Where did the time go?
It’s been over a month since the last Trade Secrets, what with Adam’s move and bandwidth situation, and my persistent cold and laryngitis, well, it’s been hard to get it together. Even so the plan for our new venture is taking shape.
In this TS, we talk about the four sides to the puzzle,
- Content tools.
- Readers and aggregators, iPods and iPod-alikes.
- Content.
- Bandwidth.
Think of this as a state-of-the-industry piece for this tiny little boomtown, by Adam and myself.
Listen
Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
[Music]
Roger!
Hey Dave Weiner, I’m in the
United Kingdom.
I hear that you’re in the United Kingdom.
I hear that you’re in the United Kingdom of Seattle.
It’s raining here Adam.
Hey everybody, hey everybody.
And while I was waiting for you to call, I recorded a morning coffee note, if you could believe that shit.
Are you kidding me? In the 15 minutes it took for me to get from Starbucks to home? Well I got news for you, it wasn’t 15 minutes.
It was actually too funny because I put the recording thing on.
I was going to record while I was waiting for Adam to call me .
And then it started getting interesting.
Oh boy.
I’m sorry if I do say so myself .
Well let me just tell everyone that you’re listening to Trade Secrets.
It’s been, I think, half of the lifetime of podcasting since we ’ve done one of these days.
It’s been a while man.
It’s been a few weeks to the UK at least.
I haven’t done one shit, haven ’t done one even the last couple of weeks at the castle because you were on the road and damn.
Yeah, well you know, whatever.
I think maybe the last one we did was at BlagerCon.
BlagerCon, right? That was the really long one with Steve Gilmore? Yeah.
Those were the days my friend, my best friend, we could dance forever and ever.
So I see you haven’t posted the morning coffee notes yet.
You’ve only recorded it? I actually just did.
Oh okay.
While I was singing the song I hit the save button.
Ah yeah, beautiful.
So how do you do server man? Yeah I know you have a really honking one.
Yeah and so let’s see, here’s what I said in the morning coffee notes.
Let me summarize, alright? Okay.
First of all, let’s talk about everything.
Fuck it, let’s not like… Really let’s go all out? I’m all for that dude.
I’m so for that.
Well, you know let me just give people a little bit of background on that okay? So yesterday you and I were talking and then you said, I said to you, you know, like you ’re so good at laying these foundations in, you know, daily source code.
It’s like, you know, you hear about things 20 times.
You surround it from all different angles.
So why can’t we do that with this brainstorming we’re doing? And you said, “Well, some lies, you know, I can’t really, it doesn’t really work. " And I said it’s like the same way for me too with, you know, scripting news.
I really don’t like plotting things in private.
Those of you that work well for me.
It’s very difficult.
For me, it’s totally association.
You know, when I’m doing, when I’m doing, it was funny you asked me yesterday, was that really true? Was it T? Of course it was true.
Everything that happens on the source code is true.
It’s, or is real.
Let’s put it that way, I don’t know if it’s true.
It’s real.
But, you know, when I’m holding stuff back, it’s like, for me it’s a broadcast of thing.
I’m sure for you, it’s a broadcast of thing for you as well.
It’s like you park this little, that’s the big problem Howard Stern has, you know, and a lot of real professional quote unquote broadcasters is you have to park all these words and things away in a corner so they don’t slip out like nipple, tits, cock shit, puss, piss, motherfucker, you know, all that stuff.
And including, you know, the stuff that we’ve been just kind of working on together.
And I find it incredibly hard.
With me, it’s like the snipples and sneezes and honks and all that shit like that.
People were giving me shit because I was doing that all along.
I don’t mind that.
Well, what can I get to do? Like, you know, becoming an android, I guess.
Yes, you can become a real pod caster.
Anyway, that was part one.
So I said, let’s talk about everything.
And then I drifted into sort of like, I don’t know how exactly I got to this, but this idea that, you know, well, we do need the truth.
You mentioned this too.
I talked about that too.
And I saw yet two more articles today that said Adam Curry who invented podcasts.
Yeah, I hate that.
Adam, when we, you know, I love you Adam and we’ve talked about this at Infanitum.
It’s not a problem I have with you.
It’s a problem I have with the world.
And, you know, I know I’m going to lose this one.
So, I mean, when you have a problem with the world, you can sort of like figure that the world’s going to win.
World one, day zero.
No, I think, no, I think it’s actually world two, day one.
I don’t think it’s zero.
I disagree with that.
But I understand what you’re saying.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is that if we were to go back and look over the sequence of events, you know, I remember clearly realizing that you were going to be doing this every day.
And I felt a little bit of sinking feeling that I knew that, you know, you were so much like more professional at this than I am.
But then again, we both know, okay, that the sort of rough ness and amateurishness of it, the mature dishness of these things is actually very important.
It’s the sort of signal of authority, but it’s not something that’s manufactured.
So, like when we got the email today from Ron Bloom, that Ron is, we’re basically, we’re talking about starting a company with a podcast.
There you go.
We said it.
Thank you.
We’re more than talking about it.
Yeah.
And we’ve been doing this for quite a while.
And now that Adam moved to, you know, got his move done, you know, basically it’s sort of time to get serious about this.
Yeah.
You know, Ron said that, well, we’re going to do, Ron is a great business guy and a very interesting sort of third member of the team.
But, you know, he said, look, that it’s going to be like TV and stuff like that.
No, it’s not going to be like TV at all.
I mean, basically, you know, whatever, to whatever extent there is sort of a pyramid to what we’re doing, I want to knock it down, you know.
I want to flatten it out.
I want to create a medium, not an age set, you know, not a dominance.
I don’t mind if people look to us for leadership, but, and I certainly want to make money.
I’m tired of giving things away and not making any money on it.
But that sort of dominance that comes from your sitting there watching and we’re on the other end talking to bullshit.
I don’t want to do it, you know , right? We’re in anything that way.
No.
So, okay.
But you were going to get to another point, which I thought was important.
Don’t gloss over that that about the articles.
Yeah.
Well, we see we’re coexisting with the old media, right? The old media is what we grew up with in the 20th century.
I was a part of it in the 20th century.
Absolutely.
You were a very important part of it, actually.
And that was all built around a centralized structure.
There was no way of avoiding it .
I mean, that was what we were pioneering in the 20th century, was this idea that, you know, that you could distribute things on a massive level.
But in the technology in the 20 th century, the only way to do that is by massively centralizing.
And now in the 21st century, we can distribute on a massive level without centralizing.
And, you know, it’s like, Seattle wires up next year and has Wi-Fi all over it’s downtown.
Is that going to be free for everyone? Is that going to be a total service for the community? I don’t know.
No, it’s not going to be free.
But, you know, some places it will be free and eventually I think you’ll let me know, is your cell phone free? I mean, you know.
No, no, okay, good point.
Good point.
Right.
But when that happens, now all of a sudden, you know, you’re not limited to the radio dial for your spectrum.
You know, you can have as many stations as there are, you know , IP addresses.
Oh, I love that.
As many stations as there are IP addresses.
Actually, it’s better than that .
It’s as many as there are domain names.
Yeah.
Because you could have multiple domain names for IP addresses.
For IP addresses, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So, it’s like the spectrum issue just went away, you know, or it’s about to go away.
And so now the question is just , what happened with personal computers? You know, what happened with personal computers before that? And this I remember very well, you know, because I learned how to program in the days before a person’s computer.
And in those days, the human being’s time was considered disposable and the computer’s time was considered precious.
And once the PC came out, it was all flipped around.
And now all of a sudden, you know, it’s the young, it was the, you know, computers became a free good.
And people became inexpensive.
And the same thing’s happening here is that, you know, I have, if I have an hour a day for listening to podcasts, well , you know, that means that there’s a tremendous limit on what I can listen to.
Right.
It used to be, it used to be that I’d flip the dial.
There were three public radio stations in Seattle, which is a lot.
Okay.
That’s a lot.
The chance is that any of them had anything I was interested in listening to on any given moment was nil.
It never happened.
So, you know, you just flip that switch.
And so, you know, can you have a company, a media company that ’s sort of camped out at that, you know, intersection? The answer is if we’re smart about it, you can have an incredible media company.
Right.
Well, and that would be the media company for the next century.
Yeah.
21st century media.
21st century.
For this century.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, we’re not going to get grandiose and fifths for the third millennium.
I mean, that would be a little bit, you know, that would sort of like be third right here.
Well, that would be like we’d have to live a real long time.
I’m not saying I’m living that long.
Fuck now, because, you know, we ’ll be old and cranky motherfuck ers if we live that long.
Fuck that shit.
I’m already there.
It’s so funny.
The other thing I talked about, it’s amazing how you segwayed perfectly into it.
I mean, I’m not even though.
I talked about a phone conversation yesterday with Dave Jacobs.
How was Dave Jacobs? Well, I’m about to tell you.
The amazing thing about where Dave was at is that, you know, I’ve known him for, I guess, about over 15 years.
And for 10 of those 15 years, I ’ve known that he had this disease that basically was a death sex.
And, and of course, all the time I’ve known him, he’s known that.
