The Edge

The Edge talks himself out of leaving by hiring the same people back. He starts an inner argument about getting out of the band, then answers his own questions until Bono is the singer, he stays on guitar, and the rhythm section is the one he already plays with. He says that lineup basically redesigns the band, and there is no doubt about where he belongs.

The questions run in order. He asks what he wants to do with his life. He is a creative person and music is his main thing, so he stays in music. On singing, he says he really wants to be the singer, and he is really happy being a guitar player. The singer he most likes to work with is clearly Bono, so a solo thing still has Bono on vocal

Bono says U2 has very little say over prices in the live business. The band takes the best seats in the house and makes them often the most affordable.

The affordable seats are the ones up front, within the heart or within the circle. Bono says U2 has done it all their life and always finds a way. The band also has no problem separating rich people from their money. Speaking to the Edge, Bono says rich people have feelings, and if they want to pay very high prices, U2 has no problem with it.

In America, Bono wants people to feel really good about the choice to pay a ticket to see U2, even when the price is probably too much. The show will challenge them, but not on the obvious.

Tim Cook, when the idea was pitched, asked why anyone who spent a whole life getting people to pay for music would give something away free. After the then-new album landed in people's iTunes without asking, the giveaway turned into a debacle people were mad about, and the same objection came back.

Bono says the band was experimenting. They wanted Apple, or another company, to pay for the music and then distribute it the way a record label does, because fixing music is going to take experimentation. Pay for other musicians is astonishingly small and frightening. Bono sees it in his son's band, Inhaler, a really successful outfit, and it is still very hard to imagine how a young band like U2

The Edge says the pivot after the Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum happened because they were being robbed of aspects of who they were. The work did not reflect them, and neither did people's understanding and perception of them.

They can get very heavy and very deep. When they are together working they have a lot of fun, laugh a lot at each other and at themselves, and fail a lot. The Edge says they are comfortable with failing, because you do not get somewhere great unless you are prepared to fail.

He feels a little bit of a responsibility to address what they see going wrong with the world, but they cannot do it incessantly. On the album they touch the subject lightly and skip names, beca

Bono calls the moment the most extraordinary moment and the greatest heist in the history of the world. He says the heist is stealing America, that it is real, and that it is happening. He says it is not a caper movie.

Bono says a discussion about the administration is fine once it stays separate from a discussion about the left and the right and conservatives and liberals. He does not want to put off good people who vote conservative and who vote Republican. He says their party has been hijacked in an aggressive takeover of the GOP. People vote conservative for all kinds of reasons that are okay, and Bono wants to invite them back.

He says the problem is serious, and the dealings are pers

Bono says the album is about evil, and that people should be grateful because evil is out in the open. On Days of Ash, the songs name names. He is not sure the conversation has been public, but he spoke with Renee Good's family. Bono says she was killed by ICE agents in Minnesota.

A week later they wrote a song about her. The lyric says America will rise up against the people of the lie, and Bono also speaks it as America will rise against the people of the lie. The Edge had given Bono M. Scott Peck's book The People of the Lie 30 years ago. The book is about the nature of evil and a study of malignant narcissism. Bono asked the family for permission on Zoom before using the lyric. He descr

Bono always saw U2 in some sort of mythological sense. The names came from a wish to escape suburbia and discover other selves. They gave the other selves names. The Ramones were the key, and the Ramones are really well drawn characters.

David Marchese asks why Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. did not take stage names too. The Edge says that at that age they laughed a lot, at each other and at themselves. The deal was that you could laugh at others if you were prepared to allow them to laugh at you. The Edge says the names were not necessarily designed for a heroic aspect. Bono's very first name was Steinrich van Heyschen bang, bang, bang. The Edge went by another name for a while before b

David Marchese asks the Edge what he thought of Bono before they played together. The Edge says Bono's reputation reached him before the two of them ever played together. Shane Fogarty, one of his best friends and a year ahead at Mount Temple, called a student named Paul Hewson a mad head: mental, and still good fun.

The Edge first agreed with the line in Bono's memoir, Surrender. As teenagers, he and his brother had a name as pleasant weirdos. He says some neurodivergence was there, maybe attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or autism, so they sat a little on the fringe, and they were fascinated with explosives. They ran a lot of experiments, and he knows more about blowing things up t

David Marchese asks whether U2 knew that closing concerts with 40, an adaptation of a psalm, brought a crowd sing-along rooted in religious feeling. Bono says they were aware of that feeling. They were not seeing it as a selling point. They were seeing it as the thing they have to speak about, because it is where they come from as people. Leaving that faith out of the work would have been hugely dishonest.

