Tech News Weekly Episode 290 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Jason Howell and I are back in the studio, and we have a really exciting episode planned because we get to talk to Apollo's developer. Yes, Apollo, the Reddit client on iOS, Christian Selig joins us to talk about where Reddit is right now, the Reddit blackout and why Apollo may be closing down on June 30th. Then we talked to Nicola Aegis of Search Engine land about Google's ad business and the challenges coming out of eu. Will there be a future for Google Ads in the eu? I don't know. And of course, our stories of the week. Christina Warren had a great piece over on Inverse about Apple getting into gaming in a new way. And we talk about Sir Paul McCartney's choice to use AI to release a new Beatles track. The Beatles nerd, Jason Howell has all of that, of course, an AI nerd as well to talk about. So stay tuned for this episode of Tech This Weekend,

Jason Howell (00:01:11):
Podcasts you love from people you

Mikah Sargent (00:01:14):
Trust. Best.

TWIT Intro (00:01:16):
This is Tweet.

Jason Howell (00:01:20):
This is Tech News Weekly episode 290, recorded Thursday, June 15th, 2023.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:26):
This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by the A w s Insiders Podcast. Search for a w s Insiders in your podcast player or visit cloud fixx.oria.com/podcast. We'll also include a link in the show notes. My thanks to AWS Insiders for their support

Jason Howell (00:01:42):
And by Brook Linen this year, give your dad the gift of a good night's sleep. They deserve the best rest, and Brooklinen has their comfort covered with a lineup of home essentials made for relaxation. Visit brooklinen.com today and get $20 off plus free shipping on orders of $100 or more with code T n w.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:03):
Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. We are back in the studio this week. I what up? I am one of your hosts, Micah Sargent,

Jason Howell (00:02:15):
And I'm the other one. Jason, hows good to see you, Micah? In the flesh in person. Whoa. We're

Mikah Sargent (00:02:19):
Back. <Laugh>, good

Jason Howell (00:02:21):
To see you. I'm excited for today cuz when I saw who our first guest was gonna be, I was like, this is gonna be fun.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:26):
Yes. So many of you probably know that Reddit is going through a bit of a kerfuffle. A kerfuffle, yeah. I was gonna say War <laugh>. At the moment it's at the very least a kerfuffle. Yeah,

Jason Howell (00:02:41):
Sure. <Laugh> and I, I just like calling things kerfuffles.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:43):
That's a really nice word. Don't mind me. Right. so while we ponder whether it's a kerfuffle or a war or something in between, <laugh> joining us is someone who I think can provide some more insider understanding of this because whether he chose to or not is ended up kind of at the forefront of what's going on at Reddit. It is the developer of Apollo, the Reddit client on iOS. Christian Selig, welcome to the show Christian.

Christian Selig (00:03:12):
Thanks so much for having me. You too. It's a pleasure.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:14):
Yeah, it's great to have you here. Great to get to talk to you about this. As a person who has used Apollo for some time, has talked about it on my shows seeing the tweet fly by where you mentioned that there were going to be some changes taking place, some unfortunate changes that was definitely a pretty shocking moment, a pretty sad moment. And I'm glad to get to talk to you about this as we inch ever closer to the day where things change. But before we get into that, I always like to start out by making sure that we are all on the same page. So I was hoping that you could tell our listeners what an a p I is, we need to get this vocabulary in place, and then how your app Apollo interacts with Reddit's a p I specifically.

Christian Selig (00:04:04):
Yeah. so if it helps I think for like the first few years of being a programmer, the concept like the word api, I still had no idea what it meant, but it's actually a, it's incredibly simple and I think that's why it, it is a little confusing cause it's deceptively simple. It's just a way of talking to something basically. So it's how you interact with something. So Reddit has an API that allows developers to talk to Reddit as a service and say, Hey, could you upload this comment for me? Or Could you reply to this comment for me? Or, could you gimme the post in the subreddit? Or could you gimme the comments for this specific post? And each of those is just an API request. So couldn't be simpler. Like Apple has APIs all over their operating system for doing certain things.

(00:04:42):
Like if you were an app and you wanted to work with a Siri api, so Siri would be able to accept commands to your app through voice. Like, it's just how you interact with something. And Reddit's historically through its entire life of, gosh, almost 15 years, has had an API that lets developers communicate with Reddit and get data back and ask it to do things. So it, at, at a very high level, it's, it's incredibly simple. You're just talking with Reddit and hopefully Reddit responds with helpful information.

Mikah Sargent (00:05:11):
Got it. Yeah, that's a, that's a great way to, to understand it. And I, I do, you really nailed it in terms of it being a lot simpler than what you expect. And so whenever you hear it, you're like, is that all? Yeah. But that, that was a great way to put it. So that api, the Reddit API is at the center of this Reddit controversy. Tell us about the upcoming change and how that's impacted your ability to continue offering Apollo the very popular client on iOS.

Christian Selig (00:05:43):
Yeah. So like I said, historically Reddits had that p i and it's been free. So every time you requested information you would basically hand Reddit a little token saying like, Hey, I'm Apollo, I'm the one asking for this. Like, this information would be handy to have. And Reddit would provide it to developers. And there was kind of like a mutual understanding, well, well, well, first off, like for a long time Reddit didn't have any official app. So if you wanted to browse Reddit on mobile, it was, it was through these third party applications. But even once Reddit released it, there was still this kind of understanding there. C e o even said at the time, like, we we want Redditers people who use Reddit to be able to browse Reddit through how they prefer and if there's a different experience that maybe suits them better.

(00:06:23):
We like giving people the option to, to browse Reddit in that way. Because say you go to Reddit and you download the official app and, and it just doesn't click for whatever reason it's kind of better for everyone if rather than just ditching the service all together maybe there's a a different way to browse Reddit that might strike a chord with you. And, and even beyond that, there's like less preferential reasons that it's nice to have. Like Reddit is staffed by an absolutely massive team of like unpaid volunteer moderators who moderate the communities and make sure that like spam is kept out, people are respectful, et cetera. And they, a lot of them prefer to do such a thing in, in third party apps because the moderator tools are just a little bit more fleshed out or they just find 'em faster or easier to use.

(00:07:08):
Or there's features that might not be available in the first party app. And you also have like accessible users, someone who might be blind or low vision, who maybe the first party app isn't very well labeled in terms of like screen reader support. So they'll prefer a third party app. So there's a whole host of reasons why third party apps have been like a huge part of Reddit's culture. And what's changing quite rapidly is that they're moving to a, a paid a p i, which is like, to be a hundred percent clear, totally fair. Like mm-hmm. It's one of those things where Reddit came to developers and said, like, look like we like working with you and we don't wanna kill you, but like this giving all of this information away for free isn't something we see as like tenable long term.

