Pod­casts are an amaz­ing con­cept — but there are thou­sands of them, and good ones can be hard to find. One guy who con­sis­tently records excel­lent work is “your inter­net pal,” Dan Ben­jamin.

I met Dan out­side FOWA Miami. His first ques­tion was “What do you think of the iPad?” which led to an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion about the future of mobile com­put­ing, pub­lish­ing, con­tent cre­ation con­trasted with con­sump­tion, etc.

He later asked me “How much do you know about patent law and the stuff Apple is up to?”

“Dan Ben­jamin brings together geeks and attor­neys to talk about the inter­sec­tion of patents and soft­ware devel­op­ment, and spec­u­late about Apple’s moti­va­tions and goals regard­ing their recent Android-​inspired law­suit against HTC.“

So I was a guest speaker on The Con­ver­sa­tion, a pod­cast with 30–40 thou­sand lis­ten­ers. The episode title is “Patent Sch­ma­tent,” and we talked about:

• soft­ware patents and copyrights
• tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages
• “why have a patent system?”
• Apple v. HTC
• “what are they think­ing?”

It seemed to go well, and I had a lot of fun talk­ing with Dan, Dave and Wil. Hope to record more pod­casts, one of these days.

Pod­cast: “Patent Sch­ma­tent“