Really Specific Stories: John Siracusa Duration: 1:07:32 SPEAKERS Martin Feld, John Siracusa Martin Feld 00:21 Thank you so much for joining Really Specific Stories, John; I appreciate you taking the time today. John Siracusa 00:26 Thank you for having me. Martin Feld 00:27 Now, first question that I ask every guest is this: how did you first get into podcasts, John? John Siracusa 00:35 I guess I should have—I see what you're doing here is documenting history—this is what I should have done for myself. I should have a diary or a journal or something, and because when people ask me questions like that, it's now so long ago that I have to just dig into my memories and hope what I'm telling you is vaguely close to the truth, because I'm so bad with dates, but this is the best I can come up with. I think the first set of podcasts that I can remember listening to, um, were by Mur Lafferty, who's a fiction writer, uh, and she had a podcast called Geek Fu Action Grip, and another one called I Should Be Writing. That was, the I Should Be Writing slogan was 'a podcast for wannabe fiction writers by a wannabe fiction writer'. And she would talk about her writing process and trying to submit books to publishers and try to get an agent, you know, to try to break into the world of fiction writing. And she was just by herself on the microphone. That's it. And she would just talk about that. And I just, for whatever reason, during my commute, I started listening to that. No idea how I found it, it was probably had something to do with the iPod and iTunes or whatever, because I think it was in that era. Geek Fu Action Grip actually started in 2004-ish, and I think uh, I Should Be Writing was a little bit later, maybe 2006 or -7. John Siracusa 01:46 Anyway, I listened to that podcast and I was, you know, I liked it. Like, maybe it was when radio had become too intolerable for me, I was tired of listening to NPR or whatever, and I just started to listen to this podcast. I am not a wannabe fiction writer. You know, it's not a thing I aspire to, but I, you know, was a writer and I did enjoy hearing her talk about what she was going through and I found it very comforting, right? So that's, that's where the seed is planted: podcasts are a thing and they're a thing that you enjoy, right? And the second thing is that I remember from around this time was whatever job I had at the time, we had like a, we have lunch and like lunch room, right? Where everyone just brings their lunch and you go to sort of the communal lunch room, we'd all sit down. It's kind of like high school, we all sit down like long tables, and take out your little bag lunch or whatever, go to the microwave and heat something up. And we'd all just sit there and eat lunch together. And I would talk to my friends and co-workers and we would have conversations kind of like at the lunch table (very much like high school). And I would do stuff that would be familiar to anyone who's ever heard me on a podcast: I would talk about Apple and technology and rant about things, right? And the table was entertained by my antics, right? John Siracusa 02:56 And so these two things together, listening to podcasts and saying, here's just this, here's Mur Lafferty, just sitting down in front of microphone by herself, and just solo holding up an entire franchise and multiple franchises and podcasts, you know, week after week, and me, you know, talking about tech stuff with my co-workers and hearing them chuckle at what I had to say, and my various uh, you know, complaints about things. The, the idea started to form in my head: 'Maybe this is something I could do, I think I might be able to be a podcaster'—which is not much of a thing to think because back in, you know, whatever was 2007 or something, who cares? Who'd ever even heard of a podcast? Who'd even heard of a podcaster? And that's why it seemed like, you know, it's not like I was sitting there saying, if some kid was thinking today, 'I think I could be a YouTuber'. They're thinking that because YouTubers are celebrities and super-famous and everything, but I was thinking, 'I think I could be a podcaster', because the bar is low, not that, you know, Mur Lafferty was great and everything and she's, she's still podcasting but it felt like so small and low-pressure, like that no one knew about these things, no one listened to them and there were no people in the field keeping you out. It wasn't like, I mean, she was, you know, she was a wannabe fiction writer. It wasn't like, uh, there was some famous celebrity who had a podcast and I thought I could have one too, it was just regular people, just regular people with regular jobs, trying to do this thing. John Siracusa 04:19 And so, that put the idea in my head, and now is where fog of memory comes in. And then at some point, I was probably contacted by Dan Benjamin or Dan Benjamin contacted me about possibly doing a podcast and at that point, I was primed because I already had in my head: podcasts are fun; they're a thing I like; and based on my experiences, I think it's a thing I might be able to do. So I jumped at that opportunity, "Yes, yes, I do want to do a podcast and in fact, I already have an idea for a podcast. And I you know, I have a name for it. And I have a tagline and I have a description! Like, I was ready to go! All I needed was someone else to do all the work, which was setting up the podcast, and doing all the RSS feeds and having the website I've been recording it and figuring out the microphones and you know, and so that, you know, that's, Dan Benjamin really helped out with that. But I was I, you know, I don't know if I would have done it myself. I probably would have eventually but Dan definitely kick-started that and so I leapt at that opportunity. I think I did like guest on a podcast with Dan before Hypercritical started, which was my first, you know, podcast that was sort of my vehicle. And I think I might have even interviewed Gabe Newell from Valve. Martin Feld 05:26 Mmm! John Siracusa 05:27 You know, the guy who runs the Half-Life company Portal, that guy? I think I might have done a podcast interview with him as one of my very first podcasts, which is not really, shouldn't really be your first podcast to interview Gabe Newell, but anyway, yeah, I started Hypercritical, and that's how and it's uh, gotten all downhill or uphill from there, depending on how you you want to phrase the analogy. Martin Feld 05:45 So Hypercritical was your first real foray into production or sharing your thoughts through this audio medium. For people who didn't hear Hypercritical, can you tell us what that show was about or what it was like to kick off that programme? John Siracusa 06:00 So like I said, I had an idea in mind already that if I wanted to have a podcast, it would be me being... me being me. Like, just I was, like I was at the lunch table at work, right? I was already at this point, like writing reviews for Ars Technica and those reviews were not entirely about me criticising things, but that's kind of the direction I would always go in: 'Here, let me look at particular product', or or, you know, I think my first thing I wrote for Ars was a book review or whatever. It's, it's always about, you know, critical analysis or whatever. 'Let me tell you what I think about this thing, and let me support, uh, you know, my opinion with facts and logic', and so on and so forth. And so I figured my podcasts would be the same thing. I'm really super into technology, I have a lot of thoughts about it. And as you can imagine, if anyone knows me, they say that I had a reputation for being critical or always complaining or telling people what's wrong with things. And I wanted to embrace that, as you know, a self-deprecating exaggeration to say I'm going to make a show that's all about criticising things. I wanted to put that right in the title and right in the tagline, to undercut the idea that people are gonna listen to the podcast and say, 'Why would I want to listen to podcasts where someone complains all the time?' You know, I get out in front of it, right? So I'm going to call the podcast Hypercritical, and I'm going to describe it as you know, the show where you know, I talk about what's wrong in the world of you know, Apple and related technologies, whatever. And a little tagline 'Nothing is so perfect that it can't be complained about'—the humorous phrasing nothing is so perfect is the highfalutin kind of like, uh, you know, ivory-tower-type-thing, transitioning to that it can't be complained about, which is the more prosaic, you know, I could have put 'whined about' but I didn't want to go that far, right? Martin Feld 07:37 Mmm... John Siracusa 07:38 'That can't be complained about', I'm gonna hear someone complain, right? In the end, that's what it is, but also, 'Nothing is so perfect that it can't...' Yeah, anyway, that was the thought behind the show. So I was going to talk about what I always talk about, which is technology, but I was going to tell you everything that's wrong, because that's my inclination. I, before the show, I had written an article on my blog on Ars Technica, I think also titled Hypercritical, that was talking about Steve Jobs, and uh, you know, his critical nature and my realisations about my critical nature and how it reflects, how it connects to my work, artistic work, sort of like doing drawing and painting as a child and a teenager. That was, that was kind of the seed of the Hypercritical podcast. It was me, plus that idea from that blog post plus the idea that I thought I might want to do a podcast. Martin Feld 08:21 Thank you for explaining that. And I'm really interested in this word that you're using, 'critical', because you're not criticising for the sake of it, or lobbing bombs or being negative about something, you're