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Totem cofounder and CEO Carter Fowler shares how he transformed a simple idea—a device that helps find friends at festivals without cell service—into a viral sensation and thriving brand. By focusing on founder-market fit, designing for organic sharing, and developing unique brand language, Totem created something people don't just buy, but buy into. Carter reveals how intentional branding from day one, customer conversations, and consistent storytelling through their newsletter ultimately attracted investors and unexpected market segments beyond their initial festival audience. Carter is cofounder and CEO at Totem, one of the fastest-growing consumer tech startups of 2024. His expertise in go-to-market, brand strategy, and product design has taken Totem's debut product from concept to global phenomenon in less than 12 months. In 2024 alone, Totem generated over 20 viral posts (1M+ views) and 130M+ organic views on social media while earning press coverage from NPR, Inc Magazine, and UNILAD under his marketing leadership. After only 5 months of shipping product, Totem has a broad international reach with customers in 60+ countries around the world. Carter is a firm believer in building brands with a "words-first" mentality. He is also an accomplished writer who had a selection of his work archived by the US Library of Congress as an "important cultural artifact" in 2018. He loves the coffee at Frothy Monkey in the historic Chattanooga Choo Choo in the Southside neighborhood of Chattanooga, Tennessee: https://frothymonkey.com/locations/southside-chattanooga-tn/ Connect with Carter Fowler on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carter-fowler-8835739b/ If you have any questions about brands and marketing, connect with the host of this channel, Itir Eraslan, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itireraslan/

