completely clear. And from the desk, you just don't see it. The two little cables run over the edge and are never heard from again. And then below there, there are cables that run into the power and the Ethernet and all of that. And I had Delcro left over. So I took my little USB audio interface that I use to attach my microphone that I talk through every day. And it's got little knobs on it for volume and all of that. And I attached that to the underside of my desk, too.

So now I feel like a real professional because I've got, like, audio equipment attached to my workspace all the time. But, you know, it's just Velcroed in there and I can rip it off and take it with me if I need to. That required me to move, like, the button that adjusts my desk up and down, which I did. So what's on my desk now is there's the speaker, which has got the Relay FM commemorative wooden block and the orange brain on it. And I've got like my iPhone is sitting here right now. And I've got this blue metal box. That's my mute button that I keep thinking I may actually also want to Velcro to the bottom of the desk, but I'm out of Velcro right now. So what I'm saying is you should be proud of me. I don't have a pile of things on here.

I've got color-matched cables. They run off the end of the desk. I've got a cable management solution. This is as good as it's ever going to get. So, yeah, maybe I'll take a picture of it so that when I start piling junk onto this desk, um, I have deniability. I can just show people the picture and say, no, no, this is what it looks like. Oh, we need a picture for the show notes too. I guess I will take a picture for the show notes, but I think it's, I think it's, uh, yeah,

it's funny. I didn't know I had that in me to be so, uh, uh, I don't know. So, so careful about this stuff. Let's say that I would, I would be like, oh, let's make it a white cable. That would be perfect. But I did that. That's what I did. So it looks nice. It's nice to have, since it's on an arm too, to lift the iMac up and have the big wide open space below it. It's nice so just just over a year ago before i started relay um i basically went through

and did a big overhaul of my physical space here changed everything up and did what you did not not to the level that you did it in velcro anything to anything uh but i got like you know those velcro cable ties i have some of those right now and i did a bunch of that kind of stuff to make my whole workspace look a bit better but over time i've been adding more and more things and right now the desk itself is in a better like situation it's ever been it is uh generally cleaner than ever because of the way that i've arranged it and everything's kind of got its place. And I have a monitor now, as well as having the TV for the games consoles.

And I have like a two Mac system going on, and I'm very happy with it. And it's very nice. But the cable situation down the back there is a nightmare. And I can't even... It's gotten to the point now where it's so bad i don't even know how i could begin to fix it uh it's that kind of scenario i've got going on right now uh it's kind of to the point where i don't think i can do it i think i need someone to come and do it for me because it's at that point where it's just beyond my my help and

assistance i've got it into this mess and there is absolutely no way i can get it out of it periodically i take my uh so in our living room which again you've seen you know there's a big we got a big tv and then there's like the receiver and their video game consoles and all this stuff and twice this summer i have because we got a new tv as we've talked about and because because I got the Xbox One, I've done the tear down and reconnect at least some large percentage of the stuff. And I'll tell you, every time I do it, I come out with like three or four cables that are not connected to anything. And I say to myself, where did this come from? Why is this here? And probably I disconnected one side and thought I would get around to disconnecting the other and didn't or couldn't find it.

And then later I would just keep plugging those in thinking they went somewhere, which they didn't. And eventually think like, oh, these don't go anywhere, but I don't know where they're plugged into on the other side. but but i don't know where they're plugged into on the other side and so then disconnected them and then they just sit there for a while and just sort of hanging not connected to anything why are they there and then uh and then the next time i i pull something on they go oh this is not connected to anything and then yeah so cables are the worst um they they are the worst i i i think it would be other than all the extra work it causes i think people should like every six months they should un they should disconnect all their cables and then reconnect all their cables just because you will i i swear you will find cables that you'd be like i don't need this cable why is this even here and uh i think that would be a smart smart move i think i need

to do that like i think I need to burn everything down and start over again. But with that kind of stuff, I got... Yeah. Just shut it all down. The cables are too bad. But I feel like in that scenario,

I have to then... I can't work the whole day because it's going to take me that amount of time to get everything back into some sort of sanity again. Yeah. Yeah.

My cables right now below my desk here are in decent shape because i've only been in this space with this stuff for a year and um i don't have that many things hooked up because i only have the one computer and all of that um but still it'll it'll it'll accumulate i'm sure of it i literally was pulling out hdmi cables going like oh i didn't know i had an extra hdmi cable oh here's another ethernet cable i just i don't know why it got back there but it was back there so yeah cables they're the worst one day mike one day everything will be decabled we'll live in a we'll put on our jumpsuits and go to space, and there will be no cables. Oh, well, we'll just have Macs with one port. Mm-hmm.

There's nothing we can do about it anyway. That's a cable. It's got a cable. Just one. Just one cable. And if it was the only one cable, you could just choose one thing. It's a grim future you're describing. So we have an interesting show today in general because our tech topics are mini

topics uh we're completely throwing out the normal format we have one more mini topic then we're doing ask upgrade then we have two mike at the movie kind of things we have we have we have mike at the movies and then we have bonus bonus mike at the movies it's mike went to a movie yesterday it's the yes it's the he just has to talk about. It's not as catchy, Vertical, but it is one, nevertheless. But you had some mini-topic follow-out, I think, that you wanted to do now? I have one really quick mini-topic, again about ATP 130, the Accidental Tech Podcast. Maybe you've heard of it. And they were talking about Alphabet and Google, and this came up when I was on Twit yesterday, too. I just wanted to share really briefly my experience

from IDG. So IDG was founded by a guy, Pat McGovern. He started Computer World. He turned this into International Data Group. And it grew. And they added more media brands. But then over time, he added investment and research and invested in all these international versions of IDG where they're in China and they're in Europe and they're in Africa and they're in Asia, the rest of Asia. And, you know, he was one of the first Western businesses to go into China. I believe one of the first Western businesses to go into Vietnam in the last 20 years, 30 years. And so he built this business. And I wanted to mention it because I see relations to this in Alphabet, which is you've got a founder, or in the case of Google, founders, and they create a thing. And then over time, the thing is much bigger than it was when it began.

And you have that moment where you're like, how do we structure this? And this is definitely what Pat McGovern did. And when I worked at IDG, you know, he was the chairman there. And then, and so there was a board of directors. And then he hired a, basically a president, a CEO of the overall IDG. But everything under that was different businesses. They were companies and they had presidents. And this strikes me as being similar to what Google is doing, where that business has grown up. It's no longer Larry and Sergey are at Stanford and they've got an idea for a search engine, right? It's come a long way. And at some point, you know, if you're Larry and Sergey, there are two things you could do.

You could say, you could have the discipline to say, we've started to make some money. I'm going to take some money out and invest it in this other thing that I want to do. But instead, they're like, well, let's just use Google's money to build this other thing. It'll be part of Google. It won't be our money. It'll be Google's money. Let's just keep it all in the one business instead of making some other businesses. And so they did that.

And they kept doing that. And they bought other companies. And they created these crazy lab divisions. And it was all just part of Google. And over time, and this is the story that they seem to be telling now too, is over time, especially the last few years, they've realized it kind of doesn't make sense. Because as we said last week, there's Larry and Sergey's playground. And there's sort of what we think of as base Google. And I know John Syracuse has said, I'm just going to call it Google forever. But I think, given my experience at IDG, it's like there is some freedom to run your own business.

And I think that this is what Sundar Pichai is going to get. And I think this is what Tony Fidel has with Nest. And I think that over time, ideally, you'll see that from Google Ventures and from the labs, projects and other stuff that they're doing, that they will see themselves more as the standalone businesses that are part of a family with a shared ownership, but that are allowed to chart their own course at least a little bit. Now, this all comes down to what the founders want, what the guys, Larry and Sergey in this case, want. Because over my time at IDG, the interference slash supervision from above varied a lot. There were times when we were very much pushed together and said, you all need to do this, even though it doesn't really benefit you, because it benefits the group as a whole. But there were other times when that didn't happen. And that was all within IDG's media group, the publishing group, we never

got feedback about how the research company IDC did its job, or what happened with Ventures. In fact, Ventures was kept at a distance because they would invest in companies that we would cover. So I wasn't even aware of what they were investing in. It was just completely separate. So it's going to be up to Larry and Sergey about how they play this. But I think the best solution here is, and what I hope they do, is let the businesses be the businesses and really just let Alphabet be a thing that transforms what we think of as thought of as Google before a week ago into this, into thinking of Alphabet as stuff that Larry and Sergey own, along with the investors who have no control. Nice trick. And that within that are a whole bunch

of different companies, including Google. And that just because Google does something doesn't mean that Nest will follow along. And just because Nest does something doesn't mean that that is only in the best interest of the Google search engine. So we'll have to watch it. But it kept resonating with me that this is the sort of thing that happens when you have founders who have this huge business that keeps growing in all these different areas and you have to make some decisions about how you segment them and how you manage them because it gets too complicated. So anyway. You mentioned the investors there. The investors remain the same though, right? Because... Well, okay. So right now the Alphabet holding company, which is coded as Google on the stock market, owns everything, right?

So first off, it doesn't preclude them from spinning things off, right? They could spin off Nest if they wanted to. They could. And give the stock, you know, translate the stock out to the Nest people. I am not an investor. I'll just say that. But they could do that. They could do that.

