Remarkable People Behind the Podcast: Ideas and Innovation in the Tech World

Foreign. Aloha. This is Guy Kawasaki and I am coming to you live from Honolulu, Hawaii. Right out over there. Oops. So excited. Right out over there, a mere block is the beach at Diamond Head. And so this may be a short podcast or not podcast, live gas. Because I'm officially on vacation. So today we had a great new guest. His name is Dave Weiner. Dave Weiner and I go back. Oh, my God, whatever. It's from 83 till today. So that's 17 will get you to 2017 plus 21 is 38 years. So we go back 38 years, which is probably more than most of you have been alive. But Anyway, so in 1983, we met. I was the Macintosh division software evangelist. My job was to get people to write Mac software. And he was a software developer. His first product was called Think Tank. It was a product that enabled you to work in an outline fashion, which means you tab, you indent, it switches between numbers and letters. I mean, basically outlining. And I found it an enormously useful tool. Something like Microsoft Word has outlining built in. But let's just say that Microsoft Words built Microsoft Word built in outlining. I would not call a great outliner, but Think Tank was. Think Tank became more so. Yeah. So Dave Weiner, real software industry pioneer, and his podcast is now available@remarkable people.com and more than any other episode, I'd say that this episode is really like you are eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends as opposed to a podcaster interviewing a remarkable person. So this is, this is a very unusual episode. So it's@remarkable people.com and so the ice breaking question is because Dave was a pioneer in RSS feeds and blogging and podcasting, arguably you could say he's. I don't know if you'd say he's the inventor or the father, but he certainly was there at conception. So of RSS podcasting and blogging. So, yeah, if you. Have you ever. Well, let me add, ask it this way. Have you ever received content from an RSS feed? True or false? Yes or no? Put that in the comments. So that's Dave Weiner. And we talk about Mac software development, we talk about the creation of RSS and podcasting and blogging and Adam Curry's role in all of this. It's a, it's a real sort of trip into history, the history of podcasting and RSS and all that good stuff. So. And I want to remind you that this live show is always sponsored by restream. Restream is this incredible platform that enables you to broadcast your live to multiple platforms at once. Actually 30 right now we're going to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. But are 26 more we could go to? I don't even know what those 26 are, but there's 26 more you could go to. So with one stream you can go to, in my case four. Four different platforms, live, high definition, audio and video. So doesn't get much better than that. And you may not be used to this background as my studio. Like I said, I'm in Hawaii. I'm in this fig forest actually, actually this fig tree and that fig tree, they're both plastic. You just don't know what to trust anymore. Yeah, they're both plastic leaves but you know, in social media looks are everything. So send your questions and I, I have to tell you a funny Apple story. So I bought three bikes while I was in Hawaii because we're going to be here for so long and it's just easier to get around on a bike than on a car. Especially if the car that budget rents you is a Ford 150, which is as close as I've been to feeling like a Texan. So anyway, so I'm driving around this Ford 150. So we got bikes. And I decided that after I read this article about how good Apple tags or airtags are for tracking stolen cars, I figure out airtags must be good for tracking, tracking stolen bikes. So I went last night to buy airtags. So at Ala wanna center I go to the Apple store and I ask can I get a four pack? Because the four pack is four for $100. And the friendly Apple person says we're out. In fact, there's nowhere on the island, none of our stores have a four pack. But there's a stack of single ones on the table. I said, well, just sell me four. She said, well four is $29 each and a four pack is $100 each. I said, well just sell me at the four pack price. She said no can do. So that's my Apple story today. I had to buy, I had to buy airtags loose at a higher price than the four pack because Apple wouldn't sell four loose ones as a four pack which that's why Apple is worth a trillion dollars. What is the. Okay, here's a question. Who is the best brand marketer after Steve? From your point of view? The best brand marketer after Steve, maybe Elon Musk. For better or for worse, maybe Richard Branson after he touched the edge of space. Let's see. I mean, if you think of all the great brands like Coca Cola, no idea who that is. Pepsi. No idea who that is. McDonald's. No idea who that is. Apple. Yeah. I mean, we all know that Tim Cook is the CEO, but I wouldn't call him a brand marketer. So we all know what happened with Bill Gates. This is a short list. Who else? Martha Stewart. You could make the case that Martha Stewart invented influencers. You have to. You have to admire Martha Stewart, what she did and how she has expanded her brand. And if you. You should definitely go