Podcasts about Haight Street

Inside ThredUp's Massive Vintage Collection with Cynthia Lee: On today's show, we're chatting with Cynthia Lee, the Head of Merchandising at ThredUp, who have just launched a limited-time, first-of-its kind curated assortment of more than 20,000 vintage pieces in partnership with Beyond Retro. From childhood treasure-hunting on San Francisco's Haight Street to managing millions of unique daily listings, Cynthia brings 15 years of merchandising expertise from powerhouse brands like Neiman Marcus, eBay, StockX, and Sephora. A lover of vintage herself, Cynthia spearheaded this initiative, and she's coming on the show today to share how it all came together. Plus, what's involved in merchandising when you're talking about millions of unique digital listings, why "flawed gems" deserve a second life, and what's ahead for the industry in 2025. Consider this your exclusive behind-the-scenes look at ThredUp's team "knee-deep in boxes" while curating this massive vintage collection! Let's dive right in:  DISCUSSED IN THE EPISODE: [4:03] A lifelong fashion lover whose family was in the fabric business, Cynthia grew up appreciating quality clothing and shopping vintage on Haight Street. [6:17] The evolving art of merchandising across luxury and digital platforms for brands like eBay, StockX, Sephora, and Neiman Marcus. [14:41]  The daily challenge of merchandising and curating 50,000 new unique listings at ThredUp [18:07] What's changed the most in the secondhand industry since Cynthia started doing this work. [21:48] Why secondhand doesn't devalue luxury brands—it makes them more accessible [24:07] What's trending in the secondhand fashion industry in 2025. [27:16] Sorting through hundreds of boxes for ThredUp's x Beyond Retro 20,000 piece vintage collaboration [35:05] How this vintage activation might shape future offerings at ThredUp. EPISODE MENTIONS:  ThredUp The Vintage Pop-Up Beyond Retro Wasteland 7 Timely Takeaways from the ThredUp Resale Report Talking Key Trends with ThredUp's Danielle Vermeer  Danielle Vermeer on Pre-Loved Podcast ThredUp 2025 Resale Report Awkwafina in Crazy Rich Asians LET'S CONNECT: 

In Part 2, we pick up where we left off in Part 1, with Woody's brief time at UC Berkeley across The Bay. During that one year of college, he lived at his grandmother's house in the Outer Richmond. His parents had recently split up, and both his parents moved, separately, to Marin.   In fact, Woody says, his parents' moves north forced him to think about and start to consider that San Francisco was and would perhaps always be his home. Time has proven that to be true, of course. But to his young-adult mind, it just felt right for that moment. He'd spent a little time in Marin, and it wasn't a fit for young Woody.   A decade or so later, now married and with a kid, Woody and his wife moved to Durham, North Carolina, for nine months. It was yet another not-San Francisco town that provided a contrast with his hometown and reminded him how much he wanted to be here.   After that brief stint in college, Woody decided he wanted to entertain, and so he enrolled in a clown school run by Ringling Brothers in Florida. He got work with the PIckle Family Circus back in The City. He did a lot of vaudeville with them and even went to Japan and on other tours.   It was during his time in the circus that Woody met his wife. Nancy had a boyfriend at the time and was headed to Spain to teach English. Two years later, she returned to The Bay and Woody was single. Their first date was at Rock and Bowl, the spot on Haight Street where Amoeba is today. They walked down Haight after that to Mad Dog in the Fog. When they left Mad Dog, Woody knew it was love when Nancy asked him, "Where can we go play video games?"   In 1997, they had a baby, their daughter Miranda. That effectively ended the Performer chapter of Woody's life. Nancy is a midwife, and he needed to be flexible enough that he could watch his daughter while his wife was working.   After that stint in North Carolina, Woody came back with a renewed purpose—he decided to devote his life to letting people know how great San Francisco is. It would start with The City's past, and how that history informs the present and helps chart a path to our future. This led to the establishment of the Western Neighborhoods Project.   David Gallagher was married to a woman who Woody had performed with. David and Woody formed a board with a couple friends also interested in SF history. They settled on being a nonprofit and built a website, something that was pretty novel at the time. They interviewed folks and shared stories of the west side of town. They also had (and still have) a podcast.   Woody was with WNP for 20 years, until just recently. He talks about how the main objective of WNP was to gather as much forgotten history of the west side of San Francisco as possible, and then to make that available to as many folks as possible so that they might understand what came before and what could be possible in the here and now.   We take a sidebar to talk about the so-called Doom Loop, especially as it relates to hearing from friends and family who aren't in San Francisco, but will ask us things like, "What the hell is going on out there?" Not to diminish the real problems facing our and other cities, bu that media trope is tired and was always nonsense.   We talk briefly about the Outsidelands Podcast, which started way back in early 2013. Woody is no longer directly involved, but it's in good hands with WNP Executive Director Nicole Meldahl. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.   From WNP, Woody joined SF Heritage, where he works today. SF Heritage's mission is "to preserve and enhance San Francisco's unique architectural and cultural identity." Nowadays, Woody is the CEO and president of the nonprofit, and he says that in that role, he "doesn't get to do a lot of the fun stuff," being more on the business side as he is. Still, he of course believes wholeheartedly in the organization's mission—it was what drew him to SF Heritage, in fact.   We end the podcast with Woody's take on our theme this season—Keep It Local. We recorded this episode in Mountain Lake Park in March 2025. Photography by Jeff Hunt

The final Run it Red of 2024 is here!  Full tracklist below and hit the charity links if you can as well as supporting the labels and artists wherever you can. Charity Link: fanlink.tv/Charities Spotify Playlist: bit.ly/RUNITREDSPOTIFY Upcoming tour dates: bit.ly/BenSimsBIT BEN SIMS pres RUN IT RED 117. NOV 2024 (PT2) (SC) 1. Vera Logdanidi - Euphoria. Semantica 2. Simoncino - Dub Theory IV. Quintessentials 3. JR Disc - Thrust. Detroit Basics 4. Carlos Nilmmns - IRL (Lo). Distangled 5. Francesco Mami - Stilgar (Reboot Remix). Rhythm Cult 6. Sound Stream - Off The Rack. Sound Stream  7. Sound Stream - El Acetato '94. Sound Stream  8. DJ Sneak - A Taste Of The 90s. Heist 9. The Oliverwho Factory - Feel. Faith Beat 10. Scan 7 - VII. Tresor 11. Flabaire - Life Flow. Bass Culture 12. Nathan Kofi - Wekū. De Lichting 13. Fred P - Vibe To The Rhythm. Synchrophone 14. Taelue - Deviancy. Synchrophone 15. Sound Stream - Make It Right. Sound Stream  16. Carlos Nilmmns - Cabana. Distangled 17. Stroef - Lost Hallways. Boomstraat 1818 18. Mark Williams - Oh Boy (Dub). Hardgroove 19. Uncertain - Feel. RSPX 20. Adlas - Open Question. Hayes 21. Oruam Zior - Torrente. Illegal Alien 22. Stephen Brown - Replika. Synchrophone 23. Scan 7 - Planet Energy. Tresor 24. Operator - Up, Then Down. Mord 25. Fhase 87 - Minimalism 04. Unreleased 26. Massimo Logli - Open Wide. Superbra 27. Stephen Brown - Compare. Synchrophone 28. Mark Williams - Take My Love. Hardgroove 29. Linkan Ray - Flight To Tokyo. Be As One 30. Mella Dee - Fiedel Played A Big One. Warehouse Music 31. PAB165 - Domination. Planet Rhythm 32. Operator - Running From The Man. Mord  33. A Thousand Details - Queimadela. Ear To Ground 34. Mike Dehnert - Berlin Rush. Matter+ 35. G-Man - Throw. Synchrophone 36. Mark Williams - Your Eyes. Hardgroove 37. Rethe - Momentum Shift. Inner Tension 38. KiNK & Raredub - Time To Change (Marcel Dettmann Universal Raw Mix). Mutual Rytm 39. Private Press - Very Cosmic. Hardgroove 40. Kaiser - Ozono (Kriz Remix). KSR 41. Fhase 87 - Minimalism 05. Unreleased  42. DHÆÜR - Chapter 03 (Deluka Remix). Supercinema 43. Dynamic Forces - Holding Out. Pleistocene Future 44. Dold - Slate. The Third Room 45. Sarf -  Orden Disruptivo (Lidvall Remix). Analog Section 46. Kaan Pirecioglu - Magnet. Float 47. Dimi Angelis - Intergalactic (Decka Remix). ANGLS 48. Lidvall - Too Serious!. Symbolism 49. Mal Hombre - Titan Eclipse. Reverse 50. Taken - Ice Truck. TH Tar Hallow 51. Vertical Spectrum - Jej Fizymatenta. Edit Select 52. Møntero - Staying Strong. Liberta 53. A4 - Four Rays. Edit Select 54. Stanislav Lavskyy - LTA-1. Corpus Black 55. Border One - Gazing Eye. Border One 56. Stroef - Widow's Lair. Boomstraat 1818 57. Dimi Angelis - Chrysalis. ANGLS 58. DJ Lily - Succumb To The Algorithm. Lilies 59. JØHRN - Morning Has Broken. Faut Section 60. Pyramidal Decode - Freshwater Use. Warm Up 61. Lidvall - He Scares Me. Symbolism  62. Milo Radd - Memory Quest. Edit Select 63. Detroit In Effect - Tear The Roof Off. M.A.P. 64. Usurp - There Is Someone Else. Headset (Edit) 65. Neil Landstrumm - Before AMS. Unknown 66. Techmarine Bottom Feeders - We Cannot Help You (The Exaltics Remix). EPM 67. Peverelist - Pulse XIV. Livity 68. Shadow Child & DJ Haus - Magic Waves. Unknown To The Unknown 69. Forest On Stasys - Magnetismo. Aura Sonora 70. Synkro & DYL - Last Chance. Relation Reset 71. Finalversion3 - Todos Los Siempres (Oscar Mulero Remix). Gordo Trax 72. Forest On Stasys - Domo.  Aura Sonora 73. Brendon Moeller - Radiation. Samurai Music 74. Ruff Cherry - Exonda. Midgar 75. Etch - Clockwork Romance. Ilian Tape 76. Galaxian - Sterile Vision. Herrensauna 77. Crossing X - Back. Avion 78. Vril - Habit Forming. 1800 Haight Street 79. Dialog - Better Way (Vocal & Version). DOT 80. Uun - Never For The Ever. Mord

A gay bookstore. An Amoeba Records. A dirty McDonald's. We're taking a walking tour of Haight Street this week with a guest whose dynamism and heart looms larger than the Golden Gate Bridge: Margaret Cho! (Also, what did we do to deserve an hour with Margaret!! Maybe our visit to heaven last week paid off?!) Margaret's on Instagram @margaret_cho and TikTok @themargaretcho. If you're in LA this Thursday (10/17), Margaret will be performing at The Hotel Café for Helene Relief for WNC. Watch her in the short film Gianna. PS - We've been named a Signal Awards Finalist for Best LGBTQ+ Podcast! This is a huge honor, particularly as an independent show, and we're counting on your vote for a Listener's Choice Award. Here's a link to cast your ballot; voting closes on Thursday (10/17). One of Us is hosted and produced by Chris Renfro and Fin Argus. It's executive produced by Myrriah Gossett for Gossett Productions and Erica Getto for Kinehora Productions. Myrriah Gossett is our sound designer, and our theme music is produced by Fin Argus and Brendan Chamberlain-Simon. You can follow One Of Us on Instagram and TikTok at @oneofus.pod. Additional Audio for: Haight_Street_Oct_07.mp3 by Shamanatrix -- https://freesound.org/s/44923/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1964 he was a working class hippie student crossing Haight Street, a road in San Francscso, when hit by a vision  - and life as he knew it was over In 1994, he was a multi-millionaire new-age entrepeneur crossing Wilshire Boulevard, a road in Los Angeles, when hit by a car - and life as he knew it was over. In the years in between, along with the co-founder of The Yippies Abbie Hoffman, counter-culture icon, anti-war activist, new age/self-help proponent, social-networking pioneer and all round troublemaker JERRY RUBIN helped articulate the voice of young America in the '60s and early '70s.   He was arrested countless times, carried out many extrardinary protests that used performance art, pranks and provocation including an attempt to levitate The Pentagon and regularly hung out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York. Unlike Hoffman, who lived off grid for several years following a drug bust, died by suicide in 1989 and was canonized as a countercultural saint, Rubin was accused by many of “selling out" - the worst thing a 1960s radical could do - and as a consequence got written out of the hippie history books.   Well that is until our guest for this episode wrote the biography, 'Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary'   PAT THOMAS, archivist, uber re-issue producer, countercultral author and music journalist returned for the third timr to the Bureau.   Previously he was here to talk about The Black Panthers and Allen Ginsberg,and this time, he traced  Jerry Rubin's journey from high school journalist to stoned political freak and multi-millionaire entrepeneur.   Along the way, we hear about The Yippies(the Youth International Party), The Chicago 8, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early 70s, EST training - and selling out   And we debate the question: 'Once a revolutionary always a revolutionary?'   Pat's book:  'Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary'     Check out this Rubin related playlist   #jerryrubin #abbiehoffman #theblackpanthers #blackpower #yippies #theyippies #thebeats #allenginsberg #timothyleary #activism #socialism #revolution #levitatethepentagon #eldridgecleaver #bobdylan #nixon #johnandyoko #vietnam #anti-war #protest #johnlennon #haightashbury #thechicago8   

Rabbi Joseph TeischmanOCTOBER 5, 2012 BY ADMINFrom Rabbis meet Jesus the Messiah – a collection of 24 biographies and testimonies of Rabbis encounters with Jesus the Messiah© Messianic Good News.Joseph Teischman was born and raised the son of an Orthodox Rabbi in New York City. He followed in his father's footsteps by also receiving smichah (ordination) as an Orthodox Rabbi. But unlike his father, Joseph also earned a doctorate in the field of psychology. When he found himself unable to continue believing the teachings of Orthodox Judaism, he decided to leave and join the Conservative movement. His wife refused to leave the protective Orthodox community. She and their young children remained in Brooklyn, while Joseph went to California and eventually became the Rabbi of the Conservative synagogue in Fresno.Some time later, Rabbi Teischman moved to Reno to take the pulpit of the Conservative synagogue there. In that neon lit town of gambling and instant weddings, Joseph became friends with a former pastor who began ministering to him.With the help of one or two others, Joseph made a definite decision for Jesus. He began to study the New Testament and grow in his faith. Sometimes he would quietly slip into the back of a church to hear the sermon. But he kept his faith in Jesus a carefully guarded secret … until his urgent meeting with Moishe Rosen at Jews for Jesus Headquarters in San Francisco. He appeared to be in deep distress and confided that he was a Rabbi who believed that Jesus is the Messiah. He went on to state that he served a Conservative synagogue in Reno and had not been able to tell his congregation about his faith and questioned whether he should resign or should he begin preaching about his faith from the pulpit! Joseph was tremendously burdened and admitted that he had for almost two years wrestled with the problem which was wearing him down; but he had to find some relief by confessing to another Jew that he believed in Jesus. He asked for prayer.The rest of the afternoon was spent discussing the Rabbi's pilgrimage to faith and his hopes and aspirations for serving the Lord in the future. He affirmed his belief that Jesus is God come in the flesh and that He died for his sin and rose from the dead and he considered himself to be a born again Christian. His favourite book of the New Testament was Galatians and the Rabbi described how he felt about being freed from the Law through Y'shua. Jesus had driven away the doubts which used to gnaw at him about his standing before God. The problem was no longer where he stood with God, but where he stood with the Jewish community. Joseph felt torn. He desperately wanted to grow in his faith but knew that his walk with Y'shua might take him on a path utterly unacceptable to his family, friends, associates and fellow members of his chosen profession. The very real possibility of losing everything he had worked so hard for depressed and frightened him.After months of visits and lengthy phone calls, Joseph began to consider confessing his faith at his synagogue. He knew this would mean the immediate termination of his career (What an horrific prospect for a man in his mid fifties). His numerous obligations included college tuition for his children, who were so very important to him.“Jews for Jesus” offered to help the Rabbi attend an evangelical seminary as a believer in Jesus. Joseph knew that he needed the education but remarked that it would be difficult to return to school after so many years as a Rabbi.Rabbi Teischman truly loved the Lord but could not seem to overcome his struggle to profess his faith publicly. When he was asked how he managed to maintain his silence when people came to him for spiritual counseling, he gave an anguished stare and said that it caused him great personal grief, knowing that Jesus could help the person, but felt that he was unable to tell them so. Yet he still found ways to encourage some people in their pursuit of Y'shua.An interesting call was received one morning from a Jewish woman who had attended Rabbi Teischman's synagogue on Yom Kippur. She had received Jesus as her atonement the previous morning, and felt compelled to go to synagogue for the high holy day.After the service, she felt that she should tell the Rabbi about her decision. She was amazed when he seemed sympathetic to her new faith and gave her “Jews for Jesus” telephone number.She called to tell them about her decision for Y'shua and to ask if they thought that the Rabbi might be open to the Gospel. All could not be disclosed to her but she was encouraged to keep in touch with the Rabbi and to pray for him.Concerning his future ministry, once he had finished a year at an evangelical seminary, Joseph expressed the desire to being called to the Gentiles like the apostle Paul; but it was pointed out to him that although Paul was the Apostle to the Gentiles, he still continued preaching the Gospel to Jewish people first, addressing non Jews once he had fulfilled his obligation to his own people. Joseph became downcast, not that he disliked his people but felt anguish at the thought of how they would reject him. He was an honest and sensitive man. Yet he was ready to endure the pain of the initial exclusion from his beloved Jewish community for the sake of the Saviour, knowing that he could not ignore the need of his own people hearing the Gospel. He continued his struggle with this and began preparing himself to visit the seminary recommended to him, and finally agreed to visit with the dean. Flights had been arranged; but the night he was due to leave he cancelled, admitting that he could not carry through with it. He knew that once he stepped outside, he would be treated like an outsider and he simply could not face the risks in following Y'shua “outside the camp”. He admitted that he could not do what God was asking of him and asked for prayer that one day he would have the strength to do so.One day, the former minister who had helped Joseph find the Lord called the “Jews for Jesus” office. He mentioned that Rabbi Teischman's sermon for the last Friday night Shabbat service had relied heavily on the New Testament. The Rabbi was said to have been in great distress. That night, Rabbi Joseph Teischman went home and died of heart failure. He was only 57 years old.There could have been several medical reasons for Joseph's untimely death. He was not obese, but he was a heavy smoker and perhaps the cigarettes led to heart disease. His regular medical examinations indicated that his blood pressure was a bit high, but the doctors had not warned that a heart attack was imminent: But there was a heart problem that the doctors did not know about. Rabbi Teischman was aching to proclaim that he had become a follower of Jesus. As his faith grew, his need to tell about it also grew. Yet he could not face losing his job, losing the respect of the Jewish community and the possibility that his children might decide to have nothing more to do with him. He was too much of an insider to imagine that his decision for Christ would be tolerated. He was a man with a lot to lose, and he could not bring himself to let go. The pressure was killing him.The man who had prayed with Joseph was one of several who spoke at his funeral, which was attended by many Rabbis and Jewish community leaders. Rabbi Teischman's faith in Y'shua was alluded to at that time. It did not seem to surprise many. His friends had known that he had been repressing something. They just did not know what it was until his death.As far as is known, Rabbi Teischman's faith in Y'shua was chalked up to “personal problems,” and the lips of his corpse could not declare otherwise. But his death was a profound lesson to those who knew that he really loved Y'shua. For whatever might be said about Joseph, it appears that he died of a broken heart, broken because he felt unable to do what he most desired, which was to serve the Lord.Reprinted from Jews for Jesus,60 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 5895 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit awolinsky.substack.com

