David Pogue Says Yes to Everything

I have never been let down by that advice that I have followed my entire career, which is just say yes to everything.

So accompany your buddy to work one day, go out to lunch with people, invite your old college professor out to lunch.

Every one of these people is a network of people who don't know you that could lead you to something else.

If I just think it's a bad idea, it's not always a great idea to try to engineer your transition.

You might not know what it is yet. So just say yes to everything.

Welcome to Second Act Stories. I'm your host, Scott Merritt.

And I'm Scott's co-host Andy Levine. We have a really high profile guest today.

Tell us about David Pogue, Scott.

Sure. So anybody who watches CBS Sunday Morning will know David. He's a correspondent. He's on almost every week.

But before that, if that wasn't enough, he happened to be the chief technology columnist at the New York Times, if you've ever heard of that.

So he's always been recognized as one of the top tech journalists in the world, at least for the past, I don't know, 26 years.

So one of the most powerful journalists in America, we got that, but tell us about his first act. Where did he start?

Okay, so like, you know, the story everybody's heard a million times, right?

So before becoming this worldwide phenomenal tech authority, right? At the age of 24, he just happened to be a composer for Broadway musicals.

Ah, yes, the old Broadway composer turned tech journalist. A story we've heard so often, right, Scott?

Oh, so often, all the time. I'm turning people away left and right. Let's hear David Pogue's Second Act Story.

I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, suburb of Cleveland. My father was a really big, big deal lawyer. He was the managing partner of the second largest law firm in the world.

Jones Day, Revison Pogue. My mom was the welcome wagon lady for Shaker Heights. Both really, really almost unhealthily obsessed with achievement and societal approval.

So my brother and sister and I, you know, learned that if we wanted the approval from the parents, it was about grades, it was about being on stage, it was about awards.

This drove David to accomplish a lot as a kid.

I was in all the school plays and musicals. I was a magician. I did 400 magic shows for birthday parties during my teen years. That was my stick. I was the town magician.

And, you know, I played piano, banjo, and harmonica. I did concerts. I was the Ohio Spelling Bee Champion in 1976. So, yeah, so very, very high achievement, I achievement family.

Where did that creativity come from?

Well, here's my theory. This is my own self-analysis. I was the third of three children. My brother and sister are five and seven years older than I am. So, I was kind of the one who got the least attention.

So, my theory is that, you know, I became the class clown, the show off, the lead in the musical, you know, to get the attention that I otherwise wasn't getting. That's my theory.

If you performed 400 magic shows, you were really good at magic. Or you had to be good enough to at least be hired 400 times.

Yeah. And you had to be cast in these musicals and in these shows. So, you had to have that talent. So, was there just an innate talent that you brought to the table? Or was that fostered in some way?

I guess so. I spent 10 years doing Broadway shows as a conductor and arranger. And one of my buddies pointed out to me that while I was not as good a piano player as the best of those musical directors and arrangers, 95% of life is just showing up.

What matters is that you're there on time, you're prepared, you're fun to deal with, you don't push back, you're fun to be around. That's what keeps people hiring you.

I asked David about his aspirations as a kid. The obvious question was whether he wanted to follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer.

There was an aspiration on my father's part that it was steady law. It was kind of expected that we would all three become lawyers. And my brother and sister did, of course.

I remember, as I was about to graduate college, my dad sat me down and I'd been, I'd been a music major at Yale and I wrote a musical each year and produced it there.

And I'd done musicals all during high school to writing them. And he said, so Dave, what do you think about after graduation? And I told him what I wanted to do is go to New York and work on Broadway shows.

And this did not go over particularly well. So he made me a deal. He said, I'll give you two years after graduation. And if you are not actually conducting a Broadway show within two years, then you're going to law school.

Now, I was 22 years old, like asking me to be in charge of a Broadway show by 24 was kind of a big ask. But through a series of really lucky events incredibly in the 24th month, we opened a show that I was conducting on Broadway.

And then it all changed. Then my dad was like, well, my youngest son, you know, is a Broadway conductor, you know.

Then everything turned around. It sounds crazy that David managed to achieve this milestone so quickly. But in a little bit of foreshadowing, it wound up being his tech expertise that made it possible.

Usually you put in years of substituting for piano players in the pit and then you work your way up. And I skipped all that because of finale finale is the software program that came out in the mid 80s,

where you could just play on your electric keyboard and it would write the notes out for you. Just the way Siri transcribes your words into text, this would transcribe your playing into sheet music.

And that had never existed before since the time of the months. And I became really into it. I became a teacher of it. I would hold finale classes at Sam Ash, the music store in Manhattan.

And I would do private lessons to musicians who wanted to learn finale. I wrote the manuals for finale. Was that the first foray into authoring anything?

Yes, yes, it was. I mean, I'd written for the school paper and stuff like that. But yeah, that was really my first book. I was 25, I guess, 900 pages, three volumes.

And so these composers, Candor and Eb and Sy Coleman and so on, they would hire me to work with them on the finale stuff, on the sheet music stuff. And eventually they were like, do you just want to be the musical director of this show? And so I really kind of got in through the side door.

