00:00:00 ◼ ► I'm the kind of guy who doesn't have a lot of interests. I like a few things a lot, and one of
00:00:05 ◼ ► them is technology and Apple stuff, and another is politics. And I could have just as easily gone the
00:00:13 ◼ ► route that you did. Instead, I thought politics would be just a little easier. Well, you know that
00:00:19 ◼ ► I almost, I might have even used the name Daring Fireball for it, but when I was like, "I should
00:00:24 ◼ ► have a blog. I could do this." I've said this many times, but I've considered making the focus
00:00:31 ◼ ► politics rather than Apple/technology/design. And/or having two blogs, one where I write about
00:00:41 ◼ ► the stuff everybody knows me for at Daring Fireball, and one where I dedicate to politics.
00:00:45 ◼ ► I mean, because for obvious reasons, of all the possible things you could mash together into one
00:00:53 ◼ ► website, the one that doesn't really go with anything else is politics, right? I mean...
00:00:59 ◼ ► Exactly. No, I think that's why you have to stay on topic. And that's what works on the internet,
00:01:04 ◼ ► is staying on topic. I think that that's what makes Political Wire appealing to people, is that
00:01:10 ◼ ► I do not deviate from politics. And what was interesting is when I first started the site,
00:01:16 ◼ ► way back when, I wrote the pros and cons. It was actually on a piece of yellow legal pad,
00:01:22 ◼ ► which tells you how old I am, right? But I wrote on each side, and the only con I could think of
00:01:29 ◼ ► to starting a site like this was politics might get boring. And anyway, that did not happen, Jon.
00:01:35 ◼ ► Well, here we are. So, your first time on this show, and trying to have as many first-time guests
00:01:44 ◼ ► as I can, I get lazy and go back to my favorites. But I feel like because you come from a different
00:01:50 ◼ ► sphere, you actually need a proper introduction. I don't know if I know how to make a proper
00:02:02 ◼ ► publisher, and blogger, writer at Political Wire, which is politicalwire.com, which are easily
00:02:09 ◼ ► what you're best known for. I would say Political Wire and Tegan Godard are to politics,
00:02:24 ◼ ► Oh, I would say the other way around. We don't have to pat each other on the back here. But
00:02:29 ◼ ► now, when did you start Political Wire? So, let's do some history. I actually done the famous words,
00:02:35 ◼ ► "Don't ever ask a question you don't know the answer to." I decided I'm not going to do the
00:02:39 ◼ ► research. I'm just going to ask you. So, which is perfectly fine. So, there was actually a
00:02:45 ◼ ► predecessor site because I always wanted the domain politicalwire.com. And back when I started
00:02:51 ◼ ► it, it was not available. Somebody had taken it. And the reason that I wanted it was because when
00:02:57 ◼ ► I was in college, I became fascinated with the devoted reader of the Wall Street Journal. And
00:03:02 ◼ ► on the right-hand column of the front page of the paper Wall Street Journal, every Friday, there was
00:03:08 ◼ ► a column called Washington Wire. And I devoured that column. It was fantastic. It was all these
00:03:14 ◼ ► interesting tidbits that came out of the journals, Washington Bureau, and things that didn't really
00:03:20 ◼ ► fit in their news stories. And I had this vision that I wanted to create a site which would
00:03:27 ◼ ► replicate that idea, but not just for Washington, politics across the country and even across the
00:03:34 ◼ ► world, but not just one source, not just the Wall Street Journal, every source. And so, at the time
00:03:42 ◼ ► when I started this, there was a predecessor site. It was called Political Insider because I could
00:03:49 ◼ ► not get the domain name. And my co-author and I, we wrote a book together for Simon & Schuster.
00:03:55 ◼ ► We started this site. And what it was was a morning briefing of politics. And this was 1997,
00:04:07 ◼ ► and I took the commuter train into the city. And at 4 a.m., I had my computer would dial up on a
00:04:14 ◼ ► modem, download web pages, save them to my hard drive. And when I got on that train, I would put
00:04:21 ◼ ► together a daily briefing of politics. And I did this every morning. And I did it really because
00:04:27 ◼ ► before I worked on Wall Street, I had actually worked in politics. I worked for a governor. I
00:04:32 ◼ ► worked for a U.S. senator. And it was my way to kind of get back into politics through this site.
00:04:38 ◼ ► And that's how it all started. Short time there later, I think it was in 1999, so about two years
00:04:44 ◼ ► later, I managed to acquire politicalwire.com. The person who had registered it just let it lapse.
00:04:53 ◼ ► And so I picked it back up again and shortly thereafter launched Politicalwire. And it's
00:04:58 ◼ ► been up ever since. Pete: Wow. I've had Katke on the show a few times, but one of the few people,
00:05:03 ◼ ► and I haven't yet had Dave Weiner. I should at some point soon get Dave. But one of the handful
00:05:09 ◼ ► of people who easily can say that they've been writing at their blog longer than I have at mine.
00:05:16 ◼ ► Which is getting to be— It's funny because back in the day, I actually thought, the vision was,
00:05:24 ◼ ► I thought that there must be some way that I can automate this. And so I actually had a lot of
00:05:29 ◼ ► conversations via email with Dave Weiner and with Aaron Schwartz, who were really just at the
00:05:42 ◼ ► compliments I had back then is that Dave actually posted on scripting.com. He called me a visionary
00:05:49 ◼ ► in the way I was using RSS. And I was like, wow, that's the biggest compliment I could ever get,
00:05:54 ◼ ► because I'm not really a tech guy. I know just enough about programming to be dangerous,
00:05:58 ◼ ► but that's not what I studied in school. It's not what I did. And anyway, it was a great compliment.
00:06:04 ◼ ► And ever since, I've been trying to see if you could automate what I do, but it turns out that
00:06:13 ◼ ► Pete: Kotke went down that route a while, a long time ago. Remember, I forget the name of it. He
00:06:28 ◼ ► Pete; And it didn't work, thankfully. I'll find a link to the thing and put it in the show notes,
00:06:35 ◼ ► but I'm glad it didn't. Yeah, I would say with Dave and alas, the departed young Aaron Swirly.
00:06:43 ◼ ► It's so weird when somebody dies young, because now I always think of Aaron as a kid, even though
00:06:49 ◼ ► he'd be probably like 40 years old at this point. And I don't want to devolve into a discussion of
00:06:57 ◼ ► RSS. But RSS originally, the original RSS spec definitely belongs to Dave Weiner as every bit as
00:07:03 ◼ ► much as Markdown belongs to me as a creation. And then Aaron, there was like this weird fork of
00:07:11 ◼ ► versions of RSS. And I forget, the version numbers were weird. It was like RSS 0.97 and then an RSS
00:07:17 ◼ ► 1.0. And Aaron had something to do with formalizing one of those specs, but Dave had nothing to do
00:07:24 ◼ ► with it. And I don't think, as prickly as Dave Weiner can be, I don't think that was a dispute.
00:07:29 ◼ ► I just, it was just a weird fork and it was like Yahoo supported one version of RSS and somebody
00:07:34 ◼ ► else. And it was really kind of a mess. And Dave fixed it with RSS 2.0, which is like the thing
00:07:42 ◼ ► everybody uses now. But the thing that made them both visionary in their own ways wasn't just
00:07:54 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. And to me, the biggest, single biggest feather in RSS's cap,
00:08:00 ◼ ► and again, Dave Weiner was there making it, saw how it could happen is podcasting itself, right?
00:08:07 ◼ ► Every open, other than if you're in the Spotify app and subscribe to a Spotify exclusive, which is
00:08:12 ◼ ► only in the Spotify app, the thing the rest of us all call podcasts, the thing that every podcast
00:08:17 ◼ ► says, or wherever you find your podcasts, that whole phrase, wherever you find your podcast,
00:08:22 ◼ ► and that you can use whatever, that's all, they're all RSS feeds. And it was Dave who's,
00:08:28 ◼ ► even though he made it to publish his blog in serial form, it was him who thought, well,
00:08:34 ◼ ► we could just use the RSS extension thing to put a link to an MP3 file. And then an RSS feed could
00:08:43 ◼ ► Pete: No, it's fantastic. And we, and we all use it and we're all grateful to Dave for doing that.
00:08:48 ◼ ► Another thing that happened right along the time when I reacquired the domain politicalwire.com
00:08:54 ◼ ► was I started using the software. The software came out by a kid, Noah Gray, who had created
00:09:02 ◼ ► Gray Matter. And for the first time, the vision that I had for what politicalwire could become,
00:09:09 ◼ ► it just, just this huge ray of light came out because Noah Gray had created the software,
00:09:16 ◼ ► server-run software that allowed you to create a website of reverse chronological posts.
00:09:23 ◼ ► It was literally the first blog that, that out there, otherwise other than people coding it
00:09:28 ◼ ► themselves. And it was fantastic. And it ran on the server. It allowed me to post items from
00:09:34 ◼ ► again, anywhere in the world. And it was just game-changing. And that's when politicalwire really
00:09:40 ◼ ► blossomed because it was no longer a daily briefing. It was, it became an all-day briefing.
00:09:52 ◼ ► Pete: Here's my funny story about that. I'm, of course, late to the start of you and me recording
00:10:00 ◼ ► this podcast. We were supposed to start at six. I was not, I was kind enough and ahead of myself
00:10:05 ◼ ► to text you a few minutes ahead that I was going to be late. And then right before we started
00:10:09 ◼ ► recording, I checked and you have one that you posted at 604. So after I told you I was going
00:10:14 ◼ ► to be late, you're like, okay. And then you went and posted something. Well, John, don't,
00:10:20 ◼ ► I don't be surprised if I post something while we're talking here. That would be the best.
00:10:24 ◼ ► I could never do it, but I could believe you could do it. Yeah. So gray matter is interesting.
00:10:29 ◼ ► Nobody uses it anymore. I don't even, it's sort of defunct, but it was ahead of its time, was cited
00:10:37 ◼ ► as largely as an inspiration for movable type, which I'm still using, but which is also largely
00:10:43 ◼ ► fallen out of favor. And WordPress was originally, was every, everything. There was a gray matter
00:10:51 ◼ ► came out and then their movable type came out and then WordPress came out. I'm not quite sure if
00:10:56 ◼ ► that's the right word. I know gray matter was first, but, and now it's sort of the whole world
00:11:00 ◼ ► sort of settled on WordPress, which I presume is what politicalwire uses now. It is. I went,
00:11:06 ◼ ► I went actually, I went to movable type, movable type, movable type was a great improvement on gray
00:11:19 ◼ ► 2006, 2007, something like that. But I can't be quite sure, but in any event, yeah, now I'm on
00:11:27 ◼ ► WordPress. I'm actually impressed that Daring Firebill is still on movable type because when
00:11:33 ◼ ► I switched there were, there were band-aids keeping it together. And the fact that you've been
00:11:36 ◼ ► able to keep it together must mean that you've made some changes to it yourself just to.