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've heard about big-time department and retail stores closing their doors. Yet, if you go down Haight Street you'd notice something different. Thrift stores everywhere! Victor Harris Jr and Jason Hernandez report on the resiliency of thrift culture in the Bay Area.

Shea and Stacy lost a Gucci shoe on Haight Street in San Fran. If you find it, you can reach them in The Wedding Planner [2001] Join the Discord! https://discord.gg/MVjxRD9M Show some love for Ebert: https://shorturl.at/vBFU5 Check out our website: https://www.blockbusterwivespodcast.com/home Subscribe to our Patreon for our first ever Side Quest; Laguna Beach! https://www.patreon.com/blockbusterwives --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/blockbuster-wives/support

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

In this HCI Podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Devon Chulick about creating and maintaining company culture through play. See the video here: https://youtu.be/2EIaSF88JBg. Devon Chulick (https://www.linkedin.com/in/devonchulick/) has dedicated the last 15 years of his career to building communities and building innovative eCommerce products and experiences. As a founder of former Haight Street gallery and printshop DSF, Chulick helped organize monthly art walks, activated plans to beautify the neighborhood, and served as the president of the Lower Haight Merchant and Neighbors Association. In the world of eCommerce, Chulick has worked on product teams for brands such as Chubbies, Everlane, and Dolls Kill. He continues to consult for a number of SMBs and VCs. In 2020, Chulick co-founded StartPlaying, a Y Combinator-backed startup that connects gamers and aims to dismantle the gatekeeping commonly associated with the community. His work as a creator in the gaming and arts space has been featured by publications such as Bloomberg, Marketplace, SF Gate, WGN News, http://BFF.FM/, and Side Hustle School. Please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon and leaving a review wherever you listen to your podcasts! Go to cardiotabs.com/innovations and use code innovations to get a free Mental Health Pack featuring Cardiotabs Omega-3 Lemon Minis and Curcumin when you sign up for a subscription. Get 3 months of GUSTO free when you run your first payroll, at Gusto.com/HCI. Get up to 20% off by using code HCI for the summer sale at shop.Ekster.com/HCI. Check out the Ready for Takeoff podcast at Wix.com/readyfortakeoff. Check out Zapier.com/HCI to explore their business automations! Go to Swag.com/HCI and use promo code HCI10. Check out the HCI Academy: Courses, Micro-Credentials, and Certificates to Upskill and Reskill for the Future of Work! Check out the LinkedIn Alchemizing Human Capital Newsletter. Check out Dr. Westover's book, The Future Leader. Check out Dr. Westover's book, 'Bluer than Indigo' Leadership. Check out Dr. Westover's book, The Alchemy of Truly Remarkable Leadership. Check out the latest issue of the Human Capital Leadership magazine. Ranked #5 Workplace Podcast Ranked #6 Performance Management Podcast Ranked #7 HR Podcast Ranked #12 Talent Management Podcast Ranked in the Top 20 Personal Development and Self-Improvement Podcasts  Ranked in the Top 30 Leadership Podcasts Each HCI Podcast episode (Program, ID No. 592296) has been approved for 0.50 HR (General) recertification credit hours toward aPHR™, aPHRi™, PHR®, PHRca®, SPHR®, GPHR®, PHRi™ and SPHRi™ recertification through HR Certification Institute® (HRCI®). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries. His other books include: ATTA, Do Every Thing Wrong!: XXXTentacion Against the World, Only Americans Burn in Hell and The Future Won't Be Long. Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for the Zodiac It's 1969. Evil lurks in California. From a Napa County hippie child murder to Haight Street gang bangs to methamphetamine psychosis to the killing of Sharon Tate. Here and now, in this place and this time, it's all gone wrong. And there's something else, too. How to Find Zodiac Dear Reader, This is not the Zodiac speaking. The one thing that I ask of you is this, please read this book. It is called How to Find Zodiac. Being that this book is about the Zodiac, it offers a new suspect. The theory is probably correct. At the moment the theory is unproven. But the idea is a bomb waiting to go massive. Can you see the flaws in the hunting method or will you just agree and say case closed. Either way one thing is true. Zodiac can never look and seem the same after you read this book. "A scruffy masterpiece of criminology. It seems to me that either Kobek's painstaking deductions are correct, or we must urgently revise the laws of probability." -Alan Moore, author of From Hell SOCIAL: Twitter: @WakeIslandPod Instagram: @wakeislandpod David's Twitter: @raviddice --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/wake-island/support

This week, we're taking a look at the (debatable) "first chronicle book for the World of Darkness", Immortal Eyes: The Toybox (not to be confused with its tie-in novel, The Toybox) (things gets complicated sometimes). The first in a trilogy of game supplements that follows the oathmates of the Immortal Eyes storyline, this is primarily a Kithain's guide to San Francisco and the Bay Area, with a few stories baked in that STs can run for their group. Although a lot of the setting information has been superseded in the last 25 years—and much of it is freely available online—there is enough depth of detail and hooks to grab onto for current groups to find some use. We highlight some of the bits we find most useful in this episode, so... give a listen! ... tourism One topic that came up early on in our discussion is tourism with relation to Glamour and Banality. Could a visitor to San Francisco seeing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time generate Glamour, or does it simply add to Banality, flattening the rich tapestry of the city into icons to be checked off a list? Is it both, or neither? Does it depend entirely on the tourist, or possibly the landmark? There aren't any hard and fast answers in the books (that we can think of at the moment), but it's an interesting avenue of thought to wander down. As always, it raises the question of the relativity of Glamour and Banality, and might demonstrate that while Glamour is volatile, ephemeral, localized, and situational, Banality is more numbing, creeping, spreading, and generalized. We'll keep an eye out for other bits in the books that give more substance to this discussion, since it would be significant for groups running their game in a major city with lots of visitors. (Lookin' at you, NYC.) ... shameless self-promotion Late last year, Pooka published this homebrew Changeling book! It was simultaneously written to be an homage to this supplement, an update to some of the setting, a clunky pun, and an excuse for coming up with selkie business (since they make their first appearance in this book). It's available on Storyteller's Vault here: https://www.storytellersvault.com/product/375875/. Proceeds go to the medical fund for Nicky Rea, Changeling author emerita, so please consider having a browse and a purchase for a good cause.

Initiations come in all shapes and sizes, from graduating with a formal degree, to becoming a parent, to losing a parent. We can't control what experience the universe sends us, but we can meet each change with our full, honest selves. Alicia Connor inspires us with a story of taking a change and flowing with it on her own terms. Music by Terry Hughes Alicia Connor https://www.aliciaconnor.com Alicia's YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT0DBT0dF_qEeiePwcxamMw Rate This Podcast https://ratethispodcast.com/shamepinata On an Android Device? https://shamepinata.libsyn.com/samsung Also check out: Do You Need A Ceremony (Pt 2) - Reinventing Ourselves https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s2e6-do-you-need-a-ceremony-pt-2 The Un-Baby Shower https://ever-changing.net/episodes/s2e5-the-unbaby-shower   Full Transcript Connor: Like say if I'm traveling like in a car with somebody else. You know, they're driving, so I can't trust them. When are we going to go the bathroom? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to get to drink something? So I just bring everything with me. It's not that I have trust issues, but I take care of myself. [LAUGHS]   Initiations come in all shapes and sizes. From graduating with a formal degree, to becoming a parent, to losing a parent. We can't control what experience the universe sends us, but we can meet each change with our full, honest selves. Alicia Connor inspires us with a story of taking a change and flowing with it on her own terms.   This is Shame Piñata. I'm Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions.  Sometimes we see change coming and sometimes it's just kind of suddenly there. When it arrives without warning it can create a numbing, a blocking out, a wanting to turn away. This is so human. The cool thing is that as humans, we are incredibly adaptive and creative and often times we will take actions to find our center again without even realizing that's what we're doing. Like cutting our hair after a breakup. That could be conscious, that could be unconscious, but either way it's a step toward owning what's happening to us. Owning the change.   Alicia Connor joins us today to share a story of going with the flow of life even when it flowed in a challenging direction. Alicia began to have some issues with her vision when she was 17. She saw some different health practitioners. They told her different things. Then, there was a diagnosis and a realization that things were going to change.    Connor: I got glasses when I was 17 because that's when my vision loss started. But I didn't know it was this genetic thing that was going to actually cause vision loss, like ongoing. So when I was 17, I went to like, your average, eye store whatever, eye world in Boston, and I was getting this pair of glasses. And I remember the optometrist, he was like... he was like, do these do anything? Like, there was a sense... he was not confident that they did anything. It was basically like putting clean glass in front of my eyes. So like, a hair or two better, right? But I felt like, well, I'm driving, they help a little bit, so I should wear them, right? And like, what else? Like, am I... I didn't know that. I could say like, I don't think they do anything, because there was some difference. And he didn't seem to know enough to be like, "If they're only helping you a little bit, let's talk about that, and I could maybe like refer you to somebody else, or maybe you should see a like... somebody else". But there was definitely a lack of confidence in his voice that I remember, like his surprise. And then the reason why I went to the Rhode Island Eye Institute was after when I was 19, I went to get a second pair of glasses, because I was like you you're supposed to get new glasses every so and so whatever. Right? And you know, it seems like these aren't doing anything. And the optometrist that I went to at that time, she was hardcore. And she was like, "I don't know, I can't figure it out. I can't correct you. There's nothing I can do. I don't know what's going on." She called the Rhode Island Eye Institute right then and I was dilated, I was dilated... and I love it when people go out of their way and just go the next level, and she got me an appointment that day when I was dilated.    Thomas: Oh, wow.   Connor: So I literally just walked 20-30 minutes to the place and then was tested.   The result of her test at the Rhode Island Eye Institute was a diagnosis of a genetic condition that would mean that her vision would decline over time and that someday she would need to stop driving. A short time after Alicia received the diagnosis, a sudden opportunity came up to really change things up in her life. It involved a long drive. A long drive that would ultimately become her last drive.    Connor: I actually remember my last drive as like, like, an adventure, like it was fun. I was 19 and I just dropped out... A good friend of mine from that I knew since fourth grade was going to school in Western Massachusetts, and I was going to school in Providence, Rhode Island. But she asked me just before Thanksgiving that year if I would be interested in to move to San Francisco. And she was like, "Oh, by the way, I need to know in three days." So I was like, "Okay, I'm on it. I'm thinking, I'll get back to you." And I knew like when she says three days, then that means three days, it doesn't mean five. And I had mean some awesome connections in Providence, Rhode Island, but not enough to like ground me there. And there was enough challenging experiences that year to to not see like, like... a new chapter would be helpful at that time. And so I turned back and I told my friend after three days, "Yeah, let's do it!" So we set the date for January 1 we are going to leave the East Coast and start driving toward San Francisco. And what's interesting is around that time period, it was just that year, I had been diagnosed with hypoplasia of the optic nerve at the Rhode Island Eye Institute. And it was interesting that… it was… it was that year, right? Like I was diagnosed with this vision loss condition that was genetic, and told, like, I'm not gonna be able to drive someday but I didn't know when that was. And I could see well then and I could drive then and so it wasn't a problem at that moment, but it was an imminent problem.    I'm not going to be able to drive someday. That's a huge thing. Most of us expect to stop driving in our 80's, not some significant time before that. As I listened to Alicia's story, I began to wonder if this drive, this last drive, was a kind of rite of passage.    Connor: It just kind of is interesting, in hindsight, but looking back at the story that my life... that it was that year that I actually like, was there any thought on like my visual loss in like what I was going to do? Like, I have no idea maybe the subconscious was like, you gotta just do this because of the I don't know, who knows. We don't know what Alicia's spirit was thinking then, but I was decisive, which is really cool. And so yeah, so what was interesting was I was the one that rented the extension van, you know, not like a regular van, but like an extension van that could, like we could store both of our stuff in there. And I was literally taking everything I owned and she wasn't taking everything she owned because she had parents that could store stuff for her. And so that was also an interesting detail. Like, this is all of my stuff. So I picked up the truck in Providence, Rhode Island, and then I drove to Boston, by myself, picked her up, and then we went to like, New Year's Eve party. And then the morning of, we hit the road. And we took… because she… my friend had a couple friends she wanted to visit along the way. So we took, like this really weird route.   They went to Memphis and hung out with Elvis's stuff in Graceland, through Kansas and Colorado, switching off driving the whole time. And then they got to Utah.    Connor: ...and when I was driving in Utah I just started crying. And when I was like packing and everything in Rhode Island and I like had to you know give notice in my apartment, I had to give notice my job, I had to drop out of school...   Thomas: Wow, so much!   Connor: Yeah, and like get rid of stuff and, "Okay, do I really want this?" I get rid of all these things. And I had to get my cat, the cat that I grew up with, I had when I was in Providence for like, I don't know, three quarters of the time, and I had to give that cat to my mom and... there was just a couple details. Basically, I didn't figure out that I had done something really big and like I was in huge transition, right, until I got to Utah. There was a delayed response and this is, you know, this was kind of common for me in terms of emotions. I'm more of an observer, or was more of an observer as a kid and a younger adult, or... in terms of my younger years. And so it made sense that it I was like, all of a sudden, like, "Oh, my gosh!" And so my friend was like, "You got to pull over." And it happened to be in this part of the highway where it's not ideal to pull over, but she was like, "Pull over. You have to like... we have no choice." So we pulled over and then we sat on the curb, and or like, whatever... it was, like a curb like section that we sat down. And I was like... [SOBBING SOUNDS] You know? And she was like, "What's up?" And it was just like, "Everything!" Right? There was no answer. It was like, like, I don't even know what I said. But I knew it was like everything. Yeah... the unknown. And I knew, like, I didn't have that much money, like, a couple hundred bucks. And then I knew I had like a check for like, $300 that was going to be sent to my temporary apartment from my work. And so it was just like, all of these... all of the uncertainty in everything just crashed. And so my friend was nice and comforting and everything. And then she took over driving. And it was just... It was actually, I think it was a relief that that happened before we actually got to San Francisco. Because I remember when we got to San Francisco, like we were on Haight Street, and we parked either after we moved all our stuff in my friend's sister's apartment. But I remember when I parked that van, that I was like, "This is maybe the last time I'm going to drive." Like I just had that feeling. I was like, "This is it, I'm gonna not drive. This is happening soon. And like me in the van... like that's it."   Thomas: Wow.   Connor: And I was just very conscious of it, not in like a stressful way, and I wasn't talking about it with my friend. It was just something I just knew that it would be better because I could drive then. I think it's better to make a decision when you know about something and be able to process it before you are forced to. Because I think... I mean, it's not possible all the time, but if you have like a suggestion of like, "Hey, maybe this is something you should look into", or whatever - it could be related to health, it could be anything, you know - preventing any sort of struggle, or any kind of like issue in the future is always a great strategy. And I was thinking randomly once in a while, like when I had my license, like I was like, "This is my last like driver's license."    Thomas: Hmmm. Wow.    Connor: So I did… I didn't think about it, but it didn't. It wasn't something that I was like freaked out about. And I think it was because I could see well then.   Thomas: Yeah. So you're sort of in like an empowered place within the realm.   Connor: Exactly. In control. And it's much easier to make, it's like if you're grounded and you're like, "Okay, this is the... it's on my side like this is my decision. Now." Instead of the external. Like say, some people experience vision loss, very dramatic, right? There's an event and so can be very stressful and that's because it happened very quickly. There was no preparation for it, and so that's a totally different situation and that is much more challenging.   [MUSIC]   I want to invite you to take a breath with me [BREATHES] and invite you to appreciate yourself for being here to listen to Alicia's story. This is a story about the human body and illness and disability. These are words that can make us unconsciously close down, or turn away, or kind of leave. When I first began working in the disability community, I was taught that sometimes we don't rush with gusto toward these concepts because being differently abled or having a chronic illness, is a club that anyone can join at any time and that's really scary.    And bodies change and illness happens, and they make up some of the million transitions we go through in our lives. Each one, a journey. The transition from one experience of being in a body to the next experience of being in the same body (that's different now) is a journey. As choreographer Bill T Jones (who, by the way, is HIV positive and who lost his partner Arnie Zane to AIDS) as he says, "My body is a spiritual experience that's constantly growing and changing."   [MUSIC]   Connor: I think... I think transitions are really interesting and I tend... I've had a couple of experience where I'm kind of like the all... it's not like the all or nothing ,but like deal with everything all at once. Like when I broke up with long-term relationship. It felt... I was like, going through a lot. My father passed away around the same time and it was just like this thing. It was kind of like... it was a similar, a very similar experience of when I was given this opportunity like, "Hey, Alicia, do you want to move to San Francisco? I need to know in three days," I was given this opportunity and then I was forced to assess my life. And my father's death was that opportunity to assess my life and how I was living it. Because when somebody passes away the reflection on what... how life is going with the person could me is a common experience. And here I was forced to look at my life because my father passed away... And it was a good thing, he was a Vietnam vet, an alcoholic, and it was time for him to go. He had enough time on this world and I'm sure he's rocking it in his next life. And so it was like relieving and everything, but it's still like death and grieving. And I think the main thing about transitions is like seeking out the support you need and talking about it with others. And sometimes we might not want to talk about it and that might be a great time to journal, just to get it out.    Thomas:  Mm hmm, yeah.   Connor: Letting yourself go through the transition and feel the feelings. Because sometimes transition can produce or increase anxiety, but that's the unknown. And the fear of unknown, and things usually work out. We have a choice, like... like go the the fearful, anxiety-ridden, intense route and just kind of be a monster or... and not approachable. Or we could, you know, go through life and experience it, because there's a lot to experience and enjoy much more to experience and enjoy the struggles.   Thomas: Wow. Well, thank you, thank you so much for telling, telling me the story, telling us the story, and the insights that you have into it. And I just think it was so brave of you to just... to just take that risk and do that move. And I feel like it's very in line with the spirit of you that I know. You're very bold, and you're very brave. You're strong.   Connor: Thank you. Thank you so much, Colleen.   Letting ourselves go through the transition and feel the feelings. Seeking out the support we need by talking about it with others. These are the reasons I love Alicia. She's so keyed in to the essence of being human, of being vulnerable, and being bold at the same time. Life surprised Alicia with a big change and she took action to own that change, to flow with it on her own terms. In a way, the cross-country drive was part of how she marked the transition, how she reinvented herself at a time when the universe had thrown her a curveball. I hope Alicia's story and spirit inspire you to do something bold today, something maybe you're not even sure you can do.    Alicia Connor is a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and Chef in San Francisco. She is the creator of "Quick & Delish by Alicia Connor," a meal planning and cooking series on YouTube that brings wellness to people by helping them create meals that are quick, delicious, and nutritious. Learn more about her work at https://www.aliciaconnor.com.   Our music is by Terry Hughes. You can follow us on IG and Twitter at shamepinata. You can reach us through the contact page at our website, shamepinata.com. And you can subscribe to the podcast on Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite player. We'll be back in February with Season 3. I'm Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

