We still underestimate our ability to finally adapt to technology while we're in the middle of adapting to it, because most of the concerns I hear about technology now mimic concerns of previous technologies.

This is the Techsploder podcast, episode one, recorded Friday, May 3rd, 2024. Tom Merritt. This episode of the Techsploder podcast could not happen without the financial support of our wonderful patrons at patreon.com slash Jason Howell. If you like what you hear, head on over and support the show directly, and thank you for making independent podcasting possible. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the premier episode of the Techsploder podcast. I am the host, Jason Howell, and I am so dang pumped to be here and to launch another podcast. I've been doing podcasts for almost 20 years, launched a lot of podcasts throughout my time in this industry, as our guest, who I'm going to introduce in a moment, has done as well, so he knows as well. And no matter how many times you do it, day one, episode one is always just like, cross your fingers, hope for the best, and you know what?

It always works out. So anyways, there's that. So if you're not familiar with what Techsploder is, Techsploder podcast is really meant to be a conversation. I've done a lot of technology news shows in my career in podcasting. I want this to be a little bit different. I want it to be an opportunity for you, the audience, and me to sit down with some of my friends in the world of technology and journalism and content creation and really talk about what it's like being a human in the midst of all of this technology, this life that we love, right? We all love technology. We've got that in common. But our stories are different.

And so the Techsploder podcast is really, in my mind, intended to be like the tech origin story, if it was such a thing, or what makes each of us unique in this world of technology. And I'm just pumped to get right into it. But before we do, real quick, this is a new podcast, right?

This is episode one. I really want to spread the word about this show and see how far we can take it. So please give the podcast a review. If you're getting this on Apple Podcasts, I would really appreciate it.

That helps out tremendously, or wherever you can review. And you can also support this show directly via our Patreon, patreon.com/JasonHowell. Per-Erik Ek is one of our supporters. And you too can have your name called out at the top of the show if you are a supporter.

That's patreon.com/JasonHowell. That allows me to continue doing the show like this, gives you a bunch of extra perks around the show, and all sorts of other things. All right, we've got the kind of housekeeping stuff out of the way.

Now we can get to the main event. And I'm guessing that anyone who knows my work in podcast also knows my very first guess of this show's work. And because I think a lot of our audiences are very, well, at least they probably, a lot of them started at the same place. So I want to welcome to the show, Tom Merritt, professional, independent tech podcaster, journalist, author, lover of dogs and K-pop, the amazing Eileen Rivera, who is his partner in life. Tom, welcome to the show.

Jason, I am so honored to be your first guest. Thank you so much for asking me to join you. And congrats on the launch, man. This is awesome. Thank you. Yeah.

Did you connect with what I was saying as far as day one new podcast? You know that you're capable and you know that it's going to go fine, but no matter what, those butterflies are always there.

Oh yeah. No, absolutely. And is this the one that's finally going to flop? Is this the one no one's going to show up for? And thankfully, you've got a bunch of great folks showing up in the chat and supporting you. And it's fantastic. So yeah, you got this. This is not going to be a problem, but I totally understand those butterflies.

Yeah. Well, you say you got this and one of the big reasons that I'm bringing you on as my first guest on this show is because I don't see it as me. I see it as we. I just want to take a second and appreciate you, shower you with a little bit of appreciation, Tom Merritt.

You know, that makes me totally uncomfortable, but thanks.

I know it does, but honestly, I don't get a lot of opportunity to do this. And I just need to say, Tom is one of the kindest knowledgeable, thoughtful, wicked smart people that I know in this industry and damn good at being a career podcaster, a creator, a journalist, and just always willing to help. Like I feel like anytime throughout my career, I've been able to call you up and get honest feedback, honest insight, ideas, bounce things off of you. You're just always a wonderful collaborator. So I really appreciate you.

Well, thanks man. I do. I do appreciate you saying so to me, it just makes you uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, if you text me like, Hey, do you have time to chat? I will make time to chat. Like I may not have time right that second, but even, but if I do we can, we can chat right that second. And to me, it's fun. Like you're always asking me like, what do you think about this idea?

What do you think about that idea? And, and I'm always thinking about those same questions in my own stuff. So it's, it's great to compare notes. And I learned from you when I have those conversations. So it's not a one-way street. I'm, I'm always getting different perspectives and everything, which is helpful for me too.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you've been there from the very beginning when I say that, like, that is absolutely the truth. Um, probably I've been saying like around 20 years, it's probably about more like 18 years, but 18 years ago you were at CNET, you'd probably been there a couple of years, I think, uh, to that point, but you were doing the podcast Buzz Out Loud, which I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this are, are probably familiar with.

