Dave Winer: "I wanted to live a brilliant life..."

Dave Winer Quotes from the Interview

Ambitions: I always felt though that I wanted to live a brilliant life you know and I sort of figured why bother living if you’re not going to try to like do something wonderful.

Inventing Stuff: I’m an engineer. I invent stuff; I’m a writer; I am a media hacker actually—is the title. I sort of got to like—meaning that you know I’m a software guy by necessity.

Organizations, Rising in or Not: I probably wouldn’t have risen to the top in any established professions, just simply because of the way I—people react to me. I don’t rise to organizations; I create organizations, I create structures, and with—and so like I was at the top of them from the day they existed so that’s how I’ve become influential.

Undervalued programmers: We waste too much of the value of a programmer; we don’t respect them well enough to even begin to understand what makes somebody a good programmer versus not. You know I think it is probably true to some extent, like everything that your skills and talents—I’m 51 years old, you know. I don’t push myself anywhere near as hard as I used to but that’s because I don’t take the drugs I used to take either.

RSS? It’s sort of like automated web surfing.

Invention of the Podcast: Pod-casting is another thing that I invented and it’s an outgrowth of the work that I do with RSS.

The System: The system isn’t built around politicians listening to those constituencies. It’s the other way around; we’re supposed to listen to them, right and of course what they’ve discovered is that if they actually say anything we won’t vote for them. So it’s all about doing nothing.

Howard Dean: Dean was a failure on the Internet. Dean used the Internet to raise money and that was it. He didn’t even spend any appreciable amount of money on the Internet; he took money out of the Internet and used it to buy TV ads, which is an insult to the Internet.

Creativity, Then and Now: The only people who created [anything] that mattered in the 20th Century were the absolute best at each thing and nobody else was—had a license to create or nobody else really was permitted to create. And now we’re in a different world where creativity is something that’s more broadly distributed.

The Technology of Decentralization: What we’re going towards is decentralization now because that’s what the new technology does. It’s not about the technology per se but it’s about what it—its influence on our culture is. The new technology is about decentralization; that’s what it does to us.

Andrew Keen is PoliticsCentral’s podcasting source for the present and future convergence of media, culture and technology.

You can find his previous podcasts @ AfterTV and his collected writings @ The Great Seduction

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Transcript: Dave Winer interviewed by Andrew Keen for Pajamas Media / Politics Central.

Narrator:  This is a Pajamas Media Politics Central presentation. Welcome to After TV with your host, Andrew Keen. Today on After TV, a show that maps out the future of media through interviews with the visionaries of today, Andrew speaks with Dave Winer, the creator of RSS.

Andrew Keen:  Welcome to After TV, the show about technology and culture and media, and today we are with one of the great personalities in technology, culture, and media—a fellow called Dave Winer. We’re here in Berkeley at the Himalayan Restaurant on Shattuck Avenue and Dave is going to tell us who he is or who he isn’t. Hi Dave; thanks for appearing on After TV.

Dave Winer:  I’m not going to be a personality today. I’m going to be very quiet. You’re going to have to get—you’re going to have to prompt me with every question—ask me leading questions. I’m going to be—I’m difficult; that’s who I am.

Andrew Keen:  Dave has never been difficult—not when I’ve known him. Anyway so Dave, before the interview I asked you who you were and you got a bit annoyed.

Dave Winer:  Well because—no, I didn’t get annoyed; you asked me if I—you didn’t let me finish.

Andrew Keen:  Okay; well I’ll let you finish now.

Dave Winer:  That’s annoying, okay; I mean you asked if I was an engineer or what else did you ask? I don’t know; yes, I’m an engineer. I invent stuff; I’m a writer; I am a media hacker actually—is the title. I sort of got to like—meaning that you know I’m a software guy by necessity because the things I want to do involve creating software and so I learned how to you know—I mean I have a Masters in Computer Science and you know I developed lots of award-winning software, so probably that’s the thing that I’m most capable at you know. But I’ve also become a pretty good writer. I’ve been doing that for over 10 years now; so—.

Andrew Keen:  How did you get into it in the first place—into inventing?

Dave Winer:  I always wanted to create stuff. I—it’s just something I always wanted to do.

