They showed him the door. We decided we would start a company together. Host when did you come to that conclusion . You talk about your work as a glassblower. When did you realize payments were a problem he had just been kicked out of or its somebody i needed to standm in better the first time, so my first suggestion was lets go to San Francisco and get even. It was like spike motivated. But jack to his credit said why dont we do something more positive and start a new company so that was the impetus and then we were looking for a problem and the only thing we determined was our company was going to be sort of focused on ive got my phone here, ive got to use it as a prop. These things. Are we going to focus on these things because the iphone had just come out and we knew it was going to b be entertained. We hired an engineer from apple and that gave us two weeks to figure out what we were going to do. We were stretching for ideas and i went back to my studio. I am a glassblower. I make things nobody needs. I make art, stuff nobody needs. In dc i used to teach, for all of the cspan viewer viewers ifu were about 20 years ago i taught you how to make a paperweight. But the point is i was in my studio trying to sell a piece of glass and i couldnt make the sale because i couldnt take american express. I was angry. I just lost this great sort of windfall will. I was talking to the lady about one of these devices and i have this attitude towards devices like this. This is a magic device that turns into anything i want. If i want a television entrance into the television, radio, itll turn into that book, literally, tomorrow it will turn into that book. It didnt turn into a credit card machine and so i was angry that i was also motivated to fix it. So i called up on the device and i said its make our iphones turn into credit cards and for that is where we came. Host the name of the book is the innovation stack. How did you learn about that from square . Guest it is and something we knew about when we started square pits the most powerful phenomenon that ive seen in business. Its a way of interweaving inventions together sometimes very simple. They create new industries. If you look throughout history at the Great Industries that have started, almost always there is an innovation stack at the beginning but i didnt know any of this so we want to build an innovation stack. I had no idea that any of this was happening in as a matter of fact, i wrote this book and ive been having people review it like your self and one of the greatest compliments i got was from a very successful entrepreneur. He has a painting on the wall that is worth more than my hou house. So im a little intimidated. He is asking me about this book and he finally says i wish id known this when i was 20yearsold and i was like me too. But it turns out there is a thing that happened. This process that can happen when you start to solve a perfect problem, something that hasnt been sold to people or because most of what we knew was copying and most of the tools and training and comfort and solutions that exist. When you get out of the middle of copying, you can build something that is truly different, but the process is different and it predates this s thing called the innovation stack. At least in m my studies, your company will dominate the world. It would run whatever business you are in. Host in the buck when you talk about innovation stack, it was interesting you talked about those that we dont associate with tech which a lot of people draw the parallel between tech and innovation. You focus on southwest, ikea and others. Why did you decide to focus on those companies outside of the technical industry . Guest i am a scientist by training and my father was a scientist. Ive been very steep in the scientifics. If you are going to do a reasonably controlled experiment, you need to eliminate the variables, and one of the most powerful variables is the phenomenon of viral growth and technology. So, like if you look at the potential for a company that does nothing really that interesting but has sufficient technology to an old business, you can get outside success and i didnt want to study back. When i saw the pattern of the innovation stack i said i want to Study Companies but not Companies Like google. It is successful or amazon, they are successful. What is it that creates this a success. Business success. In some cases just the pure disruptive nature of technology overwhelms anything else. So, this is why i laugh when people study the business practice. They could fund their own Space Program which is tremendous, but the management could be crummy, and its still such a powerful force, technology. So, i wanted to exclude that. If you exclude that, you are left with businesses in history that have still dominated their industries. So, i go back basically sort of 100 years ago and i look forward just to show the pattern is something systemi systemic in te innovation is not just the result of having, you know, Amazon Web Services and federal growth. Host some people have seen the book on the shelf and might be surprised to learn it started as a graphic novel. Can you tell me a little bit about the evolution of sex guest i didnt want to write a business book. Guest i dont particularly like this, most physics are boring. They are selfserving tones, they are not scientific, and i was like so i saw this and i thought i got to show this. And then i didnt want to write a busines Business Books i stard looking at the stories that the companies had done and the stories were epic. I mean, they were fantastic. I dont have to tell this as a business sort. I can use this as a graphic novel. So, what i originally sold to penguin was a sort of schizophrenic manuscript was like graphic novel and it flipped back and forth randomly and they liked it or i should say they pretended they liked it because they signed the contract and once they signed the contract, they owned the book. So, then they took me to this windowless Conference Room in manhattan, and had a little talk and it went like this. Do you realize