Speaker 1: Okay, we're gonna jump right into it. So, Rob, what
Speaker 1: did your father do for a living? What did my
Speaker 1: father do? From My father had a small printing company
Speaker 1: in New York called Flair Printing, which was on eight West,
Speaker 1: just off Fifth and Uh. It was a business he
Speaker 1: started in nineteen sixty two years before I was born.
Speaker 1: And he did it my whole adult kid, my whole
Speaker 1: life growing up New York up until about nine. And
Speaker 1: you grew up in Manhattan. So I grew up in Yonkers,
Speaker 1: two blocks outside of the Bronx. I was born in
Speaker 1: Mount Sina Hospital, so I was born in Manhattan, but
Speaker 1: I grew up in basically Yonkers. But I know you
Speaker 1: went to the same school as Jason Flam Right, Jason
Speaker 1: flam and I were both Filston class of seventy nine. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a true story. I met Jason uh
Speaker 1: freshman year that Fieldston has two feeder schools, a grammar
Speaker 1: school called Filston Lower, which is the one I went to,
Speaker 1: and know the grammar school called Ethical in Midtown Manhattan,
Speaker 1: which is what Jason went to. I think. So Jason
Speaker 1: I first met in seventh grade in Mrs Lesher's home
Speaker 1: room and I remembered ovidly because one of the first
Speaker 1: days of school, Jason walked in with a T shirt. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is nineteen seventy three, I think, with a T
Speaker 1: shirt of one pig on top of another one said
Speaker 1: Macon Bacon and Mrs Lesher made Jason go home and
Speaker 1: get a different shirt. So he was a troublemaker from
Speaker 1: day one. Were you friendly with Jason? Then? Jason and
Speaker 1: I were always like, uh, friendly, but not best buddies.
Speaker 1: We were in different circles. Um and Uh I was
Speaker 1: like Jason. Uh. I've learned subsequently as we've become much
Speaker 1: closer as adults. Part of wide and see him a
Speaker 1: lot of part of high school, and he spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time at the track, which I think he's
Speaker 1: talked about subsequently. So he, Jason spent the latter part
Speaker 1: of his high school years uh, in a very different
Speaker 1: arc than I spent on mine. Uh. And we reconnected
Speaker 1: later in life. Okay, so were you a science kid
Speaker 1: from day one? I was more of a math kid
Speaker 1: than a science kid. I was one of these kids
Speaker 1: who just numbers. I always made sense to me. I
Speaker 1: grew up a baseball fan and to me, like baseball
Speaker 1: with statistics, so like literal would would study way before
Speaker 1: saber metrics or way before any of this stuff became popular.
Speaker 1: I would know everybody's batting average to the fourth decimal point.
Speaker 1: I just numbers kind of made sense to me, and
Speaker 1: I was like a numbers kid. I also liked media.
Speaker 1: I mean my one of my favorite things to do
Speaker 1: was listening to w ABC radio as a kid. I
Speaker 1: just felt like radio was like this window to the
Speaker 1: whole wide universe. This is you know. I didn't at
Speaker 1: the time, I didn't have a shortwave radio, and it
Speaker 1: was obviously way before other stuff ended up doing. But
Speaker 1: I was like media, especially music started radio station when
Speaker 1: I was in high school. So I was the fact
Speaker 1: that my life ended up connecting to music, even though
Speaker 1: I have very, very poor skills as a performer. I
Speaker 1: played cello for two years in piano for a couple
Speaker 1: of years, and I sucked at both of them. But
Speaker 1: I love music, and music and math were two of
Speaker 1: my passions growing up. And was that encouraged in your household? Uh?
Speaker 1: Yet both were? Um? I mean my uh my my
Speaker 1: sisters two years older, and she was a really good
Speaker 1: pianist and music good musician. She went to Oberlin the
Speaker 1: lulib Arts part, but she spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: with her buddies in the conservatory. She went to music camp.
Speaker 1: So she's quite a good musician, or was quite a
Speaker 1: good musician, probably still is. Uh and uh. I was
Speaker 1: like the math kid, and so we kind of each
Speaker 1: gave each other our own turfs kind of deal. But yeah,
Speaker 1: my parents were like they were both the first and
Speaker 1: their families to go to college. They were very much
Speaker 1: focused on pushing us in academic directions. But in a
Speaker 1: Jewish family, well, my mom's Catholic, my dad's Jewish. Really
Speaker 1: we raised Jewish. I was great double majored and guilt
Speaker 1: um and uh uh so I, well, the woman you're
Speaker 1: married to now she Jewish. I've actually done multiple religions.
Speaker 1: I've buried at jew and I've married a Catholic woman,
Speaker 1: so I've kind of haven't done Buddhists yet. But okay,
Speaker 1: but but I am uh my current partner grew up Catholic,
Speaker 1: so yes, I've gotten back to Catholicism. But you can
Speaker 1: only marry what I'm told. Um, although the Pube's kind
Speaker 1: of changed that, I think. But but anyway, the Uh,
Speaker 1: the role of religion. We had a Christmas tree, which
Speaker 1: was kind of almost a cultural thing, but we were
Speaker 1: mostly My mom was from California, so I didn't really
Speaker 1: know as closely my the Catholic side of the family.
Speaker 1: I knew the Jewish relaity was my dad's brother lived
Speaker 1: in Long Island and we would do holidays with him,
Speaker 1: So I was in Fieldson is probably like a third Jewish,
Speaker 1: so I was in touch with kind of both sides
Speaker 1: of my heritage. Okay, you have I have to ask
Speaker 1: them if your mother was from California, did your father
Speaker 1: meet her? It's actually an awesome story. So my dad
Speaker 1: and my mom met at a folk dancing place, uh
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty three or nine four, I think, Uh.
Speaker 1: And my dad and his best friend, Bob weren't back,
Speaker 1: and my mom and her her best friend, uh Felice,
Speaker 1: both went to this place, and uh, three lifelong couples
Speaker 1: were formed that night. So my mom and my dad met,
Speaker 1: Felice met her husband Roger, and Bob and his wife
Speaker 1: Audrey all the same night. So I don't know it
Speaker 1: was in the tequila there that night, but something magical, uh,
Speaker 1: and they all married for life, which was just pretty
Speaker 1: amazing and what was folk dancing? Did they ever tell
Speaker 1: you what actually went trance fired at this venue? There
Speaker 1: were no videotapes at the time, so there's very subjective
Speaker 1: recollections of it, but it was. It was a meaningful night,
Speaker 1: obviously for all six of them. Uh and relatively you know,
Speaker 1: my parents were married over fifty years until my dad
Speaker 1: passed away five years ago, and so they had a
Speaker 1: great long run out of it. Okay, So if you're
Speaker 1: born in nineteen sixty two, you're in high school when
Speaker 1: the Apple two comes out? Were you an adherent of
Speaker 1: computers in high school? I was, but not through uh
Speaker 1: not through PCs. I was a little before and a
Speaker 1: little after in a funny way. So my first computer
Speaker 1: was a a programmable t I fifty eight computer, which
Speaker 1: was not a computer at all. I was a calculator
Speaker 1: with two hundred forty steps in it, so you literally
Speaker 1: you had to learn how to really efficient code. That
Speaker 1: was the first UH computing device that I owned. Uh
Speaker 1: And and you could program it to do sort of
Speaker 1: simulation kinds of things that had a little display. I
Speaker 1: couldn't afford the expensive one with magnetic cards, but I
Speaker 1: was able to save my money from shelving stone, raking
Speaker 1: leaves and other stuff to where I got the printer
Speaker 1: so I could actually save my programs and type them
Speaker 1: back in meticulously, all two and forty instructions of them.
Speaker 1: Then my senior in high school, Fieldston started time sharing
Speaker 1: on another computer down the street at the school called
Speaker 1: Riverdale UM. And so that was when I got first
Speaker 1: got into any sort of serious interactive programming. Uh. It
Speaker 1: was a PDP eleven thirty four. There ran an obscure
Speaker 1: operating system called Ristus for any nerds out there, UM.
Speaker 1: And the biggest thing that I did there was I
Speaker 1: wrote a game that simulated running a presidential election called
Speaker 1: pres and it became very popular, and it leveraged that popularity,
Speaker 1: and I put a trojan horse in it that gave
Speaker 1: me system access to the entire computer system. Okay, and
Speaker 1: did you utilize that access to do bad or good?
Speaker 1: I utilized it for because back in the day, hacker
Speaker 1: meant something different than it means now. Hacker meant somebody
Speaker 1: who had the curiosity, the pioneer spirit. Stephen Levi's book
Speaker 1: Hacker describes this, and it was about like climbing the mountain.
Speaker 1: The digital version of the Mountain. So I never did
Speaker 1: anything malicious. I would basically there were there were fun
Speaker 1: games on the system that you could play if you
Speaker 1: had access to them, I would do that. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the worst you could say is that I stole some
Speaker 1: CPU cycles um from the from the Riverdale computer. I
Speaker 1: did it with a buddy. I won't say his name,
Speaker 1: but he ended up being our professor at m I
Speaker 1: t so and uh a very accomplished person in his
Speaker 1: own right. So apparently we didn't We were not too
Speaker 1: too bad, but but we had fun and I learned
Speaker 1: a lot about programming computers. Uh and uh, I can
Speaker 1: tell you a lot about bad computer operating system security
Speaker 1: and trojan horses because the case did not have robust security.
Speaker 1: So that computer terminal that you had access to the
Speaker 1: main frame or mini computer whatever it was, that was
Speaker 1: at school, that was in high school. That was my
Speaker 1: that was my first experience. My my first experience in
Speaker 1: owning our computer was in one when the IBM PC
Speaker 1: came out. But that was I was alarading. Okay, but
Speaker 1: before your college. So when you're at Fieldston, would you
Speaker 1: stay after school to use that computer it was it?
Speaker 1: Would you track your relationship with a computer in school
Speaker 1: somewhat similarly to what Bill Gates says his experience was.
Speaker 1: So I didn't in beak between between the program blow
Speaker 1: calculator that I owned and my access to the the
Speaker 1: PDP eleven thirty four through a time sharing terminal. I
Speaker 1: um I got. I don't know if I got my
Speaker 1: full ten thousand hours, and but I definitely got a
Speaker 1: decent amount of computing experience. We also, by the way
Speaker 1: we had it, we had a PDP I forgot. My
Speaker 1: whole Sky school had a PDP eight before the PDP
Speaker 1: eleven thirty four, which had a one tin bawd teletype,
Speaker 1: you know, the old like you know, something out of
Speaker 1: two thousand and one, with the with the he's clanging
Speaker 1: and the uh, the loud teletype. Uh. The only thing
Speaker 1: about that was the computer would reboot when you plug
Speaker 1: the coffee pot in. So it really wasn't that robust
Speaker 1: a computer. So I dinked out with that a little bit.
Speaker 1: But it was really the the my own calculator and
Speaker 1: the other one where my main computing experence. And you know,
Speaker 1: by I'm a little bit older than you. I was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen fifty three, and then people are younger.
Speaker 1: But there was really class division in my high school,
Speaker 1: but it was much larger than your high school. When
Speaker 1: you're pursuing your love of computers, does that make you
Speaker 1: an ostracized nerd or does that include you in the class?
Speaker 1: So this I had different things I did. So when
Speaker 1: I before I started this, I started a radio station
Speaker 1: in my high school. Uh, and that was that was fun.
Speaker 1: I just did because I loved radio. Actually when I
Speaker 1: went when I when I was twelve, I went to
Speaker 1: a summer camp and my camp counselor was a a
Speaker 1: d J at w N y C. I think it
Speaker 1: was the City College, uh station, And I thought it
Speaker 1: was was it was that a classical station back then? Uh? No, No,
Speaker 1: this was it was like an all format station. Was
Speaker 1: that it was a SID No, no, w CC, it
Speaker 1: was a it was the City College in New York station.
Speaker 1: So not even I see c C and Y or
Speaker 1: something like that. And so I went and visited his
Speaker 1: radio station, uh that next fall, and I thought it
Speaker 1: was the coolest thing in the world. So I got
Speaker 1: my we we ended up setting up a intercom radio
Speaker 1: station in high school. When I did that, when I
Speaker 1: was like a sophomore junior. How much techno? Well know,
Speaker 1: how did that know? It was more of the inspiration.
Speaker 1: It was more of the inspiration. It wasn't super technical.
Speaker 1: I mean it was literally we didn't get it. We
Speaker 1: didn't get a low watching license. We just literally wired
Speaker 1: the building from the UH from the when we were
Speaker 1: into the gymnasium in the cafeteria. So it was basically
Speaker 1: doing radio over wired lines, basically what I ended up
Speaker 1: doing twenty years later when we started real networks, but
Speaker 1: not used. The Internet didn't exist then, so we just
Speaker 1: wired it ourselves. Okay, so you end up going to Yale.
Speaker 1: Where else did you apply to college? I actually only
Speaker 1: applied to two places. I applied to Yale and a
Speaker 1: little college and Iowa called Grinnell. And the reason I
Speaker 1: applied to Grinnell was um I thought after being growing
Speaker 1: up in New York and thinking I didn't necessarily want to, like,
Speaker 1: you know, follow all the whole sort of snobby elitist
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that you associate with the Northeast and
Speaker 1: the I vs. UH. One of the inventors, one of
Speaker 1: the inventor of the integrated circle, one of the early
Speaker 1: people in Intel, was a Grinnell graduate and so in
Speaker 1: the late seventies, Grinnell had one of the best funded
Speaker 1: computer science facilities of any small liberal arts college in
Speaker 1: the country. UH and I had. I went and visited Grinnell,
Speaker 1: had a lovely time, was super fun. But I made
Speaker 1: the purely pragmatic decision that if I hated Yale and
Speaker 1: I wanted to switch to Grinnell, they would have be
Speaker 1: with open arms U. Whereas if I went the other
Speaker 1: way and I turned down YELLEH went to Grinnelle and
Speaker 1: tried to get back into Yelle, they'd flipped me the bird.
Speaker 1: So I figured the right thing to do was to
Speaker 1: pick the pick the I like them both, and I
Speaker 1: picked the one that seemed like if I didn't like it,
Speaker 1: I could twitch to the other one. And UH and
Speaker 1: I ended up having a great time. So you did
Speaker 1: have a good experience in college. Fantastic I was. It
Speaker 1: was and I actually by the time I went there,
Speaker 1: I felt really good about it. My UH sister, who
Speaker 1: was two years older, a couple of her one of
Speaker 1: her friends going to Yale, and went up and hung
Speaker 1: out with them, and it was like it was a
Speaker 1: revelation to find a place where like being a nerd
Speaker 1: was kind of cool, at least not as ostracized as
Speaker 1: at Ostracigo Strong. It was not in the cultural mainstream
Speaker 1: in my high school to be a nerd like it was,
Speaker 1: but whereas college, it was a college full and nerds,
Speaker 1: so it felt they were different kinds of nerds, not
Speaker 1: all computer nerds, some or math nerds to different things. Uh.