Before getting into this new podcast, have you checked out the recent newsletter editions of Ground Truths?—how are gut microbiome drives sugar cravings—the influence of sleep on brain waste clearance and aging—the new findings of microplastics in the brain—the surprise finding about doctors and A.I.In this podcast with Dr. Emily Silverman, an internist and founder of The Nocturnists, an award winning podcast and live show, we discuss what inspired her in medicine, what led to her disillusionment, the essentiality of storytelling, of recognizing uncertainty, the limits of A.I., and promoting humanity in medicine. The audio is available on iTunes and Spotify. The full video is linked here, at the top, and also can be found on YouTube.“Storytelling is medicine's currency. Storytelling is not just an act of self-healing; it may actually create better physicians.”—Emily SilvermanTranscript with links to audio and relevant publications, websitesEric Topol (00:07):Well, hello. This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and with me, I am delighted to welcome Dr. Emily Silverman, who is Assistant Volunteer Professor of Medicine at UCSF, an old training grounds for me. And we're going to talk about some of the experience she's had there and she is the Founder of the remarkably recognized podcast, The Nocturnists. It's more than a podcast folks. We'll talk about that too. So Emily, welcome.Emily Silverman (00:40):Thank you for having me.Inspiration by Kate McKinnonEric Topol (00:42):Yeah. Well, I thought I would go back to perhaps when we first synapsed, and it goes back to a piece you wrote in JAMA about going to the Saturday Night Live (SNL) with Kate McKinnon. And it was one of my favorite columns, of course, it brought us together kind of simpatico because you were telling a story that was very personal, and a surprise factor added to it. We'll link to it. But it said, ‘Sometime in 2016, I fell in love with SNL comedian Kate McKinnon.' You wrote, ‘It was something about her slow-mo swagger; her unilateral dimple, flickering in and out of existence; the way she drinks up her characters and sweats them from her pores.' I mean, you're an incredible writer, no less podcast interviewer, organizer, doctor. And you talked about my sterile clinical life, which was kind of maybe a warning of things to come and about the fact that there's two very different career paths, comedy and medicine. One could argue they are in essence the same. So maybe you could tell us about that experience and about Kate McKinnon who, I mean, she's amazing.Emily Silverman (02:09):You're making me blush. Thank you for the kind words about the piece and about the writing, and I'm happy to give you a bit of background on that piece and where it came from. So I was in my internal medicine residency at UCSF and about halfway through residency really found myself hitting a wall. And that is actually what gave birth to The Nocturnists, which is the medical storytelling program that I run. But I think another symptom of my hitting that wall, so to speak, and we can talk more about what exactly that is and what that means, was me really looking outside of medicine and also outside of my typical day-to-day routine to try to find things that were a part of me that I had lost or I had lost touch with those aspects of myself. And one aspect of myself that I felt like I had lost touch to was my humorous side, my sense of humor, my silly side even you could say.Emily Silverman (03:17):And throughout my life I have this pattern where when I'm trying to get back in touch with a side of myself, I usually find somebody who represents that and sort of study it, I guess you could say. So in this case, for whatever reason that landed on Kate McKinnon, I just loved the surrealism of her comedy. I loved how absurd she is and loved her personality and so many things. Everything that you just read and really found her and her comedy as an escape, as a way to escape the seriousness of what I was doing on a day-to-day basis in the hospital and reconnect with those humorous sides of myself. So that's the understory. And then the story of the article is, I happened to be traveling to New York for a different reason and found myself standing in line outside of 30 Rock, hoping to get into Saturday Night Live. And there was basically a zero chance that we were going to get in. And part of the reason why is the musical guest that week was a K-pop band called BTS, which is one of the most famous bands in the world. And there were BTS fans like camped out in three circles around 30 Rock. So that week in particular, it was especially difficult to get in. There was just too many people in line. And we were at the very end of the line.Eric Topol (04:43):And it was in the pouring rain, too.Emily Silverman (04:45):And it was pouring rain. And my husband, God bless him, was there with me and he was like, what are we doing? And I was like, I don't know. I just have a feeling that we should stay in line, just go with it. So we did stay in line and then in the morning we got a number, and the way it works is you get your number and then that evening you show up with your number and our number was some crazy number that we weren't going to get in. But then that evening when we went back with our number to wait in line again to get in, what ended up happening is a young woman in the NBC gift shop, she passed out in the middle of the gift shop and I was right there. And so, I went over to her and was asking her questions and trying to help her out.Emily Silverman (05:27):And fortunately, she was fine. I think she just was dehydrated or something, and the security guards were so appreciative. And the next thing I knew, they were sweeping me backstage and up a staircase and in an elevator and they said, thank you so much for your service, welcome to Saturday Night Live. So it became this interesting moment where the very thing that I had been escaping from like medicine and serving and helping people ended up being the thing that gave me access, back to that side of myself, the humorous side. So it was just felt kind of cosmic, one of those moments, like those butterfly wing flapping moments that I decided to write about it and JAMA was kindly willing to publish it.Eric Topol (06:15):Well, it drew me to you and recognize you as quite an extraordinary talent. I don't know if you get recognized enough for the writing because it's quite extraordinary, as we'll talk about in some of your other pieces in the New York Times and in other JAMA journals and on and on. But one thing I just would note is that I resort to comedy a lot to deal with hard times, like the dark times we're in right now, so instead of watching the news, I watch Jimmy Kimmel's monologue or Colbert's monologue or the Comedy Show, anything to relieve some of the darkness that we're dealing with right at the moment. And we're going to get back to comedy because now I want to go back, that was in 2019 when you wrote that, but it was in 2016 when you formed The Nocturnists. Now, before you get to that critical path in your career of this new podcast and how it blossomed, how it grew is just beyond belief. But maybe you could tell us about your residency, what was going on while you were a medical resident at UCSF, because I can identify with that. Well, like any medical residency, it's pretty grueling experience and what that was like for you.Medical ResidencyEmily Silverman (07:45):There were so many wonderful positive aspects of residency and there were so many challenges and difficult aspects of residency. It's all mixed up into this sticky, complicated web of what residency was. On the positive side, some of the most amazing clinicians I've ever met are at UCSF and whether that was seasoned attendings or chief residents who they just seemed to have so many skills, the clinical, the research, the teaching, just amazing, amazing high caliber people to learn from. And of course, the patient population. And at UCSF, we rotate at three different hospitals, the UCSF hospital, the SF General Hospital, which is the public county hospital and the VA hospital. So having the opportunity to see these different patient populations was just such a rich clinical and storytelling opportunity. So there was a lot there that was good, but I really struggled with a few things.Emily Silverman (08:48):So one was the fact that I spent so much of my sitting in front of a computer, and that was not something that I expected when I went into medicine when I was young. And I started to learn more about that and how that happened and when that changed. And then it wasn't just the computer, it was the computer and other types of paperwork or bureaucratic hurdles or administrative creep and just all the different ways that the day-to-day work of physicians was being overtaken by nonclinical work. And that doesn't just mean thinking about our patients, but that also means going to the bedside, sitting with our patients, getting to know them, getting to know their families. And so, I started to think a lot about clinical medicine and what it really means to practice and how that's different from how it was 10, 20, 40 years ago.Emily Silverman (09:43):And then the other part of it that I was really struggling with was aspects of medical culture. The fact that we were working 80 hour weeks, I was working 28 hour shifts every fourth night, every other month. And the toll that took on my body, and I developed some health issues as a result of that and just felt in a way, here I am a doctor in the business of protecting and preserving health and my own health is kind of being run into the ground. And that didn't make sense to me. And so, I started asking questions about that. So there was a lot there. And at first I thought, maybe this is a me thing or maybe this is a California thing. And eventually I realized this was a national thing and I started to notice headlines, op-eds, articles, even pre-Covid about the epidemic of clinician burnout in this country.Emily Silverman (10:40):And there are so many different facets to that. There's the moral injury aspect of it, there's the working conditions and understaffing aspect of it. I learned about how physicians were starting to think about unionizing, which was something that had not really been in the physician, I think consciousness 20, 40 years ago. So just started learning a lot about how medicine had evolved and was continuing to evolve and felt myself wanting to create a space where people could come together and tell stories about what that was like and what their experience was. And that was the birth of The Nocturnists. But I guess that wasn't really your question. Your question was about residency.Birth of The NocturnistsEric Topol (11:20):That's a good answer actually. It kind of gives the background, lays the foundation of how you took a fork in the road here, which we're going to get into now. We're going to link to The Nocturnists website of course, but you have an intro there about, ‘shatter the myth of the “physician God” reveal the truth: that healthcare workers are human, just like everyone else, and that our humanity is our strength, not our weakness.' And that's a very deep and important point that you make to get people interested in The Nocturnists. But now you finished your residency, you're now on the faculty, assistant professor at UCSF, and then you have this gathering that you hadn't already named it the Nocturnists yet had you?Emily Silverman (12:15):I named it in residency.Eric Topol (12:17):Oh, okay in residency. So this was even before you had finished, you started the podcast before you finished?Emily Silverman (12:25):Correct. Before we were a podcast, we were a live show. So the very first live show was in 2016, so I consider that the birth year of the program. And then I graduated residency in 2017, so I started it about halfway through residency.Eric Topol (12:39):Got it. So tell us about that first live show. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Yeah.Emily Silverman (12:46):Yeah. I went to a live taping of The Moth in San Francisco, which some of your listeners may know. The Moth is a live storytelling show in the US, it's often on the radio on NPR. You may have heard it. It's a very ancient way of telling stories. It's more like monologues, people standing up on stage and just spontaneously telling a story the way you would around a campfire or something like that. It's not hyper scripted or anything like that. So I came out of that event feeling really inspired, and I had always loved live performance and live theater. I grew up going to the theater and ended up deciding that I would try that with my community, with the clinicians in my community. So the very first show that we did was in 2016, it was about 40 people in this living room of this Victorian mansion in San Francisco.Emily Silverman (13:42):It was a co-op where different people lived. In the living space, they occasionally rented out for meetings and presentations and gatherings, and it was like $90. So I rented that out and people came and residents, physician residents told stories, but a couple of faculty came and told stories as well. And I think that was a really nice way to set the stage that this wasn't just a med student thing or a resident thing, this was for everybody. And there was definitely an electricity in the air at the show. I think a lot of people were experiencing the same thing I was experiencing, which was having questions about the medical system, having questions about medical culture, trying to figure out how they fit into all of that, and in my case, missing my creative side, missing my humorous side. And so, I think that's the reason people came and showed up was that it wasn't just a night out of entertainment and coming was really more out of a hunger to reconnect with some aspect of ourselves that maybe gets lost as we go through our training. So that was the first show, and people kept asking, when are you going to do another one? When are you going to do another one? The rest is history. We have done many shows since then. So that was the beginning.Eric Topol (14:58):Well, you've been to many cities for live shows, you sold out hundreds and hundreds of seats, and it's a big thing now. I mean, it's been widely recognized by all sorts of awards, and the podcast and the shows. It's quite incredible. So a derivative of The Moth to medicine, is it always medical people telling stories? Does it also include patients and non-medical people?Emily Silverman (15:28):So we're nine years in, and for the first several years, this question came up a lot. What about the patient voice? What about the patient perspective? And the way that I would respond to that question was two ways. First, I would say the line between doctor and patient isn't as bright as you would think. Doctors are also patients. We also have bodies. We also have our own medical and psychiatric conditions and our own doctors and providers who take care of us. So we're all human, we're all patients. That said, I recognize that the doctor, the clinician has its own unique place in society and its own unique perspective. And that's really what I was trying to focus on. I think when you're making art or when you're making a community, people ask a lot about audience. And for me, for those first several years, I was thinking of The Nocturnists as a love letter by healthcare to healthcare. It was something that I was making for and with my community. And in recent months and years, I have been wondering about, okay, what would a new project look like that pulls in the patient voice a bit more? Because we did the clinician thing for several years, and I think there's been a lot of wonderful stories and material that's come out of that. But I'm always itching for the next thing. And it was actually an interview on the podcast I just did with this wonderful person, Susannah Fox.Eric Topol (17:04):Oh yeah, I know Susannah. Sure.Emily Silverman (17:04):Yeah. She was the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services from 2015 to 2017, I want to say. And she wrote a book called Rebel Health, which is all about patients who weren't getting what they needed from doctors and researchers and scientists. And so, they ended up building things on their own, whether it was building medical devices on their own, on the fringes or building disease registries and communities, online disease communities on their own. And it was a fabulous book and it was a fabulous interview. And ever since then I've been thinking about what might a project look like through The Nocturnists storytelling ethos that centers and focuses on the patient voice, but that's a new thought. For the first several years, it was much more focused on frontline clinicians as our audience.Why is Storytelling in Medicine so Important?Eric Topol (17:55):And then I mean the storytelling people that come to the shows or listen to the podcast, many of them are not physicians, they're patients, all sorts of people that are not part of the initial focus of who's telling stories. Now, I want to get into storytelling. This is, as you point out in another JAMA piece that kind of was introducing The Nocturnists to the medical community. We'll link to that, but a few classic lines, ‘Storytelling is medicine's currency. Storytelling is not just an act of self-healing; it may actually create better physicians.' And then also toward the end of the piece, “Some people also believe that it is unprofessional for physicians to be emotionally vulnerable in front of colleagues. The greater risk, however, is for the healthcare professional to appear superhuman by pretending to not feel grief, suffer from moral distress, laugh at work, or need rest.” And finally, ‘storytelling may actually help to humanize the physician.' So tell us about storytelling because obviously it's one of the most important, if not the most important form of communication between humans. You nailed it, how important it is in medicine, so how do you conceive it? What makes it storytelling for you?Emily Silverman (19:25):It's so surreal to hear you read those words because I haven't read them myself in several years, and I was like, oh, what piece is he talking about? But I remember now. Look, you on your program have had a lot of guests on to talk about the massive changes in medicine that have occurred, including the consolidation of it, the corporatization of it, the ways in which the individual community practice is becoming more and more endangered. And instead what's happening is practices are getting gobbled up and consolidated into these mega corporations and so on and so forth. And I just had on the podcast, the writer Dhruv Khullar, who wrote a piece in the New Yorker recently called the Gilded Age of Medicine is here. And he talks a lot about this and about how there are some benefits to this. For example, if you group practices together, you can have economies of scale and efficiencies that you can't when you have all these scattered individual self-owned practices.Emily Silverman (20:26):But I do think there are risks associated with the corporatization of healthcare. The more that healthcare starts to feel like a conveyor belt or a factory or fast food like the McDonald's of healthcare, MinuteClinic, 15 minutes in and out, the more that we risk losing the heart and soul of medicine and what it is; which is it's not as simple as bringing in your car and getting an oil change. I mean, sometimes it is. Sometimes you just need a strep swab and some antibiotics and call it a day. But I think medicine at its best is more grounded in relationships. And so, what is the modern era of medicine doing to those relationships? Those longitudinal relationships, those deeper relationships where you're not just intimately familiar with a patient's creatinine trend or their kidney biopsy results, but you know your patient and their family, and you know their life story a little bit.Emily Silverman (21:26):And you can understand how the context of their renal disease, for example, fits into the larger story of their life. I think that context is so important. And so, medicine in a way is, it is a science, but it's also an art. And in some ways it's actually kind of an applied science where you're taking science and applying it to the messy, chaotic truth of human beings and their families and their communities. So I think storytelling is a really important way to think of medicine. And then a step beyond that, not just with the doctor patient interaction, but just with the medical community and medical culture at large. I think helping to make the culture healthier and get people out of this clamped down place where they feel like they have to be a superhuman robot. Let's crack that open a little bit and remind ourselves that just like our patients are human beings, so are we. And so, if we can leverage that, and this is also part of the AI conversation that we're having is like, is AI ever going to fully substitute for a physician? Like, well, what does a physician have that AI doesn't? What does a human being have that a machine doesn't? And I think these are really deep questions. And so, I think storytelling is definitely related to that. And so, there's just a lot of rich conversation there in those spaces, and I think storytelling is a great way into those conversations.Eric Topol (22:57):Yeah. We'll talk about AI too, because that's a fascinating future challenge to this. But while you're talking about it, it reminds me that I'm in clinic every week. My fellow and I have really worked on him to talk to the patients about their social history. They seem to omit that and often times to crack the case of what's really going on and what gets the patient excited or what their concerns are really indexed to is learning about what do they do and what makes them tick and all that sort of thing. So it goes every which way in medicine. And the one that you've really brought out is the one where clinicians are telling their stories to others. Now you've had hundreds and hundreds of these physician related stories. What are some of the ones that you think are most memorable? Either for vulnerability or comedy or something that grabbed you because you've seen so many, and heard so many now.A Memorable StoryEmily Silverman (24:02):It's true. There have been hundreds of physician stories that have come through the podcast and some non-physician. I mean, we are, because I'm a doctor, I find that the work tends to be more focused around doctors. But we have brought in nurses and other types of clinicians to tell their stories as well, particularly around Covid. We had a lot of diversity of healthcare professionals who contributed their stories. One that stands out is dialogue that we featured in our live show. So most of our live shows up until that point had featured monologues. So people would stand on stage, tell their story one by one, but for this story, we had two people standing on stage and they alternated telling their story. There was a little bit more scripting and massaging involved. There was still some level of improvisation and spontaneity, but it added a really interesting texture to the story.Emily Silverman (24:58):And basically, it was a story of these two physicians who during Covid, one of them came out of retirement and the other one I think switched fields and was going to be doing different work during Covid as so many of us did. And they were called to New York as volunteers and ended up meeting in the JFK airport in 2020 and it was like an empty airport. And they meet there and they start talking and they realize that they have all these strange things in common, and they sit next to each other on the plane and they're kind of bonding and connecting about what they're about to do, which is go volunteer at the peak of Covid in New York City, and they end up staying in hotels in New York and doing the work. A lot of it really, really just harrowing work. And they stay connected and they bond and they call each other up in the evenings, how was your day? How was your day? And they stay friends. And so, instead of framing it in my mind as a Covid story, I frame it more as a friendship story. And that one just was really special, I think because of the seriousness of the themes, because of the heartwarming aspect of the friendship and then also because of the format, it was just really unusual to have a dialogue over a monologue. So that was one that stood out. And I believe the title of it is Serendipity in Shutdown. So you can check that out.Eric Topol (26:23):That's great. Love it. And I should point out that a lot of these clinical audio diaries are in the US Library of Congress, so it isn't like these are just out there, they're actually archived and it's pretty impressive. While I have you on some of these themes, I mean you're now getting into some bigger topics. You mentioned the pandemic. Another one is Black Voices in Healthcare, and you also got deep into Shame in Medicine. And now I see that you've got a new one coming on Uncertainty in Medicine. Can you give us the skinny on what the Uncertainty in Medicine's going to be all about?Uncertainty in MedicineEmily Silverman (27:14):Yes. So the American Board of Internal Medicine put out a call for grant proposals related to the topic of uncertainty in medicine. And the reason they did that is they identified uncertainty as an area of growth, an area where maybe we don't talk about it enough or we're not really sure how to tolerate it or handle it or teach about it or work with it, work through it in our practice. And they saw that as an area of need. So they put out this call for grants and we put together a grant proposal to do a podcast series on uncertainty in medicine. And we're fortunate enough to be one of the three awardees of that grant. And we've been working on that for the last year. And it's been really interesting, really interesting because the place my mind went first with uncertainty is diagnostic uncertainty.Emily Silverman (28:07):And so, we cover that. We cover diagnostic odyssey and how we cope with the fact that we don't know and things like that. But then there's also so many other domains where uncertainty comes up. There's uncertainties around treatment. What do we do when we don't know if the treatment's working or how to assess whether it's working or it's not working and we don't know why. Or managing complex scenarios where it's not clear the best way to proceed, and how do we hold that uncertainty? Prognostic uncertainty is another area. And then all of the uncertainty that pops up related to the systems issues in healthcare. So for example, we spoke to somebody who was diagnosed with colon cancer, metastatic to the liver, ended up having a bunch of radiation of the mets in the liver and then got all this liver scarring and then got liver failure and then needed a liver transplant and saw this decorated transplant surgeon who recommended the transplant was already to have that done.Emily Silverman (29:06):And then the insurance denied the liver transplant. And so, dealing with the uncertainty of, I know that I need this organ transplant, but the coverage isn't going to happen, and the spoiler alert is that he ended up appealing several times and moving forward and getting his transplant. So that one has a happy ending, but some people don't. And so, thinking about uncertainty coming up in those ways as well for patients. So for the last year we've been trying to gather these stories and organize them by theme and figure out what are the most salient points. The other exciting thing we've done with the uncertainty series is we've looked to people outside of medicine who navigate high uncertainty environments to see if they have any wisdom or advice to share with the medical community. So for example, we recently interviewed an admiral in the Navy. And this person who was an admiral in the Navy for many years and had to navigate wartime scenarios and also had to navigate humanitarian relief scenarios and how does he think about being in command and dealing with people and resources and it is life or death and holding uncertainty and managing it.Emily Silverman (30:18):And he had a lot of interesting things to say about that. Similarly, we spoke to an improvisational dancer who his whole job is to get on stage and he doesn't know what's going to happen. And to me, that sounds terrifying. So it's like how do you deal with that and who would choose that? And so, that's been really fun too, to again, go outside the walls of medicine and see what we can glean and learn from people operating in these different contexts and how we might be able to apply some of those.Eric Topol (30:51):Yeah, I mean this is such a big topic because had the medical community been better in communicating uncertainties in medicine, the public trust during the pandemic could have been much higher. And this has led to some of the real challenges that we're seeing there. So I'm looking forward to that series of new additions in The Nocturnists. Now, when you get this group together to have the live show, I take it that they're not rehearsed. You don't really know much about what they're going to do. I mean, it's kind of like the opposite, the un-TED show. TED Talk, whereby those people, they have to practice in Vancouver wherever for a whole week. It's ridiculous. But here, do you just kind of let them go and tell their story or what?Emily Silverman (31:44):In the beginning it was more open mic, it was more let them go. And then as the years went on, we moved more toward a TED model where we would pair storytellers with a story coach, and they would work together pretty intensively in the six to eight weeks leading up to the event to craft the story. That said, it was very important to us that people not recite an essay that they memorized word for word, which surprise, surprise physicians really love that idea. We're like, we're so good at memorization and we love certainty. We love knowing word for word what's going to come. And so, it's really more of this hybrid approach where we would help people get in touch with, all right, what are the five main beats of your story? Where are we opening? Where are we closing? How do we get there?Emily Silverman (32:34):And so, we'd have a loose outline so that people knew roughly what was going to, but then it wasn't until the night of that we'd fill in the blanks and just kind of see what happens. And that was really exciting because a lot of unexpected things happened. Certain stories that we thought would be really comedic ended up landing with a much more serious and thoughtful tone and vice versa. Some of the stories that we thought were really heavy would unexpectedly get laughs in places that we didn't expect. So I think the magic of live audience is, I guess you could say uncertainty of not quite knowing what's going to happen, and sort of a one time night.Eric Topol (33:17):I'd like to have a storytelling coach. That'd be cool. I mean, we could always be better. I mean, it takes me back to the first story you told with the Saturday Night Live and Kate McKinnon, you told the story, it was so great. But to make telling your story, so it's even more interesting, captivating and expressing more emotion and vulnerability and what makes the human side. I mean, that's what I think we all could do, you never could do it perfectly. I mean, that's kind of interesting how you organize that. Alright, well now I want to go back to your career for a moment because you got into The Nocturnists and these shows and you were gradually, I guess here we are in the middle and still a global burnout, depression, suicide among clinicians, especially physicians, but across the board. And you're weaning your time as a faculty member at UCSF. So what was going through your mind in your life at that time? I guess that takes us to now, too.A Career MoveEmily Silverman (34:36):Yeah, when I was a little kid, I always wanted to doctor and fully intended when I went to med school and residency to find my way as a physician and didn't really think I would be doing much else. I mean, I'd always love reading and writing and the arts, but I never quite thought that that would become as big of a piece of my career as it has become. But what ended up happening is I finished residency. I took a job in the division of hospital medicine at SF General and worked as a hospitalist for about four years and was doing that and balancing with my medical storytelling nonprofit and eventually realized that it wasn't quite working, it wasn't the right fit. And ended up taking a step back and taking a little break from medicine for a while to try to figure out how am I going to balance this?Emily Silverman (35:26):Am I going to shift and go full medicine and retire The Nocturnists? Am I going to go full art, creative journalism, writing and leave clinical medicine behind? Or am I going to continue to proceed in this more hybrid way where I do a little bit of practicing, and I do a little bit of creative on the side? And thus far, I have continued to pursue that middle road. So I ended up starting a new outpatient job, a part-time job that's actually outside of UCSF. I'm still on faculty at UCSF, but my practice now is in private practice. And so, I do that two days a week and it feeds me in a lot of ways and I'm really glad that I've continued to keep that part of myself alive. And then the rest of the days of the week I work from home and some of that is charting and doing clinical work and some of that time is podcasting and working on these other creative projects. So that's where I've landed right now. And I don't know what it will look like in 5, 10, 20 years, but for now it seems to be working.Taking On EpicEric Topol (36:31):Yeah. Well, I think it's great that you've found the right kind of balance and also the channel for getting your exceptional talent, your niche if you will, in medicine to get it out there because people I think are really deriving a lot of benefit from that. Now, another piece you wrote in the New York Times, I just want to touch on because it is tied to the burnout story. This was a great op-ed, Our Hospital's New Software Frets About My ‘Deficiencies' and I want to just warn the listeners or readers or watchers that Epic, this company that you wrote about has non-disparaging agreements with hospitals, censors hospitals and doctors to say anything bad about Epic. So when anybody ever writes something, particularly if it's published in a widely read place, the Epic company doesn't like that and they squash it and whatnot. So what was in your mind when you were writing this op-ed about Epic?Emily Silverman (37:39):So this came out of personal experience that I had where, and maybe this is some of the reason why the hospital medicine work wore me down so much is the frequent messages and alerts and popups just having a lot of fatigue with that. But also what the popups were saying, the language that they used. So you'd open up your electronic chart and a message would pop up and it would say, you are deficient, or it would say you are a delinquent. And it was this scary red box with an upside down exclamation point or something. And it really started to get to me, and this was definitely in that phase of my life and career where I was peak burnout and just kind of raging into the machine a little bit, you could say, I think right now I'm somewhat past that. I think part of the reason why is, I've been able to get myself out into a more sustainable situation, but ended up, it actually came out of me, this piece poured out of me one night.Emily Silverman (38:37):It was like two, three in the morning and my laptop was open and I was laying in bed and my husband was like, go to sleep, go to sleep. And I said, no, this wants to come out, these moments where things just, you just want to give birth, I guess, to something that wants to come out. So I wrote this long piece about Epic and how tone deaf these messages are and how clinicians are, they're working really hard in a really difficult system and just the lack of sensitivity of that language and ended up pitching that to the New York Times. And I think there was something in there that they appreciated about that. There was some humor in there actually. Maybe my Kate McKinnon side came out a little bit. So yes, that piece came out and I think I did get a message or two from a couple folks who worked at Epic who weren't thrilled.Eric Topol (39:33):They didn't threaten to sue you or anything though, right?Emily Silverman (39:35):They didn't. NoEric Topol (39:37):Good.Emily Silverman (39:37):Fortunately, yeah.Medicine and A.I.Eric Topol (39:38):Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it was great. And we'll link to that, too. Now, as they say in comedy, we're going to have a callback. We're going to go to AI, which we talked about and touched on. And of course, one of the things AI is thought that it could help reduce the burden of data clerk work that you've talked about and certainly affected you and affects every person in working in medicine. But I wanted to get to this. For me, it was like a ChatGPT moment of November 2022. Recently, I don't know if you've ever delved into NotebookLM.Emily Silverman (40:18):I have.Eric Topol (40:19):Okay, so you'll recognize this. You put in a PDF and then you hit audio and it generates a podcast of two agents, a man and a woman who are lively, who accurately take, it could be the most complex science, it could be a book, and you can put 50 of these things in and they have a really engaging conversation that even gets away from some of the direct subject matter and it's humanoid. What do you think about that?Emily Silverman (40:57):Well, a lot of what I know about AI, I learned from your book, Eric. And from the subsequent conversation that we had when you came on my podcast to talk about your book. So I'm not sure what I could teach you about this topic that you don't already know, but I think it's a deeply existential question about what it means to be human and how machine intelligence augments that, replaces that, threatens that. I don't really know how to put it. I had Jamie Metzl on the podcast. He's this great historian and science policy expert, and he was saying, I don't like the phrase artificial intelligence because I don't think that's what we're making. I think we're making machine intelligence and that's different from human intelligence. And one of the differences is human beings have physical bodies. So being a human is an embodied experience.Emily Silverman (41:57):A machine can't enjoy, I was going to say a cheeseburger and I was like, wait, I'm talking to a cardiologist. So a machine intelligence being can't enjoy a cucumber salad, a machine intelligence can't feel the endorphins of exercise or have sex or just have all of these other experiences that human beings have because they have bodies. Now, does empathy and emotion and human connection and relationships also fall into that category? I don't know. What is the substrate of empathy? What is the substrate of human connection and relationships and experience? Can it be reduced to zeros and ones or whatever, quantum computing, half zeros and half ones existing simultaneously on a vibrating plane, or is there something uniquely human about that? And I actually don't know the answer or where the edges are. And I think in 5, 10, 20 years, we'll know a lot more about what that is and what that means.Emily Silverman (42:55):What does that mean for medicine? I don't know about the human piece of it, but I think just practically speaking, I believe it will transform the way that we do medicine on so many levels. And this is what your book is about. Some of it is image analysis and EKG analysis, X-ray analysis and MRI analysis. And some of it is cognition, like diagnostic reasoning, clinical reasoning, things like that. I already use OpenEvidence all the time. I don't know if you use it. It's this basically a search engine kind of GPT like search engine that's trained on high quality medical evidence. I'm always going to OpenEvidence with questions. And I actually saw a headline recently, oh gosh, I'll have to fish it out and email it to you and you can link it in the show notes. But it's a little bit about how medical education and also medical certification and testing is going to have to quickly bring itself up to speed on this.Emily Silverman (43:56):The USMLE Step 1 exam, which all physicians in the US have to pass in order to practice medicine. When I took it anyway, which was back in I think 2012, 2013, was very recall based. It was very much based on memorization and regurgitation. Not all, some of it was inference and analysis and problem solving, but a lot of it was memorization. And as you said, I think Eric on our interview on my podcast, that the era of the brainiac memorizing Doogie Howser physician is over. It's not about that anymore. We can outsource that to machines. That's actually one of the things that we can outsource. So I'm excited to see how it evolves. I hope that medical schools and hospitals and institutions find ways safely, of course, to embrace and use this technology because I think it can do a lot of good, which is also what your book is about, the optimistic lens of your book.Eric Topol (44:55):Well, what I like though is that what you're trying to do in your work that you're passionate about is bringing back and amplifying humanity. Enriching the humanity in medicine. Whether that's physicians understanding themselves better and realizing that they are not just to be expected to be superhuman or non-human or whatever, to how we communicate, how we feel, experience the care of patients, the privilege of care of patients. So that's what I love about your efforts to do that. And I also think that people keep talking about artificial general intelligence (AGI), but that's not what we are talking about here today. We're talking about human emotions. Machines don't cry, they don't laugh. They don't really bond with humans, although they try to. I don't know that you could ever, so this fixation on AGI is different than what we're talking about in medicine. And I know you're destined to be a leader in that you already are. But I hope you'll write a book about medical storytelling and the humanity and medicine, because a natural for this and you're writing it is just great. Have you thought about doing that?Emily Silverman (46:24):It's very kind of you to say. I have thought about if I were to embark on a book project, what would that look like? And I have a few different ideas and I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Maybe I'll consult with you offline about that.Eric Topol (46:42):Alright, well I'd like to encourage you because having read your pieces that some of them cited here you have it. You really are a communicator extraordinaire. So anyway, Emily, thank you for joining today. I really enjoyed our conversation and your mission not just to be a physician, which is obviously important, but also to try to enhance the humanity in medicine, in the medical community particularly. So thank you.Emily Silverman (47:14):Thank you. Thank you for having me.***************************************Thanks for listening, watching or reading Ground Truths. Your subscription is greatly appreciated.If you found this podcast interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths—newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. And such support is becoming more vital In light of current changes of funding by US biomedical research at NIH and other governmental agencies. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Joseph Dolce; born October 13, 1947) is an American-Australian singer, songwriter, poet and essayist. Dolce achieved international recognition with his multi-million-selling novelty song, "Shaddap You Face", released worldwide under the name of his one-man show, Joe Dolce Music Theatre, in 1980–1981. The single reached number one in 15 countries. It has sold more than 450,000 copies in Australia and continues to be the most successful Australian-produced single worldwide, selling an estimated six million copies. It reached No. 1 on the Australian Kent Music Report Singles Chart for eight weeks from November 1980. 1947–1977: Early year Dolce was born in 1947 in Painesville, Ohio, the eldest of three children to Italian American parents. He graduated from Thomas W. Harvey High School in 1965. During his senior year, he played the lead role of Mascarille in Moliere's Les Précieuses Ridicules for a production staged by the French Club of Lake Erie Frie College, which was his first time on stage, acting and singing an impromptu song he created from the script. The play was well-received and his performance was noted by director Jake Rufli, who later invited him to be part of his production of Jean Anouilh's Eurydice. His co-star in Les Précieuses Ridicules was a sophomore on a creative writing scholarship at Lake Erie College, Carol Dunlop, who introduced him to folk music, poetry and the writings of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Dunlop later married the Argentine novelist Julio Cortazar. Dolce attended Ohio University, majoring in architecture, from 1965 to 1967 before deciding to become a professional musician. While attending college at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, he formed various bands including Headstone Circus, with Jonathan Edwards who subsequently went on as a solo artist to have a charting hit song in the US ("Sunshine"). Edwards subsequently recorded five Dolce songs including, "Athens County", "Rollin' Along", "King of Hearts", "The Ballad of Upsy Daisy" and "My Home Ain't in the Hall of Fame", the latter song becoming an alt country classic, also recorded by Robert Earl Keen, Rosalie Sorrels, JD Crowe & the New South and many others. 1978–1984: Move to Australia, "Boat People" and "Shaddap You Face" Dolce relocated to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, in 1978 and his first single there was "Boat People"—a protest song on the poor treatment of Vietnamese refugees—which was translated into Vietnamese and donated to the fledgling Vietnamese community starting to form in Melbourne. His one-man show, Joe Dolce Music Theatre, was performed in cabarets and pubs with various line-ups, including his longtime partner, Lin Van Hek.  In July 1980, he recorded the self-penned 'Shaddap You Face", for the Full Moon Records label, at Mike Brady's new studios in West Melbourne. When in Ohio, Dolce would sometimes visit his Italian grandparents and extended family—they used the phrases "What's the matter, you?" and "Eh, shaddap", which Dolce adapted and used in the song. He wrote the song about Italians living in Australia and first performed it at Marijuana House, Brunswick Street, Fitzroy in 1979. It became a multi-million-selling hit, peaking at No. 1 on the Australian Kent Music Report Singles Chart for eight weeks from November 1980,in the UK from February 1981 for three weeks, and also No. 1 in Germany, France, Fiji, Puerto Rico, the Canadian province of Quebec, Austria, New Zealand and Switzerland. Dolce received the Advance Australia Award in 1981. The song has had hundreds of cover versions over the decades including releases by artists as diverse as Lou Monte, Sheila (France), Andrew Sachs (Manuel, of Fawlty Towers), actor Samuel L. Jackson and hip-hop legend KRS-One. In 2018, the first Russian language version was released by two of Moscow's most popular singers, Kristina Orbakaite and Philipp Kirkoroy. The song has been translated into fifteen languages, including an aboriginal dialect. By February 1981, it had become Australia's best-selling single ever selling 290,000 copies, entering the Guinness Book of World Records and surpassing the previous record of 260,000 copies by Brady's own "Up There Cazaly". "Shaddap You Face" has continued to be licensed and recorded by other artists and companies since its release in 1980 with its most recent appearance, in 2021, as part of the US series The Morning Show (aka, Morning Wars in Australia.) Follow up single, "If You Wanna Be Happy" was released in 1981 and charted in Australia and New Zealand. In December 1981, Dolce released the album Christmas in Australia, which peaked at number 92 on the Australian chart. 1984–present With Lin Van Hek , he formed various performance groups including Skin the Wig, La Somnambule (1984) and the ongoing Difficult Women (1993). Van Hek and Dolce co-wrote "Intimacy", for the soundtrack of the 1984 film The Terminator, now part of the US Library of Congress collection. He was a featured lead actor in the Australian film Blowing Hot and Cold (1988). He has continued to perform solo and with Van Hek as part of their music-literary cabaret Difficult Women. In 2010, two of his photos were selected for publication in the US journal, Tupelo Quarterly. Since 2009, he has been a prolifically published poet in Australia. In 2010, he won the 25th Launceston Poetry Cup at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival. His poems were selected for Best Australian Poems 2014 & 2015. He was the winner of the 2017 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Health Poetry Prize, for a choral libretto, longlisted in the same year for the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Poetry Prize and included in the Irises anthology. He longlisted for the 2018 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's Poetry Prize and was included in the Silence anthology. He was Highly Commended for the 2020 ACU Poetry Prize] and included in the Generosity anthology. He was selected as the August 2020 City of Melbourne Poet Laureate. Since 2018, he has been the television and film reviews editor for Quadrant magazine.

