Podcasts about billy bass

• DTW FM #401 • Hosted by: Mawkus @mawkus Broadcasted live out of HydeFM in San Francisco, CA (hydefm.com) Special guest FSQ (@fsqofficial) Mawkus Tracklist: Keisuke Kikuchi - Retro Electric Mr. Ho - 000 Baby (Om Unit Remix) Darama - Homegrown Lua Preta - Tipo de Moça Bianca Oblivion, Sam Binga, Fox - Sweatboxx Party Flore & Only Now - Cut & Run (Flore Version) Fortuna Edits 004 - Tabla Solo (Cervo Edit) DJ co.kr & Bryte - Brrrrr (Nikki Nair Remix) Jack Marlow - Clueless Farsight - Leche De Tigre Dance Maniacs - Siren Drum Diego Hauz - Pick Up Games SilkyBlack - it girl (Aaliyah Edit) Bell Towers - Keep Moving Forward Posthuman - Rattler Ben Hauke - Tekfunk Fusion Nathan Fake - Sky Hook Wachita China - Bounce UR Back Sully - XT Pugilist - Wistful Neekeetone - Hide U FSQ Tracklist: Sly & The Family Stone - Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back Aye Aye Aye - Illusion Chico Hablas - Big City FSQ - Feeling Wide (Demo Version 7) Rimarkable - Metallurgency Coeo - Kawasaki Racing Club FSQ - Freak Out For Fitness (Instrumental) Boris Blank - Resonance Ryuichi Sakamoto & Robin Scott - Lexington Queen Jerry Harrison - Facing the Fire FSQ - Photograph Of The Night (Demo) Ryuichi Sakamoto & The Kakutougi Session - Sweet Illusion FSQ - On The Map featuring Eugene Tamborine, Billy Bass, Morgan Wiley (Demo) Roadrunner / Roadrunner Stomp Spotify Handle : dtw.lnk.to/DTWitall Every Saturday 12PM - 2PM EST Broadcasting via The Lot Radio (www.thelotradio.com)

Oakland Five Patron Bryce Thompson hosts this week's great game. Caffeinated Comic's host Jon Clarke returns as a guest. Jon and Matt team up against the dastardly duo of Ken and Neal. Animated mustaches and lime Green Days dot this delightful matchup. Which team will rise to the top this week? Supporters: https://www.trivialitypodcast.com/the-cream-of-the-crop/ Please RATE, REVIEW, and SUBSCRIBE on iTunes or your preferred podcast app! Follow us on social media, and support the show on Patreon for great perks!  Support us Directly: www.Patreon.com/TrivialityPodcast All Social Media: https://linktr.ee/trivialitypodcast Want to hear your trivia question during an episode? Send us question to the email: TrivialityPodcast@Gmail.com with the subject QUESTION 5 and a host's name (Ken, Matt, Neal, or Jeff). We will read one listener submitted question per round. Triviality is an Airwave Media podcast. https:// www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales.trivialitypodcast@gmail.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Triviality is an Airwave Media podcast. [New Episodes Every Tuesday] © Triviality – 2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This Morning, Billy Bass is back, we play OTF for prizes, and the Queen City Roller Derby girls are in studio talking about kicking off the season tomorrow night at Buffalo River Works!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andrew joins Ben to discuss a word that is the sliver of overlap in the Venn diagram of the previous two episodes: animate and robot.  Ben brings up a (very) minor controversy for Geoff Keighley's “The Game Awards” independent game nominees this year involving Mint Rocket's “Dave the Diver.”  Andrew goes on an exotic adventure with a Pringles flavor all the way from Japan!  After a very quick definition segment, Andrew shares a traumatic event from his youth involving an animatronic alien at Universal Studios, and then more 70s and 80s movies are discussed.  Ben drops a quick Hall of Presidents conspiracy theory and some sad Chuck E. Cheese news before he talks about the interesting origin story of Scott Cawthorn's incredibly popular “Five Nights at Freddy's” franchise.  Finally, they come up with an amazing new restaurant idea to close out the show.   00:00:21 - Vacuuming robot revolution crisis possibly averted, pictures with Santa, and work 00:03:35 - Fight Club villain discovery, mental health, and more happy controversial things  00:05:27 - “Dave the Diver” Independent GOTY nomination, and the inventor of the seed drill 00:08:34 - No GOTY love for “RoboCop: Rogue City,” and Ben is just a little disappointed 00:10:15 - How to classify games a independently developed, and a Double Fine edge case 00:12:10 - Andrew's sensory adventure… Addictive Garlic Butter flavored Japanese Pringles! 00:16:45 - The official verdict, the definition, Disney's contributions, Billy Bass, and clockwork  00:22:32 - Scary animatronics, the Neil Diamond antidote, and Andrew's E.T. ride trauma  00:27:00 - Eliot the insurance policy, Stranger Things, and extraterrestrials for the woke agenda  00:29:36 - Blue Thunder, the underrated acting prowess of Roy Scheider, and a JAFO hat 00:31:42 - Bruce the pneumatic shark, cool to creepy, and wanting to take Teddy Ruxpin apart 00:34:29 - At an appropriate distance, David S. Pumpkins, and SNL's the Merryville Brothers 00:36:53 - 45 in the Hall of Presidents… gate - https://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-animatronic-conspiracy-theory-explained-disney-world-2023-6 00:38:04 - Not realistic enough, points of articulation, computer animation, and young versions 00:41:55 - Chuck E. Cheese's decision is not FNaF related (allegedly), and Willy's Wonderland   00:46:20 - Scott Cawthorn's inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy's, and his game design arc 00:53:01 - Latest FNaF game was at PAX West, the pandemic was hard, and a story summary 00:56:27 - CORRECTION: Night Trap filming was originally funded by Hasbro for their Control-Vision system which was canceled in 1989. 00:57:27 - Having animatronic clowns in the workplace is breaking the Geneva Conventions 00:59:38 - The movie S1m0ne, the SAG strike, a brilliant restaurant idea, and a double dose.  Follow Andrew / Partly Robot Industries on… His website: https://partlyrobot.com/ On Instagram: https://instagram.com/partlyrobot On TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@partlyrobot On Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/partlyrobot Follow Two Vague on… Our website: http://www.twovaguepodcast.com  On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/two_vague_podcast On YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@twovaguepodcast On X-Twitter: https://twitter.com/TwoVaguePodcast For show appearance and other inquiries, contact us at: twovaguepodcast@gmail.com #Pringles #GOTY2023 #TheGameAwards #DIYPodcast #podernfamily #podbeanpodcast #applepodcast #twovaguepodcast #partlyrobot #videogames #trivia #FNAF

