The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You reminded me, my guest this week is Dave Pell. Dave reminded me of an email I sent

00:00:08 ◼   ► you two years ago. I'm cracking up just thinking about it. I am not somebody who

00:00:16 ◼   ► usually remembers his dreams, and I don't remember if I've ever even—maybe once

00:00:22 ◼   ► or twice in the history of the show I've recalled a dream that I had. But I don't

00:00:28 ◼   ► I don't know. I was thinking about it. Should I read the email?

00:00:32 ◼   ► I think you should. I think it's going to be pretty clear to all your listeners that

00:00:36 ◼   ► I'm sort of in your head.

00:00:38 ◼   ► So I had an upcoming trip to Vegas for a quick weekend trip with my pals, Michael Lop and

00:00:43 ◼   ► Jim Kudol. I was really looking forward to it. And one day I woke up and I'd had this

00:00:48 ◼   ► vivid dream. Here's the email I sent to you. I wrote, "So I'm going to Vegas next

00:00:52 ◼   ► month for the weekend, Guy's Weekend with Kudol and Michael Lop. I had a dream last

00:00:57 ◼   ► night that it was that weekend and it was Friday and I just got into town. It was early

00:01:02 ◼   ► afternoon and I hadn't met up with the other two guys yet. I decided to take a walk while

00:01:08 ◼   ► waiting for them. I'm on a side street off the strip and who do I run into but you, Dave

00:01:13 ◼   ► Pell. And you tell me that you're on your way to your favorite casino, the glass something

00:01:20 ◼   ► or another or something or another is some foreign sounding like French word that I had

00:01:24 ◼   ► never heard before. And I tell you, I've never even heard of the place and you tell me it's

00:01:28 ◼   ► the best. The entire building is made out of glass. It's gorgeous. You say I love Vegas,

00:01:35 ◼   ► but I go there all the time. And the only place I'll step into is this glass, whatever

00:01:39 ◼   ► it's called. So sure, I say why not? So we walk. And you know, it's a dream because who

00:01:45 ◼   ► walks anywhere in Vegas. You say the place is over there by the Rio but closer to the

00:01:50 ◼   ► strip and we're walking over that way sort of off the strip and we get there and the

00:01:55 ◼   ► entire lot is just a hole in the ground, a desert. It's all under construction and there's

00:02:00 ◼   ► a sign that says that they're replacing it, the glass whatever it's called, with a new

00:02:04 ◼   ► casino. And you turn to me and say, "Well, let's find somewhere else and get a drink."

00:02:09 ◼   ► I tell you that sounds about right to me. And then the dream cuts and immediately we're

00:02:15 ◼   ► inside some random generic stinky ass old school Vegas casino bar like the Riviera or

00:02:21 ◼   ► the Sahara or Flamingo or one of those places that just looks like generic Vegas casino

00:02:26 ◼   ► that's been there forever and never changes. And it's me and you having a drink. And then

00:02:30 ◼   ► the next thing, the dream immediately cuts to me waking up in the dream, not waking up

00:02:36 ◼   ► waking up on an airplane that has just landed in Philadelphia. My head hurts. And I realized

00:02:43 ◼   ► that my entire trip is over. It's Sunday evening, and I'm home, and I don't recall a goddamn

00:02:49 ◼   ► thing from the entire weekend after sitting down with you for that drink early Friday

00:02:53 ◼   ► afternoon. Never checked into my hotel, never once saw to my recollection, Kudol or Lop.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And I think to myself, "Goddamn it, I thought this weekend was going to be a lot of fun,

00:03:03 ◼   ► and I had stuff I wanted to talk to those guys about. What did I do? Why does my head

00:03:08 ◼   ► hurt. Those are the thoughts in my head. So I got up and I wrote the email to you.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Yeah, well, it was all part of a strange plot by me. I was upset at not being invited to the

00:03:19 ◼   ► guy's trip to Vegas. I decided to enter through any way I could. In this case, I entered your

00:03:25 ◼   ► mind through a dream, but to be more involved and sort of be one of the guys or one of the

00:03:30 ◼   ► wolf pack, as they say in the hangover. And then in the end, my plan was foiled because I ended up

00:03:35 ◼   ► completely screwing up your trip anyway, and I'll never get invited to any of your

00:03:38 ◼   ► follow-up.

00:03:39 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:03:40 ◼   ► Pete: It really was. And it is funny because I do have like this like vague association

00:03:46 ◼   ► in my head that Dave Pell's trouble. I mean, it's because of this dream. And I don't

00:03:51 ◼   ► think it's true at all. I don't think it's trouble. I'm not quite sure what happened.

00:03:55 ◼   ► Like if the dream is telling me that you like slipped me a Mickey or something, it's very

00:04:00 ◼   ► unusual.

00:04:01 ◼   ► If it's—I don't know, but it adds any more clarity.

00:04:05 ◼   ► I never really responded to your original email, but I did wake up the next morning

00:04:09 ◼   ► with a pretty nasty STD.

00:04:12 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:04:14 ◼   ► I have a little bit of follow-up here from previous episodes of the show, and I keep

00:04:20 ◼   ► forgetting to do this.

00:04:22 ◼   ► And I want to knock this out, because I think that this is with the holidays coming up and

00:04:28 ◼   ► whatever.

00:04:29 ◼   ► No promises, I don't know.

00:04:30 ◼   ► might be the last episode of the talk show for 2012. And I feel like, I don't know,

00:04:35 ◼   ► just in the way with year-end lists and stuff like that, if you have anything to follow

00:04:39 ◼   ► up on, now's the time to—let's hit 2013 with an empty slate.

00:04:43 ◼   ► So one of them—I don't know how in the world I made this mistake—is a couple weeks

00:04:47 ◼   ► ago when Merlin Mann was on the show, I said that bourbon comes from Tennessee and not

00:04:55 ◼   ► Kentucky. And of course, that's exactly backwards. And I knew that. And I knew it

00:04:58 ◼   ► even when I said it and I just didn't feel like correcting it.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Bourbon comes from Kentucky and Jack Daniels comes from Tennessee.

00:05:05 ◼   ► And that's one of the reasons why Jack Daniels is not called Bourbon.

00:05:10 ◼   ► Seems like a very, like an awful, awful mistake for me to make though.

00:05:13 ◼   ► My apologies to everybody in Kentucky who listens to the show.

00:05:20 ◼   ► You do Bourbon, man, Dave?

00:05:22 ◼   ► No, I'm less of a drinker and more of a smoker, really.

00:05:27 ◼   ► Yeah. Your writing comes across pretty frequently in your writing.

00:05:32 ◼   ► Yeah, that's the vibe I'm going through.

00:05:34 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:05:34 ◼   ► I'm not sure whether bourbon comes from Kentucky or Tennessee,

00:05:38 ◼   ► but most of my pharmaceuticals come from my drawer.

00:05:41 ◼   ► Isn't that…? You know, I do think we're reaching a tipping point. Maybe I don't have any more

00:05:51 ◼   ► follow-up. I'm looking at my notes here. I don't think I do. No, I guess that's it. All right,

00:05:56 ◼   ► decks cleared, all mistakes have been repaired. I think we as a country are reaching a tipping

00:06:01 ◼   ► point on legalized marijuana or decriminalized marijuana. It seems to me like it's tracking

00:06:10 ◼   ► a couple of years behind gay marriage.

00:06:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's going to be an interesting topic because I think in terms of people's

00:06:21 ◼   ► opinion, I think we're entering towards legalization as basically inevitable at this

00:06:27 ◼   ► point.

00:06:28 ◼   ► In terms of enforcement, I think it's going to be a lot more tricky than anybody has ever

00:06:33 ◼   ► imagined.

00:06:34 ◼   ► I've listened to a few people talk on this subject.

00:06:37 ◼   ► One guy was on Terry Gross recently.

00:06:39 ◼   ► I linked to it in the next draft.

00:06:41 ◼   ► The incredible complexities with legalizing the sale of marijuana, possibly taxing it,

00:06:48 ◼   ► making it legal for certain purposes and not legal for other purposes and somehow cutting

00:06:52 ◼   ► out the illegal trade is going to be pretty complicated.

00:06:55 ◼   ► But you figure we have decades of sort of setting up this system, so it's going to

00:07:00 ◼   ► take probably several years to sort of undo that.

00:07:06 ◼   ► I've always felt for two reasons, sort of the criminalization of marijuana just doesn't

00:07:12 ◼   ► make any sense to me.

00:07:14 ◼   ► The first, more basic reason is the fact that people still, to this day, argue that it shouldn't

00:07:18 ◼   ► be used for medical purposes.

00:07:21 ◼   ► And my philosophy on life is if you're in a situation where you're unfortunate enough

00:07:25 ◼   ► to be in some kind of serious pain or facing some serious ailment, whatever you can do

00:07:30 ◼   ► to make yourself feel better sounds like the right move to me.

00:07:34 ◼   ► And for any society that calls itself just to try to block you from that, for some sort

00:07:39 ◼   ► of vacuous moral reason is totally absurd.

00:07:42 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a whole bunch of layers of abstraction between in supporting the criminalization

00:07:51 ◼   ► of marijuana. It's all abstract, whereas a lot of these, you know, like you said, for

00:07:56 ◼   ► someone who's really in severe pain or any kind of pain, really, and, you know, it's

00:08:02 ◼   ► a completely practical application. There is no abstraction that when I smoke this stuff

00:08:08 ◼   ► or eat it or however you consume it, I feel better. And for some people, the difference,

00:08:15 ◼   ► if it's alleviation of pain, it's not more than just recreational, wow, this makes

00:08:20 ◼   ► the matrix a lot more interesting.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani And the funny part is even for that second

00:08:27 ◼   ► example, there really are two Americas when it comes to drug legalization, especially

00:08:34 ◼   ► marijuana because you know every day I'm reading headlines about the

00:08:37 ◼   ► decriminalization of marijuana but living here in the Bay Area for the last

00:08:42 ◼   ► 30 years or whatever I it seems like it's been decriminalized for white guys

00:08:48 ◼   ► with plenty of money the whole time right I mean I accidentally inhaled Jim

00:08:53 ◼   ► Ignatowski style from taxi around the first internet boom and then Cosmo sort

00:09:01 ◼   ► started delivering me some munchies. I accidentally sort of stayed in that state of mind for about

00:09:06 ◼   ► a decade. There were certainly some minuses to it. I left revenue models out of almost

00:09:13 ◼   ► every project I did during that decade. But I don't remember any police storming down

00:09:19 ◼   ► my door and saying, "Hey, what's that smell?" They just said, "Whatever. Whatever it takes

00:09:23 ◼   ► for you to enjoy your movie or to enjoy this cyclist from Cosmo having to pedal up your

00:09:30 ◼   ► steep hill to bring you a small bag of chips on a rainy night.

00:09:34 ◼   ► And some of this stuff is just nuts, man.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And I feel like you and I are a lot alike, and we can get into this in a bit too, but

00:09:43 ◼   ► in terms of our attention and the way that the web seems interested, it just seems built

00:09:50 ◼   ► for our type of minds.

00:09:51 ◼   ► I mean, how many tabs do you have open right now?

00:09:54 ◼   ► Well, since we're talking none, but at any given time, probably about 60.

00:09:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:59 ◼   ► That's how my… I mean, it's just the nature of the game if you're a link blogger,

00:10:06 ◼   ► you know, if you do that sort of… it's just the way your mind works. And the other day,

00:10:10 ◼   ► I started on Kudol's site, and he had linked to this unbelievable blog just about

00:10:16 ◼   ► William Friedkin's 1977 movie Sorcerer, which I've never seen, which is amazing. But it's

00:10:23 ◼   ► apparently one of the reasons I've never seen it is… now this is William Friedkin,

00:10:28 ◼   ► director of the French Connection and the Exorcist. I think those are the two movies

00:10:31 ◼   ► he had made right before this. So he's literally at the top of his game. And it's some kind

00:10:37 ◼   ► of crime caper in Central America. Sounds great. But it's all locked up in legal problems

00:10:46 ◼   ► because it was a joint production of Paramount and Universal. And as of today, both Paramount

00:10:50 ◼   ► and Universal say they don't know who owns it. And so there's no, there is a DVD release,

00:10:55 ◼   ► but there's no Blu-ray and there's no, like it's even hard to just screen it or get a

00:11:01 ◼   ► good print of it because neither of the two studios is claiming ownership.

