[Unedited Transcript]
Paul Ford: [00:00:00] Richard,
Rich Ziade: I believe in competition.
Paul Ford: great. That’s a good place to start. Uh, you just showed me a video of a man falling down on a rock. It’s pretty exciting. He was proposing to his wife and then he slipped and fell. We watched it about 25 times.
Rich Ziade: been, I’ve stood on that mossy rock.
Paul Ford: Yeah, no, it’s just, it’s just, if people think we’re here, like, strategizing about software all day,
Rich Ziade: We watched it again and again, because he kind of bounced
Paul Ford: we’re, we’re essentially just chimpanzees looking at other chimpanzees across the lake.
Rich Ziade: Right. Yeah,
Paul Ford: That’s us, that’s, that’s who we are. So look, um, last week we recorded a podcast in a hurry. It sounds like a product, like should have a trademark after it.
Um, and, uh, and we were talking about Google and antitrust and you’d read a bunch about it. And then, um, there, the news broke that like they’d settled something, but it turns out they hadn’t settled everything. And we should actually go back to that and talk about it cause it’s big doings.
Rich Ziade: Mm
Paul Ford: And I really don’t know what’s [00:01:00] going on.
So you’re going to tell me things. I’m going to ask you questions like an idiot, which is what I am in this situation. Google is a company that you can do things with their software, like search for web pages or use email.
And the way they make their money, most of their money, is they put ads. On the pages that result from you doing things with their software. In their browser, like you’re in Chrome and yeah.
Rich Ziade: Google is not just search. Google is a whole world and, um, Google, uh, dominates, uh, essentially the ad market on the internet. That’s what’s alleged here. Um,
Paul Ford: there’s obviously some truth in it. I’ve gone to buy ads and you have like very few choices.
Rich Ziade: I’m going to actually read you [00:02:00] from the Justice
Paul Ford: So the United States Department of Justice.
Rich Ziade: That’s right. Is enforcing, um, essentially the Sherman Act.
Paul Ford: So they’re saying you are a monopoly on online advertising or something
Rich Ziade: You are stifling competition because of your dominant position in a particular industry or sector,
Paul Ford: And Yeah.
Rich Ziade: you cannot do.
Paul Ford: Oh yeah.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, and by the way, this has happened in technology in the past. Microsoft, um, uh, was sued by the Justice Department. IBM, at one point, was sued by the Justice Department. Um, Microsoft, I mean, and if, just to recap Microsoft and what was going on there is, you had, um, Microsoft had an operating system that was utterly dominant.
Windows was the operating system. And because they were dominant, it was nearly impossible for anybody It wasn’t about the
Paul Ford: Yeah. And app for people who were, are, were young at that point. Apple was roughly the [00:03:00] size of Shake Shack at that
Rich Ziade: It was nothing. It was very small. And the issue wasn’t the operating system. Because there wasn’t anybody left to compete with them on the OS. The issue was, if I put out spreadsheet software,
Paul Ford: Mm-hmm.
Rich Ziade: or I put out an internet browser, will Microsoft use its leverage, use its position as the desktop, as the operating system, to essentially…
Stifle and, uh, bully anybody who comes out with, you know, Spreadsheet for you dot, you
Paul Ford: I want to
Rich Ziade: version five.
Paul Ford: some context here though, which is Google from the beginning of it showing a position of real market growth and dominance has consistently had a narrative of like, we’re all in this together,
Rich Ziade: Do no evil.
Paul Ford: do no evil. We have a browser, but it’s an open source browser, et cetera, et cetera.
Microsoft, when it got caught on the carpet, it was like after 20 years of. Nice spreadsheet, buddy. [00:04:00] I’ll be ashamed if somebody broke all your tables. Like, they were brutal!
Rich Ziade: They’re brutal.
