Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) 1000th Episode Spectacular

Episode Date: August 28, 2021

Talkin' OnlyFans. The founding and engineering team from Otter.ai share some exciting product news. And Chris interviews me about doing 1000 TRH episodes and how I produce this show every day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome, everybody. This is the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Wednesday, August 25th, 2021. It's almost, it's not quite the end of the summer, but it's getting into that phase.

And we were off last week. So, of course, as usual, a million things happened. And in some ways, it might have been actually good for us to be off last week because the thing that we were going to talk about today, which seems to change by the day, is this whole OnlyFans kerfuffle. And at least to start, you know, because I feel like that's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's in the Critter Economy realm. It's in the fintech realm. It's in legacy banking systems.

It's culture. It's, I don't know. It's, it's weird. It feels like it's a seminal moment. Get it? It's very weird. It's very weird. But yes, I got your...

I know. That's what happens when I'm gone for a week. Anyways, so what's your, what's your take on this, Brian? Um, there are so many stories recently. said this today where I feel like we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes and we're only seeing like the surface, you know, like even like, you know, the China stuff, the China tech stuff, there's no way for us to know over here what's really going on behind the scenes there. You know, the recent, every platform decided at the same time they wanted to

protect the kids. I think we got to the bottom of that one. I think so. Well, there's, right, because there was the theory about MasterCard, at least cutting off... No, no, no, no, I know. That was one theory. But the other thing was that the EU, and I actually had suggested this, is making some rules, some changes.

That's what I think it is. Yes. Specifically Britain, actually, it wasn't even the EU, which was kind of the point that even... New York, specifically. Yeah, I'm not saying that the UK is a small market, but the point that I think I did say on the show

was, it's not the biggest market in the world, but if they still make a rule, that most platforms have to deal with, that's still meaningful. The other story is that that whole one about the hack where the hacker gave all the money back. Was it Polygon? Yeah. No, not Polynetworks or something like that. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Where it's like, I promise you there's something else going on there. And now they're like offering him a job or something? And it's very strange. I can't tell if it's someone who's like, I don't know. Let's say, how do I put this? Someone who thinks he's doing well and is very deep into the whole crypto space, but actually when you step back from you're like, no, that's not really how you kind of contribute to the network.

Or the less generous people are saying that it was all a marketing stunt, which people are also saying about this, the only fans thing. There's not a few people that have been saying that. I'm going to say this. There are people that are saying that what is ultimately behind this is that there are people that wanted to cash out. And if you understand the porn industry over the last 10 to 20 years, the internet basically took over porn. disrupted it completely and there's one giant company that runs most of the porn industry.

Some people are saying, I'm being very careful here, that certain people behind that, you know, have been making hundreds of millions of dollars for several years doing this. And they felt like there was a documentary about this about, um, there's, yeah, okay, continue. Again, I'm not going to name any names. But so what I have heard is that certain people are like, well, this is our opportunity to either cash out or go clean. And you mentioned the creator economy. And so this would be a way to go upscale and go legit and become a... This is what I've heard.

And so this is why I'm always skeptical about the changing stories about this. Some of the stories are they couldn't raise investment money. some of the stories are that the credit card companies and the payment companies didn't want to play ball with them. All of these things can be true at the same time. Yep. But what I'm saying on this story is that I don't think we have even an inkling of what's really going on here. So what's your take? I mean, I guess I'm trying to piece apart a couple things.

Like one, what is the lesson? What is the meaning here? Like in some respects, what I find is interesting is the cultural shift towards, a different understanding or appreciation of sex work and the elevation of that, you know, trade and that opportunity to bring it into like a regular type of, you know, job, I guess. You know, it isn't seen in a sort of negative light. And if, I don't know, I was reading a bunch of things about how there's kind of conservative values that are also affecting the banking system and causing people to, you know, like,

because there's an interesting set of adjacencies that make this really hard to piece of part. Like specifically one week we're talking about child pornography and C-SAM and Apple scanning our phones. And the next we're talking about sex work and the inability for workers who are doing that work as adults, presumably, to be able to make a living performing those, that service. So I don't know how to fit these things kind of in my mind in terms of where the culture is going and where the power lies. Clearly, the banks in the system have an enormous amount of power. But is it really about the content? Is it about verifying the people? people who are on the platforms? Is it about, you know, protecting people? I don't quite know how to make all those things make sense. Now, of course, what's interesting also is the way in which we are concerned about social media platforms having this sensorial, you know, ability to amplify

and remove different content. But now if banks can do the same thing with different types of employment, which, of course, they are in many respects, that also opens up a bunch of different questions about how to regulate, you know, the regulators, et cetera. Well, and as I said, I mean, that's what theoretically crypto should solve. But I don't think I said this on the show. I'm sure I tweeted about this, but it continues to amaze me, and I know this for a stone-cold fact, that I did say on the show that any business that has the numbers that OnlyFans has would be just... Raising my hands over Fist, your phrase. It amazes me that the one taboo in VC land continues to be sex.

That's it. Now, there are longstanding reasons for that because when you raise a fund, there are LP restriction. It's written into certain funds what you will and will not invest in. But I can't believe that that still is real, is what I'm saying. in the sense that it's specifically towards sex and sexual related

Yeah, and porn. Right, and porn. And, you know, I'm old enough to remember the porn scare of the mid-90s when that was one of the first things that, you know, people tried to regulate the internet over. And that was one of the first things that the internet rose up as a community.

As a force. Yeah. To fight back against. But because, you know, gambling has become a thing that you can invest in. Cannabis is a thing you can invest in. The fact that sex is still not something that Sand Hill Road will invest in. I don't know.

That seems really anachronistic to me. Totally with you. And I am very curious to see how this actually changes and evolves. And there was a bunch of conversation also about crypto in the space. It's like if this is your moment, like come forward now. And then it turned out that there's still a lot of, you know, normal banking services that crypto companies actually use in order to convert crypto into fiat. And so then it's, you know, sort of stopped again. It's really, really hard to turn crypto into dollar bills, like directly.

Like you have to go through a processor. And those processes are the ones that hold, you know, essentially a lot more power than I think many of us think about. Was there something else that we missed in the last two weeks that you were like gnawing in, biting your tongue to talk about. I mean, there's always so much. In this case, no, you know, I think we covered that story. There's a lot of things that are just like happening. And so I think maybe, you know, next week we'll be able to, I don't know, expand into some of those topics.

But today we actually have several special guests. And so I'm going to go ahead and pivot to that. I believe they're finally up here. And this is, I feel like a conversation. that's been kind of, I don't know, certainly I've been aware of. I've been a benefactor and a user of these services for quite some time. Otter.a.I. just today announced the availability of, and actually it's present here. Of course, people who are listening to this later won't know it, but there is an Otter AI bot

that is listening to this conversation is live transcribing it. And what this service and platform does, it essentially just takes audio and, you know, as it's coming in, is able to identify the speakers. it's able to quickly translate, you know, what's going on with that. And I started using Otter, oh my God, like, I don't know when either Simon or Sam, who are here in the call can remind me, but way, way early in their, I guess, generation story. I actually met Sam when I think I was, I don't know if I was in, I don't know, it was someplace around the world or something.

And I was like, oh, my God, I love the service. And this is when I started using Superpeer to offer consulting services. And what I would do is I would take the audio recordings. from my super peer calls and I would send it off to Otter, I'd get the transcription. And that way, the people that I would consult, you know, would have kind of this written record. And it was way better than anything else that was out there. And I just feel like it's gotten way better since then. So in the last year and a half, Otter has continued to grow, has continued to offer more and more of its services.

It's expanded into the enterprise. It's raised a bunch of money. So anyways, we've got Sam here. We've got Simon here. And we'd love to hear from them about the launch, about what this means for their business, where their business is at. And I'll, you know, I have a tendency to ask a million questions. So I'm going to start there.

And hopefully we can hear from them and get some insights. Welcome, Otter, folks. Hi. This is Sam from Otter. Welcome. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Brian, for inviting us to join this talk. It's a great honor to be here.

And thank you, Chris and Brian, for, adopting order early and giving us a lot of, uh, give you guys a lot of feedback. Yeah. Good ideas of feedback and help us improve order over the years. Um, really appreciate that and help us, um, help us eventualize, uh, order as a new productivity tool. Tell me, tell us when you actually, you know, started.