00:11:40 ◼ ► Pete: I have, which is one of the reasons, I mean, I don't want to devolve into nerding out on CMS
00:11:45 ◼ ► stuff, but you know, we're talking old blog stuff, but part of it is my general laziness and
00:11:52 ◼ ► procrastination. Part of it though, is that if there's one language I can program in with any
00:11:59 ◼ ► competence, it's Perl and that's what movable type is written in. And I haven't really customized
00:12:05 ◼ ► movable type itself much. I mean, I should check my notes and see, I know I've done a few things,
00:12:11 ◼ ► but it's mostly that the extension interface is also Perl. So marked in my version of Markdown is
00:12:18 ◼ ► a movable type extension. And it's, if there's a second language that I'm pretty competent in,
00:12:25 ◼ ► it is PHP, but it's, that's what WordPress is written in, but I'm just much more comfortable
00:12:32 ◼ ► with it. And the other thing is I don't really use much of movable type. Movable type never is
00:12:37 ◼ ► exposed to the readers of Daring Fireball. It's like this complete layer that only I interact
00:12:43 ◼ ► with. And now there's this whole thing, it's not even recent at this point, but people call static
00:12:51 ◼ ► site generators. And typically they run on people's computer. You install like Hugo is a well-known
00:12:56 ◼ ► one. There's a bunch of them, but you install this thing on your computer and like in the terminal or
00:13:02 ◼ ► whatever, and then you make text files, run a command and the whole folder of text files gets
00:13:09 ◼ ► turned into HTML files, and then you can sync them to a server and that's your website. And it's
00:13:16 ◼ ► static because they're just like HTML files that go to a site and, you know, super high performance
00:13:23 ◼ ► right out of the box, even with like a $5 a month hosting account. If something happens and you
00:13:29 ◼ ► suddenly have an explosive viral moment, your server will probably keep up with it, et cetera.
00:13:40 ◼ ► every time I post emits a static file for the post, the RSS feed gets updated. But the fact
00:13:50 ◼ ► that it's outdated and doesn't get, I haven't installed a software update for movable type in,
00:13:55 ◼ ► I don't know, 15 years. It just runs and runs and runs. It's like old Unix utilities. I don't know,
00:14:06 ◼ ► you have things like comments and stuff like that, where it's more interactive and people
00:14:10 ◼ ► are actually dealing live with the site. I do. And there's a lot of reasons why WordPress works
00:14:15 ◼ ► for political wire, but the main one, and we don't have to geek out about CMSs right now, but it is
00:14:21 ◼ ► this idea. I've heard you talk in the past, how you had designed, you had wanted to be a columnist.
00:14:28 ◼ ► And that's what I always wanted to be. I wanted to be a columnist, but what political wire became
00:14:39 ◼ ► something that is, it's different than the column that we grew up with in the newspaper.
00:14:44 ◼ ► It's a totally different thing. And that's why I think a site like political wire still,
00:14:51 ◼ ► why it still does well. I mean, we're in the midst of a presidential campaign and keeping the site up
00:15:01 ◼ ► is sometimes hard, partially due to the nature of the way the site is generated coming from a
00:15:07 ◼ ► database in every page recreated on the fly. So when you talk about these static text files,
00:15:13 ◼ ► I'm kind of jealous about that right now, because it would make things a little bit easier. But
00:15:23 ◼ ► When I make a mistake, which I do, I get readers who tell me pretty quickly, you've told me in the
00:15:29 ◼ ► past that I've made a mistake. I value that because I tell you mistakes last for only a few minutes
00:15:36 ◼ ► before someone tells me. And I always kind of grip my teeth and go, "Oh, I can't believe I did that."
00:15:41 ◼ ► But I can fix it. And then the vast majority of readers don't see that. And that's what I love
00:15:47 ◼ ► about this medium. It's just a fantastic, we're just very privileged to have been there at the
00:15:59 ◼ ► Pete: I'll hold that thought because I want to come back to it. But I also don't want to let
00:16:04 ◼ ► too much time pass before I hit the money bell and thank our first sponsor of the show, our good
00:16:10 ◼ ► friends at WorkOS. Go to workos.com. There's no special slash daring fireball or anything that,
00:16:24 ◼ ► software as a service app, B2B, S-A-A-S, at some point, your customers are going to start asking
00:16:30 ◼ ► about enterprise features like SAML authentication, SCIM, which is spelled S-C-I-M, provisioning,
00:16:44 ◼ ► business-to-business, software as a service. So, none of that stuff makes any sense to me.
00:16:48 ◼ ► I don't know what they are. But if you're listening to me and you do build business-to-business,
00:16:53 ◼ ► software as a service apps, you'd probably know what all of them mean. And WorkOS can make all
00:16:59 ◼ ► of them easier. They provide easy to use and flexible APIs that help you ship enterprise
00:17:05 ◼ ► features on day one without slowing down your core product development. Let WorkOS handle all
00:17:11 ◼ ► that stuff and you focus your time, energy, and engineering on the features specific to your app.
00:17:17 ◼ ► Just you do your stuff. Let WorkOS do all of this hard software as a service B2B stuff. They are
00:17:24 ◼ ► used by some of the biggest startups in the world, including Vercel, Plaid, and Perplexity.
00:17:34 ◼ ► WorkOS also provides, this is amazing to me, a generous free tier of up to 1 million monthly
00:17:41 ◼ ► active users for its user management solution. Comes standard with rich features like bot
00:17:47 ◼ ► protection, MFA, roles and permissions, and more. You don't pay a cent until you hit a million
00:17:54 ◼ ► active monthly customers. What a deal. I honestly find that hard to believe. I would love to have
00:18:00 ◼ ► a million active readers at Daring Fireball. If you are currently looking to build your SSO,
00:18:27 ◼ ► when, I don't know when I first started thinking I should start a blog, but it's part of my
00:18:32 ◼ ► procrastination. I often say, one of the other things that I often say is, in some not too
00:18:38 ◼ ► different universe, there's a version of me who still hasn't started Daring Fireball. I mean,
00:18:52 ◼ ► But there's a part of, part of my struggle was just like, ah, but what exactly should it be like?
00:19:00 ◼ ► And in the 90s, I got my start writing at the student newspaper at Drexel, The Triangle,
00:19:11 ◼ ► but basically did all that because I wanted to be in charge of the newspaper so that my weekly
00:19:18 ◼ ► column got the best placement on the op-ed page and looked as good as it possibly could.
00:19:24 ◼ ► I've told this story before, but the first year, Drexel's, I had a five-year program there. My
00:19:30 ◼ ► freshman year, I didn't go to work at the student newspaper. Instead, I published my own newsletter
00:19:36 ◼ ► in the dorm. And a friend who did, as a freshman, go to write for The Triangle said, "You should go.
00:19:42 ◼ ► I mean, you're such a better writer than everybody there. I mean, you read The Triangle. Half the
00:19:48 ◼ ► people can't even write." I don't know. I just hated the idea of submitting a column and maybe
00:19:56 ◼ ► getting rejected. I just, I don't know. I'll just make my own goofy thing and put it in the dorm.
00:20:02 ◼ ► But the second year, I thought, "Oh, I should do it." And I did it, and they were like, "Oh,
00:20:10 ◼ ► it was you came in with a floppy disk and gave it to somebody in the office who would take it and
00:20:16 ◼ ► put it on one of their machines because there was no, in 1992, most of the, I had internet access
00:20:24 ◼ ► because I was a computer science major, but most of the people at Drexel didn't. So, there was like
00:20:29 ◼ ► a physical interaction. And I don't know, after the fourth or fifth column that I submitted and
00:20:36 ◼ ► they all ran, I'd notice each week what got changed. And usually it was subtle, and I tried
00:20:42 ◼ ► to proofread my own stuff, especially in the early days as closely as I could. But one time there was
00:20:48 ◼ ► a joke that in the middle of the column that got rewritten. I mean, in a way where it was like,
00:20:56 ◼ ► I don't know, I thought the joke was gone. And I was annoyed, but I thought, "I don't know,
00:21:01 ◼ ► I must have, what did I do wrong?" It wasn't offensive. It couldn't have been. I was just so
00:21:07 ◼ ► curious. So, the next week I came in, and the guy's name, he was the op-ed editor at the time,
00:21:13 ◼ ► his name was Francis. And I gave him the floppy disk. He said, "Ah, good to see you." And I say,
00:21:19 ◼ ► "I have a question." And I took out like the issue from the week before and pointed to my column and
00:21:23 ◼ ► said, "Hey, I wrote this, but here's how it ran. Why?" And he was like, "Ah, yeah, your column was
00:21:31 ◼ ► one line too long." And so it flew instead of ending straight, it needed to be shortened a
00:21:37 ◼ ► little. And so I changed that to shorten it up by one line. And by the time he finished telling me
00:21:43 ◼ ► that, I just immediately thought I need to become the op-ed editor of the newspaper so that this
00:21:49 ◼ ► never happens again. It all clicked in my head, and I thought, "Oh, I need to be the op-ed editor."
00:21:56 ◼ ► And I don't think I became the next op-ed editor, but I started hanging around the newspaper and
00:22:09 ◼ ► once I learned QuarkXPress and started learning graphic design, I more or less realized I needed,
00:22:15 ◼ ► I wanted to redesign the whole newspaper to make the whole thing look better, but the only way to
00:22:19 ◼ ► do that was to be the editor-in-chief. And I'm not saying I had no other interest in being, you know,
00:22:24 ◼ ► you don't get to be the editor-in-chief without some interest in news, but I had very little
00:22:30 ◼ ► interest in the typical college newspaper news, right? The, "What's the provost doing?" or saying,
00:22:36 ◼ ► I just, I delegated that, but more or less made it fun, made the whole thing funnier and look better.
00:22:42 ◼ ► Well, I had to admit it. I'm out of college for a couple of years. I want, I'm reading Dave Weiner,
00:22:48 ◼ ► I'm reading Kotke, I'm reading other blogs. I think I could do that, but what is the format,
00:22:53 ◼ ► right? Is it an issue, right? And that's what you're talking about with the newsletter that
00:22:58 ◼ ► you started with at Political Insider, right? You were coming out with a daily issue, right?
00:23:03 ◼ ► Exactly, yeah. Yeah, no, it was published to the web and it was once a day. If it was today,
00:23:10 ◼ ► it would be a sub stack or something like that, but you know, but that's what we had at the time.
