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Sept. 9, 2018 - No Agenda

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	Good, good, good, good, good.
	Adam Curry, John C. Devorak.
	It's Thursday, September 9th, 2018.
	This is your award-winning Gimbo Nation Media Assassination, episode 1067.
	This is no agenda.
	Defying time and dimension and broadcasting live to tape from the capital of the Drone Star State here in downtown Austin, Tejas, in the Claudio, in the morning, everybody.
	I'm Adam Curry.
	And from Northern Silicon Valley, live at the tape, I'm John C. Devorak.
	It's Crack, Blot, and Buzzkill in the morning.
	Whoa.
	So you're in Italy, in fact.
	I am.
	As we speak, I am probably nursing a hangover for my sister's 25th wedding anniversary, which is silver.
	If you're lucky.
	It's Italian alcohol, so it should be good.
	Yeah.
	So what we've done here is we've put together a couple of interview shows.
	I did an interview with Scott Adams and Dane Jasper.
	All right, so Dane Jasper is the CEO of SonicNet, which is a...
	Now, he's an independent guy.
	He's kind of David to the behemoth AT&T Goliath, no?
	Yeah, he's actually stringing fiber just all over the kind of parts of the East Bay in San Francisco and I think in Santa Rosa where this operation is.
	And they've always been the low-cost internet provider.
	We've used them as backup here.
	Why not as primary?
	It's just not as fast.
	It's not quite as fast, right?
	The old version, the old DSL stuff is not as fast as Comcast.
	Right.
	But this will be a lot faster.
	This is gigabit fiber to the home.
	FTTH, baby.
	Yeah.
	So when that comes in, that'll make a little...
	Now I'll have two very high-speed networks so I don't have to worry as much.
	That is great.
	And the price is going to be like 50 bucks a month.
	Oh, that's nice.
	Yeah, that's very competitive.
	That's in line with, well, is he also going to try and sell TV services?
	No, he refuses to.
	In fact, we talked about that in the interview.
	Oh, good, good, good, good, good.
	And just kind of, I mean, I'm going to listen.
	I probably have already heard this by the time I get to Italy because, of course, I have a copy listening in the plane.
	Yeah.
	But has it been a challenge for him with the behemoths?
	Has anyone tried to...
	I just want a little tip there.
	Has anyone tried to buy him or muscle him out?
	Not yet, but apparently more recently they're trying to pass some legislation to make it tougher on the little guys.
	Well, that's un-American.
	It's very common.
	Okay.
	I've asked them specifically if they were chopping down lines or breaking cable, but no.
	Saboteurs!
	Saboteurs!
	Take us into it!
	Well, first of all, we got Scott Adams, the famous cartoonist.
	Right, but we're going to talk about him in a second, after the first interview.
	The first interview is going to be Scott Adams.
	Oh, you're going to do Scott Adams first?
	Yeah.
	Interesting choice.
	Okay, I like it.
	Well, talk to me about Scott Adams.
	We all know Scott Adams.
	He's a Dilbert guy, and he does a lot of stuff on Periscope, and he's never really been interviewed like this before.
	And I've known him long enough so I could ask some questions that I don't think other people would do.
	Now, what do you mean he's never been interviewed like this?
	I don't know.
	Have you seen any really good interviews where he talks?
	Well, you have to listen to this interview, but there's a lot of stuff that he doesn't normally talk about.
	Well, first of all, I don't think I've ever heard just a sit-down, audio-only interview with Scott Adams.
	I don't think I've ever heard that.
	Audio-only where you focused on just audio.
	I don't think I have either.
	Yeah.
	This may be the first, but I seriously doubt it.
	And this took place at his house?
	Yeah, I went to his house.
	Nice.
	I'll tell you what, rather than talk about it, let's get into it.
	Here's my interview with Scott Adams.
	All right, I'm here with Scott Adams.
	So you've been cartoon, you make your money as a cartoonist.
	Correct.
	And I met you 25 years ago at Pacific Telephone.
	Yeah.
	You were an engineer and you were actually the first guy who showed me the internet.
	Wow, I didn't realize that.
	Well, not the internet, but the web.
	The web, right.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, we had a little lab.
	I was working.
	That was my day job.
	And we were showing people this thing called the World Wide Web.
	Okay.
	And it was one of the most informative times of my life.
	It was in 93, as I recall.
	That sounds right.
	Yeah.
	And Dilbert was out a little, had been out, but hadn't been out enough that I could quit my day job.
	Right.
	But you were the...
	Anyway, you showed it to me.
	You were impressed, but you obviously weren't blown away so much that you went out and bought a bunch of domain names like Smart Money did.
	No, it's worse than that.
	It's worse than that.
	So we would bring customers in, and we'd show them all our cool phone company stuff that wasn't interesting to anybody, and their eyes would glaze over.
	And then at the end, as just sort of a dessert, we'd say, oh, and there's this new thing coming called, we called it the World Wide Web then, now the Internet.
	And there were exactly two websites you could get to.
	That's it.
	The Smithsonian and some other thing.
	And we would show them that we could see the website at the Smithsonian and look at a couple of still pictures.
	And people would come out of their chairs and they'd say, can I do that?
	And we'd say, do what?
	You know, touch the mouse and make this.
	And they needed to touch it.
	They stood up.
	Their eyes got big.
	And they said, how can we get this?
	And there was no application.
	And I remember thinking, my goodness, this is going to be huge.
	It has that X factor where people want it, even though it's terrible, like early cell phones.
	Everybody wanted a cell phone, but they were terrible.
	And I cornered our top engineer in the phone company and I said, hey, if I wanted to invest in this coming thing, this World Wide Web Internet thing, what's the one company I should put all my money in?
	And he looks at me and he goes, Cisco.
	And I go, okay, what are the other companies?
	And he goes, Cisco.
	He goes, everything's going to be Cisco for the next 15 years or whatever.
	Yeah, it kind of was.
	And so I did not buy Cisco, and it's the worst financial decision I've ever made.
	Huh.
	Well, I didn't buy Cisco either.
	But I didn't have some guy telling me to buy it.
	It was pretty obvious.
	In hindsight, you can see what happened, all the points.
	You could have gone, wow, I should have done that.
	I could have done that.
	I could have done this.
	It's the worst.
	I mean, just if you had bought Apple when Steve Jobs first showed up and kept the stock, you'd be loaded, especially about $10,000 when you make a few million dollars.
	But having kind of been involved in the stock market over the years, the thing is you can't hold the stock that long.
	You just won't do it.
	You'll just say, oh, it's not going to go any higher than this.
	Because you can't do it.
	It's impossible unless somebody else buys the stock and puts it into trust and you don't even know you have it.
	It's problematic.
	So anyway, you did leave eventually.
	How long were you there at Pacific Bell?
	Well, eight years there.
	Then before that, eight years at a big bank.
	And I was doing Dilber for about six of those years that I was still at the phone company.
	So I was doing two jobs and writing a book at the same time and working day and night.
	You were getting your inspiration from the phone company.
	Yeah, that plus my memories of the bank.
	So the big aha was when I moved from a bank to a phone company, and you'd say to yourself, well, they have nothing in common, two completely different companies.
	And then you watch that the same management problems, the same way people think, the same way people treat you, it was just shockingly similar.
	And that was really the inspiration behind Dilbert, is the realization that these things were universal, and there were people trapped in jobs all over who probably thought, there's nowhere else that this is happening.
	This could not be happening anywhere else.
	It's impossible.
	It happens everywhere.
	Well, I thought the comic strip was genius because it was the only one that actually addressed kind of day-to-day, work-a-day, office-working issues.
	Everything else was cowboy stuff or just stupid animals making punchlines or trying to crack you up with a one-liner.
	No, I don't want to claim genius and inspiration totally because I'll take a little bit.
	But I also have an MBA. And one of the main things you learn in business school is listen to the customers, give them what they want.
	And that's the sort of thing that artists don't do.
	And when Dilber came out and email was coming out at about the same time or getting popular about the same time, people started emailing me because I put my email address between the panels of the strip.
	And they'd say, we love your comic when Dilber's in the office.
	We don't care for it that much when he's just at home doing generic things, which is, as you said, what most comic strips were about.
	It's just about whatever.
	Right, Dagwood.
	And so I listened to the customers and completely retooled the strip to make it a workplace strip.
	So the reason that Dilber succeeded, and it's very rare that a big comic will break out, is that I applied business techniques to the artistic realm.
	Could somebody else do a cartoon and have a breakout nowadays in this market where their syndication is different?
	Maybe you're like one of the last that actually succeeded before the door was closed?
	Well, you know, there's only one giant cartoon every 10 years or so.
	You know, it's actually very rare.
	You can count on one hand the mega cartoons.
	And if somebody were to start out today, I'd probably tell them to start on the internet and see if they can get an audience.
	And then if they can, try to also get syndicated because for those who don't know what syndication is, you sign a deal with a company that's a syndication company.
	And then they sell it to all the newspapers, so you don't have to do all the selling to the individual newspapers.
	So yeah, I would start with the internet first, see if you can get an audience, refine your art, and then try to get syndicated next.
	So it is possible, you think?
	Totally possible.
	But, you know, the market is shrinking in terms of the physical newspapers.
	But Dilbert's bigger than it's ever been because as long as there's one big newspaper in every market, you know, it runs in that paper.
	And, of course, the Internet market is growing every day.
	So it's growing there no matter what.
	Where did you get your drawing skills?
	My mother...
	Was a landscape artist.
	And my father doodled little cartoons that were more like stick figures, but very funny in their own little weird way.
	So I think I had, you know, a little bit of genetic advantage there.
	But anybody who's seen Dilbert knows I'm not an artist with any kind of a capital A. So it was really brute force.
	And the first original comics that I submitted, if you saw them, you'd say, there's no way this guy's going to get hired or syndicated.
	This looks like an inebriated monkey with a crayon.
	What's going on here?
	But it was just brute force.
	I just practiced until I could do it.
	What kind of sense of humor do you think you have?
	Well, probably it's a combination of observational plus engineering.
	In other words, to make something look clever, sometimes you have to look at it as an engineer, as in, what would be the weird way to accomplish this in the cartoon realm?
	If you've got a character who's got a problem, and it's a cartoon, so they can kind of do anything, there's no real limits, what is the funny engineering solution?
	And it might involve engineering.
	Killing somebody, it might involve aliens, it could involve anything.
	But you have to start, as you said earlier, with something that everybody goes, oh, I've been there.
	If you don't get that part right, it's hard to get much else right.
	People have to recognize and identify with the situation.
	Then you can extend it, but you've got to get them first.
	I have a theory that your humor is absurdist.
	Explain absurdist.
	You spot the absurdities in the office environment, for example, and most everything, every punchline you deliver is based on something that's just, it's beyond the pale and so far as pure absurdity is concerned.
	I'm going to agree with that with different words.
	I call it cognitive blind spots.
	So I'm looking for places where otherwise smart people are doing something that the observers would say, that doesn't look smart.
	I know you went to college.
	I know you're smart.
	Why are you doing that?
	And that explains 75% of management and And, you know, the reason for that is that people are paid to manage, but sometimes there's nothing to do or you don't know what to do, and you end up just saying, well, what's the fad, you know?
	Yeah, well, I worked in the government, so I know some of that from another perspective.
	It's still the same.
	You were fired from Pacific Telephone.
	I'm going to tell you the story that I was told by one of your old associates.
	All right.
	You remember her.
	Yeah.
	Anita.
	Yeah, Anita.
	Anita, who was the real-life model for my character Alice in the comic strip.
	Yes.
	Some bonehead came into the company on some normal kind of a, well, let's put this guy in because he's going to reorg this and he's going to do that.
	He's going to straighten things out.
	And he was naive.
	And he said, I guess he went through one.
	I've seen this happen in different operations.
	Somebody goes in there and they start doing a checklist.
	What does this guy do?
