���ϳԹ���

Peter Frick-Wright (Host): This is the ���ϳԹ��� Podcast

One of the highest forms of praise here at ���ϳԹ���, is to have a story called “a classic.” It doesn’t have to be an old story. It just has to invoke the spirit and rigor of the stories that defined the magazine, and made its name in the early days.

A few years ago, ���ϳԹ��� started republishing those old stories, calling them “���ϳԹ��� Classics” and giving a little backstory on how they came to be. What made them so special. And maybe no story is more special than The King of the Ferret Leggers, by Don Katz. It is maybe the most famous, funniest story in the magazine’s history.

Ferret legging is a lesser-known sport from the UK. A competition in which a competitor willingly, and of sober mind, stands before an audience, ties his pants at the ankles—Ferret Leggers were almost always men—and then stuffs two live, hungry ferrets down his waistband before cinching it closed. The goal is to simply see how long you can withstand the carnage before giving up. No underwear allowed.

It’s a hilarious piece, and it became an instant classic, elevating the burgeoning magazine and helping set the stage for ���ϳԹ��� writers to take risks and have fun, for decades.

Don Katz went on to do other admirable things as well. Besides writing many, many articles for ���ϳԹ���, Rolling Stone, and Esquire, he also wrote the book Home Fires, about post WW2 America, and a book about Nike, Just Do It, which was the first book Phil Knight agreed to do an interview for.

He then went and created Audible, the largest audiobook seller on the planet, and ran the company until just a few years ago.

And this had always been kind of a fun fact—the founder of Audible used to write for ���ϳԹ���, crazy—until recently, former ���ϳԹ��� editor Lisa Chase sat down with Don at Audible’s headquarters in New Jersey to talk about this incredible ride he’s been on—how he went from writing about putting Ferrets down your pants to captaining one of the most successful digital content providers, ever. And in this conversation, Don made all these connections between being a writer for ���ϳԹ���, the work ethic and worldview you needed, and how that informed his decision to create Audible, and helped him make it successful. It’s a good story. And it starts just over 40 years ago, with young Don learning about a new, small outdoor-oriented magazine looking for freelance writers.

Don Katz: What I thought was that this was some of the key people at Rolling Stone deciding to use that “you are there inside the head of somewhat novelistic and, uh, and literary structuring” to address the great outdoors and the world of physicality. And I just thought this was a, you know, just a brilliant idea, and I wanted to be part of seeing what that would become.

Lisa Chase: Were you an outside kind of person? Did you do those things? I didn't do them until I went to work there.

Don: I had no sense of the technicalities of rock climbing or anything like that, but I certainly loved the swashbuckling character of adventure and I'd done that with high risk taking articles, you know, for Rolling Stone and whether it was in Ethiopia or, you know, Northern Ireland or running around with the pre Red Brigade and in Italy, it was some pretty, uh, you know, crazy stuff and I just thought, you know, adventure and adventure travel was already something that I, I understood from more of a, you know, a political and um, in social environments, so it, why not, you know, take it on, in the world of, uh, physicality.

I, I would break from other things I felt I had to do, to do an outside piece. And it was always, you know, a complete, pleasure. And it was something I felt I could participate in at the highest level. I have luckily had two books come out of collected longer non fiction, uh, in 2001. And I realized that, seven of 22 pieces selected were from ���ϳԹ���.

Peter: The first of those seven pieces? The short, visceral story about the champion of ferret legging, Reg Mellor. Don first noticed the story in a blurb in the British magazine Private Eye, and he tucked the idea away to pitch down the road.

Don: I finished The Big Store, my, one of my 600 page books, and I was looking to have some fun and potentially get back to the UK in the days that you know I didn't fly back and forth at will because I was a working writer.

And anyways found where that Reg Mellor was still doing his thing in Yorkshire. Went back and, uh, went up and had the experience of, of finding the king of the ferret leggers himself and, uh, wrote the story.