Paul Ford: And you know, now we think
Rich Ziade: got very technical too, which for the judge must have been just absolute
Paul Ford: No, but I mean, Bill Gates back in the day, like, now he’s just like, Malaria. Oh, boy. Oh, it’s tough stuff. But back in the day, he was… The most rapacious, unapologetic capitalist ever. And it’s actually a hell of a retrofit because we all had mixed feelings about Windows and, and Microsoft was kind of evil, like just understood to be evil.
If you were on their side, it was like, kind of like I’m on the evil side and that’s cool. I like Windows and playing games. If you were a Linux nerd like me, you’re like, they’re coming to destroy everything and a lot of their products sucked, which didn’t help. So big, many corporate
Rich Ziade: How do you how do you do that? Well, they had
Paul Ford: Last bit is like, I would argue the government was right in that case, right? Like we have a better Microsoft as a result of that slap across the
Rich Ziade: Recapping that history they they the government won for the most part
Paul Ford: Couldn’t put the browser [00:05:00] right. You had to let other browsers in.
Rich Ziade: but on appeal Most of it was overturned. Microsoft overturned, because if you think about what they were really going for, they were essentially saying a little software company that makes spreadsheet software can’t really compete with Microsoft Excel on Windows. You got to keep in mind, there were a lot of shared.
libraries that gave Microsoft enormous competitive advantage. We’re drifting here, but this is actually fascinating. WordPerfect tried to get on Windows and because Microsoft had common libraries that were available to all their software.
Paul Ford: so these are called DLLs, which I’ll go to my grave knowing.
Rich Ziade: They’re called DLLs, but it was like, do I have to rebuild the toolbar from scratch if I already am using one that looks sort of similar on Microsoft Word, which is a word processor, which is a Microsoft Excel? So WordPerfect, poor WordPerfect. I remember I had it, and it would take four times as long to load.
Everything was bespoke because they didn’t have access, effectively, they didn’t have access to the secret sauce that made the [00:06:00] OS
Paul Ford: and if this is, we’re, we’re way down the tunnel now, but like WordPerfect 6 actually had like its own visual environment that would open separately from Windows.
Rich Ziade: was utterly bespoke and it was rough. It was really, really rough. And so what you end up with now with Google is, are they in a position, a dominant position that they can use that position to stifle competition, right?
Paul Ford: So let’s look at what they’ve actually got. They’ve got, you want to go buy, you want to market a product online, and when people go online they either go on social media or they go on Search, kind of one of those two. And so let’s put social media aside. If they’re searching for something, I’m searching for a new house.
I’m searching for CRM software. I’m searching for red shoes. Google, you’re probably going to Google and Google gets to say. Hey, if you are a red shoe seller, I know where all the people looking for red shoes are and I’ll let you meet them, but you’re going to have to pay me some money. And what the government is saying is that they have done this to [00:07:00] the point, there is no other place to do it and they squeeze you and that’s bad for everybody because the consumers now have to like the, the people who do the advertising have to pay so much to Google because it can set the price because there’s not enough competition. And let’s be clear, this is magical because Google gets to make so much money. It’s just pure money. They don’t have to pay, uh, as much as you and I might. Like, you know, they can just print frickin money and that’s why they’re worth so much.
Rich Ziade: Yes, uh, uh, you’re summarizing it actually pretty well. And you’re summarizing something that’s also in the spirit of why lawsuits like this happen. This isn’t about making sure some other tech company… Is able to compete with Google. It’s that if there is one dominant player, then consumers, everyone hurts.
Everyone’s in pain because they can control price. They can control access to
Paul Ford: Well they do, it’s a, it’s a dynamic marketplace where they own the, [00:08:00] they own the whole marketplace.
Rich Ziade: That’s right now, specifically in their case, um, they are concerned with. Um, what is effectively the, Google is an advertising platform. It is not a search engine. The search engine, YouTube,
Paul Ford: It enables, it enables advertising. Yeah.