being critical because you come from a position of interest or passion about something or maybe expert knowledge. So, if we take a step back, where did this critical nature come from, and this love of technology that led you up to this point of being such a commentator on technology? What was the story that led you there? John Siracusa 08:53 I think there are definitely two separate things. So the technology thing was just, has been an interest of mine since I was a kid. I was just, you know, I grew up at the same time as the personal computer revolution; my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, which was when I was very, very young; I got the original Macintosh in 1984, and that really just lit off everything in my mind because I'd never seen a GUI computer with a mouse before and that connected with me (so heavily combined with the Apple aesthetic), but I was always into computer and video games. So that was always going to be an area that I was going to pursue regardless of my individual personal nature and then my nature, my sort of nature as like, always been able to see what's wrong with something, which sounds terrible that I you know, as I described in the Hypercritical article, I don't see it that way. Like, being able to know what's wrong with something is the first step in being able to fix it, right? So I would never I would never want to look at something and be vaguely dissatisfied, but have no idea why or what to do about it, right? Like eh, this is this is a skill that everybody has, like otherwise things would never get better. Like you know, if you don't know that the food is too salty, you can't put less salt in it next time. I can just say, 'Does this food taste bad?' but I have no idea know what to do about it. You gotta know it's too much salt! And then you put less salt in it next time, right or, or vice versa. So that's just my nature, right? John Siracusa 10:07 And I connected with the artistic stuff just because one of the things I realised through all of my you know, I had like uh, formal art lessons of much of my youth—learned all the things you learn, all the different, you know, drawing and painting and all the classical things that you learn—and what I realised, doing that and sort of exploring the extent of my abilities and practising them is that pretty much my that the the best skill that I have is the ability to look at something that I've made and know what's wrong with it. Look at a drawing: arms are too long, uh that thing is the wrong perspective, that's too wide, this thing should be half the height that it is, like just, especially with drawing, it's a skill that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. If you ever played Pictionary with somebody, you'll, you'll know that, right? Martin Feld 10:53 Mmm... John Siracusa 10:53 They draw something and they know it's not right, but they don't know why. Because if they knew why they could fix it, right? And I can look at a drawing that otherwise looks absolutely perfect and be able to tell that thing is, you know, one millimetre too long. And that's not, you know, that's just a skill that I, it's not, I suppose I developed it through practice through, you know, my entire youth, but I've always felt like it was kind of innate that like, in the same way that a lot of people have that for, you know, music, like, how can you not hear that that's not the right note, right? And some people like, 'I don't know, I mean, it sounds like it's probably right', right? John Siracusa 11:25 But other people can say, 'No'. Like, it's, it's so clear to them. In the same way that people can see the difference between red and blue, you know, are red and green and colourblind people can't, right? Or people with perfect pitch can tell you not only what the note is, you know, whether it's the right note or not, but what specific note that is. I've always felt like I had that for visual things in terms of: does this look right? And so I developed that uh, as a as a child and young adult. And so combine the two, you know, and that's just talking about visual stuff like that, I felt that way about everything, about ideas, about logic, arguments, uh, and then combine that with my interest in technology, it was natural for me to look at the graphical user interface and think about how it works and be able to criticise, like how it's designed and be able to understand what what was better about the Macintosh than the competing systems and, and why and, you know, what principles were on underneath it and that. That all just kind of snowballed for me, I feel like. Martin Feld 12:07 And in that snowballing, how did you end up writing at Ars Technica (if I may ask you)? Because from what I've gathered in what you've told me so far, there was an audience there, you were shifting from just writing to doing the podcast and exploring interviews and, and audio with Dan Benjamin, as you said. How did that love of criticism and analysis and the visual translate to writing about technology? John Siracusa 12:48 So I also always enjoyed writing. In school, English was always my best subject. Uh, despite that I knew I wanted to go to get a degree in something technical, and I did eventually, ended up getting an engineering degree. English was always my best subject. Math was my worst subject. John Siracusa 13:03 Uh, it's not that I was terrible at it, but I struggled more than my peers to be able to get good grades in math. But English came naturally to me. And that ties in with like, my, my love of talking, you know, my rant—ranting at the lunch table at work was just an extension of the talking I'd always done in my family and in my life. And writing was an extension of that. I can, you know, think through speaking, I could think through writing, I was always writing something, you know, especially in the age of the Internet, I went to college, just as the Internet was sort of breaking over America. I spent a lot of time on Usenet, writing on the various news groups about, you know, the things that I was interested in: arguing about Macintosh computers, talking about U2, my favourite rock band. Everything on the Internet in those days was about writing: it was text; communicating with other people at the university on our little bulletin board; and writing things in web forums. There was this whole new outlet for me to flex this skill. Martin Feld 13:03 Mmm... John Siracusa 14:00 As, as a kid, you know, growing up pre-Internet, there wasn't much opportunity to write unless you had a pen pal in France or your French class, or you're writing an essay for English. But with the dawn of the Internet, as I was just entering college, suddenly, my ability to write had way more value, because I'm writing to everybody. I'm writing to people who are, you know, who I'm not face-to-face with right now, and that I can communicate in an articulate way with them. And, you know, being able to write was a useful skill, right? So at Ars Technica, it was a website that I read, because I was interested in technology stuff, and they would talk about things that I was interested in, and they had a web forum. And I was in the web forum, arguing about Mac versus PC and Windows and all, you know, like, all the stuff that I was doing at length in a semi-articulate manner. And uh, the owner of that site saw my posts, you know, because the owner—it was, the site was small at that point—and the owner of the site would also participate in the web forum. Saw my post and was looking for people to write for the site and said, 'Hey, you know, I've seen you read In the web forums for however long it's been, what do you think about writing something for us?' So I got recruited to be a writer for Ars Technica by Ken Fisher, the founder, one of the founders of Ars Technica. And my first thing I think I put up was a review of a book about Apple. And then I said I wanted to write about the Apple's next operating system, Mac OS X, because I had been following that story for my entire life of the... John Siracusa 14:04 ...the difficulty of Apple trying to find a modern operating system. And I'd been very invested in that story, because it was like, potentially an existential crisis for the company if they couldn't get a modern operating system out the door. And they had tried several times and failed repeatedly. And they had just bought NeXT and Steve Jobs was back. And they were trying to build another operating system, I was heavily invested in that whole story, because Apple was like, my life, as far as technology was concerned, so let me write about this thing called Mac OS X, that Apple's doing, it's going to be really important. And so I was super-early on that, before regular people were paying attention to it at all. But all I was doing was paying attention, like, this is going to be make or break and it's going to be way different than you think and it is not like the Mac that you're used to. And it's coming and it's, if this doesn't, if this doesn't work, the company is doomed. And so I started writing reviews of Mac OS X. You know, I think the first one I wrote was the second developer preview, then I did the third developer preview, maybe the fourth, then the public beta, and then the official release and then, you know, over 15 years after that, I wrote reviews for every annual release of Mac OS X for Ars Technica. And the site got big and people read my articles, and that, in turn, gave me a bit of an audience. And a lot of that audience followed me when I started podcasting and Hypercritical. Martin Feld 16:36 What did it feel like to become a kind of authority on the operating system? Because this, as you said, became a recurring theme or topic that you would write about with each successive release. How did that feel? John Siracusa 16:49 I