Lisa: Did you have an assignment when you went, or did you go and then approach ���ϳԹ��� and join forces?

Don: Well, what I remembered was that, um, I didn't, I did say, think to myself that a story about a guy who puts vicious ferrets down his pants was, you know, pretty fun, but maybe not going to, you know, turn on an editor of a, of a magazine finding its way and finding its voice. Uh, so what I did do was I bounced the idea off my close friend in England, Ralph Steadman, the great, um, artist, cartoonist, uh, famous for his Rolling Stone work with Hunter Thompson.

And so I kind of tried to put it, sell it in as a little bit of a package. And for whatever reason, I got the okay to go do it. So I did, did do it. I did find out later that, when I submitted the story that there was a fair amount of debate inside ���ϳԹ��� as to whether this could possibly make it into the magazine uh, and apparently my old Rolling Stone buddy, Tim Kale was a big champion. of running the story because of what it would mean to other writers to be able to just, you know, tell their best stories in this, in this magazine.

Um, but you know, it's, it's so interesting because the story came out and it fairly immediately became almost something of a cult classic where people passed it to each other as if it was some sort of, you know, the days of Victorian poetry. You know, they're passing around the cafes.

Writers sent it to each other and it started to have, you know, pre internet, you know, buzz. And it had all sorts of unintended consequences for me.

One of the things was that, I had this idea of trying to write a, a big story about Nike because the head of Nike, Phil Knight, never had given an interview, like the guy at Sears, like, I wanted to break through to these, inside these fortresses. And, uh, and I remember, uh, Night loved the Ferret Leggers story. And he just thought it was hysterical and it kind of endeared, it helped open, you know, open the doors.

Peter: And so a story about competitive damage to reproductive organs led to Don's book, Just Do It. But Ferret Leggers didn’t just open doors, it also informed his understanding and defense of intellectual property in a quickly changing digital world. Ferret Leggers was so good, people started trying to put it up on their websites, as if they’d written it.

Don: I remember writing in particular, some, you know, early web design, but early kind of, you know, technology person at Carnegie Mellon University saying, you've just tried to publish under your own name.

Um, Uh, something I wrote, uh, said, you might not know the concept of intellectual property, but I wrote that. I basically live on that story because it had become anthologized all over the place. And you know, you need to, as they say, cease and desist. And I remember one kid wrote me back basically saying you old fart. You should be happy. Anyone even cares about a story you wrote in 1987 and attached various at that point manifesti that said information should be free which was one of the early ideas of the internet which was to wipe out professional grade, you know, content in favor of the crowds content.

So it was the story just consistently came back to me as um, as something that was really important, but because of that happening, when Audible was designing the very first download service, very first for content, and invented the first digital audio player, which came out almost five years before the iPod, one of the things I asked for was, was an encryption system that would at least cow people who wanted to replicate other people's work.

Because I said at the time, if we're going to sustain the professional creative class through this digital transformation, there has to be some protections. So that otherwise, no one's ever going to get paid. And that literally was key to Audible's formation, and to the 27 years I ran the thing.

Peter: In the early 90s, Don was about as successful a non-fiction writer as it was possible to be. There were few major publications he hadn't written for, and he had three acclaimed books to his name. But the idea for Audible was already beginning to form.

Don: But I think in my case, um, the, the, the transfer to Audible was even to myself, something of a, of a mystery. I was doing fine. I mean, I was writing at a pretty high level. In fact, I took a 75% annual pay cut between my last year as a writer and my first year starting Audible.

I think what happened with me there was that, um, I'd written this book, Home Fires, which I think I knew that was as good as I was going to get at that kind of Rolling Stone, ���ϳԹ��� Magazine, evocation of a, of a real world with characters and, and novelistic structures and, you know, and moral storytelling and the like. I think it subconsciously freed me to go out and try something else.

