The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You ever have that thing, I sent you that link

00:00:02 ◼   ► to the Tom Hanks story, or the Tom Hanks movie

00:00:05 ◼   ► being on Apple TV Plus, and about three minutes

00:00:08 ◼   ► after I sent it to you, my computer sounded

00:00:10 ◼   ► like a freaking jet engine was taking off.

00:00:12 ◼   ► It's so annoying.

00:00:13 ◼   ► You have these web pages that, it's always,

00:00:15 ◼   ► and it's like whack-a-mole.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Like most web pages are fine, and then when it comes along,

00:00:19 ◼   ► your computer just blows up.

00:00:20 ◼   ► - It's not even browser specific.

00:00:24 ◼   ► It's, I got my Safari, we could talk about it,

00:00:27 ◼   ► but I mean, you know, I'm a Safari diehard.

00:00:29 ◼   ► I really like Safari, I prefer it for a number of reasons.

00:00:34 ◼   ► But even in that regard, and even running

00:00:37 ◼   ► like the content blocker, which I've sort of

00:00:42 ◼   ► switched between, which I think blocks

00:00:44 ◼   ► a lot of the most obnoxious ads,

00:00:45 ◼   ► and I kind of like to keep mine.

00:00:47 ◼   ► I don't want to block all ads, I'm not like a diehard on it.

00:00:50 ◼   ► I'd be a hypocrite if I were in some ways.

00:00:52 ◼   ► But even with that, every once in a while,

00:00:55 ◼   ► my fans are roaring, and I look,

00:00:58 ◼   ► and I can tell it Safari from activity monitor,

00:01:01 ◼   ► but activity monitor won't tell you which tab in Safari.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - And I can just, and I have Safari set

00:01:08 ◼   ► so that if I quit and relaunch,

00:01:11 ◼   ► it opens all the tabs I already had open.

00:01:13 ◼   ► And I can quit and relaunch,

00:01:15 ◼   ► and it'll go from 100% CPU usage to whatever normal is,

00:01:20 ◼   ► even with dozens and dozens of tabs open.

00:01:22 ◼   ► And there's no way to tell what the hell it was that did it.

00:01:25 ◼   ► - Sometimes it's pretty clear, though.

00:01:27 ◼   ► That article, that page was definitely the culprit.

00:01:31 ◼   ► - What was it, Deadline Hollywood, I think?

00:01:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, something like that.

00:01:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, so sometimes you can just kind of take a look

00:01:38 ◼   ► at a page and just sort of get a sense of this.

00:01:42 ◼   ► This is not gonna be good for my browser.

00:01:44 ◼   ► Did you see that there's so much news.

00:01:47 ◼   ► We were talking about it on, what's the other show called?

00:01:50 ◼   ► - Dithering. - Dithering, that's it.

00:01:53 ◼   ► We were talking about it on Dithering,

00:01:54 ◼   ► that we've been inundated, bombarded with news,

00:01:58 ◼   ► to the point where I don't even remember

00:01:59 ◼   ► the name of the other show.

00:02:00 ◼   ► But one of the other bits of news this week

00:02:04 ◼   ► was that the Chrome team announced

00:02:06 ◼   ► that they're gonna start process reaping obnoxious ad tech.

00:02:11 ◼   ► And it's an interesting dilemma for them.

00:02:18 ◼   ► - Right, they're gonna process reap their competitors

00:02:21 ◼   ► is basically another way to put it.

00:02:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, because basically it's like,

00:02:24 ◼   ► and they've made some definitions

00:02:27 ◼   ► and I think that by anybody's reasonable perspective,

00:02:31 ◼   ► it's, you know, they're erring on the side

00:02:38 ◼   ► of reaping too few ads.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I think that there are ads that would go within

00:02:43 ◼   ► their limits for how much, I think they're talking about

00:02:46 ◼   ► like CPU usage and overall download.

00:02:49 ◼   ► There are apps that fit within their limits

00:02:52 ◼   ► that I think it's like, well, why in the world

00:02:54 ◼   ► would you need it, would a single ad need, you know,

00:02:56 ◼   ► three megabytes before it even starts like playing video

00:02:59 ◼   ► or something like that, like that's a lot.

00:03:02 ◼   ► You know, in the process, CPU stuff.

00:03:05 ◼   ► But basically, the cynical take is, hmm,

00:03:07 ◼   ► which ads qualify the ones that aren't served by Google?

00:03:10 ◼   ► - Right.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it's, I mean, yeah, it's like,

00:03:16 ◼   ► it's one of those things where in theoretical world,

00:03:19 ◼   ► It's extremely problematic in real life world

00:03:23 ◼   ► where I have this very big computer

00:03:27 ◼   ► that should have very capable

00:03:30 ◼   ► and takes off like a jet engine

00:03:31 ◼   ► because I loaded a webpage.

00:03:33 ◼   ► It's definitely necessary.

00:03:34 ◼   ► So it's kind of goes, kind of stuck in the middle there.

00:03:39 ◼   ► - They're calling them resource heavy ads.

00:03:41 ◼   ► I don't know if I quote, I'm looking at my own posts here.

00:03:45 ◼   ► I guess I didn't quote their limits.

00:03:46 ◼   ► But anyway, I hope Safari and WebKit get involved in this.

00:03:51 ◼   ► I would love to see one of the changes to WebKit on the Mac

00:03:54 ◼   ► be some kind of way to more accurately pinpoint

00:03:59 ◼   ► obnoxious web pages so that you could see it.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And I also feel that WebKit should be more aggressive

00:04:05 ◼   ► about severely limiting the resource consumption

00:04:10 ◼   ► of background tabs.

00:04:12 ◼   ► If it's not the frontmost tab in the frontmost window,

00:04:16 ◼   ► it really should not just should be by by it should be enforced that it could only use

00:04:23 ◼   ► a minimal amount of CPU in the background.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it's interesting because that also gets in sort of this fuzzy space where in

00:04:31 ◼   ► real world application, yes, that's definitely necessary because you have to go hunting for

00:04:34 ◼   ► a tab and I think you and I are both sort of tab hoarders. I actually only have 44 right

00:04:42 ◼   ► now which is shockingly low but it's 44 because I just had to find the growth tab that was

00:04:49 ◼   ► spitting up my computer again. That's what prompted this discussion. So I just killed

00:04:53 ◼   ► a whole bunch of them. It was definitely well over 100 before. So on one hand, yes, it's

00:04:58 ◼   ► necessary. On the other hand, it gets back into the whole like, well, that's kind of

00:05:02 ◼   ► like what iOS does. iOS is very strict on sort of background processes and I don't

00:05:07 ◼   ► know the specifics of Safari on iOS but I would imagine it's the same thing, that

00:05:10 ◼   ► that background tabs in Safari and iOS are basically dead,

00:05:15 ◼   ► I would guess.

00:05:15 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:05:16 ◼   ► - But that gets into the whole, like,

00:05:18 ◼   ► well that's great for iOS,

00:05:20 ◼   ► but that's all the stuff I don't want on the Mac.

00:05:22 ◼   ► I want full background processing.

00:05:24 ◼   ► I want to be able to do all this sorts of stuff.

00:05:26 ◼   ► So if it was an option, I think that would be better.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Like, and honestly, that's the solution, I think,

00:05:31 ◼   ► for a lot of these tensions,

00:05:33 ◼   ► is there needs to be more options

00:05:35 ◼   ► and less sort of this way or the highway,

00:05:37 ◼   ► on the Mac specifically.

00:05:39 ◼   ► 'Cause you gotta, you know it's the old,

00:05:42 ◼   ► I recite this article every time I come on the podcast.

00:05:44 ◼   ► You're old, the Mac lets the iOS be what it is

00:05:47 ◼   ► because the Mac can do everything, right?

00:05:48 ◼   ► And you start walking on the Mac, it's like,

00:05:50 ◼   ► well, what's the release valve?

00:05:53 ◼   ► What's the pressure valve here?

00:05:54 ◼   ► - That was the worst, that was the worst paraphrasing

00:05:56 ◼   ► of that you've ever done.

00:05:58 ◼   ► And you have brought it up every time.

00:06:00 ◼   ► And I usually have the worst memory,

00:06:03 ◼   ► but because it was a good line that I wrote a long time ago,

00:06:06 ◼   ► I have it more or less, I forget if I called it iOS or not,

00:06:08 ◼   ► but I think my paraphrasing of the phrase was,

00:06:12 ◼   ► it would be the heaviness of the Mac

00:06:14 ◼   ► is what allows the iPhone to remain light,

00:06:18 ◼   ► but maybe it was iOS to remain light.

00:06:20 ◼   ► I forget, I might have even written it

00:06:22 ◼   ► when the iPad wasn't even out yet.

00:06:25 ◼   ► I think it was probably more like 2012 or so.

00:06:27 ◼   ► But yeah, I still think that that holds true,

00:06:30 ◼   ► and I still think that that's an interesting,

00:06:33 ◼   ► it certainly, I think, is true inside Apple

00:06:35 ◼   ► in terms of the whole ongoing debate of,

00:06:39 ◼   ► it's the iPad that's in dispute, right?

00:06:44 ◼   ► Like nobody's really arguing that the iPhone

00:06:48 ◼   ► needs to do more stuff that the Mac does

00:06:51 ◼   ► or that the Mac needs to be more like the iPhone, right?

00:06:55 ◼   ► It's the iPad in the middle that is sort of,

00:06:57 ◼   ► hey, this is better than that, this is good for work,

00:07:00 ◼   ► you can't do work, all these debates,

00:07:02 ◼   ► it's all about the iPad.

00:07:04 ◼   ► - I don't know, I don't really care about the iPad.

00:07:09 ◼   ► Just to make sure, I mean, I care to a degree,

00:07:12 ◼   ► but just make sure the Mac can keep doing everything

00:07:16 ◼   ► that it can do already.

00:07:17 ◼   ► - Right, but it is still true,

00:07:18 ◼   ► even though it's not in dispute about the iPhone,

00:07:20 ◼   ► the heaviness of the Mac,

00:07:22 ◼   ► and like one of the things that's heavy on the Mac

00:07:24 ◼   ► is that it has this whole Unix layer

00:07:27 ◼   ► where you can just run old, you know,

00:07:29 ◼   ► now I say old, but I realized, you know,

00:07:32 ◼   ► I'm sure, 100% sure, that there are dozens of people

00:07:36 ◼   ► listening to me and you talk right now in May 2020

00:07:40 ◼   ► on this show who today edited shell scripts on their Mac.

00:07:45 ◼   ► So I say old only in terms of the fact

00:07:49 ◼   ► that writing Unix-style shell scripts

00:07:51 ◼   ► is a long-standing thing,

00:07:54 ◼   ► not that it's outdated or irrelevant,

00:07:56 ◼   ► but it's a big part of the build script phase of Xcode

00:08:01 ◼   ► phase of Xcode where you can do custom things and you when you build and run your app in Xcode,

00:08:06 ◼   ► it can call out to a shell script that might do something custom to your organization.

00:08:10 ◼   ► It's just the whole idea, like one of the very heavy things is what I'm getting at that the Mac

00:08:19 ◼   ► does to allow iOS to remain light is if you want to write an iOS app, you do it on a Mac. So,

00:08:25 ◼   ► the iPhone doesn't have to worry about things like, well, how in the world are we going to

00:08:29 ◼   ► to let developers write iPhone apps on the iPhone.

00:08:32 ◼   ► They don't even have to worry about it

00:08:34 ◼   ► because they just say you have to use a Mac to do it.

00:08:37 ◼   ► - This is a good example why, on one hand,

00:08:41 ◼   ► me being on the talk show is a useful sort of guide

00:08:46 ◼   ► to dithering, on the other hand, it's also a terrible guide

00:08:49 ◼   ► 'cause we are now eight minutes and 30 seconds in

00:08:52 ◼   ► or nine minutes in and are not even remotely close

00:08:55 ◼   ► to getting to whatever point we may have gotten to.

00:08:57 ◼   ► We've already got on a Mac, iPad, shell script digression.

00:09:00 ◼   ► - That wasn't even part of the news I'm talking about.

00:09:02 ◼   ► So let's move on.

00:09:03 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:09:04 ◼   ► - Well, no, it's funny because we've been doing

00:09:07 ◼   ► a little bit of a gig on Dithering,

00:09:09 ◼   ► where people are like alternate titles for the show,

00:09:11 ◼   ► and one of the alternate titles was a brief digression.

00:09:15 ◼   ► And it's funny because we've actually gotten very good

00:09:17 ◼   ► at making them brief digressions,

00:09:19 ◼   ► whereas the subtitle for the talk show

00:09:21 ◼   ► is an extended digression.

00:09:23 ◼   ► - We have. (laughing)

00:09:26 ◼   ► we could talk about it, but I try,

00:09:27 ◼   ► when I do digress while we're doing dithering,

00:09:29 ◼   ► I try to, in the back of my head,

00:09:31 ◼   ► and I know that I've gone over

00:09:33 ◼   ► because I actually can't hold my breath that long,

00:09:35 ◼   ► but I think to myself, see if you can do it in one breath.

00:09:38 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:09:39 ◼   ► - Because then it might actually be somewhat short.

00:09:42 ◼   ► Here, let me just interrupt right now,

00:09:45 ◼   ► and then we'll start, we'll pretend like we're starting

00:09:47 ◼   ► an episode of dithering, but let me just start right now,

00:09:49 ◼   ► early on, with the first thank you to a sponsor,

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00:09:55 ◼   ► I used to call them Linode,

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00:10:04 ◼   ► and they host Linux, which is pronounced Lin.

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00:12:52 ◼   ► There you go, that's 15 minutes right there.

00:12:57 ◼   ► - So we record, we've been recording using Zencastr,

00:13:00 ◼   ► like a web app instead of the traditional Skype.

00:13:03 ◼   ► - I wanted to mention this, because that's the sort of thing

00:13:06 ◼   ► that you can't really do on an iPad.

00:13:10 ◼   ► - Maybe you can, I don't know if you can or not,

00:13:15 ◼   ► But the point is, is during your ad reads, I didn't have a nice little, because it's

00:13:20 ◼   ► all self-contained, it's both the way we're communicating and it's the recording, and

00:13:25 ◼   ► there's a nice little mute button on there that I can click.

00:13:28 ◼   ► But as here, because we're using Skype to talk to each other, and then I'm recording

00:13:32 ◼   ► directly into Audio Hijack, I would either, I have to use the hardware mute switch, which

00:13:37 ◼   ► I also have.

00:13:38 ◼   ► But it's a, it was striking that actually I kind of missed my little, my little button

00:13:43 ◼   ► in my web app that seems flaky as I'll get out, but it seems to be mostly working.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Zencastr is an interesting thing. I even love the way they spell it. It's zen, c-a-s-t-r,

00:13:56 ◼   ► and that whole just take a vowel thing out. I don't know what happened to that fad. That fad

00:14:01 ◼   ► went away. I thought it was pretty clever as a fad because it seemed like an interesting way to get a

00:14:08 ◼   ► pronounceable word that gave you a brand but also gave you something that wasn't in the dictionary,

00:14:13 ◼   ► so it would be more easily searchable and copyrightable and trademarkable, I guess is

00:14:21 ◼   ► the better term, not copyright.

00:14:24 ◼   ► It works really well with R, too, and that E-R, sort of like, it's like something that

00:14:28 ◼   ► does an action, is a great sort of general thing to get a name for something.

00:14:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know if Flickr was first, probably not first, but if Flickr is the one that,

00:14:37 ◼   ► in terms of like, you know, being like 15 years ago, but maybe more, just seemed, is

00:14:42 ◼   ► the one that really seemed to make it a thing.

00:14:45 ◼   ► - Yeah, 16 years. (laughs)

00:14:50 ◼   ► - Pretty close, pretty close.

00:14:52 ◼   ► Boy, that feels like a long time ago.

00:14:53 ◼   ► - What feels longer ago, Flickr being founded

00:14:57 ◼   ► or Microsoft's Build keynote yesterday?

00:14:59 ◼   ► - It all blurs together.

00:15:02 ◼   ► It really does.

00:15:03 ◼   ► Yesterday's news feels like it was months ago.

00:15:06 ◼   ► I honestly-- - Or the NBA

00:15:09 ◼   ► canceling its season.

00:15:10 ◼   ► it just all blurs together.

00:15:13 ◼   ► It's so weird.

00:15:14 ◼   ► I was just talking to my wife today.

00:15:17 ◼   ► And again, I know a lot of people are experiencing this

00:15:20 ◼   ► and this sort of blurring together

00:15:23 ◼   ► of what should be fresh news

00:15:26 ◼   ► and what is like three-month-old news.

00:15:28 ◼   ► But we were just talking about the president

00:15:32 ◼   ► of the United States says he's taking hydroxychloroquine.

00:15:35 ◼   ► And I spoke about it as though it was like two weeks ago.

00:15:39 ◼   ► And she was like, "That was two days ago."

