Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:00:02 ◼   ► - Hello and welcome to Connected episode 205.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I'm your host, Stephen Hackett.

00:00:14 ◼   ► I'm joined this week by my co-mic, Mr. Hurley.

00:00:18 ◼   ► - Wait. - Co-mic.

00:00:21 ◼   ► - Do you have more than one or am I shared with somebody?

00:00:25 ◼   ► - This is the argument we had last week

00:00:26 ◼   ► that actually, believe it or not,

00:00:28 ◼   ► trimmed down in the actual show because it went on for a very long time.

00:00:31 ◼   ► I have literally no memory of this discussion.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I called you something and yeah and you were upset that maybe I had another mic in my life.

00:00:41 ◼   ► But I don't.

00:00:42 ◼   ► But now we're just rehashing last week's show and we need to move on because this week,

00:00:45 ◼   ► Myke, is this week's show.

00:00:47 ◼   ► That's how it works.

00:00:49 ◼   ► That's very true and it's a very special episode.

00:00:51 ◼   ► It is.

00:00:52 ◼   ► What are we doing today?

00:00:53 ◼   ► We're going to teach some lessons to everyone.

00:00:55 ◼   ► No we're not.

00:00:56 ◼   ► is our anniversary in three days. Real AFM turns a wonderful four years old. Is there

00:01:03 ◼   ► a specific, like, you know you have like the terrible twos for children, you have a lot

00:01:07 ◼   ► of children. Is there like a particular behavioral trait that is expected of a four year old?

00:01:13 ◼   ► You know, they're getting their stuff together after being really bad at two and three.

00:01:18 ◼   ► Alright, so that's where we are, we're finally getting it together.

00:01:20 ◼   ► I need to let you know the themes for the fourth anniversary.

00:01:23 ◼   ► Oh good, good, good.

00:01:26 ◼   ► The traditional is linen or silk, so I'm getting you iOS 5.

00:01:31 ◼   ► Congratulations.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Okay, thank you.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And the modern theme is electrical appliance, so I also got you a toaster.

00:01:40 ◼   ► Oh, that's really nice.

00:01:43 ◼   ► Don't put the linen in the toaster, because that's not good.

00:01:46 ◼   ► I got you an electrical silk weaving machine, so I'm going for a little bit longer.

00:01:52 ◼   ► I can't wait to make a suit for our next live show.

00:01:54 ◼   ► gonna be so lately you can make like a smoking jacket or something yeah out of

00:01:58 ◼   ► silk smoking jackets are made out of silk like that's I'm not cool enough to

00:02:04 ◼   ► have owned a smoking jacket clearly clearly anyway so today's episode will

00:02:10 ◼   ► mostly be a Q&A so we do this every year this will be our fifth Q&A because we

00:02:16 ◼   ► did one on the formation of the company day so we've done a zero or one two and

00:02:23 ◼   ► three they will all be in the show notes so you can go and get them. We've had like a couple that

00:02:28 ◼   ► have been b-sides this is the second on connected and one was a video so we like to mix it up we

00:02:34 ◼   ► like to keep it fresh around here so they're available to you if you want to go and check

00:02:39 ◼   ► those out just to see you know maybe you could do like some kind of binge of all of them and see like

00:02:43 ◼   ► did we do what we say we were going to do you know it could be interesting to challenge us on that

00:02:48 ◼   ► But I would say that we probably have progressed through these things pretty nicely over time.

00:02:54 ◼   ► But they're available to you if you want to go and watch them.

00:02:56 ◼   ► I don't know if I'd necessarily recommend it, but like, you do you.

00:03:01 ◼   ► I think that's the most important thing, right?

00:03:03 ◼   ► At the end of the day.

00:03:03 ◼   ► Yeah, if you want to be a completionist, you will listen to six hours of us answering

00:03:08 ◼   ► basically the same type of questions we're going to get today.

00:03:11 ◼   ► Yeah, and I would expect, quite frequently, very, very similar answers.

00:03:15 ◼   ► But that's perfectly fine because that shows our level of consistency that we strive for here at relay FM that video is really good

00:03:22 ◼   ► It don't watch the whole thing, but at least watch the first like 35 seconds and the last 35 seconds

00:03:27 ◼   ► Yeah, cuz you like push me out of frame. It's pretty funny

00:03:31 ◼   ► It's a good is a good opener and the clothes you pushed me a lot harder than you had to push you very hard

00:03:35 ◼   ► I just went method on that one. Yeah, if I don't break his nose, it's not real. So anyways

00:03:41 ◼   ► go check those out and

00:03:44 ◼   ► Because it's August, it's membership drive as well.

00:03:49 ◼   ► So it's Relay Birthday Month,

00:03:50 ◼   ► and we talk about our membership.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Myke, do you know about the Relay FM membership?

00:03:54 ◼   ► Are you a member?

00:03:55 ◼   ► - No. - Of Relay FM?

00:03:56 ◼   ► - I'm actually not a member, no.

00:03:59 ◼   ► - Oh, I am because I make sure that everything works.

00:04:02 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:04:04 ◼   ► I don't think I'm a member anyway, maybe.

00:04:06 ◼   ► How would I even know that, Steven?

00:04:08 ◼   ► 'Cause I get the newsletter, right?

00:04:10 ◼   ► - You get the newsletter.

00:04:10 ◼   ► So if you are a Relay FM member,

00:04:12 ◼   ► You get access to this monthly behind the scenes newsletter.

00:04:16 ◼   ► This month, Myke Hurley walks us through his desk setup

00:04:19 ◼   ► in the newsletter that's coming out here

00:04:22 ◼   ► in about a week or so.

00:04:23 ◼   ► And you get a bunch of cool wallpapers

00:04:25 ◼   ► based on our show art.

00:04:26 ◼   ► You get a monthly host crossover show

00:04:29 ◼   ► where I take two hosts who normally don't work together

00:04:32 ◼   ► and I put them in a Skype call together

00:04:34 ◼   ► and we talk about something.

00:04:36 ◼   ► And of course, you get a full feed of bonus episodes

00:04:40 ◼   ► of Real FM shows starting in August.

00:04:42 ◼   ► The first one went up today, "Reconsiderable Differences" went first, and we've run those

00:04:46 ◼   ► through the beginning of September.

00:04:48 ◼   ► Myke, we're going to do one on "Connected," aren't we?

00:04:50 ◼   ► We most certainly are.

00:04:52 ◼   ► Our bonus episode this year.

00:04:54 ◼   ► In past years, and if you become a member, a new member, you get access to all of the

00:04:59 ◼   ► previous years of bonus shows that we've ever done, too.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Typically, the "Connected" one has been that we all get together and share our home screens,

00:05:09 ◼   ► but we fight too much.

00:05:10 ◼   ► It always devolves into like a real fight by the end of the episode.

00:05:15 ◼   ► An actual argument.

00:05:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and I didn't want to do that this time.

00:05:19 ◼   ► So we came up with the idea of we're going to watch The Pirates of Silicon Valley, which

00:05:25 ◼   ► was a what feels like made for TV movie is what I'm expecting it was, right?

00:05:30 ◼   ► Because it has that kind of feel to it.

00:05:32 ◼   ► It totally does.

00:05:34 ◼   ► But it is, without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite movie about Apple and Steve Jobs.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not Pirates of the Caribbean, that's a different movie.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I mean, they're similar, but different.

00:05:49 ◼   ► That one also feels like a made for TV movie.

00:05:53 ◼   ► So yeah, it also focuses on Microsoft too.

00:05:59 ◼   ► So it's really fun.

00:06:00 ◼   ► I like it a lot.

00:06:02 ◼   ► It is a good movie and one of the reasons that we want to watch it is so Stephen can

00:06:06 ◼   ► tell us how accurate everything is.

00:06:09 ◼   ► That's right.

00:06:10 ◼   ► So you can look out for that.

00:06:12 ◼   ► When is that coming out?

00:06:13 ◼   ► That's coming out kind of later towards the end of the month, right?

00:06:15 ◼   ► Should be August 24th.

00:06:17 ◼   ► Okay, awesome.

00:06:18 ◼   ► So you can watch out for it then, but there's a ton of really, really exciting stuff coming

00:06:23 ◼   ► out over the next few weeks.

00:06:25 ◼   ► It's always a really fun time.

00:06:27 ◼   ► So you should become a member.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Steven if somebody's not a member how did I do that?

00:06:31 ◼   ► well, they can show up at your house with $5 or

00:06:35 ◼   ► That's that's a lot of work you go to relay.fm

00:06:38 ◼   ► /connected and sign up to support this show or if you want to support other shows or the whole network you can go to

00:06:44 ◼   ► relay.fm/membership

00:06:46 ◼   ► So either one and you can you can pick a level

00:06:50 ◼   ► $5 a month $10 a month $100 a year and you get all the same perks and you'll be off to the races

00:06:56 ◼   ► Yep, most definitely.

00:06:58 ◼   ► So, there's another thing that you should know.

00:07:00 ◼   ► If you've been a member in the past, we have changed the URL

00:07:03 ◼   ► for the feed that we use for the bonus content.

00:07:05 ◼   ► You will have received an email about this if you're an active member.

00:07:09 ◼   ► So there is a new URL that you need to subscribe to.

00:07:12 ◼   ► So that's there. If you have not got that URL,

00:07:15 ◼   ► or if you previously cancelled your membership,

00:07:18 ◼   ► you probably need to sign up again.

00:07:20 ◼   ► If you have any problems, you can contact us.

00:07:23 ◼   ► Alright, so that's the membership plug out of the way. Thank you, thank you, thank you

00:07:27 ◼   ► if you do sign up. It means an awful lot that you think that you want to give your money

00:07:32 ◼   ► to us. If you can't for any reason, it's totally okay. We don't hate you, we love you, just

00:07:37 ◼   ► for listening. We are clearly advertising supported on this show and on most of Relay

00:07:42 ◼   ► FM, but the membership money really just helps give us a baseline that we can work from because

00:07:49 ◼   ► So many of us, including me and Steven,

00:07:50 ◼   ► like this is how we put food on our table,

00:07:52 ◼   ► is with the shows that we record.

00:07:54 ◼   ► So this is just like another really incredible way

00:07:57 ◼   ► that we can receive support from you if you wanna give it.

00:08:00 ◼   ► And then in return, we like to try and give you

00:08:02 ◼   ► some special stuff and some recurring stuff

00:08:05 ◼   ► that you will receive from us.

00:08:08 ◼   ► - The chat room is asking how they could watch

00:08:11 ◼   ► Pirates of Silicon Valley in advance

00:08:13 ◼   ► so they can watch it and then listen to us talk about it.

00:08:16 ◼   ► Just from doing some quick Googling,

00:08:17 ◼   ► Of course you can buy it on DVD, it's like $6 from Amazon.

00:08:22 ◼   ► But it seems like you can also rent it from YouTube for $3 if that's available in your

00:08:28 ◼   ► country.

00:08:29 ◼   ► In the UK you can buy it on Amazon Prime now because that's what I had to do.

00:08:32 ◼   ► Okay.

00:08:33 ◼   ► And it's also, at least it used to be on iTunes.

00:08:36 ◼   ► So I don't think it's streaming anywhere like on Netflix or Hulu.

00:08:40 ◼   ► But you can get your hands on it pretty easily.

00:08:42 ◼   ► It is an SD movie so it's not very expensive.

00:08:45 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:08:47 ◼   ► But it's good though, like it is genuinely good, but we won't go into it anymore than

00:08:51 ◼   ► that because we'll just end up spoiling everything.

00:08:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:54 ◼   ► Yeah, it was, I can't remember how much it was, but it was, it was pretty cheap for me

00:08:58 ◼   ► to get.

00:08:59 ◼   ► It's, it's, yeah, it's pretty cheap.

00:09:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:02 ◼   ► Okay, so I think it's question time, Myke.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, so we've been asking for questions from you all about kind of, mostly just relay

00:09:12 ◼   ► FM and we're gonna answer as many of them as we most possibly can. I've kind of

00:09:17 ◼   ► broke them down into three categories. We have like general company questions,

00:09:21 ◼   ► questions about shows like content and stuff like that and then at the end of

00:09:26 ◼   ► course we'll finish with some fun questions. So I we're gonna kind of just

00:09:31 ◼   ► go backwards and forwards asking these questions to each other. I will start by

00:09:35 ◼   ► asking you the question that comes from Khanz1 on Twitter. I'm running the

00:09:40 ◼   ► company for the last four years? How has it been different to what you expected? And what

00:09:45 ◼   ► do you think it will be like for the next four years?

00:09:50 ◼   ► I think this question, like I really leaned into the first part of the phrase of like

00:09:54 ◼   ► actually running a company like what is it like to be a business owner? And for me, it's

00:10:00 ◼   ► been I've gotten much more I got comfortable with it much sooner than I thought I would,

00:10:06 ◼   ► especially like on the financial and legal aspects of it,

00:10:09 ◼   ► I was really intimidated by that when we started.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And most of that, the way we're divided,

00:10:14 ◼   ► most of that falls on my sort of side of the plate.