Speaker 1: The other thing was helpful is so in I was
Speaker 1: good at math, but there was a kid named Paul
Speaker 1: Quintus who was the best in math in my school,
Speaker 1: and there were a few of us. Jason was before
Speaker 1: he started becoming a stoner, was super smart at math.
Speaker 1: Who there are a few of us who were like
Speaker 1: vibed for second best in math. So I never had
Speaker 1: the image that I had to become a pure mathematician.
Speaker 1: But then at Yale, I started, Okay, I'm gonna see
Speaker 1: what I can do. So I started in the early
Speaker 1: Concentration math program, which was like the hardest program. Had
Speaker 1: to take the AP and all that stuff to get in,
Speaker 1: and it started out with about fifteen people in it,
Speaker 1: and after two weeks everybody had dropped out except for
Speaker 1: me and five guys who knew each other from math
Speaker 1: camp um, which I had not gone to. Uh, So
Speaker 1: I was nerdy, but not uber nerdy, I guess and
Speaker 1: uh And it was really a revelation for me because
Speaker 1: I was clearly the worst of the six of us UM.
Speaker 1: And it was a really good thing to learn that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, at the age of still seventeen, I think,
Speaker 1: and then turn eighteen yet that I would not be
Speaker 1: hurting society by not being a theoretical mathematician because there
Speaker 1: were five people in the room with me who were
Speaker 1: far better theory mathematicians and me just in that one
Speaker 1: room in one class at Yale. So it was a
Speaker 1: liberation for me that I could go do other stuff
Speaker 1: that built on the fact that I was pretty good
Speaker 1: at math without having to go to the purest route,
Speaker 1: which of course academia almost always steers you towards, like
Speaker 1: if you're really, really good, you do the purest form
Speaker 1: of something, and then if you're you know, if you're
Speaker 1: not able to cut cut it in the purest thing,
Speaker 1: you can do something more philistine like being business. So
Speaker 1: for me, I got that UM feedback early on, and
Speaker 1: it was quite liberating for me. Okay, so you wake
Speaker 1: up one day and you say you're not gonna be
Speaker 1: the head of the class in math. What are your
Speaker 1: other interests in college? So it was a combine a
Speaker 1: bunch of things. I was always sitting media, but in
Speaker 1: college I did it by getting involved in the student newspaper,
Speaker 1: the All Daily News. I got involved in student activism,
Speaker 1: and I was pretty politically active because night was when
Speaker 1: Reagan came in. There was a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: saber rattling going on. I didn't like that very much.
Speaker 1: So I got I was sort of a student activist
Speaker 1: in a bunch of anti military, anti militaristic ninety military
Speaker 1: excuse me, anti militaristic, anti jingoistic, uh, you know, anti
Speaker 1: Reagan kinds of things, uh. In college, and I throw that.
Speaker 1: I got involved with writing editorials in the student newspaper,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of these friends are like, hey, we
Speaker 1: like you would you've wrote a column for us UM
Speaker 1: And so I wrote a column for two or three
Speaker 1: years in college called What's Left? Uh. And then the
Speaker 1: funny thing about it is the guy who wrote the
Speaker 1: column right of Way has actually become a good friend
Speaker 1: of mine, a guy named David from So David David,
Speaker 1: and I wrote, I didn't know that David from David
Speaker 1: and David was like the point counterpoint of this. Uh
Speaker 1: you know, And so I would I wrote the left
Speaker 1: wing column, he wrote the right wing column. I would
Speaker 1: think I wrote one that was a kind of a
Speaker 1: headline that was a little nasty, as I recall, it
Speaker 1: was from colon distortions, misrespsentations and lies. Um. But we've
Speaker 1: since buried the hatchet on that. And well he's also
Speaker 1: moved left. Well he he's moved. He's moved sensible at least,
Speaker 1: I would say. And he and I when I got
Speaker 1: involved many years later and a bunch of stuff around
Speaker 1: Putin and Trump. Uh, David was one of the firs
Speaker 1: as people I talked about, and he ran along piece
Speaker 1: in Atlantic about it. And so we've stayed, we've our
Speaker 1: lives have intertwined in a funny way. In college, we
Speaker 1: were pretty pretty different views. And then he I think
Speaker 1: you have to doing penance for the whole access of
Speaker 1: evil thing, because he's famously one of the person I
Speaker 1: think he's the person who coined that phrase. Uh he Uh,
Speaker 1: he's now obviously changed his views of that part of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party. Anyway, So you say you got your
Speaker 1: first computer at nineteen and IBM PC what was the
Speaker 1: inspiration for that? So luck? Luck always plays a role
Speaker 1: in life. So in the summer of eighty one, I
Speaker 1: went to work for IBM uh in Pokeepsie, New York,
Speaker 1: who was a little slower. So you're this was this
Speaker 1: is right after freshman year of college, after sophomore year,
Speaker 1: after sophomore years. So how did you even get that gig?
Speaker 1: It's actually interesting thing. So I I did computer programming
Speaker 1: while I was I was. I ended up doing a
Speaker 1: computer science degree and then a master degree in economics.
Speaker 1: So I was sort of sprattling between those two fields. Okay, wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: just you you start with math in N one to
Speaker 1: what agree? Yale? Is there a computer science program? Y'all
Speaker 1: had a good but small computer science program. It was
Speaker 1: not It's not as large as certainly uh m I
Speaker 1: T s or one of the other clothes. But it
Speaker 1: had some really good professors. Uh a few, one of
Speaker 1: the pioneers of early program language of Alan Perliss, who's
Speaker 1: since passed away. Some really interesting people in there. But
Speaker 1: it was a small program. I don't know. There were
Speaker 1: maybe fifteen of US majors, maybe a little more than
Speaker 1: that um and so I was doing computer science stuff
Speaker 1: and then I was doing economics. And one of the
Speaker 1: virtues of having done advanced math is you can start
Speaker 1: doing advanced economics earlier, because basically the only difference, as
Speaker 1: I can see between the graduate and the undergraduate economic
Speaker 1: classes is the graduate economic classes assumed calculus in economics.
Speaker 1: So I was able to kind of did you have
Speaker 1: any vision of who would what you wanted to do
Speaker 1: or be? I think I knew I wanted to do
Speaker 1: something at the intersection of technology, media and politics, but
Speaker 1: what the manifestation of that would be, and the fact
Speaker 1: that it ended up involving more technology and media professionally
Speaker 1: and more politics as a as an advocation rather than
Speaker 1: a vocation, uh was It's sort of kind of how
Speaker 1: it evolved. Part of it is when you do computer stuff,
Speaker 1: you can get decent summer jobs that pay reasonably well.
Speaker 1: And like so, I gotta I applied for a summer
Speaker 1: job at IBM in the summer of eighty one, and
Speaker 1: because one of the jobs they had at school involved
Speaker 1: doing programming on an IBM main faw also my first
Speaker 1: paid job. I worked at n y U the summer
Speaker 1: after by senior in high school working on their computer.
Speaker 1: So I did that my and doing what on their
Speaker 1: computers it was for it was a computer for the
Speaker 1: admissions department. So I was just doing regularly, regular random
Speaker 1: programming assignments, you know, job running reports for a basic
Speaker 1: for mini computer h on that the n y U
Speaker 1: Admissions department had as their in house. Okay, when you
Speaker 1: were at Fieldston, was there a teacher who taught you
Speaker 1: this stuff? That we were all self taught? It was
Speaker 1: a computer science. There were no teachers, so I taught.
Speaker 1: I taught myself programming. But you know, if you know
Speaker 1: math and you're you know, technically uh inclined, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't find learning programming was that hard. So my
Speaker 1: first actual course in programming was freshman year in college probably.
Speaker 1: And what was the language then? Uh? We learned everything
Speaker 1: from you know, C that was before C plus plus
Speaker 1: C two, A p L which was it's kind of
Speaker 1: obscure sy mode language LISP, which was a natural language programming.
Speaker 1: I did some Burgram for trand, which was more for
Speaker 1: these applied jobs. Basic is obviously the presidential election simulators
Speaker 1: slash Trudgan Horse was written in Basic, uh, which was
Speaker 1: Basic was probably the first higher level language I wrote in. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what is your gig after your sophomore year at IBM?
Speaker 1: So I worked at IBM in a really boring job
Speaker 1: in Pokeepsie, New York. UH in a group that wrote
Speaker 1: IBM had a language called j c L that was
Speaker 1: a language to batch program computers. And I came in
Speaker 1: just I just missed having to work on punch cards.
Speaker 1: I'm really lucky in that. But this was They had
Speaker 1: a language called Jewel. I don't know, I remember that
Speaker 1: because it's a prett obscure language that generated j c L.
Speaker 1: So my job was to write programs in Jewel UH
Speaker 1: that we were used for some set of maintenance programs
Speaker 1: for the for the Maiden Rand group. The reason it
Speaker 1: wasn't super boring is one of the guys in my
Speaker 1: group that I was in in Pokeepsie, New York, happened
Speaker 1: to be part of the task force that was working
Speaker 1: on the IBM PC. So I got I get there
Speaker 1: in June. Who getting lucky is better than good all
Speaker 1: the time? I get there in June, or like Marylyn June,
Speaker 1: and there about a month the IBM PC gets announced
Speaker 1: and asked this guy Jim, and he knows everything was
Speaker 1: to know about it. So he tells me all about it,
Speaker 1: and I get super excited. I was never an Apple
Speaker 1: two kid, as I mentioned that kind of sort of
Speaker 1: generationally didn't quite line up with that. But I thought
Speaker 1: the ibm PC seemed like it was going to be
Speaker 1: a really good thing, uh in terms of like taking
Speaker 1: the PC industry to the next level. And you can
Speaker 1: say legitimizing and famously, Steve Jobs and Apple once ran
Speaker 1: an ad you know what they said that people say,
Speaker 1: the ibm PC is going to legitimize personal computing. Well
Speaker 1: the bastards say welcome. So that was a famous ad
Speaker 1: Apple ran. But I but it did have that vibe,
Speaker 1: that feel and the culture. And this is going back,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty seven years now. And so I, after
Speaker 1: I finished my job summer job, with a bunch of buddies,
Speaker 1: decided to start a little software company, which I called
Speaker 1: Ivy Research, to make games for the ibm PC. So, okay,
Speaker 1: so the ibm PC, I've already forgotten. It was introduced
Speaker 1: exactly when it came out. It was just announced in
Speaker 1: the summer of eighty one and at first became available
Speaker 1: early in the fall Okay, so when you start this
Speaker 1: ivy company, are you saying, oh, this will be fun
Speaker 1: or you see dreams of riches a little bit of both,
Speaker 1: but really more it'll be fun and we'll learn a lot,
Speaker 1: uh and maybe it will become something. So basically bought
Speaker 1: one PC, which I think I used most of my
Speaker 1: summer job money to buy. I think one of the
Speaker 1: other guys bought the printer or something like that. UM
Speaker 1: in the in the we couldn't really we there were
Speaker 1: originally half a dozen of us that got excited about it.
Speaker 1: There were three of us who ended up working on
Speaker 1: it full time. So my summer job in the summer
Speaker 1: of eight two other than you a little political organizing
Speaker 1: which I could talk about, was to write games for
Speaker 1: the IBM PC UM and the game. We wrote two games.
Speaker 1: My friends was a better programmer than me. Uh so
Speaker 1: he wrote the libraries for both of them, and I
Speaker 1: wrote one of them. Um he wrote the other. They
Speaker 1: were called SLINKs and Viper and SLINKs is basically you
Speaker 1: know the old snake game on the Nokia candybar phone.
Speaker 1: It was that game, and it may have been the
Speaker 1: first incarnation of it. I've never heard of an older one,
Speaker 1: but it was the notion that you basically you run
Speaker 1: around a maze and the longer that you you pick
Speaker 1: up tokens, and the more tokens you get, the longer
Speaker 1: the snake gets. And the goal is to get the
Speaker 1: snake could be as long as possible without tripping into yourself.
Speaker 1: It's fun game. And that was one of our games.
Speaker 1: And uh we sold them nationally through a chain of
Speaker 1: computer stores called computer Land. UH and so I mentioned
Speaker 1: all these old defunct names. Um and if you do
Speaker 1: the math on it, the three of us made enough
Speaker 1: money to make it a good summer job, but not
Speaker 1: a life changing event. So it was like that was
Speaker 1: that was our we It's the summer of eight t
Speaker 1: two and then a little bit into the fall, and
Speaker 1: then I got busy getting ready to graduate and finishing
Speaker 1: with my school work. We'll take a quick break and
Speaker 1: come back with more of my conversation with CEO of
Speaker 1: Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live at the Music Media
Speaker 1: Summit in Santa Barbara, California. This week. I'm speaking with
Speaker 1: Real Networks Rob Glazer. Over the last couple of months,
Speaker 1: I've interviewed Tony Hawk and the head of music for
Speaker 1: YouTube and Google Lee or Cone. Be the first to
Speaker 1: hear next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast I'm
Speaker 1: tuned in, Apple Podcast or your podcast Apple Choice. While
Speaker 1: you're there, please rate and review the podcast. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: get back to my conversation with Rob Glazer. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you have the experience with the IBM PC, you graduate,
Speaker 1: and then you go to graduate school. No. No, I
Speaker 1: was lucky because of my head certain math. I was
Speaker 1: able to do the master's degree at an economic concurrent
Speaker 1: with the bachelor green computer science. So I was able
Speaker 1: to do all that in four years. And what was
Speaker 1: your thinking getting a master's in economics? So I thought
Speaker 1: about whether or not I wanted to go get a
Speaker 1: PhD in economics, and I didn't know. I loved the
Speaker 1: questions that economics addresses. How do we create a just society? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, how do you what? What's the source of wealth? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, how? What's the fairest way to distribute things?
Speaker 1: What's the right how to markets work? But I didn't
Speaker 1: end up liking the methodology that academia uses in economics.
