#220 Uncovering the Tech World with Award-Winning Podcaster Tom Merritt

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Jeff Dwoskin 0:28

All right, Molly, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. You get the show going each and every week, and this week was no exception. Welcome, everybody, to Episode 220 of classic conversations. As always, I am your host, Jeff Dwoskin. Great to have you back for what's sure to be one of the classic honest conversations of all time. We're talking tech past now future. It's all coming together with Tom Merritt. Tom is an award winning independent tech podcaster host of The Daily tech news show you likely got all your tech news from him on CNET back in the day, and he's here to share a ton of great stories and talk about all the amazing things he does if you're a creator, get ready to be inspired by Tom Merritt. That's coming up in just a few seconds. And in these few seconds, I want to remind everyone of episode 218 If you haven't listened yet, make that your thing to do after hearing this conversation to 18 with Greg cope white author of the pink Marine, an amazing story of his time and Marine boot camp when being out wasn't in Do not miss that amazing conversation. But right now, let's turn our attentions to Tom Merritt. We're gonna geek out a bit go back in time early 2000s Talk Tech work our way up a lot of great insights and stories from Tom Merritt. Enjoy. All right, everyone, I'm excited to introduce you to my next guest tech journalist award winning podcast or YouTube Video Creator may help build CNET TV launched buzz out loud currently in his 10th year at daily tech news show. Please welcome Tom Merritt. How are you? Hey, thanks

Tom Merritt 2:24

for having me.

Jeff Dwoskin 2:25

Tom. It's it's so great to have you on the show. I remember watching you on CNET and like thinking, Oh, this is the greatest show ever. It's like talk soup for tech.

Tom Merritt 2:38

Ya know, we kind of referred to it the same way. I'm glad that came through.

Jeff Dwoskin 2:42

Oh, yeah. I mean, I was just like, I was trying to think like, like, what, what can I do to kick off to possibly try and impress not impress, but

Tom Merritt 2:53

to kind of sell but like, so.

Jeff Dwoskin 2:55

Let me let me throw this out there. And let me know if you're like me, I'm gonna go for a move. In my basement. pretty much perfect condition. I have a box. And in that box is the original oldest photo styler PageMaker. And freehand sitting nice. Right, right. And sitting next to it is a web trans professional suite. I also have psychos, drives and zip drives in my basement with many, many great things on there that I will never see again, but that one?

Tom Merritt 3:26

Yep. Yeah, I have plastic bins in that closet over there with similar types of items. You know, I used to joke I have every computer I ever owned. I don't think it's true anymore. But I've, I've got my TI 99 by me, I've got a copy of Windows 95 on CD down there. So yeah, I know. I know what you're talking about.

Jeff Dwoskin 3:46

I think we're exactly the same age almost. And so I have the same same thing. I grew up on the TI 99. I remember vividly going and buying that. I think Bill Cosby was like the celebrity that was pushing to nine. Yeah, I remember getting magazines and spending hours typing in the code to get some crazy game just to go.

Tom Merritt 4:09

I still have the I have the beginners basic and user's Reference Guide from the TI on the bookshelf behind me. So I never forget where I came from.

Jeff Dwoskin 4:18

There'll be nothing that you say past this point. That'll impress me more than this exact moment. That's great. But the greatest part was backing up on a cassette drive. I mean, it was just like that. Those were the days.

Tom Merritt 4:31

Yeah, that sound right. When when you're when you're playing when you're loading in a program and it's if anybody knows the old modem sound, it's similar, right? It's that that jangling noisy sound? That always takes me back?

Jeff Dwoskin 4:44

It's crazy to think like how excited I was when zip drives came out and you're like, Oh my God 100 mag on Yeah, fine on one thing and I was like, Ah, man, you believe

Tom Merritt 4:56

or the first time you got 100 megahertz pan Pentium here, like, why would I need all this speed out of a processor.

Jeff Dwoskin 5:04

So I was a graphic designer out of college. And one of the things I bought, when I was in college, I spent a lot of my Bar Mitzvah money on a computer and a hand scanner, scanner. And anywhere you had a little marks, and you could have to put it all together. And it was so ahead of its time, at the time that the marketing teacher that I had for an advertising class accused me of cheating, as he couldn't. Because nobody had this, you know what I mean? Nobody, right? No college kid was going and spending like $1,800 on the computer, right? And then whatever on that. And then I remember spending almost that much on my first color flatbed scanner, the same one, you could walk into Office Max or home. Right now to get for $30 $1,800. daisy chained into my back. Like with cylinders. I can't remember like tubes that you had to replace. I remember my hands shaking when I would replace them.

Tom Merritt 6:00

Do you remember parking hard drives? You used to have to park the hard drive before you move to the computer? Because otherwise you could

Jeff Dwoskin 6:07

Yeah, like switch it to a certain mode. And

Tom Merritt 6:11

I was like, oh wait, did I remember to park the hard drive I need to move?

Jeff Dwoskin 6:15

I find his memory was spending all day on with tech support and realizing I just not pushed the power cord all the way in enough.

Tom Merritt 6:25

That yeah, I've been there. But the daisy

Jeff Dwoskin 6:27

chaining back in the days when if it wasn't in the right order. It's a I had the Mac that had you could talk to it. But I could never talk to United to talk give talk normal to these things that understand Oh, right. So it was horrible. I had a

Tom Merritt 6:41

Windows like third party software that you could talk to Windows 3.1. But it was like a limited vocabulary. So you could say launch program manager or next or enter. It worked. But you had to train it with your own voice. And it only did like dozen things that I'm able to impress the heck out of other people. It was not terribly practical.

