RW157 - Sitting In Your Eden

This week, Dan and John talk about:

Gary’s Van
The nature of Road Work, not having any catch phrases (Podcasting)
Dan seeing The Breeders opening for Nirvana (Dan Benjamin)
Universities having lost their place (Humanities)
Can you teach curiosity? (Humanities)
Asking people about their religion (Religion)
John's friend Rick the conservative Catholic (Religion)
People taking Twitter too seriously (Internet and Social Media)
Dan having the Twitter handle @dan (Internet and Social Media)
All humans are murderers (Philosophy)
What is the goal or expected result of Road Work? (Podcasting)
Dogs are not smiling (Pets)
Dan in South Korea, dogs as food (Pets)
All people are murderers (Humanities)
We don’t kill babies because we think they are cute (Humanities)
Is our natural state to murder things? (Humanities)

Bonus-content for Patreon supporters:

The journey of taking Omnibus independent (Podcasting)

The show title refers to Dan making an allegory in connection with the question if a person in Eden who has never met another human being would murder that other human being if they showed up.

John is doing just spiffy! Haddie read John’s update from the Facebook group Gary's Van to Dan about everything that has been going on.

Draft version
The segments below are drafts that will be incorporated into the rest of the Wiki as time permits.

Gary’s Van (RW157)

See Gary’s Van!

The nature of Road Work, not having any catch phrases (RW157)

Of all the podcasts John and Dan both do, Road Work is the least likely to be a gateway to either one of them. It is a place for people who know them, who want more of them, and who are looking for a conversation that is not happening other places. Road Work is like Beluga Caviar: It is not for the faint of heart and no-one starts with Beluga Caviar. John would be very surprised to hear from any of their listeners that they discovered Road Work first and then branched out and started listening to Back to Work and all the other works.

Road Work is a more challenging listen, justified by the possibility, the pedagogy, and the idea that they really are talking about something and they are not riffing. In those few instances where Dan tried to riff John stopped him immediately! They do not have any catch phrases. John's other three shows all have catch-phrases, which is not bad and keeps with those shows natures, but on Road Work it never occurred to them and none of the listeners to this program ever throw catch phrases back at them on the Internet.

It is one of the reasons that making a T-shirt for Road Work has been difficult whereas there are a lot of catch phrases for Roderick on the Line that John is proud of because they are shorthand for a mentality and a way of thinking. Dan and John don't have any of those because they are talking in a different way. If it weren't for Road Work, a major component of what John is hoping to do on the Internet and in the world would be missing.

Dan seeing The Breeders opening for Nirvana (RW157)

Dan went to see Nirvana when The Breeders were opening for them. They were a good band and Dan had heard their song Cannonball, but it wasn't getting much radio play outside of little college radio stations. It is an incredible song based on absolutely nothing! There is zero musicianship happening and it is the best. Make some noise and make it fun!

This was the time period where Dan wasn't going to a concert to have fun at a concert, but he was going to see a specific band, in this case Nirvana, and that was it! He didn’t want to see the opening act and he had no idea that they were going to become a relatively big thing with all the radio play and everything that they got later on.

Universities having lost their place (RW157)

John had a conversation with college professors about where colleges are and the consensus seemed to be that universities aren't what they were and they aren't what we hoped they would be, but university education morphed into something else. John had been talking about this for a long time. Not only are universities not working, but there is no other place either that is doing what universities should be doing, which is a place where people are thinking critically and not descending into screaming at each other about ideas that are hard and then walking away from conversations without a clear picture.

A lot of people mistake a university as a place to become an expert, but that would be a trade school: Having expertise in something is a trade, more than it is a discipline! The more you know about liberal arts the less you know about anything, that is by definition. The smartest people are the ones with no answers! Now we are living in a culture where that is not allowed and it is not even a conception that people have anymore, that to be smart is to have fewer answers, not more. That is not to say to be smart is not to advance a lot of possibilities and to talk broadly about it, even as John does as though you are speaking knowledgeably.

Can you teach curiosity? (RW157)

If John were not a curious person, none of the things that define him would be true. Curiosity drives him out the door in the morning, it is why he asks questions of people, and it is why he reads! He is doing nothing other than satisfying his curiosity, he is not working toward any expertise, he did not pursue any academic career, he did not pursue any technical expertise, it doesn't benefit him directly, but the indirect benefits are the narrative of his life.

The great question is: ”Can you impart curiosity to someone who isn't naturally curious?” Dan doesn’t think so! Most of what he is doing during the day is writing code, developing software, and that is what he has done most of his life since he was a child. For a long time it was a hobby, then he realized he could make money doing it, and what makes for a good developer is curiosity, wanting to know how something works and why it works that way.

According to Dan there are two kinds of people: People who wonder "How?" and "Why?" about everything, and people who are content not to wonder. Neither is good or bad, we need both kinds of people, but there is very little in the world around Dan where he knows how it works or he doesn't know how it works, but he wants to know. That pretty much covers everything. He knows in great detail how this microphone works and in very very great detail how the computer that he is using works behind the scenes, and that comes from just curiosity.

Dan always having been curious

When he was very young Dan always took things apart, whether it was tape recorders, flashlights, toys, or whatever. He always wanted to know how these things were put together. He didn’t really come away with any useful knowledge from it, but half of it was just: ”What is that thing? Why does that do this thing?” and as cars got more modern he started to get angry because you couldn't work on your own car as easily anymore.

That is what pushed him into getting interested in muscle cars back in high school. He wanted to work at a shop fixing cars because he wanted to understand them: ”How did they work? And why? How does this car work? How is this one different?” That was why he bought an RX7 because it had a Wankel engine and he was fascinated by the way the Wankel engine worked, even though it leaked oil and he had to keep a quart of oil in the backseat for when he would get the little oil label come on. It was Dan’s car for the early 1990s after his Civic was stolen (see RW10) and he could buy it with the insurance money.

Dan loved learning about that kind of stuff, it was very fascinating to him, and that is how he approaches everything. He is not content to just know how something works, but he wants to know what went into it, why it works that way, and why we wound up with the thing we have as opposed to some other thing. Dan doesn’t think that you can teach that! You can't make someone be curious or make them feel curiosity if it is not there.

Lots of people know that the way the car works is you put the key in and you turn it. You might have to have your foot on the brake and press the button if it is that kind of car, and when you give it gas the car goes faster and when you push the brake the car goes slower and if it makes a noise or shudders or explodes then you take it to someone who fixes it. That is their knowledge of how a car works.

This isn't a gender thing either. Dan knows plenty of dudes where that is how much they know about their car. A very good friend of his was in the process of selling their house and people aren't liking it because of the state of the bathroom. The caulk is all disgusting around the tub. Dan told him that he can just fix that in an hour by stripping off the old caulk and putting new caulk on, but he didn’t know how to do that. It is the easiest thing to do in your house, but many people will call someone to do that.

Dan doesn’t know why he got the curiosity bug. His granddad was a scientist, maybe he got it from him because he helped raise him, but Dan was curious before that. He was always that annoying kid who said: ”Why? Why? Why?” and he is still tempted to take everything apart.

