This Week in Startups - E1133: Podcast & blogging pioneer Dave Winer on inventing new forms of media, tribalism on social media, tales from Silicon Valley’s Golden Age & more

Episode Date: November 3, 2020

Check out Scripting News: http://scripting.com FOLLOW Dave: https://twitter.com/davewiner FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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That's KLA, V-I-L-L-L-L-L-O-L-L-L-L-O-L-L-L-A. dot com slash twist send pro online from pitney bows save time and money no matter what you ship or mail try it free for 30 days and get a free 10 pound scale when you visit pb.com slash twist and fiverr find the perfect freelance services for your business go to fiverr.com and use code twist to receive 10% off your first order. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week in startups, a podcast that I've been doing for over a decade now. And this podcast would not have ever occurred, nor would, I believe, Twitter, if it wasn't

for today's guests. And so you're saying, hey, is Jack on the program maybe? Or Am Williams? Who's on the program today? Well, no. A friend of mine from New York, originally from Quix, I'm from Brooklyn. So I think there's like a mini rivalry there.

And his name is Dave Weiner. And he is a software developer, entrepreneur, thinker. What do you go by, Dave? Welcome to the program. A inventor of new media types. Love it. Inventure. Sort of the big circle that everything is inside of, you know,

is that my whole thing is, I love creating new media types, and I have developed all the skills that I need to do that. And that's what I like to do. That's what I like to learn about. That's what I like to think about and write about and talk about. So it's a great time to be alive for that because there's been an awful lot of media being created. And I don't agree with you that I am responsible for Twitter. Well, I bring it up because I remember we met in the aughts, I guess, in the 2000s, and there were a bunch of us in our, let's call it early 30s, trying to be entrepreneurs in media.

And you had pioneered RSS, OPML, and RSS as a technology, had attachments. And I distinctly remember you and Adam Curry and some other folks saying, hey, if you attach a file to an RSS feed, really simple syndication, you could have kind of like this automatically downloaded experience of the attachments. And the attachments, I believe, could have been anything. And that really was the origin point of podcasting, correct? Do I know my history correct? Yeah, in a way.

I mean, it wasn't the, I mean, people like to say that, yeah, it's the technology, but I don't think it really was. It was getting, figuring out how to get people to do it. And, you know, it's, you know, I know this is about startups and this is not exactly a startup, but it's very similar process. You know, here you have this great idea. And it was actually a pretty great idea. especially at the time because the networks were so slow that when you saw, you know, an audio file or a video file or whatever and you clicked on it, you would have to wait a very long time for it to come down and the quality wouldn't be

very good. And, you know, people were saying, yeah, well, you know, audio, video stuff, that's just not for me. I don't want that. But the insight that Adam actually had was that if you do the down, you know, the down. download in the background, before the user even knows that the audio or video even exists, then you've gotten rid of what he called the click weight problem because you'll click and it'll start playing right away.

And because it's all done in the background, it could be very high resolution. And so, you know, there'd be no loss of fidelity. But, you know, I figured at the time, well, we'll just put this idea out there and everybody will see it, you know, because I had a very popular blog at the time. I had actually the top blog at the time. And so it was a very good way to get ideas out there, but really nothing happened. And then we had to figure out ways how to tease this out of people. How are we going to get them to actually start doing it? And that was an iterative process that took, I would say, It took four years before there were actually, before there was a serious base of podcasts being developed.

And I learned a lot in that process. People have to feel that it's something that they can do. And so if you throw a lot of great production values at it, which is the first instance we tried doing with Chris Leiden when I was at Harvard as a research. fellow. And Chris is this NPR guy and very, you know, I mean, he's got this incredible NPR voice. And he did all these great interviews with early bloggers and some of the, you know, people that have gone on to create this whole world. And it was great stuff. But it didn't give people the idea that they could do it because, you know, nobody listened to his stuff and thought, well, okay, you know, I'm like an NPR God, you know. but and so then I started doing them myself and I had no production quality to it whatsoever and I just never edited anything and I just put it up and threw it on my blog and that's when people

got the idea they could do it because I sounded like any schmuck doing this stuff and you know well there there is something to that making this technology accessible and allowing people to feel like they didn't need an editor and I think that was kind of the specialness that blogging had as well, you were one of the first bloggers and you created RSS essentially, correct? I mean, I mean, I would say that the starting the blogging was by far the more important of the two. I mean, RSS wouldn't have had anything to do if it weren't for blogging.

And it was an outgrowth of blogging. And there were a few other people that were doing similar things at the same time. It was Justin Hall and Bud.com Sorry? He was doing bud.com? That's right, bud.com. Justin Hall was basically talking about his life in a very raw.

It was great. Well, you know, that's part of what blogging is about. You know, they make the jokes about it, but that really is what it is. It's like, what is the world look like to you today from your point of view? You know, that's blogging. And there was also the What's New page on Mozilla. dot com or I think net scape.com or whatever. The idea was out there.

And I started doing it. It was just sort of like this epiphany. I had nothing to do. I had my company, we basically shut down my second company. And I was just, you know, looking for ideas, really. And it just hit me one day that, you know, I had all these great email contacts. And why don't I just start sending them? some of my ideas that nobody wanted, you know?

I mean, I was always knocking on people's doors saying, you should do this and you should do that, and we should get you working with, because this is the way, you know, it's like, and of course, everybody said, yeah, thanks very much, but, you know, we'll figure this out. So I had this whole backlog of, you know, ideas that nobody had bought, but they were still good ideas. And so I started publishing them through my email channel. And then I got involved in the San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994. And that was when the web hit me really hard.

I was always already aware. What was that? I'm not even aware of what that was. Well, it was this incredible sort of confluence of, you know, opportunity, I guess you'd say. I remember exactly where I was. I was in my car, going to the supermarket. I was listening to Bruce Coom. who was, I think, managing editor of the San Jose Mercury.

He was on the radio, and he was talking about this newspaper strike they were about to have in the Bay Area. And I knew him because, you know, I was a software entrepreneur and, you know, we ran in kind of the same circles. So when I got home, I called him and I said, Bruce, you know, you're going to do a website for this thing? He says, yeah, we really want to do a website. So I said, well, let me do the website. And so he said, yeah, sure, go for it. And, you know, Jason, these are the moments when you have to strike when people are open to new ideas. Because if I had called him two weeks earlier and said, let's do a website, he'd say, well, yeah, you know, you've got to talk to our operations guys.

