Podcasts about bbss

Kacper "prefetcher" Staroń created the PinkSea oekaki BBS on top of the AT Protocol. He also made the online multiplayer game MicroWorks with Noam "noam 2000" Rubin. He's currently studying Computer Science at the Lublin University of Technology. We discuss the appeal of oekaki BBSs, why and how PinkSea was created, web design of the early 2000s, flash animations, and building an application on top of the AT Protocol. Prefetcher Bluesky Github Personal site Microworks (Free multiplayer game) PinkSea and Harbor PinkSea PinkSea Bluesky Account PinkSea repository Harbor image proxy repository Harbor post from bnewbold.net imgproxy (Image proxy used by Bluesky) Early web design Web Design Museum Pixel Art in Web Design Kaliber10000 Eboy Assembler 2advanced epuls.pl (Polish social networking site) Wipeout 3 aesthetic Restorativland (Geocities archive) Flash sites and animations My Flash Archive (Run by prefetcher) dagobah Z0r Juicy Panic - Otarie IOSYS - Marisa Stole the Precious Thing Geocities style web hosts Neocities Nekoweb AT Protocol / Bluesky PDS Relay AppViews PLC directory Decentralized Identifier lexicon Jetstream XRPC ATProto scraping (List of custom PDS and did:web) Tools to view PDS data PDSls atp.tools ATProto browser Posters mentioned vertigris (Artist that promoted PinkSea) Mary (AT Protocol enthusiast) Brian Newbold (Bluesky employee) Oekaki drawing applets Tegaki chickenpaint Group drawing canvas Drawpile Aggie Other links Bringing Geocities back with Kyle Drake (Interview with creator of Neocities) firesky.tv (View all bluesky posts) ATFile (Use PDS as a file store) PinkSky (Instagram clone) front page (Hacker news clone) Smoke Signal (Meetup clone) -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Kacper Staroń.  He created an oekaki BBS called PinkSea built on top of the AT protocol, and he's currently studying computer science at the Lublin University of Technology. We are gonna discuss the appeal of oekaki BBS, the web design of the early 2000s, flash animations, and building an application on top of the AT protocol. Kacper, thanks for talking with me today. [00:00:16] Prefetcher: Hello. Thank you for having me on. I'm Kacper Staroń also probably you know me as Prefetcher online. And as Jeremy's mentioned, PinkSea is an oekaki drawing bulletin board. You log in with your Bluesky account and you can draw and post images. It's styled like a mid to late 2000s website to keep it in the spirit. What's an oekaki BBS? [00:00:43] Jeremy: For someone who isn't familiar with oekaki BBSs what is different about them as opposed to say, a photo sharing website? [00:00:53] Prefetcher: The difference is that a photo sharing website you have the image already premade be it a photo or a drawing made in a separate application. And you basically log in and you upload that image. For example on Instagram or pixiv for artists even Flickr. But in the case of an oekaki BBS the thing that sets it apart is that oekaki BBSes already have the drawing tools built in. You cannot upload an already pre-made image with there being some caveats. Some different oekaki boards allow you to upload your already pre-made work. But Pinksea restricts you to a tool called Tegaki. Tegaki being a drawing applet that was built for one of the other BBSes and all of the drawing tools are inside of it. So you draw from within PinkSea and you upload it to the atmosphere. Every image that's on PinkSea is basically drawn right on it by the artists. No one can technically upload any images from elsewhere. How PinkSea got started and grew [00:01:56] Jeremy: You released this to the world. How did people find it and how many people are using it? [00:02:02] Prefetcher: I'll actually begin with how I've made it 'cause it kind of ties into how PinkSea got semi-popular. One day I was just browsing through Bluesky somewhere in the late 2024s. I was really interested in the AT Protocol and while browsing, one of the artists that I follow vertigris posted a post basically saying they'd really want to see something a drawing canvas like Drawpile or Aggie on AT Protocol or something like an oekaki board. And considering that I was really looking forward to make something on the AT Protocol. I'm like, that sounds fun. I used to be a member of some oekaki boards. I don't draw well but it's an activity that I was thinking this sounds like a fun thing to do. I'm absolutely down for it. From like, the initial idea to what I'd say was the first time I was proud to let someone else use it. I think it was like two weeks. I was posting progress on Bluesky and people seemed eager to use it. That kept me motivated. And yeah. Right as I approached the finish I posted about it as a response to vertigris' posts and people seemed to like it. I sent the early version to a bunch of artists. I basically just made a post calling for them. Got really positive feedback, things to fix, and I released it. And thanks to vertigris the post went semi-viral. The launch I got a lot of people which I would also tie to the fact that it was right after one of the user waves that came to Bluesky from other platforms. The website also seemed really popular in Japan. I remember going to sleep, waking up the next day, and I saw like a Japanese post about PinkSea and it had 2000 reposts and 3000 likes and I was just unable to believe it. Within I think the first week we got like 1000 posts overall which to me is just insane. For a week straight I just kept looking at my phone and clicking, refresh, refresh, refresh, just seeing the new posts flow in. There was a bunch of like really insane talented artists just posting their works. And I just could not believe it. PinkSea got I'd say fairly popular as an alternative AppView. People seem to really want oekaki boards back and I saw people going, oh look, it's like one of those 2000s oekaki boards! Oh, that's so cool! I haven't seen them in forever! The art stands out because it's human made [00:04:58] Prefetcher: And it made me so happy every single time seeing it. It's been since November, like four months, give or take. And today alone we got five posts. That doesn't sound seem like a lot but given that every single post is hand drawn it's still insane. People go on there and spend their time to produce their own original artworks. [00:05:26] Jeremy: This is especially relevant now when you have so much image generation stuff and they're making images that look polished but you're kind of like well... did you draw it? [00:05:39] Prefetcher: Yeah. [00:05:40] Jeremy: And when you see people draw with these oekaki boards using the tools that are there I think there's something very human and very nostalgic about oh... This came from you. [00:05:53] Prefetcher: Honestly, yeah. To me seeing even beginner artists 'cause PinkSea has a lot of really, really talented and popular people (and) also beginner artists that do it as a hobby. Ones that haven't been drawing for a long time. And no matter what you look at you just get like that homely feeling that, oh, that's someone that just spent time. That's someone that just wanted to draw for fun. And at least to me, with generative AI like images it really lacks that human aspect to it. You generate an image, you go, oh, that's cool. And it just fades away. But in this case you see people that spent their time drawing it spent their own personal time. And no matter if it's a masterpiece or not it's still incredibly nice to see people just do it for fun. [00:06:54] Jeremy: Yeah. I think whether it's drawing or writing or anything now more than ever people wanna see something that you made yourself right? They wanna know that a human did this. [00:07:09] Prefetcher: Yeah. absolutely. [00:07:11] Jeremy: So it sounds like, in terms of getting the initial users and the ones that are there now, it really all came out of a single Bluesky posts that an existing artist (vertigris) noticed and boosted. And like you said, you were lucky enough to go viral and that carried you all the way to now and then it just keeps going from there, [00:07:36] Prefetcher: Basically if not for vertigris PinkSea (would) just not exist because I honestly did not think about it. My initial idea on making something on ATProto and maybe in the future I'll do something like that would be a platform like StumbleUpon -- Something that would just allow you to go on a website, press a button, and it gets uploaded to your repo and your friends would be able to see oh -- you visited that website and there would be an AppView that would just recommend you sites based on those categories. I really liked that idea and I was dead set on making it but then like I noticed that post (from vertigris) and I'm like, no, that's better. I really wanna make that. And yeah. So right here I want to give a massive shout out to vertigris 'cause they've been incredibly nice to me. They've even contributed the German translation of PinkSea which was just insane to me. And yeah, massive shout out to every single other artist that, Reposted it, liked it, used it because, it's all just snowballed from there and even recently I've had another wave of new users from the PinkSea account. So there are periods where it goes up and it like goes chill -- and then popular again. Old internet and flash [00:08:59] Jeremy: Yeah. And so something that you mentioned is that some people who came across it they mentioned how it was nostalgic or it looked like the old oekaki BBSs from the early internet. And I noticed that that was something that you posted on your own website that you have an interest in that specifically. I wonder what about that part of the internet interests you? [00:09:26] Prefetcher: That is a really good question. Like, to me, even before PinkSea my interests lie in the early internet. I run on Twitter and also on Bluesky now an account called My Flash Archive, which was an archive of very random, like flash animations. And I still do that just not as much anymore 'cause I have a lot of other things to do. I used to on Google just type in Flash and look through the oldest archived random folders just having flash videos. And I would just go over them save all of that or go on like the dagobah or Z0r or swfchan. 'cause the early internet to me, it was really like more explorative. 'cause like now you have, people just concentrated in those big platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, whatever. And back then at least to me you had more websites that you would just go on, you would find cool stuff. And the designs were like sometimes very minimal, aesthetically pleasing. I'd named here one of my favorite sites, Kaliber10000 which had just fantastic web design. Like, I, I also spend a lot of time on like the web design museum just like looking at old web design and just in awe. My flash archive on Twitter at least got very popular. I kind of abandoned that account, but I think it was sitting at 12,000 followers if not more? And showed that people also yearn for that early internet vibe. And to me it feels really warm. Really different from the internet nowadays. Even with the death of flash you don't really have interactive experiences like it anymore. 'cause flash was supposed to be replaced by HTML5 and JavaScript and whatever but you don't really make interactive experiences that just come packaged in a single file like flash. You need a website and everything. In flash, it just had a single file. It could be shared on multiple sites and just experienced. That kind of propelled my interest. Plus I, I dunno, I just really like the old internet design aesthetics it really warms me (and really close..?) Flash loops [00:12:01] Jeremy: The flash one specifically. Were they animations or games or was there a specific type of a flash project that spoke to you? [00:12:15] Prefetcher: Something we call loops. Basically, it's sometimes animations. 'cause, surprisingly while I like flash games they weren't my main collection. What spoke to me more were loops. Basically someone would take a song, find a gif they liked, and they would just pair it together. Something like YTMND did. At least from loops I found some of my favorite musical artists, some of my favorite songs, a lot of interesting series, be it anime or TV or whatever. And you basically saw people make stuff about their favorite series and they would just share it online. I would go over those. For example, a good website as an example is z0r.de, which is surprisingly still active and updated to this day. And you would see people making loops about members of that community or whatever they like. And you would for example see like 10 posts about the same thing. So you would know someone decided to make 10 loops and just upload them at once. And yeah, to me, loops basically were like, I mean, they weren't always the highest quality or the most unique thing, but you would see someone liked something enough that they decided to make something about it. And I always found that really cool. I would late at night just browse for loops and I'm like, oh, oh, this series, I remember it. I liked it (laughs)! But of course flash games as well. I mean, I used to play a lot when I was younger, but specifically loops, even animations and especially like when someone took like their time to animate something like really in depth. My favorite example is, the music video to a song by the band Juicy Panic called Otari. Someone liked that song enough that they made an entire flash animated music video, which was basically vectorized art of various series like Azumanga Daioh or Neon Genesis Evangelion as well, and other things. And it was so cool, at least to me, like a lot of these loops just basically have an intense, like immense feeling on me (laughs). I just really liked collecting them. [00:14:38] Jeremy: And in that last example, it sounded more like it was a complete music video, not just a brief loop? [00:14:45] Prefetcher: No, it was like a five minute long music video that someone else made. [00:14:48] Jeremy: Five. Oh my gosh. [00:14:49] Prefetcher: Yeah. You would really see people's creativity shine through on just making those weird things that not a lot of people have seen, but you look at it and it's like, wow. It's different than YouTube (Sharable single file, vectorized) [00:15:01] Jeremy: It's interesting because you can technically do and see a lot of these things on, say, YouTube today, but I think it does feel a little different for some reason. [00:15:16] Prefetcher: It really is. Of course I'm not denying on YouTube you see a lot of creative things and whatever. But first and foremost, the fact that Flash is scalable. You don't lose the quality. So be able to open, I don't know, any of the IOSYS flash music videos for like their Touhou songs and the thing would just scale and you would see like in 4K and it's like, wow. And yeah, the fact that on YouTube you have like a central place where you just like put something and it just stays there. Of course not counting reuploads, but with Flash you just had like this one animation file that you would just be able to share everywhere and I don't know, like the aspect of sharing, just like having those massive collections, you would see this flash right here on this website and on that website and also on this website. And also seeing people's personal collections of flash videos and jrandomly online and you would also see this file and this file that you haven't seen it -- it really gives it, it's like explorative to me and that's what I like. You put in the effort to like go over all those websites and you just like find new and new cool stuff. [00:16:32] Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point too that I hadn't thought about. You can open these files and you have basically the primitives of how it was made and since, like you said, it's vector based, there's no, oh, can you please upload it in 1080 p or 4K? You can make it as big as you want. [00:16:53] Prefetcher: Yeah. Web design differences, pixel art, non-responsive [00:16:55] Jeremy: I think web design as well it was very distinct. Maybe because the tools just weren't there, so a lot of people were building things more from scratch rather than pulling a template or using a framework. A lot of people were just making the design theirs I think rather than putting words on a page and filling into some template. [00:17:21] Prefetcher: Honestly, you raise a good point here that I did not think much about. 'cause like nowadays we have all of this tooling to make web design easier and you have design languages and whatnot. And you see people make really, in my opinion, still pretty websites, very usable websites on top of that. But all of them have like the same vibes to them. All of them have like a unified design language and all of them look very similar. And you kind of lose that creativity that some people had. Of course, you still find pretty websites that were made from scratch. But you don't really get the same vibes that you did get like back then. Like my favorite, for example, trend that used to be back on like the old internet is pixel art in web design. For example, Kaliber10000, or going off the top of my head, you had the Eboy or all the sites and then Poland, for example, ... (polish website) those websites use minimal graphics, like pixel graphics and everything to build really interesting looking websites. They had their own very massive charm to them that, I don't know, I don't see a lot in more modern internet. And it's also because back then you were limited by screen size, so you didn't have to worry about someone being on a Mac with high DPI or on a 32x9 monitor like I am right now. And just having to scale it up. So you would see people go more for images, like UI elements, images instead of just like building everything from scratch and CSS and whatnot. So, yeah, internet design had to accommodate the change. So we couldn't stay how it was forever 'cause technology changed. Design language has changed, but to me it's really lost its charm. Every single website was different, specific, the web design had like this weird form, at least on websites where it was like. I like to call it futuristic minimalism. They looked very modern and also very minimal and sort of dated. And I dunno, I just really like it. I absolutely recommend checking, on the web design museum fantastic website. I love them and the pixel art in web design sub page. Like those websites to me they just look fantastic. [00:19:52] Jeremy: Yeah, and that's a good point you brought up about the screen sizes where now you have to make sure your website looks good on a phone, on a tablet, on any number of monitor sizes. Back then in the late 90s, early 2000s, I think most people were looking at these websites on their 4x3 small CRT monitors. [00:20:20] Prefetcher: My favorite this website is best viewed with an 800 by 600 monitor. It's like ... what? [00:20:28] Jeremy: Exactly. Even if you open your personal site now the design is very reminiscent of those times and it looks really cool but at the same time on a lot of monitors it's a small box in the middle of the monitor, so it's like -- [00:20:49] Prefetcher: I saw that issue, 'cause I was making it on a 1080p monitor and now I have a 32x9 monitor and it does not scale. I've been working on reworking that website, but, also on the topic of my website, I, I wanna shout out a website from the 2000s that still exists today. 'cause, my website was really inspired by a website called Assembler. And Assembler, from what I could gather, was like a net art or like internet design collective. And the website still works to this day. You still had like, all of their projects, including the website that my website was based off of. [00:21:28] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean there, there definitely was an aesthetic to that time. And it's probably, like you said, it's probably people seeing someone else's site in this case, what, what did you call it? Assem? Assembler? [00:21:42] Prefetcher: Assembler. [00:21:42] Jeremy: Yeah. You see someone else's website and then maybe you try to copy some of the design language or you look at the HTML and the CSS and I mean, really at the time, these websites weren't being made with a ton of JavaScript. There weren't the minifiers, so you really could view source and just pull whatever you wanted from there. [00:22:06] Prefetcher: We also had those design studios, design agencies, notably 2advanced which check in now, their website still works, and their website is still in the same aesthetic as it was those 20 so years ago just dictating this futuristic design style that people really like. 'cause a lot of people nowadays also really like this old futurism minimalism for example a lot of people still love the Wipeout 3 aesthetic that was designed by one of my favorite studios overall the designers republic. And yeah, it's just hard for me to explain, but it feels so soulful in a way. [00:22:53] Jeremy: I think there are some trade offs. There's what we were talking about earlier with the flexibility of screen size. But there used to be with a lot of websites that used Flash, there used to be these very elaborate intros where the site is loading and there's these really neat animations. But at the same time, it's sort of like, well, to actually get to the content, it's a bit much, but, everything is a trade off. [00:23:25] Prefetcher: People had flash at their disposal and they just wanted to make, I have the tooling, I'm going to use all of the tooling and all of it. [00:23:33] Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. but yeah, I definitely get what you're saying where when I went to make my own website I made it very utilitarian and in some ways boring, right? I think we do kind of miss some of what we used to have. [00:23:54] Prefetcher: I mean, in my opinion, utilitarian websites are just as fine. Like in some cases you don't really need a lot of flashy things and a lot of very modern very CPU intensive or whatever animations. Sometimes it is better to go on a website and just like, see, oh, there's the play button and that's it. [00:24:17] Jeremy: Yeah. Well definitely the animations and the intro and all that stuff. I guess more in terms of the aesthetics or the designs. It's tricky because there's definitely people making very cool things now things that weren't even possible back then. But it does feel like maybe the default is I'll pick this existing style sheet or this existing framework and just go with that. [00:24:47] Prefetcher: A lot of modern websites just go for similar aesthetics, similar designs, which they aren't bad, but they are also very just bland. They, they are futuristic, they are very well designed. But when you see the same website. The same -- five websites have the same feel. And this is especially, at least in my opinion, visible with websites built on top of NextJS or other frameworks. And it just feels corporate kind of dead. Like someone just makes a website that they want to sell something to you and not for fun. [00:25:26] Jeremy: With landing pages especially it's like, wow, this looks the same as every other site, but I guess it must work. [00:25:38] Prefetcher: It works. And it really cuts down on development time. You don't need to think much about it. You just already have a lot of well-established design rules that you just follow and you get a cohesive and responsive design system. Designing the PinkSea look and feel [00:25:56] Jeremy: Let's talk about that in connection with PinkSea. What was your thinking when you designed how PinkSea would look and feel? [00:26:06] Prefetcher: Honestly, at first I have to admit I looked at other websites. I looked at Bluesky first and foremost. I looked at, front page. I looked at Smoke Signal, and I thought that I might also build something that's modern and sleek and I sketched it out in an application and I showed it to some friends. One of them suggested I go for more like a 2000 aesthetic. I'm like, yeah, okay. I like that. As the website was built, I just saw more and more of how much I feel this could sit with others. Especially with the fact that it's an oekaki page an oekaki BBS and as you scroll through oekaki has a very distinct style to it. And as you scroll and you see all of those, pixel shaded, all those dithered images, non anti-aliased pens and whatnot. It feels really really cohesive somehow with the design aesthetic. But of course, PinkSea in itself is a modern website. Like if you were to go to my PinkSea repository. It's a modern website built up on top of Vue3, which talks via like XRPC API calls in real time and it's a single page app and whatever. That's kind of the thing I merged the modern way of making sites with a very oldish design language. And I feel, in my opinion, it somehow just really works. And especially it sets PinkSea apart from the other websites. It gives it that really weird aesthetic. You would go on it and you would not be like, oh, this is a modern site that connects with a modern protocol on top of a big decentralized network. This is just someone's weird BBS stuck in the 2000s that they forgot to shut down. (laughs) [00:28:00] Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that's a good reminder too, that when people are intentional about design, the tools we have now are so much better than what we used to have. There's nothing stopping us from making websites that when people go to them they really feel like something's different. I know I did not just land on Instagram. [00:28:27] Prefetcher: Yeah. And making PinkSea taught me that it's really easy to fall into that full string of thought that every site has to look modern. Because I was like, oh yeah, this is a modern protocol, a modern everything, and it has to look the part. It has to look interesting to people and everything. And after talking with a bunch of friends and other people and just going, huh, that's maybe like the 2000s isn't as bad as I thought. And yeah, the website especially it's design people seem to just really like it. Me too. I, I just absolutely love how PinkSea turned out it is really a reminder that you don't need modernness in web design always. And people really appreciate quirky looking pages, so to say, quirky like interesting. [00:29:23] Jeremy: I interviewed the, the creator of Neocities which is like kind of a modern version of GeoCities and yeah, that's really what one of the aspects that I think makes things so interesting to people from that era is, is that it really felt like you're creating your own thing, and not just everything looks the same. The term I think he used is homesteading. You're taking care of your place and it can match your sensibilities, your style, your likes, rather than having to, like you said, try to force everything to be this, this sort of base modern, look. The old spirit of the internet is coming back [00:30:08] Prefetcher: I mean Neocities and by extension also Nekoweb are websites that I often when I don't have much to do -- I like just going through them because you see a bunch of people just make their own places. And you see that even in 2025 when we have those big social media sites. You have platforms where you can get a ton of followers. You can get a ton of attention and everything. People to some extent still want that aspect of self-expression. They want to be able to make something that's uniquely theirs and you see people just make just really amazing websites build insane things on those old Geocities-like platforms using nothing but a code editor. You see them basically just wanting thing to express, oh, that's mine and no one else has it. So to say that's why. Yeah. I feel like to some extent the old school train of thought when it comes to the internet is slowly coming back. Especially with the advent of protocols like ATProto. And you'll experience more websites that just allow people to make their own homes on the internet. Cause in my opinion, one of the biggest problems is that people do not really want to register on a lot of platforms. 'cause you already have this place where you get all of your followers, you have all of your connections, and then you want to move and then you'll lose all of your connections and everything. But with something like ATProto, you can use the social graph of, for example, Bluesky. I want to add followers on PinkSea. So for example, you have an artist that has like 30,000 followers for example, I can just click import my following from Bluesky. And just like that they would already get all of the artists that they follow on Bluesky already added as followers on PinkSea. And for example, someone else joins and they followed that big artist and they instantly followed them on PinkSea as well. I think that we are slowly coming back to the advent of people owning their place online. PinkSea and ATProto (PDS) [00:32:24] Jeremy: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about how PinkSea fits into ATProto. For people who aren't super familiar with ATProto, maybe you could talk about how it's split up. You've got the PDS, the relays, the AppView. What are those and how do those fit into what PinkSea is? [00:32:48] Prefetcher: My favorite analogy, ATProto is a massive network, and at least me, when I saw the initial graph I was just very confused. I absolutely did not know what I'm looking at. But let's start with the base building block, something that ATProto wouldn't exist with. And it's the PDS. Think of the PDS as like a filing cabinet. You have a bunch of folders in which you have files, so to say. So you have a filing cabinet with your ID, this is the DID part that sometimes shows up and scares people. It's what we call a decentralized identifier. Basically that identifier is not really tied to the PDS, it just exists somewhere. And the end goal is that every user controls their DID. So for example, if your PDS shuts down, you can always move to somewhere else. Still keep like, for example, that you are prefetcher.miku.place. But in that filing cabinet the PDS going back to it you have your own little zone, your own cabinets, and that has your identifier, it's uniquely yours. Every single application on the AT protocol creates data. They create data and they store the data in a structured format called a record. A record is basically just a bunch of data that explains what that thing is, be it a like, a post on Bluesky an oekaki on PinkSea and an upvote on front page, or even a pixel on place.blue. And all of those records are organized into folders in your cabinet. And that folder is named with something we call a collection id. So for example, a like is, if I remember correctly, it's app.bsky.feed.like, so you see that it belongs to Bluesky. The app.bsky part. it's a feed thing, and the same way, PinkSea, for example, the oekaki and PinkSea uses com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki with com.shinolabs being the the collective that I use as a, pen name, so to say. PinkSea being, well, PinkSea and oekaki just being the name. It's an oekaki. If you want to see that there are a lot of tools, for example, PDSls or atp.tools or ATProto browser, if you had to go into one of those and you would type in for example, prefetcher.miku.place, you would see all of your records, the things that, you've created on the AT protocol network. Relay [00:35:19] Prefetcher: So you have a PDS, you have your data, but for example, imagine you have a PDS that you made yourself, you hosted yourself. How will, for example, Bluesky know that you exist? 