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00:00 Good, good, good, good, good. Adam Curry, John C. DeVore. It's Thursday, September 9th, 2018. This is your award-winning Gimbal Nation Media Assassination Episode 1067. This is no agenda. Defying time and dimension and broadcasting live to tape from the cap of the drone Star State here in downtown Austin, Tejas in the studio. In the morning, everybody. I'm Adam Curry. And from Northern Silicon Valley, live to tape. I'm John C. DeVore. Whoa So you're in Italy in fact I am as we speak I'm I am probably Nursing a hangover from my sister's 25th wedding anniversary, which is you're lucky It's Italian alcohol, so it should be good. Yeah, so what we've done here is we put together a couple interview shows I did an interview with Scott Adams and

00:54 Dane Jasper. Alright, so Dane Jasper is the CEO of SonicNet, which is a... Now he's an independent guy. He's kind of... David to the behemoth AT&T Goliath, no? Yeah, he's actually stringing fiber just all over the kind of parts of the East Bay in San Francisco and I think Santa Rosa where this operation is. And they've always been like the low cost internet provider. We've used them as backup here. And why not as primary are they it's just not as fast right the old version the old DSL stuff is not as fast as Comcast right but this will be a lot faster this is gigabit fiber to the home FTTH baby yeah so when that comes in that'll make a little I think that'll now I have two very high-speed networks so I don't have to worry as much

01:48 And the price is gonna be like 50 bucks a month. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, that's very competitive. That's in line with the well, is he also gonna try and sell TV services? No, he refuses to. In fact, we talked about that. Oh good, good, good, good, good. And just kind of I mean, I'm gonna listen. I'm listening. I probably have already heard this by the time I get to Italy because of course I have a copy listening in the plane. But Has it been a challenge for him with the Behemoths? Has anyone tried to... I just want a little tip there. Has anyone tried to buy him or muscle him out? Not yet, but apparently more recently.

02:24 They're trying to pass some legislation to make it tougher on the little guys. Well, that's un-American. It's very common. Okay. I've asked them specifically if they were chopping down lines in our break-in cable, but no, they were not doing that. Suboteurs, suboteurs. Take us into it. Well, first of all, we got Scott Adams, the famous cartoonist. Right, but we're going to talk about him in a second. After the first interview the first interview is gonna 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

03:06 And I've known him long enough so I could ask some questions that I don't think other people would do. Now what do you mean he's never been interviewed like this? I don't know, have you seen any really good interviews where he talks? Well you have to listen to this interview but there's a lot of stuff that he doesn't normally talk about. First of all, I don't think I've ever heard just a sit-down audio only interview with Scott Adams. I don't think I've ever heard that. Audio only where you focused on just audio. I don't think I have either. This may be the first but I seriously doubt it. And this took place at his house? Yeah, I went to his house. Nice. I'll tell you what, rather than talk about it, let's get into it. Here's my interview with Scott Adams. All right, I'm here with Scott Adams. So you've been cartoon, you made your money as a cartoonist. Correct. And 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.

04:05 Wow, I didn't realize that. Yeah, we had a little... Well, not the internet, but the web. The web, right. Yeah, we had a little lab. I was working. That was my day job. And we were showing people this thing called the World Wide Web. And it was one of the most informative times of my life. It was in 93, as I recall. That sounds right. Yeah. And Dilbert was out a little, had been out, but hadn't been out enough. that I could quit my day job. Right, but you were the... anyway you showed it to me. You were impressed but you obviously weren't blown away so much that you went out and bought a bunch of domain names like Smart Money did. No, it's worse than that. It's worse than that. So we would bring customers in and we'd show them all our cool phone company stuff that wasn't interesting to anybody and they would just... their eyes would glaze over and then at the end as just sort of a dessert

05:01 We'd say, oh, and there's this new thing coming called, we called it the World Wide Web then, now the Internet. And there were exactly two websites you could get to. That's it. The Smithsonian and some other thing. And we would show them that we could see the website at the Smithsonian and look at a couple of still pictures and people would come out of their chairs and they'd say, can I do that? And we'd say, do what? You know, touch the mouse and make this happen. They needed to touch it. They stood up, their eyes got big and they said, how can we get this? And there was no application. And I remember thinking, my goodness, this is gonna be huge. It has that X factor where people want it even though it's terrible, like early cell phones. Everybody wanted a cell phone, but they were terrible. And I cornered our top engineer in the phone company and I said, hey, if I wanted to invest in this coming thing, this worldwide web internet thing, what's the one company I should put all my money in? And he looks at me and he goes, Cisco.

06:05 And I go, okay, what are the other companies? And he goes, Cisco. He goes, everything's going to be Cisco for the next 15 years or whatever. Yeah, it kind of was. And so I did not buy Cisco and it's the worst financial decision I've ever made. Ha! Well, I didn't buy Cisco either, but I didn't have some guy telling me to buy it. It was pretty obvious. In hindsight, you can see what happened. All the points you could have gone, wow, I should have done that. I could have done that. I could have done this. It's the worst. I mean, just if you had bought Apple when Steve Jobs first showed up and kept the stock, you'd be loaded, especially about $10,000 when you make a few million dollars. But having kind of been involved in the stock market over the years, the thing is you can't

06:52 Hold the stock that long. You just won't do it. You'll just say oh, it's not gonna go any higher than that You could 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 at Pacific Bell? Well eight years there then before that eight years at a big bank and And I was doing Dilber for about six of those years that I was still at the phone company. So I was doing two jobs and writing a book at the same time and working day and night. You were getting your inspiration from the phone company.

07:33 Yeah, that plus my memories of the bank. So the big aha was when I moved from a bank to a phone company and you'd say to yourself, well, they have nothing in common, two completely different companies. And then you watch that the same management problems, the same way people think, the same way people treat you, it was just shockingly similar. And that was really the inspiration behind Dilber is the realization that these things were universal and there were people trapped in jobs all over who probably thought there's nowhere else that this is happening. This could not be happening anywhere else. It's impossible. It happens everywhere. That was a genius. Well, you had... I thought we said 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.

08:27 Everything else was, you know, was like a... it was cowboy stuff or just stupid animals making punchlines that, you know, cracking up to... or trying to crack you up with a one-liner. No, I don't want to claim genius and inspiration totally because... I'll take a little bit. But I also have an MBA and one of the main things you learn in business school is listen to the customers, give them what they want. That's the sort of thing that artists don't do. And when Dilber came out and email was coming out at about the same time or getting popular about the same time, people started emailing me because I put my email address between the panels of the strip. And they'd say, we love your comic when Dilber's in the office. We don't care for it that much when he's just at home doing generic things, which is, as you said, what most comic strips were about. It's just about whatever. Right, Dagwood.

09:20 And so I listened to the customers and completely retooled the strip to make it a workplace strip. So that the reason that Dilber succeeded, and it's very rare that a big comic will break out, is that I applied business techniques to the artistic realm. Could somebody else do a cartoon and have a breakout nowadays in this market where their syndication is different? Maybe you're like one of the last that actually succeeded before the door was closed? Well, you know, there's only one giant cartoon every 10 years or so. You know, it's actually very rare. You can count on one hand the mega cartoons.

10:00 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 sign 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 Yeah, but Dilbert's bigger than it's ever been because as long as there's one big newspaper in every market You know it runs in that paper and of course the internet market is growing every day So so it's growing there no matter what where'd you get your drawing skills? um

10:59 My mother was a landscape artist and my father doodled little cartoons that were more like stick figures but very funny in their own little weird way. So I think I had a little bit of genetic advantage there. But anybody who's seen Dilbert knows I'm not an artist with any kind of a capital A. So it was really brute force. And the first original comics that I submitted, if you saw them, you'd say, there's no way this guy is going to get hired or syndicated. This looks like an inebriated monkey with a crayon. What's going on here?

11:36 But it was just brute force. I just practiced until I could do it. What kind of sense of humor do you think you have? Probably it's a combination of observational plus engineering. In other words, to make something look clever, sometimes you have to look at it as an engineer, as in what would be the weird way to accomplish this in the cartoon realm? If you've got a character who's got a problem and it's a cartoon so they can kind of do anything, there's no real limits. What is the funny engineering solution? And it might involve killing somebody, it might involve aliens, it could involve anything. But you have to start, as you said earlier, with something that everybody goes, oh, I've been there. If you don't get that part right, it's hard to get much else right. People have to recognize and identify with the situation. Then you can extend it, but you got to get them first.

12:37 I have a theory that your humor is absurdist. Explain absurdist. You spot the absurdities in the office environment, for example, and most everything, every punchline you deliver is based on something that's just, it's beyond the pale and so far as pure absurdity is concerned. I'm going to agree with that with different words. I call it 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. I know you went to college. I know you're smart. Why are you doing that? And that explains 75% of management.

13:25 And the reason for that is that people are paid to manage, but sometimes there's nothing to do or you don't know what to do and you end up just saying, well, what's the fad? Yeah, I worked in the government so I know some of that from another perspective. It's still the same. You were fired from Pacific Telephone. I'm going to tell you the story that I was told by one of your old associates. You remember her. Anita. Anita who was the real life model for my character Alice in the comic strip. Yes. Some bonehead came into the company on some normal kind of a, well let's put this guy in because he's gonna reorg this and he's gonna do that, he's gonna straighten things out. And he was naive.