your cute little comics are not going to show up on a 4inch screen fax people are going to listen to this as an audio book. So as an audio book is useless. You cant take a graphic novel and introduce it as an audio book. Book. I dare you will lose 70 of your audience. So stick with what youve got otherwise you have to rewrite it. So, they were right and so i rewrote the whole thing. But i still have all these great comics. I need my own comic. Shes got our book and this is free, you cant buy this if you go to the website i will give you a copy of this because look, this is a story about a banker, but its like theres a murder on that page and a funeral and heres the destruction of a major city. I mean, like this is comic book stuff. And the reason was because the tales of entrepreneurship and the companies that build innovation tend to be really good stories theres a lot of failure, and failure actually makes good stories. Nobody wants to hear about a success. Boring. But failure, how did you get that scar, that is a good story. So, i wanted to tell it in this format. And although there is only one chapter that sort of survive as a comic. If you guid by the book i wil give you the comic. They are good stories. They are fun. So often i find the sort of ignore the fun part on what its like to do something that hasnt been done because theres a lot of failure and you have to have a sense of humor about the state mistakes. Host on the point about the comic book i know only one chapter has turned into a comic book now, but it seems to me if you were to write a comic book about square, the villain would certainly be amazon. Can you tell me about what it was like when you realized that amazon is trying to directly compete with you in the payment space . Guest i appreciate the irony when you are in the middle of selling a book. I will redeem myself at the last second. So amazon did what they do which is they looked at the market and decided they wanted and decided to take it. They copied the product. They undercut the price by 30 and add whatever else they have like the amazon brand and 100 million customers and all this stuff. So lets grow this foryearsold and find a business. They just run the playbook. So, we were terrified. And we went looking for solutions that we could copy to respond. We looked around for all of the companies that had beaten amazon when they had been attacked in this way and there were none. Somebody like netflix with all of these giants startups, forget it. As he wrote that i now have survived this attack by amazon. We looked at what we could do and there wasnt that much we could do. They were being amazon and we were terrified that i wasnt much we chose to do differently, so we looked at all options and looking at the options, we realized they were all being done for good reasons we kept doing it. And we didnt even match them on price. The price was 30 lower than our pricewisprice was and we didnth the price. He just kept going. And it lasted for about a year and a half. And at the end, on the halloween of 2015, amazon gave up and mailed all of their former customers a little white square reader. I couldnt believe it. This does not happen, but it is what happened and that is what led me to the book because as somebody raised as a scientist, i needed an explanation. I needed to answer the question why does this happen, you cant just be lucky. They had innovation and we didnt know it at the time, there was the label and there were a bunch of reasons i havent seen but once i saw it i was like thats if thats what allows us to survive amazon and all these other companies i studied to survive the vicious attacks. Amazon was bad what happened in the early days was worst. We didnt end up in federal and state court. Host you mentioned you couldnt find the companies that havent been able to beat amazon and in the book you also say you found some people amazon beats but they were not willing to talk to you on the record about it. Guest i found many victims and talked to them personally and got their stories and then said thats great. Could i quote you. No. Even in industries competing with amazon. Everybody was so afraid of amazon nobody would go on the record. That isnt for me to share but i will tell you that it was so severe i could get nobody to go on the record. There are no quotes, just me. Host right now we are in washington where there is a lot of scrutiny on antitrust grounds at the moment. Do you think amazon is a monopoly . Not in the traditional sense but they exhibited some of the behaviors of market dominance. I dont have a valid opinion on this. But any company that gets big enough that it can move markets ought to be looked at. Again, im not a regulator. I guess i kind of am. Im a big believe her and regulations. Its good in a lot of situations. But on the other side, these platforms and amazon in particular are good at keeping the customer in mind. I think what you are looking for is a platform that gets very powerful but still maintains a semblance of responsibility. And i think that amazon and google have kind of done that and facebook kind of has not done that so they deserve regulation in different levels. Host i want to ask about apple because the square couldnt exist without the iphone and later much of the business rely on the ipad so what do you think of them in that context . Guest they are super powerful and really important to get along with. They also have great innovation. Ive got tremendous respect for them. We built our Company Based on a product that apple introduced to the world. I have a tremendous amount of respect for them and they are also not somebody that you want to kiss off. Dont do stuff like we did in the early days that could have upset apple a lot. Bought. We bypassed the connector. We thought we would get in trouble when we did that but then we thought maybe it will just be good with it because steve jobs at the time had a way of protecting the like. Host tell me about the design in the process of creating such an iconic design that people recognize. Host it is about this wide and had a