'cause it won't, it's just a server in the middle of nowhere. That's where we have a relay. A relay is an application that listens to every single server. So every time you create something or you delete something, or for example, you edit a post, you delete an oekaki. You create a new, like -- Your PDS, your filing cabinet generates a record of that. It generates an event, something we call a commit. So, anytime you do something, your PDS goes, Hey, I did that thing. And relays function as big servers that a PDS can connect to. And it's a massive shout box. The PDS goes, Hey, I made this. Then the relay aggregates all of those PDSs into one and creates a massive stream of every single event that's going on the network at once. That's also where the name firehose comes from. 'cause the, the end result, the stream is like a firehose. It just shoots a lot of data directly at anyone who can connect to it. And the thing that makes AT Protocol open and able to be built on is that anyone can just go, I want to connect to jetstream1.west.bluesky.network. They just make a connection to it and boom they just get everything that's happening. You can, for example, see that via firesky.tv. If you go to it, you would open it in your browser. Every single Bluesky post being made in real time right directly in your computer. So you have the PDSs that store data, you have the relay that aggregates every, like, builds a stream of every single event on the network. AppViews [00:37:26] Prefetcher: You just get records. You can't interact with it. You can see that someone made a new record with that name, but to a human, you won't really understand what a cid is or what property something else is. That's why you have what we call AppViews. An AppView, or in full an application view is an application that runs on the AT protocol network. It connects to the relay and it transforms the network into a state that it can be used by people. That's why it's called an application view. 'cause it's a, a specialized view into the whole network. So, for example, PinkSea connects, and then it goes, hey, I want to listen on every single thing that's happening to com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki, and it sees all of those, new records coming in and PinkSea understands, oh, I can turn it into this, and then I can take this thing, store it in the database, and then someone can connect with a PinkSea front end. And then it can like, transform those things, those records into something that the front end understands. And then the front end can just display, for example, the timeline, the same way Bluesky, for example -- Bluesky gets every single event, every single new file, new record coming in from the network. And it goes. Okay, so this will translate into one more like on this post. And this post is a reply to that post. So I should chain it together. Oh. And this is a new feed, so I should probably display it to the user if they ask for feeds. And it basically just gets a lot of those disjoint records and it makes sense of them all. The end user has a different API to the Bluesky AppView. And then they can get a more specialized view into Bluesky. PinkSea does not store the original images, the PDS does [00:39:26] Jeremy: And so in that example, the PDSs, they can be hosted by Bluesky the company, or they could be hosted by any person. And so PinkSea itself, when somebody posts a new oekaki, a new image, they're actually telling PinkSea to go create the image in the user's PDS, right? PinkSea is itself not the the source of truth I guess you could say. [00:40:00] Prefetcher: PinkSea in itself. I don't remember which Bluesky team member said it, but I like the analogy that AppViews are like Google. So in Google, when you search something, Google doesn't have those websites. Google just knows that this thing is on that website. In the same vein, PinkSea, when you create a new oekaki, you tell PinkSea, Hey, go to my PDS and create that record for me. And then the person owns the PDS. So for example, let's say that in a year, of course I won't do it, but hypothetically here, I just go rogue and I shut down PinkSea, I delete the database. You still own the things. So for example, if someone else would clone the PinkSea repository and go here, there's PinkSea 2. They can still use all of those images that were already on the network. So, AppViews in a way basically just work as a search engine for the network. PinkSea doesn't store anything. PinkSea just indexes that a user made a thing on that server. And here I can show you how to get to it somehow. Those images aren't stored by PinkSea, but instead, I know that the image itself is stored, for example, on pds.example.com, and of course to reduce the load, we have a proxy. PinkSea asks the proxy to go to pds.example.com and fetch the image, and then it just returns it to the user. [00:41:37] Jeremy: And so what it sounds like then is if someone were to create oekaki on their own PDS completely independently of Pink Sea the fact that they had created that image would be sent to one of the relays, and then PinkSea would receive an event that says oh, this person created a new image then at that point your index could see, oh, somebody created a new image and they didn't even have to go through the PinkSea website or call the PinkSea APIs. Is that right? Sharing PDS records with other applications [00:42:14] Prefetcher: Yep. That is exactly right. For example, someone could now go, Hey, I'm making my own PinkSea-like application. And then they would go, I want to be compatible with PinkSea. So I'm using the same record. Or what we call a lexicon, basically describe how records look like. I forgot to mention that, but every single record has an attached lexicon. And lexicons serve as a blueprint. So a lexicon specifies, oh, this has an image, this has a for example, the tags attached to it, a description of the image. Validate that the record is correct, that you don't get someone just making up random stuff. But yeah, someone could just go, Hey, I'm making another website. Let's call it GreenForest for example. And GreenForest is also an oekaki website, but it uses, for example, chickenpaint instead of tegaki but I want to be able to interoperate with PinkSea. so I'm also gonna use com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki the collection, the same record, the same lexicon. And for example, they have their own servers and the servers just create regular oekaki records. So for example, GreenForest gets a new user, they log in, create, draw their beautiful image, and then they click upload it. So GreenForest goes to that person's PDS and tells the PDS, Hey, I want to make a new. com.shinolabs.pinksea.oekaki record. The PDS goes okay, I've done it for you. Let me just inform the relay that I did so, relay gets the notification that someone made that new PinkSea oekaki record. And so the main PinkSea instance, pinksea.art, which is listening in on the relay, gets a notification from the relay going, Hey, there is this new oekaki record. And PinkSea goes, sure, I'll index it. And so PinkSea just gets that GreenForest image directly in itself. And in the same vein, someone at PinkSea could draw something in tegaki -- their own beautiful character. And the same thing would happen with GreenForest. GreenForest would get that PinkSea image, that PinkSea record, and index it locally. So the two platforms, despite being completely different, doing completely different things, they would still be able to share images with each other. Bluesky PDS stores other AppView's data but they could stop at anytime [00:44:38] Jeremy: And these images, since they're stored in the PDS, what that would mean is that anybody building an application on ATProto, they can basically use Bluesky's PDS or the user's PDS as their storage. They could put any number of images in there and they could get into gigabytes of images. And that's the responsibility of the PDS and not yourself to keep track of. [00:45:12] Prefetcher: Yes, that can be the case. Of course, there is a hard limit on how big a single upload can be, which is, if I remember correctly, I don't wanna lie, I think it's 50 megabytes, I don't recall there being a hard cap on how big a single repository can be. I know of some people whose repositories are in the single gigabyte digits but this kind of is a thing scares app developers. 'cause you never know when Bluesky the company -- 'cause most people registering, are registering on Bluesky. We don't really know whether Bluesky, the company will want to keep it for free. Forever allow us to do something like that. You already have projects like, for example, ATFile, which just allow you to upload any arbitrary data just to store it, on their servers and they are paying for you. So we'll never know whether Bluesky will decide, okay, our services are only for Bluesky if you want to use PinkSea you have to deal with it. Or whether they go, okay, if you want to use alternative AppViews you have to pay us in order to host them. So, that also leads me to the fact that decentralization is an important part of AT protocol as Bluesky themselves say that they are a potential adversary. You cannot trust them in the long term. Right now they are benign right now, they're very nice, but, we never know how Bluesky will end up in a year or two. So if you want to be in the full control of your data, you need to sadly host it by yourself. And it's honestly really easy in order to do so. There is a ton of really useful online content blogs and whatever. I think I've set up my PDS in 10 minutes on a break between classes and university. But to a person that's non-technical that doesn't know much I'd say around an hour to two hours The liability and potential abuse from running a PDS [00:47:14] Jeremy: Yeah, I think the scary thing for a lot of people is technical or not, is even if it's easy to set up, you gotta make sure it keeps running. You gotta have backups. And so it could be a lot. [00:47:30] Prefetcher: Yeah. This is to be expected by the fact that you're in control of your data. Keeping it secure the same way, for your personal photos or your documents, for example, your master's diploma or whatever. And it's on you to keep your Bluesky interaction secure. On one hand, it's easier to get someone to do it, and I expect in the future we'll get people that are hosting public PDSes I sometimes thought of doing that for PinkSea, just like allowing people to register by PinkSea. But, doing so as a person, you also have to be constantly on call for abuse. So if someone decides to register via PinkSea and do some illicit activities, you are solely responsible for it. PDS and AppView moderation liability [00:48:17] Jeremy: So if they were to upload content that's illegal, for example, it's hosted on your servers so then it's your problem. [00:48:27] Prefetcher: Yeah, it is my problem. [00:48:29] Jeremy: At least the way that it works now, the majority of the people, their PDS is gonna be hosted by Bluesky. So if they upload content that's breaks the law, then that's the Bluesky company's problem at least currently. [00:48:44] Prefetcher: Yeah. That is something that Bluesky has to deal with. But I do believe that in the future we are going to have, more like independent entities just building infrastructure for ATProto, not even the relay it's just like PDSs for people to be able to join the atmosphere, but not directly via Bluesky. [00:49:06] Jeremy: I'm kind of curious also with the current PDSs, if it's hosted by Bluesky, are they, are they moderating what people upload to their PDSs? [00:49:16] Prefetcher: Good question. Honestly, I don't think they're moderating everything 'cause, it's infeasible for them to, for example, other than moderate Bluesky to also moderate PinkSea and moderate front page and whatnot. So it's the obvious responsibility to moderate itself and to report abuse. I'd say that if someone started uploading illicit material, I do not think, and this is not legal advice, I do not think that they would catch on until some point let's say. [00:49:52] Jeremy: I mean, from what you were describing too, it seems like the AppViews would also, have issues with this because if, let's say someone created a PinkSea record in their PDS directly and the image they put in was not an oekaki image, it's instead something pretty illegal in the country that your AppView is hosted then, Wouldn't that go straight to the PinkSea users viewing the website? [00:50:20] Prefetcher: Yes, sadly, this is something that you have to sign up as you're making an AppView and especially one with images. Sooner or later you are going to get material that you have to moderate and it's entirely on you. That's why, you have to think of moderation while you're working on an AppView. Bluesky has an insanely complicated, at least in my opinion, moderation system, which is composable and everything, which I like. But for smaller AppViews, I think it's too much to build the same level of tooling. So you have to rely more on manual work. Thankfully so far the user base on PinkSea has been nothing but stellar. I didn't have to deal with any law breaking stuff, but I am absolutely ready for one day where I'll have to sadly make some drastic moderation issues. [00:51:18] Jeremy: Yeah. I think to me that's the most terrifying thing about making any application that's open to user content. [00:51:29] Prefetcher: I get it, sadly. I'm no stranger to having issues with people, abusing my websites. Because since 2016, my, first major project was a text board based off of, a text board in a video game called DANGER/U/. It was semi-popular, during the biggest spike in activity in like 2017 and 2016, it had in the tens of thousands of monthly visitors. And sadly, yeah, even though it was only text, I've had to deal with a lot of annoying issues. So to say the worst I think was I remember waking up and people are telling me that DANGER/U/ is down. So I log in the activity logs and someone hit me with two terabytes of traffic in a day. There was a really dedicated person that just hated my website and just either spam me with posts or just with traffic. So, yeah, sadly I have experience with that. I know what to expect that's something that you sadly have to sign up for making a website that allows user content. Pinksea is a single server [00:52:42] Jeremy: To my understanding so far, PinkSea is just a single server. Is that right? [00:52:47] Prefetcher: It is a single server. Yeah. [00:52:48] Jeremy: That's kind of interesting in that, I think a lot of people when they make a project, they worry about scaling and things like that. But, was it a case where you just had a existing VPS and you're like, well hopefully this is, this is good enough? [00:53:03] Prefetcher: I actually ordered a new one even though it's not really powerful, but my train of thought was that I didn't expect it to blow up. I didn't expect it to require more than a single VPS with 8 gigabytes of RAM and whatnot. And so far it's handling it pretty well. I do not expect ever to reach the amounts of traffic that Bluesky does, so I do not really have to worry about insane scalability and whatever. But yeah. I thought of it always as a toy project until the day I released it and realized that it's a bit more than a toy project at this point. To this day, I just kind of think that that website even if it were popular, I would never expect it to have -- And in the best, most amazing case scenario, like a hundred posts a day. I do not have to deal with the amount of traffic that Bluesky does. So one VPS it is. [00:53:59] Jeremy: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean the application is also mostly reads, right? Most people are coming to see the posts and like you said, you get a few submissions a day, but all the read stuff can probably be cached. Harbor image proxy [00:54:15] Prefetcher: Yeah. The heaviest, thing that PinkSea requires is the image proxy harbor, and that's something that right now only runs on that server. It's in Luxembourg. I think that's where my coprovider hosts it but yeah, that gets the most reads. 'cause in most cases, PinkSea, all it does, all you get is reads from a database, which is just, it's a solved problem. It's really lightweight. But with something like image proxying, you have this whole new problem. 'cause it's a lot of data, and you somehow have to send it -- it's enough for me to just host it locally on that PinkSea server and just direct people to it. But sooner or later, I can always just put it behind something like Bunny CDN or whatnot to have it be worldwide. [00:55:09] Jeremy: So Harbor is something I think you added recently. How did the images work before and what is Harbor doing in its place? [00:55:18] Prefetcher: Before I did what a lot of us currently do and I just freeload atop of Bluesky CDN 'cause Bluesky CDN is just open so far. But it's something that personally irked me. 'cause, I want PinkSea to be completely independent of Bluesky Corporation. I, I wanted to persevere even if Bluesky just decides to randomly, for example, close, the CDN to others or the relay to others or the PLC directory in the worst case scenario. So I wanted to make my own CDN more like proxy. You can't really call it a CDN because it's not worldwide. It's just a single server but let's just say image proxy. So Harbor whenever a person goes to PinkSea, they start loading in all of the images and every single image instead of going to, for example, the PDS or to cdn.bluesky.app. They go to harbor.pinksea.art, you get attached the identifier of the user and what we call a content identifier. Every single, thing uploaded to a PDS has an attached content identifier, which identifies it in a secure way so to say. So Harbor does in reality a really simple set of things. First and foremost, if the user has not seen it, like, not loaded it before first Harbor asks the local cache, do I have this file? If they do, if Harbor does, it just sends the file and it tells the browser, Hey, by the way, please don't ask me about this file for the next day. And in most cases, after one refresh, the user, all of the images load instantly because the web browser just goes, of those files were already sent. And Harbor asked me not to like, ask it more about the same file. So in the case of the image isn't in harbor's local cache, Harbor, first does a lot of those steps to resolve, the users identifier through their PDS, basically resolving that identifier, the DID to a DID document, which is a document basically explaining how that user, what is their, alias, what is their handle and where can we find them, which PDS. So we find the PDS and we then ask the PDS, Hey, send us this file for this user. The PDS sends it or doesn't, in which case we just throw an error and, Harbor just saves it locally and it sends it to the client. It basically just that. But to my knowledge, it's the first non Bluesky image proxy that's deployed for any AppView. Which also caught the attention of Brian Newbold one of the Bluesky employees and made me really happy. DID PLC Lookup [00:58:14] Jeremy: The lookup when you have the user's, DID and you wanna find out where their PDS is that's talking to something called, I think it's the PLC directory? [00:58:25] Prefetcher: Actually there are two different ways. First is PLC directory, PLC originally standed for a placeholder, and then Bluesky realized that it's not a placeholder anymore, and they stealthily changed it to public ledger of credentials. So we have PLC and we have web, the most common version is PLC. The document, the DID document is stored on Bluesky controlled servers under the moniker of PLC directory. They expose a web API that basically just allows you to say, Hey, give me the document for did:plc, whatever. And, the directory goes, have it. And this is the less decentralized version. You can host your own PLC directory and you can basically ask (their) PLC directory to just send you every single document and just you can have your local copy, which some people already do, you kind of sacrifice the fact that you are not in control of the document. It's still on a centralized server, even if you control the keys. 'cause every single DID document also has a key. And that key is used to sign changes to the document. So technically, if you define your own set of keys, you can prevent anyone else from modifying your document, even Bluesky. 'cause every single document is verifiable back and forth. You can see the previous document and its key is used to sign the next document and the chain of trust is visible and no one can just make random changes to your identity, but yeah, it's still on Bluesky to control service and it's a point of contention. Bluesky eventually wants to move it to a nonprofit standards organization, but we have yet to see anything come out of it, sadly. DID WEB lookup The next method is web. And web instead of -- 'cause in did:plc, you have did:plc, and a random string of characters. [01:00:30] Prefetcher: Web relies on domains. So for example, the domain would already like be the sole authority of where the file is. So for example, if I had did:web:example.com, I would parse the DID and I would see it's hosted at example.com. So I go to example.com, I go to /.wellknown/did.json which is the well-known location for the file. And I would have the same DID document as I would have if I used, for example, a PLC DID resolved via the PLC directory. the web method, you are in control of the document entirely. It's on your server under your domain. While it's the more decentralized version, it's just kind of hard for non-technical people to make them. 'cause it relies on a bunch of things. And also the problem is that if you lose your domain, you also lose your identity. [01:01:23] Jeremy: Yeah. So unlike the PLC where it's not really tied to a specific domain, you can change domains. With the web way, you have to always keep the same domain 'cause it's a part of the DID and yeah, like you said, you can't let your renewal lapse or your credit card not work. 'cause then you just lose everything. [01:01:49] Prefetcher: Yeah. You would still be able to change handles, but you would be tied for that domain to forever send your DID otherwise you would just lose it forever. [01:01:57] Jeremy: Yeah, I had mostly only seen the PLC and I wasn't too familiar with the web, form of identification, but yeah that makes sense. [01:02:06] Prefetcher: I think the web if I remember correctly, there is slightly over 300 accounts total on the entire network that use it. Mary who is a person on Bluesky that does a lot of like, ATProto related things, has a GitHub repository that basically gives insight into the network. And on her GitHub repository, you can find the list of every single custom PDS and also how many DID webs there are in existence. And I think it was slightly over 300. [01:02:38] Jeremy: So are you on that list? [01:02:40] Prefetcher: My PDS Yeah. If you were to scroll down. I don't use a web DID 'cause I registered my account before when I was brand new to ATProto, so I didn't know anything. But if you had to scroll down, you would see pds.ata.moe, which is my custom PDS just running. [01:02:55] Jeremy: Cool. [01:02:57] Prefetcher: Yeah. Harbor image proxy can cache any image blob [01:02:58] Jeremy: So something I noticed about harbor, you take the, I believe you take the DID and then you take the CID, the content identifier. I noticed if you take any of those pairs from the ATProto network, like I go find a image somebody posted on Bluesky, I pass that post DID and CID for the image into harbor. Harbor downloads it and caches it. So it's like, does that mean anybody could technically use you as a ATProto CDN? [01:03:38] Prefetcher: Yes, the same way anyone could use like the Bluesky CDN to for example, run PinkSea like I did. cause I do not know if there is a good way to check if a CID of an image or a blob basically. 'cause files on ATProto are called blobs. I do not think there is a nice way to check if that blob is directly tied to a specific record. But that also allows you to make cool, interesting things. Crossposting to Bluesky talks directly to the PDS [01:04:06] Prefetcher: 'cause for example, PinkSea has that, cross post to Bluesky thing. So when you create an image, You already have an option to cross post it to Bluesky, which a lot of people liked. And it was a suggestion from one of the early users of PinkSea. And the way it works is that when we create a PinkSea record, we upload that image, right? And then PinkSea goes, okay, I'm gonna use that same image, the same content identifier, and just create a Bluesky post. So Bluesky and PinkSea all share the same image. I don't upload it twice, I just upload it once. use it in PinkSea and I also use it in Bluesky. And the same way Bluesky its CDN, can just fetch the image. I can also fetch the image from mine, 'cause blobs aren't tied to specific records. They just exist outside of that realm. And you could just query anything. Not even images. You could probably query a video or even a text file. [01:05:04] Jeremy: So when you cross post to Bluesky, you're creating a record directly in the person's PDS, not going through bluesky's API. [01:05:14] Prefetcher: No, I sidestep Bluesky's API completely. And, I basically directly talk to the PDS at all times. I just tell them, Hey, please, for me, create a app.bsky.feed.post record. And you have the image, the text, which also required me to manually parse text into rich text. 'cause like, Bluesky doesn't automatically detect for example, links or tags And you basically get -- like PinkSea creates a record directly with the link to the image. And all of those tags, like the PinkSea tag and whatever, And I completely sidestep. Bluesky's API. If Bluesky, the AppView would cease to exist, PinkSea would still happily create Bluesky crossposts for you. Other applications put metadata into Bluesky posts so they can treat them differently [01:06:02] Jeremy: And since you're creating the records yourself, then you can include additional metadata or fields where you know that this was a PinkSea post, or originally came from PinkSea. [01:06:13] Prefetcher: I could do that. I don't really do that right now 'cause I don't really have much of a reason other than adding a PinkSea hashtag to every single oekaki. But I, noticed, for example, I think it was PinkSky, interesting name, PinkSky, which is like (a) Bluesky Instagram client. Any single time you make a post via PinkSky it uses the Bluesky APIs. It's Bluesky, but it attaches a hidden hashtag like PinkSky underscore some random letters. In its feed building algorithm, it basically detects posts with that hashtag, that specific hashtag, and it builds a PinkSky only timeline. 'cause it's still a Bluesky post, but it has hidden additional metadata that identifies, Hey, it came from PinkSky. [01:07:02] Jeremy: It's pretty interesting how much control you have over what to put in the PDS. So, I'm sure there's a lot of interesting use cases that people are gonna come up with. [01:07:14] Prefetcher: Yeah, of course. You still lose some of the data when you go through the Bluesky API. 'cause of course it stores the record and it's all in formats and whatnot. But you can attach a lot of metadata that can identify posts and build micro networks within Bluesky itself. I see it like that. Bluesky CDN compression [01:07:37] Jeremy: And I think, this might have been a post from you. I think I saw somebody saying that when you view an image from the CDN that the Bluesky CDN specifically, there's some kind of compression going on that that messes with certain types of art. [01:07:55] Prefetcher: It's especially noticeable artists are complaining about it all the time, left and right. Bluesky is very happy with jpeg compression, by default, their CDN, -- like to every single image it applies a really not good amount of jpeg compression which is especially not small. If you compare an image that's uploaded via PinkSea, view an image on PinkSea, and view the same image, which is, it's the same content id. It's the same blob. And you view it on Bluesky, it loses so much fidelity, it loses so much of that aliasing on the pen. You just see everything become really blurry. And on top of that, when you upload an image via Bluesky itself, if I remember correctly, I don't wanna lie here, but they also downscale the image to 1024 pixels by default. So every single image, not only big ones, and artists usually work with really big canvases, they get, downscaled and also additionally they get jpegified. So for example, PinkSea directly uploads PNG files to the PDS. And for example, Harbor gives back the original file. It does no transformations on it, but Bluesky transforms all of them into JPEG compressed images and for photos, it's fine sometimes. 'cause I've also seen people just compare directly, downloaded images of the PDS versus images viewed on Bluesky. But for art it's especially noticible. And people really (do) not like that. [01:09:31] Jeremy: Yeah, that's kind of odd. 'cause if, if I understand correctly, then if you post directly to your PDS and Bluesky pulls it in you'll avoid that, that 1024 resizing. So your images will be higher quality? [01:09:47] Prefetcher: I actually do not know. That's an interesting question. Cause I know that the maybe their CDN also does that 'cause that's what I've heard from others, that on upload the image gets processed and squashed down. So I don't know if doing it via an alternative AppView would change it or would Bluesky just directly reject this post? Because for example, PinkSea, I have built-in which I think I might change in the future -- PinkSea will reject your post if it's bigger than 800x800. 'cause then it'll notice that something is off. This could not have been made with PinkSea. [01:10:26] Jeremy: Yeah, that's a good point I suppose we know at the very least, they have some third party and internal moderation tools that they feed the images through to, so they, they can do some automatic content tagging. But yeah, I, I don't know, like you said, whether, the resizing and all that stuff is at the CDN level [01:10:50] Prefetcher: The jpegification is definitely at the CDN level. 'cause, Bluesky is actually running an open source image proxy. It's called imgproxy. Brian Newbold talked about it a bit on that harbor post. And, yeah, so a lot of the compression, the end user things are done via image proxy, but that, downscaling, I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who's a bit more intimate with Bluesky's internals. [01:11:19] Jeremy: Cool. yeah, I think we've, we've covered a lot. Is there, is there anything else, you wanted to mention or thought we should have talked about? [01:11:26] Prefetcher: Regarding PinkSea I think I've mentioned a ton both the behind the scenes things and, the user things, the design principles. What I'd want to absolutely say, and it will sound cheesy, and, is that I'm eternally grateful to anyone who's actually visited PinkSea. It's definitely grown outta all of my like dreams for the platform, to the point where I'm sitting here just talking about it. I definitely hope that the future will bring us more applications (in) ATProto. I definitely have ideas on how to expand PinkSea, a lot of ideas, a lot of things I want to do, and I'm also a very busy person, so I never get around them. But yeah, think that's it, at least regarding PinkSea. [01:12:15] Jeremy: Cool. Well, if people want to check out PinkSea or see what you're up to, where can they find you? [01:12:22] Prefetcher: So PinkSea is at pinksea.art. That's the website and Bluesky Handle is at pinksea.art and me, well, search prefetcher on Bluesky, you'll probably find me. My tag is at prefetcher.miku.place. all of my socials are probably there. I'm Prefetcher pretty much every single platform except for the platforms that already had someone called Prefetcher. GitHub, github.com/purifetchi because Prefetcher was taken. And, yeah, hit me up. I'm always eager to talk. I don't bite. [01:13:00] Jeremy: Very cool. Well, Kacper thanks. Thanks for taking the time. This was fun. [01:13:04] Prefetcher: Thank you so much, Jeremy, for having me over. It was a pleasure.

