Good, good, good, good, good.
Adam curry, John C. Devorah.
It's Thursday, September 9 2018. This is your award winning give
on nation media assassination episode 1067.
This is no agenda,
defying time and dimension and broadcasting live to take from
the Capitol the drone Star state here in downtown Austin to EOS
in the morning, everybody. I'm Adam curry Nan from Northern
Silicon Valley live to tape. I'm John C. Dvorak. Buzzkill. Oh,
oh,
so you're in Italy. In fact,
as we speak, I am. I am probably nursing a hangover from my
sister's 25th wedding anniversary, which is your lucky
Italian alcohol. So it should be good. Yeah.
So what we've done here is we put together a couple of
interview shows I did an interview with Scott Adams and
Dame Jasper.
Alright, so Dane Jasper is the CEO of Sonic net, which is now
he's these 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 Santa
Rosa where this operation is, and they've always been the
light to low cost the internet provider, we've used them as
backup here.
And why not as primary? Are they just not business
class fast, right? The old version, the old DSL stuff was
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, it'll make a little I think they'll now have
two very high speed networks. So I don't have to worry as much.
Apparently, and the price is gonna be like 50 bucks a month.
Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's very competitive. That's an
align with the Well, is he also going to try and sell TV
services
like refuses to if we talked about this morning?
Oh, good. Good, good, good, good. And just kind of I mean,
I'm gonna listen to listen, I probably have already heard this
by the time I get to Italy because of course I have a copy
listen in the plane. But has has it been a challenge for him with
the Bahamas? Has anyone tried to? I just want a little tip
there. Has anyone tried to buy him or muscle him out?
Yet, but apparently more recently? They're trying to pass
some legislation to make it tougher on the little guys.
Well, that's on American. It's very common.
Okay. I have asked him specifically if they were
chopping down lines and our break and cable but no, there
were no.
Tours. submeters take us into it.
Well, first of all, we got Scott Adams, the famous cartoonist,
Dilbert.
We're gonna talk about him in a second. After the first
interview, the first interview is going to be Scott Adams. Oh,
you're gonna 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's does a lot
of stuff on Periscope. And he's never really been interviewed
like this. And I've known him long enough. So I could ask him
questions that I don't think other people would do.
What do you mean, he's never been interviewed like this? Have
you seen
any really good interviews? Where he's talking? Well, you
have to listen to this interview. But there's a lot of
stuff that he doesn't normally talk about. 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 were 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 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
that you made your money as a cartoonist? Correct. I met you
25 years ago at Pacific telephone. Yeah, you were an
engineer. And you were you were actually the first guy who
showed me the internet. Wow,
I didn't realize that. Yeah, we had one not the internet. But
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 this thing called the World Wide
Web. And it was it was the most 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 not 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 they would just
their eyes would glaze over. And then at the end as to have sort
of a dessert, we'd say Oh, and there's this new thing coming
called, we call that the World Wide Web, then now the internet.
And there were exactly two websites you could get to.
That's 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 say, Can I do that? And we'd
say, Do what, you know, touch the mouse and make this. 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
and I remember thinking, Oh, my goodness, this is gonna be huge.
It has that X factor, where people want it, even though it's
terrible, like early cell phones, right? 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 want 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. I go, okay, what are the
other companies? And he goes, Cisco. He goes, everything's
gonna be Cisco for the next 15 years, kind of was. And so I did
not buy Cisco. And it's the worst financial decision I've
ever made.
Hmm. 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 has happened all the all the points that you
could have gotten, wow, that should have done that it could
have done that it could have done this. It's the worst. I
mean, just if you'd bought apple when Steve Jobs first showed up
and kept the stock, right, you'd be loaded, especially about
$10,000, would 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, I'm not gonna go any higher than that.
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. That it's a very, it's problematic. So anyway, you
did leave eventually, how long were you there it Pacific Bell?
Well, eight years there, then before that eight years at a big
bank. And I was doing Dilbert 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 we were 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 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 this could not be happening anywhere else. It's
impossible.
And it happens everywhere. That was a gene. Well, you had I
thought we 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 you
know, it was like a it was cowboy stuff or just stupid
animals making punch lines that you know, cracking up to, you're
trying to crack you up with a one liner. Now, 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 Dilbert came out, an 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 Dilbert is in the office. We don't care for
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 Dagwood and so I listened to the customers and
completely retooled the strip to make it a workplace strip. So
that the reason that Dilbert succeeded and it's very rare
that a big comic will break out is that i 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'd 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 that it's actually very rare. You know, there's you
can count on one hand the mega cards difference. And if
somebody were to start on 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 signed a deal with a
company that's a syndication company. And then you, 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 Gilbert's bigger than it's ever
been. Because as long as there's one big newspaper at every
market, you know, it runs in that paper. And of course, the
internet market is growing every day. So so it's growing there,
no matter what,
where'd you get your drawing skills.
My mother was a landscape artist, and my father doodle
little cartoons that were more like stick figures, but very
funny and 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 the first
original comics that I submitted, if you saw them,
you'd say, There's no way this guy is going to get hired or
syndicated. This is looks like an inebriated monkey with a
crayon. What's what's going on here? But it was just brute
force. I just practiced till I could do it.
What do you 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 in the
cartoon realm, if you've got a character who's got a problem,
and it's a cartoon, so they, they can kind of do anything,
there's no real limits? What is the funny engineering solution?
And it might involve, you know, killing somebody, it might
involve, you know, aliens, it could involve anything. So but
you have to start, as you said earlier, was something that
everybody goes all that's, I've been there. If you don't get
that part, right, it's hard to get much else right that people
have to recognize and identify with the situation, then you can
extend it but you got to you got to get them first.
I have a theory that your humor is absurdist.
is explained absurdist
ad, you spot the absurdities in the art and the office
environment, for example. And most everything, every punch
line you deliver is based on something that just, it's beyond
the pale and so far as pure absurdity is concerned,
I, I'm going to agree with that with different words. I call it
a 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. You know, I know you went
to college, you know, I know you're smart. Why are you doing
that? And that explains, you know, 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 fat?
You know?
Yeah, I worked in the government. So I know some of
that from another perspective is still the same. You were fired
from PAC 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? Nina? 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 can. 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, Guess he went
through what I've seen this happen on different operations,
somebody goes in there, they start doing a checklist. What
does this guy do? Who is this? Who is this guy? Scott Adams,
what does he do? And nobody was there and I've seen this happen
recently jobs in other companies for somebody's actually very
important to accompany 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 as a lure, which happens with any company that's
got any brains, right, bring a lure in and know you get to meet
Scott Adams. And by the way, you can buy some of these, 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 that movie the office and If you
didn't make a fuss or object or anything you left and then they
found out about it, they the upper, 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 gonna stay, I'm gonna stay gone.
