Podcasts about Brand X

On this vintage episode of the Brand X Podcast, John Jamingo and Deuce bring their signature humor to everyday oddities and international headlines. From beer pipelines in Belgium to bizarre supermarket incidents and heated debates about parking etiquette, no topic is too strange or trivial for the duo. They tackle outrageous news stories, riff on modern annoyances like self-checkout machines, and even dive into hard-hitting political developments in the Philippines. Buckle up for a wide-ranging conversation that's equal parts irreverent, insightful, and uproarious. This is classic Brand X—honest, unfiltered, and a little bit unpredictable.In this episode, Jamingo and Deuce discuss:Belgium's wild plan to pump beer through underground city pipelines for thirsty investors.The notorious supermarket “mad shitter” and the pitfalls of self-checkout technology.One man's lifetime ban from Starbucks for defending handicapped parking spaces and the broader debate about accessibility.Hacked electronic roadway signs and the most creative (and inappropriate) messages we'd love to see.The Philippines' controversial new president and his shocking directive to encourage civilians to confront and even kill drug dealers.

In this vintage episode of the Brand X Podcast, originally broadcast on May 31, 2016, hosts John Jamingo and Deuce kick things off with light-hearted banter about classic summer foods like grilled hot dogs, potato salad, and especially the beloved Jersey tomato. The duo fondly reminisce about summertime produce and recount funny stories from their youth and experiences working in local food shops, highlighting Jersey tomatoes' messiness—yet unmistakable deliciousness.The main topic shifts to the highly publicized Harambe incident at the Cincinnati Zoo, where a gorilla was shot after a child fell into its enclosure. John and Deuce passionately debate the ethical considerations of the event, firmly supporting the zoo's decision to protect the child despite public backlash. They criticize what they see as an overzealous tendency to anthropomorphize animals and challenge the notion that tranquilizing the gorilla would have been a safer or more effective option. The conversation also touches on reactions from political figures and zookeepers, and humor is injected as John suggests stuffing Harambe as a zoo reminder.The episode also features amusing anecdotes about quirky news stories, such as a man attempting to secure a loan to buy methamphetamines and the outdated use of fax machines. Rounding out the show, John and Deuce discuss a controversial study linking cell phone radiation to cancer, ultimately expressing skepticism and framing it as a cash grab for research funding. They close with their trademark irreverence and calls for listener engagement on social media.[00:00:05] Episode introduction and vintage Brand X banter [00:01:11] Listener appreciation and early show milestones [00:02:01] Memorial Day food traditions and Jersey tomato appreciation [00:08:03] Discussion of the Harambe gorilla incident at Cincinnati Zoo [00:23:13] Social media reactions and teachable moments from Harambe event [00:29:26] Quirky news: Man tries to get a loan to buy meth & fax machine humor [00:40:33] Cell phone radiation study linking usage to cancer and skepticism [00:55:40] Show wrap-up, listener engagement, and episode sign off

I denne episode kaster vi os over 7. sæsons måske mest klamme afsnit; 'Brand X'. En whistleblower fra tobaksindustrien dør under mystiske omstændigheder. Skinner, Mulder og Scully står nu overfor en hel ny modstand i cigaretfirmaet Morley - der ser ud til at have lavet en række risikable testforsøg med nye cigaretter. Den internationale stjerne Caspar Phillipson gæster os til en snak om oversete bi-rollestjerner, at ryge på film og meget mere!  0:00:00 - Intro 0:18:08 - Trivia  0:34:51 - Gennemgang  2:03:56 - Foxy Moment  2:05:39 - Bedømmelse

Welcome to a vintage episode of the Brand X Podcast, originally broadcast on May 27, 2016! Join hosts John Jamingo and Deuce as they take a hilariously irreverent look at what it means to embrace your manliness in a world that seems determined to tone it down. In this episode, the guys reminisce about the glory days of wild “steak fests,” shooting skeet, epic hiking trips, and the legendary Brand X pancakes—moments that defined their unapologetic approach to living life to the fullest.But the real adventure begins as they set their sights on the infamous Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, a restaurant that celebrates excess with hospital-themed hijinks, sky-high calorie counts, sexy “nurse” waitresses, and a menu that's as tongue-in-cheek as it is artery-clogging. John and Deuce dig into the controversies, the marketing genius, and the sheer absurdity of a place where a burger with eight patties and 40 strips of bacon is just the starting point—and getting spanked by a nurse for not finishing your meal is all part of the fun.Along the way, they get nostalgic about their early radio days, debate pop culture trends, and swap witty observations about manhood, modern life, and the changing social landscape. Whether you're craving a laugh, a trip down memory lane, or want to know what happens when podcast hosts try to outdo each other in outrageous stories, this episode has it all. Pull up a chair, prep your appetite, and get ready to embrace the madness—Brand X style!- 00:00:05 - Vintage episode intro and weekend banter - 00:01:23 - Weather complaints and impacts on activities - 00:01:33 - Phillies vs. Braves recap; sports frustration - 00:01:52 - Hollywood speech vs. historical accuracy in shows - 00:02:32 - Vikings and Game of Thrones discussion - 00:04:05 - Embracing manliness and societal views on masculinity - 00:06:09 - "Hammer" drink and steak fest stories - 00:07:10 - Cabin trips: hiking, shooting, and camaraderie - 00:08:08 - Brand X pancakes and epic eating memories - 00:09:10 - Shooting skeet and hunting stories at the cabin - 00:11:12 - "Everything tastes like chicken"; food banter - 00:11:19 - Gluttonous meals and spicy pasta sauce disasters - 00:13:19 - Discovery of Heart Attack Grill; themed restaurant intro - 00:16:08 - Heart Attack Grill's nurse outfits and legal drama - 00:17:06 - Health controversy and restaurant's business model - 00:18:11 - Cooking with lard vs. vegetable oil health debate - 00:19:01 - Eight-patty burger and the spanking nurse - 00:21:01 - Heart Attack Grill deaths debate and media coverage - 00:22:20 - Supersized portions and obesity in modern life - 00:23:14 - Morbid marketing: keeping ashes at the restaurant - 00:24:38 - Restaurant fatalities and questions of responsibility - 00:25:06 - Critique of media bias and comparisons to fast food giants - 00:27:16 - Owner's messaging: "food for thought" and health awareness - 00:28:42 - Death as marketing and the “honesty” angle - 00:29:01 - Quirky features: mini-ambulance and new spokespeople - 00:30:47 - Comparison shopping Heart Attack Grill menu prices - 00:34:50 - “Vegan menu” as unfiltered cigarettes joke - 00:36:31 - Transition to “Back in the Day at DBK” segment - 00:37:04 - College radio misadventures and station tales - 00:40:15 - Legendary on-air rebellion and technical takedown - 00:43:35 - Upgrading radio studio equipment and budget talk - 00:45:00 - Record companies sending promo albums to college radio - 00:46:07 - Playing (and hating) hit songs like “Don't Worry, Be Happy” - 00:47:10 - Arguments for college radio playing Top 40 vs. alternative - 00:48:42 - The changing landscape of music genres and radio programming - 00:49:26 -...

Welcome to a vintage episode of the Brand X Podcast! Originally broadcast on May 18, 2016, this episode is packed with classic storytelling, candid conversations, and a dose of nostalgia. Hosts John Jamingo and Deuce kick things off with a look back at their week – including John's fun guest stint on another comedy podcast.This week, the guys get real about quitting jobs, tough boss decisions, and the complicated etiquette around giving notice – complete with personal tales from both sides of the employer-employee divide. They reminisce about the childhood thrill of chasing down the Mr. Softee ice cream truck, funny mailbox mishaps, and how those carefree days compare to raising children today.The conversation then takes a thought-provoking turn into the world of bullying—then versus now—as John and Deuce discuss old-school playground justice, the changing definition of bullying, and a new approach in Wisconsin that aims to hold parents accountable for their kids' bad behavior.Rounding out the episode is a lively discussion on the quirks of American politics, with theories about the Clintons, presidential primaries, and a few wild news stories—including Yoko Ono's surprising claim about Hillary Clinton. Along the way, they keep things light with sidebar stories, plenty of laughs, and genuine rapport that shows why Brand X is a listener favorite.Settle in for a trip down memory lane, some serious talk, and plenty of laughs as the Brand X crew brings you their unfiltered take on everything from quitting jobs to ice cream memories, bullying, and beyond.- [00:00:05] Introduction and vintage episode setup - [00:00:32] Banter about Seattle weather and Three is Comedy Podcast - [00:01:43] News of the week and podcast recording stories - [00:02:08] Nephew's dilemma about quitting a job without notice - [00:03:40] Employer/employee relationships and quitting etiquette - [00:05:10] Younger employees' attitudes toward work and references - [00:09:33] Managing employees and firing experiences - [00:09:58] Mr. Softee topic: Jingle composer's passing and ice cream truck memories - [00:13:13] Childhood ice cream stories and mailbox prank - [00:16:24] Mailman's reaction to melted banana split prank - [00:18:26] Discussion: Wisconsin fining parents for kids' bullying - [00:20:33] Bullying definitions and changes over time - [00:21:50] Is there an upside to bullying? Handling bullies growing up - [00:23:44] Childhood fights, standing up to bullies, and personal anecdotes - [00:30:18] Bullying now: group dynamics and modern issues - [00:31:47] Role of families and parenting changes in bullying - [00:33:13] Parenting styles, helicopter parents, and letting kids grow up - [00:34:37] Podcast promo break: Classy Little Podcast - [00:36:41] Politics: Discussion of Hillary Clinton, Trump, Bernie Sanders, and elections - [00:41:11] Trump's business-government conflicts and government contracts - [00:43:08] Halliburton, government work, and conflict of interest - [00:44:03] Election scenarios: independent runs and youth vote - [00:45:16] Primary voting age and debate about 18 vs. 21 - [00:49:25] Primary scheduling, state rights, caucuses vs. primaries - [00:52:00] How caucuses work, Democratic vs. Republican process - [00:53:36] Superdelegates, party control, and election frustration - [00:55:02] Kennedy-Nixon debate, media influence, and visual politics - [00:56:03] Populism, Bernie Sanders' support, and superdelegates - [00:57:21] 1992 election, Ross Perot, and electoral consequences - [00:57:38] Listener feedback, podcast recommendations, and in-jokes - [00:58:34] Returning to topic: Yoko Ono and Hillary Clinton rumor - [01:00:32] Yoko Ono's press statement about...

We interview Chris Clark, one of the keyboardists for Jon Anderson & The Band Geeks! (You might also know him from Brand X!) We talk about how he got into playing music, his Yes discovery origin story, playing with Brand X, a past Cruise to the Edge, working with Virgil Donati, and working on True!

The Ochelli Effect 4-10-2025 NEWSREFERENCES and NOTES for the POD and THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW ITNew WEEKLY READER FRONT PAGE feed on OCHELLI DOT COMdid not launch on April 7. We are currently awaiting revised articles to make the flow of the premiere feed the best it can be. So anyone holding back on Editorials, Prose, Poems, Masters Thesis length rants with better footnotes and insane insights, get them in to mailto:info@ochelli.com ASAP so we know how to schedule The Weekly Reader Front Page.HOLLYWOOD ALLEGATIONS of SEXUAL ASSAULTS and other ALLEGED ENTERTAINMENTIs it good to be the King? Would Elvis and Other Star Ghosts of entertainment past just do a podcast while the world cancels their ass?Mel Gibson to Have His Gun Rights Restored by Justice Departmenthttps://variety.com/2025/politics/news/mel-gibson-gun-rights-restored-1236359708/Bill Mahr had dinner with Kid Rock and Trump?& the script for the Controlled Op Fake Liberals is as predictable as the Latest Mission Impossible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiM8n_nFRlAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXW19Vkc1I‘Adolescence' Has Now Passed All ‘Bridgerton' Seasons on Netflix's Top 10 All-Time Rankingshttps://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/adolescence-ratings-netflix-passes-bridgerton-1236184969/Judge declines to send Young Thug to prison over a viral posthttps://www.courttv.com/news/judge-declines-to-send-young-thug-to-prison-over-a-viral-post/Man Claims in Lawsuit He Was Sexually Assaulted at Diddy Party Allegedly Attended by Beyoncé, Jay-Z, LeBron James and the EstefansThe man alleges he was drugged and had a sex toy strapped to his face when he encountered Beyoncé and Jay-ZBy Liam QuinnUpdated on April 2, 2025https://people.com/diddy-accused-sexually-assaulting-man-party-jay-z-beyonce-11707264Vince & Linda McMahon, TKO File To Dismiss WWE Ring Boy Lawsuithttps://www.wrestlinginc.com/1829302/vince-linda-mcmahon-tko-file-dismiss-wwe-ring-boy-lawsuit/Will Russell Brand Stay Free?Brand X with Russell Brand = American late-night talk show/stand up comedy TV series Premiered on FX - June 28, 2012 Second season concluded May 2, 2013.June 6, 2013, FX announced  Brand X would not be renewed for a third season.2017, Brand launched a new podcast called Under the Skin with Russell Brand in which he interviewed guests from areas such as academia, popular culture and the arts.Started his podcast, "Stay Free with Russell Brand," in 2022. April 4 2025 Brand Charged 1999 - 2005? The Alleged time period in which the offenses are alleged to have occurred? 2023 investigations began ?2025 Brand is facing charges stemming from multiple rape and sexual assault allegations.April 4 2025 news release, Metropolitan Police of London said Charges are:one count of rapeone count of indecent assaultone count of oral rape and two counts of sexual assault The alleged victims are Four women The comedian and actor will appear at Westminster Magistrates' Court in London on May 2 2025https://people.com/russell-brand-charged-rape-sexual-assault-police-7971304Russell Brand@rustyrocketsMy response.https://x.com/rustyrockets/status/1908184087304548484IS the Brand X of Russell being engineered out of existence? Or is this yet another case of a rich famous guy that figured grabbing whoever by whatever just came with his Fame?Do you find any of this suspect?CRASHES MAYHEM AND RAISING THE DEADFEATURING the ARTISTS FORMERLY KNOWN as the ASSOCIATED PRESSReturn of The Dire Wolves?https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/science/colossal-dire-wolf-deextinction.htmlRussian Occupation Update, April 8, 2025https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-occupation-update-april-8-2025National Security Agency Director Gen. Haugh fired, civilian deputy director reassignedhttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/national-security-agency-director-gen-haugh-fired-civilian-deputy-director-reassigned-reportBBC Verify analyses video showing Israel's killing of Gaza medicshttps://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cj9e22dezenoRight when I was starting to like Icke again...Dot-Connector: Ep158: JFK Breaking News!!! (From 30 years ago)ChannelDavid Ickehttps://www.bitchute.com/video/Ib4bpKjgqZd2/?list=notifications&randomize=false50,000 Palestinians Have Been Killed in Gaza. This Is How It Happened, Day by Dayhttps://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-03-24/ty-article-static/.premium/50-000-palestinians-have-been-killed-in-gaza-this-is-how-it-happened-day-by-day/00000195-5706-d544-a795-df9eacaa0002-AP BULLET POINTS 4-9-25 AP wins reinstatement to White House events after judge rules government can't bar its journalistsRepublicans are going public with their growing worries about Trump's tariffsTrump's top trade rep under fire before Senate committee after days of market chaosWill the tariffs lead to a recession? Here's how to know if we're in oneWATCH: Despite market tumult, Trump says 'we're making a fortune with tariffs'Justice Department will disband its crypto-related enforcement team-Disturbing video shows moment helicopter plummets into Hudson River, killing six https://nypost.com/2025/04/10/us-news/disturbing-video-shows-moment-helicopter-plummets-into-nyc-hudson-river/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhCSS2KzpAc&t=27sUkraine and Gaza Bring Shame to Americahttps://www.theamericanconservative.com/ukraine-and-gaza-bring-shame-to-america/A new podcasting supergroup is launched: Platform Media, Listen and Goldhawk mergehttps://podnews.net/press-release/platform-media-listen-goldhawk-podxUniversity of Florida Student Sent to ICE Detention Facility Over Expired Driver's Licensehttps://www.mediaite.com/trump/university-of-florida-student-sent-to-ice-detention-facility-over-expired-drivers-license/TARIFF = TAXATION ARE YOU GETTING REPRESENTATION?TRUMPING AMERICA,OR AMERICAN TRUMPING THE WORLD ??Stock Market Today: Nasdaq, Dow Pare Huge Losses As China Tariffs Hit 145%; Chip And Oil Stocks Hammered (Live Coverage) https://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/sp500-nasdaq-djia-jp-morgan-walmart-tech-stocks-live-coverage/Trump says he decided on 90-day tariff pause because people were 'yippy' and 'afraid'https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-he-decided-on-90-day-tariff-pause-because-people-were-yippy-and-afraid-181126787.htmlAncient Chinese Secret huh?Trump pauses most of his new tariffs for 90 days, increases China tariffs to 125%

