Podcasts about vcrs

Today the gals talk Yokai and the solved/unsolved case of Pamela Buckley + James Freund, aka the Sumter County Does. Stalk us here!Merch - ghosts-n-heauxsTwitter - ghostsnheauxsInstagram - ghosts_n_heauxsFacebook - GhostsnHeauxsPodcastAnd don't forget to send your stories to ghostsnheauxs@gmail.com

On The Other Side of Midnight, Lionel talks about mispronunciations that drive people nuts. He also talks about VCRs and other retired methods of media production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On The Other Side of Midnight, Lionel talks about mispronunciations that drive people nuts. He also talks about VCRs and other retired methods of media production. Lionel later continues the conversation about pronunciations and also talks with a blind caller from Vancouver about dating, skiing and dreaming blind. Lionel starts the third hour talking about the importance of the nap. He also talks about how memory keeps you sane, the AI takeover coming sooner than you think and more.  Lionel wraps up the show discussing the uniqueness of twin studies. The show comes to a complete halt as the riveting subject of scheduling doctor's appointments takes over. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can you believe Betamax turns 50 this month? On this week's show we look at how the VCR changed the entertainment industry and gave us a reason to build our home theaters. We also read emails and take a look at the week's news. News: YouTube Is Swallowing TV Whole, and It's Coming for the Sitcom Roku adds more premium features to its own line of midrange TVs Other: Philips Hue Play HDMI sync box 8K Cosm The Betamax Turns 50 this Month In the late 1970s, the arrival of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) sparked a seismic shift in entertainment, as detailed in a recent Hollywood Reporter feature. Initially met with skepticism by studios fearing piracy, the VCR became a cultural juggernaut, reshaping how audiences consumed media and how Hollywood operated. By 1987, home video revenue surpassed theatrical box office earnings, with VHS tapes turning movies like Top Gun into cultural touchstones that families could own and rewatch endlessly.  The VCR democratized access to films, birthing the video rental industry—think Blockbuster's neon-lit aisles—and empowering consumers to curate their viewing experiences. It also gave studios a lucrative new revenue stream, with tapes priced high for rentals before dropping for mass ownership. Yet, the technology wasn't without flaws: tracking issues, bulky machines, and the dread of “Be Kind, Rewind” defined the era.  Beyond movies, the VCR enabled niche content to thrive, from fitness tapes to obscure genres, while fueling Hollywood's sequel-driven franchises. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, the VCR's legacy endures in today's streaming wars, where on-demand viewing owes its roots to those clunky cassettes. The VCR didn't just change Hollywood—it rewired how we connect with stories. Here are some fun facts about the VCR (Video Cassette Recorder): First Commercial VCR: The Ampex VRX-1000, introduced in 1956, was the first commercially available VCR. It cost around $50,000 (equivalent to over $500,000 today) and was primarily used by TV studios, not homes. Home VCRs Arrived Late: The first consumer VCR, the Philips N1500, hit the market in 1972 in the UK. It was pricey (around £400, or $4,000 today) and could only record for about an hour. Format Wars: The 1970s saw a fierce battle between Sony's Betamax (1975) and JVC's VHS (1976). VHS won due to longer recording times (up to 4 hours vs. Betamax's 1 hour initially) and better marketing, despite Betamax's slightly superior picture quality. Rental Boom: Video rental stores exploded in the 1980s because VCRs were affordable, but tapes were expensive ($50-$100 each). The first Blockbuster opened in 1985, capitalizing on this trend. Time-Shifting Revolution: VCRs introduced “time-shifting,” letting people record TV shows to watch later. This was groundbreaking, though networks initially feared it would kill live TV. A 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upheld home recording as legal, boosting VCR popularity. Early Adopters' Struggles: Early VCRs were clunky, with complex controls. The infamous “blinking 12:00” on VCR clocks became a cultural joke because many users couldn't figure out how to set the time. Global Impact: By 1980, only about 1% of U.S. households had a VCR, but by 1990, over 70% did. Japan led early adoption, with companies like Sony and JVC driving innovation. Peak Sales Period (1977–2000): The VCR was a dominant consumer electronics product for about two decades. We can estimate U.S. sales alone at approximately 100–200 million units over this period. Market Decline: VCR sales peaked in the 1980s and 1990s but declined sharply in the early 2000s as DVDs overtook VHS. By 2003, DVD sales surpassed VCR sales, and the last VCRs were manufactured by Funai in 2016.

News; birthdays/events; game: Saving Private Ryan movie trivia; word of the day. News; items we regret throwing away; game: getting to know you; things that celebrities are afraid of. News; a company in the U.K. was being sarcastic with a product tagline and now they have to apologize; game: general trivia; is a hot dog a 'sandwich'? News; funny things people say to unsuspecting/gullible friends/family/co-workers; at what point in your shift at work do you mentally "check out" for the day?; goodbye/fun facts....National Drive-In Movie Day falls on June 6 which is the anniversary of the first-ever drive-in opening in the U.S. in 1933 in New Jersey. Even though many people prefer to watch movies in the theater, their homes or on their phones now, a lot of people cherish the tradition of driving into a park and watching a movie on a large screen while munching on their favorite food. Drive-in theatres were popular because it was one activity the entire family could do together. Moviegoers could bring their babies, visit, and eat. Before drivein's, movie theaters didn't allow or frowned upon large families attending a movie. The drive-in was created for seniors who found it hard to comfortably sit in indoor movie theaters. Richard M. Hollingshead Jr. made a small drive-in theater for his mom in his driveway and placed a big screen in his backyard with a Kodak projector on his car. By the late '50s, more than 3,000 drive-ins could be found in the U.S. When cable TV, and VCRs became popular during the early '90s, the trend of drive-in theatres began to decline. 

The world is far more peculiar than most of us dare to admit. Somewhere between a demolition derby and a wrestling ring, between the crackle of VHS tapes and the shriek of late-night public access, lies a man who has turned mayhem into meaning. On today's episode, we welcome the unparalleled and unfiltered Mad Man Pondo, a professional wrestler and author whose life has been a whirlwind of body slams, topless TV hosts, and late-night green room oddities. With a voice still rough from last night's match, he guides us into a tale of chaos, tenacity, and triumph.Mad Man Pondo—real name Kevin Canady—is not merely a character in the ring. He is a living mosaic of outrageous stories and unshakable spirit.Raised in a reserved household, he found himself drawn to the fever-pitched passion of pro wrestling his grandparents once yelled at on their living room TV. That early spark lit a fire, and he never let it go out. As he says in this episode, “My mom still has the paper I filled out in grade school that said I wanted to be a professional wrestler.” That dream, written in crayon, would become a 30-year odyssey through blood, barbed wire, and blinding spotlights.The journey to the ring was not paved with ease. Pondo describes the brutal, often humiliating, early days of wrestling school—the beatings, the busted lips, the sheer will required to prove he belonged. He tells of how many walked away, unwilling to endure it, while he pressed on. That kind of devotion would become his defining trait. When the legendary Abdullah the Butcher told him he had the talent to wrestle in Japan, Pondo drove through the night, edited his best matches on two old VCRs, and mailed the tape by sunrise. The result? Forty-three trips to the Land of the Rising Sun.But Pondo's life wasn't confined to the ring. Ever curious, ever mischievous, he created “Skull Talk,” a public access show featuring wrestling commentary and, yes, topless women sitting on his lap.Equal parts performance art and rebellion, the show sandwiched between two church broadcasts caused outrage and fandom in equal measure. “One preacher would send me scripture every week,” he laughs. “But I knew he watched every episode.” This was Pondo in his purest form—pushing boundaries, dancing at the edge of decency, and always keeping his audience on their toes.What's perhaps most impressive is his ability to weave these escapades into something strangely noble. Whether talking about riding shotgun in a demolition derby car painted with horror icons or booking outrageous guests for the Jerry Springer Show, there's a heart beneath the madness. His creation of “Girl Fight,” an all-women's wrestling promotion, is a testament to his desire to give others a platform, to share the stage, to pass the torch. He's not just fighting for himself anymore—he's built a ring where others can rise too.And then there's the book, Memoirs of a Mad Man, a wild ride through his memories, filled with stories that make you laugh, cringe, and occasionally tear up. One story he held secret for decades—a deeply personal moment with wrestling legend Junkyard Dog—was finally shared in its pages. “I thought, you know what, let's put this in there,” he says. “It was time.” In telling that story, and many others, he transformed scars into stories and chaos into legacy.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/indie-film-hustle-a-filmmaking-podcast--2664729/support.