Jeff Dwoskin 7:08

So those are the good old days. So sorry. Remember that. And then I wanted to before we jump into like your illustrious tech career, there was just something Wikipedia, right? No boy hopped out that your dad helped develop coffee mate?

Tom Merritt 7:24

Yes, yes, he did. He was a food scientist for pet milk.

Jeff Dwoskin 7:28

He helped create one of the greatest inventions of all time. Why you gotta get your dad's name on your Wikipedia pages is as boring to a food scientist.

Tom Merritt 7:41

Yeah, okay. My dad is Bill Bill merit if anyone would like to cite this show as your source because you know, Wikipedia frowns on you going in and editing your own your own things. So there's a My hands are tied. But yeah, it those Wikipedia articles are weird, that kind of good for impressing friends and family that you have a Wikipedia article made about you and that it has survived you know, the Purge is when they get rid of irrelevant stuff. So I you know, crossing my fingers for preventing the day that they go like, Yeah, this guy, he doesn't matter anymore. Get rid of this article, but they're not particularly comprehensive or they

Jeff Dwoskin 8:15

know but they're good, like basic outlines. And sometimes they have gems like Tom's dad invented coffee May.

Tom Merritt 8:24

He worked on a team of course, as always with those things, but he used to bring home all kinds of experimental food that he would ask us to eat and give him feedback on like ice cream and apple soda. And he worked on old El Paso stuff. So we always had hot sauces kicking around. I just thought that was normal growing up, but it was it was unusual. The kinds of experimental foods we ate.

Jeff Dwoskin 8:49

That's amazing. Anyway, I wanted to give your dad do and now I can add it as a site once we go live that Yeah, thanks. All right. How did you get into like just being in tech obsessed? And what's the path to CNET? Let's let's get to there and we can talk about seeing that specific. What Yeah, what got you there?

Tom Merritt 9:07

Sure. Sure. So you know, I'll try to keep it short. But my beginning interest in tech was with that ti 99 for a I had desperately wanted an Atari 2600 I had saved up my allowance till I had the $99 at cost. i Oh, you know, it was ready to not have to go over to Jonathan Penningtons house to play Atari. I was going to have my own and we went into a Kmart and my dad Bill Merritt, famous food scientist, as I'm going up to the shelf to get the Atari says listen, you can get the Atari you've got the money it's a it's your money to spend you spend it how you want but if you want I will give you the extra $99 to buy the TI 99 for a your choice. And it was just like he had not prepared me for that. In that moment. I was just crushed because I'm like but then I won't have the Atari but I went through the rest utilization of like, well, the TI 99 has games too. So I can still play games but I could do a whole lot more. So I took the matching funds from my dad got the TI and very much did not regret that choice learned to program in basic got into tech, and then to fast forward eventually got a Commodore 64 moved on to Windows. I was doing my own websites in 96, just out of my house. And then that led to me being able to swing a job at ZD TV in San Francisco in 1999. I work there through it changing its name to Tech TV, and then when it moved down to Los Angeles and merged in with GE for in 2004. Some of the people I had worked with there were working at CNET and offered me a job over there. So that's how I ended up at Siena.

Jeff Dwoskin 10:51

Amazing. We have a similar Atari 2600 stories. So I interview Oh, yeah, I interviewed Howard Scott Warshaw, he developed how cool Yars Revenge and ET and raiders and I told him that same story of like, I saved up on money. And I went, I bought I figured out tax and like I went, Yeah, they prepared and it was crazy. I and my background, I had a web development company that we sold to a company called the US web. Oh, cool. Yeah, I remember because I had a graphic design background, walking into one of the bookstores they Barnes and Noble. There were two HTML books. And I remember picking one up because a friend of mine was really into the web. And I wanted to impress him because I did that I had CorelDRAW, which could make gifts. It was the only thing that could really make gifts at the time that I knew of, or GIFs. We could argue about that later.

Tom Merritt 11:36

Yeah, I just alternate pronunciations. And now you can go to

Jeff Dwoskin 11:39

the you can go to school, you can get entire degrees on that stuff. Back then I was.

Tom Merritt 11:44

I taught myself HTML with a book. I worked at Half Price Books in Austin, Texas at the time, but I used to book and then just view source code, right in Netscape. That's how you learn to back then.

Jeff Dwoskin 11:54

Alright, good times. So so that's awesome. So alright, so you're at CNET. And then you become a big TV star. Right with? Well, you had buzz out loud, which I'm fascinated by, because buzz out loud is an indefinite length podcast, but this is back in like 2004 2005.

Tom Merritt 12:12

March 30 2005. Is when it started. Yeah. What was podcasting?

