CalacanisCast Beta #12

 

In this action packed auditory adventure, Jason reflects on some of his favorite clips from recent podcasts around the blogosphere.

 

Dave Winer - Public Media conference

TWIT - Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Venturecast - on multiple round funding

Martin Scorsese - Oscar acceptance clip

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CalacanisCast Beta 12

 

Jason: OK. Hello everybody it’s your buddy, Jason. You’re listening to CalacanisCast Beta… what number is this? Maybe this is thirteen? I don’t know. [Ed. It’s #12]

 

Anyway, I’m sitting here at the Calacanis Compound in Brentwood, California. It’s a beautiful sunny day and I have with me my new producer - not the executive producer! That’s Steve Gillmor, as we all know. But I have my new producer, Tyler Crowley. Say hello, Tyler.

 

Tyler Crowley: Hi Jason.

 

Jason: How are you?

 

Tyler: I’m good. Thank you very much. It’s good to be here.

 

Jason: That’s good. It’s great to be here. He’s got all of this great equipment. This is no longer the Ghetto Cast. We are no longer using my Plantronics DSP headset. I’ve got a microphone here that looks like it’s worth…what’s it worth like a Grand or something?

 

Tyler: In that ballpark.

 

Jason: Yeah, right.

 

Tyler: It’s actually a professional, audio vocal recording microphone.

 

Jason: So this is a professional microphone with a professional mixer or something you plug into with those big fat audio cables...

 

Tyler: It’s all very professional.

 

Jason: Right. And so the idea here is that CalacanisCast was sounding a little bit rough on the edges and I needed some help. Frankly I needed some help with the podcast - you guys have been very patient with me - so Tyler is here to help me. He’s coming in and we’re going to try to do this at least once a week. Maybe we’ll get to twice a week Who knows? Maybe we’ll surprise you and do even more episodes. I’ve got a lot of ideas as to which direction I want the show to go in. It’s been a long week for me. I’m very tired of being up ‘cuz I started the ‘Fat Blogging’ movement over the last week.

 

Tyler: How has that been going?

 

Jason: It’s a little crazy! You know…it was a throwaway and I was toying with this idea of blogging about how I was uncomfortable with my weight because I had gained so much weight…

 

Jason: During the Weblogs. Inc period…you know working so hard trying to get that done…I topped the scales at about 207 lbs and I thought, you know what I should just blog about this because, you know, getting information when it comes to health is the number one thing and also motivation to stay on track. So I just said screw it, I’m going to start blogging every day until I’m thin. And… I bought a treadmill...

 

Tyler: So the idea is just to blog the weight off?

 

Jason: I could blog the weight off! I figured if I could do… if I do about 700 posts a day that’d be like 700 sit-ups…Probably each blog post burns about 3 calories.

 

Tyler: I was about to say what’s the calorie per blog?

 

Jason: I don’t know. It depends on how furiously I am typing. But my thought was obviously if you blog about it you’re going to keep getting information back. You’re gonna talk to people to get a little support going a little knowledge transfer and… So I came up with the term ‘Fatblogging’ and all of a sudden now everybody is now blogging about being fat and it was sort of a joke and whatever… And so now it’s become a movement so I said in order to join the movement you have to do one blog post a day and the subject line has to be your weight which was sort of a joke and of course, now you go on to Technorati and you search for ‘fatblogging’ and people are doing it. This is sort of like a Forrest Gump kind of thing! You know I just started running with it and now everybody’s running with it kind of a thing…but … that’s how great things start! And Joseph Jaffe who was on the CalacanisCast - I think - #11 is doing it and he’s really fat! I mean, he’s Jaffe The Hut! I mean he’s - and I know he’s listening - He does the Across the Sound podcast and he’s a really brilliant guy but you know what… smart guys can get fat fast… can get fat quick!

 

Tyler: Fat fast?

 

Jason: Yeah, fat fast! So I’m riding him pretty hard. I’m hoping Scoble will join the program. I’m not saying Scoble is fat but I’m not saying he isn’t.

 

Tyler: Pound for pound…

 

Jason: Pound for pound I think that I’m the better blogger!

 

Jason: Pound for pound. He’s definitely got more pounds though so...

 

Jason: Whatever the case may be…there’s a bunch of people joining. Will Harris from ‘This Week in Tech’ - he’s a really great guy - he just joined the movement. As a matter of fact he just registered the domain name. So after I did the blog post I went to register the domain name and I guess he happened to be reading his reader at the time and he registered it and was nice enough to give me the domain name.

 

Tyler: There’s a lesson to be learned there.

 

Jason: Yeah. Register the domain name before you hit the publish button! Exactly!

 

Jason: So I have the domain Fatblogging.com. It’s redirecting to Calacanis. I’ve gotten a whole bunch of people who have offered me to do interesting things with it. I don’t want to build a business around it. I just want to build a community around it. And …I was 207 (lbs) and now I’m like 191 – 192 and I started publishing my workouts, talking about them, and so people told me to do this HIIT Training. Somebody posted it in the comments and I did a Google search and… this is what I love about blogging! Whatever you put out there you get ten times more back.

 

Jason: It really is a karma kind of thing. So somebody posted about this HIIT Training which is: High Intensity Interval Training. And what it means is that you run really fast for 30 seconds or a minute and then you take a minute off and what happens is that your body supposedly gets so beat up and is in such shock that you burn a decent amount of calories but afterwards the healing, your body having to heal, burns even more! As opposed to doing just 25 minutes straight you do 5 minutes warm-up, 5 minutes cool down, and then 8 minutes of sprinting and then 8 minutes of cool down in between the sprints. And so I did this two days ago and I couldn’t walk this morning!

 

Jason: I was dead! So I got on the treadmill and my knees started to hurt while I was doing it because what I was doing was putting the treadmill up to 9 miles per hour. But anyway, it was a good workout. Then today, somehow, I got fit sugar, which is a cool…umm…

 

Tyler: The site...

