The SxSW Interactive Story

the history of south By Southwest or south By. I guess if you're one of the cool kid I'm not one of the cool kids. I say south By Southwest every single time. It's often designated as s X s W. The X is and LORI case and everything else is capitalized. Um yeah, I just called it south By Southwest because again,

not cool. This isn't news to you, you know it, And I thought I would chat about how it really got started, especially since it all started off as a music festival where a bunch of bands came together to play in various Austin venues to crowd So how the heck did tech get involved in that? And how did it become such a big event? For tech that arguably you could say tech has taken over south By. Look I did it well. The story actually begins in the nineteen sixties if we want to look at what formed

south By Southwest. South By Southwest would not have its first actual event until the late eighties, But in the nineteen sixties, Austin, Texas was really a standout in its state. It wasn't like other parts of Texas. So Texas has a reputation for conservative politics and also having a very fierce independent streak that that's part of the Texas identity, and Austin is a little bit different because for a

few reasons. One is that had a very large public university still does, a very good university, the University of Texas, and the culture at the University of Texas was far more liberal than what you found in most of the state and around. The university grew up this kind of liberal community. It was a community filled with artists and artisans and and craftspeople and all sorts and uh, lots and lots and lots of music. So this is all

starting to come together. In the nineteen sixties, Austin was definitely not a conservative city, even though it's the capital of Texas, and the politics going on in the Capitol building might have been very, very conservative, but Austin as

a city just wasn't. Meanwhile, at the same time, you had these small businesses that were establishing them selves in the city, many of them surviving because of the proximity to this university, and they started to get really, you know established in bigger, bigger businesses in the tech field, in particular like IBM and you know, Texas Instruments and a m D. They started to set up facilities in Texas, and part of the reason for that was that they

wanted to lure away students who had just graduated out of the University of Texas to come in and be part of the workforce, to get young talented people to join and to therefore continue to stay in front of competitors. So this area of Texas became very important within the

tech sector. Obviously, we think of Silicon Valley here in the United States, which is in California, as being really important in tech, and it is a lot of incredibly influential companies grew out of Silicon Valley, but Texas was also and still is very very important in the tech sector. So this was part and parcel with the the evolution of Austin as a community. You had a very tech savvy,

pretty liberal city that was expanding in the sixties and seventies. Uh, the vibe of the city itself was kind of young and adventurous and experimental like this again very experimental era, the sixties and seventies. In fact, later on, much much later, actually, the motto keep Austin Weird would emerge. That was effectively coined in around two thousand, so it would come much later.

But that concept of keeping Austin weird, it was kind of paying homage to the Austin of the sixties and seventies that became this this big city of the arts and of music, and also of drinking. So in nineteen seventy three, Texas changed the state laws to allow eighteen year olds to drink legally. Here in the United States, the legal drinking ages twenty one, but in nineteen seventy three Texas lowered it to eighteen. Now it's a college town. You've got all these young people who are perhaps away

from home for the first time in their lives. Obviously drinking would become a big part of the experience of going to the University of Texas and UM you had a lot of bars that would rise up around this time, especially around campus. So to this day, if you go to Austin, Texas and you walk down, I want to say, it's sixth Street. It's been a long time since I've

been there. But it's just like lines of bars, bar after bar, with occasional like shops and restaurants thrown into but a lot of bars, and in order to kind of establish themselves stand out from their competition, a lot of these bars would end up also having a space for musicians to play and they would have live music. And so Austin, Texas became known as this live music capital where you could go to that that town and on any given night you could go to one of

a dozen bars and see a different band playing. So my music scene became a really big deal in Austin. However, by the time you get up to the nineteen eighties, things were starting to change. There were a lot of snags that were slowing down Austin's growth and in fact impeding it in several ways. So, for one thing, there was a banking crisis that ended up hitting the economy

