Really Specific Stories: Jason Snell Duration: 58:58 SPEAKERS Martin Feld, Jason Snell Martin Feld 00:21 Thank you very much for joining Really Specific Stories, Jason; it's wonderful to have you as a guest. Jason Snell 00:26 Thank you for having me. Martin Feld 00:27 Now, first question, how did you first get into podcasts? Jason Snell 00:31 Oh, wow... um, OK, so Steve Jobs announced podcast support in iTunes; I think that was really the sign that we needed to up our game when I was at Macworld at paying attention to podcasts. It really was like one of those things where I felt like we ought to do it at Macworld, and so I had one of our editors there, one of our junior editors, start doing a podcast, which is, you know, essentially some version of that continues at Macworld to this day. I think it's a video now weekly, but it's the basically the Macworld podcast. But at the start, we even, it was a section it was like, Geek Factor was the name of it, it was a section that was literally extra-nerdy stuff that we thought would be interesting to our audience. It was a section that I added, because I wanted, I thought we had a nerdy audience who wanted to see the nerdy stuff you could do with, with Macs. Jason Snell 01:20 That's where it started. And uh, so that was 2005-ish, I would say, which is that sort of like initial thing where podcasts were happening, and Apple embraced it, because they really liked the idea that people were using the iPod. And then in those days, it was a very static, sort of like, iTunes checked to see if there were new episodes and then when you connected your iPod, it loaded them onto your iPod, and that was podcasting. And that's how that worked. And I, I also got into it as a listener, that was part of it too. There were a couple of very early podcasts that I loved. And um, so that inspired me as well, that that as a medium that it was something that people were gonna like, and I, having covered tech for a long time, I've come to the realisation that the real superpower, if you will, of anybody who's sort of covering tech or paying attention to tech, is that we get to see the future—that, you know, you do stuff and say, 'Everybody's gonna be doing this in five years'. And podcasting was definitely one of those where I thought, this is a thing, right, like audio on demand, I see the appeal today, it's going to take a little time, it turns out, I think it really took until smartphones (right?), and the ability to just have your play device be always on the network and always updating and always with you. And that was the gonna be the thing that kind of pushed it over the edge. Jason Snell 02:34 And that was in the kind of second wave, right? Because 2005 was before the iPhone. So, you know, there was a second wave when the iPhone came out and then there were podcast apps that started to come out for the iPhone. And there were podcasts, tech podcasts sort of like came back, and that's in the 2008/9/10 era, where sort of tech podcasting took over. And, and there I think it was that thing of like, in five years, this is going to be really huge (for real) instead of it being just: this is a curiosity; it became, like, this is going somewhere. And so that was, you know, Hypercritical with John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin, was in that era, and Build and Analyze with Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin. Dan, Dan really kind of specialised in the, um—and full credit to him for doing it—the idea of he knew about the technical side, and he could be a foil to talk to interesting people who were not going to set up and edit and produce their own podcasts themselves. And so instead, he became a foil for them and an enabler for them to get their voice out there because he felt it had value. And I, it was a great move on his part, and I still do that to this day on some podcasts: is, is I do a podcast called Downstream with Julie Alexander from Parrot Research. And she is just brilliant at the subject of the business of streaming media. And I felt like she needed a podcast and so I am her enabler for that. That's basically, I make sure that it happens. And I did that with Tim Goodman, from The Hollywood Reporter for a bunch of years too, where it's like somebody needed—Tim's original podcast at the San Francisco Chronicle was one of those first podcasts I fell in love with. And when he left the Chronicle, I sort of took it upon myself to find a way to enable him to have that podcast voice. Jason Snell 04:13 So that was the genesis of it and then personally for me, other than guesting on some Macworld podcasts and sort of instigating them, in 2010, having a conversation on Twitter with a bunch of friends about a bunch of sci-fi novels that we had read, that led me to start The Incomparable, which is still going and that's my sort of hobby podcast. Being a tech person and writing about tech stuff, I do a lot of, like: let's try this because it will be a fun thing for me to try and maybe I will write about it for my job at some point down the road. It'll, it's a way for me to learn, you know? And so I do a lot of more professional, more key-to-my-career kind of podcasts now than The Incomparable, but The Incomparable is where I sort of honed my skills and met a lot of good people and set up a podcast network. And anyway, that's 2000-... August 2010. So, I have basically been recording at least one (if not many, many more) podcast(s) a week since August of 2010. It's been a long time now. Martin Feld 05:11 Wow. Jason Snell 05:11 One year, I counted how many episodes of podcasts I'd been on in a year, and I stopped after that one time. It's like, I don't want to know, I don't actually want to know how many hours of podcasts I do in a year. Martin Feld 05:21 Thank you for that really comprehensive history, because you've really given a beautiful timeline of the development and the changes along the way. I'm interested, because you started off talking about that time that you were at Macworld, and you just described there, getting to work in tech is like seeing the future. When you were writing at Macworld, naturally, you're interested in writing about technology; that's a different kind of medium or expressing yourself. When you had that first exposure to podcasts as a medium for entertainment or conveying information about news and technology, what was it that really captured your interest about the medium? And how did you feel different using it, whether you were producing or listening versus writing? Jason Snell 06:07 I think, so Tim Goodman, who was the TV critic at the Chronicle (uh, San Francisco Chronicle newspaper) for many years, and then at The Hollywood Reporter, Tim always joked that podcasting was 'radio without the listeners'. And I always took that to heart but I, also it says something about the, the idea that it is radio on demand, and it doesn't need to meet, have the the huge audience like a broadcast medium. The way that you're judged is by having as broad an audience as you can possibly get. And there are different roles and there're different slices but in the end, if you're going to have a radio station, and there are only 10 of them, then you really can't serve 40 people with that. And podcasts changed that to be: it can be who you want to reach. And as a listener was also it can be what I want to hear, because although I did listen to radio, news and talk over the years (a bit), podcasting was: I was deciding what the content was and it was content that therefore was for me, in one way or another. And I didn't have to worry... the, the magic of it that was readily apparent to me at the time was: it didn't need to appeal to tens of thousands of people; it needed to appeal to a small number