A homo-continental Trade Secrets!

Adam, Steve Gillmor and I review the third BloggerCon, all in the same room at Rickey’s Hyatt in Palo Alto. The sound quality is mostly good, if the content is suprisingly mundane.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah BloggerCon.

[Music] I got it! [Music] Good afternoon everybody! Oh yeah! Adam Curry in Palo Alto.
And Dave Weiner in Palo Alto.
Yeah! Ain’t that something, man? Is this the first time, Dave, that we’re doing this together? Oh yeah, this is the first time , man.
It’s like the one, the zero time zone trade secrets.
Yowzo, I’m trying to think, should I look at you or should I? Oh, shit.
I wouldn’t blame you.
Clearly not.
I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t.
It’s alright, I mean, you know.
So let me just explain the setup here.
We’re in my room at the Ricky Lee Jones Hyatt.
Hickey’s Riot, actually.
Ricky’s Riot.
Ricky’s Riot.
The Riot Hyatt.
And, yeah.
Palo Alto, California.
Yeah, Sunday afternoon.
It is November 7th, 2004.
Let’s see, time is, what are we at here? 4. 30.
And so we got two microphones, which is cool.
Because Dave is wearing my love microphone.
And I’ve got this new USB thing , which I’m still trying to figure out if I like it.
It sounds okay, though.
So how you feeling? Day after a blogger call.
I’m wearing the lav mic, so I wonder if that means I can speak Dutch and let the dog out .
Yeah, but only if you roll up my spliff as well.
Well, they don’t let me do that .
Unfortunately, I can’t join you in that.
I’m sorry.
Yeah, I’m tired.
It’s been, you know, whatever.
For everybody else, blogger cons a one day or two day or three day.
In your case, I guess, what, four or five day thing? Yeah, in total.
For me, it was… It was a couple months.
It started in the summer, basically.
It was after the Democratic Convention.
That’s when you got started.
And they saw me on The Daily Show with John Stewart.
They were talking about me on The Daily Show with John Stewart.
And apparently… About you? Yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And apparently… What do you think? Right, and this was the deal.
Because going to Harvard didn’t get Stanford interested.
Seeing you on Stewart.
Going to the Silicon Valley icon for 20 years didn’t get me an invite.
Being on The Daily Show, or mentioned on The Daily Show, has been proven.
It’s a real draw.
What happened was they were covering the blogger, what they called blogger boulevard at the DNC.
Right.
They were there as well, right? The Daily Show? I actually didn’t see them.
Samantha Bee, I think, was running around talking to people.
Yeah, they were doing sort of weird things.
So they walked up to a blogger and they said, you know, what’s the deal? Any real bloggers here? And whoever it was said, yeah, Dave Weiner from Scripting News is here.
Yeah.
And so then they saw that at Stanford.
And apparently, this is like a big academic credential getting mentioned on The Daily Show with… It’s an academic credential? Apparently.
Apparently.
I love it.
I mean, you know, with all due respect.
I mean, they were very nice.
Stanford was very good and the facilities were great.
Stanford, I thought, was awesome.
Really? Yeah, they don’t really have campuses like that in the Netherlands, do they? No.
I mean, there’s… I don’t think there’s anything even… It is exactly… Well, Harvard was like that.
Well, it made a little bit different.
I think Stanford is pretty much the picture-perfect image of a university campus.
It’s pretty good.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
And people are doing interesting stuff.
There was a dance marathon against age yesterday or the day before Friday.
Right, that’s right.
Or they were soliciting people for it.
I don’t know.
It’s just… And you see people walking around with disregard for traffic because there is none.
But totally in this elevated state of I’m learning, I’m intelligent, I’m having a good time, I’m floating on air.
You know what I mean? Does that make any sense? No, that sounds really dreamy and ridiculous.
Maybe I need to roll up another one.
Hold on.
I think you need to get your daughter… I think your secret success of your podcast is that you have your daughter around to keep your bullshit in.
That’s right, Dad.
Shep a fuck up.
Stop that.
Stop lying.
I guess I sort of have to play that role here.
No, that’s not what’s going on.
First of all, we got very, very lucky on the weather.
Right on.
The weather doesn’t have to be this nice.
Praise the gods.
And early… Yeah, I mean that’s a thank god sort of thing.
And Stanford is kind of in an idyllic location.
I mean it’s from weather and landscape and it’s very beautiful.
And yeah, I mean we had, I thought, well there’s something incredible that happens.
We play sort of a bit of rou lette with how many people we open the roles up to.
We don’t know what the no show rate is going to be, who’s going to be there and what not.
But somehow it just ends up that the right number of people show up.
And it was consistent every single session.
Yeah, it was 90% full.
Because I was walking from room to room.
And after lunch, I actually don ’t think I could sit in any of the rooms.
Really? I was standing room only for like two people.
Oh, right.
So it was perfect.
It’s alright because I kept leaving anyway.
Yeah, I was so afraid that during the podcasting session that the other two sessions wouldn’t have any traffic.
Yeah, it was really interesting .
There was a woman from BBC who came and she came all the way from the UK, I thought, to be part of the podcasting discussion.
And when I poked my head into the newbie session that Rebecca McKinnon was leading, she was there.
She was there.
So that was where – Which is where she belonged probably if she wanted to learn .
Rebecca, it was really funny because I talked with Rebecca as we were planning this.
And she had been at Blagercon 2 but not at Blagercon 1.
And she had done the international discussion at the first one.
And she was a good choice for that because she spent so many years in China and Japan.
And I think she was even in Korea for some time.
Really? And in the closing session at these Blagercons, we always sort of ask, what could we do better next time? What should we do differently and so forth? And one of the things that came up that I had forgotten was that at the first Blagercon we had a whole track for new bies.
And just the whole idea at that time was trying to sort of indo ctrinate and evangelize the Harvard community on web blogs.
And then somehow we lost that in number two.
And we didn’t have anything for newbies.
And so we brought it back and it was wonderful to see this.
And not only was it for blog ging newbies but it was also for Blagercon newbies, for people who weren’t familiar with the unconference format.
And so there were 14 sessions so it’s impossible to even review them all.
There was only two that I didn ’t actually participate in in some fashion.
There was a quality, there was a variance in qualities.
Sometimes people were up and there was really exciting discussions.
I thought the podcasting session went beyond expectations.
And the only expectation we really had was as long as we’re all in the same room and meet each other, we already have, that was what we discussed because we really wanted to get out of it.
It’s so hard to do anything like that in an hour and 15 minutes.
Complicated ideas don’t really come out in situations like this.
They do not.
They totally don’t.
I mean that’s what you do I guess in your sort of solo podcast and the writing that we do on the blogs and stuff like that.
No, it was important.
First of all, what was really cool about this was that the podcasters were just like, God, they were just such positive, smiling, happy people .
Yeah, weren’t they though? Dave Slusser.
I mean, you know, I had no idea what Dave Slusser looked like, right? I didn’t either.
I never met him.
Dave’s long hair.
He’s got long hair.
Well, I’d seen a picture but you couldn’t really see how long the hair was in the picture.
That wasn’t my image at all.
Really? No.
What did you think he would look like? Oh my gosh.
I can’t think of, you know, I don’t want to like, I want to give you a name of an actor or something like that.
Yeah, right.
Actors are always good.
Right, but it’s like, I’m not thinking.
It’s no big deal.
Don’t worry about it.
I thought straighter and not smiling so much, you know what I mean? Oh really? No, I told you.
I think about Dave Slusser is the guy smiling all the time.
Same thing with Dawn and Drew.
They have this, you know, sort of twinkle in their eye.
They do.
She’s a lot cuter than I thought she’d be.
Let me tell you that.
So I hung out with them last night.
Yeah, I know.
Oh, you went to the movies with them.
Yeah, well, before I get to that part, before I get to that part, we came up with one thing about that was needed at Blog gerCon.
What’s that? And this is, you know, this is totally a Dawn and Drew and Adam discussion.
Let me just make sure we’re still recording.
We’re doing good.
So at the end, someone suggested in a rather brutal way, but you know, it was like, well, I’m sort of just drinks that rot our teeth out, can we have some water? Yeah, no kidding.
Totally.
So Dawn and Drew and I say, you know, and we also think a bowl of tic-tacs.
Yeah.
That would be good.
Because you know, you sit in there all day and you don’t eat and you’re drinking coffee.
And you get the shitty breath after it’s all over.
That’s what the tic-tacs are for.
Believe me.
I was walking around the same place you were.
Yeah, that place kind of had a little thing going there.
We got kind of stanky.
Well, you know, the water, we ordered water.
The water, I did just in show.
Oh man, I just, you know, I don ’t know.
Well, you don’t see me all that often, but like I always was a bottle of water.
Yeah, sure.
And so I said, we need to have, that was the first thing I said .
We got to have bottled water during the breaks, but I don’t know.
What happened? Yeah, well.
That’s all that went wrong.
Right.
That’s what I’m going to say.
I was just basically thanking the good Lord and Murphy and whoever else that, you know, yeah, the other thing is, and this is always a problem, is that the air conditioning never supports the number of bodies we put in the room.
That didn’t bother me.
I had no problem with the air.
No, I’m usually so.
It got a little stuffy.
It got a little stuffy there.
Yeah, near the end of the pot, but I was also just, you know.
Yeah, you were the one that was eating the room up basically.
Yeah, adrenaline was flowing and I was getting warm, so I totally felt that at a certain point, but it was not bad at all.
And I just wanted to say that the, what’d you call them, your monitors, that what you call them? Yeah, we call them monitors.
Yeah, monitors.
They were, I mean, you couldn’t tire them out.
No, they were great.
Jerry Springer would give his left nut to have these people holding the mic in his audience .
Yeah.
Or Oprah or whoever, and they were really good.
And Mike the AV, Mike was the name, right? Yeah, every guy liked Mike, yeah.
He was like a gargoyle.
He had this pack and he had all this stuff on him and he had all kinds of bags and everything, which he didn’t have to, oh, because everything worked.
Yeah, pretty much.
He could split the screens, the audio was there, you know, the wireless mic’s always crap out once in a while, but you know, it’s whatever, and it just worked.
It was high quality shit, I thought.
Well, it wasn’t just him.
It was also John Harrison who does the AV.
John Harrison, John Harrison, yeah.
For a standard, he wasn’t there , but all the setup and stuff.
And that’s his system, basically.
Right, that was cool.
And it’s a good school.
I mean, they basically have great facilities.
And yeah, that worked.
The major problem was actually the registration system and badges.
That was pretty funny because I wasn’t registered.
Right, yeah.
And my friend Ron was registered as number eight.
Yeah, I registered.
And then he became me.
He stole my identity.
Yeah, well, you’re lucky we let you in, you know.
Well, they weren’t going to let me in.
I’m really sorry.
Well, like they were told not to let you in.
Jennifer, who was the, yeah, Jennifer Sander.
Jennifer happens to be the executive director of their Internet and Society Center.
Yeah, okay, well.
She’s kind of like, you know, she’s like the boss’s boss’s boss of everybody, except for Larry.
Right.
She was Larry’s boss.
Yeah, she recognized that I should probably get a badge.
Yeah.
And we basically had a policy that, you know, we were going to basically try to have a streamlined for the people that , you know, we knew that there were people who would show that hadn’t registered.
In fact, they had emailed me to that.
There must have been.
How many do you think crashed just last minute? Probably 20? Who cares? I don’t really know.
It doesn’t matter.
I’m just interested as a percentage.
It’s really, really impossible to say.
I mean, that’s the funny thing.