This week on RITY... The mini theme is Time To Call Pest Control!... Plus, a Beatles song inspired by the poem, The Shooting Of Dan McGrew... That one time when REO Speedwagon pulled a prank that went wrong... Neil Young filled-in for Eddie Vedder?!?!... Deep cuts from Brand X, Clear Light, Fastway, John Hammond, Duke Jupiter, and more! For more info on the show, visit reelinwithryan.com

Inspiring | Thoughtful | Pioneershttps://thebrandxmethod.com/

In this Brand X Short Joe tells the ledgen of Billy the Clown. This was from episode 43. March 30, 2017,

Jessica and Dini travel back to April 16, 2000! Join us as we discuss our top 5 favorite moments from S7 EP18, Brand X! This episode was written by Steven Maeda and Greg Walker. Directed by Kim Manners. Mulder and Scully investigate the mysterious death of a man involved in a tobacco company lawsuit. The victim appears to have been killed by flesh-eating insects found in his lungs, which were linked to experimental genetically engineered tobacco. The investigation leads them to a whistleblower named Darryl Weaver, who was exposed to the dangerous tobacco and may now be spreading the lethal insects. As the agents race to uncover the truth, they face the deadly consequences of this horrifying bioengineering experiment. Do you have any X-Files-related theories, stories, key points, or podcast feedback? Please email us at TheXFilesChatRoomPodcast@gmail.com We'd love to hear from you. Please tell us how we can improve!You can find us on:Bluesky, TikTok, and Instagram @TXFChatRoomPodResources: X-Files WikiIMDBnative-land.ca

    Back in the 70s I was a huge prog rock fan and an offshoot of that fandom was discovering jazz fusion. I think Jean-Luc Ponty was the first proper fusion record I ever owned. I believe I was a fusion fan before getting into jazz in general.    I've been planning on creating a fusion mix for months but just haven't gotten around to it. Then last month I was sipping coffee on a cold morning, listening to a fusion playlist, when a couple of laid back tunes came up. I immediately started a new playlist for quiet fusion tracks. And this mix is the result.   It's got some of my all time favorite jazz fusion artists - Alan Holdsworth, Brand X, Pat Metheny, Herbie Hancock & Miles Davis. But surprisingly, not my fav fusion artist - Bill Bruford. He just didn't have anything quiet enough that worked with the mix. But at least his guitarist, Alan Holdsworth made the cut.   I hope you enjoy listening to this little diversion as much as I did creating it.   Cheers!     T R A C K L I S T : 00:00   Herbie Hancock - Vein Melter (Head Hunters 1973) 08:50   Allan Holdsworth - Distance vs Desire (Sand 1987) 13:56   John Abercrombie - Timeless (Timeless 1974) 21:38   Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays - September Fifteenth (As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls 1981) 29:06   Jaco Pastorius - Continuum (Jaco Pastorius 1976) 33:30   Soft Machine  - Between (Six 1973) 35:33   Joe Zawinul - In A Silent Way (Zawinul 1971) 40:11   Gong Emotions (Downwind 1979) 44:50   Jean-Luc Ponty - I Only Feel Good With You (Cosmic Messenger 1978) 47:38   Brand X - Black Moon (Masques 1978) 51:55   Miles Davis - It's About Time (The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions 2001) 60:49   e n d

Stand Up Comedian / Influencer Mercer Morrison returns to talk evolving w/ Cory Kastle! https://x.com/MercerMorrison https://www.tiktok.com/@mercermorrison youtube.com/ @mglover145

The final show of January 2025 and the last time for Brand X as BOTM !! BUT......we move on and once again we have three hours of incredible tuneage lined up for ya - click away and be transported to Prog Heaven LOL. ATB, Steve & Lou xx This Week.   Bumblefoot – Simon In Space Knight Area – The River Syzygy – Vanitas Glass Hammer- Behind The Great Beyond Frost* - Western Atmosphere PFM – Four Holes In The Ground (Live) The Pineapple Thief – Give It Back Karmakanic – Dr Livingstone, I Presume Kaipa – Morganism Sound Of Contact – Cosmic Distance Ladder Riverside – Rapid Eye Movement (2016 Mix) Dream Theater – Midnight Messiah Porcupine Tree – Lightbulb Sun Brand X – Malaga Virgen (Live) Chantel  McGregor – Walk On Land Talk Talk – Living In Another World (extended remix) Lucid Dream – Heroes Of Light Moon X – Dwarf Star (For Ian Curtis)

Everyone that builds precision equipment claims superior accuracy and quality. And most of them are not stretching the truth. When doing your research, you will always find groupings on targets that people are proud of, posted up for all to see, which explains why Brand X is the best. Here at Seekins Precision, we do build some of the most accurate you will find—and our quality is second to none—but you already know that. That is just one reason some of the most discerning hunters, law enforcement, and special forces warriors around the world choose our platforms.

The Jazz Session No.393 from RaidersBroadcast.com as aired in December 2024, featuring the sparkling 1979 Brand X album “Product”. TRACK LISTING: Latin Silk - Buddy Rich; Nite Sprite - Chick Corea; Travelling - Lalo; Chasing Sakura: Impermanence - Seonaid Aitken Ensemble; Not Good Enough - See Me! - Brand X; Rhesus Perplexus - Brand X; Bweebida Bwobidda - Gerry Mulligan ; Song - Cecil Taylor; Back and Forth - Mark Lockheart; The Warren - Abbie Finn Trio; Newk's Fadeaway - Sonny Rollins; Masqualero - Miles Davis; King Kong - Terry Lightfoot's New Orleans Jazzmen; Bucket's Got A Hole In It - Humphrey Lyttelton ; And So To F … - Brand X; Algon (Where an Ordinary Cup of Drinking Chocolate costs £8bn) - Brand X; Here, There and Everywhere - Brad Mehldau; Norwegian Wood - Herbie Hancock; Manteca - Herbie Mann & Chick Corea ; Carnaval – Cortijo.

Jeff and Mikki talk with Stephen Kinsella of FSM Youth (Bray Ireland) about his recent project and ebook "The Edge" and the why behind helping this generation through adversity.Episode Highlights:2:36 The Youth Mindset angle and asking the right questions3:56 "The Edge"- 9 Lessons and exercising the mind7:13 Post adversity discussion and moving to "What are we going to do about it now"9:32 The gym as a safe environment, delayed gratification and perseverance13:54 Trust and great coaches16:05 Outdoor Challenges and teens excelling25:50 Brand X®, Psycho-Social Gaps defined alongside Movement Gaps30:03 Allowing adversity35:25 "It all comes back to getting them to lift weights"36:18 Other projects "The Youth Coach Summit"41:25 The 1 Question..."Stephan, Why is it so important to you to help impact Kids?"Links and Hashtagshttps://thebrandxmethod.com/https://www.instagram.com/fsm_youths/https://www.instagram.com/theacn.app/2025 Youth Coaching Summit 2025https://fsmbray.ie/kids-program/#YouthMentalHealth#YouthResilience#YouthAthleticDevelopment#YouthStrength&Conditioning#YouthFitness

Educated at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow Scotland, Philip McGrade is an independent media production professional, writer and actor known for his quick wit and amazing accent. He was the voice of Starkard in How to Train Your Dragon and co-wrote I'll Be There. He was also a writer on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and Brand X with Russel Brand.  He has a movie getting ready to come out called Unfriendly Fire about the American Civil War.  Good Things Are Happening is sponsored by Surfshark! Get a deal at https://get.surfshark.net/SH3q3  Listen to the conversation, get some good news, and get some inspiration with the guys on Good Things Are Happening. Visit us on the web at https://www.goodthingspod.com/

Send us a textToday's podcast features James Winter, the visionary co-founder and director of Brand X, which has been creating affordable spaces for artists since 2005. With a background in dramatic and performing arts, James recognized a need for reliable, affordable rehearsal and creative spaces, leading him to establish Brand X over 20 years ago. We spoke with James about the changing face of Sydney and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on artists. He shared why he founded Brand X, how it operates, and his concerns about the lack of diverse arts programming in the city. James highlighted how this gap could lead to fewer opportunities for unique, high-quality art to be created and showcased in Sydney, ultimately affecting the city's cultural landscape. Brand X now manages the City of Sydney Creative Studios, offering a wide range of subsidised spaces for musicians, dancers, actors, and artists, available for both short-term and long-term hire in the heart of Sydney. Each year, Brand X also organizes Petite Suite, a performance residency set in a hotel. Fiona and I attended this year, and it was an incredible experience!Currently running is The Flying Nun, another Brand X initiative, which we highly recommend. For just $25, you can see these unique performances. The Flying Nun provides performing arts residencies where each project receives $2,600, a week in the venue, and a two-night performance run, keeping the majority of box office revenue. Grab your tickets here! Brand x - We re-purpose empty properties so performing, recording and visual artists can practice their craft.'We do this by working with Property Developers, Landlords and Local Governments to transform empty spaces into cultural places that allow artists to contribute, flourish and be sustainable in the community. We are driven by the belief that artists, when given appropriate space, inspire a renewed sense of belonging, harmony and pride of place for the entire community.Brand X provides subsidised workspace and creative development programs alongside facilities for hire where artists can traverse the entire creative process from development to presentation. We maintain a charter that is relevant and responsive to the Independent Arts sector dealing specifically with arts-practice sustainability, skills development and capacity building.Our objective is to afford artists the opportunity to take risks, innovate and to create work. This is achieved by offering artists affordable rates for hire, residencies and opportunities for income-generation through our activation projects. By providing Independent Artists with support while reinvigorating local communities we stimulate a vibrant cultural life for Sydney.'

