Rob Glaser

two blocks outside of the Bronx. I was born in Mount Sina Hospital, so I was born in Manhattan, but I grew up in basically Yonkers. But I know you went to the same school as Jason Flam Right, Jason flam and I were both Filston class of seventy nine. Um, it's a it's a true story. I met Jason uh freshman year that Fieldston has two feeder schools, a grammar school called Filston Lower, which is the one I went to, and know the grammar school called Ethical in Midtown Manhattan,

which is what Jason went to. I think. So Jason I first met in seventh grade in Mrs Lesher's home room and I remembered ovidly because one of the first days of school, Jason walked in with a T shirt. Uh, this is nineteen seventy three, I think, with a T shirt of one pig on top of another one said Macon Bacon and Mrs Lesher made Jason go home and get a different shirt. So he was a troublemaker from

day one. Were you friendly with Jason? Then? Jason and I were always like, uh, friendly, but not best buddies. We were in different circles. Um and Uh I was like Jason. Uh. I've learned subsequently as we've become much closer as adults. Part of wide and see him a lot of part of high school, and he spent a lot of time at the track, which I think he's talked about subsequently. So he, Jason spent the latter part of his high school years uh, in a very different

arc than I spent on mine. Uh. And we reconnected later in life. Okay, so were you a science kid from day one? I was more of a math kid than a science kid. I was one of these kids who just numbers. I always made sense to me. I grew up a baseball fan and to me, like baseball with statistics, so like literal would would study way before saber metrics or way before any of this stuff became popular. I would know everybody's batting average to the fourth decimal point.

I just numbers kind of made sense to me, and I was like a numbers kid. I also liked media. I mean my one of my favorite things to do was listening to w ABC radio as a kid. I just felt like radio was like this window to the whole wide universe. This is you know. I didn't at the time, I didn't have a shortwave radio, and it was obviously way before other stuff ended up doing. But I was like media, especially music started radio station when

I was in high school. So I was the fact that my life ended up connecting to music, even though I have very, very poor skills as a performer. I played cello for two years in piano for a couple of years, and I sucked at both of them. But I love music, and music and math were two of my passions growing up. And was that encouraged in your household? Uh? Yet both were? Um? I mean my uh my my sisters two years older, and she was a really good

pianist and music good musician. She went to Oberlin the lulib Arts part, but she spent a lot of time with her buddies in the conservatory. She went to music camp. So she's quite a good musician, or was quite a good musician, probably still is. Uh and uh. I was like the math kid, and so we kind of each gave each other our own turfs kind of deal. But yeah, my parents were like they were both the first and their families to go to college. They were very much

focused on pushing us in academic directions. But in a Jewish family, well, my mom's Catholic, my dad's Jewish. Really we raised Jewish. I was great double majored and guilt um and uh uh so I, well, the woman you're married to now she Jewish. I've actually done multiple religions. I've buried at jew and I've married a Catholic woman, so I've kind of haven't done Buddhists yet. But okay, but but I am uh my current partner grew up Catholic, so yes, I've gotten back to Catholicism. But you can

only marry what I'm told. Um, although the Pube's kind of changed that, I think. But but anyway, the Uh, the role of religion. We had a Christmas tree, which was kind of almost a cultural thing, but we were mostly My mom was from California, so I didn't really know as closely my the Catholic side of the family.

I knew the Jewish relaity was my dad's brother lived in Long Island and we would do holidays with him, So I was in Fieldson is probably like a third Jewish, so I was in touch with kind of both sides of my heritage. Okay, you have I have to ask them if your mother was from California, did your father meet her? It's actually an awesome story. So my dad and my mom met at a folk dancing place, uh in nineteen fifty three or nine four, I think, Uh.

And my dad and his best friend, Bob weren't back, and my mom and her her best friend, uh Felice, both went to this place, and uh, three lifelong couples were formed that night. So my mom and my dad met, Felice met her husband Roger, and Bob and his wife Audrey all the same night. So I don't know it was in the tequila there that night, but something magical, uh, and they all married for life, which was just pretty amazing and what was folk dancing? Did they ever tell

you what actually went trance fired at this venue? There were no videotapes at the time, so there's very subjective recollections of it, but it was. It was a meaningful night, obviously for all six of them. Uh and relatively you know, my parents were married over fifty years until my dad passed away five years ago, and so they had a great long run out of it. Okay, So if you're born in nineteen sixty two, you're in high school when the Apple two comes out? Were you an adherent of

computers in high school? I was, but not through uh not through PCs. I was a little before and a little after in a funny way. So my first computer was a a programmable t I fifty eight computer, which was not a computer at all. I was a calculator with two hundred forty steps in it, so you literally you had to learn how to really efficient code. That was the first UH computing device that I owned. Uh And and you could program it to do sort of

simulation kinds of things that had a little display. I couldn't afford the expensive one with magnetic cards, but I was able to save my money from shelving stone, raking leaves and other stuff to where I got the printer so I could actually save my programs and type them back in meticulously, all two and forty instructions of them. Then my senior in high school, Fieldston started time sharing on another computer down the street at the school called Riverdale UM. And so that was when I got first

got into any sort of serious interactive programming. Uh. It was a PDP eleven thirty four. There ran an obscure operating system called Ristus for any nerds out there, UM. And the biggest thing that I did there was I wrote a game that simulated running a presidential election called pres and it became very popular, and it leveraged that popularity, and I put a trojan horse in it that gave me system access to the entire computer system. Okay, and did you utilize that access to do bad or good?

I utilized it for because back in the day, hacker meant something different than it means now. Hacker meant somebody who had the curiosity, the pioneer spirit. Stephen Levi's book Hacker describes this, and it was about like climbing the mountain. The digital version of the Mountain. So I never did anything malicious. I would basically there were there were fun games on the system that you could play if you had access to them, I would do that. Uh. So the worst you could say is that I stole some

CPU cycles um from the from the Riverdale computer. I did it with a buddy. I won't say his name, but he ended up being our professor at m I t so and uh a very accomplished person in his own right. So apparently we didn't We were not too too bad, but but we had fun and I learned a lot about programming computers. Uh and uh, I can tell you a lot about bad computer operating system security and trojan horses because the case did not have robust security.

So that computer terminal that you had access to the main frame or mini computer whatever it was, that was at school, that was in high school. That was my that was my first experience. My my first experience in owning our computer was in one when the IBM PC came out. But that was I was alarading. Okay, but before your college. So when you're at Fieldston, would you stay after school to use that computer it was it?

Would you track your relationship with a computer in school somewhat similarly to what Bill Gates says his experience was. So I didn't in beak between between the program blow calculator that I owned and my access to the the PDP eleven thirty four through a time sharing terminal. I um I got. I don't know if I got my full ten thousand hours, and but I definitely got a decent amount of computing experience. We also, by the way

we had it, we had a PDP I forgot. My whole Sky school had a PDP eight before the PDP eleven thirty four, which had a one tin bawd teletype, you know, the old like you know, something out of two thousand and one, with the with the he's clanging and the uh, the loud teletype. Uh. The only thing about that was the computer would reboot when you plug the coffee pot in. So it really wasn't that robust a computer. So I dinked out with that a little bit. But it was really the the my own calculator and

the other one where my main computing experence. And you know, by I'm a little bit older than you. I was born in nineteen fifty three, and then people are younger. But there was really class division in my high school, but it was much larger than your high school. When you're pursuing your love of computers, does that make you an ostracized nerd or does that include you in the class? So this I had different things I did. So when I before I started this, I started a radio station

in my high school. Uh, and that was that was fun. I just did because I loved radio. Actually when I went when I when I was twelve, I went to a summer camp and my camp counselor was a a d J at w N y C. I think it was the City College, uh station, And I thought it was was it was that a classical station back then? Uh? No, No, this was it was like an all format station. Was that it was a SID No, no, w CC, it was a it was the City College in New York station. So not even I see c C and Y or

something like that. And so I went and visited his radio station, uh that next fall, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. So I got my we we ended up setting up a intercom radio station in high school. When I did that, when I was like a sophomore junior. How much techno? Well know, how did that know? It was more of the inspiration. It was more of the inspiration. It wasn't super technical. I mean it was literally we didn't get it. We

didn't get a low watching license. We just literally wired the building from the UH from the when we were into the gymnasium in the cafeteria. So it was basically doing radio over wired lines, basically what I ended up doing twenty years later when we started real networks, but not used. The Internet didn't exist then, so we just wired it ourselves. Okay, so you end up going to Yale. Where else did you apply to college? I actually only applied to two places. I applied to Yale and a

little college and Iowa called Grinnell. And the reason I applied to Grinnell was um I thought after being growing up in New York and thinking I didn't necessarily want to, like, you know, follow all the whole sort of snobby elitist kind of stuff that you associate with the Northeast and

the I vs. UH. One of the inventors, one of the inventor of the integrated circle, one of the early people in Intel, was a Grinnell graduate and so in the late seventies, Grinnell had one of the best funded computer science facilities of any small liberal arts college in the country. UH and I had. I went and visited Grinnell,

had a lovely time, was super fun. But I made the purely pragmatic decision that if I hated Yale and I wanted to switch to Grinnell, they would have be with open arms U. Whereas if I went the other way and I turned down YELLEH went to Grinnelle and tried to get back into Yelle, they'd flipped me the bird. So I figured the right thing to do was to pick the pick the I like them both, and I picked the one that seemed like if I didn't like it, I could twitch to the other one. And UH and

I ended up having a great time. So you did have a good experience in college. Fantastic I was. It was and I actually by the time I went there, I felt really good about it. My UH sister, who was two years older, a couple of her one of her friends going to Yale, and went up and hung out with them, and it was like it was a revelation to find a place where like being a nerd was kind of cool, at least not as ostracized as

at Ostracigo Strong. It was not in the cultural mainstream in my high school to be a nerd like it was, but whereas college, it was a college full and nerds, so it felt they were different kinds of nerds, not all computer nerds, some or math nerds to different things. Uh. The other thing was helpful is so in I was good at math, but there was a kid named Paul Quintus who was the best in math in my school,

and there were a few of us. Jason was before he started becoming a stoner, was super smart at math. Who there are a few of us who were like vibed for second best in math. So I never had the image that I had to become a pure mathematician. But then at Yale, I started, Okay, I'm gonna see what I can do. So I started in the early

Concentration math program, which was like the hardest program. Had to take the AP and all that stuff to get in, and it started out with about fifteen people in it, and after two weeks everybody had dropped out except for me and five guys who knew each other from math camp um, which I had not gone to. Uh, So I was nerdy, but not uber nerdy, I guess and uh And it was really a revelation for me because I was clearly the worst of the six of us UM.