And that was the end of it.
That's pretty close, I'll add a little 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 as you said, I was
good for sales customers would would come in and they were
Dilbert fans. And so I helped. And they actually made me an
offer. Anita, the one I just mentioned, the real life. Ellis
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. You know, we'll do the
engineering stuff. That was your main work. And my co workers
said, Yeah, well, we're up for that we'll do the work. You just
come in for the the times you want to basically. And I said,
so you were like a fellow without being without having to
designation,
right, in a sense. And so Anita took that to the boss you're
talking about and made that deal. And he said, I'm okay with
that. And he checked with me. And I said, yeah, that's, I'm
okay with the two. 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. And one day he was he had some other projects 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 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, 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, it's your versions, obviously more accurate than
mine. But mine still good.
Here's a good Yeah. You said you were 90%? There? Yeah.
I when it happened, I, since I knew at the time, I thought,
well, this is gonna be interesting, because it's
because how's he going to? Because I thought that cartoon
was derivative from the work experience, and you're 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 1000s 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, either there's, 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 could remember the year it was per
probably in that 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, as a weird thing called
a focal dystonia, and went to the doctor and said, What's
this? 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 my HMO
at Kaiser. And you know, 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, bed basically changed jobs. So I agreed to be part of
that 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'd do 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. Yeah, 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 you know,
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 using a stylus, the,
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
than 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've 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 what
we're talking about, you know, lemonade, and lemons. It
probably cut my work load 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 have all they all
switch over the computers one way or another, except for one I
know that's always been a computer artist. But they've
always benefited from the there's the two edged sword.
They benefited from the productivity. Because you know,
especially graphics guys couldn't change the backgrounds,
you really quickly. They want to redo everything. But then it
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. They ended up it was weird to watch the
phenomenon. Do you have Tourette's?
I do not. Why do you ask because
you have elements of almost identical to Adam Curry who
talks about his Tourette's constantly we talked about on
our show quite a bit.
Maybe I do what what are the symptoms? I thought I should be
swearing out loud for No,
no, no that nobody had. 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 aeroplane being dragged off. It was terrible. I felt
bad for the guy. Well, you dragged me off an airplane. I
gave him some of that guy. No, he was
cussing before they drag 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 sufferers. And I know people
that have you know, they, they have all kinds of twitches. Adam
fights it because he has to do he used to do TV a lot. So he
had to 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 neat freak
that says Adam says the same thing. But he is he I would say
are you I'm here at your house is where we're doing this.
You saw me picking up stuff off the off the floor when we got
here. Yeah. True story. So I wanted
to bring it back to brag This is mentioned just mentioned, you
know, you might want to look into you did have some ailment
that was disconcerting that you couldn't talk for a month or
something like that.
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 three it was 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 they're
not the hand and they're not the vocal cords. They're just that's
just where the spasm is. And, 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 didn't know who you
were, I would now I think I do so thanks for that.
So what happened and that this I just don't want to get in
no way. Hold on. Oh, now if I do. I have an excuse to swear up
people for no reason that
Adam does that too. But he neither you or him have that
form of Tourette's. I According to
you, that's a very, that's a very specific until I start
doing it. And then I've got it
get I don't want to dwell on this, but it's three years.
Yeah, three and a half years, I could make noise when we
couldn't understand that
what what happened? What when it was the breakthrough? What was
that like when you came out of it?
Well, the 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.
And 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 they you have a mental problem? Because if one of the
odd characteristics is that you can talk Okay, when you're
alone? Yeah. Wow. So if you imagine that, imagine telling
your doctor I can talk fine, as long as nobody's listening. But
if people are listening, it's like this. That's a bad
impression of me trying to talk. So obviously, they're gonna say,
okay, mental, you're 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 you know, Valium,
and I, I tried some Botox shots, there was a treatment where they
give you a botox shot through the front of your neck needle
that either you don't even want to hear about it. 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 what it was,
which I figured out also from Google, because I had the hand
problem. So I said, Oh, the hand problem was called a focal
dystonia. I wonder if there's something called a voice,
dystonia. So I put it in that search that search keywords, 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 it
was 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,
nope, nothing, 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 complaint or 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 an somewhat new slash
experimental surgery in which they would rewire some of the
nerves in your neck. They split their cut them so that for 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 route 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 grades, right?
It's either gonna work or it just doesn't work. And then
there wasn't, there was a moment almost exactly. On the day that
they predicted that the nerves could grow back together.
Because they they know what rate they grow at that I could talk
very weakly. And then did you have the cutting done? Yes, I
had the surgery, and 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 you know, 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, 2025 years ago. You sound
the same. Well, that's a that's an ordeal. We will continue. Do
you exercise?
I do. Quite committed to exercise. I'm a lifelong
exerciser. And I tried 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 am a I've 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 few years
later, I said to myself, I shouldn't be voting. What I'm
not adding to this. I'm not I'm not adding to the intelligence
of the vote. You know, 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 liked the topic of politics. And so I voted
for Carter to feel bad about it. I would I was, I wasn't McGovern
supporter if you can believe in that.
Yeah. So I'm, I don't vote and I am not a member of a party.
Oh, you don't vote at all. But you you do like to to give your
opinions and you seem to be a I don't know, if you're if you
want to take this as the as a descriptor, a Trump apologist?
I hate that phrase.
Yeah. Well, I'm called One, two, and I'm not I don't consider
myself to be one. Yeah, the
reason I hated it is it assumes that you would support him no
matter what he did. And that you're just sort of always
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, I'm a trained
hypnotist. When that happens, you become a trained hypnotist,
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 our 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. Now, that's unusual. You can't most people
would not have that experience, but about two and five would, or
one to five. And it made me think, what is this thing? You
know, what is this power that you could 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 then I've
been studying persuasion and all of its forms from 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, 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,
he's willing to say or do anything. And generally, I
believe that, you know, he's aiming his impulses, at least,
you know, his public office impulses at legitimately
legitimately making the country a better place in his view of
how that how that looks. And so, uh, his 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'd 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 he's certainly the right
person for that.
You think he's trained like you are you think it's just a part
of his being a salesman all his life because during sales,
training, if you were ever a salesman, you end up picking up
a lot of a lot of persuasion, persuading, person persuading
gimmicks.