 

Jason: The site fitsugar.com, which is part of the Sugar Publishing network which is a Sequoia Investment ( full disclosure here ) and I had Brian Sugar over here who’s actually a really nice guy. He and I ...

 

Tyler: He’s a sweet guy!

 

Jason: He’s a sweet guy. Right. I knew him from New York actually it turns out. We used to go to the same dog park but he um…He basically photocopied the Weblogs, Inc and Gawker business plans - And totally was upfront about it - He said, “Listen, I watched what you did. I copied it exactly and ...” But he’s doing it for women and man, he is so far ahead of what we tried to do with Weblogs, Inc. He’s got, like, backend systems he’s doing. He’s built social networking into the blog network.

 

Jason: So it sort of like MySpace + Weblogs Inc or Gawker.

 

Jason: Anyway, his blog linked to me and I was looking there and I saw ‘Russian Twists.” Like they had someone, one of these actress/model whatevers…And they were saying her secret was she does Russian Twists and I was like, what?

 

Tyler: I ordered one of those at a bar the other night!

 

Jason: Yeah, I said to him it’s a donut! I said I think it’s a donut. A Russian Twist?

 

Tyler: I was thinking it was a drink.

 

Jason: Oh…either way…It’s also an exercise. And so I’m Oh “Russian Twist” so I typed it into Google and I YouTube’d it and I go onto YouTube and there’s like ten videos of people doing Russian Twists. So basically it’s taking the medicine ball and then just twisting to the left and then to the right with the medicine ball and then somebody had a variation on it so I was like “ OK I’ll try that tomorrow”. So I’m going to get a medicine ball and try that tomorrow. And it’s just this sort of free flowing of information, talking about diet, ‘cuz I’ve been talking about giving up bread and pasta and how hard that is for me coming from Brooklyn and eating pizza… pizza and pasta are basically two of the four food groups where I grew up!

 

Tyler: Right. Well the whole Eastern seaboard is ...

 

Jason: Yeah. I mean I basically ate a slice of pizza a day for like 20 years. I mean that’s...

 

Tyler. Yeah. I mean, you’ve got your bread, cheese, ...

 

Jason: And your veggies!

 

Tyler: AND your veggies.

 

Jason: It’s just….yeah right.

 

Tyler: All three.

 

Jason: And if…yeah if you put some salt or pepper on it you get your fourth food group, you’ve added your spices and you’re done!

 

Jason: But anyway….it feels really great . It’s really great that’s taking off and I’m keeping busy, you know , being at Sequoia and I’m also planning the TechCrunch 20 conference.

 

Tyler: Right. When? I think people want to know when that is?

 

Jason: Yeah, so do I!

Jason: Mike Arrington and our teams had a phone call on Friday and we are closing in on a location. We have multiple locations right now. We have people basically pitching us on having it at their institutions and I’ll leave it at that…fill in the blanks.

But we’re definitely going to do it in the San Francisco area...

 

Tyler: Hugh Hefner wasn’t one of those?

 

Jason: No, no, not at this point! But the location’s going to be sorta in the Silicon Valley/San Francisco area and so we’ll either do it at a hotel or some sort of an ‘institution’ and Wow we’re really close! We’re thinking September/October time frame and we’re getting all kinds of interesting feedback from people. They’re some very big major companies out there who want to release new products at the event.

 

We’re going to have startup companies that exist or ready to launch new products or new versions at the event. We’re going to have NEW startup companies that haven’t been announced and that are in stealth and are announcing at the event. And we’re going to give a couple of slots to student projects. So there’s going to be this whole sort of imagine…like a big top 5 Internet company launching something new, then a student project, then you know a Digg or a Flickr launching something and then a totally stealth project. I mean this is great. It’s going to be so awesome! Something for everybody - a whole diverse group of people - It’s going to be a lot of fun and again…no payola. Nobody’s going to have to pay me to demo because you know the best people are just not going to do that. I would never pay 20 Grand to demo! No offense to the people who do...

 

Jason: Even though, I guess I’m sort of taking a dig at them but you know that Digg or Flickr, or myself, or Nick Denton, or Yahoo, or Google… I mean, some of the top flight people just don’t need to spend that kind of money on that type of stuff therefore they wouldn’t. I mean, why would they?

 

Tyler: Right.

 

Jason: You know? I mean Google even in their heyday would never have paid to show off Google. You know. It’s just ...

 

Tyler: That’s a great point as well. If somebody thinks they really do have a great idea might…They might think: why would I need to pay all this money to get the attention of you know…

 

Jason: Right. Yeah. It’s just ridiculous!

So anyway…there you have it. I’m thinking things are busy but I think we have a new format for the show. Oh and I forgot to say you know this show is hosted at Podtech.net. Podtech, Podtech, Podtech.net. Everybody go there.

 

Tyler: And when you register that fatblogging.com

 

Jason: When I registered Fatblogging.com actually I went to Godaddy! GoDaddy, GoDaddy, GoDaddy is also a sponsor of the show. Everybody knows that the sponsorship of this show goes to the Bay Ridge Preparatory School’s Opportunity Fund. It’s the school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where I grew up. And the scholarship fund is an opportunity fund... Not an achievement fund. There’s a key difference. People who could really use an opportunity, maybe they haven’t achieved the academic level of other folks but they could really use the opportunity and so basically they’re targeting like foster kids who are bouncing from home to home to get a scholarship to a private institution that normally costs 12-14 Thousand Dollars a year so it’s really, really great that GoDaddy and Podtech.net are sponsoring them. We’re going to put two kids in school this year thanks to their sponsorships and the way you can help is just by going to GoDaddy right now. GoDaddy.com you know the ones with the funny commercials during the Super Bowl and you register a domain name and you put JASON1 in JASON plus the #1 no spaces, no dashes, none of that and you get like 10% off your domain name and they’re the best domain name registrars out there anyway. You register your domains there, right?

 

Tyler: I definitely do.