This week we talk about the NHTSA, CAFE standards, and energy efficiency.We also discuss incentive programs, waste heat, and the EPA.Recommended Book: Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo FaloyinTranscriptIn the United States, fuel-efficiency laws for vehicles sold on the US market are set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA. They set the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE standards by which vehicle-makers have to abide, and that, in turn, establishes the minimum standards for companies like Ford or Toyota making vehicles for this market.That CAFE standard is paired with another guideline set by the Environmental Protection Agency that sets standards related to tailpipe emissions. The former says how many miles a vehicle should be able to travel on a gallon of fuel, while the latter says how much CO2, methane, and other pollutants can be legally emitted as that fuel is burnt and those miles are traversed.These two standards address different angles of this issue, but work together to, over time, reduce the amount of fuel consumed to do the same work, and pollution created as that work is accomplished; as a result, if you're traveling 50 miles today and driving a modern car in the US, you'll consume a lot less fuel than you would have traveling the same distance in a period-appropriate car twenty years ago.Back in the final year of the Biden administration, the president was criticized for not pushing for more stringent fuel-efficiency standards for US-sold and driven vehicles. The fuel economy requirements were increased by 2% per year for model years 2027 to 2031 for passenger cars, and the same 2% per year requirement will be applied to SUVs and other light trucks for model years 2029 to 2031.This is significantly lower than a previously proposed efficiency requirement, which would have seen new vehicles averaging about 43.5 mpg by model year 2032—an efficiency gain of 18%. And the explanation at the time was that Biden really wanted to incentivize carmakers to shift to EVs, and if they weren't spending their time and resources on fuel-efficiency tech deployment for their gas-guzzlers, which Biden hoped to start phasing out, they could spend more on refining their EV offerings, which were already falling far behind China's EV models.Biden wanted half of all new vehicles sold in the US by 2030 to be electric, so the theory was that fuel-efficiency standards were the previous war, and he wanted to fight the next one.Even those watered-down standards were estimated to keep almost 70 billion gallons of gasoline from being consumed through the year 2050, which in turn would reduce US driver emissions by more than 710 million metric tons of CO2 by that same year. They were also expected to save US drivers something like $600 in gas costs over the lifetime of each vehicle they own.Since current president Trump returned to office, however, all of these rules and standards have come into question. Just as when he was president the first time around, rolling back a bunch of Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards—which if implemented as planned would have ensured US-sold vehicles averaged 46.7 mpg by 2026, so better than we were expected to get by 2032 under Biden's revised minimum—just as he did back then, Trump is targeting these new, Biden standards, while also doing away with a lot of the incentives introduced by the Biden administration meant to make EVs cheaper and more appealing to consumers, and easier to make and sell for car companies.What I'd like to talk about today is another standard, this one far less politicized and widely popular within the US and beyond, that is also being targeted by the second Trump administration, and what might happen if it goes away.—In 1992, the US Environmental Protection Agency, under the endorsement of then-president George HW Bush, launched the Energy Star program: a voluntary labeling program that allowed manufacturers of various types of products to affix a little blue label that says Energy Star on their product, boxes, and/or advertising if their product met the efficiency standards set by this program.So it's a bit like if those aforementioned fuel-efficiency standards set for vehicles weren't required, and instead, if your car met the minimum standards, you could slap a little sticker on the car that said it was more energy efficient than cars without said sticker.A low bar to leap, and one that wasn't considered to be that big a deal, either in terms of being cumbersome for product-makers, or in terms of accomplishing much of anything.Energy Star standards were initially developed for the then-burgeoning field of personal computers and accessories, but in 1995 things really took off, when the program was expanded to include heating and cooling infrastructure, alongside other components for housing and other buildings.From there, new product categories were added on a semi-regular basis, and the government agency folks running the program continued to deploy more technical support and testing tools, making it easier and easier for companies wanting to adhere to these standards to do so, relatively easily and inexpensively.And to provide a sense of what was required to meet Energy Star standards in the days when they were really beginning to take off and become popular, in the early 2000s, refrigerators needed to be about 20% more efficient, in terms of electricity consumption, than the minimum legal standard for such things, while dishwashers needed to be 41% more efficient. Computers around that time, more specifically in 2008, were required to have an 85% efficiency at half load and something close to that at 20% and 100% power load—which basically means it they needed to use most of the energy they drew, and release less of it as waste-heat, which was a big issue for desktop computers at the time.Energy Star TVs had to use 30% less energy than average, with more modern versions of the standard requiring they draw 3 watts or less while in standby mode, and a slew of 90s and early 2000s-era technologies, like VCRs and cordless home phones were required to use something like 90% less electricity than the average at the time.This standard helped push the development of more energy efficient everything, as it was a selling point for companies making things for real estate developers, in particular. Energy-hogs like light fixtures, which cost a fortune to power if you're thinking in terms of skyscrapers or just building a bunch of houses, became far more energy efficient after the folks in charge of buying the lighting for these projects were able to eyeball options and use the Energy Star label as a shorthand indication that the cost of operation for those goods would be far less, over time, than their competition; it was kind of pointless to buy anything else in many cases, because why would you want to spend all that extra money over time buying less-efficient fluorescent lights for your office buildings, especially now that it was so easy to see, at a glance, which ones were best in this regard?And the same general consensus arrived on the consumer market not long after, as qualified lighting was something like 75% more efficient than non-qualified, legal-minimum-meeting lighting, and Energy Star verified homes were something like 20% cheaper to own.It was estimated that US homeowners living in Energy Star certified homes saved around $360 million on their energy bills in 2016, alone, and another estimate suggests that US citizens, overall, have saved about half a trillion dollars over the past 33 years as a result of the program and the efficiency standards it encourages.So this is a relatively lightweight program that's optional, and which basically just rewards companies willing to put more efficient products on the market. They can use the little label if they live up to these standards, and that tells customers that this stuff will use less energy than other, comparable products, which in turn saves those customers money over time, and puts less strain on the US electrical grid.This program, consequently, has been very popular, for customers, for the companies making these products—because by jumping through a few hoops, they can get some of their products certified, and that gives them a competitive advantage over companies that don't do the same, and especially over companies selling cheaper goods from overseas, which tend to be a lot less efficient because of that cheapness—and it's been popular for politicians across the political spectrum, because people who buy things and pay energy bills vote those politicians into office, and companies that make such goods hire lobbyists to influence their decisions.All of which brings us to today, mid-May of 2025, a point at which the second Trump administration seems to be considering possibly getting rid of the Energy Star certification program.Initial reports on the matter are seemingly well-sourced, but anonymous, as is the case with a lot of White House briefs right now, so some of this should be taken with a grain of salt, because of how it's being reported and because this administration has flip-flopped a whole lot already, and on things much bigger and more prominent than this, since returning to office, so this could just go away after being reported upon, even if they actually intended to do it before that pushback.But what seems to have happened is this:In January of 2025, after returning to the White House, Trump's administration put a big Trump supporter and Republican politician, Lee Zelden, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency.Zelden publicly holds a lot of standard Republican talking points, including what's often called skepticism about climate science and vehement support of oil drilling, including fracking. He did say that climate change is a real issue that needs to be addressed during his EPA head confirmation hearing, however.Under Trump's second administration, many government agencies have been either completely done away with, or wiped out, in terms of funding and staff, so that they're basically just zombie agencies at this point, and the EPA is an agency that Trump has historically not been a big fan of, and which he seems to be trying to rewire toward deregulation: so regulations like fuel efficiency standards are not good according to some strains of usually more conservative politics, and for some business owners, because these are additional rules they have to legally abide by, which costs them money.And back in March of 2025 Zelden announced that the EPA would be pulling back on regulations related to power plants, would incentivize rather than disincentivize the production of oil and gas, would do away with a bunch of pollution-related standards, especially those related to coal power plants and how much pollution they can emit, and many other similar things, which—to shorthand all this—may be somewhat popular if you think climate change concerns are overblown and that it's more important to keep coal mines operational than to keep streams and rivers clean, but which will generally look really, really bad if you're any kind of environmentalist and/or are concerned about climate change.The government also recently cut the EPA's budget by 54.5%, dropping said budget back to where it was when Ronald Reagan was president. This cut, along with cuts to other agencies responsible for tracking dangerous weather, saving sea turtles, and keeping US National Parks clean and functional, will, according to the government, save US taxpayers $163 billion.According to reports from a recent all-hands meeting of the EPA's Office of Atmospheric Protection, Trump administration officials announced that that office would be dissolved, and that the Energy Star program would be eliminated.Now, there's a chance that this is just the result of the administration's at times seemingly blind cutting of budgets, backtracking only when there's sufficient pushback, and there's a chance this is a continuation of a political moment a few years back when the Biden administration was considering doing away with Energy Star certification for gas ranges, the idea being that if it uses gas instead of electricity, it's part of the problem, even if it's more efficient than other ranges.Republican politicians responded to lobbying efforts from the US gas industry and stirred that up into a big frenzy, to the point that people were vehemently defending their right to own a gas stove, which was never under threat, but that's how these sorts of astroturfed moral panics work, and it could be that they're looking to replicate some of that magic now, taking down a standard that they hope to frame as an example of liberal overreach, telling people that these things take away their right to choose what they want to buy, and how much energy or fuel to burn, even when that's not actually true.There's also a chance, as I mentioned earlier, though, that this is just a trial balloon, and that once they realize there's a decent amount of bipartisan support for this program, they'll step back from this cut, and maybe even claim it for themselves, using it as an example of American exceptionalism: look how great American-made goods are, we're more efficient than anybody else—not bad messaging at a time in which that kind of competitive language is popular with those in charge, though that competition might not be the real point of all this, at least for some of the people making some of these decisions, right now.Show Noteshttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/09/trump-budget-cuts-environmental-programs/83441472007/https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-launches-biggest-deregulatory-action-us-historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Zeldinhttps://web.archive.org/web/20201214180957/https://www.energystar.gov/about/origins_mission/energy_star_overview/about_energy_star_residential_sectorhttps://web.archive.org/web/20161202012204/https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=about.ab_milestoneshttps://web.archive.org/web/20170622184250/http://www.dailytech.com/New+Energy+Star+50+Specs+for+Computers+Become+Effective+Today/article15559.htmhttps://insideclimatenews.org/news/08052025/energy-star-program-could-be-eliminated-by-trump-administration/https://cleantechnica.com/2025/05/10/energy-star-program-gets-the-kiss-of-death/https://www.theverge.com/news/664670/water-energy-efficiency-standards-trump-dishwasher-washing-machine-showerhead-toilethttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Starhttps://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/06/climate/energy-star-trumphttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/climate/epa-energy-star-eliminated.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/06/energy-star-program-epa-trump/https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/energy-starhttps://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64905/energy-star-program-cutshttps://apnews.com/article/trump-appliances-consumers-energy-efficiency-3b6100e001a2629dfea9be231f467841https://www.reuters.com/article/business/environment/trump-finalizes-rollback-of-obama-era-vehicle-fuel-efficiency-standards-idUSKBN21I25R/https://apnews.com/article/climate-trump-mpg-fuel-economy-standards-automakers-0ef9147a0c3874a50a194e439f604261https://apnews.com/article/vehicle-fuel-economy-requirement-nhtsa-epa-85e4c3b7bbba9a9a9b7e5b117fe099bdhttps://apnews.com/article/epa-electric-vehicles-emissions-limits-climate-biden-e6d581324af51294048df24269b5d20ahttps://www.nhtsa.gov/laws-regulations/corporate-average-fuel-economy This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

The Simpsons writer and showrunner Mike Reiss shares behind-the-scenes secrets from 36+ years on the iconic animated series. From working with comedy legends like Sam Simon, Al Jean, and Conan O'Brien to writing for Johnny Carson and witnessing the wild beginnings of FOX, Mike recounts hilarious Hollywood stories and life lessons from his travels to 147 countries. He reveals the origin of the Simpsons, why Harvard wasn't funny, how VCRs and fan feedback helped shape the show, and why the writers' room was like a "kibbutz but more Jewish." It's a deep dive into comedy, creativity, and the wild ride of creating a global phenomenon. Follow Mike's Substack: https://substack.com/@mikereiss Get Paul's Book: https://www.paulollinger.com/the-book

VCRs And Luxembourgish Dishes (5/5/25) by 96.5 WKLH

Life has left us clues.  Those that came before us left us clues.  Clues of how life can be tough, challenging, and also rewarding.    Sometimes we're quick to discount stories of the past based on the time when people didn't have shoes, or maybe had to ride camels or horses, but the lessons...............   The lessons of how to overcome challenges in life are the same because they're built on the foundation of principles of life.    Things come and go.     I remember when VCRs were the newest innovation and we could watch our favorite shows anytime we wanted.    I remember caller ID and voicemail machines.    This episode this week features Kayla Perez.  She's a 1stPhorm brand ambassador and one of the few people to climb Mount Everest.     This came from our recent Apex Quarterly Meet Ups with Entrepreneurs where Kayla tackled another fear of hers...........   Public speaking.   About the ReWire Podcast The ReWire Podcast with Ryan Stewman – Dive into powerful insights as Ryan Stewman, the HardCore Closer, breaks down mental barriers and shares actionable steps to rewire your thoughts. Each episode is a fast-paced journey designed to reshape your mindset, align your actions, and guide you toward becoming the best version of yourself. Join in for a daily dose of real talk that empowers you to embrace change and unlock your full potential.    Learn how you can become a member of a powerful community consistently rewiring itself for success at https://www.jointheapex.com/   Rise Above

This is the 100th episode folks!  100 episodes of me yapping about stuff that most folks don't care about, but I love it and I'm grateful for everyone that listens.  Join me as I take a look at 1987 television as I experienced it.  We're gonna discuss Remington Steele and The Wonder Years.  We're gonna explore how 21 Jumpstreet made me want to be an undercover cop.  We're gonna chit chat about Energizer commercials and New Coke.  And finally, I'm gonna yap about Joey Buttafuoco, VCRs, and how Weezy fails to make me horny.  100 episodes,.  Wow.

