Speaker 1: This is Master's in Business with Barry Ridholts on Boomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week on the podcast, I have a special guest.
Speaker 1: His name is a Neil Dash. He is a leading technician, entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: founder uh in the world of micro publishing and blogging.
Speaker 1: I know his work from back when six Apart was
Speaker 1: an early pioneer in the world of blogging. They put
Speaker 1: out type Pad, which was really the first robust, whizzywig
Speaker 1: what you see is what you get sort of blogging platform.
Speaker 1: Before that, you had companies like Yahoo Geo Cities. My
Speaker 1: first blog was on Geo Cities and I say this
Speaker 1: it's It's really not a joke. It's true. I say
Speaker 1: it as a joke, but it's true. I would take
Speaker 1: fift twenty minutes to write something and then two hours
Speaker 1: to code in an HTM out in order for it
Speaker 1: to work. On Geo Cities. It was you were literally
Speaker 1: coding everything. Every every indent, every bold, every underlying, every
Speaker 1: paragraph had an htmail code arout it. So to reduce
Speaker 1: that process of of micro publishing to something that was
Speaker 1: like it very much was like working on a document
Speaker 1: on Microsoft Word. If you wanted to format it, you
Speaker 1: just clicked the button that said, here's your underline, here's
Speaker 1: your talles, here's your footnote, here's your and it was.
Speaker 1: It was absolutely game changing. It went from a tent
Speaker 1: to one ratio of of coding to writing to hundreds
Speaker 1: to one in the opposite direction. You would take a
Speaker 1: half hour to write something and maybe thirty seconds to
Speaker 1: format it. It was easy as pie. My first blog
Speaker 1: was big Picture dot type head dot com. It's still
Speaker 1: up there, by the way. Not only did they create
Speaker 1: the software for this, but they also created the hosting
Speaker 1: for it. And I find six apart was a game
Speaker 1: changer for the world of publishing. I found this to
Speaker 1: be an absolutely fascinating conversation. If you're into blogging, technology, entrepreneurship,
Speaker 1: venture capital, et cetera, you're gonna find this conversation fascinating. So,
Speaker 1: with no further ado, my conversation with a Neil Dash,
Speaker 1: My special guest today is a Neil Dash. He was
Speaker 1: an advisor to the Obama White House's Office of Digital Strategy.
Speaker 1: He is a technical advisor to Vox Media advises the
Speaker 1: company medium on its publishing. He is also on the
Speaker 1: National Advisory Council of Donors Choose. His day job is
Speaker 1: CEO of fog Create Software, which has created such products
Speaker 1: as stack overflow and trell Oh were they involved in
Speaker 1: Marker Bass or is that something separate? Was a startup
Speaker 1: was doing right before this? Before that, he writes a
Speaker 1: monthly opinion column on the impact of technology on society
Speaker 1: for Wired magazine. I know him as employee number one
Speaker 1: at six Apart, behind the seminal blogging software type Pad.
Speaker 1: He also serves on the board of the Data and
Speaker 1: Society Research Institute. Neil Dash Welcome to Bloomberg. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for having me here. So I mentioned type head,
Speaker 1: I really have to jump right into that. I know
Speaker 1: who you are because I actually was a beta tester
Speaker 1: for type pad, and that's where I rolled out. Thank
Speaker 1: you for being one. That's where I rolled out the
Speaker 1: big picture blogged tell us about your role with the
Speaker 1: company six Sure. So I started blogging back and there
Speaker 1: were a couple dozen bloggers on the internet, and I thought,
Speaker 1: what were you using? Two blog? I was manually doing it.
Speaker 1: I was the people who use Windows who remember an
Speaker 1: app called notepad, and I was manually writing HTML, the
Speaker 1: language of webpages, in Notepad and saving it onto a
Speaker 1: web server by myself, which is the cutting edge or
Speaker 1: technology back into the last So I was using Yahoo
Speaker 1: geo Cities, which you're telling me is more advanced. I
Speaker 1: was just cutting and pasting content and then having to
Speaker 1: wrap the HTML code around, right. So that was the
Speaker 1: state of the art. And then in late ninety nine
Speaker 1: a couple of the first blogging tools came along and
Speaker 1: then and so I started using those like Blogger and
Speaker 1: which Google later bought and other things like that, and
Speaker 1: uh and Friends shortly thereafter built this tool called movable
Speaker 1: type and it was the first sort of serious blogging platform.
Speaker 1: Almost immediately people used it to build Gawker, huffing and post.
Speaker 1: What was behind movable type, Uh, they were then husband
Speaker 1: and wife couple Ben trot A, Mina trot Um and um,
Speaker 1: and really we're sort of visionaries about the idea that
Speaker 1: we should take this medium seriously. It was going to
Speaker 1: be something big. It wasn't just h you know, people
Speaker 1: sharing their feelings in a journal online like this was
Speaker 1: going to be where media was head. And this is
Speaker 1: this is pre Facebook, pre Twitter. Oh yeah, this is
Speaker 1: way earlier. Yeah before friends stir you even remember that one,
Speaker 1: so way way back there, and consumer internet was dead
Speaker 1: deader than dead in two thousand one. I mean you
Speaker 1: couldn't you know. We we did it a round that
Speaker 1: was six grand that we raised, and people were like, wow,
Speaker 1: that's all the money in the world. You know, I
Speaker 1: was here. I mean, it's it's it's like the catering
Speaker 1: budget for a launch party for one of these startups today.
Speaker 1: And uh. And so we did that and what was
Speaker 1: interesting was people almost immediately recognized this is important, this
Speaker 1: is something new in media. There's something really powerful enabling here.
Speaker 1: And we thought it's still not easy enough. It was
Speaker 1: still you had to have a lot of technical knowledge.
Speaker 1: And that was where Type came from. You know, I
Speaker 1: think the predecessor to today. You see the word presses
Speaker 1: and mediums and tumblers of the world, and all of
Speaker 1: them I think would say, you know, Type had as
Speaker 1: a direct antecedent to that. And it was the first,
Speaker 1: as far as I can recall, is the first whizzy
Speaker 1: wig sort of blogging software. What you see is what
Speaker 1: you get. It was like operating within a word perfect
Speaker 1: or a word doc. Since it was since it was
Speaker 1: seventeen years ago, I could say word perfect exactly like
Speaker 1: anyone knows what that for The old timers. But I think,
Speaker 1: you know, the other thing really interesting was we were
Speaker 1: experimenting with today you know, a lot of things that
Speaker 1: we take for granted and consumer web. So just the
Speaker 1: fact that we had a consumer pay model those five
Speaker 1: bucks a month, ten bucks a month. I mean, now
Speaker 1: you know, everybody's paying for Spotify and Netflix and it's nothing, right,
Speaker 1: Nobody was really thinking in terms of recurring revenue stream
Speaker 1: in a monthly Yeah, hits a credit card. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: idea that that we were even gonna ask people to
Speaker 1: do that was radical. I mean, this stuff sounds like
Speaker 1: ridiculous because we all do it now, but you know,
Speaker 1: it was this sixteen years ago. Fifteen years ago, people
Speaker 1: were really really taken aback by that. The other thing
Speaker 1: that I think in retrospect was a bigger deal, huge deal,
Speaker 1: and we sort of just took it for granted, was
Speaker 1: we were probably the first consumer product to use Amazon
Speaker 1: Web services on the back end, so were we had
Speaker 1: some features that would let you list books you were
Speaker 1: reading and music you were listening to, and they would
Speaker 1: talk to Amazon and link up you know, buy my
Speaker 1: book or or or you know by this back then CD.
Speaker 1: And the interesting thing about that is some of us
Speaker 1: still buy CDs just as every one's in a great while,
Speaker 1: I will say so for collecting purposes, that's right. And
Speaker 1: and so it was an interesting thing was that, um,
Speaker 1: we had this this app talking to web services from Amazon. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, years and years before I think that became commonplace.
Speaker 1: And then the third thing that that type Pad did,
Speaker 1: I think nobody really remembers. Um So the you know,
Speaker 1: the iPhone launch, you didn't have an app store. You know,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs is like, you gotta use against it originally
Speaker 1: and then and then a year later, so they said, okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna introduce the app store. At that initial rollout
Speaker 1: on stage with Jobs, we had our head of product
Speaker 1: for type Pad showing type Pad taking photos on your phone,
Speaker 1: uploading them to the web from your iPhone, you know,
Speaker 1: in real time. This was, you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: the years long before Instagram took off. The very first
Speaker 1: initial launch of the app store, type Pad was one
Speaker 1: of the first apps they ever future and type head
Speaker 1: is still around, still support, still doing this. They they
Speaker 1: changed ownership a bunch of times. I don't I literally
Speaker 1: have even followed because I've been so busy with other stuff.
Speaker 1: For the the last several years. But they I mean, I
Speaker 1: know the old big picture, which I did not take
Speaker 1: down when I moved toward press in in oh eight.
Speaker 1: I picked September oh eight is perfect time in the
Speaker 1: middle of the financial crisis. It was like six months
Speaker 1: in advance, and then the world blew up. I kept
Speaker 1: both that and I had a fun Essays and a
Speaker 1: Fluvia for just random of fluvia. Um and they're still
Speaker 1: up and running. I still at one point in time
Speaker 1: it was fifty percent of the traffic to wear Press
Speaker 1: and then it gradually, you know, as as people move
Speaker 1: their bookmarks and RSS feeders which no longer. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot. I mean, there's a lot of technology that's
Speaker 1: sort of come, come and gone, and I think some
Speaker 1: of these things will come back around again. But it's
Speaker 1: been an interesting thing to watch. Um, a lot of
Speaker 1: these ideas we thought were really radical around Oh, you
Speaker 1: might take a picture on your camera on your phone
Speaker 1: and then share with people instantly, and you might store
Speaker 1: that on Amazon web services, and you might use a
Speaker 1: service that's got a consumer subscription model as the way
Speaker 1: of accessing it. All those things, Um, you know, we
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily what we were first on some of them,
Speaker 1: but we weren't, you know, the only ones doing them.
Speaker 1: I think to have been certainly popularized that I think
Speaker 1: to bet that that was the way the Internet was headed,
Speaker 1: where some of the things that we're just as important
Speaker 1: as the idea that blogs were going to be media
Speaker 1: that matter. Here's the quote of yours that I like,
Speaker 1: any form of electronic communication will first be dismissed as
Speaker 1: trivial and worseless until it produces a profound result, after
Speaker 1: which it will be described as obvious and boring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's been my experience for sure. You've been blogging since?
Speaker 1: Was this the plan all along? To keep keep? You know?
Speaker 1: It was really one of those I was underemployed, not
Speaker 1: real happy with my place in life, and thought, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have a creative outlet to put stuff out there.
Speaker 1: And I can't sing, and I can't, you know, I can't,
Speaker 1: I can't do a radio show, so let me do this,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was an interesting thing to to sort
Speaker 1: of just have this outlet. And then realized this media
Speaker 1: mattered enough and that I had been early, you know,
Speaker 1: I thought it was late, starting at nine. That's funny
Speaker 1: because when I started on type head. It was oh
Speaker 1: three the song I even remember July, and it was
Speaker 1: essentially a handful of college uh economics p fessors, nobody
Speaker 1: really writing about markets, nobody really writing about investing, and
Speaker 1: you end up my experience was similar to yours, and
Speaker 1: that I'm not thrilled with what I'm doing. I'm kinda,
Speaker 1: you know, looking for a creative outlet. But it was
Speaker 1: clear that the mainstream media they take some young kid
Speaker 1: out of school and throw them. Uh. Nobody wants to
Speaker 1: cover the FED. Nobody wants to do economics back then,
Speaker 1: and they were frequently, if not wrong, then lacking context.