14:08 And he said, I guess he went through one, I've seen this happen in different operations. Somebody goes in there and they start doing a checklist. What does this guy do? Who is this guy, Scott Adams? What does he do? And nobody was there. And I've seen this happen recently in other companies where somebody's actually very… important to a company you were at the time important the way it was told to me to the sales people because the comic strip was popular enough that they would drag you out on sales calls as a lure which happens with any company that's got any brains. Bring a lure in and oh you get to meet Scott Adams and by the way you can buy some of these some of the gear or some services.

14:49 And this bonehead came in and he just unceremoniously got rid of you in some sort of a clean up very much like you see in the movie The Office. 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 co-workers once I started getting famous and started to get a little bit of money with Dilbert and

15:25 It was obvious that I was going to leave and it didn't make sense to keep my day job, but they wanted me to stay. Like as you said, I was good for sales. Customers would come in and they were Dilbert fans and so I helped. And they actually made me an offer. Anita, the one that I just mentioned, the real life Alice from the comic strip, said, how about this deal? I'll go to our management and I'll say, you don't even have to show up unless you don't want to, except for these sales calls. And otherwise, we'll do your work. We'll do the engineering stuff that was your main work. And my coworkers said, yeah, we're up for that. We'll do the work. You just come in for the times you want to, basically.

16:06 And I said... So you were like a fellow without having the 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, I'm okay with it too. But here's the thing. I don't want to be a burden. So the day that you need that budget you're paying me for something else, you just have to ask and I'll leave the same day. One day he had some other project that he thought was more important and he called me in and said, you know, this would be a good day. And I said, okay, that's the deal. You just have to ask. I don't need a reason. You just have to ask. And so I left peacefully. And yes, I did get a call from, I believe it was the CEO, 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,

17:03 Your version is obviously more accurate than mine, but mine's still good. Yours is good, yeah. You were 90% there. Yeah. When it happened, I... Since I knew you at the time, I thought, well, this is going to be interesting because 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 thousands of emails a day in the beginning with suggestions.

17:42 It was a huge burden to respond to. I tried to respond to all of them back in those days. And there was just material coming in and it would always remind me of something I had experienced. So I was always looking for that. If somebody suggested something I'd never heard of, that usually didn't work for me. But if I said, oh yeah, that happened to me, then it was a cartoon. Where I don't see a lot of stuff from you is convention life. You know why? There's a cartooning reason you don't see Dilbert go to conventions a lot. And the reason is I don't like drawing backgrounds. 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?

18:34 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 the computer. When did you switch? I switched, let's see, if I can remember the year, it was probably in the 2004-ish range, give or take a year. And it was because I had a problem with my drawing hand. I had spasms in my pinky when I tried to draw from overuse. And it's a weird thing called a focal dystonia. And 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

19:31 lived in my town and was in my my HMO at Kaiser and You know my doctor knew him and 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, but basically changed jobs so I agreed to be part of you know a Test group they were trying different things to see if they could make some progress and But in the meantime, I thought, well, I'm done unless I can figure out a solution for drawing. And so I drew left-handed for a while, which I can do, but it's slower. I'm slightly ambidextrous, but not terribly ambidextrous.

20:11 And then I thought, you know, I'll bet there's by now something you can draw on the computer that maybe my hand would act differently. Because the weird thing about this hand problem is that it was actually a mental problem that expressed itself in the hand. So the hand was fine. And the reason I knew that is that when I drew with my left hand, my right hand would spasm. because my brain would say, hey, you're drawing again, spasm, spasm, spasm. And the expert I mentioned confirmed that it's more of a brain problem than a hand problem. And so when I drew on the computer, even though the drawing looks just like drawing, it's just you're drawing on a screen and you're using a stylus, my brain did not recognize it as drawing. For whatever reason, it just didn't trigger that very specific response.

21:01 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 quarter of a second and release it before the spasm till I could do a second, then two seconds. And I did that for months until I believe I'm the first person who's ever, you know, remediated or solved that problem focal dystonia. I think I'm in the literature my doctor told me. Oh well that's good and bad I guess. It did move you over to the computer, which probably eventually sped up your work. Well, talk about, you know, lemonade and lemons. It probably cut my workload by at least over 50%. Yeah. And that's been just a huge advantage in my life, as you can imagine. Yeah, well most artists I know personally have all, they all switch over to computers one way or another, except for one I know that's always been a computer artist.

22:00 But they've always benefited from the... There's the two-edged sword. They benefited from the productivity, because, you know, especially graphics guys could change the backgrounds really quickly. They don't have to redo everything. But then there became so much computer-generated stuff that came out to compete with them. They're all singing the blues and many of them had to quit. So they ended up... It was weird to watch that phenomenon. Do you have Tourette's? I do not. Why do you ask? Because you have elements of, almost identical to Adam Curry who talks about his Tourette's constantly. We talk about it on our show quite a bit. Maybe I do. What are the symptoms? I thought I should be swearing out loud for no reason. 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 airplane being dragged off. It was terrible. I felt bad for the guy. Well, you dragged me off an airplane. I can give you some of that too. No, he was cussing before they dragged him off.

23:00 But it's mostly twitches. Oh, I have lots of twitches. Yeah, that's Tourette's. Well, it's nice to know I got that too. Well, I don't want to... Yeah, well you've got all these ailments. I hate to bring it up, but the reason I say that is because there's a commonality with all Tourette's, even the most minor of Tourette's sufferers. And I know people that have, you know, they have all kinds of twitches. Adam fights it because he used to do TV a lot. So he had to, when he was at MTV, he had to fight it. 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's as Adam says the same thing. But he is.

23:42 Yeah, I would, so are you. I'm here at your house. That's where we're doing this. You saw me picking up stuff off the floor when we got here? Yeah. True story. So I wanted to bring it back. Just mention, you know, you might want to look into it. You did have some ailment that was disconcerting, though, where you couldn't talk for a month or something like that. Yeah, so the voice problem was also a spasm of the vocal cords, and I lost my voice for three and a half years. I couldn't speak. Oh, it was three? It was that long? Yeah, for three and a half years I couldn't have a conversation or be understood on the telephone or give a speech or anything. And it turns out the focal dystonia and the voice problem are actually related because they're both brain problems. They're not the hand and they're not the vocal cords. That's just where the spasm is. But it's well known that they travel in pairs. So if you have one of those problems, it's not unusual that you might have a second one in some other place on your body. But Tourette's never came up. Maybe you don't have Tourette's.

24:41 If I just saw you on the street didn't know who you were. Well now I think I do so thanks for that. Maybe. So what happened then that this I just don't want to get in. No wait hold on hold on. Now if I do I have an excuse to swear at people for no reason at all. Adam does that too but he neither you or him have that form of Tourette's. That is a very... According to you. That's a very specific... Until I start doing it and then I've got it. I don't want to dwell on this but the three years Yeah, three and a half years. I could make noise, but people couldn't understand it. What happened? When was the breakthrough? What was that like when you came out of it? Well, the quick version, a lot of people have heard this story, so let me give you the fast version. So it took a long time to figure out what it was because regular general practitioners have never seen it. You know, it's very rare. It's called a spasmodic dysphonia. How do you explain it to anybody?

25:37 Well, so I'm trying to tell people that I've got this problem and they hear it. The first things that people think are that you have a mental problem. Because if one of the odd characteristics is that you can talk okay when you're alone. Wow! So if you imagine that, imagine telling your doctor, okay, I can talk fine as long as nobody's listening. But if people are listening, it's like this. Now that's a bad impression of me trying to talk. So obviously they're going to say, okay, mental, you're getting too worked up because of people or something like that. But I was sure that wasn't it, because it didn't feel like that, right? I didn't feel any different talking to people.

26:18 And so I rejected Valium and I tried some Botox shots. There was a treatment where they give you a Botox shot through the front of your neck with this needle that you don't even want to hear about it. 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 dystonia once I'd figured out what it was, which I figured out also from Google because I had the hand problem. So I said, oh, the hand problem is called a focal dystonia. I wonder if there's something called a voice dystonia.

26:57 So I put 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 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, you know, no, 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 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. He was doing a somewhat new slash experimental surgery in which they would rewire some of the nerves in your neck.

28:00 They 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 try, but just nothing happens. And then the re-spliced root kicks in after about eight weeks. I might have the weeks wrong, but something like that. And then you can talk or it doesn't work. Those are the two options. Great. Right, it's either gonna work or it just doesn't work. And then there was a moment almost exactly on the day that they predicted that the nerves could grow back together, because they know what rate they grow at, that I could talk very weakly

28:41 Did you have the cutting done? Yes, so I had the surgery and took a couple weeks to recover from the surgery and then I could talk just faintly and just for a little while before being sort of exhausted by it. And then it took a few years to get full fluency back because you also lose fluency. If you don't speak for three and a half years, you actually can't form sentences. You know all the words, but you can't do it effortlessly, so talking is actually difficult for years. And only I would say in the last two or three years maybe, I feel like I'm back to top fluency. Yeah, I wouldn't know the difference. I mean, from you 20 years ago, or 93, which is I guess 20, yeah, 25 years ago. You sound the same. Well, that's a...