You had two years, according to your father, to get to a certain level. But that's like somebody getting off the bus from Iowa going to Hollywood and going, I'm going to be starring in a movie.

How do you reach that level? How do you even get anybody to take you seriously as a 22 year old?

I mean, it was the fact that I was the finale guy. I knew this very complex piece of software very well. I'll give you an example. So Sy Coleman is one of the greatest Broadway composers of all time.

He wrote Sweet Charity and City of Angels and the Will Rogers Follies. And, you know, he's the guy he wrote.

And he was a genius at composing. So he would sit at the piano and the song that he was supposed to write for the show would just flow out of his fingers just right there. And what he hated was stopping the flow to write down what he was doing.

So he hired me to come over with a tape recorder and record what he was doing. And then I would go home at night and I'd put it into finale and have the sheet music ready for him at rehearsal the next morning.

And it was miraculous. And so we became, you know, more or less friends. And so it wasn't much of a stretch when the show went into production for him to say, why don't you just be the conductor? Why don't you just be the musical director?

And again, I made a point of being on time, being ready and being, you know, easy-going, you know, fun to work with. And I didn't, you know, I put my own ego aside and just let these famous composers do their thing.

Where did the interest in tech begin? Because tech and music these days, there's an obvious marriage between the two. But there wasn't back in the day.

Yeah, I think the tech thing comes from magic. So from the time I was plunked down in front of the TV to watch I Dream of Genie and Be Witched and the $6 million man, I wanted to be magic.

I wanted to have magic. And so my mom would go to the library and check out magic trick books and encouraged my interest in magic through being a magician.

Through doing magic shows. And anyone who knows magic will tell you like 10% of it is the trick. And 90% of it is the showmanship. It's what you say, it's the misdirection, it's where to look, it's the jokes, it's the structure of the unveiling of the story.

And so that was the stuff that I was good at. And so I think technology is the closest thing we've got.

I can open my phone in California and change the temperature of my bedroom in New York. That's magic. I can speak to my phone and it will obey me and write out what I'm saying.

That's magic. So I think I got into technology just because it's the closest thing we have.

So Apple, I got to bring up Apple because Apple, there's this crazy through line in your career, in your life, that where Apple is kind of omnipresent.

It's true. So let's talk about your first exposure to an Apple product.

Oh, man, I remember it vividly. The thing with Apple, what Apple did, of course, is to take computers, which were complicated and difficult to learn and limited to the rarefied few nerds who understood command prompts and commands.

And they brought it to the masses. So that was what the Macintosh did is it brought us the mouse and menus and windows and graphics on our screen. So I was about to graduate from college and Apple brilliantly had set up a half price deal for college kids.

So you could get a Mac for half price. So I figured this computer thing seems to be happening. Why don't I get one while the getting is good.

So it was the spring of 1984. I got a Mac, the very first one. And I remember I was in my dorm room. The most beautiful packaging you can imagine. I mean, it was, they, I was told by people I've interviewed that they, they put almost as much work into the packaging is into the product, you know, the sequence of things that you open and what you're presented with and what's coiled up over here and what's nestled here.

Anyway, I pulled this thing out this Macintosh. It was beautiful. It was cute. And then there's a quick start getting started guide and it said insert your first application.

And this is a key moment in my life because I didn't know what that meant. And so I literally remember going back to the shipping box and pulling out all this styrofoam looking for this extra part.

The application, like how would I know what that is? They didn't define it. And that was their word for software program. They call it, they're called apps today, but that short for that short for application.

And I couldn't find it. And so I was stymied. I like, I didn't know how to start using this computer. And so what that did is it, it planted the seed in my head that somebody needs to translate their talk into public talk.

Like into words, the average person could understand. I think it was at that moment that I became an explainer. And I think I think if anyone wants to know the through line of everything I've done in my career, it's I'm the explainer guy.

You know, a lot of tech, a lot of science, a lot of how to books and so on. Now I think that was the moment. I'm like, why should they make up new terms for something that has perfectly good words already?

Why do you got to say Ram when you could say memory? You know, why do they got to say the user when they could say you? And so, you know, only a few years later, you know, I was asked to write max for dummies, which is the first of seven dummies books that I did.

And it was that same frustration that led me like, hey, let me, let me get this. I can, I can translate their dumb jargon into everyday concepts that we can understand.

So interesting though that it's now just common parlance, right? Everybody knows what an app is. But I don't know how many kids know that it's short for application. And I don't know how many kids know that that was Apple's word for software program.

So that triggered your desire to say, okay, I'm going to be the one. I'm going to be the one who does something about this and makes it accessible for everybody else. What was the path? How did that turn into something?

Yeah, I mean, I had, I had a really strange side hobby. So when I was doing the Broadway stuff, I had a side hustle of giving private lessons on the Mac.

So the Mac was a rising star among creative people, musicians, actors, Broadway stars, Hollywood stars. And I became the kid you hire.

So Mia Farrow and Carly Simon and Harry Connick Jr. and a lot of a lot of celebrity stars have go to their apartments and teach them how to use their Mac.