And the way they've structured their stock is interesting in that all of the stock that's been bought up when they went public that made them a whole lot of money, Larry and Sergey still have control. They have the voting, the majority of the voting shares, which is a brilliant thing that they did because they didn't want to lose control of their company. I think Steve Jobs may have given them some advice there. So they can kind of do what they want. And the stock will get pummeled if the stock market doesn't like it. But there's nobody who can like take over the board and say, you're fired. We're bringing in new management to run Google. So over time, it wouldn't surprise me if they perhaps took more steps to to separate some of their businesses um but for

right now yeah it's one in the end all of these companies have the same owner but they're being run separately and the question is how separately are they really being run because i like i said i saw it both ways i don't know if it's my general kind of tendency for these things, especially Google-related things, but on the face of all of this, I believe it all. It makes sense to me. Let's imagine in 10 years' time Relay has 60 shows, right? Because we just can't stop.

I can see a world where we would have, like, spin-off networks instead. Like, you know, let's say that we ended up with 10 tech podcasts, and then we had 10 podcasts about movies and 12 about video games. Like, I can see a world where, like, we would say, oh, and then, you know, this is where you go and get that stuff. Even if it was just, like, real AFM tech and it lived at this website. Do you see what I mean? Like, I can understand that. Like, I can see from a founder's point of view like if your business

continues to grow and grow and grow to the point where it doesn't make sense anymore then you might want to like restructure things so you're able to focus on the places you want to focus on because if it gets to the point where i'm like i'm totally done with tech i only want to do video games but yet all i keep getting is this tech stuff like why don't i just put somebody else in to do that and then i'll just go to do the video game stuff but i remain with the same level of control that i had before i just don't have to care about any of the stuff i don't want to care about but as long as the tech shows keep making the money then they'll keep paying for whatever other stuff i want to do because i have

these ideas in my mind of like things i would like to do in the future like just other little projects and i see like relay and the money the income that i make from relay helping me afford to do that at some point you know well another example um i mean obviously the difference between certain kinds of podcasts is very uh much less than the difference between a search engine and a self-driving car. But it's on this continuum. I was going to use as an example, there was a podcast network called Earwolf. And they hired some ad salespeople to sell ads for their podcasts. And at some point, they realized that that was a totally different kind of business, but also a successful business with a lot of growth.

And so that's Midroll Media, which just got bought by Scripps. And that's where our friend Lex Friedman works. And that's what they did is the guy who founded Earwolf said, let's essentially split this in two. I think it's the same company or they're, you know, two companies share with a, with a shared single owner. But that was what they did is they said, oh, this is two things, not one. It started as one thing. And then it got big enough that they realized, well, this thing to grow and improve actually needs to be, uh, you know, be its own thing and not just attached to this other business that we've got. That's one of the reasons business

is so hard. Business is tough, man. And then as of today, they're a whole new thing as well. Yeah. Oh, sure. They've got more stuff. They're working. Yeah, they're working on world domination over there too.

Yep. The Netflix for podcasting, Jason. You've got that going for us. Yeah. Yeah. The Netflix for old episodes of podcasts that you now can't listen to unless you play. I love this Fast Company title, the title for the poster to put in the show notes, is how the Netflix of podcasts we've been waiting for. Who was waiting for that? Yeah.

Who was waiting for that? Who was waiting for the Netflix of podcasts? I like the concept. So what I like about the concept, and Lex mentioned something about this, What I like about the concept of what they're doing is right now it's very hard to gain a new audience for a podcast, especially like a one-off or a miniseries. And so I think they're envisioning this as being a place you could release audio content, almost like an audible where you could say, look, all subscribers have access to this new special from a comedian or this new six-episode miniseries from an NPR person that you really like, and you get access to all of it just by being a subscriber. I think there's something interesting there. It strikes me as being more like Audible than what we think of spoken content as well, they're thinking the same thing, too.

So it's interesting. It'll be interesting to see where that all goes. In the meantime, we will continue to release our podcast on RSS, where you can listen to it with anything. And it's simultaneously released worldwide and all of that good stuff that comes with being a podcast. Yeah, the piece that we may have missed from that story is what Wolf is doing, is taking the back catalogs of some shows

and putting them behind a paywall, effectively. You can still listen. My understanding is you can still listen to the new episodes, but if you want the back catalogs, they'll be behind a paywall, which is, and they have Mark Maron right at the very top of this,

and he's been doing that for a long time. he was using libsyn service and may still be in libsyn you pay them and they give you an app and they can gate your content and you have to pay a subscription fee and then you get access to the old content that's older than whatever five weeks or 10 weeks or something like that it's a little similar to what uh ricky gervais did with his podcast where uh after a little while they went down off the internet and were sold as audiobooks on Audible and iTunes. That kind of thing. And so this is what they seem to be doing too. Like with Audible, they want you to have a subscription and then you have access to this stuff including old episodes of podcasts and stuff like that.

So there you go. Yeah. Let's take a break for Ask Upgrade. It's that time already. It is. This week's episode and this vertical of Ask Upgrade is brought to you by Igloo, the internet you'll actually like. With Igloo, you no longer have to be chained to your desk to get your best work done.

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Thank you so much to Igloo for supporting this show and RelayFM. Okay, so our first Ask Upgrade this week comes into us from Jacob. And Jacob asked, and he asked this of you, Jason, have you tried AT&T's Wi-Fi calling on iOS 9 yet? And my answer was no. I have since turned it on, but not tried it. But I did turn it on, got the warning saying, you know, 911 services, your emergency services may not be available.

And tell us what your address is. And are you sure you want to do this? And I went through all of that. And then it said, this service will be available soon. And then took me back to the settings screen with it turned off. And I thought, oh, that's weird. And I turned it on again and it turned itself off. And I thought, okay, that's weird. And then I turned it on again and then it stayed on because I think that was the, you know, it would be on soon. And then finally my account was flagged or whatever as

being able to turn that on. And then I turned it on and I have not used it. So have you used it? Never fear, Jacob. Mike is here. So EE here has Wi-Fi calling and has had it for a while. I don't know why I never had it enabled. I think that it's gotten better with iOS 9. I'm not 100% sure why it has worked or why it hasn't. But anyway, I was in my co-working space the other day and I was on a call and my phone died and iOS 9 popped up to say,

hey, this call failed. It didn't say these exact words, but it's something to this effect. That call failed. Would you like to turn on Wi-Fi calling? And I said, yes, iOS 9, I would like to do that. So I turned it on. And now whenever I'm on a Wi-Fi access point,

I have EE, my network name in the top. I have two bars. And then in between the EE and the Wi-Fi logo, it says Wi-Fi call always, which annoys me. I wish it wasn't there. But I, so now my understanding is that I get better reception

wherever there's a Wi-Fi access point. And I haven't noticed any difference at all. It works seamlessly. I haven't had any dropped calls recently. It happens every now and then. So I assume it's working pretty well. But I liked that it popped up at that moment. That's great user experience right there.

Like the call failed and the phone knows that there is a solution to make this better that I didn't know about. So it pops up because this is the thing that I think about quite a lot, especially looking at these iOS devices now. As they are getting older and more mature, they are becoming infinitely more complex. And so many features now are enabled and people will never find out about them because why would they know? You know, like something will be enabled and nobody knows where to find it or nobody knows it exists. And the Apple tips app just drives everyone crazy. So you end up in a

scenario where people don't know about certain features that their devices have. And that's just the way it is. And that just feels like such an annoying, you know, it's like an annoying thing, but I don't know how you get around it without completely redoing everything every time. And you can't do that. Sometimes you have to just add features in, but you end up in a scenario where it becomes,

you know, more and more complex to try and work out how to do these things. It's just the way of the beast, I suppose. Yeah, but I like that that and that's the idea right that you surface new features by saying oh it seems like you were trying to do something it's clippy i've noticed that your your call is dropping would you like me but that there's a good instinct there of saying this looks like a job for a new feature that you haven't turned on yet and uh you know would you like me to turn it on now my phone phone does not say that. I have Wi-Fi calling turned on and it doesn't do anything.

It just is showing me two dots, AT&T and a Wi-Fi symbol. That's it. I don't know. Maybe I don't have, it says I have Wi-Fi calling, but maybe I don't. I don't know. Who knows? The magic of Wi-Fi calling.

The next question comes from Lee. Do you have any advice for someone that works full-time but owns their own website and does some freelance writing and podcasting in their spare time? To how do you build a following? This is that question, huh? Can I start? Shall I start? You may finish.

No. Lee. It's not easy. I kind of, I guess, over the last six years nearly, have built a great following now to the point where I can do this full time, and I'm very thankful to everybody that checks out anything that I ever do. But I guess I came from obscurity in the last six years,

right? Like, you know, it's not like some people like your great self, Jason, who you started your own thing now, but you have been in the public eye in that scenario for many years at Macworld, right? You knew a lot of the people that you know now before you were independent, I guess, but for a lot longer than I did. And for me, I guess the way that I did it was I found the thing that I liked to do, not necessarily the thing that I was good at. I kept doing it and I kept doing it because I liked doing it, right? Like I just enjoyed doing podcasting. It's the thing that I have liked to do and I just kept doing it. And the reason I say it's important is because if you like the thing, if you love the thing,

you will stay awake until two in the morning to get the thing done that you need to do. Right. So that is part of it is to find the thing that you love because it gives you the dedication to continue. Be consistent with it. If you're going to do a weekly schedule, stick to the weekly schedule. Otherwise, be consistent because people are more likely to remember you if they see you a lot, I think, is another thing that I have found. And try and find a thing to do differently.

