Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Every.to And Mac Studio

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

We talked to Nathan Baschez and Dan Shipper, the founders of the media startup Every.to. We talked to them about the realities of being two years in as a modern, from the ground up media company, the shifting landscape in the “creator economy” (remember that?) And a lot about Substack and its business model and philosophy. Around the hour mark, Chris and I have a lengthy conversation about the Mac Studio, my purchasing of one, my cancelling of my order for a Studio Display. And also, Chris has a very interesting 8 dimensional chess theory about where Apple is headed as a company. 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 to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Thursday, March 17th, 2022. We are joined today by two friends from the Every Bundle. I guess Every.

Dot 2 is how to get to their website. And we've got Nathan and Dan. Do you guys want to introduce yourself so we can identify your voices? Sure. I'm Dan. And I am the co-founder and CEO of Evry. And I'm Nathan. The co-founder president of Evry.

Amazing. Thank you. Do you guys want to just quickly actually tell us what you or what your one-line pitch is for Every? And then we'll sort of like see where this goes. Yeah, totally. So every is very simple. It's a bundle of newsletters. And we write newsletters around a lot of different topics that are kind of like tech-focused. So we have newsletters on things like productivity, strategy, the creator economy, crypto. And we put them all in one place and readers pay one. one subscription price and they get access to all the different newsletters that we make.

And it's a little bit different from other kinds of media companies in a couple of different ways. One is just like editorially, the kinds of pieces that we like to write are, we really like to write long form analysis and commentary pieces that are kind of four practitioners and by practitioners. We really like to publish things that are by people who work in tech and are talking about things that they know from the experiences that they've had in their life. So that's kind of the editorial model.

And then we have a little bit of a different business model at every two in the way that we structure things. So we're what we call a writer collective, which means that when we work with writers, we try to be somewhere between working for a media company and like writing your own substack. And on the media company side of things, we do things like, you know, we give writers distribution to an audience, we give them a brand to write under. We give them an editor. We pay them, all that kind of stuff. And then on the kind of substack-e-like side of things, we give writers a lot of editorial freedom to cover the things that they cover.

We really believe where kind of the vast rating comes from. We don't have a central editor that, like, hands-down stories and stuff like that. That's the first thing. The second thing is we split the profits. So we measure how much money each writer is bringing in, whether that's subscription dollars or ad dollars. and we split the upside, 50-50. And then we also let writers leave with their list. So when our writers are working with us for a while,

and for whatever reason, it's not working either for them. For us, we don't want to hold them hostage to, like, staying with us because they're going to lose their audience. We just give them a copy of their list, and they go on their way. So that's the basic gist. Yeah, we've been running it for, like, a little bit over two years now. We've about 45,000 free subscribers and like 2,600 paying subscribers. And yeah, it's been really fun.

Let me get the glib obvious thing out of the way. Sounds like a magazine, except for the fact that a magazine doesn't split all of the revenue based on equal metrics and things like that. You literally read their letter. I mean, if you go to every dot two slash letter, they said, you've invented magazines. It's great. Exactly. But yes, it's a fair critique. Okay, go ahead.

Well, what we were just talking about before we officially started recording was talking about how that business model has evolved. Because as you said, I think he said, 2,600 paying subscribers, but also you guys pivoted towards advertising. So I'm just, you know, in any sort of broad strokes, I'm just, I'm just, you know, any sort of broad strokes, I'm not asking you to disclose financials or anything like that. But, you know, how's the business going? And I do want to get into this idea of advertising because I have some thoughts on that that are kind of timely. Sure.

Ooh. Oh, no. I mean, I was just trying to say, ooh, because of the timely thing. But also because we have Evan here who deserves a lot of credit for the fact that we do advertising. We did, we did like tiny bit here and there, but it was just kind of like, I don't know, it seems like it's going to be a pain. Like it's going to take a lot of effort to like communicate with advertisers and do the whole ad ops thing. And it's a lot of extra work. And I'm not really sure if it's a good idea.

But he was like wanting to try it. So, you know, we did it a little bit more because of that. And then it's turned into like a really good thing. So Dan, you should talk about the good thing of then it is. Yeah. And I can give you like a little bit of a summary of this and too. I think, like, the first year, it was amazing. It was like, wow, this thing is growing super fast.

I don't know why people think media is hard. I'll say, if I'm stupid. We're just, yeah, this is, like, pretty freaking easy. Said no one ever about media, but you guys have, so congratulations. I would say, like, famous last words. I would say, like, year two was definitely more of a struggle. It was harder. I think we tried to transition from.

It being just me and Nathan to it being an editorial organization with a lot of writers, with editors, where we moved off Substack onto our own platform that we built ourselves. And it was like really trying to like grow up a lot. And that, yeah, that was just really hard. The business didn't grow quickly. We learned a lot of lessons. We made a lot of mistakes. And so that was difficult emotionally.

Nathan's written a lot about this in his post year two, which was, which is really incredible. Which I want to get to, too, but keep going. Cool. Yeah. We should definitely cover that. And then I think, like, towards the end of the year, we figured some things out. I think we started to figure out some things about the kind of content that we write and the things that work well. We really started to figure out the ad business, which has been just like an incredible boon to the whole operation. And things have started to pick up a lot.

So we're really growing pretty nicely. and we're bringing a lot more revenue from the ad business. Yeah, it was just one of those things where I think we really took the hard line where a subscription-only business and there's a big trade-off, he sell ads kind of mentality early on. And honestly, I think that that kind of held us back. And it was only because Evan, who's here on this space right now, pushed us to start trying to sell ads.

So we were just like, okay, we'll turn it on and we'll like see if, if anyone wants it. And we just got like a bunch of inbound, like almost immediately, almost more than we knew what to do with. And we were suddenly making a lot of money. And it was like, wow, this is great. It's almost like year one all over again. This is pretty easy.

And so now we've built it into like a really significant part of our business and we have people that are like running in and doing outreach and all that kind of stuff. And I think that we feel like the core of the business is always going to be subscription. But the reality is that like, you know, Like, some writers want to write ads supported content, either because their incentive is to reach as many people as possible. They'd much rather, like, reach a ton of people than put stuff behind a paywall. Or because the kind of content that they write is just better free. It's like sometimes you write things that people want to pay $20 a month for,

and sometimes you're going to write stuff that's, like, really great and really valuable. But people don't feel like they want to pay for it in the same way. they won't they you know it's better it's better content that's going to like spread and so um basically having multiple business models or multiple elite the monetizing means we can support a more diverse array of writers writing and more diverse set of things and that's been really great right who's who's the one that did the essay about the creators have the multi skew it's not a hunter walk hunter right okay um right just because you take up ads doesn't mean that subscriptions not you could do away with subscriptions just because you do subscriptions doesn't mean you

don't sell t-shirts or what you know what have you um and again we were talking right before like um we we both experimented with ads together a little bit and the thing that's timely about that is i um i had a conversation with um a prominent sub stacker who i'm not going to name I don't want to blow up their spot about them shifting to ads this month and them saying, oh, I didn't realize that there would be so much interest in inbound. I was so undervaluing that or underestimating that. And even in podcasting, like, that's been my experience as well, where we still have the ad-free feed and we experimented last year with doing bonus content and stuff.

But in the end, like, if we can reach 50,000 people every day and, you know, with ads and even the bonus content, the stuff that we were trying to put behind the paywall, I was just like, well, we could just reach more people with it. And then the ads made more sense than even the subscription thing. I think, Chris, isn't Alice Cantowitz's is ads supported as well? We know a bunch of people that do newsletters and substacks that have moved to advertising. And again, this is not a binary thing, but, you know, I'm just actually, what I'm curious about is do you feel like, do you feel like advertising could become not the main thing that you do, but the majority of your revenue? and then the subscription stuff is like, you know, sort of gilding the lily a little bit. What is gilding the lily mean? icing on the cake.

icing on the cake. Oh, man, that's incredible. You're going to get yourself in trouble there. Although, yeah, Nathan tends to use nice turns of phrases as well. Oh, no, that's my whole point. I admire it. I'm a collector of turns of phrase. I know.

