You're Wrong About - Napster with Niko Stratis

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

This week, a tale of two Shawns/Seans, their impossible dream, and the file sharing service that lived fast, died young, and helped create the internet as we know it. Plus, Metallica.Here's where to find Niko:WebsiteNewsletterTwitterResources cited in the show introduction: The Racial Roots Behind the Term "Nappy" on NPR's Code Switchhttps://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/09/412886884/the-racial-roots-behind-the-term-nappyThe Complex History and Politicization of Black Hair in America, presented by Danielle Harvey https://kisaradio.org/podcast-feature-the-complex-history-and-politicization-of-black-hair-in-america-presented-by-danielle-harvey/Coiled by Leanne Aile https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/coiled/id1585408648"The Other N-Word" by Shalwah Evans https://www.essence.com/feature/is-nappy-negative-or-black-hair-empowerment/"How Natural Black Hair at Work Became a Civil Rights Issue" by Chanté Griffinhttps://daily.jstor.org/how-natural-black-hair-at-work-became-a-civil-rights-issue/"The Natural Hair Movement" by Kamina Wilkersonhttps://radar.auctr.edu/islandora/object/continuum:0001.008Support us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.nikostratis.comhttps://nikostratis.substack.comhttps://twitter.com/nikostratishttp://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

Carson Daly knows what side his bread is buttered on. Welcome to You're Wrong About. I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we are talking about the dramatic rise and even dramatic fall of Napster. We are learning about this today from Nico Stratis, who per her website is a writer, podcaster, speaker, and former smoker. We've learned about email on the early internet with Anne Helen Peterson. We have learned about Karen Carpenter and the music industry with Carolyn Kendrick.

And now we're going to go right to the intersection of the two and figure out what happens when a new, unstoppable force meets a much older and movable object. Some of you may have heard that we are having a Valentine's Day live stream show. I will be visible to your eyeballs as well as your earballs. And you can get tickets if you want to see it at moment.co. slash you're wrong about. It's going to be on Valentine's Day Eve at 5 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Mountain. 7 p.m. Central, 8 p.m. Eastern, and of course 9 30 in Newfoundland. And if you're in another time zone that puts that in the middle of the night, you can also

watch it for the next seven days after it airs. And also you can watch it for the week after it airs anywhere. You don't have to be in Belgium, but of course it helps. If you want some bonus episodes, you can find us on Patreon or Apple Plus. And we just had an episode with the wonderful guest Eve Lindley talking about the moment in time when everyone woke up and hated Anne Hathaway. But for now, Napster. We do have a content advisory for this episode, which makes sense when you realize that it's

about building the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s. And at about 12 minutes and 30 seconds, we talk for a couple of minutes about the background of how Napster got its name in this episode. But it's something that we're also not going to spend a ton of time on because it is rooted in a term with a very long and racist history. And we are not the people to explain that to you, but we have some links in our show notes of some articles and podcast episodes that can. And I really hope you listen.

I loved doing this episode. This was a real chance to go back in time and talk about the way the internet used to be and therefore the way that life used to be. Not necessarily in a hugely nostalgic way, but in a way that maybe can help us make a little bit more sense out of what's going on right now. I hope. I dare to dream. So here's Napster.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we tell you about the file sharing pirate download history that America has made on. Here with me today is a woman whose name I want to say in a monster truck voice for some reason. Ladies and gentlemen, here is Nico Stratus. Wow. It's Nico Stratus. Today we are talking about Napster and there are plenty of audience members I know who

are like, what the hell is Napster? And that's very exciting to me. What the hell is Napster? Describe me Napster is maybe the most boring thing in the entire world. It was a system that was lived on the internet that allowed people to look at songs in people's folders on their computer and take them from them. That's like the nucleus of what Napster was, is that idea, which was new at the time. It was a program that lived and died in the span of two years.

It lived fast and it died young, but it kind of changed the internet as we know it. And in fact, it changed the way that we interact with music on the internet as we know it for sure. Even hearing you say that, it sounds as space age and amazing to me now as it did in like 1999. Is that when it started? What are the years? Yeah, it started in 99.

I would actually love for you to contextualize for us the world of like 90s internet and 90s computing. To me, humans feel so tiny and like the sea that is the internet. And in the 90s, I would say that the internet was like this cute little koi pond. It kind of was. It was an oddity, right? I mean, I was trying to think of this. So my first experience with the internet, I'm from the Yukon originally.

The other day I was talking to somebody and they said, the Yukon is a place that their dad uses in conversation when he's trying to describe somewhere that is nowhere at all. A lot of people will say they grew up in the middle of nowhere. I grew up to the left and up of the middle of nowhere, like off to the side of the middle of nowhere, you know? So our telecommunications then weren't the best. They're not even that great now. There's literally one cable into the internet of the internet that goes into the Yukon and

every summer, somebody cuts it by accident and then the internet is just off. Doing what? Like with a lawn mower or something? There's like a fiber optic cable that runs by the highway and then they're always doing like highway reconstruction in the summer and then they'll be like, someone cut the internet cord and now it's gone. That's honestly petrifying to me. It's terrifying.

We had our like Tandy 386 computer we bought from Radio Shack and I bought a modem. It didn't come with a modem. I had to buy a modem separately for like, I saved up my money and bought a modem. And I would dial into this like BBS service that we had in the Yukon for all the other people in the Yukon that use this BBS, which was like maybe 20 people. It's funny because also the internet really creates micro generations and my first internet was in 1996 with AOL. So I feel like there was a whole period right before that of like the early 90s where all

of it is unfamiliar to me and it's like this fascinating, it's like Atlantis. It is exactly that. It's a lost city. I'm kind of obsessed now in retrospect with like the physicality of old computers and at the time like I at least and everyone else I knew were like openly fantasizing about like, won't it be great where computers are like these cute slick tiny little like, you know, the size of a handbag you'd take to a wedding. And now we have that and I really do miss in the same ridiculous way that people miss

aesthetics that they don't have to feel annoyed by anymore. It's called nostalgia. The time when the computer needed its own room because if you had to boot it up and then you had to experience like several minutes of like worrying and clicking and a fan turning on and off and like they were very noisy. I mean, talk about ASMR, right? Like there is that sound like you said that just that description of like you're pushing the power button.

There's like a dung and then there's the worry and everything is coming to life. Like that is like my computer doesn't do that anymore. It's just on all the time without getting into like whether things are better or worse. It's just like so interesting that something that's such a fundamental aspect of our lives has changed that much in the lifetime of me, such a young, cute person. More than a lot of other pieces of internet based technology. Napster is the reason why we are where we are now. Okay.