And, you know, they got to blah, blah, blah. And the door is closed. It's not open, right? But at this moment, it was wide open. And I knew absolutely nothing about the web. So I had to learn and found some good teachers. And then I hooked up with Chris Gulker, who was doing the management paper at the San Francisco Examiner. And I knew Chris because he was a customer of mine and was using my software.

And it was a friend. And so I got in touch with him and I said, you know, I see you guys are doing the management paper. how would you like to work with us on the strike paper? And he said, sure, which was one of the big ironies of it, because we were just sharing code back and forth. He was working for the management. We were working for the strikers. And it was one of those moments where just so much progress was made in such a short period of time.

And we had all of the journalists of the day were feeding stuff to us from around the country because the strike was a big deal. And you know what the strike was about? This is really funny. The strike was about automation. And they were against it. Oh, really? Yes, they were striking to stop.

Oh, they were trying to fight against automating what? Like word processors or printing technology? All the things we were using to publish the paper. And it was the strike in support of the people who drove the trucks that carried the papers around, you know, the area. But, you know, the writing was on the wall, right? I mean, at the time, very, very clear. And this was Silicon Valley. And, of course, the people that...

That's actually the paradox is great there. It's like, you were building a web page to support the strike, and the web eventually would result in, you know, the biggest challenge the newspapers ever felt, right? No, they were aware that it was happening right then. I mean, and it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was all coming together. If you're an e-commerce-based business or have a...

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Let me spell that for you. K-L-A-V-I-O dot com slash twist. Get it all dialed in now before that holiday season. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Out of all of that came a product called AutoWeb that I, like, came out with in like, I think it was January of 95. And you see, because Jason, that's what I wanted to do. It's sort of like this, you know, you create the necessity for the software you want to develop. You learn all about the application by doing it by hand. And then once having done it,

you have a very good idea about what the, you know, how to codify that, how to turn that into code. And so AutoWeb came out and that was like the first static site generator. came out of that project in early 95. And then we got on this path that led to, you know, in 96, 97, 98, every time another iteration on the software that was, you know, the whole idea was, you know, web publishing at the time was, you know, thought to be, you hire somebody to do your web publishing, right? I remember I was friends with the people of Kleiner Perkins at the time because I had joined up with one of their companies, sold my first company. company of them. And I went to them. I said, I, you know, I could make it so that you could edit your own personal, your website, the Kleiner website. And they said, well, we don't want to do that. But I said, yeah, you will eventually want to do that. And of course, they do, right? But so it was

a whole sequence of things until we hit on edit this page. And that was the big breakthrough. to realize that the problem was that we needed to get all the different views of a website to come into one single place. And then you click that button. When you see something that's wrong, you click the edit this page button, you make the change and hit submit. That was as quick as you could make it. And from there, blogging just took off because we had found the simple.

And there was also like a lot of friction I remember in people's minds that should people be able, or should journalists be able to publish without an editor? That was everybody's big mental block, I think, in why they didn't adopt it. So when I, when Nick Denton and myself and some other folks sort of came into the space, Peter Rojas, the idea, O'Mallick was like, wait a second, these journalists, and we had been journalists and run publications in print, wait a second, you're going to give Roffitt or Ome or Peter Rojas or Elizabeth, whoever it was, the ability to publish to the website without an editor reading it. Right.

That kind of blew people's minds. Yes, that was a huge deal. At that time. I hit that one. I was, well, my blog, the initial blog, became kind of phenomenon in the valley. And everybody was reading it. And I got a call from Louis Rusetto at Wired and went down there. And he offered me a job right then on the spot to be a contributing editor for Wired.

And of course, I took it, right? It was Wired. I mean, was another one of these juggernauts. And I loved the idea of Wired, you know, of taking, you know, up to that point, it was all like nerds. And I thought, well, let's make this easy for human beings. And so I had an editor right from the start. But I loved my editor. She was wonderful.

And I, but then eventually they gave me an editor that I hated. And that was it. Got to get out of there. Yeah. You know, and so yeah, it hit, and but on my blog, absolutely, yes, it was like you had the full, you know, in a, in a news organization where you have an editor, you can always like sort of blame somebody else for the shit that happened for the, you know, mistake that you made. But if it's your thing, that's it. When you press, press the button to publish it, you know, that's it. It's your, it's your ass that's on the line right there. And, but that's also the thrill of it. And it's the power of it. And yeah, I think. we've kind of gotten, we've adjusted to that, right?

Yeah, the non-edited has made its way all the way from this time in the 90s to a president who's unedited and who just tweets anything and we start to see what, you know, perhaps a really flawed, bad intentioned persons not having a filter and communicating with tens of millions of people do. We kind of, we hit this crazy edge case, right? Maybe not an edge case at all. I mean, maybe it was the foregone conclusion that this is where we were going. You know, at that time, everybody was very idealistic about it and honestly couldn't see the downside of it. You know, I thought at the time, well, you know, all the news organizations are just like, they're making the same mistake over and over again.

And we can't get out of the rut that we're in. But we're solving the problem because we'll be able to route around them. You remember that idea, right? It's like, you know, they're the gate. Yeah, sure. We'll route around him. Well, now we are in 2020, and we know what the outcome was, and there's still the gatekeepers. You know, they like to put the blame on Facebook, but it's really the responsibility is theirs.

The things that people say on Facebook, they come from the news media. And, you know, maybe parts of the news media that they don't, that some parts, other parts don't like, but it still is where it's coming from. A lot of the discourse you see on Twitter and Facebook is just like what you saw on CNN the night before. They're just repeating the same old talking points. So it's not the panacea at all that we thought it was. Yeah, we did have the sense that we were going to enable all of these great voices to have a voice and that more voices equal to better. Yeah. And then when you level the playing field like that, then all of a sudden you get conspiracy theorists or

hate groups or proud boys or and then even this one that I think is even more pernicious maybe is the word or bad and having having terrible intent and hard to control which is the anarchists I mean you you really have this contingent of people who I guess they call it shit posting or just let's just create chaos and then that of course allows somebody to come into an open platform like Twitter or Facebook and just back into the algorithm and say, you know what, let's buy ads and rubles and create chaos in America. That could be the Chinese, it could be Russian ops,

or it could just be useful idiots in America who are just helping them amplify their message. Do you have any thoughts about that? I wonder in solutions? I don't think I have any solutions for it. I mean, you know, I think we have to create new, you know, go back to the beginning. We have to create new media types that are resistant to that. You know, this sort of total level playing field that we have on Twitter, we know where that goes.

