Bailout Watch on Fox & Friends, April 2009

In early 2009 I built an iPhone app called Bailout Watch that tracked the TARP disbursements as the federal government was wiring hundreds of billions of dollars to American banks during the financial crisis. It showed where the money was going, bank by bank, and included perspective views comparing the total spend to World War II, Hurricane Katrina, and other historical reference points — the kind of context that gives abstract numbers some shape. It cost $1.99 in the App Store, which felt like the right number for a thing you’d check once a week and feel slightly worse about each time.

If you watched the clip above, you’ve already seen what Fox went with: REVENGE OF THE NERDS. I’m not going to argue with that one.

A family member of mine worked at Fox News at the time. He knew about the app, mentioned it to Steve Doocy in passing, and Doocy thought it sounded interesting. That was the entire vetting process. A few days later I was scheduled for a 6:30am remote on Fox & Friends.

What nobody tells you about a remote TV interview is that you do it from a tiny dark room with a single camera and an earpiece. You’re lit so the camera can see you. The room is silent. The interviewer is in your ear but they’re 800 miles away in a New York studio, presumably surrounded by people. It’s the opposite of every social cue a conversation usually has. You can’t see their face. You can’t pick up that they’re winding down a question by the way their eyes shift. You just stare at a lens and try to behave like a person.

The segment was three minutes and nineteen seconds. I demoed the app, walked through what the data showed, made the points about scale. Doocy ended with a joke about whether I’d give him a bailout on the $1.99 price. I was caught a little off guard — the whole interview had been earnest until that beat — but I think I laughed. I’m in most of the video above, so feel free to judge for yourself.

My wife and I drove to a pancake place immediately after. The phone kept buzzing with App Store sales notifications. The spike was real for about six hours, then tapered. The bailout news cycle moved on to whatever was next, and Bailout Watch’s relevance moved with it. By the time TARP wound down, the app had stopped making sense as a thing. I left it on the store for a while out of habit, eventually pulled it down.

A few things worth saying about that morning, almost two decades later.

One: this is what publishing in the early App Store felt like. A single mention on cable news could move the needle for a day. The market was small enough that the leverage was massive. That doesn’t really happen anymore. The App Store has too many apps for any one mention to land hard, and the topical-news-as-app moment passed once Twitter ate that role. Whatever made Bailout Watch the kind of thing that could go on TV in 2009 — small market, novel platform, topical content — none of those conditions hold now.

Two: I learned that I don’t particularly love being on TV. Not that it went badly. It went fine. It’s that the dark-room mechanics of it eliminate the part of communication I actually enjoy, which is reading the other person. Without the read, you’re just performing into a void and hoping the timing works out. I respect the people who do this for a living more than I did before. It’s harder than it looks.

Three: my wife is still the right person to get pancakes with after a thing.

Four: the chyron Fox went with was REVENGE OF THE NERDS, which, watching it back almost two decades later, I have to admit is the single most accurate piece of journalism Fox News has ever produced about anything.