Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Aprés Spotify w/ Anchor Founder @mignano

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

Time for some deep analysis of the podcast industry. Is Spotify gonna take over all of audio? Is the blockchain useful for podcasting? What is the great Michael Mignano doing next, after leaving Spotify and Anchor? 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 Foundry, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Hey, Brian, how are you? A long time no speak. Yeah.

I know. How are you? Doing well. You still in the city? Yes. How about you? Nice. Yeah, well, I live in the Jersey side, but yes.

Yes. Still in the area. Well, hopefully our paths will cross again sometime soon. Maybe we'll find out about that tonight. Oh, cool. Okay. So I think I'll just kick us off and get us started because we've got tons to talk about. And anyways, I feel like this has been a long time in coming.

So welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. My name is Chris Messina. I'm joined by my co-host, Brian McCullough. And today we are joined by an old friend of mine, Mike McNano, who was the co-founder of Anchor, which was acquired in 2019 by Spotify. And it's funny, I was actually going through some of the old clippings on TechMeme, of course. There was a great story by Peter Kafka kind of talking about, the acquisition and why Daniel Eck was interested in acquiring it and essentially said we're

building a platform that provides a meaningful opportunity for creators, excites and engages our users, and builds the even more robust business model for Spotify in an industry we believe will become significantly larger when you add internet level monetization to it. And I think it's just, it's, you know, we're going to get into all in this, of course, but I think it's so relevant, I suppose, just for our conversation to sort of think back to what podcasting was, has been is in the process of becoming. And, you know, Mike, you've obviously been at the center of this, and your work on Anchor has been transformational.

The beginning of Anchor. Like, because, again, being in this industry, like, the idea that there were startups in the podcast space, I'm old enough to remember that that seemed crazy and things like that. So, you know, Mike, where did the idea for Anchor come from? Just tell us whatever. about your background and then we can get into how it all went down and

your time at Spotify. Sure. Well, maybe just one quick warning. I don't have a mute button. I don't know, maybe this new version that you mentioned. Chris is like maybe a little buggy. So I'm just going to warn you guys. I won't be able to mute at any point. It's not at the bottom. There's not so where the view button should be, it says request.

Oh, wow. You really are in a buggy version. Wow. Yeah. So it's like immature hour there. You're talking. Yeah. I'm not trying to be rude when you're talking. Yeah.

You know, I will say, so it's going to be like the three of us. So you don't need to worry. It's just, we'll keep it cool. But yeah, cool. Thanks for letting me know. Yeah, no worries, no worries. So, yeah, I mean, look, starting anchor feels like an eternity ago. It actually, I mean, it wasn't that long ago, if you think about it.

So we started working on it in 2014, the end of 2014. Wow, 2014. Yeah. Okay. That's when I started podcasting, by the way, February 2014. So there you go. I guess when I say it out loud, it does seem kind of a long time ago. But, you know, like, Brian, you're like since, you know, you're like, Mike anchor was the beginning of podcasting.

But it's crazy. I mean, podcasting was went way further back than that, right? I mean, it really started with the iPod. And admittedly, like, I wasn't a listener to the podcast. back then. I really only became a listener kind of like when I don't know, everyone else did. I mean,

can I give a shout out to the people in 2005 that were telling me about the Ricky Jervais podcast with Carl Polkington? That's like literally the first time I ever heard about it. So 2005-ish, that's how far back. But I'm sure, you know,

we could get a, what's his face, Dave Weiner on to go all the way back, yeah. Yeah, I was not listening back then. Like, I probably didn't even, had never even heard the word. And, you know, I'll admit it. Like, I was one of the probably millions of people that got into podcasts when Cereal came out.

Like, you know, I know that's kind of cliche to say, but it's the truth. You know, I heard somebody said, hey, you got to listen to this thing serial. And I'm like, what the hell is this? And it kind of opened up my mind a little bit. I'm like, wow, there's this whole other medium for storytelling that I didn't really, I didn't know anything about. And that was, you know, that, that sort of opened the door to the rabbit hole for me. I started listening to a lot of, I was big into sports, a lot of sports podcasts,

podcasts about movies and TVs. I was really into like the Grantland Network back then, which was Bill Simmons Old Network. And so I was at a company at the time called Aviary. Actually, I take that back. I was at a company called, which everyone knows, called Adobe, which had just a acquired Aviary. I had run product at Aviary and then that company got acquired. And a friend of mine near Zickerman and I were working at Adobe after getting acquired and we both gotten really in the podcast at the same time. And the whole thing at Aviary was that company had started

when photos had really started to take off on mobile phones like Instagram had really taken off. And our whole thing was we wanted to make it really easy for people to take and edit and share photos. We had a photo editing SDK. And this notion of sort of like democratizing creativity was very sort of top of mind for near and me because that's kind of how we thought about the work we were doing at Amy. And so as we started to get into podcasts, we were like, okay, clearly, you know, as this medium gets bigger and bigger, more and more people are going to want to create these things. Why is it so hard to create them? We had both sort of dabbled a little bit and poked around and tried to see how you did it. And Brian, you were one of the successful few that put up with a lot of the hurdles.

And I had no patience for it. I was like, I don't want to buy gear and I don't want to learn audio editing software. I just want to be able to do it on my phone. And that was kind of the inspiration, Frank. And I were like, well, why can't you just do audio on your phone, basically? In the same way that you can post to Instagram. Exactly. Right, yeah.

And so that was, you know, a lot of people don't remember this. or that, you know, they didn't know about Anchor back then. But that was actually the original version of Anchor. It was more like Instagram for audio. It was a feed. It was like a vertical scrolling. No, I totally remember that. Yeah, it was like, I mean, it was turning, yeah, basically like audio, like sort of snippets, right?

It was sort of like, I mean, a very similar. Exactly. I guess it's so interesting now to think about spaces and the social audio boom and how what they've added really is just synchronicity. Whereas before it was essentially voice notes as a social network. But it is also the ability to hit a button and start broadcasting. Like, again, to give Mike an anchor credit, that's what they saw at the very beginning, which was the insight that I still believe, I think this is true, that Anchor launches. What's the terminology I should?

Most new podcasts happen on Anchor right now or something like. I can't remember what the metric is. Yeah, it's like a crazy amount. I mean, you know, yeah, you could, you could look it up and probably Spotify's recent investor day what the stat was, but it is by far the vast majority. And I think, I think what you're getting at, Brian, is it's because it's easy, right? It's like, yeah. If you want to talk, you just have the button rather than, you know, again, get the expensive

mic to do that whole thing. And so, you know, I think like we have that insight, but we, I don't think we knew the right way to act on it. You know, are we were like, oh, it should be a social network. Like such a, such a naive and basic thought was like, everything's a social network in 2014, 2015. You know, why shouldn't audio just be a social network? And the cool thing was, and you know, Chris, you said you remember it. I mean, you know, there were a lot of people coming into it. There was definitely interests. Like people wanted to record, which was blew our minds, by the way. Like, we actually, we had no expectations. We had never built anything before. We never launched anything by

ourselves. So people were using it, but the problem was, which was very, very obvious almost immediately, was that the quality was terrible. Like, we were forcing people to record effectively voice memos. They were two minutes long. There was no, you know, there were no tools. It was really, you know, it was really hard to sort of like drill down into specific topics. And so it was just a horrible listening experience.

It was like very fascinating at first as almost a social experiment. but it wasn't a good listening experience. And so despite this sort of initial wave of excitement, it kind of stopped working very, very quickly, like, you know, eight weeks, let's call it. Wow. And so that was sort of like this first insight we had where we're like, okay, well,

it's not enough just to give people a button to talk. You actually have to help them sound good. And so we actually scrapped that app. Like we spent over a year building it, and then we realized it wasn't going to work. And, you know, it was a little bit of a different environment back then. I mean, I'm sure you guys, you guys, I'm sure know that, you know, the past two years and sort of like the venture landscape, it hasn't been hard. It hasn't been hard. Well, up until recently, it hasn't been hard to raise money. Like sort of this like infinite pool of venture capital. But back then, I mean, it was scary. Like if your product wasn't working and you hadn't found product market fit, it was like, damn, we're going to run out of money if we don't fix this. And then the company would be over.