Jeff Dwoskin 12:15

I mean, I watched the video and it seemed like you were in a studio and you had all the equipment, thanks to CNET. I'm guessing but like podcasting back then versus I mean, now it's like the barrier to entry is much lower. Right? Sure. The podcast now seems like podcasting is still in its infancy now, even though there are people like you that have been doing it for over 10 years. And so how is podcasting of all have you seen, like doing those shows versus now where you have 50 shows, I'm exaggerating, but we're juggling so much, which we'll get into what was it like podcasting back then versus now? And

Tom Merritt 12:49

yeah, I remember when Adam curry source code was out, and people were buzzing about that. And I had just started at CNET. And so I started advocating for let's do a podcast couple other people had been advocating as well, my boss, eventual boss, I don't think it was my boss then. But Mark Larkin, who eventually ran Siena TV and James Kim, all of us were saying we should do podcasts, we should do podcast. And of course, when you're in a big company like that, the wheels turn slowly. So even though we were saying we should do a podcast in the autumn of 2004, it took until 2005, to get going. But one of the advantages we had was CNET had, at one point, run a radio station. So there was this fully outfitted studio with microphones and a mixing board all set up and ready to go for us. The interesting thing is that podcasting in 2004 2005, was still very accessible. All you needed was a mic and a computer and knowledge, the barrier to entry was the work you would have to do creating your own RSS feed files, finding a place to host them all of that. But any computer with a microphone could record a podcast, what we ran into was we had great equipment, right? We could sound better than anybody else. And we and we had a nice comfy soundproof room to do it in. But it was set up for radio. So it had this horrible piece of software. I'm blanking on the name now, that was designed for radio, but you had to jump through all these hoops to get it to just put out an mp3 file. And it also recorded things in a way that if, if the software crashed in the middle, you just lost the file. It was it was just gone. There was no backing it up. So we had, you know, some hoops to jump through at CNET in that way. And I remember going rogue a few times and saying, Well, we should really just be doing it the way that everybody else who's podcasting is doing it, like make it simpler. But the fun part about it was there were no rules, you could just sit down and record your show and there was no expectation. In fact, if there wasn't expectation back then it was more that it was about music than it was about talk because a lot of the early shows even though Adam Curry was was doing talks were around music like cover Ville Brian Tibbets Early Show. So we were able to stand out really easily by just doing a professionally sounding backed by CNET a big name quick at the beginning 10 minutes once a week, which eventually became 40 minutes every day, which as you mentioned, became indeterminate length because we just wildly varied.

Jeff Dwoskin 15:24

Sorry to interrupt all the secrets of early podcasting, but I have to take a quick break. Want to thank you for all your support of the sponsors. When you support the sponsors. You're supporting us here at Classic conversations. And that's how we keep the lights on. And now back to my incredible conversation with Tom Merritt. We're gonna go a little bit into his radio background. And we're back. You mentioned it was a radio scenario, but you got your start. Early Start. Yeah, I

Tom Merritt 15:50

did. I started working at WGL the best country in the country in Greenville, Illinois in 1986. Because my mom was an aerobics instructor and the wife of the station owner was in her aerobics class.

Jeff Dwoskin 16:07

Had you dreamed of being a DJ? It seems like that was an interesting pivot to what eventually became the basis of your career that you're still doing today talking?

Tom Merritt 16:17

Yeah, I always loved listening to radio and listening to DJs. And, you know, growing up in the St. Louis area, camo X is legendary, as one of those big 50,000 Watt broadcasters with all the authoritative voices. So yeah, I was very much into getting a job at a radio station. And so I started working six to 8pm. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday as a as a 16 year old did you have

Jeff Dwoskin 16:46

do you have a radio voices? You have a radio voice by then? This is Tom Merritt.

Tom Merritt 16:49

Don't know Do you want to hear my radio voice? I actually, let's see if I can pull it up real quick. I have a short recording of the first time I was ever on radio, and I've got an accent. I've sound 16 It's pretty ridiculous here. You want me to play it? Share? Thank you. Thank you. This is only my first day and listen to that. Applause All right. So I'm here with you on WG El, the best country in the country.

Jeff Dwoskin 17:19

First time out sounded a little bit like it was a question but yeah, pretty Yeah.

Tom Merritt 17:23

Am I was supposed to be letting me do this.

Jeff Dwoskin 17:28

Oh, that's amazing. That's hilarious that you have it. That's great.

Tom Merritt 17:32

I have it on cassette. And at some point along the way, I digitized it in and someone wanted to hear it. So I put it on this soundboard.

Jeff Dwoskin 17:38

So you're doing the CNET show. And then I mean, now a day. I mean, you do a daily show now. But back then it was a curating the information for these for all this tech news. What's the what's the diff between now

Tom Merritt 17:53

right? And it's interesting, what is the same and what was different gathering the news for buzz out loud kind of borrowed skills I had acquired at Tech TV, one of my first jobs at Tech TV as a because I was a web guy at Tech TV, when I started was writing up an article for the web about what they called the top talk, it was the first thing they talked about at the top of the show the screensavers. So Leo and Kate, the hosts of the time would come out, they talk about this one news story. So it was my job to like suggest what that news story would be I'd bring it into the production meeting and cultivating those sources, which were you know, back in that time, ZD net slash dot e week, places like that kind of built up that ability to know how to scan around for important stories. And so when we started doing buzz out loud, that that's really what we did, I would I would go and I would grab a bunch of links, not all of them from CNET, and then send them by email to Mollywood, my co host, and CO creator of those out loud, then we would meet in one of our offices and then go through like which ones we wanted to talk about. And that was it. It was just an email. And

Jeff Dwoskin 19:05

then today, it's it's a whole different world, ya know,

Tom Merritt 19:09

now for daily tech news show, which is essentially the same idea as buzz out loud. 20 years later, it's going through Feedly, I use Feedly. For RSS, I look at Google News to see what their algorithm thinks is important. I look at Tech meme, I look at our own subreddit where our fans will vote on what they think is important. And then you kind of triangulate all of that we use Google Sheets to figure out what we're actually going to have in the show and we can all be on the same page and collaborate from different parts of the world. And and the source is the actual choosing of the stuff isn't that different? It's different sources than than it used to be. But it's looking over and saying what's everybody talking about? Let's identify how useful that is and talk about it in a way that helps our listeners feel a little smarter and understand things better and

Jeff Dwoskin 19:59

it's digest I suppose it's quick. 30 minutes, but we'll get it. We'll get to we'll get to that was still on your journey.

