Podcast appearances and mentions of Mitch Kapor

How can Legacy companies transform themselves to compete with Startups? What lessons can be learned from the different ways legacy companies Microsoft and IBM navigated the new business landscape. What can we expect from the new tech hubs popping up around the world that aim to be a recreation of what makes Silicon Valley work?Vivek Wadhwa is an academic, entrepreneur, and author of five best-selling books: From Incremental to Exponential, Your Happiness Was Hacked, The Driver in the Driverless Car, Innovating Women, and The Immigrant Exodus.Greg and Vivek discuss Vivek's journey from tech entrepreneur to academic and prolific author. They discuss Vivek's different books focusing on innovation, legacy companies, and the impact of technology on society. Vivek highlights the failures of traditional innovation methods, the cultural transformations necessary for company revitalization, and the broader societal impacts of technology addiction. Additionally, Vivek shares his personal strategies for managing tech distractions in his own life and emphasizes the necessity of face-to-face interactions for true innovation in business.*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.***This episode was recorded in 2021.**Show Links:Recommended Resources:MicrosoftSatya NadellaClayton ChristensenFord Greenfield LabsDoug McMillonFrederick TermanSilicon ValleyMichael PorterMark ZuckerbergMitch KaporSteve CaseGuest Profile:Wadhwa.comLinkedIn ProfileWikipedia ProfileFragomen ProfileSocial Profile on XHis Work:Amazon Author PageFrom Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink InnovationThe Driver in the Driverless Car: How Your Technology Choices Create the FutureYour Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain—and How to Fight BackThe Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial TalentInnovating Women: The Changing Face of TechnologyEpisode Quotes:The reason silicon valley can't be replicated14:19: Silicon Valley can't be replicated because you need much more than a few people. It's all about culture, the fact that we interact with each other. I mean, you go to parties over here. I mean, I remember coming to Silicon Valley 12 years ago and bumping into Mark Zuckerberg. I said, "Oh my God, Mark Zuckerberg is here." And then you bump into Mitch Kapor, you know, all of these people, and you just go up to them, and they talk to you like normal people. So it's informal; you go to any coffee shop over here, and you ask someone, "You know, what are you doing?" First of all, they'll start telling you about all the things that they failed in. They'll show off about their failure, and then they'll openly tell you what they're doing. Try doing that anywhere else in the world.On how are the people being addicted to technologies 47:41:The fact is that all of us are addicted. We're checking email. We wake up in the morning, and we check email. We go to bed late at night; we're checking email. We're traveling home from work; we're checking email. Right? We're now exchanging texts, you know, 24/7. When we have any free time, we'll start watching some TikTok videos. I mean, the kids, from the time they're like six months old now, seem to be on their iPads and so on. And the result is that teen suicide rates are high. We're not aware. All the studies about happiness show that we are less happy than we ever were. So everything good that should have happened hasn't happened. Instead, we've become addicted, and it's become a big problem for us. Disruption can come from anywhere08:38: You have to be aware that disruption would come from everywhere, and you need to have all hands on deck. It's no longer R&D departments that specialize in developing some specific technology—it's everyone in your company, right? Marketing, customer support, sales, your engineers, of course, finance—everyone now has a role in disruption, helping you reinvent yourself.

The Look Back welcomes Mitch Kapor -- Founder of Lotus Development and CEO of the groundbreaking spreadsheet 1-2-3. Kapor converted his early software success into building the Kapor Center and Kapor Capital. Now, he is an advisor and investor to 150+ under-represented founders and rocking his mission of creating an Inclusive & Equitable Technology Sector. And while a successful venture fund isn't as easy as 1-2-3... Mitch, his wife, and team have built an impressive organization HQd in Oakland, California.

Earlier this year, Consumer Reports, in collaboration with the Kapor Center, debuted "Bad Input," three short films that set out to explore and to create public awareness about how biases in algorithms/data sets result in unfair practices for communities of color, often without their knowledge. In this episode of the show, I talk to Lily Gangas, Chief Technology Community Officer at the Kapor Center, and Amira Dhalla, Director of Impact Partnerships and Programs at Consumer Reports, about the film and about state of AI at the intersection of race and equity, and the importance of educating the public if we want to see change in the future of AI and human values. Consumer Reports is an independent, nonprofit organization that works side by side with consumers to create a fairer, safer, and healthier world. They do it by fighting to put consumers' needs first in the marketplace and by empowering them with the trusted knowledge they depend on to make better, more informed choices. The Kapor Center's work focuses at the intersection of racial justice and technology to create a more inclusive technology sector for all. Founded by Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, the center seeks to develop a vision and practice to make the tech industry more diverse and inclusive. The Kapor Foundation, alongside Kapor Capital, and the STEM education initiative SMASH, takes a comprehensive approach to expand access to computer science education, conduct research on disparities in the technology pipeline, support nonprofit organizations and initiatives, and invest in gap-closing startups and entrepreneurs that close gaps of access for all. The Kapor Center seeks to intentionally dismantle barriers to tech and deployment of technologies across the Leaky Tech Pipeline through research-driven practices, gap-closing investments, increased access to computer science education, supporting and partnering with mission-aligned organizations, advocating for needed policy change, and more. 

Much of the business world has bought into the idea of stakeholder capitalism. But Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor say that doing some good by doing well isn't enough when the business impact still creates negative effects and broader disparities overall. Freada, with a background in social justice and empirical research, and Mitch, an entrepreneur and investor who got his start making early spreadsheet software, strive to invest in ventures that close the distance between those with wealth and privilege and those without. The founders explain their metrics and decision-making process at Kapor Capital. The profitable firm explicitly invests in tech startups serving low-income and underrepresented communities. Freada and Mitch wrote the book Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing.

Welcome to episode #886 of Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast - Episode #886. How can we change the way that businesses get funded? Are the best businesses actually getting funded? What about investments that truly have impact? Dr. Freada Kapor Klein and her husband, Mitch Kapor, are a dynamic duo striving to make the tech industry more diverse and inclusive. Both co-founders of Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center, they invest in tech startups that aim to dismantle the barriers of access for low-income communities and communities of color. Freada is the founder of SMASH, an organization that provides rigorous STEM education to low-income students of color across the U.S. She is also a vocal advocate against sexual coercion, a member of numerous influential councils, and the author of the revealing book, Giving Notice, which explores the hidden bias in workplaces. Adding to their shared legacy, Freada and Mitch have co-authored the book, Closing The Equity Gap, which offers insightful strategies to address the disparity in tech access among different socioeconomic groups. The book, echoing their combined mission, is an important step towards a more equitable tech landscape. Freada's huband, Mitch, is a stalwart of the personal computing industry and a savvy startup investor. He is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3 (the spreadsheet!). He is also co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the founding Chair of Mozilla, the creator of the Firefox web browser. In this episode, Freada explores the challenges of investing, the economy and how what we back in venture capital is a strong indication of how our communities will evolve. Enjoy the conversation.... Running time: 55:32. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. Check out ThinkersOne. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Freada Kapor Klein. Closing The Equity Gap. Giving Notice. Kapor Capital. Kapor Center. SMASH. Follow Freada on LinkedIn. Follow Freada on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

In part 2 of this episode with veteran founders and investors Mitch Kapor & Dr. Freada Kapor Klein, we get into the data of building human-centered cultures. In part one, we heard how Mitch and Freada went all-in on investing their values, committing 100% of new investments in “gap-closing” companies that aim to improve society, even as they aim for scale and liquidity as well. Now, Mitch and Freada can share how that's played out in practice, with both positive examples … and some negative ones as well. (Yes, they were early investors in Uber!)Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com/Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they're known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what's widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.  More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji's kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we've discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard's Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II.  Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll.  Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 and by then they had taken Bricklin and Franston's VisiCalc to market. VisiCalc was the killer app for those early PCs and helped make the Apple II successful. Personal Software brought Kapor on, as well as Bill Coleman of BEA Systems and Electronic Arts cofounder Rich Mellon. Today, software developers get around 70 percent royalties to publish software on app stores but at the time, fees were closer to 8 percent, a model pulled from book royalties. Much of the rest went to production of the box and disks, the sales and marketing, and support. Kapor was to write a product that could work with VisiCalc. By then Rosenfeld was off to the world of corporate finance so Kapor moved to Silicon Valley, learned how to run a startup, moved back east in 1979, and released VisiPlot and VisiTrend in 1981. He made over half a million dollars in the first six months in royalties.  By then, he bought out Rosenfeld's shares in what he was doing, hired Jonathan Sachs, who had been at MIT earlier, where he wrote the STOIC programming language, and then went to work at Data General. Sachs worked on spreadsheet ideas at Data General with a manager there, John Henderson, but after they left Data General, and the partnership fell apart, he worked with Kapor instead. They knew that for software to be fast, it needed to be written in a lower level language, so they picked the Intel 8088 assembly language given that C wasn't fast enough yet. The IBM PC came in 1981 and everything changed. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs started Lotus in 1982. Sachs got to work on what would become Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor turned out to be a great marketer and product manager. He listened to what customers said in focus groups. He pushed to make things simpler and use less jargon. They released a new spreadsheet tool in 1983 and it worked flawlessly on the IBM PC and while Microsoft had Multiplan and VisCalc was the incumbent spreadsheet program, Lotus quickly took market share from then and SuperCalc. Conceptually it looked similar to VisiCalc. They used the letter A for the first column, B for the second, etc. That has now become a standard in spreadsheets. They used the number 1 for the first row, the number 2 for the second. That too is now a standard. They added a split screen, also now a standard. They added macros, with branching if-then logic. They added different video modes, which could give color and bitmapping. They added an underlined letter so users could pull up a menu and quickly select the item they wanted once they had those orders memorized, now a standard in most menuing systems. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. They refined how fields are calculated and took advantage of the larger amounts of memory to make Lotus far faster than anything else on the market. They went to Comdex towards the end of the year and introduced Lotus 1-2-3 to the world. The software could be used as a spreadsheet, but the 2 and 3 referred to graphics and database management. They did $900,000 in orders there before they went home. They couldn't even keep up with the duplication of disks. Comdex was still invitation only. It became so popular that it was used to test for IBM compatibility by clone makers and where VisiCalc became the app that helped propel the Apple II to success, Lotus 1-2-3 became the app that helped propel the IBM PC to success. Lotus was rewarded with $53 million in sales for 1983 and $156 million in 1984. Mitch Kapor found himself. They quickly scaled from less than 20 to 750 employees. They brought in Freada Klein who got her PhD to be the Head of Employee Relations and charged her with making them the most progressive employer around. After her success at Lotus, she left to start her own company and later married. Sachs left the company in 1985 and moved on to focus solely on graphics software. He still responds to requests on the phpBB forum at dl-c.com. They ran TV commercials. They released a suite of Mac apps they called Lotus Jazz. More television commercials. Jazz didn't go anywhere and only sold 20,000 copies. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Excel for the Mac, which sold ten times as many. Some blamed the lack os sales on the stringent copy protection. Others blamed the lack of memory to do cool stuff. Others blamed the high price. It was the first major setback for the young company.  After a meteoric rise, Kapor left the company in 1986, at about the height of their success. He  replaced himself with Jim Manzi. Manzi pushed the company into network applications. These would become the center of the market but were just catching on and didn't prove to be a profitable venture just yet. A defensive posture rather than expanding into an adjacent market would have made sense, at least if anyone knew how aggressive Microsoft was about to get it would have.  Manzi was far more concerned about the millions of illegal copies of the software in the market than innovation though. As we turned the page to the 1990s, Lotus had moved to a product built in C and introduced the ability to use graphical components in the software but not wouldn't be ported to the new Windows operating system until 1991 for Windows 3. By then there were plenty of competitors, including Quattro Pro and while Microsoft Excel began on the Mac, it had been a showcase of cool new features a windowing operating system could provide an application since released for Windows in 1987. Especially what they called 3d charts and tabbed spreadsheets. There was no catching up to Microsoft by then and sales steadily declined. By then, Lotus released Lotus Agenda, an information manager that could be used for time management, project management, and as a database. Kapor was a great product manager so it stands to reason he would build a great product to manage products. Agenda never found commercial success though, so was later open sourced under a GPL license. Bill Gross wrote Magellan there before he left to found GoTo.com, which was renamed to Overture and pioneered the idea of paid search advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo!. Magellan cataloged the internal drive and so became a search engine for that. It sold half a million copies and should have been profitable but was cancelled in 1990. They also released a word processor called Manuscript in 1986, which never gained traction and that was cancelled in 1989, just when a suite of office automation apps needed to be more cohesive.  Ray Ozzie had been hired at Software Arts to work on VisiCalc and then helped Lotus get Symphony out the door. Symphony shipped in 1984 and expanded from a spreadsheet to add on text with the DOC word processor, and charts with the GRAPH graphics program, FORM for a table management solution, and COM for communications. Ozzie dutifully shipped what he was hired to work on but had a deal that he could build a company when they were done that would design software that Lotus would then sell. A match made in heaven as Ozzie worked on PLATO and borrowed the ideas of PLATO Notes, a collaboration tool developed at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana  to build what he called Lotus Notes.  PLATO was more more than productivity. It was a community that spanned decades and Control Data Corporation had failed to take it to the mass corporate market. Ozzie took the best parts for a company and built it in isolation from the rest of Lotus. They finally released it as Lotus Notes in 1989. It was a huge success and Lotus bought Iris in 1994. Yet they never found commercial success with other socket-based client server programs and IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. That product is now known as Domino, the name of the Notes 4 server, released in 1996. Ozzie went on to build a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, who appointed him one of their Chief Technology Officers. When Bill Gates left Microsoft, Ozzie took the position of Chief Software Architect he vacated. He and Dave Cutler went on to work on a project called Red Dog, which evolved into what we now know as Microsoft Azure.  Few would have guessed that Ozzie and Kapor's handshake agreement on Notes could have become a real product. Not only could people not understand the concept of collaboration and productivity on a network in the late 1980s but the type of deal hadn't been done. But Kapor by then realized that larger companies had a hard time shipping net-new software properly. Sometimes those projects are best done in isolation. And all the better if the parties involved are financially motivated with shares like Kapor wanted in Personal Software in the 1970s before he wrote Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released. Lotus hung on longer than most who competed with Microsoft on any beachhead they blitzkrieged. Microsoft released Exchange Server in 1996 and Notes had a few good years before Exchange moved in to become the standard in that market. Excel began on the Mac but took the market from Lotus eventually, after Charles Simonyi stepped in to help make the product great.  Along the way, the Lotus ecosystem created other companies, just as they were born in the Visi ecosystem. Symantec became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. But Bill Gates mentioned Lotus by name multiple times as a competitor in his Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995. He mentioned specific features, like how they could do secure internet browsing and that they had a web publisher tool - Microsoft's own FrontPage was released in 1995 as well. He mentioned an internet directory project with Novell and AT&T. Active Directory was released a few years later in 1999, after Jim Allchin had come in to help shepherd LAN Manager. Notes itself survived into the modern era, but by 2004 Blackberry released their Exchange connector before they released the Lotus Domino connector. That's never a good sign. Some of the history of Lotus is covered in Scott Rosenberg's 2008 book, Dreaming in Code. Others are documented here and there in other places. Still others are lost to time. Kapor went on to invest in UUNET, which became a huge early internet service provider. He invested in Real Networks, who launched the first streaming media service on the Internet. He invested in the creators of Second Life. He never seemed vindictive with Microsoft but after AOL acquired Netscape and Microsoft won the first browser war, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation and so helped bring Firefox to market. By 2006, Firefox took 10 percent of the market and went on to be a dominant force in browsers. Kapor has also sat on boards and acted as an angel investor for startups ever since leaving the company he founded. He also flew to Wyoming in 1990 after he read a post on The WELL from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was one of the great thinkers of the early Internet. They worked with Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF has since been the nonprofit who leads the fight for “digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” So not everything is about business.    

Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor's work began as it has continued—trying to level the corporate playing field. In the early 1980s, Mitch founded Lotus Development, and later brought in Freada to make the company “the most progressive employer in the U.S.,” as he says in today's episode. Both of them had a personal interest in closing these gaps—Growing up, Mitch was not terribly well socialized and often did not fit in, something which became a large part of his identity. As an entrepreneur, he saw an opportunity to create a workplace culture where everybody would have the chance to be accepted for who they were. Freada, on the other hand, had family history, experience as an activist and an in-progress Ph.D. in social policy and research behind her interest in changing the corporate setting. Now, the pair serve as founding partners of Kapor Capital and have recently published a book, Closing the Equity Gap, discussing the changes that need to be made to the standard investment model. Freada, Mitch and Brilliant Thoughts host Tristan Ahumada discuss the impact of several of the gap-closing companies mentioned in the book, the opportunities they found through their focus on gap closing and the current societal divisiveness. ---- Mentioned: Bitwise Industries Promise Pay HealthSherpa Numerade Daivergent Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor are the authors of Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. Learn more about Kapor Capital at kaporcapital.com and find them on Twitter @mkapor and @TheRealFreada.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor's work began as it has continued—trying to level the corporate playing field. In the early 1980s, Mitch founded Lotus Development, and later brought in Freada to make the company “the most progressive employer in the U.S.,” as he says in today's episode. Both of them had a personal interest in closing these gaps—Growing up, Mitch was not terribly well socialized and often did not fit in, something which became a large part of his identity. As an entrepreneur, he saw an opportunity to create a workplace culture where everybody would have the chance to be accepted for who they were. Freada, on the other hand, had family history, experience as an activist and an in-progress Ph.D. in social policy and research behind her interest in changing the corporate setting. Now, the pair serve as founding partners of Kapor Capital and have recently published a book, Closing the Equity Gap, discussing the changes that need to be made to the standard investment model. Freada, Mitch and Brilliant Thoughts host Tristan Ahumada discuss the impact of several of the gap-closing companies mentioned in the book, the opportunities they found through their focus on gap closing and the current societal divisiveness. ---- Mentioned: Bitwise Industries Promise Pay HealthSherpa Numerade Daivergent Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor are the authors of Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. Learn more about Kapor Capital at kaporcapital.com and find them on Twitter @mkapor and @TheRealFreada.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor's work began as it has continued—trying to level the corporate playing field. In the early 1980s, Mitch founded Lotus Development, and later brought in Freada to make the company “the most progressive employer in the U.S.,” as he says in today's episode. Both of them had a personal interest in closing these gaps—Growing up, Mitch was not terribly well socialized and often did not fit in, something which became a large part of his identity. As an entrepreneur, he saw an opportunity to create a workplace culture where everybody would have the chance to be accepted for who they were. Freada, on the other hand, had family history, experience as an activist and an in-progress Ph.D. in social policy and research behind her interest in changing the corporate setting. Now, the pair serve as founding partners of Kapor Capital and have recently published a book, Closing the Equity Gap, discussing the changes that need to be made to the standard investment model. Freada, Mitch and Brilliant Thoughts host Tristan Ahumada discuss the impact of several of the gap-closing companies mentioned in the book, the opportunities they found through their focus on gap closing and the current societal divisiveness. ---- Mentioned: Bitwise Industries Promise Pay HealthSherpa Numerade Daivergent Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor are the authors of Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. Learn more about Kapor Capital at kaporcapital.com and find them on Twitter @mkapor and @TheRealFreada.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can you build with conscience and still succeed? Mitch Kapor & Dr. Freada Kapor Klein certainly think so. As tech industry veteran founders and investors, Mitch and Freada have long embraced non-traditional metrics that put humans at the center. Mitch co-founded Lotus, the 1980s software giant, and hired Freada to help make the company “the most progressive employer in the U.S.” And years later, their early-stage VC firm, Kapor Capital, aligns their portfolio with their values, investing in companies that close gaps in access and opportunity. Human-centered metrics don't just improve cultures — they improve the bottom line.Read a transcript of this episode: https://mastersofscale.com/Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

Today we are joined by serial entrepreneur and investor Mitch Kapor who is also the Co-Author of the new book Closing The Equity Gap. Mitch is a pioneer in the personal computing industry, most notably founding Lotus Development Corporation and designing the iconic Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Mitch is also the founding partner of Kapor Capital which focuses on investing in early stage startups that address urgent social needs and transform industries. And he has co-authored a terrific book, Closing The Equity Gap, which we chat about on today's episode. You will love hearing all about his “win-win” roadmap for creating wealth and addressing inequalities by flipping the traditional investment model on its head through investing in gap-closing startups. This episode is filled with so much inspiration and takeaways you won't want to miss it! On this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow. Sponsored by Thinkific! Go to Thinkific.com/KARA to start educating your customers at scale. Get your FREE month with promo code KARA. Enjoying this episode of #TheKaraGoldinShow? Let me know by clicking on the links below and sending me a quick shout-out on social. Or reach out to me at karagoldin@gmail.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/karagoldin/ https://www.instagram.com/karagoldin/ https://twitter.com/karagoldin https://www.facebook.com/KaraGoldin/ Check out our website to view this episode's show notes: https://karagoldin.com/podcast/382 To learn more about Mitch Kapor, Closing The Equity Gap and Kapor Capital: https://closingtheequitygap.com/ https://www.kaporcapital.com/ https://www.kaporcenter.org/ https://www.smash.org/ https://twitter.com/mkapor https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchkapor/

Despite economic headwinds and job cuts, companies backed by venture capital—including many in the Bay Area—drive the U.S. economy, accounting for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales and profits. However, most of this wealth winds up enriching entrenched investors and favored private interests, further widening economic inequality. Two well-known technology investors and entrepreneurs, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, have committed their lives to doing things differently and finding ways to close these equity gaps. As they explain in their new book, Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing, Kapor and Kapor Klein build on their work at the Oakland-based Kapor Center and Kapor Capital, two institutions that invest in seed-stage tech startups focused on closing gaps of access, opportunity and outcome for low-income communities and communities of color. They share their core beliefs that all companies must make a positive impact. They share stories behind some of the most remarkable companies ever launched, and they argue that the standard investment model doesn't work, explain how it can be fixed, and say what the future could look like if more investors joined them. Come hear about their new roadmap for investing in tech companies that defy assumptions from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, and their belief that entrepreneurs who overcome obstacles in life are a far better predictor of long-term success than the schools they attend or investment dollars raised from friends and family. Together, the Kapors have launched close to 200 companies, invested in impactful and profitable companies whose services or products close opportunity gaps for communities of color and low-income communities, and shown that their approach can also provide strong investment returns and growth. Join us as Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein share how they've "done well by doing good" and how you can, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Washington Post senior writer Frances Stead Sellers speaks with Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, authors of “Closing the Equity Gap” and Betsy Conway, director of the Lowe's Foundation, for a series of conversations about leading with purpose, investing in employees and connecting with consumers. Conversation recorded on Tuesday, March 28, 2023.

 Natasha interviewed one of venture's most iconic duos: Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein of Kapor Capital. The investors recently published a book, "Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing," connecting scrappy stories of entrepreneurs to their investment thesis to the returns that other venture capitalists are clamoring to land.In today's episode, we're talking about:Their book and why the pair chose to do it nowMitch and Freada's broader thoughts on impact investingcriteria for success and investor due diligence.For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity's Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotifyand all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more!

Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, Founding Partners at Kapor Capital, discuss their book Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. Hosts: Carol Massar and Jess Menton. Producer: Paul Brennan.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, Founding Partners at Kapor Capital, discuss their book Closing the Equity Gap: Creating Wealth and Fostering Justice in Startup Investing. Hosts: Carol Massar and Jess Menton. Producer: Paul Brennan.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Natasha Mascarenhas of TechCrunch sits down with Kapor Capital's Mitch Kapor, Freada Kapor, Ulili Onovakpuri, and Brian Dixon to talk about the long-term plan for the firm, what leadership changes mean and how to navigate the space as an emerging fund manager today. Recorded March 1, 2023 at the Upfront Summit.

Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor, founders of early stage VC firm Kapor Capital, talk about their new book, "Closing the Equity Gap."

We have special guests on the podcast - Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor. The founders of Kapor Capital have released a new book, Closing the Equity Gap, and, on this episode, they discuss their life missions to make the tech industry more diverse and inclusive. Tune in to learn how the two got their start, founded Kapor Capital, and have been pioneers in impact investing. They impart important lessons on the power of “distance traveled” founders who harness their early experiences to found companies that better serve society. You'll hear stories about the two youngest partners of Kapor Capital, Ulili Onovakpuri and Brian Dixon, plus some of their exciting investments. The Kapors challenge the notion that investing with a diversity and equity lens doesn't create returns. We're here for it!

A pioneer in the fields of software, personal computing, and the internet, Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus and the creator of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" that led to the widespread adoption of the personal computer in the business world. Mitch is also the co-founder of the Mozilla Foundation - best known for developing the web browser Firefox - and is a leading technology investor. Mitch joins Adam to share his journey and best lessons and advice.

Most founders are lucky if they build one organization that changes the world. Mitch Kapor has done it multiple times. And he's supported dozens more through venture backing and philanthropy.On this episode of Web Masters, Mitch talks about his experiences building Lotus Software, the digital world's first massively scaling software company. He followed that by launching the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help protect innovators and entrepreneurs experimenting in the digital space. And he's gone on to support dozens of other world-changing organizations including the Mozilla Foundation, creators of the Firefox Web browser.For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Launching and scaling a successful company typically takes bold entrepreneurs who are willing to take the risk of building something in a market that doesn't exist yet. They look at the world differently and they have a vision that some might think is crazy. But, it's these entrepreneurs that go on to define markets and scale companies at unicorn valuations. In the case of Formlabs, Max and his co-founders set out to make 3D printing more accessible through its revolutionary desktop 3D printer. Fast forward, the company has scaled to about 700 employees, multiple products, and a global footprint. Just last year, the company announced a $150M Series E round of funding last year at a $2B valuation. However, when they started the company in 2011, raising capital for a company this complex was incredibly rare as it involves hardware, software, materials, and manufacturing. Landing their first investor - that being Mitch Kapor (the founder of Lotus and a legendary investor) - is absolutely one of the best funding stories that I've ever heard. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * The current state of the 3D printing industry, including the variety of use cases and predictions for the future. * Max's background story growing up, his studies at Cornell & MIT, plus what sparked his interest in the 3D printing industry. * How he met his co-founders and how they got Formlabs started, plus the details behind their Kickstarter campaign which was one of the most successful of all time. * A look at Formlabs today in terms of its scale and growth plans ahead, plus the company's culture. * Lessons learned around hiring and what has been the key criteria for successful hires. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