You would think that we would have a way of knowing even, I don’t even know how many people were there at them.
I mean, you know.
I mean, because there were lots of no shows and there were lots of people who weren’t registered that ended up coming .
So yeah, I mean, we’re going to estimate that because basically I’m going to go by 90%.
Basically say 90% of our capacity was full at all times.
And not that you really sort of get any, you know, data from that for the next time.
Because you know, every time we do it, the show is bigger, you know.
Yeah.
And so by extrapolation, when we think they, you know, the next.
That was a good point that someone brought up, you know.
What do we do next year? Well.
Shea Stadium? No.
No.
And I think the format is kind of, it’s kind of already getting a little old actually.
A little tired? I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, I, you know, I kind of, it’s like an, almost like an engineering thing.
I kind of want to figure out if there isn’t a way to.
Turbocharge it.
Or, well, you know, because yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, I did in a couple of sessions that I was in.
I tried in a, like in the, in the core values of the web that Mary Hodder was leading.
Yeah, I saw some of that.
They kind of, I thought, had gotten, and I want to be clear.
This was just my opinion because there were other people that felt it was going really good.
I walked into it and I thought, well, these, it’s bogged down here.
It’s not getting anywhere.
And so I said, why don’t we just put the mics down for a while and like just shout out what you want to say.
Let’s see what’s formal.
They do want to do it.
Oh, really? Yeah.
And I, and I respect it.
It was funny.
Well, I mean, Stacey Kramer, she was there from.
She’s in the hotel.
Yeah.
She wants to talk about.
Big content.
She also had written.
She’s an online journalism review.
She has written for an online journalism review and for Wired .
She writes for Wired News and stuff too.
And she, she was funny.
You know, when I suggested, she turned around and she says, we can’t do that, Dave.
Don’t hold the mic.
And it was like, and then she caught herself.
She says, uh, you know, this is how I fight.
That’s just how I feel.
It was like, cool.
All right.
And later on she came, she said , you know, I got, I hope I didn ’t hurt your feelings.
And I said, no, I mean, real emotion is good.
That’s what we want.
Yeah.
Well, I said, all we, all we caught you doing, Stacey was being human.
Yeah.
Stop that.
Which is really in a way, it’s sort of like, if we get people to behave human in these conferences, we win, you know? Cause so much of it is, you know, conference going is like, you know, here’s my space and my play and my strategy and my, You know what play is in Dutch? Toilet.
Yeah.
So you say in the podcast, in the podcast play.
If what you leave behind, before you play.
Before we send our packets.
It’s my little packet switch network down there, wherever that may be.
It’s true though.
So, so yeah.
So I mean, I would think that, you know, where this is all sort of, this all leads to, you know, the extreme example of this is, I don’t know how people are going to take this, but it’s like massage class.
You know, I used to go to these 11 day massage class, you know, and like, I like to say, like, doesn’t matter what you talk about, basically, we all talk about the same thing always under all circumstances.
Whenever you have a discussion, you’re talking about this is basically saying, I exist, I exist, I exist.
This is what I see.
Listen to me.
Listen to my opinion.
I want your approval and I’m willing to give some approval, but mostly I want your approval .
I’m here.
For what I’m saying.
Yeah.
That’s human nature though.
It’s what we do.
It’s 99% of communication is basically the, you know, and so the purest form of communication is touch, you know.
I mean, if you want to establish that you’re here and that, or make contact with someone else, the quickest way to do it is to touch.
And that reaches in a very, very deep level and it’s scary and, you know, whatever.
But we can’t do that in this context.
This isn’t what blogging is about.
It isn’t what you know.
So you have to sort of like choose how far down that spectrum you want to go.
The more real human emotion and trust, you see, that was, we talked about this at breakfast, right? Yeah.
The more you get to the point where, you know, you meet a guy like Dave Slusher and you find out, man, he’s friendly.
Well, what does that mean? Does that mean he’s a good person? You can’t really tell.
You don’t really know yet.
What I mean is that you’re experiencing some of his humanity and you’re building a little bit of trust, you know, which is good and it’s rare.
Most conferences don’t even have that much of that going on .
But yeah, so I mean, so how can you get people to exchange more and, you know, build those kind of relationships in a more direct way and at the same time accommodate more people? Yeah.
Yeah, that’s a challenge.
More people who haven’t been through one, two, and three.
And some newbies.
That’s what I’m saying.
Yeah, right.
The ones that sort of come in with their, you know, a precon ceived notion of how this is going to work, right? And we saw them try to impose those, you know, some of the new people try to impose their expectations on the structure of the conference and, you know , maybe at some point we won’t be able to, maybe it won’t work anymore.
Maybe FlyerCon will just become like, you know, Mac World X or Comdex, but it will at least be large at that point.
Yeah.
Isn’t everything that grows big eventually destined to suck? Yeah.
Well, I don’t know.
I mean, do you think maybe… Well, what, name it something that became big and that doesn ’t necessarily mean, well, maybe it is only when there’s a lot of people, maybe that’s when it just becomes unmanage able.
Well, I’ve never really been all the way with something that got big.
No, but just like, yeah, well … I tend to be there at the beginning.
And I’m lucky when I get there at the beginning and the thing has legs and all the people that are there are really good.
And, you know, like I’ve been there, that was personal software, that was wired, that was the web.
These were, I mean, I was really lucky.
I think we’re there again now, you know, it’s like… I agree.
We were there at the Blogmoral, we’re there again at the podcasting thing, you know.
Five years from now, we’re going to look back and you’re going to look at the people that were at this conference and each one of them is going to have gone on to do something that you’re going to say isn’t it amazing that all those people were in the room at the same time? At the same time, yeah.
Right.
And it just has that feel.
I’ve seen enough now, you know, I don’t tend to be around like when it becomes something big.
I generally have moved on to the next thing at that point.
Right, right.
But I saw it with Think New Ide as and we started as on-ramp with, you know, like 12 guys and girls with pizza boxes on the servers, which of course is always the romance of it.
And then we grew really quickly and we wound up at like 400 or 500 people across seven states and even though it was … What saved us, of course, was we were divided, you know, in chunks of 80 to 100 people in offices.
So it didn’t suck tremendously.
But as a whole, yeah, I think it did.
And MTV sucks and, you know, all this stuff that… Anything that’s cool and small once you get more and more and more people, you know what you forget? You forget a lot of the newbie stuff along the way and then people who jump on, jump in with, as you say, with their thoughts of what it is and what it ought to be and you change and morph and… Yeah, and I think that I agree totally and I think there’s a way to put it is that it will get taken away from you.
In other words, you create it and, you know, the first couple of times you do it, you sort of think, well, what I want to do… Well, the first time I did it, I didn’t want to hold on to it.
That was living video text.
After a certain point in time, it became really clear to me that in order to get the reward , I was going to have to give it up.
I was going to have to let it go.
Second time, user land, I was insisting that I didn’t want to give it up and it didn’t ever… It never grew up.
It sort of was… What does that tell you? Well, it tells you that entrepreneurs’ second efforts generally don’t work.
Okay, and there’s a good reason for it because… Mine didn’t.
Right.
You know what? Right, that’s right.
That’s when we started hanging out.
We were just talking about that .
And then my theory on that is that it’s at that moment that you try to negotiate with the world what you want is you want to have your cake and eat it too.
You want to have the success that you had in the first one, but you don’t want to work your ass off.
You want to do it in a rational way that only, you know, you can only do if you have money and you have experience.
Well, here’s the problem is you do… I disagree.
You worked your ass off for user land, but there’s a hunger factor that you can’t determine .
Yeah, I wrote about this today on Scripting News.
In other words, when I… I’ve noticed this… Paul Fried helped me see this.
John Paul Fried at Harvard, who I worked for, helped me see this, that basically he said, “Well, Dave, isn’t everything you do a success?” And I said, “No, it’s not.
But when I want… When I will it to work, when I want it to work, it will.
Because I’m that kind of person .
I’m stubborn.
I can’t.
You don’t say.
I am stubborn.
And I can’t.
Yes, I am.
It doesn’t matter.
And the key thing is that I can ’t conceive.
When I’m going to succeed, I can’t conceive of failure.
On the other hand, with user land, I could totally conceive of it and I was… I accepted it.
Yeah.
I didn’t… Like you said, I didn’t have the… It was negotiable.
Yeah, right? It wasn’t work or death or star vation.
And the first time it was totally non-negotiable.
I mean, basically I got to a place where if I didn’t, it was … It came really close to tubing several times.
So on this one… And I think… Okay, so the lesson is, let it be taken away from you.
Know that it’s going to be taken away from you one way or another and find a way to enjoy the success even if it does.
Yeah, well, of course, yeah.
So like, for example, in the case of user land, it would be unfair to say that it got taken away from me, but it’s also true that I’m not involved with it anymore.
But the satisfaction is that there’s blogger and there’s mov able type and there’s WordPress.
And there’s a fucking newsgator and blog lines and feed demon and feed server.
Net news wire.
Net news wire, right.
All these things came along to sort of fill the gap that was created by these products.
And so, you know, that says basically you can go ahead… We could have even sold out user land if I wanted to.
If the opportunity presented itself to make millions of dollars selling it out.
Once there was a standard format and protocol and it could be replaced, then there was absolutely nothing ethically wrong with, you know, with… You know, the whole thing would have an independent existence.
The problem with more and living video text was that wasn ’t true.
And the category dried up and died after we sold that out.
So that’s kind of… That was my negotiation on user land.
I didn’t want that to happen.
I didn’t want to get to a place where the things succeeded to a certain point and then it came time to sell it out and then as a result there would be nothing left in the scripting industry.
I’d be curious to see if based upon… I showed the outliner at the podcast recession.
If people downloaded radio user land.
I don’t think so.
No? No.
We’re going to… We’re going to need to do… I don’t know what it’s going to take but first of all I don’t think it’s radio user land.
I think that we need to do a package based on the open source base… A frontier.
Right.
And it needs… Well to me that’s the same… Right.
Well but it needs to boot up in exactly the mode you want… Right.
Not in the weblog creation mode but in… More even more directed.
On a window opening up with an outline.
And then an instruction window somewhere immediately next to it.
And then when you save it goes right up to the server you want it to be on and it’s linked in and content managed.
They get that sort of instant result and they can immediately see what’s going on there.
That’s when you’re going to start getting… Now I think kind of an outliner or a wave of it but you’ll start getting a trickle of adoption when you do that because the people that get interested in it will have an immediate good sort of experience.
And yeah exactly.
And I think it’s a great use.
Yeah we’ll get there.
I mean… I still have to comment on this microphone for a second.
Oh okay.
So it’s a USB microphone.
Yeah it’s kind of cool looking.
Well yeah but hold on there’s a problem.
It’s made by MacMice.
It was given to me for free.
But USB audio interface has a delay.
So you’re direct on the line in with the lav mic.
So I’m hearing you… This is like the GSM delay.
So when I’m talking there’s a half second delay because the USB can’t process the signal fast enough.
So that’s why you can see me sticking the thing in my ear every other five minutes.
Why are you sticking your ear? So that I can monitor and make sure that it’s working.
It’ll be sad if like it won’t.
Just flip the transmitter around so I can see the lights.
Thank you.
Do you have any lights? I have a red light and a green light.
The green light’s flashing.
Okay yeah that’s good.
Once the red light starts to flash then you’re low on battery.
Oh it’s not flashing.
Okay then you’re good.
Solid.
Oh okay.
You understand what I’m saying? I mean that would really suck it.
Yeah you’re talking and I’m not .
Because I’m talking a lot right .
As long as I don’t have to listen to you though it’s great .