So way back in the day, in like 2010, 2011, with my first ever podcast, I started bringing guests onto the show to interview them and also to have them talk about the tech news of me and my co-host. Jason Snell was one of those guests. That's the first way that me and you ever had an interaction. And it was basically, what it did then was it enabled people to find out about the show because they would link to it or whatever, that kind of thing. This stuff is way too common now, people guesting on podcasts where it wasn't so much i think five years ago because one thing there wasn't as many podcasts yeah but what what i know that did was that helped give me a leg up

because it helped me get a lot of contacts and that kind of thing so i'm not saying follow my exact advice but try and find a thing that you can do that sets you apart from other people. It's a very, very difficult thing to do, but that's the only advice I can give you, I'm afraid. I will follow up by saying, I think that's great advice. You said you talked about consistency. I think consistency is the most important thing. I mean, I suppose you could be consistently bad, but ideally you're doing good work. You're, you're doing something you like and that you're, you're passionate about, and then you need to be consistent. And if that's being a podcaster, it means, like you said, it means releasing an episode

every week. If you say you're going to, and not, not doing, I can't tell you how many podcasts I see that it's like, there's an episode or two, and then there's no episodes for, you know, four months. And then there's an episode and then there's no episodes for eight months. And then there's no episodes for, you know, four months. And then there's an episode. And then there's no episodes for eight months. And then there's another two episodes. And that is not a way to build a following. So be consistent.

If you're a freelance writer, try to find consistent work. And be consistent in your work. You know, turn in consistent work. Be on time. Editors really appreciate you being on time and doing your job, and they will reward you for being on time and doing a good job by giving you more work. And that allows you to be more consistent. And I would say focus is the other thing I would mention, which is building your own site and freelance writing and podcasting and working full time is a lot of

things. I do those three things without working full time, and I feel like I don't have enough time. So one thing you might want to look at is what are the most important things to you? What do you really want to focus on and be consistent with? Because it's possible that you could be more consistent and build more of a following by not doing a whole bunch of different things, but focusing on a few things. So not knowing enough about your situation to say more than that, that's, I think, the other thing I'd throw out there. Consistency, audiences like it, editors who will give you assignments for freelance work like it. I think it goes a long way. Great advice, Jason. Jim asked what our thoughts were on Dr. Dre's exclusivity on Apple Music.

So Dre has written a soundtrack for an upcoming movie called Straight Outta Compton, which is based on the life and times of the NWA. I think it makes perfect sense, right? Of course he's going to do it. He's an Apple employee. I think that this is the type of stuff that will really help set apart apple um and will be a thing that will enable them to continue uh from the the artists and people that they have working for and with them and the influence that those people can also

have on other people you know so i think that it makes perfect sense that Dre did the, if he was going to do it anywhere, of course, it made sense to do it in Apple Music. And of course it makes sense to give them an exclusivity, especially still during the free period, which when is that ending? That's got to be soon-ish. September. September time.

Okay. Something like that. Maybe they extend it. If you buy a new phone, that'd be smart. God, that'd be smart, wouldn't it? I don't love exclusivity, any content exclusivity like this, because inevitably there's something that you can't get that you want because it's locked up somewhere else and you aren't going to switch to their thing,

but that means you just can't get the thing that you want. I don't love that, but that's just the way it is. As a consumer, I don't love it, but I'm thinking of it as a pure business. It makes sense for Apple to do that. Whether it's the quote-unquote right thing to do, of course it makes sense that it would do it. Blaze would like to know our thoughts that now the YouTube mobile app supports vertical video.

What do we think about vertical videos? So instead of this is a video being taken in portrait mode with a device. This is our vertical video vertical. I think that may be the entire reason why I wanted this to be in this show. I hate vertical video because, you know, most of the devices that I watch big things on are of course horizontal. But the fact is if it's stuff for that, that's only going to be viewed or mostly going to be viewed vertically and people shoot things vertically, I would prefer that we all agree to watch things in horizontal,

you know, in landscape mode. I feel like we're going to get to the point where, where our cameras are going to be so high resolution that you're going to be able to hold your phone vertically and take a horizontal video in HD. And, you know, and maybe it's just a matter of how it, you know, how it crops it or how it presents it. But, you know, these kids today with their vertical video, it's so natural to take vertical video. I have to remind myself not to take vertical video.

I have to remind myself not to take vertical video. But if you ever plan on it being on a TV or something like that or on CNN or something like that, those are all formatted for wide. But if it's just to send it to your friends or whatever, then who cares? That's what I think. It doesn't bother me at all. I tend to hold my device in portrait mode, so it works perfectly. So I think it's great that YouTube are supporting it, because if you're going to do it, it makes sense to watch it that way.

I agree. I agree. Like I said, I think the real solution here is to make cameras that are good enough that when you hold it in that natural portrait orientation, by default, it still shoots a widescreen video. But that's not how it works now so there you go indeedy indeedy so uh we are now going to approach the first uh mic at the movies topic this week so again i'll explain this i've as we spoke about on twitter as we do every now and then jason has assigned me to watch an 80s movie this week it is well this time it is war games i'm gonna talk about that but yesterday evening i went to see inside out and i really want to talk about it with jason so after we have done a spoken about war games

we'll be talking a little bit about inside out i just have some thoughts and feelings that i wanted to share with jason so let's talk about war games okay so the idea here is that i i try to pick a movie from the 80s that you haven't seen that seems to be what we've fallen into and although your discussion of the uh of the of the new uh arment podcast with the top fours um made me want to have you watch high fidelity which is a great movie and it's about a guy who makes lots of top five lists it's not from the 80s so for now i'm sticking with the 80s and so you hadn't seen war games which is not on my list of my 10 favorite movies or anything although it's a movie i like a lot i think it might be on john syracuse's list but it is certainly a key film in terms of the depiction of early kind of computer

nerd stuff. It's I would say it's the, if not the first one of the first, like truly, truly a movie about being a personal computer, a personal computer nerd. It's from 1983, directed by John Battam, starring Matthew Broderick, Ali Shidi, and Dabney Coleman, among others. So before I go in with my usual what I knew about this movie before, and then maybe talk about how I felt about the movie, we should thank friends of the show,

the great Smile Software. Oh, do we have a friend? We do indeed. We do indeed. It's been a while, but Smile Software are here again. They're a great friend.

And also Greg from Smile, he DM'd me. He was very excited we were talking about war games today. So I thought I would have this whole segment brought to you by Smile

because I knew they were excited about it. The thermonuclear war that ends the world brought to you by Smile, because I knew that they were excited about it. The thermonuclear war that ends the world, brought to you by Smile Software. Put a smile on your face. Let's talk about TextExpander. If you type the same sentences, phrases, or even words on a regular basis,

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TextExpander 5 costs $44.95 US and upgrades are available for $19.95 for existing users. And it's free to those who purchased on or after January 1st, 2015. You can find out more about TextExpander 5 by visiting smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Please note that TextExpander 5 requires Yosemite, and TextExpander for iOS is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Thank you so much to Smile for their support of this show. So, should we do this hello greetings professor falcon oh he's turned into the computer well i was worried this was

gonna happen so war shall we play a game let's get to that in a minute uh okay i knew nothing at all about this i figured like not one thing uh i didn't have any uh pop culture things that i knew came from it the shall we play a game stuff that you just mentioned i know comes from it now right uh but i didn't know that uh i knew it was a very popular nerd movie and i knew that matthew broderick was in it because i opened up imdb because i always have imdb open when i'm watching these movies so I can write down the characters names because I always forget them and I love Matthew Broderick I think he's great um I really enjoyed this movie you did it again that's good I really liked it I I really did I have some notes in the middle of my discussion

today about 80s movies in general um but yeah this was another great one i think again like some of the other movies that we've spoken about it had some plot issues uh which i'll get to yeah but overall i found it very enjoyable it was a lot of fun and i kind of liked the overall kind of messages that it was giving out, which we'll talk about. So let's go through the movie. Okay. Begins in a very windy and mystery location. Oh, yeah.

This movie has a very surprising beginning. When we rewatched it for The Incomparable, a bunch of us said, wow, I forgot that whole beginning part is there, which is it's out in the middle of, I don't know, South Dakota or Louisiana or one of those other frigid northernmost states. Louisiana's not up there, Mike. Reference.

And there's like a secret door that leads to a secret location that leads to like a missile silo where they're launching or theoretically launching nuclear missiles. Right? Yep. Not the movie you expected to see, right? Not at all, actually, because it's very serious. And Leo from the West Wing is there. Sure. Never seen the West Wing.

Oh, Mike. Well, that's another thing entirely. Yeah, we're not going to do that because we'll be here forever. But that's actually on my list of shows to watch. TV shows, I tend to like very lighthearted TV shows in general. There's nothing wrong with that. Me and my girlfriend, well, it's her first time, but we are re-watching The American Office right now.

Wow. I like that show a lot. So we are kind of, we go into this lab. It looks like it's a house initially, right? That these two guys go into these big briefcases. It turns out to be this lab. And they pick up revolvers. They put bullets in the revolvers.

I didn't know why they were doing this. It doesn't make sense to me, but it makes sense in a bit. And they go into this control room. And my first thing that I noticed, which was really weird to me, is they go into this like control room and my first thing that i noticed noticed which was really weird to me so you go into this control room it's this big like vault doors lots of vault doors in this movie they must have got some sort of discount somewhere there's vault doors everywhere these huge thick doors yep there's a sign on the wall uh of of the outside the vault room which it lingers on for just a second, which says,

anyone urinating in this area will be discharged. Like, I wonder, like, in the set designer, like, in their mind, why they decided to include that. Like, why include that? That may have thought it was a joke, and then it turns out it ended up in the movie. Just a very peculiar inclusion, you know?