00:15:40 ◼   ► I was like, "Whoa."

00:15:41 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:15:43 ◼   ► Really?

00:15:44 ◼   ► I thought that was a huge issue,

00:15:45 ◼   ► because it is a huge deal, it's all over everything.

00:15:47 ◼   ► And I was like, "But it's gone now."

00:15:50 ◼   ► And she goes, "Well, it is two days old."

00:15:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, time was already kind of getting,

00:15:56 ◼   ► this has been happening on the internet for a long time,

00:15:58 ◼   ► where time has been compressing, right?

00:16:00 ◼   ► And you've seen this in Apple's embargo times or dates.

00:16:04 ◼   ► They've experimented different times of day.

00:16:08 ◼   ► Do you want to hit the morning news cycle?

00:16:10 ◼   ► Do you want to hit the evening news cycle?

00:16:12 ◼   ► Because it's like you get one or the other,

00:16:15 ◼   ► because once a half day is gone,

00:16:17 ◼   ► like the world has moved on.

00:16:18 ◼   ► So this compression has been happening.

00:16:20 ◼   ► But now during the pandemic,

00:16:24 ◼   ► that compression is combined with the complete lack

00:16:27 ◼   ► of exterior markers of time, right?

00:16:30 ◼   ► So there's like, what's the weekend?

00:16:32 ◼   ► What's the workday?

00:16:33 ◼   ► It kind of is all flowing together.

00:16:35 ◼   ► And so I think it just,

00:16:36 ◼   ► it's making it even more sort of disconcerting

00:16:39 ◼   ► in knowing what's going on.

00:16:40 ◼   ► Like I just got a note, you know,

00:16:41 ◼   ► oh I need to make a mention in my daily update today

00:16:44 ◼   ► that there's gonna be no daily update on Monday

00:16:45 ◼   ► 'cause it's Memorial Day.

00:16:47 ◼   ► It's like Memorial Day, what?

00:16:49 ◼   ► Like how is it that it doesn't even seem possible

00:16:53 ◼   ► that it's Memorial Day?

00:16:54 ◼   ► - You know, we were talking about that,

00:16:56 ◼   ► my wife and I were talking about that,

00:16:57 ◼   ► and I do think it is the case, I think,

00:17:01 ◼   ► it's one of those holidays where I don't know

00:17:03 ◼   ► the exact algorithm for how you figure out

00:17:06 ◼   ► what day of the year is Memorial Day.

00:17:10 ◼   ► But this year, it's May 25th.

00:17:12 ◼   ► And I think, just looking at the calendar,

00:17:16 ◼   ► 'cause that's Monday, that's this coming Monday,

00:17:19 ◼   ► the next Monday is June 1st.

00:17:22 ◼   ► So I think that it's literally of the seven days

00:17:25 ◼   ► of May that could be Memorial Day,

00:17:29 ◼   ► that May 25th is the earliest possible one.

00:17:32 ◼   ► And I just feel like of all years for that to happen,

00:17:35 ◼   ► this is the worst because it just,

00:17:37 ◼   ► it just seems the most discombobulating.

00:17:40 ◼   ► It just seems like we just got done making jokes

00:17:43 ◼   ► about April being over in a snap of the finger.

00:17:46 ◼   ► It's like how in the world are we talking about,

00:17:49 ◼   ► what are we doing for Memorial Day?

00:17:52 ◼   ► - Right, it's like the 27th or the 28th,

00:17:54 ◼   ► like oh yeah, we have a holiday at the end of May, don't we?

00:17:56 ◼   ► But now it's like today is May 21st.

00:17:58 ◼   ► It's like that hasn't even, it didn't even,

00:18:01 ◼   ► actually know it's funny because what this morning I look at my desk like my

00:18:05 ◼   ► desk needs a cleaning I need to like put stuff we know just kind of accumulates

00:18:09 ◼   ► over time and and and I always like to do these cleanings on holidays because

00:18:14 ◼   ► you know kids are in school you know I'm fortunate in that regard but the kids

00:18:18 ◼   ► are in school I have time I don't need to write something so this is a day to

00:18:22 ◼   ► go through and like you know really really get stuff cleaned up I'm like oh

00:18:25 ◼   ► yeah I should do that Memorial Day I was a few I didn't I didn't think that it

00:18:28 ◼   ► it was next week.

00:18:30 ◼   ► In my head, it was like two or three weeks away.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I just need to make it through the next two or three weeks

00:18:33 ◼   ► and I can get this whole mess cleaned up.

00:18:35 ◼   ► But boom, it's actually this Monday, who knew?

00:18:38 ◼   ► - It's also, it's just a conflation of a bunch of factors.

00:18:43 ◼   ► I don't even know, what's the average daily temperature

00:18:48 ◼   ► these days in Taipei?

00:18:51 ◼   ► - Oh, it's toasty.

00:18:52 ◼   ► Oh shoot, I'm gonna say Celsius.

00:18:55 ◼   ► I'm gonna get you all upset.

00:18:57 ◼   ► It's actually relatively cool this week.

00:18:58 ◼   ► It's in the 80s, low 80s this week,

00:19:01 ◼   ► or maybe 70s to 80s, but very soon it will be in the 90s.

00:19:04 ◼   ► But no, I'm looking at today's high is 27,

00:19:07 ◼   ► which is about 80 degrees Celsius.

00:19:09 ◼   ► - It's been a very cold May in the US,

00:19:15 ◼   ► at least parts of the US that I follow,

00:19:17 ◼   ► and certainly where I live,

00:19:19 ◼   ► or at least everywhere I've been this month.

00:19:22 ◼   ► - Which is where you live.

00:19:24 ◼   ► - Which is where I live.

00:19:26 ◼   ► But I think that--

00:19:27 ◼   ► - In my extensive travel up and down the block.

00:19:30 ◼   ► - I think that that makes it,

00:19:31 ◼   ► it really makes it even more ridiculous

00:19:33 ◼   ► that it's Memorial Day in five days

00:19:37 ◼   ► because it's like I've only worn shorts on like two days.

00:19:40 ◼   ► And I'm, you know, I'm not like an aggressive

00:19:43 ◼   ► get the shorts out while it's still cold,

00:19:45 ◼   ► but you know, I'm on the leading edge

00:19:49 ◼   ► of switching from jeans to shorts.

00:19:52 ◼   ► And I've only worn shorts like two days.

00:19:54 ◼   ► Although I'm wearing shorts today,

00:19:55 ◼   ► even though it was only 60 degrees,

00:19:58 ◼   ► you'll never guess why.

00:20:00 ◼   ► - You were moving charcoal?

00:20:01 ◼   ► - Oh, I bet. (laughs)

00:20:04 ◼   ► My belt broke.

00:20:05 ◼   ► And none of my jeans really stay up without a belt.

00:20:10 ◼   ► I don't think I buy the wrong size jeans.

00:20:15 ◼   ► I just, I don't really,

00:20:17 ◼   ► it runs on my dad's side of the family.

00:20:20 ◼   ► We don't really have much in the way of hips.

00:20:22 ◼   ► So, you know, pants just tend to slide right down.

00:20:25 ◼   ► So I've always been a belt wearer,

00:20:27 ◼   ► but now I don't, you know, my belt's half broken.

00:20:29 ◼   ► It's sort of like, and so I just put shorts on

00:20:32 ◼   ► instead of making do with a broken belt.

00:20:34 ◼   ► - Have you ever considered a shift to suspenders?

00:20:37 ◼   ► - With my jeans?

00:20:38 ◼   ► No, I have not.

00:20:40 ◼   ► But see, here's the thing.

00:20:41 ◼   ► It's a broken belt, and this is the thing.

00:20:43 ◼   ► I only own one belt, and it's lasted me for years.

00:20:47 ◼   ► I don't remember the last time I had to replace it,

00:20:49 ◼   ► And I am clearly in dad clothes territory

00:20:54 ◼   ► where I, obviously, a lot of my shirts and jeans and et cetera

00:21:00 ◼   ► are a lot older than I probably would guess that they are.

00:21:04 ◼   ► I don't remember when I bought this belt.

00:21:05 ◼   ► It served me well.

00:21:07 ◼   ► But what I would do if it weren't quarantine

00:21:11 ◼   ► is I would have just gone out yesterday

00:21:14 ◼   ► and just gone from store to store

00:21:17 ◼   ► in Center City, Philadelphia,

00:21:18 ◼   ► until I found an acceptable belt to my eyes,

00:21:21 ◼   ► and then I'd have a belt.

00:21:23 ◼   ► And it would have been probably,

00:21:25 ◼   ► you know, you can't predict,

00:21:26 ◼   ► 'cause who knows, maybe the first store

00:21:27 ◼   ► I would have popped into,

00:21:28 ◼   ► maybe they wouldn't have had a belt,

00:21:30 ◼   ► or maybe they wouldn't have had one,

00:21:32 ◼   ► you know, in my size.

00:21:33 ◼   ► Could happen.

00:21:34 ◼   ► But I would guess within 90 minutes,

00:21:37 ◼   ► I could leave my house,

00:21:39 ◼   ► and then I would be in possession of a new belt.

00:21:41 ◼   ► But now, in quarantine time,

00:21:43 ◼   ► you have to order it,

00:21:44 ◼   ► and, you know, it takes a long time.

00:21:47 ◼   ► Now I don't have a belt. - See, it's amazing.

00:21:48 ◼   ► It's amazing allegory for the entire system.

00:21:51 ◼   ► You were utilizing just-in-time apparel purchases

00:21:56 ◼   ► where no need for you to carry inventory.

00:21:59 ◼   ► You have what you need.

00:22:01 ◼   ► If it breaks, you can tap right into the supply chain

00:22:05 ◼   ► and it's there.

00:22:06 ◼   ► But now it turns out you had no slack in the system,

00:22:11 ◼   ► as it were, and you're in trouble.

00:22:14 ◼   ► - So I've got shorts on and my legs are cold.

00:22:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:18 ◼   ► So we can actually let this go,

00:22:19 ◼   ► speaking of a brief digression.

00:22:21 ◼   ► So you grew up in Wisconsin.

00:22:24 ◼   ► When did you move to Asia?

00:22:28 ◼   ► How old were you?

00:22:29 ◼   ► - I was 23, in 2003.

00:22:33 ◼   ► So I have a--

00:22:34 ◼   ► - How long did it take you to get used in your head

00:22:37 ◼   ► to Celsius as the, 'cause everybody,

00:22:42 ◼   ► I mean, any long-time listeners know,

00:22:44 ◼   ► this is a hoppy horse of mine.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I like, I'm actually on board with the Fahrenheit is more human legible and usable,

00:22:53 ◼   ► so I actually agree with you. I'm not going to give you a fight on it. But I do use Celsius here

00:22:58 ◼   ► just because everyone else uses Celsius. So, if you're, usually if you're talking about the

00:23:02 ◼   ► weather, you're talking about the weather with people here. I don't know, it didn't take too

00:23:07 ◼   ► long. The thing that always stuck in my head is that 28 degrees in Celsius is 82 degrees in

00:23:12 ◼   ► in Fahrenheit, and then it's like 1.9 degrees around that. And given that it's generally

00:23:18 ◼   ► warm here, you can—that was enough of a "I could get close enough in my head"

00:23:23 ◼   ► until over time you just kind of get used to it and you know how something feels.

00:23:27 ◼   ► But it's funny because a couple years ago I moved up to the sort of more traditional

00:23:32 ◼   ► foreigner neighborhood in Taiwan. My kids go to the American school here and it's

00:23:38 ◼   ► be closer to that. And, you know, it's funny, the folks up here, or especially the foreigners,

00:23:43 ◼   ► are also—I'm friends with several Fahrenheit diehards. So, I've been stuck in this weird

00:23:49 ◼   ► middle ground where I fully adapted to Celsius. I went native, as it were. And now I'm being

00:23:56 ◼   ► faced with Fahrenheit truthers on a regular day-to-day basis, and it's a little disorienting.

00:24:01 ◼   ► But you're, you know, because of your—it's like being bilingual. It's very similar,

00:24:06 ◼   ► but you can hear either one and you kind of have a good idea. Like if somebody says, "Oh

00:24:14 ◼   ► my God, it's 61 degrees," and you know that it's Memorial Day, you realize that's

00:24:21 ◼   ► pretty chilly for Fahrenheit for Memorial Day weekend, 61 degrees.

00:24:26 ◼   ► That's right, and I think this is maybe the case with Pinnacle is also like when other

00:24:30 ◼   ► people say it, I'm fine to absorb it, but it's when they want me to produce it where

00:24:35 ◼   ► and I'm like locked into one way of thinking, right? So I'm thinking about it or I look

00:24:39 ◼   ► it up my phone and I go, "Oh, that's the temperature is like, oh, how's it feel today?"

00:24:43 ◼   ► And I'm like, you know, or what's the temperature? And then I want to help them and translate

00:24:48 ◼   ► and that's when it gets trickier. But if they say, "Oh, yeah, it's going to be

00:24:50 ◼   ► the 70s." Then yeah, I still have the sort of latent knowledge of what I usually go back

00:24:55 ◼   ► to the U.S. every year, so I'm used to switching back and forth. But yeah, it's interesting.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I've never thought about the particulars of switching back and forth between temperature

00:25:04 ◼   ► systems, but it does happen. I don't think I would ever be able to get used to it. I guess

00:25:09 ◼   ► it's probably a lot of all the other problems I might have moving to another country, especially

00:25:15 ◼   ► if it spoke a different language. I'd probably adjust sooner to the Celsius, but I never—I don't

00:25:23 ◼   ► I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to me.

00:25:24 ◼   ► I've told this story before, but it's still my favorite.

00:25:27 ◼   ► And I'm not a radical on the issue,

00:25:30 ◼   ► I just staunchly believe that Fahrenheit

00:25:33 ◼   ► is a better scale for weather,

00:25:37 ◼   ► because it's based on the human condition,

00:25:39 ◼   ► not who gives a crap what the boiling point of water is.

00:25:42 ◼   ► It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life,

00:25:44 ◼   ► that that's 100-- - Well, the other problem

00:25:45 ◼   ► is Celsius is not precise enough, right?

00:25:47 ◼   ► So in the car, it adjusts it by .5,

00:25:52 ◼   ► because a single cell, it's too much for a car.

00:25:55 ◼   ► So yeah, it's a, for it was Fahrenheit,

00:25:57 ◼   ► it's more finely grained in a positive way.

00:26:01 ◼   ► - Right, well, we were talking about this, this was,

00:26:03 ◼   ► and as this, as we learned more about the COVID-19,

00:26:08 ◼   ► we realized that fever is still a very common symptom,

00:26:11 ◼   ► but it is an absolute, there's plenty of people

00:26:14 ◼   ► who wind up terribly ill who never have a fever,

00:26:17 ◼   ► so it doesn't really prove anything.

00:26:20 ◼   ► But in the early days, they were like,

00:26:23 ◼   ► it was a lot of make sure you don't have a fever.

00:26:27 ◼   ► And even now, I think you say that

00:26:31 ◼   ► you guys go out to eat, you get a temperature check.

00:26:34 ◼   ► And I know that that's a worldwide thing at airports

00:26:37 ◼   ► as the airports prepare for the return

00:26:39 ◼   ► to some semblance of normalcy with travel,

00:26:42 ◼   ► that passengers will be given temperature checks.

00:26:45 ◼   ► Anybody has a raging fever, let's get 'em out of the queue.

00:26:50 ◼   ► But I don't understand how you do it here.

00:26:54 ◼   ► You get two degrees high, hey, you might have a fever.

00:26:58 ◼   ► You know, in Celsius, it's like a tenth of a degree off

00:27:02 ◼   ► and you got a fever?

00:27:03 ◼   ► I mean, it's crazy.

00:27:05 ◼   ► - It is funny, 'cause that's one I've had a harder time,

00:27:08 ◼   ► but it's weird because I think because I paid

00:27:12 ◼   ► much more attention to fever temperatures

00:27:14 ◼   ► once I had kids than before,

00:27:16 ◼   ► and so it's super locked into my head,

00:27:18 ◼   ► Celsius numbers that are relevant for fevers. And I actually have a hard time with Fahrenheit,

00:27:23 ◼   ► where something like, oh, it was like 103 temperature. I'm like, what does that mean?

00:27:26 ◼   ► Is that bad? It sounds pretty bad.

00:27:26 ◼   ► Oh, that's really bad. That's like go get it.

00:27:28 ◼   ► Or 101, really.

00:27:29 ◼   ► Yeah, that's like go pour ice into the tub and, you know, I mean, you gotta, you know,

00:27:33 ◼   ► you're in big trouble. 100, no, it's nice 'cause 100, 100 means you probably have a fever.

00:27:38 ◼   ► Right, so, but like 100, yeah, 100 is, so 100 is 38.3 degrees Celsius.

00:27:44 ◼   ► Oh, that's-

00:27:45 ◼   ► But in Celsius, it's 37. So 37 is 98.6 Fahrenheit. Well, I mean, 98, what is it? 98.4?