29:40 Well, that's an ordeal. We won't continue. Do you exercise? I do. Yeah, I'm quite committed to exercise. I'm a lifelong exerciser and I try to do it five times a week and be active on the other two days. When did you become a Republican? I am not a Republican. I'm not either. So never, I guess. I am a... I went from Democrat to Republican with Reagan to Independent and then there 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 gonna register and I'm gonna vote and I cast my vote proudly for Jimmy Carter and

30:25 And a few years later I said to myself, I shouldn't be voting. I'm not adding to this. I'm not adding to the intelligence of the vote. 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 like the topic of politics. I voted for Carter too. I felt bad about it. I was a McGovern supporter, if you can believe that. Yeah, so I don't vote and I am not a member of a party. Oh, you don't vote at all, but you do like to give your opinions and you seem to be a... I don't know if you want to take this as a descriptor,

31:11 A Trump apologist. I hate that phrase. Yeah, well I'm called one too and I don't consider myself to be one. Yeah, the reason I hate it is it assumes that you would support him no matter what he did and that you're just sort of always on the team. In my case, most of my writing and talking about President Trump started during the campaign, and mostly I talked about his persuasion skills because that's another area that I have a lot of experience. I'm a trained hypnotist. When did that happen? When did you become a trained hypnotist? My early 20s. I thought, hey, is this some kind of superpower that I could just learn?

31:51 And so I learned it. I was influenced by my mother who had been hypnotized by her family doctor in my small town. And my mother gave birth to my little sister and reports that she was awake and took no painkillers and didn't feel pain. Now that's unusual. Most people would not have that experience, but about two in five would, or one in five. And it made me think, what is this thing? What is this power that you can do that kind of thing? And so I learned it. And sure enough, it is a superpower like nothing I've ever seen. It changes your entire worldview. And that's the biggest change. It changes how you perceive the world and you stop perceiving people as rational.

32:37 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 world view changed by how easily I could reprogram other people using a set of tools that are pretty well understood. And that I've been studying persuasion in all of its forms from selling to marketing to design even. Anywhere I can find anything on it for 30 years probably as part of writing, as part of creating the comic, it's an important element.

33:16 So you saw Trump as some sort of, do you think he is a genius or a savant? What I saw is that he used the tools of persuasion more effectively than I've ever seen it done. Now part of the reason he's so effective is that he seems immune to shame. He's willing to say or do anything. And generally, I believe that he's aiming his impulses, at least his public office impulses, at legitimately making the country a better place, in his view of how that looks. And so he'll cut some corners, he'll do some things people don't like, he'll ignore the facts if it's convenient, but he tends to persuade in the right direction.

34:07 Meaning that if you're someone who likes the borders to be tight, if you like a strong military, and you don't have to by the way, I'm not telling you you should like those things, but if you do, and lots of people do, he's certainly the right person for that. You think he's trained like you are or you think it's just a part of his being a salesman all his life because during sales training, if you were ever a salesman, you end up picking up a lot of persuasion, persuading gimmicks. Well, keep in mind he wrote the book or at least he read it, the book The Art of the Deal. And so if your brand is negotiating, that's really persuasion or a special form of it.

34:56 So we know that he at least has an interest in it, 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. 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,

35:44 can have a huge influence on your success. So if you think right, you're going to get better results than if you're thinking wrong. And we just watched Trump think his way into the presidency. in a sense. I mean the optimism, the positive thinking, the inability to be swayed by any problem it seemed, like he was just completely unaffected, at least in public, by you know things that would have killed most people. 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 you know, there's crime and criminal coming across the border, etc And you see him talking past the sail which is one of his most common tricks and

36:40 So if you're talking about how the wall will be built. and how it will be funded and those things. You're already talking past the decision of, is there going to be a wall? So he does this in a lot of topics. He'll make you engage on the details of the thing before you've decided there will be a thing. And that's a classic persuasion technique. And you don't see other people doing it as consistently as he does. You don't see them use visual stuff. You don't see him pick emotional topics. He knows where the emotion is. And he can read a crowd like nobody. His presentations are... I don't know how many of the speeches you've watched. A few, yeah. I've probably watched three complete...

37:23 from the early ones which were he couldn't carry an hour he could do about 35 minutes of material and then he would start to repeat himself. Then when he got to the hour he was really on a roll and his speeches I think are phenomenal. He really controls the audience and he gets a lot of people in the book as you know you were a public speaker the bigger audiences the better audience. The small audience is hard you can't speak to six people. They're not gonna laugh, they're not gonna do anything. But you get 10,000 people or 20 or 30 in his case, you can have a lot of fun. Yeah, I think history will record that he's not everybody's cup of tea, so it's sort of a love him or hate him thing. But in terms of his public speaking, best ever.

38:11 Well, it depends on your definition of best ever. Well, best ever being able to... I think most effective. Yes, being able to hold the crowd, entertain them, make them want to come back, make them talk about it, make people focus on the topics he wants you to focus on, control the headlines for a week. It's all there. He's got some... I've only read this once, I don't know the exact name of it, but he has a personality disorder of some sort that makes him only need like three to four hours sleep a night. That's a personality disorder? Well, apparently it is by today's standards and a lot of people would say it's an advantage.

38:50 But he's a very interesting character, I have to agree. And people – have you found that because you look like you're a – and I'll use the term again, Trump apologist – that you've lost any business whatsoever? Oh, sure. Yeah, probably 40 percent of my income evaporated and 75 percent of my social circle. Yeah, I'm quite an outcast and I don't do public speaking anymore because it's too dangerous. I wouldn't feel comfortable if there was any publicity and you put me in front of a big crowd right now because it only takes one person to say, that guy said something good about the president's persuasion skills, he must die. So I don't think it's safe to be in public

39:37 when people like you are branding me a Trump apologist. It's not me. I will say this, that I ran into you when I first met you, you did make some assertion that you wanted to become a public speaker because you thought that was just some really cool goal. I ran into you on the road at the same speaking event. I was a speaker and you were a speaker at some event. I don't know if you remember this, but I do. Because you were grousing. Me? Grousing? Impossible. It was unbelievable. And you had run into the same phenomenon that I had run into, which is part of actually what you discuss in the cartoon more or less, which is the boneheads that put together these events and then they hire you to be a speaker and then you say something, you do something, and you insulted the CEO somehow.

40:27 by making some offhanded remark. Did I do that that day? I think so. Well, apparently they've never seen Dilbert if they hired me and didn't expect me to insult their CEO indirectly or directly. I thought it was getting to the point where you stopped doing public speaking at that point. No, I've sort of pulled back from it a few times just because I was busy with other stuff. But at the moment, you know, and then I had to stop when I lost my voice for a few years. But at the moment, it's just not safe. Yeah. Huh. I was wondering if that was going to affect you at all. It affected our podcast by, I think, about 40 percent, 30 to 40 maybe in terms of fall off. People just don't want to listen anymore. They're too happy being kind of

41:15 hypnotized by mania. Can you cook? I can bluff my way through some things. It's not my favorite thing to do. What happened to your investments in the restaurants? Well, I can't tell you the real story because there's actually a... 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 I'm pretty worldly, 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.

42:12 And if I were, and I can't tell you because he makes settlements and you agree not to talk about them, right? But I had to settle a few and it looked like there was going to be no end to it. Like literally there would just be no end to it. The additional ones that could come. And I made a business decision to get out. Now the first restaurant 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 9-11. Timing. Yeah, timing. And when that happened, the economy fell apart and the place for the second restaurant was in a place that big companies had agreed to move into. It was just going to be a gold mine. It was the greatest location and they all pulled out. They all pulled out because of the economy. Well, that was a bad era. I mean, you first had a dot-com crash

43:06 And then you had the Y2K fiasco, and then as things were straightening out, boom, you have the Twin Towers. It was just a one-two-three punch. So I signed the lease at the literal top of the market. I got the most expensive lease you could ever possibly get at the same time that the economy went to its lowest point in a long time. You became a vegan? No, a vegetarian. I'm a pescatarian at the moment. A fish eater? Yeah, I'll eat a fish if I have to. I don't love it, but it's good for me. Have you used a vegan character in your cartoon ever? I feel like I have. I know I had a vegetarian character at least once based on me. I don't know if I've had a vegan. Don't remember. Opportunity. I'll work that in.

43:56 You did a thing, you were promoting this thing called the Blight Authority. Yes. Which is your, one of your pet projects. Yeah, so Bill Pulte is the founder and primary mover of this. And blight spelled B-L-I-G-H-T just refers to it generally in this context anyway, an urban area where it's all run down and it's just crime and abandoned buildings and stuff. And so what Bill does is he finds funding to go in and just clear it out and just bulldoze it and wreck it and bring it down to dirt so that the crime goes away, but then there's also an opportunity to build something there. And so where I'm helping the most is helping him try to get the word out that there's this opportunity, there's this land available, there can be more of it because there's lots more blight that can be knocked down.