And it was a really good thing to learn that, uh, you know, at the age of still seventeen, I think, and then turn eighteen yet that I would not be hurting society by not being a theoretical mathematician because there were five people in the room with me who were far better theory mathematicians and me just in that one

room in one class at Yale. So it was a liberation for me that I could go do other stuff that built on the fact that I was pretty good at math without having to go to the purest route, which of course academia almost always steers you towards, like if you're really, really good, you do the purest form of something, and then if you're you know, if you're not able to cut cut it in the purest thing,

you can do something more philistine like being business. So for me, I got that UM feedback early on, and it was quite liberating for me. Okay, so you wake up one day and you say you're not gonna be the head of the class in math. What are your other interests in college? So it was a combine a bunch of things. I was always sitting media, but in college I did it by getting involved in the student newspaper,

the All Daily News. I got involved in student activism, and I was pretty politically active because night was when Reagan came in. There was a lot of you know, saber rattling going on. I didn't like that very much. So I got I was sort of a student activist in a bunch of anti military, anti militaristic ninety military excuse me, anti militaristic, anti jingoistic, uh, you know, anti Reagan kinds of things, uh. In college, and I throw that.

I got involved with writing editorials in the student newspaper, and a bunch of these friends are like, hey, we like you would you've wrote a column for us UM And so I wrote a column for two or three years in college called What's Left? Uh. And then the funny thing about it is the guy who wrote the column right of Way has actually become a good friend of mine, a guy named David from So David David, and I wrote, I didn't know that David from David

and David was like the point counterpoint of this. Uh you know, And so I would I wrote the left wing column, he wrote the right wing column. I would think I wrote one that was a kind of a headline that was a little nasty, as I recall, it was from colon distortions, misrespsentations and lies. Um. But we've since buried the hatchet on that. And well he's also moved left. Well he he's moved. He's moved sensible at least,

I would say. And he and I when I got involved many years later and a bunch of stuff around Putin and Trump. Uh, David was one of the firs as people I talked about, and he ran along piece in Atlantic about it. And so we've stayed, we've our lives have intertwined in a funny way. In college, we were pretty pretty different views. And then he I think you have to doing penance for the whole access of evil thing, because he's famously one of the person I

think he's the person who coined that phrase. Uh he Uh, he's now obviously changed his views of that part of the Republican Party. Anyway, So you say you got your first computer at nineteen and IBM PC what was the inspiration for that? So luck? Luck always plays a role in life. So in the summer of eighty one, I went to work for IBM uh in Pokeepsie, New York, who was a little slower. So you're this was this is right after freshman year of college, after sophomore year,

after sophomore years. So how did you even get that gig? It's actually interesting thing. So I I did computer programming while I was I was. I ended up doing a computer science degree and then a master degree in economics. So I was sort of sprattling between those two fields. Okay, wait, wait, wait, just you you start with math in N one to what agree? Yale? Is there a computer science program? Y'all had a good but small computer science program. It was not It's not as large as certainly uh m I

T s or one of the other clothes. But it had some really good professors. Uh a few, one of the pioneers of early program language of Alan Perliss, who's since passed away. Some really interesting people in there. But it was a small program. I don't know. There were maybe fifteen of US majors, maybe a little more than that um and so I was doing computer science stuff

and then I was doing economics. And one of the virtues of having done advanced math is you can start doing advanced economics earlier, because basically the only difference, as I can see between the graduate and the undergraduate economic classes is the graduate economic classes assumed calculus in economics. So I was able to kind of did you have any vision of who would what you wanted to do

or be? I think I knew I wanted to do something at the intersection of technology, media and politics, but what the manifestation of that would be, and the fact that it ended up involving more technology and media professionally and more politics as a as an advocation rather than a vocation, uh was It's sort of kind of how it evolved. Part of it is when you do computer stuff, you can get decent summer jobs that pay reasonably well.

And like so, I gotta I applied for a summer job at IBM in the summer of eighty one, and because one of the jobs they had at school involved doing programming on an IBM main faw also my first paid job. I worked at n y U the summer after by senior in high school working on their computer. So I did that my and doing what on their computers it was for it was a computer for the

admissions department. So I was just doing regularly, regular random programming assignments, you know, job running reports for a basic for mini computer h on that the n y U Admissions department had as their in house. Okay, when you were at Fieldston, was there a teacher who taught you this stuff? That we were all self taught? It was a computer science. There were no teachers, so I taught.

I taught myself programming. But you know, if you know math and you're you know, technically uh inclined, you know, I didn't find learning programming was that hard. So my first actual course in programming was freshman year in college probably. And what was the language then? Uh? We learned everything from you know, C that was before C plus plus C two, A p L which was it's kind of obscure sy mode language LISP, which was a natural language programming.

I did some Burgram for trand, which was more for these applied jobs. Basic is obviously the presidential election simulators slash Trudgan Horse was written in Basic, uh, which was Basic was probably the first higher level language I wrote in. Okay, So what is your gig after your sophomore year at IBM? So I worked at IBM in a really boring job in Pokeepsie, New York. UH in a group that wrote IBM had a language called j c L that was

a language to batch program computers. And I came in just I just missed having to work on punch cards. I'm really lucky in that. But this was They had a language called Jewel. I don't know, I remember that because it's a prett obscure language that generated j c L. So my job was to write programs in Jewel UH that we were used for some set of maintenance programs

for the for the Maiden Rand group. The reason it wasn't super boring is one of the guys in my group that I was in in Pokeepsie, New York, happened to be part of the task force that was working on the IBM PC. So I got I get there in June. Who getting lucky is better than good all the time? I get there in June, or like Marylyn June, and there about a month the IBM PC gets announced and asked this guy Jim, and he knows everything was to know about it. So he tells me all about it,

and I get super excited. I was never an Apple two kid, as I mentioned that kind of sort of generationally didn't quite line up with that. But I thought the ibm PC seemed like it was going to be a really good thing, uh in terms of like taking the PC industry to the next level. And you can say legitimizing and famously, Steve Jobs and Apple once ran an ad you know what they said that people say, the ibm PC is going to legitimize personal computing. Well

the bastards say welcome. So that was a famous ad Apple ran. But I but it did have that vibe, that feel and the culture. And this is going back, you know, thirty seven years now. And so I, after I finished my job summer job, with a bunch of buddies, decided to start a little software company, which I called Ivy Research, to make games for the ibm PC. So, okay, so the ibm PC, I've already forgotten. It was introduced

exactly when it came out. It was just announced in the summer of eighty one and at first became available early in the fall Okay, so when you start this ivy company, are you saying, oh, this will be fun or you see dreams of riches a little bit of both, but really more it'll be fun and we'll learn a lot, uh and maybe it will become something. So basically bought one PC, which I think I used most of my summer job money to buy. I think one of the

other guys bought the printer or something like that. UM in the in the we couldn't really we there were originally half a dozen of us that got excited about it. There were three of us who ended up working on it full time. So my summer job in the summer of eight two other than you a little political organizing which I could talk about, was to write games for the IBM PC UM and the game. We wrote two games.

My friends was a better programmer than me. Uh so he wrote the libraries for both of them, and I wrote one of them. Um he wrote the other. They were called SLINKs and Viper and SLINKs is basically you know the old snake game on the Nokia candybar phone. It was that game, and it may have been the

first incarnation of it. I've never heard of an older one, but it was the notion that you basically you run around a maze and the longer that you you pick up tokens, and the more tokens you get, the longer the snake gets. And the goal is to get the snake could be as long as possible without tripping into yourself. It's fun game. And that was one of our games. And uh we sold them nationally through a chain of computer stores called computer Land. UH and so I mentioned

all these old defunct names. Um and if you do the math on it, the three of us made enough money to make it a good summer job, but not a life changing event. So it was like that was that was our we It's the summer of eight t two and then a little bit into the fall, and then I got busy getting ready to graduate and finishing with my school work. We'll take a quick break and come back with more of my conversation with CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live at the Music Media

Summit in Santa Barbara, California. This week. I'm speaking with Real Networks Rob Glazer. Over the last couple of months, I've interviewed Tony Hawk and the head of music for YouTube and Google Lee or Cone. Be the first to hear next week's episode by subscribing to the podcast I'm tuned in, Apple Podcast or your podcast Apple Choice. While you're there, please rate and review the podcast. Okay, let's

get back to my conversation with Rob Glazer. Okay, So you have the experience with the IBM PC, you graduate, and then you go to graduate school. No. No, I was lucky because of my head certain math. I was able to do the master's degree at an economic concurrent with the bachelor green computer science. So I was able to do all that in four years. And what was your thinking getting a master's in economics? So I thought about whether or not I wanted to go get a

PhD in economics, and I didn't know. I loved the questions that economics addresses. How do we create a just society? Uh? You know, how do you what? What's the source of wealth? Uh? You know, how? What's the fairest way to distribute things? What's the right how to markets work? But I didn't end up liking the methodology that academia uses in economics. It seemed very abstract and a historical by and large, So I really by the time I graduated, I thought,

I'm just gonna go out in the world. But what my master's thesis was on the job market for academic economists, because I thought, how can I It's a market, right, And I thought, how can I uh learned about what it's like to be an academic economist. I know, I'll write a paper about them. So I did a survey about how the market worked and how the structural market worked. Um, and by then I was clear I didn't want to go do that. Uh. So I thought about what I was going to do next. Uh And I so, what

did you determine? What was the market for academic It's a very self referential market, in other words, as a market where reputation carries a huge amount of weight. And you look at the feedback loop of which graduate programs place people in which academic institution. Now this was, you know, thirty five years ago, so it may have changed, although I doubt it that. Uh. You know, over a long period of time. You might say the cream risers at the top. But insofar as the best people uh go

to the best schools, it's fine. But it tends to provide a lot of sort of feedback around orthodoxy where the best professor's best students get the best jobs as sort of the pattern that emerged, which is okay. At this late date, there's a huge division between the left and the right read Paul Krugman the New York Times is one thing, and we have all the economists backing up the right wing. What's your viewpoint on this, on on the degree to which economics it can be used

as justification? Right now, we're in a it's a very weird world because we're in such a a world where there's the division is not between the academic left and the academic right. The it's between people who are scienced and fact based and people who are know nothings. So you know nothings in the old American condition of nothing. So when you look at the degree to which the tax cut, for instance, is being justified on academic on

academic economic grounds, that's not really the case anymore. You look at the deficits, right, the fact that the right wing said they hate deficits, but they have now passed the tax bill that's going to blow up the deficit to a higher level than it's ever been before, at a faster rate than you've ever seen outside of an economic depression. Ever, so right now, I actually don't really think when you look at what's going on, um in the economy, Uh, we were was a strong economy before Trump.