00:10:18 ◼   ► And so I just had to get up to speed

00:10:20 ◼   ► on a lot of stuff really quickly

00:10:22 ◼   ► and I was able to do that thankfully

00:10:24 ◼   ► and now I feel confident in like the way

00:10:27 ◼   ► that I run my part of the business

00:10:29 ◼   ► is the correct way to do it.

00:10:31 ◼   ► So I was expecting that to be scarier

00:10:34 ◼   ► than it ended up being.

00:10:35 ◼   ► And I'm glad I'm glad I was wrong.

00:10:37 ◼   ► I'm glad I was surprised by that.

00:10:39 ◼   ► As far as that looks in the next four years, I think people know, you know, as we've grown,

00:10:44 ◼   ► we work with a lot, many more people now.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And we have a sales manager who works part time for us.

00:10:50 ◼   ► And I think the next four years are going to be more like the last year and a half have

00:10:54 ◼   ► been where it is a lot more of Myke, you and I delegating things to other people, bringing

00:11:00 ◼   ► more people on to help and growing it that way.

00:11:03 ◼   ► I'll speak for me at least, I think what I can do as far as like running the company

00:11:07 ◼   ► aspect of it, my plate's pretty full.

00:11:09 ◼   ► And so as we continue to grow and do more things, it's going to be about expanding the

00:11:13 ◼   ► team now, not just figuring out between me and you who can do something, if that difference

00:11:19 ◼   ► makes sense.

00:11:20 ◼   ► I think it does.

00:11:21 ◼   ► I think for me over the last four years, things have progressed much faster than I was expecting

00:11:25 ◼   ► them to.

00:11:27 ◼   ► I don't really know where I would have said we would be by this time,

00:11:31 ◼   ► but it feels like we are much further ahead of where I thought we could be.

00:11:37 ◼   ► So, you know, so if I was looking at the next four years,

00:11:41 ◼   ► I expect it to be similar and that it will be unexpected.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Like I don't I don't feel like I have a very good sense

00:11:49 ◼   ► of predicting the future of what we do.

00:11:51 ◼   ► And I think I've always felt that way.

00:11:55 ◼   ► And I think it can, when you're in something like this, it can be super difficult to try

00:11:58 ◼   ► and make that expectation.

00:12:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so.

00:12:04 ◼   ► You know, if you, we have a lot of questions about this, so I won't go, I won't, I'll save

00:12:08 ◼   ► that for later.

00:12:09 ◼   ► Yeah, we've got more detail that we can go into in some later questions.

00:12:13 ◼   ► Alright, up next from Bonnie, "What are the top three things you wish you had done differently

00:12:20 ◼   ► over the past four years?"

00:12:23 ◼   ► So there were quite a lot of questions that had this kind of conceit to them,

00:12:27 ◼   ► either like, what is the thing you regret or what is the thing that you wish

00:12:32 ◼   ► you'd done differently?

00:12:33 ◼   ► If you if you could go back and tell yourself something

00:12:36 ◼   ► that you could have fixed, what would it be?

00:12:38 ◼   ► And the thing is that like this question implies

00:12:41 ◼   ► like there is an implication in the question, which is not a malicious thing,

00:12:45 ◼   ► but the implication there is that there is there are regrets, right?

00:12:48 ◼   ► That like if you wish you'd done something differently,

00:12:51 ◼   ► It means that you regret something.

00:12:52 ◼   ► But I actually don't have any regrets for the way that we've run our company over

00:12:59 ◼   ► the last four years.

00:13:00 ◼   ► Like there are things that in the moment you are like, oh, man, I wished that this

00:13:06 ◼   ► could have been done differently or like I wished I wouldn't have done this.

00:13:10 ◼   ► But we have got through every single one of those situations with no major

00:13:16 ◼   ► implications.

00:13:16 ◼   ► Like I couldn't think of three specific things that I would want to change.

00:13:21 ◼   ► Like there's small stuff like having our caching in a better place earlier on,

00:13:25 ◼   ► not entering into the business relationships that we did early on.

00:13:28 ◼   ► But none of these caused the last things detrimental effect.

00:13:31 ◼   ► We learned a lot from them, and I'm happy that we learned all those lessons.

00:13:35 ◼   ► So I'm kind of a big believer in the idea.

00:13:39 ◼   ► And it's not a complex idea that kind of like you are the sum of your parts, right?

00:13:43 ◼   ► Like if if you if you are

00:13:46 ◼   ► generally happy with where you are,

00:13:49 ◼   ► then you wouldn't want to go back and change something like that whole butterfly effect type thing.

00:13:53 ◼   ► You go and make one change in your past and you change literally everything. Like if you just

00:13:59 ◼   ► watch Back to the Future 2, you know, like big bad things happened to Marty and his family, you know,

00:14:04 ◼   ► we all know that's the case. So that's kind of how I feel as well. I wouldn't want to change anything

00:14:09 ◼   ► that we've done because I feel happy about where we are. Totally the same and I too struggle with

00:14:17 ◼   ► this question because we've been so fortunate over the last four years that even things

00:14:24 ◼   ► that I would do differently, they all sort of shook out in the end.

00:14:28 ◼   ► Yeah, there's always little things and nothing big, nothing like really altering to our trajectory,

00:14:35 ◼   ► I don't think.

00:14:36 ◼   ► But in my view, there's so much positive that's come out of this.

00:14:40 ◼   ► For us, our families, the community around Relay, then like, yeah, some stuff that was

00:14:45 ◼   ► frustrating on a temporary from like a temporary perspective is fine because of

00:14:49 ◼   ► where we are now. Because this is like a normal thing like even this week we've

00:14:53 ◼   ► had some struggles with some stuff but it's just like that's what running a

00:14:56 ◼   ► business is. Mm-hmm. Because every single day we are trading into things we've

00:15:03 ◼   ► never experienced before so because it's just me and you we have to just make the

00:15:10 ◼   ► decisions. And like yeah and that's that's like the biggest thing about

00:15:13 ◼   ► owning your own business, right? Like every single day you have to make a new decision

00:15:18 ◼   ► that the day before you didn't think even existed, you didn't know existed. So you kind of just have

00:15:23 ◼   ► to make your way and at first that is absolutely terrifying but then later on it just becomes a

00:15:31 ◼   ► minor annoyance which is how it is now because you get the experience and the confidence in yourself

00:15:37 ◼   ► that you're not going to destroy everything by making one decision. So then it just becomes

00:15:42 ◼   ► frustrating where you're like, "Oh man, what? We have to do this thing now, huh?" Like GDPR,

00:15:47 ◼   ► right? That was like this huge thing, but we are now at a point where like

00:15:54 ◼   ► actually finding out what we needed to do wasn't difficult because we just asked our lawyer,

00:16:00 ◼   ► right? And then they put us in touch with the person we needed. And then it was just a case of

00:16:08 ◼   ► doing the legwork to get it in place.

00:16:12 ◼   ► Well, if GDPR would have happened in year one,

00:16:14 ◼   ► it would have been like, oh well, that's it then.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Close up shop. - Back it up.

00:16:18 ◼   ► - We can't do this.

00:16:19 ◼   ► Billions of dollars of fines.

00:16:21 ◼   ► And I think that's the biggest difference.

00:16:23 ◼   ► All right, we should move on.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Frank asked, and this is a slightly different question.

00:16:27 ◼   ► If you had a time machine, what advice would you give

00:16:30 ◼   ► yourself before you started Relay?

00:16:32 ◼   ► - If I had a time machine, I would think I would do

00:16:35 ◼   ► all sorts of things.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Not just talking about work. - No, butterfly effect.

00:16:37 ◼   ► I just said it. Butterfly effect.

00:16:39 ◼   ► Just go take a sports almanac and then Biff ends at president. Wait. So for me, I think

00:16:47 ◼   ► it would be to, like in those early days when, especially when you and I were both still

00:16:54 ◼   ► working regular jobs, but then I feel like it got more stressful when you were independent

00:17:00 ◼   ► and I was not. I really struggled. We've talked about this. We talked about it publicly. Like

00:17:05 ◼   ► I really struggled with the imbalance between the two of us because you were in it full-time

00:17:09 ◼   ► and I had a job and we had a lot of back and forth.

00:17:13 ◼   ► I would tell myself that, "Hey, that time period is going to be stressful, but at the

00:17:17 ◼   ► end of it, you're going to get to go independent."

00:17:20 ◼   ► Having that weight off my shoulders, because my biggest fear in that...

00:17:24 ◼   ► It was maybe like nine months or so, whatever it was.

00:17:28 ◼   ► My biggest fear was, "Myke can go independent because he's, at the time, not married.

00:17:35 ◼   ► married now, Myke, which is awesome, but didn't have kids or anything. I had kids and a mortgage.

00:17:41 ◼   ► Myke was able to go full-time in it, and Relay would never make enough where I could do it

00:17:45 ◼   ► too, and that we'd be stuck in this limbo forever. And I would tell past Steven that

00:17:50 ◼   ► that won't be the case, and just to sort of get through this, because out the other side

00:17:54 ◼   ► you're going to be in a lot better shape. And that's how it turned out. But that time

00:17:57 ◼   ► was really hard in hindsight, and I'm glad that it's over.

00:18:00 ◼   ► So again, same feeling, I wouldn't necessarily want to do this in case it ruined anything,

00:18:05 ◼   ► but let's just imagine that I could be guaranteed that it wouldn't ruin anything.

00:18:09 ◼   ► There's two things that I would want to do.

00:18:11 ◼   ► One of them is that idea of what you just said then about the two of us, I would want

00:18:19 ◼   ► to go back and tell me that I didn't have to worry, because a big fear of mine was when

00:18:25 ◼   ► you eventually did kind of quit your job to do real AFM stuff that because I sell the ads

00:18:33 ◼   ► and we didn't have anything like membership at the time that I was responsible for feeding your

00:18:40 ◼   ► children and like that was really scary to me right that like that I had to sell ads on your

00:18:49 ◼   ► shows because otherwise you made no money. Like that was terrifying to me to have that kind of

00:18:55 ◼   ► responsibility and I don't feel it anymore because the scale is much different, right? So like I

00:19:02 ◼   ► don't really have that fear anymore because we've also had these multiple years of success.

00:19:06 ◼   ► But I would like to, you know, just tell myself like don't worry about this, like you're going

00:19:12 ◼   ► to be able to do it. And the other thing I would want to do is go back to both of us kind of like

00:19:18 ◼   ► like, when we were together two months before we launched our company and really kind of

00:19:25 ◼   ► going through it, just print out our hosts page and take that back to us in the past

00:19:32 ◼   ► and be like, "This is what it's going to look like." Because we never would have believed

00:19:37 ◼   ► it and that would be, you know, that would be fun.

00:19:42 ◼   ► It would be, yeah, it would be really eye-opening, I think.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Alex Cox, seems like a made up name.

00:19:48 ◼   ► How did you decide which of you takes on specific aspects

00:19:51 ◼   ► of the business?

00:19:52 ◼   ► Is something you knew when you started the company?

00:19:55 ◼   ► Did it organically evolve?

00:19:57 ◼   ► Have you discovered new strengths and weaknesses

00:19:59 ◼   ► over the years that were surprising to you?

00:20:02 ◼   ► - All right, I read a book for Cortex

00:20:05 ◼   ► called The E-Myth Revisited.

00:20:07 ◼   ► Terrible book, good episode of Cortex

00:20:10 ◼   ► because the book was so terrible.

00:20:12 ◼   ► But it had one thing in it that was useful, which was the idea of no matter how big your

00:20:18 ◼   ► company is, that you should create an organizational chart for it.

00:20:25 ◼   ► So not too long after I read that book, we met up for our annual retreat, which we've not

00:20:31 ◼   ► done this year because of traveling constraints, which is very sad.

00:20:36 ◼   ► I'm very sad about that.

00:20:38 ◼   ► But we sat down and we went through all of the tasks that we believe our company has,

00:20:45 ◼   ► like all of the things that we go through, and we assigned roles and job titles to each other

00:20:52 ◼   ► based upon that. So like, I got director of sales and Stephen got like SVP of live events and all

00:21:01 ◼   ► that kind of stuff. And this was like a real thing that we did, taking it very seriously, right? Like

00:21:06 ◼   ► we weren't joking around with it because then what it also did, because you go from the very top

00:21:11 ◼   ► all the way down to like the lowest level, like assistant of something, right? You go all the way

00:21:17 ◼   ► down for the entire, what you consider the entire company to be, and then you plan it all out for

00:21:24 ◼   ► yourself, right? So you're like, these are all the things that I want to do, and these are all the

00:21:29 ◼   ► things that we think are important. We assigned those jobs to each other, and then what that

00:21:33 ◼   ► stopped doing was a thing came in and then we would say, "Are you doing this or am I

00:21:38 ◼   ► doing this?" Like that just stopped because we then knew who was doing what

00:21:43 ◼   ► because the job titles were established and over time as new things are coming

00:21:50 ◼   ► in it's way easier for like completely new parts of our business occur then we

00:21:57 ◼   ► it's way easier for us to have a very quick conversation and be like, "Does this

00:22:01 ◼   ► fit into your part of the organization or my part of the organization because

00:22:05 ◼   ► now we both have like very particular ideas about what we put into the

00:22:10 ◼   ► business. So like when live shows came up as a thing it very much fit into

00:22:15 ◼   ► your side because you're really good at organizing stuff.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Mm-hmm and I like I like everything about live shows so it a lot of that is

00:22:25 ◼   ► organic because you and I are very similar in a lot of ways that we're good

00:22:30 ◼   ► at different things and I think we really have been fortunate to complement each other

00:22:35 ◼   ► really well.