So we literally just took that first version of anchor and scrapped it and went back to the drawing board. How big was the team that was working on this? It's probably like five of us. Okay. And where were we guys based? All in New York. Interesting. Actually, we had one person that was remote.

One block away from my therapist office. By the way, I need to interject. I need to interject real quick. If longtime listeners will remember, we were on anchor for a period of time because M.G. Siegler emailed me one day and was like, hey, Brian, go talk to these guys that I've invested in. I came in, talk to Mike. And I think Nair was there too. I don't remember. So, yes, I'm eternally grateful for you guys helping the TechMeme write home out early on when we needed to fill some ad inventory. And so hopefully we helped you out too at a key time. Yeah, no, you did. And I appreciate it.

I mean, yeah, you were, the TechMeme podcast on Anchor back then was honestly probably one of the bigger shows we had that early on. And yeah, it was definitely validating for us and helpful to be able to say, hey, you know, the TechMeme podcast is on here and stuff. So likewise, thank you, Brian, for taking a shot on us. And yeah, so we were right in New York. There were about five of us. I think one person may have been remote, five, seven. I don't remember exactly how many, but on that order of magnitude. And we scrapped the app and we started investing in tools.

So tools to add background music, tools to add sound effects, tools to, you know, you know, patch-in friends that you might want to talk to remotely like we're doing right now in spaces, all sorts of things. But it was still a social app. And I should also mention we weren't even calling them podcasts at this point. Like, this was our own proprietary format. Like, this was our own thing. Because, again, we loved podcasts, but we thought that they were like hard and heavy. And they had baggage, or at least that's what we felt at the time. I mean, that you weren't wrong. Yeah. But I think we were. what we realized was there was just, or what we didn't realize at the time, I should say, is there's so much momentum to podcasts at that, at that moment. I mean, you know, to the, let's think about what you, how you started the beginning of this talk, like podcasts. Wow, like podcasts were this gigantic thing. We were talking about how 2014, you know, they were nothing or whatever. It was so, so small. Just think about, like, how far it's come.

Well, but it's also, like, think of, I mean, people becoming TikTok influencers or TikTok makes it easy. Actually, this is the point I want to make. Like, if you want to become, do a good YouTube channel, there's even more that you have to get good at than podcasting, right? But what the point is for all of this, like, creator economy stuff is that if you give people the tools to be good at it, which is sort of what TikTok does, there's that cliche. that I've said on the show before, that, like, TikTok is not just a social network. It's, like, the best free version of Adobe that exists, you know? Totally. Yeah.

It's so true. Yeah, you have to give people good tools. And actually, that's like, back to my point about, like, launching the second version of anchor with tools, I mean, it was literally overnight. We launched that thing, and boom, the content was better. Like, just immediately night and day difference between the first version of anger and the second version of anger. Like, they sounded real. They sounded like people were doing really interesting things. But the reality was they were just doing this on their phone.

They didn't have a studio. They didn't know audio editing software. So that was really cool. That was the first time where I think we learned that we could sort of, you know, sort of take an insight from being out in the market and iterate and react and put ourselves in a, you know, maybe one step closer to let's call it product market fit. But even in that version, we didn't find it. We didn't find the elicit product market fed because then the problem was everyone was like, oh, these are podcasts.

Like what I'm listening to is a podcast. What I'm creating as a creator instead of Anchor is a podcast. But if you remember, I said they weren't podcasts. You had to download Anchor to listen to them. And nobody wanted to do that. Everyone was like, well, why am I going to download this other app to listen to this thing? you know, this one podcast, when I could listen to every podcast in the world over at Spotify and over at Apple. This is silly. And so once again...

Wait, wait, wait. But how much support did Spotify have for podcasts at that point? They were getting started. But I think my point was generally just like there were there big apps out there. Let's take some say Apple Podcasts. They had every, every show. Yeah. Okay. And we're like, hey, come to anchor to listen to this one show. Like 50 shows, You know. Like the Justin Bieber app to like get the Justin Bieber podcast. Yeah, exactly. So that's when we're like, okay, clearly there's some momentum to this podcast thing.

Maybe we actually just built a really, really compelling podcast creation tool. Maybe we should just find a way to get all this content on Apple and on Spotify. And so we kind of like pivoted again. We didn't scrap the whole thing this time because everything we built was actually usable, but we rushed to build a web app. We rushed to figure out, well, this is the sort of real magic was we rushed to figure out how to do distribution, like how we could take somebody's show that they made an anchor, how do we turn it into an RSS feed, like, how do we like put it into the standard of podcasts and get it up on Apple and all these places really, really quickly and easily without the user having to know. how to do any of that stuff. And once we did that, that's when things really started

taking off. And people started seeing that, oh, my God, I could make a podcast, tap a button, and be on Apple, like, in five minutes. That's special. I'm curious, you know, again, this is sort of like,

I'm sure it's all a blur, but when Spotify comes calling, how clear to you initially is this them poking around in the podcasting space

or when they showed up, I've heard from other people when they showed up, it was clear immediately that this was something they were going all in on. Is that how your experience was when you started talking to them? Maybe I can answer the question sort of like more generally

with my experience, the way these things go is and my experience with Spotify was like this as well. Let's use the example of hiring someone. When you're building a company and you go to hire someone, you try to spend as much time at least as you can making sure they're the right fit. Likewise, they're making sure that the company is the right fit for them.

You're not just responding to a job and then I'm looking at your resume and saying, okay, this person's a fit, let's hire them on the spot, right? And I think like with acquisitions and really with like fundraising as well, I would say any sort of like meaningful corporate transaction when you're building a company, these things take a long time. And so, you know, in the example of Spotify, I, you know, I was fortunate to be able to build the relationship with them over honestly many years.

Sure. You know, I met Daniel briefly after the first version of Anchor launched. And I think I've told the story before, but like literally right after the first version of Anchor launched, he reached out and said, hey, this is cool. Like, let's talk about products. And I think that's, I think that was how the first time we met. Like, we're just meeting the, you know, two product nerds just jamming on product. And so we had a number of interactions with them over the years. And I think when we, when we ended up selling to them, I think it was it was more, it was more that it really made.

sense for both of us at the same time. Like, we had already done, we'd already laid the groundwork. We already had a deep understanding, I think, of what we all wanted to do in audio and what we felt was important. And it was a lot more organic,

I would say, than people maybe think with these things. That's kind of, that's kind of what I was hinting at, because again, I can't speak to other people that I know that have been acquired by anchor. But the difference is, you know, like I've talked to other people in the industry before, and it was all like radio guys. I make, and I'm saying this pejoratively, the radio guys come in and they're going to tell you how radio works and things like that.

And the people that have, that I know that have dealt with Spotify, they're like, no, we knew right away this was different that they had this sort of expansive sense of sort of what you're talking about where it's like, it's not just that they, wanted to own audio because that was their thing. They wanted to own your ears and the app on your phone that goes into your ears and things like that. But it was also that it wasn't like the radio guys that were just like telling you how things were. Everyone told me that Spotify always came in and felt more like they were a Silicon Valley company, like a tech company versus a media company. Did you feel that way too? I don't know that I necessarily can compare. Like I don't, I don't, maybe I just don't have enough exposure to like traditional media companies to, to know. But I guess what I can tell you is like, you know, when you have a

startup, the thing that drives you is your mission, right? It's got to be because you have to, you almost have to make, almost have to make the whole, everything you're doing like so crazy and aspirational for it to actually work. Like, you can't start a company and be like, hey, I want to build, I want to build this product and have a million users. Like, that's just not aspirational enough to motivate you to grind the way you have to actually. Like, you have to wake up every morning and be like, I literally want to democratize audio for every single person in the world.

Like, it has to be that, almost that insane and that audacious. And I think we, you know, what surprised me about Spotify was when, you know, the more and more I got to know them, and by the way, like, we're a 20-person company at the time and we're chasing this big audacious mission. And they're of, I don't know, I forget what they were, maybe a 5,000-person company. And I felt that same level of ambition and hopefulness for, you know, the future of audio that we were feeling as a tiny, tiny upstart. And that was, that was really inspiring to me. That was really cool. It was like, oh, this actually isn't some big corporate entity.

this is just a group of people that also, you know, want to help shape the future of audio and have a very specific vision in Spotify's case around, you know, helping a million creators to live off their art and, you know, and everything their mission speaks to. I felt that genuinely, and I think that's why I was excited. I don't know if that answers your question. It rhymes with what I've heard, right, because it felt like as opposed to, oh, we're going to, I'm not going to name any corporate names, but, We're going to acquire you and fold you into what we've been doing at audio for 70 years.