(00:07:49):
And every developer I talked to was like, yeah, that, that makes sense. Like it's been, I think it's benefited both priorities historically, but if that's something that you think you would like money for, like that's totally reasonable. We were, if anything excited about it. Because like there's been historically been some specific functions on Reddit that weren't exposed through the api. So being like, oh, we might be able to enter in a partnership with them in a little bit more of a formal capacity mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and maybe get access to more of those APIs. It was, it was, it was an exciting opportunity to maybe like formalize our relationship with Reddit a little better. But it's, it's one of those things, like I said before, it's kind of the, the, the, the detail, the devils and the details were the price they ultimately landed on and the 30 days they gave from when the pricing was announced to when developers would start incurring potentially massive charges was only 30 days. So you kind of have these two really tricky aspects hitting you both at once as a developer, where the APIs been available for 15 years and then you have 30 days to completely revamp your app. Otherwise you'll face it like incredibly, like to the two millions of dollars in charges. So it just became very tricky for developers like myself for Apollo to figure out like how to survive that. And spoiler alert you, you kind of can't.

Mikah Sargent (00:09:06):
Yeah. I, I almost imagine it leading up to this point, there was a sort of a pedestal upon, which was a, a red phone <laugh> and Apollo could always pick up the phone and talk to Reddit and get in touch with Reddit and get the data that it needed and then hang up, and then you would go about your way. Then suddenly they're saying, we're gonna replace that red phone with a payphone, which we haven't had for years, and now you're suddenly having to stick quarters into it in order to call up Reddit and get that data that you're trying to get. And there was a part of you that was excited because those quarters you were putting in meant that it would change from just like a standard payphone to also having a computer terminal in front of it where you could get more information than you ever could before, interact in all these different ways. But instead, it sounds like they're asking you to put gold bricks into it instead of just quarters where in, where you would hope that it could just be the quarters to help it. I

Jason Howell (00:10:00):
Appreciate how close you stuck to that analogy.

Mikah Sargent (00:10:02):
Thank you. Anyways, thank you. Yeah.

Christian Selig (00:10:03):
Yeah, <laugh> and the, the only thing I build on that analogy would be that like a there was kind of a sign out front of the phone booth that said, Hey, we're, we're, we're gonna be doing this. It's not gonna be free anymore, but we just want you to know that it's our interest isn't to like kill you or we want this to be like a, a price that's based in reality and fair and equitable mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and then you see in a gold buyer and you're kind of like, I don't see how that is a cost representative. Right. Like, thing based in reality. And then they're also like, also, you have 30 days to start giving us gold bars. And so it's like all those things kind of come together to be like, if you weren't trying to kill third party apps, like, how else did you think this would go, I guess would be almost be my question. Like it might just be they're very, they're quite removed, like Reddit's, like they're worth billions of dollars. And it's kind of like, I don't know if they thought that's something that everybody has access to in terms of like millions of dollars, but I'm just building Apollo in my apartment and I certainly don't have that kind of money. So yeah, it became pretty untenable. I

Jason Howell (00:11:06):
Think that's what's so surprising about how this has all played out cuz like, like you said earlier, and I agree, like Reddit is a company, it's here to make money. It's its own service. It can make the choices that it wants, yet it a hundred percent really seemed to set the stage early on that it was going to do something to to allow third party developers like yourself to continue it kind of, it kind of put this, this cloud of hope in front of this thing and said, Hey, don't, don't worry about it. We're gonna come up with something that's gonna allow this to continue because it's really important to us. And yet out the other side of their mouth, like when it actually comes out, like it really does seem like two opposite realities. Like have you heard or are you willing to ta to address <laugh>? Whether you've heard or not anything from Reddit in, in kind

Mikah Sargent (00:11:52):
Of talking about that kind of bait, not bait and switch, but that about face between those two realities?

Christian Selig (00:12:01):
No, not really. I wish I could say I had an explanation, but like I, I've asked them like kind of how they came upon these figures because they said like, these figures seem reasonable to them. And I, and I was kind of saying, like in one of my posts I kind of broke down that they've historically posted like years ago, I think it was either 2019 or 2021, I'd have to look it up, but it was like, here's how much money we've, we've made per quarter. It was like a hundred million dollars in their best quarter, and they, and they've have x many millions of monthly active users. It was like 430 million. So you can do some very easy math there to say like, okay, so this is your average revenue per month per user. So if you have like 430 million users and you have 500 million in revenue, that's, you know, napkin math, that's about a dollar a year per user, and it works out to be about like 12 cents a month. So when you're saying like, w we're making 12 cents a month per user, but we think it's reasonable to charge you anywhere from like a dollar 50 to like $10 a user, depending on how much they use the app. That's like, if you're looking at a multiple of like anywhere from 10 times to almost a hundred times what they're earning per user. Like it is just kind of like they weren't ever able to answer how that makes sense. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, I'm not sure it can <laugh>.

Mikah Sargent (00:13:18):
Yeah. It kind of doesn't, right? Yeah, it just

Christian Selig (00:13:20):
Doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was almost why they couldn't explain it. And, and it's, and even beyond like the financials of, of revenue, I, I think Reddit's in a very unique position versus a lot of, even other social media sites where you have like the Twitters and Facebooks of the world where they they're their moderators for the content they have are paid employees. Like I think Facebook is, they have like something like a $200 million contract for two years with a company to do their moderation, where Reddit is like completely it's unpaid volunteer moderators doing this just because they enjoy the communities. And, and, and I think it's, it's very easy to say like, Reddit has bills to pay and, and engineers to pay and they have to keep the lights on like a hundred percent. Absolutely. But it's also like, I think it's important to remember how much free labor they have that benefits the website mm-hmm.

(00:14:05):
<Affirmative> and not doing them a disservice by cutting off tools that they use to do their job. And just even the community at large, like Reddit's, like Reddit doesn't sell any hardware or software themselves, like their values intrinsically in the community and the content they create. So I I, I think balancing this act of being like, are we respecting our community and moderators through our actions is really integral, like fundamentally to the financials of the company as well. And, and, and it's one of those things that it kind of feels like they're losing sight of, even though historically they've been quite good at balancing that.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:36):
Now we, we don't have too much time, but I've still got a lot of questions. I do really wanna ask you this, and you've touched on it a little bit. I know you've probably gotten this question a lot. In fact, I've seen people ask you this question before. You published a post in which you announced you'd be shutting down Apollo just right before Reddit's new a p i policy goes into effect. And the question is what made you choose to shut down the app? Or what is going to make you choose to shut down the app instead of say, raising the price for the Apollo subscription or asking folks to, you know throw money into a tip jar for, you know, the, to, to sort of get you over the, the hump? Why, what, what's the choice to kinda shut down instead of go forth? And I want to preface this, or I guess post face this by saying that the answers that I've seen you give really have made a lot of sense. And so I just want you to be able to communicate that to our listeners.