Speaker 1: It seemed very abstract and a historical by and large,
Speaker 1: So I really by the time I graduated, I thought,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna go out in the world. But what
Speaker 1: my master's thesis was on the job market for academic economists,
Speaker 1: because I thought, how can I It's a market, right,
Speaker 1: And I thought, how can I uh learned about what
Speaker 1: it's like to be an academic economist. I know, I'll
Speaker 1: write a paper about them. So I did a survey
Speaker 1: about how the market worked and how the structural market worked. Um,
Speaker 1: and by then I was clear I didn't want to
Speaker 1: go do that. Uh. So I thought about what I
Speaker 1: was going to do next. Uh And I so, what
Speaker 1: did you determine? What was the market for academic It's
Speaker 1: a very self referential market, in other words, as a
Speaker 1: market where reputation carries a huge amount of weight. And
Speaker 1: you look at the feedback loop of which graduate programs
Speaker 1: place people in which academic institution. Now this was, you know,
Speaker 1: thirty five years ago, so it may have changed, although
Speaker 1: I doubt it that. Uh. You know, over a long
Speaker 1: period of time. You might say the cream risers at
Speaker 1: the top. But insofar as the best people uh go
Speaker 1: to the best schools, it's fine. But it tends to
Speaker 1: provide a lot of sort of feedback around orthodoxy where
Speaker 1: the best professor's best students get the best jobs as
Speaker 1: sort of the pattern that emerged, which is okay. At
Speaker 1: this late date, there's a huge division between the left
Speaker 1: and the right read Paul Krugman the New York Times
Speaker 1: is one thing, and we have all the economists backing
Speaker 1: up the right wing. What's your viewpoint on this, on
Speaker 1: on the degree to which economics it can be used
Speaker 1: as justification? Right now, we're in a it's a very
Speaker 1: weird world because we're in such a a world where
Speaker 1: there's the division is not between the academic left and
Speaker 1: the academic right. The it's between people who are scienced
Speaker 1: and fact based and people who are know nothings. So
Speaker 1: you know nothings in the old American condition of nothing.
Speaker 1: So when you look at the degree to which the
Speaker 1: tax cut, for instance, is being justified on academic on
Speaker 1: academic economic grounds, that's not really the case anymore. You
Speaker 1: look at the deficits, right, the fact that the right
Speaker 1: wing said they hate deficits, but they have now passed
Speaker 1: the tax bill that's going to blow up the deficit
Speaker 1: to a higher level than it's ever been before, at
Speaker 1: a faster rate than you've ever seen outside of an
Speaker 1: economic depression. Ever, so right now, I actually don't really
Speaker 1: think when you look at what's going on, um in
Speaker 1: the economy, Uh, we were was a strong economy before Trump.
Speaker 1: They've you know, added a little bit of uh of
Speaker 1: of you know, put some more sugar in the in
Speaker 1: the in the coffee to make it even sweet, or
Speaker 1: uh not doing a way that's sustainable. I don't think
Speaker 1: most academic conicts would say that that's what you should
Speaker 1: have done. But people who like low tax rates for
Speaker 1: corporations are very happy and staying on the same point
Speaker 1: of know nothings in fact base. Is there any hope
Speaker 1: for America both in terms of the top level arguing
Speaker 1: and the people you know in the hinder lands moving
Speaker 1: back towards facts. Are we on this divergent path and
Speaker 1: it will sustain? I think it could go either way.
Speaker 1: I mean I'm pretty uh generally an optimist, but in
Speaker 1: the present time, Um, you know, you've always had political
Speaker 1: division in this country, you know. But and I didn't
Speaker 1: like Reagan very much, although in hindsight, the worst thing
Speaker 1: he did in terms of creating a huge military conflict
Speaker 1: was invading Grenada, So you know that was a pretty Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, that was a pretty mild thing to do.
Speaker 1: You know, you knocked over a few palm trees, and
Speaker 1: you know, maybe maybe one or two people got their
Speaker 1: noses broken or something. But compared to you know, some
Speaker 1: of the really bad worst we've had since then, it
Speaker 1: wasn't that pernicious. Uh. You know then you uh uh
Speaker 1: George H. W. Bush, who you know, did some really
Speaker 1: horrible things, but uh, ultimately the system worked and the
Speaker 1: pendulum swung back. Uh. And then with Obama, I think
Speaker 1: what happened was there was a lot of people who
Speaker 1: got freaked out by the fact that this uh, the
Speaker 1: the the change, the visual change, and the of having
Speaker 1: an African American president, which in my view was a
Speaker 1: sign of society being a fundamentally healthy place and a
Speaker 1: very positive thing. And I still think he's the best
Speaker 1: president of my lifetime. Uh, But but that there were
Speaker 1: a lot of people who really freaked out about that,
Speaker 1: and that created an environment when you look at they
Speaker 1: were freaked out about what the fact that somebody who
Speaker 1: doesn't look like them got to be president, and they
Speaker 1: that's you know, you whether whether it's because there was
Speaker 1: there's all these studies that are coming out now that
Speaker 1: status anxiety was a huge motivator of a lot of
Speaker 1: the Trump supporters, and the status anxiety has an economic
Speaker 1: element to it, But also want to explain what you
Speaker 1: for my audience, what lot of anxiety as well. Basically,
Speaker 1: the people are afraid that they're they're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to maintain their life situation, be it financially
Speaker 1: or be its social prestiges, and that that those kinds
Speaker 1: of fears get played on in all kinds of different
Speaker 1: ways by uh, uh you know, by by people who
Speaker 1: are you know, fearmongers or uh you know, various kinds
Speaker 1: of uh whistle dog whistleblowers, And a lot of what
Speaker 1: happened with Trump has been a lot of that sort
Speaker 1: of uh rhetoric, in my view, combined with the fact
Speaker 1: that when the economic recovery happened, you know, there's all
Speaker 1: these things that happened with two that's sixteen, but it
Speaker 1: was when the economic recovery happened, it happened on the
Speaker 1: coast very well, and it happened in the middle country,
Speaker 1: uh much much less comprehensively, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: that had solid middle class lives with union jobs, they
Speaker 1: don't have those union jobs anymore, and ironically, the the
Speaker 1: economy is getting gutted in a way that makes it
Speaker 1: much much harder for people who aren't college educated and
Speaker 1: or living in you know, the wealthier coastal cities to
Speaker 1: to to make it. And that the that created an
Speaker 1: environment where people who were chingo istic are people who
Speaker 1: are willing to manipulate the truth uh to uh sort
Speaker 1: of create uh boogey men are able to do that. Okay,
Speaker 1: So you graduate from college, you decide you don't want
Speaker 1: to be an academic economists't want to be an economists
Speaker 1: at all. So what do you do? Uh? Well, I
Speaker 1: had had two or three different job choices, and they
Speaker 1: were pretty interesting. I could have stayed with a little
Speaker 1: ivy research company that had made it made those games,
Speaker 1: and we were working on some consulting projects that turned
Speaker 1: into some interesting things. My friends Steve stayed with that,
Speaker 1: but I decided, I do I want to do something
Speaker 1: where I could learn a lot more about scale um
Speaker 1: and so I had a couple of job offers at
Speaker 1: Hewlett Packard, which I thought was I didn't want to
Speaker 1: go to IBM. I thought it was too bureaucratic and
Speaker 1: to organized around like people who's you know, in intensity
Speaker 1: level and in intellect and like, we're more sort of
Speaker 1: within one standard deviation of the norm in a place
Speaker 1: where if you really want to throw yourself into it,
Speaker 1: you could have a huge impact. And IBM is a
Speaker 1: is a great company in a lot of ways, but
Speaker 1: at that point it was it had gotten pretty big
Speaker 1: and bureaucratic um so Hewlett Packard had a couple of
Speaker 1: opportunities there. I thought it was an interesting place. And
Speaker 1: then Uh, Steve Bomber, uh and Paul Allen went to
Speaker 1: Mike went to Yale and and and inteviewed people from Microsoft.
Speaker 1: And I knew a little bit about the I knew
Speaker 1: more about the PC than the average college kid in
Speaker 1: three so interven with them and they, you know a
Speaker 1: little bit slower. Did you know them previously? You know,
Speaker 1: I knew, I knew who Microsoft was, but they just
Speaker 1: they came to campus. One of the things Microsoft did
Speaker 1: well and why it's scaled up, is they did uh
Speaker 1: college recruiting very early in Microsoft cycle. At the time,
Speaker 1: Microsoft was about two fifty people, and they started recruiting
Speaker 1: on at least some college campuses starting in like so
Speaker 1: by that time Microsoft was coming to Yale, and Microsoft
Speaker 1: ended up hiring me in six or seven of my classmates.
Speaker 1: Uh for uh with the class of eight three And
Speaker 1: what do you think? And you moved to Seattle, right?
Speaker 1: I did? Yes? And what was that for someone who
Speaker 1: basically was at East Coast boy, Well, my mom was
Speaker 1: from California and we visited the Barrier bunch. Uh and Uh,
Speaker 1: So I thought, if you'd asked me, I thought, maybe
Speaker 1: I'll end up in California. Uh. And all I knew
Speaker 1: about Seattle was I'd read Ball four when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, which was Jim Bountain's baseball book, primarily about
Speaker 1: the year that he was with the Seattle Pilots in
Speaker 1: nine nine. So I knew that Seattle was a team.
Speaker 1: Was he was a city that hadn't lost a baseball team. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: by the time I got through in a D three,
Speaker 1: they had a new one because the Mariners started in
Speaker 1: seventy seven as part of an antitrust settlement for the
Speaker 1: Pilots moving to Milwaukee. So the the uh the head
Speaker 1: of baseball team. So that was a check. It was
Speaker 1: close to the West Coast. My parents ended up retiring
Speaker 1: to northern California a couple years after we were out there,
Speaker 1: so that was sort of a check. And it was
Speaker 1: honestly that when everybody in a Microsoft was incredibly smart,
Speaker 1: incredibly hardcore, and I thought, well, this is this place.
Speaker 1: Seems like it's got a lot of people that I
Speaker 1: want to work with and I can learn from, and
Speaker 1: I'll do it for a couple of years. Un Look,
Speaker 1: it's boring and ended up being ten years. Okay. When
Speaker 1: you went to work there, it wasn't public yet, No,
Speaker 1: it was. I was getting lucky but better than good.
Speaker 1: So I got there in eighty three. Uh, and Microsoft
Speaker 1: went public in eighty six. Okay, And what was your
Speaker 1: gig at Microsoft? Well, I worked in basically three parts
Speaker 1: of the company. Was always met banking products because that's
Speaker 1: my passion. The first four years I worked in the
Speaker 1: applications products. Uh, I was involved with the I didn't
Speaker 1: create Microsoft Word, but when I got involved with word,
Speaker 1: word was like number five and word processing and got
Speaker 1: it up to number two at the time, right behind
Speaker 1: Word Perfect, and we're kind of getting getting strong with them.
Speaker 1: And then I ran what it's called program management for
Speaker 1: all the applications products, which is like the connective tissue
Speaker 1: between the marketers on the one hand and the engineers
Speaker 1: and the other. And since I had sort of a
Speaker 1: dual background, I was able to kind of play hopefully
Speaker 1: a contructive role in spanning the two. So that was
Speaker 1: my first four years, and then my next to three
Speaker 1: years was working on networking products because I was always
Speaker 1: interested in communication, right, so networking is about understanding the
Speaker 1: plumbing and the infrastructure. So that was the least successful
Speaker 1: thing I worked on because at the time Microsoft was
Speaker 1: betting heavily on an operating system called OS two and
Speaker 1: which was a joint venture of form between Microsoft and IBM,
Speaker 1: and Microsoft decided to build all its networking products on
Speaker 1: the OS two platform. UM and UH. So I did
Speaker 1: it for a couple of years, worked with some great people.
Speaker 1: It was a fantastic lesson to me of how when
Speaker 1: you have a great team, great products, and a bad strategy,
Speaker 1: you fail right. So UM a lot of the people
Speaker 1: I work with ended up in different capacities, having senior
Speaker 1: jobs in Microsoft for a number of years and doing
Speaker 1: cool things in the industry. But our products weren't that
Speaker 1: successful where the generally were failures because OS two was
Speaker 1: not a viable platform to build UH networking servers on.
Speaker 1: Top of Microsoft ended up being very successful in networking
Speaker 1: when it moved from OS to to an operating system
Speaker 1: called Windows NT, which was the next generation. But but
Speaker 1: that was after I left that group, so did for
Speaker 1: a couple of years, and then I worked in something
Speaker 1: we called Multimedia and Consumer Systems, which is the last
Speaker 1: three or four years there, which was basically about figuring
Speaker 1: out how to add media technology into Windows and then
Speaker 1: starting working on the next sort of advanced digital to
Speaker 1: some of the early sort of proto digital devices. So
Speaker 1: that was my last three or four years there, and
Speaker 1: I ended up it was a fantastic tenure run. I
Speaker 1: learned a ton uh and made made some lifelong friends
Speaker 1: and uh couldn't and financially it was obviously a very
Speaker 1: advantageous time to be there. So financially, you know, if
Speaker 1: you read the literature, you did very well. It was
Speaker 1: that primarily getting in early or your success in the
Speaker 1: operation or well, yeah, I mean it was the right place,
Speaker 1: right time. And then I did work my butt off
Speaker 1: and worked very closely with you know, Gates and Bomber
Speaker 1: and these other guys and uh, and they I think
Speaker 1: they viewed me as somebody who was hardcore like you know,
Speaker 1: I would work six seven days a week without not like,
Speaker 1: without worrying about it because I I loved what I
Speaker 1: was doing. It was was like it was I didn't
Speaker 1: have any family or kids at the time. So classic thing.
Speaker 1: You know, you're in your twenty you throw yourself into
Speaker 1: your career and had a great time with it. So
Speaker 1: it worked out. It worked out very well to me.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, at the end of the ten years,
Speaker 1: when I looked up and you know, said, wow, this
Speaker 1: has been a decade and pull up my pull my
Speaker 1: pariscope up, I was ready to do something else. But
Speaker 1: I was incredibly happy for the experience. I okay, So
Speaker 1: what came first in terms of leaving this the concept
Speaker 1: that you were done and you've fulfilled your mission at Microsoft,
Speaker 1: or that you wanted to do real networks. Well, I
Speaker 1: didn't have the idea for real network So I remember
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineties three, so I'm what thirty one, uh,
Speaker 1: and uh Gates comes to me and says, I want
Speaker 1: to reorganize some things, and I say, great, let's re
Speaker 1: organize me out of a job. Um, which I don't
Speaker 1: think what he expected because but it was really was
Speaker 1: how I was feeling I was. I'd been working so
Speaker 1: hard loving it, but I knew that I wouldn't really
Speaker 1: be able to step back and think about the next
Speaker 1: thing until I had some breathing room. I had to
Speaker 1: create some separation. Just go back when you have sets
Speaker 1: off the way you tell the story, you really were
Speaker 1: not a programmer. No. I wrote a very little code
Speaker 1: that ended up in Microsoft products. I was a technical
Speaker 1: enough person to help to work with the engineers UH,
Speaker 1: and a marketing business or in enough person to understand
Speaker 1: to go talk to customers, try to understand what the
Speaker 1: market wanted. And I was thought of myself as adding
Speaker 1: value at that intersection between those two. Okay, so you
Speaker 1: wanted some breathing room, so you said, Bill, let's reorganize
Speaker 1: me out of a job. Right? And how did that
Speaker 1: go down? So we had three meetings on the topic. UM.
