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SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups, a podcast that I've been doing for over a decade now. And this podcast would not have ever occurred, nor would, I believe, Twitter, if it wasn't for today's guests. And so you're saying, hey, is Jack on the program maybe? Or Am Williams? Who's on the program today? Well, no. A friend of mine from New York, originally from Queens. I'm from Brooklyn. So I think there's like a mini rivalry there. And his name is Dave Weiner. And he is a software developer, entrepreneur, thinker.

SPEAKER_05: What do you go by, Dave? Welcome to the program.

SPEAKER_07: A inventor of new media types. Love it. Inventor.

SPEAKER_08: Sort of the big circle that everything is inside of, you know, is that my whole thing is I love creating new media types. And I have developed all the skills that I need to do that. And that's what I like to do. That's what I like to learn about. That's what I like to think about and write about and talk about, you know. So it's a great time to be alive for that because there's been an awful lot of media being created. And I don't agree with you that I am responsible for Twitter.

SPEAKER_03: Well, I bring it up because I remember we met in the aughts, I guess, in the 2000s. And there were a bunch of us in our, let's call it early 30s, trying to be entrepreneurs in media. And you had pioneered RSS, OPML, and RSS as a technology had attachments. And I distinctly remember you and Adam Curry and some other folks saying, Hey, if you attach a file to an RSS feed, really simple syndication, you could have kind of like this automatically downloaded experience of the attachments. And the attachments, I believe, could have been anything. And that really was the origin point of podcasting, correct?

SPEAKER_13: Do I know my history correct?

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, in a way. I mean, it wasn't the, I mean, people like to say that, yeah, it's the technology. But I don't think it really was. It was getting, figuring out how to get people to do it. And, you know, it's, it's, you know, I know this is about startups. And this is not exactly a startup, but it's very similar process. You know, you hear you have this great idea. And it was actually a pretty great idea, especially at the time, because the networks were so slow that, um, that when you saw, you know, an audio file or video file or whatever, and you clicked on it, you would have to wait a very long time for it to come down and the quality wouldn't be very good. And, you know, people were saying, yeah, well, you know, this audio video stuff, that's just not for me. I don't want that. But the insight that Adam actually had was that, uh, that if you do the, um, the download in the background, um, before the user even knows that the audio or video even exists, then you've gotten rid of what he called the click weight problem. Because you'll click and it'll start playing right away. And because it's all done in the background, um, it could be very high resolution. And so, you know, there'd be no loss of fidelity. Um, but you know, I figured at the time, well, we'll just put this idea out there and everybody will see it, you know, because I had a very popular blog at the time. I had actually the top blog at the time. And so it was very good way to get ideas out there, but really nothing happened. And, uh, and then we had to figure out ways how to tease this out of people.

SPEAKER_21: How are we going to get them to actually start doing it?

SPEAKER_08: And that was an iterative process that took, uh, I would say took four years before there were actually, um, uh, there was before there was a serious base of podcasts being developed. And, uh, and, uh, and I learned a lot in that process, uh, people have to feel that it's something that they can do.

SPEAKER_21: And so you, if we, if you throw a lot of great production values at it, which is the first instance we tried doing, um, with Chris Lydon, uh, when I was at Harvard as a research fellow. Uh, and, uh, Chris is this NPR guy and, uh, very, you know, I mean, he's got this incredible NPR voice and he did all these great interviews with early bloggers and some of the people that have gone on to create this whole world. And, uh, and it was great stuff, but it didn't give people the idea that they could do it because, you know, nobody listened to his stuff and thought, well, okay, you know, I'm like an NPR God, you know, but, uh, and so then I started doing them myself and I had no production quality to it whatsoever.

SPEAKER_08: And I just never edited anything and I just put it up and threw it on my blog and that's when people got the idea they could do it because I sounded like any schmuck doing this stuff and, you know,

SPEAKER_03: but there, there is something to that making this technology accessible and allowing people to feel like they didn't need an editor. And I think that was kind of the specialness that blogging had as well. You were one of the first bloggers, uh, and you created RSS essentially, correct?

SPEAKER_07: I mean, well, I mean, I would say that the, the starting the blogging was by far the more important of the two.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, RSS wouldn't have had anything to do if it weren't for blogging and, um, it was an outgrowth of blogging and, uh, there were a few other people that were doing similar things at the same time. It was just in hall and, uh, um, bud.com.

SPEAKER_35: Sorry. He was doing bud.com. That's right. Bud.com.

SPEAKER_37: Bud.com. Justin Hall was basically talking about his life in a very raw.

SPEAKER_38: It was great. Well, you know, that's part of what blogging is about, you know, it's just, you know, you know, they make the jokes about it, but that really is what it is.

SPEAKER_08: It's like, what is the world look like to you today from your point of view? You know, that's blogging. Um, and, uh, there was also the what's new page on, uh, Mozilla.com or I think netscape.com or whatever. There were, the idea was out there. Um, and, uh, I started doing, it was just sort of like this epiphany. I, I had nothing to do. I had my company who had, we basically shut down my, my second company and, uh, and I was just, you know, uh, looking for ideas really.

SPEAKER_21: And, uh, and it just hit me one day that, you know, I had all these great email contacts and why don't I just start sending them some of my ideas that nobody wanted?

SPEAKER_08: You know, I mean, I was always knocking on people's doors saying you should do this and you should do that. And we should get you working with, cause this is the way, you know, it's like, and of course everybody said, yeah, thanks very much. But, you know, we'll figure this out. So I had this whole backlog of, you know, ideas that nobody had bought, but they were still good ideas. And so I started publishing them through my email channel.

SPEAKER_21: And then I, um, and then I got involved in the San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994. And that was when the web hit me really hard. Um, I was always already aware.

SPEAKER_42: What was that? I mean, I'm not even aware of what that was.

SPEAKER_21: Well, it was this incredible sort of, um, confluence of, you know, opportunity. I guess you'd say I was, I remember exactly where I was. I was in my car, uh, going to the supermarket. I was listening to Bruce Coons, who was, I think, managing editor of the San Jose Mercury. He was on the radio and he was talking about this newspaper strike they were about to have in the Bay area. And, uh, I knew him because, you know, I was a software entrepreneur and, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_08: we ran in kind of the same circles. So when I got home, I, I called him, I said, Bruce, you know, you're going to do a website for this thing. He says, yeah, we really want to do a website. So I said, well, let me do the website. And so he said, yeah, sure. Go for it. And, you know, Jason, these are the moments when you have to strike, when, when people are open to new ideas, because if I'd called him two weeks earlier and said, let's do a website, he'd say, well, yeah, you know, you got to talk to our operations guys and, you know, they got a blah, blah, blah. And, you know, the door is closed. It's not open. Right. Um, but at this moment it was wide open and I knew absolutely nothing about the web.

SPEAKER_07: So I had to learn and found some good teachers.

SPEAKER_21: And, uh, um, and then I hooked up with, um, Chris Galker, who was doing the management paper at the San Francisco Examiner. And, uh, I knew Chris because he was a customer of mine and was using my software and, uh, it was a friend. And so I got in touch with him and I said, you know, I see you guys are doing the management paper, how would you like to work with us on the strike paper? And he said, sure. Which was one of the big ironies of it. Cause we were just sharing code back and forth. He was working for the management. We were working for the strikers. And, uh, it was one of those moments where just so much progress was made in such a short period of time. And we had, um, all of the journalists of the day were feeding stuff to us from around the country because the strike was a big deal. And you know what the strike was about?

