Adam Curry: Legendary MTV VJ, OG Podcaster, and Tech Pioneer

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. This episode's remarkable guest is Adam Curry. Adam was one of the VJs video jockeys of MTV back in the 1980s. In this position, he interviewed some of the most popular musicians of the time. This includes Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney. Adam is an early adopter and pioneer. He embraced the web and podcasting long before other people. In fact, he helped make podcasting a thing by collaborating with Dave Weiner on podcasting technology. He also created one of the very first podcasts, the Daily Source code. In 2005, Steve Jobs previewed Apple's podcasting efforts by playing the Daily Source Code on stage at D, the most exclusive tech conference. It was a huge deal when Steve used the product like this. Adam also started companies along the way that offered services such as web designing and video sharing, incubating and podcasting. He currently co hosts the no Agenda podcast with John Dvorak. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable, the paper tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use it. 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest. 2. Taking notes while being brief about speaking gigs. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds, and office layouts. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out production. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now here's the remarkable Adam Curry, podcaster, VJ and pioneer.

August 1, 1981 is when MTV kicked off. I didn't come in until 87 as they had gone through the first wave and they were doing an expansion. And that expansion meant that they were going on prime time cable, basic cable, which was 40 channels. And that meant that that would be available everywhere. And back in the day, people, only people who are old enough remember this. But cable was a joke. It was like, nah, it's not real tv. No one's going to advertise on it. No one cares about it. I mean, they had the, the ACE Awards and then they later had the Cable ACE Awards. And each of these cable systems was like their own little fiefd. You know, the owner would be a typical guy with, with a Cadillac with horns on the front like, yeah, it's my wife, say hello, MTV man. So we'd also have to tour the affiliates to kind of make sure that they kept us on their stations, on their cable networks. So it was real Mickey Mouse. And I was living in the Netherlands and they recruited me from there. I was doing television over there and I came from like a state broadcaster, so. And we had 14 cameras, five makeup rooms, like it was all gunmetal gray. I mean none of it was, was spiffy or anything, but we had it, you know, proper camera operator and a cable puller, all the stuff you'd want. And MTV was basically a studio. We shared the studio at the time with I think the Sally Jesse Raphael Show. This was on unitel video on 57th street in Manhattan. And there was a couple lights. The lighting director would come in once a week and you say, okay, stand in your spot. And he tapped the light. Okay, this is good. I'll see you in a week or two. We had no makeup, no wardrobe, we did all that ourselves. It was really, really guerrilla television, very low rent. And it was kind of being run by radio people, like a radio station at the time. So it was, I fit right in. I felt great. Although I never really connected well with the management. I think they, they thought I had, you know, I had too many aspirations. I had all kinds of things written into my contract they didn't like, like I could do radio and that. I just thought that was ridiculous. You can be a VJ or dj. What do you want to be? I said, well, I gotta be both. Yeah, there were other things. Like I was in the music meeting as the only on air talent where they decided what they would accept to play on the channel. So, and there's some producer things I'd negotiate because they came to me. So that gave me an upper hand. But it was not the, the, the drug fueled bosom babes rolling around the studio type vibe that you might think it was. It was quite sedentary, quite tedious in fact, because we would record each day of. Of mtv. We record in. Not in real time, but just the segments. So we never actually saw the videos while we were taping it. We just, you know, we seen them before. Oh yeah, we just pretend. You see, I mean, you'll see. Go to on YouTube. You see me, I'd be like, I'm looking off camera. I'm literally looking at like a floor manager or a production assistant. Like, all right, that's great to see Bon Jovi up there. And then, you know, I'll talk about the next video and then here it comes. I look off to the side. I'm just looking into darkness. And then they would literally. This is so pre Internet. So they would take these big tapes, these U matic tapes, which is like a big Betamax or like a big. Yeah, like a big Betamax kind of would look like. And they put him in a car service, drive it to Long island to the network operations center where we had guys all day long who would insert like Adam Curry, 12pm segment A. And he play it and then he'd click the other machine and play the video. And then he'd fast forward, queue up the next segment. Adam Curry, 12pm segment B. And he'd play that. So it was kind of a play out system, like a radio station with cart machines. And it was really, really, really low rent. And I was on the Internet at the time and they had a Wang computer. I'm like, wow, these guys are ancient. It was crazy. They were, they were doing the word processing on the Wang and sending it down from the studio. Whoa, it was great.

You're bursting my bubble here. You're telling me that you didn't just watch the video and then react to it.

It was, it's all acting.

All that was fake.

All of it was fake, man. All of it. Every single bit of it. And this is why I rarely do mainstream things anymore. I know how it works. I'm always disappointed. I like what. I remember when Michael Jackson died and I got all these calls like CBS Evening News, want to talk to you. I'm like, okay, you know, that's fine. I was doing other stuff at the time, wasn't on MTV anymore, and spent three hours interview some walking shots. And then you watch at night. It's like literally 15 seconds of me going like, he'll be missed. You know, it's like all the other stuff I said was, I'm like, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm so spoiled by podcasting and the freedom that we have. There's a lot of disillusionment there. But man, does it work. Does the mainstream trickery just work beautifully? Everything is a great product that I see. It really is not truthful, but it's a great product.

Back then, did the experts scoff at the idea that there would be.

Only.

Music videos that they say, American public doesn't want this, they want movies, they want Disney specials. Just to have two minute videos over and over again is not going to cut it.