 

Jason: I just registered a bunch and I have fatblogging on there and actually Will transfer the domain name to me via GoDaddy. He had a GoDaddy account. I had a GoDaddy account. They transferred it right over. It was just like, you know, two clicks and I owned it, I owned the domain name. So, GoDaddy’s great on so many levels. And so is Podtech. They’re doing great stuff with the Scoble show and 1938 media.

 

Tyler: I remember when GoDaddy was kind of the secret that people would mention at little parties, you know?

 

Jason: Yeah, it was like very underground.

 

Tyler: Right. And then it was almost too good to be true.

 

Jason: Right. There was a time when it was $40 register.com; $40 or $50 from register.com and these guys came out and said: ‘Hey, we’ll give it to you for $8.95 or whatever…$7.95, which is like, cost! Basically they provide the service for free.

 

Tyler: And you know what? To people to haven’t taken advantage of it, their used to be a lot of guys who would go around making a small living wage off of just registering domains on GoDaddy on behalf of the people weren’t even aware of it yet.

 

Jason: Right. Yeah. Crazy.

 

Jason: So, for the format for the show this week we had a little interesting idea. You know, I listen to podcasts like crazy. I love podcasting and there’s a lot of people who are just talking about interesting things so I said why don’t we listen to them and maybe we’ll talk about what they’re talking about and just sort of extend their conversations a little bit in the CalacanisCast.

 

Tyler: Right, this was a good week for podcasting.

 

Jason: Great week for podcasting. So what do we have? Do we have anything queued up here?

 

Tyler: We do indeed. And I think the one that most people are talking about is Dave Winer did a talk about NPR. There were a lot of NPR people there and the whole sort of thing sort of involved NPR and his, sort of, advice to them.

 

Jason: Right. He flew across the country to this conference to …I don’t know where it was held? I think Boston.

 

Tyler: Right. Right. I think Boston.

 

Jason: Boston and Dave spoke and I listened to this when I was on the treadmill a couple of days ago.

 

Tyler: Right. A lot of people have heard it in its entirety and a lot of people have been talking about it and he just brings up so many great points on quite a few different subjects.

 

Jason: Right. For those people who don’t know Dave Winer is the guy who is a colossal mind in technology… this is the guy who basically created things like RSS and OPML and even podcasting he had his hands on and his fingerprints on so… He, he’s a famous guy. He’s also sort of an outsider. He sort of positions himself as sort of an outsider. He doesn’t enforce any intellectual property rights on the things he creates, in general, so basically he put a lot of great ideas out there like RSS, Really Simple Syndication which will let you syndicate blogs and uh… He’s just a mensch of a guy!

 

He’s also very brilliant, A really smart guy. He talks really fast. So sometimes he has the ability to - because I’ve spent a lot of time with Dave - he has the ability to overpower people actually. You know…did you ever meet somebody like that who’s so intelligent and their mind moves so quickly that they could just run right over somebody?

 

And, so I mean he has that ability to do that. Sometimes he gets taken the wrong way because he’s just that smart and that quick and what I love best about him from his talk at this NPR thing is what I’m calling ‘Slow Dave” because there’s a sort of slow blogging movement like the Slow Food Movement you know slow down for a little bit, you know, for the rest of the audience isn’t as quick and he really slowed down for these folks and really took a gentle approach and really thought about what he was going to say.

 

You could tell he put a lot of effort into it. Which is something I’ve been trying to do when I do my keynotes is really, really prepare for them and really have something to say and that’s what was so powerful about his talk was that he slowed down a little bit. He didn’t talk down to them. He didn’t just tell them what to do. He tried to convince them of his case, so let’s listen to a clip:

 

 

Tyler: That’s kind of an interesting point that he’s making there in that he’s speaking of John Edwards in a presidential campaign and he’s speaking to John about advising him in terms of using these tools that 15 year old girls are using in their bedrooms... which would have been an absurd thought to recommend to a presidential candidate even five years ago.

 

Jason: Yeah, and also to the NPR and PBS people in the audience it’s like, there’s no reason for you to recreate the infrastructure of the Internet. If YouTube is out there, people are already hanging out on it. If MySpace is out there and people are already there, you don’t need to create the PBS or NPR version of those services... Flickr, MySpace, whatever it is... Leverage what’s out there. Let’s save the money and put the money into the product - which I though was great.

So we have another clip on that maybe? There’s another couple of clips. Let’s hear one more clip from that.

 

 

Jason: Let me just say that is my favorite clip. I think this might be my favorite clip of the past year in podcasting and I’ll tell you why? Well, first, if anybody who knows Dave Winer, he’s a strongly opinionated guy, as I said earlier, and he would normally sort of ram home this point in a much more powerful way but I love, love, love ‘Slow Dave’ slowly and methodically getting everyone to understand his position and he’s so much more convincing when he just puts himself like in second gear instead of the fifth gear that he is normally engaged in.

 

He really, he really makes the point there and he does it eloquently and you know, if somebody does think the world is flat, in this day in age, if somebody does think that global warming is not occurring and is not an issue, it’s insane for journalists to sit there and pretend flying in the face of all convention that they have to have this sort of doubting, idiotic position. It’s just insane. I think he nailed it. I’m not saying Bush is a liar. I’m not going to go that far but I do appreciate the fact that people would say. what’s being said is not intellectually honest and I think that that’s the problem.

 

A lot of these talk show hosts either they scream from one side of the aisle or the other OR they just play these sort of like, everything has to be evil. And I remember when I was a journalist, you know they would always ask ”what’s the downside? What’s the downside?” and if you say two positive things give me two negative. They always wanted to have balance. You know sometimes you profile somebody and they’re just a great a great person and they’re doing great stuff, there is no downside. And sometimes, you’ll be writing about the story about somebody and they’re a real, you know, idiot, and they’re stupid, and what they are doing is evil, and there is no upside to it.

 

So when I talk about PayPerPost and I say hey these guys are doing the wrong thing. They’re pissing in the well. There is no upside to what they’re doing! End of story! And then he’s like, Ridiculous journalists are like: Well isn’t there….and I just did an interview with the New York Times…”isn’t there something good about what they are doing if they raise venture capital? “ And I was like, no! A venture capitalist probably got duped whereas venture capitalists probably invested in adware companies in the early days like Gator. So these venture capitalists can make huge mistakes and invest in very bad products and scams and get duped as well.