SPEAKER_08: This is really funny. The strike was about automation and they were against it.

SPEAKER_48: Oh, really?

SPEAKER_08: Yes. They were striking.

SPEAKER_48: Oh, they were trying to fight against automating. What? Like word processors or printing technology?

SPEAKER_51: All the things we were using to publish the paper.

SPEAKER_08: And, uh, and it was the strike in support of the people who drove the trucks that carried the papers around, you know, the, the, the area, but, you know, the writing was on the

SPEAKER_07: wall, right? I mean, at the time, very, very clear. And this was Silicon Valley. And, uh, and of course the people that that's actually the, the paradox is great there.

SPEAKER_52: It's like, you were building a webpage to support the strike and the web eventually would result in, uh, you know, the, the biggest challenge the newspapers ever felt, right?

SPEAKER_55: No, they were aware that it was happening right then. I mean, and, and it was, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was all coming together.

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SPEAKER_08: Out of all of that came a product called AutoWeb that I came out with in like, I think it was January of 95. And you see, because Jason, that's what I wanted to do. It's sort of like this, you know, you create the necessity for the software you want to develop. You learn all about the application by doing it by hand. And then once having done it, you have a very good idea about what the, you know, how to codify that, how to turn that into code. And so AutoWeb came out and that was like the first static site generator came out of that project in early 95.

SPEAKER_21: And then we got on this path that led to, you know, in 96, 97, 98, every time another iteration on the software,

SPEAKER_08: that was, you know, the whole idea was to, you know, web publishing at the time was, you know, thought to be, you hire somebody to do your web publishing. Right.

SPEAKER_21: I remember I was friends with the people at Kleiner Perkins at the time, because I had joined up with one of their companies, sold my first company to them. And, and I went to them, I said, I, you know, I could make it so that you could edit your own personal, your website, the Kleiner website.

SPEAKER_08: And they said, well, well, we don't want to do that, you know, but I said, yeah, you will eventually want to. And of course they do. Right. But so it was a, it was a whole sequence of things until we hit on edit this page. And that was the big breakthrough to realize that the problem was that there were, we needed to get all the different views of a website to come into one single place.

SPEAKER_21: And then you click that button. When you see something that's wrong, you click the edit this page button, you make the change and hit submit. But that was as, as quick as you could make it.

SPEAKER_70: And from there, blogging just took off because we had found the simple.

SPEAKER_72: And there was also like a lot of friction. I remember in people's minds that should people be able, or should journalists be able to publish without an editor?

SPEAKER_27: That was everybody's big mental block, I think, in why they didn't adopt it.

SPEAKER_52: And so when I, when Nick Denton and myself and some other folks sort of came into the space, Peter Rojas, the idea, O'Malley, was like, wait a second, these journalists, and we had been journalists and run publications in print. Wait a second. And you're going to give Rafat, or O'M, or Peter Rojas, or Elizabeth, whoever it was, the ability to publish to the website without an editor reading it. Right.

SPEAKER_78: That kind of blew people's minds.

SPEAKER_77: Yes, that was a huge deal.

SPEAKER_08: At that time. I hit that one. I was, well, my blog, initial blog became kind of phenomenon in the Valley, and everybody was reading it.

SPEAKER_21: And I got a call from Louis Roseto at Wired, and I went down there, and he offered me a job right then on the spot to be a contributing editor for Wired. And, of course, I took it, right? It was Wired. I mean, it was another one of these juggernauts. And I loved the idea of Wired, you know, of taking, you know, up to that point, it was all like nerds.

SPEAKER_08: And I thought, well, let's make this easy for human beings. And so I had an editor right from the start, but I loved my editor. She was wonderful. But then eventually they gave me an editor that I hated, and that was it. Got to get out of there. Yeah. You know, and so, yeah, it hit, but on my blog, absolutely, yes. It was like you had the full, you know, in a news organization where you have an editor, you can always, like, sort of blame somebody else for the shit that happened, for the, you know, mistake that you made.

SPEAKER_21: But if it's your thing, that's it. When you press the button to publish it, you know, that's it. It's your ass that's on the line right there.

SPEAKER_08: But that's also the thrill of it, and it's the power of it. And, yeah, I think we've kind of gotten, we've adjusted to that, right?

SPEAKER_85: Yeah, the non-edited has made its way all the way from this time in the 90s to a president who's unedited and who just tweets anything. And we start to see what, you know, perhaps a really flawed, bad-intentioned person's not having a filter and communicating with tens of millions of people do. We kind of, we hit this crazy edge case, right?

SPEAKER_07: Maybe not an edge case at all. I mean, maybe it was the foregone conclusion that this is where we were going, you know.

SPEAKER_21: At that time, everybody was very idealistic about it and honestly couldn't see the downside of it, you know. I thought at the time, well, you know, all the news organizations are just, like, they're making the same mistake over and over again, and we can't get out of the rut that we're in.

SPEAKER_08: But we're solving the problem because we'll be able to route around them. You remember that idea, right? It's like, you know, they're the gatekeeper. Yeah, sure. We'll route around them. Well, here's, now we are in 2020 and we know what the outcome was and they're still the gatekeepers. You know, they, they like to put the blame on Facebook, but it's really, the responsibility is theirs. The things that people say on Facebook, they come from the news media.

SPEAKER_21: And, you know, maybe parts of the news media that they don't, that some parts, other parts don't like, but it still is where it's coming from.

SPEAKER_08: A lot of the discourse you see on Twitter and Facebook is just like what you saw on CNN the night before.

SPEAKER_21: They're just repeating the same old talking points, you know, so it's, it's not the panacea at all that we thought it was.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we, we did have the sense that we were going to enable all of these great voices to have a voice and that more voices equal to better.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. Um, and then when you level the playing field like that, then we'll, all of a sudden you get conspiracy theorists or hate groups or proud boys or, and then even this one that I, I think is even more, uh, pernicious maybe is the word or, um, bad, you know, having, having terrible intent, uh, and hard to control, which is the anarchists. I mean, you, you really have this contingent of people who, I guess they call it shit posting or just let's just create chaos. And then that of course allows somebody to come into an open platform like Twitter or Facebook and just back into the algorithm and say, you know what, let's buy ads in rubles and create chaos in America. And that could be the Chinese, it could be the Russian ops, uh, or it could just be useful idiots in America who are just helping them amplify their message. Do you have any thoughts about that? I wonder, and solutions.

SPEAKER_21: Um, I don't think I have any solutions for it. I mean, um, yeah, you know, I, I think we have to create new, uh, you know, go back to the beginning. We have to create new media types that, uh, are resistant to that. Um, you know, this sort of total level playing field that we have on, on Twitter, uh, we know where that goes. It's better than earlier, uh, you know, you know, uh, ways of communicating like mail lists were completely out of control. I mean, all the trouble we had with, uh, RSS, it's all because we use mail lists for it and gave everybody, even people who had no stake whatsoever in the, the medium were controlling it, you know? And, uh, it, you know, so that wasn't good and what we have with Twitter isn't good either, but what we do need, and I feel very strongly about this is the political parties need to become social networks. And, um, and, um, and less emphasis on discussion because we know where discussion heads, where that goes and more on, you know, action and organization and mobilization so that, you know, let's say, I don't actually know where you are politically.

SPEAKER_08: I, um, but, you know, I, I don't know. Are you voting for Biden?

SPEAKER_103: Neither do I at this point. I don't know which party I fit into anymore.