Have you ever been in a tight spot, trying to avoid the cops with blood all over your tie. Inconvenient to say the least! Join us now as we follow Jimmy and George as they discover the perfect solution to their dilemma, in this Twelve Chimes sponsor promo for the fabulous Relic Vintage, "The Bloody Tie." San Francisco's finest vintage boutique offering high quality men and women's apparel, accessories and jewelry from 1920s-1970s. Check them out at www.relicvintagesf.com, on Etsy at RelicVintageSF, and follow them on Instagram at @relicvintage!! And come visit Relic at their FABULOUS NEW LOCATION: 1475 Haight Street, at Ashbury in San Francisco. Writer/Director/Producer: Aimee Pavy George: Aaron Seymour
 Jimmy: Aimee Pavy
 Store Proprietor: Oran Scott (Relic Vintage owner)
 Detective: Terra Williams (Assistant Manager at Relic Vintage) Additional music: Kurt Ribak Trio, “For Cecilia” from the album “More” Check out our website www.twelvechimesradio.com! And find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podchaser, Stitcher, YouTube, or wherever you find podcasts. If you enjoy our plays, please SUBSCRIBE and leave your review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts or drop us a line via email at twelvechimesradio@gmail.com. And thank you for listening!

Mike recalls memories from 1993. Topics discussed include: The Beach Zone, Rob Russell, sending a package of samples to Think Skateboards, Burton snowboards, Tribal Gear, ASR Trade Show in San Diego, Olé Madrid, first E high, moving to 1933 McAllister, Everlasting Tattoo, initial excitement, futon, Psycho City, skateboarding down Haight Street, hard bail, Dream TDK, Twist, Dug, Bum, ground tags, bus commute to Hunters Point, Thrasher, Printtime, surprise first day, Ben Lovejoy, the closet art department, Espo, On The Go magazine, Sope, Clay Street house, Jase, The Condor, Joker, Dubose Tunnel, IHU crew, Pilot silver markers, KRINK, green and red street boxes, daytime tagging, Josh B, living with alcoholics/coke addicts, Jagermeister, LSD, Felon, crooked Victorian, house parties, sticker tags, When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy by Margot Anand, the perineum, breathing techniques, orgasm/egolessness, spaghetti for months, coffee and muffins, sack lunch, girlfriend visits for Christmas, Sound Factory, Doc Martin, clean E, Mark Farina, Mushroom Jazz, rave near Lake Merritt, security on E, dawn set, Dwel and Jolt, copping drugs on Haight Street, getting hassled, the lost shoe, raves in the soccer fields at Golden Gate Park.

Zahra the owner of Cafe International 508 Haight Street is a GEM https://m.yelp.com/biz/cafe-international-san-francisco

In this episode of The Vine, PMP chats with James McConchie, owner of the Haight Street Shroom Shop, an educational retail space dedicated to mushroom related resources, products, and home mycology supplies located in San Francisco, California.  The episode discusses the power of the mycelium network, info on medicinal and therapeutic mushrooms, and policy reform around psilocybin and other psychedelics.

Ashleigh Brilliant is an author and syndicated cartoonist born in London, UK, and living in Santa Barbara, California. He is best known for his Pot-Shots, single-panel illustrations with one-line humorous remarks, which began syndication in the United States of America in 1975. Brilliant became a naturalized American citizen in 1969. During the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco in 1967, Brilliant gave daily lectures near the Haight Street entrance of Golden Gate Park. He released a live album recorded in Golden Gate Park in 1967 on a small Hollywood, California record label, Dorash Enterprises. The album, Ashleigh Brilliant in the Haight-Ashbury, is rare and the material uses familiar public domain tunes and melodies and incorporates clever poetic lyrics about marijuana, the Diggers, San Francisco neighborhoods, and his personal experiences, all the while displaying a banter which ebbs and flows with his audience, who respond warmly to the performance and also participate in the songs. He states in the recording that he had been performing in this setting for approximately two hours each day the prior four weeks. He laughs throughout his performance, while the audience joins him in singing along and banging on percussive items. The album ends with a "Haight-Ashbury Farewell". The Wall Street Journal described him in a 1992 profile as "history's only full time, professional published epigrammatist."

Arthur Gaus grew up on a famous block in The City. In this podcast, the native San Francisco comedian traces his story back to his parents' choice to buy a house on Ashbury just off Haight Street in the late-'70s. Arthur shares stories of growing up in his family's Victorian and hanging out on Haight Street, in Golden Gate Park (despite how dangerous everyone said it was back then), and in his backyard. His grade school was near the gate to Chinatown, a neighborhood he and his friends spent a lot of time exploring. Arthur talks about his high school years and ends the podcast with a funny story about being one of the the only boys in a play at a girls' school. Check back Thursday for Part 2, when we'll hear all about how Arthur Gaus got started doing comedy. Related Podcast Dara Kosberg Part 1 Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

Tony Carracci's life revolves around water. Tony's parents met in Seattle, where his mom was from. His dad, who is from from New Orleans, met his mom up north during a stint in the Merchant Marines. When they were expecting their first child, Tony, the young couple decided to relocate to another port town: San Francisco, away from the cold and rain of Seattle and the heat and mugginess in New Orleans. Tony did most of his growing up in the 1960s and early '70s in The City, and he shares some of his impressions of that era. He played baseball, football, and soccer, and excelled at sports in general. But because he had a hard time sitting still and focussing for a long time, school wasn't Tony's favorite. He graduated and left home in the mid-'70s. He worked in the now-defunct SF shipyards but hated it. He moved up to Portland (yet another port town!) for a couple years, started working in kitchens, and started doing hair and make-up. Then he went farther north, to his mom's hometown of Seattle. But a girl he met there and started dating got a job back in The City, and Tony decided that it was his chance to come home. After restaurant jobs here and there, Tony learned about a new restaurant in the Haight that needed an opening chef. That place was Cha Cha Cha. Tony spends the last part of this episode talking about Haight Street and South of Market back in the day. He ends with the story of opening the Cat Club. Join us Thursday for Part 2, when Tony will share the story of opening his BBQ joint in the East Bay. We recorded this podcast at Black Star Pirate BBQ in Richmond, California, in December 2020. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather

In this episode, Taraleigh and Leah chat with music photographer Jay Blakesberg about his experiences over the last 30 years capturing “lightning in a bottle” moments of live music. He talks about his initial quest for sex, drugs, and Rock n’ Roll and how it led to a thriving career where he remains inspired and satisfied in his role as a visual anthropologist documenting scenes from our live music tribe. For the “Did you Know” section, Leah talks about our innate drive as humans for the experience of collective ecstasy and collective joy in a ritualized way and Taraleigh instructs listeners on how to bring the live music magic into their daily lives now in her “Daily Jam.” Jay Blakesberg is a San Francisco-based photographer and video director whose career spans over 30 years. He began his career photographing live music events he attended. After moving to the Bay Area in the mid-1980s he became the house photographer at the rock club The I-Beam on Haight Street and began to photograph the birth of the alternative rock movement. He photographed his first assignment for Rolling Stone in 1987, and since then has shot for them over 300 times. In the 1990s Blakesberg was constantly shooting for print magazines and record companies, creating a photographic archive of 30 years of music icons. After securing a book deal to release a coffee table book of his Grateful Dead archives in 2002, Blakesberg was inspired to create his own book publishing company, Rock Out Books. Starting in the summer of 2007, he began to produce and direct live concert videos for numerous festivals and artists. Blakesberg continues to document Rock and Roll culture through photographs and video.This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave us a rating or review on iTunes and join our Facebook group to dive deeper into the conversation of live music and health and wellness.Groove Therapy is brought to you by Osiris Media. To discover more podcasts that connect you more deeply to the music you love, check out osirispod.com. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Peter Moreira is the co-founder of Entrevestor, an online publication that provides news and data on startups in Atlantic Canada. They're best-known for publishing daily reports on entrevestor.com.  They also collect data on startups and publish annual reports analyzing this data. Entrevestor is financed by selling the annual analyses of its data, as well as selling advertisements on its website. They have clients in both the private and public sectors.Peter Moreira has spent more than 40 years in journalism in Asia, Europe and North America. His postings include London Bureau Chief for The Deal, European banking correspondent for Bloomberg, banking reporter for the South China Morning Post, and a stint at the Canadian Press's parliamentary bureau in Ottawa. His writing has appeared in USA Today, the Columbia Journalism Review (online), the Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, National Post, and the Independent on Sunday (London). He is the author of Hemingway on the China Front (Potomac, 2006) Backwater: Nova Scotia's Economic Decline (Nimbus 2009), and The Jew Who Defeated Hitler (Prometheus, 2014). His crime fiction series, set in San Francisco in the 1960s, includes The Haight and A Hitman on Haight Street. Peter is a graduate of the Canadian Securities Course.Contact Peter at Peter@entrevestor.com.What's on the It's the Economy, Stupid blog this week? Subscribe and learn!We want to hear your voice! If you want to be featured in our Q&A segment, send a text or audio question to our social or matt@unsettledmedia.com- we'll shout you out by name.  Subscribe to the Unsettled Newsletter.  You'll get multiple posts per week breaking down timeless principles from the world's best minds.  Every post includes tools, product recommendations, strategy lessons, must-watch videos, must-read articles and the best stories from the worlds of culture, business & tech.This podcast is produced by me, Matt George.  Is engineered by the great Zachary Pelletier, and is part of the Unsettled Media Podcast Network.

We got on the mics right after a pretty full day of filming for our upcoming 500th episode. We're a little tired, sun drunk, and maybe even a little boozy - but we get into talking about the passing of one of our favorite supreme's, RBG, Ange's conversation with her dad about what and who Door Dash is (wtf is a dash?!), taking care of our aging parents, dirty Haight street hippies, the largest of large pizzas, filming around San Francisco, and a shout out to our videographer (and friend of the show), Evelyn Obamos.  If you need  a laugh, we got you.Be well, stay safe, Black Lives Matter, and thank you for wearing a mask.--Buy us a cup of coffee!Subscribe to our channel on YouTube for behind the scenes footage!Rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts!Visit our website! www.bitchtalkpodcast.comFollow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.Listen every other Thursday 9:30 - 10 am on BFF.FMPOWERED BY GO-TO Productions 

Margaret Cho joins us to tell us about hosting San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair; this year it is going world-wide and virtual so you can join in from home. It turns out she’s a total bottom. We hear about Margaret’s lo-fi, low-key celebrity gossipy podcast "The Margaret Cho" on the EARIOS network. She gives us her take on social media as a less than desirable medium for comedy and serves up some hope by announcing that she has live shows scheduled for next year for "Fresh Off the Boat" touring world-wide. Heklina asks Margaret about her work with comedienne Gerri Lawlor on the Be Robin movement in commemoration of Robin Williams. They remember Gerri and we find out a little about Margaret’s forthcoming book "The Mayor of Haight Street" which you can find via Chronicle Books later this year. Lady Bunny alert! Or warning. Heklina and Margaret talk about some of their biggest influences including Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor, and Don Rickles, and Lady Bunny (I didn’t say they were good influences). Plus what happened to all the Silver Lake Gays? P.S. as in they all went to Palm Springs and that’s where I’m headed, too. Tune in to hear all about it. Support Drag Time with Heklina by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/drag-time-with-heklina

San Francisco Filming Travelling to new places to film always sounds so exciting. Especially expansive beach locations with the ocean in the background. What could be better? This past January, we traveled to the San Francisco Bay area to film for our Yoga with Melissa channel and our membership community. We did some sightseeing in San Francisco, visited the Golden Gate Bridge, the Presido and Trinity enjoyed her time shopping on Haight Street. Anytime we do outdoor filming we expose ourselves to the challenges of weather, lighting, and noise that we cannot control. When we travel we open ourselves up to even more challenges. In this vlog find out why things did not go according to plan and how we adapted because we are flexible like yogis.