John talking to the adults instead of taking things apart

When John was a kid in elementary school his best friends were twins, Thomas and Peter Klüge. Their dad and mom were immigrants from Germany, he was a doctor and she may have been a doctor as well. They lived in a very cool mid-century house that John didn't think was cool at the time because he didn't think mid-century was cool until a year ago and he didn't understand it. It seemed like the kind of house his parents had.

Thomas and Peter's father was a surgeon and they were the kind of boys that Dan is describing himself as: Their idea of how to interact with an electronic toy was to take it apart and then try to put it back together, often put it back together so that it did something that it didn't formally do or make it so that it no longer could do the thing that it was meant to do.

Their room had all kinds of electrical and mechanical things. They started building a crane with an Erector Set and then they realized that the Rock ’Em Sock ’Em robots, little robots that you could wind up, also basically had a little Erector Set inside of them and if they figured out how to get them apart they could turn them into basically monsters.

John did not share their interest in that kind of play at all and the little monsters they made, little robots that they had taken apart and turned into other things, didn't intrigue him. It wasn't just that taking it apart to see what made it go didn't intrigue him, but the machine itself didn't. It just seemed like a thing that didn't work very well and John wouldn't have bought the robot as a toy in the first place. They were very close friends and played together merrily, but they had very different interests.

John would sit in their kitchen and talk to their mom, but they wouldn't sit in John’s kitchen and talk to John’s mom. John has a pretty clear picture, considering that he put this picture together when he was 7 and 8 years old, of the Klüge parents' journey from Germany to America after the war. They were reticent people, they were extremely Germanic, and there were tones in those conversations suggesting that Dr. Kluge played some part in the war in some capacity that was very definitely not in the conversation.

John doesn’t remember whether he was old enough to have served in the war or whether that was just the environment when they were young, but they certainly were in Germany for the war in some way shape or form and John knows how they came to America and he knows this because he asked questions while she was making them peanut butter sandwiches. ”Well, you guys are from Germany? Where's that?”, just little kid questions.

John doesn’t want to take apart machines, but he definitely wants to take apart other people's experiences and he wants to take apart other people, not because he thinks of them as machines, but because all the necessary information for what John wanted to build was inside other people and the only way to get it out was to ask them. He wasn't trying to build a robot or a Gollum that he was going to sick upon the world, but he doesn’t know.

Asking people about their religion (RW157)

Last night John asked a friend whom he hadn’t talked to in a while if she and her husband were different religions. Something she posted online finally tipped him over into wanting to get to the bottom of this so that he could understand not just what he was seeing, but this was a key element in understanding this person, her family, and their dynamic.

Initially she was a little suspicious that it was a trap and that anybody who would ask that question would immediately begin with a perspective, with a hot take, either that John would think one religion was better than the other or that all religion was stupid and this was his opportunity to make a big speech about how the fact that they were different religions meant something, that he was playing around in their private sandbox and: What business of it was his?

John wasn't any of those things, he wasn't going to use this information against them, he didn't have a dog in the race, he just had some questions, but most people would think that asking a question like that of someone was crossing a line. John is friends with her, they have definitely gone to a second location together, maybe even to a third location, but not a fourth because that requires that you get into a car with them.

To go to a second location is: ”We are going to a thing, I will meet you there!”, a third location is: ”Just the few of us are going to a third place!", but a fourth place basically means everybody in the car and we are going to go up the mountain. John could have gone there and could be closer to her than he is, but part of what keeps him at one remove is her husband and something about him that is tonally different.

John realized that it was possibly a religious conflict. Initially she said that they were different religions because over the last several years she had a conversion experience that was born out of a lot of suspicion about the religion that they shared, but later on in the conversation she indicated that they had left their old church together as a family and now attended a different church together as a family. It seemed like they were ultimately still going to church together but she was practicing a side religion.

It was all within the umbrella of Christianity, but there are extremely patriarchal schools of Christianity that preach that a wife submits to her husband, that obedience is the number one way you please God, that your husband is the God in the house, and in contrast to that is the Liberation Theology of an activist Catholic priest in Guatemala who is standing in front of the government guns in order to spread a Marxist Catholicism among the mountain peoples, and those are two radically different Christianities. Theologically she and her husband weren’t very happy bedfellows and John was super-curious about that.

If you are Jewish and your wife is Christian you may decide to celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas because neither of you is especially serious about their religion. Your parents might believe that nonbelievers are going to hell and they might be really worried about your eternal soul because you went to the city and got a septa piercing, but you keep going home for Christmas and you decided that you are just not going to talk about it.

It is a different thing to be raising two kids living in a house where both people are devout and one of them believes that the wife should submit to the husband and the other one believes that there should be a Marxist revolution in Central America and that Jesus wants both things. You guys can't possibly have decided that you are just not going to talk about this and arguing the finer points of this every night would be exhausting. What kind of treaty have you hammered out?

That is personal shit in a lot of families, but John could not not ask that question of them once it had occurred to him. Most people don’t recoil from being asked personal questions like that. Some people really want to hide something and are failing at hiding it or they really don't want to think about it, and most people, if you go right up to them and say: ”What's your religion?”, they may not have tried to describe it in a decade or ever!

John will only come up to someone and ask that question if he has been prompted because he doesn't care what your fucking religion is if you are just walking around, but if you performed a public act or a private act that he was aware of and that shed some light on you having made a decision to act according to a code that was evident, then John would want to know what it was immediately and he would want to know how you had shaped it because it is very rare that John is going to walk up to somebody and they are going to say: ”I'm an orthodox something!”, but it is always going to be: ”I come from an orthodox place and here is where I am now!”

John's friend Rick the conservative Catholic (RW157)

John’s friend Rick teaches at Notre Dame. He is a conservative Catholic theologian and legal scholar, but he loves the Blues, he likes to ski, and he likes to be a dick. He is a fully fledged person who has very compelling way, he is argumentative, he has a great sense of humor, he is really not a dork, and although he has nerdy interests he is not a nerd. He is the kind of guy who you would like to lead your little group somewhere, but John has not hung out with Rick in a way in which he might potentially lead a little group in 25 years. He would still happily follow Rick on a mission! If John just read his writing, certainly if he just followed his Twitter account, he would develop an opinion about him, but that is true of everybody!

People taking Twitter too seriously (RW157)

Dan would be horrified if anyone actually read his Twitter and thought that it was real. Nothing that he puts on Twitter should be taken too seriously! Every single day people are upset because of what the president said on Twitter. Dan can't speak to that, but he doesn’t take anything on Twitter too seriously. He is not walking out of an Adam Sandler movie thinking that was 100% who Adam Sandler is, but it is simply what he thought at the time would be funny to put into a movie and Dan is not going to use that as a barometer for the Adam Sandler world. Twitter is just a place to talk to people and goof off, but then someone gets angry and then they laugh about it and then something else happens.

Dan was one of the very first people on Twitter when it was still a text messaging service. You would text to 44044 or whatever it was and you got alerts from your friends on your phone via text. His username was @dan and he had to change it because he kept getting @-messages for every other Dan on the Internet. That is what Twitter has always stayed to him: It has always been a fun thing!