And that was really useful exercise because I learned things like, well, what worked and what didn't. And I also learned how much capacity you have in one sitting to accommodate new material.

Like, I learned very quickly an hour was the longest private lesson I could give like after that their brains are so full.

I remember Mia Farrow was given, and she's told this story. So I'm not, I'm not violating anyone's privacy here, but she, she was given three million bucks or something to write her autobiography.

And with that, she bought a Macintosh and Microsoft Word and me. And so I would go over to her apartment and, you know, explain the Mac to her.

You know, never use a computer in her life. And I remember saying, so these are the menus. So in these, these are lists of commands you might want to use as you write.

For example, this is spell check. And she'd like, well, I wouldn't have gotten this huge advance if I didn't know how to spell David. Can you get rid of that? I'm like, get rid of it. And she said, yeah. And this, I still remember her. She said too many options. Make me weep.

And it's, it first of all, it's brilliant. And it's true. I mean, I was like, this is bold. This is italic. These are the different fonts you can choose.

And she's like, David, how many books have you seen that use more than a single font? Get rid of them. And so like she literally had me paired in word, you can do that. You can remove menu commands that you don't use.

And so by the end of half an hour, I mean, she wrote that book with three commands, bold, save and quit.

That was it. And it's a great book. And she was right. I mean, look what Steve Jobs's whole thing was. He said over and over and over.

The art is not an adding features to a product. The art is learning to say no. The art is getting rid of stuff that is superfluous, that is confusing.

And that's how he did the iPod, the iPhone, the iMac. He got rid of stuff. And that's a lesson lost to all of Apple's competitors, where their game is just a pile on more features every year.

Even Apple today isn't quite as religious about Steve Jobs's teachings. But I was a big believer.

That's amazing. So was a psych home and it sounds like was the first sort of person, like person of note, who recognized that, oh, you were somebody to turn to for tech questions.

So was that the gateway to working with all these other celebrities?

Yes, very much so. So Si and then Candor and Ebb who wrote Chicago and Cabaret, New York, New York. I worked with a couple shows for Candor and Ebb too. And between those two, those two of those guys, they sort of would hand my name around and one thing led to another.

I wound up being sometimes, Stephen Sondheim's tech guy for 30 years.

So you were like a one man genius bar, a one man. Yeah, one man geeks.

I think that's right. That was my role. And, you know, people would call me at any time of night. And, you know, even the Macintosh was not, you know, for someone who never used a computer, even it had some weird concepts like this whole notion of dragging the little piece of paper icon onto the trash can to get rid of it.

I had one client, William Goldman, screenwriter, which Cassie and the Sundance kid, Misery and a lot of great movies. He called me one night. He said, you got to come over. He lived on the Upper East Side. He's like, you got to come over here. I cannot get rid of these files. I cannot get rid of them.

You know, you're putting them on the trash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I go over there. And he had 35 little icons parked just above the trash icon on the desktop. In other words, I told him you drop him into the trash.

So he was literally moving them just above the icon, expecting gravity to pull them down. And so over the weeks, he piled up like 35 icons in a mass right there. So it's not, it wasn't intuitive.

Tech plays a much bigger role in your life than just training a few celebrities. So I, it seems like as I was putting a timeline together here, it was while you were still working on Broadway and still working in music that you started working also as a columnist at Mac world. Right. That's your apple. That's right. Right. So how did that come about?

There's this guy named Rob Allen. And I owe him my entire career, my entire career. So I was a member of a club, the, the NIMUG, the New York Mac users group from the moment I arrived in New York City.

And Rob ran our newsletter, which was an eight page MIMUGraph thing hilariously called the Mac Street Journal. And that was when finale had just come out, it cost a thousand dollars, a thousand dollars for a floppy disk.

And so I wanted it so badly, but I was a piano player for voice lessons at the time I couldn't afford finale. So Rob Allen said, well, why don't you write to the company and tell them you are a reviewer and I'll send you a copy.

I'm like, what? It's that easy. They'll send me a thousand dollar software program for free. He goes, he goes, it goes on every day and then write us a review for the Mac Street Journal.

And I did and they did and I did. So that was my first published tech review. It was a review of finale. And then I was like greedy. I'm like, oh my god, I could get Photoshop, which is $600. I could get that for free.

I could get Microsoft Office for free and I could I could get free software the rest of my life. All I have to do is write reviews. And that is exactly what I did. And so starting in I guess 1985, I started writing tech reviews in order to get free software.

I mean, it's the biggest scam in the world. And yet it worked for everybody. And then Rob Allen, after a year of this, he goes, you know, you could be making money from this too. I'm like, what? It gets better.

He goes, there are these computer magazines. Now that you've published a bunch of reviews for us, send those clips to Mac world and Mac user magazines. And maybe they'll hire you to like pay you to write reviews.

And so I did. I sent my clips to Mac world and Mac user. Mac user never got back to me, but Mac world did. And they started hiring me first as their music software guy, then as their art software guy.

And the next thing I know I'm spending 13 years writing reviews and columns for Mac world and getting paid to get free software.

So it really started as I just want a free copy of finale, because I don't know how to afford it. 100% 100% that was the beginning of my writing career, right?