00:23:14 ◼ ► Coming from a newspaper sort of broke my mind a little or cemented my mind around issues. You
00:23:23 ◼ ► could start a website, you know, and suck.com was a super, super famous site. Everybody of our era
00:23:31 ◼ ► sites suck as a seminal and forming the independent web, but it was daily, weekdays, right? It was,
00:23:40 ◼ ► there's the Monday issue, Tuesday issue. It wasn't posts, it was, oh, here's the Wednesday issue of
00:23:47 ◼ ► suck.com. And that just isn't a great format. And all sites, big and small, sort of struggled with
00:23:54 ◼ ► that, right? I mean, it's like a recurring joke, but there was a time where the New York Times
00:24:00 ◼ ► website got updated like once a day, right? I mean, or twice a day. I don't know. It was like
00:24:10 ◼ ► of the newyorktimes.com. And it's like having your brain cemented by the limits of the old medium
00:24:20 ◼ ► prevents you from seeing the potential of the new medium. And that's where somebody like Dave Weiner
00:24:26 ◼ ► is such a genius in terms of ahead of when it's even technically possible seeing the potential
00:24:43 ◼ ► Insider and it was that one page, one page a day type site that came out in the morning,
00:24:49 ◼ ► most newspapers at that time didn't even have proper websites and the bulk of their content
00:24:55 ◼ ► wasn't online. And not only that, but it really just followed the natural paper newspaper. There
00:25:02 ◼ ► was a, for instance, the New York Times back then, they did have a website, but the website was,
00:25:07 ◼ ► you know, world news, and then there was national news, and then there was the Metro desk, and then
00:25:13 ◼ ► there were sports. And that's the way that the website followed just the same way that the paper
00:25:19 ◼ ► did. There was no politics section. And so, Political Wire almost became the front page
00:25:25 ◼ ► for politics because I and I became the editor for political news. And so, what I like to think of is
00:25:33 ◼ ► that it's the site where you come and you can come at any time and I will tell you what's important
00:25:38 ◼ ► in politics right now. And the site is living, it's live, it's updated around the clock,
00:25:44 ◼ ► and it is just ready to go. So, if you want to know what's important, what's breaking in politics,
00:25:50 ◼ ► go to Political Wire. There's a reason why people call my readers political junkies because they're
00:25:56 ◼ ► junkies. They hit that refresh button all day long. I mean, I'm right there with them. I mean,
00:26:11 ◼ ► I'm sure there's a fair number of people listening to us talk who are familiar with both our sites.
00:26:16 ◼ ► Obviously, almost everybody listening is familiar with Daring Fireball. But those who do follow
00:26:21 ◼ ► Political Wire will know exactly what I'm about to say. Nobody would mistake the style, tone,
00:26:32 ◼ ► and format of Political Wire. It's not just like Daring Fireball or vice versa. It's different,
00:26:39 ◼ ► and it's in the way that we've both settled into our personal, made the sites fit our minds, right?
00:26:48 ◼ ► But at a broad sense, they're pretty similar, right? Like, you're kind of doing the same thing
00:26:54 ◼ ► for politics that I'm trying to do for Apple and technology. And one of the ways that I feel like
00:26:59 ◼ ► they're both similar is that you can refresh five or six times a day and be rewarded with
00:27:14 ◼ ► in terms of number of posts, if not the most prolific blogger I've ever known among them.
00:27:25 ◼ ► But you could also come every day or every two days if you're busy and just read to catch up.
00:27:31 ◼ ► Like, what's happened? You know, I've been busy for two or three days. What has happened in
00:27:36 ◼ ► politics? Go to Political Wire and you'll have to scroll, but you can scroll until you—oh,
00:27:42 ◼ ► I remember reading this one a couple days ago, and now you're caught up. And you can close the tab,
00:27:46 ◼ ► and you can come back in two days, and you can be a very happy, satisfied, habitual reader of
00:27:53 ◼ ► Political Wire without really being a junkie, right, in terms of your time allocation or
00:28:03 ◼ ► And to me, that's very satisfying. I was on vacation last week with my family. We went to
00:28:09 ◼ ► Disney World, and I checked Political Wire a lot less than I usually do while I'm at my desk. But
00:28:16 ◼ ► I got that feeling of, "Oh, now I don't have to worry." And there was the political junkie in me,
00:28:27 ◼ ► that's during the DNC." And I can't because I've chosen—she's not going to—she knows not to book
00:28:35 ◼ ► a trip to Disney the week the iPhone's coming out two weeks from now. And if she did, I could say,
00:28:40 ◼ ► "That's not going to work. We're going to have to reschedule." And she'd be like, "Oh, I can't
00:28:43 ◼ ► believe I did that." She knows that I'm going to California for the iPhone event. I don't want to
00:28:48 ◼ ► say, but I'm such a—in some other world, I'm a political blogger too. And so I can't go on
00:28:54 ◼ ► vacation during the DNC. But it was, in terms of being an interesting week to be a political junkie
00:29:02 ◼ ► consumer, political—all I did was check Political Wire, really. I mean, because I knew I'd catch up.
00:29:09 ◼ ► And then the other one who sort of has eked out a different path than either of us would be
00:29:16 ◼ ► Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall's site. When Josh started Talking Points Memo was just Josh,
00:29:23 ◼ ► and it was just his blog. And I'm sure, again, talking about other multiverses, there's some
00:29:30 ◼ ► world where Josh is still doing it that way, but instead he built TPM up into sort of a newsroom,
00:29:44 ◼ ► and he started right around when I did Daring Fireballs, so it's like 20-some, 25 years.
00:29:49 ◼ ► But other than that, I felt like just by checking A, your site first, and then TPM just for any
00:29:55 ◼ ► commentary from Josh about speeches or whatever, I felt completely caught up on the political news.
00:30:00 ◼ ► And so in terms of being a political junkie who heretofore—this is the first time I didn't watch
00:30:20 ◼ ► but I'd starting in '92 with Bill Clinton and as a 20 or 19-year-old was enough of a political
00:30:28 ◼ ► junkie that of course I'm not going to miss the Democrats' acceptance speech. Your site made me
00:30:34 ◼ ► feel like I wasn't missing out. That's great to hear, and you are correct. I mean, I will get
00:30:38 ◼ ► many readers who say what's nice about political wire is that I can very efficiently, I can consume
00:30:45 ◼ ► the political news. And I try to keep—very similar to Daring Fireballs in this way—is I try to keep
00:30:55 ◼ ► you rarely use images. I rarely have images as well. And when I do, you know, it's something
00:31:01 ◼ ► pretty important, but I mean, I will go months and months without ever having an image on the site.
00:31:05 ◼ ► So it's very text-heavy, but you know, the reality is that a lot of people, that's what they want to
00:31:14 ◼ ► I'm going to say a couple months ago, but I think it was more like a year ago, but at some point,
00:31:26 ◼ ► something where I just offhandedly mentioned on Daring Fireball about one reason I don't even
00:31:33 ◼ ► embed YouTube videos. I'll just link to them and just describe it, but rather, you know,
00:31:38 ◼ ► and it's free to do the embedding so they can just hit play there, but just said something about
00:31:44 ◼ ► video fatigue. And I got—it was one of those little offhand—you never know, and I'm sure
00:31:50 ◼ ► it's the same way. Sometimes you never know when you have an audience of our size when you'll just
00:31:55 ◼ ► make an offhand comment that you didn't even think twice about, but then all of a sudden your inbox
00:32:00 ◼ ► fills up with email from readers. Yes, yes. I had been waiting for someone to mention video fatigue.
00:32:05 ◼ ► I'm so tired of hitting play and watching video. I read so much faster than I can watch a video,
00:32:12 ◼ ► even with the playback controls, and get so much more out of it. I love that your site doesn't have
00:32:18 ◼ ► videos. Love. Yeah. Every five or so years, I try to do a survey of readers, just the internet
00:32:26 ◼ ► changes, the web changes, people's consumption habits change, and I just try—I want to stay
00:32:32 ◼ ► up to date. I mean, that's what's—to me, that's what's exciting about publishing on the internet,
00:32:36 ◼ ► is that it is constantly changing, and you want to stay up to date with the new technologies and
00:32:42 ◼ ► what's happening. But I put out a survey, and the last one that I put out there, people took it the
00:32:48 ◼ ► wrong way. They're like, "Oh, my God. Are you going to change the site?" They didn't want to change.
00:33:04 ◼ ► a lot of white space. They wanted clean, to the point. And maybe it's because I don't have the
00:33:10 ◼ ► best grasp of the English language as a journalist might, but I'm very concise in terms of what I
00:33:19 ◼ ► feature. So I just get right to the point. Pete: Yeah, I'm going to say that your writing
00:33:24 ◼ ► is much better than that of the average journalist, but that's the criticism about today's average
00:33:31 ◼ ► journalist that's afield from our discussion. You do have a concision, and part of your style
00:33:38 ◼ ► that I find interesting and is different is I love block quotes when I'm quoting to something.
00:33:46 ◼ ► And in fact, it's one of the reasons I made it so easy in Markdown to create block quotes,
00:33:51 ◼ ► because I was already using them before I made Markdown and wanted it to be as easy as possible.
00:33:56 ◼ ► But you almost never use them. And instead, you'll just use actual quotation marks to quote
00:34:04 ◼ ► the passage from CNN or from the New York Times or whatever. And then I think it's pretty recent,
00:34:11 ◼ ► within the last year, where you added the new, it's sort of a new paragraph style that often,
00:34:25 ◼ ► you just quote from the sources you're linking to, but without block quotes. It's just sort of
00:34:31 ◼ ► a quote style. I'm curious if you've given that a lot of thought or if it's just the way it comes
00:34:36 ◼ ► naturally to you to write about it. Well, what's interesting, so people over the years have asked,
00:34:42 ◼ ► "I'd like to know more about your point of view." And I just tell them, "Read the website and you'll
00:34:48 ◼ ► see my point of view." And you get my point of view in some ways. Sometimes I'll use those little
00:34:54 ◼ ► comment bubbles at the end of a post. And that's if I'm going to be explicit. Sometimes I'm going
00:35:00 ◼ ► to be snarky. But I try not to. I don't run a very snarky site. But every once in a while,
00:35:06 ◼ ► there's a story that deserves it, particularly in politics these days, right? But if you want
00:35:12 ◼ ► to know what I think, it's really kind of like in the editorial selection, is in the things that I
00:35:18 ◼ ► find interesting. And I don't need to beat readers over the head with that telling them what I think,
00:35:23 ◼ ► because they're smart. They can see what I say. I put my name on the site. It's my take on politics.
00:35:28 ◼ ► It's what I think is interesting right now in politics. If you don't like it, that's fine. It's
00:35:34 ◼ ► a big internet. You can go somewhere else. Fortunately, there are many people who like it
00:35:40 ◼ ► and have kept it in business all these years. But I try to be subtle about that. I don't like to beat
00:35:48 ◼ ► people over the head with my opinion. It's the way I am in real life. When I talk politics,
00:35:54 ◼ ► that's not how I have. I don't engage in these long heated debates about politics, typically.