in general, but Austin's economy in particular, and that really hurt. Uh. Texas also lost out on that drinking age thing because during the Reagan administration there was a federal law pass that set the national drinking age to twenty one, so then you don't have the eighteen year olds allowed to go into bars and drink anymore, which obviously meant that there was a big hit to the bar scene around the University of Texas, and this really had a pretty

big impact on Austin's local economy. But then a group of folks came up with one way to potentially help Austin regain some of its its footing and bring more attention to the city itself. So, like I said, the city had already established that it was a very active and important music scene, but for the most part, the only people who knew about it were the people who

lived in Austin. So you had like the college students and the locals the townies who knew about the music scene, but anywhere outside of Austin it just wasn't looked at

as a music city. So the thought was, maybe we could throw a music festival and attract more people to the city and and uh, some movers and shakers in the Austin scene would start meeting at the Austin Chronicle, the newspaper in the city, and the meetings were really kind of like top secret because they were really kind of putting their heads together on what would be the best way to do this that could potentially get us some more attention. Among the brainstormers, there was a guy

named Louis J. Myers. He was a manager for various musicians and artists, so he came in there from that business perspective. You also had Louis Black, not the comedian, but rather an editor for the Austin Chronicle. You had Roland Swinson, who would go on to become CEO of south By Southwest and then later on the executive chairman, and he had a few others as well. And so they would meet and start brainstorming about this idea for

a music festival. And they decided that if they were going to have a music festival, they wanted to make sure that they named it in such a way that it represented the region and did not take it Austin centric. Even though the festival was going to take place in Austin.

They didn't want to call it like the Austin Music Festival because they were worried that that wouldn't attract people from out of town, it wouldn't accomplish the goals they had set out, which was to kind of raise the profile of Austin and at least the regional, if not nation estimation. Right. So, after much debate, they decided they

would call this new music festival south By Southwest. They obviously took inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock's film north By Northwest, but it made sense like they would feature a lot of musicians, a lot of musical acts that grew out of the south and now the Southwestern areas UH and in fact, a lot of the bands that have played there over the years are ones that I saw in little local establishments here when they were just starting out. So they announced this intention to have a music fest

in October nine six. The actual event would take place the following March March of nine and according to all the histories I can see, although it blows my mind if this is really true, it really is strange, but all the histories I saw said that when they were putting this together, the founders thought that maybe they would attract around a hundred fifty people to come to this

music festival. Now, the reason why I find that hard to believe is that this music festival also had one seventy seven groups and artists performing at fifteen different venues across the city. So, in other words, I find it hard to believe that they were putting together an event where the musicians would out number the people attending the festival.

Not to be fair, I have also been in theatrical productions that ended up that way where the cast of the show I was in out number or the audience that attended on a given night, which I always found kind of sadly comforting because I thought, yeah, well, even if the show does go really bad, we have the advantage in numbers, we could probably take them. That actually did happen to me a few times with a staged production of A Clockwork Orange. Um, in case you're curious, Yes,

I was in the stage production of a Clockwork Orange. No, you cannot see the pictures because I was in leather chaps and a mess shirt. And I played victims too through seventeen. That was essentially the characters I played. Anyway, A hundred fifty people did not show up that first south By Southwest. Instead, it was seven hundred people around there, so wildly successful considering what the organizers were first envisioning.

I still think that estimated hundred fifty attendees was incredibly pessimistic. It's hard for me to believe that, but seven hundred not bad. Still pretty modest really when you think about music festivals. I mean a lot of the music festivals here in Atlanta, especially the big outdoor ones, can bring more, well more than ten thousand people for a single performance. Now, I took a look at some of the acts that

played in nineteen seven. The only one that jumped out at me that I recognized right away was the Reverend Horton Heat because I saw his band play live when I was in college in Athens, Georgia. So I've seen the Reverend Horton Heat live, which was a great show. By the way, it's nice, small venue, it was high energy. But he was the only act that I recognized in