Christian Selig (00:15:35):
Yeah. <laugh>, honestly, there's so many reasons. And, and, and I think, I guess in the interest of time, I'll just say three. So, so the first one is it doesn't seem to me like at this point through the actions Reddit have taken have indicated that they want third party apps around in any capacity anymore. So it would be one of those things where like, if, if you're going into work every day, knowing your boss kind of hates you and is trying to figure out a way to get rid of you, it's not an environment that is super productive to work in. I would say. And I, and I think like read its actions even through how they've kind of indirectly tried to kill third party apps, but even beyond that, like, there's been weird allegations where they said, I've like tried to blackmail them and stuff, which thankfully I recorded the call and said, showed there that wasn't the case at all.

(00:16:18):
So there's like kind of just this bad blood aspect where they really seem to hate third party apps for some reason. And then, so I guess that would be reason one, reason two would be even just like, okay, just charge everyone $5 a month if they, if they wanna stay around. Like, the economics of that are really tricky because the way Reddit chose to do this is based on a per API call basis, which isn't inherently weird or anything, but at the price they chose it, it, it changes the calculus a little. So like unsurprisingly, like a free user typically uses less a p i calls than a paid user, so they cost less. So the average subscription user, and Apollo currently uses about a little less than 500 requests per day on average. So when you do the math, that works out to about over the course of a month, it will cost about $3 and 60, 60 or 70 cents to keep them around.

(00:17:08):
So if I charge them $5 after Apple takes their cut, you're looking at like $3 and 50 cents less to the left, to the developer. So I'm at like 10, 20 cents in the red on your average user. So then it's like, okay, so maybe you charge a little bit more, but then it's like you also have, I also have a subset of users like 5%, which is like tens of thousands of users who use between like one and 2000 requests a day. So you're looking at that point like between like $7 and 50 cents in fees and, and $15 in fees, and, and it just gets so exponentially expensive almost that, that it becomes almost, you've gotta like, choose like a phone plan where you try to estimate how much usage you're using and then you have to turn off their service after a while so it becomes untenable even from a financial aspect.

(00:17:51):
And then even if the price was cheaper, I, the third reason would be that I already have like like around like 50,000 yearly subscribers who paid like say Micah, you, you could have paid like three months ago, so you would still have like 12 or nine months of your 12 months of service left. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I already collected your payment based on the operating costs I had at the time. So like design fees server fees, I have a part-time server engineer and about the dollar a month I, I charged you was, was able to cover that. Now, Reddit's coming in and saying like, starting July 1st, you're gonna start incurring charges where each of those users, at minimum, at absolute minimum, but more on average, $3 and 50 cents will cost about a dollar. So you have 50,000 users who are already paid, and I can't monetize through no fault of their own, to be clear that are gonna start incurring between one and say $3 each.

(00:18:45):
So I'm looking at a bill of like 50 to $150,000 a month starting that'll start incurring July 1st. That I can't make any further money off of them that'll just be like potentially hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars I'll have to pay over the course of the year until their subscription expires. So like the, the calculus there is, it's just cheaper to work with Apple to refund all those subscriptions and close up shop than to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to Reddit. So there's like so many aspects where just the way they went about this kill the third party apps and so many ways. And yeah, I wish there was a way I could figure it out, but I talked with a lot of smart people. I was at Dub dub last week, and just no matter who I talked to and how I tried to ring it out, it was just wasn't making any sense. There was always like a, a hiccup mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. and I tried to talk to Reddit and say like, could you give us more time to make this change? And there was just radio silence on there end. They haven't answered my emails in a while. So

Mikah Sargent (00:19:39):
Yeah. And that's, that's one thing that I think is well worth pointing out is the fact that it's not as if you got this news and then you just said, well, this isn't gonna work and we're done with it. No, you and other third party developers have communicated with Reddit, have tried to reach some sort of agreement where instead of gold bars, it's silver bars or something. Correct. going back to the original metaphor, but mm-hmm. I wanna ask you one last question. I wish we could have you stick around for a lot longer, but I'm curious, do you think there's any chance that these ongoing blackouts, because there are some subreddit tube announced that they're gonna continue things past this point, the outcry and even the press attention that you and others are getting, do you think that any of that could result in a change on Reddit's end? Or are you pretty much certain, or not Reddit's end, but Apollo's end, or are you pretty much certain that come June 30th, I believe you are going to sort of flip that big switch?

Christian Selig (00:20:39):
I would say, I really hope it'll have an effect because like I said, the changes that they would have to do to show the community that they are listening are so minor, it would just be a matter of, like, even if you just kept the same price, just saying like, I will give you 90 days to try to come up with some gold buyers and completely revamp your app, or, and ideally saying like, look, we apologize for how we handled this, and we, and we treated developers with a lot of honestly disrespect and we're kind of going back to the drawing board and we wanna talk with them and figure out how we can make this right going forward. And yeah, I I think those steps are so minor and so easy to do that I would hope that they would respect the community enough to just do those minor things. But it's honestly, it's really anyone's guess at this point. I, I have no clue.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:26):
Well, I wanna thank you so much for taking some time today to talk to us. Christian Selig, if folks want to follow you online and see perhaps what's next where should they go to do that?

Christian Selig (00:21:38):
I am on Twitter and Meson as at Christian Selig.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:43):
All right. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

Christian Selig (00:21:46):
The pleasure's online. Thank you so much for having me.

Mikah Sargent (00:21:48):
Up next, the EU has set its sights on Google's ad business. Hmm. But first, let's take a quick break so I can tell you about a W s Insiders Podcast who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly a w s Insiders. It's a fast-paced, entertaining, and insightful look behind the scenes of a w s and cloud computing. And look, this is not your typical Talking Heads Tech podcast. It's high production value, high energy and high entertainment. It's full of captivating stories from the early days of a AWS to today and beyond. Hosts, Rahul Supermanium and Hillary Doyle dig into the current state and the future of a AWS by talking with the people and companies that know it best. Rahul is a veteran AWS pro with more than 15 years of experience managing more than 45,000 w s instances. He's known for pushing AWS products to their limits and for believing a w s is truly the operating system of the future.

(00:22:51):
AWS Insiders is a show that's full of opinions, takeaways, and untold stories about the challenges, innovations, and mind blowing promise of cloud computing. I really liked an episode of AWS Insiders called Moderna, Mr. Nna and a w s because the hosts Rahul and Hillary talked to Moderna's director of data engineering and cloud architecture about how Moderna depends on a w s and the cloud. And you find out that Moderna was a cloud first company that, that they, they started there in thinking about how to take medicine and how to take health to the next level. It required that cloud computing aspect. So it's, it's a fascinating sort of combination of medical technology, engineering, and cloud computing all wrapped up in one package. Very good

Jason Howell (00:23:44):
Stuff. You should search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player, or visit cloud fixx.oria.com/podcast. That's cloud fixx dot A U r e a.com/podcast. Of course, we'll also include a link in the show notes, our thanks to a WS insiders for their support. All right, we are back from the break, and that means it's time for Jason Howell to take it away. So it is not yet the end of the road for Google's ad business in the eu, but it certainly could be. We could be at the beginning of, of a very big transition here. The European commu commission issued a formal antitrust complaint against the company this week. That place is a target solely on Google's ad business. Certainly not the first time that we've heard of this being a possibility, but now it seems like we're we're, you know, preparing to walk down this road thanks to the eu calling, they called it anti-competitive with major implications if Google is found guilty. So we're gonna dive into this. Joining me to pick this apart is Nicola ais from Search Engine Land. It's great to have you on the show today. Thank you.