On today's Saturday Matinee, we dust off our VCRs to take a closer look at the film adaptation of HG Wells' 1897 book "War of the Worlds".Link to Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever: https://www.everyscififilm.com/Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more.History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Film critics Brendan Wahl and Jason MacLeod survey videos and related products as holiday gifts. Included: films and TV programs on videocassette, instructional videos, VCRs, laser discs and players, camcorders for children, interactive toys, video games and publications. Also: a special look at last year's hottest World War II glow-up: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Next week: More new movies!? Questions? Comments? Suggestions? You can always shoot us an e-mail at forscreenandcountry@gmail.com   Full List: https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/war-movies/the-100-greatest-war-movies-of-all-time Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forscreenandcountry Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/fsacpod Our logo was designed by the wonderful Mariah Lirette (https://instagram.com/its.mariah.xo) The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare stars Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Eiza González, Babs Olusanmokun, Cary Elwes, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding, Rory Kinnear, Freddie Fox and Til Schweiger; directed by Guy Ritchie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Will and Nelson in the morning! The Notes: Early morning weirdness! Nelson's impeccable hair! Fascist oligarchy! Our British friends are nervous! Twitter's lingering uses! Nelson on Mars! The void! Jumping and going wheeeee! Old man reminiscing about Radio Shack! It's all computers these days! Mario and Luigi! Enough of the Luigi slander! Mario and Luigi vs Laurel and Hardy! Hardy in spirit, not in girth! The Victorian rotund! Rotund vs rotunda, another chicken or the egg scenario! Aristotle warming up the philosophy machine! Will's sordid mid-80's quest for VHS boobies! Kids these days don't understand scarcity or pausing! You can pause on a dime these days! Fuzzy bars and waterbeds! The uncuttable gordian knot! That's not how VCRs work, Alexander the Great! Our regular January patreon posts are set to public for a “free trial,” so go check ‘em out and maybe become a patron! Contact Us! Follow Us! Love Us! Email: doubledeucepod@gmail.com Twitter & Instagram: @doubledeucepod Bluesky: @doubledeucepod.bsky.social Facebook: www.facebook.com/DoubleDeucePod/ Patreon: patreon.com/DoubleDeucePod Also, please subscribe/rate/review/share us! We're on Apple, Android, Libsyn, Stitcher, Google, Spotify, Amazon, Radio.com, RadioPublic, pretty much anywhere they got podcasts, you can find the Deuce! Podcast logo art by Jason Keezer! Find his art online at Keezograms! Intro & Outro featuring Rob Schulte! Check out his many podcasts! Brought to you in part by sponsorship from Courtney Shipley, Official Superfans Stefan Rider and Amber Fraley, and listeners like you! Join a tier on our Patreon! Advertise with us! If you want that good, all-natural focus and energy, our DOUBLEDEUCE20 code still works at www.magicmind.com/doubledeuce for 20% off all purchases and subscriptions. Check out the Lawrence Times's 785 Collective at https://lawrencekstimes.com/785collective/ for a list of local LFK podcasts including this one!  

Shawn is joined by Joey, Todd, and Lee to watch the cinematic masterpiece, Hard Ticket to Hawaii. Fire up your VCRs and watch this 1987 erotic (?) action comedy with us.   Stream it on Tubi:  https://tubitv.com/movies/646725/hard-ticket-to-hawaii

January 24, 2025#WhatILearnedTodayThe Daily Mojo is 2 hours of news, commentary, comedy, and auditory deliciousness."Freedom Friday: Winning Edition"The content begins with light-hearted personal anecdotes, including a reunion at the airport. It then shifts to serious topics like solitary confinement and political commentary on trans rights and legislative frustrations. Nostalgia for Blockbuster and the transition from VCRs to a disposable culture is discussed, alongside military aid to Ukraine and concerns about domestic priorities. The narrative also includes unique archaeological finds, UFO sightings, and critiques of government policies.Phil Bell - TDM's DC Correspondent  - Joins the guys live from DC to discuss Trump's successes so far and the timeline for the near future.AllThingsTrainsPhil's YouTube Channel: HEREOur affiliate partners:Dave and his crew were roasting historically great coffee before some of these newcomers even thought about creating a coffee brand. He's still the best, in our eyes!AmericanPrideRoasters.comNothing says “I appreciate you” like an engraved gift or award. Ron and Misty (mostly Misty) have the perfect solution for you if you need a gift idea for family or your employees!www.MoJoLaserPros.comWe love to support Mike Lindell and his company. He's a real patriot and an American success story!MojoMyPillow.com Promo code: Mojo50Be ready for anything from a hurricane to man-created stupidity (toilet paper shortage, anyone?). The tools and food storage you need to weather the storm.www.PrepareWithMojo50.com Stay Connected:WATCH The Daily Mojo LIVE 7-9a CT: www.TheDailyMojo.com (RECOMMEDED)Rumble: HEREFacebook: HEREMojo 5-0 TV: HEREFreedomsquare: HEREOr just LISTEN:Mojo50.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-daily-mojo-with-brad-staggs--3085897/support.

Can we make doing some adaptation of A Christmas Carol a yearly tradition? Maybe, ‘cause this is now two years in a row! Paul and Erika are talking about 1988's Scrooged and are taking the chance to helpfully explain VCRs, Xerox pranks, and Tab to the youth. Teach the children!You can follow That Aged Well on Bluesky (@ThatAgedWell.bsky.social), Instagram (@ThatAgedWell), and Threads (@ThatAgedWell)!SUPPORT US ON PATREON FOR BONUS CONTENT!THAT AGED WELL MERCH!Wanna rate and review? HERE YOU GO!Hosts: Paul Caiola & Erika VillalbaProducer & Editor: Paul Caiola

It was the best of Bill Murray, it was the worst of Bill Murray, it was the age of VCRs....nope, wrong Dickens novel. Happy holidays to all the cynics out there. We give to you another class warfare story full of nostalgia for at least one of us. Original script for Scrooged Follow us: @liveuppod on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Listen to episodes on the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Live Up Pod YouTube channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Visit the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Live UP podcast blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Allegra Madsen has a Polaroid photo of her birth. In this episode, meet and get to know Allegra. Today, she's the executive director of Frameline film fest, the biggest LGBTQIA+ movie event in the world. She might disagree, but Allegra is a big deal. (Quick side note: As we kicked off our recording, Allegra expertly solved a Rubik's Cube. No bigs.) We begin with the story of how her parents met. Allegra's dad is from Chicago originally. He taught transcendental meditation (TM) and moved all over the world. Eventually, he landed in Virginia, where he met Allegra's mom, who is from there and was just beginning to practice TM. The two met and settled down, and soon enough, they had a baby—Allegra. She was born in Virginia Beach, VA, to, as she puts it, "two hippies who were trying to change the world by sitting quietly." A lot of Allegra's family is still in Virginia, from which, as she points out, the Supreme Court's Loving case originated. That was when the high court ruled unanimously that interracial marriages are, in fact, protected under the Constitution. Her parents are of different races, and not everyone in the family looked on approvingly. Her parents never did get married. But they raised their biracial kid together. She was a fairly typical latch-key kid growing up in the Eighties, though she split her time between her parents' families. Schools were mostly segregated, too. By the time Allegra got to high school, though, local governments and school boards did what they could to integrate, at that level at least. But, she says, that meant that the students themselves segregated within the schools. Going between the worlds of her mom's family and her dad's, Allegra says she felt at home in both, however differently. She was the only mixed-race kid though, and so, as much as she strived to fit in with any one group, it was difficult. Allegra has been tall for a while, and she was urged to play basketball, which she did. She says she liked it, but her passion for the game outweighed her skill. As a teenager, she read a lot. She says that it was probably the main way that she discovered a broader world beyond her hometown. Books gave way to movies, and they all helped form in Allegra a curiosity about how people relate to one another and share space in the world. This was around the time that VCRs really took off. In addition to local video rental shops, the expansion of Blockbuster stores nationwide made it easier to rent movies. Her mom had a job at a cable company, and when young Allegra would visit her at work, she had access to cable movies that many of her friends went without. At this point in the recording, Allegra and I go on a sidebar about movies we used to love that don't hold up well nowadays. But at the time, movies and books were ways for her to escape The South. Soon enough, something started calling Allegra to leave where she's from. She graduated high school after only three years and got a job in the office of the construction company her dad worked for, helping her earn a little money. She saved and funded a fledgeling scuba career. Yes, scuba diving. Her dream was to move to the Florida Keys to work as a dive instructor. But that dream never came true. Instead, she spent the year that would've been her senior year in high school working at a music store. Her work provided Allegra with easy access to so much music. There was also a Ticketmaster counter inside the store. Being an employee, she and her coworkers were able to pull tickets for themselves before they went on sale to the public. I go on a tangent here about what a pain it used to be to buy concert tickets over landline phones. Allegra rattles off an impressive list of bands she saw back then—one that includes Missy Elliott and Bob Dylan. When she figured out that the diving dream was dead, Allegra moved to Chicago to go to college. She had family there—aunts, uncles, grandparents. But they weren't especially close. It's not that her extended family wasn't accepting of her parents' interracial relationship, but more that they weren't prepared for it. ​And so Allegra turned to her peers. She found two people in her first week of college who turned out to be lifelong friends. She says her college experience was mostly a good one, but that, in hindsight, she still hadn't come into her own, per se. She studied film photography and design. Although she wasn't enrolled in the motion pictures program, Columbia College Chicago was and is known as a film school. And Allegra says that those friends she made early on helped her dive more deeply into the world of movies—it made her more of an active moviegoer. Allegra says she always knew she was queer. She dated girls in high school, but never really talked with her parents about her budding sexuality. She never really talked with anyone about it, in fact. Instead, she simply dated women and that was that. Check back next week for Part 2 and Allegra's eventual move to the Bay Area. ​We recorded this podcast at Frameline Film Fest's offices in South of Market in November 2024. Photography by Dan Hernandez