And I had started at CNET as an intern initially on the business side, doing video stuff. And then I remember like there was one, like, like I'm sure, and I'm curious to hear what you, what you think about this in your own life, but there are moments in our lives that we can look at as, as like sliding door moments where this question or this opportunity or this person kind of walks in and only with the perspective of looking backward, are you able to realize like, oh man, if I had said something different right there, like my entire, everything that I know in this life would be completely different.

It's like that movie sliding doors.

You know, and it's funny cause I've never actually seen the movie, but I totally quote the sliding door thing all the time. Um, but anyways, you, you are that person in my, in one of those people in my life. And, um, particularly in my career, because you know, I was working at CNET and you, I remember the day that you popped over to my cubicle and you said, Hey, you know, you're, you're into audio production. Like, would you ever be interested in coming over to the consumer side and working on Buzz Out Loud as a producer? And that kind of changed everything for me.

And I was like, cause you know, Veronica's tired of this stuff. We need somebody. Uh, yeah, it, it's funny how those conversations, which from my end was like, oh crap, we need someone to run the board.

Uh, uh, who, who around here is a remotely qualified and would be willing to do it. And, and your name came up, uh, and I knew of you, but someone's like, you know, I think Jason's really good at the audio stuff. And I was like, great idea. Um, and, and so sort of went to me to my way of thinking, like had in hand, like, I know you're doing this other stuff, but you know, we're doing this weird experimental podcast over there.

It seems like maybe people are into it. Would you want to help out with that? And so I was as, as jazz that, that you were up for it as, as I'm sure, uh, you know, in retrospect, you were glad that you took us up on the opportunity.

Oh, 100%. Like I said, you know, everything that I'm doing right now hinges kind of off at that decision. And I remember you saying at the time, cause this was, I mean, this was early days for podcasting. This was really the word podcast was relatively new and people were still associating this with the iPod pod and all that. And I remember you saying like, you know, I don't know where this, all this podcast stuff is going, but no, this is working right now.

And you might be getting in at the beginning, you know, you might ride the wave of podcast here. I'm not promising anything, but there, you know, you might, that was totally a sunbite.

Like, I don't know. It could be something big. Why don't you enjoy this? I, I didn't, not that I didn't believe it, but I was like, I don't know if this is going to go away in two days or something. Uh, you know, I certainly didn't expect both of us to still be doing it 20 years later, you know? So yeah, yeah.

Indeed. So, so that's, that's my first opportunity in tech like this. What can you tell me a little bit about, like, w was there a moment that where the door opened for you where you were like, you know what, I think I want to do this. And you saw that opportunity, that opportunity floated by you and you were able to seize on it. Yeah. And similar along those lines.

No, that the, the equivalent for me, uh, was in 1999. I was working as the assistant manager at half price books on Guadalupe street in Austin, Texas. Um, you know, uh, making enough money to buy groceries, you know, but you know, not doing great, not sure where my life was going, what I was going to do with it. Had lots of interests.

A friend of mine, Russ Pitts and I had, had done a access TV show and we'd put on a play and a, and we're planning to put on another one. And my friend who I had come to know at that same bookstore had moved out to San Francisco and was saying, you need to come out here. She started looking at San Francisco women on the web newsletter postings and sending me job opportunities from it. So thank you. San Francisco women on the web, uh, for providing me, uh, that conduit.

Uh, yeah. And her name was Cindy. Cindy sent me a bunch of, of job descriptions. I applied for three of them. Uh, one was, uh, working at surf monkey, which was a children's, uh, plugin for Internet Explorer that would block adult websites. Uh, the other one was a future media, future publishing, uh, working on one of their Mac publications. And then the other one was ZDTV. Uh, I got offered all three, but the one at ZDTV was my dream job. It had the opportunity to do a little radio.

Obviously it had television. I could do writing and I got hired to be the web producer. So that was me publishing things to the web, doing some writing and publishing things to the web. Uh, and it was Regina Preciado, the producer of screensavers and call for helps websites that recognized that in me. Uh, and, and she, she said later, like your cover story, where you are your cover letter, where you described your dream job and how it fit with this is really what hooked her, uh, to recommend me. But I had to interview with a bunch of other people there as well. Thankfully, uh, that got me through, uh, and, uh, and I was able to get that job.

But if I hadn't got that job, I don't know what would have happened. That's what caused me to move out to San Francisco. That's what got me into journalism. And that is what laid the foundation for my interest in podcasts. Now I was curious about podcasts when they came along in 2004, but it was right as I had got laid off, uh, by what had by that time been called TechTV and was moving over to CNET to take a job there.