And talking to him yesterday, it became clear that something fundamentally had changed.
And, you know, I’m glad that that’s the case.
And it was an amazing experience, you know.
I just, I was blown away after I cried.
I really did.
It was like, he did too.
It was like, what a fucking relief.
You know, I said, what I said, they got us both going with shit.
I was getting burned out of this stuff and it wasn’t even happening to me.
And it’s like, wow, oh, there it is.
It’s like, we’re going to get over it.
You know, I mean, he still has challenges, but we all have challenges.
And he got his life back.
And so people think that there ’s like the same list of life that nothing ever changes.
You know, well, this changed.
Somebody’s life changed here.
And a lot of other lives that were sort of connected up to that.
A change with it, of course.
Right.
Absolutely.
Well, it always brings me back to the one thing that I’ve repeated many, many times that either you said or wrote.
I think you probably wrote it somewhere.
Life is not a waltz.
It’s a wild jungle dance and shit happens when people change .
And I think you said shit happens again.
No, I didn’t say that.
The piece is “Programmers” and it was written in 1997.
And it’s probably one of the best pieces if I could say so myself.
It was good piece.
It sort of wrote itself.
Yeah.
I mean, I wanted to tell a friend of mine who had a lot of anger.
I really thought her anger was beautiful.
And I meant she shouldn’t worry about me dodging it.
You know, it’s like, it’s because people do put all these judgments on certain things.
The fact is that if anger is expressed safely, it can be a good thing.
It’s a good thing.
It can be a good thing.
Incredibly beautiful.
A lot of creativity comes from anger.
A lot of movement comes from anger, you know, as long as you do it safely.
And then, you know, the thing is that you just, you just can ’t predict what’s coming next.
And that’s the thing is you trick yourself into believing you can know.
But if you actually go back and look at your life and see how things played out, you realize that you’re in good health.
Oh yeah, God, you have no fucking clue.
And everything you think that ’ll happen is always happens backwards.
Yeah.
Like, did you know your mom was going to get cancer? No.
I mean, that’s like, and, you know, and now it looks like, I mean, shit, the operation is going to be on the 23rd.
Wow.
I didn’t even think Christmas was going to change.
And it is.
Where is that happening? In Holland in New York.
I’m going over, obviously.
Yeah.
So yeah, 22nd, she goes in 23rd is the operation.
They expect her to be in the hospital for an average of 10 days is what is what they think it takes, but she’s strong, man .
She’s so fucking strong.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly.
Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? You can’t play it on stuff like that.
No.
No.
So anyway, so all of this is a big round loop to come back to the fact that we want to feel good about ourselves and talking about what we’re doing.
Yeah.
Well, sure.
Yeah.
I forgot how I got into the big Jenkins thing, but it was important for me to mention it.
Yeah.
Well, you said let’s not talk about the third millennium.
We’ll let other people worry about that.
Let’s just worry about the beginning of the 21st century.
About the current one.
We’re here.
We’re here now.
We could be something about it.
Yeah.
But as we’re thinking about names and stuff like that, it’s funny because, yes, and I knew that you had written this and I actually, I went looking for it and it was hard to find because I didn’t, I couldn’t remember if it was titled How to Name a Company or how to name, and anyway, it was like how to name a product.
I knew you had written these awesome guidelines which I’ve used several times before and then today you fucking link to it after I spent at least 20 minutes trying to find it yesterday.
You didn’t let me know.
I know how to find this.
Oh, I know, but the whole point was I wanted to find that myself.
Oh, well, okay.
Then you couldn’t ask me anything.
No.
Because it’s like if I couldn’t , really, really couldn’t find it, then I would have asked you , of course, but I felt I could find it.
Why don’t we go over what the four people we talked about naming things because one of the things that I believe is that before you even talk about , think about naming, you’ve got to figure out first, what are you doing? Second of all, what do you want to confede people with that name? How do you want them to think about you? It’s like how did you come up with the power of pure intellect? I’m not asking you rhetorical.
I’m not asking you to answer that rhetorical question.
Right.
I’m not asking you to tell how you came up with it.
Let me do this again.
It’s like sort of like you’ve heard it and you thought it sounded interesting and you decided to play it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And then you said, “Oh, let’s try that again. " And it worked the second time in the third time.
And then everybody, you found yourself saying that and then, “Boy. " I think I was there when that first came up.
When the boy, yeah, boy, boy, boy.
I had the next girlfriend of mine on a trade secret.
That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
You never saw the light of day.
Immediately.
That’s right.
Well, no, like three boings of that made it on the end.
The rest was all destroyed and a horrible system crashed.
I think it actually did make it on the air.
I think Steve Gilmore commented on it.
He couldn’t play it on the Gil more gang because of who it was about.
International licensing issues.
Yeah, something like that.
And all right, so what was I saying? First, we need to know what we ’re doing.
Then what we want to convey.
And then we can talk about hate .
So first, what we’re doing is podcasting.
Right on.
And what do we care about with podcasting? Well, we need good development tools.
We need aggregators.
We need sort of reading tools.
And we need great fucking shows .
We need great shows and we need a fourth thing, which is… All our money in a brown paper bag and 24-hour day limo service? Well, that goes without saying.
And bandwidth.
Bandwidth, baby, yeah.
Yeah, bandwidth is… In blogging, bandwidth wasn’t an issue in podcasting bandwidth.
Yeah.
And so, okay, we can’t do everything.
Right? I think what we’ve learned in the last few weeks, we’ve learned where we thought we could depend on the community to do the aggregators that we can’t depend on the community to do the aggregators.
Now, let’s just clarify, because I don’t think everyone understands, when we say aggregators, we’re basically talking about iPoders in the podcasting sense.
So, I think… You basically stayed out of iP oders.
Once you finished doing your work there, it was sort of like I was watching from a distance.
Watching the mail list to see what was going on.
Things seemed to be going smoothly.
And I didn’t see any reason at all to get involved, because people seem generally to be happy with what was going on there.
They don’t fix it, right? But then there’s sort of famous whole battles, and it really was a battle over whether or not we would break the RSS 2. 0 stack.
I don’t consider that to be a subjective discussion, and I don’t want to discuss it.
I don’t think it… Yeah, I agree.
It’s like… And the horrible thing about that is that there was a week, a whole week of off-list email conversation going on, which I think I know you and I got real uncomfortable with all that.
It was like all of a sudden there was a little… Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, that part you did.
I mean, you did a beautiful job with starting iPoders community off, and then there are new maintain ers of that stuff.
And what they need to do is they need to adopt a sort of helpful point of view.
It’s like, we’re here to help, and users and developers party together.
And that doesn’t include developers trying to be fasc ists with the user, you know? [laughter] I mean, I said at one point to one of these guys, “Jay, you might want to just cut out a little bit of slack,” because basically, you’ve got a really popular podcast that wears your up sign and be in piffy with the guy.
And unfortunately, developers are like, they don’t get that.
A lot of them don’t get it.
And when you find one that sort of says, “Look, I’m here to serve the users.
That’s why I’m doing this.
And I’m not going to bring any of my own bullshit into this. " Then we’re happy.
And if we can get there without having to put into this, right? Right.
Then we’ll stay out of it.
Because frankly, every day I hear about another iPoder and another sort of group of people .
I mean, even the VCs are starting investing this show.
Oh, of course.
I mean, this, and I think that ’s – you and I both said, “Hey, look, here’s something that finally we’re getting recognition for creating, something that we did create, which is based upon an incredible body of work that you did, which has just – and that’s had a whole fucking life of its own on and off list.
Let’s just call it that.
And lots of people have made money off of web logs and RSS.
And I think that guys like you and I, we need to at some point and it doesn’t have to be every single time, but at some point I think you’ve said this, we’ve got to make a little bit of money so we can go on and help with the next thing.
We’ve got to capitalize on this or we’ll never be able to help with the next step.
I think that it’s even – yes, I totally fully agree with that .
And it’s even more than that, though.
I think that in order to be successful at this idea of starting something like this and seeing it through, you have to make sure that the iPodder thing, which is a key element of the whole system, is on a solid foundation and where it doesn’t, like, split apart.
The thing you don’t want to have to deal with is to have to use one program to listen to one podcast and another program to subscribe to another one.
In other words, like, if you had to – it’s sort of like, if you had to use – you could only read – The New York Times could only be read on the Macintosh and The Wall Street Journal could only be read on the PC.
Well, that would suck, right? Or you don’t want to go there.
Or you could even – Yeah, you could even – Or you could even use a watch on the PC.
And that’s where we got to.
That’s where this discussion got to.
So this is sort of a message to the iPodder developer community that we are not without options here, okay? It’s still really early.
If you’re feeling like you’ve got a sizable piece of the install base, I swear to God, this is a tiny fraction of what ’s coming.
This is fucking nothing compared to what’s out there.
Right. And so let’s get it together and let’s get a real sense of developer and user reporting together.
If not, developers party together and forget all about users.
Not that.
And I got to tell you, I feel a little – just a little bit responsible for some of that because what happened with the iPodder dev list is it exploded .
