Podcasts about furs

It's a big juicy hazy bomb from Burning Beard! Whips & Furs takes it's name-sake from a song from The Vibrators of the same name. Much like the it's inspiration this beer seeks to be memorable enough to dig deeper into what it has to offer.

Subscriber-only episodeSend us a textOne of the last projects recorded by singer/actress Marianne Faithfull (who passed away in January) was a 2021 spoken word album of English Romantic poetry, including a hauntingly beautiful 12-minute recitation of Tennyson's “Lady of Shalott.” After exploring Faithfull's passion for (and family connections to) classic literature, Amy finds new meaning in this poem about an exiled woman fated to forever view life through a mirror's reflection. This episode includes accounts of several other doomed and exiled noblewomen in history — Lucrezia de Medici and Marguerite de la Rocque — and the books their lives inspired.Mentioned in this episode:She Walks in Beauty by Marianne Faithfull“As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull“The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred, Lord TennysonVenus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-MasochVenus in Furs by The Velvet UndergroundThe Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'FarrellLucrezia de MediciPortrait of Lucrezia de Medici at North Carolina Museum of Art“My Last Duchess” by Robert BrowningIsola by Allegra GoodmanMarguerite de la RocqueThe Heptameron by Marguerite de NavarreFor episodes and show notes, visit: LostLadiesofLit.comDiscuss episodes on our Facebook Forum. Follow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit. Follow Kim on twitter @kaskew. Sign up for our newsletter: LostLadiesofLit.com Email us: Contact — Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast

(S4-Ep8) The Velvet Underground and Nico (Verve Records)  Released March 1967- Recorded April-May and November of 1966 (Verve Records)  Despite its initial commercial failure, the Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) is one of the most influential albums in rock history. The album, produced by artist Andy Warhol, fused avant-garde art with raw, experimental rock, tackling taboo subjects like drug use and urban decay. Lou Reed's stark lyricism and John Cale's avant-garde instrumentation—particularly his electric viola—set the band apart from their contemporaries. Tracks like Heroin, Venus in Furs, and All Tomorrow's Parties showcased their uncompromising artistic vision. Though largely ignored upon release, the album became a blueprint for punk, noise rock, and indie music, influencing artists from David Bowie to Sonic Youth. The iconic banana cover, designed by Warhol, remains one of rock's most recognizable images. Over time, The Velvet Underground & Nico earned its place as a seminal work, proving that commercial success is not always a measure of artistic impact. Signature Tracks  "Heroin," “Venus in Furs,” "All Tomorrow's Parties"  Playlist  YouTube   Spotify  Full Album  YouTube Spotify 

A simple basement project transformed into a global fashion brand, Donna Salyers, the founder of Fabulous Furs, the pioneer of faux fur clothing, joins us! Her initial ambition to fit in with New York City's high-fashion crowd in the 1980s launched into a sewing kit business that grossed $300,000 in its first year out of her basement in Covington, Kentucky. Discover how strategic decisions and humility have played pivotal roles in her business' success. As Donna states, “I would go to New York and see Saks Fifth Avenue, I would walk around there and think: anything I see here I can make and it will actually be better than buying from Saks.” As the holiday season approaches, we reflect on gratitude and self-improvement, encouraging you to embrace the best version of yourself. Our Non Profit Spotlight is American Cancer Society _ Katie Harms @ katie@katieharms.com, www.katieharms.com or Lisa Rubin @ lisa@wardrobeconsulting.net, www.wardrobeconsulting.net . Follow Us On: Instagram LinkedIn Facebook YouTube Please take a moment to rate our podcast wherever you are reading or listening to this! Thank you! We are thankful to our sponsor Sweet Ivy - you can buy Fabulous Furs locally (and Littles by Sweet Ivy)

 In this collaboration episode, hosted by Jackie Zimmerman of Mental Health America, we are joined by clinical social workers Helen Garcia and Polesa Osei-Tutu as we explore crucial issues impacting mental health today. We'll delve into the economic and psychological challenges faced by women of color, particularly those caring for autistic siblings and elderly immigrant parents. Links:  Polesa Osei-Tutu, LCSW: https://www.instagram.com/sit_awhile_and_heal/  MHA Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHcA3Wg4TmU&t=5s  Crisis Center: https://chat.988lifeline.org/  Entwine Community: https://entwinecommunity.org/  Yellow Chair Collective: https://yellowchaircollective.com/  Homecoming Book: https://www.amazon.com/Homecoming-Overcome-Trauma-Reclaim-Authentic/dp/059341831X Where I Belong Book Resources/Emergency Hotlines Crisis Text Line: Text "Home" to 741-741  TTY Users: Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988  LACDMH Help Line: (800) 854-7771  Disaster Distress Helpline: (800) 985-5990  Trevor Project Lifeline: (800) 788-7386  Substance Abuse Service Helpline: (844) 804-7500  Family Urgent Response System (FURS): Call or text 1-833-939-FURS (3877)  National Sexual Assault Hotline: (800) 656-4673  SAgE's Farmer Support Hotline: 833-381-SAGE  Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration National Helpline: (800) 662-4357  Veterans Crisis Line: 988, then press 1, or text 838255  Time Stamps 00:00 New crisis resource center for mental health. 06:18 Discussing mental health shifts amid societal stressors. 09:05 Political division, identity awareness, mental health focus. 10:14 Economic crisis stresses mental health resources strain. 15:40 Community, therapy, simplicity, ease mental burden, connection. 18:54 Balancing self-care amidst mental health challenges. 22:06 Self-care means small, accessible everyday actions. 27:06 Check in with your senses for burnout. 27:46 Burnout symptoms: fatigue, eyes flicker, hair loss. 33:44 "Seek realistic balance in a capitalistic society." 37:40 Embrace objectivity, self-care, and seek support. 42:06 Remember self-care; treat yourself as a friend. 44:58 Limit tech use; life outside matters more. 48:23 Change your phone habits; it's transformative. 52:52 "Homecoming" helps reclaim your true self. 56:29 Reposted resources, certificate link, audience engagement appreciated. 57:33 Thanks, everyone. Enjoy your day!

The OTRNow Radio Program 2024-017The Shadow Of Fu Manchu. July 10, 1939. Program #27. Radio Attractions syndication. Sponsored by: Music fill for local commercial insert. The Three Golden Pomegranates. Hanley Stafford, Gale Gordon. 11007. The Shadow Of Fu Manchu. July 12, 1939. Program #28. Radio Attractions syndication. Sponsored by: Music fill for local commercial insert. Nayland Smith returns with a clue, the trail warms. Hanley Stafford, Gale Gordon. Good News Of 1939. November 17, 1938. NBC net, KFI, Los Angeles aircheck. Sponsored by: Maxwell House Coffee, Bulova (local), Beckman's Furs (local). The first tune is "The Bumpy Road To Love." Frank Morgan relates how he battled burglars in his house. Louis Mayer and Father Flanagan talk about the "Boys Town" movie and appeal for funds. Daddy prepares Baby Snooks for a visit from the boss. Scenes from "The Shining Hour," with Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas and Robert Young. "If Men Played Cards As Women Do." About one minute is missing from the middle of the program. Meredith Willson and His Orchestra, Frank Morgan, Tony Martin, Louis B. Mayer, Edward Flanagan, Fanny Brice, Hanley Stafford, Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas, Robert Young, Margaret Sullavan, Ted Pearson (announcer).  The Louella Parsons Show. January 05, 1951. ABC net. Sponsored by: Jergens Lotion, Woodbury Soap. Burgess Meredith has been secretly married. The Elizabeth Taylor-Nicky Hilton divorce is proceding. The film "The Miracle" is considered "immoral, irreligious and stupid" by the Catholic Church...and Louella. Faye Emerson and Skitch Henderson are having marital troubles. Louella interviews John Wayne and presents him with a scroll from "Motion Picture Herald." John's interview sounds scripted, but he does mention his anti-communist feelings and his support for "The Motion Picture Alliance.". Louella Parsons, John Wayne, Marvin Miller (announcer).FEDERAL AGENT 1944. Finley syndication. Music fill for local commercial insert. Nick Sarno is up for parole, and it's granted despite the objections of the Feds. Sarno's enemies are wiped out in a gangland massacre, even though Sarno is in France!   Dragnet. March 02, 1950. Program #38. NBC net. "The Big Kill". Sponsored by: Fatima. Jack Carver, just out of Folsom, is suspected of killing a cop for revenge. Friday poses as a criminal in jail to find the missing murder weapon. Jack Webb, Barton Yarborough.  Death Valley Days. June 16, 1939. NBC net. "Shoo Fly". Sponsored by: Twenty Mule Team Borax (some commercials deleted). A tough old lady runs her own claim in the Panamint mountains...with a harsh word and a shotgun. Milton Herman, Frank Butler, John McBryde (as "The Old Ranger"), Irene Hubbard, Jeffrey Bryant, George Hicks (announcer), Ruth Woodman (creator, writer), Dorothy McCann (producer), Bob Prescott (sound effects), Keene Crockett (sound effects), Harry Glantz (bugle call), Joseph Bonime (music). 

Send us a textThis week on the Montana Outdoor Podcast your host Downrigger Dale talks to Ed Hebbe from the Montana Trappers Association to get the truth about trapping in Montana. In this Podcast some VERY important information is delivered that will likely surprise you about trapping. Is trapping really necessary? Some say that trapping is actually important to the survival of wildlife in Montana and other states, is that really true? Is trapping really used for wildlife management and research? Did you know that trappers come from all walks of life and are a huge help to farmers and ranchers? Did you know that trapping is used to help control disease? Really? Why are environmental organizations and others always suing to try to stop trapping? This Podcast will tell you the answers to those questions and the answers just might shock you! After you are done listening you just might change your mind about trapping and hopefully you will get involved to protect the REAL protectors. If you don't agree we want to hear from you too! It's time to talk about this! Links:To learn more about the Montana Trappers Association click here. Click here to learn more about Montana's Furbearers.For the latest news about Trapping click here.Checkout the MTA Facebook page by clicking here!Questions for our guest on the podcast Ed Hebbe? Click here to email him.Tell Downrigger Dale your thoughts about this podcast and let him know what other topics you would like us to cover. Click here to email him, or click the text button above.Remember to tune in to our live radio show, The Montana Outdoor Radio Show, every Saturday morning from 6:00AM to 8:00AM. The show airs on 30 radio stations all across the State of Montana. You can get a list of our affiliated radio stations on our website. You can also listen to recordings of past shows, get fishing and and hunting information and much more at that website or on our Facebook page. You can also watch our radio show there as well.

In this episode of NDO Podcast we visit with Stephanie Tucker, Department game management section leader and furbearer biologist, about bounties, fur market, fisher pregnancies, the wildlife health laboratory, trapping regulations, and the time Steph came face to face with a mama mountain lion.