Nicola Agius (00:24:56):
Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

Jason Howell (00:24:58):
Yeah, it's fantastic. Thanks for taking the time. We should probably start by detailing what the EU had to share from its perspective about Google and its ad business, which is just so interesting, like where we are right now with this before you kind of break this apart, because I mean, Google's been doing its ad business forever, so we're kind of like, we're, we're so used to the way these things are operating and, and it's so critical to Google's business. So tell us a little bit about what the EU has set out here.

Nicola Agius (00:25:32):
Yeah. So unfortunately yesterday wasn't the best day for Google. No. the European Commission started this investigation about two years ago, and it launched it to determine whether Google has been violating antitrust laws here in the eu. And yesterday after Alen investigation, it announced that it was charging Google with violating these antitrust laws, and it released a statement of objections in response. And in this statement, it said that Google has been abusing its position as the world's dominant digital advertising platform. And basically what this means is Google, as we all know, operates in both the ad buying and ad selling space. And one the EU Commission did its report, did its investigation. It found that it was giving preference to ads placed with its own ad exchange platform called ad. And according to the commission, this has been going on since at least 2014. And if this is all confirmed, this is actually an, a legal practice by Google.

Jason Howell (00:26:39):
Wow. Which I guess what, what comes to me right now is why now and not before, if this has been happening for so long, is it just that the temperature around, especially in the eu, the temperature in the EU seems very hot as far as, you know, putting that kind of target on big tech and really scrutinizing exactly how business is run. But I mean, Google's been doing this for a very long time, I imagine. Why now?

Nicola Agius (00:27:05):
Well, that's actually, that's what Google has said back in it's a statement. They released a statement yesterday in response denying the charges. And in the statement they also said that these n none of its operations are new. So I imagine Google's taking issue with that too.

Jason Howell (00:27:24):
Yeah, no, que no question. So what kind of recourse does Google have to push back on this, at least at this stage? Because this isn't necessarily, Google's not proven to be guilty, let's say. This is kind like setting the stage and saying, we believe this, but it still has a a ways to go it at this stage. Does Google have any recourse in kind of pushing back against this?

Nicola Agius (00:27:47):
Well Google, as I said, released a statement yesterday. Dan Taylor, Google ads Vice president said that, you know, none of these things are new. And he's also said that it relates to a very small part of its advertising business. Mm. So I imagine that's gonna be one part of their argument. Also, I noticed in his statement that he spoke a lot about the EU commission failing to recognize all the good that Google's been doing. So lowering cost for consumers increasing choices. So I should imagine that's going to form part of its argument. Also, this isn't the first time a case like this has been brought against Google. I mean, I think it was just in January, the US Justice Department filed a very similar case. So it seems like Google's dealing with these accusations left, right, and center at the minute.

Jason Howell (00:28:37):
Yeah. Right. At some point, you know, they'll, they'll be well rehearsed and well practiced on how to deal with this going forward, but what's, what is your take on how this plays out, at least, at least, you know, kind of focusing our attention on what's happening in the eu. If, if Google is kind of seen as guilty of this, this really imparts major change on how Google does business what, what might that look like?

Nicola Agius (00:29:04):
Well, the European Commission has made some recommendations yesterday when it announced its that it was charging Google with these, with violating is with these, with this. And it said that it might force that behavioral changes aren't gonna make a difference to achieve real impact and to make things right. It's saying that Google is gonna have to sell off part of its ads business, and also if it's found guilty, it's going to have to it's going to face some pretty big penalties too, financial ones.

Jason Howell (00:29:37):
What yeah, what kind of, what kind of penalties have they gotten into the details as, as what that actually looks like? Or is this kind of like at a later date?

Nicola Agius (00:29:46):
No, it would be, I think could impose a fine of up to 10% of the company's annual worldwide turnover. So Wow. Pretty big numbers. Yes. <laugh> pretty big numbers. And that's, I think that would 10% is big for any company, but when we're talking about Google you know, Google's ad tech unit especially makes up 79% of total revenue last year. And I think it shares a quarter of the market share for global ad revenue too. So we we're talking really big numbers.

Jason Howell (00:30:16):
Yeah, that's, that's interesting when you put it when you put it in that perspective, it really reminds me like, so, so often in the past, I, I've gotten accustomed to big technology company, you did something wrong, we're gonna punish you. And then the amount that comes out, it's like, are you kidding me? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like, I mean, that's, that's a large amount for me, random person. Yeah. You know, walking on the street. But for a company like Google, like that's a, that's a tiny, you know, drip of slobber coming out of the side of their mouth compared to, you know, everything else that they've got going on. It's a tiny fraction of what they, what, you know, what they even care about. So that seems to me to be an incredible incentive for Google to make these changes. I'm just so curious to know like how Google's search product, like what we end as consumers end up seeing and what, what the businesses behind the scenes end up seeing is, is it just that Google will, will then be forced to not favor its own and really kind of liberate and open up and, and open this marketplace for everyone else to be involved, but not them, something along those lines?

Nicola Agius (00:31:25):
I mean, it is hard to tell what action Google is going to take, but what we do know is that in 2017 they're accused of something quite similar by the eu, again, with regard regarding its Google shopping products mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and

Jason Howell (00:31:40):
That's right. But

Nicola Agius (00:31:41):
That, yeah. And for that claim it was given a 2.7 billion fine. So again, big numbers and and it dealt with the issue by separating its shopping service into its own company. So maybe it will take a similar approach with its ads company and run the two separately with its own separate revenues and profits.

Jason Howell (00:32:02):
Yeah. Yeah. No question. Now so obviously this is in the eu and you've, you've mentioned like, there's similar things happening here in the US and, and other places around the world, but there are always kind of these these rollover impacts. If, if one region, especially if something this major, if one region of the world, you know, forces Google to make a change, there's gotta be some trickle down as far as how that impacts their business in other parts of the world. What what might that impact be for Google? Is this the kind of thing that the EU imparts this change and Google is then really kind of like, you know, it almost makes sense to do this on a wider basis so that we don't face this, this challenge in other markets, or, Hey, we're not there yet, so let's continue as business as usual in these other places and just give the EU what they, what they want. Is that feasible?

Nicola Agius (00:32:57):
I mean, if I were Google <laugh>, I would be taking this seriously, especially with the potential fine that they could be facing. Cuz even though Google earns a lot of money, you know, when we're talking billion dollar fines, you know, that's big even by Google standards. Yes. So I dunno, sometimes prevention's better than cure and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I would consider rolling this out globally, perhaps to prevent hefty fines from all around the world. Cuz how many times, how many more times can it keep paying out billion dollar fines? Mm-Hmm.