And also kind of at a time when I was moving and, you know, I didn’t really have a lot of time to focus on the, you know, hundreds of messages that seemed to appear daily.
No, you’re not responsible.
Well, yeah, but I couldn’t control it.
I could not add anything.
If you tried to control it, you would have learned the same thing that you couldn’t control it and it would have been a mess.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it just got to the point where, you know, it just had to happen.
I mean, that’s just what happened.
Yeah.
And you can’t take responsibility for it.
It’s just something you’re responsible for.
It’s just – I mean, hasn’t, like, you know, become a big problem yet.
And so that’s number one.
Number two is there’s all kinds of other development, content development tools.
It’s a very rich area.
And our little company or big company, if we hope it becomes a big one, right, isn’t going to be in every aspect of that fight.
Any stretch of the United Nations, right? And so there’s all kinds of stuff that you use that we can be in a position to endorse.
We can work with people.
By the way, don’t forget that there’s also iPods and equival ents, you know.
There’s like, what is the ideal iPod for podcasting look like? Well, I can tell you for sure, it’s not the thing that Apple should say.
Nope.
That’s not ideal.
Not even the one that you have the U2 name on it.
That doesn’t even come close either.
Yeah, I’m sorry.
I’m afraid that this is the same thing.
Unless it has a fucking message on it.
Yeah, if you have a cell phone on it, that might be a different story.
You get a bit – no, I’m only kidding.
No, it needs to have Wi-Fi built into it.
It needs to have aggregators.
The iPod needs to run on by itself.
Right? It needs to constantly do it for a Wi-Fi signal to see if it can find a police cell.
Just as a quick sidebar, we’re recording this show on my cell phone.
Just want you to know that – Yeah, I’m kidding.
It’s fucking amazing.
This thing – I knew it did MP3 s.
As in it can record them.
It can play them.
But it’s actually – there’s a button on it that lets you record your conversation.
It’s not – it has, I think, a reasonably mature OS in there.
It should not be a big stretch for this thing to have iPod or functionality.
And with GPRS, which is to step up from cell phones and way below Wi-Fi.
But it has its built-in network .
I mean, this is – What brand of phone is that? This is a Sony Ericsson.
It’s the 700i.
And I didn’t really think much of it.
It’s just there was like one that I thought looked nice when I picked it up from Virgin Mobile.
But it had this functionality in there.
And it’s outrageous.
I gotta tell you something.
When you just said, I didn’t think very much of it.
It had a little bit of a liver- pull thing going on there.
It might have happened to me.
Yeah, you started flipping.
You asked me to tell you if you were flipping into it, right? Oh my God.
It’s happening already.
It’s getting assimilated.
I think something to the UK whole.
Now, you get compensated.
You get overcompensated.
They’re becoming harms.
No, but I can become the database boy.
We have many people from India, Pakistan here in the UK.
And when we have electricity, we’ll be even faster.
All right.
So let me just run through some more of iPod features.
That phone is great.
And that’s, you know, okay.
There’s like this matrix of features.
It’s a confusing situation.
But what do we need? And by the way, we ought to also be– I mean, so like we need better user interface.
We need a button that we can press while driving.
Yeah, actually, yeah.
Big red one, yeah.
Yeah.
And then, okay, we need a ROM- able iPod or we need something that works in this mode.
So the UI has to collapse down to just a four-button UI.
Sure, it dots.
But what about when you’re not docked? And how can we keep it so that if you’re doing this while you ’re driving, you don’t know if you’re driving off the road? This is a big deal, right? Saving the lives of our iPoders .
We really care about that.
And in fact, I have to say that and I’ve been a cell phone guy for a long time.
Some cell phone interfaces are actually starting to make sense because they’ve been through 8, 000 iterations, unlike the iPod and MP3 players .
Yeah.
And they always knew from day one, hey, we’ve got people in the car.
They’re mobile.
So they were thinking much more about the mobile aspect.
And so, yeah, just explain the ROM-able part because I know what you mean.
But I don’t know if all the listeners know what you mean.
Well, you know, I mean, ROM- able stands for able to put into read-only memory, which is really not true.
It doesn’t need to be specifically legally read-only memory.
But the idea is that you’re taking it out of a rich environment, like a laptop or a PC, desktop, and putting it onto one of these devices with a really limited UI.
So you’re thinking, OK, take a big piece of software.
Like an iPod has got a lot of little dials and things that you can turn and things, whatever.
It should.
So you can’t do that on an iPod .
You just don’t have that much UI to play with.
This is a whole other UI problem.
And so you could say that our company wants to, at the very least, work with people who are creating products.
And, you know, either they’re in competition with the iPod, basically, or should Apple decide this is an interesting area and we’d be happy to work with Apple too.
Or maybe we want to create the product ourselves.
I would do that with a lot of reluctance, but still, not ruling out, because there are OEM-type situations that one can do.
And branding and stuff like that can really appear that we’re creating our own product and the fact we’re not.
Well, we’re just doing the design because we understand this area as users.
And we understand it as users who really, really care about this stuff.
So that’s another one.
Now, another part of the content development side is, you know, we’ve been, like, seeing a lot of it you’ve been driving has been with OPML.
And there we can do a lot. And we can do it quickly.
And we will do a lot and we will do it quickly, because of the open source release of Frontier, which includes a really excellent outliner.
And, you know, I would think that maybe even before the end of the year, we will have an OPML tool that works on both Windows and Mac intosh.
And on my cell phone.
And very, very – pardon me? And on my cell phone.
Probably not on your cell phone .
Okay. I’m not – I was dreaming again.
I couldn’t just say, “Oh, yeah, I’m on your cell phone. " Of course.
Well, hey, that’s a VC pitch.
That’s a – well, of course, we ’ll have it on every cell phone.
That’s for the – that’s a venture capitalist pitch.
Well, of course, it will be on every single cell phone all over the – over the universe.
Well, yeah.
Okay.
It’ll be a – I’m unfortunately – you have to put me – leave me at home on the day to go to a Mac pitch, okay? Because I’m very likely to do what I’ve done in the past, which is say, “Well, what do I really need?” [ Laughter ] You want to leave me home that day.
Okay. So what do we want to do? Content development.
We listen to the listening side , the aggregating side of things .
The content now, right? And this is something – this is where I think the real juice is for us.
Yeah. I agree.
This is what I’m the most excited about, really.
Yeah. I mean, we’ve got the number one podcast now, I think .
Not too many people have been in dispute.
Well, as Tony Khan would say, I ’m the Ed Sullivan of podcasting .
Exactly.
And I wear that badge with pride.
And you do it really well.
And we love what you do.
And it seems to come naturally to you.
It’s sort of like where you gravitate.
It’s what you did it into.
Yeah, it’s what I’ve done all my life.
And out of that is going to come a whole new music industry .
Oh, man. That would be so fucking cool.
Exactly.
And maybe partnerships with RIA companies.
Yeah, of course.
We need to – well, we – Be part of this because we have a very inclusive attitude about these things.
We don’t want – it’s not – we ’re not here to prove a point with anybody in specific.
We just all we really want to do is enjoy this new medium and help develop it.
And because it’s just like you love it, right? Mm-hmm.
And then other brand names.
I guess – I don’t know how else to put it, but other brand names from the 20th century, you know, bring them into the 21st century.
And I think a lot of them will carry over very, very nicely.
And some of them will come kicking and screaming.
Yeah.
Well, the key to the spirit part we can do without.
Yeah.
They can go work with our competitors.
But – But, yeah.
So, you know, so what we want to do is have a bunch of, you know, people that we love working with, you know, who do great stuff.
Your pod squad is the beginning of that.
Well, that’s something else that we’ve talked about is that in the way – you know, in what we’re doing, and particularly with this, with podcasting, there is no lock-in competitive advantage that can really be created.
It just doesn’t work.
And so what appeals to me, I think, an incredible amount is that we really can only compete on fucking quality.
Quality and quality and speed and agility, but not on lock-in .
And that is, you know, I love No lock-in.
No lock-in.
And we can cut anything off.
And I fucking love that part.
Yep.
I mean, we’re coming – So, we’re either good or we’re not good.
You know, we’re either number one or we’re not number one.
And just story.
Because, you know, while we come from different backgrounds , the one thing we have in common is sort of an innate love of the Internet and what it says, you know.
It says, “Ask not what the Internet can do for you after you can do for the Internet. " Right on.
And, you know, we’ve got to – like, everything that we do has to work at that level.
On the other hand, as you know, I’ve asked you many times, “Why does this, an MTV, didn’t have any competition?” And sometimes a company, a brand is so strong that, you know, you’ve got to figure that there were people who thought about launching a competitor to MTV.
And maybe it’s just because MTV didn’t lock anyone out.
That basically the bands that wanted to participate could participate.
Well, I don’t know.
And that – well, that’s really what did it, I think, is that I won my MTV campaign, which was done by the artists themselves.
The MTV routed around the record companies and all their approval bullshit and went straight to Sting and Madonna and said, “Yes.