00:27:53 ◼   ► What is the Fahrenheit normal?

00:27:54 ◼   ► Well, see, that's the thing. I just linked to this. For over 100 years, it was considered 98.6.

00:28:00 ◼   ► And 98.6 was considered normal. And now they're saying, experts are saying,

00:28:05 ◼   ► the average healthy human temperature is actually lower than 98.6. But they don't tell you what it

00:28:11 ◼   ► is. They're not saying it's 98.2. They're just like, "Oh, it's not 98.6." And the reason we've

00:28:17 ◼   ► said 98.6 for 100 years was that there was some guy like in the 1890s who like went around and

00:28:24 ◼   ► did the hard work of taking the temperature like 5,000 people and figured out the average is 98.6.

00:28:29 ◼   ► But the consensus now is that everybody back then was actually sick all the time because—

00:28:34 ◼   ► Ben de la Torre

00:28:35 ◼   ► Right. But this is an example where the Celsius one is easier. 37 is normal and 38 is a fever.

00:28:39 ◼   ► Like, you don't have to get—there's no decimal points necessary. So maybe just by sort of,

00:28:44 ◼   ► by luck, in happenstance, it happens to be round numbers. But, yeah.

00:28:49 ◼   ► Yeah, but 100 sounds dangerous, you know what I mean? That's the thing. See, that's the thing

00:28:53 ◼   ► that I love about Fahrenheit and arguing with people about it is that the beauty of the metric

00:28:58 ◼   ► system is this idea that, you know, it's based on, you know, that hundreds and thousands and

00:29:04 ◼   ► and powers of 10 are useful scales, and it makes all the math work out easier. And it's

00:29:13 ◼   ► crazy. And I'm trying to shift. I'm doing a lot more on Daring Fireball with weights

00:29:19 ◼   ► using—with length, I'm a little bit less consistent. But certainly with weight, I appreciate

00:29:26 ◼   ► grams versus ounces, because the ounces to pounds thing is just—

00:29:30 ◼   ► It's insanity.

00:29:31 ◼   ► It's insanity.

00:29:32 ◼   ► It's just…

00:29:33 ◼   ► Well, no, but inches to feet are, too.

00:29:35 ◼   ► Like anything that's not…

00:29:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:37 ◼   ► I mean, but that's the thing is, the temperature…

00:29:39 ◼   ► Celsius is a total bullshit metric, right?

00:29:42 ◼   ► If you want to be… if you want to say you're quote-unquote "scientific," you should

00:29:45 ◼   ► be using Kelvin, because that actually has a root in reality, which is at zero, nothing's

00:29:51 ◼   ► moving.

00:29:52 ◼   ► No, but I'm saying Celsius is a totally arbitrary…

00:29:54 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

00:29:55 ◼   ► I'm with you.

00:29:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:58 ◼   ► So, I'm with you.

00:29:59 ◼   ► for humans, actually the most human-friendly set of measurements is basically metric for

00:30:05 ◼   ► everything and Fahrenheit for temperature. So I'm there with you.

00:30:08 ◼   ► Somebody—I was on a Twitter fight with somebody, and it's actually one of the best and funnest

00:30:13 ◼   ► things to argue about on Twitter because there are people who feel very strongly on both

00:30:18 ◼   ► sides. There are some diehard Celsius people, and there's me who's very staunchly Fahrenheit,

00:30:24 ◼   ► but yet not so much so that if I were to travel to another country that I would insist on,

00:30:28 ◼   ► you know, the hotel concierge telling me the temperature of Fahrenheit. You know, when in Rome

00:30:33 ◼   ► do as the Romans. But it never gets ugly. It is a very fun dispute that's, you know, famous last

00:30:40 ◼   ► words. God, somebody's probably going to get furious at me now, but it's very fun. But somebody

00:30:45 ◼   ► suggested, and I have to, you know, it's too late now, we can't even pick between these two, but if

00:30:49 ◼   ► you could go back and pick the ideal scale, you'd keep zero at Celsius zero, which is where water

00:30:56 ◼   ► freezes and keep 100 at Fahrenheit's 100. So Fahrenheit's 100 would still be 100 and

00:31:07 ◼   ► zero would be what we now call 32 degrees Fahrenheit because freezing--

00:31:10 ◼   ► No, I don't like that because the problem is negative numbers are weird, right? Like,

00:31:14 ◼   ► I like it if you get to negative numbers-- Yeah, you'd be negative all the time, right?

00:31:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas, I'm from Wisconsin where, you know, where I like Fahrenheit. I

00:31:21 ◼   ► think actually it's on the bottom of the scale. It's in the bottom and the top where it makes

00:31:25 ◼   ► the most sense, the middle gets fuzzy.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Like if you're, in 90s it's really hot,

00:31:29 ◼   ► and the single digits is really cold,

00:31:32 ◼   ► and if it's a negative digits, it's like, you know,

00:31:34 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:31:35 ◼   ► like, it's, or if it's over 100 or less than zero,

00:31:38 ◼   ► then it's like extreme, like it's potentially dangerous.

00:31:39 ◼   ► - It's dangerous, it's dangerous, you could die, yeah.

00:31:42 ◼   ► Like when you're watching a NFL football game

00:31:44 ◼   ► and they tell you that the Lambo is, you know,

00:31:46 ◼   ► negative 17 or something like that,

00:31:48 ◼   ► it's like, forget about it, you know what I mean?

00:31:49 ◼   ► Like, I don't even, I can't even understand

00:31:51 ◼   ► how they're doing this.

00:31:53 ◼   ► My favorite, here's my favorite story, I gotta tell this.

00:31:55 ◼   ► I know I've told it before,

00:31:56 ◼   ► but I don't think I've told it in years.

00:31:58 ◼   ► But, oh man, at some point,

00:32:02 ◼   ► 10, 15 years ago, the Intercontinental San Francisco went up

00:32:08 ◼   ► and that's the hotel right next to Moscone.

00:32:10 ◼   ► Nice hotel, I've stayed there numerous times over the years,

00:32:14 ◼   ► always enjoyed it.

00:32:15 ◼   ► For whatever reason, when it first went up,

00:32:18 ◼   ► it had the most unbelievable hotel rates.

00:32:22 ◼   ► it didn't make any sense.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Like just booking through their site

00:32:26 ◼   ► was relatively inexpensive

00:32:27 ◼   ► compared to just downtown San Francisco.

00:32:29 ◼   ► Although, you know, this is talking like 2008,

00:32:31 ◼   ► 2009, 2010 maybe.

00:32:34 ◼   ► Right now hotels, the average hotel room in San Francisco

00:32:36 ◼   ► pre-pandemic was like $5,000 a night or something.

00:32:39 ◼   ► The old days when they were reasonable.

00:32:44 ◼   ► But then you could go to like those bargain hunting sites,

00:32:46 ◼   ► you know, like Hotwire or something like that.

00:32:49 ◼   ► And they wouldn't tell you, you'd be like,

00:32:50 ◼   ► Well, I want to go to Moscone and they'd say here's some offers and they'd say this place is within 0.5

00:32:55 ◼   ► Miles of where you want to go, but then you could backwards engineer which one was which by like their amenities

00:33:01 ◼   ► well

00:33:01 ◼   ► this one says they have an indoor pool and a

00:33:04 ◼   ► Workout center and the only one that's within half a mile of this that has those two amenities is the inner continental

00:33:10 ◼   ► You know, you didn't have to do that work yourself

00:33:12 ◼   ► There were like forums you could go to and then they tell you you know

00:33:15 ◼   ► So then you can we there were a bunch of us a bunch of pals and we booked like a hotel for the week of

00:33:20 ◼   ► WWDC at the Intercontinental, which is like a four and a half star hotel. We got it for like, I don't know,

00:33:24 ◼   ► it was like $150 a night. It was ridiculous. And anybody who's gone to WWDC since they moved to San Jose is like, you know,

00:33:32 ◼   ► like laughing at this because you stay at like a one star hotel in San Jose and it's $500 a night.

00:33:39 ◼   ► And you're still in San Jose. Yeah, and you're still in San Jose. So anyway, it wasn't the first time

00:33:45 ◼   ► I don't think I was there, but maybe it was. Maybe it was the very first time I was at the Intercontinental

00:33:50 ◼   ► San Francisco. Very nice.

00:33:53 ◼   ► I check in, I get up to my room, and I go in, and it probably was the first time.

00:33:59 ◼   ► And one thing I always do when I get to a hotel is I check the temperature on

00:34:03 ◼   ► the thermostat because I like it nice and cool when I sleep at night.

00:34:06 ◼   ► And I go over, and it was in Celsius. And I thought, "Oh, I get I'm at the Intercontinental.

00:34:12 ◼   ► it's, you know, got an international flair,

00:34:16 ◼   ► they're gonna do it in Celsius.

00:34:17 ◼   ► And I thought, well, that's, you know, good enough.

00:34:19 ◼   ► And I thought, well, I'll give it a down.

00:34:21 ◼   ► I gave it like one down click, you know,

00:34:22 ◼   ► move it down a degree.

00:34:23 ◼   ► And I was like, hell, in Celsius,

00:34:24 ◼   ► I probably just moved it down, you know,

00:34:26 ◼   ► five degrees in real temperatures.

00:34:29 ◼   ► Go to dinner, go out with friends, have a couple drinks,

00:34:33 ◼   ► come back, you know, get a good night's sleep.

00:34:36 ◼   ► I wake up in the middle of the night and I got this sweat,

00:34:39 ◼   ► like you just wouldn't believe.

00:34:40 ◼   ► I mean, like, I'm in like a horror movie.

00:34:42 ◼   ► I mean, it's like, and I'm like, did I eat something bad?

00:34:44 ◼   ► What's going on?

00:34:45 ◼   ► I feel terrible.

00:34:46 ◼   ► And I gotta get some water, I drink, I get up,

00:34:51 ◼   ► and I'm like, I'm just hot.

00:34:52 ◼   ► I was like, oh my God, this is our first night.

00:34:54 ◼   ► I came out here.

00:34:55 ◼   ► I'm supposed to be here all week.

00:34:56 ◼   ► I don't know if it was Macworld or WWDC or what,

00:34:58 ◼   ► but I really thought that I was sick.

00:35:00 ◼   ► I thought best case I got food poisoning,

00:35:02 ◼   ► worst case I'm coming down with something, I got a fever.

00:35:06 ◼   ► And then I think, well, let me check the temperature.

00:35:07 ◼   ► And I thought, oh, it's Celsius.

00:35:09 ◼   ► I figured I'd like googled or used my phone or something to figure it out.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Well, son of a bitch, whatever it was in Celsius was like 84 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:35:21 ◼   ► And the heat was on in a room.

00:35:22 ◼   ► I mean, so like some son of a bitch.

00:35:25 ◼   ► No, no, what happened was the system was off and then you hit the button and that turned

00:35:31 ◼   ► it on, but you set it to 29, which would be 84 degrees, and then it kicked on the heat.

00:35:37 ◼   ► It was definitely in the 20s.

00:35:38 ◼   ► I don't remember what the number was, but it was in the 20s,

00:35:40 ◼   ► and I thought, well, that sounds pretty cool.

00:35:43 ◼   ► And I let it go.

00:35:45 ◼   ► No, but I came in and I hit down arrow.

00:35:48 ◼   ► So I should have only been able to move it down.

00:35:50 ◼   ► I think some son of a bitch,

00:35:52 ◼   ► like the way that like a prankster at a restaurant

00:35:55 ◼   ► might unscrew the top of a salt shaker,

00:35:58 ◼   ► and then you go to get the salt,

00:35:59 ◼   ► but because they unscrewed it,

00:36:01 ◼   ► now you dump the whole container of salt on your meal.

00:36:06 ◼   ► I personally never did that one.

00:36:08 ◼   ► I was a teenager, I mean, I don't see any humor

00:36:10 ◼   ► in that sort of prank at all.

00:36:13 ◼   ► I think some prankster cranked the heat up on the room

00:36:16 ◼   ► and set it to Celsius, 'cause then I went back

00:36:20 ◼   ► to the Intercontinental many times over the years,

00:36:22 ◼   ► never once, and I never got fooled by that again,

00:36:25 ◼   ► but it was never even in Celsius again.

00:36:27 ◼   ► So anyway, that may or may not have hardened my stance

00:36:33 ◼   ► on Fahrenheit versus Celsius.

00:36:34 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:35 ◼   ► - The root, the root of the issue.

00:36:37 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:38 ◼   ► Oh, this is such a leisurely conversation.

00:36:40 ◼   ► It's seriously kind of jarring.

00:36:41 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:36:42 ◼   ► - All right, well, let's dig in.

00:36:45 ◼   ► 'Cause the one thing I know we wanna talk about

00:36:49 ◼   ► is we wanna talk about podcasts

00:36:50 ◼   ► 'cause we have a new podcast

00:36:51 ◼   ► and we wanna talk about that.

00:36:53 ◼   ► But literally, who knows?

00:36:55 ◼   ► There might have been more news today even,

00:36:57 ◼   ► but as of yesterday,

00:36:58 ◼   ► there was big, big news in the podcast world.

00:37:01 ◼   ► And I don't think it's an exaggeration

00:37:04 ◼   ► because by anybody's metrics, you know,

00:37:07 ◼   ► Joe Rogan's show is the second most popular podcast

00:37:10 ◼   ► in the world and it's--

00:37:11 ◼   ► - It bounces back and forth between one and two.

00:37:13 ◼   ► So I think it's safe to say it's the most popular podcast

00:37:16 ◼   ► because he also has a massive YouTube presence

00:37:18 ◼   ► where it's like sort of simulcast.

00:37:20 ◼   ► So I think I would, I'd feel comfortable calling him

00:37:22 ◼   ► the biggest podcaster in the world.

00:37:23 ◼   ► - And the one that's currently ahead of him

00:37:26 ◼   ► is called Call Me Daddy, I think.

00:37:29 ◼   ► - Right, which is a big, going,

00:37:32 ◼   ► and the reason it's above him

00:37:33 ◼   ► is because there's a big controversy around it,

00:37:34 ◼   ► which is actually super duper interesting.

00:37:36 ◼   ► I was just, I was just, but no,

00:37:39 ◼   ► Rogan is usually number one.

00:37:41 ◼   ► That's just number one right now because of the controversy.

00:37:42 ◼   ► But although that's also a huge podcast,

00:37:44 ◼   ► usually in the top 20 or something like that.

00:37:46 ◼   ► - Right.

00:37:47 ◼   ► And anyway, so the big deal yesterday was that Joe Rogan,

00:37:51 ◼   ► perhaps the, arguably the most popular podcaster

00:37:55 ◼   ► on the planet, announced a deal with Spotify

00:37:59 ◼   ► to move his show, not just to Spotify,

00:38:01 ◼   ► but to move it there exclusively by the end of the year.

00:38:05 ◼   ► Meaning at some point in the next few months,

00:38:08 ◼   ► the show will move to Spotify,

00:38:10 ◼   ► but you can, you could still listen to it

00:38:14 ◼   ► wherever you're currently listening to it,

00:38:16 ◼   ► you know, using Overcast or Apple Podcasts or Castro

00:38:20 ◼   ► or any, I mean, I don't know how many podcast apps

00:38:23 ◼   ► there are, I mean, there's dozens and dozens of,

00:38:25 ◼   ► all of them, you know, to some degree, popular,

00:38:29 ◼   ► which is sort of the point of podcasting being an open,

00:38:33 ◼   ► an open medium, they'll still work,

00:38:36 ◼   ► but by the end of the year,

00:38:37 ◼   ► you're either using Spotify to listen to Joe Rogan

00:38:40 ◼   ► or you're not listening to Joe Rogan.

00:38:42 ◼   ► - That's right.

00:38:45 ◼   ► Yeah, and so this is different than what they've done

00:38:48 ◼   ► with acquiring The Ringer or acquiring Gimlet Media.

00:38:51 ◼   ► Those, both Gimlet and The Ringer have launched podcasts

00:38:55 ◼   ► that are Spotify exclusives,

00:38:57 ◼   ► But the big podcast that sort of already existed

00:39:00 ◼   ► on those services, you know, like the Bill Simmons podcast,

00:39:03 ◼   ► which I know we both listen to,

00:39:05 ◼   ► is still available sort of broadly.

00:39:07 ◼   ► I do think it does raise the question

00:39:09 ◼   ► how long that's going to last,

00:39:11 ◼   ► because the whole point of doing this exclusive is,

00:39:15 ◼   ► I mean, there's so many angles to this,

00:39:18 ◼   ► but my strong point of view is that Spotify

00:39:21 ◼   ► is looking to build sort of a advertising service

00:39:27 ◼   ► around podcasts that's about streaming

00:39:30 ◼   ► and dynamically giving you ads that are tailored to you,

00:39:33 ◼   ► as opposed to sort of your ads, the Linode ad,

00:39:36 ◼   ► everyone gets it.