Blaine (Soloist) tells us his journey from a kid connecting to local BBSs, finding AOL, learning to program, spamming for an affiliate network, and then finally finding his true passion; building websites and businesses. Guest: Blaine Vess (https://www.linkedin.com/in/blainevess/, https://www.immeasurable.com/) Host: Steve Stonebraker Audio Editor: Sam Fox CoverArt: Created by Broast (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://broast.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), original idea by LampGold. -- AOL Underground Podcast Follow us on twitter - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@AOLUnderground⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@brakertech⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Reddit - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.reddit.com/r/AOLUnderground/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Youtube - ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@AOLUndergroundPodcast⁠⁠⁠ Merch - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.redbubble.com/people/AOL-Underground/shop⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Donate - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AOLUnderground⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Contact the Host -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://aolunderground.com/contact-host/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Reconnect with old AOLers - ⁠⁠⁠https://nina.chat/⁠⁠⁠ (AOL 4.0 is working!) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://discord.gg/p3ol⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aolunderground.com/community/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Other Check out my wife's Etsy shop - ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.etsy.com/shop/Snowbraker

Today, we're sharing a special episode from our friends at the chart-topping a16z Podcast. In this conversation, a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz dive deep into the REAL story behind the creation of Netscape—the web browser co-created by Marc that revolutionized the internet and changed the world. As Ben notes at the top, until today, this story has never been fully told either in its entirety or accurately. The two discuss Marc's early life and how it shaped his journey into technology, the pivotal moments at the University of Illinois that led to the development of Mosaic (a renegade browser that Marc developed as an undergrad), and the fierce competition and legal battles that ensued as Netscape rose to prominence. Ben and Marc also reflect on the lessons learned that still resonate in today's tech landscape (especially with AI). Listen to more episodes of The a16z Podcast here: https://link.chtbl.com/blpusvv- —

This is Hallowpeen, this is Hallowpeen, Hallowpeen, Hallowpeen, Hallowpeen, Hallowpeen. In this town, we call home, everyone hail to the pumpkin dong! While this isn't another Holly Wilde episode, we do discuss Wilde's amazing halloween read, Hallowpeen, to a degree. Kenna is off to BBSS here in the next week! Let's talk about seasonal smut and what that means for authors, readers, and narrators!

ソフトバンクのフィッシング詐欺が増加、偽警告サイトは前月比100倍に　BBSSの2月インターネット詐欺リポートより。　ネット詐欺対策ソフト「詐欺ウォール」を提供するBBソフトサービスは、3月29日にインターネット詐欺リポート（2024年2月度）を発表した。

Steven Vachani, a tech entrepreneur and early digital nomad (before it was cool and easy), shares his personal journey on the Crazy Wisdom podcast. His tech journey starts from his childhood experimentation with internet connectivity in the '80s, to establishing one of the first online food delivery businesses, and working with the early mass market online service, Free Lotto. This discussion also explores his experience co-founding Power.com, a company that aimed to create universal interfaces for users and assembling global remote teams to tackle unique challenges. Stephen speaks about his legal battles with giants like Facebook, and emphasizes the need for survival skills and ingenuity in such situations. He highlights the importance of focusing on personal unique skills, recognizing early talent, and demonstrating momentum in a startup to attract investors.  Timestamps 00:01 Introduction and Guest Background 00:30 Early Days of Internet and Digital Nomadism 00:43 Adventures in Hacking and Early Online Communities 01:40 Innovation in the 80s and the Birth of Online Gaming 04:34 The Journey to Silicon Valley 05:23 The Evolution of Internet and the Start of Location Independence 07:25 The Birth of Online Food Delivery 14:07 The Journey of Entrepreneurship 17:42 The Advent of Wireless Internet and Mobile Technology 21:43 The Start of a Tech Company and the Challenges of Scaling 27:46 The Power of Franchising and Scaling 28:04 The Age of Social Media and Rapid User Growth 28:45 The Art of Viral Marketing 29:17 The Unexpected Investment Story 30:41 The Power of Convertible Notes 33:54 The Evolution of Marketing Strategies 34:13 The Journey of Free Lotto 36:27 The Power of Mass Marketed Businesses 39:28 The Battle for Data Ownership 44:11 The Future of Internet and Automation 59:36 The Vision of a Connected Internet 01:00:41 The Journey to Brazil 01:01:38 Surviving the 2000 Crash and Finding Freedom 01:02:05 Embracing Brazilian Culture and Setting Up an Incubator 01:03:02 The Birth of Power.com 01:04:24 The Revelation about Talent Distribution 01:07:53 Building a Team in Brazil 01:10:46 The Power of Networking and Talent Acquisition 01:18:57 The Impact of Venture Capital Funding 01:20:33 The Global Search for Talent 01:28:06 Reflections on Cultural Connections 01:29:22 Introduction to Cultural Connection 01:29:35 Deep Dive into Latin Culture 01:29:54 Exploring Brazil and Eastern Europe 01:30:12 Music and Dance: A Personal Journey 01:30:54 Building Relationships and Exploring Cultures 01:31:26 Dancing and Music in Brazil 01:31:49 Exploring Zouk and Lombada 01:32:11 Life as a Digital Nomad 01:32:14 Organizing and Participating in Carnivals 01:32:59 Deep Dive into Brazilian Hip Hop 01:33:17 Exploring Brazilian Funk 01:33:41 Adventures in Brazil 01:34:28 Becoming a Brazilian Citizen 01:34:53 The Journey of a Digital Nomad 3.0 01:35:23 Raising a Multilingual Family 01:37:31 Building Companies and Living Life Remotely 01:45:20 Problem Solving in Different Fields 01:47:36 The Art of Resourcefulness 01:51:25 The Journey of a Startup CEO Key Insights Early Adoption and Exploration of Technology: Steven's journey into the tech world began with his engagement in BBSs during the 1980s, emphasizing the profound impact early internet communities had on his career path. Innovation in Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship: He shares stories of pioneering in digital marketing, like his ventures into email marketing and online lotteries, demonstrating his knack for recognizing and capitalizing on emerging opportunities. The Importance of Resilience and Adaptability: Throughout the episode, Steven highlights the significance of resilience in the face of challenges and the need for adaptability in an ever-changing tech landscape. Harnessing Opportunities in Saturated Markets: Steven discusses how he navigated through competitive markets by innovating and finding new ways to approach seemingly saturated niches. Leveraging Non-Traditional Marketing Strategies: He elaborates on his approach to mass marketing, specifically how targeting a broad audience without specific targeting can be effective in certain industries, such as lotteries. Entrepreneurial Mindset and Continuous Learning: The conversation underscores the entrepreneurial mindset, characterized by continuous learning, seizing opportunities, and an unyielding drive to innovate. Building and Leading Teams: Steven shares his experiences in recruiting and leading teams, emphasizing the importance of finding and nurturing talent, and the role of leadership in steering vision and strategy. Challenges of Being a Pioneer: He reflects on the challenges and rewards of being a pioneer in the tech industry, including the trials of introducing new concepts and technologies ahead of their time. Vision for the Future and Innovation: The discussion also touches on Steven's vision for future technologies and his continuous pursuit of innovative solutions to complex problems. The Role of Early Tech Experiences: Finally, the episode delves into how Steven's early experiences with technology shaped his career, illustrating the long-term impact of early tech adoption on professional trajectories.

Pablos: People are pissed off about social media all the time. They think that Facebook is making people vote for the wrong person. It's still very difficult to find somebody who thinks they voted for the wrong person because of Facebook, but they think everyone else did. Never mind that, there's this kind of, uh, very popular sensibility, which is to blame Facebook for all the problems in the world. They're doing fake news, they're doing, disinformation they're doing , every possible thing that could be wrong. Everybody wants to blame Facebook for getting wrong or Twitter or, any of the other social platforms. So if you think about it, in one sense, , yeah, Facebook got everybody together. I'm just going to use them as the example, we can extrapolate. They got everybody together. They, ended up getting too much content. you and your friends are posting too much shit. Nobody has time to see all of it. So you need the magical algorithm, which you should do like triple air quotes every time I say algorithm. They're like, the algorithm is supposed to figure out, okay, of all the shit that's supposed to be showing up on your feed, what's the coolest, or what's the stuff that you're gonna like the most? That's the job of the algorithm. And of course, we all believe the algorithm is tainted. And so, it's not really trying to find the things I care about the most or like the most. It's just gonna find the things that piss me off the most so that I get my, outrage, dopamine hit and keep coming back. So, which may all be true. We don't know. But, the point is, there's a fundamental problem, which is you cannot see everything that gets posted from all the people you follow. So, there does have to be some ranking. And then the second, thing is that you want that ranking to be tuned for you. And I think the thing that people, are missing about this is that you've got to have, a situation where it is very personalized because, not everybody's the same. Even if you and I followed the same thousand people, it doesn't mean we have identical interests. There are other factors that need to play into determining like what I want to see and what you want to see. And then I think that there's a whole bunch of things that, are classified as societal evils, that Facebook has to decide are not okay for anybody to follow. So if you have posts about Hitler, nobody should get to see those. Even if you're a World War II historian, nope, you don't get to see it. So there's a kind of, problem here, which is that all of this flies in the face of actual diversity, actual multiculturalism, we have 190 countries in the world. We have a lot of different peoples, different cultures, you and I just had a huge conversation about, different cultures and how they drive, we don't agree about these things. We have different ideas in different places in the world, even whole societies have different ideas about what's okay, and what's not okay, and that is the definition of Culture that is the definition of multiculturalism is valuing that that exists and letting everybody have their own ideas And and make let these different people operate in the way that suits them And when you travel, you get beaten over the head with that because, I can appreciate that people drive like this in Bangkok. That's not how I want to do it , that's kind of the fundamental point here. So anyway, what I'm trying to get at is you cannot create one set of rules for the entire world. That is not okay. Ash: 100% Pablos: And so what Facebook has chosen to do is try to create one set of rules for the entire world, at least the two billion people that are on Facebook. Ash: But then you become the government of Facebook. Pablos: You become the government of Facebook. And it's and we're all pissed off because they keep choosing rules that some people don't like or whatever. And so I think this is untenable and I don't think there's a solution there. I think it is a fool's errand and what I believe is, has gone wrong is that Facebook made the wrong choice long ago and they chose to control the knobs and dials and now they're living with the flack that comes with, every choice they make about where to set those knobs and dials. And what they should have done is given the user the knobs and dials. They should let me have buried six pages deep in the settings, have control over. What do you want more of? What do you want less of? Ash: More or less rant. Pablos: Yeah, They try to placate you with the like button and unfollow and all that, but it's not really control. So, contrast that with, the other fork in history that we didn't take, go back to like 2006, in the years before Facebook, We had this beautiful moment on the internet, with RSS. So RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, that hardly matters, RSS was an open standard that allowed any website to publish the content in the form of posts in a kind of machine readable way. And then you could have an RSS reader that could subscribe to any website. So we didn't have the walled garden of Facebook, but, you remember all this, of course, but I'm just trying to break it down here. What we had was, this kind of open standard. , anybody in the world could publish on RSS using their website, all the blog software did this out of the box. WordPress does it out of the box. In fact, most websites, would support RSS. And then you had a reader app, that could be any reader app. This is again, open standards so get any reader you want. And if you just subscribe to any website in the world, you are following them directly. When they publish a post, it show up in your feed. And when you followed too many people, you could start making filters. So I've been making filters. I still do RSS. So by the way, all this machinery still works 15 years later. The machinery still works almost any website if you just put /RSS or / feed on the domain name you'll see an RSS feed and you can subscribe to that so it goes into my reader app And then I've been building filters over the years. So I have filters like -Trump because I got sick and tired of all this bullshit about Trump regardless what you think about Trump I just wanted to think about other things and it was painful to have a feed filled with Trump during the election So I have also -Biden, I have -Kanye, I have -Disney, I have minus all kinds of shit that I don't want to see, I still follow the publishers, but it's weeding out articles that are about those things. And so I get this feed that's pretty curated for me and my interests, and I get more of the stuff I like and less of the stuff I don't like, but I'm responsible for the knobs and dials, I'm controlling the settings, and I get to have my own autonomy about what I think is cool and not cool. And if I don't want Hitler, I can easily just -Hitler. And what we did instead is we kind of signed up for this sort of, babysitter culture of having Facebook make those choices for us. And people not, taking responsibility for their own choices has put us in this situation where we just have an internet full of people want to blame somebody else for everything that they think is going wrong. What we need to do is, figure out a way to, shift the world back to RSS. And out of the walled garden. So that's my, that's where I'm at, and I have ideas about that. Ash: And it's interesting, go back to Delphi, So Delphi internet... Pablos: One of the first, before, before internet, this was like an ISP, like a, like AOL. Centralized ISP. Ash: Right. So, so Delphi was sold to Murdoch, to News Corp and, and then the founder, Dan Burns brought that back. He purchased it, he re acquired the company and then invited a couple of ragtag individuals, myself and, and Palle again, and Rusty Williams. Chip Matthes, and we had like, you know, a room with a VAX in the back. I was doing a lot of the stuff, but we were running forums. Dan had this crazy idea. It was like, Hey, what if you could just make your own forum? And this would be like way pre Facebook, it's like 97, 98. And 98, we started supplying that ability to websites. And the first one we did was a guy named Gil . And like we said to him, it's like, Hey Gil, like you guys really should have some forums, like, yeah, we totally should be. Wait, so how do we do that? And we wrote like a little contract, right? like the first, I think, business development contract that you could probably make. He was head of, , business development, eBay. Right. So he did that. I mean, he's very well known sort of angel kind of lead syndicate guy. Now I like an angel is for like for, for ages. Pablos: Oh, Penchina. I know who you're talking about. Yeah. Ash: We still have like the first document, you will do this. I will do this. I will give you a forum. You will use it for people to talk about, I don't know, the, the, their beanie baby or whatever they were selling back then. And the, the reality was that that took off and then we started supplying this technology, which we then enabled, we RSS enabled it, by the way, of course, at some point, right. When it was, when the, when the XML feeds were like ready to go, we upgraded from XML And then we, we, we took that and we said, all right, let's go, let's go for it. And at some point we're doing 30 million a month, 30 million people a month. Unique. We're like on this thing and we never governed. You could, you could go hidden, right? Kind of like your locked Instagram page versus not, but we didn't govern anything. Forums had moderators, they were self appointed moderators of that domain of, of madness. So if you didn't like that person's moderation, You know, like, all right, screw this guy. You know, like, I don't, I don't want to listen to you. You're crazy. And what we found, and this was the piece of data that I think that was the wildest. Servers are expensive back then. You actually have to have servers. Or in our case we were beating everyone else. Cause we had a VAX that was locked in a, Halon secure room. No, because it came when we repurchased it for a dollar. Like the VAX was still there and Lachlan Murdoch's, office became our like conference room. No, I'm not kidding. It was, it was really crazy. There was a, it was just a VAX sitting there and, Hey, look, you could run UNIX on it. We were good. We didn't care. It loved threads and it was good. And it could do many, many, many, many threads. So we were running this, this thing highly efficiently. There's six people in a company doing that much. That was the company, literally six. I look today and how many people we hire and I'm like, there were six of us. It was wild, the iceberg effect took place. So what ended up happening is the percent, and this is where I think Facebook can't do or doesn't want to do, is how do you advertise below the waterline? And when we were sitting there with the traffic, we're like, dude, why is there so much traffic, but we can't see it, right? It looked like we only had 20, 000 forums or something, and there was like all this mad traffic going on. And. It was something like the 80, 20 rule the other way. It was like 20 percent was indexable that you could see that you could join a forum. And it was 80 percent were, were insane things like Misty's fun house. That by the way, is a legitimate. Forum at one point, right? It was Misty's fun house. So I'm just saying, cause we're trying to figure out what was going on. Where were the people chatting and talking? And that's what we did. We let them bury themselves deeper and deeper and deeper. Usenet did that. If you just go back in time, what do you think BBSs were? It's the same. Pablos: Exactly. Ash: We always love talking. Pablos: Yeah. People love talking. Ash: You just figure out which one you want to dial into. Pablos: Nobody's pissed off about who they're talking to really. Usually they're pissed off about who other people are talking. They're pissed off about some conversation they're not really a part of. Or a conversation they can be a spectator on, but doesn't match their culture. That's one of the big problems with Twitter it's like BBSs, and it's BBS culture. Elon was the winner of the Twitter game long before he bought Twitter, because, that's just BBS culture that he had in his mind, IRC or whatever. All kinds of people who are not part of that culture, are observing it and think that it's a horrible state, of society that people could be trolling each other and shit. And that's just part of the fun. You have this problem when you try to cram too many cultures into one place, it takes a lot of struggle to work that out if you're in, Jamaica, Queens, then you're gonna, you're gonna work it out over time, with a lot of struggle, you're going to work it out and the cultures are going to learn to get along. But in, but on Twitter, there's no incentive. Ash: That's why we still have states. The EU still has, like, how many languages? That's why we have Jersey for New Yorkers. Pablos: The EU in their way has figured out how these cultures can get along. I think there's a real simple fix to this. The big death blow to RSS in some sense was that the winning reader app was Google Reader. And so the vast majority, of the world that was using RSS was using Google Reader. And then I don't totally have insight on how this happened, but, Google chose to shut down Google Reader. And I don't know if they were trying to steer people into their, Facebook knockoff products or whatever at the time. in a lot of ways I think what it did is it just handed the internet over to Facebook. Because anybody who was being satisfied by that, and just ended up getting, into their Facebook news feed instead. So it just kind of ran into a walled garden. I don't really blame Facebook for this, the way a lot of people want to. I blame the users. You've got to take some responsibility, make your own choice, choose something that's good for you, and most people are not willing to do that. But, I think to make it easier for them, and there is a case to be made that , people got better things to do than architect their own rSS reader process, but we could kind of do it for them. And so I think there's one, one big kingpin missing, which is you could make a reader app that would be like an iPhone app now. And you could think of it as like open source Instagram. It's just an Instagram knockoff, but instead of following, other people on a centralized platform by Instagram, it just follows RSS. And then it only picks up RSS posts that have at least one picture, right? So any RSS post that has one picture and then the first time you post it automatically makes a WordPress blog for you, that's free. And then, posts your shit as RSS compliant blog posts, but the reader experience is still just very Instagramesque. So now it's completely decentralized in the sense that like you own your blog, yeah, WordPress is hosting it, but that's all open source. You could download it, move it to Guam if you want, whatever you want to do. So now all publishers have their own direct feeds. All users are publishers, which is kind of the main thing that Facebook solved. Ash: Content is no longer handed over to someone, right? That's the other big thing. Pablos: Exactly. The content is yours and then your followers are yours, right? When they follow you, they follow you at your URL. And so you can take them with you wherever you go. And then to make this thing more compelling, you just add a few tabs. You add the Twitteresque tab. You add the TikTokesque tab for videos. And, add, the podcast tab. So now, posts are just automatically sorted into the tab for the format that matches them. Because people have different modalities for, for consuming this shit. So, depending on what you're in the mood for, you might want to just look at pictures because you're on a conference call. Fine. Instagram. Or, you know, you might want to watch videos because you're on a flight. Who knows? So, the point being, all of this is easy to do. You and I could build that in a weekend. And then the reason that this works, the reason this will win is because you can win over the creators, right? Because the sales pitch to a creator, and those are the people who drive the following anyway, you see TikTok and everybody else kissing the ass of creators because that's who attracts the following. The creators win because they're not giving anything up to the platform. Because they make money off advertising. So fine. We make an advertising business and we still, take some cut of what the creators push out. But if they don't like us, there's a market for that, right? The market is I'm just pushing ads out along with my content to my followers. Some of them watch the ads. Some of them don't. I have this much of an impact. And so now you get the platforms out of the way. Ash: If you do it right, Google has ad networks that they drop everywhere. Pablos: Everybody has ad networks already for websites. You could just use that. Amazon has one. So you can sign up for that if you want. Or the thing that creators want to do, which is go do collabs, go do direct deals with brands. Now you're getting 100 percent of that income. You pump it out to your fans. And there's no ad network in the middle. Nobody's taking a cut. Alright, if you could cut your own deals, then great, but you're in control and you can't be shadow banned, you can't be deprioritized in the feed, because that's the game that's happening. These platforms, they figure out you're selling something, you immediately get deprioritized. And so the creators are all pissed off anyway. So I think we can win them over easily enough. And then the last piece of it is, there's one thing that doesn't exist, which is you still need to prioritize your feed. You still need an advanced algorithm to do it. You don't want to be twiddling knobs and dials all day. You might put in -Hitler if you want. But what should happen is you should also be able to subscribe to feed ranking services. So that could be, the ACLU, or the EFF, or the KKK, whoever you think should be ranking your feed. Ash: Well, I was actually thinking you could subscribe to a persona. So people could create their own recipes. So this is the world according to Ash, right? Here you go. Like, I've got my own thing. I've done my dials, my tuning, my tweaks, my stuff. And you want to see how I see the world. Here we go. The class I teach, that's the first day I tell people, take Google news and sit down and start tuning it. And everyone's like, well, let me just start to just add, put ups and downs, ups and downs, add Al Jazeera, do whatever you want. Just do everything that you want, just make them fight and put all of that in and then go down the rabbit hole. But there's no way to export that. When we start class, I always talk about viewpoints And how all content needs a filter because we are filter. But if I want to watch the world as Pablos, I can't, there's no, you can't give me your lens. So if we look at the lens concept, today you can tune Google News, there is a little subscribe capability, but you could tune it and poke it a little bit, and it will start giving you info. It's not the same, quite the same as RSS, but it's giving you all the news feeds from different places, right? Could get Breitbart, you could get, Al Jazeera, you could get all the stuff that you want. And if you go back in time to, to when I was working with the government, that was actually my sort of superpower, writing these little filters and getting, Afghani conversations in real time translated. And then find the same village, in the same way. So then I would have two viewpoints at the same time. The good thing was that when you did that what I haven't seen, and I would love, love this take place, is for someone to build a, Pablos filter,? And I could be like, "all right, let me, let me go see the world the way he sees it." his -Hitler, his minus, minus, -election, - Trump, -Biden, that's fine. And then, and now I have a little Pablos recipe. I can like click my glasses, and then, then suddenly I see the world, meaning I filter the world through Pablos's. Pablos: Yeah, I think that, I think we're saying a similar thing because then what you could do is you could, subscribe to that. You could subscribe to the Pablos filter. You could subscribe to the... Ash: exactly, I'm taking your ACLU thing one step further. I think ACLU is like narrow, but you could go into like personality. Pablos: You could even just reverse engineer the filter by watching what I read. My reader could figure out my filter by seeing the choices that I make. Ash: Yeah, if it's stored it right, if we had another format, but let's just say that we had an RSS feed filter format. 'cause it's there. It's really the parameters of your RSS anyway. But if you could somehow save that, config file, go back thousand years, right? If you could save the config.ini, that's what you want? And I could be like, Hey, Pablo, so I can hand that over. Let's share that with me. And now what's interesting is works really well. And it also helps because each person owning their own content, the, the beauty of that becomes, you never, you never filtered, you never blocked you, you, you're self filtering. Pablos: That's right. Ash: We're self subscribing to each other's filters. Pablos: Publishers become the masters of their domain. If you've got a problem with a publisher, you've got to go talk to them, not some intermediary. The problem is on a large scale, control is being exercised by these intermediaries. And they have their own ideas and agendas and things. The job here is to disintermediate - which was the whole point of the internet in the first place - communication between people. Ash: Then the metadata of that becomes pretty cool, by the way. If I figured out that, okay, now it looks like 85 percent of the population has, has gone -Biden, -Trump. Let's think about that. Suddenly you've got other info, right? Suddenly you're like, Oh, wait a minute. and if you're an advertiser or you're a product creator, or you're a, like just sitting there trying to figure out how can I get into the world, that becomes really valuable, right? Because you could. Go in and say, people just don't give a shit about this stuff, guys. I don't know what you're talking about. Whereas when you have one algorithmic machine somewhere in Meta/Facebook, whatever we want to call it, pushing things up, it could be pushing sand uphill, right? It could be like stimulating things that you don't necessarily know you want. The structure that you just described flips that on its head because it says, Hey, I just don't want to listen to this shit, guys. Like, I just could not give a crap about what you're saying. Pablos: Right. Ash: And if enough people happen to do that, then the content creators also have some, some idea of what's going on. We try to decode lenses all day long,? We spend our life, like you said, in meetings or in collaborations or business development. What do you think we do? We sit there, we're trying to figure out the other person's view. We're trying to understand if you're a salesperson, "Hey, can I walk a mile in that guy's shoes" or speak like that person, I've never heard of anyone sort of selling me, lending me, letting me borrow their RSS, like, their filter. That would be phenomenal, that'd be great. And I bet you, if you did it right, you might even solve a lot of problems in the world because then you could see what they see, you know, I don't want to touch the topics that we know are just absolute powder kegs, but every time we get to these topics, I always tell the person, can you show me what you, what are you reading? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: Like, where did you get? Pablos: Yeah. Ash: You ever, you ever asked someone like, "where did you get that?" and then they show you, they show you kind of their, feed. And you're just like, what is going on? Like, if you, if you go to someone, whether they're pro or anti vax, it doesn't matter where it is. And just look at their feed, look at what they're listening to, because it's not the same thing I'm listening to, because the mothership has, has decreed which, which one we each get. But you look at it and then you're like, okay, maybe the facts that they were presented with were either incomplete and maybe not maliciously? I get it in the beginning of this, you started like, okay, is it malicious and didn't do it would get changed. But if you just cut out, I don't know, let's just say there's like 10 pieces of news, but I only give you five and I give the other person the other five. And they're not synchronous, you're going to start a fight. There's no question. What we don't have is the ability to say, Hey, like, let me, let me be Pablos for a second before I start screaming, let me see what he sees. that will probably change that could change a lot. Pablos: Think it could. That and certainly there's a cognitive bias that feels comfortable in an echo chamber. This is one of the issues that we're really experiencing is that, the process of civilization, literally means "to become civil" to do that. It's sort of the long history of humans figuring out how to control obsolete biological instincts. We've been evolved to want to steal each other's food and girlfriends. That's not specifically valuable or relevant at this point. We've had to learn how to get along with more people, we've had to learn to become less violent, we've had to learn to, play the long game socially, those things. And, there's work to do on that as far as like how we consume all this, this information, all the media. You're using the wrong part of your brain to tune your feed right now. You're using the lazy Netflix part of your brain to tune your news, and that's not really , how are you going to get good results. There's work to do to evolve the tools and work to do to evolve the sensibilities around these things. And so, you know, what I'm suggesting is like, we're not going to get there by handing it over to the big wall garden. You got to get there through this, again, sort of. Darwinian process of trying a lot of things and so you've described some really cool things that we'd want to be able to try that are impractical to try because things are architected wrong and using Facebook is the central switchboard of these conversations or Twitter or whatever and so you know what we need is a more open platform where like you know we can all take a stab at figuring out how to design cool filters that express our point of view and share them. And that's not possible in the current architecture. I think the last thing is, there are certainly other frustrations and attempts to go solve some class of these, some subset of these problems. You've got Mastodon, of course, and the Fediverse, and you've got Blue Sky trying in their way to make a sort of open Twitter thing. And then you've got, these other attempts, but a lot of them are pretty heavy handed architecturally. As far as I can tell, most of them end up just being some suburb of people who are pissed off about one thing or another that they get its adoption, right? So, Mastodon is basically a place for people who are, backlashing against Twitter. As far as I can tell. Ash: Yeah, and we even worked on one, right? Called Ourglass. Pablos: I don't know that one. Ash: It was coming out and we actually did an entire session on it. I actually worked on some of the product thought design on, on how that works. , it was like, it's all on chain. Part of the, the thing that, we did was very similar to what you're talking about. You wanted the knobs and the controls, and you wanted people to rant in their space. I know it gets pretty dark when you say, okay, but what are they allowed to talk about in in the dark depths of that sort of internet and and I say, "well, they already talk about it, guys" Whether they get into a smoky back room or, there's somewhere else that if they don't say it, I feel we get more frustrated. Pablos: The fundamental difference here is between centralized services. That's certainly Facebook and Twitter, but it's also Delphi and AOL, versus open, decentralized protocols and the protocols in time win over the services like TCP/IP won over AOL, AOL was centralized service, TCP/IP, decentralized protocol. At the beginning it was a worse user experience, harder to use, but It's egalitarian and it won and I think that that's kind of the moment we're in right now with with the social media. We're still on centralized service mode and it needs to be architected as decentralized protocol and we had a chance to do that before Facebook and we lost and so now there's just like the next battle is like how do we get back on the track of decentralized protocol, and I think if we just define them... That's why I think RSS won because it's called Really Simple Syndication for a reason. Because it's really simple. It was easy for any developer to integrate. Everybody could do it. And so it just became ubiquitous almost overnight. You could design something cooler with the blockchain and whatnot. But it's probably over engineered for the job. And the job right now is just like, get adoption. Ash: We started going down that path. So Delphi's sort of twin. Was, called Prospero. So Prospero was, little Tempest reference, was designed. As a way that you could just adopt it. That was that, that first eBay deal. And then we did about.com and most of the stuff. And right now you see Discuss. It's at the bottom of, of some comments. It's a supported service where, you had one party taking care of all of the threads and handles and display methods and posts and logins. And, you were seamlessly logged into the other sites. MD5 sort of hash and we did the first single sign on type nonsense, and we used to build gateways between the two, you're going to go from one to another, but the whole idea was that you provide, the communication tool, As a, as an open or available service. And you could charge for for storing it. And then what happens is you don't do the moderation as a tool. That's your problem. You strip it back to "look, I'm going to provide you the car and I don't care how you drive it." Go back to our story, whether you're in Vietnam or Riyadh or whatever you're doing, we're going to, we're not there to tell you which lane to go into, but that's, that's your problem. I think that one of the challenges with like RSS, cause we were RSS compliant, by the way. I'm pretty sure Prospero and I'm sure it's still around because it went XML to RSS. And I remember the fact that you could subscribe to any forum that was Prospero powered. You could subscribe to it a lot, like directly through your RSS reader. And I remember what was great about it is that people were like, "we don't want, your viewer." Just like we didn't want your AOL view of like, "you've got mail." I want my own POP server and then IMAP or whatever it is. I think there does need to be, like you said, someone putting together a little toolkit that's super easy. They don't need to know it's got RSS. They don't need to know anything. But it's like, "own your post." it can be like an Own Your Post service. And then the Own Your Post service happens to publish RSS and everything else, and it's compliant. Pablos: I think you just make an iPhone app and when you set up the app it just automatically makes you a WordPress blog and if you want you can go move it later. Ash: You got it. All that other stuff is just automated. Pablos: You don't even have to know it's WordPress. It's behind the scenes. Ash: If you were going to do this, what you would do is you'd launch and I would launch it like three different companies. Like three different tools. I've got a, "keep your content" tool and the keep your content guys are something compliant, RSS. You keep bringing it back. It's published, it's out there and then some new company, Meta Two, Son of Meta, creates a reader. Anyone that's got a RSS tag on it, we're a reader for it. So anyone using Keep Your Content or, whatever. the idea being that now you're showing that there's some adoption. You almost don't have to rig it. There is a way to do this because no one wants to download a reader if there aren't sources. Pablos: The thing can bootstrap off of existing sources because there's so much RSS compliant content. You could imagine like day one. If you downloaded this reader today. You could follow Wall Street Journal and just everything online. And some of it you have to charge for it. Like Substack has RSS. I follow Substacks. You could just follow those things in the app Substack has a reader, but it only does Substacks, and probably Medium has one that only does Medium. But we have one that does both, plus New York Times and everything else. So now, like any other thing, you just follow a bunch of stuff. And then, there's a button that's like post. Sure, post. Boom. Now that fires up your own WordPress blog. Now you're posting. All your content's being saved. You control it. You got some followers or if you have this many followers, here's how much you can make in ad revenue. Boom, sign up for ad network. Now you're pushing ads out. All This could be done with existing stuff, just glued together, I think, and with the possible exception of the filter thing, which, needs to be more advanced probably worth revisiting. Ash: I think what You could do is maybe the very first thing you do, create the filter company, like your RSS glasses. So instead of having to do that heavy lift, curate Pablos's, I would love to get your RSS feed list. How do you give it to me? How could you give me your RSS configured viewer? Pablos: A lot of RSS readers make it really easy to like republish your own feed. So like all the things I subscribe to, then go into feed... Ash: But then, that's blended, right? Pablos: Oh, it's blended. Yeah, for sure. Ash: Is blended, right? So now it becomes your feed. I'm saying, can I get your configuration? Pablos: I don't know if there's a standard for that. Ash: I'm saying that's maybe the thing you create a meta, Meta. Pablos: Honestly, I think these days what you would do is just have a process that looks at everything I read, feeds it into an LLM, and tries to figure out like how do you define what Pablos is interested in that way. You probably would get a lot more nuance. Ash: That's to find out what you're interested in. Pablos: It's almost like you want your feed filtered through my lens. Ash: That's exactly what I want. I want to read the same newspaper you're reading, so to speak. So if you assume that that feed that you get is a collection of stories. That's your newspaper, the Pablos newspaper, right? That's what it is, Times of Pablos and you have a collection of stories that land on your page, right? It's been edited. Like you're the editor, you're the editor in chief of your little newspaper. If you think of all your RSS feeds ripped down your, your own newspaper, I'd like to read that newspaper. How do I do that? That doesn't exist. I don't think that's easy to do. And if I can do that, that'd be great. Pablos: If you're looking on Twitter and people are reposting, if I go look at your Twitter feed and all you do is repost stuff and then occasionally make a snarky comment, that's kind of what I'm getting. I'm getting the all the stuff you thought was interesting enough to repost and I think that's a big part of like why reposting merits having a button in Twitter because that's the signal you're getting out of it. I don't love it because it's part of what I don't like about Twitter is I'm not seeing a lot of unique thought from the people I follow. I'm just seeing shit they repost. And so my Twitter feed is kind of this amalgamation of all the things that were reposted by all the people I follow and and to me, that's what I don't want. I would rather just see the original post by those people. Twitter doesn't let me do that, so I'm scrolling a lot just to get to the, first person content. I think it is a way of substantiating what you're saying, though, which is "There's a value in being able to see the world through someone else's eyes." Repost might just be kind of a budget version of that. Ash: The reason I say that it's valuable, it's like the old days you'd sit on train and maybe even today and you had a physical copy of the New York Times, and everyone, and you could see who reads the New York Times and who reads the Journal. Right. And who reads The Post and The Daily News, that's what you can tell. And those people had their lenses, you go to the UK and everyone, this is the guardian, the independent, whatever. And you were like, Oh, that's a time, Times reader. That's a Guardian reader or someone looking at page three of the sun. I have no idea what they're doing, but, you knew immediately where they were. Pablos: It's the editorial layer. Ash: You got it. Pablos: it's what's missing in today's context. What's missing now is you got publishers, and you got the readers. but the editor is gone. Ash: Well, it's not gone, that's the problem, right? So what we did is , in the, in the world of press, there was a printing press and an editorial group took stories and they shoved them through the printing press. And then, the next minute, another editorial group came in and ran it through the printing press. so if you went out , and you were making your sort of manifestos, the printing press probably didn't care, right? The guy at like quickie print or whatever it was didn't care. Today, Facebook claims it's the place to publish, but it's not. Because it's editorial and publish so that so what they're doing is they're taking your IP They're taking a content and then there's putting their editorial layer on it. Even if it's a light touch or heavy touch, whatever it is. But it's sort of like if the guy that was the printing press like "I don't really like your font." " Dude, that's how I designed it." I want the font. Like I like Minion, Minion Pro is my thing, right? That's what I'm going to do. But, but if they just decided to change it, you'd be really pissed off. Now, Facebook claims to be an agnostic platform, but they're not an ISP. They're not a, an open architecture. like we would have had in the past where like you host what you wanted to host. There, you host what you want to host, but they're going to down promote you. They're going to boost you. They're going to unboost you. So wait a minute, hold on a second. You're, you're not really an open platform. And I think that's what you're getting at, which is, either you're a tool to publish or you're the editorial, the minute you're both. You're an editorial. You're actually no longer a tool. Pablos: That's exactly right. I think, that's the key thing, we've got to separate those things. Ash: That's the element. And I think that that tells you a lot about why we get frustrated. If Twitter was just a fast way to shove 140 characters across multiple SMS, which we didn't have, because we're in the U.S. We were silly and we didn't have GSM. That's what Twitter was, right? Twitter was kind of like the first version of like a unified messaging platform. Cause it was like, you could broadcast 140 characters and it would work on the lowest common denominator, which was your StarTAC flip phone. So the point was that Twitter was a not unmoderated open tool. Then it got editorial. And now it's then it's no longer. And I think that's the problem, right? It used to be, you had a wall on Facebook and you did whatever the hell you wanted to. And then Facebook said I need to make money and it became the publisher, became the editorial board. Pablos: Okay, so we have a lightweight plan to save the internet. Let's see if we can find somebody to go build this stuff. Ash: If you could build that last thing, I think it's not a, it's not a complicated one, but they, I think they just need to sit down and, grab your feed. Or someone can come up with a collection of, Mixtapes, let's call it. Pablos: Yeah, cool. Mixtapes, I like that. Ash: Internet Mixtapes. There you go.

