An episode about two spoiled men with two spoiled hobbies-- that turns deep. Shedding light on the importance of communities, and having that space that fosters growth and positivity. Additionally, how these are the safe spaces of the internet where there is more authenticity.

Richard.

Paul, how are you?

Oh, I'm okay.

I got a little cold, so if anybody hears that in my voice, uh, don't, don't,

don't worry about me, I'll be okay.

not lack of enthusiasm.

No, exactly.

So Saturday I wake up and it's a very special day.

Uh, it's, it's the day of get ready for it can jam.

This is a trade show on fruit preserves and canned goods.

I probably wouldn't have gone to Can Jam solo.

Uh, but you turn out to be, and we've talked about this on the show before.

We have hobbies, you and me, we've, we have hobbies that we, uh, enjoy

and uh, yours is headphones you like.

Good high-end.

He.

I do, I, I, I don't even know if it classifies as a hobby.

, like hobbies.

You have to do things.

I'm just sitting there listening.

just buying, buying a couple headphones, right?

So, no, but, but hold on actually, because yes, that is true.

You've bought a couple expensive things, but when we talk about

it, we don't actually talk.

We talk a little bit about the audio and we talk a lot about.

Supply chain and the people who make YouTube videos in the community, and

why are people so motivated to seek perfect audio fidelity and the fact

that there is no such thing and the fights that people have about it, right?

Like it's all, it's all really relevant.

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah.

And so, so it's not just, it's not just, Hey, look, I, I looked into

catalog and I saw a thing and I bought it.

It's way more subjective.

It, it really is.

And, and let me get one thing outta the way cuz we're not gonna record a podcast

about high end audio, but I do wanna end it with a couple of recommendations.

It feels good to give recommendations that are not sponsored, not

anything, um, of really great products that don't break the bank.

So that'll be fun to do at the end.

let's be clear.

You gave me the headphones I'm wearing and they're.

Hundreds of dollars and they're excellent.

They're great.

I use them all the time and I love them.

They're, they're, they're worth the money.

So, okay, look, we're two spoiled guys who get to have spoiled guy hobbies.

That's just put that out there.

Okay?

But we're trying to learn from the world at the same time.

So let's describe the scene.

Okay, so I, I take the Q train and I meet you at, uh, times Square, so that's great.

That

Yes.

definitely where I like to go.

On a Saturday after 20,000 years in New York City is the

Marriott Marquee Ballroom on

I did bump into the the Bubba Gump Shrimp Shrimp

God, is it still there?

Is it still real?

yeah.

Oh yeah.

You know what it is too?

When you're a pink furry mascot on Times Square, the pink becomes a gritty

Oh yeah, like that gray, pink.

Yeah.

that

Yeah.

They're not gonna, I, I gotta imagine they're saying, look, we're gonna stretch

this Bubba Gump thing as far as it'll go, but we're not paying for new signage.

Well, we signed the lease.

Let's see this through.

Uh, you know, it's the density and insanity of Times Square is funny in that

you are gonna do a minimum, a minimal amount of business because people are not

sure where to go and they get exhausted at 1:15 PM and they need to have lunch.

, you're gonna get a good amount of business just because of that.

Um, anyway, we get to the, the ballroom at the Marriott Marquee, which,

uh, , you know, I, and, and we're not gonna get into the audio end of it.

I think here's why I love it.

And I think why you love what you love and why a lot of people love what they

love is, um, uh, the culture and the stories and the people in these places.

Um, and it's been a joy to be in there.

And I'm not in there all day, by the way.

I'm in.

Peeking in.

It's a nice sort of exit off the main highway of the internet.

It's not toxic.

There's strong opinions and feelings, but I mean, you have

strong opinions and feelings about,

Well, ultimately it

you know, amplifiers,

It translate to an experience in which you're

listening more closely to music.

That is the one thing that if we are gonna talk about the audio, it has

reintroduced me to music in a strange and pretty personal way, uh, which is great.

Like I'm very, I'm very much enjoying that.

I mean, this is the thing, right?

So a hobby like this, okay, I bought the headphones.

Now I think about the recording of the, of the records that I really love, and

we talk about that and you're like, check out the production on this.

My concern is always that this ends with two middle aged dudes into Steely

Dan, which is just kinda always a risk.

I think I, I think that

that's a universal concern.

That's, that's just

It's true.

If you have a man over 42 years old in your life and he ever has been like,

ah, I kinda like Michael McDonald.

You gotta watch out.

You really, you need to check in like on a regular basis and be

like, Hey, reel it in the years.

And if he's like, oh God, yeah, you know, you just get in there, get 'em.

steely Dan has some great songs and, and yes, they are liked by

audio files cuz they were ahead of the curve from a production perspective.

They, they were gearheads, uh, that, that were pretty kind of sci.

