This week, Dan and John talk about:
Bonus content for Patreon subscribers:
The show title refers to John always having to take the hard way throught the jungle instead of taking the road because he doesn’t trust the people who have built the road and he has to make sure there is not some wisdom to be found in the bog.
John going up early (RW163)
John got up a little bit early, early enough that he was able to get himself a peanut butter sandwich, which means peanut butter and jelly sandwich with raspberry jam exclusively and chunky peanut butter. Having a little food is very different for him. Normally he wakes up in the morning, passes through a kitchen trying to scramble up some coffee, and then he sits down and starts podcasting. Generally when he starts podcasting he has had two sips of coffee and has been awake 10 minutes, which really characterizes his entire podcast oeuvre because he is slow to wake up and drags out a bed.
If John is not doing a show he will sit on the couch drinking coffee and staring into space and if someone tries to talk to him, like his daughter, he is saying: ”Just give daddy a little while to get awake!” In his broadcasting career he immediately starts talking within minutes of waking up, which means that the person every one of their listeners knows is someone who isn't awake yet. It doesn't mean that he is slower, but he still has a few toes in dreamland, he is in a little bit of a daze, and he is punch drunk. John has been podcasting for eight years and the whole thing would be so different if he did shows starting at 6pm or 9pm.
One time they recorded an episode later in the day and it was completely different. One Roderick on the Line episode that people loved was the one they did about House Trotter (see RL182) that they recorded in person in the afternoon at Merlin's house. John has been awake, he had food, and it has a completely different quality. Today John woke up an hour early and had a sandwich, but he is still in that period where he is washing the sleep out of his eyes, so it can't possibly be representative of what it is like to talk to him when he is already awake.
Performing differently when somebody is watching or listening (RW163)
John is extremely distracted right now, while in general when he is doing the shows he has eliminated all distraction. He doesn’t have toys on the desk or anything like that, nobody is trying to talk to him, he is always alone, nobody is watching him and nobody can hear him either, which are key things. If John was sitting in his office like Dan, knowing that Haddie is on the other side of the glass, his show would be completely different because he would be primarily performing for the person right there. Although he would be talking to Dan he would also be talking to Haddie, he would include her, wink at her, and think about what had she will think about what he is saying to Dan.
John would be putting on more of a performance while now it is just him and Dan because the listeners are not on his mind. In some ways John also turns off visual information, he is not looking at anything, he is just talking. He could do these shows completely with his eyes closed and it would probably be even better if he put on a sleep mask, whereas if he was doing it live or when Adam Pranica or Ken Jennings are here and John is looking at them, he is doing a show with them and he is just talking to them.
Even if his little girl comes into the room and is quietly playing with her LEGO in the corner while he records with Ken he is conscious of her listening to what he is saying and he is performing for her a little bit. He will start to talk to Ken in a certain way, knowing his daughter is listening, and he wants her to understand what he is saying, not that he dumbs it down, but he says it partly to her.
For Dan it is a matter of practice. He knows that it is not different with Haddie sitting there. Anytime he is doing any podcast he feels very much that he is performing, but that is not very different from just having a conversation with someone. If it was Dan and John sitting together at a table in a restaurant or a coffee shop or something, Dan would not be any different with John there than he is here.
There are certain things that you need to do when you are communicating with other human beings that you wouldn't necessarily do when you are by yourself obviously, and that is about the only thing that really changes for him. Whether Dan is here in this room and Haddie is in the next room or whether she has gone to lunch while he is recording doesn't change it at all. It would change if he had his 11 year old son sitting there because there are certain things he wouldn't talk about with him there, but he wouldn't be performing in any different way for him.
John is a performer and his performance isn't noticeably different. Ken would never notice, but John is distracted because there is another person here. Even his daughter, to whom he should by all rights say: ”I am doing my show now, so I am not thinking about you, and if you want to be in here that is fine, but you get no special dispensation!”, but in the back of his head he likes his daughter to be entertained and to understand it. He is not censoring himself, but more like: ”How can I make this entertaining for her? How can I have her listen to this conversation and come away with it feeling that she knows something more, that she feels better?”
This is not just sweet of John as a dad, but he would also do it if it was a cop here waiting to arrest him: ”Okay, let me just finish the show and then you can arrest me!” He would be entertaining the shit out of this cop within the last 20 minutes before he would take him away. It is a natural desire and it is probably what makes him a good performer. He reads the audience, he is tuned in, he is connected, and he is giving them the performance they were hoping for and they leave happy, although that is a tricky thing because he can screw himself up.
There was a guy who wrote them last week (see RW162), saying: ”I am kind of a lover here. Ladies love me and I want to let them down easy! I really like this gal and I am not sure whether I should just go for it, even knowing that it is going to be a rough go for her, losing her shit over me!” - ”Don't get too far ahead of yourself thinking that you know what other people want or need or are thinking at any given moment. Don't start planning her life for her, just do your thing!”
The reason John said that to him is that he absolutely is the same way and if he is looking at an audience or a person and is thinking about what they expect and whether or not he is going to fulfill their needs or desires, he is getting way too ahead of himself because he doesn't know who they are and they could look like somebody who is wanting something and then it turns out they want something else.
Although John is performing and tailoring what he is doing for someone else, he is just clicking between versions of himself, he would never sell himself out by dancing around being something that he is not. He is never going to read a room and be like: ”Yo yo, what's up everybody!” There is a version of him like: ”All right everyone, well thanks for coming and let's get started!” and there is a version him that is: ”Oh my God, this room smells!”, but it is always going to be him, like the way you would pick a golf club out of a thing. You don't have an unlimited number of golf clubs, but when you got to hit this ball 300 yards there are only a few clubs you can pick.
John is often distracted by other things going on in his mind and it is one of the reasons why he enjoys podcasting: He can foreground the thing that he is worried about or distracted by just by starting to talk about it. These shows have no theme and no preparation and John never thinks about what he wants to talk about before he gets here. He can put his frets and his preoccupations, right on the table because Dan says every Thursday: ”What is going on?”
John never comes downstairs, thinking: ”You know what I'm going to talk to Dan about today?”, but he comes always blank slate and sits down and sometimes the preoccupation just doesn't make it out into words and they start talking about something else, but it is there and John has the option of saying: ”Actually, I'm a little bit worked up about a thing!”, which is a big part of what keeps him coming back to it or why this work is gratifying.
John looking back on his life, not being able to accept praise (RW163)
It is really hard for John to look back at the last 10 years and get a good sense of what he was doing and how he has been. For the 10 years prior to that when he was making records and touring it is fairly easy to do because he has calendars and there is a website maintained or archived by our friend Lizbeth in Utrecht that has every single show he ever played starting in 2000.