Speaker 1: They were they weren't deep enough in it right. And
Speaker 1: I think that was the thing. Is that then the
Speaker 1: people writing the blogs, with the people who are like,
Speaker 1: I'm obsessing over this whether there's an audience or not,
Speaker 1: that's that nobody cares, you know. My view was, who
Speaker 1: cares if there's an audience? There was a whole run
Speaker 1: of expert amateurs. Is that is that a real thing?
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I know exactly what you mean.
Speaker 1: And I think that summer too was a particularly interesting time,
Speaker 1: summer a GOO three, because we had folks coming up
Speaker 1: that we're doing covering aspects of economics that people weren't covering. Um,
Speaker 1: we brought some of the verse first. Well, really, I
Speaker 1: think all the first vcs that started blog and came
Speaker 1: out on type paths. We had Fred Wilson on, we
Speaker 1: had yeah, David Hornick from August Capital, a bunch of
Speaker 1: these folks, Joe Eto, who's now heading up the media,
Speaker 1: and you know, all these folks were Reid Hoffman, um,
Speaker 1: you know, like has a podcast exactly, the CEO of
Speaker 1: of Lincoln and uh and so all these people were
Speaker 1: you know, I knew them as investors, and I was
Speaker 1: not at all fluent in m VC. You know, I
Speaker 1: knew tech, but at that time you could actually build
Speaker 1: an entire career writing software and never crossed paths with VC. Really, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it was it was pretty common. And because
Speaker 1: it was a lot of big companies on the pop
Speaker 1: shops that were building software and apps and they would
Speaker 1: sort of grow organically out of that. And um, and
Speaker 1: if you weren't in the valley in particular, you know,
Speaker 1: you could easily. I was in New York. You could
Speaker 1: just never cross paths. And so to read these blogs
Speaker 1: was like opening up this whole new world, and they
Speaker 1: were now I understand, like you know, to some degree,
Speaker 1: was content marketing. They were marketing their their firms by
Speaker 1: being better storytellers. I think that's what it's involved, right,
Speaker 1: I think that's what it's evolved to, the same thing
Speaker 1: with the freemium model. Here was a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: free content owned by the way. If you want to
Speaker 1: work with us, you can. But that's not I don't
Speaker 1: think that was anyone's intent. It truly wasn't my intention.
Speaker 1: Here's what I do. I'm gonna blog in obscurity for
Speaker 1: twelve years and then have a radio show. Well, it's
Speaker 1: so interesting because I had that where. You know, one
Speaker 1: of the people I connected with back then, UM was
Speaker 1: Joel Spolsky who was writing a blog called Joel on Software,
Speaker 1: and he was really the first person to write about
Speaker 1: sort of coding culture, technical culture, and it was one
Speaker 1: of the things that those of us were coding for
Speaker 1: a living, which is what I did back then. I
Speaker 1: knew these things, but had never seen them addressed as
Speaker 1: like you are you are you know people at the
Speaker 1: place in society, and he was taking programmers very seriously. Um.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason he was blogging. Then he was
Speaker 1: explaining the ideas behind the new company he had just created,
Speaker 1: which was Fall Creek Software. And so seventeen years later,
Speaker 1: you know, for well sixteen years from that point that
Speaker 1: I took over as CEO of that company. Uh, it
Speaker 1: felt like I knew everything about how this company ran
Speaker 1: and what its values were, and what his purpose was
Speaker 1: in the world, because I had from day one followed
Speaker 1: along with the storytelling. And you think he was not
Speaker 1: content marketing, He was not. He didn't start writing this stuff.
Speaker 1: He was literally like trying to solve a problem like
Speaker 1: how do you deal with real estate in Manhattan? How
Speaker 1: do you how do you keep programmers happy in a
Speaker 1: world where you know, back then, hard as it is
Speaker 1: to believe, programmers were treated sort of like dirt. They
Speaker 1: were like this guy in the back, We're going to
Speaker 1: get him a computer and lock him in the dark
Speaker 1: and exactly right, and throw caffeine at him. And uh
Speaker 1: and now you know, you think, well, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: probably no more spoiled workers in the world in terms
Speaker 1: of like the free massages and the trades of candy.
Speaker 1: And you mentioned that Google lifted the idea of all
Speaker 1: the free food. Yeah, this and this is one of
Speaker 1: those things where like things become urban legend, and so
Speaker 1: it's hard to separate fact from fiction. But what I've
Speaker 1: heard so one thing that is, you know, definitely true
Speaker 1: is fault Creek was one of the first companies to
Speaker 1: do the like let's really spoil our coders and our
Speaker 1: technical workers. And it was everything from great free lunches
Speaker 1: to UM. One of the things I still spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time working on completely end to end healthcare.
Speaker 1: Nobody on our team pays anything for healthcare UM. In fact,
Speaker 1: we have people who have been at the company a
Speaker 1: long time or they came right out of school. They
Speaker 1: didn't know what in network out of network means because
Speaker 1: they never had to deal with it the network. And
Speaker 1: I was like, that's great, Like that's what we want
Speaker 1: people to feel. And then one of those things was
Speaker 1: really great free catered lunches. In retrospect, I think some
Speaker 1: of this was the company was always like downtown Manhattan,
Speaker 1: and especially back then, you know, just post nine eleven,
Speaker 1: there wasn't There wasn't like good restaurants there, you know.
Speaker 1: You know it also, especially if you're working late, like
Speaker 1: five pm, it would just shut down that neighborhood would
Speaker 1: just be dead a so how do you get food
Speaker 1: down to So they had caterers, right, and they had
Speaker 1: caterers come in many employees. So now the company were
Speaker 1: about forty it's it's still pretty small. It's it's kind
Speaker 1: of going up and down in size because um over
Speaker 1: the years, like they co created stack Overflow and they
Speaker 1: created Trello, and as those products grow, they get pretty
Speaker 1: big and then they would spin them out. You know,
Speaker 1: Trello spun out a couple of years ago and sold
Speaker 1: to it last back in January for let let me
Speaker 1: reel you back into the blog is sphere and talk
Speaker 1: about one of my favorite subjects, which is um uh
Speaker 1: public a blog post of yours called Don't Read the
Speaker 1: Comments Now. I wrote Bailout Nation on the blog. I
Speaker 1: would put up a few hundred words and I would
Speaker 1: get feedback and have you seen this story and look
Speaker 1: at this link and the readers the community was astonishing.
Speaker 1: And then tragedy of the comments that just gets overrun
Speaker 1: with the spammers and trolls, and it became so time
Speaker 1: consuming to stay on top of comments that finally I
Speaker 1: had to just grip my teeth and rip the band
Speaker 1: aid off in close conscience, and I was not happy
Speaker 1: about doing it, but it just became this giant time suck.
Speaker 1: What is the problem? And by the way, that's true
Speaker 1: on my columns at the Washington Post and Bloomberg as well.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you want to say something, go someplace.
Speaker 1: Here's a link to Twitter, Here's a link to Facebook,
Speaker 1: where hopefully you aren't doing this anonymously, and you could
Speaker 1: be called out because eventually I could subpoena Twitter and
Speaker 1: find out who you are if you say something. Although
Speaker 1: Twitter has been done a good job of protecting people's nanimity,
Speaker 1: they've done at protecting on a non amenmity yet but
Speaker 1: but not abuse at all. Right, they're just in fact.
Speaker 1: In fact, my argument as to why Twitter stock prices
Speaker 1: has been in the crap all this time is they
Speaker 1: have not created an encouraging communally totally agree. So there's
Speaker 1: a couple things I would sort of break out here.
Speaker 1: You know. The first is, um, I get to watch
Speaker 1: people creating the first comment systems on the internet. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a time when you couldn't actually comment on
Speaker 1: a web page and so um. The interestingly, the challenge
Speaker 1: then was what are people can type in this box
Speaker 1: at all. Are they can even understand that you can
Speaker 1: leave a comment and will show up on the page,
Speaker 1: and that's the thing you can do. So they were
Speaker 1: hyper optimized for at any cost. We just want to
Speaker 1: put we don't want to put any barriers to somebody
Speaker 1: typing in this box and leave and comment. Um. Of
Speaker 1: course that pretty quickly became well, we made it really
Speaker 1: really easy, and now there's no barriers and there's no
Speaker 1: standard and what you know, I wish we had understood
Speaker 1: the time. And I will say this, this is something
Speaker 1: I personally didn't get for a long time. Was you
Speaker 1: make a real community by introducing a set of rules
Speaker 1: that everybody understands. This is true in the physical world.
Speaker 1: We get it very intuitively. If you go to a
Speaker 1: park and it's got the you know, you can't be
Speaker 1: throwing your ball around here because you're gonna hit these
Speaker 1: little kids that are over here, or there's a dog running.
Speaker 1: You gotta keep your dog inside the fence. Whatever the
Speaker 1: rules are. It makes the place work for everybody, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be honors. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be a burden. We needn't do any of that in
Speaker 1: creating these online systems, and in fact, a lot of
Speaker 1: the people, and this is something it wasn't as much me,
Speaker 1: but people that I saw that were creating other tools
Speaker 1: that made the systems for commenting and feedback online were
Speaker 1: total zealots about the fact there shouldn't be any rules.
Speaker 1: It should be wild West all the time. And you
Speaker 1: know wild West is basically well, if you have wild
Speaker 1: West and there's no cops, guess who runs the shell
Speaker 1: the outlaws. And in fact, when when I was I
Speaker 1: went through a two step process. The first step was saying,
Speaker 1: all right, we're gonna do moderated comments and and in
Speaker 1: order to I'm gonna set up some rules which I'm
Speaker 1: not going to share, so you're not gonna know, you
Speaker 1: won't be able to gain the system just for just
Speaker 1: just to get past step one. And then step two
Speaker 1: is no ad hominem attacks, no no false no fake
Speaker 1: news like it. It's amazing that one simple sentence of
Speaker 1: nonsense can undercut this conversation deep deeply researched, intelligently debated
Speaker 1: um and I want back and forth. I wanted debate,
Speaker 1: but what I didn't want was just people derailing things
Speaker 1: with nonsense. So we've had Trump talk about fake news.
Speaker 1: Fake news, some of which is confirmation bias and tribalism,
Speaker 1: and some of which is just people purposefully trying to Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's there's a couple of guides online which I've
Speaker 1: posted on the blog as a see. It's it's the
Speaker 1: guide to disrupting Social Forums. They're they're actually out there
Speaker 1: and they're out of the CIA Black Book to how
Speaker 1: to go disrupt society. Right, it's misinformation as a tactic.
Speaker 1: And so there's there's an interesting thing here where we
Speaker 1: we've had this escalation. So first we had, um, you
Speaker 1: know what, the Internet always had ordinary trolls, right, just
Speaker 1: people saying like I don't because I can hide behind
Speaker 1: my anonymity or relative nanimity, I can be transgressive in
Speaker 1: this way where I'm just being the person who's like,
Speaker 1: you know, ruining things for people, but but in a
Speaker 1: way that I think they think it's entertaining. Um, And
Speaker 1: that's sort of like it's annoying, but it's not a
Speaker 1: big deal, and if you can ban them, that's fine.
Speaker 1: The evolution of that into organized communities that are trying
Speaker 1: to undermine other communities or undermine individual people who are
Speaker 1: trying to communicate by misinformation, by personal attacks, by threats,
Speaker 1: by all that sort of these tactics. I think people
Speaker 1: don't understand that these have gotten very organized and very instructure.
Speaker 1: As you said, there are guides to how to do it,
Speaker 1: and so they say, well, why don't you just ignore
Speaker 1: it if you don't you know, get y yeah, yeah, total.
Speaker 1: I mean, whether whether it's you know, the game or
Speaker 1: Gate or or or the men's rights activists, like, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of communities that we're doing this online.
Speaker 1: And and the interesting thing about this is one they
Speaker 1: learned from each other. They've been evolving this over ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen years. Uh, they are very organized, but they
Speaker 1: organized in places that people aren't watching. So they're happening
Speaker 1: on you know, some screw chan. I mean, there's the
Speaker 1: ones that people know, but there's also just private channels.