As a former volunteer and later employee of Fandom Forward (what was then called The Harry Potter Alliance) and a transgender man, Jackson Bird's feelings about Harry Potter have certainly evolved, especially given the extremely divisive statements JK Rowling has made about the transgender community. He shares how what was once an important part of his identity has faded away and why, as well as how he feels about his memoir four years later and what he's working on now.Here are some of the references from this episode for those who want to dig a little deeper:Jackson BirdSorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (A Transgender Memoir) (Simon & Schuster)Jackson Bird - YouTubeCool Stuff Ride Home podcastFirst Draft Theater newsletterThe Infinite Wrench — The New York Neo-FuturistsHenry's writing about the Harry Potter Alliance:"Cultural acupuncture": Fan activism and the Harry Potter AllianceWizard RockFandom Forward > (formerly The Harry Potter Alliance)Jackson Bird: ‘Harry Potter' Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed Me (NY Times Opinion)The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling podcastJudy Blume clarifies J.K. Rowling remarks: ‘I wholly support the trans community' (The Hill)Michigan Womyn's Music FestivalFlorida Anti-Trans LegislationRick Riordan on Trans Youth and LGBTQ CharactersHarry Potter TV SeriesFan Petition Against “platforming” Rowling‘Grapevine': An original podcast from NBC News Studios - a story about fringe religious movements trying to remake the American education system based on their biblical valuesVelshi Banned Book Club on Apple PodcastsPottermore Moving Trans History Forward ConferenceAmazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices - The New York TimesEpisode 101: BBSs and Early Internet Communities with Author Kevin DriscollEpisode  69: The Power of Fan Activism with Janae Phillips and Shawn TaylorBy Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism (NYU Press)Scholastic criticized for optional diverse book section - ABC NewsScholastic Backtracks on Isolating Works on Race and Gender at Book Fair - The New York TimesShare your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin, and the How Do You Like It So Far? team! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com.Music & Additional Audio:HBO Harry Potter Series announcement videoThe Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcastShania Twain - Man! I Feel Like A Woman“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmetSpaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeatsCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumentalFree Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceshipMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

We delve into the fascinating world of Bulletin Board Systems with Al's Geek Lab, the creator of the awesome YouTube series 'Back to the BBS'. We explore how BBSs laid the groundwork for today's Internet, the artistic flair of ANSI art, and the enduring allure of BBS games and mods and why the scene is thriving again today. Back To The BBS Playlist: https://tinyurl.com/2ur5mwcs Please visit our amazing sponsors and help to support the show: Bitmap Books https://www.bitmapbooks.com/ Check out PCBWay at https://pcbway.com for all your PCB needs Get 3 issues of your favourite Future Publishing gaming mag (Play, Edge, Retro Gamer and PC Gamer) for just £1 each: https://www.magazinesdirect.com/retrotrial      Get 3 months of ExpressVPN for FREE: https://expressvpn.com/retro Thanks to our latest Patreon backers, in the Hall of Fame this week: Andreas Sunna, Kev Sanders We need your help to ensure the future of the podcast, if you'd like to help us with running costs, equipment and hosting, please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://theretrohour.com/support/ https://www.patreon.com/retrohour Get your Retro Hour merchandise: https://bit.ly/33OWBKd Join our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/GQw8qp8 Website: http://theretrohour.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theretrohour/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/retrohouruk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrohouruk/ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/theretrohour Upcoming events we'll be at: Kickstart UK: https://www.amigashow.com/  Amiga38 Germany - https://www.amigaevent.de/WB.html Show notes: Monkey Island Sea of Thieves crossover: https://youtu.be/DOWILvQGVz4 Capcom Town: https://captown.capcom.com/en Iron Meat new contra type game: https://tinyurl.com/36d4c523 Croc HD is being worked on: https://retrododo.com/croc-hd/ 

Kevin Driscoll, author and associate professor of Media Studies at University of Virginia, discusses the history of BBSs, or bulletin board systems, and how they have been overlooked as part of the history of the internet. Developing out of his early experiences with local online communities, Kevin approaches the history of the internet from a grassroots perspective, offering up true stories and examples of how everyday people developed communities online. He outlines how BBSs, from the late 1970s to the 1980s, develop from a space for computer club members to share information to a place where marginalized groups, for example gay men, could gather online. Using BBS lists that were either regional or interest-oriented, Driscoll has been able to uncover the various communities and practices of early online interactions that laid the groundwork for contemporary online social groups and platforms.A full transcript of this episode will be available soon!Here are some of the references from this episode, for those who want to dig a little deeper:Kevin Driscoll BioBook, The Modem WorldFred Turner's Research on The WellHoward Rheingold's Research on The WellByte Magazine Vol. 3 number 11 featuring Christensen and Suess Article on CBBSsKristen Haring's Work on Postwar Ham Radio CultureSusan Douglas' Work on Ham Radio CultureCharlton McIlwain's Work on AfroNetRelevant Background Information: WIRED Article on The WellMinitelQuartz Article on Stacy Horne and EchoMIT  Project Athena Internet as Third SpaceSherry Turkle Amy BruckmanCheck out our previous episodes with Howard Rheingold and Sherry TurkleShare your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com.Music:“In Time” by Dylan Emmett ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmetCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumentalMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q