Rich Ziade: And if you look at the whole picture, there’s a diagram, uh, on the justice. gov
Paul Ford: me, let me describe the diagram for our listeners. Uh, it’s a lot of boxes. Okay, on the left it says sell side inventory and on the right it says buy side demand and there’s a green box that says website publishers and that goes to double click for publishers, there’s an arrow, that’s a Google product, and then there’s an ad exchange and Google, Google ad exchange is the exchange, so like, hey I
Rich Ziade: an auction site,
Paul Ford: and then there’s Google ads.
And it has all these market shares and on the right is advertisers. So what’s interesting here, and at the bottom there’s another thing called Display Video 360. So there’s this [00:09:00] whole marketplace with advertisers on one side and website publishers on the other. And in the middle there’s all these products in the marketplace, but they all have Google logos on them.
Rich Ziade: That’s the
Paul Ford: All right. So that’s our,
Rich Ziade: so, so it, it is, you know, as an advertising platform, Google is not just saying, Hey, I just take money from advertisers and I post them on my products. No, what they are saying is we actually have built, they acquired DoubleClick many
Paul Ford: Many years ago. It was like a big deal.
Rich Ziade: And DoubleClick is the dominant publisher advertising platform.
Most people don’t know
Paul Ford: no, if you, if you go into it, it’s a whole cosmos, but the whole deal of double click is you could say, here is my ad. It’s a rectangle. I’m going to upload it and I want people to click on it and Google would go, we’ll take it from here and we’ll give you’re going to pay us when people click.
Rich Ziade: Let’s say this out loud. Most people don’t know that the banner ads on CNN, on, uh, just about any site, is essentially double click. [00:10:00] Almost all of them. Uh, and so, what you have is, Google is in this funky position of, wait, so, I can actually come up with sell side inventory, billboards, essentially. But I can also control the demand side from the advertiser side.
Paul Ford: a good business right there.
Rich Ziade: beautiful business, right? And so what you have is effectively a locked in ecosystem with Google’s hooks deep in all the way from buy side. I’m Palmolive Dishwashing and I want to advertise on CNN. Oh cool, Palmolive. So I’ll take a cut from your ad posting. Uh, and then I’m gonna, I’m gonna, and then
Paul Ford: Well, we’ve been talking about the advertisers here. We’ve been saying like, you know, they get they get charged the the
Rich Ziade: Google is charging all
Paul Ford: from my point of view The worst thing advertising, you know, I’m all having this getting squeezed I mean, it’s just a green bottle comes the
Rich Ziade: well squeeze it.
Paul Ford: it but like Web, what [00:11:00] happened is the way that this world is set up is all of the so much value accrues back to the platforms.
And so what they want is for the, Google says they really want people to be publishing great stuff online. And then you, you have a little box that’s on the right of your website and you go, put it out there, man. I’d love to make a little money. And Google’s like, not a problem. I’m going to fill it right up for you.
Rich Ziade: exactly.
Paul Ford: And then, but somehow you never quite make enough to keep going. It’s like a one giant company store.
Rich Ziade: It’s, I mean, and that’s what you have here, right? You have effectively Google sitting in the middle of the entire ad market on the internet. Their argument let’s be Google for a second. Their argument is I mean, there’s can you please look over there? There’s a 1 trillion dollar company called Facebook that has its own
Paul Ford: And Amazon actually has a giant ad
Rich Ziade: Amazon has a massive ad platform.
It’s not just a store So, how does Google counter this? They’re gonna say, look at the whole internet, we’re just a piece of it, right? What is the DOJ? There’s Facebook, [00:12:00] there’s Amazon,
Paul Ford: on guys, I know, I know we’re here, but this is a, it’s actually a much larger, more complicated chart in the real world, because you know, it’s 40 percent market share on, but Google is big, like I’m looking at this chart and it is kind of funny how much Google is in the middle of that ecosystem.