00:39:38 ◼   ► There's some podcasts that do,

00:39:40 ◼   ► they insert ads on download that are based on IP,

00:39:42 ◼   ► but giving you an ad based on your IP address

00:39:45 ◼   ► is the barest possible sort of customization.

00:39:49 ◼   ► It doesn't know anything about you and your interests,

00:39:51 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera, like a Facebook ad, for example.

00:39:53 ◼   ► And so Facebook, but for Spotify to do this

00:39:56 ◼   ► and to not sort of be paying out of the nose for every podcaster, they need to basically

00:40:02 ◼   ► show they can monetize podcasts better than you can on your own. But that means they need

00:40:06 ◼   ► to pull over more users under their platform. And so the play here is they have, you know,

00:40:12 ◼   ► 20% share of the market or something along those lines. And can they, most of Spotify's

00:40:17 ◼   ► growth has been new users, right? Apple podcast hasn't necessarily lost listeners. Overhead

00:40:23 ◼   ► hasn't lost people to Spotify, is Spotify has brought new people into podcasting, which,

00:40:28 ◼   ► by the way, I think is worth noting because they are to date, and generally speaking,

00:40:34 ◼   ► have been a net contributor to the overall ecosystem. But now they're trying to not

00:40:38 ◼   ► just get new listeners, but to yank a bunch of listeners from the other podcast players.

00:40:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think it's worth, and it's not an original observation, but it's so

00:40:49 ◼   ► interesting that I think it's worth noting is that podcasts are the one area of the web that ad tech hasn't

00:40:57 ◼   ► Ruined and we you know, it's funny

00:40:59 ◼   ► I wasn't really planning it and a lot of that as often happens with this show

00:41:03 ◼   ► But it ties in to our opening where we were talking about ads wrecking a browser tab

00:41:08 ◼   ► It it really is the case that you know, like I think you just mentioned the punch the monkey ad right?

00:41:17 ◼   ► which "Famous" is sort of like the first banner ad that people remember from like the late 90s.

00:41:22 ◼   ► And people were annoyed by it because banner ads seemed dumb. It was like, "Punch the monkey and

00:41:29 ◼   ► you might win a prize." This is, I mean, if you're too young or your memory is too bad and you don't

00:41:33 ◼   ► remember it, there were these ads that were at the top of web pages that like hotwired.

00:41:37 ◼   ► It was literally "Punch the monkey."

00:41:39 ◼   ► Right. And...

00:41:41 ◼   ► Like, honestly, we're not obfuscating anything. That's what the ad was.

00:41:45 ◼   ► Right. And so the gimmick was it was a horizontal, like, think of like a little ruler going across

00:41:51 ◼   ► the top of the page, like maybe an inch high and four inches across. And there was a little

00:41:56 ◼   ► anime, a cartoon monkey who animated from one side to the other. And the idea was you'd click,

00:42:02 ◼   ► if you could, you could punch him, you'd, you know, your cursor would turn into a boxing glove.

00:42:07 ◼   ► And if you click right on the monkey's face, you'd, you might win a prize. And it was so

00:42:13 ◼   ► funny because as a web developer I was like I don't think that's possible and in like the late

00:42:17 ◼   ► 90s I'd still think it actually wasn't you know certainly not without flash or something like that

00:42:22 ◼   ► it wasn't really possible with just javascript and animated gifs certainly the html didn't make

00:42:29 ◼   ► anything programmatic possible and then you'd like view source and look at it it was just an animated

00:42:34 ◼   ► gif and it was like you didn't have to actually punch the monkey you just had to click the ad

00:42:39 ◼   ► And it's like, "Oh, duh, that's the whole point, make you click the ad."

00:42:43 ◼   ► Because it didn't seem very hard. Very famous ad. And we all thought, "Oh, boy, ads on the web stink."

00:42:48 ◼   ► Little did we know that they would make our fans turn on eventually.

00:42:53 ◼   ► Well, so this is very interesting, though, because I actually have an example of this ad on an

00:43:00 ◼   ► article I wrote last year about Spotify and their sort of goals in podcasting. And the text of the

00:43:06 ◼   ► the ad is punch the monkey and win a free iPod. And the thing was, but no, they actually

00:43:11 ◼   ► weren't lies. You really could get free iPods and you like, you had to like sign up for

00:43:16 ◼   ► a few, like you would go to these pages and it would have lists of all these things you

00:43:20 ◼   ► had to do. You had to apply for several credit cards. You had to apply for a Netflix account.

00:43:24 ◼   ► This is an under appreciated and unknown thing about Netflix's growth. Netflix was all over

00:43:29 ◼   ► these affiliate marketing schemes. Like that's how they juiced a lot of their early growth,

00:43:33 ◼   ► particularly back in the DVD days.

00:43:35 ◼   ► There was like subscription video courses,

00:43:37 ◼   ► or you sign up, you download sort of stuff.

00:43:39 ◼   ► All these sorts of stuff.

00:43:41 ◼   ► And all these products had huge lifetime values.

00:43:45 ◼   ► Think about Netflix, right?

00:43:46 ◼   ► The idea for Netflix is you're paying them

00:43:48 ◼   ► X amount a month, basically forever.

00:43:50 ◼   ► And if they can get you signed up and into their system,

00:43:54 ◼   ► it's worth a lot.

00:43:56 ◼   ► It's worth so much that it actually became viable

00:43:59 ◼   ► to give people free iPods if they were willing

00:44:02 ◼   ► to jump through all these hoops,

00:44:03 ◼   ► because some number of those people would stick around to the extent that would more

00:44:07 ◼   ► than pay for that sort of thing.

00:44:09 ◼   ► And so, what's funny is that's actually what podcast advertising kind of is today,

00:44:15 ◼   ► right?

00:44:16 ◼   ► You sign up, you put in a code or you use a special URL or something along those lines,

00:44:21 ◼   ► and that's kind of a pain in the rear end because you have to figure out, "Oh, did

00:44:25 ◼   ► the host read the ad correctly?

00:44:27 ◼   ► We have to have tracking.

00:44:28 ◼   ► We have to see how many people signed up.

00:44:29 ◼   ► We have to compare that to our baseline," et cetera, et cetera.

00:44:32 ◼   ► But it's worth it for like Linode, you mentioned in your ad a $5 a month plan, right?

00:44:37 ◼   ► Sounds super cheap.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Well, $5 a month for a year is $60 a month.

00:44:41 ◼   ► You put a little website up there that you feel like you should maintain forever, suddenly

00:44:45 ◼   ► ten years later you've paid Linode $600 and that's worth a lot.

00:44:49 ◼   ► That's worth the hassle of going through to sign up.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Or Squarespace comes with a free domain name.

00:44:55 ◼   ► Well guess what?

00:44:56 ◼   ► Once you have a domain name, you feel attached to that, you feel like you have to keep paying

00:44:59 ◼   ► for it and Squarespace ends up harvesting money from you for a very, very, very long

00:45:04 ◼   ► time.

00:45:05 ◼   ► The problem though…

00:45:06 ◼   ► Well, you're really selling these spots on today's show, Ben.

00:45:09 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Is Squarespace coming out?

00:45:12 ◼   ► Yeah, of course they are.

00:45:15 ◼   ► I mean, I've…

00:45:18 ◼   ► Sorry, it's your answer.

00:45:21 ◼   ► No, it's all right.

00:45:22 ◼   ► You know what?

00:45:23 ◼   ► Everybody knows.

00:45:24 ◼   ► I think listeners of this show know enough to multiply whatever monthly price is by 12

00:45:27 ◼   ► to get a yearly and…

00:45:28 ◼   ► Oh, I thought I know you're making a good point. You're making I own like 40 domain names. I

00:45:34 ◼   ► And it's very annoying because my domain registrar wis it's odd like the main page

00:45:40 ◼   ► It's a terrible like these people need help in their marketing schemes because it shows you your annual spend

00:45:46 ◼   ► And it's very disturbing every time I walk in I spend like

00:45:51 ◼   ► Over a thousand dollars every year to maintain all these domain names that I might or might not use in the future

00:45:56 ◼   ► It's terrible, but that's why it's a great business.

00:46:01 ◼   ► And that's why they advertise on,

00:46:04 ◼   ► they go to the hassle of advertising on podcasts,

00:46:07 ◼   ► 'cause advertising on podcasts is difficult.

00:46:09 ◼   ► Whereas advertising, and so this is the same day on the web,

00:46:12 ◼   ► the problem though is there aren't that many companies

00:46:15 ◼   ► that have business models that make sense for this, right?

00:46:18 ◼   ► So you had, again, credit cards, Netflix accounts, sure,

00:46:20 ◼   ► made sense for the early web, but then you had a,

00:46:24 ◼   ► lots of other companies that ought to advertise or you would think want to advertise but never did

00:46:30 ◼   ► because it was too it didn't make sense and so there you know Mary Meeker used to make those

00:46:34 ◼   ► charts every year about you know in one of the charts that she would always have was usage

00:46:38 ◼   ► versus monetization or like us media usage to add spending ratios and what happened again and again

00:46:44 ◼   ► and again is the internet would say well the internet is has all this time spent but the

00:46:50 ◼   ► internet share of advertising is super small and everyone can figure out like oh maybe just the

00:46:55 ◼   ► internet is never going to work for advertising what happened was was no one was doing the right

00:46:59 ◼   ► kind of advertising and and so because they're doing these sorts of things and and once it was

00:47:05 ◼   ► figured out that you could do targeted customized advertising boom that window closed very very very

00:47:10 ◼   ► quickly um sorry that was that was a that was a monologue no but it's good though it's it's

00:47:17 ◼   ► So on point.

00:47:18 ◼   ► Well, that's the thing with podcasts, though.

00:47:21 ◼   ► Spotify sees this window.

00:47:23 ◼   ► They see there's all this time spent on podcasting.

00:47:26 ◼   ► The level of monetization is very small,

00:47:29 ◼   ► relative to the time spent.

00:47:31 ◼   ► So there's an opportunity to close that window,

00:47:34 ◼   ► just like Facebook and Google close the window on the web.

00:47:38 ◼   ► But as a user, the thing that is so striking

00:47:45 ◼   ► is that podcasts have been around now for quite a while.

00:47:50 ◼   ► It's funny, I don't know if you saw it,

00:47:52 ◼   ► but there's a Slack you and I are both on,

00:47:54 ◼   ► and I dug up, the question came up as to where the calling,

00:47:59 ◼   ► our friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry,

00:48:01 ◼   ► talking about his giant, fleshy palms

00:48:03 ◼   ► and his humongous hands

00:48:05 ◼   ► and how he would attack somebody in a fight.

00:48:07 ◼   ► And everybody knew vaguely that it came up at some point

00:48:12 ◼   ► on the original run of the talk show

00:48:13 ◼   ► I did with Dan Benjamin, but when exactly nobody knew. And I figured out the easiest way to figure

00:48:19 ◼   ► out when I was. I asked David_Smith, who has both an encyclopedic memory and has programmatically

00:48:28 ◼   ► generated transcripts of a bunch of shows, and we figured it out. It was an episode from—it

00:48:35 ◼   ► was almost exactly around this time of year. It was late March or early—mid-March 2008.

00:48:40 ◼   ► So, you know, I was podcasting 12 years ago. And it was funny because we were talking about

00:48:45 ◼   ► Dan and I at that episode. We didn't even have sponsors back then. We thought about it. We tried

00:48:50 ◼   ► to get it, but it was like so foreign 12 years ago that there would be sponsors on a podcast that we

00:48:55 ◼   ► didn't have sponsors on the podcast. And we were joking that the Icon Factory should sponsor the

00:49:00 ◼   ► show to promote Twitterrific for iPhone, which was brand new at the time because 2008 was when

00:49:07 ◼   ► and the App Store opened up.

00:49:09 ◼   ► I think in March it was coming.

00:49:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that Apple had announced the SDK

00:49:14 ◼   ► and it would be coming in a couple months.

00:49:16 ◼   ► So in some ways that seems like a long time ago.

00:49:21 ◼   ► In some ways, it seems like forever ago.

00:49:25 ◼   ► And in some ways it feels like,

00:49:26 ◼   ► well, but podcasting is still podcasting

00:49:28 ◼   ► and it's just like the idea that you can monetize it

00:49:31 ◼   ► through sponsorships just sort of came up.

00:49:32 ◼   ► And whether they're big shows or smaller shows,

00:49:36 ◼   ► they're more or less the same,

00:49:37 ◼   ► and nothing's been wrecked, right?

00:49:40 ◼   ► That's the thing, is that it doesn't feel like,

00:49:44 ◼   ► and the web is so hostile as a reader sometimes.

00:49:50 ◼   ► Somebody says, "Read this article,"

00:49:54 ◼   ► and you go to read the article,

00:49:55 ◼   ► and a thing pops up literally covering the article

00:49:59 ◼   ► that says, "Do you wanna subscribe to our newsletter,

00:50:01 ◼   ► or do you wanna turn off,

00:50:03 ◼   ► please consider turning off your ad blocker,

00:50:05 ◼   ► and you have to click this and click that

00:50:07 ◼   ► just to read the thing that you got.

00:50:08 ◼   ► And however much annoyed people were

00:50:11 ◼   ► by print advertising ever,

00:50:13 ◼   ► they never put ads over the article

00:50:15 ◼   ► because it wasn't even possible to put an ad,

00:50:17 ◼   ► how could you put an ad over the article in print?

00:50:20 ◼   ► It couldn't happen.

00:50:21 ◼   ► And it certainly wouldn't pop up

00:50:23 ◼   ► while you were 100 words into the article,

00:50:26 ◼   ► which is what some things do now.

00:50:28 ◼   ► You start scrolling and then they pop up the stupid thing.

00:50:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's terrible.

00:50:32 ◼   ► There's nothing like that in podcasting.

00:50:35 ◼   ► I mean, maybe I say nothing,

00:50:36 ◼   ► and I'm sure there's people who are working on it,

00:50:38 ◼   ► and maybe you can find it in certain corners,

00:50:40 ◼   ► but most of the, using podcast apps like Apple Podcasts

00:50:45 ◼   ► and Overcast and Castro and all the popular ones,

00:50:49 ◼   ► and listening to popular open podcasts

00:50:52 ◼   ► where you just subscribe to an RSS feed

00:50:54 ◼   ► and you can just type the name of the show

00:50:55 ◼   ► and the podcast client gets it

00:50:58 ◼   ► by searching the iTunes directory,

00:50:59 ◼   ► which Apple has very generously made open to anybody to use,

00:51:03 ◼   ► and then you get it, and you type Joe Rogan,

00:51:06 ◼   ► and there's the Joe Rogan show,

00:51:07 ◼   ► and then you hit play, and you just start listening.

00:51:10 ◼   ► And there might be sponsorships,

00:51:12 ◼   ► but they're not the equivalent of web pop-ups

00:51:16 ◼   ► that keep you from reading it, you know?

00:51:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, but here's something that is maybe

00:51:21 ◼   ► a defense of Spotify and what they're trying to do with this.

00:51:28 ◼   ► You're talking about ads in web pages and browsers.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And those ads sort of arise out of desperation,

00:51:33 ◼   ► to an extent, where everyone's competing.

00:51:36 ◼   ► The whole problem with the internet,

00:51:38 ◼   ► as far from a business proposition goes,

00:51:40 ◼   ► is that you're competing with every other web page

00:51:42 ◼   ► on the internet at all times, right?

00:51:44 ◼   ► You don't have any sort of geographic advantage

00:51:47 ◼   ► or some sort of, 'cause you can access a server in the US

00:51:50 ◼   ► or access a server in Europe or in Asia,

00:51:53 ◼   ► just as easy for all intents and purposes as any other one.

00:51:56 ◼   ► and that's great if you're small like me and you want to like I have as much

00:51:59 ◼   ► reach as the New York Times. Why? Because we're both on the internet so we

00:52:04 ◼   ► actually have identical reach right but that makes it very very hard to monetize

00:52:08 ◼   ► because advertisers could go anywhere and the whole thing with ad tech is that

00:52:12 ◼   ► it you know it follows you around the internet and you know with all the

00:52:16 ◼   ► pluses and minuses that that that that entails probably mostly minuses but on

00:52:21 ◼   ► On the other hand, advertising on Facebook and advertising on Instagram doesn't have

00:52:27 ◼   ► that experience.

00:52:28 ◼   ► There's no performance penalty to ads on Facebook and Instagram.

00:52:31 ◼   ► They're highly, highly optimized to make sure they load well and quickly and don't interfere

00:52:35 ◼   ► with your session.

00:52:36 ◼   ► There's often like the amount of stuff I buy on Instagram is kind of ridiculous.

00:52:40 ◼   ► There's always like cool little things.

00:52:42 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, I got a pencil case for my daughter the other day," because you

00:52:45 ◼   ► like what would be in the art and all this sort of stuff.

00:52:47 ◼   ► It is a very clever design.