basic design flaw. It was one that i noticed in the chose not to correct which is when you are swiping a credit card through it is so narrow that it would wobble as it would go through. About 80 of the time it would wobble and it wouldnt work and this was the result of my testing so to solve the problem, i built another reader that was about the wide and everybody was 100 with that so then the question why did we build a tiny little device that didnt work as well as the big device and it wasnt for cost reasons or anything like that. But the reaction to the device was different. If i use the big device, people are like another credit card reader. If i used a small device thats no, they were amazed. They were blown away. Remember the first time you saw a car to go through you were impressed, like everybody. It was super cool and to this day the square later they were not working better but they were cool. They were great and the funny thing is it turns out that 80 number really drops after a little bit of practice. So once you practice a little that you will get a good reader. We discovered by making a product that was less than perfect we trained customers to use our products and then once they were using it they were showing off to their friends about how the good they were. Host can you talk a little bit about this . Guest i was trying to discover what a lot of square to survive amazon and there was the innovations back i wanted to tell the world about it. Ive got to draw this one i got to tell the story. And i immediately realized that the english language does not have the word for the sort of process that i was describing into the process i was describing was building a business but not a bill business that has been done before. Coffee shops had been around for centuries. Like you know how to make a coffee shop or if you dont know, you can go to a trade show and they will teach you all the stuff you need to set up. How do you differentiate somebody like that from somebody doing something that has never been done before so i have another friend of mine trying to launch satellites stripping everything out of them and loading them up with a missile and she sends them to 90,000 feet and put it in a powered dive and fires the missile from 70,000 feet you dont need to have a very big missile because theres so much energy to begin with. So if you can launch them cheaper. Now where is his trade show, the fighter jets up into the atmosphere instead. He doesnt get this. Keep living in a different set of rules where i needed to be able to describe it, so it turns out the word entrepreneur was originally used and popularized to describe the person whos doing something new and weird and it might not work. It was the original use of the word but now it has since come to mean business. That is the correct use today that the ancient 100yearold use of an economist from 100 years ago it meant somebody who was doing something different, so i sort of go back 100 years s and say we are going to use this word but in its archaic definition because that is the only word we have that i can use to describe it and i wanted to be able to differentiate what it is like to not copy because i didnt want to write a book. Its a very tough thing. And then we are like ive got to write another book that i had to write this one because i looked for the explanation phenomenon that i have seen. Nobody ever explained it and then i understood why. How can they, there isnt even a vocabulary to take off the parts they want to talk about so i needed to dust off the old parts of the entrepreneur and then go and find examples that supported my thesis. Host when did you realize that use your cell phone into the category of entrepreneur versus business person . Guest i am still realizing it so by my definition, entrepreneurs are people level problems that havent been solvebeen toldbeen toldbefore ao solve problems that havent been sold before and im certainly in that category. I have problems i still dont have solutions to. But ive also had the fortune of doing some stuff that hasnt been done and then having it work and seeing the results and the results are tremendous. So, its just a great thing when it works or when it finally works i should say because typically at least the path ive taken a slight failure, something kind of succeeds but then that creates two other problems. You do that enough, one or two things will happen, you die because you run out of energy or resources or time or you will succeed and when you succeed, you will basically be in possession of this thing called an innovations back. You will have done so many Different Things and those Different Things will interrelate and influence each other. Look like nothing else in the market and behave like nothing else in the market and even when amazon decides to try to copy what you just did, you wont be able to come even amazon with all of the resources to tell. And this pattern is what creates Great Solutions to new problems. Host you mentioned youve known jack dorsey since she was a High School Student working for your company. Tell me when did you first realize he had some of these qualities of an entrepreneur . Guest demonstrated the first night we made him pull an all nighter we were in this panic. Thats how we got to him because we were getting everybody from the location where the company was in his mother ran the coffee shop we were using to keep everybody a week. So we would stay awake by munching on caffeine. I think she regretted it because we sent him home at 5 a. M. That morning. Quality, tenacity, survive on little sleep. I later discovered he is incredibly competent. Hes really good and it just shows through. Host you mentioned you had a brother like relationship with him and you are so defensive of him the first time he was pushed out of twitter. What are your thoughts now that theres been this recent activist push once again to push him out of the company and what are your thoughts about that . Guest she kicked him out once, brought him back, didnt kick him out of the third time i think theyve come to some