No, you're going to have to use this one now. Yeah, gilding the lily. I don't know something kind of like protecting something traditional that's not Yeah, I think there's also sort of a quasi-sexual aspect to that. I'm Googling right now to make sure that I didn't

Yeah, make sure that this is like PG-13. It says to adorn unnecessarily something that is already beautiful or perfect. Yeah, because Lily's are beautiful. Sure. Perfect advertising business doesn't necessarily need to be adorned by subscriptions, is the question you're asking. I don't know.

I know. I think probably subscriptions are always going to, to be the main backbone. I mean, that could obviously change, but I just think it's hard to see a trajectory where we stop caring about subscriptions much because recurring revenue is like a beautiful thing. It is a wonderful thing. And like in a lot of ways, we've been able to weather a lot of kind of like, you know, content is really hard. You have to like find new product market fit every single day, right? Like people have the software product and you figure out a that works, you know, there's some, you have to nurture it over time, but like, you've kind of

got the thing and you can just keep, like, kind of refining it. Whereas content, it's like, okay, what's your new thing for me today? You have to know as writer, what are people going to want, you know? And it's just really hard to keep reinventing it. And I think, you know, for subscription revenue, it's really nice to have this four basic readers that's like odd in, they're here, you know, especially if they're on annual plans, right? They think of it as a long-term relationship with you. That's great. So, um, You know, the math could work out that like as we get bigger or whatever, maybe advertising is more important.

I don't think we'll ever really stop focusing on subscription revenue because the thing that's pretty about advertising revenue is, I mean, you can run into a situation where if something happened with the economy or the advertising industry or whatever, your business can get very small, very fast, you know? Yes, yes. Certainly in hard times, people might decide to cancel their or whatever, but it's just, it's a lot more resilient. I mean, we may even actually see that, you know, with what's happening with the economy

and inflation, you know, interest rate hikes. All these things may actually cause people to take a look at their subscription spend and decide that actually they'd prefer to go with something that's more, you know, not a la carte, actually, sort of a buffet where they can get a bunch of stuff, but it's like very low cost. Right. I'm just thinking, like, in this economy, 20 bucks a month is cheap now. Yeah, right?

Considering where we were like four or five years ago. Yeah, totally. But actually, so... I was thinking we should rebrand our subscription and a token, and that way people think of it like an investment. I was wondering, well, you want to be careful at securities. However, I... We're split ball here. You're really theoretical.

I mean, given that, you know, Congress is going to start moving in that direction. Be very careful for what you wish for. And I was actually, like, as a very much aside, was curious about, you know, Nathan, you've written about Web3 and had to those conversations. of course, being on means of creation and talking about the creator economy, the function of Dow's and about the ownership economy and things like that. And so it's curious that you spend a lot of time talking to people like in that world and yet that isn't the approach it seems that you've taken with Every. So what you're thinking there? Can you impact kind of like strategically like why that's the case? Yeah. I think like you know, the original inspiration for

every was around creating a certain type of writing and building a little it using a sort of description business model with kind of like the subscription sharing on back end writers. And so, you know, we have gone about building that and it's gone reasonably well. And I think crypto offers a really new and kind of interesting way to potentially monetize. But to me right now, it's just like curiosity, basically. Generally speaking or for yourself? What's that?

Like, do you mean for you? Or do you mean for everybody? It's a curiosity. Oh, no, no, no. I mean for us. Okay. Yeah, yeah, for me personally. Okay.

It's interesting, but it's very, I mean, it's a serious thing to like go all in there, right? Yeah. And like, I certainly want to learn about it. I'm absolutely curious about it. But I do think one thing that I think is for sure, that's not just curious in, in practice, even if in the future it'll be in case that kind of like, oh, all media companies run on crypto rails, like all subscriptions. actually should be organized rather than just paying in fiat currency or whatever.

And maybe you should have your readers bought in and, like, you know, they're part of their motivation for staying subscribed is just sort of participate in the economic value created by their subscribes to. Like, I could do that. But the reality today and foreseeable future is the only people who care about that are people who are bought in that full narrative. And that's really like part of our audience, not a whole audience. Right.

So at the very most, we would introduce it kind of like as a new, option. But even then, if you look at the polling that's available, it's still very early days. And it just seems like, you know, there's always going to be a place for really great writing. A lot of the institutions who produce the writing that we read today were created like 100 years ago. And we want to become that kind of organization. You know, I actually, so, okay, like, I hear what you're saying kind of like, you know, where you're coming from. And so it just kind of occurs to me that, I mean, you could do the Dowell thing if you wanted to.

You can do the crypto thing if you want to. It doesn't necessarily add an enormous amount of value right now. It might make some of the economics more transparent and, you know, get you into, I don't know, the maelstrom of stuff that's going on in the Web3 world. But I suppose it's not necessary. You can achieve the same or similar ends using Fiat and more conventional, you know, structures. So I get that. The thing that I was wondering about, and you just alluded to it, is these institutional brands, brands that get built up over time.

So in some ways, what you guys are similar to, I suppose, it seems like you're a little bit more similar to maybe like the Harvard like business review. And I was also thinking about like the economist. You know, I listened to a lot of the economist podcasts. I've been a long time reader. And I was trying to think about who was it that started the economist. I mean, it's sort of like getting a great domain, right? It's just like a great name for a magazine.

And so once you start that and once you get it going, you have a, you have a perspective and you hire your writers and you start building. building your brand and you build this thing out over time. And it feels like that's roughly what you guys are trying to do and maybe are committed to. So I suppose, I guess my question is kind of maybe around like that legacy idea. And a lot of, I don't know, newsletter type publications come and go. How do you create a sense of consistency and durability? And what was the word Matt Mullenweg used in a podcast every day?

Anti-fragile. how are you guys thinking about that for every i think the economist got started in the 1840s or something i haven't googled it but but if we're talking legacy yeah that's like literally around in 150 years god bless but i mean i personally i 150 years uh i want to peter kill to figure something out no but seriously though like i mean yeah it's kind of like a wild theme right like it would be amazing if that happened obviously you know most of the vast majority of the things that I've worked on in my career and probably, you know, in all likelihood, it won't last that long, but it would be sick if it did. Like that would be awesome. So like for us, if he is like thinking about, uh, how do we do this in a sustainable way, right? So one thing is economically sustainable, right? So that's part of the reason why subscriptions are still important. I'm still glad that that we have them. Um, and really focused on them. Another thing is like, uh, you know, to produce really good writing, consistently, you've got to understand what it takes to sort of like in the mind of a writer

to like make that happen on a regular basis. So we kind of obsess over this. This is something that, you know, I think also probably a, you know, big magazines. There's lots of culture and practice around sort of like, why do people write? Like what makes great, what makes for great writing? What kind of environment? What kind of relationship with the editor? Like this is something that we really focus on. And so like it's the journey, right? Like we have not figured out the grand secret to it all or whatever. It's like a vastly evolving thing, but it's something that feels

like I could keep working on absolutely with no end. I don't have any other thoughts of what else I might do or how big it would need to be or what the exit be or whatever else. It feels like I could pretty much hang out here and write stuff and try and get other really great people want to also write stuff and

come up with a model that feels like really good fair competition where we're providing a lot of values in the writer and they're getting to capture a lot of value too that they're creating. And so, yeah, it's like a tricky thing, though, but I think it comes down to like, why do people want to write, you know? And how do you build a brand for really great writing that attracts the best writer? But see, that's different than like the economist, which, you know, wants to bring a certain lens or discipline or perspective to the news or to what's going on in the world, right? So I understand the idea of, and I'd like to you to unpack what a writer collective is from your perspective.