Rich Ziade: and the DOJ will be like, I’m not talking about stores and social media. I’m talking about the ad placement industry on the internet, which is a huge industry. You dominate it. If I’m going to put a banner ad anywhere, if I’m going to advertise anywhere, you are running the
Paul Ford: Well, let’s, let’s actually articulate why this is a truly huge deal, which is on one side, you have all of global commerce and its ability to reach customers. Even if you’re a hardcore socialist, you need to like, you look at that and you go like, well, that is how that works. Right? On the other side, you have the fundamental means of communication of news and information to [00:13:00] humans.
From the other humans,
Rich Ziade: That, yes.
Paul Ford: So you got media on one side and all of the economy on the other. And Google, why is Google worth trillions? It’s because
Rich Ziade: Sitting right in the
Paul Ford: is right in the middle. It’s a great
Rich Ziade: It’s sitting right in the middle, yeah.
Paul Ford: And so what you’re, what, what sounds like is happening, it’s all, it always happens with these situations, which is with, with monopoly related stuff. And this is where I kind of want you as a lawyer to explain, right? Like, I think if I’m of a particular political bent, I’m going to look at Google and go, they’re monsters, they’re taking everybody’s pennies and they should go to hell. And if I’m of another bent, I’m going to be like, yeah, right place, right time, great company, Google Maps, like good luck building that chum, right?
Like, it gets into a very gray area. Right? So what, like, help me, because both sides have a good claim here. How do you resolve this?
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I, I think, I think here’s one of the things that’s helpful.
Paul Ford: And what is the risk? [00:14:00] What is the, what would, if the Department of Justice could get everything it wanted, what happens? You now have like 12 Googles, you have Google, little mini Googs?
Rich Ziade: I mean, the ultimate, the nuclear option, if in a successful antitrust case, is you have to break up the company. It literally becomes multiple
Paul Ford: it becomes like, formerly Google Video. It’s just like Verizon used to be part of the Bell system and, you know, yeah.
Rich Ziade: breakup of AT& T into many Babybels and they pretty much cut it up by geography.
Paul Ford: was wild as they did that because, um, AT& T wanted to get into computing and it failed totally. It just never really became
Rich Ziade: terrified everyone though.
Paul Ford: yeah, yeah, and they were like, you just can’t, you can’t have two industries. And so it’s like, well, alright, let’s just do this. Let’s get this done with,
Rich Ziade: Look, I, I think, so that is the nuclear option. I don’t think they’re even seeking that here. I think they’re just seeking, well sometimes they’re seeking gobs of money. Sometimes you could pay, like you could pay and say, I’m gonna do these other things and for all the damage I’ve done, I’m gonna cut you a check, DOJ.
And the DOJ uses that money to like, help other [00:15:00] shitty ad tech companies
Paul Ford: No, I know it doesn’t. There is a giant golden statue of, of Jeff Justice sitting in there.
Rich Ziade: here’s how I look at stuff like this. It’s worth saying out loud, this is not a criminal trial.
Paul Ford: Right, so there’s no like, the Google CEO, the CEO of Google does not go to jail.
Rich Ziade: and also intent, but to take that thought further. You would think there’s a dastardly plan here. There isn’t one. This is what success looks like when it’s taken all the way through. You are going to defend your territory. That’s what you do. And I think with tech, what’s especially interesting about tech is, it’s, it’s growth and domination is exponential.
Unlike a cheeseburger place that keeps expanding state to
Paul Ford: Slyly,
Rich Ziade: There’s a physical limit and its expansion is limited by physics and geography.[00:16:00]
Paul Ford: A, then using technology
Rich Ziade: what you have here with, with the platform, like with tech, if you’ve got very smart people in the room, very slyly, A, defending their territory, and B, then using technology to claim new territory, it’s, it could, it could, it’s like a brush fire you know, there’s concepts of like software ecosystems and platforms. One of the best definitions of platforms, a funny word, it gets thrown around a lot, but one of the better definitions of platforms I’ve ever heard is that as the number of transactions go up, the cost per transaction goes down.