Speaker 1: The first meeting, he yelled at me, this is the
Speaker 1: most irrational thing, This is the stupidest thing. Why you're
Speaker 1: doing this, Why do you want to do this? Go
Speaker 1: talk to this guy and go to talk to that guy.
Speaker 1: So fine, I did. That second meeting was basically the same. UH.
Speaker 1: Then the third meeting happened in about five minutes into
Speaker 1: the third meeting two star, I looked at him and
Speaker 1: I said, is this making you feel better? And he
Speaker 1: looked at me like I was crazy, because why would
Speaker 1: I say that? And I said, because it is making
Speaker 1: you feel better, you should keep doing it, but it's
Speaker 1: not making me feel better and it's not changing my mind. Um,
Speaker 1: And to his credit, he stopped cold, and we proceeded
Speaker 1: to have a very rational conversation about you know, uh,
Speaker 1: how we make a good transition, how what we do.
Speaker 1: I ended up technically doing a leave of absence, so
Speaker 1: I spent six months traveling around the world and do
Speaker 1: another taking up. Actually I took a class down and
Speaker 1: maybe I go to PhD, which I decided not to do.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh. Then I did some consulting from Microsoft
Speaker 1: on a few topics that are related to the one
Speaker 1: related to what the intersection of the Internet and Microsoft
Speaker 1: strategy should be. One related to the future. There's this
Speaker 1: joint venture Microsoft was brewing called cable Soft, and I
Speaker 1: consulted with Bill on whether he should do the joint
Speaker 1: venture with the two big cable companies to try to
Speaker 1: create the dominant operating system for cable TV set top boxes.
Speaker 1: So I did a little consulting at the back end
Speaker 1: of that. Uh and at the time I was already
Speaker 1: brewing the idea for what became Real Networks. But it
Speaker 1: was really during that that summer and fall of of
Speaker 1: two thousands of other uh three, that I was figuring
Speaker 1: out what I was gonna do next. And when you
Speaker 1: left Microsoft, did you have enough money to never work again?
Speaker 1: You know? If I was a monk? Sure, okay, I
Speaker 1: got my answer. But but I figured, like I was
Speaker 1: thirty one, uh, I think I Uh, I knew I
Speaker 1: had a lot of ambitions and things I was interested
Speaker 1: in doing, and ended up putting a bunch of the
Speaker 1: money into the company that became Real Network. So uh
Speaker 1: it worked out just fine. So how did you come
Speaker 1: up with the idea for Real Networks? Well? I had
Speaker 1: two ideas, actually, uh in the summer of ninety three.
Speaker 1: One was focused on this notion of set top boxes
Speaker 1: and cable and television as his starians and this stuff.
Speaker 1: Remember all the cable companies were talking about the five
Speaker 1: inter channel universe that time. Warner had their big trial
Speaker 1: in Orlando, Florida. They were reinventing, They're going to reinvent
Speaker 1: television uh, t c I, the other big cable company
Speaker 1: had their own tiles, and telcos had them. So we're
Speaker 1: like tele A TV, which was the thing that Howard
Speaker 1: Stringer was involved in. They're on these different trials. So
Speaker 1: I thought, when maybe I'll make technology gene products for
Speaker 1: those And then at the same time, I thought, well,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something to this online communications world. I've been
Speaker 1: an online geek. One of the products that created a
Speaker 1: Microsoft was an online product called Microsoft Access, before the database,
Speaker 1: Microsoft Access, the first Micronofic Action was a communications product
Speaker 1: that was not that successful, but I'd work closely with
Speaker 1: trying to trying to create a consistent user interface behind
Speaker 1: CompuServe and a o L and the products and all
Speaker 1: these services. So I was very smilar with the online world.
Speaker 1: And I got lucky again. A good friend of mine
Speaker 1: named Mitch kap Poor asked me to get involved in
Speaker 1: a nonprofit he started, Well, that was Lotus one, two three, right.
Speaker 1: I got to know Mitch through various interact with Microsoft.
Speaker 1: Mitch was somebody and is somebody who cares about the
Speaker 1: intersection between technology and society. And Mitch is one of
Speaker 1: these people who's always understand stuff. Five years before anybody
Speaker 1: else does both, both strategically and really more almost like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, conceptually. And Mitch was convinced that the Internet
Speaker 1: was going to be a huge deal cyberspace was most
Speaker 1: people called it at the time, and he created this
Speaker 1: organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation that was very focused
Speaker 1: on issues of civil liberty and community in cyberspace. So
Speaker 1: Mitch asked me, and the time that I was I
Speaker 1: was technically to leave, but I was I wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: go back to Microsoft. So in this late spring early
Speaker 1: summer of nine three, he said, come to a board
Speaker 1: meeting of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, And so I went
Speaker 1: to one of the board meetings in Austin, Texas, I
Speaker 1: think it was, and I met and one of the
Speaker 1: guys there was this guy named Dave Farber, who really
Speaker 1: was one of the fathers in the Internet, was telling everyone, Hey,
Speaker 1: you gotta try this Mosaic thing. So that's when I
Speaker 1: first saw the Mosaic web browser in a very early
Speaker 1: form that Mark Andresen and his band of of geeks
Speaker 1: at University of Illinois Champagne ORBANDA were creating. So I
Speaker 1: downloaded Mosaic, I got an I S D n dial
Speaker 1: in line to my home in Seattle. UH, And I
Speaker 1: just all of a sudden saw, wow, this is the future.
Speaker 1: Because you would look at the web, you look at
Speaker 1: the web browser, and they they had a web page
Speaker 1: called What's New with NCSA mosaic And at first there
Speaker 1: be like one or two new web pages a week.
Speaker 1: Then there'd be like six new ones a week. Then
Speaker 1: there'd be like three a day. And it literally felt
Speaker 1: like I was looking at a Petrie dish where the
Speaker 1: sales were multiplying rapidly. And it was clear that as
Speaker 1: the summer of ninety three progressed and got into the
Speaker 1: fall of ninety three, that there was a huge thing
Speaker 1: happening UH that was going to be like a a
Speaker 1: huge cultural phenomenon. And I had been very interested in media,
Speaker 1: of course, and had done a bunch of staff rounding
Speaker 1: around video and audio Codex in my world and Multimedia Microsoft.
Speaker 1: So I had the idea, what if I tried to
Speaker 1: do what Mosaic is doing for text and still graphics,
Speaker 1: what if we tried to do the same thing for
Speaker 1: audio and then video? Uh? And that's why what the
Speaker 1: idea for real networks ended up being, and ended up
Speaker 1: incorporating in February nine and creating the first prototype in
Speaker 1: the summer of ninety four UH, and then launching in April. Okay,
Speaker 1: and did you raise money of Real Networks? Yes? What
Speaker 1: I did was when I started, I took a million
Speaker 1: dollars of my Microsoft crop steak, which was a high
Speaker 1: percentage of it, but not a you know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: I didn't have to sell any houses or anything, or
Speaker 1: my one house. But I took a million dollars, put
Speaker 1: it into the company and told the four of the
Speaker 1: people I hired, we've got this much money to get
Speaker 1: to the next phase. So I was very lucky that
Speaker 1: I didn't have to go raise money. Then my friend
Speaker 1: Mitch kape Poor got excited about what I was doing,
Speaker 1: and in the fall of ninety four window of ninety
Speaker 1: Mitch made about a two million dollar investment into Real
Speaker 1: Networks UM. And then we launched in UH in April nine.
Speaker 1: So I was able to bootstrap it with some of
Speaker 1: my grub steak from Microsoft. Mitch, because you know, Mitch
Speaker 1: and I became close through the involved with you have
Speaker 1: have Mitch made the original Angeal investment. Then we launched.
Speaker 1: Then we took our first venture round in the fall
Speaker 1: of ninety five from a great firm called Excel and
Speaker 1: a guy named Jim Bryer who's uh, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: on the second most famous investment, but invested years later
Speaker 1: in this thing called Facebook. That worked out pretty well
Speaker 1: for him to Okay, when you're starting real network, so
Speaker 1: many people are working there. So when we started, obviously
Speaker 1: it was just me UM, and then I cobbled together
Speaker 1: a team of three guys, only one of whom became
Speaker 1: a full time employee UH to help build a prototype
Speaker 1: for real report became Real Audio UM, and then by
Speaker 1: the time we launched UH in April of ninety we
Speaker 1: probably had fifteen employees something like that. UM. One of
Speaker 1: the key guys I got was an named Phil Barrett,
Speaker 1: who was a key engineer and injuring leader in Windows
Speaker 1: UH and was one of the unsung heroes of the
Speaker 1: success of Windows UH. Windows. If people know the history,
Speaker 1: Microsoft had a very long gestation period and it was
Speaker 1: basically a near failure, and Phil got involved in creating
Speaker 1: the first useful version of Windows called Windows three D six,
Speaker 1: which allows you to run multiple doss apps on a
Speaker 1: three D six until three D six chip computer and
Speaker 1: it was really useful. And then he and a couple
Speaker 1: of his guys created a version of Windows that saw
Speaker 1: of the memory problem that Windows has. Windows was really
Speaker 1: bad with using memory because the PC had a the
Speaker 1: Intel chip had a kind of a funny segmented memory
Speaker 1: architecture that made it hard. And they fixed that and
Speaker 1: they created a core of what became Windows three. So
Speaker 1: Phil was the the unsung hero behind that, and I
Speaker 1: got him to come in not technically as my co founder,
Speaker 1: but as the technical leader of the company in the
Speaker 1: fall of ninety four. And then he Phil led the
Speaker 1: team that launched Real Audio, and so I said about
Speaker 1: a fifteen people when we launched. You're listening to my
Speaker 1: conversation with CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live
Speaker 1: at the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. I
Speaker 1: hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of The Bob
Speaker 1: Left That's podcast. If you want to listen to sound
Speaker 1: bites from the interviews and see some of my guests,
Speaker 1: check it out and at tune in or Twitter, Facebook,
Speaker 1: and Instagram. Now more of my chat with the CEO
Speaker 1: of Real Networks, Rob Glazer on The Bob Left sets podcast.
Speaker 1: So if you go to the late nineties, real Player
Speaker 1: is the standard. But if one were to pull back
Speaker 1: and look at the war, one would say, you may
Speaker 1: or may not agree. That's what I'm asking you, that
Speaker 1: Real Player ultimately lost the war other than China, which
Speaker 1: we'll talk about in a minute. True, what did you
Speaker 1: learn there? Uh? Well, we had a great run, and
Speaker 1: of course I'm back running the company now, so we're
Speaker 1: we've lived to fight another day, and I think we
Speaker 1: have another renaissance coming up, which we can talk about.
Speaker 1: But one of the things I learned is that when
Speaker 1: you have a huge competitor that threatened is threatened by you. Um.
Speaker 1: You can try to do anything you can to avoid
Speaker 1: a head on fight with that competitor, but the end
Speaker 1: of the day, you just gotta assume it's coming, and
Speaker 1: you've got to scale up massively to do that. So
Speaker 1: what happened is the following. So we got out there
Speaker 1: with real Audio in ninety five or video, and ninety
Speaker 1: seven became the de facto market standard, uh for you know,
Speaker 1: for a number different use cases of streaming audio streaming video.
Speaker 1: We can talk about the music connection. Later we started
Speaker 1: dabbling music, UM and then Microsoft decided that both we
Speaker 1: and we us Netscape and Java or existential threats to Microsoft.
Speaker 1: So they decided to do whatever they could to beat us,
Speaker 1: and UM they had a huge work chest of money
Speaker 1: to do it. UH, they had willingness to use their
Speaker 1: power relationship with PC manufacturers in any way they needed to,
Speaker 1: and so they moved and moved to potentially get PC
Speaker 1: manufacturers to ship their software and not ship our software,
Speaker 1: and to get media companies to use their software and
Speaker 1: not use our software. In the case of the computer manufacturers,
Speaker 1: they basically had a program where let's say the price
Speaker 1: of Windows license vis a hundred dollars UM. And but
Speaker 1: they have a co op program where if you ship
Speaker 1: Windows in the configuration they want, it only costs you sixty.
Speaker 1: So let's say you sell a million PCs, So that's
Speaker 1: a that's a forty million dollar difference in what you
Speaker 1: have to pay a year, and it's forty million dollars
Speaker 1: of pure margin or a low margin business. So all
Speaker 1: you have to do is what Microsoft tells you. So
Speaker 1: that's very powerful. So Microsoft was able to leverage the
Speaker 1: power of their monopoly to squeeze US out UH to
Speaker 1: at the time squeeze the Netscape browser out and and
Speaker 1: uhh force Netscape to basically sell to a o l
Speaker 1: um uh and uh to uh also mess around with
Speaker 1: Java and job and Java script is complicated history, but
Speaker 1: so so we got basically squeezed. And the rational thing
Speaker 1: for us to have done at the time, if what
Speaker 1: we wanted to do was take our chips and go home,
Speaker 1: was to sell to the highest bidder uh make it
Speaker 1: their problem or sell to someone at such larger scale
Speaker 1: that they could fight the fight on with with us
Speaker 1: as a tool or a piece of it. UM. But
Speaker 1: I kind of. I mean's a few things reason why
Speaker 1: I didn't do that. One is I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: try and build a company for long term. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to just flip it and sell it. Um. The
Speaker 1: second was the UM you know a lot of things
Speaker 1: that happened concur with that. This is now around the
Speaker 1: until the had the the the the the Internet bubble
Speaker 1: bursting at the same time. So you have the telecom
Speaker 1: bubble burst and the Internet bubble bursting, and this assault
Speaker 1: from Microsoft against and a trust uh violations that turned
Speaker 1: out UM and uh and they and those those three
Speaker 1: things had a very negative impact on us. We ultimately
Speaker 1: ended up uh not only surviving, but in a star
Speaker 1: way prevailing. We won. Ah, we started winning some and
Speaker 1: a trust legal cases against Microsoft, and they ended up
Speaker 1: settling with us for about seven and fifty million dollars. Uh.