Behind the complexity of artificial intelligence, there are groundbreaking stories like that of AI and robotics expert, entrepreneur and investor Eric Daimler.  Eric joins this episode of Before IT Happened to tell us all about his journey from being an entrepreneurial engineering student who found massive success before hitting his twenties to advising former president Barack Obama's administration on how to regulate and develop AI and data infrastructure. Are we adapting or adopting? Listen for Eric's answer and more! Before any world-changing innovation, there was a moment, an event, a realization that sparked the idea before it happened. This is a podcast about that moment — about that idea. Before IT Happened takes you on a journey with the innovators who imagined — and are still imagining — our future. Join host Donna Loughlin as her guests tell their stories of how they brought their visions to life.  JUMP STRAIGHT INTO: (01:52) - Growing up in a basement surrounded by computers: “My aspirations were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mitch Kapor. Those were actually three faces I literally had in my high school locker.” (08:19) - Eric's college experience at Carnegie Mellon: “I demonstrated the ability of a personal computer at that time to have a cheap robotic arm do its thing. I wanted to do robotics at an early age.” (11:44) - Dropping a PhD program and moving to London for work at 18: “As a young kid, I was able to buy my first Porsche, which is some sort of an accomplishment for a boy.” (17:46) - Studying two PhDs simultaneously while running a company: “If you looked at the flight, whether it was going to Pittsburgh from Silicon Valley, I was probably the only one on that flight doing machine learning problem sets.” (21:54) - Explaining why AI is the economic engine of the future: “It's often said that every company is a data company. It's not really just the data, it's that what you learn from the data and getting even more precise, it's in the data relationships” (28:04) - Machine intelligence and robotics at the White House: “I was just motivated really to serve the country. It was a pay cut, a substantial pay cut, but my father and my brother had served in the military” (33:40) - Eric's advice on how to apply AI in a safe way: “This is a big deal. It's a national imperative, maybe even saying a Western civilization imperative that everybody is involved.” EPISODE RESOURCES: Connect with Eric on https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericdaimler (LinkedIn) and https://twitter.com/ead (Twitter) Read: https://ericdaimler.medium.com/dear-mr-president-274d94f91996 (Eric's letter to President Biden on how the U.S. can ‘win the AI race') Learn more about Eric's data consolidation company https://conexus.com/ (Conexus)  Watch Eric's SALT talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP9kodLGvT8 (AI, Robotics & Consciousness) Read Alvin Toffler's 1984 book https://www.amazon.com/Future-Shock-Alvin-Toffler/dp/0553277375/ref=asc_df_0553277375/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312519927002&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=13524889963189346404&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9031945&hvtargid=pla-522053264324&psc=1 (“Future Shock”) Thank you for listening! Follow https://www.beforeithappened.com/ (Before IT Happened) on https://www.instagram.com/beforeithappenedshow/ (Instagram) and https://twitter.com/TheBIHShow (Twitter), and don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts!  Before IT Happened is produced by Donna Loughlin and https://www.studiopodsf.com/ (StudioPod Media) with additional editing and sound design by https://nodalab.com/ (Nodalab). The Executive Producer is Katie Sunku Wood and all episodes are written by Jack Buehrer.

In this talk Jessica Livingston - author of Founders at work - talks about the many lessons she learned from her interviews with the likes of Paul Graham, Steve Wozniak, Mitch Kapor and Joel Spolsky to name but a few. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