00:11:05 ◼   ► So Friedkin wants this movie to be treated the way it should and he's filed lawsuits

00:11:10 ◼   ► just to get them to just reveal the paperwork that says here's who owns it.

00:11:14 ◼   ► He doesn't even want to make money from it anymore.

00:11:15 ◼   ► He just wants it out there.

00:11:18 ◼   ► But anyway, I got sucked into this blog that's just about this movie and one of the stories

00:11:22 ◼   ► that Friedkin tells is that he flew back, they did all the shooting on location in Central

00:11:29 ◼   ► America and flew back to Texas, at Galpaso, Texas, on a little prop airplane. And one

00:11:35 ◼   ► of the stuntmen wanted to come to at the last second. He's like, "Sure, we have room. Hop

00:11:39 ◼   ► in." Guy hops in and he's just carrying like a little briefcase. They land and the cop,

00:11:44 ◼   ► some cop greets him at the airport. I guess Friedkin knew him or the guy said he was a

00:11:47 ◼   ► fan of the Exorcist or something like that. And he's talking and he's real, you know,

00:11:50 ◼   ► friendly. But all of a sudden, this German Shepherd at the airport goes nuts at scratching

00:11:55 ◼   ► at this airplane and ends up that the dog is going nuts because of this stuntman's briefcase.

00:12:01 ◼   ► And it ends up the stuntman had had some marijuana in it previously, but took it out knowing,

00:12:07 ◼   ► "Hey, I'm getting on an airplane flying internationally. I can't have marijuana in here." Took it out,

00:12:12 ◼   ► but it was just literally like a few grains, you know, just I don't know what would you

00:12:16 ◼   ► call them? Leaves? What are they? Buds? I don't know. Just dust. Like dust from having

00:12:21 ◼   ► had marijuana in there. Like nothing that you could even, not even like an amount that

00:12:25 ◼   ► you could smoke. But all of a sudden, like the cop, they got locked up. Friedkin got

00:12:30 ◼   ► locked up. Everybody who was in the plane got locked up for hours. It took like attorneys

00:12:36 ◼   ► from Universal Pictures, like studio attorneys, to get Friedkin out. And they kept the stunt

00:12:41 ◼   ► guy locked up for two weeks. I guess he didn't end up going to jail or anything because he

00:12:48 ◼   ► didn't really have, it wasn't like possession, you know, it was just something that the dog

00:12:53 ◼   ► smelled that it was like remnants. And I thought, you know, there's all sorts of stories of

00:12:57 ◼   ► people who were in prison for drugs, you know, people with lifetime sentences of their true

00:13:02 ◼   ► tragedies. I mean, a stunt man in 1977 being locked up for two weeks in an El Paso jail

00:13:08 ◼   ► is far, far, far from the most tragic case of misjustice in the criminalization of drugs.

00:13:13 ◼   ► But it just shows how absurd it is.

00:13:15 ◼   ► Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, it's also, I mean, in a weird way,

00:13:20 ◼   ► it's also shows that we expect sometimes to enjoy the output of a person's work like

00:13:25 ◼   ► a stuntman or NFL football player, but then or a cyclist riding up 72 mountains in two

00:13:33 ◼   ► days in the Tour de France, and then we're totally shocked beyond belief that there was

00:13:36 ◼   ► any artificial substances used in that quest. If you're a stuntman in the '70s doing your

00:13:45 ◼   ► own stunts, like riding a motorcycle off of a wall and landing on your head, it's like,

00:13:49 ◼   ► "My God, take a couple hits. We understand. It's for my pleasure."

00:13:52 ◼   ► No, and that's exactly like the whole Friedkin style was doing all the stunts for practical

00:13:58 ◼   ► and apparently it was a super dangerous shoot, stunts and stuff like that. There's apparently

00:14:06 ◼   ► part of the thing in the movie, I don't want to, and I don't know that much about it, but

00:14:10 ◼   ► it's that there's a, it's about these trucks that they're using for the caper and one of

00:14:14 ◼   ► the trucks is, or the truck, I don't know, is named Sorcerer. It's like, you know, like

00:14:19 ◼   ► the name of a ship, like the name of the truck is Sorcerer. But apparently, it's, the movie,

00:14:26 ◼   ► one of the reasons it's not that well known in addition to the legal problems is that

00:14:29 ◼   ► it did pretty poorly at the box office. And one of the reasons is that apparently a lot

00:14:33 ◼   ► people think that the title threw everybody off because his previous movie was The Exorcist.

00:14:38 ◼   ► The new one was named Sorcerer and people just went in thinking it was about like the

00:14:41 ◼   ► supernatural or something, you know, like about some kind of wizard or something like

00:14:46 ◼   ► that. And, you know, instead it's like a dirty, gritty crime caper. But the title had set

00:14:53 ◼   ► expectations so far afield that it damaged the box office. I'd never heard of it. And

00:14:59 ◼   ► I'm a big Freakin fan. I don't know how that happened.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Well, we'll see if we can get it out there.

00:15:06 ◼   ► So let's talk indie publishing.

00:15:10 ◼   ► Dave, you've been blogging.

00:15:13 ◼   ► When did you first start blogging?

00:15:16 ◼   ► Let's see, I first started blogging in the '90s.

00:15:18 ◼   ► I think the New York Times had an article on me that was all about how people used web

00:15:23 ◼   ► blogs to share links in like sort of the late '90s, mid to late '90s.

00:15:28 ◼   ► So I've been doing it for a while.

00:15:31 ◼   ► it's sort of always been the throughput of my whole life, although I've had different

00:15:35 ◼   ► careers and different focal points. Aside from that, I've always sort of used writing

00:15:40 ◼   ► as the main thing I wanted to keep going.

00:15:43 ◼   ► So…

00:15:44 ◼   ► Pete: What was the name of your first blog?

00:15:45 ◼   ► Jon: My first blog was called Daveanetics.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Pete; Right. That's the one I remember.

00:15:49 ◼   ► Jon; Sort of started out as a personal blog, sort of like Dianetics with me as the god.

00:15:56 ◼   ► And then it had evolved into a technology newsletter

00:15:59 ◼   ► that I actually used to send out a handful

00:16:02 ◼   ► of technology-related links and headlines and blurbs,

00:16:06 ◼   ► much like I do at Next Draft for general news now,

00:16:09 ◼   ► to a bunch of CEOs that I worked with,

00:16:11 ◼   ► because during my time on the internet,

00:16:14 ◼   ► I've also, my half of my life is about the writing

00:16:17 ◼   ► and creative stuff, and the other half is about

00:16:19 ◼   ► investing in and working with startups.

00:16:21 ◼   ► So it started out as a business thing

00:16:22 ◼   ► where I'd find these articles and send them out,

00:16:24 ◼   ► and they would go to sort of a group

00:16:27 ◼   ► of internet professionals that I worked with,

00:16:29 ◼   ► and it sort of spread from there.

00:16:31 ◼   ► And at one point, I think there were about 25,000

00:16:33 ◼   ► or so subscribers, which back then,

00:16:35 ◼   ► during the early parts of the first boom,

00:16:37 ◼   ► was pretty widespread, 'cause there weren't

00:16:39 ◼   ► that many of us out here yet.

00:16:41 ◼   ► And as time passed on, and the boom went to bust,

00:16:45 ◼   ► it was sort of, I basically became

00:16:46 ◼   ► like a daily obituary writer.

00:16:48 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:16:49 ◼   ► - And I just wasn't that into it anymore.

00:16:51 ◼   ► And also, I felt like I was writing about technology,

00:16:53 ◼   ► because that was the industry I was in,

00:16:55 ◼   ► but my passion is much more with more general news.

00:16:59 ◼   ► I'm into technology, and I'm a sick addict like you are,

00:17:03 ◼   ► and like, you know, a lot of us are.

00:17:05 ◼   ► I got my 70 tabs, and I'm always on,

00:17:07 ◼   ► and I'm controlled by these devices,

00:17:11 ◼   ► but my actual area of interest

00:17:13 ◼   ► goes beyond technology quite a bit,

00:17:17 ◼   ► so I sort of like more general news.

00:17:18 ◼   ► I've always sort of been obsessed

00:17:19 ◼   ► with whatever the big story is at the moment.

00:17:23 ◼   ► I want to counterpunch off that move who who got started first you were cod key

00:17:28 ◼   ► I'm not or do you not know I think it's a blogger definitely

00:17:33 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure Jason did because I was doing a newsletter back then hmm

00:17:37 ◼   ► But I definitely was one of the early blogger users for sure

00:17:41 ◼   ► Do you remember which other blogs most inspired you like kind of gave you that you know what I could do that

00:17:53 ◼   ► You know, definitely Kotke.

00:17:55 ◼   ► I mean, I've always felt that that was a really similar one.

00:17:58 ◼   ► You know, when Jason does a redesign, I check it out.

00:18:02 ◼   ► When I'm designing something, I always look, "What has Jason done?"

00:18:05 ◼   ► He usually picks good fonts and a good length of a post.

00:18:10 ◼   ► He has similar interests that I have.

00:18:13 ◼   ► You know, I've also definitely been inspired by Darren Fireball over the years.

00:18:17 ◼   ► You know, we cover slightly different things, but you have certain techniques that you have

00:18:22 ◼   ► I have a very different sort of online personality

00:18:24 ◼   ► that I do and a lot of it's really effective,

00:18:26 ◼   ► so I try to learn from that as well.

00:18:30 ◼   ► In the early days, it was almost anybody who could share.

00:18:32 ◼   ► I mean, it's interesting that I,

00:18:34 ◼   ► before the internet came, before the web,

00:18:36 ◼   ► sort of got going.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Every semester or so in college,

00:18:41 ◼   ► I used to write up like a 30-page document

00:18:43 ◼   ► about what I was up to or some jokes

00:18:45 ◼   ► or essentially a blog but in sections,

00:18:48 ◼   ► and I'd print it out and bind it

00:18:50 ◼   ► and sent to like 30 or 40 of my friends,

00:18:52 ◼   ► and that was also called Davidnetics.

00:18:54 ◼   ► So I was sort of irritating my closest friends

00:18:58 ◼   ► for years before the web came,

00:19:00 ◼   ► sort of blogging at them against their will.

00:19:03 ◼   ► And when I first saw blogging,

00:19:05 ◼   ► I just immediately realized,

00:19:07 ◼   ► A, this is gonna be really fun for me,

00:19:09 ◼   ► but B, this is just gonna,

00:19:10 ◼   ► this medium is gonna absolutely unleash

00:19:13 ◼   ► an unbelievable creative revolution.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And that's what I was most excited about

00:19:18 ◼   ► during the first boom,

00:19:19 ◼   ► even though most people were talking about sentences that had the word billion in it

00:19:22 ◼   ► a couple times.

00:19:24 ◼   ► But I still think that's the most exciting part about this, whether it's Twitter, whether

00:19:28 ◼   ► it's a WordPress blog, whether it's these weird Tumblr things that people have these

00:19:32 ◼   ► bizarre passions that they want to share.

00:19:37 ◼   ► I think the sharing of health information is something that is so – all of us have

00:19:41 ◼   ► like 20 things that we feel like we're the only people who has that.

00:19:47 ◼   ► you're suffering from something, you go on the web and you realize there's like a million

00:19:50 ◼   ► people out there who have felt like you were one time or another, and for some reason,

00:19:54 ◼   ► it felt compelled to share that.

00:19:56 ◼   ► Just the simple fact that you can put stuff out there and everybody can read it or see

00:20:02 ◼   ► it or watch it or listen to it, depending on what, you know, if it's something you wrote

00:20:06 ◼   ► or music or video or something like that. It's still the most amazing thing.

00:20:10 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, it's totally remarkable. And, you know, some projects you're doing, you

00:20:16 ◼   ► you have not as many readers as you want,

00:20:18 ◼   ► or like right now you're on a big roll

00:20:20 ◼   ► and you have a ton of readers,

00:20:22 ◼   ► but I think sometimes people get down on themselves

00:20:25 ◼   ► and say, "Well, I only had 100 people read this,"

00:20:27 ◼   ► or "50 people read this,"

00:20:28 ◼   ► or even sort of more middle-level blogger

00:20:31 ◼   ► that might have, "I got 10,000 reads

00:20:34 ◼   ► "and it seems small in this day and age,"

00:20:37 ◼   ► whereas it seems so exciting during the first boom.

00:20:39 ◼   ► "Oh my God, I built something," or "I wrote something

00:20:41 ◼   ► "and thousands of people are reading it."

00:20:43 ◼   ► That's crazy.