SPEAKER_08: I wouldn't say I've been following you like, you know, religiously. So I get little bits and pieces of it here. I, I think you're concerned about a lot of the things we all are. Everybody's concerned about, right?

SPEAKER_107: I mean, yeah. The virus, for example.

SPEAKER_85: I am concerned that, uh, we are not solutions based and evidence based and running experiments to solve problems and that this, you know, everything is name calling and tribalism and really no, no focus on expertise or data or even testing things. And the fact that you can't change your mind is also a very weird thing that I don't understand about politics, like in the face of new evidence, in the face of an experiment failing, well, why not try something? Right. And if you look at whatever problem it is, like censorship on Twitter, you know, the, the New York post story, I'm super interested to hear what you think of if a publication like the New York post prints a story that maybe nobody else would print.

SPEAKER_52: And then they don't let you tweet the URL that seemed like very blunt in terms of like a way to, I don't think that worked, uh, honestly, that didn't work at all.

SPEAKER_85: I mean, they changed it immediately. What, what's the more elegant way when you have a story like that?

SPEAKER_59: Do you, I don't think there is an elegant way, you know, I actually got caught in that.

SPEAKER_08: I was retweeting that I was, uh, you know, I have a, um, a link blog. That's part of my, you know, regular blog and, uh, um, and so I was actually publishing that link. So it would go to Twitter, go to my feed, you know, wherever else. And, and yeah, I got the message saying, we're, we're, we're not going to let you retweet that one. I mean, it's, it didn't occur to me that people shouldn't read it. Um, and you know, it's like almost like the Streisand effect kicked in right there because they made it more important because they were blocking it. It was the first time they did that, but I don't envy them one bit. And I don't claim that I have the right answers on any of this stuff. I mean, they bought a huge problem and I wouldn't want that problem for anything.

SPEAKER_21: You know, I mean, uh, I think Jack is kind of a hero for willing to take that on. Uh, I think people vilify Facebook a lot more than they deserve. Um, I think a lot of that responsibility belongs to journalism, honestly, because, you know, all the information about what Facebook allowed was available. I think in 2010 or 2011, you know, 10 years ago, they set up the open graph and all the APIs for it. Um, it was all out in the open. They could have learned it. They could have asked anybody. I mean, I think journalism has a responsibility to understand technology.

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SPEAKER_08: I don't think they get off on that one. I think they have. I noticed the Times has, I can't remember, what's his name? McNeil. Donald, I think Donald McNeil.

SPEAKER_21: He's an incredibly knowledgeable person about pandemics and viruses.

SPEAKER_08: And, you know, whenever he's written and writes an article, he does one every few weeks, I stop everything and sit down and read it because I know there's going to be information in there that makes a difference. So they've got somebody in there who understands the technology of viruses. Why don't they have somebody in there who understands the technology of social networks? But they are, like, all over the map. I mean, I've watched Rachel Maddow do a rant for 15, 20 minutes. And I love Rachel Maddow. But I was very disappointed to see this because she was ranting about Facebook. There was no substance to anything she was saying. But, boy, did she make it sound insidious or pernicious, to use your word. I mean, it made me question everything else, every other time she gets into that mode where she's painting something as being really dark and evil, it made me wonder, does she really understand this? Or, you know, even worse, she does understand it. And she's just decided, I think there's a lot of that to the press response to Facebook, you know, is that we've just decided to do a little bit of deflection here because they screwed up the 2016 election, not Facebook. Journalism screwed that up.

SPEAKER_126: How did it screw it up just by covering Hillary's emails? Hillary's emails incessantly.

SPEAKER_128: And it's all come out now.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, there was this book called Clinton Cash, written by a Republican consultant. And they figured this would work, and it did. And they dangled this out in front of the New York Times, and they thought it was fascinating, and they ran with it. Said, oh, there's something to her emails. She screwed up something here, you know?

SPEAKER_129: Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Well, come on. I mean, I'm sure, no, she didn't screw up anything. That should have been dispensed within five minutes. Yet, it dragged out, and it determined the course that we're on right now. You know, you want to find responsibility for 220,000 Americans dead? Some of that has to go to the New York Times. Actually, you know, let's say, be honest, all of it does. Because without that, Trump would not have gotten elected.

SPEAKER_131: Ah, I see.

SPEAKER_08: We still would have had the problem with the susceptible population that's susceptible to a Trump, right? I mean, but we wouldn't actually have Trump.

SPEAKER_85: What do you think of the algorithm's role in all of this? The fact that if something is incendiary or evokes strong emotion in a person or maybe plays to their worst instincts, it's going to get a reaction. It's going to get engagement. And the like button and the favorite button and the retweet button, this all is something for you to do in this arcade slot machine of Twitter, Facebook, social media. And that algorithm doesn't favor a rational discussion. You write something completely rational. People are like, okay, that's rational. There's no reason to favor it or retweet it.

SPEAKER_136: Right.

SPEAKER_21: That's why the people who rise to the top in the podcast world are people who deal in raw emotion, right?

SPEAKER_08: And the really good stuff, well, luckily that can still happen because there's nobody that controls what gets published in this world. But it's still most of what people, because people tune into this stuff because they want the emotion.

SPEAKER_56: Ah, so they want that dopamine hit. They want to feel that rage.

SPEAKER_08: Also, they want to feel, you know what they want more than anything, in my opinion, is they want meaning in their life. They want their, they want, not necessarily that their life has meaning. That's a hard one. But have a little meaning in my life. And that's where the tribalism comes from.

SPEAKER_21: You know, it's like the real problem is that people don't have anything to do.

SPEAKER_85: Yeah, I mean, it does feel, I mean, if you think about how, and we see what happens when it fills up too much, which is you have this derangement on both sides of the aisle. And now, even taking up the middle where everybody's like, this roller coaster is never ending. Like, who wants to live in a perpetual state of being aghast or being enraged or being depressed about the state of the world?

SPEAKER_52: Right. I mean, I'm exhausted this year.

SPEAKER_21: Especially when we're in the middle of a pandemic and that people are dying and are all of our lives suck now. Right.

SPEAKER_51: Oh, so brutal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's like, and yet, oh, I mean, I wrote this thing. It's like, it's suicidal in my opinion. I have to say this because it's because I don't want, it is just plain old suicidal to vote for Trump. It just is. I mean, we're not doing anything about this, about the virus. So if you want to continue doing nothing about the virus, then you vote for Trump.

SPEAKER_148: And that's suicidal. That's suicide. You're going to die from that.

SPEAKER_85: Well, I mean, if you, as, and I'm not saying Cuomo in New York state is perfect, but the fact that he decided every day, I'm going to show the numbers. And every day I'll start with the numbers and I'll talk about our response and I'm going to put myself out there to answer questions every day. And I'm not going to deflect and blame other people. I'm just going to talk about where we're at. Even though New York got hit really hard, at least you had the sense that somebody was confronting reality.

SPEAKER_153: No, I'll go one step further.

SPEAKER_08: He was masterful. He was masterful. He showed, provided the demo of what leadership can do. I often had emotional reactions to what he was doing. When I first heard his press conferences, I was telling everybody, look, there's hope. We're not necessarily getting flushed down the toilet here. You know? I mean, it was at a very, at a moment when you could cry for the United States. I mean, you know, you go into the supermarket. This was a moment. You go to the supermarket, you see all the empty shelves. And you go, how the hell did this happen to the United States of America? You know, this is what you see when you go to a third world country, you know? As you go in there and it hits you. I've had this happen. You know, it's like, go in there. Why are their shelves empty? And then you start to realize that you've got this, you're living embedded in this incredible system that you don't even think about. And how much it's doing for you and how much of an advantage we have in the United States. And we're just like pissing it all away right now. For what?