Catch us at Modular's ModCon next week with Chris Lattner, and join our community!Due to Bryan's very wide ranging experience in data science and AI across Blue Bottle (!), StitchFix, Weights & Biases, and now Hex Magic, this episode can be considered a two-parter.Notebooks = Chat++We've talked a lot about AI UX (in our meetups, writeups, and guest posts), and today we're excited to dive into a new old player in AI interfaces: notebooks! Depending on your background, you either Don't Like or you Like notebooks — they are the most popular example of Knuth's Literate Programming concept, basically a collection of cells; each cell can execute code, display it, and share its state with all the other cells in a notebook. They can also simply be Markdown cells to add commentary to the analysis. Notebooks have a long history but most recently became popular from iPython evolving into Project Jupyter, and a wave of notebook based startups from Observable to DeepNote and Databricks sprung up for the modern data stack.The first wave of AI applications has been very chat focused (ChatGPT, Character.ai, Perplexity, etc). Chat as a user interface has a few shortcomings, the major one being the inability to edit previous messages. We enjoyed Bryan's takes on why notebooks feel like “Chat++” and how they are building Hex Magic:* Atomic actions vs Stream of consciousness: in a chat interface, you make corrections by adding more messages to a conversation (i.e. “Can you try again by doing X instead?” or “I actually meant XYZ”). The context can easily get messy and confusing for models (and humans!) to follow. Notebooks' cell structure on the other hand allows users to go back to any previous cells and make edits without having to add new ones at the bottom. * “Airlocks” for repeatability: one of the ideas they came up with at Hex is “airlocks”, a collection of cells that depend on each other and keep each other in sync. If you have a task like “Create a summary of my customers' recent purchases”, there are many sub-tasks to be done (look up the data, sum the amounts, write the text, etc). Each sub-task will be in its own cell, and the airlock will keep them all in sync together.* Technical + Non-Technical users: previously you had to use Python / R / Julia to write notebooks code, but with models like GPT-4, natural language is usually enough. Hex is also working on lowering the barrier of entry for non-technical users into notebooks, similar to how Code Interpreter is doing the same in ChatGPT. Obviously notebooks aren't new for developers (OpenAI Cookbooks are a good example), but haven't had much adoption in less technical spheres. Some of the shortcomings of chat UIs + LLMs lowering the barrier of entry to creating code cells might make them a much more popular UX going forward.RAG = RecSys!We also talked about the LLMOps landscape and why it's an “iron mine” rather than a “gold rush”: I'll shamelessly steal [this] from a friend, Adam Azzam from Prefect. He says that [LLMOps] is more of like an iron mine than a gold mine in the sense of there is a lot of work to extract this precious, precious resource. Don't expect to just go down to the stream and do a little panning. There's a lot of work to be done. And frankly, the steps to go from this resource to something valuable is significant.Some of my favorite takeaways:* RAG as RecSys for LLMs: at its core, the goal of a RAG pipeline is finding the most relevant documents based on a task. This isn't very different from traditional recommendation system products that surface things for users. How can we apply old lessons to this new problem? Bryan cites fellow AIE Summit speaker and Latent Space Paper Club host Eugene Yan in decomposing the retrieval problem into retrieval, filtering, and scoring/ranking/ordering:As AI Engineers increasingly find that long context has tradeoffs, they will also have to relearn age old lessons that vector search is NOT all you need and a good systems not models approach is essential to scalable/debuggable RAG. Good thing Bryan has just written the first O'Reilly book about modern RecSys, eh?* Narrowing down evaluation: while “hallucination” is a easy term to throw around, the reality is more nuanced. A lot of times, model errors can be automatically fixed: is this JSON valid? If not, why? Is it just missing a closing brace? These smaller issues can be checked and fixed before returning the response to the user, which is easier than fixing the model.* Fine-tuning isn't all you need: when they first started building Magic, one of the discussions was around fine-tuning a model. In our episode with Jeremy Howard we talked about how fine-tuning leads to loss of capabilities as well. In notebooks, you are often dealing with domain-specific data (i.e. purchases, orders, wardrobe composition, household items, etc); the fact that the model understands that “items” are probably part of an “order” is really helpful. They have found that GPT-4 + 3.5-turbo were everything they needed to ship a great product rather than having to fine-tune on notebooks specifically.Definitely recommend listening to this one if you are interested in getting a better understanding of how to think about AI, data, and how we can use traditional machine learning lessons in large language models. The AI PivotFor more Bryan, don't miss his fireside chat at the AI Engineer Summit:Show Notes* Hex Magic* Bryan's new book: Building Recommendation Systems in Python and JAX* Bryan's whitepaper about MLOps* “Kitbashing in ML”, slides from his talk on building on top of foundation models* “Bayesian Statistics The Fun Way” by Will Kurt* Bryan's Twitter* “Berkeley man determined to walk every street in his city”* People:* Adam Azzam* Graham Neubig* Eugene Yan* Even OldridgeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Bryan's background* [00:02:34] Overview of Hex and the Magic product* [00:05:57] How Magic handles the complex notebook format to integrate cleanly with Hex* [00:08:37] Discussion of whether to build vs buy models - why Hex uses GPT-4 vs fine-tuning* [00:13:06] UX design for Magic with Hex's notebook format (aka “Chat++”)* [00:18:37] Expanding notebooks to less technical users* [00:23:46] The "Memex" as an exciting underexplored area - personal knowledge graph and memory augmentation* [00:27:02] What makes for good LLMops vs MLOps* [00:34:53] Building rigorous evaluators for Magic and best practices* [00:36:52] Different types of metrics for LLM evaluation beyond just end task accuracy* [00:39:19] Evaluation strategy when you don't own the core model that's being evaluated* [00:41:49] All the places you can make improvements outside of retraining the core LLM* [00:45:00] Lightning RoundTranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO-in-Residence of Decibel Partners, and today I'm joining by Bryan Bischof. [00:00:15]Bryan: Hey, nice to meet you. [00:00:17]Alessio: So Bryan has one of the most thorough and impressive backgrounds we had on the show so far. Lead software engineer at Blue Bottle Coffee, which if you live in San Francisco, you know a lot about. And maybe you'll tell us 30 seconds on what that actually means. You worked as a data scientist at Stitch Fix, which used to be one of the premier data science teams out there. [00:00:38]Bryan: It used to be. Ouch. [00:00:39]Alessio: Well, no, no. Well, you left, you know, so how good can it still be? Then head of data science at Weights and Biases. You're also a professor at Rutgers and you're just wrapping up a new O'Reilly book as well. So a lot, a lot going on. Yeah. [00:00:52]Bryan: And currently head of AI at Hex. [00:00:54]Alessio: Let's do the Blue Bottle thing because I definitely want to hear what's the, what's that like? [00:00:58]Bryan: So I was leading data at Blue Bottle. I was the first data hire. I came in to kind of get the data warehouse in order and then see what we could build on top of it. But ultimately I mostly focused on demand forecasting, a little bit of recsys, a little bit of sort of like website optimization and analytics. But ultimately anything that you could imagine sort of like a retail company needing to do with their data, we had to do. I sort of like led that team, hired a few people, expanded it out. One interesting thing was I was part of the Nestle acquisition. So there was a period of time where we were sort of preparing for that and didn't know, which was a really interesting dynamic. Being acquired is a very not necessarily fun experience for the data team. [00:01:37]Alessio: I build a lot of internal tools for sourcing at the firm and we have a small VCs and data community of like other people doing it. And I feel like if you had a data feed into like the Blue Bottle in South Park, the Blue Bottle at the Hanahaus in Palo Alto, you can get a lot of secondhand information on the state of VC funding. [00:01:54]Bryan: Oh yeah. I feel like the real source of alpha is just bugging a Blue Bottle. [00:01:58]Alessio: Exactly. And what's your latest book about? [00:02:02]Bryan: I just wrapped up a book with a coauthor Hector Yee called Building Production Recommendation Systems. I'll give you the rest of the title because it's fun. It's in Python and JAX. And so for those of you that are like eagerly awaiting the first O'Reilly book that focuses on JAX, here you go. [00:02:17]Alessio: Awesome. And we'll chat about that later on. But let's maybe talk about Hex and Magic before. I've known Hex for a while, I've used it as a notebook provider and you've been working on a lot of amazing AI enabled experiences. So maybe run us through that. [00:02:34]Bryan: So I too, before I sort of like joined Hex, saw it as this like really incredible notebook platform, sort of a great place to do data science workflows, quite complicated, quite ad hoc interactive ones. And before I joined, I thought it was the best place to do data science workflows. And so when I heard about the possibility of building AI tools on top of that platform, that seemed like a huge opportunity. In particular, I lead the product called Magic. Magic is really like a suite of sort of capabilities as opposed to its own independent product. What I mean by that is they are sort of AI enhancements to the existing product. And that's a really important difference from sort of building something totally new that just uses AI. It's really important to us to enhance the already incredible platform with AI capabilities. So these are things like the sort of obvious like co-pilot-esque vibes, but also more interesting and dynamic ways of integrating AI into the product. And ultimately the goal is just to make people even more effective with the platform. [00:03:38]Alessio: How do you think about the evolution of the product and the AI component? You know, even if you think about 10 months ago, some of these models were not really good on very math based tasks. Now they're getting a lot better. I'm guessing a lot of your workloads and use cases is data analysis and whatnot. [00:03:53]Bryan: When I joined, it was pre 4 and it was pre the sort of like new chat API and all that. But when I joined, it was already clear that GPT was pretty good at writing code. And so when I joined, they had already executed on the vision of what if we allowed the user to ask a natural language prompt to an AI and have the AI assist them with writing code. So what that looked like when I first joined was it had some capability of writing SQL and it had some capability of writing Python and it had the ability to explain and describe code that was already written. Those very, what feel like now primitive capabilities, believe it or not, were already quite cool. It's easy to look back and think, oh, it's like kind of like Stone Age in these timelines. But to be clear, when you're building on such an incredible platform, adding a little bit of these capabilities feels really effective. And so almost immediately I started noticing how it affected my own workflow because ultimately as sort of like an engineering lead and a lot of my responsibility is to be doing analytics to make data driven decisions about what products we build. And so I'm actually using Hex quite a bit in the process of like iterating on our product. When I'm using Hex to do that, I'm using Magic all the time. And even in those early days, the amount that it sped me up, that it enabled me to very quickly like execute was really impressive. And so even though the models weren't that good at certain things back then, that capability was not to be underestimated. But to your point, the models have evolved between 3.5 Turbo and 4. We've actually seen quite a big enhancement in the kinds of tasks that we can ask Magic and even more so with things like function calling and understanding a little bit more of the landscape of agent workflows, we've been able to really accelerate. [00:05:57]Alessio: You know, I tried using some of the early models in notebooks and it actually didn't like the IPyNB formatting, kind of like a JSON plus XML plus all these weird things. How have you kind of tackled that? Do you have some magic behind the scenes to make it easier for models? Like, are you still using completely off the shelf models? Do you have some proprietary ones? [00:06:19]Bryan: We are using at the moment in production 3.5 Turbo and GPT-4. I would say for a large number of our applications, GPT-4 is pretty much required. To your question about, does it understand the structure of the notebook? And does it understand all of this somewhat complicated wrappers around the content that you want to show? We do our very best to abstract that away from the model and make sure that the model doesn't have to think about what the cell wrapper code looks like. Or for our Magic charts, it doesn't have to speak the language of Vega. These are things that we put a lot of work in on the engineering side, to the AI engineer profile. This is the AI engineering work to get all of that out of the way so that the model can speak in the languages that it's best at. The model is quite good at SQL. So let's ensure that it's speaking the language of SQL and that we are doing the engineering work to get the output of that model, the generations, into our notebook format. So too for other cell types that we support, including charts, and just in general, understanding the flow of different cells, understanding what a notebook is, all of that is hard work that we've done to ensure that the model doesn't have to learn anything like that. I remember early on, people asked the question, are you going to fine tune a model to understand Hex cells? And almost immediately, my answer was no. No we're not. Using fine-tuned models in 2022, I was already aware that there are some limitations of that approach and frankly, even using GPT-3 and GPT-2 back in the day in Stitch Fix, I had already seen a lot of instances where putting more effort into pre- and post-processing can avoid some of these larger lifts. [00:08:14]Alessio: You mentioned Stitch Fix and GPT-2. How has the balance between build versus buy, so to speak, evolved? So GPT-2 was a model that was not super advanced, so for a lot of use cases it was worth building your own thing. Is with GPT-4 and the likes, is there a reason to still build your own models for a lot of this stuff? Or should most people be fine-tuning? How do you think about that? [00:08:37]Bryan: Sometimes people ask, why are you using GPT-4 and why aren't you going down the avenue of fine-tuning today? I can get into fine-tuning specifically, but I do want to talk a little bit about the good old days of GPT-2. Shout out to Reza. Reza introduced me to GPT-2. I still remember him explaining the difference between general transformers and GPT. I remember one of the tasks that we wanted to solve with transformer-based generative models at Stitch Fix were writing descriptions of clothing. You might think, ooh, that's a multi-modal problem. The answer is, not necessarily. We actually have a lot of features about the clothes that are almost already enough to generate some reasonable text. I remember at that time, that was one of the first applications that we had considered. There was a really great team of NLP scientists at Stitch Fix who worked on a lot of applications like this. I still remember being exposed to the GPT endpoint back in the days of 2. If I'm not mistaken, and feel free to fact check this, I'm pretty sure Stitch Fix was the first OpenAI customer, unlike their true enterprise application. Long story short, I ultimately think that depending on your task, using the most cutting-edge general model has some advantages. If those are advantages that you can reap, then go for it. So at Hex, why GPT-4? Why do we need such a general model for writing code, writing SQL, doing data analysis? Shouldn't a fine-tuned model just on Kaggle notebooks be good enough? I'd argue no. And ultimately, because we don't have one specific sphere of data that we need to write great data analysis workbooks for, we actually want to provide a platform for anyone to do data analysis about their business. To do that, you actually need to entertain an extremely general universe of concepts. So as an example, if you work at Hex and you want to do data analysis, our projects are called Hexes. That's relatively straightforward to teach it. There's a concept of a notebook. These are data science notebooks, and you want to ask analytics questions about notebooks. Maybe if you trained on notebooks, you could answer those questions, but let's come back to Blue Bottle. If I'm at Blue Bottle and I have data science work to do, I have to ask it questions about coffee. I have to ask it questions about pastries, doing demand forecasting. And so very quickly, you can see that just by serving just those two customers, a model purely fine-tuned on like Kaggle competitions may not actually fit the bill. And so the more and more that you want to build a platform that is sufficiently general for your customer base, the more I think that these large general models really pack a lot of additional opportunity in. [00:11:21]Alessio: With a lot of our companies, we talked about stuff that you used to have to extract features for, now you have out of the box. So say you're a travel company, you want to do a query, like show me all the hotels and places that are warm during spring break. It would be just literally like impossible to do before these models, you know? But now the model knows, okay, spring break is like usually these dates and like these locations are usually warm. So you get so much out of it for free. And in terms of Magic integrating into Hex, I think AI UX is one of our favorite topics and how do you actually make that seamless. In traditional code editors, the line of code is like kind of the atomic unit and HEX, you have the code, but then you have the cell also. [00:12:04]Bryan: I think the first time I saw Copilot and really like fell in love with Copilot, I thought finally, fancy auto-complete. And that felt so good. It felt so elegant. It felt so right sized for the task. But as a data scientist, a lot of the work that you do previous to the ML engineering part of the house, you're working in these cells and these cells are atomic. They're expressing one idea. And so ultimately, if you want to make the transition from something like this code, where you've got like a large amount of code and there's a large amount of files and they kind of need to have awareness of one another, and that's a long story and we can talk about that. But in this atomic, somewhat linear flow through the notebook, what you ultimately want to do is you want to reason with the agent at the level of these individual thoughts, these atomic ideas. Usually it's good practice in say Jupyter notebook to not let your cells get too big. If your cell doesn't fit on one page, that's like kind of a code smell, like why is it so damn big? What are you doing in this cell? That also lends some hints as to what the UI should feel like. I want to ask questions about this one atomic thing. So you ask the agent, take this data frame and strip out this prefix from all the strings in this column. That's an atomic task. It's probably about two lines of pandas. I can write it, but it's actually very natural to ask magic to do that for me. And what I promise you is that it is faster to ask magic to do that for me. At this point, that kind of code, I never write. And so then you ask the next question, which is what should the UI be to do chains, to do multiple cells that work together? Because ultimately a notebook is a chain of cells and actually it's a first class citizen for Hex. So we have a DAG and the DAG is the execution DAG for the individual cells. This is one of the reasons that Hex is reactive and kind of dynamic in that way. And so the very next question is, what is the sort of like AI UI for these collections of cells? And back in June and July, we thought really hard about what does it feel like to ask magic a question and get a short chain of cells back that execute on that task. And so we've thought a lot about sort of like how that breaks down into individual atomic units and how those are tied together. We introduced something which is kind of an internal name, but it's called the airlock. And the airlock is exactly a sequence of cells that refer to one another, understand one another, use things that are happening in other cells. And it gives you a chance to sort of preview what magic has generated for you. Then you can accept or reject as an entire group. And that's one of the reasons we call it an airlock, because at any time you can sort of eject the airlock and see it in the space. But to come back to your question about how the AI UX fits into this notebook, ultimately a notebook is very conversational in its structure. I've got a series of thoughts that I'm going to express as a series of cells. And sometimes if I'm a kind data scientist, I'll put some text in between them too, explaining what on earth I'm doing. And that feels, in my opinion, and I think this is quite shared amongst exons, that feels like a really nice refinement of the chat UI. I've been saying for several months now, like, please stop building chat UIs. There is some irony because I think what the notebook allows is like chat plus plus. [00:15:36]Alessio: Yeah, I think the first wave of everything was like chat with X. So it was like chat with your data, chat with your documents and all of this. But people want to code, you know, at the end of the day. And I think that goes into the end user. I think most people that use notebooks are software engineer, data scientists. I think the cool things about these models is like people that are not traditionally technical can do a lot of very advanced things. And that's why people like code interpreter and chat GBT. How do you think about the evolution of that persona? Do you see a lot of non-technical people also now coming to Hex to like collaborate with like their technical folks? [00:16:13]Bryan: Yeah, I would say there might even be more enthusiasm than we're prepared for. We're obviously like very excited to bring what we call the like low floor user into this world and give more people the opportunity to self-serve on their data. We wanted to start by focusing on users who are already familiar with Hex and really make magic fantastic for them. One of the sort of like internal, I would say almost North Stars is our team's charter is to make Hex feel more magical. That is true for all of our users, but that's easiest to do on users that are already able to use Hex in a great way. What we're hearing from some customers in particular is sort of like, I'm excited for some of my less technical stakeholders to get in there and start asking questions. And so that raises a lot of really deep questions. If you immediately enable self-service for data, which is almost like a joke over the last like maybe like eight years, if you immediately enabled self-service, what challenges does that bring with it? What risks does that bring with it? And so it has given us the opportunity to think about things like governance and to think about things like alignment with the data team and making sure that the data team has clear visibility into what the self-service looks like. Having been leading a data team, trying to provide answers for stakeholders and hearing that they really want to self-serve, a question that we often found ourselves asking is, what is the easiest way that we can keep them on the rails? What is the easiest way that we can set up the data warehouse and set up our tools such that they can ask and answer their own questions without coming away with like false answers? Because that is such a priority for data teams, it becomes an important focus of my team, which is, okay, magic may be an enabler. And if it is, what do we also have to respect? We recently introduced the data manager and the data manager is an auxiliary sort of like tool on the Hex platform to allow people to write more like relevant metadata about their data warehouse to make sure that magic has access to the best information. And there are some things coming to kind of even further that story around governance and understanding. [00:18:37]Alessio: You know, you mentioned self-serve data. And when I was like a joke, you know, the whole rush to the modern data stack was something to behold. Do you think AI is like in a similar space where it's like a bit of a gold rush? [00:18:51]Bryan: I have like sort of two comments here. One I'll shamelessly steal from a friend, Adam Azzam from Prefect. He says that this is more of like an iron mine than a gold mine in the sense of there is a lot of work to extract this precious, precious resource. And that's the first one is I think, don't expect to just go down to the stream and do a little panning. There's a lot of work to be done. And frankly, the steps to go from this like gold to, or this resource to something valuable is significant. I think people have gotten a little carried away with the old maxim of like, don't go pan for gold, sell pickaxes and shovels. It's a much stronger business model. At this point, I feel like I look around and I see more pickaxe salesmen and shovel salesmen than I do prospectors. And that scares me a little bit. Metagame where people are starting to think about how they can build tools for people building tools for AI. And that starts to give me a little bit of like pause in terms of like, how confident are we that we can even extract this resource into something valuable? I got a text message from a VC earlier today, and I won't name the VC or the fund, but the question was, what are some medium or large size companies that have integrated AI into their platform in a way that you're really impressed by? And I looked at the text message for a few minutes and I was finding myself thinking and thinking, and I responded, maybe only co-pilot. It's been a couple hours now, and I don't think I've thought of another one. And I think that's where I reflect again on this, like iron versus gold. If it was really gold, I feel like I'd be more blown away by other AI integrations. And I'm not yet. [00:20:40]Alessio: I feel like all the people finding gold are the ones building things that traditionally we didn't focus on. So like mid-journey. I've talked to a company yesterday, which I'm not going to name, but they do agents for some use case, let's call it. They are 11 months old. They're making like 8 million a month in revenue, but in a space that you wouldn't even think about selling to. If you were like a shovel builder, you wouldn't even go sell to those people. And Swix talks about this a bunch, about like actually trying to go application first for some things. Let's actually see what people want to use and what works. What do you think are the most maybe underexplored areas in AI? Is there anything that you wish people were actually trying to shovel? [00:21:23]Bryan: I've been saying for a couple of months now, if I had unlimited resources and I was just sort of like truly like, you know, on my own building whatever I wanted, I think the thing that I'd be most excited about is building sort of like the personal Memex. The Memex is something that I've wanted since I was a kid. And are you familiar with the Memex? It's the memory extender. And it's this idea that sort of like human memory is quite weak. And so if we can extend that, then that's a big opportunity. So I think one of the things that I've always found to be one of the limiting cases here is access. How do you access that data? Even if you did build that data like out, how would you quickly access it? And one of the things I think there's a constellation of technologies that have come together in the last couple of years that now make this quite feasible. Like information retrieval has really improved and we have a lot more simple systems for getting started with information retrieval to natural language is ultimately the interface that you'd really like these systems to work on, both in terms of sort of like structuring the data and preparing the data, but also on the retrieval side. So what keys off the query for retrieval, probably ultimately natural language. And third, if you really want to go into like the purely futuristic aspect of this, it is latent voice to text. And that is also something that has quite recently become possible. I did talk to a company recently called gather, which seems to have some cool ideas in this direction, but I haven't seen yet what I, what I really want, which is I want something that is sort of like every time I listen to a podcast or I watch a movie or I read a book, it sort of like has a great vector index built on top of all that information that's contained within. And then when I'm having my next conversation and I can't quite remember the name of this person who did this amazing thing, for example, if we're talking about the Memex, it'd be really nice to have Vannevar Bush like pop up on my, you know, on my Memex display, because I always forget Vannevar Bush's name. This is one time that I didn't, but I often do. This is something that I think is only recently enabled and maybe we're still five years out before it can be good, but I think it's one of the most exciting projects that has become possible in the last three years that I think generally wasn't possible before. [00:23:46]Alessio: Would you wear one of those AI pendants that record everything? [00:23:50]Bryan: I think I'm just going to do it because I just like support the idea. I'm also admittedly someone who, when Google Glass first came out, thought that seems awesome. I know that there's like a lot of like challenges about the privacy aspect of it, but it is something that I did feel was like a disappointment to lose some of that technology. Fun fact, one of the early Google Glass developers was this MIT computer scientist who basically built the first wearable computer while he was at MIT. And he like took notes about all of his conversations in real time on his wearable and then he would have real time access to them. Ended up being kind of a scandal because he wanted to use a computer during his defense and they like tried to prevent him from doing it. So pretty interesting story. [00:24:35]Alessio: I don't know but the future is going to be weird. I can tell you that much. Talking about pickaxes, what do you think about the pickaxes that people built before? Like all the whole MLOps space, which has its own like startup graveyard in there. How are those products evolving? You know, you were at Wits and Biases before, which is now doing a big AI push as well. [00:24:57]Bryan: If you really want to like sort of like rub my face in it, you can go look at my white paper on MLOps from 2022. It's interesting. I don't think there's many things in that that I would these days think are like wrong or even sort of like naive. But what I would say is there are both a lot of analogies between MLOps and LLMops, but there are also a lot of like key differences. So like leading an engineering team at the moment, I think a lot more about good engineering practices than I do about good ML practices. That being said, it's been very convenient to be able to see around corners in a few of the like ML places. One of the first things I did at Hex was work on evals. This was in February. I hadn't yet been overwhelmed by people talking about evals until about May. And the reason that I was able to be a couple of months early on that is because I've been building evals for ML systems for years. I don't know how else to build an ML system other than start with the evals. I teach my students at Rutgers like objective framing is one of the most important steps in starting a new data science project. If you can't clearly state what your objective function is and you can't clearly state how that relates to the problem framing, you've got no hope. And I think that is a very shared reality with LLM applications. Coming back to one thing you mentioned from earlier about sort of like the applications of these LLMs. To that end, I think what pickaxes I think are still very valuable is understanding systems that are inherently less predictable, that are inherently sort of experimental. On my engineering team, we have an experimentalist. So one of the AI engineers, his focus is experiments. That's something that you wouldn't normally expect to see on an engineering team. But it's important on an AI engineering team to have one person whose entire focus is just experimenting, trying, okay, this is a hypothesis that we have about how the model will behave. Or this is a hypothesis we have about how we can improve the model's performance on this. And then going in, running experiments, augmenting our evals to test it, et cetera. What I really respect are pickaxes that recognize the hybrid nature of the sort of engineering tasks. They are ultimately engineering tasks with a flavor of ML. And so when systems respect that, I tend to have a very high opinion. One thing that I was very, very aligned with Weights and Biases on is sort of composability. These systems like ML systems need to be extremely composable to make them much more iterative. If you don't build these systems in composable ways, then your integration hell is just magnified. When you're trying to iterate as fast as people need to be iterating these days, I think integration hell is a tax not worth paying. [00:27:51]Alessio: Let's talk about some of the LLM native pickaxes, so to speak. So RAG is one. One thing is doing RAG on text data. One thing is doing RAG on tabular data. We're releasing tomorrow our episode with Kube, the semantic layer company. Curious to hear your thoughts on it. How are you doing RAG, pros, cons? [00:28:11]Bryan: It became pretty obvious to me almost immediately that RAG was going to be important. Because ultimately, you never expect your model to have access to all of the things necessary to respond to a user's request. So as an example, Magic users would like to write SQL that's relevant to their business. And it's important then to have the right data objects that they need to query. We can't expect any LLM to understand our user's data warehouse topology. So what we can expect is that we can build a RAG system that is data warehouse aware, data topology aware, and use that to provide really great information to the model. If you ask the model, how are my customers trending over time? And you ask it to write SQL to do that. What is it going to do? Well, ultimately, it's going to hallucinate the structure of that data warehouse that it needs to write a general query. Most likely what it's going to do is it's going to look in its sort of memory of Stack Overflow responses to customer queries, and it's going to say, oh, it's probably a customer stable and we're in the age of DBT, so it might be even called, you know, dim customers or something like that. And what's interesting is, and I encourage you to try, chatGBT will do an okay job of like hallucinating up some tables. It might even hallucinate up some columns. But what it won't do is it won't understand the joins in that data warehouse that it needs, and it won't understand the data caveats or the sort of where clauses that need to be there. And so how do you get it to understand those things? Well, this is textbook RAG. This is the exact kind of thing that you expect RAG to be good at augmenting. But I think where people who have done a lot of thinking about RAG for the document case, they think of it as chunking and sort of like the MapReduce and the sort of like these approaches. But I think people haven't followed this train of thought quite far enough yet. Jerry Liu was on the show and he talked a little bit about thinking of this as like information retrieval. And I would push that even further. And I would say that ultimately RAG is just RecSys for LLM. As I kind of already mentioned, I'm a little bit recommendation systems heavy. And so from the beginning, RAG has always felt like RecSys to me. It has always felt like you're building a recommendation system. And what are you trying to recommend? The best possible resources for the LLM to execute on a task. And so most of my approach to RAG and the way that we've improved magic via retrieval is by building a recommendation system. [00:30:49]Alessio: It's funny, as you mentioned that you spent three years writing the book, the O'Reilly book. Things must have changed as you wrote the book. I don't want to bring out any nightmares from there, but what are the tips for people who want to stay on top of this stuff? Do you have any other favorite newsletters, like Twitter accounts that you follow, communities you spend time in? [00:31:10]Bryan: I am sort of an aggressive reader of technical books. I think I'm almost never disappointed by time that I've invested in reading technical manuscripts. I find that most people write O'Reilly or similar books because they've sort of got this itch that they need to scratch, which is that I have some ideas, I have some understanding that we're hard won, I need to tell other people. And there's something that, from my experience, correlates between that itch and sort of like useful information. As an example, one of the people on my team, his name is Will Kurt, he wrote a book sort of Bayesian statistics the fun way. I knew some Bayesian statistics, but I read his book anyway. And the reason was because I was like, if someone feels motivated to write a book called Bayesian statistics the fun way, they've got something to say about Bayesian statistics. I learned so much from that book. That book is like technically like targeted at someone with less knowledge and experience than me. And boy, did it humble me about my understanding of Bayesian statistics. And so I think this is a very boring answer, but ultimately like I read a lot of books and I think that they're a really valuable way to learn these things. I also regrettably still read a lot of Twitter. There is plenty of noise in that signal, but ultimately it is still usually like one of the first directions to get sort of an instinct for what's valuable. The other comment that I want to make is we are in this age of sort of like archive is becoming more of like an ad platform. I think that's a little challenging right now to kind of use it the way that I used to use it, which is for like higher signal. I've chatted a lot with a CMU professor, Graham Neubig, and he's been doing LLM evaluation and LLM enhancements for about five years and know that I didn't misspeak. And I think talking to him has provided me a lot of like directionality for more believable sources. Trying to cut through the hype. I know that there's a lot of other things that I could mention in terms of like just channels, but ultimately right now I think there's almost an abundance of channels and I'm a little bit more keen on high signal. [00:33:18]Alessio: The other side of it is like, I see so many people say, Oh, I just wrote a paper on X and it's like an article. And I'm like, an article is not a paper, but it's just funny how I know we were kind of chatting before about terms being reinvented and like people that are not from this space kind of getting into AI engineering now. [00:33:36]Bryan: I also don't want to be gatekeepy. Actually I used to say a lot to people, don't be shy about putting your ideas down on paper. I think it's okay to just like kind of go for it. And I, I myself have something on archive that is like comically naive. It's intentionally naive. Right now I'm less concerned by more naive approaches to things than I am by the purely like advertising approach to sort of writing these short notes and articles. I think blogging still has a good place. And I remember getting feedback during my PhD thesis that like my thesis sounded more like a long blog post. And I now feel like that curmudgeonly professor who's also like, yeah, maybe just keep this to the blogs. That's funny.Alessio: Uh, yeah, I think one of the things that Swyx said when he was opening the AI engineer summit a couple of weeks ago was like, look, most people here don't know much about the space because it's so new and like being open and welcoming. I think it's one of the goals. And that's why we try and keep every episode at a level that it's like, you know, the experts can understand and learn something, but also the novices can kind of like follow along. You mentioned evals before. I think that's one of the hottest topics obviously out there right now. What are evals? How do we know if they work? Yeah. What are some of the fun learnings from building them into X? [00:34:53]Bryan: I said something at the AI engineer summit that I think a few people have already called out, which is like, if you can't get your evals to be sort of like objective, then you're not trying hard enough. I stand by that statement. I'm not going to, I'm not going to walk it back. I know that that doesn't feel super good because people, people want to think that like their unique snowflake of a problem is too nuanced. But I think this is actually one area where, you know, in this dichotomy of like, who can do AI engineering? And the answer is kind of everybody. Software engineering can become AI engineering and ML engineering can become AI engineering. One thing that I think the more data science minded folk have an advantage here is we've gotten more practice in taking very vague notions and trying to put a like objective function around that. And so ultimately I would just encourage everybody who wants to build evals, just work incredibly hard on codifying what is good and bad in terms of these objective metrics. As far as like how you go about turning those into evals, I think it's kind of like sweat equity. Unfortunately, I told the CEO of gantry several months ago, I think it's been like six months now that I was sort of like looking at every single internal Hex request to magic by hand with my eyes and sort of like thinking, how can I turn this into an eval? Is there a way that I can take this real request during this dog foodie, not very developed stage? How can I make that into an evaluation? That was a lot of sweat equity that I put in a lot of like boring evenings, but I do think ultimately it gave me a lot of understanding for the way that the model was misbehaving. Another thing is how can you start to understand these misbehaviors as like auxiliary evaluation metrics? So there's not just one evaluation that you want to do for every request. It's easy to say like, did this work? Did this not work? Did the response satisfy the task? But there's a lot of other metrics that you can pull off these questions. And so like, let me give you an example. If it writes SQL that doesn't reference a table in the database that it's supposed to be querying against, we would think of that as a hallucination. You could separately consider, is it a hallucination as a valuable metric? You could separately consider, does it get the right answer? The right answer is this sort of like all in one shot, like evaluation that I think people jump to. But these intermediary steps are really important. I remember hearing that GitHub had thousands of lines of post-processing code around Copilot to make sure that their responses were sort of correct or in the right place. And that kind of sort of defensive programming against bad responses is the kind of thing that you can build by looking at many different types of evaluation metrics. Because you can say like, oh, you know, the Copilot completion here is mostly right, but it doesn't close the brace. Well, that's the thing you can check for. Or, oh, this completion is quite good, but it defines a variable that was like already defined in the file. Like that's going to have a problem. That's an evaluation that you could check separately. And so this is where I think it's easy to convince yourself that all that matters is does it get the right answer? But the more that you think about production use cases of these things, the more you find a lot of this kind of stuff. One simple example is like sometimes the model names the output of a cell, a variable that's already in scope. Okay. Like we can just detect that and like we can just fix that. And this is the kind of thing that like evaluations over time and as you build these evaluations over time, you really can expand the robustness in which you trust these models. And for a company like Hex, who we need to put this stuff in GA, we can't just sort of like get to demo stage or even like private beta stage. We really hunting GA on all of these capabilities. Did it get the right answer on some cases is not good enough. [00:38:57]Alessio: I think the follow up question to that is in your past roles, you own the model that you're evaluating against. Here you don't actually have control into how the model evolves. How do you think about the model will just need to improve or we'll use another model versus like we can build kind of like engineering post-processing on top of it. How do you make the choice? [00:39:19]Bryan: So I want to say two things here. One like Jerry Liu talked a little bit about in his episode, he talked a little bit about sort of like you don't always want to retrain the weights to serve certain use cases. Rag is another tool that you can use to kind of like soft tune. I think that's right. And I want to go back to my favorite analogy here, which is like recommendation systems. When you build a recommendation system, you build the objective function. You think about like what kind of recs you want to provide, what kind of features you're allowed to use, et cetera, et cetera. But there's always another step. There's this really wonderful collection of blog posts from Eugene Yon and then ultimately like even Oldridge kind of like iterated on that for the Merlin project where there's this multi-stage recommender. And the multi-stage recommender says the first step is to do great retrieval. Once you've done great retrieval, you then need to do great ranking. Once you've done great ranking, you need to then do a good job serving. And so what's the analogy here? Rag is retrieval. You can build different embedding models to encode different features in your latent space to ensure that your ranking model has the best opportunity. Now you might say, oh, well, my ranking model is something that I've got a lot of capability to adjust. I've got full access to my ranking model. I'm going to retrain it. And that's great. And you should. And over time you will. But there's one more step and that's downstream and that's the serving. Serving often sounds like I just show the s**t to the user, but ultimately serving is things like, did I provide diverse recommendations? Going back to Stitch Fix days, I can't just recommend them five shirts of the same silhouette and cut. I need to serve them a diversity of recommendations. Have I respected their requirements? They clicked on something that got them to this place. Is the recommendations relevant to that query? Are there any hard rules? Do we maybe not have this in stock? These are all things that you put downstream. And so much like the recommendations use case, there's a lot of knobs to pull outside of retraining the model. And even in recommendation systems, when do you retrain your model for ranking? Not nearly as much as you do other s**t. And even this like embedding model, you might fiddle with more often than the true ranking model. And so I think the only piece of the puzzle that you don't have access to in the LLM case is that sort of like middle step. That's okay. We've got plenty of other work to do. So right now I feel pretty enabled. [00:41:56]Alessio: That's great. You obviously wrote a book on RecSys. What are some of the key concepts that maybe people that don't have a data science background, ML background should keep in mind as they work in this area? [00:42:07]Bryan: It's easy to first think these models are stochastic. They're unpredictable. Oh, well, what are we going to do? I think of this almost like gaseous type question of like, if you've got this entropy, where can you put the entropy? Where can you let it be entropic and where can you constrain it? And so what I want to say here is think about the cases where you need it to be really tightly constrained. So why are people so excited about function calling? Because function calling feels like a way to constrict it. Where can you let it be more gaseous? Well, maybe in the way that it talks about what it wants to do. Maybe for planning, if you're building agents and you want to do sort of something chain of thoughty. Well, that's a place where the entropy can happily live. When you're building applications of these models, I think it's really important as part of the problem framing to be super clear upfront. These are the things that can be entropic. These are the things that cannot be. These are the things that need to be super rigid and really, really aligned to a particular schema. We've had a lot of success in making specific the parts that need to be precise and tightly schemified, and that has really paid dividends. And so other analogies from data science that I think are very valuable is there's the sort of like human in the loop analogy, which has been around for quite a while. And I have gone on record a couple of times saying that like, I don't really love human in the loop. One of the things that I think we can learn from human in the loop is that the user is the best judge of what is good. And the user is pretty motivated to sort of like interact and give you kind of like additional nudges in the direction that you want. I think what I'd like to flip though, is instead of human in the loop, I'd like it to be AI in the loop. I'd rather center the user. I'd rather keep the user as the like core item at the center of this universe. And the AI is a tool. By switching that analogy a little bit, what it allows you to do is think about where are the places in which the user can reach for this as a tool, execute some task with this tool, and then go back to doing their workflow. It still gets this back and forth between things that computers are good at and things that humans are good at, which has been valuable in the human loop paradigm. But it allows us to be a little bit more, I would say, like the designers talk about like user-centered. And I think that's really powerful for AI applications. And it's one of the things that I've been trying really hard with Magic to make that feel like the workflow as the AI is right there. It's right where you're doing your work. It's ready for you anytime you need it. But ultimately you're in charge at all times and your workflow is what we care the most about. [00:44:56]Alessio: Awesome. Let's jump into lightning round. What's something that is not on your LinkedIn that you're passionate about or, you know, what's something you would give a TED talk on that is not work related? [00:45:05]Bryan: So I walk a lot. [00:45:07]Bryan: I have walked every road in Berkeley. And I mean like every part of every road even, not just like the binary question of, have you been on this road? I have this little app that I use called Wanderer, which just lets me like kind of keep track of everywhere I've been. And so I'm like a little bit obsessed. My wife would say a lot a bit obsessed with like what I call new roads. I'm actually more motivated by trails even than roads, but like I'm a maximalist. So kind of like everything and anything. Yeah. Believe it or not, I was even like in the like local Berkeley paper just talking about walking every road. So yeah, that's something that I'm like surprisingly passionate about. [00:45:45]Alessio: Is there a most underrated road in Berkeley? [00:45:49]Bryan: What I would say is like underrated is Kensington. So Kensington is like a little town just a teeny bit north of Berkeley, but still in the Berkeley hills. And Kensington is so quirky and beautiful. And it's a really like, you know, don't sleep on Kensington. That being said, one of my original motivations for doing all this walking was people always tell me like, Berkeley's so quirky. And I was like, how quirky is Berkeley? Turn it out. It's quite, quite quirky. It's also hard to say quirky and Berkeley in the same sentence I've learned as of now. [00:46:20]Alessio: That's a, that's a good podcast warmup for our next guests. All right. The actual lightning ground. So we usually have three questions, acceleration, exploration, then a takeaway acceleration. What's, what's something that's already here today that you thought would take much longer to arrive in AI and machine learning? [00:46:39]Bryan: So I invited the CEO of Hugging Face to my seminar when I worked at Stitch Fix and his talk at the time, honestly, like really annoyed me. The talk was titled like something to the effect of like LLMs are going to be the like technology advancement of the next decade. It's on YouTube. You can find it. I don't remember exactly the title, but regardless, it was something like LLMs for the next decade. And I was like, okay, they're like one modality of model, like whatever. His talk was fine. Like, I don't think it was like particularly amazing or particularly poor, but what I will say is damn, he was right. Like I, I don't think I quite was on board during that talk where I was like, ah, maybe, you know, like there's a lot of other modalities that are like moving pretty quick. I thought things like RL were going to be the like real like breakout success. And there's a little pun with Atari and breakout there, but yeah, like I, man, I was sleeping on LLMs and I feel a little embarrassed. I, yeah. [00:47:44]Alessio: Yeah. No, I mean, that's a good point. It's like sometimes the, we just had Jeremy Howard on the podcast and he was saying when he was talking about fine tuning, everybody thought it was dumb, you know, and then later people realize, and there's something to be said about messaging, especially like in technical audiences where there's kind of like the metagame, you know, which is like, oh, these are like the cool ideas people are exploring. I don't know where I want to align myself yet, you know, or whatnot. So it's cool exploration. So it's kind of like the opposite of that. You mentioned RL, right? That's something that was kind of like up and up and up. And then now it's people are like, oh, I don't know. Are there any other areas if you weren't working on, on magic that you want to go work on? [00:48:25]Bryan: Well, I did mention that, like, I think this like Memex product is just like incredibly exciting to me. And I think it's really opportunistic. I think it's very, very feasible, but I would maybe even extend that a little bit, which is I don't see enough people getting really enthusiastic about hardware with advanced AI built in. You're hearing whispering of it here and there, put on the whisper, but like you're starting to see people putting whisper into pieces of hardware and making that really powerful. I joked with, I can't think of her name. Oh, Sasha, who I know is a friend of the pod. Like I joked with Sasha that I wanted to make the big mouth Billy Bass as a babble fish, because at this point it's pretty easy to connect that up to whisper and talk to it in one language and have it talk in the other language. And I was like, this is the kind of s**t I want people building is like silly integrations between hardware and these new capabilities. And as much as I'm starting to hear whisperings here and there, it's not enough. I think I want to see more people going down this track because I think ultimately like these things need to be in our like physical space. And even though the margins are good on software, I want to see more like integration into my daily life. Awesome. [00:49:47]Alessio: And then, yeah, a takeaway, what's one message idea you want everyone to remember and think about? [00:49:54]Bryan: Even though earlier I was talking about sort of like, maybe like not reinventing things and being respectful of the sort of like ML and data science, like ideas. I do want to say that I think everybody should be experimenting with these tools as much as they possibly can. I've heard a lot of professors, frankly, express concern about their students using GPT to do their homework. And I took a completely opposite approach, which is in the first 15 minutes of the first class of my semester this year, I brought up GPT on screen and we talked about what GPT was good at. And we talked about like how the students can sort of like use it. I showed them an example of it doing data analysis work quite well. And then I showed them an example of it doing quite poorly. I think however much you're integrating with these tools or interacting with these tools, and this audience is probably going to be pretty high on that distribution. I would really encourage you to sort of like push this into the other people in your life. My wife is very technical. She's a product manager and she's using chat GPT almost every day for communication or for understanding concepts that are like outside of her sphere of excellence. And recently my mom and my sister have been sort of like onboarded onto the chat GPT train. And so ultimately I just, I think that like it is our duty to help other people see like how much of a paradigm shift this is. We should really be preparing people for what life is going to be like when these are everywhere. [00:51:25]Alessio: Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, Bryan. This was fun. [00:51:29]Bryan: Yeah. Thanks for having me. And use Hex magic. [00:51:31] Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Let's take a whirlwind tour through the land of impulse buys and questionable merchandise! Where else you gonna purchase 50-cent socks, Billy Bass and a jar of Vaseline all in the same trip? From the cluttered aisles to the mispriced snacks, Dollar General has perfected the art of cutting costs while providing a steady stream of new recruits into Heaven. Named the #1 retailer for folks who like to watch “Cops” in real-time, Dollar General has worked hard to garner their own podcast episode. Bravo, DG. You earned it.