Well, keep in mind, he wrote the book or or at least he read the
book, The Art of the Deal. Yeah. And so if your brand is
negotiating, that's really persuasion and or a special form
of it. So we know that he's at least has an interest
standpoint. And that would be enough over the years if that's
what you're 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 gonna get better results than if you're thinking
wrong. And you just watched Trump think his way into the
presidency? In a sense, I mean, the the optimism, the positive
thinking, the the inability to be swayed by any problem is
seemed like he was just completely unaffected, at least
in public, by, you know, things that would have killed most
people. Yeah. And so there's that influence. But you, 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, the terrorists are coming to get you
the there's crime and criminals coming across the border, etc.
And you see him talking past the sale, which is one of his most
common tricks. So if you're talking about how the 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 a lot of topics, he'll 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 them pick emotional topics. He knows where
the emotion is. And he can read a crowd like, like, nobody
hears presentations, or I don't know how many of the speeches
you've watched a few Yeah, I probably watched three complete
from the early ones which couldn't carry an hour, he could
do about 35 minutes of material, and then he would start to
repeat himself. Then he got when he got to the hour, he was
really on a roll. And his speeches I think are phenomenal.
They really, really controls the artists and he gets a lot of
people. And as you know, you were a public speaker. The
bigger audience is the better audience. Yeah, the small
audience is hard. You can't speak to six people, right?
They're not gonna laugh, they're not going to do anything. But
you got 10,000 people or 20 or 30. In his case, you have, you
can have a lot of fun. Yeah, I
think history will record that. You know, he's not everybody's
cup of tea. So you sort of Love him or hate him thing. But in
terms of his public speaking best ever.
depends on your definition of best ever. Best, everything most
effective.
Yes, being able to hold the crowd, entertain them, make them
want to come back, make them talk about it, make them a
pupil, 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 data. I only read this once. I don't know exact
name, 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 thought
he 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 no 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. I'm quite an outcast. And my, 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, you must die. So I don't think
it's safe to be in public. When people like you are branding me
a Trump apologist?
That's not me. I will say this that I ran into you when when I
first met 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 his edits at the
same speaking event. I was a speaker and you were speaker to
some events. This was I don't know if you remember this, but I
do. Because you are grousing. And
me grousing?
Yes possible is 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 for something, you say something,
you do something, and you insulted the CEO somehow, by 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.
It's, I thought it was getting to the point where you stopped
doing public speaking at that point.
No, I, I've sort of pulled back from it a few times for just
because I was busy with other stuff. But at the moment, you
know, and then I have to stop when I lost my voice for a few
years. But at the moment is just not safe.
Yeah. I was wondering if that was going to affect you at all
affected our podcasts by I think, about 40% 30 to 40. Maybe
in terms of fall off. People just don't want to listen
anymore. They they're, 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. Would it happened to your investments in the restaurants?
Well, the
I can't tell you the real story, because there's actually 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'd never heard of. And if I were I
can't tell you because he makes settlements and you agree not to
talk about it, 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 was wildly popular. We built the second one. At the
peak of the market. Literally, I signed the lease the day that
the Twin Towers were coming down. It was 911. 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 that agreed to move into it was just going to be a
gold mine. It was the greatest location. And they all pulled
out. They all pulled out because of the economy.
Well, that was a bad error. I mean, you first had the.com
crash. And then you had the y2k fiasco. And then they said
things were straightening out. Boom, you have the Twin Towers
and stuff one two
punch. So I signed the lease at the literal top of the market, I
got the most expensive leash you could ever possibly get. At the
same time that the economy went to its lowest point and in a
long time,
you became a vegan? No
vegetarian. I'm a pescatarian. At the moment, 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 the 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. Don't
remember,
opportunity. Work that. You did a thing. You're promoting this
thing called the Blight Authority? Yes. Which is your
one of your pet projects.
Yeah. So Bill polti is he's the founder and primary mover of
this. And blight spelled B li ght just refers to an generally
in this context, anyway, an urban area where it's all
rundown, and it's just crime and abandoned buildings and stuff.
And so a bill does is he finds funding to go in and just clear
it out and just bulldoze it and wreck it and bring it down to
dirt so that the crime goes away. But then there's also an
opportunity 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 blight authority.com has an
ideas and forum section where people are suggesting ideas and
funding and things that can 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 a degree in engineering?
No. But I played an engineer at Pacific Bell because they ran
out of engineers the 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. And they just said a line. Yeah. And my boss
just said, Well, you're not a you're not an engineer. But can
you connect computers to equipment with cables and
figuring 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 in a laboratory, but I
love to help. So the smart people I worked with, covered
for me, well, you funny at school. Oh, maybe only in my own
opinion, I did doodles of my teachers and 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? You think Did you get high grades?
A's B's C's did you go to What college did you go to?
I was a valedictorian, also. But he gave
a speech I did.
And that sounds more impressive than it really is. You have to
understand that we're only 40 People in my graduating class.
Still another 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 gonna go
down a list and name somebody and then you're just gonna say
if you have anything to say about them, people, yeah. All
right. Maybe a couple of things, too.
Can I slander them? Who's that? Oh, yeah, of course. It's
fine. Good without podcast. And why?
Why wouldn't pence fence and ideal vice president? You know,
I've said my book when Begley, I talked 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 you 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, you know, 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
emergencies spare the backup,
do you think he could win if he ran for president and Trump
wasn't running?
No, no, I don't. But as a he just he doesn't have the
personality for it. But because if you look at what Trump had to
do, to break through the field, I mean, it was his
outrageousness, his his willingness to take positions
that were further than other people were talking about. Those
are all the things that help him grow your
health, he also helped him get about one to $2 billion worth of
media attention, which they're still irked about. But they keep
continuing this process of giving him media attention.
They he found he found a 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, they cuz he
was kinda interesting. Okay, another name, Kellyanne Conway.
Well, I don't I don't know her. By the way. I didn't meet the
president. He did invite me. Yes, she did. He did invite me
into the Oval Office few weeks ago. And
what was the point of that way? He was he? You know,
he actually didn't say, except, I guess my book when big Lee 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, it was just solidifying his base,
if you will, especially the people who would talk about him
or write about him. And, but I don't know, Kellyanne Conway and
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 did
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 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?
Vaguely did did he was any, because usually people that they
read your book to have some reference that they'll make.
He was familiar with the content enough that that we could you
know 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 have lunch?
We
didn't have lunch. It was, it was probably the experience.