And if I recall correctly, one of the things I think, and this is going to be embarrassing if I'm running about this, but that, you were to Google and you were the guy that put the red dot on Google Maps. Is that right? It's a blue dot. I wouldn't say I'm the guy. I'm one of the founding team members of the location platform. So that was the year, actually, 2006. I joined Google and I started the Google location platform project, which built the backend system that provide location service. Actually, in 2007, Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone, and Google Map was one of the apps he demonstrated live, and he pressed a button on Google Maps showed a blue dot.

indicating that they are something going on iOS 15. Yeah, exact location at the Mosconi Center in San Francisco. So, but yeah, later, you know, I left to Google, built some mobile startup first, but then in 2016, you know, we're looking for some even more audacious ideas than with my co-founder. full, you know, we figure that actually voice is a really interesting, right? It's the critical way for people to communicate. But, you know, with all the meetings, you know, phone calls, we actually found that it's really hard to capture the information, search information, and

share the information. So, you know, that motivated us to start order. But would now, no, do that come out of your experience at Google? I mean, you know, I worked to Google and we had a million meetings and, you know, a lot of them were over, I don't know what it was called, hangouts, was it back then or meet or, you know, whatever it was. Anyways, whatever it was called, you know, there was a lot, obviously that happened from those meetings. There was a lot of, I guess, frantic note-taking, you know, Google Docs actually in some ways came out of that experience. There was Google Wave, obviously, that also kind of rose and fail with the meeting culture at Google. Now it feels like everyone kind of has the Google meeting culture to some extent.

And so was that the origin story of Otter or was there something else invoice that kind of brought you to that? That's an important part of it. You know, I definitely had tons of meetings in Google. And then after I left to Google, you know, build a startup first. I talked to a lot of VCs, customers, recruit engineers, and have our own internal meetings. It's just tons of information to keep track. You know, we're leaving in an era of information overload. Now, how do I remember all this information?

How do I, you know, when I meet a investor, how do I share that information with our team member? And, you know, I was using Google Doc. And actually, for a long time, I was still using a paper notebook. Right. It's the problem with the paper notebook is, you know, after you write down so many things, when you need it, you either don't have your notebook with you, or even if you have your notebook, you don't know which page and the note is off. Well, you also run out of pages eventually.

So you also, yeah, you actually run out of the pages. So we figure that there must be a better way to do this. On the other hand, you know, I'm an engineering study computer science in college, and then I did my PhD at Stanford. I'm fascinated with data. What did you study for your PhD? Computer distributed systems. So how to build a large a digital system to handle.

you know, tons of data. Tons of data. Yeah, then so from the engineering point of view, you know, I look at the products in the world. You know, I was working on Google Maps, so I handled tons of location data. Yeah. But then, you know, I look at the system we built

actually that's our first startup. We actually built a lot of location tracking system and motion tracking system watching a lot of sensors on mobile devices. I realized that there's one sensor we were now using. That's actually the microphone that sends audio data. Then I asked a question, hey, what if we build a product that can listen? all the time, what will happen.

Then I realize that that will be interesting. You know, what if, you know, I have this app listening to everything? And then, you know, I can search for everything I heard. You know, related to meeting, right? It's, you know, we have so many meetings every day. But although we can use Gmail to search for, an email sent 10 years ago, I cannot search for anything I heard this morning. So then I said, okay, what if we build a product that I can search for everything I heard?

They can really help me. Then later we realized that, okay, maybe, you know, people have so many meetings every day. Then that will be a good product. good product for a lot of busy professionals. So was that the use case to start with? Because, you know, one of the questions that I have is about the timing of this. And, you know, one of the things that feels like was happening in 2016 when I was writing about conversational commerce was this shift in artificial intelligence and machine learning

that really allowed, you know, you to use these distributed systems to be able to understand, you know, data that previously was just too computationally expensive to understand. And now we have a lot more on-device processing and we've got neural chips and all this other stuff. So how important was the timing, you know, of your insight and the availability of this data? Because, I mean, you know, Google's ambition was, you know, theoretically to organize all the world's information and to make it useful. And audio content never seemed to be, I mean, only recently did Google ad podcasts, but they had video, they had text, and that was kind of it. So clearly there was this kind of wide open lane for you to jump into with Otter. But what was it about the timing of that that made it seem like it was right to actually go down that path?

Yeah, that's a good question. Timing is super critical here. Obviously, speech recognition is not a new topic. People have been working on that for like at least 30 years. I mean, we had Star Wars and they were talking to C3PO, you know? Like, I mean, like the idea is not new. The idea is not new, but the problem had been super hard, right? There are prior other companies like a nuance, you know, Google Voice, the Amazon, Apple Siri.

However, if you look at those systems, you know, when we started in 2016, when we talked to venture capitalists, you know, they said, hey, why are you doing this? Isn't new ones already doing it? It's an Lexon, Siri, handling that. So we actually tested their system when we started the company, and we found that if we use their API for our meetings, the accuracy is very bad. It's really not usable.

So the problem is that their model is actually built for simple questions or simple commands, like, what's the weather tomorrow? Hey, Siri, you know, set alarm at 3 p.m. It's a one single speaker, short question. If you use that model for a multi-speaker conversation, it's actually a break stop. It doesn't work. So that showed us that it's actually a great opportunity because their system doesn't work. So it gives us a chance to build something better. But of course, the timing matters. If we started this 10 years ago or even five years earlier, we wouldn't be able to accomplish what we are doing right now.

because there are two parts. One is the deep learning technology, and secondly is the price of computing resources, both the CPU and storage and bandwidths. So now the deep learning technology is more advanced. You know, we're also, you know, we, of course, we have to stand on the shoulder of giants And we build our own deep learning models,

trained our system with millions of hours of audio data. By the way, which giants are you standing on right now? Well, there's a lot of research, right? It's a lot of papers, you know, we can learn from. But we do have to invent a lot of things ourselves because, you know, voice and speech, it's so complicated. English is hard. The variation is so...

Do you support other languages also? Or is that just English for now? Right now in our product, we only support English. Okay. But we do have internal research going on to support other languages in the future. Maybe like as you're describing this, I'm realizing that I actually have a pretty like enormous blind spot in terms of what the organizational nature. of Otter is. Of course, I experienced it through the front end that, you know, Simon, I think, is responsible for. At least I send him a lot of feedback about the front end. And it sort of, you know,

comes to me as a, I don't know, as a product that works. But there's so much, and I think this is the thing that I really want people to understand out of this conversation and specifically based on your background is how an organization like Otter does what it does and provides the service that it does, which becomes so, I mean, like Google Maps, right? Like, if we just take that metaphor, the fact that maps, digital maps, works as well as they do, as seamlessly as they do, as intuitively as they do, where you can pinch and zoom and the data just kind of like flows in and it, it's, it's, I don't know, it's sort of self-evident. In a similar way, the way in which, you know, otter is always getting better, but it still is quite good now,

when it does the transcription, when it understands what I'm saying, when I upload a new piece of audio and it recognizes my voice and it identifies me in a transcript and says, this is Chris Messina saying this. What are the things that your team kind of focuses on? How is Otter, I guess, conceived as a business and as an organization? What are the different groups and what are they working on? Yeah, in terms of the team organization, we have product team, we have a design team, we have AI, technology team, and engineering team.

So, well, this is, I guess, this is the advantage of a small startup. We're actually super small. We're still under 50 people now. For many years, we build most of the stuff with less than 20 people. So the teams are small, agile, and very close, tight interaction and collaboration between ourselves. Of course, you know, this is, we build a technology, but we need to build a a user experience, a user interface, that's intuitive, that's simple for non-technical people, right?

So most people, when they use it, you know, nobody is thinking about the convolutional neural network with deep learning, right? They don't care. All they need to, all they care about is do we solve their problem. So, well, another interesting point is that we actually eat our own dog food. We use otter every single day for every single meeting we have ourselves. So we experience the pain as well as the pleasure. The end of the pleasure, of course.

Yeah. So when we built, when we started the company, you know, we wanted to build a product that we need ourselves. And when we solve our own pain, we're pretty sure that in the millions of other people had similar pains. So we, hopefully of the pleasure, actually, I did pin a tweet that links to the live transcription that is happening now on Otter. I believe Simon set this up.

And so if you guys want to go check it out, this is the real deal. And by the way, as someone that has been doing audio for however many years, now. It's the best that I've seen hands down. I've been looking for transcription forever, but transcription has never worked in terms of there being multiple speakers or a siren going on in the background, if you can hear that. And so, yeah, Otter almost has felt like a miracle to me since I was turned on to it. So sorry, please go ahead. Thank you. It's absolutely a very hard problem.

You know, with my accent, for example, you know, we have to train the model really hard to be able to handle all kinds of different accents. You know, even in the U.S., right, there are people from New York, from Texas. New Orleans or from Georgia. Right. And, and, and, and, and, keep going, Chris, Chris, do more, do more exits. Sorry, go on. So, so, okay, we can hire you to, to test our system and see how many different accents can we support, right? People from Asia, in the Silicon Valley, it's, you know, it's a full of immigrants.

So, we have to support different accents. Is that what happens, by the way? Like, is there a model for each person or is it based on accent? Or I know I'm asking very dumb and naive questions, but, you know, like, it just feels like within English itself, there's so much variation. And the fact that you guys have such a accurate, like, transcription service. And I want to get into like where that leads next and also, you know, of course, what the news was today. But getting to that level of fidelity, again, as Brian said, compared to a lot of other, you know, players out in the space, you guys have done something special and different. I guess I'm just trying to get at what differentiates your approach from others.