00:20:44 ◼   ► Now we've sort of become dead into that because the numbers on the internet are so big, a

00:20:49 ◼   ► billion users of this and a hundred million users of that.

00:20:53 ◼   ► But sometimes when I go to, like out in San Francisco, we have a theater called Herb's

00:20:56 ◼   ► Theater where a lot of the famous authors come to get interviewed.

00:20:59 ◼   ► I'd say it holds maybe 1,500 people or so.

00:21:04 ◼   ► Every now and then I'll just sit in one of those theaters and I'll think, "If I think

00:21:10 ◼   ► it's something to write right now, even if it doesn't do that well, there's probably

00:21:14 ◼   ► a chance about this many people are going to read it in a couple hours after I choose

00:21:18 ◼   ► to post it.

00:21:19 ◼   ► That's just incredibly powerful.

00:21:22 ◼   ► I don't mean that in an ego sense like, "Wow, look at how great I am.

00:21:26 ◼   ► I can get 1,500 or 15,000 readers."

00:21:29 ◼   ► I just mean the idea that the barrier between sharing your ideas has gone down so far.

00:21:38 ◼   ► With a little serendipity and a little merit, you can actually have people that you have

00:21:42 ◼   ► no contact with, sort of experience what you think on a topic and maybe best case scenario

00:21:48 ◼   ► start riffing about their opinion on it in response to you.

00:21:52 ◼   ► And I thought that was the coolest part about the web the first day I fired up a browser

00:21:57 ◼   ► and I still think that's the coolest part about the web now.

00:21:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it's absolutely, I mean, and it went from attention being an artificially limited

00:22:10 ◼   ► resource, or maybe not attention isn't quite the right word, but the number of platforms

00:22:15 ◼   ► were artificially limited to being almost a zero-sum type situation.

00:22:20 ◼   ► Here's what I mean by that.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Let's say that I want to do what I do, like write as quickly as possible, let's say in

00:22:29 ◼   ► traditional terms daily or weekly, about what's going on in technology.

00:22:35 ◼   ► And I want to have, let's just say, 100,000 people read what I write.

00:22:41 ◼   ► There were only a handful of gigs like that, that people, pre-internet, that people could

00:22:47 ◼   ► have, right?

00:22:48 ◼   ► You could write for a major newspaper.

00:22:50 ◼   ► But even in that era, really, a lot of the major newspapers weren't national, right?

00:22:54 ◼   ► The New York Times really only became a national newspaper, I think in the 90s.

00:22:58 ◼   ► It was sort of coincident with the rise of the internet.

00:23:03 ◼   ► I mean, it was certainly famous, and it certainly had a very high circulation, but it really

00:23:07 ◼   ► was a New York newspaper.

00:23:11 ◼   ► I mean, USA Today was only invented in, what, 1984 or something like that?

00:23:15 ◼   ► I was associated with Reagan.

00:23:18 ◼   ► And didn't really run, never really ran the type of stuff that I write, you know, that's

00:23:23 ◼   ► more…

00:23:24 ◼   ► There just was no way.

00:23:25 ◼   ► I mean, what?

00:23:26 ◼   ► Maybe I could, you know…

00:23:27 ◼   ► How many people can write about technology for Time or Newsweek or something like that,

00:23:31 ◼   ► right?

00:23:32 ◼   ► handful of gigs where you could have a lot of readers and write about this stuff and

00:23:36 ◼   ► that's there was no way to invent your own. I often I also think about the fact that when

00:23:42 ◼   ► I was in college, I was at the student newspaper at Drexel. And I think we used to print I

00:23:47 ◼   ► had memories are hazy. But I think maybe like 3000 issues a week. It was a weekly newspaper.

00:23:53 ◼   ► I think we printed somewhere in the low single 1000s, you know, I don't know, two, three,

00:23:57 ◼   ► four thousand issues. And it was a huge, and you know, you realize when you print that

00:24:04 ◼   ► many that a lot of those, it's not that there's three, four thousand students at

00:24:08 ◼   ► the school, it was, you know, people would pick one up Monday and read it in class and

00:24:12 ◼   ► then they'd pick up another copy on Tuesday in a different class, you know, and throw

00:24:15 ◼   ► them out. So I don't know how many students really read the thing, let's just say, I

00:24:18 ◼   ► don't know, a thousand. But it was a huge deal, a monumental effort every week just

00:24:23 ◼   ► distribute. I mean, 4000 copies of like a 20, 30 page newspaper is an enormous amount of newspapers.

00:24:32 ◼   ► Like, it was actually like a huge thing. And that was just for a small university

00:24:37 ◼   ► student newspaper to reach, you know, I don't know, 1000 students a week, you just had this

00:24:41 ◼   ► entire expensive and heavy paper just coming in week after week after week.

00:24:50 ◼   ► I also think there's something really uniquely cool about the relationship between a blogger

00:24:57 ◼   ► or some other kind of Internet writer and his or her audience, because I realized this

00:25:02 ◼   ► probably in the early, early days when I first launched Dave and Eddix.

00:25:07 ◼   ► It appeared in a couple of publications, I think it was the New York Post and the San

00:25:11 ◼   ► Jose Mercury News back when they were sort of the paper record for the Valley out here.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Jason Kotke linked to it.

00:25:21 ◼   ► I'll never forget on that day when I looked at my—they weren't real-time stats back

00:25:25 ◼   ► then so I still had some semblance of control over my minute-to-minute of my life.

00:25:29 ◼   ► But at the end of the day or the next morning when I looked at the stats, to see how many

00:25:32 ◼   ► more people had come from Kotke.org than those two other big publications with multi-million

00:25:40 ◼   ► dollar budgets behind them was pretty inspiring.

00:25:45 ◼   ► We know intuitively why, right?

00:25:46 ◼   ► is it's people are not reading just a brand

00:25:50 ◼   ► when they're reading somebody's blog,

00:25:51 ◼   ► they're reading that person.

00:25:53 ◼   ► And when that person shares a link,

00:25:55 ◼   ► they're saying, hey, trust me,

00:25:56 ◼   ► this is gonna be worth your time.

00:25:58 ◼   ► If I have too many times when it's not worth your time,

00:26:01 ◼   ► you're gonna stop reading me.

00:26:02 ◼   ► So I have a lot at stake here to make sure

00:26:04 ◼   ► I'm giving you something I think you'll like.

00:26:06 ◼   ► So the likelihood of somebody clicking on a blog link

00:26:09 ◼   ► versus clicking on a newspaper link is so much higher.

00:26:13 ◼   ► And also just signing up once they get there.

00:26:16 ◼   ► like, "Hey, Jason said this is good. Dave or John say this is good. Let's do it. Let's

00:26:20 ◼   ► give it a try," because we're actually, in a weird way, friends with them. It's

00:26:24 ◼   ► not just some brand telling me this is cool. This is not a restaurant review from a paper

00:26:29 ◼   ► I've heard of. This is my friend saying, "Dude, you're going to love the pasta at

00:26:33 ◼   ► this place. Go check it out."

00:26:34 ◼   ► Yeah, and part of it is implicit, and it comes out of almost the subconscious of the publication,

00:26:45 ◼   ► whether it's a one-man operation like mine and Kottke's and David and Edick's, or an

00:26:50 ◼   ► institution like a newspaper, which is, what do you really want the person who's reading

00:26:56 ◼   ► this thing to do?

00:26:58 ◼   ► And the newspapers, even today, what they really want you to do is stay on their site.

00:27:04 ◼   ► Stay here.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Read another one.

00:27:06 ◼   ► Load another page.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Click this, you know.

00:27:11 ◼   ► But in the 90s, it was endemic.

00:27:14 ◼   ► I mean, it was almost, it almost killed, maybe it was, I think it might have been the leading

00:27:17 ◼   ► cause of death for a lot of those portals, right?

00:27:23 ◼   ► The whole idea of portals was get them to come in and stay here, right?

00:27:29 ◼   ► And it almost killed Yahoo, right?

00:27:31 ◼   ► I mean, Yahoo certainly could have been Google because Yahoo started with, you know, cool

00:27:35 ◼   ► side of the day and go to Yahoo to find something else cool on the internet, right?

00:27:42 ◼   ► like what Yahoo was in 1994. Go to Yahoo. I don't know. I want something to interest

00:27:48 ◼   ► me. I know. I'll go to Yahoo and they'll send me somewhere good. When they shifted

00:27:54 ◼   ► to this strategy of people come to Yahoo, let's keep them on Yahoo is when they almost

00:28:00 ◼   ► choke to death. Whereas, you know, like Kottke, when you go to Kottke, he really wants you

00:28:06 ◼   ► to click the links, right? I mean, when you come to my site, I want you to go and read

00:28:11 ◼   ► the thing I'm linking to. And I trust that you will, you know, and it's, it's super satisfying

00:28:17 ◼   ► to me. It is, you know, almost, you know, like, when I link to somebody, and it breaks their

00:28:23 ◼   ► website, it, it does me, I'm not glad that people's websites occasionally break. But I'm glad that so

00:28:29 ◼   ► many that it's just like, it's, it's like, almost, I can feel it, that people really do follow the

00:28:36 ◼   ► links. Like, I want you to go away. Trenton Larkin

00:28:39 ◼   ► Right. I definitely feel the same about Next Draft. I send that out with what I think are

00:28:44 ◼   ► the most fascinating news stories of the day. One of the key measurements, of course I measure

00:28:50 ◼   ► opens and forwards and shares and stuff like that, but probably my key measurement of whether that

00:28:55 ◼   ► day was a success was how many links got hit a lot and were there any that really stood out and

00:29:03 ◼   ► got several thousand clicks that both made a difference for my readership, obviously,

00:29:08 ◼   ► and also sort of made a noticeable difference on the stats page for that person I'm linking to.

00:29:13 ◼   ► You know, I said, "Wow, this is pretty cool," especially if it's sort of an unusual article.

00:29:17 ◼   ► You know, occasionally Jason Kotke and I syndicate each other, and he'll syndicate a blurb out of

00:29:24 ◼   ► Nextdraft once a week, and I'll syndicate one of his blurbs once a week in Nextdraft.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And when we do that, occasionally we're linking to stuff that's not necessarily that popular yet,

00:29:38 ◼   ► And it's fun occasionally I've seen between the two of us,

00:29:41 ◼   ► I can pretty quickly go to the most popular item

00:29:43 ◼   ► on that site.

00:29:45 ◼   ► So that's another thing, you feel like you have

00:29:47 ◼   ► some influence of, I think you're gonna think this is cool,

00:29:51 ◼   ► and you did think this was cool.

00:29:54 ◼   ► But the whole blogger mentality is sort of built on,

00:29:58 ◼   ► it's not built on how many page views do I get

00:30:00 ◼   ► or how many ads do I sell, it's really built on,

00:30:06 ◼   ► I'm trying to be interesting to you.

00:30:08 ◼   ► I'm trying to get you to like me.

00:30:10 ◼   ► I'll give you whatever it takes

00:30:13 ◼   ► for you to sort of be my friend and to love me.

00:30:15 ◼   ► It sounds crazy, but I think that's more of the goal.

00:30:17 ◼   ► So the web is about saying,

00:30:20 ◼   ► here's these cool stuff, check it out.

00:30:21 ◼   ► So it makes sense every blogger

00:30:23 ◼   ► would immediately go to that model

00:30:24 ◼   ► because they want to be,

00:30:26 ◼   ► they want to have these virtual friends.

00:30:28 ◼   ► They want to have these people that count on them

00:30:30 ◼   ► that when there's something big,

00:30:32 ◼   ► they'll point them in the right direction.

00:30:33 ◼   ► They'll be one of the first stops they come to.

00:30:35 ◼   ► something happens if there's a big story that breaks in the Mac world.

00:30:40 ◼   ► You know, I'll probably go to Daring Fireball first, read your intro, and then click over

00:30:44 ◼   ► to that big story because…

00:30:46 ◼   ► Well, but a lot of times, too, my personal pacing and style is such that I'm usually

00:30:52 ◼   ► not first, and sometimes I'm very far behind, or at least I have anything substantial to

00:30:57 ◼   ► say about something.

00:31:00 ◼   ► My favorite example of that is whenever there's an Apple event.

00:31:04 ◼   ► My traffic goes through the roof, especially live while it's happening.

00:31:08 ◼   ► But I don't do the live blog thing.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And because most of the time I'm there in the audience and I'm listening and I'm

00:31:16 ◼   ► taking notes, I'm not posting anything.