Peter: Don had not only reached the pinnacle of his career, but he was also starting to see that freelance writer’s life was becoming increasingly threatened. The economics of ad-based revenue meant magazines were shortening articles, and not as willing to invest in the type of in-depth literary work that he and other writers he admired had built their reputations on. With Audible, Don saw an opportunity to address both those issues.

Don: I mean, I was fighting all the time to, you know, to get what I believed in and what I wanted. Um, there was also the, you would come back from almost, you know, dying in Ethiopia or whatever, and have this incredible story, and then be told that, you know, the ad sales weren't high enough, um, so they had, you have to cut 30 percent of the story, which really shouldn't have been cut.

The economic circumstances were, were trying.

I won, as lots of other people have, uh, various Entrepreneur of the Year, you know, kinds of awards, particularly early on when Audible was emerging from its existential struggles, um, And I would make a point of always saying mostly the same thing, which was, I want to dedicate this award to the most entrepreneurial people in our culture, freelance writers who make a living in America.

And at one point I said, I think I know every long form nonfiction storyteller in this country who owns a house.

Peter: There was not only an increasing need to support writers, but with the burgeoning internet and advances in digital technology, there was an opportunity to liberate books from the physical restrictions and limitations of being printed on paper. And so the idea of Audible was born--but first, he had to sell it.

Lisa: So I, I read or listened to you talking about, you'd read a statistic early on that 93 million Americans were stuck in their cars for X amount of time every day driving, which is like brilliant, right? and I also thought about, um, so that time that was just spent pushing the dial, trying to find something on the radio you wanted to listen to or not. And also the idea that as the internet grew, we became, I think, a much more of a multitasking kind of culture, right? So I'm trying to figure out if Audible, uh, reacted to that, if you were reacting to that, or if you actually, you know, Presaged it. Do you know what I mean? If you were,

Don: Oh, it's a great, it's a great question, Lisa. I had a very specific idea that there should be a distinctive mainstream media type based on the spoken word in America and there wasn't.

So I had this sort of larger, you know, vision of the possible, but I knew to get a business going, I basically had to speak the language of the things that caused capital to come in and fund an organization.

So, looking at the market opportunity of people driving to work and their agglomerated hours made a, made a case for a very large market potential. Because people, uh, value their time. I made a whole case that businesses that are successful often are arbitraging time. If you think of the whole concept of productivity, you know, I think Audible has a higher purpose culturally than getting you from here to there faster.

But Uber is a better, faster, cheaper way of getting from here to there than a taxi. And these kinds of improvements often are about optimizing time. And, um, and so they have this idea that you could arbitrage your time to basically get to work smarter than the guy in the next queue. You could arbitrage your time to read more books, which everyone knows you don't have time to read. I think at the time the average person read like four books a year. What if you redefined the concept of reading, you know, around listening, um, that there was a utility to this.

And, and look, part of what Audible success is about is the idea that the profound things that were in books, even if you didn't have time to read them, are probably worth having in your head. Yeah. And that if not books, then the kinds of journal articles that, um, you know, cause you to think and learn.

The other risk, which nobody did know about, was that I would come up against a very, very conservative wall, which was the relatively aristocratic world of publishing, that didn't want this change.

Lisa: And why didn't they want it? Just because they were hidebound?

Don: The first thing is that many of them came out of the confusion that the textual culture, which was nothing more than a technological innovation in, in the 19th century is when movable type reached its apogee, was actually the core of the cultural content, the fact that it was in text.

But if you look historically, oral storytelling predated anything textual for thousands of years. And I used to give speeches about this, the Greeks were dead set against writing anything down. They thought it would atrophy memory. Um, they thought that, you know, that lyrical elocution and the like was, was part of what made you a, you know, a thoughtful person. And through, um, Augustine in the, in the Christian world, you weren't allowed to write anything down. It was thought to be demonish. And so you basically had this, this massive oral culture that, you know, that predated this.