 

But I just love the way Dave just lulled people into this world and got there and brought them along. This is the Dave Winer that I’ve been hoping for. I hope he continues this method of discourse because he was… did you notice that his level of discourse was what he was asking them to do.

 

Jason: He couldn’t deliver that message screaming. He had to deliver that message in a conversational tone. And I think this is like the re-emergence of Dave Winer . Dave Winer is some of the guys are, you know…Some of the guys won’t let him speak at their conferences like Tim O’Reilly won’t let him speak at his conferences. John Patel won’t let him speak at his conferences. I mean, I’m not supposed to say this stuff but, it’s Inside Baseball stuff that nobody’s supposed to talk about. But basically Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle hate Dave Winer . They won’t let him speak at his conferences for whatever reason they think the he’s too immature or screams or whatever. But he doesn’t. You can just hear it in his voice there and I think it’s time that people start bringing Dave Winer back into the fold.

 

So, what other discussions have been going on in the podosphere? Is podosphere a word? Podosphere! Let’s call it Podosphere.

 

Tyler: The potty-sphere.

 

Jason: The potty-sphere. What other pods or podshows? Can’t say PodShow, Adam Curry owns that. What are the other podcasts are we interested in this week? Obviously This Week In Tech is one of my favorites. Lovely report although I was murdered on that show! It’s like, Adam Curry and I are considered the two most hated guests on the show but you know the background to that is that it’s all the Digg kids who hate me for bringing Netscape, you know the competitor to Digg.

 

Tyler: Ahhh, you know. I didn’t put that together quite yet but I get that...

Jason: Yeah, that’s why. There’s a big connection between the Digg community and the ‘This Week In Tech’ community and so you get listed on Digg and so all that hatred for me on Digg just got transferred to TWIT. So anyway, I love This Week In Tech but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be on it again because I don’t think Leo can take all the hate mail I get. He said I was the basically most hated if not the second most hated guest behind Adam Curry.

 

Tyler: Right. There was a clip on this latest TWIT as we call it, right?

 

Tyler: They reference you in the reference to Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia.

 

Jason: Ok let’s hear it.

 

 

Jason: Well, you know. This is an interesting thing. There’s a bit of a misconception about my proposal. I made many proposals and the whole concept started because I had dinner with Jimmy and we were talking and I was talking about Wikia and how he’s got advertising there but they don’t have advertising on Wikipedia, which… is interesting.

 

Tyler: Sure.

 

Jason: I’m not saying hypocritical, right now, I’m saying it’s interesting.

 

Tyler: Sure.

 

Jason: Some people have said hypocritical.

 

Tyler: But you’re not.

 

Jason: But anyway… But I’m not! But anyway, the point is it is interesting that he is pro-advertising in his for-profit venture but then in Wikipedia he’s not. And my point was, you know, if Wikipedia had a modest amount of advertising then it would be self-sustainable like FireFox and the Mozilla Foundation has become. The made $50 plus million dollars…As I first reported on my blog, because somebody had told me and now its out in the filings … FireFox is going to be here forever! Forever! And it’s got from what I understand 40 or 50 full-time employees. A lot of whom are former Netscape browser employees former our AOL employees and AOL obviously made Mozilla Open Source and started that whole great, great project. They should get a lot of admiration, AOL, for doing so although they’re AOL so they don’t get much.

 

But….why not have the ads on search? The people who actually use the Wikipedia, the Wikipedians, the most active users… They use Google to search Wikipedia. So they’re actually watching ads, they just get no money from it. So, Jimmy Wales is a very anti-advertising humanitarian and he keeps saying ‘no advertising’ and he says, ‘well in Wikipedia it’s a community decision.’

 

The community follows Jimmy. And they should because he helped create or I guess he did create… some people say he’s the co-founder, there’s a big debate about that I’m not going to get into that…but listen…yeah, Jimmy started the thing. He deserves all the credit in the world and obviously I’ve got a lot of respect for what he did but he’s wrong about this, I believe, because a modest amount of advertising would make the whole thing self-sustainable.

 

And my proposal was, and I listened, and I had a conversation with the Wikipedia people. They said. ”Well, some of us believe Wikipedia is like the Louvre or Central Park. It shouldn’t have advertising.” I said, ”Ok, I feel ya. What if the advertising was opt-in or opt-out? So you come to Wikipedia and it says Wikipedia is a free public resource…. would you like to make a donation? Would you like to see one advertisement? Or would you like to make a decision later on?“

 

Jason: You know, so you wouldn’t even have to make a decision at that point. Or… show one ad and then have the people click it and it says right underneath the ad, ‘I don’t want to see ads at the Wikipedia” and then it says, ‘Would you like to donate or would you just like to donate or would you just like to turn off ads?” and boom.

 

Jason: So you’re giving people a choice.

 

Jason: The Wikipedia community - and Jimmy - doesn’t even want to give people a choice. And that to me sounds like a red flag. Why can’t the people choose how they want to donate to Wikipedia? So you heard people on This Week In Tech say that some people don’t want it. Well, of course nobody wants to see ads! But, the real choice is would you like to see ads on Wikipedia or see Wikipedia go away? Or would you like to see a big box on Wikipedia that would sit there all day long that says ‘Donate’… or would you like to replace it with an ad? I for one would like to see Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network or anything.

 

Jason: And so what’s really interesting is that Jimmy keeps saying you have to have it open dialogue and you know, it’s a community decision but he won’t even engage in this discussion with me. And he was… we had some private emails back and forth so I’m not even going to get into those but he wasn’t upset with my insinuation that the reason he’s anti-advertising on Wikipedia is because he runs a for profit advertising-based Wiki company.

 

But…I will say he has a very… and so you know what, maybe I said it a little too strongly on my blog…because I said ‘Follow the Money’...