00:31:20 ◼   ► But the site goes nuts.

00:31:22 ◼   ► And it's just people reloading the homepage of Daring Fireball with last night's last

00:31:29 ◼   ► item at the top over and over and over again, waiting for me to say something.

00:31:32 ◼   ► Right and it is good in a sense. It's it's an honor and no and if I had a page view based

00:31:39 ◼   ► Revenue model I would have to have something. I mean, I guess I'd have to live vlog or something to take advantage of that

00:31:45 ◼   ► But it's kind of cool because it's a very nice knowing that the site is going nuts is a very nice sort of

00:31:54 ◼   ► Implicit deadline like hey get your get your thoughts together, but get them up there people are waiting, you know, like

00:32:01 ◼   ► a "I don't want to disappoint these people" sort of feeling in my gut.

00:32:06 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I think that feeling of feeling like you're part of this conversation or

00:32:14 ◼   ► community and people are sort of waiting to hear you chime in on something is a pretty

00:32:18 ◼   ► powerful feeling.

00:32:23 ◼   ► My goal with Next Draft basically is that when a big news story breaks—the presidential

00:32:29 ◼   ► was yesterday, the Academy Awards were last night,

00:32:32 ◼   ► the Super Bowl is Sunday, that one of the stops

00:32:36 ◼   ► people assume on their day, and maybe even during the event,

00:32:39 ◼   ► they're thinking, huh, I wonder if Abel

00:32:40 ◼   ► will have something weird or funny to say

00:32:42 ◼   ► about that moment tomorrow.

00:32:44 ◼   ► I'm looking forward to seeing what he says about it.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And that feeling is definitely what drives me.

00:32:50 ◼   ► And I almost feel the responsibility to do it,

00:32:53 ◼   ► but that makes me feel sort of more connected with the news

00:32:55 ◼   ► and more connected with the readers.

00:32:58 ◼   ► And I've always sort of been news obsessed,

00:33:01 ◼   ► so having a take on big news events is in my DNA.

00:33:05 ◼   ► So sharing those is sort of like a pleasure for me.

00:33:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're two of a kind in that regard.

00:33:10 ◼   ► Like I remember one of the happiest little things

00:33:15 ◼   ► of like my high school years was that, you know,

00:33:19 ◼   ► we got our homeroom teachers assigned randomly.

00:33:22 ◼   ► And I got Mr. Choyka, he was a great teacher too.

00:33:26 ◼   ► He was a social studies teacher

00:33:27 ◼   ► taught current events. And this is about 50 miles, it's a suburb about 50 miles outside

00:33:32 ◼   ► Philly. But he had a daily subscription to his office of the Philly Inquirer, which was

00:33:37 ◼   ► … So, A, there was a daily newspaper right there when I got to homeroom every day. And

00:33:42 ◼   ► he was, you know, I forget what he did, but he was, you know, shared it with, you know,

00:33:47 ◼   ► anybody in homeroom who wanted to do it. And none of the other kids wanted to read a newspaper.

00:33:51 ◼   ► So it wasn't like I had to fight over the sections. It was like I had my own subscription

00:33:55 ◼   ► to the Philly Inquirer every day.

00:33:58 ◼   ► And it was just great, to me that was just great, because it was so clearly a better

00:34:01 ◼   ► newspaper than the Redding Eagle, the local newspaper.

00:34:07 ◼   ► And the Inquirer, especially in the 80s, had a host of great columnists, just in the great

00:34:15 ◼   ► sense of the, the traditional sense of being a newspaper columnist.

00:34:19 ◼   ► Like guys who would write about anything, you know, from and women, current events,

00:34:25 ◼   ► you know, politics, to, you know, local stuff.

00:34:30 ◼   ► I remember one time it was a great column in Philadelphia, it was crazy, some, you know,

00:34:34 ◼   ► average city has stuff like this.

00:34:36 ◼   ► But we have this big, big street, it goes to the big north-south boulevard is Broad

00:34:41 ◼   ► Street.

00:34:42 ◼   ► And Broad Street, on both sides, north and south, it's separated by City Hall.

00:34:47 ◼   ► Broad Street is north of City Hall, South Broad Street is south of City Hall. There's

00:34:53 ◼   ► a median strip. So two lanes of traffic or two or three lanes of traffic each way and

00:34:57 ◼   ► then one lane in the middle that's empty. In South Philly, you're allowed to park there.

00:35:06 ◼   ► It's between yellow lines. You clearly, by the painting of the lines, should not be able

00:35:10 ◼   ► to park there. But if you do, you will not get a ticket. And so all – it's like three

00:35:14 ◼   ► miles from City Hall down to, you go down Broad Street and then you end up at the sports

00:35:18 ◼   ► complex where the Phillies and Eagles play. And Broad Street, it's parking on the curbs

00:35:23 ◼   ► and parking in the middle of the street. If you park in the middle of Broad Street in

00:35:28 ◼   ► North Philly, just one block, one block up above City Hall, you'll get a ticket within

00:35:32 ◼   ► five minutes and they'll probably call a tow truck. And there was one columnist, he

00:35:38 ◼   ► wouldn't write about it every week, but maybe once a year or so, he would, you know,

00:35:41 ◼   ► he would just, like an annual tradition was he would take one of the inquirer's company

00:35:45 ◼   ► cars, park it on South Broad for 24 hours, see if he got a ticket, never did, and then

00:35:50 ◼   ► park it on North Broad. And the inquirer building happened to be on North Broad, and then time

00:35:56 ◼   ► how long it took to get a ticket. And to me, that was, I just love stuff like that, the

00:36:01 ◼   ► way that he would do it like once a year. To me, that was, that's what I wanted to do

00:36:05 ◼   ► when I grew up. In a weird way, kind of is.

00:36:08 ◼   ► Yeah, my news childhood was probably more on the international side than on the local

00:36:14 ◼   ► side.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Our religion on weekends was the Sunday talk shows.

00:36:20 ◼   ► Me and my parents watched all the news.

00:36:23 ◼   ► If I ever moved to a new city, the first thing I'd do is get cable and turn on Bernard Shaw

00:36:27 ◼   ► and CNN and feel like I was at home.

00:36:30 ◼   ► When I was in college, a typical phone conversation with me and my dad, the phone would ring and

00:36:35 ◼   ► I'd say, "Hello," and he'd say, "That's cooking."

00:36:37 ◼   ► much," and he'd say, "Well, what do you think of this Gorbachev guy?" And basically, now a few

00:36:43 ◼   ► decades later, he calls and says, "What's cooking?" And I say, "Not much. How are the kids? Good. Well,

00:36:48 ◼   ► what do you think of this Putin guy?" That's basically our—really, a huge part of our

00:36:53 ◼   ► communication was about news, so I've always sort of been—it's just part of our family dialogue,

00:36:58 ◼   ► so I've always sort of been pretty news obsessed and following it, certainly more on the national

00:37:04 ◼   ► scale or international than—

00:37:05 ◼   ► Where did you grow up?

00:37:06 ◼   ► I grew up outside of San Francisco and San Rafael.

00:37:11 ◼   ► So what was the big newspaper?

00:37:12 ◼   ► I mean, our town would have a newspaper called the Marin IJ, but most people there still,

00:37:18 ◼   ► their main paper was the San Francisco Chronicle.

00:37:20 ◼   ► Right. And a big fat Sunday edition.

00:37:23 ◼   ► Yeah, we had a big fat Sunday edition. We had the pink section for entertainment,

00:37:29 ◼   ► and the sports section was actually green and called the sporting green. So I thought that was

00:37:34 ◼   ► When people ask me why I have such an excellent eye for user interface, I have to give credit

00:37:39 ◼   ► to the Chronicle making their sporting green, green.

00:37:43 ◼   ► This seems like the sort of thing that you'd have a strong opinion on.

00:37:45 ◼   ► I know I did.

00:37:47 ◼   ► Which of the network news broadcasts was your go-to network news broadcast?

00:37:54 ◼   ► This year, it's—you mean like during the election?

00:37:56 ◼   ► No, like in the old days.

00:37:57 ◼   ► Oh, in the old days.

00:37:59 ◼   ► As soon as we had CNN, definitely, as soon as Ted Turner hooked us up with that 24-hour

00:38:05 ◼   ► intravenous feed, that was it, man.

00:38:07 ◼   ► My family was either CNN or Wheel of Fortune.

00:38:11 ◼   ► Everything I learned about life, I either learned from CNN or Wheel of Fortune.

00:38:14 ◼   ► I learned about society from CNN.

00:38:16 ◼   ► I learned everything I know of business from Wheel of Fortune.

00:38:20 ◼   ► When somebody would buy a vowel after they already knew the answer to a little Wheel

00:38:24 ◼   ► fortunate in my family that was like always a teachable moments like look at

00:38:29 ◼   ► this guy buddy I'm buying a bottle for or the what's the other big mistake the

00:38:34 ◼   ► other big mistake is when you know that he knows the he knows the answer and you

00:38:39 ◼   ► there's four T's you know there's gonna be four T's and then he wastes it on

00:38:43 ◼   ► like $200 like he gets like 200 and then goes for the T and only gets 800 bucks

00:38:47 ◼   ► it's like no no you you know do the end and spin again to get a bigger number

00:38:52 ◼   ► for the tea, right?

00:38:53 ◼   ► - Right, yeah.

00:38:55 ◼   ► No, Wheel of Fortune was in many ways

00:38:57 ◼   ► a pivotal part of our family.

00:38:59 ◼   ► We used to have a rule where we couldn't watch TV

00:39:01 ◼   ► during dinner, so our average dinner length

00:39:04 ◼   ► was about seven minutes.

00:39:05 ◼   ► And once Wheel of Fortune came, man,

00:39:08 ◼   ► that combination of the letters, the prizes,

00:39:12 ◼   ► the blonde chick turning the letters,

00:39:15 ◼   ► like there was something for everybody in my family

00:39:17 ◼   ► and that rule just went right out the window

00:39:18 ◼   ► and spent the next four or five years watching,

00:39:21 ◼   ► eating dinner in front of Wheel of Fortune.

00:39:23 ◼   ► - Glenn Fleischmann and I were talking about game shows

00:39:25 ◼   ► 'cause he was on, when he was on the talk show

00:39:27 ◼   ► a few weeks ago 'cause he was on Jeopardy.

00:39:28 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:29 ◼   ► - And I was thinking about it,

00:39:31 ◼   ► we were talking about Wheel of Fortune

00:39:32 ◼   ► and I'm thinking about it more and more

00:39:33 ◼   ► and I really do think, I never really gave it

00:39:35 ◼   ► that much thought but I do think there really is something

00:39:38 ◼   ► to the sustained success, perennial popularity of that show

00:39:43 ◼   ► that has something to do with the fact that you at home

00:39:47 ◼   ► can figure out the answer so far in advance

00:39:50 ◼   ► the

00:39:52 ◼   ► Puzzle actually being solved and it can create a lot of drama

00:39:56 ◼   ► Especially if you're uncertain whether the person spinning also knows the answer like you you figured it out

00:40:01 ◼   ► But you're not quite sure if they did and and you can get like I'm thinking like we are cuz I remember watching with my

00:40:08 ◼   ► Fan and they'd get like five grand they'd get the big one and you'd be like are are there's four hours

00:40:13 ◼   ► And then if you know it was this incredible tension of please say are so you get all this money

00:40:18 ◼   ► funny. Don't screw this up.

00:40:21 ◼   ► There's also the aspect of the game where the game was slow enough that even if you

00:40:26 ◼   ► had no idea what the puzzle is, if somebody else in your house yelled it out, you could

00:40:30 ◼   ► almost mimic them closely enough to get your last letter out just a fraction of a second

00:40:34 ◼   ► after they did.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Right.

00:40:36 ◼   ► It looked like, "Oh, you just beat me."

00:40:38 ◼   ► And it does play into Hitchcock's definition of suspense a little bit or recipe for suspense,

00:40:44 ◼   ► which was that, you know, like his analogy or story was, imagine a scenario where there's

00:40:49 ◼   ► a terrorist who's going to put a bomb in a movie, a packed movie theater.

00:40:53 ◼   ► Everybody's first instinct in a movie or trying to create suspense is to have it be a surprise

00:40:59 ◼   ► and that you so show these people in the audience and then boom, the bomb explodes and the audience,

00:41:04 ◼   ► you watching the movie, are just as surprised by this explosion as the people on screen.

00:41:10 ◼   ► And he said, that's all wrong.