If he wonders what he was doing on March 24th, 2003, he can go look. John knows what the big chunks of those 10 years are: ”Oh, we were in Europe then. Oh, that was when we were on tour with Nada Surf. Oh, I was making that record then!” and he can thread his emotional well-being and what was going on in his life, whom he was dating, or where he was living. It is all threaded through concrete events.
When John bought his farm in the autumn of 2007 he stopped going on big tours and he stopped having big events. He wrote a column for the Seattle Weekly, but he couldn't tell you what year. It could have been any year between 2007 and 2014. He doesn’t remember when he wrote that column and he doesn't remember whether it was for a year or two years. He remembers the feeling of starting to tweet, but he doesn’t remember when that was, whether that was 2009 or 2011.
Meeting Jonathan Coulton and John Hodgman
John started doing the Jonathan Coulton cruise during its first year 2011, but he had already met Jonathan and Hodgman both on the same day in 2006. Those relationships do define a long period for John because they became very close friends and although they had been college roommates and best friends with each other, John became friends with each of them individually at the same day. They both live in New York. Colton would go on tour, John would see him at shows, he would hang out with him over here‚ Hodgman would go out and John would go hang out with him there, and John would go on tour with him.
John was friends with them individually, but also friends with their pre-existing friendship, which is very complicated in a good way. John met them in the summer of 2006 and it wasn't until 2007 that they started to recognize that they are friends and it wasn’t one of these show business relationships where you meet people out on the road, you know them, you hang out with them, but they were visiting each other, they were going on vacations together, seeking out reasons to do things with one another.
John can find pictures of them from that strange period from 2007 until 2011 and the first JoCo Cruise, these 4 years where they were doing stuff together all the time, but he couldn't tell you when any of it happened relative to anything else. 2011 seems forever ago! If you said: ”Well, you became friends with Jonathan and John in 2011 when you went on the first JoCo Cruise!” - ”That seems about right!”, except they were doing stuff together for five years before the first year JoCo Cruise!
John doesn’t have a way to look back at the last ten years with a confident timeline, and a big part of that is that for 7 of those ten years he was in the throes of declining untreated bipolar. He was super-depressed for long stretches, there was a fog over him, then he would have a strange manic period, but it never had the brightness and color of the manias that he enjoyed in his twenties and thirties. It was a purple mania, but he was building a whole new life for himself. He was talking to Merlin every week, he was out with John and Jonathan who both opened up new worlds for him in terms of fans and new directions for what he did, and none of it really had much to do with The Long Winters, but a lot of stage time.
Moving on
Then he started talking to Dan and started to think of podcasting as a new thing. The only flag pole he can plant is that his daughter was born in the spring of 2011 and he remembers that, obviously, but that seems forever ago and he was still extremely depressed and untreated for the first five years of her life. He would lay there in a state of, not catatonia, but not able to be roused and he had this little kid who was full of life just poking at him, like: ”Hello!” - ”Yeah, I mean I'm here and stuff, but not super here, not really really here, if that is cool with you, kid? Can you toddle off?”
A little over a year ago John said: ”I am going to sell my house, I am going to change my life, and selling my house is going to be a method by which I change other aspects of my life like this stagnancy, which isn't because of my house, but it is all reinforced by and tied up in my house! I have too much shit, I don't know how to differentiate its importance, I am cloaked in sentimentality that I try to process and can't, and it is too pervasive. There is sentimentality on everything around me!”
Attaching sentimentality to objects
John is a profoundly sentimental person. ”Do you want this bent safety pin?” - ”Wait a minute! That is the safety pin that was holding up the pants on the mannequin at the place where my friend was getting his tux made for his wedding. I don't talk to him anymore, but that safety pin really matters!”, which is just crazy: Imbuing inanimate objects with life and mean! A year ago John started to get his house ready, he had all these adventures, he had Sahm out there fixing the porch, he was doing all this incredible landscaping and painting and cleaning and moving and giving stuff away and it lasted all last winter.
Of course that has affected who John is and how he is. Three years ago he was breaking up with Millennium Girlfriend and he was coming out of a fog of: ”What was that relationship? Where did it come from? What did I think? What was I thinking that whole time?” John was in a relationship with that girl for 18 months and looking back he has no idea what he was thinking. He does not think he is vulnerable to losing himself, and it is not that he lost himself, like: ”I'm head over heels and whatever she says is great!”
It was a struggle, it was a fucking Kampf the entire time! A lot of the time he was unhappy, but he wasn't able to step back, get perspective and understand who he was in this and what he needed. John is not good at that in general, and he was really not good in this situation. She was a powerful woman who said: ”Don't worry about it, I will take charge of answering those questions for you!” and his natural reaction is: ”Okay, oh well, shit, glad somebody is driving!”, but it did not serve him very well. John can look back 4 years and see that. He can also look back and see himself running for city council and knowing how that felt, he even can remember what being King Neptune felt like.
But the last year has been characterized by conflicting energies. There was a lot of feeling like: ”I am going to move forward. I absolutely am going to start moving! I cannot at this point in my life remain static and I have to start moving in multiple directions. I don’t want to sell my house! I don't want to clean! I don't want to paint! I don't want to caulk! I don't want to move! I don't want to give any of my shit away!”, but he has to everyday wake up and do these things he doesn't want to do.
During that whole period John was also fighting battles with iHeart media and MaximumFun.org, feeling like he was doing a tremendous amount of work that he really loved and he wasn't being compensated for at all by people who had promised him that they were going to treat him right.
That felt awful, but he had to keep going. His instinct was to say: ”Well screw it then! Screw all of this!", but he powered through! He should be able to feel pride in himself for all of these things and say: ”You did a good job! It sucked, you kept going, you should be proud!” but John doesn’t have the capacity to say: ”Good job!” to himself.
Receiving unexpected praise, John's shield against praise
A friend sent John a couple of texts in the middle of the night, like: ”Hey! I was thinking of you and I just wanted to send you some praise because I was thinking how much praise there is for you in the world, but how little of it you take seriously and it is too bad that you can't understand how much we love you. Signed your friend!”
It came out of nowhere! John was not expecting it and it wasn't related to anything! She said: ”I was just thinking about that time nine months ago when you did this thing that was impressive and to you it just seemed like this rote thing. I just wanted to say I was thinking about it!” It got through, it made it past John's defenses because he wasn't expecting it, he wasn't fishing for it, it didn't come right on the heels of a thing where he could say: ”Oh yeah, it is all a magic trick!” It stood out as an example where he just actually received praise, and 95% of the time when people give him praise John feels like they are shooting him with praise and he has shields.