Episode 37If you dig the show, please consider telling a friend! Or friends! And if you'd subscribe or give us a 5 star rating that would rock!This week we break down:Best Fruit JuiceTackiest Home DecorGreatest Summer Popcorn FlickWe'd LOVE your topic ideas send them to @rankyoupod. Also, share your ranks & comments!Original theme for Rank You Very Much created by Walk Off The Earth

Join us for our bi-annual celebratory shemozzle! We reflect on another season of sleuthing in our 50th episode. We mull on our initial expectations of the show, and finally recreate the scene of the crime. Captain Conundrum shares his insights as our Researcher/Esteemed Elder. There are also never-heard-before clips from our Banter in the Library folder and our off-air voice notes. There are no spoilers in this episode. We also discuss Billy Bass, The Parent Trap and vegan sweets. Mystery Mentions Sleeping Murder - Agatha Christie Tour de Force (Season 1, Episode 6)- Christianna Brand London Particular (Season 3, Episode 4) - Christianna Brand Next book for Season 4, released on 19th September: The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side - Agatha Christie In the mood for more mystery? Check out our End of Year Shemozzle from earlier in the season. Follow us on Instagram: @missingsalmoncase Share with a friend: The Unsolved Case of the Missing Salmon Tell us your top 3 podcast reads: missingsalmoncase@gmail.com This podcast is created, produced and edited by Maddy Berry and Hannah Knight. Our music is sourced from Melody Loops and composed by Geoff Harvey.

John and Denny join us again to reflect on the series and share stories not heard in the podcast. Their favorite "World Series of Rock" and the time John was in the "right place at the wrong time" during one of these shows. They also tell the story behind the two best April Fools Day ads. Also, hear unearthed interviews with Paul McCartney (1976), as well as Bono and The Edge from U2 (1983). Finally, bonus stories from our conversation with WMMS legend Billy Bass. "PROHFILES - THE WRATH OF THE BUZZARD" is produced by Wessler Media and distributed on the Evergreen Podcasts Network. Guests: John Gorman, Denny Sanders, Shelley Stile, and Billy Bass. Books: John Gorman's "The Buzzard" and Mike Olszewski's "Cleveland Radio Tales" and "Radio Daze." Merch: David Helton's Buzzard T-Shirt Shop and eBay merch store. Special thanks: Alex Bevan for the use of "The Buzzard Song" as our closing credits theme. © 1977 Alex Bevan/Fiddler's Wynde Music BMI (all rights reserved) The Wrath of the Buzzard and its production company are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with 100.7 WMMS, its ownership, or any of its subsidiaries or its affiliates. Podcast cover art is an original creation of the artist, used with permission. Any audio, individuals, product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks or images featured on or referred to within this podcast or its website are the property of their respective trademark and copyright holders. Appearance on this podcast or its website does not imply endorsement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The radio station ignited the movement that provided the answer to the question: “Where should we put the Rock Hall?” It was (and is) an amazing feat, a crowning glory. While music fans were excitedly thinking about walking through the doors of the Rock Hall, discontent was beginning to stir among The Buzzard Nuclear Army. No bird of prey can fly forever. "PROHFILES - THE WRATH OF THE BUZZARD" is produced by Wessler Media and distributed on the Evergreen Podcasts Network. Guests: Bill Alford, Billy Bass, Ruby Cheeks, Ed "Flash" Ferenc, Bill "BLF Bash" Freeman, Joel Frensdorf, John Gorman, Donna Halper, David Helton, Jeff Kinzbach, Mike Olszewski, Denny Sanders, Dia Stein, David Spero and Shelley Stile. Books: John Gorman's "The Buzzard" and Mike Olszewski's "Cleveland Radio Tales" and "Radio Daze." Merch: David Helton's Buzzard T-Shirt Shop and eBay merch store. Special thanks: Alex Bevan for the use of "The Buzzard Song" as our closing credits theme. © 1977 Alex Bevan/Fiddler's Wynde Music BMI (all rights reserved) The Wrath of the Buzzard and its production company are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with 100.7 WMMS, its ownership, or any of its subsidiaries or its affiliates. Podcast cover art is an original creation of the artist, used with permission. Any audio, individuals, product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks or images featured on or referred to within this podcast or its website are the property of their respective trademark and copyright holders. Appearance on this podcast or its website does not imply endorsement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a special live edition of CLE Rocks, we examine the legacy of WIXY 1260, the AM radio station that dominated Cleveland in the 1960s, revolutionizing the industry. Guests include radio legends Larry Morrow, Billy Bass and historian Mike Olszewski. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

100.7, WMMS. The Buzzard. How did this station become so iconic? How did a small group of young hippies, some from Ohio, some from Boston, against all odds and no budget, achieve such unprecedented success? And how did it all come crashing down? This is the story of the rise and fall of WMMS - one of the most influential FM rock stations of all time. "PROHFILES - THE WRATH OF THE BUZZARD" is produced by Wessler Media and distributed on the Evergreen Podcasts Network. Guests: Bill Alford, Billy Bass, Ruby Cheeks, Ed "Flash" Ferenc, Bill "BLF Bash" Freeman, Joel Frensdorf, John Gorman, Donna Halper, David Helton, Jeff Kinzbach, Mike Olszewski, Denny Sanders, Dia Stein, David Spero and Shelley Stile. The Wrath of the Buzzard and its production company are not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with 100.7 WMMS, its ownership, or any of its subsidiaries or its affiliates. Podcast cover art is an original creation of the artist, used with permission. Any audio, individuals, product names, logos, brands, and other trademarks or images featured on or referred to within this podcast or its website are the property of their respective trademark and copyright holders. Appearance on this podcast or its website does not imply endorsement.

This week the gals cover the Jersey Shore Man-eater, the shark attacks that inspired Jaws and the sad story and urban legend of Raymond Robinson or the Green Man or No Face Charlie. 

In this episode, we take a deeper dive into some of the animals of The Sopranos, everything from dogs to cats to Billy Bass and rats. As Livia says, "The world is a jungle" and she is not wrong given the amount of different creatures we see just in this series. We want to dedicate this episode to the late Goldee AKA Pie-O-My RIP

Peak Florida Man Bumble in the HOUSE! I mean, it's like. Wow. In this episode I wax poetic on guys who pose with Billy Bass and Steve-O as well as offer up thoughts on keeping it calm and very real this holiday season. What's your distraction of choice?