Do you remember the beginning of MTV? It was, you know, I want my MTV .
That was – oh, yeah, that was the campaign. " You still there? Yeah, I’m here.
Okay.
Yeah, so the “I Want My MTV” campaign was basically MTV going backstage at concerts and events and, like, award shows and, you know, getting like a quote from Sting or Madonna or whatever and they’d make it, you know, say, “Please, could you say, ‘I want my MTV?’” And then that just became like the whole slogan.
And then everyone was saying, you know, then it became their marketing campaign.
Call up your cable company and say, “I want my MTV. " It clearly worked.
I remember – all I remember is the Dire Straits song.
I was not an early adopter of MTV.
You know, very, very rarely.
I’m an early adopter, so I don ’t remember the early days.
Okay.
I remember it being there.
I don’t remember the first time I heard of it.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, so there was a lot to it, but there’s some big differences.
Making a music video then, which no one really knew what it was.
It was like, you know, you had to have a director kind of do, you know, and some was video, but some was still film of, you know, you performing.
It was like it wasn’t quite easy for anyone to just go make a video.
No, we’re in a different place.
Yeah, they started to cost a shitload of money.
But you were doing pirate radio before MTV, right? Yeah.
So how did you feel about the fact that the cost of production for MTV was at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, at millions of dollars? How did I feel about it? Yeah, I don’t know.
I mean, it didn’t sit well with you.
It was always for the rich, you know, the only people with a lot of money.
We were doing something different.
It’s not really comparable.
It’s not really comparable.
Because, you know, now the tools are all out there and everyone can make stuff, you know, but something similar is kind of happening in reverse because , you know, I’m getting from the listeners, from source code listeners who eventually all go on to create, some of them don’t go on to do their own podcasts.
They’re starting to create stuff and be creative and make promos.
It’s kind of an organic thing that’s happening.
And it’s growing.
It’s kind of like a raft and everyone’s like, we’re all kind of like hooking our dingies together.
It really is sweet.
I really got to stop smoking dope when we have these conversations.
Really? Yeah, let’s be clear about that .
I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago at a blog dinner.
They had a dinner there in my honor.
And they were going, they pointed out to me, we were walking down Kiffin in the street.
They said, there’s Vancouver’s hash bars, you know, like Amsterdam.
I said, oh, that’s nice.
They said, do you want to go? I said, no, I don’t see that.
And they said, really? We thought you were doing that all the time.
And I said, well, that’s somebody else doing it.
Yeah, but it’s like, you’re kind of like Patricia.
You guys are naturally stoned.
You’re at a certain level all the time.
No, I know.
And I think it’s something, maybe because you’re almost similar age, you know, maybe it ’s just something that happens.
Well, it’s all that THC, you know, doesn’t flush out of your system after a while.
He was also a child of the 60s, believe you me.
Well, I’m not quite a child of the 60s.
You know, when I go through the oldies racks, I tend to end up in the 70s, not to see the disco shit.
And it was a little depressing, actually.
I kind of wish I was from the 60s.
But, you know, on the other hand, I missed the draft, which I thought was pretty cool.
Yeah, life is nice.
Yeah.
So there we go.
So I’m in the band with, we’ll figure that one out.
So we’ve sort of like covered all the four different sides of the pool, you know, the pool puzzle.
And I guess, overall, we’d like to work with people like that.
Yeah, and there’s something else there, which is kind of like an X factor, which Tony Kong from WGBH, Morning Stories podcast, he calls it civility.
He says there’s something going on that goes beyond these podcasts and the shows.
And of course, it’s similar to what happens on web logs, only it has a whole different dimension, where people are, you know, there’s civility being maintained and created amongst podcasters.
Yeah.
And I’m not very good at explaining it, but he is.
Well, I’ll give you a good example.
And he had that guy, I don’t remember his name, the production manager from Morning Stories, who had lost, I guess, the feeling in one side of his body had lost all of that.
And had never told the story to anybody but Tony.
Right.
He goes on to, and he explained that it actually is a problem for him, because it isn’t something that you get to talk about the first time you meet somebody, or even the second or third.
And usually you go out to beers with them, you know, a few times, and then, you know, maybe you feel comfortable explaining it.
But he still, like, he could not, when he shook somebody’s hand, he had a lot of trouble letting go.
Right, right, right.
And that would sort of like freak people out sometimes.
And so now he felt like this was a safe environment, and he could tell his story, and now basically, you know, and I understood what he was doing, because in blogs I tend to tell my truth, not everything, but the things that I really want to talk about publicly, I generally enjoy as I do it.
And it isn’t really a safe environment.
It feels safe in a minute.
But they’ve done some really elegant work there at WGBH.
Indeed, yeah, really.
Yeah, and I had a meeting yesterday with Seattle Times people, and had the same feeling.
You know, the nice thing about this one is that there isn’t the animus that existed between the print reporters and the bloggers.
The print reporters really weren’t very nice, generally.
They worked, of course, exceptions, with the print reporters like Dan Gilmour, who became bloggers.
But for the most part, they were not very nice to us.
The radio people are quite enthusiastic about podcasts, and it’s happening so quickly.
I don’t think there’s enough time for any organized opposition to, well, at least the help.
Yeah, well, and you’re absolutely right.
Radio people have been on this from the beginning.
And I remember telling you, “Sh it, man, look at this.
You’re the guy that created the fucking product called Radio. " I mean, you knew this 10 years ago.
Well, what I used to say to people was they’d say, “Well, there’s play music,” and I said , “Yeah. " They said, “Well, you can’t call it radio.
There’s talk radio, too. Come on. People talk on the radio, don’t they?” I mean, you know, I’m an asshole.
I should have seen this so much earlier, and I could have saved millions of dollars and countless hours of aggra vation leading up to– That’s what I was trying to tell you, man.
No, I understand.
I saw you spend all this money on Jambi, and I kept looking at it.
I was like, “I’m trying to tell you now. " I was like, “That’s what I want .
You have to have an office building full of production people. " And I was going, “Fuck, that’s what I need. I need those people. " I had the software then, and so it waits.
What happens is we wait another 10 years before it happens.
But now we’re not going away, okay? You and I– It’s only been 40 years.
We’re going to have trouble, I think, explaining to the business people why we are being so particular about how we do this.
That’s how they’re going to see it.
They’re going to see us as being difficult and insisting on things that, you know, “Oh, they’re just being like, artistic or whatever. " Correct.
Part of that is correct.
Well, I mean, it isn’t worth doing if this just turns into another sitcom reality TV show.
Sorry, I’m not willing to do that.
You can go get somebody else to do that.
I don’t need to do that.
I could actually be on the sitcom and make more money doing less work.
Yeah, well, I couldn’t. I’m not as pretty as you are.
No, I mean, you could totally be Archie Bunker.
Okay, I could be Archie Bunker.
Thank you.
I really want to do that.
That is what I’ve put in my plan for this year.
It’s your exit strategy, Dave.
It’s your career being Archie B unker.
Yeah, so they’re going to see it as being difficult, but we ’ve got to get that.
We’ve got to get those, that building full of production people.
We need to offer facilities.
We need to have people whose job it is to make sure that the bandwidth stays working.
Right.
You know, I don’t want to have to write every line of code.
I can’t do it.
That’s what we learned at User Land, basically, is that if I take on more and more and more responsibility, I end up in the hospital with my check practices.
I’m not going to be doing that again.
That’s a downer.
Not for business.
A real downer. That is not worth it.
Yeah, it was kind of a bummer, actually.
A downer? Yeah, that’s all right.
It had it’s silver lining, like they always do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So, yeah, all right. Well, we ’ll get past that.
Yeah, so you think we’ve covered enough for one, Tracy? Tell them when we’ve been talking.
Let me just check here.
About 40 minutes.
I think that’s perfect.
I think it’s perfect for the walk to end.
I think so, man.
You’re going to play some music on here? How about some of the civius b itties? Oh, dude, I’m so in love with them.
Me too. See, it works, Adam.
It fucking works. It works.
And you know what? They’re selling CDs.
People are buying CDs.
I know. I was in your show.
It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s, hey, that’s the, And they’re, and you want them something? I got to say this, man, they’re fucking worth it.
Yeah.
They play beautiful music. They have a soul.
They’re, you know, they’re not like, they’re accessible.
I feel like I go hang out and drink a beer with them.
We have a lot of fun.
Well, okay, so let’s play some of the civius bitties on our way out.
And we’ll get the fuck out of here.
Right on. See you later.
Okay.
All right.
Bye. Take care, Dave.
Okay.
It’s not like he doesn’t know just what to say to make you feel right.
Stay up nights.
Think of him all day.
Well, his song is true, but his head keeps getting in the way.
No, it’s not like he’s got a nasty disposition.
He wants to keep you locked up tight, knocked up right bare foot in the kitchen.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
No, it’s not like the boys are bad-aid, born on the wrong side of town, under the wrong roof, on the wrong day.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
Half of a man.
Just what do you think you will get if you persist thinking this is the best you can do? Say no to your life, girl, or before you know it, your life’s going to say no to you.
Easy come, easy go.