In this episode of Pekingology, Freeman Chair in China Studies Jude Blanchette is joined by Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is also the Henry A Kissinger chair in foreign policy and international relations at the US Library of Congress, Washington DC. They discuss his recently co-authored book The Idea of China: Chinese Thinkers on Power, Progress, and People. (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2024)

The US Library of Congress says the Cassowary is the world's "Most Dangerous Bird!?" But is it? We talked with biologist Steven Portugal to find out. Steven Portugal's search for the Cassowary trip Cassowary (Wiki) Darren Naish on the 2023 Cassowary Florida Relocation Event Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

 In Other News with Ethan: US Library of Congress release this years National Recording Registry class, the Justice Dept. going after LiveNation, OJ Simpson's Bronco for sale, Apple is fixing a software glitch, and a star exploded.

TONY AWARD®, United States Congressional Record & National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, Hollywood Walk of Fame Inductee 2023!!Presidential Life Time Achievement Award, In Addition, Joseph Biden Public Service Award.The Music Historian in ME Loves to Talk to the Legends.Melba has NEW Music Compilation called "Imagine'. Already Topping the American & British Soul charts.Melba Moore has done it all, twice. At the tender age of 10, Melba notes that it was then that she was introduced to music and that “I didn't have any music in my life before my mother married my stepfather. He introduced music into our home and into my life.” From that moment forward, Melba began to develop her 5-octave, note-holding soprano that would soon bring audiences to their feet. Theater: Won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her role in the musical "Purlie," Replaced  Diane Keaton in  the Broadway musical "Hair" Was first African American woman to play the female lead in the musical "Les Misérables" on Broadway. The Newark, NJ Arts High School graduate started doing recording sessions after a chance meeting with singer/songwriter/composer Valerie Simpson (of Ashford & Simpson).  That opportunity in the studio led Melba in the company of the Broadway musical “HAIR!” First in the ensemble of the show, Melba's name was tossed into the conversation when actress Diane Keaton left the show and Melba took the female lead and broke all the rules, being the first Black woman to replace a white actress in a featured role on Broadway. The journey of Melba's career took her meteorically from there to the lead of “PURLIE,” a musical adaptation of a play written by acting husband and wife pioneers Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.  That role and its musical soundtrack would earn Moore a Grammy nomination as Best New Artist in 1971 and a Tony Award for Best Featured ActressTelevisionStarred in her own sitcom, "Melba Melba's Career continues with2024  Live Apperances at 54 Below in New York City this Spring.   MelbaMoore.com© 2024 Building Abundant Success!!2024 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASAmazon ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy:  https://tinyurl.com/BASAud