It's better than earlier, you know, ways of communicating like mail lists were completely out of control. I mean, all the trouble we had with RSS, it's all because we used mail lists for it and gave everybody even people who had no stake whatsoever in the medium were controlling it, you know? And it, you know, so that wasn't good. And what we have with Twitter isn't good either. But what we do need, and I feel very strongly about this, is the political parties need to become social networks. And less emphasis on discussion because we know where discussion heads, where that goes. and more on, you know, action and organization and mobilization.

So that, you know, let's say, I don't actually know where you are politically. But, you know, I don't know. Are you voting for Biden? Neither do I at this point. I don't know which party I fit into anymore. I wouldn't say I've been following you like, you know, religiously. So I get little bits and pieces of it here. I think you're concerned about a lot of the things we all are.

everybody's concerned about, right? I mean, the virus, for example. I am concerned that we are not solutions-based and evidence-based and running experiments to solve problems and that this, you know, everything is name-calling and tribalism and really no focus on expertise or data or even testing things.

And the fact that you can't change your mind. is also a very weird thing that I don't understand about politics. Like, in the face of new evidence, in the face of an experiment failing, well, why not try something, right? And if you look at whatever problem it is, like censorship on Twitter, you know, the New York Post story, I'm super interested to hear what you think of if a publication like the New York Post prints a story that maybe nobody else would print. And then they don't let you tweet the URL.

Yeah. That seemed like very blunt in terms of like. a way to... I don't think that worked, honestly. That didn't work at all. I mean, they changed it immediately. What's the more elegant way when you have a story like that? I don't think there is an elegant way.

You know, I actually got caught in that. I was retweeting that. I was, you know, I have a link blog that's part of my, you know, regular blog. And so I was actually publishing that link. So it would go to Twitter, go to my feed, you know, wherever else. And yeah, I got the message saying, we're not going to let you retweet that one. I mean, it's, it didn't occur to me that people shouldn't read it. And, you know, it's like almost like the stricand effect kicked in right there

because they made it more important because they were blocking it. It was the first time they did that. But I don't envy them one bit. And I don't claim that I have the right answers on any of this stuff. I mean, they bought a huge problem. And I wouldn't want that problem for anything, you know, I mean, I think Jack is kind of a hero for willing to take that on. I think people vilify Facebook a lot more than they deserve.

I think a lot of that responsibility belongs to journalism, honestly, because all the information about what Facebook allowed was available, I think, in 2010 or 2011. You know, 10 years ago, they set up the open graph and all the APIs for it. It was all out in the open. They could have learned it. They could have asked anybody. I mean, I think journalism has a responsibility to understand technology. With SendPro Online from Pitney Bowes, you can simply print postage stamps and shipping labels,

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I think they have, I notice the Times has, I can't remember, what's this, McNeil, Donald, I think Donald McNeil, so incredibly knowledgeable person about pandemics and viruses. And, you know, whenever he's written and writes an article, he does one every few weeks. I stop everything and sit down and read it because I know there's going to be information in there that makes a difference. So they've got somebody in there who understands the technology of viruses.

Why don't they have somebody in there who understands the technology of social networks? But they are like all over the map. I mean, I've watched Rachel Maddow do a rant for 15, 20 minutes. And I love Rachel Maddow. But I was very disappointed to see this because she was ranting about Facebook. there was no substance to anything she was saying. But boy, did she make it sound insidious. We're pernicious, to use her word.

I mean, it may be questioned everything else. Every other time she gets into that mode where she's painting something as being really dark and evil, it made me wonder, does she really understand this or, you know, even worse, she does understand it? And she's just decided, I think there's a lot of that to the press response to Facebook, you know, is that we've just decided. to do a little bit of deflection here because they screwed up the 2016 election, not Facebook. Journalism screwed that up. How did it screw it up just by covering Hillary's emails?

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

Yeah. Well, come on. I mean, I'm sure. No, she didn't screw up anything. That should have been dispensed within five minutes. Yet it dragged out and it determined the course that we're on right now. You know, you want to find responsibility for 220,000 Americans dead. Some of that has to go to the New York Times.

Actually, you know, let's. say, be honest, all of it does. Because without that, Trump would not have gotten elected. Ah, I see. We still would have had the problem with the susceptible population that's susceptible to a Trump, right? I mean, but we wouldn't actually have Trump. What do you think of the algorithms role in all of this?

The fact that if something is in synonyary or, you know, evoke strong. emotion in a person or maybe plays to their worst instincts, it's going to get a reaction. It's going to get engagement and the like button and the favorite button and the retweet button. This all is something for you to do in this arcade slot machine of Twitter, Facebook, social media. And that algorithm doesn't favor a rational discussion. You write something completely rational. People are like, okay, that's rational.

There's no reason to favor it or retweet it. Right. That's why the people who rise to the top in the podcast world are people who deal in raw emotion, right? And the really good stuff, well, luckily that can still happen because there's nobody that controls what gets published in this world. But it's still most of what people, because people tune into this stuff because they want the emotion. Ah, so they want that dopamine hit. They want to feel that rage. Also, they want to feel, you know what they want more than anything, in my opinion?

is they want meaning in their life. They want their, they want, not necessarily that their life has meaning. That's a hard one. But have a little meaning in my life. And that's where the tribalism comes from. You know,

it's like the real problem is that people don't have anything to do. Yeah. I mean, it does fill, I mean, if you think about how, and we see what happens when it fills up too much, which is you have this derangement on both sides of the aisle.

And now, even taking up the middle where everybody's like, this roller coaster is never ending. Like, who wants to live in a perpetual state of being aghast or being enraged or being depressed about the state of the world? Right. I mean, I am exhausted this year. Especially when we're in the middle of a pandemic and that people are dying and all of our lives suck now, right?

Oh, so brutal. Yeah. I mean, it's like, and yet, oh, I mean, I mean, I wrote this thing. It's suicidal, in my opinion. I have to say this because it's because I don't want, it is just plain old suicidal to vote for Trump. It just is.

