Designed in California – LIVE on Kickstarter

TL:DR: Jason Snell and I are working on an ambitious new podcast project and we are turning to Kickstarter to get it off the ground. Please check it out and consider backing the campaign.

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In September of last year – when we were in Memphis for the Podcastathon – Jason was talking to Stephen about an idea he had to tell some stories about Apple history in the form of our favourite podcast, The Rest is History. His idea was to do a bunch of research about the beginnings of OS X and tell the story in an entertaining way.

At the time, the project was very much in an incubation stage, as he was trying to understand how to make it into something bigger. As the year progressed, Jason got sidetracked by participating in Jeopardy!, so the idea was parked for a bit.

Fast forward to March, and Jason and I were preparing our Apple at 50 coverage that would run all the way through April. We decided that we wanted to do a segment of an episode of Upgrade that would be us telling the story of the founding of Apple. This was in the same kind of style as what Jason had been thinking about, so we were both really excited to do this.

We had originally planned for this story to be about 30 minutes of the episode. It ended up running for 100. We absolutely loved it. Moving between Jason’s prepared research, me asking questions, and us debating why things may have unfolded in the way they did. After we finished recording, we knew we wanted to do more. We just needed to work out how.

A project like this is really time consuming. Jason has to do a tonne of research from books, magazines, articles, and more to pull together every possible source on a topic we are covering and understand the best version of the history that he can. He then needs to collect these thoughts and weave together an entertaining narrative. He then passes the script to me, I read through it and start to form my own thoughts and questions that I want to bring up. We record the episodes, hand them over to our editor Jim Metzendorf, who makes them sound as good as they can, then I go back in and make tonnes of small adjustments to the edit to make the content as smooth as possible.

All of this is to say that a project like this would be a really significant time commitment for us both. So this is why I proposed to Jason that we run a Kickstarter campaign, essentially pre-selling Relay memberships for the show. This way we will know if people want this as much as we do, and be certain that we can produce at least a year of the show, with the quality and attention that it deserves.

So after two months of intense planning and work, today we launched the Kickstarter for Designed in California.

This show is designed to tackle stories from all across Apple’s 50-year history, using Jason’s research, his 30 years of reporting about Apple, and our 10 years of history together producing Upgrade every week. We believe this combination will produce a really fantastic podcast project.

Throughout June, we will be releasing a second episode of Upgrade every week that is essentially what a season of Designed in California would be, as we look at the road Apple took from the Apple I to the Apple II.

If our Kickstarter is successful, Designed in California will be a regular Relay show. There will be a free, ad-supported version, but members will get the show ad-free. More importantly, we will release all of the episodes on a given topic to members at once, while the free feed will receive episodes weekly. Backing the Kickstarter at the Founding Producer level and up will get you a membership to the show for a year.

For the Kickstarter campaign, we are offering these memberships at a discount of $60 – with a $50 early-bird tier too – before they go to the standard $70 a year afterwards. We are also offering a selection of tiers that come with additional rewards, like an enamel pin, a signed poster, a named credit on an episode, and more.

I have not started any new podcast projects in over four years. But then this idea came along, and I knew I could not let it go by.

I knew this was something that Jason and I could do really well together, playing the roles we would need to play, and I felt like I had a plan that could make it work for us. If I am going to say that 2026 is my Year of New, it feels right for that I should start a new podcast.

Launching a Kickstarter is nerve-racking. You are putting yourself out there in front of the world and asking people to like your idea so much that they will pay for it before it exists. I have always been hesitant of them for fear of failure, which makes this feel like one of the riskier decisions I have taken in my career. But we believe in it so much, and we want to prove to you why we think this will be something you could enjoy.

As Jason says in our Kickstarter video, “this is not like any other tech podcast you have heard”. This is a show that will tell and dissect the many stories of Apple’s products and people over its 50-year history. As we have started planning out this show, we have realised just how many stories there are, and we really hope that we get to tell as many of them as we can.

I see this show hopefully becoming a core piece of my overall work. My hope is that episode 609 of Upgrade will mark a meaningful fork in the road for us, and we will look back on this episode as something that created a new and amazing path for us both.

It is such an honour to be in the position where I can do this kind of work with Jason, and to be in the place where we can bring this to you and ask for your support.

We have so much planned for this campaign, and for Designed in California. Please check out our Kickstarter and help us make this project a reality. And please look forward to the series we will be publishing every week in June in the Upgrade feed.

Thank you.