Like, is it? I mean, they could get there. They could eventually settle on. an editorial slant, but it just, yeah. I think what you're pointing to is something really important. And it's something, it's something about like the thing that we're trying to achieve that, I don't think we've figured out exactly how to do it yet, but we know more than we did before.

And if we, if we figure it out, it will be the thing that makes us the kind of institution that we hope it to be. Yeah. And the thing that you're pointing to is that when you read the economists, there's no byline, right? Typically. It's like, it's just like the economy. is writing it.

Yeah. It's collective identity. Exactly. And the difference is that on the internet, like what we noticed and what we've known for, I don't know, probably five years or so is like the thing that wins is not that. It's the individual voices. Yeah. And the force that we've seen over the last five years has been that those individual voices

have broken out of their traditional institutions and have been enabled by the internet to like write and create on their own and be funded. doing that directly from readers or from ads. And I think the thing that we're working on is, and the question that we said out to answer is, that's great. Like, we know that readers want individual voices, but there's a lot of power in getting a lot of voices together in one place. And it would be much better for readers if there was a group of them in one place.

And it would also be better for writers. Because if you're on your own, there's only so much that you can do. You have to, if you're on your own, you have to run a business. If you're on your own, it, like, limits the kind of content that you write. Like, you have to get out content every week if you're on your own. You can't do, like, a long piece. You know, you can't, like, have a big thing in an opera that you, like, work on for two months at least, right? So, well, like, the big question is, how do you, like, retain the things that make writing on the Internet so special, like, the real connection with an individual writer?

But how do you do that inside of a group? And that's like the question that a writer collective seeks to answer. And the first answer is, well, you have to make the economics deal more fair. And so you have to give writers a deal where if they're contributing value, they're making more money, and they don't have to ask for a raise. And you can just kind of measure it and say, okay, I did this article. It created this many subscribers, so I get more money. I think the other piece, which I think is the other thing that you're alluding to is there's a lot of complexity. in terms of editorial, when you're trying to figure out, like, who's in the bubble and who's out of the bubble and what kind of stuff we publish and what kind of stuff we're not published so that it's kind of cohesive.

And that's something that we're still figuring out. I think that we started by saying, hey, everyone can do whatever they want, like within some range of, like, acceptable. Like, we're not going to publish. Right. Within like value. Yeah. Well, actually, so this is important, right? Like, that range is the thing that becomes controversial and determines some level of participation and commitment for the writers.

So is that on the every website or where could I actually see that? We, so, so if you go look at our founder letter, like we lay out some things that are kind of like the kind of writing that we like to see or that we hope to create, which are, which is things like writing that's by practitioners, support practitioners. So it's like writing about your own, often your own personal experience in an industry, writing that's like, that's well crafted and beautiful that helps people see the world in any way or help them be better with their jobs. So we have like some idea, especially in that letter of the kind of things that we love. But it seems like you guys don't really get into more controversial topics. Like the things that Substack seems to on the one hand be advocating for, you know, wanting to provide a place, you know, for those voices that have been kicked off of

some of the mainstream platforms to go. But the topics that you guys trade in are more sort of professional development and things along those lines. Is that kind of how you just steer clear? Kind of. Yeah, we don't, I mean, we definitely don't. A lot of our stuff is, is more business focus. It's like less political or less divisive. We try to be less divisive. It's just, it's just more what we're interested in, I think. So I think that's one, that's one potential that's one potential thing. So like one axis you have to worry about is are, do people like disagree a lot inside of your collective?

And so one way that that isn't as much of a problem for us is like we don't talk about things that are as divisive usually. Just the topic coverage is, you know, more business focused. But there's still lots of problems inside of that. It's like, well, if Nathan writes about strategy and I write about productivity, like why should we be in the same place, right? And I think that we've had a lot of answers.

to that over the course of the business. One big answer that we've landed on is, like, it's, it makes it easier to do this if there is better personalization. So if readers can tell us who they want to read inside of the collective, then it's great because, like, the fact that Spotify has a bunch of songs I don't like isn't really a problem because I don't really see them. Right. But, I think, you know, we've also kind of realized that if we have lots of different writers

writing their own list, it would be much better if there was better cross-pac. Paul nation, and we could really, like, distribute more posts and more of the people that are inside of the collective. Because, like, if I have a 20,000 person list, but every has 45,000 people on the list, then every time I push published, there's 25,000 people that could see it that don't. So if we have a tighter editorial focus, we can all be rowing in the same direction more quickly. And so, honestly, that's, like, one of our big projects right now. And I don't think we have, like, a full answer to that, but it's something that we're thinking about a lot, which is, like, how do we create guardrails? or a promise to readers that is like really, really legible without like totally taking away the ability of writers to cover the things that they're most interested in, which is what we think create best writing. So yeah, stay tuned.

Definitely. Well, I mean, it seems like it's so hard, you know, because I feel like having been on the internet now for, you know, 15, almost 20 years or so, I've seen a lot of these platforms that have emerged. They have a great amount of, you know, potential and promise. and then reality strikes. And Nathan, you actually wrote about this a bit with you wrote about the substack ideology, I think is what you said. Yeah, that's the, I'll post the link. And it seems to me like most things, and the way I kind of conceptualize this is that

there's kind of a complexity balloon, I suppose, or filled with complexity helium. And as you squeeze one part of the balloon, the complexity kind of goes to another part of the balloon, and the sort of volume always remains roughly the same. And so as you guys are talking, like, I like this idea of a collective. If I were a writer, you know, I'd want to be around other writers to like, you know, get ideas or feedback or grammatical checks or stylistic kind of improvisation, you know, like jazz for writers or something. But inevitably, it seems as you want to grow, like you, you, to grow to the size that, you know, depending on how you're funded, you may need to, you end up having to make compromise. And it feels like, you know, Nathan, you had worked at substack. Like, it feels like you are either philosophically opposed to some of the aspirations of substack or more pragmatically aligned in a different vector or, I don't know, like, I feel like there's a really rich and interesting tension between what you guys are doing and where substack is going, especially as they've just like launched their own native app.

And as you alluded to, push notifications becomes a very important part of, you know, breaking through the, uh, you know, kind of, you know, attention, I don't know, milieu, I suppose. So maybe, I don't know, like from a business perspective, from a growth perspective, from a participation model perspective, can you unpack how you guys see those things shaping up and changing and evolving? Yeah, I mean, I think for us, like the key really big difference with substack is sort of substack doesn't promote stuff, right? So, like, they don't have a general sub-back audience that they send post to in the way

that YouTube does, right? And for them, this justifies the, you know, ability for them to keep content on the platform that we would obviously never publish, right? And for us, the trade-off, better trade-off is, let's have like a tight kind of like high bar, you know, that's like all this stuff at the very least, course obviously has to meet like our basic human values,

which are specific. Not every human shares our values, right? Like we're going to not do stuff at the accord by those values, you know, somebody else wants to start a different writer's collection. that's like according to their values. Like that's fine, that's great. But then also within that, if it's interesting,

if it's like on the same vibe, roughly, even if it's on the same topics or by the same people, then maybe it could coexist, right? Maybe promote one author or to another author's body, that works, right? So that's kind of like the project that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to be a place where a writer can be introduced to a large audience, a big portion of that audience feel like them, because there are, same vibe, similar way of this, stuff they came before.