This interview features Adam Rymer, CEO of OpTic Gaming. We discuss what he learned from running Harvard's campus store, adapting to Napster at Universal Music, why entertainment doesn't value innovation, being on Universal Pictures' greenlight committee, scaling Legendary Digital and working alongside Chris Hardwick and Amy Poehler, how to create communities for gamers, why he plays Fornite with his son, and how to follow your own roadmap.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow us on LinkedIn: RockWater LinkedInEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com Interview TranscriptThe interview was lightly edited for clarity.Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Adam Rymer, CEO of OpTic Gaming. So Adam was born in Fort Lauderdale and was a self-described '80s internet nerd. That meant hanging out on internet bulletin boards and attending internet meetups at bowling alleys. His online passions paid off and he ended up going to Harvard after writing an admission essay, comparing entertainment dollars versus grocery store dollars. Adam's early career included Universal Music where three months after beginning his new role Napster was launched. And Adam had to figure out questions like, "What now? And who do we sue?" After rising up to the exec ranks at Universal Adam then struck out on his own to co-founder production company that worked on projects like the Rover and sci-fi hit arrival. He then became president at nerd and legendary networks where he helped build a multi-platform media business alongside stars like Chris Hardwick and Amy Poehler today. Adam is the CEO of OpTic Gaming, where he is helping to grow and scale one of the world's most exciting companies operating at the intersection of gaming and entertainment.Chris Erwin:Adam, thanks for being on The Come Up Podcast.Adam Rymer:Great to be here, man. Good to see you.Chris Erwin:Yeah. So where are you calling in from?Adam Rymer:I am in Dallas, been here about two years now.Chris Erwin:Are you in the Envy offices right now?Adam Rymer:We are. I moved here in the middle of COVID and we've been, believe it or not, working mostly in the office since I got here.Chris Erwin:Like to hear that people getting back to the office environment. Well, we're going to talk about Envy more, but actually want to rewind a bit, Adam. So going back a few years here, I want to hear about where you grew up and a little bit of what your childhood was like to see if there's any kind of glimpses into this media and digital executive that you've become.Adam Rymer:I am a Florida man. I grew up in Fort Lauderdale. Born in Miami, grew up in Fort Lauderdale, '70s and '80s which whatever anybody thinks about Miami and south Florida now is not what it was like when I was there. It was retiree paradise. And then the occasional spring break debauchery but of course, I was too young to really understand and appreciate any of it. So I just saw all these college kids coming in and thinking that would be awesome. And then by the time I was actually old enough to enjoy spring break, that it all gotten kicked out of south Florida and moved to Daytona and Cancun and wherever else. So missed out on all the benefit of all of it. But Florida was an interesting place to grow up in the '70s and '80s. Left at 17, never really went back, but definitely helped shape my desire to stay someplace warm for the rest of my life.Chris Erwin:Okay. So I have to ask you, what was your household like growing up? Were your parents into the same things that you're into now, media entertainment, digital gaming, gaming, what that looked like back in the day was very different, but what did your parents do and what were some of your early inspirations?Adam Rymer:My dad was a physician. He was an immigrant. My mom helped run the household. I had a younger sister who was six years younger than I. And so we were not overly close partially because of the age difference. And partially because we were just into different things, I was probably what you would call a quintessential nerd back in the day when it was very, very uncool to be a nerd. I got an Apple 2e when I was, I don't know, probably like eight or 10 years old and was goofing around on that with floppy discs and playing Zork and all the text base games and whatever else I could get my hands on. I remember connecting to BBSs back in the day. That was how I spent a lot of my free time.Chris Erwin:But BBS?Adam Rymer:Yeah. BBS was a bulletin board system. It was the modern, the old precursor to, I guess what you'd call like a social media network today. It was dial-in multi-communication platform where you could type and talk to other people and play games with people online, text-based games for the most part and south Florida, believe it or not, was actually the hub of some of the biggest BBS companies in the .country every now and then we'd go to meetups with people who were on these, these services, but you'd get online and play trivia and you'd play just chat with each other. And I guess back in the day, you'd consider it pretty weird. And today you just call it WhatsApp.Chris Erwin:So question, you said we would go to meetups. How old are you and who is we? Are you going with your parents or friends?Adam Rymer:Yeah. I was like 13, 14, and I'd have friends that would drive me around. We'd meet at like bowling alleys and family entertainment centers like arcades and mini golf places. And there'd be people from 14 to 40, but everybody was just connected through these online environments of being... At the time, I guess we were outcast and ostracized. And like I said, we were big old nerds.Chris Erwin:Were your parents supportive of some of your interests here with these meetups and the BBSs?Adam Rymer:Yeah, I mean, they didn't really know what was going on. For me, it was just a way to meet people and make friends and met some really interesting folks. Met some really odd, strange folks through it. Some people went on to greatness and do some pretty cool things. Some people faded off into obscurity. I think it definitely helped define and set my career in motion from being part of something that was just on the cutting edge of interactivity and technology. And 'cause there was a lot of steps to it, right. We had to, you had to get a 300-baud modem. You had to connect a phone line to it. You had to pay for time on the service by dropping off some money at a house or sending something in somewhere else. And I mean, it was really complicated, but we made it work. It was a weird time. It was like during the days of war games, if you remember the movie War Games, it was like that sort of universe.Chris Erwin:I've known you for years now. This is the first time I've really asked about your upbringing in your childhood. And within one minute, learn something completely new, but it makes sense. Everyone nowadays talks about how do you build community? How do you build fandom amongst different media brands, participants, creators, and users, et cetera? And you have now three to four decades of experience of building fandom on the internet. It's all becoming much more clear. So as you go to high school and then you're applying for college, what did you think that you were going to do?Adam Rymer:It's funny so we used to go to Disney World a lot in Florida, right? Because it's only about two-hour drive from where I lived. And I was always, I guess, kind of a weird business-focused kid at a certain level. I remember writing my college essay about Disney, but not about the cool entertainment factor of Disney about the business of Disney and how I found it super interesting that when you would go to someplace like Disney World, that you would be totally open to spending $8 on a Mickey bar ice cream that if you were just at a grocery store, you would totally freak out about highway robbery. You would just never spend that kind of money. And, I wrote my essay about like entertainment dollars being different from regular dollars. I did, I guess-Chris Erwin:So precocious.Adam Rymer:... I was a weird kid and at the time I was like, "I want to be Michael Eisner." Michael Eisner was my idol at the time not knowing a whole lot about anything, but knowing Disney and seeing how that was working, I was like, "That's my aspiration." Right? So went off to college. And at the time I was focused on engineering because as a nerd, geeky kid, I thought I was going to be an engineer, but within a year of college, I shifted over to being an economics major and really focusing more on business and really put most of my efforts into pursuing kind of game theory and business and economics.Chris Erwin:You went to Harvard up in Cambridge, right?Adam Rymer:That's the one. Yeah.Chris Erwin:So your essay must have been something special to get into that school. Right?Adam Rymer:God. To this day, I don't know how I got in. I'll tell you, I mean, it's my 25th reunion this year. I look around and I see other people from my class and I see kids today and I mean the quality of students and applications is just phenomenal. And to this day I count my lucky stars that I went there and got in there and survived. It was the hardest experience in my life. I can't even tell you, I felt overwhelmed half the time, lucky half the time. I mean, it was something.Chris Erwin:Well, if you're going to a reunion, my dad, I think is Harvard '70. And I think he's going to his reunion this year as well. So maybe you guys can bump into one another there. So you're at Harvard, you're feeling overwhelmed, but feeling lucky and grateful. And do you think you get more clarity on what you want to do when you're graduating?Adam Rymer:Yeah. Well, look, while I was there, I had my first real work experience. So we had this thing called Harvard Student Agencies. And what that is a bunch of student-run businesses on campus that are sanctioned by the university. And they let students sort of operate businesses through a platform that the university puts together. And I started out running something called the Campus Store, which basically sold futons and refrigerators and class rings and all the stuff you need for dorm rooms. And then my second year I became vice president of the organization. And one of the things that organization also did was produce the Let's Go Travel Guides, which might be a sign of another era, but it was books that you would use to go travel abroad and low-budget travel through Europe and other places around the world.Adam Rymer:And it was a team of hundreds of students that would write these books and go out and travel and run these businesses. And I did that for two and a half years of my time at school. And I found my time working and helping to run these businesses to be maybe the best education that I got over my time there. So by the time that I was graduating, I was pretty dead set on being in the business world, operating, trying to figure out some way to be an executive in some way, shape or form. Didn't necessarily know exactly what type of business to run. So I ended up going into management consulting, coming out of school because to me that seemed like the best landing spot, where I could get a sense of a bunch of different industries, bunch of different businesses, try to solve some problems for different companies and then figure out what I wanted to do from there. Or just do that for the rest of my life. Because from what I heard, that was a pretty cool thing to do.Chris Erwin:Got it. You go to L.E.K. Consulting in the late '90s. Was the experience what you expected it to be?Adam Rymer:So, so late '90s, I got to take you back a minute. I mean, at the time computers were still relatively, they weren't new, but they were not as useful as they are today. Everything was hard. The internet was slow. The amount of data that you had access to wasn't quite there, Google wasn't quite there. So I was building a lot of financial models. It was hard to do the research. We were printing things out on overhead projector slides for client presentations. PowerPoint was not as user friendly as it is today. I think I, when I started there, we were using Lotus 1-2-3, not even Excel. I was working probably 80 to 100 hours. I found the work interesting. I found the rigor interesting. I found the type of things we were doing interesting. I did not find the clients. I was working on overly exciting, and that was a big epiphany for me.Adam Rymer:I found it really hard to stay focused working for industries that I didn't have a passion for. At one point I was no joke... People say these things as jokes, I was working for a vacuum cleaner manufacturer, literally a company that made vacuum cleaners and I was helping them reallocate their sales force across the country. It was just hard. I was on the road and I was looking through maps and I was looking at different DMAs and I was trying to help them figure this out. I also spent a lot of time working in the biotech space, trying to look at different drugs that were coming to market and how they should be priced and talking to a lot of doctors and physicians about whether they would use the product and whether they would get approved by the FDA.Adam Rymer:And look, it wasn't my background. I mean, I purposely stayed away from anything pre-med I don't think I took any biology classes past ninth grade. The work was fun. The hours were rough, but not being passionate about the day to day subject was a real challenge for me. So about a year in, I was trying to figure out what was next.Chris Erwin:I hear you. I mean, I was a banker, right when I graduated from school undergrad. I think from like 2005 to 2010. And yeah, we were able to pull down 10-Ks and SEC filings, from the internet and able to get a bunch of financial information using Excel to create models. And I just remember all my MDs being like, "We used to have to get the 10-K's physically mailed to us." They didn't have Excel and they were doing modeling by hand on paper or in these really basic computer systems. And I was like, "Either that sounds terrible or it was better because you could just focus and do less." Where when you have access to technology your bosses just expect, "Well, you can work on five assignments at the same time." Right? You're equipped. But anyway, I digress.Chris Erwin:So then, okay, you do that for a couple of years and then I think you make a decision that instead of being an advisor and consultant, you want to go work for a company. You go to the line, quote, unquote, "some people say." And you go to Universal Music. So how was that transition for you?Adam Rymer:I mean, it was a magical transition for me. I mean, it was a happenstance lucky break for me and my career and the whole rest of my career, to be honest with you. And it goes down in something I think about still on a regular basis is having been a nerd. I mean, this goes back to the BBS story is I had built a PC. I was living in Cambridge. I was downloading the first MP3 files off the internet from really obscure search engines, like web crawler and LICOs. And I bought the first MP3 player that was ever made. And I would take this MP3 player to the gym and the use case for a portable MP3 player I found fascinating. The other options available at the time were a Walkman with a tape that you had to make a mix tape for, or a CD player, which for those who don't remember them, trying to get a CD player not to skip when you're at the gym or on a treadmill is almost impossible.Adam Rymer:And so I, part of me just realized like this digital music universe is going to be the way to go. This is just going to completely take over the future as the technology gets better. And I went to the consulting company I was at, and I said, "Look, we should sell a project to the music business and help them figure out the future of digital music, because there's no doubt in my mind that this is going to change the whole face of how the music industry works." To their credit they let me help work on selling that project and they successfully did sell the project. To not their credit they didn't let me work on the project.Chris Erwin:You can be the idea, the inspiration, create the pitch. And then it's like, "And you're off the team."Adam Rymer:So I left and that was the impetus for me leaving. I applied for a job at Universal and I was very fortunate to get an interview and then ultimately get hired to go join the strategy group at Universal Music in New York in, I think it was 1999, early 1999. It was a life-changing moment because the beginning in 1999 MP3 files and digital music was starting to be a huge subject of conversation. It was on the front page of USA Today. I was quoted in a bunch of things. It was something that everybody was talking about and knew was coming. But what nobody saw coming was Napster and Napster happened about three months after I got to Universal.Chris Erwin:Oh wow.Adam Rymer:So all of a sudden I was thrown into the fire with, it wasn't just me we had a team of people. But it was the, "Okay. Piracy is real. It's not going anywhere. How do we solve this?" Do we start suing the companies? Do we start suing our customers? Do we create our own technology? Do we create a subscription service, which is no joke, an idea that we presented at the time in 1999. What do we do? How do we solve this problem? Because it's not going anywhere and technology isn't where it is today.Chris Erwin:Follow-up question on that. Adam, did you feel that the leadership, did they understand the weight of the situation? Were they really panicked, very concerned or it's like, "This is an issue we should sort this out over the next five years, but take your time and be thoughtful." What was that sense inside the building?Adam Rymer:I'm going to answer that in a couple ways. I mean, this is a problem that I have seen throughout my entire career, which is that at traditional entertainment companies, the leadership is rarely incentivized to try to really innovate solutions to the biggest challenges that are in front of them. There's a lot of reasons for that. And I don't necessarily blame the leadership that's at these companies. A lot of them are publicly traded. They need to hit their quarterly returns. They're incentivized to hit those quarterly returns. Innovation is very rarely valued at these companies the way that it needs to be. Oftentimes they can buy innovation when they need to. Right? They're big enough. They've got public stock and if there's a startup, they can often buy the company that's going to solve their innovation problem. The difficulty in these cases is when you're dealing with something that's inherently illegal or theoretically illegal, you can't just buy the illegal thing and make that part of your repertoire.Adam Rymer:So the answer that was given was essentially like, "Look, let's let the courts figure this out." It was somewhat of a, "Well, obviously this is illegal. So the government should just stop this and get in front of it and shut it down because we have the right to sell music on discs and all these other things." And I think there was an inherent unwillingness to accept the fact that the consumers get to decide these things. Consumers get to decide how they want to consume content, how they want to live their lives. And ultimately it's the entertainment companies and the media companies who have to answer to the consumers on these things. And that's where I saw the biggest disconnect. And it wasn't just at the music industry. I've seen that through most of my career.Chris Erwin:Yeah. You were at Universal Music for about one to two years. So, and clearly had some early exposure to digital, but we're seeing that this is a theme from very early on in your career and your childhood. But then shortly thereafter you go to Universal Pictures. Why'd you make that transition? Did you feel, "Hey, there's a lot of inertia here, things aren't changing and I want to go to another part of the house," or was it something else? What was that catalyst for change?Adam Rymer:Well, for anybody who remembers the advent of Napster and piracy, also the crash of 2000 from a tech standpoint, just really killed the entire music industry. I mean, the music industry was cratering at that point. People were losing their jobs. Revenue was cut more or less than half very quickly. And I had an opportunity to go to business school. So I jumped and I decided I was going to ride out the storm of 2000 and everything else while I was in business school. And if there was still a music industry to go back to, I loved the music business. I would've gone back to music after business school, but between 2000 and 2002, while I was in school, the music industry kept falling. They couldn't quite figure out the solution. And I spent my summer at Universal Pictures looking at a another side of entertainment.Adam Rymer:So after school that turned into a full-time offer. My thought on it was the biggest challenge the music industry had was technology hit them like a title wave because the technology at the time had already caught up to the feasibility for music, meaning you could download a song in a reasonable amount of time to make it useful for the end-user, right? It only took a couple minutes, 5, 10 minutes at most to download a song, if not an album based on where technology was in 1999. When I graduated from, from school and went off to film the technology, wasn't there to download a movie, right? We were still a long way off from maybe not that long, but technology hadn't quite hit the film business in terms of feasibility for the piracy and the not having enough time to get in front of.Adam Rymer:So the way I saw it was this is an opportunity to get into the film business and try to help them stave off the problems that the music industry faced. How do I take the learnings from music and apply it to the film business and try to do some things differently here that we couldn't do there?Chris Erwin:You go there and you have a seven-year run and you end up rising to become I think the SP of digital for Universal Pictures where you're managing an international staff of, I think over 20 people across the US as well as London and Tokyo, if I'm right. Did you feel that at that point that you were coming into your own as an executive where you have a vision, you know how to solve problems, you know how to build the teams? And did you feel like that was a transformational moment in your career?Adam Rymer:I thought so. I thought so. It was the, "Hey, this is great. My career's really advancing. I'm at the senior levels of a major studio. I'm getting to present to some really cool people." I'm continued to have some really lucky experiences. Got involved in some very cool projects. I was always very much on the business side of it. I was pretty far removed from I'd say the creative side. It wasn't until the very end of my stint at Universal that I got put on the green light committee at Universal, which is where you actually get to have a say over which films get made at the studio, which was a pretty cool experience. Although it didn't last very long.Chris Erwin:How big is that committee and how much weight did your particular vote from the digital strategy side count?Adam Rymer:I'm not sure how much weight anybody's individual vote has, except for a couple of people on those committees. There's about 10 people on that committee across the studio. You've got home entertainment and marketing and production and the head of the studio and those kinds of things. It's fascinating. I mean, it's very kind of closed-door sort of, sort of setting very private, almost Illuminati-ish, but it was pretty cool to be in the room for some of it. But my job was to weigh in on what the digital and alternative revenue streams could be for the titles that we were working on. So things like video games, YouTube content, ancillary products. At the time we were talking about things like ring tones. What's the other stuff that we can do out of these films to generate revenue.Adam Rymer:And then I would be on the hook for delivering those numbers against the P&L for that particular title. It was pretty neat. And I felt like things were going pretty well for my career at that point, for sure. Now the downside was during my time there, we kept getting acquired. And for most people getting acquired sounds like it's a pretty awesome thing. Usually, there's like, "Hey, you got paid out. That's a big success, big exit." Well, in the big giant corporate world, those kinds of acquisitions usually get met with, "Hey, we're just kind of sitting on our hands for a while." So Universal was a big company. And when I started working for them, it was owned by Seagram. Then it was owned by Vivendi. Then it was owned by GE. And when I left, it had been acquired by Comcast.Adam Rymer:And we were always the acquired company, which meant that the acquiring company was taking their people, having them learn about the business that they were buying, meeting with everybody trying to figure out what everybody did, which resulted in a whole lot of work for all of us to educate them. And usually, that met with a whole bunch of reorganization and strategy redesignChris Erwin:Hey listeners, this is Chris Erwin, your host of the Come Up. I have a quick ask for you. If you dig what we're putting down, if you like the show, if you like our guests, it would really mean a lot if you can give us a rating wherever you listen to our show. It helps other people discover our work. And it also really supports what we do here. All right, that's it everybody. Let's get back to the interview.Chris Erwin:So, Adam, I totally feel you on if you're always the target and you're being acquired the reeducation of the new leadership. It's a lot. I mean, I remember when Big Frame was bought by Awesomeness TV and then Verizon, and then Hearst then invested thereafter, and then Comcast NBC U came and bought Dreamworks, which had owned Awesomeness. And there's always the strategic goal shift, the mandate shift there's reorganizations. And there's a point where you're just like, "I just want to get to work." And look, that's the nature of the beast, but was that a reason why after your seven-year run, you then started to explore entrepreneurship? You were the co-founder and COO and CFO of Lava Bear Films. And you did that for a few years. Was that the reason why you made the switch?Adam Rymer:Yeah, look, I mean, there were management changes and to be honest, I had been part of a very big company where I was an employee number. I still remember my employee number to this day, which says a lot, and it was an eight-digit number. So I was just a little tired of being in that kind of structure and part of me who likes solving problems and actually making things happen and not having a whole lot of red tape. There was an opportunity in front of me. The chairman of Universal had left and had an opportunity to start a film production company and asked me to help him put the business plan together for it and raise some capital and go after it. So I thought it would be a great chance for me to not only learn how to start a company from scratch but also learn about the other side of the business, the creative side of the business. How do you actually make content from start to finish?Chris Erwin:Well, you must have been doing something right at universal if the chairman leaves and wants to bring you on board to his next venture, right?Adam Rymer:I would hope so. I would hope so.Chris Erwin:So you're there. You learned the creative side of the business, which I think is, I've talked about this on a few podcasts, right? Usually, in entertainment, you're either on the business side of the house or on the creative side of the house. It's rare for people to speak both those languages. I think of people maybe like Bob Iger or David Zaslav at Discovery in Warner Media. Right. So it's smart to build out that muscle and I think that you are an executive producer on The Rover and you helped finance the movie Arrival?Adam Rymer:That's right.Chris Erwin:Produced by FilmNation and [inaudible 00:28:25] and Glen Basner and they're good friends of ours.Adam Rymer:Great guys.Chris Erwin:Yeah. They're the best. And so you do that for four years and did you see like, "Hey, maybe there's a world where you stay in the creative side of entertainment?" Was that interesting to you?Adam Rymer:Look, it was an amazing experience. I always wanted to see how the whole sausages gets made from start to end and really got to do that. I was going around to film festivals. I was reading scripts. I was handling some of the talent deals. I was negotiating a lot of the financing for the films. We were selling the projects internationally. We were dealing with the studios. We were looking at the marketing for the films when they came out. But for I'm sure you've talked about this on some other podcasts the filmmaking process is very long and very slow. And so for me, it was I like being on the creative side of the business or having involvement on the creative side. But I don't know that filmmaking was the place for me to explore that in the long term, because I'm so used to being in areas where things move very quickly, right?Adam Rymer:Even the music business moves relatively quickly. And on the digital world, I was watching things happen. Snapchat was starting to happen and Twitch wasn't quite there yet, but YouTube was really starting to take off and there were all these other things that were happening in the background. And I just felt like I was missing some really cool, innovative opportunities that were going on. So I had an opportunity to go join Legendary, which was at the time a pretty cool independent studio started by Thomas Tull. They had made Godzilla and Hangover and King Kong and 300. And he asked me if I would help them build their digital businesses over there.Chris Erwin:Was it an immediate yes? Like, "Oh yeah, this makes sense. This is an incredible studio with some incredible IP. There's a lot I can do here. Let's get to work." Or were you evaluating other things too?Adam Rymer:I wasn't evaluating other things. And it was pretty hard decision because you this was a company that I had helped start and I was a pretty big piece of, but the opportunity and it was a blank slate. I was kind of handed a, "We don't know what the right answer is and we need somebody who's got enough experience on both sides of the equation here that understands making some content, understands distribution, understands the business side of it to really help us figure out what we should do with this asset that we have." They had just acquired Nerdist and just didn't have a solid business plan on how to start making real revenues out of it. So for me, it was a puzzle to solve right back to the things that I love, which is trying to put pieces together.Adam Rymer:At a certain level the film business has a very defined path, right? There's not much to solve in that. There's always new innovations that are getting made. There's new ways to finance a film. But for the most part, the business model of making movies is relatively defined. You might say that Netflix has changed that in some way, shape, or form, but there wasn't a whole lot of, "How am I going to do this for the next 20 years and innovate and do some neat things?" And at Legendary, it felt like there was a real chance to try all sorts of new ideas.Chris Erwin:When you enter their first year, they've acquired Nerdist and I think that was... Was that founded by Chris Hardwick?Adam Rymer:Correct? Yep.Chris Erwin:And so what did you think of, okay, these are the wins that I want to get in year one. I think that we are capable of doing this. It also feels innovative. And then I think it's going to set you up to have an exciting career overseeing digital at Legendary going forward. What was that first mandate for you?Adam Rymer:First thing was really figuring out how are we going to generate consistent revenue? Because at the time the video part of Nerdist was founded as one of the funded YouTube channels. Some people might remember that YouTube was putting a lot of money into funding channels for the purpose of creating more premium content on YouTube and right around 2014, they stopped funding those channels. And so a lot of these channels ended up in no man's land of figuring out how they were going to keep their business running. And so for me, the first step was okay, well, now that we don't have this stipend coming from YouTube every year, how are we going to find ways to just generate consistent revenue even if we're still operating at a little bit of loss, something that we can project to keep it all moving. So at the time we had the Nerdist podcast and we had some content that was existing on YouTube, and my first step was, well, how do we start monetizing podcasts in a better way?Adam Rymer:So I was able to take Chris's podcast and structure a deal with Midroll and that helped get us really kicked off with our first seven-figure deal, which let me hire some more staff and start to figure out some new lines of business.Chris Erwin:Did you feel like, "Hey, we figured out a digital revenue model here for media brands and fandoms built around big personalities"? And so did that then inspire you to say, "Well, let's start buying some other companies to add onto this roster"? Because I think you then acquired Geek and Sundry and then Amy Poehler's Smart Girls at the Party.Adam Rymer:That's right. So the idea was, well, if we can create enough of scale around these celebrity-driven community content businesses, then we can justify having an infrastructure that can support all of them the right way. So that allowed us to have a sales team that could support all of them, and start doing branded content deals that could leverage the communities that were built across all of them simultaneously bring some staff efficiencies together, and allow content production to be more efficient. So we had our entire... We had our own content production team. We had our own studio where we produced all of the content that we're making for the YouTube channels ourselves and for our branded content features. And ultimately that led us to start a Twitch channel with Geek and Sundry, which is where I started to learn quite a lot about Livestream.Chris Erwin:So do you feel at this point it's like, "All right." You're attached to a big studio, you have a lot of resources, you have incredible IP to work with, but you also, you're running your own division, which has its own P&L. It seems like you're on both the creative and the business sides of the house, where you have a real strong point of view of what content we're creating. How do we monetize it? What's getting green-lit? What new platforms are we experimenting with? You're building out a team against your vision. Did you feel like, "Hey, I feel like I have it all right now"? This is checking all the boxes for my career.Adam Rymer:In hindsight, I guess so. I mean, at time it felt very stressful. At the time it felt like we were building the plane while we were flying it. And there weren't a whole lot of examples for us to point to say, "Hey, we're doing it like these guys," or we've got somebody else that's done it in front of us. There were the MCNs out there that were aggregating a bunch of channels together. And they had a somewhat different business model, but there was nobody who was really trying to create more premium level content on a regular basis. And I mean, I had to answer to a pretty senior studio executive. So I had a lot of pressure from that side, but I did have the luxury of a good balance sheet. So I wasn't having to deal with trying to raise capital on a regular basis to keep the thing afloat.Adam Rymer:There was a couple years there where it really felt like the coolest, most fun job that I ever could have thought I've had. We were going down to ComicCon. Chris was moderating panels for us in Hall H. Got to go backstage and hang out with the cast of all the Marvel films before they got on Hall H. we had all sorts of fun people coming by the studio to be in the content, got to watch and be part of a lot of the content that was being filmed at our location. I think most of the people that were there at the time will tell you that it was a pretty magical place to be for a couple of years.Chris Erwin:I mean, I remember going to your offices a couple times during that period and just looking around at the different sets and the studios. And I was like, "This sounds like a pretty amazing gig, Adam." I knew that you were working really hard and that it was a lot and you were kind of figuring things out on the fly as you said, but I think everything in retrospect, you get some clarity of like, "Oh, that was a pretty cool moment." You know? And I think that was a very cool moment for you. And clearly, you learned a lot, which has bolstered your career. But I'm curious to hear you so you started experimenting with Twitch. I think that's just an interesting precursor to some of the channels and the partners that you work with today, particularly in gaming, similar to when you saw the power of MP3s when you were up in Cambridge.Chris Erwin:And then you saw how that was going to disrupt the music space. When you were first exposed to Twitch, did a light bulb go off on your head and say, "Hey, there's something incredibly exciting about the power of live?" What was that moment like for you?Adam Rymer:I'll be honest. I wasn't the biggest, "Hey, we're going to figure out how to monetize this immediately live streaming." I was the suit in the room on it. I had some people from Geek and Sundry come to me and they said, "We think that we can create a channel for Geek and Sundry and stream different kinds of content, just do some stuff out of our office. And we will minimize the cost that it takes for us to do it and we'll give it a shot. And they did it and they got it up and running and they spent as little as they could to create a set and livestream and got a bunch of equipment donated. And it was okay. And Felicia came on and streamed with it and that helped build an audience for it. And it was programmed. I mean, the thing that was most interesting about it was it actually had a schedule.Adam Rymer:There were shows that were on certain times of day, certain days of the week, it was a live-streamed TV network. Maybe one of the first of its kind. It started to gain some traction, but it was when Felicia brought in her friends at Critical Role to stream their Dungeons and Dragons game that we really started to see the magic of what live-streaming could be.Chris Erwin:What was unique about bringing Critical Role in live-streaming Dungeons and Dragons? What did you feel was special for the audience or to help amplify marketing? What was that?Adam Rymer:Well, I mean, what was amazing about it was it found a community that never had a place to call home. So most of Twitch was watching people play video games. There was some what you'd call today, just chatting going on, which is mostly what Geek and Sundry was. There was some game playing, but nobody was really streaming D and D at the time or doing things that were a little more creative like that in a meaningful, well-produced way. And all of a sudden this show found a home and started to spread by word of mouth and it had some great talent attached to it, right? Everybody who's on Critical Role is professional voice actors in their own right. And so they brought a level of confidence to it that don't think many people have seen before. And Matt Mercer's just a genius as a DM at the end of the day. So giving this community, which is spread out around the world a home one day a week, where they can all get together and share an experience at the same time, really became a magical place to be.Adam Rymer:So Twitch loved us because we were bringing in a community that wasn't necessarily there naturally again, because most of Twitch was more based around video gaming and the D and D community loved it because it was giving them a place that they had never had before. It was a little bit like lightning in a bottle.Chris Erwin:It just goes back to, I think I was listening to a podcast by Ben Thompson a couple weeks ago. And I think a point that was made is never underestimate the ability of the internet to reach these incredibly niche fandoms all around the world. There is interest in anything at a minimum, at least one person will be into something if you put it out there. But I think Dungeons and Dragons has this massive community and like you said, but they didn't really have a place to call home and you guys created that for them. I think that was just like so beautifully articulated. I love that. So you're doing your thing at Nerdist and Legendary you're there for five years, but then at the end of your five-year run, you go into this exploratory phase where you're advising a few different companies.Chris Erwin:I think you're reimagining cinema with a company called WeVu. And I remember being in your living room, having some brainstorm sessions around that with a few mutual friends, shout out to Adam Sachs. And then you end up as at the CEO, as of Envy Gaming, a big bet on the gaming space. How did that run come to an end? And then it kicked off. I'm going to make a bet on the gaming space. What did that look like for you?Adam Rymer:Sure. So Legendary sold to a big Chinese company called Wanda and I'll make it a short story. It was just the fit for me at the new version of the company wasn't quite the same as it was under the previous leadership. So I left and started advising companies that I just thought were really interesting and cool out there. Did some work with [inaudible 00:40:44]. Did some work with Participant. Did some work with ranker.com, other friends of mine that I had known over the years that I just had a chance to really help out here and there. And then out of the blue, right before COVID hit, I got a call from a recruiter about this position with NB Gaming. And as I've said, I've been a gamer geek nerd most of my life. And I've been paying attention to what's been going on in the gaming and Esports space for a long time.Adam Rymer:At Universal, I was responsible for all the video game work that was done. We had produced a couple games while I was there. We looked at buying a big video game publisher while I was there. So the video game space wasn't totally new to me, but the video game lifestyle space was a little bit new. And I had been following the growth of Twitch, the growth of what you'd call the celebrity influencers and creators that were emerging on the platform. And I had seen some of these Esports organizations. I hadn't necessarily known of Envy at the time, but I did know of a couple of the other ones that were out there. And I saw the potential, right? I saw the early days of a new form of brand and community entertainment, which was emerging on Twitch and other platforms because it was interactive. And when I started meeting the people that were here at Envy, it really felt like the next phase of innovation for me.Adam Rymer:And if you think about the path of my career, which has always been trying to find where's that edge of entertainment and technology and consumer behavior music with Napster and film with digital distribution and Nerdist with community-based content. This really feels like the edge of the universe at the moment, in terms of where the community is starting to emerge, where you've got a new generation of people who are not watching traditional television. It felt to me like this is a place to plant my flag for a while and see how I can help this develop.Chris Erwin:So you end up moving. You were based out of LA. Your family was in LA but the role was in Dallas. Did you just move there full-time in the beginning or were you commuting like four days a week in Dallas? And then back to LA on the weekends?Adam Rymer:I moved here to Dallas in the summer of 2020 having never met anybody at the company in person because we were all working from home. And my family stayed back in LA because of the pandemic. And I would fly back home every two weeks to see them. And we did that for about nine months while my kid was finishing the school year. It was an interesting time to be away from home and in a new city that I knew absolutely nothing about. I had never really been to Dallas before. I knew nothing about the city.Chris Erwin:Did you take on the role without ever meeting anyone from the founding team, the leadership, or the investor group in person? It was all Zoom calls and then you signed on the dotted line?Adam Rymer:Yes.Chris Erwin:Wow. That's a big decision.Adam Rymer:Yes. That's how convinced I was about the future of this space and also the people that were involved with it. So the interesting part about that period of time is I have a son who at the time was eight years old. And the way that he and I would stay in touch and I think this is telling to the future of this space, the way he and I would stay in touch while I was living in Dallas and he was in LA is we would play Fortnite together. Several times during the week I would get home from work, we'd both load up Fortnite and we'd put on the cameras. And while we were playing Fortnite, we'd catch up on how school was going and what his friends were up to and how he's doing. And that to me was the whole reason why I'm in this space.Adam Rymer:Because yes, we were playing a game and we were shooting people and we were like having a good time, but it was really just about us spending time together and talking to each other and interacting with each other. And that's what I think we're going to remember at the end of the day and not what skin we were wearing or any of that kind of thing, which to me shows how gaming is just the natural way of interacting and communicating for people today.Chris Erwin:That is so cool. I mean, I think about from our generations like Gen X and Millennials, oh, early memories of your father, it's like going fishing together, right. Going camping. And I think that your son, right, these like Gen Alpha, their memories will be like, "I remember when we used to play that old game Fortnight and we used to talk and catch up about our what was going on in school." It's just going to be a whole transformation of memories of childhood and with their parents, you know?Adam Rymer:Absolutely.Chris Erwin:I love that. We always say for us, you need to be where your clients are at. Tell our clients to don't resist or to be forceful. And I really like you're meeting your kid where he's at. If you look at the stats, we just did a big research project for a toy retailer of where are parents and kids independently and then also as a co-viewing unit spending their time online. It's on social media and it's in these big gaming environments, like Fortnite, like Roblox, like Minecraft. So I think that's pretty smart parenting, Adam. I am not a parent, but I think that it seems like smart parenting from afar.Adam Rymer:Absolutely. It's a new world. I keep trying to explain to people who are in a, I don't even want to say older generation, right because I don't feel like I'm old these days, but I'll just say anybody who's Gen X and older, we tend to use the word gamer, right? As like, "Oh, there's gamers." People are gamers and it's a misnomer now. It made sense for our generation because gaming was such a new thing for people to do. Not everybody had an Xbox, not everybody had an Atari. Gaming wasn't a natural course of business. But for this new generation, for the younger generations, asking somebody if they're a gamer is like asking people in our generations, if they listen to music or if they go to the movies.Adam Rymer:Well, you might talk to people and say, "Hey, what TV shows are you watching?" And there might be people who say, "I don't watch TV" and you're going to say, "Okay, well, that's strange. I mean, most people watch TV." But in this generation, I think we are increasingly reaching the stage of saying, "What games do you play?" Not, "Are you a gamer?" Because to me that is the given for this generation.Chris Erwin:I love that. Such a poignant point. Couple quick questions before we go onto our closing rapid fire. But when you got in there, I remember I'm like, "Adam, so what's your initial focus there?" And I think that you had a point of view like you've done at your other companies of what is the 360 monetization model? How do you take these teams, these players... How do you build media brands around them? How do you build fandoms? What is the talent-driven model to really take this business to the next level? If you could just tell our listeners what your initial re-imagination and growth vision for the company was in year one.Adam Rymer:A lot of it is applying principles to it at a certain level. What we do, isn't very different from other forms of media and entertainment that I've been involved with. And other people have been involved with in the past, which is we have a brand that has stature and meaning and association. It has a community around it. And through that brand and through the content that we create, we reach our users, we reach their eyeballs. It helps our brands and advertisers reach their eyeballs and it helps us connect with them. And so that's no different from any other form of media, whether that was magazines back in the day or television, or filmed entertainment, it is at a certain level. It is reach and it is scale. And so when I came in here first, it was really just understanding the dynamics of the industry.Adam Rymer:Where does monetization happen? What platforms does it happen on? How do we actually get in touch with these people? What kind of data is available? But then it was what are the assets that we actually have and what levers can we pull and what is our programming? So when you start thinking of the brand and your programming, you start saying to yourself, okay, well, I've got teams and I've got content creators, and I've got original programming that we put out. And you start looking at the pieces of your organization as what reach to each of those pieces have. So I've got this team and they play a certain game. Let's call it rocket league. Well, what audience does that rocket league team bring to me? Where are those people from? What demographic is that group of people? Are they mostly in the US or are they mostly international?Adam Rymer:What age are they? What states do they come from? What do they care about? What brands and industries are they interested in? And then I've got our call of duty team. Same thing. What reach do they have? Switch over to our content creator side. Okay. Well, if I'm going to bring on a new content creator, what's the audience that I'm getting from working with that content creator? It's not overly different. I mean, it is, there are differences in nuances, but if you are Discovery Channel and you're thinking about filling the 8:00 PM slot on Thursday, well, what are you going to put on in that 8:00 PM slot? You don't want to put on something that overlaps with another show that you already get that audience from. This is the whole definition of programming. It's the same reason why Game of Thrones and Westworld aren't on at the same time for HBO. They sequence those things because they want to optimize the programming and make sure that people stay subscribed to HBO for a longer period of time.Adam Rymer:So understanding your audience, understanding who's coming in, understanding the reach that you get with the assets that you have available starts to get the company thinking about us as a media property. And once you shift your mindset to thinking about it as a media property rather than necessarily a sports team, you start to build business processes around that in a different way. And that's what we're focused on at the moment.Chris Erwin:I don't think I've heard a smarter encapsulation of a media strategy than your past couple minutes, Adam. So very well done. So I'm curious in putting that strategy in place, just over the past almost two years, what are some of your favorite moments of some wins with the team? I was reading on LinkedIn. There's the Valorant Championships and the Green Wall, the Fandom really coming alive, having over a million concurrent viewers of the competition. Is that one of them? Are there others? What has that been for you?Adam Rymer:To start with our Call of Duty team won the CDL Championship within a month of me being here at Envy, which was mind-numbing. It's like, imagine joining the Chicago bulls five days before they won the NBA Championship, right? It's that kind of thing. And all of a sudden you've got a ring and you've got a trophy and you've got all this stuff and you barely started to understand what this world is all about. It was a pretty phenomenal moment. It was an amazing way to get indoctrinated into the space and get excited about it all. So now I've got a championship ring that's sitting in my office and that was a pretty fun, pretty fun moment. But yeah, about a year later, we merged with OpTic Gaming, which some of the listeners might know is one of the biggest, most passionate fan bases in the world when it comes to gaming and Esports.Adam Rymer:And that has been like wildfire for us. Hector Hex, just an amazing individual who's knows how to work with his audience and knows how to create content, and knows how to bring the audience into the brand in a really phenomenal way. And he's been educating us on a bunch of things that we didn't quite understand, and we've been working with him on some of the monetization things and just really couldn't have put two better organizations together. So within two months of bringing those organizations together, we won the Valorant Championship in Iceland, which is, as you were mentioning, had over a million people watching it. And just again, just another one of those too picture-perfect of a moment for us. Great memories that we're going to have forever.Chris Erwin:That's awesome. A final question for you is what's next for Envy gaming? What should people be watching for in some of the upcoming announcements, some new business initiatives? I think I was looking at from your team, there's some new virtual character immersion like CodeMiko. I'm pronouncing that right? Maybe some web three activations. What are you working on right now?Adam Rymer:What I think you're going to see out of us over the next year is really continued expansion of optic from a brand perspective, in terms of the areas that we're in. Just really trying to explore new ways to reach our fan base and build communities. I think the whole world of Web3, and I think a lot of people talk about Web3 without necessarily... I'm not saying I'm an expert in it, but I don't think a lot of people quite understand some of the dynamics of what makes Web3 different from Web2. And the biggest thing to me about Web3 that makes it different is community. If you don't have a community tied to some Web3 initiative, then you're missing it. I'll give you an perfect example. Web2 is about user acquisition on a one-to-one basis.Adam Rymer:So you've got a game like Candy Crush and you spend 50 cents to bring somebody in to Candy Crush and they spend a $1.50 on the game. You've made a dollar in profit and you can just keep doing that cycle all day. And you find new ways to bring more people in and you get a huge user base. There's a community that maybe gets formed online on Reddit boards and whatever else talking about Candy Crush, but the community is not an inherent part of what makes Candy Crush successful. In Web3 it's a little bit different. Web3 is if you bring somebody in, if you spend 50 cents to bring somebody to your Web3 platform and they get there and there isn't a whole community for them to connect to, they're going to leave. There's nothing for them to do. The community actually makes your project valuable.Adam Rymer:So in game terms, it's like bringing somebody in to play Fortnite, and they're just sitting in the queue, waiting for the game to start. And because there aren't 90 other people for you to play the game with, you're just sitting there and you're just waiting and waiting and nothing happens. And so it doesn't matter how much you spend on user acquisition, you didn't get your value for it. So we're going to be spending a lot of time on how do we build our community in new ways? How do we get the information about who our community is? Where do they live? What are they looking for us to do? How do we bring value to them? And how do we find partners that want to provide value back to our community? So how do we find those really interesting partnerships where we can take the Green Wall and OpTic and Envy and work together with those platforms to create really interesting dynamic opportunities together and not try to just have everything operate through our own vertical.Chris Erwin:Well said, something that we talk about at RockWater is the sense of valuing your community and communal ownership. I think that there's been a lot of literature over the past, call it year, particularly as you look at the building of different game franchises, where these users, their engagements, all the dollars that they spend on the games, all their engagement that can drive advertising revenues, right? And in-game purchases, the value that they create for a few stakeholders or investors or game owners, and it really gets siphoned to just a few. So the question then becomes, "Well, how do you reward the community for all the value that they're creating?" And I think there's actually a much bigger win there where if there's more of that two-way street, in terms of value sharing, the overall pie gets a lot bigger and everyone can win. And so I think that's a really, really smart mentality.Chris Erwin:Adam, I'll close it out with this before we get the rapid-fire. I just want to give you some kudos here. I think we were first introduced when I was probably at Big Frame and Awesomeness. So this is probably around maybe like 2015 to 2017 timeframe.Adam Rymer:Wow.Chris Erwin:And I know dating us a bit. And I just remember when I met you, you were running Nerdist and Legendary Networks at the time. I was like, "This is a guy who's a super sharp operator." He totally gets it. He's got both sides of his brain activating. I very much thought on the business side, on the creative side, I thought you really understood talent. You knew traditional entertainment, you knew digital. And I thought you were a very, very special mind and operator. And I remember when you were in your, what I call here in my notes, the exploration phase. So like after Nerdist and before you went to Envy Gaming, I think there was a period where you are wondering what really excites you. What's really going to get you going. And I think a lot of things that come across your plate that you weren't too thrilled about. And I just knew, I mean, I don't know if I ever shared this with you the right thing's going to come across Adam's desk and he's going to crush it. And it's going to be a really exciting moment for his career. Now I look back at all the success that you've had with Envy over the past, less than a couple years, and I am not surprised whatsoever. And I can't wait to see what you do there over the next two to three years. So I wanted to just share that with you.Adam Rymer:Thank you, my friend. It was definitely an adventure after leaving Legendary. There were points where I felt like I just needed to take something for the sake of taking something. I will wholeheartedly recommend people holding out for as long as you possibly can to find the right thing that feels right. If you can. Obviously don't sacrifice your family in your future and all those kinds of things. But if you can find the right thing, it definitely pays off.Chris Erwin:Very well said. All right, Adam. So we're going to get into the rapid-fire six questions. The rules are simple. It is short answer one sentence, or maybe just a couple of words. Do you understand the rules?Adam Rymer:I think so.Chris Erwin:All right. Proudest life moment?Adam Rymer:Birth of my child.Chris Erwin:What do you want to do less of in the second half of 2022?Adam Rymer:Less stress, more outside.Chris Erwin:Less stress, more outside. What one to two things, drive your success?Adam Rymer:Paying attention to everything going on out there.Chris Erwin:Advice for media gaming and Esports execs going into the remainder of this year?Adam Rymer:That's a tough one. Bear with the downside. There's still a huge opportunity in front of all of us, but manage this downside economy at the moment. And there's a bright light, but follow the path.Chris Erwin:Got it. All right. Last couple. Any future startup ambitions? Can you see yourself starting something from scratch in the future?Adam Rymer:For sure. Never a shortage of ideas that I've got. In fact, I think it's probably maybe a problem that I have. I am hopeful that I'll be launching something again sometime soon. We'll see. We'll see. if you got any ideas, send them my way, but yeah, definitely be starting some things soon.Chris Erwin:I think you got enough on your plate. I'm going to hold back on sending you too much, but maybe in a few years time. How can people get in contact with you?Adam Rymer:I'm pretty easy. It's Adam@Envy.ggChris Erwin:Adam. This was a delight. Thanks for being on the podcast.Adam Rymer:For sure. Great to be here. Let's do it again sometime.Chris Erwin:All right. That interview was just awesome. I don't think I've interviewed anyone in the gaming space yet to date. And I stand by my point that I think Adam is one of the sharpest minds that's operating at the intersection of content community in commerce. He's been in the business for a really long time who really understands the business fundamentals. And he's got an incredible set of stories. So a real gift to have him on the show, very excited for what he continues to build with OpTic Gaming. Okay. Also, as many of you know RockWater is market research and strategy advisory for the media technology and commerce industries. We've just introduced a new offering, which allows us to work with more partners. It's called RockWater Plus. It's an offering for companies who want an ongoing consulting partner at a low monthly retainer yet who might also need a partner who can flex up for bigger projects.Chris Erwin:So we've worked with a large range of companies from big and small. Big Fortune 50 like Google and YouTube and big cable networks and studios like Viacom, CBS, and Warner Media to a variety of digital publisher, upstarts and retail brands, and more. So with Plus, we do a variety of things. We can have weekly calls to address any immediate business concerns that you have. We can set up KPI dashboards that allow you to make database decisions around how to best operate and grow your business. We can do ad hoc research, ad hoc financial modeling. If you're doing market sizing need to do P&L forecasts or valuations to assess your business before you go out to investors and so much more. So if you're interested in this and you think it could be helpful shoot us a note at hello@wearerockwater.com. And then lastly, we always love any feedback on our show. If you have ideas for guests for just feedback on the format, shoot us a note at TCUpod@wearerockwater.com. All right, that's it. Everybody. Thanks for listening.The Come Up is written and hosted by me, Chris Erwin, and is a production of RockWater Industries. Please rate and review this show on Apple podcast and remember to subscribe wherever you listen to our show. And if you really dig us, feel free to forward The Come Up to a friend. You can sign up for our company newsletter at wearerockwater.com/newsletter. And you could follow us on Twitter @TCUPod. The Come Up is engineered by Daniel Tureck. Music is by Devon Bryant. Logo and branding is by Kevin Zazzali. And special thanks to Alex Zirin and Felicity Huang from the RockWater team.—Ping us anytime at hello@wearerockwater.com. We love to hear from our readers.