00:22:36 ◼   ► I think over time we have started to meet more in the middle, right?

00:22:39 ◼   ► Like the longer we're working together I think we're both getting better at each other's

00:22:42 ◼   ► thing but we do still have very, and I think that's just through osmosis of working together,

00:22:48 ◼   ► right?

00:22:49 ◼   ► Like that we both end up getting better because we understand how we work.

00:22:54 ◼   ► Mary couples.

00:22:55 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:22:56 ◼   ► Mary couples start to look alike.

00:22:57 ◼   ► Yep.

00:22:58 ◼   ► more like me now than you ever have. So I got that going. And you sound more like me.

00:23:02 ◼   ► We're just meeting in the middle. We're meeting on a small, a small Atlantic island.

00:23:10 ◼   ► Like a little piece of driftwood. Anyways, it's a good question. And I think that advice is really

00:23:16 ◼   ► good from that book. That's a hilarious Cortex episode, by the way, that'll be in the show notes.

00:23:20 ◼   ► But that idea, like even if you're two people, we will probably never have many jobs. Let's say

00:23:27 ◼   ► Let's say there were 15 positions.

00:23:29 ◼   ► We'll probably never fill that out, but it was a good exercise so we could understand

00:23:34 ◼   ► where we were.

00:23:35 ◼   ► And when we hired somebody, that came out of that organization chart.

00:23:40 ◼   ► We know, "Okay, this is where this position is, this is who this person reports to."

00:23:46 ◼   ► And it means that when it's time to make a decision, you've already weighed a lot of

00:23:52 ◼   ► the factors.

00:23:53 ◼   ► And so when it's time to make the decision, it's just about the decision itself.

00:23:56 ◼   ► You don't have to do all this backlog of work to get where you need to be.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And so it's really good advice.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I think the strengths thing I talked about earlier, I just didn't know.

00:24:05 ◼   ► I was very worried about a lot of the administrative stuff.

00:24:10 ◼   ► And we struggled with it at first, but we have systems and processes in place now.

00:24:15 ◼   ► And our error rate is way, way down.

00:24:17 ◼   ► And it's been something we've had to work at and build over the years.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But I'm really proud of what that's become.

00:24:23 ◼   ► It's part of the business no one ever sees, but it's one that's really important because

00:24:27 ◼   ► it lets us go through what we need to go through as a company, processes that we execute on,

00:24:34 ◼   ► you know, sometimes on a daily basis that really work well.

00:24:37 ◼   ► And that's something I thought I was good at before, and now I know that I'm good at

00:24:42 ◼   ► it because I've had the expertise to do this with you and with Relay.

00:24:46 ◼   ► So that's been something that I've been…

00:24:47 ◼   ► It's a totally different scale to anything you've done before because it's all of it,

00:24:53 ◼   ► not just some of it.

00:24:54 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:55 ◼   ► It's all of it.

00:24:56 ◼   ► You know?

00:24:57 ◼   ► Where like in, I think both of us in previous jobs is like, "Oh yeah, we could do this part

00:25:00 ◼   ► of it and this part of it."

00:25:01 ◼   ► But then there were this, then you'd hand it over to somebody else.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Well, that somebody else doesn't exist, right?

00:25:07 ◼   ► Like it's, we have to do all of it.

00:25:09 ◼   ► Bingo.

00:25:10 ◼   ► All right, should we take our first break?

00:25:14 ◼   ► Let's take our first break.

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00:27:09 ◼   ► All right, our next question comes from David Cuth.

00:27:12 ◼   ► What is something that you have learned to do in the last four years that you'd

00:27:17 ◼   ► not expected that you would have learned to do?

00:27:19 ◼   ► So I'll take this one first and mine is selling advertising inventory

00:27:26 ◼   ► at the level that we do. Like I knew that selling ads was going to be a part

00:27:31 ◼   ► of our company right because otherwise how else we were going to make money

00:27:35 ◼   ► but the size and amount of spots that we have to fill

00:27:38 ◼   ► now is not at all what I would have expected that we would have to take care of.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Like, it's a lot.

00:27:47 ◼   ► We sell a lot of ad spots on a lot of shows pretty consistently, and we're getting a lot better at it.

00:27:53 ◼   ► I wouldn't have expected that we would have been at that point by now, and I just never would have

00:28:01 ◼   ► expected that we would have been selling for so many shows.

00:28:05 ◼   ► you know, like there is a thing later on about like adding in shows and we always have more shows than we expect we're gonna have and

00:28:12 ◼   ► So way more of them have advertising on then I would have imagined

00:28:17 ◼   ► Yeah, it's when you looked at our inventory system. I remember what it was like in the early days

00:28:22 ◼   ► It was you could see it all in one page and now it's like holy cow

00:28:27 ◼   ► There's so much stuff in here and and you guys do such a good job at keeping it keeping the inventory not only filled but like

00:28:35 ◼   ► Correct, like no data entry errors like everything is neat and tidy and as a huge

00:28:41 ◼   ► a huge

00:28:43 ◼   ► Like a huge thank you from me to you and to carry for doing that because I know I don't do in that world every

00:28:49 ◼   ► Day, but if a question does come up

00:28:50 ◼   ► I know that if I don't know the answer I can find it reliably because those systems are so neat and tidy and that's a

00:28:57 ◼   ► huge part when you talk about scaling if you're if something as simple sounding as data entry doesn't scale

00:29:04 ◼   ► well, then you have a problem. And we've had to get that all working, and it works really

00:29:09 ◼   ► well now. That's a huge thumbs up to you guys.

00:29:15 ◼   ► David: Yeah, I did a very, very quick back of the envelope calculation. We have something

00:29:19 ◼   ► like 120 ad spots that we can sell in a month, and we're getting consistently closer all

00:29:27 ◼   ► the time to having them all sold out. That has happened multiple times this year and

00:29:32 ◼   ► had not happened before. So, you know, it's, it's a lot to keep straight. And we do it

00:29:40 ◼   ► now, as you say, we're very little issue. And that is a surprise to me. So thank you

00:29:46 ◼   ► for your for your compliment.

00:29:47 ◼   ► Yeah, my answer to this is is really different from yours. But I think I think you would.

00:29:54 ◼   ► I think you will agree with it. For me, something that I did not think I'd have to learn but

00:29:58 ◼   ► I think I am still learning, but is how to deal with being a public figure.

00:30:06 ◼   ► There's a term, and it's such a good term, you guys came up with on analog forever ago,

00:30:11 ◼   ► micro-famous.

00:30:12 ◼   ► It's like the idea that we're well known within a very specific community, and that's definitely

00:30:18 ◼   ► true.

00:30:19 ◼   ► And I've always had just great conversations and interactions with people, but that's something

00:30:23 ◼   ► I had to learn to be better at, and had to learn how to manage that.

00:30:27 ◼   ► And that's come with some decisions about some things I share on social media and those

00:30:32 ◼   ► sorts of things, like just trade-offs as the audience has grown.

00:30:35 ◼   ► That's something that I didn't really think about when we started this.

00:30:37 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, we'll keep doing our shows as normal."

00:30:38 ◼   ► I was like, "Well, now we're in however 10 times whatever size we started as, with that

00:30:46 ◼   ► has grown like spotlight on the company and on us.

00:30:50 ◼   ► And as our audiences have grown, just figuring out what that means in a bunch of different

00:30:53 ◼   ► ways.

00:30:54 ◼   ► It's hard, and in some ways it's maybe the hardest thing about this for me, but hopefully

00:30:59 ◼   ► I am continuing to mature and be better at it.

00:31:02 ◼   ► Because I do love talking to people who listen to the shows or read the sites or whatever,

00:31:06 ◼   ► but just being able to manage that better personally is something that I did not anticipate

00:31:14 ◼   ► having to take on.

00:31:16 ◼   ► It is a difficult transition, and it was really difficult for me when we started Cortex, because

00:31:23 ◼   ► it grew very quickly in a very short space of time.

00:31:27 ◼   ► That took a lot of adjustment for me to deal with that.

00:31:31 ◼   ► But over time I have gotten way better,

00:31:34 ◼   ► I'm way better at it now.

00:31:36 ◼   ► It happens to me very, very, very infrequently

00:31:40 ◼   ► that I will get noticed when I'm not expecting it.

00:31:45 ◼   ► But it does happen, it happens a few times a year

00:31:49 ◼   ► someone would recognize me kind of in the street when I'm not at a like

00:31:55 ◼   ► collection of nerds in a place. At WWDC. Exactly! And when it first happened I

00:32:02 ◼   ► was very bad at it and like super awkward and I didn't know what to do

00:32:07 ◼   ► because my brain wasn't in the mindset but now I can just launch straight into

00:32:13 ◼   ► it and like I know the things that I would say and I know how important it is

00:32:17 ◼   ► So like, because I've been in this position, like, if you've gotten the courage up to come

00:32:23 ◼   ► and say hello to me, like, I want to make sure that that person leaves that conversation

00:32:27 ◼   ► not feeling like that they're a specific imposition in my life, right?

00:32:31 ◼   ► So getting used to that has been very tricky, right?

00:32:38 ◼   ► But it's a valuable thing to do because I feel better when things go right.

00:32:44 ◼   ► So same as you.

00:32:46 ◼   ► All right, @iaminkiguy on Twitter asked, "Where do you each see Relay FM in the next four years?"

00:32:57 ◼   ► So I've been holding back some of my thoughts on this, right, for this question. So I'm very

00:33:04 ◼   ► confident that we'll be here, right? Like, I don't believe that we're going anywhere for a

00:33:10 ◼   ► significant period of time. I expect we'll have a lot of new hosts, there'll be people that you

00:33:15 ◼   ► don't know, right? The same as if you look over the last four years to now, there

00:33:19 ◼   ► would be people that you didn't know. There are people that I didn't know,

00:33:22 ◼   ► right? That like we didn't know people. I didn't know Gray four years ago. Like I

00:33:27 ◼   ► didn't even like I think I just found Hello Internet like a week before we

00:33:33 ◼   ► started the company, right? So it's very different. I think we'll look in four

00:33:37 ◼   ► years time. I believe that we will have expanded to new types of content and

00:33:41 ◼   ► we'll get into that a little bit later on. I also believe we will have more people that work for the

00:33:47 ◼   ► company in a significant role because we only really have like one and a half people in time,

00:33:56 ◼   ► right? And that's split across like four or five different people right now. I expect that that

00:34:02 ◼   ► will grow to multiple actual people that are employed or like contracted for a significant

00:34:09 ◼   ► portion of their time within the next four years. It just feels like that is a natural growth for us.

00:34:15 ◼   ► Totally. I think that follows the curve that we're on.

00:34:20 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't have anything much to add to that. I'm confident the company will be here. I think

00:34:27 ◼   ► it will be just like RelayNow isn't what it was even two years ago, really, that it will continue

00:34:33 ◼   ► to evolve and grow.

00:34:38 ◼   ► I'm excited about the future of the company.

00:34:40 ◼   ► I'm excited that we continue to do what we do and the way that we want to do it, which

00:34:45 ◼   ► is perhaps most important to me, that we're doing things on our own terms and the way

00:34:48 ◼   ► that we think they should be done.

00:34:52 ◼   ► To a degree, part of my answer is it's going to be like it is now, just with four more

00:34:56 ◼   ► years of experience under our belt.

00:35:00 ◼   ► So we'll see.

00:35:01 ◼   ► Alright, so next question comes from mehansmyer, speckhansmyer, four years in.

00:35:08 ◼   ► I'm sure you've found some ways to streamline various aspects of your business using technology.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Are there any challenges or aspects of running Relay FM right now where you're still hunting

00:35:20 ◼   ► for that optimum solution or workflow?

00:35:23 ◼   ► Do you have anything?

00:35:24 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:35:25 ◼   ► I thought about this for a minute.

00:35:27 ◼   ► know, I feel like there's some stuff that's just kind of a fixed thing like

00:35:31 ◼   ► editing is editing, right? It is just what it is. There are things that the

00:35:39 ◼   ► most obvious example to me, but not to the to the listeners is our CMS, which we

00:35:44 ◼   ► own custom built. And we have done a lot of work in that, especially over the last

00:35:50 ◼   ► two years, most of which no one ever sees, to make things like publishing the

00:35:55 ◼   ► shows better and easier for us and for our hosts.

00:35:58 ◼   ► And there are always things I'm trying

00:36:00 ◼   ► to smooth out rough edges in that CMS all the time.

00:36:04 ◼   ► So there's that.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Other than that, a lot of what we do

00:36:09 ◼   ► is still relatively manual.

00:36:12 ◼   ► We're making invoices.

00:36:13 ◼   ► We're tracking inventory.

00:36:15 ◼   ► And a lot of that, there's just not good workflows for it,

00:36:18 ◼   ► because it just needs human hands.

