Episode 654 | Shipping Every Day for 10 Years with Tom Merritt

Rob Walling:
Welcome back to Startups For the Rest of Us. I’m Rob Walling. Today, you get to hear me have a conversation with Tom Merritt, the host of Daily Tech News Show, Cordkillers, Current Geek, It’s A Thing, Sword and Laser, Know A Little More. He has more podcasts than any five people I know, and this episode is a little different. Tom Merritt is not a SaaS founder. He has not written a book for SaaS founders, but I’m fascinated with people who are able to ship something every day for years, in fact, decades as you’ll hear us get into it. I asked him about his thought process and then the physical process of how he has shipped Daily Tech News Show five days a week for a decade. Talk about grind and discipline to get it out.
He’s a tech pundit, a journalist/pundit, but he’s very balanced and I’ve always admired his ability to summarize complex situations and then talk about both sides of them. He doesn’t get so far out in left field or out in right field like so many pundits do. They do it for the shock value and he doesn’t. So, if you know who Tom Merritt is and you’ve heard him on one of these shows, I’m sure this will be fun for you. If you haven’t and you came here today for some SaaS-focused tactics, this is not your episode and you can obviously feel free to skip this one. But I really enjoy the conversation and I do think that there is a lot to get out of someone like Tom Merritt who has been so successful and shipped so much amazing content into the world.
Before we dive into that, if you’re not subscribed to our YouTube channel, we’re putting out really incredible content every week, at least one video, sometimes two. Recently, Einar Vollse and I did a livestream about the SVB Bank collapse. Then every week, I’m recording something to deal with SaaS. It’s almost like 10 to 15 minute Rob solo adventures, but you get to see my smiling face on the camera, microconf.com/youtube if you want to check that out. With that, let’s dive into my conversation with Tom Merritt. Tom Merritt, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on Startup For The Rest Of Us.

Tom Merritt:
Hey, Rob. Thanks for having me, man. This is super fun.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I’m excited to dig into your experience and we are talking offline that you’re maybe not a typical guest for this show, but I think there’s a lot that you bring to the table in your experience that folks can learn from. First question I had for you is part of your career, your early career was at CNET hosting Buzz Out Loud with Molly Wood from like 2004 to 2010 and then you left and went to This Week In Tech, which is actually where I first discovered you on. There was a show that was Tech News Daily, and I actually forget the name of it now.

Tom Merritt:
It was Tech News Today.

Rob Walling:
Tech News Today. That’s right.

Tom Merritt:
Ever since Buzz Out Loud, I tried to name shows as boring as possible. It’s the Microsoft approach to naming.

Rob Walling:
Well, the SEO is great because then when I type into Apple Podcast today, because it’s a Daily Tech New Show is your show today, they showed you.

Tom Merritt:
Right, that’s the current one.

Rob Walling:
It is a daily tech new show, but in 2013 and this is on your Wikipedia page, so it’s not as if I’m exposing anything, but you had moved to LA because your wife started working for YouTube. So, suddenly, you’re remote. On your Wikipedia page, it says that you were let go because Leo, the head of the network, wanted people who were there local. I remember thinking to myself at this time, because I heard about it, “What’s he going to do?” There aren’t that many tech podcast networks in the world. At that point, you made a shift to basically go into business for yourself. You want to talk us through that?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, I did that for a number of reasons that some were intentional and some were not. On the one hand, I still do a show called Cordkillers with Brian Brushwood, who was taking his own things independent and had been for years, who was encouraging me, gave me a lot of great advice, and helped me along that path. At the same time, I was also planning to start Daily Tech New Show with someone else who was going independent. So, I thought I was not going to be alone, and I did get severance from TWIT. So, I was able to have a little bit of runway. I sat down with my wife and I was like, “Well, I’ve got this much. Why don’t I just try all this stuff on my own and see how it goes?” But mostly, I just wanted to do things my way.
After having been at Tech TV, CNET, and This Week In Tech, I felt like I had gathered enough intelligence and the tools online had gotten good enough that I could make a go of it solo. So, I gave it a gamble. I decided to try it out. My motivation was I want to do my own show and I don’t want to have to mess with anything else. I just want to do my show. Things like Patreon and at the time, I was using Google Hangouts on Air made it easy to do that without having to put a bunch of capital outlay, to hire a bunch of producers or have a studio and all of that.