mean, in the beginning, it was kind of kind of like podcasting. It's like, 'Well, look, I'm literally the only person here', like, there's, not that I was the only podcaster but there were so few people with such a small community, it's easy to be a big fish in a microscopic pond, right? Martin Feld 17:01 Mmm… John Siracusa 17:02 But also, you know, for podcasting, I was, you know, a fairly small fish in a very small pond. But for Mac OS X, when I started writing about it, and I was super into it, other people had not really started to pay attention, and I don't blame them. If you're not super into Apple and you're not following Apple, Apple has a lot... back then Apple was saying a lot of stuff about their future operating system, and a lot of it came to nothing, so it's easy for everyone to ignore it. And the big Apple story was like, are they going to stay in business? Should they have clones or whatever, no one was worried about the details of their operating system strategy, especially since it was like operating system strategy number six, in the past, you know, three years or something. John Siracusa 17:37 But I was totally set up to be the right person for that particular job because I'd used the Mac since day one, lived it, breathed it, knew all the history, knew knew about all the people, all the players involved, all the technology had read dozens of books about Apple, had read every single magazine article about it. And I was, you know, interested in computers and was studying that as the, as my, you know, college degree and would eventually be my career. So I feel like I had the, I had the cultural context, like I was from there, I understood where all that was coming from. And also, eventually, the technical acumen to, you know, to know what the heck I was talking about, because I was, you know, getting a degree in computer engineering and all that stuff, right? And so I was just, you know, slid right into that slot, and got there first, and I think, you know, was was prepared to do that job. And then I just sort of, you know, Ars Technica and, you know, I indulged my own desire to write at length about things that I wanted to write about, and Ars Technica allowed me to do so, so if you look at my Mac OS X reviews, they just got longer, and, you know, more winding and I too-... I felt freer to take diversions to things that I thought was interesting, even if it didn't seem like it was specifically related to the operating system. John Siracusa 18:56 And the type of person that was drawn to that review was someone who... you weren't, it wasn't people who were going there to to get the answer of like, 'Should I get his operating system? Should I upgrade?' Like, that's like a one page review on like Engadget or something, right? This was, these were tens of thousands of words, like little miniature books—eventually they were actually ebooks that we would sell through Amazon or whatever—would take you all sorts of different places: an excursion into programming languages or Unix permissions, or you know, like, some new thing they added to the operating system that you didn't even know was there before. The type of people who crave that knowledge, probably people who were, you know, not necessarily younger, but who didn't have the background that I had, but who wanted to gain that background. I gained that background by reading MacUser, Macworld, MacWEEK, like that's where I learned everything that I wanted to know. I just read them voraciously. Martin Feld 19:45 Mmm... John Siracusa 19:45 And now, if, you know, if a younger version of me was on the Internet, when I was writing those Mac OS X articles, I would have loved them. Like, I was writing the article that I would have wanted to read when I was a kid. It's like, 'Yes, give me all the information; give me all the context; give me all the technical details; I don't care if it takes me five days to read it, I crave that because it's learning about a topic that I'm interested in'. Those people found me there. And I think those people followed me to my podcasting career. So, eventually, it became a bit of a burden to keep doing this year after year, which is kind of why I, you know, put the pen down, as they say, eventually, and you know, shifted over to podcasting. But, uh, it was definitely exhilarating to sort of ramp up that each each one I wrote had more readers than the past one, got more notice on the internet. And I was able to do, I think, a better job as I developed, you know (the first ones were maybe not that great) and then by the end, I think I kind of had a grip on it. Martin Feld 20:39 I'm intrigued by this kind of cross-pollination or merging of audiences: you've brought all these people who've come to know you as a technology commentator, or writer or however you'd like to put it. They're coming over to Hypercritical, your podcast, there are people discovering your audio, fresh, maybe without that writing history and knowledge of who you are. When you combine that with that idea that you're also listening to podcasts about fiction writing, I'm really fascinated by how you think about this foray into audio, or this transformation of the kind of stuff that you produce because you were listening to fiction-writing audio, you weren't reading about fiction writing, you know, writing about writing, you were listening to audio and now making it. So, how did it feel to shift away from a hobby or a career or building an audience centred on writing to one that was mainly in audio? John Siracusa 21:39 I think my writing... in my writing is always, you know, everyone's writing, your your voice comes through, or at least your writing voice comes through. And I think a lot of people reading my Mac OS X reviews responded to my personality as expressed through these really long articles. Because if it was extremely dry, or just sort of written like a textbook, without any kind of, you know, winking or humour, or inside jokes, or whatever, I don't think it would have connected with people, it wouldn't have kept their attention as much, so... John Siracusa 22:07 ...my personality was coming through in the writing, but of course, writing is different than speaking. And so, the the personality that I put through in the writing is, in writing you get, you get time you can, you can ride, you can rewrite, you can edit, so I'm trying to sound a way smarter than I actually am. And the the luxury of writing (and of course, the curse of writing) is you can check and double-check every single thing. So I would, I would triple-check every single fact that was in there, I would—I remember some days I'd be writing my Mac OS X reviews and I would spend four hours writing and I would write a paragraph because that paragraph had so much factual information in it, and I had to double-/triple-check all of it. I'd have to write a program to confirm this thing and had to install this version of the operating system on this piece of hardware, and boot it up and try to do this thing and take these screenshots. It was just so laborious, right? But it gave me the ability to, you know (the secret of writing) gives me the ability to appear super-smart, because they don't know it took you four hours to write that paragraph. Like, 'Wow! Look at all this information and all these links!' I love linking putting links in things. And then on top of that, I could also, you know, be be snarky or sarcastic or winking or make some reference to some historical Apple thing that I then linked to, right? Martin Feld 22:07 Mmm... John Siracusa 22:08 So my voice was coming through there but I think the shift to 'voice voice', as in a podcast, allowed for you know, for better or for worse, my actual personality to come through much more clearly, I don't have the luxury of being able to rehearse what I'm going to say these are not pre scripted things, everything has always been off the cuff. I can't double- and triple-check every single fact. But you will start to learn what I'm actually like. And I think it is a different voice than you get in the Mac OS X reviews or any of my writing because the writing one is definitely more... not rehearsed, but it's so clear that it has been (I hope it's clear that it's been) edited or sweated over, you know, to try to be sort of wordsmithed, whereas me speaking off the cuff, it's like, this is it, you get what you get. And I think, I think it's enough of the same that the fans that follow me from the reviews heard me talking on podcasts and could make the connection like, 'Oh, that sounds like the joker who would probably write these big reviews'. It's not, you know, a night-and-day difference. And I think if you liked that little bit of what you were getting in the reviews, you'll also like it when you get the sort of the unfiltered version of that with uh, you know, less formal factual stuff and more, uh, more personality because in the end, as I think I've said when I've talked about this on ATP and stuff, my goal as a podcaster is to entertain first and foremost, because... Martin Feld 23:19 Mmm... John Siracusa 23:21 ...to think that a podcast is going to fulfil the same role as even a, you know, researched article in Ars Technica, (let alone a scholarly pa-.. paper) is, I think, folly. Like I'm, I'm just talking off the cuff about stuff that I'm interested in, kind of like people who listen to sports radio, it has to be entertaining, like that's what you're there for, and also be informed and make you think and provide insights and stuff like that. But if it's not entertaining, it's game over. Martin Feld 24:59 No, that's a very interesting characterisation you put there: so, audio or podcasting, particularly is entertainment first, information and all other aspects second or tertiary. Is that right? John Siracusa 25:10 The shows