a in a short list. I didn't see the full seven breakdown though, So this event was big enough to gain enough success in and convince the organizers that this was a good idea and they should make it a yearly thing. They also even had a keynote speakers even at that first event. It's it's weird to think about because most music festivals don't have a keynote speaker, but

south By Southwest did right from the very beginning. Their keynote for nine seven was Huey mo that's m. E. A u X. And he was a record producer, so he was kind of there to talk about sort of the business side of things. That's another thing is that south By Southwest has always had a little bit of

like a professional conference vibe to it as well. So you've got like the music festival stuff and all the performances, but you also have the various panels and conversations and interviews that are meant to increase awareness and understanding of business elements and ways to have to go about monetizing or leveraging your creativity in ways that are practical and productive. Okay,

so that's setting the very basics there. Over the following years they had a lot of other mus schol artists that would include folks like Billy Ray Cyrus and his achy bricky Heart Mojo Nixon, who tells you that Elvis is everywhere. Jen Blossoms, the del Lords, I love them, Bighead Todd and the Monsters, the Chicks formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, Driving and Crying from my own hometown. Hometown Boys represent Bear Naked Ladies, Bella Fleck and the

Fleck Tones, Southern Culture on the Skids. Love that band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. They're the band that actually created the theme song to the Kids in the Hall. If you ever watch that show, Cracker, Lisa Lobe Ever, Clear, Meat Puppets, tons and tons and tons of bands. This is just up into the early nineties because until the mid nineties, south By Southwest was just a music festival. But all that would change in and I'll explain more

at we come back from this break. Okay, before the break, I mentioned that south By Southwest was this growing music festival was getting really big over the years. By they had more than four hundred sixty musical acts across the various venues around Austin participating in this festival. So remember it's like a hundred seventy seven for the first year, four hundred sixty by um, not even a full decade

into the festival yet, and it was really neat. You know, for one price, you could get admission to all the shows that you could dream of seeing based upon their schedules and your ability to get around town. But yeah, you could by this one admission and go see as many bands as you want throughout the festival. Well, in the festival expanded beyond just adding more musical acts. This was also the year that the festival grew to include

films and multi media content. Now, remember this is so the World Wide Web is really just a couple of years old at this point, hardly anyone knows about it, and and very few people in the mainstream, very few households actually have Internet connectivity. That just wasn't a normal thing. Yet. You had people in college who were aware that the Internet was a thing, and that the Web was a thing.

You had people in business and in the military and government organizations who were aware of it, but your average person just wasn't. So to go this early in and add the multimedia component was it was interesting. It also does not surprise me that most of that focus wasn't on the connectivity side of things, because that just hadn't

really taken hold in people's imaginations. Yet. It was more in things like programming and video game stuff that lived on a computer but did not connect to an internet. The keynote speaker for the interactive side of things was Richard Garriott. Richard Garriott creates video games. He's probably best known for creating the Ultima series of computer games. If you're not familiar with Ultima whole, that was a really, really influential series of fantasy computer role playing games. It

introduced things like morality into computer role playing games. Earlier, it was essentially kind of an amoral hack and slash kind of approach to to game design, but starting with Ultimate four, Richard Garriott really started to add in, no, you have to make the right kinds of choices in order to progress in the game. Interesting approach, very innovative at the time. Garritt himself is also known as Lord British. That's the name of his fictional alter ego within the

Ultimate series. He's the mostly evolent ruler of Britannia, and garyat has got a really fascinating background. He's the son of scientists, one of whom was an astronaut who actually spent a couple of months aboard the sky Lab space station in the seventies and also was in Space Lab in the eighties, and yeah he's he himself was extremely successful in the nineties as a video game creator and

a business owner. Famously, Richard Garytt himself would go up to space and visit the International Space Station as a private citizen, one of the few people, like one of seven I think whoever, were able to do that in the era before private space industry. This was back when you had to work with either NASA or Russia in order to have a chance of going up there. And yeah, he did it anyway, just as a point of reference.