00:36:19 ◼   ► Now, we're better at it.

00:36:20 ◼   ► We're faster at it.

00:36:21 ◼   ► We're more competent at it.

00:36:23 ◼   ► So I don't know if the technology really helps

00:36:25 ◼   ► on that side of things.

00:36:26 ◼   ► What do you think?

00:36:27 ◼   ► That's your side of things.

00:36:28 ◼   ► - There is the element of like,

00:36:30 ◼   ► the technology is of a humans, right?

00:36:33 ◼   ► And like that is definitely a thing, right?

00:36:36 ◼   ► You said like it requires intervention,

00:36:38 ◼   ► like by human hands, like it totally does.

00:36:41 ◼   ► But one thing like that can't get better

00:36:43 ◼   ► is it can be people that's not me and you, right?

00:36:45 ◼   ► Like if we're just thinking about how we both feel

00:36:48 ◼   ► and I think that we both feel better about having Kerri

00:36:50 ◼   ► she manages so much stuff for us that it works, right?

00:36:56 ◼   ► Like I feel better, you feel better having someone else there who can take some tasks

00:37:00 ◼   ► away from us.

00:37:01 ◼   ► But again, like we're very inside baseball today, right?

00:37:06 ◼   ► Because it's I mean, you would have tuned out by now if you want into this.

00:37:10 ◼   ► Super into it.

00:37:11 ◼   ► But like, you know, looking at my side of the business, we have a lot of work still

00:37:17 ◼   ► need to be done to strengthen the tools that we use for managing our advertising inventory.

00:37:22 ◼   ► So like, the way that we book shows into a system and get our hosts copy and get our hosts paid and

00:37:28 ◼   ► that kind of stuff. Like, there are tools out there that we can use and we do use right now,

00:37:34 ◼   ► but we are outgrowing everything at an increasingly quicker basis that in all the same reasons that we

00:37:41 ◼   ► build and maintain our own CMS, we also eventually need to build and maintain our own advertising

00:37:48 ◼   ► system, I think. We both agree on this, but that's really hard. It is lengthy, frustrating

00:37:53 ◼   ► and costly. That's the reason we're not doing it. But again, it's like one of those things.

00:37:59 ◼   ► So okay, so this conversation that you're listening to here, this is a conversation,

00:38:05 ◼   ► this is an issue when there's like a company like ours where I manage my part and Stephen

00:38:09 ◼   ► manages his part. We just want our children to get new things.

00:38:12 ◼   ► It's very important to me. But Stephen is effectively, yeah, Stephen holds basically

00:38:18 ◼   ► the CFO role in our business. It's one of his things, both CFO and CTO. So this is very

00:38:25 ◼   ► much in his camp where like I'm the sales guy walking into the CTO, banging my hand

00:38:31 ◼   ► on the desk and saying, give me a new system. But this is what I'm saying, lengthy, frustrating

00:38:36 ◼   ► and costly, because I am a reasonable man. I know that I can't ask for this to happen

00:38:42 ◼   ► tomorrow, but we both know that...

00:38:45 ◼   ► I was going to mail you some multicolored index cards. Take that, Myke.

00:38:49 ◼   ► We both know that ultimately we need different tools, but it's probably going to be a very

00:38:54 ◼   ► slow process, where our CMS is much quicker, and I am reasonable in understanding that

00:39:00 ◼   ► the CMS needs to be there so that the shows can actually publish, and that's why that's

00:39:05 ◼   ► important, where for me, my problem is just making things less frustrating and less time-consuming.

00:39:13 ◼   ► So I understand why it takes a back seat, but in all seriousness, we both understand,

00:39:18 ◼   ► right, that this is something that we need to do one day.

00:39:21 ◼   ► Wow, he said, squeezing my arm. Yeah, no, totally. And it's definitely something we

00:39:27 ◼   ► need to take care of. And I didn't really plan on talking about the CMS, but if I can

00:39:31 ◼   ► have a sidebar for a second. I mean, we're real deep in the weeds at this point. So I

00:39:36 ◼   ► feel like we might as well just go all the way. There's one thing we've done over the

00:39:39 ◼   ► last I guess maybe like two years, probably two years ago, I think is when we sort of

00:39:42 ◼   ► started thinking about the CMS as like a true asset to the business, not just something

00:39:49 ◼   ► we not something we just use like Google Sheets, right? Like we have lots of Google spreadsheets,

00:39:54 ◼   ► like the CMS something that we own as a company as an asset that we should invest in.

00:39:58 ◼   ► It's it's a very typical thing where like you start using something that's perfect for you

00:40:02 ◼   ► Yeah, then eventually you outgrow its intended purpose right and we did this with Google sheets

00:40:08 ◼   ► We were using Google sheets for everything and then we outgrew Google sheets and needed to go to another system or then we were you

00:40:15 ◼   ► Know it was like how we talk about my favorite app pipedrive, which nobody cares about except me

00:40:20 ◼   ► But that's because we outgrew my brain as a place to store that information

00:40:25 ◼   ► Well, we have Trello too, which we outgrew instantly.

00:40:28 ◼   ► Yeah, Trello and my head and then Pipedrive replaces both of those two things.

00:40:33 ◼   ► And that's, you know, I just have a big P logo for a face now.

00:40:37 ◼   ► It's incredible.

00:40:38 ◼   ► But that's kind of just the way that things tend to go.

00:40:41 ◼   ► So all right.

00:40:42 ◼   ► @_Flyyufools, did you ever have an end goal for Relay FM and has it changed considering

00:40:50 ◼   ► the position you're in right now?

00:40:53 ◼   ► We didn't have an end goal.

00:40:54 ◼   ► the ultimate goal was that we would both do this for our jobs and we've done that.

00:40:57 ◼   ► I don't have an end goal, which could be a problem,

00:41:00 ◼   ► but I figure we'll work it out later on.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Right. Like an end goal for me, at least with what we do.

00:41:07 ◼   ► We run a lifestyle business, right?

00:41:09 ◼   ► We run a business that is I hate that term because it I think it devalues it.

00:41:15 ◼   ► But lifestyle business means you don't want investment

00:41:19 ◼   ► and you don't want to sell it, which is ridiculous.

00:41:22 ◼   ► This question really says, this question is really asking, are you going to sell

00:41:25 ◼   ► Relay? And the answer is no. A) Well, if someone...

00:41:30 ◼   ► Most likely not, right? We have no plan to do it.

00:41:33 ◼   ► But like if somebody backs up a big enough truck of money in the right terms,

00:41:37 ◼   ► we'd be, everybody has a price, as Ted DiBiase used to say, right?

00:41:40 ◼   ► So like I would never want to go on the record and say, no,

00:41:44 ◼   ► we will never sell our company because I think that that would be foolish.

00:41:47 ◼   ► But we are not building a company to sell it.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Exactly. We are making lots of decisions that make us less desirable to accompany to bias

00:41:58 ◼   ► because we do not think in that way. Right. Like I think there are a lot of things that

00:42:01 ◼   ► we would do very differently if we thought we were ever going to sell this thing.

00:42:07 ◼   ► It's also why we didn't take any investment as a question a bit further down from Sean

00:42:11 ◼   ► was the first moment you knew relay would be financially viable. I'll answer that in

00:42:16 ◼   ► this comment that, you know, we've talked about this. We started the company like we

00:42:19 ◼   ► We both took our life savings and put it in the business.

00:42:25 ◼   ► That wasn't a ton of money for either of us, but it was scary.

00:42:27 ◼   ► I had a baby on the way.

00:42:28 ◼   ► I was like, "I'm going to spend our life savings.

00:42:31 ◼   ► BRB."

00:42:32 ◼   ► But we were able to pay ourselves back pretty quickly.

00:42:35 ◼   ► When we paid ourselves back from the business back to our personal accounts, those loans,

00:42:41 ◼   ► that's when I knew we were going to be okay.

00:42:43 ◼   ► At the very least, I didn't lose all the money my wife and I had in the bank.

00:42:48 ◼   ► We did that because we, from the beginning, we wanted to build a business that let us

00:42:52 ◼   ► work for ourselves.

00:42:54 ◼   ► If we sell it, then we're working for somebody else, or we're on a boat or something, but

00:42:59 ◼   ► probably working for somebody else.

00:43:00 ◼   ► I don't want to do that unless I absolutely have to.

00:43:03 ◼   ► I feel like from the very beginning, we've been consistent in this.

00:43:07 ◼   ► The business we want to build supports us, supports our families, supports the many hosts

00:43:13 ◼   ► on the show.

00:43:14 ◼   ► A lot of our hosts have jobs, but a lot of them now don't.

00:43:16 ◼   ► We have an increasing number of independent people doing shows on Relay.

00:43:21 ◼   ► And I think in large part, if I can be selfish for a second, that's because what Relay has

00:43:25 ◼   ► grown to become, which is awesome, but we've created a place where everybody can just do

00:43:31 ◼   ► their thing and that only really works, at least in its current state, the way that it

00:43:37 ◼   ► is now.

00:43:38 ◼   ► Well, there's two things that happen.

00:43:40 ◼   ► Either we help provide people enough money that they can maybe quit their jobs, or they

00:43:45 ◼   ► get hired by a huge technology company. That's true, we've had a lot of people leave for

00:43:49 ◼   ► Apple and Google and Microsoft. Yeah, we've got the big three, like we've got each of

00:43:53 ◼   ► them now. And then Russell went ahead and joined like his company got bought by NPR

00:43:59 ◼   ► and a few other big radio folk. So we have a pretty good track record of getting people

00:44:07 ◼   ► good jobs, it seems. Well, we're not directly associated, but you know, still good. No,

00:44:11 ◼   ► No, I called Tim Cookup and I was like, "You should hire this person." And he listened.

00:44:15 ◼   ► He's like, "Sundar, come on, we're buddies!" In a similar vein, Benjamin asks, "Your growth

00:44:22 ◼   ► has been fantastic and it looks like you stand on solid ground. Your load seems full, even as you

00:44:27 ◼   ► continue to branch out." That's a fantastic way of putting that, because you love what you do.

00:44:31 ◼   ► "How does the thought of doing this for the next 30 years strike you?"

00:44:36 ◼   ► Let's do it.

00:44:37 ◼   ► Yeah? I mean, my feeling is, do I want to do exactly what I'm doing right now for 30 years?

00:44:42 ◼   ► The exact job? No, I don't want to do that. But do I want to keep running this company for 30 years?

00:44:47 ◼   ► Yes, I want to do that. Like, I don't want to be stuck for 30 years doing the exact same thing.

00:44:52 ◼   ► But it's not about the tasks. It's about, like, owning this company that produces creative work

00:45:00 ◼   ► that supports people, whatever that ends up looking like in 30 years time,

00:45:05 ◼   ► right? Do we think we will still be producing podcasts in 2048? No, I don't. It will be some

00:45:12 ◼   ► other new type of medium, probably. Yeah, it'll be Federico and me and you in someone's living room

00:45:19 ◼   ► as holograms talking about the iPhone 28 rumors. Exactly. But do you see what I mean? Like, yeah,

00:45:25 ◼   ► I want to keep doing exactly what I'm doing. But like, that's Jason Snell says in the chat room,

00:45:29 ◼   ► from Relay FM. This is upgrade episode 1740. I don't think I want to get that far. I love

00:45:35 ◼   ► working with Jason.

00:45:36 ◼   ► I mean Mac Power Users is almost there.

00:45:38 ◼   ► That's true. I love working with Jason, but I don't know if we'll both be recording upgrade

00:45:43 ◼   ► in 30 years time. I would have hoped that in 30 years Jason would have retired. I really

00:45:48 ◼   ► hope Jason's retired in 30 years time.

00:45:50 ◼   ► No, he's still holding out for an iOS laptop at that point. Any moment. Any moment it'll

00:45:56 ◼   ► be here, Jason.

00:45:57 ◼   ► happen. It will happen. @Ragsdale on Twitter, "Relay is approaching 30 shows. How much growth

00:46:03 ◼   ► are you aiming for? Could Relay one day have 50, 75 or 100 shows? What are the challenges

00:46:09 ◼   ► of managing growth?" So we have no aim or goal for number of shows. We have been for the last

00:46:16 ◼   ► four years consistently on the edge of what we can handle. That's just how it's always been.

00:46:22 ◼   ► We are always at the edge of what we can handle at any moment and as soon as we get comfortable

00:46:26 ◼   ► again another opportunity comes our way. And these days the vast majority of new

00:46:32 ◼   ► shows that we have come from an idea from somebody else. Like somebody comes

00:46:37 ◼   ► to us with an idea that we like as opposed to we create a show, right? Like I

00:46:42 ◼   ► don't think that me and you that doesn't really happen too much anymore. You know

00:46:46 ◼   ► maybe somebody has an idea and we feel like or they approach us and like me and

00:46:51 ◼   ► you feel like we're the perfect fit for it, right? Like with query. Right, query.

00:46:55 ◼   ► Right, Wren had that idea and you were the perfect fit for it. Wren has since moved on

00:47:00 ◼   ► and now the wonderful Micah Surgeon. She's not dead!