that I do, for sure, other people can do, you know, podcasting is a big, big space, I'm sure there are podcasts that have different priorities. But my thinking, even though I do technology shows, shows filled with facts and market analysis and technology information, I always think of it, you know, you have to be entertaining first and foremost. Now you can't just be entertaining and not talk about the technology, like your podcast has to be what it's about, but talk about technology, in an entertaining way. Give insights about the world of tech, in the world of Apple in a way that engages people, that keeps them interested, that keeps them amused, whether that's through the rapport with your co-hosts, or just a you know, an interesting way of describing a technical concept rather than just laying it out in a boring, sort of academic way. Martin Feld 25:56 Now, you said 'podcasts' there that you do—plural. Obviously, people who are listening know that you've moved on to do even more and expanded your career in audio. Can you tell me what the developments or opportunities were that came from Hypercritical, the podcast? John Siracusa 26:12 Yeah, so some people do just know me from Hypercritical; they didn't know me about from Mac OS X articles. This is sort of like a continuation of what I've always felt—probably since you know, after high school, right—where, again, the Internet being a place where people could know you, and I always felt like there was multiple 'me's that people could know. There was obviously the actual me in real life that my fellow students might know from my university, or my high school or whatever, and there's my family life, and there's all that, but that's a very, pretty small circle, right? But on the internet, I could be known more widely for various other things. Some people on the Internet knew me as a big U2 fan who had a website that listed U2 lyrics, and I was active on the U2 news Usenet groups. And so there was a community there, that if they saw my name, they'd say, 'Oh, that's that guy with the U2 lyrics site from the U2 groups', right? John Siracusa 27:01 Some people would know me from the Perl community, the Perl programming language, because I was active in Perl, and I would you know, it was involved in that community. I wanted to participate in the Perl Usenet groups, and I would put Perl modules on CPAN. And some people would see my name and say, 'Oh, I know that name; I've seen it in the author's list on CPAN; I've used some of his modules; he's a Perl programmer', right? Or, you know, my later when I graduated from college, the first jobs that I got as a web developer in a, you know, Perl programmer, right? John Siracusa 27:29 And then some people would eventually know me as the guy who writes about Apple and Mac stuff for Ars Technica. And then some people will eventually know me as the guy who does the Hypercritical podcast. And there is overlap between a lot of those worlds, but some of them are pretty separate, like the U2 thing. There are people who still would only recognise my name, because they knew me from the U2 community and had no idea that any of that other stuff. And then the people who knew me as the Mac OS X writer would have no idea that I was also a Perl programmer or that I was into U2. Martin Feld 27:56 Mmm! John Siracusa 27:57 So I think that has just continued. So Hypercritical was a podcast that was popular with a very small group of people who were into that type of thing. Some of them came from knowing from Ars Technica, but some of them came from Dan Benjamin's audience with his 5by5 podcast network, and they're like, 'Oh, it's a new 5by5 show, but I'm gonna try it!' They didn't know who I was, they had never read any of my articles, but they heard the podcast because they were involved in that circle. My podcasting circle kind of expanded from there of like people who heard me on Hypercritical and liked what they heard, they'd invite me to be on their podcast. John Siracusa 28:28 There was also a big overlap with the the Apple world. So with with Jason Snell—who was, I don't know if he was Editor-in-Chief of Macworld at that time, but eventually would become editor in chief of Macworld magazine—knew me from the Apple world, but I think he had also heard Hypercritical at some point. And he started a podcast, called The Incomparable, about nerdy, you know, media, TV, books, movies, stuff like that. And he asked me to be on that show. Uh, and so I was part of The In-..., I still do episodes of The Incomparable, every once in a while, so I was part of that, and that's a panel-type show. I was part of that show. And I do another podcast with Jason Snell, called Robot or Not, that continues to this day. Merlin Mann was also on 5by5, he had his own podcast called Back to Work (still running). Uh, uh, Marco Arment had a podcast on 5by5, called Build and Analyze. It was also about technology stuff. They either heard of me through my Mac OS X articles, or heard of me from my podcast on Hypercritical or both, and I eventually hooked up with them, and now I do a podcast with Merlin and of course I do a podcast with Marco and Marco's childhood friend, Casey Liss, who I eventually met at WWDC, so my circle's expanded out from there. That's how I ended up on a show like this, like just lots of overlapping circles, lots of different personalities, lots of different things to be known for. And obviously the older ones fall by the wayside and these days no one knows I had a U2 lyrics website. It's long since off, you know, off of the Internet. Perl programming I did for pretty much my entire programming career, but now that I've quit my day job that is not particularly relevant anymore, although I still have modules and CPANs that people ask me about. And then the podcast thing has become my new career and I have a semi-diversified portfolio of present and past shows all sort of circling around that cluster of interests and people. Martin Feld 30:07 So you said there that you've now moved on from your day job; you've become a full time podcaster. What has that adventure been like? How does that work for you nowadays? John Siracusa 30:19 There's a good relevant blog post for that for you to put in your show notes as well. Um... blogger, I didn't mention as one of the things that I've been, but I did have kind of a blog at Ars Technica, aside from my regular Mac OS X reviews, and I do have my own website now at hypercritical.co, where I blog occasionally because I like to have a permanent place on the web to put all my stuff (my old Ars Technica blog is there as well). And I blogged about this: the experience of leaving behind my, quote, unquote, day job, it's more defined by the experience before that, which was, I've always had a full-time, regular, normal day job as a programmer, uh, as a web developer, since I graduated college, like I started—the job that I had when I graduated college, I started that job when I was still in college, and then when I graduated, they offered me a full-time position, right, because I was working part time for them. John Siracusa 31:08 And I worked at a job, I had gone from one job to the next with essentially no break between for my entire career for 20-something years... 25 years? Yeah, 25 years. During all that time, I've always had something else that I'm doing. I didn't just write for Ars Technica, I wrote for a bunch of other publications that have come and gone as well right? I wrote for Macworld magazine (both print and online), I wrote for a bunch of other little things that came and went and that have probably long since forgotten about. So I did freelance writing, technology writing, did a little bit of freelance programming for people, open-source stuff, but I've always been doing something besides my day job. And in the beginning, most of those things beside my day jobs were, you could characterise them as hobbies, right? Or a little bit of extra spare change here and there, like is how much with some random website that no longer exists paying me to write one article about Apple stuff, like peanuts, nothing, right? Martin Feld 31:59 Mmm. John Siracusa 31:59 And sometimes literally nothing, right? Just do it for the exposure! Or writing, writing on my own website, right? And I, over the many, many years, that ramped up, so by the time I'm writing Mac OS X, reviews that are 45,000 words long and you know, published on the Web, but also multiple ebook versions that I also build and you know, distribute. That's a considerable investment in time, on top of my regular 40-hours-a-week (if I'm lucky) day job as a programmer. And that continued, as I built up my side jobs—side hustle, whatever they call them—like, my other career, my other career as someone who writes for Ars Technica, someone who has a podcast, someone, you know, people know online, but they don't even know where my regular job is. And vice versa, I would go to my regular day jobs, and they would have no idea that I also write for Ars Technica. Sometimes there would be a crossover, where someone at work would say, 'I was reading something online and people were talking about this article, I looked at the name, and the person had the same name as you, isn't that funny?!' Like they wouldn't make the connection because it was two separate lives, but it was starting to be two full lives. And so for that 25 years of trying to to have two careers, eventually, I mean, it's not that I necessarily burned out because at various times, I've burned out, you know, for potentially unrelated reasons, but I've been burning the candle at both ends. I'd been trying to advance both careers, because I tried to also advance my job, the job, tried to, you know, do better, get better jobs, get raises, get promotions, you know, enhance my skills, do more