Salty11-24-21 Billy Bass

Vanishing Postcards host and storyteller Evan Stern on the importance of telling the stories from the places that are off the interstate. This episode is brought to you by Brain.fm. I love and use brain.fm every day! It combines music and neuroscience to help me focus, meditate, and even sleep! Because you listen to this show, you can get a free trial.* URL: https://brain.fm/innovativemindset If you love it as much as I do, you can get 20% off with this exclusive coupon code: innovativemindset   Born during the driving rainstorm that inspired Stevie Ray Vaughan to record the classic “Texas Flood,” Evan Stern is one of a proud few who can claim Austin as his legitimate hometown. Having caught the performing bug early on, he first gained attention at age 11 with a second-place finish in Austin's famed O. Henry Pun Off, and has since graced the stages of New York's Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the British American Drama Academy, whether acting Shakespeare, or charming audiences with the turn of a Cole Porter phrase, Evan is first and foremost a storyteller, with a sincere love and appreciation for history, travel and the art of raconteurship. He is now honored to return to Texas for the first season of Vanishing Postcards, an ambitious project that represents a synthesis of these passions through the form of audio essay. Vanishing Postcards is a documentary travelogue in which listeners are invited on a road trip exploring the hidden dives, traditions, and frequently threatened histories that can be discovered by exiting the interstates. Named one of the Best Podcasts of 2021 by Digital Trends. Connect with Evan IG - @vanishing_postcards IG - @evansternnyc Podcast- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/vanishing-postcards/id1544610020 Episode Transcript [00:00:00] Evan Stern: It's hard for me to really latch on one specific lesson that I have gained, but I do believe that. Everybody wants, ultimately wants to be heard. [00:00:18] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Hello and welcome to the innovative mindset podcast. I'm your host Izolda Trakhtenberg on the show. I interview peak performing innovators in the creative social impact and earth conservation spaces or working to change the world. This episode is brought to you by brain FM brain FM combines the best of music and neuroscience to help you relax, focus, meditate, and even sleep. [00:00:39] I love it and have been using it to write, create and do. Deepest work because you're a listener of the show. You can get a free trial head over to brain.fm/innovative mindset to check it out. If you decide to subscribe, you can get 20% off with the coupon code, innovative mindset, all one word. And now let's get to the show. [00:00:58] Yeah.[00:01:00] [00:01:02] Hey there. And welcome to the innovative mindset podcast. My name is Izolda Trakhtenberg. I'm your host, and I'm super thrilled that you're here. I'm also really excited and thrilled to talk about and meet this week's guest. Listen to this. Evan stern was born during the driving rainstorm that inspired Stevie Ray Vaughn to record the class. [00:01:22] Texas flood. I love that Evan stern is one of a proud few who can claim Austin. S's legitimate hometown that's the town is growing. So, wow. That's amazing how few people probably are from there. Having caught the performing bug early on. He first gained attention at age 11 with a second place finish in Austin's famed. [00:01:43] Oh, Henry punt off. And it says grace, the stages of new York's Carnegie hall and Lincoln center, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence college. American drama academy. Wow. Whether acting Shakespeare or charming audiences with the turn of a Cole Porter phrase, Evan is first and foremost, a storyteller, and [00:02:00] you know how close that is to my heart. [00:02:02] He's got a sincere love and appreciation for history travel and the art of a wreck on tour ship. He's now honored to return to Texas for the first season of vanishing postcards and ambitious project that represents a synthesis of these passions through the form of audio essay. Vanishing postcards is a documentary travel log in which listeners are invited on a road trip, exploring the hidden dives, traditions, and frequently threatened histories that can be discovered by exiting the interstates named one of the best podcasts of 2021 by digital trends, evidence here to talk about banishing postcards and everything else. [00:02:37] So amazing that he's doing Evan. Thank you so much for being there. Show welcome. [00:02:41] Evan Stern: Thank you so much for having me. It's a great honor. Oh, [00:02:44] Izolda Trakhtenberg: you're very sweet. So I I'm, this is such an exciting thing. Delving into the history of Texas. First of all, into the, into the storytellers of Texas into the dives and the honky-tonks of Texas as a travel log.[00:03:00] [00:03:00] But as a podcast, what, what inspired you to do this? What inspired you to go? You know what? I'm going to create this travel log. And I'm going to make it about my home state. What happened that you went, yes, I want to do this. [00:03:13] Evan Stern: Well, it was, it, it wasn't as if there was a lightning bolt of inspiration. It was a very kind of slow gradual process. [00:03:21] Um, and, and you told me, you know, a few years ago that right now I'd be working on a podcast. Um, you know, I might've said really. Um, but like, like so many though, I am one of those people who over the last 10 years just absolutely fell in love. Podcasting, um, and the, um, audio medium of storytelling, I think kind of the gateway drug for me, um, was years ago, I started listening to the moth, you know, just people getting up and telling personal stories without notes. [00:03:52] I, I just absolutely loved it. Um, then you start discovering, um, other programs, you know, like the, the kitchen [00:04:00] sisters and, and, and, and there's, you know, different, different stuff. I mean, there, there's a wonderful podcast about classic Hollywood called you must remember this. There's one about country music called cocaine and rhinestones, um, and around, and, you know, not too long ago as well. [00:04:18] Um, you know, the YouTube algorithm, uh, kept suggesting for whatever reason that I watched these, uh, travel blog, travel blog videos, and in watching them, I would never really see the way that I enjoy traveling represented. Um, I mean, certainly it's not always the case, but I think more often than not, when you, when you see videos of that nature, it's much less about the places themselves. [00:04:45] It's much more about the people saying, oh, look at me and how cute I am in this place. Um, and I just kind of gradually started thinking, you know, I wonder if there is something that, uh, that, that I can do. [00:05:00] Um, and initially I had this grand idea. That I wanted to do a show that was going to be a musical travel log of Mexico. [00:05:09] Um, you know, I'm, I'm immersed in the gig economy in New York, and I always try my best to get away January February just to, to escape the, the bitter cold of the winter. And, um, you know, Mexico is my happy place. It's, it's cheap, it's warm. Um, and so I initially had this idea that I was going to go, uh, kind of explore, use music as a portal to exploring the cultural, regional history of Mexico. [00:05:36] I was going to go to Vera Cruz that was going to where the tradition of, you know, and one a Watteau and, um, you know, in Monterey and the north. And I went so far as to, uh, produce a pilot episode, um, in Marietta Yucatan, um, about the tradition of the trophies that they have there. And it's one thing to, you know, when you're running an event, [00:06:00] Um, you know, you're thinking to yourself, oh my goodness, this is just going to be the best thing ever. [00:06:05] This is going to be amazing. And then you sit down and you listen to what you have spent months working on and you go, oh my goodness, I have missed the mark. So terribly. Um, it was a perfect lesson in show. Don't tell, I mean, w what happened was, is I talked all about the city of Marietta. It's about its history, this, that, and the other, but you didn't actually, um, when, when you were listening to it, I also learned pretty quickly that the, the human voice has such terrific color, shade, and nuance to it. [00:06:37] That if you have an actor come in, um, to a dub over, uh, you know, what was said in English, you just, you just lose so much. Um, and I realized pretty quickly that I needed to learn much more about audio production before tackling a project of that ambitious nature. And so I started thinking to myself, well, you know what. [00:06:59] Might [00:07:00] not be as exotic as Mexico, but if there's one thing I know it's that Texas people love to talk and they tell great stories. So in January of 2020, um, grab some equipments. Um, and I went back down to Texas to see what I could do. Um, really, it was just, uh, going to be kind of an experiment. Um, but it very quickly evolved into vanishing postcards. [00:07:26] Um, what happened was, is I took a look at what I was doing, um, and I realized that each episode was a snapshot of a different place. And if there was a thing that the place has had in common it's that you didn't know how much longer a lot of them were going to be around or that they were representative of broader cultural histories or traditions that. [00:07:52] You know, you, you just, they're kind of rare, um, in, in this kind of fast paced rapidly homogenizing [00:08:00] world. Um, and, um, since then it, it became, it it's, it's been an incredibly rewarding journey. Um, you know, as I maybe referenced earlier in, in many ways, it is kind of a 180 from a lot of the work I've previously done at the, at the same time. [00:08:17] Um, I feel that all of that work really kind of beautifully prepared me for it. Um, and having embarked on this journey, um, I ended up covering like about 1500 miles of, of Texas and, um, having embarked on this journey as a solo traveler, um, I'm now really grateful that the series is out in the world. Um, and I can invite, uh, you know, people like you and listeners really around the world, uh, to, to join me now and experience, uh, everything that I got to do. [00:08:49] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Wow. That's amazing. And it's incredible to me, what you just said about how you took everything that you had learned up until that [00:09:00] point and reframed it and repurposed it almost into this, this way of looking at your home state. And yet it is both technical and it takes a lot of artistry. And I'm wondering what, in, as part of, as part of doing this project, what did you learn? [00:09:21] What was the thing that stood out for you that you learned maybe about yourself or about the people in your state or about the places? What was the biggest thing you learned and how did it change you? [00:09:31] Evan Stern: Well, there's a lot, I mean, it's hard to, for me to really latch on one specific lesson that I have gained. [00:09:38] Um, but I do believe that. Everybody wants, ultimately wants to be heard. They, they really do. Um, and I mean, people often ask me, you know, w w w w when I first started doing this, it was, it was in January, 2020. It was before the pandemic hit. Obviously the pandemic changed, um, a [00:10:00] lot of what I could do. Um, but I was really the first episodes that you'll hear in the series. [00:10:05] I was really just kind of showing up at these places completely unannounced. Um, they really had no idea, um, that I was going to be there. Um, and it, it, people ask me, you know, did you meet resistance? We'll we'll really know. Um, everyone was, was intrigued. And for the most part, people were so honored that, you know, someone like me was taking an interest in their work, their place, uh, what they were doing. [00:10:35] Um, and I don't think too, I mean, Someone recently asked me too, that, that when they, you know, listen to the, to the series, you know, that, you know, they, they feel as if I'm able to, you know, extract these, these stories. And they said, well, how, how do you, how do you make this magic happen? And, well, the truth is is that you, you can't, um, there is nothing that you can do to you. [00:10:59] You never [00:11:00] really know what is is going to happen. Um, but the stories, if you just, if you start talking to people, um, you approach them with respect, empathy, and a willingness to listen. Um, and you ask them specific questions. Um, you just, you, you never know what you're going to. Um, and something that I tell anyone who's maybe interested in doing something like this. [00:11:29] Um, I will say that if you do want to, you know, get stories, you do want to ask people specific questions. Um, I would never go up to someone and just say, tell me about yourself. Um, I might say, um, before we get started, could you maybe describe for me your childhood home, you know, something like that. And, um, that really kind of opens up the door and we just kind of take things from there. [00:11:51] Yeah. [00:11:56] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Sorry. I'm taking all of that in. I like to take a pause to make sure [00:12:00] that I've, that I've understood everything. One of the things that I heard you say that really struck a chord with me was that it's about listening. And the other thing of course was asking those specific questions and. Were there any, and if so, what are they techniques that you use specifically as a, as a performer to help you with that part of it? [00:12:26] Evan Stern: Well, you know, I honestly, I think that, um, as I said so much of my experience, um, leading PR prepared me in, in leading up to this, um, and a big job that I've had for a number of years here in the city is it's a very, it's a very strange job. Um, I work as a, what is called a standardized patient, um, that is the medical schools, programs, hire actors to facilitate simulations [00:13:00] for, uh, medical interns and students. [00:13:03] Um, I have played all sorts of different cases. You'd never believe. I mean, they've had to diagnose me. I've been the graphic designer they've had to diagnose with cancer. Um, I have, uh, you know, I, I I've been the 19 year old crack addict who suffered a panic attack. You name it. I've I've had it. Um, but I have learned so much in, in working with these students in terms of how they build rapport and what works and what doesn't. [00:13:34] Um, I think it's amazing. How many people, uh, it can be applied to interview situations, whatever, um, you know, you give someone a microphone. Sometimes they just kind of become a completely different person. You know, they think that every question, you know, has to be probing and every question, you know, has to have weight, but you really just have to remember how you talk to people in your [00:14:00] everyday life. [00:14:02] You know, how do you introduce yourself to a stranger? Um, you know, you're just going to start talking to people, um, and you know, you, you read their body language and you, you really just it's about establishing trust. Um, and it, and I feel that people understand that. I don't think of myself as a journalist. [00:14:30] Um, I'll be the first to say that I think of myself as more of an essayist. I really think that a journalist job is to investigate a journalist job is to probe. I'm not really there to do that. I'm really there just to, you know, kind of have a conversation and, and enjoy the ride and see where that ride takes. [00:14:49] You know, I'm not, if someone tells me a tall tale, um, I'm not going to fact check that story. Um, but I think that people recognize [00:15:00] that. Um, and you know, I just think that, um, just, just really, like I said, just, just remembering how we relate to one another, uh, every day is, is just crucial. [00:15:15] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Yeah, you're talking. I mean, as you're talking, I'm going, he's, he's talking about integrity and authenticity, and those words are abandoned about aura a lot nowadays, but it really, it seems to me that that's, that that's what you, that, that that's what, what you were using, you know, using who you, who you were authentically to meet these people. [00:15:37] And I know you said that people asked you if you, if you met resistance, I'm wondering what was the most wild story you heard? [00:15:46] Evan Stern: Goodness. Oh, man, there, there were, there was, uh, so, so there's this teeny town called Castile, Texas that sits on the Western edge of the, uh, [00:16:00] the hill country. It's absolutely beautiful, very isolated. [00:16:04] The town has a population of six and, um, I don't even know if he's really there, mayor, I don't know if they actually have a mayor, but you know, the, the big local personality is Randy Love. Festi, uh, he's the owner of the Castille store. Um, I'll be releasing his episode in a, in a few weeks. Um, but, uh, when I was there, he told me that, uh, he had, uh, he, he, he, he took a trip to Cabo San Lucas with his girlfriend. [00:16:36] Uh, they saw this, uh, chicken in a bar and he said, you know what, I need a chicken for the store. So, um, you know, he bought this, uh, roof. For the store. And, um, he had this, uh, Billy Bass that was like, you know, one of those electronic things, you know, you clap your hands in the best wiggles. Well, um, one day as he tells [00:17:00] me, he looks over and, um, this rooster is having sexual relations with that bass. [00:17:05] So this thing he tells me became this huge sensation where people from all over the place started coming to town to see his rooster perform, you know, 12 times a day. And he was able to, uh, make hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate deals that he was able to sell to the people who came through the store because of that rooster. [00:17:27] And then he proudly led me into the store where he showed me this. He, you know, he, he called the rooster cockroach. Yeah, and the rooster died. And after the rooster died, he had that. He took him to the taxidermists and, um, had him, uh, mounted and placed on top of his good friend, Billy the bass. And I've seen a lot of taxidermy in my day. [00:17:51] I don't think I have ever seen a stuffed rooster and I have certainly never seen a row stuffed rooster on top of a Billy Bass. I'll [00:18:00] tell you that right now. [00:18:02] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Wow. That is. Tall tale for sure. [00:18:10] Oh my goodness. I uh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I don't even, I'm like, whatever. How do I follow that up? I think, I don't [00:18:21] know. I did. I did, because you know, the thing, the thing about this is that anytime we tell stories or listen to stories, I think we're changed by them even if, even if it's, oh, that's just the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Your experience of life is, is, is changed in some way or another. So I guess I'm wondering, how have you been changed by doing this project? [00:18:45] Evan Stern: Well, It's in many ways, it's been a dive into the unknown, as I said, it's, it's very, it was all very new for me in the beginning. Um, I had to do a lot of learning and [00:19:00] I re I really had to put myself out there. Um, it definitely, um, tested the boundaries of my comfort, um, in a lot of ways. Um, you know, you really just have to, as I said earlier, you have to go up out there and just start talking to people. [00:19:16] Um, and I usually found that I was way more nervous than the people I was talking to. And, um, I was talking to someone else about this, um, experience. Someone said, and, you know, she asked me, she was like, well, how do you, where does that confidence come from? Where do you get that confidence? And I said, well, you know what? [00:19:36] I, I, I think I've discovered that confidence is kind of overrated. Um, because you can't just read a book or, you know, attend a three-day workshop, whatever, and magically have confidence. It just doesn't happen that way. Confidence happens as a result of experience. Um, it happens as a result of mistakes. Um, and, [00:20:00] um, I think. [00:20:02] I heard somewhere that, you know, what heroic act doesn't involve, just huge levels of vulnerability. Um, and so I, I think I have definitely grown in confidence as a result of all of this, but that really, uh, just is a by-product of, of the work itself and everything that, you know, has been asked of me to, to rise to this challenge [00:20:36] Izolda Trakhtenberg: and that in itself, the, the skills you've built, the ideas that you've gotten and, and brought to fruition is a big part of the change I would imagine. And I love, I'd love to discuss a little bit as you talk about this, what is the process? What was the creative process that goes in to making an episode to crafting vanishing posts? [00:20:59] Evan Stern: Absolutely. [00:21:00] So each, you know, obviously I do have each episode does have a subject that I am interested in delving into. Um, there are people that I want to meet, just so you know, so basically, um, a bit more about the show itself for, for those listening out there. So essentially listeners are invited to join me on a road trip. [00:21:23] And so each episode is produced in documentary style. So, you know, you're going to hear a lot of, it's not, you know, interview, it's not talk show, you're going to hear a lot of different voices. Um, you're going to hear some of my narration, um, and I really work hard to make it an immersive listening experience for those who, who are hearing the episodes. [00:21:49] Um, but basically the, the way that I constructed is, um, there are. And, uh, as I said, you know, each episode, there are certain issues that, that I'm looking at. [00:22:00] Um, and so I just go, I, I talk to people, um, and I assemble a number of interviews at the, at the places that I go to. Um, you know, I try to talk to the, uh, the owners. [00:22:14] I try to talk to the workers. I try to talk to the people who go to these places. Um, you're going to ask all of those people different questions. Um, but you're also, I think there, you know, you also want to, there are also some specific questions that I will ask all of them. Um, and then what I do is I, I come back home and I listened to all of the, um, I listened to all of the interviews and I extract, you know, the, the gold from each person I speak with, you know, I could very well talk to someone for like an hour out of that hour conversation. [00:22:51] I might just take, you know, Three minutes worth of, of nuggets or whatnot. Um, and then I, you know, I, I look at [00:23:00] everything that I have and I stepped back and I, I just kind of look for it, you know, that, what, what, what, what, what are the commonalities, what, what do people keep coming back to, you know, are there opposing views? [00:23:15] Um, and from there, I, I just kind of take these nuggets and I weave together a story out of all of that. Um, I really let my subjects kind of guide the way that the, the story moves and goes. Um, the, the most challenging job for me is in the writing process of pasting it all together. Um, everything has to have I learned, you know, for years, I, you know, I've, I've. [00:23:45] Did a lot of performing in the cabaret world. Um, and you know, even if you're just putting together a show, that's, that's really kind of, you know, a series of songs, what is said in between those songs is every bit as [00:24:00] important as the songs themselves and everything has to have architecture and a beginning, middle and an end. [00:24:06] Um, so the, the greatest challenge for me is about how I can link everything together, um, in the narration as part of a cohesive whole, um, you know, I think, but each episode, uh, you know, I, I never, totally, there are always things that I want to focus on, but you just never totally know where it's going to go. [00:24:27] And before each one, um, I always ask my God, is this going to work? Um, but some so far it's worked out okay, [00:24:38] Izolda Trakhtenberg: That moment of, oh, what if this is going to be a complete disaster? I know it well. Um, and it's, I'm so fascinated by what you're saying with respect to the storytelling, the beginning, middle and end, and the sort of the patter between songs in, in, in a cabaret show, all of, all of those things, those elements [00:25:00] of storytelling, what do you think is the result? [00:25:06] What is the most crucial thing to put into it? And what is the result? How do you, when do you feel like yes, it has worked as opposed to, oh, it's going to be a disaster. [00:25:16] Evan Stern: Well, as I said earlier, again, the most important thing is, is show don't tell, um, and what, what, what is always best for me is I try not to. [00:25:34] I try not to express too much in the way of, of opinion. Um, what, what is really magical though, is just when you have, when you're talking to someone and, you know, whether they realize it or not, they, they share and tell a story that just kind of beautifully encapsulates everything, you know, that, that just really explains the issue [00:26:00] without it, you know, at that point, the work for you is, is really done. [00:26:05] Um, but you know, kind of an example of, of something that, you know, I, I did that, that was a challenge, um, was, you know, I have an episode that's coming out in a bit where. I took a trip first to, to Brownsville, Texas, where I spoke with this man who is the last, uh, cook in the United States who was allowed to serve a barbacoa cooked barbacoa, as it was meant to be prepared, which means it's, it's cooked in a pit under the ground. [00:26:37] Um, and that's what he does. He, he, he's serving barbacoa out of what had been his childhood home. Um, there's a pit out back that's in the ground and, you know, that's where he cooks it. The reason that he's allowed to do it is because his father started it in 1956 and it's been going on for this long. And so I focused on him and I did a segment on him. [00:26:57] And then I went to San [00:27:00] Antonio and I, um, you know, met a cook there who, you know, talked about cooking up puffy tacos. And, um, it ended up, you know, she, her story went in a completely different direction. Um, I mean, her mother. Started this business out of, uh, out of a garage because it was her last hope. Um, she was an incredible woman, a revered figure in San Antonio, um, who, you know, was shockingly murdered. [00:27:28] Um, and she talked all about that and, and, and everything. And, and then, and how she like found forgiveness and was being able to move beyond and, you know, everything that her, how her mother prepared her and how her mother expressed love through, through cooking. And, um, I realized that, you know, on, on the surface, you know, these two stories, yes, they were about cooking, but they were very, very different. [00:27:55] But what, what is it that they had in common? I realized that, you know, [00:28:00] through their cooking, they were both expressing love. And for me, and that's how I brought the two together. [00:28:14] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I'm still thinking, sorry, it's a beautiful, uh, yeah. That notion of, um, cooking and, and healing through cooking and expressing love through cooking, but also expressing love for, I guess, the, the heritage and the inspiration for what they did is so important. And I'm wondering if you have someone or figures or people in, in your world. [00:28:45] Hoo hoo hoo. Does that for you? Who inspired you to do this? And if so, is it that same love, it sounds weird to say love connection, but is that connection one of love and respect? What [00:29:00] is it about the people or the images or, or the ideas that inspired you that comes from that place? [00:29:11] Oh, no you're [00:29:11] Evan Stern: thinking. Oh, no, of course, absolutely. I mean, [00:29:20] There. I mean, who can you say, can you just rephrase the question in a simple, in a simple one sentence in a simple one sentence for me? Can you say, say what you're getting at [00:29:30] Izolda Trakhtenberg: again here? Sure. I'm just wondering who inspired you throughout the journey? Are there any public figures or is there anybody in Texas? [00:29:37] Are there any people who made you go, ah, this is what I want. Well, [00:29:41] Evan Stern: what I can say is that if, if there is a bar that I am always working towards, you know, never, never met him personally. Um, but I am old enough to remember growing up on CVS. There was a man by the name of Charles Kuralt who would travel the [00:30:00] country and he would really just kind of share good news is, is what he was, is what he was doing. [00:30:07] And he. He, he never expressed anything in, in terms of, in, in, in showing these stories, he was able to present, you know, the best of people without really expressing anything in the way of judgment. And there are many situations throughout this process where I have asked myself, what would Charles Kuralt do? [00:30:32] Hmm. Um, and you know, I, I don't mean to, I'm not trying to compare myself to Charles Caroll. Um, in the least, you know, I have much more work to do, you know, before I feel like I can get people called him the Walt Whitman of American television. Um, but I can tell you that that is the bar that I am always working towards. [00:30:56] Um, and the greatest compliments that I have received, [00:31:00] um, you know, or when people have heard this series and said, oh, you know what, this reminds me of Charles Perrault. [00:31:08] Izolda Trakhtenberg: That's lovely. And I remember Charles Caroll also on like, uh, CBS Sunday morning or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. His stories were all, you know, when, uh, you were mentioning the idea of love and heart. [00:31:20] That's what I remember thinking about his stories was that they were always full of such quiet soul and heart. They didn't have to be huge stories, but they were, they always left me feeling better and always gave me something to think about. Well, yeah, [00:31:38] Evan Stern: go on. Go on. No, no, no, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, and I do believe that there is a great void of that when you look at our media landscape right now, and th there, there really