Well, that's the sort of the secret sauce of our AI team. On a high level, we build a large-scale system that are constantly learning from the internet. There are tons of audio data. Like Reddit or like audio data, like podcasts and things like that. It's a combination of everything. You know, podcasts, the TV shows, their audiobooks, their, you know, White House press conferences. Yeah, literally, you know, early last year, you know, when WHO and the White House were doing their daily... The briefings.

The briefings. We actually transcribed lots of those. cause. And our system learned new words like COVID, right? You know, this is a new word that didn't exist in 2019. Right. So, you know, we build a system. Or hydrochloroquine or something, right?

Yeah, dynamically learn all those words. Wow. Learn new company names, right? Silicon Valley, every day there are new startups are being created. And how much of that is manual training versus the system sort of like realizing that these words are being used in a way that's unfamiliar? And so therefore it sort of like pegs it as, you know, a new noun or something. Yeah, it's a combination of those. You know, we also, in order also has a feature called custom vocabulary that allows users to enter their own words into order so that order can recognize them.

And are those vocabularies private? Oh, those those are private. Of course, for the team, for the team product is shared across a team. You know, and suppose you have a team that. If you're like in the medical profession or even like in the tech world, for example, if I'm talking about activity pub or something. Absolutely. You know, absolutely.

It's a special proper noun. And within my team, we all use the same, you know, or we have a special internal code words or, you know, product names, you know, or something. I could see that being very useful to have that shared vocabulary that is not generally shared. Absolutely. You know, your acronyms, terminology, people's names. You know, people's names actually are difficult to recognize, especially, you know, for non-native English speakers, you know, people coming from foreign countries, you know, their names may not be available in

a standard English dictionary. Got it, right. Okay. So I think we've sort of set the stage in terms of What makes Otter different, why it's an interesting technology, what you guys have been working on. Talk to us about this moment that today you've got this announcement. Tell us what that announcement is and also why it's so well, at least in my perspective, like, you know, timed for the world that we're finding ourselves living in. Yeah, today we announced Otter Assistant for Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Cisco WebEx. A few months ago, we released other systems for Zoom. So now, other systems can work with all the major video conferencing system.

This is very strategic in a sense that we support all major video conferencing systems, and it's a platform agnostic product. But users may use one Microsoft team for some customers and use Google Meet for some other people they meet. So they can use order for all those meetings and have other meeting notes available in one central place. They can share with their colleagues. They can search for things no matter what platform they use. to have that meeting. So it can be really interesting for a lot of enterprises,

large or small. We've seen people use it in many different ways. There are salespeople who use it, customer support, people, recruiters, designers, when they do their user interview, lots of them use order. internal product managers, use it for project management meetings.

So it's pretty broad. The goal is to provide order as a daily tool people can easily use to improve their collaboration and communication. I mean, it seems like, so one of the things that I think is so relevant about this, you know, what is the timeliness of it? Now, those of us who kind of, you know, live in the future or the cusp of, I think are used to doing, you know, video calls, audio calls. Obviously, over the last year with the pandemic, now many, many, many millions of more people are getting into that space. But the idea, I think, for a lot of people, that you

could have an automatic transcription that's powered by AI that is available for all of your calls is probably still a very novel concept for the vast majority of people. So what I'm, you know, curious about, given that we live a little bit on the future edge of this is one I want to acknowledge, you know, today's announcement in launch. And that's a big deal by being a non-platform-centric. I do think that I had a thought about how Otter and Zoom seemed to be very closely coupled. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. Like I wonder, you know, what about all these other platforms? But the fact that you can obviously run this over any, you know, video or audio stream is significant. I guess my question starts to think about, well, where does this go next? And I don't, you know, I don't want to

you know, like share anything obviously that you don't feel comfortable with, but just as with maps enabled an entirely new set of business use cases for discovery, for exploration, for, I mean, open source data mining, et cetera, what are the next types of applications of voice that you see, you know, coming and voice transcription in particular? Because everything you just described is just getting the raw material of insights. The next step would be to, as you said, like, whether it's in interviews or it's with product managers, being able to provide a layer of intelligence on top of that that makes sense of the conversations that people are having.

That's a big topic. First of all, order, as you mentioned, is a new concept. We're creating a new product category here. We so far have transcribed more than 150 million meetings. However, in the world, I don't know, it's probably like a billion meetings are happening. It's kind of sad to think about how much of one's adult life is spent in meetings. Yeah, right.

We've done in the survey and also a lot of our studies show that people spend tons of their time in meetings. Like in large enterprises, managers probably spend at least 30 or 40 percent of the time in meetings. And I just think about the cost of that time. span. But oftentimes people miscommunicate. They don't remember what happened in meetings. Then they have to schedule another meeting to resolve what they discussed last time. So, you know, having a tool like otter. I feel like you'd have a TV show about that or something, maybe, you know. Well, no, you know, but Chris, like that to me is the most powerful thing about this is that what we're describing is, you know, half of like the work environment is in these meetings, but they're not

quantifiable, they're not searchable. Think about the fact that all of this time spent in meetings is now something that you can go back to and search for data points, search for you know, as opposed to just

being this sort of thing that unless someone took copious notes about it, as he's saying, like someone remembers it this way or something. Like what if the things where we're kicking back and forth ideas is actually something that you can put into spreadsheets and you can search for it and you can put into categories and things like that.

Like that's actually amazingly powerful just for that very specific business use case. A hundred percent, right? I mean, in some ways, that's what Slack offers in terms of what was happening in email conversations. Now you bring that together into, you know, conversations that are searchable where you can go back and be like, oh, what was that file that was sent a week ago or something? And as opposed to trying to find it, you know, in this asynchronous format of content. Now you're actually getting it from a synchronous format. And it can, contains a lot more context because of the way in which people, I think, are communicating in real time and shaping that meaning at the point of expression, right? Like, that's the whole aspect of communication. And so I, anyways, I totally agree with you. And that's why I guess I'm thinking forward. Once organizations have this trove of data, aside from, you know, programming all of their automated bots and whatever. And I suppose this is where Brett should come up and tell us about some of the voice bot stuff that he's been, you know, researching for years. But, having all that data and information.

And, you know, I don't know where, maybe, maybe, you know, Otter has plans for an API or something like that. Organizations could make use of this information and this data in a way that currently just isn't even possible. It hasn't been done. Yeah, there's a lot of potential things that can happen. The integration of Otter with people's, the daily. workflow. People use all kinds of tools and a calendar, of course, and people use calendar to schedule meetings. The other already has a good integration with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook so that once you turn it on, you know, other can automatically join your meeting.

I was going to ask about that. Like, what about it? From a cultural perspective, you know, one of the things that I've noticed is that calendar links are becoming a little bit more commonplace. they're not as offensive, you know, when someone sends it to you and you're like, oh, I need to like go find a time on your calendar. What the heck? Like that's becoming more normal and acceptable. How normal do you think it will be? I mean, essentially for people in the future to walk around, I mean, walk around in a virtual metaverse sort of sense, you know, with their bots on their shoulders when they walk into meetings, right? Like, I'll have my otter bot or I'll have like my macro tool or whatever it is. Yeah. You know,

is that something that you find resistance to or are people becoming more accepting of a bunch of different bots joining meetings that are your note takers? I think it's still a new concept today. So some people may find it a little weird to have a bot joining their meetings. Some people are nervous about it. And am I being recorded? Am I, you know, is it like that law that you can't record phone calls unless everyone's aware of it?

Yeah, yeah. It's a two-party consent and you want to make sure everybody agrees. But our view is that, you know, people will become comfortable. And people in a few years, it will feel weird if there is no body helping them. Because then it's too much responsibility for them to remember what happened. You know, why isn't there a secretary or, you know, an utter assistant helping them? So I think in a few years, people will take it for granted that all their meetings will be in a tool like order. And, of course, you know, earlier you asked, you know, in addition to the transcript, what else, you know, there will be, you know, conversation intelligence, there will be summarization, you know, recognize insights, recognize.

recognize action items, integrated with your task management software. You know, if you say, hey, I will deliver that by Monday. Okay, and we'll create a reminder for you. You put that into your, you know, Asana or other task management tools or put it on to your Google calendar, right? and send you a reminder at the right time. So how do you, I mean, like, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like I just, I feel like this needs to happen where the current process, I mean, even as you alluded to in the beginning where you started out with a paper notebook and you're writing

down the notes that you have and you're writing down the tasks and then, you know, but there's like a translation process that seems unnecessary in this world where you have a bot, you know, working on your behalf and tracking these things. So as you and I are having a conversation, if I, you know, state that I will do something or create a task, you know, my otterbot should basically like take care of that for me. So I guess how do you see, how are you defensive of your position? In other words, it seems kind of obvious that a Zoom or a Google meet or, you know, Microsoft Teams or whatever other, you know, audio and video platforms exist also see that opportunity. So speak to me a little bit about how you see yourself defending against those types of encroachments on your core business. Yeah, that's a good question.