Just the light and make sure that when the red light, if it ’s flashing.
If the red light starts to flash then we have an hour left so we’re good.
You don’t even have to look at it.
Oh well then we don’t have a problem because we don’t have an hour in us.
Well another hour.
How big is your dick I don’t know.
Well Steve Gilmore’s dropping by here.
Hey he had the length of our, it’s additive right so like it ’s the length of your dick and the length of my life.
John Holmes step back.
Yeah he said old Steve is an hour and a half late.
He called me.
You were out getting him a drink.
Yeah he said hey.
I said hey.
I’m waiting for the apology you know.
It ain’t coming.
It did.
It came.
I was in a coma.
And I said you know what I said I was waiting for the apology and I’ll accept it.
It’s accepted you know.
So he was going to, he’s probably going to be here any minute.
Hey so I got a new cell phone today.
Yeah.
I did.
And the old one it was really funny I was talking with my mom .
Of course I called her first because I knew she was worrying you know.
She sent me an email.
She wanted to know how it went.
Well no not just that.
It’s like my old cell phone died like three days ago.
She couldn’t get a hold of you for a couple of days.
I was totally in a kind of need of it.
I wasn’t updating my blog.
My server had gone down as you know.
Dude I was even worried motherfucker.
Right exactly.
You know I was worried.
So it turns out that she, this is so cute.
She left voicemail which I will never hear because the phone is completely kaput.
Saying basically she thought I had either like died or was in a hospital or something.
She just wanted the server up.
I give a shit about all that.
She left a message.
She says if you’re hearing this I’m his mother call me.
Oh really? Oh that’s so sweet.
Well you know at this late stage in life basically it’s you know that used to really bother me.
Being mothered that way when I was a kid.
No but that’s important stuff.
Yeah it’s cool.
It’s cool that she worries.
It’s like and it’s.
And we still have moms dude.
Yeah that’s like really cool.
Well I have both.
I have both of them.
Me too.
Me too.
That’s gonna be cool.
Hello.
Where is here? Yep that’s Steve.
We’re doing trade secrets.
Yeah.
Yeah Steve doesn’t want to be a podcaster does he? So it’s facing straight back.
And it says 2351.
Right on the back.
So this is like in New York on WORAM when I was growing up they had a radio show that basically it was live and it was in this couple’s living room in Manhattan on Park Avenue.
They were like a rich couple.
Right.
And all these people would just drop by their house and they would sit around and talk around talking with their.
We need to find a rich friend and we can dish out.
In New York and Park Avenue.
Well we’re doing today.
We’ve got the chair for Steve and of course you know he’s like a guest.
He’s like you know it’s like the Beverly Hillbillies and P etticoat Junction and oh gosh Green Acres and the Andy Griffiths.
What was the pink submarine? Pink submarine.
Well these were all two shows.
All the shows.
Right.
Only pink submarine but they were all they all knew each other and occasionally Gomer P yle would show up on Petticoat Jun ction.
That’s just like podcasting.
Yeah.
I’m with Don and Drew.
Yeah.
When is Don and Drew coming over? You still haven’t told us about the movie by the way.
Okay.
Yeah.
Right.
So last night after Jing Jing.
How was Jing Jing by the way? Did you like it? It was great and actually because when I came I was late and because partly because I was stuck in this elevator and partly because I didn’t have a ride but I knew it wouldn’t be a problem.
I knew I just went to the front of the hotel.
There would be someone from BloggerCon going my way and there were five people so it worked out.
Yeah.
That’s BloggerCon to the max.
Totally.
You know that’s going to work.
You get a ride.
That’s the easiest.
Maybe you get more but.
So I was hoping you would get laid and instead of.
You didn’t get laid.
You could have gotten laid.
Yeah.
I guess.
I don’t think there’s any question about that.
Well you got to let people like hold a sign up so I know that there’s a signal.
Well we should have had this session and said who wants to have sex with Adam.
Right.
It’s sex for fun.
Nobody would have been at any of the other sessions.
Nobody would.
No.
I don’t think so.
All right.
Hi.
Nice to have you guys here today.
Yeah.
It’s interesting.
So when I came in it was like there was really one table was all filled up and it was like the cool table.
Yeah.
You mean like the one I was at.
Yeah.
Totally.
And you know it was Don and Drew and you and the other table was behind that and there were all the rest of the people .
That was my initial feeling.
I’ll be honest.
I was like oh okay.
All the rest of the people.
But it was great.
Yeah.
And it filled up pretty quickly and we did an introduction round and talked and actually there were incredibly amazing people at my table.
Including well I’ve got, I’m spacing out, a girl from A udible.
Oh right.
Yeah.
And some Apple engineers.
You know it was funny because I ’m like you know.
Apple engineers? System engineers.
People like work at Apple.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I’m a system engineer.
I’m a system engineer.
By any chance work on iPods? No.
No.
And you know hi I’m Adam Curry.
I’ve spent tens and thousands of dollars on your product.
Do they bring you any free products? No.
Well how tacky is that? Well I don’t think these guys in the free product division.
You know.
That’s our friend Sam Levin.
There used to be a time when Apple like they would.
They would give stuff away.
They gave me and Mac too.
Yeah they would just show up and they would loan you the smaller.
Daniel Paul.
Daniel Paul.
No.
Mike Boych was my guy.
Okay my name is Daniel.
And Guy Cowstock.
My bitch was the guy.
Guy Cowstock.
Yeah.
I never even met him.
Basically they would just show up your place with loan or hardware and you’d sign a little piece of paper saying that someday you might think about giving it back.
I did have to do that actually.
And they never, they never come back.
Eventually the program ended.
Yeah.
Eventually.
And they asked for it back and you gave it to them? Yeah.
No.
Adam, Adam, time out.
You did that.
Well you’re fucking it up for everybody else.
I mean I said fuck you Apple.
Jesus.
So anyway let me get back to Don Andrew.
You gotta be kidding.
You gave it back.
I’m an honest guy.
I signed a piece of paper.
God.
Alright.
So hold on.
Let me just make sure I’m not exploding here.
Yeah good.
Any minute Steve Gilmore is walking in that door.
So I hope I get to the Don Andrew story before that.
Okay.
And so what are we going to do after dinner and you were going to go home.
I guess they’d already asked you.
I did.
Oh they asked me.
Obviously they asked.
And right across the street was a midnight showing of lollipop girls in 3D.
Cool.
And it’s a porn movie.
And I’m like you know the opportunity to, that’s kind of like when Patricia said you know if I didn’t have sex with David Bowie my sister would never let me live it down.
I figured the podcast community would never let me live it down if I didn’t go to this movie with Don Andrew.
That’s why you went? Well I wanted to go too.
You were being put down by the podcast community? No I love porn.
Oh there you go.
So you had to twist your arm basically.
Yeah really.
So they’re two friends who are really fun people.
Yeah they’re all pierced in sort of the same way.
Yeah they made it my daughter.
She’s so proud of my new friends.
Really? Yeah she’s totally into piercing.
How does she know about them being pierced? She saw the Don Andrew website.
Oh and their pictures are up there.
Yeah.
You know when I talk, because their friend had like the big African earlobe pierced with a huge bullet hole like a shotgun hole.
Wow.
Yeah that’s trippy.
You just want to like stick your finger in there.
That was the woman or the man? The guy.
The guy.
And he’s like a super, he’s a, he was part of the human genome project.
Wow.
The sequencing of the genome.
So you must be smart.
I asked him that.
He said yeah.
There you go.
He’s like a smart.
Definitely like a straight answer right? We came back to the riot hide first to get prepared for the show.
What? The riot hide here, Ricky’s hide.
You know to get prepared and Dave Slusser showed up because he was in the hotel.
I see on iTunes they use rendez vous and I was looking at his playlist on iTunes and playing his music for the past two days .
You know a couple of years ago.
Oh he’s here at the show today.
Yeah he’s gone.
I had to leave early this morning so he didn’t go with us to the movie.
So we go to the movies, we go back and you get, you know you ’re in the, it’s like an old movie house.
My screen at home, you know the flat screens that have an investment in the company that makes these flat screens.
It was, my screen at home is almost the size of the screen.
I mean so it was not big.
I know the Z-Querys theater right? Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s on Emerson street in case you want to go there.
Right.
Across from Jing Jing.
Correct.
And hey man.
Steve Gilmore.
He’s on his iPod and he’s listening to the daily source code.
Just to bring a, bring a child.
How are we going to get a microphone on? Well I’m going to, what I’m going to do is I’m going to put this, I’m going to do like a monitor thing.
Hey Steve, how are you doing? Great.
Hey I see you have a map.
Did you enjoy it? Oh you’ll get a chance to like stroke me about 18,000 times now.
Boy.
That was the real one.
The rest of it is the fake ones .
Come on over Steve.
I’m on a wireless mic.
How’s that? You don’t even have to close mic.
Okay.
Yeah.
So yeah I just caught up to you .
I’m listening to you and Doug Kay.
Oh the, yeah.
They’ve hated that.
I hated it? What? What? They hated you and Doug Kay.
They didn’t hate it? You said you said you hated the way I sounded it.
Oh I didn’t hate the way you sounded it.
I didn’t say I hated it.
I did.
I wouldn’t regret it.
I don’t have any deal.
You said you hated it.
Well guys I’ll see you later.
Yeah.
You said you hated the way I sounded.
Not what I said you sounded.
You said you didn’t like to sound like you had the same energy as the traits.
They did source code.
Well that’s true.
I didn’t think, I mean, I hardly.
You told me a story a number of times I think.
It sounded like you were, well look, I don’t want to, you know , I mean, the first it was I don’t get it.
It’s hard.
Do you see what you did? No the problem.
All right.
Let me just try to do this.
I mean the first one was a long time ago and so the feeling is gone, right? Okay.
And basically I wanted to, I didn’t hate it because it made me want to do the interview with Doug so I can give him the other side of the story and why what you’re doing is so important, okay? Right.
And from without.
This is all the stuff I haven’t heard yet so.
You haven’t heard yet.
I just heard the first half where, you know, it’s MTV to MTV.
Right.
Right.
All of that.
I tried to get him to tell me this last night and he was like , you know, belligerent about this, you know, that I had to go listen to the tape so I just did.
Right.
You wanted to know the MTV story or something else? I was right at the point where, you know, okay so then you went into it and you said, you know.
Yeah, at a certain point Donna Drew invited me to go to the 3D portal.
Yeah, how was that? He’s told the story of it.
Why don’t you let him finish the story.
So how was it? What’s the name of the theater? The Aquarius Theater.
The Aquarius.
It’s on Emerson Street in Palo Alto.
So we’re seeing the lights are kind of happening and it’s full .
I mean, it’s all kinds of couples and people and it’s a total rocking or picture show vibe.
Like, what’s it be interesting? As Guy gets up, he looks like a UNIX system engineer.
He said that, you know what I mean? He compiles a red hat colonel breakfast.
Cool.
Yeah.
And then he stands up and he’s like, hi everybody, you know, I ’m sorry that we’re a little late, but I had a scheduling conflict .
Okay.
And then he goes to this porn trivia.
How long was John Holmes the big? I don’t know how long.
Whoa, these people know they’re porn.
How long was it? Eleven? At twelve and a half.
Yeah.
And then we have some other questions like who portrayed John Holmes in the movie nights ? Mark to Mark.
Oh, okay.
Mark Warburg.
Okay.
Stuff like that.
And then you see the pass out these mints for free.
A little tins of mints.
I left it in the theater.
I said, we’re giving these away for free because they suck.
You can’t get them open.
That’s why we’re giving them away.
