Upgrade - 521: I Can Get Pineapple Into Anything

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 521 today's show is brought to you by squarespace vitally and delete me and welcome back to the summer summer of fun i have a hashtag snow talk. No hashtag, but snow talk. Question for you, Jason Snell. How do you like your hot dogs? Cooked. Grilled is better. All beef preferred for me.

And then what I think this question's actually asking. I am a super basic ketchup and mustard yellow mustard okay ketchup that's it okay ketchup and mustard i'm i'm more ketchup i don't mind mustard but i'm i'm mostly a ketchup guy i like some crunchy onions you know that's that's good it's like fried onions i have some of that grilled onions are fine but i'm i'm not going to make any effort for any of the other things. Ketchup is my must-have, and then a yellow mustard is kind of a nice bonus.

At the ball games, I always get it with yellow mustard if it's there. But at home, I will. We have yellow mustard in the fridge, but I will sometimes just do ketchup, and that's fine. I very rarely have a hot dog at home but we did have a there was a period in there where we always had hot dogs at home because it was a thing that that my son would eat reliably and so you stock hot dogs and then there's a lunch and there's nothing to make it but there's a hot dog and you're like i guess i'll have a hot dog have you ever had a chicago style hot dog sure they're weird i've had one they're weird it's interesting yeah i like some of it and

dislike other parts yes i liked it for having had it you know what i mean like it's like i'm gonna have this thing i had it was like that was fun but i wouldn't want all of my hot dogs to be like that grilled onions grilled onions is a good hot dog thing, I've decided. Yeah. I like the idea of a grilled onion, but some of the stuff that the Chicago hot dogs have, I find bizarre, but that's okay. The beauty of a hot dog is that you have a hot dog and then you can put whatever you like on it. And I don't believe there's one true hot dog. I think that it is a blank canvas on which you can place anything you desire. If you want to put pineapple on it, do it. I don't care.

I want to try that now you've said it. Let me see. There's a hot dog place in Hawaii that we've been to called Puka Dogs, and they have the bun that's like the bun doesn't open. It's just got a hole at the top that the hot dog goes in, slides in.

Oh, yeah. And they, and they have, uh, one of their specialties is a like pineapple. I forget what else is in it, but it's like pineapple is one of the flavors.

Huh? And, uh, it's, uh, awesome. That's Pukadogs, which is sort of near Poipu beach in,

uh, on Kauai. So for those hawaiian travelers it's by uh it's like a pineapple relish this isn't their website that sounds good man it's real good real good so yes i can get pineapple into anything yeah because why not you know why not pineapples even on your t-shirts there you go i can't believe i was going to pukadog but here we are. Thank you to Matthew for sending in that Snell Talk question.

You can send in your own questions for us to answer on the show right now. We love some summer-themed Snell Talks. Just go to upgradefeedback.com. Let's do some follow-up, Jason Snell. I'm very excited. Severance is returning. Not so excited that it's not coming back until january i got so hyped that they were that they were doing a teaser clip and i'm like oh man and it

gets to the end it says january i think oh man so i said to lauren you know hey there's a severance teaser today and she says what november and i said ha said, ha, ha, ha, January. She's like, oh, January. I'm just happy it's happening because they look like there was a while where it might not happen. And I'm happy that it's coming back. Yeah. I'll look forward to the rewatch

before the new season. That's a show I will rewatch. Absolutely. Season one of Severance, for sure. Because I feel like it's a show that you'd probably want to have had the knowledge of what's happened in your mind for when the new season's beginning i feel like yeah because it's it's layered and complex and i think having some of that uh in there is probably probably for the best season one was such a great ride too that i i i

love the idea of being able to come into season two fresh i'm sure they will try to be welcoming to people who don't remember it all but like i i that's a show that i enjoyed so much that i kind of relish the opportunity relish i don't put that on my hot dogs either the opportunity of uh to re-watch it and then go straight into season two so never mind phil schiller will not be filling a seat at the open ai board after all this is something we spoke about last week that was being reported by a few outlets, I think Bloomberg and the Financial Times. Well, now, not only has Apple pulled out or declined this board seat, Microsoft is dropping their board observer seat as well

due to fear of regulator scrutiny over the arrangements however open ai are gone on record to say that they will be holding regular stakeholder meetings to share progress on their mission and ensure stronger collaboration across safety and security with their partners apple microsoft and others i would assume maybe phil this was phil's end game all along it's just to get microsoft to just make microsoft's life harder well see i i didn't know this and until uh john vorhees allowed me to listen i read a little about the virtues and article about it there are multiple uh investigations in the uk europe and elsewhere into microsoft and open ai and like the amount of control Microsoft has or does not have on OpenAI right because it's this weird situation where it's the separate organization

and yet Microsoft seems to hold all the purse strings and and and all the strings even though it's a non-profit and it doesn't really operate like one. And yeah, I do really wonder if the Phil Schiller thing was sort of like brought up a lot of issues that made somebody inside maybe open AI be like, let's wave it all off. Like all of it. Let's just not do this this way. This is making people angry. Let's just go to a different approach that is going to be, you know, will maybe survive scrutiny. Ben Thompson made a good point too, which is it sends the wrong message. Because one of the problems I think Apple has faced post-WWDC is the implication that OpenAI is powering Apple intelligence.

Right, which it isn't. Which it is not. But you're right, Seeing them tied closer, I always thought, you know, it is bizarre, right? That like, oh, well, because Apple is optionally plugging in chat GPT,

among others probably, with warning labels, this means he gets to have an observer seat on the board. It felt very much to me like more of an open ai wants to look good thing than an apple wants to be seen their thing so it is absolutely true that people think that

apple intelligence is powered by open ai which is not the case so this would just muddy it further yep i think that's a very good point yeah i i wonder how this went down and if people just didn't think of it or you know it was literally sam altman saying hey why don't you microsoft's you know such as sits in on our board meetings why don't you send somebody to sit in on our board meetings too and then then the adults were like no that's a bad idea let's rethink this i don't know uh last week we spoke about the potential for a new well the renewed rumors of a home pod with a screen after mac rumors found some code references to such a product well nine to five mac not to be outdone have found evidence of a system called poster board

which is hiding inside of tv os that will be responsible for some user interface elements for a design like this they even have a screenshot of like a wide screen lock screen with a passcode thing which is doesn't it doesn't exist for anything else like this is hidden it looks like it's tv os and it has this kind of like touchable uh uh lock board uh lock screen um I said poster board. It's called plaster board. Sorry, that was a spelling error in the document. Poster board is a different one. We were talking about this on Connected last week.