In this episode, Andrew and Dr Sam dive into the world of singing drummers—because why settle for just bashing skins when you can also belt out tunes? Expect a thorough dissection of jazz chaos theory, led by Peter Evans and his so-called “three-stooges” approach to organised sound. The duo also explore Karen Carpenter's dual talents, Red Fang's unadulterated riffage, and Mastodon's... well, let's say, questionable riff decisions. Dr Sam throws in some knowledge grenades about jazz producer legends, while Andrew recalls a traumatic encounter with Reading Festival toilets that left him missing Mastodon for a “pressing” appointment. They also ponder how Robert Wyatt of Soft Machine managed to keep it together, both rhythmically and vocally, before a window accident shifted his life forever. From awkward gig moments to a deep-dive into prog jazz and even John Grant's soundcheck playlist, this episode has it all—except, maybe, subtlety. _Featured Tracks and Artists_: - Peter Evans and friends with some chaotic jazz noodling - The Morons with "I Want to Stab You in the Neck" (naturally) - Anderson .Paak, making soul look way too easy on the Tiny Desk - Queens of the Stone Age, with zero Grohl vocals - Yoshida Tatsuya's wild prog jazz - A head-turning pick from Soft Machine with Robert Wyatt singing and drumming Grab your headphones (and maybe a stiff drink); it's a wild ride through rhythm, riffs, and a solid bit of nonsense. ### Riffs of the week #### Dr Sam's Riff - Peter Evans - Freaks (opening) #### Andrew's Riff - The Ruins of Beverast - Anchoress in Furs (opening) ### Dr Sam's track choices 1. The Morons - Stab You in the Neck (0.10) 2. Anderson .Paak - Heart Don't Stand a Chance (from NPR tiny desk) : 3.57 3. Soft Machine - Moon in June (0.20) 4. Koenjihyakkei - Rattims Friezz (1.44) ### Andrew's track choices 1. The Carpenters - Close to you (1:15) 2. Mastodon - Blood and Thunder (opening) 3. Queens of the Stone Age - Song for the dead (0:02) 4. Velvet Underground - After Hours Email us - beatmotel@lawsie.com Anderson .Paak - Heart Don't Stand a Chance (from NPR tiny desk) : 3.57 - https://youtu.be/ferZnZ0_rSM?feature=shared&t=237

The witching hour is nigh and so is the end to our “Hallo-Weenie!” miniseries! Join in as we further discuss our spooky season offerings, Austin's continued trip into dictatorial madness, the end of Beyond Fest, and finally our time in the nightmare factory that is HAUNT!   Go to Patreon.com/shudcast where you can find FULL VIDEO for our episodes as well as a host of other perks, including access to our Discord server. Be a SHUDite today!   00:00 - 12:00ish - Intros: Austin expands upon the idea of his eventual dictatorship and we discuss the top clown in America!   12:00ish - 58:00ish - The other stuff we watched this time!   Lucas - Silent Rage, The Mummy (1932), The Fall, House of 1,000 Corpses, and VHS: Beyond   Cody - House of 1,000 Corpses (x2), Nightbitch, Little Bites, VHS: Beyond, Jimmy & Stiggs, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, Presence, ParaNorman, Cloud, Chime, The Sect, Venus in Furs, The Wild Robot, and It's What's Inside   Austin - House of 1,000 Corpses, VHS: Beyond, The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Salem's Lot (2024), Apartment 7A, and The Witches (1990)    Curtis - House of 1,000 Corpses, VHS: Beyond, Jimmy & Stiggs, Cloud, Chime, It's What's Inside, The Penguin, Fright Night (2011), The Cell, The House by the Cemetery, The Exorcist III, The Exorcist: Believer, Invitation to Hell, House (1985), Stage Fright (1987), Challengers, Army of Darkness (Director's Cut), Labyrinth, and Hell House LLC   58:00ish - 1:35:00ish - HAUNT - SHUDdown and discussion!   1:35:00ish - End - “Hallo-weenie!” Awards PLUS our next THEME and MOVIE!

Danny is recapping the most recent Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, where the women went to the Miller Lite beer cave, Brittani revealed she's not dating the Osmond anymore, Bronwyn shades her husband for being elderly, and lots more! After RHOSLC, Danny touches on RHOP premiere and RHOC for a minute!ORDER DANNY'S NEW BOOK: https://linktr.ee/jolliestbunchDANNY'S (OTHER) BOOK: Smarturl.it/unrememberTwitter: @DannyPellegrinoInstagram: @DannyPellegrinoYouTube: www.YouTube.com/DannyPellegrino1TikTok: @DannyPellegrinoPatreon: www.Patreon.com/EverythingIconic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello October, we've been waiting for you!!! As we continue our celebration of spooky season and countdown to Halloween, enjoy a replay of our chat on the Netflix series, "Wednesday" starring the newly minted princess of darkness, Jenna Ortega!  Stay tuned for a new headline and hot topics episode dropping this Thursday, October 3rd! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fangs, Furs, Stoners, and Scales unite! This week, we are recapping the Netflix hit series "Wednesday!" (01:30)  Hidden Gems (1:11:06): Darby and the Dead (Hulu) The Menu (HBOMax) Ginny & Georgia (S2) (Netflix) Blood & Water (S3) (Netflix) The Best Man: Final Chapters (Paramount+) We are available on all podcasting platforms but please follow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify apps. We greatly appreciate the support! Follow us on social media: IG: @recappinpodcast Twitter: @recappinpodcast FB: ReCappin' with Delora and Ashley Contact us: Email: recappinpodcast@gmail.com

Bartees Strange cuenta su dura historia de superación en su próximo disco, 'Horror', del que te damos todos los detalles en esta sesión, donde además escuchamos uno de sus adelantos, 'Sober'. También te presentamos las últimas novedades de Mother's Cake, Sister, Thames y Black Leather Jacket, entre otros.Playlist:OCTOBER DRIFT - Blame The YoungTHAMES - BurnTHAMES - Shake, ShakeSEXY ZEBRAS - Mañana no existeBLACK LEATHER JACKET - UnitySISTER - Never Gunna Get It BackSISTER - I'm Not In LoveDAVID BOWIE - Moonage DaydreamCAPSULA - Automatical SoulMOTHER'S CAKE - Poor BoyDEMOB HAPPY - Voodoo ScienceROSY FINCH - Venus in FursREPION - BrillanteREPION - ViernesPJ HARVEY - We FloatWILCO - Hot SunU2 - Country MileU2 - Pride (In The Name Of Love)BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - Dancing In the DarkTHE GASLIGHT ANTHEM - History Books (feat. Bruce Springsteen)BLEACHERS - Chinatown (feat. Bruce Springsteen) (Live At Radio City Music Hall)THE WAR ON DRUGS - Pain (Live... Again)BARTEES STRANGE - SoberEMPIRE OF THE SUN - Cherry BlossomEMPIRE OF THE SUN - Walking On a DreamALMOST SUNDAY - Can't Slow DownCIRCA WAVES - We Made ItEscuchar audio

What happens when haunting melodies meet themes of sadomasochism and drug use? Join us as we revisit the cult classic album The Velvet Underground & Nico, exploring the profound impact it had despite its initial commercial failure. We'll kick things off with a lively debate on the best way to introduce this groundbreaking record to new listeners, celebrate Brian Eno's iconic quote about its influence, and delve into how its anti-heroic essence starkly contrasted the 'Summer of Love' ethos, influencing the evolution of punk and post-punk music.Ever wondered how a chance meeting could change music history? We delve into the fortuitous partnership between Lou Reed and John Cale, from Lou's songwriting days at Pickwick Records to their experimental collaboration that pushed musical boundaries. Our journey takes us through some of the most accessible tracks like "Sunday Morning" and "I'll Be Your Mirror," while examining Nico's enigmatic influence and Andy Warhol's pivotal role in funding and promoting their debut album with its iconic banana sticker cover design.Is it garage rock, experimental rock, or avant-garde rock? We tackle the complexities of labeling The Velvet Underground & Nico, drawing comparisons to early Pink Floyd while debating the contributions of each band member, particularly John Cale's unique viola sound. Wrapping things up, we host a passionate showdown between tracks like "Venus in Furs" and "Heroin," underscoring the exceptional synergy within the Velvet Underground. Tune in for a nostalgic, insightful, and sometimes humorous exploration of one of rock history's most influential albums.Support the Show.Twitter - https://twitter.com/mccartneyinWebsite - https://mccartneyingoal.com/

Fur coats are in demand in this week's radio mysteries, as our detectives tackle cases involving the pricey outerwear. First, Dick Powell investigates a fur warehouse fire that may be arson in "Fortune in Furs" from Rogue's Gallery (originally aired on Mutual on December 20, 1945). Then, the cops of The Line-Up hope a fur coat can help them identify a Jane Doe in "The Fur Flaunting Floozy" (originally aired on CBS on September 26, 1951). Finally, Johnny Dollar hunts for 80 stolen mink coats and the thieves who committed murder in their getaway in "The Silver Blue Matter" (originally aired on CBS between May 7 and May 11, 1956).

Your Pop Art impresarios of pretty awesome facts are back to examine a groundbreaking album that lobbed a grimy East Coast grenade into the Summer of Love. In addition to droning on about drones and other avant-garde musicians of the period, Jordan and Alex offer the behind-the-scenes drama of band patron Andy Warhol's Factory scene, a partial history of electro-shock therapy, and the Velvet's hilarious blood feud with Frank Zappa. The boys debate the merits of Lou Reed's lyrical talents by contrasting “Heroin” and “Venus in Furs” with his later-era track “Possum Day.” Get ready for a wild ride deep into the dark, druggy world of urban decay, BDSM and…bananas. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The job to investigate a warehouse of furs that caught on fire comes across Richard Rogue’s path. For a hot tip, Rogue needs to pay a $1000 payment to the…

The job to investigate a warehouse of furs that caught on fire comes across Richard Rogue's path. For a hot tip, Rogue needs to pay a $1000 payment to the…

[originally published on Patreon Dec 29, 2023] Today I'm joined by Reid (@seriations) to discuss maybe the most conceited man in the world - Ira 'the Unicorn' Einhorn. In this episode, we get into Einhorn's family history and early life, his time studying to be a guru, and his work as a snitch and informant. I lost my damn mind researching a related figure, Weldon Melick, who very much appears to be Something, but what that Something is, isn't entirely clear to me. Then we get into Einhorn's drug dealing and drug usage, which also got me sidetracked with a brief yet interesting parapolitical history of DMT. [note: my buddy Luke Marshall had only just launched his podcast when we recorded this episode, so I accidentally referred to it as "Things Unsolved" when his podcast is "Things Observed"] Songs: Motherly Love by the Mothers of Invention Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground Absolutely Free by the Mothers of Invention Hungry Freaks, Daddy by the Mothers of Invention