Interesting. Again, it was, it was really radio people who drove this and they said, we can run this like a radio station at vjs and they'll do shifts. And basically as a vj, you're one step lower on the rung from curable lepers, incurable lepers. Then down there it's vjoo. So they really want just interchangeable talent that you can just pull in and rotate out and have them look pretty and do their thing. Don't bump into the furniture and we'll play the songs. But something else happened and the revolution really came from creatives. So the first thing was these videos directors were making videos and they were doing them on really small budgets. And this became an industry. And so the first thing that had to happen was, was we had to legitimize what was going on. So every MTV video, you would see the director and the director would get a credit at the, at the beginning and the end of the video. And that was not only an interesting negotiation that we went through with certain guilds, but it also really gave legitimacy to the product. And, and then you got celebrity kind of directors who would jump into the game. You know, there was people directing for each other, so that really became quite a thing. And you know, then with John Landis and the Thriller video, all of these things really built up into this is an actual product that stands by itself. Which ultimately also became MTV's demise as we know it, when music videos were so commoditized that they found themselves competing with other networks for, for premieres. So the next Michael Jackson video was going to bet. And so Viacom, MTV Networks, they said, you know what, let's just buy bet because we can't have these guys cutting into our business here. And so they did that. And then the commoditization just continued, particularly as online started coming to play and they saw that they could get a 0.3 rating for music videos, maybe a 1.0 in prime time with some special programming like Dial MTV or what later became TRL Live. But you did a long form programming like MTV Beach House or MTV Real World or Sporting fool or Remote Control, the game show. Now you're talking a three rating. And that was it. That was the smartest decision they could have made. Sad for what it was, but the music video was no longer a viable business. And so they just went straight into, we're targeting this audience and we're going to go after them 100%. And which is a lot of it is low hanging fruit, teen moms. It's crazy. It's a lot of reality shows. And so the joke, the meme that goes around the 40th anniversary is Happy Birthday, MTV. 40 years and 14 years of music. You know, all the rest was different kinds of programming. But it's nice because it's something that our generation and that really is older millennials, I would say, up until, you know, well, maybe it's just the older millennials and some, some boomers in there as well. That was something we shared. It's like the rotary phones on the wall. You can show it to people. To be like, that was like a whole thing. And you stand here waiting for it and you grab the cord and go around the door into the basement, really. So it's kind of that, that is, it's hard to understand, but I'm so happy that, that I was a part of it. And I was there for seven and a half years. And to this day I'll be in just the most odd circumstances, you know, maybe a CEO. And then they figure it out, like, wait a minute, aren't you the guy from. And then, you know, the shirt opens up, Metallica T shirts on underneath. You know, it's like, it's so, it's, it's kind of a cultish thing at this point. But I'm, I'm very, very happy that I was a part of it. Wow.

And tell me, how did MTV go from this scrappy startup held together by duct tape into really defining the culture?

First, I will say Tom Freston was really important in that. I feel that he led, that he led MTV in his own Tom Freston way. He was a very, very interesting guy. Very, very rock and roll, but complete suit. You wouldn't know it, but you know, you look into his background. He was, did import export with Afghanistan. It's like, okay, I know enough about Tom. This guy, he's rock and roll. And, and he had a good connection with the Music industry. He understood what they wanted because we were just. MTV is just a part of the system. It became that very, very quickly with all the negotiations and what goes on and who do we put in on special rotation to hook up someone else. All the favors are all there. And it was, you know, it was top 40 radio sliding towards hip hop. The artists and the video artists who put it all together became something. They made the words come alive. The videos at a certain point was just. The budgets were crazy and record companies would still put them up and put up those kinds of budgets and that, you know, that started to change over time. So more creativity came in, the technology changed. Final Cut Pro, that was instrumental in. For MTV music videos in the latter part of, I'd say the 90s. That was. It was like what, nonlinear video editing. And I can do this at home and I can. I remember going to CBS, Sony Records in 2000, it was 2005 or something. I was going to see if I4 maybe see if I could do anything with the music business with podcasting. And I'm in the lobby there now. In Manhattan, there's a second floor lobby and that's where kind of everyone waits until you're called up to God to go meet with whoever you're going to meet with. And I couldn't believe what I saw. It was like a hundred hip hop groups and they're all film and stuff and they're, you know, they got soundtracks running. So I guess they're doing a part of the videos that they're going to get their record contract. And Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran is sitting there waiting next to me. And we're looking at all this and all of a sudden the lady comes on the speaker at Mr. Simon Lebon. Mr. Simon Lebon. You can go up now. Mr. Simon Lebon. Simon Lebon. Know who he is. And the whole thing was just mayhem. Guys like, I don't recognize this industry. I don't know who's making the money, where it's going. And of course, you know, the music business in general has really been stripped to its bare bones with Spotify and streaming and all the types of deals that were done to keep the broadcasters rich and musicians starving. The same story as always.

Nothing's changed.

No, I'm not really. Not really.

And were you part of the I want my MTV promotion?

No, no, not at all. That was before me. That was. That was the very first when they just started off and they needed to get cable stations to. To carry the signal. That was the Thing you had to clear, just like radio, you had to clear the stations and you had to talk to all these guys. And so I. I should know who came up with this, but I want my. MTV was an easy one. You got all the, especially the British guys to say, yeah, Bowie, the Stones, you got Madonn, Billy Idol. It was all the icons of the moment. And they loved it, too. It was, you know, they were part of it. It was very, very community type thing. And it was heartfelt, even though there was money behind it. And the intent was to create a $4 billion brand, which it is, or at least annual revenues. So it was. It behooved everybody. It was. It was. It was fun to watch. But the early days, no, that was not me. I was not a part of that. I wasn't part of spring break. This was. This is a good one. So spring break became famous MTV spring break coverage. But MTV didn't want to just go to Florida and watch kids belly flop. That was never the idea. The idea was, how do we get Budweiser to advertise on the channel? And I was a part of this pitch. So we went to Budweiser, Anheuser Busch, we said, look, your beer is down there in Florida and all these other places for spring break, we'll do wall to wall coverage. We'll have big inflatable bottles of Bud everywhere. And they went for it. And then, you know, then of course, we had wound up with me on the. The Bud Light boat with Spuds McKenzie. Okay. You know, but we did whatever we had to do, and that was purely to get them on the station and turned into a new kind of unforgettable programming that they repeated over and over again.

Man, you're bursting so many of my bubbles.

No, but this is good. I mean, it was really fun to do. It was. It was real. The realest thing, I think, was the Video Music Awards. Those were live. It went out live. The early ones. Later on, it became a little too contrived. And it was so good, in fact, that the VJs were not actually invited. If it was in Los Angeles, you had to fly yourself out. You had to buy your own ticket. They were horrible to us. It was like, no, no, no. This is special programming. This is not for you. People watch this all day long, you know, so you get to do one little segment or something. Like, outside. I'm standing outside here. All the stars are inside. I'm the schmuck on the outside.

So as a vj, you basically watch These videos. And then you had to just make it up on the fly that you weren't meeting with them, you weren't interviewing how.