 

I’m not saying Jimmy Wales has an ethics problem, he obviously doesn’t. I mean the guy is very Christ-like and I mean that seriously, like he’s got a very Christian attitude when it comes to this stuff. Assume good faith. A lot of these really interesting things that actually I’ve learned a lot from going to the Wikimania Conference…

 

However, he needs to recuse himself from the discussion of advertising on Wikipedia and he needs to bring more people into the discussion for two reasons:

 

1) He is conflicted. If Wikia, if Wikipedia had advertising and had more resources they would compete for the same employees that are employed at Wikia.

 

2) And Wikipedia might expand and do projects that Wikia is currently doing.

 

And everybody understands, Wikipedia and the foundation is the non profit that he started. Wikia, is a for-profit company that’s venture-backed that he has been working, from what I understand, the majority of his time on and that basically the way he describes it: is Wikipedia is the encyclopedia and Wikia is everything else at the library. All the for-profit stuff… the magazines, the books, whatever. But, what if what if Wikipedia had $50 million in funding like Firefox did? Then they could offer free wikis, like Wikia is doing. What if Wikipedia had the fifty million dollars - the foundation? Maybe they could do the Muppets wiki that Wikia does?

 

So a lot of these projects, I think there is an overlap. Again, very clearly if Jimmy is listening, I’m not saying you have an ethics problem. I’m saying you have a conflict. And if I said it wrong on my blog, I’m sorry. I actually didn’t mean to say that he has an ethics problem. I think he’s got a conflict and I also think that he doesn’t live up to his own standard of accepting and sort of having a positive dialogue because he negated me from his dialogue immediately! He said he didn’t remember having dinner with me and that there were more interesting people there, he guessed.

 

So basically he was like, you know, shooting a dig my way. Ok? When at dinner, I kid you not, he asked me a dozen detailed questions about advertising. For an hour, we sat next to each other in a Chinese food restaurant in Boston and he claims that to not remember it, which is very hard to believe. But anyway, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt even though I don’t believe that. I believe that was a setup. But he doesn’t engage the discussion. When somebody wants to engage the discussion after saying, ”Oh, I really want to have an open discussion about this.” You have to wonder...

 

Tyler: Yeah. Well you mentioned the public resource aspect of it like the Louvre or The Met, but those tow are different in the sense as well. The Louvre is, last time I went there I think it was fifteen bucks! Where The Met was free.

 

Jason: Right

 

Tyler: There are different business models to apply to these things.

 

Jason: You can, I mean the concept that Wikipedia and Jimmy are putting forward…and some anti-corporate people at Wikipedia, are putting forward is that if you have sponsorship you can’t have your ethics.

 

Tyler: No?

 

Jason: And of course you can be ethical and have sponsorship and NPR and PBS and millions of other people accept some forms of sponsorship. The Wikipedia Foundation won’t even accept free servers from Google or Yahoo. And there big complain was…and Jimmy said this to me over dinner, was, ”Well if we have Google then Yahoo’s not going to like us we would be concerned about that and we don’t want to be too closely associated to either one.’ And I said ok great. I have an idea for you. How about we negotiate a deal for Wikipedia, and I’ll just do this on my own time to help the community, between Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Google, and everybody. And we’ll give them each 15% of the ad inventory. We’ll rotate it and if anybody ever gets out of line or tries to exert any control they get bumped from the inventory. So it’s random, who gets on what page, and they could be dismissed.

 

But I think there’s something on the underground that we don’t know about which is part of the reason why Jimmy won’t engage me. It’s because I think that he is negotiating a deal right now to have advertising in areas of Wikipedia and he doesn’t want to give me credit for having been involved in that discussion, or maybe having suggestions, so he’s actually, I think, cuz he’s telegraphed it to me a little bit that maybe he isn’t as anti-advertising as he’s saying his preference is not to have it. But I think everybody’s preference is not to have it?

 

Tyler: Sure.

 

Jason: But, if you could get it and so… they just raised a million dollars in their sponsorship drive and some of it was matching funds. The Wikipedia folks are so…I don’t want to say “kooky” but kooky - about sponsorship that they wouldn’t announce who the matching sponsors were from.

 

Tyler: Or the one major donation ...

 

Jason: I think, that either Bill Gates or Larry and Sergei at Google, or the Yahoo guys, some major executive like that, entrepreneur or whatever, donated a half million dollars and said if you match it I’ll match it dollar-for-dollar. Or they got three of them to do it and they won’t release it.

 

Tyler: Who of anybody in that realm has made any statements about referencing Wikipedia?

 

Jason: Well, I think….I don’t know the answer to that question definitively but I will say that Google has made the biggest statement of all because half of Wikipedia’s traffic comes from Google. So I think Google has the Google Foundation. You know, they setup that ORG, you know that Google.org thing. I bet you that Google.org is giving them about half of their money because Google.org , of course is supporting the heck out of Firefox. Firefox, all that $50 million comes from Google AdSense and the search box which is their default.

 

Tyler: Right.

 

Jason: And FireFox is in the Google Pack so there’s this whole symbiotic relationship between Google and FireFox. Why wouldn’t there be between Wikipedia? I think they’re trying to keep Google off of Wikipedia because they don’t want to seem like it’s a Google project.

 

Jason: And, you know what? I think it’s just like a level of anti-corporate-ness that’s just wacky! You know, if Google wanted to give the New York Public Library $10 million would they have to do it anonymously? Who cares?

 

Jason: People are intelligent. I mean this is like X-Files level of distrust! You know, I mean, like ‘Oh my god.” You know, this is not ‘24’ or ‘Three Days of the Condor” I mean this is a big corporation appreciating a non-profit and giving them some money. I mean, lighten up. It’s not that big of a deal.

 

Tyler: And what it might turn into is a reality TV show drama of some sorts.

 

Jason: Haha. Who knows?

 

Tyler: It would be really interesting to a….or some epic novel or movie perhaps?

 

Jason: I would. Who knows? I mean, just to put an end to it. Honestly, I love Wikipedia. I think it’s the most important project on the Internet probably, arguably, in the history of the Internet. It might be the most important project and it’s definitely going to be the number one site on the Internet.