44:53 And I'm helping him just publicize the possibilities. So the website, blightauthority.com, has an ideas and forum section where people are suggesting ideas and funding and things that could be done with those areas. And you'll see more about that. We're going to do a lot more talking about that. Did you get your degree in engineering? No, but I played an engineer at Pacific Bell because they ran out of engineers. That's a true story. They literally had a hiring freeze. They needed engineers for the project I ended up working on. Something called ISDN for those people old enough to remember that. And they just said... I had a line. Yeah, and my boss just said, well you're not a...

45:38 You're not an engineer, but can you connect computers to equipment with cables and figure out the software? And I was like, well, probably if I have help. So I worked in a technology lab, the most incompetent employee who ever worked in a laboratory. But I had a lot of help. So the smart people I worked with covered for me. Were you funny at school? Maybe only in my own opinion. I did doodles of my teachers and my fellow students. They were, of course, whatever is the obscene version of the 12-year-old doodle. Most of them were obscene in some way or another. Were you a good student, do you think? Did you get high grades, A's, B's, C's? What colleges did you go to? I was a valedictorian. Oh. So you gave a speech? I did.

46:31 That sounds more impressive than it really is. You have to understand there were only 40 people in my graduating class. Still one out of 40. Yeah, one out of 40. Then I went to Hartwick College for my undergraduate degree in economics and then later when I was working I went at night and had my company pay for it and I got my MBA at Berkeley. I'm going to, I want to get some opinions from you. I'm gonna go down a list name somebody and then you're just gonna say if you have anything to say about them. People. Yeah. All right. And maybe a couple of things too. Can I slander them? Yeah of course it's fine. Good. So podcast. Why wouldn't I? Pence. Pence, an ideal vice president.

47:17 You know, I've said in my book, Winn-Bigley, I talk about how Pence was an inspired choice because you want a vice president that is solid. You know, he's got the resume, so he looks like he could take over if you need it, but he's the boring version of the number one, you know, 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 emergency spare, the backup. 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,

48:15 I mean it was his outrageousness, his willingness to take positions that were further than other people were talking about. Those are all the things that helped him. It also helped him get about one to two billion dollars worth of media attention, which they're still irked about. But they keep continuing this process of giving him media attention. He found the weakness in the model, which is if it's interesting, they can't not cover it. So you just make sure he's the most interesting story. I think they could have covered Bernie more. I mean, because he was kind of interesting. Okay, another name. Kellyanne Conway.

48:57 Well, I don't know her. By the way, I did meet the president. He did invite me in. Oh yes, you did. He did invite me into the Oval Office a few weeks ago. What was the point of that? Why was he not? You know, he actually didn't say except I guess my book, Winn-Bigley was popular among people at the White House. And I think it was just August and Congress was in recess and he was just sort of working supporters, you know, he was just solidifying his base, if you will, especially the people who talk about him and write about him. But I don't know Kellyanne Conway except what I watch on television. But I did feel, I remember when Hillary lost and people were so sad that, you know, hey we could have had a woman president. And I was thinking, well what about, you know, Kellyanne didn't run for president but she just, you know, helped the president get elected. Like why are we ignoring that? So in terms of her skill level, very high.

49:57 and she's stuck it out with the president, so loyalty level looks very high. So I only know what I see on TV, but I like what I see. Back to the president meeting. Do you think he read your book? Bigly, did he was any... because usually people that they read your book they have some reference they'll make. He was familiar with the content enough 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 get a lunch? We didn't have lunch. Food? It was probably the experience I'll never be able to top.

50:35 In terms of the most interesting things... Did you take the matchbooks home? They have these matchbooks you can take home. Oh yeah, I was just loading my pockets with everything that wasn't... No, I didn't take anything. I didn't record it on my secret phone in my pocket or anything. Actually, I didn't have a phone with me. And they take your phone away. If you're a visitor, you don't get to bring a phone into the... Yeah, well, they don't want anything you record competing with what the CIA is recording for all the bugs in the room. So yeah, it was just the most interesting thing I have ever done. He's very engaging, very charismatic, and just talking to him for a few minutes was like a life experience. Huh. Well, it sounds like fun. What do you think of another one, another name? Rachel Maddow. Rachel Maddow is insanely smart and talented and really good at what she does.

51:32 Now, if you don't like that political bent, then you want her off the air and her critics will howl. So I don't agree with her politics or point of view on a lot of things, but you can't deny the talent. The talent is extraordinary. Yeah, she's done the most with anyone over there once that other Oberman left. What about MSNBC in general? They seem to me like the version of CNN that went too far. Like whenever you see something on CNN that seems like, well, they're taking that opinion a little too far. Well, you know, that feels a little biased. And then you turn on MSNBC and you go, holy hell, what is this? What fresh hell is this? So they just seem like the exaggerated version of CNN. Jerry Brown.

52:32 I really don't follow local or California politics. He's been the governor most of your life. Yeah, and I haven't followed it at all. That's too bad. So I guess I have, yeah, I can't form a coherent opinion of him. Here's a generality. What do you think of Silicon Valley billionaires? Well, one of the weird um, aspects of my job. And I think you would say the same as you end up meeting a lot of billionaires. Like I was, I was thinking the other day, how many billionaires do I know personally? And it was like 20 billionaires. Like, you know, if I wanted to, I could, you know, get ahold of them with an email and it's hard to meet a billionaire who isn't interesting.

53:17 That's the first thing and I don't know if it's because I'm aware they're billionaires or whatever made them a billionaire is what also makes them interesting. But you talk personally and privately to a billionaire and you walk away thinking, I think I learned something almost every time. I think you might be right. I never thought of him as being interesting. I think, yeah, they are interesting, almost every one of them. Many of them are very focused, which is the thing that you see with a couple of these guys. I mean, Bill Gates, for example, is the most focused guy. He's got supposedly a form of autism that makes him that way. You must have the good one. Yes, it's considered the good one. I'll give you one example. Mark Benioff, founder of Salesforce. So I did give a, before I lost my voice, I gave a talk there.

54:10 And I hung out for maybe half an hour, because we were killing time before the event started. And I got to chat with him at some depth privately. And I'll tell you, I've never met anybody like him. Like he's just not like other people. And I'm going to explain that I mean that in a good way. He seems to be operating on this whole other level of, he uses the word intention. And, you know, without getting too woo-woo about it, he seems to have just a superior grasp of how it all works. And when I say how it all works, I mean how it all works. He just seems to be operating on a different level. That's what I took from that. And so this interesting exchange, I probably shouldn't talk about it, but since it makes him look good, I will anyway.

55:00 where one of his top lieutenants was talking about a slideshow. He goes, hey I've got this slideshow we're going to show. He looks at it, Mark Benioff, and he looks at the first page and he goes, you know, put something on the first page here about our philanthropic, you know, that 1% thing where they give away 1% of their profits and try to spend 1% of their time on philanthropic things, charitable things. He says, put that on the first page. And his lieutenant pushes back, he's like, well, you know, I've got that, it's in the body of the thing. He goes, no, move it up to the first page. And then the lieutenant pushes back again, and he goes, no, move it to the first page. And he pushed on it again, and he just looked at him, he's like, first page. It was like, he was so clear on what mattered, right? And representing the company with that first,

55:54 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. They're the guys who are really kind of an meta 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 and it was part of the me too movement and I think that He was the guy who was saying, no, no, no, put it on the front page. That's the same kind of a guy. And I think they're in all office environments, you know, and when you lose that guy, whether he's the CEO, usually they are, the company just kind of just falls apart.

56:36 Yeah and just to be clear it wasn't about the quality of the slide deck. He wasn't talking about that. It was as much about training this lieutenant what's important and how to put it forward. Okay another one. Why do you think the Silicon Valley billionaires are all Democrats? Well, they're not all Democrats, but you got your people who are willing to tell you about their politics and you got your people who may be under the radar. Oh yeah, there are a few people there who don't like to talk about anything because they know the majority are Democrats. Right. Which still begs the question, why do you think there's so many Democrats in a place where there's so much wealth? It's not supposed to add up that way.

57:26 Yeah, I don't know. I think you'd have to get inside their heads to know that. I don't know what the filtering mechanism is that got us to that point. Good question. I don't know. What's your favorite TV show? Do you watch much TV? Favorite TV show? Really the only one I record at this point is The Five on Fox News and also the Greg Gotfeld Show in part because I know Greg but The Five is probably the best produced show with the best characters and the most consistently entertaining. Really? Because the model that they built of these engaging characters sort of teasing each other and talking about the news is just the best thing on TV. Huh. Well, that's a shocker to me. Didn't see that coming, did you? No, I sure did not. I mean, I like my Game of Thrones, but they're not on now. What about books? What do you like to read besides persuasion books?

58:27 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. Well, that's good to know. Not alone. If you hear my dog running around in the background there, that's his spare noise.

59:06 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 know for sure, but probably extraordinary just based on the volume of new ideas I create in any moment. And I'm a very visual imaginer. And so I can create my own fiction in my head just by closing my eyes and it's better and more interesting and more attuned to me than a book. And books are work.