And literally, the lights go down, you hear people like, and like, and like that.
And I’ll do the ping-pong.
Thousands of mints.
And so they don’t get like a Tom and Jerry thing, and you have your glasses, you have my glasses.
You get a Tom and Jerry cartoon , and then it starts.
And it was, the movie was intended to make fun of the 3D effects.
So every opportunity people like to stick their head out, and you know, the leg is coming in, and the arms are going like that, and they’re pouring water into the camera.
And it was totally cheesy.
And Don was right at a certain point we should have had a squ irt gun.
Just to kind of squirt the audience because there was definitely a money shot.
It was just so fucking weird.
Oh, god, I don’t know why.
And you can see all the actors trying to like shoot the audience, and they’re like, oh, who’s this authority? I’m just thinking, I’m going to pass the screen.
Oh, now I’m getting it.
I’m going to get the mirror.
I’m just going to try to lean, and Don goes, that’s my mom! It was a fucking trip, man.
Oh, god.
That’s like having a soundtrack .
I want to Doug Cate, like walk behind me everywhere, and like be my soundtrack, like announcing everything that I was doing, sort of narrating my existence.
Now I just realize Don would be even better for that, you know? She could be explaining what everything, you know, what’s going on around, and what kind of underwear they’re wearing, and what they’re thinking, and whatever else they’re going on in there.
It was something else sitting across from Don and drew at dinner.
That’s nice.
They were really nice people.
So what are they like? Sweet.
I told them Ole and Lena jokes.
You know Ole and Lena jokes? From my scripting.
Yeah, exactly.
They were from Wisconsin, and they never heard of Ole and Lena jokes, so they were all new for them.
And, you know, that was nice.
Their friends who were from Minnesota, they knew about it.
From Minnesota, they knew all about Ole and Lena jokes, so it was nice.
And, I don’t know, it was all about vibe, I think.
It was just all about, like, hey, how are you doing? It’s nice to see you.
We’re mimicking each other’s accents, singing each other’s songs, you know? So it’s drew the sunny or, you know, the eye-turner of that? No.
Oh, he’s the flamboyant one, for sure.
Yeah, but he knows exactly how to push the button.
He’s the straight man, for sure .
Yeah, but we were in line waiting for George Burns.
Yeah, George is great, so he’s more like it, yeah.
We’re waiting in line, and… We’re waiting in line.
We’re waiting in line.
It’s the way they talk.
It is exactly the way… There’s nothing… Right.
They didn’t learn a new way of communicating, they didn’t see it.
No, they just learned to turn on the microphone.
And, she really liked the whole user thing, too, she was telling me about that.
They didn’t know nothing about the software industry, so none of the sort of… That was the thing I kept hearing from people, what’s that? None of the… I say you think.
I think, yeah, I think.
The funny thing was, I heard that from a lot of people, was that they didn’t understand what the whole shtick was.
I really appreciated what you said there, that there’s a whole history of this, and it goes back long, long ways.
Bringing Bargher Khan to Silicon Valley, I think it was inevitable that we would go through… Well, you waited a long time to do this.
Long enough, yeah.
I guess three… No, this is the third Bargher Khan, right? What else was the long time? I just, you know, I think it was… You were taking it slowly because you were concerned about the impact of the kinds of things that actually went… There was a little flare.
We never would have gotten the thing off the ground if the first one had been in Silicon Valley.
It wouldn’t have launched at all.
You needed to have… First, we needed to get the sort of format down, this idea that users… We saw it, the users didn’t… Some of the users didn’t even want to be independent.
They wanted the vendors to tell them what to do, you know? Yes, you know, people like to be… They sort of split between wanting to be free and wanting to be controlled because it feels safer.
Yeah, well, I think eventually they can have what they want if they want to be controlled, or maybe not controlled isn’t the right word, but… We still have a ways to go before… I mean, if this is going to be a commercial market where people sell products and, you know, users get what they want, we can’t have a trade show, a floor show, or… Because, you know, what’s going to happen, and the vendors are going to want to put people on panels and, you know, whatever.
You know, as I said, in my comments, I’ve been involved in a bunch of these kinds of shows in the past, and, you know, there are good reasons to do those kinds of shows.
The only thing that really kind of turned the corner for me is that there are about 30 of them a year, as you said.
And, you know, can’t we just have one that doesn’t do it that way? Right.
Yeah, so… The answer is yes. I mean, 90% of the people in the room either didn’t understand what the big thing was, or felt that, you know, they were being heard for the first time and that felt good.
You know, so, yeah, I mean, the answer is yes, you can.
And that kind of corresponds, not kind of, it corresponds directly to the feeling of doing a podcast where you can suddenly just, I mean, I can say anything I want, I mean, I can do anything I want.
It’s just like a blog, too, in the name of the conference’s blogger con.
So it would be ridiculous to have gone through all this trouble to be independent through our web blogs, only to turn the whole thing over to a bunch of technology companies.
I mean, that would be… it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t happen.
Well, it was, you know, uncomfortable and worth every moment.
Yeah, I like the way you put that.
Yeah.
So, overall, were you pleased with the conference? Yeah, I mean, it was too short.
And at the same time, I had… Well, I put my head down this afternoon just to relax for a couple of minutes.
Yeah, and… Well, what my point is, is that I’m saying it was too short, yet at the same time I was exhausted.
I mean, I heard a lot of people say, “Well, that was, you know, it felt like a week. " But, you know, that was a good week.
It was very intense on an emotional level, which I don’t think people really picked up on until after the fact.
You know, people like… It’s so interesting, he wasn’t here for the first part.
That’s exactly the only thing that matters at the conference, is that’s because it had an emotional dimension.
And most conferences try to st ifle it, so the emotions go out of the room, you know, and they become one-on-one conversations usually about frustration, is what people talk about when they’re in the hallway, when they can’t, like, be heard in the main room, you know.
So that it was emotional, to me , means that it worked.
Well, you know, I was sitting next to Ross Rader.
Is that his name, last night? Yeah, from Cadetson.
The guy just, to my right, to your left.
Oh, okay, yes.
Yeah.
And he was talking about the first source code that he heard was the one where you talked about your mother.
Yeah.
And all of a sudden, he was, you know, he, this, he was transported, the way I described to him was, “Yeah, this is not a toy. This is real life. " Yeah.
And there was just this enormous amount of power and emotion and, you know, suddenly entering this new dimension for him.
And he just realized that this is a whole lot more powerful than just some sort of Wayne’s World or whatever.
Not to put Wayne’s World down, but, yeah.
Wayne’s World is great.
Yes, I think that that, I think that that was, that came across in the conference.
It came in waves, it would, you know, ebb and flow, of course.
But, you know, I can’t wait to hear some of the, of the podcasts.
Podcasts, yeah.
Like the Larry Lessig session.
I really want to hear that.
Did you, did you, did you, No, I was in the, you know, the quote making money session.
And so I looked at the, That was a good one. I thought that worked pretty well.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was amazed that you allowed Dr. Hughes a powerful heart attack.
He asked about it.
He asked, you know, to his credit.
And that just says that there’s no rule that is without exception.
I mean, basically the reason why I don’t allow power points is because most people use power points as crutches because they’re terrified to stand up in front of a room and be.
He’s using a board like a banner.
Right. But he’s not like that at all.
I mean, Doc is a professional speaker and, and, you know, he ’s not good.
He’s a professional stand-up comedian as well.
Exactly.
I mean, so the thing is, is that, you know, the reason I don’t let people do it is because it’s just, it’s ridiculous.
Go through your fear. Be scared . That’s fine.
You’re going to survive this.
It’s not going to be terrible.
And you’ll, We were all wondering there when.
You’ll be a billion percent better if you’re, what, you’re wondering why.
When, you know, the, Why the PowerPoint was permitted. Is that what you’re doing? No, no, no. I’m just teasing you about whether we were all going to survive it when you put the mic down and we’re, Oh yeah.
That was pretty intense.
Proudling around the back of the room there. That was pretty intense.
Oh wait, I’m sorry.
I don’t think you were there.
No, I wasn’t. I’ve only heard about it.
Yeah.
Well, you want to know something, Steve? I’ll owe you personal debt of gratitude.
Well, for many reasons, but another one yesterday was I couldn’t leave the room until somebody said what you said, which is that you support where I was at.
Okay.
At that moment, right, I could pick up and go to the next session and let the best happen .
You know, let, you know, I understand people were confused about what had happened there and what were the ground rules, you know, you know, that was a lot of confusion.
We knew that this was the session that was going to be the problem.
We knew it.
I mean, I spent, you know, days talking with Scoble about this one.
He wanted to wear an Apple t- shirt.
I said, no, Scoble, you don’t wear an Apple t-shirt.
Why? You know, because we don’t really want to get fired.
Yeah, the guy works at Microsoft. He thinks it’s cool to be in Silicon Valley wearing it.
Hey, I’m taking pictures of the Apple’s Macs coming into the bag.
But it was supposed to happen.
What happened there was supposed to happen, Steve.
In other words, Is that what this, I planned it all.
Well, I knew that that tension was going to be in the building .
It’s like the making money session had to be there too, okay? Because otherwise, like I said in the opening, it’s like, if you don’t have it there, every session is going to be about it.
If you didn’t have the vendors in the room without calling it the vendor’s session, right? Then that tension would have been in every session more or less.
They would have been spread around and it never would have happened.
And then it did happen in Scott Rosenberg’s session as well.
Really? See, I wasn’t there for that.
But it was a non-bent.
Scott called on me.
The guy was starting to talk about a side of his.
I was sitting in the back and Scott said, Dave, what should I do? And literally what I said to him was, I trust you, Scott.
And then Scott said, please, let’s move on.
I’ll go to the next guy.
No problem.
I was talked about later.
I was explained to the guy that basically this was just a judgment call.
We don’t know if we were right or wrong.
But, you know– I mean, it means that we learned how to be handled on the part of all parties.
Correct.
And now the thing is that journalists deal with this all the time.
This is no big deal for journalists to figure out where somebody’s conflict of interest lies and ask them not to walk right into it.
For journalists, journalists have to be conspicuous.
There’s nothing wrong with technologists doing the same damn thing.
There’s nothing wrong with that .
The blogosphere has permanently erased the boundaries between journalists and developers and users.
That’s my opinion.
So, you know, everybody has to examine those– We all have to be aware– Right.
We have to disclose our interests that are relevant to the discussion that we’re having.
And, yeah, I mean, and even that’s not always black and white, it’s whether you can even disclose the conflicts of interest.
Sometimes you can’t, right? And then you have to exercise judgment on whether or not you should even have an opinion or state an opinion about this particular subject.
If you can’t disclose the conflict of interest, then you maybe want to just recuse yourself and not say anything, which is kind of what– You know, or on the side of just listening is not– was not a bad approach.
It was what the six-apart people– I talked with Ben and Mina before the session and said, you know, “There is a rule I just want to make sure you’re aware of it, that, you know, vendors aren’t allowed to talk about their own products. " And they said, basically, we’re quiet people anyway, so it’s not a problem for us.
I talked with Scott Johnson at Feester and Scott actually thanked me for doing it.
He said, “I’m not the kind of person who promotes my own products in public like that, and it always disturbs me when my competitors do it, because it’s a line that I won’t cross . " So, you know, it’s a– I love the idea that we could bring, you know, the same– like you said, the same kind of integrity that you see in journalism, the same sensitivity to, you know, not disclose conflicts of interest and making room for the people who are really– have the most stake, which are the users, to drive the process , you know.
And on the other side, there’s something that came up in the politics session.