	Who is this guy?
	Scott Adams.
	What does he do?
	And nobody was there.
	And I've seen this happen recently in other companies where somebody's actually very important to a company.
	You were at the time important the way it was told to me.
	To the sales people, because the comic strip was popular enough that they would drag you out on sales calls as a lure, which happens with any company that's got any brains.
	Bring a lure in, and oh, you get to meet Scott Adams, and by the way, you can buy some of the gear or some services.
	And this bonehead came in, and he just unceremoniously got rid of you in some sort of a cleanup, very much like you see in the movie The Office.
	And...
	You didn't make a fuss or object or anything.
	You left and then they found out about it.
	They, the people that knew better, they wanted you to come back and you said, you know, I don't need to come back.
	I'm going to stay gone.
	And that was the end of it.
	That's pretty close.
	I'll add a little context to it.
	My coworkers, once I started getting famous and started to get a little bit of money with Dilbert, it was obvious that I was going to leave.
	And it didn't make sense to keep my day job.
	But they wanted me to stay.
	Like, as you said, I was good for sales.
	Customers would come in and they were Dilbert fans and so I helped.
	And they actually made me an offer.
	Anita, the one that I just mentioned, the real life Alice from the comic strip, said, how about this deal?
	I'll go to our management and I'll say, you don't even have to show up unless you don't want to, except for these sales calls.
	And otherwise, we'll do your work.
	We'll do the engineering stuff that was your main work.
	And my co-workers said, yeah, we're up for that.
	We'll do the work.
	You just come in for the times you want to, basically.
	So you were like a fellow without having the designation.
	Right, in a sense.
	And so Anita took that to the boss you were talking about and made that deal.
	And he said, I'm okay with that.
	And he checked with me and I said, yeah, I'm okay with it too.
	But here's the thing.
	I don't want to be a burden, so the day that you need that budget you're paying me for something else, you just have to ask, and I'll leave the same day.
	One day he had some other project that he thought was more important, and he called me in and said, you know, this would be a good day.
	And I said, okay, that's the deal.
	You just have to ask.
	I don't need a reason.
	You just have to ask.
	And so I left peacefully.
	And yes, I did get a call from, I believe it was the CEO or president, I think it was the CEO at the time, who was surprised to find out that I had been asked to leave.
	Ah, well, your version is obviously more accurate than mine.
	But mine's still good.
	Yours is good.
	Yeah, you were 90% there.
	Yeah.
	When it happened, I... Since I knew you at the time, I thought, well, this is going to be interesting because how is he going to...
	Because I thought that cartoon was derivative from the work experience and you were getting daily material just by going to work, showing up.
	And I was wondering how you were going to handle that.
	And you've handled it quite nicely.
	I don't see any difference, actually.
	Well, I was getting literally thousands of emails a day in the beginning with suggestions.
	And it was a huge burden to respond to.
	I tried to respond to all of them back in those days.
	And there was just material coming in and it would always remind me of something I had experienced.
	So I was always looking for that.
	If somebody suggested something I'd never heard of, that usually didn't work for me.
	But if I said, oh yeah, that happened to me, then it was a cartoon.
	Where I don't see a lot of stuff from you is convention life.
	You know why?
	There's a cartooning reason.
	You don't see Dilbert go to conventions a lot.
	And the reason is I don't like drawing backgrounds.
	Okay.
	To draw the convention stuff in the back, you either have to be...
	I don't want to interrupt you, but since you're now doing everything on the computer, can't you have like a stock couple of backgrounds you just drop in so you don't have to do any of that work?
	Well, people would notice the stock backgrounds.
	I do do a stock exterior building that I reuse.
	But yeah, I'd have to draw it in the first place and I'd have to change it every time, you know.
	But you're right, it's a lot easier now with a computer.
	When did you switch?
	I switched, let's see, if I can remember the year, it was probably in the 2004-ish range, give or take a year.
	And it was because I had a problem with my drawing hand.
	I had spasms in my pinky when I tried to draw from overuse.
	And it's a weird thing called a focal dystonia.
	And I went to the doctor and said, What's going on with my pinky?
	I can't draw anymore.
	And by pure luck, the world expert, literally, the world expert on this specific condition lived in my town and was in my HMO at Kaiser.
	And my doctor knew him.
	And next thing I know, I'm talking to the world expert on this problem.
	And I said, what's the cure?
	And he said, we don't have one.
	You know, basically change jobs.
	So I agreed to be part of a test group.
	They were trying different things to see if they could make some progress.
	But in the meantime, I thought, well, I'm done unless I can figure out a solution for drawing.
	And so I drew left-handed for a while, which I can do, but it's slower.
	I'm slightly ambidextrous, but not terribly ambidextrous.
	And then I thought, you know, I'll bet there's by now something you can draw on the computer that maybe my hand would act differently.
	Because the weird thing about this hand problem is that it was actually a mental problem that expressed itself in the hand.
	So the hand was fine.
	And the reason I knew that is that when I drew with my left hand, my right hand would spasm.
	Because my brain would say, hey, you're drawing again.
	Spasm, spasm, spasm.
	And the expert I mentioned confirmed that it's more of a brain problem than a hand problem.
	And so when I drew on the computer, even though the drawing looks just like drawing, it's just you're drawing on a screen and you're using a stylus, my brain did not recognize it as drawing.
	For whatever reason, it just didn't trigger that very specific response.
	And then over time, I learned through hand exercises and gradually building up to using my hand with a regular pencil, just very, very quick tests, you know, hold the pencil down for a quarter of a second and release it before the spasm until I could do a second, then two seconds.
	And I did that for months until I believe I'm the first person who's ever Remediated or solved that problem, focal dystonia.
	I think I'm in the literature, my doctor told me.
	Oh.
	Well, that's good and bad, I guess.
	It did move you over to the computer, which probably eventually sped up your work.
	Well, talk about lemonade and lemons.
	It probably cut my workload by at least over 50%.
	Yeah.
	And that's been just a huge advantage in my life, as you can imagine.
	Yeah, well, most artists I know personally, they all switch over to computers one way or another, except...
	For one, I know that's always been a computer artist, but they've always benefited from the two-edged sword.
	They benefited from the productivity because, you know, especially graphics guys can change the backgrounds really quickly.
	They don't have to redo everything.
	But then there became so much computer generated stuff that came out to compete with them.
	They're all singing the blues and many of them had to quit.
	So they ended up, it was weird to watch that phenomenon.
	Do you have Tourette's?
	I do not.
	Why do you ask?
	Because you have elements almost identical to Adam Curry, who talks about his Tourette's constantly.
	We talk about it on our show quite a bit.
	Maybe I do.
	What are the symptoms?
	I thought I should be swearing out loud.
	No, no, no.
	I think in my whole life I've run into one person that has that form of Tourette's.
	Really?
	And he was on an airplane being dragged off.
	It was terrible.
	I felt bad for the guy.
	Well, you dragged me off an airplane.
	I can give you some of that, too.
	No, he was cussing me before they dragged him off.
	But it's mostly twitches.
	Oh, I have lots of twitches.
	Yeah, that's Tourette's.
	Well, it's nice to know I got that too.
	Well, I don't want to, yeah, well, you've got all these ailments.
	I hate to bring it up, but the reason I say that is because there's a commonality with all Tourette's, even the most minor of Tourette's sufferers.
	And I know people that have, you know, they have all kinds of twitches.
	Adam fights it because he used to do TV a lot.
	So when he was at MTV, he had to fight it.
	But everyone who's ever had even a little bit of Tourette's, neat freak.
	Really?
	I can't say I'm a knee freak.
	Adam says the same thing.
	But he is.
	So are you.
	I'm here at your house.
	That's where we're doing this.
	You saw me picking up stuff off the floor when we got here.
	Yeah.
	True story.
	So I wanted to bring it back.
	Just mention it.
	You might want to look into it.
	You did have some ailment that...
	It was disconcerting, though, where you couldn't talk for a month or something like that.
	Yeah, so the voice problem was also a spasm of the vocal cords, and I lost my voice for three and a half years.
	I couldn't speak.
	Oh, it was that long?
	Yeah, for three and a half years, I couldn't have a conversation or be understood on the telephone or give a speech or anything.
	And it turns out the focal dystonia and the voice problem are actually related because they're both brain problems.
	They're not the hand and they're not the vocal cords.
	That's just where the spasm is.
	But it's well known that they travel in pairs.
	So if you have one of those problems, it's not unusual that you might have a second one in some other place on your body.
	But Tourette's never came up.
	So...
	Maybe you don't have Tourette's, but if I just saw you on the street and didn't know who you were, I would.
	Well, now I think I do, so thanks for that.
	Maybe.
	So what happened, I just don't want to get into it.
	No, wait, hold on, hold on.
	Now, if I do, I have an excuse to swear at people for no reason at all.
	Adam does that too, but neither you or him have that form of Tourette's.
	According to you.
	That's a very specific...
	Until I start doing it, and then I've got it.
	I don't want to dwell on this, but the three years...
	Yeah, three and a half years.
	I could make noise, but people couldn't understand it.
	What happened?
	When was the breakthrough?
	What was that like when you came out of it?
	Well, the quick version, a lot of people have heard this story, so let me give you the fast version.
	So it took a long time to figure out what it was, because regular general practitioners have never seen it.
	You know, it's very rare.
	It's called a spasmodic dysphonia.
	How do you explain it to anybody?
	Well, so I'm trying to tell people that I've got this problem and they hear it.
	The first things that people think are that you have a mental problem.
	Because one of the odd characteristics is that you can talk okay when you're alone.
	Wow!
	So if you imagine that, imagine telling your doctor, oh, I can talk fine as long as nobody's listening.
	But if people are listening, it's like this.
	Now that's a bad impression of me trying to talk.
	Yeah.
	So obviously they're going to say, okay, mental, you're getting too worked up because of people or something like that.
	But I was sure that wasn't it because it didn't feel like that, right?
	I didn't feel any different talking to people.
	And so I rejected Valium and I tried some Botox shots.
	There was a treatment where they give you a Botox shot through the front of your neck with this needle that you don't even want to hear about.
	It's an ugly process and you have to do it every month or so.
	But that didn't work too well for me, and so I set a Google alert for the spasmodic dysphonia once I'd figured out what it was, which I figured out also from Google, because I had the hand problem.
	So I said, oh, the hand problem is called a focal dystonia.
	I wonder if there's something called a voice dystonia.
	So I put in that search keywords, and And it popped up with spasmodic dysphonia because that was close enough.
	So Google actually diagnosed me and showed me a video of somebody who had exactly the same problem.
	So now I had a name for it.
	So I took that name, put it into a Google alert while I was talking to doctors one after another, getting my head scanned and all kinds of things and finding nothing.
	And one day I get an alert that says there's some doctor in Japan who's got a surgery to fix it.
	I tracked down the top doctors in Stanford at first.
	They said, hey, is this real?
	He said, I don't know if that's real, but we get some exaggerated claims from that particular doctor.
	Maybe you should talk to this other guy at USC. He's doing something.
	I talked to him, Dr.
	Gerald Burke, and he was doing a somewhat new slash experimental surgery in which they would rewire some of the nerves in your neck.
	They cut them so that for, I don't know, two months or something, you can't speak because your brain is no longer connected to your vocal cords.
	It's the weirdest thing.
	You can't.
	You can try, but just nothing happens.
	And then the re-spliced root kicks in after about eight weeks.
	I might have the weeks wrong, but it's something like that.
	And then you can talk or it doesn't work.
	Those are the two options.
	Oh, great.
	Right.
	It's either going to work or it just doesn't work.
	And then there was a moment almost exactly on the day that they predicted that the nerves could grow back together because they know what rate they grow at, that I could talk very weakly.
	Did you have the cutting done?
	Yes.
	So I had the surgery.
	And it took a couple of weeks to recover from the surgery.
	And then I could talk just faintly and just for a little while before being sort of exhausted by it.