They've you know, added a little bit of uh of of you know, put some more sugar in the in the in the coffee to make it even sweet, or uh not doing a way that's sustainable. I don't think most academic conicts would say that that's what you should have done. But people who like low tax rates for corporations are very happy and staying on the same point

of know nothings in fact base. Is there any hope for America both in terms of the top level arguing and the people you know in the hinder lands moving back towards facts. Are we on this divergent path and it will sustain? I think it could go either way. I mean I'm pretty uh generally an optimist, but in the present time, Um, you know, you've always had political

division in this country, you know. But and I didn't like Reagan very much, although in hindsight, the worst thing he did in terms of creating a huge military conflict was invading Grenada, So you know that was a pretty Uh. You know, that was a pretty mild thing to do. You know, you knocked over a few palm trees, and you know, maybe maybe one or two people got their noses broken or something. But compared to you know, some of the really bad worst we've had since then, it

wasn't that pernicious. Uh. You know then you uh uh George H. W. Bush, who you know, did some really horrible things, but uh, ultimately the system worked and the pendulum swung back. Uh. And then with Obama, I think what happened was there was a lot of people who got freaked out by the fact that this uh, the the the change, the visual change, and the of having an African American president, which in my view was a sign of society being a fundamentally healthy place and a

very positive thing. And I still think he's the best

president of my lifetime. Uh, But but that there were a lot of people who really freaked out about that, and that created an environment when you look at they were freaked out about what the fact that somebody who doesn't look like them got to be president, and they that's you know, you whether whether it's because there was there's all these studies that are coming out now that status anxiety was a huge motivator of a lot of the Trump supporters, and the status anxiety has an economic

element to it, But also want to explain what you

for my audience, what lot of anxiety as well. Basically, the people are afraid that they're they're not going to be able to maintain their life situation, be it financially or be its social prestiges, and that that those kinds of fears get played on in all kinds of different ways by uh, uh you know, by by people who are you know, fearmongers or uh you know, various kinds of uh whistle dog whistleblowers, And a lot of what happened with Trump has been a lot of that sort

of uh rhetoric, in my view, combined with the fact that when the economic recovery happened, you know, there's all these things that happened with two that's sixteen, but it was when the economic recovery happened, it happened on the coast very well, and it happened in the middle country, uh much much less comprehensively, and a lot of people that had solid middle class lives with union jobs, they don't have those union jobs anymore, and ironically, the the

economy is getting gutted in a way that makes it much much harder for people who aren't college educated and or living in you know, the wealthier coastal cities to to to make it. And that the that created an environment where people who were chingo istic are people who are willing to manipulate the truth uh to uh sort of create uh boogey men are able to do that. Okay, So you graduate from college, you decide you don't want to be an academic economists't want to be an economists

at all. So what do you do? Uh? Well, I had had two or three different job choices, and they were pretty interesting. I could have stayed with a little ivy research company that had made it made those games, and we were working on some consulting projects that turned

into some interesting things. My friends Steve stayed with that, but I decided, I do I want to do something where I could learn a lot more about scale um and so I had a couple of job offers at Hewlett Packard, which I thought was I didn't want to

go to IBM. I thought it was too bureaucratic and to organized around like people who's you know, in intensity level and in intellect and like, we're more sort of within one standard deviation of the norm in a place where if you really want to throw yourself into it, you could have a huge impact. And IBM is a is a great company in a lot of ways, but at that point it was it had gotten pretty big and bureaucratic um so Hewlett Packard had a couple of

opportunities there. I thought it was an interesting place. And then Uh, Steve Bomber, uh and Paul Allen went to Mike went to Yale and and and inteviewed people from Microsoft. And I knew a little bit about the I knew more about the PC than the average college kid in three so interven with them and they, you know a little bit slower. Did you know them previously? You know, I knew, I knew who Microsoft was, but they just

they came to campus. One of the things Microsoft did well and why it's scaled up, is they did uh college recruiting very early in Microsoft cycle. At the time, Microsoft was about two fifty people, and they started recruiting on at least some college campuses starting in like so by that time Microsoft was coming to Yale, and Microsoft ended up hiring me in six or seven of my classmates. Uh for uh with the class of eight three And what do you think? And you moved to Seattle, right?

I did? Yes? And what was that for someone who basically was at East Coast boy, Well, my mom was from California and we visited the Barrier bunch. Uh and Uh, So I thought, if you'd asked me, I thought, maybe I'll end up in California. Uh. And all I knew about Seattle was I'd read Ball four when I was a kid, which was Jim Bountain's baseball book, primarily about the year that he was with the Seattle Pilots in nine nine. So I knew that Seattle was a team.

Was he was a city that hadn't lost a baseball team. Fortunately, by the time I got through in a D three, they had a new one because the Mariners started in seventy seven as part of an antitrust settlement for the Pilots moving to Milwaukee. So the the uh the head of baseball team. So that was a check. It was close to the West Coast. My parents ended up retiring to northern California a couple years after we were out there,

so that was sort of a check. And it was honestly that when everybody in a Microsoft was incredibly smart, incredibly hardcore, and I thought, well, this is this place. Seems like it's got a lot of people that I want to work with and I can learn from, and I'll do it for a couple of years. Un Look, it's boring and ended up being ten years. Okay. When you went to work there, it wasn't public yet, No, it was. I was getting lucky but better than good. So I got there in eighty three. Uh, and Microsoft

went public in eighty six. Okay, And what was your gig at Microsoft? Well, I worked in basically three parts of the company. Was always met banking products because that's my passion. The first four years I worked in the

applications products. Uh, I was involved with the I didn't create Microsoft Word, but when I got involved with word, word was like number five and word processing and got it up to number two at the time, right behind Word Perfect, and we're kind of getting getting strong with them. And then I ran what it's called program management for all the applications products, which is like the connective tissue between the marketers on the one hand and the engineers

and the other. And since I had sort of a dual background, I was able to kind of play hopefully a contructive role in spanning the two. So that was my first four years, and then my next to three years was working on networking products because I was always interested in communication, right, so networking is about understanding the

plumbing and the infrastructure. So that was the least successful thing I worked on because at the time Microsoft was betting heavily on an operating system called OS two and which was a joint venture of form between Microsoft and IBM, and Microsoft decided to build all its networking products on the OS two platform. UM and UH. So I did it for a couple of years, worked with some great people. It was a fantastic lesson to me of how when you have a great team, great products, and a bad strategy,

you fail right. So UM a lot of the people I work with ended up in different capacities, having senior jobs in Microsoft for a number of years and doing cool things in the industry. But our products weren't that successful where the generally were failures because OS two was not a viable platform to build UH networking servers on. Top of Microsoft ended up being very successful in networking when it moved from OS to to an operating system

called Windows NT, which was the next generation. But but that was after I left that group, so did for a couple of years, and then I worked in something we called Multimedia and Consumer Systems, which is the last three or four years there, which was basically about figuring out how to add media technology into Windows and then starting working on the next sort of advanced digital to some of the early sort of proto digital devices. So that was my last three or four years there, and

I ended up it was a fantastic tenure run. I learned a ton uh and made made some lifelong friends and uh couldn't and financially it was obviously a very advantageous time to be there. So financially, you know, if you read the literature, you did very well. It was that primarily getting in early or your success in the operation or well, yeah, I mean it was the right place,

right time. And then I did work my butt off and worked very closely with you know, Gates and Bomber and these other guys and uh, and they I think they viewed me as somebody who was hardcore like you know, I would work six seven days a week without not like, without worrying about it because I I loved what I was doing. It was was like it was I didn't have any family or kids at the time. So classic thing. You know, you're in your twenty you throw yourself into

your career and had a great time with it. So it worked out. It worked out very well to me. And uh, you know, at the end of the ten years, when I looked up and you know, said, wow, this has been a decade and pull up my pull my pariscope up, I was ready to do something else. But I was incredibly happy for the experience. I okay, So what came first in terms of leaving this the concept that you were done and you've fulfilled your mission at Microsoft,

or that you wanted to do real networks. Well, I didn't have the idea for real network So I remember in the spring of nineties three, so I'm what thirty one, uh, and uh Gates comes to me and says, I want to reorganize some things, and I say, great, let's re organize me out of a job. Um, which I don't think what he expected because but it was really was how I was feeling I was. I'd been working so hard loving it, but I knew that I wouldn't really be able to step back and think about the next

thing until I had some breathing room. I had to create some separation. Just go back when you have sets off the way you tell the story, you really were not a programmer. No. I wrote a very little code that ended up in Microsoft products. I was a technical enough person to help to work with the engineers UH, and a marketing business or in enough person to understand to go talk to customers, try to understand what the market wanted. And I was thought of myself as adding

value at that intersection between those two. Okay, so you wanted some breathing room, so you said, Bill, let's reorganize me out of a job. Right? And how did that go down? So we had three meetings on the topic. UM. The first meeting, he yelled at me, this is the most irrational thing, This is the stupidest thing. Why you're doing this, Why do you want to do this? Go talk to this guy and go to talk to that guy.