So the David Pope that we know today as the tech guy really got his start just because he wanted software free software. That was it. That was it.

And that led to everything. I mean, that led to obviously my involvement with finale. And I wrote the 2.0 and later versions. I wrote the manuals because the original manuals were not good.

And then, you know, I became the New York City dealer for finale. So every time I sold a copy, I would get a cut. And then that led to Mac world and then Mac world led to the New York Times and then for the times for 13 years.

So there's this there's this whole career arc that was there any plan like was there like a master vision for this when you realized what like, OK, first it was about getting a free copy of the software, which, you know, oh my God.

I don't know how it worked. But then when you were told you could make money at it, did that, did that set off bells in your head like, oh, this is the direction I want to go because there's maybe not a future in the music.

No, no, it wasn't anything like that. I mean, I really never had a plan for my life. I mean, honestly, really never did. I think very people, very few people do. I mean, there were people in college where like,

you could tell they were super into politics or super into photography. And you could see where they were going. But I was never like that. I just, I always tell young people, I just answer the phone and said, yes, whatever it was. I mean, whatever it is.

Hey, you want to do this with me? Yeah, want to try this? Yeah, want to join our meeting. Yeah, just go do everything. And then things lead to things. People lead to people. And you wind up falling into niches that you can fill.

After 13 years, you leave Macworld. And the New York Times, the New York Times, yeah, hires you as a personal tech colonist. And now there are like these two Titanic names in, in tech reporting, there's David Pogue and there's Walt Mossberg.

What does that look like when you're, when you're now the top personal tech guy at the New York Times, that's like a major post.

Oh, man, I mean, now that you know about my family back, I mean, this was the ultimate. I mean, I was on cloud 9,000, not only do I get to keep writing fun columns about technology, not only am I bringing my explainer side, but I'm bringing it to a huge audience.

Like millions of people read that column for weekly for 13 years. And you know, my parents could now go to church and cocktail parties and say, well, you know what my youngest son does. I mean, that was the ultimate and approval. Yeah, it was a really amazing, amazing job.

What was the best part about being the New York Times tech guy?

I think just being read, you know, every writer wants to be read. And you know, the feedback was immediate, especially when the internet came along. I mean, you get, it was like, it was like being on stage, you'd publish something and you'd immediately get hundreds of responses from people who'd read it, people loved it, people who hated it.

Just an absolutely fascinating interaction with a public that until that moment had been largely invisible. Just imagined David spent 13 years at the helm of the New York Times tech section before he made a monumental decision that created nothing short of a seismic shift in journalism, PR and the media industry at large.

He left me New York Times and joined Yahoo to launch Yahoo tech, making him the highest paid tech journalist in America.

There is no way to overstate just how big a deal this was when I joined the times in the year 2000. They explained it like this. We're not going to pay you very much, but you can parlay the by line into books and speaking engagements and television.

Like it's a great credit to have. And that's what I did for many years. And then in 2011, 2012, the rules changed. And they said, you can no longer speak and accept money. And you can no longer use your name on a book in the New York Times by line on a book.

You know, without special permission. And I mean, it was a radical change in. I mean, that was speaking was my entire income. I mean, my entire income. So they said, we will let you speak for nonprofits only. So government agencies, schools.

That's it. So basically my income went away at exactly the time that Marissa Meyer became the CEO of Yahoo and intended to revolutionize it. She hired Katie Kurek and me and a bunch of other times writers.

And she intended to make it a really top class journalistic destination. And I will just tell you the salary offer was 10 times what the times was paying me after 13 years. 10 times.

It was like my agent said my, the guy, the lawyer who negotiated the deal is like, congratulations. You know, the highest paid tech journalists in America. And I went and I visited Yahoo and in Sunnyvale, California. And what I saw was a bunch of like young hungry people under Marissa. They were very excited that she was about to revive the company.

She's going to make it something. She's going to make it relevant. She's willing to spend money to do it. And she offered me my own site. It was going to be called Yahoo tech. And I could hire anyone I wanted.

I could, I could design it anyway. I wanted. It could be, you know, video and pictures and audio and podcast. I mean, it could be, I mean, the creative freedom that she gave me was insane.

So incredible amount of, you know, freedom, money, talent and an excitement. So, I mean, I really, really hated leaving the times. I loved the gig. I really loved it. But I also, I mean, the financial thing was just irresistible.

Now, maybe that gives you some insight into my thinking in 2013 when I left. It was a terrible move. It was a disaster. I wrote great stuff, made great videos for Yahoo. But from the public's perspective, I was never heard from again. I just disappeared.

And everyone Katie Kuerrick will tell you the same thing with her stuff like we were just the central problem is that what Yahoo is is an algorithmically determined news site.

So when you go to the Yahoo.com front page, you see articles that have been hand picked for you will algorithmically picked for you based on your tastes from other publications around the web.

So here's CNET. Here's the New York Times. Here's the Wall Street Journal. And here's USA today articles cherry picked and assembled for you. So everyone sees a different front page when they go to Yahoo. Right.

