Podcast: Two Blokes Talking Tech

Episode: #736

Title: Apple’s WWDC 2026 – All about AI

Date: 9 June 2026

Hosts: Trevor Long & Stephen Fenech

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[00:00:00] Trevor Long: I don’t remember seeing your, uh, your office in a video call like this, Stephen.

[00:00:07] Stephen Fenech: Um, well, that’s where I normally sit there, right? That’s my desk there. But this is my little podcast. This is the podcast— it’s the podcast corner. This is where the roadcast is set up. I’ve got an iMac here, dedicated little section of the office for recording.

[00:00:22] Trevor Long: Well, that’s where I—

[00:00:23] Stephen Fenech: that’s where all the hard work happens. That’s the workbench over there.

[00:00:27] Trevor Long: I’m not sure any hard work’s happening there in the Tech Gold office. Yeah, mate, it’s a pretty breezy job, cruisy job we lead.

[00:00:35] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, early mark for me, mate. You were, you were up in the, your normal time zone. I was up at 3 in the morning, so yeah.

[00:00:42] Trevor Long: Yes, how did you cope with that, mate?

[00:00:45] Stephen Fenech: No problem, not the first time I’ve done it.

[00:00:48] Trevor Long: Yeah, not your first rodeo, but, uh, it’s been a long day here, but, uh, that’s, that’s the way we, where we go. How was your flight home from London?

[00:00:55] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, great. Yeah, all good. No problem at all.

[00:00:59] Trevor Long: Yeah, it was—

[00:00:59] Stephen Fenech: watched all the live footy on the way back. It was great because Emirates have live stations. They’ve got CNN, BBC, they’ve got a sports channel. I was watching Monaco F1 practice and then watching two NRL games back to back.

[00:01:13] Trevor Long: It was great.

[00:01:15] Stephen Fenech: Nice.

[00:01:15] Trevor Long: Yeah, is that live or Sports24 or something?

[00:01:18] Stephen Fenech: Sport24 it’s called.

[00:01:19] Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:01:20] Stephen Fenech: So from London to Dubai, I had the two Friday night games, and from Dubai to Sydney I had the Saturday afternoon games. Nice.

[00:01:31] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:01:31] Stephen Fenech: All right, it’s a shame Souths didn’t play then. Souths played while we were right in the middle of the Amazon, uh, the, the, the events. Well, controversially, let’s just say it’s only one try. You lost by many, but there was a dead set knock-on that they let go, and then Manly scored off the next set, so Let’s call it a 12-point turnaround just there. Anyhow, we’re not here to talk about that, mate.

[00:01:57] Trevor Long: We’re here to talk about the nature of football. Okay, we’re here to do this.

[00:02:00] VOICE OVER: Welcome to Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:02:04] Stephen Fenech: Not a bad price.

[00:02:05] VOICE OVER: With Trevor Long from eftm.com.

[00:02:07] Stephen Fenech: Really handy device.

[00:02:08] VOICE OVER: And Stephen Fenech from techguide.com.au.

[00:02:12] Trevor Long: Episode 736 of Two Blokes Talking Tech. Thanks to the great people at Netgear, and for all your home networking needs We’d love you to consider them for your next purchase or upgrade. And for all your home security, Arlo have you covered, and we’ll tell you about them shortly. Stephen, I just saw you take a swig of Diet Coke, and you know what it made me think of?

[00:02:31] Stephen Fenech: What’s that?

[00:02:32] Trevor Long: How you’ve gone back to normal size drinks, because in London you kept getting served tiny weeny little 200ml bottles. Yeah, they look— and in Stephen’s big manly hands, these 200ml bottles look like those little alcohol bottles in a plane or hotel minibar. They do.

[00:02:52] Stephen Fenech: That’s right.

[00:02:54] Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:02:54] Stephen Fenech: In your hands, otherwise it would have been like normal.

[00:02:57] Trevor Long: Completely normal. Yeah, my old man hands. Yeah, jeez. Um, anyway, uh, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference has kicked off. Uh, we’re bringing this, uh, to you as an emergency podcast, uh, basically bumping it up the week because why make you wait until, um, till Thursday? You’ll get, uh, Tech Guide to tomorrow, uh, tomorrow night, which is Wednesday night. Wednesday night. But we thought, uh, why waste time when we can unpack, unpack WWDC, um, right here and right now? And it’s a fascinating one, Stephen, because let’s just talk about the event before we talk about any of the announcements, right? There’s a couple of glaring things that occurred. Firstly, there was no big intro movie. Which normally happens.

[00:03:45] Stephen Fenech: So there wasn’t any— okay, so there was no— I know, like a funny little— or a little thing about that.

[00:03:50] Trevor Long: There was the Craig Fenrighi jumping out of a plane last year. There was the Apple F1 movie integration. There was the fun that they, they had with the naming of the, um, uh, of the macOS.

[00:04:05] Stephen Fenech: But apart from that, it was pretty straight, straight back. Yes. It was very— I wondered that too, because there’s been a couple of really funny videos they’ve done and to kick it off. But now it was pretty much just straight into it, wasn’t it? They did— I’m pretty sure, like, you were there. So was there like a little preamble on stage?

[00:04:24] Trevor Long: Where did it start for you?

[00:04:26] Stephen Fenech: For me, it started with Tim Cook coming out under the rainbow at Apple Park and welcome to WWDC.

[00:04:33] Trevor Long: And so in, in, in the, in the real, in present, uh, Craig Federighi came out on stage and I thought, oh, hang on, what’s going on here? Um, and he came out, you know, running on as he normally does, and he said, uh, something along the lines of, um, you know, for software, for developers and, you know, coders and engineers like me, this has been— it’s a difficult time, it’s a changing time, it’s been pretty much in the news consistently. And I’m sitting there going, oh, he’s going to address like the AI, you know, the use of AI to program and, and write code and how it’s taking jobs or something, you know. And then he goes, uh, you know, this is Tim’s last event. This is it. This is, you know, after 15 years.

[00:05:23] Stephen Fenech: So the farewell began.

[00:05:24] Trevor Long: Yeah, right. Yes. And, and then he welcomed Tim Cook on a stage and standing ovation for some— and by the way, it’s— this began at 10 to 10, so 10 minutes before the scheduled start time this happened.

[00:05:38] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:05:39] Trevor Long: And then Tim came on and it would have been a minute and a half, 2 minutes of applause, standing ovation. And all he said— and I’m telling you, he said it 20 times—

[00:05:49] Stephen Fenech: thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

[00:05:51] Trevor Long: Just constantly. It’s like, yes, tell them to sit down and they’ll sit down.

[00:05:54] Stephen Fenech: All right. I’ll tell you a similar thing. When, um, the iPad 2 launch, when Steve Jobs, remember he was diagnosed again with cancer and he actually turned up at the— no one expected him to be there. That was a similar deal. Everyone was up on their feet with like a standing ovation for him as well. And similar, similar kind of feeling.

[00:06:15] Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah. And so he, he then, he then, you know, be, you know, kicked off his little conversation. But he basically— I’m not going to say he got emotional, but I, I think he did. I think he got emotional. He said that, you know, this event’s very, very important to him and he’s very passionate about developers and, you know, he’s, he’s championed this event for 15 years. And yeah, you know, and in front of the developer community, that’s a really important thing for him to say and for them to hear. Um, and it was, it was, it was kind of stark to realize this was his sign-off from the, you know, introductions to, to these events and to hosting.

[00:06:54] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, the next event will be what, the iPhone launch?

[00:06:56] Trevor Long: It’ll be CEO, who, who, by the way, on the ground is a very visible man. So at— for the last, uh, a little bit inside baseball for folks, but I think most people are normally interested in this stuff. So all the world’s media stay in pretty much one hotel and in the middle of bloody nowhere.

[00:07:17] Stephen Fenech: Uh, I had you there again the same way.

[00:07:19] Trevor Long: Yeah, the AC and Tetra. Um, great. Moffat Field, very close to a bunch of corporate buildings but nothing else. Anyway, um, and they always have a welcome dinner, and it’s just people standing around eating chicken and stuff. But, um, Greg Jaws was there, and then John Ternus turned up. Wow. It was— he got mobbed, you know, people taking selfies and all that kind of stuff. Oh wow. And then interestingly, today after the keynote, I went to, uh, um, what they call the discussion, which was really just a panel of Craig Federighi and three of his, his, um, soldiers, his three senior managers, um, talking about AI. But in the front row, Tim Cook, John Ternus, Greg Joswiak. Like, it was, you know, it was kind of interesting that, that they’re, they’re not, you know, shying away from being very present. And it’s a— it’s a— I’ll be honest with you, it’s a different Apple. Like, this, this— it’s already different. Yeah, the way things are operating. Oh, just— well, no, that’s not a Tim versus John thing. That’s just— they are evolving in the way they communicate and they operate. So it’s kind of fascinating.

[00:08:27] Stephen Fenech: But from my end, it felt like regular deal. Craig Federici sort of taking control and shepherding it all through, and then Tim topping and tailing it like usual.

WWDC Keynote Structure — Three pillars: AI, Performance, and Trust & Safety

[00:08:39] Trevor Long: And we’ll break this show into two parts, basically. We’ll talk AI and then we’ll talk parental controls and sum up any other thoughts. But the other observation I had And this does get into a little bit of our first topic, but well, a couple observations about the structure/content of the keynote. It was very high level, whereas normally WWDC is, okay, here’s this high-level changes we’re making, like Liquid Glass, but here’s these cool things you can do, like crash detection, or, you know, there’s features, things coming. This, this was not like that. This was, we’re fundamentally doing 3 things and we’re going to talk about these 3 things, and they are performance, trust and safety, and AI, right? And so I felt it was very sparse. I didn’t feel like it had minutiae detail in the whole thing. Hi Joe. Um, um, I really felt like it was, it was a very different keynote, don’t you think?

[00:09:40] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. I didn’t know it. Uh, I, I gotta say, and I think I was messaging you at the time, like I’m thinking, okay, when— I felt like saying, when does the keynote start? There was that— you could tell that they were— I think they were sort of keeping the powder dry. They knew— I knew the back end of the, of the whole keynote was going to be where the gold is. Yeah. So I think usually where we get really detailed iOS by iOS detail, like new features they kind of just lump them all into one. Did you find that though? Because usually they go, okay, iOS 27, boom, and then they go iPadOS, boom, watchOS.

[00:10:16] Trevor Long: Did it?

[00:10:17] Stephen Fenech: There was no, like, what, no similar coverage? It was all one lumped into one. And of course a lot of them, I think that was sort of part of what he said at the intro, that the, the, them sort of becoming more alike and merging together a little bit.

[00:10:30] Trevor Long: So the features would have felt like across the board, like, and let’s just rewind quickly. Our listeners know this, right? But 2 years ago they announced fundamental changes with artificial intelligence, Apple Intelligence, and some amazing things which a year ago had not been delivered. Uh, a lot of cool things had been, but a lot of cool stuff hadn’t. And so last year was a mea culpa. They, they wheeled out some executives to apologize and talk about how they, they wanted to get it right, yada yada yada. Yeah. And so it feels like last 12 months ago they went, you’re going to make me stand up here and tell people we didn’t deliver. Here’s what’s happening. All your cool ideas for the next operating system, put them all on the back burner. And you’re going to work on 3 things. You’re going to make it better, faster, more nimble.

[00:11:12] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that was— that’s interesting too. Yeah, good point that they did the focus on how— and I, and I thought, remember, I think I sent you a message saying, oh, faster search, a breakthrough. Like, I was sort of being a bit, being a bit sarcastic. Oh wow, is that, is that all you got to tell us?

[00:11:26] Trevor Long: But it genuinely felt like they went, you know what, I know you’ve got a million ideas and we love all your ideas, but we are not going to do that. We are going to focus on delivering the thing we promised Um, and I guess the parental controls is a new feature, but it’s also politically important, and, and performance. So anyone that couldn’t contribute to the AI stuff was put on performance, and we’ll, we’ll talk about that later.

[00:11:48] Stephen Fenech: But yeah, let’s talk about that. So I think this was a case where Apple had to put the wood behind the arrow, had to be Apple Intelligence Siri. Everything was riding on that. And you’re right, I reckon it probably cost— it probably cost the development of the new features of the individual iOSes. So This, I reckon you could, you could easily call this iOS 26.7. You know, it’s— we’re up to 0.5 or whatever it is now, but yeah, it’s to fully go up to the next one. Of course they have to because it’s that time of year. But yeah, you’re right, I think it was, it was noticeably underloaded, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a lot of stuff that is going to be there that they just never had time to talk about as well.

[00:12:27] Trevor Long: And here’s, here’s the, the thing that made me realize that what they’d done here was serious, was the way they presented the Apple intelligence features, unlike any, any other of the, shall we call them, keynotes in the film era. So post-COVID, because remember before COVID they, they didn’t film stuff, they just presented on stage. Yeah, yeah. So this was basically a rewind to that time but in a film sense. And I’m— what I mean by this is when they go, oh, here’s something Siri can do they showed it in real time. Two camera shoot, one camera over the, over the phone, one camera on the person. Clearly a single shot, real-time execution of a demonstration, right? Because it felt real time because you were like, ah, come on, let’s go.

[00:13:17] Stephen Fenech: Because it took— it actually took a few seconds. I’m thinking, okay, come on, here we go.

[00:13:21] Trevor Long: It was real time. And so yeah, what that did was plant the seed, if you didn’t already have it. He’s planted the seed that said What we’re announcing is real. Like, it’s their way of saying, I know it’s live.

[00:13:35] Stephen Fenech: It’s like, it’s like when they show you a new game, they go, this is actual gameplay, it’s not— this isn’t created. So the actual gameplay going on.

[00:13:42] Trevor Long: Yeah, because think about it this way, right? They could have done today’s presentation and listed all the exact same things and not done those demos, just showed screenshots. Yeah. And we would have been sitting here now going, is any of that going to work?

[00:13:54] Stephen Fenech: They did that 2 years ago.

[00:13:55] Trevor Long: They did this 2 years ago.

[00:13:56] Stephen Fenech: The other day, to show the rubber, you can watch back the 2024 keynote.

[00:14:02] Trevor Long: The last 40 minutes was all about Apple Intelligence, right? And I’m sitting there going, this is, this is the same, you know, like it’s, it’s personal context and all this kind of stuff. But I want to— they demonstrated it.

[00:14:16] Stephen Fenech: Oh no, I agree, I agree. I felt it was very interesting though when I finally got time to say— Frederic, you said right, Now let’s talk about Apple Intelligence. And I found it interesting, I even, I even went back and typed it out word for word what he said. What is that? So I reckon he kind of defended the delay here because here’s what he said: AI is incredibly powerful technology with the potential to shape society in profound ways and with proper care unlock meaningful benefits for people everywhere. Still, Some appear to be racing forward, seemingly pursuing AI for the sake of AI, without clear regard for the people, all of us, that is, that it is ultimately meant to serve. That to me read, we took our time on purpose rather than racing ahead like everyone else tried to do. Yeah, that to me, I think it defended the, the time it took to come to, come to the surface.

Apple Intelligence & Siri AI — Google Gemini partnership and on-device processing

[00:15:16] Trevor Long: And I may be going off too early, but I sit and now believe that what we witnessed today were genuine features happen to be powered by AI. So genuine use cases, genuine real people things that don’t feel like AI, they just feel smart. And by bundle— and look, Mark Gurman’s the, the rumor king, and 95% of what he said has come true, right? Yeah, um, to, to, you know, to be very clear, we, we knew all this was coming, but to see it demonstrated was critical. And the first thing I want to talk about is the Google relationship, because they were also very strong on that. And even in the, um, post-keynote discussion that, that I went to, very strong on saying, look, we did a deal with Google, and we know that that’s been widely reported, but let me be clear—

[00:16:11] Stephen Fenech: and I am paraphrasing, sorry, hang on, is that what they said afterwards, the discussion? Because during the keynote, I don’t think the word Google was mentioned during the keynote.

[00:16:19] Trevor Long: I feel like I can’t recall Google ever getting one mention.

[00:16:24] Stephen Fenech: They sort of said partners. I think they mentioned partners, but maybe, maybe I’ll go back and look at— they normally have a transcript. I, I’m thinking they didn’t really make it a big deal that they did, that Google was the foundation here. I’ll go back and watch it again. I’m pretty sure it was— they, they didn’t say—

[00:16:42] Trevor Long: yeah, so he did, he did. I’ve just done my I found my transcript. This year we embarked on a deep collaboration with Google leveraging technologies behind their Gemini family of models. Now, that’s once the word Google was mentioned, once in the whole keynote, right?

[00:16:57] Stephen Fenech: There you go.

[00:16:58] Trevor Long: But, but what’s really important is, and this is the, this is the discerning point of this thing, is what they’ve bought from Google is not the ability to use Gemini on a phone like Samsung’s done. It’s not the ability for them to rebadge Gemini as Siri. What they bought was everything underneath Gemini, which is all the large language models and the mechanisms that makes Gemini smart. And they’ve bought them and they’ve put them onto iPhones. It’s within the iOS. Yep. Okay. And then there’s a— there’s— so there’s essentially 4 of them. There’s one that’s on your phone, and then there’s 3 that are in the cloud, the private cloud compute., and, you know, your phone decides which, which it needs and how it does it. And, you know, on-device processing is critical, private cloud compute is critical, and part of that private cloud compute has expanded. It is not just Apple’s hardware they’ve built with, you know, the A19 processor or whatever it was. There are parts of the private cloud compute which are NVIDIA, um, powered on Google Cloud. Oh, but still private, still within the private cloud compute. So because they’re running Apple software, the— there is no way for Apple or anyone else to read what’s happening on them. So it’s just deleting information.

[00:18:18] Stephen Fenech: Just so people know too, the private cloud compute and privacy— we’ll talk about like critical importance of privacy. So the private cloud compute is when your device needs to go off device to, to fulfill some search or request And then off the— in that, in that space, there is a— there’s no data that’s stored. Your data is not used to learn for anyone else.

[00:18:45] Trevor Long: No.

[00:18:46] Stephen Fenech: And it’s all wiped clean. Is that fair?

[00:18:48] Trevor Long: That’s 100% correct. Yep. And that extends to any— I turned your camera off because it’s buffering badly, mate. Okay. That extends to any part of your AI interaction with Siri, even if it uses— at the biggest extent, even if it uses the Google part of the private cloud compute. So that’s, that’s the deal. So what they’ve essentially done is gone, hey, we think your model is great. But the other way it was explained is, if you think about AI as being, you know, the request you make on your device, the language models, and then the knowledge— so what’s on the web and the knowledge that it’s learned it’s not even using Google’s knowledge, it’s using Apple-developed knowledge. Yes. And that’s again really important differentiator. It’s not really Gemini at all.

[00:19:37] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:19:38] Trevor Long: But it does have the smarts and the power of Gemini, so which is why they can do better image generation and, and, and text creation.

[00:19:45] Stephen Fenech: They said that Siri has broad world knowledge.

[00:19:49] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:19:50] Stephen Fenech: To, to get, uh, So you get the latest information from the web on virtually any topic and receive information on even the most detailed questions.

[00:20:01] Trevor Long: Yes. And additionally, uh, pre-existing knowledge that Apple has, has researched or created and built into their, into their model. Um, what I think is most important here, so you’ve got that relationship with Google which underpins it all, um, and then you’ve got this complete rebadging of Siri called Siri AI. Yep. And the ability for Siri to be exactly what they, they asked for 2 years ago, which is understand personal context. Now, I already had a really, really witty question from a mate of mine who texted me and said, if I change phones, does the, the knowledge that it have about me transfer across the new one? And so I was with Bob Borchers this afternoon and one of the other engineers whose name I don’t remember with apologies, but I asked that question and no, it does not. Oh, because, because the, the knowledge that is created about you is never part of, you know, it’s never sent into the cloud to back up or anything like that. It literally lives within your device, the secure enclave, in the same way that your Face ID doesn’t transfer over.

[00:21:10] Stephen Fenech: Yes.

[00:21:11] Trevor Long: So what happens is when you set up a new phone or when you first get iOS 27 The phone begins the process of indexing every bit of content on it. So every photo, every email, every text message, every interaction, everything on the phone gets indexed. And I said to them, I said, you know, you’re going to have a problem in the next 24 hours, 48 hours. There’s going to be a bunch of nerds who download the developer beta and they’ll say it doesn’t work because it doesn’t know anything about me, doesn’t read a text message. Yeah, because it’s going to take— they said normally a day, perhaps 2 days, because it does all this indexing while you sleep and while the phone’s charging. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, right. And there’s no indicator that it doesn’t—

[00:21:53] Stephen Fenech: it gets a lot of its knowledge though from, from your emails and your text messages.

[00:21:57] Trevor Long: Yes, but it’s got to have that personal information as well.

[00:22:00] Stephen Fenech: So that takes— is that the indexing you’re talking about?

[00:22:01] Trevor Long: That’s the indexing. Yeah, everything on your phone. So all the emails in that exist, anything that’s stored on your phone from text messages to emails to whatever it might be are able to be indexed. Um, and that takes time. Now the time isn’t long, but it’s a couple of days. And so basically if you change phones, but within a couple of days of having a new phone, you’ll be fully indexed again. Uh, so yeah, and look, there’s some need for app developers, third-party app developers, to integrate, uh, what they call the App Intents framework and things like this so that they can be indexed. Um, so there’s a bunch of things that need to happen across every app for it to really work, but obviously Apple’s hoping that you’re using, you know, Messages and email that, that, that is indexable. So for example, the Outlook, uh, software on, on iPhone is, uh, app intent enabled. So if you’re using Outlook for your work email, it, it will be part of this search. But I would argue the Gmail app is probably not. But the bottom line is your phone, once it gets iOS 27, will spend time building a database of everything it knows about you, and that knowledge never leaves your phone. Never, ever, ever leaves your phone. The best example of that was, uh, um, one where they go, okay, um, hey Siri, does, uh, can you tell me who, what, who’s bringing what food to this weekend’s, you know, viewing night of a football game, right? And so what it does, it goes and checks the the message thread from that chat group, and yeah, it says, oh, well, Steve’s bringing sausages, Trev’s bringing hot dogs, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then you ask a follow-up question with, with, uh, context remembered. You say, uh, what drinks would go with that? So the critical follow-up there is you don’t need to say what drinks go with that meal, what drinks go with sausages and hot dogs. You just say what drinks go with that. And what happens is if Siri can’t process that answer on device and it goes to the private cloud, The only information that is sent to the private cloud is drink match with hot dogs, drink match with sausages. It doesn’t say Stephen, it doesn’t say Trevor, doesn’t say football. So it only sends the contextual information that are required to give you an answer into that private cloud.

[00:24:14] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, fair enough. I did notice too that they, like, they made the decision to— well, Siri and Apple Intelligence, so they treated them as two different things even though one is sort of feeding the other. One is feeding it. So I thought that was interesting. But the, the, the new features of Siri, like, you know, being able to make the voice more expressive and change the pace of the voice and things like that, that was, that was not, not a bad new feature.

[00:24:41] Trevor Long: Which, by the way, yeah, he’s only available on iPhone 17 Pro, Pro Max. Yeah, right. And I got a verbal list but not a full list, basically. The latest, absolute true latest, like M5, M4 chips. So they talked about the dictation. There’s two levels of dictation with Siri or with Apple Intelligence in phone. Your basic level is on it on all of them, but then there’s this really advanced level, um, on those more modern devices. And that ability to change the pace of Siri and its expression only exists on the advanced devices.

[00:25:16] Stephen Fenech: So also all the, the, the premium features like the writing tools, sort of with the correcting your grammar and punctuation in real time. That’s all advanced. And I’d imagine all the, the new, the next generation’s, uh, features in like all the image, image playground and the image editing.

[00:25:35] Trevor Long: No, I don’t know that to be true because that’s all happening in the cloud primarily. Okay, that’s happening in the private cloud. It’s really only dictation. All I’ve heard verbally from a, from an Apple spokesperson or representative is The dictation and, um, what was the other thing I just said? The dictation and the Siri voice change playground and the voice— okay, cool. Voice changing, uh, on advanced devices. Everything else appears to be backwards compatible to any Apple intelligence device. So iPhone 15 Pro and onwards.

[00:26:06] Stephen Fenech: Well, what stood out for me was, uh, the, the Siri dictation, which we already mentioned.

[00:26:12] Trevor Long: It’s—

[00:26:13] Stephen Fenech: well, now finally you can dig into your emails and, and The demonstration that they gave 2 years ago can now actually happen, which is good news. But in the Apple intelligence side, uh, very impressed with the image editing, you know, the cleanup and the extend the photo, reframing, the spatial reframing. Wow, that was amazing how you could sort of change the, the camera angle after you’ve taken the photo. That was remarkable. Yeah, I mean, again, that’s going to be a late— and a feature for the very latest iPhones, I’d imagine.

[00:26:45] Trevor Long: You think?

[00:26:46] Stephen Fenech: I’d say so.

[00:26:47] Trevor Long: I don’t know that to be true. I mean, that stuff takes a lot of computing to do it. Private cloud compute. That’s the point, is if you need to compute, it should be private cloud compute. You think so? Okay. Whereas dictation is an on-device thing. Think about it, dictation is on device. It happens, has to happen in real time. Siri, the voice of Siri, is on device. So those things require the additional processor, but I don’t think things like the, the image generation, image cleanup, and image reframe is, is particularly interesting.

[00:27:16] Stephen Fenech: I did find interestingly what Apple did, like with the image playground now, how you can do photorealistic, uh, images now. But generated images, they’re going to have a hidden watermark to identify they’ve been generated with AI. Same thing with, uh, not only the— so if you edit, say, say the spatial reframing and all the other things you do to, to an image afterwards, yeah, it’ll say that it was edited with AI, and then the other Image Playground will say it was created with AI. And that’s like a watermark that’s hidden that you can’t get rid of. It’s not like a little thing in the corner you can get rid of. It’s a hidden watermark, which I think is really important to identify the fact that, no, this is an AI photo, just to put it out there and make it— well, make it known.

[00:28:03] Trevor Long: Yeah, I think, I think most AI companies are talking about or doing that kind of thing. What I think is most fascinating about this is that we are genuinely talking about how Apple is delivering on the promises of 2 years ago. It’s legitimately like, it’s day—

[00:28:19] Stephen Fenech: just on that, just on that, let me ask you this. Do you think that Apple has now caught up with everyone else, taken over slightly, or what do you think? Are they sort of now shoulder to shoulder with everyone else? Have they caught everyone, or are they slightly gone and knows.

[00:28:35] Trevor Long: The question here is, who’s everyone else?

[00:28:37] Stephen Fenech: Well, I’m talking, yeah, Galaxy AI. Okay, Gemini.

[00:28:41] Trevor Long: I think this is way better than Galaxy AI, right? Because think about it, in reality, Galaxy AI, um, started with Circle to Search, which is a Google product, which is just visual search. Pretty much every device can do that now. Rewriting letters, emails, text messages, all that kind of stuff, that was already intelligence for some time. But there is, there is no personal context on a Samsung device or any other Android device. No Pixel, no nothing, right? Yeah. There’s no ability to just go, you know, just ask a question that gets resolved across different apps. Samsung will say there is that kind of basis, but there just is—

[00:29:20] Stephen Fenech: I thought there was the context thing. Like if someone suggests— remember we saw the demo at the S26 launch where if someone has a— there’s a— suggests a date in a, in a message, then your calendar comes up underneath. And if someone says, oh, show me your photos from Australia, then your photo album appears.

[00:29:34] Trevor Long: That’s, that’s not— no, that’s not retained context. That’s, that’s context of the current thing. So if someone sends you a text and says, do you want to go see, you know, Empire of the Sun Thursday night at the Horton Pavilion?

[00:29:45] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I do. How do you know?

[00:29:47] Trevor Long: Exactly. Then, yeah, okay, okay. So Galaxy can do that. But what Galaxy can’t do is if I say Hey Google, hey Bixby, hey whatever, um, what time’s Empire of the Sun playing and, uh, and where can I get tickets? Yeah, yeah, that’s probably a bad example because it will just use the web for that. Yeah, right. Maybe this, maybe this, um, uh, hey Google, hey Galaxy, hey Bixby, um, what’s the, what’s the name of that band Stephen wants me to go and see? You know, like, that, that requires personal context, that, that requires understanding what that message was from Stephen. So in answer to your question, I think they’re ahead. If all this works as discussed and planned and demonstrated, right? Yeah, but that, that’s, that’s head-to-head with, with a device manufacturer, which is of course where you want to put them. But it’s in terms of—

[00:30:33] Stephen Fenech: yeah, I thought that too. I think they’ve, they’ve well and truly caught up here.

[00:30:36] Trevor Long: Yeah, well, in terms of AI generally though, I think, I think this is potentially the best example of AI that we will have in the market. Not the best use of AI, because, mate, I think it’s amazing that you could ask AI to write an app for you and it will code it for you, and you could basically build an app. That’s amazing. I think it’s amazing that you could ask AI to research, um, you know, all the species of whales in the world and generate a table of information that, that helps me understand, you know, how they rank from biggest to smallest. And don’t forget to include a geolocation. And a map that shows them on a map, right? That’s amazing. Like, that’s cool. But in terms of day-to-day use, once people— and this is going to take time— once people realize what they can ask Siri to do, yeah, that’s a game changer.

[00:31:29] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I think— no, I agree. I think it’s going to be— and we’ll all use it differently. Like, you’ll use it different to me, and I’ll use it different to someone else. And I think it’s that— that’s that whole personalization and getting to know you better than, than anyone else through all the stuff on your phone. So yeah, I think, uh, yeah, a welcome, welcomed improvement here, and it’s about time, I’d say.

[00:31:51] Trevor Long: Spot on. It’s, uh, it’s about time. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s lucky that they spent that time last year admitting and acknowledging that this took time, and I think it was the right— no, I, I think what happened was Tim Cook went, right, ‘You got to get this done. I don’t care about new features.’ As I said earlier, ‘I want this done and has to be done.’ I’d say that’s spot on, mate.

[00:32:13] Stephen Fenech: They, they would have said, ‘Right, all hands to the pump. AI— sorry, Siri AI and Apple Intelligence—

[00:32:17] Trevor Long: they’re priority 1 and 1.5.’ You could almost say, wait, yeah, that the successful launch of Siri AI, should it come later this year, is a legacy of Tim Cook. Tim Cook’s legacy in the business, because it could have very, very long-term benefits.

[00:32:33] Stephen Fenech: And also, to get better, right? iOS 26.2 and 0.3 and 4 are going to be massive because maybe all the features they had on the back burner will finally be ready for updates. They won’t hold it over till 28. They’ll hopefully pump it out throughout the year.

[00:32:50] Trevor Long: No, I think, I think they, they tweak, they work, they, they nut away. And next year, in one year from now, they’ve got the ability to say we’ve got the best AI on a device and here’s a bunch of cool new things you’re going to do on your Apple Watch. And they’ll go back to the kind of ways of old in terms of presenting new products to, to us here at WWDC. But certainly a vastly different kind of approach and a real focus— that required focus on their, their AI direction. Yeah, yeah. You can, um, you can read about Apple’s AI innovations at techguide.com.au and eftm.com.

[00:33:28] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech. With Trevor Long and Stephen Fenech.

[00:33:35] Trevor Long: And we do it all with great support of Netgear, netgear.com.au, for all your home networking needs. Uh, Wi-Fi is fundamental to your home. It’s as important as water and electricity, folks, and you know that. So don’t settle for crappy Wi-Fi in any corner of your home. Every part of your home should have the best Wi-Fi available to you based on the internet that you are subscribed to. So if you’re paying for 500 megabyte— megabit internet, then you should be getting 500 megabit speeds everywhere in the home. And Netgear can offer you that through their amazing mesh Wi-Fi systems, the Orbi being the crowning jewel of them all. If you don’t understand and you want to see more, Nicky’s got some great demonstrations of this on their website and a great, uh, helpful tool that’ll help you decide which product, because there’s many different Orbi products to suit different budgets, different homes, different use cases., and all of those are outlined and detailed at netgear.com.au. All we ask is that you support the companies that support us. When you’re in the market for Wi-Fi, give Netgear a shout and see if they are suitable for you.

[00:34:35] VOICE OVER: Everything about tech you never wanted to know, this is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

[00:34:43] Stephen Fenech: And the podcast is also brought to you by our great friends at Arlo. With Arlo, if you haven’t set up your security, they have a great range of products from doorbells and outdoor cameras, floodlights, uh, the pan and tilt cameras as well. With Arlo cameras gives you that peace of mind. It feels like you’re always home. You can keep an eye on things. You’ll know when that package arrives. You’ll know if someone’s ringing your doorbell. You’ll know when your loved ones have, have arrived home again. They, they’ve got all the great— these great cameras that provide great resolution but also allows you through their security plans to be able to keep a track of all of that footage for up to 30 days in the cloud and also set up smart notifications as well.. So you’re not getting nuisance notifications. You are getting the notifications that matter when people, packages, vehicles, animals are in front of these cameras and giving you those alerts when you’re not there or when you’re home. It does, uh, really help you with that peace of mind. And as I said, it feels like you’re always home. You can see everything that’s happening, whether you’re at— down at the shops or in another country. You can see exactly what’s happening. I did that when we were over in London. Was able to see everything was going on. I even answered the doorbell a couple of times. So check it out if you haven’t started your security journey. Let Arlo guide you. They got plenty of great products. Check it out at arlo.com.

[00:36:02] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

Platform Performance — Liquid Glass, faster apps, and iOS legacy support

[00:36:05] Trevor Long: Now I want to spend a little bit of time talking parental controls, but before we do that, let’s just touch on the, the other part of this, which was the platform design and architecture and performance, which was very simple. But there’s a couple things Liquid Glass, brand new, very exciting last year. This year, basically, they’ve introduced a slider that says you don’t want it or you do want it. That’s the way I interpret it.

[00:36:26] Stephen Fenech: Degree of glass.

[00:36:27] Trevor Long: Yeah, yes, it’s, it’s not quite the opacity, but it’s, it’s the level to which you want to buy into the Liquid Glass evolution. And look, I think that’s a smart thing because some people just don’t love the way it looks. Others think it is spectacular and allows you to just kind of—

[00:36:42] Stephen Fenech: I’ve got new Pretty good.

[00:36:44] Trevor Long: Yeah, same. I don’t really have an issue with it. Um, the— we mentioned a little bit about the, the performance, but essentially they’ve spent time making sure that— well, the way they describe it is, and this makes sense, right? And goes to our point earlier of take everyone off everything and just focus on these, these basic principles.

[00:37:00] Stephen Fenech: Make it fast.

[00:37:01] Trevor Long: Find bloated code, um, find everything within the iOS that is unnecessary and get rid of it so that it all happens faster. They say apps will launch up to 30% faster They say— and this is an interesting one, a lot of people hate this, but it never used to be this way— you take a photo, you go to the photo library, and the photo’s not there. They say it will be— it will appear in there 70% faster. Yeah.