On this episode of Ancestral Health Today, we have a candid conversation with Pilar Eguez, PhD. We discussed the role of food and community and the ancestral ways of experiencing them. Pilar Egüez Guevara, PhD is an Ecuadorian award-winning filmmaker, cultural anthropologist, speaker and writer. She obtained her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, two MA degrees in Anthropology (University of Illinois) and Social Sciences (FLACSO-Ecuador) and a BA in Economics from Wellesley College. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in Community Health, in 2012 she co-founded and directed Comidas que Curan, an independent food education and media company dedicated to research and promote traditional foods and knowledge through ethnographic research and film.In 2021 the US Library of Congress selected Comidas que Curan's website for inclusion in the historic collection of Internet materials related to the Food and Foodways Web Archive.  Her films have won awards and have been screened in three different languages across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia.Her film Raspando Coco (2019), a documentary advocating for the preservation of the culinary traditions of Afro-Ecuadorians, is now part of the library collections of 20 colleges and universities across the United States. Raspando Coco was nominated for best documentary short by the Indie Short Fest in Los Angeles (2019) and best foreign documentary by the Firenze Film Festival in Florence (2019). She also received honorable mention for best female director by the Independent Shorts Awards in Los Angeles in 2019.More recently she worked as Producer and Distribution Executive for the documentary series Tarpuna of the Seed Savers of Ecuador. She produced the documentary series episode Tarpuna: Guardians of the Coconut and the Mangrove directed by Gustavo Chiriboga, awarded for Best Sound Design (Gold Award by Independent Shorts Awards 2023), Best Documentary Short (Platinum Award by Independent Shorts Awards 2023), Best Cinematography and Best Documentary in Sustainability (Nominations by WIFI Film Festival 2023). She was the Producer for the recently released documentary film Salango: A Living Ancestral Legacy (2023) directed by Esteban Cedeño. She also directed the documentary series Jóvenes Guardianes de Saberes (Youth Heritage Guardians) which is made of three short films produced and shot collaboratively with youth and women in rural coastal towns of Ecuador (2021).Through her research, public speaking and films, she amplifies the voices of older men and women who are the bearers of traditional knowledge about food and medicine in Ecuador. She has brought this work to communities in Ecuador through filmmaking and research education projects, as well as to US college students in the United States through film screenings and Q&A sessions. She has worked directly with communities for 20 years on participatory-research and community-based projects in Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, and the United States.She is a published author and speaks internationally on topics ranging from cultural history, food heritage, nutrition, health and conflict transformation. She is currently lecturer at the Anthropology Department of University of Massachusetts Amherst. Get full access to Ancestral Health Today Substack at ancestralhealth.substack.com/subscribe

CREATING INTERACTIVE EPISODES FOR SCHOOLS AND HAVING STUDENTS BUILD THEIR OWN MUSIC PROGRAMMING ANDS LESSONS ... BUILT ON HOW MUSIC IS PART OF AMERICAN CULTURE...,  SNOW AND CO 'S BERT SNOW AND MUZZY LANE'S DAVID McCALL  , COMPANIES THAT HAVE RECEIVED GRANTS TO CREATE THE PROJECT, VISIT TO EXPLAIN HOW ITS ALL GOING TO WORK,

CREATING INTERACTIVE EPISODES FOR SCHOOLS AND HAVING STUDENTS BUILD THEIR OWN MUSIC PROGRAMMING ANDS LESSONS ... BUILT ON HOW MUSIC IS PART OF AMERICAN CULTURE...,  SNOW AND CO 'S BERT SNOW AND MUZZY LANE'S DAVID McCALL  , COMPANIES THAT HAVE RECEIVED GRANTS TO CREATE THE PROJECT, VISIT TO EXPLAIN HOW ITS ALL GOING TO WORK,

"It's been surprising to me how quiet things have been in the humanities. Maybe we're all just taking it in, but I also think that - and this really makes me sad - the tech leaders have been looked at by the media and probably by the politicians themselves as being the important voices at the table for the implications of technology. And there's been a lot of confusion about scientific development versus speculation. So you're seeing everybody wanting to interview the CEOs at the big tech companies or the big AI researchers. And then all of a sudden the idea that they somehow have a monopoly on ideas about conscious machines, for example, or merging with AI. Elon Musk never stops with philosophical claims, and a lot of times you have to wonder what they're supposed to be doing for his stock values as opposed to whether they're true or not. But people just take this, sadly, as what the scientists or AI companies say. You know, well, 'they know the science, so it's got to be true.' But that is not the case. That's where the humanities should be more involved. And it's been a slow plotting situation to see people really step up. I've just been sort of taking it all in, and I've been doing a lot of advising in Washington. So maybe we're all waiting to see where this all goes, right? But I think at this point, I finally achieved a sort of confidence about how I think it's going to play out."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I'm using ChatGPT Plus, and you can do much better research. I think the scientific possibilities are amazing, and it's a very good research assistant. There are plugins you can use to go through scientific papers quickly. And if you feed it the right sort of data, it has near instantaneous access to a range of facts that helps me in my field. And I think any system that has these kinds of capacities...it's a sort of crowdsourced brain if you will. So it's roughly like the neocortex, very roughly. And it's a neocortex without a limbic system. So it's just an association engine without necessarily emotions, but it's able to quickly access a range of materials that humans can't. So there should be intriguing scientific discoveries, drug discovery, and computations. And of course, involving climate change."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So it's hard to tell exactly what the dangers are, but that's certainly one thing that we need to track that beings that are vastly intellectually superior to other beings may not respect the weaker beings, given our own past. It's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future.”Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I'm using ChatGPT Plus, and you can do much better research. I think the scientific possibilities are amazing, and it's a very good research assistant. There are plugins you can use to go through scientific papers quickly. And if you feed it the right sort of data, it has near instantaneous access to a range of facts that helps me in my field. And I think any system that has these kinds of capacities...it's a sort of crowdsourced brain if you will. So it's roughly like the neocortex, very roughly. And it's a neocortex without a limbic system. So it's just an association engine without necessarily emotions, but it's able to quickly access a range of materials that humans can't. So there should be intriguing scientific discoveries, drug discovery, and computations. And of course, involving climate change."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“So it's hard to tell exactly what the dangers are, but that's certainly one thing that we need to track that beings that are vastly intellectually superior to other beings may not respect the weaker beings, given our own past. It's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future.”Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"It's been surprising to me how quiet things have been in the humanities. Maybe we're all just taking it in, but I also think that - and this really makes me sad - the tech leaders have been looked at by the media and probably by the politicians themselves as being the important voices at the table for the implications of technology. And there's been a lot of confusion about scientific development versus speculation. So you're seeing everybody wanting to interview the CEOs at the big tech companies or the big AI researchers. And then all of a sudden the idea that they somehow have a monopoly on ideas about conscious machines, for example, or merging with AI. Elon Musk never stops with philosophical claims, and a lot of times you have to wonder what they're supposed to be doing for his stock values as opposed to whether they're true or not. But people just take this, sadly, as what the scientists or AI companies say. You know, well, 'they know the science, so it's got to be true.' But that is not the case. That's where the humanities should be more involved. And it's been a slow plotting situation to see people really step up. I've just been sort of taking it all in, and I've been doing a lot of advising in Washington. So maybe we're all waiting to see where this all goes, right? But I think at this point, I finally achieved a sort of confidence about how I think it's going to play out."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I work with Congress and some of the leaders in the intelligence community. There's work that's going on by AI companies, which may benefit humanity or may not, depending upon the AI regulations and the way that history plays out. And it's really hard to tell exactly what will happen. The first concern I have is with surveillance capitalism in this country. The constant surveillance of us because the US is a surveillance capitalist economy, and it's the same elsewhere in the world, right? With Facebook and all these social media companies, things have just been going deeply wrong. And so it leads me to worry about how the future is going to play out. These tech companies aren't going to be doing the right thing for humanity. And this gets to my second worry, which is how's all this going to work for humans exactly? It's not clear where humans will even be needed in the future."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I am the type of person who's endlessly interested in different topics, and that can lead to really fun things. I'm also very worried about the future of humanity. Maybe that's an outgrowth of being a parent. I have three teenagers, and I worry about where AI is headed. We are at a really interesting point in technology, and it's sort of an honor to be alive right now to witness all this. But to go back to consciousness, this is a key aspect of my sense of life, and it always bothers me when people haven't thought about it. Like I asked my husband the other day: how can people go through life without really thinking about or appreciating the fact that they are conscious beings?"Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I think people need to remember consciousness. I think it's the most central aspect of our existence. And I think we need to remember to appreciate that felt quality of experience and know what it is and know what it is not. So as we move forward and deliberate over the human future and grasp machine intelligence and see it increasing and improving, we need to understand what's distinctive about us. And I think having a better scientific and philosophical understanding of these questions is very important."Will AI become conscious? President Biden has just unveiled a new executive order on AI — the U.S. government's first action of its kind — requiring new safety assessments, equity and civil rights guidance, and research on AI's impact on the labor market. With this governance in place, can tech companies be counted on to do the right thing for humanity? Susan Schneider is a philosopher, artificial intelligence expert, and founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. She held the NASA Chair with NASA and the Distinguished Scholar Chair at the Library of Congress. She is now working on projects related to advancements in AI policy and technology, drawing from neuroscience research and philosophical developments and writing a new book on the shape of intelligent systems.www.fau.edu/artsandletters/philosophy/susan-schneider/index www.fau.edu/future-mind/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

This excerpt from episode 40 contains material independent of that episode's topic (collaborative circles) that might be of interest to people who don't care about collaborative circles. It mostly discusses a claim, due to Andy Clark, that words are not labels for concepts. Rather, words come first and concepts accrete around them. As a resolute, concepts are messy. Which is fine, because they don't need to be tidy.SourcesLouise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, 2011Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, 2011MentionedEmily Dickinson, "A narrow Fellow in the Grass", 1891 (I think version 2 is the original. Dickinson's punctuation was idiosyncratic, but early editions of her poetry conventionalized it.)Talking Heads, "Psycho Killer", 1977Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, 1997. (This is the source for much of the argument, but I'm relaying it second hand, from Barrett.)CreditsThe image titled "Girl seated in middle of room with books; smaller child standing on stool and wearing dunce cap" is via the US Library of Congress and has no restrictions on publication. It is half of a stereograph card, dating to 1908. 

Thank you for listening to the Left of Str8 Show, hosted by Scott Fullerton. The Left of Str8 Show was created for the LGBTQ Community and our Straight Allies, and we interview celebrities and personalities from the worlds of Entertainment, Foodies, Books, and Advocacy. We post our weekly lgbtq news show, The Rainbow Rundown on Mondays, Our Interviews post on Thursdays and Fridays, and we post our bonus "5 Questions With...." our Interviewee's on Tuesdays. Our newest show, "Bears of a Certain Age," airs on its own YouTube Channel in our partnership with The Queer Centric. Please share with your friends, follow us on social media @leftofstr8 and if you like us, please give our episodes a 5 star rating so more people will find them in the Algorithm. Today my guest is author and archivist JD Doyle, calling in from Houston, Texas. JD has created an amazing archive of lgbtq songs, artists, and Houston notables that has been cataloged by the US Library of Congress because it is such an exhaustive history of our lgbtq culture. Today our main topic is his new book, "1981 My Gay American Road Trip." You all know I love me a good road trip and this book has it all; over 140 pictures, 300 pages and 28 states. It's a great read and snapshot into the early pre-AIDS panic, with a powerful Prologue about the effects of the deadly virus since then. Check out his website at www.jddoylearchives.org and you can find them all over social media. I definitely recommend going thru the archives and please pick up this great book. Please give this interview a thumbs up here on YouTube and a 5 star rating on your favorite podcast distributor, and share with your friends so we can keep sharing great LGBTQ Content with you all. Also please support the show on our Patreon Page for as little as $3 a month, $8 a month, or $13 a month, to help cover show expenses and other costs. you can find us over at www.patreon.com/leftofstr8 .............Thanks, Scott

Foundations of Amateur Radio The first official telegram to pass between two continents was a letter of congratulations from Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom to President of the United States James Buchanan on 16 August 1858. The text is captured in the collection of the US Library of Congress. It's a low resolution image of a photo of a wood engraving. Based on me counting the characters, the text from the Queen to the President is about 650 characters. IEEE reports it as 98 words, where my count gives 103 words or 95 words, depending on how you count the address. Due to a misunderstanding between the operators at either end of the 3,200 km long cable, the message took 16 hours to transmit and 67 minutes to repeat back. If you use the shortest duration, the effective speed is just over one and a half Words Per Minute or WPM. That's not fast in comparison with speeds we use today. Until 2003, the ITU expected that emergency and meteorological messages should not exceed 16 WPM, that a second class operator could achieve 20 WPM and a first class operator could achieve 25 WPM. To put the message speed in context of the era, in 1856, RMS Persia, an iron paddle wheel steamship and at the time, the largest ship in the world, won the so-called "Blue Riband" for the fastest westbound transatlantic voyage between Liverpool and Sandy Hook. The journey took nine days, 16 hours and 16 minutes. Similarly, it wasn't until 1861 that a transcontinental telegraph was established across the United States. In 1841 it took 110 days for the news of the death in office of President William Henry Harrison to reach Los Angeles. Today that distance is covered by a 39 hour drive, a 5 hour flight, and about 12 milliseconds on HF radio. So, while the speed of the message might not be anything to write home about today, at the time it was world changing. Speed in Morse code is measured in a specific way. Based on International Morse code, which is what I'm using throughout this discussion, if you send the word "PARIS" a dozen times in a minute and the next time starts right on the next minute, you officially sent Morse at 12 WPM. Looking inside the message of the word "PARIS", it's made up of a collection of dits and dahs. If a dit is one unit of time, then the letter "a", represented by dit-dah, is six units long when you include the spacing. In total, the word "PARIS", including the space after it, is exactly 50 units long. When you send at 12 WPM, you're effectively sending 600 dit units per minute, or ten units or bits per second, each lasting a tenth of a second. Unfortunately, there is not a one-to-one relationship between Morse speed and ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Morse is made from symbols with varying lengths, where ASCII, the encoding that we really want to compare speeds with, has symbols with a fixed length. You cannot simply count symbols in both and compare their speeds, since communication speed is about what you send, how fast you send it, and how readable it is at the other end. Thanks to Aiden, AD8GM, who, inspired by my initial investigation, shared the idea and python code to encode Morse dits, dahs and spacing using a one for a dit, one-one-one for a dah, and zeros for spacing. This means that the letter "e" can be represented by "10" and the letter "t" by "1110". You can do this for the standard Morse word "PARIS" and end up with a combination of 50 zeros and ones, or exactly 50 bits. I've been extending the code that Aiden wrote to include other encoding systems. When I have something to show it will be on my GitHub page. However, using Aiden's idea, we gain the ability to directly compare sending Morse bits with ASCII bits, since they share the same zero and one encoding. If you use standard binary encoded ASCII, each letter takes up eight bits and the six characters for the word "PARIS", including the space, will take up 48 bits. Given that I just told you that the Morse version of the same message takes up 50 bits, you could now smile and say, see, ASCII is faster - wait, what? Yes, if you send the word "PARIS " using 8-bit binary coded ASCII it's two bits shorter than if you use Morse. Job done, roll the press, headline reads: "Morse is four percent slower than binary coded ASCII". Not so fast grasshopper. If you recall, American Morse code, the one that has Samuel Morse's name written all over it, was replaced by a different code, made by Friedrich Gerke which in turn was modified to become what we now know as International Morse code. Ask yourself, why did Gerke change the code? It turns out that one of the biggest issues with getting a message across an undersea cable was decoding the message at the other end. Let me give you an example, using American Morse, consider the encoding of "e", dit, and "o", dit-extra-space-dit and now try sending the word "seed" across a noisy line. Did you convey "seed", or was it "sod". In other words, there is room for ambiguity in the message and when you're talking about commerce, that's never a good basis for coming to a mutually binding agreement. It turns out that encoding needs to be more subtle than just creating a sequence of bits. Something else to consider, 10 bits per second is another way of saying 10 Hz, as-in, this is not just switching, we're dealing with frequencies and because we're not sending lovely sinusoidal waves, from a signal processing perspective, a very horrible square wave, we're also dealing with harmonics, lots of harmonics, and more of them as we speed things up. So, if you send binary coded ASCII and compare it to Morse code, will your message actually arrive? I'm Onno VK6FLAB