Big Brother is finding ways into your home through your games. You'd be surprised just how much they can tell about you from the way you play. China has decided to take effeminate men off TV, along with a whole bunch of new criteria. This echoes the Tik Tok ban on ugly and fat people. China, you have some issues with representation. Maybe take a look at that. An asteroid is coming close to Earth. Prepare now, just in case. South Australians are also complaining about rocket launches. Finally, Australians can go somewhere that isn't overseas to see rockets, which is awesome.Surveillance in Video Games- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3881279 China's New Law : Sissy Man Ban- https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2021/09/02/china-bans-sissy-men-tv-encourages-more-masculinity/5694333001/ Space News- https://comicbook.com/irl/news/asteroid-close-encounter-2021-ny1-close-call-nasa-september/- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-07/whalers-way-first-commercial-rocket-lift-off/100440154 Other topics discussedWhat are the Security and Privacy Risks of VR and AR- https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/security-and-privacy-risks-of-ar-and-vr‘Doomba' turns your Roomba's cleaning maps into Doom levels- https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/12/26/18156600/doomba-roomba-cleaning-maps-doom-levels-rich-whitehouseHow Does the YouTube Algorithm Work in 2021? The Complete Guide- https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-algorithm-works/The cheapest Oculus Quest prices and Oculus Rift sales in September 2021- https://www.techradar.com/au/news/gaming/oculus-rift-deals-1329262It's 2019 — which VR headsets can you actually buy?- https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/16/18625238/vr-virtual-reality-headsets-oculus-quest-valve-index-htc-vive-nintendo-labo-vr-2019 General Data Protection Regulation (The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation Electronic Frontier Foundation (The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet civil liberties.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation Loot box (In video games, a loot box (also called a loot/prize crate) is a consumable virtual item which can be redeemed to receive a randomised selection of further virtual items, or loot, ranging from simple customization options for a player's avatar or character, to game-changing equipment such as weapons and armor.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box Regulation and legislation (Because of their use of random chance to gain items after committing real-world funds, games using loot boxes may be considered a form of gambling. While gambling laws vary from country to country, a common theme that tends to distinguish loot boxes from gambling is the inability to transform the contents from a loot box back into real-world money by legitimate means within the video game.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#Regulation_and_legislation Wii Fit (an exergaming video game designed by Nintendo's Hiroshi Matsunaga for the Wii home video game console. It is an exercise game with several activities using the Wii Balance Board peripheral. As of March 2012 Wii Fit was the third best selling console game not packaged with a console, with 22.67 million copies sold.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_FitHow ISIS Terrorists May Have Used PlayStation 4 To Discuss And Plan Attacks- https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/11/14/why-the-paris-isis-terrorists-used-ps4-to-plan-attacks/?sh=23b8e4e70554Man jailed 6 years for threats made in Runescape finally released- https://www.pcgamer.com/au/man-jailed-6-years-for-threats-made-in-runescape-finally-released/‘It's a long bow': Social media ID push dubbed ineffective, a privacy risk- https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-s-a-long-bow-social-media-id-push-dubbed-a-privacy-risk-20210402-p57g7d.htmlChina steps up its war on underage online video gaming and not everyone is happy- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-04/china-cracks-down-on-children-online-video-gaming/100428138TikTok 'tried to filter out videos from ugly, poor or disabled users'- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/17/tiktok-tried-to-filter-out-videos-from-ugly-poor-or-disabled-users Tilda Swinton (a British actress. Known for her leading roles in independent films and supporting roles in blockbusters, she is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and five Screen Actors Guild Awards.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilda_Swinton Zhao Wei (Vicky Zhao or Vicki Zhao, is a Chinese actress, businesswoman, film director, producer and pop singer. She is considered one of the most popular actresses in China and Chinese-speaking regions, and one of the highest paid actresses.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_WeiAlibaba founder Jack Ma appears for the first time since crackdown on his tech empire- https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-reappears-after-crackdown-on-his-tech-empire.htmlZhao Wei Controversy (On 27 August 2021, all films and television dramas featuring Zhao disappeared from Chinese video streaming services like Tencent Video and iQiyi, and her Weibo account is deleted. No explanation is given by the Chinese government.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Wei#Controversy Mulan (2009 film) (a 2009 Chinese action war film starring Zhao Wei as the titular protagonist. The director, Jingle Ma, has explained that this film is vastly different from the 1998 Walt Disney animated film and that the looks from the character in this movie adheres more to his imagination.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulan_(2009_film)Uyghurs (The Uyghurs alternatively spelled Uighurs, Uygurs or Uigurs, are a Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia. The Uyghurs are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UyghursI.T. Crowd – Judy (a horribly ugly woman that Roy gets entangled with while trying to meet a woman named Julie. Roy claims she has hair on her eyes and three rows of teeth.)- https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/Judy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CWqMAOHS4A Steve Buscemi (an American actor and filmmaker. He is known for acting in various supporting roles and as a leading man starring in a number of successful movies including Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992), Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (1995), Simon West's Con Air (1997) and Armageddon (1998), the black comedy Ghost World (2001), Tim Burton's drama Big Fish (2003), The Island (2005), and Armando Iannucci's political satire The Death of Stalin (2017).)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Buscemi Sean Penn (American actor, director, screenwriter, and producer. He has won two Academy Awards, for his roles in the mystery drama Mystic River (2003) and the biopic Milk (2008).)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Penn Meat Loaf (better known as Meat Loaf, is an American singer and actor. He is noted for his powerful, wide-ranging voice and theatrical live shows. His Bat Out of Hell trilogy—Bat Out of Hell, Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell, and Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose—has sold more than 65 million albums worldwide.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_Loaf Tim Curry (English actor and singer. He rose to prominence for his portrayal of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), reprising the role he had originated in the 1973 London and 1974 Los Angeles musical stage productions of The Rocky Horror Show.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_CurryChina calls for boycott of ‘overly entertaining' entertainers and ‘sissy idols' in continued purge of popular culture industry- https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3147354/china-calls-boycott-overly-entertaining RAAF Woomera Range Complex (The RAAF Woomera Range Complex (WRC) is a major Australian military and civil aerospace facility and operation located in South Australia, approximately 450 km (280 mi) north-west of Adelaide. The WRC is operated by the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), a division of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAAF_Woomera_Range_ComplexMeteor Hits Russia Feb 15, 2013 - Event Archive- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpmXyJrs7iU Chelyabinsk meteor (a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT (03:20 UTC). It was caused by an approximately 20 m (66 ft) near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second (69,000 km/h or 42,900 mph).)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteorFootage of last-known surviving Tasmanian tiger remastered and released in 4K colour- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-07/tasmanian-tiger-footage-digitised-and-colourised/100439870 Bunyip (The bunyip is a creature from Australian Aboriginal mythology, said to lurk in swamps, billabongs, creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunyip Yowie (Yowie is one of several names for an Australian folklore entity reputed to live in the Outback. The creature has its roots in Aboriginal oral history. In parts of Queensland, they are known as quinkin (or as a type of quinkin), and as joogabinna, in parts of New South Wales they are called Ghindaring, jurrawarra, myngawin, puttikan, doolaga, gulaga and thoolagal.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YowieFuturama - Planet Express Ships Engine- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RtMMupdOC4Battle of Cartagena de Indias (The Battle of Cartagena de Indias took place during the 1739 to 1748 War of Jenkins' Ear between Spain and Britain. The result of long-standing commercial tensions, the war was primarily fought in the Caribbean; the British tried to capture key Spanish ports in the region, including Porto Bello and Chagres in Panama, Havana, and Cartagena de Indias in present-day Colombia.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cartagena_de_Indias Gordon Bennett Trophy (aeroplanes) (an international airplane racing trophy awarded by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the American owner and publisher of the New York Herald newspaper. The trophy is one of three Gordon Bennett awards: Bennett was also the sponsor of an automobile race and a ballooning competition.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Bennett_Trophy_(aeroplanes) Glenn Curtiss (an American aviation and motorcycling pioneer, and a founder of the U.S. aircraft industry. He began his career as a bicycle racer and builder before moving on to motorcycles.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_CurtissSincerely Unqualified (TNC podcast)- https://sincerely-unqualified.simplecast.com/Shout Outs 11th September 2021 – 20th anniversary of 9/11 - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-11/ceremonies-for-20th-anniversary-of-september-11-attacks/100454922 Thousands have gathered in New York and across the United States for ceremonies commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Memorials were held in New York City, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania — all sites where hijacked planes were crashed in a coordinated Al Qaeda attack 20 years ago. Americans are honouring the nearly 3,000 lives lost in the attacks, while reflecting on how they shaped the country's view of the world and itself. Music legend Bruce Springsteen performed I'll See You In My Dreams before the names of victims continued to be read by loved ones. Mr Biden then travelled to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed into a field after passengers overcame the hijackers and prevented another target from being hit.5th September 2021 – Michael Keaton's 70th bday - https://movieweb.com/michael-keaton-70th-birthday/ Over the past several decades, Keaton has appeared in a variety of major roles, though he is particularly beloved for his run as Bruce Wayne in Tim Burton's Batman and its sequel Batman Returns. He is also known for playing as Jack Butler in Mr. Mom (1983), Beetlejuice in Beetlejuice (1988), and Adrian Toomes / Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and Morbius (2022). Contrary to popular belief, he is not related to Buster Keaton or Diane Keaton. Nor did he name himself after them. He needed an alternate last name, so he went through a list of possible surnames and when he got to the "K's," he decided "Keaton" sounded inoffensive enough. In 2014, Keaton garnered critical acclaim for his performance in Alejandro González Iñárritu's black comedy film Birdman, winning a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and receiving a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Tim Burton cast him in the title role of Batman (1989) because he thought that Keaton was the only actor who could believably portray someone who has the kind of darkly obsessive personality that the character has. There was a great deal of fan anger over his selection, forcing the studio to release an advance trailer both to show that Keaton could do the role well and that the movie would not be a campy parody like the television series Batman (1966). A longtime Pittsburgh resident and fan of its sports teams, negotiated a break in his Batman movie contract in case the Pirates made the playoffs that year, although they ultimately did not. He also wrote an ESPN blog on the Pirates during the final months of their 2013 season.7th September 2021 – 85th anniversary of the last thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial named Benjamin, dies alone in its cage at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thylacine#Benjamin_and_searches The last captive thylacine, often referred to as Benjamin, lived at Hobart Zoo until its death on the night of the 6 September 1936. The thylacine died on the night of 6–7 September 1936. It is believed to have died as the result of neglect—locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters, it was exposed to a rare occurrence of extreme Tasmanian weather: extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. This thylacine features in the last known motion picture footage of a living specimen: 45 seconds of black-and-white footage showing the thylacine in its enclosure in a clip taken in 1933, by naturalist David Fleay. In the film footage, the thylacine is seen seated, walking around the perimeter of its enclosure, yawning, sniffing the air, scratching itself (in the same manner as a dog), and lying down. Fleay was bitten on the buttock whilst shooting the film. After the thylacine's death, the zoo expected that it would soon find a replacement, and "Benjamin"'s death was not reported on in the media at the time. Although there had been a conservation movement pressing for the thylacine's protection since 1901, driven in part by the increasing difficulty in obtaining specimens for overseas collections, political difficulties prevented any form of protection coming into force until 1936. Official protection of the species by the Tasmanian government was introduced on 10 July 1936, 59 days before the last known specimen died in captivity.9th September 2021 – 25th Anniversary of Crash Bandicoot - https://au.pcmag.com/games/89368/25-years-ago-crash-bandicoot-gave-sony-its-first-gaming-mascot Crash Bandicoot is a video game franchise, originally developed by Naughty Dog as an exclusive for Sony's PlayStation console and has seen numerous installments created by numerous developers and published on multiple platforms. The series consists predominantly of platform games, but also includes spin-offs in the kart racing and party game genres. The series was originally produced by Universal Interactive, which later became known as Vivendi Games; in 2007, Vivendi merged with Activision, which currently owns and publishes the franchise.In August 1994, Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin began their move from Boston, Massachusetts to Los Angeles, California. During the trip, Gavin and Rubin decided to create a 3D action-platform game, taking inspiration from 16-bit-era games such as Donkey Kong Country, Mario and Sonic. Because the player would be forced to constantly look at the character's backside, the game was jokingly code-named "Sonic's Ass Game".Development on the game started in the very early days of the PS1. There wasn't even a dev kit for the system, just a PCI board that you'd insert into your work PC. So they had to start from scratch with the simplest of tasks, like rendering geometry on the screen, then learn as they went along. Just the very concept of a full 3D platformer was totally new. Super Mario 64 hadn't even been released, and although the PS1 would get titles like Jumping Flash, they were far from the lively, character-filled experiences that 16-bit consoles were delivering in 2D. So the team at Naughty Dog built things from scratch, first learning how to display polygons on-screen and then working to translate their art to a game environment. Needing a lead character for the game, Naughty Dog recruited American Exitus artists Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson and met with them weekly to create the characters and environments of the game, eventually creating a character named "Willy the Wombat". The marketing director of Universal Interactive insisted that the character be named "Wez", "Wuzzles" or "Wizzy the Wombat". While playing the game during development, Rubin realized that there were many empty areas in the game due to the PlayStation's inability to process numerous on-screen enemy characters at the same time. Additionally, players were solving the game's puzzles too fast. Rubin soon came up with the idea of a box and putting various symbols on the sides to create puzzles. Breaking these boxes would serve to fill in the boring parts of the levels and give the player additional puzzles. The first "crate" was placed in the game in January 1996, and would become the primary gameplay element of the series. Willy the Wombat's destruction of the crates would eventually lead him to be renamed "Crash Bandicoot". Remembrances7th September 1741 – Blas de Lezo - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blas_de_Lezo Admiral Blas de Lezo y Olavarrieta, a Spanish navy officer best remembered for the Battle of Cartagena de Indias (1741) in modern-day Colombia, where Spanish imperial forces under his command decisively defeated a large British invasion fleet under Admiral Edward Vernon. Throughout his naval career, Lezo sustained many severe wounds; he lost his left eye, left hand, complete mobility of the right arm, and had his left leg amputated in situ after being hit by the projectile of a cannon. He perceived his wounds and physical limitations as medals, he refused to wear an eye patch to hide his blind eye. Wearing his past battles history on his flesh won the respect of his peers and soldiers. Lezo's defense of Cartagena de Indias against a vastly larger British fleet consolidated his legacy as one of the most heroic figures in the history of Spain. He is often recognized as one of the greatest strategists in naval history. In 1704 he fought in the War of the Spanish Succession as a crew member in the Franco-Spanish fleet against the combined forces of Great Britain and the Netherlands at the indecisive Battle of Vélez-Málaga. During the battle, his left leg was hit by cannon-shot and was amputated under the knee. Participating in the 1707 defence of the French naval base of Toulon cost him his left eye. In 1714 he lost use of his right arm in the Siege of Barcelona. Later in this campaign, his ship captured the Stanhope commanded by John Combes, sometimes claimed to be a 70-gun but actually just a 20-gun merchantman. Thus, by age 25, depending on the sources, de Lezo had lost his left eye, his left leg below the knee, and the use of his right arm. Modern sources often focus on these salient features and refer to Lezo with nicknames such as "Patapalo" (Pegleg) and "Mediohombre" (Half-man). There is no contemporary proof that these (or others) were actually used during Lezo's lifetime. Blas de Lezo died four months after the battle of Cartagena de Indias at the age of 52 in Cartagena de Indias, New Granada.Famous Birthdays 7th September 1829 – August Kekulé - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekul%C3%A9 Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure and in particular the Kekulé structure of benzene. Basing his ideas on those of predecessors such as Williamson, Charles Gerhardt, Edward Frankland, William Odling, Auguste Laurent, Charles-Adolphe Wurtz and others, Kekulé was the principal formulator of the theory of chemical structure (1857–58). This theory proceeds from the idea of atomic valence, especially the tetravalence of carbon (which Kekulé announced late in 1857) and the ability of carbon atoms to link to each other (announced in a paper published in May 1858), to the determination of the bonding order of all of the atoms in a molecule. Archibald Scott Couper independently arrived at the idea of self-linking of carbon atoms (his paper appeared in June 1858), and provided the first molecular formulas where lines symbolize bonds connecting the atoms. For organic chemists, the theory of structure provided dramatic new clarity of understanding, and a reliable guide to both analytic and especially synthetic work. As a consequence, the field of organic chemistry developed explosively from this point. Among those who were most active in pursuing early structural investigations were, in addition to Kekulé and Couper, Frankland, Wurtz, Alexander Crum Brown, Emil Erlenmeyer, and Alexander Butlerov. Kekulé's idea of assigning certain atoms to certain positions within the molecule, and schematically connecting them using what he called their "Verwandtschaftseinheiten" ("affinity units", now called "valences" or "bonds"), was based largely on evidence from chemical reactions, rather than on instrumental methods that could peer directly into the molecule, such as X-ray crystallography. Such physical methods of structural determination had not yet been developed, so chemists of Kekulé's day had to rely almost entirely on so-called "wet" chemistry.Kekulé's most famous work was on the structure of benzene. In 1865 Kekulé published a paper in French (for he was then still in Belgium) suggesting that the structure contained a six-membered ring of carbon atoms with alternating single and double bonds.The empirical formula for benzene had been long known, but its highly unsaturated structure was a challenge to determine.More evidence was available by 1865, especially regarding the relationships of aromatic isomers. Kekulé argued for his proposed structure by considering the number of isomers observed for derivatives of benzene.The new understanding of benzene, and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé's honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper. Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).He was born in Darmstadt, Grand Duchy of Hesse.Events of Interest7th September 1909 – Eugène Lefebvre crashes a new French-built Wright biplane during a test flight at Juvisy, south of Paris, becoming the first aviator in the world to lose his life in a powered heavier-than-air craft. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Lefebvre Eugène Lefebvre was the first engineer and chief pilot of the Wright company in France. He, Louis Blériot and Hubert Latham were selected as France's representatives during the contest for the Gordon Bennett Trophy on 22 August, after poor weather made the morning's planned qualifying run impossible. When the weather lifted around 6 o'clock that evening, Lefebvre was one of the pilots who took to the sky in an exhibition, giving one of the earliest displays of stunt flying. The New York Times described his maneuvers thus: "Lefebvre...came driving at the crowded tribunes, turned in the nick of time, went sailing off, swooped down again till he made the flags on the pillars and the plumes on the ladies' hats flutter, and so played about at will for our applause." He was subsequently fined $4 by the judges for displaying excessive "recklessness and daring." During the running of the race, he placed fourth, behind Glenn Curtiss, Blériot and Latham. Only nine days after the end of the Reims event, Lefebvre was killed in a crash at Juvisy, when the plane he was testing dropped to the ground from a height of 6 metres (20 ft). 7th September 1958 – Queen Of Outer Space landed into theatres - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052104/ A star is born! On this day in 1958, the Queen Of Outer Space enjoyed her royal U.S. theatrical premiere. Directed by Edward Bernds, the SciFi feature starred Eric Fleming and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and here's the plot summary: "American astronauts are drawn by a mysterious force to the planet Venus, which they find to be inhabited only by beautiful women and their despotic queen." The Three Stooges and the Bowery Boys director Edward Bernds recalled that, after producer Walter Wanger was released from prison for shooting agent Jennings Lang in the groin for having an affair with his wife Joan Bennett, Wanger could only find work at the low-rent Allied Artists (formerly Monogram Pictures). In 1952, Wanger brought a ten-page idea for a screenplay by Ben Hecht called Queen of the Universe that was a satirical look at a planet run by women. Several years later, with the idea of science fiction films being more common, Allied Artists revived the project with Wanger replaced on the film by Ben Schwalb, who was then producing the Bowery Boys films. Allied Artists retitled the film Queen of Outer Space as they thought the original title sounded more like a beauty pageant. The central plot of a planet ruled by women was recycled from other science fiction productions of the era, including Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953), Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), and the British feature film Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1955). Queen of Outer Space also recycled many props, costumes, and other elements used in earlier films of the 1950s, most prominently the C-57D crewmen's uniforms and Altaira's wardrobe from Forbidden Planet (1956); models, sets, and special effects from Bernds' World Without End (1956); stock footage of an Atlas missile taking off; and a model rocketship built for Flight to Mars (1951). The film takes place in 1985. In an interview, director Edward Bernds said that Zsa Zsa Gabor got very "testy" with the actresses playing the Venusian girls. They were mostly beauty contest winners, and were many years - and in some cases a few decades - younger than her. When she noticed that the crew was paying more attention to the tall, leggy, mini-skirted "Venusians" than they were to her, she became very difficult to work with. He said that Gabor gave producer Ben Schwalb such a hard time on the picture that Schwalb eventually wound up in the hospital with ulcers. The film opens with a 15-minute prologue before the opening credits. It is somewhat of a coincidence that the colors of the uniforms of the armed women on Venus (red, blue, gold) match the basic colors of the uniforms of the original Star Trek (1966) series. The "Star Trek" uniforms in the pilot were different--blue, gold, beige. The production company spent most of their funds on landscaping the planet Venus and makeup for the Venus women. In a world where everyone speaks in the same, "midwestern" accent, only one character speaks with a thick accent, Zsa Zsa. IntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us on Facebook- Page - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/- Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/440485136816406/Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/nerds_amalgamated/Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comSupport via Podhero- https://podhero.com/podcast/449127/nerds-amalgamated See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We've got a very important issue to talk about this week. Apple wants to look at your private pictures. They've made such a big deal about privacy for years, so what's changed and why can't we trust them anymore? What have you done Tim Apple?The Australian government really hasn't liked supporting the games industry, despite years of lobbying and studies into how great the industry is for the economy. Someone's finally got through to them and we'll be getting changes to tax and visas to help encourage AAA development.Jason Mamoa thinks superheroes are like Greek mythology. Turns out the only reason he's joining the Scorsese comic genre battle is to remind everyone he wants to talk about climate change in his movies. Anyway, we all know his best role will be Duncan Idaho in Dune. It better not get delayed againApple's controversial new child protection features- https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/10/22613225/apple-csam-scanning-messages-child-safety-features-privacy-controversy-explained- https://www.ask-solutions.org/blog/2021/08-11-01?fbclid=IwAR1M731S3OrleR84O6134H-ZWXb5EtBoTY9tyXlIs0TiUXBVFwgHpP8Qmvc- https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-apples-child-protection-features-spark-concern-within-its-own-ranks-2021-08-12/Australian Games Industry gets a Government Injection- https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-08-10-how-australia-is-creating-a-sustainable-video-game-development-ecosystem?Jason Mamoa's take on superhero movies- https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/08/09/aquaman-star-jason-momoa-defends-superhero-movies-as-an-art-form-in-response-martin-scorseses-genre-criticisms/Other topics discussedWorst Cooks in America (an American reality television series that premiered on January 3, 2010, on Food Network. The show takes 12 to 16 contestants (referred to as "recruits") with very poor cooking skills through a culinary boot camp, to earn a cash prize of $25,000 and a Food Network cooking set.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worst_Cooks_in_AmericaFBI–Apple encryption dispute (The FBI–Apple encryption dispute concerns whether and to what extent courts in the United States can compel manufacturers to assist in unlocking cell phones whose data are cryptographically protected. There is much debate over public access to strong encryption. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) wanted Apple to create and electronically sign new software that would enable the FBI to unlock a work-issued iPhone 5C it recovered from one of the shooters who, in a December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, killed 14 people and injured 22.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93Apple_encryption_disputeHow Does the YouTube Algorithm Work in 2021? The Complete Guide- https://blog.hootsuite.com/how-the-youtube-algorithm-works/Perceptual hashing (the use of an algorithm that produces a snippet or fingerprint of various forms of multimedia. A perceptual hash is a type of locality-sensitive hash, which is analogous if features of the multimedia are similar.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashingreCAPTCHA (a CAPTCHA system that enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The original version asked users to decipher hard to read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users to decipher text or match images if the analysis of cookies and canvas rendering suggested the page was being downloaded automatically. reCAPTCHA is owned by Google.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHAThe Shadow Brokers (a hacker group who first appeared in the summer of 2016. They published several leaks containing hacking tools, including several zero-day exploits, from the "Equation Group" who are widely suspected to be a branch of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_BrokersElectronic Frontier Foundation (The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet civil liberties.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Frontier_Foundation- https://www.eff.org/WarGames (a 1983 American Cold War science fiction techno-thriller film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film, which stars Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Ally Sheedy, follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses a United States military supercomputer programmed to predict and execute nuclear war against the Soviet Union.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGamesHackers (a 1995 American crime film directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller, Angelina Jolie, Jesse Bradford, Matthew Lillard, Laurence Mason, Renoly Santiago, Lorraine Bracco, and Fisher Stevens. The film follows a group of high school hackers and their involvement in a corporate extortion conspiracy.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(film)Shodan (Shodan is the world's first search engine for Internet-connected devices. Discover how Internet intelligence can help you make better decisions.)