of people—and I was one of them. And that, and that was magical, because the stuff that's more focused on you is better than the stuff that's focused on everybody. And you happen to be under the spotlight of whatever the the beam of light is, right? Like, it's it's this is a finely-focused, highly-focused beam right down on you and it's powerful. Jason Snell 07:43 As a media creator, from the very beginning I've been open on the idea that we're in a new media era. I keep saying this, because I have definitely become over the years, uh, seen by especially a younger generation of people who maybe remember me from when they were kids, and they were reading their Macworld magazines or whatever. When I was in college, I started an Internet magazine that was a short-fiction magazine called InterText. And the San Diego Supercomputer Center gave me an award for like creative use of the technology; we distributed that by a postscript file by a text file and via a listserv and all these things. So when I went to MacUser to start my career, you know, I didn't go in there as a magazine person, I went in there as a media person who knew that the only place I was going to get a job covering technology was at a, at a magazine that was, you know, and the only way you could get a job in media and journalism at all was going to be newspapers or magazines. So even though I knew that the medium was already pushing past it, that there was already on the horizon, looking into the future, the Internet and digital distribution of all this stuff, that wasn't where I could get a job. Jason Snell 08:50 First thing I did when I went in the door at MacUser was say, 'We should have a website'. Like literally, and I was told, 'No', I was told that the future was on CompuServe, not on the web. Oops! So, uh, they listened to me, I guess eventually, but my point is that I've always been thinking the bigger picture about how do you serve audiences in different medium, media, mediums, whatever you want to say! And so podcasting, a lot of people just default to: 'Well, that's not what we do'. And my thought was always, this is a new medium, let's explore it. And professionally at Macworld it was, if we can do a radio show, just to the people who care about Macworld, that's never going to be on the real radio, but we could do a podcast and they can, it can be a companion to the magazine and reach other people who don't read magazines. And let's, let's try it! Um, and as an individual with The Incomparable, it was a very similar kind of thing of like, well, this is fun. Let's try it. Let's see where this takes me. Jason Snell 09:44 Just like that, doing that, you know, Internet fiction magazine in 1991, it was a very similar thing in 2010 with The Incomparable or... and I had a blog in the '90s too, called TV, that was similarly like, let's try this medium of a blog that—they weren't even called blogs then, but that's what it was. It was a group blog. So, from a media-creation standpoint, that was my thought about it, was like, this is an opportunity to try something new. And those don't always work out but I thought it was worth a try. And in the end, it actually, you know, it very much did work out. But the point was, you could even think of yourself as a 'magazine person' or a 'print-media person'. And in that era, like, there were lots of people who did, and they had a really hard time, because the way technology was moving, that was just not going to be viable for them. Or you can embrace the new and say, 'Let's try this one, let's see what it's like!' And that's what I hoped, it's what some of us did with podcasting, not everybody, but some of us did. Martin Feld 10:42 In this period, you've basically talked about experimenting and diving into a whole heap of different channels, writing on multiple sites about different topics. At that time, and even through today, you had technologies like RSS underpinning that. How important to you are delivery mechanisms or protocols or frameworks like that? Was that something you were thinking about a lot at the time? Were you focused on the content? How do you remember things from that era? Jason Snell 11:12 In the early days, I feel like, I mean, I can't speak for everybody. I'm sure, like, Tim Goodman wasn't focused on the RSS feed, right? But I'm sure Ricky Gervais, uh, who was a very, had a very, very early successful podcast, wasn't focused on the RSS. There was somebody doing that for him. As a tech person, I was my own person who was worried about that. And I would say, when you're in the early days of the medium, and maybe it's part of the fun of it, but part of it is: how does this get out, right? Publishing is still, as a word, right? Publishing, you need to get it out there some way. Otherwise, you're just making something and then nobody hears it. So there was always a question. And in fact, oftentimes, that was the constraint. I did a podcast for tv.org; we did like seven episodes of it, it was low-bit-rate, and, you know, we thought we were going to break our server, because at that point, those files were huge and every single person who listened had to download the file, and I thought we were going to, like, lose our server, basically, or have to pay a huge bill. Jason Snell 12:12 So you did start to get worried about how can we do this in a way that makes sense, and what is the RSS feed and what's the mechanism by which the RSS feed gets built? And I would say that that is nothing new. Um, if you're on the cutting edge and the tools don't exist yet, you end up having to sweat that stuff. So when I mentioned InterText earlier, you know, InterText started as I would literally post it to Usenet. And then I got a mailing list, I had to find a mailing list server, from which I could then post a notification, and then that turned into a multiple mailing lists, that would send out the file or would send out the notification that you could go download the file via FTP or from Usenet. I had to get an FTP server, which, I was a college student at the time and so the college had those things, and I was able to kind of get my hands on them. But like, it was a, you know, we, making in many ways, making the text file or the postscript file of the magazine issue—while still a lot of work—um, I was on my college newspaper at the time, we did the same thing there. I knew how to do it and so you could do it. The difference was with the newspaper, I could put the pages in a box and literally drive 40 minutes up the freeway to an offset press and they printed 10,000 copies and brought them back to campus in a truck, right? Uh, whereas it was on me to figure out how do you distribute a magazine on the Internet, and me and like two or three people who were trying it. Jason Snell 13:42 So, that's always been a case where you end up with, uh, one of the reasons when I say we see the future is because it's the nerds who are working out all those details and also creating. And then some nerds build the tools that make it easy to do those things, because they've worked out the details. And that lets people who are not as technical to come in and do the rest of it. And those are to varying degrees, right? The challenge with podcasting was always that it wasn't just RSS feed, and how do you tell people to subscribe and how do people know about it? And that's a very particular sort of, like, web-publishing knowledge base, but you also need an audio knowledge base, uh which, you know, most of us didn't have back then. It was like, 'I have a microphone, and then, like, GarageBand and maybe we can make a podcast'. That made podcasting, you know, those were the two things you need to do, is: you need to understand the audio technically, and you need to understand the