They, they, there was part art, part science going on there.

Um, but this podcast is not about steely Dan.

not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

Okay, so here we are at the Sheraton Ballroom.

Walk in.

First of all, tickets are not free.

Like you, you're gonna go have a consumer experience essentially, but

it was 40 bucks ahead to go into this

Just to walk in.

How crowded is it at that point you would expect like, okay, headphones.

Yeah, it's New York City.

How crowded?

I mean, it was crowded.

It was, it was not.

Well, first off, you're going to check out.

High end audio gear.

It's loud, it's noisy,

Yeah, it's

so it's kinda a sloppy mess.

I'm gonna be honest.

And, and no one minded.

It's worth noting people, nobody was throwing a tantrum about it.

Um, it's

I'll tell you what was cool.

Everybody knew what they were talking about.

Like everybody was really, and not just like they were really into the subject,

but like there was no, nobody was looking around for discussion topics.

It was

a common language, right.

And it's a common knowledge and that feels really, really good.

And, and, and look, there was a lot of gear.

My read was there was a lot of gear there that most of the people can't afford.

To be frank, and that's okay.

It is almost, there was a, there was a mus walking through the museum quality to it.

Um, and nobody was angry or bitter about it.

Um, I think it was more like, this is my community.

I get to be here and I get to connect with, uh, other fans of the community.

It's worth noting the whole thing is born out of a.

An online forum.

The forum came first and they're like, okay, wait a minute.

There's tens of thousands of people in here.

They do it around the world, they do it in Singapore, they do it in California.

It's a big deal.

Um, and it's great.

And I'm glad I was there, and it's fun to be in that setting.

I'll tell you what I liked about it, and I'm gonna sound old for two seconds.

Um, it, it was friendly and not.

About promotion or marketing, and it wasn't toxic like that was me.

It wasn't about the individual.

There are, there are

It's literally like a marketing event.

Everybody's got, you go in, there's people with banners behind them,

they have listening booths to try to sell you their headphones.

How is it not about marketing?

It's not about marketing yourself.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

The big, big, big.

Like trade shows and conventions are around marketing yourself.

it's a networking event maybe for the distributors and for

the, the, the people who are selling, but, but not for the participant.

The participant is just there to experience the headphones.

even, even the brands, nobody's walking outta

there with bags of stuff.

It's worth noting.

First off, you couldn't, some of the things were the size of

a small refrigerator, so you, nobody was walking out of there.

you, you talked to like one brand from Singapore, right?

And you, you couldn't buy it.

Yeah, he's, he's like, you can listen.

Um, I don't have any, I'm like, what are you doing here?

Dude, you came all the way from the other side of the earth to New York City.

Did you bring some inventory with you?

Um, I don't wanna say the brand.

It was phenomenal.

Um, but it's, it's, it's funny.

It's.

It is about brand building, it's about reputation, it's about, you know,

your peers and the respect of others.

It feels really, To learn casually without being graded at the end.

Yes.

It, it, it's a very fulfilling thing.

It feels really good to be in, uh, in that community and share

information and knowledge back out.

That feels really good.

Um, and, uh, it's.

It's the same drama.

It's just not as intensely white hot as the rest of the internet when

people are screaming at each other.

But it's also people jabbing each other, people saying, oh, why

would you spend that on that?

There's a lot of that.

There was, I want to talk about, you know, the, the exhibitors and how it

is less about revenue, it seems like, and maybe that's what passion is when

you're passionate about something.

Do you think about revenue also?

I don't know, maybe sometimes.

It was weird to sit down and put on $5,000 headphones

and have them be warm and moist with the previous auto auto nerds

That's a tricky

That was a lot.

I have a friend who lives in Europe, um, who's learning to fraught fly.

Fly an

in his late flying airplane.

He's taking flying lessons.

He's in his, he's in the late, his late thirties.

He's been.

Like a, he has a childlike wonder when he sees a plane flying over his head.

He's just one of those people that just can't believe it's flying in the sky.

Yep.

He, he, he moved, they used to live in New York.

That's how we got to know them, and he moved to Europe and he'll tell you

about his job and his kids and like getting them into certain schools.

But then he starts talking about his flight.

. And he's like a child, he's a banker, by the way.

He's a banker.

of course, right.

and, and not, and, and not your stereotypical guy.

Like a really sweet guy, very smart, kind of a, a quant.

But when you talk to him about flying and he, and what he loves telling you

about is how hard it is and all the skills he's gonna have to learn and how

he has to do all kinds of new things that he didn't know how to do before.

And that is amazing, right?

And I, and then I asked him, I said, you know, how do you.

, who do you talk to when you have a question?

He goes, oh, there's a dozen communities.

He's in a German aviation community forum thing where it's just people helping

each other, talking to each other.