Michelle Gallagher, - a renowned intuitive, AKA psychic Medium, teacher of esoterica, Kundalini Yogi, bad ass white witch who is the creator of Venus Rising Healing Collective - her virtual and real life event space dedicated to the spiritual transformation of men and women alike and her new podcast Orphic Frequency, a supernatural podcast covering all things esoteric. www.venusrisinginc.com & https://www.instagram.com/michellelgallagher/

Guest: Robby Allen - Former Head of Sales @Mixmax (Founder @Buena Vista Ventures; Formerly @Flexport, @Zenefits) Guest Background: Robby was born and raised in San Francisco and knew from a young age that he wanted to build and scale companies. At Zenefits he took the outbound SDR team from 0-250+ reps. At Flexport he built a global outbound team across 3 continents. After that Robby was the head of sales at Mixmax, taking the team from a self-serve business to a B2B sales model. Currently, Robby runs his own consulting practice: Buena Vista Ventures. Buena Vista focuses on emerging technology companies, mainly SaaS businesses, looking to build and scale high performing and efficient sales organizations. Outside of the office, you can find Robby playing basketball or hiking to the top of a peak. Guest Links: LinkedIn Episode Summary: In this episode, we cover: - Scaling SaaS Sales Functions Across Multiple Growth Phases - Hiring & Onboarding Sales Teams at Massive Scale - Building Sales Development Engines - Sales Compensation Plans Full Interview Transcript: Naber:  Hello friends around the world. My name is Brandon Naber. Welcome to the Naberhood, where we have switched on, fun discussions with some of the most brilliant, successful, experienced, talented and highly skilled Sales and Marketing minds on the planet, from the world's fastest-growing companies. Enjoy! Naber:  Hey everybody. We have Robby Allen on the show today. Robby was born and raised in San Francisco and knew from a young age that he wanted to build and scale companies. At Zenefits, which had a $4.5 billion evaluation on $584 million capital raised, Robby took the outbound SDR team from 0 to 250+ reps. Then at Flexport, which had a $3.2 billion valuation on $1.3 billion raised, Robby built a global outbound team across three continents. After that, Robby was the Head of Sales at Mixmax. Mixmax has raised $13 million, and he took that team from a self serve business to a B2B sales model. Currently, Robby runs his own consulting practice, Buena Vista Ventures, Buena Vista focuses on emerging technology companies, mainly SaaS businesses looking to build and scale high performing and efficient sales organizations. Outside the office you can find Robby playing basketball or hiking to the top of a peak. Here we go. Naber:  Robby! Awesome to have you on the show today. How are you my man? Robby Allen:     I'm good. I'm good, Thanks for having me, Brandon. It's good to be here. Naber:  Good. Fresh off your recent trip to Europe. You're in a feel good mood. You've got good energy. I'm loving it. You and I have known each other for awhile, and I'm really happy and proud to be chatting with you today. I think there's a lot that the audience can learn from you. What I think we'll do, if it's okay with you, is we'll go into some personal stuff first - let the audience get to know you a little bit better. We'll go into a few different things around your basketball career. I want to talk about some of the things that you did growing up, get an idea for some of your interests, all the way from Robby as a kid and what you were interested in and what you were like, all the way through to the end of the end of school in Eugene. So, if you're okay with it, could you give us maybe five, seven minutes, and it will probably last a little bit longer than that because I'll ask questions, hopefully not too rudely, to explain a few things. But could you give us a few minutes on what Robby was like as a kid and what it was like being Robby Allen as a child growing up? Robby Allen:     Yeah, sure. And to start, I'm super excited to be here. Super excited you're doing this. and can't wait to see the first handful of these episodes released into the wild. I think, given your network and the people you know it's going to be fun. But yeah, a little on me. So I was born and raised in San Francisco. People tell me that's something unique that live here, because so many people scratch, and claw, and work hard to move to San Francisco because, in the world of tech, it's considered to be the land of opportunity. I was fortunate in some ways to grow up right in the middle of it. And I knew at a really young age that I wanted to build and scale companies. It was just something where when I was five years old, I used to tell my mom that I wanted to put a suit on and can go downtown to work. Obviously the suit thing has changed, people don't wear suits anymore in San Francisco, unless you're in finance or something like that. But from a young age, I've been very interested in this notion of building things from scratch, building wealth, building value for markets and that sort of thing... Naber:  Hey, can we pause on that just for a minute. Did you ever, did you have any businesses or ways of making money growing up? Well, actually there's a really good question that someone asked me the other day, and I want to pay it forward to the audience, and get your thoughts. What was your first way of making money? Robby Allen:     Yeah, that's a good question. So I used to hustle Pokemon cards, if you remember what those are. I had a little business that in elementary school - and for folks that don't know, Pokemon was a Japanese trading card game that got really popular in Japan, and then overtook my generation, I guess - and I went to a Japanese bilingual school in San Francisco called Clarendon. So everybody there was first generation Japanese where their parents immigrated from Japan, and I happened to grow up right around the corner from there. So I went to school there. And so there was a lot of popularity around that and I saw an opportunity, I think, that was one example. I got into sneakers, when I started to really get into basketball. And so I started to buy and trade sneakers that were,popular. I would buy them when they were released for a cheaper price and sell them for a little bit more. It didn't make a lot of money, but it was something where I was able to get good at it, so to speak. Those were, I guess those were a couple things. I think that eventually scaled up until I landed in the world of sales where I think I really enjoyed that because it was something where I could control my own destiny, so to speak. Naber:  Nice. Those are good examples. Wow. I mean...the purpose of the question, that comes from an executive that a at a company that I used to work at, but his take is that he believes that work ethic starts at a very young age and entrepreneurial spirit starts at a very young age. And that that is one of the hardest to teach in your twenties and thirties. And he feels that people don't necessarily develop that in their twenties and thirties. They actually develop it as at a really young age. So that was that's he purpose of asking that question. But you have some pretty kick ass examples. That's great. Quick insert here, what is your favorite sneaker you've ever traded for? Robby Allen:     Oh, man. Yeah, so I think it's kind of a random one that most people won't know, but it's the story here, it's a pair of Air Flight 89's and my younger brother and our mutual best friend, who grew up around the corner from us in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. When I was really young, we'd sell lemonade on the corner on hot days in San Francisco, and we would play up the fact that my mom grew lemons in the backyard, but mostly it was just the concentrated lemonade that you'd get from Safeway. And so we'd sell this. And then I remember I'm, the listeners won't know this, but I'm very tall. And so at a young age I became really big, and the whole cute factor of selling lemonade certainly drifted away from me, and I was no longer necessarily somebody who was an obvious candidate to sell lemonade. So I, naturally the opportunity still being there, I recruited my younger brother and our buddy Ian. A I sort of operated in the background, refilling and getting them out there. And we made enough money one Saturday afternoon, a sunny afternoon in the fall in San Francisco, where we could all go to a sneaker store on Haight Street and buy a pair of Air Flight 89's. And so I guess you could say that was a trade of labor and lemonade for sneakers. But, I'll never forget that pair because all three of us walked out of the store with the same shoes. Naber:  That's a great story. Two things. One, what did you say something and lemonade? You said something and lemonade. Naber:  Labor and lemonade. Naber:  Labor and lemonade would be the title of your first book. Second of all, everyone of us mere mortals at six foot and under always wonders what it's to be tall. And, people always think of the upside, pun intended. But some of the downside could be you could retire from lemonade sales very early in your career. Which is, that could be a sad story. But it's a good story for you. Naber:  I had to let that drift away, yeah. Naber:  That's right, you're good. So let's talk about high school for a second. So you went to St I's College Prep in San Francisco, is that right? And played basketball? Robby Allen:     Yep. Saint Ignatius, that's where I really got into sports. And yeah, I played basketball and did high jump at SI. Naber:  Cool. What position do you play in Basketball? Robby Allen:     I was I played power forward. I was pretty new to it...I started playing basketball really in high school. I was a baseball player before that, but an injury prevented me from continuing that path. So, I was tall and I could jump and I was pretty quick. So I started to pick up basketball, and they stuck me in at power forward, and I didn't really have a ton of skill per se. I was just springy and my batteries we're always charged. So I did that for four years, and then I went to college up at Oregon, at University of Oregon. And I decided not to follow the basketball path, but after about a year, sort of missed it. Missed the organized sports, missed the competition, and was one of those guys in college who you could basically see me at the rec center seven days a week playing pickup basketball. So I actually ended up finding a local junior college called Lane Community College. I met the coach and I got to know him, and he gave me a full scholarship, and I ended up going and playing two years of basketball at a little junior college in town. I was still going to University of Oregon, and I went to the business school and took a full load of credits there. And then unbeknownst to most people I knew, I was also taking the bus on the other side of town and taking a full load of credits at Community College just to play basketball. And it ended up being this really fun thing because community college, most people, you and I work with and know didn't spend any time in community college, and this is a little secret I have. And it ended up being amazing thing for me. You get to meet, you meet a lot of people that are decades older than you, and they're just now getting to getting around to going to school to maybe get an associate's degree or something that, to up level a little bit. And so it was humbling in the sense that I, I really grew to appreciate what I had, at the University that I was going to across town, and I got to get my two years of basketball in at that level, and that was all I needed, and went back to U of O and finished up my degree. Naber:  Awesome man. Wow. Very cool. I love that you went after your passion, with a credits at this school, basketball at the school vengeance - missing your craft. One more thing, I think you've done some coaching in your, day as well while we're on the basketball. And when I say the basketball, I mean while you're on your basketball career? I got used to saying the basketball, or the football, or the baseball when I was in Australia. So sometimes I put the in front of a sport arbitrarily. Anyways, while we're on your basketball career. So let's talk about some of the coaching you did as well. What does your coaching career consist of? Robby Allen:     Yeah, so, after hanging it up so to speak, from a couple of years playing in college, I...one of my assistant coaches from my college team, actually took an off season job as the head coach of a local high school team for Mohawk High. It's about 45 minutes outside of Eugene, Oregon. And, to give you an idea, I mean this is high school, probably had 200 students and at the...and I come from a school where there were probably 65 kids who tried out for the varsity basketball team every year, and only about 10 or so made it, it was a big thing...Seven kids showed up to the tryouts, so all seven kids made it. And this is ranging ranging from kids who had played basketball to had never played in their life. So this is a very different challenge. I think the team had finished in last place out of 10 people for the last 10 or so years. And so myself, and I recruited another buddy who played on the team with me to come be an assistant coach for the team, and it was more than a challenge. Because you know, we did not have any real semblance of talent on this team. But you got to know this group of kids, and we would take a yellow school bus two hours north and south of Eugene twice a week to go play games. And in some of these towns that I probably never would have otherwise set foot in my life. And I actually remember, at halftime, there was a game in, I can't even remember the name of the city, it was a western Oregon town. There was a hoedown at halftime, where about 30 people came out in cowboy boots and did a cowboy hoedown. And they had a live auction, or so they had a live raffle. And so they drew a raffle prize. There's dust and hay now all over the court, these kids have to come out and play the second half still. And they draw a number and someone in the crowd wins, and they're going crazy, and we don't know what the prize is. And they walk like 1500 pound pig basically, from the locker room. And they auctioned off a full grown male pig and somebody took home the pig...just to give you an idea of the spirit of some of these games. But that was was a learning experience for sure. But, the end of the story is we ended up finishing in second place in the league, which was the best they'd ever done. And, while it wasn't necessarily the team I would have picked or recruited myself because, frankly, we had we had to take a...there wasn't enough interest in the school. I started to really figure out that coaching was something I was passionate about, and that was a takeaway I brought with me. And still to this day, it's a guiding thing for me in terms of looking for opportunities to coach. Because even when you're making a small difference in a group of kids that are never going to play basketball at a high level, you can still have an impact on their life in a positive way. So that was a fun experience. Naber:  Cool man. We're going to cover that in a little bit, a little bit more on coaching from a professional context. That's a great story. So that, that brings us to post-Eugene. You get out of sphere-O'Ducks in Eugene, and your first role after school is what? Robby Allen:     Yeah, so I'm actually at the time working for a craft beer company that was based in Eugene - a company called Ninkasi Brewing Company. Their CEO was a former Wall Street guy who came back to Eugene and built this really, really successful fast-growing craft beer company. And I was able to finagle a job at that company, which as you can imagine, was a really fun job to have in college, and it made me very popular, especially during the summertime. And part of me thought I wanted to pursue that post college, but the more I dug into it, it just wasn't, it was more of something that...I like the idea of building this business, but it wasn't necessarily the industry I wanted to work in. So I had some people that I was close with giving me the advice that, starting a career in sales would be a good place to start. And I ended up taking a job at this company called People Matter, which was an HR technology company. And frankly didn't really know a lot about the business, didn't really have a great why for why I picked it other than it was the first door when it was an opportunity that opened up to me. The role was just a straight up outbound SDR role., the first outbound SDR the company had ever hired, reporting directly to the VP of sales. Little to no training, threw you out into the wild. And I flailed a little bit for, for probably about a month until really starting to get the hang of it. And I think the thing that I liked about it was the challenge of being able to basically directly challenge and try to add value to people that were often 20 years my senior, and help book meetings and that sort of thing. And I did really well at it against all odds. It wasn't something where I was necessarily set up for a ton of success, and that was something that I remembered and brought with me in future roles where I was the one responsible for hiring and training folks in that role...and that office was a satellite office for a company based in South Carolina, and I'm remember I was on a camping trip with my wife, girlfriend at the time, and I came back and I turned my phone on and somebody, I had 15 will voice messages and all my colleagues told me, hey, they shut the office down. I was as Oh my God. So, they closed the office down. It was something that I think I just didn't have enough business aptitude or savvy to see something that coming, per se. I was just focused on my own success, but it ended up being a blessing in disguise. I got introduced to a company called Zenefits, where a friend of mine worked. I had been a successful AE for nine months and like any successfully AE of nine months was convinced I should be an AE, but decided to take a step back to take a step forward. So I actually came in as an SDR at Zenefits. And I was an early employee there, and it was an amazing atmosphere. I mean, it was the kind of place where the phones were ringing all day, and there weren't enough sales people to take the number of demos that we were setting and the deals we were closing. And, so I came in there and it was the start of a really, really interesting journey. And I, I went from the top performing rep to becoming a manager, and building out this outbound team. They were sort of an all inbound shop before that. I built out a team of about 20 SDRs in San Francisco, hired a manager and placed them there. And the CEO, Parker, approached me and asked me, "hey, do you want to move out to Arizona and build this at 10x the scale." And I remember telling him no at first. I was like I'm a San Francisco kid, my girlfriend's here, all my friends and family are here. And I remember he told me this thing that always stuck with me. He said, "Robby, once or twice in your career, if you're lucky, a big, maverick tidal wave will come up behind you. And it's your decision if you want to grab a surfboard and jump in and try to ride it or not. And when a CEO tells you something that, it's kind of hard not to get fired up...So about two weeks later I was on a flight to Phoenix, and was moving out there. And over the course of the next two and a half years I built, and this is always kind of wild to say out loud, I'd built and scaled out at an SDR team of about 250. So we were hiring 30 SDRs every month, and really going from product market fit to repeatability to full-on hypergrowth, in this really condensed time period. And there are a ton of learnings and I'm sure some things that we'll be able to unpack along that journey. And it was a big growth experience for me. I was 25 years old, in a room full of 200 people that I'd hired in this whole organization we'd built out. And so learning just how to grow, with this growing business, personally. And how to uplevel my skills, and understand what the things were that I could do to add value at the certain different stages we went through. I was an amazing experience. So we went on a journey from a zero to $70 million in ARR over those three years. Which was a lot, and an amazing journey. And when that journey concluded, I had done everything I've set out to do at Zenefits and wanted to move back to the Bay Area. And so I came back to SF and actually got introduced to a company called Flexport. My old, my former former boss... Naber:  Let's pause for a second because I want to keep your head space in the Zenefits zone for a minute because we'll hop into Flexport and a little bit. But there's just so much to unpack with Zenefits that while your head's on the space, I'd to keep it there for a few minutes. For those that are listening, you heard the amount of scale both from a hiring, bookings, and revenue perspective, and just an operational scale - just unbelievable. Somewhat unheard of hypergrowth scale you guys are operating at, and you being the spearhead of a lot of that operational execution for hiring to make sure that you're building pipeline and building the pipe for the sales team at scale. All the way through to making sure you have a pool of talent and a bench of talent to mobilize within the organization. All of that is obviously vitally important to the massive scale and results that you guys had. So let's pause on that for a minute. So first of all, let's talk about hiring teams. There's a lot of people that are going through either their version of hyper growth, or what would fit everyone's definition of hyper growth. Whether they're hiring a significant number of people in their head, or in reality they're hiring a lot of humans to do a various number of roles. So let's talk about that. So when you think about recruiting at massive scale, what are a couple of the fundamentals that people need to keep in mind and remember, or get right, that you think about as a framework for how you scaled that much growth for hiring? Robby Allen:     Yeah, a great question. And I think, with the benefit of hindsight, I can probably speak a little bit more intelligently to it, then I could at the time. Naber:  To all of our benefit actually, to all of our benefit. Robby Allen:     Yeah. So I think the first thing that's just so important that you hear time and time again, but I think that there is no amount of time that you can spend that is too much, is getting your foundational team - your founding team, you're first team - right. And in in my case, I had the benefit of building out a team in San Francisco, and was able to sort of, get a couple - two of the top reps, my friends Alex Snatch and Andrew Case, both of whom became very close friends, and were at my wedding. and to this day are still very close friends - top reps in San Francisco and were able to get them to move about the Arizona with me. And so having that institutional knowledge there on the ground made such a big difference because there's already this dynamic of what excellence looks for every new hire that comes in. And I think that that's really important, And I think that for folks that are, that are starting a new role or coming into a new environment, if you're in a sales leadership position, whether you're an SDR manager, or VP of sales, or a VP of marketing, or whatever the case may be, you should probably already know who the first two or three people that you're going to recruit and hire into the organization are going to be. And the reason for that is because you can create an environment that you've got a little bit more control over, and create a culture that you're comfortable with and familiar with and that you can help integrate your new people into. Because once you start to add new folk onto the team, if you don't already have that foundational culture in place, you can't go back in time and rebuild it. And that can be a recipe for disaster. And so I was very fortunate to have benefited from that without necessarily prioritizing it. But it's something that I've learned now over the years that you, you can't really spend enough enough time in the beginning recruiting and focusing on who is going to be my founding go to market team. Naber:  Yup. Yup. That makes sense. And then, let's talk about operationalization of that hiring as well. So your founding team, you need to get both the culture as well as that group right - the first few people on your team. Then we need to get into the actual operations of hiring that many people. Can you give us an understanding of...if you think about it this way - from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, or from one part of the operational execution to the other - what are some of the best practices from a recruitment perspective that you need to nail when you're hiring at scale? Robby Allen:     Yeah, so I think it's a great question. And we went through many iterations of this. We went through me being the sole owner of top to bottom recruiting for this organization to having an internal recruiting team of 15 recruiters that were sort of running an engine. And so I saw every evolution along the way. And I think there were a couple of takeaways that I recommend to folks when I talked to them. And the first one is, when you think about your role as a leader, at the end of the day, it's your call. And the success or failure of the sort of decisions that you make when you're hiring people rest on your shoulders. And so when you think about what is the highest point of leverage that you have throughout the entire recruiting process? In my opinion, it's two things. One, it's setting the tone in terms of what to look for, and what our criteria are, and making that very evident so that everybody who's involved with the recruiting process is aligned on the same page, right? So defining the role but also making sure that you walk the walk in terms of the team that you're building along the way. So it's self represented. And the second thing is when you think about the leverage that you have as a leader or a hiring manager, it's actually this final stage interviews and the decision of go/no-go, and the ability to close candidates and then everything that happens after that in terms of the successful ramp and management of the team. And so the thing that I suggest to most folks, is please negotiate with your CEO, or the leader, or the person who you're recruiting to, whether you've got internal recruiting resources or outsourced external resources. you need the support in terms of I prospecting and management. We've proven in so many different aspects of the business, and we can take sales as an example that specializing the sales process in terms of appointment setters, and deal closers, is just more effective. And from a recruiting standpoint, you should think about it in a similar way. And so there's just going to be...it's nice for all of us to think that we can take a sniper approach to recruiting and just pick the four people we want to hire, hyperfocus on them, and close three out of four of them. But the reality of situation is that it's never been more competitive to recruit, really in any market. And that it's a candidates market so to speak. And so you want to get recruiters working for you. And it is worth the cost of admission. And it's just something to think about when you're either taking a new role or managing up, that you really want to help define the amount of work that, that recruiter's going to do for you. And so in the beginning at Zenefits, we had a couple of SF based recruiting firms doing a lot of this recruiting for us in Arizona. And I would take flights out there twice a week and hold full on interview days where we would do upwards of 10-15 interviews, and do batch hiring. But it allowed me to really isolate and focus on being super present in the interview, and making conscious decisions to place the right bets on these people that we were hiring. And that combined with the support of the folks that I mentioned earlier who were already high performers being involved with the process, allowed us to get a lot of those early hires right, and that helped us along the journey. Naber:  Awesome, man. That's great. It's gold. One of the things that I always touch on with either my clients, or folks in groups, or keynotes, or whatever, is specialization. Once you get to specialization within the process of bringing great talent onboard and the operationalization of it - so bringing in sourcers, bringing in recruiters, and making sure you don't have generalists working on it, but specific people working on specific pieces of the process - it's a great analogy to sales that we've proven it out for SDR, for sales, for account management, customer success, the specialization across the entire spectrum. I mean it's just gold what just came out of your mouth. So I hope that people take that onboard. Two more things I want to talk about within Zenefits, and then we'll move on. So you're bringing in a shed load of those people all the time. And you're keeping your culture and your values in mind the whole time, while at the same time running at breakneck speed for bringing those people in. Two questions. One is, as you're evaluating talent at that scale - so some people that are listening are going to need to hire five people in a year, some people that are listening are gonna need to hire 500 people in a year, or maybe even 5,000 people in a year depending on,the level of responsibility that they have, listening on this conversation - So when you're thinking about bringing those people on board, interviewing all of them, sourcing all of them, what is the calibration method that you guys have used that has been most successful to make sure that you have multiple people inside the organization giving input on this person being the the right person to hire? So the right candidate, what's the calibration method that you found, that is most useful or valuable as you're going through that level of hiring at scale? Robby Allen:     Yeah, it's a good question because I think the thing that worked well for us in the beginning was not necessarily the thing that worked well for us on the pathway along the journey. And that transition wasn't super smooth. And so I was the single point of accountability, or single point of failure success, however you want to state that. And that I made the hiring decision for the first hundred or so sales reps that we hired, where I was in every single interview. And so, as you can imagine, this absorbed a ton of my bandwidth, but we were fortunate to have a lot of support in terms of ramping and making reps successful and then hitting their numbers, and we were able to stay ahead of that. So I was able to do that. Handing off that decision responsibility took quite a bit of calibration. And I think that at the end of the day with recruiting, it's nice for organizations to have a fully calibrated, well-oiled recruiting machine where you can predictably make the same decisions about hires based on an agreed upon set of criteria and principles. And I think that there's companies out there that do this really well. It's really hard to do during a hyper growth phase. And I actually recommend, to most folks, that you hold onto a single point of accountability or a single decision in terms of this hiring, as long as you can. And then as you get folks up to speed and you're able to delegate out some of some of the hiring responsibilities, do that. But I think it is really the single most important thing that you can do, when you're at a hyper growth stage. And narrowing that level of responsibility for decision down to the smallest group of stakeholders possible, it may sound counterintuitive because a lot of bigger companies do as well where it's delegated across many people. But in my opinion, I think it's better to hold on to it. And when you get to a point where you've got folks that are...Because when you keep in mind we're hiring 30 new people to start on the first Monday of every month, that by the time we've got a hundred people on board, the most ramped folks that we have on the team had been there for four months. Now this is an experience in scale that most businesses what won't necessarily have to deal with. But I think to some degree, many hiring managers have been in a position where next most tenured individual just doesn't have a ton of tenure. So you have to work with those folks, and help them become