John always found praise burdensome because his primary mode is to feel like a disappointment who doesn't deserve nice things or praise. When someone tells him he did a good job his answer is: ”Well, yeah it is too bad that I didn't do the thing that I could have done that would have been a lot better than that, but yeah: Thanks for praising this shabby job I did on this small thing!” Praise feels like an injury, not only because it gives his brain an opportunity to just dismiss it and not accept it, but also to convert that praise into criticism. The praise for what he did stands in bold relief to the thing he didn't do. John is on guard against praise all the time!
Dan can't feel pride about himself either
Dan is exactly the same way. He knows if he has done a good job and he knows if he hasn’t. Dan rejects praise generally speaking and he doesn’t feel pride in things either. People are telling him he should absolutely feel pride: "Look at this thing you have done, look at this thing you have done!” - ”But none of it is really that good, and none of it is good enough!”
Dan is not walking around thinking he will never be happy and this is not good enough, he just knows that it is nothing worth being proud of. He is very proud of his children for things that they accomplish, he is proud of friends if they have an accomplishment or do something great, he can feel good for them which he is told is what pride is, but he can't say that he is or has ever been necessarily really proud of anything that he has done.
People would say: ”What are you talking about? You built 5by5, which was a big thing when no-one else was doing it. You did Fireside and got thousands of customers!” Dan doesn’t not feel any pride in it because there are a billion things left to do and a lot of things could be improved.
Dan is not saying he only sees the faults in those things, but he mostly sees the faults and he is not capable of patting himself on the back, saying: ”You did really well there, that was really good, you should feel good about that!” because if he wastes any time feeling good about that he won't improve it and won't do the next thing that he needs to get done.
John has paid Merlin plenty of compliments and it is hard for Merlin to accept those as well. He doesn’t know what Merlin's relationship to pride is, but he has been his good friend for 15 years now and got a sense of it. John and Merlin have an extremely different emotional nature, and yet he also has a hard time accepting praise. If you asked him to review the last ten years of his life, he wouldn’t say it has been an unalloyed pleasure.
Always taking the hard or dramatic path
For John has lived his life thus far immune to being praised, immune to feeling accomplishment, and immune to feeling pride or joy. As an artist, as a dramatic young man, he cultivated his sense of his own darkness because it was dramatic and he looked like Mr. Darcy (character from Pride and Prejudice). He was out on the fence with his cloak blowing in the wind, feeling nothing but sorrow.
As time went on John recognized he can keep feeding that dragon for the rest of his life, he can be 90 years old and have never felt pride or joy, or he can try to confront it. There are so many things people tell you, like: ”Why don’t you just meditate or yoga, eat right and exercise?”, but John has never taken any path that was offered if there was a chance for him to step off the road with a machete and bushwhack at great labor to arrive at the same location two days later, covered with bruises:
”I'll meet you guys at the bar, but I take a route that I hew from the jungle rather than just go on the road, because Jesus! The road! Am I right? God! The road!” How could John just trust the person who built the road and all the people who walked on it? He has to make sure that there is not some wisdom to find in the bog.
John already stood at a turning point several times, admitting that his life had become unmanageable. For the last year he subjected everyone to his daily frustration and anxiety, expressions of emotion that he never used to allow. He would never have anxiety or talk about it or acknowledge that it was that, but he also wouldn't feel anxiety expressed as anxiety, but he felt depression, the catchall for all negative emotion.
In addition, John didn't express a constant level of frustration, but he would explode in frustrated moments and he has been inflicting it on everyone. He has been making this big change, but it has all been outward, he has been projecting it onto these missions: ”I have to sell the house, now I have to search for a house, now I have to deal with this contract, I have to make these moves, I have to set up this account…”
Throughout this whole season John has not been practicing a different way, except for giving away things and trying to confront sentimentality by saying: ”I am sending this thing that I love the most into the stream in order to be free of it and free of attachment!” Doing big bold moves like that has been one thing, but it was another thing to open up the box of his dad's tax returns from the 1970s and throw them into the garbage rather than to keep them because he thought that one day when he opens his presidential library they are going to want his dad's tax returns.
John has not begun a comprehensive program of exercise, he has not taken any steps to sit with himself and Kumbayah, he has not been going to Alcoholics Anonymous, which he absolutely should have done the whole last year, but he has been white-knuckling it, just grabbing on for dear life.
John making an offer on a house (RW163)
Yesterday John made an offer on the house they were talking about last week (see RW162) and it got accepted by the sellers. The house had scared off all the other buyers because everything about it is insane and anyone in their right mind would (go someplace else).
Just as John's farm, there had been an explosion of activity as soon as it came online. People couldn't believe it was so cheap and so cool, it immediately became a hot home, people were touring it, thinking that it was their dream and whatnot, but as soon as everyone arrived at the house and walked through it and started ticking off all of the things, (they quickly turned away from it). The house is exactly what John was looking for, a 65 year old house that was still in possession of its original owners.
The original owners were Boeing engineers who built the house in the immediate aftermath of the war. Dad was a Boeing engineer during the construction of the 707 and the B-52 while they were still doing regular maintenance maintenance on B-29s. The graffiti around the house makes it very clear that this guy played a role in the development of the 727. He was an electrical engineer and the house is updated because that is how engineers are, but it is not aesthetically updated. It still has the built-in lights that look like little Sputniks, it still has the tile in the bathroom that has little kidney shaped graffitos, like: ”Here's George Jetson!”
1955 was early days for modernism, but these were airplane people. This house is 65 years old and if you were looking for a dishwasher that had a dry cycle, or if you were looking to put something on the stove and have the stove communicate with you in any way, this isn't the house for you. Not only that, but if you were thinking that there weren't going to be stickers on the closet door commemorating the Apollo 11 program you were also mistaken.
This house is intact just from a move-in standpoint. John put the pictures of all the electrical junction boxes that he could find up on Instagram. They are all daisy chained! This guy had a band saw, a drill press, and 15 other major power tools. He had it all wired over the years, meaning there is wiring from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
John needs to hire a qualified electrician to basically start at the street where the wires from the street touch off the house and they are going to have to go all the way through it. Half the outlets are two prong and half the outlets are three, but all the three prong outlets are grounded and the owner did the upgrade that a lot of people did over time, which is: ”Do I need a three pronged outlet here? Yes! So I am putting one in and I am doing it right, but over there all that is ever plugged into that is a lamp, so I don't need to change it!” That is going to cost money and time and effort, but unlike the lake house this is the stuff that John loves to do! He loves to mess around with panels and breakers!