Spotify always felt like, no, we're cutting edge. We're still the startup mindset. And that's why it was very attractive to folks that I know. Yeah. Yeah. And to be honest, like, it was an awesome company to work for. I have nothing but great things to say about Spotify as a company, about a culture. Yeah, it was a great, you know, and look, it's hard to know what could have been if we didn't get acquired but Spotify.

You know what, can I give you the analogy that someone told me is that it's, that it's, when, when radio people acquired friends of mine that were in the podcast space, it felt to them like, well, This is a fad. We're checking a box to make sure that we're on the cutting edge. Okay, so our CEO can't yell at us for not being on the cutting edge or whatever. Versus Spotify actually having the vision that we're going to where the future of audio is going to be. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds right to me. So yeah, I mean, that was basically, so like I said, we sort of pivoted to this, this, this, this basically a podcasting platform as opposed to this, you know, this social network for audio. That really resonated. That seemed to work. And, and it was a lot of fun. I mean, because once, once we sort of became one of the bigger podcasting platforms, and this is even before we sold the Spotify, we could start to do things that, hadn't really been tried before, which was fun.

And still to this day, I find inspiring. I'll give me an example. And Brian, maybe you can relate to this. Actually, I think you used this product really early on. I think I, yeah. Mixed results, but I think you, I think you recognize the potential of it before we got acquired. And like, so, okay, so podcasting is based for, in many ways on a standard, right?

That standard being RSS. standards are amazing because if you adopt a standard, if you're building a product and you adopt a standard to power your product, you're basically like accelerating your product development. Like in the case of building a podcast app, if you build a player and ingest RSS, boom, you've already solved the supply side of your business. You get to pull every podcast in the world into your app

just by accepting the standard of RSS. But the downside of standards is it creates a tremendous amount of fragmentation in the market because it lowers the barrier to building a product. So what you end up with is, you know, a thousand different podcast apps, which I'm sure you guys can identify with. I mean, you know, you both know about podcasts. There are a lot of podcasts. Oh, yes. There are. It's sort of like building a notes app.

It's like a right of passage. Exactly. And so, but that creates a bit of a problem because that means that there isn't. sort of like when you're building with a standard and now you've got all these different products and you've got all this fragmentation, it's hard to build products that benefit and services that benefit from economies of scale. So with Anchor, when we started to amass, you know, a lot of creators in the platform, we actually could for the first time be like, oh, well, maybe we can actually offer like a scaled ads platform for creators, where creators can now, because they're part of this network, because we can take this network and bring it to advertisers,

we can start to offer ads to creators. And so we did that. And that was really cool. That was a lot of fun. And that was... No, wait. I would you to unpack this because ads and podcasting, there's a little bit of like oil and water or, you know,

it could be vinegar, depending on your preference. I remember going into Meet Mike the first time and being like, I know what you want to do. You want to do AdSense for podcasting, don't you? Everybody wants to do adsets for podcasting. And please do it sooner rather than later. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so just to be clear, though, my, my question is a little bit about the flavors, I suppose, of podcasting ads. You know, one where it's, you know, read by the speakers, the people who are actually doing the show versus ads that are, of course, pre-recorded, you know, by anybody randomly and inserted. What do you guys do if you don't mind me asking? I still do host Red. I mean, programmatic, it all depends. Like, what we're really talking about to get high level. Yeah. Yeah, it is, is programmatic would mean things are sold on an exchange and like it's, it's sort of like a, uh, an auction sort of thing. And then like the host doesn't even know. At least for me, I'm working with a network for 70% of our ads. But it's still like, it is still hand held and hand sold. So I mean, I guess so like add some, again, some flavor, some. Some. context for this because, you know, podcast was, and even to this day, to some degree, still is,

one of the areas that is kind of, I don't want to say the least commercialized because obviously it's become very commercial. But kind of like when Spotify acquired anchor, it was like a big kind of like, oh shit, like now this content, which has been sort of like from, you know, of the free and open web where everyone just publishes, you know, out of the generosity of their hearts. Now is what you're grasping at is like, so. the way that ads are sold digitally has been since 2008-2010

is again, it's all of these sort of algorithmic programmatic exchanges. And at least for me, and maybe I'm not the biggest podcast in the world, and certainly what Spotify's doing, is they're trying to get it to where it is that, like you don't have to do anything, you just have to put a little thing in your show,

like insert ad here. But what you're grasping at is that podcasting at least right now is still largely handheld and like personal relationships and networks and things like that versus algorithms. And maybe Mike has more insight on this than me. Well, I'm teasing on a couple things here, right? So like, and again, I'm not trying to speak on behalf of Mike, but as an observer of Spotify, of the podcast space of what Mike was doing at Anchorage. and also as someone who's worked in Open Standards, I feel the tension very deeply that he's describing,

which is, of course, in the one hand, you want sort of podcast RSS to be consistent and to allow those millions of bespoke podcast apps to bloom. And on the other hand, you want to evolve the format and allow for new types of expression, new types of monetization, new types of ways for creators to support what they're doing in a way that might actually break or interrupt some of the consistency of those old formats. And so to me, me, like, I, you know, I remember, I'm pretty sure this happened, although, you know, I have a lot of drinks when I go to South by Southwest, but I know, Mike, you and I met up. I think we've hung there a few times. Yeah. And I don't remember, I think this might have been, you know, probably after the,

the acquisition or something. And, you know, I was probably, you know, saucy as I, as I sometimes get. And it was like, regaling, well, regaling is probably a positive word. I was probably harassing you. with some sense of concern for the future direction of how this company would, you know, spend hundreds of millions of dollars on your company and then want to turn this tool that you'd created into a tool of, you know, commercialization and capitalism and therefore, you know, kind of ruin the format and the medium. And to your credit, I think, and to the sort of broader spaces credit, there's been an interesting, just new set of dynamics in the space where there are a lot more people publishing audio content, win. And then there's also,

a way for some people to, you know, make some kind of living from it, also kind of a win, without it becoming completely horrible, you know, in the way to sort of Google, let's say Google search results, for example, have been overtaken by advertising or sponsored content. It's a mix. It's not perfect, et cetera, but at least it moved things forward. And then you have other formats where you evolve things with Q&A, for example, which is a feature within Spotify where a podcast host can post essentially a poll or a question and kind interact with their audience in a way that it's non-standard in other podcasting apps.

So I guess what I'm trying to get you to tease out is that tension between being compliant with the standard versus innovating and doing something new, right, and breaking from the sort of quote-unquote tradition and doing that now with leverage, right, because now you work at Spotify. Well, I used to. I'm talking about that moment in time, though, back then, yes. I'm fusing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to speak on behalf of Spotify, obviously, because I'm not there anymore.

But what I will say is like, you know, with Anchor, when we were doing Anchor, it was really important for us to help creators at scale. Like, it was literally in our mission to help, help creators. And, and I'll say, like, you know, Spotify, it's in their mission to help a million creators love up their art. I think in both of those, there's this notion of scale and making sure that what you do is creator first and enables creator choice. And I actually think there is a way, you're right that there's attention, but I think there is a way to do both. And I'll give you what I think is a really good example of this, not related to podcasts at all, but is related to open standards. So SMS, the messaging standard, right? this is this is like text messaging right and it was invented it was invented in the 80s and I think I think it launched for the first time I don't have the dates in front of me but I want to say it's like the late 90s right then it goes through a period where it has to because again the standard it has to gain adoption from a bunch of different handset manufacturers and carriers that finally gains adoption at scale I think in like the early to either late 90s or early 2000s then by the way somebody

gets the idea, oh, we want to add pictures. But again, once you have all this fragmentation and the analogy here is the 10,000 different bespoke podcast apps, becomes really, really hard to do that because, you know, you have to go and you have to convince these 10,000 stakeholders. But they eventually do it by launching a whole new standard called MMS. And that finally launches and gains scale and popularity. I want to say unless 10 years later. So very, very slow product development lifecycle, right?