We were asked a question all the time by our investors. Why? Because, you know, they, you know, hey, why should I invest in order? You know, today's announcement is actually a really strategic move. It further established order as a cross-platform product. You know, you ask, hey, what if Zoom, Google, does the same thing, but they only support their own platform. They, you know, they don't want to support other platforms because they're competitors.

Yeah, right. Right. But a user can use any tool. And there are another aspect. Actually, we're having a hybrid working mode now. Some people return to office. So some meetings are happy, are in person now. And some meetings are remote on Zoom or Microsoft team.

So how do you support both seamlessly? Right. This is where Otter is having some advantage. Because order actually has a good mobile app on both iPhone and Android. Right now, actually, Otter is being featured on Apple App Store in the productivity category. Congratulations. Right now. Yeah, it's a, it's a, I think they call it one of their favorite apps on Apple App Store.

Well, that's got to help. So no matter how you're conduct your meeting, either in person or on Zoom or on teams or meet or WebEx, Otter can support you. So that's a important strategy. Yeah, I mean, just to build on that point. And then I think we'll wrap on the segment. But I've now started to get into some of these hybrid meetings, you know, where there's a set of people who are in an office someplace. You know, and we, you know, on the Republic team, we're actually distributing.

And so there's a bunch of folks in New York and Miami and other places. And when there are, you know, groups of people, you know, three or four people who are live in person face to face and then there's like four of us, you know, on Zoom, inevitably, the people on Zoom, and I know this is a very, you know, cultural thing, get kind of ignored to some degree. And I can imagine what a game changer otter and live transcription would be for those moments. Because not only can you hear what's going on in the office where people are face to face and having that, you know, human experience.

But now there's a way to sort of refer back to and say, oh, and so-and-so, and you know the person who said it, even though you weren't in the room because of the speaker identification, you know, when so-and-so said this, you know, that means that we need to work on this or this is like the next set of tasks or whatever. So I don't know, I just, I find that this is like so timely in that respect. And anyways, I'm really glad you have that. And you are cross-platform.

Absolutely. You mentioned speaker identification. That's actually a very sophisticated piece of technology. We are able to identify speakers accurately. And if you look at the outer notes, the auto actually shows you the speaking time for each speaker. Right, the percentage. Right now is afterwards.

Actually, we could make it a real time as well. So it would be interesting. I know that I've been in this conversation. So, you know. It can help people. Yeah. you know, just to give you a little reminder, okay, maybe you spend too much time talking, give other people some chance to speak up.

And also you can track, you know, actually, you know, how much time you spend on each topic. You know, who asks the question, who answer the questions. You know, there's tons of insights can be extracted out of meetings. So, okay. That can help people actually improve their meeting. Last question in terms of like where you see this going. Do you see Otter possibly becoming more of like a facilitator of good meeting etiquette? Because like what you just said, I think is so cool if Otter is able to tell what you're talking about and then say, okay, you allotted 15 minutes for this.

You know, you're at 20 minutes. And Otter's like, it's time. It's time to move on. Like we got other things to talk about because that would be so useful. That would be worth its weight in gold or Bitcoin, whatever. I think longer term, yeah, Otter can become a facilitator. right now it's mostly passive but in a few years it can become active okay well I will leave it that and and I won't hold you to it but hopefully in the

next the next time we have you guys on here that's what you'll be announcing something along those lines I want to thank you guys for coming we're going to switch over to a slightly different topic now which is the yeah before you do that yeah I just wanted to say Sam, everybody from Otter. Thank you for coming on because Chris and I want to do more of this. We want to encourage folks that have news to come break the news with us.

And we thought this was a perfect one because we know the Otter folks. And also, if you're a listener to the show, you know, I've been experimenting with all of these various transcription and audio products. So we thought this was a great sort of news story to break. So others out there

listening, get in touch. And if it fits for what we've been talking about. We'd like to do something like this with your product if you've got news. Yes, totally. And thank you for that reminder because, you know, the auto team reached out and they wanted to come talk to all the folks who were here. They wanted to talk to us. And so that was, you know, an honor on our end.

And so we're really glad to make this happen. Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Brian. Of course, Simon is here. Simon has been doing a fantastic job leading the product team. And, you know, taking input from all users and continue. Yes, Simon, Simon, we do know that you're there.

And as always, you're always there. He's such a lurker. It's so great. But we love you, Simon. So thanks for putting this together, too. Yes. Yes. Okay.

Are you ready now, Brian? Yes. All right. You shake it out? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's tee it up. Okay.

And by the way, Sam, Simon, if you guys want to hang out, but by all means, you're welcome to stick around. But we wanted to, or at least, you know, this is going to be a little bit of a different part of the, I don't know, the show, the conversation. You know, it's not every now and then that you hit a thousand, like, milestone, a thousand of whatever's. And in this case, this, you know, we're recording Brian's thousand, I can't even see the word. It's so big and impressive.

Thousandth episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. experience. Now, you know, I was, I was just kind of like tried to wrap my mind around this, you know, because you sort of like mentioned this a couple weeks ago and I was like, wow, that's like a really big deal. You know, and for several reasons, you know, one, most podcasts, as far as I understand, you know, end up maybe making it to the first or second or maybe fifth episode and then it peters out. You know, no one's listening, you know, you just kind of get, you know, bored or you get distracted by the things and it just doesn't go anywhere. So to do this a thousand times is, you know, demonstrates a little bit of insanity, but also a commitment,

you know, to the stories, to the narratives, to the arcs. And so, you know, I guess I want to, I went back and I actually, I did listen to the very first technical ride home experience. I've never done that and I won't do that. No. The preview music was like, oh, that's, that's an interesting choice. But more or less, the format has stayed the same. And I would say, you know, you've only kind of improved over that time, like a fine wine. essentially. So anyways, can I? Yeah, go ahead. Let me, let me, let me ask my question and then you can say whatever you want to say.

Sure. Which is, I guess I want to understand, you know, the origin story, you know, where this came from. Because like you, I've been, you know, a longtime reader of tech meme. As we learned in a previous episode, Gabe actually launched or at least, you know, was present at the first bar camp. And so, you know, he and I go way back 15, 16 years. And so Techmium is a staple. It's an institution, as far as I'm concerned, of Silicon Valley and the changes that have happened. I mean, that archive is gold. It's platinum.

It's, you know, it's the original NFTs. And so the fact that, you know, you decided, I don't know when or how you decided to take that format and turn it into a daily news show, just, you know, considering where you'd been. I don't know. Like, there's so much I want to go into in that. But that's what I want to start. I'll try to do that origin story as fast as I can. Sure. But I do, I remember when Tech Meme, reading about Tech Meme, it surfaced on TechCrunch.

Yeah. And they were buddies. Well, right. Gabe, I think I can choose it. I think he was living with Mike at the time. They were. They were, there were roommates. Yeah.

So from the day that it launched, it was the, you know, the first bookmark in my browser. I also remember the day that I joined Twitter. But I remember that so clearly. So for sure, tech meme from the day it launched was basically my heartbeat, checking the pulse of what was happening in tech. Really super fast. I founded companies before my first company was in 1999. So I've been in tech circles for over 20 years.

it lines up with my kids, my daughter's seven, six months before she was born, the plan was that I was going to be the stay-at-home dad, and I said, well, I need a project to keep myself occupied if I was going to do that, and I decided I was going to write a history of the Internet. And I did. The book exists. It's called How the Internet Happened, et cetera, et cetera. But to do the research for it, I just started reaching out to people to do interviews, and I recorded them, right?

And about five interviews into it, I was like, well, these interviews, if it gets in the book, it'll be like one sentence of this hour and a half long interview I did with one of the first engineers on the Internet Explorer team or something like that, right? And I was like, so why have that be nowhere? So I put them up as podcasts. I'd been a podcast fan since 2005 or six. Do you remember Ricky Jervase had a podcast really early on? Yes. That's how Carl Pilkington became famous and things like that. So I don't know.

It's one of those things where I didn't think too much about it. I was just like, well, I'll just put these interviews up on edited. and the iTunes team featured it the first day I launched it. We had a thousand listeners within 24 hours. You're a thousand true fans from the start. Exactly. Which, you know, those are the sort of luck things that, you know, you can't always plan for and things like that.

Did you know people on the iTunes podcast team? No, God, no. Organically, they just found you. I submitted it to iTunes and the next day it was featured. Just like that. So look, this is what I'm saying. Anyway, internet history podcast. I did about 200 interviews for that.