Life’s too short to live it so.
No, it’s not like it’s more than you can stand to have that pretty boy sitting next to you, kissing you, holding your hand.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
I hear that you’re in the United Kingdom.
I hear that you’re in the United Kingdom of Seattle.
It’s raining here Adam.
Hey everybody, hey everybody.
And while I was waiting for you to call, I recorded a morning coffee note, if you could believe that shit.
Are you kidding me? In the 15 minutes it took for me to get from Starbucks to home? Well I got news for you, it wasn’t 15 minutes.
It was actually too funny because I put the recording thing on.
I was going to record while I was waiting for Adam to call me .
And then it started getting interesting.
Oh boy.
I’m sorry if I do say so myself .
Well let me just tell everyone that you’re listening to Trade Secrets.
It’s been, I think, half of the lifetime of podcasting since we ’ve done one of these days.
It’s been a while man.
It’s been a few weeks to the UK at least.
I haven’t done one shit, haven ’t done one even the last couple of weeks at the castle because you were on the road and damn.
Yeah, well you know, whatever.
I think maybe the last one we did was at BlagerCon.
BlagerCon, right? That was the really long one with Steve Gilmore? Yeah.
Those were the days my friend, my best friend, we could dance forever and ever.
So I see you haven’t posted the morning coffee notes yet.
You’ve only recorded it? I actually just did.
Oh okay.
While I was singing the song I hit the save button.
Ah yeah, beautiful.
So how do you do server man? Yeah I know you have a really honking one.
Yeah and so let’s see, here’s what I said in the morning coffee notes.
Let me summarize, alright? Okay.
First of all, let’s talk about everything.
Fuck it, let’s not like… Really let’s go all out? I’m all for that dude.
I’m so for that.
Well, you know let me just give people a little bit of background on that okay? So yesterday you and I were talking and then you said, I said to you, you know, like you ’re so good at laying these foundations in, you know, daily source code.
It’s like, you know, you hear about things 20 times.
You surround it from all different angles.
So why can’t we do that with this brainstorming we’re doing? And you said, “Well, some lies, you know, I can’t really, it doesn’t really work. " And I said it’s like the same way for me too with, you know, scripting news.
I really don’t like plotting things in private.
Those of you that work well for me.
It’s very difficult.
For me, it’s totally association.
You know, when I’m doing, when I’m doing, it was funny you asked me yesterday, was that really true? Was it T? Of course it was true.
Everything that happens on the source code is true.
It’s, or is real.
Let’s put it that way, I don’t know if it’s true.
It’s real.
But, you know, when I’m holding stuff back, it’s like, for me it’s a broadcast of thing.
I’m sure for you, it’s a broadcast of thing for you as well.
It’s like you park this little, that’s the big problem Howard Stern has, you know, and a lot of real professional quote unquote broadcasters is you have to park all these words and things away in a corner so they don’t slip out like nipple, tits, cock shit, puss, piss, motherfucker, you know, all that stuff.
And including, you know, the stuff that we’ve been just kind of working on together.
And I find it incredibly hard.
With me, it’s like the snipples and sneezes and honks and all that shit like that.
People were giving me shit because I was doing that all along.
I don’t mind that.
Well, what can I get to do? Like, you know, becoming an android, I guess.
Yes, you can become a real pod caster.
Anyway, that was part one.
So I said, let’s talk about everything.
And then I drifted into sort of like, I don’t know how exactly I got to this, but this idea that, you know, well, we do need the truth.
You mentioned this too.
I talked about that too.
And I saw yet two more articles today that said Adam Curry who invented podcasts.
Yeah, I hate that.
Adam, when we, you know, I love you Adam and we’ve talked about this at Infanitum.
It’s not a problem I have with you.
It’s a problem I have with the world.
And, you know, I know I’m going to lose this one.
So, I mean, when you have a problem with the world, you can sort of like figure that the world’s going to win.
World one, day zero.
No, I think, no, I think it’s actually world two, day one.
I don’t think it’s zero.
I disagree with that.
But I understand what you’re saying.
Yeah, I mean, the thing is that if we were to go back and look over the sequence of events, you know, I remember clearly realizing that you were going to be doing this every day.
And I felt a little bit of sinking feeling that I knew that, you know, you were so much like more professional at this than I am.
But then again, we both know, okay, that the sort of rough ness and amateurishness of it, the mature dishness of these things is actually very important.
It’s the sort of signal of authority, but it’s not something that’s manufactured.
So, like when we got the email today from Ron Bloom, that Ron is, we’re basically, we’re talking about starting a company with a podcast.
There you go.
We said it.
Thank you.
We’re more than talking about it.
Yeah.
And we’ve been doing this for quite a while.
And now that Adam moved to, you know, got his move done, you know, basically it’s sort of time to get serious about this.
Yeah.
You know, Ron said that, well, we’re going to do, Ron is a great business guy and a very interesting sort of third member of the team.
But, you know, he said, look, that it’s going to be like TV and stuff like that.
No, it’s not going to be like TV at all.
I mean, basically, you know, whatever, to whatever extent there is sort of a pyramid to what we’re doing, I want to knock it down, you know.
I want to flatten it out.
I want to create a medium, not an age set, you know, not a dominance.
I don’t mind if people look to us for leadership, but, and I certainly want to make money.
I’m tired of giving things away and not making any money on it.
But that sort of dominance that comes from your sitting there watching and we’re on the other end talking to bullshit.
I don’t want to do it, you know , right? We’re in anything that way.
No.
So, okay.
But you were going to get to another point, which I thought was important.
Don’t gloss over that that about the articles.
Yeah.
Well, we see we’re coexisting with the old media, right? The old media is what we grew up with in the 20th century.
I was a part of it in the 20th century.
Absolutely.
You were a very important part of it, actually.
And that was all built around a centralized structure.
There was no way of avoiding it .
I mean, that was what we were pioneering in the 20th century, was this idea that, you know, that you could distribute things on a massive level.
But in the technology in the 20 th century, the only way to do that is by massively centralizing.
And now in the 21st century, we can distribute on a massive level without centralizing.
And, you know, it’s like, Seattle wires up next year and has Wi-Fi all over it’s downtown.
Is that going to be free for everyone? Is that going to be a total service for the community? I don’t know.
No, it’s not going to be free.
But, you know, some places it will be free and eventually I think you’ll let me know, is your cell phone free? I mean, you know.
No, no, okay, good point.
Good point.
Right.
But when that happens, now all of a sudden, you know, you’re not limited to the radio dial for your spectrum.
You know, you can have as many stations as there are, you know , IP addresses.
Oh, I love that.
As many stations as there are IP addresses.
Actually, it’s better than that .
It’s as many as there are domain names.
Yeah.
Because you could have multiple domain names for IP addresses.
For IP addresses, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So, it’s like the spectrum issue just went away, you know, or it’s about to go away.
And so now the question is just , what happened with personal computers? You know, what happened with personal computers before that? And this I remember very well, you know, because I learned how to program in the days before a person’s computer.
And in those days, the human being’s time was considered disposable and the computer’s time was considered precious.
And once the PC came out, it was all flipped around.
And now all of a sudden, you know, it’s the young, it was the, you know, computers became a free good.
And people became inexpensive.
And the same thing’s happening here is that, you know, I have, if I have an hour a day for listening to podcasts, well , you know, that means that there’s a tremendous limit on what I can listen to.
Right.
It used to be, it used to be that I’d flip the dial.
There were three public radio stations in Seattle, which is a lot.
Okay.
That’s a lot.
The chance is that any of them had anything I was interested in listening to on any given moment was nil.
It never happened.
So, you know, you just flip that switch.
And so, you know, can you have a company, a media company that ’s sort of camped out at that, you know, intersection? The answer is if we’re smart about it, you can have an incredible media company.
Right.
Well, and that would be the media company for the next century.
Yeah.
21st century media.
21st century.
For this century.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, we’re not going to get grandiose and fifths for the third millennium.
I mean, that would be a little bit, you know, that would sort of like be third right here.
Well, that would be like we’d have to live a real long time.
I’m not saying I’m living that long.
Fuck now, because, you know, we ’ll be old and cranky motherfuck ers if we live that long.
Fuck that shit.
I’m already there.
It’s so funny.
The other thing I talked about, it’s amazing how you segwayed perfectly into it.
I mean, I’m not even though.
I talked about a phone conversation yesterday with Dave Jacobs.
How was Dave Jacobs? Well, I’m about to tell you.
The amazing thing about where Dave was at is that, you know, I’ve known him for, I guess, about over 15 years.
And for 10 of those 15 years, I ’ve known that he had this disease that basically was a death sex.
And, and of course, all the time I’ve known him, he’s known that.
And talking to him yesterday, it became clear that something fundamentally had changed.
And, you know, I’m glad that that’s the case.
And it was an amazing experience, you know.
I just, I was blown away after I cried.
I really did.
It was like, he did too.
It was like, what a fucking relief.
You know, I said, what I said, they got us both going with shit.
I was getting burned out of this stuff and it wasn’t even happening to me.