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1168, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Finish The Line 1: The Beatles:"Yesterday all my troubles seemed...". so far away. 2: Francis Scott Key:"Oh! Say, can you see...". By the dawn's early light. 3: President Bush:"Read my lips...". no new taxes. 4: Clark Gable in "Gone with the Wind": "Frankly, my dear...". I don't give a damn. 5: Your mom:"Penny wise...". pound foolish. Round 2. Category: My Tv Dads 1: James Gandolfini led 2 types of families, each with their own unique sets of problems, on this HBO drama. The Sopranos. 2: In "Two and a Half Men", he was just Duckie playing Alan Harper, dad to the half-man. (Jon) Cryer. 3: On this show, Will moved in with his Auntie Viv and Uncle Phil, parents to Hilary, Ashley, Nicky and dance master Carlton. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 4: Taiwanese immigrant Louis Huang makes a go of it in 1990s Orlando with his wife and 3 sons on this ABC sitcom. Fresh Off the Boat. 5: His 2017 Emmy award as dad and son on "This Is Us" was his second in two years--for your information, the "K" is for Kelby. (Sterling K.) Brown. Round 3. Category: Let'S Play Clue 1: This murder weapon could also light up the table in the dining room. Candlestick. 2: In the 1985 film based on Clue, this "Rocky Horror" actor played Wadsworth the butler. Tim Curry. 3: It's the main claim to fame of Anthony E. Pratt, a fire warden in Leeds, England. He invented the game ("Cluedo"). 4: He's the only academic among the 6 suspects. Professor Plum. 5: In the U.S. version, the game of Clue starts when this man is found dead in his mansion. Mr. Boddy. Round 4. Category: National Velvet. With Velvet in quotes 1: Bobby Vinton revived this Tony Bennett song and took it to No. 1 in 1963. Blue Velvet. 2: "Dark" mixed drink of stout beer and champagne. Black Velvet. 3: Holy Roman emperor Charles V spoke of power as "An iron hand in" one of these. a velvet glove. 4: Classic songs by this '60s band include "Venus in Furs" and "All Tomorrow's Parties". The Velvet Underground. 5: 1989 Czechoslovakian uprising that led to democratic elections. the "Velvet Revolution". Round 5. Category: Soft Rock 1: This French-Canadian woman topped the adult contemporary charts with "The Power Of Love" and "All By Myself". Céline Dion. 2: Putting the "easy" into easy listening, Lionel Richie sang, "That's why I'm easy, I'm easy like" this. Sunday morning. 3: Now known as Yusuf Islam, he embarked on the Peace Train Tour in 2014. Cat Stevens. 4: In the '80s this duo had a string of hits beginning with "Lost In Love" and "All Out Of Love". Air Supply. 5: Seals and Crofts made us feel fine with this tune, "blowing through the jasmine in my mind". "Summer Breeze". Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

Angeblich verreist jeder 7. Erwachsene nur mit Stofftier im Gepäck. Sucht man nach dem Geheimnis der Plüschliebe, kommt es zu unvergesslichen Begegnungen: in der Coburger Teddyfabrik, wo der Angela-Merkel-Bär seine Pfoten zur Raute formt. Oder bei den Münchner Furs e.V., die sich in lebensgroße Plüschtiere verwandeln.

Fashion Lust Style --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fashion-talk/message

Tonight we talk to all the host and new shows for the 2024 season. Meet Host: Randy Newton - The Final Cast. Monday 7pm Eastern John Rapp - The Rusty Hook Podcast. Tuesdays Gene Campbell - TPO Dock Talk Show Monday 6pm Mtn Dustin Nicholas - Chasin' the Tide Sundays Susie - Fishing For Noobs Show - Wednesdays Brain Schiller & Jay Randall - OG Show. - Fridays Brad - Feathers and Furs (seasonal) We will also talk about other plans and shows in the works! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 Originally Published 10/29/17Bondage, Leather, Whips, Furs, Latex, Masters and Slaves - all about Fetishes tonight!Here's the Playlist:Oh Bondage (Up Yours)X-Ray Spex Punk You Vol. 1Vinyl Fetishists 45 Adapters  Patriots Not FoolsWaitress in...

 Originally Published 10/29/17Bondage, Leather, Whips, Furs, Latex, Masters and Slaves - all about Fetishes tonight!Here's the Playlist:Oh Bondage (Up Yours)X-Ray Spex Punk You Vol. 1Vinyl Fetishists 45 Adapters  Patriots Not FoolsWaitress in...

Subscribe to the PPM Patreon to access the Premium Feed: patreon.com/ParaPowerMapping Today we're joined on the show by the inimitable Jacob Everett, editor-in-chief of Apocalypse Confidential, for a wide-ranging & far-reaching conversation that serves as a preliminary materials for a deep dive into the New England opium smuggling outfits & the Sino-American trade in the 19th century. It's a highly enjoyable parapolitical jam sesh... W/ a particular focus on Jacob's family history, specifically his ancestor Ramsay Crooks, who was a Scottish-born fur trader who would ascend the ranks of the Pacific & American Fur Companies to the very zenith, becoming wealthiest man in America John Jacob Astor's most trusted lieutenant & eventually president of the American Fur Company himself once Astor left the game. We learn about Crooks' involvement in the overland, Lewis and Clark-esque expedition to establish the Astoria settlement, a grand "Chinese" dream of Astor's that is seriously reminiscent of previous fur trading & alchemical colonial plantation schemes that we've covered in previous MasSUSchusetts EPs. We establish how the PNW fur trade was viewed as an essential link in numerous triadic Sino-American trading get-rich-quick schemes, and how Astoria itself would eventually serve as a loading bay for furs to be added to Perkins & Co ships laden w/ contraband cargo (opium) that would then make their way to Canton. We also find time to discuss all manner of things, from Dick Cavett; to Astor enlisting the MasSUSchusetts author Washington Irving in a pseudo-mythologizing psyop project to glorify the short-lived Astoria settlement; to a quick rehash of the PTCave phenomena & recent mass shootings; to Astor's Freemasonry; to the Tonquin incident & the tragic deaths of 100s of indigenous warriors; to white boy familial guilt; to Milk Morgellons; to Ramsay Crooks' Civil War colonel son & "Indian agent"; all the way to Jacob's experiences editing a magazine of the Kali Yuga, and, most importantly, whether he believes humans are ontologically evil or not! Oh, and short fiction about rape-y dolphins, which kinda connects to the last one. Songs: | The Velvet Underground - "Venus in Furs" | | The Psychedelic Furs - "Here Come Cowboys" |

It's a furrennaisance! Amythe7th featuring black-owned fur company owner Tiara Marie, aka The Furry Godmother. She's all things fashion, furs and luxury! The mom of 3 and her husband own Fur and Leather Centre, North America's largest privately-owned fur company. The Furry Godmother is rebranding what it means to step out in furs. She says it's not just winter fashion. She's modeling that very mantra from New York Fashion Week to even her own series, Furbaby on YouTube. I catch up with Tiara to talk about being a minority in the industry. What's like being a black woman running a large corporation. And how she's juggling it all from family, marriage, and success. She tells me, “You can have it all if you want it all.” A decision anyone can commit too. The full video of this episode airs tonight on YouTube! Be sure to tune in! Don't forget to grab 10% off your next fur by visiting https://www.thefurandleathercentre.com/. You can also learn more about Tiara on IG @furrygodmother.tiara/. As always, support my channel by visiting taeharborstudios.com/contact.

Royal Blood - Pull Me Through Dolly Parton - Jolene R.E.M. - Imitation Of Life Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie Tame Impala - Elephant Camp Claude - Te Faire Danser Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors The Mamas And The Papas - Monday Monday Bandit Bandit - La Marée The Smiths - Girlfriend In The Coma Psychedelics Furs - Pretty In Pink Queen - Bicycle Race The Kills - 103 Parabellum - Ilot Amsterdam Kasabian - Days Are Forgotten Guns N' Roses - It's So Easy The Vaccines - Heartbreak Kid Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock Melissa Auf Der Maur - Out Of Our Minds Sting - If You Love Somebody (Live At Villa Il Palagio) Dinosaur Jr. - Freak Scene The Troggs - Wild Thing Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes - Man Of The Hour Electric Light Orchestra - Evil Woman Larkin Poe - She's A Self Made Man Korn - Blind

Lee and Leah dive into a pool of kink and murder this week as they talk about the late period giallo, "Arabella: Black Angel" (1989), directed by Stelvio Massi, and starring the beautiful and often nude Tini Cansino. A lot of the conversation revolves around the abundance of kink content, nudity and softcore sex, as well as the crazy plot twists. Is this a good giallo? How does the movie tackle mental health in realtion to sexuality? Can a movie this sleazy also be sex positive? All this and more in this episode, so come join us at Freak Boy Town, and don't forget to wear your boxing glove on one hand and carry your ass-peg in the other! "Arabella: Black Angel" IMDB  Featured Music: "Angel" of the Morning by Merrilee Rush; "Angelfuck" by The Misfits; & "Venus in Furs" by The Velvet Underground.

Dice and Dialogue Episode 12 | Furhaven Campaign Overview & Additional Tips to Enhance Your Game The Furhaven campaign takes place in the town of Furhaven, where tensions between two factions, the Furs and the Feathers, are escalating. The players, a group of young adventurers known as the Younglings, are caught in the middle of a conspiracy! Throughout the campaign, the players uncover clues and face various challenges. The campaign highlights themes of betrayal, loyalty, and the struggle for power. It offers opportunities for stealth, combat, and problem-solving. With its engaging story, suspenseful moments, and a mix of urban and wilderness exploration, the Furhaven campaign offers players a thrilling and memorable adventure in a world filled with intrigue and danger.

Dice and Dialogue Episode 10 | Introduction to Fate's End: Furhaven The World of Aloria is a place of mystery and danger where adorable characters undertake dangerous quests to protect their families and homes. The main hub of commerce and civilization is the settlement of Furhaven, a large community of humble Furs from throughout the forests, pastures, and sunny spaces. Furhaven is an exciting campaign setting for 5th Edition, full of colorful characters, magical items and spells, new races, and daring adventures.

Moobarkfluff! Wow, what a lot of stuff this week. We have lots of upcoming events, we visit the Transfurmation lab, talk about some creature oddness, visit with Taebyn's honey; Tatsu, A movie review from Cheetaro, and well, that's just some of the hilarity you you expect from BFFT! Moobarkfluff all you furs! Migration | Official TrailerTaebyn Merch at FourthwallWild Bills SodaMerch at RedbubbleMerch at BonfireMerch at FourthwallThis podcast contains adult language and adult topics. It is rated M for Mature. Listener discretion is advised.Support the showThanks to all our listeners and to our staff: Bearly Normal, Rayne Raccoon, Taebyn, and Ziggy the Meme Weasel.You can send us a message on Telegram at BFFT Chat, or via email at: bearlyfurcasting@gmail.com

we continue on in our exploration of filmmaker Jess Franco, and the period of his career where he worked with problematic producer Harry Alan Towers, beginning with their foray into the even more problematic world of Fu Manchu, alongside their first De Sade adaptations + Venus in Furs

On Saturday, July 22, 2023, the Duluth News Tribune released episode 21 of the Northlandia podcast, which is a weekly podcast that tells true stories of the unique and fascinating people and places you'll find exploring the Northland.  To give you another opportunity to see the unique stories Northlandia has to offer, we're providing episode 7 here for you listen. This episode of Northlandia was first released on April 15, 2023.  If you enjoy the episode, we encourage you to check out the other episodes of Northlandia by visiting duluthnewstribune.com/topics/northlandia or wherever you get your podcasts. The Duluth News Tribune Minute is a product of Forum Communications Company and is brought to you by reporters at the Duluth News Tribune, Superior Telegram and Cloquet Pine Journal. Find more news throughout the day at duluthnewstribune.com.