Speaker 1: You know, they can text each other like anybody else.
Speaker 1: Like they're they're not you know, they're very technically literate.
Speaker 1: And so what happens is people who are not sophisticating
Speaker 1: these things think, well, okay, look, if this person is
Speaker 1: being a jerk to online, why don't you just not
Speaker 1: go on Twitter? Or why don't you just not you know,
Speaker 1: don't worry about a delete or comment and kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, the difference is when you have
Speaker 1: people organizing trying to undermine a specific community, Um, just
Speaker 1: ignoring it doesn't make it go away. And the the
Speaker 1: the social costs of for example, saying just get off
Speaker 1: of social media or don't go on Twitter, don't go whenever,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, that's you know, if I work in media,
Speaker 1: I work in publisher and work in tech. It's a
Speaker 1: business tool. I need that. I need to have a
Speaker 1: presence there. Translate the digital version of that into meat space.
Speaker 1: It's sort of like saying don't go to the town square,
Speaker 1: don't don't go to the school, don't go to the theater,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a ridiculous exactly right. Then you take like,
Speaker 1: you know, YouTube comments. I think they're getting a little better,
Speaker 1: but notoriously terrible. And if you said I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: to Google's lobby in Mountain View and I'm going to
Speaker 1: start shouting epithets at people, They're not gonna be like,
Speaker 1: have a seat, have some of our free lash. They're
Speaker 1: gonna be like, no, you gotta stop doing that. We're
Speaker 1: gonna kick you out my My explanation of it was,
Speaker 1: if you have a cocktail party, a you get to
Speaker 1: invite who comes and be someone starts flipping over tables,
Speaker 1: you get to throw them out. It's not like well,
Speaker 1: the thing that makes me incensed about this is that
Speaker 1: they scream First Amendment. And my response is always, nothing
Speaker 1: is stopping you from going and starting your own blog
Speaker 1: and laboriously building it other than the fact that you're
Speaker 1: lazy untalented. Other than yeah, I mean the other thing
Speaker 1: to feel free. They don't want to do that. They're
Speaker 1: not trying to create some coy're trying to destroy something exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think that that there's a really there's a
Speaker 1: tough lunge where um, you know, you can express yourself
Speaker 1: however you want. You're not entitled to destroy my platform
Speaker 1: and my community and my back and forth. Yea, and
Speaker 1: and and and It's an interesting thing because there's also we,
Speaker 1: I think especially technical people, have this desire to say,
Speaker 1: I want one set of rules that applies to everybody,
Speaker 1: and I want this one set of you know, this
Speaker 1: behavior is always bad if you do this, if if
Speaker 1: then exactly exactly exactly. Binary logic like the stuff that
Speaker 1: that doesn't always work, and and it ignores the realities
Speaker 1: of societies, which which is that people have different positions, roles, power,
Speaker 1: all these things shape of dynamics. And the example I
Speaker 1: else give is the sort of like the classic, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the worst things that people do to threaten
Speaker 1: people who are on the margins, who are vulnerable or
Speaker 1: ideas that are unpopular. You know, they're gonna, we're gonna
Speaker 1: expose you. We're gonna, we're gonna you know what they
Speaker 1: called docking, and we're going to publish your home address.
Speaker 1: I mean, have had this happen to me? You know,
Speaker 1: the gamer gets published my home address. Don't you have
Speaker 1: your phone number on your do? I thought that was insane,
Speaker 1: you know. So there's an interesting thing where part of
Speaker 1: it is about reclaim aiming like I'm going to control
Speaker 1: this stuff and what's out there. Um, some of it
Speaker 1: is I do I want to show people of good intent.
Speaker 1: I am accessible, I'm not trying to hide sometimes, I'm
Speaker 1: not trying to be you know, wall myself off from
Speaker 1: because I do think most people are good and do
Speaker 1: want to engage with ideas and want to be thoughtful.
Speaker 1: And so that's something that's just signaling like I'm open
Speaker 1: to that. Then there's this other part, which is so
Speaker 1: there's a behavior where like if somebody is like legitimately
Speaker 1: vulnerable and they are keeping themselves anonymous or pseudonymous in
Speaker 1: order to to keep themselves safe, and you out them,
Speaker 1: that's a real danger. On the other hand, if you say,
Speaker 1: the person who did this transgressive thing, this dangerous thing,
Speaker 1: who posted this threat, I'm gonna identify them, that is
Speaker 1: actually protecting people. Right. So the exact same activity I'm
Speaker 1: gonna identify this person who's trying to hide can be
Speaker 1: both very good or very bad. It can be very
Speaker 1: much a positive that helps society, or can be very
Speaker 1: negative because you're making somebody vulnerable. And so the logic
Speaker 1: of what I think a lot of programmers tend towards,
Speaker 1: like if you do this rule, you're bad. If you
Speaker 1: follow this, if you break this rule, you're bad. It
Speaker 1: ignores power, ignores the dynamics of society, and that's why
Speaker 1: we keep bumping into what seemed like really obvious screw
Speaker 1: ups in tech where we're like, how come we can't
Speaker 1: make a civil place. It's like, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be able to regulate human behavior with a single binary
Speaker 1: set of rules. Let's talk a little bit about diversity
Speaker 1: and inclusion. This is all over the You were way
Speaker 1: way ahead of the curve on this. We have the
Speaker 1: CEO of Uber being forced out. We have a number
Speaker 1: of vcs having to step down either from the boards
Speaker 1: that they serve on or from their own companies. Uh.
Speaker 1: It looks like the broke culture in Silicon Valley is
Speaker 1: coming to an end. UH, tell us a little bit
Speaker 1: about your perspective on diversity and inclusion in the world
Speaker 1: of technology. So there's definitely a moment of reckoning going
Speaker 1: on right now. And for me, ten years ago, I
Speaker 1: was just I had been in Silicon Value a couple
Speaker 1: of years. Um, even though I've been in tech twenty years,
Speaker 1: I've spent a couple of years. Because you're really uh
Speaker 1: in New York. Yeah, yeah, so you when did you?
Speaker 1: Were you here when we were they were doing six
Speaker 1: apart and the company was growing. And I went out
Speaker 1: to uh San Francisco in two thousand four and I
Speaker 1: was there until two thousand seven. And really one of
Speaker 1: the drivers for me of sort of being done with
Speaker 1: being in Silicon Valley and being in San Francisco was
Speaker 1: it felt so homogeneous and and yeah, it just you know, well,
Speaker 1: I think I've been spoiled. I've been in New York.
Speaker 1: I had worked in media publishing, where you are there's
Speaker 1: so many and you know, and I had people that,
Speaker 1: you know, there were friends that were outside of tech
Speaker 1: and they were in other just ones that they could
Speaker 1: be in fashion, they can be media, they can be
Speaker 1: in in finance, whatever it was. And you just get
Speaker 1: a different view of the world. And it was astonishing
Speaker 1: to me. It's like, with all the problems that you know,
Speaker 1: say the entertainment industry had, there was still much more
Speaker 1: inclusive and much more diverse. And so to go into
Speaker 1: conference rooms, boardrooms, meeting rooms in Silicon Valley and look
Speaker 1: around and be like, essentially, this is just a bunch
Speaker 1: of white and Asian guys and that doesn't count as diversity,
Speaker 1: you know. Well, and it's interesting because it's it's it's
Speaker 1: particularly complicated being Asian American, where we're overrepresented and you know,
Speaker 1: like we over index were two percent of the population.
Speaker 1: And yet you look at just Indian American you know,
Speaker 1: people in tech, the CEO of Google, CEO of Microsoft,
Speaker 1: CEO of Adobe, these are all Indian guys, it's like,
Speaker 1: we're doing fine. And yet you know, like I said,
Speaker 1: being in media, publishing, entertainment, I was like, I know
Speaker 1: that there are black and Latino folks in California. You
Speaker 1: can't tell me they're not there. And yet you go
Speaker 1: to these offices and it wasn't just technical staff, it
Speaker 1: was the legal staff, the marketing staff that you know, everything,
Speaker 1: every one of these roles. The representation was way out
Speaker 1: of whack to a point where you couldn't ignore it anymore.
Speaker 1: The number that was in in one of your columns,
Speaker 1: California's Hispanic population is uh the average percentage of employees
Speaker 1: and tech companies head quartered there is less than five percent.
Speaker 1: Google is three And if you look at the industry
Speaker 1: average for women, it's only a third of employees and
Speaker 1: women when more than half of the population of women, right,
Speaker 1: and so so there's just this proportionality where you like,
Speaker 1: at a certain point you can say, Okay, it's not
Speaker 1: exactly match, of course not, but if you try, if
Speaker 1: you take you said, well, we we looked at the
Speaker 1: population and we could only find three percent of our
Speaker 1: staff that could meet our requirements. I don't buy I
Speaker 1: just don't buy it. Just the math doesn't add up.
Speaker 1: Now that the pushback to that is, hey, you know
Speaker 1: you mentioned India, huge technical training, engineering, mathematics science, UH,
Speaker 1: Indian Institute of Technology, go down the list, just tremendous. UH.
Speaker 1: And my other favorite stat is half of the C
Speaker 1: suite and Silicon Valley are immigrants. So there's clearly some
Speaker 1: recognition of meritocracy, at least in fear that's the ideal.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I could not be more pro immigrant.
Speaker 1: My parents are immigrants. They're here because you know, you know,
Speaker 1: they were willing to do the work and get educated
Speaker 1: and and and you know, I'm incredibly proud to be
Speaker 1: in that you know, of that descent and in that tradition.
Speaker 1: That being said, you look at the costs for paying
Speaker 1: for an H one B, for paying for the lawyers
Speaker 1: to bring somebody over here, for paying for all these
Speaker 1: things to bring those workers over here is a huge
Speaker 1: investment for these companies, huge And for the same amount
Speaker 1: of money, you could train workers here and they're not
Speaker 1: and you could train people from the underrepresented communities. So
Speaker 1: what's the thinking that's a sure thing and training them
Speaker 1: is a risk? You know, well, I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of factors. I think one of them is, you know,
Speaker 1: h one B workers can never organize or really complain
Speaker 1: because if you you know, essentially, if you get too
Speaker 1: up at you lose your job, you get deported, and
Speaker 1: then you're not sending money back to your family, to
Speaker 1: your village or whatever else. So the amount of leverage
Speaker 1: they have over these workers is incredible. UM. I have
Speaker 1: to think that's a factor, you know, you look at
Speaker 1: particularly in the case of like there was UM this
Speaker 1: collusion orchestrated by Steve Jobs and and and Eric Google
Speaker 1: Apple for you of the biggest techn companies, everybody exceptally
Speaker 1: essentially except for Facebook, UM colluded against their own workers
Speaker 1: right to depress their wages by saying we're not going
Speaker 1: to poach each other's workers and UM, which is still
Speaker 1: astonishing to me. And if there was almost no ramification,
Speaker 1: this is an amazing thing. Is the workers Like there
Speaker 1: was a sort of obligatory lawsuit. I think it was
Speaker 1: for eight billion dollars or something. They settled it for
Speaker 1: a tiny pittance that which and you know the people
Speaker 1: at Apple who went through this. I talked to people
Speaker 1: that work there and they were like, yeah, I still
Speaker 1: just really love and Revere, Steve, and I'm like, the
Speaker 1: guy took money out of your kids college funds and
Speaker 1: you're like, it seems like a nice guy. Like what
Speaker 1: would you have to do for you to be like,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna, you know, fall along with this. You'd
Speaker 1: have to remove the headphone jack from that is a
Speaker 1: bridge too far, right, That's the line. And what you realize,
Speaker 1: what you realize is, you know, when there's that reverence
Speaker 1: to they're like, who am I to complaint? I am
Speaker 1: getting a good salary, I am being paid well. And
Speaker 1: what they don't see is common cause with those H
Speaker 1: one B workers or common cause with the you know
Speaker 1: the contractors, I say contractors and quotes who are providing
Speaker 1: the meals, driving the shuttles to the office and giving
Speaker 1: them a free massages. All those things are presented as
Speaker 1: perks or you get free lunch, you get these things
Speaker 1: like therese are people are workers and they never get
Speaker 1: equity in these companies. And so we realize that there's
Speaker 1: this sort of you know, this class system built in
Speaker 1: that um and I'm just a big believer in like,
Speaker 1: you got to treat your people well and they certainly
Speaker 1: have the money to do it, and they didn't need
Speaker 1: to nickel and dime their workers they did. That's kind
Speaker 1: of odds because there was no reason they have more
Speaker 1: cash than all these companies and more cash I have
Speaker 1: to point out that the only reason Facebook did not
Speaker 1: participate in it is a they were too young for
Speaker 1: that deal was originally made, and be they were busy
Speaker 1: rating Google for some of their favorite engineers. So as
Speaker 1: well as Apple. Let's talk a little bit about what
Speaker 1: fog Creek is doing before we have you repair Twitter.