Rob Walling:
Well, and that’s the thing is 10 years later, you’re still doing it. So, it’s obviously worked out. You were the first person I believe I ever heard who mentioned Patreon. I had never heard of it. It was early. It feels like if you had perhaps left TWIT five years earlier that it would’ve been such a different road. I don’t know how you would’ve asked for donation. It just wouldn’t have worked, right?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah. I had been doing independent podcasts. One of the reasons I left CNET to go to This Week In Tech was because I wanted to do podcasts that were independent. Because CBS owned CNET, they would let you do it, but they made it hard. You had to go get them approved. There were certain ones, they were like, “Well, you can do it, but you can’t make money off of it.” But I was doing some and monetizing them with ads, but it wasn’t a lot. So, I thought, “Well, I could try to make a go of this by boosting the numbers and doing ads.” I was going to take ads on it, but like you say, Patreon had launched just about six, seven months before. It was Brian who said, “Let’s do our show,” which we had been doing on This Week In Tech as well.
He’s like, “Let’s do our own version of it independent. Let’s do it on Patreon.” I had messed around with Patreon and almost applied it to a different show because I do way too many shows. We almost use Patreon when it launched for a show I do called It’s A Thing, but we decided against it. So, when Brian was like, “Let’s try it with Cordkillers,” it worked like gangbusters immediately.
So, even though I launched Daily Tech News Show without a Patreon, with the idea of just building an audience and going advertising, Cordkillers was doing so well with it. By January 23rd, I was like, “Well, you know what? I should launch a Patreon for DTNS and see how well it can do with just Patreon.” Like you said, if I had launched it a year early before Patreon, I probably would’ve been doing an ad only model. You’re right.

Rob Walling:
A couple things on that. In SaaS, people try freemium and it usually doesn’t work. If you’re funded, you have buckets of money, you can do it, but freemium is like, “Well, you can use that up until a certain point.” Certainly, asking for donations wouldn’t work, costs and all this stuff to acquire customers, blah, blah, blah. So, I remember when you were talking about Patreon, it sounded to me like either a freemium model or a donate to help support the show. I remember my heartbreaking and thinking, “Oh, this isn’t going to work,” but how wrong I was, right? I mean, because is it public? If I went on to Patreon, does it show how much you make from DTNS?

Tom Merritt:
Not anymore. It was back then by default. They don’t show it anymore.

Rob Walling:
I remember 10 or 15K a month was the last I remembered. It was years ago. I’m not going to ask how much you make, but that’s the level. You have a very large audience and it’s obviously a broad audience because a lot of folks can listen to it. But you pretty quickly, it seemed like, were making a full-time income. Then you would hit a mark and then you’d bring on a co-host who I assume you were able to pay at that point.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah. In the earliest days of Patreon, they even don’t do this anymore, but they let you set goals to say, “Well, if we get to this amount of money or maybe this amount of patrons, we will do X.” So our first goal was we’ll stay ad free. We won’t go and get ads. Now, years later, I did create an ad supported free feed for people who weren’t patrons to say, “Look, if you don’t want to support Patreon, here’s your option. You can listen to the one with ads.” That exists now too, but in the beginning, it was like, “We’ll just go ad free for everybody.”
So, once we hit that mark, I was like, “Well, if you like this person that I have on, what if I had them on once a week? If we hit this mark, we’ll bring this person on once a week.” So we did that with Veronica Belmont, who I had worked on Buzz Out Loud with, Patrick Beja, a French tech podcaster, Darren Kitchen, if you know Hak5, you know Darren Kitchen, Scott Johnson, and Justin Robert Young. Eventually, within a year, I had set enough goals and met enough goals to bring on one person every day to help me out.

Rob Walling:
Was there ever a sense of doubt or fear? Because a lot of folks who make the leap are like, “Well, I used to get a paycheck and now I don’t.” You’ve mentioned your wife Eileen was very supportive and she has a full-time job, so that makes it little easier.

Tom Merritt:
Which was huge.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, but what was the emotional aspect for the first three, six months?

Tom Merritt:
Well, I think the fear that this was not going to work at any moment, it could all just fall apart, finally left me last year.

Rob Walling:
Really? Whoa.

Tom Merritt:
I’m saying that to be funny, but also it’s true. Those first five years particularly, I constantly hit marks where I’d be sitting at my table preparing for the show, just thinking, “I should probably just go get a job. This is too hard.” But it was so rewarding when I did it and the audience was so supportive that it always turned me around. Those moments became less and less, but I still kept thinking, “Well, I can’t go on forever.” At some point, it’s just going to fizzle out. It really is only in the past couple of years and we’re now in our 10th year where I’m pretty sure that even if it’s fading out now, it’s not fading out fast enough to ignore it and we can be serious about this. It’s a going concern, not just a thing that I’ll do as long as it lasts. It took a long time for me for that to sink in.

Rob Walling:
You mentioned that some days, you would get up and say, “This is just too hard, but you would do it anyways.” What was hard about it? Is it just putting the show together? Is it grind sometimes to find the stories and do it?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, well, there’s that, right? I have a bigger staff now than I did in those first five years, but I had a producer, Jenny Josephson, for those first five years, who is very experienced in television, not as familiar with the tech world. So, I wasn’t relying on her for content. I was relying on her for production support. That was incredibly helpful, don’t get me wrong, but the vast amount of content preparation was on me. 95% of it was on me. My co-host, of course, brought in part of it, but I wasn’t making them spend all day with me when they were on. They were just coming on for the show.
So, writing and researching and deciding, “Okay, what are the things that are going to keep people interested? What are the things that are important to people?”, and then reading enough about them to make sure I don’t get it wrong. Then running into people who were critical, who were dismissive, who were saying, “Oh, well, you didn’t do this well enough. You screwed this fact up.” A lot of times, those were people where I’m like, “No, you’re misunderstanding,” or “You didn’t hear what I said,” which would frustrate me. Sometimes they were right. I’m like, “Oh, no, I screwed that up. I got that wrong.” So that wears at you because people say something nice to you like, “Your show is great. You’re the best.” People do say that to me. You remember it for 10, 15 minutes. People say, “You screwed this up.”
For me, I remember that all week and it just haunts me. So, it was that pressure that was just grinding on me, the expectation that oh, Tom went and did this crazy thing and it’s going to fail. Whether people were really saying that or not, that was in my head as well. Then there was also one person who hopefully got help that was threatening me and I had to report them to the police. So, I didn’t think that was normal, but that just was another thing that weighed on me. So, yeah, it was just all of that pressure combined and just trying to figure out each day, because it was a daily show, how to make sure we delivered on what I knew the audience liked.