owners, and help them really understand that as an owner of the business these are the specific things that we look for, and here's how you embody those certain principles, and those are things you need to work on. But for me it would actually was holding on to that as one of the singular most important points in my job, as long as I could. Naber:  Yup. Solid. I like it. I lied, I actually have two more questions in addition to that other one. The next one in on onboarding. So, this is something that most people overlook and turn it into a checkbox exercise. What was it that you guys did to make sure that everyone - you mentioned this twice around setting them up for success - what did you do to make sure they were set up for success in the onboarding phase and anything after that? Anything you would include in that phase to make sure they're set up for success at massive scale, as you were bringing a lot of people on board in the sales function. Robby Allen:     Yeah, that's a good question. So a couple things. We, had an owner of the onboarding program from day one. So one of the things that we did was we hired somebody into a sales enablement capacity as one of the very first hires that we made. And they ran a two week bootcamp, where we put folks through everything from systems training, to market training, to competitor intel, to pitching, to live role play, and we actually would have folks get certificates. And this was something that we took really seriously because, two reasons...One, it allowed us to create a system of measurement where we can say, okay, if we are able to deliver x amount of training, what output can we measure with...months down the line, weeks down the line. And that gave us actually a feedback loop that tied back into our recruiting conversations were actually talking about ramp success of people that we had recruited three months prior, in recruiting meetings. And I think it's important that you've got that feedback loop of success on hires all the way back to recruiters that isn't just anecdotal, but it's actually looking at the data performance based on, based on how these folks got ramped. So one thing was just creating an owner early on with sales enablement was critical. Systematizing it and having a way to measure rep performance week over week and having benchmarks and then really sticking to those. Making it clear that if new hires didn't hit certain criteria along this journey in their first three months, there wasn't going to be a grace period. I mean, it really was you needed to perform at a certain level, even in the early days. And so that wasn't so much putting numbers on the board in the first month as it was showing competence, and learning, and demonstration of ability to be coached, and some of the things that we looked for. And so those were a couple of things. And to be frank, that onboarding program, we needed to tear it down and rebuild it every 90 days because what we were measuring and what we were coaching on needed to be updated based on how the business had evolved, because it was such a dense time period during hypergrowth. Then you really have to constantly be looking at it through the lens of, is the foundation correct, and do we need to rebuild it? And it turned out we needed to rebuild it every 90 days. And so it was a lot of work. But, it created a lot more relief for the managers of those people and for the people themselves once they were able to pick up their bag, so to speak, and know that they have the skills to succeed. Naber:  Cool. One more side question on that. Is there three things that you can say every person that is onboarding new sales development, sales talent, people within the sales and marketing org, or just generally onboarding...Are there a few things, maybe three things, that you have to put into or get right within your onboarding program or project? Robby Allen:     Yeah, that's a good question. So I think the first thing is it everybody needs a crystal clear understanding of what their role is, and what what the value is that they're adding to the business. And hopefully this is something you did in the recruiting process, and it sounds obvious, but helping people understand why, what it is that they're doing is so critical to the overall success of the company and the vision of the company, creates a lot of buy in early on. And for a lot of people it's one of the reasons why they consider and decide to take a job in the first place, is what's the impact that I can have? How is this going to help me grow personally, but also this business grow? And helping create that reminder is, I think, really important. And then helping people feel, helping people understand how they can fail and that failure is appropriate, I think is really important too. And I think you have to define what that failure means, but people need to feel safe, safe to fail. And by fail, I don't necessarily mean fail to show up to work,. What I mean is fail, fail in an effort to do the right thing, right? So maybe you decided to call the CEO of a company that you're prospecting into, and you get a connect, and maybe your pitch wasn't quite as sharp as you wanted it to be. But at the end of the day, you were doing the right thing, you were calling up in the organization. That's something that you want to celebrate and help people understand that that's actually something where you're doing the right thing here. Now let's talk about how we can perform better, in that specific scenario. And so creating that environment, I think is really important too. And I think the third thing is you have to create a rigorous system of measurement. So what a lot of sales leaders do is they'll pair up a new hire with the top rep on the team, tell him to sit in on demos and take notes, for as long as they need. And then after about four weeks, let's start funneling demos so that new AE, or if it's an SDR let's start or funneling leads to that SDR. And then it just becomes this sink or swim type of an environment. And you see this perpetuated I think get a lot of sales orgs, and it's understandable. I think that most of most sales leaders are great at what they do because they're looking at the bottom line results, not necessarily the top line inputs of pipeline or new talent. But if you're not really rigorous about these are the specific things that you need to do to be successful, you institute this feeling in a rep that there isn't necessarily a repeatable playbook for success, and it's actually their responsibility to create a path to success. And so what ends up happening is every rep does something different. And when every reps doing something different, you can't scale. And so you never cross that chasm, from product market fit, to repeatability, to hypergrowth. And so once you've actually got folks doing things repeatably, now you can really press the gas, and make things happen a lot faster because you've at least got the knowledge that everybody is executing and selling in a similar fashion. But you can't do that unless that folks are getting ramped up the same way. Naber:  Nice. Awesome. Man, great advice, Robby. Thanks. That's great. And then last question on Zenefits, and we'll move on after that. The machine that you put together, from a sales development perspective, from the outside looking in, just unbelievable - for all the different moving parts you had to piece together, and the best practices that you guys deployed while you were doing that. So someone that's building a sales development function, as you know, and as many people listening are going to have to do - either one, they're a sales leader and they're building sales development function. And a lot of people think that translates well, but oftentimes it doesn't. And number two, a founder, or someone that's never done this, or never been in sales before, or someone's the head of marketing, oftentimes they'll have to build sales development engine to try kick off and catalyze their first phases of growth, and then high growth, and then hyper growth. So when you're talking to people that are building sales development engines, like you did at Zenefits, and then ultimately you did at Flexport as well, which we'll get into in a second - what are the fundamentals, actually let's pull it back, not the fundamentals; What is your mindset when you're building a sales development engine, Robby? Let's start there. Robby Allen:     Yeah. Well I think, when we think about a sales development engine, your typically building this because you don't have a marketing engine pumping out leads, right? You aren't necessarily really building this engine as a first investment in the business, in a lot of cases. Typically you've already got some salespeople in the org, and closing some deals, and you want to scale that function up. But when you look at some of the other inputs into where the demand is being created, you don't necessarily have the level of confidence in what those inputs are to scale that. So you think about, okay, let's take this matter into around hands. And so I think you have to have a hypothesis about, okay, if we're going to make this investment, there's two things that we need to get right. And the first thing is the economics need to make sense, meaning we're going to need to know pretty specifically what kinds of deals and customers we're going after here, what what the win rates and conversion rates are going to be, so that we can understand if we hire one SDR how many AEs this is going to support, and ultimately how we can make the economics of the model work. So the first thing is just having a hypothesis about...and often for companies, if you're going outbound, that's going to be a slightly more upmarket targeted customer, a named account that you understand to be in your demographic of product market fit. That's pretty typical, but it can depend. And then I think the second thing is we're investing in building a talent funnel for for the business. And, this looks different at every company. If you're at a very technical enterprise sale, it can be really challenging to have a 20 year veteran AE and a one year out of college SDR, and how are you going to bridge that gap and promote that person. And in some cases you can't. So I think for the folks that are thinking about their own career paths, definitely look for the type of company where you can get promoted and elevate into full cycle roles and see growth there as well, where it's not such a big bridge to jump. But in any case, the business needs to think about what are we going to do from a talent perspective. And the best companies develop this talent pool, and and ended up recruiting directly out of their SDR organization. And, so for a much lower cost, and much faster ramp time,and typically much more successful rep, they're able to scale up the AE part of the business too. So I think about the economics of the role itself, and then the payoff being not just the output of the role, but the multi year promotion path that you're seeing for folks that you're hiring into that role. Naber:  Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I mean, that's again, gold. Okay, cool. So let's walk Flexport now. So you get to a place where, you're ready to make a move. Why Flexport and tell us about that jump in a minute or so, and then we can talk about your experience there, and let us know what you did. Robby Allen:     Yeah. So my former boss and VP of sales at Zenefits, Sam Blond, who's now the Chief Sales Officer over at Brex, he was consulting at the time for Flexport, and was helping out specifically with their SDR team. And so he introduced me to Ryan, who's the CEO of Flexport, and I had the chance to meet Ryan and some of the other folks on the team. And, basically, Flexport is this interesting business where it's a SaaS business in a sense that they are building a software as a service product, but really it's a freight forwarding business. And I personally had not spent any time in the logistics or freight forwarding industry. So it was a new dynamic. I mean, I remember taking some supply chain classes that were required in college, and I was practically asleep the whole time. I didn't really understand contextually why it mattered, but Flexport really helped bring out that perspective, and maybe we can talk about that later. But, they basically, the business itself...Freight forwarding and logistics is an interesting supply demand business. where there isn't necessarily a lot of inbound demand regardless of where you are in the market. Essentially importers, people who make physical products overseas need to basically employ third party freight forwarders like Flexport to help them move those goods wherever they need to go in the supply chain. But they're not necessarily signing up for demos on websites the way that you would with Marketo, or Salesforce, or something like that. So they needed to have an outbound strategy for new logos. And at the time it was a little bit Willy Nilly. There were a handful of Sdrs in San Francisco. They were doing a good job, but it wasn't really set up to scale. And so I got introduced and it was a cool opportunity to be for me, one because it was a completely different industry and a new mental challenge that I was just interested in. But when I looked at the business, I saw a couple of things. One, it was growing really quickly, in spite of having basically no predictable demand generation model. So that told me that despite the fact that there's a gap here, the business is growing exponentially. And that was really exciting to me. And two, there was a unique opportunity, for me to learn, where I was going to get a chance to scale out a global team. So we needed to hire SDRs in New York City, and LA, and Amsterdam, and Hong Kong, and San Francisco, and a few other markets. And so that was, that was a unique opportunity where I had only really operated in the US before. So I came on board, shortly after leaving Arizona and coming back to SF and took a role there as the Head of Global SDR. Naber:  Very cool. So I have three things I want to talk about within your Flexport experience. Firstly, everyone has this moment, if they're going to look after global teams and businesses that have either global scale, global ambition, everyone has this moment where they move to a geographical diversification of focus and resources, away from just a single market or a single region within a market.This Is the first time, at least at scale, that you had had to do that, across different countries where you're diversifying both talent focus, resources that you're spending as well as using, and just your time management and decision making focus across multiple markets. What are some of the things that you learned, that someone needs to think about as they're diversifying across multiple markets, when you were doing this at Flexport? Robby Allen:     Yeah. So it's a great question, and there's a couple things that I learned, kind of after the fact, that I think I almost wished I'd known at the time. But the big question, and that we wrestled with Zenefits, or sorry, at Flexport, in regards to building this SDR team, was to centralize it or to decentralize it. And so at the time when I joined, we were centralized, meaning we were booking and setting demos where all of our global offices in one office in San Francisco. So we were calling out into all these different geos. And the thinking was that because it was centralized, we would be...there was a central knowledge hub. We could help ramp reps faster. We could institute best practices. We could roll out change faster. We can just generally move faster. And to remind, at Zenefits, we were a centralized model, right where we had this giant office in Scottsdale, AZ. But what we figured out was that these global markets were really different. Outbound in Amsterdam will look very, very little like does in San Francisco, or New York City. It's just, it's a completely different game. And, similar to Hong Kong, which is worlds away, in terms of being able to prospect into accounts. And so we ended up deciding to decentralize it, which was the right decision because most of the subject matter expertise for that local market lived in that local market. And so you had a GM and you had some senior salespeople in that local market who could partner up with an SDR to help target the right types of accounts. And so I think for me that was actually a big exercise and just letting go. And not being the one to control all the campaigns that we were running and all of the different messaging we were using. And the advice that I got from a senior executive at Flexport at the time was encouraging me to think about the function as a service to the global GM's that we were working with, as a service provider. And it a sales person, you're not, you don't typically think of yourself as a service provider. But basically what they were telling me was that to really focus on listening to what the unique problems where in each of these markets and provide expertise and consultation on how to solve them, but ultimately give that local GM the credence and responsibility to make that decision. And honestly, it was hard for me. I came from a place where I was successful because I was the one who is controlling and making decisions for this big organization at Zenefits. And so Flexport was a challenge for me just in the sense that, success meant letting go and I'm bringing subject matter expertise to the table and making recommendations and offering it more as a consultant, but ultimately leaving those decisions to the local GM's. And so, to come back to your question about how I'd recommend folks who have global geos that they're selling into. I think you have to treat each one its own unique problem set and hopefully get an expert in there to be the owner of that problem set sooner rather than later, and then just provide support. Naber:  Yeah, I see that a lot right now. Whether it is hyper growth businesses trying to scale from afar. So using SF or, or wherever their headquarters is, as a hub, and hiring a couple of people in a new office. Or whether they have a bunch of people in that new office or that new market and they're now moving to this model of having a GM where you have a local owner so that all of those issues, problems, and solutions can roll up through one person that understands the market versus multiple points of contact that need to then have multiple points of contact back at the hub where you've got different stakeholders that may or may not play ball, as well as others. And understanding that markets are different or situations are different. So I hear a lot of people talking about moving to that GM model as they, one, open up an office or, two, they move to it after they feel they've made enough mistakes with a non-GM model. I've heard a lot of tech businesses talk about that lately. How can you burn a lot of cash and a lot of resources as quickly as you make mistakes when you're in high growth or hypergrowth. So, I've heard a lot of people try to move away from that. The second thing I want to talk about with Flexport is Compensation Plans. So one of the things that - you and I have talked about this in the past a little bit - but one of the things that you did at Zenefits was you had to think about the construction, from a micro and mid macro perspective of putting together how people got paid, what the measurement was, and you guys have iterations and iterations of that over time. Especially as you scale, and as you either make mistakes or some things go well, and you doubled down, etc. So when you were at Flexport as well as at Zenefits - and you can talk about Mixmax too if you want, but don't move on to that too quickly - but from a comp plans perspective, what did you learn about putting together comp plans, and what are the landmines that people should try to avoid as they're putting together comp plans for sales and sales development reps? Robby Allen:     Hmm. Yeah. so the first thing I did at Flexport was I moved it from a quarterly payout to a monthly payout. And the reason that I lobbied for this, and frankly spent a little bit of personal capital on it, was that inside sales rep need quick feedback loops. And the quickest feedback loop is the direct deposit into your bank account based on the prior month performance. And because it was taking 120 days to get that feedback loop, reps weren't necessarily feeling the way that they were performing in the way that you really want folks to feel, based on these incentives. And so we moved it to a monthly program and overnight, you would see, the folks that were performing the highest behaving a certain way, and folks that weren't behaving a different way. And that's not to say that folks were coming in and being gaudy about whatever their OTE's were. But it's more just to say that you noticed a difference in terms of what the first of the month and the last day of the month, and everything in between, looked when there are monthly feedback loops. So I'm a big fan of feedback loops early and often. And when you can program one of the most important feedback loops in sales, which is incentives and cash comp plans, you want to have that happen pretty frequently. and I think especially for SDR roles, if anybody listening to this is doing a quarterly payout, or in hopefully not anything longer than that, I would consider what the operational burden would be to maybe move that to a monthly payout. And if it's not too high, I would do it. And the reason why, just because reps benefit from that feedback, especially in a hyper growth environment. So that's the first thing that we did. And the next thing that we did was we move the goals up. And that's always a hard thing to do, but the team was performing well and so we moved the goals up, and the OTE stays the same. And I think that that's always a challenging thing for a young manager to do in their career, is help people get onboard doing more work for the same pay, so to speak. But we are fortunate to have some really talented people on the team that just owned it, and went out and crushed their numbers and set the bar really high. So yeah, I mean there's a lot of specific things that I can talk about with regards to comp plans, but I'm always the belief of system of rapid feedback loops, uncapped upside, as long as it's not going to put the business at risk in any way. Those are the two things that I always try to make sure are built into comp plans. Naber:  Awesome, man. That's great. Great answer. And then, last thing, and this is more general because I know that you and I've had enough conversations where I believe that one of your superpowers is your, strategisation - that's a word... - for how you navigate your career and subsequent accurate execution...What I've always been impressed by is your ability to identify and understand very, very quickly - digest, ingest, and execute based on what you've learned, from a career development and a career navigation perspective - it's, it's fascinating to have conversations with you, especially over time. So when you're thinking about career development, career navigation, n your mind, tell us about your mindset for how people should be thinking about the next opportunities that they take - because you've had hundreds and hundreds of these types of discussions - and what actually matters. Robby Allen:     Yeah, that's a good question. So the framework that I've used that has worked well for me, is I think there's really two things that actually matter when you think about and you evaluate an opportunity in your career. And this is what I tell people who are interviewing, or how I use this framework myself. And I think the first thing is the name on the front of the Jersey. And so at the end of the day, in the beginning of your career, it's easy to get caught up in minute details about specific roles that you're in, titles, and small variances in compensation and things that at the time feel really important. And certainly to some degree are important - titles matter, comp matters. But five to 10 years after you move on from that role and you're doing something different in your career, what people are going to look back on is what was the story of that company at what part of that journey did you participate in, and what was your role in the journey? And so I think when you think about the opportunities that you're evaluating, the name on the front of the jersey is going to matter a lot more, when it's all said and done. And people associating your name with the type of companies that really matter and that are lasting go through journeys, are the ones that are going to grow your career actually quite a bit more than titles and compensation, early on. And the next thing is the people you work with. And this is a tough thing to evaluate, but when you're going through the interview process, it's really important to do a thorough evaluation of the folks that you're going to work with. Your boss, your boss's boss, your peers. If you're coming into a leadership role, the folks that are going to be reporting directly to you, and anybody around your peripheral. And the reason being is you're going to spend more time with these people than you are your family. You're going to be in there grinding it out, working with these folks hip to hip, going on a journey. And what you figure out after you go on a journey, and then start a new journey, and look back is that all of these people that you work with go on to do more journeys. And the network that you build internally, the people that you work with, can create so many opportunities for you in the future, or not depending on the quality of talent of people you work with. So I just recommend that people are thoughtful about choosing the type of people they want to sign up to work with. and it can be hard in an interview process to really get a thorough understanding, but you've got internet resources at your disposal - use linkedin. Understand are the people that you're working with active online and the type of people that are investing in their own careers, because that's gonna pay off later. And I can't tell you how many deals in my career that have gone a lot smoother because I have an internal contact with somebody that I used to work with at Zenefits or at Flexport, when we're able to open the door and get directly to the decision maker and get to a decision a lot quicker. And that's one example of hundreds. But, the people that you work with and the name on the front of the Jersey are, are really the two things I think at the end of the day that actually matter. Naber:  I love it. I love it. And, you mentioning that your network is your net worth is something that I think people remember and take away. That's awesome. So, let's hop into Mixmax. So you're at Flexport, you're making the move to Mixmax. Let's talk about that for a minute. Robby Allen:     Yeah, sure. So, my journey at Flexport was going really well, and I ended up actually getting an introduction to an early stage founder, at Mixmax. And Mixmax is actually a tool that we were using at the time, and something I was really passionate about because it was a sales productivity tool that some of the teams were using internally at Flexport, that I thought showed a lot of promise and it's really interesting. And they were looking for a Head of Sales. And so we had a dialogue going, and the opportunity presented itself for me to jump in and own the full sales process end to end, and get to build a team out from scratch. And this was a business that had gone from about zero to 5 million in revenue, all on self serve. And so they're looking to take this jump into more of a B2B sales type of a model. And I jumped at the opportunity. It was the right timing and the right place for me to go earlier than I'd ever been before, and wrap my hands around the full share of the B2B sales model at the business. And so I came on board and recruited out a team of 10 reps, so five SDRs and five AE's. And we built out an SMB, and Mid-market, Enterprise Sales team, and went to market with it. And it was an amazing journey. And we went from about zero to a million in revenue on the B2B side in about six, seven months. And it's, it's funny because I looked at the time at Zenefits, and we did,six times that or something that, in that same time period. But this was harder, and almost meant more. Just because the market that we were competing in was very competitive and going from a self serve model to a B2B model was more challenging than I could have imagined. Naber:  Okay. So, I wanna I wanna I wanna stay here for two specific topics. One of them is exactly what you just said. Going from a self serve business to a B2B or more towards an enterprise sales business - choosing enterprise loosely for the way that I say that, for defining it. But let's talk about that. Talk about the learnings you had going from that self serve business to a non self serve business as you were building at Mixmax. The learnings as in, what did you guys do well, and combining that with what do you wish you would have known at the time that you could have done differently. You don't need to define them in those terms, but comprehensively, what did you learn or what are your learnings from it? Robby Allen:     Yeah, so I think the first thing is that when you have to understand that, despite the fact that we were pretty well established, early stage SaaS business, humming it away at about 5 million in revenue, you have to look at this switch to a B2B notion as a completely new exercise in product marketing fit. And the reason being is that the notion of convincing an entire org, or at least an entire team, to buy an an annual license of your product versus signing up for a much lower risk, per se, at a slightly higher cost and doing a monthly, it's just a completely different notion. And so I think one of the things that we didn't do well early on was that we tried a bunch of different plays. And what I mean by that is that we, the product had brought applicability from recruiting, to account management, to customer success, and sales, and SDR, and we didn't necessarily nail our niche until about a couple months in, when we started to figure out that AE teams were the right team. Oftentimes they were using products that were more designed for SDR's, just by nature of inheritance and not having other options, and that these were the folks that were typically signing up on their own, and these are the ones we want to go after. And so I use this analogy sometimes when I think about scaling playbooks across different phases of growth. But, if you look at it basketball, and I use a lot of basketball analogies, so you have to bear with me. But in the product market fit phase, all you're really looking for is a mismatch that you can exploit. And so if you've got one, let's say, player on the court that's taller, faster, stronger, can jump higher or has one move that you can repeatedly go to to get a bucket when you need it, that's where product market fit is. It's not a whole range of plays. It's one play. And so we figured out what that one play is, and we went there, and we started to scale it. And, in the back of your mind, you're telling yourself, okay, I know that we're gonna have to broaden this playbook a bit more, but part of this product market fit is repeatedly running that same play again, and again, and again. Naber:  Hey, Robby - can you give an example from a sales perspective? Robby Allen:     Yeah, sure. So, I think in the context of Mixmax, the way that our business works was we would land in accounts through self serve model, we would identify the ones where we had traction, we would go outbound, so to speak, where we would reach out to the folks using the product and convert those into larger paying accounts. Very similar, I'm sure, to what you guys did with Sales Navigator at Linkedin, right? And, and so basically what we look for there is okay, we're running a range of different plays. We're running plays against recruiting teams where we're seeing similar things, account management teams we're seeing similar things, we're seeing the win rates with a AE teams just a little bit higher. And we started to figure out why and it's because of a couple things. One, the buyer who in this case is the VP of Sales, or the leader of the Sales org, typically has a budget and decision making power, and there isn't necessarily any approval process beyond them. ,And so if we can make a business case and the AE's can go to their boss and say, we need this tool to be succes