Tom Merritt 20:04

Yeah.

Jeff Dwoskin 20:05

I don't want to jump ahead. Yeah, but it's good. I like bouncing is good people interesting. Alright, so you left buzz out loud on May 14 2010. It was celebrated by all of your folks in Episode 1228. They had a Tom Merritt love fest, how was it emotionally and just kind of making that switch and leaving CNET? So to get ready to go to twit? Yeah,

Tom Merritt 20:29

we had a unique situation with Bose out loud. And it was a situation that was similar to what we had a tech TV with that audience that I didn't think would be replicated. But even today, people who listened to buzz out loud back then throw catchphrases at us like, well actually, or talk about buzz town, which is what we call the folks in the audience. So leaving them was very hard. The reason I left was because I wanted to branch out and do other shows. And I was doing other shows I'd already started Sword and Laser with Veronica Belmont. I was doing current geek with Scott Johnson but CNET, which by that time was owned by CBS was just very, very bureaucratic, about that sort of thing. So I wanted the independence to not have to shuffle a bunch of paperwork and get an approval from somebody who was a lawyer who didn't really understand what I was doing every time I wanted to make a move. And so moving to Leo Laporte, the twit network, he agreed to say, Yeah, you do what you do for me, and then you can do whatever you want outside. So my hope was that we could move the audience with me that folks would still follow. My initial hope was that Molly would have gone with me over there, which, which would have been great, then we all would have had a new home. Unfortunately, that part didn't work out. But yeah, it was. It was bittersweet because I got the Independence I wanted, and I got a chance to start something fresh, which was exciting. But I had to close that chapter, which is something that will never be like that again. I don't think

Jeff Dwoskin 22:01

yeah, it seemed like it was a good crew. It seemed that they really miss you. They even did a top five segment. hair and fashion tips. Oh my gosh, I'd forgotten all about this episode. Yeah, Erin, pay the top five and number five hair and fashion tips. obscure references. The Dennis Miller attack as geeky how to bad pawns. Anglo file was a runner up and bathroom reporting from CES Hawaiian radio, ln prizes, and always playing devil's advocate. These were the things that your your co workers on buzz out loud we're gonna miss the most segues was a big topic too. And that goodbye.

Tom Merritt 22:43

Think bad puns is still there. Devil's advocate is still there. I hope the segways are still as good as they used to be.

Jeff Dwoskin 22:50

segways are key for Yeah, speaking of which. So now you're doing tech news today, which is the kind of taking that format, if you've reinvented the format along the way or readapted it to yourself in your new homes. So still the grind? What goes into any of these? I mean, how long does it take to produce 30 minutes of any one of these are? You know, I know the new shows are about 30? Yeah, like how long does it take? Like the process you were mentioning earlier? We're talking about kind of just diving in and finding this stuff. But fine tuning it, how much of it? Do you scrapped? How much of it do you just go i This is what I basically know we're going to talk about and then I'll just kind of deliver those things.

Tom Merritt 23:33

I don't know it's hard to put a firm number on it every day, I get up and look at my RSS feeds and Mark stories for inclusion. And I wake up six or 7am That's kind of one of the things I do well, I drink my coffee and eat my breakfast, then I go do some other things. But 9am is when we hit the ground running. And we actually have developed a fairly routine schedule from from nine to 10. We're nailing down what's going to be in the show we use discord to talk to each other from 10 to 11. It's writing the setups so we don't write the entire show and we want to have discussions that are open but we write the setup just to make sure we get the numbers right and the facts right and all of that sort of thing that exists as shownotes that people can refer to as well. 11 to 12 is proofreading all of that double checking Everything's in there any late breaking stories that happen then at 12 o'clock we do a quick discord audio production meeting to just go over the show, grab some lunch and then 1245 We're in stream yard getting ready to do the show do and Mike checks from one to 130 we do daily tech news show from 130 to two we record Good day internet which is the extended show that patrons get and then from two you know we go off we go off the street to and we do kind of a post show wrap up talk about any notes or anything. Joe or video producer does all the publishing and by 233 o'clock everything things wrapped up and we get up the next morning and do it all again.

Jeff Dwoskin 25:03

It's a lie. Yeah to do every single day. But I mean, I guess nowadays with a lot Elon Musk is a probably don't have to worry too much about there being new. If anything

Tom Merritt 25:12

we have to worry about over covering Elon Musk. That's one of the things we tried to do is not feed the outrage machine. So with Elon, it gets tricky because especially there for a couple months he was just spouting off. And we're like, Well, not everything he says is news. Right. But

Jeff Dwoskin 25:28

everything he hears he believes is Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, what are your thoughts on the AI revolution?