00:35:59 ◼ ► Every once in a while, I do. But typically, that's not what I do. But I do love politics. It's a
00:36:05 ◼ ► fascinating medium for how humans interact, how they try to get things accomplished, how they try
00:36:11 ◼ ► to achieve power, when they achieve power, what do they do with it? Are they interested in fixing
00:36:17 ◼ ► public problems? Do they have other motivations? And I've been fascinated. Literally, the first
00:36:24 ◼ ► campaign I covered, it was with my father at age 10, sitting in front of a television with Walter
00:36:31 ◼ ► Cronkite talking about the Electoral College. To me, the whole idea that we had this Electoral
00:36:36 ◼ ► College, and that's how we chose our presidents, it was amazing as a 10-year-old. And it continues
00:36:42 ◼ ► to be amazing today. And over the course of Political Wire's history, we've had two elections
00:36:47 ◼ ► where the Electoral College decided it, not the popular vote. And so it's been an interesting time
00:36:53 ◼ ► to do this. Yeah, I'm a little younger than you. But I remember in the '80s, at some point,
00:37:00 ◼ ► learning about the Electoral College and high school civics or history, whatever the name of
00:37:04 ◼ ► the course was. And the way that we were taught it, I'm quite certain of this, we were taught it
00:37:10 ◼ ► as a sort of quirk of the system, that it's almost like a footnote. Like, technically speaking,
00:37:18 ◼ ► whoever gets the most votes nationwide doesn't win. It actually goes state by state. And whoever
00:37:24 ◼ ► wins the most votes in each state wins that state. And the state gives their electoral votes that way
00:37:30 ◼ ► when they're electoral votes, except for this one weird place in Nebraska and Maine, I guess,
00:37:36 ◼ ► is split. It's like a footnote on a footnote. But it was all presented as, but of course,
00:37:41 ◼ ► except for like one time in 1882, that whoever wins the national vote popular-wise wins the
00:37:50 ◼ ► Electoral College. So it's all, who cares? And then comes 2000, then comes 2016. And now,
00:37:57 ◼ ► everybody who pays attention at all knows exactly how the Electoral College works and knows that
00:38:04 ◼ ► with these relatively, well, last two elections have been very close, both ways, popularity-wise
00:38:12 ◼ ► and Electoral College-wise, that the campaigns need to strategize to win the Electoral College,
00:38:26 ◼ ► during that 2000 recount was when I was playing around with Noah Gray's Gray Matter. And what I
00:38:34 ◼ ► was doing was, at the time, the site would put up a daily briefing in the morning. But then all of
00:38:39 ◼ ► this stuff would happen during the day. And it would have to wait till the next morning before
00:38:44 ◼ ► I posted it. And when I saw this, when I saw this first blogging software that came out, it just,
00:38:51 ◼ ► the light bulb went off. I was like, this is exactly it. This is exactly what I want this site
00:38:57 ◼ ► to be. And I wonder if that recount had not happened, and had not drawn out over those five
00:39:03 ◼ ► weeks in late 2000, whether Political Wire would be a very different site, because that's what
00:39:16 ◼ ► I started Daring Fireball, because Daring Fireball has always just been chronological on the homepage,
00:39:21 ◼ ► whatever the most recent post is, is at the top, and you scroll down. Every once in a while,
00:39:28 ◼ ► I will change the date on a post, not the date, but the time on a post to move it up or move it
00:39:34 ◼ ► down slightly. If I just, if I publish a 4000 word review of the iPhone 16, and some other little,
00:39:45 ◼ ► really truly minor thing happens, and I post it right afterwards, I might change the times
00:39:51 ◼ ► to put my big review above it, something like that. But for the most part, it's chronological.
00:39:56 ◼ ► But I, before I created or launched Daring Fireball, when I was thinking, what would the form
00:40:01 ◼ ► be, when I mentioned before my sort of preoccupation with issues, or the world of print, it was the
00:40:08 ◼ ► fact that like in the print world, and you mentioned the Wall Street Journal front page of
00:40:12 ◼ ► the physical paper before, which is a real—I haven't looked at it in a while because I don't
00:40:17 ◼ ► read printed newspapers. But really, the Wall Street Journal in the heyday of print was a marvel
00:40:23 ◼ ► of information density. I mean, just not just the fact that they didn't run photographs,
00:40:30 ◼ ► and therefore could get more text in there. But just the, they had the Washington Wire thing on
00:40:37 ◼ ► this Fridays that you mentioned, there was the news and brief every day. It was a true marvel
00:40:45 ◼ ► of information design that knew their audience too. What can you, what if the, what if it's a
00:40:51 ◼ ► business person who's only got five minutes right now? It's 830 in the morning, they're about to
00:40:57 ◼ ► start the workday, they've got coffee in one hand, and the top half of the Wall Street Journal
00:41:02 ◼ ► in the other hand, because they've got coffee in the one hand, so they can't unfold the whole
00:41:06 ◼ ► broadsheet. How much information can you give them in five minutes in one hand from the top
00:41:11 ◼ ► half of the fold of the front page? A lot, right? It was every day. Every single day, it was a lot,
00:41:18 ◼ ► right there. But there's also, because it's print, if something big and important happened,
00:41:26 ◼ ► it looked big and important, even in the Wall Street Journal. And I just was obsessed with that
00:41:31 ◼ ► with Daring for a while. I don't know, if you just go chronological, it's like you're not really
00:41:36 ◼ ► telling by the design what's more important than anything else. Turns out it doesn't matter,
00:41:42 ◼ ► people will find it. Just go chronological. And now the whole media world revolves around feeds
00:41:56 ◼ ► chronological versus algorithm ordering, but it still is just a thing that people scroll until
00:42:01 ◼ ► they find one that they like and they stop. People are willing to scroll, right? That's sort of the
00:42:05 ◼ ► trick. Well, it's the, yeah, we're now in the world of the feed, and it's also why you're
00:42:12 ◼ ► co-host on Dithering, Ben Thompson. What he always loves to talk about is the feed is what made the
00:42:18 ◼ ► monetization then work is because all of a sudden, as you're scrolling, you could put within that
00:42:23 ◼ ► feed advertising, and that could at least begin to pay for some of this good publishing that's
00:42:29 ◼ ► going on the web. And he's 100% correct. In those early days of the web, they're just putting up
00:42:35 ◼ ► newspapers in the sections the way that they had the paper newspaper and slapping ads around them,
00:42:41 ◼ ► and it just didn't work. And it's no wonder that so many of those newspapers have gone defunct at
00:42:48 ◼ ► this point. Not to mention the geographical issues when all of a sudden a newspaper becomes available
00:42:54 ◼ ► to the world. It's a very different publication than it once was. So The Wall Street Journal back
00:43:00 ◼ ► in the day, it really was a design wonder. And the saddest thing, interestingly, a week or two ago,
00:43:07 ◼ ► I had a conversation because I had been sending so much traffic to The Wall Street Journal's website
00:43:14 ◼ ► that it came up on someone's radar, and they wanted to have a conversation with me, and it
00:43:20 ◼ ► was from their audience modernization group. They wanted to talk to me, and would you like to have
00:43:25 ◼ ► an arrangement, do a deal, or whatever? And I said, "Look, I'll talk to you about whatever."
00:43:29 ◼ ► And anyway, bottom line is, I just said at the end of it, I said, "You guys had it made. I don't
00:43:33 ◼ ► know why you changed everything." I mean, you knew that front page, that was everything. And you knew
00:43:46 ◼ ► these people I was talking to, they were much younger than me and had no idea what I was talking
00:43:52 ◼ ► about. I do think though that's one of those areas where you're in my sights overlaps so much,
00:43:58 ◼ ► which is that we not just are willing to throw our readers' attention to the thing we're linking to,
00:44:06 ◼ ► we almost expect them to, right? And I don't know what you call it, but there's so few sites that do
00:44:12 ◼ ► it that way, and there's so many other sites who the nature of their format is that everything
00:44:29 ◼ ► number of words and just sort of looks big enough on the page, when somebody else breaks the news or
00:44:37 ◼ ► writes the exclusive or has the opinion that you want to link to, the only way to make it work in
00:44:42 ◼ ► that format is to sort of regurgitate the whole post. And then at the end, you put in, "Here's
00:44:48 ◼ ► the link to the original thing that we're referring to," but people don't really follow the link from
00:44:54 ◼ ► those sites, and those sites aren't getting a call from the Wall Street Journal talking about
00:45:00 ◼ ► acquisition because they don't send a lot of readers. The readers just read their regurgitation
00:45:05 ◼ ► of it, and most of them, I don't think, follow it. Whereas you and I, to me, the shorter the
00:45:18 ◼ ► saying, "If this little nugget that I've pulled out entices you and this interests you,
00:45:23 ◼ ► click the link and go read the original, please." And it was a joke for a while that I don't think
00:45:31 ◼ ► a sign that Daring Fireball is less popular or sends less traffic, but before caching was built
00:45:38 ◼ ► into WordPress, it would often, if I link to a WordPress site from Daring Fireball, it frequently
00:45:45 ◼ ► broke the site because if every page view was coming, pulling from the SQL database on each page
00:45:52 ◼ ► view, it was too much traffic. It doesn't happen much anymore just because web servers have gotten
00:45:57 ◼ ► better, computers have gotten faster, and again, specifically because WordPress itself out of the
00:46:03 ◼ ► box comes with good caching built in, and it was the lack of caching that made it so susceptible
00:46:09 ◼ ► to being fireballed. But it pleased me to no end that getting fireballed became a verb.
00:46:15 ◼ ► It really, really made, I mean, that just made my day because, A, getting verbified is just
00:46:23 ◼ ► kind of cool, but B, what a cool thing to be known for, for sending too much traffic to other people's
00:46:30 ◼ ► sites. You know, it's the opposite of stealing. It is being generous with the attention of readers.
00:46:37 ◼ ► I mean, that's what I want to do, and then here was proof of it. I linked to somebody's
00:46:43 ◼ ► WordPress site and it broke. Well, it's proof that I send a lot of traffic. I tried my best.
00:46:48 ◼ ► Pete: Exactly. 15 years ago, I had a partnership with the Economist Group. They sold advertising
00:47:05 ◼ ► that he was retiring and that he was going to leave the Senate. Well, anyway, I got that alert,
00:47:11 ◼ ► and I pulled over on the side of the road. I updated political wire with a one-sentence post
00:47:17 ◼ ► saying exactly what I just said. And two, three hours later, the site from The Economist,
00:47:24 ◼ ► Washington, D.C., called Roll Call, had the Capitol Hill newspaper still had not had a article
00:47:32 ◼ ► on their website about Senator Evan Bayh retiring, and I didn't know what was going on. And about
00:47:39 ◼ ► three to four hours later, they finally posted an article, and all it did was regurgitate what he
00:47:46 ◼ ► told the Indianapolis Star. They didn't interview him. They didn't do anything. And then I was asked
00:47:52 ◼ ► by some of the editors, they're like, because they were selling advertising, they could see the
00:47:56 ◼ ► traffic to political wire. They could say, "How did you get so much more traffic on a one-sentence
00:48:03 ◼ ► post than we got on our story?" I said, "I gave readers exactly what they wanted," which was
00:48:09 ◼ ► the source where Evan Bayh told exactly why he was retiring. And so sometimes that's all people want
00:48:16 ◼ ► is they want the news, and then, you know, this is what you do and what I do is I always link to
00:48:22 ◼ ► the source so that if people want more, they can get it. And there's a total transparency.
00:48:28 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah. And the other similarity then is, like you said, the way that we've become our own form
00:48:36 ◼ ► of columnist is that you can read one post, then the next post, then the next post as you scroll
00:48:44 ◼ ► down, and there's like a rhythm to it or an irregularity if it's like for you right now,
00:48:51 ◼ ► something about Harris campaign, something about the Trump campaign, but then something else odd,
00:48:57 ◼ ► just out of left field, like a crazy statement from Nancy Mace or something like that. That has
00:49:03 ◼ ► nothing to do with the election. But that's the third post. It wasn't expected, but here's a crazy
00:49:09 ◼ ► quote of the day from somebody about something else. And it forms a rhythm. Do you remember,
00:49:15 ◼ ► I always say it's like, I know people think I'm joking when I say that it was one of the numerous
00:49:31 ◼ ► Pete; Larry King had a long-running column in USA Today that I think was the best thing ever in USA
00:49:38 ◼ ► Today. And it was just, I don't know how often it ran. I'd never bought USA Today on a daily basis.