Amazing. Napster is a great story of two different spellings of the name Sean. Oh, that's right. We get to talk about Justin Timberlake's character in the search hole network. I'm thrilled. The two Sean's that created Napster, Sean Fanning, Sean the first, Sean with a W, S-H-A-W-N. My favorite spelling. I love that one of them is phonetic.

Sean Fanning born in Massachusetts, Brockton, Massachusetts. He's a Sagittarius. Ah. Actually Sean Parker, other Sean also a Sagittarius. You can see how we're bound for a roller coaster. Yeah. We're in for it. Sean Fanning grows up in a bit of a difficult household.

He has a bad father situation. His mom sort of trying her best. He's one of five kids in the documentary I watched. His brother refers to them as growing up not well, like he chooses his words very careful and says, we grew up not too well off and so Sean Fanning gets into sports in a big way before he discovers computers and really starts, he discovers this sort of like world of being able to go on to these BBS services, these Bolton board services. He sort of loses himself in this world and people always remark about the fact that he

was always sitting by a computer online with a radio on, always listening to music, which so people are like, we're not surprised he developed Napster because he always listened to the radio, which is, I mean, like everybody always listened to the radio. That's all we have. Right. When I'm describing this, especially like early internet technology, when I'm describing it to people that are younger than me, especially people that are significantly younger than me, I feel like I'm telling them about how rocks used to look.

It just feels so old, right? Right. But this is kind of a key thing of Napster and like the way life and music were technologically at this time, which was that if you wanted to play Orinoco Flow, you had to go on a quest to like find the little silver object that it lived inside of. Yeah. This is like peak CD boom, right? And in fact, like, and this will come up later, but like Napster is kind of the beginning

of the end for the CD industry. It kills record stores. Yeah. CDs were also extremely expensive. Like I think a CD would cost the equivalent of like four to 10 hours worth of minimum wage work for a teenager. Like I think there are murder cases in the 90s where part of the motive was that somebody had been promised payment that in whole or in part included CDs, you know, because they

were such an important and important and difficult to obtain thing for teenagers. And to me, there's like, there's something incredibly poignant about the fact of like music being so much harder to hear, you know, because it's like songs are so important. I think when you're young, because you'll hear a song that makes you feel a certain way. And I think it's like an almost universally human experience to like hear a piece of music that like lodges in your brain and your heart and that you just want to hear over and over again until you have to like move on or else you'll get completely sick of it.

And in a small way kind of breaks my heart that like as a kid for like much of the history of pop music, like you would hear something that you loved and then just be like, well, that was nice. I don't know if I'll ever hear it again. You know, when I was reading about him always being on the computer with this radio, like I would do the same. I would be locked away in our computer room and I would have the radio on and then I would have a tape always in the tape deck with the with the radio and I was always have it paused

on record and I would wait because I would hear those songs and I would be like, okay, I love that song. I've got to wait till I know it's going to be back in rotation on the radio and I'm going to try to tape it and you would, you were like, you were always chasing this dream because yeah, like a new CD was like $20 and $20 in the mid 90s was a lot of money. So Sean Fanning says something interesting about his time with like being on these BBS services and doing all this stuff where he says, going online and finding people who had the same interests, who I could learn from, your reputation was your own.

It wasn't about how well off your family was or how well you trust or how well you spoke. And it's very much like for him, it is this equalizer for him. He can like, he can, he doesn't have to put on errors or pretend to be somebody. He's not, he can just be who he is and he's on an equal playing field in theory. He goes to work for his uncle, his uncle John, who is a, who is a big figure in the, in the building of Napster. His uncle John is this like, he's like everybody that has an uncle that's like, I'm a businessman but he can never tell you what his business is and you don't ever know that some of those

businesses are likely selling drugs, but he just doesn't want to say it. His mom wants Sean to have a better life. So she sends him to kind of spend time with his, with her brother, his uncle John and his uncle John, you know, he buys Sean fancy suits. He buys them really nice cars. He's like, he buys him a laptop that's $7,000, phonetic Sean, his handle. He's in this IRC chat room, this internet relay chat room called Woo Woo. Like, and it's with all these other like hacker guys that he knows and like other hackers

and programmers and his handle is Napster because he has an Afro and everybody calls him Nappy when he's playing basketball, which is very casual with that sort of racist talk. Yeah. And that this ultimately became the name of the company and nobody ever commented on it in a big enough way for it to kind of lodge itself in the record is kind of incredible to me actually now that we're talking about it. But one of the people he meets on this chat room, his handle is Man-O-War, like M-A-N-O-W-A-R. And Man-O-War is Sean Parker.

Like Man-O-War is from such a particular kind of universe of boy internet names. I mean, you could do a real case study on like performative masculinity via the internet and there is because there's so much flexing. And I think the word Man-O-War is so indicative of that of like, he's like 17 years old. Like, my friend, you have never seen war, you know, but for sure, call yourself that. Yeah. Like what words specifically are you a Man-O please tell us. And so Sean Parker, he was like a young, he's a young hacker too.

And in fact, there's this great story when he's a teenager, he's 16 years old and he's like learning to hack and he's sort of flexing his hacking muscles. And his dad tells him, his dad is like a scientist and his mom is like a banker or something like that. And his dad sort of tells him, you know, to screw basically like screw around when you're younger, because when you have a family, you can't sort of like play this fast and lose with the rules. So Sean Parker takes that to heart very much so.

And he hacks a Fortune 500 company when he's 16 years old. Wow. His dad comes to pick him up at school and rushes him home because the FBI is like raiding their house and taking his keyboard off. But he was 16. So he just got community service because he wasn't old enough to be tried as an adult. When everybody talks about Sean Parker, they're always like, oh, he was a genius. He's one of those guys that is just like, a lot of people call him like a web oracle.

Like there's all these like very fawning profiles of him after the fact, because he eventually becomes like part of Facebook. He's an early investor in Spotify. Like he's able to see where the internet is going. Yeah. And I think that there are, there are definitely people who are great trend forecasters and who are good at investing. I would submit that it's a consistent problem in media that we're always looking

for people who are like the next big thing in a bigger than life way. And, you know, at just 19, she dropped out of Stanford to patent her blood testing technology. It seems too good to be true. And it's like, yeah, the reason these things seem too good to be true is that they are too, too good to be true. And I feel like what I would question is like, I'm sure he did see where things were going, but also like people who make good investments also tend to make bad

investments because they make a lot of investments. And I feel like we never talk about how success in any arena is based on not having just like only good ideas, but just like having a lot of ideas and a lot of follow through. Yeah. Well, and like, they're kind of like the two Shauns are kind of perfect for matched for each other in this regard, because one Sean, like Sean, Phenetic Sean is like, Phenetic Sean, he is like the guy that is like staying up on

like coding and programming. In fact, he sort of takes the idea of what he thinks Napster could be to this IRC chat room that they're all in and says, because you can to sort of give a little background to where MP3 technologies at the time, it does exist, but it's like you would go to a website and they would have it and you could download it and it might take a couple of days and you would do it in steps. And sometimes you only got some of the song and it was very clunky. It was a thing for people that knew how the internet worked.