I mean, we're not doing anything about this, about the virus. So if you want to continue doing nothing about the virus, then you vote for Trump. And that's suicidal. That's suicide. You're going to die from that.

Well, I mean, if you, as, and I'm not saying Cuomo in New York, state is perfect, but the fact that he decided, every day, I'm going to show the numbers. And every day, I'll start with the numbers and I'll talk about our response. And I'm going to put myself out there to answer questions every day. And I'm not going to deflect and blame other

people. I'm just going to talk about where we're at. Even though New York got hit really hard, at least you had the sense that somebody was confronting reality. No, I'll go one step further. He was masterful. He was masterful. He showed, provided the demo, of what leadership can do i often had emotional reactions to what he was doing when i first heard his uh press conferences i was telling everybody look there's hope we're not necessarily getting flushed down the toilet here you know i mean it was at a very at a moment when you could cry for the united states i mean you know you go into the supermarket this was a moment you go to the supermarket you see all the empty shells

and you go how the hell did this happen to the united States of America. This is what you see when you go to a third war country, you know, is you go in there and it hits you. I've had this happen. You know, it's like going there, why are there shells empty? And then you start to realize that you've got this, you're living embedded in this incredible system that you don't even think about and how much it's doing for you and

how much of an advantage we have in the United States. And we're just like pissing it all away right now. For what? I don't get it. But it's, it's very strange. And it's also, like, the thing I don't understand is the testing. I've been talking to people in other countries. And rapid testing for $2, $15, $10.

Anybody can get tested anytime they want. You can get at-home kits. You could have a party get tested before everybody comes in and then have a little bubble at your own house, just like the, you know, NBA had their bubble or movie sets have their bubble. And if everybody did what the NBA did and you start making little bubbles, eventually that bubble would go from being Bay Ridge to being, you know, South Jersey to being New Jersey to being the tri-state area.

You know, you could just build this little bubble up and up and up. And then you could actually test and trace or do the trace part because you're doing the testing part. And you would eventually beat this thing, which other countries have done exactly that playbook. And we're the greatest country in the world. And we couldn't rally and martial testing. Right. Yeah. First of all, what the NBA did was incredibly impressive.

and surprising. And if we had talked, you know, before they did that, I would have said, there's no way it's going to work. They're never going to pull it off. But they did. They totally did. And it's amazing that they did. And then other countries had an advantage that we didn't have,

which is they had been through SARS and we hadn't. So, you know, we had a, for whatever reason, we kept it contained in the United States. So we didn't have the, the cultural experience. They didn't have it in Europe either, but they had it in Asia. And, you know, I have a friend who lives in Vietnam. And the experience from his point of view, I mean, he was, you know, documented a whole thing on Facebook while they were locking down. And I was, I mean, shocked at the whole concept of a lockdown. But they got it under control. And I don't think

they actually had any deaths in Vietnam at all. And it's not a small country. It's a 93 million people. And they were, you know, okay, so they're not the United States. They don't have the same freedoms we do. Maybe. But yeah, we could have done much, much better. And we should have. And it's, it's, yeah, we're not that bad a country.

We haven't slid that far. You know, we could get out of this if we placed some value on getting out of it. The problem is, half. Some coordination from the top down. This seems like one of these problems. that you can't solve on a strictly local level. You have to have a coordinated response to it. And maybe just the operating system of the United States isn't built for this.

No, it is. We just happen to have the most incompetent president we've ever had. Yeah, that might be the other piece too. At the moment, we needed leadership. We had no leadership. Obama could have done this. I think George W. Bush was an awful president, but I think he could have done it too. Yeah, no, he would have.

Yeah, he might have been paralyzed at first and confused. and whatever, but he would have had, he would have listened to the people around and they'd said, look, we have the playbook for this. We know exactly what to do. This is, you get up right now and you give this speech and we know that 67% of the people will believe you because we, we, you know, we simulated this and we know, though it's going to happen, you know, and you, yeah, people just didn't, didn't believe it or who knows. Yeah, it is. You want to know. You want to know. Jason, I'll tell you what. I think we've been doing this to ourselves a lot.

We had the Iraq war, and we had tax cuts during the Iraq war. Now, that's immoral, and that is part of the problem. We just don't think anything can fuck us up. I don't know if you're allowed to say words like this on it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, fuck it. I don't like to say it a lot, but I think fuck us up is the word, okay, or the phrase. is that we just don't believe anything bad can happen to us in the United States.

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to this amazing episode. in capitalism? Do you, I mean, there seems to be this undercurrent of things are getting too big. I saw you writing about that. Yeah. I don't believe there is such a thing as capitalism. I don't, I don't believe in this world that we live in at the level that we live. I think that the, the romantic notion of capitalism worked when we had an agrarian society, when we didn't have any medicine, you know, when there were, you know, connections between all of the different cities and countries and I mean, once you have medicine, how can you have capitalism? Think about it. Medicine just doesn't submit to capitalism. How so? I'm not sure I follow. Okay. I mean,

is it something, do I have to have like $10 million in the bank to get cancer treatment? Or could I get the cancer treatment just because I have cancer? That's a fundamental question. Well, what's the answer? I think today you would get the cancer treatment, right? Well, I'm not asking about today, but what's the right moral question? Yes. Oh, the moral question? Yeah, I mean, it does seem like in a society that is this wealthy and has achieved this level of sustainability and you're sort of, you know, you were sort of saying we live in this system where we take it for granted. You know, we take for granted

that K through 12 or pre-K through 12 exists. We take for granted that unemployment exists or food stamps, welfare, whatever safety nets there are here. And obviously some other countries have slightly better and most countries have much worse. Yeah, it would seem to me that in a developed country having a basic healthcare system is an absolute no-brainer. And why wouldn't we strive to have that? That's it. Why wouldn't you? Why not?

Right? We can do it. We have medicine. Why should that be something that you, I mean, you know, we can. But on the other hand, we should have rewards for, for ingenuity, for hard work, for being right. Being right should have a lot of rewards with it. And our system isn't really well set up for that, honestly.