00:49:47 ◼ ► I mean, who does? I mean, it's what you get what used to be. You'd always read it when you check
00:49:52 ◼ ► into a hotel, right? Because the way they got a million daily circulation was they worked out
00:49:59 ◼ ► a deal with all the major hotel chains to get a copy a day for everybody who stayed in a hotel.
00:50:04 ◼ ► But when I did read Larry King's column, I just lapped it up. I loved it because it wasn't like
00:50:10 ◼ ► 700 words making a cohesive argument from start to end. It was just like a bunch, it was like a blog.
00:50:18 ◼ ► It was just like 700 words of paragraphs that were all over the place. Like, one comment about
00:50:26 ◼ ► the president, another comment about Zaza Gabor, another comment about why can't you get a good
00:50:32 ◼ ► sandwich in the airport, all in one column. I was like, "Why aren't there more columns like this?
00:50:38 ◼ ► This is so great. This guy is kind of interesting. I love the way his mind works. And this column is
00:50:45 ◼ ► just so clearly what's on his mind." It was a great name, King's Things, right? It was like,
00:51:07 ◼ ► Joe: Yeah, more or less King's Things, I know a zillion people have made the same observation.
00:51:13 ◼ ► It was more or less like he was posting 20 tweets as his column before 10 years, 20 years before
00:51:21 ◼ ► Twitter existed. But it was, to me, a better way to read them though, because instead of being
00:51:26 ◼ ► interspersed every couple hours with hundreds of other tweets from other people, it was like,
00:51:31 ◼ ► you got 20 King Thing tweets all in a row. And they somehow, even though topically weren't related,
00:51:40 ◼ ► flowed together. And I feel like that's what I'm always hoping for at Daring Fireball. And it's
00:52:02 ◼ ► do you think the same thing has happened with podcasts and radio and TV? Were there things,
00:52:11 ◼ ► were there radio features 30, 40 years ago that actually just work better as a podcast? Or
00:52:18 ◼ ► is the way the podcasts are, it's just, for instance, the one that we're on tends to run
00:52:24 ◼ ► long, Jon. It's a long podcast, it's a long show. We all love it, but it's one of those,
00:52:29 ◼ ► it's one of those longer ones where nobody would give you that airtime, I guess, back in the day.
00:52:45 ◼ ► they both serve their purpose, but they both serve their role. But was there, you know,
00:52:50 ◼ ► when you started Dithering or when you started this show, was there anything that you were
00:53:03 ◼ ► relatively short, but also having a defined limit is much more like old school media, right? Where
00:53:08 ◼ ► you did, you know, the TV famously is programmed in half-hour chunks. But I was, it's funny,
00:53:20 ◼ ► the nature of all previous mediums defined the content, right? There's only a very limited
00:53:32 ◼ ► number of airway frequencies for radio stations and TV channels. And so, of course, it had to be
00:53:39 ◼ ► regulated by the government to say you need a license to broadcast at 6.10 on the AM dial,
00:53:46 ◼ ► because you can't have multiple signals interfering with each other. And like when I grew up, there
00:53:51 ◼ ► were 13 channels on the TV, and one of them was UHF, which was just static, right? So, we really
00:53:57 ◼ ► only had like 12, and you'd turn a dial and it'd come over the air. And then it seemed miraculous
00:54:04 ◼ ► when cable became a thing. And I don't know, I think when my family first got cable, we had like
00:54:10 ◼ ► 30-some channels, I don't know, 30, 40 channels. And it seemed like an infinite library of content
00:54:17 ◼ ► for about a week, right? But the nature of a channel of TV is that the sort of half-hour
00:54:24 ◼ ► programming matrix, it kind of had to be that way. You couldn't just have five-minute shows or
00:54:37 ◼ ► regularly, about esoteric topics like I like to talk about. And same thing with print, right?
00:54:43 ◼ ► If you got the back page column in Newsweek, the column had to, A, it couldn't be too short and it
00:54:50 ◼ ► couldn't be too long, right? And there was a little bit of flexibility. I mean, that's,
00:54:55 ◼ ► hence my story about becoming the op-ed editor at the student newspaper. To make a column two
00:55:02 ◼ ► lines shorter or one line longer, you know, there's margins and stuff you can play for and pull quotes.
00:55:08 ◼ ► There's ways to tweak it slightly. But for the most part, a newspaper column has to be about,
00:55:14 ◼ ► in a printed newspaper, has to be about 750 words. It could be more like 700, maybe more like 800,
00:55:22 ◼ ► but it certainly can't be 1100, and it can't only be 300. But what if you have a 300-word thought?
00:55:30 ◼ ► I have lots of 300-word thoughts. I also sometimes have 4,000-word reviews of an iPhone or something.
00:55:39 ◼ ► Those things don't work in print, right? You can't just have a tiny little article, and you can't
00:55:45 ◼ ► just run 4,000 words in print whenever you want. And to me, that's where I just feel so lucky to
00:55:52 ◼ ► have come of age with the internet where I could build a career on. And it certainly defines the
00:56:10 ◼ ► "Hey, that was a good show, and we're done." And it could be an hour, it could be two hours,
00:56:14 ◼ ► it could be whatever. It doesn't matter, right? And then the other thing is that because it's
00:56:20 ◼ ► non-linear and people listen to it on their own pace, unlike the old days of radio where you were
00:56:27 ◼ ► either tuned in and listening live or you missed it. My theory, and I think it's totally panned
00:56:34 ◼ ► out, I mean, every time I probably get emails from people hearing me finish this sentence,
00:56:39 ◼ ► and they'll say, "Yeah, that's how I do it," is I just, from the very early days of podcasting,
00:56:50 ◼ ► listen to podcasts, if they like the show, they'll listen to 35 minutes of it, and then they'll pause,
00:56:55 ◼ ► and then when they go home at the end of the day, they'll listen to another 35 minutes. And if they
00:57:06 ◼ ► but you've also filled a market with dithering at 15 minutes. And when you first announced dithering,
00:57:13 ◼ ► yeah, I probably was like one of the first people to subscribe. You and Ben, two of my favorite tech
00:57:18 ◼ ► writers. But it was that idea that you would cover one, maybe two topics, but normally one,
00:57:26 ◼ ► and that it was just enough for me when I start my morning day, I'm out walking my dog,
00:57:32 ◼ ► I come in and I make coffee, and it was the perfect length, and it gets my brain going.
00:57:38 ◼ ► And the idea that you're there each week, it's fun as a consumer, but as someone who's running
00:57:45 ◼ ► a media business, it's like the Holy Grail because you're in someone's head multiple times during the
00:57:51 ◼ ► week. You're not only writing regularly, and we're refreshing the browser, but it's that podcast.
00:57:56 ◼ ► And I have to say, you probably noticed, but I completely copied you a year and a half ago,
00:58:01 ◼ ► when we launched Trial Balloon, which is the podcast for members on Political Wire, again,
00:58:21 ◼ ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 5s): I have noticed, I find it, and you wouldn't be here as my guest on the
00:58:31 ◼ ► in the same way that there are numerous Apple ecosystem blogs that are vaguely of the format
00:58:40 ◼ ► of Daring Fireball, which I don't really think you can point to anything before Daring Fireball and
00:58:45 ◼ ► say Daring Fireball is like that one. But I don't begrudge that at all. I only find that, again,
00:58:53 ◼ ► flattering. I don't know. I think as soon as I saw that you were changing, I remember it was that
00:58:57 ◼ ► first month of dithering, and all of a sudden the next month comes and the podcast arch change,
00:59:02 ◼ ► I was like, that's just genius. That's just genius. I get so tired of looking at that same logo,
00:59:08 ◼ ► these podcasts. And then I noticed that you had various themes going and depending upon the time
00:59:14 ◼ ► of season and all the rest, and I just thought that made a ton of sense. And so when Chris
00:59:19 ◼ ► Reback and I, my co-host on Trial Balloon started, we wanted to do the same type of thing, which was
00:59:26 ◼ ► politics has a season. The summers are times for conventions. The falls are times for knocking on
00:59:32 ◼ ► doors and campaigning. There's so much imagery around those seasons that we wanted to do that.
00:59:37 ◼ ► And then the idea of just changing out the podcast, it's one thing that I wonder how many listeners
00:59:44 ◼ ► pay attention to it, but you've always been one to pay attention to the design and the detail.
00:59:49 ◼ ► And I just think it's really a nice twist. And I wonder why more podcasts don't do it. I love it.
01:00:01 ◼ ► that's the whole point of having you on the show. I seldom talk about why and what I do,
01:00:07 ◼ ► but I'm not necessarily unhappy to. I just, I don't know. It feels self-indulgent, I guess,
01:00:17 ◼ ► but there's times for it. I know Ben and I started dithering in 2020. And it's just like anything
01:00:23 ◼ ► that happened in 2020 is very easy to peg as to happening in 2020 because it was the weirdest,
01:00:30 ◼ ► hopefully the weirdest year any of us are ever going to live through. And as I recall, we had
01:00:38 ◼ ► been talking about doing what became dithering before the pandemic started. And I do think it
01:00:47 ◼ ► was more Ben's idea than mine. We were close friends. We'd become close friends as he grew
01:00:54 ◼ ► with Stratechery. I don't recall how, but it feels more like his idea than mine. It still does.
01:01:01 ◼ ► But I remember thinking a subscriber only would be good. And we should talk about this too,
01:01:08 ◼ ► right? That one way that Daring Fireball at this point really, really stands out in the
01:01:13 ◼ ► ecosystem of independent media is that I don't have any membership income for now. Even though
01:01:22 ◼ ► I tried that in 2006 and instead of canceling it, just sort of let it fade away. But I could even
01:01:31 ◼ ► four years ago see the rise of stuff like Substack and how new independent, some so-and-so has left
01:01:41 ◼ ► their job at the Washington Post and they're starting their own publication. What are they
01:01:45 ◼ ► going to do? They're going to Substack, right? I mean, that's what almost everybody did. And it's
01:01:49 ◼ ► no ads and all the revenue comes from membership. And I don't practice what I preach, but I've
01:01:59 ◼ ► preached having as multi-legged a stool of revenue numbers as possible. Don't just rely on the weekly
01:02:06 ◼ ► sponsors at Daring Fireball. Don't just rely on the podcast sponsors, build out multiple streams
01:02:15 ◼ ► of revenue. But some kind of membership thing I felt was the only way I could think of to
01:02:21 ◼ ► continue growing my income and just felt safer in a media world that was clearly moving more towards
01:02:28 ◼ ► memberships. I have a completely irrational reluctance to put my writing behind a paywall,
01:02:38 ◼ ► even though I know it works. I mean, and Ben's model in particular I think is genius and I think
01:02:46 ◼ ► it has been copied widely. I mean, honestly, I think all of Substack is in some ways a copy of
01:02:51 ◼ ► Stratechery. Because he's my friend, I feel happier saying that than complaining about anybody who's
01:03:00 ◼ ► stolen ideas from me. But part of the genius is consistently once a week he has a public article,
01:03:08 ◼ ► a public column that anybody can read, and he tries to make that as broadly—if he has a best
01:03:17 ◼ ► column of the week idea, he I think tends to steer towards the free one for everybody. But then the
01:03:24 ◼ ► other four days a week there's a members-only update. So, four out of the five articles he
01:03:29 ◼ ► writes every week are only from members. And it's worked out very well for him. And you can, you
01:03:33 ◼ ► know, it's just common sense, even if you don't think about the media. It kind of makes sense that
01:03:38 ◼ ► if you're going to charge people money, making some of your content exclusive only for them
01:03:45 ◼ ► is going to be more lucrative than just asking for donations, which is sort of what I did in 2006,
01:03:58 ◼ ► But that's me being—I'm so precious about my writing that it just would—it bothers me to think
01:04:06 ◼ ► about my writing being behind a paywall. But I don't feel that way about podcasting at all.