Yeah. But it was there. We had it. Okay. And then, effectively, what I find out and what you find out is that these guys, there's two guys in this room and they're sitting in front of these big control panels and they're doing a bunch of tests and things like that. They are in command of nuclear warheads and there is a siren and there's this whole scene which i love this scene right so

there's this siren that goes off and this siren gives out some message and then some codes and there is then this whole big scene of the two of them working in tandem they must have gotten this from the from the actual procedures this must be similar to all the two of them working in tandem they must have gotten this from the from the actual procedures this must be similar to all the kind of thing that happens because it's so interesting and feels so right um there's two guys they each write down uh half of the code each that's given out right it's like they write down or they write down the whole 10 digit code or whatever it is uh they write it down on these like acetate like all these laminated uh pieces of paper with these pencils that can be wiped off then they each go over to this um

cabinet and they have a combination each to unlock this this little cabinet they open these cabinets and they bring out these plastic things which they break open and when they break them open they each take out this piece of paper that's inside and they unfold the piece of paper and each of them has half of the code, which they have to independently verify to each other that is correct. They then flick a bunch of switches

and that kind of thing because they're verifying at that point that they have received an actual real code that is not a test, that they are to launch the nuclear weapons. They each get their keys they put their keys in they flicked a bunch of stuff and then it all kind of one of the guys starts to crack and he wants to get somebody on the phone right and you can see the doubt in his eyes because he's uncomfortable with the idea of having to kill all these people right um and he's like oh can you just get somebody

on the phone for me i need to speak to someone and this other guy's like this isn't protocol this isn't protocol and he's like i want somebody on the phone before i kill 20 million people and the countdown's going off in the background and then he can't get anybody on the phone the one will speak to this guy and the countdown's going down and going down. And then the other guy draws a revolver upon him and is like, you have to do this. Turn your key, sir. There you go. And then, how does it end?

This got out of my head now. How does the scene end? It cuts away, right? I think that's it. There isn't a resolution. It just cuts away, and then the movie begins. Yeah. And it the movie begins. Yeah. And it seemed really strange.

So you begin, like the movie begins, and we're now at NORAD. And that's like, what is NORAD? It's like some missile defense location. This is the North American, yeah, this is the central command for the American nuclear missile arsenal, basically. Okay. It's in the middle of like a mountain somewhere to be protected from nuclear war arsenal basically okay it's in the middle of a like a mountain somewhere to be protected from nuclear war basically right um and i thought that we were going back in the past ah right that we'll get back to this later which is what i thought and

then it starts and two guys arrive uh they arrive in a jeep to meet a lady who's waiting for them to take them to a meeting and this is things that another massive vault door is starting to close and there are people like jumping through it it's like yeah they're gonna get crushed it's like why would you do that that's so dangerous like this massive door like you are going to be flattened but in they go and we are kind of they're taken to this this group of people uh and there are a bunch of people in a room and they are basically talking about things and they you realize that what that what happened well that whole opening scene was a test of those men and apparently like they say i can't remember the percentage, but like a high percentage of the test subjects

fail to launch the missiles. Right. So the whole idea is we've got men in these silos. We give them the legitimate order to launch the nuclear missiles to fire on the Soviet Union. And a large percentage of them don't do it, which is a problem if you're planning war in the US military in the Cold War. And I think it's Dabney Coleman who says, we've got a project to automate this so that humans don't have to be involved because they

have consciences and are worried about not killing people. And that's problematic. We need to be a little more ruthless as killing machines, apparently. That's the message here. Yeah. And then basically, we have the idea of them saying, take the men out of the loop.

Exactly. Right? So what you need to do is get rid of the men and basically let's hand it over to computers. And this is being said by, I'm bringing up the character's name now. I didn't have it written down. That's McKittrick, isn't it? Danny Coleman?

McKittrick, yeah, that's it. I didn't know his name, but I know his character name. So McKittrick says this and he has a system that he wanted to tell them would work and it would be an automated system. And then the idea would be, you know, so we all still sit at the top and we give the order. But then once we've given the order, the order is executed. It doesn't go to anybody else for there to be any doubt, right? We give the order, the order is carried out.

And it's apparently the answer to all of their problems. And McKittrick is explaining this to, I guess, people in the military but seem to be more in the president's camp. Like, I'm not 100% sure what these people do. They seem to be agents of some kind, right? And they work in between the military and the president. And they go and show it around. And, you know, the computer is the answer to all of their problems.

And it's called WOPR. Mm-hmm. W-O-P-R. It's an acronym with some description, and it plays war games. That's something that it has done for many years. It has tested itself by the fact that it understands war, and it can judge everything. It can judge who should fire first, when they should fire, it can calculate casualties, all that kind of stuff. It has been crunching all this data and learning itself to be able to play these games um and then they have the old general uh general beringer

i believe played by barry corbin yeah who says northern export northern exposure another show you haven't seen yep who says i wouldn't trust this overgrown pile of microchips any further than i could throw it it's like it's a war of ideologies yeah he's like a texan he's got his chewing tobacco in all the time and he doesn't believe all this computer crap and thinks then they need to be there need to be military men in the in the uh in the loop here it's like a man versus machine type thing exactly you know that's that's kind of how that works that's definitely an undercurrent of society at this time too is what can we automate but well how how can computers replace people and this is the computers can replace

people at killing people all right so it's you know that this is kind of the way we leave this scenario, right? Yes. And it seems like they're going to go with the computer and they're going to give that a go. The guy says, I'll tell the president about it. Then we go to our hero, David, who is played by Broderick. And the first time we see him, he is playing a video game gallagher and i feel it's like a foreshadowing right you know war games you know watch out that kind of thing i love

that kind of stuff uh and he is realized he's late for class and he sneaks into he you know hightails it to class and he's late to class. To a teacher who is a very peculiar character, the teacher. Yeah, yeah. Who seems to like sometimes make jokes with the kids, but the rest of the time just loves giving Fs. Like he just relishes in giving an F. Makes them come to the front of the class. Very strange.

He's a jerk. Yeah, that teacher's a jerk. He is a jerk. I didn't think that. I mean, I'm sure I thought that at the time, but now as an adult, I look at that and think that guy, that's a terrible teacher. That he, he like waves people's Fs in front of the class as he hands them out and mocks, sort of mocks them for being terrible students. And, you know, but then again, the kids make fun of him too.

So that works. The line is, who, what was it? Who first came up with the idea of asexual reproduction? And Matthew Broderick, who's late to the class, says, your wife? Yep. Great line. So he gets sent to the principal's office. So I have a question for you about principal's offices.

Yes. I don't know if you ever visited one. Only visiting, not sent there. Look at you. Okay, so in American pop pop culture all principal's offices look the same yes there's a really big desk and there's a really big bench is that how they look you know i don't know um i think yeah i don't know maybe my i think our principal's office had their desk and like a couple of, a couple of chairs,

not a, not a big, not a big, well, you, you wait at the bench by the receptionist and then are sent into the principal's office. I think that's how that works. Okay.

Yeah. I think that's, I think that varies from school to school, but that that's not an entirely inaccurate depiction of some of the school offices that I, you know, that I saw as a kid so david is taken in to the principal we don't see what happens there he's been here before he has that

moment with the receptionist where she's like i think we're all getting a little tired of this and he says yeah i am too yeah uh and then basically we go to him leaving school and jennifer has a motorcycle for a reason well a scooter i think she's got a scooter right okay or something so so jennifer uh who he was kidding around in class and this is alishidi um who who has been in many other other movies that you might have actually seen like the breakfast club yep okay whoo got one and short circuit yeah yep so she uh she uh uh gives him a ride on her uh scooter back to his house yep uh and basically the what they're going to do is he's saying you know david's saying that he can help her with the f and can can help her out basically and what it transpires is that he is going to change her grade like he changes his grades in the school

computer can hack into the school computer now this is this is the moment that you probably have been waiting for uh where i talk about the computer equipment. Yes. I have zero idea about any of it. I don't know what any of it is. I have huge floppy disks, which I have a... I had a memory as a young boy at my uncle's house. He had these types of floppy disks, like the huge ones, right?

That were actually floppy. Yeah. The actual disk itself, like the case that it was in, was not rigid right yeah oh yeah that that's that's uh i had those on my first computer um the there were really big ones and then there were a little bit small smaller ones that were the actual floppy discs and his computer in this is some weird computer that according to wikipedia is is a it's an 8080 microcomputer

that's not a brand name. But given that this movie is in 1983, that is a probably inaccurate computer for the time. It would be better if it was an Apple II or a TRS-80 or something like that. But it's a big keyboard and a screen with text on it. And he has an acoustic coupler modem, which were going out of style at that point to a modem that was actually a box that you just plug your phone line into. This is the kind where you had your big handset of your telephone and then you would plug it in, which for stagecraft purposes, I think it makes a lot more sense to use that in this movie, just because you get the exciting things where he's picking up the phone and hearing the sounds and all of that. And so it makes

sense even though i think they were on their way out or were out by the time that that this uh that this movie was made so he yeah so he's got a computer with a with a the screen with text on it and he's got the modem and he's got the big telephone in his room he's got his own line uh you know so he can make calls and and uh and pirate software and do stuff like that yeah that was the other thing that i wasn't familiar with i knew what it did but it's like i've never seen that type of motor before where you actually put a telephone handset on top of it yeah and then it's you know it's basically got a speaker and a microphone and it's it makes the computer sounds out of the one and and listens

for the computer sounds from the other computer out of the other one. And that's how it transfers data, which you can't, obviously, that has to be really slow data transfer. And that's why they switched. I never had a modem like that. That's why they switched. Even the first modem I had was a 300 baud modem. It was a direct connect kind of thing because that was just not, you couldn't get very much speed on it because you were, again,

dealing with a microphone and a speaker in order to make all the noises to transmit data. So they got past that really quickly. So then we kind of, Jennifer is really unimpressed by this. She is angry, if anything, about the fact that he wants to change her grade and doesn't want a part of it at all. And she leaves. But then David changes her grade and doesn't want a part of it at all. And she leaves. But then David changes her grade from an F to an A anyway. Yep.