So many boards. Plaster board is the internal code name that Apple have given to this interface, which I pointed out on Connected that I think actually further indicates the home element of this because plaster board is a material used for walls it's sheetrock it's also known as sheetrock so yeah yeah this is cool to see like i love the smoke coming together on this one to give me a fire which is a home pod

with a home pod with a screen tv os combo thing yeah that's what i want yeah dan moran and i predicted on the six colors podcast uh i'm gonna give this to dan but i i sign off he was like next fall for what did you say 550 something like that because you got to follow the snell rule right which is what are the competitors and then what do you think Apple would do? And then you increase it and then you round it up further and make it hurt. And then you ultimately get to a piece that is $599. HomePod with a screen, $599 next fall. That's Dan's guess. And I think he's probably not far off. that feels like it might be a an iphone 17 event product yep um that's using the same chip that's

in the iphone 16 um could be a could be a mid-year thing but sounds like a fall thing to me for next year yeah i i would sign on to that timeline too And the price makes sense because they're not going to skimp out on the screen. Not the screen and not the processor and probably RAM, right? Because this will presumably be an Apple intelligence device, right? Yeah. Because at this point, it really feels kind of irresponsible

for the product teams to release products that can't run Apple Intelligence, right? Like even if they're not immediately running it, to ship new products that can't support this stuff is silly. If it's possible to do so, yeah, for sure. In the spirit of the Summer of Fun, I don't know if this is why they chose to do it it but we're talking about it because it's a summer of fun famed film composer michael giacchino is releasing an album which he has re-scored some of his favorite and like most famous uh film score and film themes in i would say surf rock summer vibes it's really good really good yes it's called exotic themes for the silver screen volume one uh and it will be on all streaming services and you can also like buy the cd if you want to and uh it is really fun there are some previews of some of the tracks and i was

listening to their track enterprising young men which is like the theme from the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie and like I started and I was like is this really chill vibes and then it gets into it and it's got the kind of like the guitar and the little kind of like xylophone timpani kind of thing

going on and like I sent this link to you and you just said he gets it and we I mean we this is what we did with the summer fun theme we said to chris breen can you do a a surf rock chill vibes uh version of the upgrade theme and that's what we use too so i love it he gets it love it uh heads up there's no there will be no episode of upgrade next week uh yes we're going to be preparing and traveling and all kinds for the relay fm 10th anniversary live show in london so jason's coming

over along with a whole host of relay fm hosts a whole suite of relay fm hosts is maybe a better way to put that we're going to be playing a game of fortunate families in front of an audience over of over a thousand relay fm listeners in the historic Hackney Empire in London. There are some last-minute tickets available if you want to go to relay.fm.com. And we really look forward to seeing you all there. I'm so excited now. We're getting so close. And so, yeah, there'll be no episode next week.

We're back on the 29th. Yes. Thank you for your support use use next week to catch up on other podcasts that you've gotten behind on well later on in the show gonna make some recommendations for shows good when we get to ask upgrade we have some recommendation that someone wrote in and asked for recommendations i have some podcast recommendations i'm sure you do too what else could you listen to while we're not here you know and i just want to point out in terms of the value that we provide mike as we record this it's been 513 weeks since upgrade

premiered and we've released 521 episodes. Look at us go. We're going to clear. So are we going to take 10 weeks off? We are wide open. Well, because there were those periods where we were doing emergency draft episodes, so there's some weeks where we did two episodes in a week. You know, Usain, I know that we're at episode 521.

I know that. But to hear you say the show has been around for 513 weeks is wild like we're it is we're staring at 10 years like a little later on this year september the show's been around for a decade which is incredible to consider like i know that relay has been around for 10 years but then there's something about the individual shows right that i still can't get my head around that me and you have been working together for 10 years 10 years incredible i don't feel like i could have been working with anyone for 10 years and yet right but yeah and yeah 513 weeks 521 episodes i would say it's unprecedented but it's not i think we

have skipped the last week of the year a few times. We have done that. Although then we sort of started getting into the upgradeys. The upgradeys. And so now not so much. Anyway, so next week, just no upgrade. Just stay tuned. Episode 522 will happen July 29th.

Yep. That's how that's going to go. Time for the details. Woo-hoo. July 29th. Yep. That's how that's going to go. Time for the details. iOS 18 beta 3 is out. And there were a couple of things I wanted to note. And I'm assuming you're using it with some frequency. I've not put iOS 18 on my phone. I have.

I have it. I am writing previews of the Mac andad betas for whenever the public betas drop uh dan's doing ios so i've spent a little less time on the phone but i do have an i actually got the watch too they're all kind of over my shoulder here um sitting so i've spent a little time with it but more time with ipad than ios at this point so in beta 3 dark mode is being forced to all icons. So there are some icons where Apple's doing something to change the colors of the icon, or they're dimming them if they're kind of like a full color icon.

But it's really interesting to me because it seems like Apple is making some decisions somehow about third-party apps. Like I've seen some screenshots of like the one that stands out to me the most is the Facebook icon, where the Facebook icon is a white F on the blue background, and they have a black background of a blue F. It's like, how do you get to that so it's very interesting but it is you know the thing that i was wondering would apple do this because brands

have their colors and like you know would they force it on people the answer is yes so what this will make people do which is i think is what apple wants people to do is to submit like their own dark mode icons and like you know like to submit an icon with the new system where it will you choose where you want the tint to be because if you don't apple's going to do it for you right very aggressive i find that probably intriguing yeah uh-huh finally, stickers are now, now actually can appear as emoji. So this is a thing that has long been said, like, you know, these are emoji stickers.

These are sticker packs, just like emoji. You can have me emoji, da-da-da. And it's always been, they're stickers and they're emoji, but you can't have like tiny stickers inside of text or whatever, like you would an emoji. With Beta 3, you can. or whatever like you would an emoji with beta 3 you can any sticker can show as an emoji you can use them in tap backs but you can also just use a sticker as part of a text message and it will appear so you can now finally if you want to use memoji in place

of emoji i can't believe it's taken this long for them to do this, but clearly they needed to do this for the tap back system and also for Genmoji. So they've done it here too. It's good. It's good. Finally, again, it's that in writing a bunch of stuff about,

like I was writing about the calculator app yesterday and I, I didn't know what to say about it on the iPad other than to say, I mean, I'm going to talk about math notes, but like the actual app, it's like, I mean, yes,

it's good that it's here. Do I give them credit for finally doing it? I don't know. I mean, I'm going to talk about math notes, but like the actual app, it's like, I mean, yes, it's good that it's here. Do I give them credit for finally doing it? I don't know. I mean, like it should have been there, but I'm glad it's there. And I feel that way about this too. It should have been there, but I'm glad it's there now. It's like they tempted us with it so many times and like, here it is. I've only seen it and I've only tested it in messages.

I don't know how it appears in other apps across the system i expect it's a thing where like if you use apple's actual text input system it probably will work but if you don't it's not going to work yeah i think that this is a yeah the special thing that apple's doing to make these things go in line and treat them as text even though their images is a thing that's, yeah. And it's hilarious if you send these messages and then look at an iOS 17 device or a Mac OS, like 17 or whatever it is.

What are we, Mac OS something, whatever? An older version. Yeah, Sonoma. Because they all just send us individual images, which is very funny. Beta 3 also introduces a new default wallpaper on the phone that dynamically changes colors throughout the day, which is a nice touch. Yeah, they've introduced this idea of sort of the generators for wallpaper and screensavers. I mean, screensavers sort of do this already, but they're sort of going back and making them wallpapers.

On macOS, they've got the sort of classic Mac thing that they're doing as well. And it's beautiful. It's really well done. So whatever they've gotten on the wallpaper train a little bit, and it's a good thing because these are really interesting and different if you want something more dynamic.

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but they also have fantastic customer support too. So go and check it out for yourself right now by going to squarespace.com. You can sign up for a free trial there. You can build your entire site and when you're ready to launch it, just go to squarespace.com you can sign up for a free trial there you can build your entire site and when you're ready to launch it just go to squarespace.com slash upgrade and you'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain that is squarespace.com slash upgrade when you decide to sign up and you'll get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for the show our thanks to squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So Jason, we have something a little bit special today. Do you want to talk about what we're going to play for our listeners now? A little summer of fun special in this episode. We talked a few weeks ago about the Vision Pro What If interactive special,. Interactive story, I guess.

Experience. So this was a thing with Marvel and ILM Interactive that they did. It's like an interactive story. We really enjoyed it. There's a part at the end that you really loved. And so we had this nice chat. And I talked with some of the technical people and some of the designers for a little quick six colors thing that I did. That was all very nice.