I'll never be able to top in terms of the most interesting
match
books home they had these match books you can take. 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. You know, if you're a visitor, you don't
get to bring the phone into the
Yeah. You don't want anything your record competing with what
the CIA's recording for all the bugs in the
right. So yeah, it was just the most interesting thing I've ever
done. He's very engaging, very charismatic. And just talking to
him for a few minutes was like a life life experience. Hmm.
It sounds like fun. What do you think? 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 to, you know, off the air, and her critics
will howl. So I don't agree with her politics or point of view
and a lot of things, but you can't deny the talent. The
talent is extraordinary.
Yeah, she was she's done to most with anyone over there once that
Olbermann left. What about MSNBC in general?
They, they seem to me like the the version of CNN that went too
far. Like, like, whenever you see something on CNN, this seems
like, wow, they're, they're taking that opinion a little too
far. Or? Well, you know, it 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 too bad. So I guess I
have, yeah, I can't form a coherent opinion of him.
Here's the 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.
Yeah. I was thinking the other day, how many billionaires do I
know personally? It was like 20 billionaires, you know, if I
wanted to, I could, you know, get a hold of them with an
email. And it's hard to meet a billionaire who isn't
interesting. That's that's the first thing. And I don't know if
it's because I'm aware of their billionaires, or that 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, I think, yeah, they are interesting, most
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. So that was focused guys got supposedly
a form of autism that makes him that way.
He must have the good one. Yes, it's a considered a good one.
I'll give you one example. Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.
So I did give us before I lost my voice, I gave a talk there.
And I hung out for maybe half an hour, because we're killing time
before events started. And I got to chat with him at some 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 gonna
explain that I mean that in a good way. He He's seems to be
operating on this whole other level of he uses the word
intention. And you know, without getting too woowoo 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, probably
shouldn't talk about it, but since it makes him look good
We'll anyway, where one of his top lieutenants was talking
about a slideshow. He goes, Hey, I got this slideshow we're gonna
show, it looks at it. Marc Benioff, 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, they give away 1% of their profits and strive
to spend 1% of their time on philanthropic things, charitable
things. He says, put that in the first page, and there's
Lieutenant pushes back is like, well, you know, I've got that
it's, 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 out at
it again. And he just look at it was like, first page. It was
like, he was so so clear on what mattered, right? And
representing the company with that first really mattered,
those kind
of guys, which are CEOs liked. And there's a lot of them and a
lot of them aren't billionaires, they still have these
characteristics, or they're the guys who are really kind of an
medic quality control. They're the ones who, you know, I felt
this way when they fired John Lasseter from Pixar, who was who
was the creative genius, he was fired for hugging too much of it
was part of the me to 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. And I think they're into all office
environments, you know, and when they you lose that guy, whether
he's the CEO, usually they are, the company just kind of just
falls apart.
Yeah. And, and just to be clear, it wasn't about the quality of
the slide deck. He wasn't talking about that. It was it
was it was as much about training this this lieutenant,
what's important and how to how to put it forward.
Okay, another one. Why are do you think the Silicon Valley
billionaires are all Democrats?
Well, they're not all Democrats. But you got your you got your
people who are willing to tell you about their politics, and
you got your people who may be
there are out there don't like to talk about anything? Because
they know, because they know the majority are Democrats. Right,
which still begs the question, why do you think there's so many
Democrats in the in a place where there's so much wealth?
Doesn't? doesn't support? 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 favorite TV show? Do you watch much TV?
Favorite TV show? The really the only one I record at this point
is the five on Fox News. And also the Greg Gutfeld 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 the 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.
Well, that's a shocker to me. I
didn't see that coming.
I sure did not.
I mean, I like my Game of Thrones, but they're not on now.
So
which, 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. 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.
Let's go to basic not alone. If you're my dog running around the
background there, that's Kenny spear 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 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 hard
to know for sure, but probably extraordinary. Just based on the
volume of new ideas. I create any any moment. And I'm a very
visual, 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 your head instantly. But I can
you started with with the ISDN crowd, but you weren't kind of a
techie? Or do you think that you're never worried techie,
I was a programmer at a very low level. In other words, I did it
professionally. But when we were programming it usually just,
well basic and doing easy things for the deck, you know, the VAX
back in the day. So programming, and 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, you know, graphic video games. But it took me so
long to build one that the entire industry had moved to so
far, in the six months, it would take me to build on that it no
longer looked like, like a game anybody would ever buy. So I
couldn't I couldn't keep up with the companies that were doing.
So I was technical that way. But I think I'm more. I'm more about
the talent stack, which I talked about the idea of building lots
of different talents and stacking them until you have
something that's unique, even if 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. You know, when you came, you saw me
working with a bunch of new equipment put together a new
studio set up for myself. And I liked that stuff.
Yeah, so you have kept up but you're 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 needed you just
always needed the other one. You know, 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. Now I want to start stop you there. Because you 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 really good job of making all my all my
devices work together. And you know, 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 2,011x five BMW and SUV.
And that's it. You don't have a second car low.
Why do I need two cars?
Just get bored? Yeah, I
don't like cars. I'm not a car guy.
Oh, so if you go out to dinner, what kind of what level of
restaurant do you go to? You go to a high end place, low end
place and hamburger place? What do you like? If I'm a gourmet,
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 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. I developed a 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 here
would save money. If you went to high end restaurants. I can tell
you that.
So the answer your question is my girlfriend Christina and I
have tried a bunch of 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 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,
I like a good, 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, it because I had this
theory about interviewing and I was working on it, would it? It
was mainly to preclude what I'm going to ask next. Which is what
should I have asked you. They didn't ask?
Well, you haven't asked me about my startup, which let's do that.
So the startup the name of the company is when hub when hub all
one word, and the app we're focusing on right now is called
interface by went up. 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.
And it's a dating app. And no,
it's not a dating. 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 some
psychologist, it could be, you're just somebody who was
visiting your grandmother, who was who needs some medical care,
and maybe the kids want to call in, and the professional just
takes the 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. You know, 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 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 health care, to, you know, could help people
with PTSD, if they have somebody to talk to could reduce suicide,
because you've got somebody to talk to. It could be quite
transformative. Who's we we use the the team.
But Whose idea was this to begin with? Are you just the 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, it was a nick Kalyani, who is our CTO and co
founder, co founder. And he initially had the idea and we
refined it from there. But I get I get pretty involved in the the
look in the field and the business end of it.
When this began.