So that continues. And then we end up the next scene. We start to see his parents, who are very peculiar people. They are. Yep. They eat raw corn. Yeah. i don't understand why that happened so it's a bizarre part of the movie that i we talked about i mean comparable i don't really understand why it's there other than to add some jokes and i guess it's a commentary on like west coast 80s culture that the mom thinks that you should just eat your corn raw because you can

really taste the nutrients to which the dad says and i i think they kept it in because i mean it's funny the dad says can we just take some pills and then cook the corn yeah but but there's also the they butter the corn with a piece of bread which is crazy and honestly since i re-watched this movie for the incomparable um i i that's now how i butter my corn it's genius because then you still get the bread afterwards yeah exactly and it goes all over the the the corn cob because it's impossible to butter corn yeah i think that somebody made a director just that was the way he buttered corn and just wanted to get more people to know about it the whole the whole dynamic in the house is amusing because in a in a movie that really wants to streamline you could take a lot of that stuff

out he says his parents aren't home they're kind of absent you could just essentially have the parents not be in the movie very much but instead they are they they have their their little quirks and they make him embarrassed later when they ask about his little friend would you like your little friend to come to dinner at a key moment he has to take out the trash i mean which is i think directly referenced in galaxy quest have you seen that no oh my god anyway when justin long gets asked to take out the trash in galaxy quest i feel like that is just a direct quote of um of war games but uh so yeah his parents are quirky and but they they both work as as he explains to so they're not home during the day when he can get up to his computer shenanigans and, you know, like bring a girl into his room without anybody seeing, which he does.

But later on in the movie, they have no problem with it. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, they don't. Oh, no, she walks in. He's in that later scene and he's got, like, no shirt on. And there's a lot of hilarious embarrassment because you get the sense that, that David, um, doesn't have a lot of experience with girls and, uh, Ally Sheedy is, is obviously interested or intrigued by him. Um, and so like the one time she comes into the room

and he looks at his room and he's like, ah, and he's picking up dirty laundry and underpants and things and putting them in a ball and throwing them in the corner. And then, you know, he has no shirt on and he, and he has to put his shirt on and all that and it's just it's there's some funny little bits where he's super awkward around her um which i i which i like i feel like that rings true too so that part with the no shirt on is when she comes she comes back to the house like a day or two later because she wants her grade changed. Yeah, she's decided to change it. And she goes and sees him and he says, come back to the house and we'll change your grade.

But he can't change the grade because the computer is busy doing something. Exactly. It is dialing phone numbers because he had seen in the call on the cob scenario. He's seen a very intriguing computer ad about the ProtoVision, which is in a computer magazine, and it was talking about video games like you've never seen before, and he wanted to play those games now. He didn't want to have to wait for later in the year or whatever it was. So I wanted to ask you, because I've heard you mention on many shows

about the ads in computer magazines. This was a very intriguing ad. It was multiple page. You had to open up a flap to see the inside to find out the reveal of the ad. Was this what they were like? I assume so. I have no memory of this level of detail of an ad. I think by the time I was paying more attention, they were not doing this anymore. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that you would get this like, you know, some software company would spend a lot of money to do a crazy gatefold ad in a computer magazine to get people excited about it.

But as you said, David is not, David immediately thinks, could I, like, steal that? Could I download that? And he proceeds to dial, as he explains to Ali Sheedy, every phone number in the exchange of Sunnyvale, which is where the, I think it was Sunnyvale, where the ProtoVision is. So if it's 408-222-0000 and then 0001 all the way through all 10,000 numbers and hoping to find one that answers with a computer. And so they have a nice scene where they show like they get a pizza place and a laundry and a couple of people and a couple of no answers. And, you know, it's explaining this concept, which is quaint because this became known as war dialing after the movie War Games. As this method became known as that named after this. And in fact,

when wifi became a thing and people were driving around, um, finding, uh, open wifi networks to connect to that was called war driving, which was based on war dialing, which is based on war games. So this is,

uh, he didn't, this movie didn't invent this technique, but it's the one that made, uh, the world know about it. And certainly this is where I learned about it. So Jennifer has a very interesting relationship with the computer in the way that she reacts to many of the things that it does.

And she is clearly playing the uninformed people. She's the audience proxy here. Yeah, because, for for example when they're when he's going through the numbers and he finds some some ones that are worth trying you know he finds some places that are worth connecting to uh and they eventually stumble upon which would later be found out to be the missile defense system basically uh he david tries to log in and it says connection terminated and she goes connection terminated how rude how rude like the computer's not rude that's a funny scene though because he well he enters the password

wrong and it just hangs up on him yep she's like oh how rude and then you know there's the whole thing uh i think it might be during this whole scene or maybe a little bit later where he's able to talk to the computer and the computer can talk back to him. And via this, I think that this is over, like, overselling. I can't imagine this would have been possible. You can tell me if I'm wrong about the signals being able to be interpreted into human voice. It seems like it was maybe overstretching for the time the way i always thought of it was that you know he's got a he's got a box that reads the serial port and does text-to-speech okay which is not implausible there were there were there were bad but you know text-to-speech honestly text-to-speech

has not has not come as far as you would think. I mean, you can remember how the original Mac text-to-speech worked. And yeah, the current text-to-speech is better than that, but it's not a lot better. And this is from this era. So it's not implausible. And I see why they did it from a filmmaking standpoint, because this way, you're not just reading text on a screen. And as he's typing, he's saying the words that he's typing and it's like they're having a conversation. So it's more cinematic. What's funny about this and something that I never noticed

until I watched it for The Incomparable is that the voice that you're hearing is actually the actor who plays Professor Falcon. It's a British accent and it's him and it's processed to sound like a computer-generated voice. And they do a great job with the processing because it sounds like a computer-generated voice. But if you listen to it and then you listen to the actor later, you realize that it's his voice. And the reason is because he created this computer, even though that technically makes no sense. The only way it makes sense is if this is a stock, you know, if he also invented a text to speech algorithm with his based on his own voice that went into every box that was, you know, made to do that, which seems seems like that would be in my headcanon. That'll be in my little fan fiction that I'll write about more games later.

canon that'll be in my little fan fiction that i'll write about more games later um but uh it is it is a nice touch because it makes you feel that joshua uh the computers the whopper so named joshua to refer to professor falcon's son um is you know is his product is his thing because it talks like him i feel like that's just an easter egg the fact that it's him yeah but it wants it's not even something you're supposed to notice but I feel like it is tying you it's tying them together like just subconsciously but it's not meant to be

noticed I think other than just subconsciously that they're related I don't know so during this whole scene so I during this whole scene, so I love this whole scene with you have Jennifer. Jennifer is here

and she's just come for a run, which is really weird. I love her character, by the way. Oh, she's so great. Her character is so fantastic. Like she is fun. She is very active. She seems like a real she she goes running she's like

she got a a kind of tomboy like i don't even know if that's a politically correct phrase anymore i have no idea she's quite sporty and she feels like she can she can be a girl but she can also hang with the guys like she feels like she is a real great role model figure i don't know like there's just something about her whole character that i really warm to she's very positive very smart and funny and she's a great foil for david but this whole scene with the two of them in the bedroom and she like traps him uh in between her legs when he's trying to go past and that's your little friend does your little friend want to come to dinner too yeah and just this whole thing this whole little scene is one of the things that i just really love about 80s movies i love the music like i love the music

like the soundtrack type music and i love the kind of music where it's you know the music that runs through like the the score right i love the dialogue between everybody um i everything everything in general in 80s movies is more innocent and wholesome which i like you know because they're just fun movies like they're not dark yeah no i mean well okay this movie gets dark but it gets dark in different ways yeah i mean i'm thinking of like batman right yeah well and these kids that we we meet here right i mean they they're not perfect they don't get good grades you know they're they're skipping school and and uh but at the same time they're still you know and they're they're kind of innocent too and don't

and they step in they step in something and they have to learn about this thing that they that they that they screwed up on i mean he is logging into people's computers and changing grades and stuff he's committing crimes and yet on in so many other ways he's completely innocent about the world and there's a when they when they play the game and then and then uh it's on the news in in the sort of the next scene they have that freak out moment of like oh my god did we do this what do we do what do we do and they realize how in over their heads they are and it's all kind of adorable also it's funny the dynamic between them because you know you know she is she's flirting with him um and it's like you're you're starting you get the sense that you're starting from almost zero, like they know each other, but that they don't have any history to speak of.

And that this is the thing that causes them to get to know each other. And that's kind of adorable, too, to watch their relationship kind of grow as she learns about the quirks. And then they get put in this shocking thing that happens to them and it may just be selection bias because of the movies that you're showing me but i'm very much enjoying all of them for this reason you know like if they could say anything i love that movie so much i'd see that again um and then uh so basically there are these nerds at a lab that they go to see jim and malvin who are great comedy characters jim is very quiet and angry and malvin is socially awkward and annoying a little broad little broad these characters but yes this is where this is where you get the uh the back doors back doors that

whole thing where they explain what back doors are which is again where most people heard for the first time about the concept of putting a back door in a computer system it came from this from this scene in this movie so then uh then it unfolds a montage where effectively where david is trying many different things and he's looking at different resources and trying to come up with the password, which culminates in another scene back in his bedroom. This is where... Yeah, this is another scene back in his bedroom. Basically, Jennifer goes to see him.