Episode 215: First up in Tidbits: Joe and Kari's thoughts on the new Wham! documentary that is streaming on Netflix, so make sure you've watched it before listening (the doc is highly recommended!). Obscure Soundtrack Songs: If you've never heard of the movie Party Party, it's okay because Joe and Kari had never heard of it until they each located a copy of the soundtrack in different record stores. Songs from Altered Images and Modern Romance are discussed. Next up is Fatal Beauty, a movie that Joe watched quite a bit as a child, for some reason? Music from Shannon, The System, and (most importantly) Madame X is highlighted. Could've Been So Beautiful: The segment that swaps out overrated top 20 hits for lesser known "hits" makes a return to HRT80s. Find out which frenetic songs are swapped out for songs that deserved so much more. 

The following episode contains material that may be disturbing to some listeners. If a story concerning queerphobic, familial, or religious abuse in the form of conversion therapy is likely to disturb you, then please feel free to skip this one.When Blake is sent to Guiding Path Academy, a school for converting gay boys, there's only one thing he can do.Today's story is the second and final part of “Run” by Dirt Coyote, who, when he's not causing all sorts of trouble on twitter, is writing a novel, a series, and short furry fiction. You can find his works in the recently released Furs with Benefits, upcoming anthologies, and at DirtCoyote on Twitter for future updates.Last time, Blake had been sent to a conversion therapy school for boys. Not wanting to tolerate the lies Dr. Fitzpatrick tells him nor the awful treatment from staff and other boys, Blake took his future into his own paws and began the plans for an escape.Read by Kergiby, a Full-Time Panther.thevoice.dog | Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsIf you have a story you think would be a good fit, you can check out the requirements, fill out the submission template and get in touch with us on Twitter.

The following episode contains material that may be disturbing to some listeners. If a story concerning queerphobic, familial, or religious abuse in the form of conversion therapy is likely to disturb you, then please feel free to skip this one.When Blake is sent to Guiding Path Academy, a school for converting gay boys, there's only one thing he can do.Today's story is the first of two parts of “Run” by Dirt Coyote, who, when he's not causing all sorts of trouble on twitter, is writing a novel, a series, and short furry fiction. You can find his works in the recently released Furs with Benefits, upcoming anthologies, and at DirtCoyote on Twitter for future updates.Read by Kergiby, a Full-Time panther.thevoice.dog | Apple podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsIf you have a story you think would be a good fit, you can check out the requirements, fill out the submission template and get in touch with us on Twitter.

Flame Canada. I Don't Like Beeeeeeeer (in Tina Voice). The Right Way To Go To High School. Extra Virgin Coffee. AI AI O. Lady Mix Tapes, For Ladies. I Neither Left with Pepsi but took with Pizza. Netless and Nutless. IT'S TOO EARLY FOR A FISH SANDWICH EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE!! Concertville. Ready for the White Man's Overbite. You say Playlist, I say Mix Tape. The Hamburgler Has Moved Onto Pizza. Butt Spooning. The Furs are still Psychadelic. AppSlappy and more on this episode of The Morning Stream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Flame Canada. I Don't Like Beeeeeeeer (in Tina Voice). The Right Way To Go To High School. Extra Virgin Coffee. AI AI O. Lady Mix Tapes, For Ladies. I Neither Left with Pepsi but took with Pizza. Netless and Nutless. IT'S TOO EARLY FOR A FISH SANDWICH EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE!! Concertville. Ready for the White Man's Overbite. You say Playlist, I say Mix Tape. The Hamburgler Has Moved Onto Pizza. Butt Spooning. The Furs are still Psychadelic. AppSlappy and more on this episode of The Morning Stream. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Noize is giving you a special episode replay with one of the best contemporary artists in the game, Jamea Richmond-Edwards. The 7 Mile girl, joins the podcast to talk about her amazing mixed media work. Her work centers Black women fully and unapologetically. She crafts narratives around her life experiences growing up in Detroit in the '90s. We talk about her inspirations from Ebony magazine spreads to Howard and beyond. It's another great conversation with one of the best contemporary Black artists in the world. Listen, subscribe and share!Episode 168 topics include:AFRICobra influencesembracing colorbeing a Black Indigenous womanspiritual energy in artsymbols in Jamae's workusing women as subjectsgrowing up in Detroit in the 1990sthe power of styleJamea Richmond-Edwards graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Jackson State University in 2004 where she studied painting and drawing. She went on to earn an MFA from Howard University in 2012. She offers a repertoire of portraits of women drawn using ink, graphite, and mixed media collage. Richmond-Edward's work has garnered the attention of various art critics including in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post's “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know”. Richmond-Edwards has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally including the Delaware Art Museum, California African American Museum, Charles Wright Museum in Detroit, MI, and Galerie Myrtis In Baltimore Maryland. Her works are in the permanent collection of private collectors across the country including the Embassy of the United States in Dakar, Senegal.See more: www.jamearichmondedwards.com + @jamearichmondedwardsPresented by: Black Art In AmericaRead the Studio Noize Artist FeatureArtist Jamea Richmond-Edwards: Story of a 7 Mile GirlEpisode TranscriptFollow us:StudioNoizePodcast.comIG: @studionoizepodcastJamaal Barber: @JBarberStudioSupport the podcast www.patreon.com/studionoizepodcast