I think we're about three years into it. The new product is only
just the Zen out. Yeah, it's been in stores. The original
version was crypto only. In other words you had to pay in
our own crypto was an Ico still is an Ico by the way. And now
we're on an exchange or two. And we're, we can take credit cards
now. What's the crypto called? Is the when w h e n and La
token, the exchange? You can you can buy that now.
You're a fan of crypto.
I think 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 his use will
we'll see the battle between you know, 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 it feels like that's how it's gonna go. Yeah.
I don't see any 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 got everything covered
unless you got something else you want to throw in there
because it's free. Well, free airtime. And we wrote the book,
a big Li and you got a new books you're working on like a cartoon
book, maybe something a new Dilbert compilations. So
there's always a new Dilbert compilation. The latest one is
cubicles that make you envy the dead reprints and the Dilbert
calendar will be coming out in a few months. And there's always
something I got to buy.
What's the Dogbert characters little devil? Where'd that come
from?
The dog birds.
You have a you have a devil character.
Oh, well,
that looks like dog Bert. Oh, you're
thinking of cat birth. The. In the in the comic, the cat bird
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 us letting me interview you.
Well, thanks for coming all the way out here. And it was fun.
Yes. Great. Catching up. We'll talk again.
Gonna show my school by donation to no agenda. Imagine all the
people who could do that. Oh, yeah, that'd be fun.
Wow, we have what No, no, stop. No, no. Stop thinking about
taking. Oh, oh, yeah. Wow. That was fantastic. I mean, there's
stuff in there that he has. I've never heard him talk about that.
So
certainly, that's because he far as I know he never has it does,
I suppose 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 chat and about everything. Well, I like
knowing that we both have Tourette's so it makes me feel
very comfortable. And very good about myself and my friend
Scott, my brother from another mother. My shame You can brother
from another mother.
Yeah. As you said in there, he says, No, we can use it as the
way you do as an excuse.
I do not use you I cuss on purpose. And you say it's the
Tourette just to try
are the witnesses to rest. But beside the point, we don't have
an interview, or I'm sorry, we don't have a donation segment
because this has been taped in advance. So we want to mention
to 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 us 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 take a day off, like wow, we took a day
off. And I think this is good. You know, it's it's, it's this
is, this is another side of us of the show, which I think is
very complimentary. And I like these, like the people you
chose. And let me just remind everybody, that to support our
show, and this work that goes on, please remember us at
forex.org/yes.
Exactly. Let's start. Let's go to the interview with Dane. Hey,
John, hey, Dane.
We activating so much network,
you have to be here, we have, you know, still have to attend
that all the time. But half the town is polls.
And certainly a lot of interest in it.
There's a lot in response to it. So let's start with this
discussing what you guys are doing at Sonic in terms of
rolling out this fiber and it's fibre to the home.
Yeah, we're building primarily fibre to the home networks. We
also do connections to schools, 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 fibre
to the home network.
Now, before you win, you just around the time you guys
announced this, and what is the monthly charge for this fibre to
the home.
So the fiber the home service is is $40 a month for the first
year. After that introductory time it goes up by 10 is the the
month to month rate is 50 Currently, so and this is
gigabit symmetric, so 1000 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 robo call blocking, which is a real annoyance, and
unlimited nationwide calling and unlimited calling to fix lines
in 66 countries. So if you have business or relatives in, you
know, England, South Africa, Japan, etc. Your calls to those
countries are, are no charge as well. So it's it's a, you know,
I think a really innovative product price point,
compared to everything else in the only way I live don't mind
you going on and on about it because one of the purposes of
conversation like this is to inform people that this sort of
deal. I'm assuming you're not losing your but on this when
it's finally when all said and done and as you cost it out over
time, or you wouldn't be doing it at all. Yeah, I
mean, what's what's exciting for me about the business is that,
you know, the delivery of internet and of telephone
service, the costs of of those have really declined
substantially although consumption particularly of
internet is climbing, but the costs of delivering it are
declining. And but most consumers you know, 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 gotta call the cable company and get my
internet and then they railroad you into a big bundle of a bunch
of TV, you know, linear conventional TV offerings. And
you know, you end up spending you know, maybe it's you know,
7080 $100 the first year but in the long run I think the average
household on you know, internet telecom TV, they're spending
over $200 You know, set top box rentals, regional sports
networks, local broadcast fees, I mean, this is really an
archaic way to do this. And we see a really interesting and
disruptive opportunity and you know, people want really fast
internet you know, no nonsense.
A couple of companies around the country and in Canada In Canada,
for example to Kaos 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 three It was $3 because it's
accidentally. Well, it was accidental because I was I had a
company that was sold to somebody else to somebody else,
all of a sudden I have this shot these shares the stock goes. And
so it skyrocketed to about $60. Oh, and I couldn't figure out
why they weren't, you know, they were selling, I guess ISP, web
addresses or, you know, domain registry and registry, right.
And then all of a sudden, but when they started skyrockets,
when they started putting in fiber, they started putting in
fiber, and I think it's fibre to the home. It's the same thing
now. Yep. So I have to assume this. There's a lot of potential
here not. Before I get into the details of the technology. I
want to ask about the about the wiring itself, in Albany, and
Berkeley, and I guess you're putting some of the 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,
I've seen examples of that not being the case with other
companies. So on the site of all the trucks you have, it has the
sonic logo and the price. Yep, it's actually quite funny. So I
got a billboard. And it is and so they're floating around. And
they're stringing because we have telephone poles around most
of these areas. There's some underground, most of his
telephone poles. And there's like nowadays, there's so much
stuff hanging from these poles. And what you guys are string and
looks heavy. So what are you string it? So I'm going to ask
what are you you're stringing up the place is 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 it's, 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, copper television, cable wires,
amplifiers, taps all the components of the coax
Television Network. And those two networks are 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
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 with a lashing wire.
And then all of that is spliced up at convergence points
cabinets were 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, you know, this infrastructure is ugly. And I
think you know, what's happening is it sort of has been ignored
for a long time. And you know, 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 that without this getting too unsightly?
Now at antique a well the poles are unsightly anyway but they're
also kind of pleasant there because you know that if
somebody runs into one there it's not like you know these
underground cables when they when they break or something bad
happens it's can take days to get him fixed.