Speaker 1: Tell me what tell us about glitch and some of
Speaker 1: the other products. Creek Creek is a very storied company,
Speaker 1: has been around seventeen years. Brilliant co founders Joe Spoilsky,
Speaker 1: Michael Prior and what they always wanted to build one
Speaker 1: a great place for like people who want to make
Speaker 1: the most interesting technology to come work. And it's been
Speaker 1: a very influential company that has spun out. They co
Speaker 1: created stack overflow, which is a community that pretty much
Speaker 1: every code in the world uses to answer the questions
Speaker 1: about programming. Did that eventually become like a white labeled
Speaker 1: version where if you want to set up your own
Speaker 1: internal Q and a UM you you can do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure a sacriflow has has an enterprise product for that.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm just on the board of Stacks, so I
Speaker 1: get to see a lot of what they're doing. And
Speaker 1: and the bigger thing to me is you have this
Speaker 1: community where tens of millions of coders around the world
Speaker 1: come and answer each other's questions in this really collaborative way.
Speaker 1: Um and and interestingly, it's a very you know, reassuring, nurturing,
Speaker 1: supportive environment. People really get answers right away, problems or
Speaker 1: no and you know, like I think historically the one
Speaker 1: of the biggest challenges was they weren't probably friendly enough
Speaker 1: to newbies because they were like, you have to phrase
Speaker 1: your question the right way and it has to be
Speaker 1: you know, exactly right. I think that's starting to ease
Speaker 1: up a little bit, is the sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the community evolves in being more welcoming. But the key
Speaker 1: thing is there's never been wide scale harassment. There's never
Speaker 1: really wide scale abuse. And that's what the site that
Speaker 1: is probably in the top forty websites in the world
Speaker 1: in terms of traffic. So it's possible to make a
Speaker 1: large site that works well. So so Stack was co
Speaker 1: created with the Jeff Atwood and his team, and that's
Speaker 1: spun out. It's an independent company. H They made a
Speaker 1: project management tool, Trelloh, which lots of people use. It's
Speaker 1: really popular, and that spun out and last thing about that.
Speaker 1: So there's this track record of making these wildly successful products.
Speaker 1: And you know, I they approached me about taking over
Speaker 1: the CEO last year and I said, well, you know
Speaker 1: what's what's coming down the pipe. And I saw what
Speaker 1: became Glitch that we launched earlier this year, and I
Speaker 1: was just blown away. I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: most revolutionary products I've seen in my life, like in
Speaker 1: my whole co text. And so what glitches is very simply,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a programming environment where you can go
Speaker 1: and write code. Um and there's a couple of things
Speaker 1: that does that nobody has done before. The first is
Speaker 1: as you type, it's automatically taking the code you're writing,
Speaker 1: the that you're creating and publishing it live to the web.
Speaker 1: That sounds trivial, but that's you know, you take entire
Speaker 1: businesses like Amazon's web services hosting business or Hiroku, which
Speaker 1: is sort of beloved by coders, and the whole process
Speaker 1: of getting an app live onto the web is really hard.
Speaker 1: It's become very complicated. To do it completely automatically in
Speaker 1: the background is a radical change. So is this an app?
Speaker 1: When when we talk about apps, I think about the
Speaker 1: app store in the Android stores right now web app
Speaker 1: So this is things that you go to in your browsers.
Speaker 1: So if you want to make a little, you know,
Speaker 1: a simple app for your business, you're gonna make an
Speaker 1: expensing app for your your team to use, or you
Speaker 1: make it to do list app or something like that.
Speaker 1: It can be as complicated as you want. But the
Speaker 1: problem is that process of like even if you know
Speaker 1: how to write the code and you've built that whole
Speaker 1: thing yourself, just getting it onto the web was a
Speaker 1: lot of work and it was just a pain. So
Speaker 1: we took all that away and that was step one.
Speaker 1: Step two was your entire coding environment. Everything just lives
Speaker 1: in the browser. And that's easier for the same reason
Speaker 1: that like you'd like to use Gmail instead of having
Speaker 1: a mail app on your on your computers, like it's
Speaker 1: just there, whatever computer log into all my stuff is there.
Speaker 1: Those alone were a big leap forward. The biggest things
Speaker 1: that happened the two things that sort of came out
Speaker 1: earliest year was the first is we made almost an
Speaker 1: app store, a catalog of all the different apps people
Speaker 1: have built, and you can remix any of them. So
Speaker 1: I say, somebody already made it to do list app
Speaker 1: and you say, well that's nice, but I want to
Speaker 1: be blue instead of green. You go in there, you
Speaker 1: edit it. That's instantly, years you can remix it, do
Speaker 1: whatever you want to with it. So it's really the
Speaker 1: power the promise of open source that we've had for
Speaker 1: many years. And then the thing that blew my mind
Speaker 1: when I saw the team had built it was you
Speaker 1: can edit this code in real time with other people.
Speaker 1: So like Google Docs. I was about to say, that
Speaker 1: makes me think of Google Docs, but for application exactly
Speaker 1: applications that's exactly it. So nobody has made that kind
Speaker 1: of powerful real programming environment that that is multiplayer. What's
Speaker 1: the business model on this? You're selling it to enterprise.
Speaker 1: There's there's a couple parts to it. Um. The first
Speaker 1: thing we're doing is um incidental to the fact that
Speaker 1: you can code at the same time as other people,
Speaker 1: which is an incredible learning tool, teaching tool because you
Speaker 1: can help people. So right now, all of the big
Speaker 1: companies have what they call their APIs Application Programming Interface,
Speaker 1: and this is the way that you build services on
Speaker 1: top of Stripe for payments, or Twilio for messages, or
Speaker 1: um Twitter for sending messages obviously and um but it's
Speaker 1: really hard for them to get developers to try out
Speaker 1: their tools. So if you say, we have a new
Speaker 1: developer platform and we want people to use it. For example,
Speaker 1: Amazon has skills for the Alexa, you want to make
Speaker 1: new commands that work there. Where Slack has bots in
Speaker 1: their messaging app. They're desperate to be just added a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of slack bots and the birthdays and it's
Speaker 1: just really interesting. Now you see that and you're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I wish it would talk to this other system we're using,
Speaker 1: Like I can never do that, that's too hard. The
Speaker 1: process with glitch now is we've got a sample slack
Speaker 1: bot for you. You go and your remix it. You
Speaker 1: change the part that just works for your system to
Speaker 1: be exactly what you wanted to be, and it's instantly
Speaker 1: up and running. So we take the time to develop
Speaker 1: a slack bot or Alexa skill from uh days or
Speaker 1: hours in two minutes, and that is something that's a
Speaker 1: normal value. All these companies of shots platforms, so they
Speaker 1: want to use it um and be able to pay
Speaker 1: to do a couple of different things. The key one
Speaker 1: is supporting developers creating these things. So right now, if
Speaker 1: you're like, I want to build on you know, Alexa's
Speaker 1: skill set from Amazon, so it's Amazon buying this or
Speaker 1: or Twitter buying this, not necessarily an enterprise company to
Speaker 1: create their own unique Everybody's desperate to make things easier
Speaker 1: for developers because developers are so in demand and it's
Speaker 1: so rare to get them and pay attention to your platform.
Speaker 1: And I look at it. There's a search tool called
Speaker 1: Algolia that I just love. It was one of those
Speaker 1: searchers really hard to do well, Like, I'm not Google,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to figure this thing out. I had
Speaker 1: always been interested in trying it, and I thought I
Speaker 1: have if I could tie that search feature into my app,
Speaker 1: would be really useful. And I was like, but you know,
Speaker 1: I'm running a company. I'm busy. I don't have time
Speaker 1: to learn all this stuff. Even if I got a
Speaker 1: little bit of coding skills. Now I can go remix
Speaker 1: an example out from Algolia that already has search working.
Speaker 1: Just plug in the parts that I want to into
Speaker 1: my own app and be up and running instantly. That
Speaker 1: was something where I was like, it took it from
Speaker 1: it would be cool to try this out. I have
Speaker 1: this intent of learning this programming skill into I can
Speaker 1: deploy it instantly. And the biggest thing I see is
Speaker 1: the coders who we show it too, like their eyes
Speaker 1: light up, like it looks like Christmas morning for them,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, that is a really good sign that
Speaker 1: we were on something something big with glitch. So that
Speaker 1: sounds really fascinating. You you mentioned Twitter earlier. Let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about what you would do to fix Twitter. I've
Speaker 1: been amazed that they while there have been a series
Speaker 1: of updates and they continue to improve the interface and
Speaker 1: some of the general behaviors, the broader concept behind the community,
Speaker 1: they just can't seem to wrap their their heads around.
Speaker 1: It's a hard thing. And I do have a lot
Speaker 1: of empathy for the team. I do think they're trying,
Speaker 1: but I think, you know, it was so long for
Speaker 1: them to turn the ship around to really addressing a
Speaker 1: lot of the issues that that's the question. Believe in it.
Speaker 1: Why why did it take so long? For them to
Speaker 1: notice that they had a giant harassment problem. You know,
Speaker 1: I think there's a there's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 1: I am one of the key issues is um who
Speaker 1: feels the pain? Right? So we talked about the inclusion
Speaker 1: in diversity issue and tech and you know, Twitter is
Speaker 1: like most of the tech companies, it doesn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of people from you know, black and Latino communities,
Speaker 1: doesn't have as many women. And guess who gets targeted
Speaker 1: by the majority of harassment online. See, I haven't let
Speaker 1: me stop you there, because as a white dude in
Speaker 1: New York City, perhaps I'm not experiencing the same thing. However,
Speaker 1: and I'm kind of thick skinned. I'm more annoyed by
Speaker 1: the failed logical deduction people calling me ugly. But what
Speaker 1: I I'm amazed at is and I'm I'm I'm seeing
Speaker 1: all this harassment mostly on a partisan basis, name calling
Speaker 1: and stupidity, just craziness, which I think discourages knew you. Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to go ye absolutely, And so it's
Speaker 1: a little moderate in Facebook because people have to use
Speaker 1: theoretically are using their real names or otherwise I have
Speaker 1: to go through hope process of creating a fake name.
Speaker 1: And I know people certainly do that, but but there's
Speaker 1: some barriers, right, it's harder to do. So what would
Speaker 1: you do to fix fixed Twitter? Yeah, there are a
Speaker 1: couple of things. I actually wrote a piece back in
Speaker 1: January one Jack Dorsey asked, I guess the whole internet, like,
Speaker 1: how would you how would you fix Twitter? And there
Speaker 1: were a couple of things I wrote in there, and um,
Speaker 1: the more cogent ones. One of them which was, um,
Speaker 1: show people you know how to update the service and
Speaker 1: update the apps. Just the ability to iterate and introduce
Speaker 1: new things would introduce a lot of trust into the platform.