The problem was I was writing stuff that I wanted people to read. And the algorithms weren't choosing my stuff because there's a financial deal that happens when Yahoo uses somebody else's article.

That I can't even remember to Yahoo pay them or did they pay Yahoo. I can't even remember. But the point was they couldn't favor their own in house writers over the ones they had deals with.

So I would write a review of the new iPhone. And on the front page of Yahoo would be CNET's review of the new iPhone. So I was absolutely buried.

You would think that that's something that they could have solved easily.

I mean, it was endless arguing and you know discussion and meetings and but there was just literally no way. So they just there was no promotion.

There was I mean, you couldn't even sign up to get my columns by email. You couldn't even get notifications.

Like it was as though they were determined to bury our stuff. Wow. So conceptually the whole thing was really good, but it was just hidden under a barrel.

So after five years, I left and I had been doing stories occasionally since 2002 for CBS Sunday morning, right, who in the beginning needed a tech guy to do stories.

And they had been saying during the 20 teens, you know, we'd love for you to get more involved. Have you ever thought about coming with us full time.

And so the timing for that was just right. Since 2002, David has done countless segments for CBS Sunday morning.

There were two segments in particular that I wanted to ask him about. The first was his interview with Elon Musk.

It was super surreal. So I got a call from the PR guy at SpaceX. And he said we're inviting five journalists to SpaceX to watch the launch of our Falcon super heavy rocket, the one that's going to go to Mars test launch.

And you're the only one from network television. Would you like 15 minutes or 20 minutes with Elon Musk? And I'm like, would I have to limit my questions to the rocket and space? He's no, you can talk about whatever you want.

And so I said, okay, and I called my boss and he said, oh, yeah, let's let's this is a great thing for us. And so the other four journalists were all space journalists, one from a newspaper and the other three were bloggers.

And so I had spent, you know, two weeks. If I have 20 minutes, how do I parse this? What do I do? Where do I go? I had watched a recent interview of Elon where the interviewer was what you would expect of, you know, like, you know, your, your doge is tearing apart lives and ruining the government.

And we're losing our soft power overseas, you know, do you ever lie awake regretting what you've done? Like, and so what did he do? He got furious and he shut down. And the rest of her interview was one word answers.

And like, you know, do you have any remorse for what you've done to blah, blah, blah. And they were all like that. So like, I know that's what every liberal viewer would want me to do. But I don't think that's the way to do the right interview or interview.

So it had to be a dance. So I decided I would start with a couple of space questions. And the questions would get progressively harder. So if you shut down on me, at least I would have some good answers.

But he came in when it was my turn, we were on two directors, chairs overlooking the SpaceX factory. We could see the rockets being made a really cool, cool place in Texas.

And he was livid. He was angry about something from the moment. Like I put up my hand to shake it and he shook it briefly, but he wouldn't make eye contact. He was looking out over the factory floor.

And we sat down and you know, it takes a couple of minutes to put on the microphones and to adjust the lights. And so he's wearing a t-shirt that says Occupy Mars. And so I thought I'd make some small talk. I'm like, oh, I love that t-shirt.

Is that available in the SpaceX gift shop? No response. Just stared out over the factory floor. Like, wouldn't look at me. And like, why is he so angry? I haven't said a word to him yet.

I later learned that somebody on the PR team and told him this is probably going to be a tough interview. So I mean, I don't know where that came from. One way or another, I had indicated nothing about what the interview would be.

So he was really pissed. And he is, when he's angry at you, I mean, he looks at you with these dead eyes, like sharp eyes. And anyway, so the first question was about the launch.

And he was happy to answer that. And then I said, the president is trying to shut down foreign students from coming to the United States to study.

But how do you feel like about that? Because that was you. You came here to study. And he's like, yeah, we're not going to talk about that.

He said, we're just going to talk about space stuff. But your people told me that anything goes. And he's like, no. And like, well, great.

Like, I've worked out this carefully calibrated interview. And now it's. And so, and yet, and yet incredibly without being asked, like a couple questions later, he just started going off on Trump.

And especially this big, beautiful bill, which he hated. He hated it. And he's like, you know, they're, they're undoing what I've just spent months trying to accomplish, which is eliminating waste and balancing the budget.

And they're going to spend more money with this bill in a day than I've, than I've, than, you know, all the savings that I've achieved over months.

And he said, he famously said, I think you can have a bill that's big or one that's beautiful, but it can't be both.

So this is on a Tuesday, the story is supposed to air on Sunday. That afternoon, CBS takes those parts of the interview and starts running them as promos for the Sunday broadcast.

And it went scary white hot viral, like it was every social media post. It was the front page, the top left corner of the New York Times must turns on Trump.

And the next morning I wake up and my producer has texted me and he goes, I think you just got Elon Musk fired and like, what must to leave White House?

Like unbelievable. Now do you think that that happens without you involved or without that interview?

That's an excellent question. I mean, there's a really good theory that he used this interview to say that on purpose, that he took this opportunity to say what he'd been wanting to say.

He knew it was CBS news, so visibility wise. Yeah, because I'm telling you, I didn't ask him about Trump. He volunteered this.