distribution technically and that got easier as time went along. Jason Snell 14:38 But depending on what part of the era you're looking at, for any of these media, you end up in that position of, like, you kind of needed to figure it out, technically, and also make the content. And, and that's what was always a challenge. Doing tv.org, it was the same thing. It's like we were reading about TV every day for like three or four years. But you know, part of the motivation there was: I was testing out website software that let you do dynamic templating and stuff like that, and, and then writing about that for my day job, but also using it to learn. So, eventually these goes, these go in cycles and the tools get easier, but I think when you're out there on the cutting edge, that's a beautiful time, because you are there with a bunch of other people who are trying to figure out what the tools even should be in order to enable whatever that thing is. So today, where you can like literally open a web browser page and press a button and talking to a microphone, at the end, press... some of these services, press a button and it's a podcast. That's the ultimate end result right, which is now you don't have to worry about or a Substack is a good example of that right, which is, it's a blog, it's a mailing list, it's a ecommerce system, and they built it all in one thing. Isn't that nice? But when it started, you know, if you wanted to make a living on the Internet, you couldn't do that; you had to build a very hard-to-build infrastructure, um, and then over time, it gets easy. Martin Feld 15:59 I appreciate that you've illustrated the point of how much harder it was and how it's become easier, because that also plays into things like accessibility, uh, not just for people with certain needs or disabilities, but just making it accessible to every one. Jason Snell 16:13 Yeah, literally, literally anyone! Martin Feld 16:15 Absolutely, but there's also that question of interacting with people and audience. So, you've described being on all these different forums, webpages, blogs. Uh, I love how you described having to drive and print stuff and then deliver it. That's great! In terms of that shift in the history that you shared from being, uh, from writing for a publication with others to becoming an independent producer, how would you describe that feeling of building an audience over your career and over your hobby production as well? (Like you said, with The Incomparable) Has it felt different engaging with and building audience between earlier publications like Macworld through to today? Jason Snell 16:59 I feel like building an audience is the hardest thing, because when I get asked, like, 'How do I, how do I do a podcast? How do I, how do I do it?' I can, I can answer the technical questions, right? I can say, 'Do you have money for a microphone? Here's a microphone, here's a $99 microphone you can buy; here's $150 microphone, you can buy; and use this software, or um use this software. And you can use this web... this host or this host'. I can answer everybody's question on any budget about how to make a podcast; I can even give them advice about how to record and, and how to edit; and I can do all those things. I cannot give good clear, reliable advice on how to I get hundreds or thousands of people to listen. That I can't do. And my real answer is: it takes time, it takes a luck and it takes crossing over into places where other people have audiences. And that's really squishy. So all my other advice is really hard and fast and clear, and hopefully helpful, but that last part is the squishy part. Jason Snell 18:03 For me personally, I wrote articles for computer magazines, for, I don't know, 10 years? (Maybe a little less) And nobody knew who I was, other than I mean, my friends knew who I was, and I would meet with people and I made friends and all that. And that's good, you know? And that was an audience, I was building an audience of a sort, but it's a small audience. And then I had the good fortune to work at a magazine, where I was then the editor-in-chief, and the editor-in-chief had a page at the front of the magazine every month that was going out to half a million people, and it had my picture in it. And what I discovered was my name could be at the, in the byline of the cover story of the issue and nobody knew who I was. But when, once my picture was on a piece of paper in a magazine, everybody knew who I was—by name and by face. And that that was my moment of like, 'Oh, right, right...', because people don't pay attention to bylines, but they, they react to pictures. And then my picture was in the magazine for many, many years after that. And that was huge for me, especially when I went out on my own, because I had a level of name recognition and identification. I had been personified in a way that most people who work at magazines in those eras did not get. And uh, that was very helpful for me because when I did go out on my own, I think my last column even said, 'You can find me at this domain'—some temporary domain I set up. Jason Snell 19:36 But in the interim time, I'd also been doing side projects like The Incomparable, so that helped because I was building an audience there. And then I went out on my own and started a tech podcast and all that and I'm sure I only got a small percentage of the people who knew who I was from Macworld, but it was a great, you know, you take a fraction of a decent size and you end up with enough people to make a living doing it. But the other part of it that I haven't mentioned is that third part that I mentioned earlier, which is intersecting with other people and other people's audiences. And I'm a real believer in this, is: so much comes from being, you know, guesting on other people's podcasts, things like that, having people guest on your podcast. There is value in that because everybody's got a different audience; none of them are the same. So I had huge, I found huge value in guesting on Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech and MacBreak Weekly. I did that a bunch, and every time I did it, I would find I would, you know, people would follow me back, say, 'Oh, I like that guy'. And again, a tiny fraction but like I would pick up, I asked people who are members of my podcast network, where they heard of us. And a lot of them were like, I saw Jason on TWiT, and then I went and listened to the podcast, and I loved it and now I'm a diehard fan. Jason Snell 20:54 And it's like, you can't really advertise—advertising, most of us don't have an advertising budget. So it is intersection, intersecting with other people. So like, Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett, who started the Relay FM network, like, they had podcasts, and they asked me to be on their podcast, because they knew me from Macworld. And I got to get to know them, so they're building their audience, I'm building my audience; we get to know each other by (again) intersecting. And so it's not just about the audience, it's about the people. And I ended up going and you know, and working with those guys, for what I do now. And we brought our respective audiences to the projects that we did together. So, that's the big picture, but you know, there's no solution there, like, seriously: be fortunate enough to have your face in a magazine that goes to half a million people, it's almost—magazines don't really exist anymore—so you, so go back in time, and then do that and that helps a lot. Jason Snell 21:48 Otherwise, you just got to be lucky, right? Like John Siracusa parlayed his Ars Technica reviews into, and then the Hypercritical podcast, and, you know, he had a series of things that happened. There's no one path; it kind of comes