No, no, no. I mean, there was. I. There was plenty of interviews and stuff that would then get chopped up. I had several shows throughout the years that would include. Would basically be six segments or six segments in an hour, of which three could be two minutes. And it's a typical. It's like typical television because you got to sell more Skittles. So we do that. And those things were great. And I love doing that many, many interviews. But it was never really like a live. A live show, except for Mardi Gras was live. We would cut live to Mardi Gras, which was really fun back before you got killed in the streets. Some MTV Spring break was live and I did. The afternoons were live for a while with dial MTV where people would call in and request their. Their favorite video. So no, it was. It was actually a lot of fun. And. And they were in general highly scripted. So every VJ was highly scripted. There was a teleprompter and I. And I just said, just leave it empty because I'll just make it up. I know what's going on because I was researching this is. I had found the Internet in 88. 87. 88. And I was on. On Gopher. I was poking around. I was looking at news. Yeah, I'm on. I was. I got a slip account through Panics in New York City and figured out how to set up that. That slip connection. And you got your PPP stack and all that stuff. And then you fire up the terminal. Oh, okay, there it is. Then you log into the Gopher server and check around. But I really had more fun with the news groups and. And email. Email was phenomenal because my audience was college students who a. Didn't count in the ratings at all. So they weren't even. Didn't even know how many were watching. They were watching. But they had very different ideas about what videos they like. So I'd get feedback from them. And that's how I ultimately set up my own Gopher server and registered mtv.com to run it. And I would pitch that on the air from time to time. And so people. I'd put little stories up. And so I typically had news stories a day before MTV News itself because I was getting it from the people out there in the country who were emailing me these stories. And then it was, I think around 93. And I got an email from a guy in university in Champaign, Urbana, Illinois. And he says, yeah, Adam, I've got this thing and I want you to try it out.

Let me guess, let me guess. Was his initials MA?

Yeah. Marc Andreessen says, Adam, check this httpd server out. I think I had like 1.4 or something. And I set it up and like, oh, Mosaic browser. I'm like, oh, wait a minute. And that blew my mind. And I wound up leaving MTV maybe a year later to start my own company. Because I was like, this is it. This is the real future. What's going on here? I'm just mucking around on this cable news business or cable business. And so, yeah, so that, that's really how I got sucked in very, very deep. And I saw that I could be much faster, much nimbler, do more fun stuff, less restrictions online. And it was, it was truly the wild west. I mean, AOL wouldn't let you on the Internet, if you recall. And you know, people were like, come on, man, give us a browser, give us a browser. And like, okay, you know, you got that browser and had to click all those warnings like, it's dangerous out here. Anything could happen. Which is exactly what you wanted. And after that, you know, AOL became a dial up company. You know, everything got sucked into the Internet. It was beautiful. It was really an exciting time.

Okay, only one more question back in MTV days because we're going to make the transition through the web here. Were you there when Michael Jackson required that everybody call him the King of Pop?

Yes. Oh, this is, this is one of my favorite stories. So there were many, many deals that were made and they typically revolved around the Video Music Awards. So if you wanted to have an artist of stature appear, then you maybe would have to play some other video by the same label or some other, you know, favors were made, deals were done. And so we had, for Michael Jackson, he was going to perform. And we had a whole Michael Jackson weekend planned around the premiere of his latest video. I don't remember what that was. And of course, teasing that he would be on the Video Music Awards. And the way it worked on MTV is you tape on Thursday, you tape for Friday and Saturday and wait on Thursday, you tape for Friday, Friday, you tape Saturday, Sunday, something like that. Somehow we threw in a Monday somewhere. But you would, we wouldn't work on the weekend, but it was the weekend, so. So we all did our bits, 48 hours worth of programming. And then I got a call Friday night. It's like, y' all gotta come in tomorrow because someone messed up and the, the deal was every single time you say Michael Jackson, it had to go Michael Jackson, comma, the King of Pop. So they made. Now I don't even know if Michael Jackson cared. But we reshot the whole weekend just to make sure we didn't. We didn't screw anything up with that deal. That's how political it was when it came to the deals. But it was all for the good, you know, we wanted Michael Jackson to be on the show, I guess. But there was some grumbling.

I can just imagine. Let's get out of MTV days. We already touched on this a little bit. But tell us about this getting on the web. What a concept, right? How did that happen? How are you this early adopter, this pioneer of the Web?