Dan’s daughter is 8 years old now, just like John's, and Dan still sees every stage of her life in her. He sees her in the sonogram picture, as the baby that was just born, as a little girl running around the house, and now as the young lady who entertains her friends at her birthday party with stories. Dan sees all of that and everything in between. The only way you can really get a complete picture of someone is to spend a whole lot of time with them, but there are people who are looking at Twitter and think that it is the way someone is. God!

Twitter represents less than 1% of Dan’s personality, and it is usually the percent that is not in the best mood. He would never want someone to look at to his Twitter and say: "That is what Dan is about!" Twitter is a slice of life when everyone is experiencing road rage and it is not representative of anything. Some people don't know that or don't feel that way about it, and they see something posted by someone who does feel that way about it and take it very seriously and get upset. Twitter is like an Adam Sandler film: You jump in and you laugh for a minute then you get out of there and don't talk about it again!

Dan having the Twitter handle @dan (RW157)

In the early days of Twitter Dan had the handle @dan, but it was too much trouble because he was getting all these calls from other Dans. His three-letter Twitter handle was @dan, not even something like @brp, but one of the only three-letter names like Tom or Joe. Twitter names were never traded like URLs, but people have bought them and Dan probably could have made some money if he had kept that. What a coup!

John only has @johnroderick on all the platforms that he is interested in being on because somebody told him to go sign up for Instagram now and get his name. When he signed up for Instagram it was still possible to just be @johnroderick and all the other poor John Rodericks have to be John Roderick 57, but Dan was @dan because he was very early when it was still available. All the listeners understand that, but John wants to remark upon it. It would be the equivalent of John being @john! Can you imagine? Wow! He would be The John.

Dan is @danbenjamin on every service with the exception of GitHub where he was also early enough to be @dan. He gets tons of invitations for secret repositories and he will just ignore it and then get an email later that he had been removed. Dan continues to explain to John what GitHub is and how source control works. It is a very well-known service and it is pretty much where all the code for everything is kept.

If you hire someone new you are going to give them access to your GitHub repository for your code and it seems like Dan is getting all the invitations for anyone whose name starts with Dan because as you are adding your collaborator you start typing Dan and someone comes up and then people click it and Dan gets invitations for super-secret code. He doesn’t look at it, but this is the equivalent of getting hundreds of @-messages every day for someone that is not you. Dan is not changing it because it is way less bandwidth than it was taking up on Twitter and all the text messages.

All humans are murderers (RW157)

Some of their listeners just enjoy hearing people shoot the breeze, but the majority of their listeners is probably trying to glean insider information about the clockwork that is the universe. Does Dan have a sense that he and John are building something and if so what? What are these podcasts making? If they did a podcast about a murder it would be like a murder TV show and people would listen to someone describe a murder.

Few people are less eloquent storytellers than murder cops. They are no poets, but people still love to hear those guys with clip-on ties go like: ”… and then we realized we are going to have to look more deeply into where the corn syrup originally came from!” People are digging this kind of show because people love murder because people are murderers!

All people are murderers! Everything we do, everything we have learned, every bit of agriculture, animal husbandry, beer-making, architecture, and patent leather shoes, has been a studied effort to distance ourselves from murder, which is our number one thing. Our desire to build all those things is at the same time due to something in us that doesn't want to murder but wants to live without it, and that is the push and pull inside us all.

Every morning we wake up and go: ”Gotta brush my teeth and comb my hair and stumble downstairs and stumble in the kitchen and grab a coat and grab my hat” (lyrics for On The Sunny Side Of The Street by Brenda Lee) The whole time we are telling ourselves: ”Don't murder! Don't murder! Please don't murder!”, but that is not how John feels because he is successfully domesticated, like we all are.

There is a reason that the most popular shows are all voyeuristically about murder, either zombie murder, cop murder or criminal murder. Dan does not draw the same conclusion and thinks it is a logical fallacy! Murder is repulsive and if we were truly repelled by it, it would be very easy to watch television shows about animal husbandry and about farming. We are often drawn to things that we fear, that we don't like, and that we find repulsive.

A lot of people have a morbid curiosity: Faces of Death part 1, 2 and 20, but that doesn't mean that we like it or want to do it. John questions that we are drawn to things we fear and says that there aren't any television shows about being locked in a small box, but Dan could name a dozen about people being trapped in a small space and not all of them are in preludes to them being murdered. Some people want to be in the box! Dan continues to name movies about people locked in small spaces throughout the rest of the podcast, the summary being:

Boxing Helena
Pulp Fiction
Kill Bill
The Prestige
Room, where the lady is abducted, based on a true story and she actually gives birth inside of a very small room that she is locked in.
Locked in a Box, everything in horror has to do with that
The Wicker Man gets locked in something
Devil, where people are trapped in the elevator
Panic Room with Jodie Foster
Primer, a SciFi film about time travel where they enclose themselves into a small box to travel through time.
Cloverfield Lane with John Goodman, they are trapped in a small space in the shelter and there is all this talk of prepping and stuff.

Within the human community there are people we hire to murder for us, people whose job it is to murder by any other name. We are murdering things constantly, and we reserve the actual murdering for the murdering caste, which differs from place to place. John was talking about this the other day: The Untouchables, the tanning and butchering class in feudal Japan, the Cargot in Southern France and Spain, they all do these jobs that no-one else wants to do. Those people are proxies for this work we don't want to confront.

People starve all the time rather than become cannibals, but other people survive because they were cannibals. The other day John read a thing that said that during the Ukrainian starvation genocide, the Stalinist famines in Ukraine, all of the good people died first because if you were inclined to share your food with someone else who was hungrier than you were, you died first. If you weren't willing to steal, you died first. If you weren't capable of being a cannibal, you died first. That is a terrible little epigram: The good die first. It is a Billy Joel song, too, which makes it even worse. ”The good die young!”, but he means it differently and doesn't mean those unwilling to steal or cannibalize die young.

It is an awful daydream and maybe the reason true crime shows are so popular with people is that we do imagine ourselves in that situation and on both sides: ”What if I were killed this way and what if I were driven to kill this way?” All by way of saying: We are no strangers to it! Those are the popular shows and as the shows get closer and closer to two middle-aged guys philosophizing freelance and freehand, those are less popular than murder shows. Marc Maron is interviewing rather than freelancing, which is a whole separate deal.

What is the goal or expected result of Road Work? (RW157)

Dan conceived of Road Work, he pitched it and he performs it, but he is not completely rooted in the act of it and he does not imagine a result from it, but he just shows up, looking forward to talking to John about whatever comes up. Obviously he hopes that people will support the show so that he can make a living, but even if he woke up tomorrow and had $20 million in the bank account he wouldn’t just cancel the show. If anything he would put more energy and time into making it better because he wouldn't have to worry about anything else.

If John had a windfall he would absolutely keep doing his shows. Many people would consider that John already has a life of leisure, but if he suddenly were able to sit in his room in a hotel in Saint-Tropez in France and have the bellhop set up his podcasting rig in some corner of his expensive suite, he would wake up in the morning and say: ”Draw my bath and bring me my podcasting rig so that I can talk to this dingaling in Austin Texas that I have been doing a show with for a long time!” - ”Missieur, what are you talking about with your friend?” - ”Nothing, really!”