SPEAKER_157: I don't get it. But it's.

SPEAKER_108: It's very strange.

SPEAKER_85: And it's also like the thing I don't understand is the testing. I've been talking to people in other countries and rapid testing for $2, $15, $10. Anybody can get tested anytime they want. You can get at home kits. You could have a party, get tested before everybody comes in and then have a little bubble at your own house. Just like the, you know, NBA had their bubble or movie sets have their bubble. And if everybody did what the NBA did and you start making little bubbles, eventually that bubble would go from being Bay Ridge to being, you know, South Jersey to being New Jersey to being the tri-state area. You know, you could just build this little bubble up and up and up.

SPEAKER_13: And then you could actually test and trace or do the trace part because you're doing the testing part. And you would eventually beat this thing, which other countries have done exactly that playbook. And we're the greatest country in the world. And we couldn't rally.

SPEAKER_153: We could have done, right. Yeah. No, first of all, what the NBA did was incredibly impressive and, and surprising.

SPEAKER_08: And if we had talked, you know, before they did that, I would have said, there's no way it's going to work. They're never going to pull it off, but they did. They totally did. And it's amazing that they did. And then, um, other countries had an advantage that we didn't have, which is they had been through SARS and we hadn't. So, you know, we had a, for whatever reason, we kept, we, we kept it contained in the United States. So we didn't have the cultural experience. They didn't have it in Europe either, but they had it in Asia. And, you know, I have a friend who lives in Vietnam and the experience from his point of view. I mean, I, he was, you know, uh, documented the whole thing on Facebook while they were locking down. And I was, I mean, shocked at the whole concept of a lockdown, but, but they got it under control. And I, I don't think they actually had any deaths in Vietnam at all. And it's not a small country. It's 93 million people. And, and they were, you know, okay. So they're not the United States. They don't have the same freedoms we do maybe, but yeah, we could have done much, much better. And we should have, and it's, it's, uh, yeah, we're not that bad a country. We haven't slid that far.

SPEAKER_164: You know, we could get out of this if we placed some value on getting out of it.

SPEAKER_85: The problem is some coordination from the top down. This seems like one of these problems that you can't solve on a, on a strictly local level.

SPEAKER_30: You have to have a coordinated response to it. And maybe just the operating system of the United States isn't built for this.

SPEAKER_08: No, it is. We just happened to have the most incompetent president we've ever had. Yeah.

SPEAKER_168: That might be the other.

SPEAKER_08: At the moment we needed leadership. We had no leadership. Obama could have done this. I, I think George W. Bush was an awful president, but I think he could have done it too. Yeah, no, he would have. Yeah. He might've been paralyzed at first and confused and whatever, but he would have had, he would have listened to the people around him and said, look, we have the playbook for this. We know exactly what to do. This is, you get up right now and you give this speech and we know that 67% of the people will believe you because we, we, you know, we simulated this and we know though it's going to happen, you know? And you, yeah.

SPEAKER_173: People just didn't, didn't believe it or who knows.

SPEAKER_175: Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_38: You want to know, Jason, I'll tell you what, I think it's, we've been doing this to ourselves a lot.

SPEAKER_08: We had the Iraq war and we had tax cuts during the Iraq war. Now that's immoral. And that is part of the problem.

SPEAKER_70: We just don't think anything can fuck us up. I don't know if you're allowed to say words like this on the. Yeah. Okay, good. Okay.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. Fuck it. I don't like to say it a lot, but I think fuck us up is the word. Okay.

SPEAKER_08: Or the phrase is that we just don't believe anything bad can happen to us in the United States. It's like going like what I was talking about before, but not realizing that there's a reason the shelves are always stocked in our stores. It took a lot to get us to that place. We have the ability to print the only currency everybody wants. I mean, we never have to run out of money.

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SPEAKER_85: Do you still believe in capitalism? Do you, I mean, there seems to be this undercurrent of things are getting too big. I know.

SPEAKER_189: I saw you writing about that. Yeah. I don't believe there is such a thing as capitalism.

SPEAKER_08: I don't, I don't believe in this world that we live in at the level that we live. I think that the, the romantic notion of capitalism worked when we had an agrarian society, when we didn't have any medicine, you know, when there were, you know, connections between all of the different cities and countries. And I mean, once you have medicine, how can you have capitalism?

SPEAKER_153: Think about it. It's medicine just doesn't submit to capitalism.

SPEAKER_192: How so? I'm not sure I follow.

SPEAKER_08: Okay. I mean, is it something, do I have to have like $10 million in the bank to get cancer treatment? Or could I get the cancer treatment just because I have cancer? That's a fundamental question.

SPEAKER_153: Well, what's the answer?

SPEAKER_197: Uh, I think today you would get the cancer treatment, right?

SPEAKER_201: Well, I'm not asking about today, but what's the right moral question? Yes.

SPEAKER_85: Oh, the moral question. Yeah. I mean, it does seem like in a society that is this, uh, wealthy and has achieved this level of sustainability and is sort of, you know, you were sort of saying we live in this system where we take it for granted. You know, we take for granted that K through 12 or pre-K through 12 exists. We take for granted that unemployment exists or food stamps, welfare, whatever, you know, safety nets there are here. And obviously some other countries have slightly better and most countries have much worse. Yeah. It would seem to me that in a developed country, having a basic healthcare system is an absolute no brainer. And why wouldn't we strive to have that?

SPEAKER_204: That's it. Why wouldn't you, why not? Right. We can do it.

SPEAKER_08: We have medicine. Why should that be something that you, I mean, you know, we can, but on the other hand,

SPEAKER_55: we should have rewards for, uh, for ingenuity, for hard work, for being right. Being right should have a lot of rewards with it.

SPEAKER_08: And our system isn't really well set up for that. Honestly, I, I, my life story has a lot of being right in it and not being rewarded for it.

SPEAKER_148: I mean, that's. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: Well, I mean, you, you did work in open source, which is.

SPEAKER_85: You kind of gift people, you gifted people a lot of your ideas, right? So, I mean, it was pretty philanthropic. A lot of the work you did.

SPEAKER_55: It never was intended to be philanthropic, philanthropic.

SPEAKER_08: I'm a software developer, entrepreneur. You know, I, I like to think of even the things, the open formats and protocols that I put out there. I like to think of those things as products too. Yeah. And so like when, for example, when RSS took off, then I don't know what year was that in

SPEAKER_216: like 2003, somewhere in there.

SPEAKER_85: Yeah. 2003, 2004. I mean, whenever Technorati kind of clicked, that was when it came into a lot of people's consciousness or.

SPEAKER_164: Maybe a few months before that. Right.