That's obviously really hard to do. The place with tension metaphorical aeroplane is the complexity goes towards, well, how do you actually accomplish that? Because it seems like if you squint at it, like, it's all just kind of like tech Twitter people writing. But if you start to look close to it, like, well, this person's cryptos stuff has like a different flavor than this other person's cryptos stuff and they're interested in different kind of thing. And this person doesn't respect this person or whatever. And it's like, you know, the, uh, I forget, I forget who said. I think this is your, but someone said like five back in you seem still, uh, tense because the stakes are small or something like that. It's kind of like that. Like the narcissus is small. Like, no matter how close you look at the fractal, we feel like there's a very big difference to me, the thing, their favorite thing that they identify with and then the thing right next to, you know, um, so it can be tricky. That's really hard. And that's, you know, we honestly have not solved, not defined. We find that some stuff. the cross promo works really, really well and other stuff to work less well.

We're trying to figure out in shape and bad, how to make it work and fit. Well, I was also, I was going to point out that I'm assuming that every hasn't raised as much money as Substack has, so you don't necessarily have the same scale pressures in theory. But also, you know, in your piece about Substack,

you did point out that, I think Substack found that if you're a reader of, one particular substack, you're like two and a half times more likely to become a paying reader of a different substack or whatever. So like, it's almost like you're sort of, you know, jumping the fence a little bit and just like doing the sort of same, not network effects, really, but like the same sort of a finity. It's like network traversal. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's funnily, right? Like that's the key thing. Like there is this core,

this is kind of like one of the things that started the company that I think that has proven true is there's an economic benefit to creators and consumers for bundling, right? When you offer something up for a price, there's going to be some people who are willing to pay that price. There's like a demand curve, right?

And some people are willing to pay more and some people are willing to pay less. And there's like a pretty printable, proven mathematical thing that's like, in a lot of cases, bundling makes sense. Not necessarily every case. There's definitely not perfect. But there's a lot of opportunities for bundling that create surplus for consumers and give more money on the back end to create. Well, because, and again, I'm reverencing your piece, but also this is something that everyone's thought about, which is, you know, how many substacks can a person subscribe to?

And so that's where bundling makes sense in the same way that every time you go home for Thanksgiving, your uncle is like, yeah, but you know what the business I would start is all of your subscriptions in one. subscription, you know. Right. Yeah. Right. That was me. I was now. Well, okay.

So, but I want to take this apart a little bit. I mean, because, you know, as you wrote in your piece, the internet changes everything. And I think that it's worth considering that that may actually be true, especially when it comes to the nature of bundling and unbundling or token gating or opening up. access to some parts of the network and restricting access to other parts of the network, and then also considering weights on the nodes in the graph. So what do I mean by these abstract concepts? Well, it just occurs to me that in the attention economy, and we're still, I think, unpacking and learning kind of what the full, I don't know,

spectrum of attention economics is, that what you guys are doing is first kind of providing a, I don't know, broad kind of gauzy view of how to get better at your craft, you know, through good writing. And you're going to bring together a bunch of writers who are actually working together and collaborating. And again, I don't have a full picture of what those writers collaborating looks like. But let's say that they do to make good content that you really want to read, some of which is, you know, requires payment to access and some which is free and then supported by ads. Ads are simply windows into your attention sphere. that are, I guess, paid for by people who have an interest in ceding the things that they are trying to promote, you know, to the readers.

And it just, it feels like the way, and I don't know, maybe, maybe I'm either being overly generous with what the Internet does or struggling to imagine that this business model that was invented, you know, back in the 1800s or whatever, by the guy that wanted to give away his newspaper, you know, to get more volume. isn't somehow new as, I guess, related to the way that we build relationships with the people who are producing the content. So, you know, Nathan, like, I followed you around, like a number of different places, you know, from, you know, Pratotent to substacts to, you know, even hardbound before all this, to, you know, what you're doing now. And so there is a weight to that node in the graph that means that I sort of, you know, follow along. and there's kind of like an attention signal that already exists. And I guess, you know, in the economist model, that didn't really have the possibility to exist as much if there are no bylines. So it just, it feels like there's a little bit of a different, I don't know, environment in the crater economy that you guys are alluding to and trying to, you know, create some sort of, I don't know, kind of like a wagon train, you know, that's circled up and saying, hey, there's cool stuff in here that's going on. And some people that you know come and join us.

And yes, there is like, you know, a fair to get into this space. I guess I'm trying to ask, like, how much does the Internet change this? How much do relationships between readers and writers make a difference? How does this change the economics of participating as a creator on the Internet? That's a good question. It's really broad. I think we could talk about that for a long time. I can tell you about one piece, which is like you kind of alluded to the idea that you follow Nathan around on Internet.

hopefully in a non-stockerish way. Mostly. I was observing in the Figma sense. Chris has always been a gentleman. Good to know, good to know. And I think that that is super important, right? That's one of the founding principles of every is what we noticed is when we, Nathan and I were writing our separate newsletters and then we bumped them together. We brought our audiences together.

We noticed when we added our first. bundle writer, his name is Tiago Forte, and he wanted to get his list. He brought his audience with them too. So that was like a key growth lever for us and continues to be a growth lever for us, is that the reputations that these individuals have that we work with, you can kind of bring that audience together and kind of create one big audience together if people join. The next kind of like thing that happens is someone like Nathan or someone like Tiago,

has kind of like this respect bubble. So people who read Nathan, respect him and care about what he thinks. And if he says, hey, go check out this other writer, they're going to do it. So if you have a bunch of writers, each of them who have audiences and kind of combine their audiences, those writers have the opportunity to like cross-pollinate and promote other writers with the bundle. And you suddenly have this like group of people who now have all been introduced to each other, like a big massive internet party that all kind of are friends, because they all, all like the core people that are that are kind of in the middle of it.

I think that that probably answers maybe part of your question, but I'm not 100% sure. So I'm curious, like, what that brings up for you. Yeah. I mean, I definitely get like the cross-pollination piece. I think, you know, what I'm, what am I noodling on? It just feels like there's something both qualitatively and aspirationally different. Like maybe, you know, just going back to the original, like, early days of the web and imagining the web as being a place where anybody could publish, anybody could contribute, and anybody could

kind of grow their stature, you know, over time, sort of starting from, you know, almost nobody and nowhere, and then rising up. And I look at what's happening with Mirror, you know, as a place for the Web3 crowd to kind of publish to each other and promote each other and to create new economic ways to kind of reward one another. And, you know, rather than just giving likes, you know, they drop some token or they buy some NFTs or something. And you guys, you guys, you guys, you know, you guys, are playing in a space where, you know, I don't know, like, I think maybe I'm just trying to piece apart what is ultimately new about this, what is familiar and, you know, tried, but now happening in a new medium and a new environment. And so maybe what I'm asking is what the

nature of interaction is that might be new, novel, or different with every, between every's writers and, you know, the readers. And do they find value in that? And is there interaction and engagement or is it more of a passive, you know, consumption experience? Like you said, it's like magazines, right? Like I'm thinking about like Flipboard. And Flipboard for a moment was this novel way of reading things that had this page curl effect that was like super realistic and new and exciting. And I haven't heard about them in years. So I guess, you know, part of this is about understanding human interaction, human connection, and learning from another. And so you're also creating new organizational units and structures for people to come together on the internet.

And I guess maybe that's the thing that's, I don't know, interesting to observe. Yeah. I mean, I think the kind of like simple answer is what's new is you get to take an email list to you and you get 50% description revenue drive and you get promoted to an ever-growing list right now is like 40-something thousand people instead of having a search scratch. Yeah, totally. So it's like the cold start problem. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. That's like the very concrete kind of like what's new. And then there's stuff that we're not doing a lot of right now. That's mostly right now the way we look and feel is like similar to any traditional publisher on the internet, but could get pretty different, which is like unlike the magazines of the past, like we do have the benefit of like data and infinite shelf space and personalization and all that kind of stuff. You know, we're not really, we don't need or we're not able to use it yet. It's not at that level of scale.