- https://www.shodan.io/PhotoDNA (PhotoDNA creates a unique digital signature (known as a “hash”) of an image which is then compared against signatures (hashes) of other photos to find copies of the same image. When matched with a database containing hashes of previously identified illegal images, PhotoDNA is an incredible tool to help detect, disrupt and report the distribution of child exploitation material. PhotoDNA is not facial recognition software and cannot be used to identify a person or object in an image. A PhotoDNA hash is not reversible, and therefore cannot be used to recreate an image.)- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodnaThe Trauma Floor The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America- https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizonaMortal Kombat 11 Developer Was Diagnosed with PTSD Due to Graphic Violence- https://segmentnext.com/mortal-kombat-11-developer-ptsd/Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job- https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/12/21255870/facebook-content-moderator-settlement-scola-ptsd-mental-healthArtificial neural network (usually simply called neural networks (NNs), are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected units or nodes called artificial neurons, which loosely model the neurons in a biological brain.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_networkBob's Burgers – The Snake Song- https://genius.com/Bobs-burgers-the-snake-song-lyrics- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tvhw7jnYi0Financial crisis of 2007–2008 (also known as the global financial crisis (GFC), was a severe worldwide economic crisis. Prior to the COVID-19 recession in 2020, it was considered by many economists to have been the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%932008Halfbrick Studios (Australian video game developer based in Brisbane. The company primarily worked on licensed games until 2008. The company released Fruit Ninja (2010) and Jetpack Joyride (2011).)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfbrick_StudiosUntitled Goose Game (a 2019 puzzle stealth game developed by House House and published by Panic. Players control a goose who bothers the inhabitants of an English village. The player must use the goose's abilities to manipulate objects and non-player characters to complete objectives. It was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untitled_Goose_GameFruit Ninja (a video game developed by Halfbrick. It was released April 21, 2010 for iPod Touch and iPhone devices, July 12, 2010 for the iPad, September 17, 2010 for Android OS devices.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_NinjaFiverr (Israeli online marketplace for freelance services. The company provides a platform for freelancers to offer services to customers worldwide.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiverrActivision Blizzard Lawsuit Alleges Horrific Mistreatment Of Women- https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/07/22/activision-blizzard-lawsuit-alleges-horrific-mistreatment-of-women/?sh=56144afb166cYongYea - Scummy Amazon Policy That Steals Employees' Personal Game Projects Dropped After Backlash From Devs- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQtKfutVFTIMotion Picture Production Code (a set of industry guidelines for the self-censorship of content that was applied to most United States motion pictures released by major studios from 1934 to 1968. It is also popularly known as the Hays Code, after Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) from 1922 to 1945.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_CodeBreaking Bad (an American neo-Western crime drama television series created and produced by Vince Gilligan. The show aired on AMC from January 20, 2008, to September 29, 2013, consisting of five seasons for a total of 62 episodes.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_Bad‘Simpsons' Episode Featuring Michael Jackson Kept Off Disney+- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/simpsons-episode-featuring-michael-jackson-kept-disney-1254609/2012 (a 2009 American science fiction disaster film directed and written by Roland Emmerich. It was produced by Harald Kloser, Mark Gordon, and Larry J. Franco, and written by Kloser and Emmerich. The film stars John Cusack, Amanda Peet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Oliver Platt, Thandiwe Newton, Danny Glover, and Woody Harrelson.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_(film)Geostorm (a 2017 American science fiction disaster film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Dean Devlin (in his feature directorial debut). The film stars Gerard Butler, Jim Sturgess, Abbie Cornish, Ed Harris, and Andy García. It follows a satellite designer who tries to save the world from a storm of epic proportions caused by malfunctioning climate-controlling satellites.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeostormVolcano (a 1997 American disaster film directed by Mick Jackson, and produced by Andrew Z. Davis, Neal H. Moritz and Lauren Shuler Donner. The storyline was conceived from a screenplay written by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray, and is inspired by the 1943 formation of the Parícutin volcano in Paricutin, Mexico.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano_(1997_film)Thanos (a genocidal warlord from Titan, whose own main objective was to bring stability to the universe by wiping out half of all life at every level, as he believed its massive population would inevitably use up the universe's entire supply of resources and condemn this. To complete this goal, Thanos set about hunting down all the Infinity Stones, being confident that the combined power of the Stones would achieve his goal.)- https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/ThanosNo Man's Sky Gameplay Trailer | E3 2014 | PS4- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLtmEjqzg7MAngryJoeShow - No Man's Sky Angry Review- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTTPlqK8AnY&t=1897sInternet Historian - The Engoodening of No Man's Sky- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ&t=59sAgent Orange (a herbicide and defoliant chemical, one of the "tactical use" Rainbow Herbicides. It is widely known for its use by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand,during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. It is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. In addition to its damaging environmental effects, traces of dioxin (mainly TCDD, the most toxic of its type) found in the mixture have caused major health problems for many individuals who were exposed, and their offspring. )- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_OrangeThe Tramp (also known as The Little Tramp, was British actor, Charlie Chaplin's most memorable on-screen character and an icon in world cinema during the era of silent film. The Tramp is also the title of a silent film starring Chaplin, which Chaplin wrote and directed in 1915.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_TrampApple – Think Different Commercial- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAB83Z1ydEAnti-Monopoly (a board game made by San Francisco State University Professor Ralph Anspach in response to Monopoly. The idea of an anti-monopoly board game dates to 1903 and the original Monopoly created by Lizzie Magie.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-MonopolyAnti-Monopoly, Inc. vs. General Mills Fun Group, Inc. court case 1976–1985 (Starting in 1974, Parker Brothers and its then corporate parent, General Mills, attempted to suppress publication of a game called Anti-Monopoly, designed by San Francisco State University economics professor Ralph Anspach and first published the previous year.)- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Monopoly#Anti-Monopoly.2C_Inc._vs._General_Mills_Fun_Group.2C_Inc._court_case_1976.E2.80.931985The Rageaholic - Begun, The Comic Film Crash Has - A Rant- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dlk3-NtOFkkTerror Australis Podcast (TNC podcast)- https://anchor.fm/terror-australis-podcastShout Outs 9th August 2021 – 5th Anniversary of No Man's Sky - https://www.nomanssky.com/2021/08/no-mans-sky-5th-anniversary/No Man's Sky is easily one of the most infamous titles in video game history, thanks to its extremely rocky launch and poor state at release. The game lacked many of its core promised features when it launched, resulting in heavy fan backlash. Within two years of its rollout, the tide started turning in No Man's Sky's favor, thanks in large part to updates that transformed the experience. NEXT counted as the first of such changes, ushering in multiplayer gameplay options that Hello Games teased in the lead up to launch. This particular update also overhauled the graphics and introduced refined base-building mechanics. Hello Games' efforts didn't stop there either; as such, the redemption arc for No Man's Sky has been rather impressive to watch unfold. With the game now celebrating its fifth year anniversary, Hello Games has put out a short video looking back at all of the updates we've seen so far, along with a tease of what's coming next.9th August 2021 – 25th anniversary of Escape from L.A. - https://movieweb.com/escape-from-la-25th-anniversary/Stylized on-screen as John Carpenter's Escape from L.A. A 1996 American post-apocalyptic action film co-written, co-scored, and directed by John Carpenter, co-written and produced by Debra Hill and Kurt Russell, with Russell also starring as Snake Plissken. A sequel to Escape from New York, Escape from L.A. co-stars Steve Buscemi, Stacy Keach, Bruce Campbell, and Pam Grier. The film gained a strong cult following. The film was in development for over 10 years. At one point, a script was commissioned in 1987 and was written by screenwriter Coleman Luck, with Dino De Laurentiis's company producing. Carpenter later described the script as "too light, too campy". In time, Carpenter and Kurt Russell got together to write with their long-time collaborator Debra Hill. Carpenter insists that Russell's persistence allowed the film to be made, since "Snake Plissken was a character he loved and wanted to play again." At the beginning of the film, Kurt Russell wears his costume from the original film, which still fits after fifteen years. The film takes place in 2013.10th August 2021 – 60th Anniversary of Operation Ranch Hand, spraying an estimated 20 million US gallons (76,000 m3) of defoliants and herbicides over rural areas of South Vietnam in an attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of food and vegetation cover - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ranch_HandOperation Ranch Hand was a U.S. military operation during the Vietnam War, lasting from 1962 until 1971. Largely inspired by the British use of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D (Agent Orange) during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, it was part of the overall herbicidal warfare program during the war called "Operation Trail Dust". Ranch Hand involved spraying an estimated 20 million U.S. gallons (76,000 m3) of defoliants and herbicides over rural areas of South Vietnam in an attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of food and vegetation cover. Areas of Laos and Cambodia were also sprayed to a lesser extent. Nearly 20,000 sorties were flown between 1961 and 1971. The herbicides were sprayed by the U.S. Air Force flying C-123s using the call sign "Hades". The planes were fitted with specially developed spray tanks with a capacity of 1,000 U.S. gallons (4 m3) of herbicides. A plane sprayed a swath of land that was 80 meters wide and 16 kilometers (10 mi) long in about 4½ minutes, at a rate of about 3 U.S. gallons per acre (3 m3/km2). Sorties usually consisted of three to five aircraft flying side by side. 95% of the herbicides and defoliants used in the war were sprayed by the U.S. Air Force as part of Operation Ranch Hand. The remaining 5% were sprayed by the U.S. Chemical Corps, other military branches, and the Republic of Vietnam using hand sprayers, spray trucks, helicopters and boats, primarily around U.S. military installations. The use of herbicides in the Vietnam War was controversial from the beginning, particularly for crop destruction. The scientific community began to protest the use of herbicides in Vietnam as early as 1964, when the Federation of American Scientists objected to the use of defoliants. In 1967, seventeen Nobel laureates and 5,000 other scientists signed a petition asking for the immediate end to the use of herbicides in Vietnam. According to the Vietnamese government, the US program exposed approximately 4.8 million Vietnamese people to Agent Orange, resulted in 400,000 deaths due to a range of cancers and other ailments. The Vietnamese population has suffered a range of ailments with three million Vietnamese people suffering health problems, one million birth defects caused directly by exposure to Agent Orange, and 24% of the area of Vietnam being defoliated.12th August 2021 – 40th birthday of the IBM 5150 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#DebutOn August 12, 1981, Don Esteridge, who was unknown at the time, announced the release of the new personal computer created by his company. The head of development at IBM Entry Level Systems presented the 5150, or IBM PC, a concept that would revolutionize the computer industry forever. The machine was based on open architecture and a substantial market of third-party peripherals, expansion cards and software grew up rapidly to support it. The PC had a substantial influence on the personal computer market. The specifications of the IBM PC became one of the most popular computer design standards in the world, and the only significant competition it faced from a non-compatible platform throughout the 1980s was from the Apple Macintosh product line. The majority of modern personal computers are distant descendants of the IBM PC.Pricing started at $1,565 for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics Adapter, and no disk drives. The price was designed to compete with comparable machines in the market. For comparison, the Datamaster, announced two weeks earlier as IBM's least expensive computer, cost $10,000. IBM's marketing campaign licensed the likeness of Charlie Chaplin's character "The Little Tramp" for a series of advertisements based on Chaplin's movies, played by Billy Scudder. The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels rather than directly to customers. Reception was overwhelmingly positive, with sales estimates from analysts suggesting billions of dollars in sales over the next few years, and the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry. Dealers were overwhelmed with orders, including customers offering pre-payment for machines with no guaranteed delivery date. By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.Remembrances10th August 2010 - David L. Wolper - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_L._WolperAmerican television and film producer, responsible for shows such as Roots, The Thorn Birds, North and South, L.A. Confidential, and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). He was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the 57th Academy Awards in 1985 for his work producing the opening and closing ceremonies of the XXIIIrd Olympiad, Los Angeles 1984 as well as helping to bring the games to L.A. His 1971 film (as executive producer) about the study of insects, The Hellstrom Chronicle, won an Academy Award. On March 13, 1974, one of his crews filming a National Geographic history of Australopithecus at Mammoth Mountain Ski Area was killed when their Sierra Pacific Airlines Corvair 440 slammed into the White Mountains shortly after takeoff from Eastern Sierra Regional Airport in Bishop, California, killing all 35 on board, including 31 Wolper crew members. The filmed segment was recovered in the wreckage and was broadcast in the television series Primal Man. The cause of the crash remains unsolved. In 1988, Wolper was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame. For his work on television, he had received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He died from congestive heart disease and complications of Parkinson's disease at the age of 82 in Beverly Hills, California.Famous Birthdays10th August 1889 – Charles Darrow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_DarrowAmerican who modified the design of Lizzie Magie's original invention The Landlord's Game. He became the first millionaire game designer in history, and although Magie patented her invention she received only $500. Parker Brothers falsely credited Darrow as the original inventor. While Darrow eventually sold his version of Monopoly to Parker Brothers, claiming it to be his own invention, modern historians credit Darrow as just one of the game's final developers. Monopoly is a board game which focuses on the acquisition of fictional real estate titles, with the incorporation of elements of chance. After losing his job at a sales company following the Stock Market Crash of 1929, Darrow worked at various odd jobs. Seeing his neighbors and acquaintances play a board game in which the object was to buy and sell property, he decided to publish his own version of the game, with the help of his first son, William, and his wife Esther. Darrow marketed his version of the game under the name Monopoly. In truth, Darrow was just one of many people in the American Midwest and East Coast who had been playing a game of buying and trading property. The game's direct ancestor was The Landlord's Game, created by Elizabeth Magie. The Darrow family initially made their game sets on flexible, round pieces of oilcloth instead of rigid, square carton. Charles drew the designs of the properties with drafting pens, and his son and wife filled in the spaces with colors and made the title deed cards and Chance and Community Chest cards. In 1970, three years after Darrow's death, Atlantic City placed a commemorative plaque in his honor on The Boardwalk, near the corner of Park Place. In 1973 Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at San Francisco State University, produced Anti-Monopoly, a game similar to Monopoly, and for this was sued by Parker Brothers. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Events of Interest10th August 1960 – Dinosaurus! was released - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053768/ On this day in 1960, it was 'Jurassic Park' all over again with the release of Dinosaurus! The feature starred Ward Ramsey and Kristina Hanson, and here's the plot summary: "After undersea explosions near a Caribbean island, prehistoric creatures are unleashed on the unsuspecting population. Freed from his watery tomb, as well, is a very friendly Neanderthal man who proceeds to befriend a local orphan boy. The boy, Neanderthal and irritated dinosaur make for an interesting dramatic climax." The leading role was intended for Steve McQueen, who starred in The Blob two years earlier, also produced by Harris and directed by Yeaworth. McQueen passed on the film to make The Magnificent Seven instead. The dinosaurs were filmed using the technique of stop-motion animation as well as puppets for close-ups. The film promulgates the naïve idea that herbivorous animals (such as the brontosaurus) are not dangerous (a similar claim was made in Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park', 1993). The cape buffalo is one of the most aggressive and dangerous animals in Africa (and only weighs about 5% of what a brontosaurus is estimated to have weighed). Marcel Delgado was given less than half the time originally agreed upon to create the dinosaur models used in the film. The studio initially agreed to give him five to six weeks, as he requested, but two weeks later he was told that they would begin production on Tuesday. When Betty is captured by the neanderthal and taken to his cave, she's wearing a white dress and a pearl necklace. Combined with her red hair, she bears a striking resemblance to Wilma Flintstone, one of the stars of the TV cartoon series "The Flintstones" (1960), which would debut on American television one month after this movies US release (coincidentally, Betty is the name of Wilma's best friend).10th August 1990 – The Magellan space probe reaches Venus. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_(spacecraft)#Orbital_encounter_of_Venus On August 10, 1990, the American Magellan probe, named after the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, arrived at its orbit around the planet and started a mission of detailed radar mapping at a frequency of 2.38 GHz. It began the orbital insertion maneuver which placed the spacecraft into a three-hour, nine minute, elliptical orbit that brought the spacecraft 295-kilometers from the surface at about 10 degrees North during the periapsis and out to 7762-kilometers during apoapsis. During each orbit, the space probe captured radar data while the spacecraft was closest to the surface, and then transmit it back to Earth as it moved away from Venus. This maneuver required extensive use of the reaction wheels to rotate the spacecraft as it imaged the surface for 37-minutes and as it pointed toward Earth for two hours. The primary mission intended for the spacecraft to return images of at least 70 percent of the surface during one Venusian day, which lasts 243 Earth days as the planet slowly spins. To avoid overly-redundant data at the highest and lowest latitudes, the Magellan probe alternated between a Northern-swath, a region designated as 90 degrees north latitude to 54 degrees south latitude, and a Southern-swath, designated as 76 degrees north latitude to 68 degrees south latitude. However, due to periapsis being 10 degrees north of the equatorial line, imaging the South Pole region was unlikely. The resulting maps were comparable to visible-light photographs of other planets, and are still the most detailed in existence. Magellan greatly improved scientific understanding of the geology of Venus: the probe found no signs of plate tectonics, but the scarcity of impact craters suggested the surface was relatively young, and there were lava channels thousands of kilometers long.IntroArtist – Goblins from MarsSong Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJFollow us onFacebook- Page - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/- Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/440485136816406/Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamatedSpotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrSiTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/nerds_amalgamated/Email - Nerds.Amalgamated@gmail.comSupport via Podhero- https://podhero.com/podcast/449127/nerds-amalgamated See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Once upon a time, people were computers. It's probably hard to imagine teams of people spending their entire day toiling in large grids of paper, writing numbers and calculating numbers by hand or with mechanical calculators, and then writing more numbers and then repeating that. But that's the way it was before the 1979.  The term spreadsheet comes from back when a spread, like a magazine spread, of ledger cells for bookkeeping. There's a great scene in the Netflix show Halston where a new guy is brought in to run the company and he's flying through an electro-mechanical calculator. Halston just shuts the door. Ugh. Imagine doing what we do in a spreadsheet in minutes today by hand. Even really large companies jump over into a spreadsheet to do financial projections today - and with trendlines, tweaking this small variable or that, and even having different algorithms to project the future contents of a cell - the computerized spreadsheet is one of the most valuable business tools ever built. It's that instant change we see when we change one set of numbers and can see the impact down the line.  Even with the advent of mainframe computers accounting and finance teams had armies of people who calculated spreadsheets by hand, building complicated financial projections. If the formulas changed then it could take days or weeks to re-calculate and update every cell in a workbook. People didn't experiment with formulas. Computers up to this point had been able to calculate changes and provided all the formulas were accurate could output results onto punch cards or printers. But the cost had been in the millions before Digital Equipment and Data Nova came along and had dropped into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars  The first computerized spreadsheets weren't instant. Richard Mattessich developed an electronic, batch spreadsheet in 1961. He'd go on to write a book called “Simulation of the Firm Through a Budget Computer Program.” His work was more theoretical in nature, but IBM developed the Business Computer Language, or BCL the next year. What IBM did got copied by their seven dwarves. former GE employees Leroy Ellison, Harry Cantrell, and Russell Edwards developed AutoPlan/AutoTab, another scripting language for spreadsheets, following along delimited files of numbers. And in 1970 we got LANPAR which opened up more than reading files in from sequential, delimited sources. But then everything began to change. Harvard student Dan Bricklin graduated from MIT and went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation to work on an early word processor called WPS-8. We were now in the age of interactive computing on minicomputers. He then went to work for FasFax in 1976 for a year, getting exposure to calculating numbers. And then he went off to Harvard in 1977 to get his MBA. But while he was at Harvard he started working on one of the timesharing programs to help do spreadsheet analysis and wrote his own tool that could do five columns and 20 rows. Then he met Bob Frankston and they added Dan Fylstra, who thought it should be able to run on an Apple - and so they started Software Arts Corporation. Frankston got the programming bug while sitting in on a class during junior high. He then got his undergrad and Masters at MIT, where he spent 9 years in school and working on a number of projects with CSAIL, including Multics. He'd been consulting and working at various companies for awhile in the Boston area, which at the time was probably the major hub. Frankston and Bricklin would build a visible calculator using 16k of space and that could fit on a floppy. They used a time sharing system and because they were paying for time, they worked at nights when time was cheaper, to save money. They founded a company called Software Arts and named their Visual Calculator VisiCalc. Along comes the Apple II. And computers were affordable. They ported the software to the platform and it was an instant success. It grew fast. Competitors sprung up. SuperCalc in 1980, bundled with the Osborne. The IBM PC came in 1981 and the spreadsheet appeared in Fortune for the first time. Then the cover of Inc Magazine in 1982. Publicity is great for sales and inspiring competitors. Lotus 1-2-3 came in 1982 and even Boeing Computer Services got in the game with Boeing Calc in 1985. They extended the ledger metaphor to add sheets to the spreadsheet, which we think of as tabs today. Quattro Pro from Borland copied that feature and despite having their offices effectively destroyed during an earthquake just before release, came to market in 1989. Ironically they got the idea after someone falsely claimed they were making a spreadsheet a few years earlier. And so other companies were building Visible Calculators and adding new features to improve on the spreadsheet concept. Microsoft was one who really didn't make a dent in sales at first. They released an early spreadsheet tool called Multiple in 1982. But Lotus 1-2-3 was the first killer application for the PC.  It was more user friendly and didn't have all the bugs that had come up in VisiCalc as it was ported to run on platform after platform. Lotus was started by Mitch Kapor who brought Jonathan Sachs in to develop the spreadsheet software. Kapor's marketing prowess would effectively obsolete VisiCalc in a number of environments. They made TV commercials so you know they were big time! And they were written natively in the x86 assembly so it was fast. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. They added color and printing. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. It was 1- spreadsheets, 2 - charts and graphs and 3 - basic database functions. Heck, one could even change the size of cells and use it as a text editor. Oh, and macros would become a standard in spreadsheets after Lotus. And because VisiCalc had been around so long, Lotus of course was immediately capable of reading a VisiCalc file when released in 1983. As could Microsoft Excel, when it came along in 1985. And even Boeing Calc could read Lotus 1-2-3 files. After all, the concept went back to those mainframe delimited files and to this day we can import and export to tab or comma delimited files. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released, although the final release had come in 1983. Lotus had eaten their shorts in the market, and Borland had watched. Microsoft was about to eat both of theirs. Why? Visi was about to build a windowing system called Visi-On. And Steve Jobs needed a different vendor to turn to. He looked to Lotus who built a tool called Jazz that was too basic. But Microsoft had gone public in 1985 and raised plenty of money, some of which they used to complete Excel for the Mac that year. Their final release in 1983 began to fade away And so Excel began on the Mac and that first version was the first graphical spreadsheet. The other developers didn't think that a GUI was gonna' be much of a thing. Maybe graphical interfaces were a novelty! Version two was released for the PC in 1987 along with Windows 2.0. Sales were slow at first. But then came Windows 3. Add Microsoft Word to form Microsoft Office and by the time Windows 95 was released Microsoft became the de facto market leader in documents and spreadsheets. That's the same year IBM bought Lotus and they continued to sell the product until 2013, with sales steadily declining. And so without a lot of competition for Microsoft Excel, spreadsheets kinda' sat for a hot minute. Computers became ubiquitous. Microsoft released new versions for Mac and Windows but they went into that infamous lost decade until… competition. And there were always competitors, but real competition with something new to add to the mix. Google bought a company called 2Web Technologies in 2006, who made a web-based spreadsheet called XL2WEB. That would become Google Sheets. Google bought DocVerse in 2010 and we could suddenly have multiple people editing a sheet concurrently - and the files were compatible with Excel. By 2015 there were a couple million users of Google Workspace, growing to over 5 million in 2019 and another million in 2020. In the years since, Microsoft released Office 365, starting to move many of their offerings onto the web. That involved 60 million people in 2015 and has since grown to over 250 million. The statistics can be funny here, because it's hard to nail down how many free vs paid Google and Microsoft users there are. Statista lists Google as having a nearly 60% market share but Microsoft is clearly making more from their products. And there are smaller competitors all over the place taking on lots of niche areas. There are a few interesting tidbits here. One is that the tools that there's a clean line of evolution in features. Each new tool worked better, added features, and they all worked with previous file formats to ease the transition into their product. Another is how much we've all matured in our understanding of data structures. I mean we have rows and columns. And sometimes multiple sheets - kinda' like multiple tables in a database. Our financial modeling and even scientific modeling has grown in acumen by leaps and bounds.  Many still used those electro-mechanical calculators in the 70s when you could buy calculator kits and build your own calculator. Those personal computers that flowed out in the next few years gave every business the chance to first track basic inventory and calculate simple information, like how much we might expect in revenue from inventory in stock to now thousands of pre-built formulas that are supported across most spreadsheet tooling. Despite expensive tools and apps to do specific business functions, the spreadsheet is still one of the most enduring and useful tools we have. Even for programmers, where we're often just getting our data in a format we can dump into other tools! So think about this. What tools out there have common file types where new tools can sit on top of them? Which of those haven't been innovated on in a hot minute? And of course, what is that next bold evolution? Is it moving the spreadsheet from a book to a batch process? Or from a batch process to real-time? Or from real-time to relational with new tabs? Or to add a GUI? Or adding online collaboration? Or like some big data companies using machine learning to analyze the large data sets and look for patterns automatically?  Not only does the spreadsheet help us do the maths - it also helps us map the technological determinism we see repeated through nearly every single tool for any vertical or horizontal market. Those stuck need disruptive competitors if only to push them off the laurels they've been resting on. 