Jason Howell (00:33:26):
<Affirmative>. Yeah, I would, I would agree with that. Is there any way that what we're seeing here in the u with this focus on Google's ad business might impact other, other businesses that have, you know, something something going in the ad ad industry? I mean, we, we commonly talk about the ways in which the ad market can be just kind of a, it's, it's a challenging landscape, let's just put it that way. It's, it's got a target on its back in a lot of different directions. This is just one example. How might this in the EU impact other businesses? Not just Google or, or if at all?

Nicola Agius (00:34:01):
Well, I, I mean, if I was, if I was a company operating in a similar way, I'd be paying close attention right now, because if they're doing it to Google, we definitely do it to the other companies. And Google probably has more money to fight these cases than smaller companies, perhaps. So I'd be paying close attention and also following what action Google takes a afterwards and perhaps adopting something similar. But one thing for sure, I don't think even with all of this is going on, I don't think Google's going anywhere. It's still gonna be the world leader in advertising, digital advertising.

Jason Howell (00:34:36):
Yeah, indeed. It take a lot to, to take Google down as far as that's concerned. I would absolutely agree with that. Well really appreciate you taking a few minutes to talk to us about this. Nicola ais wrote writes for search engine land, search engine land.com. Love what you all are doing over there. If people wanna follow you and your work online, of course they can find you@searchengineland.com. Are you doing any socials? Where, where can people find you there?

Nicola Agius (00:35:00):
Linkedin would be a good one. I'm on LinkedIn and also on Twitter at nicola underscore ages.

Jason Howell (00:35:07):
Right on. Thank you, Nicola. It was a pleasure talking with you. Thank you.

Nicola Agius (00:35:11):
And you, lovely to meet you.

Jason Howell (00:35:12):
All right. Nice to meet you too. We'll talk to you soon. All right. Coming up, Mac Gaming getting a major boost. Big deal. If you have a Mac and you wanna be gaming, you're gonna, you're gonna be happy with this news. But first, this episode, tech News Weekly is brought to you by Brooke Linen. I'm so happy to, to get to provide my thoughts on Brooke Linen. Good, because I've been sleeping really good lately. <Laugh> Brooke mission is to provide you with hotel quality, luxury bedding delivered directly to your door at a fair price. It was actually founded by husband and wife, duo Rich and Vicky in 2014. And Brooklinen has everything you need to upgrade your home with quality products and curated designs that are gonna leave your guests swooning. If you have that guest bedroom that someone's staying in, you throw some Brook linens sheets on there.

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Mikah Sargent (00:39:23):
Yes. So obviously the big conversation at ww DC was Apple's New Vision Pro headset that will come out sometime next year, early next year. And the conversation mostly surrounded that there was a little bit of talk about the max that Apple announced and a little bit of talk about all of the operating systems that it updated. But one of the big highlights that came out, I think after the show and something that got a lot of attention was the Game Porting toolkit. And what this does sort of in its the, the planned use for this is a way for game developers to be able to see what it would be like if their games ran on a Mac. So let me kind of break this down now, because for <laugh> forever and always it seems like there's been this sort of conversation about true gaming doesn't happen on the Mac, right?

(00:40:31):
If you want to do your Triple A gaming, you're going to need a PC and you're going to need to run Windows most likely. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Linux, not really. Everything else, not really true gaming needs to happen on a Windows pc. That's pretty souped up. And then the other games, of course take place on consoles like Xbox and PlayStation. Well, apple has always kind of tried to combat that. Of course, it's got this huge mobile gaming landscape and lots of people who play lots of mobile games. But to combat the idea that true gaming can't happen on the Mac, you always see Apple highlighting some sort of title, some gaming title that that comes out. And so I, they will have these little demos or they will show off little previews where people are doing some what would, what looks like pretty powerful gaming on the platform.

(00:41:29):
Yet the big game titles, the big game names don't end up making their way to the Mac. A big reason is because developers, game developers, game publishers are making games in such a way that they simply run very well on Windows machines. Mm-Hmm. And then of course, you have your console games that run very well on the consoles, but to then try to take some, to, to either hire a team or to try to internally use resources to also develop for the Mac, they don't have the resources to do that, so it doesn't get the attention that the rest of the, the games do. So I guess this is what's, what's kind of confusing to me is that I guess what Apple was hoping is if they can get the developer or the publisher to quite literally visualize what it's like to run a game on the Mac without doing anything to it, then they will be encouraged to make the game for the Mac first plat, like f first party situation where it's running natively on the Mac, because then you'll get even better performance.

(00:42:53):
So it's supposed to be kind of like a bragging moment. Like even though we're doing all of this work, it's still playing quite well. So obviously if you could actually just make it make it for the platform, then it would be even better. What's happened though, is tinkerers and developers and, you know, nerds and geeks everywhere have realized that they can use this toolkit to run these AAA games and many other games that only run on Windows on their max. So another change that Apple made at this W W D C is that it used to be in order to publish apps on Apple's platform, in order to use the developer betas in order to make use of all of the developer tools, you paid $99 a year. And so that $99 a year got you access to all of this stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise.

(00:44:02):
Well, this year Apple said, we're doing something different. All you need to have is an Apple ID that you log into the developer side of the account and you can get access to pretty much everything. Save for the ability to publish apps to the app store that requires an actual $99 per year subscription. So now more people are able to you know, try out development, are able to run the developer betas are able to test it, et cetera, et cetera. It's a great sort of democratizing of that portion of Apple's development stuff. But that also means that anyone can go and get this game porting toolkit, download it, and then there are a bunch of tutorials now and even some little sort of toolkits that let you install, for example, steam for Windows on your Mac and then run direct X 12 games on your Mac.

(00:44:59):
Now, it's important to understand that it is not emulation, and this is where I'm actually I want to be clear, I want to quote the inevitable Christina Warren, who is a GitHub employee, but has been a long time guest on many shows here on the Twit Network. Very excited that I got, I, you know, this morning I was looking through headlines and I saw, oh, Christina wrote something so occasionally still publishing things, which is exciting. And she did kind of a deep dive into this. And so one of the aspects that she talks about is that this is not emulation, but instead is translation. So what's happening here is that you, so a game developer is basically creating a game that your inputs call on different parts of the operating system, right? Mm. we just talked earlier about APIs.

(00:46:03):
So it's the picking up the phone and being able to talk to the system and having the system talk back to you. So what would, the way that it kind of traditionally works is that the system would call to the Windows platform and then it would be translated so that it could call to the Linux platform or to macOS platform. And so Apple kind of took that and built upon this technology with this toolkit to make it possible. It, it kind of flattens that, that aspect of it, that translation or emulation aspect of it. So it's a little bit closer to the, the hardware, if you will, so you can get some pretty good performance. There are loads of videos out there now of different games being run. Diablo four is a very popular game right now. And so they showed that running close to 60 frames per second at 10 80 p and then also running close to 90 frames per second at the default resolution on a MacBook Pro.