SPEAKER_08: And so I'm meeting with all the VCs. Okay. They all want to meet with me because look, look at this thing, what's going on. This is the guy that knows everything about it. So I meet with them. Right. And I'm figuring we're talking about setting up companies, but no, they're talking about setting up companies without me. Right. And none of the, by the first time I ever hear about there being actual dedicated RSS startups is I read press releases, you know? And it's like, good Lord, I, what, how do you, why do you do business like this? I mean, first, you know, if you're going to fuck me, why don't you at least call me and tell me that you're fucking me, you know, and why, and why would you want to fuck me? The point is the people that they hired, I don't want to make, make it the people they hired knew nothing about it. They knew absolutely nothing. And they, the same thing happened again with podcasting, you know, and, um, and nobody knew what to do. I don't know that for a fact that I knew what to do, but nobody did what I wanted to do. And nobody even listened to me. And they gave, uh, $25 million to Adam Curry's startup, the guys at Kleiner who were supposedly friends of mine, they did call me before they did the deal and they asked me, what's the situation said, the situation is I have a deal with Adam that I get 50% of whatever he gets. And, uh, they, you know, you know what, Jason, you influenced me very heavily on this. He said, if you're going to do a deal with somebody, you, you really should write a contract

SPEAKER_59: up. I remember you saying that and I'm going, yeah, I've learned that lesson.

SPEAKER_227: Well, I mean, if it's anything is worth doing, it's worth doing.

SPEAKER_85: Right. Is what somebody explained to me. That's right. Yeah. Because somebody explained this to me and they were like, do you have a contract? I was like, no, you know, we just agreed.

SPEAKER_231: And if they don't want to do a contract, you should get the fuck out of there. Okay.

SPEAKER_85: I actually have another perception of it, which is now that I've become an angel investor. And, uh, you mentioned angel investing in your tweets right today.

SPEAKER_235: I realized that it's being one of the worst possibilities in an outcome is being too early

SPEAKER_37: because it's almost like the people who get there too early, um, you know, the audience isn't ready. And you said like, oh, the first four years, we just had to get people to believe they could use this technology for podcasting.

SPEAKER_52: And it really takes that there's like this walk through the desert, right? You know, like going from, you know, the, the East coast of the West coast, there's this huge, like barren desert. And then maybe like the Donner pass and snow. And then all of a sudden you get to California. And I feel like if you're starting and you're those people who are the pioneers, you kind of wind up dying somewhere in Arizona or in the middle of the desert. And then it's the people who start maybe after the Donner trail or whatever, who pick up and say, you know what? I found California or here's the oil in Texas, or here's the, here's the gold in

SPEAKER_241: California.

SPEAKER_240: Yes. I know that that's true, but, but I don't accept that for, for my own experience in

SPEAKER_21: these situations. I mean, it's water under the bridge. Look, I've made a lot of money. I'm not complaining. Money isn't an issue here. You know, what I wanted to do and didn't get to do was to build a, a development organization, according to my values, without the kinds of limits I had the first time around. I mean, you know, I, I mentioned, I did an angel based company and they, my angel, this guy was named Bill Jordan.

SPEAKER_08: And, um, he was, I would guess he was probably about my age when I first met him, I had totally given up on any form of investment. I was so tired of meeting with the VCs at a little office on San Antonio road in Palo Alto. So, and I had one person working with me and, and, uh, this guy, Bill Jordan, I wanted to meet with us. And I said, no, you meet with them. I don't want to talk. I'm just going to write code. I'm going to go do my thing, you know? And, and he, my partner comes in and he puts a check down on the table for $50,000. He said, he really would like to talk to you. And I thought, okay, this does it. I'm going to talk. And it was that kind of relationship. I mean, it was very collegial.

SPEAKER_21: I love the idea when it works, it's wonderful. The angel investment stuff.

SPEAKER_244: So, uh, what was your idea with him? That was a think tank.

SPEAKER_21: Um, think tank was, uh, was a long story on that one, but, uh, there's a company called

SPEAKER_08: living video text started in 81. And before that I had been a developer at personal software, which is the company that did VisiCalc.

SPEAKER_247: Um, wow.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah. So VisiCalc for people who don't know was Lotus one, two, three before Mitch Kapor did it and certainly Excel long before Mitch Kapor and VisiCalc.

SPEAKER_21: And I worked for Mitch Kapor. Mitch Kapor was, uh, I mean, I was an author. I had a contract with them. I didn't, I wasn't an employee, but they paid me and I had a percentage and long, it's a really long story, but yeah, I knew all those guys. And, uh, and then, uh, we started a company around the product and, uh, and it didn't go very well until, um, until that moment. And then it started, then things started clicking. Um, and we ended up, uh, merging with Symantec and that's how I hooked up with, uh, the Kleiner guys. And, uh, cause they were, it was really, I mean, I did the deal with John Doerr and, um, I asked him at one point, would you, instead of buying me out, would you fund me?

SPEAKER_250: And he said, no, we're not going to do that.

SPEAKER_253: See, the problem is they, they never understood.

SPEAKER_21: I don't think, I mean, you know, I don't, I'm not an easy thing for them to understand because the world thinks that programmers are fungible and uncreative and not leaders and all, you know, all kinds of very negative.

SPEAKER_03: That seems to have changed from that period of time.

SPEAKER_08: Do you think so? I don't know if it has.

SPEAKER_85: I think it's, you know, I think Y Combinator does get credit, Paul Graham, for saying we're going to invest in developers and they're going to be the, the tip of the spear. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_08: Y Combinator is a, I would say net net is a positive thing. I always thought that incubators were a good idea. I really did. I wrote about it when they were out of fashion.

SPEAKER_21: I said, you know, we shouldn't give up on them so quickly because, you know, because developers need help, you know? And if you can, you know, take some of the functions of, of running a company and, you know, factor them out so that you don't have to reinvent them for every single company.

SPEAKER_85: That's a good idea, you know, but, um, but I venture capital has changed a lot too. I mean, if you think about who the venture capitals were in those early days now, I don't think, I don't think so.

SPEAKER_08: Because you know what? I don't think we're trying out any of the big ideas, to be honest with you. I think what you're getting is a lot of derivative products that are, you know, the, uh, four square of tire changing, you know, or the Uber of, I don't know how many, this is, I saw this when I was at NYU, uh, when was that 20, 10 to 20, 11, somewhere in there.

SPEAKER_21: And, uh, they were starting up their own incubator sort of thing. And I was, uh, in the journalism school there. And so I was on their network and the, the students would come to me and they say, I want to come up with a great idea so I can be the next Zuckerberg.

SPEAKER_08: I go, well, that's ass backwards. What? You can't be the next Zuckerberg. Fuck you. You know? Yeah. Whatever. I think that you want people that try really big, weird ideas. And I think that VCs are never going to do that. Because VCs are bankers and that's how they look at the world. And they need a bankable idea.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah.

SPEAKER_85: I, they are definitely looking for things that can, um, they, they're looking to take the risk out and have a clear path to whatever amount of revenue and clear path to an exit and scale and really outlandish ideas.

SPEAKER_237: Um, you know, they, they, you can get a lot of egg on your face from them.

SPEAKER_21: Let me ask you this.

SPEAKER_08: How outlandish would it be for a guy who was a two-time entrepreneur, both times successful, has now created this thing called not personally created RSS, but made it happen.

SPEAKER_153: Why shouldn't he get a chance to start an RSS company? Why did that business decide that that person couldn't do that? And I've never understood it.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I don't think the quality of the people they replaced me with were, I mean, their result was predictable. These were people who didn't understand what they were doing. Uh, there haven't been any technology-based podcasting startups. I can't think of any.

SPEAKER_70: I mean, there've been some individual efforts that have been good, but there should have been an early on podcasting startup.

SPEAKER_85: And yeah, it's interesting. You know, the technology being so standardized and open, um, yeah, you, you really, it never became one person's domain, right? You had Zencaster handling, recording, or Libsyn handling, hosting, and RSS feeds.