It was well respected. To this day, it still is. I mean, I think it gets as much as 50,000 downloads a month, even though I haven't done one. By the way, like, did you, I mean, yes, you were in the tech world, I suppose, but like, what was it that got you to have these interviews? Like, why did people say yes to you? I mean, two things, which is, number one, if you're in an industry long enough, you do know people. So, yes, I was able to be like, hey. You weren't in Silicon Valley.

No, no, no. That's true. But, I mean, you know, again, if you live long enough, the, the dumb people you meet when you're 22 end up being important people when you're 40. You know what I mean? I know that story. Yeah. Yeah. So there's that.

but then also, and I, this is maybe a life hack for people. Like some of the people that I reached out to early on, their stories hadn't been told. So when I reached out to them and I was like, I'll let you talk for an hour in your own words, and I won't edit it. And so, you know, later on, as it snowballed, then I'm able to get people that were important where it's like, well, oh, you spoke to this person. Well, then I'll do it too. But early on, the key hack was, is that, well, no one's ever asked me to tell my son.

of this, right? So I think that's an interesting hack for, I don't know, doing history or research or things like that. Yeah, just, you know, if you can find a niche where no one's ever, you know, kind of dug up the dirt before, if you're the first one to do that, it's kind of not that hard, but also I have no idea why the first people said yes. Anyway, internet history podcast, well respected, enough. that I had been approached by a media brand.

When would this have been? Around the time Max was born, so 2016, so right, maybe four years ago. We were in talks that I was going to do a weekly tech news podcast where, again, you just get a bunch of people around a table and let's talk about what happened this week in the world of tech. There's a million of those. And I would have done it.

It didn't end up happening. but I would have done it. But as we were having the discussions, I was talking to Gabe Rivera, who is the founder and owner of tech meme. I've been friends with him for over a decade. How did you connect with him? I literally don't remember.

But I mean, my wife and I are friends with he and his wife. We're fairly close to the point where it's far beyond any sort of working relationship. To the point where I think it was his wife that suggested it, because I said to Gabe, I was like, if I do this podcast, I'm just going to be reading tech meme every day and then just regurgitating the news of the day. And I think it was Ashley, I think we've given her credit for that before, where she was like, well, you should just do a tech meme podcast.

And Gabe and I were like, well, that's not a dumb idea. And I think we both at the same time understood that what tech meme is good for is that you can check it any hour of the day and find out what you missed. And like I say that at the beginning of every show, here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It would make no sense to do a TechMeme podcast any other way other than a daily show, right? Right, right. And also a fast in and out sort of thing.

TechMeme is a news aggregator. And so it's just news aggregation where I'm reading you the stuff that happened, you know. So yeah, we just did it. We have a really simple deal where I just licensed the brand to be used as a podcast, and I kick back some revenue to TechMeme, and that's it. One of the things that you said from listening to that first episode, I'm not trained in any of this, in media, in performing, in broadcasting, anything like that. The reason I can't listen to those first episodes is one of the things that I

learned in that first month of doing it was that I had to perform it, which sounds dumb. But if you listen to those first episodes, I think they sound bad because I think it sounds like I'm reading. I was going to say, so what is the difference actually? And I think this is the right moment for you to share a little bit about this between like the writing, right? And, you know, let's get it to, because what just came to my mind is maybe the way that you write the show is identical to the very first day. But the way, as you said, you perform it, I think that is the difference. Like there is a way of both writing audio content or content meant for audio that doesn't come across as though it's being read. And then there's also the performance aspect where you can be reading it, but there is actually a performance.

So how has your writing and your performance, you know, evolved or changed? So, you know, if you want to talk about metrics, so if we're doing, if it's a thousand episodes, I know when I wake up every morning, I have to write at least 2,500 words to make 15 minutes of audio. And some days I go way over that and some days I struggle to hit that. But so, you know, if we've done a thousand episodes, that means I've written two and a half million words at least for this show in about three years. It would be a very chaotic book if you compile all that, but yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. I have all the files. I save all this stuff. Who knows?

We should send it to Otter and have them do an analysis of it. Well, also, someone should train my voice. I offered that. Did we do that to Descript? Right. We did it with the script, but I was like, you know, there's probably very few people, except for the audiobook people, that there is more of my voice out there. Right.

You know, just as a thing. Okay. What was the question again? Back to your, basically the way that you compose the daily show, the content. You were saying something about stats and about analytics and about the improvements over time. So what it is, is I do have access to the tech meme back end. Tech meme has, I think about a dozen editors that work around the clock. Gabe has a whole software system for surfacing stories. And, you know, like, first of all, the editors actually argue about what should be top of page, what's important, what we should cover, what we shouldn't cover.

I mean, this is a whole separate conversation. We got to have a game on this. A whole separate conversation. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. But the reason that I say that is, number one, I can wake up every morning and I can go in the Slack channel and I can see what they've been arguing about. I can see what is surfacing. And also the back end, it shows you like, I'm sort of imagining like the minority report people that are in that bath.

you know, kind of like in the ball comes down? No. No. It's because part of it is automated where what we call chatter, like stories will go to the top of the page if there's enough chatter about it. That's all like algorithmic and like linking cross. Okay, I see. But then the editors can put their thumb on the scale on that sort of thing.

That's the thing that's interesting. Yeah. I would be remiss if I didn't say that I am standing on their shoulders. Like I can wake up and be like, well, this is what we're going to cover today. The difference is that because I am the way I am, I've been obsessively reading about all of the stuff for 20 years so that I'll wake up in the morning and I'll check Twitter and I'll see something and I'll be like, all right, there we go.

That's my lead story and I'll have a take on it. So on a good day, things will pop and I'll be like, well, that's it. And I've got this is how we're going to frame it. This is what we're going to do. And then the thing that I like to do about it is also, you know, I don't, my job is not to give you what Brian thinks about the news. My job, number one, is to give you the news. Now, there are ways to editorialize that are not me saying what I think, but if there's different takes on it, that's what, you know, reading the tweets are. You amplify the different perspectives.

So that's what I love the most is that it's not just reading the headlines. and like, you know, a robot can do that. It's also, here's the context. And then here's the conversation. I love nothing more than when there's something that's happened. And then I can be like, well, here's what someone says about this. And here's what someone says in opposition to this. And here are the different viewpoints.

Like, that's what I feel like is valuable. How much are you kind of, I think this is like an interesting, like, question and point, which is how much are you reflecting what you believe to be the interests of your audience and your listeners? How much are you reflecting your own biases? and interests. Obviously, as you said, you kind of amplify different, you know, points of view. And how much of that is based on maybe like intuition versus like surveying, surveying, or asking your audience? You know, how do you know which things to sort of pluck out of the tech meme, you know, bin, to put forward? I don't know. It's like pornography. I know it when I see it.

But I would say that I try very hard to have Brian's take only be 10% of it, right? I'm not going to lie and say that sometimes, you know, clearly over 12% ready. Right, right, right. But that's not my job. And, you know, if you read comments and things like that, like, you know, I'll always be accused of, well, you're even dumb things. Like you're an Apple fanboy or you hate Apple or you know. I love that like you've gotten both of that. So that means you're doing a good job.

Right, right. For everything that you can possibly imagine. So primarily, I just want to give you whatever. happened, and then I want to give you what the conversation is in Silicon Valley, so that whether I agree with what people's takes are, is not as important as I want you to know the takes that might be driving what people are talking about and thinking about, right? So I will 100% err on the side of giving all sides of the conversation or the most prominent side of the conversation, even if I personally disagree with it, because that's the point.

Like, what's driving the narrative is what I'm trying to inform people about. And how much of that is just, like, you know, sort of resident in the ram of your brain versus, like, I don't know if you have notes or systems or some amazing like Rome, you know, or Nottinger database, or is this all just spontaneous? Well, that's why we need to do an episode where you talk about your workflow, because I don't have tools and things like that. I literally wake up in the morning and by 11 o'clock, I've written the show and I know what to do. So, but I'm not saying that I'm like a fucking savant or something like that.

It's just that I've been paying attention to this stuff for 20 years. Well, but when you and I've had this conversation, one of the things that your brain does is it needs to put things into a sequential order. Right. And it explains them because I feel like there was, I don't know what it was. We were working on something and there was a little more chaos to the order of the thing. And you were like, I don't get this. I don't understand it. I was like, whoa, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you're like, this doesn't make sense. And I think that linearity, you know, the fact that you did the internet history, you know, book just. Right. It's cause and effect and cause and effect and cause and effect sort of ad infinitum riding at the bleeding edge of what is happening in the world of tech. I will, I will cop to that in the sense that. I am a history nerd before any other nerd. I have lots of nerddoms, but I'm a history nerd first. My wife is in the room and we can bring her up at the end if you want to ask her.