Uh, so it wasn't until like January of 2005 that I was one of the voices saying, gosh, we, you know, we should really start doing these podcasts. We should come up with something. Uh, and, and then, you know, we did, we created Buzz Out Loud and the rest is history.

Yeah. You created Buzz Out Loud. And I love, I don't know at this point how many times I've heard that very first episode, which, which by the way, I don't think you can find any of this stuff online very easily. I think the internet archive has, has probably the most comprehensive archive of BOL, but, uh, CNET site, I mean, you've only got the last like maybe year or two bits and pieces definitely have the last episode. Anyone who wants to find you, anyone who wants to find us in the, in the TV studio, sitting around a circular table on Fridays doing the really strange, like alternative version, video version of Buzz Out Loud. Like you can't even find that anymore. It's lost.

The, the, the buzz town folks, uh, have created an alt, uh, have recreated the feed. They have, they have done, uh, the work of, of digging it up, uh, and, and have recreated, uh, a feed. So if you, if you search, search around for, for the buzz town, uh, project, I'm trying to find the actual URL right now. Cause I'm blanking, uh, on, on it now.

Buzztownarchive.com. Is that it?

Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Let's see. And it's just a bunch of, of fans that republished the episode of, uh, of Buzz Out Loud in their original form. So if you want to find them, that's the best way to go. And big thanks to all the folks who got together to do that.

Man, no kidding. Well, and, and this is, this is kind of a really great example of, of kind of the, the critical element in our career in podcast careers and podcasting is that, you know, the community that builds up around the work that we do, it's, it's unreal. Like it really is a life in and of itself.

And I don't know, you know, that we could do half of what we do without the, the, the community who cares about what we do and not only cares to watch, but cares to be involved and do things like this, like create a, create an archive that didn't exist prior to it.

Yeah. Right. It's, it's a combination of, of technology, uh, empowering the connection, right. Uh, both the connection between us and the community and the community with itself, uh, so that they can, they can talk to each other about it. Uh, and I think it is something I learned about at TechTV with its community, did not think I was going to experience again when I left TechTV and was, was blessed by being able to experience it again with Buzz Out Loud and have stayed in some tributary of that community ever since.

And I'm sure there are people who, um, who you are connected with through these shows that have been there from the absolute very beginning, like from the first time you popped up on TechTV or whatever your first like visible public kind of appearance was, you know, there've got to be some people who are following you now, literally like at this point, you know, a third to a half their life, like has been spent with Tom Merritt in their ear or in on the screen in front of them as a constant. That's amazing.

It kind of, I kind of, I'm unbelieving sometimes when someone is like, yeah, I used to watch you on TechTV. I'm like, did you though? I mean, I wasn't on that much. I, you know, I wrote on the website, but, but yeah, there, there are definitely people who were active in the TechTV message boards, uh, in the TechTV chat, uh, and then active in the CNET message boards and the CNET chat.

Uh, yeah. Who are, who have just come along the whole way. I mean, one of the, one of the ones I remember the most is Karl, the med student, who's now Dr. Karl. Like we, Dr. Karl, we didn't put him through med school, but we, we accompanied him on his journey. I remember being excited and I still, I still get emails, uh, from Carl from, from time to time with comments on stuff. It's fantastic.

Yeah. The, the lives of all that just, I mean, it, you know, uh, obviously duh, you know, everybody's lives continue on and everything, but it goes from, it goes much further beyond the, Oh, this is the name on a screen to suddenly like years and years later, you realize they're, you know, they're, we know so much more about them because of their interaction. We see how their lives have developed and how they're now a professional and how now their hair is graying.

And, you know, they used to look like a kid and now they're like middle aged and they have a family and it's just, it's really cool. That's, and that's kind of at the heart of like what I love about the idea of what we're doing here, having a conversation about technology is that, you know, as technology fans, we love the, the, the digital bits and we love, you know, the, the gadgets and all this kind of stuff. But really at the end of the day, we are human beings living with this technology and in this technological universe together.

And we all share that kind of passion. Like when you were, when you were a kid, did you think I want to be in technology somehow when I grow up or was that not like not even on your radar yet? What did you want to be when you were younger?

The technology that I was into when I was, was youngest, like most kids was gaming related, right? It was, it was, you know, those actually, I think I have one here. The, the little Mattel, you know, electronic games.