[00:37:25] Stephen Fenech: And then AirDrop. Yeah, 80% faster. That’s a—

[00:37:28] Trevor Long: that’s—

[00:37:29] Stephen Fenech: it was fast already, it’s going to be even faster.

[00:37:31] Trevor Long: That’s awesome. Yeah. What I want is AirDrop to be 100% reliable.

[00:37:35] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I found it to be all right when I—

[00:37:37] Trevor Long: whenever I’m sending photos and documents, stuff from my iPhone, share via AirDrop on device that I’m sitting next to doesn’t appear on the list is frustrating.

[00:37:48] Stephen Fenech: I find that too when, like, if I want to send Jo— if I’m sending her a Face— uh, airdrop, I find that if you turn off, uh, contacts and allow everyone— go from contacts to everyone— then it appears. I don’t know why, even though I am in her contacts.

[00:38:06] Trevor Long: I, I know that. I was going to say, mate, I don’t want to break to you, that’s because you’re not in her contacts.

[00:38:09] Stephen Fenech: No, I’m there, mate, I’m there.

[00:38:11] Trevor Long: Uh, the other thing that is worth noting here is that because this is essentially iOS 26.7 or whatever we’ve agreed, yeah, this— the legacy support for this is the best they’ve ever had. It goes back to the iPhone 11. So 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, and we can assume the 18, or with the name, that’s 8 years, yeah, worth of devices that will support this latest.

[00:38:35] Stephen Fenech: Like you, like you just alluded then, it, it mustn’t be a massive, uh, upgrade in terms of the the compute required for it. So that’s why they’ve kept it.

[00:38:45] Trevor Long: Just think about it, actually. The stuff that we’ve just described is tidying up, right? So that makes sense that it would go back to the same place. The stuff that we just spent 20 minutes talking about, Siri, only works on iPhone 15 Pro and onwards. So that doesn’t— any changes to the, to the iOS for iOS for iPhone 11 doesn’t involve that. And so yeah, that’s basically— it makes sense that it would be this far legacy, which is fantastic. And there is a bit of connectivity smarts as well, which I think is really cool. So basically it’s, it’s smarter for it switching between Wi-Fi and cellular so that you avoid those kind of dead zones that happen when your phone’s going, no, no, I’ll connect to the Wi-Fi now, I want to be on the 4G. Yes, that’s cool.

[00:39:27] Stephen Fenech: It happens outside my house waiting for my Uber to arrive. It’s still on the home Wi-Fi, just clinging on. I’m thinking, I don’t want that, I have to turn Wi-Fi off.

[00:39:35] Trevor Long: Yeah, now they’ve made that a lot smarter, which is sensational.

[00:39:41] Stephen Fenech: I really like— did you see the, um, the maps, the fly— the flyover mode?

[00:39:45] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:39:46] Stephen Fenech: Wow, it looks like what you’re watching a movie. That’s impressive. That’s great.

[00:39:50] Trevor Long: Pretty impressive. So the other thing that, that they focused on— so their first pillar, let’s call it AI. Second pillar was the performance we just talked about and the basic platform changes. But the third pillar was trust and safety. Now this is fascinating because it was presented as— it felt like it was presented as something new, but I sat there going, what are you talking about? This is parental controls. I’ve had these for— I wish I knew when I first set it up. I wish I had a date for that, but yeah, it’s got to be, it’s got to be 7 or 8 years my kids have been in a family shared group, uh, with me having access to their um, their approvals. My kids can’t download an app unless I approve it. Even today, if Victoria wants a new app on her Mac or iPhone, she’s got to ask for approval, and that mom or dad have got to say yes.

Trust & Safety — Parental controls, Ask to Browse, and screen time improvements

[00:40:39] Stephen Fenech: So let me ask you then, you’re in a great position to, to see this. So what percentage of features unveiled today are brand, brand new? Like, are these just better old features that they’ve improved, or are they brand new ones that are that have come up? I know they’ve created different time allowances and the different categories for apps and stuff like that, but what else is new?

[00:41:00] Trevor Long: My— I, I’ve been saying today broadly, I think that most of what they— if you look at every word they spoke about parental controls, I think probably 80% of it was existing knowledge.

[00:41:11] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:41:11] Trevor Long: And Stephen, you know this better than anyone, when you receive a press release from Apple about the new iPad, right? Yeah. And it goes, here’s what it can do, it can, it can process images this way, mate. Last year’s version could do that. But they don’t, they don’t tell you that it’s not new, they just tell you what it can do. That’s right. So what they do is they say, here’s our trust and safety framework for protecting kids, and they list it all. And unless you’ve used it or got kids, you don’t know that this is not all new. This is all very similar. But, but I’m, I’m supportive of this because what it does is it makes more people talk about it, understand it, and hear about it. But what’s new What’s primarily new is Ask to Browse. So your 9-year-old will have a very strict set of websites that they can visit. If they want to visit another one, like if one of their mates sends them a text with a link, or they just type in the address, it just blocks the website and says you got to ask permission to view this. And then it sends that in a text message to the parents, and the parents go yes or no.

[00:42:12] Stephen Fenech: So your, your cheeky mate from school can’t send you a link to a porn site, but you’ll get busted. It’ll, it’ll block it. Is that what you’re saying? Correct.

[00:42:20] Trevor Long: Yeah. And if your cheeky mate from school gives your iCloud— so let’s say you’ve got an iPad with Wi-Fi only, you don’t have a cellular account, you don’t have a mobile number, so you’ve got an iCloud email address— and your mate Jimmy tells that thug Billy your iCloud account and he sends you a message, that message, it’ll say, you know, billythethug@icloud.com. Yeah, um, but the message itself, whether it’s a written text, whatever it is, does not appear. You have to ask permission to add that person as a contact. Yeah, now that’s fantastic.

[00:42:54] Stephen Fenech: That’s fair. Yeah, that’s great. Of course, sort of stop a lot of the bullying and everything going on.

[00:42:59] Trevor Long: Yes, and the parent can preview that message before they approve it. The kid can provide context by saying, oh, this is the bully, I’m happy to add him. You know, they can— the kid can say that if they want. But the other part of this, and this is again desperately underplayed is they can detect when a child is receiving or likely sending an image that is nudity, violence, or gore.

[00:43:23] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah.

[00:43:23] Trevor Long: And block that image until it’s approved.

[00:43:26] Stephen Fenech: And does the parent then get a little heads up or no? Remember, we— they, they said they know that this, this thing’s happening.

[00:43:33] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:43:33] Stephen Fenech: So basically trying to send a photo, or they’re gonna— someone’s trying to send it to them.

[00:43:37] Trevor Long: If they’re— if they really want to send the photo, they have to get the parents’ permission. Right, you can assume that might happen if, let’s say, okay, a real world example, um, you’ve got a, you’ve got a teenage daughter who is at the beach with her friends and she wants to send a selfie at the beach to one of her other friends. Now let’s say Apple’s AI looks at that photo and goes, gee whiz, not wearing a lot of clothes, you know, she’s in a bikini. It may block that. Now I’m not saying that’s exactly what will happen Okay, but maybe the bikini is skin color and so thinks she’s nude. Who knows, right? I don’t know, I’m trying to think of an example where it’s, it’s, it’s okay.

[00:44:13] Stephen Fenech: I think it’s going to be very conservative. It’s going to err on the side of—

[00:44:17] Trevor Long: you would hope so, right? Yeah, yeah. And you know, the girl might say, hey, Mum, can you approve this? I’m just sending a photo to, to Jill. You know, like, it’s cool. Yeah. Um, but, but what it does, it creates those conversations with—

[00:44:28] Stephen Fenech: absolutely—

[00:44:28] Trevor Long: with, with parents and kids.

[00:44:29] Stephen Fenech: And look, it’s come along at the right time with the social media ban and all these discussions going on about, you know, what’s appropriate and what’s not. It’s, uh interesting how it is working. The timing of it couldn’t have been better. And I think what— even though a lot of these features are brand new, I think what it emphasized though, it just seems that Apple have nailed it in their ecosystem. It’s a— it’s— I think it’s a bit easier. Of all the parental controls available, theirs appears to be— and I’ve never had to use it, thank God, because my kids are older now— but it appears to me to be easier to manage.

[00:45:01] Trevor Long: Is it? Would that be right? Question. There’s no question. Apple has the gold standard for parental controls. And that starts, by the way, you got to remember, that starts with the Apple Watch, uh, and the now called Apple Watch for Kids, which is also now available through Telstra, which is not available 5 years, 6 years ago when this launched. So you can buy an Apple Watch for your kids, you can set it up on your phone as their device and limit certain things like who they can contact. And you know, but you can track them with Find My and all that kind of stuff. And so for $20 a month on a Telstra plan You can now add a Telstra SIM plan to that, to that watch, which is awesome. And then they, then they progress. So they’re part of your family, then they progress to a phone or a tablet, and they progress. So they keep getting devices and you keep upgrading their, their access to things. And as they age, they automatically get their privileges. But as a parent, you can manipulate that and say, no, no, I’m— you know what, this kid is 14 and I’m okay with him seeing this, that, and the other, right? So you can determine their age group.

[00:45:59] Stephen Fenech: So is Jacko now free and clear, mate, or what? Is he on his own now, or what’s the go?

[00:46:02] Trevor Long: So, so it’s fascinating, right? Jackson is now absolutely an adult, so has no restrictions on his access. He’s still absolutely part of our family, right? So in our Apple family, he’s still listed there because the smart thing there is anything I buy, he owns, you know, because you’re in the family, right?

[00:46:21] Stephen Fenech: Of course.

[00:46:22] Trevor Long: Yeah, the family, you know, your family. Um, and so yeah, he, he’d be mad to leave because he’ll have to subscribe to Apple Music and he’ll have to buy his own apps and all that.

[00:46:32] Stephen Fenech: Of course, mate, he wants the old man to pay for that stuff.

[00:46:35] Trevor Long: Yeah, he’s not an idiot. Um, and so the other thing that’s really interesting is the addition of these— and you, you, uh, alluded to it— these kind of time frame settings. So you’ve always been able to limit when your kids see apps, but what we can do now is you can say, listen, um, every Friday afternoon from 4 till 6, carte blanche. That’s, you know, end of week, you’ve earned it, right? And everything’s available for unlimited time. You could say, listen, on Saturday mornings between 9 AM and 11 AM, no one gets to use any apps except phone and messages because we’re all meant to be watching, you know, your sister play netball, right? So we should be present as a family.

[00:47:17] Stephen Fenech: You’ve got chores to do, you’ve got your jobs to do.

[00:47:20] Trevor Long: Yeah, but you can allocate the— you can allocate apps across groups as well. You can say, so these apps are social, these apps are learning, these apps are— and you can enable time limits based on those groups. Which is really, really cool. But the other thing is that the— in the, um, in the basic settings of Screen Time, there are now really simple, uh, buttons— excuse me— for pause all or free time, do your best. So there’s a button that says pause device use and you just go boom and it just stops the device from being used, or allow unlimited use.

[00:47:54] Stephen Fenech: It’s got the kill switch on it.

[00:47:55] Trevor Long: Yeah, so it’s like your kids having a sick day from school, click unlimited use because all the rules are out of play.

[00:48:03] Stephen Fenech: But I like how they’ve got the allowed— they’ve got categories now. So you can say, okay, gaming, you can play that on weekends, but after between 4 and 6, you’ve got to be doing your homework, can’t access them, can’t access social media, you know. And, and the times of the day too. So like if they’re at school and they need to— you also, as though they don’t let them use their phones at school much, but if there’s education apps, I suppose they could— you can allow them to use them all the time. Social media, some of the time.

[00:48:31] Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah, it’s very smart stuff. It is. It plays— and look, the thing here is, my concern with this is this is not new. Parents have had access to these things for 7+ years. If you— if parents haven’t been using them, why are they going to start using them now? This is the let parents be parents question. It should be the case that if parents want to be parents and they want to use screen time, that they, they should be allowed to activate that for their kids. But if you choose to not implement these, these, these things, if you choose to give your kid an iPad with your iCloud account on it, you’re an idiot. And, and look, in one of the— I went to a demo with the team that work on this today, and They go, here’s little Timothy’s just given a brand new iPad. And you know, you’ve got the hello screen, you swipe up, you click to set up, right? And, and the, the example was you click, click, click, and then it goes, are we setting this up for an adult, a child, a teen, or a child, right? You click child, and then from there on you need a parent to do the thing. Just that very demonstration proved that if a parent hands a kid an iPad and says set it up, what chance that they’re going to click child and not adult. Yeah, right, of course. So a parent really needs to be engaged from the absolute unboxing, and if you’re not, then you are relinquishing control of your child’s digital experience. And I think that’s the challenge that we’ve got.

[00:49:55] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but I think the good news is though, like, I know there’d be a lot of parents and kids— most kids, you’d agree, would all want iPhones, and not many are sort of hassling their parents for Androids.

[00:50:05] Trevor Long: For Androids, no.

[00:50:06] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, so if they’re— if you’re in if they’re in the ecosystem, the parents would naturally have an iPhone as well. At least that peace— it’ll give them some sort of peace of mind knowing that it’s not too hard to set up and manage. Yeah, then that’s what’s deterred parents, I think, from getting involved because they think, oh, it’s all too hard.

[00:50:23] Trevor Long: Yeah, and look, I think the timing of this does relate definitely to the wider conversation politically around restrictions and apps and all this kind of stuff. It’s Apple showing that they’re willing to play a strong role in you know, controlling what happens and where. They’re putting a lot of emphasis on developers putting the right, um, guardrails around what age groups should be and shouldn’t be using their apps and all that kind of stuff, right? They’re doing all the right things because the conversation is happening globally around the same things that happen in Australia, and that is restricting things in a great way. And you know, that doesn’t really, uh, that doesn’t really work well for Apple.

[00:50:59] Stephen Fenech: So yeah, I think it’s a shame the government didn’t see all the control the parents have. Like with all this stuff. Well, they don’t get it, all the controls that are available, right?

[00:51:09] Trevor Long: Yeah, that’s exactly the problem is, yeah, government didn’t know that these controls exist, and the government should have said, these controls exist, folks, what are you doing?

[00:51:17] Stephen Fenech: Use them. Yeah, yes, yeah, let parents be parents.

[00:51:21] Trevor Long: Hey, that is our motto. So look, a bunch of great changes. I think if you’re a parent of a young child anywhere between 0 and kind of 12, 13, this is the kind of space you absolutely need to be in if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and plan to be there with your kids as well. And I think it’s, it’s credit to Apple, the work they’ve put into this. It is beyond anything anyone else is doing. And I know that Google have screen time and parental controls built in, excellent, but I don’t think they’re anywhere near the granular nature that Apple’s able to deliver through, through iOS. And well done to them on that. Yeah, good stuff. Um, that’s pretty much everything from Dub Dub. And, um, you know, the details are all at our websites, techguy.com.au and eftm.com. I know it’s a lot of Apple talk, sorry Bruce, but, um, it is, it is what it is.

[00:52:04] Stephen Fenech: It is their day, isn’t it? WWDC is their day, mate.

[00:52:07] Trevor Long: You know what, uh, Samsung will have their day. We, we expect an Unpacked event to be announced in, in June, in July sometime. Um, no, no confirmation of that yet, but we expect it to be announced somewhere in July. Uh, and of course we will, we’ll dominate a show with, uh, with those announcements. No doubt, Stephen.

[00:52:24] Stephen Fenech: Of course.

[00:52:26] Trevor Long: All right, who are the Rabbitohs playing this weekend?

[00:52:28] Stephen Fenech: Uh, Broncos on Thursday night, so, uh, I’ll be out there. Yeah, although all the, all the State of Origin players are not playing for Brisbane, so we couldn’t have picked a better time to play them.

[00:52:40] Trevor Long: Great news. Yes, you know, the Queenslanders are very, very good players.

[00:52:46] Stephen Fenech: That’s it, mate, that’s it. Well, Payne has played for New South Wales anyway, he plays for Brisbane and Tony Staggs plays for New South Wales as well, so two Broncos won’t be there. They’re New South Wales players.

[00:52:56] Trevor Long: All right, well, they’re ready.

[00:52:57] Stephen Fenech: They’re not the best, just so you know, in their representative colors.

[00:53:00] Trevor Long: Um, all right, mate, uh, thank you. And, uh, yeah, let’s do it all again next week.

[00:53:07] Stephen Fenech: We’ll be back in person in the studio next week.

[00:53:10] VOICE OVER: Bring it on! This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long and Stephen Fenech.

Podcast: Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars

Episode: 123 – Polestar Boss on sales and the future

Date: 7 June 2026

Hosts: Trevor Long & Stephen Fenech

Guest: Scott Maynard, Managing Director, Polestar Australia

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Scott Maynard (Polestar Australia) — Polestar model range, sales growth and future plans

[00:00:01] Trevor Long: This is Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars with Trevor Long and Steven Fenech. Thanks to NRMA Insurance and Uniden. Great to have your company. Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars and NRMA Insurance helping Australians protect what matters most for 100 years and many more to come. And all we ask is that you give them a chance. If when your renewal comes up for your insurance, get a quote, and hopefully there’s a better deal out there for you. Frankly, you should be doing that regardless.

[00:00:27] Stephen Fenech: Should be doing that.

[00:00:27] Trevor Long: But you need to make sure NRMA Insurance is one of the people you call to get that quote. And you Uniden Smart Dash Cams. If you’ve got a car, you should have a dash cam. You should have a record of what happens around you because it’s peace of mind, not just for the silly things that you want to tell your wife happened, but if something unfortunate happens and you’ve got a record of it then. So the ultimate peace of mind, Steven, with a Uniden Smart Dash Cam. Good to see you, mate.

[00:00:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, great to be here. Big busy show today.

[00:00:52] Trevor Long: Of course, we don’t muck around.

[00:00:53] Stephen Fenech: We talk to a lot of people on this show, very important people as well.

[00:00:56] Trevor Long: Very important people, and you are important to us. So if you have a question about electric cars and you’re sitting on your big screen TV watching us on YouTube, or you’re going for a walk listening on Spotify, doesn’t matter. Send us a text message, 0477 657 657. Send us a text about your electric car questions, your journey, or your experience. We’d love to talk to you, as we do with hundreds of people on the show. But first, Steven, this week the managing director of Polestar Australia is joining us on the line, Scott Maynard. Welcome to the show, my friend.

[00:01:25] Scott Maynard: Good morning, guys. Thank you for having me on, mate.

[00:01:28] Trevor Long: Absolute pleasure. Um, Polestar is a brand we’ve had a little bit to do with. We’ve, we’ve driven, I think, at least 2 of your models, maybe 3. 3. And just, we get a lot of very positive feedback about the Polestar brand. People love that they’ve bought a Polestar. Is it an overwhelmingly positive experience compared to the many years of automotive experience you have in your, in your experience?

[00:01:52] Scott Maynard: Yeah, I have been around for a little while and been fortunate to work for a couple of brands. This is a positive experience. It’s really lovely to work inside a brand where everyone in the brand working for the brand is very passionate about not just the cars, but the cause that it represents as well. The position that Polestar takes on sustainability, its positioning as a performance luxury brand. It’s, it’s very serious business inside Polestar, and I really enjoy it.

[00:02:17] Stephen Fenech: I’ve got to tell you a little story, Scott. When I first drove my first Polestar, I was lucky enough. I don’t know why, but I had the car a couple of months before it actually came out officially.

[00:02:28] Trevor Long: They don’t know why. I had— it was an accident.

[00:02:30] Stephen Fenech: I had people stopping me in the middle of the road, literally like stop the car. I want it. What is this car? Yeah, that’s it. That was the interest in it. And it just looked so different and stood out. So that’s obviously an advantage for the brand if you can have that kind of appeal.

[00:02:49] Scott Maynard: Our styling is quite minimalistic and it doesn’t scream Polestar. I still have that today. I drive a Polestar 3 and on occasions I’ll walk back to my car to find 2 or 3 curious onlookers staring at it and they say the same thing. What is that exactly? Well, it’s a Polestar. They’re understated and I think that goes over really, really nicely.

[00:03:07] Trevor Long: For people listening who are at the start of their electric car journey, and we should acknowledge there’s plenty of people listening who either own a Polestar, have driven a Polestar, maybe test drove a Polestar and bought something else, doesn’t matter. You may be familiar with it, but for people that are— because we do have a lot of people joining us that are new to the concept of electric car because for all the reasons that we’ll talk about soon, it’s become a really hot topic. Talk me through the model range because it’s actually, with greatest respect, it’s a touch confusing because your 2 into your 3 becomes an SUV, then you go into kind of sports car stuff. Like it’s The numbering. I don’t know that the numbering works for me, but talk us through the range and how you position the range.

[00:03:44] Scott Maynard: Let me make it really easy for you. It’s very, very simple. The cars are numbered quite simply in the order that they came out and were released. So.

[00:03:53] Trevor Long: Well, that makes sense. That’s logical.

[00:03:55] Scott Maynard: Yeah, but there’s a— stick with me. There’s a twist at the end.

[00:03:58] Trevor Long: Okay.

[00:03:59] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:04:00] Scott Maynard: So we— yep. So we started the whole thing with Polestar 2, which has been a really fantastic car, and it’s had some really great updates. We switched that car from front-wheel drive to rear-wheel drive partway through its lifecycle and did it successfully as well. So Polestar 2 is a smaller car. It’s, it’s like a coupe, really practical, and has served us well. We, we backed that up with the Polestar 3. Polestar 3 tops the range as a luxury SUV. It’s the largest car, and that runs single motor or dual motor models, really spacious, really roomy, and its styling is fantastic. Shortly after 3, we launched Polestar 4. Polestar 4 is also similar in size to Polestar 3, but it’s a lower-slung coupe-style car. That’s the car that is famous for not having a rear window. Yep. Yeah, no rear window.

[00:04:58] Stephen Fenech: We drove that. Scott, sorry to interrupt, Scott. We drove that and loved it. The only thing we picked up on, you can’t give a thank you wave in the car, mate.

[00:05:11] Scott Maynard: No.

[00:05:11] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:05:12] Scott Maynard: No, I don’t know.

[00:05:13] Trevor Long: You gotta wind down your window and give a wave.

[00:05:16] Scott Maynard: You wind down the window and give a wave, or you just do the hazard lights, a quick blink, just to let people know that you’re grateful. It does. Yeah, it does block that right out. But the camera system and the screamer inside the high definition, yeah, it works really, really well. So we’ve got that. That’s selling well. That’s the The hottest selling product we have right now. Yeah, we’re selling a lot of the Polestar 4 product.

[00:05:44] Trevor Long: Which, for perspective, is an $80,000-$90,000 car, right?

[00:05:48] Scott Maynard: It is, yeah. So most of the range sneaks under the luxury car tax threshold. There is a super high performance dual motor car that pops above that, and we sell a few of those as well. But it’s a great, great value package. Just recently we put on sale the sports car. It’s a grand tourer, it’s a 4-door coupe, it’s Polestar 5. And we’ve been doing some launch events with Polestar 5 around the country. We flew a left-hand drive pre-production car to Australia. We had that on our stand at the Melbourne International Motor Show just a little while ago. And we’ve recently been running that car around Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane, and now back Kiri.

[00:06:34] Stephen Fenech: What’s the reception been like?

[00:06:37] Scott Maynard: It’s been great. It’s been a really, really pleasing reaction to Polestar 5. It’s not a cheap car. It’s a $200,000 sports car, but it really is taking it up to supercar rivals in terms of its performance, its fit and finish, its polish, its extraordinary styling. And so we’ve been really excited to see the public reaction to Polestar 5. We will get our first cars here a little bit later in the year, in the second half. And we’re starting to take some orders on it now, which is really pleasing. And so that sits at the top of our range. We’re really excited about that.

[00:07:12] Stephen Fenech: So Scott, I take it that the other models will still be available. So the 3, the 4, and the 5. So there’s a choice for customers, you’re not— So even though the numbers are going up, they’re not being— they’re still available. It’s not like an iPhone where the 16 is long gone and outdoes the other one.

[00:07:30] Scott Maynard: No, no. All the models are still on sale. Okay. There’ll be some enhancements and changes and all the sorts of things that car companies do will continue to happen in the future. And then off into the future, we’ll see some changes to Polestar 2 next year. And then shortly after that, we’ll see a new SUV and we’ll be calling that Polestar 7. We skipped to 7 because there is a 2-door coupe badge Polestar 6, which is still on the drawing board. We’re not going to release that just yet. We’re holding that off.

[00:08:00] Trevor Long: Wow, you’re going to skip a number.

[00:08:01] Stephen Fenech: It’s like Windows going to 10 from 8.

[00:08:05] Trevor Long: Skipping numbers, but that’s completely fine. Let’s talk numbers. We’ve obviously reported over the last few months some pretty extraordinary sales figures for the industry, record EV penetration through the sales. I’m assuming that’s, that’s been part of the Polestar story as well. My question for today is, is it still happening? Because, or was it a 2-month bubble? Because obviously fuel prices are receding back to where they were, but I assume that people have gone, I now know how volatile fuel prices can be, I’m getting out.

[00:08:37] Scott Maynard: Yes, yeah, you’ve got it exactly right. The customers that we spoke to during that initial, you know, sort of 6-week period were customers that were now aware that Australia only ever holds about 30 days of fuel in reserve, and so any disruption to the supply that replenishes that puts at risk our ability to be able to buy fuel on a day-to-day basis. And so The moment the government sort of released a 4-step plan that had the word ration in it, we saw a run for the door. And that really did create a frenzy of activity right across the EV industry, as you point out. And Polestar certainly got its share of that, which was pretty exciting. The customers we spoke to over that period, they wanted a car right now, right or wrong. It has settled from there, but it’s settled to a level that is higher than it was before. And that’s really pleasing to see. It feels like that there is now a broader understanding of the benefits for an electric car. There is a greater appreciation of the flexibility that an electric vehicle brings and independence to be able to charge and run your car. People have done a bit more research and realized that there’s cost benefits to it as well. And so I think we’re now starting to see just a gentle rise or a sustained level of interest that’s higher than it was before that peak period. We’ve rolled off the peak, that was expected. We wouldn’t have seen it continue continue like that. But last month we saw electric vehicles take up 16% of the total new car market. We’ve not seen a number like that before. We’ve seen electric vehicle sales double in the first part of 2026 as compared to the same period last year. And so that’s good news. It will now be interesting to see just where it now settles to and what it runs like, but it’s looking good.

[00:10:31] Stephen Fenech: Okay, Scott, you’ve been in the car game for quite a while, so I want to know, how does a brand, especially especially in a very competitive EV market, how does a brand, how do you get your edge over your competitors? And you, of course, can look back on your experience with your, with, I think you worked with Audi for a while.

[00:10:51] Trevor Long: How does Polestar in this instance, how do you stand out from the crowd?

[00:10:55] Scott Maynard: Yeah, that’s not an easy thing to do. Manufacturers need to be able to demonstrate some form of legacy, a little bit of history. They need to be able to demonstrate a A car is a complicated thing. And so not everyone can knock one of these things together and make it last. And so Polestar works hard to demonstrate some history that goes back to the ’90s, a history in motorsport, a history that aligns with development in step with Volvo, an established brand with a long history. So we draw on that.

[00:11:28] Trevor Long: Like a DNA trace, essentially. You’re kind of doing your family tree for people.

[00:11:32] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:11:32] Scott Maynard: That’s it.

[00:11:33] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:11:33] Scott Maynard: Face the family tree, run the family tree back and you’ll see that we are Swedish through and through and that there’s a whole heap of Volvo in there as well. We’ve done the motorsport thing. We employ engineers that know how to make a car handle. We employ people that know how to make a car last and make a car look good. It’s interesting. I was lucky enough to travel to Sweden and spend some time in the design studio there. And that’s not an easy place to get into. There’s a bit of cloak and dagger in that. And in speaking with the design designers, just talking about some of the designs that are prevalent in electric cars now, and ours do seem to stand out. Why is that? And they said, well, we take a lot longer to design a car than a lot of brands delivering vehicles to market in Australia at the moment. We take that time to stand back from the car and ensure that it’s going to look good from every angle, in every light condition, for 20 years. And that, that takes a bit of time, but I think that that’s appreciated by the market where there’s a lot of, you know, semi-disposable product being sold, and we’re building cars that last, that drive well, high quality. But getting that message out is the challenge for us. And we’ve just got to keep pushing that.

[00:12:45] Trevor Long: One of the key bits of feedback we get from everyday people, real consumers, owners of cars, purchasers of cars, things like that, is the experience at the dealership before and after buying. Yeah. I don’t think that we’ve had any negative comments about Polestar at all. In fact, as I do a little search of our AI assistant who knows all of our transcripts, there’s a lot of positivity around Polestar in real terms. How, how important and how do you handle the dealership experience for buyers, people that are walking off the street to both understand if they’re educated or not and whether or not they need to be handled differently from a sales perspective? And then what are you telling them about the next 5 years of owning this car? How are they going to be supported and where are they going to be supported and where are parts and servicing? How do you handle that whole experience?

[00:13:37] Scott Maynard: Yeah, so it’s a really carefully put together relationship that we have with retailers. And when Pulsar first started, Pulsar insisted on running every one of its showrooms. We call them spaces. We insisted on running every one of them ourselves because for exactly the reasons that you talk about, the car could be brilliant, but if the person talking to you about it does not is not, you know, pull across confidence, is not able to explain the vehicle well, isn’t able to help you with the questions that you would probably have if you’re transitioning to electric car for the first time, then all the work done on product is going to go to waste. So, we have to be really careful about the partners that we choose. We choose dealer groups that already represent luxury brands. We are a bit particular about how we train, and we also make sure that there’s a lot of support there. In terms of the conversation we have with our customers, yes, that’s, that’s that’s also carefully procured with a lot of training that goes into it. We don’t have showrooms on every street corner. We’ve got 12 across Australia. There’s a couple more in the wings, but we’ve got a good representation across the broader country, but we’re not absolutely everywhere. However, we’ve got almost 20 service points, so we’ve got a great representation of service, and that’s where that partnership with Volvo Volvo comes into play. You can take the Polestar to pretty much any Volvo service department and they’ll know exactly what to do with the car so that it’s well supported. Because we do value that 5-year journey, the worst thing we could do is sell everyone in Australia one car. We need to be able to do this on a model that allows, well, that encourages people to refer their friends to come back to us again. So it’s a relationship that we need to build. And because we’re 5 years young and we still have a containable customer base, we can get quite personal with every one of our customers, which is really lovely.

[00:15:30] Stephen Fenech: Interesting you should mention the getting personal with customers. I can remember a few weeks ago we had a caller who described buying an electric car like buying an iPhone. You just jump on the website, spec it up, and then go from there. So is that, obviously you want to embrace having that reach to customers, but also at the same time, you still wanna make it like a distant relationship. You still wanna have that personal touch, as you just mentioned.

[00:16:00] Scott Maynard: Yes, so you can jump online right now, you can spec up a Polestar, hit buy, put down your money, and you’ll own a car. It’s still possible to do it that way if the overwhelming preference of a purchaser is to do it semi-remotely. However, the vast majority of our customers will come and visit one of our centers and speak speak with our teams, go through the product and drive it and see it in a space. And no matter how it’s purchased, we will still do a proper handover experience in, again, a very carefully set up handover space, which is nice and quiet. We can step the customers through the product and make sure that they leave with a full understanding of it. So we can offer both, but it’s got to be personal.

[00:16:47] Stephen Fenech: That’s what you want.

[00:16:47] Trevor Long: So the big question is 2, 3, 4, 5, 7. I’m assuming there’s not going to be a 1 then. The pipeline for the future, you know, the 7 sounds exciting. What else can you tell us about what people can expect from Polestar as, as you grow in Australia, both globally and here in Australia?

[00:17:07] Scott Maynard: Yeah, well, there’s a bit to come. So we— our global CEO, Michael Löschler, made a fairly strategic announcement a couple of months ago wasn’t even that ago now, recently. And he spoke about an updated version of Polestar 4. We’ll get to keep the coupe that currently is our best-selling car. There’ll be a new variant of that, a vehicle that’s perhaps a bit more practical, perhaps a little bit more styled on a wagon or an SUV style of vehicle. We’re looking forward to bringing that to market. That will come hopefully at the end of this year. It may roll into early next year.

[00:17:44] Trevor Long: A Polestar 4 wagon would absolutely go nuts.

[00:17:50] Scott Maynard: Yeah, wouldn’t it? We’re excited about it.

[00:17:52] Trevor Long: I mean, isn’t it funny though, because, and again, you’ve got a long history in motoring, but we went, as a society, Australia was a wagon country for a long time. Your Commodore and your Falcon wagons and things like that. And then we went SUV. But there’s a couple, there’s a couple in the premium market, BMW and such. But I think BYD at the Melbourne Motor Show had a wagon that was a hybrid. You know, I feel like, I feel like there might be a move back back there. So it feels like you’re, you’re seeing trend and, and picking up on it.

[00:18:19] Scott Maynard: I’d love to see it. And I mean, Europe’s really big on wagons. It now seems to be returning, just as you said, to the Australian scene. We’re starting to see more people opt for, for wagon-style cars. So we’re going to meet that. The, the 4 will be— it’ll still be a little SUV-ish, it’ll still be riding a little bit higher, And it’s a nice size car. So again, I was really lucky to see that when I was over in the design studio spending time with them there, and it looks fantastic. So we can’t wait to be able to release images and then have the car join the range here at the end of this year and the beginning of next. That will be really, really cool. We’ll get Get7 that we talked about, which is a compact SUV that will be built in Europe, and that will come to us. And then there’ll be a couple of other little limited editions and little tweaks and changes that we make through that period as well before we then get into some new stuff, which will be a bit further out.

[00:19:17] Trevor Long: This may be a completely random thing to ask at this point, given where we’ve been talking about, why are you not in VFAX? It’s a very internal thing for the world, but for people trying to report on the market, we’ve gotta take numbers from VFAX, which is 99% of car companies, and then we’ve gotta look at Tesla and Polestar numbers is that a political thing about the FCAI’s views on the new vehicle emissions scheme, or is it just easier or cheaper, or is it the fact that frankly journalists don’t need to know through one source? You can tell them, what does it matter?

[00:19:48] Scott Maynard: No, I’d love you to know, and I really— I’m so sorry for making your life that little bit more difficult. It’s not a ploy to make you go to two different sources. Our data is published through the Electric Vehicle Council, and you will note that they publish first just before the FCI. And yes, it did get a little bit political there. There was a period of time, particularly while we were developing the New Vehicle Efficiency Scheme, that there was a fair bit of legacy industry pushback against NVS. FCI’s member base requires that the FCI represent their cause. Well, that wasn’t our cause. Pulsar is a brand that believes in the NVS and pushes hard to to continue the electric vehicle discount that’s been generously applied by government to electric vehicle sales. And so to be subscribing into an organisation that actively works against that cause didn’t make sense for POSA at the time. And so the decision was made to step out of the SAI. That meant that our figures were no longer supplied to VFACS, given that it sits inside the NCAI.