Joshua Bellas returns to the show to first help us talk all things VHS. We share some of our favorite films we recorded off television, the first VCRs we had, 80's camcorders, and more. Let us know what you love about the VHS era in the comments below. Then we turn to Josh as he tells us about his custom VHS business, Blenheim Retro. Josh takes original VHS tapes of some of your favorite movies and turns them into amazing collectors pieces by changing their cases, giving them a custom paint job, and more. Check out Josh's work on Whatnot at the link below! Blenheim Retro on Whatnot: https://www.whatnot.com/user/blenheimretro @blenheimretro @joshua.bellas.art CannedAirPodcast.com Twitter: @CannedAirPod Instagram: @Canned_Air If you'd like to show your support, you can either visit our Patreon page at Patreon.com/CannedAirPod or you can leave us a comment, like, and subscribe! Thanks for watching! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on Nov. 5. It dropped for free subscribers on Nov. 12. To receive future episodes as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:WhoGary Milliken, Founder of Vista MapRecorded onJune 13, 2024About Vista MapNo matter which region of the country you ski in, you've probably seen one of Milliken's maps (A list captures current clients; B list is past clients):Here's a little overview video:Why I interviewed himThe robots are coming. Or so I hear. They will wash our windows and they will build our cars and they will write our novels. They will do all of our mundane things and then they will do all of our special things. And once they can do all of the things that we can do, they will pack us into shipping containers and launch us into space. And we will look back at earth and say dang it we done fucked up.That future is either five minutes or 500 years away, depending upon whom you ask. But it's coming and there's nothing we can do to stop it. OK. But am I the only one still living in a 2024 in which it takes the assistance of at least three humans to complete a purchase at a CVS self-checkout? The little Google hub talky-thingys scattered around our apartment are often stumped by such seering questions as “Hey Google, what's the weather today?” I believe 19th century wrenchers invented the internal combustion engine and sent it into mass production faster than I can synch our wireless Nintendo Switch controllers with the console. If the robots ever come for me, I'm going to ask them to list the last five presidents of Ohio and watch them short-circuit in a shower of sparks and blown-off sprockets.We overestimate machines and underestimate humans. No, our brains can't multiply a sequence of 900-digit numbers in one millisecond or memorize every social security number in America or individually coordinate an army of 10,000 alien assassins to battle a videogame hero. But over a few billion years, we've evolved some attributes that are harder to digitally mimic than Bro.AI seems to appreciate. Consider the ridiculous combination of balance, muscle memory, strength, coordination, spatial awareness, and flexibility that it takes to, like, unpack a bag of groceries. If you've ever torn an ACL or a rotator cuff, you can appreciate how strong and capable the human body is when it functions normally. Now multiply all of those factors exponentially as you consider how they fuse so that we can navigate a bicycle through a busy city street or build a house or play basketball. Or, for our purposes, load and unload a chairlift, ski down a mogul field, or stomp a FlipDoodle 470 off of the Raging Rhinoceros run at Mt. Sickness.To which you might say, “who cares? Robots don't ski. They don't need to and they never will. And once we install the First Robot Congress, all of us will be free to ski all of the time.” But let's bring this back to something very simple that it seems as though the robots could do tomorrow, but that they may not be able to do ever: create a ski area trailmap.This may sound absurd. After all, mountains don't move around a lot. It's easy enough to scan one and replicate it in the digital sphere. Everything is then arranged just exactly as it is in reality. With such facsimiles already possible, ski area operators can send these trailmap artists directly into the recycling bin, right?Probably not anytime soon. And that's because what robots don't understand about trailmaps is how humans process mountains. In a ski area trailmap, we don't need something that exactly recreates the mountain. Rather, we need a guide that converts a landscape that's hilly and windy and multi-faced and complicated into something as neat and ordered as stocked aisles in a grocery store. We need a three-dimensional environment to make sense in a two-dimensional rendering. And we need it all to work together at a scale shrunken down hundreds of times and stowed in our pocket. Then we need that scale further distorted to make very big things such as ravines and intermountain traverses to look small and to make very small things like complex, multi-trailed beginner areas look big. We need someone to pull the mountain into pieces that work together how we think they work together, understanding that fidelity to our senses matters more than precisely mirroring reality. But robots don't get this because robots don't ski. What data, inherent to the human condition, do we upload to these machines to help them understand how we process the high-speed descent of a snow-covered mountain and how to translate that to a piece of paper? How do we make them understand that this east-facing mountain must appear to face north so that skiers understand how to navigate to and from the adjacent peak, rather than worrying about how tectonic plates arranged the monoliths 60 million years ago? How do the robots know that this lift spanning a two-mile valley between separate ski centers must be represented abstractly, rather than at scale, lest it shrinks the ski trails to incomprehensible minuteness?It's worth noting that Milliken has been a leader in digitizing ski trailmaps, and that this grounding in the digital is the entire basis of his business model, which flexes to the seasonal and year-to-year realities of ever-changing ski areas far more fluidly than laboriously hand-painted maps. But Milliken's trailmaps are not simply topographic maps painted cartoon colors. They are, rather, cartography-inspired art, reality translated to the abstract without losing its anchors in the physical. In recreating sprawling, multi-faced ski centers such as Palisades Tahoe or Vail Mountain, Milliken, a skier and a human who exists in a complex and nuanced world, is applying the strange blend of talents gifted him by eons of natural selection to do something that no robot will be able to replicate anytime soon.What we talked aboutHow late is too late in the year to ask for a new trailmap; time management when you juggle a hundred projects at once; how to start a trailmap company; life before the internet; the virtues of skiing at an organized ski center; the process of creating a trailmap; whether you need to ski a ski area to create a trailmap; why Vista Map produces digital, rather than painted, trailmaps; the toughest thing to get right on a trailmap; how the Vista Map system simplifies map updates; converting a winter map to summer; why trailmaps are rarely drawn to real-life scale; creating and modifying trailmaps for complex, sprawling mountains like Vail, Stowe, and Killington; updating Loon's map for the recent South Peak expansion; making big things look small at Mt. Shasta; Mt. Rose and when insets are necessary; why small ski areas “deserve a great map”; and thoughts on the slow death of the paper trailmap.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewTechnology keeps eating things that I love. Some of them – CDs, books, event tickets, magazines, newspapers – are easier to accept. Others – childhood, attention spans, the mainstreaming of fringe viewpoints, a non-apocalyptic social and political environment, not having to listen to videos blaring from passengers' phones on the subway – are harder. We arrived in the future a while ago, and I'm still trying to decide if I like it.My pattern with new technology is often the same: scoff, resist, accept, forget. But not always. I am still resisting e-bikes. I tried but did not like wireless headphones and smartwatches (too much crap to charge and/or lose). I still read most books in print and subscribe to whatever quality print magazines remain. I grasp these things while knowing that, like manual transmissions or VCRs, they may eventually become so difficult to find that I'll just give up.I'm not at the giving-up point yet on paper trailmaps, which the Digital Bro-O-Sphere insists are relics that belong on our Pet Rectangles. But mountains are big. Phones are small. Right there we have a disconnect. Also paper doesn't stop working in the cold. Also I like the souvenir. Also we are living through the digital equivalent of the Industrial Revolution and sometimes it's hard to leave the chickens behind and go to work in the sweatshop for five cents a week. I kind of liked life on the farm and I'm not ready to let go of all of it all at once.There are some positives. In general I do not like owning things and not acquiring them to begin with is a good way to have fewer of them. But there's something cool about picking up a trailmap of Nub's Nob that I snagged at the ticket window 30 years ago and saying “Brah we've seen some things.”Ski areas will always need trailmaps. But the larger ones seem to be accelerating away from offering those maps on sizes larger than a smartphone and smaller than a mountaintop billboard. And I think that's a drag, even as I slowly accept it.Podcast NotesOn Highmount Ski CenterMilliken grew up skiing in the Catskills, including at the now-dormant Highmount Ski Center:As it happens, the abandoned ski area is directly adjacent to Belleayre, the state-owned ski area that has long planned to incorporate Highmount into its trail network (the Highmount trails are on the far right, in white):Here's Belleayre's current trailmap for context - the Highmount expansion would sit far looker's right:That one is not a Vista Map product, but Milliken designed Belleayre's pre-gondola-era maps:Belleayre has long declined to provide a timeline for its Highmount expansion, which hinged on the now-stalled development of a privately run resort at the base of the old ski area. Given the amazing amount of money that the state has been funneling into its trio of ski areas (Whiteface and Gore are the other two), however, I wouldn't be shocked to see Belleayre move ahead with the project at some point.On the Unicode consortiumThis sounds like some sort of wacky conspiracy theory, but there really is a global overlord dictating a standard set of emoji on our phones. You can learn more about it here.Maps we talked aboutLookout Pass, Idaho/MontanaEven before Lookout Pass opened a large expansion in 2022, the multi-sided ski area's map was rather confusing:For a couple of years, Lookout resorted to an overhead map to display the expansion in relation to the legacy mountain:That overhead map is accurate, but humans don't process hills as flats very well. So, for 2024-25, Milliken produced a more traditional trailmap, which finally shows the entire mountain unified within the context of itself:Mt. Spokane, WashingtonMt. Spokane long relied on a similarly confusing map to show off its 1,704 acres:Milliken built a new, more intuitive map last year:Mt. Rose, NevadaFor some mountains, however, Milliken has opted for multiple angles over a single-view map. Mt. Rose is a good example:Telluride, ColoradoWhen Milliken decided to become a door-to-door trailmap salesman, his first stop was Telluride. He came armed with this pencil-drawn sketch:The mountain ended up being his first client:Gore Mountain, New YorkThis was one of Milliken's first maps created with the Vista Map system, in 1994:Here's how Vista Map has evolved that map today:Whiteface, New YorkOne of Milliken's legacy trailmaps, Whiteface in 1997:Here's how that map had evolved by the time Milliken created the last rendition around 2016:Sun Valley, IdahoSun Valley presented numerous challenges of perspective and scale:Grand Targhee, WyomingMilliken had to design Targhee's trailmap without the benefit of a site visit:Vail Mountain, ColoradoMilliken discusses his early trailmaps at Vail Mountain, which he had to manipulate to show the new-ish (at the time) Game Creek Bowl on the frontside:In recent years, however, Vail asked Milliken to move the bowl into an inset. Here's the 2021 frontside map:Here's a video showing the transformation:Stowe, VermontWe use Stowe to discuss the the navigational flourishes of a trailmap compared to real-life geography. Here's the map:And here's Stowe IRL, which shows a very different orientation:Mt. Hood Meadows, OregonMt. Hood Meadows also required some imagination. Here's Milliken's trailmap:Here's the real-world overhead view, which looks kind of like a squid that swam through a scoop of vanilla ice cream:Killington, VermontAnother mountain that required some reality manipulation was Killington, which, incredibly, Milliken managed to present without insets:And here is how Killington sits in real life – you could give me a thousand years and I could never make sense of this enough to translate it into a navigable two-dimensional single-view map:Loon Mountain, New HampshireVista Map has designed Loon Moutnain's trailmap since around 2019. Here's what it looked like in 2021:For the 2023-24 ski season, Loon added a small expansion to its South Peak area, which Milliken had to work into the existing map:Mt. Shasta Ski Park, CaliforniaSometimes trailmaps need to wildly distort geographic features and scale to realistically focus on the ski experience. The lifts at Mt. Shasta, for example, rise around 2,000 vertical feet. It's an additional 7,500 or so vertical feet to the mountain's summit, but the trail network occupies more space on the trailmap than the snowcone above it, as the summit is essentially a decoration for the lift-served skiing public.Oak Mountain, New YorkMilliken also does a lot of work for small ski areas. Here's 650-vertical-foot Oak Mountain, in New York's Adirondacks:Willard Mountain, New YorkAnd little Willard, an 85-acre ski area that's also in Upstate New York:Caberfae Peaks, MichiganAnd Caberfae, a 485-footer in Michigan's Lower Peninsula:On the New York City Subway mapThe New York City subway map makes Manhattan look like the monster of New York City:That, however, is a product of the fact that nearly every line runs through “the city” as we call it. In reality, Manhattan is the smallest of the five boroughs, at just 22.7 square miles, versus 42.2 for The Bronx, 57.5 for Staten Island, 69.4 for Brooklyn, and 108.7 for Queens.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 71/100 in 2024, and number 571 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