watch some of her YouTube videos with her and Snoop Dogg, because what an unlikely pair, what great YouTube videos they put together. So Martha Stewart, I think. I think Martha Stewart is right up there with Branson, Musk, and Jobs. There you go. Any other questions? Far away, are both of your names embossed on the original Macintosh casing? I had one back in 1984. Remembering over to discover a bunch of signatures embossed inside. So Waleed, the people whose names are embossed on the inside of the Mac 128 case are about the first 30 or 35 people in the division. And I was about number, I don't know, maybe 99 or something. So my name is not inside that case. The names there are like Steve Jobs, Susan Kerr, Joanna Hoffman, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrow Smith, Steve Capps, those. Joanna Hoffman. Those kind of people. I was not in the first 30, so the answer is no. What else? What other questions you got? Because I'm on Hawaii time. Met Dave at an early Apple Expo. Loved his outliner, forgot about him until till early RSS days. Heard Adam Curry podcast and looked into the technology, and there was Dave Weiner. Again, shout out to Dave. Okay, yeah, Jeff, put that back, put that back, put that back, because I'm gonna take a screenshot of that and send that to Dave. He will be happy to see that. Okay, I took a screenshot. Yeah. You know, I think many people have not heard of Dave Weiner, but Dave Weiner made enormous contributions to personal computing in general, but especially to podcasting, rss, you know, those kinds of things. He may not have been the inventor of such things, but it's very difficult to exactly trace, you know, who was the exact inventor of anything, really, because so many people, you know, they do a little bit here, do a little bit there, they take it a leap forward. But there's not a single inventor of most technologies, and there's not a single moment where you go, aha, it's invented. Things just kind of evolve. So he deserves, I think, much more credit than he has been given. Partially it's because he's a gadfly. And I looked up the definition of a gadfly and a gadfly is someone who's very opinionated and often sort of irritating. And Dave may be listening, but I'm sure he would agree with that definition of a gadfly. So, yeah. So I, I think we should all give Dave Weiner much more credit for, for what's, what's developed in podcasting and RSS and blogging and you know the answer to that question about have you ever gotten content through rss? You may not have realized it, but yeah, you got content through rss, especially if you subscribe to any podcast that's rss. So what other questions or comments have you got here? Have you used an outlining pro? Oh, I thought someone is asking me that. Yeah. So the question is, have you ever used an outlining program? And again, Dave's first product was called Think Tank. Second product was called More. More was just more of Think Tank. So there are more features in the outlining like the ability to add graphics and everything. And Dave tells this incredible story that you have to put yourself back into the 1980 time frame. And if you work for a company where you had a weekly staff meeting, you'd have to give us a weekly report. And it was a major pain in the ass to make these reports. Many people use word processors. And then you had to take your bullet points and all that and you had to print them to an acetate because you were going to put the acetate on top of an overhead projector. Now we're really going back into time here. So an overhead projector, for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, was this big thing and it had a light on the bottom. The light shined up through the acetate and then it was like a periscope looking thing that put it on the wall. So you would put your plastic sheet and there would be your bullet points. So anyway, it was a major pain in the ass to print onto that, that acetate because you'd have to use a word processor or something that wasn't formatted for changing every page. Because, because if you had, you know, 20 slides, you wanted 20 pages, it couldn't be a 20, you know, four page document with slides three up. It had to be one slide per page. So anyway, what, what I think was a major breakthrough for Dave was that one day he showed me this ability to take an outline, like a word processing outline, and then to make it to show the bullet points as sub parts of the outline. And I said, well, if you could just put a frame around it and put the bullet points and make it into a quasi looking slide and print that one up, it would be a breakthrough because everybody would use this to make their acetate slides instead of trying to, you know, hack around a word processor. And he did that and, and the rest is history, as we say. So he actually gives me a lot of credit for that idea. So, you know, once every few decades I have a good idea. And that was it for the, the 1980s. So, any other questions or comments? Because I'm going to go surfing. Who do you think are emerging tech companies to watch for innovation and why? Oh man, that's a very hard question to answer. It's much easier to answer that question looking back, and I'm not being facetious that at, well, particularly at the point