in all sorts of different ways. You just gotta persevere and be open and talk to a lot of people and then big cloud with a question mark, like, that's the mystery of it, is: you can't control it. And you can have the, you could honestly, and this is true of anything like YouTube or something like that, too, it's like, you could have great content, and it could, you could just not get an audience. And that's tragic but there's truth to that. I mean, it's less likely now than it was in the, in the days of big-media gatekeeping, but it's still true, because it's still (to a certain degree) luck, you have to be found. And it's not just like, it's work, you got to put in the work, put in the content, do all that stuff, and then also have luck. Martin Feld 22:39 I love a lot of what you said in there, but there's a point that I want to pick on, particularly, where you said, 'It's not just audience, it's people'. How do you think the community has changed, whether you factor in things like social media, the very recent kind of shift even from Twitter to Mastodon, anywhere along the line? How do you think the community has shifted and how do you see your role in it? Jason Snell 23:01 I think in any more mature medium or community, things change a little bit. They tend to get... bigger. It's this weird thing too, where sometimes if a community is getting smaller, it will get weirder, because it becomes, like, the diehards. But also, I think when a community gets bigger, it gets weirder to begin with, because there's just more people. If every tenth person is a weirdo, and you get, then you get a million people, that's a lot of weirdos. And I say that because although there's a great thing about the addressable audience, it also means that you've got people who are kind of like, the stink bomb at the party, and it changes how you have to interact with people. And I suppose anybody who's actually famous would tell you the same thing, right, which is that beyond a certain point, you can't behave the same way, even if you'd really rather behave the same way. And social media is a good example where, you know, I used to share all sorts of stuff on social media that was silly and fun, like making pizza in my kitchen and stuff. And I stopped because it got weird. Like, literally anything I posted, we'd get very strange, hostile responses back. And it's like, you know, I'm a person, I am doing this for fun. If people are jerks, whenever I do it, guess what! It's not fun anymore. That's been a thing that's changed over time, as more people have gotten on social media in general. Jason Snell 24:27 So I mean, the trend lately has been to find places that are not quite as free and open. And I think that is a thing that is continuing, that, the truth is... and there are a few different ways to do that, right? Like I've got, I've got membership programs, and those people get to interact with me way more than the people who aren't paying. And on one level, I don't want to say, 'Well, you know, unless you pay me I'm not going to talk to you', because that's not entirely true. But if you pay me that shows you are not a random person—and trust me, there are bad actors in the, in the paid groups too, but they're less bad and there are fewer of them because they're not randomly rolling in with no context. A lot of times on social media too it's people who have no context of who I am or what my background is, and they don't follow me, and then they just roll it in, because they saw a tweet that went by, and they respond to it in a terrible way. And it's like, 'I don't even know who you are, you don't know who I am... why are we even? Like, why are we even wasting our time here? Why, you shouldn't see my stuff, and I shouldn't see your stuff'. So that's part of it. Jason Snell 25:24 It's also part of it too, just like the kind of abandonment of Twitter by most of our tech community, which really has happened, the interaction there is very low. There's, you know, media people and sportspeople who are still there posting like nothing's changed but the tech stuff has kind of gone away, in large part. But that's forced us to also re-..., rethink a bunch of stuff like, Twitter was easy to say, Twitter, you know, 'Send us stuff on Twitter'. And so like, at Relay FM, they have spent the last couple of months building a whole kind of comprehensive, uh, new feedback system that lets people talk to us without using Twitter, because we got, it was kind of lazy and it was easy. And we were actually with, you know, people who didn't have Twitter couldn't give us feedback. That was another kind of silo that was not quite 'Pay to talk to me', but it was like, if you're not on Twitter, you don't get to give us feedback. Or at least not easily, you could find an email address, but that was about it. And our systems for building, like, what feedback we respond to, we're not really keyed to looking at our email. So those voices would kind of be, even if we saw them, they wouldn't be on the podcast, for the most part. And so they built a whole system to get that feedback, and make that the primary way that we do it, which means that anybody can send it, you don't have to pay us or anything like that. You also don't have to become a member of Twitter or something else in order to do it. And I think that's good, too; that's a healthy thing for us to do. So, it's always changing, but I'd say that was the biggest thing, is that I feel like we with social media, it got so big, that it became less of a small group, manageable group of people, and it became more of a broadcast medium. And once you're on that stage performing the responses change, and for me, certainly it became a lot less fun. Martin Feld 27:08 And you've said really explicitly there how you had to change your behaviour, the moment people started to know who you were, whether or not they were getting your content in or out of context. When you think about how you participate in or produce different shows, do you feel like you're the same person or different people across the shows that you're on? How do you think about how you present yourself as a producer, whether it's your own content, whether you're a guest, whether it's on Relay FM? Who is Jason Snell in podcasts? Jason Snell 27:40 I would say that I am always the same person, right? (Maybe some other people take this differently.) I am always the same person. However, if you are a media professional especially, I feel like you always should be asking yourself, 'What's my audience?' That's the key question, is: what's your audience? So like, I'm giving a presentation to a user group next week, and I'm going to think, like: OK, user group, it's older, less technical; it's not your everyday Upgrade podcast audience; I'm going to need to take it down a level; I'm going to have to change how I talk about these issues; I'm gonna need to find my terms better than I might normally, because I'm talking to a enthusiastic, but probably older and less technical, and certainly not part of the whole Internet, social media podcast-sphere discourse, for the most part. Jason Snell 28:34 And I learned that lesson, I mean, Macworld and MacUser were a great lesson in that too, because that's, the magazines have positioning first off, right? Because they sell, their audience is being sold to advertisers, right, for the ad sales, and you're like, what are you about mattered, right? It's like, we're not about video games, we're about business or whatever. So, always thinking of your target audience, um, in terms of who are they? What level are they? You write a book, is it an introductory book? Is it a complex book for big nerds, right? Like, if I'm writing anything, right? So that's what I would say about different