Basically, you know, the conflicts of interest on the–

• Yeah. - on the journalist’s side.
  There’s been a– there’s slowly creeping into the ecosystem, if you will, the understanding that nobody is free of an opinion, least of all the journalists.
  The journalists are allowed to have an opinion.
  Well, I always thought so, but No, there is no.
  20 years ago, that would– If you look at the rules, if you go to– I should look on Google, I guarantee you that the– what ’s the– what’s the journalist’s organization? Where can I look at their charter? What a journalist is? And it’s– I guarantee you– Adam, that’s one interesting thing. There really isn’t one.
  Oh, and Holland, there is.
  Not here.
  Oh, really? They have like a medical review board for journalists.
  No, there’s no professional organization.
  Really?
• Yes. - Oh, that exists in Holland.
  Oh, no, not here.
  Yeah, and if you can hardly sue anyone– That came up at the journalism session, that there’s no– Look at those ads.
  There’s no certification process, there’s no– Really? –report of ethics, there’s no form of redress, there’s no place to take it.
  I suggested this at the journalism session.
  I said, “Let’s do a blind study , okay?” And, you know, take 20 news articles, okay? And before the journalist writes the article, he puts in a sealed envelope what his opinion is about that subject, okay? Oh, yeah.
  And it goes in a sealed envelope.
  Then he writes a story, and he publishes it, and then you get 20 readers to read it.
  Read the article, tell me what you think– [static] –the opinion is on this subject.
  I guarantee you– Yeah, I’m sorry.
  I just moved the mic and it went– Well, in that case– I’m sorry.
  Anyway, I guarantee you that we could tell you exactly what the guy believes just by reading the article.
  Sure.
  You know, so it might as well be disclosed.

  That contents of that envelope
  Is there a–
  Is there a school of journalism
  ?
  There are lots of schools of
  journalism.
  Absolutely.
  There’s a school of journalism
  at Stanford.
  Right.
  But, you know, the good
  journalists don’t go to schools
  with journalists.
  I’m just saying that I have
  always read that a journalist’s
  job is to get the facts,
  check the facts, and that your
  own opinion is allowed.
  No.
  In the United States, you said
  –
  The old–
  The only thing I agree with it
  –
  Right.
  –is saying that’s–
  Right.
  The old school– we had this
  came up at the DMC, Walter Me
  ars, who was an old-time
  reporter for the Associated
  Press, was presented to us at
  the blogger’s breakfast as
  being
  the AP blogger, okay?
  Right.
  And so he–
  Well, you know, but he’s a
  respectable, respectful people.
  You know, I mean, it’s clear
  that people respect this guy.
  He’s an institution.
  So David Weinberger asked him–
  David was one of the Clutrain
  authors, a blogger.
  Now he’s a fellow at Berkman
  Center.
  Asked him, who do you support
  for president?
  And Mears said, I can’t tell
  you that.
  If I did, then I would be, you
  know, revealing some lack of
  objectivity.
  And–
  Well, that’s–
  You should disclose that.
  You should or you shouldn’t?
  You should.
  Yeah, well, because you’re a
  blogger.
  Yeah.
  You see it that way.
  Yeah.
  Now a journalist sees it the
  other way.
  You can’t disclose it.
  You have to report, you know,
  you have to report as if you
  didn’t have an opinion.
  But I say, and you say, and
  Weinberger says, and bloggers
  in general say, you need to
  tell
  me who you’re going to vote for
  .
  So I know that I can subtract
  that from what you’ve written.
  It’s almost a mathematical
  thing.
  Well, I got a comment today on
  my blog.
  What is your blog?
  I mean, I’m like, I don’t know
  what you’re doing.
  This is–
  You have a blog?
  Yeah.
  And what’s the URL?
  It’s the URL.
  Come on, plug it in.
  I have no idea what the URL is.
  What?
  The base camp, if you will, is
  blogs. zdinets. com.
  Okay.
  And it’s probably slash Gilmore
  with a capital G.
  Don’t you think you should know
  the URL of your blog?
  You know, I’m new to this
  business.
  That was the thing.
  Mears did too.
  People asked him, what’s the
  URL of your blog?
  I ain’t to tell you this, Steve
  .
  He didn’t know either.
  No, I know, but I don’t know to
  be able to spell it out on–
  This is a trade secrets or a
  trade secrets.
  So I want to know, what is
  trade secrets?
  You promised on the first
  broadcast of trade secrets that
  you were going to–
  Tell us the story.
  On some future date, you were
  going to explain what it really
  means.
  Oh.
  And all of that stuff.
  That’s what I want to hear.
  All right.
  It was a bar I was going to
  start in Palo Alto, actually.
  It’s true.
  It’s true.
  And the idea was this, is that,
  first of all, when I first came
  here, and I can say here,
  because we’re here, right, in
  1979, I kept looking for the
  center of Silicon Valley.
  I’d go all over the place and
  go, where is it?
  And couldn’t ever find it.
  There was no–
  In New York, it’s Times Square.
  In San Francisco, it’s Union
  Square, or the Fisherman’s War,
  or whatever.
  Here, there was no place.
  So I thought there needed to be
  a center.
  And so I thought, let’s open a
  bar.
  And the benchmark would be,
  this is where programmers would
  go to get laid, which is
  a little clue.
  I was a programmer, and I was
  trying to get laid, OK?
  And I hope–
  Like something has changed over
  there.
  Really?
  My model–
  He’s doing old conferences to
  get laid.
  He used to do that.
  It doesn’t work anymore.
  But my benchmark, I hope he
  doesn’t hate me for this, was
  that Andy Hertzfeld would be,
  like Andy Hertzfeld could go to
  trade secrets.
  And the image was a beautiful
  woman’s hand in a back pocket
  of blue jeans, of Andy Hertz
  feld’s
  blue jeans, basically.
  And that’s where developers and
  users would go to party
  together in a whole different
  way.
  And since everybody in Silicon
  Valley was so secretive, and
  basically you had to sign
  the disclosures about, you know
  , a cute name for the bar would
  be trade secrets.
  It’s a double entendre.
  OK, blogs.
  Trade secrets.
  It’s about trade secrets.
  blogs. zdnet. com/gilmore.
  Scroll up.
  I’m clicking to go to it.
  So how do you edit your blog,
  Steve?
  He has to call his secretary.
  Well, I can’t edit mine.
  The Potosphere.
  He’s claiming the Potosphere.
  He’s coining it.
  No, I had to regrow my beard.
  We’ve heard about that.
  And then I have to–
  So he has to grow the beard
  back because the picture–
  Here’s an updated picture.
  But they stretched it, like Ann
  Wilson in Heart.
  And look, I’ve got hair here.
  Yeah.
  Oh, damn.
  Not here.
  Yeah.
  And I see it.
  Over here.
  I was doing a comparison.
  And you look kind of weak here.
  Yeah, that was–
  You look much stronger.
  I think that was about two
  months after I got fired from
  Info World.
  OK.
  So I was like–
  Cool.
  I was fired from some of the
  best places.
  Where’s your RSS feed?
  All of them.
  I’m running out of places to
  get fired from.
  Where’s your RSS feed?
  No, that’s a good question.
  He doesn’t have one, Adam.
  Of course I do.
  It just doesn’t work.
  What’s the difference between
  having one that doesn’t work
  and not having one?
  All RSS feeds.
  RSS Months.
  Hey, it’s a 2. 0 feed.
  So you can do enclosures?
  Of course it is.
  Can you do enclosures?
  Well, I thought so.
  What is the guy’s name that we
  were talking to last night from
  who just–
  the guy who wrote WordPress is
  now a–
  Matthew Molenway.
  He’s a CNET guy.
  This is a CNET publication.
  Cool.
  Oh, he can help you with that.
  So like being yet?
  No, they’re not using Vignette.
  No, this is WordPress that they
  ’re using.
  Is that what it is?
  OK.
  They’re using–
  The WordPress developer was
  there at BloggerCon yesterday.
  The guy who made it.
  Matthew Molenway.
  Right.
  I talked with him.
  And I said, I just want you to
  know that I got the chairman of
  the Socialist Party in
  Holland to blog.
  And he says, yeah, he’s using
  WordPress.
  And the whole Socialist Party
  is on WordPress.
  That makes sense.
  Why would they use–
  How many parties are there in
  Holland?
  Oh, God.
  I mean, is this a big party in
  Holland?
  It’s gaining a lot of traction.
  It’s the fastest growing party,
  for sure.
  And what’s the reigning party?
  It’s– well, we don’t– this is
  the problem, I think, in
  Holland.
  We have– you have to build a
  coalition.
  So most people voted for the
  labor party.
  However, the coalition, which
  is– is the Christian Democrats
  and the kind of right-of-center
  Democrats.
  And they together have more
  voters than labor parties.
  So they are coalition and labor
  party is now the opposition.
  And this doesn’t work.
  Right.
  And so they call it purple.
  That’s– our governments are
  purple.
  Because it’s kind of like, you
  know, red and blue and–
  Those of us who can’t see my
  eyes, they’ve rolled into the
  back of their head.
  Yeah, well, that’s– it’s
  fucked up.
  It’s fucked up.
  And so Socialist Party are also
  , of course, opposition.
  But now they’ve got the
  internet and the blogging thing
  .
  And it’s making–
  Are they going to jump into the
  pot-a-sphere next?
  I don’t know about that.
  I mean, I’m not doing anything
  for Holland anymore.
  Fuck ’em.
  I’m tired.
  Now, I can’t contribute to that
  country anymore.
  We went to that last night.
  Yeah, we had a couple of those
  –
  Proverbs.
  That’s Proverbs, which is–
  The second one in particular, I
  thought, was really–
  Yeah, which is both with my
  field out here.
  So that means any blade of
  grass that grows above the rest
  gets chopped off immediately.
  And, you know, since you’re six
  , what?
  And I’m smoking grass.
  You know, that’s really bad.
  Well, there are lots of tall
  people in Holland.
  Holland is one of those weird
  countries, right?
  Yeah.
  They grow pretty tall there.
  So he’s not– I mean, he’s not
  exceptionally tall in Holland.
  He’s really tall for here.
  But it’s clear what is meant by
  the–
  Yeah, no.
  I first time I heard that one,
  it gave me chills.
  You told that story at the blog
  ger’s dinner we had in Amsterdam
  .
  Yes, and Pendinga was there,
  and he was agreeing.
  They all agreed with it, yeah.
  They also explained to me that,
  you know, there’s no big deal.
  People don’t stop for
  celebrities.
  That basically it’s–
  It’s the same thing.
  If you’re not acting normal,
  fuck you.
  Yeah.
  Celebrities are hated.
  I hate it, because you’re a
  celebrity.
  And therefore, you’re acting
  differently.
  It’s gotten better over the
  years, but not much.
  Interesting.
  But Holland was a very
  successful commercial country.
  It still is.
  It was.
  No.
  It’s not anymore?
  Well, it used to be the Gateway
  to Europe with the Rotterdam
  Harbor.
  That’s the number one thing.
  They built Skippel Airport,
  which was also intended to be a
  gateway to Europe.
  And because, hey, look, you
  know, either you choose for
  your environment,
  and Skippel Airport is three
  yards below sea level,
  reclaimed land, or you’re going
  to choose for commerce and
  economy.
  And so they’ve limited
  everything on the airport.
  The airport can’t expand.
  The airport, you know, okay,
  that’s fine.
  But then realize that that’s
  going to Frankfurt.
  And it’s going, you know, it’s
  going–
  Frankfurt is the–
  Yeah, it’s going, you know, so
  that traffic is going away,
  and you’re no longer the
  connecting hub.