The music keynote speaker that year was Johnny Cash, So talk about an influential our is So you had Richard Garriott delivering a keynote for the multi media side and Johnny Cash doing the same for the music side. So by the time you get up to nine, south By Southwest was now a music and media conference for real zas and it included film as well, so people would come and talk about film, They do panels about film, and they would premiere films at south By Southwest or

sometimes screen do special screenings of films. And it was growing up enough so that the festival needed to spread out a little bit, so in nine Film and Media Conference would split over into a separate event and Richard Garriott would again deliver a keynote. In In nine, the multi media part of south By Southwest got a rebrand. This is when it became known as south By Southwest Interactive, which is what it's still called today. And there were

some really important guests that year. There was Thomas Dolby and Jared Lanier. So Thomas Dolby I think of Thomas Dolby as the musician behind She blinded me with science, but has done tons and tons of work in tech. And then Jared Lanier, He's the guy who coined the whole virtual reality concept. He didn't invent virtual reality, but he coined the idea, he coined the phrase, and is

a visionary in that field. No pun intended, but Jared Lanier did a lot of fundamental foundational work for virtual reality as well as other technology related stuff. And by this time folks were starting to really talk about the

power of the Internet. Like by, people were starting to really catch on and it was expanding beyond the little niche communities that had been aware of the Internet and been jazzed about it, but by you started to see excitement, right the idea of oh, could be a really big year for the Internet, and there were discussions about stuff like online communities, which wouldn't have happened a few years earlier, but now there was this recognition that an online community

could be a very powerful thing. Film was really hitting hard to by the late nineties. Who had Quentin Tarantino there, you had might judge there. Brendan Fraser was there during his first run as being a beloved actor, and I'm glad to see him getting a lot more attention and acknowledgement today. When you get up to Mark Cuban the entrepreneur would give a keynote. Philip Glass, the musician, the composer,

was also one of the interactive guests that year. Oddly enough, not just you know sometimes we see this too where there's a lot of crossover between the different tracks of program So having Philip Glass appeared to talk to the interactive crowd was interesting. Also, south By Southwest held a panel about streaming video technology. Now at the time, no one was really sure if streaming video was going to work. Right, Like at that point, if you had a video online.

It was more likely just a file sitting on a database and someone would have to go and download that video to their computer and then use a video playing program of some sort to access the video file and watch it, because there weren't a lot of options for streaming. But in nine they were actually talking about that at

south By Southwest. The reason I bring this up is because one of the important things to remember is that while south By can be a hype machine, it can be kind of like people all blow and smoke up each other's rear ends for seven to nine days, it can also be a genuine place for real discussion about stuff that's important, that is unfolding, that's at it's very you know, earliest stages, so we don't really know where

it's going to go. And in ninety nine, no one was predicting that YouTube was going to be a thing. YouTube wouldn't launch until two thousand five. That was six years later, so really prescient of the panelists to talk about streaming video all the way back in n I would have been really interested to attend that particular discussion and see what they had to say, because I mean, today you look around, there's so many different streaming services

like that's where the focus of entertainment is today. I don't know that anyone in ninety nine would have envisioned what we have at our disposal now, fascinating stuff. By two thousand one, the Festival the Music Side had more than a thousand artists playing at forty eight venues across the city. Two thousand one, so more than two decades ago, and it had more than a thousand artists. That's just

so huge. I can't even imagine being in Austin and wanting to see, you know, various groups play and having to decide between that many. That's like I get a choice paralysis all the time. Analysis paralysis, I guess you can call it. Well, if you give me too many options, I kind of shut down because I just can't. After

you get past three or four, I start to panic. Uh. I complained about this a lot to my partner, who well often send me thirty to forty choices at a time, and I just tell her, like, this is not good for me. I can't handle it. So I can't even imagine looking at a different thousand different acts and try to figure out where I'm going to go see. But two thousand one also saw some interesting speakers. The founder of Napster had attended and he gave an interview over

at Interactive. Remember, Napster was truly a an important UH service. In the early two thousands, Napster was seen as an enormous threat to the established music industry, which is interesting that they would then have him appear at south By Southwest because obviously, like he was like uh most wanted for all the different music studios that wanted to sue