And it’s like, wow, oh, there it is.
It’s like, we’re going to get over it.
You know, I mean, he still has challenges, but we all have challenges.
And he got his life back.
And so people think that there ’s like the same list of life that nothing ever changes.
You know, well, this changed.
Somebody’s life changed here.
And a lot of other lives that were sort of connected up to that.
A change with it, of course.
Right.
Absolutely.
Well, it always brings me back to the one thing that I’ve repeated many, many times that either you said or wrote.
I think you probably wrote it somewhere.
Life is not a waltz.
It’s a wild jungle dance and shit happens when people change .
And I think you said shit happens again.
No, I didn’t say that.
The piece is “Programmers” and it was written in 1997.
And it’s probably one of the best pieces if I could say so myself.
It was good piece.
It sort of wrote itself.
Yeah.
I mean, I wanted to tell a friend of mine who had a lot of anger.
I really thought her anger was beautiful.
And I meant she shouldn’t worry about me dodging it.
You know, it’s like, it’s because people do put all these judgments on certain things.
The fact is that if anger is expressed safely, it can be a good thing.
It’s a good thing.
It can be a good thing.
Incredibly beautiful.
A lot of creativity comes from anger.
A lot of movement comes from anger, you know, as long as you do it safely.
And then, you know, the thing is that you just, you just can ’t predict what’s coming next.
And that’s the thing is you trick yourself into believing you can know.
But if you actually go back and look at your life and see how things played out, you realize that you’re in good health.
Oh yeah, God, you have no fucking clue.
And everything you think that ’ll happen is always happens backwards.
Yeah.
Like, did you know your mom was going to get cancer? No.
I mean, that’s like, and, you know, and now it looks like, I mean, shit, the operation is going to be on the 23rd.
Wow.
I didn’t even think Christmas was going to change.
And it is.
Where is that happening? In Holland in New York.
I’m going over, obviously.
Yeah.
So yeah, 22nd, she goes in 23rd is the operation.
They expect her to be in the hospital for an average of 10 days is what is what they think it takes, but she’s strong, man .
She’s so fucking strong.
Yeah.
So, but yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly.
Who the fuck knows what’s going to happen? You can’t play it on stuff like that.
No.
No.
So anyway, so all of this is a big round loop to come back to the fact that we want to feel good about ourselves and talking about what we’re doing.
Yeah.
Well, sure.
Yeah.
I forgot how I got into the big Jenkins thing, but it was important for me to mention it.
Yeah.
Well, you said let’s not talk about the third millennium.
We’ll let other people worry about that.
Let’s just worry about the beginning of the 21st century.
About the current one.
We’re here.
We’re here now.
We could be something about it.
Yeah.
But as we’re thinking about names and stuff like that, it’s funny because, yes, and I knew that you had written this and I actually, I went looking for it and it was hard to find because I didn’t, I couldn’t remember if it was titled How to Name a Company or how to name, and anyway, it was like how to name a product.
I knew you had written these awesome guidelines which I’ve used several times before and then today you fucking link to it after I spent at least 20 minutes trying to find it yesterday.
You didn’t let me know.
I know how to find this.
Oh, I know, but the whole point was I wanted to find that myself.
Oh, well, okay.
Then you couldn’t ask me anything.
No.
Because it’s like if I couldn’t , really, really couldn’t find it, then I would have asked you , of course, but I felt I could find it.
Why don’t we go over what the four people we talked about naming things because one of the things that I believe is that before you even talk about , think about naming, you’ve got to figure out first, what are you doing? Second of all, what do you want to confede people with that name? How do you want them to think about you? It’s like how did you come up with the power of pure intellect? I’m not asking you rhetorical.
I’m not asking you to answer that rhetorical question.
Right.
I’m not asking you to tell how you came up with it.
Let me do this again.
It’s like sort of like you’ve heard it and you thought it sounded interesting and you decided to play it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And then you said, “Oh, let’s try that again. " And it worked the second time in the third time.
And then everybody, you found yourself saying that and then, “Boy. " I think I was there when that first came up.
When the boy, yeah, boy, boy, boy.
I had the next girlfriend of mine on a trade secret.
That’s right, that’s right, that’s right.
You never saw the light of day.
Immediately.
That’s right.
Well, no, like three boings of that made it on the end.
The rest was all destroyed and a horrible system crashed.
I think it actually did make it on the air.
I think Steve Gilmore commented on it.
He couldn’t play it on the Gil more gang because of who it was about.
International licensing issues.
Yeah, something like that.
And all right, so what was I saying? First, we need to know what we ’re doing.
Then what we want to convey.
And then we can talk about hate .
So first, what we’re doing is podcasting.
Right on.
And what do we care about with podcasting? Well, we need good development tools.
We need aggregators.
We need sort of reading tools.
And we need great fucking shows .
We need great shows and we need a fourth thing, which is… All our money in a brown paper bag and 24-hour day limo service? Well, that goes without saying.
And bandwidth.
Bandwidth, baby, yeah.
Yeah, bandwidth is… In blogging, bandwidth wasn’t an issue in podcasting bandwidth.
Yeah.
And so, okay, we can’t do everything.
Right? I think what we’ve learned in the last few weeks, we’ve learned where we thought we could depend on the community to do the aggregators that we can’t depend on the community to do the aggregators.
Now, let’s just clarify, because I don’t think everyone understands, when we say aggregators, we’re basically talking about iPoders in the podcasting sense.
So, I think… You basically stayed out of iP oders.
Once you finished doing your work there, it was sort of like I was watching from a distance.
Watching the mail list to see what was going on.
Things seemed to be going smoothly.
And I didn’t see any reason at all to get involved, because people seem generally to be happy with what was going on there.
They don’t fix it, right? But then there’s sort of famous whole battles, and it really was a battle over whether or not we would break the RSS 2. 0 stack.
I don’t consider that to be a subjective discussion, and I don’t want to discuss it.
I don’t think it… Yeah, I agree.
It’s like… And the horrible thing about that is that there was a week, a whole week of off-list email conversation going on, which I think I know you and I got real uncomfortable with all that.
It was like all of a sudden there was a little… Yeah, go ahead.
I mean, that part you did.
I mean, you did a beautiful job with starting iPoders community off, and then there are new maintain ers of that stuff.
And what they need to do is they need to adopt a sort of helpful point of view.
It’s like, we’re here to help, and users and developers party together.
And that doesn’t include developers trying to be fasc ists with the user, you know? [laughter] I mean, I said at one point to one of these guys, “Jay, you might want to just cut out a little bit of slack,” because basically, you’ve got a really popular podcast that wears your up sign and be in piffy with the guy.
And unfortunately, developers are like, they don’t get that.
A lot of them don’t get it.
And when you find one that sort of says, “Look, I’m here to serve the users.
That’s why I’m doing this.
And I’m not going to bring any of my own bullshit into this. " Then we’re happy.
And if we can get there without having to put into this, right? Right.
Then we’ll stay out of it.
Because frankly, every day I hear about another iPoder and another sort of group of people .
I mean, even the VCs are starting investing this show.
Oh, of course.
I mean, this, and I think that ’s – you and I both said, “Hey, look, here’s something that finally we’re getting recognition for creating, something that we did create, which is based upon an incredible body of work that you did, which has just – and that’s had a whole fucking life of its own on and off list.
Let’s just call it that.
And lots of people have made money off of web logs and RSS.
And I think that guys like you and I, we need to at some point and it doesn’t have to be every single time, but at some point I think you’ve said this, we’ve got to make a little bit of money so we can go on and help with the next thing.
We’ve got to capitalize on this or we’ll never be able to help with the next step.
I think that it’s even – yes, I totally fully agree with that .
And it’s even more than that, though.
I think that in order to be successful at this idea of starting something like this and seeing it through, you have to make sure that the iPodder thing, which is a key element of the whole system, is on a solid foundation and where it doesn’t, like, split apart.
The thing you don’t want to have to deal with is to have to use one program to listen to one podcast and another program to subscribe to another one.
In other words, like, if you had to – it’s sort of like, if you had to use – you could only read – The New York Times could only be read on the Macintosh and The Wall Street Journal could only be read on the PC.
Well, that would suck, right? Or you don’t want to go there.
Or you could even – Yeah, you could even – Or you could even use a watch on the PC.
And that’s where we got to.
That’s where this discussion got to.
So this is sort of a message to the iPodder developer community that we are not without options here, okay? It’s still really early.
If you’re feeling like you’ve got a sizable piece of the install base, I swear to God, this is a tiny fraction of what ’s coming.
This is fucking nothing compared to what’s out there.
Right. And so let’s get it together and let’s get a real sense of developer and user reporting together.
If not, developers party together and forget all about users.
Not that.
And I got to tell you, I feel a little – just a little bit responsible for some of that because what happened with the iPodder dev list is it exploded .
And also kind of at a time when I was moving and, you know, I didn’t really have a lot of time to focus on the, you know, hundreds of messages that seemed to appear daily.
No, you’re not responsible.
Well, yeah, but I couldn’t control it.
I could not add anything.