00:41:12 ◼   ► What you do is you show the people in the theater, and then you move the camera down

00:41:16 ◼   ► underneath a little girl, and you show that the bomb is under her chair.

00:41:21 ◼   ► Then you go back to the audience.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Now you, the people watching the movie, are filled with suspense, because you know there's

00:41:27 ◼   ► a bomb, and the characters on screen do not.

00:41:31 ◼   ► That's suspense, right?

00:41:33 ◼   ► And Wheel of Fortune has that, where you can know the answer, and you don't know if the

00:41:38 ◼   ► contestants do.

00:41:39 ◼   ► But basically the threat of somebody buying an unnecessary vowel was that bomb under my seat at the dinner table

00:41:46 ◼   ► for about five years of my life I

00:41:48 ◼   ► Don't know I feel like game shows are a lost art

00:41:53 ◼   ► Yeah, there's not there they've gone overboard with all the reality stuff

00:41:59 ◼   ► Yeah, they've been replaced with this mishmash of reality and game shows, you know, like I guess survivors the canonical example

00:42:08 ◼   ► which is sort of a game show sort of a reality show, but it's it's

00:42:13 ◼   ► You know just the the the hokiness of a traditional game show with

00:42:19 ◼   ► Buzzers and wheels that you spin and the fact that it's so clearly shot in a studio in Los Angeles

00:42:24 ◼   ► Something's lost. I do think in a strange way game shows were a precursor to social networks though. How so

00:42:33 ◼   ► Well, I've always felt there's certain television shows or classes of television shows that there's some people whether you read them on the web

00:42:40 ◼   ► Or you're talking they're like, I can't believe you watch that dude. There's no way you sit through Wheel of Fortune

00:42:46 ◼   ► Oh my god, Beverly Hills of you know, I mean the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. That's so brutal

00:42:52 ◼   ► How can you waste your time with that entertainment? And the truth is you can't waste your time with those forms of entertainment unless

00:42:59 ◼   ► And this is a big unless unless there's somebody else in the room with you

00:43:02 ◼   ► If you're with your wife and you're watching the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills the entire time

00:43:07 ◼   ► All you're doing is talking about how stupid all the people are

00:43:10 ◼   ► Is the pleasure said once you're done talking about all of the other couples, you know

00:43:16 ◼   ► And all the other families and you've done all the gossip for the day. It's like alright

00:43:19 ◼   ► Let's figure out some other people we can gossip about for a few hours. So you put on these shows even game shows even jeopardy

00:43:25 ◼   ► It's sort of fun when you're by yourself, but it's much more fun when you're competing

00:43:29 ◼   ► against somebody.

00:43:31 ◼   ► If you look at the early days of the web, some of it was sort of interesting, but there's

00:43:36 ◼   ► just some stuff that's more fun to laugh together at than to laugh alone at.

00:43:41 ◼   ► Last night when Google released the new Maps thing, there were about 40 jokes in my Twitter

00:43:46 ◼   ► stream.

00:43:47 ◼   ► I'm part of that, like you, part of this strange community that forget the 12-12-12

00:43:53 ◼   ► forget any other TV that's on, forget the fact that it's Wednesday night, it might be a good time just to relax with the family.

00:44:02 ◼   ► It's like, no, this is a huge tectonic news story right here. The Google Maps app has been approved.

00:44:08 ◼   ► But because there's this inside conversation about this event that happened where everybody sort of knows the backstory,

00:44:16 ◼   ► Everybody knows the characters.

00:44:19 ◼   ► You can get away with making jokes that are one line because people know what you're

00:44:22 ◼   ► referring to.

00:44:23 ◼   ► It sort of adds to the story, whereas sitting home alone in front of your screen reading

00:44:29 ◼   ► that the Google app got released, it's like, "Okay, great.

00:44:31 ◼   ► Click.

00:44:32 ◼   ► What's next?"

00:44:33 ◼   ► But because there's a group of people talking about it, it adds so much value.

00:44:38 ◼   ► I see what you mean.

00:44:39 ◼   ► What you're saying is that a trashy TV show like Real Housewives of insert any town where

00:44:44 ◼   ► have of the show, is not really best seen as a way to zone out in front of the TV in the classic couch

00:44:51 ◼   ► potato sense, but rather it's fuel for conversation. Right. I mean, I think that's this whole second

00:45:01 ◼   ► screen movement, right? It's saying, "Hey, you can't pay attention to something. So, you know,

00:45:06 ◼   ► look down at your other screen and share that experience with somebody, right? So now you can

00:45:10 ◼   ► can watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with me if we're on IM or Twitter or whatever,

00:45:15 ◼   ► right?

00:45:16 ◼   ► But I think in a really weird way, the television, and this is one of the reasons why I'm very

00:45:20 ◼   ► protective of television and I like the web.

00:45:23 ◼   ► Television is like my blood.

00:45:25 ◼   ► And I'm very wary of how the new TV revolution, that it doesn't ruin and make TV too interactive.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Because when we were kids, television was seen as this, "Oh, my family's not talking

00:45:39 ◼   ► to each other anymore, everybody sitting in silence in a room.

00:45:42 ◼   ► We used to sit around the dinner table and have a conversation.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Today, TV has the exact opposite role in our society.

00:45:48 ◼   ► Today, if you close your laptop and just watch a TV show,

00:45:52 ◼   ► it's actually one of the rare times the whole family,

00:45:54 ◼   ► or a few people from the family, are doing something together

00:45:57 ◼   ► at the same time and are focused on the exact same topic.

00:46:02 ◼   ► And in a weird way, if it's a great show,

00:46:05 ◼   ► you're getting nurtured another way, right?

00:46:07 ◼   ► If somebody talks during Mad Men, you're like, "Dude, stop."

00:46:11 ◼   ► But if it's something stupid like a game show or a reality show, it's actually, you're

00:46:16 ◼   ► actually interacting with the other person on the couch where if the TV were off, at

00:46:22 ◼   ► least in my house, both laptops would be open and there'd be no interaction from the people.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:27 ◼   ► So in a weird way, I feel like the TV is this one little character on our couch that I don't

00:46:33 ◼   ► want it to become so interactive that it becomes that you can have community while you're

00:46:39 ◼   ► alone. I want that community to still come from all the other people on the couch.

00:46:42 ◼   ► Dave Asprey That's interesting. I kind of agree with

00:46:44 ◼   ► that and I never really thought about it that way. Let me take a quick break here and do

00:46:51 ◼   ► a sponsor, thank our sponsor of the week. Is that all right?

00:46:56 ◼   ► Michael

00:46:56 ◼   ► I want to thank our friends at Global Delight.

00:47:00 ◼   ► They've sponsored the show all year long.

00:47:02 ◼   ► They've been great supporters of the talk show.

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00:47:10 ◼   ► on December 18th.

00:47:12 ◼   ► It's amazing.

00:47:13 ◼   ► This is very exciting stuff.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Here's what the sale includes.

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00:47:24 ◼   ► It's for the Mac.

00:47:25 ◼   ► Makes your sound sound better.

00:47:29 ◼   ► Regularly it's seven bucks.

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00:47:43 ◼   ► Almost like a studio app.

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00:47:45 ◼   ► A totally professional setup for taking screen captures and screen recording.

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00:47:52 ◼   ► Thirty bucks, right?

00:47:53 ◼   ► can get it for $4.99, $5. That's 83% off. I mean, this is a huge sale. It's a $30 app,

00:48:01 ◼   ► well worth $30. You can get it for $5. Camera+ Pro. Camera+ Pro sponsored the show just two

00:48:08 ◼   ► weeks ago. Great, great app. Beautiful, powerful, simple camera and photo editing app for the

00:48:13 ◼   ► iPhone. It's celebrating its third anniversary on the 18th of December. I guess that's why

00:48:18 ◼   ► they've coincided the sale with this. This is the app that really made Global Delight

00:48:22 ◼   ► a success. It's on sale right now for just one buck, 99 cents. That's 50% off the normal

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00:48:58 ◼   ► It's called Game Your Video.

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00:49:02 ◼   ► It wasn't free before.

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00:49:24 ◼   ► can't believe it but it's a free app. Game your video. So, if you got an iPhone, an iPod

00:49:29 ◼   ► Touch, an iPad or a Mac, you've got to have some of these apps. And if you don't have

00:49:33 ◼   ► an iPhone, an iPod Touch, an iPad or a Mac, I honestly don't know why you listen to this

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00:49:59 ◼   ► you go to their website. Here's what you do. You want to find out anything about these

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00:50:19 ◼   ► Go there now, you'll get great apps and a chance to win an iPad Mini.

00:50:23 ◼   ► My sincere thanks to Global Delight for their continuing support of the talk show.

00:50:29 ◼   ► So here's one of the things I want to talk to you about.

00:50:32 ◼   ► So you mentioned this a little bit earlier,

00:50:34 ◼   ► that Dave and Eddick's kind of wound down originally.

00:50:39 ◼   ► You know, it was, and this sort of thing

00:50:42 ◼   ► does fascinate me for total self,

00:50:45 ◼   ► you know, just self-absorbed reasons.

00:50:48 ◼   ► But, you know, the fact that there aren't a lot of blogs

00:50:52 ◼   ► that have longevity.

00:50:54 ◼   ► People get into it.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I mean, there's not many people like Kotke

00:50:57 ◼   ► who've been going for 14 consecutive years.

00:51:01 ◼   ► Why did you stop with Davinetics?

00:51:04 ◼   ► I mean, not that it ever was shuttered,

00:51:07 ◼   ► but it ceased to be a daily thing.

00:51:11 ◼   ► - No, it's a great question.

00:51:12 ◼   ► I mean, I think the shorter answer is that it was a mistake.

00:51:17 ◼   ► I think probably if I had to pick one mistake

00:51:22 ◼   ► that I could take back or redo on the web,

00:51:24 ◼   ► it's that I just have had too many brands over the years.

00:51:30 ◼   ► And that was sort of an example of that where I love launching new sites and I love doing

00:51:37 ◼   ► the branding and the logos and the taglines and thinking of something new and having a

00:51:42 ◼   ► fresh start.

00:51:43 ◼   ► I invest in and work with startups and the only part that I have any passion for is the

00:51:48 ◼   ► first six months.

00:51:49 ◼   ► I just love that sort of launching products and whether they're my own or helping with

00:51:53 ◼   ► somebody else.

00:51:56 ◼   ► And over the years, I thought, "Well, if it's Dave and Etix's associated with technology,

00:52:01 ◼   ► that's creating something called Next Draft that's associated with news."

00:52:05 ◼   ► But I think because of that, there would always be times where it would take people a little

00:52:10 ◼   ► bit of time to find me again after that.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And I probably would have had a stronger stretch or less ups and downs over the years if I'd

00:52:18 ◼   ► had a single brand the whole time.

00:52:20 ◼   ► If I just had DavePel.com instead of Dave Pelle, the musician, getting it first, or

00:52:27 ◼   ► I just stuck with Dave and Eddix the whole way, I probably think it would have been fine

00:52:31 ◼   ► to morph that product into whatever I was into at the time, as opposed to launching

00:52:35 ◼   ► a totally new product.

00:52:37 ◼   ► But I've had so many brands over the years.

00:52:39 ◼   ► But now, that's all over now.

00:52:41 ◼   ► My wife has been telling me this for years.

00:52:43 ◼   ► We're focused on Nextdraft.

00:52:46 ◼   ► I'm sticking with Nextdraft.

00:52:48 ◼   ► Nextdraft is the brand, and that's it.

00:52:49 ◼   ► You're not allowed to relaunch a new thing. I'm not allowed to rebrand in any way.

00:52:53 ◼   ► Right. Well, why did you go away from Dave and Ex? Was it just that you wanted to switch to

00:53:00 ◼   ► something new? It was the appeal of a novel new thing and a new logo and a new name and maybe,

00:53:06 ◼   ► you know, a slightly new format or something like that was irresistible?

00:53:10 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that… Because it is sort of the same thing. I mean,

00:53:16 ◼   ► you know, in theory. You know, I mean, it's the same beat, it's the same sort of columnist-style

00:53:21 ◼   ► injection of your personality into what you're doing and links, you know.