59:59 And closing my eyes is not. And I get exactly what I want anytime I want. Now, I feel sorry for anybody who can't sort of build an entire story in their head instantly, but I can. You started with the ISDN crowd, but you were kind of a techie, or do you think that you never were a techie? I was a programmer at a very low level. In other words, I did it professionally, but when computers... What were you programming in? Usually just, well, BASIC and doing easy things for the DEC, you know, the VAX back in the day. So programming in BASIC was just for internal, you know, financial reports and easy stuff.

1:00:40 and I built a few utility programs that got used, and I built some video games in my own time, actual graphic video games. But it took me so long to build one that the entire industry had moved so far in the six months it would take me to build one that it no longer looked like a game anybody would ever buy. So I couldn't keep up with the companies that were doing it. So I was technical that way, but I think I'm more I'm more about the talent stack, which I talk about. The idea of building lots of different talents and stacking them until you have something that's unique, even if you're not great at any of those things. So I'm certainly not great or even really good at anything in technology, but I'm pretty comfortable around it. When you came, you saw me working with a bunch of new equipment, put together a new studio set up for myself, and I like that stuff.

1:01:38 Yeah, so you have kept up, but you seem to be a Mac head. At the moment, I've gone back and forth. For most of my career, I was a double platform guy because you just always needed the other one. If you're doing a lot of licensing and working with people around the world, you can't have one platform. But at the moment, the Mac pretty much gives me everything I need, so I abandoned Windows. And you use the iPhone exclusively? Yeah, I like the whole... Now I want to stop you there because you already credited Google with pretty much saving your life when it came to the research on this dysphonia. Yeah. And now you end up turning your back on them and going with an iPhone. Well, Apple does a real good job of making all my devices work together and somewhat seamlessly. Google also does, but just a little less

1:02:34 user interface love so that makes a big difference to me. What kind of car do you drive? I've got a 2011 x5 BMW and SUV. Ah, that's it? You don't have a second car? Why do I need two cars? It's just me. You get bored. Yeah, I don't like cars. I'm not a car guy. Oh, so if you go out to dinner, what kind of, what level of restaurant do you go to? Do you go to a high-end place, low-end place, hamburger place? What do you like? If I'm with... Are you a gourmet? Do you collect wine? I don't drink at all and when I did,

1:03:10 I didn't drink wine. I'm not an alcoholic. I know you're thinking that, you're all thinking that right now, aren't you? Did he stop because he's an alcoholic? No, I developed some kind of weird reaction to it and then I just stopped and realized, hey, I don't need this, I feel better. If I just never have a drink, I'm just healthier. It would save money if you went to high-end restaurants, I can tell you that. So the answer to your question is my girlfriend, Christina and I have tried a bunch of top restaurants just for the experience of it and they weren't really that good. I got to say, they weren't better than a mid-level restaurant. I don't know why people go to these top Michelin star restaurants. I won't name names. Why not? They were not impressive.

1:03:56 I will tell you that the French laundry was impressive. That just knocked my socks off. But other than that, no. I like a good Italian tablecloth restaurant and I'm happy. So I went through a whole couple of sheets here and I hate to do this but I'm going to do it anyway because I had this theory about interviewing and I was working on it. It was mainly to preclude what I'm going to ask next. Which is, what should I have asked you that I didn't ask? Well, you haven't asked me about my startup, which... Ah, well let's do that. So the startup, the name of the company is WenHub, WenHub, all one word, and the app we're focusing on right now is called Interface by WenHub.

1:04:46 And if you can imagine, it's like a Tinder for experts, meaning that it's people who are online and available right now for a video call. And it can be any topic. So anybody can sign up for an expert. Anybody can use it to make a connection. It's a dating app? No, it's not a dating app. Oh, it's for experts. It's for anybody who wants to charge for their time on a video call. So it could be a consultant, it could be an expert on some technology, but it could also be a psychologist. It could be your you know, just somebody who's visiting your grandmother who needs some medical care and maybe the kids want to call in and the professional just takes 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.

1:05:49 and the experts will be determined by ratings just like any other service. You'll get a star rating from the people who use you. And we think it could change everything from education to health care to, you know, it 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 is the team. Whose idea was this to begin with? Are you just a money guy? So I'm more than the money guy and it's the third product that the same team has developed. So we've done our pivoting. This specific idea was Nick Caliani, who's our CTO and co-founder.

1:06:38 And he initially had the idea and we refined it from there. But I get pretty involved in the look and the feel and the business end of it. When did this begin? I think we're about three years into it. The new product is only just this week. Is it out? Yeah, it's been in stores. The original version was crypto only. In other words, you had to pay in our own crypto. It was an ICO. Still is an ICO, by the way. And now we're on an exchange or two and we can take credit cards now. What's the crypto called? It's the WEN, W-H-E-N, and L-A token, the exchange. You can buy that now. Are you a fan of crypto?

1:07:26 A fan is probably too strong a word. I think the blockchain is probably here to stay or whatever it evolves to, but I'm no blockchain expert. And I think it has its use. We'll see the battle between, 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 that's how it's going to go. Yeah. I don't see any other alternative because otherwise you have chaos. Not that I'm rooting for the government.

1:08:04 Anyway, I think that'll do it. I think we've got everything covered unless you got something else you'd want to throw in there because it's free. Well free air time. We promoted a book Big Lee and you got any new books you're working on like a cartoon book? Maybe something a new Dilbert compilation. So there's there's always a new Dilbert compilation. The latest one is Cubicles that make you envy the dead it's reprints and the Dilbert calendar will be coming out in a few months and There's always something I got to buy. What's the Dogbert character's little devil? Where'd that come from? The Dogbert's... You have a devil character.

1:08:41 Oh, well, you're thinking of Catbird. In the comic, Catbird 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, just likes playing with you. Okay, well on that note we'll end. I want to thank you for letting me interview you. Well, thanks for coming all the way out here and it was fun. Yeah, great catching up. We'll talk again Wow, we have what no no stop no no stop take about take about oh, yeah take about Wow

1:09:34 That was fantastic. I mean, there's stuff in there that he is. I've never heard him talk about that stuff. That's because as far as I know, he never has. A couple of things I think he doesn't even like to talk about, but he was very relaxed and he was very amenable to chatting about everything. Well, I like knowing that we both have Tourette's. That makes me feel very comfortable and very good about myself and my friend Scott, my brother from another mother, my shaken brother from another mother. Yeah. As he said in there, he says now you can use it as the way you do as an excuse to cuss. I do not use it as the... I cuss on purpose and you say it's the Tourette's just to try and... You're the one that says it's Tourette's, but beside the point. We don't have 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 everybody who helped us out on this particular show.

1:10:27 that your donations will be moved to the next show and you'll be credited then on an extra long segment on Thursday. Yes, and I love that we're just keeping our streak going. This seems to be the new way for us. We've done different things in the past when we took a day off, like wow, we took a day off. And I think this is good. 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 the people you chose. Let me just remind everybody that to support our show and this work that goes on, please remember us at... Yes. Exactly. Let's go to the interview with Dane.

1:11:13 Hey John. Hey Dane. We have... Activating so much network. You have to be here. We have, you know, still half the town, not all the town, but half the town is polls. And there's certainly a lot of interest in it. There's a lot of interest in it. Consumers want it. So let's start with discussing what you guys are doing at Sonic in terms of rolling out this fiber and is fiber to the home? Yeah, we're building primarily fiber to the home networks. We also do connections to schools and libraries, municipalities and smart city and traffic signal applications and we build two cell towers. But those are all kind of the applications layered on top of the base foundation which is the fiber to the home network.

1:12:02 Now, just around the time you guys announced this, what is the monthly charge for this Fiber to the Home? So, the Fiber to the Home service is $40 a month. for the first year. After that introductory time it goes up by 10 as the month-to-month rate is 50 currently. And this is gigabit symmetric, so 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 robocall blocking, which is a real annoyance.

1:12:42 and unlimited nationwide calling and unlimited calling to fix lines in 66 countries. So if you have business or relatives in England, South Africa, Japan, etc., your calls to those countries are no charge as well. So it's a really innovative product and price point. compared to everything else and the only and I don't mind you going on and on about it because one of the purposes of a Conversation like this is to inform people that this sort of deal I'm assuming you're not losing your butt on this when it's funny when all said and done it and 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

1:13:34 and of telephone service, the costs of those have really declined substantially, although consumption, particularly of internet, is climbing, but the costs of delivering it are declining. But most consumers, you're moving into a new place, you bought a house, you're renting a new apartment, And you kind of have this moment where you go, oh shoot, I got to 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, 70, 80, $100 the first year. But in the long run, I think the average household on

1:14:18 Internet, telecom, TV, they're spending over $200. 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 people want really fast internet. No nonsense. A couple of companies around the country and in Canada for example, 2COWS, has been rolling out a, which is usually a very old internet company that was involved with shareware and downloads. And they had a stock, I acquired some of their stock by accident when it was $3.