- SKOR North's Judd Zulgad chats about things that are now considered old like VCRs and DVDs. Tom and Judd chat about the price of things like cassette tapes and old VCRs. The Timberwolves kick off their season tonight, is this the year they can make the run to the Finals? Will you be tuning into either the Wolves or Wild tonight?- KSTP's Chris Egert shares a PSA about how people have forgotten about basic cable being free, talks about protesters at the U of M who want the university to divest any sort of funding to Israel and more things that align with their cause, a shooting that occurred at a light rail stop, and some other local headlines from the day.- Actor Penelope Ann Miller joins the show to talk about home entertainment release of Reagan which is available for purchase now! Reagan is a biographical drama film directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner, based on Paul Kengor's 2006 book The Crusader. In the film Miller stars alongside Dennis Quaid, Jon Voigt, and Scott Stapp.- Kristyn Burtt has news about Liam Payne's death and the controversial report by TMZ reporting the death where they posted a picture of Payne's body in the initial report before eventually taking it down. Plus some good tv options for your viewing this evening!Stream the show LIVE on the Tom Barnard Show app M-F from 8-9:30AM or get the show on-demand on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

- SKOR North's Judd Zulgad chats about things that are now considered old like VCRs and DVDs. Tom and Judd chat about the price of things like cassette tapes and old VCRs. The Timberwolves kick off their season tonight, is this the year they can make the run to the Finals? Will you be tuning into either the Wolves or Wild tonight? - KSTP's Chris Egert shares a PSA about how people have forgotten about basic cable being free, talks about protesters at the U of M who want the university to divest any sort of funding to Israel and more things that align with their cause, a shooting that occurred at a light rail stop, and some other local headlines from the day. - Actor Penelope Ann Miller joins the show to talk about home entertainment release of Reagan which is available for purchase now! Reagan is a biographical drama film directed by Sean McNamara and written by Howard Klausner, based on Paul Kengor's 2006 book The Crusader. In the film Miller stars alongside Dennis Quaid, Jon Voigt, and Scott Stapp. - Kristyn Burtt has news about Liam Payne's death and the controversial report by TMZ reporting the death where they posted a picture of Payne's body in the initial report before eventually taking it down. Plus some good tv options for your viewing this evening! Stream the show LIVE on the Tom Barnard Show app M-F from 8-9:30AM or get the show on-demand on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The First Run, Chris and Matt adjust the tracking on their VCRs to no avail with the latest in the V/H/S series, ‘V/H/S Beyond'. Then, they'll give you the rundown of the Big Releases on Physical Media, featuring the Viper Video and Streaming Picks of the Week. Finally, Matt and Chris will wrap up the show with their all killer, no filler list of their 5 favorite Horror Anthologies. 00:00-25:57: Intro/VHS Beyond25:58-36:25: Physical Media Picks36:26-55:14: 5 Favorite Horror Anthologies55:15-56:29: Wrap-UpTheme music by Jamal Malachi Ford-Bey