Venus in Furs

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

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EP301 - Annual Predictions, NRF Big Show, Year End Recap This ended up being a slightly longer than usual episode, sorry! If we had more time, we'd make a shorter podcast (to paraphrase Mark Twain). So here are some timecodes if you want to jump ahead: Recap of the NRF Big Show 1:27 Recap of 2022 Holiday and Full Year Results 22:43 2022 Predictions Scoring 30:34 2023 Predictions 54:51 2022 Predictions Recap Jason: NFTs, Web 3, Metaverse, and Ultrafast delivery services are all overhyped and don't deliver meaningful commerce revenue in 2022. Yes Shein exceeds $30B in annual sales, disrupting apparel industry Yes Adoption of BNPL services slows down to less than 15% CAGR in 2022. Yes Amazon opens more than 100 Amazon Fresh grocery stores No Last Mile evolves Veho, X-Delivery, shipium, or Instacart gets aquired No Jason Total Score: 3 of 5 Scot: Amazon launches a competitor to Shopify webstore, possibly via a headless solution on AWS No Amazon wins ultra-fast delivery. Gopuff, Gorilla, or  Jokr goes out of business in 2022 Yes Metaverse gets lots of buzz but no revenue Yes Livestream commerce goes mainstream in the US No Fabric gets acquired No Scot Total Score: 2 of 5 Jason pulls out the rare win! 2023 Predictions Jason: At least 2 retail bankruptcies (besides Party City) BNPL Consolidation (Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay. Sezzle) – at least one merges/exits US or BNPL. Shopify launches an ad product such as a retail media network Meta/Google/TikTok lose ad share to new social media platforms and retail media networks. Live Streaming Commerce Still not meaningful in US in 2023 (less than 5% of social commerce in US) Scot: Amazon uses this 2022 setback/slowdown/reversion to the mean for a public resetting of expectations, but behind the scenes they take share and raise the bar on shipping Shopify is acquired An innovation in e-commerce powered by ai (gpt4) surprises us by how fast it's adopted and how cool it is E-commerce accelerates back to the mean in 2H after a mean regression in 1H. E-com returns 10-15% growth rates. Sephora and/or Ulta move to a subscription model for new product discovery ChatGPT “based on trends and current developments in e-commerce, it is likely that we will see continued growth and expansion in the industry, with an emphasis on mobile commerce, personalize shopping experiences, and increased use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Additionally, there may be an increased focus on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility in e-commerce” Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 301 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 19th, 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 301 being recorded on Thursday January 19th I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scott showed listeners Jason I was looking in our in my podcast app I'm an iPhone user says looking in the Apple podcast app, we had a review in six months so I thought of the top of the show here we would ask folks if you enjoy the show we sure would appreciate a review if you are in that player you go into the app you find our podcast scroll down a fair amount because we have so many episodes about four Scrolls I would estimate and then right there you'll see the Low Five Stars we would love a five star review or any review that you'd like to leave that would be most appreciated, we do this for the reviews so we appreciate it. Jason: [1:21] Yeah I would just add that makes a great New Year's resolution because you can literally accomplish it 5 minutes after you met. Scot: [1:27] Yeah and you get a dopamine hit and feel feel better about yourself sand Jason and I will be very happy, Jason today we are going to talk about two of my favorite topics so number one you just got back from the NRF Big Show and then we are belated with our predictions and recap for last year's predictions so we're going to sneak that in here we're still in January so I still think we're kind of in the new year a little little close here recording on the 19th but I think we're still in that window, so how I was not able to make it at in our F this year but you did and I look forward to hearing what you saw there. Jason: [2:07] Yeah yeah it was a good time obviously the biggest efficiency was your absence. But for any newer listeners that haven't been there before National Retail federation's in Trade Organization represents the retail industry and and this is their big event every year this is a hundred year old show, that is always at the Jacobs Javits Center in Manhattan in mid-January usually in the middle of a blizzard. Um so so a bunch of things worked in our favor this year during the last couple covid years the Javits Center got remodeled and so. The main areas where they do Keynotes and a lot of the big presentations and content are now like a new very nice facility that's very comfortable. And it was unseasonable e nice weather so it was kind of like 30s and 40s and clear no no snow no no blizzard to have to fly home in. Scot: [3:05] That's good. Jason: [3:07] So that got things kicked off on the right foot and then to me the most exciting thing was just the vibrancy, I don't think they've published the final attendance number but I'm pretty confident it's going to be just a smidge north of their 2020 attendance so, that you know given all the things that went on in the last couple of years being positive against your last pre coded year seems pretty good definitely felt like there was a lot of energy people were really happy to be there, and I was particularly pleased because. Last year was not a great year they tried to have the show last year there was just a big pain demick spike in New York right before the show so a lot of exhibitors. Publicly pulled out other exhibitors quietly pulled out and just didn't show and so you know it was kind of this weird thing where they had. Um you know a somewhat empty Spartan giant trade Joe for where they you know they frankly made a bunch of exhibitors still come in spite of the fact that there weren't very many, attendees for them to talk to, several of the Keynotes didn't show up and came via Zoom so it was it was not a good event last year and I was a little worried that that you know people that were forced to participate last year would be resentful and less interested in coming back. But it appears like we're back to normal. Scot: [4:33] This retail thing is catching on. Jason: [4:35] Yeah yeah it's not going away. So a couple of the big trends and we won't go into depth in any of these but you know maybe some of these will come up as topics in subsequent podcast. [4:49] They're the last couple shows there's there there have always been what I'll call digital shelves like electronic fact tags everybody knows I always like to talk about video displays on shelf Edge smart shelf so that know, um what inventory they have on them and. They get incrementally better every year so there were a lot more of them this year they were all better and cheaper. For a variety of reasons I still don't think 20:23 is going to be the year that they become. Super common in the wild but the tech is getting better a related Tech that seems like it has a lot of new vendors in this space is what I call in-store analytics so that's using cameras and computer vision too, measure Shoppers in the store and kind of like Google analytics for your your store again I'm not expecting huge deployments this year but it's, the computer vision technology is just getting more and more amazing and so that the insights that these things can get from relatively few cheap cameras keeps getting better. Um there's a lot of automation at this show so you know there's the usual. Auto store and perfect pick which are two of the big automated Warehouse Systems but there are a lot of other. [6:08] Startup automation things that could bring automated picking to store fulfillment or small fulfillment centers or. Pick to light systems and gloves like a lot of. Get more efficient about fulfilling omni-channel order stuff so automation was a big theme. Another thing that got a lot of space and signage at the show was what all broadly call headless Commerce, so Shopify made a big announcement right before the show that they were releasing a new offering called Shopify Commerce components and so this is kind of a. Upmarket headless version of Shopify Shopify has always been kind of a monolithic web app that you know was a super good fit for very small start-up companies, um and you know some of which have grown to be quite large on the platform, and they've always had a second offering called Shopify plus which was. Intended to be more Enterprise features but the plus mostly meant more Enterprise sales features not necessarily a lot more Enterprise, features in the in the platform and so this new offering seems like. [7:27] You know a pretty evolved set of apis and as a we've talked about in a previous episode of this show, fine but they sometimes called the mock principles, so they had a big booth that was mostly focused on this Shopify Commerce components, Salesforce has a very similar offering they already are kind of more enterprise-e and so they were there and then there's a, I want to call my startup they've been around for a while now so I'm not sure it's fair to call it a start-up but newer more modern Commerce platform. It's called Commerce tools in the chief strategy officer, from from from Commerce tools Kelly has been on our show before they had a huge presence a big booth and sponsored a bunch of stuff so there were between Shopify Salesforce and commerce tools, you definitely got a strong headless vibe in the show and then for old timers, the trade show floor is divided into three sections there's an innovation Center which is all new startups there we had a great Innovation Center this year was mostly International companies so I companies from Israel companies from France, there were very small startup showing some pretty cool Tech there's the upstairs trade show for which is all the. [8:56] Kind of incumbent Legacy vendors the Microsoft's the oracles the ncr's, all the big players with a really big boost and then the more digital players that you know they might exhibit it shop talk or would have exhibited it at shop dot org in the past, they're in the downstairs exhibit hall and it all this is not true but it felt like this year one of the rules that was in place to exhibit at the downstairs exhibit hall is you had to rename your url to end in dot AI. [9:30] Every every single vendor downstairs. Was you know some some execution of AI and some of them were super interesting and, I think we'll talk about this later but I'm very optimistic will be a big part of the Commerce ecosystem this year and some of them are, you know pretty speculative and far-fetched so so you know a good breath of everything and then I'll sum all that up that's what the floor look like the content you know is mostly, some some decent key notes from from Big retailers and the problem with key notes from the CEOs of big retards is they're not necessarily going to share anything. [10:14] Proprietary or new insightful like it's kind of interesting to hear their their philosophies but like I don't tend to learn a lot that I'm going to use, um in my day-to-day gig from the content sessions and in our f, um but what I do love is talking to all the people in the halls and aisles and by far you know kind of trying to take everyone's temperature that I could I could get time with the overwhelming consensus was, this is 2023 is going to be a really uncertain year for retail that there's a lot of, economic challenges that people are going to be really focused on profitability and a lot of the Retailer's talked about how, um their budgets are getting reduced significantly that the focus is really going to be deploying that Capital against things that can have a short term. Benefit to their cost structure and help them get their profitability up and so I kind of interpret that as. We're going to see a lot more a lot fewer investments in customer acquisition and front end systems and a lot more investment in back-end systems and optimizations. Scot: [11:23] Pickle I got a million questions on Automation in you know kind of the state of Art and my mind is still the key the system is there something out there you think at least on the you kind of mentioned in store but I'm thinking more Warehouse side anything there that's kind of. Jason: [11:41] Yeah so there's two big vendor like so Kiva is Amazon's proprietary system and to my knowledge they don't sell it to others yet do they. Scot: [11:49] No but it's still kind of the state of Missouri. Jason: [11:52] Yeah yeah they certainly could have some point so so you know there's kind of two philosophies of these like big fulfillment center automation. [12:02] Go go get bring the goods to a picker or you know you know so you actually move Isles which is what the key this system does it moves bins, um to a human picker that then pulls them out so the picture gets to stand still or these fully automated systems that like you don't bring things in on conveyor belts and so there's two big vendors, um there's a store a vendor called Auto store which is like a, very dense set of bins that are stacked quite high and they're shuttled around on conveyor belts so it's a 3D delivery system of these these bins, and there's a bunch of big retailers if you've highly automated your your fulfillment center in the u.s. like you're probably using Auto store or their competitor perfect, and so both of those had full live demos at the show that where you know are super mesmerizing to watch because they have all these. [13:01] These bins flying around but then went there were was a lot of startups that were more Kevo like, so instead of like a conveyor belt that ends with your exact products you know in a bin ready to package, um these are things that are like lifting shelves and moving the Shelf to a to a picker so even in that Innovation Center there were several Israeli companies that you know we're in a tiny little 10 by 10 booth, with the little robot that could you know lift up a gondola full of products and bring and move it around a warehouse. Scot: [13:34] Merkel and then from afar I saw Shopify really hitting the we're headless to kind of train which I thought was interesting because they kind of have, you just kind of dip their toe in that water I read it as they must be hitting some headwinds maybe at Shopify plus maybe some churn and realize they had to go into that market pretty hard so I wonder if our friends at Fabric and some of these other places were starting to take some share from. Jason: [14:02] Yeah so I don't know if it's as explicit as taking share I think there's this notion new companies are highly likely to start life on Shopify and it's a. If a family member calls me and says I want to start a business and sell something online I'm sending him to Shopify it's the easiest safest best best way to do it, so there's a notion that those companies ought to grow up and you know either by something else or spend a lot more money with Shopify, and so I think a lot of people looked at Shopify plus and they said oh yeah that's that's for the startup companies to evolve into, and then I think a lot of people are looking at the these Shopify Commerce components in that same way I actually suspect that's not the case, the overwhelming majority of startups that start on Shopify are are going to go out of business, right I just the attrition rate is super high and so most companies aren't getting bigger and need a bigger platform, um the I think what they're trying to do by having a mid-tier kind of mid-market offering is not so much help their existing customer base to grow its to acquire, um a new customer base that you know frankly has a little more proven business model and a little more stability to kind of help them with