On this episode, your intrepid host falls down a rabbit hole while doing research for one thing, and ends up discovering something "new" that must be investigated further, the 1987 action/comedy Oklahoma Smugglers. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   You were probably expecting the third part of the Miramax Films in the 1980s series, and we will get to that one the next episode. But as often happens while I'm researching, I'll fall down a rabbit hole that piques my interest, and this time, it was not only discovering a film I had never heard of, but it fits within a larger discussion about disappearing media.   But before we get started, I need to send out a thank you to Matthew Martin, who contacted me via email after our previous episode. I had mentioned I couldn't find any American playdates for the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie The Quest around the time of its supposed release date of May 1st, 1986. Matthew sent me an ad from the local Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review dated July 18th, 1986, which shows the movie playing on two screens in Spokane, including a drive-in where it shared a screen with “co-hit” Young Sherlock Holmes. With that help, I was also able to find The Quest playing on five screens in the Seattle/Tacoma area and two in Spokane on July 11th, where it grossed a not very impressive $14,200. In its second week in the region, it would drop down to just three screens, and the gross would fall to just $2800, before disappearing at the end of that second week. Thank you to Matthew for that find, which gave me an idea.   On a lark, I tried searching for the movie again, this time using the director's last name and any day in 1986, and ended up finding 35 playdates for The Quest in Los Angeles, matinees only on Saturday, October 25th and Sunday, October 26th, one to three shows each day on just those two days.   Miramax did not report grosses.   And this is probably the most anyone has talked about The Quest and its lack of American box office. And with that, we're done with it. For now.   On this episode, we're going to talk about one of the many movies from the 1980s that has literally disappeared from the landscape. What I mean by that is that it was an independently made film that was given a Southern regional release in the South in 1987, has never been released on video since its sole VHS release in 1988, and isn't available on any currently widely used video platform, physical or streaming.   I'll try to talk about this movie, Oklahoma Smugglers, as much as I can in a moment, but this problem of disappearing movies has been a problem for nearly a century. I highlight this as there has been a number of announcements recently about streaming-only shows and movies being removed from their exclusive streaming platform, some just seven weeks after their premieres.   This is a problem.   Let me throw some statistics at you.   Film Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 that is dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, has estimated that half of all the films ever made before 1950 no longer exist in any form, and that only 10% of the films produced before the dawn of the sound era of films are gone forever. The Deutsche Kinemathek, a major film archive founded in Berlin in 1963, also estimates that 80-90% of all silent films ever have been lost, a number that's a bit higher than the US Library of Congress's estimation that 75% of all silent film are gone. That includes more than 300 of Georges Méliès' 500 movies, a 1926 film, The Mountain Eagle, that was the second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and London After Midnight, considered by many film historians to be “the holy grail” of lost films. A number of films from directors like Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and Leo McCarey are gone. And The Betrayal, the final film from pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, is no longer with us.    There are a number of reasons why many of these early movies are gone. Until the early 1950s, movies were often shot and printed on nitrate film, a highly flammable substance that can continue to burn even if completely submersed in water. During the earlier years of Hollywood, there were a number of fires on studio lots and in film vaults were original negatives of films were stored. Sometimes, studios would purposely incinerate old prints of films to salvage the silver particles within the nitrate film. Occasionally, a studio would destroy an older film when they remade that film with a new cast and director. And sometimes films, like Orson Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, would be dumped into the ocean off the Southern California coast, when studios no longer wanted to pay to store these elements.   Except Oklahoma Smugglers does not fit into any of those scenarios. It's less than forty years old, in color, with a synchronized soundtrack. It's crime was being a small budgeted independently distributed movie from an independent production company that was only released in a small section of the United States, and never got any traction outside of that region.   Not that this alone is why it disappeared.   You may recall hearing about David Zaslav, the head of the mega entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, cancelling the release of two completed films, a Batgirl movie that would have featured Michael Keaton's return as Batman a full year before The Flash, and a sequel to a fairly successful Scooby Doo animated movie. Warner Brothers had spent more than $200m between the two films. They were shot, edited and scored, and ready for release. Then Zaslav decided these were of the quality he expected for Warner Brothers movies, and wrote them off for the tax break. Unless someone at Warners somewhere down the line decides to pay back the tax incentive to the Fed, these two movies will never legally be allowed to be shown, effectively making them lost films.   Again, there are many ways for a film to become lost.   In our case, it seems that Oklahoma Smugglers is an unfortunate victim of being the one and only film to be produced by Cambridge Entertainment Corporation, based in Needham MA. The company was founded on September 10th, 1986 and went into involuntary dissolution on December 31st, 1990, so it's very likely that the company went bankrupt and no company was interested in picking up the assets of a small independent production company with only one tangible asset, this movie.   So here is what I could find about Oklahoma Smugglers.   The film was produced and directed by Ota Richter, whose only previous film work was writing, producing a directing a horror comedy called Skullduggery in 1982. The film has its fans, but they are few and far between. Three years later, in 1985, Richter would work with a first time screenwriter named Sven Simon to come up with the story for Oklahoma Smugglers. When the script was completed, Richter would raise the money he would need to shoot the movie in Toronto with a no-name cast lead by George Buzz and John Novak, and a four week production schedule between February 24th and March 21st, 1986. One can presume the film was locked before September 10th, 1986, when Cambridge Entertainment Corporation was founded, with Ota Rickter as its treasurer. The other two members of the Cambridge board, company President Neil T. Evans, and company Secretary Robert G. Parks, appear to have not had any involvement with the making of the movie, and according to the Open Corporates database, the men had never worked together before and never worked together again after this company.   But what Neil Evans did have, amongst the six companies he was operating in and around the Boston area at the time, was a independent distribution company called Sharp Features, which he had founded in April of 1981, and had already distributed five other movies, including the Dick Shawn comedy Good-bye Cruel World, which apparently only played in Nashville TN in September 1982, and a 1985 documentary about The Beach Boys.   So after a year of shopping the film around the major studios and bigger independent distributors, the Cambridge team decided to just release it themselves through Sharp Features. They would place an ad in the September 16th, 1987 issue of Variety, announcing the film, quote unquote, opens the Southeast on September 18th, just two days later.   Now, you'll notice I was able to find a lot of information about the people behind the film. About the companies they created or had already created to push the film out into the market. The dates it filmed, and where it filmed. I have a lot of sources both online and in my office with more data about almost every film ever released. But what I can't tell you is if the film actually did open on September 18th, 1987. Or how many theatres it played in. Or how much it grossed that first weekend. Or if any theatres retained it for a second week. Or any reviews of the movie from any contemporary newspaper or magazine. Outside of the same one single sentence synopsis of the movie, I had to turn to a Finnish VHS release of the film for a more detailed synopsis, which roughly translates back into English as such:   “Former Marines Hugo and Skip are living the best days of their lives. Hugo is a real country boy and Skip again from a "better family." Together they are a perfect pair: where Skip throws, Hugo hurls his fists. Mr. Milk, who offers security services, takes them on. Mr. Milk's biggest dream is to get hold of his nemesis "Oklahoma Smuggler" Taip's most cherished asset - a lucrative casino. Mr. Taip is not only a casino owner, but he handles everything possible, from arms smuggling to drugs. The fight for the ownership of the Oklahoma Smuggler casino is a humorous mix of fistfights, intrigues and dynamite where Hugo and Skip get the hero's part. What happens to the casino is another matter.”   Okay, that sounds like absolute crap.   But here's the thing.   I actually enjoy checking out low budget movies that might not be very good but are at least trying to be something.   I would be very interested in seeing a movie like Oklahoma Smugglers. But I can't the darn thing anywhere. It's not posted to YouTube or Vimeo or any video sharing service I know of. It's not on The Internet Archive. It's not on any of the Russian video sites that I occasionally find otherwise hard to find movies.   There's no entry for the film on Wikipedia or on Rotten Tomatoes. There is an IMDb page for the film, with a grand total of one user rating and one user review, both from the same person. There's also only one rating and mini-review of it on Letterboxd, also from the same person. There is a page for the film on the Plex website, but no one has the actual film.   This film has, for all intents and purposes, vanished.   Is that a good thing?   Absolutely not.   While it's highly likely Oklahoma Smugglers is not a very good movie, there's also a chance it might actually be stupid, goofy fun, and even if its a low quality dupe off a VHS tape, it should be available for viewing. There should be some kind of movie repository that has every movie still around that is in the public domain be available for viewing. Or if the owners of a movie with a still enforceable copyright have basically abandoned said copyright by not making the film available for consumption after a certain amount of time or for a certain amount of time, it also become available. This would not only help films like Oklahoma Smugglers be discovered, but it would also give film lovers the chance to see many movies they've heard about but have never had the opportunity to see. Even the original theatrical version of the first three Star Wars movies are no longer available commercially. Outside of a transfer of the early 1990s laserdisc to DVD in 2004, no one has been able to see the original versions in nearly twenty years. The closest one can get now are fan created “Despecialized” editions on the internet.   Film fans tend to think of film as a forever medium, but it's becoming ever increasingly clear that it far from that. And we're not just talking about American movies either. When I said it is estimated that half the films ever made are considered lost, that includes movies from all corners of the globe, across several generations. From Angola and Australia to the former Yugoslavia and Zambia. Gone forever.   But every once in a while, a forgotten film can come back to life. Case in point, The Exiles, a 1958 film written, produced and directed by Kent Mackenzie, about a group of Native Americans who have left their reservation in search of a new life in Los Angeles' Bunker Hill neighborhood. After premiering at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the film was never picked up for theatrical distribution, and for many years, the only way to see it was the occasional screening of the film as some college film society screening of the one 16mm print of the film that was still around. Cinephiles were aware of the film, but it wouldn't be until the exceptional 2004 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Anderson that many, including myself, even learned of the film's existence. It would take another four years of legal maneuvering for Milestone Films to finally give The Exiles a proper theatrical and home video release. The following year, in 2009, with new public exposure to the film, the Library of Congress included The Exiles on their National Film Registry, for being of culturally, historically or aesthetically" significance. In the case of The Exiles, much of Bunker Hill was torn down shortly after the making of the film, so in many ways, The Exiles is a living visual history of an area of Los Angeles that no longer exists in that way. It's a good film regardless, but as a native Angelino, I find The Exiles to be fascinating for all these places that disappeared in just a few short years before my own birth.   So, that's the episode for this week.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue our miniseries on Miramax Films in the 1980s.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Oklahoma Smugglers.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.  