[00:20:57] Trevor Long: Fair enough. And that’s the right place to be, mate, really. Awesome stuff. We— people love the brand, owners love the cars, and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it? Just to know that people are driving around with a smile on their face and they’re probably at a barbecue talking to their narky mate who doesn’t love electric cars and they’ll say, listen, come for a drive, let me show you, because there’s nothing better than just showing them what it’s like.

[00:21:22] Scott Maynard: Yeah, I still get to talk to customers a lot. I really enjoy it. And I did have a customer say that, that he and his family were really proud to buy a Polestar. He said there’s a lot of people that will go to a barbecue and say, oh, I bought an electric car. He said, but Polestar is a brand that you go to a barbecue and say, I bought a Polestar, and people know what that is. They know it’s an electric car. And I like that. I thought that was a really lovely way of summing it up.

[00:21:44] Trevor Long: Fair enough. Scott Maynard, Managing Director of Polestar Australia. Mate, thank you for your time.

[00:21:47] Stephen Fenech: Thanks, Scott.

[00:21:49] Scott Maynard: Thank you so much. I love your show. It was really good to be on it. It’s a lot of fun.

[00:21:51] Trevor Long: Thank you guys. Very good, mate. We appreciate it. And we’ll take your calls after this on Two Blokes Talking Electric Cars. Oh goodness me.

[00:22:09] Stephen Fenech: It’s like we get a bit of exercise when we do this show.

[00:22:11] Trevor Long: If that’s exercise, you’ve got problems, my friend.

[00:22:13] Stephen Fenech: That’s as much exercise I’ve had for a while.

[00:22:15] Trevor Long: Yeah, that’s more than I’ve done too. But anyway, great to chat with with Polestar boss there and we’ll bring in many more manufacturers over the weeks and months ahead because if they want to talk, we’ll have them on the show. It’s as simple as that.

[00:22:26] Stephen Fenech: They’re flooding us with inquiries. Well, they want to be on the show.

[00:22:28] Trevor Long: You know, there’s— to a degree, there’s different levels of interest, let’s just say. No, but I do have these conversations with the people in the car brands and it’s sometimes just hard to arrange because we’re very strict in our timing. We only record on a certain day of the week. Exactly right.

[00:22:43] Stephen Fenech: We know this.

[00:22:44] Trevor Long: It is what it is. Anyway, we also love taking your calls. 0477 657 657. Send us a text, uh, save it in your phone as The Two Blokes, and we’ll get your message and we’ll get you on the show. Trev’s on the line. G’day, Trev, how you doing, mate?

Trev — BYD owner on vehicle-to-home charging and bidirectional EV plans

[00:22:59] Trev (Caller): Yeah, all good, thank you. All good.

[00:23:00] Trevor Long: Tell us, uh, where you’re at in the world. You’ve, uh, you’ve got an EV and you’re thinking past the world of just general electric cars. You’re thinking about vehicle to home. You’re thinking about how else you can use that that big battery in the driveway.

[00:23:13] Trev (Caller): Absolutely. Our journey has been purchased a BYD F03 in May ’23. Okay. Since then we’ve done about 44,000 kilometers on it. I did the Tesla Charge upgrade and thanks to you guys for pushing that one through.

[00:23:33] Trevor Long: Oh right, because it wasn’t yours, yours was an early model not compatible with the Tesla chargers. Correct.

[00:23:38] Trev (Caller): Yeah, the modification. And okay, cost me, cost me a lot of aggravation trying to get people inside. After your, after your podcast that day.

[00:23:49] Scott Maynard: Yeah.

[00:23:50] Trev (Caller): It took me a lot of phone calls to get BYD dealerships and parts people to agree that, oh yes, that is a thing.

[00:23:57] Trevor Long: Yeah. What do you end up, what do you end up paying? It was a few hundred dollars, wasn’t it?

[00:24:02] Trev (Caller): Yeah, it’s about $300, just over $300 and And the only person after about 6 phone calls that knew anything about it was the great crew down in BYD Dandenong. They were really helpful. Nice.

[00:24:17] Trevor Long: Yeah. And so just broadly on the EV front, great decision. You’re happy with— aside from the dramas of the charging network compatibility, it’s turned out to be a great decision to go EV a couple of years ago.

[00:24:31] Trev (Caller): Absolutely, more than happy. I think at the time we had a diesel Hyundai Tucson that was end of lease, and this was to be my wife’s car to drive to and from work for probably the last 9, 10 months of her working career. But, and it worked out perfectly, you know, once we’d done all of the the charging installs. We put a Zappi 2 system in. We always also had a solar, Enphase solar micro, micro inverters. Yeah, yeah. Micro inverters. Sorry. And a Tesla Powerwall 2. And between—

[00:25:19] Stephen Fenech: You’re kitted out, aren’t ya, mate? That sounds pretty good. Can I ask, what was the— back in 2023, what was the— motivation to go EV? Were you seeing them on the road and thinking, oh, I want to get amongst that? Was it like a cost-saving thing or was it just wanting the latest and greatest? What was the main motivation?

[00:25:37] Trev (Caller): It came down to looking towards the time where I won’t call it retirement because haven’t done that, where our income streams were reduced and we were looking to minimize our outgoings during that period. So having an EV for everyday use was just a no-brainer as far as we were concerned. The whole hybrid thing at the time, I felt it was like being half pregnant. You shouldn’t do that.

[00:26:13] Trevor Long: Yeah, it seems about right. Yeah, it’s, it’s, I think it’s an analogy that’s been used before on this show, but go big or go home. And obviously that initial, you know, income change moving to where you’re at now has evolved over a few years. So now you’re thinking, how else can you use the battery? Is that where you’re at?

[00:26:31] Trev (Caller): Absolutely. So it was, it was always a goal to, to use the battery, to use the car as a, as a vehicle-to-home backup. However, the, you know, the lack of warranty backup and all that sort of thing from BYD was, was the thing that stopped me. Because I didn’t want to void warranty on a new technology that all of that. So I think now it’s getting to the point where I think it’s ask, ask forgiveness, not permission.

[00:27:04] Trevor Long: So I feel, I feel very similar on that. I mean, I know it’s a huge risk to take, but also with BYD, they’re one of the few that has been engaging in this space with some of the trials going on, aren’t they? So there’s a little bit of, there’s a little bit of EYD’s got skin in the game. At least they know what’s going on. It’s not going to be some surprise to them if you tell them you’ve been doing it.

[00:27:29] Trev (Caller): Yeah. Yes. And that was the thing. There was a trial done. I’m not sure if it’s even still underway with, I think it was Origin Energy.

[00:27:43] Trevor Long: There’s about 3 or 4 different trials going on. And let’s all remember, bloody trials always take forever. You think it’d take 2 months to work out if it’s working or not. 6 bloody years. So yeah, the trials are definitely real.

[00:27:55] Stephen Fenech: I still think we’re a while away from this becoming a thing, mainstream feature of an EV.

[00:28:01] Trevor Long: We will look back on the first time we talked about this, which is now a year ago, as being ages and ages ago when it finally is real. But my question for you, Trev, is how much are you prepared to invest in this? Because you’ve got a battery already, you’ve got solar already, you’re gonna have to replace the Zappi with something that does this. That’s gonna be a big cost. So where do you see that paying off?

[00:28:28] Trev (Caller): Yeah, I think again, working towards minimising outgoings. It’s not about how long it takes to pay this off and make it worthwhile. It’s immediate cost reduction in monthly outgoings. So on that basis, I did get a quote from a company called Revcharge. You may know them.

[00:28:51] Trevor Long: I’ve heard of them.

[00:28:52] Trev (Caller): And they were part of that part of the South Australian trials. Yeah. No, I think it was in New South Wales, this particular one. And they’re quoting the Halo Charger as part of their setup.

[00:29:07] Trevor Long: How much?

[00:29:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:29:08] Trev (Caller): Tell us the price, son. Well, the price, the bottom line was $7,500.

[00:29:14] Trevor Long: Whoa.

[00:29:15] Scott Maynard: $7,000.

[00:29:16] Trev (Caller): Yeah.

[00:29:16] Scott Maynard: Yeah.

[00:29:16] Trevor Long: So by the way, that’s come down. When I first started researching this, maybe 3 years ago, it was about $10,000. Because Wallbox have one called the Quasar, you know, bidirectional. Suppose about 10 grand, right?

[00:29:26] Stephen Fenech: By the time it becomes reality, it’s probably going to be 3 or 4 grand by then.

[00:29:30] Trevor Long: Yeah, I think so too.

[00:29:33] Stephen Fenech: You mentioned you have to obviously get rid of the Zappi, but do you have to get rid of your other battery, the Tesla battery?

[00:29:38] Trevor Long: No, no, no, no. You could keep the battery, couldn’t you?

[00:29:40] Stephen Fenech: That’s just additional storage.

[00:29:41] Trevor Long: Was that part of their quote to you, was to plumb it in so that it would charge either the battery or the home or the grid?

[00:29:47] Trev (Caller): Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s, that’s the installation would not take away the Tesla Powerwall because as a comparison, I had a, I got a quote on an additional Tesla Powerwall 3 because they recently announced that you can add a Powerwall 3 to your Powerwall 2 system. And that was that I think ended up being about the, the $18,000 to do that, which was too much. Yeah. And or take out both Powerwall 2 and putting 2 Powerwall 3s and that was about— oh no, that was a SIG Energy system. Sorry, that was about $22,000 or something like that.

[00:30:33] Stephen Fenech: So I walked away from that. But having said that, so even if you were to buy that charger today, that’s way cheaper than having your battery rearranged.

[00:30:42] Trevor Long: Correct.

[00:30:43] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:43] Trev (Caller): Wow. Absolutely.

[00:30:45] Trevor Long: Absolutely. So have you in that configuration, how much battery storage do you have with the Teslas?

[00:30:52] Trev (Caller): The Tesla Powerwall is 13.5 kilowatts.

[00:30:55] Trevor Long: So see, see, it’s funny because it really is, as you say, it’s about deciding your outgoings. And look, I look at it and I’m like, oh, probably in the next 6 months I’ll bite the bullet and it will, it will be a stupid amount of money. More than the solar and everything cost. But the way I look at it is the system I’m looking at is huge. So it’d be a 48 probably kilowatt-hour battery or 40 kilowatt-hour battery and bidirectional charging with SIG Energy. But for me, on my numbers, it’s about, it’s about a 10-year repayment. And I go, well, look, if I can afford it upfront, I like the idea of the minimal payments ongoing and the long, long, longer-term benefits. And that’s kind of where you’re at when you’re in our age and you start to think that, you know, when you get to retirement, retirement, how do I reduce my overheads?

[00:31:41] Stephen Fenech: You looked at me when you said that.

[00:31:43] Trevor Long: Exactly. But isn’t it funny? Look, Trev, I don’t know how old you are, mate, but you know, Steven’s in his early 50s. Late.

[00:31:50] Stephen Fenech: Mid to late 50s, actually.

[00:31:51] Trevor Long: I was being nice for the first time ever.

[00:31:53] Stephen Fenech: I’m 58 years old.

[00:31:55] Trevor Long: All right, well, I’m about to turn 50 and you know, retirement’s 15—

[00:31:58] Trev (Caller): You’re young blokes.

[00:31:59] Trevor Long: Yeah, 15-odd years away. But you do go, okay, well, you see all these calculators about retirement and how much you need to live and stuff and you go, well, if I could completely and utterly, and I’ve done this with my mum, I look at her expenses on the pension and you go, if you had no power bills, it’d be a whole lot easier and stuff like that. So that’s the kind of thought in your mind, isn’t it? It’s reducing those long-term ongoing costs and having that huge battery sitting in your car is gonna be a big part of that.

[00:32:28] Stephen Fenech: Absolutely.

[00:32:28] Trev (Caller): Absolutely.

[00:32:29] Trevor Long: Absolutely.

[00:32:29] Trev (Caller): That’s what we’re looking for.

[00:32:31] Trevor Long: Mate, we just have to hope the governments the authorities really start pushing this and regulating it. That’s really all we have to hope for.

[00:32:38] Trev (Caller): Yeah.

[00:32:39] Scott Maynard: Yeah.

[00:32:39] Trev (Caller): So I think, I think it’s, you know, now we’re looking at the next model and if as we’re sort of looking at the BYD Atto 3 Evo, you know, and that sort of solves that vehicle would solve another problem where we found on trips that the, the Atto 3 standard range which we currently have is a little bit short on on range. You have to stop a little too often. And we did a comparison where we did a Noosa trip one year from Melbourne. Wow. In the electric and it worked really well. No problems.

[00:33:18] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:33:18] Trev (Caller): We found we had to stop multiple times. We’d stay overnight a couple of times because you can’t get as far in one day. Yeah. And then the following year, our second vehicle is BMW 330d, so it’s a turbo diesel. Okay. And we found less stops. It actually cost us less money to drive to Noosa because we’re not buying $25 worth of coffee and—

[00:33:45] Trevor Long: Yeah, everything. One stop.

[00:33:47] Trev (Caller): Because it’s not just the cost of accommodation.

[00:33:49] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:33:50] Trevor Long: Power and fuel are not the only costs, right? If you put in accommodation.

[00:33:54] Stephen Fenech: True that.

[00:33:55] Trevor Long: And the one thing you don’t want to do is you don’t want to, you don’t want to quote your own time What’s your time worth per hour? Yeah, a lot. So it’s a realistic, realistic comparison. So you’re right, adding range with the Evo will be a huge benefit to you now that you know, like you’ve got everything else in place now that you know what you need. And the beautiful thing is cars today by default have more range. We’re just getting, we’re just getting that in the industry apart from the smaller cars made for the city. So the Evo is perfect for because I think it positions BYD really well to go. We’ve got the ATTO 1 and 2, which are pretty much city cars. And then the ATTO 3 becomes your, you know, you need range, you need space and then everything else in the lineup. So Mate, it’s a good little lineup that they’ve got going on. So it sounds like you’ll end up being a BYD man and hopefully you can get some sort of sign-off for vehicle-to-grid. And so just finally, are you going to look at that quote and go, I’m going to bite the bullet and just do it and hope for the best?

[00:34:47] Trev (Caller): Well, I’m hoping you use your considerable influence on BYD and get some early gin on what they’re going to do in Australia with the EVO. Clarity.

[00:34:57] Trevor Long: That’s a fair question. It’s a fair question.

[00:35:00] Trev (Caller): Can’t get a lot of information out of BYD because they work on the SWOT principle of sell what’s available today.

[00:35:07] Trevor Long: And so that’s not what it normally stands for.

[00:35:10] Stephen Fenech: No, I thought it meant some tactical thing.

[00:35:14] Trevor Long: No, isn’t it? No, no. Well, that’s, that’s in the Army. It’s— there’s also a SWOT in business too. I can’t remember what it stands for.

[00:35:18] Scott Maynard: Correct.

[00:35:19] Trevor Long: What’s it stand for, Trev?

[00:35:20] Stephen Fenech: So SWOT in the EV world is sell what’s available today. I love that.

[00:35:24] Scott Maynard: Correct.

[00:35:24] Stephen Fenech: Oh, that’s great. Nice how you’ve coined that.

[00:35:27] Trevor Long: That’s— well, well played, Trev. Well played. Well, we will take that on notice.

[00:35:31] Stephen Fenech: Trevor with some brains, mate.

[00:35:33] Trevor Long: That’s great. Yeah, it’s great.

[00:35:34] Trev (Caller): And just, just, just one, just one last point. Listening to your podcast from last week, you talked about the Better Route Planner software.

[00:35:43] Trevor Long: Mate, yes.

[00:35:46] Trev (Caller): Just, just a quick, quick, quick addition to that is if you get yourself a Bluetooth-connected OBD interface. Yep. I use an iCarPro. You get the dynamic feedback from the car to the software and it gives you more of what you call the Tesla experiences too.

[00:36:08] Trevor Long: Trev, have you hacked us? Have you hacked our rundown for this show? Because literally, literally after we hung up from you, I was going to talk about this. So let’s just quickly talk about it because it’s fascinating. We brought it up, you said, a couple of weeks ago and Yep. It’s an unbelievable route planner. But so for people that don’t know, an OBD is the onboard diagnostics port. It’s a little port normally under the steering wheel where a mechanic will come in, plug in, and they’ll get the error messages from the car. It gives them data. But also you can get things like loggers. So you plug it in and it logs trips. So if you’ve got a logbook, you can use that. But the one that you’re talking about, and I’ve had a look on Amazon, there’s one called OBDLink. There’s a bunch on the ARBP or the A Better Route Planner website. Basically, you spend the money on this little box, you pair it to your phone, and then this little box is constantly transmitting information about your efficiency. So how much battery you’re using, and therefore how much range you’ve got, what the range prediction of the car is versus the app. And then it’s using that real information to give you the Tesla-like experience. Mate, I am ready to click the button. So tell me, Trev, what am I buying? Because I’m currently on Amazon and the one I’m looking at is $240.

[00:37:21] Trev (Caller): Yeah, I don’t think I’ve paid that much. It’s some time back now, but I’ve got the iCarPro.

[00:37:27] Trevor Long: iCarPro.

[00:37:30] Trev (Caller): I can—

[00:37:30] Trevor Long: the reason, the reason I’ve been a bit careful is because the Better Route Planning website goes into great detail about there being issues with some models, and it’s not yours, thankfully. The VGate iCarPro also works well, fine. Has been tested, but it does say there is no security. So what they’re concerned about is these devices, if left running, are constantly emitting a ‘pair with me, pair with me,’ you know, for— and so you come up to your car with a mobile phone and pair with it and get your data. Do I care? Probably not. So you might have to pay a little bit more for one that has security. You’re saying to me, if I buy this thing, plug it into the car, um, it will then give me this great route planning information, and you Do you almost swear by it, Trev?

[00:38:13] Trev (Caller): Yeah, it works so well on long trips. The map’s a little bit clunky, I have to say, but in comparison to Google Maps—

[00:38:21] Trevor Long: You gotta pay a subscription as well to get the CarPlay.

[00:38:25] Trev (Caller): Yeah, subscription is pricey. It’s over $7 a month. So I only subscribe if I’m going to do a trip.

[00:38:34] Stephen Fenech: Gotcha, yeah.

[00:38:37] Trev (Caller): The thing that the addition that you should, if you’re concerned about security, the addition you should purchase is there’s an extension cable for an OBD port that’s got a switch in it and you turn the switch on or off and it just— Correct. And it just turns the power off and you don’t have to be fiddling under the dash to, well, to turn the thing on or off.

[00:39:01] Trevor Long: The thing that I want from this kind of— the thing that I would love I love, if I drove a Tesla, is the kind of assurance that if it says I’m gonna get there with 10%, I’m gonna get there with 10%. But I don’t believe any car I own or drive. If the calculation is it’s got 300Ks range, I assume 200, and sometimes you’re lucky it’s got 300, right? Absolutely. Is the accuracy of that percentage calculation, do you see accuracy with it?

[00:39:27] Trev (Caller): It’s better because at least then you’re, um, it’s putting it into the map and you know how far you’re going. Because unless you’re using the onboard navigation of BYD, you don’t get that feedback. So this, a better route planner, is, is much better for, uh, all the different charge points and all that sort of thing available on your route. So at least you get the feedback and it’s more accurate. I wouldn’t I probably can’t comment that it’s 100% accurate. Yeah, it’s certainly a lot more information.

[00:40:03] Stephen Fenech: You think maybe a car company might take this over and make it part of their, part of their vehicle?

[00:40:08] Trevor Long: No, because if you use the in-car maps in a lot of cars, it does work like a Tesla. But none of us want to use that because Waze and Google are just better.

[00:40:17] Trev (Caller): Yeah.

[00:40:17] Trevor Long: So I think, I think that’s essentially, essentially the point. So anyway, fascinating. I really appreciate that, mate, because I We’re kind of blown away by a better route planner and how good it looks. So the ability to now really upgrade it like this is mind-blowing. I’m gonna give it a go on my next long trip, Trev. So thanks for the input, mate. And thanks to everyone else who suggested the same thing after that episode a couple of weeks ago, mate. Good to hear from you, mate. Keep us in the loop on how you go with the bi-directional and we’ll keep asking those questions for you, mate.

[00:40:45] Trev (Caller): Thank you, sir. Have a good day.

[00:40:47] Trevor Long: Cheers. No worries at all. Good on you, mate.

[00:40:48] Stephen Fenech: That’s excellent. So there you go.

[00:40:49] Trevor Long: Blake hacked our rundown and went, got ahead of me there.

[00:40:53] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, there’s been a lot of feedback about that.

[00:40:55] Trevor Long: And yeah, it just sounds like a really good system. Yeah. And I’m more than happy to try it.

[00:41:01] Stephen Fenech: The basics of it is you get better, you can predict and also plan. Say you want to have, you know, you want to have 15% battery left when you arrive. Yeah. It’ll help you facilitate that.

[00:41:13] Trevor Long: Yeah. I have noticed in a few cars now and you’ll notice you’re about to take away, it gives you range and then most and least. So it gives you what it thinks it’s going to be. And then it says, but it could be as much as, you know, 700 or could be as little as 300, which is— it’s a better thing for you because it means the car’s going, listen, if you flog this thing, it’s going to be 250. But if you take your time and drive around the city, it’s going to be 400, you know, that kind of stuff. So I like that. The other, the other news about a week ago was The Ferrari electric car, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been revealed, the Luce.

Ferrari Luce — First Ferrari EV revealed, design and speculation

[00:41:47] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, the Ferrari Luce.

[00:41:49] Trevor Long: Now there’s a— gee whiz, the internet hates this car.

[00:41:52] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I’ve had mixed reactions to my comments. Have been one— the one that struck mine, one of them described it as a twisted sandshoe. Okay, that’s whatever that means.

[00:42:02] Trevor Long: The best meme I saw was the car on its roof with a cable underneath, Johnny Depp on it with it like the Apple Magic house.

[00:42:09] Stephen Fenech: That’s true.

[00:42:09] Trevor Long: The reality is, and I was at the Ferrari factory last year, saw the kind of underpinnings of this, this thing is going to be— I call it right now, it’ll be the best driving electric car on the planet because it’s over-engineered to be so.

[00:42:21] Stephen Fenech: It’ll be solidly priced.

[00:42:22] Trevor Long: It’s also going to be a million dollars. Yeah. Which is—

[00:42:25] Stephen Fenech: so you can—

[00:42:25] Trevor Long: you’ll be right to get one. Insane.

[00:42:26] Stephen Fenech: Trevor’s doing very well.

[00:42:27] Trevor Long: But it’s funny watching videos of it because there’s a guy, he goes, look at the charging door, it’s amazing. It goes, and it goes inside the car. And I’m like, Porsche does that, mate. What are you talking about? Like, it’s Some of it’s not new, but the interior, it’s, it’s Johnny Ive all over. So many people have said to me, this is what Apple’s car would have looked like if they released one with Johnny Ive, because it does.

[00:42:46] Stephen Fenech: It is like, design is so— it is really minimal and beautiful and typical Johnny Ive. I like the doors, the— yeah, what do you call that?

[00:42:58] Trevor Long: They call them rear hinges, but opening in the same direction.

[00:43:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Yes. So it’s a 5-seater as well?

[00:43:04] Trevor Long: Yes, first ever Ferrari 5-seat car.

[00:43:06] Stephen Fenech: 4-door.

[00:43:07] Trevor Long: Did you expect it to be a 4-door car? Yes. Because when we saw it, it was in camouflage. It looked like a— looked more like a hatchback, kind of a small SUV size because they had fake— still pretty slick looking— fake coverage on it.

[00:43:17] Stephen Fenech: But I like it. I don’t know. There’s a lot of people who don’t like it.

[00:43:20] Trevor Long: If this was a— so if this was priced the same as a Porsche Taycan, it would— it would be my new first love because if I win Powerball I will buy a Porsche Taycan. I love that car. I think it’s amazing. If I win $60 million, I’ll probably save up and keep a bit for the Ferrari. But just, just in terms of comparing it, I do, I do, I like it. I like the look of it a lot because I’m not looking at it as a Ferrari and going, you’ve ruined the design. It’s an EV. I’m looking at it as a sports car EV and going, this is unbelievable.

[00:43:48] Stephen Fenech: It just happens to have the prancing horse on the front.

[00:43:50] Trevor Long: Like something as simple as, if you’ve seen the infotainment system in the middle, has a handle so you can just swivel it to the right and the passengers get to see it, which is genius because it means they don’t need to build it for the left or right-hand drive. It just works for either. Works. But it’s also really cool to go, hey, can you just set the map for me to the next destination or whatever?

[00:44:05] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it’s those little things though that matter. And yeah, I do love—

[00:44:10] Trevor Long: 102.5. Yeah, that’s pretty— a motor on each wheel.

[00:44:14] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that is pretty good. And the interior looks really good. It looks pretty compact.

[00:44:20] Trevor Long: Don’t you think the interior reminds you of like the ’70s or ’80s, that kind of the way it’s stitched horizontally on the rear seats. I just, it just felt classic to me.

[00:44:30] Stephen Fenech: The instrument cluster looks like, you know, it’s like an iPhone and then there’s an iPad next to you. You know, it’s sort of same shape as a phone.

[00:44:36] Trevor Long: I can’t wait to sit in it and just feel the buttons because Johnny Ive will have been involved in the feel, the tactile feel. Because they’re not buttons, they’re switches. But I bet you they feel amazing to touch.

[00:44:46] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, you know, you’re going to go you might as well go all the way.

[00:44:50] Trevor Long: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I think I might have mentioned this on the EFTM podcast a couple of weeks ago, but there’s a guy in New Zealand called Grant Baker. I think on Instagram he’s Grant K Baker. He’s, I don’t know if he’s in property or the motoring industry. I can’t quite remember, but he’s very, very wealthy. He owns a lot of Ferraris and he shows videos of them. He orders a new one. He shows you the whole process.

[00:45:08] Stephen Fenech: Is that the video you watch? He videos his Ferraris?

[00:45:10] Trevor Long: Yes. But like crazy amount of them. And the process. And he was asked in the comments, would you buy one? He said, wouldn’t rule it out. And so that’s, that’s, that to me is a green light from an absolute collector.

[00:45:22] Stephen Fenech: That’s it.

[00:45:22] Trevor Long: Yeah, he got absolutely pummeled by saying that. He’s like, well, you’re a suck-up, you, you’re just doing it to stay on their list and all that kind of stuff. But it’s Ferrari though, come on. As a purist, everyone’s heads will turn when the reviews come out because they’ll review this not just on the road but on the track. And I am so confident that this thing will feel amazing. It’ll blow people away. And the thing that we haven’t seen yet is the sound.

[00:45:46] Stephen Fenech: Well, because is that transmitted into the cabin?

[00:45:49] Trevor Long: Is that right? So what they’ve done is they’ve built essentially a microphone into the chassis of the electric motor that turns the sound of the vibration into the sound you hear in the car. Like an engine sound? The way it was described to me, no, not like an engine. The way it was described to me, think of an electric electric guitar. The way an electric guitar has sensors that pick up the vibration of the string and turn it into something else, right, as opposed to an acoustic guitar, that’s the way this pickup will work on the vibrations of the electric motor. So it’s genuine sounds from the electric motor, okay, turn into something— but not like a V12. It will not sound like a V8 or a V12. No, it will sound like— it’s probably the most authentic electric car sound I’ll ever hear.

[00:46:34] Stephen Fenech: It’s more than 5 meters long.

[00:46:35] Trevor Long: Yeah, it’s big.

[00:46:36] Stephen Fenech: The pictures, they make it look small. Yeah, it’s 5— more than 5 meters long.

[00:46:41] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:46:41] Stephen Fenech: And 2 meters wide. Yeah, yeah, it’s a big solid car.

[00:46:45] Trevor Long: Anyway, are we going to get to test drive this, you reckon? I’m sure down the track it’ll be in the driveway. Hi, Ryan.

[00:46:52] Stephen Fenech: Um, is that for Ryan from Ferrari?

[00:46:54] Trevor Long: Yes. G’day, Ryan. We love you, Ryan. Um, look, I can’t wait to see That’s it. There’s no doubt. But it’s a next— it’s a 2027 car for Australia. But it’ll be fascinating. The reception after a car this year, this will be all around Hollywood.

[00:47:08] Stephen Fenech: I would have got this if it was this year.

[00:47:09] Trevor Long: It’ll be all over Hollywood like Priuses in the ’90s. What color would you get? I like the blue.

[00:47:14] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I don’t mind the blue. Yellow looks nice too.

[00:47:15] Trevor Long: I don’t think you buy the red because I think that is an insult to Ferrari.

[00:47:18] Stephen Fenech: Maybe. I reckon yellow or blue.

[00:47:21] Trevor Long: All right. Two blokes talking electric cars. We appreciate you listening, downloading, watching, and I hope that you share it with your friends and anyone that’s on the electric car journey. More from us next week. Thanks to the great people at NRMA Insurance and Uniden Smart Dash Cams. Steven, let’s do it all again next week, mate.

[00:47:36] Stephen Fenech: I will turn up for you, mate.

[00:47:37] Trevor Long: Oh, will you?

[00:47:37] Trev (Caller): Yeah.

[00:47:38] Trevor Long: Oh, thanks, mate.

Episode: Dead Calm

Podcast: Best Movies You’ve Never Seen

Date: 5 June 2026

Hosts: Stephen Fenech & Trevor Long

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[00:01:43] Stephen Fenech: Hello and welcome one and all to The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen. This is our little podcast where I present some movies to Trevor Long. My name is Stephen Finnick. I’m the movie nerd of the, of the duo here. And, uh, Trev’s never seen many movies until now. He’s building up his vocabulary week for week.. And the idea of the show is for Trevor to watch a movie at my suggestion that he’s never seen before, and perhaps that you’ve never seen before. Perhaps. There’s a lot of, uh, a lot of movies from, uh, this movie we’re doing today, Dead Calm, was released in 1989. So that’s really— that’s a while ago. Wow. Okay, maybe some listeners here that weren’t even born then, right?

[00:02:20] Trevor Long: Okay, I hadn’t dated in my, in my head, so that’s— yeah, that’s fascinating.

[00:02:23] Stephen Fenech: Uh, yeah, released in 1989, Dead Calm, starring Nicole Kidman, a very young Nicole Kidman.

[00:02:28] Trevor Long: Oh yeah.

[00:02:28] Stephen Fenech: Uh, Sam Neill. And Billy Zane, directed by Philip Noyce, a great Aussie director who’d go on to direct some other big blockbusters as well. Now this is a— when you describe this to someone, I’d call this like a horror thriller, like a psychological horror thriller.

[00:02:46] Trevor Long: I don’t know, I look— yeah, I still think horror element, horror loosely, but yeah, certainly a psychological thriller, no doubt.

[00:02:52] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, and it’s, it’s a very— like, there’s only 3 characters in it, right? So it’s very tight.

[00:02:56] Trevor Long: Casting was easy.

[00:02:57] Stephen Fenech: It’s sort of—

[00:02:58] Trevor Long: yeah, it’s really easy.

[00:02:59] Stephen Fenech: Well, I’ve got the 3. I see. So the, the they were literally on the ocean for 95% of the movie. Wow. Filming took almost 6 months. Jesus, it takes a lot. Coordinating on the ocean, I guess, is hard. You heard all the horror stories about films like Jaws and Waterworld, or that when it’s hard to film.

[00:03:19] Trevor Long: Okay, that’s extreme. But you know, staff costs a lot. It’s just 3 cast members.

[00:03:24] Stephen Fenech: That’s it. Uh, this is— was based on a novel There was a novel by Charles Williams called Dead Calm, inspired by the real-life murders of a family on a sailing ketch off Florida’s coast in 1961.

[00:03:39] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:03:40] Stephen Fenech: So the case involved a— there was a decorated veteran named Julian Harvey who was hired by a family to skipper a boat from Fort Lauderdale to the Bahamas, right? Uh, Harvey’s wife, the veteran’s wife, was also on the boat. Upon returning from the Bahamas, Harvey went on to murder his wife, hoping to collect an insurance policy, and 4 members of the family, of the Duperrault family, who hired him. Um, but he thought one of the— when he went along, killed everyone, thought one of the, uh, the daughters was, uh, had died, but they were asleep below deck. Uh, he scuttled the boat, so sank the boat. Assuming that she would drown. Terry Jo, her name’s Terry Jo. And, uh, he sort of— he got rescued, made up a great story about a storm and him being the sole survivor. But Terry Jo was found alive, brought back to Florida, and when Harvey, the, the guy who did— committed the murders— we found out she was alive, committed suicide.

[00:04:44] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:04:45] Stephen Fenech: And, uh, Terry Jo made a full recovery.

[00:04:48] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:04:48] Stephen Fenech: One surviving member of the family.

[00:04:49] Trevor Long: I don’t think she made a full mental recovery.

[00:04:51] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:04:51] Stephen Fenech: So that’s quite involved, the novel. So they took the sort of the concept of someone—

[00:04:56] Trevor Long: because when you said inspired by, I thought, okay, so it’s just the skippering of the boat and the deaths. But then the actual survival and stuff is— because you’ve taken that as well.

[00:05:04] Stephen Fenech: You got to remember what the Billy Zane character gets up to. So I think that’s pretty much on his side of it. Yeah. They’re inspired by it. Nice. Had you heard of this at all?

[00:05:13] Trevor Long: I’d heard of it.

[00:05:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:05:14] Trevor Long: And I think even, you know, in my pre-this podcast years, I could have named Nicole Kidman as being—

[00:05:20] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:05:20] Trevor Long: This being a movie star.

[00:05:22] Stephen Fenech: Well, the poster, famous poster is her. It’s like a little yacht and the ocean horizon and her face sideways on the horizon. That was the famous poster. Was that your thumbnail?

[00:05:32] Trevor Long: I don’t remember what it was actually. But you know why I don’t think I saw a thumbnail? Because it was arduous to find. You made me watch something on ABC iView for the first time in history.

[00:05:41] Stephen Fenech: Oh, there you have it. Yeah. I knew it was available. I don’t put a show on one platform. I don’t put a show up unless you can.

[00:05:46] Trevor Long: ABC, you made me sign up to the ABC. You owe me.

[00:05:50] Stephen Fenech: Sorry, mate. Well, I had this on, uh, it’s not on 4K yet. I had it on Blu-ray. Okay. Yeah. Um, Steven Spielberg watched this movie and liked Sam Neill so much he cast him in Jurassic Park.