S4:E12 Xmas 1984 : BBS: Demented and Sad, But Social In this episode, Steve and Jeff discuss Christmas 1984. Tramiel had purchased Atari but the Fulton brothers were oblivious and just wanted a modem to call BBSs and download public domain software. They also discuss Atari Writer, Printers, Gateway to Apshai, and a few magazines from December of 1984. Steve’s story goes over this time in detail and the events surrounding it. The boys discuss what really happened to the Atari 8bits and video games during the USA Video Game crash during this time period by going through ads from various local newspapers at the time. Notes Local Ads on the ITVB site: https://intotheverticalblank.com/2021/12/29/december-1984-computer-and-game-advertisements/ Recorded, Mixed, Edited and Produced by Steve And Jeff Fulton Music : Oceans of Neon – Tony Longworth : Patreon: Tony Longworth is creating free music for everyone | Patreon Theme by Brian TravisTitle: Into The Vertical Blank theme Words & music by Brian Travis (c)(p)2021 Taste This Moment Music ASCAP http://www.briantravisband.com/ Find us here: http://intotheverticalblank.com Into the Vertical Blank: Generation Atari | Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/intotheverticalblank Into The Vertical Blank Pod Cast – Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Atari_VB_Pod

S4:E12 Xmas 1984 : BBS: Demented and Sad, But Social In this episode, Steve and Jeff discuss Christmas 1984. Tramiel had purchased Atari but the Fulton brothers were oblivious and just wanted a modem to call BBSs and download public domain software. They also discuss Atari Writer, Printers, Gateway to Apshai, and a few magazines from December of 1984. Steve’s story goes over this time in detail and the events surrounding it. The boys discuss what really happened to the Atari 8bits and video games during the USA Video Game crash during this time period by going through ads from various local newspapers at the time. Notes Local Ads on the ITVB site: https://intotheverticalblank.com/2021/12/29/december-1984-computer-and-game-advertisements/ Recorded, Mixed, Edited and Produced by Steve And Jeff Fulton Music : Oceans of Neon – Tony Longworth : Patreon: Tony Longworth is creating free music for everyone | Patreon Theme by Brian TravisTitle: Into The Vertical Blank theme Words & music by Brian Travis (c)(p)2021 Taste This Moment Music ASCAP http://www.briantravisband.com/ Find us here: http://intotheverticalblank.com Into the Vertical Blank: Generation Atari | Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/intotheverticalblank Into The Vertical Blank Pod Cast – Twitterhttps://twitter.com/Atari_VB_Pod

Allan is joined this week by Emilio Escobar, CISO at Data Dog and former VP of Information Security at Hulu. He is also a long-term developer of Ettercap, a comprehensive suite for man-in-the-middle attacks. Like many of us, Emilio started his journey in infosec as a hacker kid, exploring the world through modems and BBSs. Emilio is not a security vendor CISO, but is a CISO for a company that is in the supply chain for many other companies. He has to balance internal and external duties as a result. Come listen as Allan and Emilio discuss the B2B CISO life, the skills required, business alignment, facing customers, and how all of these skills just might define "the modern CISO". And, yes, they even tackle the age-old question, "How technical should a CISO be?"   Key Takeaways: 01:27 Bio 03:10 Security questionnaires and interactions 05:49 Is there a fix to solving vendor risk? 07:17 Utilizing machines for questionnaires 09:33 Leveraging skills 12:50 How technical should a CISO be? 18:01 Understanding other roles in the business 23:48 Balancing internal and external customers 28:17 What surprises you the most in cybersecurity?   Links: Learn more about Emilio on LinkedIn, and Twitter, and learn about Ettercap Follow Allan Alford on LinkedIn and Twitter Purchase a Cyber Ranch Podcast T-Shirt at the Hacker Valley Store Learn more about Hacker Valley Studio and The Cyber Ranch Podcast Sponsored by our good friends at Uptycs

Veja histórias divertidas sobre o início da internet. Como ela começou e como entrou em nossas vidas, desde os tempos das BBSs, vamos compartilhar histórias pessoais e contar como a internet começou no mundo e no Brasil. As tecnologias necessárias para usar a internet nos anos 90 e muito mais! Com a participação de Roberto Hypolito Braga Caldeira. - Participante Convidado: Roberto Caldeira CONTEÚDO DESTE EPISÓDIO: - Origem da Internet no mundo - e-mail - Telex - Telegrama - Telégrafo - Fax - ADS - Fax desaparece - Fax / modem - Tipos de modems - Modems queimavam - Fio enrolado - Instalando modem - Soft modem - BBS * - Pagando por provedor - Acumuladores - Fotos de mulher pelada - Deep web * - Chat na BBS - Interligação das redes - Horário mais barato para usar a internet - GetRight - Napster - e-mail levava 24 horas para chegar - Videotexto - SOS Computadores - Sem Freio proibidão - “Internet é uma onda passageira” segundo Bill Gates em 1995 - Primeira vez que conectou * - Site: Cade - yahii - Site: Thedoors.com - Dan's Gallery of the Grotesque - Programação - Frontpage 98 - Geocities - FTP E MUITO MAIS! LINKS COMENTADOS PODCAST SEM FREIO #10 - NOSTALGIA: HISTÓRIAS DA ADOLESCÊNCIA NO COLÉGIO ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnR0lA9JZs0 Telex com computador - http://bit.ly/3bYRNr2 HISTÓRIAS DE ADOLESCÊNCIA NOS ANOS 1990 - com Marcio SS - PODCAST SEM FREIO #65 ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNjO2mZvJA Yahii ► http://www.yahii.com.br/ Vídeo Primeiro Site do Dimitri Kozma: Dimitri Kozma World ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjsQ9ugV9jE GAMES ANTIGOS E EMULADORES - com Roberto Caldeira - PODCAST SEM FREIO #73 ► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwELDO2pSm0 Arquivo da Internet ► http://web.archive.org/ E-MAIL DE CONTATO ► semfreiopodcast@gmail.com CAMISETAS DO DIMITRI ► http://bit.ly/2XS3eeQ COMPRAR AS ARTES DO DIMITRI IMPRESSAS ► http://bit.ly/2O5H4Pl LIVRO "OS CONTOS DAS SOMBRAS DA MENTE" ► https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B08BTYZ471 APOIE A GENTE pelo PAYPAL e contribua para criação de conteúdo ► http://goo.gl/f4XRLS ACOMPANHE A GENTE: SITE ► http://dimitrikozma.com YOUTUBE ► http://goo.gl/BZ9mA9 SEJA MEMBRO DESTE CANAL E GANHE BENEFÍCIOS ►https://bit.ly/3i4k2W2 INSTAGRAM ► https://www.instagram.com/dimitrikozmaart CANAL DIMITRI KOZMA ART ► https://bit.ly/2A9LgKN SPOTIFY ► https://spoti.fi/2UYEhcj APPLE PODCASTS ► https://apple.co/2Va7f95 GOOGLE PODCASTS ► http://bit.ly/2Jugltq ANCHOR ► http://bit.ly/2VGABAd FEED DO PODCAST ► https://anchor.fm/s/b181680/podcast/rss CANAL É A VIDA, MEUS QUERIDOS ► https://goo.gl/kjxmcG CANAL KOZMA GAMES ► http://goo.gl/K5Ibrb CANADÁ DIÁRIO YOUTUBE ► https://youtube.com/canadadiario GAMES DO DIMITRI KOZMA ► https://dimitrikozma.itch.io/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dimitrikozma/message

In this episode, Jethro and Frederick discuss the history of radicalization, challenges, and give advice for what parents can do to help their children. Brief History 1978 Invention of Bulletin Boards 1979 Neo*Nazi Bulletin Board Set Up in West Virginia; attracted kids from area Quickly followed by numerous others In the mid*1990s, with the development and growth of the Web, these BBSs moved onto the Internet Every online resource, from niche forums to wildly popular platforms like Facebook and YouTube, are used to spread hate speech and groom children The problem intensified with the creation of social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s, along with growing child access to mobile devices The combination of pandemic and lockdown is intensifying the problem Some of the radicalizing groups that use technology to target kids Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists ISIS QAnon Social / Tech Problems The cost of distributing speech is virtually “free”. some important social equity issues but also gives a platform for the fringes It's the World Wide Web, which makes it easier for fringe elements to coalesce online Algorithms and hyperlinks are radicalizing all of us but especially our children. We've invented dark and dangerous rabbit holes Stark contrast with books as an information technology Overwhelmingly, the Internet is fueled by advertising. Controversy attracts eyeballs and clicks Tech speech companies are torn between need to operate in a functioning, decent society and the need to make money Legal Issues Speech, even hate speech, is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which provides that “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech” Corporations are not bound by the First Amendment; it applies only to governments and governmental agents Services like Twitter and Facebook look like “public spaces” but they are not; they are private services regulated by terms and conditions. Corporations are not required to do business with other companies, even if the primary function of one business is speech (so Amazon can stop hosting Parler US law does not apply overseas (8chan, 8kun) “Free” speech does not mean “free from consequences” What can parents do? Context, context, context. Many and persistent conversations with children about prejudice and the hate speech it can cause. Common Sense Media “Where Kids Find Hate Online” As much as practical, limit unsupervised time spent online. Kids don't radicalize over night but a lot of radicalization does take place after bedtime!!! Particularly for younger children, consider the installation of filtering software. Use every parental control available Pay attention to kid behaviors, attitudes, media interests, hobbies, etc. What games are they playing? Are they developing a surprising interest in chemistry or wiring?