terms but come on, who else is going to run twitter. I dont know anything about twitter or have anything to do with the company, but i would say this, jack is a fantastic leader and this whining about the fact he is running to Public Companies i think it has been successful and i assume he is working as competently as the other company. Host what do you think it is about him that gives the ability to run these Companies Successful . Guest hes single. [laughter] guest co. Single, no kids. [laughter] if i said you could not have a family, not have kids but have to run another company, im not saying it isnt a good tradeoff, but actually thats why i left square. I had my first child and i couldnt work 12 hour days anymore. I wouldnt know my kids and it wasnt fair for the other people working the Hours Tuesday around and go home, see you guys, i couldnt do that. That is when i left after my son was born. Host how did your life change . Guest i was all of a sudden taller. People start treating you differently. My life didnt change all that much because i was living in st. Louis. I had already paid off most of my death, so i wasnt in debt. It turns out going from a lot of debt to no debt is a big deal. Going from no debt to a lot of money isnt that big of a deal. I dont spend that much. But people started treating me differently. And i noticed i stopped getting good feedback so i spent years writing a book and i think its a good book but i cant tell because everyone says your book is great and im like well maybe you are just saying that. If i were my old self when i was much grumpier and less known, i would be getting more feedback. I dont know, youve read it you dont have to be honest, the cameras are on. Its a fascinating account of your own experience and also the research into so many others as fascinating as well. Guest i hope it isnt about me. Believe me you dont want to buy a book about me. The story is good but its twofold. It supports the thesis and ive got firsthand knowledge, complete you cant get it anywhere else but it felt like or what i could say. But the rest of the book i wasnt going to write unless i found examples otherwise it is just me talking about me and that is boring. So its not a book on the square. Its a phenomenon even though we didnt know what it was. If you build it without knowing what it is, why is it important to know and the answer is to go back to the reason i wrote it i wrote this when i was typing the words i have a person in mind, she is incredibly competent. She is so good at, she has so much potential and is one of these people that disqualifies herself from trying to do new things and its heartbreaking because being qualified is the right answer if its possible, but if its not then you were in my world, then you are going to do stuff thats going to feel worse and i will give you an example. If i want to fly home today and take control of the little plane, i thought to get certified and pass all the tests and do all this stuff to make me a qualified pilot and even then so thats good. It would be bad for me to just say i will take over from here. Today you can be a qualified pilot but what about the Wright Brothers come i to the first pen that ever flew, he doesnt know if it is even possible. He doesnt know because there can be no qualifications because nobodys ever been a pilot or ever thought a plane. The pilot of 2020 better have all this stuff they need. The pilot of the first couldnt be qualified okay so back to my friend. She has been raised and trained as we all have that we need to be qualified. Learn from people who know it better than you. Thats good. Thats the way it should be excellent if you are doing something that hasnt been done and we have so many problems that havent been done yet. They will never feel qualified. And every time, my hands sweat. I get nervous. As an economics degree in Computer Science degree the only professional credential as a massage therapist. Biggest bank of the world started he sold by this debate go let us. Kicked out of his own country starts the Biggest Furniture company in the world. They are not qualified to do this, but it turns out qualification is effectively irrelevant if you are doing something new. I wanted to reach out. But when you are in the middle of doing something you are not qualified to do it is okay and others who are also not qualified to do the things that they did were in similar situations. Host what did it feel like when you were at the beginning and realizing how much you needed to learn about the payments. You are working on the product and realized i think we are breaking about 17 different walls right now so how did you overcome that hurdle . Guest i stopped counting at 17. We discovered on the first day that what we were doing was against all these rules. It turns out it wasnt just in one way that it violated 17 rules and regulations to sort of handle the transactions to all of the banking relationships and tons of stuff. We built it anyway and turned the machine even though it wasnt licensed. Theres also no spark and explosions aexclusions of it tut worked and we then had this thing we could point to to get the people who needed to change to accommodate us to change the law or to change the rules. In some cases we tried to change the system to become compliant but there were a few cases where we absolutely were in violation of something that had to be changed to exist so we would go to them and show them this beautiful thing that worked. It just violated the rules. Host another in the book starts out a highly regulated space and has to break some rules at the beginning. The founder of Southwest Airlines of course and those are some of the most fascinating parts of the book. The trip down to texas to meet him. Tell me a little about that and i know that he passed away a year ago. I would like to hear what his legacy has been in the business world. Guest i miss him he was generous. I probably got the last living interview with him. That is the last one i ever heard. He welcomed me down to Southwest Airlines because at the time i had this