Speaker 1: Because they hadn't shipped any features, they hadn't updated anything,
Speaker 1: so you can make whatever proclamations you want to about
Speaker 1: we're fixing abuse, for fixing harrassment, we're adding better features
Speaker 1: or filtering or whatever, and people don't believe it because like, well,
Speaker 1: the thing hasn't changed at all in a long time,
Speaker 1: you know. And in fact, they were killing off things
Speaker 1: like vine that was really great and creative and interesting
Speaker 1: and didn't have harassment problem. And and you know, she said, okay,
Speaker 1: well these these things that make you feel good, and
Speaker 1: those are getting killed and the things that are making
Speaker 1: me feel terrible. You're you're you know, doubling down on
Speaker 1: So what I think they've gotten better at that they've
Speaker 1: sort of started shipping more too, is to sort of
Speaker 1: be really clear about a harassment policy. So instead of
Speaker 1: these nebulous, vague rules like we have to see like
Speaker 1: this person who's very obviously transgressing, being abusive and horrible
Speaker 1: to people, Um, we got to see their account gets suspended.
Speaker 1: That that happened not too long ago. I forgot his
Speaker 1: name is a fairly milos Yanna Pulosolis, right, notorious troll
Speaker 1: and harasser. And he finally again you have to go
Speaker 1: so far, so repeatedly before your account. Is not not
Speaker 1: just that that he transgressed so frequently, so often that
Speaker 1: he was openly explicit about the fact he was trying
Speaker 1: to harass people, right, you know, and like these are
Speaker 1: the things where it's like this is a um, but
Speaker 1: the fact that he stands out as as someone who's
Speaker 1: banned and there isn't. First of all, there's a boatload
Speaker 1: of bots just insane anounza. I assume half might it
Speaker 1: or followers or software al goes and then on top
Speaker 1: of that, it seems that there are some people that
Speaker 1: are just you know, calls to violence and just all
Speaker 1: sorts of like how do they tolerate this? I think
Speaker 1: one of the things it's easy to lose track of
Speaker 1: outside of Silicon Valley is how extreme they are about
Speaker 1: some of some parts of libertarianism around these views. Right,
Speaker 1: so they're very like everything is free speech, everything is
Speaker 1: fair you know, fair game to put no one saying
Speaker 1: you you can't do this. But we're a private company,
Speaker 1: this is our product, and you could go do this
Speaker 1: house free. You're free to be obnoxious and offense of
Speaker 1: wherever you want, just not in our private community. Well,
Speaker 1: the interesting thing, I think there's a couple of parts
Speaker 1: they sort of ignore, one of which is, you know,
Speaker 1: the argument there's often the argument that technically it's too
Speaker 1: hard to limit these things. They say, well listen, and
Speaker 1: I say listen, you know, go ahead and upload a
Speaker 1: Beyonce MP MP three. Quickly they can detect that. So
Speaker 1: like the tech is there, Right, it's not harder to
Speaker 1: detect you know, a sound signature and a song than
Speaker 1: it is text. Right, this is a racial epic. A
Speaker 1: key phrases. Here's I mean especially in the machine learning
Speaker 1: is making leaps and bounds in advancements like that can
Speaker 1: be something where you can get better at a I
Speaker 1: should really be all over And I think that is
Speaker 1: starting to seep into Twitter a little bit. They're getting
Speaker 1: a little bit better at hiding and flagging things. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to say, but that's part of this.
Speaker 1: They need to communicate clearly about it. The The other
Speaker 1: part is, um, you know, we always talk about the
Speaker 1: free speech for the people who are harassing and abusing,
Speaker 1: but what they do is they chase off vulnerable voices,
Speaker 1: and what about the free speech and the people who
Speaker 1: are exactly And I see this where like you know,
Speaker 1: I have extremely thick skin. I am a loudmouth all
Speaker 1: the time, so like I'm I'm pretty hard to shut up.
Speaker 1: There are times when you get to the worst of them,
Speaker 1: you know, a mob of people coming after you and
Speaker 1: they're you know, targeting you, your friends, your family, your coworkers,
Speaker 1: and you just say enough, I'm gonna put this away.
Speaker 1: And like, if I can go through that with all
Speaker 1: as fortunate and privilege as I am, with as much
Speaker 1: of a network as I have to be able to
Speaker 1: be like, sometimes it's too much. People who aren't as
Speaker 1: lucky as I am and don't have that support network
Speaker 1: behind them can easily be hounded out off of this network.
Speaker 1: And it's like their speech matters too. And I care
Speaker 1: a lot more about the people who are targeted, you know,
Speaker 1: fairly for harassment. I care a lot more about their
Speaker 1: free speech than the people who are saying horrible things
Speaker 1: to them. We have been speaking to a Neil Dash
Speaker 1: of fog Creek Software. If you enjoy this conversation, be
Speaker 1: sure and stick around for the podcast extras, where we
Speaker 1: keep the tape running and continue to discuss all things technology.
Speaker 1: Be sure to check out my daily column on Bloomberg
Speaker 1: View dot com. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions
Speaker 1: right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at rid Holts. I'm
Speaker 1: Barry rid Holts. You're listening to Masters in Business on
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to the podcast, and Neil, thank you
Speaker 1: for doing this and appreciate you being for so so
Speaker 1: generous with your time. Happy to be here. We we
Speaker 1: were talking during the during the break about the blocking
Speaker 1: problem on on Twitter, and you mentioned the service Twitter
Speaker 1: has its own service for importing and exporting lists of blocks,
Speaker 1: but it's not very well integrated. There is a site
Speaker 1: called block together that actually a bunch of activists made
Speaker 1: that gives you the tools to share a block list
Speaker 1: with your friends and or to subscribe to theirs and
Speaker 1: uh and it's really handy because then you don't have
Speaker 1: to individually block a whole community of people that are
Speaker 1: trying to troll a harass. So if you're looking to
Speaker 1: so I break the world into three categories of people
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll keep this relatively PG. But there are
Speaker 1: the folks who are just simply misinformed. And I've learned
Speaker 1: if you give somebody a fact that challenges their misunderstanding,
Speaker 1: it doesn't doesn't help them. So what I always do
Speaker 1: with that group of people is you should find data
Speaker 1: source for the bls and if you could, if you
Speaker 1: can prove to me that what you're you're saying is correct,
Speaker 1: I'll write a column on it and either all because
Speaker 1: if they follow me, I could d M them and
Speaker 1: then subsequently delete the d M so they can't harangue
Speaker 1: me on direct message, and I'll give them a not
Speaker 1: so much a homework assignment. But if you really believe
Speaker 1: this steaming pile and nonsense you've shared. I'm not asking
Speaker 1: you to create a persuasive argument, just sending your data source. Right.
Speaker 1: So so that's a that's the sort of gentle nudge.
Speaker 1: The next level of people who are just kind of
Speaker 1: ideologically broken. And what I mean by that is no
Speaker 1: concept of of beyond not having any data, any data
Speaker 1: that contradicts their beliefs, their ideology, just pure cognitive dissonance, right,
Speaker 1: and and for them but not but not venal, but
Speaker 1: not vicious, just philosophically askew on top of not being
Speaker 1: evidence based. And so now you know, I really because
Speaker 1: I start, I'll look at something and I'll go down
Speaker 1: the rabbit hole and it's like, oh, okay, I know
Speaker 1: this is you know, old roads lead to bright Bard
Speaker 1: and Drudge in a bunch of And there's some versions
Speaker 1: of that on the left as well. Some of the
Speaker 1: early um, I'm trying to remember the sites Salon could
Speaker 1: be a little over the top. And then there's another
Speaker 1: one on the left. And I mean, I think they
Speaker 1: can be wrong or exaggerated, but they very seldom inspire
Speaker 1: a mob to go target people, that's for sure. But
Speaker 1: as somebody who works in finance. I can't afford to
Speaker 1: have a stream of dead, bad memes and misinformation and myths.
Speaker 1: So I just want to cut so those people get
Speaker 1: me did But the aggressive like I'm wrong and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be aggressive about it, um and obnoxious about it
Speaker 1: and offensive about it. I'm sorry those folks have to
Speaker 1: be blocked. I didn't know block together even existed. My
Speaker 1: only concern is how do I not So I've noticed
Speaker 1: some crazy Trumpers lately. Right at one point in time,
Speaker 1: it was other crazies. But I don't mean people who
Speaker 1: are pro Trump or anti Trump. I have friends in
Speaker 1: the Trump administration. Anthony Scamucci is a buddy of mine.
Speaker 1: We've had very civil debates about Trump. Someone in my
Speaker 1: office as a Trump supporter. She and I have had
Speaker 1: very rational adult discussions that online just do something tribal
Speaker 1: and partisan that people lose their mind. So, and I'll
Speaker 1: give you a perfect example. This weekend, I discovered that
Speaker 1: Jenna Jamison, the former adult film star, is kind of
Speaker 1: like a wild just listen there. There is some extreme
Speaker 1: behavior in her history. So but I never expected that
Speaker 1: to tip into wild ideological and it was just kind
Speaker 1: of random that I found she's amplified white supremacists. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's Yeah, it's a sort of surprising, you know, I think, Um, so,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you block the people that
Speaker 1: you want to block, yet at the same time not
Speaker 1: block so so I can't say it on the radio,
Speaker 1: but there was a science thing about something happening in
Speaker 1: one of the guests, giants in outer space, about a
Speaker 1: subsequent probe. I won't even go there, and she just retweeted,
Speaker 1: at least buy me dinner first. And I just found
Speaker 1: that hilarious that I was looking for something science and
Speaker 1: phil plate uh does does a bad astronomy exactly? And
Speaker 1: from that led to this, led to that, So I
Speaker 1: don't want to The beauty of the web is the
Speaker 1: random serendipity. Yeah, absolutely, So how do you block people
Speaker 1: on a list like um blocked together and not lose
Speaker 1: that random? You know what I want? They're going to
Speaker 1: be some false positives, but that already happens, an email
Speaker 1: that already happens, and everything, right, I mean, but you
Speaker 1: can at least check your seat. But yeah, but it's
Speaker 1: the same thing like if you really I mean, you
Speaker 1: know somebody exactly, you can just go and and bet
Speaker 1: it like if you're like I really want to see
Speaker 1: this tweet, but I have this person blocked, you just
Speaker 1: do unblock them. There's nothing to that. I think what
Speaker 1: is key is like being able to use the service
Speaker 1: where like it's not it's not some huge barrier, right
Speaker 1: if you block somebody, they can still see your tweets
Speaker 1: if they want, they just don't. Yeah, absolutely, So it's
Speaker 1: not like this is some impermeable barrier. All it's doing
Speaker 1: is making it harder for a mob of harassers to
Speaker 1: target you. And that's really useful. Like for me, it's
Speaker 1: like like if I'm like whatever, out with my kid
Speaker 1: and you know, we're doing fun stuff on the weekend,
Speaker 1: and it happens to be the moment when like a
Speaker 1: mob of white supremacist is a decided they want to
Speaker 1: come after me for something I wrote. And the thing
Speaker 1: is like, they'll go back through your history. It could
Speaker 1: be something I wrote years ago. Um, and I'm getting
Speaker 1: notifications on my phone while I'm out with my kid
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yeah, exactly. I like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be distracted by this. If I can just go
Speaker 1: and find somebody who's already got a good block list,
Speaker 1: and just share it and be like, Okay, good, I've
Speaker 1: been able to sort of cut this off. That's it's
Speaker 1: a no brainer. Like why can you search for a
Speaker 1: blocklist by a specific it's block list with this person
Speaker 1: and then I'll share it's just a person. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you go by like an individual Twitter user who you
Speaker 1: trust and use, you know what I mean? The opposite,
Speaker 1: I want to block Jimmy Dean and then who else
Speaker 1: is blocked? I don't think so, And part like they've
Speaker 1: been very thoughtful about it where they don't they don't
Speaker 1: encourage sort of willy nilly blocking, Like it's really about
Speaker 1: sort of sharing with the community and doing and and
Speaker 1: and people having human judgment involved in it. And so
Speaker 1: I think that's really good. And you can um and
Speaker 1: you can also go and search for like people that
Speaker 1: you UM follow who do have lists, and so like
Speaker 1: those things are very handy. I think Twitter is gonna
Speaker 1: involve their tools too. But the key is that, like, um,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a really valid use to blocking people
Speaker 1: that we learned from Again, like I almost think digital
Speaker 1: communities need to learn from physical communities, right, And there's
Speaker 1: a reason why we sort of say, like you can't
Speaker 1: come into this coffee shop if you're going to shout
Speaker 1: at people, and you can't you come into this lobby
Speaker 1: if you're gonna be acting this way, and a crowd theater,
Speaker 1: and so being able to have analogous tools for sort
Speaker 1: of just limiting really really anti social behavior. I think
Speaker 1: it's really useful, and I'm glad that, like the tools
Speaker 1: are starting to evolve. I think it's a shame they're
Speaker 1: happening by like activists self funding themselves, building as opposed
Speaker 1: to the platforms building in. So are we just going
Speaker 1: to end up with ideologically opposed left blocks and right
Speaker 1: blocks or is it really is the unifying factor anti
Speaker 1: social behavior? I think it's a social behavior. There are
Speaker 1: people that do that, of course, that are like ignore
Speaker 1: anybody who disagrees with them politically, but they were already
Speaker 1: doing that, Like they don't need software to do that
Speaker 1: if you're the kind of person they can't deal with
Speaker 1: dissenting ideas. The block was not the issue. The interesting
Speaker 1: thing that's happening rhetorically now where I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to interact with for example, like white supremacists online,
Speaker 1: go figure right and they'll come back to me. And
Speaker 1: be like, oh, you can't handle political dissentsion sake. I
Speaker 1: love the expression snowflake, yeah, because it's all massive projection
Speaker 1: because to the slightest challenge and and and and I'm
Speaker 1: just like, you know what, Like I like, I'm tough
Speaker 1: as nails. I have no question about that. Like I
Speaker 1: know what I've been through, and I know you know
Speaker 1: what I'm able to do. I'm just like, why would
Speaker 1: I want to deal with you? This is like, this
Speaker 1: is an elective thing. It's about me having good judgment
Speaker 1: and discernment where I'm like, you're you're a person who
Speaker 1: acts obnoxious online all day? Why would I put like,
Speaker 1: I'm not that's that's not the idea. I'm working to engagement.