Then this amazing product gets launched. It's called the iPhone. It's just launched yesterday, 15 years ago, right? Yeah, exactly. Then the iPhone comes along 15 years ago to the day yesterday. And it's such a great product that virtually overnight, they have a critical mass of people on it. People on both sides that want to send and receive messages. And I think Apple did a really, really brilliant thing here, actually, where they basically,

they broke away from the standard, right? They made their own thing, iMessage. And similar to your point about Q&A for Spotify, iMessage does all these crazy things, right? It does Memoji and audio notes and, I don't know, 10,000 other features that are completely incompatible with iMessage. But it does something really smart. You can still text someone on Android.

And what happens when you text someone on Android, it actually falls back to the green bubble. SMS. It creates a whole generation of shame. Yes. Exactly. So there's, there's, there's, there's, there's probably like crazy things happening underneath the hood there where it's actually like defaulting back to a different

technology. And the person on the other side can't get that rich experience that let's say you and I can if we both have iPhones. Um, but, but it is backwards compatible. And I think that's like a pretty decent analogy for, you know, when I think about podcasting and where it's going, um, how some of this stuff has worked out, right? Like there are all these great features that now exist, like the ones you mentioned, but it is still compatible with RSS.

When you publish, even to this day, a podcast on Anchor, you're getting an RSS feed. It's going to all the other players. It just might not be the same, Richard. Wait, okay. So I think this is part of the tension that I think is so useful to, like, you know, have you talk about, right? Because on the one hand, you start out with Anchor as a tool that essentially publishes, you know, an open standard, you know, XML and RSS with, to represent the podcast as an enclosure. and then you start to evolve the things that you can do with that media format, right? And so just as your example suggests that Apple kind of uses the green bubble to manipulate

people into wanting to get an iPhone to sort of, as you say, upgrade their experience, in a similar way, you can imagine that if I'm distributing a podcast and I want to have that fan engagement, that I need to actually use Spotify to get that level of fan engagement, even if the standard format supports it. So I guess my question is also, and, And again, I don't want to get too down the weeds in this because the product side, I think, is actually a little bit more interesting to me. But the degree to which the things that you were publishing or innovating on at Spotify became sort of open standards or extensions to the podcasting format to encourage others to adopt those new forms of engagement. Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it was like, how do we continue to deliver on the original promise, which was like we want to make this really, really easy for people and offer them broad distribution?

But how do we also at the same time, like, make the format better? Like, how can we actually push podcasting forward? Because there were a lot of limitations. I mean, we experienced, I mean, this is why we shifted to a tools business, right? Anchor. I mean, we want, you know, think back to the first version. And then the second version, we make this new format on these tools. Like, wow, we built this really cool, like proprietary format.

But, oh, wait, nobody can consume it because it's not being distributed over our set. So, yeah, it's. It's a really, I don't know, it's a really interesting tension. I actually think maybe we're getting a little bit ahead and a little off topic, but like I think there's potentially a dynamic with Web3 that ties into this. Chris, you have a little bit of online. We're about to go there. We're about to go there.

And I am setting us up, but I know Brian had something to jump in on this. And then we'll talk about that. Okay. I'm not afraid to interject real quick, not about product, but about the business. Because there's a lot of podcasters that I know in the audience right now. So let me just ask you this one real quick. Okay. So, like, there's somebody that I know that a few years ago were like,

I want to become a influencer, a media brand, and they wanted to launch on YouTube, and I told them not to do it, do podcasting because you're under, you're the captain of your own ship. And sure enough, this person is right now experiencing problems with the YouTube algorithm changing. At the same time, what they said to me three years ago was, well, Spotify is just going to do the same thing to audio that YouTube has done to video. And listen, I was, you know, early in blogging and I saw, you know, the ads go to the basement, you know, where you used to be able to get.

The fact that I can still get $30 CPMs in podcasting is amazing to me, given what I saw happened to the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. ad rates on the open web and things like that. So what I'm trying to get at from a business perspective as a podcaster, how do you feel having worked at Spotify, having helped them sort of go in this direction? Do you feel like what you're talking about, open standards, embracing open standards and things like that, is Spotify in danger as podcasters, are we in danger of them capturing the commons like has happened to other things in the the broader web, or is podcasting and audio different? I think that's a really hard question to answer,

because I think you're sort of posing, you're sort of posing that there are only two answers. You know, like, you're like, is it, is it, yeah, are they doing this? I did only give me two options. And I actually think, like, you know, if I'm going to, if I were to look at YouTube, But I can't say that it's black or white. You know, I think that there are a lot of people out there, a lot of YouTubers that have made a lot of money and have had their lives transformed by being able to create on YouTube. That might be a whole other podcast episode.

Well, okay. So I switch to Web 3. Sorry. Well, hold on. I want to just like wrap up sort of the experience at Spotify because I feel like we. we've dug into certainly the early part and, you know, some of the interesting tensions with some of the innovation around podcasting. And I think like what I would love to understand a little bit more of is just kind of maybe just an insider view of Spotify as a company. It's one of those

companies that a lot of people talk about, but sort of as a media conglomerate because they don't quite know how to relate to some of the, I don't know, the culture or like it's hard for me to imagine what it's like to work at a place like Spotify, given that I suppose it's a little bit more like YouTube in that it's closer to creators, it's closer to media, it's closer to culture. And so, you know, having worked at Google and then also, you know, YouTube to be sort of, you know, down the road in San Bruno, the culture of Google was very different than YouTube. So what was it like for you coming from New York to go to Spotify, you know, to have come in through an acquisition, right?

So you had your own kind of little mini culture and kind of entrepreneurship and then to join this larger thing. what was that transition like for you? And sort of how did that change and evolve over the years while you were there? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, you know, back to the point about we spent a bunch of time getting to know each other before the acquisition. I mean, one of the reasons I was excited to actually do it is because I felt like we had similar values. Like, you literally took Anchor's core values at the time and put them side by side with Spotify's core values.

They weren't the same words, but they were kind of saying the same thing. and again, I spoke about the mission earlier, which were also pretty similar and very rooted in helping creators. So I felt good about it. And by the way, like, you know, obviously spent a lot of time with people and felt that they were actually living and representing the mission and the values. So that was encouraging. And then when I got in there, I found it to be true. I guess a couple things I'll say. So one thing that was that I found to be really cool.

So in the earlier part of my career, I worked in the music industry. I worked at Atlantic Records. And the thing I felt about that label, it's a really, really old record label. It's like one of the original. What was your job? So I actually started, I started there as a web developer. So, all right, let me go a little further back. I was a CS grad, computer science, like came out of school, coding, engineering for some consulting firms, didn't like it.

Which is cool? I didn't want to be an engineer. Delaware, University of Delaware. Okay. Decided that I didn't want to do that. I was like, I don't, I understand how to program. I just got my degree, like, whatever, I'm working. But I, this is not sort of tapping into the more creative side of me that I,

that I was just like much more, I was much more passionate about music and art and creativity. And I was like, I got to get out of here. I was like, I'm going to go into music. I don't know how and where and what I'm going to do, but I'm going to get a job somewhere in music and so I used my degree to get my foot in the door at Atlantic building all the artist's website I was building websites for all the artists

I ended up being there for about five years running product innovation there at one point but the thing I always loved about that place was like there was a real passion and reverie

and like respect for the artist and the creator like everything was about the artist the artist was like really put up on a pedestal and everything had to be about serving them and helping them and you know and and I loved that and then I went into tech I went you know I got really into I got really into the idea of technology because the

like I said the iPhone launched and when the iPhone launched I realized oh wow like software is a means of creativity you can make something and then with a tap of a button you distribute it to millions of people I want to be a part of that so I went over there and I did the aviary thing, Adobe. I told you about that already. The cool thing about Spotify, to get to your question, was it was like this really cool combination of both the sort of wide-eyed,

like we can change the world tech side of the business, mixed with the passion and respect for helping creators. It was a perfect blend for me of both. And that's what I loved about it when I first, I mean, still to this day. But when I first joined, I was like, oh, wow, this is a tech company, but it's also a music and content company. And like people really care about the content and the media and like getting it to the fans.