And I, you know, I grew up on the internet.

I built businesses on the internet and seeing these corners, they're

just such good places to go be.

First off, you keep growing and second, you connect with others in positive ways.

Um, that's.

I think that's the key, right?

It's, it's a, the internet was really small and I, I feel that.

People from our cohort often get nostalgic for this very small kind

of indie scene that we were part of.

It was like 10,000 blogs,

Yeah, exactly.

And so, and you would participate and people would send you

email and so on and so forth.

But that is, that's definitely nostalgia.

It, it doesn't exist that way anymore.

It is this huge high velocity force run by giant platforms.

Facebook, to me is like the perfect example because it's like

you look at it and it's, I just recently got back on Facebook cuz.

Similar to you.

I have my hobby.

My hobby is synthesizers, and I was like, oh, I'll go on Marketplace.

I haven't looked at Marketplace in a while.

It's a disaster because Facebook is right there and then you go on a, you go on

like synth oriented businesses and it's so much easier to shop and you can go

on the forums and it's so much easier to understand what people are talking about.

Like you can't have one giant conversation that sort of.

Contains all the other conversations.

I wanna, I'm gonna throw out a theory here as to why

I think these corners are so good.

and positive is because so much of the internet got wired

up around scoring popularity.

Right.

And, and, and when you do that to people then, and, and I think

about that for young people.

Young people who are trying to impress, I mean, what are you

trying to do when you're 14?

You're just trying to get accepted, right?

And so all of your social energy.

Goes towards a scoring mechanism.

And, and this has been, this has been talked about before, and, and

a lot of people wanna, they want to attack the platforms head on.

And what I would suggest, whether it's you in your thirties or you're a parent

of a child, is take them to those corners.

They're much better.

They don't score popularity, they score knowledge.

And information and community, um, and they are more positive places.

Here's the thing that you're getting at, I think, or at

least where I'm taking it, which is these spaces almost by definition

have enormous room for subjectivity.

Like you can't, there is no one pure headphone experience.

There are people trying to literally do acoustic curves to say, this

one aligns with that curve or the other, what's it called?

The Harmon Curve.

that's one of them.

Yeah.

But it's the big one.

Yeah.

Most review, to your point, most reviewers when they do a YouTube

review, they have two sections.

They have what they call objective sound and subjective sound, which is hilarious.

Yeah, but famously what the internet, the, the, you know, the idea of

context collapse and the way that people don't read charitably and so on, we kind

of have stripped out enormous amounts of space for any kind of subjectivity.

You kind of need to align with one particular mindset.

In order to jump in and participate in the larger thing.

Now you have these spaces, and these spaces are highly subjective.

They're not about politics.

They're not about, so society or culture, they're just about this kind

of like subjective, interpretive space.

And then, but as they fan out, they connect to everything.

They connect to music and they connect to.

Sure.

and they connect to supply chain and they connect to, they

also do connect to social issues.

Right.

But it, it's, it's always one more step rather than like, welcome.

Here you are.

Get yourself ready.

You're now part of an infinite campaign for all humanity that never ends.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, you know how you can kind of see this, if you look at the, uh, topology of

YouTube, uh, if you go to YouTube, Without signing in it is like, how do I get your

eyes to go slightly wider in 2.8 seconds?

That is the goal.

And so you see things like the stills tell the story, the stills of the

videos of like, oh my God, my, the truck dumped the dirt on the Honda Civic

You wanna know the perfect YouTube video?

The cake exploded.

The cake exploded, which is fine.

Look, a little bit of that is okay, but it turns out if you zoom out

and you go to the edges, right, you'll find all of these communities

on YouTube and they're incredible.

I just got into Mid Journey re recently, which we're gonna talk

about on another podcast, but

an AI drawing tool, like it draws the pictures for you, similar to

draw us a picture, you.

and yep.

Exactly, exactly.

And I was like, okay, I wanna learn this a little bit more.

There's like 45 minute videos, full expert videos of people sharing their knowledge.

Beautifully produced.

Why is that?

Like, and guess what the comment thread is?

Like More questions.

Nobody's saying that's stupid.

So dumb.

It's just useful and, and you find that in gardening.

You find that in audio, you find

gardening.

Is Gardening's a really good example here?

You like to garden?

I'm not huge on it, but I, I help out my wife sometimes.

Um, gardening is so, but the, and the same dynamics and I, I think it's

important to point this out cuz headphones are in, especially fancy headphones,

are expensive consumer goods that can easily run into the thousands, right?

Gardening can run into the hundreds and then you gotta really double.

It takes work.

yeah, yeah.

It's, I mean, it's like literally you're buying bags of dirt.

It's just not, but the, a level of community and

engagement is probably great.

It's, it's much, much greater and much larger.