SPEAKER_270: It should have all been one thing. It should have been, there should be, I mean, still to this day, iPhones are not good podcasting devices.

SPEAKER_192: No, that is interesting. Yeah, they suck at it.

SPEAKER_08: I might be even too late to do this. And I don't want to go into tremendous detail on it, but the story there is an interesting one because it went, I went all around to all the different places that could have had a stake in this. And technology companies, like, you know, all of them.

SPEAKER_21: And then none of them were curious about what were the dimensions of this new medium. I don't think they still are. I don't think they're curious about it. You know?

SPEAKER_85: Yeah. I, you know, it, it kind of snuck up on them. I think like they were all behind the users on this one, which is similar to the blogging moment where the, it was so user driven and so talent driven that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_111: The big companies, by the time they tried to capture it, it was already independent and sustainable.

SPEAKER_153: Well, but the same thing with the VCs, they reacted just like the big companies.

SPEAKER_111: Yeah.

SPEAKER_153: So, Jason, why don't you, when, listen, I, I, I, I, I take the pitch right now. No, because I want to be, a friendship to me is an active thing, you know? Yeah. I want to be friends. So let's, you know, and we are, we have always been friends, but. Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_72: I've, I've always looked at you as like an inspiration, like, um, maybe not a mentor, but just somebody who I looked at and go, wow, just everything he does.

SPEAKER_85: Keep an eye on because there's so many nuggets of wisdom there as he, as he goes.

SPEAKER_38: Let me tell you the equivalent for coming back from me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: I know you struggled a lot and you had huge ups and downs through your career, but I think it was always clear what you want to, what you wanted to do.

SPEAKER_38: I always had a pretty good idea and it's what you're doing right now. Yeah. So, you know, hats off to you. You, I mean, it didn't just come to you, right?

SPEAKER_156: No, it was 20 years.

SPEAKER_38: You had to keep throwing yourself up against the wall, get bloodied, go lick your wounds and then come back and try it again. That's, I mean, the people that hit the first time, that's luck, but.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, it's pretty rare. I mean. What you've done is, is remarkable and admirable and should be taught.

SPEAKER_116: People should have that as an example.

SPEAKER_52: It's very kind of you to say they did a case study on me at Stanford, which was bizarre to read because I would never get into Stanford, you know, business school. And they literally did Jeffrey Pfeiffer, the professor over there did one on my ability to network and build a network of people to then, you know, drive success in the future. And it's worked out.

SPEAKER_21: Well, you know, okay, you just raised the next question because I saw you asked about universities. How can we use universities in technology? Didn't you ask about that?

SPEAKER_288: Yeah. I mean, it does seem to me like. It needs another look and.

SPEAKER_290: It definitely needs another look for sure.

SPEAKER_292: And I, I've been thinking about that. I mean, I, you know, I have the same story.

SPEAKER_08: Harvard never would have accepted me as a student.

SPEAKER_21: I didn't come close to getting into Harvard, but later in my career, I knocked on their door. I said, you know, I'd love to do some stuff here. And they said, yes. So, you know, it's, they're, um, yeah.

SPEAKER_293: You were a fellow at.

SPEAKER_08: No, but what's funny about it is that they've never tried to correct that. You know, they've never done a case study. It says, well, why are we writing case studies about Jason Calcanis? But we, we never would let him in as a student.

SPEAKER_85: Well, yeah. I mean, if you think about what the acceptance criteria is, it's certainly not like underperforming, but potential and grit, you know, like it's not. That's really why I think entrepreneur special, because it favors people of action and grit and resiliency and the things that may be testing and getting great grades in an academic setting don't optimize for, right? No, that's conforming. They kind of optimize for conformity.

SPEAKER_270: That's correct. They are, there are people who conform and, you know, it's, I suppose there's a lot of

SPEAKER_21: value to that too. But, um, yeah, I mean, you described my situation. I, uh, I was through high school was always on the verge of getting kicked out. They didn't think I was very special in college, um, or in grad school for that matter.

SPEAKER_08: Uh, and then, you know, whatever they, they never thought I was that special in Silicon Valley either. You know, it's like, it's weird, but, you know, wouldn't it be great if Silicon Valley lived up to its promise? Cause I don't think it does.

SPEAKER_21: I left there. I just didn't want to be there. You know?

SPEAKER_85: Yeah. Money does change things. I mean, the, the scope of Silicon Valley has just gotten so big now, uh, and the number of companies being invested in. So I see, I see both sides of it. More people are being funded for more divergent backgrounds and places than ever before. So you ha I mean, the New York tech scene, the Austin tech scene, the Salt Lake city, the Los Angeles tech scene, obviously saddle has been going for a while have really started to become places where the VCs here are like, I got to get to Stockholm. I got to get to Austin. I got to get to Miami and find the companies there, Australia, even with Canva and Atlassian. People are like, wow, you know, Australian entrepreneurs are dope. So I kind of feel like the code of Silicon Valley got cracked and just got distributed everywhere. And everybody's got like, kind of the recipe in the playbook.

SPEAKER_52: Now it's kind of like nukes, right? Like people got there first and then a bunch of people got the recipe and we're like, oh, I can make a nuke. Yeah. How long does that take a decade or two? Great. I'm going to start my, my nuclear program and build my bombs, uh, until like somebody pumped the brakes on it. Maybe a bad analogy. Uh, did you ever, I'm, I'm curious about some of the old days.

SPEAKER_03: Cause you, you were there for a lot of this. Did you ever meet like, uh, and spend time with Steve jobs, Bill Gates and that group? Yeah. And what were they like, you know, when they were young, you know, in the eighties, when

SPEAKER_30: they were in their thirties or forties, what was that time period?

SPEAKER_08: Like, well, I, you know, by the time I got there, uh, let's see, I got there in the, um, fall of 1979 and yeah, my first, uh, call was Apple. I mean, I had come there from, uh, I was living in Madison, Wisconsin and, uh, where I had gone to grad school and, uh, I had developed two products.

SPEAKER_21: One was a relational database and the other was an outliner, which is what I eventually

SPEAKER_08: made my career on the first version of it, of my career. And, um, and I wanted to hook up with somebody to publish it. You know, I didn't want to start a company. And so I, uh, I, I had some sales background. I, uh, God, I have to keep this very abbreviated because it's a long story.

SPEAKER_21: Um, but yeah, I did, um, meet with Steve jobs and, uh, and, um, and he said,

SPEAKER_36: you're on an outliner. And this is like the year before they want the outliner.

SPEAKER_152: He wanted the database and yeah.

SPEAKER_08: And he, and I told him you should want the outliner. That's the product for you. I mean, you've got the outliner machine here and this fucking machine is never going to run a database. Come on, get real.

SPEAKER_309: I mean, this is like apple two days or apple one day, right?

SPEAKER_08: The apple two had just, they just come out with the floppy drive. And you know how much data could fit on the floppy drive?

SPEAKER_74: Wow. Is it 360 K 140 K 140 K 140 K.

SPEAKER_312: Yeah. Yeah. And that was per side, right? So if you clipped it and flipped it over, no, no, I think that was both. So I don't know how they did it.