Well, it started. I've always been a tinkerer. So my love of radio started when I was 13. I got it, I still have it, the Radio Shack 101 projects. And it's a breadboard and it has components and you connect them with different length wires and stuff. And so that's how I built my first transmitter, my FM transmitter. And you know, that's how I kind of learned, kind of fell into radio because I needed something to play on my transmitter. And before I knew it, I was building a mixer and understanding how to mix in a microphone, etc. So my dad, actually, he was into. We were living in Europe and he was into all kinds of PR stuff, but it was online. And the first thing he brought home was a minitel terminal from France. And France was very, very sophisticated. Early on, every household had this little terminal and it was meant for, you know, hotel reservations or restaurant reservations and some, you know, news, et cetera. Turns out it was being used by sex workers a lot. So they had to scuttle the project at some point because there was some message board thing. So my dad had all these weird computers. And the one that I really grabbed hold of was the Sinclair ZX80, which was basically this plastic keyboard with a module on the back which was the RF modulator. They hooked it in the TV and you could write and load programs through a cassette. But I worked part time at a computer store on weekends. And a buddy of mine, I think he might have had the Commodore Vic 20 at that. But we built our own modems, our own acoustic modems. So we ripped apart old phones and we put them in little boxes so you could put the phone cradle right on top. And it works. You know, it was like three baht a minute or a second, whatever, but it worked. And so that was kind of my introduction. Then you know, bulletin boards and that kind of thing that followed. And then I put everything aside as my radio and television career started when I was 19 in the Netherlands. And then when I got to the States in 87, the first thing I did is I went to 47th Street Photography and I bought a Mac plus with a SCSI external hard drive, 20 megabytes with a big SCSI cable. Remember, to terminate, you could, you could plug an RV into that thing. It was so much power. And so. And a 1200 baud modem. And I was using it for CompuServe because I discovered CompuServe. By then I thought that was phenomenal. Prodigy was coming around around that time. I think that was a Sears deal. But all of this stuff was nothing because I kept hearing people say, no, the Internet, man, the Internet, it's impossible to get on, but all the cool kids are there. And so that's. I just fooled around night after night until I finally got a dial up account with Panics New York, figured out how to get the TCPIP stack running and I was off to the races. And from there, as I said, it just progressed into, into the web. A guy from Sun Microsystems, Carl Jacob, who later, I think he's still a. He wasn't. He might have been on Facebook board at some point, but he was at sun and he said, check this out, Adam. And at this time I had a 56k frame relay in my house. I mean, look out, I'm cooking with gas now. And so he streams a sound file from San Francisco to my computer in New Jersey. I'm like, that's it, man. Why am I mucking around in this cable business? This is where I gotta be. And so I literally, I finished the number one video on the top 20 countdown. I said, that's it. I'm leaving MTV. I'm gonna start my own company. I'm gonna do something on the Internet. I don't know what it is, but that's where the future is. And I'm done and I'm out. And I left. I never looked back. Went right to my radio syndicators and started a company called On Ramp. And the first thing we did was this 56 annual Grammy Awards. We did what we called a cybercast with one main spot, two sponsors, Visa and Casio. Casio was sponsoring because they just come out with digital cameras that you could connect via a serial cable to your computer so you could then upload the photos. And we were using Cuc me video, you know, one frame, one frame a second. And it was a tremendous success. And, and we even brought a T1 line into the shrine Auditorium. And it was cowboy stuff. It was really crazy. But it was all east coast, right? It wasn't until I met the west coast guys that I really understood how nuts the world was. And that's where I met such luminaries as Mark Cantor and Dave Weiner and John C. Dvorak, John Perry Barlow. And I really didn't know that much about the culture of Silicon Valley and computers other than the thing I held in my hand. So these were like prophets, man. It's like, wow, there's a whole nother thing going on out here. In fact, I was still at mtv, I think, and Halsey Miner gets in touch with me, said, we got this thing, we'll do this pilots called cnet. Come on out. I'm like, okay. So I got. And they had an idea. They brought in Kevin Wendell, a top. He helped built the Fox. The Fox network, not Fox News, but the FOX television station network. And they were going to do like a cable channel or something called cnet. And, and we're. And, and they had a whole bunch of people in just shooting all weekend long. I said this should be an Internet thing. Really. He says, ah, yeah, good idea. What should we do? So well, do you have cnet.com no. All right, hold on a second. I register cnet.com I ran their email for, for at least a year. Just, just, just IMAP or pop, pop three email boxes for them. They never had an idea that it was going to be seen at the, the computer network the way, the way it turned out to be. So there were all these things that were just coming across that really enamored me with. If you sit down with Mark Cantor and he's smoking some weed, man, you could, you can listen to that guy for hours. Like, wow, these guys are nuts. And, and so that's how I kind of started to learn about again, the tinkering side rss. This is what I learned from Dave Weiner. He was building the micro blogging, really. He was building RSS and aggregator and Mark had his multimedia stuff and they're all, with all of these different things happening. Meanwhile, I moved to Amsterdam at the end of 99 to go back. I had a Dutch wife and she wanted to be near her parents and they had cable modems. Now this was cool because cable modems was not fast or anything, but it was always on. You didn't have to dial up. You didn't have to tie up a phone line. Napster was just happening. So people like, holy crap, I'm sharing all this stuff and I'm literally poking inside someone's hard Drive and pulling MP3 files out. And it's all kind of working, but it was all so slow. And that's when I came up. I wrote a blog post called the Last Yard. And I had this idea that since the computer was always on, why couldn't we just have like the video file that, that is that you absolutely want to see instead of the experience of the day which was click, wait, wait, download, click open up with another program. Like the real player starts to jerk open. You know all this stuff that was crap. I said, well, wouldn't it be great if there's like some program that would run in the background, know when I want something I wanted to see was ready, would download it, but then would tell me later because you know, once it's downloaded then it's just one click. It plays. So what I don't know won't hurt me. That was my whole concept. And somehow when Dave and I was very involved because I loved his product Radio User Land. So well, this is a two way system. You, you, you create an RSS feed on the blog and I aggregate it and I can read it on my end. Why don't we do like a file attachment? It wasn't that simple. I had to go fly to New York and I had to explain to him what I was talking about. And I think he probably thought I was a schmuck. Like, what's this Hollywood guy doing here? Tell me what to do. But, but he saw it, he saw the light. And then he and I, I think by the time I was back in, in Europe, he had kind of coded it in and for two years we were testing this functionality, just going back and forth and like, oh cool, there's another 100 megabyte file that Dave uploaded last night in San Francisco. And I don't have to download it. I click it plays right away. It was all kind of fun for me at least. And Dave was working with Chris Lydon. I know that they had done some stuff, some radio, like his raise radio program. But when I saw the ipod, yeah, that's when, that's when it all came together. I'm like ah. Because I looked at the ipod and that was not a digital Walkman or whatever people were saying. I looked at it and I said that is almost exactly like the Sony transistor. Radio my grandmother gave me when I was 7 years old that I have under the pillow. It was the same size. I said, this is a radio. It's a radio receiver. And now we can have the radio shows. You, you know, subscribe was the word of the time. You subscribe, and then this. This little program is going to look for the new Episodes or whatever we were calling it. Episodes, I think. And it'll download it and put it on your ipod, and Bob's your uncle. And that's where we started. Literally, that's where we started. And I'd started doing the Daily Source Code, which was a daily podcast. We didn't. We didn't even know what it was called at the time. And the whole point of the Daily Source Code was I was talking about what the developers were building because they were building more radios. That's like, oh, you know, the ipod, RX and ipod or lemon and all these. We didn't have apps, we didn't have phones or anything. My God, the tools we have now is so unbelievable compared to. Compared to then. So, yeah, and so that. That just took off real fast. I mean, people grabbed hold. I say that Tony Khan from wgbh, he was quite instrumental, Unsung Hero, because he really pulled NPR into the game early. Early on. He was pushing them very hard, and that really gave it legitimacy. And, yeah, just. I mean, it grew so fast. It was only a number of years, so.

So people have applied the moniker Pod Father to you.

Is that.

Is that accurate? Are you the father of podcasting? Well, then, what's Dave Weiner? Is he the mother?