(00:47:12):
So yeah, here we've got some video playing showing and then the, the Game porting toolkit has this little readout in the top right corner that shows how well the game is working. It shows the performance of the game. And again, the idea here is that a developer would look at this and go, holy moly, if it can run this game, if Apple's Silicon is able to run this game at this level without being directly made for the game, just think of how amazing it would be if it was made for this platform. It would run even better. It would run even smoother. It would maybe work on lower power chips. So someone could be running Diablo four on an M two apple silicon chip on a 14 inch MacBook Air instead of needing to have the MacBook Pro. And then the idea is if it's going to open up that there are gonna be so many more devices now that could be running these games, and that is, you know, supposed to kind of entice right worth your time, worth your effort.

(00:48:14):
Yeah. Worth exactly. Worth your time, worth your effort. Yeah. And you know, apple even talks about how this 14 inch MacBook Air I have here, this is just the standard M two MacBook Air is a great gaming machine on its own, but could be even better if, you know there were more titles available for it. What's important to understand though, and I think that it's something that has mostly been missed I think even in or not, I think, but including in this piece on inverse, is that Apple's game porting toolkit is not, is not the be all end all solution. And in fact, Apple's licensing surrounding the game porting toolkit, sh has, you know, terms that say you aren't, we're not, we're not providing this as a way for you to publish games and sell games on Apple's platforms. So the only way to make use of this tool is from tinkerers is from the developers.

(00:49:18):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is like, I can, I can install it and do all of this backstage stuff that I need to do and then run a game with all of the complication that's involved, but it's not as if the everyday user's not gonna not gonna go near that. And not only that, but it's not as if Diablo fours maker, whoever that is, I'm not up this stuff with all of that, but Diablo four couldn't tomorrow start offering Diablo four for Mac, right? Yeah. Shipping that tool inside of the game, they would have to create a Mac version of this. This is just for these developers and publishers to see what it would be like to run on a Mac platform. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So while people were really, really excited about this and thinking, oh my goodness, there are going to be direct X 12 games on the Mac, you know, in the next three months, no, as the license is currently written, and as things currently stand, that is not going to be the case.

(00:50:17):
But I am curious, I'm wondering if that might change because I was at the on Wednesday, this past Wednesday I was in San Jose at an event called the Talk Show, which is John Gruber's show. It's this podcast, but every year at wwdc, he holds one in person and typically talks to Apple execs. And the guy in charge of of, of marketing for Apple Jaws was there. And one of the things that he said was, somebody had asked a question about this game porting toolkit, and he said, I heard that's really breaking the internet right now. So guy that's in charge of marketing for all of Apple knows that just having this game porting toolkit has quote unquote broken the internet. I wonder if we might not see a change where Apple gives these developers the ability to ship a version of this so that they could run games on the Mac without having to completely translate over for the Mac.

(00:51:29):
And it's like, yes, you could make it directly for the Mac and it's gonna do this, this, and this and this, but why not make it if I can already run these games, or in some cases there are some games that won't run, but just need a little bit of tweaking. Let's make it possible. Let's let these Macs be part of the, the, you know, options for someone cuz Yeah. Yeah. I you know, Leo had to, in order to play some of the games that he wanted to play, buy an outfit, an entire win PC system just to be able to play those games. And not all of us can do that, but

Jason Howell (00:52:01):
Maybe the witness that's been the way it's been for decades.

Mikah Sargent (00:52:03):
Yeah, yeah. You, you have to have both. You'd have to run both platforms. Yeah. that's just not the case for many people. So this is, while this is very exciting that it works and while some of us are able to make this happen, a it's not for everybody to do. You gotta do a lot of terminal stuff. It only sometimes works when it does work. And it is not intended to be a way for developers to ship games tomorrow for the Mac.

Jason Howell (00:52:33):
It proves something. It proves something. Yeah. It shows that it's possible. And I think for, I, I'm sure there are a lot of Mac users who, like myself over the years have wondered like, man, you know, this hardware is so amazing. Yes. It can do so much. And it's relied on in many industries that require, you know things like graphical power. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mean all, you know, the, the, the graphic arts industry,

Mikah Sargent (00:52:57):
Music, graphic arts, music,

Jason Howell (00:52:58):
Like all of these creative industries that require great hardware under, you know, underlying hardware in order to pull it off is doing all those things. Why is it not doing these things? Yeah. Like it's, it's always baffled by, in my mind,

Mikah Sargent (00:53:12):
They wonder that sometimes internally, why developers have continued to not try to put resources into making it for the Mac. So I think they've just gotten to a point where they go, well, if they're not gonna do it, then we're going to, it's almost like they're extending the bridge halfway and hoping that they, they'll extend the bridge the other halfway

Jason Howell (00:53:32):
Yep.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:32):
As opposed to just waiting on their side going, come on, build that bridge. Build that bridge.

Jason Howell (00:53:36):
Right. It's like,

Mikah Sargent (00:53:37):
No, they're not doing that. All right. I'm gonna

Jason Howell (00:53:38):
Give you a little something. Yeah, exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:39):
We'll

Jason Howell (00:53:39):
Stretch that. This is

Mikah Sargent (00:53:40):
Pretty impressive. Grab my hand. That's pretty

Jason Howell (00:53:42):
Cool to see what they, what they pulled off.

Mikah Sargent (00:53:44):
Yeah. Everybody go read that piece. Over on Inverse from Christina Warren. It's, it's a great piece and it looks at the history of, of Apple gaming too, which is a sad, sad, sad history. <Laugh>. Yes.

Jason Howell (00:53:54):
<Laugh>. Yes, indeed. Well speaking of history there are two in this, in the story that I'm bringing to the, the story of the week, there are two topics that I am a big fan of. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> converging into one. Whoa. So it was like, when, when I read this, and then of course Leo talked about it a little bit on this week in Google yesterday, but I was like, I gotta talk about this cuz like, I love The Beatles. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so often we're talking about AI here on this show. And this is like, you know, world, the peanut butter and the chocolate coming together. Yes. World's cde. So to kind of give a little bit of background here, Paul McCartney was interviewed on BBC Radio's radio Four Today program just earlier this week. Ended up making a, a bunch of headlines.

(00:54:38):
He mentioned during the interview that he and the other surviving member of the Beatles Ringo Star were working to release one final Beatles song sometime by the end of the year. That song, I've actually heard this song back in the day I used to collect Beatles bootlegs, and this was definitely one of them is an old John Lennon demo called now and then. It's a great song. The recording is incredibly rough. It was basically recorded in 1978 on a boombox sitting in front of John Lennon while he was playing piano and kind of performing and singing. So a single recording, it's not like a multi-track thing where any of that stuff is isolated. I'm gonna get to why that's important, but Super lo-fi super noisy. There's actually like this electrical buzz, this underlying buzz under underneath it as well.