Andrew Keen:  What—as a child?

Dave Winer:  Yeah.

Andrew Keen:  And what does that feel like—to want to invent stuff?

Dave Winer:  I don’t know; probably it some kind of personality disorder [Laughs]. It probably had to do with not getting my parents’ approval and figuring that—that was a pretty good trick—a pretty good way to get them to approve of me—or just to be brilliant you know. Being a first-born Jewish boy is kind of like training for—it’s like brilliance school in a way [Laughs]. You’re supposed to be brilliant and it’s kind of expected of you and you know the—and whatever. So I always felt though that I wanted to live a brilliant life you know and I sort of figured why bother living if you’re not going to try to like do something wonderful with your life. So that was a young—I remember having a feeling—I remember talking to my dad about that actually when I was pretty young.

Andrew Keen:  Where did you grow up?

Dave Winer:  In New York City.

Andrew Keen:  And what—what was his reaction when you told him you wanted to be brilliant?

Dave Winer:  He wasn’t into it. [Laughs] My dad wasn’t into it.

Andrew Keen:  He wasn’t into being brilliant?

Dave Winer:  No.

Andrew Keen:  What was he into?

Dave Winer:  He loved having a job. He was—he’s a refugee, a first generation American. My parents were born in Europe; they’re Jewish. They fled you know from Hitler during the War. A lot of my family was killed in the War and so for them their values are it’s pretty wonderful to have a job, and so both of my parents had jobs their whole lives and they would freak out when they saw the path I was taking which was one that was not focused on getting a job. And for many years I didn’t have one and my parents really didn’t accept me. So my dad kind of thought it was a silly idea; he said really the thing that you want to do is get a job and I don’t think that he’s wrong. I think that actually—you know there would be a lot of advantages to having gotten a job. [Laughs] But I can honestly say that I’ve only had a job for six months in my adult life.

Andrew Keen:  You had a job and what was that?

Dave Winer:  I worked at a timesharing company in New York named Rapid Data. I was a tech, the tech guy working on the tech sales team and we serviced a couple of big accounts and I actually made quite a bit of money and in just a few months and then decided to go back to school.

Andrew Keen:  So when you say you wanted to be brilliant you could have been brilliant in lots of fields; I mean you could have chosen to be a brilliant doctor or a brilliant historian.

Dave Winer:  Yes.

Andrew Keen:  What drew you to the tech—were you always drawn to technology?

Dave Winer:  No; it was like the most improbable thing for me to do. I hated computers when I was in high school; I hated them from the political standpoint. I thought they were bad.

Andrew Keen:  In what way?

Dave Winer:  They were part of—you know I grew up in the ‘60s, so you know for me the—from that timeframe computers were part of the military and they were you know—they were bad things, you know. And but I—ultimately I decided that I would go that way, first of all because I found that I had a real aptitude for it. I just—I took a class and I was a math major undergrad which was also just a ridiculous choice for me. I think that—like a lot of kids do—make stupid choices in life because just do the most ridiculous thing you can imagine doing, you know. This is the most ridiculous thing I could do.

Andrew Keen:  Why was that ridiculous though?

Dave Winer:  Because I had no aptitude from—. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  But you were—

Dave Winer:  I really didn’t have any aptitude particularly; what I did have aptitude for and why it turned out to be a particularly good decision was I had incredible aptitude into computers. I understood how computers worked before anybody taught me the first thing about computers and so for me learning how to program was like a homecoming at a—a sort of very—you know basic level. I was discovering something very important about myself; this really worked for me. I really understood it, and I found I understood it better than pretty—pretty much anybody else around me. And so I followed it because I—first of all I thought it was ridiculous for a different reason that I could get a degree doing this was—I thought this is silly. I mean getting degrees is supposed to be hard. And this wasn’t hard. Actually though for a lot of other people too, programming is fun; it’s like puzzles. Like I like crossword puzzles; nobody pays me to do a crossword puzzle right. I mean but I—I love crossword puzzles but I hate Scrabble—period. There’s an interesting—something interesting in that; I don’t know what it is but I don’t like Scrabble but I do like crossword puzzles.