00:47:03 ◼   ► Moved on from another, okay, she's not moved on to another existence, I never said that.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Surin

00:47:08 ◼   ► - The maternity's no longer with us.

00:47:10 ◼   ► - She's an apple now, so that's that.

00:47:13 ◼   ► - Giant parking sky.

00:47:14 ◼   ► - The wonderful Micah now is your co-host on query.

00:47:18 ◼   ► - I love Micah.

00:47:19 ◼   ► - But the challenges for us I think are just in what it

00:47:23 ◼   ► takes to manage the amount of people and their needs.

00:47:27 ◼   ► And so when I say we've been consistently on the edge,

00:47:30 ◼   ► it's like we feel like can we handle more people?

00:47:32 ◼   ► And then you bring it in and then you settle to that.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And then you can expand again.

00:47:37 ◼   ► My personal feeling is there is no real harm in having as many shows as we have or more.

00:47:44 ◼   ► Like I think we provide options for people.

00:47:47 ◼   ► I don't believe that a lot of people's first interactions with Relay FM is going to relay.fm/shows.

00:47:53 ◼   ► Like they have found out about a show somehow and they start listening to it.

00:47:57 ◼   ► And then one day they either hear about another show that they want to subscribe to.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Like maybe some people just heard about query for the first time or want to go check that out because

00:48:05 ◼   ► Micah and Steven are awesome together, right? So maybe you want to go and look at that.

00:48:08 ◼   ► Or you're like, "I've run out of shows. I know that X show is part of Relay FM.

00:48:13 ◼   ► Let me see if they have anything else." So I think that our job over the next

00:48:21 ◼   ► however many years is to just to make it easier to display that content to people when they do

00:48:27 ◼   ► come to our website, which we have got better with. Like our redesign last year has made it

00:48:32 ◼   ► way better and way more simple to look at our stuff. And as we go into the future, maybe

00:48:38 ◼   ► that's what we do, right? Like, who knows? Maybe we want to get to 100, so Relay FM starts

00:48:43 ◼   ► like a sister network, right, that we run that is like focused on something else, right?

00:48:48 ◼   ► Like we don't know what that's going to look like, but I am not interested in setting a

00:48:55 ◼   ► fixed number.

00:48:57 ◼   ► No.

00:48:59 ◼   ► Because I hear from all the time, right? People say to me, like Kate just did in the chat

00:49:03 ◼   ► room, like, started with Cortex, then found Connected, and then went wild from there,

00:49:09 ◼   ► you know? And I hear that all the time, right? Like, whenever we do pen shows, whenever me

00:49:12 ◼   ► and Brad go to pen shows, people say to me all the time, "Oh, I listened to Cortex and

00:49:16 ◼   ► found out that you did a pen show, so now I listen to that." Or like, I have people

00:49:20 ◼   ► that say, "Oh, I listened to the pen addict, and then I started listening to Connected

00:49:24 ◼   ► and Ungenius," right? Like, this happens to me all the time, so I don't think there's

00:49:27 ◼   ► is a problem. I think if anything it's a good thing because we give people even more and

00:49:30 ◼   ► more types of stuff that they want to listen to. And considering so much of our content

00:49:35 ◼   ► is niche content, right, like we make stuff for people that super care about things, I

00:49:39 ◼   ► think the more shows you have, the more likely you are to get more people. So I think it

00:49:43 ◼   ► works for us.

00:49:44 ◼   ► So what you're saying is we're going to have a model train show pretty soon. Hit that community

00:49:48 ◼   ► of people.

00:49:49 ◼   ► Sure. I mean, so it's two shows that people think that I would want to do one day and

00:49:54 ◼   ► would but never will. Lego and watch it. And it's because of the cost. The

00:49:59 ◼   ► purchasing. All right I have the pen addict. That's enough for me. We have connected. You're

00:50:05 ◼   ► gonna buy a new iPhone and iPad like next month. Right but so this is this is the thing and we'll

00:50:10 ◼   ► get to this later on like I would have bought those anyway. That's true. Benjamin Heron asks

00:50:16 ◼   ► what are your thoughts about Overcast's upcoming feature to allow podcasters to promote their

00:50:20 ◼   ► their Patreon or membership links directly on the now playing screen and do you think

00:50:25 ◼   ► App Review will allow it?

00:50:28 ◼   ► I think it's a good thing.

00:50:32 ◼   ► Businesses like ours will be advertising driven for as long as we're around probably unless

00:50:37 ◼   ► something really crazy happens.

00:50:41 ◼   ► But membership is a way, we talked about earlier, yes it helps support our hosts but it creates

00:50:48 ◼   ► relationship and like a platform for dialogue between a part of the audience and us.

00:50:55 ◼   ► And I think that's a good thing.

00:51:00 ◼   ► And so what Overcast is going to do if you didn't see the tweets is if you put a special

00:51:04 ◼   ► link in your show notes, there's going to be a little spot in Overcast UI to say, "Hey,

00:51:09 ◼   ► if you want to support this show, tap this link and it'll take you to wherever that link

00:51:12 ◼   ► says."

00:51:13 ◼   ► It's not invasive, I don't think.

00:51:15 ◼   ► does things always with a balanced hand and with good taste and from what I've seen this

00:51:20 ◼   ► is going to follow that, it's going to look very natural and overcast. I think it's great.

00:51:24 ◼   ► And I'm not worried about App Review, I think that's a silly word. Like it's literally a

00:51:28 ◼   ► URL.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Like in the URLs for this episode in Overcast, there will be links to support our membership.

00:51:37 ◼   ► So if it's a problem for him or anybody that implements this, because it seems pretty open,

00:51:44 ◼   ► like anybody could do something like this who makes a podcast app with the way that Marco wants to do it

00:51:48 ◼   ► This is exactly the same right like there isn't yeah, you know, this is gonna take you to the web, you know

00:51:56 ◼   ► so like for instance, I bought a

00:51:58 ◼   ► Kindle book actually just last night and so I googled the book and I have the Amazon app installed on my iPhone

00:52:05 ◼   ► I just googled the book first link was Amazon Kindle

00:52:08 ◼   ► I clicked it it went to the app and then it came to me to Safari immediately because you can't buy Kindle books within the

00:52:13 ◼   ► app and like once you're on the web Apple can't say anything so I'm not I'm

00:52:17 ◼   ► not worried about this I don't think mark I don't know but I don't think

00:52:21 ◼   ► Marco is either yeah I don't think so all right so we just talked about Kate

00:52:27 ◼   ► but she asks since the last Q&A which was a year ago is there anything in

00:52:32 ◼   ► particular that has happened that you never thought could be possible selling

00:52:38 ◼   ► out three live shows. We sold out our show in San Jose, we sold out a show, two

00:52:46 ◼   ► upcoming shows, one in Chicago and one in New York. I wouldn't have imagined that

00:52:52 ◼   ► we would have done that. So that is incredible and thank you if you bought a

00:52:56 ◼   ► ticket and we thank you for being in San Jose or thank you to see you, thank you

00:53:01 ◼   ► to see you in in October in our mini tour that we're doing in October.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Yes, and I think there'll be more of this in the future. We really enjoy him, so.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. I know that's gonna make Alex Cox very happy. Alex is constantly bugging me

00:53:16 ◼   ► to do more live shows. Every time I mention anything I'm working on, she's

00:53:19 ◼   ► like, "Oh, is it more live shows?" And I'm sure she probably does the exact same

00:53:22 ◼   ► thing to you as well.

00:53:23 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:53:24 ◼   ► Constantly. So, Alex, more live shows.

00:53:26 ◼   ► We're coming to your hometown. This should be enough.

00:53:29 ◼   ► We're just gonna do a weekly show in Alex's living room, just to make her happy.

00:53:34 ◼   ► That's a little weird.

00:53:36 ◼   ► Today's show is brought to you by our friends at Pingdom.

00:53:39 ◼   ► This is another sponsor who's been with us for an incredibly long time.

00:53:41 ◼   ► Pingdom is one of our very, very favorite companies because they are one of the companies

00:53:45 ◼   ► that we use to great effect.

00:53:47 ◼   ► I know that every time we have a problem with our website, we know about it because Pingdom

00:53:50 ◼   ► tell us.

00:53:51 ◼   ► So while you've been listening to this podcast, Stephen, how would you know if your website

00:53:55 ◼   ► had gone down?

00:53:56 ◼   ► Would you know?

00:53:57 ◼   ► I would know.

00:53:58 ◼   ► I'd get a text message.

00:54:00 ◼   ► I get a push notification.

00:54:01 ◼   ► I get an email.

00:54:02 ◼   ► That's right.

00:54:03 ◼   ► I have all three turned on.

00:54:04 ◼   ► All three.

00:54:05 ◼   ► Because you wouldn't want it to be that if your customers are trying to click that buy now button or get to your site that they

00:54:12 ◼   ► Couldn't you you if you didn't have pingdom you might just stumble across this by luck or because you've seen a tweet

00:54:17 ◼   ► That's not a good system. You need something to tell you that everything is running smoothly. You need that peace of mind

00:54:23 ◼   ► So you need pingdom they will let you know the moment your site goes down or that is any or if there's any trouble in

00:54:29 ◼   ► Whatever way best suits you they're smart to they'll get the information needed to solve this issue sent to whoever needs it

00:54:34 ◼   ► it, whether that's one person or your whole team.

00:54:38 ◼   ► They're dedicated to making the web faster and more reliable.

00:54:40 ◼   ► They use more than 70 global test servers to emulate visits to your site, checking its

00:54:45 ◼   ► availability as often as every minute.

00:54:47 ◼   ► All Pingdom needs is the URL and they'll take care of the risk.

00:54:50 ◼   ► Don't risk being the last to know about something on your site breaking.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Start monitoring your site today by going to pingdom.com/relayfm.

00:54:58 ◼   ► You'll get a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

00:55:01 ◼   ► when you sign up, use the code "Connected" at checkout to get an amazing 30% off your

00:55:05 ◼   ► first invoice.

00:55:07 ◼   ► Our thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and Relay FM.

00:55:09 ◼   ► Can I tell a story about downtime?

00:55:12 ◼   ► Yeah, please.

00:55:13 ◼   ► It's not about Relay.

00:55:14 ◼   ► It's a previous job.

00:55:15 ◼   ► So I had a background in IT.

00:55:18 ◼   ► I was IT director at a nonprofit for a long time, and one day I needed to change something

00:55:23 ◼   ► on the network and we had a bunch of Windows machines.

00:55:26 ◼   ► And unfortunately, the way Windows works with DNS caching, I had everybody reboot their

00:55:31 ◼   ► Windows machines. So I came in early, I did my stuff on the network, I realized I needed

00:55:36 ◼   ► to tell people, "Hey, if you can't get on the internet, just restart your computer and

00:55:39 ◼   ► you'll be all set." But we had like 30 employees, they were scattered across a building, and

00:55:45 ◼   ► I started getting phone calls, like inter-office phone calls, like, "Hey, my internet's down."

00:55:49 ◼   ► And then I ran to the problem of, "Oh, how do you tell people the internet's down if

00:55:55 ◼   ► the internet's down? You can't know, you're trapped in a time loop of sadness. Don't do

00:56:01 ◼   ► So my version of Pingdom was I wrote I put a printed out a thing that said if your internet's down

00:56:07 ◼   ► Please restart your computer and I put it on the employee like where people clocked in and then people knew I

00:56:13 ◼   ► Basically invented Pingdom. This is what I'm trying to say

00:56:16 ◼   ► Alright, so we are done with asking answering questions

00:56:20 ◼   ► Meta stuff we're done. See you later. We're now going to answer questions about

00:56:27 ◼   ► Content and shows. So content. Our first question comes from on G wound underscore Ted. If you were

00:56:36 ◼   ► to start a new podcast, and you could choose anyone in the world to be your co host, who would you

00:56:40 ◼   ► choose? In other words, what would be your podcasting panel? And what would you be talking

00:56:44 ◼   ► about? What would you do? Would you pick? That's a this is one I didn't really. I didn't really

00:56:51 ◼   ► have much time into. I agree. I agree with your first answer. So I'll just defer to you because

00:56:55 ◼   ► your answers I'm in sync with. I would like to talk about technology products

00:56:59 ◼   ► with MKBHD and video games with Griffin McElroy. I implore every single person

00:57:05 ◼   ► that listens to this show to never mention that to anyone. This is a secret that we

00:57:09 ◼   ► share, okay? Right? Because it's probably never going to happen. Someone's already tweeting at...

00:57:13 ◼   ► Yeah, so just don't. I love you, please don't. But they are... that's kind of like my

00:57:18 ◼   ► dream situations. There you go. John Keys asked, "Could you please clarify whether

00:57:24 ◼   ► thoroughly considered is a sponsored content podcast or does it work the same

00:57:30 ◼   ► way as your other excellent programs? Stephen could you explain what a

00:57:34 ◼   ► sponsored content is? Yes, a sponsored content podcast is one where a company

00:57:42 ◼   ► approaches a network let's say and says hey we would like to make a show we like

00:57:47 ◼   ► to pay for it and in part of this is we're gonna help shape potentially shape

00:57:53 ◼   ► what's in the show. So other networks do this. We don't do it, to spoil the answer, but there

00:58:01 ◼   ► are shows out there that do that. Most of the time they're clearly labeled what they

00:58:03 ◼   ► are. So Gimlet does a bunch of this. It's like whatever the show name is, powered by

00:58:07 ◼   ► eBay or whatever.