1:15:01 It was $3. It was accidental because I had a company that was sold to somebody else and all of a sudden I have these shares that are stuck. You know how it goes. And so it skyrocketed to about $60. And I couldn't figure out why. They were selling ISP web addresses. Domain registry. Domain registry, right. But when they started Skyrocket, it's when they started putting in fiber. They started putting in fiber, and I think it's fiber to the home. It's the same thing. So I have to assume there's a lot of potential here. Now, before I get into the details of the technology,

1:15:45 I want to ask about the wiring itself. In Albany and Berkeley, and I guess you're putting some in San Francisco, in the neighborhoods where you're putting this, there's two or three things I've noticed. One, you have a lot of trucks, and the trucks are very well branded, I might add. I've seen examples of that not being the case with other companies. So on the side of all the trucks you have, it has the Sonic logo and the price. Yeah, it's actually quite funny. It's like a billboard and it is and so they're floating around and they're stringing because we have Telephone poles around most of this area. There's some underground but most of its telephone poles And there's like now these there's so much stuff hanging from these poles and what you guys are stringing. It looks heavy. I

1:16:34 So I'm going to ask, you're stringing up the place. Do you have to pay a fee to the pole companies? What kind of wire is this? Is it a big heavy glass cable with a bunch of fibers in it? Is it plastic? What? Yeah, so you touched on a lot of areas there and let me try and dive into some of that stuff. We are building mostly in residential locations where the utilities are aerial, that is overhead on wood utility poles. And if you look at those poles, traditionally they've hosted electricity up at the top and then kind of in the middle of the pole, telecommunications, big old heavy copper telephone wires.

1:17:21 And then typically about a foot above that, slightly smaller coaxial cable, you know, copper television cable wires, amplifiers, taps, all the components of the coax television network. And those two networks have then been adapted to deliver, in addition to phone and TV, they've been adapted to deliver internet as well. Now what we're building is an all-new, all-optical end-to-end network. So this is dielectric cable, so it's plastic and glass. It's smaller diameter and lighter weight than the copper infrastructure, the metal infrastructure that's up there. But it starts with a metal, what's called a messenger cable. So there's a stainless steel cable that runs from pole to pole, and then the fiber cables themselves are lashed to that with a lashing wire. And then all of that is spliced up at

1:18:15 Convergence points cabinets where we split the light to the different homes in each neighborhood. And then adjacent to your home, on the pole closest to your home, there'll be a little terminal that comes off with a set of plugs out the bottom of it. And those then are equipped with a drop cable that comes to your house. Now, one of the complaints we have gotten has been that this infrastructure is ugly. And I think what's happening is it sort of has been ignored for a long time. And if you look up there, there is a lot of pre-existing telephone and cable infrastructure. And then we come along and put up a new cable. Maybe there's only one of them, and maybe it's smaller diameter than what's already up there. But it draws the attention to the fact that there's more cables going up there. And so it does create some practical considerations about

1:19:09 How many times can this be done? How much infrastructure can we put up there without this getting too unsightly? Now AT&T, well, the poles are unsightly anyway, but they're also kind of pleasant because you know that if somebody runs into one, it's not like these underground cables where when they break or something bad happens, it could take days to get them fixed. Yeah, maintenance is easier. There's pros and cons. fixing things that break is faster but aerial cables are more exposed to damage. You know, fires, sometimes the transformers on the poles will light on fire and the pole won't burn. Yeah, that happens. And then when they blow up, all the oil that's in the transformer runs down the pole, that oil ignites, the pole incinerates. We've seen electrical fires from streetlights on poles, damaged cables, and we have issues with squirrels. I have Comcast.

1:20:06 I always have two systems because of what I do. I have to. And I was having nothing but trouble. In fact, the reason I went to Sonic in the first place was because the Comcast line was really flaky. And it took about a year until the right guy came out and he found that the cable had been attacked by a squirrel. And he brought the piece out. It's interesting because copper networks When you have issues with rodents in the ground, squirrels up in the air, there's water incursion and the problem is that the issues can really be transitory and insidious and really hard to troubleshoot. And so you end up with experiences like yours. With fiber, it's pretty much either fine or it's broken. And there's no concept of sort of the attenuation that's caused by water.

1:21:06 on a metallic signaling system. And so fiber has much higher reliability and better failure modes that lead to, you know, one of the things that we see in our customer service center is customers that are on copper technologies like VDSL and ADSL 2 plus and POTS voice They'll call technical support much more frequently because there's issues with those copper wires and we have to dispatch much more frequently. With fiber, it's way more reliable. So what you'll find, you're getting the fiber service installed.

1:21:45 the cable will become your backup and you'll find that the fiber is so reliable you shouldn't need to utilize the cable. And I just saw a tweet from one of our customers and he said he posted some stats out of his home network where he monitors latency and DNS performance. And he says, hey, can you see what day I switched to Sonic? And it's got this sort of widely variable latency on his commercial cable connection at home. and then a move to Sonic Fiber, and it's just this rock solid low latency. And so you'll enjoy the fiber connection. It's really the right technology for broadband access. My partner at the NOA Agenda Show, Adam Curry, has Fiber. I think it's AT&T's or Verizon. I don't know who it is. It's in Austin, Texas. Probably AT&T or Google. It was in Google. The Google guys were

1:22:43 Flaky and Google seems to be losing interest. I 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, did a lot of research and it turns out that you disable IPv6. It, it should fix it. Yeah, the issues that you begin to, yeah, I was going to say, I don't know what would be wrong with the IPv6. We have seen in some cases, IPv6 is unfortunately, I mean it's not new, but it's new from an implementation perspective for many vendors. And so sometimes you'll see IPv6 implementation issues in a router, in a Wi-Fi access point, or even in a client device, workstation, an Ethernet interface.

1:23:38 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 a router configuration, then the Wi-Fi becomes the weak link. What's neat for me is in the past, the wide area network, the uplink to the Internet was always the slowest connection. You think back to the days of dial-up and computers were mighty slow back then, but they were way faster than these ultra slow dial-up connections we had. Then computers got faster, DSL came along, cable came along, but until you get to gigabit Ethernet connected Internet at full gigabit speeds,

1:24:34 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 people are saying, well, why is it going 150 megabits on this computer? And it turns out they're using a USB 2.0 Ethernet dongle or why is it going you know only 300 megabits 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 GPON and Ethernet that we run over it are

1:25:20 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. They're in other parts of the country. But you guys actually have a real customer service operation where if I call I usually get some guy who's not only helpful but very knowledgeable. So I'm assuming these guys aren't in India. No, we do everything here in the San Francisco Bay Area. So our headquarters are in the North Bay, all of our call center, customer service, dispatch, fleet, yard, field force, everything is local folks. And I think one of the

1:26:10 things that is very infuriating, particularly to those of us that are a little bit more technically minded, is when you call for customer service and you reach somebody who knows very little, they've had little training, and they're equipped primarily with a script. And somebody sat down and figured out that these are the top 10 reasons for problems, so we're going to make everybody go through this. But it's frustrating, it's infuriating. And from our perspective, we don't equip our staff with scripts. We give them a lot of training in the concepts of troubleshooting, listening to what the customer has already tried, and hearing the customer's theories about what might be wrong, because often they know.

1:27:01 And then beginning to isolate the problem. Well, how do we split this problem in half and figure out, well, is the problem in your Wi-Fi or is the problem in your router? Is the problem in your router or is it in the connection to the internet? Where do these problems exist? Is it a site you're trying to access? Is it a protocol? You've got issues with things that are over IPv6 and not IPv4. And so investing in kind, patient, articulate people Who will just hear out the consumer and collaborate with them to find a solution is really a refreshing experience and we've had a customer reach out to me and he said you know will you please.

1:27:40 like start a credit card company, a mobile phone company. Takeover AT&T. If you could start a transmission shop, that would be great because the customer service experience that people have, especially with companies that are providing telephone customer service, which is generally outsourced to a large call center, the experience is not an enjoyable one. 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 and

1:28:34 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 uh... and that smells like opportunity to me and 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 that is in a lot of ways the opposite of

1:29:12 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 it's not just about the values, it's also the business. Around here I don't understand why everybody on the block doesn't get the system because it's crazy not to, unless you don't use the internet or you don't care. but that's just me. Now, back to the technical aspects of this. So now what kind of gear, what piece of equipment at your head end, let's call it, sits there that does this in the first place? Who makes it and what is it? Yeah, so the technology that we deploy, and I think this is pretty uniform for carriers building fiber to the home,

1:30:11 in the US. The technology is called Gigabit Passive Optical Networking or GPON. And a PON or Passive Optical Network brings a dedicated fiber to your house. That fiber goes up the street to the head of your neighborhood and goes into a passive splitter. 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 OLT, which uses the GPON protocol to talk to a customer premise device, an optical network terminal, think of it as a modem basically, that

1:31:05 outputs symmetric gigabit Ethernet. And sometimes this is integrated with what's called a residential gateway that'll do the routing and network address translation, firewalling, Wi-Fi, and those make up the components. The vendors that make this equipment, there's a variety. We use equipment from Adtran in most of our network, but there are other vendors like Calix and Nokia and and Ericsson that make equipment that does this. And this allows us to deliver a true symmetric gigabit to the customers. And it's neat technology.