	And then it took a few years to get full fluency back.
	Because you also lose fluency.
	If you don't speak for three and a half years...
	You actually can't form sentences.
	You know all the words, but you can't do it effortlessly, so talking is actually difficult for years.
	And only, I would say, in the last two or three years, maybe, I feel like I'm back to top fluency.
	Yeah, I wouldn't know the difference.
	I mean, from you 20 years ago, or 93, which is, I guess, 20, yeah, 25 years ago.
	You sound the same.
	Well, that's an ordeal.
	We won't continue.
	Do you exercise?
	I do.
	Yeah, I'm quite committed to exercise.
	I'm a lifelong exerciser, and I try to do it five times a week and be active on the other two days.
	When did you become a Republican?
	I am not a Republican.
	I'm not either.
	So never, I guess.
	I went from Democrat to Republican with Reagan to Independent, and then I didn't realize a better one than that, which is unaffiliated, which is what I am now.
	When I was a young man, I thought, I know enough about politics.
	I'm going to register and I'm going to vote.
	And I cast my vote proudly for Jimmy Carter.
	And a few years later, I said to myself, I shouldn't be voting.
	I'm not adding to this.
	I'm not adding to the intelligence of the vote.
	I like that I can vote.
	I'm glad that other people do it.
	But I'm not adding anything to the intelligence of the outcome.
	And I don't think that's changed, but I like the topic of politics.
	I voted for Carter, too.
	I felt bad about it.
	I was a McGovern supporter, if you can believe that.
	Yeah, so I don't vote, and I am not a member of a party.
	Oh, you don't vote at all.
	But you do like to give your opinions, and you seem to be a...
	I don't know if you want to take this as a descriptor, but...
	A Trump apologist.
	I hate that phrase.
	Yeah, well, I've called one too and I don't consider myself to be one.
	Yeah, the reason I hate it is that it assumes that you would support him no matter what he did and that you're just sort of always on the team.
	In my case, most of my writing and talking about President Trump started during the campaign, and mostly I talked about his persuasion skills because that's another area that I have a lot of experience.
	I'm a trained hypnotist.
	When did you become a trained hypnotist?
	In my early 20s, I thought, hey, is this some kind of superpower that I could just learn?
	And so I learned it.
	I was influenced by my mother, who had been hypnotized by her family doctor in my small town.
	And my mother gave birth to my little sister and reports that she was awake and took no painkillers and didn't feel pain.
	Hmm.
	Now, that's unusual.
	Most people would not have that experience, but about two in five would, or one in five.
	And it made me think, what is this thing?
	What is this power that you can do that kind of thing?
	And so I learned it, and sure enough, it is a superpower like nothing I've ever seen.
	It changes your entire worldview, and that's the biggest change.
	It changes how you perceive the world, and you stop perceiving people as rational.
	Once you can reprogram them so easily, you realize that their rational minds are not really running the show and that's just an illusion.
	So you've gotten philosophical about it.
	Yeah, I guess it's philosophical in the sense that my worldview changed by how easily I could reprogram other people using a set of tools that are pretty well understood.
	And that I've been studying persuasion in all of its forms from, you know, selling to marketing to design even.
	Anywhere I can find anything on it for 30 years probably as part of writing, as part of creating the comic.
	It's an important element.
	So you saw Trump as some sort of...
	Do you think he is a genius or a savant?
	What I saw is that he used the tools of persuasion more effectively than I've ever seen it done.
	Now, part of the reason he's so effective is that he seems immune to shame.
	He's willing to say or do anything, and generally I believe that he's aiming his impulses, at least his public office impulses, at legitimately making the country a better place, in his view of how that looks.
	And so he'll cut some corners, he'll do some things people don't like, he'll ignore the facts if it's convenient, but he tends to persuade in the right direction, meaning that if you're someone who likes the borders to be tight, if you like a strong military, and you don't have to, by the way, I'm not telling you you should like those things, but if you do, and lots of people do, he's certainly the right person for that.
	You think he's trained like you are, or you think it's just a part of his being a salesman all his life?
	Because during sales...
	If you were ever a salesman, you end up picking up a lot of persuading gimmicks.
	Well, keep in mind he wrote the book, or at least he read the book, The Art of the Deal.
	And so if your brand is negotiating, that's really persuasion or a special form of it.
	So we know that he at least has an interest in it, and that would be enough over the years.
	If you're always dealing in that domain, you would pick up a lot of stuff.
	Because the thing with persuasion is, it's not hard to learn.
	You just have to be paying attention to it and absorbing it where you can.
	But he also had, this is a weird little tidbit, his pastor when he was a kid, his family pastor for the church they went to, was Norman Vincent Peale.
	Funny, I remember that vaguely, yes.
	Yeah.
	And Norman Vincent Peale was one of the most famous American authors, and he wrote The Power of Positive Thinking.
	Right.
	And probably is the person most responsible for popularizing the idea that the way you're thinking about your situation can have a huge influence on your success.
	So if you think right, you're going to get better results than if you're thinking wrong.
	And we just watched Trump think his way into the presidency, in a sense.
	I mean, the optimism, the positive thinking, the inability to be swayed by any problem, it seemed like he was just completely unaffected, at least in public, by things that would have killed most people.
	And so there's that influence.
	But when you see the technique, you see how often he uses visual imagery.
	You see how often when it's available, he'll use fear...
	Persuasion, you know, the terrorists are coming to get you, there's crime coming across the border, etc.
	And you see him talking past the sail, which is one of his most common tricks.
	So if you're talking about how the wall will be built...
	And how it will be funded and those things.
	You're already talking past the decision of, is there going to be a wall?
	So he does this in a lot of topics.
	He'll make you engage on the details of the thing before you've decided there will be a thing.
	And that's a classic persuasion technique.
	And you don't see other people doing it as consistently as he does.
	You don't see them use visual stuff.
	You don't see him pick emotional topics.
	He knows where the emotion is.
	And he can read a crowd like nobody.
	His presentations are...
	I don't know how many of the speeches you've watched.
	A few, yeah.
	I've probably watched three.
	From the early ones, which he couldn't carry an hour.
	He could do about 35 minutes of material, and then he would start to repeat himself.
	Then when he got to the hour, he was really on a roll, and his speeches, I think, are phenomenal.
	He really controls the audience, and he gets a lot of people.
	As you know, you were a public speaker.
	The bigger audience is the better audience.
	The small audience is hard.
	You can't speak to six people.
	They're not going to laugh.
	They're not going to do anything.
	But you've got 10,000 people, or 20 or 30 in his case, you can have a lot of fun.
	Yeah, I think history will record that he's not everybody's cup of tea, so you sort of a love him or hate him thing.
	But in terms of his public speaking, best ever.
	Well, it depends on your definition of best ever.
	I think most effective.
	Yes, being able to hold the crowd, entertain them, make them want to come back, make them talk about it, make people focus on the topics he wants you to focus on, control the headlines for a week.
	It's all there.
	He's got some...
	I've only read this once.
	I don't know the exact name of it, but he has a personality disorder of some sort that makes him only need like three to four hours sleep a night.
	That's a personality disorder?
	Well, apparently it is, by today's standards.
	And...
	A lot of people would say it's an advantage.
	But he's a very interesting character, I have to agree.
	And people, have you found that because you look like you're a, and I'll use the term again, Trump apologist, that you've lost any business whatsoever?
	Oh, sure.
	Yeah, probably 40% of my income evaporated and 75% of my social circle.
	Yeah, I'm quite an outcast.
	And I don't do public speaking anymore because it's too dangerous.
	You know, I wouldn't feel comfortable if there was any publicity and you put me in front of a big crowd right now because it only takes one person to say, that guy said something good about the president's Persuasion skills.
	He must die.
	So I don't think it's safe to be in public when people like you are branding me a Trump apologist.
	It's not me.
	I will say this.
	When I first met you, you did make some assertion that you wanted to become a public speaker because you thought that was just some really cool goal.
	I ran into you on the road at the same speaking event.
	I was a speaker and you were a speaker at some event.
	I don't know if you remember this, but I do.
	Because you were grousing.
	Me?
	Grousing?
	Impossible.
	It was unbelievable.
	And you had run into the same phenomenon that I had run into, which is part of actually what you discuss in the cartoon, more or less, which is the boneheads that put together these events, and then they hire you to be a speaker, and then you say something, you do something, and you insulted the CEO somehow by making some offhanded remark.
	Did I do that that day?
	I think so.
	Well, apparently they've never seen Dilbert if they hired me and didn't expect me to insult their CEO indirectly or directly.
	I thought it was getting to the point where you stopped doing public speaking at that point.
	No, I've sort of pulled back from it a few times just because I was busy with other stuff.
	But at the moment, and then I had to stop when I lost my voice for a few years.
	But at the moment, it's just not safe.
	Yeah.
	Huh.
	I was wondering if that was going to affect you at all.
	It affected our podcast by, I think, about 40%, 30 to 40 maybe in terms of fall off.
	People just don't want to listen anymore.
	They're too happy being kind of hypnotized by mania.
	Can you cook?
	I can bluff my way through some things.
	It's not my favorite thing to do.
	What happened to your investments in the restaurants?
	Well, I can't tell you the real story because there are a variety of legal problems that you end up running into if you own a restaurant and you have deep pockets.
	Meaning that unscrupulous people will find reasons to go after you that you've never even heard of.
	And I mean literally...
	You've never even heard of them.
	And, you know, I'm pretty worldly.
	You know, I've been involved in lots of businesses.
	And as I said, I've got an MBA, worked at big companies.
	I know a lot of stuff.
	I've heard of a lot of stuff.
	But the problems that I had legally are things I had never heard of.
	And I can't tell you because you make settlements and you agree not to talk about them, right?
	But I had to settle a few and it looked like there was going to be no end to it.
	Like literally, there would just be no end to it.
	The additional ones that could come.
	And I made a business decision to get out.
	Now, the first restaurant...
	It was wildly popular.
	We built the second one at the peak of the market.
	Literally, I signed the lease the day the Twin Towers were coming down.
	It was 9-11.
	Timing.
	Yeah, timing.
	And when that happened, the economy fell apart and the place for the second restaurant was in a place that big companies had agreed to move into.
	It was just going to be a gold mine.
	It was the greatest location and they all pulled down.
	They all pulled down because of the economy.
	Well, that was a bad era.
	I mean, you first had a dot-com crash, and then you had the Y2K fiasco, and then as things were straightening out, boom, you have the Twin Towers.
	It was just a one-two-three punch.
	So I signed the lease at the literal top of the market.
	I got the most expensive lease you could ever possibly get at the same time that the economy went to its lowest point in a long time.
	You became a vegan?
	Yes.
	No, a vegetarian.
	I'm a pescatarian at the moment.
	A fish eater.
	Yeah, I'll eat a fish if I have to.
	I don't love it, but it's good for me.
	Have you used a vegan character in your cartoon ever?
	I feel like I have.
	I know I had a vegetarian character at least once, based on me.
	I don't know if I've had a vegan.
	I don't remember.
	Opportunity.
	I'll work that in.
	You did a thing, you were promoting this thing called the Blight Authority.
	Yes.
	Which is one of your pet projects.
	Yeah, so Bill Pulte, he's the founder and primary mover of this.
	And blight, spelled B-L-I-G-H-T, just refers to it generally, in this context anyway, an urban area where it's all run down and it's just crime and abandoned buildings and stuff.
	And so what Bill does is he finds funding to go in and just clear it out and just, you know, bulldoze it and wreck it and bring it down to dirt.
	So that the crime goes away, but then there's also an opportunity to build something there.
	And so where I'm helping the most is helping him try to get the word out that there's this opportunity, there's this land available, there can be more of it because there's lots more blight that can be knocked down.
	And I'm helping him just publicize the possibilities.
	So the website, blightauthority.com, has an ideas and forum section where people are suggesting ideas and funding and things that could be done with those areas.