So fine, I did. That second meeting was basically the same. UH. Then the third meeting happened in about five minutes into the third meeting two star, I looked at him and I said, is this making you feel better? And he looked at me like I was crazy, because why would I say that? And I said, because it is making you feel better, you should keep doing it, but it's

not making me feel better and it's not changing my mind. Um, And to his credit, he stopped cold, and we proceeded to have a very rational conversation about you know, uh, how we make a good transition, how what we do. I ended up technically doing a leave of absence, so I spent six months traveling around the world and do another taking up. Actually I took a class down and maybe I go to PhD, which I decided not to do.

Uh and uh. Then I did some consulting from Microsoft on a few topics that are related to the one related to what the intersection of the Internet and Microsoft strategy should be. One related to the future. There's this joint venture Microsoft was brewing called cable Soft, and I consulted with Bill on whether he should do the joint venture with the two big cable companies to try to create the dominant operating system for cable TV set top boxes. So I did a little consulting at the back end

of that. Uh and at the time I was already brewing the idea for what became Real Networks. But it was really during that that summer and fall of of two thousands of other uh three, that I was figuring out what I was gonna do next. And when you left Microsoft, did you have enough money to never work again? You know? If I was a monk? Sure, okay, I

got my answer. But but I figured, like I was thirty one, uh, I think I Uh, I knew I had a lot of ambitions and things I was interested in doing, and ended up putting a bunch of the money into the company that became Real Network. So uh it worked out just fine. So how did you come up with the idea for Real Networks? Well? I had two ideas, actually, uh in the summer of ninety three. One was focused on this notion of set top boxes and cable and television as his starians and this stuff.

Remember all the cable companies were talking about the five inter channel universe that time. Warner had their big trial in Orlando, Florida. They were reinventing, They're going to reinvent television uh, t c I, the other big cable company had their own tiles, and telcos had them. So we're like tele A TV, which was the thing that Howard

Stringer was involved in. They're on these different trials. So I thought, when maybe I'll make technology gene products for those And then at the same time, I thought, well, maybe there's something to this online communications world. I've been

an online geek. One of the products that created a Microsoft was an online product called Microsoft Access, before the database, Microsoft Access, the first Micronofic Action was a communications product that was not that successful, but I'd work closely with trying to trying to create a consistent user interface behind CompuServe and a o L and the products and all these services. So I was very smilar with the online world.

And I got lucky again. A good friend of mine named Mitch kap Poor asked me to get involved in a nonprofit he started, Well, that was Lotus one, two three, right. I got to know Mitch through various interact with Microsoft. Mitch was somebody and is somebody who cares about the intersection between technology and society. And Mitch is one of these people who's always understand stuff. Five years before anybody else does both, both strategically and really more almost like, uh,

you know, conceptually. And Mitch was convinced that the Internet was going to be a huge deal cyberspace was most people called it at the time, and he created this organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation that was very focused on issues of civil liberty and community in cyberspace. So Mitch asked me, and the time that I was I was technically to leave, but I was I wasn't gonna

go back to Microsoft. So in this late spring early summer of nine three, he said, come to a board meeting of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, And so I went to one of the board meetings in Austin, Texas, I think it was, and I met and one of the guys there was this guy named Dave Farber, who really was one of the fathers in the Internet, was telling everyone, Hey,

you gotta try this Mosaic thing. So that's when I first saw the Mosaic web browser in a very early form that Mark Andresen and his band of of geeks at University of Illinois Champagne ORBANDA were creating. So I downloaded Mosaic, I got an I S D n dial in line to my home in Seattle. UH, And I just all of a sudden saw, wow, this is the future.

Because you would look at the web, you look at the web browser, and they they had a web page called What's New with NCSA mosaic And at first there be like one or two new web pages a week. Then there'd be like six new ones a week. Then there'd be like three a day. And it literally felt like I was looking at a Petrie dish where the

sales were multiplying rapidly. And it was clear that as the summer of ninety three progressed and got into the fall of ninety three, that there was a huge thing happening UH that was going to be like a a huge cultural phenomenon. And I had been very interested in media, of course, and had done a bunch of staff rounding around video and audio Codex in my world and Multimedia Microsoft.

So I had the idea, what if I tried to do what Mosaic is doing for text and still graphics, what if we tried to do the same thing for audio and then video? Uh? And that's why what the idea for real networks ended up being, and ended up incorporating in February nine and creating the first prototype in the summer of ninety four UH, and then launching in April. Okay,

and did you raise money of Real Networks? Yes? What I did was when I started, I took a million dollars of my Microsoft crop steak, which was a high percentage of it, but not a you know, I wasn't I didn't have to sell any houses or anything, or my one house. But I took a million dollars, put it into the company and told the four of the people I hired, we've got this much money to get to the next phase. So I was very lucky that

I didn't have to go raise money. Then my friend Mitch kape Poor got excited about what I was doing, and in the fall of ninety four window of ninety Mitch made about a two million dollar investment into Real Networks UM. And then we launched in UH in April nine. So I was able to bootstrap it with some of my grub steak from Microsoft. Mitch, because you know, Mitch and I became close through the involved with you have have Mitch made the original Angeal investment. Then we launched.

Then we took our first venture round in the fall of ninety five from a great firm called Excel and a guy named Jim Bryer who's uh, you know, maybe on the second most famous investment, but invested years later in this thing called Facebook. That worked out pretty well for him to Okay, when you're starting real network, so

many people are working there. So when we started, obviously it was just me UM, and then I cobbled together a team of three guys, only one of whom became a full time employee UH to help build a prototype for real report became Real Audio UM, and then by the time we launched UH in April of ninety we

probably had fifteen employees something like that. UM. One of the key guys I got was an named Phil Barrett, who was a key engineer and injuring leader in Windows UH and was one of the unsung heroes of the

success of Windows UH. Windows. If people know the history, Microsoft had a very long gestation period and it was basically a near failure, and Phil got involved in creating the first useful version of Windows called Windows three D six, which allows you to run multiple doss apps on a three D six until three D six chip computer and it was really useful. And then he and a couple of his guys created a version of Windows that saw

of the memory problem that Windows has. Windows was really bad with using memory because the PC had a the Intel chip had a kind of a funny segmented memory architecture that made it hard. And they fixed that and they created a core of what became Windows three. So Phil was the the unsung hero behind that, and I got him to come in not technically as my co founder, but as the technical leader of the company in the

fall of ninety four. And then he Phil led the team that launched Real Audio, and so I said about a fifteen people when we launched. You're listening to my conversation with CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live at the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. I hope you're enjoying listening to this episode of The Bob Left That's podcast. If you want to listen to sound bites from the interviews and see some of my guests, check it out and at tune in or Twitter, Facebook,

and Instagram. Now more of my chat with the CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer on The Bob Left sets podcast. So if you go to the late nineties, real Player is the standard. But if one were to pull back and look at the war, one would say, you may or may not agree. That's what I'm asking you, that Real Player ultimately lost the war other than China, which we'll talk about in a minute. True, what did you

learn there? Uh? Well, we had a great run, and of course I'm back running the company now, so we're we've lived to fight another day, and I think we have another renaissance coming up, which we can talk about. But one of the things I learned is that when you have a huge competitor that threatened is threatened by you. Um. You can try to do anything you can to avoid a head on fight with that competitor, but the end of the day, you just gotta assume it's coming, and

you've got to scale up massively to do that. So what happened is the following. So we got out there with real Audio in ninety five or video, and ninety seven became the de facto market standard, uh for you know, for a number different use cases of streaming audio streaming video. We can talk about the music connection. Later we started dabbling music, UM and then Microsoft decided that both we and we us Netscape and Java or existential threats to Microsoft.

So they decided to do whatever they could to beat us, and UM they had a huge work chest of money to do it. UH, they had willingness to use their power relationship with PC manufacturers in any way they needed to, and so they moved and moved to potentially get PC manufacturers to ship their software and not ship our software, and to get media companies to use their software and not use our software. In the case of the computer manufacturers, they basically had a program where let's say the price

of Windows license vis a hundred dollars UM. And but they have a co op program where if you ship Windows in the configuration they want, it only costs you sixty. So let's say you sell a million PCs, So that's a that's a forty million dollar difference in what you have to pay a year, and it's forty million dollars of pure margin or a low margin business. So all you have to do is what Microsoft tells you. So

that's very powerful. So Microsoft was able to leverage the power of their monopoly to squeeze US out UH to at the time squeeze the Netscape browser out and and uhh force Netscape to basically sell to a o l um uh and uh to uh also mess around with Java and job and Java script is complicated history, but

so so we got basically squeezed. And the rational thing for us to have done at the time, if what we wanted to do was take our chips and go home, was to sell to the highest bidder uh make it their problem or sell to someone at such larger scale that they could fight the fight on with with us as a tool or a piece of it. UM. But I kind of. I mean's a few things reason why I didn't do that. One is I actually wanted to try and build a company for long term. I didn't

want to just flip it and sell it. Um. The second was the UM you know a lot of things that happened concur with that. This is now around the until the had the the the the the Internet bubble bursting at the same time. So you have the telecom bubble burst and the Internet bubble bursting, and this assault from Microsoft against and a trust uh violations that turned out UM and uh and they and those those three

things had a very negative impact on us. We ultimately ended up uh not only surviving, but in a star way prevailing. We won. Ah, we started winning some and a trust legal cases against Microsoft, and they ended up settling with us for about seven and fifty million dollars. Uh. So we got a decent outcome from that standpoint. From the standpoint of shareholders, um but um, but we ended up also pivoting the company and reinventing the company in

a few different ways. But you know, if I had it to do over again, I would probably have found the safe given that we didn't have the resources ourselves to compete head on with that attack. Even though we're able to win legal settlement, they basically uh compensated us for the lost business, but they didn't replace the lost business except in China. More than that in a minute. But they um but they If we found the right safe port in a storm, that could have been interesting.