My life story has a lot of being right in it and not being rewarded for it. I mean, that's... Yeah, well, I mean, you did work in open source, which is you kind of gift people, you gifted people a lot of your ideas, right? So, I mean, it was pretty philanthropic, a lot of the work you did. It never was intended to be philanthropic. I'm a software developer, entrepreneur. You know, I like to think of even the things, the open formats and protocols that I put out there.

I like to think of those things as products, too. Yeah. And so, like when, for example, when RSS took off, and I don't know, what year was that? in like 2003, somewhere in there? Yeah, 2003, 2004. I mean, whenever Technorati kind of clicked, that was when it came into a lot of people's consciousness or maybe a few months before that. Right.

And so I'm meeting with all the VCs, okay? They all want to meet with me because look, look at this thing. What's going on? This is the guy that knows everything about it. So I meet with them, right? And I'm figuring we're talking about setting up companies, but no, they're talking about setting up companies without me. And none of the,

by the first time I ever hear about there being actual dedicated RSS startups is I read press releases. You know, and it's like, good Lord. Why do you do business like this? I mean, first, you know, if you're going to fuck me, why don't you at least call me and tell me that you're fucking me? And why?

And why would you want to fuck me? The point is the people that they hire, I don't want to make it. The people they hired knew nothing about it. They knew absolutely nothing. And the same thing happened again with podcasting. You know, and nobody knew what to do. I don't know that for a fact that I knew what to do, but nobody did what I wanted to do.

And nobody even listened to me. And they gave $25 million to Adam Curry's startup. The guys at Kleiner who were supposedly friends of mine, they did call me before they. did the deal. And they asked me, what's the situation? I said the situation is I have a deal with Adam that I get 50% of whatever he gets. And they, you know what? Jason, you influenced me very heavily on this. He said, if you're going to do a deal with somebody, you really should write a contract up. I remember saying that. And I'm going, yeah, I've learned that lesson. Well, I mean, if it's anything is worth doing, it's worth doing right.

is what somebody explained to me. That's right. Yeah, because somebody explained this to me and they were like, do you have a contract? I was like, no, you know, we just agreed. If they don't want to do a contract, you should get the fuck out of there, okay? I actually have another perception of it, which is now that I've become an angel investor, and you mentioned angel investing in your tweets are up today, I realized that it's being one of the worst possibilities in an outcome is being too early because,

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

And it really takes that, there's like this walk through the desert, right? You know, like going from, you know, the east coast or the west coast, there's this huge,

like, barren desert, and then maybe like the Donner Pass and snow. And then all of a sudden you get to California. And I feel like if you're starting and you're those people who are the pioneers, you kind of, of wind up dying somewhere in Arizona or in the middle of the desert. And then it's the people who start maybe after the Donor Trail or whatever who pick up and say, you know what, I found California,

or here's the oil in Texas or here's the gold in California. Yes, I know that that's true. But I don't accept that for my own experience in the situation. I mean, it's water under the bridge. Look, I've made a lot of money. I'm not complaining. Money isn't an issue here. What I wanted to do, and didn't get to do was to build a development organization, according to my values, without the kinds of limits I had the first time around. I mentioned I did an angel-based company. My angel, this guy was named Bill Jordan,

and I would guess he was probably about my age when I first met him. I had totally given up on any form of investment. I was so tired of meeting with the VCs. I had a little office on San Antonio Road in Palo Alto. And I had one person working with me. And this guy, Bill Jordan, wanted to meet with us. And I said, no, you meet with them. I don't want to talk.

I'm just going to write code. I'm going to go do my thing, you know. And my partner comes in and he puts a check down on the table for $50,000. He really would like to talk to you. And I thought, okay, this does it. I'm going to tell. And it was that kind of relationship. I mean, it was very collegial.

I love the idea. When it works, it's wonderful, the angel investment stuff. So I had, what was your idea with him? That was a think tank. Think tank was a long story on that one. But there's a company called Living Video Text, started in 81. And before that, I had been a developer, a personal software, which the company that did VisiCalc.

Wow. Yeah. So VisiCalc, for people who don't know, was Lotus 1, 2, 3 before Mitch Kapor did it and certainly Excel long before Mitch Kapor and VisiCalc. And I worked for Mitch Kapor. Mitch Kapor was, I mean, I was an author. I had a contract with them. I didn't.

I wasn't an employee, but they paid me and I had a percentage. And it's a really long story. But yeah, I knew all those guys. And then we started a company. around the product and it didn't go very well until um until that moment and then it started then things started clicking um and we ended up uh merging with semantic and that's how i hooked up with uh the Kleiner guys and uh because they were it was really i mean i did the deal with John door and um I asked him at one point would instead of buying me out would you fund me and he said no

we're not going to do that See, the problem is they never understood. I don't think, I mean, you know, I don't, I'm not an easy thing for them to understand because the world thinks that programmers are fungible and uncreative and not leaders and all, you know, all kinds of very negative. That seems to have changed from that period of time. Do you think so? I don't know if it has.

I think it's, you know, I think why Combinator does get credit program for, saying we're going to invest in developers and they're going to be the tip of the spear. Yeah, Y Combinator is a, I would say NetNet is a positive thing. I always thought that incubators were a good idea. I really did. I wrote about it. When they were out of fashion, I said, you know, we shouldn't give up on them so quickly because, you know, because developers need help. You know, and if you can, you know, take some of the functions of running a company and, you know, factor them out so that you don't have to

invent them for every single company. That's a good idea, you know. But I, but I. Venture capital has changed a lot too. I mean, if you think about who the venture capitals were in those early days. No, I don't think, I don't think so. Because, you know what? I don't think we're trying out of any of the big ideas, to be honest with you.

I think what you're getting is a lot of derivative products that are, you know, the four square of tire changing, you know, or the Uber of, I don't know, how many, this is, I saw this when I was at NYU, do. When was that? 2010 to 2011, somewhere in there. And they were starting up their own incubator sort of thing. And I was in the journalism school there. And so I was on their network when the students would come to me.

And they'd say, I want to come up with a great idea so I can be the next Zuckerberg. I go, well, that's ass backwards. Why? You can't be the next Zuckerberg. Fuck you. You know? Yeah. Whatever.