	And you'll see more about that.
	We're going to do a lot more talking about that.
	Did you get your degree in engineering?
	No, but I played an engineer at Pacific Belt because they ran out of engineers.
	That's a true story.
	They literally had a hiring freeze.
	They needed engineers for the project I ended up working on, something called ISDN for those people old enough to remember that.
	I had a line.
	And my boss just said, well, you're not an engineer, but can you connect computers to equipment with cables and figure out the software?
	And I was like, well, probably if I have help.
	So I worked in a technology lab, the most incompetent employee who ever worked in a laboratory.
	But I had a lot of help.
	So the smart people I worked with covered for me.
	Were you funny at school?
	Oh, maybe only in my own opinion.
	I did doodles of my teachers and my fellow students that were, of course, whatever is the obscene version of the 12-year-old doodle.
	Most of them were obscene in some way or another.
	Were you a good student, do you think?
	Did you get high grades, A's, B's, C's?
	What colleges did you go to?
	I was a valedictorian.
	Oh, you gave a speech?
	I did.
	And that sounds more impressive than it really is.
	You have to understand there were only 40 people in my graduating class.
	Still one out of 40.
	Yeah, one out of 40.
	Then I went to Hartwick College for my undergraduate degree in economics, and then later when I was working, I went at night and had my company pay for it, and I got my MBA at Berkeley.
	I'm going to...
	I want to get some opinions from you.
	I'm going to go down a list and name somebody, and then you're just going to say if you have anything to say about them.
	People.
	Yeah.
	People.
	And maybe a couple of things, too.
	Can I slander them?
	Is that okay?
	Yeah, of course.
	It's fine.
	It's a podcast.
	Yeah, why wouldn't I? Pence.
	Pence.
	An ideal vice president.
	I've said in my book, Win Bigly, I talk about how Pence was an inspired choice because you want a vice president that is solid.
	You know, he's got the resume, so he looks like he could take over if he need it.
	But he's the boring version of the number one candidate.
	And if you stand Pence next to Trump, Trump is like the full-color multimedia circus, and Pence is like whatever you have left after you take all the interesting things away from Trump.
	You know, if you started with Trump and subtracted everything that makes him interesting, you'd have Pence.
	So he's a perfect choice as the emergency spare, the backup.
	You think he could win if he ran for president and Trump wasn't running?
	No.
	No, I don't.
	He just doesn't have the personality for it.
	Because if you look at what Trump had to do to break through the field, I mean, it was his outrageousness, his willingness to take positions that were further than other people were talking about.
	Those are all the things that help him.
	It also helped him get about $1 to $2 billion worth of media attention, which they're still irked about, but they keep continuing this process of giving him media attention.
	He found the weakness in the model, which is if it's interesting, they can't not cover it.
	So you just make sure he's the most interesting story.
	I think they could have covered Bernie more.
	I mean, because he was kind of interesting.
	Okay, another name.
	Kellyanne Conway.
	Well, I don't know her.
	By the way, I didn't meet the president.
	He did invite me in.
	Oh, yes, you did.
	He did invite me into the Oval Office a few weeks ago.
	What was the point of that?
	What was he...
	You know, he actually didn't say, except I guess my book, Win Bigley, was popular among people at the White House.
	And I think it was just August and Congress was in recess and he was just sort of working supporters.
	You know, he was just solidifying his base, if you will, especially the people who would talk about him and write about him.
	And, but I don't know Kellyanne Conway except what I watch on television.
	But I did feel, I remember when Hillary lost, and people were so sad that, you know, hey, we could have had a woman president.
	And I was thinking...
	Well, what about, you know, Kellyanne didn't run for president, but she just, you know, helped the president get elected.
	Like, why are we ignoring that?
	So in terms of her skill level, very high.
	And she's stuck it out with the president.
	So loyalty level looks very high.
	So I only know what I see on TV, but I like what I see.
	Back to the president meeting.
	Do you think he read your book, Bigley?
	Because usually people, if they read your book, they have some reference they'll make.
	He was familiar with the content enough that I knew that he knew what I was writing about.
	That's all I know for sure.
	Did you have fun?
	Did you get a free lunch?
	Did you get a lunch?
	We didn't have lunch.
	Food?
	It was probably the experience I'll never be able to top.
	In terms of the most interesting...
	Did you take the matchbooks home?
	They had these matchbooks you could take home.
	Oh yeah, I was just loading my pockets with everything that wasn't...
	No, I didn't take anything.
	I didn't record it on my secret phone in my pocket or anything.
	Actually, I didn't have a phone with me.
	And they take your phone away.
	If you're a visitor, you don't get to bring a phone into the phone.
	Well, they don't want anything you record competing with what the CIA is recording for with all the bugs in the room.
	Right.
	So, yeah, it was just the most interesting...
	He's very engaging, very charismatic, and just talking to him for a few minutes was like a life experience.
	Huh.
	Well, it sounds like fun.
	What do you think of another one?
	Another name?
	Rachel Maddow.
	Rachel Maddow is insanely smart.
	And talented and really good at what she does.
	Now, if you don't like that political bent, then, you know, you want her, you know, off the air and her critics will howl.
	So I don't agree with her politics or her point of view on a lot of things, but you can't deny the talent.
	The talent is extraordinary.
	Yeah, she was, she's done the most with anyone over there.
	Once that other, Obermann left.
	What about MSNBC in general?
	They seem to me like the version of CNN that went too far.
	Like, whenever you see something on CNN that seems like, well, they're...
	They're taking that opinion a little too far.
	Well, you know, that feels a little biased.
	And then you turn on MSNBC and you go, holy hell, what is this?
	What fresh hell is this?
	So they just seem like the exaggerated version of CNN. Jerry Brown.
	I really don't follow local or California politics.
	He's been the governor most of your life.
	Yeah, and I haven't followed it at all.
	That's too bad.
	So I guess I have, yeah, I can't form a coherent opinion of him.
	Here's a generality.
	What do you think of Silicon Valley billionaires?
	Well, one of the weird aspects of my job, and I think you would say the same, is you end up meeting a lot of billionaires.
	I was thinking the other day, how many billionaires do I know personally?
	It was like 20 billionaires.
	If I wanted to, I could get a hold of them with an email.
	And it's hard to meet a billionaire who isn't interesting.
	That's the first thing.
	And I don't know if it's because I'm aware they're billionaires or whatever made them a billionaire is what also makes them interesting.
	But you talk personally and privately to a billionaire and you walk away thinking, I think I learned something almost every time.
	I think you might be right.
	I never thought of them as being interesting.
	I think, yeah, they are interesting, almost every one of them.
	Many of them are very focused, which is the thing that you see with a couple of these guys.
	I mean, Bill Gates, for example, is the most focused guy.
	He's got supposedly a form of autism that makes him that way.
	You must have the good one.
	Yes, it's considered the good one.
	I'll give you one example.
	Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce.
	So I did give, before I lost my voice, I gave a talk there.
	And I hung out for maybe half an hour because we were killing time before the event started.
	And I got to chat with him at some depth privately.
	And I'll tell you, I've never met anybody like him.
	Like, he's just not like other people.
	And I'm going to...
	Explain that I mean that in a good way.
	He seems to be operating on this whole other level of...
	He uses the word intention.
	And, you know, without getting too woo-woo about it, he seems to have just a superior grasp of how it all works.
	And when I say how it all works, I mean how it all works.
	He just seems to be operating on a different level.
	That's what I took from that.
	And so this interesting exchange...
	I probably shouldn't talk about it, but since it makes him look good, I will anyway.
	Where one of his top lieutenants was talking about a slideshow.
	He goes, hey, I've got this slideshow we're going to show.
	And he looks at it, Mark Benioff, and he looks at the first page and he goes, you know, put something on the first page here about, you know, our philanthropic, you know, that 1% thing where they give away 1% of their profits and try to spend 1% of their time on philanthropic things, charitable things.
	He says, put that on the first page.
	And his lieutenant pushes back.
	He's like, well, you know, I've got that.
	It's in the body of the thing.
	He goes, no, move it up to the first page.
	And then the lieutenant pushes back again.
	And he goes, no, move it to the first page.
	And he pushed on it again.
	And he just looked at it, it was like, first page.
	It was like, he was so clear on what mattered, right?
	And representing the company with that first really mattered.
	Those kind of guys which are CEOs like, and there's a lot of them, and a lot of them aren't billionaires, they still have these characteristics.
	They're the guys who are really kind of in meta-quality control.
	They're the ones who...
	I felt this way when they fired John Lasseter from Pixar, who was the creative genius, and he was fired for hugging too much.
	It was part of the Me Too movement.
	And I think that...
	He was the guy who was saying, no, no, no, put it on the front page.
	That's the same kind of a guy.
	I think they're in all office environments, you know, and when you lose that guy, whether he's the CEO, usually they are, the company just kind of just falls apart.
	Yeah, and just to be clear, it wasn't about the quality of the slide deck.
	He wasn't talking about that.
	It was as much about training this lieutenant what's important and how to put it forward.
	Okay, another one.
	Why do you think the Silicon Valley billionaires are all Democrats?
	Well, they're not all Democrats, but you got your people who are willing to tell you about their politics and you got your people who may be under the radar.
	There are a few people there who don't like to talk about anything because they know the majority are Democrats, which still begs the question, why do you think there's so many Democrats in a place where there's so much wealth?
	It's not supposed to add up that way.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I think you'd have to get inside their heads to know that.
	I don't know what the filtering mechanism is that got us to that point.
	Good question.
	I don't know.
	What's your favorite TV show?
	Do you watch much TV? Favorite TV show?
	Really the only one I record at this point is The Five on Fox News and also the Greg Gottfeld show.
	In part because I know Greg, but The Five is probably the best.
	The best produced show with the best characters and the most consistently entertaining.
	Really?
	Because the model that they built of these engaging characters sort of teasing each other and talking about the news is just the best thing on TV. Huh.
	Well, that's a shocker to me.
	Didn't see that coming, did you?
	No, I sure did not.
	I mean, I like my Game of Thrones, but they're not on now, so...
	What about books?
	What do you like to read?
	Besides persuasion books?
	I hate to say it, but I don't read a lot of books.
	There have been years I've written more books than I've read, and that's literally true.
	Part of it is that you can glean the essence of most books pretty quickly, you know, from other sources.
	But part of it is also that I don't enjoy fiction.
	So pure fiction is...
	And I can now give you the real reason for that.
	So for years I couldn't tell people the real reason I didn't like fiction.
	There's a lot of people that don't like fiction, so let's start with that.
	Well, that's good to know.
	I'm not alone.
	If you hear my dog running around the background there, it's a spare noise.
	The things that I can imagine, just by closing my eyes, because I am a professional creative, I believe that every human capability has this big range, you know, where most people are average and some people are terrible and some people are great.
	So in the same way that I'm terrible at music, let's say, I have no musical ear whatsoever, my Ability to imagine is probably hard to know for sure, but probably extraordinary, just based on the volume of new ideas I create in any moment.
	And I'm a very visual imaginer.
	And so I can create my own fiction in my head just by closing my eyes, and it's better and more interesting and more tuned to me than a book.
	And books are work, and closing my eyes is not.
	And I get exactly what I want anytime I want.
	Now, I feel sorry for anybody who can't sort of build an entire story in their head instantly, but I can.
	You started with the ISDN crowd, but you were kind of a techie, or do you think that you never were a techie?
	I was a programmer at a very low level.
	In other words, I did it professionally, but when computers...
	What were you programming in?
	Usually just, well, basic and doing easy things for the DEC, you know, the VAX back in the day.
	So programming at BASIC was just for internal financial reports and easy stuff.
	And I built a few utility programs that got used.
	And I built some video games in my own time, actual graphic video games.
	But it took me so long to build one that the entire industry had moved so far in the six months it would take me to build one that it no longer looked like a game anybody would ever buy.