Andrew Keen:  Was there like a moment that you realized that this was amazing or did it just happen?

Dave Winer:  Yeah; there was a moment when I knew this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

Andrew Keen:  Do you want to talk about it?

Dave Winer:  No; that’s the moment. [Laughs] That’s it.

Andrew Keen:  But I mean where were you? Were you on campus, were you in front of a computer; did you just suddenly realize it?

Dave Winer:  I don’t remember where I was. I just remember having the—I just remember knowing at some point not too far into it that this is what I was going to do. One of the reasons why—actually there was a logical reason to choose this also—not just that I had aptitude for it but also because the barriers to creativity were so incredibly low.

Whereas you know if you wanted to rise to the top I might have—actually I probably wouldn’t have risen to the top in any established professions, just simply because of the way I—people react to me. I don’t rise to organizations; I create organizations, I create structures, and with—and so like I was at the top of them from the day they existed so that’s how I’ve become influential. Had I had to rise through, I don’t take tests well; I don’t—I’m not easily managed, you know—all those sorts of things that help somebody become the best reporter or the best doctor or the best whatever are not things that I have. So it was probably a pretty good idea to pick something where there was no ladder basically and the ladder needed to get created still. So you know—that’s why it was a good choice and why it worked out reasonably well.

Andrew Keen:  I’ve always understood that—and I’m not a mathematician; I’ve always understood that mathematicians tend to peak earlier and spend the rest of their lives in kind of intellectual decline. Do programmers age well intellectually?

Dave Winer:  Well it’s not—it’s way too early to have an opinion about that because we waste too much of the value of a programmer; we don’t respect them well enough to even begin to understand what makes somebody a good programmer versus not. You know I think it is probably true to some extent, like everything that your skills and talents—I’m 51 years old, you know. I don’t push myself anywhere near as hard as I used to but that’s because I don’t take the drugs I used to take either. So I mean, you know it’s like [Laughs]

I mean there’s a—you know your body does change but on the other hand I mean we don’t respect programmers at all, so how you can possibly tell—? I mean you know we have a basic respect for baseball players okay; so we take their batting averages and we have competitions were we figure out who’s the better baseball player based on a certain set of criteria. We don’t have anything like that for programmers.

In fact, you know we haven’t gotten to the point yet where we even like acknowledge that—that was a particularly good piece of work or where we even archive or note innovation in programming. For example, we’ve thrown out like a huge amount of know-how over the last 20 years; we’ve just lost it—completely lost it. I think we’d do better if we looked at that—sort of figure out why do we do that?

Why do we like throw all this great stuff out so frequently, you know? We don’t maintain it; we don’t keep it. We don’t honor the people who create this stuff, so I don’t know. I mean yeah, you’re probably right but in all practical purposes I’m every bit as productive today as I was—. I mean here, look at it this way; I invented or created this whole programming environment called Frontier, right? I did that with enormous amounts of young person time, okay. Well nobody—hardly anybody uses the damn thing; so was there any effective development going on there? Whereas RSS which I put a very small amount of time into developing, I mean relatively speaking, tiny little amount of time has had huge impact on the world. So which matters more?

Andrew Keen:  That’s an interesting question.

Dave Winer:  I think it kind of matters more that the tiny little bit of work has had much better—greater influence. Now is the work that I did on Frontier per hour any less valuable—no; it’s every bit as valuable. There’s a lot of breakthrough ideas in there; people just simply don’t want to look at it because they’ve got this idea, okay well that’s not something Dave does. You know whatever—for the lunacy of the world we live in you know a lot of stuff gets thrown away. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter. Does that answer your question?

Andrew Keen:  I think so. I mean do—I guess the young people always must ask you the same questions. I mean when you’re—when you’re thinking up new programming ideas are you thinking is that sort of—is that aesthetically exciting and intellectually exciting?

Dave Winer:  Sure, oh yeah.

Andrew Keen:  Is this going to be useful because the RSS thing, I mean you know you’re—

Dave Winer:  Both; you can’t be one without the other. In other words, the aesthetics are all about the utility.

Andrew Keen:  So what went wrong with Frontier? Why didn’t people use it?