00:52:48 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, that's kind of cool."

00:52:50 ◼   ► And why? Because it's sort of built in as a first-class citizen in a way that fits the

00:52:58 ◼   ► format, right? It fits the, if it's in the feed, it's similar to the content around it.

00:53:03 ◼   ► And that is what Spotify is trying to do. They're trying to build a system that's sort

00:53:09 ◼   ► of fully integrated. Because the thing with Spotify, like, you know, why is, Spotify doesn't

00:53:14 ◼   ► download MP3s. Why do you have to go to Spotify as a podcaster and sign up? Because they

00:53:19 ◼   ► ingest your MP3 and into their streaming infrastructure and everything is streamed.

00:53:24 ◼   ► Well, everything is streamed, then inserting ads that are streamed and dynamic becomes a much

00:53:30 ◼   ► more approachable problem than trying to stick it dynamically into an MP3 or something.

00:53:34 ◼   ► So right now, the ugliest advertising in podcasting are these dynamically inserted

00:53:39 ◼   ► ads on download. They don't fit the podcast at all. It's awkward. There's this weird kind of

00:53:44 ◼   ► pseudo-targeting based on your IP address, but that's actually the worst. The podcast

00:53:51 ◼   ► we most listen to, it's all host-read and it feels very, you know, like, people like

00:53:56 ◼   ► it because it feels friendly, etc., etc. Yeah, you can skip through it, but if you listen

00:53:59 ◼   ► to it, it's not the worst thing in the world. And then, on the other hand, you can envision

00:54:03 ◼   ► a Spotify world where things are much smoother and just tied together in a much more cogent

00:54:08 ◼   ► way, but there is this messy middle world that is actually the better analogy, I think,

00:54:14 ◼   ► to advertising on the web.

00:54:16 ◼   ► Well, anyway, Joe Rogan is—

00:54:19 ◼   ► Just one more point on this. No, because I think it's really interesting, because I've

00:54:24 ◼   ► been very oppositional to Spotify, but the reason I'm oppositional to Spotify is because

00:54:29 ◼   ► they don't support openness at all. So, for example, Dithering, our new podcast, is

00:54:34 ◼   ► open, it's not free, you have to pay to get a feed, but that feed can go into any podcast

00:54:40 ◼   ► app. You can add to Apple Podcasts, you can add to Overcast, you can add to Pocket Casts,

00:54:44 ◼   ► you can add to iTunes, you could put the feed in your browser and look at the feed and see

00:54:50 ◼   ► exactly what the enclosures are, where the MP3s come from, etc.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Obviously, it's like email, which I have experience with. I sell email and now I sell

00:55:00 ◼   ► sort of RSS feeds. It's the same sort of concept, but it's not free because you have

00:55:04 ◼   ► to get your own customized one. Spotify, the Joe Rogan podcast, is going to be free, but

00:55:09 ◼   ► there's no mechanism to put in an arbitrary RSS feed, which means that Spotify is not

00:55:15 ◼   ► just building the system. They're also shutting off every other possible means to sort of

00:55:20 ◼   ► monetize and build a podcast. That's what bothers me as a publisher, even though as

00:55:26 ◼   ► As an analyst, I appreciate what they're doing.

00:55:28 ◼   ► I think there's a big opportunity here.

00:55:30 ◼   ► I think it's smart by them.

00:55:31 ◼   ► As a podcaster, I actually think there's potential here.

00:55:35 ◼   ► There's potential for Spotify to build a Facebook, the positive parts of Facebook, a pleasant

00:55:43 ◼   ► experience that monetizes way better than what we have currently.

00:55:49 ◼   ► - Well, but then I look at the way that,

00:55:52 ◼   ► podcasting is the exception to that regard, right?

00:55:57 ◼   ► Like stuff that you see as you scroll

00:56:00 ◼   ► has been dominated by Facebook

00:56:02 ◼   ► and Instagram is part of Facebook.

00:56:04 ◼   ► And the entirety of Instagram's monetization strategy

00:56:08 ◼   ► occurred post-acquisition, right?

00:56:11 ◼   ► I don't think Instagram had any kind of ads at all

00:56:14 ◼   ► before Facebook acquired them.

00:56:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was the reason why Facebook

00:56:18 ◼   ► got regulatory approval.

00:56:19 ◼   ► because it wasn't perceived as being competitive

00:56:23 ◼   ► because they weren't monetizing,

00:56:25 ◼   ► which is kind of amazing in retrospect.

00:56:28 ◼   ► - Really, really?

00:56:29 ◼   ► - No, this is a firm example of not understanding

00:56:31 ◼   ► the internet, Instagram was clearly a social network,

00:56:35 ◼   ► it's very visual, how else on earth

00:56:38 ◼   ► would they ever monetize?

00:56:39 ◼   ► Of course it's gonna be advertising.

00:56:40 ◼   ► - Then there's other ways they could have done it,

00:56:44 ◼   ► and like you said, they worked out a way to do native ads

00:56:48 ◼   ► that certainly haven't kept people

00:56:52 ◼   ► from using Instagram in the aggregate.

00:56:54 ◼   ► But there's other ways they could have done it.

00:56:59 ◼   ► But the fact that they could do it at all

00:57:02 ◼   ► was sort of really ignorant to pretend like,

00:57:05 ◼   ► well, but their revenue is zero,

00:57:07 ◼   ► so they're just losing money, so there's no problem.

00:57:11 ◼   ► But I look at video,

00:57:15 ◼   ► And there's just no equivalent to,

00:57:20 ◼   ► there never really was an equivalent

00:57:23 ◼   ► to podcasting for video, right?

00:57:26 ◼   ► Like it's just a very strange difference

00:57:30 ◼   ► because, okay, video is by size,

00:57:35 ◼   ► like a video file is a lot bigger than an audio file.

00:57:39 ◼   ► But we've reached the point

00:57:40 ◼   ► where people have internet access now

00:57:42 ◼   ► where I guess hosting still would be a concern

00:57:46 ◼   ► if you were just gonna host video on your own server,

00:57:50 ◼   ► your bandwidth would still be a concern.

00:57:52 ◼   ► But it's one of those areas where hosting my own website

00:57:56 ◼   ► just isn't a thing that I don't think about it anymore.

00:57:59 ◼   ► Like even Daring Fireball, which doesn't have many images,

00:58:04 ◼   ► has almost no video in the history of the site,

00:58:07 ◼   ► relative to most sites, very, very low bandwidth.

00:58:11 ◼   ► In the earlier years of Daring Fireball,

00:58:16 ◼   ► as it grew in popularity,

00:58:19 ◼   ► the amount of bandwidth I was using a month

00:58:22 ◼   ► was something I had to keep an eye on.

00:58:24 ◼   ► And slowly but surely over time,

00:58:27 ◼   ► I had to up my hosting plans and move to higher level plans.

00:58:32 ◼   ► And it was never, in terms of business costs,

00:58:36 ◼   ► a significant factor.

00:58:38 ◼   ► my accountant was always just stunned

00:58:41 ◼   ► at the level of my hosting costs to the revenue.

00:58:46 ◼   ► He was like, "This is an unbelievable business."

00:58:48 ◼   ► 'Cause my accountant isn't coming from the world of internet.

00:58:52 ◼   ► He's coming from the real world.

00:58:55 ◼   ► But bandwidth was a concern just 15, 20 years ago

00:59:01 ◼   ► for a site like Daring Fireball.

00:59:02 ◼   ► So obviously, video's bigger than that.

00:59:04 ◼   ► But it's not that different from audio in my mind,

00:59:09 ◼   ► but yet the way that the two media ecosystems

00:59:11 ◼   ► on the internet have evolved couldn't be more opposite,

00:59:14 ◼   ► right, where we're at this point now,

00:59:16 ◼   ► and in 2020, we're only beginning to talk about Spotify

00:59:20 ◼   ► as a company that might be building

00:59:23 ◼   ► a monster walled garden of exclusive content.

00:59:28 ◼   ► I mean, and I say audio,

00:59:32 ◼   ► and I'm talking about spoken word audio,

00:59:34 ◼   ► 'cause obviously music is something

00:59:36 ◼   ► that's entirely different.

00:59:38 ◼   ► And I guess it's not a surprise that somebody like Spotify

00:59:42 ◼   ► is evolving into the world of spoken world stuff

00:59:44 ◼   ► coming from music where that's how they built up

00:59:47 ◼   ► the massive hundreds, literally hundreds of millions

00:59:50 ◼   ► of users, whereas video never had that.

00:59:52 ◼   ► There was never really a popular open video world,

00:59:56 ◼   ► and there's stuff for professional quote unquote

01:00:01 ◼   ► TV shows, TV-style shows and movies like Netflix,

01:00:05 ◼   ► and Apple TV Plus now and HBO and others, Hulu, et cetera.

01:00:10 ◼   ► And of course, YouTube, right?

01:00:14 ◼   ► YouTube for, which is the closer equivalent to podcasting

01:00:19 ◼   ► in terms of supporting independence, right?

01:00:22 ◼   ► Like people in our sphere, I mean,

01:00:25 ◼   ► somebody like Rene, Richie, who's always on the show,

01:00:27 ◼   ► is now, that's his, now that he left iMore,

01:00:30 ◼   ► primary gig is his YouTube channel. That goes through YouTube and that is so different from

01:00:40 ◼   ► the mindset of being an independent media producer from podcasting. And I was reading

01:00:46 ◼   ► today, you know, you and I started talking about Joe Rogan in this movie yesterday. And

01:00:52 ◼   ► I know that he had a big YouTube presence too. You mentioned it just a bit ago that

01:00:57 ◼   ► this is, you know, it's a factor in the, you know, the success of his show. But I also read today

01:01:04 ◼   ► that he's had an enormous amount of problems with YouTube, quote-unquote, "demonetizing" him,

01:01:09 ◼   ► et cetera, over the years, I guess based on arguments over the content of the show?

01:01:15 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause he, like, he's, one of the things about his show is he will basically interview

01:01:20 ◼   ► anyone and everyone it like he's sort of you know all the way on the extreme of the you know I might

01:01:28 ◼   ► disagree with you but like I'm gonna let give you a right to talk and that goes on his show so like

01:01:32 ◼   ► he's had I think like Alex Jones on his on his podcast before so just to take like an extreme

01:01:37 ◼   ► example of somebody who's clearly controversial whatever you think of Alex Jones that's right

01:01:42 ◼   ► that's right so so this is very yeah so that's an issue for him and one of the reasons that pushed

01:01:48 ◼   ► him away from YouTube because I think he's been talking about that a lot. But there's

01:01:52 ◼   ► actually a few really interesting points in what you just talked about. You mentioned

01:01:56 ◼   ► the, well, yeah, it's different bandwidth, but I think there's a certain sort of like,

01:02:02 ◼   ► there's a tech mindset, which I think we would both share, which at the end of the

01:02:06 ◼   ► day, it's all ones and zeros, right? Text and audio and video, it's all just going

01:02:12 ◼   ► over the same pipes as it were in the same format, right? And the truth though is I actually

01:02:18 ◼   ► think that the cost of bandwidth has fundamentally shaped the fact that text and audio and video

01:02:26 ◼   ► are totally different. I actually think that is all that matters.

01:02:30 ◼   ► Because it just wasn't, you know, you think about, go back to when Napster sort of blew

01:02:33 ◼   ► up in, you know, 1999, I believe it was, or 1998, 1999, and it was on the edge of sort

01:02:41 ◼   ► of possible, if you were on a dial-up, which most people were, it would take like an hour

01:02:46 ◼   ► to download a song. We were on the university broadband network, so it was amazing. But

01:02:50 ◼   ► even then compared to today, it still took forever. But there was no way... There were

01:02:54 ◼   ► some people that were sharing video even at that time via... You'd have these crazy,

01:02:59 ◼   ► sketchy sites. You'd do FTP logins to other people's computers across the internet. It

01:03:04 ◼   ► was insane.

01:03:05 ◼   ► And you were downloading a movie. It would come across as 50 different files that were

01:03:13 ◼   ► that were split up and numbered

01:03:15 ◼   ► and then you'd have software on your computer

01:03:17 ◼   ► to put 'em all back together.

01:03:20 ◼   ► But it was because the downloads were so unreliable

01:03:23 ◼   ► and so slow that you couldn't possibly risk

01:03:26 ◼   ► having one file of the whole thing

01:03:28 ◼   ► because you might get 90% of the way there.

01:03:31 ◼   ► - You get 90% through, yep.

01:03:32 ◼   ► - And somebody would pick up the phone.

01:03:35 ◼   ► - And not just that, but you would download it

01:03:37 ◼   ► for like a week and then you would play it

01:03:38 ◼   ► and it was like postage stamp size.

01:03:40 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:03:41 ◼   ► So, like, the size of video is so astronomically larger that I think that's why it never became

01:03:50 ◼   ► sort of user, you know, peer-to-peer sort of thing.

01:03:53 ◼   ► It's always been centralized services.

01:03:55 ◼   ► Yes, you can host your own video, but you have, like, in today it's actually more viable

01:04:00 ◼   ► because of widespread CDNs and things on those lines, but it's already too late because YouTube

01:04:04 ◼   ► is dominant.

01:04:05 ◼   ► You're just going to use YouTube.

01:04:06 ◼   ► Or, you know, so professionally speaking, Napster, or not Napster, Netflix is sort of,

01:04:11 ◼   ► you know, was early to this and established a very dominant position.

01:04:16 ◼   ► Whereas Audio Files, because they were small enough, they sort of, you started out with

01:04:24 ◼   ► a peer-to-peer thing and with everyone having a bunch of MP3s.

01:04:27 ◼   ► And so Spotify came in in a very different position in the market because instead of

01:04:32 ◼   ► competing against nothing like YouTube was or Netflix was, it was competing against piracy.

01:04:38 ◼   ► So that shaped how the service was created and formed. So that's number one, that's different.

01:04:45 ◼   ► But then number two with podcasts in particular, Apple launched the podcast Support in 2005 or

01:04:52 ◼   ► something like that. I mean, the name podcast didn't even exist until 2004. I think Dave

01:04:58 ◼   ► Dave Wien and I produced something along the lines

01:05:00 ◼   ► of late 90s, but you'll say mid-2000s, somewhere around then.

01:05:02 ◼   ► What's interesting is that's the same time

01:05:04 ◼   ► that YouTube started.

01:05:04 ◼   ► YouTube was in 2006, I think.

01:05:07 ◼   ► And the difference though is YouTube grew up around YouTube

01:05:12 ◼   ► and podcasts grew up around Apple and iTunes.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And the reason why I think nothing has happened in podcasts

01:05:18 ◼   ► until the last couple of years is because Apple

01:05:22 ◼   ► was the only obvious candidate to do something about it.

01:05:25 ◼   ► they just continuously chose not to do anything. And so that left it in sort of a state of stasis

01:05:32 ◼   ► where if Apple had cared to lift a finger, they could have completely shaped and owned

01:05:38 ◼   ► and dominated the entire market. But by virtue of doing nothing, nothing happened and also no

01:05:44 ◼   ► one else could do anything. And this whole Joe Rubin thing fits into this because it's an attempt

01:05:49 ◼   ► by Spotify to basically wrest control of the system away from Apple because without a centralized

01:05:56 ◼   ► player, it's never going to evolve beyond what it is. And Spotify is not that centralized player now,

01:06:03 ◼   ► and they're trying to become it. All right, let's take a break. We can pick this back up and thank

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01:08:25 ◼   ► Here's the thing too, they make it,

01:08:27 ◼   ► their website, once you subscribe,

01:08:29 ◼   ► makes it so easy to manage your shipments.

01:08:32 ◼   ► I used to make coffee every morning

01:08:35 ◼   ► and then I'd go out in the afternoon,

01:08:36 ◼   ► get a second cup of coffee out and about.

01:08:39 ◼   ► Well, I don't go out and about anymore.

01:08:40 ◼   ► I'm locked up, it's quarantine.

01:08:42 ◼   ► So I had to effectively more than double my delivery coffee.

01:08:47 ◼   ► Just like two clicks, two clicks, hit okay,

01:08:49 ◼   ► now I have more coffee.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Things go back to normal a couple weeks from now,

01:08:53 ◼   ► maybe months from now, who knows.

01:08:55 ◼   ► I wanna go back two clicks away

01:08:58 ◼   ► from decreasing my subscription.

01:09:00 ◼   ► It's so super easy, no commitment,

01:09:03 ◼   ► and it's seriously, seriously my favorite coffee

01:09:07 ◼   ► in the world, I just love it.

01:09:08 ◼   ► drinking it right now. So go to yes, please, yesplz.coffee, and then remember that code

01:09:15 ◼   ► FIREBALL5SAVEFIVEBUCKS off your first order. My thanks to yes, please. Go get some.

01:09:21 ◼   ► Jon Streeter And a great example where subscriptions are

01:09:24 ◼   ► not a bad thing. It's a win-win. I mean, you know what you don't have. You're not walking

01:09:29 ◼   ► around Central City, Philadelphia, with a bunch of boarded-up shops trying to find coffee.