SPEAKER_17: I was never really, no, I, whatever. You never flipped the disc over. Nobody ever did that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: So, so, um, so he said, well, you know, basically fuck off. And I said, you got any recommendations on where I could go from here? And he said, well, you could go to this company. We just turned down their product. Um, and it was VisiCalc. So. Right. That, that was, uh, I mean, I think they made a mistake in turning down the outliner, but it, they definitely made a mistake in turning down VisiCalc. And, um, I guess they thought nobody would want to do that on the apple two. And when I met with them, uh, they, uh, they were actually looking for an outliner and that was, I thought, wow, this, what a wonderful world. You know, you develop a weird product completely out of left field, and then you go to Silicon Valley and they want it and, you know, whatever. And, uh, so that was my one, I mean, you have to understand, even at that time, Steve Jobs, was a icon and famous. And, you know, it, it was off putting and I got into an argument with him, but it, it still was off putting.

SPEAKER_70: And, uh, so then a couple of years later, I had, well, more than a couple of years later, ugly. You'd meet Bill Gates was quite accessible. You know, he would go to conferences and you could, you know, talk with him.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, he would sit at lunch. I mean, I remember in the PC forum days, he was just there hanging out. He'd have lunch. He'd sit and say, Hey guys, what's up?

SPEAKER_259: Yeah.

SPEAKER_231: Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: And, um, and he gave a talk at, uh, Roger Von Eck had a conference at Ricky's Hyatt house, which has been torn down since then. And he talked about, uh, very visionary speech about the creating modules of software and tying them together with scripting language is just what frontier was. It's what I ended up developing, um, much later, but, um, and so I was really impressed. And then, um, I started making trips to Microsoft. I mean, that was a pretty, and they were very, I actually really liked Microsoft. I have to say that, you know, I mean, they were, I don't know. I always actually like they were red meat eaters, you know, and screw around. And when they were small, they were, they weren't, I didn't feel that they were dangerous. And, uh, and I always loved working with them and they actually tried to buy my company. They were the first user land, no living video text. And, uh, that was in, I'm going to say 87. And, uh, and we had a letter of intent and, uh, it had the deal gone through. We would have been their first acquisition. And, uh, wow. Yeah. It went, the value of the deal went from 10 million to 20 million while we were in due diligence and cause they were just gone public and, uh, the stock was going up multiples, but we didn't have the product that they wanted. And we, and they, when they figured it out, what they wanted was PowerPoint. And we had, uh, we were, we pioneered presentation software on the Mac, but PowerPoint came along

SPEAKER_160: and was, uh, I forgot that they bought PowerPoint for, yeah, they bought it for $14 million.

SPEAKER_08: And so PowerPoint was going to go to Symantec and we were going to go to Microsoft. And w and in Microsoft, uh, I got a call from Frank Gaudet, who is, I think a Queens guy. And he was an older guy, really nice. And he had, you know, his theme was, we're going to love you into this company, Dave. You're just going to love it here. And I was actually really excited. I get turned on at some of these meetings. I really, you know, it's like, whatever. And he said, Bill's going to call you in a few minutes and you're not going to like it. And that's what happened. So I ended up selling to Symantec. And I ended up getting, I was large shareholder in Symantec after that deal. And then a few couple of years later, we went public and yeah, I would see Bill Gates. Every time I'd go up to Microsoft, I would go in and hang out with him in his office. And we'd shoot shit. I would, I actually, we were having, I don't know if you ever heard about the TSR wars.

SPEAKER_331: It was a TSR wars.

SPEAKER_08: No. Yeah. Oh, it was a huge deal. If there was a product called sidekick from Borland.

SPEAKER_13: Oh, I had psychic on my computer. It was like the first little set of apps. You had post-it notes or calendar.

SPEAKER_332: Those were called TSRs. That's what they were called. And TSR stood for terminate and stay resident. Yes.

SPEAKER_03: I now remember that term. That was like, I remember in my DOS days, you would load it up and you could use a quick

SPEAKER_37: key to pop it up. Yep.

SPEAKER_336: That's it.

SPEAKER_37: And it was like a precursor to having windows or task management.

SPEAKER_08: Well, it's, it was the poor man's version of it. It was like what you could do with DOS before we got to, you know, multitasking computers. It was, it was beautiful. Philippe Kahn, total visionary, real character, you know, and at that time, kind of an asshole, to be honest with you. Um, so we followed in and had the number two product in that market called ready, which was a terminate and stay resident outliner.

SPEAKER_231: And every time when we shipped, they changed their product so that they would knock us out of memory.

SPEAKER_340: They didn't want us in there. Yeah. I thought you would like that. Right.

SPEAKER_51: Cause it's like, that is so hardcore. I had a guy working for me, Bob Beerman, who loved that. So he would come out with a workaround.

SPEAKER_344: We'd ship a new version and then they would knock that one out. I guess they kind of thought we were a virus, whatever, you know, it was kind of flattering. So after that, I went up to Seattle and hung out and went to see Bill Gates.

SPEAKER_08: And I pleaded with him to put something in the operating system. This was MS-DOS that would arbitrate this. So we could then say, okay, you know, you, you know, it would have been a tiny little, we were willing to give him the code, Jason, you know? Yeah. He said, oh no, we've got this great new OS coming out real soon now. And you should just wait for that. And that was OS two. It was like, oh great. You know, it's like, this is by the way, a pattern in tech. This happens all the time. Is it people think, oh, the next thing it's going to be this radical. Everybody's going to want to install it right away. And it's going to solve all the problems. I believe he was sincere in that. I don't think he got any pleasure out of that. Yeah. Because, and that was also called Ram Cram and it was hitting the 640 K limit. And then all of that extra memory was going to Lotus, right? Cause that's what everybody was running. And it was just a complete mess. And it just needed a little bit of management from anybody. IBM could have done it. Microsoft could have done it and they didn't do it. And they didn't do it. And that was, and that, I mean, I don't know if they would agree, but I think that was the end of MS-DOS because it hit that wall and it didn't manage it very well. And the same thing happened with Windows. I don't know. What was it? 12, 15 years later, somewhere in there with the, uh, malware on Windows. They never, they never did anything about that. And they could have done something. I don't think the Mac was inherently better than Windows. I just think that Mac didn't have the malware and that's why everybody went to it. You know?

SPEAKER_350: Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_85: Uh, it's crazy to think about those days when being able to just load something from memory and not have to reload it. Right.

SPEAKER_03: Is, uh, you know, like an incredible innovation at that time.

SPEAKER_332: I wouldn't say innovation is the right word. I think that everybody knew it could be done.

SPEAKER_08: Even the users knew it could be done, but it was a relief. It'd be kind of like when Trump doesn't win. If Trump doesn't win, that'll be a big relief. It won't be an innovation though. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_212: We had that problem solved before Trump came along. Right.

SPEAKER_354: But, um, what do you, what does your gut tell you about the election? I'm curious.

SPEAKER_21: I don't have a gut on that one. I just, I don't.

SPEAKER_08: What does your gut tell you? I don't know. I mean, I think that whatever happens is going to be super exciting. And I don't think that's good.

SPEAKER_357: I'd prefer super boring. That would be, but there's, I think boring would be good again.

SPEAKER_37: Cause this is taking up too much of my cognitive space. Exactly.

SPEAKER_52: Um, you know, like talking about a memory overload and talking about your upper and lower memory being filled. Um, like having the pandemic fill all these cycles and memory and then having Trump filling it constantly.

SPEAKER_37: I, uh, my thought is that, um, what you, this is, there's this concept of what got you here won't get you there. And what got him into office, I think was his ability. He's like a media savant, right? Like he's able to make all of the attention come to him. So he's just like attention master. And so because he was able to flood the zone and make everything about himself and get all this press that got him into office. And then by doing that for four years straight, it's exhausted people because every time he does it, he has to be more outrageous, more insane. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Um, more outlandish. And I think even some contingent of supporters, they're exhausted. They're just exhausted.