This past Valentine's Day, Shawn Richard stood before the San Francisco Planning Commission and made the case for why the board should let him open the first cannabis dispensary in the city's legendary Upper Haight neighborhood. Given the Haight's legacy as the epicenter of the weed-fueled counterculture movement, his shop would be historically significant.

  You can hear a quickie of the first-ever episode of Sexploration with Monika which debuted in 2007 on Erotic Radio Live. This is an edited 10 min demo version of "The BDSM Tea Party" for the article "Professionally Homeless for Sex Talk." Sexploration with Monika explores how women and men get what they want in the context of sex and relationships, with a heavy emphasis on exploring new ideas, consent, negotiation, safe sex, kink, connection, communication, and play. Sexploration with Monika show topics range from sex-robots, Japanese bondage and other fetishes, metamorphasexuals, polyamory, and tips on having the perfect menage-et-trois. You can enjoy how "golly gee whiz" I am when they clue me about pegging, obviously this was before I was a Certified Sexual Health Educator! LoL Thanks to David Fratto of Media Posse for donating valuable production time for the first few shows in his lovely studios on Haight Street in SF. It was not uneventful (but it was a learning experience), & I'm sure his neighbors have forgotten all the strange noises by now!

Borderlands Books and Borderlands Cafe is a gem in the city: a bookstore and cafe that specializes in new and used science fiction, fantasy, and horror. If you've been around these parts 10 or more years, you might remember their sphinx kitties roaming the store, and a sign that told everyone when the cats were in.  Today's episode is from Borderlands co-founder Alan Beatts. The Borderlands Cafe was a later addition to the bookstore. During the construction of the cafe, Alan found something in the basement that sent the crew running.  The bookstore faced closure a few years ago, and amazingly the staff raised $2M through a grassroots campaign to buy a building on Haight Street where they will be located permanently.

Walking & wandering, executive function disorder, food service work, escaping the burbs, movies, lost in music, Haight Street, fate or circumstance, Benjamin Button, acceptance, pros and cons of conformity, the happiness gene, hat dependency, and much, much more...