Speaker 1: Like if you think that the only way that your
Speaker 1: ideas can be representing in culture is by you acting
Speaker 1: like a monster all day lighting it on fire, and
Speaker 1: yours probably aren't that good, you know. And it's like,
Speaker 1: it's not that I'm not intellectually curious. I know, I am.
Speaker 1: I'm very interested in having my options challenge and learning
Speaker 1: things like I am very much like I love that
Speaker 1: idea of like I had to change my mind because
Speaker 1: I was wrong about the way I thought about this thing,
Speaker 1: Like I love that feeling. Uh, it doesn't come from
Speaker 1: somebody saying, like why streaming epithets exactly, Like why the
Speaker 1: fact that, like my family is multiracial is wrong? Like
Speaker 1: that is never going to be the thing that I'm like, Wow,
Speaker 1: I've seen the light. You know, we used to have
Speaker 1: laws against that sort of stuff that's in the good
Speaker 1: old days. It's uh, it's it's amazing. You know, when
Speaker 1: I get the requests through a colleague, Hey, you block
Speaker 1: so and so so. Now the processes, I'll go look
Speaker 1: at their not only their tweet stream, but their tweets
Speaker 1: and replies because I want to see how they're interacting.
Speaker 1: That's right. And I say to people, listen, life is
Speaker 1: too short. You're not a good person. There's eight billion people,
Speaker 1: most of whom are half decent and well intentioned. Some
Speaker 1: may be misguided. But I don't need venal jerks and
Speaker 1: nobody needs no Life is too short, and I got
Speaker 1: too much left to learn to spend my fighting with
Speaker 1: the strangers really wants to fight more than they want
Speaker 1: to learn. Right, That's right. You know. One of the
Speaker 1: beauties of of going to law school is mood court.
Speaker 1: And the best part about mood court is you have
Speaker 1: to be able to switch hats and argue either side
Speaker 1: of any litigation. Literally mid case, you could be all
Speaker 1: right now. So I've always taken that as a as
Speaker 1: a sign of intellectual openness. Having the ability to see
Speaker 1: all sides of an issue, of a problem, what have
Speaker 1: you prevent you from, uh turning your your opponents into
Speaker 1: a sub human It keeps the discussion rational because Hey,
Speaker 1: things that are really really at least in court, things
Speaker 1: that are really one sided, those cases settle. But where
Speaker 1: there's a legitimate debate, let's have the debate. And unfortunately
Speaker 1: too many people uh just can't imagine the other side
Speaker 1: of the discussion. And that's amazing. Yeah, and I'm very
Speaker 1: you know, my my mother's families all lawyers, and I'm
Speaker 1: sort of you know Rais Well, you know, it's interesting
Speaker 1: they were both um somewhere criminal defense lawyers and and
Speaker 1: then um, my great grandfather was involved in the Indian
Speaker 1: independence movement. He marked with FANDI and was sort of
Speaker 1: very involved in civil rights and social justice about you
Speaker 1: know what's interesting is they had a printing press at
Speaker 1: the house, and so there is a tradition of like
Speaker 1: how do you use your own you know platform exact idea? Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know a century ago, that was cutting edge
Speaker 1: technology to be able to have in a rural, very
Speaker 1: very poor part of India. And so yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there is this idea of how do you debate ideas
Speaker 1: using cutting edge platforms to get your ideas out there
Speaker 1: and advancing the cause of social justice. And I think
Speaker 1: those are things that you know, you don't think about
Speaker 1: consciously as a kid, but they sort of seep in
Speaker 1: into your mind. And and so there was always a
Speaker 1: healthy debate about how to how to do these things.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, like especially you look at this
Speaker 1: is still true today. Civil rights movements always have these
Speaker 1: big schisms within them of like how how radical do
Speaker 1: we want to be? And what's the right way to
Speaker 1: approach this? And you know, do we change the system
Speaker 1: from the inside or do we you know, try to
Speaker 1: tear it down from the outside. And those kinds of debates.
Speaker 1: I think those are fascinating and timeless debates. And I'm
Speaker 1: always happy to engage in those. The people who are
Speaker 1: like I want to personally, you know, hurt you or
Speaker 1: or or I want to attack you, and and and
Speaker 1: that's the only way to vance my ideas. I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's never it's never going to be the thing that
Speaker 1: that persuades me or that makes me see the light.
Speaker 1: And it certainly doesn't indicate much confidence in that person's
Speaker 1: argument anyway. You know, I've gone back and looked at
Speaker 1: some old blog posts that I could see are out
Speaker 1: of frustration where I don't want to say I just
Speaker 1: called other people idiots, but I would look at their
Speaker 1: position and first try and take it apart, and somewhere
Speaker 1: in the middle was a little bit of name calling
Speaker 1: would be in and then you catch yourself and move
Speaker 1: away from it. How have you you, more than any
Speaker 1: person and I know, have been at the vanguard of
Speaker 1: of seeing the arc of the blogosphere change over time.
Speaker 1: What what have you noticed? Um? How has this evolved?
Speaker 1: Do you plan on continuing blogging for forever? What? What
Speaker 1: are your thoughts on? Yeah, you know, I've learned a lot.
Speaker 1: I think, Um, it is that I definitely see you
Speaker 1: when I look back at eighteen years of writing now,
Speaker 1: UM that it is always this sort of ink blot
Speaker 1: test about where I met in my head. You go
Speaker 1: back and read it and I can see exactly how
Speaker 1: I was feeling at the moment, even if I don't
Speaker 1: remember writing it. Shocking, wo, I was having a bad
Speaker 1: day that you know, or or wow, I was really
Speaker 1: in a good mood. And and and you can really
Speaker 1: read that into you know, the work. I think that
Speaker 1: that's been really instructive, because like, I don't keep a
Speaker 1: like a mood journal, and so I could be writing
Speaker 1: about like whatever a new update to Windows came out
Speaker 1: when I used to blog about tech a lot, and
Speaker 1: I could still tell you exactly how I felt, you
Speaker 1: know what I read. I think that really instructive. I
Speaker 1: think my attitude about dealing with you know, people being
Speaker 1: aggressive or hostile online has has changed a lot over
Speaker 1: the years. I think initially, um, you know, I think
Speaker 1: your first reaction is like, well, you know, screw you too, buddy,
Speaker 1: and you can sort of go at them. I think
Speaker 1: I spent a long time trying to be like I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna, you know, love you to death and that'll
Speaker 1: get you to change. And and I had some successes
Speaker 1: with that. I mean, I have actually seen conversations where
Speaker 1: I change somebody's mind her they changed my mind, or
Speaker 1: at least you get them to back down from the
Speaker 1: sort of over I think people's initial emails, like it
Speaker 1: would be great if email had like a sixty minute delay,
Speaker 1: Like you can't respond instantly. So every now and then
Speaker 1: someone sends an email and if you give them a
Speaker 1: big friendly hug and say like you're really upset or
Speaker 1: or hey, I hope you're not missing the key point here,
Speaker 1: here's my data source. What are you using to reach
Speaker 1: this conclusion? As often as not or not, especially in
Speaker 1: the professional community, So my universe's finance. When someone gets
Speaker 1: it's not even though back down it's like I've gotten Hey,
Speaker 1: I appreciate your responding. Civilly, I was online like you say, oh,
Speaker 1: these people are really professional and smart. He was just
Speaker 1: perturbed at something. Yeah, it's yeah. It could be whatever
Speaker 1: they you know, they didn't eat lunch that day, or
Speaker 1: they have something else going on. What what about the
Speaker 1: change in media? How has the bloggersphere impacted that? In
Speaker 1: your perspective, it is It's interesting. I was such an
Speaker 1: idealist about blogging and social media when he came out.
Speaker 1: I was like, we're gonna give platforms that are going
Speaker 1: to give voice to people that don't have any other
Speaker 1: places to share the words, and that was true. That
Speaker 1: did happen the professional amateurs exactly who are no longer
Speaker 1: amateurs now they're professional experts, expert professionals, right, And I'm
Speaker 1: exhibit A. Yeah, and you know I've been very lucky
Speaker 1: to benefit from that too. And I think that was true.