01:04:11 ◼ ► I don't know why. It's, like I said, I don't even—it's put me on the psychoanalyst couch.
01:04:21 ◼ ► popularity-wise or income-wise, I will never not think of myself as anything but a writer
01:04:34 ◼ ► It's the writing that to me is the real work. And I'm just reluctant, even though that means I,
01:04:41 ◼ ► in some ways as a business person, I should be like, well, that's what I should put behind
01:04:45 ◼ ► a paywall and get people to pay for. But it bothers me not to have to decrease the audience
01:04:50 ◼ ► size. And I take dithering very seriously, and I really enjoy doing it. And I'm so glad it's
01:04:55 ◼ ► successful, and I'm so glad four-plus years later, I still feel as enthusiastic on the nights we
01:05:02 ◼ ► record as I did at the beginning. So that's a good sign, and I love it. But I don't feel guilty at
01:05:08 ◼ ► all that it's subscriber-only. It doesn't bother me. I don't know. So part of that worked.
01:05:13 ◼ ► But the other thing I remember that the—I think the name dithering came from me, and I know that
01:05:20 ◼ ► the album art rotating idea was mine. And it totally harks back to my thinking in the 90s
01:05:28 ◼ ► of starting a site that was more like a weekly publication, right? Because to me, one of the fun
01:05:35 ◼ ► things about doing a magazine is doing the cover and thinking, what's the cover this week, right?
01:05:41 ◼ ► That's always seemed like that was part of the best fun. I never worked at a magazine, but I
01:05:49 ◼ ► could—that would be my favorite part of the job if I did. And when I was—even with a newspaper where
01:06:02 ◼ ► and a newspaper is the text of the articles there. But doing the front page of the weekly Drexel
01:06:09 ◼ ► newspaper was one of my very favorite jobs at the student newspaper. I just love doing it.
01:06:14 ◼ ► Which article is bigger? How big is the headline? What photo? If we're going to put a photo on the
01:06:20 ◼ ► front page, what's the photo going to be? I loved it. And with Daring Fireball changing so little
01:06:27 ◼ ► visually over the years, there just was a huge pent-up, unscratched itch in myself, my ego,
01:06:42 ◼ ► Pete: Yeah, no, I think what you said is it's fun. You've made it fun. And Dithering's 15 minutes,
01:06:49 ◼ ► Trial Balloon, my podcast, is only about 20 minutes. There's not room for really chapter
01:06:55 ◼ ► art or other things like that. And changing out the cover art is really just one way to make it
01:07:02 ◼ ► fun and make it a little bit different. And that's what I—anyway, thank you for not being angry that
01:07:14 ◼ ► Dithering and it's some level of renown, how come the idea hasn't been stolen more widely,
01:07:21 ◼ ► right? Like, at this point, I have noticed the similarity in format with Trial Balloon,
01:07:27 ◼ ► but I can't think of any other podcasts that I listen to that do anything vaguely similar. And I
01:07:32 ◼ ► wish they did. I like it. I would love to look forward to the September, what's going to be the
01:07:38 ◼ ► September album art for the other podcasts I listen to. One thing I will also say that I did get right,
01:07:48 ◼ ► and it seems like this—we could have adjusted on the fly without saying anything, but I knew
01:07:54 ◼ ► up front that monthly was the right schedule to update it. That if we did it weekly, it'd be too
01:08:08 ◼ ► wouldn't feel updated enough. Monthly, even though it is a twice a week podcast, in any first year or
01:08:13 ◼ ► two, it was three times a week, monthly just felt right. I don't know why. It just was like a total
01:08:19 ◼ ► gut feeling, but I knew it. And now, four years later, I still feel 100% certain that a monthly
01:08:32 ◼ ► Well, I think you can add that to Markdown as one of your big contributions to the computing world,
01:08:38 ◼ ► is changing out the cover art, because I think it's a great thing. I hope more people copy it. But
01:08:42 ◼ ► as for what you were talking about before, though, the putting your work behind the paywall,
01:08:48 ◼ ► that's where you and I differ. I don't have any issues with that. And in fact, what I know is that
01:08:54 ◼ ► members of political wire, people who subscribe, they are a special, special sort in the fact that
01:09:00 ◼ ► they're true junkies. They want to know what's going on at any time. And as I said before,
01:09:06 ◼ ► so many people wonder, what is Tegan Goddard? What are his views? Where's he coming from? And this is
01:09:13 ◼ ► where I get the chance to tell them exactly what I think about a specific issue, whether it's how
01:09:18 ◼ ► someone performed in a debate, how a speech went, what some sort of campaign strategy should be,
01:09:24 ◼ ► and so when I put that behind the paywall, first of all, it became political wire became a much
01:09:30 ◼ ► more sustainable business. And so it allows political wire to exist. But then it also just
01:09:37 ◼ ► meshed. And this is something that Ben talks about all the time, is by creating a bundle of products
01:09:43 ◼ ► that all work well together. So the fact that trial balloon is a benefit that you get as a
01:10:00 ◼ ► some other bonus newsletters that I've licensed so that they can be part of this bundle,
01:10:06 ◼ ► all of those things together is what you get. And I think that's the way I view it. It isn't so much
01:10:12 ◼ ► that it's just my writing behind the paywall, but there's more behind the paywall for the people who
01:10:17 ◼ ► are really just committed readers. And most importantly, none of this would be possible
01:10:22 ◼ ► if we weren't able to turn these into businesses to support our families and all. And so it becomes
01:10:29 ◼ ► a very, it's a very, as a business model, it's just a very clean business model. It's people
01:10:36 ◼ ► paying you for exactly what you want. And you have a very elegant advertising model on Daring
01:10:42 ◼ ► Fireball. You always have political wire because of the political content is a little bit harder
01:10:47 ◼ ► to do what you do. So I have to rely for the free site on advertising that can be, let's just say,
01:10:53 ◼ ► sometimes imperfect. And that's probably my least favorite thing about it. But I love the fact that
01:10:58 ◼ ► when you become a member of political wire, the ads all go away. The page is even cleaner,
01:11:07 ◼ ► Pete: I lucked into that part, the elegant advertising model on Daring Fireball. I mean,
01:11:21 ◼ ► obstinance and refusal. I used to often say to some people, like, it's a good thing that I'm
01:11:26 ◼ ► the only one negotiating with would-be advertising networks, not advertisers for my existing format.
01:11:33 ◼ ► But in the earlier years of doing it full time, I would get a lot frequently offers from
01:11:54 ◼ ► I know she knows that I've joked about it, but it's good that I was the one doing the negotiating
01:11:58 ◼ ► and not my wife because there were some offers that I turned down that were for a lot more money
01:12:04 ◼ ► than I was making selling my own ads. But I just did not, I wouldn't sleep by taking them
01:12:11 ◼ ► and what they looked like, the fact that they were animated. But there was a long while in the early
01:12:17 ◼ ► years where I left a lot, I mean, just left money on the table to stick to what I thought
01:12:24 ◼ ► looked better and worked better and was more, I mean, the best thing I can say about my ads is,
01:12:29 ◼ ► I think if and when I put a membership system back on Daring Fireball, I would really like for it
01:12:39 ◼ ► not to include, or certainly by default, not to include not having the ads because I actually
01:12:45 ◼ ► think the ads improve Daring Fireball. Maybe I'm just crazy for thinking that, but I honestly think
01:12:52 ◼ ► that it looks better with the pop of color that only comes from the ad and the fact that it's over
01:12:58 ◼ ► there. But I'm so super fortunate that I just by the nature of what I write about and the fact that
01:13:06 ◼ ► I started writing it in 2002 and built up an audience five years before the iPhone and then
01:13:13 ◼ ► the iPhone came and writing about Apple became a lot less of a niche and a lot more of a genre
01:13:36 ◼ ► even than Instagram can pull off, famously, probably the most lucrative ads in the world.
01:13:44 ◼ ► But you don't have to do any tracking or cookies or anything to target the Daring Fireball audience.
01:13:50 ◼ ► You just have to kind of, if you vaguely know what I write about, then and you have a guess in your
01:13:56 ◼ ► head what the audience is like. Everything I know about my audience is your guess is exactly right.
01:14:02 ◼ ► And so I've lucked into the effective CPM rate of targeted ads without doing any targeting at all
01:14:10 ◼ ► and could get away, can knock on wood, still continue to get away with one sponsor per week
01:14:31 ◼ ► professions, no matter what their interests, and people stay in touch. And so it is a little bit
01:14:36 ◼ ► different there. That's why I kind of embrace the membership as a business model. Because I do think
01:14:43 ◼ ► that my most loyal readers, they do get the best experience. Not only do they get this bundle of
01:14:50 ◼ ► extras and other things, but they, that the experience itself is the best possible experience
01:14:56 ◼ ► you can get. So when you're, what you talk about with Daring Fireball and the way that it looks,
01:15:01 ◼ ► that's what I think political wire is for its members. And so it works. And at the end of the
01:15:08 ◼ ► day, I consider myself just so fortunate to be able to do this for a living. I mean, I have just
01:15:24 ◼ ► Tim Cynova Yeah, no, it's unbelievable. And I'm sure Ben Thompson would agree as well. What an
01:15:31 ◼ ► amazing world that you can put up a site and that you can do something that's valuable for readers
01:15:37 ◼ ► and make a living from it. It's really, it's a great, it's a great time to, it's really been
01:15:56 ◼ ► from childhood onward. I just am fascinated by it. And little things like, I mean, is it,
01:16:05 ◼ ► how innovative is it that the talk show has never had a theme song at the beginning? And it just
01:16:11 ◼ ► starts with a cold opening. But I remember arguing with Dan Benjamin about it, you know, that
01:16:21 ◼ ► we can have a short theme song, but you got to have a theme song. Otherwise, it's weird.