(00:55:32):
So I remember hearing the, the demo kind of a couple of decades ago. I got this bootleg, this John Lennon bootleg, and it was part of that and loving the song. And I was like, that's a shame that there isn't a better version quality better quality version of this. Back in 1995 if you remember the three Surviving Beatles at the time, that was McCartney Star and George Harrison, who's no longer alive teamed up with Jefflin. They produced a, a creation of two new Beatles songs to coincide with the anthology release, which was essentially releasing all sorts of, of B sides unreleased material. Cuz I mean, Beatles lore is just filled with, you know, hundreds if not thousands of hours of these lost recordings and stuff that if you're a fan, if you're like a fan that obsesses over the Beatles, you could spend your entire life hunting these things down.

(00:56:22):
Right. And people get really obsessive about it, you know as far as that's concerned. Well, the two songs that they pulled out were free as a bird and Real Love, both taken from Old John Lennon recordings and at the time, this was like 1995 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, they were able to take these old noisy recordings, clean 'em up, sync 'em, record multi-track. So you had all the remaining members of the Beatles kind of recording on top of it. They had their producer to kind of help them along. And those songs became real Beatles songs. I mean, it's probably, you know, Beatles fans probably are, are are divided on whether they are constitute real Beatles songs. Yeah. Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:57:01):
That's its own thing,

Jason Howell (00:57:02):
Isn't it? Wow. Yeah, totally. Or Oh, that was a John Lennon song, and then they did their parts over the top, and yes, it's all the same people, but it wasn't really created all four of them together. So is it the same thing anyways, the music, the Beatles purists? Yes, exactly. Of which there are many, don't get me wrong. So that, that came out with anthology and it was a big, big deal at the time. Two new Beatles songs that you've never heard before, you know? Yeah. That'd be exciting. And it, it was a big deal then. So, and, and actually from a technological standpoint, like especially through nowadays perspective and what I'm gonna talk about next really impressive that they were a able to pull that off and clean up that, that old, you know, crusty audio with 1995 technology. This was, this was before much of the audio industry was doing anything inside a computers, like as, as like the computer being the be all end all location of a lot of this, the way it is largely now.

(00:57:57):
It was a lot of it was done with hardware, which, you know, the hardware was obviously good enough to, to pull this off then things are different now. But George Harrison at the time refused this as a third track. They wanted to do this track as a third release at the time, but the audio was so bad. He's like, no, no, no, no. And they tried, they went into the studio, they spent an afternoon recording elements and everything like that. They ended up giving up on it. George Harrison like refused. He's like, Nope, it's rubbish. The the vocal quality is just horrible. Like, there's nothing we can do to make this sound good. But important to, you know, reiterate, they all kind of offered parts in the process before they were done. And that's important because George Harrison is no longer alive. But he did put down some guitars on this a few years ago. You remember Peter Jackson had the Get Back documentary? Did you see that documentary? I did not. You gotta be a real big Beatles fan to appreciate the documentary I Cause it's incredibly long. Yeah. but I even, like I heard

Mikah Sargent (00:58:57):
Loved it. You and Leo

Jason Howell (00:58:58):
Both talk a lot about Oh,

Mikah Sargent (00:59:00):
So I, I know that it was for the folks who are Yeah, I I'm sure it was amazing

Jason Howell (00:59:04):
<Laugh>. Yeah, it was, it was, its just a really cool kind of insight into how a band of that, you know, that importance, I'd say in, in the music world how they worked. So it was really cool. Well, a big part of that was the use of artificial intelligence to go back to the, all the tape that was recorded back then and remove other elements from the audio recordings to isolate the, the voices. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because this is a movie, you know, this is essentially a documentary, a movie. They needed to be able to, to clue in on what that person's saying over there, what that person's saying. But when they recorded all this footage back then they didn't do it with that in it necessarily in mind. There was a lot of other stuff getting in the way, artificial intelligence, we can train it to say, I want to hear that voice.

(00:59:51):
Yeah. And I don't want to hear everything else. And so that technology was really successful with how that turned out. They also use this technology in a, in a, I didn't realize this a reissue of the album Revolver where that album, when it was created, everybody was around a single mic and they were all kind of performing or, or a mic set up. They were all performing. To go back and remix that at a later date was not easily done because they were all in the same room. They used artificial intelligence to pull out the individual pieces Huh. And do a remix a couple of years ago. So that's pretty interesting. All this is to say is, where we're at now is Paul McCartney saying, we're gonna release the third song. It's that song from then they're using the technology, the AI technology that Peter Jackson used for the Get Back documentary to pull out and isolate these parts from this. And I say, they're, they're going to, that's not true. Apparently they've already done it, it's gonna come out this year. And they were able to kind of isolate those vocals, clean 'em up, isolate the, the piano, take the George Harrison guitar that he recorded back then and bring that into the recording. Wow. So they will actually, even though they're doing this, you know, at a time when both John Lennon and George Harrison are no longer alive, they're able to put together the fi what what McCartney says is the final new Beatles track.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:12):
So this is not typing out new lyrics and AI generating his voice No. To sing new, it's just for isolating.

Jason Howell (01:01:21):
It's, yeah. It's taking what is Yes. To my understanding. That's exactly it. Okay. They're,

Mikah Sargent (01:01:25):
When I first heard about this and I didn't read it, you were like,

Jason Howell (01:01:27):
No.

Mikah Sargent (01:01:28):
I thought, oh no, they're gonna like make just like the, you know, the virtual versions of Tupac and all that weird stuff. Totally. In this case. Yeah. Adding to the song or something. But if it's just, I think that's a fantastic application of artificial intelligence, frankly. Once

Jason Howell (01:01:41):
Again, it's, it's kinda like the, the comparison that I come up with is Photoshop has certain tools that, that for years people who know Photoshop have been able to do things that people who don't know Photoshop wouldn't have. The second, you know, the slightest clue how to pull that off mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and now artificial intelligence makes some of those things so easy. Yes. Right. And, and is able to do these really kind of magical things that we didn't think you could do at a push of a button 10 years ago. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And that's kind of where we're at with AI and audio right now is, is it's possible to go into these single and analyze the audio. And even though it's all, you know, if it, if it was multi-track, if I had the piano over here on one track of audio and the vocals over here, that's very easy to, to isolate and mix mm-hmm.