 

Tyler: Well, I think that one point that gets overlooked is almost everything that you are putting into this conversation is based on the fact that at the end of the day you very much like what its all about...

 

Jason: Oh yeah! Absolutely.

 

Tyler: and you want to see it succeed and...

 

Jason: Yeah, it’s all based on love and appreciation and affection. The problem is, I think, you know, certain people have a very anti-corporate vibe and I think I have the opposite. I have a very corporate vibe! So people associate me with all the almost like, too much corporate! Which is funny because I’m an entrepreneur but I guess after you sell your company and your work at a big company people just sort of paint you into that box.

 

Jason: So anyway, I wish them the best but gosh, I mean why wouldn’t it have advertising if people opted-in? I mean who are the people who are anti-advertising to tell the rest of the audience they can’t donate that way? I mean, if that’s the way I’d like to donate, why not? The technology makes it available. So I mean, how could you possibly be against opt-in? It’s weird. It’s definitely weird. So, anyway...

 

Tyler: However that works out it’s going to be a new…it’s a new thing for the Internet in general. It raises new issues that, this might not be the first time or this might not be the last time, you know? It might be interesting to see how this plays out.

 

Jason: Yeah. So we have one more clip.

 

Tyler: Two actually.

 

Jason: Alright.

 

Tyler: Venturecast did an interesting bit.

 

Jason: Oh yeah. Let’s hear the Venturecast.

 

 

Jason: Yeah, so anyway. Venturecast, that’s a great podcast. Dave Hornik from August Capital, who did Six Apart and he’s invested in a bunch of other things. He’s a really smart cat! And what he’s talking about there is some valuations have gotten very high. They’re raising money at $250 million. I’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs who ask me this question: ”Should I raise money at a higher valuation? I’ve got this opportunity…” And what he explained there is exactly correct. You’re moving the goalpost every time you raise money so let’s say you raise money at a $10 million valuation now your VC’s want to get out at 5, 10, maybe 20 times that amount.

 

Jason: $50 million, $100 million, $200 million. If you raise money at $100 million dollar valuation now you’re VC’s want to get out at $500 million to a billion!

 

Jason: And that’s a problem. For example, Digg has, they kept raising money… they could have been bought for $50 million probably. The founders would have had an incredible exit! Now…they raised money I heard about $60 million, $70 million. I don’t have any inside information on that but if they raised $8 million or $9 million at $60 million they gave away another 15 percent of the company or whatever… 10-15 percent. Now, they’ve got to get out at $200 million, $250…. It’s gets a little harder to make those kinds of exits. Those are big exits! You’ve got to really demonstrate that you have a lot of revenue to make that exit. I told you to exit at $250 million or $200 million you might have to have $20 million in revenue or $40 million in revenue, you know? I think 20 times your EBITDA, 20 times your earnings, 4 or 5 times your top-line revenues so you would need $20 million in earnings just to get to a $300 or $400 million exit you might have to have $60 million in revenue and that’s a lot of money! It’s hard to get there. It could take five, six, seven, or eight years. Raising money, gosh, now that I’m at a VC firm, even though I’m an entrepreneur-in-action, I’m really not a VC, I’m having a lot more exposure at this area and ... God, people are so obsessed with raising venture capital. It is just a small fraction of the companies that are actually funded by venture capital. If you can avoid venture capital I high recommend it. And that’s coming from somebody who works in a VC firm! I mean, the reason is: why dilute yourself? - and every VC will tell you this - if you’ve got a profitable business and you don’t need to raise money or you can get a client to underwrite it… There was somebody I was talking to and they were making this software and they wanted to sell it to a company and I said,’go to the company that wanted and tell them that you’ll give them the software at half-price and pay them 25% of the fee in advance. Use their money to build it and tell them they’ll get free updates and free support for being the anchor client” And they’re like, “ Oh, I never thought of it that way” and I am like, “ Yeah and guess how much equity you’ll give away? None!

 

Jason: And guess who’s on your board? Nobody. And guess who gets to keep making decisions about how to run the company? You.

 

Clients are your best funding source. When we did Weblogs, Inc Brian and I put our own money and sweat into it and we had a lot of advertisers who came in early on and supported it. So, we used the advertiser money to grow and we had very little dilution. We wanted to make an exit. It was basically us and Mark Cuban, who had to make that decision. He invested a little bit of money, not a ton. We were thankful for it, either way, of course, but either way he had invested actually more in terms of his intelligence. You know, that’s the kind of investor you want, he knows what they’re talking about!

 

Jason: A lot of VCs, to be frank, they’re VCs for a reason. I mean, they’re not operating companies because they can’t, they’re not good at it. They’re good at picking people who can operate companies well. That’s why it’s great to take money from an Angel Investor who is knowledgeable in the space.

 

If I had to give you the order in which you should take money, I would say…

 

1) Your own if you have it.

2) Your client.

Well those are neck and neck, or you can do both of those.

3) An Angel Investor who is actually like an entrepreneur like a Mark Cuban or a Marc Andreeson or a Reid Hoffman Somebody with operational experience…Mark Pincus, Matt Kaufman, or Elan Musk… I mean you can go right down the line - Somebody who has run a company because they’ll have expertise to lend.

4) And then, like, last I would say a VC! VC’s are good when you want to scale something really big or a big opportunity. But you know, you’ve got to think about that because they are going to be very involved and they’re investing that money for a very strong return whereas an individual investor, like an Angel Investor, maybe they’re doing it for the affinity and they have a longer outlook and they don’t need to make back as much money ‘cuz they’re comparing their return to something like, you know, what they made in real estate or the stock market or bonds.

 

Tyler: But what is it that is leading people to think that it is the right way to go?