But what you really found was that any time there was a technological disruption that changed media and culture and art. Um, it was resisted by the standing class of the moment. The, the, you know, Edison and the recording devices and the like was completely subverted by the sheet music business.

Which was this extremely aristocratic, this is, you know, turn of the last century, um, you know, group of people, um, and they didn't want, you know, music recorded. Music was meant to be played in your parlor or in the opera houses and the symphony halls for, you know, for the aristocracy. Um, you know, the paperback book was resisted for 15 or 20 years because books were designed to be leather bound items for those privileged enough to read.

And I think. As with my wife's book group, when I started Audible, people looked at listening to a book as cheating. They looked at it as a, as an inferior, you know, intellectual and, uh, you know, even, you know, emotional process. And I basically said, no that it's, um, it's actually, if you think about it, refracting well composed words through another extremely sophisticated filter, which is an interpretive performance.

And as Audible became more successful, I started to basically preach that, look at the critical vocabulary of theater, um, look at the critical vocabulary even of, of film. Where you have obviously the writing is, is honored, but the direction, the production, and the acting, you know, refracted through in a sophisticated way. And this is going to end up being, you know, a very nuanced art form that people, people will study. And that certainly is what happened.

Peter: WE'LL BE RIGHT BACK

[Ad Break]

Lisa: So I, I was trying to identify themes and I wanted to run through these and see what, if you agree or disagree.

Don: I love that you did that. That was really great.

Lisa:  I feel that you are perhaps drawn to people the mainstream might consider to be crazy, who have outrageous ideas and pursue them. And that Reg Meller, our king of the ferret leggers, is certainly one of these people. It occurred to me that people might have described you that way when you were coming up with the idea for Audible and all the stuff you went through to get it going.

Don: It's definitely true. And, um, I mean, I think that, you know, people who mark history with something different are, you know, often considered, you know, crazy or outliers or people who, you know, who, Who were, you know, really off. And so there was no, no question with that.

And I think also this idea of, uh, of people who are, I don't know, these relentless people who just don't give up on, on ideas, uh, I, I do think there's a, a relationship to fatherlessness to people being, you know, being driven.

And I believe there's studies that entrepreneurs have a high level of, of fatherlessness. And I don't need to be sexist, but that's the way I've, I've understood it. Um, versus, versus others, either through abandonment or death.

Lisa: How old were you when you lost your father? I was 19.

Don: And, uh, my father was just playing tennis and perfectly healthy at 47 and, and died. And, uh, he was an entrepreneur. He was a guitar company maker. And, uh, and he was a, a, a big time war hero in World War II. And I think, you know, when you leave these unanswered questions, um, where you can't go back and, because I think you, your, your maturation allows you to see your parents as people, if you ever do, um, you know, sometime in your 20s and a little, little later.

And, and I realized I had, um, if you looked at my, my books, I wrote a book about, Sears, uh, and it was really the World War II generation's embrace of these great heartland corporations and what happened to that generation's experience of, of business.

In many ways, the, uh, the Nike book was about a killer entrepreneur, which was my father, as far as my memory of, of him.

Um, and then Home Fires was really about the World War II generation's experience of suburbanizing, you know, their children and, you know, what happened throughout everything, including the counterculture. And I realized I kind of was going back and answering a lot of the questions I probably would have asked, you know, my father, and then there seemed to be some ultimate leap, which was, why not I try to be an entrepreneur, too? Um, and see what happens.

Lisa: do you hear his voice on your head when you're, when you've been doing things? Is it that kind of a thing?