I've heard. I've heard people use Podfather with each of us interchangeably. That's fine. I'm the last one to say I'm the Podfather, but that's what people say. Some people say Adam Carolla is the Pod father. Ricky Gervais calls himself the Pod Father. I don't think there's any one father of anything. And if you look at the lineage of what we're actually doing and how far back it goes through XML and the people who were involved in that, and luckily, there's now a whole new generation of developers who are expanding on the original podcasting RSS 2.0 format with the podcast namespace. So this is. This is just our role in the evolution, because you could also say that MP3 was extremely important in the whole podcasting game and the. And the eventual licensing of that so everybody could use it. These are really. This is really the heroics is the people like Dave who make things that they cannot own. They cannot own a patent or a copyright because they know that it won't work if. If one person has control. And this is what I love about podcasting. It is truly free speech in that you only need to be able to create an RSS feed, a text file basically, and a place to put your MP3 and you're in business, you don't need anybody else. And that's why no one has ever been able to own podcasting. Many have tried. Myself, I've given it a stab and I know for sure you cannot monetize the network. This is impossible, it's dumb. And people who think they can do podcast networks, I'm happy to advise you why it's not going to work. And it's become part of the media landscape that is its own medium and is so powerful by its disintermediation and its decentralization. It's not a single person. Joe Rogan is not the most powerful person in the universe, but he makes up a part of a fabric that is way beyond the realm of anything most people are exposed to in mainstream. And I think that this, it's clear that this is growing as people discover more and as people start to use their voice themselves more. You were looking at more than over 4 million podcasts, of which I think accurately about 800,000 are really active. That's a lot, a lot of content.

But don't you think that Apple is close to controlling podcasting?

No. They fucked it up. No, no, actually I made an error. I'm sorry, I should say that I made an error when Steve Jobs called and asked me to meet with him, which was mind boggling. This was like I could not have been on a higher high. And essentially he was asking me for my blessing to put podcasting into itunes and into the ipod. Like, if I had said no, he wouldn't have done it. But it didn't matter. What I've now come to understand when Steve is courting you, it's hot. And I got the hot, sexy Steve and was very enjoyable. But I made an error in that I always thought radios would be around. I'm a radio guy, so there's radios in cars, radios are everywhere. And the radio for podcasting is an app. And when Apple put it in, put podcasting capabilities into itunes. I gave them our directory, which was. It was called ipod or.org and it was a decentralized, actually a very cool directory with multiple country managers. And it all kind of Flowed up into one centralized spot. But you could, it was a great thing, but it had like 5,000 podcasts organized and categorized. So why don't you start with this? So first of all, what they did is they, they used that, but they put all of the mainstream NPR type stuff on the homepage, which was disappointing. But because of this, Apple became the de facto on ramp to podcasting because you had to be on the Apple podcast app. There's no doubt about it, it was the biggest one at the time. Now that by itself is a gatekeeper function that shouldn't really be there, but Apple was a great steward of podcasting for a very, very long time. And the thing that happened, in a weird way, which is a very unapple thing, the way I understand it, their podcast app functioned in the old school way. It did the aggregation on your ipod or on your iPhone. It only talked to the Apple index to get the latest information, to get the latest update, really as a search, et cetera. Because of that, the API laid open and exposed for any independent podcast app to do the same thing. So we had this whole ecosystem, kind of unbeknownst to everybody, that had done two things. It had not moved in 10 years because, hey, if Apple's not doing a new feature, why do it? Why would a hosting company or anybody, it's not Apple, why do it? So that's very destructive for creative development. And the other thing is, and it happened in two different ways. One, Joe Rogan decided to go exclusive with Spotify and overnight his podcast disappeared from every podcast app. And I thought, wow, okay, that's interesting. Why did it happen so simultaneously? Well, he removed his feed. No, but really he removed his feed from Apple. And so all these. So the whole ecosystem lost that. Then there was some famous deplatformings that happened in, in concert, Apple and Facebook and Twitter. It took down Alex Jones and a whole bunch of QAnon podcasts. I don't even care what it is. What happened is they removed it from Apple. It went away from everything else. So this is a problem. If Apple doesn't want to have that on that platform, that's fine. But anyone else should be able to easily spin up an app and do this. And so that's where I decided to put my foot down. And we had to create an independent index that is just that it's independent. We don't care. You can replicate it, duplicate it, you can make your own index, but it is the index of podcasts. And we provide a free API so developers can Just go ahead and do whatever they want, any kind of experience they want. So we wrestled that away from Apple, I think, just in time, because when they did their big change to the subscription model, they, believe it or not, the API changed. So all of these apps, again, had they not had the index, would have been dead in the water. And I think Apple has given up. A lot of developers were very upset. And I said, have you ever paid Apple one dime for access to that API? No. And you weren't on their business list, my friend. They don't care about you. They don't care and they don't. And that's okay. So now we're in a little different position where we have big players, Spotify now entering the mix, all trying to do the same thing that has been impossible for anybody to do, and that is own podcasting. And luckily the podcast index now, you know, makes everything available, so everybody can go off and do whatever they do and include or exclude whatever podcast they want. If you just want a knitting app, podcast app, be my guest. It doesn't matter. And you know, we've been doing a few more things in that regard with what I call podcasting 2.0, to really solidify the capability for anyone to speak freely and not to have to wait for Apple to approve if you can show up on an app. I want university professors to put their lectures in and go home and upload their feed and it be available on 100 apps immediately. We've created that. That's now possible outside of Apple, but there's some fragmentation going on.

We need to back up a little bit because I think people may have missed this transition when you start using the pronoun we. So we is this podcast index project. Yes, that's the we. And you're creating this index that is not dependent on Apple, Spotify and all this other stuff. This is like. This is everything in podcasting.

Yes, correct.

Including QAnon, including whatever. Alex Jones.

I'm sure it's all in there.

Okay.

Yeah.

And this is a not for profit, a for profit.

It's an llc. Three partners, myself and Dave Jones. Now, he and I have been working on RSS aggregation projects for 10 years, just mucking around for our own, for our own bits, just screwing around. And Eric Mackey, who is very important because he understands legalities, keeps me out of jail and understands how a P and L works. But it's a value for value project. And this was an open project. And what I learned with no agenda, the podcast that I've been Doing with dvorak for almost 15 years is if you ask people to send you whatever they think your product is worth, you will be amazed at the success you have if you have an outstanding product. So this is. This is a core belief of mine, Silicon Valley. I call it value for value. Silicon Valley started pricing creative works really with. It goes much further back, but let's just say with the itunes store. So if you want to buy the Beatles, I want to hold your hand 99 cents. Who determined that? Who may and does that really represent the value to me, if I had to pay $99, I'll do it every single day for that song. It's one of the best love songs ever written. So when we first started asking for what is now known as maybe a Patreon model, you know, subscribe for $5 a month or $10 a month. We'll give you a T shirt if you do $25 a month, John. And I said, you know what? Whatever this show was worth to you, just write that number down and send it to us. And we still got a lot of people sending $5, quite a few sending $50. And lo and behold, a whole bunch of people sent $500, which.