Rob Walling:
That’s a really good point. It wasn’t even something that I thought about coming into this conversation, but your audience must be 10 times mine or 20 times, a lot larger, which means I know that I deal with a lot of compliments and it feels great. To your point, I also deal with people who say, I said the wrong thing. I’m dumb. I’m dumb. I’m an (beep). Whatever it is they say, you could call them haters, but frankly, to your point, there’s a lot of people that aren’t haters and their opinion is actually valid. I’m like, “Huh, I really did drop the ball there,” or “Wow, I misspoke there,” but you have whatever, 10, 20 times that volume might imagine. You talked a little bit about it, but how do you deal with that?
It is relevant to software entrepreneurs because so much of my audience is software developers. The first time they write a blog post, the first time they ship some code, it’s terrifying. Someone’s going to criticize me. I’m at the top of Hacker News and everyone’s ragging on me, or I’m on Product Hunt. Person said it was a crappy product. It’s this fear of criticism or this fear of public failure or whatever it is. You deal with that probably more than most. How have you learned to live with it without getting… Because you don’t strike me as someone who has a shell that’s so hard that it’s just like F everyone, right?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, no, definitely not.

Rob Walling:
I feel like that’s what some politicians do or CEOs of big companies. Everyone else is wrong. That’s not balanced either, right? So how have you held those two things in tension?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, it’s tough. I do a lot of things. For the stuff that you know is irrelevant, it’s just like, “You know what? You can get away with not reading the comments in some situations.” I have built a show that’s based on reading everyone’s emails and everyone’s comments. So, I can’t do that as much as maybe somebody who does a movie who’s like, “Yeah, I’m just not going to read my reviews.” There’s a little bit of that. There’s a little bit of just taking solace in the audience that you do have and saying, “Hey, do you also agree that this is there?” That resets expectations. If they do agree, they’ll say it nicer. But the majority of the time, what I’ve done is I engage. Now, there are a few situations where you can’t engage.
In fact, somebody dinged us in an Apple Podcast review this week for covering AI too much and gave us three out of five stars. I have no way to respond to it. So, it’s just sitting there in my brain eating away at me, but I’ll tell you in a second what I’ve done to deal with that. But for the people who email, I often just email back and I give myself time. Sometimes I’ll even write the response and then delete it so that I’m not responding emotionally. I try to recast what they’ve said in the nicest possible terms and then respond as if they said it that way. A lot of the times, I would say three quarters of the time, the person comes back with, “Oh, my gosh. I came off so harsh. What I meant was X,” or “Oh, that’s really helpful to hear. Thank you.” It turns it all around. That helps a lot.
Sometimes they don’t respond at all. Sometimes they still respond angrily. Honestly, that helps me because if I’ve made the effort to be nice and then you still respond angrily, I’m like, “Oh, okay. I can ignore you now. You are unreasonable.” I don’t have to think that what you said at the beginning was reasonable, but I can still learn something from it. I think the final thing I usually do is I try to honestly say, “Is there a way to do something better that will cause someone not to think this?” Because usually, what they’re saying is not what they’re mad at. When they’re saying, “I hated that you called Apple great,” they’re not saying, “I hated that you called Apple great.” They’re saying you don’t cover Android enough.
So, I try to look at okay, but what’s really behind the comment there and try to adjust that. I also do a lot of preventative measures, like going out and doing surveys and asking people, “Well, yo, what do you hate about the show? Get it out now. Just let us know.” That seems to help a little bit. Then in those cases, that Apple Podcast Review, I just said on the show today, I was like, “Hey, I know some people are tired of us covering AI, but it seems to be one of the most important stories right now, so that’s why we’re covering it.”
Maybe that person heard it and now I’ve answered this is why we’re covering it that way, but I usually try to just let myself calm down, maybe even write the angry email to get out of my head, and then say, “Okay, but what can I learn from this?” That helps some. There’s still times when it just gets to you and you just got to let it go.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, that’s a good system you have. It’s just a very mature way of thinking about it, because it’s so easy to say everybody’s wrong and it’s easy to also take offense to it and be too offensive.

Tom Merritt:
Well, yeah. If you just say everybody’s wrong, you don’t learn anything and you just keep getting the same criticism over and over again. But if you learn from it and then they still say the same thing, then at least for me, I’m like, “Oh, but you’re not right anymore because I addressed that already.” Yeah.