00:58:08 ◼   ► They have us all second armed with a company called Gimlet Creative.

00:58:12 ◼   ► Yes. And that's the key, I think, where it is sort of separate from their other editorial

00:58:19 ◼   ► process at Gimlet and that's how we would do it too I think but uh but we don't do it that's not

00:58:24 ◼   ► what they really consider it is. No I understand why people ask this question because it is a show

00:58:29 ◼   ► totally fair in which we talk about the output of one company which is Studio Neat right so it's

00:58:34 ◼   ► Tom and Dan and Studio Neat and me um the reason this show exists is because we find the two of

00:58:41 ◼   ► them incredibly interesting people and I thought it would be really cool to just

00:58:47 ◼   ► dig into their thinking about how they make stuff and as you can tell right by

00:58:53 ◼   ► doing that we spend every single episode promoting their products right because

00:58:57 ◼   ► we are talking about how they make stuff based upon their own experiences so I

00:59:05 ◼   ► can understand the question right because it's like well you're only

00:59:08 ◼   ► talking about them is not just a big ad for them. No money exchanges hands, right? They don't pay me,

00:59:14 ◼   ► it's just a thing that we're really interested in. And it's why for now and for the foreseeable

00:59:20 ◼   ► future there's no advertising on the show. Because the show in and of itself is like an ad for their

00:59:25 ◼   ► stuff, right? Because it's all we're talking about. And you can just be clear, you can back

00:59:30 ◼   ► Thoroughly Consider it as a member. But yeah, other than that, and that's everyone's free choice to do,

00:59:37 ◼   ► It is it is 30 consider is not writing us a check to do that show we do it because honestly

00:59:41 ◼   ► We love Tom and Dan and I think we both love their company

00:59:45 ◼   ► I'm at them in like 2010 or 2011 for the first time way before relay was a thing and we just think they're really

00:59:52 ◼   ► Interesting people doing interesting things and so we wanted to talk about it. Yep. So that's why that exists

00:59:57 ◼   ► Yep brought to you by the glyph

01:00:00 ◼   ► What?

01:00:02 ◼   ► All right another one for you Jeff fairy asks their plans for at I Myke

01:00:06 ◼   ► to do an interview show again I loved inquisitive.

01:00:10 ◼   ► - Nope, there are no plans, there's no plan.

01:00:13 ◼   ► Interview shows are, they're really hard to do

01:00:18 ◼   ► because you have to plan guests, book guests,

01:00:24 ◼   ► you have to think of something new and inventive

01:00:28 ◼   ► every single time, right?

01:00:30 ◼   ► You have to do a lot of research into the person.

01:00:34 ◼   ► I did a weekly, I did a show every single week of a guest for five years in total, right?

01:00:42 ◼   ► Because "Inquisitive", before that it was command space, you know, like I had morphed from one to the

01:00:49 ◼   ► other. And I kind of changed it up a little bit every now and then, even made it like interviews

01:00:54 ◼   ► of groups or I would, I did my favorite album series, right, where I bring people on and just

01:01:00 ◼   ► talk about their favorite albums, but the logistical issues remain exactly the same

01:01:05 ◼   ► of finding people, thinking of people that are interesting enough, contacting them to

01:01:09 ◼   ► see if they want to be on the show, then researching it, then you record with them and deal with

01:01:14 ◼   ► all of the potential recording issues that can come from speaking to people who maybe

01:01:21 ◼   ► don't have that much experience in podcasting, right? I just decided after five years I didn't

01:01:27 ◼   ► want to do that anymore. And every now and then, I get this feeling of like, "Oh man,

01:01:32 ◼   ► I kind of miss interviewing." Because I like the process of interviewing, but I have zero

01:01:38 ◼   ► desire to deal with all of the work that it takes to deal with. So, short answer is no.

01:01:44 ◼   ► Long answer is what I just said.

01:01:47 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:01:48 ◼   ► Long answer is, go back 30 seconds.

01:01:50 ◼   ► Yeah. I just -- you know what it's like, right? With booking people for download. I see you

01:01:55 ◼   ► Jason's struggling with it every single week and it is it's really difficult to do

01:01:59 ◼   ► and to do correctly you know to do right to have a nice mix of people like it's hard it is really

01:02:05 ◼   ► hard work the benefit that you guys have with download is you can bring people on multiple

01:02:10 ◼   ► times right because they become experts that you can call upon right it's not it and it's not an

01:02:16 ◼   ► interview show it's a panel show there's a huge difference like they are not the subject themselves

01:02:20 ◼   ► they are there to talk about the subject. I can't bring the same person on three times in a month,

01:02:26 ◼   ► right? Because... Well then it just turns into something else. It's not an interview show,

01:02:30 ◼   ► they're just the host. Plus, interview shows, shows with one-on-one with a guest, I have found

01:02:36 ◼   ► to be more tricky to sell advertising on. So, and my theory on this is that interview shows

01:02:44 ◼   ► do not have a chemistry between the hosts. So unless your show is huge, it can be difficult

01:02:50 ◼   ► to make advertising conversions.

01:02:51 ◼   ► Yeah. It really was a good show and you're good at it, but I understand why you.

01:02:56 ◼   ► It's a skill I had because I honed it over five years, right? Like, sure, I know I wasn't

01:03:01 ◼   ► always good at it, but I did it every single week for five years. Like, if I was bad at

01:03:06 ◼   ► it, I should have given up a long time before.

01:03:09 ◼   ► I really like Command Space 77, primary source material with John Roderick.

01:03:15 ◼   ► I think that's the best one.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Oh, all of the Command Space archive is there too, right?

01:03:20 ◼   ► Yeah, because we pulled in the old retired shows.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Yeah, so Command Space is probably my strongest single body of work.

01:03:28 ◼   ► There's some stuff in there that's very good.

01:03:32 ◼   ► some stuff in there that is very bad. But Peru's at your leisure, I guess.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Risk. Yeah, risk. That's a good way of saying it.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Manton asks, "Do you think that y'all will do any more shows like short podcasts, like

01:03:48 ◼   ► Subnet? And are there any surprises or lessons learned from producing a short daily show?"

01:03:56 ◼   ► I think these are two questions. I think the short format is interesting, but I think it

01:04:01 ◼   ► only works if it's daily or near daily because if you just release a two-minute podcast every

01:04:07 ◼   ► Monday, it's like, "What's going on here?"

01:04:10 ◼   ► It's not a podcast.

01:04:11 ◼   ► For me, I do subnet five days a week.

01:04:14 ◼   ► If you're not familiar, subnet is a show where I pull what I think are the three biggest

01:04:19 ◼   ► or most interesting tech stories for the day.

01:04:22 ◼   ► There's a new episode out basically Monday through Friday, really it's Sunday through

01:04:26 ◼   ► Thursday, but you listen to it the next morning because I put it out late at night.

01:04:30 ◼   ► through Friday, there's a new episode. Just for reference, I'm just looking in my archives.

01:04:37 ◼   ► The first episode was February 22. And I've only missed one day since I missed the day

01:04:44 ◼   ► of our live show in San Jose because it's ran out of steam. But the the question is

01:04:53 ◼   ► it surprise surprises about it's not a surprise, I knew it was going to happen. Daily or near

01:04:58 ◼   ► daily shows are extremely difficult. The work isn't hard. I can do a subnet. If I've been

01:05:04 ◼   ► working all day and on the internet all day, I already kind of have an idea. I collect

01:05:08 ◼   ► links throughout the day in my head and then I can write it. I write it and then I read

01:05:11 ◼   ► it. Starting cold, like so yesterday, I didn't spend much time online. And so I kind of sat

01:05:19 ◼   ► down in my office about six and like, I took about 40 minutes to do because I had to like,

01:05:23 ◼   ► read a bunch of news and kind of put it through my filter process and see what came out the

01:05:26 ◼   ► the other side. And then I sort of punted and made a joke about Instagram instead of

01:05:30 ◼   ► doing a third story. But it's really hard because you have that daily grind. And so

01:05:36 ◼   ► while we're just being honest, Subnet's way closer to the end of its life than the beginning,

01:05:40 ◼   ► at least in its current form. I don't know what's going to happen to it. I know a lot

01:05:44 ◼   ► of people like it, I know it's well listened to. But doing it five times a week is difficult,

01:05:49 ◼   ► and I don't think that particular show works two or three days a week. I think the idea

01:05:53 ◼   ► have some of being daily or a new one every every workday every weekday I

01:05:59 ◼   ► think that's where it fits but I don't know if I can't keep that up forever and

01:06:04 ◼   ► so we're talking about what to do with it so it's hard and I think that's I

01:06:08 ◼   ► don't think we're gonna be doing daily stuff past this Myke you did a daily

01:06:11 ◼   ► tech show years and years ago and you told me this was gonna happen you were

01:06:14 ◼   ► right everyone everyone who's done who does this you go now very quickly

01:06:18 ◼   ► because you burn out from any show but you're doing this five times more right

01:06:25 ◼   ► yeah so you burn out five times quicker yeah so you know I won't kill it without

01:06:31 ◼   ► some heads up but it is definitely whatever if you if this is phase one of

01:06:37 ◼   ► subnet phase one is winding down I don't know what's next for it if it'll someone

01:06:41 ◼   ► else will do it or we change it or just kind of kind of goes away as I don't

01:06:46 ◼   ► know yet. So if you have thoughts on subnet, let me know. I'm curious what you

01:06:49 ◼   ► guys think if you're a listener. What works, what doesn't, and maybe how you

01:06:53 ◼   ► feel about it. Yasmeen Evian asks, "What do you see for the future of Relay FM?

01:06:58 ◼   ► What type of shows do you want to bring to the network? Does Relay stay podcast

01:07:01 ◼   ► only or do you see it expanding to other mediums?" So I would say we remain pretty

01:07:06 ◼   ► open to pretty much any idea if you think it will fit. This fit can come from

01:07:11 ◼   ► topic or this fit can come from person. I think that our history is shown, it's typically

01:07:18 ◼   ► preferred if there's some kind of technology slant because that's what we know we fit in

01:07:22 ◼   ► that world, but it's not fixed to that. If we think that the fit is right, then we do

01:07:26 ◼   ► it. The problem is I cannot in any way, shape or form, describe what the fit is. You just

01:07:34 ◼   ► know it. We're just feeling our gut. Does this feel like a project that we want to do?

01:07:39 ◼   ► Does this feel like a project we want to have a part of our thing?

01:07:41 ◼   ► We know or we don't know, right?

01:07:43 ◼   ► So that's kind of just how it goes, right?

01:07:45 ◼   ► That's just kind of how we do.

01:07:48 ◼   ► I do see us expanding to other mediums at some point, as we mentioned earlier, right?

01:07:52 ◼   ► Like the hologram shows.

01:07:53 ◼   ► It feels like a natural evolution of where we will be, right?

01:07:58 ◼   ► Like blogging?

01:07:59 ◼   ► Are we going to start a blogging network?

01:08:01 ◼   ► No.

01:08:03 ◼   ► I'm sorry to say no.

01:08:05 ◼   ► Yeah, we don't know.

01:08:08 ◼   ► Podcasting wasn't a thing 10, 15 years ago the way that it is now.

01:08:12 ◼   ► And so I think we would be foolish to say it is always going to be what it is today.

01:08:17 ◼   ► Because we are at the heart of it.

01:08:20 ◼   ► I think we're a content company and podcasting is the medium.

01:08:24 ◼   ► And it's a medium that you and I both love passionately and will fight to the death for.

01:08:28 ◼   ► Maybe not to the death, the near death.

01:08:30 ◼   ► I would suffer some injury for podcasting, but not, I don't want to lose a limb or anything.

01:08:36 ◼   ► But who knows what's next?

01:08:37 ◼   ► So we're open to that. You know, I think it's one reason we both experiment with video and

01:08:42 ◼   ► other things and we tried everything. Subnet is honestly kind of a part of that of like,

01:08:48 ◼   ► it's still podcasting, but what if we take our tools and apply them in a very, very different

01:08:53 ◼   ► format? And that's kind of an interesting thing to poke around.

01:08:56 ◼   ► It's like, people can listen to Subnet and Overcast, but that's not what we made it for.

01:09:01 ◼   ► Right? Like, we made it to be listened to in other places. Like we made it to be listened

01:09:06 ◼   ► to in anchor. We made it to be listened to in Google Home and Amazon Echo.

01:09:11 ◼   ► Right. Like that's what the show is made for, like those places, which is very

01:09:15 ◼   ► different. So that was that is an attempt for us to see like what works and what

01:09:21 ◼   ► doesn't. Right. Am I saying that right? Do you think?

01:09:22 ◼   ► I think so.

01:09:24 ◼   ► Brentac Prime asked, what is the best and worst part about recording live in front

01:09:28 ◼   ► of an audience?

01:09:29 ◼   ► Oh, I love it so much.

01:09:32 ◼   ► I know you do.