Napster out of existence, which did eventually happen. But it really also brought to light the usefulness of peer to peer technology and it it really demonstrated that there was a real need to address digital music in a way that made sense for consumers two thousand one. This is before we get to things like the launch of the iTunes store. It was hard to get digital music. There wasn't like an easy way to access it and to purchase it and too be able to download it, and

so people were turning to piracy because that was easy. Uh. It wouldn't be until we started seeing things like iTunes really established itself where that would change. Plus, obviously the music labels and the government of the United States in particular, brought the hammer down on all the different sharing services that really cut back on piracy that way too, And obviously all that would change again once we got into audio streaming services, which has been taught a lot about it.

South By Southwest as well. Another person who was at two thousand one was one of the co founders of Google, Larry Page. So at this stage, you know, again pretty early on in the lifetime of south By Southwest, you start to see some important people in the various industries arrive and and give talks and centations and workshops at south By Southwest. This applies across all the different tracks.

I'm focusing mostly on interactive, but you also had, you know, incredibly important people in the world of music, whether they were musicians or on the business side or the engineering side of things. And equally so in the film world, really important filmmakers. So two thousand one also had a session that was important called is anyone making Money? And you know, you also have to remember two thousand one this is like where the bubble bursting is happening in

Big Swing. It's the spring of two thousand one, so it's before nine eleven. Nine eleven would really be where the entire world would take a hit financially, but the dot com industry in particular would be completely almost completely wiped out. Not completely, there'd be some companies that would survive, like Amazon survived. But you know two thousand one is it when making money, it's the questions that you need to ask because the answers to that might help you

avoid disaster down the line. There was also a lot of discussion about wearable computers in two thousand one, which you know that was still a science fiction kind of concept in two thousand one. Now we have all these activity trackers and smart watches and stuff. So again very prescient. Uh. In two thousand four, Jonathan Abrams of friends Sterre would present at south By Southwest. Friendster would not be super important for much longer, but this was like the dawn

of the social platform age. Two thousand five saw Malcolm Gladwell give a presentation at south By Southwest. Malcolm Gladwell of course hosts Smart Talks with IBM, which you've probably heard a few of those episodes on this feed. So a friend of the show, Malcolm Gladwell, Laura Swisher very important into actually gave a presentation that year as well, and then in two thousand seven we saw the launch

of panel Picker. So this is in south By Southwest's own terminology quote the official User generated Session Proposal platform for south By Southwest and south By Southwest e d u end quote. So panel Picker is a way for attendees and hopeful participants to submit ideas for stuff that needs to be talked about. Typically it can be very buzzy, hypeish stuff. On occasion, it could be very very important.

Sometimes it's too early to call it important, it ends up being a lot of people talking about buzzwords and not much else. But the idea here is that let's look at the issues that are either really big or about to be really big in the industry and pitch a panel based off that so that we can have a discussion about where things are going. Two thousand seven has also when Twitter would attend for the first time and got a lot of attention. So it didn't launch

at south By Southwest two thousand seven. There are a lot of stories where that's kind of thrown around as a fact that didn't happen. It actually launched the year before, at the end of March in two thousand six, so too late to be at south By Southwest in two thousand six, but it was very small. It was mostly the internal team of Twitter and their friends and family, and then a small following beyond that. Right, it had

not really made a big splash. But in two thousand seven at south By Southwest they put up a bunch of screens that would show people's public tweets as they were making them. And this got people really excited and a lot of people started to sign up, And really two thousand seven south By Southwest is where Twitter would establish itself as having an important space in the tech field in particular, and it just grew from that point forward. Okay,

we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk about one of the worst interviews in south By Southwest history, and it involves a very prominent tech leader. But first, let's take this break. Okay, I promised you all a train reckon two thousand and eight, south By Southwest gave us one. It was when a journalist named Sarah Lacy conducted an interview with a tech leader named Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook at the time

now Meta, and this was a big deal. Mark Zuckerberg did not give interviews, especially in public, really, and so this was a highly anticipated event at south By Southwest two thousand eight. As such, the crowd filled in the room.