John doesn't have a goal for this show, but he definitely anticipates a result, maybe a greater shared understanding, or having facilitated a small pocket of people add to their vocabulary of techniques and capabilities. The end-goal is unknowable, but hopefully some little contribution will reverberate long past their lifespans. John is hopeful and optimistic.

Dogs are not smiling (RW157)

Animals, especially dogs, don't smile in a way that you might smile after you have had Dutch apple pie and an Affogato and you might sit back and say: ”Yeah!” with a little smile on your face. John claims he doesn’t smile. Dan has seen John do something with his face that Dan would call a smile, but it is just rigor mortis.

People will look at a dog and say: "Oh look! My little dog is smiling at me!” The owner will say something to the dog that makes the dog wag its tail because the dog is getting attention, but it doesn't know why or what it did. After the second or third time it realizes: ”Wait a minute! After I was doing a yawn and that thing with my face I got all this praise. I am going to do that again!” Then the smiling dog gets bread with another dog where the person realized it also smiled and the next generation of dogs is going to naturally smile more. They are not feeling the emotion necessarily, they just look like they are smiling.

Dan in South Korea, dogs as food (RW157)

When Dan was in Busan in South Korea many years ago there were a lot of dog restaurants. One time he was walking with one of his handlers, they saw a guy walking a dog, Dan said: ”Look at that little dog over there!” and his handler laughed, shook his head, and said: ”No pet! Eat!” This guy had bought the dog to butcher and eat it. Although there are people who might keep a dog as a pet, that was very unusual and most dogs were for food. There was a certain breed of a white dog that was an eating dog.

As you walked down the street you would see a sign in front of a building with a picture of a chicken and that was where you were going to eat your chicken. Then there would be one of a dog and that is your dog restaurant. Dan did not eat dog, but his handlers took him to a dog restaurant and ate dog while they were there. He was mortified by the fact that these people were eating dog because you are not supposed to eat a dog, a dog is a pet! Later he realized how hypocritical it is that one non-human animal is somehow blessed and another one is not and he regretted not eating dog.

All people are murderers (RW157)

It is very possible to be cynical and crusty and still believe that mankind is basically good and that we are all effectively murderers. The fact that the part of us that desires not to murder would go as far as inventing patent leather shoes to distract us from murder is a sign that we are good. That is the side of us that John is intrigued by, not the murderer-part of us, which is why all true crime shows bounce off of him.

There are a lot of ways to kill somebody and catching the killer is a fun game of chase, but the vast majority of us who wake up every morning, suppress the voice that is going: ”Kill kill kill!” and say: ”I got to get these shoes tied and get out the door!” because that is way more compelling and way more fruitful. A lot of people like to study human nature and wonder who these killers are: ”Jesus! What is it with everybody?”

Dan doesn't like true crime stuff either. It doesn't interest him and in the best case scenario he just doesn't like it, but in the worst case scenario it would make him feel paranoid and it should: Every single person, your neighbors, even your own children, are prepared to gnaw on your finger-bones if pushed. Your cat will eat your face, although animals don't have any higher reason centers. Dan does not agree with John.

We don’t kill babies because we think they are cute (RW157)

If you draw a picture of a cute little baby face and show it to your child, the child will say: ”It is so cute!” We are hard-wired to like the face of a baby so that we don't kill the babies because they make really loud noise in the middle of the night. If they weren't so cute we might kill them, but they are really cute because they have big eyes for the head and a big head for the body. They also look helpless, which is cute. You want to help, you want to hold them, and all of a sudden you are a parent and: ”What the hell did I do? How did I get here?” This thing looked cute, the defense against murder is being cute, and we are biologically programmed to think that.

You also think that a squirrel is cute like a baby because it has big eyes for its head, a big head for its body, and we are programmed to think that that is cute. Dan doesn’t have feelings for squirrels, but there is no difference between a squirrel, a cow, a cat, or a dog. They are all mammals, but we don't want to kill and eat the ones that look cute.

When we are driving down the road and see a raccoon that has been run over, we say: ”Poor little raccoon! Let's go get a burger!” We differentiate that because we don't have to look at the thing we are about to eat and think it is cute. Something in human nature is very primitive, barbaric and aggressive. As a believer in evolution you would say that is how we evolved and where we came from. Most things in nature are brutal and harsh!

Dan read an article this morning about a tiger or a jaguar, some big cat that was in captivity in Germany and had two babies and then ate them. They were disappointed, but that happens! It could have been something about being in captivity, or it could have been that there was something wrong with them. If the kittens act weird she will eat them because the maternal instinct in her that says: ”This is a cute little kitten and it is mine and I need to take care of it” turns off and now it is no longer their cute little kitten, but a small furry thing and they eat small furry things.

Human beings are protected from that because most people think that children or little babies are cute. The same is true for most animals and that is why there are stories of dogs becoming a foster parent for a family of mice. All mammals can recognize a baby and we are programmed to not hurt babies generally.

Is our natural state to murder things? (RW157)

Thomas Hobbs believed that life is nasty, brutish and short while John Locke believed that man is basically good. People have argued about that for hundreds of years ever since then. It is possible and maybe necessary to believe both things: Life is nasty, brutish and short and man is basically good and there is a state of all against all that is nature. Animals do not think in terms of the greater good. Some work cooperatively, but a lot of them just sit and eat plants. Not all of them eat birds.

We have the nature of a predator in us and we work cooperatively to accomplish ends, not because we love it or for the sheer enjoyment of it. We are cooperative because we recognize that five people can lift a heavier thing more easily than just one. We are capable of seeing the greater good, the bigger thing that we want built, and we are willing to put our effort into a pool to accomplish something that we can not do alone.

But as soon as that is accomplished, the work party dissolves because our natural state is not to remain in communion with one another. People might then work on something else with that same group because they have a good working relationship, but just that little term ”a working relationship” does not suggest that working together is in the nature of relationships and that you are in a relationship with somebody if you work well with them. You are in a working relationship with them!

We are certainly tribal but we are not actually looking to be part of a single organism. We each are alone and you mate and you cleave to one another, but you are always alone. If your entire family is murdered by a murderer and featured on a murder show you can survive somehow and move on and maybe even start another family, as impossible as that might sound, because we are born alone and we die alone.

We are each a beast, but that better nature is also in us and we seek God, we write books, and we do podcasts to tease that out! There is nothing about the beast in us that is not already known by each of us personally. What makes it interesting to people and why it is so intriguing is that that is the sex of life.

It is why all these preppers are so freaked out: If the power goes down we all revert. Ten days of no food and anyone listening to this show is going to be a freaking animal. Dan totally agrees with that, but he doesn't think that it is our natural state. It is one possible state for us. John counters that it is our natural state as the result of scarcity of food and shelter.

If you were not raised in society, but if you all of a sudden were on your own in the world, living in a forest, fending for yourself, and you were used to killing stuff and eating it, if you never met another human being before besides your own reflection in the tide pools, if a human being shows up, is there is a 50% chance that you are just going to pull off and kill that person? Or is it that you might kill the person if you had to?