01:09:33 ◼   ► I love the energy in the room.

01:09:36 ◼   ► I love making people laugh.

01:09:38 ◼   ► I love giving you a toilet that looks like a trophy.

01:09:40 ◼   ► Wait, a trophy that looks like a toilet?

01:09:42 ◼   ► - No, no, no, no, you can't.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Don't go around thinking edit that.

01:09:46 ◼   ► That was us in there.

01:09:47 ◼   ► - Edit point.

01:09:47 ◼   ► No, I'll leave that in.

01:09:50 ◼   ► I like the looseness of it.

01:09:52 ◼   ► The worst part for me is just the plan.

01:09:57 ◼   ► Not even like the day of, but just like,

01:10:00 ◼   ► it takes a long time.

01:10:01 ◼   ► Like these fall shows we're doing,

01:10:04 ◼   ► I've already been working on for a couple of months.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Like we got the Vinny's booked and now we're working

01:10:07 ◼   ► on travel, like that just takes a lot of time.

01:10:10 ◼   ► And there's a lot of moving parts.

01:10:12 ◼   ► And this tour, you and I are traveling together.

01:10:14 ◼   ► We have other people coming to Chicago,

01:10:16 ◼   ► and some people coming to New York,

01:10:17 ◼   ► and like it's a million moving parts,

01:10:20 ◼   ► and that's just hard to keep up with.

01:10:21 ◼   ► But for me, it's worth it when I can step out

01:10:24 ◼   ► and make a joke about web objects and people laugh.

01:10:29 ◼   ► - I love all those same things.

01:10:31 ◼   ► my worst part that Stephen doesn't really get is nerves.

01:10:33 ◼   ► I get so nervous. It's unbelievable.

01:10:35 ◼   ► You've never seen a human being like it.

01:10:37 ◼   ► Like it's not good.

01:10:39 ◼   ► There are times where like I just can't talk to anyone for like two hours.

01:10:41 ◼   ► I get really, really nervous.

01:10:44 ◼   ► Until I step on the stage, I'm totally fine.

01:10:47 ◼   ► But like that buildup is pretty catastrophic for me.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And I don't know why.

01:10:53 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense. I've done so many of them now.

01:10:55 ◼   ► You know, like we do.

01:10:57 ◼   ► I've done I've done I don't even know how many live shows I've done now.

01:11:00 ◼   ► But it's it's it's more than enough for me to get used to it.

01:11:05 ◼   ► But I haven't.

01:11:06 ◼   ► Similar, well, a question that leads into this, Jonas, do you think there will ever

01:11:12 ◼   ► be live shows in other countries than the US?

01:11:14 ◼   ► Yes, I do. Do I know when?

01:11:16 ◼   ► No. Would you agree with that?

01:11:17 ◼   ► Right. Like, yeah, sure. But we have to really get when.

01:11:20 ◼   ► I really want to do some stuff in London one day, but like it's just not on the cards

01:11:24 ◼   ► right now because I can't and won't plan it.

01:11:27 ◼   ► Right. Because that's I'm not good at that stuff.

01:11:30 ◼   ► And so, you know, maybe one day.

01:11:33 ◼   ► Well, definitely one day.

01:11:34 ◼   ► But we just don't know when.

01:11:36 ◼   ► James Brain, Rios, the real James Brain wants to know, why do you both have so

01:11:40 ◼   ► many podcasts?

01:11:41 ◼   ► And what was your first podcast together?

01:11:47 ◼   ► So I have so many shows because I have so many interests.

01:11:51 ◼   ► And yeah, I started doing one or two shows and then eventually, like I wanted to

01:11:57 ◼   ► just have a podcast about everything that I was interested in.

01:12:00 ◼   ► I've gotten better at this. I don't do this so much anymore. I'm kind of trying to chill out,

01:12:05 ◼   ► but that's why I have so many shows because either it's a thing that I'm interested in or somebody

01:12:10 ◼   ► gives me an offer I can't refuse. And the first show we ever did together was "Ungeniused" in the

01:12:15 ◼   ► first run. Now we do "Ungeniused" in the new run. Yeah, same thing. Like "Lift Off," for instance,

01:12:21 ◼   ► a podcast Jason and I do about space and the space industry. We did it because we're both interested

01:12:26 ◼   ► in it and we sort of discovered we had a common shared interest and then we make a show about

01:12:32 ◼   ► it now. And you do have a lot of shows. I am quickly catching up with you in a way that

01:12:39 ◼   ► is troubling. But it's things that we're interested in and because we like the format so much,

01:12:44 ◼   ► it's like an obvious place to talk about those things.

01:12:46 ◼   ► It's quite funny. So I'm going to be a part of PodCon again, which is very exciting. It's

01:12:53 ◼   ► gonna be there, they have an Indiegogo campaign right now going until a couple more weeks

01:12:58 ◼   ► or something and they describe me on their page like they said, "My co-host, Cortex,

01:13:04 ◼   ► remastered a pan-adict analog playing for fun and more" and in brackets, yes, actually

01:13:08 ◼   ► more which is funny. They keep describing me as like a person who hosts a lot of shows

01:13:12 ◼   ► and I don't really feel like, I feel like there are lots of podcasters that host as

01:13:16 ◼   ► many shows as I do but I guess, assumedly not, I don't know. There you go. I'm looking

01:13:22 ◼   ► forward to PodCon. It was great last time. Alright, so Nate asks, "For as many shows

01:13:28 ◼   ► that live on relay FM, are there more shows that didn't make the cut?"

01:13:32 ◼   ► Oh boy howdy. I mean, okay so there's two parts of this right? Like shows that we

01:13:39 ◼   ► have tried to make but ended up not existing. There's a small handful of

01:13:43 ◼   ► those right that like didn't make it past demo. That's happened a few times.

01:13:47 ◼   ► and we get pitches like I don't even know probably every day at this point

01:13:53 ◼   ► and I want to give a piece of advice to anybody out there who considers pitching

01:14:00 ◼   ► us so two things one do the show yourself first would be my would be my

01:14:05 ◼   ► first thing and the reason for this is if it's your first show we have no idea

01:14:10 ◼   ► if you can do it right like you have to show up on a consistent schedule like if

01:14:16 ◼   ► if you are going to join an outfit, right?

01:14:19 ◼   ► Like there are certain expectations required of you

01:14:21 ◼   ► and that schedule can be whatever you want it to be.

01:14:24 ◼   ► But we need to see that, like, if we put the investment in

01:14:27 ◼   ► to launching a show, that it's going to stick around.

01:14:30 ◼   ► Like that is very important to us.

01:14:33 ◼   ► So if you've been able to do a thing, one, it shows us

01:14:37 ◼   ► you can do it and that you have the commitment and the other,

01:14:40 ◼   ► we can listen to it and see if it's good,

01:14:43 ◼   ► you know, or at least having demos, like whatever it is, like

01:14:46 ◼   ► you've got to do it. So yeah, we get pictures all the time and most of the

01:14:51 ◼   ► responses, like I would say like 95% of the response is go ahead and do the

01:14:57 ◼   ► thing, like go and do it on your own or do something that you can point to that

01:15:01 ◼   ► we can see and then go ahead and make that thing. Now there is somebody who's

01:15:06 ◼   ► put some this up way better than I have, right? Yeah, we have a link in the

01:15:09 ◼   ► show notes to a video our friend Quinn did. Quinn was the host of Mixed Feelings

01:15:15 ◼   ► on relay a show that wound down this year, but she has a really great video on her channel about

01:15:20 ◼   ► her joining of relay FM and her point basically is yours of like

01:15:25 ◼   ► Just go do the work like

01:15:27 ◼   ► Podcasting is still small enough where if you're doing something interesting in our space. We will see it like if it is

01:15:35 ◼   ► Doing well and is standing out from the crowd

01:15:39 ◼   ► It'll be noticed by other people not just us anyone with a network or anybody with a bigger audience like

01:15:45 ◼   ► people notice things happening in their corners

01:15:47 ◼   ► of the internet, so like, go do it.

01:15:49 ◼   ► And when I answer those emails,

01:15:51 ◼   ► I always try to have in there of like,

01:15:53 ◼   ► don't take us saying that it's not a fit for us yet.

01:15:57 ◼   ► Don't take that as a sign that you shouldn't do it.

01:15:59 ◼   ► Like, go do it, like, go do it.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And go do the work and see what happens,

01:16:05 ◼   ► because that is like a real turning point

01:16:09 ◼   ► for a lot of projects, right?

01:16:10 ◼   ► Like if you are doing something because you want

01:16:13 ◼   ► be part of a bigger thing, or want the name recognition or

01:16:16 ◼   ► something. But then you're not willing to do it when when you

01:16:20 ◼   ► end up doing it, like independent, right? Like, if

01:16:23 ◼   ► that's the reason you end up not following through, then you

01:16:26 ◼   ► weren't going to succeed anyways, because you weren't

01:16:28 ◼   ► passionate about it. And you weren't really behind it the way

01:16:32 ◼   ► that you thought you were. So I say that as an encouragement to

01:16:37 ◼   ► people like go do the thing like if this is what you want to do,

01:16:39 ◼   ► go do it and if you find success, then lots of people will notice and see where it takes

01:16:46 ◼   ► you.

01:16:47 ◼   ► So go watch Quinn's video.

01:16:49 ◼   ► Yeah, go watch Quinn's video.

01:16:50 ◼   ► Jeff asked basically what we've answered, which is like, what do you say to people looking

01:16:55 ◼   ► for advice on how to get started and not burning out?

01:16:57 ◼   ► So that's kind of like part of it.

01:16:59 ◼   ► Just go out and do it.

01:17:00 ◼   ► The problem with the burning out part, I feel it.

01:17:02 ◼   ► Like if you've been doing something for a while and it's not getting anywhere, like

01:17:05 ◼   ► I feel it and I wished I had better advice than keep trying.

01:17:12 ◼   ► But that was what we both did.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Right. Like I have been podcasting for eight years.

01:17:18 ◼   ► Real AFM has existed for four years.

01:17:20 ◼   ► Right. So like you can see that on your own.

01:17:24 ◼   ► But like I got my real success four years ago.

01:17:27 ◼   ► That was when it really started kicking off for me.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Like I had a bunch of like exciting things that happened beforehand.

01:17:32 ◼   ► a lot of stuff that was amazing and felt like real success at the time.

01:17:35 ◼   ► But this was the start of what I have now.

01:17:39 ◼   ► So it took me four years to get to where I wanted to be.

01:17:43 ◼   ► And I know that there are many people that are working for longer.

01:17:46 ◼   ► Like I know people that have been doing it for longer.

01:17:49 ◼   ► Like it's just that's just it takes a lot of time.

01:17:52 ◼   ► And the thing is like the people that end up being successful

01:17:55 ◼   ► are the people that stuck to it. Right.

01:17:56 ◼   ► Like I know that's kind of a glib thing to say, but that is the truth to it.

01:18:00 ◼   ► I wished it was easier than that, but just keep keep doing your thing.

01:18:04 ◼   ► Like the thing you're doing right now might not end up being the thing.

01:18:07 ◼   ► You might have to have another idea,

01:18:08 ◼   ► but you only have those other ideas by keeping on the grind.

01:18:11 ◼   ► So that's unfortunately, that's kind of how it goes.

01:18:15 ◼   ► All right. Let's take a break.

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01:20:14 ◼   ► Thanks to inboard technology

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01:20:16 ◼   ► and Relay FM.

01:20:17 ◼   ► All right, these are what

01:20:20 ◼   ► I have labeled fun questions.

01:20:24 ◼   ► Okay, Kyle's the gray asks who once and for all has grown the most epic beard

01:20:28 ◼   ► It feels bad of it for yourself, but I'm gonna vote for myself. It is more epic it is but the thing is right

01:20:35 ◼   ► So this is Rosemary's question leads. I'm just before we write round this out. Lots of people care about our beards

01:20:40 ◼   ► This is Rosemary or to the host of automators and relay FM

01:20:44 ◼   ► If only one of you were allowed to have a beard, who would it be?

01:20:47 ◼   ► I feel like it would be me though, right because you shave it off

01:20:50 ◼   ► Whenever you want occasion and I don't I never shave my enough so we can mine will grow back

01:20:56 ◼   ► Are you worried that yours wouldn't come back? No, I just don't want to be without it, right?

01:21:00 ◼   ► like this is my face like and has been I've had facial hair for like

01:21:04 ◼   ► 15 years like half of my life. I have had some element of hair on my face

01:21:11 ◼   ► Right, like it was a bad 15 years a mustache

01:21:14 ◼   ► But like it's this funny thing that yes, you do have a better beard than me

01:21:18 ◼   ► But the beard is attached to me right like people think of me when it comes to the beard but your beards way better

01:21:23 ◼   ► but it's because you fluctuate and I don't I

01:21:25 ◼   ► Do yeah, I'm a I'm a a beard fluctuator

01:21:30 ◼   ► How many jiggle was does that give you?

01:21:34 ◼   ► Previously mentioned Michael Sargent has an incredible question if Netflix were to create a mock work mock place

01:21:46 ◼   ► oh my god if Netflix were to create a workplace mockumentary based around the

01:21:52 ◼   ► launch and subsequent operation of relay FM who would you want to play you?