It isn’t unfinished work, but it is work that needs to be upgraded and John can upgrade it the way he wants. He can bring as much power into this house as he wants and he will never have to look at the panel and say: Oh God, I wish I had another 1000 amps, but he just has to put in the number of amps that he wants. It is not that he wants a 65 year old house that has never been touched, but he wants to make his own decisions about what gets changed and what doesn't.
A lot of people toured this house. John went to the open house and stood there and watched people stream in and out and listen to them talk about it and he sympathized with them. A lot of them were young families with three or four kids who were looking for a good elementary school. The elementary school close by is good and part of the reason people want to buy into this neighborhood is the fucking good-schools-baloney, but the house is just daunting and overwhelmed them.
A ”hot home” in Seattle sometimes sells for 50% more than they asked for, and their asking price was low because they expected it would attract a lot of attention and then the House would get bid up, but the house scared and terrified everyone! John made an offer at asking price and there were a couple of other bids, but John beat them all.
The way forward after having bought this house (RW163)
A year and a half ago John's daughter's mother sold her apartment on Capitol Hill and bought a house in South Seattle. That was key for John because he and his daughter's mother both bought their homes at about the same time in 2007. His farm and her apartment were examples of two directions that either of them could have gone back then. She bought a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of Capital Hill and John bought a four-bedroom house out at the edge of Seattle and they paid about the same amount of money for the two properties.
She was maybe even still married or just getting divorced and at that point in time she and John weren't seeing each other and it wouldn't have occurred to them that by 2011 they would have a kid together. When she sold her apartment and bought a house down to South Seattle she paid less for the house in the suburbs than she had sold her apartment for, and that was a story that John just latched onto.
Of course, at 300th you get more house for less money than at 200th, and at 100th and at 10th. She had lived on 10th and she moved out to 200th in exchange for a profound difference in lifestyle. You give up everything that goes along with living on 10th, including a choice of 25 Pho restaurants within walking distance, but she gained this whole project, a new life.
John had this idea that he was going to sell his house and he was going to buy a house down in that neighborhood for less money than he is going to sell his house for. It is going to be part of this story! He sold his house and the market seemed to be flattening, he didn't sell it for what he thought he was going to. The market also never stopped rising in the South because the Southern city had been underpriced. John was terrified that he had sold his house in a depressed market and was now trying to buy a house in a heated-up market.
All summer long, for the last five months, John has been looking at houses every morning, every afternoon, and every evening. He has been touring them, chewing on them, trying to picture himself in them, while the houses in the South-end continued to rise in price and the amount of money he had to spend remained stagnant or declined.
He didn't like any of the houses he saw, either! Eventually he started looking at houses that he couldn't afford and the banks would have loaned him the money for the lake house that he had made an offer on, he could have bought it and it would have been fine, but he would have spent every last penny he had access to. It would have needed all that work and he couldn't have afforded it. He would have been living in drywall dust.
The house that John is in the process of buying now is $250.000 less than the lake house and it is less than he sold the farm for, which means he did it! He spent 18 months pursuing this story and he eventually found a house that he loved and would love to live in. He did it! If he were a better person he would feel pride, he would say: ”You did it!” His sister would say that he manifested it and he would roll his eyes at her.
John stuck to it, he suffered through it, and he spread that suffering to his mom, his sister, his daughter, her mother, and everyone who listens to all of his shows. They all had to suffer along as he agonized, but he did what he set out to do: "Knock on wood!" A million things could still happen, we could all get struck by a lightning, but a month from now John will take possession of a house that he is going to live in for at least a decade.
It is going to be a place that he will pour his energy in. He is going to be working on it, he is going to be making it into a thing, and hopefully he has learned from his experience with the farm that he needs to do that work and not just let it molder and fester: ”If you want a window in there, then put the window in and don't let the lack of that window become a cudgel that you use to punish yourself!” The lack of a window isn't the problem, but the problem is the failure to proceed.
John's new house has an intact bomb shelter, which is right up his alley. He had been looking at houses built in the 1950s in a neighborhood dominated by Boeing engineers, but why has he not seen any bomb shelters? Surely there are houses in this neighborhood that had bomb shelters built into them when they were new? There is also ham radio shit scrawled in the rafters of John's new house because the person probably worked on Apollo. His kids are still alive, they are who sold him the house, and John needs to do some research.
The basement was interesting and weird. One of the hallways went around a corner to a doorway that looked weird from the outside because it was built as a somewhat hardened position, a defensible zigzag. You can't get anything in there, you couldn't put a bed in that room. The interior walls of this room are made out of cinder blocks, but they are not load-bearing and inside there were four bunks for all family members and racks and racks of shelves for their supplies.
There is a clean air in and a dirty air out, and there are rust stains on the floor from 50 gallon (190 l) Civil Defense barrels with fresh water and government cheese. John’s jaw just hit the floor! It is a bomb shelter that still got the beds and not everybody wants that! John doesn’t need it either and he should probably tile it and turn it into a Russian bath. He now has a bomb shelter with a hardened entry point, and although as a bomb shelter aficionado he would have built that entry point differently he is not going to try and fix it now. The prior owner has been defending that position for 65 years, it was good enough for him!
In the process of purchasing this house all of John's potential energy becomes kinetic energy. He cannot move into this house and unpack his sentimentality, arrange it on shelves, go back to being sedentary and self-recriminatory, and rejoin his life already in progress. For the last year and a half he has been focusing on the external process of putting himself into a place where he can begin (a new chapter).
It is completely backwards! Any guru would have said: ”It doesn't matter where you live‚ you just need to get right with the universal oneness!” and Jason Finn would say: ”You just need to eat more kale!” He would love to be John’s guru, even if he in all of his fucking Schützengruben has been saying: ”Get right with God first!” Now all John has to do is work on the electrical, improve this house, and improve himself!
BONUS CONTENT
John having bought a house (RW163)
John did not keep track how many houses he wound up looking at. One of the great things last night was when he took Redfin off his phone so that he no longer has to look at it every day and he no longer has to look at that little red circle of notifications piling up. It felt like a victory! Who knows how many houses have gone by the wayside!
John can get into the house one month from now, but if possible he will get in there sooner. He has two lenders and he is going to pit them against one another to fight, something he usually never does: ”Okay guys, you want my business? Go at each other and let’s see what you can do!”, but why shouldn’t he get them trying to kill each other? He got two offers, one of them was for 3.9% and one was 3.5%. One of them is just on a piece of paper while a form has been filled out for the other one.