podcasts or posts on my blog or anything is, the question is: who is it, who am I talking to? (And adjusting because of that) Jason Snell 29:17 I don't change; I am me. Ideally, I'm aware of who that audience is and also what they're used to. So like, I will have internalised over the years, you know, what is the right thing to say on The Incomparable, uh, in terms of like, what's OK to say? And what's like, maybe, the wrong tone to take? And that's not like, always say you like things; it's more like, I know what words I probably shouldn't say, and I know the way I should phrase certain things, so that I'm not really offending people. I sort of set a level. We all have this sort of like, what's our expected level? Can you swear on this podcast, that sort of thing, right? And then if I'm a guest on a different podcast, if I don't know, I'm gonna sort of like try to be safe as much as I can, just because I don't want to make trouble for the host. And then other times, like, I guess, every now and then on this podcast, The Rebound with Dan Moren and Lex Friedman and John Moltz, and like, those guys are funny on that podcast, and there are jokes that I maybe think of, or, or I might not... that I might riff on something they say, that on another podcast where I'm being a little more serious, I might not do. But it's not like I'm not being myself in those places, it's that I'm choosing—like we all do, right?—I'm choosing what we say like, are you not yourself in a business context and yourself in a personal context? I would argue that you are still yourself, but certainly, if you're in two different business contexts, yes, the context is different. You're still you, ideally, not playing like a part. And also I am actually incapable of playing a part. I can't fake that. And I think the audience knows, I can't fake it, or would know if I was trying. But what I try to keep in my mind is the short version of that is what I tried to keep in mind is, who is this that I'm talking to? Martin Feld 31:02 Well, it's good to know that we're getting the real Jason today—the only real Jason. Jason Snell 31:05 It's all there is! Martin Feld 31:06 You've spoken about different audiences, you've spoken about community, you've spoken about business and independence versus being part of a publication. Throughout all of this, there's technology brands or the things that you're covering or interacting with. Kind of linking to that, not necessarily conflict, but that difference between being part of a larger publication and being independent, what can you say about the feeling of representing or reporting on a fandom linked to big tech brands like Apple? How do you think about the business and the reliance on that kind of content and news? Jason Snell 31:44 Yeah, I mean, and it goes um, hand in hand with the idea of knowing, knowing your audience, but I'd say that honesty is the thing that I try to keep coming back to, which is, you know you're honest, but part of the deal is that you need to be, or you know, your audience, but you need to be honest with them. That's the deal. And doing The Incomparable, you know, we're talking about a fandom there, too. So it's people who are enthusiastic about something or a bunch of things. What I owe them is my honesty and that is what makes me not marketing and not PR. And the way that we always talked about it back in magazine days, and the way that I still think of it is: my job is not to serve (taking my public professional primary role), my job is not to serve Apple, I don't get paid to take care of Apple. I get paid to be honest to people who care about Apple, about what Apple's doing. But the audience is, that's who I serve. I don't serve the company, I'm not their PR. And OK, so within that, there are people who are always going to say, 'Well, my job really is to...', whether they're doing it duplicitously, or whether they legitimately feel this way, is like, 'My job is to be hyped up about what Apple's doing'. Jason Snell 33:08 And I always feel like my audience and my job is to talk to people who care about Apple, want Apple to do well, sure, because they love, uh, some or all of the products that they use, and maybe Apple is part of their identity, but really, it's like, for a reason, right? And then it's my job to be able to say to them, 'No, I know you; I know you care about this stuff; this thing that they just did, that's not it, right? This they kind of blew it, this is not a good one; you should wait for the next one, maybe'. That's my job. My job isn't to say, 'Whatever it is, it's great', right? Because first off, they're gonna get it and they're not gonna think it's great, and then they're gonna not believe me anymore. And it's not my job to be a cheerleader, right? It's not for me to just pump everybody up because again, Apple's not paying me. They're [audience] paying me. And most people I firmly believe people don't pay, uh, for cheerleaders, right? They, they pay for good information that they can they can trust and that that takes them seriously. Jason Snell 34:07 So, that's the challenge because there are definitely fans out there who do not want to hear anything negative. And I run into those people who are like, 'I can't believe'. And then there are also people out there who are like the anti-fans, who cannot believe that you like something, and they will always accuse you of being in the pocket of the, of the big company. And you know what? There's nothing you can do about either of those people. All you can do is try to be honest and say, you know, 'The value I provide is that sometimes I like it and sometimes I don't, and I will tell you why, and I will give you good advice, and I have, you know, spent years of my life, and I spend hours of my day thinking just about this because you love it—but you can't, you've got something else to do, but I can and so I do and then I'm gonna report back to you about what I see about it'. Jason Snell 34:55 It is a delicate line to walk. It is the same line that you have to walk if you're talking to Star Trek fans or Star Wars fans, or Marvel fans or whatever, like there are the ones who hate everything and there are the ones who love everything. And I don't do that... I just, I'm not wired that way. I'm one of those people who never gives them anything five stars because it's like, nothing's worth five stars. I'm the kind of person who when they're like, 'Oh, no, no, you need to give your Uber driver five stars!' Jason Snell 35:20 I'm like, 'Well, no, baseline is three, and then if they're good, I'll give them four, nobody's gonna get a five'. Jason Snell 35:24 And they're like, No, you don't understand, baseline is five'. Jason Snell 35:26 And I'm like, 'OK, fine, everybody's a five then, I guess'. Um, I just, I'm not, I'm not wired that way. So, uh, I have to, I have to call it the way I see it. But within that, too, I am not speaking to an audience, because I get this sometimes too, which is like, you know, 'Yeah man, but you didn't compare it to the Google Pixel camera'. And it's like, you know, I always usually have a, an Android phone around and I try to keep up on sort of like, general tech stuff. But the truth is, I am not a journalist who specialises in speaking to an audience that doesn't care whether they buy an iPhone or an Android phone. There is an audience for that. There are sites that do that, you know, PC World used to do that—and still actually still does—but as a magazine, it used to do that. Harry McCracken, the editor there for many years said, you know, 'Macs are PCs, iPhones are phones, we're going to cover them too’. Jason Snell 36:19 But like, I'm a specialist in Apple primarily. And the audience I speak to, like, what I always said is they've made their