Produced by Foundersuite (www.foundersuite.com), "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Donnel Baird of Blocpower.io, a Brooklyn-based climate technology startup that is making American cities greener, smarter, and healthier by retrofitting older buildings with more efficient energy systems. In this episode, Donnel talks about how he got started by "greening" some barber shops in Harlem and then landed a government contract, getting past 200 "no's" when raising early capital, pitching Ben Horowitz and Mitch Kapor for his pre-seed round, understanding the "Silicon Valley Archetype" of what VCs are looking for and how to close the gap if you are different from that archetypes, tips for Black founders, and much more. The Company recently raised a $63 million Series A round ($55 million debt, $8 million equity). The round was led by American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact, AccelR8 and The Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group, with participation from Kapor Capital, Elemental Excelerator, CityRock Venture Partners, The Schmidt Family Foundation and Salesforce Ventures. Other investors in the Company include Kapor Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, MaC Venture Capital, Exelon, New York Ventures of the Empire State Development Corporation, Echoing Green, and The Schmidt Family Foundation. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $3 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at https:/www.foundersuite.com/

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

Venture capital firms are known for being an incredibly exclusive group. The firms themselves are often small. Even smaller is the number of partners, the actual decision-makers who control hundreds of millions — sometimes billions — of dollars. At the biggest firms, there might be a dozen partners maximum. And if you’re an entrepreneur who wants some of that money, it definitely helps to have gone to college with one of those partners. Kapor Capital is trying to be more inclusive in whom it promotes and funds. One way it’s different: It finds founders primarily through a submission form on its website instead of networking. Molly speaks with Mitch Kapor, the firm’s founding partner.