It's not clear who they would have been like in two thousand, who would have who would have been the player? Obviously, net Escape went to a o L. They got some money from a share oulder standpoint, but the browser didn't live in a o L, didn't even ultimately end up living. And now they get folded into a Verizon. So it's it's not obvious the I mean, you know, it depends on you're playing the game, but playing the game to

make the most cash. The thing that Netscape did, or that Mark Huban did, where Mark sold his broadcast dot com business to Yahoo for four billion dollars and you know, took the money and did other stuff with it. You could have done that, but I was was trying to build something for the longer term. So when did you buy the Pro Bowlers Tour? So, okay, that's kind of a weird one, but it's true. So my friend Chris Peters was a Microsoft buddy of mine who got really

into bowling. Uh. Chris is a much better bowler than me. Uh he He approached me in a third friend of ours, Mike Slade, uh more than ten years ago, I have to remember how longer it was, probably sixteen seventeen years ago, and said, hey, I can buy the p b a uh at a bankruptcy or near bankruptcy that's been mismanaged. And I was bowling was one of my favorite sports as a kid. I was in a bowling league. Um, I am a mediocre bowler, but I enjoy it to this day. And you have a bully at a bowling

lane in your house. I I Uh, I used to have a bowling lane in my office. Yes, we and Real Network's office in where we were for a decade, we had a bowling lane. When we moved to the to a top floor of a building, we didn't get a bowling lane there, but we did have a bowling We did a pair of bowling lanes in the in the building uh that we had and uh in a neighborhood called Belltown in Seattle, and that was fun. So

I love bowling. Uh, and I thought, okay, let's do this and uh Chris ended up bowing out about five or six years ago. So now Mike and I are the owners of it. We got a really good guy named Tom Clark who runs it. Um if anybody wants to buy the p b A, I'm willing to sell it. But it's it makes a little money. Uh, it's uh, it's nice to be a steward or something that you care about. The bowlers are all great human beings, uh and uh but most of them are great human beings.

And uh, you know, I'm happy that we're able to sustain a sport that is sort of at the center of Americana, And is there any hope for bowling or

is it going to go extinct? Uh? Well, bowling itself has never even more popular in terms of like, you know, how many people your bowl bowling leagues have had to reinvent themselves because there's describe a book called Bowling Alone, which he sent me a copy of for sort of obvious reasons and talked him once or twice how bowling was tied to the industrial period where everyone worked the same shift and left the shift and then went bowld at night, you know, sort of Lavern and Shirley style,

And that culture doesn't really exist anymore. We have a much more everybody's on their own schedule, much more scattered, both in more and more families both both parents work, so you have much less rhythm around that. So there is a core industry of corp like four million people you're bowling bowling leagues, but it's down from whatever ten million used to be, But the number of people who bowl recreationally is up higher. You just bowling has been reinvented.

So how you actually connect professional bowling into that world where you have a lot of casual bowlers, but you don't have as many sort of league bowls who identify with bowling as their sport. Sort of an interesting thing to do. But what we've managed to, you know, the p b A, we've been on, We've had a long run on ESPN. We're just moving to uh Fox. I think that kind announced. I hope I'm not jumping the

gun on that one. I don't think I am uh and uh and so I think we're gonna have a good you know, next next run with the bowling um And it's a it's it's a funding. I only get to like one or two tournaments a year. I wish I get to more of but I have a pretty busy day job in between that and family. Okay, so you're into two thousand. There's a steria revolution in the music business, and abster you have real networks, you ultimately decide to go in that business, right, What is your

thinking there? Well, I believe that the end of the day there would be a legal streaming industry. I didn't know all the fits and starts in the twist of the road, but I had the belief that all this illegal uh you know, uh pirate stuff was going to be a phase the industry would go through and the industry would figure it out. So I started having conversations with people the music industry about this as early as

like ninety five. I remember meeting Charlie Koppelman, who was when he was running a M. I remember meeting, you know, senior folks UH in UH multiple labels. Nothing really came with those discussions. I remember, you know, having a conversation with Al Teller, who was running MC at the time, and we're in the middle of the conversation and then um uh then Edgar Brompan bought m C A and it was clear there's gonna be a new sheriff in town. So that there's a lot of a lot of that

happened a few times. So then um what happened was UH sony UH and Universal decided to come together to create a joint venture that ended up being first was called Duet and it'd be called press called press Play, and UM we talked to them about using our technology and they kind of wanted to build their own, so we put together a coalition of the three other UH majors at the time, but there was E M I Bertlesman,

causin Ian BMG hadn't merged yet. UH and Warner and we also had a O L in there because it was after the all time Warner and we created a joint venture called music Net and it was basically it was the other three majors and they had the two majors, so the two biggest so UH they had about forty percent of the content. We had about forty percent. There was about there were indies that were licensed to both

and it was clear that that wasn't gonna work. It was just one of the series of tactical maneuvers to create UM UH an opening for everything to get licensed everybody and UM and so then what happened was there was a little company UH that product called Rhapsody. The product was called Listen to Coming Listen dot Com. And they ended up being like the Checkpoint Charlie of if you remember the in the Cold War that exchanged prisoners, Checkpoint Charlie and Berlin right the line between East Berlin

and West Berlin, and Rhapsody was the Checkpoint Charlie. And that they were the first company that all five majors would license to because they wouldn't they didn't license to each other yet because the lawyers were freaked out about that. But by creating sort of standard licenses that Rhapsody could have, Rhapsody became the first company that had licenses from all five majors. At the time we owned of music Net and A During fence with the labels and the board

meetings were the most painful things. They were like the u N in terms of like everyone shows up with all these lawyers. The lawyers are making sure there's no ended trust collusion. Meanwhile nothing gets done. So uh. So we had an opportunity to basically to buy Rhapsody because they were running out of money. Uh, and we believed in the space, so we basically bought Rhapsody and sold our stake in music Net. So we sort of switched

horses until the license got cleared. And then basically at the time we bought raps and you had fifty subscribers or something, and then we wrote it up as our vehicle. Uh and you know it's still going. We actually merged with Napster and now we use the name Napster. We got you know, to an appallion subscribers whatever it is. Uh. We are we're uh we've resized the staff so it generates, so it's even a positive. But we're obviously we're not

Spotify and we're not Apple. So there were so many lessons there which we can talk about about why that ended up. You know, we still have a business that's got you know, uh, it's you know, if you if you step back from the you know, from Spotify and obviously Apple were the largest, uh independent company in the space, but you know, a huge order of magnitude lower than than the two big guys, and you know where that goes is an interesting question. But learned a lot of

things along the way. So isn't the real business being a white labeled service now licensing your technology the third party? Uh? So the Naster business is a combination of white label and co branded. It depends what partners want. So like for instance, the case of I Heart Radio, I heard music and we power there on demand. I Heart wants to be the brand and it says powered by Napster,

but you don't necessarie it prominently. Some our other partners use an Abster brand more prominently like and uh and so it just depends. Like in Brazil, uh, we have Vivo Music. Uh, it was the largest whereless carrying Brazil, powered by Napster. Uh So we use different brands and different parts of the world. We have a director consumer business, but it's it's not it's the minority of the business. It's no longer the main business. So you ultimately walk

away from real networks to become a VC. What's the thinking there, Well, well, these things always, these life changes always happen through accombination of personal reasons and professional reasons. I have three fantastic kids, twins who are almost twelve, and the little guy called little Guy is almost eight. Um Um, I've said this publicly, so I'm not speaking at the school. In their mom Oh I'm still get

along with very well, had really bad postpart and depression. Um. Like you know, she wanted kids every but as much as I did, and she is a fantastic mom, but she went through a really rough period. So my switching gears and focusing on being a dad for about three years was one of the best things I ever did

in my life. It probably wasn't the best thing for Real Networks because the we tried to other people into the company who were kind of like the drummer and spinal tap unfortunately if that's the music ANALYSI people know. But it was appropriate for me personally to to really go deep in in family. And my kids are doing great, uh great partner, Uh, my ex is doing super well. The kids go back and forth in the two and I don't know that we could have gotten there if

I had stayed, you know, full time. A real networks the whole way through. And did you I mean, were you in basically a house dad or were you a VC during that period? So I was this thing called a venture partner, which I it's a little bit like the p massuseatists I wrote on on economists. Um, if you want to be a VC, or think if you think you might want to be a VC, if you go be a venture partner at a firm, you learn

a lot. So Excel is an incredible firm. You know they invested you know I mentioned us, but they Facebook is probably their signature huge investment. They've had many other successes over the years. You can go look at their website. Um. And so what I would do is I would go down to board to partner meetings once or twice a month, and I would KiB its uh and give them feedback.

I probably made three or four investments with them. I probably made, you know, in the period when I was actually investing, I probably made fifty investments, UM, maybe a quarter of them with Excel on a quarter of them either on my own or with other venture enities. I ended up deciding that I'm not wired to be a good VC. UM. I like angel investing, which is very

different than a VC. But when you're a VC, uh, it's this weird mix of you've got a partner partnership, you are running shared money, but you're each individual responsible for a deal. And if the chemistry is great with the partners, I'm sure it can be great, but it's very easy for these partnerships to fracture, depending on like you know, which deals work, which deals don't work, who gets credit for them, who doesn't get credit for them?