Pack up your bags, you're being moved into a Freedom City. Don't worry, it's not an Agenda 21 Fifteen Minute City. We all know that would be a nightmare. This is a utopian new way to live that comes with a brand new and improved form of government.  Topics include: questions to ask to understand the world, ambiguous non answers, Deep State, billionaires, presidential election, narratives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, social media platforms used for propaganda, confusion and obfuscation, MAGA money support, Mark Cuban, government run as a business, Libertarian ethos blended into Trump campaign messaging, mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, Republican Party changed by far right fringe ideas, Silicon Valley Libertarians, Marc Andreessen, Techno Utopian Manifesto, alt media online augmented reality, tech upgrades bring propaganda upgrades, technocracy, PR is Trump's only skill, generative AI political candidates, Peter Thiel, LLMs, JD Vance, insult comedy, fake masculinity, culture war, evangelicals, Putin, Post Truth, Triumph the Dog, internal war within MIC, desire to recreate American governmental structure, Curtis Yarvin, techno-feudal city states, Freedom Cities, Pronomos Capital, rebranding, network state, Space X and Brand X, Agenda 21 population movements, 15 minute cities, Zeitgeist Movement, Venus Project, martial law, Alex Jones, left/right paradigm

The Age of Transitions and Uncle 8-16-2024AOT #431Pack up your bags, you're being moved into a Freedom City. Don't worry, it's not an Agenda 21 Fifteen Minute City. We all know that would be a nightmare. This is a utopian new way to live that comes with a brand new and improved form of government. Topics include: questions to ask to understand the world, ambiguous non answers, Deep State, billionaires, presidential election, narratives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, social media platforms used for propaganda, confusion and obfuscation, MAGA money support, Mark Cuban, government run as a business, Libertarian ethos blended into Trump campaign messaging, mainstreaming of conspiracy culture, Republican Party changed by far right fringe ideas, Silicon Valley Libertarians, Marc Andreessen, Techno Utopian Manifesto, alt media online augmented reality, tech upgrades bring propaganda upgrades, technocracy, PR is Trump's only skill, generative AI political candidates, Peter Thiel, LLMs, JD Vance, insult comedy, fake masculinity, culture war, evangelicals, Putin, Post Truth, Triumph the Dog, internal war within MIC, desire to recreate American governmental structure, Curtis Yarvin, techno-feudal city states, Freedom Cities, Pronomos Capital, rebranding, network state, Space X and Brand X, Agenda 21 population movements, 15 minute cities, Zeitgeist Movement, Venus Project, martial law, Alex Jones, left/right paradigmUTp #341Uncle was definitely the first person to talk about the many issues with EVs. We get back into those issues here, and also talk a little bit about 3D printers. Topics include: getting crazy, what does a rabbit jump up to a clown do?, GOTJ, live streaming, X Franzimulation account, Musk Trump interview, Tesla, point A to point B, EV chargers, B1 to B2, Porsche Taycan EV, diesel car, mall sword shop, sword attacks on the street, hybrid vehicles, cars modified to run on fryer oil, UK unrest, Chickengate, 3D printing, Dwayne the Croc Johnson, custom prints, Blender, Fusion 360, Uncle bobblehead, 360 scan of Uncle head, busts, rungerart on IG, Gonzo, press the button, VHS FRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/KEEP OCHELLI GOING. You are the EFFECT if you support OCHELLI https://ochelli.com/donate/Email Chuck or DONATE to The Effect blindjfkresearcher@gmail.comJFK Lancer Conference Information Virtual Tickets starting at 74.99In Person Tickets starting at 144.99Student Price is 39.99, must show proof of being a studentUse code Ochelli10 for 10% off your ticketTickets are for sale at assassinationconference.comDates: November 22nd-24thHotel: Dallas Marriott DowntownRoom prices starting at $169 per nightTo book a room call Marriott reservations at 1 (800) 228-9290 or (214) 979-9000 and mention the November in Dallas Conference Group RateUse code Ochelli10 for 10% off your ticketIf you would like assistance finding discount flights to the conference or activities for your spouse to do in Dallas they can reach out to Gabbie's Getaway Adventures through Facebook or email gabbiesgetawayadventure@gmail.com BE THYE EFFECT!Listen/Chat on the Sitehttps://ochelli.com/listen-live/TuneInhttp://tun.in/sfxkxAPPLEhttps://music.apple.com/us/station/ochelli-com/ra.1461174708Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelli

Send us a Text Message.Edward reacts to the reactions of an AITA story  by Brand X and Boomer Bunker. Johnathan Jamingo is heavily involved. I love you. Enjoy! Support the Show.Tree of Links: https://linktr.ee/amicancelledyet

Dave issued a challenge to find one that he would actually hate. That's why Bryan beered us the famously bad movie Foodfight! It's a movie that dares to ask, "What if Toy Story took place in a grocery store and was animated by the people who make Shrek memes and budget movie theater concession stand ads?" Join Charlie Sheen as Dex Dogtective while he and the other brand icons try to save Marketropolis from Brand X, who are definitely not a metaphor for Nazis, because nobody involved knows what a metaphor is. *Foodfight! © 2009 Boulevard Entertainment

Welcome to episode 125 of the Brand X Podcast, where your favorite trio, Joe, Deuce, and John dive deep into a mix of serious topics and light-hearted banter, marking another memorable chapter in our ongoing dialogue. From discussing the nuanced dynamics of gambling and skill games like poker to addressing the controversial topics around protests and immigration, this episode is packed with nuanced takes and bold opinions. Expect a blend of humor, candid stories, and a bit of controversy as we navigate through topics that touch upon societal pressures, personal freedoms, and the essence of modern conflicts. Celebrating our 8th anniversary of the podcast, we bring you discussions that are as engaging as they are provocative. Here's what we cover: - A spirited debate on whether poker is a game of skill or just another form of gambling. - Critical opinions on the effectiveness and moral stance of protests at college campuses. - The ongoing discussion about online privacy, data concerns, and the influence of foreign powers in technology. - Personal anecdotes and humorous insights into culture, dating, and the "soft guy era." - A reflection on our podcast journey, favorite episodes, and what our listeners love about the Brand X discourse. 00:00 Starting the ninth year of Brand X 05:56 Archbishop tells story, woman dies on Easter. 13:40 Conceited guy makes unfavorable impression, disappoints further. 22:04 Ate Taco Bell, took laxatives, had gas. 23:38 AI version of The Simpsons in Springfield. 32:25 Seeking clarification on expectations and resources available. 38:13 Simone Biles' husband made her pay bills. 43:40 Reconsider giving it away for free. 45:53 Banning of TikTok and online poker frustration. 50:36 Debate: Is poker gambling? 58:15 Wednesday nights at Atlantic City poker game. 01:00:33 Customized content on platforms redefines user experience. 01:08:21 Concerned about enjoyment and fulfillment on dates. 01:14:06 Discovering evidence of foreign exchange agitators on campus. 01:19:14 Discussion with daughter on Israel's actions summarized. 01:23:50 Controversial wedding pictures of two-headed woman. 01:29:12 Be kind to those with gender dysphoria. 01:32:53 Disdain for outdated beliefs and mental illness. 01:39:01 Kelly Ripa stood up, left college, found success.

Jeff and Mikki Martin are the owners of The Brand X MethodTM, As the world leader in youth fitness, The Brand X MethodTM offers a strength-and-conditioning program specifically designed for kids and adaptable to any environment. They strive to help protect kids and teens against sports injury, boost their sports performance, and push back against the forces behind obesity. Since 2004, they have been driven by a relentless pursuit of best practices in youth training. A focus on motor pattern training and physical literacy enhancement optimizes kids' fitness and elevates their athleticism.https://x.com/thebrandxmethod?s=21https://www.instagram.com/thebrandxmethod?igsh=MXh2dmpnaHE0azQ5aQ==https://thebrandxmethod.com/https://youtube.com/@platesandpancakes4593https://instagram.com/voodoo4power?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=https://voodoo4ranch.com/To possibly be a guest or support the show email Voodoo4ranch@gmail.comhttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/voodoo4ranch

Brain Drain Episode 29 with Forde Brookfield & Toby Batchelor

In Part 1 of 2 U18 podcasts, Mikki & Jeff discuss Brand X® Youth Barbell Prep, and how it fits into a Youth Strength Training Program. How teaching use of the Barbell to younger kids in a safe, engaging, developmentally appropriate environment while leveraging Play created motivation and State and National records.Show Notes & Highlights:1. 1:20 What is it and Why is it offered?2. 2:57 Developmentally appropriate Goals & Methods3. 4:35 Who is it for? Age, focus, competency4. 7:37 Psycho-Social considerations, Safety protocols, set up, retention and success5. 11:30 What does a day in Barbell Prep Class look like?6. 12:54 Loaded Play 7. 15:07 Competitions, Events and RecordsFind Brand X® Training here:https://thebrandxmethod.thinkific.com/collectionsHashtags and links:#USAPowerliftingKids#YouthBarbellTraining#YouthPowerLifting#BarbellSafetyYouth#youthathletics#theyouthfitnesspodcast#youthsport#functionalfitnessyouth#thebrandxmethod#theyouthfitnesspodcast#BrandXYouthProgramming#theathletecoachnetwork#jeffandmikkimartinhttps://www.instagram.com/theacn.app/