1:31:48 Now, 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 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, a couple of things. Is that the fastest, is there any chance of going to 10 gigs? Well, funny you should ask. We just began offering for commercial customers a two gigabit product, and so it delivers

1:32:50 multiple one gigabit Ethernet ports and a total of two gigabits of aggregate throughput. And so for customers that are, we would think of them as small business or home office customers, they can now opt for a two gigabit connection, a little more costly, it's $90 a month, but that's pretty amazing frankly for a couple of gigabits connectivity. The technologies are evolving. GPON was the successor to what's called broadband PON or BPON. BPON had basically the capacity to deliver nominally about 20 megabits to each household on a 600 megabit shared

1:33:36 segment. GPON delivers a gigabit on a 2.4 gigabit segment. There are upcoming technologies XGSPON and NGPON2 which can deliver from 10 gigabits to 40 gigabits to the premise. These will be adopted first to serve businesses that have greater than one gigabit needs. 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

1:34:13 We changed the optical line terminal in the cabinet or central office, and we changed the optical network terminal, the equipment in the home, but the fiber network itself, which is the most expensive part by far. You mean the wire? Yes, yes. The fiber cables that we're placing out on poles, and where today one gigabit is a typical consumer product for fiber networks. I think you'll see that advance to higher speeds in the future. And what's great is that we don't have to swap out and rewire the optical network. And just like the telephone, the twisted pair telephone network, it's had a life of over, in specific cables over 50 years, the coax network, there's coax cable that's delivering gigabit with DOCSIS 3.1 today that was placed 15, 20 years ago.

1:35:18 and you'll see the fiber optic network with a realistically 40, 50 year lifespan where cables last at least that long and we're able to simply iterate the equipments on the ends. Now AT&T came along just before you guys started this program, door to door with sales guys who were like bros. I don't know if you know this. And they went door to door around here, any place where you guys were headed, to pre-sell some something, some fiber. It was fiber, they emphasized fiber. And I said, is it fiber to the home? And they said, no, no, no, no, it's fiber to the curb.

1:36:07 What are the limitations of that? By the way, the offer was mediocre. I was very disappointed in the offer. I thought it was because I thought maybe it would be good backup or something, but I found it not to be the case. Comcast is a better deal. Yeah, what a number of incumbent carriers are deploying is Fiber to the node technology. 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 a thousand feet to three thousand feet from your home and then VDSL 2 is used over the copper pairs Okay, so, you know next generation faster DSL and

1:36:53 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 it. Believe me if I was anyplace else, if I was out in the middle of nowhere Kansas, I'd be very happy with that. Well, and what's frustrating about it is when they go door to door and they say, we're bringing fiber to your neighborhood. Would you like to sign up for this package that is television, 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 fiber to the home. That's just moving the DSLAM, the DSL Access Multiplexer that previously was in the central office.

1:37:45 Now it's moved a bit closer, it's in a cabinet, you know, a sort of lawn fridge that some unfortunate person has on their front lawn in order to deliver faster DSL service. But it's not transformative in the same way that fiber all the way to the premise is. Do you have caps on the gigabits? No, we don't. We've got a reasonable use provision. It's a residential product, so we don't allow folks to resell it. And so it wouldn't be okay for somebody to set up a wireless ISP off their roof. So the intention is reasonable household use, but there's no caps on that consumption. If I want to put a server on it because you've got so much speed, is that allowable? It isn't permitted in the way that we've set the terms up because we'd consider that a commercial use.

1:38:44 And frankly, for $40 a month, we can't cover costs if a lot of our customers deploy servers that output half a gigabit, gigabit, consistent peak traffic. And there is a reliance in the pricing when you're selling a $40 a month product. The assumption is people are going to use it in the way that a typical household uses it. They're going to stream a bunch of 4K TV. They're going to have a bunch of connected devices. They're going to download movies and big updates, they're going to upload a certain amount of video and photos and so on. But you build your business model around assumptions about consumer behavior. If somebody sets up three racks in a data center in their garage and starts pushing out a lot of traffic, then that breaks the business model for us. So we put some reasonable use provisions in there. It's not a cap as to any specific amount of use, it's basically that you can't

1:39:42 resell it and so a commercial use like hosting or becoming a wireless ISP would basically saturate those connections and we'd look at that and go, hey wait a minute, what's this fellow John doing? What if you take the $90 deal? The same, the $90 deal is a small office home office configuration so it's intended for consumption by people. It's still intended to be mostly used for downloading. Why don't you just cap, or not cap, but why don't you just make the whole system asymmetrical? Are people that desirous of gigabit up? Most people can't even suck down gigabit let alone, you know, you could push it up but it's going to go to a slower downloading environment.

1:40:35 The upstream speed and moving away from an asymmetric connection is actually really, really useful in a household. Being able to take a bunch of videos and pictures with your cell phone at an event and then come home and your cell phone connects to the Wi-Fi and quickly uploads all that content. To be able to back up your home network and all of your home computers on a regular basis to a cloud backup service. Having a lot of outbound capacity enables a lot of interesting uses. And what we see is, these days with the availability of AWS and cloud services for hosting and for people starting a business, we don't see a whole lot of demand for or abuse of

1:41:30 the upload capacity. So that's the goal. Do you contemplate ever maybe for your customers having a cloud-based backup program somewhere? You know... Before you go on though, because you do have, I know with your former system, I have not fully utilized it but every once in a while I play around with it. And I'm not that interested in putting up a server because it's actually a lot of work. But You do have a website capability at the home office where I can have a domain put there and I can serve pages and do some miscellaneous chores from sonic.net. Yeah, and one of our, you know, one of the things that we've pursued is to try to

1:42:23 how can we add more value to what we're delivering? So every customer gets a domain name. So we cover the registration for the first year, they get hosting, they get a whole bunch of e-mail boxes. We provide everybody with an electronic fax line. So there's like a ridiculous amount of capability that we load in. These are all things that for us are very low cost to add and that we've layered into the product. But on the other side, We don't have to solve every problem. There's a lot of great services out there on the internet. And there are some things, like for example, cloud backup. Well, there are some great solutions for cloud backup. I use personally, for all of my data, I use Dropbox to synchronize all my systems. 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.

1:43:18 And the bottleneck, the problem that really, really needs to be solved is building new infrastructure in the last mile to every single home and business. 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 a lot of great X out there on the internet. We don't need to be that. I mean, a big one is television.

1:43:57 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 going to become internet TV. You know you're going to choose between YouTube 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 capability, we kind of run them through a set of filters and say, well, is this something we can do? Yeah, well should we do it? Is there someone else doing it? Can we do it at low cost and add value? 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, we can do all that work

1:44:57 And it will cost you $10 a subscriber and we charge them $20 or you charge them $20 and then we take $10 from that kind of thing like a microservices architecture on a bigger scale. Is that possible? You know, the challenge in television is twofold. One is the cost of content. Consumers want 150, 200, 250 channels. That's going to 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.

1:45:52 And then on the other side, as you look at the technology, platforms like DirecTV's Genie and Dish's Hopper and Comcast's X1, they're good platforms. They invest a substantial amount of resources in differentiating those platforms, making them really, really good. And for a For a carrier like us, the field of potential set-top boxes and interfaces, the software, the middleware that runs on the set-top boxes, they're not great. As you look at the cost of content, the quality of the experience,

1:46:36 And then more importantly, you look at where is the industry going? Where do consumers want to be? And I would say that 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. Off the air is a whole other topic. But 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, big heavyweight TV package and you might commit for one or two years to that product is really going to be supplanted with

1:47:26 Set of apps, you know one that brings you 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 and easier for normal less technical individuals and 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

1:48:23 but get a fiber internet connection, dump the slower, less reliable cable internet. And then the other is we're happy to sell a customer a satellite dish TV subscription if they would like that. And it's a bit less than 10% of our new customers take that, but almost one out of 10 new Sonic fiber customers chooses to also add dish to that. And in doing that, they get a bundle discount. They save about $10 a month and they get the conventional sort of video experience. And for some people, that's 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, even the cabling to CAT7.

1:49:20 Do you guys advise any of these? Because there's a huge difference in at least the style of these cables. I mean, Cat7 is like, it's a more, seems like much more formidable. It's wider. Yeah, now we're deploying Cat6 in some corporate environments. But for Gigabit, Cat5e, which has been widely deployed for more than a decade, Cat5e can deliver gigabit Ethernet and it's more craft-friendly, we would say. It's easier to work with than the products that can deliver higher bandwidth. I guess the question is in your home, do you anticipate a need to deliver faster than one gigabit?

1:50:14 And you will see some sort of flex speeds where traditionally Ethernet was 10 meg, 100 meg, 1 gig, 10 gig. Well, there's some flex speeds where you'll see 2.5 gigabits or 5 gigabits delivered at different distances over Cat5e. And if you're wiring a house with, and you want to invest in the absolute best cable, you could do a Cat6 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, then you could deliver 10 gigabit within the home. But then you have to figure out, well, do I need 10 gigabit to my smart TV?