Rob Walling:
That’s great. I want to mix up a little bit and ask you about you’re very prolific. You have many podcasts. I listen to most of them, Daily Tech News Show, Cordkillers with Brian Brushwood. You were doing Current Geek with Scott Johnson. I think it’s on hiatus or maybe you won’t come back to it. I know there was a season. It’s A Thing with Molly and Sword and Laser as well, which I just never listened to. I don’t read a lot of fiction. Know A Little More and Let’s Talk About Star Wars. I could keep going. That’s a lot of podcasts, man. I have three podcasts. I have this one that’s shipped every week since 2010. I have one that goes in seasons, and I interview a startup founder over the course of a year every month, and then we make one season. So, it’s like a longitudinal things, but that’s one conversation.
Then there’s a producer and a voiceover and blah, blah, blah. It’s highly produced, but that’s a thing that happens once a year. Then I have one that I just do intros for, where we’re pulling content off our YouTube channel, audio content, but even that and I put a YouTube video at it every week on our channel, that’s a lot. Now I have a day job. These are all part of my day job, but I do run two companies as I’m doing that. But man, it feels like a ton of content. You, sir, put out way more than I just described. I think there are a lot of folks in the audience who want to be able to produce more content or to produce it quickly at a high quality. How do you this?

Tom Merritt:
Well, dude, you just said you run two companies. You threw that away that’s like, “I also just run two companies.” Well, I guess I run the company that’s making my podcast, but that’s all tight. That’s all it does. The key is that I do not have the day job. That helps a lot.

Rob Walling:
So is DTNS… Daily Tech News Show for those who aren’t getting the acronym there. Is DTNS most of your morning? Are you busy from 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning until 2:00 or 2:30 with it and then anything else has to happen after that?

Tom Merritt:
Pretty much. The short version of how Daily Tech News Show gets produced on a day where I’m on the show, I may or may not be in charge of what we call the rundown, which is what’s going to be in the show that day, but it’s basically the same whether I am or not. In the morning, I’m looking through my RSS Reader, I’m looking through Feedly. I’m marking stories that I think will be interesting. We have a shared Feedly account so we can all mark stories for each other. Then I go walk the dog, have my breakfast, that stuff, come back. We’re on a pretty routine schedule that from 9:00 to 10:00 Pacific, we are filling in the rundown.
So, if you’re in charge, you’re the one putting stuff in there saying, “This is going to be the quick hits. These are going to be the discussion stories.” If you’re not in charge, you’re contributing. You’re like, “Oh, I really like this story. Don’t miss this one.” You’ve got a little more latitude there. If I’m not doing the rundown, sometimes I’ll get a jump on a story I know is going to make it and start writing it. Then from 10:00 to 11:00, we’re writing up the intros and the notes and things we want to make sure we cover about those stories.
That gets distributed amongst the people working on the show. 11:00 to 12:00 is just cleaning up, making sure there’s as few typos as necessary as possible, looking if there’s any gaps, checking to see if there’s any late breaking news, whether a bank has had a problem that day that we suddenly have to jump on. Then at 12:00, we have a Discord voice meeting to go over that rundown and be like, “Okay, how much time are we given to this? Is this right? Any last minute adjustments we need to make?”
Then we get a break for lunch, 12:45, we jump on StreamYard, do all the tech checks, make sure everything’s working, and then we go live 1:00. 1:00 to 2:00 is the show. 2:00 to 2:30 is any production notes, any post stuff, things we need to talk about before we’re out of there. That can sometimes end early. Then I’m off to do other stuff. In there, depending on the day and what the load is like, and whether we have a guest who’s producing their own segment, I might have a little time to do some other stuff. I usually have time to do a few things. But yes, Daily Tech New Show is pretty predominant through that part.

Rob Walling:
The interesting thing is obviously, the software entrepreneurs in the audience are like, “Well, I don’t have every day until 2:00 PM to produce a show or a podcast.” But that’s not the takeaway here. The takeaway is, I think, A, you’re very disciplined as you’re talking in 15-minute increments almost, but also, I don’t think you rely on your own discipline. My guess is you have to show up because other people rely on you. If you don’t show up, it’s like having a gym buddy. I don’t want to go to the gym, but if I told I committed to being there every day at 9:00, then I’m going to be there. That’s what I think a lot of folks who do want to put out, let’s say, a podcast for their company or something on the YouTube channel.
The only reason that I ship the show every week still 13 years in, 650 something episodes, not the only reason, but a main reason that I don’t miss a week is because I haven’t missed a week. I haven’t missed a week. I mean, I got super sick one time and I recorded an episode. You hear Ira Glass sometimes with This American life where it’s like, “Ooh, this is rough,” but the show must go on, right? It’s like you have this rhythm. It’s the Jerry Seinfeld exes, right? I write a joke every day. I don’t want to break the chain.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Is there a sense of that for you that it’s like, “Well, this is just what I do. I don’t care if I don’t feel like it”?