Owen Husney, Prince's first manager sits down with Captain Party to discuss how he discovered Prince, and shares some intimate stories of a young man on the verge of greatness. Then the Captain switches gears to bring you the story behind Prince's iconic first photo shoot with photographer Robert Whitman. We want to thank San Francisco's Family Affair art + photography+design gallery for access to Owen and Robert. Please go out and support the Prince Pre-Fame exhibit at the gallery on 683 Haight Street before it ends on July 7th!   Special thanks to our sponsor, ManGrate.  For a limited time, our viewers can go to mangrate.com and enter the code DAD18 for 40% off!   Visit our website! www.bitchtalkpodcast.com Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter...  

Today on Crosscurrents:

Join TNS Host Steve Heilig for a conversation with David Smith, co-founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in San Francisco on Haight Street. David served as medical director at the clinic for 39 years, which was originally founded as a response to the medical needs of thousands of young people who descended upon San Francisco for the Summer of Love. The clinic was initially funded through proceeds of benefit concerts, many of which were organized by Bill Graham, with bands such as Big Brother and the Holding Company, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ravi Shankar, and George Harrison. David Smith, MD is a medical doctor specializing in addiction medicine, the psycho-pharmacology of drugs, new research strategies in the management of drug abuse problems, and proper prescribing practices for physicians. He is the founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics of San Francisco, a fellow and past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine, past president of the California Society of Addiction Medicine, past medical director for the California State Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, past medical director for the California Collaborative Center for Substance Abuse Policy Research, and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. David is also an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Francisco and the founder and publisher of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.

Bay Area Ventures presents this first of two special follow-up episodes where we check in with guests from the first three seasons of the show. First up, we’ll be speaking with Christopher Farm, Co-Founder and CEO of Tenjin, Inc. (www.tenjin.io) Christopher made his first appearance on Bay Area Ventures in April of 2016. Back then, Tenjin was a new startup fresh out of the Y-Combinator incubator. Chris will share with us how Tenjin has fared over the past year and talk about some of the biggest surprises and challenges he’s faced. Did his staff grow? Have sales grown? How difficult has it been to attract and retain technical talent in the San Francisco Bay Area in a period of extreme economic growth and competition. Christopher will tell us all about it.In the second half of the show we’ll follow-up with Dave McLean, Founder of Magnolia Brewing (http://magnoliabrewing.com). Dave was my first guest on Bay Area Ventures back in March of 2014. At the time, Magnolia Brewing was operating its flagship Magnolia Gastropub on the fabled Haight Street in San Francisco and was still building out a new restaurant and a new brewing facility. We’ll see how those facilities have done and also learn about their recent entry into retail sales with a new line of canned beers.Dave has been brewing beer since the 1990s and is one of the leaders of the modern San Francisco Bay Area craft brewing industry. Dave was the founder of the San Francisco Brewer’s Guild which now boasts a membership of hundreds of craft brewers and hosts dozens of major events in the Bay Area each year including San Francisco Beer Week and the annual Brews by the Bay festival.McLean is passionate about beer and business. He has built a thriving enterprise with thousands of devoted fans in a city whose roots as a brewer’s haven go back to the gold rush days of the 1800’s. That’s no small feat and Dave will tell you how he’s done it.This will be a jam-packed show with a lot of takeaways for your business.As always, I welcome your comments and feedback. If you have questions for Christopher, Dave or me please feel free to reach out and we’ll do our best to get back to you as quickly as possible.Recorded on April 24, 2017, on SiriusXM Channel 111, Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School. Bay Area Ventures airs live on Mondays at 4:00pm Pacific Time, 7:00pm Eastern Time. For a list of upcoming and past guest information visit www.donaldlandwirth.com and click on the Show link. #onlinemarketing #PPC #SEO #SEM #mobileadvertising #entrepreneurship #startup #SanFrancisco #beer #craftbrewing #marketing #restaurants

Margaret Cho was born Dec. 5, 1968 and raised in San Francisco. “It was different than any other place on Earth,” she says. “I grew up and went to grammar school on Haight Street during the ’70s. There were old hippies, ex-druggies, burnouts, drag queens, and Chinese people. To say it was a melting pot – that’s the least of it. It was a really confusing, enlightening, wonderful time.” Ignoring the traditions of her patriarchal culture, her mother bravely resisted an arranged marriage in Korea and married Margaret’s father a Korean joke book writer. “Books like 1001 Jokes for Public Speakers – real corny stuff,” Cho says. “I guess we’re in the same line of work. But we don’t understand each other that way. I don’t understand why the things he says are funny and the same for him.” What Margaret did know is that being a kid was hard. Racing toward adulthood as fast as she could to escape the constant bullying she endured, Margaret began writing jokes at 14 and professionally performing at age 16. Getting picked on, and not having a feeling of belonging, is a subject that’s not only near to Margaret’s heart, but something she still feels very deeply despite all of her successes. In that sense, Margaret has gladly and graciously become the “Patron Saint for Outsiders,” speaking for those who are not able to speak for themselves, and encouraging people who can to use their voice to promote change.Soon after starting her Stand Up career, Margaret won a comedy contest where first prize was opening for Jerry Seinfeld. She moved to Los Angeles in the early ’90s and, still in her early twenties, hit the college circuit, where she immediately became the most booked act in the market and garnered a nomination for “Campus Comedian of The Year.” She performed over 300 concerts within two years. Arsenio Hall introduced her to late night audiences, Bob Hope put her on a prime time special and, seemingly overnight, Margaret Cho became a national celebrity. Her groundbreaking, controversial, and short-lived ABC sitcom, All-American Girl (1994) soon followed. Oddly, while chosen because of who she was – a non-conformist Korean American woman with liberal views – the powers-that-be decided they preferred for Margaret to “tone it down” for the show. She soon realized that though she was an Executive Producer, this would be a battle she could not win. “For fear of being too “ethnic,” the show got so watered down for television that by the end, it was completely lacking in the essence of what I wanted to accomplish.” The experience was a traumatic one, bringing up unresolved feelings left over from childhood, and Margaret developed an eating disorder as a response to criticism about her body. She was so obsessive in her goal to try to be what she thought others wanted, that she landed in the hospital with kidney failure. Through out this period of self-abuse, Margaret continued performing to sold-out audiences in comedy clubs, theaters, and college campuses, working to channel her anger in to something more positive. In 1999, her groundbreaking, off Broadway one-woman show, I’m The One That I Want, toured the country to national acclaim and was made into a best-selling book and feature film of the same name. After her experience with All-American Girl, Margaret wanted to make sure she would only ever have to answer to herself, putting herself in charge of the distribution and sales of her film, which garnered incredible reviews and broke records for ‘Most Money Grossed per Print’. In 2001, after the success of her first tour, Maragaret launched Notorious C.H.O., a smash-hit 37-city national tour that culminated in a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall. Notorious C.H.O., hailed by the New York Times as “Brilliant,” was recorded and released as a feature film. Both films were acquired by Showtime, and produced by Margaret’s production company, a testament to the success of Margaret’s business model. In March of 2003, Margaret embarked on her third sold-out national tour, Revolution. It was heralded by the Chicago Sun Times as “Her strongest show yet” and the CD recording was nominated for a Grammy for Comedy Album of the Year. In 2005, she released Assassin, with The Chicago Tribune stating “(Assassin) packs passion in to each punch.” The concert film premiered in select theatres and on the gay and lesbian premium channel Here! TV. In 2007, Margaret hit the road with Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry and Erasure, along with indie faves The Dresden Dolls and The Cliks, to host the True Colors Tour, benefiting the Human Rights Campaign. An entertainment pioneer, Margaret also created and starred in The Sensuous Woman, a live variety show featuring vaudevillian burlesque and comedy, which she took for an extended off-Broadway run in the fall. Margaret returned to TV in 2008 with the VH1 series, The Cho Show. Describing it as a ‘reality sitcom,’ Margaret said at the time, “It’s the closest I’ve been able to come on television to what I do as a comic.” The Cho Show followed Margaret, her real parents, and her eccentric entourage through a series of bold and outrageous experiences, shaped by Margaret’s ‘anything goes’ brand of stand-up. The aptly titled Beautiful came next, exploring the good, bad and ugly in beauty, and the marketers who shape our world. The concert premiered in Australia at The Sydney Theater, marking the first time Margaret debuted a tour abroad. While touring through the US, the concert was filmed at the Long Beach theatre, aired as a special on Showtime in 2009, and then released as both a DVD and a book. In 2009 Margaret nabbed a starring role in the comedy/drama series Drop Dead Diva, which aired for six seasons on the Lifetime network. Margaret enjoyed not having the sole responsibility for keeping things afloat. “(Drop Dead Diva) was a very fulfilling experience. It let me taking about the things I talk about, like body image, and women feeling good about themselves.” Never one to shy away from a challenge, Margaret stepped right up to the plate when asked to do Season 11 of the highly- rated Dancing with the Stars. Paired with pro Louie Van Amstel, Margaret was on the show’s most controversial seasons. Margaret got a very strong reaction to her Rainbow Dancing Dress during a time when the issue of bullying, especially among gay teens, was being heavily covered in the media. “I am very proud to have been able to wear a gay pride dress on a show that is so conservative.” 2010 culminated with another high honor, a second Grammy Award nomination for Comedy Album of the Year for Cho Dependent, her incredibly funny collection of music. Featuring collaborations with Fiona Apple, Andrew Bird, Grant Lee Phillips, Tegan & Sara, Ben Lee and more, the album received critical acclaim. The album is funny, but also quite musical, featuring not only her surprisingly strong singing voice, but her skill on the guitar, banjo and dulcimer. “I was inspired to make beautiful music with a comic edge. I took this very seriously, taking vocal and guitar lessons while I was touring.” Margaret self released Cho Dependent on her own Clownery Records, and was encouraged by the acclaim, since there are only a handful of artists putting out true albums of comedy music – “Weird” Al Yankovic, Flight of the Conchords, The Lonely Island, to name a few – yet no women. In 2011, Margaret released the live concert film of Cho Dependent, which also had its cable network debut on Showtime. Shot at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, GA, she remained uncensored, with a characteristically no-holds-barred show. In 2012, Margaret spent whatever free time she had crafting her all new standup show, the uproariously and aptly named MOTHER, which kicked off with both a US and European tour. According to Margaret, “MOTHER offers up an untraditional look at motherhood and how we look at maternal figures and strong women in queer culture.” Margaret’s creative side moved ahead at full speed with an Emmy nomination for “Best Guest Performance” on Thirty Rock. After the death of her mentor, Robin Williams, overwhelmed her, a mutual friend told her not to grieve Robin, but to ‘Be Robin’. The hashtag #BeRobin was born, as Margaret began setting up shop in different places around San Francisco in an effort to raise money for the Homeless community. “All I do and create a distraction – comedy and music – for several hours and collect goods and donations for people who need them.” The GoFundMe page Margaret set up [at http://GoFundMe.com/BeRobin ] has raised over $20,000.00 in donations.In 2015, Margaret was one of the hosts of TLC’s All About SEX, a late night call-in talk show with Margaret covering sex toys and alternative sexuality. “I wanted to remove the stigma of women not only buying sex toys, but experimenting with what makes them feel good.”2015 also brought Margaret back to the stand up stage, where she filmed her Showtime special/DVD psyCHO at the historic Gramercy Theatre in New York City. Called “wildly kinetic” by the New York Times, psyCHO “Is about insanity, about the anger I feel about everything happening in the world, from police brutality to racism to the rising tide of violence against women.” In keeping with the show’s theme, the artwork, a portrait she commissioned from artist Vincent Castiglia made entirely of her own blood. There’s no break for Margaret in 2016: The three-time Grammy and Emmy nominee will release her next studio album, American Myth, on April 29th on her Clownery label. The follow up to Cho Dependent, it’s the first collection of new music from Margaret in 6 years. She has already debuted three music videos: “Ron’s Got a DUI” [https://goo.gl/8j3SgH], “Fat Pussy” [https://goo.gl/B6rfER] and the song that set the Internet on its ass (take that, Kardashians), “(I Want To) Kill My Rapist” [https://goo.gl/SMuKhA]. Salon magazine called the song “A new anthem” and UK’s The Guardian reminded anyone who was offended that “Cho is famed for her boldness, her taboo-breaking humour.” Margaret spoke to Billboard about the song saying, “I’m a victim, and now a survivor, of sexual abuse and rape, and I think it’s really hard to talk about it. I think having a song to perform live will allow others to talk about it. It’s a huge issue, and this was cathartic for me.” American Myth, made with her longtime collaborator Garrison Starr, also showcases Margaret’s first efforts as a composer. Margaret says the album is “my glamorous and glittering tribute to family, comedy, anger, fame, gayness, grief, fat pride, love and hate.” In what is a fitting tribute, Margaret has also been named special co-host of E!’s Fashion Police, covering the biggest award shows of 2016. Since Joan Rivers was not only a friend, but also a vocal supporter of Margaret, this has a unique significance. “Although I am not quite a fashionista, I would love to look at it like I am changing it up – Fashion Police: Special Victims Unit. It makes me happiest to spend time with Melissa (Rivers), and when I see her laugh at my jokes, I feel like Joan is smiling.” And in typical “go-go-go” style, Margaret has signed on to develop a “Highland,” a dramedy for Amazon. The hour long show follows Margaret, who after court-0rdered rehab, gets a chance to start over by moving in with her (dysfunctional) family who run a pot dispensary. Co-created by Margaret and writer Liz Sarnoff (“Deadwood,” “Lost,” “Alcatraz”) Margaret is set to star and executive produce as well.   With so much success in her artistic life, Margaret has never turned away from the causes that are important to her. She is incredibly active in anti-racism, anti-bullying, advocating for the homeless and gay rights campaigns, and has been recognized for her unwavering dedication. She was the recipient of the Victory Fund’s Leadership Award and the first-ever Best Comedy Performance Award at the 2007 Asian Excellence Awards. She also received the First Amendment Award from the ACLU of Southern California, and the Intrepid Award from the National Organization for Women (NOW). Margaret has been honored by GLAAD, American Women in Radio and Television, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), PFLAG and LA Pride, who gave Margaret a Lifetime Achievement Award for leaving a lasting imprint on the LGBT community. Through her hard work, Margaret has had the opportunity to be heard, to extend her point of view and become regarded as a true pioneer in her field. She takes none of it for granted. “It’s a wonderful thing to be known as a ‘safe haven’ for people. People come to see me, or buy my records and/or DVDs because my point of view satisfies a lot of what needs to be said out there. More than anything, that makes me really proud.” Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/officialmargaretcho Margaret’s Official YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/mcho88 Twitter: http://twitter.com/margaretcho/ Official Website:http://www.margaretcho.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/margaret_cho/  

It's been a full year since we dropped the very first episodes of Sup Doc! We watched many classic and soon-to-be-classic documentaries, talked to new and old friends, and jumped feet first into podcasting. Paco and George are joined by producer Will to reminisce about our dynamics, getting blocked out of Outside Lands, the secret of the Sup Doc logo design, mystery emails from Anonymous, and what to expect in the next few months of the show. We play clips from Kaseem Bentley and Adam Pfahler about San Francisco 2.0 (Episode 15), Chris Thayer talks about his high school performance art band with Emily Heller and David Gborie live in SF (Episode 22), Beth Lisick gets taken in by the JT LeRoy con and a Haight Street hustler (Episode 3), Jesse Thorn visits a farm sanctuary (Episode 13), and Jamie DeWolf compares L. Ron Hubbard to Stephen King (Episode 16). Paco also appears on The Todd Glass Show (http://nerdist.com/the-todd-glass-show-251-paco-romane) and claims to be friends with Mr. T (a likely story). **Sup Doc has created a Patreon page for those that can help out. We will also be providing unique Sup Doc content for our contributors. If now is not good for you we always appreciate you listening and spreading the word about Sup Doc! http://www.patreon.com/supdocpodcast. Special thanks to our Patreon supporters; Angi Brzycki, Veronica Belmont, Jaan Shenberger.Follow us on:Twitter: @supdocpdocastInstagram: @supdocpodcastFacebook: @supdocpodcastsign up for our mailing listAnd you can show your support to Sup Doc by donating on Patreon.