On this episode, your intrepid host falls down a rabbit hole while doing research for one thing, and ends up discovering something "new" that must be investigated further, the 1987 action/comedy Oklahoma Smugglers. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it's The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.   You were probably expecting the third part of the Miramax Films in the 1980s series, and we will get to that one the next episode. But as often happens while I'm researching, I'll fall down a rabbit hole that piques my interest, and this time, it was not only discovering a film I had never heard of, but it fits within a larger discussion about disappearing media.   But before we get started, I need to send out a thank you to Matthew Martin, who contacted me via email after our previous episode. I had mentioned I couldn't find any American playdates for the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie The Quest around the time of its supposed release date of May 1st, 1986. Matthew sent me an ad from the local Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review dated July 18th, 1986, which shows the movie playing on two screens in Spokane, including a drive-in where it shared a screen with “co-hit” Young Sherlock Holmes. With that help, I was also able to find The Quest playing on five screens in the Seattle/Tacoma area and two in Spokane on July 11th, where it grossed a not very impressive $14,200. In its second week in the region, it would drop down to just three screens, and the gross would fall to just $2800, before disappearing at the end of that second week. Thank you to Matthew for that find, which gave me an idea.   On a lark, I tried searching for the movie again, this time using the director's last name and any day in 1986, and ended up finding 35 playdates for The Quest in Los Angeles, matinees only on Saturday, October 25th and Sunday, October 26th, one to three shows each day on just those two days.   Miramax did not report grosses.   And this is probably the most anyone has talked about The Quest and its lack of American box office. And with that, we're done with it. For now.   On this episode, we're going to talk about one of the many movies from the 1980s that has literally disappeared from the landscape. What I mean by that is that it was an independently made film that was given a Southern regional release in the South in 1987, has never been released on video since its sole VHS release in 1988, and isn't available on any currently widely used video platform, physical or streaming.   I'll try to talk about this movie, Oklahoma Smugglers, as much as I can in a moment, but this problem of disappearing movies has been a problem for nearly a century. I highlight this as there has been a number of announcements recently about streaming-only shows and movies being removed from their exclusive streaming platform, some just seven weeks after their premieres.   This is a problem.   Let me throw some statistics at you.   Film Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 that is dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, has estimated that half of all the films ever made before 1950 no longer exist in any form, and that only 10% of the films produced before the dawn of the sound era of films are gone forever. The Deutsche Kinemathek, a major film archive founded in Berlin in 1963, also estimates that 80-90% of all silent films ever have been lost, a number that's a bit higher than the US Library of Congress's estimation that 75% of all silent film are gone. That includes more than 300 of Georges Méliès' 500 movies, a 1926 film, The Mountain Eagle, that was the second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and London After Midnight, considered by many film historians to be “the holy grail” of lost films. A number of films from directors like Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and Leo McCarey are gone. And The Betrayal, the final film from pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, is no longer with us.    There are a number of reasons why many of these early movies are gone. Until the early 1950s, movies were often shot and printed on nitrate film, a highly flammable substance that can continue to burn even if completely submersed in water. During the earlier years of Hollywood, there were a number of fires on studio lots and in film vaults were original negatives of films were stored. Sometimes, studios would purposely incinerate old prints of films to salvage the silver particles within the nitrate film. Occasionally, a studio would destroy an older film when they remade that film with a new cast and director. And sometimes films, like Orson Welles' original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, would be dumped into the ocean off the Southern California coast, when studios no longer wanted to pay to store these elements.   Except Oklahoma Smugglers does not fit into any of those scenarios. It's less than forty years old, in color, with a synchronized soundtrack. It's crime was being a small budgeted independently distributed movie from an independent production company that was only released in a small section of the United States, and never got any traction outside of that region.   Not that this alone is why it disappeared.   You may recall hearing about David Zaslav, the head of the mega entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, cancelling the release of two completed films, a Batgirl movie that would have featured Michael Keaton's return as Batman a full year before The Flash, and a sequel to a fairly successful Scooby Doo animated movie. Warner Brothers had spent more than $200m between the two films. They were shot, edited and scored, and ready for release. Then Zaslav decided these were of the quality he expected for Warner Brothers movies, and wrote them off for the tax break. Unless someone at Warners somewhere down the line decides to pay back the tax incentive to the Fed, these two movies will never legally be allowed to be shown, effectively making them lost films.   Again, there are many ways for a film to become lost.   In our case, it seems that Oklahoma Smugglers is an unfortunate victim of being the one and only film to be produced by Cambridge Entertainment Corporation, based in Needham MA. The company was founded on September 10th, 1986 and went into involuntary dissolution on December 31st, 1990, so it's very likely that the company went bankrupt and no company was interested in picking up the assets of a small independent production company with only one tangible asset, this movie.   So here is what I could find about Oklahoma Smugglers.   The film was produced and directed by Ota Richter, whose only previous film work was writing, producing a directing a horror comedy called Skullduggery in 1982. The film has its fans, but they are few and far between. Three years later, in 1985, Richter would work with a first time screenwriter named Sven Simon to come up with the story for Oklahoma Smugglers. When the script was completed, Richter would raise the money he would need to shoot the movie in Toronto with a no-name cast lead by George Buzz and John Novak, and a four week production schedule between February 24th and March 21st, 1986. One can presume the film was locked before September 10th, 1986, when Cambridge Entertainment Corporation was founded, with Ota Rickter as its treasurer. The other two members of the Cambridge board, company President Neil T. Evans, and company Secretary Robert G. Parks, appear to have not had any involvement with the making of the movie, and according to the Open Corporates database, the men had never worked together before and never worked together again after this company.   But what Neil Evans did have, amongst the six companies he was operating in and around the Boston area at the time, was a independent distribution company called Sharp Features, which he had founded in April of 1981, and had already distributed five other movies, including the Dick Shawn comedy Good-bye Cruel World, which apparently only played in Nashville TN in September 1982, and a 1985 documentary about The Beach Boys.   So after a year of shopping the film around the major studios and bigger independent distributors, the Cambridge team decided to just release it themselves through Sharp Features. They would place an ad in the September 16th, 1987 issue of Variety, announcing the film, quote unquote, opens the Southeast on September 18th, just two days later.   Now, you'll notice I was able to find a lot of information about the people behind the film. About the companies they created or had already created to push the film out into the market. The dates it filmed, and where it filmed. I have a lot of sources both online and in my office with more data about almost every film ever released. But what I can't tell you is if the film actually did open on September 18th, 1987. Or how many theatres it played in. Or how much it grossed that first weekend. Or if any theatres retained it for a second week. Or any reviews of the movie from any contemporary newspaper or magazine. Outside of the same one single sentence synopsis of the movie, I had to turn to a Finnish VHS release of the film for a more detailed synopsis, which roughly translates back into English as such:   “Former Marines Hugo and Skip are living the best days of their lives. Hugo is a real country boy and Skip again from a "better family." Together they are a perfect pair: where Skip throws, Hugo hurls his fists. Mr. Milk, who offers security services, takes them on. Mr. Milk's biggest dream is to get hold of his nemesis "Oklahoma Smuggler" Taip's most cherished asset - a lucrative casino. Mr. Taip is not only a casino owner, but he handles everything possible, from arms smuggling to drugs. The fight for the ownership of the Oklahoma Smuggler casino is a humorous mix of fistfights, intrigues and dynamite where Hugo and Skip get the hero's part. What happens to the casino is another matter.”   Okay, that sounds like absolute crap.   But here's the thing.   I actually enjoy checking out low budget movies that might not be very good but are at least trying to be something.   I would be very interested in seeing a movie like Oklahoma Smugglers. But I can't the darn thing anywhere. It's not posted to YouTube or Vimeo or any video sharing service I know of. It's not on The Internet Archive. It's not on any of the Russian video sites that I occasionally find otherwise hard to find movies.   There's no entry for the film on Wikipedia or on Rotten Tomatoes. There is an IMDb page for the film, with a grand total of one user rating and one user review, both from the same person. There's also only one rating and mini-review of it on Letterboxd, also from the same person. There is a page for the film on the Plex website, but no one has the actual film.   This film has, for all intents and purposes, vanished.   Is that a good thing?   Absolutely not.   While it's highly likely Oklahoma Smugglers is not a very good movie, there's also a chance it might actually be stupid, goofy fun, and even if its a low quality dupe off a VHS tape, it should be available for viewing. There should be some kind of movie repository that has every movie still around that is in the public domain be available for viewing. Or if the owners of a movie with a still enforceable copyright have basically abandoned said copyright by not making the film available for consumption after a certain amount of time or for a certain amount of time, it also become available. This would not only help films like Oklahoma Smugglers be discovered, but it would also give film lovers the chance to see many movies they've heard about but have never had the opportunity to see. Even the original theatrical version of the first three Star Wars movies are no longer available commercially. Outside of a transfer of the early 1990s laserdisc to DVD in 2004, no one has been able to see the original versions in nearly twenty years. The closest one can get now are fan created “Despecialized” editions on the internet.   Film fans tend to think of film as a forever medium, but it's becoming ever increasingly clear that it far from that. And we're not just talking about American movies either. When I said it is estimated that half the films ever made are considered lost, that includes movies from all corners of the globe, across several generations. From Angola and Australia to the former Yugoslavia and Zambia. Gone forever.   But every once in a while, a forgotten film can come back to life. Case in point, The Exiles, a 1958 film written, produced and directed by Kent Mackenzie, about a group of Native Americans who have left their reservation in search of a new life in Los Angeles' Bunker Hill neighborhood. After premiering at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the film was never picked up for theatrical distribution, and for many years, the only way to see it was the occasional screening of the film as some college film society screening of the one 16mm print of the film that was still around. Cinephiles were aware of the film, but it wouldn't be until the exceptional 2004 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Anderson that many, including myself, even learned of the film's existence. It would take another four years of legal maneuvering for Milestone Films to finally give The Exiles a proper theatrical and home video release. The following year, in 2009, with new public exposure to the film, the Library of Congress included The Exiles on their National Film Registry, for being of culturally, historically or aesthetically" significance. In the case of The Exiles, much of Bunker Hill was torn down shortly after the making of the film, so in many ways, The Exiles is a living visual history of an area of Los Angeles that no longer exists in that way. It's a good film regardless, but as a native Angelino, I find The Exiles to be fascinating for all these places that disappeared in just a few short years before my own birth.   So, that's the episode for this week.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue our miniseries on Miramax Films in the 1980s.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Oklahoma Smugglers.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.  

This presentation will focus on the migration of Kazakhs, Uyghurs, Russians and some other ethnic groups from Xinjiang province of China to Soviet Kazakhstan in the 1950-60s. Discussion of the migration based on analysis of the Soviet archival materials as well as oral histories of migrants will be put into the context of the Great Game paradigm, that is a struggle of great powers for domination in Central Asia. Besides the historical background of the migration, we will examine the main factors of the migration. repatriation of Soviet citizens from Xinjiang and Manchuria and settling them in the ‘virgin lands' of Kazakhstan. Main stages of the mass migration, its ‘push' and ‘pull' factors, adaptation of migrants to Soviet environment and their involvement in the Sino-Soviet ideological war in the 1970-1980s, emergence of the ‘Chinese' segments among the ethnic communities of Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics will be other issues to be discussed. About the speaker: Graduate of the Department of Oriental studies (China studies) of the Tashkent State University in 1984. Accomplished aspirantura (PhD) program at the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies (present Institute of Oriental manuscripts, St. Petersburg) and earned his PhD degree from that Institute in 1990. Gained his D.Sc. degree (habilitation) from the Institute of Oriental Studies in Almaty, Kazakhstan. His main academic interests include History of Turkic peoples of China, with a special focus on Uyghurs. His latest publications include monographs “Uyghurs of Kazakhstan”, “Dungans of Kazakhstan” (both: 2016), “Oral History of Migration of 1950-1970s from China to Kazakhstan” (ed., 2022) and “Links Across Time: Taranchis During the Uprising of 1916 in Semirech'e and the “Atu” Massacre of 1918”, in The Central Asian Revolt of 1916. A collapsing Empire in the age of war and revolution (Manchester, 2020: 227-255), “Uyghur Historiography”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2021), “Nation, religion and social heat: heritaging Uyghur mäshräp in Kazakhstan”, in Central Asian Survey (2021: 9-33; co-authored with R. Harris). Held positions of visiting scholar at the University of Washington (Seattle), the US Library of Congress, Indiana University (Bloomington IN), University of Oxford (UK), and Maison des sciences de l'Homme (Paris). He served as President of European Society of Central Asian Studies (ESCAS) in 2020-2022), and was elected President of Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) in 2022. Editorial Board member of ‘Central Asian Survey' (UK) and other journals.

Listening to the radio a couple weeks ago, I came across an interview discussing the 25 recordings the US Library of Congress had selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry this year. Among this list were some familiar sounds like Jimmy Buffett's “Margaritaville,” Mariah Carey's omnipresent “All I Want for Christmas is You,” John Lennon's “Imagine” and the theme song for the Super Mario Brothers Game- which immediately took me back to many Saturday mornings trying to save Princess Peach and collect as many gold coins as possible. But there was one recording that I was especially excited to hear had been selected. It's the recording of “Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan. You see, the photo of the Pale Blue Dot hangs in my office. And I believe it is the single most important photograph taken in the history of the world. Let me explain.

“It's just easier if I do it myself.” “No one does it as good as I do it” “They just don't care as much as I do.” These are all statements that I have heard you make, and they are all statements that will sabotage your Executive Leadership. The leader could drive the tractor, could fulfill the order, could supervise the build, could execute the transaction, could meet with the client, and could negotiate the material pricing. But the Executive Leader reminds herself that she has “Proximity to motivate a team to pursue the named future you see” The Executive Leader creates proximity.  They receive a phone call from the client and elect not to respond, or to immediately pass it to the trained and capable team member who can respond within the core values. The Executive Leader intentionally withholds their response…even when it is helpful, knowing that their discipline will create an opportunity for their team to get more reps in a crucial part of their business. When an Executive Leader willfully withholds a natural response in a display of self-discipline, it will be misunderstood and will be questioned… and it will create the value of another rep for the leader to whom that response has been delegated. John Maxwell famously stated, “If someone else can do a task at least 80% as well as I can, I give it to them.”  The math of that reasoning tells us that 20% of their work may not hold up to your personal standard… and yet, the 80% that they take from you allows you to be freed up to pursue the highest and best use of your time. Money can always be regenerated… time and attention cannot. An Executive Leader must guard her time because nothing she has dominion over is of more value than how she spends her time.  Yet, we waste it on task management and decisions that others could easily make (even if they don't perfectly align with our decision).  You might have selected a circle while your leader selected an oval, but either way the decision is done and allows the organization to hit on the mission within the guideline of the values.  That's a WIN! Starting and building your business required a relentless, red-eyed, sacrificial devotion to doing and seeing it all. Be free from that.  What you have built is good, valuable, helpful, beneficial, and powerful… but not if you are going to insert yourself in every little task and decision thereby sabotaging growth and therefore opportunity. When the growth of a business is stunted so too are the growth opportunities for each team member.  As a business grows, so too the roles required of which existing team members have opportunity for promotion.   Executive Leaders are more like pilots; build the initial systems to operate the plane, and then set the GPS coordinates and allow the people and systems to get you there.  What are the indicators that you are moving in the right direction of Executive Leadership? First, You will spend far more time on vision and people, than you will on process and task. The executive leader will have multiple calendared times throughout each year they gather the entire company together in person or virtual and read back through their written vision story, mission, and values followed by a self-evaluation of “Green/Yellow/Red” flags in the business.  These vision days with the added addition of flag-reflections offers the executive leader and the team a sobering, in-the-moment consideration of where they think they stand in a number of business and personnel areas. The executive leader will be in a continual state of learning and understanding the art and science of human psychology and personality.  They will take seriously the objective insights of profiles and assessments while pursuing acumen into generational diversity, trends, and norms while training their leaders on what they see and hear..   Second, you will have a defined and published group of tapped leaders in place, and those leaders will begin showing evidence of building and refining the team to carry the heavy loads of business.   In this case, published means a visual org chart, formally communicated to the team, while you make space in team meetings and check ins for investing time and attention through line item training and with the culture calendar review.   Published is public and the Latin root “pub” means a collection of people.  If the people have confusion about who is leading, then your leadership is not published.    The third indicator of executive leadership is revealed when you begin having greater proximity to your leaders; both close and far away. Proximity towards your leaders comes by way of the RPMs of great leadership that we talk about frequently. Repetitious proximity is an engagement that happens over and over realizing that once is never enough. Predictable proximity is an engagement that happens without surprise allowing for clarity and sobriety in thoughtful and timely conversation.  The micro-manager asks the wrong question at the wrong time, whereas the executive leader asks the right question at the right time. You will also need to prioritize meaningful proximity which will welcome the skill of intentionality…a deliberateness the way a skilled surgeon navigates a robotic arm into a space unseen by the naked eye.  Not hurried but targeted, slow, seeing and hearing what is in front of you, not allowing your mind to be pulled apart to the worthless things screaming for your limited attention.   When you have well-communicated time away from the “office”, defined meetings structure, and a more closely aligned weekly schedule they offer an unrestrained path to the bull's eye of what is most valuable in that moment.   A fourth indicator of executive leadership is when you are making time to pursue the wisdom of 3rd party voices OUTSIDE of your business.  Your internal leaders cannot serve this function in full, they are overseeing the management of the business…they will soon be in desperate need for new inspiration and updated motives to lead. For some, this 3rd party wisdom will reveal themselves in nature walking, hiking, biking, swimming, or jogging alone outside. For others, it may be in silent and unruffled stillness; a quiet room with a small chair and a window, or the edge of a wooded park in the middle of a workday when no one is around. Books are a magical merging of the rustling of words without a sound.  Books are the perpetually evergreen wisdom of the years encapsulated in the products of our earth; the pages, the glue, the string, the binding, the ink all creating a quiet symphony upending our norms and reclassifying our most closely held beliefs.  As Thomas Jefferson was sending books as a gift to the US Library of Congress, he wrote in a note to John Adams saying “I cannot live without books”, neither should the executive leader. Many times those books are penned by the hand of a sage, which draws its root from the sophists; a Greek term that doubles for wisdom. Wisdom from a sage, a wisdom-dispenser brings nuance, clarity, brilliance, and sturdiness.  Like a battered book in an antique shop, a sage presents its attractiveness precisely by their brokenness and scars.  The executive leader has sages, plural, multiple. The uncoordinated team of sages offers a teaspoon of fresh strategy in favor of a full cup of tested perspective.  The sage is rarely interested in solving a problem that will last a week…they wish to help transform the soul of a person or a business for a lifetime. At least four elements revealing the growth of an executive leader: Investing more time and attention on vision, mission, and values…purpose. A published group of defined leaders in place. A proximity to those leaders both close and far. A symphony of sages. None of these will be purchased in the pre-packaging of modern products, allowing you to “hack” the system.  The elements of executive leadership are only obtained through adventure and pioneering…creating ruts of repetition, predictability, and meaning.