So I mean, the question was had been about doge. Like now that you see how upset people are about the cuts to the national parks and health care and clinics and on and on.

I said, do you think maybe now looking back there might have been a better way to go about it? That was my question.

And then he just went off on the Trump stuff. So it's entirely possible that I had nothing to do with it and he was just taking the opportunity.

But I wonder if you wind up on Trump's shit list. Probably. I mean, in the journalism world, that's considered a markup honor.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not. It's not exactly a tough achievement if you're working.

That's true. That's okay. So moving on from Elon, this is the one that I can't believe that you did a segment on the Titan sub.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. You were supposed to go down. I did go down. I was on that thing. I was on that submersible.

Three dives before it imploded. Like there was another one and another one and that it imploded.

But did you go all the way? No, we didn't go all the way down. We had a malfunction four feet down and we had to come back at the top, back up to the surface.

And you know, at the time, I was pissed. I'm like, dude, this is 12 days of my life, this excursion.

And I mean, the reason they came across, I'm telling you, as the most safety, maniacal organization in the world.

Everything had inspections and countdowns and checklists. And twice a day, there was mandatory meetings for everybody on the ship to talk about in detail, how's the fuel level, how's the electronics, how's the navigation.

I mean, it was so tightly controlled. And they had a rule of three, a safety rule of three. If any three things are a miss, even the tiniest things, the flashlight battery is not fully charged.

The label is peeling off one of the valves. Like three little things, they cancel. I mean, I know, I know that the picture we all have of them now is, you know, bananza, maverick, crazy people, making money and killing people because of lack of safety concern.

From what I saw, they were nuts about safety, including our dive. So the way it works is there's, there's submersible and it's bolted to a platform, like 20 by 20 feet.

And they, you get into the submersible, close the door and then you sink the platform, 40 feet down. And the reason is that it's calmed down there. The water's calm underwater.

But if you try to like board and do the setup on the surface of the North Atlantic, you're bobbing your banging your head. It's dangerous.

So you get on, you sink 40 feet, they make all the final checks and then they, they unbolt you with scuba divers and then off you go.

So that's where we were. We were all set to go. And on the four corners of this platform are floats, these big oval shaped buoys that help keep the platform facing the right way.

And one of them came untied and floated to the surface. And for that, they canceled our dive. And I'm like, people just unbolted, who cares about the platform, the platform's job is done.

We are ready to go. Let's go.

And they're like, no, that's not the way it works. So I mean, retro, retroactively looking back. Of course, I have a very different feeling about, but I mean, tell you at the time, I thought you guys are so safety paranoid.

It's ridiculous. But now knowing what we know, does it feel like it was safety theater, or was it really safety?

I really don't know. I mean, there's definitely that, that theory is, you know, occurred to me too.

I mean, I don't, I can tell you this, a Stockton Rush, the guy who designed the sub and ran the company, was not tricking anyone.

He believed in the safety of this thing. He had to had it tested at, you know, at one point, NASA and the University of Washington and Boeing engineers had all been involved in running tests for him.

And he was satisfied with, with the safety of it. And P.H. Nargele was satisfied with it. He was the French diver, the single most experienced Titanic diver in the world.

He'd been down there 22 times or something. And he'd been on all five of the world's Titanic submersibles, the only ones that can go down that deep.

He'd watched over its construction. He'd watched over the design. And I interviewed him before the dive. He's like 100%.

I'm on this thing. I approve of it. And, and then he died. He died when it imploded.

So, I mean, there've been documentaries or events, you know, the Coast Guard study.

There were whistleblowers in 2018. His technical director said this plexiglass, the port hole is too thin. And the carbon fiber of the actual submersible is too thin.

And it was. And, you know, so Stockton Rush sued that guy and he sued Stockton Rush. And it was a whole thing. But in the end, he rebuilt the sub with thicker plexiglass and thicker carbon fiber. Nobody tells that part of the story.

So, man, there's no way to know. I think Stockton Rush believed to the day. Maybe he was deluding himself, but he believed that it was safe because he's the pilot.

But he's the one who's in it when he takes you down. Of course he believes it's safe. Has it changed the way you approach stories that you're considering doing?

People ask me all the time, would you go into space if you were offered? And at this moment, I'm kind of thinking, no, I still feel like that's a little too experimental.

There hasn't been an explosion yet in one of these tourism things with SpaceX or Richard Branson's thing or Amazon's thing Blue Origin.

But Elon himself has said it's only a matter of time. Like he said, one of these things is going to blow up. And I don't like that. So it might not be worth it. So we'll see if it comes up, I'll have a good long think.

David's experience, in tech and in journalism, and most importantly, his history with Apple led him to what's now become his magnum opus, his new book called Apple, the first 50 years.

It's a magnificent 600 plus page book that chronicles the legendary company from its inception to today.

So this is kind of a cool story. And I should point out, by the way, that there are 360 beautiful color photos in this book. Like never before seen prototypes and early versions and cool stuff.

So it's not a wall of 600 pages of text to be fair. So the story of this book is it started in January of 2024, just about two years ago.

I was invited to be the MC for a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Macintosh.