Long before Facebook, Twitter, or even the World Wide Web, groups of computer enthusiasts would congreate on computer bulletin board systems, BBSs, to share stories, make jokes, and build friendships. Bruce Wyman was the sysop of two legendary California BBSs; SoftWorks and The Grotto, and he joins us for this episode of the Clearly Cloud Podcast to contrast those early days with what we are seeing in online communities today.

Rumble Network Discovery (https://www.rumble.run/); a platform designed to make asset inventory quick and easy by combining active scanning with innovative research. Prior to starting Rumble, HD was best known as the founder of the Metasploit Project (https://www.metasploit.com/), the foremost open-source exploit development framework, and continues to be a prolific researcher and occasional speaker at security events. In this episode, we discuss starting with BBSs back in the day, starting the Metasploit project, project Sonar (https://www.rapid7.com/research/project-sonar/), his development of Rumble Networks, securing home networks, fingerprinting networks, jump boxes in IoT networks, and so much more. Where you can find HD: LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hdmoore/) Twitter (https://twitter.com/hdmoore) Blog (https://hdm.io/)

In this episode of ABC, Desmond takes us on a journey through the classic 2002 film "Paid In Full" starring Wood Harris, Mekhi Phifer, and Cam'Ron. New discoveries and fun facts await as he breaks down drug culture, the breakthrough performance by Cam'Ron at the height of the Dipset era, and more! "The BBSs?!"

In this Best of Episode, we re-visit the Prologue to:  "Our story."  We'll be sharing our entire "Our Story" series in the Saturday "Best of Episode" releases over the next few weeks. You don't want to miss these!  We'll be giving you all the juicy details of who we are, where we began, and how it all happened!   This episode was originally published on October 3, 2017.  You can check out the original episode here:  https://flippedlifestyle.com/podcast163/   FULL TRANSCRIPT Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work.  We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online.  And now, we help other families do the same.  Are you ready to flip your life?  Alright. Let's get started. What is going on, everybody? This is Shane and Jocelyn here, flippedlifestyle.com, super excited to be back with you for another podcast today.  This one's going to be a little different than our normal podcast where we're helping our people take their online business to the next level, members of our Flip Your Life community. Jocelyn and I actually are having a book written about us.  An author is writing a book about our story and a part of that process is we are recording our story on audio for her to listen to, to go through, kind of like in an interview style format. Jocelyn and I were sitting here recording, and we thought, man, what a great opportunity to fill in the gaps and a lot of you listen to our podcast for online business advice and things like that.  But what a great opportunity to share our story with you, how, basically, two normal people from really, really small rural communities in Kentucky over a period of time– we went through our careers, we learned about online business, and we ended up creating this amazing life that we didn't even know existed a few years ago, and maybe just let you guys in on that, and let you walk that journey with us, listen to it, and listen to our story, let it inspire you, and let you know that you can do this, too. Jocelyn: Today, we are starting out with our early life.  A lot of you guys have listened to us on other podcasts and you've heard a lot of our story from the past five years, but what you really don't know is more about us from the past 35 years or more. Shane: That dated us, Jocelyn, you totally had dated us right there.  What we're going to do is we're going to release these every week as we record them and we're going to let them roll out, and this is going to be our story, our journey how we got to where we are, literally, right now today from A to Z.  We're going to look back and connect the dots.  We were writing an outline for today's podcast and it's mind blowing when we were reading it.  We both just stopped, and we're like, “This doesn't even sound real, it doesn't even sound possible,” like, it's incredible when you see looking back with 20/20 hindsight how all of the dots aligned and everything, and all the puzzle pieces came together. What we want you to do is listen to these podcasts.  You are going to get a ton of information out of them that is going to help you succeed in your journey, too, and it's going to help you see those dots in your own life, and see how you have all the puzzle pieces right in front of you, and you just have to move them around and connect them together. Alright, so we're going to jump right into it.  You want to start? Jocelyn:  Oh, we were just having a conversation who was going to start, and Shane's like, “You start.”  And I'm like, “No, you were born first.” Shane: So, this is like those board games we play with Anna Jo and she gets really upset if it's the youngest person first to the oldest person first, so I think we have opened the box to a board game where the oldest guy in the room gets to start off the deals. My story basically starts in a really, really small-town in  Southeast Kentucky.  Very much a coal town, we're a railroad town, we have a depot here and basically all the coal that comes through the mountains of eastern Kentucky comes through my little town.  That was kind of the industry: the railroad, the coal miners, we had less than 5,000 people in my town as we were growing up.  Really, just a very rural childhood.  I lived in the city limits, what we call a city– it's not really a city.  But I lived inside the city limits.  I didn't live out in the country, but a very rural upbringing, not anything remotely related to technology or big business or anything like that. Basically, the people were schoolteachers, coal miners or they worked at the retail stores, like Walmart or something like that– Jocelyn: Or maybe at the hospital. Shane: Or maybe at the hospital.  Yeah, things like that.  That's the kind of jobs that we would have around here.  I'm actually the 4th of five boys.  My parents have five kids, huge age differences between us.  My oldest brother is 19 years older than me.  I've got another brother that is 18 years older than me, and then there was a gap between the middle of all five of us.  The next brother up was nine years older than me, and that I have a little brother who is about three and half years younger than me.  Huge span of children in my family, and lots of different age groups. It was kind of weird because when I was born, two of my brothers were not even in the house and one of them was in college.  When I was nine years old, he'd moved off.  By the time I could remember things and I was a kid, three of my brothers were gone, so it was kind of like I was the oldest, it's me and my little brother.  It was just a bizarre kind of family dynamic and that. Jocelyn: I actually grew up in a small town in Western Kentucky, very flatland. Shane: Still a coal mine in place though. It's a big coal mine place. Jocelyn: Definitely, coal mining is the major industry there.  I was born in 1980. Shane: Oh, yeah, I was born in 1978.  A child of the 70s. Jocelyn: Barely.  My parents, they were really young when they had me.  My mom was just out of high school.  Actually come to think of it, I think she was in high school.  They started from a very young age, they worked very hard to make sure that we had everything that we needed.  I have a sister, she is three years younger than me and we grew up in just a neighborhood, we had a lot of friends who lived next door.  They were probably, I would say, maybe 30 houses in this neighborhood.  It was the 80s, we all ran around and played together — Shane: — Rode bikes — Jocelyn: — Went out at breakfast time, and came in at dinnertime but it is just what we did.  I spent a lot of time outside and a lot of time playing.  No iPads or technology at that time.  I feel very fortunate to have grown up in a time like that. Shane: It is pretty cool.  I think we had similar childhoods growing up because we both grew up in very traditional Southern-type towns, went to church on Sundays, hung out with the neighbors, both of our mom stayed home while our dads worked.  It was just like good, slow-paced, southern life before the Internet, before we had all this technology and stuff. My dad worked really hard, too.  He was an insurance agent.  He had his little independent office where he sold auto insurance.  Had his own business.  It was kind of cool I think that was maybe where the seeds of entrepreneurship kind of were born in me because I can remember my dad telling me about jobs he had had.  Used to drive to Chicago from Kentucky to work in the steel mills during the week and they would drive back to Kentucky.  This was before the interstates, basically, were really in place.  He would come back on the weekends to come down here and he always told me about these grocery stores or restaurants or places he worked. Jocelyn: And he would sleep in the steel mills. Shane: Under the boilers. Jocelyn: He's told us about this before.  They would drive up there to Chicago, they would sleep in the steel mill, and then they would drive home to Kentucky on the weekends. Shane: Yup, they'd work there all day, sleep under the boilers at night where it was warm, and then they would get up and work, and they would come home, after they just did that.  But I would remember that because he would always tell me growing up, I was like, “Well, dad, why do you do this? Everybody else has a job, what are you doing?”  He goes, “Well, I just decided that I would rather be broke and work for myself, and have my time freedom and be able to go to your ball games,” or something like that. That always kind of stuck with me a little bit, and he just said he had worked for other people and he decided it was just better through the ups and downs that they could go at it on his own.  That is what he did. Jocelyn: He's made it a long time.  He is still there today. Shane: Still in business. Jocelyn: Still doing very well. Shane: He's 77 years old, and he's still going in every day.  He loves what he does.  Other than that, he was just very traditional.  Grow up, go to ballgames, played baseball in the summer, played basketball in the fall or in the winter, play a little football in the fall.  We never really traveled much or did anything.  I didn't really know of a lot about I guess the rest of the world other than what you saw on TV or something.  Really, until I went to college, the farthest we ever really drove was maybe up to Lexington Kentucky or down to Knoxville.  That was the big city for me, 250,000 people that was my New York, I guess, growing up.  I did not even fly on an airplane until I was in my 20s.  Just a very small-town, sheltered kind of life. Jocelyn: My dad was a cable engineer.  He has been doing that for a very long time. Shane: He was the cable guy.  Climbing poles, and hooking up cable systems and all that good stuff. Jocelyn: My dad, he is super hard working person. Just something I really respect about him for sure.  I can remember that he always worked extra jobs.  He was an engineer, super smart guy.  People would hire him to do things on the side. I remember he installed satellite dishes and he worked with a guy who did audiovisual type things for a while. I could remember going places with him sometimes at night like when he would install somebody's satellite or something like that, that would be how we would spend time together a lot of times.  I remember those types of things as I was growing up.  My mom, she helped us do everything.  She helped us with our homework when we came home, make sure we were reading, which really wasn't a problem for us because we loved to read. Shane: But she probably helped you learn that. Jocelyn: Oh, of course, she would always work with us and make sure that we had everything we needed for school and take care of all the grocery shopping, and the cooking it, the cleaning and all those types of things that had to be done.  My parents, great people, really appreciate everything that they've done for me growing up. We also did not travel a whole lot.  We would go to the surrounding larger towns which in Western Kentucky are not very large. Shane: There is like, two of them. Jocelyn: Pretty much.  Yes. Shane: Bowling Green yeah, that is about it. Jocelyn: Owensboro, we would go places like that.  We would do that.  We didn't get to take a lot of vacations, far away.  We, instead, would go camping.  Those are some my fondest memories growing up.  We started out tent camping.  We had a boat so we would take it on the lake and we eventually were able to get a camper, which was awesome.  We had an old black-and-white TV. Shane: Was it like a pop-up camper? Jocelyn: No, it was a regular camper. Shane: That little square thing you hook up to the truck kind of deal? Jocelyn: It was orange and white, I remember that. We would pull it with this old green and white truck; we called it Alice. Shane: I think it was the 80s, so weren't all campers orange and white back then with the big stripe? Jocelyn: Yeah, probably, I don't know. But we would take our camper down to the lake.  We would go out and ride in a boat, those were some of my most fun memories growing up.  I could just remember going to the campgrounds, we would go to the pool.  We would swim in the lake.  I was saying we had an old black-and-white TV in the camper, and we thought that was the greatest thing ever because there was no Internet, there was nothing back in the 80s and before when we were tent camping, we just had our books which was awesome, but then when we had this black-and-white TV, we were really high-tech. Shane: High-tech, all three channels that you picked up on the airwaves.  Our upbringing was kind of cool because I would never say we were poor-poor like we were farming for our food or anything.  We were middle class.  We just did not have a ton of stuff.  I grew up in a two-bedroom, one bath house.  We, finally, when I was in high school, I think my sophomore year in high school, maybe my freshman year, we built onto our house, and it was the first time I actually got my own room because I had to share a room with my little brother. But I did get to see our parents as I grew up, they worked so hard, and they built on to their life.  I saw the value of how working hard works.  My dad had this little bitty office that was seriously– how big do you think that building is? It couldn't be 15 x 15, maybe?  It was really tiny.  Had this little bitty, tiny office, and for the first 10 years of my life, I could remember going out into that little office after school.  My dad would put my Legos up on the shelves. I loved going into his office, but it was this little bitty room.  It was probably about as big as the room we are in right now in our house.  I can remember when he upgraded to this bigger space, this bigger office, and I thought, “Man, that was the coolest thing ever,” because you could see the fruits of his labor.  I remember when we built onto our house, basically my five brothers and their families and everybody came over to this little, bitty, tiny house.  We actually had this room we call the back porch.  There used to be a back porch on it, and my that mom and dad built walls and made it like a sunroom. We kind of took it over as the kid room because it was extra space, then we closed in the area that was between the patio in the garage, this big living room.  I got a room on the back, and it was cool watching that progression of, we started with very little, and as I got older, things got better because they worked so hard.  I think it was cool that I didn't necessarily have everything growing up that I wanted, but we always had our needs met, and I got to see my parents build a life, and I think that that definitely had an impact on the stuff that we are doing now. Jocelyn: I definitely had a similar situation.  When my mom and dad started, like you said they were super young.  I can't even imagine my life right now, just the way they had started out versus the way I started out.  It is crazy, but they started out, in a trailer, just in the middle of nowhere. Shane: Stereotypical Kentucky trailer kind of deal. Jocelyn: Yeah, not too much after that, they were able to get a house.  They, later, built a house. Shane: And when we say built a house, Jocelyn's dad literally poured the concrete, hammered the wood, put on the roof, pretty much built the house the they have now by hand in his spare time, when he wasn't being a cable guy. Jocelyn: He did a great job on that, and they still live there today.  It is a beautiful house, so they have just worked hard and– Shane: Basically from nothing. Jocelyn: Yeah, and they've done a great job.  They've built on what they had, the same as Shane's dad's insurance agency, and today their life as much different than it was when they started out.  It is awesome to be able to have been part of all the transformation. Shane: There is a great book called out ‘Outliers' were it talks about people who took advantage of their unfair advantages.  You have the guys like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Bill Gates, his unfair advantage was he was born into a wealthy family.  There were only three or four computers in the 60s all around the country.  His high school or his school something had access to one of these supercomputers, so he got to learn it early. I think, if I remember the book correctly, Steve Jobs, he lived down the street from Hewlett-Packard.  He would go tinker in his garage, and that was his unfair advantage.  The neighborhood he lived in and the people he had around him. I think that an advantage that Jocelyn and I had was, we grew up in poor, southern Kentucky town to parents who had to work really, really hard for everything they had, and they did an amazing job modeling that for us.  That kind of gave us the foundation that we were able to go forward and say, “Hey, we see something.  Let's go get it!” Jocelyn: And the reason that we start here and tell you guys this is because I think a lot of times, people want to think that, “Oh, look that person has a trust fund,” or, “That person– somebody gave them tens and thousands of dollars to get their business started.” Shane: Or they look for a variable, what was their magic pill? What makes them different than me that makes them succeed, and me not, basically? Jocelyn: We didn't have that.  I am just saying we got started all on our own.  We certainly had support of a loving family– Shane: Love, and a loving family.  That goes a long way. Jocelyn: I don't discount that in any way.  But we didn't have some like super-privileged upbringing, is what we're trying to tell you. Shane: We didn't have the financial advantages of some other people.  We met people that started a business and maybe someone funded it for them, gave them the money to seed their capital for the first business venture, or something like that.  We really literally started from nothing.  We started life, just a normal total upbringing.  When we were starting our business, which we will talk about later, we had nothing.  We had no extra money, no extra time, and all we had were a lot of drive and ourselves.  That is kind of the moral of the story is, you can definitely rely on that work ethic and those things you've learned, you know, the lessons of life growing up from your parents, from other people or whatever and turn that into something successful. While Jocelyn's values and my values are aligned, and we had very similar socioeconomic and regional upbringings, we could not have been two more different people when we were like, growing up.  I was a total knucklehead when I was in school.  I was a football player and was kind of a troublemaker. I didn't do anything too legal but her mom and dad might have had to pick me up from the local police station once or twice. Jocelyn: And how many times did you get kicked out of school? Shane: I actually got sent home from school a few times.  I never got expelled — Jocelyn: You got suspended. Shane: I got suspended a few times.  I like to fight and do some things like that.  I was kind of like, gosh, it's so funny.  I've literally had former teachers, when they hear what we do now, say, “Are you sure that's you? Are you sure that's Shane Sams?” Jocelyn: “Is it a different brother?” Shane: “Is this a different brother? There's five of them. That can't be the same guy.”  I always tested really high on the test scores, and then I would make terrible grades or I wouldn't do my homework, and I just didn't care about school. Jocelyn: People got mad because you are part of the gifted program, right? Shane: Yeah when I was in sixth grade, they put me in this thing called SOAR, which was like our local gifted and talented thing, where you got to take classes at the high school.  Here was me, getting on the bus, this knucklehead who just got suspended from something or whatever I was doing in school, and I'd get on the bus to go over to the– oh, where do we go? We went to the middle school to do those classes, and sometimes we go to high school.  You see all these other straight A, smart people. This is how big of a knucklehead I was.  Multiple parents literally called and said they did not want me to be in the SOAR program, the gifted and talented thing, because they didn't want me with their kids.  That tells you like what kind of idiot I was.  I was just like, man, I just hated the structure of school.  I hated the rules, I hate following rules even today.  It irks me when I am on a railroad track.  I can't be on a railroad track.  I've got to be out exploring or something like that. The things that I did love: I love sports.  I absolutely loved playing football.  I loved media classes.  I got to be the producer of our local news show on our high school news program; loved media class, loved editing, love to technology, but from a school perspective, I just hated it.  I almost missed graduation because we had to do these portfolio things.  We didn't get it done.  I just thought it was the stupidest thing in the world.  I hated keeping up with it, and I literally almost did not do it, and my mom and I were like the week before graduation, we were frantically trying to get this thing done.  Jocelyn was a little bit different when she was in high school. Jocelyn: Yeah, growing up, I would say– and I know that you long-term listeners, you will totally get this.  I was a very high achiever.  I have always been a high achiever; I don't know why.  I think that part of it is just my upbringing.  My parents didn't necessarily pressure me; it's just they always expected us to do our very best.  I think honestly, it is just something that is in my DNA, it's just very important to me to always be a high achieving person in anything that I do. Growing up, I wasn't necessarily competitive with other people, I just wanted to make sure that I was doing everything that I could do.  I generally made straight As in schools I mean, there were a few times that I got a B, and once even a C in Math.  Imagine that! Shane: Yeah, once again, long time listeners. We are not so good at the adding and subtracting over here the Flipped Lifestyle World Headquarters. Jocelyn: Yeah, actually, my very first C ever was in sixth grade, and in math, so that was a fun fact about me.  And I cried.  My parents were like, “What happened?” Shane: My parents cried for joy when I got C's.  “You didn't get a D!” “You didn't fail! Good job, Shane! Woohoo!” Jocelyn: That is not because you were not intelligent.  It was because you didn't apply yourself. Shane: I just didn't care. I never did homework.  Wait until we start telling you about college, and you hear how many times I went to class.  I don't know how I have a degree, to be honest with you. Jocelyn: Back in school, I just followed the rules, I went along with the plan I didn't really cause any problems. Shane: Jocelyn was in the band. Jocelyn: I was actually in the Color Guard. I wasn't in the band. Shane: It's the band.  It is the band. Jocelyn: But I didn't play an instrument.  I was in the Color Guard. Shane: It is the band. Jocelyn: So yeah– Shane: Nothing wrong with the band.  I'm all cool with the band. Jocelyn: So, yeah.  I was just a very straight-laced kind of gal.  Had Shane and I known each other in high school.  There is no way.  This would have never worked. Shane: No chance.  No, no there is no way.  She would have looked at me, and been like, “Who is this loser-jock-guy that won't do anything and won't listen to the teachers and all this stuff?”  Yeah, I am so glad.  It is funny like the person I became was actually totally different, even when you did meet me because when I was in high school, I had a devastating knee injury.  I actually was playing in a football game.  I was playing linebacker, and they handed the guy the ball, it was on the three-yard line, and I came running in to fill the gap, to fill the hole that was created because he was going to score a touchdown when they blocked our lineman. I planted my foot, the guy dove for the end zone.  My cleats went into the ground.  The guy hits my knee and all my weight falls forward with my foot pinned to the ground.  It snapped my ACL and my PCL in half.  I've never felt anything like that since, and I hope I never have to again.  I fell backwards.  He was laying on my foot, and my teammate went to kill him, he hit me instead, and it literally turned my body 360°.  My shoulders were facing one goal post, my toe was facing the other and it snapped all the other ligaments in my leg and that moment basically ended my football career. Over the next couple of years, my first year in college, my last year in high school, I kind of became a different person because I was really down, because I couldn't play the sport that was my identity anymore.  But I started hanging around with different people more, I got away from that kind of jock culture a little bit, it kind of humbled me and mellowed me out a little bit.  It's funny, like that moment in my life, I always point back to for a lot of different things, but if that had never happened to me, as negative and terrible as it was at that time, when I got to the point where I met Jocelyn, it made me a person that I think that she could accept.  I'm kind of glad it happened.  Not only would that not have sent me down a career path, which I will tell you more about later, that we are in now, we would not have been the right fit for each other. Jocelyn: Yeah, I think that's definitely true.  But I'll tell you, before we get to where we met, I will tell you a couple other things about my high school career.  I think that they are relevant to where we are today.  First of all, I told you that I am a high achiever.  I always knew my entire life, not even just in high school, but my entire life, I just knew I just wanted something more than what most people in my town wanted.  Most people in my town, they wanted to grow up, get a job, maybe have some kids. Shane: Young, get-married-the-day-after-graduation kind of thing. Jocelyn: And you know, if that is what you want to do, I don't judge you for it.  It's just that I knew that that wasn't what I wanted for me.  I wanted something more.  I did not know what that something more was, but I just knew that I wanted something more. Shane: It is also important to remember, too, our environment especially in the rural southern Kentucky, there is really high rates of teen pregnancy.  There is really high rates of smoking and drugs and things like that.  It's not this sanitized, you know, everybody is walking up and down Main Street environment.  You see a lot of people just check out of life.  There is not a lot of people trying to go to the next level. In the entrepreneur community, or when you discover online business, man, you see hustlers, easy grinders, you see people wanting to 10X everything.  You see people wanted to change their lives and change other people's lives, and make a difference in the world.  We do not see that.  We see 80% of our people that we grow up with and settle. Jocelyn: And that is okay with them, that is cool with them. Shane: For some of them, they may not want to, but they don't feel like they got the opportunity. Jocelyn: But it has never been okay for me.  I've just never wanted that for my life.  In the early 90s, I mentioned before, that my dad is an engineer, in the early 90s, he realized that having a home computer and being online was going to be something super important.  I am so thankful that he bought us a PC back in 1993.  I was 13 years old, it had a whopping 4 MB of RAM and a 256 MB hard drive. Shane: That's big time right there, now. Jocelyn: I have a memory stick right here in my drawer that probably holds a lot more than that. Shane: The light bulb on our roof probably has more memory.  The light bulb in the ceiling right now, like one of those LED lights that you can control from your phone or something probably is more powerful than the computer that you had. Jocelyn: It might have had 8 MB RAM, I can't remember the RAM exactly, but I know that it did have a 256 MB hard drive, it even had a modem.  It would connect to these local bulletin board systems that are also called BBS's.  Some of you guys know what I'm talking about.  Through a 2400 baud modem. Shane: It might even fit not even the 56K.  You know what I'm saying? Not even your phone modem.  I don't even know what baud means what is a baud? Jocelyn: I think I could, seriously, crawl faster than this transfer data. Shane: You could write down your message, and run it to the guy on the other end of the bulletin board system and come back. Jocelyn: I think probably, somewhere on the Internet, there is a simulation of what a 2400 baud would be like.  Maybe our VA's can– Shane: Maybe we can find that. Jocelyn: –and put it in the show notes for today like what it would look like to load a website in 2400 baud.  Of course, at the time, it was just text but there wasn't even like any pictures or anything. Shane: But just early computers experience like that at the birth of the Internet, basically. Jocelyn: But I learned to communicate with a computer.  We didn't even use Windows.  It was like old school DOS operating system, I learned how to use that. That was like invaluable experience for me just as a kid, learning this on my own, I didn't have any instruction manual. Shane: That was a major investment at that time for your dad and mom who didn't have a lot of disposable income to do that. Jocelyn: They just recognized that this is going to be something super important, and they went out on a limb and did it, and I am so thankful for that.  That is one moment in my life that I think was just critical to my future success.  But my very first online experience was on the coal mine BBS.  It was a local bulletin board system just where local people would talk, and we logged in there. Shane: This was pre-Facebook. This was before Facebook, folks, or MySpace or anything like that. Jocelyn: And we went and met the sysops– the system operators– we went to meet them in person, like we knew them, it was just a good time.  If you are on BBSs back in the 90s, it was good times. Shane: I think I had a similar experience.  My dad is old-school.  My dad was born in the 40s right after the depression era, and wasn't super into the technology; still isn't today– I'm pretty sure his computer at office was Windows 98 or something. Jocelyn: He may be using a flip phone. Shane: He is using a flip phone, and I'm pretty sure he is like still using Paint and stuff. Jocelyn: Loving him. Shane: Love the guy.  He doesn't even use a computer.  He just got one sitting there, and just like, “Yeah, I got a computer.  I don't use it, but whatever.”  I remember when video games really took off, like Atari and Nintendo came out, and all these things.  They were really expensive.  But at Christmas time, he really wanted us to have these video game things, and he actually told me one time, he's like, “I didn't understand computers, I didn't understand what was going on or what it was, but I knew that this technology you guys needed to know it.” He always made sure we had those things.  Not just from a kid perspective, but he wanted us to be familiar with technology, and it was cool because I had friends that had computers.  I remember my cousin; his dad was like Jocelyn's dad.  He was a postman.  He was a post office guy, and he didn't understand really the computer, but he felt like he wanted to give his kids a better opportunity.  He was going to buy a car or that computer, and he bought that computer.  I'm so thankful that he did it because I would walk up to their house to play Wolfenstein 3-D and learn how to type.  But I learned how to use DOS. I think having some kind of technology background for sure was one of those dots that we connected later and at least we spoke the words, the language and things like that.  I'm not saying you've got to have technology background to do that. Jocelyn: But it didn't hurt. Shane: We used an unfair advantage there.  Hey, we were exposed to that when a lot of kids, especially in our area in Kentucky, were just not being exposed to technology. Jocelyn: So I spent a lot of my high school days being obsessed with this PC.  I mean obsessed.  I would start taking programming classes.  That is something they offered at my high school which is really kind of unusual.  There weren't a whole lot of people in those classes. Shane: We had typing.  We had keyboarding on computers, was the most advanced computer thing you got. Jocelyn: We learned keyboarding, too.  I learned keyboarding in middle school, but when we got to high school, we had a very limited selection of business classes.  One of those classes was computer programming.  I am like, “Alright, I'm signing up for this.”  I learned basic, and then I moved on to Pascal, and then started learning some C++ which is actually still used today.  Now, do I still remember it? No. For a variety of reasons but anyway.  I learned those programming languages, and I started learning more and more about computers and they started getting more and more sophisticated.  That was a cool thing about it is that, I just kept up with that and kept learning and kept getting better. Shane: When you went to college, you were trying to be a programmer at first right? Jocelyn: Yeah, and I've got some story about that as we move into the college days, but yeah.  Honestly, when I was in high school, I counted down the days until I could go out to college.  It wasn't because I had a bad home life, I had a fantastic home life, it was just because I wanted something more.  I didn't even know what that something more was.  I just wanted something more.  I was ready to get out. Shane: And Jocelyn left her hometown.  She moved to Lexington to go to University of Kentucky.  She was 17 because Jocelyn is really smart, and she like, skipped second grade something. Jocelyn: I skipped first grade. Shane: First grade, whatever.  She skipped a grade.  She was she literally turned 17 in March of her senior year, that summer– can you imagine having a 17-year-old right now letting them do that– would you let your kids do that? Jocelyn: No — Shane: Because they will meet bad people like you, Shane, they'll be bad influences like you. Jocelyn: Yeah, but the thing about it is, you have to remember, back in the 90s– this is 1997, when I moved to the University of Kentucky, people didn't have cell phones.  A few people did, but a lot of people didn't even have cell phones.  My parents sent their barely 17-year-old daughter– Shane: In a shoddy car– Jocelyn: In a 1989 Buick Skyhawk– Shane: And a 1989 Buick Skyhawk that barely ran.  One time we drove Jocelyn's car, it was– what did you call it? Myrtle or Ethel? Ethel.  She called it Ethel — Jocelyn: Hey, I loved Ethel.  I cried when I traded Ethel in. Shane: I do miss Ethel.  Ethel was a good old girl.  But one time, the muffler broke or fell off or something — Jocelyn: I'm pretty sure it fell off — Shane: I'm pretty sure it fell off, like literally.  We were driving, and all of a sudden you're like, “Oh, it's a car,” and then it goes, wah-wah-wah-wah-wah because it is terrible when the muffler is not on the car.  And we're like, “Did the muffler just fall off?” And she's like, “I saw sparks.  Yeah, I think so.”  We had to go back to Jocelyn's hometown for the weekend or something, and I think my car was broken down or something, too.  Something was going on, so we drove her car there, and we went all the way back to her hometown, like a three-hour drive with no muffler.  That was bad on the ears, that time. Yeah. It's funny you say that though, because we're about to go to the next phase here, but Jocelyn looks back, and you're so systematic now and process-oriented and things like that, and that experience with the computers that you had, you were drawn to that, like you said, you were obsessed with it. I think about going back to high school.  I just hated school, and I think about the things that I did like.  I liked to be talking and argumentative, so I really loved history, political science and debate-style classes.  Also, I loved those video editing classes. Anything where I could take my imagination and be creative, and it's funny how we both, even in our business today, if you look at our roles, how you connect the dots, and it gravitates toward those things, you do deal with a lot of the systematic process stuff.  Even the technology stuff, you talk to our Infusionsoft contractor, and things like that, where I'm doing more like producing the kids' YouTube channels, and working with our editor to make things sound and look right, and it's funny how some people I think that are listening right now may not be connecting all those little things that you take for granted that you could use to build some kind of epic life and business out of, basically. Jocelyn: You know, just remember that when you start looking back at things to affirm your life, there are experiences that are beneficial for you as you move forward in your online business, or whatever it is that you are trying to do.  You might not even think about it right now, but as you think back, then you just remember, that hey, this experience happened for a reason, and maybe it can benefit me in the future. Shane: I think that what's really important about that part of our journey, too, and your journey as you are listening to this show is knowing that there is something else, and knowing that you want something else is the most important part of this entire formula, this entire process because you take our parents; our parents– we've already said, they were really, really hard workers– they all built lives out of nothing, basically.  They didn't have a lot, but they kept building, kept stacking.  They didn't really know outside of our community.  They didn't really know there were other jobs out there. They didn't really know there were other things that they might be able to do or grow. We didn't really know that until maybe five or six years ago, when we started our journey.  We just thought it was, this is the way life was.  The world told us we need to get jobs, we need to be secure, we need to safe, we need to be stable, we need to prepare for the worst case scenario all the time, and just hang on and wait until retirement or whatever. But when you make the decision, I want something else.  When you make the decision, I would like to model that person, I think I could do that, too.  When you look around in your life, and you say, “There's more to this; I can go do this.” And you're like Jocelyn when she leaves, when she's 17 to go find out what that is, or me getting frustrated and bored with what I was doing, and saying, “No, I'm going to go out and pursue another career,” that's the most important part of this whole thing. What we're telling you here is: everything in your life, every experience leads you to a moment where you want something more, and then take action to go do that.  You have all the equipment, all the tools built inside of you whether you know how to use computers or didn't, whether you played sports or didn't, whatever it is, and you can make something happen out of that if you put all of those puzzle pieces together. Guys, that's the first part of our journey, the first part of our lives. That's the backstory of how Jocelyn and I grew up, and next week, what we're going to get into is actually going to college, where we met, and how I knew that I was going to marry this beautiful girl across from me on the microphone right now, I knew it.  I knew it from the first time I saw her, and she did not quite know it yet; she resisted the magnetic pull of my romance. Jocelyn: Can you blame me? Shane: That's what we're going to get into next week.  We're going to talk about basically how our lives, our paths crossed, and how we got into our relationship, and how we dated for seven years almost before we got married, and all that stuff that kind of kicked off the journey that led us to where we are today. As we go through this journey, you're going to learn about how we started online business, how we built our online business, how we made it happen, but what we really want to do is just inspire you.  We have so many examples in the entrepreneur community. You see these young, single millennials, or you see these people that are living in Thailand off of $8.00 a week, or you see these people who work 95 hours a week and they are swearing and they are cussing and they're screaming about how you've got to be a hustler, a grinder, and do this and do that.  But we want to just show you our story so that you can be inspired and realize we are just normal people. You are normal people, but you can do extraordinary things when you really set your mind to it, and you really want to flip your world upside down.  You want to flip your life, you want to try to live the Flipped Lifestyle, and you want to make a change that not only changes your life, but it changes your family tree, and your kids' lives. That is the point of these, I hope you are enjoying this.  We will be back next week to give you the next step in our journey. Hope that you guys get a lot out of this, thank you for hanging out with us for a little while, and we can't wait to see you again next week. Links and resources: Podcast 163:  Our Story - Prologue:  A Couple of Kids from Kentucky Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information Flip Your Life community PROLIFIC Monthly Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what's possible for your family! Join the Flip Your Life Community NOW for as little as $19 per month! https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife

Phil Zimmermann criou a primeira versão da criptografia PGP em 1991. Ele era um ativista antinuclear de longa data e criou a criptografia PGP para que outras pessoas com as mesmas afinidades pudessem usar o BBSs para armazenar mensagens e arquivos com segurança. O software era open source e nosso amigo Zimmermann quase foi preso pelo governo. Belo teaser para o vídeo que será publicado em breve sobre o PGP, no qual falamos um pouco da história, explicamos como funciona e, principalmente, fizemos um tutorial pra você começar a usar esta ferramenta no seu dia a dia. SIGA OS BITCOINHEIROS: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/bitcoinheiros Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/bitcoinheiros Allan - https://www.twitter.com/allanraicher Dov - https://twitter.com/bitdov Becas - https://twitter.com/bksbk6 Ivan - https://twitter.com/bitofsilence Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitcoinheiros Facebook: https://www.fb.com/bitcoinheiros Podcast: https://anchor.fm/bitcoinheiros APOIE O CANAL: - Dê uma gorjeta pela Lightning Network: https://tippin.me/@bitcoinheiros - Dê uma gorjeta em Bitcoin onchain: https://tallyco.in/bitcoinheiros - Inscreva-se no canal - Deixe seu comentário no vídeo - Dê um like no vídeo - Compartilhe o vídeo e o canal com amigos e familiares na sua rede social - Envie um email com seu comentário e sugestões: bitcoinheiros@protonmail.com - Bitcoinheiros recomendam a carteira Trezor para fazer a segurança das suas criptomoedas. Usando este link você ajuda o canal: https://shop.trezor.io/?offer_id=10&aff_id=1135 ISENÇÃO DE RESPONSABILIDADE: Este conteúdo foi preparado para fins meramente informativos. NÃO é uma recomendação financeira nem de investimento. As opiniões apresentadas são apenas opiniões. Faça sua própria pesquisa. Não nos responsabilizamos por qualquer decisão de investimento que você tomar ou ação que você executar inspirada em nossos vídeos. #Bitcoin #Segurança #Privacidade --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bitcoinheiros/message

The word that keeps coming up in this episode is “audacity.” Ellen Petry Leanse joins Melinda Byerley to talk about her experiences in the early days of Apple, when she served as Apple’s first User Evangelist. Proclaimed the “nerd queen,” she led the company’s first online debut in 1985 with one of the first BBSs. Her career is a parable of what happens when you are willing to take risks, work hard, and don’t worry about looking back. Ellen touches on how she views art as an integral part of product design, science, and business, and raises the question of whether today's atmosphere of innovation is truly letting curiosity reign. Greatly respected throughout Silicon Valley for her achievements, Ellen has been featured on CNN, CNBC, and NBC and in the pages of Time, Forbes, Vogue, and Business Insider. Currently, she teaches “Unleashing Creative Innovation and Building Great Products” for Stanford University Continuing Studies. MUSICAL INSPIRATION FOR THIS EPISODE ON SPOTIFY:"Imagine" by John Lennon LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Ellen’s essay on the word “just”: "Google and Apple alum says using this word can damage your credibility" “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”― Albert Einstein Ellen's bestselling book: The Happiness Hack: How to Take Charge of Your Brain and Program More Happiness into Your Life Happiness by design | Ellen Petry Leanse | TEDxBerkeley (video) “What I Learned About the Brain by Writing a Book About It” from Stanford University @ Fifteen Seconds Festival 2017 (video) ABOUT THIS PODCAST Stayin' Alive in Tech is an oral history of Silicon Valley and technology. Melinda Byerley, the host, is a 20-year veteran of Silicon Valley; and the founder of Timeshare CMO, a digital marketing intelligence firm, based in San Francisco. We really appreciate your reviews, shares on social media, and your recommendations for future guests. And check out our Spotify playlist for a playlist for all the songs we refer to on our show.

Platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook dominate the internet today, providing private infrastructures for public culture. These systems are so massive that it’s easy to forget that the digital world was not always like this. More than two decades before widespread Internet access, millions of people in France were already online, chatting, gaming, buying, selling, searching, and flirting. This explosion of digital culture came via Minitel, a simple video terminal provided for free to anyone with a telephone line. After thirty years in service, Minitel offers a wealth of data for thinking about internet policy and an alternative model for the internet’s future: a public platform for private innovation. Julien Mailland studies telecommunications networks design, law, and policy through the lens of history. He is an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University’s Media School, a research associate with the Computer History Museum Internet History Program, and a lawyer with the fintech industry. Kevin Driscoll studies popular culture and computing. His research builds alternative models for platform governance and online community from the internet of the 1980s and 1990s. Recent projects examine dial-up BBSs in the US and Minitel in France. Kevin is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia.

In May of 2001, I launched a martial arts community with a focus on respectful discussion and a generally family friendly atmosphere. The very next month, Bob Hubbard did the exact same thing. From an outward perspective, you might label us competitors and expect us to dislike each other. But we developed a friendship based upon mutual respect, which allowed us to compare notes and share knowledge around common challenges. On this episode, we discuss the benefits of being friendly with those managing “competing” communities. Plus: Community “brigading,” or coordinated attacks meant to disrupt an online community The threats that we received running communities where, more often than not, the members have been taught a form of physical combat How Bob approached selling his forum Big Quotes “If you make people choose, they won’t choose you. That’s always been my thought process. For instance, with my moderators and staff members, there’s no loyalty pledge – to borrow a phrase that’s really out there right now thanks to our president. There’s no loyalty pledge for joining my staff as a moderator.” -@patrickokeefe “I always tried to put MartialTalk on the mindset of you’ve just had a really good seminar, now you’re in the lobby of the school. You’re putting your gear away, and you’re shooting the breeze with everybody about what went on and what you’re going to do next. As opposed to some forums that had the attitude of no chit chat, just keep it on right on topic. You couldn’t deviate.” -Bob Hubbard “My own instructor got suspended [from my community] once or twice. It’s like, ‘Just because he’s the guy holding a belt rank in front of me doesn’t mean we’re going to give him a pass on behavior.'” -Bob Hubbard About Bob Hubbard Bob Hubbard is a photographer in Buffalo, New York. A native of Western New York, he speaks fluent chicken wing, beef on weck and sponge candy. He has a background is game development, programming and BBSs. Bob started moderating dial up BBSs in the late 80s and writing war games and RPG’s on the Commodore 64. In the late 90s, he transitioned to web design and launched his first web forum in 2000. A small locally-focused martial arts community on a hosted platform, it failed due in part to bad software and poor promotion. In the summer of 2001, he launched MartialTalk.com, and so began a 13 year journey in community building and forum management. Related Links This is a partial list of links from the show. This list will be updated to be complete once we have completed our transcript. Bob’s website Community Signal on SoundCloud Community Signal on Instagram MartialTalk.com, the community Bob founded 17 years ago, and ran for 13 years KarateForums.com, the community Patrick rounded 17 years ago IMDb, which erased 18 years of forum posts in 2 weeks “Why You Should Be Friends with the Managers of ‘Competing’ Communities” by Patrick, about his friendship with Bob Managing Online Forums, Patrick’s book Robert M. Carver, the founder of Budoseek, who Bob also was in contact with South by Southwest, a conference where Patrick attended a panel with Heather Champ, where the panel turned around their name placards to reveal nasty names community members had called them vBulletin, the software that powers MartialTalk.com phpBB, the software that powers KarateForums.com Wikipedia pages for Filipino martial arts and Modern Arnis, which provided the initial basis, topic wise, for MartialTalk.com Tim Hartman, who “pretty much” co-founded MartialTalk.com KenpoTalk.com, another community that Bob founded and managed for more than 11 years Forum Foundry, the company that Bob sold his communities to FMATalk, a community where Bob was also an administrator “Do You Love Your Community Enough to Let it Go? Why I Gave My Most Successful Community Away” by Patrick Bob’s online photography portfolio Bob’s martial arts photography Bob’s Facebook page Bob’s martial arts photography Facebook page Bob’s Instagram Transcript View transcript on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you’d like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon. Thank you for listening to Community Signal.

Parlez-vous ATDT15014521700? In the days before the internet, there was the BBS…and for some weird and probably unhealthy reason, your host wanted to run one of his own. A tale replete with BBSs, MIBs, not nearly enough +++ATH0, and numerous other unfortunate abbreviations. (1:15:38) Right-click here and “save as” to save to your newfangled digital […]

As we embark on our fall and winter 2015 episodes of Burgh Biz Saturday Showcase, the premiere edition is dedicated to hosts and sponsors of positivelypittsburghlivemagazine.com, http://pplmag.com. PositivelyPittsburghLive is an anchor show and also guests today Sunita Pandit of Mrs. Cardiology and JoAnn Forrester, EmpressofBiz. Also joining us today the sponsor of one of our sixteen weekly segments, Darlene Kruth of Northwood Realty, Upper St. Clair and West Mifflin Areas. Darlene sponsors our Neighborhood Nuggets Segment.| If you would like to sponsor a segment or become a guest on Burgh Biz Saturday Showcase, please contact host Joanne Quinn-Smith at 412-444-5197. Next week BBSS will feature real estate related businesses.

This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken chat with Lon Seidman, sysop of the Matrix Returns BBS and co-host of Behind the Video. The dial-up bulletin board is making a comeback, thanks to Warp Six and the Raspberry Pi! It’s so easy, anyone can do it — unlike buying an Apple-1, the going rate […]

Nathan Rabin is the head writer for The A.V. Club, the sister-publication to The Onion that focuses on columns, articles and reviews of television, films, and other media. Rabin is also the author of two books - The Big Rewind, a memoir filtered through pop culture, and My Year of Flops, a collection of columns where Rabin focuses on revisiting failed movies to see if they deserved their ignominy. "My Year of Flops" started running regularly in The A.V. Club in 2007, and Rabin's wit and genuineness have made many people reconsider what heretofore had been considered shitty movies. (He made us take a second look at Joe Versus the Volcano, which in retrospect is an awesome film). On tour in support of My Year of Flops, Rabin sat down with us in the back room of the Columbus Circle Borders to discuss juggalos, BBSs, writing for The Onion, writing for The A.V. Club, and Schwab's Pharmacy.

The MyMac crew welcomes Steve Sande as our guest this week. Topics include AppleTV, his history with computing, BBSs, Apple consulting, and much more. A fun a lively discussion!

Welcome to episode #143 of the TVA Podcast. In this week’s episode, we welcome Bryant Thomson and Mike MacQueen The Bring Back Swayzes! In this episode, Darcy, the BBSs, and I yammer on about: – A surprisingly goodly amount about basketball – The room that...

Scott chats with founders of Mustang Software (creators of Wildcat! BBS) Jim Harrer and Scott Hunter about the BBS era. We start at 300 baud and work our way up. Remember Hayes modems, v.32bis, Fidonet, Compuserve? This is the show for you.

Welcome to our second episode!Run time: 17:16Community Divas on iTunesIn this episodeWe present Part 2 of our interview with Jay Moonah, a podcaster, marketing strategist, musician and a driving force behind the social media unconference Podcamp Toronto. He blogs and podcasts at MediaDriving.com.Connie gives an update about her Twitter account deactivation.  Eden and Connie then discuss whether it is possible to use too many online community building tools. Tell us what you think!We try another method for recording our discussions. Our conclusion: keep looking for another method. 00:01 Intro by Jay Moonah00:09 Eden Spodek and Connie Crosby introduce themselves00:14 Summary of today’s episode00:24 Introducing part 2 of our interview with Jay Moonah00:35 Interview with Jay Moonah continues00:41 Jay talks about how to determine which tools to use for community building around marketing efforts. He mentions some of the demographic research covered in the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. He also mentions Facebook, Neville Hobson and FriendFeed.05:11 We ask Jay about what music communities online mean to him, and also how he is trying to distinguish himself from being just "the music guy". He throws in references from "back in the day" when he used CompuServe and dial-up BBSs, not to mention MySpace, Uncle Seth, MP3.com, the McFlies, McFlies on Facebook, and the ever-popular Breakfast Television.08:43 Jay gives us his take on personal brands.10:31 Eden wraps up the interview, but Jay gets in the last word.11:00 Connie gives an update about her Twitter account, and the concern she still has. She recommends if you are on LinkedIn to back up your contacts.12:14 Eden asks what is the optimum number of tools we should use to build a community: one tool, or more than one tool? Community Divas have set up a both a Facebook page and a FriendFeed room, and have discovered two distinct groups gravitating toward each. How can we bring the two together in discussion?  Connie mentions the library industry call-in podcast show Uncontrolled Vocabulary.16:05 Where would you like to see Community Divas, and what is the optimal number of places for a community on the Web?16:27  Eden wraps up the show.Our cool theme music “Get Out of My Face” is by Jay's band Uncle Seth and is from the Podsafe Music Network. We thank Jay Moonah for all his help in getting us started! And we thank everyone who listened to our first episode and encouraged us. We hope to hear from you! Send your comments to communitydivas@gmail.com or post them on the blog at communitydivas.com. Our Facebook page and FriendFeed room are also available; free registration is required for them. Or follow us on Twitter.