But I think we'll theoretically be able to scale better as we go, covering potentially like lots. different niche topics and then niche industries. That's a core part of the vision of every. And that's kind of like far up in the future, right? You know, it occurs to me that like a job covering the tech industry. Yeah. We think we could get to go further. One of the challenges that you guys have is that you're predicated on the written word, you know, long form pros. Because as you were describing what you want to work on, like that is TikTok, but TikTok figured out how to do it with, you know, visual moving images.

So it is a harder problem, I think, to capture people's attention, you know, with words, with, you know, sentences and that form of communication. And so craft is and is a differentiator and so important, which makes sense that you guys are almost like the, like, how do I put this? It's a pre-formulation process, I suppose, to get content into a form that is both worth the attention that it demands and then also repays. the reader because you've almost like done some of the predigestion for them. Yeah.

I think there's something that text just has a competitive advantage for, right? Like, video is really great at a certain thing. Text is better at other things. I think that, you know, the relative audience of text might shrink over time compared to like video or something like that or might be shrinking. But I think the absolute audience text is growing over time. And I think we're fine on that front. Or if we're not, I mean, I'm going down with the ship.

We're tied to words. I appreciate that. I mean, and that being instead, like, we're super interested in new phones of moving text, right? Like, that's what hard ground to develop out. And, like, absolutely there's going to be a spot for that inside every, like, as we have a little bit more bandwidth to try and experiment with new things. And then also, like, we do podcasts, both podcasts, conversations for amazing.

It's not, it's not like, you know, 100% text purists, but text, that's definitely, right? And that'll probably hope you need. Let's take the opportunity to plug that podcast real quick, Nathan. Which one? Isn't it a means of production? No, not means of production. Oh, yeah, means of creation.

Creation, right, right, right, right, right. Plug that one, yes, exactly. Yeah. Means of creation is a great podcast that we have. It's still interesting because it started out as a podcast by the greater economy and that podcast about Web 3. So we've kind of like, you know, the meme of the guy walking with his girlfriend looking at the other girl, like that everyone did on tech Twitter where, you know, creative economy. So classic.

Like music creation is like the sort of living podcast embodiment of that. But it's awesome. I mean, you know, it's really driven by, you know, what Lee is interested in, my co-host and what I'm interested in. And it's been really cool with you guys. It's not like it took it over and the creator economy isn't anything, but it's how it's a voice. And so I'm just curious on your take, based on working with Lee, how Web3 has evolved, how you've been thinking about what the creator economy even means at this point. Yeah, I think it's fascinating. I think, like, the way that those two worlds intersected has more due with the sort of, like, crazy world dominating, like, amazing momentum of.

Web3, then it has to do with any specific inherent thing about Web3. Because I think Web3 is like this mega potential mega trend that's like, it's sort of like the Internet. It's like, okay, the Internet's not just about text on a screen. It's about the way that we basically think about, way that logistics happen in the world, about like about everything, kind of. So Web3 is similarly fundamental, it's aspiration. And then I think also Web3, Earstar, Creator, Economy, just happen to be,

the sort of like hot thing in venture capital before web three became the hot thing in venture capital so it's more about the interest of like a relative part bc's in the world that are like powerful ones so like you know it's not that many people um than it is about some inherent inherent connection but i do think okay so we take like the idea of some degree and you apply the economy there's obviously stuff that kind of really intersect and i think specifically around rewarding early supporters early community members with like economic people. And I think that that's cool. Like I think it also might be security fraud in a lot of cases.

So like we're being careful about it. But I do think it's really cool. I don't necessarily it should be securities fraud. But like, you know, it might be current. So that's like, I don't know, we're being kind of like caution about it. It's like a lot of work and kind of risky. But it is very interesting. And it's something that I really love talking about every weekend learning more about.

The other question that I've been sitting on, and sorry, Dan, but I'm going back to Nathan Post about the subsex ideology. And I'm going to ask this in the lens of how you guys describe what you're doing with Every, which is, you know, literally the title of the post is substacks ideology. Nathan makes a bunch of points about what the actual business model behind Substack is. But even when I saw that headline, I'm like, oh, okay, I know what he's talking about. It's the cliche of somebody quits their jobs, somebody gets in trouble. I don't want to use cancel word or whatever, and they go to Stubstack. That's become the sort of cliche at this point, right? Right.

The very wise, platonic ideal is a back right. Exactly. And by the way, Nathan, unless I'm speaking out of school, like when you were working with substack, didn't, didn't Hamish give you credit for the sort of algorithm of like how many followers people had on Twitter might be a good person for a substack and things like that? Was that you? Yeah. Yeah. I wrote a Twitter bot that basically like, who basically out of all the writers has, was team? seems like a very active body because you can't just stop by the number of followers. There's a lot of people with like a million followers who get three likes. So we're looking for people who people would probably upgrade to pace. Okay. So it's more sophisticated than just the amount of followers, which makes sense, by the way, because again, it's sort of engaged.

But so this is my question. Gone around Robin Hood's barn to get here. But it seems to me that substack, if you buy into that cliche of, well, the people that work the best as writers on substack are the people that are the most controversial, the people that almost traffic in, for lack of a better term, you know, banter on Twitter and social media and things like that, versus what you all are doing where you said early on in the conversation that, like, there are certain things that you wouldn't publish,

not necessarily because you have an objection to it morally or whatever, but like that you have an editorial idea of like what you want to publish and things like that and the people that you want to work with. Do you think because in your piece, again, I'm sorry, I'm going on and on, you talk about how what substacks ideology is, is there against the algorithm forcing things down your throat, forcing engagement, forcing things that make people angry, except for the fact that that seems to be working. really well for substack if they pick these controversial people versus what you guys want to do is slightly different than that. So first of all, substack, do you agree with my assessment that that's what seems to be working for them? And then number two, your vision from that being different is, does that mean you could never have the same sort of scale if you can't go for that controversy? Yeah, I mean, I think that definitely the sort of most popular stuff on subject you just like look at their leaderboards consists of people who are like, you know, basically pundits, right? They're like people with opinions, right? It seems like opinion columns are kind of like the defining genre of sub fact. Technically you can do other stuff. You know what I mean? Like you can publish really just like straight analysis or you can try and break news or you can do a serialized novel. But, It seems like the kind of like most profitable thing to do is like have an opinion every week.

And the way to have opinions that a lot of people are read is to have a better exciting and is actually controversial and playing people's, you know, tribal identities and all that kind of stuff. And it certainly benefits from the Twitter algorithm, right? It's not, it's a symbiotic where I think one half of the relationship thinks that the other half are bad, but then also kind of price a lot off of it. You know, it's hard to, it's hard to, I personally excited that in that post, what I wanted to do was just lay out what I think, suspect, and why they make their decision, what their sort of ideology is, your values are. And I wanted to point out that, to a greater degree than a lot of companies, they do have a specific sort of ideology. And it constrains their decision makers.

So I think a lot of people, there's some like no-brainer lay-up type ideas that you would do. you're following kind of like the tip thing that, you know, a YouTube PMD or something like that or like the one from from Facebook or whatever. Like, and stuff that isn't going to do a lot of things. Like, I mean, even just simple things, like having ads, Hamish literally tweeted that over my dead body. I mean, that's pretty strong, right? So it's interesting. Well, it's not like there's no ads, right?

I mean, people, the writers are actually putting their own ads in manually. Right. And technically, that's against term service. they don't, of course. But yeah, they're not going to introduce an advertisement. We're going to cover that. So, yeah, I mean, and in terms of, like, you know, in that post, I also just bracket out the whole part of their ideology or censorship for free speech. It's a really, really important part of it.