Tom Merritt:
There’s a group of people that are going to show up live. We stream the show on Twitch. We stream the audio on our Discord. Even though they are not the majority audience, the majority audience listens to it on demand later. They’re there. They’re waiting for us. They’re going to say, “Hey, where did you go?” if you’re not there. So, yeah, in the past, I have done the show from an airport just sitting out at the gate using airport Wi-Fi to stream. I’ve done a show from my car when I was moving and I couldn’t use my studio because everything was being packed up and put in a truck.
So, I just sat in my car in the garage and did the show from there. Thankfully, we’ve gotten to a point where if I need the day off, I can take the day off to the show and people will cover, but we still have a show. That has been one of my greatest stresses is making sure that we deliver because like you say, there’s that expectation of, “Hey, where’s the thing? I’m expecting the thing.” It is a habit.

Rob Walling:
Have you missed a day of Daily Tech News Show? Not you personally. Has there been a day where there was no show since 2013 or 2014, I guess?

Tom Merritt:
I don’t think there’s been a day without a show that wasn’t planned. We take all federal holidays off. That’s my way of not having to have to think too hard about what days are off. So, we’re like, “Yeah, if it’s on the federal holiday list, we take it off.” Then we take Saturdays and Sundays off, but I don’t think we’ve ever had a day we’re like, “Oh, sorry. There was no show.” Shows have been moved a couple of times. The very first show was late because I had to go do my… Not TSA pre, but the what’s the customs one?

Rob Walling:
Oh, the World Card.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, whatever that one is, the customs thing. I had to go do the interview that day and it had been planned months before. Yeah, so there’s been a couple that have been rescheduled, but we’ve never missed one. We’ve never missed one that we intended to do, put it that way.

Rob Walling:
Yeah, it’s incredible. I want to ask you about this, ability that you have that I think is lost in society today. It’s to see both sides of a story or of a conversation or an argument, and it’s to be moderate. I say that complimentary.

Tom Merritt:
I know it’s a dirty word these days.

Rob Walling:
I’m insulting you, but no, this is the reason that I have listened to you, because I listened to you since the TWIT days. So, what are we talking, 12 years or something in there. It’s because when I hear a story from you, I don’t expect a spin. Even if there are others around it who are really wound up about it and are saying things, my words, not yours. Brian Brushwood is hilarious on Cordkillers, but he just gets spun up about things and he’ll just go off and you bring them down to earth. You’re like, “Well, maybe, but also, here’s the other side of that. Netflix is already paying the providers in France, the internet.” You show the other side of it.
Again, I just don’t hear it from many people and it’s a very informed opinion and calculates not the right word, but it’s very well considered. It’s as if you are like, no, this is the whole story and I’m going to present it. You have opinions of I think they’re screwing this up and long term, it won’t work, but also you’re not this extreme whatever Joe Rogan type thing. It’s not my style. So, how do you do that? Is it natural? Did you have to work on that?

Tom Merritt:
As with most things, a little of both. I think I’ve always been naturally tending to be empathetic. I try not to make that sound like a self-compliment, but always being able to see another person’s point of view and understand, “Oh, this is what they mean by that.” I think that that’s just one of those things I’ve been able to do. I’m also a contrarian. I have definitely been told that by my family that if there’s an opposite side to be taken, I will take it. So, that is part of it too is like, “Oh, if everybody’s thinking this, I’m going to tend to want to be like, ‘Yeah, but what’s the other side?'”
And then you combine that with not wanting someone to be able to write in and say, “You got this wrong” makes me try very hard to really understand because the corrections that I like getting but also try to avoid are I understand why you covered the 5G interference with airlines this way. I’m a pilot though, and let me tell you this is something that most people don’t know that we run into. I love getting those. I value those amazingly, but I do try to be like, “Okay, what is the pilot going to say about this? Can I find that answer before I have to rely on that person?”
You can’t always do that because no one can have all the experiences, but I do have that motivation to try to look a little farther behind what people think are the knee-jerk motivations. Well, they’re doing that because they’re greedy or they’re doing that because that. Human motivations are usually much more complex than that. I’ve been on the inside at CNET where people were accusing us of things and I was like, “No, I’m here. I know we’re not doing those things.” So I also try to go like, “Okay, but what are the people inside of Facebook thinking when they make this decision?” It looks different from the inside than it does from the outside. So, all of those things, I guess if I had to come up with a reason contribute.

Rob Walling:
AI, you’re covering it a lot, which I think is great and not too much for me, by the way.

Tom Merritt:
Three out of five stars.

Rob Walling:
Three out of five stars for you.

Tom Merritt:
There’s too much, too much.