And then we heard from, I got an email from one of the writers of the thing saying, it's so awesome that you liked it. Maybe we could, we could come on and talk about it sometime. And, uh, it, that was really a cool thing. So we talked to the PR people at ILM interactive and all that, and we set it sometime. And that was really a cool thing. So we talked to the PR people at ILM Interactive and all that, and we set it up. And so we get to have this interview in this episode where we got to talk earlier last week to Phil McCarty and David Dong, who are the writers. They come from a screenwriting background, as you'll hear, they're writers of this what-if interactive experience, which is, you know, it's not a movie, it's not a game, it's something in between. And I think it's really interesting to go into sort of how they got involved and what goes into writing something, an experience like this. So it was

really a pleasure to talk to them. them guys thank you so much for joining us we uh very excited to talk about this i mean i'm as a i am a huge fan of all mcu projects and especially the the what if thing was incredible i think we'd like to start at the beginning how did this project come about and kind of how did you guys get involved in it dave boucher came to us um and we uh got involved with him um i believe phil and i wrote a spec for the sundance like tv was it like tv lab or something like that this was a long time ago um and what's funny about it is our our spec was about it was like a thriller it was like a thriller procedural set in vr um okay that's and this was this was back in the day before everyone had a pilot about vr we were fast we did it west world free cutting edge

at the time and i believe dave was there. At our table read. Yeah, at our kind of big table read. And then, you know, years later, I think he had this opportunity. And he came to us and asked if we wanted to push some ideas around. I just, and again, I know that this is a complicated thing. Do you come in and say, are you handed a bunch of elements and saying, let's make this into a thing? How much of that is sort of like pre-baked

or is it more like, because there's obviously the software and the platform and the story that they want to tell. How much of that comes from you and how much are you handed kind of elements and saying, these are the elements that we need in the story that you need to work on?

Oh, it was absolutely a blank slate to start off with. Like there was nothing, it could have gone any number of directions, uh, from project inception. Like there was no, there was nothing,

uh, dictated. That's what you're asking essentially. Yeah. That's, that's what's really cool about Marvel studios. They kind of just like, kind of let you,

let you play. And if the idea is cool, then we're going to do it. I think you'll see some characters like Carol Danvers, Nova Corps, and some certain characters like that that probably wouldn't have immediately come to mind, but we pitched them, and Marvel was like, yeah, this is cool. Let's do it. So from what I understand on our end creatively, this all started just like every other project that starts at creative. We have to think about what's a story that we want to tell. And then we look towards what is really right for what if. How can this be a plus up for people who are big fans of what if?

But also kind of turn that and give them something that they've never experienced before. So it was really the concept was what if and a a vr interactive story but beyond that it was you know come up with some thoughts and pitch this yeah we we came up actually we came up with a bunch of pitches yeah at first yeah it wasn't even what if from the beginning like we we landed on what if we definitely there were some initial iterations that were sort of in like black panther space and then you know just various properties so we we ultimately landed on what if and it could have gone anywhere i have to apologize if i'm so used i've confessed i'm a huge fan of your podcast and i've listened to both a lot of this and the incomparable so there's i'm having this a little bit like our

experience where you're watching the thing and you're watching and you get to partake and i'm like i'm so used to listening to you guys talk and now i'm oh i'm supposed to talk to the podcast every podcaster has had this moment where you guest on a show you're used to listening to and then you realize you haven't said anything like the first time that i was on the incomparable i think may or one of the first times it was i think we were doing end game we did like a an end game review episode and i realized i hadn't spoken for like 15 minutes because i was just listening it's like what a great episode that's me being a bad host too because i'm supposed to notice when the guests don't talk now you're the hero of the story yes oh it's this is interactive the most interactive of all podcasts when you're a guest on it snap myself away i do think that like

the what if idea was maybe the best place for a story like this um where you can things can kind of be unexpected and strange and weird things are happening and also the idea of you know with the the experience of vision pro being in a bunch of small sections like you're dipping into a lot of character stories it feels like it fits the anthology style of a what if really really well i think i think it was a having experienced it seemed like a very logical place to to land on in the end yeah i wish you could take credit for it there's also a lot like the fact that it's not a photorealistic you know property essentially right like that we allow for a stylistic environment it seems so smart in retrospect like yeah what a great choice that was it's just it we landed there rather than kind of like aimed there if that makes sense but yeah i think that a lot of things made this the ideal

property for for this platform the thing about the mcu right is that you've got and marvel in general is you've got a toy box there of all of these characters you know you had to pick some because this is you know there are only so many and there are tech limitations too right like there are only so many characters that they're going to build and design in order to build this thing out. So you can't have a cast of thousands. What drove you to the choices you made in terms of the characters that are in there? I mean, obviously, what if you're going to get the Watcher? But Wong is in this a lot, which I always thought was actually an incredibly clever thing because of the way they built out magic as a hand gesture.

And the MCU films and Vision Pro is all about hand gesture control what goes into choosing the toys from the toy box well so for Phil and I this idea a lot of this idea started very much as a like simplifying it but it's very like what if the villains you knew were heroes and what if the you know and what if the heroes weren't who you thought they were um and so when you start there we we gradually put put our guests through you know like well who's the biggest bad of them all thanos right so when you first encounter that it's emotionally very uncomplicated you, you know what you're doing, even if you've been overwhelmed, this is your first, you know, kind of immersive spatial thing. Um, you know, you know,

this is the big MCU bad guy. Um, so there, uh, then we wanted to do something, something, a bit of a tone switch. Uh, and so we, that led us to kind of the 70s, 80s Cold War feel. And then that's a couple of iterations in and we came up with the kind of cool Darkman Captain America kind of story twist on that. And then finally, we wanted your third one to be a character that you would have very emotionally complex feelings about when you were dealing with that. Suddenly, you shouldn't be so sure that these are all villains. So we took one of my favorite MCU villains, Hela. That character is so hilarious. And then we spun her story.

We spun her story, we spun her look, you know, we turned all the dials to sort of play with your expectations. And like, maybe these aren't multiversal villains. And maybe I'm not being led down the right path of all this. Wong is great as magic and all of that stuff came more to the forefront from interactive. It made more sense to bring Wong in. And then at a certain level, you realize that, well, Wong now needs to be part of the story in a big way. He can't just show up and talk and show you tutorials and then leave. So interactive is ILM, right? So the team, I'm correct, and it's the team behind putting together the technical aspects of the experience. Yeah, ILM right so the team I'm correct and it's the team behind like putting together the the technical aspects of the experience yeah ILM immersive yeah yeah great and how what was that like that this kind of like the teamwork because obviously this is you know every I'm sure every

writing project it comes with constraints kind of during and after, and the experience goes through as you're working with directors and actors. But in an experience like this, as well as that, you also have brand new technology, brand new ways of interacting, and I'm sure things were appearing throughout the process that were changing the story. What was that kind of interplay like of understanding how the tech could be used and how it would adapt to the story and push the story yeah ilm was ilm immersive they were really good about uh empowering us for lack of a better word you know we would say can we do this and they would just very cleanly say yes or no we weren't necessarily privy to their kind of like back-end considerations on like what the apple vision pro was capable of or not. But I do know that there was a lot of consideration on their end to determine what was kind of in bound so that they came to the table saying, Hey guys, yes, this idea is great. Run with it. This might not be feasible, you know, this sort of thing. So it was mostly us sort of like

brainstorming and daydreaming and them kind of giving us a thumbs up or thumbs down on like what fit within the scope because of the project and the timeline we were working with it was a really tight partnership we were in a lot of meetings with them just a real yeah it was like daily at some points um but just kind of really refining what both what could be done um what what made sense to do and then dealing with curveballs because i'm sure you guys can imagine even small curveballs can really like force us to take a story you know down down a different turn so yeah it was a lot of that i mean it was it was really such a joint venture. And even from them to point at creative and be like, well, if this is this, then we have an opportunity to creatively do this.