What has been for her? I literally, I go to bed every night listening to history audiobooks just because when she asked me about it, I'm like, it just makes my brain feel good to hear, to put things in order. My daughter, my seven-year-old daughter is obsessed with Minecraft and what she will do, if you give her the opportunity at the drop of the hat, she'll tell you, well, by the way, wolves weren't in Minecraft until version 3.2, blah, blah, blah. And when she does stuff like that,

and she'll give you like a 20-minute long thing, I'm like, girl, I know. Your brain is my brain. It makes you feel good to understand that this became before this and that and the other thing. So I just think that accidentally, I have a job that fits my psychosis. Same.

Yeah, mostly. Yeah. I mean, the fact that I read and then tweet, like, release notes, I mean, clearly you and I have something going on that's, you know, similar dysfunction. Let me hit one thing that we mentioned at the beginning because I think this is important is I wasn't trained for this. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a broadcaster.

But once literally two weeks into the show, I realized that what I had to do was perform it. And it felt dumb to me at the beginning. But if you listen to the show, I'd like to think that you think that I've done it all the way through without taking a break and doing any edits or anything. Yes. It's because if you don't do it right and I've had other people try to do it and they can't do it right and you haven't heard them because there's other people that we've tried to have fill in it. If it just sounds like it's being read, then it's dumb. And so I'm not an actor, I'm not anything like that.

The biggest breakthrough I had was I had to perform it. I had to read it like I wasn't reading it. And once I got that, then it also was more freeing in terms of, it's just like, it sounds better to listen to, but also it's me like not just reading from a fucking script. Do you know what I mean? I know what you mean, but I want to know. I don't know how I can describe it. I don't know how I can describe it. Like, do you write it a certain way? And like, because I feel like I've actually, yeah, so, because I remember when we started doing the show on

Clubhouse and you sent me your scripts, I could hear your voice in my brain. You know, of course, that is how much I've listened to the show. But like, and, and, and yet I was not able to speak it in the way that you, you know, speak it. And so you're able to obviously carry forth your, your language and the way that you express things in a way that also catered. to the tone. I mean, it's funny, you know, this is the kind of stuff that we were talking about

with Sam before, but obviously you have your own intonation and the way that you write the thing is the way that you speak the thing. And so once you were able to unify those two modes of expression, one, you're able to write the thing in advance,

which is necessary so that, you know, because when I try to just extemporaneously say things, I just, I repeat myself and I sound stupid, et cetera. So you do need the script. Ditto.

But you need to be able to do it in a way that doesn't come across as though it's dead and flat. So that totally makes sense. So did you see a change in, you know, listenership or audience engagement once you embrace that? Hard to say because, again, I had that, you know, breakthrough two weeks in, you know, the first month we maybe have, we maybe had 5,000 listeners.

And so, you know, we're around 50,000 now. So it's, you know, it's hard to say what grew and what didn't and what hit. what didn't. I don't know the answer to that. But I 100% believe that the reason I mentioned Howard Stern at the beginning of this. I'm a child of Howard Stern and Ira Glass

even though I again wasn't a broadcaster or anything like that. Or Terry Gross too, where all three of those broadcasters are like natural, right? They're not stenotarian. They're not like I'm reading the news.

Hello, this is NBC Nightly. Like, that's not... So I just... You know, they always say about podcasting is that it's a very intimate medium. You feel like people are your friends. I'm not... I don't want to be your friend because my job is to give you the news.

But at the same time, I'm not Lester Holt or somebody. You know what I mean? So I have to get that middle ground. And as dumb as it is, and I sound like I'm like on Inside the Actors Studio or whatever, that was such a breakthrough for me. And then it made it so much easier where it's like, well, just talk, just write it for how you talk and perform it that way. And then you're good.

All right. So I feel like we've covered the format pretty well. And also basically like what you do and how you do it. What can you say about any of the, I don't know, the consequences or the results or the opportunities or access or whatever else that maybe came as a result of this? You know, it's, obviously you also rode the wave of podcasting, you know, before it was cool and sort of like the streaming wars were picking up. And before Spotify had exclusives and bought Roger Rogan. So what has been the experience for you over these past thousand issues or episodes? I think I said to someone on Twitter today or yesterday that I feel like I'm, you know how Indiana Jones pulls the hat out from under the door as it's, uh, yeah, I think I got in on the last chance to get in on podcasting.

First of all, let me take this opportunity to say that it blows my mind that 50,000 people make me a daily habit. Think of how crazy that is, Chris. Yeah. Okay, but, okay, this might be humble braggy. But when I do the show every day and I get done at like two or whenever, and then it's like I hit publish and it's like, I'm here in my house by myself. and I go take the dog for a walk around. But then sometimes I remind myself that, like, you know, right now probably 3,000 people at this very second

are listening to your voice. Right now, if I went into the stats, probably 1,000 people downloaded today's episode in the last hour and are probably listening to it right now. So, like, that's fucked up. And I feel so thankful to all of you for putting up with me. and I'm unbelievably grateful for that. So let me take that opportunity to say that.

I mean, on behalf of all the listeners, thank you. Thank you for doing this day and day out. I would say this. I think that the show obviously fills a niche for people. I've been told personally by certain folks that the entire C-suite of certain fan companies listen every day. and there's big people in the world of tech that I know. Listen, I've never been recognized by my face, thank God,

because I try to keep that out of the thing. But I have many, many times been recognized by my voice, and that's a weird thing, where I'll be at a conference back when we had those and meetups and things like that. And people will turn around and be like, what? Wait a minute. You're that guy. Exactly.

So that's crazy. Yes, I just, here's the thing. I like being able to keep people informed about their industry. When I think of who's listening to me, I think of someone in a C-suite at a fan company. I think of a dev independent working to try to make a living, people in the trenches working at startups, you know, I'm just trying to be like,

here's what's happening in your industry. And that's, you know, like... Okay, so this is a critical point, right? Because on the one hand, we started out talking about the internet history podcast. And that was all about getting people who have done these things where you look back and you talk about like Netscape or you talk about like, you know,

other things that people have done in the tech world. And you're getting their perspective with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that the things that they did impacted the world. And, of course, they want to talk about it. Now, what you're describing is wanting to equip all of the people that you just described with information. What is it that drives you to do that? Why do you think that's important? And what function does the Daily Show serve to the industry, would you say?

You might want to invite Lisa up onto the stage. But let me put it this way. The best days are the days when I wake up and I check my phone. And before I get in the shower, I see a story and I'm like, oh, shit. I can't wait to tell people about this. Sometimes when the show goes 20 minutes, 22 minutes or whatever, it's because I literally can't cut stuff. I do cut things for editorial reasons and things like that.

But I get so excited to be like, can you believe this happened? Can you, did you know that this exists? Like, I love it. Like, I legitimately love it. So I feel privileged to be like, I get to tell you about something that you didn't know. I don't know. Like, so. Is this something that or a behavior that you had earlier in your life in terms of being sort of like the person who progenates information?

No, I don't think so. I mean, I haven't had a job like this before at all. Well, I mean, this is the job that you gave to yourself. By the way, I did send Lisa an invitation, so if Twitter spaces works. Yeah, maybe she fell asleep. That's true. It's late over there. Well, okay.

I guess so my question is kind of, you know, what are your takeaways from these thousand episodes? Like, you know, it's been three years that you've been doing this more or less doing with a few breaks here and there. But you're in the trenches. You're, you know, at the forefront of this thing. You know, it's sort of like, you know, we've had a pandemic during this time. Like, there are many, many, you know, there's the whole thing with, you know, Trump and the election and politics and tech becoming such a central part of the most of humanity's experience.

And you've been there kind of, you know, providing that context. You know, it's funny that you say that I wish I had done it longer. Huh. I wish we were celebrating a decade, you know, because we may be someday. Well, hopefully, you know, knock wood, let's all be here a decade from now. Right. I am actually grateful because of the politics stuff, and we've sort of obliquely talked about this on the show that I try to keep politics out of it. Yeah.

Like, I feel like it's a safe space for me that I don't have to wake up every day normally and worry about politics, right? and I feel like that's sort of been that's been a blessing for me personally and also I feel like that that's kind of been a guiding imperative of what I'm trying to do which is like all right I have this narrow lane and I need to do my best in this narrow lane

you know I wish that I had been doing it longer because we are at sort of like this if you want me to talk about like where tech is. We're at this sort of like maximalist peak with tech where it's almost, if you know like art history, we're sort of in the Baroque era of tech where everything is as florid and crazy and insane as it could possibly be. And, you know, someday down the road,

there's going to be an impressionist era that's going to, you know, but like everything is. Right, right. Oh, 100%. Maybe we're already into that. But everything is so money and power and the impact on society. And so I kind of wish I was doing it back in 2012 when it was still like, I think that that's the problem that tech has as an industry is they still feel like they're the underdogs and so many people haven't realized that they're not. Tech is not the underdog anymore.