Yeah. The little handheld things like basketball and auto racing and baseball. And then the big one was when I got the TI 99 4a, that was my first computer that I saved up money for an Atari 2600. And my dad gave me an option of using what I had saved up to get the 2600 or get the TI 99, which was twice expensive as expensive, but he'd pay the difference. And so one opportunity, that's a great opportunity.

Yeah. Once I did that I was into programming was in, I got the cassette, you know, adapter. So I could store programs on a cassette machine. I was creating my own games.

And it was, it was all about games, right? I wanted the 2600, but I got the TI. So the TI, I got some of the game cartridges, but then I realized I could make my own games. So I made a slot machine that led to the Commodore 64 and the Commodore 64 had more capabilities in its basic.

And so I could do more sprites and things like that. And, and I also took a programming class at Kaskaskia college for young students during the summer. And I learned to program Apple basic there. And so that, that all led to a lifelong interest in technology to the point that even when I was working at that bookstore, I was one of the few people who had an internet connection. I got a shell account in the nineties and I would, I would go on news groups and I would, I would post Subbriliant News, my zine on news groups as well as on paper.

And, and so, yeah, it was, it was just something that was always, I was always fascinated with, with software mostly of like, how can I like make something out of nothing, you know, just make something out of words and letters.

Did you have a, you know, by the way, I pulled up the Wikipedia for the TI-9948 cause I did not have one, but I'm familiar with one. My friend had one and occasionally I would go over to his house. Actually my friend's dad did in his den that was just like this.

It was a total man cave, you know, super dark, dank, really messy, had electronics and like, you know all sorts of like parts and pieces and everything everywhere, but also had a TI-9948 and we would plug around on that every once in a while. So it says here introductory price was 1,150 bucks.

Wow. That's the TI-994. Look at the price of the 4A.

Oh, I see. So that was the cheaper one. You got it $525.

And it was 199 by the time we got it because we were not early adopters.

Yeah. Did you have any, any like mentor or person in your life that, that kind of, you know, showed you this technology prior to you having it that kind of lit that spark at all? Or was it just something that you read about in computer magazines or something like that?

Yeah, it was, it was stuff that I just saw on television and was fascinated with. It was stuff my dad encouraged me to learn about and my grandpa encouraged me to. I remember my grandpa asking me to write a program to track the stock prices of the, of his retirement account.

And I remember thinking like, he doesn't need a computer program to do this. Like, but he, he wanted to encourage me, you know, and challenge me. So I, so I did it. So, so those two for sure encouraged me.

And then the, the teachers in that Kaskaskia college course were, were incredibly helpful in, in fostering all of us. That was fun because you walked in and there was a side of the room that had TRS 80s and a side with Apple twos. And they just said, pick a seat.

And you had no idea that you were picking a side at that point, but you really weren't because by the end of that two week course, we were all, you know, talking about how our machine was better than their machine. It's just like natural to get all tribal about that stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, what that's doing for me, that's reminding me I have this very faint, like vague, but I know what happened. It actually happened memory of going to a computer summer camp. And it was like a week long summer camp out in the woods somewhere where one of the big kind of buildings, you know, you know, total like rustic wood buildings or whatever like log cabin sort of things. But on the inside, it was, you know, gigantic. And on the inside, they had all these computers and you could learn turtle graphics. Oh yeah.

Right. Just how special that was. Like I was so young, like I hardly, I hardly knew what I was doing. Like I have, I wish I remembered more about it. It's, it's crazy how, you know, a lot of those details fade over time, but just how, just how magical being like, like when you said walking into the room and seeing the line of computers, that's immediately what came to my mind. It was kind of like, I got goosebumps because I remember feeling that and going, oh, I'm at home. I'm with my people, you know?

Well, and just learning what was capable of, right. As well as learning the limits, but, but learning like, oh, I can actually do this. I can actually make a computer program, which is something you only, you only saw on TV, uh, before that. Uh, the, the one thing I never got in high school was into BBSs or anything, because my dad did not want a modem. He was a little, he was a little security conscious, uh, possibly paranoid. Uh, but I, you know, that was at a time when long distance calling was, was a way to go bankrupt. Right.

Cause they, they charged a lot, a lot of money for calls. So I think he was worried about accidents, uh, as well, but I never got, I never got in the internet until I got to the university of Illinois. My first internet experience was in a journalism class, uh, where we used a computer lab to write and research stories. Uh, and I remember the computer lab manager very sternly warning us that we must log out, not just log in because there were a certain amount of seats on the main frame you were logging into. And if you didn't log out, that seat could not be released without him having to go in and, you know, do a lot of trouble. So, uh, I just, it's funny to think like, oh yeah, you had to log out of stuff, but that was impressive because it was my first experience with, uh, worldwide information where we could go on and find out, you know, uh, candidate Clinton's, uh, and then later in the next semester, president Clinton's, uh, his, his, his, uh, his plans, his, his, uh, well, it wasn't president Clinton.