One listener said: ”I miss the times when you spoke about things other than real estate!”, followed by a sad face, the incomplete kind of sad face. Dan is fine with emoji, but if you are doing text-emoji you have to include the dash and you can’t do a colon and then an open parenthesis and think that is a frowny face. A colon followed by an open parenthesis means nothing! You must have the dash! Otherwise you could also leave all the vowels out of the words when you type them. The dash is the one vowel that you have got to have it!
How to handle being excluded from a group that you care about (RW163)
Hi Dan and John,
I’m a longtime listener and Patreon supporter. Dan might recognize my name and email address but I would like to stay anonymous for this. A few weeks ago I was made to leave an online community that I deeply valued for reasons I am not entirely clear about. I am aware and acknowledge there were things I did that were bad, primarily that the community became my chief sounding board after my job became a difficult and stressful experience due to personnel changes. That is a separate story, but in short I got a new boss that transformed my work environment from trusting and supportive to one where I was untrusted and unsupported and I handled it poorly.
When it was explained why I was being removed from the community it was mentioned that I had made others in the community uncomfortable and that is the part I don’t fully understand. I asked for details or specific instance that pushed things over, but answers were not forthcoming. I feel guilty and I hate the idea that I caused harm to people I care about. The guilt is compounded because I didn’t know I was hurting them and I didn’t know what I was doing that hurt them. I still don’t know beyond the vaguest outlines and a couple of specific instances that I admit were my fault, that I thought I had done my best to make up for. If I knew the full extent of what I did wrong I would still feel guilty, but I would at least have an understanding of what I need to do differently in the future.
The entire experience, especially coming on the heels of losing my job (I have since become re-employed) has me feeling a sensation that I felt a lot through my life, that people don’t actually like me or my company, that they only tolerate me until they have had enough and want to be rid of me. I’m fully aware this is not true. I have relationships online and offline that have lasted for many years, a childhood and adolescence of social isolation and bullying however combined to make it difficult for me not to believe the negative thought pattern sometimes.
My question is I suppose twofold: Have either of you found yourself on the outs from a group of people you considered an important part of your lives and, if so, how did you handle it?
Thank you for all the great shows, and I appreciate you taking the time to read and discuss this one. Semi-anonymous Patreon supporter and listener.
There have always been instances where people have been chased out of the village and excluded from the community. One of the defining characteristics of a community is that some people are in and some people aren’t. In Online-life you can exclude someone from a community based on a lot less than it would take to run someone out of a village.
If just a couple of people say they are uncomfortable, depending on who the moderator is and how they feel responsible to the community, whether it is to to keep it completely free of controversy, or whether it is to protect vulnerable members from less vulnerable members, or however they take their responsibility, they do have a lot of authority to do a keystroke that can be extremely devastating to the person excluded and there is no recourse. That is true in many other places in life that aren’t online. A lot of things happen where there is no recourse!
Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Ask Me Another, is a really delightful and overwhelming guy with a lot of energy and a lot of feelings and opinions. He had a beautiful life with a wife, two daughters, a lovely family, and a nice house, but at some point something went sour between him and his wife and his wife convinced his daughters that he was a bad guy, which in his version not only is not true, but he never was a bad guy.
Somehow he got mischaracterized after he and his wife separated and his daughters turned against him. He is more or less John’s age and he is living a life where he has no contact at all with his teenage daughters and is watching them grow into adulthood, go off to college, go to the prom, and graduate. Not only does he have no contact, but even if he sends them a letter of congratulation it comes back unopened. He has no appeal!
There is nothing he can do or say that will not make it worse. Anytime he tries to contact them and say: ”Wait, I’m your dad! I want to be part of your lives!”, it is received as further evidence of his bad character. It is a crime of disinclusion and all Peter can do is live without any recourse. He cannot contact his daughters, he cannot convince them to love him or to accept his love, and the only thing anyone can say is: ”You just have to wait!”
He could be a 70 year old man and have children in their 40s who still don’t talk to him because in his estimation he was misrepresented to them by their mother as part of a divorce controversy at a tender age when they took their mother’s take on things. John can imagine no greater pain, other than to lose a child, but you have effectively lost a child while your child is still there in the same town.
To be excluded from a community is devastating, and to have no recourse and to just accept it is hard. You just want to know the truth or the answer: ”All right, fine! I’m not wanted here, I can’t be a part of this, or you don't want to see me anymore, but I just want to know why!" Dan thinks that if it is possible to explain, then the person who is pushing the person out owes it to them to at least say: ”This is my side of it, this is how I feel. What’s done is done, but here is your takeaway!” Why wouldn’t they tell him?
John says they don’t owe it to him, which is the painful part about it. He isn’t owed anything and at a crucial level he understands and he knows that. The people on the other side probably also sense that he doesn’t just want an explanation, but he wants an explanation to make an appeal based on that. He is not just like: ”Oh, you think I’m an asshole? Okay, thanks for telling me! All I needed was an explanation. I’ll go quietly now!”, but he wants them to say: ”You did this and you said that and you said this!” to give him an opportunity to say: ”Well, that’s not what I meant!”
He wants to appeal, but they don’t want to consider his appeal. With all the sympathy for him in the world they don’t owe him anything and he isn’t going to get that satisfaction. Imagine standing up in front of the town on the stage, saying: ”Thank you everyone for giving me this hearing! I would like to explain what I was really doing when you caught me poisoning the well, or what I was really doing when I said those inflammatory things that I now regret!” and town replies: ”No, we would still like you to go!” There is no recourse, it is still as painful, and you still have to go.
The online world has eliminated the face-to-face confrontation, but with some aspects of online life we are at a turning point or even past a turning point where those of us who remember prior times just need to understand that online rules are never going to go back and comport with real life rules. Holding up real life rules and online rules and trying to make a common set of rules out of them is a folly of old people. Never the twain shall meet! Online rules have their own, and you don’t get an infinite number of appeals, particularly in a smaller privately moderated forum.
Twitter can kick you off for some violation of rules, but at least you can appeal. The comedian Dave Hill got permanently kicked off of Twitter because he said something to the effect of: ”I hope the president burns in a fire!” Twitter is going through a period where they are managing their accounts and they are both-sides-ing it: ”If these Nazis have to go, then Liberal comedians who call Donald Trump a ding dong also have to go because we are a fair and judicious platform!”, but a Facebook group or any group moderated by a person or a handful of people is their little world, their fiefdom, and you can’t appeal to the law.