challenging, more interesting things in my regular job. John Siracusa 32:05 And the same thing with my podcasting career, having a smaller podcast with a smaller audience, building that up, finding a way to make money podcasting, finding a way to make money writing for Ars Technica, getting a bigger, bigger audience there. And eventually, they were, you know, the two things were big enough and complicated enough and time-consuming enough, but also making enough money that I could afford to, in theory, drop one of them. And it was an easy choice for me to drop the uh, to drop the one that I had, you know, because one of them I had done essentially for free for years and years, and the other one I had always been paid to do. And so I dropped the one that I had always been paid to do, because it's obvious that I liked the other one better because I had been willing to do it for free. And don't get me wrong, I did enjoy programming. And in fact, one of the things that I picked up when I put down my day job was writing applications for the Mac, which I'd always wanted to do but I had never been able to, you know, because I'd always been a web developer. I'd never been able to transition or you know, in my career as a programmer, I'd never been able to write back Mac apps, but when I quit my day job, I could actually find time to write Mac applications, and I did, right? So, I feel like it was mostly a putting down of one career because the other career that I had built up over 25 years was ready to take over that role. And I, and also I was pretty much done doing both at the same time because it felt unsustainable. Martin Feld 33:28 Let's just explore what you said about developing your own Mac apps for a second, because in your story, as a Mac enthusiast, you've now had the chance and the time to develop your own apps. What does that mean to you personally as a project? John Siracusa 35:01 I think I got more of a 'Look at me, I can't believe I'm here' type of feeling from the first time I got a column on the back page of Macworld magazine, because I had grown up reading that magazine and reading the article on the back page from authors that I, you know, really admired. And then my face was there with my article; that was kind of like a fulfilment of a childhood dream. As a child, I loved software. But especially when I was younger, I didn't picture myself writing it, like, I didn't, I didn't decide to be a programmer until college, like I had dabbled in programming as a kid, dabbled in BASIC and played with stuff on the Mac, and used HyperCard, I'd written HyperCard stacks or whatever. But it never... programming never clicked for me. So I didn't have in my mind as a kid, someday I'm going to write software for this platform that I love. I just felt like someday I'm gonna be able to use really cool programs that other people wrote, right? John Siracusa 35:53 But when I went to college, I very quickly discovered that I love programming, like it was, you know, I caught the programming bug real hard and just wasted a tremendous amount of time learning programming, and you know, like on Unix, and all those other things, when I should have been actually doing my classes and getting better grades. Uh, so it was clear once I was in college that I was going to be a programmer, but I was just, I was addicted to the Web, because the Web was just, you know, forming back then in the early '90s. And I became a web developer, I loved it, I do love the web, but it was kind of weird, it's like: you love the Mac, and now you're a professional programmer, but you're not writing Mac applications. And for various times during that time, and especially in the '90s, it wasn't clear that Apple would still be around, so it's probably a good career move to concentrate on the Web. And there weren't, just weren't a lot of jobs writing Mac software, right? It's, it's much easier to get a job in 1997, as a web developer than it was to get a job as a Mac developer, especially since I'd never written anything for the Mac. John Siracusa 36:47 But eventually, you know, over the course of my 25-year career as a programmer, I'm like, 'I'm a programmer, I'm super into Apple stuff, I'm writing about it all the time, I would love to write a Mac program'. But I didn't know any of the languages or APIs that are involved on the Mac. And I didn't have time with my other two careers that I was trying to develop to throw a third thing in the mix. But I always wanted to do that and so once I quit my day job (or was about to quit my day job), I did have time to say, 'I should write something with a Mac'. And I love it, like I would, you know, if I could have a programming another programming job, as much as I love the Web stuff that I was doing. I would love to just be a Mac developer. As you know, if I had to pick a job and said, 'You can't podcast anymore and you can go back to being a web developer', I would pick being a Mac developer any day. I love the system. I know, I think I know what a Mac app should be and I love writing them. It's been extremely enjoyable. John Siracusa 37:38 Now the Mac apps that I write are trivial toy things or whatever. Like they're not, you know, the only reason they sell anything is when people know me for my podcast, right? But I do enjoy writing them. And I wrote Mac applications to scratch my own itch, so my, my two dinky, little esoteric Mac programs that I wrote, I run them myself 24 hours a day, all the time, right? So I feel like there's a satisfaction of saying, 'There was something I wanted on my Mac and I just wrote it myself'. And every time I look up there, my menu bar over to the side and see the thing that's running, uh, it's very satisfying. And it's satisfying that other people find it interesting by them and like the software as well. But yeah, it feels good but it definitely like the, you know, having having an article on Macworld definitely was much more of the you know, 'Look at me, top of the world, and I never thought I would be here' type of thing. Martin Feld 38:22 You've said in different ways throughout your story, this idea that there have been different versions of you, or different personas around the Web, and that people have come to different products or podcasts or things that you've done by discovering you elsewhere, or knowing you elsewhere. Now that you have this extra knowledge of developing your own Mac apps alongside everything else that you have done, and continue to do, how does that fuel your commentary and creative production experience on something like Accidental Tech Podcast, which I think most people would know you from? (If they're listening to this podcast...) John Siracusa 39:00 Something people would say to me all the time when they would meet me or talk to me at WWDC (Apple's developer conference) or something, is that they would talk to me and I, and I would say, 'Oh, you know, we talked about programming or whatever'. John Siracusa 39:12 And I'd say, 'Oh, actually, I don't I don't, I'm not a developer for Apple's platforms; I don't write Mac apps; I don't write iOS apps; you know, that's just not something that I do'. John Siracusa 39:20 And they could not believe it. They'd be like, 'I read your articles, I listened to you on your podcast, you're clearly a professional programmer, but you're telling me you you have never written anything for any Apple platform?! I could, if I had to put money on I would have said, "Of course, this guy writes for you know, Apple platforms, like he knows so much about them!", you know, all the APIs, you write all these articles, how can you not be an iOS developer? How can you not be a Mac developer from way back? I read your articles and it's so clear that you are a longtime Mac developer!' John Siracusa 39:50 And I'd say, 'Nope! I have never written a real Mac application! You know, I played with, uh, you know, Mac app and CodeWarrior when I was a kid, but I never actually wrote anything'. John Siracusa 39:58 And they could not believe it. They would say to me, 'You, you know more about Mac programming than anybody I've ever met who is not an actual Mac developer!' It seemed absurd to them, right? And so I feel like, it's not as if becoming a Mac developer suddenly gave me new insight into commentary. I think it's the reverse. Everything I already knew about Apple's platforms and programming languages meant that for me to slide into being a Mac developer was just to get over like one or two little conceptual hurdles, and all I needed to do that was like, a week of time to dedicate to it. I used to joke to some of my friends who were like, 'Why are you not a Mac developer?' John Siracusa 40:32 I'm like, 'I don't quite, like there's a conceptual hurdle that I haven't quite been able to get over'. John Siracusa 40:37 And it's like, 'Oh, you'd be able to get over it! Just give it time!' John Siracusa 40:39 It's like, 'Yeah, I guess it is different to write about than to play, but it's like I've been writing about baseball my entire career; there is not a lot of mysteries left in the game of baseball that I don't understand. You know, even though I haven't been playing, I've been studying baseball my entire career. I know everything about the game I've interviewed, the players interviewed the coaches, I have a broad view of the entire thing. And yeah, and now I'm up there swinging at the ball and maybe it's different when you're trying to do it'. But in a tech field, like you know, again, it's not like I wasn't a programmer, I was a developer for my career, just for a different platform. So, I don't think becoming a Mac developer has actually had that much influence on my analysis or experience. It's just kind of like a fun, a fun reward and a fun diversion at the end of all this, that I finally have time to dedicate to it, and I