Actually, it was just candidate Clinton. Cause I, I graduated after that, but anyway, we could find out his itinerary, like what he was doing, where he was going. And it just felt like such privileged information. You'd go on, go for it.

You'd get the official presidential, uh, George Bush schedule and governor Clinton schedule. And, uh, you just felt so important nowadays that stuff is commodity, right? Your problem is finding a version of that, that isn't clickbait, that that's actually accurate. Uh, but back then it was unprecedented to have that kind of access. Indeed.

Our, our model was, you know, going into the library and working off of information that was, uh, you know, years, if not decades old, um, hold on to the thought of internet memories. Cause I definitely want to ask you a question about that, uh, right after this pause. All right. Let's talk a little bit about the internet. You brought it up.

I'm not sure. I'm not, maybe this is your, your fondest early internet story, uh, or memory, but if it isn't, or maybe come up with another one, like, is there something from the early days of the internet that really kind of captivated, uh, captivated your mind and, and, uh, I don't know, just kind of, kind of lit you up with possibility, I suppose.

Yeah, that, that would be the earliest memory that, that story of, of being able to access gopher and email, uh, and all of that. Uh, and then going onto newsgroups and being like, oh, I can publish my zine articles. I was doing parody news. Uh, and, and then I found out the onion existed and we're doing it way better, but I kept doing it anyway. Uh, and I would go onto newsgroups and post them. Uh, I was very vociferously against the graphical web.

Uh, I just thought that was going to ruin everything with advertisements. Uh, and I was that guy in the nineties in my insufferable twenties. Yeah. Now I think coming now.

Yeah. Now I think I, I am less accurate, uh, than I would have thought back then. But anyway, uh, I, I think probably the fondest memory I have is the first time I created a website. Uh, and that was not through my internet connection. In fact, I, I was not making a lot of money, but I went to the expense of, of subscribing to a second internet connection because it gave you five megabytes of free space to create a website.

Five megs. Yeah. Wow. Huge amount. What did you do with that wealth of storage? Like I'm not going to fill that up.

That's awesome. Uh, so I signed up for, even though I had a shell account through CCSI, I signed up for a graphical web account from AT &T world net, uh, because I wanted to get the free space. Uh, and in fact, I signed up for AT &T world net, uh, and then found out that the free space only came with a higher level tier that was more expensive than I wanted to pay. So I changed to concentric.net. That was my actual first website was, was concentric.net/~acedtect, uh, because that was my user name on Concentric.

Right. And I, I published the zine. I took the zine that I had done on paper that had been on the news groups and I created a website, uh, for it. Uh, and that eventually became subbrilliant.com, which is still out there. I don't, I haven't updated it in years, but it's still, it's still up. Uh, but that first time that I published something and it was on the web and you could see it and I was like, okay, I guess the graphics aren't all bad. Uh, it, it was, it was mind blowing that I'm like, I've published something for the entire world.

Now I'm looking, if you're watching the video version, uh, which is, is on YouTube, by the way, go to tech splitter, a channel to find that, um, your subbrilliant.com sites, uh, looking a little bare. It's like, there's a lot of black space.

That's Subbrilliant corporation. Click on Subbrilliant News and that forecast podcast.

Oh yeah, no, there's some updating that needs to be done there for sure. But if you click on Subbrilliant News, that's, that's actually what the original site was.

Got it.

Oh, this looks a little better. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, we got it.

Wow. Okay. This is, I mean, Oh man, that's so, that's so rich, man. Looking at your archive and seeing it dated all the way back to like 1993 dash 2000. That's amazing.

Yeah. If you click on the 1993, I think I actually even have like a replication of, uh, the 1993 means that I've, I'm including stuff from the printed zine and the news groups and stuff.

Yeah, that's right. Kidding. Entire premier, premier issue. Wow, dude, this is, this is really impressive. I'm not sure that I've seen all this stuff before. June 2nd, 1993.

Yeah, that's the first printed zine.

Yeah. Volume six ounces. Um, okay. Which maybe that ties into the picture of a hamburger on a bun. Wow, man. This is, this is like early Tom history right here. And I'm not sure that I've ever seen this. That's amazing to have that archive and to be able, like I'm, I'm a huge, like hugely nostalgic person and being able to have things from that long ago organized as neatly as you do here.