Dave Winer:  Oh a lot of things went wrong—a lot; I mean I don’t think your listeners care particularly why—

Andrew Keen:  Well you know—

Dave Winer:  I mean you know it’s like you know I don’t want to go—I mean folks thinking of the negative and I don’t really want to do that.

Andrew Keen:  Right; but I mean presumably there’s sort of a lot involved and you’ve got to have a few shots at something for something really to happen.

Dave Winer:  Yeah; oh yeah a lot of luck and a different kind of know-how too. I mean the kind of know-how that comes with being in your 40s or 50s makes it possible to manage the politics to get something like RSS going. It’s probably not something I could have done when I was in my 20s because I didn’t know how to listen very well. And I didn’t understand what the valuable relationships were and how to get other people to move. What kinds of things matter to other people?

So in the case of RSS there was a ton of value in getting the New York Times to implement RSS even though—and I want to qualify it; I wanted them to do it because I wanted their content. I’m avid reader of the New York Times. But that—that would influence a lot of bloggers is kind of almost counter-intuitive because people would think okay, bloggers are perhaps—they’d buy anything by other bloggers but they—you know sort of like what we called in the ‘80s the Nikon camera effect—is that professional tools sold to amateurs because amateurs wanted the best tools in case they happened to have a brilliant moment when the perfect shot showed up in front of their camera. They wanted the Nikon; so that they could win the Pulitzer [Laughs] and they didn’t want to be stuck with the [brownie] you know for a lack of having a really good camera; why lose the great picture right. So everybody would want to use the thing that the professionals used; so it turned out to make a big difference.

There were a lot of things that made a big difference that had nothing whatsoever to do with programming—had everything to do with people.

Andrew Keen:  And RSS from my own technical perspective seems so simple.

Dave Winer:  Yeah.

Andrew Keen:  It seems so elegant; do you want to you know very briefly for our listeners—perhaps you don’t know what it is. Could you describe it?

Dave Winer:  I suppose. It’s a way of transmitting news information in the way a computer can read it and then other—and then the software can sort of take a whole bunch of these RSS feeds is what they’re called and sort of pick the new stuff out and just show you the new stuff. So you—sort of like automated web surfing; take something that you know if you—if you didn’t think—if you thought you could use more information from the web RSS is a way of getting you more information, squeezing more currency out of it. I don’t know if that helps.

Andrew Keen: And RSS is the sort of—is the foundation for blogs; is that fair?

Dave Winer:  Well it’s certainly one of them.

Andrew Keen:  Right.

Dave Winer:  But it’s every—as I said it’s the—just as much the foundation for newspapers as it is for blogs.

Andrew Keen:  So—

Dave Winer:  These papers changed—if you didn’t notice they changed in the last 10 years. RSS is how they changed; I mean—.

Andrew Keen:  So rather than sort of pulling it’s pushing; is that fair to put it very viably?

Dave Winer:  No, yeah—not really but [Laughs]—no, because I mean you want the honest answer—no; it’s not. I mean it’s just providing it in a way that a computer can assist you in the surfing and the computer can view it automatically—do automatically for you what you were doing manually which is the trick of computers. That’s what computers do for you is they take things that were—that you were doing manually and do it for your automatically.

Andrew Keen:  And I think what RSS has done for the average computer user has made being on a computer a more productive richer experience.

Dave Winer:  Richer I would say; I don’t know about more productive. I mean it’s not necessarily about productivity. You know being more informed about the world that you live in or having the capacity of being more informed might be more accurate. It has value in its own right whether it’s productivity or not—it’s kind of hard to say.

Andrew Keen:  Well you must be pretty pleased that you—you’ve—you were one of the guys who came up with a program that has made the experience on the Internet be richer.

Dave Winer:  Sure.

Andrew Keen:  I mean that’s what a programmer as you say lives for—is to change things.

Dave Winer:  I don’t know; oh I don’t know about that. You see changing the world is not one of the things I want to do. I mean but certainly making the—making things work better is something I do want to do; that’s fine. I think that it’s you know—and there’s maybe a subtle difference but I’m not one of those guys who thinks I know how to change the world.