(01:02:32):
<Affirmative> and do different things with. But if it's all on a single recording, it's very difficult. And AI has made it a lot less painful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and able for a band like The Beatles to do this. I don't know how it's gonna turn out. I'm super curious how it turns out. Of course. Just cuz I am a Beatles fan and I love the process of it. Like, I love knowing the, the lore and the story around this. Is this revisionist history though? Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's taking two people who are dead, one of them who opposed to doing this 20 years ago or 25 30 i, I don't know, almost 30 years ago.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:07):
See, to me, that's, that's the one complication in this, I don't think any of the, for me, none of the rest of that matters. I know purists would have a different Sure. Perspective, but the idea that the person didn't wanna do this, but they also, George didn't want to do it because of how it sounded at the time. Right. It was like, I'm not

Jason Howell (01:03:29):
That's a really good point. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:30):
I'm not putting my name on this because it's j it's, it's rubbish. It's absolutely Crush <laugh>. It's Rub Rubish. But if they can make it Yeah. Not sound like

Jason Howell (01:03:36):
Rubbish,

Mikah Sargent (01:03:37):
Then perhaps it would be something that he would be okay with at this point. Yeah. because I go back and forth on I recently did a rewatch of all of the Star Wars films, and I go back and forth on the choice that Lucas made to add in CG to some of the original films in places where it wasn't originally there. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because on one hand, the have the cre this is the creator. Like this is the person who was at the, the, you know, forefront of making this possible. And so

Jason Howell (01:04:14):
If anyone should be able to make that choice Yeah. It should be the creator of

Mikah Sargent (01:04:17):
It. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to think that if I made something and I wanted to go back later and make adjustments to it. Right. But I could do that, could mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so ultimately that's kind of where I landed on that. But there were times where I thought I could understand how people might want to just see it in its original form for sure. And see what it was like. And in fact, I did that with some of the scenes. I looked up, you know, what they originally looked like just to see the difference. Yeah. And sometimes it felt like it was egregious, but there was a purpose for all of that, for George Lucas, which was to essentially move the technology forward by showing it's a little bit like what we were talking about, the game porting toolkit, showing others what could be done and getting them interested in it.

(01:05:00):
Yeah. Which led to that shift into digital video. What, so it was more than just, I'm making a story here. And I think sometimes people don't like to realize that and hear that they get a little closed eared mm-hmm. <Affirmative> about how George Lucas in, you know, from his mouth and from the mouth of the people around him. His point was to like just as much as telling a story, it was also, these are some examples of how we can use this technology. Everybody should be using this technology and we're trying to push it through. Right. Right. And so, you know, you've, you've gotta understand the intent of, of the thing. And Yeah. For George, this George who just at the time was going, well, no, we're not gonna release this. This sounds terrible. This isn't a Beatles thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, this is rubbish. If it's not rubbish now that's fantastic.

Jason Howell (01:05:49):
Yeah. There you go. I also think it's pretty cool that McCartney has seen everything that he's seen around music from Oh yeah. Back in the day, the birth, the birth of rock and roll, being there at the very beginning being such a, a monumental part of that history all the way to now where AI can like go into those old recordings and give them new life and everything. And it's

Mikah Sargent (01:06:13):
Just what that must be like to witness. Totally. Totally. I mean, cause honestly, it was just shocking to me to hear you say that they were releasing an anthology in 95. Like Yeah, they ex they existed far enough before that, that they were doing an anthology in 95. Yeah. Yeah. That's not even 2000.

Jason Howell (01:06:28):
It's just wild. Yeah, I know. It is crazy. It is crazy. But anyways, these stories really, really get me get my imagination going. So, so there you go. I love it. All right, we've reached the end of this episode, tech News Weekly. Thank you so much for watching and listening. Thank you for subscribing cuz that's the most important thing that you can do for any of our podcasts. Go to the show page of whatever show you love, but in this case, twit TV slash tnw click the button to subscribe in your pod catcher of choice and you will never miss another episode again. Thank you for doing that.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:00):
Also, if you'd like to get all of our shows ad free, we've got a way for you to do that. It's joining Club Twit at twit tv slash club twit. When you join the club, starting at $7 a month or $84 a year, you're gonna get a lot of stuff, as I mentioned, first and foremost, every single twit show with no ads because you in effect are sponsoring the shows. So it's a great way to get all of the content. You also will get access to the Twit plus bonus feed that has extra, extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show special Club Twit events all get published there and access to the members only Discord server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members and also those of us here at twit.

(01:07:43):
Again, it starts at $7 a month, $84 a year. And it's not a scale thing. It's not like if you pay $10, then you get a call from Mic A Sergeant, or if you pay $25, then you get a TWIT license. No, it's $7 a month. We just provide people the ability to pay more if they'd like to, because we heard from some folks who said, you keep adding stuff to the club, I'd like to give you more. So you put in $7, you put in $8, you put in nine, whatever you'd like. But starts at $7 a month, $84 a year, and along with that you're gonna get some more amazing stuff. It's special shows that exist only in the club. There's the Untitled Linux Show, which as you might imagine is a show all about Linux. You also can watch Hands on Windows, the short format show from Paul Thot, where he covers windows, tips and tricks, so all of you Windows users out there can make sure you're making the best of those machines You have. I do a show in the club called Hands on Mac, which covers all sorts of Apple stuff, although right now I'm going through Mac Os Ventura with Window Management. So everything you need to know about making sure you've got your windows organized and all laid out exactly as you want them. And the newly relaunched Home theater geeks from Scott Wilkinson is also in the club. So please consider joining the club, getting all of those great shows at twit TV slash wait. Twit tv slash club twit. Why? There

Jason Howell (01:09:13):
You go.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:13):
It suddenly went away from me for some reason.

Jason Howell (01:09:15):
<Laugh>

Jason Howell (01:09:16):
Yes. I can't possibly be right except that it is, except it's TWIT tv

Mikah Sargent (01:09:19):
Slash club twit. If you who would like to follow me online, I'm at Micah Sergeant on many a social media network, or you can enter chihuahua.coffee, c h i h Hua, h hua.coffee, that's where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Consider subscribing to my shows on Tuesday. You can tune in to watch iOS today with Rosemary Orchard and yours truly, where we cover everything to do with Apple's sort of mobile platforms, iOS watch os, iPad os, et cetera. On Thursdays, of course, here on Tech News Weekly, as well as hands on Mac if you're a Club Twit member. And on Sundays where I co-host, ask the tech guys with Leo LaPorte where we take your questions live on air and answer them. Jason Howell, what about you?

Jason Howell (01:10:08):
Oh, yeah, at Jason Howell on Twitter, Twitter social slash at Jason Howell on Mastodon other places too. I'd give you my Reddit username. But you know, Reddit's kind of a mess right now, too. <Laugh>. So any who all about and Android every Tuesday, twit.tv/aaa. Don't miss it. Having a lot of fun there. Got a review of a phone that I'm not talking about quite yet, coming up on Tuesday's episode. So Twitter TV slash AAA for that. And just a big thanks to everyone who helps us do this show each and every week. John Ashley, John Lenina, who's actually not here today, but Burke Mc Quinn, everyone behind the scenes marketing, everybody that helps us do this show and spread it far and wide. Thank you. And thanks to you for listening, for watching and for subscribing. We appreciate you and we'll see you next time on Tech News Weekly. Bye everybody. Bye.