It was like at full capacity to the point where they had to have overflow rooms where they were watching a video feed of the interview unfold and they're apparently playing like high energy music before the interview, and there were like people in the front row or even dancing to the music like it was a It was an energetic vibe in that room. You had people who are really hyped up. Mark Zuckerberg and Sarah Lacey come out.

Zuckerberg was clearly not ready for this. He was nervous and sweating, and it was not a good look, like it was like panic in in in in front of everyone up on stage and the interview starts, and a lot of people were complaining early on that Sarah's questions to Zuckerberg, we're kind of softball, and we're focused mainly on business e types of stuff and not on nuts and bolts and policy things like this, things that people

were really interested in. There were people who have tough questions that they wanted to ask but they felt that Sarah was taking a different approach. And to be clear, there are more than a few people I have I have never actually sat down to watch this interview because I can't I empathize too much. I can't handle watching people struggle and being super uncomfortable and awkward. I do that enough for myself, so I have not watched myself.

But the all the different reports I was reading, including one from barrettun Day Thurston who's been on the show, made it sound like the questions just weren't going in the way the crowd wanted, and the crowd started getting uneasy. They felt like the interview was largely a waste of time and that Zuckerberg was clearly out of this element. Here's the thing. Twitter had had not launched, but Twitter

had become popular in two thousand seven. This is two thousand eight, so now everyone at South Byself US is on Twitter. So people started going on Twitter and live tweeting their responses to watching this interview unfold, to the point where Baratunday actually said there were two events happening simultaneously. There was the interview that was actually unfolding in the room, and then there was everyone heckling the interview online via Twitter as they were responding in real time to what

they were seeing. Towards the end of it, apparently the crowd started to shout out questions and demanding answers. Zuckerberg was miserable, Sarah was out of her element, and things got really super ugly, to the point where people just talked about being the most awkward, uncomfortable interview of self by selfless history, which honestly I find comfort in and

I'll explain why in a little bit. But the interesting thing I think about this this interview, apart from the fact that it was just not a good day for Mark Zuckerberg or for Sarah for that matter, is that it really illustrated how important Twitter would be at events like this, where you could have this secondary conversation unfold

as an event itself is happening. And that was really the first time that that would play a huge part at South By Southwest, and it was kind of like the dawning of realization on all the people who are attending. This interview, from what I understand, is available to watch online, so if you are morbidly curious to watch, you can. Maybe it turns out to not be as bad as everyone says it was. But every every UH report I read made it sound truly terrible, and I just don't

think I could sit through it. Anyway. I'll talk about my own personal version of that in just a little bit. So two thousand nine, we get up to the point where four square would launch at south By Southwest. This was the original four square. So when it originally launched, four Square was this app that would let you check

in two places you were visiting. So you might go to like a restaurant, and you check in via four square to say, yes, here, I am at this restaurant, and it helped with discovery, so people who followed you on four square could say, oh, they went to this restaurant, said it was really good, let's go, Let's go there tomorrow and let's check it out. And so restaurants began to have incentives to invite people to come in and UH and check in at four square and you could

get like an appetizer or something on the house. Actually had that happened a few times when I used to use four square. For this reason, there were also other things you had to take into consideration, like you are giving up privacy by checking into locations and saying this is where I'm at. Depending on your situation, that might be a dangerous thing, and eventually four Square would get away from that. We got away from that location check

in element to the app. But in two thousand nine when they first launched, that is what they were all about. That's also wins. South By Southwest introduced the Accelerator Pitch Competition. This is an event where various startups all try to pitch their idea for the possibility of getting investor support. We've seen similar events like this in the tech space, but yeah, this is when it became part of south