Rob Walling:
I’m so opinionated about your coverage of AI, but the question for me is, are you using it? I record a YouTube video every week about building and growing SaaS companies, and I’m given a title. My team comes up with a title and says, “Can you record a video about this?” I say, yes. Then I think, “How am I going to outline this?” So I go to ChatGPT sometimes, and I’ll just type in outline a YouTube video just to see. I rarely use more than 20, 30% of it because a lot of it is generic internet advice. But I’m curious if in your workflow, anything you’re doing, are you using AI to help generate content research, any of that?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, I’ve been trying it and I’ve used it for a few things here and there. It’s not good for a lot of the things I do because I am so focused on what we just talked about, trying to make sure that I’ve got all the nuances and bringing in the parts of the story that maybe people aren’t considering. ChatGPT is not good at that because it’s trained on the people who aren’t doing that. On the other hand, we use it on Sword and Laser, science fiction and fantasy book club podcast to create the artwork that goes in the thumbnail. My co-host, Veronica Belmont, uses Midjourney for that. That has been fantastic. It doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes it works hilariously, but we usually get something pretty interesting out of it.
I’ve been using it every so often to aid in writing a paragraph or two of something where I’m like, “Man, I just really need this summarized well.” I’ll put what I put in and say, “Shorten this up.” It’s pretty good at that. I still have to tweak it. It’s not ready-made when it comes out, but it helps. It saves a little time. My favorite use of it has been, I have an episode of Know A Little More coming out that is about OpenAI stuff and about transformers. So, I put in the two paragraphs leading up to it, describing how it works. I think it’s particularly about ChatGPT, this segment. Then I had ChatGPT write the next paragraph. It was really good. It nailed that one. It knows itself at least.

Rob Walling:
Any chance you’ve checked out ElevenLabs? It’s audio generative AI.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, I have.

Rob Walling:
About a month ago, you can train it with your own voice, snippets of your own voice. So, I uploaded snippets of mine and trained it to sound like me. Then I typed out a piece of the intro of this podcast and I cut it in just to see if anybody would notice. I called it out in the episode. The Rob bot itself called out that I am not. Do I sound funny? Because I am Rob bot. Some people noticed, but most people said it sounded like you had a cold or you were using a different microphone. It was different, but it was really close, so you should do it. It’s weird. It’s weird to hear your own voice.

Tom Merritt:
This is where I reveal I’ve been using it this entire time.

Rob Walling:
The whole time. I’ve been using it for a decade, bro.

Tom Merritt:
No. Scott Johnson, one of my fellow podcasters, sent me a clip of myself saying something ridiculous about eating spiders or something in my own voice that he had trained it on. It was my first experience with it. Then I had a friend of mine, Alison Sheridan, did a bunch of the intros and outros of an episode of her podcast using it because she had lost her voice. So, it was super helpful for her. Then like you did, she called it out. Another friend of mine, Andrew Heaton, did an entire episode of his Political Orphanage Podcast written by ChatGPT and read by either ElevenLabs or one of the similar ones. I can’t remember if he used ElevenLabs or not.

Rob Walling:
I cannot imagine doing something long form like that. ChatGPT stuff that’s short or the ElevenLabs clip that was short, I can work with that. The longer it gets, it’s like a copy of a copy type thing where it starts getting off the rails. So, that must have been super interesting to hear. Well, Tom Merritt, it’s been great having you. Folks want to keep up with what you’re up to, Daily Tech News Show, wherever greater podcasts are served, on Patreon as well obviously, and Know A Little More. You have five, six other podcasts, but people can find you. On Twitter, you’re @acedetect.

Tom Merritt:
If you just search Tom Merritt-

Rob Walling:
There you go.

Tom Merritt:
… that crazy username shows up. Yeah.

Rob Walling:
Two R and two T’s. Yup. Thanks again so much for taking the time, Tom.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, thanks, Rob. Appreciate it.

Rob Walling:
I really appreciate Tom taking time out of his business schedule to come on the show. I’ll admit he’s one of those people that I really admire and I’ve learned a ton from him over the years and it was great to be able to sit down and get some insights from him. If you like this show and are interested in tech news or cutting the chord streaming TV or just learning more about technical topics, his podcast are some of the best out there. Thanks for joining me again this week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 654.
Welcome. You’ve made it to the Hidden Track. When I told my 16-year-old that I was going to be interviewing Tom Merritt, he said, “I have to talk to him.” My son and I bond over a lot of Tom’s shows as we’re driving or doing whatever, especially their show, It’s Spoiler in Time, which is where they essentially talk about shows that are on the air. So, they are doing Last of Us and they do the Star Wars shows that come out, Mandalorian. It’s great fun and we’re able to hear other people’s other smart people’s opinions and compare them to our own. So, I let my son come on for a few minutes and just talk to Tom about a few nerdy things, and we’re going to roll that right here. Hope you enjoy it.

Fin:
Mr. Merritt, how do you feel about the obvious joke?

Tom Merritt:
Oh, the obvious joke. You have to push the obvious joke to make the obvious joke work.

Fin:
So in order to give the obvious joke merit, you have to be real stretchy with it.

Tom Merritt:
Like that, good example. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t like the obvious joke if it’s just laid out there flat, but yeah, you can use it to good effect or you can turn it on its head. One of my favorite things is when it sounds like someone’s doing the obvious joke and then at the end, it makes a hard left turn and you’re like, “Oh, that was not where I was expecting it to go.”

Fin:
All your podcasts have a certain quality to them that makes them really cool and fun to listen to.

Tom Merritt:
Oh, thanks. What is that? So I can keep doing it.