their Journey a little bit right and so, um I think that was the intent but far behind Shopify Plus. [15:23] Shopify plus never got a ton of traction and they actually had a pretty big staff reduction in Shopify plus earlier last year so. E-commerce components does feel like a restart like they're tackling I think the right problem this time like before they were tackling, the Professional Services that they thought you know an Enterprise client would want in order to use Shopify this time they're there they're tackling the. The functionality and the flexibility that a mid-market or Enterprise client might want so I think this is going to be, an interesting play but I don't think it's so much that Bigcommerce or Fabric or Commerce tools, um stoled customers from Shopify I think it's more Shopify want some of those customers in its ecosystem as well and obviously they have a lot of resources to go after them so that's kind of how. How I interpreted it. Scot: [16:20] We will agree to disagree on the a. Jason: [16:26] As we're about to find out from the predictions I am occasionally wrong. Scot: [16:29] Yeah we all are this is the The Humbling part of this program is trying to make predictions and this current world we live in AI everything was one of the things you have to have a DOT AI anything that blew your mind, you and I had chatted about you know we're starting to see a eyes for example that'll create product detail Pages where you anything getting some traction or is it all just. Jason: [16:54] Yeah so so I so a I think there's a trend that's super annoying to me I'm old and curmudgeonly is everyone knows but like, there are a bunch of companies that are decided to AI is cool and then they're just desperately looking for a problem to solve with AI and so and sometimes they don't understand the space very well or the problems or the economics of the problem very well and so there are a bunch of, AI companies, the I don't find particularly interesting right like there's probably 30 AI companies that are like we're personalization engine to do better product recommendations with a i. [17:29] And personalized product recommendations is super important there are, 15 Enterprise products that have been using AI for 15 years and are the is the AI getting much better. [17:43] Yes but. Like the you're not necessarily like bringing anything new to the party when you're you know a small start-up in that space, um so there are you know some things I don't get super excited about. The AI for inventory management is super interesting like these models that are doing demand forecasting that are doing kind of. You know most retailers kind of have a pretty simplistic model for for inventory balancing like you know what what inventory do I put in what fulfillment center how much extra inventory do put in a store for store fulfillment, things like that and now they're using AI to make that much more robust, um AI promotion engines so you know instead of kind of a one-size-fits-all promotion where hey we're going to do 30% off this product across the whole country, um we're going to you know throw some business rules to an AI engine that's going to decide like when and where to offer a promotion and it's going to, factor in a lot more localized factors and personalization factors and so you know there might be deeper discounts and, in some stores and other some circumstances and others are even in someday Parts than others so so I think all of. AI to improve these existing business processes is super interesting and then the the new use cases. [19:12] I'm very convinced that the majority of e-commerce content the majority of product descriptions we read attributes we read are going to be written by AI in the future like it's gotten really good there's a bunch of benefits to having it read it. I'm about in the old days Channel advisor at a bunch of clients they created product content for and then they syndicated that content to a bunch of different retailers and one problem was that content was the same at all those retailers so from an SEO standpoint it didn't look very unique, and one of the things that a I can do trivially is take your master product content and make 10 variants that are. [19:48] Equally human readable but are unique so that you could Syndicate different content to eBay Amazon and Walmart for example which is. Pretty cool and as we talked with mad about last week, you know Goodwill finds is using AI to onboard all their new skews pretty efficiently so I think it's really good for that and then the last thing I'll say is there's a lot of super interesting stuff around computer vision so both, pulling product attributes out of pictures, um using the security cameras in the store to to do inventory checks and to do merchandise and compliance checks and pricing checks, um and stuff like that and using that that inventory to understand customer using those security cameras to understand customer Behavior better even using computer vision to do better loss prevention which loss prevention, is a really big issue with this show and there's an explosion in organized crime this year and so that you know kind of, predicting crime events is kind of an interesting thing the days a eyes doing so like plugging a i into a camera is yielding I think a lot of pretty interesting use cases for retailgeek. Scot: [20:57] Yeah very cool did you get to see some of our favorite folks. Jason: [21:04] I did I did I saw a lot of past guests I think I made a joke on Twitter which we're going to have to do a separate show about how sad I am about everything that's happening on Twitter, but the. The most common thing that happens to me now is I have a loud obnoxious voice that everyone at this trade show can recognize yrg from this podcast and so everyone is super excited and I get tons of compliments I feel bad that you weren't there because it's kind of, it feels nice to have all these people recognized us and talk about how we're you know an important part of their, there we can help them in their job so I really appreciate that and I want to say hi to everyone I, I did cross paths with at NRF it was awesome to meet you and thanks for for stopping and saying hello but then the next word out of their mouth is where is Scott because I'm way more interested in meeting Scott than I was in meeting you. And I have to say that you're you're too much of a big deal the coming in or out. Scot: [22:04] No just I'm allergic to the cold and had a little bit of work to do on my side the auto industry's on a different cycle than the retail industry sadly. Jason: [22:15] Yeah but they are they are colliding have you like Auto Commerce is going to be a big thing. Scot: [22:19] Yes yes was almost all Automotive companies which is kind of out of never did not have that on my bingo card. Jason: [22:27] Yeah they're going to have to rename it AES or something Auto Electronics Show. [22:43] Yeah as everyone knows my pandemic hobby is trenching US Department of Commerce retail data in Tableau and kind of annoying that in our F ended on Tuesday night, so try to get up Wednesday morning and fly home but I had to wait to leave my hotel room because the 8:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday the US Department of Commerce published, their monthly retail sales data and this month is particularly exciting to me because it's the December data so that lets us do two things. Look at November and December together and kind of understand what happened in holiday and then it also obviously lets us Wicked January through December and start talking about, 20:22 as a whole year which lets me retire all my 2021 talking points so so that was exciting. Scot: [23:36] Recap of what what did we learn. Jason: [23:37] Yeah so that's about a four-hour show but I'm gonna recap the two top lines in under 30 seconds so we'll start with a holiday so if you add November and December sales which I would argue the best view of holiday is November December January, generate data is not available in a lot of people think of holidays November and December so if we just talked about November and December, and I'm going to take a narrow definition of retail for purposes of holiday I'm going to pull cars out, I'm going to pull restaurants out and I'm going to put gas stations out because it's a super volatile thing that's not very tied to Holiday behaviors so November and December sales were up, 5.2% versus last year so from 2021 which was a monster year we went up another 5.2%, now most people were disappointed when they saw that number, big for a couple reasons last year we were up 13.4 percent using the same definition of retail so. [24:38] You know a much lower rate of growth in last year and most people you know are having to comp against last year and they set their financial goals based on last year, and also in the middle of holiday like especially around Black Friday a lot of, third-party analyst publish a prediction they say we have Secret inside data we have credit card data and we think retail sales are going to be 9% or 12% or you know there were all these estimates, there were optimistic, all the digital guys came out and said digital sales are up significantly from the previous year and the inner F came out with these vague statements and said like more people are going to be shopping on Black Friday than ever before so you heard all this good news around Black Friday which made you think. [25:20] This is going to be a big holiday season and then and so you 5.2 sounds like a huge disappointment compared to some of that over exuberant, but to put that in perspective. [25:34] The historical average growth is four point four percent so 5.2% is meaningfully above the historical average, and I don't want to say I told you so but all of you that attended my webinars about holiday performance, I heard that that I was predicting in that five to five and a half percent even even back then so so there's a rare occasion of me getting it right. Here's the piece of bad news about that whole thing that 5.2% was all inflation so if if you adjust those two months for inflation we were actually down 1.8% from last, so the big takeaway from holiday is. [26:12] It was disappointing it was much more difficult to make a profit on this holiday than it has the last several Prophets, so a lot of retailers came in a holiday with pretty robust inventory levels they didn't sell through their inventory what they sold they didn't sell it particular High margins, um and so that's setting us up for a uneasy first half of 2023, retailers have too much inventory and and not enough recent profit so we're likely going to see a lot of discounting and you know more pressure on on income as they kind of work through all that in. [26:47] So that's the holiday Debbie Downer the full year is I think a better story the full year we sold seven point one trillion dollars worth of stuff which that's the first time we passed the seven trillion dollar mark, that's up 8.2 percent from last year again last year was a monster year, the best year in my my career of retail so, being up 8.2% versus that you know again is a really good story it's a bad news is you pull inflation out of that and we were basically flat we were up 0.2. Um so through that lens 2022 was not a fabulous year but the one thing I would say is, what's really interesting is where is retail compared to before the pandemic and cumulatively, retails up 31% from 2019 so so the full year of 2022 is 31 percent higher than 20, um an average year over the last 20 years in retail for a full year would be up 4.7% so. 31% is still almost twice what we would expect over a three-year kakkar so you know not a, knock it out of the park year but still you know very healthy industry on the backside of this pandemic. Scot: [28:09] So if we kind of you know there's that famous chart you hate and then we reverted to the mean does this mean we're kind of back on the meat. Jason: [28:19] Because it's wrong and I get to make fun of it. Scot: [28:21] Do you love to hate how about that are you hate to love I don't know and the so we reverted kind of back to the mean do you think that this kind of resets and we get back to that kind of traditional growth. Jason: [28:35] I still think there's some factors yet to play out so I'm not sure we're going to get completely back to normal for 2023 I think we're going to, we are still seeing some residual pandemic effects and the main residual pandemic effect we're seeing is. The spending is still skewing to experiences more than Goods so there was pent up demand for experiences, so we're you know we're we're possible we're seeing people invest more in experiences and less than Goods, but we're also starting to see a lot more economic uncertainty especially in the bottom two quartiles and so you know you're starting to see even kind of lower middle class people, change their purchase Behavior you know you're hearing in Macy's earnings that they're saying their consumers start starting to make some, you know economic trades in their purchase behaviors and so a lot of that's going to be. Kind of cooked into this 2023 so I don't think we're quite back to kind of perfectly the mean but I do think the, the ratio of store sales to e-commerce is likely to look a lot more normal this year than it has the last couple of years. Scot: [29:47] Pretty cool and this is the one that doesn't really give us e-commerce data. Jason: [29:51] Yeah there's some loose e-commerce data in there which is why I didn't quote it but next month they will publish the queue for e-commerce data so that will give us. A full year of e-commerce, you know we're starting to use these T numbers instead of B numbers in e-commerce. Scot: [30:21] Got it cool we'll have to do a big show on that one and you can just have a two hours a day spewing data. Jason: [30:28] Why I can describe my charts it's soup there's no more fascinating podcast than listening to a dude drone on about a chart. Scot: [30:34] Yeah that he can't see alright world will put a put a pin in that one and come back to it, on the all right so let's talk about predictions so I had to go back and one of our many interns research this it was back on episode 284 where we did our predictions and as is our custom we like to rate and review the prior Year's predictions and then lay down a stake for the next year so if we go I guess you'll kick it off so you'll go through my predictions and I'll say how I did and you'll kind of chimed in and then we'll flip. Jason: [31:10] Awesome and are we going to do off of yours and then all five of mine is that the easiest way to do okay. So we'll start with your first prediction Amazon is going to start getting serious about a Shopify competitor in potentially double down on headless. Scot: [31:27] Yet this was a Miss as far as I know you know what I didn't see coming was Amazon has had a bit of a rough year in and especially the back half of 22 you know they've done some layoffs they've, shuddered a lot of their physical stores they stopped their plans for big grocery expansion. I'll get that get that out on the record here early and yeah they've even started shedding warehouses so I think you know what what's happened is in this post there's been some really fascinating articles where, turns out they had this automated inventory system and its name is Scott ironically with one t and it. They trusted this thing so wholesale lie that it just went kind of Rogue and did not see the downturn you know this. Track attacking back to the mean and it kind of went Bonkers and so it's a little bit of an interesting case study of AI gone wrong and that has them having their hands very busy with their Core Business and they have not had a chance to punch Shopify in the nose and in some ways they may not have to because Shopify also had a lot of wind come out of it sales. Jason: [32:41] Yeah yeah I agree and I'm inclined to give you a note that too but if I were making an argument that you got it partially right the argument would be that they rolled out a really interesting feature