Andrew Keen:  What are you working on now?

Dave Winer:  Right at this minute? [Laughs] I don’t know. I just got through doing a conference called Blogger [Conference], which your publisher didn’t like.

Andrew Keen:  Why didn’t he like it; do you remember?

Dave Winer:  He’d have to ask him. He has certain personality flaws basically; it was a perfectly lovely conference. Everybody that was there thought it was great.

Andrew Keen:  And this is Roger Simon. What did he say about it; do you remember?

Dave Winer:  I don’t remember; you’d have to ask him. But this is my way of saying hello to him and saying I agreed to do the interview despite the fact that you work for an uninformed person. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  Well if he fires me now you’ll have to employ me, Dave.

Dave Winer:  I don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] Are you kidding? What am I doing now? What we’re doing is at this moment working on sort of bringing pod-casting back to the people. Pod-casting is another thing that I invented and it’s an outgrowth of the work that I do with RSS and there has been this weird idea that it needed to be Silicon Valley(ized) and that means owned—turned into user-generated content and all that’s run its course and they’ve all pretty much failed to do that. And so now we’re going back to creating sort of a community directory that allows you know the same idea that the big media and individuals share a platform for promoting their work and it’s going great. Everybody wants to do it and so that’s what I’m doing this week. And I thought we were going to talk about politics too.

Andrew Keen:  Yeah; well let’s definitely talk about politics.

Dave Winer:  Yeah; because you know I’m active politically and I think all this stuff has a political dimension you know and that’s something I—I am going to do in the upcoming election—the 2008 election; the context in which I do it is still up for grabs; but—.

Andrew Keen:  What do you think that could involve?

Dave Winer:  Well I think it’s pretty simple; I mean I was in—at Harvard at Berkman Center during the 2004 Primary Campaign and got peripherally involved with the Dean Campaign.

I wasn’t a supporter of Howard Dean but I did get involved in their use of technology and understood what they were doing and I—you know everybody sort of assumes that the Internet is going to play a role in the 2008 election, and of course it is going to play a role and every—all of the political candidates are trying to figure out how to be as much of a breakthrough as Dean was in 2004. And I think the answer there is going to be not so—it’s not going to be in candidates’ blogging which is what sort of knee-jerk reaction—every time this subject—

I did a conference in 2003 about this and we had all the bloggers from all the campaigns there and we had regular bloggers there and all they—anybody could come up with was well the candidates need to blog or—and then they—John Edwards was at this conference I was at a few weeks ago and they all said well you have to blog yourself and you have to let bloggers on the bus and you have to have bloggers go with you everywhere you go except in your bedroom.

And it’s like [Laughs]—and the horrible thought of course is that of course Edwards could pull that off. I mean you know he is such an incredibly good actor that he could appear to be spontaneous yet stay on message and even while he’s taking a dump you know. [Laughs] But—and that’s not the answer; I mean you know more acting, more—more push as you say, you know where they view the Internet as just another advertising medium is nothing revolutionary interesting—even interesting about it.

However, if politicians were to start to read the blogs and understand and listen to them and pick up good ideas from them and then add their value which is—and this is what they’re supposed to do is learn how—they know how to make the political system do things for people. So now connect the bloggers up to that and you might have something.

A good example of that was Hillary Clinton is promoting this idea of—that the Congress-people don’t get raises until the minimum wage is raised, which is an interesting idea and that came from bloggers. So the ideas that—it’s a two-way medium, which means you don’t just write for it; you have to read it too. And so that—the candidate that figures out how to do that—how to distribute the—the insight and of course there’s a lot of crap in the blog(isphere) too and you have to sort through all that too—is that finally great stuff on the blog(isphere) and then route that through the political system—that’s something and that would be worth doing.

Andrew Keen:  Is that a technology challenge or is that just some theorist political figure sitting down and reading the blogs?

Dave Winer:  All of it is not a technology challenge. Almost none of this has any heavy-duty technology to it. So the answer is no; it’s—it is a human challenge. Yeah; I mean blogging is very lightweight technology, Andrew; it’s not heavy technology. None of this is about technology.

Andrew Keen: Why do you think then it seems so much to ask for politicians to actually read what we all think?