Recently, the Super Mario Bros theme was the first piece of music from a video game to be enshrined in the US Library of Congress. (think of this as culturally important to the US or a Hall of Fame) So on this week's Save Data Cast, we're delving into our favorite soundtracks and songs to figure out which ones we think should be added to the list! While we cover soundtracks new and old, I'm sure there are plenty of bangers that we missed. Check out the playlist of songs that we discussed (and some we added afterwards) and let us know what we missed down in the comments! We'll add some of our favorites to the playlist for all to enjoy :D  P.S. Watch Saving Throw  https://youtu.be/UxHwkUDXLjg Remember to watch the show live roughly every other Thursday or Friday at 8:00 pm EST at: https://Twitch.tv/SaveDataTeam (check the Discord for a more accurate schedule!) Check us out on all these platforms: Discord: https://discord.gg/kt9AJtp Patreon: https://Patreon.com/savedatateam Twitch: https://Twitch.tv/savedatateam Instagram: https://Instagram.com/savedatateam Twitter: https://Twitter.com/savedatateam Facebook: https://Facebook.com/savedatateam

Joe Biden heads to Northern Ireland, Sudan misses the deadline to form a civilian-led government and the latest business news with Bloomberg. Plus: the US Library of Congress opens its main reading room to the public.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The transport minister resigns and three days of mourning are declared after more than 40 people are killed in a rail disaster. Also: Guinea and Ivory Coast are sending planes to evacuate their citizens from Tunisia following inflammatory remarks by the president against sub-Saharan Africans, and the singing legend Joni Mitchell is honoured by the US Library of Congress.

Jim Metzner has spent a lifetime recording soundscapes, from which he has produced records, radio programs and now podcasts. His podcast Pulse of the Planet, started on radio in 1988 and is now also heard widely as a podcast. In 2020, Jim's sound archive was acquired by the US Library of Congress which will be the new home of the Metzner archive: 40 years of soundscapes, programs, interviews, music and non-categorizable audio.

David Copperfield is a magician and entertainer, best known for his combination of storytelling and illusion, and described by Forbes as the most commercially successful magician in history.  His illusions have included the disappearance of a Learjet, the vanishing and reappearance of the Statue of Liberty, levitating over the Grand Canyon, walking through the Great Wall of China, escaping from Alcatraz prison, and flying on stage.  He has received 21 Emmy Awards, 11 Guinness World Records, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a knighthood by the French government, and the Living Legend award by the US Library of Congress.  You can watch him live performing 7 days a week at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.    Some interesting insights from this episode: While he's passionate about magic and one of the greatest magicians ever, at heart he is a storyteller. He is a multidimensional entertainer. His role models growing up weren't other magicians but actors and dancers like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. And storytellers like Walt Disney. He likes to make audiences feel something in the heart, not just a challenge in the brain. To this day he is inspired by a quote he read as a kid: “You're only as good as you dare to be bad.” You can't do something unique and special without taking some risks along the way. The formula for his success is summarized with his mantra: “Passion, preparation, and persistence.” He still has imposture syndrome at times which pushes him to continue to keep trying to perfect his craft.    “Excellence is about nothing ever being finished. It's a process that never ends.”

Recording the sounds of our planet over four decades, American Jim Metzner is an audio legend. Host and producer of one of the longest running science programmes Pulse of the Planet, Metzner has recorded everywhere from Australian cloud forests to Brazilian favelas. The significance of Metzner's work has been acknowledged this month by thousands of his recordings being archived by the US Library of Congress. Metzner is currently visiting the University of Otago as a Fulbright Specialist. He will give a public talk in Dunedin on 6 October. While here he is also working with others to record soundscapes as part of Aotearoa Stories in Sound. Head here to contribute. Metzner recently published his first novel, Sacred Mounds, set among first nation American ancient earthworks.

#Bitcoin #BTC #Etherum #smartcontract #NFT You can't peruse social media without encountering banter from Bitcoiners bashing cryptocurrencies. Rightfully so, the majority of these altcoins are utter garbage. While Ethereum (ETH)is known for its multi-million-dollar monkey pictures #boredapes, it also has practical utility with smart contracts and blockchain data storage. Bitcoin can't store any information outside the scope of a transaction. Although users have the ability to add text, Bitcoin miners are not obligated to retain this data when generating new Bitcoin blocks. While Bitcoin is the most powerful decentralized supercomputer in the world, it's only being used to send/receive and log transactions. To put it into perspective, the most powerful supercomputer(excluding Bitcoin) reaches a mere 143 petaflops. Collectively, the Bitcoin network processes over 80,704,290 Petaflops on millions of nodes around the world. This glorious power is grossly under-leveraged. Say what you wish about Ethereum and Cardano, they can store the entire US Library of Congress, in which I own the copyrighted hit record, “Belief in Bitcoin”, on the blockchain perpetuity. Bitcoin needs the ability to store data. One, it's embarrassing to mint Bitcoin NFTs on an Ethereum blockchain. Moreover, in the long haul to 2140, the ability to store data on a blockchain will become not only best practice but mission-critical for nations, corporations, and any organization storing valuable data. Bitcoin needs to accept this charge and shoulder the world's most pertinent information. Centralized points of failure are the biggest threat to organizations dependent upon essential data. As the world flirts with yet a third global conflict, having disaster sites recovery on several hemispheres isn't sufficient. We must leverage this powerful decentralized network and implement a means of data storage. Proposal: Allow long text to be stored with BTC transactions in the form of a hash. Hash Char count TBD. The hash can be used to reference text or code stored elsewhere IE: on a sister blockchain. BTC Miners need to agree to store a number of characters in hexadecimal. Once consensus is reached, users can store text on the Bitcoin blockchain in the form of hexadecimal. As all data is code and all code is text, this will allow for smart contracts and NFTs. We may need a parallel blockchain to store the actual long text that was converted into hexadecimal. Miners should be provided an incentive to store the raw data. This will add value and utility to the Bitcoin blockchain and allow for smart contracts, NFTs, and supercomputing. The drawbacks are that it may slow down transaction speeds and significantly increase the size of the blockchain. Still, it seems the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, and enhancing the Bitcoin blockchain is inevitable. Technology knows no bounds and will continue to evolve. How will Bitcoin behave in 2140? Let's use this tech to UPGRADE AMERICA! Definitions pe·ta·flop /ˈpedəˌfläp/ Learn to pronounce noun: COMPUTING plural noun: petaflops 1. a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/chris235/message

On the 227th episode of Audioface: REVIEWS: "Paradise Again" by Swedish House Mafia, "Wet Leg" self-titled, and "Soft Power" by Ryan Egan. New Single: "LET'S DO IT AGAIN" by Jamie xx Someone ignores the "We Have Guns and Shovels" sign at DaBaby's mansion. The Paradise Again review. Black Star reunites after 24 years. The Wet Leg review. Wu-Tang Clan, Queen, and Ricky Martin get added to the US Library of Congress. The Soft Power review. CA cops were hiding behind Disney to do their dirty work. --- GET MORE AUDIOFACE WITH SYNDICATE 23 MEMBERSHIPMore info at join.syndicate23.co AUDIOFACE'S 2022 NEW MUSIC PLAYLIST:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5re14dHv4E6iOA9yj1PmtB?si=480f679829c0471b SUPPORT AUDIOFACE!Subscribe to this podcast (or Follow on Spotify) so you don’t miss new episodes every week. Tell some friends about this show to keep it growing! We appreciate it, and you. Reach out to us: https://twitter.com/audiofacepod/https://intsagram.com/audiofacepod/https://www.youtube.com/audiofacepod?sub_confirmation=1 For advertising opportunities, email info (at) syndicate23 (dot) co

Durant la seconde Guerre mondiale puis la guerre froide, les films d'animation ont été embarqués dans une lutte idéologique et culturelle que se sont livrés les deux blocs de l'Ouest et de l'Est. Nous retrouvons Sébastien Roffat, historien, spécialiste du cinéma d'animation. Illustration: le héros de ce dessin animé des années 1950 - Albert, mécanicien automobile - rêve qu'il travaille parmi les fourmis de l'État d'Antrolia. Enthousiaste au départ, il déchante lorsqu'il menace de faire grève et que les fourmis soldats le traînent devant un peloton d'exécution. (© US Library of Congress)

STAR OF BETHLEHEM OR UFO? In the first half, guest-host Victor Viggiani examines the lore of the star of Bethlehem which, according to the Bible, guided three wisemen to where a new born child of significant eminence lay in a construct that sheltered animals. Tradition says they came to hail the birth of a new king. Is it possible the star of Bethlehem was actually UFO? https://sites.google.com/site/zlandco... http://www.nigelkerner.com/home.html Guest: Nigel Kerner was born in Sri Lanka, his mother from a British planting family and his father an officer in the British Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm. This international family base provided the background for an obsessive and serious interest in international human affairs and how these interface with science, religion and philosophy. He has felt driven, from his young years, to expose the humbug and hypocrisy in modern scientific and religious and social thinking. His formal graduate education is in biomedical science and human behavioural psychology. His fascination with the puzzling and enigmatic phenomenon of UFOs resulted in his first book 'The Song of the Greys.' ? A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTMAS In hour two, Victor and guest examine a number of provocative questions surrounding Christmas: Who actually were the Magi? Kings or Scientists? What was the celestial phenomenon we are told the Magi followed in the sky? Why was Mary chosen to be the Mother of Jesus? What was the role played by King Herod in the highly politicized world in Judea before and after Christ's birth. Also - how did the Prophecies in the Old Testament foretell the birth of history's most influential man, a man destined to be born in a stable, among lowly farm animals and shepherds? Guest: Father Robert Geis is a Prelate Protosyncellus in the Eastern Orthodox rite. He has published a number of books on philosophy and theology, as well as Holy Scripture. His work on the Resurrection in the National Catholic Herald is cited as "a remarkable book." His work on immortality received high marks in the philosophic journal The Review of Metaphysics. He has also written and published one of the most definitive works on Papal authority, Peter and Linus, the question of Papal Infallibility. Many of his works are housed in the US Library of Congress. Listen live every Sunday at 11pm on Zoomer Radio

John Krivit is an audio educator and founder of the extremely popular Facebook group "Hey Audio Student."  He's a past president of the Audio Engineering Society, and served as Chair of the 2018 AES Conference on Audio Archiving, Preservation & Restoration at the US Library of Congress and was Chair of the 2018 and 2019 AES High School Audio Educators Conferences. John is also a senior affiliated faculty at Emerson College, where he's been the recipient of the Inabeth Miller Award for excellence in teaching and the Norm Prescott Award for outstanding faculty member.  During the interview we talked about not so obvious audio jobs, John's “Hey Audio Student” community, conducting audio manufacturer factory tours, and much more. On the intro I'll take a look at how much streaming platforms are paying in 2021, and new uses for spatial audio. var podscribeEmbedVars = { epId: 81947497, backgroundColor: 'white', font: undefined, fontColor: undefined, speakerFontColor: undefined, height: '600px', showEditButton: false, showSpeakers: true, showTimestamps: true };

Here's a quick bit of Halloween fun from Hank's Granny, aka Jeanie Murphy, that we love to play in our home and sing along with as well! Jeanie played this old traditional song—that she learned and loved from Jean Ritchie—for and with her kids (that's Hank's mom & uncle) when they were little, so it's a great fun to pass it along to another generation. We hope you enjoy it, too! If you love old songs and sing-alongs, we hope that you will check out Jean Ritchie! Here's a recording housed at the US Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/afc9999005.3966/ You can find out more about our show and send us jokes at www.powerdogadventures.com This podcast was made possible, in part, by a grant from The Regional Arts & Culture Council in Portland, OR. It was made more possible by listeners like you! Thank you for your support! Support the show: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/powerdog https://www.patreon.com/powerdogadventures We are proud members of Kids Listen, an organization dedicated to high-quality audio content for kids and families. The Adventures of Power Dog in Dogland is created in the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz, bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Tribes of the first people who made their homes along the rivers. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/powerdogadventures/support

Durant la seconde Guerre mondiale puis la guerre froide, les films d'animation ont été embarqués dans une lutte idéologique et culturelle que se sont livrés les deux blocs de l'Ouest et de l'Est. Nous retrouvons Sébastien Roffat, historien, spécialiste du cinéma d'animation. Illustration: Le héros de ce dessin animé des années 1950 - Albert, mécanicien automobile - rêve qu'il travaille parmi les fourmis de l'État d'Antrolia. Enthousiaste au départ, il déchante lorsqu'il menace de faire grève et que les fourmis soldats le traînent devant un peloton d'exécution. (© US Library of Congress)

It's hard to imagine a worse rollout than the AstraZeneca vaccine -- what to believe and what to do.  We get some blunt talk from Dr Lisa Barrett of Dalhousie University in Halifax.And in a special guest appearance, we're joined from the US Library of Congress by Winston Churchill!