00:53:25 ◼   ► Trevor Burrus Right. Well, I see the beat is a little—the

00:53:27 ◼   ► beat, in terms of what you mean, is the writing style, for sure. In terms of the topic, it's

00:53:31 ◼   ► definitely—next draft is all news. So, that's the big difference. Why didn't I just say,

00:53:36 ◼   ► "Hey, I'm not just into technology, this is now—David and Alex is going to be on all news,

00:53:40 ◼   ► hope you stick with me, and if you do, tell your friends." If I had to do it over again,

00:53:44 ◼   ► that's what I would have done for sure. The reason I switched is because like I told you,

00:53:48 ◼   ► I've always been obsessed with news and these broader issues. And I have,

00:53:52 ◼   ► while I'm interested in technology and my job is in technology, I feel I have more interesting/

00:53:58 ◼   ► potentially funny things to say about other areas. So I've always wanted to branch out into this

00:54:05 ◼   ► sort of broader news category. And Next draft is sort of,

00:54:12 ◼   ► It really is in the sweet spot of, you know, I wanted to focus on something that I felt like I

00:54:18 ◼   ► could do, that my skills lent themselves to, and I could do uniquely well. I can look at 100 sites

00:54:25 ◼   ► in a couple hours and pick out 10 stories that I'm really quite sure people will be interested in.

00:54:30 ◼   ► I can counterpunch off those stories either by writing something informative or funny or both

00:54:36 ◼   ► pretty quickly and proofread it and I don't get nervous at all about pressing send and go.

00:54:42 ◼   ► And I really enjoy that process. So in a way, Nextdraft is really the perfect product for my

00:54:49 ◼   ► personality, both my interest and my skills. Whether I should have had one brand all along,

00:54:55 ◼   ► I don't think there's any doubt about that. That would have been a better move and

00:54:57 ◼   ► wiser people than both of us have told me that several times over the last 15 years of our

00:55:04 ◼   ► marriage.

00:55:05 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:55:06 ◼   ► There's two issues, I guess, in play then. One's the branding angle, and I totally see

00:55:10 ◼   ► what you say there, and I guess I agree with your wife. But the second one, too, is about

00:55:16 ◼   ► format. And that is one of the things that the internet has really freed people like

00:55:24 ◼   ► us, because I feel like I've been able to forge—and, you know, a big part of it, I've

00:55:32 ◼   ► copied a lot of it. You know, I mean, Kottke was a huge influence on Daring Fireball. Dean

00:55:38 ◼   ► Allen's Textism was an enormous influence on Daring Fireball. Mark Pilgrim's Dive into

00:55:47 ◼   ► Mark started a little bit. I think it was also the same year that Daring Fireball did.

00:55:52 ◼   ► But you know, his sort of just the way he wrote about technology was definitely an inspiration.

00:56:00 ◼   ► But I think ultimately I've sort of, especially after three, four years of doing it, sort

00:56:05 ◼   ► of wheedled it down.

00:56:07 ◼   ► I don't want to call it a formula, but there's like a voice to a day, or maybe even better

00:56:12 ◼   ► to look at it as like a week worth of content on Daring Fireball, that isn't really like

00:56:17 ◼   ► anything that came before it.

00:56:18 ◼   ► And it's certainly like nothing in print, right?

00:56:21 ◼   ► I mean, like in the print days, which is probably what I would have done if I had lived a generation

00:56:26 ◼   ► earlier, somehow try to break into print, but you were hamstrung by format, right? If

00:56:32 ◼   ► you're a columnist for the New York Times, which is a great gig, right, but three times

00:56:36 ◼   ► a week, every week you're writing 750 words. And it's 750 words every time, or two times

00:56:43 ◼   ► a week, I guess. Whereas I can write, you know, three, four little pithy one-line things

00:56:51 ◼   ► and then whip out a two thousand word piece,

00:56:55 ◼   ► one right after another.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Right, now I find it interesting that you've gone back

00:57:00 ◼   ► to the, what do you want to call it, a newsletter, right?

00:57:05 ◼   ► It's a daily, next draft is a weekday, once a day issue.

00:57:10 ◼   ► - Right.

00:57:13 ◼   ► - Which is--

00:57:14 ◼   ► - On email and an iOS app.

00:57:16 ◼   ► - Right, but it started as email, and in either case,

00:57:20 ◼   ► I said, I guess the nugget of delivery is the issue, right? And the issue contains 10

00:57:26 ◼   ► items. So instead of sending out 10 posts a day or 10 emails a day or 10 whatevers a

00:57:31 ◼   ► day, there's one issue and the issue has 10 items. I'm curious what drew you back to that.

00:57:37 ◼   ► And it does seem like that's your natural format.

00:57:40 ◼   ► Trevor Burrus Yeah, it's interesting. When I first did Next

00:57:43 ◼   ► Next draft as a younger man with more Red Bull, I actually had a column at the lead

00:57:47 ◼   ► of the whole thing.

00:57:51 ◼   ► So I'd write a column and then I'd link to the day's most interesting news.

00:57:58 ◼   ► There's something about the format.

00:57:59 ◼   ► First of all, email in general and these days the app also.

00:58:05 ◼   ► When I first relaunched Next draft about a year and a half ago, a friend of mine who

00:58:08 ◼   ► had used to Reddit said, "Hey, you should relaunch Next draft.

00:58:10 ◼   ► People would love it.

00:58:11 ◼   ► They need it."

00:58:12 ◼   ► get it right now. People have Twitter, Facebook, they're overwhelmed by news that keeps flowing in.

00:58:19 ◼   ► They don't want another news source. And my friend argued, "No, what they need is a news source that

00:58:24 ◼   ► somebody else goes out there and deals with the flood and then says, "Here's 10 things I'm pretty

00:58:30 ◼   ► sure you'll be interested in and you don't have to worry about following every incoming link for the

00:58:35 ◼   ► rest of it." So I was sort of dubious, but because I loved it so much when I did it, it's always been

00:58:41 ◼   ► my favorite thing to do on the internet.

00:58:43 ◼   ► I sort of launched it again, and I followed a really similar format from before, but I

00:58:48 ◼   ► think of it as a column with links.

00:58:53 ◼   ► It has numbers, so it's easier for people to sort of scroll through and know when it's

00:58:57 ◼   ► going to start and end, or on the iPhone and iPad app, you can sort of swipe through it

00:59:02 ◼   ► and know where you are in the story.

00:59:05 ◼   ► But ultimately I do think of it as sort of, it's my column on today with links.

00:59:13 ◼   ► A lot of people tell me that they never click on the links.

00:59:17 ◼   ► They just read it, they get enough of an overview so that they enjoy reading it, getting my

00:59:22 ◼   ► overview of the day's news and they feel like they have enough data to sort of be semi-interesting

00:59:28 ◼   ► at a dinner party that night.

00:59:29 ◼   ► Probably the most common user will click through on one or two things, maybe three.

00:59:38 ◼   ► There's something about it that is sort of this story that I like doing and I like being

00:59:42 ◼   ► able to refer back to other stuff.

00:59:43 ◼   ► There's certainly limitations.

00:59:45 ◼   ► If a big story breaks ten minutes after I publish my newsletter, that's a bit of a

00:59:50 ◼   ► drag.

00:59:54 ◼   ► I love something about that newsletter feel.

00:59:56 ◼   ► I think eventually there will be a blog version.

00:59:58 ◼   ► In fact, I'm sure of it, but there's something I've always loved about email, and I feel

01:00:04 ◼   ► like the app sort of mimics that experience without all the clutter of your inbox.

01:00:09 ◼   ► There's been so much criticism of email over the years, especially not entirely limited,

01:00:15 ◼   ► but especially among people in our industry that get 15 million of them a day and feel

01:00:21 ◼   ► compelled to update us on the status of their inbox on Twitter, which is to me the one thing

01:00:26 ◼   ► more irritating than a crowded, cluttered inbox.

01:00:28 ◼   ► You know what I've started doing recently?

01:00:31 ◼   ► And I got away with this from this years ago, and I sort of was relying on filters and stuff

01:00:36 ◼   ► like that.

01:00:38 ◼   ► What I've started doing is when I encounter an email and I'm annoyed by it, and I know

01:00:42 ◼   ► that it's not an email from a person, it's some sort of automated email.

01:00:47 ◼   ► If I'm annoyed by it, I've gone back to going to the bottom, clicking the unsubscribe

01:00:51 ◼   ► link and opting out of whatever the hell it is and going through.

01:00:56 ◼   ► And I've found that my email has been—I don't know, there's something about that.

01:01:03 ◼   ► And I think that's the complaint a lot of people have, is that you look at your inbox

01:01:06 ◼   ► and you can just tell by scanning it before you start reading messages that a lot of it

01:01:10 ◼   ► is shit you don't want to read.

01:01:12 ◼   ► And I got to a point where I would just, you know, there was only one more click on the

01:01:17 ◼   ► down arrow from going past the one I don't want to read. But I find that I'm actually

01:01:23 ◼   ► happier if I take a little bit of time to try to keep the crap out in the first place.

01:01:29 ◼   ► It makes me more likely to even go and check my email.

01:01:32 ◼   ► Right. I've always found myself to be a little defensive about email because it gets

01:01:37 ◼   ► criticized so much, but I don't think that the medium is the problem. I think the content

01:01:41 ◼   ► is the problem. Most emails suck. So people assume that email sucks. I think email was

01:01:50 ◼   ► nice at the outset. I think actually in the day of Twitter and Facebook where you're

01:01:54 ◼   ► constantly inundated by incoming content, it's actually in a strange way even more

01:02:02 ◼   ► valuable because with Twitter, the links go by, the streams go by, the stories on – we

01:02:11 ◼   ► We talked about how many tabs we have open.

01:02:13 ◼   ► It all sort of passes by and you're not sure where you saw something or how it related

01:02:17 ◼   ► to something else you saw, but email is always just right where you left it.

01:02:21 ◼   ► I started reading this email.

01:02:23 ◼   ► I know exactly where it is.

01:02:24 ◼   ► It's right where I left it.

01:02:25 ◼   ► I can go finish it later if I want to.

01:02:29 ◼   ► Do I acknowledge that for many people, especially in industries, that they sort of have a ton

01:02:35 ◼   ► of co-workers, sending them thousands of emails a day, paid email for sure. That's why I launched

01:02:41 ◼   ► an iOS app and sort of said it's the exact same sort of private intimate experience.

01:02:49 ◼   ► Something you can count on being there that doesn't sort of just scroll by without you.

01:02:54 ◼   ► But it's out of your inbox.

01:02:55 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** It makes sense because, and it doesn't seem,

01:02:59 ◼   ► it feels natural because like I said, to me, they feel like daily issues and anywhere where

01:03:05 ◼   ► idea of an issue makes sense is a natural for Nextgraph and that the app

01:03:09 ◼   ► feels just as it doesn't feel like it's a newsletter oh and you can read it

01:03:15 ◼   ► through an app it you know the when you're when I read it in the app it

01:03:18 ◼   ► feels just as natural as reading the reading in an email yeah well I'm glad

01:03:24 ◼   ► that's definitely definitely the goal when when how did you decide what's your

01:03:30 ◼   ► schedule like like you work in the morning or do you do start doing the

01:03:35 ◼   ► next day's issue the afternoon before? When do you put an issue? What's your schedule

01:03:40 ◼   ► like every day?

01:03:41 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I basically, I never really turn off on that topic and finding stories.

01:03:46 ◼   ► So I'll always check at least once a few sites the night before to make sure I'm

01:03:52 ◼   ► not going to miss anything that, like we said, it's all transient. It goes away by the

01:03:56 ◼   ► next morning sometimes. So I'll always check things, but my hard schedule is more I usually

01:04:04 ◼   ► get into my office around eight or so, and I just crank for the next three and a half,

01:04:08 ◼   ► four hours. Half that time or so is finding the stories, and the other half is sort of

01:04:14 ◼   ► writing proofread format. I'm pretty old school. I write it all in BP edit and just paste it

01:04:19 ◼   ► into a web form at MailChimp and send it out.

01:04:23 ◼   ► There's one big difference you have from what I have there for, and it's really like

01:04:29 ◼   ► almost retro, is that when an issue goes out, especially with email, I guess you could fix

01:04:34 ◼   ► it in the app, but if you have a typo, it's in there. Right? And it makes me not—I certainly

01:04:41 ◼   ► proofread before I publish, but I'm certainly far lazier than I would be otherwise. And

01:04:48 ◼   ► my typical style is to proofread myself, but I do it quickly, publish, and then pay attention

01:04:54 ◼   ► to my email and Twitter for the next five minutes to fix any typos.

01:04:58 ◼   ► Right because they're gonna be reported

01:05:00 ◼   ► Whereas that does not eat that that ain't gonna work with a newsletter, right?