I know one of my favorite moments in the thing came about a really tight partnership, and that was the time stone moment yeah yeah because um sorry from jumping around but uh yeah that that this was a big collaboration by by every you know joe ian um sharif dave all of us to kind of craft that very specific moment where like this character asked for help but as the player you don't know what to do because we haven't give you the tools to do it. And then suddenly a portal opens and you hear clink, clink, clink.

And we put the time stone right in your vision. And then it's like, Oh, Oh. And you start piecing it together. What it is, right? It's no one,

no one ever tells you how to use the time stone and no one ever really hands you the solution about how to save Fenris until much, much longer after most people have already, you know, done, done the motion. And that was a, just a big teamwork by, you know, me and Phil and all of the immersive team. Right. It's set up at the beginning that there's this mechanic. And so when you have that moment, then you, you realize what to do. I mean, this is interesting.

So I talked to some of the designers involved in this a while ago and they said you know the challenge here is that it's it is an interactive story it's not quite a video game right it's an interactive story and in part that's because if they made there's a complicated if you guys made there's a complicated branching narrative you would be building out huge sections of story that people would never see and i'd still be writing to this day yeah exactly and so there's so there's one clear narrative branch, but otherwise it's more of a gentle kind of like leading you through and letting you participate in what's going on.

It strikes me as being though, writing wise, a little bit like working on a video game where there's this incredible kind of like collaboration between the people who are writing and the people who are building the technology. Have you guys worked on video games before? Is your background just in like movies and TV and things like that? Because this would seem, unless you come from a video game background,

to be a little bit of a different kind of collaborative effort. Both of us, we were trained. We were film, TV, screenwriters. That's kind of our bag. We were also, like everyone on the project, lifelong gamers. So everyone has a little bit of that vocabulary. When was younger in college i worked for electronic arts it's like a game tester so i had a little bit in the back of my mind but how was it not having to do something that's not quite a game but it's kind of close it was really interesting because as a film writer

and a screenwriter you have like your core utilities for your protagonist to like do and say things right like they get to do things and say things and that's how the audience gets to like have a feeling about them or like get to know them we were in a situation where in this story you're telling a story and the protagonist the player can't say a single thing like there's no way for that person to kind of express any sort of emotional agency any sort of there's there's nothing they can do and so on some level it felt very much like you were kind of like, you know, handcuffed, like, oh, our primary tool wasn't available to us, but you know, kind of necessity being the mother of invention, it encouraged us to like find other ways to have like the watcher or Wong bounce back emotional responses to kind of an implied emotion from the player if that makes sense it was very very interesting and again luckily everyone on the team was we were you know a family

of gamers essentially so that shorthand was already like built in like we all knew that that was a limitation but it was definitely different from our traditional writing yeah i don't have any professional experience building a game but i have played enough games in my life to certainly um be able to put myself in the shoes of my audience which is always really important to me when i'm writing something so i know what this is going to look like from from the audience perspective whatever we're writing whatever we're working on and like like phil said you your tools change when you're in interactive right so you no longer have control of the camera. I took this great course at UCLA about games writing,

I think by John Kalin. And it turned me onto a thought that was really interesting, where in interactive writing, you're not really in control of time. You're in control of place. What you're really doing is you're shuttling your player in this instance from location to location, and they're discovering the story there on their own terms, of course, within reason. So that really struck me, and that

you can probably see some of that philosophy in the the writing and the and the staging and the structure of what if immersive it never really occurred to me the idea that yeah you usually are writing dialogue and instead you've got a whole bunch of characters who can kind of lean in toward the player toward the viewer and say oh yes uh but they can't respond unless because this is not one of those things where they're going to put up like a a grid of responses you don't have a video game controller like it's a very limited set of interactions so you have to make those assumptions about like obviously the character is troubled in this moment they've just seen something difficult or they've just done something and they're reacting to that and you can kind of react to that but you can't ever have the character who's running the show say anything that's yeah that is quite a challenge

that's amazing yeah and i did like in some of the moments where i knew there was something to be done but i could kind of sit with it a little bit and a little bit more would happen like i thought that that was really cool like you know like i know i'm supposed to deal with this thing right now you know i'm supposed to stop this fight, but if I let it play out a little bit, I can watch Carol Danvers flying around and like doing the whole thing. And like, you know,

they're talking like it was, it's, you know, I can see how that is like a, also a complicated part of a video game writing, which is, as you say, like you,

you're encouraging someone to go do a thing, but they still have to go and do it. And you've kind of, I guess, got to account for that a little bit, that it's not going to just end. There has to be some element of, I guess, looping, I would suppose, in there that you have to consider. Yeah, I mean, so it's, like you said, it's a very tricky thing to balance, right? Like, you have to give the player enough agency where they feel like they're not just like on rails completely on a roller coaster where if I black out, I'll wake up and this thing will be over.

Like you want to, you know, make them feel like they have to do something, but also you can't give them complete agency where they can do anything so that the narrative does progress. So, yeah. So in that moment, there is like a little bit of looping and in other places. And there are a couple of places where if the player doesn't do anything we will kind of like nudge you forward so you don't get stuck or anything but yeah that is a it's certainly a tight rope to to walk on but i i would say that's where the bounds of like immersive story and and games are are being drawn right like if this were a game my expectation would be to give a lot more of this freedom and to account for a lot more of this type of thing right but we're not a game right we we are trying

to tell a story um of which you are the protagonist i i always envision the writer's job as being i'm gonna obviously you're interacting but you're doing your job and there's a whole team of other people doing their jobs. Did you interact with like the art and design teams or was it much more like, you know, we have some ideas, here's what we're doing. And then they came back and, and, you know, you didn't have to worry about that part or was there a lot of give and take with on a project like this with the people who are designing the art and the, and the environments. And I mean, there's a lot of pieces that go into it. Yeah, there was an ongoing kind of iterative cycle, essentially, where we would come up with

a pitch for a location, and then that location would go off to the artist, and the artist would draw a rendering of it. We'd see and go, oh, based on this, we can kind of incorporate that into our writing process. Or here's our take on a couple of characters we'd like to use. And they're like, oh, could Hela look like this? Like, oh, maybe she should be younger. Oh, but could Steve look like this? No, people, people, they see this costume. They're going to know exactly who this is.

We need to dial down how much Captain America is in. You know what I mean? So there was definitely extensive back and forth. One of the designers actually asked me, i was praising that uh cold war bunker kind of location and they actually said so did you know that it was the winter soldier in that in that pod off to the right and i was like well yeah but i mean who else is it going to be given the context of it but they were concerned right there was this like it was kind of easter eggy but also kind of like we do want you to kind of be able to get it and did you notice and that's a hard you don't want to be obvious you don't want to put a spotlight on it because then

then it's just super blatant but at the same time you want people to notice it you don't like there's a video there's a like a video game console floating in space that's the last remnant of new york city at one point that made me laugh just so like little touches but i can appreciate that that's it's tricky to get the balance right there yeah and making it even trickier is you don't we didn't really know who the audience for this was right because it's like it's people that are going to buy this headset that doesn't exist yet it's coming out shortly will they have seen all the movies will they have seen none of the movies you know how much can you know say you have to write a game that's an experience, excuse me, for, you know, a wide number of people with completely different backgrounds as far as the source material goes, which is, again, it's all very dicey, but fun. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by our friends at Vitally.