[00:06:02] Trevor Long: Oh wow.

[00:06:02] Stephen Fenech: It was this movie he thought he’d be good, he’d be good for my movie.

[00:06:05] Trevor Long: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, yeah, he did, mate. He played a great role. Yeah. Um, you know, he’s a— because you could kind of tell, I mean, I assume She was the junior, you know, this is not, you’ll tell me later, but it’s not a first, it’s a very early movie. And he came with chops, you know, he had a bit of experience there.

[00:06:23] Stephen Fenech: Absolutely, yeah, there was an age difference and I will reveal that later on. Sam Neill also met his wife on this movie, Noriko Watanabe. She was, I think, on the production crew.

[00:06:34] Trevor Long: Well, she was definitely on the production crew because you want her in the movie.

[00:06:37] Stephen Fenech: Exactly. So she was part of the film and that’s where they met.

[00:06:40] Trevor Long: Wow, that’s lovely.

[00:06:41] Stephen Fenech: And still married. Excellent. Righto, this is your last exit before the freeway. If you have not watched Dead Calm, we are gonna really go right out to sea with this one.

[00:06:51] Trevor Long: Aye!

[00:06:51] Stephen Fenech: If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it through Fetch.

[00:06:55] Trevor Long: That’s right, Fetch is your all-in-one entertainment service. And this is a great example. Not every movie is available to rent or buy on any platform, including Fetch. But because Fetch has so many inputs, so yep, you could watch your free-to-air TV, you could watch included TV channels or other subscription channels. You can watch the streaming apps, Netflix, Stan, Disney+, Disney Plus, plus all of the local catch-up apps like NineNow, Seven Plus, Ten, ABC iview, and SBS On Demand. Well, when you do a universal search on your Fetch Box, it’ll show you where these items are. And this one instantly took me to ABC iview. And because I hadn’t used it before, I had to log in, but then it just took me straight into this movie, uh, after I’d logged in. So it was a seamless situation, easy to use, and it means there are 10,000 plus— in fact, 11,000 plus movies to watch. Buy, rent, enjoy on your Fetch Box through either the rental buy or through the subscriptions or free services that you’ve got access to. And it actually exposes you to how much free content there really is out there on, on the internet for you, because a lot of it’s available right there on Fetch. You can buy a Fetch Box from major retailers, get one from Telstra, or you can go to fetchtv.com.au.

First impressions — Brutal opening, Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill

[00:08:07] Stephen Fenech: We have now watched Dead Calm Just give us your first impressions.

[00:08:12] Trevor Long: I, you know, it’s a, it’s a slow burn, but very quick movie, but slow burn and just beautifully done. Like, I love the fact that I don’t know that any of it is truly predictable. You can get a sense of, well, he’s going to go over there, he can get a sense of some things. Yeah, but yeah, I like the fact, I like the fact that it, it keeps you, keeps you guessing a little bit. And, you know, I, I wouldn’t say Nicole Kidman’s Best movie performance. She’s excellent in it, but Sam Neill’s the star of this movie, I think, in terms of acting performance.

[00:08:41] Stephen Fenech: Billy Zane, he was good, the villain.

[00:08:43] Trevor Long: He’s pretty good. I like Sam.

[00:08:44] Stephen Fenech: And what is your social media post?

[00:08:46] Trevor Long: Oh, my social media post for this one, if you just stand by while I bring that up, is, uh, you might have heard of this early Nicole Kidman film Dead Calm, but like me, never seen it. Well, it’s worth a look. A brutal opening leads to a calm on the open water until— and the rest of it you need to see for yourself. Hidden on ABC iview, but it’s worth a watch.

[00:09:03] Stephen Fenech: Very good. I saw this at the movies. I was actually playing for Souths at the time.

[00:09:08] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:09:08] Stephen Fenech: And I remember watching this movie one month before I did my ACL. I did my ACL in July ’89. I remember seeing this in the theaters, May, I think early June. Right. And then a month later I’m out with 6 months on my knee. Many rewatches in the meantime. Yeah, I really enjoy this movie. It’s a bit— it’s a— we’ll talk about— thank God I got a big screen later, but it’s a beautiful, very well shot film.

[00:09:32] Trevor Long: Yeah, beautiful.

Cast — Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill, Billy Zane

[00:09:33] Stephen Fenech: Cast, not many. There’s only 3. Nicole Kidman plays Rae Ingram.

[00:09:37] Trevor Long: So where is this in her career?

[00:09:39] Stephen Fenech: Very early. Yeah, she goes on to play Moulin Rouge with Ewan McGregor, Baz Luhrmann’s film.

[00:09:46] Trevor Long: Right.

[00:09:46] Stephen Fenech: I think it’s the 25th anniversary this year, and we are probably not going to do that.

[00:09:52] Trevor Long: No, I’m happy with that.

[00:09:53] Stephen Fenech: Oh yeah, yeah. I tried to watch it, I couldn’t. It was just too cut, cut, cut.

[00:09:58] Trevor Long: Too— That Baz Luhrmann style.

[00:09:59] Stephen Fenech: It was going to give me— if you’re epileptic, don’t watch it.

[00:10:01] Trevor Long: Right, wow.

[00:10:02] Stephen Fenech: It’s really hard to watch. All Baz Luhrmann films like that. Most of them are like that. Nicole Kidman was also one of your favorites, The Others, which we’ve done. Okay, remember that one? Not really.

[00:10:11] Trevor Long: You don’t remember, do you?

[00:10:12] Stephen Fenech: Remember the woman with the two kids in the big house thinking she hears the ghosts?

[00:10:16] Trevor Long: Oh yes.

[00:10:17] Stephen Fenech: Okay, all right, don’t have to rewatch it. It’s a great watch, great listen. Listen to it on our show. Uh, she was also in The Hours. She won a Best Actress Oscar for The Hours. I think she plays an author. Her name doesn’t escape me right now. She was also in Eyes Wide Shut opposite her then-husband Tommy Boy Cruise. And we will do this. This is a Stanley Kubrick movie. It’s a bit out there, but it’s worth a check.

[00:10:44] Trevor Long: I’ve only seen certain scenes.

[00:10:46] Stephen Fenech: I bet you have. Yeah, I bet you have. Sam Neill, your man, plays John Ingram, and he was in, of course, Jurassic Park. He was in The Hunt for Red October, another favorite. Ah, yes, he was.

[00:10:57] Trevor Long: Favorite. You did love that one.

[00:10:59] Stephen Fenech: In my top 5 movies ever. Love that movie. He was also in Evil Angels. He played, you know, that was about the Chamberlains, Lindy Chamberlain. Oh, of course. What’s the husband’s name? Richard Chamberlain, was it Richard Chamberlain? Richard Chamberlain, was it? No, no, that’s an actress. That’s an actress. It’s Michael Chamberlain. His name was Michael. He plays Michael Chamberlain and looks a dead ringer for Michael Chamberlain.

[00:11:18] Trevor Long: Fair dinkum. Yeah, yeah.

[00:11:19] Stephen Fenech: All right. He was also in another movie called Event Horizon, which I’ve seen. It’s a sci-fi slash horror film. It’s, yeah, it’s not bad. Not bad. Billy Zane plays Hughie Warrener, and of course he was in Titanic. That was his, yeah, that’s his, that’s his, the first line of his obituary is he was in Titanic.

[00:11:38] Trevor Long: Right.

[00:11:38] Stephen Fenech: He was also in the Phantom, and it was for fans of the Phantom, uh, which is an international— like, internationally known character. Not quite your Batman, Superman level, but, uh, yeah, the movie was, was good, not great, right? It was, yeah, it was average.

[00:11:57] Trevor Long: Oh wow.

[00:11:58] Stephen Fenech: But you know what, good that they had to go.

[00:12:00] Trevor Long: They gave it a crack.

[00:12:01] Stephen Fenech: Did you also notice Billy Zane in Back to the Future Part II? He was part of Biff’s crew.

[00:12:08] Trevor Long: Oh, is he?

[00:12:09] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, one of the three guys. All right, he was one of those.

[00:12:12] Trevor Long: Okay.

[00:12:12] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah.

[00:12:13] Trevor Long: So next time I see that old mate, he was in the Titanic.

Sponsor — Hisense RGB Mini LED TVs

[00:12:16] Stephen Fenech: There you go. Alrighty, before we get to the top scenes, let us chat about Hisense. And you know what, Hisense, they’ve just released their new mini LED RGB TVs. RGB is their new tech— red, green, and blue. That means that the backlight not only produces the light, but also the color. So brightness and color from the same source and individually controlled. The result is amazingly accurate color and just an improved viewing experience. And the, the UR8 series— they’ve got the UR9, but there’s also the UR8, sort of slightly more affordable, available in sizes from as small as 55-inch all the way up to 85-inch. So this is the brand new 2026 technology at a more affordable price and has all the bells and whistles too. The RGB Mini LED, the Hi View AI engine, the native 180Hz game mode as well. Don’t forget, best screen in the house, you want to play your games. Also has anti-reflection and glare-free, so even if you go for the bigger TVs where there’s likely to be reflections in your bright viewing area, it’s not going to be a distraction at all. And the great thing about the Hisense TV2 is that out of the box it sounds great. 2.1.2 multi-channel sound right out of the box, no need to add a soundbar, it sounds great on its own. So if you are, if you are looking for a new TV to enjoy the movies that we talk about on the show, or your sport, or your games, Hisense has got you covered. Check out their new RGB Mini LED range now at hisense.com.au.

Scene breakdown — The opening tragedy, Saracen on the ocean

[00:13:54] Trevor Long: Okay, now the, the movie, for a movie that’s, it’s all about the water, this opens like I’m watching the wrong show. Like, for a minute there I went, wait, it’s got to start with all the, with all the logging into ABC, I wonder whether I’d actually started the right movie.

[00:14:08] Stephen Fenech: Well, you did start the right movie. Sam Neill is on the train. When he gets off the train, he’s obviously— he’s a Navy captain. Did you notice it says Australian Navy on his— all the other guys, remember? And he’s a captain and they’re saying, oh, you know, Merry Christmas, I think. Well, I wish you a Merry Christmas or something.

[00:14:23] Trevor Long: There’s a lot of that going on. But then there’s two guys that they’re standing there and it’s like, hang on, is he about to be arrested or what’s going on here?

[00:14:29] Stephen Fenech: Two police come up to him, mate. So it’s a rainy night and he’s a Royal Australian Naval Officer. And he’s expected to be greeted by his wife and child. Yep. But he’s instead greeted by two police officers, and he’s told some really bad news.

[00:14:46] Movie Audio: Yes, I did. I’m very sorry, but we’ll need a formal identification. Yes, of course. I have to warn you, most of the injuries were to the face, I’m afraid. The police said that my son died on impact. Is that correct?

[00:15:04] Movie Audio: Not quite.

[00:15:06] Movie Audio: Just after the ambulance arrived. And how long was that? He was unconscious, Captain. He wouldn’t have been aware of any pain. How long, doctor? About 20 minutes.

[00:15:18] Stephen Fenech: So yeah, pretty— uh, and as they’re talking, he walks into the ward where, uh, Ray, his wife, is, and she’s getting reflex testers and, and it’s got all tubes down her throat and everything. And so pretty horrific start.

[00:15:31] Trevor Long: Yeah, mate, brutal. Yeah, because it’s not just that moment there. Then they go through a bunch of flashbacks.

[00:15:37] Stephen Fenech: And yeah, so we see what the incident— which is his wife Ray’s driving the car there, little boy, cute little kid in the back, unbuckles himself, lets himself out. I think he’s— what did he drop, his teddy bear or something? And he’s reaching for it, she gets distracted, boom, crash, head-on crash. The child just goes straight through the windscreen and is killed. Yeah, but the next cut is to the wide open ocean. And to cope with this grief and heal her trauma, they decide to get out on their well-equipped sailing yacht, the Saracen.

[00:16:12] Trevor Long: And you get a sense that this is not just their idea, but so he talks here, I don’t know if it’s specifically in this clip about how this is what they said, it would take time and you’ve gotta heal, you’ve gotta let it happen. And so it’s kind of an interesting way of trying to move on from such a tragedy really.

[00:16:28] Movie Audio: We’ve got weeks and weeks.

[00:16:31] Movie Audio: Calm days, calm seas.

[00:16:34] Movie Audio: And we’re gonna get strong. And when you’re strong, then we’ll go home and we’ll start again.

[00:16:43] Stephen Fenech: Because she was having nightmares and flashbacks, and that’s where we hear him calming her down. Now, my little interjections are going to be called anchors. Okay, anchor here. Now, you’re asking about how old they both were. Yes. At the beginning of production, which was in May 1987, Neil— Sam Neil was 39. Nicole Kidman, how old do you reckon?

[00:17:09] Trevor Long: 21?

[00:17:10] Stephen Fenech: 19.

[00:17:10] Trevor Long: I was gonna say 19.

[00:17:12] Stephen Fenech: She was 19.

[00:17:13] Trevor Long: Yeah, she is super young in this. Like, every shot of her, you kind of go, wow, she is so young.

[00:17:19] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, she is.

[00:17:20] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:17:21] Stephen Fenech: Anyway, weeks pass, the ocean, uh, becomes, uh, glassy and still, uh, a real dead calm.

[00:17:27] Trevor Long: You get a real sense of the movie title there. Yeah.

[00:17:30] Stephen Fenech: Uh, Ray, still visibly fragile, uh, has has nightmares and he’s taken heavy prescription sedatives.

[00:17:39] Trevor Long: But old mate is constantly on guard. Like he’s basically her carer here. So he hears her go for the pill bottle and she’s shaking them out. He takes a few off her so she’s only taking what she’s meant to be getting and stuff like that.

[00:17:50] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s true. And don’t forget, he’s a naval captain. He’s an officer. So sailing this thing’s like nothing for him.

[00:17:55] Trevor Long: He’s at home here.

[00:17:56] Stephen Fenech: That’s fine.

[00:17:57] Trevor Long: He has no issue with this. He’s probably away at sea most of the year, but it’s her that wants to go home and him that’s, you know, guiding her through the ocean.

Scene breakdown — The Orpheus appears, Huey boards the Saracen

[00:18:04] Stephen Fenech: Now, uh, the silence is broken when John spots a black schooner named the Orpheus drifting on the horizon.

[00:18:14] Trevor Long: Did you know that term before this? Yeah, I did.

[00:18:16] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, come on. I swear I did, mate.

[00:18:17] Trevor Long: It’s a black sailing ship, okay? It’s just like a First Fleet style sailing ship. For people that don’t know what we’re talking about, if you haven’t watched the movie, it’s a First Fleet style sailing ship with masts.

[00:18:26] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah.

[00:18:27] Movie Audio: Black schooner to my east. Black schooner to my east. This is yacht Saracen, Victor Kilo 2762, position Position 1616 south, 17647 west. Do you read me?

[00:18:41] Stephen Fenech: Over.

[00:18:43] Trevor Long: So he’s trying to get in touch.

[00:18:45] Stephen Fenech: It’s what you do. Trying to say, okay, to your east, is everything okay? They, they, there doesn’t seem to be much signs of life, but my other anchor here is that tall ship. Okay, you want to call it a tall ship?

[00:18:54] Trevor Long: There you go, that’s what I’m looking for.

[00:18:55] Stephen Fenech: That was used was the Golden Plover, which is based at Airlie Beach. Really? Near the Barrier Reef.

[00:19:02] Trevor Long: Are you going to tell me later on where this was filmed?

[00:19:04] Stephen Fenech: Near the Whitsundays. It was filmed in the Whitsundays. Really? Yeah. That’s where Dead Calm was filmed, says it here. A full-size model ship was then burned. Remember later on they burned? And Golden Clover is still around today.

[00:19:16] Trevor Long: Oh, ’cause again, one of my questions, that was a really well-done burn scene because it didn’t, it looked real to me. I’m thinking that’s crazy good. But then you like, if it’s a, I wonder how big the model was, like 1/3, 1/8?

[00:19:29] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I think if they’re full-size, they said full-size model ship. Yep, yep. Burned in the film. That’s all spoiler alert, that happens later.

[00:19:37] Trevor Long: See, that’s the budget I want to know, how much they spend on that.

[00:19:39] Stephen Fenech: I don’t know the budget, but it’s been decent. Yeah, this was, I think, like Hollywood quality Australian film. Oh, sure. You know, like this is an Australian production, but Hollywood quality.

[00:19:48] Trevor Long: Just imagine going, we’ve got this script, you got Philip Noyce, it’s all good, right? It’s coming together. Here’s the budget, we’ve got the cast and the crew, we got this, we’re gonna have a boat, we’re gonna have a spare yacht, whatever. We got boats to go around that one. Also, we’re gonna need a big tall ship. Cool. You can rent that from Airlie Beach. But also we’re gonna need to build another one of them and burn it.

[00:20:07] Stephen Fenech: And set fire to it.

[00:20:07] Trevor Long: And someone’s like, so you want $150,000 to build something you’re gonna burn?

[00:20:12] Stephen Fenech: Like, it looks great, that one, Phil.

[00:20:13] Trevor Long: Mate, you look at that shot and you go, worth whatever they paid.

[00:20:16] Stephen Fenech: That’s the nature of Hollywood, isn’t it? They build something and then—

[00:20:19] Trevor Long: They literally burn money. Yeah, they wreck it.

[00:20:21] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s exactly right. But it’s there forever, mate, on film. That’s right. The deck of the schooner, tall ship, shows no signs of life. Radio calls go unanswered. But as he’s looking through the binoculars, sort of looking at the ship, then he tilts down and there’s a— sees a frantic guy rowing.

[00:20:38] Trevor Long: She thinks she spotted something, so he’s like, okay, let me look, and let me have a look.

[00:20:41] Stephen Fenech: And there’s a guy rowing a dinghy frantically away from the vessel towards them, and like so hard towards them he nearly runs into him.

[00:20:50] Trevor Long: He runs into the yacht.

[00:20:52] Stephen Fenech: He’s like, hang on, crazy. The man we find is an American named Huey Warren. This Billy Zane collapses on the deck of the Saracen in a state of terror.

[00:21:01] Movie Audio: How long have you had the boat?

[00:21:03] Movie Audio: 32 days out. We’re bound for Papeete. I’m heading for Fiji. I only bought her about 3 months ago. My plan had been to cruise around the Pacific, to sail around the Pacific.

[00:21:17] Trevor Long: I mean, who would have thought, right?

[00:21:19] Movie Audio: What’s your trouble, Mr. Werner?

[00:21:21] Trevor Long: Trouble?

[00:21:21] Movie Audio: Trouble that she’s going down, that’s the trouble. She didn’t sheet up on last morning.

[00:21:27] Movie Audio: You sure?

[00:21:29] Movie Audio: Yeah, she opened up all over.

[00:21:32] Movie Audio: How’s the water hit your engine?

[00:21:34] Movie Audio: My engine, radio, the fucking bulkhead, galleys, everything. My only chance was to try to reach you in the dinghy.

[00:21:48] Movie Audio: See what Mr. Warner needs, darling, and, um, get him to bed.

[00:21:55] Movie Audio: Where are you going?

[00:21:58] Movie Audio: Well, um, I ought to get over there. How many people on board?

[00:22:04] Movie Audio: Nobody.

[00:22:04] Movie Audio: I’m alone.

[00:22:05] Movie Audio: I’m it.

[00:22:08] Movie Audio: Trying to take her across the Pacific. Any around?

[00:22:16] Movie Audio: No.

[00:22:17] Movie Audio: There were 6 of us.

[00:22:22] Movie Audio: Yeah, this died 10 days ago. One by one, all happened in a day.

[00:22:33] Trevor Long: Pretty full-on. And by the way, I’m with John, didn’t like him from the get-go.

[00:22:37] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, you knew something was up there, and we find out that all 5 of his companions, according to Huey, died, uh, from botulism. Remember he mentioned—

[00:22:48] Trevor Long: I did talk about a canned salmon. Yeah, John again being— sounds like a wise man, suggests it might be botulism.

[00:22:55] Stephen Fenech: So here we go. John, uh, a veteran seaman of 25 years, is like you said, skeptical of Hughie’s hysterical story that everything was ruined by the water.

[00:23:06] Movie Audio: There must be something.

[00:23:10] Movie Audio: Oh, give me a break, Liam. You know what I had to do?

[00:23:14] Movie Audio: I can guess.

[00:23:15] Movie Audio: You can guess? They’ve been dead for days, man. You know what that does to a body, pal?

[00:23:20] Movie Audio: You’ve got to try and stop thinking about it.

[00:23:22] Movie Audio: I mean, I— I can’t go back, all right? I can’t go back there right now, ever.

[00:23:32] Stephen Fenech: So his antennas are way up now.

[00:23:35] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:23:35] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. But while Hughie sleeps off his exhaustion below deck, John locks him in the cabin.

[00:23:42] Trevor Long: As I didn’t notice originally that he was locked in. I just, you know, they sent him off to sleep.

[00:23:47] Stephen Fenech: But also too, he finds in his, a little piece of paper. I think he had like something.

[00:23:53] Trevor Long: There’s a bunch of things in there. One of them is a newspaper clipping that I think raises his suspicions.

[00:23:57] Movie Audio: Interesting stuff here. Listen to this. South Sea Island cruise. 4 young women wanted for photo assignment. Must be attractive and broad-minded.

[00:24:12] Movie Audio: You don’t like him, do you?

[00:24:16] Movie Audio: I hadn’t really thought about it.

[00:24:18] Movie Audio: John, imagine what he’s been through.

[00:24:21] Movie Audio: Sorry, Ray, whichever way I turn it, I just can’t swallow it.

[00:24:26] Movie Audio: Any reason?

[00:24:27] Movie Audio: Not really. Just 25 years at sea.

Scene breakdown — John boards the Orpheus, discovers the horror

[00:24:32] Stephen Fenech: So his gut is pretty right, it’s quite spot on. Uh, ignoring Ray’s unease, he decides to jump in Huey’s little dinghy, rows over to the drifting orca, and makes it very clear to Ray to load the gun.

[00:24:45] Trevor Long: That’s how, that’s how nervous he is about this story.

[00:24:47] Stephen Fenech: He says, uh, leaving his— so he’s left Ray alone with their dog Ben, their little doggy.

[00:24:53] Trevor Long: Uh, don’t call him a little doggy, mate, because that gets hard later on.

[00:24:55] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I know. You never— yeah, anyway, John boards the flooded Orpheus, wading through water, discovers a house of horrors. No evidence of food poisoning. Remember, he opens the door, there’s like red bodies coming out.

[00:25:11] Trevor Long: Yes. Do you know what’s really fascinating about that is, because when you— when they look into that kind of hallway, there’s, there’s 3 doors, one in front, 2 each side. Yeah. And I could see the, the tainted water, the bloody, just, just slightly bloody. Yeah. Coming out of one door. And I thought, hang on a minute, what’s going on here? And then it starts coming out of the other door. And then he opens it up and like, oh, Yeah, it was kind of— and I’m not suggesting I’m psychic, I’m— I just think it’s amazing how they plant little things like that to make it real. Oh yeah, do you know what I mean? Like, absolutely, to, to go, hang on a minute, if there’s bodies in here and people have been killed, there’s going to be blood, so we need to, you know, show that as well.

[00:25:44] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, uh, so yeah, it’s pretty, uh, we’re seeing brutally mutilated and hacked up corpses of the crew. Yeah, and all everyone else. But he manages to restore the boat’s generator. And that triggers a video playback.

[00:25:59] Trevor Long: It kind of brings on the power.

[00:26:00] Stephen Fenech: So the generator’s on.

[00:26:02] Trevor Long: So there was a VHS TV playing.

[00:26:04] Stephen Fenech: Just so happens to be a little tape in there playing, showing basically that what started as a cheerful vacation, topless women and they’re taking photos and you hear the photographer like Hughie’s making suggestions of stronger, saying, mate, shut up and let me.

[00:26:20] Trevor Long: Yeah, it’s like the photographer is like, Hughie, you’re here to drive the boat. Do your job. I’ll take the photos. But Hughie thinks he’s better than the photographer already.

[00:26:28] Stephen Fenech: So, you know, it shows that Hughie’s actually a psycho.

[00:26:32] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:26:32] Stephen Fenech: And he suffered, suffered a psychotic break, let’s just say.

[00:26:35] Trevor Long: Let’s call it that.

Scene breakdown — Huey seizes the Saracen, Ray held hostage

[00:26:36] Stephen Fenech: Back on the Saracen, Hughie wakes up, breaks out of his locked cabin, and attacks Ray, knocking her unconscious. Now John’s rowing back at this point in a panic, and he was yelling out, jump off, jump off, to get off the boat, right? But she’s unconscious, and as he’s coming towards it, he tries to jump back on the deck, misses it, and he’s off. The motors are on and he’s off. Yeah. So John rows drives the boat back to the Orpheus and sees—

[00:27:02] Trevor Long: just for that moment, hang on a minute. So we’re in the middle of the Pacific here, right? Yeah. Or we’re in the middle of the ocean with a ship that’s just sinking. You’re like, okay, there’s a big ship there that’s sinking, you’re on a bloody dinghy, and your yacht is now charging someone else’s—

[00:27:16] Stephen Fenech: someone’s direction with your wife on board.

[00:27:17] Trevor Long: Could you imagine the feeling of isolation, even being a seasoned seaman like that? Like, it’s unbelievable.

[00:27:24] Stephen Fenech: It’s— so it’s, it’s set up. So that’s the real sort of plot point that, okay, geez, there’s a situation here.

[00:27:30] Trevor Long: And you know, you know, he’s an experienced sailor. So we’ve got a sense that he’s now going to go back and he’s going to work. So you got that. What I mean by the predictability earlier when I talked about it, like that’s predictable. He’s going to go to the big boat and try to work it out.

[00:27:40] Stephen Fenech: He’s going to go and try to sort it out, which is what he does.

[00:27:41] Trevor Long: But that, that broad, I think the way it positions your mind at this point is great. Yeah.

[00:27:46] Stephen Fenech: Well, he’s left alone literally in the middle of nowhere. Back on. So John rows back to the Orpheus. His boat sailing away. But John gets back on board and he realizes he’s trapped on a dying ship here. There’s no working engine at this point, no sails, a flooded hull, and it’s, uh, going down. But thankfully he’s got his naval engineering skills here. He rigs the bilge pumps, plugs structural leaks, and tries to repair the engine to give chase, knowing he’s in a race against time. He’s got to get this boat working if he’s any hope of following them.

[00:28:23] Trevor Long: That’s right. And I think there’s a bit, there’s a bit here where you go, well, oh mate, and especially if you go with the based on a true story, so We’ve got this, what they call the split narratives too.

[00:28:30] Stephen Fenech: So there’s John and then there’s Ray on the boat.

[00:28:33] Trevor Long: And so you think about that original story this is based on, that the bloke scuttled the ship, right? So you can theorize that the idea here was that old mate had scuttled the ship, but, you know, not quick enough. It hasn’t sunk yet. But John’s smart enough to know, well, a ship is not built to sink easily. You know, there’s different ballast and all those kind of areas. So he’s smart enough to be able to go, okay, how can I try and bring this back? And that physical exertion of him Yeah, you know, pumping the bilge, pumping water out is remarkable. It’s really well done.

[00:29:00] Stephen Fenech: Like, luckily, like, that was you or me, mate, we’d be dead. We’d be, we’d be sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

[00:29:04] Trevor Long: Plenty of those moments.

[00:29:05] Stephen Fenech: He’s a naval engineer, so it’s in his wheelhouse.

[00:29:08] Trevor Long: Though I will say, I think one of the underlying little plot points or stories or thoughts of this movie is just what absolute adversity does to the human character. Because there’s a few moments which we’ll mention where it’s like, exactly, like, this is the end of you, or you need to do this. And there you go.

[00:29:28] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, right. Uh, Wake— uh, Ray’s Wake— woken up on the Saracen and finds herself held hostage.

[00:29:36] Movie Audio: Where is he?

[00:29:37] Stephen Fenech: He’s gone.

[00:29:44] Movie Audio: What have you done to him?

[00:29:46] Movie Audio: Nothing.

[00:29:49] Movie Audio: He went aboard her.

[00:29:53] Movie Audio: We’ve got to go back.

[00:29:55] Movie Audio: Look, he’s only got himself to blame, right? I mean, he should have trusted me. But that’s always been my problem.

[00:30:02] Movie Audio: Don’t you understand?

[00:30:04] Movie Audio: Please don’t shout.

[00:30:06] Movie Audio: As I was saying, that’s always been one of my problems. I can never tell people the real motive.

[00:30:10] Movie Audio: Okay.

[00:30:10] Trevor Long: Too late?

[00:30:11] Movie Audio: Let’s just turn the boat around.

[00:30:17] Movie Audio: Uh, where shall we go?

[00:30:20] Movie Audio: Turn around!

[00:30:21] Movie Audio: Hey, look, you’re being very aggressive, Ray. That could be a real problem on a small boat. I’ve seen it happen before. It doesn’t work.

[00:30:29] Stephen Fenech: So she’s now appealing to his humanity, begging for him to—

[00:30:34] Trevor Long: there is a very quick up and down in there in the way that she reacts to him and treats him. I don’t know that it’s perfectly scripted, if I’m honest, but you get a sense of it’s an evolving story for her, and she’s trying to work out how to deal with with him.

[00:30:47] Movie Audio: I just need to know if that boat is sinking.

[00:30:52] Movie Audio: Sinking?

[00:30:55] Movie Audio: Well, past tense would do, but— oh God, but, uh, yeah, yes, it is. Why, uh, don’t you believe me?

[00:31:04] Movie Audio: Yeah, yeah, I believe you. Of course I do. That’s why we’ve got to go back. Back?

[00:31:11] Movie Audio: Uh-huh, to get John What, you mean back there?

[00:31:14] Movie Audio: Yeah, right now. Uh-huh.

[00:31:18] Movie Audio: No, Ray, no, okay? That’s over. That’s all over. So why don’t we just erase start one from memory and start again, please? There’s no going back, Ray.

[00:31:28] Trevor Long: See, now, spoiler alert, but you’ve watched the movie by now, folks. We’ve given you the last exit. But it’s at this point where I go, babe, I don’t want to break it to you, you’ve got something he would want, so you should probably play on that. I’m literally thinking that at this point. You think so?

[00:31:42] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Yeah? I’m like, this guy, He’s so emotionally disturbed.

[00:31:46] Trevor Long: Yeah, that he— because you see him basically bipolar, go from being, you know, this, you know, subtle, we’re friends, to this really aggressive. So there’s something there. Honestly, at this point I’m thinking, love, I don’t want to break to you, there’s one way to, you know, capture this bloke.

[00:31:59] Stephen Fenech: One thing’s obvious, uh, he’s totally unhinged. Unhinged.

[00:32:03] Movie Audio: What about those people, huh? There wasn’t any food poisoning. What’s there?

[00:32:17] Movie Audio: You want to do this now?

[00:32:20] Movie Audio: All right.

[00:32:22] Movie Audio: They tried to kill me, Ray.

[00:32:24] Stephen Fenech: They tried to suck the light out of me, if you could possibly grasp that concept.

[00:32:29] Movie Audio: Who were—

[00:32:30] Stephen Fenech: All of them.

[00:32:32] Movie Audio: Look, nobody wants to kill you.

[00:32:36] Stephen Fenech: Repeat that.

[00:32:38] Movie Audio: I said nobody—

[00:32:39] Movie Audio: No, say the words, Ray. Come on. You mean I just imagined it?

[00:32:42] Movie Audio: No.

[00:32:43] Movie Audio: No!

[00:32:44] Movie Audio: No. I just mean that it must be a mistake. Mistake?

[00:32:48] Movie Audio: A mistake, lady? The mistake is that you think I’m making this up!

[00:32:52] Movie Audio: No, no, no, I don’t.

[00:32:54] Movie Audio: You sound so much like them, Ray. It’s scary. Now, they were trying to kill me. Do you understand?

[00:33:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, spooky. He’s definitely off the hook there.

[00:33:06] Trevor Long: And the anger, the sheer aggression from him is pretty wild.

[00:33:09] Stephen Fenech: And like you said, he’s gone from 0 to 100 and back again in no time. Instantly. Meanwhile, back on the Orpheus, John is watching the videos of Hughie clashing with his now dead shipmates.

[00:33:20] Trevor Long: So he’s really starting to get a picture of the whole thing. Yeah.

[00:33:22] Stephen Fenech: And he manages to get the engine started and sets a course to catch up with the Sarah Sanderson.

[00:33:27] Trevor Long: Because again, remember, he’s a sailor. He’s plotting points.

[00:33:29] Stephen Fenech: He was drawing lines and writing things down. He looked at the compass, even though the ship ship was just floating.

[00:33:34] Trevor Long: As soon as he got on board, he looked at the compass and the time, and he made those points. I don’t know how you do it. See, that’s the thing where it’s like, if this was you or I, I’d be like, yeah, I don’t know, the sun went up that way. Uh, that’s about as smart as I would be. I’d be like, okay, I need to look where the sun is.

[00:33:47] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you’re definitely not a seaman, are you, mate? No, me neither.

[00:33:50] Trevor Long: No way.

Scene breakdown — Radio contact, Ray’s plan to drug Huey

[00:33:52] Stephen Fenech: Meanwhile, back on the Saracen, Ray has snuck to the radio and establishes a brief one-way connection with John.

[00:33:58] Trevor Long: Yeah, because he’s sitting on the, on the Orpheus trying to fix things. So he’s again—

[00:34:03] Stephen Fenech: so the radio is on, but he can’t transmit.

[00:34:06] Trevor Long: He doesn’t know, right? Click. He’s just trying to solder eye and fix this thing. But, but I think during this clip he realizes, wait a minute, she can’t hear me, but she can tell that I’m here.

[00:34:17] Movie Audio: Yeah, yeah. I’m not reading you. Is that you, John?

[00:34:27] Trevor Long: One click.

[00:34:30] Stephen Fenech: One for yes, two for no.

[00:34:31] Movie Audio: Are you hurt?

[00:34:32] Movie Audio: You told me you had no trouble.

[00:34:35] Trevor Long: Two clicks, you assume it’s no because he’s not hurt.

[00:34:38] Movie Audio: It’s sinking, isn’t it?

[00:34:39] Trevor Long: I like this because you work it out.

[00:34:43] Movie Audio: So that’s it?

[00:34:45] Stephen Fenech: No, it’s not sinking.

[00:34:47] Movie Audio: You’re not hurt, and no, the boat isn’t sinking. Is that right? Yes. Are you following? Yes. John, what should I do?

[00:35:02] Trevor Long: Yes or no questions only, love. Jesus, what are you doing?

[00:35:07] Movie Audio: Do you want me to stop the boat? Yes. I don’t know how.

[00:35:17] Trevor Long: Sleep with him.