that you have to join a company as a startup or invest in a company as a startup, you really have no idea. And it's only looking backwards that you can say, oh yeah, I knew Apple would be successful, I knew that Google would be successful, or Facebook or Pinterest. But those are the only examples you hear about because they are the successful ones. I guarantee you. Hundreds of thousands of people go to work for tech startups believing that they're the next unicorn and they fail and they die and you never hear about them. So I guess all of that is to tell you that I don't know and at least I know, I don't know. If I knew, it's not clear I would tell you. But well, I'm, I'm involved with one unicorn right now, to put it mildly, called Canva. So I'm the chief evangelist of Canva and we have tens of millions of month active users who create something like I think it used to be a couple, a couple, three months ago, like 4 million graphics a day. I'm sure it's higher than that now. So. You know, I joined Canva seven years ago because it was such a great tool to make graphics for Twitter that Peg Fitzpatrick had found and so she found it, so I started using it and she also used it to make my tweets. And then one day out of the blue, Canva reaches out to me via tweet. And I got the tweet and I asked Peg, is this the company you use to make our graphics? She said, yes. And I said, well, should I help them? And she said, yes. And the rest is history. So, you know, can I tell you that it was my wisdom and my vision and my outstanding ability to predict the future that got me involved with Canva? I would say that would be a lie. I would say that the person most responsible for me getting involved with Canva is Peg Fitzpatrick, who today is the producer of the Remarkable People podcast. So we go back that far, even further. The way Peg and I met was I had written a book, and I can't remember which one because I've written 15. And she had a Twitter book club. And so I think she just reached out to me via tweet and said, guy, would you be on my Twitter book club, you know, chat? And I said yes. And I'm pretty sure that's how we met. And if she's listening, she can send a comment to verify that story or not. At least that's what I remember. But I'll be the first to admit that my memory is not what it used to be. So, any other questions or comments? Well, what do you think? Do you think blogging has made the world a better place? I do. I mean, I. I would generalize that for all social media. I would generalize that for the Internet. Yeah. I mean, the Internet has done some bad things, like it's got bad people elected, for example. But on balance, there's no question in my mind that the Internet, social media has made the world a better place. And, you know, not everything is, you know, all black and white and perfect and hunky dory. But. Well, in a sense, it's an academic discussion. Because we can't put that horse back in the door. No, that's the wrong metaphor. We can't put that horse back in the barn is the right expression. Yeah. So I think the world has made the podcasting a better place. What do you think? Send a comment and listen. Don't forget this live broadcast is sponsored by Restream, where you can have high definition, high, high definition audio and video coming out multiple platforms at once. If you are a podcaster or you're a social media person or you're a company and you're trying to do live interactions, you know, live things like this. You have got to use Restream. I mean, it just makes your life so much simpler than trying to stream through multiple platforms at once or serially, I. E. One at a time. Right now, I'm parallel pro parallel broadcasting on four networks. Man, life is good. Because I don't want to do this four times and cut into my surfing. So Restream, powered by Restream. And by the way, they're hiring a lot of people right now, so check out their website. Okay. Remarkable People is very empowering for me. Real people, true stories, a lot of fun and needful insights. Thank you very much for that. I really, really appreciate that. I have to tell you that Remarkable People, first of all, is very much a team effort. So Jeff C, who is also producing this show, is the sound design. Just God, who makes it sound like npr, except there are no pledge drives. And Peg Fitzpatrick is the person who does the final production. They're getting the picture together, putting it up on Simple Cast, doing all the marketing of it. So she's marketing of the podcast. Jeff is the sound design of the podcast. And then what I do is I do the background research. I ask the question, I take the first pass at editing because I like to edit a lot there. There are podcasters who believe you just turn on the mic, turn it off, and you put it out there. I don't do that. I. I spent hours and hours working on the raw audio, and partially that number. And the effort has just about doubled recently. Because recently I interviewed Haben Girma, who is the first person who was deaf and blind to graduate from Harvard Law School. She is a disability rights activist. She was last week. Or was she? And also I interviewed someone named Martin Lindstrom, who is the author of Biology B U Y ology. And in our interviews, I discussed my