	So I couldn't keep up with the companies that were doing it.
	So I was technical that way, but I think I'm more...
	I'm more about the talent stack, which I talk about.
	The idea of building lots of different talents and stacking them until you have something that's unique, even if you're not great at any of those things.
	So I'm certainly not great or even really good at anything in technology, but I'm pretty comfortable around it.
	When you came, you saw me working with a bunch of new equipment, put together a new studio set up for myself, and I like that stuff.
	Yeah, so you have kept up.
	But you seem to be a Mac head.
	At the moment, I've gone back and forth.
	For most of my career, I was a double-platform guy because you just always needed the other one.
	If you're doing a lot of licensing and working with people around the world, you can't have one platform.
	But at the moment, the Mac pretty much gives me everything I need, so I abandoned Windows.
	And you use the iPhone exclusively.
	Yeah, I like the whole...
	I want to stop you there because you already credited Google with pretty much saving your life when it came to the research on this dysphonia.
	Yeah.
	And now you end up turning your back on them and going with an iPhone.
	Well, Apple does a real good job of making all my devices work together somewhat seamlessly.
	Google also does, but just a little less user interface love.
	So that makes a big difference to me.
	What kind of car do you drive?
	I've got a 2011 X5 BMW and SUV. Ah, and that's it?
	You don't have a second car?
	Why do I need two cars?
	It's just me.
	You get bored.
	Yeah, I don't like cars.
	I'm not a car guy.
	Oh.
	So if you go out to dinner, what level of restaurant do you go to?
	Do you go to a high-end place, low-end place, hamburger place?
	What do you like?
	Are you gourmet?
	Do you collect wine?
	I don't drink at all.
	And when I did, I didn't drink wine.
	I'm not an alcoholic.
	I know you're thinking that.
	You're all thinking that right now, aren't you?
	Did he stop because he's an alcoholic?
	No.
	I developed some kind of weird reaction to it, and then I just stopped and realized, hey, I don't need this.
	I feel better if I just never have a drink.
	I'm just held here.
	It would save money if you went to high-end restaurants, I can tell you that.
	So, the answer to your question is, my girlfriend Christina and I have tried a bunch of, you know, top restaurants just for the experience of it, and they weren't really that good, I gotta say.
	They weren't better than a mid-level restaurant.
	I don't know why people go to these top Michelin star restaurants.
	I won't name names.
	Why not?
	They were not impressive.
	But I will tell you that the French Laundry was impressive.
	That just knocked my socks off.
	But other than that, no.
	I like a good Italian tablecloth restaurant, and I'm happy.
	So I went through a whole couple of sheets here, and I hate to do this, but I'm going to do it anyway, because I had this theory about interviewing that I was working on, and it was mainly to preclude what I'm going to ask next, which is, what should I have asked you that I didn't ask?
	Well...
	You haven't asked me about my startup, which...
	Ah, well, let's do that.
	So the startup, the name of the company is WenHub.
	WenHub, all one word.
	And the app we're focusing on right now is called Interface by WenHub.
	And if you can imagine, it's like a Tinder for experts, meaning that it's people who are online and available right now for a video call.
	And it can be any topic.
	So anybody can sign up for an expert.
	Anybody can use it to make a connection.
	It's a dating app?
	No, it's not a dating app.
	Oh, it's for experts.
	It's for anybody who wants to charge for their time on a video call.
	So it could be a consultant, it could be an expert on some technology, but it could also be a psychologist.
	It could be just somebody who's visiting your grandmother who needs some medical care and maybe the kids want to call in and the professional just takes a call and says, yeah, I'm checking on your grandmother.
	She's taking her pills.
	It could be any kind of medical, financial, any realm.
	It could be just somebody who wants to spend time with somebody while they're eating because they're lonely.
	Somebody might just say, I just need somebody to talk to.
	And anybody can set their price, and the experts will be determined by ratings, just like any other service.
	You'll get a star rating from the people who use you.
	And we think it could change everything from education to healthcare to, you know, could help people with PTSD if they have somebody to talk to.
	It could reduce suicide because you've got somebody to talk to.
	It could be quite transformative.
	Who's we?
	We is the team.
	And whose idea was this to begin with?
	Are you just a money guy?
	So I'm more than the money guy, and it's the third product that the same team has developed.
	So we've done our pivoting.
	This specific idea was Nick Caliani, who's our CTO and co-founder.
	And he initially had the idea and we refined it from there.
	But I get pretty involved in the look and the feel and the business end of it.
	When did this begin?
	I think we're about three years into it.
	The new product is only just this week.
	Is it out?
	Yeah, it's been in stores.
	The original version was crypto only.
	In other words, we had to pay in our own crypto.
	It was an ICO. It still is an ICO, by the way.
	And now we're on an exchange or two, and we can take credit cards now.
	What's the crypto called?
	It's the WEN, W-H-E-N, and LA token, the exchange.
	You can buy that now.
	Are you a fan of crypto?
	A fan is probably too strong a word.
	I think the blockchain is probably here to stay or whatever it evolves to, but I'm no blockchain expert.
	And I think it has its use.
	We'll see.
	The battle between government control and people who want to be free of government control, we'll see who wins.
	It'll be interesting.
	The government always wins.
	It feels like that's how it's going to go, yeah.
	I don't see any other alternative.
	Because otherwise you have chaos.
	Not that I'm rooting for the government.
	Anyway, I think that'll do it.
	I think we've got everything covered, unless you've got something else you'd want to throw in there, because it's free.
	Well...
	Free air-timing.
	We promoted a book, Bigly, and you got any new books you're working on?
	Like a cartoon book, maybe?
	Something, a new Dilbert compilation?
	So there's always a new Dilbert compilation.
	The latest one is Cubicles That Make You Envy the Dead.
	It's reprints, and the Dilbert calendar will be coming out in a few months, and there's always something I've got to buy.
	What's the Dogbert character's little devil?
	Where'd that come from?
	The Dogbert's...
	You have a devil character.
	Oh, well...
	That looks like Dogbert.
	Oh, you're thinking of Catbert.
	In the comic, Catbert is the director of human resources.
	And I made that character a cat because your human resources director doesn't care if you live or die.
	He just likes playing with you.
	Okay.
	Well, on that note, we'll end.
	I want to thank you for letting me interview you.
	Well, thanks for coming all the way out here, and it was fun.
	It was great catching up.
	We'll talk again.
	I'm going to show myself old by donating to No Agenda.
	Imagine all the people who could do that.
	Oh, yeah, that'd be fab.
	Yeah, I'll know a gender in the morning.
	Wow.
	Well, no, no, stop.
	No, no, stop.
	Take a bow.
	Take a bow.
	Oh, yeah.
	Take a bow.
	Wow!
	That was fantastic.
	I mean, there's stuff in there that he is...
	I've never heard him talk about that stuff.
	That's because, as far as I know, he never has.
	A couple of things I think he doesn't even like to talk about, but he was very relaxed and he was very amenable to chatting about everything.
	Well, I like knowing that we both have Tourette's.
	That makes me feel very comfortable and very good about myself and my friend Scott, my brother from another mother, my shaken brother from another mother.
	Yeah, as he said in there, he says, now I can use it the way you do as an excuse to cuss.
	I do not use it.
	I cuss on purpose and you say it's the Tourette's just to try and...
	You're the one that says it's Tourette's, but beside the point, we don't have a donation segment because this has been taped in advance, so we want to mention everybody who helped us out on this particular show.
	That your donations will be moved to the next show and you'll be credited then on an extra long segment on Thursday.
	Yes.
	And I love that we're just keeping our streak going.
	This seems to be the new way for us.
	We've done different things in the past when we took a day off.
	Like, wow, we took a day off.
	And I think this is good.
	This is another side of us, of the show.
	Which I think is very complimentary.
	And I like the people you chose.
	Let me just remind everybody that to support our show and this work that goes on, please remember us at dvorak.org.
	Yes.
	Exactly.
	Let's go to the interview with Dane.
	Hey, John.
	Hey, Dane.
	Activating so much network.
	You have to be here.
	We have, you know, still half the town, not all the town, but half the town is Poles.
	And there's certainly a lot of interest in it.
	There's a lot of interest in it.
	Consumers want it.
	So let's start with discussing what you guys are doing at Sonic in terms of rolling out this fiber.
	And is Fiber to the Home?
	Yeah, we're building primarily Fiber to the Home networks.
	We also do connections to schools networks.
	And libraries, municipalities, and smart city and traffic signal applications, and we build two cell towers.
	But those are all kind of the applications layered on top of the base foundation, which is the Fiber to the Home network.
	Now, just around the time you guys announce this, what is the monthly charge for this Fiber to the Home?
	So the Fiber to the Home service is $40 a month for the first year.
	After that introductory time, it goes up by 10, as the month-to-month rate is 50 currently.
	And this is gigabit symmetric, so 1,000 megabits down and up to the home, along with a home telephone line with all of the voice features, like caller ID and voicemail.
	We've even integrated robocall blocking, which is a real annoyance.
	An unlimited nationwide calling and unlimited calling to fixed lines in 66 countries.
	So if you have business or relatives in England, South Africa, Japan, etc., your calls to those countries are no charge as well.
	I think a really innovative product and price point.
	Compared to everything else, and I don't mind you going on and on about it, because one of the purposes of a conversation like this is to inform people that this sort of deal, I'm assuming you're not losing your butt on this when it's finally, when all is said and done, and you cost it out over time, or you wouldn't be doing it at all.
	Yeah, I mean, what's exciting for me about The business is that the delivery of internet and of telephone service, the costs of those have really declined substantially, although consumption, particularly of internet, is climbing.
	But most consumers, you're moving into a new place, you bought a house, you're renting a new apartment, and you kind of have this...
	Moment where you go, oh shoot, I've got to call the cable company and get my internet.
	And then they railroad you into a big bundle of a bunch of TV, linear conventional TV offerings.
	And you end up spending, maybe it's $70, $80, $100 the first year.
	But in the long run, I think the average household on...
	Internet, telecom, TV, they're spending over $200.
	Set-top box rentals, regional sports networks, local broadcast fees.
	This is really an archaic way to do this.
	We see a really interesting and disruptive opportunity.
	People want really fast internet.
	No nonsense.
	A couple of companies around the country, and in Canada, for example, Two Cows has been rolling out a, which is usually a very old internet company that was involved with Shareware and the downloads.
	And they had a stock, I acquired some of their stock by accident when it was $3.
	It was accidentally $3.
	Well, it was accidental because I had a company that was sold to somebody else and all of a sudden I have these shares of stock.
	You know how it goes.
	And so it skyrocketed to about $60.
	Oh, and I couldn't figure out why.
	They were selling, I guess, ISP web addresses.
	Yeah, domain registry.
	Domain registry, right.
	But when they started skyrocketing is when they started putting in fiber.
	They started putting in fiber, and I think it's fiber to the home.
	It's the same thing.
	Yep.
	So I have to assume there's a lot of potential here.
	Now, before I get into the details of the technology...
	I want to ask about the wiring itself.
	In Albany and Berkeley, and I guess you're putting some in San Francisco, in the neighborhoods where you're putting this, there's two or three things I've noticed.
	One, you have a lot of trucks, and the trucks are very well branded, I might add.
	I've seen examples of that not being the case with other companies.
	So on the side of all the trucks you have, it has the Sonic logo and the price.
	Yep.
	It's actually quite funny.
	It's like a billboard.
	It is.
	And so they're floating around and they're stringing because we have telephone poles around most of this area.
	There's some underground, but most of it's telephone poles.
	Yes.
	And there's like now there's so much stuff hanging from these poles.
	And when you guys are stringing, it looks heavy.
	So I'm going to ask, you're stringing up the place.
	Do you have to pay a fee to the pole companies?
	What kind of wire is this?
	Is it a big, heavy glass cable with a bunch of fibers in it?