He hasn't been in school for a while. Like, where has he been? He has been... Actually, I think this is the scene where he has his shirt off, right? It's this one. Or is it all the same scene? Anyway. And then he's kind of going going through things he's got paper all over everything

it kind of looks like a man possessed you know there are things hanging up everywhere that kind of stuff he's been doing research we discover he's done he's gone to the library he's got like newspaper research and he's got like video clips and they watch they watch a video of him of the guy and uh jennifer's like he looks really nice you know looks like a nice guy and then they read the obituary and find out he was 41 when he died and she looks at him in the video and says he wasn't that old and he was like he was 41 uh david says and jennifer goes oh yeah that's old that's old makes me laugh every time and then they end up working out that joshua the name of his son that

died in a car crash is the password and they log into the system and then we have would you like to play a game and then he has a list all of the games um you know there's some there's games like blackjack and tic-tac-toe and poker uh it suggests chess a nice game of chess would be nice. A nice game of chess. But then David is drawn to a very exciting game called Global Thermonuclear War. And basically they start this game of Global Thermonuclear War and it sets off alarms at NORAD because it has woken up the WAPA system, which is now simulating that there have been missiles launched from Russia. And it's a fun scene where, so after he changes the grade, he does a reservation on an airplane going to Paris. All these things we can do that are pranks, basically. So here they kind of giggle and say, who do we want to nuke first? And they choose Las Vegas. And then they say, and also Seattle, because they're in

the Seattle area. That's where they live. So they think this is going to be really funny. Cut to NORAD headquarters, the center of the United States nuclear missile arsenal, and the red alert goes off that there were soviet missile launches and and they're incoming to las vegas and seattle because they are now using this machine for the actual processing but now this machine is playing a game but it looks to everybody else like it's real right um and then the next day david sees a news report um that basically there was you know they reported oh didn't they realize initially there was a it was a false alarm so this is what happens and it's very funny this is where um david's mom says you need to take out the trash

and he flips off the computer at which point the screens in norAD go blank and they're like huh and then the guy runs in saying it's a simulation it's stopping it's a simulation um but they've already you know they've already shut it down but the computer guy tells them that it wasn't real it was the computer and they and they discover that um you know somebody was dialing in from somewhere but they they terminated the call but it was from from Seattle, Washington area that that much they know for certain, but they don't know any more of that. And this is also at the point where the general reduces the goes to DEFCON 4, I think, or to DEFCON 3 and then back to DEFCON 4, which is where that in a million other movies since then, I think largely was popularized. It was a real thing, but it was largely popularized the first time people heard about military DEFCON,

which goes all the way up to 1, which is World War III. It's in this movie. They've got a nice little sign with all the numbers on it that they can show you where the DEFCON is at the moment, defense condition.

Yeah. But the computer is alive at this point and wants to continue going down this route. Right. So then, so the next day there's all the news stories about, about how there was a false alarm and there was almost a nuclear accident. And that freaks David and Jennifer out because they know that it must have

been them who did that. And what have they gotten themselves into and then uh so yeah the computer calls him and isn't that a great moment where he's like no go it's like i i i told you never to call me here he's like no and it just keeps calling him back and he plugs it in we're still playing the game it says he's like no no no no it's not me. Professor Falcon is dead. To which it responds something like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Professor Falcon.

And it just keeps going because it's a computer and it doesn't understand. And he pulls the plug on his phone so it doesn't ring. And he and Jennifer agree to just not say anything and play it cool and nobody will know. And we just won't tell anybody about it. So now the thing is the government and the military think that, because basically the simulation continues, they think that David is a spy

and that this is actually a real thing that is happening. They pick him up at a 7-Eleven. I love that scene. There's the guys with the earpieces in them in the parking lot and he's just got his big gulp and he's walking through the parking lot of the 7-Eleven and there's a mysterious guy behind him with an earpiece and then a big black car drives up and the guy gets out and he turns the other way and another thing drives up and he's nabbed and they think that he's a you know a terrorist or a spy or something so uh he gets taken to norad and mckittrick wants to talk to him so he takes him on this little walk and he starts talking to him about computers and stuff like that and then takes him into his office because you know he's trying to be all nice and then he takes him into his office and like starts interrogating him and grilling him, that kind of thing, about what's going on.

And then there's some kind of emergency. So McKittrick leaves. And then, I don't know why David does this, starts playing around with a computer in McKittrick's office to talk to Joshua, as he calls it, the Whopper machine. And obviously the receptionist looking through the glass wall uh sees him typing on the computer uh and you know all hell breaks loose they the the computer's kind of going into like it's really going down this route now and it's saying

that when it gets to defcon 1 it's going to set off the nuclear warheads uh so they all come and grab david because they think that he's up to no good and they throw him away into this like infirmary area um in which david macgyver's an escape you know he kind of grabs this uh he rips the panel off the wall and figures out a way to unlock his uh because he's a good hacker he figures out a way to unlock his, because he's a good hacker, he figures out a way to unlock the door electronically. And he sets off through the utility shafts and then ends up sneaking away with a tour group, gets on a bus and escapes out of NORAD on a tour bus.

He hitchhikes his way, because also, oh, he has found an address, right? A classified address for another guy, a doctor. But he works out that this is probably going to be Dr. Falcon or Falcon, Professor Falcon. Professor Falcon. Whatever you call him, Dr. Falcon. So this, the NORAD section for me is the weakest part of the movie right um i think i like dabney coleman in this um i think he's trying to make it like uh

david he and david are kindred spirits in a way because they're the computer guys they're surrounded by all these military guys there's this really gross thing where the the one guy that is trying to pick up on the secretary that's like what is happening that it's like why i don't even know why that's in this movie other than that it's a distraction yeah he needs to be distracted by something so i chose the the escape the escape is fine i mean i think the reason he types on mckittrick's keyboard is that he's desperately trying to stop Joshua from continuing the game, and he figures this is his opportunity to do it. And he's just trying, like, it's like a last-ditch attempt, and it totally fails. The part that really kills me is this is the center of U.S.

defense, and it's the missile launch, and there's a school tour where a bunch of kids from school have been brought in their school buses to take a tour of norad i don't know if that's accurate or not it seems completely ridiculous to me that there is a school tour but it allows david to slip out with the school which is what i think why it's there and so he escapes from norad but i don't know why there's a school tour there um so yeah i don't know what it was i feel like they were like trying to do some sort of pr balancing because of the i don't know it's just stupid uh but it was a good plot device to get sure i mean this this kicks the plot into gear it puts david and david learns the scope of what's going on realizes he can't stop it that the people there won't really listen to him or believe him um and he just figures that he has to get out and find professor falcon basically

that he's gotten information now about professor falcon he used to work there now mckittrick's got that job you know and this sets david on the it's a tough part of the movie because this is this is all just to kick the plot into gear for the second half of the movie, where they're going to go seek Falcon out, and the Whopper is going to continue the countdown. And then, basically, David has left his hitch, hiked his way out, and he gets Jennifer to book him a plane ticket. I love that he is a massively wanted man, but can get on a plane, right? Different times. that he is a massively wanted man but can get on a plane right different different times this is that that is one of my favorite things about that that uh that section of the movie is um

he can show up somewhere yeah they don't know it's they he's wanted but they can book a ticket in his name and nobody knows it and he can just walk in and there's no security and it's just yeah very different time um so we basically are a situation where uh oh yes okay so this is something that i just realized by looking at my notes jennifer arrives she's there yeah when he gets off the plane yeah she picks him up the airport she's come down to wherever they are and they're're going to go find Professor Falcon. And then, oh, they find Falcon. Yeah, they go to his island. And one of my favorite scenes is they get to this island,

and they're like, where the hell are we in this island, and what's that? And there's a dinosaur that is flying. There's a pterodactyl flying around. Yeah. It's a great non-sequitur, right? That's one of my favorite non-sequiturs in any movie ever it's like what am i seeing why is it but it turns out it's a radio-controlled pterodactyl being piloted by the the guy who's under an alias but that we realize is is the actual mysterious professor falcon um and dr falcon's crazy i love i love this whole section. So he has been driven, if not mad, he is in such despair over the death of his wife and son that he's gone into hiding.

He plays with his dinosaurs. And he has, you're right, he's kind of crazy. with the dinosaurs and that they went extinct and that his thoughts about his contribution to the military industrial complex and the nuclear arms race and all of that is inevitably going to lead to the, to the destruction of humanity just as the dinosaurs were destroyed and that we will become extinct. And, and the, this is the dark part of the movie where he basically makes the argument that,

you know, you guys are young and it's a shame that you'll die. But, you know, even if we extended this a little while, your kids would die because we're all going to die. We're all going to kill ourselves. Humanity doesn't deserve to live. I'm just going to let sure I could probably stop the countdown, but I'm not going to because we don't deserve to live which is he is in a very dark place and and and this is the low point in the movie it's not a bad point but it's the like emotional low point is they leave his he's like you can stay here because the last ferry has left the island that he's on and he's like you can stay here overnight and sleep on the floor if you want

they're like we're out of here and they go for a walk and they and they um and this is like well it's a very sweet scene where they're talking about they feel like resigned to the fact that they're going to die now that the nuclear war is going to happen uh falcon won't stop it they're stuck on this island and so they had this sort of like what would they do if they you know what were they going to do if they lived she says she was going to be on a tv show with the people from her aerobics class which is weird it's and it's a sweet scene because they they are opening up to each other and feel like they're going to die.

And then they start kissing, which, you know, you feel like, hey, the world's going to end tomorrow. We got to live for tonight. Right. So that's all. I like this whole little block of the movie that Falcon is so dark and so weird. And the kids are the voice of reason. They're like, no, we want to live.