It wasn't this like readily accessible thing that just anybody could download a program and use. So it wasn't like, it didn't take off the way that Napster did because it was a little bit more, it required you to have some technical skill in order to be able to access it and achieve it. And so he took this idea of like, this is what I want to do. I want to make this, this platform to this chat room and all of the hackers and programmers in there by and large were like, I don't see that becoming a

thing. And Sean Parker is the one to say, I actually think this has some legs. Let's sort of see this thing through. So is the idea like, yeah, sure, that's a good idea, theoretically, but like, where are the users? Where are the customers? Yeah. Like one of the guys, this guy, Ali, Ali Adar, I apologize if I'm not pronouncing your name properly and you do listen to this.

He says, one of the things he says to him is stop wasting your time. No one's going to share MP3s, but he still comes on board. Like he decided he agrees to come on board and help program. And, you know, cause Sean Fanetic Sean is like, he's a coder, but he's taught himself. His uncle John has this like kind of business office setup that used to be a restaurant. And Sean is like sleeping on the floor and on the couch and, you know, is working on this stuff. He eventually, cause he's going to Sean is Fanetic Sean is going to north

eastern and eventually drops out of university. Cause he's like, I've got this idea for this thing and I need to drop out of school in order to see it through. And then so him and Sean Parker sort of team up to become the heads of this thing. And Sean Parker is like the business guy. Both of them are like 18, 19 years old. Like it is that thing, right? Of like, can you believe they're only, they're younger than 20, but it is, it

is a lot of responsibility foisted on someone that has not really experienced or been impacted by the world yet, which I think is important for people. Yeah. And also like at this age, I would wonder like how many jobs have you had? Yeah. If it was entrenched as a cultural myth, it was not as entrenched as it is now around the turn of the millennium. But I think now it's like everybody recognizes that it's such a part of the

like tech founder origin story to drop out of college in some way, preferably an Ivy League one and to go your own way and say, essentially the established means to power aren't good enough for me. I'm inventing my own because people love that. And I feel like it's kind of the same sort of perspective less guttsiness that motivates 18 and 19 year olds to like join cults and start movements and do like all manner of things, both great and terrible and in between, they just require like an incredible amount of confidence that like you actually I

think aren't capable of once you've fallen on your face a certain number of times. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think a lot about a the sort of mythos building, right? Like, like you said, you know, the nicer the the Ivy League, the college you drop out of the better because it's all part of your own myth building, your world building, it's this, it's calling yourself man award. There's so much performance involved in this sort of thing because you are sort

of putting on airs. You are faking it and crossing your fingers that you are in fact going to make it because neither of them have ever built a program and sold it and started a started a company that would eventually be worth a lot of money. Yeah. The first time the two Shones meet, it's a pitch meeting. They go to their first investor pitch and that's the first time they ever meet each other in person.

Oh my God, there was something about the internet at this time that I think we still have access to, but in a different way where like by default, your real life identity was not attached to your internet identity, which is what made you've got mail possible. You know, if we were to make that again today, they would be both running catfishing accounts or something. You've got DM would be a much different movie for sure. Oh my God.

You've been slid into. I think part of that myth building becomes with like you choose the name that is presented and you can build up this idea of yourself because you can obfuscate who you are or who you are avoiding. Like so much of the early internet, I think is about being able to go online and being able to be somebody else. And then they were sort of able to turn being somebody else into two other people that built a company.

This is like the peak of the CD boom. Like record stores are huge, but people are starting to complain about like, I don't want to spend $20 on a CD for one song. So much of it was like you were buying stuff for one song. It's like soundtracks are big. One hit wonders are really big because record companies know that they can sell a $20 CD because people want the one song that they know. Chumba Wamba is actually a really odd good example.

Cause people are like, I want that Tub Thumping song. I crave Tub Thumping and I'm going to buy a Chumba Wamba record. We did crave Tub Thumping. Let me tell you, to be alive in the late 90s was to crave Tub Thumping. And it was also to get knocked down and then to get up again. Cause they're never going to keep you down. I got knocked down. The Napster story.

This is like, this is my bitch for the narrative movie. So they start building Napster and it starts to become like a viable idea. And so they start sort of pitching it to investors and Sean's uncle, John is like an integral part of this company. He sort of wedges himself and he gives them some startup money, but it's like, I'm going to own 70% of the company. And Sean Fanning is going to own 30%. That's his like deal that he cuts for him, which Sean sort of like is,

is hesitant about, but doesn't want to cause a fight with his uncle. So he's like, it's very music industry to take a very predatory business deal because you're trying to make a name for yourself. And it's like, that is extremely music industry in and of itself. So true. So when does Sean Parker find out about this? How does that go? So they start sort of pitching this around to investors and uncle John is sort

of this like guy that's kind of ruining the deals. Like these investors will come in and it's these two 18 year old kids that are like living in their own filth. They don't know how to present themselves for a business meeting. And then there's uncle John, who in my head is just like Randy Quaid. Okay. So like Randy Quaid, like National Lampoon, Randy Quaid or okay, totally. Yeah.

He's, he's standing off in the corner yelling shitters full, but he's also saying like he's like bragging about all the, all the people. He's like one of those guys that's like talking about all the Silicon Valley people he knows and all this stuff. So he's really making the deals difficult. Silicon Valley, Randy Quaid, he totally is. They initially, they talked to this one investor, this guy, Ben Lillinthiel. Sorry, I apologize again.

There's a lot of names that I won't be able to pronounce all that well. He had like created an email service that he had sold to a Boston company. He's got some money and they get close to an investment of a million dollars. But uncle John keeps pushing for more money because he's, uncle John also has a lot of debt from all of his own failed companies. So he's trying to recoup on his like own losses. Okay. And what, how much are they looking to raise at this point?

Part of the problem is, is that the two Shans kind of don't seem to know, like by all accounts, they're too young to really be aware of how much startup capital they'll need and how much it'll cost for them to really build the thing they're trying to build. And this guy, Ben Lillinthiel is like, he kind of backs out because he's, the two Shans kind of didn't know what they were looking for or how much they needed or what would be required. So it doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

And the deal doesn't end, that deal doesn't end up going through. Right. Cause they probably wouldn't know what operating budget they would need for running a snow cone stand. So why would they know how to run something like this? Something like this that has never existed before, right? It's not like they could say like, well, when X company made a thing, they needed this much, there's no benchmark.