	Is it plastic?
	What?
	Yeah, so you touched on a lot of areas there, and let me try and dive into some of that stuff.
	We are building mostly in residential locations where the utilities are aerial, that is overhead on wood utility poles.
	And if you look at those poles, traditionally they've hosted, you know, electricity up at the top.
	And then kind of in the middle of the pole, telecommunications, you know, big, old, heavy copper telephone wires.
	And then typically about a foot above that, slightly smaller coaxial cable, you know, copper television cable wires.
	amplifiers taps all the components of the coax television network and And those two networks have then been adapted to deliver, in addition to phone and TV, they've been adapted to deliver internet as well.
	Now, what we're building is an all-new, all-optical end-to-end network.
	So this is a dielectric cable, so it's plastic and glass.
	It's smaller diameter and lighter weight than the copper infrastructure, the metal infrastructure that's up there.
	But it starts with a metal, what's called a messenger cable.
	So there's a stainless steel cable that runs from pole to pole.
	And then the fiber cables themselves are lashed to that with a lashing wire.
	And then all of that is spliced up at convergence points, cabinets where we split the light to the different homes in each neighborhood.
	And then adjacent to your home, On the pole closest to your home, there'll be a little terminal that comes off with a set of plugs out the bottom of it.
	And those then are equipped with a drop cable that comes to your house.
	Now, one of the complaints we have gotten has been that this infrastructure is ugly.
	And I think what's happening is it sort of has been ignored for a long time.
	And if you look up there, there is a lot of pre-existing telephone and cable infrastructure.
	And then we come along and put up A new cable, maybe there's only one of them, and maybe it's smaller diameter than what's already up there, but it draws the attention to the fact that, you know, there's more cables going up there.
	And so it does create some practical considerations about, you know, how many times can this be done?
	How much infrastructure can we put up there without this getting too unsightly?
	Now AT&T, well, the poles are unsightly anyway, but they're also kind of pleasant because you know that if somebody runs into one, it's not like these underground cables when they break or something bad happens.
	It could take days to get them fixed.
	Yeah, maintenance is easier.
	There's pros and cons.
	Fixing things that break is faster.
	But aerial cables are more exposed to damage.
	You know, fires.
	Sometimes the transformers on the poles will light on fire.
	I had one blow up.
	Yeah, that happens.
	And then when they blow up, all the oil that's in the transformer runs down the pole.
	That oil ignites and the pole incinerates.
	We've seen electrical fires from street lights on poles, damaged cables, and we have issues with squirrels.
	I have Comcast.
	I always have two systems because of what I do.
	I have to.
	And I was having nothing but trouble.
	In fact, the reason I went to Sonic in the first place was because the Comcast line was really flaky.
	And it took about a year.
	Until the right guy came out and he found that the cable had been attacked by a squirrel.
	Yep.
	It's interesting because copper networks, when you have issues with rodents in the ground, squirrels up in the air, there's water incursion.
	And the problem is that the issues can really be transitory and insidious.
	And really hard to troubleshoot.
	And so you end up with experiences like yours.
	With fiber, it's pretty much either fine or it's broken.
	And there's no concept of sort of the attenuation that's caused by water on a metallic signaling system.
	And so fiber has much higher reliability and better failure modes that lead to...
	One of the things that we see in our In our customer service center is customers that are on copper technologies like VDSL and ADSL 2 Plus and POTS Voice, they'll call technical support much more frequently because there's issues with those copper wires and we have to dispatch much more frequently.
	With fiber, it's way more reliable.
	So what you'll find, you're getting the fiber service installed, the cable will become your backup and you'll find That the fiber is so reliable, you shouldn't need to utilize the cable.
	And I just saw a tweet from one of our customers, and he said he posted some stats out of his home network where he monitors latency and DNS performance.
	And he says, hey, can you see what day I switched to sonic?
	And it's got this sort of widely variable latency on his commercial cable connection at home.
	And then a move to sonic fiber, and it's just this rock-solid low-latency thing.
	And so you'll enjoy the fiber connection.
	It's really the right technology for broadband access.
	My partner at the No Agenda show, Adam Curry, has fiber.
	I think it's AT&T's or Verizon.
	I don't know who it is.
	It's in Austin, Texas.
	Probably AT&T or Google.
	Yes.
	It wasn't Google.
	The Google guys were flaky, and Google seems to be losing interest.
	You might want to comment on that.
	But we were having trouble, and it turned out that he was losing packets.
	And he's got a very high-speed Internet.
	And he had to disable...
	It turns out that we looked up and did a lot of research, and it turns out that he would disable IPv6.
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know what would be wrong with the IPv6.
	We have seen in some cases, you know, IPv6 is unfortunately, I mean, it's not new, but it's new from an implementation perspective for many vendors.
	And, you know, so sometimes you'll see IPv6 implementation issues in a router, in a Wi-Fi access point, or even in a client device, workstation, an Ethernet interface.
	And so IPv6 kind of brings out some...
	You know, it shouldn't be new.
	It's been a long time.
	But sometimes it brings out bugs that expose themselves because of its sort of newness.
	And then the other area where you will experience issues is in Wi-Fi.
	So you get this great connection to the house.
	But then if your Wi-Fi is poor, if you don't have a good access point and a router configuration, then the Wi-Fi becomes the weak link.
	What's neat for me is, in the past...
	The wide area network, the uplink to the internet, was always the slowest connection.
	You think back to the days of dial-up, and computers were mighty slow back then, but they were way faster than these ultra-slow dial-up connections we had.
	Then computers got faster, DSL came along, cable came along, but until you get to gigabit ethernet-connected internet at full gigabit speeds, the The internet connection was always the bottleneck, and the local area network, whether it was the ethernet or the wifi, was generally not a problem.
	Well, now we deliver a gigabit symmetric to the house, and people are saying, well, why is it going 150 megabits on this computer?
	And it turns out they're using a USB 2.0 ethernet dongle.
	Or why is it going only 300 megabits over here?
	Well, you've got a wifi capacity issue, or you've reached the capacity.
	It's possible with that Wi-Fi spectrum.
	So interesting new problems.
	I'm happy that the wide area network and the technology, the fiber and the protocols in GPON and Ethernet that we run over it are generally not the bottleneck anymore, and that's transformative.
	Well, I will say a couple of things on your behalf, even though for the most part I'd say 90% of the people listening to this conversation can't get Sonic in other parts of the country.
	But you guys actually have a real customer service operation where if I call, I usually get some guy who's not only helpful, but very knowledgeable.
	So I'm assuming these guys aren't in India.
	No, we do everything here in the San Francisco Bay Area.
	So our headquarters are in the North Bay, all of our call center, customer service, dispatch, fleet, yard, field force, everything is local folks.
	And I think one of the things that is very infuriating, particularly to those of us that are a little bit more technically minded, is when you call for customer service and you reach somebody who knows very little, they've had little training, And they're equipped primarily with a script.
	And somebody sat down and figured out that these are the top ten reasons for problems, so we're going to make everybody go through this.
	But it's frustrating.
	It's infuriating.
	And from our perspective, we don't equip our staff with scripts.
	We give them a lot of training in the concepts of troubleshooting, listening to what the customer has already tried.
	And hearing the customer's theories about what might be wrong, because often they know.
	And then beginning to isolate the problem.
	Well, how do we split this problem in half and figure out, well, is the problem in your Wi-Fi or is the problem in your router?
	Is the problem in your router or is it in the connection to the Internet?
	Where do these problems exist?
	Is it a site you're trying to access?
	Is it a protocol?
	You've got issues with things that are over IPv6 and not IPv4.
	And so investing in...
	Kind, patient, articulate people who will just hear out the consumer and collaborate with them to find a solution is really a refreshing experience.
	I had a customer reach out to me and he said, Will you please start a credit card company?
	Take over AT&T. If you could start a transmission shop, that would be great.
	Because the customer service experience that people have Especially with companies that are providing telephone customer service, which is generally outsourced to a large call center.
	The experience is not an enjoyable one.
	And frankly, I think that these companies benefit from that.
	If you don't call because you know that the experience is going to be negative, they save the dollars that they would spend on the labor for that phone call.
	And if you instead try to solve the problem yourself, Or ask your nephew for help or something like that.
	They save a call.
	And if they create an experience that's painful, it reduces costs.
	Well, that works for them in an environment of monopoly.
	And unfortunately, when it comes to Internet access in America, I think most folks are subject to, at best, a duopoly.
	And that smells like opportunity to me, and that's exciting.
	But we need to do more than just present Faster, better, cheaper, more reliable product.
	We also pair that up with the right values around privacy and neutrality and the right values around customer service and the integrity of the organization.
	That is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of much of the way that our industry has been performing.
	Consumers really, really react well to that and love that They then tell all their neighbors, and that's good business.
	Those neighbors then sign up.
	So, you know, it's not just about the values, it's also the business.
	Around here, I don't understand why everybody on the block doesn't get the system, because it's crazy not to, unless you don't use the internet or you don't care.
	But, you know, that's just me.
	Now, back to the technical aspects of this.
	So now what kind of gear, what piece of equipment at your head end, let's call it, sits there that does this in the first place?
	Who makes it and what is it?
	Yeah, so the technology that we deploy, and I think this is pretty uniform for carriers building fiber to the home, In the US, the technology is called Gigabit Passive Optical Networking, or GPON. A PON, or Passive Optical Network, brings a dedicated fiber to your house.
	That fiber goes up the street to the head of your neighborhood and goes into a passive splitter.
	That passive splitter combines the light from your home and typically 32 others On to one fiber optic strand that goes to a central point, a cabinet or central office or data center facility.
	And in that facility, we have an optical line terminal, or OLT, which uses the GPON protocol to talk to a customer premise device, an optical network terminal.
	Think of it as a modem, basically, that outputs symmetric gigabit Ethernet.
	And sometimes this is integrated with what's called a residential gateway that'll do the routing and network address translation, firewalling, Wi-Fi, and those make up the components.
	The vendors that make this equipment, you know, there's a variety.
	We use equipment from AdTran in most of our network, but there are other vendors like Calix and Nokia and Ericsson that make equipment that does this.
	And this allows us to deliver a true symmetric gigabit to the customers.
	And it's neat technology.
	Now, when it comes into here, it goes into one of the...
	What is the device that the fiber goes into that it delivers an Ethernet cable out to me?
	Yep.
	So that's the optical network terminal.
	So think of it as the modem or converter box.
	Fiber from the...
	Pole or the street outside is dropped to the home.
	We drill a hole in the house.
	We caulk up the hole so it doesn't leak.
	We bring the fiber into the home.
	And that fiber is terminated and plugged in to the optical network terminal that outputs a gigabit Ethernet.
	And a couple of things.
	Is that the fastest?
	Is there any chance of going to 10 gigs?
	Mm-hmm.
	Well, funny you should ask.
	We just began offering for commercial customers a 2 gigabit product.
	And so it delivers multiple 1 gigabit Ethernet ports and a total of 2 gigabits of aggregate throughput.
	And so for customers that are, you know, we would think of them as, you know, Small business or home office customers.
	They can now opt for a 2 gigabit connection.
	A little more costly.
	It's $90 a month.
	But that's pretty amazing, frankly, for a couple of gigabits of connectivity.
	The technologies are evolving.
	GPON was the successor to what's called Broadband PON or BPON. BPON had basically the capacity to deliver Nominally about 20 megabits to each household on a 600 megabit shared segment.
	GPON delivers a gigabit on a 2.4 gigabit segment.
	There are upcoming technologies, XGSPON and NGPON2, which can deliver from 10 gigabits to 40 gigabits to the premise.
	And these will be adopted first to serve businesses that have greater than 1 gigabit needs.
	And then as the economies of scale ramp and the equipment becomes more cost-effective, you'll see those technologies come into residential deployment.