Well, I want to just like jump in and like because, you know, if I remember when I first got on Spotify and, you know, it was this, you know, crazy app that had come out of Europe. And it wasn't even available in the U.S. But I had a friend that, you know, hooked me up or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Right. And, and it was, it was like an amazing experience. It was Napster, except it was legal. And, you know, from the very beginning, there was that dichotomy between, you know, content wants to be free. And I remember I was super angry with Metallica and, you know, their whole vibe. But, you know, Daniel, I think always did have that respect for artists and that artists need to eat and, you know, need to be fed. And that, you know, if you just take their content and you don't find a way to remunerate them, then they won't be able to. And then they want me more stuff.

Right. So I just want to, like, sort of put, put, put. the listener kind of back into the mindset of where this stuff came from. And like, I find it's so interesting that there's so much angst about, and I think it's valid, you know, in some respects. And I just, I don't know what the, when you try to democratize things in such a way, I don't know how the economics ultimately even out. But in the sense that Spotify does pay artists, some, of course, will argue that it's not enough, but it's more than Napster. And so there's some argument to be had there. But so I guess I'm just sort of wanting to build upon.

the your premise and the credibility of the suggestion that even though it comes from a tech kind of background, which is kind of all about automation and kind of, you know, reducing the human element, that that actually wasn't part of Spotify's kind of origin story, at least as I read it. No, yeah, you're totally right. I mean, you know, Daniel himself was a musician. And like you said, like everyone loved Napster. Everyone loved, you know, how, I forget, what was it? a thing that bit torrent that everyone was doing like after and after.

The original bit thing. Yeah, like Spotify had the realization that, hey, this is not sustainable. This is not, this is not good. And the only way you're going to be able to compete with, with free is that you actually make it better. And better means not just a great consumer experience, but better means a great experience for creators and helping creators get paid. I mean, look, people can knock streaming all they want, but look at, you know, there's a,

there's a very easily doable chart on the internet that shows like, recorded music revenues over the past 20 years. And streaming has been, you know, not just Spotify, Spotify, Apple Music, all of them, transformative for the revenue paid out to crazy. Yeah, I mean. And also, we, we, we, it's bigger than it's ever been. We need to give them credit for the fact that people were trying to crack this egg forever. Like, I think on the internet history podcast, I talked to one of the founders of Rhapsody or whatever. Like, even the Napster folks, even there's that, that great video of Sean, Fanning and Parker talking about how this is going to be on your phone someday and it's going to be...

Everyone knew this was going to happen. It's just that you were dealing with essentially, I think I said in the book, a mafia that wouldn't let you do it. So Spotify should get way more credit than they are getting at this point. Oh, of course, this is the way it was going to be. Everyone could see it. Yeah, except for the fact that 30 to 50 different startups tried to make it happen and didn't and Spotify did. So yeah. Yeah. So, so that was one thing I felt when I got there to answer your,

your original question. Right. And then, you know, there were, I mean, when I, when I, like, look back and I reflect about what I learned, what I, what I went through. When I joined there, I was, um, you know, I was, I was running a team of 25 or something. And I was very much like a startup founder. Like, I knew how to get a lot done with a little. And, you know, I was, I was, with a little and how to move a team really fast. You know, when you're a small startup, speed is kind of your advantage. You can be nimble. You can, but I think, you know, one of the things I learned how to do in my time there,

which I really appreciate that I had the opportunity was, hey, how do you get like big, really big things done with really big teams of people? You know, it almost sounds like it's going to be easy. When you're at a big company, you could just get these big things done. But you realize there's a lot you have to learn. about operating and communicating cross-functionally with, in some cases, hundreds or thousands of people. It's a completely different muscle. And so that was something that I had to learn.

And it took me a lot of time, to be honest. That was something cool that I was able to do that I'm really happy. I had that experience. And another thing, you asked what like, how did it change over the years? I mean, well, naturally, something that we went through that everyone else went through was COVID. and, you know, shifting to dynamic work environment. That was a pretty interesting experience. Again, I think for everyone, you know, figuring out how to manage a big team remotely.

Like, you know, there's so many things that you change about how you work when it shifts to that, right? You go from lots of sort of in-person communication meetings to more of a memo culture, like writing a lot. like learning how to write, like learning how to write long pieces, you know, sort of for communication. Lots of, you know, repetition. One thing that Spotify has internally is its own employee podcasting, like, tools or capabilities. And I don't know specifics about it, but, you know, in the context of remote work, I'm curious, like, you're talking a lot about writing and, you know, words in that sense. Was there any kind of audio element to this as well? Or was it totally separate?

There are some, you know, there are some employees that have, that have podcasts, and I think I've used them as a way to communicate more broadly. That's not something I did. I think I just, I focused more on trying to write more like long form. So actually, a little Chris, Chris has been kind enough for the listeners who are listening. Chris has been kind of enough to read this like long piece that I'm not, I may or may not publish. I see. That's kind of where that came from. Yeah, like I never wrote like that before I worked at Spotify.

I think working at Spotify and going through COVID was a thing that helped me to be a better communicator, I think. You know, the other thing, again, and I don't necessarily think this is unique to me, or to Spotify, but working and managing a team remotely, I mean, it teaches you how to be extremely intentional with your time, right? because you could just sit on Zooms all day long. 100%. And that could burn you out. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I learned a lot. And I definitely, I had a great experience.

So why, like, I guess, yeah, I was going to say. So why did you leave? And I want to make sure we have time to get into some of the Web3 future media stuff, too. So what brought about that decision? Yeah, I mean, look, I, I, I have lots of interests. I've always been a person that has my hand and multiple things. And I've gotten really into angel investing.

I've really enjoyed it. And, you know, I've always, my whole career has been about trying to empower people. So when I was at Atlantic, you know, I view that as like on a very, very small scale of helping a small number of people to be creative. Aviary was very much about helping people be creative, but on a much larger scale with the photos. and the mobile editing. And then Anchor, obviously, is about helping people be creative. I have actually really enjoyed over these past couple of years working with startup founders because I loved being a startup founder.

I feel like I learned a ton. I feel like, you know, I can, I feel like occasionally I may actually have something I can be helpful with. And so I had this opportunity, which I can't share specifics of yet, unfortunately. I'm going to have this opportunity to do it full time. And I said, you know what? I've been doing Anchor for, you know, eight, nine years. The team is in a great place right now.

I think the team has never been better. I think the strategy is in a great place. I think Spotify is in a great place. Let me try something new because, you know, we only get so many years to do interesting things in our lives. just ready for a new chapter. Got it. That makes sense.

Okay. So I'm not going to assume that you went to Andreessen Horowitz, although they hire everybody these days, and they seem to employ 10,000 people. So I'll leave that as speculation. But talk to us about the future of media as you see it. You know, as you're leaving Spotify, obviously, you know, anchor is this great tool that you've used to kind of democratize.

One of the things that people talk about, of course, is product market fit. But I think that there's a whole other aspect. of this, which is not just based on kind of economics and money, but it's also sort of content and medium fit. And I think, right? So in some ways, you kind of took what people were already, you know, likely going to be doing with voice notes and voice memos and phone calls and things like that. And you use that medium as a way to sort of broadcast out to a broader unknown audience, unseen audience, where you didn't, you know, it's funny when I was, when I was working

on the sharebox on Google Plus, one of the things that I always was thinking about was sort of thinking about the audience and whether you knew who you were talking to or writing to when you were creating a new post. You know, and this is a problem, of course, that Twitter has to solve and Facebook had to solve. But, you know, when you send an email, you start by thinking about who you're actually sending the email to and then you write the email. Whereas in social media, you start with a post and then you think about, well, is there an audience

for this? And do I need this to be private or is it public? And so in a similar way, you know, I think you did the same thing with audio content. It was sort of like, let's allow people to create that audio content. and then the audio content through the internet, it'll find its audience. But let's talk about the future of media when it comes to all the stuff that's been going on with Web3

and just maybe lay out some of your thoughts about where we're at and where this is going to go. Sure. So I should caveat all this by saying, like, I am by no means a Web3 expert. There are lots of really, really smart people on the Internet writing, lots of think pieces and lots of philosophy. Well, even if we step back from whatever Web3

three or how we define it might be, right? I think you have a unique perspective where you can almost kind of take away all of the assumptions or baggage, right, like you know, like you did with RSS and say, where are things that, where there's still friction? How can we evolve, you know, the mediums using, you know, let's say blockchain as an enabler or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think it's actually really interesting that you mentioned RSS and that's actually

an analogy. I've been thinking about what three and RSS is an analogy quite a bit. And I'm actually interested to learn more. I mean, maybe one of the things I hope comes out of this is, you know, if there's somebody that's listening that knows Web3 really well. And, you know, when you hear what I'm about to say, like, if you have thoughts on it, please, please let me know. I'm trying to learn and be smarter on it.