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT There are not a lot of companies that have been involved in what we now call digital signage for 44 years, but Videotel has been selling technology that puts marketing information on screens since 1980. The company started with VCRs (younger readers may have to Google that) and then started designing, manufacturing and selling DVD players that, unlike consumer devices, would happily play out a set of repeating video files for weeks, months and years. Back in the days before fast internet connections, cloud computing and small form factor PCs, that's how a lot of what we now know as digital signage was done. About 14 years ago, the San Diego-area company added dedicated, solid state digital signage media players - and that product line has steadily grown to include networked and interactive versions. The company also now has interactive accessories for stuff like lift and learn, and directional speakers that help drive experiences in everything from retail to museums. I had a good conversation with Lisa Schneider, who runs sales and marketing, and Travis McMahand, Videotel's CTO. We get into the company's roots, the evolution to solid state media players, and how Videotel successfully competes with $400 and higher players, when at least part of the buyer market seems driven mostly by finding devices that are less than $100. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thank you for joining me. Can you introduce yourselves and tell me what Videotel is all about?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having both Travis and me today. We appreciate it. My name is Lisa Schneider and I am the executive vice president for sales and marketing for our company, Videotel Digital. We were founded in 1980. Gosh, it's been almost 44 years now, back when we were manufacturing top-loading VCRs, that went into industrial-grade DVD players, and now in the last 14 years, we are manufacturing digital signage media players. We have interactive solutions that include various sensors like motion sensors, proximity sensors, and weight sensors. We've got mechanical LED push buttons and touchless IR buttons and RFID tags, and things like that that create interactive displays. We also provide directional audio speakers. We have various form factors for all types of projects, and then we also have Travis on the line with us. I'll let Travis introduce himself.  Travis McMahand: Oh, hi, I'm Travis McMahand I am the CTO of Videotel Digital.  Where's the company based? Is it in San Diego?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we are in, it's San Diego. It's actually Chula Vista, borderline San Diego. So in California.  San Diego area.  Lisa Schneider: Yes, San Diego area. Beautiful San Diego.  So I've been aware of your company forever and going all the way back to the days when you were doing industrial grade, commercially oriented DVD players. In the early days of digital science before things were networked, that's what people were using and if you used a regular DVD player or even a VCR or something like that, the thing was really not set up to play over and over again if you were using just like a consumer-grade device. So the whole idea was you were, you guys developed commercial-grade versions that were rated to last, for days, weeks, months, years. Is that accurate?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that is accurate, and it was, that was our flagship product back in the day. That was because we made a truly industrial-grade player and it would auto power on, auto seamlessly loop and repeat without any manual interaction, even without a remote. So it was a looping player.  We actually still have three different types of industrial-grade DVD players that we still offer. They're actually really popular in healthcare facilities because they are specifically UL-approved for medical DVD players still, and they are still out there and, we are still producing them.  The attraction for that at the time was that just the absence of really networked media players unless you were quite sophisticated and were using big box PCs and everything else, I assume that market with the exception of what you're saying about Hospitals is largely gone away? Lisa Schneider: It hasn't been, for example, like sometimes with waiting rooms, people are still using DVDs for movies, for entertainment purposes, not just in healthcare. Sometimes there are still people who are self-burned content for museums. It's just simple for them to just throw the disc in and then they walk away and it just continuously loops. So they're still out there.  It's not completely gone away and we are one of the only ones left though that is still really providing the industrial grade DVD players. You said about 14 years ago, you got into digital signage media players that were not based on DVDs, it was based on hard drives or solid-state storage. Lisa Schneider: Yes, we started with solid state media players that were just simply looping off of an SD card or USB, no network connection, none of the fancy stuff, and that was really kind of the migration from the DVD, because people didn't want to use DVDs anymore. They just wanted to upload their content, do the same thing, load them, and go. So we probably still have a few versions of just solid-state players. That's how we entered the market. But one of the really cool things we did was we made one of them interactive, which, that's where we come into the interactive solutions, which we can talk about too.  The primary products that you have now are network-connected, right? Lisa Schneider: We have both. We still have solid-state digital signage players, for those simple needs, and then we do have networked players as well.  I'm thinking there's an awful lot of cases like retail marketing for brands for product launches and things like that, where, yes, you could use a network digital signage player, but it's loading up a set of files at the start and that's really all it's ever going to use, right?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's a lot of the use cases, where they just want to upload the content and let it go but there are obviously use cases where the content is ever-changing and they can push out content on our remote players, network players, via quick push. Do you have device management? Will you know what's going on with these devices, as they're out in a big box or whatever?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, one of our new player, we actually just did a press release on it for our VP92 4K network player. It will allow customers to use our free embedded software on the player that will allow them to push out the content remotely and that they can see what is being played in the various locations, wherever the box is deployed to, and then if it's just a single unit or hundreds of units if it's up in the thousands, then we recommend our cloud-based CMS software where they can manage, do all the management within the software itself. So you have your own software, but I'm assuming you're not selling yourself as a software company?  Lisa Schneider: No, we are not selling ourselves as a software company. We have hardware and then we have various software options. But it is embedded in the players to make it extremely simple to use. And it's tuned specifically for your devices.  Lisa Schneider: Correct. Yes.  Can a third-party CMS company, a CMS software company use your boxes?  Lisa Schneider: Travis that might be a good question for you to answer.  Travis McMahand: That's a possibility. We design our players to be simple and reliable. We don't make it so difficult to set up a program, so in doing that, we've hidden or disabled, certain features within the operating system. But we can still work with companies if they have a specific application or service that they want to use. We can definitely work with companies to try to make that happen.  Okay, so I guess a scenario would be something like a retailer or even a brand that has networks in stores and is using a CMS for the big displays for retail marketing and they say, we would like to use your stuff for the interactive or whatever, can we use the same platform to manage both of them? Travis McMahand: Yeah, that's a possibility. It goes on a case-by-case basis.  It's not something you're actively marketing, but technically you could do it if it makes sense for both sides, right?  Lisa Schneider: Absolutely, Dave. That's what I'd like to interject. We're open to those conversations with anybody who is interested, especially if it is a larger project is something I would entertain.  The hardware sector has been a tough one for a lot of the companies that have media players, with maybe the notable exception of BrightSign, which has a very big footprint everywhere, but the PC guys in particular, struggled to, in recent years, get relevance, and a lot of that seems to be driven by a race to the bottom to see how low we can go in terms of cost for a media player, and we now have Amazon with a custom build or kind of a stripped-out build of its Fire Sticks that are $99.  Has it been a challenge to compete with that stuff or, do you operate differently or have a different market? Lisa Schneider: That's a great question, and yes, I did see that new Amazon $99 Fire Stick. But we're very unique in a sense where, sure you can purchase a $99 player, but is it really industrial grade? Is it going to seamlessly auto-loop? Is it reliable? Can you connect interactive devices to it? Can you grow within it?  So it is a challenge in some aspects of it. But it seems that the ones that go, the customers that choose that route, end up circling back and they want more. It wasn't enough. The price was good, but then they realized, if we invest a little bit more, we're getting all of these things that we can grow into. And your media playout boxes, they look like they're industrial grade, ruggedized. They've got what looks like heat sinks or things like that built into it. Are these designs done in Chula Vista and then you have contracts manufacturer over in Asia?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, spot on. We design our own players in-house, and then we have them made, and we have a stringent process and a bunch of design engineers that are just constantly trying to break things, and they do a really good job of it, and we are very careful as to what we put out in the market and that is what also makes us unique.  And that allows you to sell at a higher price point because you have people looking at it and going, okay, I get why I'm paying more for this.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, absolutely. We're not just relabeling some cheapo boxes. This is something that is designed in-house and these are the features, and we are able to get a little bit more because we are using premium parts during the manufacturing process and other other reasons as well, not just for the hardware. Travis, is it your own operating system or are you running on some kind of flavor of Linux?  Travis McMahand: The base operating system is Android. We use Android and just build off of that, build our apps within it, and set up all of the settings exactly the way we want.   Has that been that from the start or did you evolve into Android? Travis McMahand: Oh, we evolved into Android. We originally started when we first were doing players that were playing content just from USB and SD cards. It was really simple at that point and we were doing our own operating system. embedded operating system within the player at that point.  But then when we wanted to start adding more features and opening up the platform to more types of files, we found that using an Android-based operating system was much easier and more reliable to get going.  When I look at your customer list, it's impressive. You've got a whole bunch of interesting customers, a lot of them appear to be attractions, museums, that sort of thing, some brands, and so on. How would you describe, Lisa, your core customer base?  Lisa Schneider: I would say our core customer base is going to be in the retail space, museums, trade shows and events, and probably hotels, if I had to go down the list, but, we have just about everybody from food and beverage to restaurants, people use our players for menu boards, a lot of kiosks. We do healthcare, dentist offices, med spas, we're into transit on buses and bus stations. Just like the list goes on, but I would say those would probably be our top.  Because you have these ruggedized boxes, is it advantageous that you are in the San Diego area as opposed to on the other side of the Pacific in terms of, there are companies that also sell small form factor, ruggedized media, and play-out boxes that are in Taiwan or China. But the challenge you sometimes have is the time zones and language.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we make it known that we are in the States, obviously we wanted to serve the US, but also we can maintain and manage the international business as well. But yeah, it's just was like just evolved in that way.  You sell direct or do you have channels and distribution?  Lisa Schneider: Great question. We do both. We sell directly more to the small business owners, and then most of our business is through integrators and the reseller channel. Why did they come your way? We covered it, but I'm still curious about the pitch when you get asked, why you?  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, why Videotel? We've been around for 44 years, and we have experience. One of the big things is we really do listen to our customers. The word gets out, we offer free customer support and free technical support. You get a live person on the phone. Our customers are constantly, it's funny how they say, gosh, thank you for calling me back. It's “does so and so not call you back?” So they love us for those reasons and that we do offer industrial-grade equipment. It lasts and thank goodness the rumor is out there that we make solid products.  I'm also curious about how you get the manufacturing done. Do you have somebody located in China or wherever it is?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, we do. We have a team of people that are in China that we've actually had relationships for, gosh, I think 15 years now and so it's a very solid relationship. It makes it so much easier to communicate, and then they're the interface to all of the manufacturing that goes on. So there's our front lines there and it makes it a lot easier for us. Are your deployments, I guess they're not your deployments, but the projects that are done, do they tend to be small quantities and a lot of different customers or do you have accounts where they may have hundreds or even thousands of your units because they're all over the place?  Lisa Schneider: Yeah I would say probably 70% of our business is the small to mid-sized business and then the other 30% is where you're going to find the more enterprise larger on the upward of a thousand projects.  As a biz dev person when you have a whole cavalcade of smaller customers that gets to be a challenge to manage, right? Lisa Schneider: It can be, but this is what makes life a lot easier for us as a team here is that our products are so easy to use that they are plug-and-play. They can figure it out. We have a whole learning program, a bunch of videos on our website, examples, and things. We have a chat, so it flows nicely. It really does.  It hasn't been too much of a burden because I think we just make things that are simple. That's what we pride ourselves on.  So I go directly to you, I'm a museum, and I need three of these things for looping videos. I order them, and you ship them to me, what do I need to do to get them running?  Lisa Schneider: You need to simply connect it to your HDMI to any of the screens that you're using, and then you upload the content on the USB SD and then you insert it and it will play or if you're using the network capabilities, same thing, you plug it in, you get your network connection and then depending on if you're using the free embedded software, It's a matter of just opening up the software on the player and choosing the source that you want to use. If it's, let's say USB SD, if you want to use SFTP or LAN, you can point your content to a URL, but it's basic clicking of a button and uploading your file, it's just that simple. So if you want to get fancy, you can, and use file transfers and everything else, but, if IT is not your role, but you just need to get something running, you don't need to bring somebody in to help you.  Lisa Schneider: That is exactly right. In fact, I always tell people, I say, you do not need a computer science or an IT degree to run our stuff. So you get it, take it out of the box, plug and play, and you're really ready to go.  If it's networked, wre you getting questions about security these days?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, I think we have. Not too many, but Travis would be better suited to answer that. He handles that side of that.  Travis McMahand: Yeah, for security, we really try to lock down the player to make it so that it really doesn't have any incoming ports to it. So you can't log directly into the player over a network. The only settings that you can do on the player itself are done with either the infrared remote control that comes with the player, or you can connect a keyboard and mouse to our network players to access the menu that way. But for the sources, say you're using a shared LAN folder or an SFTP site, you're putting your content on one of those sources, and then you're just pointing the player to that source and telling it, okay, go check for new content or check for changed content every hour or every day or whatever. So the player itself goes out and checks for the content. There's no inbound traffic to the player that the player doesn't initiate,  Gotcha, and I gather from the IT and IS crowd lately that whereas several years ago they were pretty jumpy about using Android, they're now pretty comfy with it.  Travis McMahand: Yeah, I haven't heard too many complaints about it being an Android player. Once we explained the security that we have built into the player, we really haven't had any pushback on that.  Let's talk about interactive. Why did you go down that path? Was it customer demand?  Lisa Schneider: Yes. You know what? It actually was. It started with a museum actually in San Diego and they came to us and they said, this is what we're looking for. We want to trigger content and this is how we want to do it, and we thought, okay, we'll give it a shot, and then it just bloomed from there.  Once we came up with a way of connecting and how we're gonna create the interaction, then we started evolving from there with all the different types of interactive sources. You also have interactive devices that are paired with your playout boxes. Was that a kind of a learned decision that you're best to develop your own as opposed to trying to integrate other stuff that may be used for other purposes and could maybe be hacked to work with this? Lisa Schneider: Yeah, I think that the reason we just did it in the house was because we wanted to control it, and also really because everything was just out was so complex. We're like, okay, we need to just bring this down 10 notches. Let's just, we need to make the super simple for our customers. So then that's why we just developed it in-house.  Yeah, in my dark past, I worked with a company that did digital signage solutions and had its own media players, and I remember there was an ask for interactive, and we had to source big ass buttons from a company that made buttons for slot machines, and then we had a guy who worked out of a, I think a motorhome somewhere in California and designed controller boards. So we had a custom controller board for this thing and everything else and it worked, but good God, that was a process as opposed to just saying, “Yeah, I want this play-out box and, I need two of these, and two of those interactive things.”  Lisa Schneider: Oh, that's pretty much how it went down with us too. And our team really loves the challenge. We love doing custom work. I know Travis is working on a bunch of stuff right now with different projects. We have one that is using our interactive IP push, is what we call it, for the automotive parts department actually, and I can't say who just yet, but, it's a customer that just reported back that with our solution that we created, this was the first time in the history of their company they had the highest productivity.  Again, it comes from the customers. That's what I mean. When I say we listen to our customers, they help you grow,  When I look at the different accessories that you have, there's motion sensors, there's triggers and buttons and things like that. What typically are your customers using?  Lisa Schneider: I would say the most popular would be the LED push buttons and/or the IR touchless buttons for museums, also in the trade show booths, I would say our sense solution, is our motion sensor that kind of detects human distance from a display. So you can lure somebody into something and then it would trigger the content once they're in within a certain range. I would say that was probably our two most popular solutions.  We also have a sensor that's a wave to-play where you just wave your hand over an area and it will trigger content. That's another popular one too. I've always wondered about some of those things because if there's any sort of a learning curve, like you, you've got to get somebody to wave to change a file or whatever that is, how hard is it for them to figure that out? Even though it sounds simple.  Lisa Schneider: Yeah, we do. We make suggestions for, God, the stuff that some of these integrators come up with is so cool, but they do make it really simple, using decal stickers or there it's on plywood or it says, wave your hand here, or it's within the content itself. So they come up to the screen. It's pretty pretty self-explanatory.  We're not one of those where it's going to tell you your age, your hair color and eye color and anything to that degree. This is more simple. We don't find too many people standing there lost looking at it, thank goodness.  Are many using the capabilities to lift and learn?  Lisa Schneider: Yes, that's one of our newer solutions that we just came out with, really cool, lifting a product off of a display and then it triggering. Retailers are really taking to that right now as well as the museums, where you have to physically hold something, lift it.  Yeah. It's interesting because that's something that's an idea, a concept, and a capability that has been around for 10-15 years. So when I've seen companies saying, look, we can do lift and learn. I'm thinking, okay, you didn't exactly discover fire. It's been around, but it really didn't have much marketplace adoption until now, it seems, recently.  Lisa Schneider: It is, but the lift and learns that was out there before were again, so complex and we take it down a notch and it's just a matter of making a harness, they plug it in the back of the player, plug it in the TV and you name your files a certain way and they're good to go. So yeah, we're not reinventing anything, but. We have made it so simple to use that you don't need that, to a degree to figure it out.  When you talk to prospects and they ask about your company and everything, is there a reference customer, or a project that you tend to trot out and say, here's a great example of what we do? Lisa Schneider: Yes, there are so many. We're lucky enough to have a whole plethora on our website of case studies that have participated in that. So if I say yes, if it's a museum, I say, okay, I have a link to a laundry list of museums, and here's what we did for them. They shared their photos and how they did it. So yes, we absolutely can do that.  All right, this has been great. It's terrific to finally have a chat with you guys and find out more about your company. Thanks for spending some time with me  Lisa Schneider: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. It's always so good to chat with you.  Travis McMahand: Yeah. Thank you