Tom Merritt 25:36

Oh, sure. Yeah. The chat GPT stuff particularly is I think Pivotal, not because Chad GPT is even that great of a tool, relatively speaking to what's GPT and other models are capable of. But because it caught that public imagination, it was that moment where everybody started talking about something, started playing around with it, finding things to use it for, and I know a couple of folks at open AI. And they were like, I mean, we didn't think that we there's like we've done public demos before. And none of them got that attention. We didn't expect that one to be that much different from the others. Wait until you see GPT four. And of course, Microsoft just recently said they're gonna start putting GPT four into new stuff that is multimodal. So it can do not just text, but you can write a text prop and it can create a video or images or describe an image. I think this is going to be one of those things like the internet like smartphones, that we don't even know what it's going to be used for what its effects are going to be really right now.

Jeff Dwoskin 26:42

Yeah, I mean, GPT for is like, it's like 100 million ties. Yeah. And what we have now, it's interesting, I've read one thing that the playground was around for a while, but it was that different interface that they created that everyone's used to. It's just a simple, yeah, that helped it blow up. Because that's when I think then when people say, Oh, they blew up to a million, it was via that interface, like when they made it so simple to use

Tom Merritt 27:04

as a graphic designer that must make you feel pretty good, right? Like UI people. It's

Jeff Dwoskin 27:08

important. I didn't want to oversell myself as a graphic designer. I started as a graphic designer to get into it. And then I became strategy and stuff when I realized gotcha, yeah, good at graphic design.

Tom Merritt 27:17

I wasn't that good at HTML. That's why I ended up talking for

Jeff Dwoskin 27:21

once I started the web company, we hired people who were good at that kind of stuff. It was like, you know, then you start, you start moving into some of the other things, but you have you have a million podcasts and shows that you do and you go beyond tech. So you mentioned sorting lasers. So let's just cover that one real quick. You do this with Veronica Belmont. Right? And this is an online book club, sci fi fantasy books, reading books and stuff. That's a huge investment of time to where do you find what I feel like? Maybe you're using time travel and not telling anyone so you've developed some kind of tech trick to make more than four. Give more than 24 hours in a day. Alright, so sorted laser, which you've sounds like you've been doing for over a decade also.

Tom Merritt 28:00

Yeah. 2007. I

Jeff Dwoskin 28:02

think what sparked this passion because it's clearly an ongoing passion. When you talk about people just dropping pod fading after seven episodes here, we Yeah, you know, years years later, so you know, in that 320 plus episodes or so

Tom Merritt 28:14

I'm a sci fi nerd, probably my earliest sci fi though, Bill merits getting a lot of shout outs in the in this episode, my dad and I would sit down on Sunday mornings and watch reruns of the original Star Trek before there were any other Star Trek's that you could watch that was it maybe the animated series, but it was because he was in the Navy. So he loved that naval aspect of it, and that that sense that Gene Roddenberry who was also in the Navy brought to it and we both like space stuff than Hitchhiker's Guide came out. And Douglas Adams showed me the humor side of sci fi. So I've been into sci fi since a young age. And then Veronica, who was an intern, and then producer of buzz out loud at CNET was in a fantasy. So we would always compare notes she would tell me about, you know, whatever novel with dragons, she had been reading and I would tell her all the spaceship novels that I was reading, and at some point, we decided, you know, we should start a podcast about this about, you know, the conversations we have where we expose each other to the other side of the conversations or the other side of the genre. I don't know how it ended up starting as a book club online. First. I know, we heard Leo Laporte talking about somebody should start an online book club. And that kind of gave us a nudge as well. We started on Ning, which is no longer around as just an online forum with the intention of starting the podcast, which we started a couple of months later. But it was it was basically those conversations we were having about the different sides of the genre. And I really wish I still had this email, we send an email back and forth with each other trying names and the last one was just a bunch of names that sounded like Pugs and Sword and Laser was one of those and that's how we how we got that name. We just love doing it. it there have been a few times over the years when one or the other of us is like, you know, I'm not sure if we have enough time let's talk about it. But we've we've always found a way to keep it going just because we enjoy talking to each other about it. We have a great community that pitches in and and talks about the books with us now on Discord. You know, we were still on good reads as well. It's too much fun to not do.

Jeff Dwoskin 30:23

That's the hardest part about being creative is when you put something in motion. Yeah, I was surprised like when I would be clicking on the links of some of your podcasts and then find ones that maybe didn't exist anymore. I was like, whoa, this must have been very painful. When I got here we got a damn fine podcast which you've covered the Twin Peaks. Yeah, show

Tom Merritt 30:45

that had a built in expiration date. Because we were catching up on old twin peaks, timing it when the new one came out on Showtime.