01:09:32 ◼   ► Dave

01:09:32 ◼   ► - No, you couldn't find coffee right now if you tried.

01:09:35 ◼   ► Joanna Stern was on the show a couple weeks ago.

01:09:37 ◼   ► She said that her neighborhood place

01:09:39 ◼   ► is serving takeout coffee.

01:09:41 ◼   ► So I'm sure there's places in Philly you could get it.

01:09:43 ◼   ► None of my favorite places are open.

01:09:45 ◼   ► I hope they're all doing okay.

01:09:46 ◼   ► I don't know, I mean, I hope all the people,

01:09:48 ◼   ► the regular baristas I know are doing well.

01:09:51 ◼   ► I worry about 'em.

01:09:52 ◼   ► It's been a long time, but yeah.

01:09:55 ◼   ► Yeah, yes, please, I mean, again, they are a sponsor.

01:09:57 ◼   ► I mean, they're sponsoring the show,

01:09:59 ◼   ► but it is absolutely a fantastic subscription service

01:10:02 ◼   ► and a terrific product to have a subscription for.

01:10:04 ◼   ► - And a great match for a podcast,

01:10:08 ◼   ► because people like you, they care about your opinion,

01:10:12 ◼   ► you say this is actually great, I'd recommend it regardless,

01:10:15 ◼   ► and then, at least in theory,

01:10:17 ◼   ► they're getting X number of dollars per you for a month

01:10:21 ◼   ► for a very, very, very long time.

01:10:22 ◼   ► It's a win-win.

01:10:23 ◼   ► - And 100%, it's all based on their confidence, seriously.

01:10:26 ◼   ► I mean, I've talked to Tonks about it.

01:10:27 ◼   ► They're just confident that if you like coffee

01:10:30 ◼   ► and you try their coffee and you subscribe,

01:10:32 ◼   ► the deal keep subscribing

01:10:33 ◼   ► because the coffee speaks for itself.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Here, listen, I can prove it.

01:10:36 ◼   ► This is the proof.

01:10:37 ◼   ► You can't fake this.

01:10:38 ◼   ► This is the proof right here.

01:10:40 ◼   ► Listen.

01:10:41 ◼   ► (water pouring)

01:10:42 ◼   ► That's me pouring the remainder

01:10:45 ◼   ► of my nighttime pot of coffee here.

01:10:47 ◼   ► It's 1130 at night in Philadelphia.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I'm drinking coffee.

01:10:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:10:53 ◼   ► - This is how we end up with dithering

01:10:55 ◼   ► because usually in the morning,

01:10:58 ◼   ► it's the evening West Coast time, and so I'm busy talking to people, etc., etc.

01:11:02 ◼   ► And then it gets into sort of the noontime here, early afternoon, and everyone's sort

01:11:07 ◼   ► of dropping off, going to bed, just being quiet, I'm trying to do work.

01:11:12 ◼   ► But not you!

01:11:13 ◼   ► You're always still awake.

01:11:17 ◼   ► I want to talk about dithering in the third segment of the show, but it is funny because

01:11:21 ◼   ► last week we recorded 10, 10 o'clock Eastern.

01:11:25 ◼   ► It actually works out beautifully.

01:11:27 ◼   ► We're 12 hours apart.

01:11:29 ◼   ► I forget, that's not true 365 days a year.

01:11:32 ◼   ► There's a part of the year--

01:11:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's no daylight savings time here.

01:11:35 ◼   ► So then it becomes 13 hours.

01:11:38 ◼   ► - That, you know what, we could talk

01:11:39 ◼   ► about daylight savings time.

01:11:41 ◼   ► If we haven't angered everybody with Fahrenheit Celsius,

01:11:43 ◼   ► I could get on this.

01:11:45 ◼   ► I love no daylight.

01:11:47 ◼   ► No, you guys are always daylight savings.

01:11:49 ◼   ► Isn't that the case?

01:11:50 ◼   ► - No, we're never daylight savings.

01:11:51 ◼   ► - Oh, never. - So I hate it.

01:11:52 ◼   ► It's bad. - Oh, that's terrible.

01:11:53 ◼   ► - Because it, yeah, it gets dark too early.

01:11:55 ◼   ► Like, who wants it to get dark early?

01:11:57 ◼   ► These people that rage against daylight savings time

01:11:59 ◼   ► are out of their minds.

01:12:00 ◼   ► They're just complaining to complain.

01:12:02 ◼   ► They haven't thought about anything.

01:12:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, every time I rail about,

01:12:06 ◼   ► I'm with you, I mean, I'm a night owl too,

01:12:08 ◼   ► but you know, I mean, there are times

01:12:10 ◼   ► I have to get up early.

01:12:11 ◼   ► I know sometimes you have like a 6 a.m. flight

01:12:13 ◼   ► or 5.30 flight or something, you gotta get up,

01:12:15 ◼   ► get to the airport.

01:12:16 ◼   ► Who cares if it's dark?

01:12:17 ◼   ► It's early in the morning.

01:12:19 ◼   ► - You feel miserable anyway.

01:12:20 ◼   ► It's like you're appreciating the light.

01:12:24 ◼   ► So anyway, Joe Rogan, Howard Stern is the,

01:12:29 ◼   ► we thought about talking about it on Dithering,

01:12:31 ◼   ► we're like, no, let's save it,

01:12:32 ◼   ► let's save it for the talk show.

01:12:34 ◼   ► Joe, Howard Stern does not identify as a podcaster,

01:12:38 ◼   ► and if anything, if you listen to him,

01:12:42 ◼   ► he'll rail against the fact that he thinks podcasters

01:12:45 ◼   ► are a bunch of hacks and they don't,

01:12:48 ◼   ► he's sort of anti-podcast.

01:12:51 ◼   ► But, you know, semantics of what exactly is a podcaster or not, Howard Stern is effectively

01:12:59 ◼   ► the proto-podcaster.

01:13:00 ◼   ► Yep, no, that's exactly it.

01:13:03 ◼   ► I've always made this point about Bill Simmons, who Bill Simmons never wrote a blog, and he's,

01:13:09 ◼   ► I've complained about bloggers, but he was the first blogger in spirit, right?

01:13:14 ◼   ► Because it was the tone and the way in which, like, the whole, like, fan perspective, and

01:13:19 ◼   ► I'm going to put my allegiances out there and, you know, going to write about it seemingly

01:13:23 ◼   ► inane stuff, but what people actually care about instead of this sort of like traditional

01:13:27 ◼   ► calmness voice from nowhere sort of approach.

01:13:30 ◼   ► It was the tone of a blogger, even though he was kind of before blogging became a thing,

01:13:36 ◼   ► it led the way to blogging.

01:13:38 ◼   ► Once this sort of infrastructure got there, and I've always thought of Stern in a similar

01:13:42 ◼   ► way, right?

01:13:43 ◼   ► There's something about his show that feels podcast-y, even though it absolutely came

01:13:50 ◼   ► up on the radio, but there were no podcasts then.

01:13:52 ◼   ► There wasn't even an option.

01:13:53 ◼   ► And now folks that come along later, like Joe Rogan, feels like in the same kind of

01:13:57 ◼   ► line, right?

01:13:58 ◼   ► You know, kind of a little off the wall, an interviewer.

01:14:01 ◼   ► You know, I'm not a close listener to either, so I'm by no means an expert on this.

01:14:06 ◼   ► But similar in spirit, even if the format is different.

01:14:11 ◼   ► - With Bill Simmons, our first time,

01:14:12 ◼   ► I know he wasn't born at ESPN,

01:14:15 ◼   ► but I certainly became aware of him

01:14:17 ◼   ► when he was writing at ESPN, I guess in the late '90s?

01:14:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it was 1999 or something,

01:14:23 ◼   ► 'cause he had like an AOL channel.

01:14:26 ◼   ► That's all he saw.

01:14:27 ◼   ► - See, I wouldn't have known that 'cause I never had AOL.

01:14:29 ◼   ► But he can say he wasn't a blogger.

01:14:32 ◼   ► I know exactly what you mean though,

01:14:33 ◼   ► because his writing felt right at home

01:14:37 ◼   ► in a web browser window.

01:14:39 ◼   ► - That's right.

01:14:40 ◼   ► whether you wanna say it was a blog or not,

01:14:41 ◼   ► it certainly was native to the web

01:14:44 ◼   ► and he was liberal with his links

01:14:47 ◼   ► and wrote with a way where it wasn't just, you know,

01:14:50 ◼   ► like, and you could see it here

01:14:53 ◼   ► and the word here is a length to it.

01:14:54 ◼   ► - There's no editing for length.

01:14:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, and there was no editing for length

01:14:57 ◼   ► and you could go sprawling, but he would, you know,

01:15:00 ◼   ► to me, a native hypertext added a dimension to writing

01:15:05 ◼   ► that was literally impossible before.

01:15:08 ◼   ► you can be a terrific web writer and not embrace it, but it's like, I'm almost like—like,

01:15:15 ◼   ► one way of putting it is that you can do it as a sort of form of sarcasm, where you could make

01:15:19 ◼   ► a certain word, a link, and the thing that it links to, if you followed the link, would make

01:15:24 ◼   ► you realize that, oh, that's sarcasm. But you wouldn't realize it was sarcasm if you didn't

01:15:29 ◼   ► follow the link because, you know. You know what I mean?

01:15:33 ◼   ► I mean, that's exactly, I think that's really profound actually. It added a new dimension

01:15:39 ◼   ► to writing. That, and this idea of it was not possible on print. It was only possible

01:15:45 ◼   ► on the web. And then the mechanisms became blogs, but the style was web writing. I think

01:15:51 ◼   ► that's exactly what it is. And I think this makes me quick for the Stern thing too, because

01:15:55 ◼   ► the best sort of Howard Stern shows are timeless, right? There's an aspect where you can listen

01:16:00 ◼   ► to it live, or you can listen to it later, or you can listen to it a few years down the road,

01:16:06 ◼   ► and it still can be funny, it still can be informative, it can still be all these sorts

01:16:10 ◼   ► of things, and that is—like podcasting, that's a big part of podcasting. It's not a live show.

01:16:16 ◼   ► It's a time-shifted show that shifts with you, and so that kind of quits what I was trying to

01:16:21 ◼   ► go at with that sort of essence sort of idea. I think that's exactly right.

01:16:25 ◼   ► And the nature of the Stern show,

01:16:30 ◼   ► if you just listen to it,

01:16:31 ◼   ► it certainly sounds a lot like a podcast.

01:16:34 ◼   ► I mean, he's a super professional broadcaster.

01:16:37 ◼   ► I mean, and he's also born gifted

01:16:40 ◼   ► with a truly fantastic voice.

01:16:44 ◼   ► I mean, it's just an unbelievably terrific voice.

01:16:49 ◼   ► And it's sort of like the equivalent

01:16:51 ◼   ► of having just a beautiful typography

01:16:54 ◼   ► in a written thing.

01:16:55 ◼   ► But the advantage of writing is that, you know,

01:17:00 ◼   ► you can pick somebody else's font.

01:17:02 ◼   ► I'm stuck with my voice, you know.

01:17:05 ◼   ► And that's part of his anti-podcaster shtick

01:17:11 ◼   ► is that he's, you know, he thinks that people just,

01:17:15 ◼   ► you know, plug in a USB microphone and start blathering

01:17:18 ◼   ► and they don't know what they're doing.

01:17:19 ◼   ► And they didn't go through the process that he did.

01:17:24 ◼   ► did where he literally started as like a traditional disc jockey back when being a disc jockey actually

01:17:30 ◼   ► involved discs that you jockeyed about as you played records on a radio and learn to work a

01:17:37 ◼   ► control board and actually understands how an FM radio station actually broadcasts its signal

01:17:44 ◼   ► because you had to do it and I think you know to have the job you had to be like certified

01:17:49 ◼   ► you know, and have like a license from the FCC, I think. And going through all of that today's

01:17:56 ◼   ► world, it doesn't even make any sense, you know what I mean? It's—you can't expect everybody who

01:18:00 ◼   ► has an audio show, whether they call it a podcast or not, to, you know, learn the chops of being,

01:18:06 ◼   ► you know, a disc jockey on FM radio at 1979 or something like that when it was, you know,

01:18:12 ◼   ► literally they were making hit TV shows about how cool it was to be a disc jockey on FM radio.

01:18:18 ◼   ► I remember back when I was in college, and I worked for this newspaper, and I thought

01:18:24 ◼   ► it was great fun particularly to be a columnist.

01:18:26 ◼   ► And so I'm like, "I want to be a columnist.

01:18:27 ◼   ► I want to be a columnist for the New York Times."

01:18:30 ◼   ► And so I went to the New York Times and looked at everybody's bios, and most of them were

01:18:33 ◼   ► like journalists for like 20, 30 years before they finally got the perch on the opinion

01:18:38 ◼   ► page, right?

01:18:39 ◼   ► And I'm like, "I don't want to be a journalist.

01:18:41 ◼   ► I want to be a columnist.

01:18:42 ◼   ► I don't want to put in, you know, 'Go cover high school track meets or city council

01:18:48 ◼   ► meetings and work your way up the chain, etc., etc. But that's the way it was done. What

01:18:53 ◼   ► I did, I looked at, there's William Safire, who was a speech writer for Nixon, and I'm

01:19:00 ◼   ► like, "That sounds like a much more interesting path. I'm going to go work in politics and

01:19:04 ◼   ► then transition over to be a columnist." I realized that working in politics is actually

01:19:08 ◼   ► absolutely miserable, even worse than being a journalist. Pretty good any sort of beliefs

01:19:13 ◼   ► ideals. But it turned out, because of the internet, I was able to become a columnist

01:19:18 ◼   ► just in a sort of like doing it directly. And I can imagine for a traditional newspaper

01:19:24 ◼   ► person that put in years and years and worked their way up, and then I'm coming in with

01:19:29 ◼   ► my, you know, my WordPress blog and like challenging them for attention and opinion, it has to

01:19:36 ◼   ► be a little irritating.

01:19:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, I can imagine that.

01:19:39 ◼   ► I mean, for those who don't remember,

01:19:41 ◼   ► I was a huge, I'm not surprised to hear,

01:19:43 ◼   ► I don't think we've ever talked about Sapphire before,

01:19:45 ◼   ► but no surprise that I was an enormous Sapphire fan.

01:19:49 ◼   ► And definitely came upon what I wanted to do the same way.

01:19:53 ◼   ► But Sapphire, everybody who does know him,

01:19:56 ◼   ► knows him for two columns that he wrote

01:19:58 ◼   ► for the New York Times over the years.

01:19:59 ◼   ► Primarily, he was one of the full-time op-ed columnists.

01:20:04 ◼   ► know like the space now occupied by Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd and uh

01:20:10 ◼   ► I think Ross Douthat is is the yeah like the conservative

01:20:14 ◼   ► heir because he was they always have someone on the right uh

01:20:19 ◼   ► right I mean I don't want to name them all but the Tom Friedman

01:20:22 ◼   ► is like the resident jackass

01:20:26 ◼   ► uh actually they have a couple because they got David Brooks and Brooks is sort

01:20:30 ◼   ► of they never really fully replaced Sapphire because Sapphire's thing was that he was the

01:20:35 ◼   ► conservative on the liberal op-ed page of the liberal New York Times where at least the liberal

01:20:42 ◼   ► editorial page and op-ed page you know were were always politically liberal even notwithstanding any

01:20:51 ◼   ► sort of dispute or argument over whether the news coverage is as a political slam which is neither

01:20:57 ◼   ► here nor there, but Sapphire was the conservative and, you know, his bona fides as a Nixon speech

01:21:04 ◼   ► writer pretty much certified that. I mean, that's, that's, you know, pretty credible. He's never

01:21:10 ◼   ► really been fully replaced, but the other thing that Sapphire had was the "On Language" column

01:21:14 ◼   ► in the Sunday magazine, and so as a political junkie who still to this day loves reading

01:21:21 ◼   ► perspectives I don't agree with, although it's harder and harder to find reasoned ones,

01:21:27 ◼   ► But Sapphire was one who I always enjoyed. I disagreed with him more often than not, but,

01:21:32 ◼   ► you know, overall, especially in my younger, you know, in my 20s and even late teens,

01:21:38 ◼   ► my politics were, by the standards of US political discourse, centrist. You know, I wasn't really—you

01:21:48 ◼   ► could ask me, you know, here's the top 10 issues of the day, and I wouldn't really fall as somebody

01:21:53 ◼   ► you would say, "Well, that guy's a diehard liberal," whereas now it's bifurcated.

01:21:58 ◼   ► Right, because the Environmental Protection Agency, I think, came in under Nixon,

01:22:02 ◼   ► just to give a perspective of how different things were to be on the right or the left way back then.

01:22:08 ◼   ► So the entire existence of the Environmental Protection Agency came in under Nixon.