And Uh. To me, I'm much I much prefer to do individual angel investing, which I do very little of nowadays because I'm too busy. I do a little bit of it. Uh. I prefer that to being part of a professional venture fund. But I only know that because I spent a couple of years sort of sitting around the table with the Excel guys as they did their thing. So at this late date, what are the main products of Real Networks and where's the company going. So Real

Networks has four major growth initiatives going forward. Um and you can say it's a late date, but for some of these initiatives is actually super early. Um we one is a consumer initiative that's actually in the games business. We we had a games business that we spun up in the nineties. Uh. It did well for a while and then it lay follow and then I brought back to the entrepreneurs that helped create the European business. It's

called game House. It's actually East in the Netherlands, and it's at the intersection of of casual gameplay and storytelling. So we have now about two dozen of what we call these game House original stories, and we're in the process of launching a subscription product around them. We for the first couple years, we didn't have enough to make a subscription, so we sold them individually, built a decent business on it. It's about it's about million dollar business

something like that. But now with subscriptions, were pretty optimistic that we can grow it significantly. And the team doing that kind of rut Computers and Rakusen's are the two guys who are in a jointly. They're fantastic entrepreneurs. They're uh, they kind of both do both, but Eric is more of the creative spark and Rutgerry is more of the business guy. Although they both do both and they probably um blanched my pigeonholing him in that way, but they

work together collaboratively. They do a fantastic job. I love working with them, and Uh in that business, I think I'm very optimistic about its future as a subscription business. Then we have three B two B products, which is something real has always had a foot in. Both we make technology, we love consumers. Um. The one that when I said, remember China, the one that's the most obscure, but it's true, is we have a robust business of

licensing video compression technology in China. Uh and uh we when I came back, it was clear that what happened is and I'll explain why when Microsoft displaced us with this thing I told you about where they got to PC manufacturers and they say you only have to pay us sixty dollars per windows if you do what we say a hundred dollars. Otherwise, the Chinese manufacturers companies like Legend which became Lenovo, or a great Wall or some

of these others. They basically told Microsoft, you know, I only shipped a hundred thousand PCs this year, here's your money. And when Microsoft said, no, we think you shift a million, They're like, you know, maybe only ship fifty. So so the Microsoft had less leverage in the Chinese market circuit two thousand to use this tactic of using their marketing car program to push us out of the market. So

we never got displaced in the Chinese market. So our video format, which is called r M v B continuous to be very popular. So about three years ago three four years ago, I spot up a team where commissioned the team to spun up to build a next generation video technology. We put half the R and D team in Seattle, half in Beijing, and we have a next generation video technology called r MHD that is doing very

well in China. We have a partnership with one of the three largest broadcasters in China called c I the end UH their affiliate just launched uh in uh in the in the first phase of of launch in China. So that business is going to do very well basically licensing video technology. That's next generation technology. It's better than the next generation m PEG. It's very competitive with the best in the world. Whether we bring that technology from

China the rest of the world, we'll see. It's something we want to do, but we've got to get into the chip sets. We've got to build out the infrastructure first. So those are two businesses. The third business is actually very obscure, but it's very interesting. It's around messaging. UH. Do you know how much like robotcalling and spam you're

getting on your phone. Uh. We built a product called Context that's designed to cut down on TECHT spamming and then also providing a way for message UH providers to classify their messages to basically create more structure on them a lot of stuff that's done an email and not done in texting. The reason we've gotten that business is we have a related business that is the powers what's called inter carry messaging. So if you're on Verizon on an A, T and T and I send you a text,

it goes over our inter carry messaging software. So we have the software that is the highly reliable but invisible layer that about a billion and a half message today travel over. So that team used that expertise to build this next product, which is called Context and that's just rolling out. And then the fourth, which may be the coolest of them all, is a computer vision platform called real c V, which leverages all of our expertise and

video technology to do phenomenal face recognition. We haven't yet described what markets are going after that, but we've got some fantastic ideas that we think are gonna go are gonna make people really happy to have computer based face recognition be applied, not in creepy situations, but in situations where it's actually good for society to have people know who's who. Okay, you're also very heavenly political. If one

follows your Twitter feed, most of it is politics. You invested in Air America, So what was your thinking of

the Air America and where are you relative to politics today? Well, so the reason I got involved in America, and that goes back over a decade, UH is UH I was very frustrated by the rise of UH Fox News and the the right media right that there was no longer UH any kind of There was not any kind of balance because you had the mainstream media which is very much covers the horse rays tries to have journalistic ethics, etcetera.

And then you had Fox operating as kind of a right word magnet that was not operating within journalistic bounds in my view even back then, but was sort of being uh like talk radio and television. Uh also had a lot of right wing talk radio. So the question was why can't why why can't there be a progressive

alternative just to rebalance society. So I got to know, uh, somebody who may talk about in a minute, Al Franken Uh through some people I knew, uh, and Al got was interested in getting involved in this fledgling in Gold America, and he asked me for advice, and I said, well, all, I think you should do it. I think it's gonna

I think you'll be fantastic. You know, Al had already uh you know, he'd done Saturdayright Live, he'd written some books that were very compelling, and I thought, Alex somebody who could could really have a big impact. Um and uh, but I said, I don't know about the people that the people are backing yet. I don't know if it's the resources anyway, So through Al I allowed myself to get sucked in and became for a while the chairman of this thing. Um. And it was very it was

financially not very robust. Uh it was. But we you know, there's this there's this old expression, right, you know, the patient operations was successful, but the patient died. Um. That's kind of like what happened with Their America because through Air America we created something that had critical mass around progressive media. Rachel Maddow came from Air America. She was one of our up and coming stars. Uh. And and

obviously Al played a huge role in it. Uh. You know you you there are there are There are a few other folks that are less famous that came up to the ranks there. The whole way MSNBC started came out of the um, the sort of the ashes, if you will, of Air America. So it was not a good use of capital from the standpoint of making money, but I kind of knew that. But I think it did play a catalytic roll. Um. It took a while, uh in two thousand fours when it started, it didn't

move the meter enough to change the outcome there. But over time I think we do have more you know, be it Huving to Post, be it, the MSNBC more outlets that are that give voice to progressive ideas and value. So I'm not involved it anymore, but I'm glad I did it, even though it was from a cash on cash standpoint, is a bad investment. Okay, So the big issue today and technology is privacy. So what's your a point on what's going on there with privacy and data? Uh?

I think that the reckoning that's happening now is important and has to happen. I think that, uh remember Facebook's used to have their slogan move fast and break stuff. UM, I don't think they meant to break democracy, but I think that's largely what happened. Uh And and and it

happened because it became too easy for bad actors. Probably Cambridge Analytics could be one of those bad actors, uh to scoop up huge amounts of data on people UH that that can be used to uh both target uh them and influence them uh in all kinds of pernicious ways. And so so from my standpoint, we need to have much more rigorous uh laws and enforcement of those laws

around data privacy. Uh. And and you know, for instance, this this new European Ladge GDPR, which I think it becomes effective like amount a month from now, I think the middle end of May. I think it's a huge step forward in the right direction. What I'm seeing is a lot of companies are actually used because Europe is such a big part of their business. Whatever policies they're putting in place for um uh for Europe, they're putting

in place globally. But I think the U s should should have its own GDPR law not rely on the Europeans, right, you know, we would We wouldn't say, well, the Europeans are taken care of air traffic safety, we don't need our own air traffic safety standards. Of course we do, and maybe they'll be the same as Europe, maybe they'll be a little different or something, but we should have our own equivalent GDPR in the US. Absolutely agree with that in terms of what it would mean in practice.

I still think most people would would be willing to uh use these social media services uh and would use the ad supported versions of them. The approach that I've taken is I don't think I've had I think every post I've ever posted on Facebook, I've basically put Twitter Twitter rolls on it. I assume that it's public because my assumption is anything I post, if I share it with fifty friends, I've shared it with the world anyway.

So I don't post pictures of my kids on social media just as a matter of personal preference, personal truth, and privacy. If I want to send pictures of my kids, I email to my friends and I trust that they're not gonna you know, Poston social media. Um, anything I post publicly assume you know, I'm gonna have to live with it twenty years from now. If I said something obnoxious about Trump, and you know, Trump gets to know

about prize or something, gonna have to eat crow, that's possible. Um, But but I you know, it's uh, my my assumption was and with this anything. So my daughter is now eleven, UM, and she rides a school bus because she now goes to a Catholic girls school that she has to take a bus to go to. UM and uh, it's fantastical, great for her. But now she needed a phone. So she was like, well, Dad, can I have an iPhone?

She's eleven years old. I said no, So I got her a five year old LG flip phone with a text keep word when you can buy an eBay by the way, um, And she's mad at me about this. This is like, this is like the biggest like and so she she's like, Dad, all my friends have iPhones. And I said, what about Andy's daughter? And he's a guy worked with a Microsoft, and I know that Andy is also vigilant about this stuff. And she said, well, Andy's dad won't even let his Naomi get a flip

phone for two more years. And I said, why don't we go to lunch with Andy and his daughter and talk about this? And I said, no, no no, Dad, we don't need to do that. So my point is that a lot of what makes how to make social media healthy for kids and not unhealthy is actually parents understanding that there are choices. The choice isn't give him an iPhone or not. You know, yeah, you gotta go to let your way to find a five year old flip phone.

But it works just fine. She can text and call us, which is all at the age of eleven I want her to do. When she's thirteen. I'm sure she'll have an iPhone. We'll probably have policies on you know that

she has to show us all of her text. I'm sure she'll get around them in some ways, but it to me, Um, the pernicioners of social media comes with the interaction between the fact that most people don't understand what this stuff is and the fact that the large scale companies running it we're too willing to take advantage of that naivete. So I don't think the solution is no social media. I think the solution is better regulation

and better education. We'll plause here for a brief moment and get right back to CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer. As you know, I'm a writer and you can read my work at left sets dot com. In addition of reading my commentary on music tech in the world at large. There'll be the first to find out when we've published a new podcast. Go to left sets dot com and sign up for the news left Now More with CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer, recorded live with the Music

Media Summit in Santa Barbara, California. Okay, it's time for question and from the audience, raise your hand. Jim has a microphone, and please talk into the microphone and ask a question as opposed to the basic a statement. Okay, before the first question, Um, quick story. So, when we were about to reach out to um Rob about coming here, I spelled his name with a Z and I get this note from Bob, you know, chastising me, like, dude, you've got to spell people's names correctly if you're gonna.