01:16:25 ◼ ► I was like, but I, there's not a single podcast I listen to that I want to hear the theme song. I
01:16:31 ◼ ► skip it. So, why don't we just, why don't we just do the skipping for the listener and just start at
01:16:39 ◼ ► a great point? What's a great, to this day, I don't know, I don't even pick the entrance. The
01:16:44 ◼ ► editor, my good friend Caleb Sexton, who edits this show and has for years, picks where the cold
01:16:51 ◼ ► start will be. I don't know, but he does a great job of it because he knows and likes the show.
01:16:55 ◼ ► But the whole point is, you know, ideally it's a funny thing or a funny quip or sometimes it'll
01:17:01 ◼ ► make people laugh or whatever. But the main point is just, just give them something interesting
01:17:07 ◼ ► right from the first second. And so Dithering, we don't have a theme song. We have the little
01:17:11 ◼ ► ticking stopwatch, but it only takes a couple of seconds. But the part of the format when Ben and
01:17:16 ◼ ► I were talking about Dithering is, well, how long should it be? I think we kicked around,
01:17:21 ◼ ► should it be three times a week, 10 minutes? Should it be two times a week, 20 minutes?
01:17:27 ◼ ► We knew it would be short. And I think we quickly settled on 15 as, let's see how 15 goes. And if we
01:17:35 ◼ ► want to go to 20 or 10, we can adjust that later. But 15 has obviously worked very well. But one
01:17:42 ◼ ► thing that was obvious and Ben, because of what he does at Stratechery and where it's membership
01:17:48 ◼ ► only with no ads, he didn't, we never really even talked about having ads because I don't,
01:17:53 ◼ ► I think that would have been, he would have said that's off the table because he likes,
01:17:58 ◼ ► and I appreciate, I kind of sometimes wish, I don't feel like me having advertisers puts me in
01:18:04 ◼ ► a conflict of interest often, but it's always in the back of my head that it's theoretically
01:18:09 ◼ ► possible. That somebody who's sponsored the site could be the subject of something I want to write
01:18:14 ◼ ► about. And now I've got to do disclaimers and blah, blah, blah. And so I appreciate his,
01:18:25 ◼ ► even if he was open to it, we had 15 minutes. How do you put ads in there? We couldn't do the long
01:18:31 ◼ ► rambling freestyle ones I do here. We could pre-record 30-second ones to make sure they're
01:18:37 ◼ ► exactly 30 seconds and put them in. But I don't know, dithering wouldn't be dithering with an ad
01:18:43 ◼ ► break, right? And if you stick them at the end, then people aren't going to listen to them. And
01:18:47 ◼ ► if you put them at the beginning, at the very beginning, then you lose the whole thrill of the
01:18:51 ◼ ► cold open, right? So why not go membership only? It seemed very, but that sort of playfulness with,
01:18:59 ◼ ► well, what's the exact format to be? I just love doing, but it sounds funny because I do
01:19:08 ◼ ► Yeah, no, I think for what it's worth, I think dithering works the way it is. I love the fact
01:19:14 ◼ ► that you get right into it after the ticking clock. And I'm always curious to know who's
01:19:29 ◼ ► write to me, I'd love to see it. I would love to see somebody go through the whole feed and
01:19:43 ◼ ► more like 55% Ben, 45 me as to who opens. But it feels to me, my gut says 50/50. But I wouldn't be
01:19:53 ◼ ► surprised if somebody went through all the episodes and said, "Dude, you were way wrong.
01:19:57 ◼ ► Ben opens 80% of the shows and you open 20%." I'd be like, "Wow." But hopefully, but the fact that
01:20:04 ◼ ► you think that's part of the fun each time a new episode arrives is exactly part of my intention
01:20:12 ◼ ► Well, and it's also trying to find the compatibility between the two hosts of the show,
01:20:21 ◼ ► since graduate school. We wrote a book together. We started Political Insider together. And now
01:20:29 ◼ ► we're doing Trial Balloon together. But we had tried for years to come up with an idea and a
01:20:34 ◼ ► format for a show. And in our way that it works is he opens every show and he asks me something
01:20:42 ◼ ► and I'm always caught off guard because he's got a clever way. He knows me and he always kind of
01:20:47 ◼ ► catches me off guard, but that's kind of the way that works. Anyway, it really, and shows don't
01:20:58 ◼ ► Yeah. And the other thing is just getting all meta and actually staring at my navel. I mean,
01:21:07 ◼ ► I don't do tons of episodes of the talk show. I mean, it's ideally three times a month sometimes,
01:21:13 ◼ ► especially in the summer, it's only two times a month. But even at that relatively slow pace,
01:21:20 ◼ ► I'm my own booking agent and I kind of don't enjoy it. I just don't enjoy the actual booking
01:21:27 ◼ ► part itself. And I do, the one part of doing the show, the old original version of the talk show
01:21:33 ◼ ► that I missed was never had to worry about it because it was always me and Dan. That's it.
01:21:43 ◼ ► wasn't just easy. It didn't exist. Right. And having that back with dithering satisfies
01:21:50 ◼ ► a thirst that I've had. And in fact, in hindsight, and like I said, four years in, I enjoy it as much
01:21:57 ◼ ► as I did when we started. I knew that I missed that, but I think I underestimated how much I
01:22:03 ◼ ► missed it. The best way I can say it, I always say my ideal reader at Daring Fireball is that
01:22:10 ◼ ► other version of me who didn't start writing Daring Fireball, but it's somebody who is just
01:22:17 ◼ ► exactly like me, shares my interests, shares the same taste in writing styles, shares everything.
01:22:23 ◼ ► That's who I'm writing for is another version of me. And I don't know how else to make things that
01:22:30 ◼ ► I'm happy to do the making of other than to make what I would want to consume myself. And I don't
01:22:36 ◼ ► listen to anywhere near as many podcasts as most people who make a big part of their living on,
01:22:42 ◼ ► because I don't drive anywhere. I live in the city and I just walk places and I only get to listen to
01:22:46 ◼ ► the podcast while I'm out walking around. But I know that I would enjoy listening to dithering.
01:22:51 ◼ ► I would. And so to me, that's the test. It's not how many zillions of listeners we have or how much
01:22:59 ◼ ► money we make from it or whatever. It's do I feel like we're putting out a show that I myself
01:23:04 ◼ ► would definitely listen to every time a new episode came out? And for me with dithering,
01:23:11 ◼ ► the answer is definitely yes. Yeah. I mean, that's exactly why I started Political Wire,
01:23:17 ◼ ► because I wanted it to exist. I would read it. That's what I wanted. It's exactly what I was
01:23:22 ◼ ► looking for. I had an imperfect version of it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal,
01:23:32 ◼ ► We are lucky in the fact, the similarity that we have is that politics did not get boring as I
01:23:39 ◼ ► worried about 20 years ago. And you're lucky the fact that Apple pulled out of the nose dive and
01:23:45 ◼ ► became one of the most successful companies in the world. It's funny though, because there used
01:23:50 ◼ ► to be, it was so common in the Apple media sphere to pick a name that referenced Apple. I mean,
01:23:56 ◼ ► and I would say the most incongruous of the ongoing sites is Federico Vitticci's Mac Stories,
01:24:07 ◼ ► but it's so funny to me in hindsight, because what Federico is best known as is as an iPad
01:24:16 ◼ ► aficionado and somebody who has made the deepest dive into going full time with an iPad as his main
01:24:24 ◼ ► computer while his site that he founded known is called Mac Stories. I mean, he does, it's not like
01:24:30 ◼ ► they don't write about the Mac there either, but it was a very conscious decision on my part not to
01:24:43 ◼ ► pessimistic about Apple in 2002, but I just, it wasn't so much that I thought they would go away,
01:24:53 ◼ ► for five years from now or three years from now. And something like if there was never an iPhone,
01:24:58 ◼ ► but Palm had come out with the WebOS, the Palm Pre phones, that would have been something that
01:25:06 ◼ ► I would have written about as much in a world where the iPhone didn't exist and the Palm Pre
01:25:10 ◼ ► came, it's sort of a weird hypothetical because Palm Pre only came out that way because they had
01:25:17 ◼ ► the iPhone to copy, but let's just say they came out with it on their own. I would have written
01:25:22 ◼ ► tons about it and bought one and used it and talked to written as much about it as I write
01:25:27 ◼ ► about Apple stuff. And I wanted a name that would have let me do that if Palm became the most
01:25:33 ◼ ► interesting company in technology. After all that time talking about how we don't do ads on
01:25:37 ◼ ► dithering, I need to take a break here, do an ad on the talk show for our good friends. Guess who?
01:25:44 ◼ ► Oh, you're never going to guess who the second sponsor is. Oh, you're right, Squarespace.
01:25:50 ◼ ► Squarespace, the longest running sponsor on this show. Just had a conversation with them this week.
01:25:56 ◼ ► They're still happy as a clam with the results they get. What is going on? The basic gist is
01:26:04 ◼ ► Squarespace is a phenomenal platform for building your presence on the web. If you're listening to
01:26:11 ◼ ► me and Tegan today and thinking, "Boy, these two guys who own their own web presence really seem
01:26:16 ◼ ► to enjoy it," maybe I should do that. Maybe it's in the back of your head that you should start a
01:26:21 ◼ ► website, something like a blog or a podcast or anything like that, or just, I don't know, just
01:26:27 ◼ ► you want a website to do X, Y, or Z. Squarespace is an absolutely fabulous way to start. Give it a
01:26:34 ◼ ► try. You get a 30-day free trial at, you go to squarespace.com/talkshow to send them from this
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01:26:48 ◼ ► you want, Apple Pay support, credit card support, of course, built in. Even if you're selling actual
01:26:53 ◼ ► physical goods, those new buy now, pay later things like Afterpay, they have integration
01:26:58 ◼ ► with those. If you want to gate content behind paywall, as we've been talking about on this show,
01:27:04 ◼ ► Squarespace has that functionality built in. You can totally do that. If you're just making a
01:27:09 ◼ ► website that's free for everybody, then there's no payments involved at all, then you don't,
01:27:13 ◼ ► you can just ignore that part of Squarespace. You could just do that. They have, in terms of
01:27:18 ◼ ► customization, it's, "Oh, I don't know, is Squarespace one of these things where you sign
01:27:21 ◼ ► up for Squarespace and everybody's site looks like a Squarespace website?" No, it's so opposite that
01:27:27 ◼ ► I guarantee you throughout your day, you are seeing one, multiple Squarespace websites,
01:27:33 ◼ ► and you have no idea because every Squarespace website can look so different, so unique,
01:27:38 ◼ ► so customizable. They have a new feature. It makes it even, takes that idea even further.
01:27:43 ◼ ► They call it Blueprint AI. You start a completely personalized website with their guided design
01:27:48 ◼ ► system, Squarespace Blueprint. You choose from professionally curated layouts and styling options
01:27:53 ◼ ► to start, but then go through their AI guided system, answering questions, and you build a
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01:28:06 ◼ ► device. It is really great, really easy. They've always made customization easy and flexible,
01:28:11 ◼ ► but it's, they've leaned into that as the years have gone on even more. Email campaigns,
01:28:17 ◼ ► that's built into the Squarespace platform. Anything you could want like that, it's all there.
01:28:22 ◼ ► Go to squarespace.com/talkshow for a free trial. Again, 30-day free trial, no credit card up front.