decision, right? Like, they're pretty much in on the platform, I'm not, my job is not to convince people to be on the Apple platform, my job is not to convince people to get off the Apple platform; my job is to serve people who are on the Apple platform, and tell them within that sphere, what's good, what's bad. And so I try to phrase it that way. So, if I think Apple's doing something bad, I'm gonna say so. But it's not my job to say, 'Let's compare this new laptop to all the PC laptops', because it's like, nope! That's just, I am not even capable of doing that. I'm going to compare it to your last Mac laptop and the two Mac laptops ago and your options when you're choosing a laptop. That's what I'm going to try to go for. So, all I can do is provide honesty, and try to thread that needle of like, if you care about this stuff, then you gotta care about when it's going good and you gotta care about when it's going bad. Jason Snell 37:14 Just, here's a tangent: I remember reading a record review of an, a favourite artist of mine. And the record review was: this album isn't very good; it's OK, but it's not very good. But then again, what do you expect? This artist isn't very good. And I thought, who does that serve? Right? Who is being served by that review? And this goes back to: who is the audience? Who is the audience for a review from artist or about artist X? There's really two. There's the people who like, who are interested in artist X and want to know, does this live up to their catalogue or is it a misstep? You know? Is it something you're like, 'No, no, no, don't buy this one. It's really a step down'. Jason Snell 37:58 And there's discovery, which is, 'Hey, everybody, you may not know about artist x, but this album, you should listen to it.' I don't understand why you write a review that says, 'I've never liked this artist and I still don't', because who's that for? Other than maybe like the sport of it, of just kicking the dog...? I don't know why you do that. So I think that's what it comes down to in part, is like, I'm just trying to serve my audience and tell them the truth, but within this constraint of like, my job is not to say, 'Should you be here in my audience?' I mean, I suppose there could be an extreme. If there was an extreme case, like Andy Ihnatko (my old pal from many, many years ago), he at some point decided that he preferred Android to iOS and he, for, for the, for phones, and kind of has just sort of, uh, he still talks about the iPhone, but I think he definitely has a strong preference for Android. And like, if it came to that, then sure, but um, not only do I not feel that way, but I feel like somebody else is doing that job. My job is not to be questioning people's platform choice; my job is to serve the people who made the choice. Martin Feld 39:03 Everything you said there was deeply interesting to me, and you said a bunch of words that I want to try to spotlight a bit. Jason Snell 39:09 All the words... Martin Feld 39:10 You said the word 'care' a few times. Now this is really important to me, even in doing this podcast, because you as a participant—and I want this to be transparent to people listening—there's a care for you as a participant, because you get to decide if this goes up or not. You get to decide what elements of your story go in and the ones that don't. There's an ethical consideration there. So, when you're showing care for your readers or your listeners, or you're talking about things that you care about and that they care about, how much of this kind of ethical consideration comes down to you or is there some link to being a journalist or having a journalistic background? (Because you've mentioned being a journalist before) And other people in the podcasting sphere that we're talking about maybe don't have that background... Jason Snell 39:54 Right... Martin Feld 39:54 ...so how do you think about care and ethics and maybe how it links to journalism? Jason Snell 39:59 Well, it It's what I said before about honesty. I feel like ultimately, the biggest duty—duty of care, if you want to say—is being honest with your audience. So you need to know who they are, generally, and try to understand what they want from you, and then give it to them honestly. I mean, that's the set of rules that I try to approach. Now, again, going back to that argument of what is a back-in-the-day, what is the magazine's audience, target audience? You can control that to a certain degree, right? That I had, like, education stuff that I wanted to cover at MacUser, and they're like, 'Education is not our market, like, desktop publishing is our market, other busi-... corporate is our market, little home is our market, education is not our market'. Jason Snell 40:45 I'm like, 'OK, alright'. Like, I was frustrated, because I'm like, 'Well, this is Mac stuff'. Jason Snell 40:49 And they're like, 'Yeah, but it's not our market'. On my own, it's a little more self-selecting. I mean, I write about stuff that interests me, to a certain degree, and I hope that some of my audience comes along with me, or maybe that I find a different audience for that part of it. I am limited in what I do, I try to keep it to tech stuff, but like, I care about e-readers. All the books I read are on e-readers, so I write about e-readers. I feel like they don't get written a lot, about a lot. And I care about them, and so why not? And it's something I can do in addition to the other things that I do. There are other things like that: streaming media and occasionally I have things that are just a little bit of outliers that I will write about, because I feel like, 'Hey, I care about it, and I'll write about it'. Jason Snell 41:33 So, there's room for me to adjust a little bit about what my remit is, and I don't expect my whole audience to follow. I write some technical stuff about user automation, because I find it interesting and I think that some people care about it; and I feel like other people should care about it more and like get into it more, so I'll write about shortcuts and AppleScript and stuff like that. So I can expand that a little bit, and ultimately, I kind of expect that, that my audience will either follow me or, or just ignore the stuff that they're not interested in (up to a point). But I also am reminded that there is a limit to how far I can probably expand the size of any one of my podcasts or my website, and that beyond that is beyond our remit. And it's, so you talk about care, this is the other side of it, which is having been a person who was employed by a magazine; magazines are subscription relationships, you give me money, but it's an ongoing relationship. You give me money for a year or two, and then I give you magazines, and then I ask you for more money, and you say yes or no and then you get more magazines or you don't—that subscription relationship. Jason Snell 42:43 Podcasts are a subscription relationship. I would argue my blog, whether it's RSS or being a subscriber, is a subscription relationship. So it's not a drive-by, it is a conversation, it is an ongoing evaluation and I think that's really important. And I think that factors into the care you take in deciding what the rules are for what you're going to do, because in some ways, you've sold them a product. And if you don't provide them the intended product, if you go too far outside of what is expected, there is a schism, there's a gap between what was promised and what's being delivered. And on a free podcast, I mean, the fallout is that they just drop you. And it's no harm, no foul, you know? You didn't pay; get a full refund for your free podcast. But it's still that same relationship, right? And that, the beauty of it is you get them coming back every week, which is, which on