Don: You know, not enough. Uh, it is, it is true. You, you know, you lose track of, uh, of, of some voices and the like, and, uh, you know, I don't, uh, you know, I don't, you know, I don't dwell on it, but I, but I think there is this sense of, uh, of relentlessness, but I know that when I started out, um, at Rolling Stone in particular, I was taking kind of ridiculous risks, uh, at times. And I think ultimately I looked back and thought I was playing out my war resistance and lack of any, you know, sense that I was going to fight an immoral war in Vietnam, which my father was alive for some of that. And I do remember. Even though he was, he was a challenge because he was a progressive guy. It was always hard to be a, you know, a progressive kid when you're a progressive parent. Um, but he, when I said that maybe I'd be a conscientious objector, he went crazy because what happened to the conscientious objectors after World War II is their lives were ruined and they didn't get jobs and, uh, they were thought to be cowards.

And so, uh, uh, you know, off I went to you know, prove various points. I kind of got off, got off, uh, on this in, you know, in a, in a kind of a general way, but I think, uh, the, the Audible thing was a case where I had this idea, and other than my college roommate, Ed, who helped me imagine the complexity of the technological things, because he was a supercomputer designer out in, uh, California. And I'd even taken computer courses back at NYU just to be able to talk to him, because he was so deeply technical and, uh, but other than him, I literally couldn't find anyone around me who had any level of economic or business sophistication or anything else who thought I wasn't out of my mind.

They just thought it was silly. No one was supportive. My wife, Leslie, has supported these crazy things, you know, forever. So she was saying, sure, we lived without a net already as a writer, but she always does say, I married a writer. Like, you know, what, what happened here? But, but the truth is, um, starting Audible was, uh, was definitely against the tide.

And when I first, um, was doing it, all this stuff was pretty secret. Cause I, you know, this was pretty big stuff and I didn't particularly want it to get out. And, uh, I'll never forget there was a, a gossip column in New York Magazine that basically said that I had, um, I had not only abandoned a perfectly good writing career, but I'd abandoned text itself, uh, for this some sort of audio thing.

That, that I was secretly working on. But the conjecture was, I was doing it to write a book about it. And, I will never forget, Audible must have only had 20 people at that point coming in to work, and this thing was out publicly, and people looking at me like, are we part of a, are we lab rats?

Lisa: Are we, are we characters in your story?

Don: And, uh, I guess I showed that I was pretty serious about making it work.

Lisa: Yeah, so this brings me to my next, um, idea, uh, theory is, um, the, the twin theories of endurance and domination. Right, so. I went through many things, Jack LaLanne, uh, King of the Ferret Leggers, you could definitely say, uh, My Life with the Horror, one of my favorite pieces you wrote about motion sickness.

Don: One of mine, too. It's a, yeah.

Lisa: Uh, The Big Store, of course. So, um, you know, and I, I'd read, uh, that it took, that at one point the Audible, um, stock price went down to four cents a share after the after the bubble burst And it took you ten years. Um, then I read that your market share is basically of of, um, audiobook publishing is basically everything.

Don: we don't like to say that for legal reasons, but, uh, yeah, you're, you're, you're right. Audible was very, very successful over the years. It, I played a pretty good chess game of, you know, neutralizing much larger competitors that could have, you know, destroyed this, this fledgling, uh, company. Partnering like crazy with, precociously, whether it was Apple or Microsoft or Amazon, um, you know, along the way, and, um, you know, creating, uh, a service that got better and better and made, you know, you know, people happy. And it was just a, it was, it was, it was day to day and it was 24/7. But you know what?

I wrote 24/7. I mean, I wrote 24/7. And I worked 10 hours a day as a writer. I mean, I was like, I was not, you know, I used to hear about, you know, writers who put in, you know, 3 hours and 4 pages or something and thought this was an enervating, you know, experience. And I, I just always was pretty driven and, um, uh, I, I just kind of wanted, wanted to win.

One of the things that I, I think was motivating me with Audible was that, uh, I, I'd had some experiences in kind of public service life, raising a huge amount of money to build a library and the like, where I realized my persuasive capacities that would get me inside.

the head of, you know, revolutionaries and business leaders and stuff as a writer, I was, I was pretty good at, at galvanizing action in groups and asking people to, you know, take on roles and the like. And I got the sense after a while there was something to be said for having more colleagues, um, and being part of something that was, um, a communal experience.