Paul Ford: So now you make money. So you and I built a product, okay? And it is kind of a platform. It lets people organize things. And do all sorts of stuff. It’s the sponsor of this podcast, by the way. It’s called Aboard, aboard. com. Check it out. All good. But, uh, right now, every transaction that happens, every time somebody adds something because of the money we’ve [00:17:00] invested in it, we’re, it’s expensive.
Like, like if I go do something on that platform today, it’s probably like 10. Every time I click my mouse, if we get a thousand users. Let’s say, and we’re, we’re kind of there now, but let’s say, let’s, let’s, so one user, I have to pay all that money to write that code, a hundred users, and it’s still pretty expensive.
A thousand, it doesn’t cost any more every time I click the mouse, a hundred thousand, a million, like the costs are only going up tiny, tiny bits overall. And I’m, I’m serving more and more and more people. And now I’m, if I’m Google, I’m putting ads on that, or I’m like. Bam! You’re off to the races. It’s just at a certain point, it all just becomes pure profit.
And that’s the platform miracle.
Rich Ziade: is the platform era what ends up happening is those additional resources and cycles get used To claim new land and defend the platform,
Paul Ford: Hell yeah, we got to keep growing. I mean, that’s the absolute ecosystem of our industry.
Rich Ziade: the way, the Justice Department also takes issue with acquisitions. Like, one of the ways to do it is your product is just better.[00:18:00]
Paul Ford: we’re watching Microsoft and Blizzard, right? They wanted to buy.
Rich Ziade: forever. A lot of times you need clearance from the DOJ to get the acquisition done. When they bought DoubleClick, they weren’t as dominant as they are today. The
Paul Ford: was, that was early. That was like 15, 20 years ago
Rich Ziade: but boy, was it a home run of an acquisition, right?
Paul Ford: Well, nobody knew that the internet was going to become the internet. It was, that was a like a,
Rich Ziade: was extremely early on. Yeah. What happens on the other side of this? Probably not a lot changes, frankly. Um, what they end… You know, people…
Paul Ford: industry, let’s be clear. Like, ad people, not the greatest.
Rich Ziade: It’s
Paul Ford: love some of them. I love you, my
Rich Ziade: Everybody wants like the, you know… The villain kind of, you know, shaking his fist behind bars. That’s just not going to happen here. It’s never happened, actually, with any of these. It never ends that way. Um, armies of lawyers. Um, it becomes a war of attrition.
Paul Ford: mean, let’s be clear. This is a [00:19:00] wonderful move for, for the legal department of Google, like everybody’s going to get promoted.
Rich Ziade: This is, well, the law firms that they’ve, probably many, multiple law firms that have been hired. Here’s what it does do though, and it actually starts to hurt, and it happened to Microsoft, is it’s immensely distracting. You are still in, Google is still in a competitive setting, they’re still in
Paul Ford: no, this, this is the CEO’s part time job now is, is figuring out how to keep the company. Cause if they roll back, the company gets broken up. The shareholders like, like they’re not doing a good job. Like you don’t get to be CEO if you preside over the breakup of your company.
Rich Ziade: it’s not good, right? And it casts doubt, and it also, they are in a, Point right now where they’re seeing AI as this well, who knows if it’s an actual existential threat, but they see it as a thread They they feel like they’ve been caught flat footed a bit and they’ve got this thing They have to deal with right like
Paul Ford: Also, they gotta
Rich Ziade: I haven’t been good at my job since the divorce started.
Paul Ford: wear a suit, first of all. I have to wear real, I have to wear actual shoes.
Rich Ziade: that is That’s [00:20:00] worth many many billions of dollars and you gotta understand who else touches Google. It is the default search on on um Apple iPhones, right? They pay for it. They pay billions for it. You know who else, but forget it. Apple’s going to be just fine. Let’s not start the violin for Apple.