[00:35:21] Movie Audio: Look, don’t worry. I’ll work it out.

[00:35:28] Trevor Long: God, she’s young. She’s so young in this. Her voice.

[00:35:31] Stephen Fenech: In that clip though, I think towards the end, he says, are you sinking? How many hours? Is it 4, 5, 6? And he goes click, click for, he clicks for 6.

[00:35:39] Trevor Long: It would have been easier, by the way, just say click for the number of hours that you, maybe. That would have been a lot easier.

[00:35:43] Stephen Fenech: So what Ray does is go down and stop, get the key. Is that the key?

[00:35:47] Trevor Long: She turns off like a fuel line, then she grabs the key to the engine.

[00:35:49] Stephen Fenech: And it’s got like a wooden paddle on it so it’ll float.

[00:35:52] Trevor Long: She thinks she’s gonna throw it in the water, but.

[00:35:53] Stephen Fenech: She does throw it in the water and the dog gets it. And the dog gets it. And then he goes, come again? Then it was like, who’s the dog going to get back to anyway? Now here’s the part that you like where you—

[00:36:05] Trevor Long: he’s really— she’s really— I’m just saying it’s, it’s a clear path for her.

[00:36:10] Stephen Fenech: Well, look, you know what, let’s, let’s get him in a space a little bit, all right?

[00:36:13] Trevor Long: Like, I think at the time you’re thinking you need to disarm your, your hostage taker.

[00:36:18] Stephen Fenech: If that was, uh, anyone who’s sort of more rational wouldn’t have fallen for it. Like, Hughie’s a nutcase, right?

[00:36:26] Trevor Long: So that’s a good point. He’s a—

[00:36:28] Stephen Fenech: anyway, yeah. So if you’re— if he’s as irrational as him, you would believe that she’s attracted— he would believe that she’s attracted to him.

[00:36:34] Trevor Long: And yes, that’s a good point.

[00:36:36] Stephen Fenech: So she plays into that. Yes. So, and then some.

[00:36:40] Trevor Long: And then so she’s— so maybe she needed that.

[00:36:43] Stephen Fenech: She’s in survival mode still, right? But she’s gonna use her feminine wiles to disarm him.

[00:36:47] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:36:47] Stephen Fenech: She acts compliant, feigns attraction.

[00:36:50] Trevor Long: FYI, ladies, will work every time.

[00:36:52] Stephen Fenech: Initiates an intimate encounter.

[00:36:54] Trevor Long: Yes, she does.

[00:36:55] Stephen Fenech: Yes. And here’s my other anchor. Yes. Now, when you’re during this scene where she’s laying on top of him and takes off her shirt and he rips off her shorts. Yeah. He ripped off her shorts for real. You go through his sheer strength. These weren’t cutaway breakaway shorts. He went and from his sheer strength without any alterations to make them easier to rip, he gone whooshka.

[00:37:16] Trevor Long: What a movie fact that you’ve just brought out there, mate. Wow.

[00:37:19] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. And then Nicole Kidman’s full nudeski. Yeah. On top of him there.

[00:37:23] Trevor Long: There you go.

[00:37:23] Stephen Fenech: But then she says, she uses a bathroom break as an excuse to slip away to retrieve a shotgun stored on the deck.

[00:37:31] Trevor Long: Which she hadn’t preloaded or put together. No. This would have been a great time to blow his head off if you’d have preloaded the gun.

[00:37:38] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Blow it. I didn’t know where we are with the blowing.

[00:37:41] Trevor Long: Okay.

[00:37:41] Stephen Fenech: Righty-o. So, but the plan goes awry though, because her dog Ben follows her onto the deck and starts barking. Yes. And alerts Huey.

[00:37:51] Trevor Long: But she’s smart.

[00:37:52] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, she grabs a pack of cigarettes, she puts it away and grabs the smokes. That’s it. And then returns pretending she just went up for the smoke. To survive, she goes through with having uncomfortable sex with Huey. Afterwards, she prepares him a glass of lemonade heavily spiked with her prescription sedatives. Looks good.

[00:38:17] Movie Audio: Do you want some? No. Oh, come on, you do. Come on, have it. Yeah, now look, do you want it?

[00:38:29] Movie Audio: I want—

[00:38:31] Movie Audio: thank you.

[00:38:33] Stephen Fenech: And he scolds it down.

[00:38:35] Movie Audio: I better go and get dressed. Keep it. Make me another one.

[00:38:42] Stephen Fenech: So Australian she’s sounding, eh? There, don’t you reckon? Well, she’s an Aussie, good luck to her. Yeah, although, you know, you know where she was born? I know, Honolulu. Ah, yeah, she was born in Hawaii. Well, there you go, born in America. So yeah, Huey drinks lemonade, uh, but notices Ray’s suspicious movements just as a big storm hits. Uh, Huey discovers that she’s trying to retrieve the shotgun. Yeah, violent struggle ensues, uh, on the, on the deck. Uh, heavily impaired and drowsy, Huey gets the shotgun but blinded by the drugs, shoots out the radio instead of Ray.

[00:39:19] Trevor Long: Yeah, which is just as bad, to be honest.

Scene breakdown — John escapes the sinking Orpheus, Ray turns back

[00:39:20] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Meanwhile, back on the Orpheus, which is going down, the storm’s broken the main mast, and the mast has fallen down and blocked the door for his exit on the deck.

[00:39:29] Trevor Long: Remember that?

[00:39:29] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. And he couldn’t get out. He’s thinking, Jesus, trapped down there. So he is now trying to, trying to work your way out there, finds a little piece of pipe so he can still breathe as the water’s—

[00:39:41] Trevor Long: yeah, like he’s trying to hold on to it, but it breaks. And so he realized this pipe could be going to the surface, so he pushes his breath through it to push anything out of it. Fortunately, he didn’t breathe it in because there was cockroaches in it. And then that’s the way he gets air.

[00:39:52] Stephen Fenech: Unbelievable. So he does, though— I remember when he was breathing in his tube, a little fish swims past him and he goes, “Hang on a minute, there must be a hole down here for the fish to get in.” He finds that hole, punches his way out, and boom, gets back to the surface.

[00:40:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:40:08] Stephen Fenech: So what he does though, he’s clinging to a piece of wooden debris in the water and he uses a flare gun to ignite the remaining above water wreckage of the Orpheus. Yeah.

[00:40:21] Trevor Long: Pours petrol, gets it going.

[00:40:23] Stephen Fenech: And it’s up in flames.

[00:40:24] Trevor Long: ‘Cause he’s thinking, well, this is gonna make a lot of fire.

[00:40:27] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:40:27] Trevor Long: And someone will see. It’s essentially a big flare of its own.

[00:40:30] Stephen Fenech: Big flare, big signal.

[00:40:31] Trevor Long: He doesn’t use a flare gun, he uses a lantern. ‘Cause he pours petrol and then throws a lantern and creates a flare from the boat. He uses a flare gun.

[00:40:38] Stephen Fenech: Later.

[00:40:39] Trevor Long: That’s great.

[00:40:39] Stephen Fenech: Yes, Ray flees below deck, locks herself inside the master bedroom with a spear gun, and he’s firing through the door.

[00:40:47] Trevor Long: Don’t they— doesn’t this, you know, skip ahead a couple of points, but doesn’t this go against your theory that they never heard a killer dog? Yeah, well, because I knew it as soon as she shot— you heard it, you heard it, you know. But as soon as she shot it, I thought she shot the first time, I thought, oh no, don’t keep doing that because and then it happened.

[00:41:08] Stephen Fenech: Well, what establishes it before— do you remember during the film that he can actually put the handle down and he can be that tall? Yeah, yeah. And so when she’s shooting and then you hear a little, little yelp, and then you think, oh shit.

[00:41:20] Trevor Long: Later on they show it. I mean, come on.

[00:41:21] Stephen Fenech: Well, now what happens, she comes out the door and then he pops out at her, and then the door closes behind her. He’s choking her, the door closes behind her, and there he is impaled on the back of the door. Yeah, and yeah, so shocker. But yeah, you don’t normally kill dogs in movies, mate. But yeah, like, you know what, like Fatal Attraction, remember they killed the rabbit? And in this one, the unfortunate, the dog copped it.

[00:41:45] Trevor Long: But yeah, had to be done.

[00:41:47] Stephen Fenech: I’m sorry, not nice. Uh, anyway, as he’s choking her, remember the, uh, he’s got his hands around her neck, but then the drugs really kick in and he’s sort of knocked out. She ties him up, remember, he’s unconscious, she ties him up with with rope, and she turns the Saracen around and braves the— the storm’s getting worse— to sail back to John’s last known coordinates. Yeah. Uh, Hughie wakes up though, using a broken shard of mirror, cuts the bonds and creeps up on Ray at the helm. Yeah. Uh, Ray grabs the harpoon again, shoots him in the shoulder and knocks him overboard. Maybe she, she gets the little, uh, inflatable. Yeah. Pops him on and says, see ya.

[00:42:26] Trevor Long: He’s like, see you later, bro.

[00:42:27] Stephen Fenech: You’re out of here. And then he’s off. Uh, but then she spots the fire. She, she spots the faint glow of flames on the nighttime horizon. She steers the Saracen toward the fire, successfully rescues an exhausted and freezing John from the water. Another anchor here for you: before she filmed the movie, she took sailing lessons.

[00:42:48] Trevor Long: Oh nice.

[00:42:49] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, and, uh, the— she, she knew how to operate the whole thing. Yeah, during that sequence near the end, she is actually piloting the yacht.

[00:42:59] Trevor Long: Really?

[00:43:00] Stephen Fenech: All that time?

[00:43:01] Trevor Long: Good on her.

Scene breakdown — The ending, Huey returns one last time

[00:43:02] Stephen Fenech: So the next morning, the ocean is calm again, and they see the life raft that Ray dumped Hughie into the night before. And they grab a couple of flares and fire it into it, burn it up, and see you later. Yep. Whether he’s in it or not, you don’t know. Well, it’s—

[00:43:17] Trevor Long: yeah, well, you’re walking— I’m like, that’s just like a symbolic thing for her to really just farewell it and say goodbye.

[00:43:22] Stephen Fenech: But it’s—

[00:43:23] Trevor Long: get out. It’s also partly because it’s like, we should check, but He clearly would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean. You know, he would have fallen off because he wasn’t attached.

[00:43:29] Stephen Fenech: You would think that, wouldn’t you? Obviously. So, you know, believing the nightmare is over, Ray sits on the sun-drenched deck. John goes below to prepare breakfast, and he’s shampooing her hair with fresh water, and it’s all lovely.

[00:43:43] Movie Audio: Fresh water? It’s extravagant.

[00:43:48] Movie Audio: No, you want to hear extravagant?

[00:43:50] Movie Audio: Yeah.

[00:43:52] Movie Audio: A steaming hot bath that you can slip into up to your ears with coffee and a croissant.

[00:44:01] Movie Audio: Croissant.

[00:44:04] Movie Audio: Covered in bitter dark marmalade.

[00:44:10] Movie Audio: Oh, and mango. Really, really cold.

[00:44:14] Movie Audio: Now you’re talking.

[00:44:16] Stephen Fenech: So here’s the kettle going off and he wanders off. But I love this, this is a really great shot where she’s sort of reclining with her wet hair and you see these two hands come and start massaging in here.

[00:44:28] Trevor Long: Clearly not John’s because they’re covered in blood, covered in blood and muck.

[00:44:31] Stephen Fenech: And it’s a barely alive Huey, uh, somehow survived the life raft, boarded the boat again. I love the shot too where the camera pans to the side of the deck and there’s a bloody handprint on the side.

[00:44:41] Trevor Long: Did you notice that? You kind of knew He knew it.

[00:44:43] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, of course, from the bloody handprint. And he begins violently strangling her. She’s gasping for air, fighting back frantically. John comes out with— holding her brickie, sees the struggle through the safe like a silhouette. Yeah, yeah. And then he grabs a flare and aims it directly at Huey, and bingo! Not just directly to Huey, he gets him right in the face, gets him in the mouth, and, uh, killing him in a plume of smoke. He drops into the ocean.

[00:45:07] Trevor Long: And it’s a pretty, pretty Hollywood, uh, death there by—

[00:45:10] Stephen Fenech: death by Yeah. So she couldn’t kill him, but he does straight away.

[00:45:14] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:45:14] Stephen Fenech: See ya.

[00:45:16] Trevor Long: So he tumbles off. But that is also like a— like the point is she didn’t load the gun because she didn’t have the fear or the distrust of him.

[00:45:24] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:45:25] Trevor Long: She could have killed him on the first moment if she loaded the gun. But also, does she have that in her?

[00:45:31] Stephen Fenech: Perhaps, John.

[00:45:31] Trevor Long: If it was the other way around and she had have gone—

[00:45:34] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:45:34] Trevor Long: If she’d have gone off to the boat to check it out and come back and report back to John, we’d be like, mate, why’d you make her row all the way over there? But then if he’d have noticed anything, he would have shot his head off, right? Absolutely. So different story.

[00:45:44] Stephen Fenech: Totally right. Now, John and Ray, they’re battered, but they’ve survived. They’re holding each other tightly as the Saracen sails away on the open horizon. Now, one final anchor here: that ending was, uh, was not the original ending, right? The film originally ending with Ray bashing Hughie in the head with the spear gun and throwing him into the ocean on the inflatable mattress. Yeah, uh, so he’s floating in the distance before turning.

[00:46:16] Trevor Long: The idea was to add the extra bit.

[00:46:18] Stephen Fenech: Well, the last shot of the movie was Ray hugging John and telling him she loved him and that she hadn’t given up hope, so that, you know, she’s back to, you know, she wants to resume her life. Yes, but test audiences weren’t satisfied with Hughie’s ambiguous fate. Is he dead? Is he not dead? And, uh, dead. Well, the implication was Ray had killed him with the blows to the head, so you’re thinking, is he dead or not? No, not proven beyond doubt.

[00:46:45] Trevor Long: He’d also been speared through the shoulder, and that doesn’t last long without medical attention.

[00:46:49] Stephen Fenech: Maybe, but they reshot it. The studio head said, mate, we don’t want audiences spreading bad word of mouth here, we want a better ending. And they re— the one you see ending we saw was a reshoot. They came back and shot it.

[00:47:03] Trevor Long: No wonder it took 6 months. They would have to go back.

Trivia, plot holes, speaker workout & themes

[00:47:05] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, there you go, there you go. Now there’s only— it’s not many much audio in this movie, but there’s one line. I’ve got one favorite line in this one. Uh, remember she was asking, what day is it?

[00:47:15] Movie Audio: What day is it today?

[00:47:17] Movie Audio: I don’t know, Thursday or Friday, one of those days with an R in it.

[00:47:21] Stephen Fenech: One of those days with an R in it. I thought it was funny. Now, uh, how did that happen? A little plot hole here. Um, do you remember when Huey uh, when he comes onto the boat, John rows back to the schooner in his little dinghy. Uh, the rowboat’s visible tied to the schooner, so when he gets off the schooner that’s sinking, he’s sitting on a raft. Why doesn’t he use the robot?

[00:47:45] Trevor Long: I know.

[00:47:46] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I was thinking, why didn’t he use the robot? Yeah, that’s a question. Anyway, uh, the speaker workout. Now this works two ways here. There’s a lot of parts of this movie where there’s no sound.

[00:47:56] Trevor Long: Yes, absolutely.

[00:47:57] Stephen Fenech: The lack of sound cuts to the come. But also too, like, I think the sounds when he discovers the bodies on the schooner and, uh, yes, the battles on the boat, the sound of the water like rushing out of doors and stuff like that is pretty well done. Very good. If you’ve got a good surround setup, you hear a lot of, you know, a boat makes all sort of creaking noises. Yes, the creaking of the wood. Yeah, you hear that very much, especially on the old schooner. Uh, in, in my theater, it was going everywhere. Um, thank God I got a big screen. Well, how stunning are the ocean shots?

[00:48:25] Trevor Long: It was beautiful, especially the wide ones with not much in it.

[00:48:28] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I like the aerial shots. Remember there was a couple years ago here and the schooner here and the rowboat in between? It was really nicely done. Yeah, yeah. Okay, the business now. The, the facts here about what do you do if you need to help if someone’s in distress at sea? What are the protocols? So according to international maritime law, the captain of any vessel is legally obligated to render assistance, okay, to anyone at distress, in distress at the sea provided it does not endanger their own ship or crew. Right. So a private yacht rescue, you’d have to recover the guy or the person, raise the alarm, emergency communication. So if you— if once the person’s on board, you’d have to establish, broadcast your position and your situation. And the other bit is first aid and handover. So you’d administer first aid, and then once the— whoever comes out to you, then hand the— hand that person over. That’s assuming that international maritime law— assuming you’re not currently searching for an or anything like that. Yeah, it’s a good— nice one, mate. Uh, if this movie was made today, I don’t think it would be much different. There’d be more advanced gear.

[00:49:41] Trevor Long: Well, I know, I thought the gear was pretty—

[00:49:42] Stephen Fenech: like, it had the radar on everything.

[00:49:44] Trevor Long: So I reckon they’d have SATCOMs or something, but the same thing, all you need is one gunshot. Yeah, no, that’s dead to kill it, right?

[00:49:51] Stephen Fenech: If you remade it, like, she’d have a satellite phone and he’d have different—

[00:49:54] Trevor Long: knock it out of a hand or something, or smash it or something.

[00:49:56] Stephen Fenech: Exactly. Yeah, every day is a school day. What’s our lesson here? Don’t let people on your boat.

[00:50:02] Trevor Long: Yeah, especially ones that are aggressively rowing towards you and bashing into you. Like, it just— yeah, that whole moment was like, mate, you just stop off, just relax, sit down, relax, pal.

[00:50:11] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah. But you know, that’s the whole thing about, you know, it’s dealing with— she’s— don’t forget, she’s grieving grief.

[00:50:18] Trevor Long: And one way to get over the grief of your dead child is to go through another horrific incident.

[00:50:23] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, Jesus. Well, they were mean. They were looking to emotion, to ice isolate themselves both physically and emotionally. They want to be alone. So yeah, civilization versus isolation. Uh, would you go sort of masculinity, sort of control, masculine control, trying— him trying to take over?

[00:50:41] Trevor Long: Yeah, there’s a bit— lots of things to explore. The other, the other thing is, you know, maybe trust your partner’s gut instinct.

[00:50:47] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, trust your partner. Trust the guy. He’s a sailor, for God’s sake. Trust him.

[00:50:51] Trevor Long: Load the gun.

[00:50:52] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s the theme, load the gun. Best use of the pause button. Now, did you notice at the start he’s writing his position? He’s 16 degrees 16 minutes south, 176 degrees 47 minutes west. Uh, that would have put the Saracen in the South Pacific Islands of Tonga. Okay, the 65 nautical miles southwest of the Tongan island of Ua, 350 miles east of the island of Fiji.

[00:51:18] Trevor Long: There you go.

[00:51:19] Stephen Fenech: Both, uh, on the South Sea Island Cruises, uh, and Huey’s South Sea Island Cruise pamphlet and story are true.

[00:51:26] Trevor Long: Ah, right.

[00:51:27] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, so South Seas.

[00:51:28] Trevor Long: Nice.

[00:51:29] Stephen Fenech: Uh, also, did you notice if you pause it when she’s looking, she’s loading the gun— I’m not a gun guy, right, so I trust this research here— when she’s loading the gun, the shotgun shells are missing their primers. So if a shotgun shell’s been shot, the primer is still there. So when she’s loading in those, none of those primers there, they were empty shells. So if you look closely, if you’re a gun person, you would have noticed that, right? All right, uh, things you might not know, uh, in a 2021 interview on Mark Maron’s podcast, Sam Neill said that at the start he was very uncomfortable over the fact that he was playing a couple with Nicole Kidman even though he was twice her age. Yeah, he was a bit uncomfortable.

[00:52:12] Trevor Long: It’s a A bit weird.

[00:52:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Um, the other thing you might not know, uh, Philip Noyce directed most of the film, but the secondary, you know, the Sam Neill part, George Miller directed. Wow. Yeah, so he stepped in and he was the— all the bits of him trapped on the vessel were there. There was a scene filmed in which a shark bursts into the half-submerged vessel, uh, forcing Neill’s character to fight for his life, but it was deleted, um, according to Miller, uh, lost to all time. I deleted that scene.

[00:52:47] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:52:47] Stephen Fenech: And I looked on the disc, I don’t think there is a deleted scenes. I’ll check. Uh, did you notice, I think I’ve already mentioned this, the shotgun, the primers aren’t there. That was, uh, that was it. Uh, what’s the meme? Is there a meme here?

[00:53:00] Trevor Long: Load the shotgun is all I can think of.

[00:53:02] Stephen Fenech: I think, well, I, I I have— I think her preparing the drink. You have my drink, I know you want it. Washing— I think the shot of her, the hands washing the hair. Gonna wash that guy right out of my head. Yeah, maybe that one.

[00:53:17] Trevor Long: There’s probably something in the row, him, his brutal rowing at the start, you know. Yeah, yeah, he’s coming for you or something.

[00:53:22] Stephen Fenech: Competing for the time trial Olympics. Yeah. By Any Other Name. No, I love this. Dead Carving, great name. The only suggestions I had was was open sea.

[00:53:31] Trevor Long: Yeah, or ocean, or high seas. Just call it ocean, on the ocean, or something.

[00:53:35] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, Dead Calm, Sebasta, you could call it. You can’t improve on that.

[00:53:38] Trevor Long: Good grief.

[00:53:39] Stephen Fenech: Good grief, what?

[00:53:40] Trevor Long: I don’t know.

[00:53:41] Stephen Fenech: No, he’s grieving. That’s, that sucks. Uh, the one thing you want— I’ll take the boat, the yacht, obviously. Yeah, uh, I’ll take the harpoon that she had that she fired at him.

[00:53:51] Trevor Long: Oh, that’s brutal.

[00:53:52] Stephen Fenech: Um, the flare gun, the flares.

[00:53:54] Trevor Long: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:53:55] Stephen Fenech: And the bottle.

[00:53:57] Trevor Long: Ah, some of— I’d like some of the maps or something, you know, they’d look really nice framed.

Three questions for Trev, ratings & next week

[00:54:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, don’t you think? Yeah, not bad. Right, 3 questions for Trev.

[00:54:04] Trevor Long: Okay, hit me.

[00:54:05] Stephen Fenech: What happens to Ray and John now? What’s the next—

[00:54:08] Trevor Long: if they get back to— they get back to life and, uh, have another kid? Oh yeah, that’s, that’s always a— I don’t know, I couldn’t answer that question.

[00:54:15] Stephen Fenech: I think they get back, get it on, she’s pregnant, 9 and a half months later there’s a new baby.

[00:54:20] Trevor Long: I think it’s a lot longer than that. It’s a girl.

[00:54:22] Stephen Fenech: Okay. Yeah. Question 2: do you think they report what happened or keep it a secret?

[00:54:34] Trevor Long: He reports it. He’s an Australian naval officer. Yes, he’s a naval officer. He would document it.

[00:54:39] Stephen Fenech: I reckon no. I reckon let’s keep this between us, no one will ever know.

[00:54:43] Trevor Long: No, because he’s thinking of the families of the other people that were lost on the boats.

[00:54:47] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, maybe.

[00:54:47] Trevor Long: He’s got as much information as he can from reading everything he can. He writes it all down.

[00:54:51] Stephen Fenech: All right, you’ve changed my mind.

[00:54:53] Trevor Long: There you go.

[00:54:53] Stephen Fenech: There you go. Righto, question 3: sequel, prequel, or just leave it alone?

[00:54:58] Trevor Long: I mean, you could definitely sequel it because what do they do and what happens next? But you could just— the problem with the sequel is it’s like, well, A, you could only sequel it if you don’t, if you don’t have that last extra scene because then you go, he’s actually alive and he comes back to try and kill him because they are reporting it like that. The only way you sequel this is by—

[00:55:14] Stephen Fenech: is this him sailing off and you think, is he dead? Is he not? Correct. Okay, right.

[00:55:18] Trevor Long: Yeah, fair enough. Because put it this way, at no point did I think he wasn’t dead. He’s dead. He was in the raft. Yeah, I just don’t—

[00:55:25] Movie Audio: he’s—

[00:55:25] Trevor Long: it’s a dead body. I just don’t want it on the boat.

[00:55:27] Stephen Fenech: Well, I— even the first time I saw it, I think he’s not dead. He’s in that. And you know what, what, what sort of compounded— I’m thinking he’s not dead. Then when they see the raft again, I’m thinking, oh, hang on. But then they shoot the thing and think, oh, he’s definitely dead. Now, right? So it’s like a double twist there. Yeah. And then he comes back.

[00:55:45] Trevor Long: But yeah, you could definitely have frozen this in time and not had the extra ending, and you could have made it—

[00:55:49] Stephen Fenech: maybe, maybe.

[00:55:51] Trevor Long: But any sequel is going to end in some sort of weird— you know, you know it’s a weird twist coming. So I don’t know, I keep it—

[00:55:56] Stephen Fenech: leave it alone, leave it alone, leave it alone. Why not? That is Dead Calm. Give us your wrap-up and rating.

[00:56:01] Trevor Long: I mean, it’s a very good movie. I really enjoyed it. She’s so young in this. Like, just listening to her voice back is crazy. She’s 19. Um, but you know, she’s excellent in it.

[00:56:11] Stephen Fenech: I don’t—

[00:56:11] Trevor Long: yeah, like, I don’t think she’s amazing. I don’t— I don’t know how something like this leads to a Hollywood career. I thought it was excellent. But yeah, it’s an interesting one. Um, but yeah, good story. Nice— nicely broadly unpredictable. Um, 7.5.

[00:56:27] Stephen Fenech: Okay, it’s an 8 for me. Okay, I’m an 8. Um, yeah, so what are you?

[00:56:32] Trevor Long: 7.5. I’m an 8.

[00:56:34] Stephen Fenech: Okay, let’s talk about next week.

[00:56:35] Trevor Long: Let’s do it.

[00:56:36] Stephen Fenech: We are watching Wayne’s World.

[00:56:38] Trevor Long: Schwing! Schwing! Oi!

[00:56:40] Stephen Fenech: Starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey.

[00:56:44] Trevor Long: You have, ladies and gentlemen, I’m not that much of an idiot.

[00:56:47] Stephen Fenech: All right, well, if you—

[00:56:48] Trevor Long: what year was this made, do you know? 1992. Yeah, so I’m in year 11.

[00:56:52] Stephen Fenech: So in your prime. Yeah, I’m like prime audience.

[00:56:54] Trevor Long: I’m like with my mates who love The 12th Man. Like, this is, yeah, okay, comedy gold.

[00:56:59] Stephen Fenech: So you saw this at the movies?

[00:57:00] Trevor Long: I don’t know that I saw at the movies. Wow, that’s a first. Maybe, I don’t know, it’s a— I guess maybe I would.

[00:57:04] Stephen Fenech: Is it the first movie you’ve ever saw at the movies?

[00:57:06] Trevor Long: I don’t know, I don’t think so, no.

[00:57:08] Stephen Fenech: Um, do you remember the first movie at all?

[00:57:10] Trevor Long: Well, I definitely remember going to the movies in Griffith, so that’s year 7 to 10, right? Because I remember there being intermission and ice creams.

[00:57:17] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:57:18] Trevor Long: Wow.

[00:57:18] Stephen Fenech: Anyway, uh, right, I’m across it. Mick, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, uh, what was Wayne’s World based on? Was it A, a book A, a play. C, a comedy sketch. Or D, a cartoon.

[00:57:33] Trevor Long: I’m going to call comedy sketch Saturday Night Live. Yeah, correct, it is.

[00:57:36] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s an easy one. Yeah, because they’re on Saturday Night Live, Saturday Night Sketch, even in the films produced by Lorne Michaels, who’s the boss of Saturday Night Live.

[00:57:46] Trevor Long: Yeah. So, okay, well, you got it easy.

[00:57:48] Stephen Fenech: That was an easy one.

[00:57:49] Trevor Long: Easy one. I can’t wait.

[00:57:50] Stephen Fenech: I gave you an easy one. All right, well, next week’s Wayne Wayne’s World, but we’re glad you enjoyed Dead Camp.

[00:57:58] Trevor Long: Party time! Excellent!

[00:58:00] Stephen Fenech: All right, that’s next week, mate, but I’m glad you enjoyed Dead Camp. See you next week.

[00:58:04] Trevor Long: See you next week.

Episode: TBTT #735 – Amazon’s Future plans, A smarter Alexa, Satellite Internet and more

Podcast: Two Blokes Talking Tech

Date: 4 June 2026

Hosts: Trevor Long & Stephen Fenech

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Recording from London — Hotel room setup, trip context

[00:00:00] Trevor Long: I mean, this is completely, completely within the ordinary realms of podcasting here, Stephen. Just don’t breathe in it.

[00:00:07] Stephen Fenech: We do our best.

[00:00:08] Trevor Long: We’re improvising here, ladies and gentlemen. We are improvising because that’s what tech guys do. We improvise when things happen. We improvise and we’re on the road. So sometimes it doesn’t all go perfectly. Stephen, what are your thoughts?

[00:00:22] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, stuff happens. You got to adapt to the conditions and that’s what we’re doing.

[00:00:29] Trevor Long: Thanks for joining me here in my hotel room too.

[00:00:31] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I’m happy to say your room’s smaller than mine.

[00:00:34] Trevor Long: It’s very rare.

[00:00:36] Stephen Fenech: I’m really pleased about that. I think that’s great. I’ve got a better room than Trevor.

[00:00:42] Trevor Long: When you say smaller, what are you talking, 30 centimeters, a meter?

[00:00:45] Stephen Fenech: Well, I’ve got a bit more room in my entry passage. So my bathroom goes off the entry. I’ve got just another wall where the bed is. My bathroom’s in there. Yeah, but it’s an entry that way. And there’s more room down there, down the hallway.

[00:01:02] Trevor Long: This is the second smallest hotel.

[00:01:04] Stephen Fenech: What’s that up there? That’s the roof.

[00:01:06] Trevor Long: The roof.

[00:01:06] Stephen Fenech: That’s the roofline. That’s it. That makes it even smaller than mine then, right?

[00:01:11] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:01:11] Stephen Fenech: I do overlook the courtyard though.

[00:01:13] Trevor Long: Easily the second smallest hotel I’ve ever been in. The smallest was in the Moxie in New York. The Moxie. The Moxie was the— at the end of the bed, it was room for a chair, but they, they didn’t have a desk. It was, it was up on the wall and it came down, so you like Oh, so you had to sit on the edge of the bed to use the desk? Yeah, pretty much, yeah. It was tiny.

[00:01:37] Stephen Fenech: How long ago was this?

[00:01:38] Trevor Long: It was a year and a half ago. Oh. Yeah, not that long ago. Okay. It was not an enticing thing. And I know—

[00:01:46] Stephen Fenech: Where was I there too? Or was this on your own?

[00:01:48] Trevor Long: I don’t think so. I feel like it was just me and Stig. It was on the Airbnb Uber trip. So it was Uber, Uber last year. Right. Yeah, May or June last year. So Egypt, yeah. And look, I know, ladies and gentlemen, This is first world problems.

[00:02:01] Stephen Fenech: First world problems. Yeah.

[00:02:02] Trevor Long: But please stop popping into the microphone, Steven. It’ll drive me insane all night.

[00:02:07] Stephen Fenech: I’m trying my best, mate.

[00:02:08] Trevor Long: Well, just don’t put it in front of you, mate.

[00:02:09] Stephen Fenech: I’m logging into WhatsApp on the phone.

[00:02:11] Trevor Long: We’re holding, ladies and gentlemen, we’re holding wireless microphones in front of us and it’s—

[00:02:15] Stephen Fenech: Like an influencer on Instagram.

[00:02:17] Trevor Long: Yeah. So closer, but like near your chin, Steven. Yeah, that’s right here. So I know it’s a first world problem, but the thing is when we travel and I know, Stephen, you spend most of your days just wandering around being a tourist, but my hotel room is my office. And mine too. And I— but like, I need space. Like, I want to put my stuff out, I want to sit at a desk, and this desk is tiny. It’s just, you know, from a working situation—

[00:02:43] Stephen Fenech: don’t they know who you are?

[00:02:44] Trevor Long: Not ideal.

[00:02:46] Stephen Fenech: Well, put it this way, did you tell them that you’re Trev Long from The Today Show?

[00:02:48] Trevor Long: Reception knows who I am.

[00:02:50] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I heard, I heard you’re a big red, red mark against your name.

[00:02:54] Trevor Long: Been some calls. There’s shower issues, and then there was a light issue which was resolved by a maintenance man coming in and showing me where the switch was.

[00:03:02] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you press the knobs, a button. Is that what he said? Idiot. The knobs, a button as well.

[00:03:05] Trevor Long: He obviously didn’t say that exactly, but it’s what he was inferring.

[00:03:08] Stephen Fenech: Did he call you sir and all that, or?

[00:03:10] Trevor Long: Yeah, he did.

[00:03:11] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:03:11] Trevor Long: And then the maid stole my breakfast bowl. Um, yeah, it’s just, it’s just a lot of little issues.

[00:03:18] Stephen Fenech: Mate, does this— when you travel with your family, are you this high maintenance with your family?

[00:03:22] Trevor Long: Not at all, because I’m on holidays.

[00:03:23] Stephen Fenech: Because you, because you’re in control of everything.

[00:03:25] Trevor Long: No, but also I’m on holidays. I don’t give a rats.

[00:03:27] Stephen Fenech: Okay, all right. So if you’re— so you’re asleep on the foldout for the holiday, not a work trip, you’d be fine. Oh, the bathroom would have been a massive issue, and the light would have been an issue too, mate.

[00:03:38] Trevor Long: Yeah, you’re right, 100%.

[00:03:39] Stephen Fenech: You can’t turn off grumpiness, mate. That’s how you are. That’s how you roll.

[00:03:44] Trevor Long: Well, you weren’t here when we checked in, but when we checked in, um, I don’t know what happened to get me offside instantly. You know what it was? Because the steps up into reception, and so like you’re lugging your bag in there, and I’m like, what is happening here?

[00:03:57] Stephen Fenech: And for a 20-hour, 24-hour flight, like we’ve been We’ve been traveling.

[00:04:01] Trevor Long: The lady goes, “How’s your day been?” I went, “Listen, I’ve been on a plane for 30 hours, right? So just leave me alone.” Anyway, so the bloke that’s walking us up to the room’s taking over and we’re in the lift and he goes, he says something along the lines of, “Are you having a bad day? You seem angry.” And I thought to myself, “You’re a very perceptive young man.” Trevor Long, how are you? Welcome. We haven’t met, ask around.

[00:04:29] Stephen Fenech: There you go.

[00:04:31] Trevor Long: I’ve got references if you need them.