Speaker 1: And and we kept saying, you know, the whatever, the
Speaker 1: mainstream media makes all these mistakes, and now the social
Speaker 1: media will help correct it. And then we ignored or
Speaker 1: didn't anticipate the exact opposite, which was the times when
Speaker 1: mainstream media was exactly right, and people would use social
Speaker 1: media to spread disinformation. Yeah, and the idea that like, um,
Speaker 1: the people who didn't have access to get their voice
Speaker 1: out there, some of them would would not use that
Speaker 1: power responsibly. We I was such an optimist and idealist
Speaker 1: of like, wow, if we just give everybody a printing press,
Speaker 1: all they're going to print is good, thoughtful, true things,
Speaker 1: and um, you know that's not the case. And it
Speaker 1: was a a long, slow, painful lesson that I I know,
Speaker 1: I personally took too long to learn. What's the old
Speaker 1: quota a law is halfway around the world where the
Speaker 1: truth is still tying on its boots. Yeah, yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think that was very naive on my part. And
Speaker 1: the amazing thing about it is I felt like I
Speaker 1: was slow to get that lesson and slow to to
Speaker 1: really build it into my work and the and the
Speaker 1: tools and the platforms I was creating. And yet I
Speaker 1: think it still took even longer for the people that
Speaker 1: made the facebooks and twitters of the world to get
Speaker 1: that lesson. And not only do they have to recognize that,
Speaker 1: they have to then recognize that it's an existential threat
Speaker 1: to their platform and then create the tech to response
Speaker 1: to it. Well, and I was lucky and that we
Speaker 1: had built a product when we built blogging tools that
Speaker 1: people paid for. You paid for right, you know, And so, um,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to have a voice in a platform,
Speaker 1: you were going to directly support it and you were
Speaker 1: head an investment in it. And so we weren't based
Speaker 1: on attention, We were not based on the ad model,
Speaker 1: and um, so you didn't have to be outrageous, you
Speaker 1: didn't have to jump up that scream, you don't have
Speaker 1: to have clickbait headlines. Well, and you won't believe what
Speaker 1: slide three, right, But even if you're going to do that,
Speaker 1: you were incentivized to build your audience on your terms,
Speaker 1: but not just views at any cost, you know, Patriots
Speaker 1: in any cost and everybody else basically went with the
Speaker 1: ad model, and I, you know, I was really adamantly
Speaker 1: against it, and I do think inc you know, you
Speaker 1: see the sort of return as subscription models right at
Speaker 1: the Times New York Times and like everybody, we want
Speaker 1: you to subscribe and pay for great journalism all these things.
Speaker 1: This is this reaction to seeing the distorting effect that
Speaker 1: that the major ad models have on on web media
Speaker 1: and the facebooks and twitters and and you know instagrams
Speaker 1: in the world built models that were totally advertising dependent
Speaker 1: and so get hyper exaggerated into attention getting models. And
Speaker 1: I think that's something that the publishers didn't understand how
Speaker 1: much that would skew their business. And it's interesting because
Speaker 1: in print, you know, there's one of there was more
Speaker 1: ad dollars to go around two they were indirect models, right,
Speaker 1: So the fact that you had a ton of classified
Speaker 1: ads might encourage you to have a real estate section,
Speaker 1: but it didn't make your news headlines more extreme about
Speaker 1: politics and about whether and about whatever. Same thing with
Speaker 1: the automobile, so you can go through each of the
Speaker 1: major sections of the Sunday New York Times, and they
Speaker 1: were advertising and so you have the theater section, the
Speaker 1: arts and Arts and Entertainment section, real estate, automobiles. I
Speaker 1: don't know if they still have an automobiles. They might,
Speaker 1: they might have killed off. But even to that example,
Speaker 1: like the existence of an automobile section was as a
Speaker 1: sop to advertisers obviously, but it didn't skew the hard
Speaker 1: news reporting, and so that was okay because you're like, okay, whatever,
Speaker 1: you gotta pay the bills. Of course you have comics.
Speaker 1: You don't have comics because like, like, this is an
Speaker 1: important news for people, Like this makes people read and
Speaker 1: that gets the circulation up, and that that um, let's
Speaker 1: just do the hard news work. And the problem is
Speaker 1: that line goes away in web media. There isn't some like, well,
Speaker 1: you're gonna come and read the car ads and that's
Speaker 1: going to support you're reading the hard news. The hard
Speaker 1: news has to sell on its own, and so it
Speaker 1: gets more and more distorted and more and more exaggerated
Speaker 1: in order to get to that attention because you're in
Speaker 1: this more and more extreme environment. Now that that's a
Speaker 1: buzz Feed or maybe a vox or something like that,
Speaker 1: But that shouldn't be The Washington Post, in the New
Speaker 1: York Times, the Wall Street Journals, all of them. There's
Speaker 1: no difference between those. Like, yeah, I mean you look
Speaker 1: at like the best reported stories on buzz feed are
Speaker 1: not different than the best reported story race on the
Speaker 1: Times of the Post, like when you do good journalism,
Speaker 1: like there are but not necessarily the most read stories. No,
Speaker 1: that's true. And there are more you know, cat pictures
Speaker 1: or lists that are subsidizing that journalism on the buzz
Speaker 1: feeds than there are on you know, the other sides.
Speaker 1: But like that's just a that's just a question of
Speaker 1: how you subsidize, you know, in the case of the
Speaker 1: Post of the Times or whatever, they're subsidizing through print
Speaker 1: subscriptions that are going to go away as that audience
Speaker 1: ages out. I finally, I finally dropped everything but the
Speaker 1: weekend edition in New York Times because I would carry
Speaker 1: through the office carrying home and it would go go
Speaker 1: into the recycled. Then yeah, and the Wall Street Journal
Speaker 1: comes to the office, and this way I don't have
Speaker 1: to take it home. It goes right into the recycled, right,
Speaker 1: the way the Journal has there, and I think the
Speaker 1: Times is the same. If you do a digital subscription,
Speaker 1: the print edition is free. Yeah what what? Well? And
Speaker 1: this is all about the metrics and the numbers, right,
Speaker 1: so the advertising exactly. So they want to tell the advertiser,
Speaker 1: we this many print subscribers, even though all those people
Speaker 1: are just you know, when does that stop? When does
Speaker 1: that go next? Ten years? Ten years? No more newspapers? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you know, for any practical purposes, there will
Speaker 1: be the same thing with New York or New York
Speaker 1: or the digital subscription and the digital plus um print
Speaker 1: are the same price. So your initial reaction is, oh,
Speaker 1: well this is more for the same price. I'll take that.
Speaker 1: Then you have a stack of unread magazines. It's pointless.
Speaker 1: Well it's like, yeah, unless you're going to the beach
Speaker 1: or something, you're not you're not looking at that print edition.
Speaker 1: And I see this all the time with people that
Speaker 1: like I watched, that have print subscriptions that are saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: well I found this article, but I'm gonna read it online. Now.
Speaker 1: I will tell you that when you thumb through a paper,
Speaker 1: you're gonna find things that you're not going to discovery digital. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's other than the ink on your hands and and
Speaker 1: the fact that you're carrying around. There's there's no question
Speaker 1: the discovery experience on print media is good, is an
Speaker 1: interesting and unique thing, and you find stuff you wouldn't
Speaker 1: find otherwise on digital. But that's also just a design challenge,
Speaker 1: Like it's not impossible to solve these problems in the
Speaker 1: digital realm, they just haven't invested in doing so. So
Speaker 1: one of the things I've noticed in the arc of
Speaker 1: um of media has been how in the beginning, and
Speaker 1: I want to call that the mid two thousands, they
Speaker 1: felt very comfortable lifting anything from print, anything from the
Speaker 1: blogosphere without attribution, just relentlessly, and and I started the
Speaker 1: read it here first, here's the blog post from Monday,
Speaker 1: and oh look, this is what the whole Street General
Speaker 1: had on Thursday. I would do screenshots side by side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I definitely had that with with stuff I read about tech. Right,
Speaker 1: And then then you send it to the editor and
Speaker 1: saying I want you to know that I'm going to
Speaker 1: keep doing this until you're free to call me. I
Speaker 1: have a professional title where I'm quoted in the media
Speaker 1: all the time. Don't don't rip this off, and if
Speaker 1: you do this more blatantly, I'm going to stick the
Speaker 1: lawyers on UKUS. At a certain point, you cross the
Speaker 1: line from inspired by two copyright infringement and there was
Speaker 1: a head. My favorite was a thing I did on
Speaker 1: terrestrial radio. I'm a big music buff and I just
Speaker 1: hated what Clear Channel was doing to music. And I
Speaker 1: didn't right oh three or row four. It was way early.
Speaker 1: And then I think it was Barons had this front
Speaker 1: pick cover story losing the signal, and to their credit,
Speaker 1: they didn't actually steal language, but the structure, and it
Speaker 1: was like, wait a second, this looks really really didn't
Speaker 1: even notice it until a friend said, hey, Barons ripped
Speaker 1: you off? What do you mean? Look at that? It's
Speaker 1: um And there are a couple of other people I
Speaker 1: won't mention their names who feel like they can take
Speaker 1: that and it's so first that was the first phase.
Speaker 1: The second phase was one the Wall Street Journal in
Speaker 1: New York Times and other mainstream media started rolling out
Speaker 1: blogs of their own. Does this have any staying power? What?
Speaker 1: How do you see the role of a fast, not
Speaker 1: really very lightly edited, get it out quick gale. How
Speaker 1: do you see the role of that in mainstream media.
Speaker 1: I think it depends on the vertical and you know
Speaker 1: what what space you're covering, and um, how much reporting
Speaker 1: and and you know the original network sort of fuels it.
Speaker 1: There are there are great blogs done by mainstream media
Speaker 1: outlets that are usually written by somebody that has a
Speaker 1: great voice, that knows the space really well, has their network,
Speaker 1: and um can turn that into you know, a story
Speaker 1: really quickly. And I look at like it, Actually it
Speaker 1: wasn't a blog, but I look at like David Carr
Speaker 1: what he had done at the Times. Um, boy, I
Speaker 1: missed that guy. And you know he was very blog
Speaker 1: like in the way even he wrote his print columns
Speaker 1: very fast, turn things around new exactly who to call
Speaker 1: connected the dots really really well. I think that model
Speaker 1: can work, UM, but very few of the major outlets
Speaker 1: have a business model for that. You can't hide the
Speaker 1: blog behind a paywall, because that that ruins its point
Speaker 1: of linking to stuff. I've had that argument with the Wolster,
Speaker 1: this discussion with editors of the Wall Street Journal. Hey,
Speaker 1: why don't you put your blog out ahead of the payaball?
Speaker 1: But you have to be a registered subscriber to comment,
Speaker 1: and this way not only that you have actual people
Speaker 1: who are identifiable and make sense, right, you're inherently raising
Speaker 1: the quality of discussion. Yeah yeah, and you know so
Speaker 1: I think the business tensions always arise, and you see
Speaker 1: that with even sites that create great blogs, they sort
Speaker 1: of fade out after a while because the company is like,
Speaker 1: I'm not really behind this, I don't believe in this,
Speaker 1: um and and I draw that contrast to like organizations
Speaker 1: that started by blogging, right, so, you know, Gizmoto formerly Gawker,
Speaker 1: like they're sort of still all in and they still
Speaker 1: do good work. I mean, I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's always been uneven, but like the good stuff has
Speaker 1: always been good. You know, BuzzFeed still feels like a blog, um,
Speaker 1: even though you know, I don't like you can define
Speaker 1: blog however you want, but like that that that aesthetic,
Speaker 1: that voice is still there. Can we say the blogosphere
Speaker 1: is a meritocracy? Or is that overstating Yeah? I think
Speaker 1: that's overstating it because you still have the same dynamics
Speaker 1: you have in a lot of media. Would one of
Speaker 1: which is just simple, like you know, old boys network,
Speaker 1: like people promote who they know and these kinds of things.
Speaker 1: I think it's easier to get in. UM. I think
Speaker 1: you can blog your way to being the voice on
Speaker 1: a certain topic. Like if you have a certain niche
Speaker 1: or a certain subject that you are just obsessive about
Speaker 1: and you go all in on and you just keep
Speaker 1: bloging about it, you can own that topic or that idea. UM,
Speaker 1: and that's still true. I think if you're in a
Speaker 1: popular subject of you know, you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: like like for me, like a generic tech blog about
Speaker 1: what's happening in the tech industry, it's really really hard
Speaker 1: to break out. And that is going to be about
Speaker 1: do you have the relationships? Do you have somebody who's
Speaker 1: gonna scratch your back by giving you traffic? Let's jump
Speaker 1: right into our favorite questions. Tell me something. The most
Speaker 1: important thing people don't know about your background. UM, A
Speaker 1: lot of people don't know that I am from a
Speaker 1: tiny little town in rural Pennsylvania and that we were
Speaker 1: one of the only uh certainly only Asian families uh
Speaker 1: and that and that really UM informed out of my
Speaker 1: view of like having a very different, probably the opposite
Speaker 1: perspective of living in a big city like Manhattan. Understandable,
Speaker 1: who are some of your early mentors. Um, I've been
Speaker 1: very lucky to have a lot of good ones. I
Speaker 1: had a business partner named Fred Burke, who was my
Speaker 1: partner in my first company I started the day after
Speaker 1: I graduated high school, and he taught me a ton
Speaker 1: about sales and marketing and that was really really instructive.