Have you considered joining The National NeedleArts Association (TNNA)? In this episode, I interview knitting teacher, designer, and tech editor, Beth Whiteside, about the benefits of membership, newly formed Business and Creative Services sector, and power tips for getting the most out of the TNNA trade show.  About Beth Beth Whiteside is a knitting teacher, designer, and technical editor whose curiosity has led her to visit many countries (stranded color, EPS, k1b, lace, ...) on the knitting-world map. Originally from New England, she now lives in San Francisco, where mountains, ocean, and Haight Street are always good sources of inspiration. She has been teaching locally since 2003, and nationally since 2005. What she loves most about teaching is finding ways to make light bulbs pop on in her students' heads and helping them grow as knitters.   You can learn more about Beth by visiting her website,  Beth Whiteside Design. You can also follow her online on Facebook | Instagram | Ravelry | Twitter  About the interview In today's episode, I talk with Beth about the evolution of her own business, Beth Whiteside Design, and her involvement with The National NeedleArts Association for the past 10 years. We talk about Affiliate membership, attending the trade shows, and the newly formed Business and Creative Service sector, which focuses on individuals and agencies that offer creative and business services to the needlearts industry including authors, bookkeepers/accountants, copy editors, designers, fiber artists, finishers, graphic designers, illustrators, marketing specialists, photographers, teachers (business­-to-­business and consumer), technical editors, website developers, and those in video production. Resources mentioned in this episode You can find The National NeedleArts Association online at its website. Follow TNNA on Facebook | Instagram | Pinterest | Twitter. Links to other TNNA resources we mentioned: You can learn more about membership types here. Most regular listeners will probably fall into the Affiliate member category, with the exception of indie dyers, spinners, and other yarnies (and yarn shop owners). For yarnies who sell directly to consumers, Retail membership is less expensive than Wholesale membership, but doesn't allow you to exhibit at the trade shows. There is also a Student membership option. You can find a list of upcoming TNNA events, including trade shows and webinars, here. I also mentioned a previous episode that you may want to go back and listen to: Episode 33: 7 Steps for Pitching Your Ideas for Workshops, Presentations, and Panel Sessions to Conferences and Events   If you enjoyed this episode The Creative Yarn Entrepreneur Show is no longer broadcasting. Episodes are available as a service to the yarn community. This episode originally aired in April, 2016. Be aware that content may be outdated. If you'd like to chat with other yarn-related business owners, join the Creative Yarn Entrepreneurs Facebook group. Support Marie's work by buying one of her books, Make Money Teaching Crochet: Launch Your Business, Increase Your Side Income, Reach More Students (Amazon | Gumroad) or Design It, Promote It, Sell It: Online Marketing for Your Crochet and Knit Patterns (Amazon | Gumroad).

Beth is a knitting teacher, designer, and technical editor whose curiosity has led her to visit many countries (stranded color, EPS, k1b, lace, ...) on the knitting-world map. Originally from New England, she now lives in San Francisco, where mountains, ocean, and Haight Street are always good sources of inspiration. Her designs have been published in Creative Knitting and Knitters' magazine, as well as by Cascade Yarns, Claudia's Handpaint, Fiesta Yarns, and Red Heart. She has been teaching locally since 2003, and nationally at STITCHES Expos since 2005. What she loves most about teaching is finding ways to make light bulbs pop on in her students' heads and helping them grow as knitters. What we can do in our knitting, we can do in our lives. Throw the spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. Keep what works, throw out the rest. To get the show notes: www.powerpurlspodcast.com/009-beth-whiteside/ To listen to more episodes like this: www.powerpurlspodcast.com To subscribe on iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/power-purls-podcast/id1043956186

Live from the Tenderloin, sheriff blotter prose, the tangled tale of Haight Street; and San Francisco band Rin Tin Tiger.

Angus Macfarlane returns to tell us about when some of the greatest baseball players of the nineteenth century played along Stanyan Street across from San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Also, the first Big Game!

 Technology consultant Sarah Slocum loves social media and her Google Glass, she wears them everywhere. But when she walked into Molotov’s, a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, she discovered that not everyone shares her love for wearable gadgets. Also, your host makes his annual pilgrimage to SXSWi and ends up designing wearables at a surreal Hack Day. We also hear from Shingy, AOL’s Digital Prophet. He says wearables will allow us to have it both ways: we can be both digital and human.  **This episode features elements that were recorded binaurally. If you listen with a pair of headphones or a LiveAudio enabled JAMBOX, you will experience three dimensional sound – it will be like you are there.** *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

Episode url: https://getnerdywithit.com/episode31 Host: Jennifer Ruggiero On episode 31 of Get Nerdy With It, Jennifer had a talk with Social Media Strategist and Tech Writer, Sarah Slocum. Sarah is San Francisco’s latest Tech Crime Victim. One week ago, Sarah was assaulted and robbed in a ...

Eccentric antique shop, Loved to Death opens its doors to Science Channel for a second season of ODDITIES: SAN FRANCISC, Saturdays at 10pE/P. Loved to Death is more than just a store — it's the heart and soul of the oddest street in town. The store's colorful owner Audra, and employee Wednesday, are joined by newcomer Lincoln to take on the eclectic customers and bizarre antiques that enter the Haight Street haven. From germaphobes to ancient artifacts, the ten brand new episodes of ODDITIES: SAN FRANCISCO showcase the weird and wacky world of antiques.Owner Audra began her career working in a natural history store and her personal collection grew from there. Audra is also an artist and makes the dioramas and jewelry in her upstairs studio. A perfectionist, Audra prides herself in hand-selecting the most perfect items for her shop, traveling from private collections to flea markets on a regular basis.Wednesday is a part-time Goth model whose longstanding obsession with obscurities made her a perfect fit at Loved to Death. The resident 'brainiac' enjoys researching the origins of bizarre items and often goes into long historical and scientific tangents when explaining them to customers.

Chapter 1 - https://soundcloud.com/jcatsoup/filmfatale-dark-times-for#t=2m35s Chapter 2 - https://soundcloud.com/jcatsoup/filmfatale-dark-times-for#t=5m35s Take a walk down any major street in San Francisco and you’ll see them: dead movie theaters. Corpses. It’s hard not to shudder when you walk past one – the doors locked and covered with plywood, the entrance collecting tin cans and old newspapers. The theater’s once grand marquee, now deprived of the electricity needed to power the lights, seems gaudy and hubristic. These are dark times for movie theaters. On July 25, 2011, The Red Vic Theater became the city’s latest victim. It had just turned 31 years old. When I arrived on the scene – San Francisco’s iconic Haight Street – the theater lay in critical condition. One of the Red Vic’s guardians, Jack Rix, let me in to examine the victim, his theater. It was a bright sunny day, and Rix seemed to be in a relatively cheerful mood, despite the recent tragedy. Once inside, I saw they were doing some emergency reconstructive surgery to keep the Red Vic alive. “This is the old Red Vic auditorium. The permanent fixed seats have all been taken out. They were sort of like church pews, which we always thought was quite appropriate because this was the Temple of Film,” Rix said. Back in the projection room, the heart of the theater, it appeared that the Red Vic had a bum ticker. Rix explained, “We’re finding we need to take out the old Red Vic projector, the 35 mm. Apparently, what they’re saying is they’re going to quit making 35 mm movies as of next year.” “They,” meaning the Hollywood movie industry. Tinseltown. And when they go digital, it’s all digital, everywhere. A brand new digital projector for the Red Vic could easily cost $70,000 – an expensive procedure with a small chance of success in this case. As I poked around in dusty corners of the old theater, one fact became clear – the Red Vic would never be the same. I needed to know more about the theater’s past. Rix was happy to oblige. “The Red Vic was so eclectic, we played everything. We would show a political documentary, then a second run title, then something crazy like The Room, the Citizen Kane of bad movies. We always tried to program what we called ‘Red Vic films’ and it was something you could never define. Sometimes it was high art, sometimes it was low art, but it was always film as art.” Rix said the audience for these screenings steadily declined. “Toward the end, we probably had a group of maybe 20 or 30 people, on a good night, who would still show up for the movies.” The theater was dying. Slowly. Even more disturbing, Rix seemed to believe that the Red Vic was just the latest in a series of attacks. He pulled out the documents that appeared to prove it. “This is interesting, looking at the San Francisco movie list, there are all these downtown theaters - The Electric, which I don’t even remember, the Embassy, St. Francis 1 and 2, and the Strand - those are all gone. The Alexandria’s gone, the Alhambra’s gone, the Balboa is still going, thank goodness.” Rix’s list continued on an on, but I had heard what I needed. The Balboa was a living witness. I was on my way. Located in San Francisco’s outerlands, The Balboa is the westernmost theater in the continental US. Its massive marquee shines through the fog like a beacon. And it was there, in a closet-sized office, that I found the man I was looking for. Roger Paul is the general manager of the Balboa Theater. On the day of our meeting, he was wearing a bowler cap and a white t-shirt. I asked him if he knew anyone who might want to see the Red Vic dead. “You know, back in the day, two theaters that really had a fierce competition with each other at one time were the Red Vic and the Roxie,” said Paul, contemplatively. Was that it? An inside job? A fierce rivalry between two theaters that ended with the Red Vic beaten and bloodied? No. Not here. These days, independent theaters have bigger fish to fry. “I think I speak for all the theaters – we are not the competition, we are not the enemy,” Paul clarified. “For us, I think it’s all just a question of cooperating and promoting each other as best as possible.” So, if they’re in cahoots, who is the enemy? Did this go all the way to the top? Were the big film studios squeezing the life out of indie theaters, one by one? Paul continued, “They’ve always been strange bedfellows, where there’s been a lot of distrust... But I think that the entire industry is in flux right now. None of us can coast, whether it’s the studios, the exhibitors, the chains, the large circuits and most definitely the smaller neighborhood theaters.” I needed to get back to the fundamental facts of the case. The people of San Francisco seemed to love the idea of indie movie theaters, but Paul was quick to remind me, “Warm and fuzzies don’t pay the PG&E bill. You need to have regular attendance.” The Balboa has tried arthouse movies and it used to show double features, but over time, the people stopped coming. “It becomes a lesson that the quality of a movie doesn’t necessarily correlate to the size of the audience. And after you have enough busts showing all these great movies, you start to move away from them,” Paul said. So the Balboa has started to drift a bit toward the same fare the big chain multiplexes survive on – blockbusters, romantic comedies, and star vehicles. “Again, you want to show the best movies that you can, and that you’re proud of, but that people want to see and that they don’t look at and say, ‘Oh that sounds great, I gotta put that on my queue.’ You want the response to be, ‘That sounds great, let’s head down to the theater tonight, honey.’” There was something about what he said. A clue. A … queue. Netflix queue... Rix had mentioned something about home movies, too. Thinking back on our conversation, I remembered Rix explaining, “When Netflix started mailing the videos directly to homes, I noticed that our audience shrunk a little bit. And then when they started streaming, I really noticed. It seemed like the floor dropped out.” There it was, the murder weapons: home theaters, couches, Netflix. But who was the killer? Could we trace the trail of blood all the way back to a home entertainment service? No. DVD rentals don’t kill theaters, people do. People, like Jack Rix, the oh-so-friendly caretaker of the Red Vic! I raced back to the theater and hauled him in for questioning. “You know, it’s funny, even if you talk to people who work at movie theaters, usually we admit, if we’re taking a lie-detector test, that we do stream films and we do watch at home,” Rix admitted. I had it: the confession. It was Rix all along. Rix and all his movie-streaming cohorts. But my charge would never stick in court. “Look, your Honor – a nation of people all not going to the movies! Throw ‘em in the stir!” No way. The only thing left to do was fight back. Arm the few remaining theaters with their own deadly weapons: beer, wine, local food, a sense of community. As I canvassed the city, I noticed one theater was way ahead of me. For years, the Kabuki Theater in Japantown has been experimenting with the art of movie showing. I met up with a woman named Nancy Gribler, Vice President of Marketing for Sundance Cinemas. She works on behalf of a larger umbrella organization, the Sundance Group. They run the Sundance movie festival, movie channel, a related resort, but they’ve also been remodeling a handful of old theaters across the country. The Kabuki used to be in shabby shape – an old AMC struggling to survive. But since 2006, everything in the theater has been replaced except a few carpets. She agreed to walk me through the redesign. “This is what we call the Big Kabuki, which is auditorium number one,” Gribler said in a hushed voice. Inside I saw a big screen and comfy wool seats. Next, she led me upstairs and showed me their most lethal weapon. “This is our balcony bar where people can buy drinks and then take them to their seats.” Their facilities were state-of-the-art. Gribler continued to explain their elegant battle plan. “We don’t have television commercials, all of the seats are reserved, everything here is compostable, recyclable,” explained Gribler. But that wasn’t all. “It’s really important to us that the whole experience is pleasurable and comfortable and you’re there for that moment where the lights go down and you see a movie on the screen it’s just so magical.” But every theater can’t afford wool seats, liquor licenses, 3D capability… And the Kabuki makes you pay. During prime hours, it charges a $3 “amenity fee” per ticket, on top of the price of the movie itself. That’s not a sacrifice everybody is willing to make. I ran it by Roger Paul, of the Balboa to see what he thought. He expressed mixed feelings. “I have heard a lot of snarky comments about reserved seating, but the interesting thing about that – and even though I’m not a fan of reserved seating – is that they did something different and I think that San Francisco theaters can learn from them,” Paul admitted. “None of us, and not even the Sundance Kabuki, can rely on what has worked in the past.” The bodies of dead theaters are still scattered throughout the city, a testament to a need for change. The Alexandria, the Coronet, the Strand…The names still ring in my ears. It’s been a dark time for independent movie houses in San Francisco, but I can still see a flicker in the projection booth. There’s still life in the old theater. And tomorrow is another day.

DJ Brad Robinson live from 333 Haight Street (2000)

This morning we feature Sarah Crowell, Program Development Director and Artistic Director, for Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company and a youth company member, MC “Vee”, who is completing his final credits at Emilano Zapata Street Academy. Visit www.myspace.com/vturf and www.destinyarts.org. Destiny is 20 years old this year and they are celebrating with a concert performance, 12/13, 7 PM at McClymonds High School in West Oakland. The program is called: Love in Action. In the 8:30-9 AM segment we have cast from Thick Description's revival of their 1994 hit, "The American Play," by Suzan Lori-Parks, directed by Tony Kelly. This is part of a celebration of the theatre's 20th Anniversary season. The play is up 12/12-12/14 8 p.m. Visit www.thickhouse.org Michael Morgan, artistic director and conductor of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and Cortez Mitchell, member of the 12-male voice, voice orchestra, The Chanticleers, which has performances throughout the San Francisco Bay Area beginning tonight in Berkeley, at the First Congregational Church, 2345 Channing Way, and continuing 12/15, 12/19 and 12/20. "Let Us Break Bread," the OEBS favorite celebration of choral music is 12/14, 4 PM at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Oakland. Visit www.oebs.org and www.chanticleer.org. Perhaps I'll be able to play something from their repertoire next week on my show. We closed the show with a conversation with the director of the film, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell", Gini Reticker, who will be joined by Abigal E. Disney at the screenings tonight, 7:15 PM at the Red Vic Movie House in San Francisco on Haight Street, and tomorrow at the Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley. Visit www.praythedevilbacktohell.com. For all the news visit www.wandaspicks.com

For our first episode of 2008 we bring you a RAGER from San Francisco's Evinrude (Stimulus, Netamp). One of the Bay's few remaining all-vinyl DJ's, he's been a functioning vinyl junky for about a decade, selling his drums for the stuff shortly after getting hooked. He started making himself known in the Bay Area around 2000, slinging a special recipe of hard trance, acid, energy, and breaks under the moniker Darth. A few years later he joined forces with Dirt and Nugz to start breaks weekly Broke-Ass, and launched a monthly at the now-defunct @lpha Bar called Smoke Breaks. He also briefly ran a weekly called Crooked at Nickie's on Haight Street, which was interrupted by the gentrification of that venue.

Hello! This is Mystic Babylon broadcasting from near Haight Street with the best of San Francisco poetry. Today we have some poetry from two other poets besides me. First I have some poetry from a poet who asked me a long time ago to record some of her works named Lenore Weiss. She gave me a disk of what she called cell-phone poetry and I extracted one small snippet from that recording. After that I have some poetry from a poet named David Alpaugh. He also runs a small press. David Alpaugh’s works have appeared in more than a hundred literary journals and anthologies. His first collection, Counterpoint, won a prize, and is published by Story Line Press. He has had chapbooks published by Coracle Books and Pudding House Publications. His new book HEAVY LIFTING has just been published by Alehouse Press. Order it direct from the poet for $15 postpaid: Small Poetry Press Distribution, P.O. Box 5342, Concord, CA 94524, or go to: http://www.alehousepress.com . He has his small press at: http://www.smallpoetrypress.com . May I remind you to read and buy our books. My poetry book is: Spirits of Bondage and Inherent Transcendence, and my new novel is called: Little Bird Told Me. My voice-over for that book is almost finished and as soon as I get it submitted to Audible.com in its full version, for sale, I will start posting it chapter by chapter over a whole year. David's picture and part of the cover from his new book is above. Remember, as Poor Richard’s Almanac said, “Money Doesn’t Grow On Trees”.