[00:04:33] Stephen Fenech: My, uh, I arrived— you arrived sort of during the day, did you? Yeah, I arrived like late at night. I got in at like 9:30. I was checking in.

[00:04:41] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:04:42] Stephen Fenech: And, um, I had— I’ve got— I didn’t check any luggage, you know. I’ve just got my carry-on and a backpack. Yeah. And he kept saying, can I take your bag? I said, no, mate, I’m good. Just take me to the room. You know, I had to walk through the courtyard again thinking, where are you taking me?

[00:04:54] Trevor Long: Yeah, I know, it was weird.

[00:04:55] Stephen Fenech: And he kept asking me. I said, mate, don’t worry about the bag, I’m fine. Just show me the room. I just— let’s get there. Anyway, anyway, I was nowhere near as grumpy as you though.

[00:05:06] Trevor Long: We haven’t even mentioned we’re in London here as guests of Amazon. We’ll talk about that shortly. But, um, yeah, Stephen’s done plenty of kilometers wandering around the city.

[00:05:14] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, did a bit of shopping today too.

[00:05:15] Trevor Long: It was good. Yeah, you bought, you bought some DVDs? Yeah, I did. Yeah, it was 4K.

[00:05:20] Stephen Fenech: HMV is still pumping here. Amazing.

[00:05:23] Trevor Long: Like you said, 3-level store.

[00:05:26] Stephen Fenech: One level was all disc, all movies, all physical media, physical media. Because what’s happened to me, or to all disc collectors, is the, uh, the 20th Century Fox have stopped making physical media. So any recent 20th Century Fox films, you can’t buy them, you can only watch them on Disney Plus. And so I wanted the 4K version so that they sell them here, bigger market. They don’t do us, too small a market, right? So yeah, I got a few titles that 20th Century Fox that weren’t available in Australia. I could have bought them online, would have cost me 3 times as much.

[00:06:00] Trevor Long: Had a great idea. I wonder if I the microphone works just on your glasses. Hang on my glasses.

[00:06:05] Stephen Fenech: No, it doesn’t, mate.

[00:06:06] Trevor Long: Good. Disappointing.

[00:06:08] Stephen Fenech: So yeah, it was a good day, and they had a Disney— Disney Store across the road had a really cool Star Wars section too. If I was living in— if that was in Australia, I would have done a lot of damage. There was a lot of cool gear in there that I would have bought.

[00:06:20] Trevor Long: As if you didn’t do damage here.

[00:06:21] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but no, but I’ve got no room to put in my bag. That’s the thing. I’ve got all carry-on stuff.

[00:06:26] Trevor Long: I don’t have a check-in bag. Sound of Music in 4K, how much better? Hello?

[00:06:29] Stephen Fenech: Like, well, 4 times better. 4 times better than HD. I don’t know, that’s a beloved movie. I love that.

[00:06:36] Trevor Long: How do they— was it—

[00:06:37] Stephen Fenech: I mean, I know they go back to the original print and they go to the original upscale, they print, they go to the original print and then upscale. And, uh, yeah, apparently it’s, it’s in time for the 60th anniversary was released because there’s a lot of money involved in doing that. A lot of fans of the movie. That’s why it’s, it’s the movie that inspired our movie podcast.

[00:06:56] Trevor Long: It is, absolutely. And then I shout out to Arnie Shell, who you refer— you, you came to me straight away and said you’ll want to see this. He said to me, Aunty Cheryl’s going to want to know this. It’s available in 4K. I said, listen, she can’t see bugger all. I’m not even sure she knows what’s happening on the screen.

[00:07:11] Stephen Fenech: But she’ll say, wow, they’re much clearer.

[00:07:13] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:07:14] Stephen Fenech: What’s happening? I can see the kids’ faces.

[00:07:16] Trevor Long: She’ll just say, turn it up. That’s all she wants is to turn it up. All right. Well, without any further ado, welcome to Two Blokes Talking Tech. Not a bad price.

[00:07:27] VOICE OVER: With Trevor Long from eftm.com.

[00:07:29] Stephen Fenech: Really handy device.

[00:07:31] VOICE OVER: And Steven Fenech from techguide.com.au.

[00:07:34] Trevor Long: .au. Episode 735 of Two Blokes Talking Tech, uh, on handheld microphones. So apologize for any quality issues you hear throughout the show, but we’re doing our best to keep the dream alive. Thanks to the great people at Arlo Home Security Needs, they’ve got you covered, and Netgear for your home Wi-Fi and security needs as well, um, based on your home network. We’ll tell you about them shortly, and we’d appreciate you supporting them as they support us. But we are here as guests of Amazon in, uh, London town Sunny, sunny London. Sunny for 2 hours and 10 minutes. Yeah.

[00:08:05] Stephen Fenech: And then the heatwave ended the second my plane’s wheels hit the tarmac.

[00:08:09] Trevor Long: Yeah, it was over. And then it’s pouring and then it’s cloudy. But we are here at the time of year, like coming into the peak of their summer and it’s daylight from 4 a.m. until 10 p.m. Like, it’s unbelievable. You wake up in the morning, you go, Jesus Christ, I slept through my alarm. Yeah. You’re like, no, no, it’s 4:30. What’s going on? It’s wild.

[00:08:30] Stephen Fenech: Crazy.

Amazon Delivering the Future — Alexa Plus & AI assistant upgrade

[00:08:31] Trevor Long: So we’re here with Amazon for their Delivering the Future conference, let’s call it. And it’s a fascinating one because it is— let’s be honest and let’s be absolutely dead set honest upfront here. There’s not a lot of directly relevant Australian announcements that are made, but what it is, a little bit of kind of crystal balling, a little bit of, you know, innovation talk and critically things that we can, we can get a sense of. Now, I think the big one that I was most excited about was expansion of Alexa Plus. Yes. Alexa Plus. You’ve got your Echo speaker with Alexa. You can ask Alexa questions and all those kind of things. And Alexa’s always been pretty good. In fact, I think we both agree Alexa’s the number one smart home assistant.

[00:09:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, we’re an Alexa household.

[00:09:15] Trevor Long: Beats out Google just because I think it’s a bit, bit more diverse. And I think it’s a bit— and also you can’t buy Googles anymore. Like, they’ve stopped making them. They’ve stopped selling them in Australia. I’m sure there’s new ones to come, but they’ve basically given up on Australia for a couple of years. So you’ve got your— so many Echo products and there’s so many from the little cheapo ones up to the big screen screens and all that kind of stuff. And so what— whatever you’ve been able to do with Alexa, what you’ve not been able to do is what we now know as large language model AI conversations like you would have with ChatGPT as a voice agent and stuff like that. So Alexa Plus is essentially their large language model AI assistant, which can obviously still do all the things that your smart home connected Alexa can do, like turn on lights, start timers, and all those things, but when you have a conversation about, you know, what’s the capital of a country or what’s the whatever, you could dig deeper into that and have a more conversational approach to remember the relevance of what you’re asking it. Yeah, that kind of stuff. So, and it’s going to be a subscription-based model. So basically if you’re a Prime member, you’ll be able to get— you’ll get Alexa Plus.

[00:10:19] Stephen Fenech: Tied everything together, haven’t they?

[00:10:20] Trevor Long: Really?

[00:10:21] Stephen Fenech: Wow. See, Prime gets you delivery too.

[00:10:23] Trevor Long: Prime gets you fast delivery, it gets you the video, gets you music, and now it gets you Alexa Plus. It’s actually probably the best value subscription on the market. I think it’s under—

[00:10:33] Stephen Fenech: agree 100%—

[00:10:34] Trevor Long: underpromoted in that sense. So bad news, we don’t have a date for its availability in Australia. The Alexa Plus.

[00:10:41] Stephen Fenech: But they did say that, like, the news here is I think it’s releasing in France.

[00:10:45] Trevor Long: Yeah, that’s the news.

[00:10:46] Stephen Fenech: But the other, the last paragraph of the press release said 10 additional countries in 2027.

[00:10:52] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:10:53] Stephen Fenech: And I discreetly asked our Amazon representative here, I said, are we safe to assume that Australia could be one of those countries? Which went, Yeah, I think so. She didn’t say no, no, no. Didn’t say yes either. But no, you’d be a safe bet to think that we’d be next cab off the rank. So in 12 months we could have this within 12 months. I think it could be early, early ’27.

[00:11:15] Trevor Long: Yeah, but it’s still, it’s still weird because like, what is the scalability problem that it’s not been turned on? Because we know they know the language, right? They’ve got the voice.

[00:11:23] Stephen Fenech: Or is it our accents?

[00:11:25] Trevor Long: No, but that’s already been done.

[00:11:26] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but, but English in an American accent is different to—

[00:11:29] Trevor Long: Yes, but Alexa’s already got Australia. So yeah, true, true. So that’s done.

[00:11:33] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Although it needs additional processing.

[00:11:36] Trevor Long: And I think what it is is that you continually need to phase up as you scale up your data centers and things like that. Yeah. Because you’re getting so much more compute, as you just mentioned. Yeah. That essentially as soon as you onboard a country, you’re talking about millions of requests per day, per hour, per minute that you need to have the compute power Well, and access to the resources too.

[00:12:00] Stephen Fenech: Like they’re building data centres in Australia, we found out too. So they’re, they’re and building it with them sustainably too. Apparently they’re the biggest, you know, biggest contributor to the renewable energy in Australia.

[00:12:12] Trevor Long: That’s right.

[00:12:13] Stephen Fenech: So that’s going to handle all those extra load for these, these agentic, more detailed inquiries. I remember writing about this for the first time a little while back and and it can, it can be that agent for you and sort of make like you say, you say you need to repair your dishwasher or get your quotes and stuff like that. Is that still part of the plan?

[00:12:34] Trevor Long: I mean, that in theory. Yeah, but in theory, communism works. But you know, the theory is strong on these things. How much of it gets ticked off and turned on is, is yet to be seen. But I, I’m all in favour of a smarter home assistant because we’re now at a point where we expect more from asking a computer a question. So just take the word AI out of life, right? Yeah. And just go, what we’ve known up until now was you used to be able to ask a computer a question, then you could speak to these things in your house and turn off and on lights, right? And ask questions, get jokes and stuff. But we’ve all, in the last 2 and a half years, we’ve come so far with AI that we expect more of computers in terms of how they answer us.

[00:13:15] Stephen Fenech: And so that’s, but also, you know, have you noticed a lot of people like, AI is useful, but AI has become the new search engine. It’s now, we want your opinion, or rather than— and because it’s more capable, people are using it. And Alexa Plus will be a prime candidate here.

[00:13:32] Trevor Long: Someone we were with, and, uh, we were asking a question, something you would normally have just Googled to get the answer, straight to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. Yeah, do you know what I mean?

[00:13:42] Stephen Fenech: People are getting an opinion. You’re not getting a result, you’re getting an opinion as well.

[00:13:45] Trevor Long: Well, I think a lot of the time it is— it’s not opinion, it’s just, I want like we’ve gone from a place where you would ask Google for an answer and then go to the pages it suggested to find. Yeah, the base to Google then giving you a summary and then Google adding AI. And so because Google’s put AI at the top of search, they’ve basically said to everyone, hey, we’re just going to give you AI. So everyone is— everyone’s gone, well, I’m using AI in another app. Yeah, that’s the challenge that Google’s created is that they’re pushing people to AI. In some cases it might be Gemini, but in other cases it’s bloody Claude or ChatGPT.

[00:14:20] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, okay. But again, it’s a whole other story about how the, they, they crawl the web for all these, these details and take all the credit. They take the credit for it. We miss out on the click. Yeah, they get the credit. That’s a problem across the board, I guess. Yeah. Should we talk about some other, uh, a new— well, let’s talk about Amazon LEO because that’s, that’s coming to Australia soon this year. I feel like Australia is among the first, if not the first country in the world to get it because I understand they launched the satellites from the South Pole upwards.

Amazon LEO — Satellite internet, Starlink competitor, Australia rollout

[00:14:49] Trevor Long: Upwards, yeah.

[00:14:49] Stephen Fenech: So Australia is right down there in the, in the, right in the clouds.

[00:14:52] Trevor Long: Literally to the point where when they did the deal with the NBN, they said that Tasmania would be the first case, like that’s going to be where they tested first. Now I don’t know their rollout is going as quickly as they hoped.

[00:15:02] Stephen Fenech: I understand there’s a bit of a delay, but it’ll still be this year, but not— when I wrote the— I remember last August was when they announced it, yeah, and they said it’d be June 26th, which is now, but I don’t think they’re quite ready, but not far off. So you expect to see— and To be clear, this is the direct competitor to Starlink, and the NBN is like— no doubt Starlink would have pitched the NBN too, surely, wouldn’t they, to get that business or not?

[00:15:28] Trevor Long: Oh yeah, you know, they would have bid for it.

[00:15:29] Stephen Fenech: And then LEO, well, it was called Project Kuiper back in the day. Now it’s called LEO, which is short for low Earth orbit, which is how the satellites can provide such a faster result because the, the current Skymaster, they’re high Earth orbit.

[00:15:46] Trevor Long: So that’s why they’re geostationary.

[00:15:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. And these ones are low Earth orbit. So the data getting up and down is faster. Yes. And hence the— like, I had Starlink on the plane. I flew Emirates via Dubai, Sydney to Dubai, 777, Starlink on board. I did a speed test. I got 480 megabits per second down. Download speed?

[00:16:10] Trevor Long: Well, get this, on the plane. So on Sunday before we left, like literally before I had— we were— we had to go to the school for a choir rehearsal, right? And Amanda wanted to film it all and make a video for the school. And I said, I’ll come and help. But this choir rehearsal was going to end at 4, and I had to be on a car to the airport at 4:30, right? So this was— so we filmed all this stuff, right? And so I said to Amanda and Harry, just upload it to Dropbox. So at Qatar, I downloaded it all from the Dropbox, 32 gigs weeks. Then while I was on the Qatar to London flight, I edited the video, a 4-minute video. I exported it as like low def and WhatsApp’d it to Amanda. She says it’s good. And then I exported as 1080, uploaded it to Dropbox. Yeah. Amanda goes, very hard to share Dropbox links with people that don’t know what Dropbox is. I said, I’ll put it on YouTube as an unlisted so people— oh yeah. So I might—

[00:17:00] Stephen Fenech: you do all that on the plane?

[00:17:00] Trevor Long: All of that on a plane? Yeah, right. Yeah. So the power of low Earth orbit satellites is unbelievable. Yeah. The, the, the original plan when I met with Amazon, I’ll tell you what date it was. It was in 2023. I went to Seattle. They said they have booked 77 rocket launches to deploy 3,300 satellites with, with sort of 90% of their constellation to be deployed by 2029. So You know, that’s, that’s a pretty, pretty big rollout. Now, Starlink, I think at this point have like 9,000 satellites launched right there. They’ve got coverage, right? But they’re also now relaunching a second generation, third generation of satellite too. So they’re, they’re lengths ahead. But I find this fascinating, right? Because they’re here, here in London, they’re talking about LEO and the future of it in Europe and all that kind of stuff, right? In the end, this business, this LEO business is huge for Amazon. Huge. And you look at Starlink or SpaceX’s IPO this week, they’re a $1.5 trillion company now, right? This is the best thing that they have in terms of competition. It’s the only thing they have in terms of— there are other low Earth orbit satellites, but none that are truly not to the scale, consumer-focused, right?

[00:18:16] Stephen Fenech: But to the scale.

[00:18:17] Trevor Long: And it’s— I don’t want to sidetrack us, but It’s like when we talk about EV charging on the EV podcast, right? And I’ve said a million times, if someone had $1 billion, you just roll out a big charging network, right? Yeah, but you can’t. It’s too expensive. This is essentially Jeff Bezos going, just spend whatever you need to, to build the network out and build it and they will come, right? Of course. So you bring satellite internet to crazy number of places, regional. And Australia is one of the biggest markets for this because we are so remote.

[00:18:44] Stephen Fenech: We are the best country for this. This because we’re a big country and like sparsely populated in much of the country. So there’s no cellular coverage. So we’re perfect candidates for this. And we already know Telstra actually this week celebrating one year of messaging by satellite. Yeah. So I think other companies like Optus and Vodafone have done deals with Starlink as well. So will Amazon— is that part of their business plan to maybe try to get them across?

[00:19:12] Trevor Long: Direct-to-cell is not part of their plan.

[00:19:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. So this is via the NBN and so through third-party providers.

[00:19:18] Trevor Long: Well, no. So Leo in Australia. So it’s really fascinating as I understand it, and I can’t really talk to the specifics, but as I understand it, there are 300,000 homes. So there’s 11 million properties in Australia, right?

[00:19:30] Stephen Fenech: Homes.

[00:19:31] Trevor Long: 300,000 of them are designated by the NBN as being satellite serviced. Okay. So that means you can’t get certainly fiber, you can’t get hybrid fiber coaxial, and you can’t get fixed wireless, the 4G, 5G, right? So there’s 300,000 homes that are satellite determined, and those 300,000 homes, if they want NBN, will get it from a certain point in time, they’ll get it from LEO, right?

[00:19:56] VOICE OVER: Yeah.

[00:19:56] Trevor Long: But Amazon are allowed to sell LEO as a satellite internet service to every other home in Australia. Okay. So I believe What I believe is subsidised version through the NBN. No, no, no. The NBN is only to those 300,000 homes. Yeah, but I believe that those 300,000 homes will essentially, if they, if they try to get LEO, they’ll just be pushed to the NBN. But every other house or every other consumer will be able to go, you know what? So my brother with a property in Young or Leeton can go, you know what, this fixed wireless is good, but it’s not great. So I’m going to get Starlink and he’ll go, hang on a minute. Leo’s cheaper potentially, right? It might be cheaper, but that service, direct-to-consumer, one-to-one relationship, has nothing to do with the NBN at all. Okay. It’s a pure— it’ll be Starlink competitor.

[00:20:47] Stephen Fenech: And if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you get a discount. Maybe they’ll tie you in there too.

[00:20:51] Trevor Long: Maybe, maybe. But see, they’ve got to remember, and the thing about Amazon Leo is there’s three size dishes. Yep. There’s a small one about the size of a big CD case, but smaller than a vinyl album, if you think. Then there’s one that’s kind of traditionally more like your Starlink size, you know, big kind of portfolio briefcase size. I understand that the small one will be like 100 meg speeds. The briefcase size one will be like 400 meg speeds. And then there’s a huge one, huge being suitcase size, which will be for commercial opportunities, which would be like gigabit. Wow. So it’s pretty— it’s a pretty amazing service. Incredible.

[00:21:26] Stephen Fenech: So, you know what, that’s— competition is a good thing. Starlink V Leo.

Amazon shopping — High return rate badging, robots & delivery innovations

[00:21:31] Trevor Long: Let’s, let’s talk Amazon. What the Amazon everyone knows, which is Amazon parcel deliveries and shopping. Yeah, I find this one fascinating. It is such a little tidbit, but I still love it. On the Amazon website, something I’ve not ever noticed is a thing called low return rate badging. So if you’re on a product, it might have a badge on that says low return rate, which is your way of knowing Do you know what?

[00:21:56] Stephen Fenech: A lot of people bought this, they’re happy with it.

[00:21:58] Trevor Long: But you know, so few people have returned it. But well, there’s a new badge coming called high return rate. Whoa. Now imagine being a, you know, an Amazon retailer that gets that badge put against you. There’ll be filthy retailers.

[00:22:09] Stephen Fenech: Well, obviously the game, the aim here is for them to not get that. So they’ve got to make sure their products are better. Knowing, knowing that that badge could be on one of their products, it will make them think, well, geez, we need to lift our game here.

[00:22:21] Trevor Long: Yeah. So I think that’s cool. I like that. I like that as a really simple, pretty transparent. And I know there’s already reviews, but you know, they’re saying what they’re saying, right? They’re saying we’ve got reviews that gives you a sense of what people think. Yeah, but what we now want you to know is what is it like to people to own. Yeah. And they’re saying, listen, this thing gets returned more than most other things. And that’s something you should know before you buy it, because essentially think about it as a business. You’re like, they, they essentially cover the cost because when you return something, you just take it to the local post office or chemist, whatever it is in your area that’s hooked up. And it’s a cost from that point on, from you logging on and going, I want to take this back. It’s a cost to Amazon. Yeah.

[00:23:00] Stephen Fenech: To bring it back because free postage, you just drop it off.

[00:23:03] Trevor Long: Oh yeah. Yeah. So what they’re doing is eliminate—

[00:23:06] Stephen Fenech: it’s in their best interest to not have that.

[00:23:07] Trevor Long: Spot on.

[00:23:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s smart. That’s smart.

[00:23:10] Trevor Long: I really like that. It’s so simple. I love it.

[00:23:13] Stephen Fenech: Excellent. What about— well, you know, you don’t come to these Amazon tech events and not see, hear about robots. Yeah, robots again going to be front and center here. And I know a lot of people also think, well, hang on, they’re replacing everyone with robots. But that’s not exactly the case, is it? They’re creating a lot of jobs here. Like the press releases that are obviously meant for the European press and the UK, they’re talking like hundreds of thousands of jobs create— job creations.

[00:23:42] Trevor Long: Well, the boss of Amazon UK said to us this week, he said there’s 75,000 people employed by Amazon in the UK.

[00:23:50] Stephen Fenech: There you go.

[00:23:50] Trevor Long: I mean, what are we talking about here, folks? Anyone that’s been to the robot fulfillment center in Western Sydney knows— and you can do tours, by the way— um, knows that there are staff everywhere. There are.

[00:24:01] Stephen Fenech: It’s busy. But the, uh, the robots, they’ve got their next generation Proteus which is their— this is kind of the AI-backed, sort of can follow the natural language commands and actually take on more tasks. So before they were limited pretty much to certain areas of the business, but now associates can actually ask them to do various things and they sort of— their level of actions is now being expanded.

[00:24:29] VOICE OVER: Yeah.

[00:24:30] Stephen Fenech: They’ve also announced Vulcan, which is the first robot with a sense of touch. So, uh, it can handle like finer items and smaller items, right?

[00:24:43] Trevor Long: So basically what that means is a robot with a— with the ability to clamp something might have normally clamped it, not given concern to how hard it clamped it, but now because it knows it’s touched it, it can be more gentle. It’s funny, we’re talking about robots with this.

[00:24:59] Stephen Fenech: Good to be more gentle. But yeah, that’s, this is, that’s another one of many more announcements. But the other is the delivery itself. And one of the, one of the, one of the releases is about same-day delivery for fresh groceries. Now, this isn’t available for Australia, but what happens in these cases, they launch them in really big cities. So the UK, Japan, US. Big cities and they say, well, if we can get it to work here, then it’s a piece of cake when it comes to smaller places like Australia.

[00:25:31] Trevor Long: Well, same-day deliveries of fresh groceries are now live in parts of Tokyo and 2,300 US cities. Yeah. And so if they’re expanding it across more parts of Japan and across the UK, you can only assume that that has some potential to come to Australia as well. But what is Australia, a different market though?

[00:25:52] Stephen Fenech: Well, because they just announced, remember, they’re associated with Harris Farm. So that’s having same-day delivery of groceries, like especially ordering fruit and veggies and stuff. You want them straight away, don’t you?

[00:26:02] Trevor Long: Yeah. But do you think, is Australia, and I haven’t really paid any attention to other markets, but is Australia already too mature in the grocery market?

[00:26:14] Stephen Fenech: I guess because Coles and Woolies, yeah, they deliver. Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty popular.

[00:26:18] Trevor Long: There’s not a day you don’t see 3 of those trucks.

[00:26:21] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but Harris Farm, mate, this is Harris Farm. It’s a new, a different chain of—

[00:26:25] Trevor Long: But I’m saying the full-on same-day grocery stuff.

[00:26:29] Stephen Fenech: Well, I’ll use my brother Michael. He never goes to the supermarket. He gets all his stuff delivered all the time. Yeah, we go to the market.

[00:26:36] Trevor Long: We have a supermarket. No, we now we’re a bit more of a direct-to-boot because Amanda will order online but then go pick it up because if there’s any anything missing or anything, you’re at the shop, you can pick it up. Right. Okay. Also, she’s, she’d prefer to pick the fruit and get that from the gross fruit, fruit stand as opposed to from Woolies.

[00:26:54] Stephen Fenech: Sure.

[00:26:54] Trevor Long: But I just don’t know whether that one’s bound for Australia given how mature our grocery delivery market already is.

[00:27:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:27:02] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:27:03] Stephen Fenech: And what about the new delivery vehicles? They know already. Well, before we talk about that, on the sustainability side, we know that there’s more than 50,000 electric delivery 3 vans now operating globally, which is— that’s a step in the right direction, but that’s going to increase. But there’s now new micro mobility solutions. So we’re talking electric mopeds, electric cargo bikes, even some countries, some cities deliver on foot. Like they go—

[00:27:33] Trevor Long: I’m talking about New York.

[00:27:34] Stephen Fenech: New York. They just get a big backpack and deliver on foot. Yeah.

[00:27:38] Trevor Long: Big backpack.

[00:27:38] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. I love the idea of a trolley.

[00:27:41] Trevor Long: I hope you’re not buying a 24-pack of Diet Coke. Some fool like the one you’re gonna carry. One of the times I did flex driving, one of the last orders was in a bloody apartment block, and it was just the last 2 big boxes in my car, and it was like 2 big boxes of clearly, you know, cans of drink. And it’s like, dude, this is heavy. Schlep it down the driveway into the apartment block.

[00:28:05] Stephen Fenech: Oh well, that’s what’s involved, mate. Yeah, that’s what happens.

Amazon Music & TV — Sekou, Clarkson’s Farm, MGM

[00:28:10] Trevor Long: I mean, it’s kind of— it’s, it’s remarkable really to think about the scale of what Amazon is. And just a couple of days here with them, all those things we’ve talked about are interesting and fascinating. But then we also had some time on the first night with them just hearing about how they do TV and music. Yeah, and it’s funny because you think about music, you probably We think Apple, Apple and Spotify, but Amazon Music especially.

[00:28:35] Stephen Fenech: They’re big.

[00:28:36] Trevor Long: Again, if you’re an Amazon Prime member because of the delivery, you get it free, dude. And you’re paying for Spotify. What are you doing?

[00:28:43] Stephen Fenech: Exactly.

[00:28:43] Trevor Long: I know it’s part of your subscription.

[00:28:45] Stephen Fenech: And so the people we were listening to, there was a woman who was sort of like artist development. So she was here helping support artists as they’re starting out and helping them get bigger. And then the other guy on the stage is all about the non-scripted TV.

[00:28:58] Trevor Long: TV. Like, he was basically in charge of Clarkson’s Farm. Yeah. And what was the name of the young bloke that sang?

[00:29:03] Stephen Fenech: Oh mate, you’re testing me now. Was it Q2 or something like that?

[00:29:08] Trevor Long: Oh geez. Yeah, I wonder. Well, Stig posted something on Instagram. I wonder if he tagged him because that’s the kind of thing Stig would do.

[00:29:17] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but he was the, the singer came on stage, was really meek and mild and really humble, and then see when he started CQ.

[00:29:27] Trevor Long: Okay, when he started singing, boy, what a set of pipes he had on him. Spelled S-E-K-O-U.

[00:29:33] Stephen Fenech: Okay.

[00:29:34] Trevor Long: Oh, oops, I’ve screenshot of you. Yeah, CQ, as in seek you. Hey, better man. He sang that song? Yeah, this is the guy.

[00:29:46] Stephen Fenech: That’s his stuff.

[00:29:47] Trevor Long: I mean, and by the way, this bloke, when he got up to talk, just placid.

[00:29:51] Stephen Fenech: Yes, I just said that.

[00:29:53] Trevor Long: And this really—

[00:29:54] Stephen Fenech: boom, meek and mild. And it was bang. Well, he mentioned, he goes, when I’m on stage, I feel like a different person. And it sounded like a different person.

[00:30:02] Trevor Long: I’ll be adding that to a playlist. I want to have a listen to those properly. Me too. He was brilliant.

[00:30:06] Stephen Fenech: When he becomes massive, I’m going to say we saw him when he was just starting out.

[00:30:09] Trevor Long: But yeah, I feel like they are underrated. And we’re not saying this because we’re here as guests of them. I’m just— it’s— this is what happens on these trips is we get exposed to things things that we would not normally be. Yeah. And Apple play a very smart game. They do roll out— like, they had Zane Lowe at Vivid, and so they rolled him out on the Today Show. He did a bunch of radio stuff. And so they’re able to push that content.

[00:30:31] Stephen Fenech: Amazon don’t push it as hard as Apple. No, they’ve got probably more to push than Apple does. They probably do. So, well, yeah, of course.

[00:30:38] Trevor Long: Well, you talk about like MGM Studios.

[00:30:39] Stephen Fenech: MGM Studios, that’s, that’s an Amazon property now, and they hold the rights to the Bond films.

[00:30:44] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:30:44] Stephen Fenech: So that’s— there’s all those. So there’s a full production also. Apple TV does that too.

[00:30:50] Trevor Long: But yes, but see, that’s my point is everyone knows Apple TV does that, whereas most people wouldn’t associate Amazon with TVs or movies.

[00:30:56] Stephen Fenech: You gotta remember too, Amazon has Kindle, so they’re all books.

[00:31:01] Trevor Long: Audible.

[00:31:01] Stephen Fenech: Audible audiobooks. So they’ve got Prime, which is movies, TV shows.

[00:31:06] Trevor Long: Listen, did you get that bloke’s email address? Because we should pitch an unscripted TV show.

[00:31:10] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I’ve got his name.

[00:31:12] Trevor Long: Two blokes will pitch you. What’s the TV show idea?

[00:31:16] Stephen Fenech: I think the TV show would be an Office-style mockumentary about traveling tech journalists.

[00:31:23] Trevor Long: I love it. I’m all in.

[00:31:26] Stephen Fenech: And the character player, Trevor, you got the angry, egotistic, angry, egotistic TV guy. And then the other guy was easygoing. Yeah. Former footballer. Good look. Really good looking bloke.

[00:31:40] Trevor Long: And then there’s the one that everyone hates. And we’d give him a weird—

[00:31:44] Stephen Fenech: we’d call him something random like David, you know, just, um, and then, yeah, and then we’d all be sort of chatting behind their back about how much they’re really idiots. And he’s on this trip, oh my God.

[00:31:59] Trevor Long: You’d see us land at the airport and you get in the car and you’re like, oh man, they’ve got more influences here, the Bludgers.

[00:32:06] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mate, I’d watch that.

[00:32:07] Trevor Long: I don’t know that I would.

[00:32:08] Stephen Fenech: I’d watch it. I’d help write it.

[00:32:12] Trevor Long: I don’t know, it’s a funny thing because we do live some strange lives. Oh, you said to me, um, something about a TV show. I said Stig’s always had the idea that the TV show is basically a— it’s called The Junket.

[00:32:23] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:32:23] Trevor Long: And it’s a behind the scenes of what happens on these trips, right? And I said, but the problem is there’s one journo blowing up about his shower and, um, his lights aren’t working. His most most of the good stuff is not the stuff that the, the brands would want covered.

[00:32:41] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you know, that’s, that’s all part of the drama, all part of the, of the, uh, the show.

[00:32:46] Trevor Long: I think you’d be uninvited from a lot of things.

[00:32:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, well, that’d be, that’d be one storyline. Like, oh no, I can’t say that.

[00:32:53] Trevor Long: Next time, then the show doesn’t exist.

[00:32:55] Stephen Fenech: No, but I mean within the show, within the show. But you wouldn’t be talking about real companies. It’d be fictitious companies.

[00:33:01] Trevor Long: So you’re talking about the Office-style mockumentary?

[00:33:03] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it wouldn’t have it like— you wouldn’t call a company Apple, call them Pear or call them Apricot or something.

[00:33:08] Trevor Long: So it’s utopia for tech journalists.

[00:33:10] Stephen Fenech: That’s right. Yeah, I’d watch that. We should put a one-pager together for him and see what happens.

[00:33:17] Trevor Long: Well, you’ve got the Unscripted guy’s number. Yeah, look him up.

[00:33:20] Stephen Fenech: I’ve got his, uh, I’ll get his deets.

[00:33:22] Trevor Long: Uh, you can read all the details of what Amazon’s been talking about here in London and delivering the future events at techguide.com.au and aftm.com. And if anything additional comes out while we’re here, we’ll let you know.

[00:33:35] VOICE OVER: Everything about tech you never wanted to know. This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

Sponsor — Netgear Nighthawk M7

[00:33:42] Trevor Long: And we do it all thanks to the good people at Netgear, netgear.com.au. If you need your networking, they’ve got you covered, especially when you’re traveling. So I land here, I’ve got my Nighthawk 5G M7 wireless router, mobile router, and it’s about the size of a, you know, Pro Max smartphone, bit thicker. And I plugged it into USB-C, charged it up, paired it with my device using the Netgear app. And within 5 minutes I’d purchased a local SIM card which was downloaded via my phone onto the Nighthawk M7. So this is an eSIM anywhere you go in the world, about 100 countries or something like that. But the other cool thing about this device, and I use this when I travel with the family, right? So when I go with the family to America later this year, I can take the Nighthawk M7 with me. Yes, I can buy a local SIM card so that while we’re at a cafe or at the Dodgers game or whatever it might be, we can all use the same Wi-Fi network that we’ve been using for the whole 2 weeks to get internet. But when we’re at the hotel, you don’t want to waste your, your, your 5G, you know, eSIM data when there’s hotel Wi-Fi. But what you do is you connect the Nighthawk M7 to the hotel Wi-Fi and it’s then shared via your normal Wi-Fi network. So all my kids can just connect to what’s called EFTM M7 for the whole trip, and it doesn’t matter to them whether we’re on the hotel Wi-Fi or the 5G. They’ve just got internet, and that’s really all that matters is have you got connection. Netgear have got you covered at home or on the go with the Nighthawk M7, and you can read more about it and check it out at netgear.com.au.

[00:35:17] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long. And Steven Fenech.

Laser portable monitors — Affordable new pricing

[00:35:23] Trevor Long: All right, Steven. Big news from Chris and Ronnie Briskett. Yep.

[00:35:28] Stephen Fenech: Laser. Laser.

[00:35:29] Trevor Long: Laser have gone super affordable. This is the— this is a very competitive space, which I think we would acknowledge has been around for a very long time, but has probably been popularized by our mates at Espresso with their high quality, high definition, super thin, super light. Portable monitors. I’ve got one with me, it’s in my yellow bag at all times, right? But every other brand is now doing this, from small brands to big brands. And Laser have a range of these products, and they have just absolutely slashed the prices on these things. So you’re talking now under $100 for a portable additional monitor for your laptop or computer, right there from Laser. It’s bloody good value.