Not to go down this path too much, but what then? what then if the people who you're talking about and writing about every day took that role seriously or differently? I mean, that is in some respects, I don't mean to say the role of governments, but we think about, I think, you know, governments being in that serious position, whereas, you know, people who build tech, it's like, oh, it's just tech, but clearly it's not anymore. But there's a, there's a, there's a more mature way to be. Like, do you, you know the term noblesse oblige? Yes, it's a very, that French haute couture. Old school term, which is, actually, the easiest way to explain it is the Spider-Man thing,

which is with great power, great responsibility. But there used to be this idea that if you are rich and powerful, you're obligated to, you're obligated to wear it well. Yeah, yeah. And not be an asshole about it. And I think I said before on the show that my overarching bias on the show is, the only industry I've ever been into my whole life is tech. I believe in tech to my bones.

It's because I believe in humanity. Tech to me is the human race bettering itself, right? And so when tech is not as good as I want it to be, it offends me. And so my overarching bias is that I want tech to be as good as I think it should be. And I mean that morally, I mean that, you know, know, the products we do, you know, everything. I just want tech to be better and not better because it's bad now, but I want it to be its best self.

That's my bias. And like, I'm totally with you. And I mean, I think that's obviously what has drawn me and so many other people to it. One of the things that I just, I can't not think about now is the degree to which there is overlap between the quality of the individuals who are building that tech. and whether or not the tech achieves what you're describing. Like, for example, you know, you asked me, like, what's a story that would have been interesting to talk about, you know, over the last week or so? And, you know, it was not in my mind, but I have been hearing a lot about the stories, you know, in Afghanistan.

And I think that that is a fascinating moment in time to think about all these assumptions that we've made about tech and technology being used, let's say, by governments, suddenly being used by government or potential government, which is, not going, like, has not been recognized or has been recognized as being, you know, a negative actor in the world or, you know. Yeah, the idea that that Twitter or Facebook might have to turn over the official Afghan accounts. Right. To the Taliban. Right. Exactly. I mean, I mean, you, you and I were around for when the Arab Spring happened and, and everyone credited Twitter with that. And, but, but, you know, 20 years ago when the Afghan war started, there was no social media. And so the, it's funny to be. And, you know, it's funny to be. And, you know, like, oh my God, the Taliban are using social media as a way to create legitimacy for their

government to create. But of course they are. That's the world we live in now. I think that's my point. And maybe the last question that I kind of want to ask, and then if you want to open it up, we can, is about what you sort of imagine for the next thousand episodes. Given where we are with tech, given what's happened, just in the last three years. years over the last thousand episodes. Like, you know, you mentioned sort of being in this baroque period. And I forget my art history in this moment. But like, you know, what are the next sequence, sequential things that you think are going to happen? I mean, you've been covering a lot about crypto, a lot about, you know, the ways in which tech is being weaponized,

the ways in which exploits are happening, you know, the way in which tech is being used against us. So where do you, where do you have optimism and hope? Where do you think this goes over the next thousand episodes? Well, it's entirely cyclical. Both you and I have been around for several cycles. There are cycles when the pretty people come in to get rich, and then there will be a bust. I don't know that tech has had its punk movement yet if we're going to use art history metaphors. Not the cup of punks, they don't qualify?

I'm saying... It's not really punk rock. I mean, it's... Yeah, I'm saying punk rock in the sense of like... anti-establishments. To me, yes. Yes, and?

Yes. I don't think. TBD. See, I don't think that crypto is as anti-establishment as crypto thinks it is. But whatever. It's just another type of establishment that's waiting to be established. I would think that there will be, everything is so big and Baroque right now that there's going to be a reaction that will be more.

Oh, fuck, what would the word be? Nialist? No, no. Actually, I would say more craft-based. More- Like craft beer? More, yeah, right. More human scale. Bespoke. There you go. That's it. Bespoke. It's where everything isn't, and it's already happening. I've been saying this for a few years now, and it's already true. It's not about going for a billion users for everything right now. Well, there's a biification, right? Because there's platforms like mirror.

at XYZ that are really exclusive. And then you have medium trying to figure out what it's doing against, you know, substack and trying to get all the users and all the subs and all the stuff. And there's a lot of people are just like, you know, I, it's putting too much of the financial benefits and upside kind of in the center of the thing. And I just, I want to. And I do think, tomatoes or something. I do think that that's what excites me about this creator economy idea, even though

what I don't like about the creator economy is all the platforms trying to basically grab it and domesticate it. But if the creator economy does pan out the right way, it will be sort of a DIY punk sort of thing. So that's what excites me about that. Maybe it won't turn out that way. But you know what, Chris, before we shut down, let's please do, let's open up if anybody, if anybody listening has questions. You can raise your hand now, actually. Yeah, about how I do shit or why I do shit.

shit. Criticisms. Yeah. Feedback. Exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Now is your chance. You can raise your hand. And if nobody does, that's fine too. Oh, let's see. Let's bring up Steve. Oh, and we got, okay, we got a couple folks. Come on up. Hey, this is Steve Mozer.

Hey, Steve. Welcome. Yes. Hey, Steve. Yeah. I was just thinking a way to like to tie this whole show together, right? With the whole auditor bit and everything. Yeah.

And I thought it was fascinating. I love the feature in TechMean where it mentions you if you're mentioned in or LinkedIn. Oh, I love that too. If you have a tweet, right? The tweets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if they had that, but like, Otter was able to like pull out that. Ooh, audio mentions.

Oh, boy. Exactly. Oh, boy. Simon's still here. Like, tweet at somebody that, hey, I mentioned you in the TechMean podcast. Like, just make a really easy thing to share the snippet that you, you, you quote. That'd be great. Yeah, there you.

Simon, you're listening? Yeah, go ahead. You know, what Otter, people say about audio is that it has a discovery problem. Audio exists outside of things like SEO and things like that. So, you know, Otter. We'll call it the ears burning feature. Yeah, there you go. Otter has the opportunity to blow that wide open, I think.

Simon, can you speak to that? Can you guys hear me? Yes. So within order, you can add mention someone to another auto user. Verbally? With your voice? Or just, no, you have to like, not with your voice. Yeah.

Sorry. That's what we want. Yeah. Yeah. So in the roadmap. Yes, please. Well, actually, actually, this is, I think I'm able to talk about this, but I'm going to talk about anyways.

There is a beta program that. Otter is working on for groups. And TechMeme is going to be piloting one of these groups. And so perhaps, Simon, we can work on bringing in mentions of companies, of people, et cetera, and think about how we can surface that information, whether it's through Twitter or some other means. You know, because one of the things actually that would be really cool, you know, for looking over Brian's transcripts is to see all the people and the companies and the, you know, the proper nouns that he's mentioned over time and to see all the episodes where those things are mentioned. So perhaps that's something we can build into the groups beta that we're going to be piloting.

Absolutely. Sounds great. In the all-in podcast, there's like somebody that does like all this AI statistics of like who's dominating the conversation and everything. It's a topic in the podcast itself. So yeah, I'm just democratizing that for every podcast or every meeting or something. Totally. That's great. All right.

We got David up here. David. Hello. Oh, hey, real quick, Brian, congratulations. Thank you. I was going to say, I'm sure you had no struggles whatsoever to get 1,000 episode out of the window. So perhaps is it okay to share maybe, you know, that one time where you almost gave up and say, screw this, I'm going to skip one episode today. Yeah, can you share one of those moments, you know, because we're all trying to grind through our third episode,

and you got 1,000, it would be good. Yeah, what is your secret? And when did you always fail? It's funny. And this is, again, why I wish Lisa would. Because I say this to her sometimes, because, you know, the last year we've been working in the same room, it goes in waves.

And I swear to God, some days, it just fucking sucks. I can't talk right. The stories are uninteresting. I can't find enough stories to talk about. I don't know how or why. But if you've ever been like a regular exercise, like a runner or you go to the gym five days a week or whatever. Right, right, right.

Well, actually, you wouldn't know what to look at me now, but I was big into weights when I was in college. And it's just like someday you go to the gym, and what you could do yesterday, you just can't do today. There's no rhyme or reason for it. So it doesn't help some days when there's no news that I'm interested in. But I swear to God, just some days, like there's a weird moon out or something,

But like, you know, I wish sometimes I could release the unedited, you know, it'll take me 45 minutes to record a show because I'm like, my lips won't work. I'm like, I'll be sitting there trying to read something. I'm like, who fucking wrote that? I wrote that. What the fuck is this? He's fired. Yeah, it's just crazy how some days it goes so smooth and you're firing on all cylinders and some days, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. So all I can tell you is that if you do something long enough, I feel like that that's the way it goes.

you know, like Michael Phelps has days when he can't fucking swim. Tiger Wins. Yeah, that's just the way it goes. Lisa is up here now, so she can actually provide some color to this. Oh, boy. Lisa, what's it like to work next to a podcaster all day long? He's really loud. There's a lot of swearing that happens.