If you tried to control it, you would have learned the same thing that you couldn’t control it and it would have been a mess.
Okay, good.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it just got to the point where, you know, it just had to happen.
I mean, that’s just what happened.
Yeah.
And you can’t take responsibility for it.
It’s just something you’re responsible for.
It’s just – I mean, hasn’t, like, you know, become a big problem yet.
And so that’s number one.
Number two is there’s all kinds of other development, content development tools.
It’s a very rich area.
And our little company or big company, if we hope it becomes a big one, right, isn’t going to be in every aspect of that fight.
Any stretch of the United Nations, right? And so there’s all kinds of stuff that you use that we can be in a position to endorse.
We can work with people.
By the way, don’t forget that there’s also iPods and equival ents, you know.
There’s like, what is the ideal iPod for podcasting look like? Well, I can tell you for sure, it’s not the thing that Apple should say.
Nope.
That’s not ideal.
Not even the one that you have the U2 name on it.
That doesn’t even come close either.
Yeah, I’m sorry.
I’m afraid that this is the same thing.
Unless it has a fucking message on it.
Yeah, if you have a cell phone on it, that might be a different story.
You get a bit – no, I’m only kidding.
No, it needs to have Wi-Fi built into it.
It needs to have aggregators.
The iPod needs to run on by itself.
Right? It needs to constantly do it for a Wi-Fi signal to see if it can find a police cell.
Just as a quick sidebar, we’re recording this show on my cell phone.
Just want you to know that – Yeah, I’m kidding.
It’s fucking amazing.
This thing – I knew it did MP3 s.
As in it can record them.
It can play them.
But it’s actually – there’s a button on it that lets you record your conversation.
It’s not – it has, I think, a reasonably mature OS in there.
It should not be a big stretch for this thing to have iPod or functionality.
And with GPRS, which is to step up from cell phones and way below Wi-Fi.
But it has its built-in network .
I mean, this is – What brand of phone is that? This is a Sony Ericsson.
It’s the 700i.
And I didn’t really think much of it.
It’s just there was like one that I thought looked nice when I picked it up from Virgin Mobile.
But it had this functionality in there.
And it’s outrageous.
I gotta tell you something.
When you just said, I didn’t think very much of it.
It had a little bit of a liver- pull thing going on there.
It might have happened to me.
Yeah, you started flipping.
You asked me to tell you if you were flipping into it, right? Oh my God.
It’s happening already.
It’s getting assimilated.
I think something to the UK whole.
Now, you get compensated.
You get overcompensated.
They’re becoming harms.
No, but I can become the database boy.
We have many people from India, Pakistan here in the UK.
And when we have electricity, we’ll be even faster.
All right.
So let me just run through some more of iPod features.
That phone is great.
And that’s, you know, okay.
There’s like this matrix of features.
It’s a confusing situation.
But what do we need? And by the way, we ought to also be– I mean, so like we need better user interface.
We need a button that we can press while driving.
Yeah, actually, yeah.
Big red one, yeah.
Yeah.
And then, okay, we need a ROM- able iPod or we need something that works in this mode.
So the UI has to collapse down to just a four-button UI.
Sure, it dots.
But what about when you’re not docked? And how can we keep it so that if you’re doing this while you ’re driving, you don’t know if you’re driving off the road? This is a big deal, right? Saving the lives of our iPoders .
We really care about that.
And in fact, I have to say that and I’ve been a cell phone guy for a long time.
Some cell phone interfaces are actually starting to make sense because they’ve been through 8, 000 iterations, unlike the iPod and MP3 players .
Yeah.
And they always knew from day one, hey, we’ve got people in the car.
They’re mobile.
So they were thinking much more about the mobile aspect.
And so, yeah, just explain the ROM-able part because I know what you mean.
But I don’t know if all the listeners know what you mean.
Well, you know, I mean, ROM- able stands for able to put into read-only memory, which is really not true.
It doesn’t need to be specifically legally read-only memory.
But the idea is that you’re taking it out of a rich environment, like a laptop or a PC, desktop, and putting it onto one of these devices with a really limited UI.
So you’re thinking, OK, take a big piece of software.
Like an iPod has got a lot of little dials and things that you can turn and things, whatever.
It should.
So you can’t do that on an iPod .
You just don’t have that much UI to play with.
This is a whole other UI problem.
And so you could say that our company wants to, at the very least, work with people who are creating products.
And, you know, either they’re in competition with the iPod, basically, or should Apple decide this is an interesting area and we’d be happy to work with Apple too.
Or maybe we want to create the product ourselves.
I would do that with a lot of reluctance, but still, not ruling out, because there are OEM-type situations that one can do.
And branding and stuff like that can really appear that we’re creating our own product and the fact we’re not.
Well, we’re just doing the design because we understand this area as users.
And we understand it as users who really, really care about this stuff.
So that’s another one.
Now, another part of the content development side is, you know, we’ve been, like, seeing a lot of it you’ve been driving has been with OPML.
And there we can do a lot. And we can do it quickly.
And we will do a lot and we will do it quickly, because of the open source release of Frontier, which includes a really excellent outliner.
And, you know, I would think that maybe even before the end of the year, we will have an OPML tool that works on both Windows and Mac intosh.
And on my cell phone.
And very, very – pardon me? And on my cell phone.
Probably not on your cell phone .
Okay. I’m not – I was dreaming again.
I couldn’t just say, “Oh, yeah, I’m on your cell phone. " Of course.
Well, hey, that’s a VC pitch.
That’s a – well, of course, we ’ll have it on every cell phone.
That’s for the – that’s a venture capitalist pitch.
Well, of course, it will be on every single cell phone all over the – over the universe.
Well, yeah.
Okay.
It’ll be a – I’m unfortunately – you have to put me – leave me at home on the day to go to a Mac pitch, okay? Because I’m very likely to do what I’ve done in the past, which is say, “Well, what do I really need?” [ Laughter ] You want to leave me home that day.
Okay. So what do we want to do? Content development.
We listen to the listening side , the aggregating side of things .
The content now, right? And this is something – this is where I think the real juice is for us.
Yeah. I agree.
This is what I’m the most excited about, really.
Yeah. I mean, we’ve got the number one podcast now, I think .
Not too many people have been in dispute.
Well, as Tony Khan would say, I ’m the Ed Sullivan of podcasting .
Exactly.
And I wear that badge with pride.
And you do it really well.
And we love what you do.
And it seems to come naturally to you.
It’s sort of like where you gravitate.
It’s what you did it into.
Yeah, it’s what I’ve done all my life.
And out of that is going to come a whole new music industry .
Oh, man. That would be so fucking cool.
Exactly.
And maybe partnerships with RIA companies.
Yeah, of course.
We need to – well, we – Be part of this because we have a very inclusive attitude about these things.
We don’t want – it’s not – we ’re not here to prove a point with anybody in specific.
We just all we really want to do is enjoy this new medium and help develop it.
And because it’s just like you love it, right? Mm-hmm.
And then other brand names.
I guess – I don’t know how else to put it, but other brand names from the 20th century, you know, bring them into the 21st century.
And I think a lot of them will carry over very, very nicely.
And some of them will come kicking and screaming.
Yeah.
Well, the key to the spirit part we can do without.
Yeah.
They can go work with our competitors.
But – But, yeah.
So, you know, so what we want to do is have a bunch of, you know, people that we love working with, you know, who do great stuff.
Your pod squad is the beginning of that.
Well, that’s something else that we’ve talked about is that in the way – you know, in what we’re doing, and particularly with this, with podcasting, there is no lock-in competitive advantage that can really be created.
It just doesn’t work.
And so what appeals to me, I think, an incredible amount is that we really can only compete on fucking quality.
Quality and quality and speed and agility, but not on lock-in .
And that is, you know, I love No lock-in.
No lock-in.
And we can cut anything off.
And I fucking love that part.
Yep.
I mean, we’re coming – So, we’re either good or we’re not good.
You know, we’re either number one or we’re not number one.
And just story.
Because, you know, while we come from different backgrounds , the one thing we have in common is sort of an innate love of the Internet and what it says, you know.
It says, “Ask not what the Internet can do for you after you can do for the Internet. " Right on.
And, you know, we’ve got to – like, everything that we do has to work at that level.
On the other hand, as you know, I’ve asked you many times, “Why does this, an MTV, didn’t have any competition?” And sometimes a company, a brand is so strong that, you know, you’ve got to figure that there were people who thought about launching a competitor to MTV.
And maybe it’s just because MTV didn’t lock anyone out.
That basically the bands that wanted to participate could participate.
Well, I don’t know.
And that – well, that’s really what did it, I think, is that I won my MTV campaign, which was done by the artists themselves.
The MTV routed around the record companies and all their approval bullshit and went straight to Sting and Madonna and said, “Yes.
Do you remember the beginning of MTV? It was, you know, I want my MTV .
That was – oh, yeah, that was the campaign. " You still there? Yeah, I’m here.
Okay.