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AirPods Pro for every Upgrade listener who books a qualified meeting. So if you're a customer success decision maker, schedule your call today by visiting vitally.io slash upgrade. That's vitally.io slash upgrade for a free pair of AirPods Pro when you schedule a qualified meeting. Our thanks to Vitally for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. What was it like when you first tried the experience? Like for the first time or the final time, whatever the most kind of impactful moment was for you, what did it feel like seeing and being in the story

that you had made rather than just watching it on a screen? It was a little like for almost like the first like third of it. I, you know, I forgot that I wrote it because there was like a, yeah, there was like a good period of time. Like, you know, turning in the final draft so to speak and then um and then them going off and making magic uh but there was like a chunk so so at first the the first time when the watcher steps out and is really like corporeal and i'll say like what an amazing job like i love members did because like these characters like really do feel like they're there um and and it's so weird right because they're cartoons and so the idea that like these cartoons

feel like they have presence and weight was just such a such an amazing magic trick but like the first third of it i was kind of just just just humming along and like not even remembering that that i wrote this and it wasn't until like certain turns of phrases that are very much like things me and phil like to do that i was like oh oh yeah yeah that's right that's what we did this this was this was our fault i i had a super weird uh onboarding to this experience because i i'm currently in portugal and i i was going through hoops to get my Vision Pro here. So when it came out, I was watching all the playthroughs on YouTube first. So I got to watch everyone else kind of play through it before I got to play through it. And I was like, oh, okay, that's, oh yeah, it looks pretty good. That

looks pretty decent. Oh, that looks fun. That's great. That's cool. And then, and so having written it and then having watched it from afar, I thought I had a pretty good read on what the experience was like, essentially. I was like, all right, I'm a pro at this experience. And I got the headset, installed it. And again, it felt like an entirely like the sea change shift in reading or watching something 2D and being immersive is so fundamental that even even with all that kind of exposure it still felt cool i was like how can i think this is cool when i'm so intimately and familiar with it like how can i still be wowed by it at all and that kind of really yeah it was i was i was surprised i think you've you've quite adequately described the idea of it being immersive and like that it is a different medium and it truly requires experience like to to see the footage of this game on a flat screen does not tell the story

of what it is like to be in it when the watcher is making eye contact with you yeah while standing in your living room or wherever you are yeah one of the most impressive things for me is the fact that the characters are looking at you and like that makes it feel real because that is what people do and and just lots of little touches like that make it an experience which is it's hard to grasp unless you have been been in it and it becomes like part of your memories it's a very strange thing but it's what makes this medium so exciting i think absolutely i mean this this is obviously a pretty special and a unique experience to build this. Seems far away from what you'd done before. Any interesting things you learned along the way about this? Like where you came out of there and were like, oh, I'd never really thought about something like that. Because you would think

that this would be kind of a changing experience for both of you where you'd be like, wow, how did we get here? And you have to solve some problems you never expected. a lot of our learnings we kind of ironed out in the initial stages because again like we our inclination is to have people say things and do things to like tell the story and our producer uh david boucher uh very much like made it try to drill this point into our heads like early on in the project which is that like when people put on a headset and there's a new world around them their attention for and their appetite for dialogue and learning and kind of information whittles to like almost nothing because you're just like a kid in the can you're just here there's everything going on around you sensory overload you are your sensory overload and so there's a we had to kind of internalize a new kind of like appreciation for the ebb and flow of what a player is doing and when they're doing it and when they're receptive to things.

And when you can say kind of very heavy plot or story-based information or when you need to dial it back and say things that it's okay if a person didn't catch. Whereas when you're watching a movie, you expect that the audience is going to process 95 of the dialogue right because you're just sitting there and you're paying attention you're watching in a immersive experience like this that number drops like incredibly so we just had to be very cognizant of that so that was helpful to learn if that makes sense i have two and one is it's just a nice confirmation that story and emotionally connecting through characters and theme work, right? Like I think most people, even people who are watching on a flat version, kind of really grasp a lot of the philosophy of what we're really trying to get through with this piece and the feelings of it. And so it's rewarding to see that storytelling like that works even when you do switch mediums. Secondly, I would say the big learning is that what seems really obvious to me because I'm writing it isn't obvious once people make it, and that's good and bad. I was howling like a little child at some points about, no, we're giving too many things away people are gonna know and like i was just wrong

uh like people didn't know um and i was i was shown that like no you know like it's okay to it's okay to put a little bit more of that stuff out there and ultimately ends up more rewarding than to hold it hold the hold the mysteries of your story super close super close to your chest speaking of the mysteries of the story before we finish super close to your chest. Speaking of the mysteries of the story, before we finish, before we wrap up, I want to talk about the end. The snap moment, one of the coolest things I've ever done in a video game.

If you are a huge MCU fan like I am, being able to enact that moment, it gave me goosebumps. It's like a you're now doing this and the weight of that moment like i know what that means and like what that does in the mcu just to find i well there isn't really a question as much as just say it was awesome i loved it so much that was really great and that's the one branching choice in the in the whole thing is right there at the end is the snap determines you know which ending you see yeah what reality is like yeah yeah the snaps i mean i'm i'm so happy to hear everyone respond to it i i don't know that i what i would do if people were like but I mean for for me when when this project came to us

and we kind of understood that hand tracking was going to be our main push for interactivity I was like well we got to do it and and it almost pushed the story to be about Infinity Stones because I was like, what other chance in my lifetime am I going to get to reenact the Infinity Snap without any sort of like a distant, you know, like it's not on a controller. It's not on a, you know, right. It is literally you're doing it. And I was like like i may not get another chance in my lifetime to do this so i really gotta i really gotta push on this just like from a technical perspective i didn't even know that the hardware could could could detect that like so that was also like really fun too like i hadn't i didn't know

like you know if it was like a thing if if app was said like oh and one of the ways that you deal with the ui is you snap your fingers then it i would have probably assumed that what if would have you do that but like getting to that point and kind of you're just asked to do it i was like i've raised my hand like oh my god i get to do it it was it was really an just an incredible moment it's magic magic, right? Yeah, because all throughout the process, I remember Ian was like, we can do this, right? Because it has to work and it has to work really well.

And Ian was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got it. And I was like, okay, because it's got to be perfect. And it was. Yeah, it was really, really cool. Any little bits in the game? Sorry, it's not a game. It's not a game. I've played this thing. It is an interactive story. That's the thing about it. It not a game it's not a game i've played i've played this

thing it is it is an interactive story that's the thing about it is an interactive story and not a video game uh i will say i will say like interactive stories are a kind of more new genre of video game you could call it that right like you know like they're a lot of they're called like um like interactive novels that kind of thing is becoming more and more of a style of game but i understand the the desire to call this an interactive story to just expectations it sets expectations well for people judge it for what it is but from my eyes this is as much of a game as many games i have played but like i i get the idea of talking about it as a as a story sorry to interrupt you, Jason.