Every week we say that the yarns can't get better than last week and every week we get proven wrong. Champ'd by your Uncle, naughty VCRs, school yard hustles and more in this instalment of our favourite time of the week. Enjoy trendsetters!Got a yarn? Keep it under 2 minutes and email it to carryon@alphablokes.com.auEver wanted to watch the podcast? You can watch all of our episode visuals, ad-free and uncut alongside all of our vlogs on our Patreon: www.patreon.com/alphablokespodcast0:00 - Intro2:12 - Knuckles Proper True Yarnn5:50 - Carry Ons57:11 - Winning Yarn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the podcast, Josh and Drusilla discuss one of their very favorite European lesbian vampire films, Daughters of Darkness. From wiki: “Daughters of Darkness[b] is a 1971 erotic horror film co-written and directed by Harry Kümel and starring Delphine Seyrig, John Karlen, Andrea Rau, and Danielle Ouimet.” Also discussed: Laserdiscs, VCRs, Alice Sweet Alice, Psycho II, Scream, franchises, It's Alive, Karen Black, The House that Screamed, Delphine Seyrig, Klaus Kinski, Jean Rollins, Dark Shadows, haint blue, queer villains, gigolos, and more!NEXT WEEK: Vacation of Terror and Vacation of Terror II    Follow them across the internet:Bloodhaus:https://www.bloodhauspod.com/https://twitter.com/BloodhausPodhttps://www.instagram.com/bloodhauspod/ Drusilla Adeline:https://www.sisterhydedesign.com/https://letterboxd.com/sisterhyde/ Joshua Conkelhttps://www.joshuaconkel.com/https://www.instagram.com/joshua_conkel/https://letterboxd.com/JoshuaConkel/

We played Throwback Live at 7:05! Does anyone still own VCRs? & more

VCRs, landline telephones, tube televisions, the Dewey Decimal System... what is scarier: antiquated 90's technology or a cursed VHS tape that kills hapless viewers? The Brains dismantle this Japanese export to discern how a cheesy premise provided such a spooktacular outcome.

Are you looking for a story that is 100% guaranteed to blow your mind? A true crime tale that'll leave you wondering how crooks got away with it for so long in the first place? Well, hold on to your girdle, because this one's a doozy. It's got everything: insurance scams, fake passports, an undercover sting operation, Israeli really bank accounts, and huge sales on some of the best TVs and VCRs around (sales tax not included). Best of all, you can listen to this story for the low, low price of FREE! Now that price is insane! Ray teaches Rob about how a mom-and-pop consumer electronics store went from being a tri-state curiosity to a national sensation; who the real man is behind all those infamous ads; why having a CPA in the family comes in handy when you're committing tax fraud; and why building an empire on a foundation of shady financials and skimming off the top probably isn't the best business model.If you like what we are doing, please support us on Patreon.TEAMRay HebelRobert W. SchneiderMark SchroederBilly RecceDaniel SchwartzbergGabe CrawfordNatalie DeSaviaWEBSITEWhite Collar Fraud ARTICLESMental FlossNew York Times - 1985New York Times - 2016 (1)New York Times - 2016 (2)New YorkerNJ.comWashington PostEPISODE CLIPS1987 Crazy Eddie CommercialCrazy Eddie 'Insane!' Commercial (NY, 1978)Classic Crazy Eddie Commercial 'Bathroom DooWop' (1977-1979)

#299:  VCRs are buzzing again in the city...that's right! Watching a movie on VHS is back! But in 2024, with streaming and Blu-Ray, why watch something on tape? HTLA producer Victoria Alejandro spoke with VHS vendors, collectors, and other tape aficionados around the city (including filmmaker Vera Drew of "The People's Joker") to understand the subculture, the community, and let YOU know why tapes are back, baby! Guests: Filmmaker Vera Drew, head of Altered Innocence Frank Jaffe, Michelle Halac and Alex Gootter of Hollywood Entertainment, Erik Varho and Jessica Gonzales from Whammy!, Eliana Oropeza from Aztec Pickers, Jackie Forsythe from AMIA

This episode is, we suppose, like a box of chocolates, because technically you don't know what you're going to get, but we can tell you we're talking about the ubiquitous Forrest Gump soundtrack. Remembering top-loader VCRs, #justiceforJenn, powering through overplay, how long sixties soul acts gave themselves to get drawers on the floor, and songs Muppets sing at you. What does it sound like when the Beach Boys sing a New Yorker article about pirates? Find out with our latest episode! Intro and outro by Andrew Byrne; interstitial music by Classics IV. For more information/to become a patron of the show, visit patreon.com/mastas! SHOW NOTES Where to watch Forrest Gump Record Of The Year Showdown, Episode 1: 1959-1974 John Fogerty not about certain pols' use of "Fortunate Son" Episode 45: Gladys Knight And The Pips, "Midnight Train To Georgia" Episode 195: Dolly Parton's Underrated Hits

Javier López looks at engineering challenges differently. He became Vice President of Engineering at Carta after starting his career building web pages in his spare time. He eventually leveraged his development skills from Mexico City to emigrate to the United States and enter the world of start-ups. López is a self-made leader driven by a passion for learning. From his early days disassembling and reassembling VCRs as a child to reading up on programming languages during his early career on the web, he remains inquisitive. In his spare time, López has a keen eye for photography. His philosophy on work balances curiosity, creativity, and company strategy to provide customer-focused solutions. In this episode of Wolfed, López joins host Chris Cohen to discuss: His career journey, from aspiring photographer to immigrating to the United States and leading teams at Carta. Overcoming imposter syndrome as a U.S. immigrant by leveraging his unique experience collaborating with international teams. How IT leaders can work cross-functionally to gain buy-in and generate top-line revenue. The role transparency plays in leading high-performers prepared for emerging technologies and tomorrow's business challenges. Learn more at qawolf.com.

Send us a Text Message.If you're in your 30s, 40s or 50s, you'll relate to this episode! Jeremy Bradley talks about being a computer owner back in the 1990s and early 2000s. The systems were minimal and basic, and, you know what, they were perfectly fine! JB has a laugh talking about his family's 256 MB computer and having to uninstall programs just to free up space to use a scanner they got for Christmas. Plus, the era of dial-up internet -- with the AOL CDs and the squealing phone lines and the virus fears, JB reflects on how slow everything was back then. Could you tolerate that today? Probably not. Later, he talks about how many VCRs he went through as an avid TV watcher and the pain of finding two minutes of a video clip on the six-hour tape.

On this week's show we ask you to try an experiment with your friends and family. We also look at the history of VHS. Finally we read your emails and take a look at the week's news. News: YouTube TV is testing an enhanced 720p quality setting too Most Cord Cutters Do Not Pay for a Live Service Like YouTube TV, Fubo, or Hulu + Live TV Roku Debuts Pro Series TV With Mini-LED Starting at $900 Home Cinema Viewing Experiment The other day we were watching a movie on Netflix and between my wife, brother-in-law, and his wife I noticed that everyone was periodically glancing at their phones. This kind of irritated me mainly because I have spent a lot of money on sound and picture and thought, they might as well be watching on a phone or tablet. The next night, I asked my wife and kids to not only silence their phones but also put them away. We watched a movie and the family was a bit irritated. It seems that the only place they can really immerse themselves into a movie is actually at the cinema. I encourage you to try the following experiment: Minimize Distractions - this is any distraction digital or otherwise. Silence your devices - Put phones and tablets on silent and turn off any notifications on all the devices within ear shot. Quiet Environment - Choose a time when household noise is minimal. Shut doors and windows if external noise is an issue. History of VHS VHS, or Video Home System, was a home video recording format developed by JVC (Victor Company of Japan) in the 1970s. It became one of the dominant formats for home video playback and recording during the 1980s and 1990s.  Here is a brief history of VHS: Development - JVC unveiled the VHS system in Japan in 1976, offering consumers the ability to record and play back video content on videocassette recorders (VCRs) using magnetic tape. VHS was in direct competition with Sony's Betamax format, but thanks to longer recording time and lower production costs, VHS eventually emerged as the preferred choice among consumers. Market Dominance - Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, VHS gained widespread popularity and became the standard format for home video recording and distribution. Major Hollywood studios began releasing movies on VHS, leading to a booming rental market, especially with the rise of video rental stores like Blockbuster. Format Wars - The battle between VHS and Betamax is often cited as one of the most famous format wars in consumer electronics history. Despite Betamax's superior picture quality, VHS's longer recording time and lower cost attracted more consumers and content producers. By the late 1980s, VHS had clearly won the format war, leading to the eventual decline of Betamax. Expansion into Other Markets - VHS technology expanded beyond home video recording to become a standard format for recording television shows, archiving video content, and even for use in educational and industrial settings. Evolution and Decline - VHS continued to evolve with the introduction of VHS-C (compact VHS) for camcorders and Hi-Fi stereo sound capabilities. However, with the emergence of digital video formats like DVDs and later Blu-ray discs, VHS began its decline in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The last known major Hollywood film released on VHS was in 2006. Legacy - Despite its eventual obsolescence, VHS left a lasting impact on the home entertainment industry. Its widespread adoption paved the way for the concept of home video consumption and laid the foundation for the home entertainment market we see today. VHS was a revolutionary technology that revolutionized the way people consumed and enjoyed video content at home. While it has been replaced by newer digital formats, its legacy as a pioneering home entertainment medium remains significant.