is. [00:31:48] Um, we live in a horribly polarized, horribly divided age. Um, I, I do not believe that anything that we have lived through over the [00:32:00] last five, six years should be normalized. I will be the first to say that, um, But I do believe that, you know, the, the issues that we are wrestling with right now as a nation, uh, in the divisions that we're dealing with in terms of politics and race are completely unsustainable. [00:32:20] But at the same time, I do think that there is more that we have in common than what we've realized. And I do think that culture right now is one of those rare areas of agreement. And what this show is about celebrating is that culture, um, you know, culture provides opportunity for shared experiences and you know, that that's really kind of what I'm getting at with, with all of this. [00:32:53] Um, and, and additionally too, I mean, how can we expect for people in [00:33:00] our rural communities to appreciate what is good and beautiful about places like New York city or San Francisco, or even Austin for that matter, if we cannot appreciate what is good and beautiful about them, [00:33:22] Izolda Trakhtenberg: from what you just said, it feels like there's a sort of a, through the looking glass aspect to your show that you're inviting people to go on a journey with you to, to see these places or to listen to these, to these stories and to hear about them. When you do that, when you're in that space of inviting people on a journey, how do you decide which stories are the ones that are important to tell. [00:33:52] Evan Stern: Well, something that's important to me. Is that so often when we think about art and [00:34:00] culture, I mean, we think about palaces of civilization, like the mat, the British museum, the, the loop, but the truth is that art and culture is everywhere. And oftentimes some of the best of it comes from places that you're just not going to read about in glossy magazines. [00:34:20] You're not going to see about these places on Instagram. And it's really about exploring that, you know, Detroit gave us Motown, Clarksdale, Mississippi gave us the blues. Um, and, and for me, it's really kind of about seeking these, these places out. You know, if you read a, you know, if you read like a tourist guide book about Texas, they're going to tell you to go to the Alamo. [00:34:49] They're going to tell you to go to the river walk, do this, do that. Um, There's so much more to that. I mean, I had the [00:35:00] great honor of visiting a town called San Benito, um, which is about, you know, 15, 18 miles north of the border. Um, and you know, th this is, you know, if you look at this country, um, you know, the real Grandy valley, um, is just statistically, one of the, the poor regions, you know, there's been a lot. [00:35:21] Um, you know, uh, D population, you know, flight, whatnot, but this town of San Benito, um, was responsible for giving birth to the movement of music. Um, which is an incredible genre. Basically what happened is the, uh, the Mexican laborers down in south Texas, um, heard the music that was brought to the area by the checks, the Germans, they heard the Pocus, they heard the accordions, um, and they, they took that accordion music. [00:35:51] They took those polkas and they added their own lyrics and Spanish to them. They threw in guitar and they created this whole entire genre [00:36:00] of music. And, um, w w the story there is, is, is I knew that I wanted to. To do a piece, you know, on the border, you hear about the border a lot, um, in the news right now, but what is always lost in the noise surrounding all of that is the culture and the people who actually exist there. [00:36:19] Um, and I thought that kahuna really kind of provided a terrific, uh, opportunity just to explore kind of the beautiful th the, the beauty that exists there. And I heard that there was this museum in this town called the Texas kahuna music hall of fame. So I sent a message on Facebook. Um, I I'd heard that, uh, it was founded and owned by a man by the name of Ray Abila. [00:36:42] And a little while later, I got a call from his son, turned out, uh, that Mr. Abila, his father had died about seven months prior, but that if I wanted to go, um, visit the museum, that they would be honored to have me and I showed up. This museum, the small town in [00:37:00] Texas and the entire family was there because they wanted for me to know about their father. [00:37:07] Um, they wanted me to know about Cancun . Um, they found a, the president of a record label who specializes in this music so that he could be there with us too. And they had such pride and joy in, in sharing. And an honor that someone took the time to visit a place like, like San Benito. Um, it is an experience I will always treasure and never forget. [00:37:34] Izolda Trakhtenberg: That is so lovely. And I'm so glad that you got to tell that to, to tell that story, to show, to show, to sort of open the window, if you will, into San Benito and into this music. And I'm wondering something, this is a little off topic, but do you know who Alan Lomax was? I [00:37:54] Evan Stern: have heard the name. Um, please refresh my memory. [00:37:57] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Sure, sure. So he was an [00:38:00] ethnomusicologist and what he did with his whole career for 50 years, he traveled the world and he recorded music. And when video came along, video of mew, indigenous music, wherever he was, he tried to find the music from that place. And, uh, and there, when I worked at the national geographic site in many moons ago, he came over and he was like, Hey, I would love to put together a library that didn't happen with the geographic, but his daughter, after his death put up a website and there is a website that you can go and, uh, sort of see the music from anywhere. [00:38:35] You can hear the music from anywhere, you just type it in. And if it's there, if they got a recording of it, you'll be able to hear it. And so I'm wondering for posterity, what is your. W w w this library, if you will, that you're creating this travel log that you're creating in my mind, Alan Lomax, his version of it is providing us access to music from all [00:39:00] over the world that is, that could be lost. [00:39:03] And I'm wondering, what do you, what is your feeling about that with the stories that you're telling you mentioned earlier that these that's, their survival is not certain the different traditions and the, and even the, the, you know, the honky-tonks the places themselves, what are you going for here? What is your long-term vision for vanishing postcard? [00:39:24] Evan Stern: Well, so yes, so I'm collecting oral history and I, I think it is really important that we do have a record of it. Um, I think in some ways, uh, this is something perhaps of a bit of a call to arms. Um, you know, I, I want to say it's about shining a light on, you know, what is, what is still, what is still there. [00:39:47] Um, but we can still go to, but as I said, you know, some of this stuff might not be around for too much longer, so it's, it's really kind of about drawing attention to it so that we can preserve it. Um, you know, I look at my [00:40:00] hometown of Austin. Texas as a whole. Um, it is, it is changing at rapid pace. I don't think that change is something to be feared. [00:40:09] Um, in, in many ways I think it is something that, um, should be embraced, but we have to change and grow responsibly. Um, we have to ask, you know, why, w w what is it that people like about Austin? What is it about Texas that draws people there? Why do people keep coming? Um, and I do think that it is it's culture, and I believe that we, as a society need to do a lot more to protect the culture that surrounds us. [00:40:36] I mean, th th most of the places that I spotlight are small businesses and. You know, whenever a small business closes that, you know, has a great history behind it or fondness to it, you'll have all of these people come out of the woodwork saying, oh my goodness, this is horrible. This is the worst thing ever. [00:40:54] But my question always is, well, when was the last time you, you actually went there? Um, [00:41:00] I mean, it's really exhausting. It's a lot of hard work, um, to, to keep these places going. And if people get tired or they aren't making ends meet you, you can't blame them. Um, and this is an issue that you see happening in New York. [00:41:14] It's an issue you see happening in Texas, California, London, name it it's happening. Um, and so I do think that. You know, th th hopefully this series kind of makes people think, uh, a bit more about that. Um, and long-term, it is my hope, uh, that I can expand the map beyond Texas because, um, the, the issues that I feel are explored in this series are truly universal. [00:41:44] In fact, if you look at the analytics, um, most people tuning in and listening right now are actually listening from outside of Texas. Um, and so I think it's important to, uh, you know, I want to expand the map [00:42:00] and, um, you know, if I can do a part to draw attention to, you know, the, the, the beauty of a meal, American culture that surrounds us, um, you know, that's kind of what my goal is. [00:42:16] Izolda Trakhtenberg: And it's a great goal. And I'm so glad that you said that you eventually, cause that was going to be, my next question was, do you want to take it outside of Texas? And I mean, Texas covering Texas can be a lifetime's work cause it's such a big place with such a varied set of, of uh, peoples and cultures. [00:42:32] And yet I love the notion of, of that, what you said, finding those small businesses, finding those people, who aren't, the ones trumpeting themselves and giving them a chance to, to shine. I think that's amazing and wonderful that you're doing that. And I love the notion. And if you could. What would you go next? [00:42:53] Evan Stern: Uh, well, I, I have a dream. I would love to drive route 66 from Oklahoma to [00:43:00] California, and I would love to collect stories and oral histories along the way. Um, I think that route 66, so much of why, um, it kind of occupies this mythic status, um, is because of the timing. Um, you know, there were other highways that were built before or after there were larger ones. [00:43:19] Um, but I think, you know, if you journey route 60, I've never done it, but I, I have to think that if you drive route 66, I mean, you were following in the steps of the, the Okies who migrated to California because of the dust bowl and the great depression. Um, it was an incredible artery during world war II. [00:43:38] So there's that history as well. Um, then it kind of. You know, in encapsulates that golden age of American travel and in the late forties and fifties, then it was decommissioned. And, you know, there was a lot of abandonment that happened and kind of, what does that say? Um, you know, about the American dream, you [00:44:00] know, it was it, uh, and, and so there's a lot that I would like to explore and taking that journey, um, beyond that, I would also love to take a trip to Mississippi sometime, uh, something that fascinates me about Mississippi. [00:44:11] I think, um, the, the writer really Maura said that Mississippi is America's Ireland. Um, if you look at it, it has produced the most incredible Canon of just literary lions, um, William Fox. Um, Richard Wright, Eudora, Welty. Um, they were all Mississippians and Mississippi continues to produce an incredible writers there. [00:44:36] There's a wonderful storytelling tradition attached to Mississippi. Um, and I would love to see, uh, what, what I could get there. [00:44:47] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I love it. I think that's amazing. First of all, I'd driven along 66 and you will, you will love it. Love it, love it. And, uh, you know, Mississippi and the south in general [00:45:00] has a rich storytelling culture. I have every time I spend time in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, that, that part of the country there, if you, if you set a spell, you will, you will get amazing stories. [00:45:16] And often you don't, it doesn't take a lot of prompting. So I'm I'm you said earlier that, that it's just about sort of talking to people the way you would talk to them. The, I guess the question is, have you had people who just say Nope, Nope. Not doing it. And if so, what have you done if that particular story is important to you or do you just move on to the next person? [00:45:38] Oh, [00:45:38] Evan Stern: absolutely. Well, there, there is. Um, you know, so the. The third episode that you'll hear in the series. Um, I did at a honky-tonk called arche blue, silver dollar, um, in this town called Bandera, Texas. Um, it's a fantastic place. Um, again, it was pre pandemic. Um, so, you know, I showed up there unannounced and I really wanted to [00:46:00] talk to, uh, archi blue. [00:46:01] He's he's the owner, he's in his eighties. He performs there every Saturday night. Um, I thought, you know, th this guy is a legend. I've got to talk to him, got to talk to him. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Wouldn't give me an inch refuse to let me record him. Um, and you know, he was cordial when I talked to him, we're talking, you know, you're one word answers, you try everything. [00:46:24] Um, but what happened is, is, uh, every, I, I talked to everyone. That I could find around him and everybody had a story about archi that they wanted to share and, um, what resulted in. And so his refusal became part of the story itself. Um, but in talking to everyone who knew and loved him and had stories to share about him, you really got a terrific, uh, portrait that wouldn't have existed. [00:46:56] Otherwise that that I think is entirely charming. [00:47:00] Um, and when that happened, I had to remind myself that one of my very, very favorite, um, essays of all time, uh, was written by, uh, gates Elise. Um, in 1965, he was given an assignment to interview Frank Sinatra for Esquire magazine and Frank Sinatra completely refused to talk to him. [00:47:23] Um, but what he ended up doing was he interviewed all the hangers on everyone in his, his entourage. And, uh, to this day, people say that it is the most realistic. Portrait of Frank Sinatra that has ever been captured. Um, and so I would recommend to anyone who finds themselves in that position to think of that story and, you know, maybe read that story, uh, because that's something that I draw tremendous inspiration from.[00:48:00] [00:48:03] Izolda Trakhtenberg: It's so interesting. I have a friend who, uh, who's a PR expert and she talks about the difference between marketing and PR Gloria, Charles, her name. And she says marketing is when you come to people and you say, Hey, I'm great. But PR is when someone else goes, you know what? That person they're great. And as long as it's someone you trust, it weighs more than if the person is trumping again themselves, you know? [00:48:31] And so there's something to what you said that kind of reminded me of that, that notion of the other people around Frank Sinatra or, or, or archi, uh, being the ones who tell their tale. And I, I guess I'm wondering within that, I've asked you about the wildest, what is the story that has touched you the most? [00:48:55] The one that made you go, ah, wow. I had no [00:49:00] idea. [00:49:02] Evan Stern: Well, for me, the, the episode that, that, that has the most personal heart for me, um, is, is the second one. What happened is I went to this dance hall. Um, I, I, I knew that I wanted to do a piece on dance halls. Um, in, in Texas, you know, everyone always talks, always writes about Greenhall or Lukin Bach. [00:49:27] You know, those are the big dance halls, but there are many, many, many more others out there. And there was one I discovered that I'd never been to called SEF Shaq hall. It's in this teeny community, um, called Seton, Texas. It's about eight miles outside of a town called temple. It's a community of about 40 people. [00:49:48] And, um, and there's this old dance hall there called SEF shuck hall. That is pretty much trapped in time. Um, by most accounts, it is now the oldest, [00:50:00] um, family run dance hall in Texas. You know, it's a family that, that owns it. This family has, has always owned and run it. And, um, I went there and I wanted to talk to its owner, Alice, who is 89 years old. [00:50:19] Um, and, uh, you know, I had actually called an advanced to ask if I could come and talk to her. She said, sure, well, I got there. And I said, well, I'm here to talk to Alice. And it turned out, you know, that morning she took a fall and they had to take her to the emergency room. Um, and you know, and it kind of, you know, you could feel the way. [00:50:41] In that situation, you know, what, what happens to this place? Um, you know, without, without Alice here. And I ended up talking to her daughter-in-law and son, um, and you know, they're, they're committed to keeping it going. Um, but you could feel like the, you [00:51:00] know, the, you know, I, I feel like that situation kind of infused the episode with, with weight. [00:51:06] Um, but beyond that, um, you know, I listened to, to what I had initially, and there was something missing. Um, I said to myself, I said, you know, I'm doing a lot of talking here. I'd like to find someone else who could do some, some talking for. Um, and there there's an association called the Texas dance hall preservation. [00:51:29] And I found the woman who was working at the time as their executive director, because I wanted to talk to her just to kind of get some more historic perspective on dance halls. You know, I was talking about the history. I think it's better if someone else can talk about the history, other than me, that actually knows more. [00:51:45] And, you know, I talked earlier about how, you know, you have those moments where someone just kind of, you know, tells a story or share something that just beautifully illuminates everything. And, um, [00:52:00] I was talking to her and I asked, I said, you know, there are so many causes out there in this world that are, that are worth devoting attention to. [00:52:09] I said, you know, why are dance halls important to you? And she said it was, it became an incredibly emotional interview that I was not expecting at all. But she said that, you know, those places have a lot of heart and that her fear was that we're getting away from that as a society. And, you know, she, you know, ends up crying. [00:52:34] She's saying, you know, these places, you know, people go there, you know, it's not just about the fun. It's, it's not just about the dancing. Um, it's about, you know, it's about cleaning the roof. It's about cleaning the toilet. And she says, I see so many people working so hard to keep these places going and, you know, and of course it is perfectly illustrated what the shoe lock family, you know, we're, we're [00:53:00] doing, you know, the, the, the daughter-in-law the son, you know, they, they work, you know, five days, they do not take days off. [00:53:07] You know, they have regular jobs that they keep Monday through Friday, and then they're there on the weekends. And, um, I think that it beautifully exemplified their story. In addition to just about every other person that I talked to in the series as a whole, [00:53:30] Izolda Trakhtenberg: that is beautiful. And I'm so grateful that you shared that, that moment of, of talking to her and also the story of. Dance halls in general or, or anything that we do because we love it. Um, you know, we, we do it because whatever it is, whatever that thing is that you do, because you love it. And particularly these places where one of the things that I think Evan, that, that you've highlighted, that I think is so [00:54:00] incredible is that you've taken, you've highlighted places that aren't going out for fame. [00:54:08] You know, these are people and places that are just living, doing their thing and living their lives day in and day out, year in and year out. And they're not going to be a celebrity. They're not trying to be world famous for example. And yet you've shown the light on them. And I think that's so it's powerful because of that, because they're living their lives and doing something hopefully that they love, like with the dance hall story. [00:54:35] And they're not looking for accolades and yet you've given them a platform. And I'm so grateful that you've [00:54:43] Evan Stern: done that. Well, I will say it's not even that. I think a lot of them as well, feel a responsibility to the people who go to these places, you know, like a dive bar, isn't just a place to grab a beer. [00:54:58] You know, a dive [00:55:00] bar represents an entire community. Um, you know, a dive bar, a dance hall. These are all places where people go to, to belong. That's that's, that's what, all of the, that's another through line that I think these places have in common, you know, whether it's a barbecue joint, a dive bar, a dance hall, people go to these places for community and for places to belong. [00:55:25] And I think that it's, it's, it's important to highlight that aspect as well. [00:55:31] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Absolutely. I agree. Yeah. Interestingly because people come and go, like you said, there are a lot of people who, who come to Texas, uh, especially Austin has, has ballooned. Uh, I guess the question that's come that's upper. Most of my mind right now is culturally the culture of places changes. [00:55:54] Right? And so, as the culture evolves, I [00:56:00] know that you're a lot of what vanishing postcards is about is, is capturing that before it goes away before it's no longer in its current form. Are there things that you've done that have been, uh, sort of in the process of changing or something is over and something new's coming to take its place? [00:56:21] And if so, what have those things been? [00:56:25] Evan Stern: Um, you mean my work or places I've been. [00:56:30] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I guess I'm not asking the question very well. I'm just wondering about culturally, your vanishing postcards project is focused on sort of the smaller, uh, heart, very heartfelt places in people in Texas now and perhaps, and perhaps hopefully someday elsewhere. [00:56:51] And as, as the culture changes in those places or for those dance halls, have you captured in any of the [00:57:00] episodes that you've done? That change taking place? Absolutely. [00:57:04] Evan Stern: Um, the, the very first place that I went to, um, was a bar called, uh, the, the dry Creek cafe. Um, it's been there for about 70 years. Um, it, when it first opened in the early 1950s, it really basically sat on the edge of the country. [00:57:22] Now, not only is it no longer country, um, it's now pretty much surrounded by mansion's. Um, it's now basically it's this ramshackle dilapidated dive that is surrounded by some of the priciest real estate in all of Texas. Um, but this bar has survived. Um, and I think it's one of the few places that you can go where you're reminded that, you know, before the tech, uh, millionaires invaded the Hills, the Hills were actually home to Cedar choppers, which was this, um, Appalachian subculture. [00:57:55] Um, and, uh, the, the very first person that I interviewed. [00:58:00] In, um, in Texas for the series was angel their bartender. Um, this was a tough day game, you know, raspy voice, you know, just changed smoker, you know, just, just fabulous, you know, just tough as nails, woman. Um, she was incredibly, um, reticent to, uh, to speak with me again, getting her to talk on the record and letting along to record her. [00:58:28] Um, just took every ounce of charm that I could possibly muster. But when she found out that I was okay with cussing, um, she opened right up. She let the F bombs fly. Um, we had a terrific time, um, and, uh, very sadly I think about, um, four months or so. Um, after I, I interviewed her, she died. Um, what was remarkable about angel is, um, as I said, the place opened in, um, I think it was 1950. [00:58:59] [00:59:00] Three. Um, she was only the third bartender to ever work there. Wow. Um, and so I'm incredibly grateful that I, you know, captured her, her voice and I have that record of her. Um, but you know, you have to ask, you know, when, when someone like that goes, you know, um, you know, what does that, how does that change a place? [00:59:22] You know, what does that do? I was actually just back in Austin last week. Um, and I went there to visit the place to, you know, just see if there was some additional footage I could get that would help bring the season two to a close, um, just to kind of see how that change had affected things. Um, and you know, so there, there are analogies, there, there are now like a few bartenders there who are like trading duties and whatnot. [00:59:48] Um, but I think what's kind of beautiful is that those who have filled in, you know, were all regulars, who, who knew and loved and cared about the bar. Um, [01:00:00] and, uh, you know, they dedicated a section of the bar to angel where they have, you know, her pictures and some things that she loved. Um, and, um, it was, it was just kind of interesting and reassuring to see, um, how, you know, yes, you know, when a beloved, you know, figured, uh, leaves, it's hard and it's challenging. [01:00:21] Um, but if the community is there. It will come. It will find a way to continue. At least for now. I'm grateful to see that, to know that the dry Creek is still there and that those who love it, um, are doing their part to, uh, to keep it going. [01:00:38] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I'm so glad to hear that story. That is wonderful. Evan. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this. [01:00:46] It's, it's such an important topic because it isn't one that, that we tend to focus on. So I'm really grateful that you took the time to tell me about vanishing postcards and to tell me about the culture and the people that you are, [01:01:00] uh, Capturing, if you will, for, for all of us, for all of us to enjoy. And I, and if you're listening to this, you need to go check out vanishing postcards. [01:01:08] I've listened to a few episodes and it's fabulous and amazing. Evan. If you wouldn't mind, I would love it. If you would give whatever social media. Uh, that you have so that if people want to find you, that they can. [01:01:22] Evan Stern: Absolutely. So the, um, you know, if you search, uh, vanishing postcards on Instagram, uh, you'll find it there. [01:01:29] Um, it also has a, a, a, a Facebook page, just search vanishing postcards. It should turn up. Um, you can also find me on Instagram as well. I'm at Evan stern NYC. Um, and, um, you know, I thank you so much and oh, and, but most important, most crucially, um, you know, please go find, listen to subscribe to vanishing postcards. [01:01:54] Um, since this is a podcast, uh, you know, whatever, you're listening to this on, I'm quite [01:02:00] confident that you'll find us there. We're on apple, we're on Spotify, we're on all the, uh, you know, whatever platform is out there. We're more than likely on, and I'd be most honored if you'd consider giving us a little. [01:02:12] Izolda Trakhtenberg: Awesome. And I will actually put all of that in the show notes so that if you're listening to this and you've seen the show notes, you'll be seeing the links to all of it. I just, people learn differently. So I like giving both the audio and the sort of, you can read it visual for it. Uh, Evan, again, I'm really grateful that you took the time to chat with me. [01:02:32] Me and I, I have one last question, if that's okay. Of course. It's a question I ask everybody who comes on the show and it's a silly question, but I find that it yields some profound results. Yeah. And the question is this, if you could sky write anything for the whole world to see what would you. [01:02:53] Evan Stern: What would I say for the whole world to see? [01:02:58] Oh my [01:03:00] goodness. Yeah. So I feel like I need to say something profound, like Buddha or something like that now, or Yoda. My goodness. [01:03:11] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I've had people say, eat your veggies. So it does not have to be, [01:03:16] Evan Stern: I mean, it is a cliche. Um, I've, I've heard it many times. Um, but I, I do believe that there is something to be said for the fact that if I were to write this in the sky, I would say luck is the result of preparation meeting opportunity. [01:03:34] I absolutely believe that to be true. Um, I always do my best to be, uh, you know, prepared and, uh, educate myself and, you know, and, and be ready so that, um, you know, when opportunity comes, you know, luck can, can happen. [01:03:53] Izolda Trakhtenberg: I love that. I think that's a great way to end this episode, Evan stern, you are fabulous, and I'm [01:04:00] so glad that you were here. [01:04:01] Thank you. This is the innovative mindset podcast. You have been listening to my wonderful conversation with Evan stern, who is the host of the vanishing postcards podcast, which of course, you know, you need to check out if you're liking what you're hearing, do me a favor, leave a review, let me know comment. [01:04:20] However you'd like to get in touch. I would appreciate it until next time. This is again, Izolda Trakhtenberg reminding you to listen, learn, laugh, and love a whole lot. [01:04:36] thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you being here. Please subscribe to the podcast if you're new and if you like what you're hearing, please review it and rate it and let other people know. And if you'd like to be a sponsor of the show, I'd love to meet you on patrion.com/innovative mindset. [01:04:53] I also have lots of exclusive goodies to share just with the show supporters there today's episode was produced by [01:05:00] Izolda Trakhtenberg and his copyright 2021 as always, please remember, this is for educational and entertainment purposes. Only past performance does not guarantee future results, although we can always hope until next time, keep living in your innovative mindset.   * I am a Brain.fm affiliate. If you purchase it through the above links and take the 20% off, I'll get a small commission. And please remember, I'll never recommend a product or service I don't absolutely love!  