And so I, I think I wanted that, um, and, and of course, you know, I've often said that, um, one of the best backgrounds you could possibly have for starting a business is being an inquisitive and sophisticated journalist.

And the reason is that you have to be incredibly honest about what you don't know. You have to be entrusted, have entrusted people to show you what you don't understand because you're pursuing the truth. And that idea of getting that truth out of people, of being, you know, whatever it is, charismatic or trustworthy enough to get people to trust you, in that sense that you have to supplement your own overtly stated deficiencies. Um, that is absolutely key to drawing together a band of missionaries to create a new company.

Lisa: Right. Okay. So this sort of leads me to the third thing, which I think you've answered, is that I, I see you as an iconoclast, someone who goes against the conventional wisdom. And I'm wondering why? What about you? What, what, what, what in your life made you that, be that kind of person?

Don: I think I became something of a student of, of history and, you know, a sense of people who, who marked their lives in the culture with something, something new. And, uh, I think I had enough experience to think that, you know, if you could be one of those people, it probably led to a more, you know, fulfilling life with a sense of purpose.

And the truth is, um, my sense of, of that was really expanded when I was part of Rolling Stones early years. Because I often said that the best of Audible's culture came from, and I use the word elan, of being part of Rolling Stone in the early years. Because from my perspective, and God knows there were ridiculous office politics and all sorts of silly stuff that go on in, in cultural institutions, but my sense was that I knew, and most of the writers I'm still friends with knew, that you were imprinting the culture and the polity with something new.

People forget, but Rolling Stone was somewhat there to tell the truth about things like the war and race and other things, when the New York Times was not. I don't want to go into a New York Times trashing thing here, but the truth is all this idea of the Pentagon papers onwards and the like, the New York Times was very much into the war. They refused to write the word Black, even well after the, the famous Olympics moments where it became clear that that was the word you should use and, you know, and the like. And, and Rolling Stone comes along as this kind of, you know, subversive underground sense from my sense of what it was. Um, and I do think I felt then that if you could write, you know, write the truth in a, in a particularly evocative way, that was a noble calling. And then when it came to, um, the idea of the, of the business, uh, the truth is part of it too, was that I knew that the people who actually made the goods, the writers, were kind of at the mercy of this world of executives and agents and others who ended up with most of the money. And, you know, there were reasons that the inefficiencies of their business almost caused this.

And I just remember when I realized that this new thing, which was just the phone lines, not the internet yet. It was like the idea that you could digitize a signal and send it through the phone lines. I immediately thought, Oh my God, you don't have to have returned books anymore. You would actually be able to get to Portland on your book tour, and it wouldn't be out of books because you'd be sending it through the phone lines.

Oh, and then I thought the packaging cost alone of a book is a, is a massive reason to knock down trees and everything else at, you know, a cost. And it's, that's why the publishers were so successful. The capital intensivity of books caused them to have all the money because they had to have a lot of money because they ran these printing presses.

What if they didn't exist, but the content would be in this pure form. . Imagine if you renovated this idea that, you know, the substance in a book is what matters, not, you know, how it's, you know, perceived. And you cut the acting class in on, on this. And so it just kind of went from there. And I guess you could call it, you know, iconoclastic, but I never really thought of myself as iconoclastic for my own sake. I just got obsessed with ideas.

Peter: Don Katz is the founder of Audible and author of The King of the Ferret Leggers, first published in 1983. You can find it in the July/August issue of ���ϳԹ���. Lisa Chase is a freelance writer in Larchmont, New York. She was an editor at ���ϳԹ��� from 1987 to 1993.

You can read King of The Ferret Leggers at . That’s F-E-R-R-E-T

The ���ϳԹ��� Podcast is made possible by our ���ϳԹ��� Plus members. Learn more about all the benefits of membership at outsideonline.com/podplus.