Jeff Dwoskin 30:52

But let's talk about Star Wars. That's I wore my Star Wars shirt. You can't Oh, nice that one. You know, I know you're covering it and cord killers, you know, with Mandela, Mandela and stuff like that. There's so much stuff you do I just do you talk Do you speak? No, here's that'd be a content creator and create 50 things at the same time. Yeah,

Tom Merritt 31:10

the joke that the one of my friends Justin, Robert Young makes is that, first of all, I never go a day without a new podcast idea. I don't execute on all of them, of course. But also when when I left twit and start a daily tech news show at one point, I wasn't sure what I was going to be doing next. And I said, I don't know. Maybe it won't be daily. And he just laughed. He's like, No, you're you will always maximize your schedule. So then the reason that some of those shows most recent of which being let's talk about Star Wars go away is just time. And as I've been doing this, I've been getting better about accurately estimating what I'm capable of. And as I get older, I'm capable of less than I used to. So it was just one of those things where I'm like, You know what we just, it was great when it started. It's still great. But at some point, you have to draw a line on stuff. So things like forecast and current geek and let's talk about Star Wars and FSL tonight, those are ones that fell on the other side of the line. Unfortunately, not that I didn't enjoy doing those two,

Jeff Dwoskin 32:10

but so much still Tom Merritt to enjoy currently. So alright, chord killers. So this I love this one, I do a live show with my friends. We call it crossing the streams. We talked about just stuff you should be binge watching. So we're like, well, that's great. Yeah, came from the pandemic. And it was like, it was a great way just to connect with friends. And we were just talking about things we were talking about anyway. Alright, so chord killers. This is great. I love what I love about this is kind of short, or like short bursts. And then it seems like you just love to be able to kind of tackle every every kind of aspect of everything you enjoy.

Tom Merritt 32:42

Yeah, that's that's one of the the answers to how do you do all this is I've taken things that I would enjoy doing anyway, and figured out how to turn them into a show. I love talking to Brian Brushwood, my co host on chord killers, it gives us a chance to talk to each other every week about stuff we would talk about anyway, which is kind of the inception of that show. I'm going to be watching TV shows and movies, I'm going to be tracking those TV shows and movies and the technology portion of it portion of that I'm going to be covering for daily tech news show anyway. So we just kind of put that all together in the cord killers

Jeff Dwoskin 33:13

for daily tech news. So it's your 10th year, it's a 10th anniversary, which is thank you so do anything special for the 10th What do you got planned anything special, or?

Tom Merritt 33:22

Yeah, this is our 10th year. So we've done it for nine years, we've completed nine years. So our 10th anniversary will be at the end of this year. And it actually very beginning of next year, January 2. And so what we decided to do was just spend the entire year celebrating that we got some special art from Len Peralta to commemorate that that's going out to our patrons through the Patreon merchandise, we're going to have another version of that come out next year that everybody can get. We've been doing a lot of work with the audience of like, what do you want? What do you like? We do that all the time anyway. But there's sort of a special urgency of like, okay, this is beginning of a new chapter at the end of this year. And not that we're relaunching the show or changing anything significantly but but really fine tuning it to say the tech show that was right for 10 years ago, is not the same tech show. That's right for now. Because we have different priorities. We have aI we have automated cars on the horizon. We have Bitcoin and whether that actually is a thing or not, and NF T's and all of that sort of thing. We have Mastodon we have this whole craziness with Twitter. So the things that were popular 10 years ago, were more about apps and smartphones. And there was there was more optimism I think our mission on daily tech news show is helping each other understand technology. So as we go through this 10th year, it's really figuring out how we adapt to help people understand technology now as it keeps changing?

Jeff Dwoskin 35:00

How do you feel about Elon Musk and the $42,000 API's? And

Tom Merritt 35:05

yeah, I don't claim to understand what he's doing with Twitter, I've made my best guesses at multiple times. And then I've been proven wrong. I'm very confused with why he wanted to buy it in the first place. And what his plan is now that he was forced to buy, it was pretty clear. He didn't need to he had regrets and didn't want to buy it. But I don't think that he's just trying to run it into the ground. Some people think, Oh, he's just mad, and so he wants to kill it. I don't think it's that I think this really is him. I think he had more experience in the kind of companies he's run before, like SpaceX and Tesla that he does in a social media ad driven company. I think that's showing, I think, with the API thing, specifically, he's very much an on paper kind of decision maker, and I'm not going to soft coat the effects. So what he's doing makes perfect sense. They need to cut costs, having an API that's freely available, may not have been boosting Twitter as much as previous administrations of Twitter had hoped. So it may make perfect sense on paper to say, like, you know what, we can't afford to float that anymore. Let's change it, there's a way to change that, that keeps more developers on board. And there's the way he did it, which is just pull the plug and then pick up the pieces afterward, which has been his management style this whole way along. I look forward for Twitter's sake to the day that he finally picks a lieutenant to take it over and he moves on to the next shiny thing that captures him, because I do think there's a lot of value in Twitter, I think every time people say Twitter is dying, that that is overblown, however, there is a point at which he will beat it once too many times. And that isn't tomorrow, but he really does need to hand it over to somebody else. The positive side of all of this, in my opinion, is that it has opened the way for people to see what else is possible in that space. So Twitter is ceding ground that it dominated, we may or may not think it was doing very well at it. But it was really hard to get in and compete to do the same thing that Twitter does. And what Twitter does is very valuable or wouldn't still be around this long after it launched. But we're seeing not just Mastodon take off. But the idea of a decentralized short message blog system like Twitter take off. When you see folks like medium launching a mastodon server when you get that story that meta is considering creating at least an activity pub, which is the protocol if not a mastodon server that you log in with your Instagram, blue sky, which was spun out of Twitter by Jack Dorsey before Elon Musk came has a very similar system. They think it's a better system than activity pub, but we'll see. On the other hand, blue sky could just start using activity pub at some time or interoperate with it. I think, at the end, to me, it's more interesting, what's going to arise Now, given this new situation that we're in, and will Twitter interoperate with that or will, what arises supersede it? But I think we as users are going to get all the things we enjoyed out of Twitter, possibly with a lot of improvements. All right. We can only hope. That's a long way of saying I don't know, I know. But that's where my brains pointed anyway.