SPEAKER_85: And if you exhaust everybody, it's sort of like being the dinner guest who's got like a lot of great stories, but then we shut up and the stories kind of get less good as they go on. And you're like, yeah, that guy was good.

SPEAKER_266: Or that guy was good for the first part, but you know, they, they monopolize the conversation too much.

SPEAKER_355: I think it's just monopolized our brains too much. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_70: I know. I felt that before the 2016 election, I mean, you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's, yes, I agree with you. I mean, that's why I constantly feel burnt out and exhausted. And, you know, it's not just that it's also the, the, uh, the virus that, you know, I'm a, you just turned 50 or something, right?

SPEAKER_365: I'm turning 50 next month. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: You're turning 50 next month. Right. So I'm 15 years older. I just turned 65. So, um, so yeah, I mean, I, I think, but we're both in this situation where it, you're really,

SPEAKER_08: you really want to, if you really want to survive this and I really do, that's, I would say my prime thing is that, you know, I'm willing to hang out for a while until we get this. And I think we're going to get, I think next year, this time, if we get rid of Trump, if, if we don't get rid of Trump, I don't think we have a future. But if we get rid of him by this year, next time, no matter how fucked up things are, we'll be out of this mess.

SPEAKER_70: Yeah. I would agree with that.

SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I, I felt like we would be out of this by now, or at least have it controlled because we'd be testing, you know, 5, 10 million people a day.

SPEAKER_373: We've only gotten to a million.

SPEAKER_70: That's the functional America you're talking about. That's the one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: That acts rationally that usually that we used to be that we grew up in, you know, and we have this like, um, whatever that, you know, whatever that like, uh, military authority is where you can, uh, you know, take it emergency authority and tell any company to build anything and get on it.

SPEAKER_377: The defense production act.

SPEAKER_85: Yeah. Like what happened to that? Like we built like 10,000 ventilators and then we stopped. Right. Why didn't we stop and say, Hey, Elon. Hey, GE.

SPEAKER_379: Hey, everybody.

SPEAKER_08: Cause Trump is not actually a president. He plays a president. He's an actor who plays a president. He isn't actually a president.

SPEAKER_311: Uh, and then what do you put in charge of this? Who's in charge of it now? Fauci. Pence. Jared. Nobody.

SPEAKER_08: You know, we could have been creative about this. We could have made him an offer probably before he took office and said, look, we're going to hire somebody to actually be president. And you can be the pretend president. You can have all the trappings can live in the white house. You can hang out with whoever you want to, and you can steal lots of money. You know, in fact, we'll just give you the money.

SPEAKER_383: Okay.

SPEAKER_382: Here's a billion dollars. Just. It would have been a good deal. It would have been a good deal.

SPEAKER_03: Would have been cheaper than the $5 trillion. We're going to spend on what? I don't know. Saving every company that shut down during this.

SPEAKER_212: Okay. We're going to get me depressed.

SPEAKER_52: Well, I mean, how much would it have taken if we put, if we poured $5 trillion into this, how much would it have taken to just get the testing up and running? That couldn't, you couldn't spend. It's not the money.

SPEAKER_389: It's not the money. It's not the money. They have the money allocated. No. Money's already allocated. It's execution. They just won't spend it.

SPEAKER_391: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: It is bonkers to me. It's so bonkers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_85: And I don't know if we survive. I agree with you. Like, I don't know if we survive a second term. I think they got to just give him the pardon right now and be like, listen, bow out. Here's the pardon. We know you did a bunch of criminal shit. We know that it's all dirty. Here.

SPEAKER_52: Everything's done. No taxes. Your whole family. No IRS audit. Just get the fuck out of here, dude. And stop causing chaos. It's too much chaos. I'd sign off on that.

SPEAKER_395: Yeah.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah.

SPEAKER_85: I mean, when I saw him in some of these debates and some of these rallies, I get the sense he doesn't want to be in the job anymore.

SPEAKER_08: He never wanted to be in the job.

SPEAKER_397: Right. But I think he really doesn't want to be in the job now.

SPEAKER_14: There's this wonderful scene in the Batman movie with Heath Ledger as the Joker. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: And the guy with the half of his face blown off. I forget his name.

SPEAKER_399: Two-Face. What's his name?

SPEAKER_153: Two-Face. No. Well, maybe he is. I don't know. This isn't that movie though.

SPEAKER_08: And so he mentions the plan that the Joker has. And the Joker goes into the speech, but you think I have a plan?

SPEAKER_38: I'm like the dog that caught the car. I don't know what to do. I just do things. I just do things. That's what he says. You know? Yeah. He talks about the people who do have plans and they're all the, you know, Mitch McConnell and Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, whatever.

SPEAKER_08: They have plans, but I don't have plans. I just do things.

SPEAKER_85: Harvey Dent. Perfect. Yeah. Say again? I think Harvey Dent, who is the guy. It was Harvey Dent. He becomes Two-Face eventually when he becomes a super villain later comics. Uh, and then he flips the coin to determine your fate. Um, is kind of his.

SPEAKER_403: Oh, you see, I didn't see the follow on movie. Cause yeah. Or whatever.

SPEAKER_85: I don't think they ever really fully developed the character, but yes, it does seem like he is Heath Ledger. Some men just want to see the world burn. Yeah.

SPEAKER_292: I think is what. He actually seemed kind of sympathetic in that moment. You know, he wanted to be friends with this guy and this guy wouldn't be friends

SPEAKER_08: with him. I mean, who doesn't like somebody who wants to be friends with everybody? Right? I mean, that's good.

David Friedberg: In a way that's kind of Trump's thing is a narcissist. Right? He just wants everybody to love him. He does.

SPEAKER_292: And if we had been sophisticated enough to respond to him that way, we could have

SPEAKER_08: possibly avoided some of this, you know, where this idea came from is that apparently he made that proposal to Kasich before the election. He said, I'll let you be the president and I'll be in charge of making America great again. That was his proposal. And you know what that means? It means I'm going to go around and give speeches and you don't have to do anything.

SPEAKER_216: I say, I'm just going to give the speeches. Yeah. I go to the rallies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_291: And he's happy and he's going to lose and he knows he's going to lose and he's going to be relieved. And then the Southern District of New York is going to drop.

SPEAKER_364: I hope they come down really hard.

SPEAKER_52: Mountain of bricks on him. Those Southern District of New York is like a hardcore group of people. Like they are just not playing games. So you love New York, don't you?

SPEAKER_413: Oh God, I love it. I just love it. Why don't you live in New York?

SPEAKER_13: I'm thinking about coming back.

SPEAKER_85: I've really enjoyed my time in California, but I would like to come back and buy the Knicks. That's kind of what I did.

SPEAKER_153: That's my long game. I moved out of Manhattan though. I don't live in the city anymore. I live up in the Catskills. Oh, it's gorgeous up there.

SPEAKER_416: Yeah, I have a wonderful place. Yeah. I have a wonderful place.

SPEAKER_153: Yeah.

SPEAKER_292: Well, we're over all this stuff. Come to New York and come to visit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_237: Come have dinner again. All right. There you have it folks. Dave Miner, legend, inventor, entrepreneur, blogger. Go read scripting. Jason's friends. Friends. Yeah. Right on. All right. So let's stay in touch, Dave, and we'll see you all next time on This Week in Service.