This was being hosted at the Computer History Museum, which is an incredible museum in Mountain View, California.

And they were going to invite back Andy Hertzfeld and Chris Espinosa and Bill Atkinson and Guy Kawasaki and all the early people who worked on the Mac.

The people who created it when they were in their 20s and they had no sleep and no food and just wanted to make the deadline and change the world under Steve Jobs's leadership.

So that was an unbelievable night. These guys coming back, now they're in their 70s or older and a lot of them hadn't seen each other in decades.

And the audience was just full of Mac fans and ex-Apple people. I mean, it was Woodstock. It was a love fest.

It was a night of humor and storytelling and PTSD. It was an unforgettable night and a couple weeks later, I had a two two book deal with Simon and Schuster, one I did in 2021 called How to Prepare for Climate Change.

And then I had a second book I owed them. And so one night, Nicky knew my wife wakes me literally in the middle of the night. She had a dream.

She said, wake up, wake up. And she's like, you should do a book for Apple's 50th anniversary, like tracing the whole story. Steve Jobs, the whole thing.

Like, Nicky, you've missed it. It's common gone. Go back to sleep. And we went back to sleep. And so when I woke up, you know, when you have an idea in your sleep, you're not really sure if it's a good idea or not.

And so when I woke up, I looked it up and it was not till 2026, like a year and three quarters later. And like, that's the perfect timing to write a book.

And I'm like, Nicky, you were right. Come here. Come here. And so I was often running. It's a great freaking story. I mean, Steve Jobs started Apple twice and he left Apple twice.

Apple's growth and success looks sort of like an italic capital letter N, right? Like it took off. It became the Apple too became the first home computer that people bought.

Sold millions and millions of them introduced normal people to computing and then Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh and it was a failure at first.

And so he was pushed out. And so for 11 years, he was gone. And Apple just crashed without him. The products went terrible. The money was terrible.

The product quality was wretched. Apple had three different CEOs during this time. They devolved into a kind of set of fiefdoms like people would fight each other.

They had 22 ad campaigns going on at the same time with different ad agencies. None of them aligned. Some of them actually contradicted themselves.

My favorite story was that there was one day in 1996 when two Apple lawyers showed up in trademark court to sue each other.

I mean, it was so dysfunctional, but super juicy to read about. Right. You know, that makes for an interesting content. Yeah. So that's the bottom of the end.

And then and then Steve Jobs comes back in 1997 and in a single year fires the entire board fires all 22 ad agencies. Apple is selling 70 products at this point. 70 different max.

He shuts all of them down. I mean, this is really upsetting within Apple. Not everyone loved that Steve Jobs is back. He'd he'd gone off and started next and that was a failure. And he'd failed at Apple. So why would we want a failure to come back?

But he did it. He said we're going to replace those 70 products with four max, two laptops, two desktops. That's it. Cancel everything else. And we're going to put all our best people on only four products. That's how you make them great.

He was still CEO of Pixar while he was doing this. But he pulled it off. It's an amazing story.

Well, anybody who's listening can learn a heck of a lot more about Apple by getting your book and reading through it and and learning a lot more about the first 50 years.

So you've had this love affair with Apple through your entire adult life. I mean, since Apple's been relevant, just imagine like where would you be if there were no Apple? What would you be doing today?

I mean, I think I think the connection between Apple and magic is probably how I got into tech, you know, again, Apple really believes in magical things.

Think about the first time you spread two fingers on a photo or a map on the iPhone. I mean, that is a magical action.

So in the years of tech reviewing that I did, as I look back on it, the things that I loved and not just Apple, anyone, the things I loved were the things that were the most magical that gave us magical powers, you know, like that Google introduced Google maps and knew the traffic conditions on a road somewhere.

That's magic. That's freaking magic.

So that tends to be the things that I've always loved. So I don't know that my trajectory would have been any difference if there weren't an Apple.

But it is definitely the case that things that are beautiful and magical are the things that in my as my reviewer career go are the ones I loved.

So you've reached the top in a whole bunch of different fields. What is the, what's the through line? What's the motivation that helps you succeed at that level and could help somebody else succeed?

Well, I think if you're going to do media, like if you're going to do TV or write, I like that idea of doing your editor's work first, do the 95% of life is just showing up.

So read that thing out loud or put it in a different font. So you catch more mistakes. Be on time with it. Be the right number of words.

If it's a TV story, I always labor over the structure of a TV story. Sometimes I'll bookend it. So I'll introduce the thought at the beginning that I come back to at the end.

People like a rise in a fall or rise in a fall on a rise in a story. So have some structure to it.

And just, I mean, these days you really have no excuse for not turning in something that's polished and ready to go dump it and chat you BT and say find the mistakes or suggest a better structure.

And you've got that for free. So make your stuff better. You can do it.

Which part of your career has been most personally satisfied?

You know, the CBS Sunday morning stuff is really an extraordinary gig because I can pitch my own stories. I write my own stories. I write my own questions, conduct my own interviews.

I mean, I write music for my own stories over the garage.

This is really interesting because this is where David's lives intersect.