That's a, that's an endeavor. Is that something that you did after the fact kind of cleaned up your archive or is this just, it was this are organized from the beginning?

I'm pretty sure I did that part of the archive in the nineties because there was a point in time when I was working at the bookstore where I was publishing on a schedule. I would, I would do a publication once a week. I would write at least one story. I had met people on my own message boards that I had, uh, that I had created in Pearl, uh, who were submitting stories of their own that I was publishing. Uh, and then I created in Pearl using the same code from the message board system, a co a like primitive content management system that would let me actually, uh, give them a link, an incredibly insecure link by today's standards, but of security through obscurity, I'd give them a link and say, here, you can publish your story. Uh, just write your title and everything in here.

And then it will go up on, on the, uh, on the web. So I had a whole thing. And when I was doing that, I was like, Oh, let me bring in the zine archives and make it real professional. Once I actually got a real job, um, in, in, uh, TechTV days in 1999, publication and maintenance started to fall by the wayside. Yeah.

I mean, it's a, it's a part-time job, if not a full-time job, keeping all that kind of stuff organized and categorized. It's why so many people are like, I'm going to start a blog. And then they do.

And then, you know, at a certain point, you just realized like you also got everything else going on in your life. It's really hard to manage and maintain these things with consistency, which is something I might add. You are expert at, you have so many projects, so many damn things. I look at what you're doing now with, you know, not just DTNS, which is a, you know, a five days a week news show, but you've got all of these other, you've got your sub stack, you've got your multiple podcasts, all of these things. And obviously at this point, you've built up your kind of independent, uh, capabilities to a point to where you have staff and you have people helping you with this stuff. But I'm just, I'm just blown away by, by what you're capable of and organizing all of this and making it happen, uh, with the amount that you do. It's pretty, really impressive.

Well, thank you. One of these days I will explode. But it's, it's, it's a testament to the fact, somebody asked me recently, like, why did you decide to do a daily news show when you went independent? You could have done anything. And I'm like, it's just what I like doing. I've been doing a version of that since 99, because even, even in 99, I was doing, uh, I was collecting things for the screensavers website every day. So, uh, it's something I, I enjoy doing. And a lot of these spinoff projects are me saying, you know, I'm already doing this work for the project.

It could also be accessible this way. So you mentioned the sub stack, the tech Tom sub stack is me writing up all of my notes for DTNS that day. And I used to just write them up and throw them away, uh, not throw them away, but I put some of them in the show and everything else would just go away. So I'm using that. I have to spend a little extra time formatting it, trying to spell check it and all of that. But I'm like this, this makes the sub stack worthwhile. That provides another level. I'm not sure it's successful enough, but it's stuff I would mostly be doing anyway. Uh, and it provides a basis then for Sarah, my cohost, Sarah Lane, Roger, uh, even some of the, uh, the spinoff shows to look at and say, oh, there's, there's some resources.

And that's what Tom is looking at today. Great. I can, I can use that and jump from there. Uh, no, a little more is me just doing research for stories so that I know about them for daily tech news show and then turning that into its own show. Um, so, so yeah, a lot of it is just me interested in the topic and taking aspects of that interest and saying, well, you know, we could repackage that and make it into something else.

Well, as, as is always the case in my interactions with you, I learned something new and now have new ideas as far as what I can do. Cause you're right. I take, I do these wall of notes. Like I am definitely not a fly by the seat of your pants person when it comes to these shows and what we do on a daily basis.

I'm better at that. I've really tried to work hard on letting go a little bit. And actually this show is kind of an exercise in that and just like letting go and letting it be what it is. But I still have to organize and I still end up with these walls of texts that are kind of like my preparation, my, my way of understanding. And then you're right. I just kind of like delete the text, edit, you know, file and move on with my life. But that's a lot of work that could be directed somewhere else. That's a really smart.

I gotta credit Justin Robert Young with pointing out like, Hey man, you, you do all this preparation every day. Like that's newsletter level preparation. I'm like, huh? You know what? That is so smart. That is so true.

Um, I know that we have you for like another eight minutes. I've got a few kind of, I don't know, fun questions. I think. And I know that, um, you love science fiction. That's one thing that I've learned about you over time.

You're, you know, you are an author, like I said, at the top of the show and you write, rewrite novels about science fiction and other topics. Um, so what I'm wondering is when you were younger and you were looking ahead, Oh, that's my dog. She just knocked over my water bottle.