I decided I wanted to focus on the components of it because I think speech stuff is like, you know, it's a little bit of a third rail and it's very well understood and very well discussed. I think other things that people don't quite understand as much we're taking into account. I'm trying to think about why is stack doing what it's doing. So from our perspective, we think we're totally fine to promote content

to whoever in our ego because all the stuff published, we're proud of, right? We're a publisher. We're on a platform. Substack platform. And so they decided as a platform to be careful about what they cross people because they host a lot of stuff That's not great, probably.

But, like, we don't know what that's not great. So we can have an algorithm. Yeah, so, I mean, like, you both have, like, editorial control, and you have a perspective, and you're not shy about being a publisher. And I guess I am curious since we're down this path. And I don't think, besides mentioning Hunter Walks blog, that we've really talked about Medium. And Medium has been around for quite a while. They took a whole bunch of money.

they were kind of in the space beforehand. It feels like they've tried to play catch-up with their own newsletter platform, and yet they seem, I don't know, eternally conflicted, you know, between being a publisher or a platform, hence a platisher. But, like, is it just that there's going to be several of these different places and the voices and the vibe are going to sort of be consistent, sort of within them, and people will go and they will subscribe to whatever is going on in those places because of those elements,

that they're almost like, not to get to Metaversian about it, but like you kind of know what the vibe of content on Medium is going to be because the algorithm started to reward, you know, before, of course, it was on BuzzFeed, it was like listicles and now on Medium, it's sort of like, here's why I left, blah, blah, blah, or there's sort of a set of tropes that work. And each of the tropes, you know, kind of defines the content experience that you're going to get. And as long as it's human curated, which it is on every, and it seems like it's sort of unclear. about, you know, substack, that that will determine, you know, where your sort of subscriber dollars might go. Sort of like the stuff on Netflix is different than the stuff on Disney Plus is different than the stuff on like HBO Max. And you'll just kind of like, you know, move around the space and decide where, you know, your budgetary, your, I don't know, attention spend goes. Yeah. I'm curious what Dan thinks like medium and the rest, but I'll just try to make the quick,

like, I think the last I heard of media, they actually kind of pivoted away from really publishing much at all and they're more pure platform now. And I think what they found is they had some stuff with a lot of high-minded ideals that's like stuff they could be proud of that they put a lot of money behind. And it just sadly didn't really generate a lot of description. And meanwhile, they had a bunch of stuff that's like, you know, how to get 250% return in one day's using 100x leverage on 25 protocol. And like that drove a lot of subscription. And they, they weren't maybe necessarily as proud of it. And maybe they just had a certain point we're like, ah, what's the cost of keeping up here?

And kind of, let's just let content rip, like, you know, cut her costs and, like, go into sustainable business. That's the vibe I got for the announcement they made. But, like, I don't know. I don't really know what's going on inside media, but I do think the big thing, kind of like, at this point, just anachronistic about medium is, it's wild that on medium you can't email list for you. I mean, it's one thing if you were, like, after time, whatever, it's, like, kind of

cutting edge for an organization like that to share the email list for their writers. but medium, I mean, God, why would anyone go somewhere where you can't cheat on a few? It just makes zero sense. So I think that's the biggest thing that's hurt them. You know, I understand why they tried to do it because for a long time it worked until when they stopped working. It just took a while to kind of update the policy. I think that's a huge, huge part. Yeah.

Dan, did you want to add anything to that? Oh, yeah. I think anything covered it pretty well. I don't know that I have an opinion on exactly what happened to be in, but I do think that there's this. It reminds me of another piece of the bet that we kind of made with every, you know, thinking about if we want to, if we want to have a bunch of writers, like, how are we going to do it and how do we settle on a vibe that feels good to us? And part of that bet is like having having a, having a limit on who can write for us feels like a really important way to create that vibe. Because the reason that medium posts are the way they are is not because medium started being like a low quality kind of junk place. like, and I'm not saying everything on Medium is junkie, but like, I think generally if you see

a post from Medium, you're kind of like, I don't know, it's going to be some tech bro. Well, but it does go back to the incentives, right? Once they launched the Medium Publisher Program, then you had an incentive to write a certain way to get a certain number of collapse. Sure. That's, that is true. There's there's the incentive, but also honestly, just allowing anyone to write. Like, if, if you, like, when, when, when Medium first started, if you had a if you were writing on medium, it was really cool. Yeah. But then once everyone writes on a medium, it becomes this kind of like drag.

And I think, uh, this is why we can't have nice things. Exactly. And I think like the same thing happened with substack where, um, substacks are there actually are something cool, but like a couple years ago, they're even cooler. Um, but over time, you'll, you kind of like see it degrade in it. But if you have a place where there's a bar and the only people that make it over the bar are people that have a certain sensibility and can hit a certain level of quality,

then you can make a place where if you want to read about business tech type stuff, you know that everything on there is good in a way that you can't do as well if anyone can write. Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like the perennial challenge. You know, on the one hand, you want to democratize access and the ability for anybody to publish and to contribute their voice. But then you sort of run into that challenge, of course, that having everyone contributes, sort of actually waters down the signal in such a way. And then, you know, not everyone has, again, the same alignment of incentives, goals,

or et cetera. All right, guys, this has been super great. We're coming up on an hour. Brian and I wanted to have a little conversation about Apple stuff. So you're more than welcome to, like, stay or take off if that's cool, too. But before you go, if there's... Literally, yeah, you can just mute and then disappear silently. Before you do that, please plug anything you want.

Where should people find you? What are the things that you want people to see or listen to or read? Yeah, you should go to every. That's everything. Ever written. But I think that, you know, if you're interested in this kind of balk about like what's going on in the media, how does technology be it? We get a bunch of stuff on that, a bunch of stuff on DFI.

I'm publishing a piece in called Screw It. I'm investing in Melaton's the one in the Y. Ooh. That I'll put it in a part there. I read your recent your Peloton platform piece. I read that was interesting,

so I would recommend that. Oh, thank you. Yeah, I'm basically in the process writing that piece. I kind of sat on on. I'm going to invest in. I wrote about the process

shifting from. Trying to articulate what I thought the strategy changed. to I think I believe in it. Anyway, it's like a crazy bag. But it'll be fun. So we will see. But yeah, but that's the only plug,

but. Cool, Dan. Dan, do you have anything else? I mean, yeah, I mean, you got it. Just check out every and follow both most on Twitter. I'm at Dan Shipper and Nathan's at N. Bishaw. And Dan, what is the name of your newsletter? My newsletter is called Superorganizers.

Exactly, which is an amazing newsletter. So everyone should check it out. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you guys so much for having us. This is really awesome. Awesome. Indeed.

Thank you so much for coming on. And again, if you just happen to go on mute and then we say something about the Macs studio that you want to jump in on, you can. Otherwise, Chris, I wanted to do something because I didn't do it on the show today. Okay. I did read the Mac Studio review from The Verge, but what I didn't do was the Apple Studio display review. Oh, God. I read some of those, and not so good.

Well, so number one, because remember, we talked about how I didn't go ahead and buy. Yeah, what did you end up buying? Well, so, no, I didn't get a laptop. I never got a Mac Pro because I literally maybe use my Mac Pro once a month. It's uncharged most of the time. But this iMac that I've been using is my main driver now. And so, okay, I souped up a Mac Studio, got an 8 terabyte hard drive. Nice.

Motherfucker is going to last me the better part of a decade, I hope. And I got the Ultra, you know. Oh, uh-huh. So, right, I spent a good amount of money. Over $6,000. But what I did do, you know, as I'm writing the show today, and, you know, I put the Mac Studio review in there. And then I didn't put the Studio Display review in there, but a Nilai Patel at the Verge scathing review. I canceled the Studio Display order that I also put in.