So they eventually get this guy, he's a guy that his uncle John plays chess with. His name is Yossi Amram and he's like a Harvard business school guy. He's from Tel Aviv originally. I think it is important to say too, this is the dot com game still. The bubble hasn't burst. So like investing in startups on the internet is actually like the reason why there's so much money is like everybody wants to get in on the ground floor because the bubble hasn't burst quite yet.

Right. And I mean, that's such an important cultural moment to center ourselves into because I remember this being something I was conscious of as like an 11 year old that there was a dot com bubble that then subsequently burst. And one of the most famous aspects of this that I remember is pets.com, which I think just had like this unbelievably high valuation for no apparent reason or something like that. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. I should back up a little here as well and say that when this stuff is happening with these investment bakers, Napster has, you know, they have, like uncle John has incorporated it for them already. So Napster does exist as a business. It is slowly building users. It goes online in May of 1999. In June, Sean, phonetic Sean gives it to 30 of his friends and says, you know,

here's this program we've developed within, you know, like a short amount of time it has something like 15,000 users because those 30 people, you know, they give it to 30,000 to 30 other people and it sort of grows and grows. And is it free at this time? It's free. It's in beta. Like it's a beta program that they've developed and given away for free. It proliferates through universities, which were so many of these things

built on universities, especially early stage internet, because you don't have to worry about tying up your phone line at home. And so if I'm in a university and Napster has come to my campus is my experience, like I boot up my compact Presario and I open up Napster and I'm then able to be like, Oh, Jeff on the floor above me has. Bungle in the jungle. I want that. And then I can download it.

I mean, look, everybody has bungle. And colleagues, they do. Yeah. So you download Napster, you install it on your Windows PC. You, you mark the directory where all your music is going to be that you're willing to share with anybody. And then you boot it up, you log into the internet through your, at this point, you want to have like a 56.6 K bod modem, which again, I am describing rocks,

but you were like, you would spend the money on a nice modem and to dial into the internet, otherwise it was too slow. And it would take upwards of a day to download music, which is bananas. I cannot believe I spent my time this way. But when I was in eighth grade, I had Kaza, another music downloading service. And we had dial up internet at the time. And I once spent, I think something like seven months downloading dead poet society.

There was a dedicated phone line for the computer room. And every day I would come home from school and log on to read my fanfiction or whatever and just like get a little bit more dead poet society. Just a, just a, just a bit more. Just move that needle. Right. And I guess it's important to say that also streaming as a concept does not exist yet.

Like I don't think I heard the word streaming until 2006. Oh, no. Just to like belabor this that what streaming is, is that you like download a bit at a time and you watch as you go and you kind of, the connection has to just kind of like keep building railroad out in front of you, like in Wallace and Gromit and in the era of downloading material and then listening to it or watching it. You just had to get the whole file done because like the internet would not

keep up with you. No, I mean, I'm glad you went Wallace and Gromit because I was thinking Wiley Coyote chasing the road runner like you are always like, you are always just like with streaming, the road runner is just always that much further ahead. Totally. The internet and streaming and media and culture all exist around us in a way now where we can be so passive to it because we don't have to be active participants in obtaining it.

And at the time you really had to like, you had to like type in, you would type into the song like, I'm looking for, you know, baby got back or whatever you were looking for. And you would have to like look for other people that have that. And it would say like, yes, so-and-so on Napster has this song, you know, is peer-to-peer file sharing, which was kind of unheard of. Like you opened up your computer, a directory on your computer to somebody else to come and sift through.

And you could see everything they had and you could be like, well, I was looking for this, but I'm going to look through everything that they're sharing. And I'm going to build my library based on what these other people have. I mean, it occurs to me that this is really an early social network. It very much is. And in fact, it's kind of the impetus behind when Sean Fanning is envisioning what he wants Napster to be. He's sort of in his head.

He's drawing this idea of like, I want it to be like an IRC chat room. And I want it to be components of all of the parts of the internet that he uses, that he enjoys and sort of like condensed down to this really bite sized thing. And it is kind of the first social network in a way. You're not chatting with people, but you are connecting to them and that is unheard of on a large scale. People didn't think of computers in that way still at the time. We were coming on board with that idea, but it wasn't widespread that you

used your computer to communicate with other computers and other people. Like this idea of using them as a tool for connectivity and community is what made computers into something that everybody actually needed. You know, and then there's like technology becomes necessary in practically every workplace in terms of navigating infrastructure in your daily life. But I do feel like the computer becoming a social tool was the first big leap really. Absolutely.

I mean, because I can sort of put myself in the same shoe, right? Of like, I like this thing and I feel alone. I feel like I'm on an island appreciating or enjoying or loving this specific thing. But then all of a sudden you can go online and you can see, oh, there's 5,000, 6,000, 10,000 other people around the world that have this thing that I enjoy in their catalog and also I can access whatever I want. And I can search for whatever I want. And it is the first instance that we get of there is an entire world of other people

out there that are in fact just like you. Whereas before you might feel I lived in the Yukon and I knew nobody like me. And all of a sudden across the world, there's so many people like me. For me, so much of culture is what does this tell us about our world and how does this impact us and how are we impacting on it? And I think so much of this early internet as driven by Napster is opening the world to us and giving us a place to belong. Like I wanted to escape the Yukon and I couldn't physically, but I could through

the internet, I could through this sort of connectivity, right? And I think that is a thing that maybe goes unsung a lot in these sorts of conversations about the advent of technology. And I think it's so important. Totally, because I mean, that gets it why music is important to us to begin with, right, which is that we will go to such lengths to get our hands on a song or an album, you know, not just because we appreciate its aesthetics, but because of how it helps us feel and how it helps us to maybe imagine

how life could be or what our relationships could be. Yeah, it gives you a place to belong that you didn't know of before. It gives you another Sean to be. Oh, and also, just for people who have never had the pleasure, how does the music get onto the computer? Well, at the time, if you had a CD driver in your computer, you could put your CD in the computer, you could rip the MP3, like from your, from the CD, rather, to your computer, and then you stored your own music

catalog on your computer when you could take music from your, from the CD and put it onto your computer and store it there. And then all of a sudden you could share it with somebody else. Then it became this thing of like, oh, no, we've lost control. We've lost control of the copyright. And this is sort of how that worked. And as Napster started to build, you know, people are sharing their libraries with other people, they're doubling up their library,

then somebody else is borrowing from them, they're doubling their own. So it's, there's this exponential growth of a collective music library amongst all these people that are using this program. And as the internet grows too, you know, the people are able to just sort of take all these files and just add them to this, to their library on their computer and just sort of slowly build it over time. And so like the aggregate gets larger, basically, it's becoming a communal, like a single communal database, the more users we get.