 

Jason: I think it’s sexy! Venture capital is sexy to people. Venture capitalists live a very plush lifestyle, you know, they get a management fee so if they have a $100 million to invest they get 2% of that as a management fee just to run their businesses. They go to conferences. They’ve got fancy business cards and they’ve got track records! So, how could you not be enamored with the person who did the investment in Google or Yahoo or YouTube or LinkedIn or, I don’t know….Netscape or AOL. It’s like, ‘wow, so they invested in those things and became big.’ OS people sort of work backwards from the hits. But they don’t see that for every hit, for every eBay, they had 50 other companies that didn’t do so well.

 

Tyler: Cuz I had this thing called ‘Doodydoo” and it didn’t go anywhere!

 

Jason: Right, exactly.

 

Tyler: They gave me a hundred million but…

 

Jason: There is a lot of people who didn’t …who don’t make it and people don’t see that! And people forget, like “Oh, who did Pets.com?”

 

Jason: You know…who did FreePC or Cosmo.com or UrbanFetch or who did WebVan? You know, there is a lot of failures out there and you know they don’t follow the failures backwards. They follow the winners backwards. They go, “Oh well this person invested in Google or Yahoo or whatever than they must be geniuses”

 

But…if you invest in 50 things and one-hits are you a genius or are you just disciplined? I think the best VCs are disciplined. They invest in …they know how to identify the people who are going to go for it and who are good operators.

 

That’s…that’s really what they do! All they’re betting on when you make an investment is you’re betting on the person and the space. So they’re betting on search and Larry and Sergei or they’re betting on the directory and they’re betting on Jerry Yang and David Filo or their betting on Kevin Rose and Digg social bookmarking. You know, you’re betting on a sector and a person and very little else. And then you just support the heck out them.

 

Tyler: After there was really a good point. There was something interesting on the web this week. It wasn’t podcasting per se but it was something to do with the Top 25 web 2.0 companies.

 

Jason: Yeah, I went through the list. There were a lot of Sequoia companies in there.

 

Tyler: But also, there were a couple that were single-employee companies.

 

Jason: Yeah. I mean a lot of the best… I mean, Kevin Rose was doing Digg, for a while, alone. StumbleUpon, which was on that list, is another great company... Ahh…that’s like five years old now they were doing it just a couple of guys from Canada. A lot of things start out as individuals and then they grow. I mean, ‘the hypemachine’ I think, is the probably one of the coolest thing on the web today. Nobody knows about it! It’s one guy in Brooklyn who’s got a day job. So, I think the best projects are probably the ones who usually in groups of less than five people which is something I tried to do at AOL, was get them out of the ‘big group think’ because every time I wanted to do a project they wanted …They, I’m not saying anyone in particular - but the machine that is the company - wanted a lot of people in a room! And I would not let the AOL sort of culture or aesthetic interfere with my way of building something which is 3 or 4 people in a room discussing it and those same 3 or 4 people in the room building it. And the people making the product decisions were the people who are the developers and the designers and the editors as opposed to some mid-level of management making the decision. You know and a lot of cases the bloggers, Peter Rojas, doing Engadget, knows what the commenting system should be on Engadget better than I ever will as the manager.

 

Tyler: Great point.

 

Jason: And…even the developers and the web designers, you know, they’re going to know probably better than me because they’re going to sit there and live with it. So, I always made people live with the product. The people who were working on Netscape actually used it…the developers and the editorial people and so… You know…you’ve got to be careful when you this ‘big group think’. It doesn’t create great products!

 

Tyler: That might be a point as to why a lot of blogs have done as well as they have - like blogging in general.

 

Jason: Right. That is a solo, it’s like folk music! I mean, you get out there with your guitar and you’re Bob Dylan… It’s you, your guitar, your microphone and you do the best you can and it is all your responsibility. Which is what blogging is about! It’s like Robert Scoble or Dave Winer, or Doc Searls or, you know, Rocket Boom or…. I mean, these folks like, Ask A Ninja, Amanda Congdon, and what she is doing…

 

All this stuff or people in general, they have a little bit of support around them, but it’s one person doing that performance and they can really focus on and take ownership and responsibility. Does it take twelve people in a room to make art, or to make a product? The responsibility gets diffused. In psychology they call it diffusion of responsibility. I was psych major and I remember the more people you have in the room the more responsibility spreads out and it’s sort of like two baseball players watching a popup fly and it lands right in between both of them and it’s like, absolutely equidistant. You know, somebody’s got to be responsible at some point and the smaller the team the better they’ll do!

 

Jason: No great product was made by more than five people, I don’t think!

 

Tyler: That is a famous quote as well...

 

Jason: Is it?

 

Tyler: The only thing that’ll ever change the world is a small group.

Jason: Yeah. I believe that.

 

Tyler: And you know where we would have to find the answer to that?

 

Jason: Wikipedia!!

 

Tyler: Wikipedia!!

 

Jason: Exactly! That’s great. That’s great.

 

Tyler: The last, last little clip and it wasn’t so much…this is just more of a ...

 

Jason: Feel good moment.

 

Tyler: Right, right.

 

Jason: Feel good clip of the decade! Thank you, God, for this clip!

 

Jason: Wow. I’ve got to say, long overdue obviously and the fact that ‘Dances With Wolves’ beat ‘Goodfellas’, I mean…’Goodfellas’ is one of my top three movies of all time.

 

Tyler: Exactly. Where is ‘Dances With Wolves’ now?

 

Jason: You know, I couldn’t sit through “Dances With Wolves”. That was the most boring movie ever! I mean, that movie, I mean…Kevin Costner, he couldn’t direct you to the 405 Freeway!!

 

Jason: No seriously, Kevin Costner beating Martin Scorsese for director, I mean it just makes no sense! “Dances With Wolves”, I mean, I guess it’s politically correct to say that it’s like a beautiful film. That was a boring movie!

 

Tyler: I mean, time, history has sort of ...

 

Jason: Yeah! When was the last time that was on TV?

 

Tyler: When was the last time you heard the name?

 

Jason: Yeah, I mean, people saying ‘Dances With Wolves” is almost like saying, “Waterworld” or something. It’s like a joke.

 

Tyler: Yeah it’s usually in a pun.