Um, hi sugar. Um, when you were younger and you were looking towards the future and you were looking into your crystal ball into the future and thinking about like, what is possible? And maybe, maybe it's an idea from science fiction. Maybe it's just like, wouldn't it be cool if, or whatever. And you looked into the future and you said, I would love for this idea to come true.

This, this technology or this thing to come true someday. Did that happen? Has it come true? And how, and if it has, how do you feel about it? Like does it live up to your expectation, your hopes, or does it, uh, kind of unseat some troubling aspects in the process?

Uh, that's an interesting question because in my high school years, particularly, I assumed that there would be a nuclear war that would wipe out most of us by the time I was in my mid twenties. And I like, when I say I assume that I basically like, I'm like, yeah, there is no future.

So I really didn't spend a lot of time imagining like the far future. I assumed that it was going to be like, we'll need to survive some somehow. Uh, so I, I, I kinda, I kinda look at everything past, you know, 1994 as gravy, um, and, and have for most of my life, which is I think why sometimes I may come off as a little Pollyanna, uh, these days and like, things are not nearly as bad as, as you think, because I, I've, I had that horrible, like, no, it's all gonna fall apart. Uh, it, and, and it didn't, um, that doesn't mean it won't, but it also, I, I look at the world now and I'm like, it was worse.

Like, it doesn't feel like it could have been, but objectively it was. Uh, and, and so I, I feel more optimistic now than I did then. Uh, this is all me tap dancing though, trying to, uh, you know, cover the fact that maybe I just didn't have much imagination when I was a kid because, because I guess most of my thoughts were, we're going to go to other planets.

I think that's where my head was at. It was all star Trek stuff. Like, will we be like able to visit, uh, far off worlds?

Well, you know, will we, we be able to go to the moon? Uh, and, and, and that's where my imagination was. It wasn't with the near term technology. I, I didn't even imagine anything like the internet, uh, became, I mean, I, I actually, I knew that things like CompuServe and stuff existed when I was, when I was in high school, but I did not imagine, you know, the worldwide communications network and the worldwide entertainment, uh, things that we had. Uh, I do think that we still underestimate our ability to finally adapt to technology while we're in the middle of adapting to it. Because most of the concerns I hear about technology now mimic concerns of previous technologies, like VCRs with piracy, like television with, you know, degrading young minds and screen time and all of that. And that's not to say the concerns aren't valid.

They are. That's how we adapt is by having the concerns and figuring out how to deal with them. But we, we do generally figure out how to deal with them. Now, maybe this is the time we don't, right?

That's what I hear. A lot of people say is like, this time is different, but every time up until now, everyone has said this time is different. Uh, so I think that's, that's the one thing I would hold on to is that, uh, we're, we're probably better at dealing with this stuff than we think. It just doesn't feel like it until we've dealt with it.

Yeah. When you're in the moment, it feels much larger than it does when you're, when you're hindsight looking back and you're like, Oh, wait a minute, I survived. Everything's okay. Um, and actually this question does tap into one of our patrons, actually the executive producer, one of the executive producers of this show, Jeffrey Marracini, um, asked a question saying, and it's, it's very similar along this line, wondering on what Tom's views are about his content, his content being incorporated into generative AI, large language models, training data databases. Are you for or against any other thoughts related to that? What do you think?

I've got a little Linux hippie in me. Uh, so, uh, I have generally considered that my creative output is probably something that is best opened for other people to make use of. That's why I've always put things on a creative commons license and that when people support me, they support me because they see value in what I do and they want access to what I do first, uh, versus having to hunt around for it. And that principle means that I am not terribly concerned with someone scraping my content and using it to train a large language model, probably because I understand that large language models are just really, really fancy and really, really talented mimicry bots. Uh, and, and that is definitely oversimplifying, but I kind of oversimplified a counter the narrative that they're, they're stealing my data.

They're not stealing my data. They, they use my data along with billions of other points of data that mine get lost in to try to figure out like, Oh, is this how humans talk? Is this how humans write?

Is this what the next word should be? That makes sense. So I'm not too worried about that. On the other hand, I do think that this use of data is new and I'm very sympathetic to people who say, no, I don't want my work to be trained and be able to possibly be output because if it's trained on my data and it's good at predicting what words should come next, sometimes it's going to predict my words to come next.

That's just a natural outcome. And so I do think it would be appropriate for some kind of law or agreement or system that says, yes, under previous copyright law, it's a fair use because it's so transformative to take this data and train on it. But that's not how people feel. And so you should get permission. This should be a new category of, if you're going to train off someone's data, you should have the right to do that. And creative commons could be a way for you to flag that and say, you don't have to pay me, go ahead and train off of it. And anyone who doesn't flag that licenses should be struck, uh, same as anything else. But, but yeah, I, I think also the copyright law should be a lot shorter. Uh, so I, I think stuff that's really, you know, from the twenties and everything that, that should all be trainable, but, but it's clear that, that people feel a sense of unease that their data is being used. And so I think there ought to be new rules that recognize that. Yeah.