Speaker 1: Who most influenced your approach to technology and entrepreneurship? Um,
Speaker 1: maybe one of the biggest influences is Dan Brocklin, who
Speaker 1: is the inventor of the spreadsheet and later later it
Speaker 1: sold it to Lettus and was working with Mr k
Speaker 1: Port and that team that made one too three. But
Speaker 1: Dan is one of the more thoughtful, brilliant, creative voices,
Speaker 1: you know, really undersung as one of the heroes of
Speaker 1: the tech industry and um super generous with his thoughts
Speaker 1: and ideas. This is the question that listeners ask all
Speaker 1: about constantly. This is the most asked question from listeners.
Speaker 1: What are some of your favorite books? Favorite books? UM,
Speaker 1: The Powerbroker, Robert Carross, Bio Robert most classic and and
Speaker 1: and also really teaches systems thinking. Um, so that's one
Speaker 1: of those that really really jumps out. Um. Uh. David
Speaker 1: Ritz did a biography of Aretha Franklin. Really and it
Speaker 1: is it is it's almost a history of America in
Speaker 1: the form of a biographyavor Wretha Franklin. It is such
Speaker 1: a brilliant, brilliant David Ritz, Yeah, the biography of Aretha Franklin. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: see I would have named that respect if Yeah. He
Speaker 1: I forget what, I forget what the actual titles and
Speaker 1: they there's a bunch of books about are name of respect,
Speaker 1: so they didn't go with that name. But it is, um,
Speaker 1: it is actually one of the best business books that
Speaker 1: I've read in a long time. Really, Yeah, that's quite fascinating.
Speaker 1: And give me one more. Oh, um fiction nonfiction technom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's there's so many, it's really it's it's give us
Speaker 1: ten more. There was actually, um, I'm gonna forget the
Speaker 1: name of it, there was a book about the creation
Speaker 1: of the Highline Park here in New York City, um,
Speaker 1: and how it started as a really a community movement
Speaker 1: and it became this sort of you know, one of
Speaker 1: the top landmarks in the city. Now touris to visit.
Speaker 1: Those guys are actually consulting around the world, people are
Speaker 1: trying to do similar and they did such a good
Speaker 1: job of telling story and of even being self critical
Speaker 1: about the mistakes they made. UM, and for example that
Speaker 1: the park is not really inclusive enough of the community
Speaker 1: that that's part of UM. I thought it was just
Speaker 1: very thoughtful and nuanced and also showed how you can
Speaker 1: build things that are improbably ambitious and make them happen. Anyway,
Speaker 1: now now they're talking about trying to create an underground
Speaker 1: park from it. I don't know if that will really
Speaker 1: work to the same degree. But listen, no one thought
Speaker 1: the Highline would work. It's been a home run. UM.
Speaker 1: Since you've joined tech, tell us about what you think
Speaker 1: are the most significant changes. UM. You know what I
Speaker 1: would say these past couple of weeks has been one
Speaker 1: of the most significant milestones, which is this this wreckling
Speaker 1: of you know, vcs being pushed out of their own
Speaker 1: funds on ethical grounds Susan Fowler blog post, which was
Speaker 1: really powerful, which is amazing because that post was around
Speaker 1: for months before it seems to have gained any traction. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and also there were voices before her, right, And
Speaker 1: you know, I think the fact that just a steady
Speaker 1: drumbeat of activism worked and that you have things like
Speaker 1: you know, the CEO of Uber stepping down. I think
Speaker 1: these are hopefully a moment of reckoning for so many
Speaker 1: of us that have been talking about the need for
Speaker 1: tech to be more ethical, more humane, more inclusive, to
Speaker 1: be able to really point at that having had some impact.
Speaker 1: And these are not victories, because these are horrible situations
Speaker 1: that people went through, but it's just the first time
Speaker 1: that we didn't completely lose after somebody had to endure
Speaker 1: these kinds of indignities at work. I suspect Travis, who
Speaker 1: owns fifty one plus percent of the voting stuff, is
Speaker 1: going to eventually find his way back when he's being
Speaker 1: you know, re educated and and the kindler, gentler Travis
Speaker 1: will show up. But you never know. Um. So that's
Speaker 1: that's the changes that have taken place. What do you
Speaker 1: think the next major changes are? And it's only technology,
Speaker 1: it's not a big field that I do think there
Speaker 1: is um a return to first principles about people being
Speaker 1: able to create on their own, which is that, you know,
Speaker 1: the promise of the web was that we were all
Speaker 1: going to have a voice and we have a place,
Speaker 1: and that we would be able to publish and create things.
Speaker 1: And there is such a centralization happening around Facebook, Google,
Speaker 1: you know, go to those two exactly and about that
Speaker 1: much of the tech platform development. So what developers are
Speaker 1: doing outside in the world is I'm doing this for iOS,
Speaker 1: for for Apple, I'm doing this for Android for Google,
Speaker 1: and being able to go back and say, well, the
Speaker 1: web itself is still the bigger platforms. So the biggest
Speaker 1: platform has ever existed. How do you create for that
Speaker 1: and support that and express yourself there? And I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, we have a dog in this fight with
Speaker 1: glitch where I'm very lucky because developers love it and
Speaker 1: they're catching on and and really saying like this is
Speaker 1: one of the things that gives us hope. But I
Speaker 1: think it's a broader movement, which is um what brought
Speaker 1: a lot of us to the web in the first place,
Speaker 1: the idea that we could create something in the world
Speaker 1: could find it and respond to it and make it
Speaker 1: a successful So this is a standard question I asked people,
Speaker 1: but it's especially poignant for you. Tell us about a fail.
Speaker 1: Tell us about a time you failed and what you
Speaker 1: learned from the experience. And if people want to know
Speaker 1: why that is a point in question, just google anal
Speaker 1: dash and quote fail and you'll understand why. Um, I
Speaker 1: do think one of the biggest failures was in being
Speaker 1: part of the community that created the first social media
Speaker 1: and social networking tools. We were so desperate for and
Speaker 1: hungry for people to use them and optimize for growth
Speaker 1: at the expense of making these environments humane and thoughtful
Speaker 1: for people, and and so there's been a tremendous social
Speaker 1: costs where Yeah, everybody got connected, and it's great, it's
Speaker 1: amazing to be able to send messages and media and
Speaker 1: photos to people instantly anywhere in the world, but it
Speaker 1: should have also been something that empowered the people, most
Speaker 1: of the margins, most vulnerable, to be able to advocate
Speaker 1: for themselves. And and instead, in many ways, we re
Speaker 1: victimized them. And um that is something that I hope
Speaker 1: to spend the rest of my career working to fix.
Speaker 1: To be fair to you guys, that's like third level
Speaker 1: thinking at the time, it's hey, is anybody going to
Speaker 1: use these tools? Not the is gonna become widespread, widespread adoption,
Speaker 1: It'll be enormously successful, so successful that trolls are going
Speaker 1: to be a problem in the common sense that that
Speaker 1: was just ends. Yeah, you know, you know, someday there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a million people on social media, and she
Speaker 1: was you know, she was founder of our company, and
Speaker 1: she's like, you idiot, there's gonna be a hundred million people.
Speaker 1: Of course, then it turns out there's a billion, and so,
Speaker 1: you know, you would never it would have been absurd
Speaker 1: if we had said, let's plan for what happens when
Speaker 1: a billion people show up on these social networks, because
Speaker 1: people like you're of your mind. There aren't a billion
Speaker 1: people with computers, right, but there are a billion people
Speaker 1: with smartphones. It was just so there was no like
Speaker 1: science fiction that that's exactly right. Um, what do you
Speaker 1: do to keep mentally? You're physically fit outside of the office,
Speaker 1: what do you do to relax? I love music. I
Speaker 1: know you're a music fan. I I still am. I'm
Speaker 1: sort of notorious for being a big Prince fan even
Speaker 1: before he passed away. But I love sort of cataloging
Speaker 1: his work and so he's showing the cultural impact and
Speaker 1: so it's it's it's a fun hobby because you cross
Speaker 1: paths with like an improbable cross section of life. Like
Speaker 1: there are people in politics and media, all these different
Speaker 1: disciplines that are like, oh, you know whatever, they like
Speaker 1: the music. It's fun, but also this like, oh, he
Speaker 1: was a pioneer in tech and did all these sort
Speaker 1: of interesting cultural things. And then of course just at
Speaker 1: a human level for me, like, um, one of the
Speaker 1: best ways to clear my head is I have got
Speaker 1: a six year old son and will go out and
Speaker 1: you know, just sort of do something fun. Go to
Speaker 1: a museum, uh, you know, walk around the neighborhood, take
Speaker 1: the dog for a walk, and I am now for
Speaker 1: not reset by spending it just a little bit of
Speaker 1: time listening to him in his view of the world.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of fun. If UM, if a millennial
Speaker 1: came to you, or someone at the beginning of their
Speaker 1: career came to you and said, hey, I'm interested in
Speaker 1: going into tech or social community, what sort of advice
Speaker 1: might you give them? Um? One of the key things is, uh,
Speaker 1: find this topic about which you are irrationally passionate, like
Speaker 1: so that it can be as narrow as niche as
Speaker 1: you want. But if you can be the person who
Speaker 1: is the one person in the world who is most
Speaker 1: in love with that idea and knows the most about it,
Speaker 1: obsesses over it, and really just owns it, Um, there's
Speaker 1: something there for you like you you can you can
Speaker 1: really build a whole career around that because you can't
Speaker 1: win on Like everybody is chasing this one trend and
Speaker 1: I'm going to be part of it. I think that's
Speaker 1: really key. I think the other part um, because the
Speaker 1: tide is starting to turn, particularly in tech, find the
Speaker 1: people who are most of the margins, least connected, least central,
Speaker 1: at least privileged in tech and lift them up because
Speaker 1: people one day will remember it. They'll never forget you
Speaker 1: did it too. I think that is who is a
Speaker 1: sentant broadly is the people on on the outside are saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I want to be part of this success, that I
Speaker 1: want to benefit from it. And three it's just the
Speaker 1: right thing to do. It feels good. And our final question,
Speaker 1: what is it that you know about technology and social
Speaker 1: networks today that you wish you knew seventeen or twenty
Speaker 1: years ago? Um? I wish I had known that technology
Speaker 1: follows the same rules of human society that the physical
Speaker 1: world does. In the same way that we architect our
Speaker 1: buildings and design our communities in our neighborhoods to be safe, comfortable, welcoming,
Speaker 1: warm places for us to live. We need to put
Speaker 1: the same thought into designing our digital spaces so that
Speaker 1: people are welcoming and kind to each other and treat
Speaker 1: each other well and feel neighborly towards one another. And
Speaker 1: if we can just repeat a lot of the lessons
Speaker 1: that the last ten thousand years of civilization have taught us, uh,
Speaker 1: we can make being online and in our apps a
Speaker 1: lot more thoughtful and rewarding experience. We have been speaking
Speaker 1: with Anald Dash he is the CEO of fog Creek Software.
Speaker 1: Be sure and look up an inch or down an
Speaker 1: inch on Apple iTunes and you could see any of
Speaker 1: the other hundred and fifty or so such conversations. We
Speaker 1: love your feedback, comments and suggestions right to me at
Speaker 1: m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. I would be
Speaker 1: remiss if I did not thank my audio engineer Charlie Valmer,
Speaker 1: my head of research Michael bat Nick, and my booker
Speaker 1: slash producer Taylor Riggs. I'm Barry Ritolts. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.