This week we tell your Ouija board stories! From the funny to the creepy, we cover them all! Get your sage out, consider this your warning!    Tell us what you think by reviewing us on Apple Podcasts!  Follow us on Instagram @yinandjuicepodcast Got an idea for an episode? DM us on Instagram!   Shop our links of our favorite (and sustainable) brands! Tentree: www.tentree.com Use Code: TB0UIFAX for 10% off your order! Pura Vida: https://www.puravidabracelets.com/?rfsn=4385881.9c1f2f Sustainable Fashion: https://poshmark.com/closet/hlweeks 

Katie connects Billy Bass to Seth Rogen?? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Katie connects Billy Bass to Seth Rogen?? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

** visit acedoutpodcast.com to see photos and more **By the time guitar hero ANDRE FOXXE (P-Funk/Jimmy G and the Tackheads/Incorporated Thang Band/Psychedelic Ghetto Pimpz) was in his early 20s, he had a production deal with the legendary Don Davis at United Sound, the funk pride of Detroit. Amazingly, that gave him free reign in a place where Johnnie Taylor and Aretha Franklin were also actively laying tracks. And of course, George Clinton was there as well. Andre still had much to learn, but he was so glad he wasn’t working some job or back out on the street ducking bullets, he just acted like he knew while soaking everything up. “All I did was watch George Clinton… and took notes in my mind,” he explains, “I just imitated what I saw them do… And I never told nobody I didn’t know what the fuck I was doin.”Indeed, Foxxe had the drive and talent to be in the room. But how did he get there in the first place? As it so happens, he literally walked through the door. It all started one fateful day in 1979, when a friend of Andre’s who kept bragging he was buddies with someone in PARLET asked him for a ride to the Funk Festival at the Pontiac Silverdome. When Andre showed up at the dude’s house, he was surprised to see Parliament-Funkadelic singers Ray Davis, Jessica Cleaves, Shirley Hayden, and Sheila Horne (aka Amuka) there as well. All hopped in 18-year-old Andre’s little yellow Duster and they went to the gig.Once there, they parted company and left Andre to wander around by himself. “I’m walking down this little hallway,” he remembers. “I hear good music playing behind this door. It wasn’t marked or anything. So, I’m inquisitive… I open the door and walk in. It was George Clinton and Bootsy Collins listening to a song called ‘Knee Deep’ that they were working on at the time. “Well damn. Andre’s presence didn’t seem to bother the two funk superheroes, so he stayed put. That’s when he noticed this kid, a bit younger than him, standing there, too. “I said, ‘What you doin in here?’” Andre recalls. “He goes, ‘That’s my dad right there.’ And I was like ‘That ain’t your dad!’ He goes, ‘What are YOU doin in here?’ I go ‘I just heard that music.’” As it turned out, the kid was Tracey aka Trey Lewd, who then invited Andre to join him onstage to sing part of “Flashlight” that very night. Two weeks later, Clinton and songwriter/producer Ron Dunbar offered Andre a job as a driver. They even got him some new wheels for the gig. “Everybody that was within Parliament-Funkadelic from ‘79 to like ‘81 I drove around in this green van,” he says. Meanwhile, Andre’s skills as a multi-instrumentalist—though he was still keeping quiet about them for the most part—were starting to come into play. He joined Trey’s project Plastic Brain Slam for a time, along with Steve Pannell and Trey’s brother Daryl Clinton. That fizzled out, but Clinton and Davis were starting to take notice of Andre’s musical acumen. He was pulled into George’s little brother’s project, Jimmy G and the Tackheads, who put out the fantastic and underrated Federation of Tackheads (1985). Then Jimmy G fell off and Andre found himself in the driver’s seat of the Incorporated Thang Band’s Lifestyles of the Roach and Famous (1988). Throughout, Andre was also writing and recording with serious cats like the almighty Junie Morrison and Blackbyrd McKnight, contributing cuts to Clinton joints like You Shouldn’t-Nuf Bit Fish (1983) and R&B Skeletons in the Closet (1986). But receiving credit and money for this valuable work wasn’t always in the cards. So it’s good that Foxxe further solidified his contributions to the P with his classic solo joint, I’m Funk and I’m Proud (P-Vine, 1994)—featuring a who’s who of funkateers—as well as releases from his Psychedelic Ghetto Pimpz.However, despite Andre’s determination and success, his transition from driver to player within the P-Funk team wasn’t necessarily a smooth one. “When I started doing it, of course nobody took me serious,” he explains. “Hell, I just picked you up from the airport!” Unfortunately, when his guitar game got strong enough that he was offered a job in the band, things didn’t get better. In fact, they kinda got worse. “That’s when I really started catchin it,” he laments. “And when I decided to develop an image in that thang… that set a few people back as well.” Specifically, the O.G.’s didn’t seem to appreciate Andre grabbing eyeballs with his stage outfit: a bridal gown, which he first put on as a dare inspired by his recent marriage as well as his dedication to the Funk. But even George seemed to be hating on it. “From there on… I just got a little resistance from those guys,” he says. “It was weird… I thought it was part of the gig. I didn’t know it was creating animosity… I was bringing my A game.”But Andre persisted, and over the course of the mid 80s to 2014 he performed with the P-Funk AllStars, sharing the stage with Blackbyrd, Garry Shider, Mike Hampton, and Billy Bass. “We all were expected to do the job,” says Andre about holding his own while doing the gig. “You’re not on the stage if you’re unqualified… Because, if you can’t do it, there’s 15 other cats that can come up here and outdo you. So if you got the blessing to do this job you better do these parts… And that’s how I was able to stay focused.” But life as a funk soldier wasn’t always what it was cracked up to be, and Andre was constantly in and out of the lineup. “I think I’ve been fired more than anybody in the whole P-Funk organization,” he quips. But nowadays the wisdom of hindsight has overruled any ill will he’s had toward George Clinton in the past. “I’ve said some bad things about that cat, and I’m sure he said some bad things about me too,” he admits, “But I realized I really love the dude… He was like Dad…. In families and relationships, you go back and forth with the parental figures… I can see his worth to the world and the music industry. I get it now. Because he’s a very valuable dude. He should be an American treasure, if you ask me.”In this unique, insightful hangout session, Foxxe talks about first wanting to play bass because of his love for Jermaine Jackson, becoming a guitar player while high on mescaline at Garry and Linda Shider’s house, and what P-Funk songs he helped create but never got credit for. He also talks about touring in Africa with afrobeat drummer/innovator Tony Allen, working as an A&R guy for Japan’s P-Vine records, his lifelong friendship with Amp Fiddler, and what it was like having EDDIE “Maggot Brain” HAZEL as a mentor and roommate for four years. Produced & Hosted by Ace AlanCohosted by Jay Stonew/ Content Produced by Jay Double You! & Andre FoxxeWebsite & Art by 3chardsEngineered by Nick “Waes” Carden at the Blue Room in Oakland, CABut we couldn’t have done it without Mawnstr and especially Scott SheppardIntro track “I Can Never Be” from Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth by the Funkanauts. Go get it wherever music is sold. RIP Brotha P.This episode is dedicated to Bay Area Legend SHOCK G (August 25, 1963 – April 22, 2021)

Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Brady Report - Wednesday April 21, 2021

Do you remember the Billy Big Mouth novelty bass? Can you name all 23 flavors of Otter Pops? What about Windy City Heat? Well if not, have no fear. Local thrift store mannequin made flesh Austin Langley stopped by to eat some sweet, sweet 'member berries with the boys. You can see Austin performing stand-up all over Denver and you can purchase a lot of approximately 100 used Billy Bass novelty toys on ebay for 500 USD. As-is, Local Pick-up. click here for the video Follow us and do as we command: Austin Langley on facebook and probably linkdin @alanbromwell @coreyjcooley theperilouspodcast.com alanbromwell.com Wade in the Water by The Pine Hill Haints Take Me To The River by Talking Heads

Click Here for the Full Episode NotesIn the aftermath of the January 6th siege of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters, Laura convenes a panel of pro-democracy activists to discuss the fate of the nation. What really led to the events of January 6th and how should we move forward? How do we go from insurrection to cooperation in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy? Is building a healthy political ecosystem and humane economy even possible in the America we have today? And can the Biden/Harris administration solve what ails us? Panelists Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner at Change Lab, Ash-Lee Henderson, Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Center, and Eric Ward, Executive Director at the Western States Center, discuss all this and more.  Music in the Middle:  “Dancefloor Democracy” by FSQ featuring George Clinton, Trey Lewd and Billy ‘Bass' Nelson courtesy of Soul Clap Records. If everyone of our dedicated, forward thinking listeners like you committed just $3 a month, we'd have a solid financial foundation to meet the urgency of these times head on in doing the crucial reporting on solutions, change makers and forward thinkers! Goto Patreon.com/theLFShow. 

Billy Bass lives near Orlando and was eating a piece of steak when it became lodged in his throat and he started choking.  He was home alone, so he went to the next door neighbors house and that’s when Karen Aranda performed the Heimlich.  There was a Ring doorbell on Karen’s porch, so the end of the issue was all captured on video. You can hear Billy in the video say to Karen, “You saved my life.” A Tampa Bay area teen has been adopted and over 60 people got to witness it over video conference. Autumn is 17-years-old and was adopted by Mary Goe and Mary wanted show Autumn how special she is. “I wanted to make sure Autumn knew how special she was,” Goe told said. “How many lives she has touched and how many people will support her. so with 66 people on here, I really think you guys are showing her that.”

Just because the Guys can’t be in the same room together during stay-at-home orders, doesn’t mean they still can’t ramble on for half an hour anyway.  Thank you, technology.   And this week they give their takes on a handful of technological breakthroughs that have now, essentially, put on the brakes.  From lightsaber apps, to aux cords connected to cassette tape adapters, to Billy Bass, to Netflix DVD’s (hey…wait a minute…), the Guys reminisce about gadgets and such that were at one point essential “personnel” but have since been sent home.   When it comes to Geeks of the Week, Robbie says it’s hip to be Square, Jay’s still playing with high-end legos, and Art is ready to join (or at least watch) the Space Force.  Call the delivery guy, grab a donut chicken sandwich, and listen.  

We couldn't remember if this was one of the Steve Carrell movies where he makes miniature dolls! (Unfortunately, it isn't).Cass and Els are joined by comedian Elise Fernandez to talk about Billy Bass, wholesome Twitter exchanges, and how these kids need to start pantsing each other already! Follow Spotted: @spotted_pod on Instagram and TwitterFollow Elise: @dads_newgirlfriend, @biggaywitchpod, @diamondcomedyhour, @ladylikechicagoFollow Cass and Els: @thefakecass and @activesandalEdits by Nate Lamkin Logo by Elsie How (@activesandal)Theme by Tracie Kunzika (@zikavirus97)Recommendations mentioned in this episode: David and Goliath by Malcolm GladwellThe Sopranos (HBO) Shot in the Dark (Netflix)The Circle (Netflix)Mandy (2018) Jubilee (YouTube)

Welcome to The Wild Card Podcast!  This is episode 133 of our attempt at this whole podcasting thing!! Today's episode features: Jared Eaton serving as a non-perverted Subway spokesperson, Jeff Curtis escaping from Colditz Castle, Ron Blair being a little scruffy-looking, and Special Guest: Billy Bass (who is definitely related to a singing fish)!! Throughout the episode, you'll hear the four of us discuss such varied topics as: the way this podcast is about the severe C.H.U.D. problem facing New York City, the items which should be named after us, a commercial direct to your earholes, the best Bob Fosse musical, making cocktails on the YouTube, the Cuban refugees in the Land Before Time, the finest orange juice in the world (Ron doesn't get any), and occasionally we part from our tangents to learn about the Conch Republic. This week, Billy explains the origins of this micronation, the famous invasions of 1995, their lauded military exploits, and even some incredible fun facts!  Join us on this journey to wherever and we're sure you'll do nothing but secede as you listen to our Shell-tastic Podcast!Please like/subscribe and leave comments below! Let us know your thoughts on The Conch Republic, your favorite micronations, your favorite Billy Bass moments/memories, what items should be named after each of us (or which should be named after you), whether you think O Mercado's oj is as good as Ron thinks it is, any future reports you'd like us to do, and if you are interested in being an official Deckhead!P.S.  “We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them."~ Shane KoyczanP.P.S. Bite the Edge!

from ACTION NEWS JAX: "Florida man battered boyfriend with Billy Bass fish" Derrick really hated that singing fish. Caleb and Jess try to figure out why and go on a trip with Big Mouth Billy Bass through the troubled corridors of post-capitalist television and into the realm of ancient Babylonian revenge gods. Then they talk about fishing. And Morrissey. Music by Miami's premiere Smith's cover-band, Ordinary Boys.

On this week's episode, Blake becomes a wizard, Scottye goes out for BBQ and the boyz summon dark entities! After that, Blake brings a tell us a tale of his amazing trip to Ikea and Scottye gives away his entire plan for an epic space audio-drama! Links ALoadOfPureBS.com Merch.ALoadOfPureBS.com Patreon.com/ALoadOfBS Twitter @ALoadOfPureBS @BlakeATanner @Scottyemo

We’re back (a dinosaur’s story), and we come bearing the gifts of CWs for sexual assault, rape, and CSA! But also, we’re talking about some great movies, including one of those slippery, queasy Awesome Movies Directed By a Reprehensible Person, and one movie that’s kind of a dud. Also, now we’re 25% of the way […]

We’re back (a dinosaur’s story), and we come bearing the gifts of CWs for sexual assault, rape, and CSA! But also, we’re talking about some great movies, including one of those slippery, queasy Awesome Movies Directed By a Reprehensible Person, and one movie that’s kind of a dud. Also, now we’re 25% of the way done with the first round, hooray!Oh yeah, and just so we don’t get any emails or tweets about it: Isabelle does in fact mean to say Sam Spade (the famous fictional detective), and not Sam Malone (Ted Danson’s character on Cheers). To be fair, “Sam Malone” would be a good name for a noir gumshoe.This week’s matchups: The Great Escape v. Chinatown The Godfather Part II v. Perfect Blue–See the bracket [SPOILERS AHEAD] Drop us a line: middlebrowmadness@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter: @middlebrowpod Follow Isabelle on Twitter: @spacejamfan Follow Derek on Twitter: @derek_g

High octane radio. How to fold laundry (properly). Getting the church to clap. Billy Bass. C'mon people it's all here. Recorded live, March 28th, at hotdirt.net