01:21:56 ◼   ► Zach Braff. He's had a really good podcast TV show. Isn't he the guy? I've been thinking about this today and I think I

01:22:06 ◼   ► would like to go for Matt Smith who was Doctor Who because I think that he can

01:22:14 ◼   ► be animated in a ridiculous way, which I think I am quite a lot, right?

01:22:18 ◼   ► Like moving my arms around and saying stupid stuff.

01:22:21 ◼   ► Um, and he is also really funny, which is good for this type of show.

01:22:26 ◼   ► I'm not saying that I'm really funny, but he is kind of, he's really funny.

01:22:29 ◼   ► So I think he's British enough that it would work right.

01:22:33 ◼   ► Like I was like thinking that I needed someone who was lighthearted,

01:22:36 ◼   ► kind of ridiculous and British.

01:22:38 ◼   ► And that's how I landed on Matt Smith.

01:22:40 ◼   ► I am keen to hear people's other recommendations.

01:22:44 ◼   ► I actually have one for you.

01:22:47 ◼   ► Please, because I don't have an answer prepared to be honest.

01:22:50 ◼   ► Seth Rogen. Seth Rogen would would play you.

01:22:53 ◼   ► Are you beard casting me?

01:22:56 ◼   ► Yeah, but he also has curly hair.

01:22:59 ◼   ► And he's dry, funny like you, you know? Yeah.

01:23:02 ◼   ► So I think Seth Rogen would work. OK.

01:23:05 ◼   ► He's also American.

01:23:08 ◼   ► He isn't. I don't think he has a southern accent.

01:23:10 ◼   ► But you would just have to go with that unless you come up with something better.

01:23:15 ◼   ► I think we go with it.

01:23:16 ◼   ► Although Jason seems upset in the chat room, I don't know what it's about.

01:23:19 ◼   ► So it could be all of it.

01:23:21 ◼   ► Everything.

01:23:21 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:22 ◼   ► This is Jason's journal angst.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:23:24 ◼   ► All right.

01:23:26 ◼   ► This next person.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Go for it.

01:23:31 ◼   ► CK_Kraus99.

01:23:34 ◼   ► Yep.

01:23:35 ◼   ► It's a family name.

01:23:37 ◼   ► That means they're like what 18 or 19 years old, maybe 17 years old, right?

01:23:41 ◼   ► Right. They're 99 years old.

01:23:44 ◼   ► They'll be ages.

01:23:45 ◼   ► What is your favorite non tech podcast?

01:23:49 ◼   ► I have two because I can't pick one.

01:23:52 ◼   ► A show called Wonderful, which is hosted by Griffin McElroy and Rachel McElroy.

01:23:58 ◼   ► And they just talk about two things every week that

01:24:03 ◼   ► they love. That's it.

01:24:05 ◼   ► It's just a happiness podcast is all it is.

01:24:08 ◼   ► It's just a married couple have incredible chemistry and they're super funny together.

01:24:13 ◼   ► They just talk about things that are nice and they're so nice to each other.

01:24:16 ◼   ► It's just like 30 to 40 minutes of just joy.

01:24:21 ◼   ► That's why I love that one.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And also Dubai Friday, because it's where I get my political news.

01:24:26 ◼   ► Yeah. And also really great.

01:24:29 ◼   ► I love Dubai Friday.

01:24:31 ◼   ► It is an incredible show.

01:24:32 ◼   ► I would expect that everybody that listens to this must be listening to Dubai Friday at this point.

01:24:37 ◼   ► And if they're not like, you need to it's so good. It's so good. And I continue to pick Dubai Friday

01:24:43 ◼   ► and have done in kind of this spot for a long time now.

01:24:46 ◼   ► Same. I really, really love it. Yeah, I also just want to throw out there slow burn. It's a podcast

01:24:56 ◼   ► by Slate. And it is about presidents who have been impeached. So they did Watergate and they just

01:25:01 ◼   ► started the Clinton impeachment. So it's political and kind of heavy, but it's really fascinating

01:25:05 ◼   ► if you're interested in that sort of stuff. So I really enjoyed season one. Season two

01:25:09 ◼   ► just started. I have a new episode waiting for me and I can't wait to listen to it, hopefully,

01:25:13 ◼   ► later this week.

01:25:14 ◼   ► I've seen this promoted and now I know what it's about.

01:25:17 ◼   ► The artwork is very good. Most of Slate's stuff is, but it looks really good.

01:25:21 ◼   ► Yeah, they do really interesting stuff over there.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Brent, Tac Prime, second question, both good questions.

01:25:31 ◼   ► What kind of chair do you podcast in?

01:25:33 ◼   ► Are you as a--

01:25:34 ◼   ► - Beanbag.

01:25:35 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:25:36 ◼   ► - Can you imagine the noise?

01:25:37 ◼   ► - Oh God, that would be awful.

01:25:38 ◼   ► - God, you have to sit so still.

01:25:40 ◼   ► This is actually, I said to, I replied to Brent,

01:25:42 ◼   ► said these are really good questions you've asked.

01:25:44 ◼   ► And they said to me, oh, it's because I had to just edit

01:25:49 ◼   ► some chair noise out of my show,

01:25:51 ◼   ► so I wanna know what you're recording,

01:25:53 ◼   ► 'cause there's no chair noise.

01:25:55 ◼   ► Basically all chairs devolve to noise over time. It's true. That is a mine's got a pop if I turn the wrong way

01:26:00 ◼   ► Yeah, they all chairs

01:26:02 ◼   ► devolve to noise, but I use a

01:26:05 ◼   ► Herman Miller M body

01:26:08 ◼   ► Very expensive chair, but you know, they're kind of like $900 or something. There's two reasons I did this

01:26:14 ◼   ► I bought like a two hundred and fifty dollar chair on Amazon that lasted me 80 ads

01:26:19 ◼   ► Right bad choice, right?

01:26:20 ◼   ► It didn't last me no way in a long enough because it was it was a piece of junk, right?

01:26:24 ◼   ► And that tends to be what you get for a $200 chair. It's a lot of money, but they they age really quickly

01:26:30 ◼   ► and the Herman Miller chairs if you buy them from either them or

01:26:34 ◼   ► You look through their kind of

01:26:37 ◼   ► Supplier page that they have on their website. They have a 10-year guarantee on their chairs

01:26:43 ◼   ► So you have that chair? Well, this chair will last me for 10 years if I want it to so

01:26:50 ◼   ► Yeah, there we go. That's what I use.

01:26:54 ◼   ► I use its sibling, the Herman Miller Aeron. For all the same reasons you do, I bought

01:27:01 ◼   ► an Amazon chair when I quit my job, and it quickly fell apart and was quickly uncomfortable.

01:27:07 ◼   ► I tried the chair you have, and I just like this one a little bit better. But they do

01:27:12 ◼   ► very similar things.

01:27:13 ◼   ► They do. They do.

01:27:16 ◼   ► And mine's in black, because that's the correct color for a chair.

01:27:19 ◼   ► Well I got blue, the closest I could get to our company color.

01:27:23 ◼   ► A little more blue.

01:27:25 ◼   ► Real time follow up on casting.

01:27:27 ◼   ► So I remember that we did this on episode 19 of Connected.

01:27:30 ◼   ► I remembered we did it on Connected and couldn't remember the episode number so couldn't find

01:27:34 ◼   ► it.

01:27:35 ◼   ► We for some reason casted ourselves on that episode.

01:27:38 ◼   ► And the way that I actually stand by this casting as well.

01:27:41 ◼   ► So Bradley Cooper as you and a bearded Benedict Cumberbatch as me.

01:27:48 ◼   ► If you click on the link in the show notes to episode 19 of Connected, you'll see the

01:27:54 ◼   ► pictures that were chosen.

01:27:55 ◼   ► And I think if you put just a bigger beard on Bradley Cooper, it would still work.

01:28:00 ◼   ► And we were with a long haired Joseph Gordon-Levitt for Federico.

01:28:05 ◼   ► Still perfect.

01:28:06 ◼   ► That casting is still perfect.

01:28:07 ◼   ► I think.

01:28:08 ◼   ► It's pretty good.

01:28:09 ◼   ► It works.

01:28:10 ◼   ► It all really works still.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Plus, I mean, you know, I would love Benedict Cumberbatch playing me.

01:28:14 ◼   ► But the thing is with those, right?

01:28:16 ◼   ► So I tried to think of like someone who might be in this show and I don't think we could

01:28:20 ◼   ► land those two for this show.

01:28:22 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:23 ◼   ► But Matt Smith still does TV, right?

01:28:25 ◼   ► Like he actually still does Netflix shows.

01:28:26 ◼   ► He just did like the Queen, Joe.

01:28:30 ◼   ► Is it called Queen?

01:28:31 ◼   ► What's it called?

01:28:32 ◼   ► Is it the Queen?

01:28:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:34 ◼   ► What are you talking about?

01:28:35 ◼   ► The Netflix show.

01:28:36 ◼   ► Is it called the Queen?

01:28:37 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:28:38 ◼   ► The Crown.

01:28:39 ◼   ► Excellent show.

01:28:40 ◼   ► All right.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Last question comes from Todd.

01:28:44 ◼   ► of you would win an arm wrestling match me it was you because you go to the gym

01:28:50 ◼   ► it's true however I'm playing the next time we get to go Cooper you know go

01:28:56 ◼   ► coming a movie oh you're trying to bulk up yeah next time we're together I think

01:29:00 ◼   ► we should try it okay but you would win but I want to try it anyway okay deal

01:29:05 ◼   ► get some of that just raw British power behind me the Empire building power that

01:29:13 ◼   ► I have somewhere in my brain.

01:29:15 ◼   ► How's that empire?

01:29:16 ◼   ► Not very good.

01:29:17 ◼   ► That's why I'll lose.

01:29:18 ◼   ► It will be good for a little while and then crumble horrifically.

01:29:22 ◼   ► That's kind of how it will go.

01:29:24 ◼   ► Hey, welcome to our present.

01:29:26 ◼   ► Thank you for listening to episode 205 of Connected.

01:29:29 ◼   ► If you sent a question in, thank you so much.

01:29:31 ◼   ► There were a ton of questions we couldn't get to.

01:29:33 ◼   ► We're sorry if we didn't get to yours, but we still appreciate each and every one of

01:29:38 ◼   ► you because without y'all, we would not be celebrating four years of our company.

01:29:41 ◼   ► It is all because of you.

01:29:42 ◼   ► But you know who we appreciate the most?

01:29:44 ◼   ► Members.

01:29:44 ◼   ► Members.

01:29:45 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:29:47 ◼   ► We don't have a favorite child, but we do love some of you more.

01:29:51 ◼   ► Yep.

01:29:51 ◼   ► And so if you become a member, just know that we love you the most.

01:29:54 ◼   ► Relay.fm/membership.

01:29:57 ◼   ► Please, please sign up.

01:29:58 ◼   ► If you do, thank you.

01:29:59 ◼   ► Thank you so much.

01:30:01 ◼   ► Maybe even better, go to relay.fm/connected and support this show specifically.

01:30:06 ◼   ► Thank you so much to everyone for listening and supporting.

01:30:09 ◼   ► Steven, take us out.

01:30:10 ◼   ► There are a few links this week.

01:30:11 ◼   ► not as many as normal, but you can find them over at relay.fm/connected/205.

01:30:17 ◼   ► While you're there, you can get in touch with us.

01:30:20 ◼   ► You can send us an email with some follow-up.

01:30:23 ◼   ► You can find us on Twitter.

01:30:25 ◼   ► Myke is I-M-Y-K-E, and Myke is the host of a bunch of shows on Relay FM.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Go check them out.

01:30:31 ◼   ► Federico is still on vacation.

01:30:32 ◼   ► We promise he's still part of the show.

01:30:34 ◼   ► He'll be back very soon.

01:30:35 ◼   ► We hope next week, right?

01:30:37 ◼   ► I think next week, yeah.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I hope so.

01:30:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:40 ◼   ► We're planning on it.

01:30:41 ◼   ► Federico, please come back. Please come back. We've had enough alone time. Please come back.

01:30:48 ◼   ► So maybe tweet at Federico just encouraging him to come back to the show. Please come back.

01:30:56 ◼   ► You should say the show's still good, but please come back.

01:30:59 ◼   ► Yeah. So you can find him there at VITICCI. And of course Federico is the editor-in-chief of

01:31:06 ◼   ► He's working on a big iOS review for this fall.

01:31:11 ◼   ► So get ready.

01:31:13 ◼   ► Get your time taken off now so you can just sink into iOS 12 whenever it comes out.

01:31:18 ◼   ► You can find me on Twitter sometimes as ismh, but I write 512pixels.net and host the 512pixels

01:31:25 ◼   ► YouTube channel.

01:31:26 ◼   ► I'd like to thank our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Pingdom, and Inboard Technology.

01:31:31 ◼   ► Until next week, Michael, say goodbye.

01:31:35 ◼   ► I love you and happy anniversary and goodbye.

01:31:38 ◼   ► - Wow, adios.

01:31:40 ◼   ► - Is that all I get?