Speaker 1: So we got a decent outcome from that standpoint. From
Speaker 1: the standpoint of shareholders, um but um, but we ended
Speaker 1: up also pivoting the company and reinventing the company in
Speaker 1: a few different ways. But you know, if I had
Speaker 1: it to do over again, I would probably have found
Speaker 1: the safe given that we didn't have the resources ourselves
Speaker 1: to compete head on with that attack. Even though we're
Speaker 1: able to win legal settlement, they basically uh compensated us
Speaker 1: for the lost business, but they didn't replace the lost
Speaker 1: business except in China. More than that in a minute.
Speaker 1: But they um but they If we found the right
Speaker 1: safe port in a storm, that could have been interesting.
Speaker 1: It's not clear who they would have been like in
Speaker 1: two thousand, who would have who would have been the player? Obviously,
Speaker 1: net Escape went to a o L. They got some
Speaker 1: money from a share oulder standpoint, but the browser didn't
Speaker 1: live in a o L, didn't even ultimately end up living.
Speaker 1: And now they get folded into a Verizon. So it's
Speaker 1: it's not obvious the I mean, you know, it depends
Speaker 1: on you're playing the game, but playing the game to
Speaker 1: make the most cash. The thing that Netscape did, or
Speaker 1: that Mark Huban did, where Mark sold his broadcast dot
Speaker 1: com business to Yahoo for four billion dollars and you know,
Speaker 1: took the money and did other stuff with it. You
Speaker 1: could have done that, but I was was trying to
Speaker 1: build something for the longer term. So when did you
Speaker 1: buy the Pro Bowlers Tour? So, okay, that's kind of
Speaker 1: a weird one, but it's true. So my friend Chris
Speaker 1: Peters was a Microsoft buddy of mine who got really
Speaker 1: into bowling. Uh. Chris is a much better bowler than me.
Speaker 1: Uh he He approached me in a third friend of ours,
Speaker 1: Mike Slade, uh more than ten years ago, I have
Speaker 1: to remember how longer it was, probably sixteen seventeen years ago,
Speaker 1: and said, hey, I can buy the p b a
Speaker 1: uh at a bankruptcy or near bankruptcy that's been mismanaged.
Speaker 1: And I was bowling was one of my favorite sports
Speaker 1: as a kid. I was in a bowling league. Um,
Speaker 1: I am a mediocre bowler, but I enjoy it to
Speaker 1: this day. And you have a bully at a bowling
Speaker 1: lane in your house. I I Uh, I used to
Speaker 1: have a bowling lane in my office. Yes, we and
Speaker 1: Real Network's office in where we were for a decade,
Speaker 1: we had a bowling lane. When we moved to the
Speaker 1: to a top floor of a building, we didn't get
Speaker 1: a bowling lane there, but we did have a bowling
Speaker 1: We did a pair of bowling lanes in the in
Speaker 1: the building uh that we had and uh in a
Speaker 1: neighborhood called Belltown in Seattle, and that was fun. So
Speaker 1: I love bowling. Uh, and I thought, okay, let's do
Speaker 1: this and uh Chris ended up bowing out about five
Speaker 1: or six years ago. So now Mike and I are
Speaker 1: the owners of it. We got a really good guy
Speaker 1: named Tom Clark who runs it. Um if anybody wants
Speaker 1: to buy the p b A, I'm willing to sell it.
Speaker 1: But it's it makes a little money. Uh, it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's nice to be a steward or something that you
Speaker 1: care about. The bowlers are all great human beings, uh
Speaker 1: and uh but most of them are great human beings.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, I'm happy that we're able to
Speaker 1: sustain a sport that is sort of at the center
Speaker 1: of Americana, And is there any hope for bowling or
Speaker 1: is it going to go extinct? Uh? Well, bowling itself
Speaker 1: has never even more popular in terms of like, you know,
Speaker 1: how many people your bowl bowling leagues have had to
Speaker 1: reinvent themselves because there's describe a book called Bowling Alone,
Speaker 1: which he sent me a copy of for sort of
Speaker 1: obvious reasons and talked him once or twice how bowling
Speaker 1: was tied to the industrial period where everyone worked the
Speaker 1: same shift and left the shift and then went bowld
Speaker 1: at night, you know, sort of Lavern and Shirley style,
Speaker 1: And that culture doesn't really exist anymore. We have a
Speaker 1: much more everybody's on their own schedule, much more scattered,
Speaker 1: both in more and more families both both parents work,
Speaker 1: so you have much less rhythm around that. So there
Speaker 1: is a core industry of corp like four million people
Speaker 1: you're bowling bowling leagues, but it's down from whatever ten
Speaker 1: million used to be, But the number of people who
Speaker 1: bowl recreationally is up higher. You just bowling has been reinvented.
Speaker 1: So how you actually connect professional bowling into that world
Speaker 1: where you have a lot of casual bowlers, but you
Speaker 1: don't have as many sort of league bowls who identify
Speaker 1: with bowling as their sport. Sort of an interesting thing
Speaker 1: to do. But what we've managed to, you know, the
Speaker 1: p b A, we've been on, We've had a long
Speaker 1: run on ESPN. We're just moving to uh Fox. I
Speaker 1: think that kind announced. I hope I'm not jumping the
Speaker 1: gun on that one. I don't think I am uh
Speaker 1: and uh and so I think we're gonna have a
Speaker 1: good you know, next next run with the bowling um
Speaker 1: And it's a it's it's a funding. I only get
Speaker 1: to like one or two tournaments a year. I wish
Speaker 1: I get to more of but I have a pretty
Speaker 1: busy day job in between that and family. Okay, so
Speaker 1: you're into two thousand. There's a steria revolution in the
Speaker 1: music business, and abster you have real networks, you ultimately
Speaker 1: decide to go in that business, right, What is your
Speaker 1: thinking there? Well, I believe that the end of the
Speaker 1: day there would be a legal streaming industry. I didn't
Speaker 1: know all the fits and starts in the twist of
Speaker 1: the road, but I had the belief that all this
Speaker 1: illegal uh you know, uh pirate stuff was going to
Speaker 1: be a phase the industry would go through and the
Speaker 1: industry would figure it out. So I started having conversations
Speaker 1: with people the music industry about this as early as
Speaker 1: like ninety five. I remember meeting Charlie Koppelman, who was
Speaker 1: when he was running a M. I remember meeting, you know,
Speaker 1: senior folks UH in UH multiple labels. Nothing really came
Speaker 1: with those discussions. I remember, you know, having a conversation
Speaker 1: with Al Teller, who was running MC at the time,
Speaker 1: and we're in the middle of the conversation and then
Speaker 1: um uh then Edgar Brompan bought m C A and
Speaker 1: it was clear there's gonna be a new sheriff in town.
Speaker 1: So that there's a lot of a lot of that
Speaker 1: happened a few times. So then um what happened was
Speaker 1: UH sony UH and Universal decided to come together to
Speaker 1: create a joint venture that ended up being first was
Speaker 1: called Duet and it'd be called press called press Play,
Speaker 1: and UM we talked to them about using our technology
Speaker 1: and they kind of wanted to build their own, so
Speaker 1: we put together a coalition of the three other UH
Speaker 1: majors at the time, but there was E M I Bertlesman,
Speaker 1: causin Ian BMG hadn't merged yet. UH and Warner and
Speaker 1: we also had a O L in there because it
Speaker 1: was after the all time Warner and we created a
Speaker 1: joint venture called music Net and it was basically it
Speaker 1: was the other three majors and they had the two majors,
Speaker 1: so the two biggest so UH they had about forty
Speaker 1: percent of the content. We had about forty percent. There
Speaker 1: was about there were indies that were licensed to both
Speaker 1: and it was clear that that wasn't gonna work. It
Speaker 1: was just one of the series of tactical maneuvers to
Speaker 1: create UM UH an opening for everything to get licensed
Speaker 1: everybody and UM and so then what happened was there
Speaker 1: was a little company UH that product called Rhapsody. The
Speaker 1: product was called Listen to Coming Listen dot Com. And
Speaker 1: they ended up being like the Checkpoint Charlie of if
Speaker 1: you remember the in the Cold War that exchanged prisoners,
Speaker 1: Checkpoint Charlie and Berlin right the line between East Berlin
Speaker 1: and West Berlin, and Rhapsody was the Checkpoint Charlie. And
Speaker 1: that they were the first company that all five majors
Speaker 1: would license to because they wouldn't they didn't license to
Speaker 1: each other yet because the lawyers were freaked out about that.
Speaker 1: But by creating sort of standard licenses that Rhapsody could have,
Speaker 1: Rhapsody became the first company that had licenses from all
Speaker 1: five majors. At the time we owned of music Net
Speaker 1: and A During fence with the labels and the board
Speaker 1: meetings were the most painful things. They were like the
Speaker 1: u N in terms of like everyone shows up with
Speaker 1: all these lawyers. The lawyers are making sure there's no
Speaker 1: ended trust collusion. Meanwhile nothing gets done. So uh. So
Speaker 1: we had an opportunity to basically to buy Rhapsody because
Speaker 1: they were running out of money. Uh, and we believed
Speaker 1: in the space, so we basically bought Rhapsody and sold
Speaker 1: our stake in music Net. So we sort of switched
Speaker 1: horses until the license got cleared. And then basically at
Speaker 1: the time we bought raps and you had fifty subscribers
Speaker 1: or something, and then we wrote it up as our vehicle.
Speaker 1: Uh and you know it's still going. We actually merged
Speaker 1: with Napster and now we use the name Napster. We
Speaker 1: got you know, to an appallion subscribers whatever it is. Uh.
Speaker 1: We are we're uh we've resized the staff so it generates,
Speaker 1: so it's even a positive. But we're obviously we're not
Speaker 1: Spotify and we're not Apple. So there were so many
Speaker 1: lessons there which we can talk about about why that
Speaker 1: ended up. You know, we still have a business that's
Speaker 1: got you know, uh, it's you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you step back from the you know, from Spotify and
Speaker 1: obviously Apple were the largest, uh independent company in the space,
Speaker 1: but you know, a huge order of magnitude lower than
Speaker 1: than the two big guys, and you know where that
Speaker 1: goes is an interesting question. But learned a lot of
Speaker 1: things along the way. So isn't the real business being
Speaker 1: a white labeled service now licensing your technology the third party? Uh?
Speaker 1: So the Naster business is a combination of white label
Speaker 1: and co branded. It depends what partners want. So like
Speaker 1: for instance, the case of I Heart Radio, I heard
Speaker 1: music and we power there on demand. I Heart wants
Speaker 1: to be the brand and it says powered by Napster,
Speaker 1: but you don't necessarie it prominently. Some our other partners
Speaker 1: use an Abster brand more prominently like and uh and
Speaker 1: so it just depends. Like in Brazil, uh, we have
Speaker 1: Vivo Music. Uh, it was the largest whereless carrying Brazil,
Speaker 1: powered by Napster. Uh So we use different brands and
Speaker 1: different parts of the world. We have a director consumer business,
Speaker 1: but it's it's not it's the minority of the business.
Speaker 1: It's no longer the main business. So you ultimately walk
Speaker 1: away from real networks to become a VC. What's the
Speaker 1: thinking there, Well, well, these things always, these life changes
Speaker 1: always happen through accombination of personal reasons and professional reasons.
Speaker 1: I have three fantastic kids, twins who are almost twelve,
Speaker 1: and the little guy called little Guy is almost eight.
Speaker 1: Um Um, I've said this publicly, so I'm not speaking
Speaker 1: at the school. In their mom Oh I'm still get
Speaker 1: along with very well, had really bad postpart and depression. Um.
Speaker 1: Like you know, she wanted kids every but as much
Speaker 1: as I did, and she is a fantastic mom, but
Speaker 1: she went through a really rough period. So my switching
Speaker 1: gears and focusing on being a dad for about three
Speaker 1: years was one of the best things I ever did
Speaker 1: in my life. It probably wasn't the best thing for
Speaker 1: Real Networks because the we tried to other people into
Speaker 1: the company who were kind of like the drummer and
Speaker 1: spinal tap unfortunately if that's the music ANALYSI people know.
Speaker 1: But it was appropriate for me personally to to really
Speaker 1: go deep in in family. And my kids are doing great,
Speaker 1: uh great partner, Uh, my ex is doing super well.
Speaker 1: The kids go back and forth in the two and
Speaker 1: I don't know that we could have gotten there if
Speaker 1: I had stayed, you know, full time. A real networks
Speaker 1: the whole way through. And did you I mean, were
Speaker 1: you in basically a house dad or were you a
Speaker 1: VC during that period? So I was this thing called
Speaker 1: a venture partner, which I it's a little bit like
Speaker 1: the p massuseatists I wrote on on economists. Um, if
Speaker 1: you want to be a VC, or think if you
Speaker 1: think you might want to be a VC, if you
Speaker 1: go be a venture partner at a firm, you learn
Speaker 1: a lot. So Excel is an incredible firm. You know
Speaker 1: they invested you know I mentioned us, but they Facebook
Speaker 1: is probably their signature huge investment. They've had many other
Speaker 1: successes over the years. You can go look at their website. Um.
Speaker 1: And so what I would do is I would go
Speaker 1: down to board to partner meetings once or twice a month,
Speaker 1: and I would KiB its uh and give them feedback.
Speaker 1: I probably made three or four investments with them. I
Speaker 1: probably made, you know, in the period when I was
Speaker 1: actually investing, I probably made fifty investments, UM, maybe a
Speaker 1: quarter of them with Excel on a quarter of them
Speaker 1: either on my own or with other venture enities. I
Speaker 1: ended up deciding that I'm not wired to be a
Speaker 1: good VC. UM. I like angel investing, which is very
Speaker 1: different than a VC. But when you're a VC, uh,
Speaker 1: it's this weird mix of you've got a partner partnership,
Speaker 1: you are running shared money, but you're each individual responsible
Speaker 1: for a deal. And if the chemistry is great with
Speaker 1: the partners, I'm sure it can be great, but it's
Speaker 1: very easy for these partnerships to fracture, depending on like
Speaker 1: you know, which deals work, which deals don't work, who
Speaker 1: gets credit for them, who doesn't get credit for them?
Speaker 1: And Uh. To me, I'm much I much prefer to
Speaker 1: do individual angel investing, which I do very little of
Speaker 1: nowadays because I'm too busy. I do a little bit
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. I prefer that to being part of
Speaker 1: a professional venture fund. But I only know that because
Speaker 1: I spent a couple of years sort of sitting around
Speaker 1: the table with the Excel guys as they did their thing.