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like a big record store that doesn't sell anything that we can all go to and pull from whenever we want. I just, I remember Napster first being in the news and it just like feeling magical, right? Because it was like, it's like the idea of like, you can press a button and get infinite cheeseburgers or something. Like at the time, like I remember hearing about it and being like, you mean I can just listen to whatever song I want? Like that is so humdrum now.

Like if I'm out for a walk with my dog and I'm like, oh, I want to hear this. Boy, genius song that everybody's talking about. I can pull it up on my phone and I can hear it instantly and that is, and it's so routine. But at the time it was like, oh, I can look up whatever music I've ever wanted to hear that I've never heard before and find it. That was incredible. It was magic.

Right. And like, and that there would be songs that had haunted you for years, you know, and that you had been trying to find for years and you finally got to hear them again. So they eventually get this Yosi Amram as their investor. He invests $250,000 for 1.25 million shares. And his proviso that he makes them is he wants to be the CEO. He wants to choose a three member board that he sits on.

And he wants the two Shauns to move to Silicon Valley, which they do. They rent an office space above a bank. It is very clear. And a lot of people have said this in a lot of the reading as I was, I came across a lot of people said the same thing, which is there's no real business plan because again, they're like 19 years old. They can't rent a car, but they have this company, right? Their business plan is basically we want this program to work.

That's the full extent of their business plan as they're like building this startup. Right. And like, do they have any idea about how they're going to monetize it at any point? Their idea was we want to build this program and we want to have, you know, X amount of users. I think they want to have like a million users. And they that was sort of the extent of their goal. It is such a unique, entantalizing idea that it just sort of takes off, right?

They could just build so quickly. They have, you know, tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands and then millions of users, like in the span of months. And in fact, they incorporate in May, you know, they start giving it out in June, December of 1999. So like six months later is when the recording industry association of America files their first lawsuit on behalf of like the five major record labels saying that Napster is a, they call it, they say that Napster is a haven of piracy,

which is not untrue. Yeah, it makes it sound really cool, though. It does. Like there's so much of this is like, they just make them sound way cooler than their two 19 year old kids that don't own beds, like sleeping on floors. Like pirates do. Yeah. Pirates don't have beds. In short order, these two will become massively famous.

But like at the time, they're kind of still nobody's. Yeah, I think we just kind of adore like success that happens as fast as possible. And, you know, one of the Mark Zuckerberg mottos is something like move fast, break stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's that sounded really cool before you like, you know, before your technology helped foment a genocide also cause the rise of America's first openly white supremacist president in at least a while, right? It's like, cause when you say move fast, break stuff in the early days, it's like,

yeah, embrace mistakes, Brene Brown, you know, it's not like taking into account like how much responsibility you could end up with and how like wildly unprepared you could be for it. In January, Napster is so popular in university campuses that some have had to block it entirely because it is clogging there. Like there are networks of computers because so many people are using it. Like major universities across the country are like, okay, we need to do something about this because our network is down because so many kids are using

Napster all the time. I mean, they're commanding respect to the point where an April of 2000, April 13th of the year 2000 is when Metallica enters the picture. This is when Metallica files their lawsuit against Napster. Enter Sandman, if you will. Truly enter Sandman. So here's the, here's kind of the baffling thing about the situation. So the reason why Metallica is aware of Napster at all is they have a song coming

out on the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack. Oh my God. A movie I saw in theaters and thought was pretty great. So Metallica hears this, a demo version of this song that is slated to be on the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack. They hear it on the radio. Not only has this not been released, this isn't the finished version of that song. That is wild that that happened.

It is truly bananas. And they, they traced it back to, it had made its way to Napster. How that happened, nobody's willing to say my guess is that somebody that worked for the record label that was putting out the Mission Impossible 2 soundtrack got the demo and leaked it to somebody. And it just warmed its way through a system and eventually ended up with somebody that knew somebody to radio station and gave it to them and said, head, here's a demo of Metallica song, Metallica, who's like in a low period, you know, they

haven't put out a record in a couple of years. They're not the Titans that they were. And so they're not like the most relevant piece of culture in the year 2000. And so this is a big deal. They take them to court. This is like, I would assume an unprecedented situation, really. Nobody has yet really had to deal with this. And in fact, a lot of this really reflects poorly on Metallica in a lot of ways.

And a lot of people hold a lot of animosity towards them. But like they are, like you said, nobody has had to deal with this situation before. And they're responding to it reflexively, obviously, but like they're doing what they can to sort of try to stem what they see as like a fire that could easily rage out of control. Lars Ulrich says, we take our craft, whether it be the music, the lyrics or the photos and artwork very seriously as do most artists. It is therefore sickening to know that our art is being traded like a commodity

rather than the art that it is. Which, you know, like in 2023, as we're talking about streaming and royalties and all this stuff, we are again, having this conversation of like, is art a commodity or is it art and what is the valuation of art? And it is interesting that we're still kind of having this fight. That's the eternal story, really, right? Because I think also people who are in charge of art at a business level, you know, if you look at how record labels function and how movie studios function,

publishing houses, et cetera, you always see this trend of like the people who make the money trying to kind of create the thinnest margins possible and therefore burning out talent by doing that. Totally. There's a relatively short list of artists at first that are sort of willing to put their name forward as of not being happy with what is going on with Napster, like Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Scott Stapp from Creed. You know, all the heavy hitters at the time are very much like, we do not like this.

All the alpha males. It is extremely alpha male. In May of 2000, this is the thing I think that will forever mark Lars Alrick in people's eyes. They tracked down a list. They hired like a consulting firm to scan through Napster and its users and who's sharing one. And they get a list of three hundred and thirty five thousand people that are

sharing Metallica songs. They print those names out and deliver them to the Napster offices and say, these are all the people that are sharing our like copyrighted work. They need to be banned from your service. Wow. Not cool, Lars. They go to dad because mom said no. What do you remember when this lawsuit was happening?

Like, do you do you have a memory of like hearing about Lars Alrick specifically who became such a caricature of himself at this time? I do. Yeah. I remember feeling at the time that the sort of media narrative was that the guy from Metallica was on this like vendetta against this company. And even to me, you know, as a kid with no skin in the game at all, I was like, well, that seems seems a little bit disproportionate, you know,

you know, because I think he's just they're just reacting so quickly to the situation that they're not really fully thinking it through. And they're just like, well, this is bad. We need to shut it down. I think there's also something kind of funny about Metallica doing it, right? Where if it was if they were being sued by Ricky Martin's management, you'd be like, well, yeah, that makes sense. But the idea of I think you kind of lose countercultural cred when you do

that kind of thing. Yeah, because it does seem like you've gone to the cops, right? And like, and that is just a thing you don't do. Totally. Depending on who the artist is that's leading the fight, it changes the public perception of it. Like, you know, when Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster in 1993, people didn't care about it nearly as much.