That never makes it in the show. I thought Monday was going to be one of those, was it Monday? It would be one of those days that he just throws in the towel because I think most of the listeners know that we spent the weekend moving a storage unit and been sitting with a lot of moldy boxes and questionable hotel rooms. And so Brian's throat on Monday, my voice has been terrible. Oh, I heard your voice. I was like, it sounds like he's got cold. No, it's because two of the hotel rooms were moldy. That's a whole other story. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think Monday was a close call. I even offered my services and he turned me down for delivering a show. You could probably do it even better than him at this point. But I would have no idea what I'm talking about. So that, you know. Yeah, but I could write it and you just have to read it. But just as a neutral observer, like do like I go into. like some sort of like a fugue state when I'm like like what happens because I do know that I get

angry until I can get it all out and then the editing is just the editing but like what do you think like my workflow is is it like is it chaotic or what do you think from as an observer it you have you stop and start a lot because I notice you know I'll be typing away in on an email or something like that. And then you're just like, come check out this me or come over here. You have to see this thing. And then you show me like a cat meme or something like that. And then you go back to like writing the show. And it's kind of stops and starts. And then when you go into recording, it's, you do plow through it. And you know, it's, you're very productive. It's quite surprising. But he always makes time on Tuesday and Fridays to watch for the street cleaner.

Oh, right. She's going to take a picture of me one day. Every time when this, now that we're working from home, every time the street cleaner goes by, she, I like a prairie dog, I sit up in my chair and I look out the window to see if our part of the street has been cleaned. That's her cracks her up every time. It's very cute.

Lisa, so while we got you here, any observations or any thoughts about that, you know, the change or about his approach or what you've just sort of witnessed, you know, as a, as a party present for these last thousand episodes? So, um, what I, what, and this may, isn't directly related to podcast, but sort of is, is that actually his, the relationship with, with Gabe, uh, has been lovely to watch. Brian, like he said, he was a super fan of tech meme for years upon years. And when we first moved to New York, Brian was kind of bored. And he applied for a job at TechMean.

Oh, that's right. That's right. And Gabe called you, and you were so excited. Like, I'm going to talk to Gabe or Farah. And then Gabe was basically like, why do you want this job? You're overqualified. And by the way, you're not getting the job. I totally forgot that.

That's the best kind of rejection. never. You're just far too good for us. And then it was like a few months later, we met up with him for whatever reason. Like, he took a chance and we met up with him in Hell's Kitchen for like a burger or something. No, I think before that, like M.G. Siegler was in town and we, and somebody else and we went to lunch or brunches. Anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like, what, 2011 or something? Yeah. Yeah. And so it's just been, it's been fun getting to know Gabe and Ashley and the development of that really. and seeing how the show has gone from A to Z and has come a long way.

It's been a great ride. That's awesome. We have one more person I brought up here. I pinned a tweet that came in from JCPenny's, at least that's their Twitter handle, that that was actually a really, really useful reminder, you know, for us, right? Because, you know, I live in Oakland and, of course, you guys are in New York, but we are are so deep in the tech world that it, you know, we are, we are fish in a fish pole and everything around us is just sort of of this world. And I feel like, so I will read this tweet, because

it's a good reminder, I think, of the broader audience, you know, of those 50,000 folks, you know, you mentioned many folks who are in the tech world, but it's the people who are adjacent to it and are trying to make sense of it, are trying to understand what is going on and how do these things connect. And, you know, I think, Brian, that's one of things you bring to this is that historical perspective that puts thing into context. So it's not just a matter of a bunch of facts being thrown at you, but it's like, this is how this relates to this. And this is why it's important. And this is like this other trend that might be happening. You know, pay attention to this. And I think it's useful. So this is what JCPennings writes. I'm 33 and drive

a concrete mixing truck in the middle of Kansas. I believe chaos is Kansas. Listen every day and sort of live vicariously in the tech world through your tech meme and internet history podcast. Makes me feel more connected to the white-collar world of Silicon Valley folks, you know. Thanks for that, and thanks for including me. So I just, I, by the way, J.C., just so you know, I remember you because you came on one of the early listener episodes, like, over a year ago when we were first starting to experiment with that. And I wanted you to come on and you were like, you were too shy to do it. You're like, I've got nothing to say, but I still remember you because, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I appreciate that. I think it is, it's important, right? This is the one thing I think that, that, you know, that you do provide as a service, which is helping people to have access to an insight and an inside into all of these things that are coming down the pipe that I think a lot of people, you know, they're mysterious. You know, they feel disconnected from. You know, it was funny. I got an email from my, my half-sister today. And, and, you know, she was, you know, talking about how she's a book coming on. She's like, I think I need a hashtag or something for that. And like, she's just like not connected to this world at all. And there are so many people who are not and are trying to make sense of it. And so I think that that is one of the things that is worth, I guess, keeping front and center in terms of why this is worth doing. But okay, so last question is from, oh boy, Anyebo. Did I say that right? Yeah, you said it right. Yes. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you guys for having me. Congratulations to both you guys. I had a question about something that Brian said. He mentioned that there's a lot of big

companies who C-Suite listen to them, and I could attest to that I was a lift driver for one of the Collison brothers. And I was playing the podcast. You actually mentioned Stripe. And he was like, what the hell is this? And it was a little bit of a funny moment. But I wanted to ask you. I wanted to X, you know, you do a good job of just talking about the facts and the stories and you generally give your pain, sometimes the bigger stories at the end. As the podcast grows more and it gets attention from the bigger tech companies, do you feel a need to maybe expand on that or limit that? Like, how do you feel about that? I've said before, I'm not a journalist, so I will never, and the reason I say this is because

I come from a family of journalists, so I respect. the profession. So I'm never going to claim to be that. But at the same time, that means I'm never going to claim to be 100% what's neutral, right? But at the same time,

I hope to God, and you all hold me to this, if I all of a sudden become too incitiv, insidery or something. I can't imagine that I would ever be that important that I'd be insidery. But like,

I'd like to just call everything neutral and a straight shooter. You know what I mean? So, if we're having the 2000th episode and you need to say, Brian, you're, you've become best friends with the Collison brothers and you're too

buddy buddy with them. Like, let me know. We'll do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. That's a hard thing to say because, again, Chris and I do know people, right? Right. But at the same time, at least the people that I'm friendly with would never take offense if I said something about their company or their fund or something that they disagreed with. Like one principle, or at least I feel like I think you and I are similar in this regard. And I think both you and I have that hope. And we want tech to have a positive impact on the world.

We want the humans building the tech to be held to a higher standard because of the impact that I can have. So when it comes to that insideriness, I don't know, I guess all the things that I would say about people on a podcast, I would say to their face. Yeah. I would hope that they would be open to that feedback and willing to take it. And, you know, you and I, Ryan, like today, I think had a conversation like behind the scenes about like the show and about how it's going. Yes. Yeah. And, you know, I feel like I've worked really hard to get to a place where I can provide that critical feedback while also, you know, being respectful and understanding that there needs to be that conversation that happens first and then there can be criticism if the criticism is warranted.

I think we come from the same place of seeing like how things happen and how they unfold. where blame or going to blame in the first order or the first case doesn't always result in understanding or making progress or moving forward. So, you know, I think that that criticism comes from a place of wanting to be helpful and generative, not from a place of wanting to cut other people down. But, you know, the other thing, maybe this is hubristic to say, but I've said this to people before. You know how in high school there was those kids that would go between clicks. You know, they weren't really the jocks. They weren't really the stoners. I always thought of myself as a chameleon and I really belonged to nine. Right. So, yeah. I feel like that was me in high school too. And I really feel like that that's me in the tech world where,

especially here in New York, I know VCs for 20 years, right? I know, like we were talking about earlier, Chris, where it's like the the weird kid that you meet when you're 22 ends up being the billionaire when you're 42. Like I know so many, of those people and none of them think, at least in my, from my perspective, and maybe this is hubrisic, no one thinks that I'm in that crowd. You know, I'm not necessarily an operator and not necessarily a VC. I'm not necessarily a journalist. I'm not necessarily fine. So I think if that's true, the longer I can hold on to that where no, I'm not clearly in any crowd, that's better for me to do my job, you know? Totally makes sense. And I agree with that. All right.

Let's bring this to a close. Any last thoughts that you'd like to share on this historic moment for you? No, but please, let's do another thousand at least. And I want to reiterate again that I can't thank people enough for putting me in your head every day. And this is the best job I've ever had. I've never been so professionally fulfilled than doing this podcast in particular. So I appreciate it, long made it last, and thank you for listening. Cheers to that.

Totally agree. And thank you for the last thousand episodes, and I look forward to listening to the next. Thanks, Brian. God bless you, everyone. Congrats, Brian. Awesome. Thanks. Later, everybody.

Bye, guys.