People have always drawn a line somewhere around themselves and there are very few people who if you asked them: ”How are you socially?” - ”I’m amazing socially! I’ve got great friends!”, or maybe a huge proportion of people will say: ”My social live is great!” The comparatively small group of people that John knows personally do draw a line somewhere and say: ”On the other side of this line people seem to be having a good time and be socially at ease. On my side of this line I do not know how to be with other people a lot of time!”
The important part of this email is the idea that their listener suffers from a feeling that he is unlikable, which he traces to his childhood experience. He provided a lot of information in terms of acknowledging that he is not proud of what he did in this community and how he behaved. He is linking it to a feeling he had for a long time or he is not fully comfortable with his position in the world socially. He is doing what we all do, the thing that will one day define our era, which is going back to his past, his childhood, and linking it to experiences he had.
All of that relates to his departure from this community, in some ways directly, in some ways tangentially, in some ways not at all, but it is mostly irrelevant. The issue is: How do you outwardly bear this banishment and exclusion with grace and ultimately: How do you bear it? How do you move on? He is always going to care about it, but how can he accept it and accept that there is no appeal: "I fucked up, I want to make it right, but I am not allowed to!”
That of all things happens in life. You fuck up and they won’t let you back to make it right. You have to accept that and find a new path and close the door on that chapter, because in order to make amends the person who is receiving the amends has to consent. They have to want your apology and you can’t force an amend or you would just be committing another crime.
The other person is not obligated to accept your apology and to expect them to is controlling. It is the nature of people. There are apologies from people that John doesn’t want, because: ”Fuck you! Fuck your apology!” All you can do is walk away, reflect, and not make that mistake again. Think hard about what happened, how you reacted, how you performed, and what it was about. Was it about a childhood of bullying? Was it about being controlling and not having filters? That is important and valid information to put into a manila envelope and carry under your arm for a while!
The listener has John’s sympathy. It is hard! You will never know and that is part of your punishment. Punishment is maybe the wrong word because we don’t know what he did or what he did wrong, and maybe there is a misinterpretation or someone said something or someone passed something around about him. But it is their intended punishment!
Listener Feedback (RW163)
Dan and John,
My name is Tony, 52 years young, 5’9” (175 cm), 155 pounds (70 kg) most days. I just wanted you both to know how compelling your cold open recent episode (see RW158) and accompanying bonus content have been to me over the past day. I was on my way to get my car washed when I was listening to John share his music with us. When I got to the car wash place I immediately opened Patreon on my phone and changed my membership contribution from $2 to $5 per month. Not to stop hearing ads, not to continue getting to listen to bonus content, but I did it because of how much both of you mean to me in the sense that your creative efforts have had such a massive impact on my life.
I have stated this in previous emails, but you need to hear it again! I probably will never get to meet either of you unless you come to Charlotte North Carolina for some reason, and the only way I can really let you know how much Road Work means to me is through my words and my commitment to your creative work. I know a few more dollars per month from me is not going to change the world, but I cannot tell you how happy I was after changing my account settings, knowing that it would help a little more than it already has.
Again, thanks for all you do! Warm regards. Tony, PhD
That felt suspiciously like reading an Amazon 5-star review. Dan has mixed up his stack of emails and the ones about the Patreon are now mixed in with listener questions, giving him a hard time finding the next email.
The reason so many people contribute to their Patreon is because they feel compelled to thank them, a lot of the time primarily John, for the connection, for the honesty, for sharing, and for not being afraid to talk about certain stuff on the show. They share what is going on in their lives without holding back very much and they talk about a lot of things that other people aren’t talking about, whether it is John’s struggles with bipolar or other things like that. The guy who wrote in the beginning who doesn’t want to hear about real estate obviously wants to hear more about drug addiction, but now that John finally got a house again they will be able to get back to that.
Dan wanting to do a newsletter about the podcasting industry (RW163)
Dan has another podcast called Podcast Method which teaches people about podcasts and talks about podcasting news and stuff like that. Dan took a break from it while he was working really hard on Fireside, but now he is ready to come back to it. The suggestion from a lot of people was to not just continue to do that, but also do videos where he would show gear and review stuff on his YouTube channel.
Dan in an English major and writing is what he does best, but he misses writing. Among all the coding and podcasting the one thing he hasn’t really done in a long time is writing. It is easy to not do stuff unless he can really be accountable for it, even if it is just to himself. He used to have a blog called Hivelogic where most people who have been following him for a while know him from. It helped him to start 5by5 because he had many readers there and when he talked about it they were supportive.
For the last year Dan has been playing with the idea of doing a newsletter focused on the podcast industry, but not: ”Here is today’s news in a newsletter!”, but: ”Here are the latest trends I have been seeing over the last week. Here are my thoughts on them!” with analysis and opinion. The people who are not afraid to share their opinions and who are providing more analysis are the most interesting, for example daily newsletters with the premise: ”Here are the 5 most important things that happened in the last 24 hours!” Dan loves those, but that is not what he does.
Besides his friend Adam Curry and maybe a couple of other people Dan doesn’t know anybody who has been in the podcast space as long as he has, which doesn’t mean that he knows more than what other people know, or that he is somehow more wise, but it provides him with a different perspective than a lot of people have. Whenever he meets someone who says they have a podcast he will ask: ”How long have you been doing it?” - ”Six months! I am a veteran now!” - ”Yeah?”
John is not from the foundation era of podcasting, he is not OG, but his first episode was on September 9th, 2011, which was 8 years ago. Before that he didn’t know what a podcast was. The first podcast he ever did was on August 30th 2011 when he guested on Back to Work when Dan was out of town: ”With Dan on sabbatical Merlin is joined by John Roderick of The Long Winters to talk about life as a bull in a china closet, craving real world constraints, making better records, and being banned for life from Interpol’s corn chip bowl." The title was: You can polish AC/DC all day long. At the time Merlin had something with Scott Simpson and Lonely Sandwich (Adam Lisagor, the podcast is called You Look Nice Today), but John didn’t know what it was. Just a week later they started Roderick on the Line.
John is definitely not from the foundation era and he is not even from the second era, but he is from the third era of podcasters. Dan had it all broken down into eight different areas of podcasting and he firmly situated John in the dawn of era three. Post-Serial it became just blah blah blah. Dan started podcasting in 2006 and nothing good was going on back then!
By 2009 he was podcasting as his full time job and he was in a situation where it was easy to get 10.000 downloads on a show, but it was really hard, and it still is, to get 40.000, so he just kept doing more shows and selling ads on them to make a living. At one point he was doing three or four shows a day, each one was an hour or two, and afterwards he also had to edit them all and he did video for all of them. He is very glad that this time period is over with because it was very hard!