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT When I asked an industry friend, whose opinions I respect and trust quite a bit, what CMS software he'd looked at and been impressed by, he rattled off a few companies I was expecting to hear about, but also mentioned the platform developed and marketed by a smallish UK company called NowSignage. He'd seen a lot of different options, but these guys he said, had something that was very modern and nimble. I finally got my act together and scheduled a chat with founder Nick Johnson. Now's roots are in pushing social media messaging to big screens at live events - like concerts and big games. Requests started evolving, both in terms of what could be done with screens and how long they'd be used - which led in part to him concluding the future business was in permanent installations and revenue that was recurring and predictable, versus periodic. Now markets its product as being affordable and not focused on a particular market segment, like QSR, workplace or whatever. That generalist approach tends to worry me, because buyer decisions tend to get focused on price, as in who costs the least. But in my chat with Johnson, he explains that their market focus is on what he calls multi-screen management - networks with a lot of locations and a lot of screens. Most companies would also say they want that and do that, but as Johnson explains in our chat, that's easy to talk about, but much harder to do well. I also had to ask about the Frankenstein'd Rolls-Royce that was the eye candy for the NowSignage stand at ISE in Barcelona. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Nick, thank you for joining me. I know NowSignage reasonably well. I suspect a lot of other people do as well, but could you maybe just give me a rundown on the background of the company, what it is you do, what's distinct, that sort of thing?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, sure. Cheers for having me on, Dave. And, yeah, nice to be here. Yeah, so NowSignage, for those who don't know who we are, is a UK-based business that has been around since 2013. A lot of people thought we launched a market and were in a big whirlwind storm about six years ago, but actually, the tech has been being developed since 2013 now, and then we really honed in on the permanent signage market around seven or eight years ago, really. In terms of signage, we position ourselves as a multi-screen management platform that allows our users to effectively and efficiently manage large networks of screens. So, we don't really focus on a specific vertical specialism. So, with IE, we're not a specific sector, like a corporate sector outright or anything like that. Our specialism is really around meeting the needs and demands of projects that have multiple screens, often in multiple locations or multiple sites, so those large-volume projects are our specialism.  Now, I would imagine most software companies would say: we can fully support large enterprise level, big footprint projects across multiple locations and all that, so that doesn't immediately hit me as a distinction, but I'm guessing you're going to tell me that it's easier said than done?  Nick Johnson: Exactly. So normally, as you say, with CMSs, and we found it ourselves in the early days, we had an eye on those bigger projects, but in reality, as soon as it got above 50 screens, that becomes a challenge for a CMS. It's got a different thought process that needs to go into the CMS from an intuitive nature, but also, your platform needs to be built to kind of balance those enterprise features alongside the simplicity, flexibility, and scalability of the platform.  So yeah, there are some nuances that, for sure, where if you want to manage those large scale projects, you really need to nail the ability to make it as easy as possible for those end users to target specific screens with specific promotions or specific content and that's quite a powerful and hard to achieve thing within a CMS. It's all about bringing those features to enable that functionality.  So, if I'm an end user or even a reseller integrator looking at different options out there, what's my sniff test (or smell test) to determine who can genuinely support large-scale networks like that?  Is it data integration, you know, is it elasticity, at the server level? What are those things?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, both of those, obviously, come into consideration. The way we position our product is that we ultimately want it to be self managed by the user. So if it can't be easy to be managed by the user, then you've got a problem, and to make it easy to be managed by the user, you do need those features in the platform like very advanced targeted tags or roles and permissions for locking down areas of the platform. The targeted tags will allow people to target localized stores with localized messages based on the tagging functionality. I'd probably say the most important thing is just giving that flexibility throughout the platform. You can't say that all scheduling has to be done in the scheduling area. You need to be more flexible on that. So in the NowSignage CMS, we enable certain degrees of different types of scheduling to happen, whether it's in the content area, the actual playlist area, the scheduling area, and even at the screen's level, there are different types of tools that you can use to meet the requirements of the customer.  So, it's not always one size fits all. You have to go to that customer and say, look, we've got this feature set here that makes it easy to manage large networks. What's your specific requirement here? And we may turn around and go, great. You want to use our targeted tags and our override functionality, or we might say you want to use nested playlists and the ability to set assets to show and remove at set dates and times. So, it's giving that broader flexibility within the CMS to adapt to their needs.  I'm curious as well about the whole idea of affordability. It's one of the things that comes across on your site pretty quickly that you talk about it being cost effective and affordable. But it's also pretty sophisticated, like a lot of the platforms that say they're affordable, it's because, they do the basics.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I'm glad you used the word affordable there because I don't like the word cheap. So, for us, it's not a race to the bottom. We're not about being the cheapest. We're about being what you get out of our package, which is the most affordable. It's the most cost-effective. So you get the most amount of performance out of our platform for the cost and ratio. So yeah, it's all about affordability. So, with the platform, we don't charge for add-ons within the platform.  When you get access to NowSignage, you get access to all our features and functionality, and you even get access to them as we roll out new features and functionality; they become free for all end users to use. So that's why we appeal, as I said at the start there, we don't really have a sector specialism; we focus on the type of customer that we want to work with, and then often those customers we find because we operate, let's say with lots of supermarkets, a supermarket isn't just a retail requirement in the front of the store. A true requirement for a supermarket is actually they want to centralize that CMS and they have a retail requirement. They have a retail media network requirement. They have a digital out-of-home requirement. They have a back office requirement. They have a factory and manufacturing plant requirement. So all of these requirements are completely different, and the NowSignage platform allows those users to pull on different features and functionalities in the platform. So they may in their manufacturing plant use our Microsoft Power BI integration for showing dispatch information and fleet management, whereas in the retail media network, they might be using our proof of play functionality, which, as you've alluded to, is very much an enterprise feature and it normally very often doubles the cost of a license. We absorb all of those costs, from our servers and so on because we spread that across our whole customer base. So, yeah, it's absolutely the most affordable is how we position ourselves, not the cheapest in the race to the bottom.  Yeah, I've often said that if you're going to be a generalist, that can be a little deadly because you are just competing on price by and large, but what you're saying is, we go across a number of vertical sectors, but we're not really a generalist because our specialty is large, multi-screen networks. Nick Johnson: Yeah, and what you will get with those networks as well, because of the types of brands and customers that you're working with for those projects, it's not really about just selling features and competing on cost for those large networks. Now, obviously, they will be price-driven because often they go out to tender, so you do need the ability to really come down on your price, which we have that capability to do so we can be very competitive on price, but equally, what the brands wanna see is they really want to build a partnership with that CMS to get confidence from you that you are advising them on how to structure their account to maximize the usage of your platform, to meet their goals and of what they require from the network. So if you can communicate and instill that confidence, I think that's really where you find the winning edge to things.  You also, as a company, say that your hardware is agnostic. I have seen all kinds of companies go down that path, and many of them then almost surrender and come up with their own dedicated player devices.  I don't think it's because they're making extra hardware margin; it's just that they grow wary of trying to support all these different types of hardware, and the much easier path is to just have their own, which they can control because they know the build and everything else. So, how do you manage being agnostic across so many different platforms? Nick Johnson: Yeah, so it's all about getting the feature parity across all those different operating systems. There are so many out there. You've got the standard kind of Android, Windows, Linux, all of those. But then you've got the more proprietary ones with the system on chip, where a lot of them are really using an Android base there but you've got Samsung with Tizen, LG with WebOS, BrightSign with their setup there. So, yeah, we've got one centralized code base, and so I probably can't share too much about that and give our full game away, but yeah, we've got one centralized code base set, which delivers feature parity across all those builds. So when we make a change within the platform, we don't need to make it for seven different builds or ten different builds. We don't have to support lots of builds of the platform, meaning lots of developers. We have one centralized build, and that is built in a way that is then compatible with all operating systems out there. So you may have seen that on our stand at ISE. At ISE, we had three or four BrightSign displays. We had a large video wall that was powered by a Windows player. We had a Sony system on-chip display and a Samsung system on-chip display, and on one setup there via the show Wi-Fi, which is very flaky at times, we managed to achieve perfect screen synchronization across different hardware again, which is quite unusual.  Not only are we offering parity across the hardware, but actually with features like Screen Sync, we can bring all of that together and actually offer the synchronization to take into account those different processing powers and speeds and so on. Does that mean if you inherit a network and you're then going to expand on it and it has multiple different operating systems on different devices and so on, you can manage them all off of your application without having something in the middle, like Signage OS or whatever? Nick Johnson: Absolutely, and I think that's what's so important with the types of customers that we're onboarding is that they will have a network that's out there that's got legacy hardware and screens in there, and they're not in a position where they want a huge outlay of cost to go and transform all that hardware over brand new hardware. So because we can sit on a system on a chip, we can sit on the media players, we also work closely with those partners, as you've mentioned, the Signage OS, if there was a requirement there, then we could sit alongside that. But generally, because we have that feature parity and the hardware-agnostic approach, there's no requirement for that additional layer that needs to be added, so it can reduce all the costs and also mean that the network can be rolled out at relative ease and speed as well.  Some of the other software applications out there that say they are hardware agnostic, they're able to do that because it's a somewhat truncated application. It's a web player or something. So yes, you can get content, all the different operating systems or whatever, but it's not a pure player. It can't do everything that a native player could do.  Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, ours is a full application in the way that it's powered. So we are a Chrome OS partner, and we can run through a browser mode or any sort of environment like that where it needs to be embedded into a web page or as a browser player, but yeah, the way our code base packages or fit packages, or everything is its own native application. A few companies have started talking, well, they've been talking about a few things, but one of them is this idea of headless CMS and the idea that, if I have a tool set that I'm already using within a larger company, that's pushing out to web, mobile, intranet, extranet, whatever it may be, they want to use that tool set to also do digital signage as opposed to logging into a separate application. Can you do that sort of thing?  Nick Johnson: So are you referring to embedding us into different environments so that we could be played within an intranet environment?  Probably more so that the development, the scheduling, a lot of what you would do for a digital sign network, you could do within another application, and the digital signage platform is kind of the plumbing, the infrastructure that moves things around. It's kind of the way that Samsung with VXT now is positioning itself as you can write your application on top of our platform.  Nick Johnson: Yeah. So, normally, we operate with a fully open API. So we really want to be the source and the conduit for everything coming into it. So we won't go out there and build some specialist functionality that other platforms already build a lot better than us, like a Microsoft Power BI integration; we wouldn't try and build something like that or a Quividi integration that we've got if we want to do audience measurement with camera systems and so on, we have an API there. So we can pull all of those great features and functionality together and then be the source to output that.  Similar to QSR environments, things like with the API, we sit in harmony with their product systems. So, if they want to do dynamic pricing, we will just be another outlay to them. They will look at the output to all the other different avenues for that pricing, and we will just be a different source that they're inputting into. Then, we'll showcase that dynamic pricing data on the screen. So yeah, we've got an open API, and we're kind of pulling all that data resource into NowSignage. I would imagine the data side of things is super important, the ability to support all that?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, from two angles, really. In terms of the data capacity on our side, we've just gone through a full year's process of improving and upgrading our infrastructure. So, the infrastructure of a CMS is super important. It is arguably what sets a lot of CMSs apart. You've found in recent years that there are certain CMSs that have risen to the top and that they're probably the ones that have invested in their infrastructure, their scalability as a brand, and their security. So, likewise, we've done the same.  Our infrastructure is invaluable to the platform. If we have downtime or anything that's going to impact our size of customers, which isn't acceptable, but also the data that we can then pull together and aggregate to then analyze and give back to the customers inside the platform is obviously crucial as well, and that's probably going to be a big focus for us this year. We already have features like proof of play in the platform that can report on when, where, and how many times an advert is played on the screen, and all of that is live data that comes through. So customers don't need to wait for that data, and we obviously have lots of information about the status of the screens and the uptime status and the ability to kind of set them to go on and off and push our app updates and all of that kind of good stuff. But I think that will be a big push this year to analyze and help our customers understand that data more and more, knowing exactly where their screens are and what's happening with them.  Your company is young enough in relative terms that I suspect you're not saddled with some of the problems that, or challenges that, really well established companies may have in terms of they have a software application that's, they've been building off of for 15-30 years, in some cases, versus what you've got. If you started in 2013 and you kind of emerged a few years after that, you've got a platform that's using modern web tools and everything else, and you're a lot more malleable, I suspect.  Nick Johnson: Exactly, and a lot of the team that I've brought together as well, we're all from completely different sectors, but before that, created and delivered and brought to market a very successful SaaS business there in a completely different sector. So, as I built this business, I brought on a lot of the expertise from the old CTO, and my investor and my business partner are from that background as well. So right at our core, we understand how SaaS businesses and tech need to work. So we're not from a hardware background. We're not interested in the hardware. We're interested in it. How can this software be the most efficient and scalable piece of software and also the most innovative piece of software?  So you're right, probably the timing of it and in the sense that digital signage had kind of become to get a bit more established around that point and knew its place, so we don't have all the legacy burden of the hardware and having to build on and revamp our infrastructure with.  We've managed to build a very clean UI from day one, but also from the experience and background of myself, but also the people that I've built around the team, where we're really focused on SaaS and technology and innovation, that's what we live and breathe every day, really. And the company kind of grew out of, or at least was inspired by, I believe, it was pushing social media to screens at live events. Is that correct?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, let's be honest. It was probably me just having a bit of fun in my mid-twenties at that point. So, yeah, the way it all started was I was working for a company that was a web agency at that point, developing websites. And so my part in that business was that we developed a piece of technology that was embedding social feeds into those websites. So, at the time, just before 2013, I separated that as a separate company and thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get some social content onto screens at events.  This was kind of around the time that the Twitter walls were emerging. So it was right at the early stage of that. So our first ever event was actually at the Olympic stadium, and we were powering the big screens where people were taking Instagram pictures and popping them onto big screens and I couldn't really believe what I'd got into at that point. So, I just enjoyed the ride for a few years. We got shipped around all over the world, doing large events and as we did more of those events, I suppose the platform evolved, which is why the platform is so intuitive and focused just around the software because we kind of started off with that base and then we were doing events where people then wanted to advertise onto the screen. So we had to bring in some advertising capability to show images and videos, and then before we knew it, we started doing some more permanent setups where we needed to bring in that better structure and management and, then, as I say, probably around, I can't remember the exact date now, but it must've been around seven or eight years ago. Just overnight, it was 90 percent of our revenue at the time, I just decided we needed to focus on permanent signage. That was the model that was going to work. That's the sustainable model and the growth model that we wanted. So we kind of just made the ballsy move at that point that we were ditching all of that income, and we focused permanently on permanent digital signage and because we have the background of the platform already, as I say, people were looking at us going, who are these guys who have come to market and we've just kind of won four AV awards in a row. But, actually, it's because the software was there, and we actually just needed to understand what the channel was and what the industry was and that's what we focused on, and we don't sell directly at all. We only sell directly through our resell reseller channel, whether it's a balance of integrators or distributors, and that's how we now go to market.  It's funny, I was talking about that with somebody else yesterday about the channel and the opportunities and challenges of doing that and how difficult it can be to sell direct if you also have channel partners. You're kind of saying that you've got to choose door number one or door number two. You can't go through both.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and I think it's a fine balance, and I'd say certainly in where we come from, it's always through the channel, but I have seen some variances globally that some people say that the channel in Europe, and then in the US that they're selling direct because they get a big contract and the brand wants to work direct. We've actually just secured a very large project in the US, which is great news for us, but the relationship of that is that we engaged directly and we built trust with the end user and we demonstrated our platform, but now it's come through to a commercial point. We are absolutely funneling that through the channel because that's how you build that trust and that relationship with the channel. So that's now being commercially funnel funneled through one of our channel partners, and then off the back of that. For us, there's no way that we can; we would never do a direct deal because that kind of breaks our whole model of how we're going to market and how we're building trust with our resellers that they're ultimately our partner and our direct customer.  And are you white-labeled and totally behind the curtain, or would the end user know that this is NowSignage as managed by Brand X? Nick Johnson: In almost all circumstances, they will know it's NowSignage. What we don't do is we don't do white labels for our resellers. We want them to proudly shout about it being NowSignage. So everybody at the sales point knows that they are purchasing NowSignage. In some instances, once it then goes through the end user, they go, great, we're now using NowSignage, but actually, we want our staff to log into an environment that feels familiar and friendly to them; at that point, we can white label for the end user, but at no point is it hidden and that it's NowSignage. It's NowSignage all the way and then when the end users dive in, we can white label to an end user requirement.  Yeah, I've always wondered about white labeling. I understand the task and everything, but if you do that as a reseller, there's then an expectation you really know your way around the software, and I suspect that there are a lot of uncomfortable phone calls and meetings.  Nick Johnson: Yeah, and also, I think you get that frustration as well. We've found fortunately that we've managed to secure some of those resellers who have traditionally sold a white-labeled CMS, and the frustrations that they've actually ended up happening is that they get a demand from an end user to say, we need this feature, and we need it right now. Now, it's not their code base. They don't own the IP. They don't own the code. They've got no developers. So, at that point, they have to go back to the CMS and say, can you build this? But I think from a CMS's point of view, that kind of, like, well, you're a white-label solution so you now just need to join the queue of things, whereas with us, we have that open dialogue with the end user and with our reseller. So if a request comes in, it funnels straight to us, and we control that kind of destiny of where those features come in, and we're very transparent with that roadmap to react.  ISE was a couple of months ago. You guys were there when I was walking around. I was expecting to hear a lot more about AI from different software companies. Here's how we're using AI. Here's how we're applying it. Here's the opportunity, and so on.  But maybe it's just early stages, and I just didn't hear much. I'm curious what you guys are doing with it or you're kind of sitting on the sidelines watching it? Nick Johnson: No, we're absolutely not sitting on the sidelines watching it, but to have a go at us, we're not shouting about it as much as we probably should be, and what we've found is that we are doing a huge amount of development in the background with AI. So we've already done some integrations into the platform with AI that haven't been released as full features into the platform. My understanding and the feedback that I'm getting from other CMSs that we talk to and have good relationships with are that AI at the moment; none of the big brands are quite ready to take the first step with it, really. They're all very interested in it, and it's a great opportunity to open a door and start a conversation with them. So we do have AI features built into the platform that can, you can walk up to a screen and tell it what your allergies are, and it can then relay what food is appropriate for you within that store or help you find products within certain aisles or find your preferences. So we're using it as a tool to really open up the door and demonstrate. But in reality, there's not been a huge amount of adoption from it on our side, and I think that it will come, but I think some of the big brands are just waiting for someone to take the first step to see if it goes well, and then there'll be a lot of people to follow, but we're absolutely in that talking point where we've done a lot of AI development. Yeah, I think, as you say, a lot of the work isn't really something that is going to be visible to an end-user or to a channel partner. It's work that helps expedite some basic coding and things, right?  Nick Johnson: Yeah, it's all about bringing in the data and feeding that back to the end user in the cleanest and most efficient manner. So it can become a very powerful tool, where we're seeing it. As I say, a great example would be to walk into a coffee shop and say, “I want something for breakfast, but I've got a nut allergy,” and it can relay all that allergy information and say, this is what we suggest, and if you say, “I don't want anything that has to meat in it,” it will say: here are the vegan options. “Where can I find that?” You can find that on aisle five, it's priced for 99 or whatever it might be. All of that is just pulling live data and using the AI tool to relay that information.  Just going back to ISE, I can't have this conversation without asking about the Rolls Royce. Nick Johnson: Yeah. So we had a lot of interest in a lot of questions about why you have got a Rolls Royce there, but I think that's it Dave. But I think for NowSignage and me, we like to get noticed and it's important to get noticed because it's, at times, a crowded marketplace, and I think you've really got to understand that there's a cost of being dull, and a lot of people waste a lot of energy and get drowned out by all this white noise because everyone's saying the same old, same really. So you've got to really consider what is the cost of being dull. And if you're going to be dull in the events industry, you're going to have an empty stand. You're going to have no pundits on your stand. You're going to be having no conversations. So, it's all about, I think, making people care, making people smile, and surprising them in some way, and if you can hit those three points at any point in any form of marketing, I think you'll get an interest in your sparking debates, really. So, for people who did not go to ISE, what did you do?  Nick Johnson: So we bought a 1950s vintage Rolls Royce from a scrap heap, and we did it over three months. My business partner is a fanatic about cars…  Yes, I met him.  Nick Johnson: He did it as a bit of a hobby, and before we renovated it, we, to some Rolls Royce lovers, they may not have been happy, but I remind them that it was on a scrap heap, so we did save it in the first place. Wwe chopped it in half, we attached a flatbed truck to it. We then constructed a digital scene on the back to make it look like it was a, like a food van, but actually it was constructed with screens and the digital element created a visual effect to make it look like the screens went up and down and then we drove it 1,300 miles from Manchester in the UK all the way to Barcelona at 50 miles an hour and parked it on the stand.  So, was it on the back of another truck, or was it a viable rolling vehicle?  Nick Johnson: So with this setup, and it was over seven meters long unit, so yeah, and because of the age of it, we actually built an electric motor inside it underneath. So what we did is we transported it on another vehicle that had to drive very slowly, and then when we got it near the venue, we actually drove it in with a remote control by the electric power. So we actually drove because no petrol was allowed in the car, and we remote control it in and reversed it onto the stand and then we had a few gags throughout the show as well, where we got people to sit in and then quickly remove the remote, and they thought that they'd pressed something and made the car move forward.  Well, that's certainly a lot more eye-grabbing than a bowl full of pens.  Nick Johnson: I agree.  So what are you going to do next year? Or you can't tell me?  Nick Johnson: I am under wraps on that one, but let's just say it's definitely going to be bigger and better. The problem that I think we will have once we do next year is that I'm not too sure how we're going to top it the following year. So, next year is going to be, yeah, pretty impressive. It is vehicle-related again, but yeah, it's even more impressive. I'm quite looking forward to getting it over there.  Yeah. Well, the challenge of that is just what you just said. If you one up by yourself every year, then there's an expectation now: what are you gonna do? Is it gonna be a space shuttle or what? Nick Johnson: Yeah, or just not turn up for any year or so, but I don't think we could do that.  Nick, thank you. That was terrific.  Nick Johnson: Excellent. Well, yeah, thanks for having me on, and yeah, I look forward to catching you in Infocomm or wherever I see you next.  Infocomm and I'll be at the event in Munich in six to seven weeks, something like that, so I'm around. Nick Johnson: Good stuff.  All right. Take care. 