$500 for what?

That was the value they got out of the podcast. When I asked them, I said, really? What was the show worth to you? And by the way, what we've learned to do is on the next show, we'll thank those people and say exactly how much they gave us. You can. You can count the money that's coming in by just listening to our donation segment. This came. This turned into a whole thing where numerology comes into play and people. On PI day, they'll send $31.40, $314. I mean, these things are. It's. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep. When you. You can't look in someone else's pocketbook, this is. People negotiate against themselves all the time. Well, my show. Is it really worth $5 a month for eight shows? I don't know, man. When you ask someone else, what was this one show worth? Oh, that was worth a hundred bucks easily. I loved it. Here you go. It was a hundred bucks. Someone might spend $100 easier than you or I. And if you just leave that to the individual, turns out that that is the magic to the value for value model. And we have put kids through school. We're not. We're not. We're not billionaires and millionaires. We get what we deserve. And this is the model. This is the media model that, that we've developed and we've exported that to other, other podcasts and help them do this. And it, it really does include the fundamental part. My, my wife is a semi retired nonprofit professional. She worked at Ronald McDonald House Charities, many other nonprofits. And she said the number one reason why people do not give to a cause is because they're not asked. Forget to ask. So we're blatant. We're like, hey man, that butcher shop you never went to? And then it was gone. One day that could happen to us. So taking that into account, we knew that if, if we started the, on our own dime, we built the, the database, the index, we filled it up. Now the hosting side of podcasting is still very distributed. It's a lot of small companies. 100,000 here, 100,000 there, 25,000 there. These are all small companies, all serving their customers mainly with advice and teaching because someone shows up and says, I'm ready for my podcast. So they do a lot of educational stuff to help people use their system. They have so much benefit by being able to do things like not have an index aggregator, paying all of their feeds ten times an hour and sucking all those feeds out. I mean, that's just bandwidth they're wasting. They want new features, they want transcripts, they want chapters, they want location, they want seasons. All these things that were not possible because everyone used Apple as the central index. So we've expanded it with all these new features. And then all of a sudden app developers come along and say, paul, that's cool. I've been looking to make a better app. And with today's tools, a web app is baked in a day. But we have many apps. Android, iOS. I mean, @newpodcastapps.com you can see all the apps and hosting services that provide these extra, these extra features. So we run purely on the donations that people give based upon the value. So often it's developers like, this is so valuable. I get to, I get to develop this app. Here's $50. Thank you very much for keeping it running. And we don't take any salaries. You know, it would be great if one day we could, but that's not really not the point. This is, this is to keep podcasting something for everybody. So it's not owned by one central comp. I want to use it. I don't want to get deplatformed, guy. I could say something stupid and then, you know, okay, this is really critical because this is the final thing. The problem, as you well know, Is advertising. Advertising is the issue. It is. It is now used as a lever for political means, et cetera. But when Google first started with YouTube, they didn't care. They didn't care what you said. Throw your alien stuff, your conspiracy theories, the crazier the better. And the advertisers came along and went, yeah, I don't want my stuff anywhere near any of that. So, okay, the first thing you do is they say you're demonetized. No, you just. The ads are not running on your stuff. That's. You're not demonetized. They don't care about you. They don't want their advertiser to be exposed to whatever the advertiser is upset about. And then because it's such, you know, literally advertising is censorship because of the programmatic way that ads are thrown into every single piece of content, every news stream. That's what Silicon Valley runs on. Mainly. Advertisers have a lot of power by saying, okay, I can't trust you, Google, to run me on your adwords because I keep showing up on the, on the white supremacy site, the self harm site, all the stuff I don't want to be on. Okay, so they can fix some of that. But this is where you get the mechanism where you can easily organize online whether your media matters or whether you're sleeping giants, or you can get together and say, oh, oh, that podcast. Yeah, Mr. Advertiser, you don't want to be on that podcast because this guy's a xyz. Fill it in, whatever the person is. And the advertisers, the first thing they do is like, I'm done, I'm out, no problem. I don't want any controversy. So that lever has been applied. So that can be applied to anybody at any time. And with that in mind, I said what we also need. So now we kind of have this uninterruptible distribution. We need uninterruptible money. We need to be able to have this supply of value going between the podcaster and the audience. And as we were looking at this, the Lightning network, which is, it's layer two, but I call it Venmo for Bitcoin, has just come into, into its own. And you can send real micro payments. One Satoshi is, you know, 0.001 penny. And you can send those in one or 50, whatever you want. So we hooked up the mechanism, believe it or not, value for value. Again, where you say, okay, this podcast that I'm going to listen to, it's definitely worth a Dollar an hour. That's kind of my. I think any podcast you listen to something for an hour, it's worth a buck. So I'm going to fill up my wallet here with $10. And every minute that I'm playing a podcast, 1/60 of a dollar is being sent to that podcaster in real time. No intermediary, direct from your app to the podcaster's wallet. Should you like something that the podcaster says. Now, in Silicon Valley land, you hit a heart or a like button. Here you hit a boost, you can send 500 satoshis, which is, you know, now you're talking 10 cents. You could do 50,000 if you wanted, which would be like $12. This is working. So we implemented this nine months ago, and this flywheel is just turning. And we now have over a thousand podcasts doing this. They're immutable by design of the database, and they're receiving value back for the value they provide in MP3 bits going into someone's ears with little bits of bitcoin coming back. And I think that this is a model for all kinds of content moving forward. It's time based, it's pleasure based, it's value based. The pricing mechanism is done by the person receiving the value. Which, in general, what is a television or an audio program worth? Nothing. It's not tangible, it's worth nothing. It's only enjoyment you get from it. And it's phenomenal. When you see how people use this, they are. They're sending special numerology like, oh, 2112, that's my Van Halen number that I'm 2100 and 2112 SATS. So that's, you know, that's 10 cents. But there's also people sending much more and they're truly supporting the podcaster in real time. And this is, this is creating something and I'm certainly dragging it forward. So it has to become something because. Because I. It's so exciting. Every minute of the day, there's little bits of value coming back for people who are listening to your podcast at that very minute.

So just to back up for a second and let me put the pieces of my brain back in my head.

I'm trying to fit it all into one week.