  And, you know, air traffic is,
  you know,
  that’s very interesting
  business and all that shit.
  Uh-huh.
  They can’t expand the harbor
  either.
  Now Antwerp Harbor is kicking
  their ass.
  They built this $15 billion
  railroad, which is still not
  completed,
  which was supposed to extend–
  you come into the harbor and
  then you ship everything
  through Germany with trains and
  water and all that.
  Every way you can.
  And, you know, the builders
  have ripped off the government
  to no end.
  You know, this is all coming up
  as now we have whistleblowers
  and, you know,
  shadow accounting showing up in
  big garbage bags.
  And it’s, you know, what’s
  happening is–
  and this is partly due to blogs
  ,
  provably so, is the ships
  starting to float to the top.
  You know, we’re finding out
  that everyone’s corrupt.
  It’s a very small country, so
  it’s a lot easier to see it all
  happen.
  So the only thing they really
  have–
  there’s no more defense
  industry.
  They’re barely a part of the
  Joint Strike Fighter.
  Not that I’m condoning that,
  but, you know, it’s money,
  right?
  That’s how a country makes
  money.
  They’re not a part of that.
  They’ve kicked out the final
  guy who actually, you know,
  built submarines.
  And so the only– the sugar
  industry is kept high artific
  ially.
  What sugar industry were they
  growing there?
  Sugarbeets.
  Oh, okay.
  So one ton of sugar in Europe–
  that’s not just Holland–
  in Europe cost $600.
  The world price– the world
  market price is $200.
  So, you know, they’re in a
  closed little loop there.
  And the only thing that I
  guarantee you, Holland, is the
  number one supplier of
  is marijuana and ecstasy.
  And every day in the paper, you
  know, someone is, you know,
  300 plants are being taken out
  of some apartment.
  That’s what everyone’s doing.
  Everyone’s growing weed.
  Why are they taking the plants
  out?
  Well, because it’s illegal.
  You’re not allowed to grow weed
  in your house.
  You’re allowed to smoke it,
  though.
  Yeah.
  I mean, this is–
  It’s not illegal, actually.
  It is illegal.
  Yes.
  But this is what they call ged
  ogh beleidt, which means
  permission policy.
  Of course, that’s not the only
  thing that there’s permission
  policy in, which is,
  you know, so eventually, laws
  aren’t being enforced.
  I want to ask Steve a question.
  What’s it like watching Adam
  talk after having listened to
  him on the podcast so much?
  I mean, you’re sitting right
  across from him.
  Well, it was a little– like
  you were telling me this at the
  conference yesterday,
  that there’s this odd quality
  of disembodiedness.
  Yeah.
  But that was mostly last night.
  In this context, it’s beginning
  to appear–
  I mean, I have this weird
  sensation that comes from this
  whole space, which is that–
  Excuse me.
  I tried to see because we can’t
  see.
  I know.
  That’s because human pissing
  all over me about–
  That’s me.
  Let’s show it with this little,
  ugly guy.
  A little bit of play.
  Let’s all do this together.
  This land is your land.
  This land is–
  All right.
  I’m sorry.
  Yeah, you are.
  Yeah.
  I do it intentionally.
  Yeah.
  Well, you have a very
  distinctive voice, Steve.
  Yeah.
  You do.
  Is it a radio voice, or is it–
  that’s just your voice.
  I did radio once.
  Did you?
  Yeah.
  In Charleston when I was living
  there, I did an AM radio
  technology show.
  Charleston, South Carolina.
  South Carolina.
  Yeah, that’s where we moved.
  We moved to have and bring up
  our children from New York City
  .
  Yeah, right off.
  Yeah.
  Sort of a similar kind of
  sensation there.
  But not for the schools.
  That’s why we moved out here.
  Good luck to us.
  The schools out here are
  challenged as well.
  Really?
  Yeah.
  Well, getting all kinds of–
  Getting all kinds of kids into
  them as a child.
  It’s higher educational.
  Well, there’s that.
  Getting into them–
  Yeah.
  You know.
  You know, I’m not a celebrity.
  I used to be like, “Hi, I’m
  Adam Cray.
  Sure, your kid’s in. "
  And now it’s like, “Well, hello
  .
  Fuck you. "
  So, yeah, I was on the radio
  there.
  But, you know, I once was
  producing a record with Proctor
  and Bergman, you know, two of
  the fireside.
  And I was in the studio and I
  was trying to get Bergman to do
  a line reading, which,
  of course, he didn’t appreciate
  .
  What’s a line reading?
  You know, I was–basically, I
  forget what the line was, but I
  said, “Well, I don’t like
  this. "
  And Peter says, “That’s very
  good, Steve, but, you know, it
  ’s my record. "
  Yeah.
  So, yeah, I know how to do it,
  but I don’t think this is about
  radio voices.
  No.
  In fact, the thing that I
  noticed with almost everybody
  is, you know, when you hear
  your
  –when you’re a kid and for the
  first time you heard your voice
  on tape, it’s like,
  “Ooh, I sound like that. "
  Yeah.
  It wasn’t the “oo” thing, but I
  hear Steve, and of course it’s
  different than MP3.
  Is it?
  It’s a different timbre.
  Interesting.
  Well, it’s certainly–
  What eventually happens is your
  mind will recognize it and you
  won’t hear the difference
  anymore because I’ve heard it,
  but I had never had that
  information.
  And everyone sounded different.
  But what you have, what you
  have as well, Dave, is you have
  –and I have it too.
  It’s just there’s a certain
  frequency range that’s low that
  microphones like to pick
  up, and that is actually very
  comforting for listeners.
  You know, I think it’s actually
  a learned characteristic
  because I think it goes to what
  you were talking
  about, which is when you first
  hear yourself on a recording,
  it sounds like, you know,
  if you do an experiment and put
  your finger in it, you can hear
  the resonance and the
  bunch.
  All that stuff is gone.
  Right.
  You don’t hear that on a
  recording.
  My voice sounds a lot better
  when I’m talking than it does
  to me than when I hear it
  through
  a speaker.
  I mean, I am very nasal when I
  talk.
  You know, when I hear it
  through the speaker, then nasal
  doesn’t come through for me
  when
  I’m listening to myself.
  I can put that in for you.
  No, no, no, no.
  The nasal is there.
  It’s not here.
  I don’t feel like–I feel like
  my voice is like not nasal at
  all, but then–and I hear
  it on the–
  So, you know, the thing is, is
  that I think as you start to do
  this, you start to learn
  how to kind of put that back in
  .
  That’s something I want to say.
  Oh, that’s something I want to
  say.
  Yeah, that makes sense.
  You never listen to your own
  show or rarely.
  No, that’s not true.
  That’s not even–
  That’s like you did.
  –not really.
  No, I very often do.
  You know, what I do is like I
  record it and I then add the ID
  -3 information, then I upload
  it and while it’s uploading it,
  I listen to it.
  Okay.
  Right.
  And after it’s uploaded, I tell
  them.
  When you did your show about
  the open sourcing of frontier,
  that was a real breakthrough
  for you because you weren’t
  concerned about–I’m not going
  to psychoanalyze it.
  All I’m saying is that that was
  akin to Adam’s show about his
  mother because all of a sudden
  You weren’t doing anything with
  recording at all.
  No, this was about your life
  and your life’s work.
  Yeah.
  And it was compelling and–
  Yeah.
  And once you do that kind of
  thing, it’s part of your aura
  from that point on.
  And that’s what we have to keep
  reminding ourselves because
  that’s where we’re talking
  about this,
  the reality radio that’s really
  what’s coming from.
  We had a breakfast this morning
  where we were trying to come up
  with an elevator pitch for
  non-techy type people.
  So what is this stuff?
  The significance of podcasting.
  So what we’re doing with
  podcasting is the radio
  equivalent of what reality did
  for television.
  Reality radio?
  Yeah.
  I mean, it’s a lot more.
  But right now, that’s what
  everyone is latching onto and
  is loving.
  Well, it’s all bootstrapping.
  So whatever works to get to the
  next phase is probably okay.
  Better software is very
  important, actually.
  So what did you think about the
  conference?
  Well, nobody’s asked me that.
  That’s how we started an hour
  and eight minutes ago.
  You sure?
  You asked me that?
  Well, you know what?
  No one’s listening anymore, so
  answer it.
  No, nobody’s asked me point
  blank that way.
  Okay, I’ve certainly talked
  about what I think of the
  conference, but it’s not come
  quite that way.
  I have mixed feelings about it,
  actually.
  Not the things that you might
  think that, because I expected
  that there would be some
  conflict.
  I also expected there would be
  mixed quality.
  And I think I don’t want to
  rate one session or another,
  but there was mixed quality.
  And it’s getting bigger, and
  the blogosphere is getting
  bigger, so the idealism is
  fading, I think.
  So it’s not quite so obvious
  sometimes that there’s an ideal
  istic answer to a question, and
  the mundane answer,
  and sometimes we end up stuck
  on the mundane answer, and I
  find that very frustrating.
  Because what I want is I want
  to be inspired by people who
  are thinking really big.
  Oh, it’s not.
  Pretty much.
  Well, all the time on a day
  that you come to be inspired,
  you know?
  This is not every day, right?
  I mean, for most people, at
  most you’ve been to three, you
  ’ve said three of these days in
  your life.
  Steve, this is the first blog
  ger con you’ve been to, so you
  ’ve had one.
  Well, that’s not true, but I
  always pay virtually.
  Right, but I think it’s
  different.
  I think it’s very different
  whether you’re there by the web
  cast.
  But I don’t know, because I’ve
  never done the webcast for a
  blogger con myself.
  I haven’t done it.
  I mean, I had a sort of maybe a

2. 5 experience out of three in absorbing the first one, because I was sort of vacill ated between the insanely variant audio feed, the official audio feed, and Kevin Marks with his little ISAC camera.
   I think we should mind not that this time.
   I think we actually had a web cast.
   Oh, was there a video? Yeah.
   No, not video.
   No, we don’t do audio.
   There was also a video webcast.
   I think Kevin Marks’ stuff was going out as well.
   Kevin wasn’t there? Kevin Marks wasn’t there.
   No, he was in the home.
   I think Jenny Vaska had a camera at one point.
   Well, see, that’s the dimension of the blogger con that I never get, okay? I don’t get the IRC dimension.
   Well, anyway, it’s not about me .
   I was asking you.
   Right, and so let’s see.
   Right, so, but you know, I don ’t think that’s that different from the others.
   I mean, there were, there’s always, it’s not as inspiring as I would like it to be, but, you know, but then again, you know, you find your inspiration in whatever you are inspired by, right? The fact that all these people come together in itself is pretty cool.
   I think the format, I’m looking , going to look for sort of some new things we can try with format.
   I don’t know what they are yet, but I don’t like the microphones.
   Yeah, I’m going to push back on you about that because, you know, while we were doing it, and by that I mean, particularly when your session, and I was participating, we make the point, because you’ve already said this on the microphone that you didn’t want the microphones again.
   No, I didn’t say that, right? I wasn’t totally happy with them, okay? Okay, all I’m saying is that, you know, that was, you called this, you know, kind of, it was a wood stock for the pod osphere, you know? Right, and that was the… And the way that that works, to give people in that room on an equal basis the ability to be able to put their voice out into the room and over the … It was really more for the podcast.
   That’s a really good thing.
   But then we can do a lot better than that.
   Absolutely.
   I think we ought to get together and talk about that, okay? Yeah.
   I’ll give you an example.
   We’ve got a room here right now , and we’re not waiting for somebody to come with a microphone, right? Right, there’s no latency here.