Featuring music from Alcyone (US-WA), The Black Wizards, The Dark Element, FramePictures, Gambler, Hanson, Hellraiser (IT), Jelly Fiche, Kaleidoreal, Lily (DE), Magic (US-MI), November (SE), Pax Romana (FI), Richard Wright, Sailor Free, Toy Matinee, plus “Spotlight Sets” devoted to Brand X and Tad Morose. Do you enjoy Prog-Scure? If so, perhaps you might consider helping […]

This week we are just confirming for everyone that smoking is indeed bad for you while we discuss “Brand X”! We're talking the FBI inflicting protective custody on people, how ridiculous it is to get mad at the Bigfoot Division for coming up with theories about Bigfoot, theorize that the Cigarette Smoking Man must be at fault for this somehow, and get very excited about Mr. Jigsaw himself showing up on the scene. We're cracking our fingers and getting our Saw jokes ready. We get really disgusted at all the bugs in people's lungs (NOT where bugs are supposed to be), Skinner starts chewing on wheat and becomes our audience surrogate, discover that Scully can stop you from smoking with just A Look and how anti-smoking campaigns should really make use of that, and we do just spend 5 minutes looking at Tobin Bell's IMDB page. Also: we have a heated debate on whether Skinner is good at laying down the law. The most contentious forum discussion in existence, locked after 256 pages of heated debate.NOTE: Please submit Season 7 questions/comments by April 21st! Don't listen to the date we say in the episode, our recording schedule moved back by a week.Send us an email at scullynationpod@gmail.com or follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Welcome back to the Brand X Podcast—your uncensored dive into discussions that push the envelope and ignite important conversations. In Episode 123, "Getting The Band Back Together," Deuce, Joe, and John open up about the shadowy parts of family histories and how they relate to today's dialogue on race and reconciliation. They delve into the ethics of passion versus technology, societal responsibilities, and the fast-moving advancements in robotics that align with Elon Musk's futuristic predictions. Join us as we blend sober reflections with signature Brand X humor, covering everything from the ghosts of past generations to the possibility of humanoid companions. It's a rollercoaster of an episode that you won't want to miss. Topics in this episode: - The Complexity of Family History and its Link to Racial Justice: We're unpacking the baggage of the past and exploring the impact of generational actions on today's discourse. - Elon Musk's Vision and the Role of Robots: We'll be getting into what a future with a billion humanoid robots might mean for us and our moral compass. - The Threads of Addiction: From sex robots to video games, we're discussing the nature of pleasure-seeking behaviors and how technology ripples through those primal urges.  - Political Maneuverings and Social Commentary: Expect a robust debate on current events, from Trump's potential return to office to societal shifts influenced by western population declines. The Evolution of Brand X Podcast: Amid reflections and spirited banter, we share plans for future episodes, the valued return of co-hosts, and maintaining the integrity of content without external pressures. Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandxpod Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandxpodcast Website: https://brandxpodcast.com/ Voice Message: (856) 477-1935

Finally, we've reached the last episode of the marathon year of 1977 in The Album Years Podcast! On today's instalment, we commit the cardinal sin of talking about an album we've never even heard… tune in to find out what that might be! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Brand-Xperience is a special audio series leading up to the event of the year “BRAND-X” focused on creating growth in your BRAND through SOCIAL MEDIA, LEADERSHIP, PARTNERSHIPS, and creating your BRAND STORY. What is your X-Factor? What holds you back from the next level? What are the ingredients for guaranteed success in business? In this episode, Travis shares a very real and genuine message of business, life, and building your brand.      Want to attend or be a part of Brand-X as sponsor or speaker?   Go to BrandXExpo.com  

 Chappie Hunter of Alpine Ranch CrossFit, Westin and his parents Joe and Shelly join Jeff and Mikki to discuss Westin's journey into fitness and the myriad benefits that experience has created for both Westin, Chappie and the CF Alpine Ranch community.Episode Highlights: 1. 1:34 Alpine Ranch CrossFit, Brand X® and the Young Warriors, Teen Gladiators programs2. 2:38 Fitness, Sport, CrossFit perception and the reality at Alpine Ranch CrossFit3. 3:52 Coach and student learning, how focus and attention contributed to Westin's excellent and varied gains in processing, grip strength, biking, posture, muscle tone, academics, and interpersonal relationships4. 8:25 "Transcending the gym and transcending the sport"5. 10:18 The number one rule "Be a good human being"6. 12:17 Westin's success in BenchPress, Thrusters, Sit-ups, Cross Country and Track7. 18:54 Future goals for pacing, pushups and running longer without breaks8. 20:00 Keeping instructions simple, straight forward language and focusing on gym landmarks9. 25:41 Joe and Shelly explain their experience with and definitions of autism spectrum10. 30:20 "Working with Westin and other autism spectrum kids has made me a better coach"11. 31:05 What do we need to know to best serve your child as an individual?12. 33:28 Winning and incremental celebrations of success13. 36:17 Using challenges to make us all better as coaches, athletes and humans.Hashtags and links:#AlpineRanchCrossFit#autismspectrumyouth#autismresourcesforkids#youthhealth#youthperformance#theyouthfitnesspodcast#youthfitness#youthsport#functionalfitnessyouth#thebrandxmethod#theathletecoachnetwork#jeffandmikkimartinhttps://www.instagram.com/alpineranchcrossfit/https://alpineranchcrossfit.com/https://thebrandxmethod.thinkific.com/collectionshttps://www.instagram.com/theacn.app/

Singer/Songwriter Releases New Album Featuring Living Colour's Vernon Reid#newmusic #newalbum #singersongwriter #avantgardemusic #soulmusic Percy Howard, a NorCal based singer-songwriter and product of the New York no-wave avant-garde, has performed and or toured with members of Living Colour, King Crimson, Swans, Guns N' Roses (Buckethead), Oxbow, Henry Cow, This Heat, and Brand X. Percy has also shared European festival stages with Brazilian music legend Caetano Veloso and ambient pioneer Stephan Micus.Percy is the generator of the Meridiem project, which has included collaborative input from Bill Laswell, Vernon Reid, Charles Hayward, Trey Gunn, Fred Frith, Robert Rich, Buckethead, Jarboe, Happy Rhodes, and Jill Tracy, amongst others. Percy's Genre-defying mix of rock, jazz, soul and classical influences have drawn critical attention and praise from all over the planet. Percy has recently started the record label Necessary Angel, which he sees as an archival entity whose sole mission is to spread as much sonic beauty across the world as possible.Influenced by the Laurel Canyon Sound, Bowie, Steely Dan, Richie Havens, and Scott Walker, but created in the context of my own experience, Percy's new album “The Stars and The Well” is unabashedly nostalgic, consumed with Romance and unafraid of the fragility of love. It's a retrospective of the impact of love in my life, in all its forms… From the heights (The Stars) to the depths (The Well).To purchase: https://7dmedia.com/percy-howard-the-stars-the-wellBandcamp: https://percy-howard.bandcamp.com/album/the-stars-the-wellInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/percyhowardmusic/Thanks for tuning in, please be sure to click that subscribe button and give this a thumbs up!!Email: thevibesbroadcast@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/listen_to_the_vibes_/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevibesbroadcastnetworkLinktree: https://linktr.ee/the_vibes_broadcastTikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeuTVRv2/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheVibesBrdcstTruth: https://truthsocial.com/@KoyoteFor all our social media and other links, go to: Linktree: https://linktr.ee/the_vibes_broadcastPlease subscribe, like, and share!

The Sound Chaser Progressive Rock Podcast is on the air. On the show this time we have new music from Hawkwind, Yesterdays, Numen, and Pattern-Seeking Animals. There is plenty more music from the lands and eras of prog. Of course, The Symphonic Zone delivers the grand and elegant in the middle of the show, as well. All that, plus news of tours and releases on Sound Chaser. Playlist1. IQ - Failsafe, from Subterranea: The Concert2. Horslips - Comb Your Hair and Curl It, from Live3. Morning Sky - Lorelei, from Morning Sky4. Djam Karet - Wind Pillow, from Regenerator 30175. Pat Metheny Group - Slip Away, from Letter from Home6. John Nilsen - The Garden, from From the Sky7. Andreas Vollenweider - Stella, from Cosmopoly8. Big Country - Chance, from Brighton Rock9. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Shadowtime, from Twice upon a Time - The Singles10. Kate Bush - Π, from Aerial11. Hawkwind - Outside of Time, from The Future Never Waits12. Nathan Mahl - Down from the Mountain, from Exodus13. Birth Control - Change of Mind, from Birth ControlTHE SYMPHONIC ZONE14. Le Orme - Sospesi nell'incredible, from Felona e Sorona 201615. Yesterdays - Engedj El, from Eveningblue16. Numen - Cyclothymia, from Crib of Rarities17. Ian Neal - 96 Bells ~ (for Elizabethans) [online single]18. Deluge Grander - Terrestrial Debridement, from Lunarians19. Deep Purple - First Movement: Moderato - Allegro, from Concerto for Group and OrchestraLEAVING THE SYMPHONIC ZONE20. Sigi Schwab & Percussion Academia - Rondo a Tre, from Rondo a Tre21. Vidna Obmana - From the Stepping Stone, from The Spiritual Burning22. Cesar Regino - Byte Four, from Bytes Within23. Alan Stivell - Rory Dall's Love Tune, from Harpes du Nouvel Age24. Alan Stivell - Kervalan, from Harpes du Nouvel Age25. Alan Stivell - Luskellerezh, from Harpes du Nouvel Age26. Alan Stivell - Dihun'ta, from Harpes du Nouvel Age27. Alan Stivell - En Dro Inis-Arzh, from Harpes du Nouvel Age28. Alan Stivell - Dans Fanch Mitt, from Harpes du Nouvel Age29. Alan Stivell - Suite Ecossaise, from Harpes du Nouvel Age30. Alan Stivell - Dor III, from Harpes du Nouvel Age31. Enya - Angeles, from Shepherd Moons32. Mike Oldfield - Mirage, from QEII33. Al Di Meola - Chasin' the Voodoo, from Casino34. Brand X - -ish, from Livestock35. Eyes of Etherea - Dimension Drift, from Files from the Chronographic Institute36. Pattern-Seeking Animals - Underneath the Orphan Moon, from Spooky Action at a Distance

Coach Dan Quesenberry is the Head Strength and Conditioning Coach at Ravenwood High School in Brentwood Tennessee. He has been a physical education teacher for 24 years. Coach Q is the Owner Head Coach of Brand X Nashville. He uses this experience to help create a better moving athlete. He has a Bachelor of applied Science in physical education and coaching from West Virginia University and is a USR level 1 speed coach and Brand X Method Professional Youth Coachhttps://x.com/coach_q?s=21https://instagram.com/coach_q?igshid=MmVlMjlkMTBhMg==https://instagram.com/brandxnashville?igshid=MmVlMjlkMTBhMg==https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWaZLavBJ8gnplFmD9I7PQhttps://youtube.com/@platesandpancakes4593https://instagram.com/voodoo4power?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=https://voodoo4ranch.com/To possibly be a guest or support the show email Voodoo4ranch@gmail.comhttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/voodoo4ranch