 

Jason: Yeah, the punch line…”Dances With Wolves”, whatever! You know, and “Goodfellas”, wow! What a masterpiece. And ‘Mean Streets”, I mean, it’s right up there. “Raging Bull”, “Taxi Driver.”

 

Jason: I mean, even ‘Gangs of New York” I loved. I know some people didn’t like it. I loved it. And I thought “The Departed” just thinking, you know, I would say, Goodfellas is my favorite and, I think “The Departed” might be my second And…

 

Tyler: Wow.

 

Jason: “The Departed” and ‘Raging Bull” would be my second.

 

Tyler: That’s really saying something that ... -

 

Jason: And then I’d say ‘Mean Streets’ and then ‘Casino’. I mean, I love ‘Mean Streets” because it’s raw and ‘Taxi Driver’ because it’s raw, but as a film, “The Departed” was so well written. The dialogue was the best dialogue in any Scorsese film ever!

 

Tyler: Yup.

 

Jason: And the performances…I mean, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, everybody was just ON! Great film!

 

Tyler: Yeah. I think that they had a lot of respect for him as actors had a lot to do with it.

 

Jason: Yeah. They wanted him to win this one. I mean, they worked hard, and I think they worked hard to get him this. And no offense to ‘Little Miss Sunshine”, I saw it at Sundance when it first came out—very cute film. If this lost to ‘Little Miss Sunshine” I would have literally killed myself! I would have thrown or turned over my 46 inch Samsung LCD and…you know...

 

Tyler: Yeah, it was like a running gag that they just had to end at some point.

 

Jason: Absolutely, I mean, when those three guys come out onstage and you’ve got to think Lucas, Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola they gotta...

 

Tyler: It’s now or never!

 

Jason: Yeah, yeah I mean if they had said ‘Little Miss Sunshine” in that envelope and they just...

 

Jason: I mean, you’re going to go up to George Lucas and Spielberg and like what, kick them out of the Academy? You know, they ARE the Academy so….

What is it? Some guy, some dweeb from Ernst & Young going to go and say, “Excuse me, I think you got it wrong.”

 

Tyler: Mr. Spielberg—

 

Jason: Mr. Spielberg ahh: NO! I think that may have been an executive decision, but I don’t know? Goodfellas is one of those films I’m so entertained that no matter what point in the film I won’t flip the channel when it’s on…I have to watch it to the end. All my life, I wanted to be a gangster. You know…”Go get your shoeshine box.” I mean there’s a million lines in that film. “A little bit…little bit out of line”… there’s a million great lines and memorable scenes in that film and great music track. I’m trying to think of films that when it comes on that I can’t stop watching…’Gladiator’, Blade Runner”, ‘Goodfellas”, like, I’m so entertained I have to watch it to the end.

 

Tyler: Right.

 

Jason: Very few films like that that I ...

 

Tyler: That’s a real good metric for classic film...

 

Jason: I think so... you turn it on and you just can’t…

 

Tyler: You just can’t stop.

 

Jason: You just can’t stop. I mean, ‘The Manchurian Candidate” I feel that way about. ‘The Conversation” I feel that way about. “Godfather” I feel that way about… What other films do I feel that way about? Some of the ‘Star Wars’ films, you know, I turn on ‘Empire Strikes Back” and I just don’t feel like turning it off. I mean, it’s like, I know that if I change the channel on those films, nothing’s going to be better than it. Unless it’s some other film that is on that list and what are the chances of that?

 

Tyler: I feel that way about, “Lonely Girl’ -- “Lonely Girl 15”

 

Jason: Yeah!! Ahhh… that’s a sad, sad, sad statement!

 

Jason: Alright, well the show’s coming to an end.

 

Tyler: I think so.

 

Jason: Tyler, thank you for helping me with the show. I’m hoping this turns out well.

 

Tyler: I think it’s going to be good!

 

Jason: So, next call, next time I think we’ll have maybe about 30 calls from what people did. I’m definitely going to get to some of those. Although when you call the number: don’t call and do a plug! It’s so obvious when you call and do a plug and you’re like, “Jason, I love the show. Let me insert my domain name here and let me ask you a question and insert my domain name here. And let me ask you a relevant question and mention my domain name a third time! It’s like, C’mon!

 

Tyler: Well, most of those were me, so I’ll cut those out right now.

 

Jason: Well, just ask your question. Ask a good question. I’ll put the phone number again on the site. Or, well, Tyler will put that on at the end…

 

But thank you, GoDaddy, GoDaddy, GoDaddy.com. Go there and register the domain name and use the code: JASON1. Thank you, Podtech. Podtech, Podtech.net. There’s lot’s of great stuff going on there. If you are a FatBlogger, keep working out. Eat some carrots.

 

Tyler: And what was that HITT?

 

Jason: HITT. High Intensity Interval Training. But don’t do... -

 

Tyler: It sounds like fun.

 

Jason: Don’t do HITT stuff unless you’ve been running for a while because it does kick your butt! I mean… I’ve been feeling it. I’m hurting today and I didn’t want to get on the treadmill today. The only thing that made me do it is because we’re almost at the end of February, the month and I’m trying to get 20 days of working out on the treadmill and in 28 days so if I hit these last couple of days I’ll be at the 20 mark.

 

Tyler: So does that make it a habit?

 

Jason: I don’t know? I think I just wanted to do in Nov and Dec. I did 14 days out of 30 so I just wanted to crush my record and then in March, I want to do every single day. I want to get on the treadmill every single day.

 

Tyler: You would know better with the psychology background but I think if you something 25 days in a row it becomes officially a habit.

 

Jason: Oh does it, really?

 

Tyler: I think so.

 

Jason: Absolutely. Ok, well there you have it. Listen to CalacanisCast 25 days in a row and you’re an addict!

 

Tyler: Right.

 

Jason: At what point do you become an addict? So you can’t live without it?

OK so go check out Godaddy.com and Podtech, Podtech, Podtech.net and we’ll see you all next time on the CalacanisCast Beta. It’s still in Beta!