He was doing shows with Mike Montero, John Gruber, Marco Arment, and John Siracusa, it was peak 5by5 time around 2011/2012 and in probably 2011 Fortune 500 did an article on him. This was really the big time! Since then Dan was able to scale things back and start other things.
Dan feels he has something to share on that and he wants to do it as a newsletter. He has always loved newsletters and he likes them better than reading blog posts. He can listen to a podcast while he is doing something else, whether he is walking, jogging at the gym, rowing, driving in the car, but there are times where he wants to read something.
Dan loves getting newsletters, there are a few he really enjoys, he used to do one himself a long time ago and now he wants to do another one, but he doesn’t want to screw it up. He had already screwed up their Patreon situation because John wanted nothing to do with it and Dan had to do it in secret to prove to John that it was going to be a good thing. Maybe if John had been involved he would have told Dan to the donation and $5 and they would have been hugely successful from day one.
Dan has been researching the newsletter business for a long time now and there are many different models to do it. Back in 2011/2012 there was a period when 5by5 was the place to go to for all geek podcasts, but since then a lot of other places are doing really good shows and the advertisers are spreading their money out across all of them, as they should. Back in the days Squarespace would come in and just buy an ad spot on every show and they sent a giant fat-ass check. There just was no-one else.
Then all of a sudden there was a huge explosion in podcasting and a lot of those new shows were really good and the advertisers rightfully put their money on those. Dan is now looking for ways to supplement his income and he is thinking about a podcast-industry-adjacent focused newsletter, which is going to be interesting to podcasters who care about things that happen in the world of podcasting.
He might talk about new gear, he might share his thoughts on trends like dynamic ad insertion, or a new company might come up and Dan might check them out and share his thoughts on them. It is not going to be a vehicle to promote Fireside because he has enough other vehicles to do that. He might talk less about the world of podcast hosting because he doesn’t want to be biased in that.
It would be a wonderful way to share his thoughts instead of just keeping them to himself or writing them down and sharing them with nobody. It feels like it would be a commitment, though. Dan is very careful when he starts something new. Throughout most of his life up until 10 years ago he used to say ”Yes!” to everything and he would try to do too much. He had stress, anxiety, gastro-esophageal reflux disease GERD, heart palpitations, insomnia, and all these other things as a result of all the stress, so Dan is very very very careful now whenever he tries to start something new.
Whenever he is going to devote a significant amount of time to something, and he would spend a lot of time on it throughout the whole week, he is taking time away from other things and he does want to get compensated for the hard work he is going to put into it, but he is not sure yet how to do that. He is against charging for the newsletter itself because that becomes a barrier for people getting it and he wants it to be out there. There might still be a way to get something back for the time that he will be putting into this and that will be taken away from writing Fireside code or doing an extra show a week or whatever it is.
The audience would be anyone in the podcasting industry: People who are podcasters themselves, podcast advertisers, people making software or any kind of service for podcasting, people who make gear for podcasting, really anyone in the whole industry or adjacent industries. If something crazy happens with copyright stuff that has to do with YouTube, he might talk about that because that is connected to podcasting, too. It is not going to be like: ”Sure came out with a new version of the SM7B which is exactly like the old version. Here is a link!”
If Dan is going to do it he is going to put his all into it because that is the way he works. Sponsors in the newsletter could be one way to monetize it. He could have a Patreon for it or something like that where you sign up to donate a certain amount before you get it, but that is a barrier for people. Other people hate ads! Maybe he will release it for free and there will be extra material, but he doesn’t really like that because that implies a lot of extra work. It is going to be once a week, not daily, so it can’t be four days for free and the fifth day costs money. Dan doesn’t know yet!
John looking forward to reading this newsletter
The financials are the big question that everybody has about podcasting, newsletters, music, and everything else on the Internet now: ”How do any of us make money making wonderful things that people love to consume, but they don’t want to pay for if they can get for free?” John no longer feels like there is anything contemptible about people trying to get things for free. Why wouldn’t you?
Imagine the porn industry: They are making this great porn, but everybody is just trying to get it for free! Porn is hard to make and people who are making porn aren’t rich, so pay for your porn, but the whole world says: ”I don’t pay for porn! There is so much free porn! Somebody paid for it and then I get it for free!”
People yell at John all the time about saying that computer-maths are bullshit, but porn is harder work and requires more talent than working as a coder for Amazon. John sure as shit knows that making music is harder in every way! It isn’t just an intellectual exercise, it doesn’t just require the hours, but it is a life consuming pursuit! A lot of people who have jobs are going to say there are other rewards for making music besides money and that is true because as a musician you are in that life all the way, or at least you should be. You don’t just make music 9 to 5, but it chews you up!
There is a lot of talk right now about how we can help the kids get into music, but John is increasingly less and less willing to listen to grownups worry about the kids because the kids are going to worry for themselves just like John worried about ourselves. He is worried about the grownups, people his age, musicians, podcasters, writers and actors who are 50 and who never got a shot and never made it even in a little way.
Dan has made it, he built an empire, although it is a small empire and Dan thinks it should be bigger. John is one of the few people from his world who can talk about buying a house on this show for a year. John owned a house and has never worked for a salary and has not worked an hourly job since 1998. That is rare!
John doesn’t know either how to make money off of a newsletter, and that would be something Dan could talk about in the newsletter. He should absolutely do a newsletter, but be reminded that as with all industry letters there are going to be people like Marco Arment who have very technical interest and people like John who are podcasters already and who don’t know what they need to be interested in.
If Dan said: ”Here is a new thing!” John's reply would be: ”I didn’t even know that was a thing!” Dan should introduce people who are generally savvy to things that they weren’t aware of and that they are curious about. He is going to have the mass of people who would be interested in that, just like the people who read music magazines or any other creative stuff.
There is an enormous number of people who go to book readings and are part of the book culture, but they really want to be a writer, a musician, or a podcaster, and they are looking for hints and shortcuts. If Dan said: ”Here is a new thing that will help get dynamic ads into your podcasts!”, people are going to be writing that down and will ask: ”Am I going to be a successful podcaster once I get that?”
Dan might write articles about some things he has noticed that make a good or a bad episode: ”Here are things that really good podcasters have in common that seem unique to them, but when you look at it across the whole spectrum you see that there are patterns.”