This episode is a big celebration for me, and what's a better way to celebrate than to have a person you look up to? Tom Gire is the owner of Brand X, he is also an amazing musician and an inspirational human being.   In this episode we talk about healthy attitudes towards burnout, what makes a banger track? We also talk about transitioning and pivoting in your craft as a composer, the power of shutting up, Internal success vs External results and way way more. Gems all over the place so make sure to listen all the way   Tom's Publishing company (Brand X)   https://brandxmusic.net

Understated excellence, subtle sophistication, and saying without saying… This is PART 2 of Brit unpacking Quiet Luxury with special guest, NYU MBA Professor and Brand(x)Lux head, Thomaï Serdari, Ph.D. If you have haven't heard PART 1, start there! Thomaï is an international luxury authority with a unique background encompassing design, humanities, and business.  She specializes in luxury marketing and branding to help clients launch and manage luxury brands that focus on creative innovation. As the Academic Director of the Fashion & Luxury MBA at NYU, she aligns product offerings with market demands by drawing on her interdisciplinary training. She also heads Brand(x)Lux, a brand consultancy that interprets culture and its impact on business. Thomaï's expertise is further reflected in her contributions to various publications including Luxury Daily, VOGUE Business, among many others.  She is also the editor of the academic journal called "Luxury: History, Culture, and Consumption" and the host of POPULUXE podcast, which explores luxury through unique objects and stories. Her latest book further delves into her method and is called Rethinking Luxury Fashion: The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Creative Strategy. Here is part one of Brit's conversation with Professor Thomaï Serdari about "Quiet Luxury". MUSIC: "Moving Slowly" (Wilson Trouvé), "Spirit Blossom" (RomanBelov), Empire State of Mind [Instrumental] (JAY-Z, Alicia Keys) ©2023 Britton Rice. Tin Whisper Media

Mike Miller Interview: Mike Miller is one of the most melody-oriented players around. GREAT stories about working with Boz Scaggs, Chick Corea, Quincy Jones, Burton Cummings, Tommy Bolin, Tim Bogert, more… getting sober and re-learning to enjoy life… timing vs. melody, zip-lining, preparation, practicing everything you can think of, and more. One of THE coolest and most grateful guys around, a gem, and a must listen Discover Where the Money's Hiding in Today's Music Business: https://MusicReboot.com Support this show: https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/support A first-call LA session player, Mike is currently touring with Boz Scaggs, and over his career, has performed or recorded with Chick Corea, George Duke, Brand X, The Yellowjackets, Gino Vanelli, Burton Cummings, Brian Wilson, loads of Zappa tribute bands, Chad Wackerman, Vinnie Coliauta, Steve Gadd, Simon Phillips, Bill Frisell, Larry Coryell, Airto, Stanley Clarke, Tommy Bolin and many others Subscribe & Website:  https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/subscribe Cool Guitar & Music T-Shirts, ELG Merch!: https://www.GuitarMerch.com    

Mikki & Jeff Martin from the Brand X Method join us this week to discuss youth & teen health and wellness. Since 2004, Brand X has driven by a relentless pursuit of best practices in youth training. Their focus on motor pattern training and physical literacy enhancement optimizes kids' fitness and elevates their athleticism. They help protect kids and teens against sports injury, boost their sports performance, and push back against the forces behind obesity.As the world leader in youth fitness, The Brand X Method confronts the public health threat, head on with a strength-and-conditioning program specifically designed for kids and adaptable to any environment, from austere, low-gear settings such as elementary PE classes to well-equipped training facilities such as D1 prep schools and commercial gyms.Stay Connectedhttps://thebrandxmethod.comhttps://www.instagram.com/thebrandxmethod/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWWaZLavBJ8gnplFmD9I7PQhttps://www.facebook.com/thebrandxmethod/

Understated excellence, subtle sophistication, and saying without saying… Today Brit unpacks Quiet Luxury with special guest, NYU MBA Professor and Brand(x)Lux head, Thomai-ï Serdari, Ph.D. She is an international luxury authority with a unique background encompassing design, humanities, and business.  She specializes in luxury marketing and branding to help clients launch and manage luxury brands that focus on creative innovation. As the Academic Director of the Fashion & Luxury MBA at NYU, she aligns product offerings with market demands by drawing on her interdisciplinary training. She also heads Brand(x)Lux, a brand consultancy that interprets culture and its impact on business. Thomaï's expertise is further reflected in her contributions to various publications including Luxury Daily, VOGUE Business, among many others.  She is also the editor of the academic journal called "Luxury: History, Culture, and Consumption" and the host of POPULUXE podcast, which explores luxury through unique objects and stories. Her latest book further delves into her method and is called Rethinking Luxury Fashion: The Role of Cultural Intelligence in Creative Strategy. Here is part one of Brit's conversation with Professor Thomaï Serdari about "Quiet Luxury". MUSIC: "Messenger", "Before the Lens" (Steven Gutheinz), "Biomes" (James Heather). ©2023 Britton Rice. Tin Whisper Media.

Not-your-Brand-X pod from Emily and Jim. The Post Sunday Blues: A Preaching Postmortem is where you can go backstage with Liberti Church Collingswood's sermons! Email us your thoughts via postsundayblues@gmail.com.