1:50:57 If it's going to do 4K TV in three dimensions, that might be 25 megabits worth of streaming. And so there comes some point where you have to be pragmatic about what you deploy. And so generally we see Cat5e 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'm noticing that too. My Roku is hooked to a Wi-Fi repeater. Works? Yeah, and so what you'll see in the household is that

1:51:37 the Nest thermostat and the Peloton bike and the Roku plugged into the TV upstairs, etc. all end up being Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi is just so easy. And unfortunately, it's less reliable than a hard wire 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 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.

1:52:29 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. You mentioned you use a repeater, a Wi-Fi repeater that's then connected to the Roku. That's a good configuration too where you might have a number of access points in the home that are themselves wired. That gives you a great foundation for a good wireless experience at the edge. Yeah, it does seem to work. 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

1:53:10 in their environment? You know, I think we see folks at two ends of the spectrum. I mean on the one side we've got people who have followed the developments in the technology, they understand the regulatory and infrastructure and deployment challenges and they're sort of shut up, take my money, kind of mode and when and and that is about one out of ten households today you know they hear we're coming there sign up before we can say a word and and then there's a a big group of folks who know they use the internet

1:53:49 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, fiber to the node and DOCSIS cable and GPON fiber. And so the challenge for us, I guess, is Convincing those for whom technology and the internet is not something that they think about every day, that this is just a better experience. In our case, a great company delivering good customer service.

1:54:29 a fair price, a well-priced product, but also a really reliable, consistent, snappy performing product. And so that's a bridge we have to, we really have to work to, a gap we work to bridge. Yeah, I consider it 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. And most people don't know what this is all about. Because again, like I said, if you have somebody stringing fiber optic cable in your neighborhood and they're offering fiber to the home at a very low price,

1:55:15 Why would you not be asking going outside and knocking on the door truck doors window and and Asking what's going on because you'd like to get involved in this something we do yeah, and we do it's kind of the it's the one out of ten people are like eager for it and They'll chase our guys down the street literally and say, hey, is it coming yet? I live right over there. When can I get hooked up? And we really appreciate that enthusiasm. Those early adopters, those are the people that those who are less technical look to for answers.

1:55:51 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 say it's a failure of the technology writing community. I don't follow. you know all of the hobbies and interests that such a diversity you know whether it's cars are bass fishing or or fiber optic networks you know everybody's got an interest and uh... but at the end of the day the internet and use of internet and fast reliable smooth internet in the home uh... at you know the vast majority of people uh... do want that and you understand that it's been interesting to see though you know it used to be consumers understood

1:56:45 The modem and router and ethernet and wifi and sort of how things were plugged in and today people just say my wifi like they don't talk about internet or ethernet anymore it's just. what's the wifi, how's the wifi, my wifi's up, my wifi's down. Yeah, I know it's pathetic, but that's just the way it is. It is, and I try not to place a judgment on that and say it's become this ubiquitous, important, integrated piece of technology, and it's our job as a service provider to try to make that as simple

1:57:25 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 really benefit from the fact that you know America's cable companies in particular are some of the most hated companies People really despise the business practices, pricing policies. They're really abusive practices that come from the abuse of that near monopoly. And so we get a certain amount of, even from those who don't understand the technology, they say, wait, there's something that I've heard is a little better and it's not the darn cable company? Great, sign me up.

1:58:15 Why do you think Google's kind of like lost interest? They started putting fiber in here and there and actually affecting property values around the country with fiber networks going into neighborhoods, mostly obscure ones. You know, my observations from the outside and my speculation is that they may have found it to be harder, more expensive, slower going, than they expected and they may also have found that the realities of consumer adoption, convincing people that they should switch to this, it is a real tough pull. Now, Google has continued to build out in the cities that they were committed to. They've sort of paused and they've had some changes in leadership, but I don't think that the story is done and I think

1:59:12 whether it's Google Fiber or Two Cows Ting building fiber, Socket Internet in Missouri, GorgeNet in Oregon, or Sonic in California and hopefully beyond. I think you're going to see new market entrance, building new networks and disrupting cable and telco incumbents in the coming years, and I'm very optimistic about that. What is a foot of the fiber cable cost? Oh, it depends on 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 6, 7 cents a foot. So really, really cheap.

1:59:56 The outside plant stuff, we're stringing, we did a signaling system for a railroad and put in a bunch of ribbonized 432. And that cable ends up being between three and four dollars per foot. And then you'll spend another two or three dollars per foot to place the cable, nevermind getting conduit in the ground, which can be tens, you know, 10, 20, 30, even $50 per foot. In San Francisco, you know, our budget per foot for underground construction in San Francisco is nearly $500 per foot. And as a result, we do very little of that. But this is, I mean, it's very interesting because I'm a technology person and I'm interested in product and customer service and disrupting the market. But we've, you know, over the span of the last, you know, seven, eight years, learned a lot about construction.

2:00:50 And underground and aerial construction, the process of construction cost optimization, it's a whole other fascinating business that we've become. And a question I asked at the beginning wasn't fully answered is what do you do to get access to actually use these poles? Do you have to buy access? Is there licensing? Yeah, well, so poles, utility poles are, they're in the public utilities easement. So the infrastructure of your community incorporates water and sewer and gas and power and communications lines. Those all live in an easement space.

2:01:30 It's private property, but then the utilities have a right to deploy in that easement. And so when wood utility poles are placed by an electric utility, the poles are either split, jointly owned with telecommunications utilities or rented. spaces rented to telecommunications utilities. So generally speaking, we are renting one foot of vertical space on a wood utility pole outside your home, for example, and we spend about $7 per year to rent that one foot of space on that one pole. And that and cable maintenance, you know, dealing with somebody knocks a pole down or a squirrel chews a cable,

2:02:17 Those are the primary costs of running the infrastructure of the network. 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 named some of them, that are stringing cable to just bypass the old infrastructure, which looks like a cost benefit to me. I want to thank you for the Now I do want to ask, when I get this thing, when they finally put it in, they're going to have the box downstairs and they're going to run a piece of Ethernet cable up to my office and then I'll have a device that I plug it into that strings out the... it's like a router, I suppose.

2:03:05 Yeah, so we'll... There's a video on YouTube if you search for Sonic Gigabit Fiber Installation on YouTube, you should find one of our videos. 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 Ethernet and Wi-Fi. And so that's a typical configuration. And I think... Is that your router or mine?

2:04:01 You can do either. We supply a router and we certainly encourage customers to use the router that we supply. Critically, it's capable of full gigabit speed and most routers aren't. So you need to have a good router to deliver gigabit performance. 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

2:04:52 keep them up to date as well. I mean obviously you're aware of things like VPN filter and the sort of recent security issues that we've seen with consumer routers. And so for the majority of consumers, I encourage them to use the service provider router which is remotely managed, it's patched, it's security updated, If there are issues with it, it can be swapped at no cost to the consumer. Now, there's another category of consumers that enjoys managing their own network. They're going to deploy their own firewall. They might have a PF Sense box or a Raspberry Pi system that does ad blocking. They might run their own Ethernet switch. They might run multiple access points around their house. There's a category of consumer that really enjoys building their own local area network, and we certainly don't mind them doing that.

2:05:50 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 to the edge of the demarcation, which at that point becomes the optical network terminal. your network connections up, it's not working over here, well maybe it's your network. Yeah, you're on your own after that. You're on your own, exactly. Okay, well it's good to have the option. I think that covers everything I needed to ask and besides maybe slamming some other companies but it is nice to do that. So thanks, Dane. Of course, thank you very much, John. I appreciate the time. Okay, bye.

2:06:31 So, is there such a thing as a lifetime free account with SonicNet? I wish. I think it should be comped. Interesting guy. I like guys like this who just screw it, I'm just gonna go do it. I mean, it's nice. It's pretty much his attitude, I have to say. I've always enjoyed him. He's got a good take on things. I admire that. And we're gonna be back next Thursday or this upcoming Thursday with a regular show. You're gonna be coming in from Europe, which will always give us some insight. Yes, 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 at Lake Como.

2:07:16 just before we head off to the Large Hadron Collider, which I promise we will not go there until after Thursday's show. So we can have one last contact before I fall in and get sucked into the black hole. Very excited about it. So we want to thank both Dane and Scott for taking part in this show. It's usually thank you very much. Appreciate it Yes, we 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 Mimi on my voicemail hey, let's have John do more of those he needs to get out of the house more out of the house

2:08:04 Alright everybody that is what we do even when we're on vacation. We don't just bring you reruns We either bring you brand new fresh mixes done by professionals or stuff like this Interviews with interesting people done by professionals who've been around for a while Enjoy it because it won't be here forever and on that note remember us for our next show, partially coming to you from the European Unions and from northern Silicon Valley. That will be on Thursday and I certainly will have the breakdown of Kamala Harris and Sheryl Sandberg about the face bag money. You could just count on it, you know I'll have it. Coming to you from downtown, coming to you from somewhere in the middle of Italy,

2:08:48 In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Curry. And from northern Silicon Valley where I remain, I'm John C. Dvorak. We return with our live show on Thursday. Until then, adios mofos! The best podcast in the universe! mofo.dvorak.org slash n-a-o-r-k

2:09:28 Maybe I should write a book on how to get by on 500 million. There's a lot of people that don't really know how to do it.