I think that you want. want people that try really big, weird ideas. And I think that VCs are never going to do that. Because VCs are bankers, and that's how they look at the world. They need a bankable idea. Yeah, they are definitely looking for things that can, they're looking to take the risk out and have a clear path to whatever amount of revenue and clear path to an exit and scale.

and really outlandish ideas. You can get a lot of egg on your face from them. Let me ask you this. How outlandish would it be for a guy who was a two-time entrepreneur, both-time successful, has now created this thing called, not personally created RSS, but made it happen. Why shouldn't he get a chance to start an RSS company? Why did that business decide that that person, couldn't do that.

And I've never understood it. I don't think the quality of the people they replaced me with were, I mean, their result was predictable. These were people who didn't understand what they were doing. There haven't been any technology-based podcasting startups. I can't think of any. I mean, there have been some individual efforts that have been good, but there should have been an early on podcasting startup.

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, the technology being so standardized and, open. Yeah, you really, it never became one person's domain, right? You had Zencastor handling recording or Libyan handling hosting in RSS feeds. It should all been one thing. It should have been, there should be, I mean, still to this day, iPhones are not good podcasting devices. No, that is interesting. Yeah, they suck at it. I might be even too late to do this. And I don't want to go into tremendous detail on it, but the story there is an interesting one because it went, I went all around to all the different places that could have had a stake in this and technology

companies like, you know, all of them. And then none of them were curious about what were the dimensions of this new medium. I don't think they still are. I don't think they're curious about it. You know? Yeah. You know, it kind of snuck up on them, I think. Like they were all behind the users on this one, which is similar to the blog.

moment where it was so user-driven and so talent-driven that the big companies, by the time they tried to capture it, it was already independent and sustainable. But the same thing with the VCs. They react just like the big companies. Yeah. So, Jason, why don't you when, listen, I take the pitch right now. No, because I want to be, a friendship to me is an active thing, you know? Yeah. I want to be friends. So let's, you know, and we are, we, we, have always been friends. But yeah, I think so. I've always looked at you as like an inspiration, like maybe not a mentor, but just somebody who I looked at and going, wow, just everything he does, keep an eye on because there's so many nuggets of wisdom there as he goes. Let me tell you the

equivalent for coming back from me. Yeah. I know you struggled a lot. And you had huge ups and downs through your career. But I think it was always clear what you wanted to, what you wanted to do. I always had a pretty good idea. And it's what you're doing. And it's what you're doing. doing right now. So, you know, hats off to you. You, I mean, it didn't just come to you, right? No, it's 20 years. You had to keep throwing yourself up against the wall, get bloodied, go look your wounds, and then come back and try it again. That's, I mean, the people that hit the first time, that's luck, but. It's pretty rare. I mean, what you've done is, is remarkable and admirable and should be taught.

People should have that as an example. It's very kind of you to say they did a case study on me at Stanford, which was bizarre to read because I would never get into Stanford, you know, business school. And they literally did Jeffrey Fiefer, the professor over there did one on my ability to network and build a network of people to then, you know, drive success in the future. And it's worked out. Well, you know, okay, you just raised the next question.

I saw as you asked about universities, how can we use universities in technology? Didn't you ask about that? Yeah, I mean, it does seem to me like... It needs another look. It definitely needs another look for sure. And I've been thinking about that. I mean, I have the same story. Harvard never would have accepted me.

As a student, I didn't come close to getting into Harvard. But later in my career, I knocked on their door. I said, you know, I'd love to do some stuff. here and they said yes. So, you know, it's there, um, yeah. You were a fellow at the loss. No, but what's funny about it is that they've never tried to correct that. You know, they've never done a case study as well, why are we writing case studies about

Jason Calcanus, but we never would let him in as a student? Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about what the acceptance criteria is, it's certainly not like underperforming but potential and grit, you know, like it's not, that's really why I think entrepreneur is special because it favors people of action and grit and resiliency and the things that may be testing and getting great grades in an academic setting don't optimize for, right? No, that's conforming. They kind of optimize for conformity. That's correct.

They are people who conform and, you know, it's, I suppose there's a lot of value to that too, but yeah, I mean, you described my situation. I was through high school, was always on the verge of getting kicked out. They didn't think I was very special in college or in grad school, for that matter. And then, you know, whatever. They never thought I was that special in Silicon Valley either. You know, it's like, it's weird. But wouldn't it be great if Silicon Valley lived up to its promise?

Because I don't think it does. I left there. I just didn't want to be there. there. Yeah, money does change things. I mean, the scope of Silicon Valley has just gotten so big now and the number of companies being invested in. So I see both sides of it. More people are being funded for more divergent backgrounds and places than ever before. So you have, I mean, the New York tech scene, the Austin tech scene, the Salt Lake City, the Los Angeles tech scene, obviously Saddle has been going for a while, have really started to,

become places where the VCs here are like, I got to get to Stockholm. I got to get to Austin. I got to get to Miami and find the companies there, Australia even, with Canva and Atlassian. People are like, wow, you know, Australian entrepreneurs are dope. So I kind of feel like the code of Silicon Valley got cracked and just got distributed everywhere. And everybody's got like kind of the recipe in the playbook now. It's kind of like nukes, right? Like people got there first and then a bunch of people got the recipe and we're like, oh, I can make a nuke. Yeah. How long does that take a decade or two? Great. going to start my nuclear program and built my bombs until like somebody pumped the brakes on it.

Maybe a bad analogy. Did you ever, I'm curious about some of the old days because you were there for a lot of this. Did you ever meet like and spend time with Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and that group? Yeah. And what were they like, you know, when they were young, you know, in the 80s when they were in their 30s or 40s? What was that time period like? Well, you know, by the time I got there of, let's see, I got there in the fall of 1979. And, yeah, my first call was Apple. I mean, I had come there from I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and where I had gone to grad school.

And I had developed two products. One was a relational database, and the other was an outliner, which is what I eventually made my career on, the first version of it of my career. And I wanted to hook up with somebody to publish it. You know, I didn't want to start a company. And so I had some sales background. I have to keep this very abbreviated because it's a long story.

But yeah, I did meet with Steve Jobs. And he said... To pitch him on an outliner. And this is like the year before they went public? He didn't want the outliner. He wanted the database. And I told him you should want the outliner. That's the product for you.

I mean, you've got the outliner machine here. And this fucking machine is never going to run a database. Come on. Get real. This is like Apple two days or Apple one days? Right. The Apple two had just, they'd just come out with the floppy drive. You know how much data could fit on the floppy drive?