And he's like, no, we're all going to die. It's a real thematic shift um but i really love it and i love how how dark and and twisted falcon is at this point he's not menacing except through inaction like he's just like he's written humanity off and they're trying to make him believe it and he won't believe it however when uh they kiss something happens and when when they kiss uh something seems to happen to the plot of the movie in that it just starts to tear into pieces so a helicopter arrives and chases them for way too long yeah yeah so this is that this is the flip side of the pterodactyl which is they start to kiss and they're it's like the last night on Earth. And then black helicopters come to take them away back to NORAD

because they've realized, I guess, that they are finding their way to Falcon and the government knows where Falcon is. And so they take them all back to NORAD. And it's essentially... Oh, okay. Is that what you expect? Because I couldn't work out where the helicopter came from. Oh, I assume that they finally figured out that they were traveling or they just realized mckittrick he had been talking about falcon and that and that

david had been obsessed with falcon and that they know where falcon is and some combination of those things um they went to falcon falcon said oh they just left here because they say like oh falcon sold us out which is probably not quite it um you know but and we don't know how long it's been did they just walk out the door or had they been walking for an hour or something and talking the thing that i don't get though is that the army guy the military guy seemed to be working with them rather than trying to take them yeah it's it's weird i'm unclear because i was like where did he get this helicopter? This is the strange connective tissue here, where I think basically what McKittrick has realized is that the computer is out of control.

That they need Falcon, that Falcon is in play, that the kids knew it, that the kids went and found him. And they're so desperate at this point, they're like, let's just bring them all back. Let's bring them all back and talk to them. And this is what the movie is trying to do the movie wants to get all of its stars in one place on one set which is that enormous norad set so that they can have the end of the movie and it's a great end of the movie but this is the point where they're like in the screenplay they're like well you know and emotionally i love i love the whole island stuff with them but there is that moment where they have to sweep everybody up and bring them to the next part of the movie, and this is it.

It's with the helicopter. Then Falcon somehow, well, they all arrive, and he convinces the general. They're rushed in, right, and they get to go through those doors that are almost going to slam them. Yeah. But they get in just as they're closing the doors.

Oh, that actually makes sense, what you said now about your theory for it, because the lady is waiting for them. Yeah, they're trying to get them in as the door. She's like, you got to hurry. You got to get in here now. And they rush them in there because they've realized they're going in nuclear war lockdown, which I always feel bad for the people who are wandering around outside the doors because it's like, see you guys. You don't get to come into the vault. But they rush them in there and and basically say god what

is happening fix it you know fix it um so at this moment they're like they're counting down like the minutes to impact and falcon somehow convinces the general to think and not follow the machine and like do you think this is really happening like an unprovoked attack that they would want to destroy it like he really asks him to take a gamble with himself right like yeah because the general believes this is happening like he genuinely believes this is happening as he should in this well he's he's responsible for this right like the idea is if i if i don't act here then i will have allowed my country to be annihilated. Yep.

And so it's a really strange thing that Falcon is able to convince him so quickly. But I don't know. It's just an odd point for me. So the general calls off the attack, and they have this great scene with he is on the line with a bunch of different command bases that would be first to be hit. And they confirm to each other that everything's okay and everybody starts to celebrate and everyone's going crazy and everyone's happy. But Dr. Falcon recognizes that Joshua is still running and it's trying to find the launch codes. So it has not stopped like because the i assume that the way the computer has seen it is they have attacked us so now we must attack them right right because it's still playing the simulation but in this simulation america strikes afterwards that's the simulation

that they're playing and nobody has made the simulation happen yet so the computer is still running through its sequence uh and there's this whole scenario where it's trying to find the launch codes and whilst it's trying to find the launch codes everybody then starts to freak out and there's like a countdown as it's getting the one by one and then everybody huddles around the machine

and this is like that that you know you've got to have the movie end this way, but it's weird. It's like everyone's huddling around the machine and Dr. Falcon like clearly knows the answer, but wants David to do it himself. And he's like, no, you do it. And it's like, oh, and then he works out that tic-tac-toe makes the machine freak out. So he starts playing games with tic-tac-toe. It's taking too long and they need

to get the machine to like either learn or to overload itself and then he says oh doctor can it play simulation it's like yes just enter zero like why don't you just give offer that information up um and then he does have a remarkable lack of uh lack of uh desire to move things along lack of urgency yes no urgency at all. Professor Falcon. Especially when it comes to flying helicopters around. He will do that for a long time. The chat room says that they think that Falcon has second thoughts

and goes and gets them in the helicopter and takes them away. Maybe. I'd never really thought that, but maybe that's it. See, that was what I expected. But where did the helicopter come from? Well, Falcon has a helicopter in addition to a pterodactyl. Exactly. With a military personnel inside.

That was my problem. I couldn't work out where it came from. Yeah, I assume that they sent somebody to talk to Falcon. And then maybe it's his helicopter. Maybe it's not. But I assume that they were at play there. The tic-tac-toe is set up because it's one of the games that it wants to play. And we've learned that Whopper, that Joshua,ua is a learning machine and so there's this suggestion and it's clever that's like let's have

him war game tic-tac-toe let's have him simulate tic-tac-toe and what he'll realize is with two you know intelligent players you can't win it's always a draw it's always a cat's game and that's the that's that's your message of the movie which which is that in order to stop Joshua, you can't just tell it to stop. You have to teach it. And so they have at War Game all of the nuclear war scenarios, and all of them have no winner because everybody dies. And there's a great – it's not a montage because it's like this fast-forward computer simulation thing. And it's running through all of these scenarios. It's so great, and they all have these crazy names.

They all have these scenario names of like, it starts here, it starts here, and they all end in winner, none, right? Everybody dies. Yeah, there is no winner. And then it's the... So basically, it then cuts out, and the computer comes up and speaks.

Obviously, I have one of those talkie boxes there, too. Yeah, it's using the same voice, too. Yeah, same voice. And it voice and it says you know basically the own is discovered that the uh the only winning move is not to play yeah strange game the only winning move is not to play that's your message the only way to win a nuclear war is to not have one everybody celebrates and the movie ends now what should what should come next, though, is David being arrested for causing this entire scenario. That is the next part.

And maybe being extradited to Russia because they're having to deal with all of this. But this is the other thing, all the ramifications. Because the Russians are getting nervous because the Americans keep sending jets and stuff into the air. There is a whole other movie, is not war games 2 as i've been told on twitter yeah that you know that should exist which is what happens afterwards which is david being arrested and being thrown into prison forever uh but i i did enjoy this movie again from that that there are some parts at the end which

i think of plot problems but overall this is very enjoyable. And you can give me Matthew Broderick in the 80s and 90s in any movie, and I tend to love it. Yeah, sure. I love Ferris Bueller. I wish I would never have seen Ferris Bueller, so we could have done it as part of the show. Very quickly, what I love about Ferris Bueller,

obviously not originally, is nothing happens in Ferris Bueller. That's what I love about it. Thatueller, obviously not original in this, is nothing happens in Ferris Bueller. That's what I love about it. Right? That it is just a day. Accurate. It's just a day. And that's what I love about that movie. But anyway, War Games.

I've really enjoyed War Games. I feel like McKittrick and Falcon would go to bat for David and say, you know he caused this to happen but in reality this was going to happen the whopper was a learning machine this was going to happen this was going to happen the moment that we made the decision to take the soldiers out of the silos and um you know because that's part of the lesson here too is the the having having humans do this thing and that replacing them with a machine is a mistake but also it's because the humans have a moral sense of a sort and uh that's why the people refused to turn the keys in the silos so so you know this is an anti-war movie um it's

also sort of an anti-technology movie but sort of not not, I think. But anyway, I feel like David would probably, because he did, you know, help convince Professor Falcon and, you know, played some tic-tac-toe and saved the world, that they'll probably let him off with, we're going to watch you, you know, no more modems and, you know, and just go to college and do something respectable or they you know or we'll hire you but you have to you know but no more no more modems in the meantime yeah if they let him off they definitely hired him i think so i imagine that's see that's the sequel that they should have made is you know it's 20 years later and david is now working as an analyst and discover something

computery that is threatening the world. And that would have been an interesting way to do that, to do a sequel. Instead, they did a weird direct to video sequel like years later that has no connection and don't watch it. It's not, I was actually surprised when people say,

Oh, but don't watch the sequel. It's like, I don't even consider that sequel a sequel. It's just a cash grab from, from many, many years later. Yeah. It's a a cash grab from many, many years later. Yeah, it's a movie with the name War Games 2.

War Games, yeah. That's it. Or whatever it's called. The Dead Code. So, yeah, I enjoyed that one. It was another great suggestion, I think. I liked it very much. Good.

Because, again, I think there is clearly a theme that I am clearly a sucker for 80s movies with young love stories in them. That is clearly a thing that I like, I like 80s romantic comedies. Even though this isn't a romantic comedy, but it has the romantic, like it has the romance element. I love it.

It's got the young love at the time of the end of the world kind of thing. And they bond by doing this crazy thing with computer and all that. And it definitely inspired a whole generation of computer nerds with the whole talk of war dialing and, and, you know, proto vision, I have you now and all of that kind of kind of stuff, too. So yeah, but but I love that. I love that relationship that they have. And it's a fun thing. And I love that scene where they talk about what they're not going to do because they're all going to die tomorrow. And as somebody who lived through that era, let me tell you, you know, it didn't happen every day, but there were days where you would think, are we all going to die tomorrow? Like literally the possibility that the human race would extinguish itself anytime was floating around, you know,

which is bizarre. And we don't feel that now, which is not that we aren't capable of doing it now, but, but it doesn't have that same feeling, uh, as it did in the, in the early to mid eighties.

We are running extremely long. Yes, we are. But I still want to talk about inside out. Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. We should, we should, we I still want to talk about Inside Out. Is that okay? Yeah, that's fine. We should do that.