the Web, where you're just a random article on a search engine, they never come back. But on the podcast, you get them every single week. Jason Snell 43:46 However, there is a responsibility there, right? You have to be thinking—and this goes back to thinking about what our audience is and what the product is—it's, it's you have to be thinking like, 'Am I giving them what they want?' And it should not preclude you from experimenting, and it should not preclude you from changing over time, I really believe, but you gotta be aware of it, and you've got to be aware of your kind of contract with your listeners—implicit contract, not legal contract—but just implicit contract of like, 'I know what I'm getting'. And you can play with that even to a certain extent, but you've got to be aware of what you kind of promised them and make sure that you can deliver at least enough for them to continue the relationship, so that, that's the other part of it, of, of the care is just, you know, they signed up for this—even if it's free—they signed up for it expecting something, and assuming that was a reasonable expectation and that you set the expectation with your previous work. you should be aware of that, because if you don't give them what they want, they will leave. Martin Feld 44:52 When you look over the course of your career, or even hobby projects or things that link to more personal aspects of your life, what are the most fulfilling things that you think you've created? Or what's the work that you're most proud of? Jason Snell 45:07 That's a, that's a tough one. I am proud of different aspects of different things. So I'm not going to, again, I'm not going to give you a straight answer. I am proud that as of this recording, The Incomparable has released 655 episodes, and is a network of a couple of dozen podcasts put out by all sorts of different people who know me or have come to know me—mostly people, I didn't know when I started The Incomparable and it's just sort of evolved. So I'm very proud of that. I'm proud of some of the detail work that I've done. I'm proud of, I did a podcast called 20 Macs for 2020, which was a podcast that challenged me creatively, which is why I did it. And I'm proud of the work there, that it's basically a documentary slash essay series about 20 interesting Macs throughout Apple history, and what stories spin off of them. And that challenged me as a writer, and also as an interviewer and also technically, as an editor. And that was fun to be challenged like that, so I'm proud of that. Jason Snell 46:13 I'm proud of building an audience for Upgrade, my podcast with Myke Hurley, because that was the real test of whether I was going to be able to go out on my own out of corporate media and survive, I think. I had looked on at other people's podcasts, with envy. And I felt like I couldn't start my own podcast about technology while being employed by my employer, because they were paying me to do that. And I watched these other people start successful tech podcasts and I thought, 'Mmm... man, I would love to do that'. But could I do it and can we get away with it? And you know, we're still getting away with it, like, seven years later, so I'm proud of that, that we really made it happen, that people like it, that we have paying subscribers to our bonus version and that we've also got the free version. And that, that was not a given: leaving a magazine and a website to do a podcast, based on my name, and having to just sort of say, 'Hey, everybody, I'm over here now, please subscribe to my thing'. And that they did that, I'm very much proud of that. Jason Snell 47:19 And then, more broadly than that, I am proud of the fact that I was able to leave my job in corporate media and go out on my own and make it. And it's been whatever, eight years now, and I made it! It is a job I like a lot and actually pays the bills, and I have two kids in college and I managed to make it work. And it's a lot of work snd I'm still to this day doing what I said earlier, which is not only generating the content, but dealing with all the technical issues, because I am kind of my own technical person to a certain degree, but it's a job I can do, and it makes me capable of doing everything that I want to do. So I'm also proud of that. Martin Feld 48:02 That's wonderful. And what do you feel like you still have to do, if at all? Jason Snell 48:08 I don't have like a big list of like, well, here's the thing, that's the mountain that I need to climb. I don't have that. I have, for me, it is about, always... the mountains come at you. I'll put it that way: the mountains come at you. I learned... look, I took a magazine job knowing the Internet was coming, right? Having published on the Internet, I took a magazine job. I never, ever, in my—whatever that was—almost 20 years working in print media and corporate magazine media—even when we were also on the Web—there was not a day that I had the illusion that everything was going to be fine. Not a day. I went into it knowing we were in the middle of a massive media transition, and then I ended up spending five or 10 years of my career trying to drag magazine people into the, onto the Web (with varying degrees of success). But it was very, very hard. And I knew that was happening. I was always the person advocating for us to try new things. So I've never felt in my entire life starting in, starting as a media professional in the, in the early to mid-'90s that there wasn't another big change coming. What would, what must that be, have been like to work in a newspaper in 1950 and be like 'You've got it made'? Jason Snell 48:13 But I never experienced that, so for me, it's always about: can I roll with the punches? Can I identify the stuff where I can...? Like, I'm not going to be on TikTok, I don't get TikTok, my kids get TikTok. I'm not going to be, 'How do you do fellow kids?' on TikTok. You know, I need to know where to pick my spots. I also am not going to be a YouTuber, even though I think I probably could do that. I've got other stuff that I'm doing, and I would need to go all in on that. My friend Rene Richie did that and now he works at YouTube, so I guess that worked. But that's an example of something that it's more like a calibrated decision that I do some things on video, and I do some things on YouTube. But I'm always looking at what, what is the thing that I could do that maybe I could bring my audience to or I could find a new audience for? And also like, what are my threats to things that might prevent me from doing, making a living doing the things that I do? That's the stuff that is on my list, is not so much, 'I want to do this', as much as I want to stay relevant to my audience or relevant to enough of an audience to continue being on my own and doing my own thing. Those are my goals. Jason Snell 50:42 You know, if I can work with more great people, great. If I can't, then so be it. Like, I'm open to all of those things. And The Incomparable has made that really great in terms of working with other people. But in the long run, that's the stuff that I'm watching out for is sort of like, always ask those questions. Like, for podcasting right now, I'm having those discussions about like, do we want to....? Most of my podcasts don't do video and I'm starting to have those conversations, like, do we want to record video? Do we want to not release it, but just use it to cut out...? Like a lot of podcasts now are starting to do like highlights from the podcast that they use video to promote on social media. And so and those are the debates, right? It's like, do we want to do that? Does that change the podcast? Is it worth it? Like, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know what we're gonna decide. I