By Southwest's own scope of of activities. In there was an app that was created by twenty four people who used to work at Stanford Research Institute who showed off this interesting voice activated personal assistant thing. It was apparently very bare bones but really fascinating, And it must have been truly fascinating because a couple of months later, Apple bought the whole project and it would become Sirie. By the time you get up to two thousand thir team,

you've got el Un Musk attending south By Southwest. He was interviewed on stage. This was specifically with his involvement of SpaceX but Musk has been to south By Southwest a couple of times, which makes sense. I mean, SpaceX is is kind of centered in Texas, and he's talked about all sorts of tech stuff at the event. Don't know if he's scheduled for this year or not. I also thought it was interesting that, according to south By Southwest's own website, in one of the presenters in the

interactive area was Neil Gaiman. Um. I think of Neil Gaiman as an author, and I he writes a lot of fantasy and kind of horror stuff and things that are are really fascinating, But I wouldn't necessarily think of it as interactive, So I'm very curious what he was what he was actually talking about. I don't have that information, but I thought that was really interesting. You also had a lot of other things going on around this time.

In the big news was Edwards Snowdon attending south By Southwest. Virtually he couldn't do it in person because he was a very wanted man still is. He attended via skyte and called in and talked about his role in being a whistleblower and leaking classified information to Wiki leaks. Uh. This was a very controversial move on the part of south By Southwest. You actually had US politicians contacting the

conference and asking them to rescind that invitation. Other guests who were at two thousand and fourteen south By Southwest include Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astronomer, Adam Savage, the former host of of MythBusters, and Chelsea Clinton was there too. Okay, we have made it up to my own personal terrible interview of south By Southwest. I've only ever been part of an official seuth By Southwest event once till this year, anyway, and that was in two thousand sixteen, and the event

was called an Honest Conversation with yek Yak. If you don't remember, yek Yak was and actually now it's back again. But yek Yak was. This this social platform map where you could post messages anonymously that were GEO located to wherever you were, and only people within a certain range of your physical position would be able to read that message.

So let's say I'm in downtown Atlanta and I use yek Yak and I write something like traffic today is out of control, while the people in that radius would be able to see that I had posted that and they could chime in. Maybe they'd say, like, you're an idiot, it's always out of control. You're just not in downtown Atlanta very much, which should be pretty accurate on all

fronts really. So anyway, yak was mostly known for its popularity at college campuses, and there were a lot of people who were concerned about yik yak because of the the ability for people to potentially abuse folks anonymously, and there could be terrible bullying and just trolling in general. It could lead to some really toxic behaviors, so there was a lot of concern about this. Now, at the time, I had not really conducted any interviews. I hadn't really

moderated panels. I was asked by my boss of the time to do this, and I wasn't confident enough to say no, I don't want to do this. So I agreed to do it. And that's on me. That's my fault. In fact, I want to own this, like I hate that it happened, but boy, it really was my fault for not saying no. So I agreed to do it. But I had to submit all my questions in advance to the yik yak team, which meant that I felt intimidated. I didn't feel comfortable writing questions that were more critical

of the service. And then we get to the day of this interview, and I'm there with the two co founders and I'm asking them questions, but they're giving me very short answers, which means that I'm burning through my questions so so fast. And we finally get to a point where we're supposed to get to audience Q and A. And that was supposed to be like a ten minute session, but they had gone through so quickly there was more like twenty five minutes or maybe even thirty minutes left

in the panel. So I opened it up, and let me tell you, the people who were asking questions from the audience, they did not have to submit their questions in advance, and they really asked some very tough questions. And I just kind of sat there thinking I would rather be anywhere else in the whole wide world. I was completely out of my element. I was not a

good moderator. This is one of those low points of my career, and I feel comfortable talking about it because I think that there are lessons to be learned, the big one being if your boss asks you to do something that you really don't feel comfortable doing, say so because you might. You're gonna save everyone a lot of heartache, Like if you if they go with someone else who does a great job, then everyone's happy. You didn't have to do it. Someone else did what they were good at.