Because fuck it. Yeah. Because you can get a 34-inch wraparound display for about $1,000. Yep, yep. That has HDR and variable refresh rates and things like that. And so what do you think is going on? Neither of us are going to know the answer to this, but a really weird miss to me. So I will share Joanna Stern.

did a review for the Wall Street Journal, and I will pin her review to the space here. And she actually did a really good job of comparing five different displays, sort of side by side by side. And it really kind of, I think, comes down to what you're evaluating the display on. I think for many, many people, this studio display is going to be great. It's going to be fine. It's going to be way better than whatever they – well, I don't want to say whatever they have now. but if you have an older iMac or you know for example for many years i was rocking uh two apple thunderbolt displays and i did not want to upgrade because i love the form factor and man it was so

painful when they didn't have retina and i'm like trying to do design and of course everyone had moved on anyways that's here to there it seems like it is 5k i get that and 5k is rareish right is so it's yeah but like i feel like this is a case and I'm going to just, I don't know, go on a limb and it's not a conspiracy theory so much as it is kind of like a wondering about how Apple manages its supply chain. You know, they have to sort of buy a certain number of things at a certain point in advance, you know, plan for a number of products years in advance, and then decide when they're going to roll those products out and when the technology on their hardware is going to be ready to power them, et cetera, right? So, and you also have to sort of like time the market in terms of use cases and what people are going to want and need. I wonder when the planning for the studio display started. Was it pre-pandemic?

Was it post-pandemic? Because the cameras that ended up in this device, now, I guess Apple has said that there's going to be a fix that comes in software or something, which is a little crazy to think about. But if the cameras on these displays are not that good, is that because there was a logic pre-pandemic when webcams just weren't really that important for the vast majority of people? And now they are.

And, you know, that's the problem with Apple never, I think it was M-CCler that was like, things that never change is Apple has the best friggin camera, is the best camera unit in the world, and yet they still can't put a decent camera at a Mac. Right. Okay, it wasn't the webcam that was the deal breaker for me, because I still, I've got this webcam that's external that has a light on it, which the, right, the, the, the studio. So what is your deal breaker? Because that is the thing that they all kind of like shot on.

Well, right, which they were like, the camera's insane. It was when I realized that like, you know, I hadn't actually paid attention to the spec in terms of refresh rate, no HDR. Right. Like, like the local dimming. Yeah. Exactly. Right. If I can't watch Dune on it.

Right. because everything is so grayed out, then what the fuck am I spending? It feels like a major miss. And again, it feels like they're selling their old stock to make new for, you know, to make room for something else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And, and I did upgrade the $400 for the. Oh, for the little tilty thing. Uh huh? Yeah. When I saw that, I immediately canceled. I'm like, what am I doing? And I'll get. I know for a hinge.

You paid $400. dollars for a hinge. Right. Well, because look, what I can do, because these exist, there's like an alien wear thing that is relatively new, that's like a 34-inch sort of wrap-around gaming one where it's going to have all of the refresh rate, and it's going to have the dark blacks and things like that. The only thing that gave me pause was the speakers. I heard those were good. Like six of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so anyway, that was weird. Meanwhile, I'm still based on all of the reviews. I always go with the verge reviews because I feel like, um, they're, it's not that they're the most comprehensive. It's more that they're the most. I feel like they're aligned with like, you know, our use case or the ways that, you know, we might ask questions about this thing. It's like, they always make the most sense to me. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Um, so for the Macs studio, like, again, I'm. I'm thrilled to get one if I ever get it. I'm a little jealous to be honest, but I am happy with my MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. Yeah. Well, and by the way, I did do the research, like, you know, even for I am a creator. Yeah. But podcasting doesn't. You've got to crunch some audio, you know, and maybe some videos someday.

Podcasting doesn't require. You went with the ultra though. That's, that's, it sounds a little over a little overboard. Well, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. But the reason I did that is I was trying to be like, I want this to last eight years. Yeah, no. I maxed out mine for the same reason, you know?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to that. It'll be interesting to see if I really do get it in June or if like, you know. Okay, wait, wait. So, sorry, continue. And then I have like one more conspiracy theory to throw at you.

I don't know. I was just going to say, as far as I know, beginning of June, so we'll see, like, maybe they'll slip it and all of a sudden it'll become the end of May. And then give me your conspiracy theory, and then I have one more thing to give. Okay. So my conspiracy is this. We know that Apple, you know, the Apple headset, goggles, glasses, whatever you want to call them, are going to be arriving, you know, at some point. What is occurring to me is a couple things. So one, these things need an enormous amount of compute to drive them. Two, you need to be able to... Because we assume that they're not going to tether it to an eye. It's going to be a standalone device. We're assuming that. So this is a bit of my conspiracy theory. You might need to have one in your pocket, but you're not going to have to wire it.

Or the compute is what I'm saying. Let me say something different. So my thought and my question is about what the field, you know, sort of in a radar or, you radio sense, what the field of computing in the future is going to look like and what the signals around us are going to, I don't know, contain in terms of bandwidth and connectivity and compute power. And I don't know exactly how this is going to work from a privacy and security perspective, but setting that aside, we have so many sensors, so many devices, so many objects that have the ability to do maybe continuous partial computing that I wonder if, you know, the Mac Studio and devices

like it or appliances that sit there and have all these, you know, kind of spare GPU cycles lying around, will sort of like the Find My Network and the air tags become part of this mesh network of computing that powers the glasses. So rather than there needing to be so much compute power on the devices themselves, there can actually be an interplay between what's happening kind of on nearby devices and what's happening on your device. So the thought, I guess, is that this Mac Studio display maybe doesn't need to be that good, isn't that good, because you're going to want to actually be computing

in glasses of some sort in not too long. And then the question is whether or not those chips will be powered by like ultra-wideband or something else where, I mean, maybe they're tethered for some of the time, but maybe mostly they're not. It strikes me that these computers are so powerful and most people are probably going to only tap a portion of what they're capable of.

So why do you need all that extra? kind of power in the house and just lying around. Each of the devices, each of the Apple devices are becoming so powerful unto themselves that it just seems like it only makes sense that all that compute power could be harnessed or marshaled in some way through some wirelessly connected device, you know, as you're moving around a space, you know, that has these devices in it. And the reason why I'll go a little bit further on that is because lately, you know, I've been, you know, in my AirPods all day long. And I will sometimes forget my iPhone, like, in the basement and I will walk upstairs and it's ostensibly connected through no no Bluetooth and I'll

continue to have reception of whatever podcast I'm listening to so the fact that either through or in you know ultra wide band or Wi-Fi or whatever again this is why it's a conspiracy theory and probably you know radio engineers will tell me this is not even possible but something along the lines of where you start to put compute power into places where it didn't exist for example an A-13 chip in your display, you're starting to be able to have access to computing in a different way than just having it localized in the device that you're currently using. Yeah. And they're, and there, you know, the fact that they're putting the most powerful chips in every

device, like you get the most powerful M chip in your iPad, you get it in your phone, you get it. That's a beautiful, that's a beautiful conspiracy theory to me, because that means that I've done the right thing by future-proofing myself. Well, they tried to do it with like the home pod, you know, and it failed. Right. So they were looking for a way to break into the home. I mean, not like, you know, as a rubber might, but sort of.

Yeah. With the device that people would really want and would put around, you know, just as Amazon and Google have figured out how to do, you know, that with on the lower end of the market. But it turns out that Apple is very bad at selling kind of, you know, lower end, lower end market products for the house. They can do it with iPhones, but that's about it. It is weird what Apple is always bad at. And so the Occam's Razor thing is the M.G. Stigler thing of they just can't put a fucking decent camera and a Mac. But I do like that as a conspiracy theory. I do like the idea that, you know, the competitive advantage of Apple Silicon.