Dan says that after ten days with no food a lot of people who would say: ”I do what I have to do!”, but they are not going to kill their spouse and children. John is not saying that our natural state is to murder our spouse and children, but we will murder someone else's spouse. You will not try to kill this person of the opposite sex that is arriving in Dan’s edenic world and takes their clothes off.

John is not saying that humans are only murderers, that all we know how to do is murder, but if you are sitting in your Eden and you are eating a raw rabbit, looking up at the stars, wondering when they are going to fall on your head, and someone comes in and stands across the little stream, you would be very curious about them. If they stepped across the stream and grabbed the raw rabbit out of your mouth that you had spent two days trying to capture you would lunge at their throat. Dan totally agrees: ”No one is taking my rabbit!”

What John means is that murder is not an aberration and it is fascinating how many things we have built to not murder, and to spend any time at all wondering what was in the head of the murderer. The reason why true crime shows on TV are so popular is that we want to tickle that animal. We put some veneer on it to have it appeal to our minds, but we are really stimulating our loins when we spend any time at all thinking about murder. That raw rabbit that you were eating: You had to murder it! Every morning you wake up and think: ”Shit, what am I going to have to kill today?” and fortunately for us all we have to do is kill a box of macaroni and cheese!

John is betting not a single person of the tens of thousands of people listening right now is willing to even consider eating a raw rat. Some of us have done the wash, put it in the dryer, and then left it in the dryer before putting it away longer than it would take them to descend to a state where they would be willing to eat a raw rat. Dan would murder a person who did that! If your refrigerator stopped working and there was no store anymore and you hadn't figured out how to make fire, you would be eating raw rats!

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The journey of taking Omnibus independent (RW157)

John's stress levels

Your friendly neighborhood chicken potato here, just wanting to chime in on some of the recent revelations John has made regarding podcasting income and the fate of Omnibus. While talking about it on Road Work may be off topic, I feel a lot of the emotional journeys he has had are Road Work oriented and it is the most commonplace these sorts of topics get discussed.

John, you said before that the public doesn't quite know the real you. Even with your frankness and the general level of public scrutiny, some parts of the things you have been going through you had revealed in tiny flashes and for the intuitive it has been clear there is a background radiation of deep stress even outside of the big reveals, such as selling your house.

My observation is that you have expended a great deal of emotional energy and time and responsibility managing what seems like not just one, but a series of wildly complex problems with moving parts. I also observed the tremendous progress you have made as a human, from self-care by the way of therapy, medication, and seeking out ways to self-soothe like pursuing aloha, to tackling projects that help other people heal as well like all the work poured into the WSH album.

It has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated how you maintain sobriety, how tenaciously you have tried to hang on to friendships that can become fraught where business gets involved, how earnestly you have committed to the work you do and how much growth you have achieved in recent years. I doubt that I am alone in this sentiment. I wanted to say that I am sorry for the incredible amount of stress you have had in recent times, but I am so full of gratitude for you and the work you do.

And Dan: I would like to hear a conversation with John at some point about how you each develop your ethics and choices when it comes to sponsorship and advertising. I feel like the shows you have been on largely avoid shady businesses. We do still exist in a time and place where income must be had and I don't know if the average listener knows what the whole process is like, and how it helps or harms creative work, and how difficult it can be to vet potential sponsors.

Thanks guys! Love and appreciation to you both for your work!

Dan doesn’t like to read letters where they didn't say their age, weight and height, but this one was good. It is nicely written and very encompassing. That little phrase ”I don't know if the average listener knows” suggests that this person is in podcasting.

It is the kind of letter that is lovely to receive, the kind of letter that John might write to someone. They are recapping what has been happening to John as a way of saying that they are listening and that they are absorbing it. They are not explaining his joke to him and they are not trying to tell him something about himself, but they are recapping what he has revealed and that is extremely flattering because they are obviously articulate. They are indicating that they get it and John agrees that they do get it.

The thing that they were talking about that he wrote on Facebook was pretty candid about the fact that throughout this whole year he pursued aloha in the context of the fact that both Omnibus and Friendly Fire, two podcasts he had started in the last two years and that he is very proud of and has poured a lot of work into, were in tremendous crisis throughout the spring. Neither was being paid, unlike Road Work where his co-host is also his business partner, and Roderick on the Line where in order to earn money they turned to Dan and Haddie to sell ads.

The other two shows were signed to major networks and those networks were utterly failing them. The stress of doing very complicated podcasts is one thing, but to be doing creative work and not be paid is the most devastating thing. John was extremely proud of what he was making and he knew there was an audience and a market. It wasn't that the networks were profiting from the show at John’s expense, but neither network, How Stuff Works and Maximum Fun, showed any interest or acumen at earning money. They weren't selling ads!

How Stuff Works has a major label mentality and if the show wasn't a 3 million download hit it wasn't worth the sales team's time to sell ads. This show has a level of listenership that exceeds Roderick on the Line and Road Worked where Dan and Haddie are competently and comfortably selling ads every week and every month, and not necessarily for every ad space, but it is the rare show that runs without some sort of renumeration. Also: Dan started a Patreon for Road Work, trying to earn money.

How Stuff Works just wasn't interested and all they did was put promos for their other shows on the Omnibus, week after week. They would send them cheques that were like: ”What am I supposed to do with that? You just sent me a check for an entire quarter of the year and according to your accounting we are in arrears to you somehow. $300 for a quarter, for three months of two shows a week of a big show?”

The Maximum Fun network is very close to them all, but philosophically they are ambivalent, which isn't to say against, but they believe that they are doing good in the world. They are committed to crowdfunding income because it comports with their idea of a community they have created, but they are also in business with people who are selling ads and they only do a crowdfunding once a year.

When Friendly Fire started they had done the crowdfunding only one or two months later that year and John got only $700 from that show. That was fine when the show was one month old, but a year and a half later they had a huge audience and that was still all they were making, it was crazy! The stress that it created in John!

John started these two shows with the idea that he was really going to embrace podcasting and do some shows that will make some money so he can make a living doing this thing that he really likes and that people seem to be entertained by. He gave himself a job, he did a podcast every day, and he succeeded! He did great shows that he was really proud of and he really enjoyed doing.

Because he had made the mistake of signing a contract with someone else and putting the business decisions in their hands he was suddenly in a position where he was writing e-mails to people that sounded like: ”Hey, why are we not making money?” - ”Oh yeah, I'll get back to you at the end of the week!” Three weeks would go by and John would ask again: ”Hey, I was wondering about why we are not making any money!” - ”Oh yeah, well we are working on that! We talked to somebody and we did a thing… ” Two years! All this Aloha, the panic attacks, and the state of the worst tension and anxiety John had ever felt was as a result of this.

John sold his RV, he sold some guitars, and he sold his house trying to work his way through this. He was $50.000 dollars in debt by the end of this past spring, not because of spendthrift but because he had invested all his time and energy in things that weren't generating any money. He wasn't able to talk about it either because he was in negotiations with these companies to try to resolve this and these big media corporations are often run by really thin-skinned people who are capable of making business decisions based on whether or not they are offended by an email.