Wow, is it 360K? 140K. 140K. K. 140k. Yeah. Yeah. And that was per side, right?

So if you clipped it and flipped it over? No. No, I think that was both sides. I don't know how they did it. That was both sides. I was never really, no, I, whatever. You never flipped the disc over. Nobody ever did that.

Yeah. So, so, um, so he said, well, you know, basically fuck off. And I said, you got any recommendations on where I could go from here. And he said, well, you could go to this company. We just turned down their product. Um, and it was VisiCalc. So that was, I mean, I think they made a mistake in turning down the outliner, but they definitely made a mistake in turning down VisiCal. And I guess they thought nobody would want to do that on the Apple 2.

And when I met with them, they were actually looking for an outliner. And that was, I thought, wow, this, what a wonderful world. You know, you develop a weird product completely out of left field. And then you go to Silicon Valley and they want it. And, you know, whatever. And so that was my one, I mean, you have to understand, even at that time, Steve Jobs was a icon and famous. And, you know, it was off-putting.

And I got into an argument with him, but it still was off-putting. And so then a couple of years later, I had, well, more than a couple years later, You'd meet Bill Gates was quite accessible. You know, he would go to conferences and you could, you know, talk with him. Yeah, no, he would sit at lunch. I mean, I remember in the PC Forum days, he was just there hanging out. He'd have lunch. He'd sit and say, hey, guys, what's up?

Yeah. And he gave a talk at Roger Von Eck had a conference at Ricky's Hyatt House, which has been torn down since then. And he talked about, they have very very, very. visionary speech about the creating modules of software and tying together with scripting language. It's just what Frontier was. It's what I ended up developing much later. And so I was really impressed. And then I started making trips to Microsoft.

I mean, that was a pretty, and they were very, I actually really liked Microsoft. I have to say that, you know, I mean, they were, I don't know. I always, actually, like, they were red meat eaters, you know. I didn't screw around. And when they were small, they were, they weren't, I didn't feel that they were dangerous. And I always loved working with them. And they actually tried to buy my company. They were the first.

User land? No, living video text. And that was in, I'm going to say, 87. And we had a letter of intent. and it had the deal gone through, we would have been their first acquisition. Wow. Yeah, the value of the deal went from 10 million to 20 million

while we were in due diligence. Because they had just gone public, and the stock was going up multiples. But we didn't have the product that they wanted. And they figured it out. What they wanted was PowerPoint. And we had a, we were, we pioneered presentation.

software on the Mac. But PowerPoint came along and was... I forgot that they bought PowerPoint. Yeah, they bought it for $14 million. And so PowerPoint was going to go to Symantec. And we were going to go to Microsoft. And in Microsoft, I got a call from Frank Goddette, who is, I think, a Queens guy. And he was an older guy, really nice.

And he had, you know, his theme was, we're going to love you into this. company, Dave, you're just going to love it here. And I was actually really excited. I'd get turned on at some of these meetings. It's like, whatever. And he said, Bill's going to call you in a few minutes and you're not going to like it. And that's what happened. So I ended up selling to Symantec.

And I ended up getting, I was the largest shareholder in Symantec after that deal. And then a few couple of years later, we went public. And yeah, I would see Bill Gates. Every time I'd go up to Microsoft, I would go in and hang out with him in his office and we'd shoot the shit. I would, I actually, we were having,

I don't know if you ever heard about the TSR Wars. It was a- TSR Wars? No. Yeah. Oh, it was a huge deal. It was a product called Sidekick from Borland.

Oh, I had Seidkick on my computer. It was like the first little set of apps. You had Post-it notes or calendar. T-S-Rs. That's what they were called. And T-SR stood for Terminate and Stay Resident. Yes, I now remember that term.

That was like, I remember in my DOS days, you would load it up and you could use a quick key to pop it up. Yep, that's it. And it was like a precursor to having Windows or task management. Well, it was the poor man's version of it. It was like what you could do with DOS before we got to, you know, multitasking computers. It was, it was beautiful. Philippe Khan, total visionary, real character, you know, and at that time, kind of an asshole, to be honest with you. So we followed in and had the number two product in that market called Ready, which was a terminate and stay resident outliner.

And every time when we ship, they changed their product so that they would knock us out of memory. They didn't want us in there. I thought you would like that, right? That is so hardcore. I had a guy working for me, Bob Bierman, who loved that. So he would come out with a workaround. We'd ship a new version. And then they would knock that one out.

That's hilarious. We were a virus, whatever. It was kind of flattering. So after that, I went up to Seattle and hung out and went to see Bill Gates. And I pleaded with him to put something in the operating system. This was MSDOS that would arbitrate this. So we could then say, okay, you know, it would have been a tiny little. We were willing to give him the code, Jason, you know.

Yeah. He said, oh, no, we've got this great new OS coming out real soon now. And you should just wait for that. That was OS2. It's like, oh, great. You know, it's like, this is, by the way, a pattern in tech. This happens all the time is that people think, oh, the next thing it's going to be this radical. Everybody's going to want to install it right away and it's going to solve all the problems.

I believe he was sincere in that. I don't think he got any pleasure out of that. Yeah. Because that was also called Ram Cram. And it was hitting the 640K limit. And then all of that extra. memory was going to Lotus, right? Because that's what everybody was running.

And it was just a complete mess. And it just needed a little bit of management from anybody. IBM could have done it. Microsoft could have done it. And they didn't do it. And that was, and that, I mean, I don't know if they would agree, but I think that was the end of MS DOS because it hit that wall and it didn't manage it very well.

And the same thing happened with Windows. I don't know, what was it, 12, 15 years later, somewhere in there with the malware on Windows. They never did anything about that, and they could have done something. I don't think the Mac was inherently better than Windows. I just think that Mac didn't have the malware, and that's why everybody went to it, you know. Yeah. It is, it's crazy to think about those days when being able to just load something from memory

and not have to reload it, right, is, you know, like an incredible innovation at that time. I wouldn't say innovation is the right word. I think that everybody knew it could be done. Even the users knew it could be done. But it was a relief. It'd be kind of like when Trump doesn't win. If Trump doesn't win, that'll be a big relief. It won't be an innovation, though, right?

Right. We had that problem solved before Trump came along, right? What does your gut tell you about the election? I'm curious. I don't have a gut on that one. I just, I don't. What is your gut tell you? I don't know.