So I have a podcast called Remarkable People. And let's say that I have. Last week's episode was Cody Keene, and he was speechwriter for Barack Obama. He drops a lot of great tips about how to be a great speaker and speech writer. So me, as a business person, I Listen to that. And I say, I would have paid five bucks to hear that. Okay, so now what does Guy do? How do I get into this mechanism where now Joe Blow, who loved Cody Keenan, is now saying, I'm send Guy five bucks. How does that. Like, I don't even know where to begin for that.

Well, it's. It's really simple. All you need to do is have a podcaster wallet on. On the podcast side, on the receiving side, and a new app, a podcasting 2.0 app, and that has a wallet. And you literally fill it up with. With. With satoshis, which is a lot of ways to do it. But now you can even get the strike app from. From the App Store, and you can connect it to your debit card.

For those of you not familiar with the term, a Satoshi is 1/100 millionth of a Bitcoin. It's named after the person or people who created bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.

That is the. Onboarding is the biggest. Is the biggest hurdle. I would say right now it's analogous to the old days of podcasting, when we used to say, subscribe to the show. Find the little RSS icon. Right click on it. Copy, link, take it over to your subscribe. Yeah. And then paste it in and hit go. And now you're good. You think we're at that level of getting your money into a bitcoin wallet? There's also a lot of ways you can get it. People will give you some. Just send it to your wallet just to get. We're doing programs to onboard people, but once that part is done, that's pretty much it. Dennis. Just go to. In the podcast app, search for the podcast, and then say, okay, it'll probably have a default of 50 or 100 satoshis per minute, which will wind up around your dollar and a half per hour. You can change that per podcast, and then you just start listening. When you stop listening, the payment stops. If you pick it up again, it starts paying again.

And right now, I use simplecast. So I put it to simplecast, and it goes to six different places.

Right.

Do I stop that and go only with your thing, or is that another.

No, that's. That's the beauty of it. If you go to podcasterwallet.com all you have to do is authenticate that it's your feed, and we actually add that in for you at the. At the index, we'll add your. Your. We call it the value block, and we'll hook you up with any number of wallet providers right there. So okay, I'll use. There's a lot, you know, free. They just store your money with them and you can ship it right out. You can set up your own independent node that you can have running in your home. Again, this is freedom always requires an extra step. So no, there's no help desk that's gonna, that you can call when you forget your password or screw it up. There's lots of people willing to help but. And once it's running, it's running, but there's always a little more work required. And it's no surprise that of the 1,000 podcasts we have now, at least 35, 40% are Bitcoin and crypto podcasts because they have a jump on understanding the, the mechanism of crypto. A lot of people just like ah, crypto. But you know, the system will work with the digital dollar. It'll work with any, any digital coin that anyone comes up with. So if bitcoin is, is somehow outlawed, which is doubtful, we could still use the central bank digital currency because it's scriptable money. That's, that's the beauty of it. You can now send and receive money with computer scripting. It's, it's, it's beautiful.

So in your world, to take an extreme example, Joe Rogan, who is exclusive with Spotify, he's a dinosaur now.

I mean, well, he's, That's a very interesting question. First of all, he's a good friend and I've been on his show three times and I love him to bits because he totally recertified me as someone who matters in the podcasting world because it's 18 years ago, most people never heard of me. Joe is this generation's Tonight show. And I don't care what he's on, he's the Tonight Show. And the Tonight show is not an hour jam packed with commercials and funny bits and jokes. And let's move it along, it's a three, a three, three and a half hour sit down talk with someone who's super interesting or not. You can skip it altogether if you want. So he really utilized the medium and he also created an entire layer of comedians and talent that otherwise would not have been exposed to podcasting and might not have. I mean this. Huge careers have come out of people who have been on Joe Rogan and started their own podcast to supplement their existing business, which is being a comedian and touring, etc. Not everything has to be, has to be money. That said, I believe that he, even though I'm not intimately familiar with his deal, but I know that he can really do whatever he wants. But I think he does self censor. The pressure is bigger. He feels there's more responsibility. There's always strings that come with something with a big paycheck like that. I personally think he may be back when. When three years is up. I don't know if I think he was probably doing about $10 million a year in revenue as is, but he was in the sights of the cancel cannon. This is the problem. He cannot come back and do ads. It's just, I mean, yeah, limited. Some advertisers will always stick by him, but a lot will.

My pillow.

My pillow. Well, this is the kind of the thing, advertising on podcasts. I'm sorry, guy, but it's not a big business. It's never. It never will be. Yeah, they say it's a billion dollars, but it's all B. It's all C and D level. It is my pillow, my Nothing against mypillow. Fantastic product. Find the guy. Very entertaining. But it's not BMW, it's not pharmaceutical, it's not telecom. These are the big advertisers that are not in podcasting and there never will be because these guys don't want any controversy. It's just too risky. They're not going to do it. So I don't understand why people are still so hung up on creating this advertising juggernaut. Spotify is not proving it at all. They're losing monthly active users overall. And I think they're having a hard time converting music listeners to podcasting inside their app. It's not proven people like listening to scary, uncomfortable stuff. This is why true crime is so biggest category in podcasting. True crime. People love hearing scary, gory stuff that kind of feels like you shouldn't be listening to it. They love this. I've been in programming all my life in television radio program. This is what people like. They want that. They also want their mind to be challenged with unconventional thoughts. And yes, people may want to sometimes hear a crazy kook talk about Qanon stuff. It doesn't mean that that person is evil or that you're, you know, being sucked into a cult. I watch Rachel Mano too, you know, I listen to Kara Stricture as much as I can. You know, that it's beautiful. It's still a listen, it's still valid. So, you know, I want the negative boost so I can suck back out of her wallet, give it back. No, but podcasting is such a beautiful place still Gu. And, And. And it is because it's just impossible to control. It's way out of control. It. There's no way that a company can try and harness. I tried it myself. I set up a podcast network in 2006. Steve Jobs said it would be a good idea and he got me in with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia and Ron from Sherpa. I mean, these were the top, top VCs who I disappointed completely with with none of their money coming back to them. It can't be done. It just can't be done. But individually, this is what's so beautiful. I mean, we have one podcast, it's two guys, and the family does. I mean, it's work. It's real work we're working on all the time, but we don't need, you know, staff to do things. You'll never make money that way. So you can do a lot yourself. And there's no need to try and expand with more in a network. Everything is its own island, and each island has its tribe around it. So now I'm crossing over with your tribe, and people who listen to me will now check out your show and vice versa. And that's how it starts to expand. And that's the discovery thing the Silicon Valley keeps thinking they can fix with podcasting. But it's not fixable. It's not meant for that. It's not like YouTube. It's not equate. It's not like TikTok is the ultimate YouTube. That's why TikTok is kicking everyone's ass. It's 40 seconds, boom, done. Next one. It's like top 40 radio on crack. But that's not what podcasting is. You know, top 40 radio on crack. You can make so much money Instagram that the ads are phenomenal the way it's integrated. This is so smart. But that's not gonna work with what we're doing here. It's just not. It's just not, you know, and everyone, you. You may have a sponsor who sponsors you for a million dollars for the rest of your life. That's something that is you and it's who you bring to the table, who you are. It's not something you can do by calling your agency and saying, give me some podcasting. It's just not going to work that way.