theory and data. They cant argue with you like if i am dead wrong he will not return from going to cspan to contradict me. Like it just isnt going to happen. I have this theory and i wanted to take it to someone and say you have lived through something i think is incredibly generous and super fun. He smoked two packs of cool menthols while we were there and he said the same thing happened to me only worse. He had like five that were worse. It was like watching the world through a magnifying glass. He was so cool and fun and reminded me of how much fun it was and i tried to capture that and i had this whole thing ready like i have to make a superhero. And i asked for permission to do that and he said no. He felt it wasnt dignified so he didnt want to be portrayed. But what a man and what a Great Company they have built. If you know what air travel was like before southwest, it was a province of the rich. You could only fly if they were rich and the government concluded only rich people wanted to fly because they studied people on the plains and therefore only rich people want to be on the planes. If he wants to visit his grandmother, you know. He changed so many lives. People can go and get Cancer Treatment at Cancer Centers where they have the right equipment and then go back to be with their families. Its lifechanging. You do this and you will improve the lives of millions of people, and he was a living example of that and i am so sorry we lost him. Host theres a great story when you were getting out of his car he signed it for you. Guest i have one friend that is an nba star. I was so starstruck i wanted his autograph but i filled up my notebook so there was no space left in cuba is driving me to the airport and his car is just full of empty cigarette boxes. I grabbed one and hand it to the man and asked will you autograph a pack of menthols for me and he said schorr sai sure so he grabn as its my most prized possessions sitting in my office in a little case that im building for it. Host what do you think the legacy is and how has that changed peoples lives . Lives . Guest it allowed people to go into business for themselves. A lot of people that work for Big Companies may not be working for them after a while and selfemployment is a viable option but only if you can get paid. If you sell something that costs more than 100, nobody pays that much anymore and checks are basically dead. If you dont take an electronic form of payment, you will not get the money and by enabling the basic tool, theyve started this process and we piled on by adding these tools so now i run my little studio using a dozen different tools to manage payroll i dont want to make this a square or commercial but theres all these tools they used to have and now i have is a small companas asmall company ae to complete. They can compete with the Big Companies so that is what i find so gratifyin gratifying is by ne a Small Business person who is doing what she loves to do and the business is working because she has this thing shes making or selling or doing so she can ignore the rest of the. Host tell me once you step back from daytoday use started a nonprofit, right . Guest we had a big deficit of programmers that we needed and as a matter of fact we had an office in st. Louis that the closed because we couldnt hire enough in my hometown. I wanted it to be located. For some reason that doesnt work and we know it doesnt work because the problem has been getting bigger. The shortage problem has been getting bigger for the last 20 years or 30 years actually and we have had plenty of training during that time. One of the problems is that employers will not hire newly minted programmers because they can do too much damage. They dont have experience. No jobs and they dont get experience, so it is a catch22. So we start launch code in its index afree Training Program ths you the skills you need for free but the most important thing we started off as a Training Program, but as a job placement system so if you have the skills the matter what the credentials were and we figured out a way to do that. I figured out what was nobody had figured out before, how to have the comfort and coding skills with zero experience in a way that doesnt hurt the companies. We are not asking them to be kind or nice or pay it forward. Pure greed motivated. The job placement is then coupled with education. We added another to make it free. It turns out part of this is magical because it does two things. It opens up the door to everybody. And we find talented people, people you wouldnt expect, people that you would look at our test and they wouldnt test the way that you would expect if we could get them a job and its a fantastic program. Host you raised some skepticism at the beginning of the business sucks. Some of them are great but you kind of know, right . Host what is the biggest take away you hope they take away from your book . Guest if you do something significant, you will not feel qualified to do so and i could explain why a show you a pathway out oout of and then im going o show you this thing called an innovation stack which you can build and you end up transforming the industry. Its different than the other industries and you are almost beyond attack. Weve seen this in the current day theres probably hundreds of examples around the country but its just a powerful thing and if you see it and recognize it, you will be a little less scared. I dont want people to think its some sort of a guidebook. It isnt a howto. Its basically a confession of somebody thats been there coupled with supporting historical evidence and then all tied together around this idea that true innovation of the stuff that hasnt been done before is different and we havent discussed it before. And what is that like . Lets talk about that and hopefully, if you read it and find yourself in a situation where you consult a perfect problem, you will not disqualify yourself early. We had a multimillionaire. He told me he shot one of his companies down six steps into the innovation stack he said if i read your book i might not have