I mean, I think that whatever happens is going to be super exciting. And I don't think that's good. I'd prefer super boring. That would be, but there's, I think boring would be good again, because this is taking up too much of my cognitive space. Exactly.

You know, like talking about a memory overload and talking about your upper and lower memory being filled, like having the pandemic fill all these cycles and memory and then having Trump filling it constantly, my thought is that, um, what,

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

Yeah. More outlandish. And I think even some contingent of supporters, they're exhausted. They're just exhausted. And if you exhaust everybody, it's sort of like being the dinner guest who's got like a lot of great stories, but then when we shut up and the stories kind of get less good as they go on and you're like, yeah, that guy was good or that guy was good for the first part. But, you know, they monopolized a conversation too much.

I think it's just monopolized our brains too much. Oh, yeah. I felt that before the 2016 election. I mean, you know, whatever. I mean, it's, yes, I agree with you. I mean, that's why I constantly feel burnt out and exhausted. And, you know, it's not just that. It's also the virus that, you know, I'm a, you just turned 50 or something, right?

I'm turning 50 next month. Oh, you're turning 50 next month, right? So I'm 15 years older. I just turned 65. So, yeah, I mean, I think, but we're both in this situation where you really want to, if you really want to survive this, and I really do, that's, I would say my prime thing is that, you know, I'm willing to hang out for a while until we get this. And I think we're going to get, I think next year this time, if we get rid of Trump, if, if we don't get rid of Trump, I don't think we have a future. But if we get rid of him by this year next time, no matter how fucking. up things are, we'll be out of this mess. Yeah. I would agree with that.

I felt like we would be out of this by now or at least have it controlled because we'd be testing, you know, five, ten million people a day. We've only gotten to a million. That's the functional America you're talking about. That's the one that acts rationally, that usually that we used to be, that we grew up in, you know. And do we have this like... Whatever that, you know, whatever that, like, military authority is where you can, you know, take an emergency authority and tell any company to build anything and get on it.

The Defense Production Act. Yeah. Like, what happened to that? Like, we built, like, 10,000 ventilators and then we stopped. Like, why didn't we stop and say, hey, Elon, hey, GE, hey, everybody. Because Trump is not actually a president. He plays a president. He's an actor who plays a president.

He isn't actually a president. And then who do you put in charge of this? Who's in charge of it now? Fauci, Pence, Jared, who's in charge? Nobody. You know, we could have been creative about this. We could have made him an offer probably before he took office and said, look, we're going to hire somebody to actually be president. And you can be the pretend president.

You can have all the trappings, can live in the White House, you can hang out with whoever you want to, and you can steal lots of money, you know. In fact, we'll just give you the money, okay? Yeah, here's a billion dollars. Just don't fuck it up. It would have been a good deal. It would have been a good deal. We'd have been cheaper than the $5 trillion we're going to spend on what, I don't know, saving every company that shut down during this? Okay, now you get me depressed.

Well, I mean, how much would it have taken if we put? If you poured $5 trillion into this, how much would have it taken to just get the testing up and running? You couldn't spend $100 billion. It's not the money. It's not the money. They have the money allocated. Money's already allocated. Execution.

They just won't spend it. Yeah. Yeah. It is bonkers to me. It's so bonkers. Yeah. And I don't know if we survive. I agree with you.

Like, I don't know if we survive a second term. I think they got to just give him the pardon right now and be like, listen, bow out. Here's the pardon. We know you did a bunch of. of criminal shit. We know that it's all dirty. Here, everything's done. No taxes, your whole family, no IRS audit. Just get the fuck out of here, dude. And stop causing chaos. It's too much chaos. I'd sign off on that. Yeah. Yeah. When I saw him in some of these debates and some of these rallies, I get the sense he doesn't want to be in the job anymore. He never wanted to be in the job.

Right. But I think he really doesn't want to be in the job now. There's this wonderful scene in the Batman movie with Heath Ledger as the Joker. Yeah. And the guy with the half of his face blown off. I forget his. True face. What's his name? Two face.

No. This is, well, maybe he is. I don't know. This isn't that movie, though. And so he mentions the plan that the Joker has. And the Joker goes into the speech, but you think I have a plan? I'm like the dog that caught the car. I don't know what to do.

I just do things. I just do things. That's what he says. You know? He talks about the people who do have plans and they're all the, you know, Mitch McConnell and Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, whatever. They have plans, but I don't have plans. I just do things.

Harvey Dent. Perfect. Yeah. Say again? I think Harvey Dent, who is the guy. It was Harvey Dent. He becomes two-face eventually when he becomes a supervillain. later comics.

And then he flips the coin to determine your fate. It's kind of his. Oh, you see, I didn't see the follow-on movie because, yeah, or whatever. I don't think they ever really fully developed the character. But yes, it does seem like he is Heath Ledger. Some men just want to see the world burn, I think, is what Alfred tells him. He actually seemed kind of sympathetic in that moment, you know. He wanted to be friends with this guy, and this guy wouldn't be friends with him.

I mean, who doesn't like somebody who wants to be friends with everybody, right? I mean, that's good. In a way, that's kind of Trump's thing. He's a narcissist, right? He just wants everybody to love him. He does. And if we had been sophisticated enough to respond to him that way, we could have possibly avoided some of this.

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

Yeah, I go to the rallies. Yeah. And he's happy. And he's going to lose and he knows he's going to lose and he's going to be relieved. And then the Southern District of New York is going to drop. I hope they come down really hard. Mountain of bricks on them. Those Southern District of New York is like a hardcore group of people.

Like they are just not playing games. So you love New York, don't you? Oh God. God, I love it. Why don't you live in New York? I'm thinking about coming back. I've really enjoyed my time in California, but I would like to come back and buy the Nix. That's kind of my...

That's what I did. That's my long game. I moved out of Manhattan, though. I don't live in the city anymore. I live up in the Catskills in the country. It's gorgeous up there. Yeah, I have a wonderful place. Yeah.

Well, we're over all this stuff. Come to New York and come to visit. All right. There you have a folks. Dave Miner, Legend, Inventor, Entrepreneur. blogger, go read scripting. Jason's friends. Friends, yeah.

All right. So let's stay in touch, Dave, and we'll see you all next time on this week and serves.