get to do something that I thought I would, you know, take to like a duck to water (and I pretty much do), but it's, in the end, it, programming is programming, and I've been a programmer for my entire career and it just seems natural. John Siracusa 40:39 And like, 'Yeah but I don't have time for that!' And it turns out, the amount of time it took was like a week and a half, two weeks, right? Like, and off to the races, right? And so I feel like, being a Mac developer, is not actually helping me with my, uh, with insight into, uh, any Apple stuff. Because even stuff like dealing with the App Store or like, the APIs, like, it's, I felt like I understood all of that, when I was writing about it, because to be able to write about it, you need to immerse yourself. It's kind of like a reporter who, like, writes about sports, and, you know, writes about baseball for their entire career. And then when they're, you know, 50 years old, they become a professional baseball player somehow. It's like, does this finally give you insight into baseball?' Martin Feld 41:21 No, that's a great explanation. And in your podcast co-hosting, you talked about adapting voice from written to audio, but there's also the aspect of sharing voice with others on a podcast. Now, you said that you're also a critical character, or that's the kind of persona or role that you've taken on—how would you describe the sharing of roles and Interplay on a show like Accidental Tech Podcast or other shows that you've done? John Siracusa 42:44 All the shows that I've done, because I've never done a show solo. Like, I still think that would be extremely difficult—despite the fact that Mur Lafferty was doing it back in the day, and still is—all the shows that have been on it's with somebody who I can bounce off of, right? And I feel like that's part of the vibe, even at the lunch table, like at work, I'm bouncing off of my co-workers and friends at work to make the conversation happen. That I feel like is the key ingredient in all of my podcasts. I don't think I am necessarily... [sighs] I'm not changing anything about myself to be on those things, but it's: we are foils for each other; we are, provide contrast to each other; it's, you know, it's the the hosts' reactions to each other that makes that chemistry, right? That makes the interesting conversation that people listen into the, you know, that makes the friendship, right? You know, I look different reflected in the light of them and vice versa, and I think that's why the shows work. And so I'm not, I mean it's not something you do consciously, it provides interest because I am interested. When someone is shocked at something that I say they're genuinely shocked and vice versa, because we surprise each other with our, you know, personalities and our opinions and our positions. And, and of course, I love, I love arguing and I love, you know, trying to support my position and uh, you know, finding fault with other people's positions. And that's just natural, and so if the people I'm on podcast with are able to tolerate that, let's say, right, and they're not you no insulted by it, and that's why that's why the shows work, I feel like. Martin Feld 44:15 With this presentation of a personality and bouncing off co-hosts, how have you found participation within the broader community or having an audience? What's it like to interact with people who listen to you every week? John Siracusa 44:29 I think I benefited from having a gentle introduction to being a public person on the Internet. It's probably more difficult for people who have like a more meteoric rise, right? Because when I started writing for Ars Technica, not a lot of people were reading the Ars Technica website, period (let alone when I was writing on it), right? And that sort of gradually, organically built over time—much more slowly than some of the competitors, like, even things like Slashdot that sort of went from zero to being the dominant tech website back in the day... much faster than Ars Technica. Ars Technica had slower growth and and because of the things that I wrote there, I necessarily had a narrower audience, I was not writing for a broad mass-market audience. Ars Technica wasn't wasn't a website for a mass-market audience; it was for tech nerds; it was necessarily limited; it was never even going to be as broad, as like, The Verge is today or something, right? It was super-nerdy, kind of like an AnandTech or similar websites, super-nerdy, Tom's Hardware or whatever, it, the tech enthusiasts. And so that limited my audience as well. John Siracusa 45:32 And I got slowly used to, as the readership of what I wrote, went up and up and up, you still have things that happen on the Internet, people, you know, disagreeing with you and arguing with you. Back in the day it was funny, I spent most of my early Internet, uh, you know, life arguing on Usenet about Mac versus PC. I'm on the Mac side, of course, and telling you why PCs are bad, why Windows are bad, why Macs are great, right? Why, why Windows 95 is not the same as the Mac operating system, like, I'm arguing on the Apple side. I start writing for Ars Technica, which was their tagline was 'the PC enthusiast resource', they would write about overclocking your Celeron and stuff, right? And I'm in there as the Apple person, oh, and by the way, you know, because Ars Technica wasn't limited to PC stuff, you know, Apple makes, quote, unquote, personal computers as well. So I started writing about Apple topics, right? And I would have criticisms of them. John Siracusa 46:20 And the first feedback I started to get from the world at large, who had no idea I was was, why are you letting these PC people write about Apple stuff? It's clear they don't like Apple, and they're just out to get them! All they have are criticisms of Apple stuff and I had previously been the 'Apple fanboy' and in Usenet they would say, you know, 'Oh, you're just... everything Apple does you think is great!' or whatever, right? And so the feedback I was getting from Ars Technica readers is, 'Why do you hate Apple so much? You'd go back to Windows, it's clear, you don't you're not interested in Apple's platforms', which was, you know, one of the first lessons in without context, what might people think of you, if you read an article that is critical of Apple's, you know, future operating system efforts, they might just assume you are a PC-using weenie and don't like Apple, and it was, nothing could be farther from the truth, right? John Siracusa 47:05 And so that kind of gentle introduction of a few people saying that when, you know, I had very small readership got me used to the idea of, you know, context collapse, and uh, and angry people on the Internet. And of course, I was protected by the, you know, the advantages of being white, male, straight, like, just all the things that gave advantages that other people didn't have, where I was only being harassed for criticising Apple and not being harassed for literally who I was, right? So that ramped up over years and years and I feel like I figured out how to live as a semi-public person on the Internet without, uh, getting crushed under the weight of constant scrutiny and criticism and all the things that come with that. Martin Feld 47:47 And as you've had that accumulating experience in dealing with an audience, making friends on the Internet, taking in commentary and managing it, what do you think about when it comes to anti-fandom? Do you have a view on that? Like, where do you think ideas against a certain fandom really come from? John Siracusa 48:10 Can you define anti-fandom for me? I don't think I've even heard that term before. Martin Feld 48:14 So for example, we're dealing with the fandom of Apple, right? You come at it as an enthusiast or a fan, you're writing or speaking about it regularly, but there are people who are 'anti' that fandom... John Siracusa 48:26 Mm-hmmm... Martin Feld 48:26 ...they might actually come from another camp or preference. What do you think fuels that kind of interaction? John Siracusa 48:31 Yeah I, so I felt like I kind of did my time in the like, in the Mac-PC wars, is kind of like a formative experience for me online. Again, it was small stakes, it's Usenet, it it was just a bunch of kids in universities who could figure out how to use Usenet and character-based terminals or whatever. That so absorbed my, you know, the early '90s for me, arguing on the Internet, with warring fandom groups, Mac versus PC, those were the camps, right? And they were, they were against each other. And that's all we would do about, arguing. I was arguing about this topic in high school on the bus, right, with the three other people in my high school who cared enough to argue about it, but we would argue, right?! And then Usenet, it's 300 people arguing about it! So huge, right? John Siracusa 49:13 I spent so much time, sort of like, I don't know, practising arguing, participating in flame wars. It's not that I burned out on it, it's that I, that you learn you learn the lessons, you eventually learn the lessons of fandom wars. When you've been through it enough times through enough cycles, you start to sort of see the matrix and you understand this dynamic, to the point where warring fandoms is no longer, like, no longer interesting or novel. It's the same for everything, Marvel versus DC, you know, uh, Mustang versus Camaro, like you, once you've really been in and understood one of them, they all end up looking the same, right? So I kind of lost interest in participating in that and lost interest, when I saw it going on elsewhere. I'd be like, 'Oh, there's a bunch of other people learning that lesson'. John Siracusa 50:01 Eventually, and some people don't learn the lesson, like that they will just participate in that war forever, and