literally don't know. But we gotta ask the questions because if we don't, and then we get complacent, then that next mountain is going to come and I'm not going to be ready for it. Jason Snell 51:36 I see people who are I mean, they're not my age, but are, who are not, who are, you know, full-grown adults who are doing their TikToks. And I see what they're doing, and I get it and I'm like, 'Yes, you are young enough and close enough to this that you can, maybe you can fake it'. But I look at that and think, I think it's a little cringy and I know that mine would be worse. And it's like, I just don't want to. I'm also fortunate, I mean, I will also say I'm fortunate that I have enough stuff going on. If I was turning over, you know, turning over the couch cushions looking for change, and all of that, you don't know how desperate you'd get, say like, 'I'm going to do this, it's a bad fit for me but I'm going to do it because I need to find something'. I'm fortunate that over, after seven or eight years, I am completely full of projects, and I don't need to do that, which is great, but I also need to keep my eye on it, right? That's the, that's because when I went out on my own—here's here's a data point—when I went out on my own, I expected to make my money primarily from my website and podcasts would be a nice addition. And the fact is, my guesses about how the website would go financially were right in the beginning and then rapidly (after about a year) completely wrong. And within two years, I think I was making more money as a podcaster than as a writer, which is a very strange thing for somebody who, who thinks of themselves as a person who types words out for a living, that actually more money was coming in from me talking for a living. But that's a good example of being open to go with whatever is changing with what you're doing. If I was committed solely to writing and not doing podcasts. I don't know if I could have uh, I could have stayed out on my own. Martin Feld 53:22 So is it fair to say that podcasting, although the Web is many different media and many different links all connected, is podcasting the core for you of what you do? Jason Snell 53:33 Financially or mentally? Mentally, I still think of myself as a writer, more than a podcaster—less than I did eight years ago, but I still do. Financially, I have to check, I don't know if we've finished our financials for 2022, but like, I make more money from podcasting than writing—bottom line. Yeah. Martin Feld 53:51 So that's the shift that's taken place? Jason Snell 53:53 Yeah and that happened fast. It happened really fast. You know, John Gruber is the same. A lot of us who think of ourselves as as writers. And now with membership, it's a little bit different but you know, the fundamentals are, you know, I've got members for Six Colors, but I also have members for Upgrade and The Incomparable, so in the end, you know, it all kind of scales at the same level. So it's still, you know, I write a weekly column for Macworld, and I write my website, and I don't anticipate stopping those things. But Upgrade doesn't do well enough for me to stop doing everything else I do. You know, I feel like Accidental Tech Podcast was enough for John Siracusa to quit his job, right? Like, Upgrade is not at that level. So, I end up having... I did a thing last year where I went off to a friend's Airbnb that they let me have for a couple of days and I did an off-site. And just one of the tasks that David Sparks, uh my friend David, recommended to me was write down, write down your job. I was like, 'Oh, I have eight jobs!' And I've tried to cut some of those out over the last year. But that is one thing about what I'm doing, that is, is the case is nothing I have is such a hit, that I can drop the other jobs, so I do have four jobs or whatever and that's just how it's going to be. Jason Snell 55:08 It would be, I think the interesting theoretical would be, if Upgrade was so successful—or Upgrade plus MacBreak Weekly plus whatever—if my tech podcasting was so successful, that I didn't have to do Six Colors, would I do Six Colors? I believe the answer would be 'Yes', because I think it is such a part of my identity, uh, being a writer, but what's already the case is, if I had no tech podcasting, I would probably be writing a lot more than I am, that's probably true, because I'm taking that time doing podcasting instead. Um, and that reduces the amount of stuff that I'm writing, although it does give me ideas for stories, so that's good. Anyway, I'm rambling a little bit but what else is new? But anyway, it is a crisis of, a little bit of a crisis of personality. And like I said, I talked to John Gruber about it too, because it's the same thing. You think of yourself as a writer and you realise that podcasting pays the bills, and it's a very strange place to be. Martin Feld 55:57 I love how you've brought it to that point of identity, because this is the kind of flow through the history that I've really been interested in, so I'm grateful that you put it there. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about, anything about your experience, anything about the medium that you would like to say, before we close? Jason Snell 56:12 If I had any additional thing to say it would probably be: the beauty of podcasting, as I said earlier, is that it is reaching a narrower audience but that's the beauty of the Internet, in general, right, is that you can reach your people. As a creator of content, reaching the people who care about what you're writing about is amazing. And as a receiver of content, having people writing for you is just as amazing. As much as I got to witness old media burned to the ground from day one of my career in old media, and we knew it was coming, but as much as it was to witness it, I truly believe and have believed since college that that's the beauty of the era we live in with digital media—is that digital media allows a connection that is so much stronger. Jason Snell 57:01 Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that it's stronger because of interactivity and I think that's not necessarily the case; I think it is in part, and maybe large part, because of the fact that the content is so much more focused on a smaller group of people who care about a subject rather than it being broad. And so, that connection you feel, 'This person is speaking my language; this person understands the things that nobody in my regular life even understands that I care about; but they care and I care, and now we're connected'. And that I think is maybe the most powerful thing about our modern Internet media landscape, more than like, yeah, they can also send you tweets, but it's more just like, 'They're speaking my language, they knew who I am'. 'There's a whole radio show that I can listen to two hours a week full of people who think like I do, or don't think like I do, but care about the stuff that I do and challenge me', whatever it is, I think that that's the, that's the greatest power. And sure, there are downsides to that but it's my favourite thing about the world we live in, is that I'm not speaking to a mass of half a million people who have vaguely, I mean, there's no focus there, you just have to take your best shot. Whereas if you're talking to 30,000 people who really, really, really care, it's a totally different experience. Martin Feld 58:22 And we've come back to that fantastic word that I love: 'care'. That's awesome. I want to say, 'Thank you', Jason, for joining Really Specific Stories; I appreciate the time that you've taken out of your busy production and listening schedule. Jason Snell 58:36 And thank you for having me and for the real specificity. Martin Feld 58:42 [laughter] Brilliant.