Speaker 1: So at this late date, what are the main products
Speaker 1: of Real Networks and where's the company going. So Real
Speaker 1: Networks has four major growth initiatives going forward. Um and
Speaker 1: you can say it's a late date, but for some
Speaker 1: of these initiatives is actually super early. Um we one
Speaker 1: is a consumer initiative that's actually in the games business.
Speaker 1: We we had a games business that we spun up
Speaker 1: in the nineties. Uh. It did well for a while
Speaker 1: and then it lay follow and then I brought back
Speaker 1: to the entrepreneurs that helped create the European business. It's
Speaker 1: called game House. It's actually East in the Netherlands, and
Speaker 1: it's at the intersection of of casual gameplay and storytelling.
Speaker 1: So we have now about two dozen of what we
Speaker 1: call these game House original stories, and we're in the
Speaker 1: process of launching a subscription product around them. We for
Speaker 1: the first couple years, we didn't have enough to make
Speaker 1: a subscription, so we sold them individually, built a decent
Speaker 1: business on it. It's about it's about million dollar business
Speaker 1: something like that. But now with subscriptions, were pretty optimistic
Speaker 1: that we can grow it significantly. And the team doing
Speaker 1: that kind of rut Computers and Rakusen's are the two
Speaker 1: guys who are in a jointly. They're fantastic entrepreneurs. They're uh,
Speaker 1: they kind of both do both, but Eric is more
Speaker 1: of the creative spark and Rutgerry is more of the
Speaker 1: business guy. Although they both do both and they probably
Speaker 1: um blanched my pigeonholing him in that way, but they
Speaker 1: work together collaboratively. They do a fantastic job. I love
Speaker 1: working with them, and Uh in that business, I think
Speaker 1: I'm very optimistic about its future as a subscription business.
Speaker 1: Then we have three B two B products, which is
Speaker 1: something real has always had a foot in. Both we
Speaker 1: make technology, we love consumers. Um. The one that when
Speaker 1: I said, remember China, the one that's the most obscure,
Speaker 1: but it's true, is we have a robust business of
Speaker 1: licensing video compression technology in China. Uh and uh we
Speaker 1: when I came back, it was clear that what happened
Speaker 1: is and I'll explain why when Microsoft displaced us with
Speaker 1: this thing I told you about where they got to
Speaker 1: PC manufacturers and they say you only have to pay
Speaker 1: us sixty dollars per windows if you do what we
Speaker 1: say a hundred dollars. Otherwise, the Chinese manufacturers companies like
Speaker 1: Legend which became Lenovo, or a great Wall or some
Speaker 1: of these others. They basically told Microsoft, you know, I
Speaker 1: only shipped a hundred thousand PCs this year, here's your money.
Speaker 1: And when Microsoft said, no, we think you shift a million,
Speaker 1: They're like, you know, maybe only ship fifty. So so
Speaker 1: the Microsoft had less leverage in the Chinese market circuit
Speaker 1: two thousand to use this tactic of using their marketing
Speaker 1: car program to push us out of the market. So
Speaker 1: we never got displaced in the Chinese market. So our
Speaker 1: video format, which is called r M v B continuous
Speaker 1: to be very popular. So about three years ago three
Speaker 1: four years ago, I spot up a team where commissioned
Speaker 1: the team to spun up to build a next generation
Speaker 1: video technology. We put half the R and D team
Speaker 1: in Seattle, half in Beijing, and we have a next
Speaker 1: generation video technology called r MHD that is doing very
Speaker 1: well in China. We have a partnership with one of
Speaker 1: the three largest broadcasters in China called c I the
Speaker 1: end UH their affiliate just launched uh in uh in
Speaker 1: the in the first phase of of launch in China.
Speaker 1: So that business is going to do very well basically
Speaker 1: licensing video technology. That's next generation technology. It's better than
Speaker 1: the next generation m PEG. It's very competitive with the
Speaker 1: best in the world. Whether we bring that technology from
Speaker 1: China the rest of the world, we'll see. It's something
Speaker 1: we want to do, but we've got to get into
Speaker 1: the chip sets. We've got to build out the infrastructure first.
Speaker 1: So those are two businesses. The third business is actually
Speaker 1: very obscure, but it's very interesting. It's around messaging. UH.
Speaker 1: Do you know how much like robotcalling and spam you're
Speaker 1: getting on your phone. Uh. We built a product called
Speaker 1: Context that's designed to cut down on TECHT spamming and
Speaker 1: then also providing a way for message UH providers to
Speaker 1: classify their messages to basically create more structure on them
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff that's done an email and not
Speaker 1: done in texting. The reason we've gotten that business is
Speaker 1: we have a related business that is the powers what's
Speaker 1: called inter carry messaging. So if you're on Verizon on
Speaker 1: an A, T and T and I send you a text,
Speaker 1: it goes over our inter carry messaging software. So we
Speaker 1: have the software that is the highly reliable but invisible
Speaker 1: layer that about a billion and a half message today
Speaker 1: travel over. So that team used that expertise to build
Speaker 1: this next product, which is called Context and that's just
Speaker 1: rolling out. And then the fourth, which may be the
Speaker 1: coolest of them all, is a computer vision platform called
Speaker 1: real c V, which leverages all of our expertise and
Speaker 1: video technology to do phenomenal face recognition. We haven't yet
Speaker 1: described what markets are going after that, but we've got
Speaker 1: some fantastic ideas that we think are gonna go are
Speaker 1: gonna make people really happy to have computer based face
Speaker 1: recognition be applied, not in creepy situations, but in situations
Speaker 1: where it's actually good for society to have people know
Speaker 1: who's who. Okay, you're also very heavenly political. If one
Speaker 1: follows your Twitter feed, most of it is politics. You
Speaker 1: invested in Air America, So what was your thinking of
Speaker 1: the Air America and where are you relative to politics today? Well,
Speaker 1: so the reason I got involved in America, and that
Speaker 1: goes back over a decade, UH is UH I was
Speaker 1: very frustrated by the rise of UH Fox News and
Speaker 1: the the right media right that there was no longer
Speaker 1: UH any kind of There was not any kind of
Speaker 1: balance because you had the mainstream media which is very
Speaker 1: much covers the horse rays tries to have journalistic ethics, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And then you had Fox operating as kind of a
Speaker 1: right word magnet that was not operating within journalistic bounds
Speaker 1: in my view even back then, but was sort of
Speaker 1: being uh like talk radio and television. Uh also had
Speaker 1: a lot of right wing talk radio. So the question
Speaker 1: was why can't why why can't there be a progressive
Speaker 1: alternative just to rebalance society. So I got to know, uh,
Speaker 1: somebody who may talk about in a minute, Al Franken
Speaker 1: Uh through some people I knew, uh, and Al got
Speaker 1: was interested in getting involved in this fledgling in Gold America,
Speaker 1: and he asked me for advice, and I said, well, all,
Speaker 1: I think you should do it. I think it's gonna
Speaker 1: I think you'll be fantastic. You know, Al had already
Speaker 1: uh you know, he'd done Saturdayright Live, he'd written some
Speaker 1: books that were very compelling, and I thought, Alex somebody
Speaker 1: who could could really have a big impact. Um and uh,
Speaker 1: but I said, I don't know about the people that
Speaker 1: the people are backing yet. I don't know if it's
Speaker 1: the resources anyway, So through Al I allowed myself to
Speaker 1: get sucked in and became for a while the chairman
Speaker 1: of this thing. Um. And it was very it was
Speaker 1: financially not very robust. Uh it was. But we you know,
Speaker 1: there's this there's this old expression, right, you know, the
Speaker 1: patient operations was successful, but the patient died. Um. That's
Speaker 1: kind of like what happened with Their America because through
Speaker 1: Air America we created something that had critical mass around
Speaker 1: progressive media. Rachel Maddow came from Air America. She was
Speaker 1: one of our up and coming stars. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: obviously Al played a huge role in it. Uh. You
Speaker 1: know you you there are there are There are a
Speaker 1: few other folks that are less famous that came up
Speaker 1: to the ranks there. The whole way MSNBC started came
Speaker 1: out of the um, the sort of the ashes, if
Speaker 1: you will, of Air America. So it was not a
Speaker 1: good use of capital from the standpoint of making money,
Speaker 1: but I kind of knew that. But I think it
Speaker 1: did play a catalytic roll. Um. It took a while,
Speaker 1: uh in two thousand fours when it started, it didn't
Speaker 1: move the meter enough to change the outcome there. But
Speaker 1: over time I think we do have more you know,
Speaker 1: be it Huving to Post, be it, the MSNBC more
Speaker 1: outlets that are that give voice to progressive ideas and value.
Speaker 1: So I'm not involved it anymore, but I'm glad I
Speaker 1: did it, even though it was from a cash on
Speaker 1: cash standpoint, is a bad investment. Okay, So the big
Speaker 1: issue today and technology is privacy. So what's your a
Speaker 1: point on what's going on there with privacy and data? Uh?
Speaker 1: I think that the reckoning that's happening now is important
Speaker 1: and has to happen. I think that, uh remember Facebook's
Speaker 1: used to have their slogan move fast and break stuff. UM,
Speaker 1: I don't think they meant to break democracy, but I
Speaker 1: think that's largely what happened. Uh And and and it
Speaker 1: happened because it became too easy for bad actors. Probably
Speaker 1: Cambridge Analytics could be one of those bad actors, uh
Speaker 1: to scoop up huge amounts of data on people UH
Speaker 1: that that can be used to uh both target uh
Speaker 1: them and influence them uh in all kinds of pernicious ways.
Speaker 1: And so so from my standpoint, we need to have
Speaker 1: much more rigorous uh laws and enforcement of those laws
Speaker 1: around data privacy. Uh. And and you know, for instance,
Speaker 1: this this new European Ladge GDPR, which I think it
Speaker 1: becomes effective like amount a month from now, I think
Speaker 1: the middle end of May. I think it's a huge
Speaker 1: step forward in the right direction. What I'm seeing is
Speaker 1: a lot of companies are actually used because Europe is
Speaker 1: such a big part of their business. Whatever policies they're
Speaker 1: putting in place for um uh for Europe, they're putting
Speaker 1: in place globally. But I think the U s should
Speaker 1: should have its own GDPR law not rely on the Europeans, right,
Speaker 1: you know, we would We wouldn't say, well, the Europeans
Speaker 1: are taken care of air traffic safety, we don't need
Speaker 1: our own air traffic safety standards. Of course we do,
Speaker 1: and maybe they'll be the same as Europe, maybe they'll
Speaker 1: be a little different or something, but we should have
Speaker 1: our own equivalent GDPR in the US. Absolutely agree with
Speaker 1: that in terms of what it would mean in practice.
Speaker 1: I still think most people would would be willing to
Speaker 1: uh use these social media services uh and would use
Speaker 1: the ad supported versions of them. The approach that I've
Speaker 1: taken is I don't think I've had I think every
Speaker 1: post I've ever posted on Facebook, I've basically put Twitter
Speaker 1: Twitter rolls on it. I assume that it's public because
Speaker 1: my assumption is anything I post, if I share it
Speaker 1: with fifty friends, I've shared it with the world anyway.
Speaker 1: So I don't post pictures of my kids on social
Speaker 1: media just as a matter of personal preference, personal truth,
Speaker 1: and privacy. If I want to send pictures of my kids,
Speaker 1: I email to my friends and I trust that they're
Speaker 1: not gonna you know, Poston social media. Um, anything I
Speaker 1: post publicly assume you know, I'm gonna have to live
Speaker 1: with it twenty years from now. If I said something
Speaker 1: obnoxious about Trump, and you know, Trump gets to know
Speaker 1: about prize or something, gonna have to eat crow, that's possible. Um,
Speaker 1: But but I you know, it's uh, my my assumption
Speaker 1: was and with this anything. So my daughter is now eleven, UM,
Speaker 1: and she rides a school bus because she now goes
Speaker 1: to a Catholic girls school that she has to take
Speaker 1: a bus to go to. UM and uh, it's fantastical,
Speaker 1: great for her. But now she needed a phone. So
Speaker 1: she was like, well, Dad, can I have an iPhone?
Speaker 1: She's eleven years old. I said no, So I got
Speaker 1: her a five year old LG flip phone with a
Speaker 1: text keep word when you can buy an eBay by
Speaker 1: the way, um, And she's mad at me about this.
Speaker 1: This is like, this is like the biggest like and
Speaker 1: so she she's like, Dad, all my friends have iPhones.
Speaker 1: And I said, what about Andy's daughter? And he's a
Speaker 1: guy worked with a Microsoft, and I know that Andy
Speaker 1: is also vigilant about this stuff. And she said, well,
Speaker 1: Andy's dad won't even let his Naomi get a flip
Speaker 1: phone for two more years. And I said, why don't
Speaker 1: we go to lunch with Andy and his daughter and
Speaker 1: talk about this? And I said, no, no no, Dad, we
Speaker 1: don't need to do that. So my point is that
Speaker 1: a lot of what makes how to make social media
Speaker 1: healthy for kids and not unhealthy is actually parents understanding
Speaker 1: that there are choices. The choice isn't give him an
Speaker 1: iPhone or not. You know, yeah, you gotta go to
Speaker 1: let your way to find a five year old flip phone.
Speaker 1: But it works just fine. She can text and call us,
Speaker 1: which is all at the age of eleven I want
Speaker 1: her to do. When she's thirteen. I'm sure she'll have
Speaker 1: an iPhone. We'll probably have policies on you know that
Speaker 1: she has to show us all of her text. I'm
Speaker 1: sure she'll get around them in some ways, but it
Speaker 1: to me, Um, the pernicioners of social media comes with
Speaker 1: the interaction between the fact that most people don't understand
Speaker 1: what this stuff is and the fact that the large
Speaker 1: scale companies running it we're too willing to take advantage
Speaker 1: of that naivete. So I don't think the solution is
Speaker 1: no social media. I think the solution is better regulation
Speaker 1: and better education. We'll plause here for a brief moment
Speaker 1: and get right back to CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer.
Speaker 1: As you know, I'm a writer and you can read
Speaker 1: my work at left sets dot com. In addition of
Speaker 1: reading my commentary on music tech in the world at large.