not ever sort of age out of it or figure out that—I'm not gonna say that not that it's fruitful because I enjoyed arguing Mac versus PC, I enjoy arguing, you know, U2 versus insert-band-here. That's something that I like doing, but also the negative aspects of it were readily apparent, sort of the the toxic nature of that—'flame wars' on Usenet, as we used to call them—that I did eventually tire of it and figure out, you know, the only winning move is not to play from war games or whatever. It's not just about, you know, building a thicker skin or whatever, it's, it's sort of like, I don't know, growing up, like, and I feel bad for the people who didn't get to have that formative experience in a relatively protected little cove like I did in Usenet. Because if I had to be my 1993 self, in the view of millions of people, it would have been way worse for me, right? I had the luxury of being young and stupid, with not as many prying eyes on me. So by the time millions of people were looking at the Internet, I had learned, to some degree, what not to do, what to stay away from, what not to get involved in. Um and so, when I see warring fandoms like that, it feels familiar to me. And I have nostalgic, fun feelings from it, but also I understand how terrible that can be. Uh, and so like, I feel like a more like an anthropologist and like, I'm not a participant anymore. I am from the outside looking in at these things and going, 'Yep, I've been there, I've done that, I know what that's like, and I also know that that's currently not for me'. Martin Feld 51:40 So whether you class yourself as a participant or an observer, how do you think about the fandom that has built around the podcasting community and the kind of work that you do? John Siracusa 51:52 I mean, aside from the whole concept of, you know, that people end up thinking they know you when they really don't, which I'm on both sides of like, obviously, a lot of people think they know me, because they listened to me talk for hundreds of hours, and I think I know people that I listen to on podcast that I've never met, and we're both wrong. Like we don't, you don't actually know the people, but it feels like you do because podcasts are so intimate. Similarly, I'm mostly OK with that. Like, I think my podcast fans, fans of my podcast worlds are very nice, like we don't have this big problem of people being terrible to each other. John Siracusa 52:24 Even, you know, another community that I'm vaguely tangentially involved in: the gaming community seems to be much worse there. There's lots of people who do gaming podcasts or gaming YouTube channels. And the gaming fan base is way broader than Apple tech-nerd community, so it has more people. And there's just so much sort of like abuse and toxic behaviour from the fans there that I just haven't experienced in the smaller Apple tech-circle podcast world. I mean, part of it is that it is a lot smaller, but part of it is the type of people that are drawn to it. I feel like if you have a more mass-market thing, you're gonna get a more representative cross section of humanity. Sports, very mass-market, and I guess, you know, video games also pretty mass-market, so you're gonna get everything there. And maybe you get more quiet, polite nerds in the Apple tech-nerd world. John Siracusa 53:11 And so, I feel like I've been lucky that I haven't had to deal with anything particularly bad, again, protected by my privilege of not being in any kind of traditionally marginalised group that gets crapped for just existing, right? And so I don't think... I don't mind the illusionary familiarity...? Like the idea that people think they know me and come up to me, and they'll, you know, a stranger will come up to me and say something that reflects the fact that they know, like, everything about my life, because they listen to me talk for hundreds of hours, and I have no idea who they are. That's just something you have to get used to as someone who is out there in public talking about their life, even if indirectly for years and years and years. People know, what's your, you know, wife's name is, what your kids' names are, that you have a dog, what your dog's name is, what you like to eat for breakfast, you know, like, they just know so much about you. And I have no idea who they are. John Siracusa 54:03 And like I said, it's the same for me for the podcasts that I listen to. If I ever meet those people, like, I've listened to them talking on podcasts for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours over the years. I think I know so much about them and it's so easy to just meet them. And, you know, it used to be you'd meet like a movie star and you you'd know all about their roles and say lines from their movies, but the total number of lines in all the movies that Tom Cruise has been in is nothing compared to the number of words I've said in like a single year worth of podcasting. Like, I just feel like you're so exposed on the Internet if you're constantly putting out content where you are being yourself and not playing a role, that uh, you just have to sort of get used to the idea that... not that people feel partial ownership over you but that people know a lot about you and are excited that they know a lot about you and if they do meet you for the first time that's going to be their entrée to conversation and it's not because they're trying to be creepy. Martin Feld 54:51 And in the course of doing podcasts with Casey, Marco, Jason, Merlin, people you've mentioned, it would feel natural, I would say, to share these details or stories in the flow of conversation. When people have come up to you in the street or said something online that shows that knowledge of you and at least some aspects of your personal life, how does that feel? Do you take a step back and feel a bit more cautious, or is it normal now? John Siracusa 55:19 It definitely felt weird the first, you know, it's kind of like a gentle introduction, I have only had a gentle introduction to that because the first time I ever went somewhere, where people knew who I was, was, I think my first trip to WWDC, Apple's developer conference back when they used to have it in person. I think my first one was maybe 2011-ish. And probably people didn't know what I look like, but if they saw my name tag, or heard me introduced or whatever, maybe they recognised my name from Ars Technica, maybe they'd recognise my name from Hypercritical. And so yeah, that was the first time I was at a public place and people who I didn't know would recognise me and want to say 'Hi', but it was a small number of people, and so it was a gentle introduction to strangers coming up to you, who, you don't know who they are, but they know who you are, and they want to talk to you about stuff. John Siracusa 56:07 And it was weird at first for sure. But over the years, as I kept returning to WWDC, more and more people would recognise me, but I was getting better at understanding how to handle that situation. Still a little bit weird, I'm not particularly comfortable with people in general, but it becomes more, I mean you get, it becomes more routine, it's happened to you enough times that you, that you're not shocked by it, that you're not suddenly deer in the headlights and don't know what you're supposed to do. Even though it's still potentially uncomfortable—as much as I'm uncomfortable when any, any stranger tries to talk to me ever. I'm a New Yorker, after all, not a lot of people are talking to each other in public—but you know it's going to happen and, you know, again, blessed to have mostly positive experiences with everybody because they're nice people, and because there's a small community of of nice people. And it's not like I've had to deal with anything particularly difficult other than my own inadequacies of dealing with, you know, social interactions. This is just that, but slowly ramped up from zero to a mild roar and WWDC is the only place where I get recognised by anybody, so the whole rest of my life, I don't have to worry about this at all. Martin Feld 57:16 On the flip side, away from being a known producer on the Internet, you're also a consumer and fan of things for sure. You mentioned other podcasts you listen to, the fact that you're into gaming. What are you a fan of these days and how do you engage with things as the consumer? John Siracusa 57:34 Some would say I made the mistake of podcasting about the hobby that I'm most interested in, Apple or whatever, and that is not ruin the hobby for me. I'm still super into it, right? So, Jason Snell, founder of The Incomparable, which is now a podcast network, just, not not just a show by that name, but the original Incomparable podcast now called The Incomparable Mothership podcast, is about geeky movies, music, TV, books, stuff like that. I'm a fan of all those things. I was dying to be on that podcast and I, you know, was from the very beginning, more or less. And so things that I'm fans of, I'm fans of all the, all the media that gets talked about in The Incomparable, I'm a fan of that. And what do I do with that fandom? I talk about it on a podcast, with a bunch of other fans! Everyone's like, 'Oh, you shouldn't, you know, if you're, if you have something as a hobby, you shouldn't, you know, turn it into a job or whatever!' But just like the Apple stuff, I like watching a movie and then getting to talk about it on a podcast, I like playing a video game and then getting to talk about it on a podcast or write about it on my blog or whatever. That does not ruin it for me, even if it is literally my job to read news about Apple and then talk about it on a podcast. If I'm a fan of something, there's nothing that I'm a secret fan of the people don't know about this point, because if I'm a fan of it. I'm writing