01:22:13 ◼   ► The idea that conservatives would be into conservation was something that was repeated

01:22:21 ◼   ► often it was actually taken as like this goes hand in hand that we're conservatives politically

01:22:28 ◼   ► because we are hesitant to make changes fast and you know this these forests have been here for a

01:22:36 ◼   ► very long time long before we were here we should keep them and say you know keep them the way they

01:22:40 ◼   ► are you know like that that was considered hand in hand with conservatism um the other one that's so

01:22:48 ◼   ► it—people just wouldn't believe it. It was that Nixon came within like a whisker

01:22:52 ◼   ► of passing nationalized healthcare. Like—

01:22:55 ◼   ► David: Well, I mean, he issued price controls, too. I mean, which is the—yeah, it was a

01:23:01 ◼   ► different era.

01:23:02 ◼   ► Dave: And maybe, you know, I think maybe—I don't know how apocryphal it is, but I think

01:23:07 ◼   ► as a nutshell synopsis without really going into a longer-than-a-breath digression on

01:23:12 ◼   ► this, the basic gist of the Nixon nationalized healthcare proposal was that it pretty much

01:23:17 ◼   ► got stymied by Ted Kennedy, of all people, on Kennedy's thinking being, "I don't

01:23:24 ◼   ► want Nixon to be the one to pass it.

01:23:26 ◼   ► I want to be president in '76 or maybe 1980, and I'll be the one to pass it."

01:23:31 ◼   ► And so, Ted Kennedy, as the liberal stalwart in the Senate, sort of put the brakes on Nixon

01:23:37 ◼   ► passing what would now be considered extraordinarily left-wing healthcare in the United States.

01:23:45 ◼   ► But anyway, that's where Sapphire came from.

01:23:47 ◼   ► I was exactly like you and thought, "Boy, that's the sort of writing I feel like I want to do,

01:23:53 ◼   ► I feel like I could do." It is somehow—the form, tone, nature of it just is so appealing to me,

01:24:03 ◼   ► and I don't want to do any sort of working my way up the ladder to get there.

01:24:09 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:24:12 ◼   ► And in some ways—

01:24:13 ◼   ► John: It sounds terrible when you put it that way, but yes, it's totally true.

01:24:16 ◼   ► - All right, so imagine that you really,

01:24:18 ◼   ► your mind, you're a young person

01:24:20 ◼   ► and you're drawn to the military

01:24:23 ◼   ► and you think to yourself,

01:24:25 ◼   ► boy, what I would like to be is a general.

01:24:27 ◼   ► That seems like, that just is what I wanna do.

01:24:32 ◼   ► That seems like a fulfilling life.

01:24:36 ◼   ► I think I'd be good at it.

01:24:37 ◼   ► I think it's important work.

01:24:39 ◼   ► I would like to sign up and become a general.

01:24:41 ◼   ► Well, you know, it doesn't really even make any sense

01:24:44 ◼   ► it would work that way. Whereas it didn't make sense to me that to become like an op-ed columnist

01:24:51 ◼   ► or a business page columnist or a tech, you know, personal technology columnist, that you

01:24:56 ◼   ► should be expected to work your way up the ladder by starting as like a city hall reporter,

01:25:01 ◼   ► reporting on like, you know, the city council meeting where they're talking about whether to

01:25:06 ◼   ► change the street cleaning days from Tuesday and Thursday to Wednesday and Friday. You know,

01:25:13 ◼   ► like, "This doesn't seem like it doesn't make any sense for what I want to do that

01:25:18 ◼   ► I should start that way," whereas working your way up the ladder in the military, it,

01:25:22 ◼   ► you know, to name one example, it feels like it does.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Ben: And I think that's been proven out, because once it became possible to take an

01:25:31 ◼   ► alternate path, it turns out that path works very, very well. Like, there's no, you know,

01:25:38 ◼   ► And it's one of the things that is pretty neat about the Internet, and the fact that,

01:25:44 ◼   ► you know, like all our archives are out there, you can go back and read everything I've

01:25:48 ◼   ► written, you know, a few thousand pieces over the last six, seven years, and to believe

01:25:55 ◼   ► or do what I write about now, well, you can look back and see what I wrote before, and

01:26:01 ◼   ► you can correct things.

01:26:02 ◼   ► That's another great thing about writing the Internet, we've talked about, you know,

01:26:05 ◼   ► If you get something wrong, you get to go back and change it, and then you can write

01:26:08 ◼   ► a new post saying, "I got this wrong.

01:26:10 ◼   ► This is why I got it wrong," etc., etc.

01:26:12 ◼   ► And so there's a certain credibility-enhancing factor there that's sort of built in if

01:26:16 ◼   ► you are willing to sort of embrace it in a way that, you know, you put a column out there

01:26:20 ◼   ► on a newspaper that is printed and it's set.

01:26:24 ◼   ► It is what it is.

01:26:25 ◼   ► And in that world—sorry, I'm just kind of thinking all out here—in that world where

01:26:29 ◼   ► you printed a paper and there was so much permanence attached, maybe it did make more

01:26:34 ◼   ► sense to have a long path because you had to really make sure you had the right person

01:26:39 ◼   ► in that role.

01:26:40 ◼   ► They had to be vetted.

01:26:41 ◼   ► They had to be experienced because the cost of mistakes was way higher, whereas the cost

01:26:46 ◼   ► of mistakes on the internet are much lower, sort of for better or worse.

01:26:50 ◼   ► Well, and I think the other factor that always—I think there's part of that.

01:26:53 ◼   ► Part of that, it was justified, and I think part of it was that there was just so few

01:26:59 ◼   ► space for it, right?

01:27:00 ◼   ► Because there was—

01:27:01 ◼   ► That's right.

01:27:02 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:03 ◼   ► page in the newspaper.

01:27:05 ◼   ► You know, that's, this was like something that like,

01:27:09 ◼   ► it was like a light bulb in my head in college,

01:27:13 ◼   ► like same as you, like going through the student newspaper

01:27:15 ◼   ► was I thought the op-ed page was for opinion and editorial,

01:27:19 ◼   ► but op-ed stands for opposite the editorial,

01:27:22 ◼   ► where the, I mean, maybe it stands for both,

01:27:25 ◼   ► maybe it's one of those things, you know,

01:27:27 ◼   ► that has multiple origins.

01:27:29 ◼   ► But the idea is that it's just tradition

01:27:33 ◼   ► And if you buy the print New York Times or the Washington Post, it still works this way

01:27:38 ◼   ► where you go, you look in the index and it says here's where the editorial page is,

01:27:44 ◼   ► and you go turn to page 16.

01:27:48 ◼   ► The newspaper's editorial, which isn't traditionally, isn't bylined.

01:27:53 ◼   ► It's written by the editorial board and is sort of the opinion voice of the newspaper

01:27:58 ◼   ► itself is on the left-hand page, and there's letters to the editor and maybe a political

01:28:05 ◼   ► cartoon on that page.

01:28:07 ◼   ► And then on the right-hand page is where the op-ed columns are, usually one or two from

01:28:14 ◼   ► the staff, op-ed writers and columnists, and then the submissions from freelancers and

01:28:21 ◼   ► statesmen and whoever else might submit was on that page.

01:28:28 ◼   ► there's just one page in the newspaper, so it's super competitive. And I think there were a lot

01:28:32 ◼   ► of people who had that feeling like, "Well, that's what I want to do. I want to be the,

01:28:35 ◼   ► you know, I'd like to be the op-ed columnist or, and one of them." It was so competitive that I

01:28:41 ◼   ► think it just made sense that within the newspaper, there were so many people who wanted the job

01:28:47 ◼   ► that when a spot opened, that of course it went to one of them first, whether they were the best

01:28:53 ◼   ► for the job or not. Yeah, that's right. And it was someone deciding, right? The op-ed editor,

01:29:00 ◼   ► whoever was in charge, decided who got on that page. And I think what makes the thing about the

01:29:05 ◼   ► internet that is great from our perspective and maybe very threatening from a sort of newspaper

01:29:10 ◼   ► perspective is no one decides. Anyone can go out there and can set up a page and can succeed or

01:29:19 ◼   ► fail based on the traffic they get on where they can charge money.

01:29:24 ◼   ► This is the great thing about being open.

01:29:25 ◼   ► This is the worry about Spotify.

01:29:28 ◼   ► It's the worry about having someone in the center deciding what can be on or not.

01:29:32 ◼   ► It's the problem with YouTube that Rogan ran into.

01:29:36 ◼   ► YouTube can decide if you're on there or not, whereas in the open web, when it comes

01:29:42 ◼   ► to web pages or in podcasting, open podcasting, no one can decide.

01:29:46 ◼   ► I got a question where, you know,

01:29:48 ◼   ► so dithering is not on Spotify.

01:29:50 ◼   ► - Right.

01:29:51 ◼   ► - Because you can't put in an arbitrary RSS feed.

01:29:53 ◼   ► So I was like, well, if Spotify add the capability

01:29:55 ◼   ► for RSS feeds, would you let dithering go on Spotify?

01:29:57 ◼   ► I'm like, I wouldn't have a choice.

01:29:59 ◼   ► That's the whole point of being open, right?

01:30:01 ◼   ► - Right.

01:30:02 ◼   ► - So, they're like, oh, exponents not on there.

01:30:04 ◼   ► What do you, exponents?

01:30:05 ◼   ► They're like, it wouldn't be up to me.

01:30:07 ◼   ► If they let arbitrary RSS feeds go on there,

01:30:09 ◼   ► anyone could put that on there,

01:30:11 ◼   ► and I couldn't control that,

01:30:12 ◼   ► and that's exactly how I want it to be.

01:30:14 ◼   ► - Right, and again, to make two analogies

01:30:19 ◼   ► where the way it works makes a lot more sense

01:30:22 ◼   ► to people who maybe don't think about it deeply.

01:30:24 ◼   ► It's like imagine somebody comes out

01:30:26 ◼   ► with a new email client,

01:30:28 ◼   ► and it's just new client software,

01:30:31 ◼   ► and you can use this client and get your email

01:30:34 ◼   ► on your phone or wherever you're using it.

01:30:37 ◼   ► Will Hecri's daily updates still show up?

01:30:39 ◼   ► Well, yeah, of course, it's just an email client.

01:30:42 ◼   ► Your email address didn't change.

01:30:43 ◼   ► just going to show all the email that shows up in your inbox.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Or when somebody comes out with a new browser and, you know, however much we've ossified

01:30:52 ◼   ► in the number of browser engines, the number of browsers continues to be a little bit more

01:30:58 ◼   ► fluid as, you know, Microsoft has switched to Chromium and there's a new browser, relatively

01:31:04 ◼   ► new browser called Brave that a lot of people use.

01:31:08 ◼   ► Brave comes out and it's a new browser

01:31:11 ◼   ► built on the Chromium engine.

01:31:13 ◼   ► I don't sign terms and conditions and agree to something

01:31:18 ◼   ► so that daringfireball.net renders

01:31:20 ◼   ► and you can read it in Brave

01:31:23 ◼   ► and that your bookmarks import over.

01:31:26 ◼   ► And if you like to have Daring Fireball

01:31:29 ◼   ► in your favorites bar and click it in the morning

01:31:31 ◼   ► to see what's new, I may not even know

01:31:34 ◼   ► that there's a new browser out.

01:31:36 ◼   ► It just happens, right?

01:31:37 ◼   ► And so the same thing, like if Spotify allowed you

01:31:40 ◼   ► to just add, you know, there's a plus button,

01:31:43 ◼   ► and then you could paste an RSS feed in there,

01:31:46 ◼   ► dithering would just show up.

01:31:47 ◼   ► - Yep, that's exactly right.

01:31:50 ◼   ► The challenge I think for Spotify,

01:31:51 ◼   ► I think there's two issues.

01:31:53 ◼   ► One is they wanna control everything.

01:31:55 ◼   ► I think there might just be a technical issue though,

01:31:57 ◼   ► because the Spotify streams everything, right?

01:31:59 ◼   ► And so the problem with the RSS thing is

01:32:01 ◼   ► it's pulling in an MP3, and they don't probably even have,

01:32:04 ◼   ► like the, you know, do they even have the data model

01:32:07 ◼   ► Spotify app to house an MP3. How is that going to work? I mean, but honestly, if they supported

01:32:15 ◼   ► this, I seem like the most extreme anti-Spotify thing, but my opposition is I'm actually fine

01:32:25 ◼   ► with them trying to figure out this new model for podcasting, as long as you preserve the openness

01:32:31 ◼   ► for other models to be figured out as well. And the great thing about going direct, you know,

01:32:37 ◼   ► the solution to these aggregators, these people that try to collect all the users and monetize

01:32:43 ◼   ► them more effectively because they're all centralized, consider the customized ads,

01:32:47 ◼   ► et cetera, et cetera. The solution is to go direct to customers. And how do you go direct

01:32:52 ◼   ► to customers? You ask them to pay you. And that's kind of what we're doing. And it works with

01:32:57 ◼   ► Facebook, right? I pay to check your links on Facebook and if you want to get the paid

01:33:02 ◼   ► stuff you can pay me directly. Facebook's not involved at all. There's broader issues

01:33:08 ◼   ► about Facebook and Google and journalism in the long term, but you are still able, the

01:33:13 ◼   ► New York Times for example, can build a thriving business by connecting directly with consumers

01:33:19 ◼   ► who pay them directly and Google and Facebook can't touch that at all. Spotify is not

01:33:23 ◼   ► allowing that. That's what's frustrating.

01:33:26 ◼   ► I think it's, I don't know, before we move on, I think it's worth circling back to Howard Stern

01:33:32 ◼   ► as the proto-podcaster. And part of it is fundamentally about the content of the show,

01:33:38 ◼   ► which is that if you just have a recording of the show and you listen to it, it sounds a lot like

01:33:44 ◼   ► what people would think of as a podcast today. Strong personalities, Howard Stern is co-host,

01:33:51 ◼   ► or however you want to describe Robin Quiver's role on the show.

01:33:55 ◼   ► The other regulars who are on the show,

01:34:01 ◼   ► the way that the show flows,

01:34:03 ◼   ► it's just, you know, it's all personality-based,

01:34:06 ◼   ► and it's not, you know, like, well, it's exactly an hour long,

01:34:09 ◼   ► and there's 20 minutes in, there's a break,

01:34:11 ◼   ► and then 20 more minutes in, there's a break.

01:34:13 ◼   ► You know, it goes with the flow, and it's longer, you know.

01:34:17 ◼   ► That's podcast-like.

01:34:21 ◼   ► But then in the modern era, what's so interesting

01:34:24 ◼   ► is how he forged this independent,

01:34:28 ◼   ► and again, he's on Sirius XM,

01:34:30 ◼   ► but his independence is remarkable, historically speaking.

01:34:35 ◼   ► He was on FM radio, regular old-fashioned radio

01:34:41 ◼   ► over public airwaves, and you'd tune in on FM,

01:34:44 ◼   ► and it was syndicated around the country.

01:34:47 ◼   ► But basically, you therefore had to listen

01:34:49 ◼   ► when he was on, right?

01:34:50 ◼   ► That's how FM radio worked.

01:34:52 ◼   ► And technically, I guess somebody could tape it

01:34:54 ◼   ► and circulate tapes, but there was no other way.

01:34:58 ◼   ► There was no way to time shift

01:34:59 ◼   ► for most people who weren't nerds.

01:35:01 ◼   ► And he had a massive, massive audience

01:35:07 ◼   ► and was making a lot of money,

01:35:09 ◼   ► but was also fighting the FCC on a regular basis

01:35:13 ◼   ► because being on FM radio meant you had to adhere

01:35:17 ◼   ► to FCC regulations on things like curse words

01:35:20 ◼   ► and content of the show.

01:35:23 ◼   ► And his show is, I don't know what other adjectives he used,

01:35:28 ◼   ► but to use one, it was raunchy, or remains raunchy,

01:35:31 ◼   ► where there might be actors from porno movies

01:35:36 ◼   ► or something like that who were the guests

01:35:38 ◼   ► of the show of the day talking about subject matter

01:35:41 ◼   ► that would violate FCC regulations

01:35:43 ◼   ► for what you can say on FM radio.

01:35:45 ◼   ► And literally millions of dollars of fines.

01:35:47 ◼   ► And what he did is he took his ball,

01:35:52 ◼   ► went home and went to satellite radio,

01:35:55 ◼   ► which people thought was crazy.

01:35:58 ◼   ► Because satellite radio was this small niche

01:36:01 ◼   ► and people had to pay for it.

01:36:03 ◼   ► And when he did it in 2004,

01:36:06 ◼   ► the degree that people had to jump through hoops

01:36:09 ◼   ► compared to everybody could get FM radio

01:36:11 ◼   ► on just about anything that played audio,

01:36:13 ◼   ► your car, your Walkman, like even your tape players

01:36:18 ◼   ► used to always have built-in radio receivers.

