Making Media
Episode 56 Read What Matters
Making Media

Episode 56: Read What Matters

Making Media

Episode 56

Read What Matters

Ben Springwater is the founder of Matter. We cover how Ben is solving the challenges of infinite content, the role of humans and machines in curation, and his favorite pieces of content.

(00:00:00) - Welcome to Making Media

(00:01:36) - The Challenges of Building a Product Like Matter

(00:03:41) - The Power of Curation in the Digital Age

(00:08:03) - The Future of Recommendation Systems

(00:15:26) - The Challenges of Building a User-Centric Product

(00:22:14) - The Intersection of Reading and Listening in the Digital Age

(00:25:12) - The Business Model of Matter

(00:27:04) - Ben’s Recommendation #1: The Road to Self-Renewal 

(00:33:14) - Ben’s Recommendation #2: Basic Income, Not Basic Jobs: Against Hijaking Utopia

(00:42:38) - Ben’s Recommendation #2: The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

(00:51:19) - The Importance of Being An Enthusiast

(00:52:06) - Debrief

Read What Matters

Introduction

Matt
Welcome back to Making Media. Today, we are joined by Ben Springwater, Founder of Matter. Now we could call Matter a reading app. We could call it an evolution of the original read-it-later apps, but any classification that we try to give it seems to understate all that Matter is building or has built already.

We talked to a lot of traditional media operators on the show, but Ben falls slightly outside that box. There are constant frustrations about how we get served media. There's infinite content, and it's harder and harder to separate the good from the bad. I experienced this personally and a lot of people share their frustrations with me as well.

In my eyes, Ben is working to solve that problem. We had a fun conversation about what it's like to build a product like Matter. So there's the technical challenges, there's the human challenges and then there's how Matter's team thinks about making those decisions. It was very interesting to get Ben's perspective there.

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