But when Taylor Swift fights them in 2023, that's a different story. All of a sudden people are invested in this fight. And also people have been forced to use Ticketmaster for 30 years. So yeah, and we've been beaten down by the system. So in May, like a month after Metallica sort of figures out what's going on in May, Napster blocks the password of 300,000 users that are sharing Metallica songs, like that's how many people are using the service. And again, like a pretty short order.

This thing's been alive for a year at this point. And by the summer of the year 2000, Napster is sharing 14,000 songs a minute. Wow. This is kind of when the CD burner picks up too. Oh my God, I loved making a mixed CD. I would also, I specifically remember like, burning CDs of Broadway soundtracks for my friends in high school. And then it was also really fun because you got to like draw with Sharpie on

top and like, you know, draw like the wicked soundtrack and beautiful cursive or something. It really sort of allowed you to be this IRL influencer in this very analog way of like, I've made a, I've made my own custom mix. It's on this CD. Here you go. Yeah. And I mean, I, I understand why the record companies would be running

scared from this because what they were doing at the time was like really based on having a complete monopoly that they believed would never end. Yeah. And it's important to note too, that like for all the like bluster of Metallica and Scott Stop from Creed being against this, there was people like Chuck D wrote a op-ed in the New York Times that was like pro. He was like, Napster is a good, this is a net positive. This is the new radio.

This is, and eventually like Alanis Morcette will testifies in Congress and say like, this drives ticket sales. Napster has like value in the world. We need to keep this, but at the time people aren't really sure and people, and artists especially are very wary. It's that idea of like biting the hand that feeds, right? If they say one thing or the other, they could potentially ruin their entire career. Right.

So it's like you also have this imperative to come out swinging in defense of the record companies who you hate and who are oppressing you. Yeah, this is sort of, we also enter into a period of a lot of months that use the word appellate court and injunction and all of these things like, and you could tell they're very much scrambling. So they're trying to figure out like they're not allowed to engage in or facilitate others in copying, downloading, uploading, transmitting or distributing copyrighted musical compositions.

This will come up to bite Sean Parker in the ass in short order. An interesting thing that happens as well in the year 2000, there's a poll in university campuses where they say, would you pay for an app store? And all of these university students say, yeah, we'd pay like $15 a month for this, to use this as a paid service, which is more than Spotify is now. Totally. Cause like, I mean, I feel like at the time it was just, and also like $15 was worth a lot more back then, but it was like so clearly so much better of a deal

than whatever you could get just by, by buying CDs and stuff. I wonder what the alternative universe would be where if we attached a value to this immediately and said, music is available on the internet. It costs this much money. This is where the money goes. If we would feel differently about it, but we devalued it to zero and then slowly over time built it into a subscription service. But like you started at zero, it was always free.

So now why don't you just go the free route as opposed to saying like, look, we're going to put music on the internet. It's going to cost you money to get it. We might have had a totally different world wherein we attached a dollar figure to these people's art or, or however you want to look at it. Yeah. It's a little bit of internet chaos theory. Lars Ulrich testifies in Congress.

Like that was a big thing. You know, there's arguments back and forth, lawyers from Metallica and Dr. Drace and letters to Harvard and Columbia and asked them to like restrict Napster and they're just like, we are not doing that. I'm sorry, but no, this is what I think turns public opinion against Metallica, especially they really tore the brunt of it. It was like they are gunning so hard on control and they are like very much trying to say like what people can do with the internet and when and people

really responded negatively to that. This really dogged Metallica for a long time. Sean Fanning shows up to the MTV music video awards in a Metallica shirt and he walks on stage. He's like co-presenting with Carson Daly. So these guys are also like celebrities based on all this. Are they like, are there faces out there? Yeah, like in October of 2000, Sean Fanning is on the cover of Time Magazine.

Oh, like, and that's like, remember when Time Magazine was big? Yes. If you can remember such an age. I can, I can. It's so funny to think about how Steve Jobs became iconic in a way that I think there isn't really room for anymore because everyone in that field, to some extent, is kind of doing Steve Jobs, you know, and there's so many kind of freshman founders every year who are trying to

to work in that mold. Yeah, like that archetype is now really absorbed into our culture in a way that we often don't even notice anymore. Did you use Napster or were you, did you sort of come on to the file sharing sort of in the post Napster? Cause a limelayer era? Yes, I did not use Napster because I didn't understand how to get it. And also my mom specifically was worried about the FBI coming for me.

So she told me I couldn't use it. So I used Kaza starting in I think 2002, like immediately post Napster. And then I think Limewire after that in high school. And just, and I feel like these were probably pretty similar. I mean, this was, this was the thing I was really curious about your experience with because like there was that fear of like, oh, if you download a song, you wouldn't download a car. You know, like if you downloaded, you wouldn't download a car.

Yeah, it's, I guess I would speak for yourself. But like that fear of, oh, if you do it, the FBI is going to raid your house. Totally. They were doing pretty well, I think, with like the whole shock and awe thing of like, be careful, you could be the one it's prohibition. I mean, is there a sense at this point that Napster is like under attack and, you know, could disappear? Yeah, it's very beleaguered at this point.

You know, like in September, you know, he shows up to the MTV Music Awards in the Metallica T-shirt and Carson Daly has an awkward moment with him on stage where he's, he makes a joke. Sean Fanny makes a joke on stage at the MTV Music Video Awards. And Carson Daly immediately is like, oh, I think we actually need to move on with the show, like doesn't give him an inch because it's so like it is such a volatile conversation. Carson Daly knows what side his bread is buttered on.

Yeah, it is definitely the music of that piece of bread. They cut to like Lars Albrecht in the audience and he's pretending to sleep. And then he like, he presents an award to Blink one, eight or two later and gets resoundly booed on stage. Like people hate Lars. It is such a big thing, right? This like Napster is this like beleaguered underdog and the big, bad music industry is coming for them.

Yeah. And Metallica is like the tool in the music industry's hand. Ironically, why isn't it tool? Why isn't it, you know, it's funny, like Dr. Dre is also filing lawsuits all the same time as well. But Metallica is really the face of it when he's when Sean Fanny's on the cover of time, you know, in the profile, when you read it up on it is very much like he's this scrappy young kid that came from nowhere and made this thing.