Dave Winer:  Because that’s the inversion of the system; that’s—that really does—it’s the same reason why a reporter at the New York Times who has risen up at the top of their field doesn’t want to all of the sudden start you know competing with bloggers because he worked so hard to get to the top of his ladder in that system, he doesn’t want to hear about the system changing. The system isn’t built around politicians listening to those constituencies. It’s the other way around; we’re supposed to listen to them, right and of course what they’ve discovered is that if they actually say anything we won’t vote for them. So it’s all about doing nothing. [Laughs] I don’t know; so it’s—that really is change, right.

Andrew Keen:  Do you think Dean listened in 2004?

Dave Winer:  I’m sorry?

Andrew Keen:  Do you think Dean was listening?

Dave Winer:  Absolutely not, no; no, no, Dean was the failure on the Internet. Dean used the Internet to raise money and that was it. He didn’t even spend any appreciable amount of money on the Internet; he took money out of the Internet and used it to buy TV ads, which is an insult to the Internet.

Andrew Keen:  Have you come across any politicians local who might be doing what you’re suggesting?

Dave Winer:  Nope, nope, but there should be.

Andrew Keen:  So what is it—does it have to have an anti-politician?

Dave Winer:  No; I don’t think so. I think that this is an evolutionary process. Eventually you’ll have what—I mean I like that idea of an anti-politician. I mean that sort of goes back though to the framework of the Constitution of the United States. They didn’t envision anything like a politician; they envisioned the citizens—us governing ourselves—self-government, right. So you know it’s not so much a new idea as it is going back to an old idea. And ultimately the—there will be continual upheaval until we get back to that because the whole theme of the Internet everywhere and this is not technological—is disintermediation—is that it takes out the intermediary and so the politicians had better start doing their job which is to facilitate the interests of their constituency and even at that they’re going to have a struggle to survive in the new context. But at least they—those individuals have a fighting chance. But if they continue to play the—I mean the—the current system is just—it’s all based around what a few big media moguls want; in other words they’ll give you coverage and with that coverage you can raise money which you then turn around and give back to them. That’s their little system; that’s how it works. That system is breaking and soon will break.

Andrew Keen:  Do you have any sort of figures in history who you admire politically—I mean Martin Luther King, Gandhi, someone who really did sort of achieve some of these things?

Dave Winer:  I don’t think in those terms. I’ll have to think about that. I don’t think about historical political figures; I’m sure there are plenty that are admirable but I don’t have an answer for you right off the top of my head.

Andrew Keen:  So what you’re imagining, what would be good is something that has happened before?

Dave Winer:  I didn’t say that; I meant what I said.

Andrew Keen:  Right.

Dave Winer:  I’m not one of those guys that tells you different answers from what I actually think.

Andrew Keen:  But you did talk about sort of early American history.

Dave Winer:  Sure, yeah; I admire what they did. I don’t know how they did it. I also know enough about how history gets created to know that we probably don’t really know what they thought. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  Right; but it sounds like—

Dave Winer:  And what the—each individual actually did. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  But it sounds like what you’re sort of saying was suddenly that some of the—at least some of the anti-federalists in the debate around the Constitution—and I’m not saying you are an anti-federalist or anything like that—

Dave Winer:  I’m also—I’m just an observer really, okay; in other words I study the Internet and I understand how the Internet works and I’m a product like all of us of the 20th Century and the mono-culture in every aspect of what we did. The only people who created [anything] that mattered in the 20th Century were the absolute best at each thing and nobody else was—had a license to create or nobody else really was permitted to create. And now we’re in a different world where creativity is something that’s more broadly distributed. So all I do is just study that and come to my conclusions about it; it’s not based on anything that I want particularly you know. For all I know centralized government might be the answer to all of our problems but that’s not what we’re getting. What we’re going towards is decentralization now because that’s what—because the new technology and—and it’s not about the technology per se but it’s about what it—its influence on our culture is. The new technology is about decentralization; that’s what it does to us.

Andrew Keen:  And de-professionalization if there’s such a word?