You had the vaccine a week ago, is your life really any different than it was a month ago?Dr Zain Chagla joins us.  But also, the Suez Canal and why its blockage is so important.  And the sound of history, we take you back thanks to the US Library of Congress. "Holy Cow"!

Melody Garcia is a multiple award-winning international keynote speaker who keynotes at Harvard University and shared platforms with some of the biggest iconic game-changers such as former first lady Michelle Obama, Elena Cardone, Tarana Burke, Les Brown and etc. Melody is also a published international writer, multi-media powerhouse, and international best-selling author whose co-authored book titled “Women who Influence” was accepted in the US Library of Congress. She was recently honored as one of the top 10 most influential Filipino Americans in 2020 out of 4.1 million Filipinos in the USA, and the top 100 in the last 10 years. Melody is one of the few certified PNA (Psycho Neuro Actualization) coaches in the world who is certified to maximize human potential. She is also the founder and creator of Unicef Unite Orlando who represented 192 countries in children's global advocacy. In this episode, we'll be discussing: 1) What is "Social Conscious Leadership" & "Why Is It Crucial For Successful Businesses?" 2) How You Can Attract Successful People Into Your Life? Learn more about Melody Garcia: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/melodyliezl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melodygarciavip/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/melodygarciavip Website: https://www.melodygarcia.org/ Learn more about me: Follow on Instagram: @Raygacy Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Raygacy/ Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raysonchoo Subscribe on Itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../the-raygacy-show/id1435706344 Join The Tribe of Raygacy: https://t.me/theraygacyshowfamily --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/theraygacyshow/message

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the history of Wikipedia. The very idea of a single location that could store all the known information in the world began with Ptolemy I, founder of the Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt following the death of Alexander the great. He and his son amassed 100s of thousands of scrolls in the Library and Alexandria from 331 BC and on. The Library was part of a great campus of the Musaeum where they also supported great minds starting with Ptolemy I's patronage of Euclid, the father of geometry, and later including Archimedes, the father of engineering, Hipparchus, the founder of trigonometry, Her, the father of math, and Herophilus, who gave us the scientific method and countless other great hellenistic thinkers. The Library entered into a slow decline that began with the expulsion of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145BC. Ptolemy VIII was responsible for that. Always be weary of people who attack those that they can't win over especially when they start blaming the intellectual elite for the problems of the world. This began a slow decline of the library until it burned, first with a small fire accidentally set by Caesar in 48BC and then for good in the 270s AD. In the centuries since there have been attempts here and there to gather great amounts of information. The first known encyclopedia was the Naturalis Historiae by Pliny the Elder, never completed because he was killed in the eruption of Vesuvius. One of the better known being the Encyclopedia Britannica, starting off in 1768. Mass production of these was aided by the printing press but given that there's a cost to producing those materials and a margin to be made in the sale of those materials that encouraged a somewhat succinct exploration of certain topics. The advent of the computer era of course led to encyclopedias on CD and then to online encyclopedias. Encyclopedias at the time employed experts in certain fields and paid them for compiling and editing articles for volumes that would then be sold. As we say these days, this was a business model just waiting to be disrupted. Jimmy Wales was moderating an online discussion board on Objectivism and happened across Larry Sanger in the early 90s. They debated and became friends. Wales started Nupedia, which was supposed to be a free encyclopedia, funded by advertising revenue. As it was to be free, they were to recruit thousands of volunteer editors. People of the caliber that had been previously hired to research and write articles for encyclopedias. Sanger, who was pursuing a PhD in philosophy from Ohio State University, was hired on as editor-in-chief. This was a twist on the old model of compiling an encyclopedia and a twist that didn't work out as intended. Volunteers were slow to sign up, but Nupedia went online in 2000. Later in the year there had only been two articles that made it through the review process. When Sanger told Ben Kovitz about this, he recommended looking at the emerging wiki culture. This had been started with WikiWikiWeb, developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994, named after a shuttle bus that ran between airport terminals at the Honolulu airport. WikiWikiWeb had been inspired by Hypercard but needed to be multi-user so people could collaborate on web pages, quickly producing content on new patterns in programming. He wanted to make non-writers feel ok about writing. Sanger proposed using a wiki to be able to accept submissions for articles and edits from anyone but still having a complicated review process to accept changes. The reviewers weren't into that, so they started a side project they called Wikipedia in 2001 with a user-generated model for content, or article, generation. The plan was to generate articles on Wikipedia and then move or copy them into Nupedia once they were ready. But Wikipedia got mentioned on Slashdot. In 2001 there were nearly 30 million websites but half a billion people using the web. Back then a mention on the influential Slashdot could make a site. And it certainly helped. They grew and more and more people started to contribute. They hit 1,000 articles in March of 2001 and that increased by 10 fold by September, By And another 4 fold the next year. It started working independent of Nupedia. The dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and by 2002 Nupedia had to lay Sanger off and he left both projects. Nupedia slowly died and was finally shut down in 2003. Eventually the Wikimedia Foundation was built to help unlock the world's knowledge, which now owns and operates Wikipedia. Wikimedia also includes Commons for media, Wikibooks that includes free textbooks and manuals, Wikiquote for quotations, Wikiversity for free learning materials, MediaWiki the source code for the site, Wikidata for pulling large amounts of data from Wikimedia properties using APIs, Wikisource, a library of free content, Wikivoyage, a free travel guide, Wikinews, free news, Wikispecies, a directory containing over 687,000 species. Many of the properties have very specific ways of organizing data, making it easier to work with en masse. The properties have grown because people like to be helpful and Wales allowed self-governance of articles. To this day he rarely gets involved in the day-to-day affairs of the wikipedia site, other than the occasional puppy dog looks in banners asking for donations. You should donate. He does have 8 principles the site is run by: 1. Wikipedia's success to date is entirely a function of our open community. 2. Newcomers are always to be welcomed. 3. “You can edit this page right now” is a core guiding check on everything that we do. 4. Any changes to the software must be gradual and reversible. 5. The open and viral nature of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Create Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License is fundamental to the long-term success of the site. 6. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. 7. Anyone with a complaint should be treated with the utmost respect and dignity. 8. Diplomacy consists of combining honesty and politeness. This culminates in 5 pillars wikipedia is built on: 1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. 2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view. 3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute. 4. Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility. 5. Wikipedia has no firm rules. Sanger went on to found Citizendium, which uses real names instead of handles, thinking maybe people will contribute better content if their name is attached to something. The web is global. Throughout history there have been encyclopedias produced around the world, with the Four Great Books of Song coming out of 11th century China, the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity coming out of 10th century Persia. When Wikipedia launched, it was in English. Wikipedia launched a German version using the deutsche.wikipedia.com subdomain. It now lives at de.wikipedia.com and Wikipedia has gone from being 90% English to being almost 90 % non-English, meaning that Wikipedia is able to pull in even more of the world's knowledge. Wikipedia picked up nearly 20,000 English articles in 2001, over 75,000 new articles in 2002, and that number has steadily climbed wreaching over 3,000,000 by 2010, and we're closing in on 6 Million today. The English version is 10 terabytes of data uncompressed. If you wanted to buy a printed copy of wikipedia today, it would be over 2500 books. By 2009 Microsoft Encarta shut down. By 2010 Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing their massive set of books and went online. You can still buy encyclopedias from specialty makers, such as the World Book. Ironically, Encyclopedia Britannica does now put real names of people on articles they produce on their website, in an ad-driven model. There are a lot of ads. And the content isn't linked to as many places nor as thorough. Creating a single location that could store all the known information in the world seems like a pretty daunting task. Compiling the non-copywritten works of the world is now the mission of Wikipedia. The site receives the fifth most views per month and is read by nearly half a billion people a month with over 15 billion page views per month. Anyone who has gone down the rabbit hole of learning about Ptolemy I's involvement in developing the Library of Alexandria and then read up on his children and how his dynasty lasted until Cleopatra and how… well, you get the point… can understand how they get so much traffic. Today there are over 48,000,000 articles and over 37,000,000 registered users who have contributed articles meaning if we set 160 Great Libraries of Alexandria side-by-side we would have about the same amount of information Wikipedia has amassed. And it's done so because of the contributions of so many dedicated people. People who spend hours researching and building pages, undergoing the need to provide references to cite the data in the articles (btw wikipedia is not supposed to represent original research), more people to patrol and look for content contributed by people on a soapbox or with an agenda, rather than just reporting the facts. Another team looking for articles that need more information. And they do these things for free. While you can occasionally see frustrations from contributors, it is truly one of the best things humanity has done. This allows us to rediscover our own history, effectively compiling all the facts that make up the world we live in, often linked to the opinions that shape them in the reference materials, which include the over 200 million works housed at the US Library of Congress, and over 25 million books scanned into Google Books (out of about 130 million). As with the Great Library of Alexandria, we do have to keep those who seek to throw out the intellectuals of the world away and keep the great works being compiled from falling to waste due to inactivity. Wikipedia keeps a history of pages, to avoid revisionist history. The servers need to be maintained, but the database can be downloaded and is routinely downloaded by plenty of people. I think the idea of providing an encyclopedia for free that was sponsored by ads was sound. Pivoting the business model to make it open was revolutionary. With the availability of the data for machine learning and the ability to enrich it with other sources like genealogical research, actual books, maps, scientific data, and anything else you can manage, I suspect we'll see contributions we haven't even begun to think about! And thanks to all of this, we now have a real compendium of the worlds knowledge, getting more and more accurate and holistic by the day. Thank you to everyone involved, from Jimbo and Larry, to the moderators, to the staff, and of course to the millions of people who contribute pages about all the history that makes up the world as we know it today. And thanks to you for listening to yet another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day! Note: This work was produced in large part due to the compilation of historical facts available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

Dominic Smith's fourth novel, the New York Times best seller "The Last Painting of Sara de Vos" won both Indie Book of the Year AND the Australian Book Industry awards Literary Fiction Book of the Year in 2017.  For Rare Air, he joins me to discuss his most recent novel, The Electric Hotel. Set around the birth of cinema, as the Lumière Brothers sent commission agents around the world to demonstrate their cinematographe, The Electric Hotel introduces us to French filmmaker Claude Ballard. One of the original Lumière commission agents, then silent film heavyweight, now in his eighties, a dedicated mushroom forager and long-term resident of the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. It's a truly captivating story, beautifully researched, where even the most staggering human experience feels entirely plausible. Smith says his goal was to fall in love with silent film.  He watched over one hundred of them for research.  Preservation of these films has been an issue.  It was reported by the US Library of Congress in 2013, that 75 percent of silent films made in the US between 1912 and 1929 had been lost. This formed part of Smith's motive to write a book set in the era as he tried to imagine a comparable situation in the world of literature.  In this conversation Dominic Smith also speaks about the formation of his writing discipline and muses about being an American, born and bred in Australia. He spoke to me from his home in Seattle, WA.               

Phil Proctor is a founding member of the legendary Fire Sign Theater. He's been a voice actor appearing in movies (Monsters INC,  Toy Story, Inside Out) TV Shows (Rugrats as Phil and Lil's Dad, Howard), video games like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Doom 3, and Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain, and he's even embedded into Apple's OS.His new book, 'Where's My Fortune Cookie?' is out Sept 28th, 2017, and has received rave reviews from "Weird" Al Yankovic, Penn Jillette, and Leonard Maltin. Also on September 28th, 2017, the US Library of Congress is hosting the event, An Evening with the Firesign Theater... or Whats Left of It.Pre Show Notes (FREE Stuff)— I'll be a guest on Alex Ferrari's Indie Film Hustle. Alex has one of the best and most popular indie film podcasts around! This one is going to go down in the record books, mark my words. We'll be chatting about my TV pilot, Game Over (which will be released soon), and everything else under the sun.— First Glance Film Festival  — Oct 6th – 8th 2017 here in Philadelphia.— Backstage –  Use code dbcast at checkout when posting a casting call for a FREE basic listing— Dave Bullis Podcast Filmmakers Group on Facebook – a FREE filmmaking group I made on Facebook. Show NotesContactPhil Proctor-- Official Site -- Twitter-- IMDB -- Where's My Fortune Cookie? on AmazonDave Bullis— Official Site— Youtube— Twitter— Instagram— FacebookSupport the Podcast1. Sign Up for Dave's email list2. Rate the Podcast on iTunes3. Buy on Amazon.com using my affiliate link Subscribe to the Podcast— Podbean — iTunes — Stitcher— Google Play Podcas

Neil Young pulls music from stream services over quality concerns, archiving every tweet proves difficult for US Library of Congress, keeping your phone charged in an emergency using a candle and water, Mac OS X El Capitan public beta is out, Microsoft unveils Office 2016 for Mac.

We delve into the Media Network archives to look back at the early days of commercial shortwave broadcasting from the United States. On October 15, 1927, , a radio inventor, was granted the first  license in the United States and began experimental shortwave station W1XAL in . In 1935, the station began transmitting non-commercial, educational, and cultural programs. Supported by charitable institutions it was a not run for profit. The broadcasts came from a transmitter site in Scituate, Massachussets. I found some recordings of the station in the audio section of the US Library of Congress for this programme. And  got me the recordings from a later stage in the station's history when it was WNYW, Radio New York World Wide. He used to work there as a Saturday job in the 1970's, and made some great studio recordings which I haven't heard elsewhere. 

In 1998 we remade a documentary on Tokyo Rose in the light of new recordings and websites that were springing up. This was before Wikipedia of course. I think it interesting to contrast this story about Tokyo Rose (it was more than one person) with that of American actress Mildred Gillars who broadcast from Berlin to North America. I see that she is the subject of a new book by Richard Lucas called 'Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany". There are recordings of her in the US Library of Congress. The original programme is also on this website.