01:28:33 ◼ ► by using that URL off your first purchase. And the reason they keep sponsoring is because people who
01:28:38 ◼ ► listen to this show keep going to squarespace.com/talkshow. So if you've been waiting, stop.
01:28:44 ◼ ► Go check them out. On that, Jon, I've been, as you know, I've had a website for 25 years. I know how
01:28:50 ◼ ► to do websites. I can't tell you the number of people who have told me, who have asked me,
01:28:55 ◼ ► can you help me with your, with my website? I want a website for this. I send them right to
01:29:15 ◼ ► you referenced this earlier. You write about politics. I mean, it's right there. It is in
01:29:21 ◼ ► the name. And it's the same way I avoided putting anything Apple-related in the name of Daring
01:29:26 ◼ ► Fireball. You did not avoid putting anything political in the name of political wire, but
01:29:32 ◼ ► it, you mentioned that your point of view isn't the main focus of the site, right? It's, it is the
01:29:43 ◼ ► news junkie part. And I, you, I don't know. Do you feel like it's more the media landscape for
01:29:55 ◼ ► writing about politics and doing something like what you do at political wire that it's, it's
01:30:00 ◼ ► even more partisan than ever, or do you think the nature of the internet is such that it's always
01:30:09 ◼ ► been partisan? Oh, no, it's definitely more partisan than it used to be. I mean, if you look
01:30:15 ◼ ► at what was once called the blogosphere, there were all sorts of links that we had between sites
01:30:22 ◼ ► on the left, right, in the middle. There were a lot of people reading both kinds of sites. It is
01:30:27 ◼ ► not that way anymore. People pretty much choose the point of view that they're interested in
01:30:32 ◼ ► looking for. And my point of view, I like to say is neither left nor right. What it is, is it's,
01:30:38 ◼ ► if you're interested in politics for all the good reasons, which are, are you interested in how power
01:30:45 ◼ ► is gained, how power is used. If you're interested in that type of, that aspect of politics, and
01:30:52 ◼ ► you're okay with stories and anecdotes from the other side that you might not vote for, the other
01:30:58 ◼ ► party that you might not vote for, I think you're going to get that at political wire. So it's less
01:31:03 ◼ ► of a rah rah Democrats or rah rah Republicans type site. What I'm interested in is how people
01:31:11 ◼ ► gain power and use it and hopefully use it in the right ways to actually correct some of the
01:31:17 ◼ ► problems that we have in the country. That's what my focus has always been. And if my readers are
01:31:23 ◼ ► left or right or whatever, it's really just a byproduct of that. If you have one candidate,
01:31:29 ◼ ► as we have right now, who doesn't seem to be all that interested in using the government for good
01:31:35 ◼ ► purposes, then obviously, the other party's readers are going to gravitate towards political wire for
01:31:42 ◼ ► that reason. So because that's really what my bias is. So I do have a bias. I'll get criticism over
01:31:47 ◼ ► the years as you're so biased. And I said, well, I actually never said that I'm unbiased. The name
01:31:52 ◼ ► of the site is Tegan Goddard's political wire. It is exactly what I think about politics. It's
01:31:57 ◼ ► exactly what I think is important about politics right now. And if you don't like it, that's fine.
01:32:03 ◼ ► But that's what I'm trying to share with you. And fortunately, many millions of people each year
01:32:08 ◼ ► think it is. But that's all I'm trying to do. But there's no doubt that the environment is far more
01:32:15 ◼ ► partisan. And also, as you, I think, alluded to earlier, the journalism itself, I think, is
01:32:20 ◼ ► lacking, let's say. And so I actually think that that helps a site like political wire exist,
01:32:27 ◼ ► because, you know, what I tend to focus on sometimes is not the lead of a story in the New
01:32:32 ◼ ► York Times. Sometimes it's the 10th paragraph in that story that I think is the most interesting.
01:32:38 ◼ ► And that's what I kind of pull out. And so so many people who don't get around to reading the
01:32:50 ◼ ► even when most people read in the New York Times actually did read it on paper and get their hands
01:32:56 ◼ ► dirty with the ink. It's always been like a meme about the New York Times that they'll bury the
01:33:04 ◼ ► most interesting thing in the story in the last paragraph. Like it's almost a running joke. But
01:33:09 ◼ ► I at this point, I feel like it's gone from, oh, they had this thing that they wanted to put in
01:33:15 ◼ ► the article. But they were it wasn't going to fly putting it up top, but they worked it in at the
01:33:20 ◼ ► end that they get away with it. But now it's often the case that infuriates people, particularly on
01:33:27 ◼ ► the left. And if the meme has gone from how the New York Times buried the most interesting thing
01:33:32 ◼ ► in the story to how many times have you seen this? I'm unsubscribing. How many? If everybody who's
01:33:39 ◼ ► ever threatened to unsubscribe from the New York Times actually unsubscribed, it would be like
01:33:45 ◼ ► they would have had to have 6 billion subscribers in the first place. It doesn't even make any
01:33:50 ◼ ► sense. And I get it. I'm sure there are thousands of people listening to this podcast who are like,
01:33:55 ◼ ► "Hey, wait, I did unsubscribe from the New York Times." I get it. I know that people actually
01:34:00 ◼ ► have and done unsubscribe from the New York Times over frustration with their coverage. But
01:34:04 ◼ ► at this point, you do. You have to be a close reader because it's like, "Ah, this is the
01:34:10 ◼ ► first seven paragraphs of the same old shit." But, oh, this is interesting. Why isn't this at the
01:34:15 ◼ ► top of the article? And it's like, it's just weird almost, right? Well, I remember back in the 2004
01:34:28 ◼ ► the New York Times about comments that Kerry had made. And I think it was like the 10th or 11th
01:34:33 ◼ ► paragraph where Kerry was quoted as saying about the Iraq War, "I voted for it before I voted
01:34:40 ◼ ► against it." And I was like, "Oh my God, he did not say that, did he?" And it became the quote of
01:34:46 ◼ ► the day on political wire. And, you know, I like to think that, you know, in so many ways, that's
01:34:52 ◼ ► why we know that quote, because otherwise it was just buried in the bottom of a New York Times story.
01:34:57 ◼ ► Fascinating, because I would honestly say if you had said, what do you, name one thing you remember
01:35:02 ◼ ► from John Kerry's campaign in 2000. Before you even bring it up, that quote might have been
01:35:08 ◼ ► something I remembered. There is a total tangent that I also remember only because it recently came
01:35:16 ◼ ► up, literally came up like days ago, which is Swiss cheese on a cheesesteak gate. And now I
01:35:24 ◼ ► know you saw this with J.D. Vance, where J.D. Vance was here in Philadelphia and went to Pat's Steaks
01:35:38 ◼ ► do you remember this? Or did you, I don't, maybe I was reminded of it even just reading
01:35:41 ◼ ► political wire. When John Kerry was running in 2004, as far as I know, every major political
01:35:46 ◼ ► candidate in my lifetime at some point has gone to Pat's or to Pat's and Gino's in South Philly
01:35:52 ◼ ► to get a cheesesteak. John Kerry ordered his with Swiss cheese, and I think he actually got it
01:36:06 ◼ ► but it was sort of made news on the right side of this fear playing into the John Kerry is
01:36:20 ◼ ► of Martha's Vineyard where, who vacations windsurfing off the coast of Martha's Vineyard?
01:36:25 ◼ ► This guy's not a man of the people. This guy, it's almost as if he married a billionaire
01:36:33 ◼ ► You know, Martha Coakley when she was running for, I guess, US Senate at the time in Massachusetts,
01:36:38 ◼ ► and she wouldn't campaign in front of Fenway Park of all places. It's like those local stories
01:36:48 ◼ ► Right. Whereas Hillary knew what she was doing, lifelong Cubs fan, but then she moved to New York
01:37:04 ◼ ► I always thought that our first conversation would be sitting at a Red Sox Yankee game, but
01:37:12 ◼ ► Oh, it'll have to happen. Maybe this will be a good year with the year Aaron Judge is having,
01:37:23 ◼ ► They're a pesky team this year. They're not a great team, but we have won four championships
01:37:31 ◼ ► Steven: Oh, man. The Yankees, they had old-timers day last weekend, which I think is a great
01:37:37 ◼ ► tradition that more teams should do. They play, I forget how many innings they play. I've never
01:37:42 ◼ ► gone. And one of these years, I'm definitely going to go, but they let old retired players play,
01:37:48 ◼ ► I guess, three innings of baseball, and they mic a couple of them up. It seems like a lot of fun,
01:37:52 ◼ ► but it's a way to bring old players back to the stadium. And this year was the 15th anniversary
01:37:58 ◼ ► of the 2009 World Series. And it's, I don't know, something happens between 10 years and 15 years,
01:38:07 ◼ ► where it's 10 years after a sports thing, the athletes still, you kind of squint and could
01:38:14 ◼ ► still see them in uniform. And 15 years, you're like, "Oh my God, Jorge Posada looks old."
01:38:20 ◼ ► Well, Jon, you can see on my video feed right over my shoulder is a picture of Fenway Park
01:38:29 ◼ ► taken almost 20 years ago. That was actually taken, that photo, at the moment that Dave
01:38:35 ◼ ► Roberts stole second base. In my view as a Red Sox fan, that was the moment that the curse was
01:38:42 ◼ ► finally broken when the Red Sox were going to overcome the Yankees and the ALCS. So that was
01:38:49 ◼ ► one of the great moments almost 20 years ago. 3-0 lead from the Yankees, from the good guys.
01:38:54 ◼ ► Somehow the Red Sox prevailed, but yeah. Well, if somehow those pesky Red Sox can make a wildcard
01:39:01 ◼ ► slot and make a run for it and meet the Yankees in the playoffs, let's meet in New York City and
01:39:07 ◼ ► catch a game. Well, it was so much fun. I'm going to just give you the credit. It was your idea
01:39:13 ◼ ► to do this show and just lean into the summer dearth of tech news. Is there political news
01:39:21 ◼ ► this summer? Have you been busy? Just a little bit. August is usually very slow for technology
01:39:30 ◼ ► for obvious reasons. And it was as you thought it would be to me, it was a lot of fun talking about
01:39:37 ◼ ► this stuff, Tegan. It won't be the last time, but like you said, maybe next time we'll just do one
01:39:42 ◼ ► of these shows in person, hot dog in one hand, beer in the other, or at a ballpark. The thing about,
01:39:48 ◼ ► you know, I am also just a huge Apple fan as well. So much so that when one of my sons was young,
01:39:54 ◼ ► we were walking in an Apple store and he screams out loud, "Daddy, you have everything here."
01:40:00 ◼ ► I was so mortified and I was embarrassed, but I am a huge Apple fan, which is why I read Daring
01:40:08 ◼ ► Fireball all the time. So I know the feeling. I don't think my son's ever done that, but I don't
01:40:15 ◼ ► think my son has ever been excited to go to an Apple store because there was nothing there that
01:40:21 ◼ ► he hadn't seen. So it's kind of similar. Anyway, we've mentioned it multiple times, but people,
01:40:26 ◼ ► of course, can follow Tegan's site at politicalwire.com. I really think most of you have