Dave Winer:  Sure; absolutely—amateur(ization)—there is nothing wrong with amateur by the way. All the good things that happen in our world were started by amateurs. They don’t get professional until later in their lives; so—.

Andrew Keen:  What does—could you give me an example of that?

Dave Winer:  Baseball—I’ve been studying that; baseball completely started as an amateur thing. In fact the rule for the first 20 or 30 years of baseball was that you were not allowed to make money playing baseball. And I’ve found it fascinating. Look at everything—anything that’s ever been done that’s any creative endeavor always started out as an amateur thing because when they start nobody is willing to pay for it.

Andrew Keen:  So amateur meaning—in defining terms you don’t get paid for it?

Dave Winer:  Well sure, absolutely; you do it for love.

Andrew Keen:  It’s just for passion?

Dave Winer:  For love—that’s the root of the word. Ama—is love.

Andrew Keen:  So would you agree that you’re a little bit of a romantic or not about that?

Dave Winer:  No; I—no, Andrew; I’m sorry. [Laughs] Why?

Andrew Keen:  Well it’s—and I don’t—

Dave Winer:  I have no idea what that means; I don’t like labels.

Andrew Keen:  You don’t like labels. Well you—

Dave Winer:  You can say whatever you want. I’m not going to say that about myself.

Andrew Keen:  Okay; but it’s—

Dave Winer:  [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  —no, it’s an attractive ideal.

Dave Winer:  Thank you.

Andrew Keen:  Everyone doing what they love and somehow figuring out a way that they get paid for it.

Dave Winer:  No, but it’s—no, no; you see that—that’s the whole thing that amateurs don’t get paid for it. Once you get paid for it you’re not an amateur anymore.

Andrew Keen:  So how could that world work then?

Dave Winer:  Sure; a lot of things you do you don’t get paid for. I’m not getting paid to talk to you right now. But I’m doing it anyway; I’m going to eat lunch right after we finish and not only am I not getting paid to eat lunch, I’m actually going to pay to eat lunch—if you can believe that. I mean money—I don’t get paid for almost anything I do; I get paid for a very small portion of what I do. And I’m not that unusual. If you really stop and look and see what your life is about and how much of your time is spent doing things that you get paid for and things that you—versus things that you don’t get paid for you’ll see that there is an awful lot of your time you spend doing things you don’t get paid for.

Andrew Keen:  Right; and I—I agree. I mean—it’s a very—it’s a very attractive notion of all of us doing—spending as much time as we can on things we love. I mean that—and when I used the word romantic I meant that in a positive sense; I didn’t mean it critically.

Dave Winer:  Maybe I do things out of a need for—an obsessive need, a compulsion; maybe it’s not romantic. [Laughs]

Andrew Keen:  Right.

Dave Winer:  It’s still an amateur though. It’s still an amateur if I do it and I’m not getting paid. That’s why I didn’t want to like say it because that’s self-aggrandizement and I’m not into that, you know; but you know—you can say it if you want to but it’s not something I’m inclined to say.

Andrew Keen:  But—but amateur is an ideal—something that’s sort of attracting?

Dave Winer:  No; the amateur is what we’re doing.

Andrew Keen:  Are you an amateur writer?

Dave Winer:  Of course; I’ve gotten paid once or twice. I mean I used to be a contributing editor at Wired, that—their online—Hot Wired was part of Wired Magazine and I got paid what was it like $500 a column or something like that.

Andrew Keen:  Was it bad?

Dave Winer:  No; but that was really not putting too much food on the table to be honest with you. [Laughs] My server bills were like $2,000 a month okay to give you a rough idea of what I was spending to create the $500 a month—a column you know and it wasn’t—it wasn’t about the money but—and other than that I’ve never been paid to write.

Andrew Keen:  Have you ever thought of doing a book?

Dave Winer:  Sure.

Andrew Keen:  Well Dave, I want to thank you; this has been very entertaining. I want to free you up to have your lunch and I want to have you back on After TV to talk more because you’re a great interview. Thank you very much.

Dave Winer:  Thank you.

Narrator:  Thanks for listening to After TV, which is hosted and distributed by www.pajamasmedia.com, featuring music by Unity, an artist licensed by Creative Commons. Hope you can join us again.