Maintenance is 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 hold up Yeah, that happens and
then when they blow up then all oil at some transformer runs
down the pole that that oil ignites and the pole incinerates
we've seen electrical fires from St. Louis Lights on poles
damaged cables, and we have issues with squirrels,
I had that I have Comcast lined up I bet you're, I always have
two systems. Because what I do and I was having nothing but
trouble was the fact the reason I went to Sonic in the first
place was to Comcast, and I 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. And they brought the ball in there's, it's interesting,
because copper networks, when you have issues with with, you
know, 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
see 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 that lead to, you
know, one of the things that we see in our, in our Customer
Service Center is customers that are on copper technologies,
like, you know, VDSL and ADSL, two plus and Potts 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 know, you're 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 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 switch to Sonic. And it's
got he was 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. And so
you'll enjoy the fiber connection. It's really the
right technology for for broadband access.
My partner at the no agenda show Adam curry has a fiber. I think
as 18 t's or Verizon I don't know who's who it is. It's in
Austin, Texas.
And only 18 T or Google.
It wasn't Google. He was the Google guys were flaky. And
Google seems to be losing interest. Might want to comment
on that. But we he was having 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 in terms of you disable
IP v. Six.
It Yeah, that is the beginning. Yeah, I was gonna say I don't
know, you 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, sometimes you'll see ipv6
implementation issues in a router in a Wi Fi access point,
or even in a client device, workstation, and 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 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 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 you
know ultra slow dial up connections we had many
computers get faster DSL came along and cable came along. But
until you get to Gigabit Ethernet connected internet,
it's at full gigabit speeds. The the internet connection was
always the bottleneck and the local area network whether it
was the Ethernet or the Wi Fi was generally not a problem.
Well, now we deliver a gigabit symmetric to the house. And you
know people are saying well, you know, 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, you know, only 300
megabit over here, well, you know, you've got a Wi Fi
capacity issue or you've reached the capacity possible with that
Wi Fi spectrum. So interesting new problems, I'm happy that,
you know, the wide area network and the technology, the fiber
and the protocols in G pond and Ethernet that we run over it are
generally not the bottleneck anymore. And that's
transformative. In my opinion, 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 there 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. Yeah, so I'm
assuming these guys aren't in India?
No, we do everything here in the San Cisco Bay area. So our
headquarters are in the North Bay, all of our call center,
customer service, dispatch fleet, you know, yard field
force, everything is is local folks. And, you know, 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, you know, these are the things, these are
the top 10 reasons for problems. So we're gonna make everybody go
through this. But yeah, it's frustrating, it's infuriating.
And, you know, from our perspective, we don't equip our
staff with scripts we we give them a lot of training in the
the concepts of troubleshooting, you know, listening to what the
customers already tried, and hearing the customers theories
about what might be wrong, because often they know, and,
and then beginning to isolate the problem, well, how do we
split this problem in half and figure out what is the problem
in your Wi Fi? Or is the problem in your router is a problem in
your router? Is it in the connection to the internet? You
know, where do these problems exist? Is it a site you're
trying to access is a protocol, like you've got issues and
things that are over ipv6 and 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. And we've had I had a customer reach out
to me and he said, you know, will you please, like start a
credit card company? Key, 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 is generally, you know,
outsource to a large call center. 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, you know, or
ask your nephew for help or something like that. They save a
call and you know, 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, and that smells like opportunity to me.
And that's, that's exciting. But we need to do more than just
present, you know, 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. And, you know,
that is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of much of the way that
our industry has been performing. And 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
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 have you get
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 you have now what what kind of gear what kind of
what kind of what piece of equipment at your head end let's
call it sits there that does this in the first place. Who
makes us? And what is it?
Yeah, so the technology that we deploy, and I think this is
pretty uniform for for carriers building fibre to the home. In
the US, the technology is called gigabit passive optical
networking or de Pon. And a pawn or passive optical network
brings a dedicated fiber to your house, that fiber goes up the
street to the you know, head of your neighborhood and goes into
a passive splitter. And that passive splitter combines the
light from your home and typically 32 others onto 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 a optical line terminal or o LT, which uses the G pond
protocol to talk to a customer premise device, an optical
network terminal, think of it as a modem basically. That that
outputs symmetric Gigabit Ethernet. And sometimes this is
integrated with or what's called a residential gateway that will
do the routing and network address translation firewalling
Wi Fi and and those make up the components. The vendors that
make this equipment is a variety. We use equipment from
AD Tran in most of our network, but there are other vendors like
calyx and Nokia, and an Ericsson that make equipment that that
does this. And this allows us to deliver you know, a true
symmetric gigabit to to the customers. And it's it's neat
technology.
Now if when it comes into the here, it goes into one of the
what is the device that the fiber goes into, then it
delivers a 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 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 Gigabit
Ethernet.
And the couple of things is that the fastest Is there any chance
of going to 10 gigs?
Well, funny you should ask we we just began offering for
commercial customers, a two gigabit product and so it
delivers multiple one gigabit ethernet ports, and a total of
two gigabits of aggregate throughput. And so for customers
that are you know, we we would think of them as you know, small
business or home office customers, they can now opt for
a two gigabit connection. Little more costly, it's $90 a month.
But, but that's pretty amazing, frankly, for a couple couple
gigabits connectivity, the technologies are evolving. G Pon
was this successor to what's called broadband pawn or de Pon
de Pon had basically the capacity to deliver nominally
about 20 megabits to each household on a 600 megabit
shared segment, G pond delivers a gigabit on a 2.4 gigabit
segment. There are upcoming technologies, X GS pawn, and ng
Pon two, 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 one 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 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,
did you mean the why that is? Yes,
yes. The the fiber cables that we're placing out on poles are I
hesitate to say future proof but 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 advanced to higher speeds in the future. And what's great
is that we don't have to swap out and rewire that 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
three, one today that was placed 1520 years ago. And you'll see
the fiber optic network with a, you know, realistically, you
know, 4050 year lifespan, you know, where cables last at least
that long and, and we're able to simply iterate the equipment's
on the ends.
Now, AT and T came along, just before you guys started this
program, door to door with sales guys who are 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 was fiber, they emphasize fiber, and I
said, is it fiber to the home? And there's no, no, no, no, it's
this fiber to the curb? What are the limitations of that? And 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 a good good backup or something. But I find it not to
be the case that Comcast has better deal.
Yeah, what, what a number of incumbent carriers are deploying
is fibre to the node technology. So 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, you know, 1000 feet to 3000 feet from your
home. And then VDSL to is used over the copper pairs. So, you
know, 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 you know, that's exciting when you have Yeah,
leave
me if I was missing, 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 into
the conversation is we're bringing fiber to your
neighborhood that's not fibre to the home, that's just moving the
D slam 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, sort of lawn treads 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 gigabit?