But so I love the promise of Web 3 of decentralizing data, right? Data portability. Like one of the big promises of Web 3 that I find fascinating and great. is that my data can live on your data, and all of our data in interacting with a platform can live on a decentralized blockchain that belongs to no one. It's not belong to the big corporation.

It doesn't belong to the big corporation. It belongs to no one. It's just decentralized, which means it can follow me wherever I go. I think that's an amazing promise of Web3. One of the things, you know, I haven't heard anyone talk about, really and I'm curious about it.

I'm trying to round my head around if this is a problem or not. Is that if you decentralized everything and you basically put a bunch of data on a on a on a blockchain and then the platforms all and the products all build around that data. I wonder if you actually end up with a ton of fragmentation like we had in podcasts. So we talked about RSS how like the data and the content. it's technically not decentralized, right? Like, you know, Brian, when you were hosting, you know, an RSS feed back in 2014, it probably lived on your website or maybe feed burner or something.

But you can imagine that, like, if that data lived on a decentralized blockchain, and, you know, everyone said, okay, this is what a podcast is. These are the fields. You know, these are the data field. These are the components of a podcast. You probably get the same thing that we saw with RSS where you get these, thousands of bespoke podcast apps that you mentioned, Chris. And now imagine that happens for literally everything on the internet, right?

Like every type of media, whether it's a song or an album or an article or a movie or a TikTok style video, whatever, do you just end up with basically a ceiling for the level of innovation that can happen? Because everyone has to conform to a standard. Right now, any product that needs to be built has to conform to a standard and it's impossible to build anything that goes beyond that standard because there won't be any support for that on the blockchain. Are you talking about sort of the staleness of formats?

Exactly. That's kind of exactly what I'm talking about. Like I wonder if we stopped evolving formats with the GIF format, which is how Brian pronounces it in 1989 when the format came out. Or if we stopped with SMS and we didn't get to MMS, right? because it was all in the blockchain, then it becomes this massive coordination problem where trying to upgrade the formats is actually a huge headwind. Okay.

Okay. I want to push back real quick. On Jeff or GIF? Well, yes. Remember, every time I do that in a story, I pronounce it both ways every time just to cover my base. He wants you to be guessing. You're okay.

Okay, here's my pushback. Yeah, please. And by the way, like I said, this is less than a opinion and more just like a question. Well, yeah, and this is, hopefully I'm going to grasp towards a larger thing, but I'm going to start with the podcasting angle. Because again, you know, since I started my fund and I'm a well-known podcaster, I've gotten a whole bunch of Web3 podcast pitches.

There's people in the audience. God bless you. I love you all. And please reach out to Mike because apparently, even though I might have not worked with you, he clearly is thinking about things right now. But for podcasting, the Web 3 thing, I've not heard anything that makes any sense to me. Because again, this is where I make my living.

And there's nothing that anyone's ever pitched me that's like, oh my God, that's going to make my life easier. That's going to make things better. And what you're talking about is the portability of things. Like, in a sense, podcasting is still the dream of the 90s alive because as we've discussed, I was able to take my R.S. S-Feed to Anchor and away from Anchor? Like, it's almost, it is almost like, you know, what's the thing?

So you like the portability. So, yeah, because, yeah. You know how people are like, well, you can always host your own website. You can always host your own email server and things like no one wants to do it. But I don't know that it's that. But so, and also I'm going to bring up the, the Mark Andreessen thing on Tyler Cohen's podcast where he, Tyler was literally asking him about how Web3 could make podcasting better. Oh, and Mark was like, well, because we can, no one's going to tell us what to

say. No one's going to tell us what to say already, right? So now, let me frame it this way. I haven't heard a pitch and I've heard dozens of them for Web3 and podcasting. Nothing in, in the sense of, well, put it on the blockchain. Does that make it better? It doesn't. However, what you were sort of hinting at, which is, but would that sort of portability that I just described be better for other mediums, right, where they have been captured by these platforms that don't let you take your stuff and go somewhere else? Yeah, I think the tradeoff is going to be portability versus innovation, right? Sorry, Chris. It sounds like you were about to say something. Well, I mean, I also wanted to hear your response, but I just, I wanted to jump in on this point because I think there's an, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a.

it's so easy to conflate a number of things here. And it's also easy to get, I think, lost or stuck applying today's models to kind of what you think that this new, I don't know, like emergent paradigm right? Right. So Tanner, who's in the audience, mentioned uncut.fm. And they're sort of moving towards, I guess, let's see, kind of tokenizing communities, right? So that's one thing you buy the NFT and now you have access to, like, limited stuff. Like, okay, that's like one direction. I think, Mike, what you're pointing to.

is a little bit different about the expression of content and media in the stuff that is stored on the blockchain specifically. Now, of course, you could have kind of adjacent content through, let's say, like, IPFS or something where you're storing files all over the place, and they're just like references, and maybe the files themselves can be updated or improved or more metadata can be added over time, and they can be embellished in some other way. I don't think we're talking specifically about storing podcast files on the blockchain, although, you know, we can, imagine that happening as well. Those are two different kind of ways to think about this. I think like one of the questions has to be, just like we rely on kind of, I guess, you know, Apple, you know,

and some other big podcast indexers to, you know, it's sort of a, what is it? It's a relay where you publish your podcast file and then it kind of fans out to all the sort of subscribers of those things. If we were to have this globally readable and writeable database of public content, the question, one of the questions is, what are the formats and how do you define the formats of the data that is being stored? Once you have sufficient amounts of data that is marked up or in a certain schema, what then can you do with that data? And then if you go even further down the field, when you have enough of that data that's out there, that's of substantial or significant interest to enough people, what other types of embellishment or experiences or augmentations could occur

through that kind of innovative, you think about it kind of as raw material. The raw material of this data that you're talking about would enable a lot of different people to develop new types of software or technology or experiences or content or creativity, potentially, let me pause. And then there's a second part,

which we don't know how to think about, which is around licensing, privacy, access, you know, copyright, Right, because there are ideas with smart contracts where, you know, if I listen to your podcast, you get a penny or whatever it is, sort of like decentralized Spotify. The reality is that I haven't seen a lot of that work. And I don't know to what degree creators are actually getting paid for their NFTs when they're being flipped multiple times. And how many times an NFT has to flip in order for there to be a meaningful amount of income sort of residuals, you know, to the original artist without having a centralized body that's kind of doing that work and counting all the transactions. So anyways, I've been going for a while, but like, I just, I think it's important to separate some of those things. No, they're all valid questions, I think. I mean, something you mentioned in the end there is like another thing that I've been thinking a lot about.

I mean, you mentioned, hey, there are already a number of these sort of, you know, decentralized Spotify's or, you know, whatever you, however you called it. Right. Yeah, exactly. Like royal.io is an example. You know, to me, that makes actually a lot of sense because if you think about it, if you're a creator, you know, what do you want more than anything else? You want to reach. You want to reach new people, right? And so naturally, you're going to gravitate to the platform where you can get the most reach.

And so I think platforms like this are inevitably going to have a bit of a chicken and egg problem where, you know, the value that they're advertising to the creator can't really be fulfilled upon unless they have a critical mass of consumers. I don't know. Like, as I'm saying these things, I'll let it's triggering all sorts of other questions. And I think that was kind of your point. Like, there are many questions to unpack here. You know, but anyway, yeah.

Web 2, for whatever else it did, it solved reach like nothing else in history. It literally is the thing that made Web 2, Web 2, right? It's the distribution, it's the reach, it's all that stuff. My problem with Web 3 is that thus far, I don't see. a similar sort of aha moment with that, where from day one with freaking flicker, it was all about allowing anybody in the universe to see your pictures and blogging and all that stuff.