No, no, that's fine. I was the one who said the wrong word. Anything that you got to get in here that you just, I mean, again, I go back to the toy box. Anything in here that you're just happy that you were able to slide in a little something here or there that was maybe a favorite idea of yours, a favorite reference, something that you said, can we work this in? I mean, you mentioned Carol Danvers and the Nova Corps, which is something that I caught and laughed at because I used to read Nova when I was a kid. And that character has not

appeared in the films, but the planet and the uniforms had. And so to have that remix where that's where Carol ends up, but I was just wondering if there were any other, and again, the bubbling, uh, winter soldier pod was hilarious. I just, I wonder if there were any little bits in there that you, you're like,

I don't know if anybody's going to notice this, but I was happy we got it in. Oh, I don't know if they're all super, like super subtle like that. Uh, cause I'm not a very subtle person, but,

but, um, I mean, uh, I, whatever makes you happy. I was really giddy to be able to fit in someone saying what if uh and that that cold open into the into the marvel logos gives me

chills every time i can watch it i could do it and like oh being inside the model logo it just sounds so great like so great so great. Brad Winterbaum came to us about the Star Fox inclusion. And originally I was a little scared about it, but ultimately I was like, I was really happy that we got to, we got to play with that character. And so it's not, not an Easter egg,

but I'm those two things I'm, I'm, I didn't expect going in and I'm so thrilled like to be able to do it what about you phil there was a moment i was i was really happy with because i thought this was going to get cut uh there's a moment where um you finally meet the scarlet witch and she has just you know she has dismissed everyone she sent everyone off to you know various places she's like sealing you all in this and you go it's like oprah it's like you're in the soul stone you're in the soul stone you're in the soul stone and she gets you you're in the soul stone and you know it's it's a super low moment right like you've essentially lost and

you're trapped forever i love that vision who has been like just trapped in here who is you know trying not to die essentially his wife is like wreaking havoc in the universe and he just hits you with this sort of like very wry like so i see you've met my wife and it's just such a very i i just was glad we were able to stick that in there it's good it was very real and unexpected for vision i was like they're gonna take this away from vision but no it got in so i was happy with that one how about you what about what was your i this is kind of you know because you have such a great purview into both movies and games i saw a tweet recently that was so interesting and i feel stupid for never having noticed it or someone said that a lot of the great kind of uh tech shifts have created a lot of the great ips and i forget who tweeted it

but it's something like four color printing press gave us Marvel comics and sync and sound gave us Disney and CG gave us a star or no blue screen compositing gave us star Wars, et cetera, et cetera. And so I kind of have, I was like, Oh, the context of the suite wasn't this, but I wonder if immersive storytelling opens up the door for a new kind of IP. And, you know, you guys both love tech and story. Do you have thoughts about that? Is there maybe a type of story or a thing that even just from this small taste of it that like sparks your own curiosity, like, oh, where else could this go? That maybe we couldn't have done in other mediums and other platforms or without this technology, if that makes sense.

You know, like if we look at what you did here with What If as this is the beginning of what this kind of storytelling can be, while, and Jason touched on it earlier, the complexity of branching narrative is always a huge thing. But I can imagine immersive branching narrative is always a huge thing but i i can imagine immersive branching narrative to be much more emotionally effective than in regular video games because when you are in these immersive environments you feel more active in your participation than when you're in these immersive environments, you feel more active in your participation than when there is a controller

that is the medium for you to participate. And I really wonder what the kind of morality stories that can be told in these environments, I think could be much more emotionally effective than the typical types of video games that we have today. And so I can see something happening there, but of course it's a big, huge thing to deal with. But I think people are more likely to be emotionally effective

of the decisions that they make if they actually feel like they're in the world with the people that they're making them with. I'm going to interrupt real quickly because we talked about that very specifically and kind of used The Last of Us as a reference point when we kind of briefly entertain the idea of doing a parenting narrative upfront. It's very difficult and I'm curious to see how other people balance this themselves. It's difficult to tell a story with an emotional arc

like The Last of Us if you don't know what experiences the player is going to have along the way. So if they have free latitude to do whatever and say whatever, they might not get all of the key pivotal moments that'll make that final decision so emotionally impactful. So there's definitely like there's an art to giving enough freedom to feel free but narrowing down freedom enough so that the story can have all the emotional beats necessary to hit that emotional climax, if that makes sense. this scale right like oh my god it's it's not just well it's like going from a book to go to a movie or a video game it's just it's the it's a similar concept on a completely different level i wonder mike said the emotional connections when you're in an immersive environment it's not even just the the characters i keep coming back this is probably a dumb idea but i keep coming back to the idea of do you remember everybody there was this fad like 15 years ago the alternative reality game idea like we're doing a movie but also you scan a barcode and go to a website you can download a thing that you can

scan and then it takes you here and all of that and i i wonder in this in whether it's ar or vr AR or VR, if there is a way to do narrative that is part of your immersive world. So the idea that if you're working in an augmented reality environment, there may be aspects of it that aren't really there, but that if you interact with them, they will lead to other things being generated later on, almost on an extended kind of narrative. And then the Vision Pro environments are so spectacular that I also think about that, like, what if things happen in those environments or something like those environments where you could be in it, but you could get your work done, but somebody might come walk up to you on the beach or something might wash ashore on that beach that leads to another kind of thing, whether it's a super heavy narrative or whether it's just a little bit of delight that unlocks something somewhere else i i because to me the difference between playing a video game on a screen and being in something like the vision pro is is that immersion that that that you're

somewhere else um and and so anything that can take advantage of that, whether it's an interactive narrative or like even the very limited supply of those immersive videos that Apple has put out so far, like you can see it's not like anything else. So what could you do with that? And I'm not quite sure what, but that was the first thing that came to my mind was what if they were a little bit more, even lightly more interactive or a narrative? Like a friend of mine back in the 90s did a short story that was done by email. So you basically got, you signed up for it and then you got a series of emails that were supposedly between two people talking to each other via email. And it was, you know, you weren't participating in it, but time was part of the experience. The time between the emails was part of the experience. The time between the emails was part of the story. And I think about just weird ways of doing story that you could do in an immersive or an AR environment that you can't do in the real world, or at least without scanning a barcode that you got on a Mountain Dew can or something. in ducan or something so the environments it's i don't know if you saw like in the latest uh vision 2 docs they kind of like released kind of like the guidelines for making your own environments right like there's a little bit of like so they're definitely you can see that apple sort of paving the way for that so that there will be third-party environment kind of things right i think that

the kinds of things that can happen in ar and mixed reality can be like if a video if you're playing a video game when someone comes along and taps you on the shoulder it doesn't mean anything to you or someone steps up to you and says hi in a game it means nothing like you're saying if you're in bora bora and a person walked up to you and said hi like that is a transformative you know experience for you right like it'd be horrifying if you didn't know it was going to come but you know but it's very fundamental basic basic things get opened up. So, yeah, I think that there's almost an extent to which traditional games have been so hellbent on sort of like becoming photorealistic and how many frames per second and like, you know, what's the realest shooting game ever that now we can sort of maybe step back to like very basic interactions.

basic interactions yeah like even like you know like i think you referred to like the zork and sierra online games earlier like just walking around a cave and you know finding a thing can be so much more engaging because of the platform that you're on if that makes sense yeah yeah i think that there there's there's a a new old frontier there if that makes sense yeah shout outs to mountain dew cans yeah i mean you got to scan it to get your secret uh code for that for some movie that's in and out of theaters for a week and that's got fewer credits and that's how you send in a self-addressed stamped envelope to this address that's how we had to do it back in the day it was really slow uh well phil and david thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about this I know like the Mike especially was uh I mean we both really enjoyed it and Mike was like pumped about this

entire that snap really got him yeah I'm saying so I'm so glad that we got to talk to you about about this very interesting thing that's like outside of your wheelhouse and it's not like something that we've ever really seen and and it was a lot of fun and I hope, I hope there's more down the road from you guys and from ILM interactive. And, and yeah, it was a lot of fun. Thank you for talking about it with us.