01:36:20 ◼   ► You couldn't, you know, even if all you really wanted to do

01:36:22 ◼   ► was play cassette tapes on a Walkman,

01:36:26 ◼   ► it also had AM and FM radio reception,

01:36:28 ◼   ► because why not, right?

01:36:30 ◼   ► Whereas Sirius XM, where I guess Sirius and XM

01:36:34 ◼   ► used to be two companies and he went to Sirius,

01:36:36 ◼   ► but you had to have dedicated hardware

01:36:38 ◼   ► to get their proprietary satellite signal.

01:36:42 ◼   ► You had to subscribe to their service,

01:36:44 ◼   ► which costs money every month.

01:36:46 ◼   ► And even if you were a serious subscriber,

01:36:49 ◼   ► you didn't get the Howard Stern Show automatically

01:36:52 ◼   ► with your paid subscription to a proprietary service

01:36:55 ◼   ► that you had proprietary hardware for.

01:36:57 ◼   ► You also had to pay an additional subscription monthly

01:37:00 ◼   ► to get the Stern Show.

01:37:02 ◼   ► And people did it.

01:37:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, you know it worked

01:37:05 ◼   ► 'cause he signed a new contract five years later

01:37:07 ◼   ► for like another $100 million or $90 million for five years,

01:37:12 ◼   ► which included like fewer shows per week,

01:37:14 ◼   ► so he lightened his burden.

01:37:16 ◼   ► So clearly it was successful from a serious perspective.

01:37:19 ◼   ► And you put that in the context here,

01:37:22 ◼   ► all you have to do with Spotify is just switch to an app

01:37:25 ◼   ► you probably already have on your phone.

01:37:28 ◼   ► - Right, right.

01:37:29 ◼   ► So it's a lot, you know, right.

01:37:31 ◼   ► If the Joe Rogan show only, if the only people who go,

01:37:36 ◼   ► Like, you know, there's, how many people listen to a show

01:37:40 ◼   ► is hard to estimate.

01:37:41 ◼   ► You can kind of get a good gauge of how many times

01:37:43 ◼   ► a show is downloaded through regular traditional

01:37:46 ◼   ► download statistics from a web server.

01:37:49 ◼   ► How that translates into actual listeners

01:37:53 ◼   ► is sort of impossible to say.

01:37:55 ◼   ► It's the same, you know, gauging the audience

01:37:57 ◼   ► is always pretty difficult, right?

01:37:59 ◼   ► You can measure how many subscribers you have,

01:38:01 ◼   ► but how many people read the subscription, I don't know.

01:38:04 ◼   ► How many people listen to a show that's been downloaded?

01:38:08 ◼   ► How many people download it three times because they have three different podcast apps that

01:38:12 ◼   ► automatically download it, but they only listen to it in one?

01:38:15 ◼   ► You know, it's not one to one.

01:38:18 ◼   ► But you know, you can kind of get a rough number.

01:38:23 ◼   ► What was interesting, actually this as an aside, one thing that I realized while sort

01:38:28 ◼   ► of writing about this stuff is it's hard to measure market share of podcast players

01:38:34 ◼   ► in part because your typical podcast player plugged into the open ecosystem

01:38:39 ◼   ► downloads podcasts all the time. You can set it to stream only, but most people, they just

01:38:42 ◼   ► download the podcast, and so when they hit play, it's already downloaded and they can play the MP3.

01:38:47 ◼   ► Whereas Spotify, because everything is streamed, what Spotify does to accommodate the world,

01:38:53 ◼   ► like, because downloads is sort of like the defined accepted measure in the podcast world,

01:38:57 ◼   ► So Spotify, when you hit play, will tag, or sort of like tap the original MP3 so it registers

01:39:06 ◼   ► a download, but then Spotify is just streaming it.

01:39:09 ◼   ► But the implication is Spotify, a Spotify download, is if you go to your analytics page

01:39:15 ◼   ► for your podcast and there will be a Spotify category, a Spotify download is actually a

01:39:20 ◼   ► listen because they only do that tagging when you actually click play on the podcast, which

01:39:26 ◼   ► which means that Spotify is always under-counted

01:39:29 ◼   ► because they don't have the bonus of downloading

01:39:33 ◼   ► a bunch, like downloading podcasts

01:39:34 ◼   ► that you never actually listen to.

01:39:36 ◼   ► And so it's kind of tricky actually to figure out

01:39:39 ◼   ► how much market share do they have

01:39:40 ◼   ► because their downloads actually equal listens

01:39:44 ◼   ► in a way they don't for anyone else.

01:39:45 ◼   ► - And they have an incredible installed base already.

01:39:50 ◼   ► I mean, that's the point we're getting to

01:39:51 ◼   ► is it's not like an upstart like Luminary

01:39:54 ◼   ► where Luminary is this new, I guess it's a year old now,

01:39:58 ◼   ► that only does podcasts and is only proprietary

01:40:02 ◼   ► and requires you to download the new thing.

01:40:04 ◼   ► I get the whole point I'm trying to make here

01:40:05 ◼   ► is that if the only people who move

01:40:08 ◼   ► from Joe Rogan's current podcast that's open

01:40:11 ◼   ► to his new one that's Spotify exclusive

01:40:13 ◼   ► are people who already, as of today, May 20th, 2020,

01:40:18 ◼   ► already have Spotify on their phone, it could work, right?

01:40:23 ◼   ► because there's like 280 some million

01:40:26 ◼   ► Spotify users out there.

01:40:27 ◼   ► - Yep, yep.

01:40:28 ◼   ► - They don't need new Spotify users

01:40:31 ◼   ► to make the Joe Rogan deal work.

01:40:34 ◼   ► Presumably Spotify probably has a good idea

01:40:37 ◼   ► that there's some number of tens of thousands,

01:40:40 ◼   ► hundreds of thousands, perhaps, Joe Rogan listeners

01:40:43 ◼   ► who are huge Joe Rogan fans who don't have Spotify

01:40:46 ◼   ► or don't subscribe or something like that,

01:40:48 ◼   ► who will, and he'll have months to go

01:40:50 ◼   ► in the rest of this year to remind people

01:40:53 ◼   ► on a regular basis, multiple times a week,

01:40:55 ◼   ► is like three, four times a week,

01:40:59 ◼   ► I think like four times a week,

01:41:00 ◼   ► to say, hey, we're moving to Spotify,

01:41:04 ◼   ► get the Spotify app, it'll be part of the show, I'm sure,

01:41:07 ◼   ► I mean, it wouldn't make sense not to,

01:41:09 ◼   ► but they don't really have to get a new app,

01:41:13 ◼   ► most of them, right?

01:41:15 ◼   ► - That's exactly right, and whereas the other thing

01:41:17 ◼   ► with the luminary thing is, to think about,

01:41:20 ◼   ► is Luminary wants to charge a subscription fee upfront.

01:41:24 ◼   ► So not only do you have to download a new app,

01:41:26 ◼   ► you also have to pay.

01:41:27 ◼   ► Whereas, this is where it's important to remember,

01:41:29 ◼   ► Spotify does have a subscription layer.

01:41:31 ◼   ► Of course, and they say that some people

01:41:34 ◼   ► that listen to podcasts convert

01:41:36 ◼   ► and it's been good for that part of the business.

01:41:38 ◼   ► But this is really, really all about advertising.

01:41:41 ◼   ► And there was a little thing that Spotify did

01:41:44 ◼   ► on the last earnings call, which was they shifted

01:41:46 ◼   ► how they accounted for content costs,

01:41:49 ◼   ► they bought the ringer, they bought the gimlet, so they're getting all these costs for producing

01:41:53 ◼   ► content. They used to split the cost proportionally between their subscription business and their

01:41:59 ◼   ► advertising business because both sides listened to it. What they did was they went back and

01:42:04 ◼   ► they said, "Actually, all these costs go on the advertising side of the business."

01:42:08 ◼   ► Why do you do that? Because the point of accruing those costs is to build the advertising business

01:42:15 ◼   ► and that's just a more honest representation of your numbers.

01:42:18 ◼   ► And I think it really speaks to the fact that this makes sense.

01:42:23 ◼   ► And so to go back to the Rogan thing, so he's switching over.

01:42:26 ◼   ► Spotify is paying him this money because they want to build the advertising business.

01:42:29 ◼   ► Whereas if say Luminary signed Joe Rogan and say it was successful in the way that Sirius

01:42:34 ◼   ► was successful for Howard Stern, right?

01:42:36 ◼   ► And suddenly Luminary is a super popular podcast.

01:42:38 ◼   ► Well, what Joe Rogan could do is go to Luminary and say, "You need to pay me more because

01:42:44 ◼   ► I'm the one driving all this money in a very sort of direct way.

01:42:47 ◼   ► And if you don't pay me more, I'll just go independent. Whereas, uh,

01:42:51 ◼   ► whereas on Spotify,

01:42:52 ◼   ► Spotify is building an advertising engine that Joe Rogan or any single podcast

01:42:56 ◼   ► or couldn't because the scale of an advertising business is so much greater than

01:43:00 ◼   ► any one person. Whereas subscription is much more of a sort of one to one thing.

01:43:03 ◼   ► And that scale mismatch is why it's a win-win for Spotify and Rogan to work

01:43:08 ◼   ► together. Whereas Rogan and Luminary would immediately be negotiating over who

01:43:12 ◼   ► gets the biggest share of the subscription, and Rogan would take the most.

01:43:17 ◼   ► Whereas, if you go to Stern, so Stern was subscribers, but you had to have satellites

01:43:21 ◼   ► in the air, right?

01:43:22 ◼   ► You had to have, like, devices, and Stern couldn't do that on his own.

01:43:26 ◼   ► So he needed Sirius.

01:43:29 ◼   ► Sirius had some sort of leverage in the relationship in a way that Luminary, because it's all

01:43:34 ◼   ► just bits on the internet, had no—even if Luminary succeeded, even if they got tons

01:43:39 ◼   ► subscribers, what would happen is they would never ever make any money because the most popular

01:43:44 ◼   ► podcasters that drove the subscriptions would renegotiate to take all the money. And so it was

01:43:49 ◼   ► just kind of a doomed model from the beginning because they weren't doing anything that any

01:43:54 ◼   ► podcaster couldn't have done on their own. Right. And that's the question that comes up,

01:44:00 ◼   ► is Joe Rogan better off now or will he be better off when he moves to Spotify than he was already

01:44:07 ◼   ► with what's inarguably the super popular podcast

01:44:12 ◼   ► and already making tons of money,

01:44:14 ◼   ► and it's not that hard, and you don't really need,

01:44:16 ◼   ► there's not really a lot of overhead.

01:44:18 ◼   ► You don't need, to your point,

01:44:20 ◼   ► you don't need satellites in the air.

01:44:22 ◼   ► You don't need your own custom,

01:44:24 ◼   ► you don't even need your own custom app, right?

01:44:26 ◼   ► Which isn't that much to ask, it's not that much to build,

01:44:30 ◼   ► but in fact, in the open podcast world,

01:44:32 ◼   ► it's actually contrary to,

01:44:36 ◼   ► It's a bad idea and probably slows adoption if you build your own app.

01:44:41 ◼   ► It's better. All you need is an RSS feed, which really is, technically speaking, trivial to publish.

01:44:47 ◼   ► That's right. That's right. You know, it's very interesting to think about because, I mean,

01:44:52 ◼   ► he's so he's also making less than Stern did, right? Because Stern was making

01:44:56 ◼   ► certain or what was certain making 20 million a year? Was it $100 million a year?

01:45:00 ◼   ► I think it's no, I think 20 million. So yeah, there's like five year deals for $90 million

01:45:05 ◼   ► or a five-year deal for $90 million. Yeah, whereas the Rogan thing I think could be up

01:45:10 ◼   ► to $100 million. So maybe it's actually roughly comparable. I heard it's for like three years

01:45:14 ◼   ► or something and there's a signing bonus and increasing amount each year, but then there's

01:45:19 ◼   ► like performance incentive. So I guess it's actually fairly comparable, but it's fairly

01:45:24 ◼   ► comparable sort of 15 years on. So there's some degree to which it's less. But I think

01:45:29 ◼   ► I think it's a win-win for, I mean,

01:45:32 ◼   ► there's a degree, if you're very big,

01:45:37 ◼   ► advertising is always gonna be, has the most upside

01:45:40 ◼   ► as far as sort of monetization goes.

01:45:42 ◼   ► Like subscriptions are great,

01:45:43 ◼   ► obviously I've built my whole career on subscriptions,

01:45:46 ◼   ► but you are by definition limiting your audience

01:45:49 ◼   ► because people have to pay money

01:45:51 ◼   ► to sort of get into your universe.

01:45:53 ◼   ► And there's always, and you can't spread as well,

01:45:56 ◼   ► it's hard to get viral, you know,

01:45:57 ◼   ► people are always hitting paywalls. Implied in a subscription is making it more difficult

01:46:03 ◼   ► for people in some respects.

01:46:05 ◼   ► Well, I've got to interrupt. Live correction here. I'm getting a feed here from the control

01:46:11 ◼   ► room. Nope, we were wrong. I talked myself down. Stern's current deal from 2015 is

01:46:16 ◼   ► a five-year deal for $90 million per year.

01:46:19 ◼   ► Okay, that's what I thought. That's what I thought. Yeah, so Rogan is making a lot

01:46:22 ◼   ► less because he's making an average of I think it's around 30 million once you once you sort of

01:46:29 ◼   ► sketch it all out that's that's whisper I don't know if it's actually true or not

01:46:34 ◼   ► it passes the sniff test though to me in terms of how popular

01:46:40 ◼   ► does just the sniff test of how popular does Joe Rogan seem to me in popular culture compared to

01:46:48 ◼   ► Howard Stern and yeah it seems to me like a 2020 deal in a new compared to

01:46:56 ◼   ► 2015 where there's a lot more money in the market and a player like Spotify who

01:47:01 ◼   ► wasn't in the market in 2015 I mean Spotify was around but they weren't

01:47:05 ◼   ► throwing around 100 million dollar deals for podcast type hosts it just you know

01:47:12 ◼   ► and I just think like you know in terms of Howard Stern's enormous pop cultural

01:47:17 ◼   ► presence. He was, for a couple of years, he was on the America's Got Talent show. I don't know if you

01:47:23 ◼   ► ever watched it. It's not the type of show I watch. It's like one of those, you know, it's a talent

01:47:28 ◼   ► contest with celebrity judges. There's a bunch of them. But they got Howard Stern to do it for two

01:47:34 ◼   ► or three years. And I watched because of that. I've never watched before. And since he left,

01:47:40 ◼   ► I haven't watched again. But I watched when he was on. And it wasn't even that great. And he wasn't

01:47:46 ◼   ► really is Howard Sterny. It was sort of a dour—you know, it was appropriate for a

01:47:50 ◼   ► primetime NBC show, but it still made for much better television than, in my opinion,

01:47:55 ◼   ► than it was without him. If Joe Rogan became the host of America's—or one of the judges on

01:48:01 ◼   ► America's Got Talent, I think it would be news. I think it would bring in people, but it wouldn't

01:48:05 ◼   ► be the sensation that Howard Stern was. So, Rogan—

01:48:08 ◼   ► Well, that's part of the internet. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

01:48:11 ◼   ► Well, Rogan at 30 million compared to Stern at 90 in a five-year-old deal that's about to expire

01:48:17 ◼   ► feels, you know, passes the sniff test. Well, and this is the advantage that Howard

01:48:23 ◼   ► Stern had, right? He might gripe about, "I came up through the control board and, you know,

01:48:29 ◼   ► it worked my way up," et cetera, et cetera. But if you were able to sort of get in the door—because

01:48:34 ◼   ► the problem was there was a door, right? There was a gatekeeper. And if you were able to get in,

01:48:37 ◼   ► if you were able to be William Safire, you were able to be whatever it might be,

01:48:40 ◼   ► Then you had very little competition

01:48:42 ◼   ► and so you had situations where Howard Stern could be on every radio station all over the entire country and

01:48:48 ◼   ► People had nothing else to listen to so they listened to the radio right and we thought you see us like TV shows

01:48:53 ◼   ► You know we talk about Seinfeld back in the day. You know

01:48:55 ◼   ► How could the entire country be watching one show well cuz there weren't that many shows to watch

01:49:01 ◼   ► So there was it was very beneficial

01:49:05 ◼   ► For you if you could get through the door and if you could get on top the payback was way greater back then

01:49:12 ◼   ► Whereas today sure Joe Rogan's the most popular podcaster. Yeah, he has millions of downloads

01:49:17 ◼   ► But he's competing against hundreds not hundreds thousands or if not millions of other

01:49:23 ◼   ► Podcasts and other uses for their time. I listen to podcasts all the time

01:49:26 ◼   ► I don't listen to Rogan at all whereas to imagine if I watch TV all the time

01:49:31 ◼   ► but I've never seen Seinfeld. Like, it's unimaginable back then in a way it is very