An organization like Mozilla, which all of its funding comes from Google, um, has to be thinking, Oh, are you feeling okay?
Paul Ford: everybody okay?
Rich Ziade: okay over there? So it is just, to me, the real
Paul Ford: Because the outcome here, okay, so we, so what, what people are preparing for mentally is, if the Department of Justice was able to succeed, um, that all the things that are downstream of Google and Google advertising, like Mozilla revenues, or an Apple is, sees an opening where it could stop giving Google so much money and so on, so, so what, what you’re actually saying, it’s not just that it’s distracting that I have to go to DC and, and wear, you know, wear like a, and
Rich Ziade: cause change that disrupts. This[00:21:00]
Paul Ford: The stability of my giant enterprise is threatened, which means that all of my loyal soldiers of all different kinds, including the ones that my mercenaries that I pay are just sort of starting to look elsewhere
Rich Ziade: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, not just look elsewhere, but also just the, the focus and credibility and forward momentum of this key partner of yours, um, is, uh, called into
Paul Ford: and they’re thinking, Hey, you know, um, Connie over there, she’s good at that, running that big chunk of advertising on YouTube. Maybe we’ll call her up because I bet she’s picking, picking up some weird
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I mean
Paul Ford: And so your talent can leave. And so all of these like key anchor things that keep you, like Google will be fine and me and maybe it’ll be worth like, you know, a hundred billion less and everyone will still get to go into
Rich Ziade: That’s right. That’s right. I don’t think it’s gonna get broken. I my view is it won’t get broken up.
Paul Ford: Yeah, but you know, the Biden administration actually has a more credible threat, like this was never going to happen [00:22:00] before, but I think like, like Joe Biden, like this current political climate, they wouldn’t mind breaking up a little tech, they wouldn’t,
Rich Ziade: They wouldn’t mind no
Paul Ford: they’re not going to do it, I agree,
Rich Ziade: it is important that cases like this every so often show up honestly
Paul Ford: it reminds people of why this law exists.
Rich Ziade: The law didn’t come into being because everybody was feeling frisky. It came into being because you can actually have dominant players show up and, uh, you know.
Paul Ford: This ecosystem, as we see it, is not great for, for commerce on one
Rich Ziade: It’s not great.
Paul Ford: it’s not great for publishers on the other. And it, it impedes the free flow of information. It’s one of many things that the internet, which is supposed to be the great flowering of that kind of marketplace of ideas and so on, uh, has failed that.
And so like,
Rich Ziade: This seems, what’s so fascinating about antitrust is it’s often grabbed on to as Big government regulatory bearing down on free
Paul Ford: no, socialism, nanny state, you know, [00:23:00] all that
Rich Ziade: but it’s actually the opposite.
Paul Ford: No, this is a,
Rich Ziade: actually for is to allow competition to thrive. So I actually view it as important for competition to continue.
So you can have that upstart, that startup show up and shake things up.
Paul Ford: You know, it’s tricky in all this, and I actually, it’s a, it’s a wild one, because I actually think Google’s intent has never to be this,
Rich Ziade: It never
Paul Ford: but they, I think they just have executed so incredibly well at certain key moments that they’ve just completely grabbed the lion’s share. I’ll give you an example.
Google came up with this technology, I actually think in a relatively spirited way, which like, Good spirit away called AMP and it was going to like make a faster, better mobile internet because the web was getting so messy. But over time, if you read the history of AMP, there was a big article in the verge about it.
The, um, all the little dominance moves started to happen. And it became less of an open standard. And the people who are involved with AMP are actually pretty good people. And they were trying to do the right thing. They’re trying to make with the web work [00:24:00] fast on mobile, but it just, they just kind of kept slowly pulling all the energy and goodwill and the resources towards Google with this platform.