Speaker 1: There'll be the first to find out when we've published
Speaker 1: a new podcast. Go to left sets dot com and
Speaker 1: sign up for the news left Now More with CEO
Speaker 1: of Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live with the Music
Speaker 1: Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. Okay, it's time for
Speaker 1: question and from the audience, raise your hand. Jim has
Speaker 1: a microphone, and please talk into the microphone and ask
Speaker 1: a question as opposed to the basic a statement. Okay,
Speaker 1: before the first question, Um, quick story. So, when we
Speaker 1: were about to reach out to um Rob about coming here,
Speaker 1: I spelled his name with a Z and I get
Speaker 1: this note from Bob, you know, chastising me, like, dude,
Speaker 1: you've got to spell people's names correctly if you're gonna.
Speaker 1: And so then Rob gets here today and and uh
Speaker 1: looks at his name tag and it has two essays.
Speaker 1: So I have to apologize for that and take ownership
Speaker 1: of it. And I don't know how it happened. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a story about my daughter, which um
Speaker 1: since I don't show a pictures of the internet. So
Speaker 1: her name is Eva E v A. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that in the current generation that's a moderately popular
Speaker 1: in but apparently because of Reef Witherspoon, Ava a Via
Speaker 1: is like one of the five most popular girl names.
Speaker 1: So about five years ago, when she was six years old,
Speaker 1: she goes through T S A and the T S
Speaker 1: A guy looks at her and says Ava Glazer, and
Speaker 1: she looks back at him. T s A guy you
Speaker 1: know she doesn't know, noting its assassin, she says, actually
Speaker 1: it's Eva, and the T S A Gui apparently isn't
Speaker 1: used to being sassed by six year old kids. Uh
Speaker 1: hands her back the passport and in a kind of
Speaker 1: exaggerated way says, excuse me, Eva, And then her reply is,
Speaker 1: actually it's a common mistake. So it's actually a common mistake.
Speaker 1: I have a couple of technical questions, So tracking all
Speaker 1: the video technology but you've been doing since where do
Speaker 1: you where do you think the technology is moving with
Speaker 1: like AI and like fake app and all that stuff
Speaker 1: that's going on, and how big a problem is that
Speaker 1: going to be? And then following up on that with
Speaker 1: AI and the Sergey brand founder's letter about saying responsibilities
Speaker 1: in AI? Where you see AI and what's your feeling
Speaker 1: on that? Well, the first one is easier than the
Speaker 1: second one because the second one is like so open ended,
Speaker 1: you know, you get to the you know, the Elon
Speaker 1: Mesk debates with everybody that stuff and Sergey Uh. So
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a really interesting convergence in the next
Speaker 1: five years between uh C g UH computer graphics and
Speaker 1: natural video. We already see it today with augmented reality
Speaker 1: because you think about what it augumented reality is. It's
Speaker 1: it's reality where you take a video and you superimpose
Speaker 1: in some way something that looks very lifelike that is
Speaker 1: not actually in the scene, and so augmented reality is
Speaker 1: incredibly powerful, you know, with lots of utility for it,
Speaker 1: but also means that you can no longer trust the
Speaker 1: authenticity of an image or an experience. Uh. And that's
Speaker 1: been going from for a while. I mean people have
Speaker 1: been uh, you know, retouching photos for years, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole You can argue that you know, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: People Magazine and the like are our pure examples of
Speaker 1: the fact you can't trust to photograph, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: where the images they show of people looking for more
Speaker 1: itiful than they ever could look or have looked. But
Speaker 1: it's gonna get worse, and it's gonna apply to video.
Speaker 1: I think we'll probably have to come up with some
Speaker 1: authentication techniques on video that involve some combination of triangulation
Speaker 1: and water marking. And by triangulation, I mean literally when
Speaker 1: you get the same image with the same time code
Speaker 1: from multiple cameras and multiple advantage points, and then you
Speaker 1: you have those water marked by some kind of trust authority,
Speaker 1: so you know that that's the image of what really
Speaker 1: happened and the uh and that's that whole how you
Speaker 1: create um trust authorities that people respect for factual things.
Speaker 1: Is a huge problem you have already in in you know,
Speaker 1: in text and quote unquote fake news, and it's gonna
Speaker 1: get even worse as this uh, you know, connection between
Speaker 1: computer generated video and natural video gets deeper and deeper.
Speaker 1: But hopefully we'll solve that problem because you know, and
Speaker 1: and we're living in weird times, right because at the
Speaker 1: same time, there's all this forensic stuff that gets that
Speaker 1: that gets done, like the Golden a killer got caught
Speaker 1: because of consumer DNA websites that were used by law
Speaker 1: enforcement to track relatives of the guy. So that's a
Speaker 1: case where data was used to solve a crime. Um
Speaker 1: that where you actually were able to combine gumshoe work
Speaker 1: with data. And you know, he'll go to a trial
Speaker 1: and you know, he's guilty, instantly proven guilty, but it
Speaker 1: sounds like he's probably the guy. Uh, And they got
Speaker 1: him through science that authentically figured out who he was
Speaker 1: based on you know, DNA from thirty years ago they
Speaker 1: got put in a vault somewhere. So there's cross currents here.
Speaker 1: But I do think for video, we're going to have
Speaker 1: to create strategies for validating authentic video rather than just
Speaker 1: looks realistic to me, because sometimes it might be just
Speaker 1: a brilliant fake. On the second point about ai UH,
Speaker 1: there's no question that there are certain categories of jobs
Speaker 1: that will be massively disrupted by a i UH. Like
Speaker 1: let's take like a radiologist, for instance. The best radiologists
Speaker 1: can find things that that mediocre radiologists can't find, and
Speaker 1: the best AI system can probably find things that the
Speaker 1: best radiologists can't find. Is that good for society? Yes,
Speaker 1: it's good to have better radiology. Is it good for radiologists?
Speaker 1: Probably the best ones will still do fine. Probably the
Speaker 1: mediocre ones will will find that in their job being
Speaker 1: outsourced to India, the job got outsourced to a computer.
Speaker 1: So there's gonna be economic disruption around from AI, for sure.
Speaker 1: I don't know that. I take the view that you
Speaker 1: know we're gonna have the problem that you had in
Speaker 1: two thousand one with how where they're going to take over.
Speaker 1: I think that's a little bit of a stretch. But
Speaker 1: I think the economic disruption that's going to come from
Speaker 1: AI is gonna be huge. Um, But I think it
Speaker 1: takes longer than you think. Like, for instance, I'm personally
Speaker 1: quite bearish on self driving cars. I think it's not
Speaker 1: gonna be self driving cars as a phenomenon replacing taxi drivers.
Speaker 1: Uh won't happen uh before Let's say, um, and that's
Speaker 1: a bearer's few compared to some. There'll be scenarios where
Speaker 1: augmentation is good, Like, for instance, you're driving and you
Speaker 1: start to fall asleep. It'll save a bunch of lives
Speaker 1: in that case. Uh, that's a good thing. Um, Somewhat
Speaker 1: somewhat that will be maybe because it notices your braiding
Speaker 1: pattern and it wakes you up by by you know,
Speaker 1: giving you a little bit of shake. Maybe it'll be
Speaker 1: because it prevents you from u steering into a rail
Speaker 1: and then it wakes you up. But pure that's augmentation.
Speaker 1: So I'm bullish on that big picture. I'm a technology optimist.
Speaker 1: I mean I called uh my company Progressive Networks before
Speaker 1: we ended up changing the real networks foundation is the
Speaker 1: Glazer Progress Foundation. I believe in the idea of progress,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it's an unguided missile. I think
Speaker 1: you've got to make very conscious social choices on how
Speaker 1: you use the technology. Question over here, Um, two things.
Speaker 1: One is recently on I think it was on CNN.
Speaker 1: They were showing some augmented video of Obama and but
Speaker 1: they were interviewing a company that actually has software to
Speaker 1: detect that. So maybe there's a future with those companies
Speaker 1: and embedding their software. But secondly, I don't know if
Speaker 1: anyone else has this question, But you worked for Microsoft
Speaker 1: all those years when you had to deal with them
Speaker 1: um trying to basically bury you, didn't you at any
Speaker 1: point reach out to them and see if we could
Speaker 1: make a deal? Or because I didn't, hang I did
Speaker 1: I skipped over that story. I mean, Bob asked amazing questions,
Speaker 1: but you can only cover so much stuff. So in
Speaker 1: what happened in ninety and remember the years, right? So
Speaker 1: uh in nine seven we came out with real real
Speaker 1: video and then uh uh later that year or was it,
Speaker 1: we heard that Microsoft was about to buy our biggest competitor,
Speaker 1: coming called the Extreme. Uh, and so we we went
Speaker 1: to Microsoft. We said, rather than buying the Extreme, why
Speaker 1: don't we do a deal with you? And so we
Speaker 1: did a licensing deal. When we sold Microsoft ten percent
Speaker 1: of our company, licensed them our technology, gave them an
Speaker 1: opportunity to buy another ten percent of our company and
Speaker 1: gave it comortunity buy another license to US in order
Speaker 1: to create a counter common roadmap. And that was the
Speaker 1: deal done in good faith with the very senior people
Speaker 1: to Microsoft. What happened then was just one of those
Speaker 1: unfortunate things, and we had a plan B for it.
Speaker 1: But what happened was Microsoft gave the responsibility of that
Speaker 1: deal to the guys whose job previously was to compete
Speaker 1: with us, and they hated our guts UM, and so
Speaker 1: they did everything they could to try to put us
Speaker 1: out of business by they took the software, the license
Speaker 1: from US and they gave it away for free, trying
Speaker 1: to create our server business UM. And we got around
Speaker 1: that by coming out with a new version of the
Speaker 1: product three months later than meant they were giving away
Speaker 1: day old milk for free UM. And so there was
Speaker 1: a lot of back and forth and maneuvering. UH. We
Speaker 1: took a shot at trying to be aligned with them.
Speaker 1: We meant it sincerely. We weren't time, We were not
Speaker 1: trying to get into the PC operating system business. We
Speaker 1: weren't trying to be a hostile competitor. There's but we
Speaker 1: didn't We did not manage to UH get the team
Speaker 1: that received the deal licensing deal to feel good about it.
Speaker 1: That's life. So we took our best shot at trying
Speaker 1: to trying to stay a line with them. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then years later, we actually didn't end up initiating the
Speaker 1: lawsuit until three or four years later because I kind
Speaker 1: of wanted us to stabilize the company. And you know,
Speaker 1: with these suits workers, you can look back three or
Speaker 1: four years. So we waited until we were stable and
Speaker 1: we're still in a look back period, and that's when
Speaker 1: we started the lawsuit and we settled the lawsuit. I
Speaker 1: sat down with Gates and we negotiated the final negotiation.
Speaker 1: Some very senior people on both sides were involved, so
Speaker 1: we ended up settling without going to court. Uh. We
Speaker 1: we started in court, we didn't finish in court. Um
Speaker 1: we Uh. We settled, you know, a year or two
Speaker 1: into the lawsuit. Uh, and got a good outcome and
Speaker 1: moved on. Okay, any Jim, you have the microphone? Okay? Hi? UM,
Speaker 1: My name is Vicky Nahman and I actually worked at
Speaker 1: music Net back in the day and uh, just as
Speaker 1: side anecdote, one of the first meetings I had was
Speaker 1: with Warner Music wanting to license US tracks at four
Speaker 1: dollars and d five cents wholesale, and that that was
Speaker 1: a yeah, that was a point where I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is going to take a while. UM. But my
Speaker 1: question for you is is in there's a school of
Speaker 1: thought that there's only one Apple, there's only one Google,
Speaker 1: there's only one Facebook. UM. In music, do you what
Speaker 1: are your thoughts about there's only one Spotify, there's only
Speaker 1: one streaming service? Um. Right now we have a commoditization
Speaker 1: of all of the catalogs and I'm just interested in
Speaker 1: what your view is in in the landscape for music. Well,
Speaker 1: I would say the following. Uh, Spotify has done an
Speaker 1: incredible job and a huge respect for Daniel and folks
Speaker 1: like Toroy with her yesterday, what they've done, they were
Speaker 1: able to succeed in a particular context and maybe useful
Speaker 1: for this group to explain that. I thought maybe Bob
Speaker 1: would ask about this. Spotify I was able to get
Speaker 1: to scale because they started in Europe for a very
Speaker 1: particular reason. So we uh, we launched in the US
Speaker 1: between US which was rapture at the time, Napster, a
Speaker 1: few others, we had over a million subscribe verse. We
Speaker 1: we did a teeny bit of every in Europe, but
Speaker 1: not a much much. In the early days, Europe was
Speaker 1: very expensive because you had a license, county, back country,
Speaker 1: and of course every country has its own repertoire, where
Speaker 1: sixtiescent of the repertoire in most countries is local language,
Speaker 1: local culture. So it was much more expensive to launch
Speaker 1: in Europe at the time that Spotify launched Europe. If
Speaker 1: you guys had a million paid subscribers Europe, maybe at
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand, it was tiny. So Spotify was able
Speaker 1: to go to the majors and get a much more
Speaker 1: flexible deal for their free to premium, for their freemu
Speaker 1: offer than we could never get in the US. We
Speaker 1: begged the labels for that deal. The best deal we
Speaker 1: can get from the U S labels was what we
Speaker 1: called rapswenty five, which was a non subscriber could listen
Speaker 1: to twenty five streams a month and then we have
Speaker 1: to pay. And that turned out maybe we were allows
Speaker 1: you marketers, but I think that was much harder to
Speaker 1: market than the than the than the Spotify pre product.
Speaker 1: So Spotify launched and got two critical mass in Europe
Speaker 1: with a free offer that was much much more robust
Speaker 1: than any free offer that that we were able to
Speaker 1: get the U S labels too right now. Then Spotify
Speaker 1: came to the US and Spotify already had the momentum
Speaker 1: of Europe and they basically said to the majors, we
Speaker 1: want to do the same deal in the US, and
Speaker 1: it took two years to get the deal done because
Speaker 1: the major's kept saying no. Finally, Daniel raised a hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars, basically paid it to the labels and he
Speaker 1: got a pretty similar form of that deal. Good for him,
Speaker 1: incredible for him. But that's a huge reason why Spotify
Speaker 1: became the king of the industry was because it had
Speaker 1: the bootstrap in Europe and by the time it got
Speaker 1: into the US, it had the financial structure to raise
Speaker 1: a hundred million dollars like a billion dollar valuation or something.