Fin:
Panache.

Tom Merritt:
Okay. All right.

Fin:
Maybe not the adjective good that I would’ve gone for. I mean, there is panache, but I think what makes it amazing is all that the work you put in. I mean, considering your success, it’s probably proof that the podcast, there’s no big podcast network, but the idea of podcasts are a meritocracy.

Rob Walling:
Uh-oh, here we go. You’re not going to do this. You’re not going to this the whole time, right? Yeah.

Fin:
No.

Rob Walling:
You’re killing me.

Fin:
Now I want to talk about nerd stuff.

Tom Merritt:
Okay, cool.

Fin:
Okay, so Star Wars.

Tom Merritt:
Yes.

Fin:
What’s your favorite Star Wars thing to come out in the last five years, let’s say?

Tom Merritt:
Last five years.

Fin:
Yeah. So, Clone War season seven was in there. There’s some good stuff.

Tom Merritt:
Bad Batch, Mando, all of that.

Fin:
Andor.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, see, I think Andor is great, but Brian Brushwood thinks it’s the best. He would immediately just say Andor. I almost want to admit that he’s right, but then I resist that because I don’t want to admit that he is right. But I didn’t have the over the top reaction that he did, but I still really liked it. That first season of Mandalorian was really good too because again, it’s subverted expectations and it gave me that feel of Star Wars and the lived universe. I don’t know if you get Andor without the Mandalorian, so I probably will say season one of Mandalorian, which Andor is indebted to.

Fin:
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I’m glad that you mentioned Brian because one of the things we talk about a lot is the interesting dynamic on the podcast. We mostly listen to your Star Wars and Marvel stuff, and Brian is usually like, “I don’t like this.”

Rob Walling:
This is on Spoiler in Time, which is-

Fin:
Yeah, Spoiler in Time.

Rob Walling:
… part of Cordkillers.

Fin:
I need to specify because you have so many.

Rob Walling:
Yeah. There’s other listeners.

Fin:
Yeah, and Bryce tends to like him and you are the cooler head that prevails in those two. It’s an interesting dynamic and I’m wondering how much of that is conscious and how much of that is you guys overplaying. Is it natural or exaggerated, I guess, is my question.

Tom Merritt:
All of it is natural. All of it is real.

Fin:
I wasn’t trying to imply that it was…

Tom Merritt:
Well, this is just the first half of the answer, which is like we don’t sit down beforehand and say, “Okay, you be the negative person.” But we do exaggerate. Brian for sure likes to exaggerate. That’s who he is.

Rob Walling:
He’s a performer.

Tom Merritt:
That’s his personality, and it makes it more interesting to exaggerate as a conversation. But I probably exaggerate the least of them. I used to exaggerate more. I used to pick fights with Brian and get him going, but then people started to wonder if we were getting along and I was like, “Okay, that’s probably a push we get too far. We don’t want people to think we’re mad at each other.” But yeah, I think even in the last year or so, it’s gotten closer to Brian moderating and saying, “Yeah, there’s no bad episode of this series, but there has to be one worst episode,” as a way to say, “Look, I’m not trying to hate on it, but let me explain what I don’t like about it.” So yeah, I’d say there’s like 18% exaggeration in there.

Rob Walling:
That’s a good number.

Fin:
That’s what we were talking about, where it feels very real and natural, but there is also the sense that maybe Brian is a little bombastic.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, he likes to push buttons and stuff, which is good. It’s fun.

Fin:
Okay. Fact, check me on this, Rob, but you used to run to do Walking Dead on either the film or podcast.

Rob Walling:
They did spoiler years ago. It was on frame rate, I think.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, back at the frame rate days even. Yeah.

Fin:
Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve discussed this on a podcast, so I’m really sorry if this is redundant information, but as someone who has enjoyed both a lot of Walking Dead and the Last Of Us, how do you think those two compare?

Tom Merritt:
They almost feel and I guess literally they are as if they’re from different decades, different time periods, right? Again, not to repeat the Mando thing, but I think Last Of Us’s appeal owes a lot to Walking Dead. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised, although I don’t know this if Last of Us the game didn’t owe something to the graphic novels of Walking Dead, because I think Walking Dead was one of the first to say, “Okay, but what if we focus on the problem being the people more now?” The movies did that a little bit.
The Romero movies certainly did that, but Walking Dead very quickly, we said, the zombies are not really a character with agency in our story. It’s going to all be about the people involved. I think The Last of Us ran with that and said, “Well, what if we focus even more on a couple of characters?” I don’t know. I guess The Last of Us is better to me, but only because it learned from our reactions to Walking Dead.

Fin:
It does feel not realistic, but everyone feels almost more grounded. In The Walking Dead, everyone goes off the deep end, and from there, it’s just like, “Wow, all these people suck.” But since The Last of Us is about this connection between Joel and Ellie, it almost feels more personable. I feel like even that applies to the villains because the lady who took over the Fedra place and made it almost worse, Caitlin, Catherine?

Tom Merritt:
Yeah. Yeah. Caitlin I think is right.