   Right, and so… Except on my headphone.
   I want to tell you another, I want to tell you a little story .
   I know we’re going to go probably way, way over here, right? Yeah, it doesn’t matter.
   But this doesn’t have to fit on the CD, right? Anyway.
   Hot boys.
   Knock that off.
   Open up.
   Hot boys.
   I’ll make you a dick.
   I really, really spent a lot of time with Doug Kay at this conference.
   I really, really got to like Doug, you know, and that was nice.
   So I can make, I feel like I can make a little fun of him now.
   But anyway, I went to a non-dis closed event at Microsoft, which you were aware of, you know, a few weeks ago.
   And I’m not going to say what the event was about or anything , but I want to tell you a little anecdote.
   One point during the event, there were 20 people in the room screaming at the Microsoft people, okay? And it freaked them out, of course.
   I mean, but the screaming wasn ’t like, “You stupid idiots. " The screaming was, “This is what we want you to do, and this is why we want you to do it.
   I want you to do this, and I want you to do this. " You could discern from all the different threads that were going on at the same time different ideas.
   In other words, it wasn’t just that people were screaming.
   They were saying things.
   They were excited.
   They finally had figured it out .
   It was great.
   And so one of the guys from Microsoft gets up.
   This is not a blogger.
   None of the Microsoft people, except for Skilville, were blog gers, okay? So that means that there were 30 Microsoft people in the room .
   Only Skilville was a blogger, and he pretty much kept quiet.
   He said, “No, no, no.
   Everybody talked one at a time . " And I screamed, and I said, “We ’re bloggers.
   We’re just, this is the way it works.
   We’re going to scream, and you ’ve got to fucking listen to what we’re saying. " Because it had been so polite up to that point, and they just simply weren’t hearing what we were saying.
   So at that point, at least we could hear what we were saying.
   And then it was like a real, I was telling Adam before about Stacey Kramer, about how she had a real moment when she totally objected to something I said, and she said it in a very sort of opinionated way, and she immediately said, “Oh, I’m sorry. " And I said, “No, no, no.
   There’s no problem.
   A little humanity came out.
   We like that.
   That’s good. " You notice what you’re saying about the emotions, right? I mean, people are being real when the emotions come out.
   So to me, it’s also some good ideas that don’t come out under controlled service.
   That’s what I’m saying, and that the blogosphere is not about waiting for the microphone to show up.
   It’s almost the opposite of that.
   It’s this cacophony, this mess of ideas just thrown out, and God, I hope somebody can hear this.
   There’s a lot of that to blog ging, right? And when you pretend that we’re so orderly and we can wait for the microphone, then you start getting the speech effect .
   And I heard that a lot of times .
   It’s like, “Well, wait, I’ve got five things to say. " But if you were like that, you wouldn’t have five things to say because you wouldn’t have a moment to prepare.
   But isn’t that just a technical problem? That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
   That’s only a technical problem .
   Well, and it may be that the next barricade that we do– Everyone comes mic’d.
   –may be, but I have a different idea, okay? Which is that we vary the format radically, and we don’t lessen the commitment to this format.
   We just do one interim that is a completely different format, okay? And maybe it’s podcast or blog athon or something like that.
   And what you do is you rent a small room, a conference room somewhere, okay? A small enough room so that mic ‘ing it up isn’t a problem, right? And the acoustics are good, and you don’t try to do even a whole day, okay? You try to do something like what we’re doing right now, and you try to make something coherent, come out of 10 people in a room focused on a specific thing.
   It doesn’t matter what it is.
   A specific issue, a problem that needs to be solved, something like that.
   And you try to come out of it with the kind of focus that the blogosphere is capable of doing, and try to see if you can’t make that happen in a real-time audio way.
   And I think that if you can, what comes out the other end is some incredible programming.
   I mean, just, you’ll watch the problem be solved.
   And that’s, I think in solving that problem, you end up providing the template for what John Stewart was looking for from CNN Crossfire.
   You know, it’s kind of, you know, it’s jazz is what it is.
   It’s, you know, it’s people, you know.
   It’s improv.
   There’s a guy who used to, he was the producer of Al Green.
   I forgot his name for a second, but he has this recording technique where he folds back all the monitor feed into the drum kit and into the room.
   So you basically sit in a circle.
   What’s the drum kit? The drums? The drums.
   He takes the monitor feed.
   He takes, you know, the speaker inside the drums.
   He puts the speakers inside.
   He just, he feeds back into.
   Really Mitchell? Exactly.
   And, thank you Google.
   No, fuck you.
   I knew that.
   Hey, we’re slowly finding where the knowledge comes from.
   The power of pure intellect.
   I mean, you know, at the technical level, you know, the thing that really works is that the overtones coming from acoustic guitars and vocals being pushed into the cymbals create overtones which are unm atched.
   You know, it’s a sound that is instantly recognizable and it’s one of the reasons that the, you know, the backbeat in, you know , Willie Mitchell’s and Al, the guy who died who was the drummer in those days.
   It’s just, it has this kind of feel that you cannot get from overdubbing from, you know, essentially having to record, you know, recording once, one at a time and overdubbing.
   Oh, okay.
   In other words, you don’t hear what the other, you’re not listening to what the other person is playing and interacting with that person and vice versa.
   And that kind of thing.
   That would be Kenny Butchery? No.
   Okay, now you’re kind of.
   Al Jackson? Al Jackson.
   He was the, the drummer in the original.
   Booker T in the MGs.
   Very good.
   So what I’m saying is, is that, you know, the only pushback I ’ll give you is the ten people, you know, who are the ten people? There’s going to be, there’s not going to be 390 people.
   No, no, you would do it deliberately so it wasn’t an analyst.
   That wouldn’t be the point at all.
   And there are ways, by the way, we, you know, we found ways to, to dampen the A-list, right? That was the dinners last night , the choice of the discussion leaders.
   They weren’t chosen for the celebrity.
   I think that not one blogger knew who Craig Klein was.
   But Craig is an incredible discussion leader.
   He has so much experience with it.
   And he has.
   Which one was this? This was the mobile blogging one.
   But Craig, the thing about Craig is, is that, you know, a good discussion leader might very well be somebody with a personality that you can hardly even find, you know? The point is, is that he’s supposed to make the discussion happen, right? Not impress you with his personality, right? So Craig, you know, we tried different things, you know, was less a good discussion leader? I think he was.
   And I don’t want to, you know, let’s go straight there.
   That one, everybody seems to have thought, I mean, there was a controversy there.
   I didn’t catch it.
   I wasn’t there for that.
   Is it a con session? Yeah.
   Had I been there, I would have totally agreed with what the guy said.
   I wouldn’t characterize it as a controversy.
   It was a fairly mellow session.
   That’s the problem.
   It shouldn’t have been a mellow session.
   It should have been one of these.
   People were exhausted from, you know, this.
   But we did the session after that, the making money session.
   And with a little bit of stimulus, we were able to get that session to really rock, okay? To the point where it wasn’t just like, let’s not talk about the nickels and thimes.
   They’re on this and making money, right? Well, when we’re talking about making money, why should we talk about nickels and thimes when there are millions of dollars on the table? You know, picking up nickels and thimes on the floor is not really the, you know.
   But yeah, a lot of people like to talk about the nickels and thimes and think big, you know.
   And I think it’s not people to think big.
   I know it’s not.
   Not easy.
   I know.
   And that’s the thing.
   You saw my friend Ron Bloom.
   That’s really struggling.
   He’s a big ass thinker.
   Old school.
   But right.
   And that’s the point of bringing people together and into one building for 12 hours and saying this one day, we’re going to stretch those minds and we’re going to see if we can’t get fired.
   You know, there are some people , by the way, who can think big who came like Keith Teer, okay? Keith is a big thinker.
   He’s got a big mind, but he doesn’t know that much about blogs.
   So he came.
   He got his one day education on blogs.
   And all of a sudden, his brain is exploding with ideas.
   But it takes people.
   But this is when you ramp up.
   Even if you’re a newbie.
   You got to make him doesn’t need that much.
   No, no, no.
   But there are a lot of people there.
   Absolutely.
   So what you do is you open the door for anybody of any type.
   Be surprised.
   Nobody is an architecture of human nature.
   I mean, or an architect of human nature.
   You can’t, you don’t live long enough to learn how to do that, right? If we lived 500 years, you might learn how to architect human nature and use it in a more effective way.
   None of us do so we don’t learn how to do that.
   What you do is you open the door up and you try to throw some big ideas into the room.
   And then you sort of let whatever happens.
   So you may get one person who knows a lot about the blog osphere but never thought about it this way.
   Or another person who knows nothing about the blogosphere but is always thinking expans ively.
   So I thought, what we would do that session, I thought we would put doc surals.
   Now doc totally gets it.
   I think doc is sometimes really frustrated that he can’t get other people to get it.
   So the Clutrain Manifesto to me , when I first even heard the idea and read the manifesto itself, you know, we the people of the earth, that thing, okay.
   I mean, I’m like the third sign atory on the damn thing.
   And I said basically, guys, you gotta know, I believe in this shit, right? I mean, to me it was a total fucking no brainer, you know, that you want to turn the funnel upside down.
   You want to let the stuff, the good stuff pour in any which way it wants to come, you know, and you don’t worry about it.
   You don’t think in terms of a top of the mountain and great ideas flowing down and out, because that’s the old model, right? The new model is I don’t care where the ideas come from.
   They can come from anywhere, you know? And that’s why be picky.
   If you could ask your question there.
   Have you noticed in your life, both you’re older than I am, that as you get older and wiser as to what the world is.
   I find that almost every process, almost everything that I held to believe to be true, it all has to be turned upside down.
   What? Wait, wait, wait.
   Okay.
   Everything you believe to be true.
   Any process, I look at it and say if I did, if I did turn it around.
   Everything you believe to be true, Adam, was true.
   Okay? You may have had some small things that were misconceptions that made me go like, I’m the center of the universe, okay? Life teaches you that you’re not the center of the universe and you aren’t going to live forever, okay? But you, everything you believed was true.
   It all was true.
   You don’t lose that.
   That’s not what life teaches you.
   Life doesn’t teach you you were wrong.
   I think you misunderstand what you’re saying.
   Okay, all right, fair enough.
   I’m going to the cone concept.
   Okay.
   Cone concept is, you know, I’ve always looked at it exactly right.
   You know, it comes from the top and it goes down.
   That’s the way most things seem to work, but they don’t.
   It seems like if you turn it around, it works much, much better.
   Right.
   But I found that in technical processes, it’s as well as like users and developers.
   You have to reverse the process .
   Tell you what? Yes, you do.
   But the thing is you always have to reverse it whichever way you have it turned.
   The creative mind can conceive of everything working differently.
   And that’s where… Okay, maybe that’s what… And it’s like, right, and it’s like, so if it’s structured this way, you may find some new territory if you flip it around and structure it the other way.
   So you are creative thinker Adam.
   That’s my creativity growing.
   Does that grow older? I don’t know if your creativity grows as you grow older.
   I don’t know about that.
   I created some, personally created some really good shit when I was really young.
   I think that in some ways my… But a classic statement is that you have this burst of horse and the walsy and creativity when you’re young and then you sort of settle into… That’s one way of… I’m not sure that that’s… You have a different motive when you’re younger.
   Young people, young overachie ver type people, when they’re in their 20, especially males, have to prove their… Right.
   It’s like you have to win something.
   You have to fight a war and you have to win.
   And I had that, I felt really strongly, and I see it in a lot of other men.
   I don’t see it so much in women .