[00:36:12] Stephen Fenech: But you know what I like about their approach here? Like Espresso’s approach was productivity and work and doing stuff on the go. Yeah, Laser, that’s partly their approach as well. But, you know, they’re marketing this to be, you know, if you’re a gamer, you can sort of plug your console into this thing. If you’ve got the kids in the car, you can use this as their little entertainment screen to connect to their computers or to their phones and things like that. So it has all the benefits and can be used in the same way you’d use other brands. So whether you want to be productive or working or streaming, gaming. This, this ticks all the boxes. And like Espresso, there’s a single cable connection and it draws its power from the source. So whatever you’re watching, say if it’s connected to your laptop, the laptop is powering that screen as well. Yes. So that’s no need to carry any adapters.

[00:37:03] Trevor Long: No, it’s literally just you carry the, you carry this flat little box as long as, as well as one monitor. Now there’s three versions, a 14-inch portable monitor has gone down from $149 down to $99. The 15.6-inch without touchscreen is now $129. The 15.6-inch with touchscreen is now $159. Yeah, at Good Guys Harbin, great value.

[00:37:25] Stephen Fenech: Crazy. And the touchscreen is especially if you’re using like a Mac, you know, if you, if you don’t normally have a touchscreen interface, it can be a real game changer for some of those customers. But it is, as I said, a really great way to enjoy your content, whether you want to watch, you know, you want— if you want to do like when we bring them on our trips here, like I use it as a second screen so I can easily have my emails on one browser, on the other when I’m writing on another one.

[00:37:53] Trevor Long: So I’d definitely set it up if I had a bigger desk.

[00:37:57] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, you’ll fit it on there, mate. Don’t dry your eyes, will ya? But now I’ve got mine set up. My desk is the same, same size as yours, mate. It’s set up perfectly. And, uh, I brought the 17-inch one.

[00:38:09] Trevor Long: I’ve got the one you’ve broken 3 times.

[00:38:13] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, is that right?

[00:38:14] Trevor Long: The light doesn’t bust it for you? No, look, it’s in a Pelican case.

[00:38:18] Stephen Fenech: Oh man, I had it in, in a, in a backpack and it was like— and I actually had it in a roller bag. You know, whenever I check a bag, you know, I have that roller bag. It was safe in there, pulled it out, broke.

[00:38:27] Trevor Long: Have you seen how baggage handlers treat luggage?

[00:38:29] Stephen Fenech: They did That was my carry-on bag. It was in my carry-on bag.

[00:38:32] Trevor Long: Have you seen how you treat your luggage? I treat it with— not according to Nick and the team at Espresso.

[00:38:38] Stephen Fenech: Well, I’ve returned 2 and didn’t get a return, didn’t get another one sent out to me. They think we’re cutting him off, this bludger.

[00:38:46] Trevor Long: They’ve just gone, you know what, we’re cutting him off. Yeah, 3 is the limit.

[00:38:49] Stephen Fenech: Shout out, Nick. Good on you, mate. I’m still waiting for my replacement screen.

[00:38:52] Trevor Long: Oh, but you’ve got the 17-inch.

[00:38:56] Stephen Fenech: 17-inch I’ve been using here, but it’s a bit bigger than the other.

[00:38:59] Trevor Long: But look, there’s so many. I think I’ve got 4 different brands of these kind of screens in the office. And look, you know, I think there is something to say for the quality and the performance of the Espresso. But for just simple, I want an extra screen. One of the great places for this is still professional. And it’s when you’re, you’re called to do a boardroom presentation, you know, like you’re trying to— you’re a salesperson. And you’re trying to sell something, you sit with your laptop looking at you, you plug the screen in, you turn it around, you just duplicate your screen. And the other people sitting across from you can see what you’re talking about.

[00:39:30] Stephen Fenech: See exactly what you’re seeing.

[00:39:31] Trevor Long: Such a simple thing to do.

[00:39:32] Stephen Fenech: And I think it’s one of those products that once you use it, you can’t not use it. It’s one of those things you think, this is amazing. You can’t, like I can’t travel without it now. I’ve always got it whenever I travel. So I think once you get the taste for it, And thankfully laser gives you really affordable access to one of these products now. Then I think there’s no going back. Yeah, no turning back.

[00:39:54] Trevor Long: Yeah. And they’re easy. They’re easy to obtain because they’re good guys. Harvey Norman, Bingley. I think the good guys— no, the good guys don’t have all— no one. Harvey Norman has all 3 different models. That’s the only one that has all 3. But, but yeah, great, great products. Simple, easy to use and well worth a look. And if you’re in the market You can read it, read more and see photos at eftm.com and techguide.com.au.

[00:40:18] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

Sponsor — Arlo home security cameras

[00:40:23] Stephen Fenech: Two Blokes Talking Tech, proudly brought to you by Arlo. Arlo is our great friend on the road as well. I really— I’ve got all my cameras set up so you can buy your regular cameras, your doorbell floodlight cameras. And the beauty of all of them is when they’re connected, they all connect back to the app. And you can control them, see all the different footage. Like whenever I travel, I’m always checking the feed. If say I was expecting a delivery, I could see exactly when it came and I’ll text my wife saying, look, I’ve got a delivery, can you just bring it in?

[00:40:55] Trevor Long: Or whatever. Amanda asked Harry last night, are you okay? He was at home on his own for about an hour. And has a delivery arrived? No. And then I got an Arlo doorbell ring. I answered it, but I knew Harry was gonna answer the door, but I wanted to watch. Also I felt like he’s 14. He said, I’m alone, it’s good to see you. For me about to see who he’s talking to. And there was this big parcel under this lady’s arm. So I instantly texted, said parcels arrived. Yeah, that’s great.

[00:41:17] Stephen Fenech: And that’s the beauty of it too. You can just looking at your feed because it’s got AI. And when you subscribe to the Arlo Secure, which gives you up to 30 days of cloud storage, but also the smart notification. So it’ll say, oh, hang on, there’s a package there. Someone with the package has arrived. So in your case, you would have got that specific notification. Spot on. And there’s also personalized localization as well. So I can tell, not there’s a person there, I can tell that my wife’s there or my daughter’s there or someone’s there, that if we know them. Same thing with their cars as well. So yeah, if you, you want, look, this is, this gives us peace of mind. We travel a lot, so we’re able to see exactly what’s going on at home. I love it, I love it when Jo gives me the cheeky wave on the, on the, the doorbell when she knows.

[00:41:55] Trevor Long: I don’t get a wave, I normally get something different.

[00:41:57] Stephen Fenech: She knows that I check it and she normally gives me a little smile, little waves on the doorbell camera, which is lovely. Look, if you’re looking to get to start, if you want to be able to put it together, that’s it. If you’re looking to start off, get your system up and running, Arlo’s the place to go. They’ve got a great range and they’re on their website too. They’ve got a bundle and save option. So if you’re starting from scratch, you need to pull together a few cameras, then you can get a deal right there at arlo.com.

[00:42:28] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long and Steven Fenech.

Belkin Lilypad — Toy Story 5 iPad case

[00:42:34] Trevor Long: All right. If you’ve got little kids and they get to use the family iPad or they’ve got their own iPad, you need to instantly and urgently be checking out the Belkin website and Amazon because the Lilypad iPad case is launched in Australia. This thing sold out in 2 weeks at Walmart in America. Yeah, this is the one of the main characters of Toy Story 5, which is out in the next week. And basically Toy Story 5, from what I can broadly see of the promo, is about kind of about the tech, the use of technology, toys, all that kind of stuff. And so again, it’s probably Woody and Buzz getting jealous of that, and then there’s a bit of kickback. But this is— we’ve seen this in kind of preview modes at different, different events, and they showed it to us there. Velcro is super proud of this because it’s a huge— it’s a huge thing for them to have a partnership with Disney. Yeah, they’re the only company that’s been given the rights to to produce a Lily Pad iPad cover.

[00:43:31] Stephen Fenech: Like, big deal. So it’s Pixar and Disney. Yeah, so that’s a big deal. I hope Disney also do Star Wars. You reckon Bill can do some Star Wars?

[00:43:37] Trevor Long: I think they would definitely be in talks about anything now that they’re happy to be their consultant. I’m sure you would. Free. Yeah, yeah. Can you hold the microphone so it’s pointing up at your mouth?

[00:43:46] Stephen Fenech: I’m trying my best.

[00:43:47] Trevor Long: The other way around. Yeah, I’m trying my best. I don’t want to pop it too much, but it’s only, uh, it’s only like $70.

[00:43:53] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it’s cheap. I was surprised by that. $69.95. It suits the iPad 10th and 11th generations, like your entry-level iPad. So it’s—

[00:44:01] Trevor Long: but it’s more than just a, you know, robust case because it’s super robust, drop-proof and everything. But it’s got grip, it’s got grippy edges, it’s got a nice handle, and it’s got a little kickstand on the back.

[00:44:10] Stephen Fenech: I know, which is super easy to set it upright.

[00:44:14] Trevor Long: And once—

[00:44:14] Stephen Fenech: once— like, Toy Story isn’t in the cinemas yet, is it?

[00:44:16] Trevor Long: It comes out on June 30th. Yeah. Oh no, I think it’s sooner than that.

[00:44:20] Stephen Fenech: Okay, so once it hits cinemas, I think every kid’s gonna want one of these. Yeah, they love their iPads, but they’re gonna think, I want a case like that.

[00:44:27] Trevor Long: And just so you know, when you buy it, there’s a pamphlet in it with a QR code on it that allows you to download some exclusive wallpapers, which are essentially like from the, from the movie.

[00:44:37] Stephen Fenech: That’s lovely.

[00:44:38] Trevor Long: It’s very cool.

LEGO Smart Play — Pokémon range announced

[00:44:40] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. Should we talk about some other kid— would you call it kid-related the Smart Play, the Lego?

[00:44:46] Trevor Long: Oh yeah, sure, kids love that, don’t they? Big kids, little kids, doesn’t matter.

[00:44:49] Stephen Fenech: We were, we were both, I think, in agreement that Lego, their Smart Play announcement at CES was probably one of the best parts of the show. Uh, and naturally they went with their best offerings, with the Star Wars sets, right? So we’ve seen Star Wars, but now they’re doing the same thing for their Pokémon range. I don’t know whether you’ve been to Pokémon or your No, not at all. Yeah, Pokémon’s massive. And so this is the second wave of SmartPlay products are now going to be Pokémon. We’re talking there’s like a dozen different, different sets, but they’re going to play it the same way as they did with Star Wars. So there’ll be a few key sets that come with the Smart Brick. That’s right. So you get the brick, you get the Smart Tile, you get the wireless charging pad. And then what they do, they release other smart sets. That don’t have the Smart Brick but are compatible with the, with the set, with the Smart Brick.

[00:45:45] Trevor Long: So they can interact with the minifigs would be, would have the Smart Play built in. It’s got the, got the little tiles and different things.

[00:45:51] Stephen Fenech: But it’s a real clever way of building in. Like, for example, if you bought, if you bought the Star Wars X-wing and the, and the Darth Vader, Darth Vader TIE fighter, they’ve each got a Smart Brick and they, they, they can play together very well.. But if you buy, say, the Millennium Falcon or the Scout Walker that don’t have the Smart Brick, but because they’ve got their own little smart tiles and smart minifigures, they can interact with it as well.

[00:46:16] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:46:16] Stephen Fenech: And we, we saw at CES that the lights and the movement is what makes it the play even better. And so now for Pokémon fans— and which kid isn’t a fan of Pokémon? Very popular among kids— this is the new LEGO Smart Play range which is being released.

[00:46:33] Trevor Long: Yep.

[00:46:34] Stephen Fenech: So do you have a favorite Pokémon?

[00:46:35] Trevor Long: No, I have not. I’ve known nothing about it.

[00:46:37] Stephen Fenech: Do you know Pikachu?

[00:46:38] Trevor Long: That, you know, Pikachu. I’ve heard of Pikachu.

[00:46:40] Stephen Fenech: That’s one of them. Yeah, there’s Eevee and Jolteon.

[00:46:42] Trevor Long: So looking at prices, $129, $199. There’s a $34 one because that’s a compatible set. So there’s only 2 sets that are all in one. Correct. One of those $129 ones, $199.

[00:46:52] Stephen Fenech: And that’s what you get the Smart Brick with, the Smart Brick charger, Smart Minifigs, the Smart Tiles, and then the others.

[00:46:59] Trevor Long: Jigglypuff concept is just, uh, $24.99. I mean, that’s unbelievable. That’s a bargain. Who doesn’t love Jigglypuff?

[00:47:06] Stephen Fenech: Puff. But you know how massive Pokémon is?

[00:47:09] Trevor Long: I’m aware of the card situation.

[00:47:11] Stephen Fenech: It’s huge.

[00:47:12] Trevor Long: And, and of course the cards, I think, are stupid as it’s become the character. Most of your collections, but that’s okay, you’re the wealthy one. Yeah, I’m the idiot that has nothing.

[00:47:21] Stephen Fenech: Well, you know, if they do a Phantom one, I’ll tell you, I’ll buy that. I don’t think they will though.

[00:47:26] Trevor Long: No, I don’t think so.

[00:47:27] Stephen Fenech: So I mean, I’m all in with Star Wars, to be honest.

[00:47:29] Trevor Long: This is exciting. It’s good. It’s an expansion, but I’m waiting for the generic. I’m waiting for when you can just— yep. So there’ll be a time when you can walk into a LEGO display and there’ll be like a Smart Play backing in the shop, and there’ll be just the charger, there’ll be just a brick and a charger, there’ll be just a bunch of tiles, and they’ll be themed like LEGO City. Yeah, I think they’ll just be—

[00:47:49] Stephen Fenech: you put it with a car or a place.

[00:47:51] Trevor Long: In the packet will be a brick, a charger, a couple of minifigs like a police cop and a robber, and then a couple of tiles things that you can just build your own stuff.

[00:48:01] Stephen Fenech: Well, we saw— we kind of saw a preview of that, didn’t we? Yeah.

[00:48:04] Trevor Long: So, but we don’t imagine how they’re going to sell it, but I imagine they’ll just sell them as packs.

[00:48:08] Stephen Fenech: I don’t reckon that’s going to be their priority. I reckon that they’re going to want people to get into the sets. Like, imagine Harry Potter.

[00:48:13] Trevor Long: I think that’s stupid. I think what they want—

[00:48:16] Stephen Fenech: they want to draw people into the more expensive.

[00:48:17] Trevor Long: But if you really want to make LEGO Smart Play the future of LEGO play, yeah, then I need to be able to just play with my lego.

[00:48:25] Stephen Fenech: I guess so. You you’re saying, well, imagine you’ve already got it. So you’ve probably already got Harry Potter, you’ve already got Harry Potter sets and that.

[00:48:31] Trevor Long: You can forget any— forget anything generic. I’ve just got— we’ve just got a bag of Lego. Yeah, right. Boxes of Lego now. We got rid of the bag because it was just turning around.

[00:48:39] Stephen Fenech: Free play.

[00:48:39] Trevor Long: Free play. You should be able to build a helicopter. Yeah. And then put the brick in it and find the helicopter tile and put it in it so it acts like a helicopter.

[00:48:47] Stephen Fenech: I’d say that’s on the agenda, mate. I think it has to be on the agenda. But imagine, imagine Formula Yeah, Formula One cars or Harry Potter or Marvel.

[00:48:55] Trevor Long: Like, there’s so many they could license, you know, like Oscar’s very, very plain on the team radio. Like, he doesn’t really have emotion.

[00:49:04] Stephen Fenech: Well, they’re not going to have voices.

[00:49:06] Trevor Long: No, but they could make a kind of sound. Yeah, they could do heaps. They could make the— maybe they could make the radio sound, you know, stuff like that. It’ll say box, box. That’d be cool. I think it’s super exciting what they could do.

[00:49:20] Stephen Fenech: That’s what’s remarkable. And like we said, this was— it probably stole the show at CES. We’re talking biggest tech show in the world.

[00:49:28] Trevor Long: It’s been successful, but hasn’t it? I don’t know.

[00:49:31] Stephen Fenech: Well, mate, I see it everywhere. And I remember sitting— I went to Big W at Eastgardens near my place, and I remember watching this family looking at it. Guess I— hang on, this one’s got the Smart Brick, this one doesn’t. So what does that mean? And the kid explained it to them. They said, oh no, no, if you— if we play together with them, they’ll work. And they go, okay. And they end up buying them. And so the kids are educating the parents on them in this case. But no, from what I’ve seen, the displays are everywhere, there’s sets everywhere. And I think the curiosity factor is what got people in to try it out.

[00:50:07] Trevor Long: Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, if you’re into Pokémon and Lego and Star Wars, still available.

[00:50:12] Stephen Fenech: Available too.

[00:50:13] Trevor Long: Yeah, of course. Stephen’s just trying to sell you more Star Wars. Of course, man. You can check it out at techguide.com.au.

[00:50:18] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech.

Kmart Joy AI assistant — Wesfarmers’ AI shopping tool

[00:50:22] Trevor Long: Now I know you talked about this on the Tech Guide podcast, but for those of us that didn’t listen to that—

[00:50:26] Stephen Fenech: what, the 3 people who never listen?

[00:50:28] Trevor Long: Yeah, it’s 2. I think it’s only 2. Me and one other. Good one. Kmart launched an AI assistant. Now to be very clear, Kmart’s owned by Wesfarmers. Wesfarmers also Bunnings. Bunnings also has this, right? It’s called Buddy on Bunnings, but on Kmart it’s called Joy. It’s the same thing. You, you’re on their website up in the top right-hand corners there. On Bunnings it’s Buddy and on Kmart it’s Joy. Click on that button and you launch this AI agent and that allows you to go, I’ve got a kids’ party this weekend, give me decoration inspiration. It’ll just go through the catalog of Kmart items and give you ideas of what to buy. The other one I did was cleaning the kitchen. Give me kitchen storage ideas. Years. Boom! Just came up with all these little storage boxes I wouldn’t have known they found— they had. And I’ve been relaying it this week, Steven, like on the radio, saying when you go to Kmart physically, you either walk in to buy a thing and you know where it is, you go and buy the thing. Yeah. Or you walk in and go, I don’t know, what are we looking for here? You know, you are looking for kitchen storage solutions, but you ask them of yourself and you go wandering through.

[00:51:34] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:51:35] Trevor Long: Well, online, think about online shopping. Shopping. It’s actually very hard to wander, you know, it’s very hard to browse an online shop. So because often you, if you, if you find the right, you need to know what you’re looking for, you’ve got to know what category to go into. Is it on the lifestyle, homewares, kitchen? What’s it under, right?

[00:51:51] Stephen Fenech: That’s a good thing about this new thing.

[00:51:52] Trevor Long: And that’s what this Joy just goes, hey, here’s a bunch of ideas and you can back and forth with it to narrow down your ideas, whack them in the shopping cart and off you go.

[00:52:01] Stephen Fenech: Happy days. I like to, you can upload your photo and have like watch, see outfits on yourself.

[00:52:06] Trevor Long: I didn’t know you could do that.

[00:52:07] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. You can upload a picture and see an outfit.

[00:52:10] Trevor Long: I don’t want to do it.

[00:52:10] Stephen Fenech: And it also try to get you the right size. Like, you think about that.

[00:52:14] Trevor Long: I definitely don’t want Joy sizing me up. It’s bad enough at dinner someone telling me my hands look like an old man.

[00:52:20] Stephen Fenech: You can imagine though the amount of my hands look old. I don’t think so, mate. They look dainty.

[00:52:25] Trevor Long: I thought my hands look young.

[00:52:26] Stephen Fenech: You’ve got very dainty hands.

[00:52:27] Trevor Long: I thought they were the youngest part of me.

[00:52:29] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but, um, The, when you’re like, I like whenever I shop for like shoes and certain brands of clothes, I know my size. Of course I think, right, I’ll buy them. But often people don’t know their size and that’s, you think about how many returns there would have been online shopping for clothing. This is sort of the first step in getting it right the first time.

[00:52:50] Trevor Long: It’s like what we said about Amazon earlier with the returns thing. It’s like you want to minimize the, the number of those things. So if you you can get people to size it up.

[00:52:58] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but I think the fact you can ask it questions, I think one example I saw was like, I’m throwing my 10-year-old son a birthday party, what decorations should I get? Or I wanna buy a present for a young kid who loves Star Wars, what do you suggest? And boom, all of those. And also comparison shopping too. It really, I know you can do it already on some sites, but this really surfaces it up. So you say, right, I wanna buy an air fryer I need it to be this big and I want this. And then boom, all the options are there. You can see them all side by side, pricing, features. That’s gonna— that’s got to help too.

[00:53:31] Trevor Long: I like the idea. I think it’s really simple. I think it’s a good— I think it’s a good use of AI.

[00:53:35] Stephen Fenech: Yes.

[00:53:36] Trevor Long: Do you know what I mean?

[00:53:37] Stephen Fenech: I think other stores are going to follow.

[00:53:38] Trevor Long: The difference between people— people yelling at their radio, headphones, whatever— the difference between this and just having search on your website is that when you search, you’ve got to search for what you want and have it come up. If you search for birthday decorations, you’re going to get hundreds of results in, in lists of 20 at a time, and the male and female, boy and girl ages are not relevant, whereas Joy is going to narrow it down for you.

[00:54:02] Stephen Fenech: Exactly.

[00:54:03] Trevor Long: Which is what you want.

[00:54:03] Stephen Fenech: What a joy. Great name. Smart name for it too.

[00:54:07] Trevor Long: Not bad.

[00:54:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I love that name.

[00:54:08] Trevor Long: I like Buddy for Bunnings as well. Buddy?

[00:54:10] Stephen Fenech: Oh, they’ve already got that.

[00:54:11] VOICE OVER: It’s already—

[00:54:11] Trevor Long: it’s exactly the same thing. Same thing. There you go. Yeah.

[00:54:13] Stephen Fenech: See, Bunnings got ahead of the curve there.

[00:54:15] Trevor Long: Well, as I said, you were texting, but as I said earlier, they’re owned by the same company, so it’s the same.

[00:54:20] Stephen Fenech: And so is Target. Is that right? Yeah, good.

[00:54:22] Trevor Long: Because Joy will surface whether an air fryer is available at Target or Kmart.

[00:54:25] Stephen Fenech: How good is that?

[00:54:26] Trevor Long: Bit of cross-pollination going on there between brands. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s totally fair. Yeah, that’s totally fair.

[00:54:32] Stephen Fenech: Useful for the customer.

[00:54:33] Trevor Long: Anyway, you can read about Joy on techguide.com.au, on eftm.com. Stephen, you’ve got radio to do.

[00:54:40] Stephen Fenech: I do. Yeah, that’s why I was texting.

[00:54:42] Trevor Long: I know, I could tell, I could tell. I know what’s going on.

[00:54:45] Stephen Fenech: It’s getting close, mate, but we’ll be right. I said, look, I’ll text you when I’m ready.

[00:54:48] Trevor Long: Oh wow.

[00:54:49] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, that’s the sort of pull I’ve got, mate. Well, it’s that or nothing though. That’s basically it. So, uh, I’ll tell him when I’m ready, which should be in a couple of minutes. It’s, it’s about the right time now anyway. I’m normally about 20 to 25 to, so we’ll We’re getting there.

[00:55:06] Trevor Long: Oh, okay. I thought it’s half past.

[00:55:08] Stephen Fenech: That’s what it is right now.

[00:55:10] Trevor Long: That’s what—

[00:55:11] Stephen Fenech: that’s the time. But I’m normally like 7:35, 7:38, something like that. So I should be right, mate.

[00:55:16] Trevor Long: You bought yourself—

[00:55:16] Stephen Fenech: if we wrap it up, if we wrap it up soon, I’ll be able to—

[00:55:18] Trevor Long: I’ve been trying to do for the last 30 seconds, right?

[00:55:21] Stephen Fenech: We can get— I can get moving.

[00:55:22] Trevor Long: That’s great.

[00:55:23] Stephen Fenech: I’ll get out of this minuscule room and go back to my luxurious suite. Absolutely.

[00:55:29] Trevor Long: Um, safe travel home, Stephen, and And we’ll talk remotely next week. Yes. And then we’ll be back in the studio the week after. You can— what’s the movie this week?

[00:55:38] Stephen Fenech: Dead Calm this week. Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill.

[00:55:42] Trevor Long: So I saw a TikTok of a guy and his wife or girlfriend on an inflatable in the ocean with their boat in the background. And he’s like, oh, there’s no wind. So we’re just mucking around. We can’t go anywhere. So we thought we’d just drift around on the inflatable. And I went to the comments. You know, there’s a movie about this and it’s not good.

[00:56:00] Stephen Fenech: It’s called Dead Calm. Yeah, directed by Philip Noyce.

[00:56:03] Trevor Long: Philip Noyce, cracking. Very young Nicole Kidman. So that’ll be on your podcast feed.

[00:56:07] Stephen Fenech: See if Trevor likes it or not.

[00:56:09] Trevor Long: I can’t even remember.

[00:56:11] Stephen Fenech: I think, yeah, from memory you didn’t mind it. Okay, you got to tune in to see your score.

[00:56:17] Trevor Long: Watch Dead Calm and then download the podcast and have a listen and enjoy it. That’s great. Great. With us. All right, mate. See you when we’re back.

[00:56:24] Stephen Fenech: Take care. Bye-bye.

[00:56:25] VOICE OVER: This is Two Blokes Talking Tech with Trevor Long and Steven Fenech.

Podcast: EFTM

Episode: A Song for Trevor? Have a listen to this caller’s story!

Date: 2 June 2026

Host: Trevor Long

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[00:01:09] Trevor: G’day, g’day, great to have your company. Happy June, folks. We are 5/12 of the way through the year. I mean, can you believe that in like less than 30 days we’ll be halfway through the year? That is insane to me. I just— it’s going to hit me every week, I’ll tell you right now. It’s, it’s, it’s just weird. But anyway, it is what it is. I am currently in London, but, uh, we’re still here pumping out the shows for for you. As I said, next week I’ll be at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino for the Worldwide Developers Conference. Looking forward to that. And this week there’ll be news from Amazon, so keep your eyes on eftm.com. I’m literally just right now in the backend of the website adding some details to the Ask Trev page because I had this thought that you need to tell people to come to me. So if you’re on Facebook, let’s be honest, that’s where a lot of the, you know, how do I do this stuff happens. You need to tell people to, well, why don’t you just ask Trev? So what I’ve done is it worked, has it worked? Yes, it has. I’ve added a banner that has my face and the big thing, got a tech question, ask Trev. And so essentially, if you just go to eftm.com and click Ask Trev yourself and then copy that URL, that website address, go back and paste that in the comments of your mate’s tech question. Get them to ask me. That’s what I’m here for, right, is to help take your questions. Um, and so yeah, don’t be afraid to tell people to get in touch. You can advocate for me. See, the thing is, as we continue 16+ years into doing this talkback stuff here on the podcast, um, you, dear listener, you’re well aware of how everything works. You don’t have a question because you’re savvy. You’ve been listening, you’ve learned from me. Hopefully over the years. That said, there is no such thing as a dumb question. So if you have a question you think is dumb, ask it, because you’ll be blown away by how absolutely logical it is and how many other people might be asking just the same thing and will benefit from the same question. And that to me is the fun part of this, is other people benefiting from your question. So give it a crack, folks. If you paste the Ask Trev URL into Facebook, you’re basically sharing a picture of me. I might— you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to publicly put it out there now. I’m going to put it on my Facebook page now so that people know they can ask that question. Simple as that. Um, because that way we, we, we get your calls. Otherwise, what are we gonna do on this show? We do have a lot coming up on the show though. A lot of companies want to be on the show, so we’ve got a lot of interviews coming up over the couple of months ahead. We’re going to talk to Samsung, HP, um, the Australian— hmm, ACAN, Communications Consumer Action Network, I think it stands for— because I want to talk about the spectrum pricing I want to talk to Hisense about their XR10 projector, which has just been delivered to my office. There’s so much I want to talk about, so we will talk to people. And if you’re someone you want me to talk to, then let me know. See, that’s— it’s a two-way relationship here, this thing. You can ask me and I can benefit from that. Producer Rob can get ideas from you. If there’s some— something you think we should cover, just text it through. Producer Rob sees all the texts. He can write it down. He might even use his initiative and come up with an interview on it, but he’s very busy because he’s a granddad. Producer Rob’s a granddad. Uh, he’s doting, he’s doting over a, uh, a beautiful new baby, which is lovely. So, uh, he’s not 100% focused on his computer, which is absolutely as it should be. Family first is what I say to the boys, um, and I say that all the time because I, I believe in it personally. I will I put family first every day of the week. Now, weirdly, I work stupid hours. I work like 14 hours a day most days. So am I putting family first? Not on a weekday, but I get home, I sit around the dinner table, we talk rubbish, and I go to bed. But on the weekends, I’m there. And if there’s something that the kids need to be at, I’ll give up my time ’cause I can leave work easily ’cause I’m self-employed. So I’ll say no to events because I’ve got something on for the family. I believe I put family first, but when Scott, Daniel, Rob, or whoever it is that’s involved, um, uh, need something or need to do something, I would prefer they put their time into their family than anything AFTM. Um, and speaking of family, and I’ll say this here because it’s, it’s like the quiet club, all right? And this news is now a week old, but I don’t think I would have announced it anywhere yet. But just between you and me, part of the family now is jbbuddy.com. Do you remember a year ago we— I think we had Kyle on the show, um, we certainly talked about on the radio and I published it on EFTM. jbbuddy.com, a website created by a young Aussie guy who just wanted to be able to give you the better prices, find the best price for a model. So I’ve been playing around with obviously the EFTM TV search, the buyer guide, and love it. Still a big fan of mucking around with it and it’s great information for me. But I’ve also got to work on getting the prices. So what I’m essentially hoping to leverage through acquiring JBuddy.com, and by acquiring, I mean I didn’t buy the domain name, I bought it all. EFTM now owns the whole site, the database and the processes. And Kyle is helping out on an ongoing basis for the next couple of years at the very least. Run it, manage it, and keep it up to date. But we’ve also agreed to work together over the couple of months ahead to build out my thing and his thing into something pretty special. So I imagine in my mind, just between you and me, I imagine you’ve got the JB— the point of JBuddy is I know what I want, find me the best price. The point of the EFTN, which TV to buy, is I don’t know what I want, help me out. And so you essentially come in with the first question, do you know what you want? Or do you want our help finding it? And you cascade through the flowchart, and we will end up finding you the best price online without any affiliate marketing, without taking any commission, just through sheer data power. So welcome to the family, JBuddy. Thank you to Kyle, who was absolutely awesome about the concept and the process. And yeah, really, really excited to take that data and make something of it for TV buyers. Lots of TVs are bought and sold every year, so let’s be part of that. Let’s be part of that conversation. I’ll be honest with you, I can’t stop thinking about doing the same thing for electric cars. Like, I know there’s websites that narrow these things down, but they overcomplicate it. It’s like car sales and you’ve got to answer too many questions. No, no, I just want an electric car with range this long. Oh, but, but it’s less than this price. I don’t know, I feel like there might be something in that. Producer Rob, make a note. It’s already in my head. It’s in my personal notebook pretty heavily, but I’ve got to think about how. Anyway, I shouldn’t openly think out loud. It’s bad for me. Let’s get on with the show. Let’s take your calls, uh, whatever it is. 0477 657 657.

[00:08:22] VOICE OVER: This is the EFTM podcast.

[00:08:27] Trevor: Great to have your company and taking your calls. Anytime you’ve got a tech question, you know where to go. You can save it in your phone. 0477 657 657. We’ll try and help you out. Blake’s on the line.

Blake — Bone conduction headphones for a truckie

[00:08:36] VOICE OVER: G’day, mate.

[00:08:37] Blake: G’day, Trev, how are you?

[00:08:38] Trevor: Hey, really good. What can I do for you?

[00:08:41] Blake: Just want to inquire, and apologies about my voice.

[00:08:44] Trevor: That’s okay.

[00:08:44] Blake: I just want to inquire about these, um, faux conductive headphones that I keep seeing popping up everywhere.

[00:08:50] Trevor: You’re getting ads for them on the internet, are you? Oh, flat out.

[00:08:56] Blake: Holy Julie.

[00:08:57] Trevor: And so why do you think they’d be right for you?

[00:09:00] Blake: Well, that’s what I want to find out. Um, I’ll probably I do sort of stick with the earbud system for most of my day talking on the phone. But yeah, just wondering if they’re sort of worth the change and if they’re safe in that regard with the EMFs.

[00:09:23] Trevor: Yeah. Oh, there’s certainly no safety concern at all with them because they’re essentially exactly the same headphones as what you’ve got now, except they vibrate against your skull instead of projecting sound in your ears. So the waves, instead of waves coming into your ears, it’s a wave going into your bone. Does that make sense? So that’s how the sound works. I don’t know, I think for me, I see them as a really valuable thing for people that are walking and running because they are what we call open. You know, your ears are still exposed to the world. So if someone yells out, “Oi, look out!” you know, you hear it.

[00:09:58] Blake: You’re gonna hear it.

[00:09:59] Trevor: You know, so that’s critical for people that are on the go, especially out running, which is why I think they’re perfect for runners.

[00:10:04] Trevor: Is that Is that what I understand? Yes. Yeah. So mate, one of the things I would say to you is I don’t love wearing in-ear headphones for a long time. So I wonder whether as a truckie, they become like in your ear, it kind of, it becomes uncomfortable. So bone conducting would be brilliant in that sense. ‘Cause they’re just kind of sitting on your ear and your head. They’re not really in your ear or even hanging on your ear. And I’ve seen some that have a little headset mic on them, which would mean excellent quality for making phone calls if that’s what you’re doing all day up in the big rig, you know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. So mate, I know there’s probably a lot of ads for them, but the one— I’ve only seen one, I would call them traditional brand, doing them. I’m sure there’s hundreds of brands doing them online, but the brand I would recommend is Shox. S-H-O-K-Z. Shox. And the reason I recommend them is not just because they’re sold in JB Hi-Fi and they’re reputable brand, I’ve seen their other products. They’re the one that I can I see online they’ve got one with a little headset microphone at JB— at Officeworks. So I reckon that one would be awesome for the truck because you’re gonna get great quality calls, comfortable, and yeah, it’s gonna work great for you, mate.

[00:11:21] Blake: Fantastic. All right, so time to go shopping, mate. I’ll save some money for something like a pair of shocks, and I won’t waste any time and money with those ones I keep seeing advertised.

[00:11:30] Trevor: And mate, let us know how they go. And are you talking on your phone or earbuds now?

[00:11:35] Blake: I’m talking on the earbuds now, mate.

[00:11:37] Trevor: So then you need to make me a promise. Producer Rob will reach out in a few weeks and see if you bought them, and then let’s have a quick 2-minute chat to see what the quality is like.