But it's all in danger of being taken away at any minute. Like it is such a, I don't know, it feels almost hero's journey in a way, right? Like you could draw that into a piece of fiction so easily. Oh yeah. I mean, we love David and Goliath story so much that we'll bend over backwards. To find instances of them where they can't possibly exist. Like I think America kind of still likes to see itself as this like scrappy little startup country.

And it's like, no, I think we're past that. But yeah, I mean, it's funny too, because it feels like in this dynamic Metallica is like standing for the entire music industry and they're the Goliath or like it's representative. But really it's like, you know, I also can imagine how from their perspective they're like, God damn it, we're fucked if this continues. We're freaking out. Well, and also like you can kind of look at it through a modern lens and be like,

yeah, I understand that you wanted to get paid for your art. Right. Which is like something that artists have been attempting to do for all of time with very middling success. Yeah. And I mean, with the advent of the internet, all of these companies, like the music industry part of it is like, it's almost like the music industry feels foolish that they never considered they would have to monetize the internet.

Totally. Yeah. And like, and they appear not to have. And this is also the time when like a lot of businesses are kind of getting caught with their pants down by the internet, right? Because they never thought it would be a thing until suddenly it was. And this happens in various ways. This continues to happen.

I think like we can see it now most with the realization that has become so widespread recently, I think that like you kind of need to produce some kind of short form video content to survive as like a business or an entity online, which like two years ago, even I think we were still like tick dark is for teenagers. And now it's just like you can't survive without it practically. Regardless of how many times the like ever growing internet bites us, we never learned that it has teeth.

And like, we are always so quick to like, to see things as they're happening for what they are, and then always have to be reactive to it. Yeah. And we could have learned so much from Napster. So at this point, you know, like they aren't beleaguered. They are like, there's lawsuits, there's injunctions, there's all these things. In November of 2000, Sean Parker, there's an email that leaks where he says that he's aware that people are sharing pirated music, which bites them because

there was a thing they were claiming wasn't happening. So he leaves the company. So exit Sean Parker. One, so we're down to Sean. One Sean down, one to go. Napster eventually gets bought by a German company that represents one of the five heads of the five major record labels. So they joined forces and that's a big story.

But then immediately the German police come to them and say, they slap an injunction on them because they realized that people are sharing a lot of right wing, extreme right wing music through Napster. And they're saying the internet is spreading this, this right wing rhetoric. And we want to stem the tide. We did not learn. We did not. Well, why would we learn?

We hate learning. Learning's the worst. Learning gets us nowhere. And instead, why don't we just continue to hate the drummer from Mattel? And that is the theme of this show. Over the next year from this point, there is a lot of injunctions and court decisions and injunctions and court decisions and Orrin Hatch, who comes out of the woodwork on Napster's side a little bit.

He has a Mormon Christian rock band that I was unaware of until. Oh my God. Senator Orrin Hatch, the Mormon rock star. Yeah. And he's excited because he's like, people are sharing my music on Napster. People at Napster are sharing my Mormon music. Orrin! He's a folk hero.

He's a hero of the people. The defender of Napster. Yeah. It all sort of devolves into like e-music and the producers are the Grammys soon Napster in March of 2001. They get supplied with a bunch of songs that need to be removed from the recording industry. And there's all these like burdens placed on them and barriers.

And they're down to Sean. And eventually in 2002 is when Napster eventually files for bankruptcy. And because they've just, they're never able to get a stranglehold. Like they're constantly trying to say like, oh, we're going to move to a subscription service, but they can never build because they're constantly fighting all these lawsuits. But it was never about artists. It was always about the music industry, not being able to make money off CDs.

Yeah. And it's, it's like to, to an extent artists are just irrelevant to this whole conversation because it's really about like, how is the music industry going to keep making money and not paying the people who make music hardly any of it. Yeah. And like, you know, it is such an easy story to look back on and being like, it is the Napster versus Metallica story. But there was a lot of artists that weighed in good or bad, but it's really

sort of boiled down to this thing because you can put a figurehead out there. You can put Lars Albrecht out there as the foil for the music industry at large. Even though it very much was like the music industry wanting to say, hey, look, we want to continue to make X amount of money off the sale of $20 CDs. And in fact, the rise of Napster and then, you know, your line wires, your casals, all these things, we start to see CDs store start to close. Like, you know, Tower Records starts to struggle. All these, all these record stores start to struggle because CD sales are way down.

Right. So is it like, you know, Napster is forced to shut down, but it's like, they're just one wave in the ocean of what this technology is now capable of and what it's going to do to these industries. They are kind of the canary in a coal mine, I guess, for lack of a better, a lack of a better metaphor. They are, they are the opening wave. They are the man of war.

They are just. It all goes back to Man-O-War. It all goes back to Man-O-War. And then how do things end for Fanetic Sean? Fanetic Sean kind of gets out when they file for bankruptcy. He, you know, makes some money. He goes on to work in a bunch of other industries. He gets into the video game industry for a bit.

He gets into a bunch of other startups in the 2010s, like 2012, him and Sean Parker come back together and create like a video group chat platform that has like a star studded, like, uh, what's his name from that 70s show? Topher Grace. Not Topher Grace. I was hoping it would be Topher Grace. The, the other one, the Steve Jobs one, Ashton Kutcher. Yeah.

Ashton Kutcher. He's like one of the people that is like selling this video chat service. They have that kind of flops and Sean Parker gets out and gets into other industries, right? Facebook sort of comes around shortly after and he sees it for what it is and gets on board. He's the president of Facebook. He invests like $50 million in Spotify.

When Spotify is starting to build, you know, he sort of moves himself into different arenas. Sean Fanning kind of disappears into the background for the most part. We kind of never hear from him ever again after this. And it seems like Sean Parker like ended up very rich. I presume from Facebook and that Fanetic Sean is perhaps more of a normal person, or is he also doing great, but quietly. He's doing fine, but quietly.

Like he definitely is not hurting for money. You know, like he worked for like Electronic Arts, doing some video game platform stuff when video games were becoming more online, like when World of Warcraft is starting to build. And I think he got like a multi-billion, million dollar buyout when his company got sort of folded and all these things. Like they make out okay, but Napster, you know, they fold and then get Napster changes hands, you know, it's bought by Rhapsody and then it's bought by Best Buy

and then it's bought by all these people. Like Napster still exists. You can go to Napster.com right now and download Napster. Every time I look at it, I'm like, I don't, I don't understand you. Apparently it like does okay. You know, it makes money. It makes like $8 million a year, which is pretty good. That's more money than I make.