01:05:04 ◼   ► No, I always tell people if you want to test and be sure if people are really reading your stuff

01:05:09 ◼   ► Just put a typo in the first paragraph

01:05:13 ◼   ► So especially like a one that's like a pet peeve typo, right? Yeah, it's you left the imposter free out of its right

01:05:20 ◼   ► You know major conniption

01:05:23 ◼   ► Part is that when you get the people email it and say like I'm sure I'm not the first person to tell you this but

01:05:28 ◼   ► And then it follows with three paragraphs on the different meaning of its and its all right, right

01:05:33 ◼   ► And then you have to email them back to say yeah, actually

01:05:35 ◼   ► Nobody else bothered. It was just you but thanks, you know

01:05:38 ◼   ► I made a name for that typo and it never caught on I'd still like it to catch on I call it an it so

01:05:44 ◼   ► That sounds good. And it's either way. It's it and it so is

01:05:48 ◼   ► writing one of the IT apostrophe s or or ITS where what you wanted was the other one either one it's an it so and

01:05:57 ◼   ► And then you could just say to someone, "You have an itso in the first paragraph."

01:06:00 ◼   ► Right. Yeah.

01:06:03 ◼   ► I-T-S-O. Itso. Let's try to make that. Can we make that catch on?

01:06:07 ◼   ► I'll do that. Next time somebody, the next 30 times somebody emails me about that, I will

01:06:12 ◼   ► respond and say, "Thanks for giving me the heads up about the itso."

01:06:14 ◼   ► The other one, too, is that there's this weird history in internet culture of it being deemed

01:06:19 ◼   ► rude to point out that somebody made a grammatical or spelling mistake, and therefore, sometimes

01:06:23 ◼   ► when people write to me, they'll be extraordinarily apologetic, like almost over the top apologetic.

01:06:29 ◼   ► I can't believe I'm bringing this up to you. And I'm so sorry. I really love your site. I've been

01:06:33 ◼   ► reading it for years. I buy your t-shirts. And I hate to tell you this, but you use the, you know,

01:06:38 ◼   ► you've got a t-a-g-i-r where you meant t-h-e-y apostrophe r in the third paragraph of this piece.

01:06:44 ◼   ► And then I always write back and be like, "No apologies." You know, if readers didn't point

01:06:48 ◼   ► this out, I'd never catch them. Carl -

01:06:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I probably differ with you there. I like that. I like the several paragraphs of love that

01:06:55 ◼   ► precede it. I hate it. I hate it. Because I feel bad because I feel like there's people out there

01:07:00 ◼   ► who see these or seeing typos and aren't reporting them to me because they're

01:07:03 ◼   ► so apologetic that they don't even want to send them to me.

01:07:07 ◼   ► Well, you know, you can trust from our relationship that if I ever email you, notify

01:07:14 ◼   ► you about a typo, it's mostly because I want you to link to one of my projects.

01:07:19 ◼   ► So you find yourself—you don't have a problem editing your own prose. I do. I find

01:07:29 ◼   ► myself usually repulsed by my own writing, especially when it's fresh, like when I'm

01:07:33 ◼   ► done writing it.

01:07:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a secret friend who's always on IM during the day when I'm writing, who

01:07:41 ◼   ► for some reason enjoys Next Draft and thinks it's a worthy use of my time, with or without

01:07:47 ◼   ► a revenue model. And so if I ever have a problem, I usually don't need the whole thing proofed,

01:07:53 ◼   ► Fred, but occasionally I'll have one or two sections that I feel like I'm not sure it works,

01:07:59 ◼   ► or is this joke going too far, or, you know. Get somebody else's eyes to look at it.

01:08:05 ◼   ► Yeah. And this guy, his name is Morty. He's a lot more literal than I am. So sometimes I'll have

01:08:11 ◼   ► six or seven cups of coffee and sort of get a little too wound up and I'm firing off some

01:08:16 ◼   ► tweets and I've just got it going on, and then I'll sort of have a paragraph that the joke is

01:08:21 ◼   ► sort of an inside joke between me and myself. So occasionally I'll run one of those by him too.

01:08:27 ◼   ► And in the process, if he tells me that I have an apostrophe in one of my "its-os,"

01:08:31 ◼   ► then that's just the "shit-so."

01:08:34 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:08:35 ◼   ► Pete: I think I read about it on Nextdraft actually. Was it last week? The story, I'm sure

01:08:40 ◼   ► you put it in Nextdraft, but I think it's where I first saw it was the news that somebody's,

01:08:45 ◼   ► some scientists have said that drinking excessive amounts of coffee is good for you.

01:08:49 ◼   ► That the people who drink, I don't know, I forget what the cutoff was, but a fair amount of coffee

01:08:55 ◼   ► every day have significantly higher life, or statistically, relevantly longer life expectancy.

01:09:03 ◼   ► Yeah, they're just too apt to die.

01:09:05 ◼   ► Right. But I see, and I know that I'm a total,

01:09:10 ◼   ► hypocrites not the right word, but I

01:09:12 ◼   ► When news about like the stuff that I like to take the coffee booze when it says that it's good for you

01:09:20 ◼   ► I I jump all over it and I read it and and I love it and then when something comes out

01:09:25 ◼   ► You know that points the other way. I just say yeah, it doesn't apply to me. Yeah, you just explained all of media right there

01:09:32 ◼   ► Why MSNBC only has left-wingers and Fox only has right wingers, you know, and I don't feel like I'm that way

01:09:40 ◼   ► politically I do I like to read well-written pieces from the opposing

01:09:45 ◼   ► View I tend to be liberal I tend to vote Democrat. I like to read some of the

01:09:52 ◼   ► You know certainly not the Tea Party types, but there's certainly the reasonable types

01:09:56 ◼   ► You know I like to read George will once in a while

01:09:58 ◼   ► I like to see what what you know I like to open my mind to stuff like that

01:10:02 ◼   ► But when it comes to the coffee

01:10:03 ◼   ► I don't want to read I don't want to hear about problems that you get from drinking too much coffee right well

01:10:07 ◼   ► But you need your stuff for claimed chowder, so you gotta read some of the dummies once

01:10:11 ◼   ► in a while.

01:10:12 ◼   ► Right.

01:10:13 ◼   ► I'm trying to think.

01:10:14 ◼   ► Anything else before?

01:10:15 ◼   ► We should probably talk about Google Maps.

01:10:17 ◼   ► So you mentioned that the Google Maps app, as we record today, on Thursday, December

01:10:23 ◼   ► 13th, the Google Maps iPhone app hit last night.

01:10:27 ◼   ► You know, I have two things I want to say about that.

01:10:30 ◼   ► One was there was this crazy story on all things D that they promoted as an exclusive,

01:10:35 ◼   ► Kara Swisher tweeted it and it was this big story on all things D last night which was

01:10:42 ◼   ► that they had an exclusive which was that Google Maps was coming out later that night

01:10:46 ◼   ► and it's like a 700 word article and I the thing that struck me about it is you know

01:10:51 ◼   ► I'm not saying they should if they found out obviously they had a source who confirmed

01:10:56 ◼   ► before everybody else knew that Google Maps for iPhone was coming out last night well

01:10:59 ◼   ► that is news but if the entirety of what you know can fit in a tweet then it should just

01:11:05 ◼   ► be a tweet. Right? Just tweet it. Right? This incessant desire for exclusives and the page

01:11:11 ◼   ► view driven mindset that would make you write an article. They didn't have screenshots.

01:11:15 ◼   ► They didn't get to use it. It wasn't a review of it. They didn't have the app yet. All they

01:11:20 ◼   ► had was the knowledge that it was coming out.

01:11:22 ◼   ► Trevor Burrus Yeah. Well, that kind of stuff is mostly an

01:11:25 ◼   ► SEO play all learned from the folks over at the Huffington Post, you know? Think about

01:11:31 ◼   ► what people are going to be searching for in the next 45 minutes and have a headline

01:11:34 ◼   ► up that matches that. Ah, I didn't even think about that angle.

01:11:37 ◼   ► What time is the Super Bowl? I guarantee there'll be a big headline on Huffington Post

01:11:42 ◼   ► a day before the Super Bowl that will say what time is the Super Bowl and they'll come up first.

01:11:46 ◼   ► And the worst part is they don't answer the question right away, the article.

01:11:51 ◼   ► Right, they don't care about that. They just want the page view.

01:11:54 ◼   ► The truth is even a lot of technology news is funny, right? Because you're

01:12:00 ◼   ► sort of breaking exclusives at a time of night when there's like 16 of us who give a shit and

01:12:06 ◼   ► we all already know it. So there's always this weird thing also, you know, there's this sort of

01:12:11 ◼   ► race to inform the 12 people who care about something who already know it.

01:12:15 ◼   ► Yeah, I hear this article and I tend to follow, you know, because you tend to follow people who

01:12:20 ◼   ► see things the way you do, at least on Twitter. So the people I follow tend to be the type who

01:12:25 ◼   ► are opposed to that. And it's like an endless, almost like an in joke among a bunch of us that

01:12:29 ◼   ► putting exclusive in a headline is, it's, ah, it like, every time I see it, it just rings,

01:12:36 ◼   ► it just, I don't know, grates upon me.

01:12:40 ◼   ► Trevor Burrus Yeah, certainly like with the John

01:12:41 ◼   ► McAfee story, you know, everybody had an exclusive with him. Here's like a crazy guy standing on a

01:12:46 ◼   ► corner in Guatemala mumbling to himself. That's not an exclusive. We can all hear him.

01:12:51 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin But they were all exclusive, call it.

01:12:56 ◼   ► I heard it from a slightly different angle than these other 12 Guatemalans did.

01:13:01 ◼   ► And part of it is that it's a total internetism because it's all about, you know, like in the old

01:13:07 ◼   ► days, there was never like, in the print days, nobody ever put the word exclusive in a headline.

01:13:12 ◼   ► There was no need to, right? If you were first, you were first and everybody had to wait another

01:13:16 ◼   ► day to catch up anyway, right? The exclusive was inherent, right? Like if New York Times had an

01:13:22 ◼   ► exclusive, a bit of news about, I don't know, the war in Afghanistan. They just,

01:13:27 ◼   ► you know, and they still do this. They don't put "exclusive" in the headline at

01:13:30 ◼   ► the New York Times, but it was exclusive for a day, right? It was, because nobody

01:13:35 ◼   ► else, it took another day for you, the Washington Post, to get another issue

01:13:39 ◼   ► out. So, you didn't have to tell people something was exclusive, it was

01:13:43 ◼   ► exclusive. Now, people put "exclusive" in the headline, and as soon as it comes out,

01:13:47 ◼   ► everybody's linking to it anyway, and it's not exclusive. So I guess that's what bothers me.

01:13:53 ◼   ► When things were exclusive because of the nature of print, nobody ever had to say they were

01:13:58 ◼   ► exclusive. Now people brag about things being exclusive, and they're not. There's nothing

01:14:02 ◼   ► exclusive about it. I also, as a related thing that I find incredibly, I don't know if it's

01:14:09 ◼   ► angering or humorous or maybe some combination of the both, is the live tweeting and live blogging

01:14:15 ◼   ► of events that every single person in your Twitter stream is already live blogging or live tweeting

01:14:20 ◼   ► with, but with no irony, no added value, no joke. So I admit I live tweet every Apple event from the

01:14:28 ◼   ► comfort of my own desk here in San Francisco. But I mean, I'm just making jokes.

01:14:33 ◼   ► You're adding color. Right.

01:14:34 ◼   ► Like I just, it's incredible that people are absolutely seriously saying like, Oh,

01:14:42 ◼   ► the new phone is going to have a camera in the front and it does 10 more pixels, you know,

01:14:46 ◼   ► it's like, well, you know, that you're the 48th person to say that, right. And it's really not

01:14:52 ◼   ► urgent because it comes out in a month and a half anyway. Back is now aluminum, not glass. Yeah.

01:14:57 ◼   ► And everybody does it. But it's like, at least add an opinion or a joke or something. You got

01:15:03 ◼   ► 140 characters at least make three or four of those characters, something I don't already know.

01:15:08 ◼   ► But I guess people get obsessed with that stuff. I have a couple friends who don't tweet much,

01:15:15 ◼   ► but every now and then they just get really into a football game and they'll just start tweeting

01:15:19 ◼   ► specific plays from the game as if we're all watching together. They don't name the game,

01:15:25 ◼   ► they just sort of say, "Oh, sweep left goes for two, second and seven."