about it on my blog, I'm talking about it on a podcast, I'm posting about it on Twitter, Mastodon or whatever. And that's just the natural way that I, you know, that that's my preferred way to interact with the world and my fandoms. So, yeah, it's all kind of out there, uh, you know, and it's all it's all the stuff that you've heard and it's all stuff that you'd expect. Martin Feld 59:08 And I'm perhaps exacerbating it for you today by asking more personal questions and putting it out there. And look, I'm aware of the time—is there anything that I haven't asked you about with regard to your story, what you do on the Internet, what fuels your motivation, that you would like to explore? Something that we haven't delved into? John Siracusa 59:27 I'm sure there's stuff you forgot, but I don't know what it is. That's your job! I mean, I feel like the, you asked about the uh, quitting my day job and being a podcaster full-time, and I feel like that transition is still unresolved! I haven't even done it for a full year yet. I haven't really finished resetting my conception of myself, as even just the idea of the discomfort of someone saying, 'What do you do for a living?', and now I have to say I'm a podcaster, I guess? Like what the Hell do I even say? Whereas before my whole, my whole m.o. for those 25 years was, I would, when someone asked me what I did, I would tell them the day job, and I would never mention, 'I write for Ars Technica, I do podcasts;, whatever. I never mentioned that, never bring it up. I would just say, you know, 'I'm a web developer'. And then they stopped asking me questions, or if they did we talk about my job as a web developer, right? John Siracusa 1:00:18 Now, I'm in a situation where I don't do that anymore. I just do the other things and I don't really know... I haven't really finished 'repotting myself', as Merlin would say, as a, you know, independent, self-employed podcaster, software developer, blogger, tweeter, Mastodon 'tooter', whatever the Hell I am now... a guy who goes on podcasts and talks about himself. It was easier for, I think it was easier for me, when I had a conventional, socially-acceptable answer for what I did for a living that really was my, you know, main career, that gave me my healthcare and paid me a steady salary or whatever. And now, now I'm like, so many of my other friends, I talked about this in my blog post about this, that just so many people that I worked with, were either independent when I met them, as in they were self-employed, or you know, ran their own company or wrote their own software or full-time bloggers or whatever, or eventually became independent, like Casey Liss used to have a job just like I did, but eventually quit his job to become a podcaster full-time and I was like the last one in my group, to finally give up on the 'jobby job' and try to give it a go as an independent after everyone else. I know some people I know have been doing it for 10/20 years. Now finally, I finally quit my day job to do it full-time, and I feel like I have not... kind of like Apple with the ARM Macs, I've not completed the transition, let's say, because I haven't even made it one year yet! Martin Feld 1:01:42 So it's fair to say that you're wrestling with the formation of a new identity, really? John Siracusa 1:01:42 Like the whole you know, all the people that stress that John Gruber was going through in 2002, or whatever, 'Can I make a living doing this? Am I going to have enough money to to pay the bills?!', right? 'How am I gonna get healthcare', and I you know, obviously, my situation is different, because my wife is still working her regular job, and we're gonna get healthcare through her, which is nice, but still, all of those concerns of like, now you are self-employed, you do not just have to show up every day and get a paycheque, you have to figure out how you're going to make money and how you're going to continue to make money and that, that is an ongoing story for me, even though, like I said, so many of my peers and friends in this, the world that I live in, have been living this life for so long, while I was essentially too afraid to do so. Now I am trying to do it for myself, and I'm old and tired and scared and everyone else is like, 'Pfff! It's fine. I've been doing this forever, you'll be fine', because it's, to them it's old hat, but to me it's it's pretty brand new. So I'm still, still settling in there, I feel like. John Siracusa 1:01:51 Yeah, I mean, it's kind of kind of similar to what I imagine people go through when they retire, only I'm not retired. People say, 'Are you retired there?' John Siracusa 1:02:29 It's like, 'No, I wish...'. I can, I cannot be retired! I, I still need to have a job that makes money, that's part of the stress of this, right?! That I, it's not as if I can retire with my millions, it doesn't quite work that way. I have kids, you know, my son just entered college. The bills are big and I have another kid, it's just you know, so... But similarly when people retire, like, if they had, you know, been working in a particular job for their entire career, and now they have no job, how do they, how do they reset their conception of their self there? I feel like you have the same thing, only I'm... I'm shifting my conception of myself to a thing that I've always been doing, but that was always kind of like a secret. Like it's, this is my secret world where people know me for computer stuff and I go to WWDC, right? And now that is the only me and the other me isn't there anymore. That's definitely weird. Martin Feld 1:03:37 So other than the enticing final goal of retirement, which I totally understand, is there something left on your list or some aspect of your identity that you still want to realise? Something that you want to experiment with or achieve? John Siracusa 1:03:53 This is this is a phrase that I've said so many times: 'I think I've talked about this on a podcast before', which is just true of so much, but it's I find myself saying it over and over again because I feel like there's this imagined audience that has heard everything that I've listened to and I have to give, I have to give a disclaimer before I say something just so they don't say, 'Hey, I've heard that before!' But anyway, I had so many hobbies as a kid, so many things that I was interested in—just this huge list of things I couldn't even as a kid with no job just in, you know, elementary school, I couldn't do them all! I couldn't be into them all, like model building, remote-control cars, like, building electronics, painting, drawing, video games, sports, BMX bikes, you know, like just everything you can imagine! So many hobbies, that, the my experience of growing up has been setting aside those hobbies one by one, because there's just not enough time in the day to be able to be that into that many things and it just as time went on, they all just got put down and put down and put down until the only things left standing were the ones that I cared the most about: Apple, technology, computers or the things that related to my career programming or whatever. John Siracusa 1:05:02 So in theory, if I'm eventually able to start putting down other stuff, I would pick up the things that I put down as a kid. I would build a remote-control car again, right? I would resume painting, you know, like, whatever, like just or try new things, right? But like, I feel like to fit into my life I need to put down, I need to make room for those things to come back. So retirement could in theory, if I put down a bunch of other stuff, let those things come back. I would imagine that if and when I do, actually, quote unquote, retire, I will just continue to podcast and blog and, and do all those things, maybe at a slightly reduced schedule, simply because I was doing them before I was getting any money for them anyway, and I will probably be doing them after, because they are the things that I enjoy the most. And that probably means there won't be a lot of extra room for me to pick up other stuff. I mean, it, probably the biggest one that I put down is my whole career as an artist, which I've written about a bit, like, you know, as in drawing and painting; I spent so much of my youth concentrating on that, and just had to put it down entirely because I knew I never wanted to do it as a career, because I was more interested in some other things, and because I think it's easier to have a career as a programmer than just to have a career as a painter, let's say. Maybe I would pick that back up again. But maybe I wouldn't, maybe I feel like I'm done with that. Like, it's hard to say until that time comes. So, I will never be lacking for things that I'm interested in that I could potentially pick up again, it's just a question of priorities and how much room is there in my life for those things? Martin Feld 1:06:30 Well, I think in everything that you've said, there, a lot of people who listen to this podcast episode are going to be thinking about or reflecting on some of the things that they've had to sacrifice or the difficult decisions they've had to make about time. And I do hope that over time, you can pick up more of those things and continue to diversify your portfolio, as you said. I think, considering the time, this has been a wonderful chat. I think we've covered a lot, and if you're happy to end there, John, perhaps we should wrap up the episode. John Siracusa 1:07:01 Yeah, I think I have to make some room in my life for napping, which I'm told that will actually be an important activity in my later years. Martin Feld 1:07:07 Um, look John, this has been a real pleasure. I want to thank you for the time and the effort that you've put into this episode of Really Specific Stories—appreciate it. John Siracusa 1:07:15 Thank you for having me.