Fin:
I feel like she is more sympathetic than the governor, for example.

Tom Merritt:
Oh, for sure. Right.

Fin:
Yeah. But we haven’t seen the finale yet, so please no spoilers. But the evil, the priest teacher, creepy guy in episode eight felt very Walking Dead, because he was unhinged and unsympathetic. That sparked a conversation of what feels different and similar about these two shows. Yeah, I think the human connection is really what makes it interesting.

Tom Merritt:
I think that’s a normal process with new kinds of stories that are in the same vein where the first one to tell it like Night of the Living Dead doesn’t have to be complex because people are like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never seen zombies before.” The zombies are new. When we go back and watch it, it looks cookie cutter in some ways because we’re like, “Well, yeah, you don’t have to explain zombies. Zombies aren’t impressive. We’ve seen a million zombies.” That happens in smaller ways too. Whereas The Walking Dead, they had more space. They didn’t have to explain what zombies were anymore, but they had to leave space for you to realize, “Oh, this is about the interactions of the people.”
Last of Us benefits from like, “Oh, yeah, we’re used to that. Of course, it’s always about the people.” So now they have more space to be like, “Okay, we don’t have to explain this is about the people. We don’t have to leave space for that. We can focus in a little more.” But then there’s some characters like creepy guy that it’s like, “Yeah, it’s still a good character type. Maybe we’ll drag that one out anyway.” Yeah, it’s an interesting choice.

Fin:
Yeah. Oh, I’m glad you mentioned The Night of The Living Dead. I do feel like that one does have the barest hints of a more complex thing, because the zombies are definitely the start of the show, but spoilers for a 60-year-old movie, by the way. But at the end, the guy gets shot because they just think he’s a zombie. I think it was a real gut punch moment for me the first time I saw it. I think it was an accident and it’s not due to humans going crazy when civilization falls, but it does have that hint of this guy survived all this just to get shot by the people who should be helping him.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, those are timeless elements of a story, right?

Fin:
Being really frigging sad.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, or Old Yeller, no spoilers.

Fin:
Bridge to Terabithia.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, Romeo and Juliet. I won’t tell you how that one ends.

Fin:
Ooh. I’m sure you’ve answered this somewhere else, but I don’t remember. So, thoughts on The Last Jedi?

Tom Merritt:
The Ryan Johnson one?

Fin:
Yeah, that was The Last Jedi, Ryan Johnson. Yes.

Tom Merritt:
So episode eight.

Rob Walling:
Episode nine. Wait, no, that’s Skywalker. Wait, is that Skywalker?

Tom Merritt:
Well, that’s why I asked. I was like, “Okay, it’s not the last movie. It’s The Last Jedi.”

Fin:
Yes, The Last Jedi.

Tom Merritt:
I like The Last Jedi.

Fin:
Good, thank you. Me too. I only dislike that they didn’t have Abrams and Johnson cooperate more because it did feel a little bit like a tug of war of “Oh, you were taking the story this way. Well, I’m going to take the story this way.” But outside of that, I thought it was a really good story. There are a couple parts here and there, like in any movie, where I’m like, “Eh, that didn’t work for me as much.” But overall, the way they handled the force timing between them, where they’re talking through the force I thought was really cool and really interesting.

Rob Walling:
Well, If you think about four, five, and six, their original trilogy, Luke or Vader and Obiwan could only communicate when they were together. It’s like you can’t just have them together that much, but the story might be better if they were talking and they were able to do that with this Force Time of you have these two arch enemies. So, that when they do finally get together, they can just fight and not have to have this long diatribe of when I met you, I was about [inaudible 00:45:43]. It’s like, “Okay, get on with the fight.” So I feel like Forced Time was a really nice narrative device.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah. Yeah.

Fin:
Okay. Also, just for the record, both of you probably know this, but it is called a dyad. I appreciate Force Time, but I want to make sure we’re all on the same page here as a Star Wars nerd. Oh, a dyad in the fourth.

Rob Walling:
That’s like the technical term for it.

Fin:
D-Y-A-D.

Tom Merritt:
Got it.

Fin:
Yes, definitely, Force Time. Great. I’m glad to hear you say that because my most unpopular movie opinion is that The Last Jedi is really good actually. I wrote a whole essay on it.

Tom Merritt:
I don’t know why people hate on that movie.

Fin:
That’s my litmus test.

Tom Merritt:
There are certainly little things about it you can pick on, but I don’t know why people hate it.

Fin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I feel like it almost gets dragged down by Rise of Skywalker because it sets up so much and the ninth movie.

Tom Merritt:
I knew a lot of people who are already against it even before Rise of Skywalker, who were then undermined, because they’re like, “You’ll see Rise of Skywalker’s going to be better.”

Fin:
Yeah, I hear people nowadays go like, “Oh, they set this up and never paid it off.” I’m like, “That’s not Johnson’s fault. Eight taken in a vacuum is a great movie.”

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, I agree.

Fin:
Cool. I’m glad we agree on that. This is a really fun if brief nerd diatribe.

Tom Merritt:
Yeah, man. Thanks for saying hi. It was good to meet you.