And so then Rob gets here today and and uh looks at his name tag and it has two essays. So I have to apologize for that and take ownership of it. And I don't know how it happened. Well, I'll tell you a story about my daughter, which um since I don't show a pictures of the internet. So her name is Eva E v A. And it turns out that in the current generation that's a moderately popular in but apparently because of Reef Witherspoon, Ava a Via is like one of the five most popular girl names.

So about five years ago, when she was six years old, she goes through T S A and the T S A guy looks at her and says Ava Glazer, and she looks back at him. T s A guy you know she doesn't know, noting its assassin, she says, actually it's Eva, and the T S A Gui apparently isn't used to being sassed by six year old kids. Uh hands her back the passport and in a kind of exaggerated way says, excuse me, Eva, And then her reply is, actually it's a common mistake. So it's actually a common mistake.

I have a couple of technical questions, So tracking all the video technology but you've been doing since where do you where do you think the technology is moving with like AI and like fake app and all that stuff that's going on, and how big a problem is that going to be? And then following up on that with AI and the Sergey brand founder's letter about saying responsibilities in AI? Where you see AI and what's your feeling

on that? Well, the first one is easier than the second one because the second one is like so open ended, you know, you get to the you know, the Elon Mesk debates with everybody that stuff and Sergey Uh. So there's gonna be a really interesting convergence in the next five years between uh C g UH computer graphics and natural video. We already see it today with augmented reality

because you think about what it augumented reality is. It's it's reality where you take a video and you superimpose in some way something that looks very lifelike that is not actually in the scene, and so augmented reality is incredibly powerful, you know, with lots of utility for it, but also means that you can no longer trust the authenticity of an image or an experience. Uh. And that's

been going from for a while. I mean people have been uh, you know, retouching photos for years, you know, the whole You can argue that you know, uh, you know, People Magazine and the like are our pure examples of the fact you can't trust to photograph, uh, you know, where the images they show of people looking for more itiful than they ever could look or have looked. But it's gonna get worse, and it's gonna apply to video.

I think we'll probably have to come up with some authentication techniques on video that involve some combination of triangulation

and water marking. And by triangulation, I mean literally when you get the same image with the same time code from multiple cameras and multiple advantage points, and then you you have those water marked by some kind of trust authority, so you know that that's the image of what really happened and the uh and that's that whole how you create um trust authorities that people respect for factual things.

Is a huge problem you have already in in you know, in text and quote unquote fake news, and it's gonna get even worse as this uh, you know, connection between computer generated video and natural video gets deeper and deeper.

But hopefully we'll solve that problem because you know, and and we're living in weird times, right because at the same time, there's all this forensic stuff that gets that that gets done, like the Golden a killer got caught because of consumer DNA websites that were used by law enforcement to track relatives of the guy. So that's a case where data was used to solve a crime. Um that where you actually were able to combine gumshoe work

with data. And you know, he'll go to a trial and you know, he's guilty, instantly proven guilty, but it sounds like he's probably the guy. Uh, And they got him through science that authentically figured out who he was based on you know, DNA from thirty years ago they got put in a vault somewhere. So there's cross currents here.

But I do think for video, we're going to have to create strategies for validating authentic video rather than just looks realistic to me, because sometimes it might be just a brilliant fake. On the second point about ai UH, there's no question that there are certain categories of jobs that will be massively disrupted by a i UH. Like

let's take like a radiologist, for instance. The best radiologists can find things that that mediocre radiologists can't find, and the best AI system can probably find things that the best radiologists can't find. Is that good for society? Yes, it's good to have better radiology. Is it good for radiologists? Probably the best ones will still do fine. Probably the mediocre ones will will find that in their job being outsourced to India, the job got outsourced to a computer.

So there's gonna be economic disruption around from AI, for sure. I don't know that. I take the view that you know we're gonna have the problem that you had in two thousand one with how where they're going to take over. I think that's a little bit of a stretch. But I think the economic disruption that's going to come from AI is gonna be huge. Um, But I think it takes longer than you think. Like, for instance, I'm personally

quite bearish on self driving cars. I think it's not gonna be self driving cars as a phenomenon replacing taxi drivers. Uh won't happen uh before Let's say, um, and that's a bearer's few compared to some. There'll be scenarios where augmentation is good, Like, for instance, you're driving and you start to fall asleep. It'll save a bunch of lives

in that case. Uh, that's a good thing. Um, Somewhat somewhat that will be maybe because it notices your braiding pattern and it wakes you up by by you know, giving you a little bit of shake. Maybe it'll be because it prevents you from u steering into a rail and then it wakes you up. But pure that's augmentation. So I'm bullish on that big picture. I'm a technology optimist. I mean I called uh my company Progressive Networks before we ended up changing the real networks foundation is the

Glazer Progress Foundation. I believe in the idea of progress, but I don't think it's an unguided missile. I think you've got to make very conscious social choices on how you use the technology. Question over here, Um, two things. One is recently on I think it was on CNN. They were showing some augmented video of Obama and but they were interviewing a company that actually has software to detect that. So maybe there's a future with those companies

and embedding their software. But secondly, I don't know if anyone else has this question, But you worked for Microsoft all those years when you had to deal with them um trying to basically bury you, didn't you at any point reach out to them and see if we could make a deal? Or because I didn't, hang I did I skipped over that story. I mean, Bob asked amazing questions, but you can only cover so much stuff. So in

what happened in ninety and remember the years, right? So uh in nine seven we came out with real real video and then uh uh later that year or was it, we heard that Microsoft was about to buy our biggest competitor, coming called the Extreme. Uh, and so we we went to Microsoft. We said, rather than buying the Extreme, why don't we do a deal with you? And so we

did a licensing deal. When we sold Microsoft ten percent of our company, licensed them our technology, gave them an opportunity to buy another ten percent of our company and gave it comortunity buy another license to US in order to create a counter common roadmap. And that was the deal done in good faith with the very senior people to Microsoft. What happened then was just one of those unfortunate things, and we had a plan B for it.

But what happened was Microsoft gave the responsibility of that deal to the guys whose job previously was to compete with us, and they hated our guts UM, and so they did everything they could to try to put us out of business by they took the software, the license from US and they gave it away for free, trying to create our server business UM. And we got around that by coming out with a new version of the product three months later than meant they were giving away

day old milk for free UM. And so there was a lot of back and forth and maneuvering. UH. We took a shot at trying to be aligned with them. We meant it sincerely. We weren't time, We were not trying to get into the PC operating system business. We weren't trying to be a hostile competitor. There's but we didn't We did not manage to UH get the team that received the deal licensing deal to feel good about it. That's life. So we took our best shot at trying

to trying to stay a line with them. Uh. And then years later, we actually didn't end up initiating the lawsuit until three or four years later because I kind of wanted us to stabilize the company. And you know, with these suits workers, you can look back three or four years. So we waited until we were stable and we're still in a look back period, and that's when we started the lawsuit and we settled the lawsuit. I sat down with Gates and we negotiated the final negotiation.

Some very senior people on both sides were involved, so we ended up settling without going to court. Uh. We we started in court, we didn't finish in court. Um we Uh. We settled, you know, a year or two into the lawsuit. Uh, and got a good outcome and

moved on. Okay, any Jim, you have the microphone? Okay? Hi? UM, My name is Vicky Nahman and I actually worked at music Net back in the day and uh, just as side anecdote, one of the first meetings I had was with Warner Music wanting to license US tracks at four dollars and d five cents wholesale, and that that was a yeah, that was a point where I thought, Okay,

this is going to take a while. UM. But my question for you is is in there's a school of thought that there's only one Apple, there's only one Google, there's only one Facebook. UM. In music, do you what are your thoughts about there's only one Spotify, there's only one streaming service? Um. Right now we have a commoditization of all of the catalogs and I'm just interested in what your view is in in the landscape for music. Well,

I would say the following. Uh, Spotify has done an incredible job and a huge respect for Daniel and folks like Toroy with her yesterday, what they've done, they were able to succeed in a particular context and maybe useful for this group to explain that. I thought maybe Bob would ask about this. Spotify I was able to get to scale because they started in Europe for a very particular reason. So we uh, we launched in the US between US which was rapture at the time, Napster, a

few others, we had over a million subscribe verse. We we did a teeny bit of every in Europe, but not a much much. In the early days, Europe was very expensive because you had a license, county, back country, and of course every country has its own repertoire, where sixtiescent of the repertoire in most countries is local language, local culture. So it was much more expensive to launch in Europe at the time that Spotify launched Europe. If you guys had a million paid subscribers Europe, maybe at

a hundred thousand, it was tiny. So Spotify was able to go to the majors and get a much more flexible deal for their free to premium, for their freemu offer than we could never get in the US. We begged the labels for that deal. The best deal we can get from the U S labels was what we called rapswenty five, which was a non subscriber could listen to twenty five streams a month and then we have

to pay. And that turned out maybe we were allows you marketers, but I think that was much harder to market than the than the than the Spotify pre product. So Spotify launched and got two critical mass in Europe with a free offer that was much much more robust than any free offer that that we were able to

get the U S labels too right now. Then Spotify came to the US and Spotify already had the momentum of Europe and they basically said to the majors, we want to do the same deal in the US, and it took two years to get the deal done because the major's kept saying no. Finally, Daniel raised a hundred million dollars, basically paid it to the labels and he got a pretty similar form of that deal. Good for him,

incredible for him. But that's a huge reason why Spotify became the king of the industry was because it had the bootstrap in Europe and by the time it got into the US, it had the financial structure to raise a hundred million dollars like a billion dollar valuation or something. So as tempers in the company ended up, obviously, they've they've created a lot of economic values since then. They don't they know the cash flow yet, but they have the economic value in terms of what happens next UH

visa to be Spotify and the labels. I think the big question is what happens to the current day tont right Spotify, it's been widely reported. I have no proprietary information on this. Has contractually agreed they're not going to be a labeled right, so they they can only go so far. They can negotiate margins, try and get more profitability, but at the end of the day, their their biggest power as a distributor is to leverage that into being

a label. And how that plays out is to me, the unwritten story of the next five years, which is real Universal and Sony and and and Warner, which are the three big labels and that control a huge amount of catalog end up getting um uh, I don't know what the right world would be uh squeezed by Spotify needing to have more control of repertoire. Now Spotify has tried to branch out video, trying to branch out of Jason areas, but in so far Spotify stays an independent company.