	Now, what's great is that we change the optical line terminal in the cabinet or central office and we change the optical network terminal, the equipment in the home, but the fiber network itself, which is the most expensive part by far...
	You mean the wire?
	...is...
	Yes, yes.
	The fiber cables that we're placing out on poles are, I hesitate to say future-proof, but they are future-proof with regards to increasing capacity over time.
	And so what you'll see is, you know, where today one gigabit is a typical consumer product for fiber networks, I think you'll see that advance to higher speeds in the future.
	And what's great is that we don't have to swap out and rewire the optical network.
	And just like the, you know, the telephone, the twisted pair telephone network, you know, it's had a life of over, you know, in specific cables over 50 years.
	The coax network, there's coax cable that's delivering gigabit with DOCSIS 3.1 today that was placed 15, 20 years ago.
	And you'll see the fiber optic network with a, you know, realistically, you know, 40, 50 year lifespan.
	You know, where cables last at least that long and we're able to simply iterate the equipments on the ends.
	Now, AT&T came along just before you guys started this program, door-to-door, with sales guys who were like bros.
	I don't know if you know this.
	And they went door-to-door around here, any place where you guys were headed, to pre-sell some something, some fiber.
	It was fiber.
	They emphasized fiber, and I said...
	Is it fiber to the home?
	No, no, no.
	It's fiber to the curb.
	What are the limitations of that?
	By the way, it wasn't anything...
	The offer was mediocre.
	I was very disappointed in the offer.
	I thought it was...
	Because I thought maybe it would be a good backup or something, but I found it not to be the case.
	Comcast is a better deal.
	Yeah, what a number of incumbent carriers are deploying is fiber to the node technology.
	Sometimes it's called fiber to the curb, but it's generally not your curb.
	It's more typically a cabinet that serves a neighborhood, and it might be anywhere from 1,000 feet to 3,000 feet from your home.
	And then VDSL2 is used over the copper pairs.
	So next generation, faster DSL is used to deliver typically anywhere from 12...
	To 75 megabits.
	Yeah, they were claiming 50 as though I was going to jump at that.
	Yeah, and that's exciting when you have...
	Believe me, if I was anyplace else, if I was out in the middle of nowhere, Kansas, I'd be very happy with that.
	Well, and what's frustrating about it is when they go door-to-door and they say, we're bringing fiber to your neighborhood.
	Would you like to sign up for this package that is...
	You know, television and internet and phone and so on and would you like mobile while you're at it?
	And the lead-in to the conversation is we're bringing fiber to your neighborhood.
	That's not fiber to the home.
	That's just moving the DSLM, the DSL access multiplexer that previously was in the central office.
	Now it's moved a bit closer.
	It's in a cabinet, you know, a sort of lawn fridge that some unfortunate person has on their front lawn.
	In order to deliver faster DSL service, but it's not transformative in the same way that fiber all the way to the premises.
	Do you have caps on the gigabits?
	No, we don't.
	We've got a reasonable use provision.
	It's a residential product, so we don't allow folks to resell it.
	It wouldn't be okay for somebody to set up a wireless ISP off their roof.
	So the intention is reasonable household use, but there's no caps on that consumption.
	If I want to put a server on it because you've got so much up speed, is that allowable?
	It isn't permitted in the way that we've set the terms up because we'd consider that a commercial use.
	And frankly, for $40 a month, we can't have...
	We can't cover costs if a lot of our customers deploy servers that output half a gigabit, gigabit, consistent peak traffic.
	And there is a reliance in the pricing when you're selling a $40 a month product.
	The assumption is people are going to use it in the way that a typical household uses it.
	They're going to stream a bunch of 4K TV. They're going to have a bunch of connected devices.
	They're going to download movies and big updates.
	They're going to upload a certain amount of video and photos and so on.
	But you kind of build your business model around assumptions about consumer behavior.
	If somebody sets up three racks in a data center in their garage and starts pushing out a lot of traffic, then that breaks the business model for us.
	So we put some reasonable use provisions in there.
	It's not a cap as to any specific amount of use.
	It's basically that you can't resell it.
	And so a commercial use like hosting or becoming a wireless ISP would...
	Basically saturate those connections and we'd look at that and go, hey, wait a minute.
	What's this fellow John doing?
	What if you take the $90 deal?
	The $90 deal is a small office home office.
	It's intended to be mostly used for downloading.
	Why don't you just make the whole system asymmetrical?
	Are people that desirous of gigabit up?
	Most people can't even suck down gigabit, let alone push it up, but it's going to go to a slower downloading environment.
	The upstream speed and moving away from an asymmetric connection is actually really, really useful in a household.
	Being able to take a bunch of videos and pictures with your cell phone at an event and then come home and your cell phone connects to the Wi-Fi and quickly uploads all that content.
	To be able to back up your home network and all of your home computers on a regular basis To a cloud backup service, having a lot of outbound capacity enables a lot of interesting uses.
	And what we see is these days with the availability of AWS and cloud services for hosting and for people starting a business, we don't see a whole lot of demand for or abuse of the outbound Do you contemplate maybe for your customers having a cloud-based backup program somewhere?
	Before you go on, though, because you do have, I know with your former system...
	I have not fully utilized it, but every once in a while I play around with it.
	And I'm not that interested in putting up a server because it's actually a lot of work.
	But you do have a website capability at the home office where I can have a domain put there and I can serve pages and do some miscellaneous chores from sonic.net.
	Yeah, and one of our...
	You know, one of the things that we've pursued is to try to, you know, how can we add more value to what we're delivering?
	And so every customer gets a domain name.
	So we cover the registration for the first year.
	They get hosting.
	They get a whole bunch of email boxes.
	We provide everybody with an electronic fax line.
	So there's like a ridiculous amount of capability that we load in.
	And these are all things that for us are very low cost to add and that we've layered into the product.
	But, on the other side, we don't have to solve every problem.
	There's a lot of great services out there on the internet.
	And there are some things, like, for example, cloud backup.
	Well, there are some great solutions for cloud backup.
	I use, personally, for all of my data, I use Dropbox to synchronize all my systems.
	And I really enjoy that, and it's a great solution.
	I don't think Sonic can or should try to replicate a service like that.
	And...
	The bottleneck, the problem that really, really needs to be solved is building new infrastructure in the last mile to every single home and business.
	To the degree that we can add features to our product which reduce costs or increase usability that are not too hard for us to add, we do.
	When they get complex, We say, well, there's a lot of great X out there on the Internet.
	We don't need to be that.
	I mean, a big one is television.
	We do not have an IPTV product in a conventional way.
	And that was an interesting decision that we made a few years ago.
	And we said, where is the television industry going?
	Well, it's going to become Internet TV. You're going to choose between YouTube TV and Hulu TV and Sling TV. Subscription video on demand services like Netflix and Prime.
	And so we shouldn't be in the television business.
	It's a look backwards.
	And so with each feature capability, we kind of run them through a set of filters and say, well, is this something we can do?
	Yeah.
	Well, should we do it?
	Is there someone else doing it?
	Can we do it at low cost and at value?
	And that's the decision making we engage in.
	Now, saying that, I was actually going to ask you about the television part of this equation, which is, there are third parties out there that would come in and say, well, you know, we can do all that work, and it will cost you $10 a subscriber, and we charge them $20, or you charge them $20, and then we take $10 from that kind of thing, like a microservices architecture on a bigger scale.
	Is that possible?
	The challenge in television is twofold.
	One is the cost of content.
	Consumers want 150, 250 channels.
	That's going to include ESPN and Disney and regional sports nets.
	Those things are costly.
	And they're particularly costly for buyers who are not buying at scale.
	So a disruptive new market entrant that is gaining a foothold struggles with content costs that are very high compared to an entrenched incumbent.
	And then on the other side, as you look at the technology, platforms like DirecTV's Genie and Dish's Hopper and Comcast's X1, they're good platforms.
	They invest a substantial amount of resources in differentiating those platforms, making them really, really good.
	And for a carrier like us, the field of potential sort of set-top boxes and interfaces, the software, the middleware that runs on the set-top boxes, they're not great.
	And as you look at the cost of content, the quality of the experience, and then more importantly, you look at where is the industry going?
	Where do consumers want to be?
	And I would say that, you know, you look at millennials today and they've never had a conventional cable subscription.
	The idea that you would pay...
	They don't even know how to turn on the antenna on most of their sets.
	Well, true.
	Yeah, off the air is a whole nother topic.
	But, you know, the point is that that industry is changing a lot.
	And the way that it is inevitably going to go is over the Internet.
	There's so much more choice.
	And the idea that you would buy a bundle that would have a big heavyweight TV package and you might commit for one or two years to that product is really going to be supplanted with a set of apps.
	One that brings you a big channel lineup that you like.
	Maybe that's Sony's Vue product or YouTube TV product.
	Then piecemeal, you might add things.
	Well, you know, you want to watch Handmaid's Tale, you're going to subscribe to Hulu.
	You want to watch some of the Amazon Prime originals, you might be a Prime subscriber.
	And, you know, smart TVs are getting easier and cheaper.
	Equipment like the Apple TV and the Roku are making this easier for normal, less technical individuals.
	And that's where, you know, entertainment is going, is towards streaming.
	And so we don't do a conventional television solution over the fiber today for that reason.
	Now, we do have customers that have cable TV today.
	They would like a conventional television experience.
	And we really see two solutions.
	One is keep the cable for TV but get a fiber Internet connection, dump the slower, less reliable cable Internet.
	And then the other is we're happy to sell a customer a satellite Dish TV subscription if they would like that.
	It's a bit less than 10% of our new customers take that.
	Almost 1 out of 10 new Sonic Fiber customers chooses to also add Dish to that.
	In doing that, they get a bundle discount.
	They save about $10 a month.
	They get the conventional video experience.
	For some people, that's what they're What they want.
	Others are kind of ready to cut the cord.
	And the fast new broadband pipe becomes an impetus to help them cut the cord.
	So I'm going to wire up...
	I've been switching all my cabling, internal cabling, Ethernet cabling to CAT7. Do you guys advise any of these?
	Because, you know, there's a huge difference in these, at least the style of these cables.
	I mean, CAT7 is like, it's a more, seems like much more formidable.
	Yeah, now, we're deploying CAT6 in some corporate environments.
	But for gigabit, CAT5e, which has been, you know, widely deployed for more than a decade...
	Cat 5e can deliver gigabit Ethernet, and it's more craft-friendly, we would say.
	It's easier to work with than the products that can deliver higher bandwidth.
	I guess the question is, in your home, do you anticipate a need to deliver faster than one gigabit?
	And you will see some sort of flex speeds where Traditionally, Ethernet was 10 meg, 100 meg, 1 gig, 10 gig.
	Well, there's some flex speeds where you'll see 2.5 gigabits or 5 gigabits delivered at different distances over Cat5e.
	If you're wiring a house and you want to invest in the absolute best cable, you could do a Cat6 deployment and for some reason, Some locations and at the right distances.
	And if you did the terminations right and you have all the right end bits and you have the right switch in the middle, then you could deliver 10 gigabit within the home.
	But then you have to figure out, well, do I need 10 gigabit to my smart TV? You know, if it's going to do 4K TV in three dimensions, you know, that might be 25 megabits worth of streaming.
	And so there comes some point where you have to be pragmatic about what you deploy.
	And so generally we see Cat5e within...
	Gigabit delivered ubiquitously being adequate.
	I think, unfortunately, many households are moving the other direction, which is to unwire virtually everything.
	Yes, I'm noticing that, too.
	In fact, my Roku is hooked to a Wi-Fi repeater.
	Works?
	Yeah.
	And so what you'll see in the household is that the Nest thermostat and the...
	The Peloton bike and the Roku plugged into the TV upstairs, etc., all end up being Wi-Fi.
	Wi-Fi is just so easy.
	Unfortunately, it's less reliable than a hard wire.
	It's necessary for a device that moves around.