Austin Parker, Community Maintainer at OpenTelemetry, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss OpenTelemetry's mission in the world of observability. Austin explains how the OpenTelemetry community was able to scale the OpenTelemetry project to a commercial offering, and the way Open Telemetry is driving innovation in the data space. Corey and Austin also discuss why Austin decided to write a book on OpenTelemetry, and the book's focus on the evergreen applications of the tool. About AustinAustin Parker is the OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, as well as an event organizer, public speaker, author, and general bon vivant. They've been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception in 2019.Links Referenced: OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ Learning OpenTelemetry early release: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-opentelemetry/9781098147174/ Page with Austin's social links: https://social.ap2.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Look, I get it. Folks are being asked to do more and more. Most companies don't have a dedicated DBA because that person now has a full time job figuring out which one of AWS's multiple managed database offerings is right for every workload. Instead, developers and engineers are being asked to support, and heck, if time allows, optimize their databases. That's where OtterTune comes in. Their AI is your database co-pilot for MySQL and PostgresSQL on Amazon RDS or Aurora. It helps improve performance by up to four x OR reduce costs by 50 percent – both of those are decent options. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a few hundred episodes since I had Austin Parker on to talk about the things that Austin cares about. But it's time to rectify that. Austin is the community maintainer for OpenTelemetry, which is a CNCF project. If you're unfamiliar with, we're probably going to fix that in short order. Austin, Welcome back, it's been a month of Sundays.Austin: It has been a month-and-a-half of Sundays. A whole pandemic-and-a-half.Corey: So, much has happened since then. I tried to instrument something with OpenTelemetry about a year-and-a-half ago, and in defense to the project, my use case is always very strange, but it felt like—a lot of things have sharp edges, but it felt like this had so many sharp edges that you just pivot to being a chainsaw, and I would have been at least a little bit more understanding of why it hurts so very much. But I have heard from people that I trust that the experience has gotten significantly better. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of me lobbing passive-aggressive bug reports at you have for you to fix in a scenario in which you can't possibly refuse me, let's start with the beginning. What is OpenTelemetry?Austin: That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So, OpenTelemetry is an observability framework. It is run by the CNCF, you know, home of such wonderful award-winning technologies as Kubernetes, and you know, the second biggest source of YAML in the known universe [clear throat].Corey: On some level, it feels like that is right there with hydrogen as far as unlimited resources in our universe.Austin: It really is. And, you know, as we all know, there are two things that make, sort of, the DevOps and cloud world go around: one of them being, as you would probably know, AWS bills; and the second being YAML. But OpenTelemetry tries to kind of carve a path through this, right, because we're interested in observability. And observability, for those that don't know or have been living under a rock or not reading blogs, it's a lot of things. It's a—but we can generally sort of describe it as, like, this is how you understand what your system is doing.I like to describe it as, it's a way that we can model systems, especially complex, distributed, or decentralized software systems that are pretty commonly found in larg—you know, organizations of every shape and size, quite often running on Kubernetes, quite often running in public or private clouds. And the goal of observability is to help you, you know, model this system and understand what it's doing, which is something that I think we can all agree, a pretty important part of our job as software engineers. Where OpenTelemetry fits into this is as the framework that helps you get the telemetry data you need from those systems, put it into a universal format, and then ship it off to some observability back-end, you know, a Prometheus or a Datadog or whatever, in order to analyze that data and get answers to your questions you have.Corey: From where I sit, the value of OTel—or OpenTelemetry; people in software engineering love abbreviations that are impenetrable from the outside, so of course, we're going to lean into that—but what I found for my own use case is the shining value prop was that I could instrument an application with OTel—in theory—and then send whatever I wanted that was emitted in terms of telemetry, be it events, be it logs, be it metrics, et cetera, and send that to any or all of a curation of vendors on a case-by-case basis, which meant that suddenly it was the first step in, I guess, an observability pipeline, which increasingly is starting to feel like a milit—like an industrial-observability complex, where there's so many different companies out there, it seems like a good approach to use, to start, I guess, racing vendors in different areas to see which performs better. One of the challenges I've had with that when I started down that path is it felt like every vendor who was embracing OTel did it from a perspective of their implementation. Here's how to instrument it to—send it to us because we're the best, obviously. And you're a community maintainer, despite working at observability vendors yourself. You have always been one of those community-first types where you care more about the user experience than you do this quarter for any particular employer that you have, which to be very clear, is intended as a compliment, not a terrifying warning. It's why you have this authentic air to you and why you are one of those very few voices that I trust in a space where normally I need to approach it with significant skepticism. How do you see the relationship between vendors and OpenTelemetry?Austin: I think the hard thing is that I know who signs my paychecks at the end of the day, right, and you always have, you know, some level of, you know, let's say bias, right? Because it is a bias to look after, you know, them who brought you to the dance. But I think you can be responsible with balancing, sort of, the needs of your employer, and the needs of the community. You know, the way I've always described this is that if you think about observability as, like, a—you know, as a market, what's the total addressable market there? It's literally everyone that uses software; it's literally every software company.Which means there's plenty of room for people to make their numbers and to buy and sell and trade and do all this sort of stuff. And by taking that approach, by taking sort of the big picture approach and saying, “Well, look, you know, there's going to be—you know, of all these people, there are going to be some of them that are going to use our stuff and there are some of them that are going to use our competitor's stuff.” And that's fine. Let's figure out where we can invest… in an OpenTelemetry, in a way that makes sense for everyone and not just, you know, our people. So, let's build things like documentation, right?You know, one of the things I'm most impressed with, with OpenTelemetry over the past, like, two years is we went from being, as a project, like, if you searched for OpenTelemetry, you would go and you would get five or six or ten different vendor pages coming up trying to tell you, like, “This is how you use it, this is how you use it.” And what we've done as a community is we've said, you know, “If you go looking for documentation, you should find our website. You should find our resources.” And we've managed to get the OpenTelemetry website to basically rank above almost everything else when people are searching for help with OpenTelemetry. And that's been really good because, one, it means that now, rather than vendors or whoever coming in and saying, like, “Well, we can do this better than you,” we can be like, “Well, look, just, you know, put your effort here, right? It's already the top result. It's already where people are coming, and we can prove that.”And two, it means that as people come in, they're going to be put into this process of community feedback, where they can go in, they can look at the docs, and they can say, “Oh, well, I had a bad experience here,” or, “How do I do this?” And we get that feedback and then we can improve the docs for everyone else by acting on that feedback, and the net result of this is that more people are using OpenTelemetry, which means there are more people kind of going into the tippy-tippy top of the funnel, right, that are able to become a customer of one of these myriad observability back ends.Corey: You touched on something very important here, when I first was exploring this—you may have been looking over my shoulder as I went through this process—my impression initially was, oh, this is a ‘CNCF project' in quotes, where—this is not true universally, of course, but there are cases where it clearly—is where this is an, effectively, vendor-captured project, not necessarily by one vendor, but by an almost consortium of them. And that was my takeaway from OpenTelemetry. It was conversations with you, among others, that led me to believe no, no, this is not in that vein. This is clearly something that is a win. There are just a whole bunch of vendors more-or-less falling all over themselves, trying to stake out thought leadership and imply ownership, on some level, of where these things go. But I definitely left with a sense that this is bigger than any one vendor.Austin: I would agree. I think, to even step back further, right, there's almost two different ways that I think vendors—or anyone—can approach OpenTelemetry, you know, from a market perspective, and one is to say, like, “Oh, this is socializing, kind of, the maintenance burden of instrumentation.” Which is a huge cost for commercial players, right? Like, if you're a Datadog or a Splunk or whoever, you know, you have these agents that you go in and they rip telemetry out of your web servers, out of your gRPC libraries, whatever, and it costs a lot of money to pay engineers to maintain those instrumentation agents, right? And the cynical take is, oh, look at all these big companies that are kind of like pushing all that labor onto the open-source community, and you know, I'm not casting any aspersions here, like, I do think that there's an element of truth to it though because, yeah, that is a huge fixed cost.And if you look at the actual lived reality of people and you look at back when SignalFx was still a going concern, right, and they had their APM agents open-sourced, you could go into the SignalFx repo and diff, like, their [Node Express 00:10:15] instrumentation against the Datadog Node Express instrumentation, and it's almost a hundred percent the same, right? Because it's truly a commodity. There's no—there's nothing interesting about how you get that telemetry out. The interesting stuff all happens after you have the telemetry and you've sent it to some back-end, and then you can, you know, analyze it and find interesting things. So, yeah, like, it doesn't make sense for there to be five or six or eight different companies all competing to rebuild the same wheels over and over and over and over when they don't have to.I think the second thing that some people are starting to understand is that it's like, okay, let's take this a step beyond instrumentation, right? Because the goal of OpenTelemetry really is to make sure that this instrumentation is native so that you don't need a third-party agent, you don't need some other process or jar or whatever that you drop in and it instruments stuff for you. The JVM should provide this, your web framework should provide this, your RPC library should provide this right? Like, this data should come from the code itself and be in a normalized fashion that can then be sent to any number of vendors or back ends or whatever. And that changes how—sort of, the competitive landscape a lot, I think, for observability vendors because rather than, kind of, what you have now, which is people will competing on, like, well, how quickly can I throw this agent in and get set up and get a dashboard going, it really becomes more about, like, okay, how are you differentiating yourself against every other person that has access to the same data, right? And you get more interesting use cases and how much more interesting analysis features, and that results in more innovation in, sort of, the industry than we've seen in a very long time.Corey: For me, just from the customer side of the world, one of the biggest problems I had with observability in my career as an SRE-type for years was you would wind up building your observability pipeline around whatever vendor you had selected and that meant emphasizing the things they were good at and de-emphasizing the things that they weren't. And sometimes it's worked to your benefit; usually not. But then you always had this question when it got things that touched on APM or whatnot—or Application Performance Monitoring—where oh, just embed our library into this. Okay, great. But a year-and-a-half ago, my exposure to this was on an application that I was running in distributed fashion on top of AWS Lambda.So great, you can either use an extension for this or you can build in the library yourself, but then there's always a question of precedence where when you have multiple things that are looking at this from different points of view, which one gets done first? Which one is going to see the others? Which one is going to enmesh the other—enclose the others in its own perspective of the world? And it just got incredibly frustrating. One of the—at least for me—bright lights of OTel was that it got away from that where all of the vendors receiving telemetry got the same view.Austin: Yeah. They all get the same view, they all get the same data, and you know, there's a pretty rich collection of tools that we're starting to develop to help you build those pipelines yourselves and really own everything from the point of generation to intermediate collection to actually outputting it to wherever you want to go. For example, a lot of really interesting work has come out of the OpenTelemetry collector recently; one of them is this feature called Connectors. And Connectors let you take the output of certain pipelines and route them as inputs to another pipeline. And as part of that connection, you can transform stuff.So, for example, let's say you have a bunch of [spans 00:14:05] or traces coming from your API endpoints, and you don't necessarily want to keep all those traces in their raw form because maybe they aren't interesting or maybe there's just too high of a volume. So, with Connectors, you can go and you can actually convert all of those spans into metrics and export them to a metrics database. You could continue to save that span data if you want, but you have options now, right? Like, you can take that span data and put it into cold storage or put it into, like, you know, some sort of slow blob storage thing where it's not actively indexed and it's slow lookups, and then keep a metric representation of it in your alerting pipeline, use metadata exemplars or whatever to kind of connect those things back. And so, when you do suddenly see it's like, “Oh, well, there's some interesting p99 behavior,” or we're hitting an alert or violating an SLO or whatever, then you can go back and say, like, “Okay, well, let's go dig through the slow da—you know, let's look at the cold data to figure out what actually happened.”And those are features that, historically, you would have needed to go to a big, important vendor and say, like, “Hey, here's a bunch of money,” right? Like, “Do this for me.” Now, you have the option to kind of do all that more interesting pipeline stuff yourself and then make choices about vendors based on, like, who is making a tool that can help me with the problem that I have? Because most of the time, I don't—I feel like we tend to treat observability tools as—it depends a lot on where you sit in the org—but you certainly seen this movement towards, like, “Well, we don't want a tool; we want a platform. We want to go to Lowe's and we want to get the 48-in-one kit that has a bunch of things in it. And we're going to pay for the 48-in-one kit, even if we only need, like, two things or three things out of it.”OpenTelemetry lets you kind of step back and say, like, “Well, what if we just got, like, really high-quality tools for the two or three things we need, and then for the rest of the stuff, we can use other cheaper options?” Which is, I think, really attractive, especially in today's macroeconomic conditions, let's say.Corey: One thing I'm trying to wrap my head around because we all find when it comes to observability, in my experience, it's the parable of three blind people trying to describe an elephant by touch; depending on where you are on the elephant, you have a very different perspective. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is, what is the vision for OpenTelemetry? Is it specifically envisioned to be the agent that runs wherever the workload is, whether it's an agent on a host or a layer in a Lambda function, or a sidecar or whatnot in a Kubernetes cluster that winds up gathering and sending data out? Or is the vision something different? Because part of what you're saying aligns with my perspective on it, but other parts of it seem to—that there's a misunderstanding somewhere, and it's almost certainly on my part.Austin: I think the long-term vision is that you as a developer, you as an SRE, don't even have to think about OpenTelemetry, that when you are using your container orchestrator or you are using your API framework or you're using your Managed API Gateway, or any kind of software that you're building something with, that the telemetry data from that software is emitted in an OpenTelemetry format, right? And when you are writing your code, you know, and you're using gRPC, let's say, you could just natively expect that OpenTelemetry is kind of there in the background and it's integrated into the actual libraries themselves. And so, you can just call the OpenTelemetry API and it's part of the standard library almost, right? You add some additional metadata to a span and say, like, “Oh, this is the customer ID,” or, “This is some interesting attribute that I want to track for later on,” or, “I'm going to create a histogram here or counter,” whatever it is, and then all that data is just kind of there, right, invisible to you unless you need it. And then when you need it, it's there for you to kind of pick up and send off somewhere to any number of back-ends or databases or whatnot that you could then use to discover problems or better model your system.That's the long-term vision, right, that it's just there, everyone uses it. It is a de facto and du jour standard. I think in the medium term, it does look a little bit more like OpenTelemetry is kind of this Swiss army knife agent that's running on—inside cars in Kubernetes or it's running on your EC2 instance. Until we get to the point of everyone just agrees that we're going to use OpenTelemetry protocol for the data and we're going to use all your stuff and we just natively emit it, then that's going to be how long we're in that midpoint. But that's sort of the medium and long-term vision I think. Does that track?Corey: It does. And I'm trying to equate this to—like the evolution back in the Stone Age was back when I was first getting started, Nagios was the gold standard. It was kind of the original Call of Duty. And it was awful. There were a bunch of problems with it, but it also worked.And I'm not trying to dunk on the people who built that. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. It was an open-source project that was awesome doing exactly what it did, but it was a product built for a very different time. It completely had the wheels fall off as soon as you got to things were even slightly ephemeral because it required this idea of the server needed to know where all of the things that was monitoring lived as an individual host basis, so there was this constant joy of, “Oh, we're going to add things to a cluster.” Its perspective was, “What's a cluster?” Or you'd have these problems with a core switch going down and suddenly everything else would explode as well.And even setting up an on-call rotation for who got paged when was nightmarish. And a bunch of things have evolved since then, which is putting it mildly. Like, you could say that about fire, the invention of the wheel. Yeah, a lot of things have evolved since the invention of the wheel, and here we are tricking sand into thinking. But we find ourselves just—now it seems that the outcome of all of this has been instead of one option that's the de facto standard that's kind of terrible in its own ways, now, we have an entire universe of different products, many of which are best-of-breed at one very specific thing, but nothing's great at everything.It's the multifunction printer conundrum, where you find things that are great at one or two things at most, and then mediocre at best at the rest. I'm excited about the possibility for OpenTelemetry to really get to a point of best-of-breed for everything. But it also feels like the money folks are pushing for consolidation, if you believe a lot of the analyst reports around this of, “We already pay for seven different observability vendors. How about we knock it down to just one that does all of these things?” Because that would be terrible. What do you land on that?Austin: Well, as I intu—or alluded to this earlier, I think the consolidation in the observability space, in general, is very much driven by that force you just pointed out, right? The buyers want to consolidate more and more things into single tools. And I think there's a lot of… there are reasons for that that—you know, there are good reasons for that, but I also feel like a lot of those reasons are driven by fundamentally telemetry-side concerns, right? So like, one example of this is if you were Large Business X, and you see—you are an engineering director and you get a report, that's like, “We have eight different metrics products.” And you're like, “That seems like a lot. Let's just use Brand X.”And Brand X will tell you very, very happily tell you, like, “Oh, you just install our thing everywhere and you can get rid of all these other tools.” And usually, there's two reasons that people pick tools, right? One reason is that they are forced to and then they are forced to do a bunch of integration work to get whatever the old stuff was working in the new way, but the other reason is because they tried a bunch of different things and they found the one tool that actually worked for them. And what happens invariably in these sort of consolidation stories is, you know, the new vendor comes in on a shining horse to consolidate, and you wind up instead of eight distinct metrics tools, now you have nine distinct metrics tools because there's never any bandwidth for people to go back and, you know—you're Nagios example, right, Nag—people still use Nagios every day. What's the economic justification to take all those Nagios installs, if they're working, and put them into something else, right?What's the economic justification to go and take a bunch of old software that hasn't been touched for ten years that still runs and still does what needs to do, like, where's the incentive to go and re-instrument that with OpenTelemetry or anything else? It doesn't necessarily exist, right? And that's a pretty, I think, fundamental decision point in everyone's observability journey, which is what do you do about all the old stuff? Because most of the stuff is the old stuff and the worst part is, most of the stuff that you make money off of is the old stuff as well. So, you can't ignore it, and if you're spending, you know, millions of millions of dollars on the new stuff—like, there was a story that went around a while ago, I think, Coinbase spent something like, what, $60 million on Datadog… I hope they asked for it in real money and not Bitcoin. But—Corey: Yeah, something I've noticed about all the vendors, and even Coinbase themselves, very few of them actually transact in cryptocurrency. It's always cash on the barrelhead, so to speak.Austin: Yeah, smart. But still, like, that's an absurd amount of money [laugh] for any product or service, I would argue, right? But that's just my perspective. I do think though, it goes to show you that you know, it's very easy to get into these sort of things where you're just spending over the barrel to, like, the newest vendor that's going to come in and solve all your problems for you. And just, it often doesn't work that way because most places aren't—especially large organizations—just aren't built in is sort of like, “Oh, we can go through and we can just redo stuff,” right? “We can just roll out a new agent through… whatever.”We have mainframes [unintelligible 00:25:09], mainframes to thinking about, you have… in many cases, you have an awful lot of business systems that most, kind of, cloud people don't like, think about, right, like SAP or Salesforce or ServiceNow, or whatever. And those sort of business process systems are actually responsible for quite a few things that are interesting from an observability point of view. But you don't see—I mean, hell, you don't even see OpenTelemetry going out and saying, like, “Oh, well, here's the thing to let you know, observe Apex applications on Salesforce,” right? It's kind of an undiscovered country in a lot of ways and it's something that I think we will have to grapple with as we go forward. In the shorter term, there's a reason that OpenTelemetry mostly focuses on cloud-native applications because that's a little bit easier to actually do what we're trying to do on them and that's where the heat and light is. But once we get done with that, then the sky is the limit.[midroll 00:26:11]Corey: It still feels like OpenTelemetry is evolving rapidly. It's certainly not, I don't want to say it's not feature complete, which, again, what—software is never done. But it does seem like even quarter-to-quarter or month-to-month, its capabilities expand massively. Because you apparently enjoy pain, you're in the process of writing a book. I think it's in early release or early access that comes out next year, 2024. Why would you do such a thing?Austin: That's a great question. And if I ever figure out the answer I will tell you.Corey: Remember, no one wants to write a book; they want to have written the book.Austin: And the worst part is, is I have written the book and for some reason, I went back for another round. I—Corey: It's like childbirth. No one remembers exactly how horrible it was.Austin: Yeah, my partner could probably attest to that. Although I was in the room, and I don't think I'd want to do it either. So, I think the real, you know, the real reason that I decided to go and kind of write this book—and it's Learning OpenTelemetry; it's in early release right now on the O'Reilly learning platform and it'll be out in print and digital next year, I believe, we're targeting right now, early next year.But the goal is, as you pointed out so eloquently, OpenTelemetry changes a lot. And it changes month to month sometimes. So, why would someone decide—say, “Hey, I'm going to write the book about learning this?” Well, there's a very good reason for that and it is that I've looked at a lot of the other books out there on OpenTelemetry, on observability in general, and they talk a lot about, like, here's how you use the API. Here's how you use the SDK. Here's how you make a trace or a span or a log statement or whatever. And it's very technical; it's very kind of in the weeds.What I was interested in is saying, like, “Okay, let's put all that stuff aside because you don't necessarily…” I'm not saying any of that stuff's going to change. And I'm not saying that how to make a span is going to change tomorrow; it's not, but learning how to actually use something like OpenTelemetry isn't just knowing how to create a measurement or how to create a trace. It's, how do I actually use this in a production system? To my point earlier, how do I use this to get data about, you know, these quote-unquote, “Legacy systems?” How do I use this to monitor a Kubernetes cluster? What's the important parts of building these observability pipelines? If I'm maintaining a library, how should I integrate OpenTelemetry into that library for my users? And so on, and so on, and so forth.And the answers to those questions actually probably aren't going to change a ton over the next four or five years. Which is good because that makes it the perfect thing to write a book about. So, the goal of Learning OpenTelemetry is to help you learn not just how to use OpenTelemetry at an API or SDK level, but it's how to build an observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry, it's how to roll it out to an organization, it's how to convince your boss that this is what you should use, both for new and maybe picking up some legacy development. It's really meant to give you that sort of 10,000-foot view of what are the benefits of this, how does it bring value and how can you use it to build value for an observability practice in an organization?Corey: I think that's fair. Looking at the more quote-unquote, “Evergreen,” style of content as opposed to—like, that's the reason for example, I never wind up doing tutorials on how to use an AWS service because one console change away and suddenly I have to redo the entire thing. That's a treadmill I never had much interest in getting on. One last topic I want to get into before we wind up wrapping the episode—because I almost feel obligated to sprinkle this all over everything because the analysts told me I have to—what's your take on generative AI, specifically with an eye toward observability?Austin: [sigh], gosh, I've been thinking a lot about this. And—hot take alert—as a skeptic of many technological bubbles over the past five or so years, ten years, I'm actually pretty hot on AI—generative AI, large language models, things like that—but not for the reasons that people like to kind of hold them up, right? Not so that we can all make our perfect, funny [sigh], deep dream, meme characters or whatever through Stable Fusion or whatever ChatGPT spits out at us when we ask for a joke. I think the real win here is that this to me is, like, the biggest advance in human-computer interaction since resistive touchscreens. Actually, probably since the mouse.Corey: I would agree with that.Austin: And I don't know if anyone has tried to get someone that is, you know, over the age of 70 to use a computer at any time in their life, but mapping human language to trying to do something on an operating system or do something on a computer on the web is honestly one of the most challenging things that faces interface design, face OS designers, faces anyone. And I think this also applies for dev tools in general, right? Like, if you think about observability, if you think about, like, well, what are the actual tasks involved in observability? It's like, well, you're making—you're asking questions. You're saying, like, “Hey, for this metric named HTTPrequestsByCode,” and there's four or five dimensions, and you say, like, “Okay, well break this down for me.” You know, you have to kind of know the magic words, right? You have to know the magic promQL sequence or whatever else to plug in and to get it to graph that for you.And you as an operator have to have this very, very well developed, like, depth of knowledge and math and statistics to really kind of get a lot of—Corey: You must be at least this smart to ride on this ride.Austin: Yeah. And I think that, like that, to me is the real—the short-term win for certainly generative AI around using, like, large language models, is the ability to create human language interfaces to observability tools, that—Corey: As opposed to learning your own custom SQL dialect, which I see a fair number of times.Austin: Right. And, you know, and it's actually very funny because there was a while for the—like, one of my kind of side projects for the past [sigh] a little bit [unintelligible 00:32:31] idea of, like, well, can we make, like, a universal query language or universal query layer that you could ship your dashboards or ship your alerts or whatever. And then it's like, generative AI kind of just, you know, completely leapfrogs that, right? It just says, like, well, why would you need a query language, if we can just—if you can just ask the computer and it works, right?Corey: The most common programming language is about to become English.Austin: Which I mean, there's an awful lot of externalities there—Corey: Which is great. I want to be clear. I'm not here to gatekeep.Austin: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of externalities there, and there's a lot—and the kind of hype to provable benefit ratio is very skewed right now towards hype. That said, one of the things that is concerning to me as sort of an observability practitioner is the amount of people that are just, like, whole-hog, throwing themselves into, like, oh, we need to integrate generative AI, right? Like, we need to put AI chatbots and we need to have ChatGPT built into our products and da-da-da-da-da. And now you kind of have this perfect storm of people that really don't ha—because they're just using these APIs to integrate gen AI stuff with, they really don't understand what it's doing because a lot you know, it is very complex, and I'll be the first to admit that I really don't understand what a lot of it is doing, you know, on the deep, on the foundational math side.But if we're going to have trust in, kind of, any kind of system, we have to understand what it's doing, right? And so, the only way that we can understand what it's doing is through observability, which means it's incredibly important for organizations and companies that are building products on generative AI to, like, drop what—you know, walk—don't walk, run towards something that is going to give you observability into these language models.Corey: Yeah. “The computer said so,” is strangely dissatisfying.Austin: Yeah. You need to have that base, you know, sort of, performance [goals and signals 00:34:31], obviously, but you also need to really understand what are the questions being asked. As an example, let's say you have something that is tokenizing questions. You really probably do want to have some sort of observability on the hot path there that lets you kind of break down common tokens, especially if you were using, like, custom dialects or, like, vectors or whatever to modify the, you know, neural network model, like, you really want to see, like, well, what's the frequency of the certain tokens that I'm getting they're hitting the vectors versus not right? Like, where can I improve these sorts of things? Where am I getting, like, unexpected results?And maybe even have some sort of continuous feedback mechanism that it could be either analyzing the tone and tenor of end-user responses or you can have the little, like, frowny and happy face, whatever it is, like, something that is giving you that kind of constant feedback about, like, hey, this is how people are actually like interacting with it. Because I think there's way too many stories right now people just kind of like saying, like, “Oh, okay. Here's some AI-powered search,” and people just, like, hating it. Because people are already very primed to distrust AI, I think. And I can't blame anyone.Corey: Well, we've had an entire lifetime of movies telling us that's going to kill us all.Austin: Yeah.Corey: And now you have a bunch of, also, billionaire tech owners who are basically intent on making that reality. But that's neither here nor there.Austin: It isn't, but like I said, it's difficult. It's actually one of the first times I've been like—that I've found myself very conflicted.Corey: Yeah, I'm a booster of this stuff; I love it, but at the same time, you have some of the ridiculous hype around it and the complete lack of attention to safety and humanity aspects of it that it's—I like the technology and I think it has a lot of promise, but I want to get lumped in with that set.Austin: Exactly. Like, the technology is great. The fan base is… ehh, maybe something a little different. But I do think that, for lack of a better—not to be an inevitable-ist or whatever, but I do think that there is a significant amount of, like, this is a genie you can't put back in the bottle and it is going to have, like, wide-ranging, transformative effects on the discipline of, like, software development, software engineering, and white collar work in general, right? Like, there's a lot of—if your job involves, like, putting numbers into Excel and making pretty spreadsheets, then ooh, that doesn't seem like something that's going to do too hot when I can just have Excel do that for me.And I think we do need to be aware of that, right? Like, we do need to have that sort of conversation about, like… what are we actually comfortable doing here in terms of displacing human labor? When we do displace human labor, are we doing it so that we can actually give people leisure time or so that we can just cram even more work down the throats of the humans that are left?Corey: And unfortunately, I think we might know what that answer is, at least on our current path.Austin: That's true. But you know, I'm an optimist.Corey: I… don't do well with disappointment. Which the show has certainly not been. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Austin: Welp, I—you can find me on most social media. Many, many social medias. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and we all know what happened there. The best place to figure out what's going on is check out my bio, social.ap2.io will give you all the links to where I am. And yeah, been great talking with you.Corey: Likewise. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. Austin Parker, community maintainer for OpenTelemetry. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment pointing out that actually, physicists say the vast majority of the universe's empty space, so that we can later correct you by saying ah, but it's empty whitespace. That's right. YAML wins again.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