They have to make a move like that somehow sometime in the next five years, uh, or they're ultimately their model is going to be compromised unless they sell to somebody else. That's a massive scale. So you know, there's all these things that haven't played out yet. If I knew the answer to that question, I know the answer

to your question, which is what happens next? Right, you know, you've got Spotify have any million change whatever numbatory I told you yesterday, Apple at forty and change or whatever their lettuce number is, uh, and then you know everybody

is much much lower than that. Amazon a sort of a wild card because they have a hundred million prime users and they've got a catalog, you know, mediocre product for them, and then they've got a premium product that has many, many fewer users, but it's it's very stratified. And if I were a major, I would view that as a very very dangerous, unstable place to be for the reason that I just described. So if I was

a major, I'd be doing everything it could. It's ethnically legal to make sure there are three or four other scale competitors so that when Spotify comes to you for the next renewal cycle and wants to jam, you wants to get out of this, we can't be a labeled through whatever. You'd have the ability to walk away. But if there's a certain point, if Spotify is half of the major's revenue, that's going to be unbelievably hard for

them to do. And we're getting to that point. I don't know what the math is today, but Spotify is obviously a majority there streaming revenue, and streaming is a majority of their revenue, so it doesn't take to more much for Spotify'd literally be a majority of their revenue the whole, in which case the labels, you know, the power Dinamic and shift. So if I were a label, I would be trying to encourage as many people as

possible to create as much diversity as possible. We have that conversation we meaning Napster with Sony, with Warner, with Universal. They get it, but then there's a question of how you activate it. Okay, Uh, but I'm aware of your interest in what's happened and what happened in VSA V Russia and uh their involvement in our elections. Uh looking forward to what do you anticipate the things that uh we ought to be, you know, looking out for an

anticipating vs V their chicanery. Uh well, I'll explain what you what you said for the post. So in the summer of sixteen, I started a website called putin Trump dot org um. And it's not because I have a

crystal ball. Uh, It's because I was just pattern matching, which is one of the things that I do right, and it was clear to me that there was something really weird happening when the Republican convence and soften in their in their um, you know, in their uh, their platform, they softened their program to be anti Ukraine and pro Russia, whereas the Republican Party had been the hardercore ones, particularly when Mitt Romney is running the hardercore anti Russia party.

So there was something weird going on there. There's all this stuff about uh, you know, all of the uh, the money laundering ish things that happened with high end real estate and Trump that has been reported on UH. And I didn't know anything about tapes of of of random things that happened in Moscow, any of that stuff.

I didn't know anything about the I heard rumors about the what what ended up, uh you know, uh being the Steel Documents steal dossier in the fall of sixteen after we launched the website, but I didn't anything about it at the time we launched it. UM. But it was clear that there was something weird going on here, and I wanted to just shine a light on it. So we created a website. UH didn't put a huge amount of money behind it, but publicized it a bit,

got some attention for it. But at the end of the day, UH, there were so many other massive trends that were driving the election of Trump over Hillary. Looking to do thousand eighteen, there's no question in my mind that there is going to be a lot of of of effort by the Russian government to influence the elections

where they can. They're gonna have one disadvantage relative to sixteen, which is there's not you can't write the same national, national fake news and fake social media postings that you couldn't do thousand sixteen. A because hopefully the facebooks and the twitters of the World War vigilant and be because it won't be one national issue. What what wins that swing state congressional district in Ohio will be specific to

two Ohio candidates. The most of us have ever heard of the same thing, So it'll be district by district. But I do think that who wins Congress in ten is the binary issue for the next two years. You know, if Democrats win control of the House representatives, they're gonna be robust UH hearings. UH there's gonna be a robust process, and I think it's highly likely than Trump will be impeached. Now, the Democrats are afraid to say that because they don't properly.

I think they don't want to make it sound like they're not going to be data driven. I say that because I think that what the data would expose between the Muller axis UM and the uh, you know, the Michael Cohen sleazy stuff and who knows what else, is that Trump has committed a series of acts that are impeachable offenses. But we have we don't have all the data yet, we only we have certain things that are suggestive of that. But I think when we get the data,

we'll see what happens. My personal belief is when we get the data, it will demonstrate the need to impeach him, and that that should then happen. Then there's no question would be what happens in the Senate and does Trump cave then or does he stay in fight. Different people of different views of that. I don't think it's a foreker conclusion either way. If you study seventy three seventy four, UM, you know it was the smoking gun tapes that ultimately

cause Republic in the Senate to flip and made Nixon resigned. Whereas, of course in in in nine with the Lewinsky stuff, Uh, it was an idea stuff. It was clear that Clinton had perjured himself over a blowjob, which was wrong. I think you can have an interesting debate about whether that's

an apeche of offense or not. But I don't. I think the Democrats didn't feel under political pressure to call it in a petual offense, and therefore he finished his termat So I don't know how it's going to go beyond that, but I think the eighteen election will be the uh, you know, the limit. If the Democrats don't win the House an eighteen, we'll just have two more years like the last two years, the less year and

a half. Okay. I have another political minded question, and that's if there if the right has uh media and they have media scale with Fox News, and then they have the biggest you know, tweeter of all time that's really dominating the headlines. Based on your experience with Air America, Um, what can the left do to create a media engine, communications strategy move forward that can rival what the right is doing at scale and to communicate what the demos

about or what the left represents. And then also how does that intersect with technology? Is it like what the crooked media guys are doing, but just at scale. And if you were to say I'm gonna I'm gonna launch you America for what would that company look like and what would that communication strategy be? Well, UM, I have

thought about conceptually, but not operationally, what it would be. UM. I think it actually if you look at the fact that Trump's popularity is still below UM, I think it's all about marshaling electoral critical mass from people who want our country to work where it's supposed to work. So I don't think the right thing to do is to fight UM their boisterous UH propaganda and UH name calling

and frequently lies with the same. I think the right thing to do is to appeal to anybody that thinks that our democracy is too important to allow truths to become a subjective thing, that our societal cohesion is too important to allow uh facts to be irrelevant. And if you just say, look, this is just about what the facts are, right, you know, climate change, there's there's an incoutabal scientific consensus around this. That's a fact. Um. The

the data on what weather is happening. That's a fact. And yes, it's unfortunate for people in the abstract, in the extractive industries that those facts are there, but those are facts. So I think if we just literally um stick to the facts and being unyielding about raising those facts in the space, in the face of name calling, in the face of about hominem attacks, in the face of whatever else, I think that's the greatest chance to restore some balance to the political discourse and to the

text and balances. I mean the big tragedy of TWI sixteen West and just Trump's election, but the fact that one of the one of the other branches of government's supposed to be a check and balance has completely abdicated that responsibility. And it's advocate the responsibility because the politics for the for Republicans are that they feel like if they don't, they'll get primary and they'll lose, and if

they do, they'll get to keep playing ball. So that's it's unfortunate that that that is the dynamic we have. But the only solution to that dynamic is to is to not have them being the have the levels of power. And to do that we've got to persuade a lot of independence that that change has to happen. And if we do that, then I think that will build on itself. Okay, rights, The question was about music and VR. Um. I am mediu embarrassed on VR because the ergonomics of using a

VR headset and an experience are not Uh. It's so immersive that it is not doesn't fit in a wide enough swatch of life. Everyone got excited about three D because you could go to watch James Cameron movie in a movie theater, but that's an intended immersive experience where for two hours you're focusing on you're going to a location, you're watching it home. Three D didn't work because people don't watch glass put glasses on to watch movies at

home because they're watching in such a range of different ways. So, you know, and lets until you have the equivalent of direct view VR. Uh, I think it's going to be a more of a niche thing, uh than than people realize. So do I think that? Um? Uh? There are ways to do much more immersive experiences with live music shows. Absolutely, and you know there's a there's there's lots of different uh techniques for doing that. Do I think people are gonna put VR headsets on to watch concerts. It makes

for a great demo. But know, the headset fatigue thing is a real phenomenon, and uh, you know, the the ergonomics of using these devices have to be uh compelling.

Uh and uh you know I I one of one of the Angel investments that I've done that I'm proudest in the last couple of years is a company called Control Labs, which Stephen Lee wrote the nice write up of in Wired magazine to bringian kind of Thomas Weird, who I've known for for many years, and his his his band of of neurobiologists, and they've created a technology letch of an arm band that you basically think of it as like an Apple Watch or a you know,

a next generation fitbit where the Apple where the band can can literally detect individual electron signals, uh, neurological signals from your brain to your fingers, so you it can tell what you're doing here with your individual fingers with a band that sits under wrist something like that, where the technology is not in base, you don't have to

wear a big data glove. I think it's going a huge import for the input side of all this this a r VR staff and we need the equivalent of the output side of that where you can get an immersive experience without having to wear an immersive headset. And I think I think the a R plus path is probably a better path for achieving that in my view than the than the immersive headset experience, which make for incredible demos, but I don't think people really want to

be in those. Thank gear for that long. Okay, let that be a lesson. You don't have to be limited to one vertical Rob as we've owned the Pro Bowlers tour is involved in music, technology and politics. Thanks so much for being here and sharing your ideas of the audiences. That wraps up this week's episode of the Bob left Sets podcast, recorded live at the Music Media Summit in

Santa Barbara, California and produced by tune In. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with CEO of Real Networks, Rob Glazer and his interactions with Asia and his history with Bill Gates and micro us off. What did you think of the interview? Emailed me at Bob at left Sex dot com. Until next time, I'm Bob left Sex. Can think of and me reas don't know exactly why must be its out of theseas