He's Building A Space Station For $1 Billion - EP 38 Jed McCaleb

**Jed McCaleb** (0:00)
If you were inducing infringement, like if you said, hey, get Madonna's new song here, then that would be breaking the law. But if you were just like, hey, here's this open thing like BitTorrent or whatever, here's this thing you can download, you can share your own stuff, you can share other people's stuff, then that's fine, right? And so we were much closer to that, where it's just, we weren't inducing infringement in any way. But yeah, but it was tough because you can't grow the business. There was all these other ideas we had that were different than file sharing. We had kind of this drop box kind of idea.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:28)
I remember that, yeah.

**Jed McCaleb** (0:29)
But we couldn't really do it because what happens if the whole thing gets sued, then that thing just gets swallowed up, right?
You definitely can't raise money. There was just, it's just really hamstrung the whole operation.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:40)
What was the closest, the best conversation you ever had with the recording industry where they might have actually started to see the light or were inquiring about?

**Jed McCaleb** (0:51)
I mean, towards the end, we did have a lot of conversations with them. We're like, okay, how do we make this work?
We want to make this service where there's a subscription or we iterated lots of ideas. Then there's some set of folks there that are on board and want to do this. But like a lot of business development, you're talking to one set of people that are into it, but the corporation as a whole is just never going to go for it. So I don't think we're actually ever that close, although it seemed like that to us.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:33)
Jed McCaleb, thank you for joining us, appreciate it.

**Jed McCaleb** (1:37)
Yeah, it's great to be here, thanks for having me on.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:40)
You know, there was this period of when I was doing reporting, and okay, I'll set up a little bit of your background. I mean, it's quite diverse. You were involved in the peer-to-peer file sharing days, heavily involved in the rise of crypto technology, made quite a bit of money from that, and then this is getting to the point of my story, and then investing in all kinds of interesting areas, including space and AI and a whole wide scope of things. But that's, I felt like there was this, I don't know what it was, like a three, four-year period where every time I would hear about some company that would really catch my attention, and then I had asked somebody who's backing it. It was always Jed McCaleb is backing this company, and then it's not like you were like a full mystery, but there wasn't a ton of information out there. You didn't seem like you kind of brag about these investments. I would just see your name pop up all the time, and so I was fascinated by you, and then never really had a chance to talk to you until we ended up at, was it Frontier Camp?

**Jed McCaleb** (2:49)
Yeah, Frontier Camp.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:50)
Okay.
So it's like one of these gatherings of hopefully interesting people, and I think we had a chance to chat. So anyway, thank you for coming on the show. I wanted to talk to you for a long time.

**Jed McCaleb** (3:01)
Yeah, excited to be here.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:02)
Yeah. I was going to start. I mean, there's a million places we could go. I was going to start with your background just because I try to do a fair amount of research for these things. And there wasn't a ton on some of the things that I'm always interested in, which is where somebody grew up and all that. I mean, I saw you're from Arkansas, but I saw nothing on what your parents did, what kind of childhood you had. Arkansas is unusual for in Techland to find somebody from there. Yeah, I mean, tell me a little bit about where you grew up and what it was like.

**Jed McCaleb** (3:34)
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I was born in Arkansas. I think for the first few years of my life, my mom and I just lived in this little cabin in the woods. And then, you know, as it came time for me to go to school, like, you know, first grade or whatever, that we moved into Fayetteville, which is a small town in Arkansas, and I lived there for a few years, and then eventually moved to Little Rock, where I grew up. And yeah, I mean, it was just me and my mom, so I spent a lot of time alone, a lot of time reading, playing in flagos, things like that.