And the amount of content, uh, we should probably find a gardening conference,

except I think that's just going outside

it's your backyard.

Well, no, actually, here's what's real.

The nursery and the garden center have been social

centers for decades and longer.

They love talking to you about it.

If you go to like a good nursery, I, I, I, sometimes I go to ones

upstate, um, they, they just, they're not, they're not selling you goods.

They're selling you their knowledge and they love talking to you about it.

They love telling you, don't buy that right now.

It's not time yet.

They love, they love sharing that information and you'll find.

, they're on YouTube, they're all there.

And look, they, they're, they're not small numbers by the way.

It's hundreds of thousands.

Some people have millions of views.

Um, because the world's a big place.

Right.

And, and I guess what I'm getting at here is like, what you've seen is a bunch of

documentaries and articles and, and shows about like, we have to head off social

media before it ruins the children.

Right.

And it wades into regulation and all that.

And what I'm trying to say is the internet's a really, really big place and.

I want to go back to how you opened the podcast.

Times Square is insane.

It's so bad.

I got off at,

Square is insane.

I got off at 49th Street and of course you being, you had kind of screwed

up my ticket, so you're waiting for me.

And I was like, don't worry.

I'm like a minute away and then it's like 10 minutes to just get

through all the Elmos to get three

yeah.

Yeah.

Times Square is the YouTube homepage.

Oh yeah, it is

just, it's all it is.

But it turns out New Yorkers laugh at tourists, right?

Not laugh.

They're like, wait, you're going to eat Italian food at So Sparrows

and you came to New York City, it's the running joke, right?

It's, it's the Olive Garden in Times Square, et cetera, et cetera.

Why?

Why do we, why are we like just shocked by that decision?

Is because.

Come to the corners, come to the edges, come to Queens.

The food scene in Queens.

The ethnic food scene in Queens is incredible.

Brooklyn, everywhere else.

You came all the way here.

What are you doing?

Going into Olive Garden.

get on, get on a, like hop on the L train.

Hop on the, yeah, absolutely.

That's right.

And And the same goes for the internet.

Come off the Instagram main feed come.

All the stuff that's TikTok.

You know TikTok is TikTok,

but wait, hold on a sec, right, because here's what we're saying and I

we're both saying the same thing, which.

You're gonna be happier if you go to the garden center.

You're gonna be happier if you say hi to the guy behind the counter

and say, Hey, you know what can you tell me about these four cia?

You're gonna be happier at the bookstore and you're gonna be happier

when you And retail experiences, I think are just part of life.

There's church and community and and, and there's stores.

And so like, okay.

And now we're saying the internet boy, it's a massive platform.

It's now like Facebook is like the, the phone system, right?

And you can kind of get in there and connect, but it,

it's more like infrastructure.

Uh, but that's not how it really works.

We got Amazon, we got Facebook, we've got all these giant platforms.

Do you think there is a chance that the little stuff can get in there

and sort of knock over the giant.

No, of course not.

Okay.

Well, all I'm saying is walk.

Walk two or three avenues east or west of Times Square and it gets interesting.

Right.

Times Square will not be going away.

No, no, no, no.

Of

uh, that's it.

I mean, some times Square is the interface to New York City.

It's the public API for the world.

don't try to regulate Times Square.

You're not gonna, you're not gonna delete Times Square, you're not gonna

pass laws to make times square, less

They did regulate Giuliani, regulated the hell out of times.

Why that's, that was probably for the best.

Okay.

So some regulation.

Some regulation.

And then, uh, but don't, don't try to do away with the fact that the giant

things have their APIs to the world.

So to close it out, Paul, I'm going to make a suggestion.

All right.

Make a suggestion.

Is this a headphone

sh I'm gonna share a brand.

It's a headphone suggestion if anybody wants to spend 500 bucks or less.

Okay.

give you two brands.

Um, one is called, uh, moon Drop.

It's a Chinese brand that, um, makes excellent in ear monitors or ims,

a little, little nubbins that you'd put in your ear if you're into that.

And then for, if you want big headphones, There's a company called Hi

Fiman, H I F I M A N, that makes $300 headphones that can change your life.

Like they're really, really great.

They, they're not Bluetooth, they're not wireless.

There's no noise canceling.

It's not the point of these.

But if you wanna dip into this world and be careful if you dip in, you might

end up trying to swim across the ocean.

But, uh, check out those two brands, moon Drop and High Fymen.

I gotta say, you've, you've handed me some headphones that have

changed the way I listen to music.

It's wild.

It's totally wild.

I recommend it.

Uh, and if anyone has questions and wants a 2000 word answer, please email us at

. Paul Ford: hello, it's z ford.com,

Any, any other ways for people to contact us?

I think it's enough

All right, friends.

Have a lovely week.