And then the problem with Web 3, again, if we're going to have this sort of debate, is a lot of what Web 2 was simplifying things, again, people don't want to run their own servers, don't want to run their own email. You want to put all that underneath a layer that simplifies it. And so there's two things. In Web 3, at least again, I'm going through the lens of podcasting, but maybe all media.

I don't see how Web 3 has the distribution and reach thing that Web 2 has. And for sure, Web 3 has not solved the make it simple enough that my mom can use it. Totally, totally. Let me jump before I hear from Mike, because I want to sort of set you off with two things. One is that yesterday, Adam Aseri has announced now that, of course, Instagram is moving forward with NFTs. And apparently as of today, Facebook now has a tab on your profile to list your NFTs. So the web two companies are starting to support the representation and display of some of these types of assets. Now, the thing that I want actually, Mike, you to talk about is passport.

Specifically, there's Tretechoree and there's Dithering, and of course, that is a decentralized approach to providing tokenized access to essentially private podcast feeds. And I got to say, like, the experience is a little difficult. And yet, like, one, I was super impressed that Spotify actually went down that path and used Oath

and kind of set up this thing that allows independent publishers to essentially put a paywall up against their content and then to have Spotify distribute that content, but then support a native kind of checkout experience in that. So I guess what I'm seeing is that that's almost like a Web 2.5 kind of solution where there's a 2.0 style app, I'll call it Spotify, providing access to content that is kind of private and hosted and, you know, premium on a third-party context.

And I don't know if you have anything to do with that, but I imagine you at least have some insights into how that kind of came about. I think it's super relevant to this discussion, actually. It's an interesting reference that you bring up. I mean, what that is doing and what Ben Thompson's passport does is it's kind of exactly what we're talking about with Web3, right? He's basically saying, like, the identity of the user is detached from the platform, and it can move from platform to platform. So if you're listening on, you know, if you want to listen or read ontrechtary.com, great. But then if you want to go listen on Spotify, great, you can listen there as well.

And that's the part of actually when I hear this performance. proposal for Web 3 and media, I get super excited. I'm like, oh my God, this makes so much sense. Like now I don't have to worry about having these siloed identities and these siloed pieces of personal information locked up in these centralized databases. It can just sort of travel. But again, like as more and more of the actual media starts to end up decentralized as well, I just keep coming back to this fundamental question of, okay, well, what is the 15 to 20 year implication of this like the does the format basically get stuck and do we just end up with these sort of like dumb down versions of media that can't evolve at a certain point um that's like that's my

concern that i just don't know if anyone it's it's sort of it becomes like satellite junk right like space junk essentially the debris of the first era of web three yeah exactly be all this shit from all these nfts that are stupid and dumb you know that people put there and paid 200 in gas fees and we're going to go back and be like, wow, this is what we chose to put there, like a bunch of butts and whatever, you know? Yeah. I mean, not that that's a problem. I mean, it's the internet all the way down.

Exactly. Yeah. So is there an area of this that you're interested in, like, working on? Obviously, I know you can't sort of reveal what you're specifically going towards next, but I'm generally a person that gravitates towards consumer-facing products, right? Like, I'm, you know, Brian, I think it was you, Brian, that said, like, what's the thing that my mom, or, you know, this thing is not ready for my mom to use.

I actually think about that with Web 3 all the time. I'm like, my mom would not have to do any of this stuff. Like, I have a friend who was texting me a few weeks ago. She's like, I'm trying to buy an MFT. I'm like, I cannot figure this out. I cannot figure out of set up my MetaMask wallet and like, buy the EF on Coinbase and transfer. Like, so I think until problems like that get solved,

yeah, I mean, I don't think a lot of this technology is ready for prime time. I tend to gravitate towards consumer products that are stupidly easy for people to use. You know, Aviary, I think was that kind of product. It was like, anyone could do this.

Anchor obviously tries to be that in a way, or at least in the beginning. That's what we were really going for. Like, hey, anyone can start a podcast. So I'm really attracted to products like that. I mean,

I'll give an example of a product that I love. Let's see, like, universe. Have you seen the universe? Yeah. It's a website builder. Like you can basically build.

It's on universe.com, right? Yeah. I think it's on universe. com. Oh, okay. It's basically like Squarespace, but on your phone. Like you can make a fully feature-rich website. It's like blocks.

Yeah, exactly. I love things like that because I think they lead to new forms of creativity. They lead to people doing things that they previously weren't able to do. They in many cases create new markets, right? Like I think in many ways, Anchor sort of expanded the market of podcasts. I'm interested in other products that can do that. I'm also, Chris, you and I were texting a little. a little bit about this. I've recently become fascinated with this notion of

encryption being like a consumer-centric feature. And here's what I mean by... Yeah, unpack that. Like explain, yeah, your thoughts about that. Here's what I mean about that. Obviously, encryption has been around forever, to various degrees and in, you know, all different types of applications at different sort of places within the stack. But I feel like it's moving up to almost like the consumer layer or like the presentation layer where it's actually something the consumer cares about. And I'm trying to figure out why that is. And I have a suspicion. I think it's, I think it comes, I think it's, I think it's sort of rooted in this growing distrust of institutions in society.

I mean, this is more anecdotal, but I feel like more and more every day I see more of my friends using Signal. I don't know if it's the same with you guys or in your circles. Like, I'm talking to more and more people on signal or an encrypted WhatsApp chats. And if you ask any of these people, I don't even know if there's a specific fear they could pinpoint. It's like, you know, I'm sure they don't think, you know, the government's watching them or they're going to be hacked. But it almost feels like some hedge towards the future.

Well, also, I mean, that's that's a little bit of privilege because people have been afraid of people listening in all the time. It's just that I'm with you because I'm hearing more people talk about VPNs for their, I'm just, I'm just a middle class person with a house and some kids and I want a VPN. And like even two, three years ago, because VPN advertisers are huge on podcasts, like I always feel like no one wants this. And now I feel like that's one of the things that has become mainstream, you know? 100%. And then something happened over the past week.

I don't know if you guys saw it. But I was fascinated by it. With the Supreme Court or? Well, yes. I mean, obviously that happened, right? Which was, which I thought was absolutely horrifying and terrible. But then what happened as a result was, you know, there's an app called Stardust, which is, you know, there's a big category of women's health apps that help women track their periods, their menstrual cycle. This app Stardust, which is, you know, an intent encrypted privacy first.

Period, dragout. Shout up to number one in the app store. Like literally the number one app in the US. And again, back to this notion of, you know, growing mistrust of institutions. I don't know. Like I'm seeing all these things happen, this VPN thing that you mentioned, Brian, signal, you know, Stardust, the app go to number one. It feels to me like encryption and privacy is going to be at the forefront of a lot of consumer products over the next couple of years. So I think this is a super interesting direction, right? Because on the one hand, there's this enablement that encryption offers, which is a type of privacy, right?

And privacy, to some degree, is the ability to be let alone in some contexts. And the interesting thing about the democratization of media means that now you have the ability to publish publicly that in which anybody in the world could see or hear what you have to say. The problem with that, though, is that there is an extreme context collapse that happens as a result of that new capability. And so the judgments or the cultural moors or the laws or other types of prohibitions that exist in other places that don't apply or not relevant to the place where you happen to be, now suddenly make you vulnerable to be judged or critiqued or to be vulnerable to those types of evaluations

that makes sense perhaps in other contexts. And so suddenly you need the ability to actually claw back some of that context collapse. And encryption is a way where you kind of put this cloak around everything that you do. And then you can then hand out the keys to those people or those contexts which you feel safer or where there's some sense of protection or inviability or to not be violated, you know? So like a really good use case for this started out being about just saving money, which is that I want to be able to watch Netflix and I don't have to pay for it. So we're going to share passwords. And then maybe I'm in another country. And, you know, there's only one of my friends who has a credit card. And so therefore I need a VPN

to like, you know, log in to some other country or something. And I've heard about this use case recently. But then over time, through that exposure of using a VPN for that commercial purpose, you start to become a little bit more curious of it. Well, how does this even work? And what is this for? And then perhaps it does lead you down this road of thinking about encryption, especially around messaging and conversations. And then you get to the, like, essentially what's amazing about crypto and, you know,