People have said U2 is the band that people who do not know they believe in God like. Bono says the line is personally true. Faith sits in the work in a natural way, with no polemic. It is their search and their inquiry. U2 is not part of any religious movement, doctrine, or sect, so the

Shaan Puri says a trainer told him, in the middle of an argument, to ask what they are trying to do here. The question is about the relationship, separate from the disagreement that started the fight. Even if the surface fight is Mexican food versus Italian food, he means I love you, you love me, a great time, and an awesome relationship.

The sooner Shaan brings his own awareness to whether he loves the other person, whether he wants the relationship to be amazing, and that they are on the same team, and away from the wrongs of the situation, the edge goes off. It is never really the situation. It is how people are reacting in the situation. He says the difference between a reaction and a r

On IndieRails, a name server in Australia could take almost an hour to reload because it connected to the core database and pulled all the zone data, while the same reload in Chicago took four minutes. Replicating zone data to each edge brought a full reload down to four minutes, and the edges now finish together.

Stock tools were tried early and did not work well across a large spread of systems or at the needed speed. The design still running today keeps the core application in Rails with a Postgres database behind it. A zone change sends a notification through a small Go application that lives at each edge, and the Go application fans that notification out to the name servers, which are

On the show, the domain business is lopsided. Innovation happens at the edges, at the registrars, and the money gets sent to the core, at the registries. The money goes to the wrong place, and Anthony Eden thinks that is one reason the industry continues to see stagnation.

Becoming a technical registry operator means meeting stringent requirements with ICANN for permission, then convincing top-level domain holders to switch. The registry operators own the rights to a top-level domain, so an operator has to prove stability and stay involved at the policy level and the technology level. The work sits deeper at the core. The people operating the registries get attacked most often, constantly e

DNSimple gets record changes out through its own internal transfer system, and the bar for that system is Australia. The authoritative network has eight points of presence, data has to travel from the primary data center in the US to the furthest one, and default time-to-live values are set fairly low so a caching name server does not sit on a record for a day.

On Hanselminutes, Scott Hanselman said he stuck with DNSimple because a change such as exampleapp.hanselman.com showed up on refresh, and a text record for a certificate was visible when he went back to the command line. People updating a C name at GoDaddy would wait about 12 to 15 minutes for changes to propagate, and the demo never

Jason speculates that we are now living in a society where surviving has gotten so easy that it removes the edge and fear.

On the other hand, work, entrepreneurship, and capital has become portable, and you are now competing with anyone who can do your work, around the world. It could be demoralizing.

Agencies get to work on a lot of different things, surrounded by lots of other creative people. Companies often hire agencies to take off the edge work, something to gain an outer perspective, and to explore ideas. If you like that kind of work, it could be very fresh and exciting, but it also means you might not be fully let into their plans, and not able to contribute all of your good ideas. Often, these exploratory ideas also don't get shipped, and you need to be okay with that.

Working in-house on the other hand allows you to see projects through, and develop a deep expertise in a particular area. If you have both of these experiences, you’ll get the best of both worlds and be more im

In season 2, episode 6 of My Dad Wrote a Porno, the chapter Casino Etoile, Amsterdam reaches its last beat in the casino. Belinda asks who Zara is and says she seems intimidating. Grigor looks across the room and answers, "I think you're about to find out." The hosts call it the first cliffhanger of the book. The story has jumped from ordinary business meetings in Amsterdam to this meeting with the Russians, and Jamie says he is actually on the edge of his seat, which he rarely is. The next chapter, they tell listeners, is Chapter 7, The Countess Zara.

Christopher Michel is a success photographer who had made several career transitions in his life, going from the Navy, to work at Pentagon, to then living the life of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, only to change it all again and to become a photographer, with the goal to make a difference by taking pictures that people would love and remember.

Christopher Michel has been all over the world, taking pictures from Antarctica to the edge of space. He has an open mind, and an approach which has enabled him to make money from photography, while still enjoying the craft, in a time when many photographers are struggling wit

A Smash Notes episode plays a Knowledge Project conversation between Shane Parrish and Josh Wolfe, co-founder of Lux Capital. Wolfe says the edge is to see what everyone else is looking at, then hunt the white space they ignore. Venture is an inefficient market, he says, because there is no known list of companies. Two people can decide to start one tomorrow and nobody else knows. He looks for scientists, or founders teamed with scientists, who are inventing the future, and he tries to back them before anyone else does. Lux wants to find what nobody has discovered yet, and it wants the crowd to agree later, not now.

He understands that there's very little slack when it comes to money. He takes what he has to invest in his company and expects to make money back from it. Whatever he’s investing in, it’s ultimately to benefit and support his family.

Mike thinks that once you turn 50, the odds are against you. At this age, your peer group is no longer at the edge. Whatever age you are as an investor, you should always be talking with those closest to what’s happening-- and this may be the younger generation in some cases, the millennials.