Yeah, so the “I Want My MTV” campaign was basically MTV going backstage at concerts and events and, like, award shows and, you know, getting like a quote from Sting or Madonna or whatever and they’d make it, you know, say, “Please, could you say, ‘I want my MTV?’” And then that just became like the whole slogan.
And then everyone was saying, you know, then it became their marketing campaign.
Call up your cable company and say, “I want my MTV. " It clearly worked.
I remember – all I remember is the Dire Straits song.
I was not an early adopter of MTV.
You know, very, very rarely.
I’m an early adopter, so I don ’t remember the early days.
Okay.
I remember it being there.
I don’t remember the first time I heard of it.
Right.
Yeah.
But, you know, so there was a lot to it, but there’s some big differences.
Making a music video then, which no one really knew what it was.
It was like, you know, you had to have a director kind of do, you know, and some was video, but some was still film of, you know, you performing.
It was like it wasn’t quite easy for anyone to just go make a video.
No, we’re in a different place.
Yeah, they started to cost a shitload of money.
But you were doing pirate radio before MTV, right? Yeah.
So how did you feel about the fact that the cost of production for MTV was at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, at millions of dollars? How did I feel about it? Yeah, I don’t know.
I mean, it didn’t sit well with you.
It was always for the rich, you know, the only people with a lot of money.
We were doing something different.
It’s not really comparable.
It’s not really comparable.
Because, you know, now the tools are all out there and everyone can make stuff, you know, but something similar is kind of happening in reverse because , you know, I’m getting from the listeners, from source code listeners who eventually all go on to create, some of them don’t go on to do their own podcasts.
They’re starting to create stuff and be creative and make promos.
It’s kind of an organic thing that’s happening.
And it’s growing.
It’s kind of like a raft and everyone’s like, we’re all kind of like hooking our dingies together.
It really is sweet.
I really got to stop smoking dope when we have these conversations.
Really? Yeah, let’s be clear about that .
I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago at a blog dinner.
They had a dinner there in my honor.
And they were going, they pointed out to me, we were walking down Kiffin in the street.
They said, there’s Vancouver’s hash bars, you know, like Amsterdam.
I said, oh, that’s nice.
They said, do you want to go? I said, no, I don’t see that.
And they said, really? We thought you were doing that all the time.
And I said, well, that’s somebody else doing it.
Yeah, but it’s like, you’re kind of like Patricia.
You guys are naturally stoned.
You’re at a certain level all the time.
No, I know.
And I think it’s something, maybe because you’re almost similar age, you know, maybe it ’s just something that happens.
Well, it’s all that THC, you know, doesn’t flush out of your system after a while.
He was also a child of the 60s, believe you me.
Well, I’m not quite a child of the 60s.
You know, when I go through the oldies racks, I tend to end up in the 70s, not to see the disco shit.
And it was a little depressing, actually.
I kind of wish I was from the 60s.
But, you know, on the other hand, I missed the draft, which I thought was pretty cool.
Yeah, life is nice.
Yeah.
So there we go.
So I’m in the band with, we’ll figure that one out.
So we’ve sort of like covered all the four different sides of the pool, you know, the pool puzzle.
And I guess, overall, we’d like to work with people like that.
Yeah, and there’s something else there, which is kind of like an X factor, which Tony Kong from WGBH, Morning Stories podcast, he calls it civility.
He says there’s something going on that goes beyond these podcasts and the shows.
And of course, it’s similar to what happens on web logs, only it has a whole different dimension, where people are, you know, there’s civility being maintained and created amongst podcasters.
Yeah.
And I’m not very good at explaining it, but he is.
Well, I’ll give you a good example.
And he had that guy, I don’t remember his name, the production manager from Morning Stories, who had lost, I guess, the feeling in one side of his body had lost all of that.
And had never told the story to anybody but Tony.
Right.
He goes on to, and he explained that it actually is a problem for him, because it isn’t something that you get to talk about the first time you meet somebody, or even the second or third.
And usually you go out to beers with them, you know, a few times, and then, you know, maybe you feel comfortable explaining it.
But he still, like, he could not, when he shook somebody’s hand, he had a lot of trouble letting go.
Right, right, right.
And that would sort of like freak people out sometimes.
And so now he felt like this was a safe environment, and he could tell his story, and now basically, you know, and I understood what he was doing, because in blogs I tend to tell my truth, not everything, but the things that I really want to talk about publicly, I generally enjoy as I do it.
And it isn’t really a safe environment.
It feels safe in a minute.
But they’ve done some really elegant work there at WGBH.
Indeed, yeah, really.
Yeah, and I had a meeting yesterday with Seattle Times people, and had the same feeling.
You know, the nice thing about this one is that there isn’t the animus that existed between the print reporters and the bloggers.
The print reporters really weren’t very nice, generally.
They worked, of course, exceptions, with the print reporters like Dan Gilmour, who became bloggers.
But for the most part, they were not very nice to us.
The radio people are quite enthusiastic about podcasts, and it’s happening so quickly.
I don’t think there’s enough time for any organized opposition to, well, at least the help.
Yeah, well, and you’re absolutely right.
Radio people have been on this from the beginning.
And I remember telling you, “Sh it, man, look at this.
You’re the guy that created the fucking product called Radio. " I mean, you knew this 10 years ago.
Well, what I used to say to people was they’d say, “Well, there’s play music,” and I said , “Yeah. " They said, “Well, you can’t call it radio.
There’s talk radio, too. Come on. People talk on the radio, don’t they?” I mean, you know, I’m an asshole.
I should have seen this so much earlier, and I could have saved millions of dollars and countless hours of aggra vation leading up to– That’s what I was trying to tell you, man.
No, I understand.
I saw you spend all this money on Jambi, and I kept looking at it.
I was like, “I’m trying to tell you now. " I was like, “That’s what I want .
You have to have an office building full of production people. " And I was going, “Fuck, that’s what I need. I need those people. " I had the software then, and so it waits.
What happens is we wait another 10 years before it happens.
But now we’re not going away, okay? You and I– It’s only been 40 years.
We’re going to have trouble, I think, explaining to the business people why we are being so particular about how we do this.
That’s how they’re going to see it.
They’re going to see us as being difficult and insisting on things that, you know, “Oh, they’re just being like, artistic or whatever. " Correct.
Part of that is correct.
Well, I mean, it isn’t worth doing if this just turns into another sitcom reality TV show.
Sorry, I’m not willing to do that.
You can go get somebody else to do that.
I don’t need to do that.
I could actually be on the sitcom and make more money doing less work.
Yeah, well, I couldn’t. I’m not as pretty as you are.
No, I mean, you could totally be Archie Bunker.
Okay, I could be Archie Bunker.
Thank you.
I really want to do that.
That is what I’ve put in my plan for this year.
It’s your exit strategy, Dave.
It’s your career being Archie B unker.
Yeah, so they’re going to see it as being difficult, but we ’ve got to get that.
We’ve got to get those, that building full of production people.
We need to offer facilities.
We need to have people whose job it is to make sure that the bandwidth stays working.
Right.
You know, I don’t want to have to write every line of code.
I can’t do it.
That’s what we learned at User Land, basically, is that if I take on more and more and more responsibility, I end up in the hospital with my check practices.
I’m not going to be doing that again.
That’s a downer.
Not for business.
A real downer. That is not worth it.
Yeah, it was kind of a bummer, actually.
A downer? Yeah, that’s all right.
It had it’s silver lining, like they always do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway.
So, yeah, all right. Well, we ’ll get past that.
Yeah, so you think we’ve covered enough for one, Tracy? Tell them when we’ve been talking.
Let me just check here.
About 40 minutes.
I think that’s perfect.
I think it’s perfect for the walk to end.
I think so, man.
You’re going to play some music on here? How about some of the civius b itties? Oh, dude, I’m so in love with them.
Me too. See, it works, Adam.
It fucking works. It works.
And you know what? They’re selling CDs.
People are buying CDs.
I know. I was in your show.
It’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s, hey, that’s the, And they’re, and you want them something? I got to say this, man, they’re fucking worth it.
Yeah.
They play beautiful music. They have a soul.
They’re, you know, they’re not like, they’re accessible.
I feel like I go hang out and drink a beer with them.
We have a lot of fun.
Well, okay, so let’s play some of the civius bitties on our way out.
And we’ll get the fuck out of here.
Right on. See you later.
Okay.
All right.
Bye. Take care, Dave.
Okay.
It’s not like he doesn’t know just what to say to make you feel right.
Stay up nights.
Think of him all day.
Well, his song is true, but his head keeps getting in the way.
No, it’s not like he’s got a nasty disposition.
He wants to keep you locked up tight, knocked up right bare foot in the kitchen.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
No, it’s not like the boys are bad-aid, born on the wrong side of town, under the wrong roof, on the wrong day.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
Half of a man.
Just what do you think you will get if you persist thinking this is the best you can do? Say no to your life, girl, or before you know it, your life’s going to say no to you.
Easy come, easy go.
Life’s too short to live it so.
No, it’s not like it’s more than you can stand to have that pretty boy sitting next to you, kissing you, holding your hand.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.
He’s a hell of a boy, but only, only half of a man.