Everybody looks good and you can move on with your life. But if you end up saying yes, like I did, then you're gonna end up having this this weight on your shoulders and it's really hard to shake off, y'all. I mean it's like seven years later and I still think about that night. Yuck. Anyway, probably didn't have to worry about any way, because, like, there's a lot of other stuff going on in twenty sixteen, the Obamas were there in so my little crash and burn with the

ick Yak was nothing. It certainly wasn't on the level of the Zuckerberg interview from a few years earlier. South By Southwest was starting to become a more unified event. They were creating twenty four tracks across music, film, and interactive, so they were kind of reversing that decision of splitting everything off into sort of separate events at this point

was an early cancelation due to COVID. Keep in mind, south By Southwest happens in March, so March of like, people were still not really sure what was going on with COVID. They were starting to get worried by you know, February, but it was still fairly early, and south By Southwest canceling was one of the early indicators that oh, this is a big deal, this is going to affect a lot of things moving forward, and so the show was completely scuttled. In it was a huge uproar, not uproar,

but a huge upset in the tech industry. One there was a south By Southwest, but it was online only, so again no in person conference. They did have musical performances and stuff that streamed out, so you could buy an online pass to south By Southwest that it obviously was not the same two went back to being both in person and online at the same time, so you could actually go in person or if you wanted to,

you could stay and watch on your computer. And these days you can buy various types of badges to access the different events and y'all, you've gotta have deep pockets to go to south By Southwest as an attendee, Like if you're not a guest and you don't have a badge that's already assigned to you. As I recall when I got my badge back in, it had like the dates that it was active, and beyond that I was

not hill. I didn't have access to south By Southwest, which makes sense because you look at the price of these things. So if you only wanted a badge to the interactive parts of south By Southwest and and that's all you really cared about, that would set you back one thousand, five hundred dollars right now, if you were to buy it at the door, it would be a hundred bucks more than that, very very expensive. Uh. Now,

let's say that you just want to do music. If you just wanted to do music, that's actually the cheapest. That's just an eight dollars. And south By has had a sort of a decline in attendance on the music side of recent years, so that might be why it's it's the cheap price of eight film is a thousand, four hundred, so just a little less expensive than interactive. If you wanted to be able to see everything at priority category, well you'd have to spend one thousand, eight

hundred nine five dollars almost two grand. Now, according to south By Southwest, any badge gets to you primary entrance into the related category and secondary entry into most other events.

I don't know what secondary intrigue means. I just assume that means you get, like you know, not the not the prioritized seating, and there might be much more limited space for that, but at least then you could, in theory, by a badge for for music and use it to see most other events during the whole festival, which stretches, like I said, more than a week at this point, or if you prefer, you could get an online pass for the low low price of a So there is

that anyway. South By. I think it's a cool event. Uh. There are a lot of other things that are happening at around the same time, like parties and promotional stuff that really end up being a lot of fun that are in addition to the official south By Southwest events.

So it really becomes a big party atmosphere. But it's also incredibly expensive, and I think it becomes sort of almost an elitist kind of thing because only the people who can really afford it are gonna be going, and it really creates a have have not situation there, and I don't know how I feel about that. I think that's kind of a bummer. I love live music, I don't think I love it enough to spend nine on a badge to be able to see at all. It's

just it's kind of sad. Uh. But at the same time, a lot of cool stuff happens, and a lot of really interesting technologies have launched there or become popular there. So I hope that I'm going to be going this year, And if I do that, maybe I see some of you out there. I'll keep an eye out, and uh yeah, before I run too long, I'll just say I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I

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