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

There’s an idea that’s long been gospel in the venture capital industry, that investing in companies that have a positive social impact is a money loser — impact investing is “concessionary.” But what if it isn’t? Mitch Kapor is a well-known tech investor. He helped create the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and was an early Uber investor. But for the past decade, Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, have focused on companies that they say fill a gap, whether it’s social, information or opportunity. And in 2019, their firm, Kapor Capital, reported that in fact it does make money. Lots of it. “Marketplace Tech” host Molly Wood talks with Mitch Kapor.

The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL, was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and is still available at well.com. We did an episode on Stewart Brand: Godfather of the Interwebs and he was a larger than life presence amongst many of the 1980s former hippies that were shaping our digital age. From his assistance producing The Mother Of All Demos to the Whole Earth Catalog inspiring Steve Jobs and many others to his work with Ted Nelson, there's probably only a few degrees separating him from anyone else in computing.  Larry Brilliant is another counter-culture hero. He did work as a medical professional for the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox and came home to teach at the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan had been working on networked conferencing since the 70s when Bob Parnes wrote CONFER, which would be used at Wayne State where Brilliant got his MD. But CONFER was a bit of a resource hog. PicoSpan was written by Marcus Watts in 1983. Pico is a small text editor in many a UNIX variant and network is network. Why small, well, modems that dialed into bulletin boards were pretty slow back then.  Marcus worked at NETI, who then bought the rights for PicoSpan to take to market. So Brilliant was the chairman of NETI at the time and approached Brand about starting up a bulletin-board system (BBS). Brilliant proposed NETI would supply the gear and software and that Brand would use his, uh, brand - and Whole Earth following, to fill the ranks. Brand's non-profit The Point Foundation would own half and NETI would own the other half.  It became an early online community outside of academia, and an important part of the rise of the splinter-nets and a holdout to the Internet. For a time, at least.  PicoSpan gave users conferences. These were similar to PLATO Notes files, where a user could create a conversation thread and people could respond. These were (and still are) linear and threaded conversations. Rather than call them Notes like PLATO did, PicSpan referred to them as “conferences” as “online conferencing” was a common term used to describe meeting online for discussions at the time. EIES had been around going back to the 1970s, so Brand had some ideas abut what an online community could be - having used it. Given the sharp drop in the cost of storage there was something new PicoSpan could give people: the posts could last forever. Keep in mind, the Mac still didn't ship with a hard drive in 1984. But they were on the rise.  And those bits that were preserved were manifested in words. Brand brought a simple mantra: You Own Your Own Words. This kept the hands of the organization clean and devoid of liability for what was said on The WELL - but also harkened back to an almost libertarian bent that many in technology had at the time. Part of me feels like libertarianism meant something different in that era. But that's a digression. Whole Earth Review editor Art Kleiner flew up to Michigan to get the specifics drawn up. NETI's investment had about a quarter million dollar cash value. Brand stayed home and came up with a name. The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL.  The WELL was not the best technology, even at the time. The VAX was woefully underpowered for as many users as The WELL would grow to, and other services to dial into and have discussions were springing up. But it was one of the most influential of the time. And not because they recreated the extremely influential Whole Earth catalog in digital form like Brilliant wanted, which would have been similar to what Amazon reviews are like now probably. But instead, the draw was the people.  The community was fostered first by Matthew McClure, the initial director who was a former typesetter for the Whole Earth Catalog. He'd spent 12 years on a commune called The Farm and was just getting back to society. They worked out that they needed to charge $8 a month and another couple bucks an hour to make minimal a profit.  So McClure worked with NETI to get the Fax up and they created the first conference, General. Kevin Kelly from the Whole Earth Review and Brand would start discussions and Brand mentioned The WELL in some of his writings. A few people joined, and then a few more.  Others from The Farm would join him. Cliff Figallo, known as Cliff, was user 19 and John Coate, who went by Tex, came in to run marketing. In those first few years they started to build up a base of users. It started with hackers and journalists, who got free accounts. And from there great thinkers joined up. People like Tom Mandel from Stanford Research Institute, or SRI. He would go on to become the editor of Time Online. His partner Nana. Howard Rheingold, who would go on to write a book called The Virtual Community. And they attracted more. Especially Dead Heads, who helped spread the word across the country during the heyday of the Grateful Dead.  Plenty of UNIX hackers also joined. After all, the community was finding a nexus in the Bay Area at the time. They added email in 1987 and it was one of those places you could get on at least one part of this whole new internet thing. And need help with your modem? There's a conference for that. Need to talk about calling your birth mom who you've never met because you were adopted? There's a conference for that as well. Want to talk sexuality with a minister? Yup, there's a community for that. It was one of the first times that anyone could just reach out and talk to people. And the community that was forming also met in person from time to time at office parties, furthering the cohesion.  We take Facebook groups, Slack channels, and message boards for granted today. We can be us or make up a whole new version of us. We can be anonymous and just there to stir up conflict like on 4Chan or we can network with people in our industry like on LinkedIn. We can chat real time, which is similar to the Send option on The WELL. Or we can post threaded responses to other comments. But the social norms and trends were proving as true then as now. Communities grow, they fragment, people create problems, people come, people go. And sometimes, as we grow, we inspire.  Those early adopters of The WELL inspired Craig Newmark of Craigslist to the growing power of the Internet. And future developers of Apple. Hippies versus nerds but not really versus, but coming to terms with going from “computers are part of the military industrial complex keeping us down” philosophy to more of a free libertarian information superhighway that persisted for decades. The thought that the computer would set us free and connect the world into a new nation, as John Perry Barlow would sum up perfectly in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. By 1990 people like Barlow could make a post on The WELL from Wyoming and have Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, makers of Lotus 1-2-3 show up at his house after reading the post - and they could join forces with the 5th employee of Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Foundation. And as a sign of the times that's the same year The WELL got fully connected to the Internet. By 1991 they had grown to 5,000 subscribers. That was the year Bruce Katz bought NETI's half of the well for $175,000. Katz had pioneered the casual shoe market, changing the name of his families shoe business to Rockport and selling it to Reebok for over $118 million.  The WELL had posted a profit a couple of times but by and large was growing slower than competitors. Although I'm not sure any o the members cared about that. It was a smaller community than many others but they could meet in person and they seemed to congeal in ways that other communities didn't. But they would keep increasing in size over the next few years. In that time Fig replaced himself with Maurice Weitman, or Mo - who had been the first person to sign up for the service. And Tex soon left as well.  Tex would go to become an early webmaster of The Gate, the community from the San Francisco Chronicle. Fig joined AOL's GNN and then became director of community at Salon. But AOL. You see, AOL was founded in the same year. And by 1994 AOL was up to 1.25 million subscribers with over a million logging in every day. CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie, Dephi were on the rise as well. And The WELL had thousands of posts a day by then but was losing money and not growing like the others. But I think the users of the service were just fine with that. The WELL was still growing slowly and yet for many, it was too big. Some of those left. Some stayed. Other communities, like The River, fragmented off. By then, The Point Foundation wanted out so sold their half of The WELL to Katz for $750,000 - leaving Katz as the first full owner of The WELL.  I mean, they were an influential community because of some of the members, sure, but more because the quality of the discussions. Academics, drugs, and deeply personal information. And they had always complained about figtex or whomever was in charge - you know, the counter-culture is always mad at “The Management.” But Katz was not one of them. He honestly seems to have tried to improve things - but it seems like everything he tried blew up in his face.  So Katz further alienated the members and fired Mo and brought on Maria Wilhelm, but they still weren't hitting that hyper-growth, with membership getting up to around 10,000 - but by then AOL was jumping from 5,000,000 to 10,000,000. But again, I've not found anyone who felt like The WELL should have been going down that same path. The subscribers at The WELL were looking for an experience of a completely different sort. By 1995 Gail Williams allowed users to create their own topics and the unruly bunch just kinda' ruled themselves in a way. There was staff and drama and emotions and hurt feelings and outrage and love and kindness and, well, community. By the late 90s, the buzz word at many a company were all about building communities, and there were indeed plenty of communities growing. But none like The WELL. And given that some of the founders of Salon had been users of The WELL, Salon bought The WELL in 1999 and just kinda' let it fly under the radar. The influence continued with various journalists as members.  The web came. And the members of The WELL continued their community. Award winning but a snapshot in time in a way. Living in an increasingly secluded corner of cyberspace, a term that first began life in a present tense on The WELL, if you got it, you got it. In 2012, after trying to sell The WELL to another company, Salon finally sold The WELL to a group of members who had put together enough money to buy it. And The WELL moved into the current, more modern form of existence. To quote the site: Welcome to a gathering that's like no other. The WELL, launched back in 1985 as the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, continues to provide a cherished watering hole for articulate and playful thinkers from all walks of life. For more about why conversation is so treasured on The WELL, and why members of the community banded together to buy the site in 2012, check out the story of The WELL. If you like what you see, join us! It sounds pretty inviting. And it's member supported. Like National Public Radio kinda'. In what seems like an antiquated business model, it's $15 per month to access the community. And make no mistake, it's a community.  You Own Your Own Words. If you pay to access a community, you don't sign the ownership of your words away in a EULA. You don't sign away rights to sell your data to advertisers along with having ads shown to you in increasing numbers in a hunt for ever more revenue. You own more than your words, you own your experience. You are sovereign.  This episode doesn't really have a lot of depth to it. Just as most online forums lack the kind of depth that could be found on the WELL. I am a child of a different generation, I suppose. Through researching each episode of the podcast, I often read books, conduct interviews (a special thanks to Help A Reporter Out), lurk in conferences, and try to think about the connections, the evolution, and what the most important aspects of each are. There is a great little book from Katie Hafner called The Well: A Story Of Love, Death, & Real Life. I recommend it. There's also Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and John Seabrook's Deeper: Adventures on the Net. Oh, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, And the Rise of Digital Utopianism from Fred Turner and Siberia by Douglas Rushkoff. At a minimum, I recommend reading Katie Hafner's wired article and then her most excellent book! Oh, and to hear about other ways the 60s Counterculture helped to shape the burgeoning technology industry, check out What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff.  And The WELL comes up in nearly every book as one of the early commercial digital communities. It's been written about in Wired, in The Atlantic, makes appearances in books like Broad Band by Claire Evans, and The Internet A Historical Encyclopedia.  The business models out there to build and run  and grow a company have seemingly been reduced to a select few. Practically every online community has become free with advertising and data being the currency we parlay in exchange for a sense of engagement with others.  As network effects set in and billionaires are created, others own our words. They think the lifestyle business is quaint - that if you aren't outgrowing a market segment that you are shrinking. And a subscription site that charges a monthly access fee to cgi code with a user experience that predates the UX field on the outside might affirm that philosophy -especially since anyone can see your real name. But if we look deeper we see a far greater truth: that these barriers keep a small corner of cyberspace special - free from Russian troll farms and election stealing and spam bots. And without those distractions we find true engagement. We find real connections that go past the surface. We find depth. It's not lost after all.  Thank you for being part of this little community. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day.

Join Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join Ed Belove is a very active angel investor. He's a successful founder in software and hardware. Just a very thoughtful person. Very, very smart, very observant, very committed. Founders would be very lucky to have Ed Belove in their corner. I really enjoyed this interview, which I recorded in the first season of the podcast. And it is a very, very meaty interview. Full of interesting stories. For example, helping build Lotus with Mitch Kapor and all sorts of other things. So, it's a little bit of history of the software industry. A lot of wisdom about building a company and an introduction to just a tremendous, tremendous angel investor and person. I highly recommend the conversation with Ed Belove. As an undergrad at Harvard, Ed Belove hung out with people at the campus radio station that liked to play with computers. This eventually led to a brilliant career that included building software products with the visionary Mitch Kapor at Lotus Development. Ed co-founded a company that greatly expanded the Apple II’s ability to communicate. The company would eventually pivot to supplying the hardware for early Internet services such as CompuServe and AOL. This successful trajectory allowed Ed to dedicate his time to building early-stage companies and doing philanthropic work. As a much sought-after angel investor, Ed puts his capital and energy to work on behalf of promising startups. If you are building a software startup, you would be well served to listen to the thoughts Ed expresses in this podcast. HERE ARE SOME OF THE TOPICS COVERED IN OUR CONVERSATION: Ed Belove's Bio Data General in the Early 1970’s Was a Hotbed of Entrepreneurship – Many Startups Came Out of Data General Software As It Was Before It Ate the World Data General Gave Away Software to Sell Hardware Space War Video Game on PDP-10 Computers “Soul of a New Machine” by Tracy Kidder Now There Is a Huge Number of Software Building Blocks That Anybody Can Put Together – This Did Not Exist in the 1970s Telex and TWX Emulation for the Apple II – Got Around Apple II’s Inability to Multitask Ed Belove Went to Work Lotus Development – Mitch Kapor Was a Real Visionary Ed Belove Runs into People Who Are Still Using Lotus Agenda WorkFlowy! Ed Belove, Lessons from Fetchnotes – Alex Horak & Alex Schiff “Ease of use can't be overestimated” Interchange Online – Put the First Major Paper Online, The Washington Post – Ziff Davis AT&T Still Had a Monopoly Mindset despite Deregulation & Divestiture – No Hurry to Make Decisions in Fast-moving Market “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen “The Road Ahead” by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson How Ed Belove Got into Angel Investing Do Help Get the Word out About Angel Invest Boston by Leaving a Review on iTunes What Ed Belove Looks for in a Startup Knowing What You Don’t Know CEOs Need to Have People to Talk to In & Out of the Startup – There Are Now Many More Resources than in the Past CEO, Don’t “Manage” Your Board, Work with Your Board CEO, Founder, Know Thyself Shares, Notes and SAFEs, Oh My!