When John would write e-mails that said: ”This is fucked and you need to get your shit together!”, they would say: ”Well, I guess I'm not going to deal with this problem for a month and see how you like it!” - ”Seriously? You are the president of a company and you can't take a This is Fucked email from some artist?” The entire business-world lives in this tiptoeing-around-each-other-bullshit-garbage-culture of hating one another and phrasing every email so that it sounds gracious. It is a dismal universe!

Ken Jennings, to his credit, but also infuriatingly, is fluent in that language, and will write all these: ”We really appreciate everything you've done and we just had a suggestion that maybe you could think about, which was maybe that you would try and earn some money, although not if it is at any inconvenience to you. Loves! Us guys” and John was just like: ”Fuck that!”

These networks had leverage over them, in particular How Stuff Works, even before they were purchased by iHeart media. They are run by people who had some success putting podcasts on the Internet, but ultimately they did not give a shit about podcasts. It was a media business and they wanted hits and if your show wasn't a hit, it is not like you are a liability because putting a podcast on the air costs nothing.

To promote an album is a major expense for a record label and if the record isn't selling lame record labels just abandon them. To keep a podcast running you just have to pay some hosting fees, it is not that it costs $50.000 a month to keep a podcast up, and it is fine to just leave a show moldering over in the corner, not earning any money, but not really costing anything either. Maybe it is an ego boost to have a show over there just percolating along. It would seem crazy!

Ken and John were amendable to any kind of solution: "What if we crowdfunded, what if we had someone else sell ads, what if we…" They were throwing ideas around and all of them were rejected because none of it worked with their self-image. John is not talking about the company, but about the people running it. Dan has been John's confidant through this for the last nine months as he has been trying to find a way to get Dan to sell ads on Omnibus. They walked up right to the edge and then How Stuff Works and ultimately iHeart media said at the very last minute: ”Oh well, that is not going to work!” and they did a lot of carrot and stick stuff.

When iHeard media got on board, the only difference was that they started populating the shows with ads for cigarette companies and the Koch brothers, the ultra-conservative billionaires that fund all the absolute worst things. John did multiple ads for them, the kind of ads Philip Morris used to do which were not about cigarettes, but: ”Philip Morris: We like to pet butterflies!”, or ”Philip Morris: We are not lying about cigarettes!” Just propaganda, basically.

iHeart media suggested: ”We would love to make money with you guys! What would you think about doing a whole series of shows on the history of frigid air or the history of the Chevy Nova?” - ”We wouldn't do that!” - ”Okay, if you don't want to make money…” They are exponentially less interested in podcasts, but they are not the ones who fucked Ken and John, they were just the gross new owners.

Ken and John were still fucked because How Stuff Works won't give them the RSS for their own show, which is a massive violation of what should be the honor code. Ken and John secured for themselves in the contract that they owned the intellectual property of Omnibus, but How Stuff Works are saying that the RSS feed, the location of the show on the internet, is not included in the intellectual property.

Dan says that is garbage! He has done a lot of shows, a lot of them being successful, a lot of them have failed, a handful of them left 5by5, and it all comes down to the original agreement. Back in the days being on a network mattered a lot more than it does today. Networks certainly have their benefits today, but they are different than they were a long time ago. It is not necessary to have a network to have a successful podcast by any means, but it can help and sometimes it can hurt.

Dan had people come and say: ”Here is the show that I want to do and here is what I want to call the show and this is going to be my show, but I want to do it on 5by5 and I want you to sell ads for me.” They would put all of that in the contract: ”John owns the show Omnibus. It may live on 5by5 and we will be a distributor for your show, but if you decide to leave you can leave. Give us a 30 day notice or a 60 day notice that you are leaving, honor all of the ad contracts that we have sold for you and go your merry way. The show art, the name of the show is your, all of that is yours!”

It would be different if you came to Dan and said: ”I want to do a show!” and Dan said: ”Listen, we will do the show art for you and we will help you create the show and we will come up with it with you!” The contract would then say: ”5by5 owns this show. You are the host, but we own the show!” Dan had situations like that, too! But that is in the person's contract and if they say they don't want to do it, then they won't sign the contract and they would figure something else out.

These days Dan is not really adding shows to 5by5 on a very regular basis and it is not really that much of an issue. The best example of this in the industry and the thing most people can connect with or relate to would be The Tonight Show. It has had many hosts over the years and currently it is hosted by Jimmy Fallon. When Jimmy Fallon's contract expires or when he gets bored or if he does something dumb and they fire him, The Tonight Show will probably continue with a new host.

The first Tonight Show came out in the mid/early 1950s with Steve Allen as the host. They had Jack Paar doing it, Carson, Leno, Conan O'Brien and now it is Jimmy Fallon. The same is true for the podcast Stuff You Should Know: It is owned by How Stuff Works. Chuck Bryant and his co-host (Josh Clark) are not the owners, but they are employees of the network who could kick those guys off the show and hire Dan and John to do it. Jimmy Fallon makes a salary for doing The Tonight Show and how much he makes is a highly negotiated thing. They could fire him out of his contract or he could leave if he wanted. It is all spelled out, there is no question!

Dan is not saying that How Stuff Works or iHeart were trying to swindle John from the get-go, but they totally had him over a barrel because they basically owned all of it. John was doing a show, he wasn’t getting paid anything for it, and they were at least indirectly profiting from having the show while John wasn't. It is frustrating to Dan who has been podcasting since 2006, more than 13 years and full time for 11 years, that John should be in a situation like that. The most frustrating part is that they are holding the show hostage!

From the physical and technical standpoint a podcast is just the location and the URL of the RSS feed. That is your show! If you had control of that you could put your show wherever you want, on any network, on any hosting platform, but John doesn't own it, the network owns that for all intents and purposes and they control it. Without that feed John would be starting totally from scratch, even with the same name, the same show, the same format, the same music, everything the same, they would have to start out from scratch and in their last episode they would have to say: ”Please, everyone go find our show! It is going to disappear!” and they would lose a percentage of their audience.

For all your podcasters out there: Make sure that if you are doing a show on a network that you put in your contract that you own the show name and you own the RSS feed. The stupid easy way to do this is make your own domain name and always have that domain name be the first point for people to subscribe. You would have omnibuspodcast.com and the RSS feed would be omnibuspodcast.com/RSS. You own that from day one and that is where people go to subscribe. Behind the scenes maybe that is mapped over to the infrastructure of the network, but when you want to leave you can do that. If you controlled your own domain name there is no feed redirection, there is none of this nonsense that John has been talking to Dan about forever that they have been saying: ”No no no no no!” to.

There is nothing in John’s contract that says that they own and control the RSS feed, but its possession is 9/10th of the law. When they were starting the show, neither Ken nor John are especially technical or interested in managing the day to day ins and outs of the show, but they wanted to do a show. Now John knows they should have secured the domain, they should have owned the RSS from the outset, but these nice people at How Stuff Works were their friends. Chuck Bryant came to them and pitched them the show and he was the face of the network to them. They were so nice!