People are going to be reading this thing who are wondering: ”I want to be a podcaster! What do I do?” Those people come up to John all the time, and they used to come up to him with regards to music: ”All I want is to be as big as Jacob Dylan and The Wallflowers. I don’t want everything. I don’t want to be a huge star. I just want to be as big as Jacob Dylan and The Wallflowers.” - ”What? Jacob Dylan and The Wallflowers are enormous!” - ”Well, I mean they are not big like Pearl Jam!” - ”They are bigger than you will ever be! You will never meet Jacob Dylan and The Wallflowers. You won’t ever use a bathroom that they have used! Get your expectations right! If you could sell 75 tickets to a show on a Tuesday night you are a fucking star, relative to what you have got, which is just attitude. I don’t even know if you have songs! All you have is an expectation that the world owes you something!”
People say: ”Everybody has a podcast, so I should have one! I like to talk, and all I need to do is find that secret thing to get listeners!” Listeners are perceived to be 80.000 people who have nothing else to do today, who don’t have any preferences or taste of their own, who are just waiting to be told to listen to a show, and who blindly follow what they are being told.
Marco or John are the people who are probably going to make up the bulk of Dan's respondents and he needs to find a way to charge those people or at least make them suffer, and that is where people get usurious or unscrupulous because you start to do things like: ”Buy my bucket of Dan Benjamin’s disaster food! If you want to be a podcaster, buy Dan Benjamin’s bucket of podcast audience!”
John agrees that a newsletter is a wonderful thing and he looks forward to Dan doing it. A tight curated newsletter about podcasting would be a thing that John and a lot of people would gobble up. They are all so freaking in the dark! None of us know how many listeners we have and none of us know how to prove that! We all suspect that at one level our listenership is underreported, we also are told that our listenership is overreported.
Everybody got a dog in the race, everybody got a secret, and there are all these proprietary and secret worlds. John recently talked to somebody at Megaphone who said that they wanted to write a book to explain to people that ownership of the RSS is the whole game. No matter what else is in play, if you go into a business arrangement with someone and you don’t possess the RSS in your hot little hands then you don’t own anything.
John wished he had known that. Right now the RSS for this show is in Dan’s hands and John trusts him. The RSS for Roderick on the Line is in Merlin’s hands and John trusts him, but the big issue for John continues to be dealing with iHeart Media (see RW157): They continue to possess the RSS to The Omnibus and will not surrender it. It has been a nightmare for John, but it was not a thing anybody had mentioned.
It wasn’t a thing that occurred John to ask for when they went into business together, and now he would never say a word to anybody that didn’t start with: ”Own your RSS!” It is the type of thing in a newsletter that would actually help people, a thing Dan already knew. He would never go into business with somebody without having a clear arrangement.
The shitty part of it is: They knew, and they did it on purpose, and John didn’t know when they knew he didn’t know and that is why they did it. It is the part of it that is the most infuriating about John’s story: He was played, he was a nubile little boy, walking into a situation where they knew they would take advantage of him, and they knew that and John was taken advantage of and it didn’t need to be that way.
During the late 1990s John heard from a couple of different bands who signed major label deals and who spent a lot of time negotiating with the label to ensure that they had complete control over the cover art and the production of the music. They really fought for creative control, but what they didn’t fight for was the money, the terms of the deal, the length of the contract, and the recording budgets. They felt like they had really screwed the label by getting all this creative control over their art while the label just laughed all the way to the bank.
The situation with John's show The Omnibus
When Ken and John made their deal with iHeart media they worked pretty hard on that contract to ensure that they would be well taken care of when the show was a hit, and they did not know or spent any time thinking about something like the RSS, because in the contract it says that they own the intellectual property.
They said they usually don’t give the intellectual property to somebody, they usually retain that, but for Ken and Jon they would make an exception and let them own the show. Ken and John own everything about it and iHeart Media was just their distributor. ”Great! Handshake on that!”, but the RSS wasn’t included specifically in the intellectual property.
What is included in the contract is that they have exclusive rights to the distribution of all episodes of this show that were released up until the day that John and Ken terminated their deal, which means that they can’t give them the RSS because they need it to continue to populate episodes from 2018 with ads for baldness creams and payday loan companies.
John and Ken don’t have the rights to their RSS because iHeart Media interprets the distribution clause of the contract as giving them exclusive ownership of the RSS, which they continue to present to them as a small matter: ”We just can’t do that, sorry!” Meanwhile every episode of The Omnibus, even though John and Ken are now independent, has to go to iHeart Media and is posted on their stream and hosted by their company. They could shut it off at any moment!
Ken and John knew enough to get the intellectual property, they were smart enough to ensure that they own the name Omnibus and the logo and the concept, they just don’t own any of the episodes up until two months ago, and they don’t own the actual portal that people subscribe to. If John had read Dan’s newsletter two years ago, he would be in a much different situation. Honestly, if John would have told them that this was a deal breaker within the contract, they knew what they were doing and they might have fought it.
More of Dan's thoughts
What if the only thing that they do a year from now is this show and that newsletter? John will be contributing editor and Dan will be the writer and that’s it, that is all either of them needs to do! Dan won't have to do any other shows, he won't have to do Fireside, and John won't have to play any shows anymore unless he wants to and he can do "an afternoon with John on the green" and wouldn’t even have to charge for it, but it would just be an open air amphitheater facing the ocean. He wouldn’t have to worry about money, all because of this newsletter.
There are many different models for how to make these newsletters work. One that is free, another where you donate something, advertisers, all this stuff! The thing is: You can’t change it later. Dan can’t start out saying it is free and then close the door on someone, or say people would get the one from two months ago for free. You have to start out with a model that is sound. You can make it free later, but you can’t charge for it later.
A couple of people were upset that they were changing what you get at the $5 level versus the $1 level for the Road Work Patreon. Some people were grandfathered in to continue to get the stuff, which they should. All patrons get this personal private content, but to get the episode without sponsors you have to give $5 a month or more. People who just donate a measly $4-2 only get this.
John doesn’t think that it would be very easy to start a newsletter out of thin air and charge for it, so Dan would have to figure out another way to make money. He could have hyperlinks to products that if people go buy on Amazon he would earn money. Dan would probably provide two links: If you want to support me click this link, if you don’t click this link.
John is subscribed to a newsletter that is a daily digest of the news and it just links to news sites. He doesn’t know how it makes money. He is also subscribed to Next Draft, a news digest edited by Dave Tell, who is an old friend of Dan, but Dan hasn’t talked to him in too long. At the top of this newsletter he got an ad for Firefox, and the ad thing is probably a good way to do it. Firefox is supporting his show and everything else is just links to newspaper articles. John doesn’t know how much Firefox pays him, but this newsletter is a lot of work! He probably has a lot of people follow him, but how does that translate into money for him? Dan is going to ask him.