EP165 - Amazon Alexa's David Isbitski David Isbitski (@thedavedev)is the Chief Evangelist for Alexa at Amazon. In this interview, we cover a wide range of topics including the growth of the Alexa platform, the evolution of the developer community, the future of voice, and voice commerce specifically. Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 165 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday, February 22, 2019 from the eTail West tradeshow in Palm Desert, CA. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason “Retailgeek” Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded on Friday February 22nd 2019 live from the etail West Trade Show here in not completely Sunny Palm Desert I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and unfortunately Scott is trapped on an airplane so we are going to make a lot of fun of him and hopefully assign him some action items for after the show, long-time listen to the show will know that if we were to make a word cloud of everything that we’ve said in the hundred and seventy something episodes. Amazon would be the biggest word on that word cloud and Alexa would probably be third I think Star Wars might so I can let you be. David: [1:02] Well that’s good to hear. Jason: [1:03] Be ahead of Alexa, but obviously we talked about a lot on the show so I guess we’re super happy to have on this week’s show is Dave a bitsky who’s the chief of Vangelis for Alexa at Amazon welcome to the show. David: [1:17] Thanks for having me super happy to be here. Jason: [1:19] Yeah so I record a lot of these for my home studio and the first thing I have to do is mute all of my Alexa devices. David: [1:28] Oh yeah I’m the same way yeah in fact even when I’m on stage if I’m Kino to hear something when I say her name there’s still that thread that goes through my head waiting for a response. Jason: [1:42] Oh no it’s something going wrong. David: [1:43] Yeah yeah. Jason: [1:45] So David for a long time with some of the show we always like to start by getting just a little background about the the guests can you tell us a little bit about your backup. David: [1:52] Yeah sure I guess it depends on how far you want to go back. Jason: [1:57] I have your high school records of. David: [1:59] Yeah yeah exactly so I grew up in the 80s in Commodore and this this vision of how, science fiction and Technology was a future rights what do you mention Star Wars growing up on Star Wars and things like, the black hole right and Star Trek and all of that and I just, man I want to be a part of it and I remember speech technology TTS text-to-speech back then be able to do stuff like that I had to do that and. [2:29] I just I was like man when is this going to happen right and I started out any e-commerce 96-97 building. Commerce pipelines actually competing against Amazon was just getting started the time at this company called microwarehouse macwarehouse and then I did web whole rise of the web did want you to. Com Consulting did I, Enterprise gig in a large pharmaceutical company, and that was my me trying management and realized it wasn’t my cup of tea I just I love that I love being, I love traveling talking to people and using new technology which is right and around 2007, October to a Microsoft December roll to I have now there a lot of stuff around games and mobile and worked on Windows phone and Xbox Kinect, and then I joined Amazon, oh gosh 2013 help out with the we are kicking off the Android App Store that we have with the new Kindle Fire tablets did that watch Fire TV is Saint with fire phone and then. I am super fortunate I was Employee one for Alexa skill marketing team around 2014, and now it’s crazy where everything is now in 2019. Jason: [3:45] That’s awesome so I don’t listen to the show will know that Scott and I are two of the four Alexa fire owners so you. David: [3:51] But thank you I still have mine. Jason: [3:52] We sometimes we have our suit we sometimes predict it shall rise again I’m not asking you to. David: [3:59] The dynamic perspective stuff still awesome. Jason: [4:01] Yeah there’s that there’s some cool features so that’s going to be interesting to see if you have a rear job and Amazon you mentioned liking to talk to people I would argue the majority of Amazon employees are not encouraged to talk to her. David: [4:13] Yeah I’m just I’m one of those rare birds where I approved, Alexa’s spokesperson Amazon spokesperson, I’ve been doing it for a long time though I’ve been in very much these Community Building public-facing you know kind of marketing PR working with marketing and PR roles, and there’s always a need for that because you know. I have this belief like large companies we all have processes and there’s so many things that if it falls out of that process gets lost, and I’ve always looked at my job to be the person that’s finding all those anecdotes cuz they’re so important cuz a lot of times there’s signs for things that need to change or that we missed and that we need to do better, and I’ve always I left startup mentality and unfortunate Amazon is just as Perpetual startup mentality it’s not for everyone but it’s it’s Scrappy man it is like and that’s, I love that I love where things aren’t to find you got to figure him out there tough problems you’re constantly inventing things you have to think about the customer problem and dive deep in the stuffing, I’ve just been able to make a job out of that you know it’s it’s funny because funny you ask that I’ve gone on a couple podcast, the past few months cuz that seems to be the big thing is like. Jason: [5:30] I guess to warm up with a couple of those farm system podcast before they come here so that’s all. David: [5:34] Yeah it’s like you got to start thinking about cuz you cuz it’s so all over the place there’s no defined like I went through this. Where I was like, I’m old enough that all of my friends now are turning into CIO CTO xorbee peas and I’m like I’m doing this thing, what is this thing exact but I love it and I would talk to him if you like crazy but we do sucks I would love to do what you do. So it’s like just Embrace what you’re passionate about and get down there and if I like to look at it like if I saw 12 year old me, and he was asking me when all this Tech was going to happen I make it happen for him and keep him happy. Jason: [6:13] I like it I like it I also like your Amiga Roots I actually work for, nor in the. David: [6:17] Oh man we got to talk. Jason: [6:18] Yeah that that text-to-speech engine was called Sam so Sam was the person. David: [6:22] Yeah yeah well I still have it I have I have been working Amiga fully 1000 or 2000 I’ve 600 1200 I still Google Talk. Jason: [6:30] That’s why I sent my nigga 1000 predates, door and it’s actually in the The Tech Museum in San Francisco. David: [6:34] I have never been but I’ve always wanted to go. Jason: [6:39] They’re a couple of those key Engineers one of them is a Google Now RJ Michael. And one of them Jim Mayer Who did all the hardware chips is actually the the Chief Architect behind the Roku. David: [6:53] Yeah yeah. Jason: [6:54] Fancy Nails guys continued. David: [6:56] And Dave Haney is I’ve seen him out in so where I am cuz I’m near Philly there still it’s like in, in like Wall jersey there’s this Tech thing and he comes out there and people talk about forgetting his name but he helped build Amiga 3000 and 4000 and a couple of things like that he’s out there, but a lot of people stayed in the area after Valley Forge after a little. Jason: [7:22] The the USA quarters for, nor was in West Chester Pennsylvania I was based in San Diego and so my boss never trusted that I was working cuz if you’re in Westchester in winter. That you don’t think the young kids in San Diego doing anything years later I visited a client in Westchester and I’m getting at the address to their thing it’s the old commodore. Marker 01 David: [7:42] Yeah well that’s on its QVC or Home Shopping Network is one of those owns that whole campus map. Marker 02 Jason: [7:50] Jumping back to today stopping at appreciate the reminiscing. David: [7:55] We can look forward without looking back. Jason: [7:57] Absolutely you talk a little bit about your role love to hear just a little bit more about your turn trolling as it is it mainly like developer poking focusing is it mainly like consumer adoption. David: [8:06] No we hire teams that are on that now I would say you can think of me as helping incubate new Alexa businesses, so I worked a lot with Alexa for business helping them get started a lot of what I do is helping Brands nowadays to what does it mean in this boy’s first world how do you connect with your customers. How do you build better quality conversations things like that so it’s it’s new areas yeah it’s, the nice thing about having such large teams is once I’ve done something and I can operationalize it it’s not something that I never need to do again and I burnout least called isbitski burn out when I was growing up where, I’m always it’s funny if you look at personality test like if you know anything about the five core traits I have super high in enthusiasm and. Open to new experiences and assertiveness which basically means that even when I was a kid, I would get super excited about something I make all my friends go and follow me and do that thing and then six months later I’d be excited about something else and I feel like we all need to try this now right now Amazon with all the different things that we’re doing now, to be able to do that. Jason: [9:20] That’s awesome couple quick things we want to get out of the way like what’s your personal wake word at home for your Alexa devices. David: [9:26] So it’s always been Alexa I mess around with computer when it was out but by then we already had a relationship with Alexa and it’s interesting here’s a little anecdote Cell 2014 when I would talk about it, and I would talk to press and think everybody would say the Amazon Echo, and then I noticed about six months in people would say Alexa and that wasn’t like anything from that people just started saying Alexa cuz you hadn’t you could say Amazon you can do it was a smart speaker. Now when I talk to people they say our Alexa I don’t know if you picked up on that which is super interesting because it’s become part of the family it’s our Alexa right it’s not Alexa that’s hard Alexa she has her own way of knowing what we like. Jason: [10:05] Indeed she does and I know we we love all our children but do you have a personal favorite Alexa device. David: [10:13] Oh boy well I love the new show at home I would say there’s three I had love the new show Thomas cuz super big screen, and that’s the main one on my desk if anyone is curious I really loved the spots and that’s my kids have enough and I also have one in the den cuz it looks like a clock, you know it’s just a perfect little little size and my third favorite is I have a head for years are Garmin speak which looks like a little tiny Echo dot in my car, and that’s why I listen to podcasts because I have a Honda and so I have Android auto and I have carplay Nike all that but what I find is just saying with voice to go ahead and without having to hold down a button or doing anything and just pause, play the latest episode of and then I mentioned this in the keynote today but you know if you do a lot of trouble and you listen to podcast news in the audio books are sometimes where you’re like, especially stuff I was sometimes it gets deep and you’re like my brain shutting off I just want to play a game, so I play games I played like Westworld and it played Skyrim and I put Jeopardy and a car I think this, I’m a I’m a huge gamer so right by my own gaming rig at home and I have consoles I have Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. [11:31] When I’m in a car and there’s an Alexa skill available I’m surprised how much I’m engaging with that stuff so I think there’s you know it’s it’s, it’s about the situation you’re in right and in continued conversation as fun my kids doing and yeah. Jason: [11:46] I like it I like all those devices I have to say my new favorite though is the Billy Bass. David: [11:51] Yes but I if you look if you go to my Twitter there’s a link to a dead reinvent so that team they weren’t they were going to watch that, and so a Tremont I did a talk and I did the actual unveiling, of the twerking Santa and Bear, I think about like a even a little man with a flag if you need to take your medication use and that’s just a visual for somebody in the home like my parents are old to be able to see that they walk in and they see it you can’t have light but there’s all sorts of things you could do it right, somebody can make that maybe you’re delivering a package again little guy carrying a package or something like that right it’s just it’s integration with his of objects I think it’s pretty neat for notifications that way. Jason: [12:36] The old digital physical things going to continue to be an amazing at Lowe’s, you alerted your talk today so your topic was how to talk to your customers in a voice person world can you give us a little bit of a recap about like what the what the topic was there and what you got. David: [12:52] Yeah you know it’s a sew-in audience like this and with the 25-minute keynote it’s like what do you talk about right and so for me a lot of it ctas and so I always break this down into three things, is there going to be people never heard this they’re going to be people that have a relationship with Alexa already and so. And then maybe people getting gas how do they do this until I always start it off with what does the future look like cuz I’m constantly thinking about that what does it look like 5 years, you know head and why we we look back right so we start off with that kind of paint with a futures. [13:27] Make sure people know that this is Amazon is just part of that, but this whole voice first is huge you need to think of it like the internet even even bigger right it’s it it’s the interface for everything it’s the human technology relationship moving forward, and it makes everything accessible and simple and so I make sure people understand that and then explain some of the Core Concepts because I think even for me when I start my shift same for me cuz I’m stupid everybody should just assume for me the first time I use this is I use voice control before the stuff doesn’t really work right and that’s not what this is this is understanding intention, something called natural language understanding is not TTS it’s not looking at phonemes and actually translating them into the letters right it’s different so getting people to understand that and ways that doesn’t get to computer science he and, try to make myself look smart or anything like that right side motor stand in terms like that and then, third party that is okay well what can I do today and what have you learned. [14:30] Because I get to you lot I have this unique view of the field when I talk to somebody customers I have access to so many teams at Amazon I’m always thinking in this space A lot of times when I meet with people they just, used to freak me out was like what what can I have to offer and they’re like Dave your view the field this you meant just share with us something so you know and so that’s what I try and do as I learn new things and I talked to customers and we’ve released new features based on that feedback I includes those in the Kia Soul a lot of it is this is what customers are saying this is how people are using it today they could be using it differently a year from now and this is what you need to be thinking about and, starting to focus on. Jason: [15:08] Fair enough and so most of the listeners of this show are our brands are retailers like. 4 Brands like how should they be thinking about like is it a no-brainer that they should be building a branded skill is there a different more nuanced way they should be thinking about it. David: [15:23] That’s funny. I always feel like I’m in a Morpheus in The Matrix and they might my Syfy should write my what if I told you what if I told you and you could talk to your customer, everyday in the moment where they are on their own terms. That’s an Alexa skill or Flash briefing or in any pain but that’s what this is doesn’t exist is always been a barrier and so if that interests you it’s about what I like to call meeting your customer in the moment, and it’s your tongue got really like I was growing up in Jersey I had it you know I work two jobs since I was, gosh like 10 with a paper out but I remember one of my favorite jobs work in a movie theater. I can still tell you I would have to say to people would you like to upgrade that to a large popcorn and a large soda for only $0.25 more the big combo special right but it was that up sale in brick and mortar right there and it’s in the moment and that is, completely different than it did not purchase react hit the side button or use your fingerprint or any of that kind of stuff right you’ve already enabled it knows your voice you can set up a pin but it’s seamless and nothing beats time, right and that’s what that’s for Brands is something they just think about is customer in the moment having a conversation with them every day and. [16:48] What would they say if they could talk to you today what brands don’t know other than the help desk tickets right and I’ve seen companies now. Where they are now looking at the Amazon skill reviews as part of their entire ux cycle to know what new features they need to be releasing because it’s the easiest thing that people can just talk you know and so you need to be thinking about those things and then, lastly what I tell them is what is your brand sound like Miami for us you know podcasters and listen to felt like for me I just, I loved one for me audio I love conversation I’m always thinking in those terms but I find most brands it’s still very visual social is visual so it was a bunch of images and video and so what does it mean. [17:34] Do I use Alexis voice do I use my own voice do I have create a new voice of the company, write like Jeopardy skills Alex Trebek that you here right and then we you know based on feedback we provide more and more voices so you can generate through what we have a service and Amazon web services closed poly so I can generate all sorts of voices if I need to do that but that’s another thing that they need to start thinking about in the moment, what do I sound like one of my customers asking for where they want to have an early day so it’s, Newcastle new customer acquisition is not going to be like what you think in Mobile and wet right it’s early like early mobile web days but man if you have an existing customer and they have a device, and I’ve ordered something from you and I can just say reorder, or when is that coming right or check on a status or even games like Destiny made us feel other games and made a scale where you can just say hey what’s my friend score right like you’re just like that it’s interacting again without what I was talking about is it is human, technology that relationship together and that’s really what’s enabling and that’s to me is a couple spaces where it’s just a huge and exciting business brands, Auto Vitaly. Jason: [18:56] It is interesting the likes of the there certain brands that. Needed we have this permission to have a daily conversation with a client because of the nature of the brand in the product or whatever and it seems like it’s a no-brainer for them that they need to have a scale and be there a way to have a. David: [19:14] There’s certainly some of that like the early web days where it was like I have a skill and then you talk to the scales just about the company I mean I was building those websites for Brands back in the early 90s. Jason: [19:23] But if you’re the Weather Channel or something like it would be foolish not to. David: [19:28] Yeah yeah. Jason: [19:29] Have a skill there because again there’s people are going to get up every day and want to know what the weather is and how to get dressed. The children have a little bit with some Scott like it’s just needed to voice we talked a lot about app fatigue on the phone right and if you’re not one of the apps on the front page of the phone you get forgotten pretty quickly. David: [19:46] Yeah. Jason: [19:47] On voice we don’t even get the visual cue so the problem is there to be 300 great skills that I’ve enabled on my Alexa echo system, if I don’t have a daily reason to use them I’m likely to forget a bunch of them exist and so that like so some of these by I probably don’t want a daily relationship with Charmin toilet paper. Sherman still thinking about how are Branch it evolved in a world in which voices are super important in her face like any advice for those cut like I feel like you’re mostly going to interact with Charmander, through the native utterances on the on the Alexa platform is going to be at. David: [20:25] But what’s interesting is like. Why have a mobile app to write like you these are all of it doesn’t change any of those questions what it does changes what’s the relationship of my customer right the demographic of the customer ships, voice, you mean somebody has to understand they have to have a smartphone they have to know how to patch it after I have downloader app get the latest version of your dad if they’re using a web browser they still have to be able to patch the OS on a computer do all those things, in some of these devices you’re talkin like 5 $10 right and it’s always the latest version. There’s never been a technology as a brand where your customer has the latest version of your experience at all times right, cuz even the web I mean man, I spent so many years with all the different web browser differences there is not I’m sorry there is not one version of your and anybody that’s how to program client-side knows that and you know jQuery and other things made things easier but gosh, that is in a nightmare so it’s that except my dad and he said my mom still print out emails. But he’s never did with his money right really gave you really turn on computer my dad, you know he’s a butcher he’s retired now never touch computers life and when we’re hanging out he tells me about songs he pulled out and thinks he’s talked to you with Alexa. [21:44] And that’s when the light bulb went off for me is I’m like this is empowering man like this is like anybody can do this stuff and so maybe toilet paper isn’t important for me and my age but maybe, it is for somebody else that needs to think about stuff that right so it’s that’s what you really need to think about what’s the demographic, your customers if any demographic had access to it cuz there’s kids that are talking to everything now, because they’re used to Alexa right I hear from customers are expected to so when that happens right that opens to meet new possibilities, and so you need to focus on those things and look at existing customers when I like to tell people is. To get to the utility of speed right nothing being speed go look at your mobile app and look at the top 10 things people are doing what are they doing everyday they’re probably doing that one thing everyday cuz it’s fastest on mobile. So if you can make that faster, even if it’s just checking on the status even if it’s just a reorder or maybe it’s getting information we try to do things to make it easier to have conversations and so we have the ability for you to say something like that. [22:57] Alexa how do I remove a grass stain now I may not know what brand but a brand can respond, right cuz that’s a human being to think we may not remember the full invocation or anything like that until we try to do more and more of those things or Alexa play a game and I get some suggestions but it’s about, what you think about this is Alexis going to learn about you what do you what do you like your right and what are what’s, getting reviewed well and things like that so if that’s kind of I think. To me and this is going to sound crazy from a guy that’s spent so many years building app stores across so many platforms, but to me I don’t see that 10-15 years down the road, right cuz I put all the onus on the human being would I see 10-15 years down the road is an AI that knows me intimately that’s already out there, and remembers things so can be like hey Dave and we had a conversation a month ago about XYZ topic I just found some information about that if that’s what we want we never had that and that’s what voice is going to enable imagine trying to do that in a mobile app. Jason: [24:02] Yeah I totally agree I feel like a lot of these things that we have to explicitly enable is apps or skills or whatever like become implicit like apis or capabilities that we just. David: [24:12] I could always do it because for some reason computers, I just nerd it out on them I love them just even in like we talked about it maybe I just spent two hours like making my icons perfect. It was fun, and I used to get upset that I couldn’t share that with people cuz it’s such a joy to me and people like right like they just didn’t like it and so I knew did that was just inherently broken if there’s such that technical divide that something else has to be there right and this is it man this is the. The big enabler. Jason: [24:44] Why don’t you mention the kids screaming at the Alexa ideas funny like two things that come up in my newsfeed a lot lately you are, advice for parents that we need to teach our kids to use politeness with our our Alexa stop Alexa devices because there’s some risk of. That’s raising a less polite culture because kids are used to sharing commands at the other devices and they respond. David: [25:07] My anus is there and this isn’t a belief isn’t that starts with the family what starts with the individual first in the family and then the family. [25:18] These up to the Community Practice Community is a bunch of families and so regardless of what technology was introduced we’ve always had a set family Rules so when. Screen when we first started getting iPads and and the Kindle Fire and things like that we had to set rules around screen time. And some of those rules where you do homework first you do not know when we wake up on the weekend first thing I’m doing is not logging you into these things when we eat dinner as a family for us everybody put phones away. Included, right and so that is in something that comes with the manual for that technology has something you decide as a family and then as a culture so voice for me absolutely was that because when we first got it early days I be playing music and my, so this is 2014 so gosh she was six, and she would run into the room and say Alexa tell me a joke and I be like that’s listening to music so then we had to do a family joke that said you know like this is what’s rude this is not with rude, and you can do stuff like we did hear from families, so we enabled stuff like a follow-up mode so if Alexa does something and you say thank you she’ll say you’re welcome back she recognizes all of those things or whisper so if you a little one at home and you can be like Alexa, quiet and she’ll Whisper back which is a very interesting the first time you hear it cuz it’s so human to do that you know and so you can enable whisper mode. Jason: [26:46] Yeah I know it’s totally totally cool like the other parental thing that’s happened is Amazon has completely wiped out the the female child’s name Alexa. Parents don’t want to name their kid for you no fear of triggering all those devices Olive. David: [27:02] Yeah well I do I talk to families that have names that are similar in that they are all Amazon or Echo. Jason: [27:11] So it might be my family I have a sister-in-law named Alexis which is close enough inside where we’re at Echo family cuz we also for work say Amazon to off. David: [27:21] What’s going to be the new left handed right. Jason: [27:23] Exactly is that at that is exactly what it is so I mentioned the other listeners are retailers, the default position for a retailer is Alexa is the evil, front door of my competitor and I’m desperately rooting for any other artificial intelligence technology to win because when Alexa wins that comes attached to my competitors store, are they. If that’s true that’s fair enough like I mean there’s a lot of competitors in the world is that true or is there a way in which we like Israel and which Walmart should be thinking about how to leverage Alexa or are they right. David: [27:58] They could completely make an Alexa skill it’s open to everybody it’s interesting because even and this is going to be in iOS use Amazon services, was because they weren’t locking into an ecosystem I could use my Amazon video, my Windows device on my Android device on my iPad and I could get my Kindle book on the Kindle I had 10 years ago where I can download it onto my phone audible working across everything so it was always I always viewed Amazon. It always depends on the space that you’re in right so I always do that was on as this Innovative tech company and that that was not locking it is all about giving in the customer choice right and so for me. [28:50] I never looked at it as what you’re you’re saying that’s just a personal on an Amazon note, from day one this is been open everybody don’t charge the idea has been that voice, review is the next big disruption it’s the human. Technology interface so it has to be everywhere so we’re not going to be the one to do that we’ve got to open it up to everybody, and so that’s why you see it in the IQ and I we can make our own Echo, there’s hardware specs to lake house and then you and I can go sell it on Amazon for five bucks and we can make it the retail geek Echo, write and let me know that that Tech and so it’s, that but that benefits everybody because it’s helping customers its helping push it for its I view that the people that aren’t that would say something like that are the people that would say cuz I dealt with this years ago to that would say, that I’m not going to use HTML in the internet because Google Microsoft phones. [29:50] And no they don’t own it it’s the way that human beings are going to talk that’s what this is there’s no single company infected. Jeff has said I completely agree with him is that there’s going to be hundreds of a eyes in real life not just okay I mean Alexa maybe the one, I want you spray but there’s going to be all sorts of him and eventually we’re going to want them although to talk to each other, and that’s what this is this isn’t some smartprix speaker that you can order stuff on although you can this is a new way of human beings interacting with technology and it’s going to be in everything everywhere. Jason: [30:25] It involves the normal Trend like usually these Technologies come about and they start out as like wall Gardens where everyone wants like everything in their own echo system so I got I go to CES every year for 30 years. David: [30:37] My apologies. Jason: [30:38] It’s like I did not say it is a matter of pride, the first year there’s a voice interface for televisions everyone has invented their own voice interface and it only works in their echosystem than they imagined you can buy all the devices in your home from just from LG or Samsung and you know you walk that show three years later and. Frankly like this year there’s an Alexa and a Google logo on every one of those devices and it just. David: [31:00] Customer choice. Jason: [31:03] How to make is a better experience with a customer. David: [31:05] Nothing’s nothing’s in a vacuum all of our lives have multiple endpoints and we just want to simplify that. Jason: [31:11] You talked a little earlier you’re like hey if we looked at that uses on the phone there’s like certain things that would have weight higher usage because they’re just the the low-friction best best things to do in the phone and like there certainly is an analogous twist, her voice and relax all right until we’ve seen some of the surveys and it’s, people overwhelming we are going to use it to play music to get information you know there’s and you probably know the exact list on making it up. David: [31:36] Because we’re at bombers show. Jason: [31:37] Commerce show like we always notice like at the moment Converse is pretty low on those lists like it does not appear. The primary thing very many people are using their device for is to place orders for for stuff and I’m just curious if you have a POV is. David: [31:55] Is Jason: [31:58] You are truly an adoption or is it never likely to be the dominant thing we do the invoice or what your. David: [32:04] It will be the dominant for everything is my opinion but I mean I’m old enough to have heard people say that about the web and mobile as well, and that’s what you want man you want you want it to just you want in those early days where you’re going to see it up Tick and get in cuz that’s when you can build a really strong brand and really strong relationships. It’s early days but there’s nothing like in the moment so I’ll give you an example. If you follow like the thinking of like app store, where you can buy like Jeopardy you can buy extended and you can do more questions and things like the offer that you can do premium subscription answer today. Jason: [32:52] Forgot to take stuff the bus. David: [32:54] Nice nice and you can do the innocent and I think people are familiar with that but people were familiar with that in the beginning I mean I grew up I’d buy go to Electronics Boutique and buy a game and that was it man I wasn’t like I was spending five bucks a week on a skin I just paid one price right and so it’s funny we can get used to it and so there’s that model, but there’s also did integrates with Amazon pay so physical Goods in things like I’ve started seat like you guys have a podcast maybe you have somebody on the podcast that has a product if you had an Alexa skill where people can listen to your podcast right in the middle of it you could say you know for 50% off would you like to purchase this and then you’re getting, physical Goods in you’re getting part of that Amazon affiliate program and things like that right then you have other types of skills that look at it as an endpoint. [33:43] So I do this is It’s At Its if I don’t do it all the time but it’s my it’s my guilty pleasure I love the Domino’s thin-crust Pizza I’ve always have the grown up in Jersey and, so if I’m when I’m not traveling and we calling my house Friday night party table I’ll be like all right Friday night and so as I do is say Alexa, ask Domino’s for my easy order boom it’s already got credit cards not going through Amazon that’s an existing customer relationship, we have something that we call account linking so you don’t even have to go through Amazon use Amazon pay you don’t have to use login with Amazon you can have your own existing customer relationship they see screen it’s like a mobile, analog in a waffle those kind of things so you could use any of those providers or your own so it’s an existing customer through a different endpoint, and I’m surprised even in my own life the use in that and so I think this is my thought. [34:46] Is that nothing as human beings when it comes to technology and this is especially with purchasing beats speed. That’s why I think I shipped it and most people shipped it to mobile. Because I don’t want to go log on to my what the title is a desktop and a laptop and patch and get to the browser and figure it out is in the website and then using them over I mean it’s Common Sense instead of even using the mobile, I just say Alexa ask your brand to order my stuff. [35:17] So what does that look like when people started using that year after year after year was that look like 5 years what does that look like. People who may be caught the people that would call up a number to order stuff right I have I won’t name my in-laws that she is huge QVC Home Shopping Network all of those things. Call the number doesn’t use the app you know and so and she picked up in a wax on her own and I and was telling me about all these skills it was funny, I just want to run away maybe 1,000 scales and I were over 80,000 and. She’s like I brought it to play the Eagles she’s huge Eagles fan and I was like, you know I already I already pulled up every album I know how to search might like I I’ve never had, a relative a family member ever just run with a new piece of technology have you it’s like you literally you go there over the holidays in your patch and stuff and your training and maybe you’re trying to reorder some what are something new cuz what they have is so outdated, the song it’s like it’s an appliance the hardware is the appliance, this day is getting smart and smarter over time said that I think if you just naturally think about human behavior. Write an end how we act and if you make something easier and you give me incentives that’s just naturally the way things are going to go. Jason: [36:45] That’s right I mean I feel like there’s two points and then I would totally agree with theirs. The experience and product are going to get an exponentially better because I just wanted some everything at the magically improves and it’s just better than next day versus like these, product we have to make one go back to the drawing board design version 2 and you know it’s a much longer duration and for sure I have also in my life via in-laws seen the leapfrogging Where do I, there’s a bunch of the user interfaces that are so complicated my relatives are never going to learn them. David: [37:16] But then just let prognose in her faces yeah. Jason: [37:16] I just left brought those interfaces the laptop in the phone and now you know the voice they are they’re totally capable of embracing, the I do and I I’ll be honest I’m nervous about this opinion because I’ve shared it a bunch of times and I have the whole deck of Ono was ever going to buy clothes on the internet no one’s ever going to buy a TV on the internet and like almost any time you hear that. Precondition to no guarantee that’s going to be wrong. David: [37:43] Info. Jason: [37:46] So voice Commerce I have a slightly nuanced guess, I feel like there’s a category of stuff that people probably aren’t going to buy any internet that are high consideration, they require a bunch of complicated brand specific attributes right like so I’m not likely to go hey Alexa order I will leave Urbana leopard skin size medium. Address for 2-day delivery here’s my promo code right like out I probably will never wear in the vernacular to order a dress for the first time with all those custom words in it. But that’s how you know just one chunk of Commerce incident okay I see that Jason but I think all of this like consumables and replenishment and order the peanut butter everyone’s going to do via voice I get that response a lot and I would even say. The easiest stuff I actually think Amazon’s going to figure that out without voice like I feel like you’re just going to send me the Charmin toilet paper, and no I need it before I need it right and so. David: [38:44] Yeah but that’s just making customers lives easier. Jason: [38:47] Which is a good thing so it to me voice is going to fit in this middle Zone which could be a huge chunk but I called the Goldilocks zone. Too complicated to learn how to say and stuff that’s not perfectly predictable what my consumption pattern is right and so are your point like the pizza is. David: [39:06] Make a perfect example in this. Jason: [39:07] Check example in the Starbucks and hey I have family coming over double my peanut butter order all those kinds of things like manicuring aren’t my reoccurring. David: [39:14] Super Bowl commercial with Harrison Ford and so it’s it’s super interesting because it’s, individual based like maybe this was two or three holiday seasons ago we released like what people ordered through Alexa and people were ordering like huge stuff. Like like stuff that was like thousands of dollars I think maybe something was an engine or canoe just like. [39:43] Everybody’s different In-N-Out. And it’s also I talked a little about this on my weasenforth With Friends Podcast is as somebody who’s been gaming for 30 years it’s I buy favorite genre and I still play is massive multiplayer online game. [40:01] But I see with my kids the battery out the fortnite’s right and now they want Apex and there is a genuine General shift. In those patterns with gaming just like there is and how information is shared through social media just like information the and any parents who have teens know this they FaceTime all the time, there’s there’s did the visual seeing each other I’m more comfortable with text the chatting all right so, where’s that how easy is it for me to be in the middle of an Xbox game and or PS4 or whatever and say something like, buy me another skin pi to half up right now, just walking down the street you see you know the pizza boxes people holding it up horizontally they’re talking into it now they’re talking to text you know all of those things occurring is, there’s a study of science with epigenetics we’re with our Behavior actually turns off and on genes, and so over time is people get more and more used to that the Comfort level increases that to me is the most important thing that has happened in voice. In five years is there are people now. [41:21] And I include myself as part of this when I want to use a piece of technology to try to talk to it that’s the first thing that goes through my mind I try to ask Alexa or whatever. I didn’t exist five years ago so that to me is what. [41:37] Stuff gets ordered online because I can see you talk about I remember cuz I where I started out, in e-commerce like I was talking about and this Mac Warehouse might get some of those you know there were $5,000 $6,000 and then it was servers and stuff and so are people going to order that, cuz or they want to talk to somebody and have them walk if it’s a comfort level you know and so I never I think it’s going to be different I think it’s going to fall down into, and I think you’re going to be surprised I think people be surprised where the engagement is like this is one of things I talked about in the keynote is. I had a picture up of both a younger gentleman and an older gentleman and I said I pointed the older gentleman I said that maybe your biggest future customer. That somebody or targeting today. Gagement stare right and so I think you know those people have never had a chance because I think about if I had an opportunity to just order stuff. Cuz they’re come from. Jason: [42:40] The thing that lowered that friction enough that they can finally do it or not. David: [42:43] Wait cuz we’re basing all the data we’re basing all the data on a certain generation of people who were familiar with technology or who ramped up right and you can and so I think all that’s going to change over time. Jason: [42:56] No I told you buy that there’s tons of funny videos on YouTube of the toddler’s to get handed a magazine and they’re like trying to swipe the magazine. David: [43:03] Oh yeah my kids are like that when they are young yet. Jason: [43:05] Magazines just an iPad that’s broken to a toddler right and there’s this clip by using a lot of Dex but you may you may need to steal this but one of the original Star Trek movies they like go back in time. David: [43:15] Scotty computer. Jason: [43:17] And it’s Scotty talking to. David: [43:18] I talked about that yet that was my favorite year. Jason: [43:20] Yeah yeah he just assumed it like a horse weigh. David: [43:23] Computer. Jason: [43:25] And then when he finds out he has to use them at the. I do I’m serious though Fallout like you you mentioned the. Speech interface to the phones and you know that you are and you start to see that here and I definitely see more of that here than I used to in the in the pizza configuration. David: [43:41] What’s our primary Computing device as of right now. Jason: [43:45] Go to Asia and it’s noticeable to me how more frequent it is and so that’s like one of the my curiosity’s is like, man I see people in Shanghai like constantly talking in their phones in here it’s a little bit like I would argue it’s more natural to talk to, an Alexa. Then it is to talk to a Google Android. David: [44:06] It depends man like if I got to go pick my teen up and I see them all waiting they’re all. Jason: [44:15] Talking on there okay. David: [44:16] They’re all on the devices right purses like if I’m hanging out at work or something like that so it’s, I think a lot of that. Related it could be cultural by here you were talking about there too but it all goes down to learn to behavior and so you can’t get to any of that voice, stuff without foil learned behavior, Comfort levels things like that. Jason: [44:39] Part of me in it does just hypothesis I’m wondering if China is just a little earlier adopter a voice because, keyboard input of the simple Chinese is a little more painful than than English and so they’ve gone to voice sooner but in the long run. David: [44:58] It’s painful for everybody it’s so low bandwidth I have this problem where my brain, I think it’s way faster than I can type and I used to like be down on myself I was like I’m just a really horrible writer but I’m good at having conversation right, and I don’t mean that in an egocentric way to I do I mean that, as I don’t need to make fun of myself I have a comfort level it’s natural and so then I started doing I have Office 365 and they one of the new releases they have, dictation and I’ve been using that in my work. And I just. Tons of it’s it looks like I’m writing 15 pages but all’s I did was talk for an hour because it’s finally there and that I met an author he used to, he was one of those the co-creators of the onion it was at the digital Summit I gave in gosh now it sounds like I’m done driving I’ll just go but I was impressed by who he was, and that he had the same problem and he wrote this whole book and he said to me he was like Dave just he should he basically did it on Siri on his phone he had this app on his phone and he wrote the whole book by talking to it and so, voice, your keyboard and typing and mouse and all that it’s so low down with voice is higher bandwidth when we get to spot we’re going to be a little better. Jason: [46:24] So that that’s actually good pivot to our last question cuz we’re coming out on time. The folks jump in the time machine and go to the show 5 years from now and catch you know what we’re all talking about like we do things in a surprise than the most like what’s going to be, the most surprising thing is is it is there going to be an Alexa that plugs in or brain or what you know. David: [46:46] I know gosh I have to I always go way out for me. Jason: [46:51] Okay even go further yeah I’m good with that. David: [46:53] Well I think the way that you can predict the future is to go way out and then you’ve got to pull it back because everything’s done in Milestone so if I was going to say 5 years. I think what we’ll start to see is that. The human isn’t the major driver like technology today is very what I would call a veteran, I have to initiate something as a human being I’m looking for something as a human being I’ve turned something I push a button I’ve done all of those things. I think within five years there going to be a eyes that know us well enough. That it becomes a way to amplify ourselves and what I mean by that is. [47:37] When is has been proven right is that you have to have a conversation about a topic in order to learn how you feel about that topic know to defend your position into this is why you know in groups that you can come up with better ideas because of that process but if I have an AI that I can have a conversation with rise me up like the Star Trek Holodeck, right you can go back and talk with Einstein and Newton and things like that that’s real when we get to that point, that wooden locks in human potential is huge because my biggest problem is like, my OneNote man is like 10,000 different entries right and I’m searching and it’s all these thoughts I’ve had and I Journal a lot and I think about things a lot but I’m like, I just wish my brain could access that better and I think that’s where we’re going to head is there’s going to be a digital self of me it’s going to understand that. And is going to be able to interject on things like I’m working on an idea and it’s like actually Dave five years ago you had a similar idea and by the way you were feeling this way around the time cuz I’ve also found in journaling that I go through, very cyclical emotions based on other things which I wasn’t attending self-awareness is very very key right and. [48:51] Not to get existential or anything like that but I think that’s what AI is going to allow everybody to get more self-aware who they are and the type of questions they answer and everything else is just barfing opinions of everybody else and not listening right and it also allows I think it’s. If we go out more than 5 years it allows Legacy imagine if a hundred years from now you know my, great great great in a kids could talk to me and that’s the reason why I podcast so much as I know there’s going to be the ability for an AI to go through, how I respond in conversation in my thoughts and my experiences there already is some of those kind of experimental Services you can say and just be able to have a conversation with me you know and that’s going to tie us together, you’re feeling the same way that my great-great-great done the same stuff I do you know and so I think that is with all of this is going to be able to, invoice I think voices the beginning of it it’s I like that’s why I like this a conversation in folks on human beings cuz I think voice is, start I think we can we can understand a little bit and we can speak a little bit but we still can’t see we still don’t know feelings, and if there’s so many other things touch there’s so many other things we as human beings just inherently are great at ability to detect emotion in face, I think when we go out 20-30 years that that stuff will also come into play more does that mean right. Jason: [50:21] Visual Commerce you. David: [50:22] You got it dude and yeah and then you got to be careful The Uncanny Valley and things like that with people game freak which to human. Jason: [50:33] I told you I hope that none should I come to pass and that’s going to be a great place to leave it cuz I have burn through are a lot of time as always, questions we can get you on the show feel free to drop us a note on Facebook and we’ll continue the conversation there if you enjoy the show we sure would love it if you jump on iTunes and give us that five star review, David and listeners want to connect with you or or learn more about what you’re up to what’s the like are you. David: [50:54] About what you’re up to what my vanity and my vanity URL is just the Dave Dev so the Dave dtv.com and that’s my Twitter LinkedIn email podcast everything. Jason: [51:07] Awesome if you’re driving don’t write that down I will put it in the show notes and you can you can click on it when you get to your destination David really appreciated talking you thanks very much for taking the time. David: [51:17] Thank you for having me on. Jason: [51:18] Until next time happy commercing.