No, we don't. We got a reasonable use provision. It's a
residential product. So we don't allow folks to resell it. And so
it wouldn't be okay for somebody to like, set up a wireless ISP
off their roof. And, you know, so the intention is reasonable
household use, but there's no caps on that consumption. And
if I want to put a server on it, because you get so much speed is
that allowable,
isn't permitted in the way that we've set the terms up, because
we consider that a commercial use. And, you know, frankly, for
$40 a month, we can't have, we can't cover costs, if a lot of
our customers deploy servers that output, you know, half a
gigabit gigabit consistent peak traffic. And there is a, you
know, there is a reliance in the, in the pricing, when you're
selling a $40 month product, the assumption is people are going
to use it in a 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 gonna download, you
know, movies and big updates, they're gonna 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, you know,
reasonable use provisions in there. It's not a capitalist 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, you know, basically saturate those
connections and we'd look at that and go, Hey, wait a minute.
What's this? What's this fella John doing?
What if you take the $90 deal?
The same, the $90 deal is a, you know, it's a, it's a small
office home office configuration. So it's intended
for consumption
intent, this tended to be mostly used for downloading, why don't
you just kept are not kept, but why don't you just make the
whole system asymmetrical are people that desirous of Gigabit
up, most people suck down gigabit let alone, you know, you
could push it up, but it's going to go to a slower downloading,
you know, that environment, the upstream speed and moving away
from asymmetric connection is actually really, really useful
in a household, being able to, you know, take a bunch of videos
and pictures with your cell phone, at, you know, at an event
and then come home and your cell phone connects to the Wi Fi and
quickly uploads all that content, you know, to, to be
able to backup your home network and all of your home computers
on a regular basis to a cloud backup service. You know, having
a lot of outbound capacity enables a lot of interesting
uses. And, you know, what we see is, you know, these days with
the, the availability of AWS and cloud services for hosting, and
for people starting a business, you know, we don't see a whole
lot of demand for or abuse of the upload capacity, do you? And
so that's, that's the goal. Do you
contemplate ever, maybe for your customers having a cloud based
backup program somewhere? Because you know, before you go
on, though, because you do have, you know, with the with your
former system, I have not fully utilized it, but everyone's
Well, 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, you do have a website capability at the home
office where I can have a domain put there, and I can just serve
pages and do some miscellaneous chores. from the, from Sonic
dotnet. Yeah,
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 had a whole bunch of email boxes, we tried
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, 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. And, you know, 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, you know, 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. And to the degree that
we can add services to our product, you know, add features
to our product, which, you know, reduce costs, or increase
usability that are not too hard for us to add, we do when they
get complex, we say, well, you know, there's, 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. You know, 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 it's
going to become internet TV, you know, you're going to choose
between you tube TV, and Hulu, TV and sling, you know,
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 or capability, we kind
of run them through a set of filters and say, Well, is there
something we can do? Yeah, well, should we do it? Is there
someone else doing it? Can we do it, you know, at low cost and
add value? And, and that's the decision making we engage in
now saying that guys are 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 For $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. does is that possible?
You know, the challenge in in television is twofold. You know,
one is the cost of content. You know, consumers want 150,
Twitter and 250 channels, that's gonna include ESPN and Disney
and regional sports nets. And 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 Genie, and dishes, Hopper and Comcast, x one,
they're good platforms, they they invest a substantial amount
of resources in differentiating those platforms, making them
really, really good. And for a, for a carrier like us, the field
of potential sort of set top boxes and interfaces, the SOC,
for the middleware that runs on the set top boxes, kind of
they're not great. And as you as you look at the cost of content,
the quality of the experience, and then more importantly, look
at where is the industry going where to 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 isn't a whole nother topic. But the, 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 T 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. You know, one that
brings you to a big channel lineup that you like, maybe
that's Sony's view product or YouTube TV product, then
piecemeal you might add things well, you know, you want to
watch Handmaid's Tale, you're gonna 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 you
know they they 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 the slower, less reliable cable internet and
then the other is we're happy to sell a customer a satellite dish
T TV subscription if they would like that. And it's a bit less
than 10% of our new customers take that but you know almost
one out of 10 Yeah almost one out of 10 new Sonic fiber
customers chooses to also add dish to that and in doing that
they get get a bundle discount they save about $10 a month and
and they get the conventional sort of video experience and you
know 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 Cat seven 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 cat seven is
like it's a it's a more seems like much more formidable
Yeah, now we're you know we're deploying cats x in in some
corporate environments. But for gigabit cat five E which has
been you know, widely deployed for more than a decade. Cat five
II can deliver Gigabit Ethernet and in his it's more craft
friendly, we would say it's easier to work with Then, then
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 know, you will see some sort of
flex speeds where, you know, traditionally Ethernet was 10
meg 100 meg one gig 10 Gig Well, there's some flex speeds where
you'll see two and a half gigabits, or five gigabits,
delivered at different distances over cat five E. And if you're
wearing house with an you want to invest in, you know, the
absolute best cable, you know, you could do a cat six
deployment, and for 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, and you can 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 gonna 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 cat
five E, with gigabit delivered, ubiquitously being adequate, I
think, unfortunately, you know, many households are moving the
other direction, which is to unwire, virtually everything,
yes,
I noticing that too. And so everybody, Roku is hooked to a
Wi Fi repeater works.
And, yeah, and so, you know, what you'll see in the household
is that the Nest thermostat, and the, you know, peloton, bike and
the Roku plugged into the TV, upstairs, et cetera, all ended
up being Wi Fi. And Wi Fi is just so easy. And unfortunately,
it's less reliable than a hardwire. And it's necessary for
a device that moves around, right 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 on your, you know, 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, you know, 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 use a
repeater, a Wi Fi repeater that's then connected to the
Roku, that's a good configuration to 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. So is there anything you think I
should be discussing that people? What is the thing that
most people don't know about at all, when it comes to putting
fiber in their environment?
You know, I think we see folks it at two ends of the spectrum.
And then 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, they're sort of shut up, take my money kind of mode.
And when and that is about one out of 10 households today. You
know, they hear we're coming there sign up before we can say
a word. And and then there's a big group of folks who, you
know, they 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 and nor maybe should they
about the differences between you know fibre to the node and
DOCSIS cable and G pond fiber and, and so the challenge for
us, I guess is you know, convincing those for whom
technology and the internet is not something that they think
about every day. This is just a better experience, you know, a
good you know, in our case, a great company delivering good
customer service, a fair price, a well priced product, but also
a really reliable, consistent, real you know, snappy performing
product and so that's a bridge we have to we really worked
worked to get to a gap we worked to bridge
Yeah, I considered a failure on 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 that and it's the most people
are they don't know what this is all about because again, like I
said, if you had somebody stringing fiber optic cable in
your neighborhood and they offering fiber to the home at a
very low price, why would you not be asked it going outside
and knocking on the door? Trucks doors window and, and ask them
what's going on? Because you'd like to get involved in this?