There you go. Doing okay. Well, I'm getting Napster. The thing that Napster really does more than anything is it forces the record industry to realize that they need to figure out how to monetize music online. And unfortunately they're behind. Steve Jobs creates the iTunes store in 2003 and kind of forces their hand and says, this is going to be the terms of our deal.

This is how much we're going to sell albums for on the internet. This is how much money you're going to make and you're going to take the deal. And they kind of don't want to do it, but they've already been through this fight with Napster and they can't fight Steve Jobs. And the iTunes store comes online. The iPod gets created and digital music as we know it fundamentally starts to change. You know, because if you're Steve Jobs, you actually have been to the rodeo a few times before and you know how to strong arm record labels.

Yeah. You know, I always wonder what would have happened if when they started Napster, if they had had a business plan at all. But yeah, it does occur to me that like, if you're going to start a business that you hope to be valued at like a billion dollars someday, you might take a course. Just one. I don't know. It's a thought.

Take a night class. Take a night class. Yeah, I feel like these are kind of the like good fellows of the world that that we are forced to live in as sort of millennials who understand that our ability to like get a ride home from the bar or buy a concert ticket or listen to a song is kind of based on the dick swinging activities of a lot of powerful people, primarily men. But that also a lot of them are just like dropouts with a big idea and that they're kind of like that they're creating the world that we live in.

So aside from all the other reasons that these stories might be attractive, we kind of have to try and understand them because they're in charge to an extent. Yeah, I mean, like we kind of don't have any choice, but but sort of adapt because they are in charge and they aren't dictating the way that everything is going to change. I mean, I think a big thing of it is that it took the niche idea of the internet and made it accessible. Like the thing that worked for Napster was it was easy to use and that ease of use really draws you into a world.

Right. Like the reason why Twitter became popular is because Twitter is easy to use. Yeah. And then, you know, these things, they're not doing something that has never been done before necessarily, but they're doing it in a way that is user friendly and that that's going to be the idea that that beats all the others. It has such an interesting legacy for such a short lived thing just because it was like sort of this Wild West era of the internet where nobody knew what it was and no one really

was aware of its full potential because we hadn't even really started to realize it. And they pushed for that to happen before anybody really pushed for it to happen on a large scale. I feel like this is a story about like what the internet can be and what it is often forced to be, like not because of its innate qualities, but because of who gets to control, you know, who makes money off of it and when. I mean, who could have imagined in, you know, when we're downloading Napster or Kaza or whatever we're using and who could have imagined that this system that we're using would at

some point in our lives never turn off. Yeah. No, I mean, I wouldn't. And I think that it seemed so far away that it was like the kind of dream where it was like, well, once the internet is so different than like will be different too. And I feel like this is what futurism is about partly is this dream of the perfect ability of humankind, which is always going to be, I think, elusive and disappointing. I think the thing about humans is that, like, we're always going to be this organism we are, which is like this very illogical, easily manipulated, like think that we are super

intelligent in areas where we're like demonstrably not, and we just have whatever we do, we just have to work with that and can't bank on. Yeah, I don't know, do you get that vibe? Do you feel the sense that like when we fantasize about future technology, we're really fantasizing about like future humans and how will somehow be different? Yeah, I mean, I think about that a lot lately, because I think we are, especially because right now we are kind of on the verge of the internet trying to change again. I want to imagine that there is some future version of us that is somehow different or

better or more at peace with not being perfect. But because I think we are always kind of chasing this perfect thing, right? And the more connected we are to each other, as I think it is a great tool, I think it is great that we can be so connected and we can see ourselves reflected in other people. But I also think it has us chasing a version of perfect that just will never exist. Well, and now, in a sense, we're all Metallica because like so many more people than we ever imagined have to make a living somehow online. If not directly, then like you have to promote your small business.

You have to have, you know, Instagram and TikTok. You have to, if nothing else, use the internet for like basic functionality and, you know, bookkeeping and communication and stuff. I think the only growing industry that I can see in the US really is content creator. And that's what freaks me out the most is that like because of the accident of when you and I were born, like we were actually able to, like as a default, hang on to privacy until adulthood, I feel like that's become the thing that is a real rarity to be able to know what it's like to be a truly private citizen before you really have the ability to decide as an

adult whether or not to sacrifice that. Yeah, we will have eroded the very idea of privacy, right? Like there will come future generations that don't even expect it. They just assume that nobody, that nothing is sacred and no one is private. Yeah. And the future, I'm sure someone has made this joke. It's an obvious one. Maybe I did it before.

I don't know. But in the future, everyone's going to have 15 minutes of privacy and we'll be lucky to get them. I like connect that to the fact of like Metallica are weirdly the villains in the story. And yet clearly the record companies themselves should be. And I think it's a case of just like it's hard to picture something that large and diffuse and sort of seemingly inevitably a part of the way we live. Because at the time it was like, how else are we going to get music? It's unimaginable to find a way to circumvent that.

I guess the shocking thing is that we actually did, but that artists still aren't getting paid. So we should do something about that. Because it was easier to hate on Lars Ulrich than it was to consider the fact that, you know, the music industry is a largely predatory industry that doesn't really pay or compensate artists fairly. And is, in fact, a very much part of a capitalist machine that is only serves to ensure that the industry survives. Not the people like we didn't consider artists to be workers at the time. And now we are in this conversation with like a Spotify or whatever, where we say, well, we want these workers, we want the musicians to make money off of their art.

But how do we do that? Because we have like devalued their work to such a degree that, you know, they are getting paid pennies on the dollar for every piece of their work that makes it out into the world. NicoStratus, where are you on the good old internet? I am. So funny to wrap this conversation about like digital privacy and content creation to be like, here's all the places you can find my content creation. Seriously. Yeah. I am at NicoStratus on Twitter and Instagram.

I have us a newsletter, NicoStratus.substack.com. That's where you find me. And it's a great newsletter. I hate email and I like your newsletter. Well, thank you. That's very kind. I despise email, but newsletters are somehow the only good part of it. And that was our episode.

Thank you so much to NicoStratus for being our guest and trying the great stuff. It's delicious. Don't believe me? Ask the dishes. Thank you so much, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing the show and making me sound like all of my sentences have a beginning and an ending. Don't forget, we're having a Valentine's Day livestream, moment.co slash you're wrong about 5 p.m. Pacific on Valentine's Day, 8 p.m. Eastern, all the other time zones, exactly where you'd expect them to be based on that. You can watch it for a week after it's on. Watch it alone.

Watch it with your polycule. Watch it with your sweetie in a hot tub in the Poconos that's shaped like a champagne glass. I don't care. Just be there or not. I'm not your boss, but if you're there, it'll be fun to spend Valentine's Day together. Thank you so much for listening. See you next time.