blockchain technology and Web3 stuff is that it basically is private key pair encryption, which has been around forever, you know, PGP, but was never in a form that was usable by end users. And now it's come to the point where there is enough products out there. and there was enough kind of other activity around it that it's become more acceptable. So I'm very interested, I guess, and I'm wondering how you saw this, you know, whether that's, you know, Spotify or elsewhere, of whether there's a growing kind of awareness from a younger generation that grows up with these things and with these experiences, that they reset the

baseline of how this stuff actually works in practice in the marketplace. I don't know, to be honest. I mean, on one hand, I would say, like, it seems like with all the younger generations, public is often the deep. Well, I don't know. I actually, as I'm saying, I take it back. I mean, I'm thinking about TikTok, and I'm thinking, you know, about how it feels like the younger generation is so used

to this sort of public form of expression. On the other hand, as I say it, you know, I feel like there's also a ton of direct messaging that go. I mean, I think it's pretty common knowledge at this point. You know, lots of people have their, you know, their public accounts on TikTok and Instagram, whatever, and their private accounts, right? Their FinC does. Yeah, exactly. the fence pithogram right um i don't know um i'm not actually sure i this is kind of why i'm so

interested by it because it feels like this unique sort of dichotomy that's sort of unfolding in culture in real time and it seems like the it can swing really quickly i mean the the roe v way thing is a perfect example i mean this one oh my god i mean like right yeah like i'm i wasn't you know i i woke up that day and refreshed new york times dot com and it's like oh holy shit, wait, what just happened? So it just things like, it feels like things are moving so fast that culturally can be so broadly impacted so quickly. I don't know.

I'm curious to say, but it's interesting that you brought a blockchain. That was another example I forgot to mention. You know, there are obviously people in lots of places in the world where it's actually not easy to send money because of, you know, government oversight or, you know, it's hard to get access to financial, financial. institutions. And Bitcoin can be an incredibly liberating thing for people because of the, you know, the anonymity that goes along with it. Obviously, that has downsides as well. And I'm sure people in the U.S. are using Bitcoin for all sorts of nefarious reasons.

But, you know, there's also clearly a lot of potential for it as well in other countries as well. So I don't know. There's a lot to unpack here. but it's all pretty fascinating. I want to ask one more question for us. By the way, Michael, we should probably let you go since we've been going way longer than an hour at this moment. No problem. This is fun. Yeah, yeah, all good. Let me, let me, this is for both of you. This is, this is poking at something. Charlie Wurzel had a piece that was very critical of Web 3 this week.

I don't think I mentioned it on the show, but one of the things that was in the piece that stuck with me was a Web 3, founder who said that, I'm going to quote, and I realize there's a pattern here. I keep making things that people don't want. What am I building things people won't use for free? About Web3 and the idea that, you know, will my mom use this and things like that? I'm curious, and again, this is for both of you. Is the tokenization sort of the thing that has fucked Web3 in the sense that if you come out with product and you look for product market fit and you look for traction, that has to come from the end user. And then you had all these projects over the last few years that have tokens and the tokens

take off so people think that there's traction. And so that like the token and all the ancillary things around these Web3 projects fooled founders into thinking that, oh my God, we're going to the moon, everything. But no, but you didn't actually pay attention to the product. Do you know what I mean? I'm just curious what you think about that, the idea that, you know, because again, if we're in a winter again, obviously good things come out of winters and whatever. But like go back to basics and build something that people want to use. I was going to say to Mike, like if you could, if you restarted Anchor today, how or would like Web3 and tokens help you with a Cold Star problem?

I don't think it would. Interesting. Okay. Well, I'm talking about actually in 2014, but okay. No, I mean, well, even if we started it today, like even if it was 2022 and we started Anchor again, I don't think it would. I mean, because again, like I went, we went through this with RSS and I actually found it to be problematic. I found it to be great and problematic at the same time. And so, you know, Web 3 would basically be another version of, you know, effectively, let's just call it

sort of an open standard. I know it's a little bit more nuanced and different than that. Again, I keep coming back to this notion of like, you hit this ceiling in innovation and innovation and product development. I'm not sure that it actually would help us. I do think the point you make, Brian, is really

interesting. It was your point that we just came out of this bull market where people were going absolutely nuts over anything crypto and therefore, like getting involved with any project meant you could just by default effectively be speculating on the token that was associated with it. And in many cases, just start making money because you're working

on these projects. Is that your point? And now we're going into this winter. Well, that, and it fooled people into thinking, like, look, all of a sudden, right, our market cap is $5 billion because of our token, right? Versus, did you get that because people are buying your product? Because people are adopting your product? Right. So, right. So the incentives for building products during this crazy crypto boom

was just pure coin speculation. It was almost, hey, let's build something of value. It was all good ideas. And by the way, that's the capitalist fantasy world where it's just all good ideas and everybody with a good idea gets rich or whatever, except for the fact

that the cold reality is to make money even good ideas can Totally. Totally. And then, you know, the money, the money cost turns off. And it's like, oh, okay, you know, it's all, it's all, I don't know, gobbly gook or something. It's like, where's where's the real product? But I think that that's one of the, the real challenges about this moment and about what we've just gone through is that there was so much false signal about what was good and what was working. And the thing, you know, was sort of like an Aurora Boris. And it was just eating itself until it ran out of itself. and it could no longer eat itself, and so therefore there was a crash. And I think, you know, Brian, to your point, and, you know, I think in some ways this is a very good kind of moment to step back. And again, like, Mike to your point, like, think about some of the fundamentals.

What are the things that people are trying and wanting to do? Where is it hard and where is the friction? And there are, you know, there continue to be kind of these, you know, the way that I kind of think about some of the stuff sometimes is, like, you need to have these, you know, like artists are one example of this, but you need to have random seeds. in sort of a sea of homogenation and conservatism, because conservatism is a system for remembering things that work and then trouncing the things that don't work so that when there is a winter, and when the potato famine happens,

you can still survive as a species. But, you know, we've gone through this period with a kind of abundance, thanks to the Industrial Revolution, that allows us to be much more speculative with how to put out kind of the efforts of human kind of creativity. And so we kind of got ahead of ourselves with this financialization through Bitcoin and other types of, I guess, cryptocurrencies that allowed us to kind of just invent out of thin air currency that never existed before in a way that suddenly, basically money was democratized. And it created this set of kind of consensual hallucinations that this is actually how it's supposed to work and how it's always going to be. and yet actually having kind of adversity is totally necessary to the process of creating real evolutionary, I guess, I guess evolution.

So I guess like what I'm sort of just imagining is like how putting economic motivation for getting people onto these platforms distorted a lot of founders or creators' sense of what was working, as opposed to people being intrinsically drawn to something for something that is much more in a way. and personal, which is culture and art and a lot of the stuff that, you know, the mediums that we were talking about are necessary for. So if we think about what the content of the money, of the medium of money is, it's just capillary movement. It's the sort of movement of energy, whereas creating things that are interesting and impactful, that's sort of like the next wave that I think has to come from this that's enabled perhaps by some of these crypto things, but is not the thing itself. Well, maybe one great outcome then of what is happening, right? now, right? It's all sort of washing away. Maybe that as a constraint will force people to

really focus on the really powerful and beneficial use cases of Web3 that do provide new types of value. In other words, maybe this is a, maybe this is a good constraint for creativity inside a Web3 and like really forcing people to identify like what the true benefits of it are. All right, Mike, we're going to stop there. Where can people follow you? And if they want to figure out what you're up to next. When do they, when do they get a little hint about that? Just, I'm, I'm at McNano, which is my last name, M-I-G-N-O, pretty much everywhere here on Twitter. I don't know, anywhere else, like in Instagram, whatever. When will, when will they find out? Soon. Sometimes, stay tuned. Well, we will have to have you back when you come out with that

and when you've figured out the whole purpose of Web 3. Yeah, this is awesome. Thank you guys so much. So great to reconnect for the first time in years publicly. Exactly. Yes. Right? Yeah, it's good to talk to you again. And yeah, excited to find out what you're about to do because I think you have a very interesting perspective and insight on some angles here. Thanks, Brian.

I appreciate that. And you guys do as well. This is a really, really thoughtful and fun conversation. Appreciate you guys having me.