efforts to transcribe the podcast. So the way it works is we use squadcast to record both ends of the conversation. Squadcast is what's called a double ender, so it records both sides locally. That way you're not subject to the whims of the Internet. So we have two good files. We upload it to a product called Description. The script creates a transcript, a textual transcript. You can edit the textual transcript to edit the audio. So let me say that again. I get a textual text. Textual. I get a transcript that's in text, and I can wipe out text. I can ignore text, and that will affect the audio. So that's how I edit. I don't edit listening and going backwards and forwards. I edit using text. And so I would spend a couple hours doing that. But now, after interviewing Haben and Martin, I believe that I have a moral obligation to provide as high a quality transcript as possible. So just a machine generated transcript doesn't cut it anymore. So this means there's a lot more editing, because when you interview someone like Dave Weiner and he mentions a name, Adam Curry is easy, but he mentions many other names who were instrumental along the path of the development of podcasting and blogging in rss. Well, when he mentions all those names, which are proper nouns, you really have to go and look who he's referred to. Exactly how you spell that name, that's a very different world for transcription. And if you interview someone like Jane Goodall and she's talking about Nairobi and Tanganyika, you know, and like villages, and you have to really do a lot of research to figure out what exactly is that village name or that city name. And so, anyway, so I probably spent four hours per hour, and then, believe it or not, I give it to two different people, Luis Magana or Alexis Nishimura, and both of them then take the Word document that's exported from Descript, and then they listen to the audio and they're going word by word and trying to make it absolutely perfectly matched. So they spend another five hours. So I'm telling you that I spend about four hours per hour. They spend five hours. So that's nine. Jeff spends five hours. Now we're at 14. Peg probably spends five hours getting all the marketing stuff together. There's probably 20 hours of work, work per hour of podcast. So this is a very long explanation or response to the comment that you like my podcast. Thank you very much. It reflects a lot of people working very hard and especially, especially if you know any deaf people, please tell them to. To obviously not listen to the podcast, but read the transcripts, because I'm telling you, our transcripts are as good as anybody's, including NPR's. Okay, Peg Fitzpatrick. Yes, it was my book club for Enchantment and we trended on Twitter. So, yes, I have, for once in my life, remembered a story accurately. That's how Peg and I met. So remember, today's guest is Dave Weiner, pioneer in computing. This brought to you by Restream. The podcast is remarkable. People.com. oh, yeah. And you can join my text ohana by sending a text to 831-609-0628 that will put you on a text group. I broadcast One to many to that group. If you respond, then it's one to one. And then if I respond to you, it's one to one. So it starts off one to many, and then it's. Then it continues on one to one. Just FYI. So that's my text ohana. That's the sponsor of this. Dave Weiner is my current guest, Peg Fitzpatrick. Jeff C. Is bringing this to you. Transcripts by Luis and Alexis. That's the team. And I don't know, man, we put so much effort into remarkable people. I'm amazed at how hard it is to podcast, but I tell you, I honestly believe your podcasts are top shelf. Sincere thanks for your diligence. Thank you, Keith. I appreciate that. Or we appreciate that. I tell you that as I look back on my career, I'm 67 years old right now, so I've been software evangelist for Mac. I've been a director at Apple. I've worked with the CEO of Motorola when Motorola was part of Google. I've started about four different companies. I've written 15 books. I've given thousands of speeches. I will tell you that as I look back on my career, I think that my podcast is the best work that I've ever done in my career. Sadly, I also think it's the least appreciated work that I've done in my career. So come on, guys, let's fix that problem. Tell more people about my podcasts. Okay? All righty. That's. That's your assignment. I'm going to check back with you next Wednesday. I want you to text or email people to listen to my podcast. We have people from Jane Goodall to Steve Wozniak with Chrissy Yamaguchi. Who else? We have Haben Girma. We have the founder of Hint Water. We have the founder of Frey Fry Farms. We have the founder of Poo Pourri, sid and Shay McGee from McGee Design, the Netflix series. Sheila Nazarian from the Netflix series about plastic surf. Plastic surgery. Not cosmetic surgery. Plastic surgery. So, yeah. So end of ad for remarkable people. It's Wednesday and it's July 14th, and I hope you're having a great summer. I certainly am. And I'm gonna bid you a fond farewell from my fake farm in Honolulu, Hawaii, overlooking Diamond Head. If you. If you're in Hawaii right now and you see somebody that looks like me, it is me. All right, as we say in Hawaii, mahalo and aloha.