I think, like, as sort of revolutionary as it's been right now, I don't, like, we're seeing the tip of the iceberg of where that might go. I mean, I think when it comes to power, when it comes to, again, ultra wideband and 5G, yep, and efficiency. Like, to find my network is part of something that will happen. And I just, I'm sitting back and I'm seeing things that Apple is doing that seem very anti-competitive to things that, you know, Facebook was working on years ago, for example, payments. One of the things that I just noticed, and maybe I'll find my tweet and share it,

is that it seems like in iOS 15-4, you now have the ability to kind of top up and add money to your Apple ID. And somebody replied and said, oh, no, that's been there for a while, but, you know, I don't think so. And so it seems curious to me that Apple is, and actually, I remember, this is one of the things that Apple was announced, where you could pay for things using just your phone and no credit card reader, right? So the device becomes your wallet. Right.

Anyways. The square killer, right, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, let me all share this to the... Okay, great. So I just pin my tweet. If you want to take a look at that, you know, my assessment is that, you know,

Apple is slowly becoming a bank, but without calling itself that, Apple is slowly building a social network in iMessage and game center and a bunch of other things, which is competitive with Facebook. But of course, you know, Apple wants, you know, regulations against meta. We're not the first people to point out that Apple is, you know, sort of an absentee landlord on top of a social network that they could exploit at any time. Of course.

You know, just messages being the obvious low-hanging fruit there. But, yeah, I mean, you know, look, the... they're further ahead in wearables in terms of watch, you know, earbuds, earbuds, whatever. Air pods. Oh, sorry. Yeah, see. Do I do this for a living or whatever? But then, so right, when if they can get to glasses, then you've got a car.

Like, when you, when you connect all the dots in terms of how you live your life on a daily basis. Like, no is close to what is potential for what Apple could connect together in terms of, you know, your day-to-day and everything like that. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Nope. That's it. So it just, it feels like these things are precedence to what is going to happen next. And when on the one hand, you know, we still have this kind of one-to-one relationship with our computing platforms. It just seems like, you know, in five to ten years, you will use kind of, you know, just like we use water or electricity, we'll use just compute that's around to power our augmented reality devices that we're all wearing.

Well, and the funny thing is, is that if that works out the way it is, and if an Apple car actually comes, the funny thing about the Tim Cook era and the teens and the early 2020s will be, oh, they pivoted to services almost as a placeholder. waiting for all I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm not saying that as they just did it

because there was nothing else to do. It was more that that also lays the groundwork for this holistic in the same way that Matthew Ball years ago said one day you're going to have a Disney subscription and we're waiting for that Apple

subscription or whatever. You know, you'll pay Apple $500 a month if it's your phone. if it's your car, if it's your all these things, with all of the services. So like, it's, I say placeholder as like they're waiting for all of these other pieces to be this holistic lifestyle. No, I think it's happening in parallel. And I think the services are driving the adoption of the devices. So I know that you can get Apple TV on some other platforms, but not all.

You know, you kind of get the device and you assume a set of services will be available for you. You know, like I accidentally subscribed to like Apple Arcade and it's actually like really delightful. It's really nice. Like there's I like it. Yeah. Yeah. The great game on there. What is it?

The car game. Uh, shit. I'll look it up. Oh, there's like Metro something. I don't know. The one I've been playing is called grindstone. It's a lot of fun. But going to the app store and being able to click play as opposed to, you know,

buy for $2 or whatever is an amazing experience. You know, it is having that entire library. And, you know, going back to what we were talking about. talking to Dan and Nathan about, like having these bundles of content that are at a certain level of execution and then you just know that if you start playing it, it's going to be, you know, at least somewhat good. At least someone like took a look and it's not just some app that was built to just put ads in front of you because it had a catchy name or a good, you know, logo or something. So I don't know. I just, I think what this generation of M1 devices does is

it sort of fits into the paradigm of the previous set of hardware devices, and we're not quite yet clear on where this stuff goes next, especially as it supports more mobile or new types of mobile expressions of computers, namely the glass. The game I was thinking of is mini motorways, which is my go-to game for waiting for the train to show up, and it's beautiful. Okay, I got one more. Okay. I've got five minutes. This is not Apple. Great.

And this is a different gadget. And by the way, I want to stress that. People accuse me of this sometimes. This is not a paid thing. If I ever do an ad, you'll hear music behind it. Yes, exactly. In the same way that Apple hasn't paid me to talk about their stupid $7,000 computer. Are you familiar with The Remarkable Two?

No. Tell me about that. Okay, I got this this week and I'm in love. Wow. It is a, it's a E-ink tablet. Oh, wait, I know what this is. Guy Kawasaki gave me one. Oh, yeah.

He might have given you the version one. This is the version two. Now, for example, so it's an E-ink tablet. It's the thinnest tablet, I believe, that exists. Wait, does it have colors or is it black and white? No, black and white. Yeah, like it's like a Kindle. Also, right, a Kindle, but not with the backlighting.

I'm assuming that would be the remarkable three. And it's expensive. And I'm going to tell you eventually why I got it recently. But as an example, so all of the articles from Every that we were talking about, I sent them sort of like a read later thing to this. And so then I'm highlighting and reading them. and marking up my notes on top of it using the stylus and things like that. That's not the reason I got it.

The reason I got it was, you know, I'm doing all of these, you know, three and four calls a day, talking to companies and things like that. And so I have all these notepads. If you can hear, you know, these are the literal spiral notepads on my desk of like the notes that I'm taking when I'm talking to companies, things like that. And it's because you know, Chris, when we do interviews and things like that, I do things like simple note and whatever for like questions and stuff. But I still, when I'm on a call, I'm still writing things down on Penn. So the thing that convinced me to do this is so now, man, I'm writing

on this tablet in longhand. And then, so I can then save these as files. And so it's like, all right, this is company X, Y, and Z, and I can look it up later. I can search for it. I can transform my handwriting into text. Oh, okay. You can do things that, you know, my wife's an architect. So, she sketched out all sorts of stuff on here, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is a, you know, I don't know how to draw.

This is a really good stylist. You can screen share. Oh, really? So she could be with. clients and do a sketch and, you know, on a call with clients and say, anyway, I'm in love with this thing. Wow. It is expensive.

But it is, it's taken. It's about $350. Yes. Or $400 for the, if you get a new one, I think. So again, this is not paid. Maybe I'll reach out to them and you'll share that. Sure. And then, yeah.

Actually, I can put you in touch with Guy Kawasaki. He's, I think, one of their evangelists or something. I fucking love. I love it, man. It is, and it's a, it's a sexy device too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. If people have a bunch of, I, if I could take a picture of my desk right now, there's seven spiral notebooks in a pile here. And now I have the remarkable. You know, you know, the favorite part, and I think this is going to be the last thing to close out this, this podcast, is that you spent more on a hinge for your display than you did on this device that you absolutely love. So, yeah. That is the Apple distortion field for you right there. But remember, I canceled the display.

And you can buy the Remarkable 3. Well, I'm going to get a wrap-around. A 24-inch or 40-incher, yeah. Nice. Cool. All right, Chris, thanks for indulging my gadgetry talk there. Yeah, it's great. Do you want to plug anything?

You know, I will say one thing, and I don't have a review yet, but I've just joined Reforge. Reforge is a kind of learning studio, I guess, for product managers, and now I'm a product lead at Republic. I don't know if I've announced that yet. I don't know. But anyways, so I'm no longer in Bizdev. I'm now a product manager slash product lead, and that means I actually have to do stuff. So in some ways, that's a bummer. But also, I'm very excited about this work. And Reforge is going to teach me some things.

So we'll see how that goes. If anybody has an experience with Reforge, you know, feel free to reach out and let me know how it is. All right. And the only thing I can plug is that we are living in the old matrix, Arsumnot beat liberal. Ah, well, so it goes. All right.

Thanks, Brian. Good night, everybody.