	The phone in your pocket, the tablet you sit on the couch with, those devices have to be wireless.
	But the devices that can be wired...
	You know, that Roku behind your smart TV. The computer that doesn't move.
	I certainly encourage folks to consider wiring the devices that aren't moving.
	But it's hard to justify investing a lot of dollars in doing that.
	Thankfully, a lot of homes are pre-wired.
	They'll have some existing Ethernet and can hook up some devices wired.
	You can also use the wires as a basis for The Wi-Fi.
	So you mentioned you use a repeater, a Wi-Fi repeater that's then connected to the Roku.
	That's a good configuration too where you might have a number of access points in the home that are themselves wired.
	That gives you a great foundation for a good wireless experience at the edge.
	Yeah.
	It does seem to work.
	Is there anything you think I should be discussing?
	What is the thing that most people don't know about at all when it comes to putting fiber in their environment?
	I think we see folks at two ends of the spectrum.
	On the one side, we've got people who have followed the developments in the technology, They understand the regulatory and infrastructure and deployment challenges.
	And they're sort of shut up, take my money kind of mode.
	And that is about one out of ten households today.
	They hear we're coming.
	They're signed up before we can say a word.
	And then there's a big group of folks who use the Internet.
	The Internet is important to them.
	They understand that slow...
	Internet is frustrating, but they don't really have a good understanding of the technology, and they don't understand or care, nor maybe should they, about the differences between fiber-to-the-node and DOCSIS cable and GPON fiber.
	And so the challenge for us, I guess, is convincing those for whom technology and the Internet is not something that they think about every day that this is just a Better experience.
	In our case, a great company delivering good customer service, a fair price, a well-priced product, but also a really reliable, consistent, snappy performing product.
	That's a gap we work to bridge.
	Yeah, I consider it a failure in the part of the technology writing community to keep everyone up to speed on all this sort of thing so they would just immediately jump to it.
	And so it's a fail, the way I see it.
	And it's the most people, they don't know what this is all about.
	Because again, like I said, if you get somebody stringing fiber optic cable in your neighborhood and they're offering fiber to the home...
	At a very low price, why would you not be going outside and knocking on the truck door's window and asking what's going on because you'd like to get involved in this?
	Yeah, and we do.
	It's the one out of ten people are eager for it.
	They'll chase our guys down the street, literally, and say, hey, is it coming yet?
	I live right over there.
	When can I get hooked up?
	We really appreciate that enthusiasm.
	Those early adopters, those are the people that those who are less technical look to for answers.
	Should I get this new thing?
	I've heard about it.
	Why would I want that?
	Then that person says, oh yeah, I've had it for months.
	It's been great.
	I had a great experience.
	It's faster, better, cheaper, more reliable, whatever the outcomes are.
	You say it's a failure of the technology writing community.
	I mean, you know, I don't follow, you know, all of the hobbies and interests.
	There's such a diversity, you know, whether it's cars or bass fishing or fiber optic networks, you know, everybody's got an interest.
	But at the end of the day, the Internet and use of Internet and fast, reliable, smooth Internet in the home, you know, the vast majority of people I do want that and do understand that.
	It's been interesting to see, though, you know, it used to be consumers understood the modem and router and Ethernet and Wi-Fi and sort of how things were plugged in.
	And today, people just say my Wi-Fi.
	Like, they don't talk about Internet or Ethernet anymore.
	It's just, you know, what's the Wi-Fi?
	How's the Wi-Fi?
	My Wi-Fi's up, my Wi-Fi's down.
	Yeah, no, it's pathetic, but that's just the way it is.
	Yeah.
	It is.
	And I try not to place a judgment on that and say it's become this ubiquitous, important, integrated piece of technology.
	And it's our job as a service provider to try to make that as simple as we possibly can so that the experience is, well, I don't know much about my cable connection or how it's connected, but I know that this new fiber connection is...
	Way less expensive.
	I've heard from my neighbors that it's way faster, way more reliable, so I'm going to make that switch.
	I'll say we really benefit from the fact that America's cable companies, in particular, are some of the most hated companies.
	People really despise the business practices, pricing policies.
	They're really abusive practices that come from the abuse of that near monopoly.
	We get a certain amount of Even from those who don't understand the technology, they say, wait, there's something that I've heard is a little better, and it's not the darn cable company?
	Great.
	Sign me up.
	Why do you think Google's kind of like lost interest?
	They started putting fiber in here and there and actually affecting property values around the country with fiber networks going into neighborhoods, mostly obscure ones.
	You know, my observations from the outside...
	My speculation is that they may have found it to be harder, more expensive, slower going than they expected.
	They may also have found that the realities of consumer adoption, convincing people that they should switch to this, it is a real tough pull.
	Google has continued to build out in the cities that they were committed to.
	They've sort of paused and they've had some changes in leadership, but I don't think that the story is done.
	And I think whether it's Google Fiber or Two Cows Ting building fiber, Socket Internet in Missouri, GorgeNet in Oregon, or Sonic in California and hopefully beyond, I think you're going to see new market entrants Building new networks and disrupting cable and telco incumbents in the coming years, and I'm very optimistic about that.
	What does a foot of the fiber cable cost?
	Oh, it depends on the strand count, but the in-home, the sort of single-strand stuff at the end, you might be spending anywhere six, seven cents a foot, so really, really cheap.
	The outside plant stuff, we're stringing.
	We did a...
	Signaling system for a railroad and put in a bunch of ribbonized 432, and that cable ends up being between $3 and $4 per foot.
	And then you'll spend another $2 or $3 per foot to place the cable, never mind getting conduit in the ground, which can be $10, $20, $30, even $50 per foot.
	In San Francisco, our budget per foot for underground construction in San Francisco is nearly $500 per foot.
	And as a result, we do very little of that.
	But this is, I mean, it's very interesting because I'm a technology person and I'm interested in product and customer service and disrupting the market.
	But we've, over the span of the last seven, eight years, learned a lot about construction.
	Underground and aerial construction, the process of construction cost optimization, it's a whole other fascinating business that we've become.
	A question I asked at the beginning that wasn't fully answered is, what do you do to get access to actually use these poles?
	Do you have to buy access?
	Is there licensing?
	Utility poles are in the public utilities easement.
	So the infrastructure of your community incorporates water and sewer and gas and power and communications lines.
	Those all live in an easement space.
	It's private property, but then the utilities have a right to deploy in that easement.
	And so when wood utility poles are placed by an electric utility, the poles are either split, jointly owned, with telecommunications utilities or rented.
	Spaces rented to telecommunications utilities.
	So generally speaking, we are renting one foot of vertical space on a wood utility pole outside your home, for example.
	And we spend about $7 per year to rent that one foot of space on that one pole.
	And that and cable maintenance.
	You know, dealing with somebody knocks a pole down or a squirrel chews a cable...
	Those are the primary costs of running the infrastructure of the network.
	Interesting.
	Well, I'm wishing you nothing but luck on all these other little companies out there, and I guess there's more than a few, you just named some of them, that are stringing cable to just bypass the old infrastructure, which looks like a cost-benefit to me.
	Correct.
	I want to thank you for the interview.
	Now, I do want to ask, when I get this thing, when they finally put it in, they're going to have the box downstairs and they're going to run up a piece of Ethernet cable up to my office and then I'll have a device that I plug it into that strings out the...
	It's like a router, I suppose.
	Yeah, so we'll...
	There's a video on YouTube.
	If you search for sonic gigabit fiber installation on YouTube, you should find one of our videos.
	There's one that we shot in San Francisco, and it shows the process of deployment when utilities are aerial.
	And then there's another one we shot in Brentwood that shows the process when the utilities are underground.
	But yes, once it comes into your house, we bring the fiber into the house.
	We may extend the fiber some distance in the house, or we may stop it in the garage or in a home office location.
	Then we deploy that optical network terminal and then we'll extend Ethernet or use existing Ethernet cable if you have it to connect to the router, the residential gateway that does the Ethernet and Wi-Fi.
	So that's a typical configuration.
	Is that your router or mine?
	You can do either.
	We supply a router, and we certainly encourage customers to use the router that we supply.
	Critically, it's capable of full gigabit speed, and most routers aren't.
	You need to have a good router to deliver gigabit performance.
	If we supply the router, then...
	One of the advantages also is that we take responsibility for it.
	So it allows us to give an experience which is sort of the Wi-Fi on the couch to the Wi-Fi router that we have remote management of, the Ethernet to the optical network terminal, the entire optical network.
	So Sonic can maintain responsibility for all those components and keep them up to date as well.
	Obviously, you're aware of things like VPN filter and the sort of recent security issues that we've seen with consumer routers.
	And so, you know, for the majority of consumers, I encourage them to use the service provider router, which is remotely managed.
	It's patched.
	It's security updated.
	If there are issues with it, it can be swapped at no cost to the consumer.
	Now, there's another category of consumers that enjoys managing their own network.
	They're going to deploy their own firewall.
	They might have a PFSense box or a Raspberry Pi system that does ad blocking.
	They might run their own Ethernet switch.
	They might run multiple access points around their house.
	There's a category of consumer that really enjoys building their own local area network, and we certainly don't mind them doing that.
	Obviously, then, support doesn't have access to them.
	The router can't see the Wi-Fi devices connected to it, and so we can't really help all the way to the connected device.
	We can only help, you know, to the edge of the demarcation, which at that point becomes the optical network terminal.
	So we say, well, your network connection's up.
	If it's not working over here, well, maybe it's your network.
	Yeah, you're on your own after that.
	You're on your own, exactly.
	Okay, well, it's good to have the option.
	I think that covers everything I needed to ask, besides maybe slamming some other companies, but there's no reason to do that.
	So thanks, Dane.
	Of course.
	Thank you very much, John, for your time.
	Okay, bye.
	So, is there such a thing as a lifetime free account with SonicNet?
	I wish.
	I think it should be comped.
	Interesting guy.
	I like guys like this who just screw it.
	I'm just going to go do it.
	I mean, it's nice.
	Pretty much his attitude, I have to say.
	I've always enjoyed him.
	He's got a good take on things.
	I admire that.
	And we're going to be back next Thursday or this upcoming Thursday with a regular show.
	You're going to be coming in from Europe, which will always give us some insight.
	Yes.
	Looking at the newspapers and getting a feeling for things.
	Yes, and of course I will have just spoken to all of the family at the anniversary.
	Everyone's coming in for this.
	Then the Keeper and I are going to see Clooney and Amal at Lake Como just before we head off to the Large Hadron Collider, which I promise we will not go there until after Thursday's show.
	So we can have one last contact before I fall in and get sucked into the black hole.
	Very excited about it.
	So we want to thank both Dane and Scott for taking part in this show.
	Yes, profusely.
	Thank you very much.
	I highly appreciate it.
	Yes, we like that.
	And thank you, John.
	Thanks for doing that.
	That was good.
	And I think it's good you get out of the house.
	Yeah, I got out of the house.
	I can just hear Mimi on my voicemail.
	Hey, let's have John do more of those.
	He needs to get out of the house more.
	Get him out of the house.
	Get him out of the house.
	All right, everybody.
	That is what we do even when we're on vacation.
	We don't just bring you reruns.
	We either bring you brand new fresh mixes done by professionals or stuff like this.
	Interviews with interesting people done by professionals who've been around for a while.
	Enjoy it, because it won't be here forever.
	And on that note, remember us for our next show, partially coming to you from the European Unions and from Northern Silicon Valley.
	That will be on Thursday, and I certainly will have the breakdown of Kamala Harris and Sheryl Sandberg about the face bag money.
	You can just count on it.
	You know I'll have it.
	Coming to you from downtown, or coming to you from somewhere in the middle of Italy.
	In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry.
	And from northern Silicon Valley, where I remain, I'm John C. Dvorak.
	We return with our live show on Thursday.
	Until then, adios mofos!
	Maybe I should write a book on how to get by on 500 million.

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