Rich Ziade: A lot of times. Facebook tried this too, by the way. They tried to have like their own
Paul Ford: pages. Yeah. Rapid pages or
Rich Ziade: publishing, so that the page came, because Facebook was obsessed with how long a page took to load. They’re like, well, we’ll host them all. Don’t worry about it. It’ll take a half a second if you just let us host them all.
So they’re thinking they’re being decent citizens on the internet. What they were actually doing was effectively, um, carving out their own sort of power centers on the
Paul Ford: Well, and then the publishers can never afford to implement to the technology company. So like, everybody’s like struggling to get their AMP and Facebook magic pages or whatever the hell they were called together. And then, and then it just like doesn’t work. It just falls apart.
Rich Ziade: It’s a rough thing to see. A
Paul Ford: But they help. See, that’s the thing, like, the worst thing Google can do [00:25:00] for the media industry is try to help it. Like, the best thing would be for there to be more fairness in pricing and for more money to flow straight from avenue, uh, um, advertisers to the publishers without all those little cuts in between.
Rich Ziade: lot of cuts in between. And that’s the crux of this lawsuit is the cuts in between and the, and the, the sort of intractable position they put themselves in. You can’t route around them. It’s impossible
Paul Ford: can’t. So, I mean, this is genuinely interesting. We’ll keep an eye on this. We’ll see what happens.
Rich Ziade: We will see what
Paul Ford: It would be good to get more of an open web back, like, not like crunchy ex web types making little webpages like me, but like, like actually, you know, frickin the web, like CNN and big news and public and little magazines and all that stuff.
Rich Ziade: period of the web was created trillions in value because no one had entrenched themselves yet.
Paul Ford: No, you could have like, there’s like a little ad agency or an ad hosting [00:26:00] platform called Federated Media, right? I’m sure they’re still around but like blogs could suddenly make money.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. There’s a little indistinct. Why? Because nobody was like this dark cloud
Paul Ford: Well, and then Adobe was
Rich Ziade: everybody.
Paul Ford: like we should market directly to the designers who’s who’s got design blogs, right? Like they’re, um, so anyway, all right. Well, here we go. Well,
Rich Ziade: we go. We’ll
Paul Ford: a lot.
Rich Ziade: We’ll keep up on this. So you’re welcome.
Paul Ford: I like when you use your, I like, you actually have a slightly different tone of voice when you talk about law.
You get less aggro, you’re way more like,
Rich Ziade: Is that true? You’re aggro
Paul Ford: it’s the opposite. No, you, you become analytic.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: kind of cool to see, like, you go into legal brain. You’re like, then on the other
Rich Ziade: the way, I am no, I am no legal expert. Uh, let
Paul Ford: but you’re actually much less libertarian when you’re a lawyer.
Rich Ziade: That’s funny. Am I libertarian?
Paul Ford: bit, right?
Like, we’re, we’re okay with
Rich Ziade: Everybody likes a little something off the buffet.
Paul Ford: right? No, no, but like, but when you’re a lawyer, you’re like, well, you know, frankly, everyone has a point of view.
Rich Ziade: sit down and talk. Yeah, [00:27:00] yeah,
Paul Ford: So this will be good. We can, maybe after this, um, we can fix some marriages. You know, you can. You can be an arbitrator. I
Rich Ziade: of fixing marriages, actually no, this has nothing to do with fixing marriages. It’s a very cool tool that can fix your, uh, use of the web. Uh, it’s called a board at board.
Paul Ford: mean, we literally built it because all the platforms keep taking everything away. And so we’re like, here, make your own internet that’s a little less, like, grabby.
Rich Ziade: to make your own internet. It’s a carve out a cleaner, more sane corner of the internet and make it your own. It lets you grab anything from anywhere. It’s real smart about it. It makes some beautiful cards. It’s free. Go check it out at aboard. com and check us out at
Paul Ford: Ziade Ford on Twitter and, oh sorry, XYZ. And hello at ZiadeFord. com should you need anything at all.
Rich Ziade: have a lovely week. [00:28:00]