called by with. And we talked about on the show we had a beta tester on the show that was super bullish on it and it's kind of a trojan horse that creates them interesting. Problems for Shopify that like frankly I'm still not sure shopify's figured out what they're going to do about but that went from a pilot program to full deployment. The week before in our F and it was a major feature of Amazon's booth and it's weird they branded the booth AWS but like. The booth was talking more about by with prime than it was a WS and and you know they're not they're not in the same divisions Within. [33:31] Um so you could argue by with prime is partly a Shopify competitor, but in the interest of me staying competitive in the predictions I'm not gonna not giving it to you and I will say, of your Amazon commentary is certainly true, but be a little careful like you know people tend to look at some of that and go oh man Amazon's really flailing like they're really feeling you know it's a huge thing for them to cut back on their fulfillment capacity and you know cancel some leases and just remember, they bought more fulfillment capacity than anyone else in the world has in a single year. The year before so it's it's not like they're getting out of retail. Scot: [34:15] You're spoiling one of my. Jason: [34:16] Find that people over over read into the you know that accurate – news but they think it's it's a more material part of Amazon's business than it is. Scot: [34:27] Yeah I integrated that into one of my future predictions. Jason: [34:31] All right so so we're going over one I like it so far I'm winning that your second prediction is Amazon puts a hurting on go puff and others go puff gorilla and Joker. Don't get out of 2022. Scot: [34:48] Yeah I'm going to score this one a win I don't I think somebody's out our business and I think go Puffs on its last legs if it's did it do a Down Round and layoffs and I don't. I certainly haven't even used it I don't know if it's I'm sure it's still around but I feel like it is on its last legs and I'm increasingly here in North Carolina like in Chicago you've had this for a while I'm increasingly getting offers that say Hey if you if you throw a little bit more in the cart you can get this thing overnight which has been kind of you know I feel like Amazon is really starting to shorten that delivery window in this post covid world. Jason: [35:26] Yeah so I'll give you a yes for that I do think a lot of the instant delivery companies like pulled out of markets or flat went out of business or left the US in 2020 so I think that's fair. I'm not sure go puff is publicly position themselves as quite as dire, as you did I could be wrong but they you know they're the biggest player left standing and and I think they have some some positive and negative indicators. The one thing I would quibble with is it's not clear to me if they are if all this instant Commerce not working is because Amazon put a hurt on them or whether, it just wasn't a good business model than enough customers were willing to pay for. Anyway right so I'm not sure if Amazon was the direct cause of all that pain or not but I do secretly think, Amazon has much better service levels than a lot of people realize you live in a wonderful place but it's. It's probably not a tier-one market for Amazon I talk to a lot of people in cities that The the vast majority of their orders are delivered same day and certainly the vast majority of stuff I ordered from Amazon, I get that order in by noon and it's it my doorstep before 10:00 that night and so that still is different than this instant delivery but. [36:49] I think Amazon's service level is darn impressive and I think you know that certainly you didn't want to be an investor in instant delivery in 2022. So I'll give you a yes. Scot: [37:01] Yes Pooh okay. Jason: [37:06] So your third one is metaverse lots of demo videos no Revenue. Scot: [37:13] Yeah think I nailed this one the Facebook has had a lot of Pi interface for spending an inordinate billions and billions of dollars on the Oculus the sales have dramatically underperformed even you know even moderate to light expectations there's no real use case that's popped out of here and then just generally and then certainly if we look at our e-commerce world there's really not much going on here so this one's been kind of a dud I'm a little bummed because I love AR and VR I just don't think we've kind of come up with the use case I think the wild card on this technology is there's increasingly detailed rumors of Apple having a device and if anyone can figure this out I think applicant but until they do, I think we're not going to see a lot of metaverse updates. Jason: [38:01] Yeah yeah I think this is a category that to me like if people are familiar with the Gartner hype cycle it fits it perfectly like. There definitely is a chance that there will be a version of The Meta verse that's very meaningful at some point but right now it's wildly overhyped. One could quibble with your in precise language like you say no revenue and of course there are some, some novel examples where there's a little bit of Revenue and the one that has meaningful revenue is for the kids is real box where you know it's. Game Revenue it gets its you know ingame credit it's not like you know people are shopping for real world of goods in the environment so there's a few things but I certainly think the spirit of your things exactly right that it's, it's wildly over-hyped and not. A financial driver in the in the near future and I would even argue nobody can even agree on a definition of what the metaverse is a it sounds singular to fight this pack that it's it's quite poor rural. You know a lot of people think the metaverse has to be on web 3 which means it's open and, Roblox is the example most people use the meta verse which is not on web three and you know a lot everybody thinks of the metaverse is VR and a lot of definitions of metaverse so Ike. Do not require VR so I don't know I'm cynical in the short term for sure so I'll give you a yes. Scot: [39:27] Okay. Jason: [39:29] For live streaming goes mainstream in 2022. Scot: [39:36] Yeah, here I was hoping to kind of weasel out with the mainstream so I will point to some successes so what not is a very collectible oriented Marketplace that is all live stream and I think they're gnd is north of a billion it may be closing in on two or three so that's pretty mainstream and then I've read probably 20 articles in the last 10 days about Tick Tock e-commerce and every time I dig into it there's no data it sounds like it's just new so I was hoping to take credit for that in some way but don't think I can so I'm going to probably score myself a no on this one. Jason: [40:18] Yeah so tricky like I think there's some use cases where a live streaming has become a thing and collectibles, is certainly one and it does I guess toy depend on what you meant by mainstream here's the thing the most generous definition of social commerce all social commerce in the US last year was about. 60 billion in total sales and live streaming was likely less than 1% of that 60 billion so I. [40:48] Social commerce isn't that big a piece of Commerce and live streaming is in a very big piece of social commerce so I through that lens, I feel like it's not a big thing and fun fact none of the Commerce on Tick Tock is wives. It's so people do I think confused short form video with live streaming, um and so I tend to think live streaming is overhyped in the US it does work in China but what people don't understand is, that live streaming in China is, flash deal-sales like all of them come with a significant price offer and the reason that you you want to watch that stream when it's alive is because, that offer has scarcity attached to it and that offer is not going to be available two hours after the video plays so you have to watch it while it's being broadcast in order to get that deal, um and you know none of the u.s. versions have really been that that deal oriented and without that deal why have live streaming when you could just record a short form video and, you know 100 times more people watch it over the subsequent two weeks or three weeks or whatever so so for all those reasons, I feel like live streaming has been a little overhyped in the US and I agree with you why I probably didn't go mainstream this year. Scot: [42:09] Yeah I don't know Tick Tock could be live stream it's kind of there's a stream. Jason: [42:16] But it's yep are you watching it when the person talks I mean that's what it boils down to or is it recorded on a server and you watched it days later. Scot: [42:23] I don't Tick Tock I don't want I don't want my get brainwashed. Jason: [42:26] Yeah spoiler alert it's not last. Scot: [42:29] Okay. Jason: [42:33] There is a live flavor on Tik-Tok but it's been quite small. Scot: [42:37] Yeah I'm two for two so I'm Batman 50. Jason: [42:40] So you're to noes to yeses and then your final prediction, is that fabric which is a an e-commerce platform / Marketplace and and the CEO Fazal has been on a show a couple times and you were predicting that they would. What says fabric acquisition so that could mean either that they made a big acquisition or they got acquired. Scot: [43:04] Yeah it was being acquired. Jason: [43:07] Yeah that's what I said. Yes and I met him at the show and I can confirm that he's still at fabric. Scot: [43:14] How are they doing. Jason: [43:15] Really well well I think they feel like, there are well positioned and benefiting from some of these headless trends that we talked about and we had a good chat Faso as a longtime veteran of the industry and ran e-commerce at Staples and and some other places so he's always fun to talk to. Scot: [43:33] Here's a head-scratcher so facile likes to be called Faisal and then we have a guy at 50 that wants to be Fazal so so and you know you know how it is like I know it's I cannot get it right because I always it's 50/50 coin toss but it always lands the wrong way so it's. Jason: [43:52] Yes I'm familiar with those dilemmas I also really struggle with fabric because his company is called Fabric and then there's another company called fabric that make micro fulfillment centers for grocery e-commerce. If you like you can have two companies with the same name in roughly the same space. Scot: [44:08] I give him. Entrepreneur credit because he raised a boatload of money when valuations were super high which was smart if it's enough to get through to the from the peak through the valley to the next week so we'll see how it goes for. Jason: [44:25] I'm knocking on wood you just can't hear it because I'm such a good audio editor. [44:39] It's kind of your historical average right now I don't know I'm. Scot: [44:42] Usually do better than half yeah it. Jason: [44:43] You've done better actually I think that's a down year for you I think it's up here for me and a down here for you. Scot: [44:48] Post covid it's hard to predict what the what's going on in the world. Jason: [44:53] And and as we have learned doing five years of these as hard as it is to predict something happens it's also timing is so tricky like very often we predicted something just in the wrong year. Scot: [45:04] Yeah I gave up on Amazon competes with the other shippers and that one still I still think it's coming. Jason: [45:10] Hundred percent there's a weird cognitive bias where like after you've been wrong once or twice you hate to predict it again even though it probably would be smart the. Scot: [45:18] Yeah yep. Jason: [45:20] I'm with you all right well let's see if I can hang with you at all. Scot: [45:21] Alright let's see how you did yeah so your first prediction was you love web 3 you're going to mortgage your house put all your money in FTS and this token that you were super excited about that was going to the mood called FTX how'd that work out for you. Jason: [45:40] It worked out better for Michael investor Tom Brady than it did for me. Scot: [45:44] Well I don't know he's in pretty rough rough time right now. Jason: [45:49] Neither of us are having our best years. Scot: [45:50] Butts. Jason: [45:53] I'll be different reasons but I feel like you might have slightly misstated the spirit of my prediction. Scot: [45:59] Oh yeah I misread this so it says in FTS web 3 meta 15-minute delivery will be Duds less and ft dollar transactions will happen in 21 verses 22. Jason: [46:12] Yeah so I was down I didn't think any of those things would be a big deal this year I guess one of those kind of overlap with you because you also didn't think instant delivery would be a big deal. And I don't think any of them were a big deal we've covered them pretty exhausted lie but in order to make this a fair prediction I tried to put something that was more measurable and so I said in Ft transactions will be down in 2022 from 2021 and. I got to be honest I looked it up before the show and so the good news is I'm right. In Ft transactions gmv for an ftes and in the u.s. in 2021 was 25 billion 25 Point 1 billion and this year it was twenty four point seven billion so just barely down and I have to be honest, I feel like I dodged a bullet because. The way you buy an mft is with a cryptocurrency and the two main cryptocurrencies are each less than half their value. From the beginning of the year and so you would think like, in Ft transaction should be way down just because the value of the underlying currencies is way down but you know apparently like despite the fact that it's not a mainstream thing it grew enough that I was I almost ended up being. Wrong on my on my number but that's a long-winded way of saying I feel like that's a yes. Scot: [47:32] Got it cool so we'll give you a yes prediction to here in North Carolina we call it Sheen you fancy City people call it she in your prediction was that they would do over 30 billion more than double the previous year so since we're a year off so you predicted in 2022 they would double a guest from 2020 1.15 billion you check this close and I do so I'm gonna have you self-regulate this one. Jason: [48:00] Yes I nailed it like almost to the penny except that you know they're not a public company so we don't we don't really know the revenue but that estimates for for 20 21 where 15 billion so I predicted 30 billion in 2022 they did a raise in March or may of May of 2022 and they disclosed during that raised that halfway less than halfway through the year they were already at 16 billion in Revenue, year to date, so I was tracking really well and they're doing another raised right now as we speak and their side note taking a ginormous haircut on that race so the, the May raise was that a hundred billion dollar valuation the razor trying to do right now is it 64 billion, um but they disclosed in the in the deal docks for this raise that they finished the year at 30 billion which is, means that their sales significantly decelerated in the second half of the year but it means my prediction was exactly right. Scot: [49:04] Very good congrats on that one. Jason: [49:06] Yeah and we could be out of time and not do the other other predictions if you want. Scot: [49:10] Well there's one country showing let's jump into this one so your third prediction was buy now pay later which we call B and P L is going to lose momentum it had 29 percent growth and 21 and you said it would slow to sub 15 and 22. Jason: [49:28] Yeah and so it depends on exactly what math you're using but the actual growth rate in 2022 is 48.6% so is that is that more or less than 15. Scot: [49:39] I find that hard to believe. Jason: [49:41] I do too I was surprised. Scot: [49:44] Yeah no I think I'm gonna give you this one because you know the stocks on all these are down clar NE is on life support and I don't know I feel like these guys the the largest, kind of tie up was Peloton and buy now pay later and you know Peloton is had a really rough go of that in 22 and took all you know down the biggest buy now pay later operator with a firm so I feel like he just was a yes. Jason: [50:17] Okay well I'm not gonna argue with