This episode was taped In early March right before Heard Museum Native American show and sale when Peter Miller came to Tucson to visit and before Covid19 had closed down the country. Peter is a collector who I've had the pleasure of selling to and during these brief visits we've always had wonderful conversations not only surrounding the art he collects, but also his world as an entrepreneur working at MIT. He was educated at MIT and was involved in several different software companies that he helped found and run. We went through the process of what it is to be in the business world as an executive and as a mentor, going over how those of skills correlate with any business, whether its a gallery, or an artist, or a large software company with over 1100 employees. Of course, we talked about collecting and his interest in art and how this developed which is a passion he and his wife share together. Peter is a remarkable person who was kind enough to share the backstory of his life from being a successful business person to his joy of collecting art. He's also a fan of the Charles Bloom Murder Mystery series and after this podcast was kind of enough to proofread of my next book "The Candy Man" another skill set he possesses.

Ep 124FU: Dragan Milovanović o dugotrajnosti iPada:Imam iPad 2 64 GB + GSM koji koristim za slušanje muzike i podkasta...Ako nisam umislio, povezan na pojačalo daje mi bolji zvuk od iPad 6th gen. i iPhone 6s i često sam ga koristio. Sim karticu u njemu nisam koristio godinama i davno je blokirana.Nedavno mi je iz čistog mira tražio aktivaciju i nije hteo da se aktivira po proceduri.U poslednjem podkastu sam čuo da i tvoj drug Miki ima isti problem, a na Netu sam našao još slučajeva. Danas sam probao aktivaciju nekoliko puta po ovom receptu bez rezultata:https://support.apple.com/en-ph/HT206214https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250492364Uvek je procedura trajala značajno preko navedenih 15 minuta i ponovo bih bio na početku.Na kraju sam odustao i eksperimenta radi sam iPad povezan na Mac probao da aktiviram bez povezivanja na WiFi, tj izabrao sam opciju aktivacije preko iTunes-a (nema veze što nemam iTunes na Catalina) i čudo se desilo! Uređaj se trenutno aktivirao i sada sve radi kao da cele ove zavrzlame nije bilo.Sim karticu sam pre celog postupka izvadio po Mikijevom savetu, ali mislim da nije bilo ni potrebe, jer me je na kraju aktivacije iPad pitao da li želim da nastavim bez sim kartice što sam izabrao. Da ne zaboravim da sam nekom momentu trebao da se ulogujem na svoj iCloud nalog.Dva puta je vaskrsavao iz mrtvih, sada još i ovo kada sam mislio da je kraj. Ovaj iPad je neuništiv!FU: Arheologija iz analognog doba: Bajagin poklon singl iz 1985FU Zoltan Kubat:@Aleksandre, ja sam takodje menjao tastaturu, ali sam kupio Keychron K2 10 key less :)Link: https://www.keychron.com/collections/keyboardOdusevljen sam sa istom, uzeo sam model RGB, samo zato sto ima metalni frame, sa Cherry MX Blue switche-vima. Jako su glasni :) Jako mi se svidjaju.Takodje mi se jako svidelo ovo NVME resenje za externi M.2 drive, i ja cu ga poruciti, samo se nadam se da necu imati problema sa postom.@Milane, spominjali ste Xserve. Mozda Vam ovo bude interesantno:Pratim jednog MacOldschoolasha: http://www.stayornay.com/mac84/retro.htmlIma na sajtu gomilu stvari koje mislim da ce ti biti interesantne.Poslednji video mu je Live popravka Xserve G5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxVndMjSZAE&t=11531sSve pohvale za vas dvoje, sve najbolje i da vas slusam jos dugo!VestiMiloš javi da se pojavila zvanična BusPlus app za iOS.Apple izbacio Swift Playgrounds app za Mac.Mac360 prestaje sa radom zbog ozbiljne bolesti autora.In memoriamLarry Tesler nas je napustio.Mnogo lepih stvari rečeno o čoveku, evo nekoliko tvitova: Chris Espinosa, Mitch Kapor, Chris Espinosa, Tom ConradSoftwareMiroslav Petrović i muke po emailuStopTheMadnessiPad, za posao: editovanje podcasta u Ferriteu koristeći Apple Pencil – Jason SnelliPad, za knjige: It Shall Come to PassForumApple: the services company?Tyler Hall o istom utisku o modernom Appleu.HwAlek završio (eh…) sklapanje Hackintosh računara.Sumiramo šta valja i šta su problemi.ZanimljivostiTesseract – Bartosz CiechanowskiZahvalniceSnimljeno 22.2.2020.Uvodna muzika by Vladimir Tošić, stari sajt je ovde.Logotip by Aleksandra IlićArtwork episode50 x 70 cm , ulje na platnu , 2020.by Saša Montiljo, njegov kutak na Devianartu.

On this episode, we’re doing something a bit different. Peter Fleming (Professor, Management, UTS Business) recently wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Peter asks- Are corporations using CSR to take over social services formerly provided by governments?Nicole and Peter explore the origins of CSR in the 60’s and 70’s, the critique by Economist Milton Friedman in the 80’s and CSR's return to popularity after the global financial crisis. Plus, Nicole and Peter take a close look at Uber's CSR policy, entitled 'Global Citizenship.'Further Reading:Human Rights Watch- Definition of Corporate Social ResponsibilityYou can read Milton Friedman’s 1970 piece in the New York Times Magazine The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.In August of this year, the Business Roundtable in the US, released a statement on reframing the purpose of a corporation to include all stakeholders.You can find more of Peter's research on the UTS Business School website.Music: Lotus, Peter Sandberg, Ebb & Flod, Trevor Kowalski, Farrell Wooten (Epidemic Sound) and Mitch Kapor (Critique on corporations) Credits: CNN Business, Wayne Heaney (Occupy Wall Street), Kino Library, Mitch Kapor

Mitch Kapor is fond of saying, “genius is evenly distributed by ZIP Code, but opportunity is not.” So, in 2011 Mitch and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, set out to tackle this issue by investing in seed stage tech startups closing gaps of access, opportunity, or outcome for low-income communities and communities of color in the US. After more than 100 investments over eight years, Kapor Capital has not only been able to generate gap-closing social impact but has done so while achieving financial returns in the top quartile among VC funds of similar size. In this episode, Mitch shares lessons learned from his journey into impact investing and tries to dispel harmful biases still embedded in the VC community.

The post E24: “Angel” podcast: Mitch Kapor, Partner at Kapor Capital, shares stellar return results of their portfolio’s first-ever Impact Report, investing with purpose to close gaps & back entrepreneurs with distance traveled, insights on Uber’s IPO, fixing the gig economy, promoting diversity in Silicon Valley & creating long-term value v. short-term gains appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post E24: “Angel” podcast: Mitch Kapor, Partner at Kapor Capital, shares stellar return results of their portfolio’s first-ever Impact Report, investing with purpose to close gaps & back entrepreneurs with distance traveled, insights on Uber’s IPO, fixing the gig economy, promoting diversity in Silicon Valley & creating long-term value v. short-term gains appeared first on This Week In Startups.

Mitch Kapor, Partner at Kapor Capital, shares stellar return results of their portfolio's first-ever Impact Report, investing with purpose to close gaps & back entrepreneurs with distance traveled, insights on Uber's IPO, fixing the gig economy, promoting diversity in Silicon Valley & creating long-term value v. short-term gains

Venture capitalist and prominent activist Freada Kapor Klein, the founder of Kapor Capital, talks with Recode's Teddy Schleifer about diversity in tech and impact investing. In this episode: In this episode: Kapor Klein’s background; her first forays into activism; why the term “sexual coercion” is more meaningful in the workplace than “sexual harassment”; holding managers accountable when they don’t live a company’s values; why did Kapor Klein and her husband Mitch Kapor become impact investors?; how to have values as a VC; being an Uber investor during the company’s discrimination scandal; how is Dara Khosrowshahi doing?; why the venture capital industry is “flunking” the diversity test; startups that widen inequality; the problem with how All Raise measures diversity; Kapor Klein’s publicly quiet supporters; what does impact investing really mean?; Bill McGlashan and the college admissions scandal; making college admissions more equitable; why Kapor Klein is optimistic about the world; and the 2020 presidential campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When we talk about the broad swath of technology and its progenitors in Silicon Valley rarely are we talking about great breakthroughs. A new app for dating or dog walking, the one-hundredth messaging app or new forms of enterprise collaboration are hardly the stuff of Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates or Mitch Kapor or Robert Noyce or Bill Hewlett. But every once in a while there is a new new thing that really matters. Like the PC or the smartphone or Microsoft Word and Excell. For years, many thought something called Virtual Reality might be that thing. What was not know is that it would take a 19-year-old dreamer, one of odder character in a world that celebrates oddness, to make it a reality. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg the man that the European Union just called a “technology gangster,” would co-opt it and screw it up, only adds to an important chapter of legends of Silicon Valley. Like other legends, this one is told by Blake Harris in The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality My conversation with Blake Harris

Season 2 of Money + Meaning kicks off with a special episode featuring luminaries from the SOCAP18 main stage including Anand Giridharadas, Joy Anderson, Joan Carling, Mitch Kapor, and Amit Bhatia. Themes include gender lens investing, the racial wealth gap, indigenous rights, distinguishing real change from fake change, and how complex power structures underlie all these important discussions.

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)

Panel Brendan Eich Joe Eames Aaron Frost AJ ONeal Jamison Dance Tim Caswell Charles Max Wood Discussion 01:57 – Brendan Eich Introduction JavaScript [Wiki] Brendan Eich [Wiki] 02:14 – Origin of JavaScript Java Netscape Jim Clark Marc Andreesen NCSA Mosaic NCSA HTTPd Lynx (Web Browser) Lou Montulli Silicon Graphics Kernel Tom Paquin Kipp Hickman MicroUnity Sun Microsystems Andreas Bechtolsheim Bill Joy Sun-1 Scheme Programming Language Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) by Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman & Julie Sussman Guy Steele Gerald Sussman SPDY Rob McCool Mike McCool Apache Mocha Peninsula Creamery, Palo Alto, CA Main () and Other Methods (C# vs Java) Static in Java, Static Variables, Static Methods, Static Classes 10:38 – Other Languages for Programmers Visual Basic Chrome Blacklist Firefox 12:38 – Naming JavaScript and Writing VMs Canvas Andrew Myers 16:14 – Envisioning JavaScript’s Platform Web 2.0 AJAX Hidaho Design Opera Mozilla Logo Smalltalk Self HyperTalk Bill Atkinson HyperCard Star Wars Trench Run 2.0 David Ungar Craig Chambers Lars Bak Strongtalk TypeScript HotSpot V8 Dart Jamie Zawinski 24:42 – Working with ECMA Bill Gates Blackbird Spyglass Carl Cargill Jan van den Beld Philips Mike Cowlishaw Borland David M. Gay ECMAScript Lisp Richard Gabriel 31:26 – Naming Mozilla Jamie Zawinski Godzilla 31:57 – Time-Outs 32:53 – Functions Clojure John Rose Oracle Scala Async.io 38:37 – XHR and Microsoft Flash Hadoop Ricardo Jenez Ken Smith Brent Noorda Ray Noorda .NET Shon Katzenberger Anders Hejlsberg NCSA File Formats 45:54 – SpiderMonkey Chris Houck Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford – TXJS 2010 Douglas Crockford JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford TXJS.com ActionScript Flex Adobe E4X BEA Systems John Schneider Rhino JScript roku Waldemar Horwat Harvard Putnam Math Competition Chris Wilson Silverlight Allen Wirfs-Brock NDC Oslo 2014 JSConf Brendan JSConf Talks 59:58 – JavaScript and Mozilla GIP SSLeay Eric A. Young Tim Hudson Digital Styles Raptor Gecko ICQ and AIM PowerPlant CodeWarrior Camino David Hyatt Lotus Mitch Kapor Ted Leonsis Mitchell Baker David Baren Phoenix Tinderbox Harmony 1:14:37 – Surprises with Evolution of JavaScript Ryan Dahl node.js Haskell Elm Swift Unity Games Angular Ember.js Dojo jQuery react ClojureScript JavaScript Jabber Episode #107: ClojureScript & Om with David Nolen MVC 01:19:43 – Angular’s HTML Customization Sweet.js JavaScript Jabber Episode #039: Sweet.js with Tim Disney TC39 Rick Waldron 01:22:27 – Applications with JavaScript SPA’s Shumway Project IronRuby 01:25:45 – Future of Web and Frameworks LLVM Chris Lattner Blog Epic Games Emscripten Autodesk PortableApps WebGL 01:29:39 – ASM.js Dart.js John McCutchen Monster Madness Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban: TypeScript 0.9 – Generics and More (Channel 9, 2013) Legacy 01:32:58 – Brendan’s Future with JavaScript Picks hapi.js (Aaron) JavaScript Disabled: Should I Care? (Aaron) Aaron’s Frontend Masters Course on ES6 (Aaron) Brendan’s “Cool Story Bro” (AJ) [YouTube] Queen – Don't Stop Me Now (AJ) Trending.fm (AJ) WE ARE DOOMED soundtrack EP by Robby Duguay (Jamison) Hohokum Soundtrack (Jamison) Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe (Joe) Audible (Joe) Stripe (Chuck) Guardians of the Galaxy (Brendan)