01:15:29 ◼   ► It's like, I'm just not sure how that's adding any value here. That's how I see live tweeting.

01:15:37 ◼   ► I can see it second and seven. That's not a tweet, dude. Let's go.

01:15:40 ◼   ► Putting exclusive in a headline is no better than putting first exclamation point in a comment

01:15:48 ◼   ► under the article. You're just telling people that you're the first to write this, you know?

01:15:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:15:54 ◼   ► Crazy. So, Google Maps, what do you think? What do you think of the new Apple Maps? You probably

01:16:01 ◼   ► don't leave the Bay Area much. The Apple Maps are pretty good out there, right?

01:16:05 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't find them that terrible. I was mostly just reading about it, the problems people

01:16:10 ◼   ► were having, and definitely hearing about a lot of the frustrations at Apple about it.

01:16:15 ◼   ► Honestly, I'm not a huge Maps user.

01:16:20 ◼   ► Me neither. So I do find it hard to write about.

01:16:25 ◼   ► In the rare circumstances that I don't know where something is, I either just ask somebody

01:16:29 ◼   ► who'll know or I will use Google Maps or something on the web and just take a quick glance at

01:16:35 ◼   ► and say, okay, that's the directions.

01:16:37 ◼   ► I don't really, I'm not the type to open up an app

01:16:39 ◼   ► and say, okay, turn left at here, you know.

01:16:42 ◼   ► Maybe that's because I'm a little insular here, you know,

01:16:44 ◼   ► which tends to happen to us old internet people.

01:16:46 ◼   ► I probably, I'm about as far from my desk as I ever get

01:16:49 ◼   ► and I'm really right next to it.

01:16:52 ◼   ► But I thought, you know,

01:16:55 ◼   ► I thought that Apple Maps was well-designed

01:16:56 ◼   ► and had the typical problems you would think it would have.

01:16:58 ◼   ► You know, it didn't have multiple years

01:17:01 ◼   ► of millions of people hammering on it

01:17:03 ◼   ► finding the holes and saying, "Fill these holes."

01:17:06 ◼   ► I thought the UI and the look and feel of it was fine.

01:17:09 ◼   ► I didn't really have that much of a problem with it.

01:17:11 ◼   ► With Google Maps that I've tried in anticipation of this conversation, like I said, it's not

01:17:16 ◼   ► something I was anticipating with bated breath.

01:17:19 ◼   ► I feel like the map part of it is awesome.

01:17:22 ◼   ► You click the button and says, "Locate me.

01:17:25 ◼   ► It nailed me right to the corner."

01:17:28 ◼   ► And I said, "Show me the front of the place

01:17:30 ◼   ► "I used to live in in New York City."

01:17:33 ◼   ► It took me right to that address

01:17:35 ◼   ► and gave me a beautiful street view of the exact unit.

01:17:38 ◼   ► And all that stuff was great.

01:17:40 ◼   ► When I actually started using it and saying like,

01:17:42 ◼   ► "Hey, take me on a drive from my office to my house

01:17:47 ◼   ► "as a test," it took me about five minutes

01:17:50 ◼   ► to figure out how to get out of that screen.

01:17:52 ◼   ► I just, I couldn't quite get out of that screen.

01:17:54 ◼   ► I feel like there's no doubt Google is improving on software, but I still don't feel like it's

01:18:01 ◼   ► as...

01:18:02 ◼   ► For me, it wasn't as intuitive as it could be.

01:18:04 ◼   ► I know people are raving about it.

01:18:06 ◼   ► When I tested it to route my directions from my office to my house, it definitely gave

01:18:12 ◼   ► me good directions, but I was just testing it.

01:18:15 ◼   ► When I wanted to get out of that screen, it actually took me a few minutes to navigate

01:18:20 ◼   ► my way out.

01:18:23 ◼   ► All the things that you would expect from a Google mapping program and from a mapping

01:18:27 ◼   ► back end, whether it be street view or directions or locating yourself, finding nearby stuff,

01:18:32 ◼   ► all seems awesome.

01:18:33 ◼   ► That's the critical stuff.

01:18:35 ◼   ► That's what they're great at and they've done a great job.

01:18:37 ◼   ► When it comes to navigating the map, a maps product, I actually found it was almost slower

01:18:42 ◼   ► for me to navigate through the app than it was to navigate through space using the app.

01:18:48 ◼   ► Well, I think it's pretty good.

01:18:51 ◼   ► I do think that one of the things that's interesting, and I know not a lot of people have both things,

01:18:57 ◼   ► you know, you have to be like a gadget nerd to do it, but I think it's better designed

01:19:01 ◼   ► than the Android Maps app, the Android Maps app that they did. It's very similar, it's

01:19:07 ◼   ► certainly far more similar than it used to be. But the iOS one is cleaner. It's sort

01:19:13 ◼   ► of, you know, they're not trying to shoehorn the Android look and feel into iOS. They are

01:19:18 ◼   ► writing apps purposefully for the iPhone. And I guess the other thing I find

01:19:24 ◼   ► interesting about it is that I think Google, you know, in this whole saga,

01:19:33 ◼   ► Google lost something because it was really, really, what they really want is

01:19:38 ◼   ► to collect location data for both you as a user so they can serve you targeted

01:19:44 ◼   ► and collectively because it's sort of this crowdsourcing that makes the information accurate and up-to-date and relevant.

01:19:52 ◼   ► And they lost something by not being the default data provider for all iOS users.

01:19:57 ◼   ► And Apple, I'm sure, I mean, certainly doesn't like the perception, but I'm sure that they actually want their own mapping product to be as good or better than Google's.

01:20:09 ◼   ► better than Google's, and they don't have that. I think it's better than the reputation

01:20:16 ◼   ► as conventional wisdom holds, but it's still clearly not as good, especially for search,

01:20:23 ◼   ► which is a big use of maps. So Google didn't get what they want. They've lost being the

01:20:27 ◼   ► default for all iOS users, and Apple hasn't been able to do what it wants, which is provide

01:20:31 ◼   ► a best-of-breed mapping experience. But the result as of now, it's one of those cases

01:20:37 ◼   ► where I feel like the users win because the users get an Apple Maps app that's probably

01:20:43 ◼   ► the best designed app, right, like you were saying about the navigation. And if you want

01:20:48 ◼   ► Google Maps, now you have a Google Maps app that's better than what we had before this

01:20:54 ◼   ► whole thing started because now it has vector map tiles that load faster and it does turn-by-turn

01:20:59 ◼   ► direction, which we didn't have before.

01:21:01 ◼   ► Right. No, I think that's certainly on the broadest level. That's the story here. The

01:21:06 ◼   ► users have won, and Google got better at design, and we got a better product, and we have the

01:21:11 ◼   ► good maps.

01:21:12 ◼   ► Right. And I feel like part of the excoriation that Apple went through was short-sighted.

01:21:18 ◼   ► It was a three-month period where iOS 6 had shipped, and last night when the Google Maps

01:21:27 ◼   ► app became available. And so you could say, well, yeah, kind of things were kind of if

01:21:32 ◼   ► you if you use, you know, lived in a place where the maps are more accurate, or you use

01:21:36 ◼   ► them for a purpose that the apples one was really just worse or bad or, you know, literally

01:21:41 ◼   ► put you in the middle of nowhere instead of where you wanted to go. That sucked, but it

01:21:47 ◼   ► was just a three month blip in the history of years. And now afterwards, it's actually

01:21:52 ◼   ► better for users. Right? The excoriation was that Apple put its own interest above those

01:21:56 ◼   ► of users. But I think in the long run, iPhone users are now better off than they ever were

01:22:03 ◼   ► before when it comes to mapping, which is sort of curious.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Right. Wasn't the whole controversy at the beginning that Google didn't want to share

01:22:11 ◼   ► the turn-by-turn directions with iOS users also?

01:22:14 ◼   ► Yeah. And well, but what they wanted to do, it was a classic negotiation situation where

01:22:22 ◼   ► It's not that they were outright refusing.

01:22:25 ◼   ► It's that in exchange for it, they wanted Apple to have that built-in Maps app do more

01:22:35 ◼   ► with Google services, like provide a way to log in to the Google location, whatever it's

01:22:42 ◼   ► called.

01:22:43 ◼   ► What's it called?

01:22:44 ◼   ► I forget.

01:22:45 ◼   ► But, or Google+ or something like that, so that they could do more.

01:22:49 ◼   ► They wanted more information about, you know, identifiable information from users.

01:22:55 ◼   ► So Apple didn't want to give them that for their own reasons, competitive reasons.

01:22:59 ◼   ► So Apple didn't want to give them the data, but without the data, Google didn't want

01:23:04 ◼   ► to give them the turn-by-turn and the vector map tiles.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And I think that if anybody made a mistake, I think that the people at Google who ultimately

01:23:14 ◼   ► had to make this decision, overestimated Apple's willingness to just say, "Fuck you, we're

01:23:23 ◼   ► going ahead with our own maps, whether they're worse or not."

01:23:25 ◼   ► Because I think that they had an accurate sense of how good Apple's maps were going

01:23:30 ◼   ► to be.

01:23:31 ◼   ► It was sort of—it wasn't really a secret, but I mean, I knew.

01:23:37 ◼   ► I mean, like, it was a lot more as of WWDC, right?

01:23:41 ◼   ► WWDC is when this maps thing was announced.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Everybody knew Apple though, it was working on maps.

01:23:46 ◼   ► I mean, the acquisitions of mapping companies over the last few years are public knowledge.

01:23:53 ◼   ► You don't buy, spend 20, 30, 100 million dollars on mapping companies and not be building your

01:24:00 ◼   ► own mapping system.

01:24:01 ◼   ► But there was a general sense that Apple's maps weren't yet up to snuff.

01:24:06 ◼   ► Maybe they were good and okay, but not great.

01:24:09 ◼   ► And I think Google knew that, and I think Google sort of internally estimated, well,

01:24:14 ◼   ► there's no way that their maps are good enough yet, so they're not—they'll come

01:24:17 ◼   ► to us.

01:24:18 ◼   ► They'll give in, and, you know, in exchange for the vector and the turn-by-turn, we'll

01:24:23 ◼   ► get more integration with our, you know, Google+ and stuff like that.

01:24:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:24:30 ◼   ► And I think that's why it, you know, the Google Maps app wasn't ready on day one,

01:24:36 ◼   ► is that they thought that they had at least another year.

01:24:40 ◼   ► But ultimately, I feel like it's all worked out.

01:24:46 ◼   ► I don't think that, I feel like people are missing that.

01:24:49 ◼   ► I don't see that in the coverage of this.

01:24:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, that was pretty much my take

01:24:54 ◼   ► in next draft was that everybody here wins

01:24:56 ◼   ► except for the guys who were working

01:24:57 ◼   ► on the Apple Maps team.

01:24:59 ◼   ► - Well, and even they do now.

01:25:00 ◼   ► It's even, I mean, I don't know that they win,

01:25:03 ◼   ► but it certainly, they know how high the bar

01:25:07 ◼   ► has been raised, right?

01:25:09 ◼   ► - Right.

01:25:10 ◼   ► - So I don't know.

01:25:12 ◼   ► I think it's wrong to think that Apple's,

01:25:16 ◼   ► that the situation now for iOS users

01:25:18 ◼   ► is that they're screwed on maps.

01:25:20 ◼   ► I think it's better.

01:25:22 ◼   ► - Oh, no doubt, no doubt.

01:25:23 ◼   ► The users are coming out good here.

01:25:24 ◼   ► They had three months of a little bit of frustration

01:25:28 ◼   ► for some users here and there,

01:25:29 ◼   ► probably outweighed by the amount of discourse

01:25:32 ◼   ► fun that they had around the issue and now they have the maps product they want

01:25:37 ◼   ► and better than ever that's probably a good place to end the show Dave Pell

01:25:43 ◼   ► thank you for for being here people can find out more pride number one website

01:25:49 ◼   ► did you'd want people to go to they want if they want more Dave Pell go to go to

01:25:52 ◼   ► next draft calm and right you could find out about the app you can find out about

01:25:57 ◼   ► how to sign up for the newsletter you can see a picture of Dave with with the

01:26:01 ◼   ► top part of his skull coming off his head.

01:26:04 ◼   ► It's as good a selling point as any.

01:26:07 ◼   ► Thanks.

01:26:08 ◼   ► I really appreciate it.

01:26:09 ◼   ► [BLANK_AUDIO]