Jeff Dwoskin 38:21

Sorry to interrupt, have to take a quick break. And we're back with Tom Merritt. I think another thing I dug up of interest while stumbling upon your dad's coffee mate. Is the the apple Foxconn plant in China. And you're right, that's in the Wikipedia, right. Yeah. So what I thought was interesting about this is so in 2012, there was a call for a boycott of Apple products in response to worker suicides and dangerous working conditions at the Foxconn plant in China. And then it talks about how you got them to kind of reconsider it, and kind of refocus it and in terms of where they should what I thought was interesting about it, I'd love to hear what it was like to be part of this. But is it the now in the cycles that we have now? There's seems to be no room for that. Right? It's headline comes in, people react. And then that's it. Right? And so there's no time for kind of thinking about things and rationalizing different outcomes and and seeing well, maybe there's a different way, you know, then the knee jerk reaction way. And so it was just it was interesting. As I read this, I was like, Oh, this is of times pass. But it's I thought it was a good thing to kind of bring up only because as a reminder that maybe you know, the knee jerk reactions that we have these days. We need to all take a take a pause and and look a little deeper. Yeah, I

Tom Merritt 39:42

don't know why that one's in the Wikipedia article. I don't even think it's the best example of a topic like that we've covered on various shows maybe because it was on Bose out loud and not on one of the other shows. I also advocated and still advocate not over attributing the effect of the Cambridge Analytica stuff with Facebook, I think on daily tech news show because of the diversity of opinions amongst the contributors, and yet our ability to all get along, even when we disagree, we have continued and it has not been easy to navigate those waters of like, let's try to actually understand what's happening and not just get emotional about something and condemn it out of hand. So yeah, that that Foxconn one was one where I'm like, Hey, there's probably more going on here than meets the eye. Let's not just have a knee jerk response. And I try to continue to do that even even with Elon Musk stuff. Sometimes I'm like, Well, what he's doing makes sense. You just heard me do it. Like what he's doing makes sense. It's the way he's doing it. That may be the problem that gets people upset. It has not been easy, though, man. Like, I'll tell you that

Jeff Dwoskin 40:44

the world needs people that kind of stand up for different points, at least to keep people open minded about different things and to take in different points of view. So keep fighting the good fight. Thanks. Besides Cambridge analytic eyes are another great example.

Tom Merritt 40:59

That's probably the one that I take the most heat for. There's the constant, you know, why are you over covering NF T's? Isn't a is one that I've gotten where there's a lot of backlash just against cryptocurrency in general, and the culture around it, and people tend to pick aside and get tribal about it. So yeah, NF T's is a good example where I think that underlying technology is incredibly interesting and possibly very useful. I'm still looking for that use. And so sometimes when I cover something where I'm like, hey, this might be a really interesting use of NF T's. I get a lot of people who are upset, they're like, Oh, you're promoting NF T's? I'm like, No, I'm certainly not trying to sell you an NF. T. And no, I don't think you should spend any money on NF T's yet unless you want to like I'm not here to judge but I am looking for something that's very interesting about that technology to be put to good use.

Jeff Dwoskin 41:49

Yes, I'm sure the blockchain technology as much better usage than just buying a meme. Yeah,

Tom Merritt 41:55

buying an ape. I mean, I guess I also like a if you've got the money, and that makes it fun for you great, but don't see it as the future of the internet. That's

Jeff Dwoskin 42:03

all I always. When I think about NF T's unlike if you asked me to find a picture from my 2015 trip to Disney World on my phone, I wouldn't be able to find my suppose. You want me to pay 500 $500 or $10,000 for a picture. It's

Tom Merritt 42:20

what it solves. It makes it easy to find that picture.

Jeff Dwoskin 42:24

Not once you have a lie. To me, that was to me have we not learned anything from just having a lot of photos on our phone that just digital trying to find something?

Tom Merritt 42:33

There's that collector mentality though, right? Like,

Jeff Dwoskin 42:37

I'm a collector. Yeah. I'm into vinyl. I'm into like, he used to be in The Simpsons toys. I like I love I love collecting. I got it. I got it. You see

Tom Merritt 42:45

that vinyl past CD unit sales last year, not just revenue.

Jeff Dwoskin 42:50

I did. And I love vinyl. I just went to a record show a couple of weeks ago and stuff like that. I did see that headline. And I laugh because I was like, well, nobody buys CDs anymore. And people are buying vinyl. Yeah, it makes sense. My daughter was going to a Post Malone. She gets to take it to the Post Malone. And it came with a CD. And she gets it and she was just looks at me and she's like, What am I supposed to do with it? She does, I don't know that my daughter has ever had a CD player, my computer. My computer hasn't had one in forever. My car doesn't have one anymore as like good for vinyl. I think it speaks well. But as like who can even plays. I've got a thing at CD CDs in my basement that I was just like, thankfully at one point I converted them all over to

Tom Merritt 43:33

yeah, here's what's gonna happen though. cassettes are getting popular now amongst the Gen Z crowd. So that's going to pass CDs but then CDs are going to become nostalgic with Gen alpha or whatever down the road. Right and then they're going to make a comeback.