Before we do that, though, I want to just thank our final sponsor for this week, and that is Squarespace. You can start building your own website today at squarespace.com, and if you use the offer code UPGRADE, you will be able to get yourself 10% off at checkout. Squarespace. Build it beautiful. When it comes to finding a home for yourself online, in my opinion, there is nowhere better than Squarespace because they give you all of the

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but with their annual plans, you'll get a free domain name if you pay annually, which is really awesome. You can start a trial right now with no credit card required and start building your own website today by going to squarespace.com.

And if you use the offer code upgrade at checkout, you will get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for this show. Thank you so much to Squarespace for helping us out today. Squarespace, build it beautiful. So last night I went to see Disney Pixar, their latest movie, Inside Out. And I am about halfway through episode 254 of The Incomparable called You've Ruined Pizza, which is great when you've seen it.

And I'm about halfway through that. But I really love this movie and I wanted to just share some of my thoughts with you because I think they're very... I think I come from a very different background to basically everybody on the panel in that I don't have kids and i know that andy didn't but he seemed to also be coming at this from looking at it in that way as well

like looking at it as a effect that parents can have on children as being one of the key themes of the movie which it definitely is and i could see that but that was not the way this movie made me feel. Okay. So I'm not a parent, right? So all that stuff with, you know, and it really, I can see it there, right? Because I could feel the emotion in it, like the parts where the mum and dad are saying to Riley about thank you for being so strong for us, right? You know, you could see it at the time, like, oh, that's a problem. By the way way massive spoilers

for inside out and we're not really going to go through the plot i just had some feelings that i wanted to get out so i hope that you've seen it um but basically it seemed that a lot of the discussion that i've heard on the on the great episode of the incomparable so far is about this effect that parents have on kids and how it can be to watch children grow and for like the emotions to form uh but for me this felt like a very interesting um take on mental health that was kind of the way that i saw this movie uh and the way that i was watching it because it was kind of like explaining to me um as well and the way that it made me feel was to kind of be like to say you can balance things like it's okay that all of these emotions exist and at certain times

different emotions will drive you but it's cool because that's just what's going to happen and it was very interesting to me because it was, it was, I thought it was a really positive message for mental health to be like, these are the five elements that we have in our minds and no one person is all of them, you know, except for the bus driver. Uh, but you know, but we have all of these different elements that make up our personality and it's totally okay that at certain points they're going to drive and what it ended up showing was ones that you think are really bad like sadness actually can be incredibly important to your life right and the way that that

can can run and you know you see it and i noticed it at the time when they showed that the mom the mom uh the mother was being controlled by sadness sadness was in the middle of her control desk right showing for her and like the dad was anger right like they're that they have these guiding emotions in that riley had the daughter had joy but they can change and they can grow and they adapt um and i also felt about like the the journey that joy and sadness go on. So they get ejected out of headquarters. Genius, right?

Stuff like that. Headquarters. Very clever. Like train of thought. Oh, yeah. Those Pixar people are just geniuses. They really are so smart, the way they think of those little things. things. And the journey that they go on together and watching how everything gets broken down and how they have to go through it together and to work out that actually they can coexist and why

that's beneficial. I kind of saw that as like every kid has that happen in their brains, right? Like that joy and sadness always get lost together for every child like it wasn't a this is what i took from anyway it wasn't a thing that just happened to riley like there is a thing in which all kids go through right they go through that period or that time where joy and you know sadness or whatever are not with them anymore and they're driven by anger for example because there are these other are these other emotions these other like strong emotions that they have of having that adventure where they can learn to get back together and rebuild their personality and the whole idea of the personality

is getting broken down and new ones being grown i i imagine like the way that i look at that is that happens to all of us multiple times in our lives and different traumas break down our personalities and allow them to grow again. Like I think of like breakups in relationships, they break it down again. You have that relationship island smashed to pieces. And then when you meet somebody new, it grows and it grows differently because this person's different and you grow into a relationship yourself and it enables you as a whole to change. And those kind of big moments in our lives smash those islands down and enable us to rebuild them a bit. So that's my overall feeling about Inside Out. Yeah, I think it's funny about the parents. I think some of that is about

as a parent, you're thinking this is a movie about the emotional development of a child. And so when you've got children, you start to think about their emotional development as a child more than about your own emotional development, we kind of took that point of view. I think you're right. I think one of the messages of the film is definitely the idea that the idea that if you're thinking that the only way for you to be a normal person or a healthy person is that you are happy all the time, that you are setting unrealistic expectations for yourself, and that life is more complicated and people are more complicated than that. And that, you know, some of the richness in life is things that we think of as negative and that that's all a part of us, too. us too. And I think, you know, I think you're right. It's a, it's a message of this about sort of mental health and a healthy attitude toward life that, um, that it's all part of, it's all part of the whole. And that if you, if you decide to categorize it as like, this is the good part and this is the bad part, then you're going to be unhappy or unhealthy

because you are, you have an unrealistic expectation for for life uh it can never be fulfilled and that in fact you wouldn't want a life that was nothing but this because you know if there are no highs and lows then everything is just flat um and i i that i mean that and ultimately that's the message of the movie, right, is that joy and sadness together create, you know, to use nerdy terms, create this kind of dynamic range. Like it's better that the memories are bittersweet and not just all joyful or all sad, that it's this combination, which, again, I think that's why it's about a young girl, is that she's going through this transformation that leads to adults that hopefully, you know, in the adult mind, you have a more nuanced set of feelings that are all working together and integrated more. But as a child, you know, you don't start out that way. And so we're seeing her understand about mixed emotions and about, you know, feeling bittersweet feelings about things. And it's really interesting. Also, Bing Bong is in it. And any parent will tell you that the moment that the imaginary friend comes on screen, you think, oh, no, something bad is going to happen to Bing Bong. imaginary friends don't last it's a beautiful thing but then they fade away and they're gone and and again as a parent you look at this and you think these are this is also a story about

all of these things that you saw in your children when they were little that then eventually they all went away because they grew up so that's that's another reason that you know you view that that way as a parent i think yeah i didn't i didn't have that crushing sense of dread when bing bong came on the screen oh yeah oh yeah i i just i that was a moment i was like oh no big bong because yeah because imagine how many how many grown-ups do you know who have imaginary friends right it's like he's doomed he's doomed and he's already been filed away he's lurking in the background right sure so yeah it's a good movie it's a really good Sure. So, yeah. It's a good movie. It's a really good movie, and it has a lot.

There's a lot of depth to it. There will be great, you know, there'll be books written about the meaning and metaphor in Inside Out, I think. I cried a lot, Jason. Wow. It's a great work of art, and Pixar is good at making people cry, too. But, yeah, it's a really work of art and a Pixar is good at making, making people cry too. But it's a, yeah,

it's a really, it's a really fascinating piece of piece of art. I have to say that the correlation between time of Pixar movies, you know, like over time as more and more movies have come out and crying has, there has been an increase in the amount that they make you cry. Yeah. They've really, I mean, they've been making people cry since toy story 2 i would say but lately they're there they definitely are

very good at it and they know it there's like the whole there's like a whole half hour towards the end of the movie where i'm crying every three minutes like i'm not like um when when i say crying as well because i say it's like a bunch i don't mean like tears running down my face but like i'm choked up and there are tears in my eyes i kind of consider that as crying because it's like you may as well have done that to me now because i'm i'm on the edge you know you've you've effectively got me to the edge so i will call that crying um i saw a link today that they're going to be making a little uh like an inside out kind of direct to DVD type thing as an extra on the on the movie and on the Blu-ray, which is cool. It's called Riley's First Date.

So I'm happy about that, that there'll be more kind of stuff, which is great. I'm happy to see that. But I wanted to end this show today by asking you, what emotions do you think drive you? you, what emotions do you think drive you? Because, you know, we have the mom is driven by sadness and the dad is driven by anger and Riley tends to be driven by joy. What emotions drive Jason Snell? I can't answer this question. I love that you want to end on this and I have no answer for you because I feel like I'm a pretty integrated person and i have all those well i can answer for myself then i think all right i think that i tend to be driven with a mix of fear and joy i think that they are like my overriding emotions i'm either happy or i am scared of something that because you know i can be a person i suffer from anxiety

not in a bad way but like i get really anxious about things uh anybody that listens to analog will know that about me by now um i'm a worrier and i think that i have that combination of being driven by by happiness but also by fear like they are in the in the driving seat for me i think if i if i had to answer i would probably give the same answer as that which is a lot of what i do is pursuing things that I want to do them because I feel joy in doing them. And, you know, that's definitely a part of it. And then, sure, you know, fear is a motivator at times. And you need to realize when it's unhealthy and when it's healthy. Because, again, with something we associate as a negative emotion, some fear is good. Fears can spring from, you know, an alert system that this is something

you need to, you need to worry about. And other times it's bad because it's motivating you to make bad decisions or not make decisions when you need to. So I think that's true. But like I said, I feel like ultimately every time I think about this, I think I've got all of them at the, they're all poking at the control panel. They've all got very nice seats around the control panel. If you want to find the show notes for this week's episode, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 50. If you'd like to find us online, there's a couple of ways you can do that.

You can find Jason is at J Snell, J S N E double L on Twitter. He hosts clockwise and lift off on relay FM. You should check them both out as well as a whole other host of shows on the incomparable at the incomparable.com. And also Jason writes over at six colors.com. And I am, I Mike, I M YK-E on Twitter and you can find me in many other shows that we do here over at relay.fm you're gunning for me now Snell three shows on relay now

yeah, well you know fortnightly, it's like half a show every 14 nights and if you would like to support our sponsors that would mean a lot to us I can I'd like to thank them again Squarespace, Smile, Igloo and Linda they've been here to support this bumper

episode of Upgrade but most of all if you're at this point now thank you so much for sticking with us and we'll be back next week for another episode of Upgrade until then say goodbye Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Hurley.