This week, Bryan and Tony discuss beard nets, Tony's house of the future, new tv/Playstation, bankruptcy costs, Lil Dicky, Every Little Thing podcast, Adam Ruins Everything podcast, work party, Ikea, Action Bronson, older movies, KFC fire log, toilet paper gun, Angus Young Funko Pop! figures, Billy Bass, our QoftheW and recap, and more!     Our Patreon: Patreon.com/saltylanguage   Links: 1. KFC log https://www.kfc.com/fire-log 2. Alexa enabled Billy Bass https://www.amazon.com/Big-Mouth-Billy-Bass-Compatible/dp/B07657LKNZ 3. Angus Youn Funko Pop! figures https://www.loudersound.com/news/hells-bells-acdcs-angus-young-joins-funkos-pop-rocks-range 4. Lil Dicky YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8rVJyj4zE0S9-sccMLifIA 5. Every Little Thing podcast https://www.gimletmedia.com/every-little-thing 6. Adam Ruins Everything podcast https://www.maximumfun.org/shows/adam-ruins-everything QoftheW: What would make spiders even more creepy?     Subscribe / rate / review us on Apple Podcasts! Visit us at: saltylanguage.com Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/salty-language/id454587072?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3GnINOQglJq1jedh36ZjGC iHeart Radio: http://www.iheart.com/show/263-Salty-Language/ Google Play Music: https://goo.gl/35HR6A salty-language.tumblr.com / facebook.com/saltylanguage @salty_language / saltylanguage@gmail.com http://salty.libsyn.com/webpage  / http://www.youtube.com/user/SaltyLanguagePod Instagram: SaltyLanguage Reddit: r/saltylanguage Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/salty-language Blubrry: https://www.blubrry.com/salty_language/ TuneIn: http://tun.in/pi72k Voicemail: (415) 857-2589 tangentboundnetwork.com dangerentertainment.net Share with your friends!

Thanks for coming back this week, I hope everyone in the U.S had a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend! I got lots of tech news this week from Google, Facebook,  how to help advice and a lot more and remember Big Billy Bass (you know the fish on a wooden back); well it's back with a new addition. Show Notes: Amazon record-setting day on Cyber Monday Nintendo best selling device on Cyber Monday Apple Music on Alexa Ariana Grande Comcast bogus fees Playstation Classic Sega Dreamcast Fornite boasts 200 million players Google Assistant Canada  Google Maps Sundar Pichai Sinemias new debit card  Oppo foldable phone plans Facebook Lincolns 2010 Aviator SUV Detox with your smartphone  Minimalist Android Apps Big Mouth Billy Bass  

PLUS: 3 at 12:03 - Billy Bass, Mel B and Paris. Elizabeth has the Dirt Alert AND CHONAS BONUS - who is attending the wedding?

John and Stephanie discuss retail and technology with Anne Marie Stephen. Timeline: 1:49 Shoptalk, CES, NRS review.  First quarter goes quickly. 3:21 Anne Marie talks about 3 things that she’s learned. 1. People want to meet and connect with others that have similar interests and challenges.  2. Real need to get under the hood and really learn. 3. Nobody wants to be sold to anymore. 4:11 What are the interesting trends in retail in 2018? 6:50 Technology is allowing brands to connect in ways that they couldn’t before. 7:24 Billy Bass turned into Alexa 8:00 Alexa tells a joke about Billy Bass 8:22 The future of voice in retail. 9:00 What are shopping centers and malls seeing for tech in the industry? 9:16 On demand pop up stores are popular. 11:30 Duration of leases is a challenge for brick and mortar. 14:00 b8ta is reinventing what is happening inside stores. 15:00 Flying Solo, fashion and apparel, 70 designers collaborating under one roof. 17:00 Customers are wanting community and connections. Authentic experiences. 18:20 IS there a mindshift in long term lease and flexibility? 20:00 Leasing challenges are coming from financing.  21:12 Mayor of New York is proposing legislation that vacant retail property could be imposed a penalty. 25:00 AR in beauty is relevant. 26:14 VR can gamify shopping experience. 27:28 Interview/panel with Sophia the Robot.  Autonomous stores are coming.

Talking Through Laura!!! On episode 40 of Fear the Walking Dead Talk Through, Kyle and I are joined again by TWDTT co-host Mark, as we talk through Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 5, titled Laura. Laura was written by Anna Fishko, and directed by Michael E. Satrazemis. Forgive us for being late this week, but I was not available to edit the episode like I normally do. Billy Bass alarm clocks! Kyle and Mark both had reservations and suspicions about John, but they do no longer! They have joined me for being members of the John Dorie Fan Club! Anyone who has a Billy Bass alarm clock can’t be a bad guy! How can you not love John? I want to BE John. I just hope that Naomi’s not dead after all and that he will meet up with her in the end. Laura, what’s your story? Why Laura/Naomi didn’t stay with John at the end is beyond me, but at least she said consistently from first arriving until she left that she would be leaving. That’s why I haven’t gone completely ballistic over her. I don’t understand why she won’t stay, what she has to get back to, and, if she HAD to get back, why didn’t she take John with her? I definitely hope we will get an answer soon. She reminds me of a couple of past girlfriends a little too much. What’s the Laura consensus? We all loved it! What else can be said? Ratings are pretty even… S4E5 Laura got a 0.85 in the 18-49 demographic, with 2.464 million viewers, only slightly off versus 0.85 and 2.485 million last week. Regular Feedback Deadline!!! Please leave your feedback by 6 PM Eastern/5 PM Central on Tuesday, May 22, 2018. We will be discussing Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 6, titled Just in Case. We may finally know what happened at the diamond. One of the best ways to submit feedback is on our Facebook group! Other Fun Stuff Completely Unrelated to Laura! I mentioned on this week’s podcast that I might not be on next week, but since we recorded, I can now tell you that I will be on next week. However, Mark will not be, so it’ll just be Kyle and me. If you want to help pay for the editing of this and other podcasts, I mentioned how you can donate credits to my Auphonic account, which I use to make these episodes sound so good! That link is https://auphonic.com/donate_credits?user=bmeloche. Thanks to all who have contributed so far! We have the best listeners in al

Talking Through Laura!!! On episode 40 of Fear the Walking Dead Talk Through, Kyle and I are joined again by TWDTT co-host Mark, as we talk through Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 5, titled Laura. Laura was written by Anna Fishko, and directed by Michael E. Satrazemis. Forgive us for being late this week, but I was not available to edit the episode like I normally do. Billy Bass alarm clocks! Kyle and Mark both had reservations and suspicions about John, but they do no longer! They have joined me for being members of the John Dorie Fan Club! Anyone who has a Billy Bass alarm clock can’t be a bad guy! How can you not love John? I want to BE John. I just hope that Naomi’s not dead after all and that he will meet up with her in the end. Laura, what’s your story? Why Laura/Naomi didn’t stay with John at the end is beyond me, but at least she said consistently from first arriving until she left that she would be leaving. That’s why I haven’t gone completely ballistic over her. I don’t understand why she won’t stay, what she has to get back to, and, if she HAD to get back, why didn’t she take John with her? I definitely hope we will get an answer soon. She reminds me of a couple of past girlfriends a little too much. What’s the Laura consensus? We all loved it! What else can be said? Ratings are pretty even… S4E5 Laura got a 0.85 in the 18-49 demographic, with 2.464 million viewers, only slightly off versus 0.85 and 2.485 million last week. Regular Feedback Deadline!!! Please leave your feedback by 6 PM Eastern/5 PM Central on Tuesday, May 22, 2018. We will be discussing Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 6, titled Just in Case. We may finally know what happened at the diamond. One of the best ways to submit feedback is on our Facebook group! Other Fun Stuff Completely Unrelated to Laura! I mentioned on this week’s podcast that I might not be on next week, but since we recorded, I can now tell you that I will be on next week. However, Mark will not be, so it’ll just be Kyle and me. If you want to help pay for the editing of this and other podcasts, I mentioned how you can donate credits to my Auphonic account, which I use to make these episodes sound so good! That link is https://auphonic.com/donate_credits?user=bmeloche. Thanks to all who have contributed so far! We have the best listeners in all of podcasting! Please rememb

Talking Through Laura!!! On episode 40 of Fear the Walking Dead Talk Through, Kyle and I are joined again by TWDTT co-host Mark, as we talk through Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 5, titled Laura. Laura was written by Anna Fishko, and directed by Michael E. Satrazemis. Forgive us for being late this week, but I was not available to edit the episode like I normally do. Billy Bass alarm clocks! Kyle and Mark both had reservations and suspicions about John, but they do no longer! They have joined me for being members of the John Dorie Fan Club! Anyone who has a Billy Bass alarm clock can’t be a bad guy! How can you not love John? I want to BE John. I just hope that Naomi’s not dead after all and that he will meet up with her in the end. Laura, what’s your story? Why Laura/Naomi didn’t stay with John at the end is beyond me, but at least she said consistently from first arriving until she left that she would be leaving. That’s why I haven’t gone completely ballistic over her. I don’t understand why she won’t stay, what she has to get back to, and, if she HAD to get back, why didn’t she take John with her? I definitely hope we will get an answer soon. She reminds me of a couple of past girlfriends a little too much. What’s the Laura consensus? We all loved it! What else can be said? Ratings are pretty even… S4E5 Laura got a 0.85 in the 18-49 demographic, with 2.464 million viewers, only slightly off versus 0.85 and 2.485 million last week. Regular Feedback Deadline!!! Please leave your feedback by 6 PM Eastern/5 PM Central on Tuesday, May 22, 2018. We will be discussing Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Episode 6, titled Just in Case. We may finally know what happened at the diamond. One of the best ways to submit feedback is on our Facebook group! Other Fun Stuff Completely Unrelated to Laura! I mentioned on this week’s podcast that I might not be on next week, but since we recorded, I can now tell you that I will be on next week. However, Mark will not be, so it’ll just be Kyle and me. If you want to help pay for the editing of this and other podcasts, I mentioned how you can donate credits to my Auphonic account, which I use to make these episodes sound so good! That link is https://auphonic.com/donate_credits?user=bmeloche. Thanks to all who have contributed so far! We have the best listeners in all of podcasting! Please rememb

Don’t worry, be happy…that we have found one of the oddest places for this episode of Odd Spots. On this Odd Spot, Brett and Amy take you on a trip to the big city of Little Rock to adopt an 80’s fad and it’s really strange back story. Travel with us as we dive into … Continue reading "Odd Spot – Billy Bass Adoption Center – Little Rock, AR" The post Odd Spot – Billy Bass Adoption Center – Little Rock, AR appeared first on Travel Oddities Podcast.

It's just terrible! Trading certainty for Truth. And OMG Don Jr, of course. More at ProfessionalLeft.blogspot.comSupport the show (https://www.paypal.me/proleftpodcast)

In today's podcast we hear about the report on Russian election hacking and influence operations the US Director of National Intelligence released Friday. Election hacking? Not really, but influence operations? You bet. Robert M. Lee from Dragos Security weighs in on the report. European authorities worry about Russia inserting itself into 2017 elections. Law, and order, torts and Twitter. Emily Wilson from Terbium Labs describes the role of law enforcement on the Dark Web. And a note on she-who-must-not-be-named (our listeners in San Diego will know exactly whom we mean—heck, it's Alexa).