Jeff Dwoskin 43:46

Right? You got it then you'll be able to go and buy like a CD player. Yeah, yeah. Railroad so make the retro giant Walkman or you can you can just you heard it here first folks we called. And And okay, so on top of all this, you're off also an author, you've got at least five books that I'm aware of. And I was like Project Vera gallium pilot X. They said those in reverse trigger and avaria. Where do you find the time? I am? So

Tom Merritt 44:16

yeah, the writing thing is just something again that I've always enjoyed. And I tried to figure out well, how do I do this thing that I enjoy and turn it into something? I'm kind of at a crisis on my writing right now? Because the system that I had developed over the years has broken down for me a little, but it used to be that every year I would do National Novel Writing Month. Have you heard of that? I haven't. But okay, so sounds great. It's short version is you spend a month in November, writing a certain amount of words a day in order to hit 50,000 words and at the end of the month, have a book that you've written first draft anyway, right? It's not completed, but first draft. So I've used that over the years every every year in November, I do NaNoWriMo. I end up with 50,000 words and I spend the rest of the year kind of polishing it up editing it and getting it ready to go. Most of those books you mentioned, are just self published. They're something I put out on Kindle and print on demand pilot X and trigger I did through a company called Ink shares, which actually acts like a regular publisher, it's crowd sources, the pre orders, and then then publishes them. So you can go to a regular bookstore and find those. But I have not, this is one of those things where I have not had the time to actually become a traditionally published author, the way you would if you get an agent, and a publisher and all of that. So it's, it's stayed kind of on the quasi hobby side of things. And I've got four novels sitting on my hard drive that I sort of stalled on self publishing and getting edited. And I do have a task every day to write or edit something, and I stick to that I just gotten behind in the publishing

Jeff Dwoskin 45:49

side of it. Now I know now it's hard to get publishers. Yeah, it is

Tom Merritt 45:53

it is and can and I'm sure I could, it's just that I've got, like you said a million podcasts.

Jeff Dwoskin 45:59

Not to mention a word with Tom Merritt, where you sit with the smartest and most interesting people in the world. Another great one, I went through a Tom Merritt rabbit hole. I could tell Yeah. And they're all great as I wanted to find one that was at least okay by now. Oh, thanks,

Tom Merritt 46:17

man. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, a word. A word is my retirement plan. I wanted to really easy show. So it's like one where I just need a booker. I don't need to write anything and prepare anything. I mean, I guess you have to prepare for interviews as you as you just demonstrated, but you don't have to research daily tech tactics. I guess that's where I was going. And it really is just me going. I want to talk to that person. Let me talk to them. I feel like you can understand this, this impulse. Yeah. I

Jeff Dwoskin 46:44

mean, I, you know, in my podcast, I you know, in thinking about, like, the time, the thing when you start a podcast, right, it's like, you don't realize what's going to take the most time, which is why, you know, there's 2 million podcasts out there and only 100,000 or whatever number it is that have published recently, the most of them just fade off because it's easy to start it. It's not easy to keep doing. You got to like you said you're extremely passionate about it and and really do it. So there was pieces of it that were taking more time and I was just like, I know, no one's really needs to hear this. I'm gonna do an interview show, right like this. So it's like, get to the interview. Nobody wants me Yap. And they they're gonna tune in for Tom Merritt. They want to hear Tom Merritt. They want to hear the conversation. Yeah. And so So yeah, it's definitely that I get it. If it can be easier. It can be easier. It's a half the battle showing up right? That's right. That's right. All right. Cool. I, I loved all these stories. And it was so great to chat with you. I thank you so much for spending time with me.

Tom Merritt 47:42

Jeff, thank you for having me. This was this was really fun talking with you. I appreciate it. So Tom,

Jeff Dwoskin 47:46

do the where can people find you on the web and the socials?

Tom Merritt 47:50

Sure. Tom merritt.com collects everything together. Course daily tech news show.com. If you want to go right to the tech news stuff. And on social media, I have a ridiculous username that dates back to 1996 that I sort of refused to give up. So just search for Tom Merritt. And if you see ace detect spelled wrong, that's me. You can find me on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon everywhere.

Jeff Dwoskin 48:17

It's the same with me like my Twitter is big mocker. It was a nickname someone gave and gave. And so I had signed up. I didn't use Twitter for five years after that. And then once you get verified, now it doesn't matter probably wants to switch over to Twitter blue at some point. I'll put the link in the show notes. Everyone. Tom merritt.com is probably the best source. It's got the links to everything. All links to all Tom Merritt stuff. Everything we talked about and more. Indeed, it's time has done so much. He's done so much, too much. Thank you, Jeff. All right now amazing with Tom Merritt. It was so cool to talk to the guy that I used to get all my tech information from back in the day. And now I get it from him daily on the daily tech news show, head on over to Tom merritt.com. All the links are in the show notes to all the great things we talked about that he does such an amazing content creator and such a great guy though full of knowledge. All right. Well, with the interview over that guy me one thing I know episode 220 is coming to an end. Can't believe it. One more huge thank you to my guests, Tom Merritt. And another huge thank you to all of you for coming back week after week. It means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.

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Unknown Speaker 49:59

Good day

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