This past December, he did a CBS Sunday morning segment about what makes a great Christmas song.

After consulting the experts, he actually composed his own song called The Sound of Christmas.

I have a green screen set up, you know, so I do a lot of explainers where I'm standing in front of this big green piece of paper that the computer can then replace with graphics.

So I can interact with a live graph or I can put in video there and point to things in it.

And I do that myself. I do the compositing myself, replacing the green with some other image.

There is no other show. There is no other show where I'd be allowed to have that much creative control.

Zero none. So it is the joy of my life. It is wildly creative and it's got a huge and very loving audience.

What advice would you give to anybody out there who's considering embarking on a second act? Maybe just feels stuck where they are or is unsure about how to get off the fence?

Second act. I have never been let down by that advice that I followed my entire career, which is just say yes to everything.

So accompany your buddy to work one day. Go out to lunch with people. Invite your old college professor out to lunch.

Every one of these people is a network of people who don't know you that could lead you to something else.

If I just think it's a bad idea. It's not only it's not always a great idea to try to engineer your transition.

You might not know what it is yet. So just say yes to everything. Try everything for a little while.

While you're in your bad job, try a new job in a volunteer basis on a company retreat as the friend of somebody.

Just experiment and say yes. Never say no to anything. And little by little networks of networks will lead you to the better thing.

Scott, I got a hand at you. This is a great interview. Just a man filled with amazing, amazing stories and also a great storyteller.

So congrats to you for for landing this great interview with David.

Yeah, great. I mean, I was so thrilled when he said yes because I know he's a great storyteller and there are no words to really describe that when you sit in front of him and have a conversation.

How just completely captivating it is because he's got no shortage of super incredible interesting compelling stories.

Well, in your interview, there are a lot of fascinating moments. I want to pick out two and I'm just wondering if you can reflect on those two.

The first moment is when he talks about making a transition with no journalistic experience, but he starts writing reviews of software programs just because he wants to get the software packets for free.

And that ultimately led him to a journalism pass. You want to talk about that for a moment?

Yeah, well, I mean, in fairness, he did give full credit to his friend who opened that door for him. He said, I owe my entire career to this opportunity.

So yeah, I mean, look, he was just a guy working on Broadway, getting by and not really able to afford a $1,000 software program.

And here was an opportunity to get it for free. I mean, that was like, that was the greatest thing ever.

And then, you know, then, oh, wait, I could be paid for this.

Now, that's the greatest thing ever. He takes him to Macworld and then takes him to the New York Times just to make it.

Yeah. And then ultimately leading to his career right now working on CBS Sunday morning.

So, you know, one little software review, just to get a free software package leads somebody all the way down the path, you know, when you look back, the path is obviously very clear.

He had no idea where it was going to go, but it all kind of, you know, he said, yes, everything didn't he?

He didn't. We're going to get to that. But the second part I want to ask you about is his decision to leave the New York Times.

So, this is a job he loves, but he leaves it for a much higher paying job at Yahoo, which ultimately he describes as a bad decision and a disaster.

Can you talk about that moment?

Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously the tides were turning at the New York Times. There were some reason he didn't just leave because Yahoo came knocking, right?

He left because a lot of the ground rules that the New York Times changed. But also, this is kind of a really good lesson for anybody who gets wood away by money.

Not that it was just money. There was a lot of prestige with what he did. There was a lot of groundbreaking nature to it.

And there was also the opportunity to really build something of his own. But, you know, the dollar signs had to be spinning around in his eyeballs, right?

10 times your pay. But, you know, money isn't everything. And ultimately, you know, he was very proud of what he built.

It just, for reasons outside his control, it didn't take off the way he had anticipated or hoped. And ultimately it came to an end that was, I think, it was very disappointing for him.

I want to take you back to a phrase you mentioned earlier, and it's sort of at the end of the podcast when you're asking for advice. His advice is, say yes to everything.

And we've interviewed 187 people. He is the first person to offer that advice to our listeners. Can you just give me your thoughts on what he shared there?

I think his story. If you look at him and his career path in his life, that advice has really served him well, right? It really worked out well.

But I think the real crux of the message here is, you know, you don't, you never know where something is going to lead. So just open every door, right?

It reminds me of that scene from Willy Wonka, right, where everybody's crowded around that little tiny, itty bitty door. And then they swing it open and it's this gigantic door that opens up into the chocolate factory.

That's what software reviews were for David. It was that little itty bitty door that opened up into the chocolate factory.

You wouldn't have known that if he didn't say yes to everything.

Okay. Well, I it just stuck out to me. It's just great advice. And to me, just a very, very powerful part of your interview with him.

We're probably at a good point to wrap this up. So you take us home here.

Sure. If you want to learn more about David Pogue, all you have to do is Google him. There is like a zillion different pages that'll come up.

And you should check out his new book Apple the first 50 years. It is available anywhere you can buy books and it's definitely worth a read.

We do hope you'll keep listening and subscribe to second act stories on your favorite podcast app links to all our social channels are also in the show notes.

If you love what we're doing, we do hope you'll consider rating us and leaving us a review on Apple because that does help other people find us.

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