Yeah, something we
do. Yeah. And we do. It's kind of the, it's the one out of 10.
People are like, eager for it. They'll chase our guys down the
street literally, and say, Hey, is it coming? yet? I live right
over there. I went, when can I get hooked up? And we we really
appreciate that enthusiasm, those early adopters, those are
the people that those who are less technical look to for
answers, Well, should I get this new thing? I've heard about it?
Why would I want that? And 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. And, you know, I mean, you say it's a failure of
the technology writing community. I mean, you know, I
don't, I don't follow, you know, all of the hobbies and
interests, that 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. And, 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 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 is up, my Wi Fi is down,
ya know? But that's just the way it is.
It is, and I try not to place a judgment on that. And say, you
know, it's because I'm this, you know, ubiquitous, important,
integrated piece of technology. And, you know, it's our job as,
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. And I'll
say, we're really benefit from the fact that, you know,
America's cable companies, in particular, some of the most
hated companies, people really despise the business practices,
pricing policies, you know, they're really abusive practices
that come from the abusive that near monopoly. And so we get a
certain amount of, you know, 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, and most of the obscure ones.
Yeah. You know, I, you know, my observations from the outside.
And my speculation is that, you know, they may have found it to
be harder, more expensive, slower going, than they
expected. And they may also have been, have found that the
realities of consumer adoption, you know, convincing people that
they should switch to this. It, it is a real tough poll. Now,
you know, they, you know, Google has continued to, to build out
in the cities that they were committed to, they've sort of
paused and that's they've had some changes in leadership. But
I don't think that they the story is done. And I think,
whether it's Google Fiber, or to cows Ting, building fiber socket
internet in Missouri gorge net in in Oregon, or Sonic in
California, and hopefully beyond, you know, I think you're
going to see new market entrants, you know, building new
networks and disrupting, you know, cable and telco incumbents
in the coming years and I'm very optimistic about that.
What is the foot of the fiber cable cost?
Oh, it depends on the the strand count. But you know, the in home
the sort of single strand stuff at the end, you know, you might
be spending anywhere six, seven cents a foot. So really, really
cheap. The outside plant stuff, you know, we're stringing We did
a signalling system for a railroad and put in a bunch of
revenues for 32. And that that cable ends up being, you know,
between three and $4 per foot. And then you'll spend another,
you know, two or $3 per foot to place the cable, nevermind, you
know, getting conduit in the ground, which can be, you know,
10s, you know, 1020 30, even $50 per foot. In San Francisco, you
know, our budget per foot for under ground 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, I'm a technology person, and I'm
interested in product and customer service and, and
disrupting the market. But we've, you know, over the span
of the last, you know, seven, eight years learned a lot about
construction, and underground and aerial construction and the
process of construction cost optimization. It's, it's a whole
nother fascinating, you know, business that we've we've
become.
And the question I asked at the beginning, which wasn't fully
answered is what what do you do to get access to actually use
these polls? Do you have to buy access? Licensing?
Yeah, well, so poles utility poles are there in the public
utilities easement, right. So the infrastructure of your
community incorporates you know, 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 default by in that easement. And so, when would
utility poles are placed by an electric utility, the, 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 that
one foot of space on that one pole and and that and cable
maintenance, you know, dealing with somebody knocks a pole down
or a squirrel tuza cable. Those are the primary costs of running
the the infrastructure the network.
Hmm, interesting. Well, I'm wishing you nothing but luck,
and all these other little companies out there and I guess
there's more than a few you just name some of them that are
stringing cable to what just bypass the the old
infrastructure, which is looks like a cost benefit to me. And I
want to thank thank you for the interview. Now, I do want to ask
when I get this thing, when they finally put it in, they're gonna
have the box downstairs, they're gonna run up a piece of Ethernet
cable up to my office. And then and then I'll have a device I
plug it into that strings out the it's like a router, I
suppose.
Yeah, so we'll there's a there's a video on YouTube if you search
for Sonic gigabit fiber installation on YouTube, you
should find one of our videos and 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 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 the the Ethernet and Wi Fi. And so that's a
typical configuration and I think is
that your router or mine,
you can do either we supply a router and and we certainly
encourage customers to use the router that we supply you know
critically it's capable of full gigabit speed and most routers
aren't and so you need to have a you need to have a good router
to to deliver gigabit performance and so 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 entire optical network so Sonic can maintain
responsibility for all those components. And they keep them
up to date as well. I mean obviously you're aware of things
like VPN filter and, and and the sort of recent secure already
issues that we've seen with consumer routers, yeah. 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 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, you know, 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 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 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 they say
well, your, your network connections up. Yeah, it's not
working over here. Well, maybe it's your network. And yeah,
you're
on your own after that on your own. Exactly. Okay, well, it's
good to have the option. I think that covers everything I needed
to ask and 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
a sonic net? I wish
I think it should become
interesting guy. I'd like guys like this who just screw it. I'm
just gonna go do it. I mean, it's yeah, pretty
much. Yeah, I've always enjoyed him. He's got a good take on
Meyer that. And we're going to be back next Thursday. We are
this upcoming Thursday with a regular show. You're going to be
coming in from a Europe which was 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 at the anniversary. Everyone's coming in for this.
Then the keeper and I are going to see Clooney and the mall and
to 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 get contacts rolling in for me
before I fall in. It gets sucked into the black hole. Very
excited about it.
So we want to thank both Dana and Scott for taking part in
this show. It's usually
Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Yes, we'd like that. And
thank you, John. Thanks for doing that. That was good. And
you know, and I think it's good you get out of the house.
Yeah, I got out of the house.
I can just hear me on my voicemail. Hey, let's have John
do more of those key needs to get out of the house from
the house of the house.
Alright, everybody, that is what we do. Even when we're on
vacation. We don't just bring your 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 Union's and from
Northern Silicon Valley. That will be on Thursday and I
certainly will have the breakdown with Kamala Harris and
Sheryl Sandberg about the face bag money. You could just count
on it, you know, 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 Jhansi Dvorak we
return
with our live show on Thursday. Until then, adios mofos.
for.org/and Maybe I should write a book on how to get by on 500
million people that don't really know how to do it.