Thank you so much for having us. So a real honor again, surreal to hear you guys and be able to talk back. Thank you so much for letting us be a guest on your podcast. Yeah. Thank you. Such a pleasure. I'm so glad for letting us be a guest on your podcast. Yeah, thank you. Such a pleasure. I'm so glad that it landed. So, yeah.

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dot com slash upgrade20 promo code upgrade20. A thanks to Delete Me for the support of this show and RelayFM. It is time for some Ask Upgrade questions. So this one was promised and foretold earlier on in the episode. Zach wrote in and asked what podcasts should I

listen to in your absence? So we're not going to be here for a week. What should people listen to instead? I think a great starting point is to go to the website that Zach maintains for us actually, which is Upgradies.com because there is a favorite podcast category. So you

can go through that list and maybe pick up something from a previous favorite podcast winner from the Upgradies. Right? That's a good starting point, I think. And obviously just the blanket starting points of Relay.fm and TheIncomparable.com. Go pick up a show from those.

But I wanted to make a couple of, I wanted to make a selection of recommendations for some shows that I am particularly enjoying right now. One is the upgrade-y, award-winning The Town by Matt Bellany from Puck. It's just a great entertainment-focused podcast, but I just think it's just a very good, entertaining, enjoyable show.

I think Bellany is a fantastic interviewer and he just does a great job um there is a video game podcast that i picked up recently called into the ether uh this is a show that essentially it is a podcast about video games but it's not necessarily following the day-to-day happenings of all the latest games and all of the news and drama around gaming the episodes that i've actually been listening to they do these incredibly long episodes where at the start of each season they'll play basically the vast majority of a back catalog from a retro system and we'll talk about their favorites they've done like game boy advanced

nintendo ds um and sega dreamcast for example. They also do really, really long episodes about game of the year. They actually just put out an episode to celebrate a milestone a couple of days ago, Jason. It is games of the decade, like the last 10 years. It's 15 hours long. That's our thing, which I'm excited to listen to. But I appreciate the commitment

that the Aether hosts have to making podcasts because that is an incredible achievement. I've recently picked up The Rest is Politics because with everything going on in this country right now, which I'm happy about, I just want to be a little bit more informed about what's going on. So I wanted to get some election takes, and I'd heard of this show,

partly because of something you're going to mention in a bit, but I was aware of this show. And they did a couple of emergency pods about the election, so I was like, yep, let me start with those. And I really like it. So it's Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart, who have both been in government. And one is typically Labour, one is typically Conservative, which I also appreciate because they talk things out.

Yeah, it's an interesting show. I'll also recommend, just in general, the Kind of Funny podcasts that I love especially kind of funny games daily and kind of funny games cast and uh federico john and brendan brendan is one of the hosts from into the ether the show next portable console is the new gaming show too so lots of gaming content from me all right um yes people should look at the favorites obviously flophouse still listening still one of my favorites um i mentioned origin story a while ago uh that's a very interesting podcast british podcast uh ian dunt and dorian linsky talking sort of taking apart kind of terms and where they come from um in terms like lots of terms terms using politics and what they actually mean. Um, you mentioned the rest of politics. That is a goal hanger podcast. They have a bunch of the rest is podcasts, but it all started with the rest is history, which I mentioned, I think on a previous show. And that's the one that I have gotten to. I, it's a great window into what our members go through, which is that I got into that show and I loved it so much that I started, I became a member and then they're like,

okay, well now you get bonus episodes and you get the discord community and all that stuff. And I get to see it from the other side, which is really actually kind of fascinating, but I also really enjoy that show. It is two historians, a,

a, uh, it's actually, uh, interesting because I think their, their political views are a little divergent and their areas of specialty in history are divergent. And yet they are just hilarious together.

Really great history podcast. They've done so many episodes now that just find a topic you're interested in. I got into it. I said this when I mentioned them the last time. I got into it because somebody sent me a link to British historians doing a series of podcasts about the American Revolution. And that was just mind-blowing. But they're actually just a series of podcasts about the American Revolution, and that was just mind-blowing, but they're actually just a lot of fun. They're doing a series about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And while I've known the basic detail that somebody named Archduke Franz Ferdinand

was assassinated in Sarajevo and it kicked off World War I, I knew no, and the Gavilo Princip, I think the assassin's name, I think I knew at one point, no other details. And so that's a great example. The rest is history. It's just like six part episode about that, which they actually recorded in Sarajevo,

which is even, they don't usually do that, but that was kind of a hilarious extra. So anyway, love it. That's fun. And the incomparable game show, I'm just going to mention a specific incomparable podcast because people don't know necessarily. And it's every other week and it's just various games that we play that are

fun, including feuding families and a thing that I just brought back called trivial retreat where we play trivial pursuit backward. And yeah, there's usually there, there's just just it's a lot of fun it is the maybe the most ongoing kind of silly fun podcast that i'm involved with um and so people don't know about it they should check it out what was the name of the first show that you mentioned i think like the origin story already yeah i remember yeah which i mentioned a couple years ago i think it was one of my upgradey uh yes also mentions and it's just i deandunt is a is a very fun political writer from england that uh and then he went and did that that story that it's not a goalhanger podcast

strangely it's some other british podcast network i just remember last time it's the same issue that i've had this time is that it's an incredibly hard show to search for just the name so having ian dunn in there helped because like yes there's a million shows called origin story yeah it's podmasters is the name of their uh podcast network apparently pod podmasters podmasters nathan writes in and asks, do you think the conversation around Apple intelligence would have been different if Apple used the old strategy of simply labeling the features as smart or machine learning? By labeling them all as Apple intelligence, it seems to have grouped the criticism around software design,

ethics, legal reasons, use cases, etc. all under one umbrella. What do you think? So for me, my issues are twofold image generation and the way in which they acquired the data set for their llm which i think they did in an underhanded way and they're trying to pretend like it doesn't just brush it off for me these aren't branding things like branding the branding of apple intelligence is not the problem and actually i quite like the brand of Apple Intelligence I think it's clever

like branding these things and collecting them all together it's not that's not the issue I don't think I think the issue that some people are having is like the specific things that they've done and how they've done them similar like some people just like for them

like the thing they can't that they draw a line anything text related right like even just rewriting or for other people it is uh the open ai stuff is the issue like i don't think that the collecting of this altogether makes a difference and i don't think the way they brand it makes a difference people have particular issues with particular features that's my take yeah i think i think that's true also i think it's the point the point of collecting it as apple intelligence is to say yes we're doing this because there are some people who felt like uh apple was behind and that apple products are going to become inferior because they weren't doing this sort of thing and they wanted to send the signal that they are and in a different way etc etc but that they are and i think that they they

probably did need to the way the world has gone look sometimes a term that you prefer is uh not used and the term you don't prefer is used instead yeah and at some point you've got to stop fighting like didn't apple for years insist that everything was a notebook and and now they've given up they call them laptops yeah i mean at some point you just Apple for years insists that everything was a notebook and, and now they've given up that they call them laptops. Yeah. I mean, at some point you just got to give up.

And this is a case where Apple, Apple fought against calling this AI because it's inaccurate and they use machine learning, which is accurate. Yep. And then the world said it's AI. And, and at some point Apple was like, Oh geez,

we're not only are we behind on some of the AI, but we've hidden all the ways that we're not behind because they're using a different term. So let's just call it AI. So I think that they kind of needed to do that, whether we like it or not. I think they kind of needed to do that. But I agree with you, Mike. criticisms are not you know would not really have been hidden because they they they announced that they've got a model running in the background that's been trained on the internet and like that that is the thing that is the issue for a lot of people have you seen i can't remember the exact

phrase now but there's now like another name for ai which is like the step between now and the like uh agi i think it's called super ai or something like artificial general intelligence right which is the like that's well that's the problem right they've had to invent a new term to for real ai because ai has been co-opted by this stuff that we've got now and and originally like real ai was it's a thing that thinks and you know that and then there are these you know crackpots who are like oh it's thinking now and it's it's not that's not how it works but um you know that that is part of the naming but again you don't get to control it like i didn't love i didn't love that steve jobs was all about the apps but you but they're apps.