you I feel like they got a lot of, negative momentum for a variety of reasons in in 2022 and right now we're seeing their valuations go way down because their default rates are starting to go up and what I'm noticing is, they're all trying to Pivot out of buy now pay later into other, other retail services but like depending on how much of a stickler you might be like they still apparently sold a lot of stuff on buy now pay later last. I'll take the yes or at least I'll take a half a yes. Scot: [50:48] I'll give you the win but I'll scold you for bad predicting like never get specific with percentages. Jason: [50:53] I know I know well I was I feel like so many people make these like lame predictions that I was trying to be super specific but I agree that was that was dumb alright thanks man you should great all my stuff. Scot: [51:02] Now this next one is kind of a Whopper so this is this is kind of my favorite so you predicted Amazon would open 100 grocery stores how's that one going. Jason: [51:15] It's great they opened one store and that store opened 365 times. But if you're doing store count. I missed it pretty substantially that I think they have 44 stores in the US and 17 stores in the UK so well short of 100, the end and I'm way less optimistic that they're going to invest in that that concept, now than I was a year ago when I made this prediction so that's definitely a no the only fun fact is compared to any other retail Concept in Amazon this one did pretty well because they literally closed every other one, and they're they're laying off a ton of the retail people like right now as we speak unfortunately so. So I think that's a clear no it does not seem like the immediate future for Amazon is in brick and mortar. Scot: [52:07] Yeah yeah they've really pulled in the horns on that one. Jason: [52:11] Fun fact then this means nothing no one should interpret this but Amazon close their bookstores in 2022 and Barnes and Noble was opening new book store some joint too so I think there was a time when we would have said that could never happen. Scot: [52:25] Yeah one of these is not going to be going well okay your last prediction was that last you there would be a last mile delivery acquisition of some kind you mentioned instacart v0x delivery and ship iam. Jason: [52:41] Yeah and none of them were acquiring so I think, I miss this I mean if you go deep cut enough I found there's a couple like four million dollar transactions that happen but none of the name ones did anything there they did some fundraising the the premise behind this, this prediction last year was, that one of the ways that a lot of e-commerce sites deliver packages is not exclusively through FedEx UPS in u.s. post office, that increasingly they're using a Federation of a bunch of small last-mile companies and that often there's a middle man that's helping aggregate all those small a smile companies that make it easier to ship with them, and so my thought was that's becoming a more important. [53:27] Part of the e-commerce echo system that somebody's going to try to make a big play there and kind of roll some of them up or acquire some of them and and you know kind of add them together and make something more valuable, um and it didn't happen last year and what's interesting is, Fedex rates and UPS rates are going way up this year like one of the conversations I had with a lot of e-commerce sites, last year was that their last mile costs are going up at an untenable rate so this. This methodology is becoming more important and more popular so this is a classic example, if I were smart I should probably take this this prediction and double down again on it for this year but spoiler alert I did not do that I just took the no and I moved on. Scot: [54:12] All right so out of your five you had sixty percent so you had three correct and to wrong so you you win the year so congratulations you get the virtual trophy you get an mft, ironically you get the nft the Jason Scott exclusive one of one in Ft. Jason: [54:38] I'm super excited about that for all our listeners I only accept in ft's that are minted on proof of stake blockchains I don't accept proof-of-work blockchains because they're an ecologically. Scot: [54:51] So it's Solana for you all right I know we're Up Against Time the shows always go a little long so I'm going to kind of lightning round my predictions for 2023. [55:15] All right so number one Amazon uses the this 2022, perceived setback that I think's way overblown you kind of mentioned it at the top and, I think what's going to happen is sure e-commerce is going to revert to the mean but under the hood I feel like they're going to be taking share at a really aggressive clip, the reason to borrow on shipping the selection of things that are near you is going up, I have through my day job I can see that they are making a lot of good changes with last mile delivery they're still putting a lot of effort into that and improving it and making it better all the time so so basically I think they're going to you know if I have to, get a little more specific I think they're going to take a fair amount of share in 2023 from the rest of e-commerce so they already are like more than half of e-commerce and I think they grab a chunk so that's kind of how I would measure this is what percentage of e-commerce Amazon has and I think they're going to take, pretty good chunk. Jason: [56:19] I like it cool. Scot: [56:20] That's my first one number two is I think Shopify is going to be acquired you know so I think they're doing this headless thing the first party piece hurts them and a lot of you know Facebook so that's a natural Binding Together they're there we're going to talk about it in a future show but they're kind of they have never really executed on this idea of a Marketplace they've had a lot of weird cultural things where they talked about getting rid of meanings and then like their hole. Admin interface was down for days it feels like something's going on they've had a lot of people a lot of turnover they've gone totally virtual I'm not a fan of that I think it's hard to be super Innovative and have to whatever the world changes have to hop on a DSM calls to figure out what everyone's thinking so I think I think they're they definitely we've hit Peak Shopify probably you know in 2021 and this is when it starts to be time maybe some people say hey this wouldn't be a bad time to to tap out here, we'll see. Jason: [57:24] Wow that's awesome one just quick curiosity one problem is the valuation like while it's gone down a lot is still pretty high like so the pool of acquirers is pretty small or are you thinking the valuations going to keep going down low enough that there's. That more people might take a shot at it. Scot: [57:42] Yeah I think I think even at this valuation there's probably three or four acquirers and I think the valuation could go down further. Jason: [57:48] All right cool I like I love the big bold ones. Scot: [57:51] Yeah you're going to hate this next one so this one is where everyone thinks AI is hype I'm thinking there's going to be a big innovation we don't see it from these new AI engines specifically right now the state of the artist G PT 3, I know people have seen GPT for and they all can't express enough how game-changing it's going to be so I think there's going to be something in the e-commerce world not this is like so it has to be kind of a big idea so I can't be just like a chatbot or like another recommendation engine but I think there's gonna be something kind of, big here that's hard, it's so different that it could be hard to I can't tell what it's going to be but I think something big is going to happen here that kind of makes our heads explode so that's my prediction that we actually see a really, disruptive piece of technology kind of AI that impacts the e-commerce world. Jason: [58:47] Okay I like it I don't have a other than it's going to be higher so you hard to measure but I guess we'll know it when we see it. Scot: [58:56] Yeah. Yeah and then since we've got great each other gives you a lot of fodder to push against ich number for e-commerce is going to accelerate back so I think and the first half will have these recessionary wins I'm a eternal optimist you're typically on the pessimist I think we'll have a soft Landing maybe we don't have much of a recession and then in the back half will be kind of through this post covid Hayes hopefully I think part of this prediction in Furs that inflation will will kind of get under control and we'll see e-commerce go back to kind of its average growth rate which has been historically 15 percentage so that's my prediction there. Jason: [59:38] Okay yeah I think they're a bunch of people that are like kind of e-commerce growth is tapped out which is I think they're wildly wrong so I certainly take the bullish side of that one for you. Scot: [59:50] Yeah and then this one I have to give props to my daughter I was she was looking over my shoulder and I was doing these and she said I have one and I said you don't understand the stakes I've got to be Jason because I did bad this year and she said I don't care I'm 16 and I spend a lot of time at Sephora and Ulta this is her speaking not me I also do because I'm with her but now she can drive so I'm spending less time there and I think they're going to come out with some kind of a subscription model so, there you go I don't know any specifics but that is her hot take. Jason: [1:00:21] Okay and and by that you don't mean they're going to transition their whole business to a subscription you mean they're going to add some kind of subscription offering okay. Scot: [1:00:28] Yeah yeah and you know I was thinking you know what was that one there was a box that was Beauty used Beauty Box every over the name of that. Jason: [1:00:38] Yeah there. Scot: [1:00:39] I don't think I made it yeah and I said you mean like that. Jason: [1:00:43] Box is that what. Scot: [1:00:44] Birchbox well very good man yeah old school way to pull that one out and she said no it'll be more like I can go to the store and they'll I can I can pick up kind of like they'll pull stuff for me that comes in and I could just go to the store and it'll be already there for you. To understand. Jason: [1:01:05] Clarifying question because far be it for me like I want to learn to like and your daughter certainly have the future behavior that neither of us understand yet. Is she thinking like that in the same way that Birchbox was kind of a discovery thing she's thinking this is some kind of. Discovery thing of new products because I actually think Sephora already has a like you know if you use this amount of moisturizer will automatically send you a new thing a moisturizer every three months. Scot: [1:01:35] This was tied more to influence your site so I think there's these influencers and they each have kind of staked out you know there each store has a set of influencers and I think she's starting to see them come out with seasonal products kind of like a yeah and I think that it'll be a subscription to that kind of thing. Jason: [1:01:52] That makes total sense that would be new and I. Could seem cool a lot of the traditional subscriptions lately have not done as well as some of us might have expected but so yeah this this will be interesting kind of like the next gen of those Discovery boxes. Scot: [1:02:09] One thing I did notice in my last six I think this is for they have a end cap that says inspired by Tick-Tock and it's always empty. And as estimate I was like are they she's like oh every time they put something there so I was up and I was like wow that's pretty amazing. Jason: [1:02:28] The Tik Tok made me buy it in cap. [1:02:38] I'm 100% with you social commerce is a thing and it's mostly not about people ordering stuff on Tick Tock it's about people discovering stuff on Tick Tock and then buying it from Sephora. Scot: [1:02:47] I know I was trying to get some partial credit. Jason: [1:02:51] Yeah I like it though all right I think those are great. Scot: [1:02:54] And then in the spirit of my third prediction which was a I will change the world I actually asked chatgpt to make a prediction and it said. Chatgpt: [1:03:04] Based on Trends and current developments in e-commerce it is likely that we will see continued growth and expansion in the industry with an emphasis on mobile Commerce. Personalized shopping experiences and increased use of Technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Additionally there may be an increased focus on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility in e-commerce. Scot: [1:03:30] And when it said that I was thought I thought you were punking me I thought you were on the other side of the chat because I was like that's exactly what someone at publicist would say. Someone with a really long title like eight words that's the exact kind of synergistic linguistic word salad that they would they would throw out. Jason: [1:03:52] Yeah there's nothing super tangible in there but it sounds really good That's a classic chatgpt answer. Scot: [1:03:58] So one way my my one prediction could come true as if you're replaced by an AI so I'll just I'm not that's not a prediction is just one way I could cheat my prediction. Jason: [1:04:08] So fun fact is some people know I have a Forbes column and my my most recent Forbes article was about the demise of e-commerce being overhyped. Often I read those articles from scratch myself sometimes I write an outline or a first draft and I send it to a pupusas copywriter and they send me back a first draft and then I edit it and. When I do that I have to do a lot of work because of the copywriters are really talented writers and use proper English and I'm really. Less sophisticated so to put it in my. In my voice I have to change it a lot so this most recent Forbes article I had chatgpt writer and I said write a Forbes article in the voice of Jason Goldberg that has this title and makes these Five Points. Um and so it didn't really do any research for me it didn't like pick any of the answers because I gave it all the answers in my prompt and the data I wanted to support it. It was kind of like I handed it my outline and had it right the first draft in my voice and it was way closer to exactly what I wanted then the ones I get from the copywriter so I probably will never write a first draft from scratch again. Scot: [1:05:25] Does that mean that copywriters going to lose their job. Jason: [1:05:28] No she's gonna move to higher value stuff from now the actual smart people to do some good with proper English. Scot: [1:05:36] Unrelated we going to have a new new podcast host. Jason: [1:05:42] The yeah that we're way over on time but like the the really scary one is these awesome avatars that can make, I can learn your voice and then sound perfectly like your voice are now out in the wild from several companies including Adobe and, and I conveniently have 3:00 of my own voice and your voice on wreck so I think I can make the two of us say anything we. Scot: [1:06:07] Yep I think again. Jason: [1:06:09] Awesome all right well those all seem like good predictions that seems like you have a very viable chance of coming back and getting your nft trophy back for me, I will whip through mine, I suffered greatly because we are recording this late I wrote my predictions of the beginning of the year and I said Party City and Bed Bath and Beyond are going to declare bankruptcy, and unfortunately pretty soon declared bankruptcy yesterday in Bed Bath and Beyond hasn't cleared yet but they've announced publicly that there, they're likely to so I can't really use that prediction but I'm going to say that there are going to be at least two other retail bankruptcies besides Party City in the in the space this year, um you know I think Bed Bath and Beyond is likely to declare bankruptcy but I also think we might see some of the kind of model-based apparel retailers or. There's a few other other retards I have my eye on so I do think we're

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