   I don’t understand women to that extent that what’s driving them at that age, it’s really hard to know.
   You can only go by… You need to listen to the super smart or sex radio show.
   Okay.
   That will teach you a lot about what drives you.
   I’m always fascinated with women.
   That’s a podcast you’ve got to check out.
   Okay.
   I mean, that’s the thing about us men, we don’t understand them, but we’re endlessly fascinated.
   I learned a lot.
   Right.
   Good.
   Let’s say you know.
   I learned a hell of a lot.
   All right.
   Well, they’re willing to teach us, that’s good.
   That’s good.
   We like that.
   Precisely.
   It’s just different.
   I think that as you grow older, you deepen.
   And this is cliched, right? You deepen and you also have a better sense of humor and you ’re not so worried about things that you were worried about when you were younger.
   You relax.
   It’s a paradoxical.
   As you get older, you’re getting closer to death, right? It would seem like you’d be more of a rush than you were when you were younger, but it doesn’t work that way.
   No, there’s this, when you reach a certain age, there’s this… If you reach a certain age, there’s this kind of glow.
   A calm that comes from the fact that, “Holy shit, I actually… I’m not so hormone-driven.
   I’m not so driven by what Dave was just talking about. " Or there’s a calm and a confidence that comes from experience.
   At a younger age, I never could have handled that last session.
   That allows you to be able to appreciate life a little bit better.
   At a younger age, I never ever in a million years could have handled that last session.
   There’s that guy standing up there and he’s throwing something at my… He wants something from me that isn’t… He’s not being direct about what he’s saying.
   My imagination would run wild.
   This is something I noticed when I was in my late 30s, early 40s.
   The thought that would form in my head was, “Oh, he’s acting just like my father. " Yeah, it would happen.
   Literally, that thought would form in my head.
   And then, the next thought is, “I respond to my father. " That’s not necessarily always fun.
   Oh, God, no.
   It’s terribly not fun because it’s not my father and he doesn ’t know what he’s supposed to do next.
   He probably doesn’t do it.
   He’s probably talking to his father and he’s doing it.
   What you end up with is two dead people, basically.
   At that moment… Here, I hear you.
   I can’t wait to hear that part of it.
   It’s a dead people part.
   Two dead people part.
   So, what you do in a situation like that is you take five deep breaths while the guy’s talking and then you check out the room and you see, “Okay, this is where I am.
   There’s a window there.
   There are 30… There are actually 200 people sitting all around this place.
   I’m going to look at their faces and see how they’re doing . " And then I’m going to listen at the same time to every word this guy says and I’m going to make sure that I don’t respond to anything I don’t have to.
   And that’s the thing that maybe you wouldn’t have done when you were younger is force yourself to listen.
   That’s very hard.
   That’s the important thing.
   That’s what this guy really wants.
   He wants that more than he wants to fight, although he really wants to fight.
   I mean, think about what he was doing.
   Because the risk for him is that he’s going to destroy this conference.
   It’s going to turn into bedlam, right? We’re all going to go there where he is, right? And it’s all going to get destroyed.
   He doesn’t really want that.
   What he wants is he wants somebody to understand that he ’s hurting, that this hurt his feelings and that he didn’t like it.
   So what you got to do is without recognizing that there are so many other people there, I don’t want to bring it into that dimension, but I want to validate it.
   I want to say I’m not going to object to anything that you said, except for the fact that you say I attacked you because that ’s just not realistic.
   I was standing here 40 feet away from where you are.
   There was no attack going on here.
   And I could have made a mistake , too.
   I hope I said that.
   I was thinking that I need to say that I could have been mistaken.
   I don’t insist that I had to be right.
   I don’t know.
   We’ll not.
   No doubt that people will listen to those words very carefully.
   I think you might have, actually.
   I don’t doubt that from his point of view, you see, you can put everything on that and say that there were many points of view of that event.
   Lots of people saw all kinds of different things there.
   I know what I was thinking was I was expecting this to happen and this is not a surprise and it’s going to fall to me to do it.
   This was something I was trying to find somebody else.
   I knew it was going to happen and I talked to a couple of other people and I said, “This is about to happen.
   Will you stay in the room and will you stop it when it happens?” Nobody wanted to deal with it.
   So they didn’t really understand, even understand what I was saying.
   So I stayed and I waited and it happened.
   All right, so we’re one hour and 30 minutes.
   It’s ridiculous isn’t it? Why don’t we wrap it up with some podcasting clutch? What’s that? Let’s talk about podcasting.
   I thought we were going to sing about this land is your land.
   You’re already dragged.
   You know what? Harvard.
   Harvard I heard from Professor Lassen.
   What? Harvard has a license for people singing.
   So Stanford has a license for people singing at school.
   I don’t have that license here.
   Oh, excuse me.
   You can’t sing.
   Oh, really? Yeah.
   Well, there must be something I can sing.
   All right, anyway, podcast.
   What should we do? Well, I can’t wait to hear the – I don’t know, so it may not have been addressed, but there are a number of issues that came up about how we deal with this intersection with the RIA that’s coming.
   I mean, the – What did Ron Bloom say? What he said? About the intersections coming up with the RIA.
   He had a very – He said – I wish you were here because it was very – you know who Ron Bloom is? Yeah, I met him.
   Exactly.
   What way should we tell them? He’s my former partner.
   I think new ideas, company we took public.
   I met him early on in the company, and he really did the whole taking as public.
   I kind of told him on those co- tails.
   Yeah, I heard – I – You heard it.
   You heard it.
   You’re one of the other people who – We’re not the only – I’m looking at you.
   And I’m telling you this.
   I’ll shut up.
   I’m a light.
   Okay.
   He needs to foil.
   He needs to crutch.
   And – He’s so used to doing these things.
   Why do you need to look at him when you’re talking to him? Because it comes across in the show.
   It does.
   It does.
   But you see, we do all these things without – I mean, you ’re – Were you ever smiled at anybody when you were talking on the phone with them? All the time.
   You’re probably right about that, yeah.
   Okay, so – I’m getting tired.
   He’s a – I’ll shut up now.
   He’s a musician, really.
   He wrote some hits on.
   Yeah, he – he was like – and he admitted this.
   He never really – he made money and he had studio and had lots of – did lots of session or, of course, lots of stay-al ike.
   What he didn’t mention is that he lived with Princess Stephanie of Monaco.
   Wow.
   Yeah, that’s – Was she a hottie? Fucking A.
   Really? Okay.
   In between bodyguards.
   No, way before that.
   He produced a record, which is how it always happens, isn’t it ? Hey, baby.
   Over here.
   I got you, baby.
   Oh, oh, oh, oh, don’t get me in jail.
   Oh, there you go.
   Oh, there you go.
   So he – but what he knows from an artist standpoint a lot about getting paid or not getting paid.
   This is an example.
   He’s done a lot of soundtracks probably for that movie we saw last night with Don Drew.
   And if it’s played in American theater, he gets nothing.
   He doesn’t get paid for that zero.
   If it’s played in a German theater, he gets paid.
   So, you know, this is weird.
   And he said everything should be labeled fair use.
   What – based on that, the idea was look at ringtones.
   Billions of dollars being made on ringtones.
   It’s all back catalog stuff.
   It’s all real simple.
   The DRM works and people are making tons of money on it.
   He says, “Well, that’s three levels.
   It’s real simple.
   There’s fair use, which is just using it myself.
   There’s sharing it with my friends, which would be 20 bucks.
   And then there’s professional use.
   It would be podcast.
   It would be 5,000.
   Whatever.
   Make it simple.
   Boom, boom, boom.
   And everyone wants to participate.
   And his approach was don’t try to go to the lawyers to get this done.
   Go to the CEOs of the music business and show them the money.
   I think it’s impossible to – I sort of agree with that.
   I wish you were here to explain .
   Yeah, yeah, this is the guy who could go to the CEO.
   Yeah, right.
   And speak the language.
   I hear that.
   And I think that that is the right approach, is to go and talk to them.
   The thing, though, is I think that there’s an opportunity to create enough content.
   Totally.
   To be able to go to them and say, “Okay, you want some of this?” Yeah.
   That’s what he’s saying.
   Yeah, that makes sense.
   He’s saying, except without being confrontational about it, being sales-y about it, saying, “Here’s a distribution system.
   We want to plug you into it. " Right.
   We need to create an archive, a backlog, a catalog of this.
   A lot of this.
   So that we can have something to trade.
   You can’t stop that catalog from being created now.
   The catalog is already there.

   It’s just we don’t know how to
   Hey, I have another idea for
   format, okay?
   Another format for a conference
   , all right?
   What you do is you rent a hotel
   like this, okay?
   Maybe not here – this is
   pretty close, actually, to what
   I would like, except it’s not
   like near a beach or something,
   a place where you can go for h
   ikes or whatever.
   And you rent out enough rooms
   in it so that you could have
   like 25 different people who do
   podcasts in the hotel
   at the same time for a week,
   okay?
   All right?
   And you cross pollinate.
   You sit down, you do exactly
   what we’re doing right now.
   Yeah.
   You do the – you find out what
   the combinations do.
   You do the combinatorics.
   And you also –
   Maybe even do a round robin.
   Maybe even play some games, too
   .
   You also have that big room
   sometimes.
   Whenever you want it, actually.
   For the recording studio.
   Right, whenever you want it.
   That’s what that was.
   And it’s a 24 by 7 thing.
   It’s going on all day, all
   night, you know, whatever, you
   know, and it’s –
   You have a house band.
   Yeah, you need the whole line
   of yards.
   We’ve been talking about this
   for a long time.
   How would you –
   How would you guys –
   How would you guys will be here
   ?
   They will be here.
   They will fucking be here.
   And you have to do a live
   recording with them before you
   leave town.
   Not this time.
   Yeah, oh yeah.
   And I will.
   They’re going to come to the
   castle.
   I’ll have them do a little mini
   concert.
   Curt Castle.
   I’m a big fan of the –
   I’ve been very happy when you
   played the Power of Puritan to
   the beginning of your session.
   It was like a wave.
   It was nice to hear.
   Oh, yeah!
   The show is starting!
   Exactly.
   Yeah, I was like, oh, this is a
   show.
   Yeah.
   It was –
   Notice I didn’t mention that
   every source code.
   No, you didn’t have to.
   We all got in that mood right
   there.
   It’s cool.
   It’s like Cavalod’s dogs were
   crying out loud.
   He started –
   Boy!
   Say that again.
   Boy!
   Boy!
   Boy!
   Boy!
   You’re going to be 50 years.
   You’re going to be –
   Okay, let’s have another hand
   for –
   Come on, give us another boy!
   Boy!
   I’m already new there.
   What are you talking about?
   That’s when I died.
   There’s no song.
   It’s just boy.
   I was just giving you another

I was just saying – 50 is good.
Yeah, I mean, 98.
You can do it.
You can do it.
You can do it.
Yeah.
You’ll have great, great, great grandchildren by then.
Oh, okay.
I think you’re not Jewish, you know how to say that.
What do you mean I’m not allowed to do that? Did you guys want to go to dinner? Yeah.
I had thought maybe we’d go for Fuki Sushi.
You like that? Yeah, I love that.
It’s right down the street.
It’s a really good sushi place.
Yeah, that used to be – I don’t know if it is anymore.
It used to be Steve Jobs’ favorite sushi place.
Yeah, you could go in there.
You’d see him there.
Yeah.
Let’s go and see him there.
Yeah, maybe he’s there.
Can we ask for an autograph? Maybe we can? Maybe? Maybe? Maybe? Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
Maybe we can ask for an autograph.
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