There's nothing you can do about it. Like programs, software, applications, nope, they're apps now. And at some point, you just got to give in because that's the word that people use. And you got to use it. Remember when Leo Laporte wanted everything to be a netcast instead of a podcast? Netcast you love for people you trust. He gave it up because it's too bad. You can use a word that nobody else uses but eventually

you just seem weird and nobody understands you and and in the interest of clear communication you just have to use the word that yeah so everybody knows what you're doing yeah like i remember on this show like i i put you know i made my point which is it's not ai it's just machine learning like i got my i got my point out but i was not going to hold on to it forever but like i do like to mention it every now and then we're like it is actually just machine learning it's all it's doing which is incredibly impressive technology and powerful but it is not artificially intelligent like that's not what is happening but language is what language is and it changes and adapts

and evolves and things meaning read a. I just read a thing. Somebody was commenting on the fact that the magic sparkles emoji has come to just mean AI. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know how that happened, but like everybody just puts little magic sparkles on features now. And it means AI. I'm like, okay. I don't know how it happened. But at some point you just have to say, okay, I guess that's what we're doing now. Because you can refuse it, but it's not how it works, right?

You can fight against it, but the truth is that at some point, especially as a communicator, you just have to accept that this is how people communicate. And if you want to communicate, you use the tools that people use so david emil who works uh at mkbhd he's on he actually made a 30 minute youtube video about how the sparkles emoji became the ai emoji i'll put a link in the show notes if people want to watch that so if you want to know where that came from and like why that started to happen he does a deep dive into like how that began kevin writes in and says what are the chances apple could open up apple vision pro and let it be more like a mac with gatekeeper and an app store but able to load any software that the user wishes i for one could justify buying it if it offered the openness and community

expandability of the mac rather than the lockdown app store of the ipad um your answer which i can see in our document and my answer are the same which is no chance no i i don't think apple will ever unless legally forced to by entities ever ever do another platform like the mac right apple model. How many platforms has Apple launched since the iPhone? Many. Are all of them using the iPhone model? Yes. All of them. The Mac has been retrofitted to use a modified version of the iPhone model, but also accepting the fact that the horse has left the barn and it's always going to be that way. So I would say in terms of like Vision Pro being a Mac and being open, I'm going to say absolutely not 0%. However, I have one little caveat here, one little quirk, one little aside I'm going to make, which is I don't think, depending on how the product goes, I don't think it's impossible that at some point Vision Pro, I actually think it's the most likely of any of apple's

products could run mac os in a virtual machine i think that's possible right like again it could be happen on the ipad it could happen on vision pro but i i did like the vision pro is so good with a mac, right? Like they've got that, that pass through mode and it's going to get, you know, widescreen this fall at some point, like there are really interesting applications of using a Mac and a vision pro together.

And I can see a scenario where that goes on to be so powerful that they decide, you know what? And a future version of the hardware, they've got enough Ram, they've got enough RAM, they've got enough processor, they could just let you run macOS in an app, in a window, in a virtual machine. But that's the only scenario I can foresee

where there would be anything like what Kevin is asking about. And even then, it wouldn't be Vision Pro. It would be macOS running inside of Vision Pro. It's funny, funny you know saying about vision pro we're recording this episode on friday the 12th which is the day that vision pro is available in the uk and it has been really funny to me to see people in the british media having the same rollout plan that american media had like yeah i'm seeing pictures of people taken by apple with their hands in the

air you know like sure it's just like funny to me of like we're just gonna do that again but like now and it's and it's two two years after we we saw it more than two years after we saw it right or no it's a year no it's what 13 months 13 months more than a year sorry it seems so long ago now but yeah like remember because it shipped this year. Remember, it shipped five months ago or whatever in the US. But 15 months ago, we all tried it. And now here it is, and people are having probably very similar experiences now. It's just funny.

They're having the beginning experience again. Going back to this question at hand about the Mac, I believe that there are many people high up inside of Apple that wish, wish they could make the Mac App Store the only place to get apps on the Mac. Absolutely. It is the outlier through age. It is not a strategy. They attempted to make the Mac App Store a thing. And the Mac App Store is a thing for what it does. And I think it's good that it's there because it is an easy way for developers who want that

to get their apps out. I know lots of developers that want the Apple model because it is easy for them and that makes sense. But the idea that there would ever be another platform like the Mac, no, because they don't want that. They really don't want that. Unless, as you say, they are forced to do so.

Right. So they've got this kind of ring fence thing where, you know, they set the default. And that's how they do it with the Mac. And it's actually pretty smart. Like the Mac, you can set the default to Mac App Store only, or you can set the Mac to, which I think is the default to Mac App Store and notarized and they've changed i got to check the latest beta but they've changed sort of how it works when you try to launch a non-notarized app um in mac os now where you at least the last time i checked it like through the first time you do it it throws a security warning and you have to go to settings and say

okay and then if you open it again and then it puts up a warning and you have to say okay and then it asks for your password which i think is like a bridge too far here because it's not authenticating anything at that point but but i've also at wwc and i will i will scream bloody murder if they ever try to do this i don't think they ever will but at wwc in san jose i think the last year they had it in san jose maybe maybe yeah 1918 something like that an apple person stood up on stage at wwdc and said the mac will you will never be prevented from running unsigned software on your mac flat out. And I believe them. I believe that Apple is committed to erecting as many walls as they can. And the reason they're doing it is because if you look at any story about Mac malware, the way Mac malware happens generally is that they socially engineer

a user to turn off those protections and click through those warning dialogues. They're like, here's how you have to install it. You got to click okay here, and then it's going to warn you, and then you say okay, and then your great awesome app is installed, and then it's actually spyware or malware of some sort, right? So Apple's trying to create ways to get between the bad stuff and the user, but then i'm trying to launch an app that isn't signed and you know a couple of which i use and it's yelling at me and making it hard but like that's so so they're going to keep doing that but that's because they don't they don't like it they want the default to be mac app store or mac app star plus notarization they yeah the idea that they would ever allow something more broad even notarization without being legally forced to like they are in the eu

it's just it will it will never happen they don't want to do it but they may be forced right and even then the notarization thing like again, again, as we talked about last week, unless they're legally forced to drop notarization or change their notarization policies, they will use it as a way to control it as well. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer in a future episode of the show, or you'd like to send in feedback or follow up please go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send that in you can find jason's work over at sixcolors.com and hear his podcast on the incomparable.com and here on relay fm you can listen to me here on relay fm and check out my work over at cortexbrand.com you can find us online jason is at jsnl j-s-n-e-double-l i am at imike i-m-y-k-e you can watch I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. You can watch video clips of this show on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube,

where we are at Upgrade Relay. Thank you to our members who support us with Upgrade Plus. You can get longer ad-free episodes of the show. Just go to getupgradeplus.com. Today, we're going to talk about Jason's travel prep for coming over to London. Thank you to our sponsors of this week's episode, Delete Me, Vitally, and Squarespace. But most of all, thank you for listening. We'll be back in two weeks.

Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. See you in two weeks, everybody. Goodbye. you