The third in a series on Brand X® methodology, Base- Build- BoostThe Martins cover how to BOOST performance and autonomy for a healthy movement-rich life."Intensity is the sport of mechanics, so it is our job as coaches to make sure our athletes understand the rules of the sport before they play it."- Keegan MartinEpisode Highlights:1:30 BOOST = Accelerating growth, performance and training autonomy2:49 Maximizing potential, volume, load and the continued use of pause and tempo strategies for strength gains4:36 Complexity, Olympic Lifting, loading and testing5:40 Base Build BOOST concepts, apply to bodyweight, calisthenics and gymnastics too7:55 Considering transferability of positions athletes are repeating, appropriate progressions excellence and expansion in the BOOST phase.10:32 Healthspan, longevity and the potential to maximize training and outcomes11:58 The Ultimate goal, taking the long view - making sure young athletes understand "the rules of movement before playing the game"13:37 Magically this long view and the Base Build Boost process not only aligns with What is Best for Kids™ but feeds retention and longevity in youth programs as well.Hashtags and links:#youthhealth#youthperformance#theyouthfitnesspodcast#youthfitness#functionalfitnessyouth#thebrandxmethod#theathletecoachnetwork#jeffandmikkimartinhttps://thebrandxmethod.thinkific.com/collectionshttps://www.instagram.com/theacn.app/

With so much happening in the world, Misha and Hagar caught up for their regular chinwag that went waaaaay longer than it was supposed to (as it always does — but we love having Hagar on!) In this episode we talk: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Putin's domestic troubles and starvation diplomacy. To rapprochement or not to rapprochement; China, US and the perils of talking. Israel and the Supreme Court; what happens next if Israel becomes an illiberal democracy? Sogavare, Xi and the Solomons. Barbie diplomacy and Brand X. And more! Be sure to follow Hagar and the Oh My World! show on social media and YouTube @ohmyworldshow and @hagarchemali You can follow Diplomates and Misha at @mishazelinsky @diplomates.showSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Building a great fitness program for kids requires a very specific approach tailored to young people—and their parents.For example, you can't scream like a drill sergeant and hope pre-teens will develop a lifelong love of movement. You also can't just promote a "super-fun program" to parents who want more than balloon and parachute games for their young ones.Remember: The parents are the actual clients, and you must solve their problems and help them accomplish their goals with your program.In this lecture delivered  at the 2022 Two-Brain Summit in Chicago, Brand X Method co-founder Jeff Martin explains how to approach kids coaching so you can satisfy parents and set young athletes up for a lifetime of movement and health.Listen, then use Jeff's advice to improve or start your own kids program—a key revenue stream for a microgym.LinksBook a CallGym Owners United2:38 - Excelling kids4:09 - Target lessons9:32 - Learning to move16:02 - Breaking it down21:32 - Maximizing potential24:42 - Succeeding with youth programs

In this episode of our So Bad They're Good series we take a look at the short animated film Foodfight! (2012) When the supermarket closes at night, the contents inside come to life. The shop becomes a living world for Dex Dogtective and all other creatures inside it at night time. However, with the new Brand X coming into the store, things take a turn for the worst. In other words, it's Toy Story in a grocery store mixed with a poorly rendered version of your worst nightmare. Charlie Sheen as Dex Dogtective, an anthropomorphic dog investigator,owner of the Copabanana nightclub, and mascot for a cereal product. Wayne Brady as Daredevil Dan, Dex's best friend; a squirrel pilot of a small aircraft and mascot for a chocolate product and the film's comic relief. Hilary Duff as Sunshine Goodness, an anthropomorphic cat mascot for a raisin brand; Dex's fiancée. Eva Longoria as Lady X / Priscilla, former mascot of the prune product turned owner and leader of Brand X. Larry Miller as Vlad Chocool, a chocolate cereal vampire bat with attraction for Dan. Christopher Lloyd as Mr. Clipboard, the robotic representative for Brand X products in the human world. Robert Costanzo as Maximillus Moose Chris Kattan as Polar Penguin Ed Asner as Mr. Leonard Jerry Stiller as General X Christine Baranski as Hedda Shopper Lawrence Kasanoff as Cheasel T. Weasel Harvey Fierstein as Fat Cat Burglar Cloris Leachman as Brand X Lunch Lady Haylie Duff as Sweetcakes Shelley Morrison as Lola Fruitola Edie McClurg as Mrs. Butterworth George Johnsen as Kaptain Krispy Greg Ellis as Hairy Hold James Arnold Taylor as Doctor Si Nustrix Jeff Bennett as Lieutenant X Stephen Stanton as Mr. Clean (deleted scene), Lord Flushington Jeff Bergman as Charlie Tuna Sean Catherine Derek as Toddler's Mom Enn Reitel as Kung Tofu / François Fromage Daniel Franzese as Twinkleton Listen, Rate and Share the show!!! Find us at all2reeltoo.com Listen to Mike on The Family Fright Night Horror Podcast ... https://open.spotify.com/episode/7kstbpDOnLQeI8BQGLzina Check out some cool music by host Matthew Haase at https://youtu.be/5E6TYm_4wIE Check out cool merchandise related to our show at http://tee.pub/lic/CullenPark Become a Patron of the show here.... https://www.patreon.com/CullenPark Listen to Mike on The Nerdball Podcast.... https://pod.fo/e/ba2aa Check out some cool music from Jason Quick at www.jasonquickmusic.com TO HELP WRITERS AND ACTORS ON THE PICKET LINES YOU CAN DONATE HERE: ENTERTAINMENT COMMUNITY FUND If you can during these troubling times make a donation to one of the following charities to help out. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/ https://www.hrc.org/hrc-story/hrc-foundation https://pointfoundation.org/ https://www.directrelief.org/ https://www.naacpldf.org/ https://www.blackvotersmatterfund.org https://www.tahirih.org/ https://www.monafoundation.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to a new weekly series we are launching on the Latin Wealth platform, Wealth Wednesday! On Wealth Wednesday, we will be discussing trending news, Latino culture and topics surrounding business, host by @chrisbelloso and @ricoramirez86. On today's episode we discussed: Why having a quality inner circle matters Having quality people in your circle mattersMoney can't buy trust, loyalty and that genuine support Elon musk rebranding twitter into brand “X” Twitter has officially rebranded to "X" after owner Elon Musk changed its iconic bird logo Monday, marking the latest major shift since his takeover of the social media platform. Twitter's world-renowned bird logo was transformed into an X, change their website, HQ. Musk tweeted Sunday that the idea of changing the logo to “X” was to “embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.” Florida is an emerging hub for Bitcoin mining operations to flourish Many digital asset ecosystem are leaving California, the Pacific Northwest and New York For the more tax friendly state of Florida But also because of Floridas reliable energy grids and its increasing leadership in sustainable energy Follow us on IG: @latinwealth Email for questions or inquiries: latinwealthpodcast@gmail.com

Lady Justice is often depicted wearing a blindfold, signifying that judges are neutral arbiters of the law. Unfortunately, thanks for a judicial doctrine known as Chevron deference, the Supreme Court has required judges to peek from behind that metaphorical blindfold and put a thumb on the scale for the most powerful litigant in our nation: the federal government. In a case called Brand X, the Court took Chevron deference to its logical conclusion, allowing agencies to overrule judicial decisions. One dissenter wrote that this was not only bizarre, but it was probably unconstitutional. That view has been picking up steam in the past decade. Next term, the Court will hear a case asking it to overturn Chevron deference.Thanks for our guests Aditya Bamzai and Jeff Wall.Follow us on Twitter @ehslattery @anastasia_esq @pacificlegal #DissedPod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.