Yeah. There is a, there's a certain kind of sense of, of this moment with this technology that the scale is different. The scale and the, the possibility of that, that wide reaching scale, it means that it's capable of something more than was, was before. And I, I would absolutely agree with you. I think, you know, whether it lines up or not with, you know, the, the, the letter of the book or whatever, the fact is people feel very strongly about this. And certainly there's some fear in there. And, you know, maybe some of that comes from not knowing that or understanding the technology to the degree at which maybe they, they could or should, but, um, but there's no sense in denying people how they feel about the impact of this kind of technology and, and pretending like it doesn't exist because

it goes along with, with another principle I have, which is, uh, people much prefer to opt in than to opt out of things. Uh, and I think that's one of the driving principles here is if you say, Hey, may I use your data to train? And you have the chance to go, yes. Or, well, if you pay me or no, that's a whole different situation than, oh yeah, we totally scraped all your stuff. You didn't even know it. I think that's what bothers people. Yeah, indeed. Indeed.

Uh, Tom Merritt, you are amazing. We are, we are at the end of the chat here. Um, I just, I really appreciate you, um, for so many reasons. Um, not just because you are the first guest on this show, but, uh, you know, you've been a constant throughout my career and, um, I just, I literally would not be doing what I do right now if it weren't for you and your influence and your kindness and your generosity and everything. So thank you for being who you are. You are an amazing person.

Well, thank you, Jason. I'm also argumentative. So I'm going to push back and say, I bet you would still find a way to be doing this, uh, no matter what, because you are incredibly impressive. Uh, just watching you recently, uh, launch all of this and all of the effort and all the communication and the promotion and the care and consideration that you've put on it, uh, is incredibly impressive. And that, that is all down to you, uh, and, and your own talents. So you should, you should take all the credit for that and, and well done, man. It's fun to watch.

Thank you. Thank you. I'm having a great time. Um, and yeah, and getting a lot of confidence through these conversations. So, uh, Tom Merritt, uh, if people want to follow your work, obviously, uh, dailytechnewsshow.com is the site that has all of your stuff. Is that kind of the main place that you normally point people to?

If you want my tech stuff, that that's where it all is going to show up. dailytechnewsshow.com is the main thing I do. Uh, there's also techtom.substack.com, uh, which is that newsletter that we were talking about earlier. If you want to get a little more of my opinion, I play more of a moderator role on DTNS. So if you, if you want to get, uh, you know, a little more of my take on things in your inbox every day, it's techtom.substack.com and TomMerritt.com kind of brings all of it together. So you can check me out there as well.

Has it all in one easy to find place, Tom, thank you again. And, uh, I'll definitely be in touch. Cause I will have questions throughout the, uh, this episode. I look forward to it, man. Right on Tom. Thank you. Such a pleasure. And, uh, good luck prepping for DTNS today.

Thanks. I got the rundown open right now. I'm ready to go. All right. All right.

Get to it. Thank you again, Tom. I'll remove you from the stage. You are amazing. Uh, listen up everybody. I could not do this podcast without your support. The most direct way that you can support me right now. Um, as I'm building all this stuff up around me, like we were talking about is at Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/JasonHowell, there, you are going to find, uh, the tech splitter or Patreon, which does include the Techsploder Podcast and, you know, all other things that I'm doing. There's a lot of tiers. We offer ad free shows, early access to videos, a discord community, regular hangouts.

I'm doing hangouts like via zoom with, uh, patrons Q and A's with me extended Q and A's with me as well as the extended, uh, Techsploder fam and a whole lot more. And I also offer the ability, the chance for you to be an executive producer of this very show. Just like this week's executive producers, Jeffrey Marricini, Catie Lake, and my brother from another mother, John Kuehne. John, good to have you here. Thank you all for supporting this independent podcast and for allowing us to do what we do. Techsploder podcast records live every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific 1 p.m. Eastern on the @Techsploder YouTube channel with the audio podcast publishing to the feeds later that day.

Do not forget to like rate review and subscribe wherever you happen to be. And you can find everything you need to know about the show at Techsploder.com. Thanks again to our guest, Tom Merritt. Thanks to you for watching and listening. I'm Jason Howell. I'll see you next week on another episode of the Techsploder podcast.

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