quite so early and i sat there for a second like what would the world be like because he was trying to solve a big problem but he couldnt do it. Thats because i kept getting this negative feedback. And he quit. If i could use his name, i want but i cant because i didnt get the permission. Dont disqualify yourself or at least no wind to or have a sense of what it looks like because it is going to feel different. Host obviously the book just hit shelves but have you shared this idea of the innovation stack and see it play out successfully with any other entrepreneurs . Guest im not trying to keep the ideas. Ideas. If you piece together the interviews, you can piece it together. Its an easy way to disseminate knowledge. Sometimes i actively discourage them to see if they can handle it, but i think the best advice i can give is that new solutions are really messy ugly things and weve been trying to watch delegation in advance and that is going to stop every time. Just get over that. And then i hope people will care about something enough to actually stick their neck out because what i found again is at least those i studied said none of them are doing it for the money. Maybe a little bit. Not for the fame or for the public benefit. Its because they care about solving a problem. They care enough about a problem it will give a tremendous motivation. Im giving away another chapter. You dont even have to buy the book. The point is you get that motivation to solve a problem you care about and if you care deeply about the problem, it will drive you in a way that any other external motivator cant. Even your family members. I come home to this day and tell my wife some of the things and she kind of rolls her eyes. Youve got to have something to stand on. Host you talk about how there are so many copycats in Silicon Valley and theres a distinction between the copycats and disruptors and innovators. What is a company that youve seen recently that you think is a real disrupter that you are excited about . Guest let me sit back and talk about copycats. Ive got no judgment. I think copying is exactly the way to do anything. Everything in this room is a copy. Some of it is actually fake. Those arent real tvs. And thats okay. People have figured out they needeneed to air condition thise so much. The station were in right now is a copy of others tv studios. Thats good. They all work. This is a perfectly good chair. I love copying and i will i love copying and i will always have theres an existing solution. But i dont believe that they should stop there. I dont believe we should only copy. And i believe that if you limit yourself to only the world of non solutions, you will deprive all of us of this new thing. So, companies i think are doing great. Im going to land a rocket like that. Mines going to lan is going tot up and down. I am going to take off this and stick the landing. I dont know how many times use all the videos. But he sticks the landing. It has a massive innovation stack. There are hundreds of things that are different. They will have a hard time copying they get so much abuse of these early stages you want to see they should look for those that are the most mocking. Host we have a couple of minutes left. Weve talked about perfect problems and i would ask what is the next perfect problem youve identified that you want to solve . Guest the next one is journalism, specifically the problem that we as individuals have lost control of our own identities and we no longer have control of part of ourselves so i exist in this file with a bunch of ad companies and platforms and i dont know what is in the finals or what is being used for good or against me. Its just bad for me as an individual. Individual. Thats also bad for me as an individual is if ive lost my economic voice. What we mean by this is i cant figure for content or less. Its to work for a handful of publications but most publications and videos are supported by Washington Post wall street journal, New York Times and economists. If it isnt one of those five i think that i was tried for the talked into this into building a microsoft payment and the reason he wanted to do this and i have been doing this is because of all of us as Consumers Want to be able to pay more for good stuff and bad for bad because that is how the signal that is good so lets have lunch in dc and im going to spend my money at a restaurant and probably going to eat vegan. If i buy a lot of expensive vegetables and pay more for the planned burger and a real hamburgehamburger cottages to va plantbased diet and it gets tabulated and i think that is 20 votes for this sort of thing that i want. Now, we tabulate all of those votes and that is what gives us quality in everything. But it doesnt work online because those crusading about online consumption is if i tricked you into watching something for ten seconds, i make the same couple pennies as if i created ten seconds you love. You are a journalist, you need to get paid. Theres a whole Organization Behind you and you know who gets paid for that, consumers like me that consume your stuff. I need to pay you more because you have an organization that needs to create that and its not a judgment of who is right and who is wrong. Its simply a way of saying humans need to be able to express their preferences otherwise we will be left with crap. So think of it again in terms of food. If we pass the ball in dc that every meal is ten bucks, would you like it . What happens, say i go to a great restaurant tonight, though, they just went out of business because they cant put a fancy steak in front of you for 10. Now, you wont starve because what will happen is the Business Model to replace it is we will make the cheapest crap they possibly can and sell it for 10 that is the world they live and in journalism, and what i think is a crime is the fact that what we become is a combination of a little bit of what we put in our heads and a model for its it py much works, the model we put in our heads and you create as a journalist is being economically incentivized by this system that rewards cheap