I'm gonna have to rethink my entire approach to podcasting after this.

Well, what is your approach, guy? What is your podcast?

Well, if Joe Rogan is a dinosaur, I am like, freaking amoeba.

I mean, no, see, I disagree because you, you speak to remarkable people, right? You do remarkable things with remarkable objects. You have a remarkable device, which I've been reading about.

You're going to get one.

You're interesting to listen to, you're interesting to watch. And I think if you want, I don't, I don't know if you have any wait for it monetization strategy on this, on this product. But, you know, maybe you just want to sell books, maybe you just want to sell devices. It doesn't. That is probably more of a valid monetization strategy than any. And that, you know, why wouldn't a college professor do lectures to sell himself or herself as a great class to take? These are all perfect reasons for podcasting.

As I look back over my career, I think that the work I'm doing in podcasting is the best work I've ever done in my career.

I'm with you. I am. So I've been in broadcasting for 40 years, since I was 15, the most fun. And I've also this last job, if you call it that, no agenda running on 15 years. Longest I've been in a job, longest I've been without an employment contract, longest I've been living paycheck to paycheck. Like, why, who knows what will come in next week. But the fun that I have, and this is the final thing that I would say about podcasting. With radio, we learned the way to grow your audience is really there's only two ways you can. Well, three ways you can do stuff on location, which always works. Radio stations going on location, doing at the local soda fountain, whatever it is at the local fair always works. You can also put people on the air with phone lines or you can read there. We used to read postcards and now of course, it's email. So that's kind of it. We took this to a next level and the first thing we said is all our data is open. We have no copyright except on our faces. You can do whatever you want. And all the show notes, everything is in xml. I learned that from Dave. Make it machine readable. So we have people who have built search engines. We have every one of our episodes. There's new album art because we have at least 15 artists competing while we're doing the show to make the art that we'll choose. And there's a place for it, the no Agenda Art Generator. We didn't build it, we don't maintain it. Some guys who make T shirts, mugs, hats, hoodies, whatever they set up no Agenda shop. They get art from the Art Generator. They split the money with the artist, and they give us a donation from time to time. I don't know how much it. I mean, yeah, I guess it's a third. Maybe not. I don't care. I don't have to have any meetings. I don't have any. No. No licensing agreements. They just do it and it's done. Jingles, mixes, SEO. All of this is done by our audience, who we early on called producers. You're not listeners. You are a producer of the show. And you show up with one of three things. Your time, your talent, or your treasure. We need treasure to pay the bills. But if you are a lawyer and you've heard something about mandating vaccines, you know, what is your professional opinion? We have constitutional scholars. We have doctors, nurses, ems. We have many people in government in. Everyone has a story. It's what Dave Weiner would call sources go directly. And it's not quite direct, but it is direct in the fact that they will send me their information verbatim. I can share that with the audience. So we're really. We're information routers. We play 40 to 50 clips per show of mainstream that we then deconstruct and say, okay, well, here's what I think is really going on with this. And it is. It's only twice a week, but I love my job, guy. I feel the same thing. I love my job, and I want many people to be able to love it the same way I did, without any restrictions. We've done it for 18 years. We can keep it open, we can keep it going, and I intend to do that. I intend to keep that alive for as long as I can.

If this is the first time you've listened to the Remarkable People podcast, you may not know that the Remarkable Tablet Company sponsors the Remarkable People Podcast. The Remarkable Tablet is all about focus, helping you do your best and deepest thinking. So I ask each guest how they do their best and deepest thinking. Remarkable People podcast, sponsored by the Remarkable Tablet Company. This last question is, how do you, Adam Curry, do your best and deepest thinking?

In the shower, without a doubt. The shower. I can. My wife will be like, you've been under there for 45 minutes. Say, yes, but I. I know how to do it now. I've figured it out. That. And that's my best thinking, but passively. I will almost always at night, take a problem. Not. Not a problem, but something I'm trying to figure out or trying to solve. And if I. And if it's not something immediate. I will. I will make one up. Like, oh, if only I could make a command line script that could do this, this, or this. I'm just. Every night I have to give my brain something, and I wake up in the morning and I use it. Oh, my brain has processed it. It helps me get to sleep and it does some processing. And it's a. I love this skill because I can take it, something complicated and put it in my head. And the next morning, it's maybe not solved, but it's always clearer. So subconsciously, but really in the shower is when I. When I connect the bits, you know, it's like, okay, if I have that over there and this fits into that, and it's usually technical stuff. I can't develop my way out of a paper bag. But I understand it. I understand how it fits. And I think you're very similar in understanding how complex systems come together, how they work, and how you can actually attach part A to part B. There's real connectors there.

My thinking is getting a lot less effective because we have water rationing here in California, so the showers are shorter.

Right. That's why you got fired. Why are you living in that hell hole? I mean, I was reading in a diary, there was some guy, he was doing a journal in like 1870 or something, and he's writing about California. This place is a hellscape with fires and mudslides and like 1870, it's always been that way. This is not new. And I lived in Cal. I lived in San Francisco. I lived in Los Angeles. So beautiful. The nature is so beautiful. But, oh, man, I'm happy to be in Texas now. I'm in Hill Country Texas. I'm digging it out here, which is filling up with Californians, I've noticed.

So there you have it. Adam Curry, pioneer and podcaster, podcasting pioneer. If you're not old enough to have seen mtv, go look at some of the archives. MTV defined the culture, the pop culture in particular, of the 1980s. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. My thanks to Julie Masters. She introduced me to Mark and made this episode possible. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, who helped define this podcast. Until next time, wear a mask, get vaccinated, wash your hands, be safe, be healthy. If nothing else, do it for the kids, because kids under 12 cannot be vaccinated yet. All the best to you. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable, people.