John loves Chuck, he is a close friend, and oh it was all just friendly teddy bear stuff: ”Let us get you that domain! Let us get the RSS! We will handle all that for you guys! You guys just do a nice show!” and it was only when John and Ken were saying: ”You are not making us any money and you are not responding to us when we have complaints and you are not treating us very well and nobody seems to be in charge. When you do write to us you are just shining us on, like: Everybody wants to be on How Stuff Works, I don't know what you guys are complaining about!” - ”We are complaining that we are giving you free content! You are obviously profiting from it!"

They profit from it because it increases their overall download-number and they can use that as a way to sell ads across the network. They were very reluctant to see Omnibus go because it was a great benefit to their network that cost them nothing and that they had to put no effort, energy, or money into in order to have it on their roster of shows. John is giving them a free show, everybody else is making money, and they say: ”Well played! We gave him an ice cream!” The teddy bear friendliness just went completely away as John said: ”Hey, you guys got that URL for us and that RSS and we would just like to take those!” - ”Oh, well…” It feels evil!

Dan says that although this would not be the nice thing to do, the network would be within their rights to say: ”We registered the domain, we are not going to give you that and we are not going to give you the show art and stuff like that, but it is your show and if you don't want to do it here that is fine and out of respect and because we feel bad that we have never sold anything for you and we failed you we will redirect it to wherever you want to go.” That would be perfectly fair and perfectly fine!

Dan would even understand if they said: ”We own the name Omnibus. We have invested money in it, we own the art and we own the domain, but we understand you guys want to go somewhere else. Start something with a new name somewhere else and we will forward the existing stuff over to the new show for you. Omnibus stays here with us, the work you did for us is here!” It would be like Jimmy Fallon saying: ”I can't take The Tonight Show with me, but I am taking all the people that go around with me, my band, all the stuff, and we are going to do a new show called Jimmy Fallon Tonight over on this other network” There is no redirecting on TV, but if there was, they could send people over to watch this one.

That is an extreme case and that is as far as Dan thinks they should be allowed to go, but John and Ken specifically negotiated not that. John and Ken said: ”We own the show! We own Omnibus! We own the intellectual property!” and it is in the contract. John and Ken came up with the name and the concept, they were not employed by the network, but they were doing their own show that was hosted by them and they had a contract with them to sell advertising and now they withhold the RSS feed because the RSS feed is not specifically included in the description of the IP and John and Ken didn't do that because they didn't know to.

They are holding it because the contract allows them to continue to sell ads on the back catalog. They are afraid that if John and Ken take the RSS feed that they will have to ask them to place ads on the back catalogue, and because they don't want to have to ask, because they feel they have a contractual right to sell ads, they do not want any impediment. They have made it very clear that they would rather see Omnibus die, that there be no further Omnibus. They want to continue to sell ads which are dynamic ads populated there by a computer.

John told them: ”We are contractually obligated to let you sell ads on that, so if we take the RSS and go somewhere with it we will continue to honor that contract, otherwise you would sue us!” - ”Yeah, it would just be easier if we kept it!” so now they are in the situation that they do not have the keys to the show. The network could shut it down at any moment although Ken and John are now independent of them and the network is not doing any work. They are not selling any ads on new shows, but if they decide for any reason to turn the lights out on that RSS feed it would be gone.

If one of their minions is listening to this show and reports back that John is shit-talking them, they could say: ”Fuck that guy!” and turn it off. Until John finds a way to get possession of that RSS feed he and Ken are in a position of complete vulnerability to a company that has demonstrated that they have no interest in doing what seems to be the right thing.

From Dan’s experience, the sponsors like they have on this show and other shows that Haddie sells for don't want your back catalogue, but they want current up to date new shows. They don't want remnant ads, they don't want old ads. Some exceptions are shows that are very evergreen, shows that continue to get 100.000 downloads on the old episodes forever, they have some more interest in doing that and some of them will do it.

But even then, advertisers will not be paying nearly as much as they are paying for new stuff. Those are dynamically inserted ads, and in the case of John’s old show they are not going to be host-read ads, but drop-in ads that are recorded by some other voice talent that is working in the ad wing of their company. They are not going to send John a script and say: ”John, we need you to record this ad spot, we are going to drop it into Episode 8” A computer is going to put that in and Dan knows exactly how that works because he is writing software to do this right now! It is not what advertisers want! They will take it, but it is not what they want.

When you used to turn on the TV at 2:30am you would see hour-long infomercials about appliances because it costs $8 to run your ad during that time slot because no one cares and no one wants it. You are not going to see the brand new Budweiser commercial airing at 2:30am on the UHF station, but you are going to see the thing for Appliance Direct because it is $8 and they don't want it. How much money do you really think that they stand to make from John's back catalogue in the course of a year, based on the history that they have had selling ads up till now? Do you think they will make $100 or $1000? It is not much!

It is petty and disgusting for them to not release the RSS to John and Ken, especially because from the beginning they said that Ken and John own the IP. To say that the RSS feed is not included in the IP is horrible. At the very least they should say: ”We will redirect that feed to you for 3 months or 6 months.” Dan had a situation where a show came on to 5by5 and they were there for a while. They owned the show, they owned the IP, and they wanted to move after a few years. Dan redirected the feed for them, he left that redirect open for a year and he told them many times. ”Make sure to tell your audience to re-subscribe to the show under the new feed just in case!”, but they didn't do that.

Then after a year they lost some listeners when Dan was redoing all the server infrastructure and changing the way everything worked and he didn't have the ability to do the redirect the same way and he just didn't turn it back on. They reached out and said: ”People are saying that they can't get the feed!” - ”I'm sure sometime in the last 13 or 14 months you told them to re-subscribe, right?” - ”No, we didn't!” - ”Well, that sucks, but it has been a year!” Dan should think at the very least they would do something like that, even if it was for a month or two!

Podcast-clients have gotten much better about updating source for feeds over the last few years since Dan ran into that problem. They should at least do that and then they can keep their old RSS feed and anyone who is still on it. How much do you think they are going to make? $1000 for a company like iHeart media who just announced that they spent $50 million buying some other podcast networks? They are worried about the $1000 they might make from John’s show over the next five years? It is ridiculous!

The president of How Stuff Works works at iHeart media now and doesn't want to lose face. His ad-sales team has no interest in doing anything for anybody else. It would be a simple matter, but it would require that somebody stand up from their desk and walk 10 feet to somebody else's desk and talk to them for five minutes and why would they do that? It is a business culture that doesn't care about the creator. The president of How Stuff Works can say to iHeart media when he sells the company: ”We have one billion monthly downloads!” and if you take Omnibuses 500.000 then he has to say ”We have 999.500.000 downloads!” and even that doesn't matter. iHeart media doesn't care!

The question is: ”Which would be easier for me? To be helpful to some guys that I don't care about or to screw them?” If he screws them it gets him 1% more Klout somewhere! Screwing them costs nothing. They don't care if the show stops, although if the show stops it will generate a lot less money for them in back catalog sales. They don't care about the money! It is a contemptible human enterprise to take Omnibus, which is a labor of considerable love, and an opportunity for two people to profit from their experience and hard work, and lump it in some kind of content pile with a bunch of dreck that has been manufactured with a content sausage maker.