[00:11:44] Blake: All right, all right, mate. Copy that, will do.

[00:11:47] Trevor: Brilliant stuff, mate. Stay safe out there.

[00:11:49] Blake: Legend, Trev. Good on you, mate.

[00:11:50] Trevor: All the best. No worries at all. Yeah, Blake’s in the truck, um, and very important you stay safe on the roads and focus. So yeah, I think the Bone can— I’ve seen more people running with them lately, and I think That’s a safety thing, which is awesome. I want people to be safe when they’re walking. Think about the looking down at your phone when they’re crossing the road thing. That’s bad enough, but people running that can’t hear the world around them, that’s a challenge too. So yeah, Shox, they definitely, they make a lot of products. So that would be a great option right there for Blake.

[00:12:22] VOICE OVER: You’re listening to the EFTM podcast. Join the conversation, head to eftm.com.au. And click Ask Trev.

[00:12:40] Trevor: Great to have your company. Would love to hear from you. If you want to talk tech, if you’ve got a tech question, tech problem, whatever it might be, 0477657657. Send me a text or a WhatsApp message and we’ll get you on the show. Producer Rob will be in touch. Margaret’s on the line. G’day, Marg.

Margaret — Playing AI-written songs for nursing home residents

[00:12:53] Margaret: Hi, Trevor. What can I do for you?

[00:12:55] Trevor: Oh, my absolute pleasure.

[00:12:57] Margaret: I have a question. I’m a volunteer at a local nursing home. Where I’ve started writing songs for the residents, but most of the residents don’t have mobile phones. So I’m hoping you can suggest another device that they could maybe have in their room so they can listen to their song, because otherwise I have to be there and play it on my iPad.

[00:13:18] Trevor: Yeah, right. So you can play to them whenever you want, but obviously if you’re not there, which you’re not all the time, they’re going to struggle. Now, are you talking about like a speaker device or what kind of device?

[00:13:30] Margaret: I don’t know. In the past, like a long time ago, I know my daughter had like an iPod or there were MP3 players and that sort of thing. But all I have is my iPad and my phone. But I can send the song to a phone. So what else could I send the song to so that someone could come in and maybe press the button for them every now and then and they could listen to their song?

[00:13:52] Trevor: What, um, do you use Amazon for shopping at all?

[00:13:57] Margaret: Um, yes, I’ve got a Prime membership, I think.

[00:13:59] Trevor: Well, I mean, you could be in a world of pain here like I am. I’m just looking, I just logged on to mine and I can see so many items in the shopping cart and I realize my wife has put all these things in the shopping cart to discuss with me because they’re clearly— she’s trying to renovate my bathroom here at the office and I can see that’s what they are. But anyway, as I browse, what I searched for on Amazon was speaker because we want it to be a speaker, right? Not a device. MP3, because you’re gonna— what you’re gonna create hopefully are MP3 files that you can then put onto. We want to put an MP3 file onto a device like we used to do with an iPod, but we wanted to be a device they can hear out of without having to pair with Bluetooth and all that kind of thing, right? That’s in my mind, that’s the ultimate. That’s what, that’s what I think would be kind of perfect. Um, so Straight away on Amazon, a lot of little, like less than $20 speakers come up. They look like they’re going to be absolutely tiny, tiny little things. So look, you could buy one of those and just see how it works, because the problem is always going to be the ease of use. You know, you’re relying on, you know, a carer or a nurse or someone else at the facility to press the button or whatever for them. It can’t be true. You can’t make it too complex for them right now. The good news is you might just You might end up with just something that is, you only put one file on it, or if you put two or three files on it, it always just plays through the three and they don’t get to choose the song or choose the music, but it still would do the job. But the other one, the other brand I want you to look at is Laser, Aussie company, and they make, you know, affordable electronics normally sold at places like Big W and sometimes Harvey Norman and the like. And I know they have a range of products. They’ve got a portable Boombox. Now it’s $100. It looks exactly like an old-school cassette boombox, right? Yeah, it will play cassettes, but it also has a micro SD card slot. And so again, you could save your song onto that memory card and put it onto, um, put it onto the boombox and play it there. Thing is though I mean, we’re spending money on every resident here. It’s starting to cost you a bit, right? How many residents have you made songs for?

[00:16:24] Margaret: At the moment, about 10 out of 160.

[00:16:26] Trevor: Oh, okay. Wow.

[00:16:29] Trevor: Okay. Yeah, that’s going to add up. That’s going to add up a lot. Now, I— here’s what I’ve got to go. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I talk to the people at Laser, Chris and Ronnie Briskett and the team at Laser who make these products, and ask them what their simplest/most affordable product would be, ’cause if it’s the $100 unit, fine, but whatever. And let’s get you one and see how it works. Oh, really? Because then we know how it works and if that’s gonna be viable for you long-term. Because whether it’s 10 residents or 100, the problem will always be the people that need to operate it, be it the family member or the carer. And I think you need to play with that first. So if you’re okay with that, I will talk to the team at Laser and I’ll ask them.

[00:17:20] Margaret: Wow.

[00:17:21] Trevor: The simple question, can we— what would be their advice in this situation? And, and, and can we get one for Margaret so that you can— so you can use it?

[00:17:29] Margaret: All right, that would be wonderful. Try it out anyway.

[00:17:33] Trevor: How are you writing these songs? You’re a musician?

[00:17:36] Margaret: No, no, no. This is just, um, AI music. AI. I write all the lyrics, I put them into a program, and it gives me the song.

[00:17:44] Trevor: And now hang on, I did this years— it feels like maybe a year ago, or I don’t know, but there was a thing called, uh, uh, is that the one thing you’re using?

[00:17:53] Margaret: Yeah, that’s the one.

[00:17:54] Trevor: But in this case, you’re writing the lyrics, are you?

[00:17:56] Margaret: Yes, they’re my lyrics.

[00:17:59] Trevor: Right. So you’re writing the lyrics and then you tell it what style of song you want.

[00:18:03] Margaret: Yes, all of that. I spend half an hour with the resident and ask them all their life questions, and then I go home, write the song, come back the next day and I play it for them. Beautiful. You know, they get a kick out of it and so do I. Yeah.

[00:18:18] Trevor: Producer Rob sent me a message and a link to what I assume because it’s called For Trevor. I assume you’ve written this for me.

[00:18:26] Margaret: Oh yeah, it’s your song. Yes, that’s your song.

[00:18:28] Trevor: Well, I’ll play the whole thing. I’ll play the whole thing at the end of the show, but let me, let me, let me play just a little bit of it now. Okay, so hang on, let’s, let’s have a listen to a little bit of this.

[00:18:48] [Song clip plays]

[00:19:18] Trevor: Well, that’s wild. So you wrote these lyrics?

[00:19:21] Margaret: I did last night.

[00:19:22] Trevor: Yeah. Listen, how long have you been following or listening to me?

[00:19:27] Margaret: I’ve always seen you on television for years, years and years. Goes way back.

[00:19:32] Trevor: Wow.

[00:19:33] Margaret: Yeah. You’ve always got something interesting on the Today Show for sure.

[00:19:37] Trevor: That’s very nice. Well, that’s lovely. I’ll play the whole thing at the end of the show so people can hear the whole song. Okay. So, all right, we’ve got a plan because it’s a lovely thing you’re doing for the residents there. So you just do this in your your spare time? Because you’re retired, did you say?

[00:19:50] Margaret: I am retired. I couldn’t work anymore because of my health, but my husband’s in the nursing home, and so I spend my day with him and then I go home and write.

[00:19:58] Trevor: Oh wow. And so you spend your day with him, but you also duck out and see the other residents at the same time?

[00:20:03] Margaret: Yes, absolutely. I’m a volunteer.

[00:20:06] Trevor: That’s so lovely. And it’s lovely that you can, you can spend that time with your husband as well, which is important. And has— how many songs, how many songs you’ve written for Oh, heaps and heaps.

[00:20:17] Margaret: I couldn’t remember. I’ve written over 300 songs altogether.

[00:20:21] Margaret: So he comes into quite a lot of them.

[00:20:22] Trevor: How did you come across Suno?

[00:20:25] Margaret: Well, I’ve been writing poetry and putting it on Facebook, and I said to my son-in-law, he came down from Alice Springs, and I said, “I’d really like to hear this sung.” And he said, “All right, Mum.” And he looked up on Google and he said, “This is programmed for Suno.” ‘And would you like to try it out?’ I said, ‘Yeah, why not?’ And so that’s how I started. I bought the— I didn’t buy anything. I did the free membership for a little while, and then I thought, ‘No, I’m just going to pay the subscription because then they’re my songs. They don’t belong to, you know.’ Oh, gotcha. Now they’re mine. Yeah. So I pay a small subscription every year and I can write that many songs. I can’t use up all the credits that I’ve got. That’s wonderful.

[00:21:07] Trevor: Oh, because I feel like when I tested it out some while ago, it— I paid some money for credits or something. And so yeah, I could churn out songs. Is there a different plan that says you kind of own the rights as well?

[00:21:23] Margaret: Or there are 3 different levels of plan, right? So you can do the freebie, but the songs don’t belong to you. So if you pay the next subscription up, they do belong to you. Then there’s a higher one for pro, which I’m not going to go that far. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, it’s fun just to have a go. It will write songs for you. I know there’s an option, but these are all my lyrics.

[00:21:46] Trevor: Yeah, I remembered using it and it was like you could give it a theme or an idea and it would come up with the lyrics and everything. So you’re, you’re essentially using it for half the process. I notice in your lyrics, because now that I’m looking at the one you sent.

[00:22:00] Trevor: You, there’s little prompts there for. Yeah. You know, musical, like chorus and things like that. Are you putting those prompts in or is that doing that?

[00:22:09] Margaret: Now I have to do all that.

[00:22:11] Trevor: Right. So that it understands— you’re essentially explaining the song to it.

[00:22:14] Margaret: Yes. You have to get— otherwise you don’t get what you want back.

[00:22:17] Trevor: So how long did it take you to learn? Because that’s a really critical learning about AI is what you need to give it is more important than actually the basics.

[00:22:27] Margaret: Yes, that’s exactly right. Probably in the last 6 months I’ve become a lot better at it. Knowing how to put the prompts in and what to say that I want to get whatever back. You have to put the right words in, otherwise it gives you something that’s totally off the planet. Yeah. And you just have to scrub that song. But, you know, you’ve got— I’ve got that many credits, so it doesn’t matter. They like to mess you up every now and then, I’m sure, just to use up the credit, just to use up some credits. Yes, but it’s fun. You know, you can just delete them. It doesn’t matter.

[00:22:56] Trevor: Well, I’ve got 550 credits. I don’t know how many that is. Oh, is that a lot or a little?

[00:23:01] Margaret: That’s— yeah, it’s 10 credits when you get 2 songs.

[00:23:04] Trevor: Oh geez.

[00:23:05] Margaret: Okay, so you’ve got a lot.

[00:23:07] Trevor: I obviously went crazy in the early days.

[00:23:11] Margaret: You have to start writing.

[00:23:12] Trevor: I’m almost certain that I’ve since unsubscribed or, you know, turned it off because I see what happens in my life is I sign up for everything because I’ve got to test everything. And then— and I’m lucky I’ve got a business. This is my job and my business. So it’s all a business expense. But every now and then I go, hey, Trev, like, we should tighten the purse strings here. A little bit and you just go through the AMEX statement and you go, hang on a minute, $12 a month here, $20 a month there.

[00:23:39] Margaret: Yes, it adds up.

[00:23:39] Trevor: And it really does add up. So I know, yeah, I can imagine what I did was go, give me all the credits on day one and thought it was nice.

[00:23:49] Margaret: You probably did.

[00:23:50] Trevor: All right, well, I might have another play around with it and have some fun. But well done on the lyrics. Thank you for the little song about me and lovely work you’re doing for the residents there. And I hope your husband’s doing okay. And we Producer Rob will reach out and we’ll get your address details and we’ll get the people at Laser to get in touch and get you something to play with and see whether that’s going to help.

[00:24:11] Margaret: That’s great. Oh, I’m so excited. Thank you very much for your time.

[00:24:15] Trevor: No worries at all.

[00:24:16] Margaret: Thanks for the chat. Appreciate it.

[00:24:17] Trevor: Thank you. Good on you, mate. No worries at all. Isn’t that lovely? What a lovely thing she’s doing. And, you know, it’s heartbreaking to have to think about going and visiting your own partner in a home every single day. But then she’s taken that and she’s, she’s doing some lovely things for other people as well. That’s just lovely. So let’s try and help Margaret out as much as we can there. And the Chris and the boys will absolutely send us something and we’ll see if that’s going to be— maybe give her some sense of what, what might work for the longer term as well. You’re listening to the EFTM Podcast.

[00:24:51] VOICE OVER: Tech, cars, lifestyle. This is the EFTM Podcast with Trevor Long.

[00:24:57] Trevor: Lovely to have your company, and if you have a tech question, please get in touch. Send me an SMS 0477 657657, or you can send a WhatsApp message, whatever you prefer, and we’ll get you on the show, try and help you out. Laurie’s on the line. G’day, Laurie.

Laurie — Replacing a 7-year-old ASUS laptop

[00:25:09] Laurie: Hi, Trevor. Good morning.

[00:25:11] Trevor: What can I do for you?

[00:25:13] Laurie: Look, I have had problems with my ASUS laptop, which I have owned for about 7 years, and I think it’s on its last legs. It doesn’t want to do what I want it to do. So is it, is it slow?

[00:25:28] Trevor: Is it slow or is it running out of battery? What’s happening to it?

[00:25:31] Laurie: Yes, it’s slow. Not only slow, it’s the battery that is a big problem. I have to keep it charged to power all day long if I’m using the laptop.

[00:25:41] Trevor: Yeah. Do you know anything about the model number?

[00:25:43] Laurie: Uh, yes, I do. It’s a 509F, ASUS 509F. Because I did ring ASUS at one of their branches, I think based at Seven Hills, and the guy said to me, you can get a battery, but, uh, you know, we first have to check it out. And they this and that and the other. And I thought by the time he checks it out, I will have covered a quarter of the cost of getting a new laptop.

[00:26:08] Trevor: It’s— and that’s the challenge because back in the day when— remember when laptops were like an inch and a half thick when they first came out? You could— there was like two clips and the battery would come out and they actually often came with a second battery so that you could get through the day.

[00:26:23] Laurie: You’re right.

[00:26:24] Trevor: Whereas these days they’re kind of wired in. So it’s not something you can do yourself. Is the bottom line there. Do you know how much that laptop cost you back 7 years ago?

[00:26:34] Laurie: About 7 years, I paid about $1,100, I think.

[00:26:37] Trevor: So it was a decent valued laptop. And do you feel like, forgetting the current problem, do you feel like you got good value out of it over 7 years?

[00:26:46] Laurie: I do. I have to say I did. And, you know, I have no regrets if it’s kind of—

[00:26:53] Trevor: if it’s time to—

[00:26:54] Laurie: it’s old.

[00:26:54] Trevor: You know what? I appreciate you’re 4 foresight there, because that’s what I was getting at. Essentially, I think you’re right, you can replace the battery, and it may— let’s say the battery replacement, the physical battery, is a couple of hundred dollars and the labor is a couple of hundred dollars. Let’s say you’re in for $500 or $600, right? Yeah, maybe even a little bit less. That’s half the price of what you paid for it. And the reason that doesn’t sound like a smart move is because we’ve come so far with laptops in 7 years. I would argue we’ve come so far with laptops in 2 years. What do you mainly do on the laptop? What do you use it for?

[00:27:33] Laurie: I’ll tell you, because I’ve retired, I do mainly my Word documents. I keep track of my accounts, which is my payment of bills, bank statements, whatever, on an Excel spreadsheet. So I know, you know, I have all my paperwork in chronological order. And of course, just emails that I get from friends and family. And that’s basically what I use it for.

[00:27:59] Trevor: And how big is the screen on it, do you know?

[00:28:02] Laurie: Yeah, 15.6 inches. Yep. Yeah.

[00:28:05] Trevor: So here’s the thing, a modern ASUS brand new 15-inch Intel Pentium, 256GB of hard drive space is $800. Oh wow, for a brand new— and this is a nice big laptop with a— with— it’s got a stupid thing to observe, but it has a number pad on the side of the keyboard so you can type numbers on the side, you know, like a proper— yes, uh, big screen keyboard. Um, yes, that would be That would be the cheapest one I’d want you to get, because anything less than that, there’s probably going to be some form of compromise. Yes. Outside of that, there’s obviously a lot of money you could spend, a lot, a lot of different amounts of money on a, on a computer these days. But an interesting observation would be, in, in my view, one of the most beautiful laptops on the market today is the ASUS ZenBook A14. I think, in fact, I don’t have my magazine near me, but I’m pretty sure we gave this best laptop of the year last year in our awards. It’s normal, it’s normally $2,000. It’s currently on sale at JB Hi-Fi at $1,600, $1,599. Okay, now there’s a couple of things about this device. Big hard drive, very thin, thin and beautiful. It’s only a 14-inch screen, but it’s a beautiful OLED screen. It has this stunning feel to it. It’s got this lovely feeling on the outside. It doesn’t feel like a cheap laptop at all. And because it has what’s called a Qualcomm processor instead of Intel, it’s going to last— the battery on this thing will last 20, maybe 30 hours.

[00:29:43] Laurie: Right.

[00:29:44] Trevor: Okay, this is— this computer will last you the, the same. It’ll be a 5 or 7 year laptop for you once again. I have no question about that.

[00:29:53] Laurie: Um, sure.

[00:29:54] Trevor: And, and look, that’s an extra investment. I hear the 16— so you basically— I’m presenting you two options. Options. $800 for a lovely— it’s a beautiful— have a look at these on JB Hi-Fi. It’s a lovely looking laptop with all the ports and HDMI and everything you might need if you needed a few extra little bells and whistles. $800, lovely. But double that and you are getting what I think— and I remember my wife is not heavily engaged in what I do for a job, right? But she notices things, and she was, she was looking at my magazine last year where I, I gave this device an award. Board. And then a few weeks later, she said to me, oh my God, Oprah has given this— has her best laptop of the year. Oprah Winfrey, people.

[00:30:35] Laurie: Yeah.

[00:30:36] Trevor: So if it’s good enough for Oprah, it’s good enough for, for Laurie, I reckon.

[00:30:41] Laurie: Yeah, I guess so. Trevor, one question about the big hard drive you mentioned. Is it 1TB? No, this is what I have at the moment.

[00:30:50] Trevor: The, the, uh, the ASUS ZenBook A14 that I’m looking at is 512 I would wonder how much of the 1TB are you actually using?

[00:31:00] Laurie: I haven’t used a lot because like I said, you know, I don’t need a lot of— I actually store all my data, my important data on an external hard drive, which means, you know, if anything happens to the laptop, I haven’t lost everything.

[00:31:16] Trevor: Yeah. And look, that’s why I would— I’d be amazed if you needed 256. I’d be amazed. So if you were able to get the 512, it’d be a nice balance between what you have now and, and what you really need. And you stay in that habit of using external hard drive for your important documents.

[00:31:34] Laurie: Oh yeah, I do.

[00:31:35] Trevor: But at the same time, Laurie, have you got any cloud storage available to you?

[00:31:39] Laurie: No, because I use my hard drive, so I don’t know much about cloud storage. I have to admit, I’m out of the workforce for the last 10, 12 years, you know.

[00:31:49] Trevor: Well, I want you to play around. If you— it sounds like you’ve got probably Microsoft 365 for your office.

[00:31:56] Laurie: Yes, I do.

[00:31:57] Trevor: That will come with, I don’t know how much, but it will come with an amount of storage in OneDrive.

[00:32:03] Laurie: Right, okay.

[00:32:03] Trevor: And I think OneDrive is a really nice integration of the cloud because it appears in a new computer in Windows 11, it appears like on the left-hand side of the File Explorer, it just looks like another hard drive. You remember how we, back in the day, we used to have an A drive, a C drive, and a B drive and whatever. These days, you know, they don’t really show that, but it’s still there. But essentially OneDrive appears like it’s a hard drive on your computer and you drag a file over there or you save by default all of your important spreadsheets and documents to OneDrive. You can still back them up to your external hard drive, but by default they’re saved in the cloud. And so if someone stole your laptop and you got a new one, you logged into your Microsoft account, all your files are still there.

[00:32:48] Laurie: Now tell me something, I do have OneDrive. I have absolutely no idea what it stood for. It shows up every time I open a Word document.

[00:32:57] Trevor: That’s what it is, because they want you to default to it. They— look, it’s a bit frustrating, but if you, if you made the decision that from, from the time I get my new computer, I’m gonna put, I’m gonna put my folders— so in your My Documents, I’m assuming you’ve got folders for different things. What you do is you store those folders in your OneDrive. And so by default, when you save a spreadsheet, you go OneDrive OneDrive, you know, family planning, OneDrive Christmas party, whatever, you know. And yeah, and it doesn’t make any difference to you and the computer, but whenever you’ve got an internet connection available, it’ll synchronize that up to the cloud. And then hey presto, you’re good to go and you’ll never lose that file again. And remember, you can still sync it to your hard drive, your little portable hard drive as well.

[00:33:44] Laurie: Yes, yes, that’s what I do on a regular basis. And one last question is, how do I get all my data transferred from the old C drive to the new one. What do I do? Do I have to go to a particular computer shop and get it done?

[00:33:59] Trevor: When you say data, what do you mean?

[00:34:02] Laurie: Your documents? The hard drive on— yes, my documents that are on the C drive. How do I transfer them across to the new laptop?

[00:34:09] Trevor: Well, you’ve got two options. Well, you’ve got three options. One, you could take it to someone and they will do that for you at a price. Two, you’ve got yourself an external hard drive. Just drop them there, put them on the external hard drive, or use this as your, your moment to start using OneDrive.

[00:34:27] Laurie: Okay, right, right.

[00:34:29] Trevor: And here’s the number one thing for someone that’s using the— because the great thing is your computer’s not dead, so when you buy a new one, you’re gonna have them sitting side by side, which is great. Yes, yes. So you don’t have to panic about losing something. Yes. But if you just tonight, this afternoon, today, whenever you want, just create a single folder in OneDrive OneDrive and move a few files in there, a couple of spreadsheets or whatever you like.

[00:34:52] Laurie: Yes, yes.

[00:34:52] Trevor: And then an hour later, open up the internet just in a browser and go to OneDrive on the internet, log in, and see if you can see those files. Because if you can see those files via a web browser, it means they’re in the cloud, and that’s all you need to do. And when you get your new computer, you just log into your Microsoft account and it will synchronize copies all that OneDrive onto the new computer for you.

[00:35:17] Laurie: Okay, so OneDrive is like another folder?

[00:35:22] Trevor: Exactly, except it’s another folder, but it’s in a building outside of your home.

[00:35:28] Laurie: Okay, I see. And I need to create a login ID to get—

[00:35:34] Trevor: No, it’s just your Microsoft one. It’s probably already logged in. It’s probably already logged in because you, you have Microsoft 365 and all those things. So if you go to— I’m actually, I’m gonna guess here, but I think it’s onedrive.com because I don’t really use it that much myself. Yeah, if you go to onedrive.com, mine has automatically logged me in as Trevor Long using my Microsoft account, and I can see in here a bunch of files that I’ve saved in my OneDrive. There’s some company reports I’ve done and different things because I’ve been using a Windows computer at the time. Easy as pie. It just, it’s just, it’s just another folder older, but it’s, uh, not on your computer, right?

[00:36:15] Laurie: And if for some reason I want to remove the old hard drive that I have on the current ASUS laptop, I can do that, isn’t it?

[00:36:23] Trevor: Remove it physically?

[00:36:25] Laurie: Yeah, physically, and then just smash it up after I’ve done all the copying from the C drive to the external hard drive.

[00:36:33] Trevor: If you’ve got a screwdriver and pulled that computer apart with all your mouse Yeah, with the greatest respect, I don’t think you’d know which was the hard drive in there.

[00:36:42] Laurie: No, I don’t, because you know what happened? I rang Bunnings one time and they told me what to do. They literally sent me a picture and I gave it to my brother-in-law who got it out for me.

[00:36:53] Trevor: Here’s what I’d do. I’d go to Bunnings. I’d go to Bunnings. I’d buy a set of safety glasses and a pair of safety gloves and a sledgehammer. And I would have all the fun in the world on the driveway smashing that laptop.

[00:37:07] Laurie: Oh, good on you, well done.

[00:37:11] Trevor: Because, Laurie, if you take that laptop to your local e-waste recycling center, yeah, ain’t no one there gonna look at the hard drive, trust me. Oh really? Don’t worry about it.

[00:37:21] Laurie: I don’t know, people scare you to death about having hard drives.

[00:37:25] Trevor: I get it. But Laurie, do you work in the Defence Department?

[00:37:28] Laurie: No, I don’t.

[00:37:29] Trevor: Do you work for ASIO?

[00:37:31] Laurie: No, I work for the state government.

[00:37:33] Trevor: So do you have state government secrets on that laptop? No, no, no one’s, no one’s looking at you through a window waiting for you to throw that laptop out.

[00:37:42] Laurie: Okay. Yeah, we do have a lot of recycling service centers.

[00:37:47] Trevor: Yeah, e-waste recycling. Do the right thing with it. Send it into e-waste recycling. And, and yeah, if you want to open it up and try and remove the hard drive yourself. But it’s not that hard if you can locate which is which.

[00:37:59] Laurie: No, it’s not. Because Bunnings actually sent me a picture step by step.

[00:38:03] Laurie: My brother-in-law is pretty good. He’s a handyman. So he got it out for me.

[00:38:08] Trevor: All right. The ASUS ZenBook A14 would be an absolute cracker if you got it.

[00:38:12] Laurie: So the ZenBook A14.

[00:38:14] Trevor: All right. Enjoy.

[00:38:15] Laurie: And it’s sitting around $1,599.

[00:38:16] Trevor: If you go now, you’ll get it nice and cheap.

[00:38:19] Laurie: Yeah. Actually, as you said, it’s now the end of financial year season. Yes. So I may shop around. Good idea.

[00:38:25] Trevor: Good on you, Laurie. Great to hear from you.

[00:38:28] Trevor: Yes, no worries at all. Lovely to hear from you. So there you go, we’ve solved that problem. Um, you know, it’s— I think 7 years is a good, good number for a Windows laptop. And I do think critically that point about fixing that now gives you access— so changing the battery gives you access to a 7-year-old laptop. Very different to a 7-year-old phone or 5-year-old phone. Alone because we’ve come so far in the last few years with laptops. So I think the current laptop is a much better investment than the repair.

[00:39:03] VOICE OVER: Tech, cars, lifestyle— this is the EFTM podcast with Trevor Long. You can text Trev now thanks to Vodafone on 0477 657 657.

[00:39:17] Trevor: Great to have your company. Bruce is on the line. G’day, Bruce.

Bruce — Battery-powered smart speaker for bathroom intercom

[00:39:20] Bruce: How are you, Troy?

[00:39:21] Trevor: Really good. What can I do for you?

[00:39:23] Bruce: I have a Google Nest and smart speakers in my house, and the problem is my wife says if she’s in the bathroom and something happens, she calls out, I can’t hear her downstairs. So what I’m looking for is a speaker, preferably a battery-powered speaker, to put in the bathroom so we can broadcast if she needs help or I need help.

[00:39:45] Trevor: Hang on, so it has to be a smart speaker?

[00:39:49] Bruce: Well, any sort of speaker that can broadcast.

[00:39:52] Trevor: That can broadcast as in a message from— like an intercom? Yes. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s going to have to be a smart speaker. Yes. I can’t think of another way of doing it, frankly. But you’re all in on the Google system, are you? Yes. They used the original Google Home, which was a funny looking cylindrical thing with an angled top. There was aftermarket accessories that came out mount for it that allowed you to put it on a battery. Yes, but I haven’t— like, the biggest problem we’ve got is that they’re not— are they even selling Google speakers in Australia anymore?

[00:40:26] Bruce: Well, the trouble is I’ve got the Google Nest and the Google Smart speakers, but I’ve had looked online and I really can’t find anything. That’s what worries me. I mean, I’ve got the system and it’s— I can’t get another speaker.

[00:40:40] Trevor: Yeah, honestly, Google has just got this weird thing where they’ve just almost abandoned the market. I feel like they’re waiting for the fullness of technology to hit the speakers so that we get Gemini with the speakers as opposed to just, um, uh, what it is now, a very, you know, not conversational speaker. However, I would argue, and I’m almost certain as I Google it right now, yes, there are plenty of products made for Amazon Alexa speakers. So I’m just looking now at what this is. It’s a battery base. ‘Cause look, mate, Amazon Echo speakers are sensational. They’re okay. And here’s the great thing, you can have both. There’s nothing, we’ve got a Google speaker in the dining room, which pretty much only gets used to set timers while we’re cooking. And it’s got a really big clock on it. So when my wife’s aunt, who’s intellectually disabled, is around, she’s always like, when’s lunch? And we’re like, look at the clock. And it’s a big digital clock and she can see that it’s not 12 o’clock. Yet. But in the lounge room we’ve got an Alexa speaker for playing music and things. So you can have both.

[00:41:46] Bruce: No, I didn’t. I wasn’t aware of that because I’ve used my Google Nest for my, for my broadband and I didn’t know you could mix.

[00:41:55] Trevor: Yep, 100%. So basically what do you use the Google speakers for?

[00:42:02] Bruce: Just basically playing music. There’s one in a room where my wife does yoga. I use that. And I’ve got a display downstairs with some photos on it.

[00:42:13] Trevor: Yeah, that’s about it. So there are— and a doorbell and a doorbell, right? So the only time it becomes complex having two is when one can do something that the other can’t. So for example, if you have a set of smart lights that only one can control. But the good thing is normally that happens across Apple versus the others because there’s some stuff that’s only HomeKit compatible or that’s not HomeKit compatible. But I’ve never found a product that isn’t both Google and Alexa compatible. Compatible. Even a smart light from Bunnings is normally going to have Google and Alexa compatibility. It just means you’ve got to set it up twice. So if you had a smart light, you can set it up twice. Your Nest doorbell camera is still going to be answered through the Nest app or the Google Home app on your phone, and it’s going to show up on that screen in the house. It’s not going to show up on an Alexa screen. But right now I can already see that, mate, if you go to Amazon, an Amazon Echo speaker, they’re like under $100, right?

[00:43:04] Trevor: And, and a quick search online, I found a company called which make these battery bases for Echo speakers, and there’s heaps of them. There’s— they’re about— like, they might be in the US, so I don’t know, we need to find a local option. But I suspect if you spend a little bit of time on the Amazon website, you’ll find a bunch of battery options. Okay, great. And that, mate, you just got to set up one. And the great thing is the Amazon— if you bought two, you can do— oh, do they call it announce? There’s a term they use for it on the Alexa app, and and it allows you to speak to the other speaker, right? And that’s all you’re doing is you’re just announcing to the other speaker what it is you want said, and it gets said on air. Weirdly, I did it on the Today Show, I don’t know, 8 years ago, and I weirdly saw the segment the other day come up in a YouTube memory or something. And it was, yeah, it was just simple demo of just on the phone, I spoke to the phone and then it came up and spoke what I said. It transmitted my voice onto the speaker sitting on the studio.

[00:44:11] Trevor: Great little system and you can do it from one speaker to another. So you can say— I’m not going to say the term Alexa— you can say hey to the speaker and announce this to the bedroom or announce this to the bathroom and it will announce it just to that room. Great.

[00:44:27] Bruce: Thank you for your help.

[00:44:28] Trevor: Appreciate it. All right, buddy. Anytime. No worries at all. Thank you. Thanks, mate. Cheers. Yeah, I mean, there’s something weird about— I mean, let’s look at the Google Store. Google Store, because it used to be, uh, that they would sell a bunch of products. And you remember that they had— they were the first smart home here. Speakers. Let’s click on speakers. Nest Mini. You can still buy Nest Mini. Is this Australia though? Oh, I don’t know. It actually thinks we’re in Australia. Uh, I’m going to change it to AU. EN-AU. It still comes back to GB. So there is a Nest Mini for $79. Um, all of them are out of stock. Like, it’s listed on the website, but it’s out of stock. That’s the biggest tease ever. All of them out of stock. The big Nest Audio and the Nest Mini, all out of stock. Completely useless. Ah, goodness me, you can’t win with these people. So yeah, I would— uh, the display’s in stock. Let’s have a look at that. Hub Max out of stock. Uh, Hub 2nd Gen out of stock. Google just unbelievably out of stock.

[00:45:41] Trevor: Yes, I’m searching JB Hi-Fi now. Nope, no smart speakers. Isn’t that wild? No smart speakers from Google. They’re just letting Amazon run this country, and people like Bruce are just going to go and get Amazon speakers because they’re easy to set up and done. Oh well, good luck to them, but that’s, uh, it’s a great solution there for Bruce.

[00:46:01] VOICE OVER: This is the EFTM podcast.

[00:46:08] Trevor: Thank you for listening. Another great show. And I made a promise there while talking to Margaret, we played a bit of the song. We could play the whole song, why not? She wrote these lyrics. Margaret wrote these lyrics, and what a wonderful human being she is for everything she’s doing in that facility for those lovely people. So she’s gone to the trouble of writing this for me. I think we should absolutely play the whole thing. Um, so thank you, Margaret, for this. Thank you for taking the time, and thank you to Suno for putting a sound to this. And I can tell you, I think from what I can see here, I’m just looking at the thing, um, summary. I’m going to copy this summary so I can read it easier. Um, It says her instructions on this, we’re kind of cheating here a bit, we’re learning Margaret’s vibe, but her instructions are follow the instructions, free-flowing lyrics, verses, beautiful engaging music, medium to slightly upbeat tempo, very deep, rich, smooth, beautiful female voice, singer-songwriter with a clear diction, love song, clicking percussion sounds, breathing noises, choir, speaking voice, male vocals, clicking, fermata, vibrato, classical, epic, American accent clapping. Wow, that’s a lot of— oh, sorry, those are negatives. So love song, no clicking, no percussion sound, no breathing noises, no choir, no speaking voice, etc. So there you go. So you can remove things from its thought as well. That’s very cool. So knowing that she wrote the lyrics, and what I meant in my conversation with her is she has these little notes in there which says intro verse, beautifully engaging music. Then it says chorus, multiple female voices singing louder. Then it says, like, it’s even got giggling in where she has the giggling sound. Then again, chorus, verse, etc. So, and musical outro, fade. They’re the instructions. It’s pretty detailed. So she’s learned over time how to essentially manipulate the AI to give her the result she wants. So without any further ado, here is the entire version. I think it’s about 4 minutes and 9 seconds of For Trevor, uh, written by Margaret, composed by Suno.

[00:48:49] [Song plays — “For Trevor” written by Margaret, composed via Suno]