Speaker 1: So as tempers in the company ended up, obviously, they've
Speaker 1: they've created a lot of economic values since then. They
Speaker 1: don't they know the cash flow yet, but they have
Speaker 1: the economic value in terms of what happens next UH
Speaker 1: visa to be Spotify and the labels. I think the
Speaker 1: big question is what happens to the current day tont
Speaker 1: right Spotify, it's been widely reported. I have no proprietary
Speaker 1: information on this. Has contractually agreed they're not going to
Speaker 1: be a labeled right, so they they can only go
Speaker 1: so far. They can negotiate margins, try and get more profitability,
Speaker 1: but at the end of the day, their their biggest
Speaker 1: power as a distributor is to leverage that into being
Speaker 1: a label. And how that plays out is to me,
Speaker 1: the unwritten story of the next five years, which is
Speaker 1: real Universal and Sony and and and Warner, which are
Speaker 1: the three big labels and that control a huge amount
Speaker 1: of catalog end up getting um uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: what the right world would be uh squeezed by Spotify
Speaker 1: needing to have more control of repertoire. Now Spotify has
Speaker 1: tried to branch out video, trying to branch out of
Speaker 1: Jason areas, but in so far Spotify stays an independent company.
Speaker 1: They have to make a move like that somehow sometime
Speaker 1: in the next five years, uh, or they're ultimately their
Speaker 1: model is going to be compromised unless they sell to
Speaker 1: somebody else. That's a massive scale. So you know, there's
Speaker 1: all these things that haven't played out yet. If I
Speaker 1: knew the answer to that question, I know the answer
Speaker 1: to your question, which is what happens next? Right, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got Spotify have any million change whatever numbatory I
Speaker 1: told you yesterday, Apple at forty and change or whatever
Speaker 1: their lettuce number is, uh, and then you know everybody
Speaker 1: is much much lower than that. Amazon a sort of
Speaker 1: a wild card because they have a hundred million prime
Speaker 1: users and they've got a catalog, you know, mediocre product
Speaker 1: for them, and then they've got a premium product that
Speaker 1: has many, many fewer users, but it's it's very stratified.
Speaker 1: And if I were a major, I would view that
Speaker 1: as a very very dangerous, unstable place to be for
Speaker 1: the reason that I just described. So if I was
Speaker 1: a major, I'd be doing everything it could. It's ethnically
Speaker 1: legal to make sure there are three or four other
Speaker 1: scale competitors so that when Spotify comes to you for
Speaker 1: the next renewal cycle and wants to jam, you wants
Speaker 1: to get out of this, we can't be a labeled
Speaker 1: through whatever. You'd have the ability to walk away. But
Speaker 1: if there's a certain point, if Spotify is half of
Speaker 1: the major's revenue, that's going to be unbelievably hard for
Speaker 1: them to do. And we're getting to that point. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the math is today, but Spotify is
Speaker 1: obviously a majority there streaming revenue, and streaming is a
Speaker 1: majority of their revenue, so it doesn't take to more
Speaker 1: much for Spotify'd literally be a majority of their revenue
Speaker 1: the whole, in which case the labels, you know, the
Speaker 1: power Dinamic and shift. So if I were a label,
Speaker 1: I would be trying to encourage as many people as
Speaker 1: possible to create as much diversity as possible. We have
Speaker 1: that conversation we meaning Napster with Sony, with Warner, with Universal.
Speaker 1: They get it, but then there's a question of how
Speaker 1: you activate it. Okay, Uh, but I'm aware of your
Speaker 1: interest in what's happened and what happened in VSA V
Speaker 1: Russia and uh their involvement in our elections. Uh looking
Speaker 1: forward to what do you anticipate the things that uh
Speaker 1: we ought to be, you know, looking out for an
Speaker 1: anticipating vs V their chicanery. Uh well, I'll explain what
Speaker 1: you what you said for the post. So in the
Speaker 1: summer of sixteen, I started a website called putin Trump
Speaker 1: dot org um. And it's not because I have a
Speaker 1: crystal ball. Uh, It's because I was just pattern matching,
Speaker 1: which is one of the things that I do right,
Speaker 1: and it was clear to me that there was something
Speaker 1: really weird happening when the Republican convence and soften in
Speaker 1: their in their um, you know, in their uh, their platform,
Speaker 1: they softened their program to be anti Ukraine and pro Russia,
Speaker 1: whereas the Republican Party had been the hardercore ones, particularly
Speaker 1: when Mitt Romney is running the hardercore anti Russia party.
Speaker 1: So there was something weird going on there. There's all
Speaker 1: this stuff about uh, you know, all of the uh,
Speaker 1: the money laundering ish things that happened with high end
Speaker 1: real estate and Trump that has been reported on UH.
Speaker 1: And I didn't know anything about tapes of of of
Speaker 1: random things that happened in Moscow, any of that stuff.
Speaker 1: I didn't know anything about the I heard rumors about
Speaker 1: the what what ended up, uh you know, uh being
Speaker 1: the Steel Documents steal dossier in the fall of sixteen
Speaker 1: after we launched the website, but I didn't anything about
Speaker 1: it at the time we launched it. UM. But it
Speaker 1: was clear that there was something weird going on here,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to just shine a light on it.
Speaker 1: So we created a website. UH didn't put a huge
Speaker 1: amount of money behind it, but publicized it a bit,
Speaker 1: got some attention for it. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, UH, there were so many other massive trends
Speaker 1: that were driving the election of Trump over Hillary. Looking
Speaker 1: to do thousand eighteen, there's no question in my mind
Speaker 1: that there is going to be a lot of of
Speaker 1: of effort by the Russian government to influence the elections
Speaker 1: where they can. They're gonna have one disadvantage relative to sixteen,
Speaker 1: which is there's not you can't write the same national,
Speaker 1: national fake news and fake social media postings that you
Speaker 1: couldn't do thousand sixteen. A because hopefully the facebooks and
Speaker 1: the twitters of the World War vigilant and be because
Speaker 1: it won't be one national issue. What what wins that
Speaker 1: swing state congressional district in Ohio will be specific to
Speaker 1: two Ohio candidates. The most of us have ever heard
Speaker 1: of the same thing, So it'll be district by district.
Speaker 1: But I do think that who wins Congress in ten
Speaker 1: is the binary issue for the next two years. You know,
Speaker 1: if Democrats win control of the House representatives, they're gonna
Speaker 1: be robust UH hearings. UH there's gonna be a robust process,
Speaker 1: and I think it's highly likely than Trump will be impeached. Now,
Speaker 1: the Democrats are afraid to say that because they don't properly.
Speaker 1: I think they don't want to make it sound like
Speaker 1: they're not going to be data driven. I say that
Speaker 1: because I think that what the data would expose between
Speaker 1: the Muller axis UM and the uh, you know, the
Speaker 1: Michael Cohen sleazy stuff and who knows what else, is
Speaker 1: that Trump has committed a series of acts that are
Speaker 1: impeachable offenses. But we have we don't have all the
Speaker 1: data yet, we only we have certain things that are
Speaker 1: suggestive of that. But I think when we get the data,
Speaker 1: we'll see what happens. My personal belief is when we
Speaker 1: get the data, it will demonstrate the need to impeach him,
Speaker 1: and that that should then happen. Then there's no question
Speaker 1: would be what happens in the Senate and does Trump
Speaker 1: cave then or does he stay in fight. Different people
Speaker 1: of different views of that. I don't think it's a
Speaker 1: foreker conclusion either way. If you study seventy three seventy four, UM,
Speaker 1: you know it was the smoking gun tapes that ultimately
Speaker 1: cause Republic in the Senate to flip and made Nixon resigned. Whereas,
Speaker 1: of course in in in nine with the Lewinsky stuff, Uh,
Speaker 1: it was an idea stuff. It was clear that Clinton
Speaker 1: had perjured himself over a blowjob, which was wrong. I
Speaker 1: think you can have an interesting debate about whether that's
Speaker 1: an apeche of offense or not. But I don't. I
Speaker 1: think the Democrats didn't feel under political pressure to call
Speaker 1: it in a petual offense, and therefore he finished his
Speaker 1: termat So I don't know how it's going to go
Speaker 1: beyond that, but I think the eighteen election will be
Speaker 1: the uh, you know, the limit. If the Democrats don't
Speaker 1: win the House an eighteen, we'll just have two more
Speaker 1: years like the last two years, the less year and
Speaker 1: a half. Okay. I have another political minded question, and
Speaker 1: that's if there if the right has uh media and
Speaker 1: they have media scale with Fox News, and then they
Speaker 1: have the biggest you know, tweeter of all time that's
Speaker 1: really dominating the headlines. Based on your experience with Air America, Um,
Speaker 1: what can the left do to create a media engine,
Speaker 1: communications strategy move forward that can rival what the right
Speaker 1: is doing at scale and to communicate what the demos
Speaker 1: about or what the left represents. And then also how
Speaker 1: does that intersect with technology? Is it like what the
Speaker 1: crooked media guys are doing, but just at scale. And
Speaker 1: if you were to say I'm gonna I'm gonna launch
Speaker 1: you America for what would that company look like and
Speaker 1: what would that communication strategy be? Well, UM, I have
Speaker 1: thought about conceptually, but not operationally, what it would be. UM.
Speaker 1: I think it actually if you look at the fact
Speaker 1: that Trump's popularity is still below UM, I think it's
Speaker 1: all about marshaling electoral critical mass from people who want
Speaker 1: our country to work where it's supposed to work. So
Speaker 1: I don't think the right thing to do is to
Speaker 1: fight UM their boisterous UH propaganda and UH name calling
Speaker 1: and frequently lies with the same. I think the right
Speaker 1: thing to do is to appeal to anybody that thinks
Speaker 1: that our democracy is too important to allow truths to
Speaker 1: become a subjective thing, that our societal cohesion is too
Speaker 1: important to allow uh facts to be irrelevant. And if
Speaker 1: you just say, look, this is just about what the
Speaker 1: facts are, right, you know, climate change, there's there's an
Speaker 1: incoutabal scientific consensus around this. That's a fact. Um. The
Speaker 1: the data on what weather is happening. That's a fact.
Speaker 1: And yes, it's unfortunate for people in the abstract, in
Speaker 1: the extractive industries that those facts are there, but those
Speaker 1: are facts. So I think if we just literally um
Speaker 1: stick to the facts and being unyielding about raising those
Speaker 1: facts in the space, in the face of name calling,
Speaker 1: in the face of about hominem attacks, in the face
Speaker 1: of whatever else, I think that's the greatest chance to
Speaker 1: restore some balance to the political discourse and to the
Speaker 1: text and balances. I mean the big tragedy of TWI
Speaker 1: sixteen West and just Trump's election, but the fact that
Speaker 1: one of the one of the other branches of government's
Speaker 1: supposed to be a check and balance has completely abdicated
Speaker 1: that responsibility. And it's advocate the responsibility because the politics
Speaker 1: for the for Republicans are that they feel like if
Speaker 1: they don't, they'll get primary and they'll lose, and if
Speaker 1: they do, they'll get to keep playing ball. So that's
Speaker 1: it's unfortunate that that that is the dynamic we have.
Speaker 1: But the only solution to that dynamic is to is
Speaker 1: to not have them being the have the levels of power.
Speaker 1: And to do that we've got to persuade a lot
Speaker 1: of independence that that change has to happen. And if
Speaker 1: we do that, then I think that will build on itself. Okay, rights,
Speaker 1: The question was about music and VR. Um. I am
Speaker 1: mediu embarrassed on VR because the ergonomics of using a
Speaker 1: VR headset and an experience are not Uh. It's so
Speaker 1: immersive that it is not doesn't fit in a wide
Speaker 1: enough swatch of life. Everyone got excited about three D
Speaker 1: because you could go to watch James Cameron movie in
Speaker 1: a movie theater, but that's an intended immersive experience where
Speaker 1: for two hours you're focusing on you're going to a location,
Speaker 1: you're watching it home. Three D didn't work because people
Speaker 1: don't watch glass put glasses on to watch movies at
Speaker 1: home because they're watching in such a range of different ways. So,
Speaker 1: you know, and lets until you have the equivalent of
Speaker 1: direct view VR. Uh, I think it's going to be
Speaker 1: a more of a niche thing, uh than than people realize.
Speaker 1: So do I think that? Um? Uh? There are ways
Speaker 1: to do much more immersive experiences with live music shows. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and you know there's a there's there's lots of different
Speaker 1: uh techniques for doing that. Do I think people are
Speaker 1: gonna put VR headsets on to watch concerts. It makes
Speaker 1: for a great demo. But know, the headset fatigue thing
Speaker 1: is a real phenomenon, and uh, you know, the the
Speaker 1: ergonomics of using these devices have to be uh compelling.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh you know I I one of one
Speaker 1: of the Angel investments that I've done that I'm proudest
Speaker 1: in the last couple of years is a company called
Speaker 1: Control Labs, which Stephen Lee wrote the nice write up
Speaker 1: of in Wired magazine to bringian kind of Thomas Weird,
Speaker 1: who I've known for for many years, and his his
Speaker 1: his band of of neurobiologists, and they've created a technology
Speaker 1: letch of an arm band that you basically think of
Speaker 1: it as like an Apple Watch or a you know,
Speaker 1: a next generation fitbit where the Apple where the band
Speaker 1: can can literally detect individual electron signals, uh, neurological signals
Speaker 1: from your brain to your fingers, so you it can
Speaker 1: tell what you're doing here with your individual fingers with
Speaker 1: a band that sits under wrist something like that, where
Speaker 1: the technology is not in base, you don't have to
Speaker 1: wear a big data glove. I think it's going a
Speaker 1: huge import for the input side of all this this
Speaker 1: a r VR staff and we need the equivalent of
Speaker 1: the output side of that where you can get an
Speaker 1: immersive experience without having to wear an immersive headset. And
Speaker 1: I think I think the a R plus path is
Speaker 1: probably a better path for achieving that in my view
Speaker 1: than the than the immersive headset experience, which make for
Speaker 1: incredible demos, but I don't think people really want to
Speaker 1: be in those. Thank gear for that long. Okay, let
Speaker 1: that be a lesson. You don't have to be limited
Speaker 1: to one vertical Rob as we've owned the Pro Bowlers
Speaker 1: tour is involved in music, technology and politics. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for being here and sharing your ideas of the audiences.
Speaker 1: That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob left
Speaker 1: Sets podcast, recorded live at the Music Media Summit in
Speaker 1: Santa Barbara, California and produced by tune In. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this conversation with CEO of Real Networks, Rob
Speaker 1: Glazer and his interactions with Asia and his history with
Speaker 1: Bill Gates and micro us off. What did you think
Speaker 1: of the interview? Emailed me at Bob at left Sex
Speaker 1: dot com. Until next time, I'm Bob left Sex. Can
Speaker 1: think of and me reas don't know exactly why must
Speaker 1: be its out of theseas