If iHeart media and by extension How Stuff Works could make podcasts out of AIs, machines that went: ”Today on the show more stuff that we are getting from the Internet!” and sell that, they would, and that was triple-infuriating! You are emailing with them and they reply: ”We love you guys! Oh my God! Ken, John, you are the greatest!”, but they wouldn't walk three feet out of their way to pull you out of a burning manhole.

John is scalded by this. It has been a while since he had made contact with the world as it is rather than the world as he imagined it. They worked hard to put a world as they envision it into action. When John writes to Dan and Haddie and says: ”Let's try and sell some more ads!” and they would say: "We are trying!”, nothing in that feels like a lie. John does not imagine Haddie putting her little feet up on her desk, saying: ”I've worked enough today!” She is hustling! Dan has never told John a lie as far as he can tell. Dan opens his books, he works hard, he is trying to earn money, it seems like a natural thing. When you are signing a contract with a business it never occurs to you to put into the contract that the business owner is obligated to try to make money for the client.

John managed to patch up the relationship with Maximum Fun and they are still on the MaxFun network. He had a couple of pretty long phone calls with Jesse Thorn where they hashed it out. One of the things Jesse said was: ”You can't leave the network! You signed a contract!” - ”Yes, but this contract implied that you are going to try to earn money for us and you haven't sold a single ad on this show for nine months. Although you are not in violation of any clause in the contract that said business owners should try to earn money, the whole reason there is a contract is that we are trying to earn money and you are not trying!”

It was flattering to have Friendly Fire on their network. The fact that they added to their collective download numbers and added to their prestige was useful to them. They were profiting from them being on the network, they just weren't trying to earn them money. If they were earning a ton of money and stealing it from them there would be clauses in the contract that they could point to, but the fundamental clause of any contract is: "Try to make a living in this business we are engaged in!" and they are violating it, they are violating the spirit of having a business relationship!

John could go independent with Friendly Fire tomorrow because to Ben Harrison's credit he is technical, he does possess the RSS, he does own the URL, and they run it all, they are just contracted to MaxFun. John and Ken were just flat-out taken advantage of, they didn’t know how to do any of that stuff because they are regular human beings and they completely took advantage of them! John knows how to do it now!

John and Jesse sat and yelled at each other and in the end there wasn't any arguing, but: "Make us money or we will go!” They could take Friendly Fire and go independent, put up a Patreon, start selling ads themselves, and be making twice the money already next month and it would only ramp up from there. Compete with that!

Ken and John launched a Patreon yesterday and in just a day it is already very close to the amount that they earn from Road Work (in August of 2019 they had 1041 Patrons giving $3600)! The audience for Omnibus is more than double of the audience for Road Work. 1/20th of the Road Work listeners support them and if 1/20th of the listeners of the Omnibus would support them they should make twice as much money, just through Patreon alone.

The ultimate question is: ”How the hell do Merlin and Max Temkin with their show Do by Friday make $15.000 a month on Patreon?” John doesn’t think Do by Friday is exponentially larger than Omnibus, but they have reward tiers and it is a big part of their show to encourage people to donate to the Patreon. It was the premise from day one: ”We will have fun harassing our listeners to support the show!”

Many people know John and Ken Jennings, but even more people probably know who Max is thanks to Cards Against Humanity, which is hilarious and great. You can't say anything bad about him! He is a super nice guy who is really fun and super creative. He has had some tremendous success and success breeds success. It is a show in a format that hadn’t been done that way before, it has the right people doing it, it started at just the right time, and that is a big part of why they have the success they are having.

There is no reason John and Ken couldn't have the same success! If you give it a couple of months it will be double! They are already making more than they ever made at How Stuff Works from the Patreon that they started yesterday. Dan says How Stuff Works helped them launch, but it didn't account for most of their audience, but John and Ken accounted for most of their audience. If How Stuff Works had sold ads on their show, they would still be on How Stuff Works. They helped them launch the show which was their half of the job, while Ken and John created a great show!

There was no clause that would have prevented them from doing a Patreon all along but it didn't occur to Ken and John because the network said that none of their other shows do that and it would be unseemly and it would cast aspersions on their business. "Why would we need it if we are on this great network that everybody supposedly wants to do a podcast on?" As they really looked at the contract there wasn't anything prohibiting them from doing it and they thought about it, but they felt people would say: "You are on a huge network that just bought an aircraft carrier and painted it pink and that is putting cigarette ads on your show, why the hell are you going to do a Patreon?" It just felt gross!

Now they are an independent show and they can say: "Support us!” It has really made John think about the Road Work Patreon a lot more, too! It is a viable way of supporting a thing that you love. Here they are again, talking about the Patreon behind the paywall, but anybody who is still listening to this conversation two hours into just bitching about (that stuff is probably interested in it). John is genuinely concerned that the post he made on Gary's Van or this conversation will leak out and get back to the president of How Stuff Works and he vindictively just shuts them down or in some other way makes life difficult.

John doesn't want to be caught in a world where half of the people are listening in one place and half of the people are listening in another. If only there was a way to put the RSS through omnibusproject.com that they do for sure own, then they could be migrating people there and that is where they would want them to be forever.

This is where the Stockholm syndrome really comes into play: The network never said that they won't one day give them the RSS feed. They say: ”Not right now!” They can't do it right now, but they can do it maybe one day if John and Ken are nice, if they don't talk about them on the Internet and make them mad or if they do what they say, if they just let them be the boss for as long as they want.

What makes it difficult for John is that Ken is so conciliatory, as a function of his time working in businesses and just his conflict-avoiding nature that most of the people John knows have. When John says: ”We need to just burn this whole thing down!” he says: ”Let's wait until September because I think when September rolls around things will be different and smoke will have cleared and this and that and this!”

It is part of why John was so stressed, part of why this was so Aloha: The writing was on the wall about these people in December of 2018 and if it had just been John all by himself he might very well have said all the way back then: ”You know what? You are fucked! This is fucked! I see that this is never going to work. Goodbye! I am just going to start from the ground up!”, but instead they gave them seven additional months of free content while the network strung them along.

They waited for them to be nice and waited for a solution to avoid the hurt of a hard stop. For the last seven months Ken and John could have been doing a show on a new URL, they could have started a Patreon on January 1st. Instead they were in a state of constant stomach knots because they were trying to be reasonable with business people who don't behave reasonably as far as John is concerned.

They said: ”Can we do this?” and they replied: ”Yeah sure!” - ”Let's do it!” - ”We can't do it like that today because: Reasons! We talked to somebody in the office and they don't want to have to get up from their desk and walk over to the neighboring desk, so we are going to have to table that whole thing!” It makes John want to rage!

Right now they are just trying to get people to donate to the Patreon and it is terrifying to think that they would also be saying: ”Update your RSS feed!” Take it one day at a time!

This has been a long and really awful after show, but no-one will hear any of what they are saying right now, they are long gone! This went from doing a show to just a conversation between Dan and John, not a public conversation, just a conversation. Dan is going to push it out this way. ”John‚ have a good week! Let me know what you decide!”

page revision: 2, last edited: 07 Apr 2022 16:09

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The Story of John Roderick

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