Host Victoria Guido welcomes Wendell Adams, CEO of PrimeLab.io, as he talks about his lifelong passion for technology and entrepreneurship. Wendell shares his experiences, from hacking electronics as a child to studying various fields in college and eventually starting his own business. He emphasizes the importance of understanding market needs and leveraging language to make technology accessible. Wendell's drive to improve encryption and data security led to the formation of PrimeLab; a company focused on making encryption functional and accessible without compromising performance. Wendell discusses PrimeLab's strategic direction and market fit. He outlines the challenges and opportunities in the entertainment industry, emphasizing the need for innovative solutions that respect user control and privacy. Wendell also shares insights into how PrimeLab's technology can democratize data access and enhance business processes. The episode concludes with a reflection on the future of AI and encryption technologies and Wendell's advice for aspiring entrepreneurs to think critically and creatively about their ventures. PrimeLab.io (https://primelab.io/) Follow PrimeLab.io on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/primelab-io/), or X (https://x.com/PrimeLab4). Follow Wendell Adams on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendell-a-83317895/). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Transcript:  AD: We're excited to announce a new workshop series for helping you get that startup idea you have out of your head and into the world. It's called Vision to Value. Over a series of 90-minute working sessions, you'll work with a thoughtbot product strategist and a handful of other founders to start testing your idea in the market and make a plan for building an MVP. Join for all seven of the weekly sessions, or pick and choose the ones that address your biggest challenge right now. Learn more and sign up at tbot.io/visionvalue.  VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Wendell Adams, CEO at PrimeLab io. Wendell, thank you for joining us. WENDELL: Thanks for having me. So, question, actually, where'd you guys come up with the name? VICTORIA: You know, I have asked this before, and I think I remember the answer. I might have to go back to the 500th episode to get it, but I think it was just robots was already kind of a theme at thoughtbot. I mean, thoughtbot, obviously, has robot in the name. Joe might have the best answer. And we have our special co-host, Joe Ferris. Who better to answer? JOE: [chuckles] Yes, I'm not sure who better to answer, probably Chad. I don't remember the answer either, but happy to be here to speculate with the two of you. It comes from the blog. We named the blog Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots and then used it for our podcast. But I don't remember where the blog name came from. WENDELL: It kind of reminds me of the Robot Wars thing, like, where they would have competitors driving around the robots and then smashing into each other, trying to flip them over and disable them. JOE: That was excellent. I also watched that. WENDELL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, it's a pretty great name. I really enjoy being a host. And, you know, I go out to local San Diego events and meet people and introduce myself as a co-host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots. It's usually pretty funny [laughter], which is where I met you, Wendell; we met at a San Diego CTO Lunches, which was super fun. WENDELL: Yeah, I always enjoy any type of tech conversation or anything else. I thought that was a lot of fun to sit down and just talk with people and talk about what they're working on. VICTORIA: I love that, yeah. And before we dive into the tech and get to hear more about PrimeLab, I just want to start a little more socially question. What did you do last weekend, Wendell? WENDELL: It was my father-in-law's birthday party at Legoland. We took my daughters my mother-in-law, and we all went to Legoland. It was a lot of fun. Although, honestly, I prefer the San Diego Zoo over Legoland, so... VICTORIA: Can you please describe what Legoland is to people who may not know? WENDELL: Okay. Legoland is based in Carlsbad, and it's really ideal for, like, four to nine-year-olds. And they have, like, miniatures of all the different cities. Actually, the SF miniature that they have is crazy detailed with Chinatown and everything else. They did an amazing job there. They actually...I think they just redid the San Diego part of it. But the miniatures are really cool, seeing all this stuff. They have different rides performers, but it's definitely, like, one of those things that it's more for kids to go and kind of experience. If you're an adult, you're going to love a lot of the processes that go into place, like how they built things, but mostly, yeah, it's very much kid rides and stuff like that. VICTORIA: I imagined it to be, like, life-size Lego buildings, but maybe I'm...that's very interesting all those other things you could do there. WENDELL: Well, like, they have the One World Trade Center, and I think it's, like, 25 feet tall. It is, like, the replica of it. It's kind of interesting, too, because not all the Legos that they build, they're huge, are solid Legos. So, it's like, they'll do where it's like, on the outside, they'll do a base, and then they'll build it. There's a replica of a Lamborghini. That one's life-size. But it's heavy. It's, like, 2,000 pounds, something like that. VICTORIA: Is that as much as a regular Lamborghini weighs, too, 2,000 pounds? It can't be that far up. WENDELL: I don't know. No, I don't think it...no, it couldn't be. VICTORIA: I have no idea how much cars [laughs] weigh. What about you, Joe? Did you do anything fun this weekend? JOE: Not a lot. It was supposed to be my son's first soccer game ever, but it rained here in Boston, so they postponed it. Sunday he went to my parents' house for a grandma day, and so I did nothing. I ate cookies. WENDELL: [laughs] VICTORIA: Wait, what kind of cookies were they, though? JOE: They were chocolate chip cookies. VICTORIA: That's so good. JOE: They were good. They were brown butter chocolate chip cookies, I should say. VICTORIA: Were they homemade, or did you get them somewhere? JOE: They were. We made them in this home. VICTORIA: Oh, that's the best. Yeah, love that. I got some fancy cookies that someone else made, and they were also [laughs] very good. And then, yeah, I've just been having cookies pretty much every day. So, that's been my time. WENDELL: My mother-in-law recently made me peanut butter cookies, and those are my favorite kind of homemade cookies. VICTORIA: Okay. Noted. You'll get a post-podcast gift of peanut butter cookies [laughter]. I love that. It's so great to hear a little bit more about each of you as, like, in a personal way before we dive into AI. And tell me a little bit more about your background and what led you to PrimeLab. WENDELL: I've always kind of, like, been a hacker, so to speak, just from a technical standpoint. My one grandfather was an engineer. He worked for GM designing, like, assembly arms and stuff like that. And then my other grandfather was a master electrician. So, I've always been the person that, like, just worked on things, got stuff together. You know, there's a lot of stories. Like, there's the story about when I broke my grandmother's workbench, rocking bench out front, and it was all aluminum. I remember telling my grandfather, and he's like, "Oh, what are you going to do?" And I was like, "Buy a new one?" He's like, "You got money?" I said, "No." And he said, "Well, you better figure how to make it then." So, ironically, it's half aluminum, half wood. We took wood, sanded it down, and stuff. So, it's just like I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always been interested in this kind of stuff. I used to hack VCRs, and PlayStations, and all kinds of stuff. I always liked parts and components and rewiring things. And as I got older, I also really liked math and all those things. And I wanted to understand more about how the world works, so to speak, like why it works the way it does, not just from a technology standpoint. But why do people think the way that they do? Why do things behave the certain way they do? So, initially, I started going to college. I thought I might be a math professor, and then decided to get degrees in business, economics, finance, marketing, consumer product goods, and comparative religions. So, while I was in college, I started working on, like, hacking, different video games, writing JavaScript, writing Java, all kinds of stuff. And then, eventually, even writing mobile applications early on, and then just analyzing because I always liked to build phones, too. I would take apart phones. And I really was curious about, like, how to make things faster, more efficient, and better. So, now to bring it down, like, how to make things accessible, where it benefits some of the smallest people and make it where it's a greater opportunity for someone to come out ahead of something. Like, one thing that I learned from my marketing degree is language matters. So, it's like, all the marketing it's not anything special. It's just they intentionally create language barriers that cause people not to feel as accessible with it. And then, like, you hire a consultant or something to just basically teach you about those language barriers. And I think every industry has, like, SAT, or LTM, or something like these abbreviations that mean a lot of different things. And it causes bottlenecks if you don't speak the language. So, understanding the language but also learning about how was very helpful from a standpoint on the marketing side. And I always try to figure out how do I make this accessible to people who don't understand that language? VICTORIA: And what was the turning point where you decided to start PrimeLab, and what made you realize there was a company there? WENDELL: It was a project I've been working on since at least 2011, honestly. And just as a heads up, PrimeLab as a whole works with encrypted data for AI models and to speed that up and everything else. So, early on, I was very obsessed with how advertising works through, like, stealing user data, which stealing is different, here or there, the sense of privacy, the sense of, like, how things could run, and the sense of messaging. And initially, a lot of it was using encryption as an overlay in, like, the pixel application space, which is always a way to hack or get into it. And it slows everything down. So, I had always been working on trying to figure out how do you speed up and embed security so it's actually functional? And it took a while to figure out, like, give encryption functionality, like, make the encryption something that you could actually execute on. And, actually, one of the things that really helped is the blockchain space there's a lot of, like, hash trees and everything else, like, where people are innovating in that. That's really helped innovate encryption as a whole from understanding, like, Merkle trees, hash graphs, and everything else to make it more functional and faster. Because people are trying to speed up distributed networks and stuff, but the actual technology that they built, like Hedera is...What Hedera has done with Hashgraphs and everything else—really amazing. I'm glad that they open-source stuff like that. But it's also really interesting just to see how things push forward. So, like, when I first started, like, RAM was, like, 256 in a phone. So now, you know, you can get multiple gigabytes, which makes it a lot more capable to do encryption, decryption, and work more in the functional space of things. The bigger problem that you have on the data part is how an application communicates because there's so many levels of abstraction. Like, you have the Swift language that communicates into something else that then communicates into something else. Like, right now, we're talking on a system that's recording us over the internet through a browser, all those different things. And it's an approximation of what the data is and what we sound like. It's not an absolute. So, I was really interested in when you have absolutes, and you can verify those absolutes, what can you do with that? A few years ago, I felt like we got to a point where we could actually execute those things and actually deliver on that. So, therefore, I decided to start PrimeLab with my co-founder, who I really liked and enjoyed. And we've had a lot of really great advisors, where people have helped us continuously. Over, you know, the decade-plus of working on this, I've gotten a lot of input from some of the smartest people I know, from people who have designed full server racks for AWS to literally a good friend of mine that built cloud storage. His name's on the patent for it. So, that kind of stuff has really helped me understand and build this where it can communicate the lowest possible level. VICTORIA: Yeah, and to just recap and reflect that back a little bit, it sounds like you were always interested in how to make encryption faster and lighter weight, and so you could build it in and build in security without impacting the performance of the applications. And then meeting your co-founder and the advancement of technology, this time a couple of years ago, led you to think, okay, let's really go forward with this. WENDELL: Kind of rephrasing, I was always interested in control. So, like, one of the things that really interested me...so, I started a video game store buying and selling, like, video games and trading cards and stuff when I was roughly ten and a half or so, and then sold it roughly when I was 17, which is how I paid for quite a bit of college and likewise. But the things that really interested me about that is it went out of business three to four months afterwards because the person who basically bought the rest of it bought too much of Madden. And Madden, at this time, the margins were, like, a buck, as you go all the way through, and the price drops immensely. So, I wanted to really understand why that happened. What you kind of get to is, like, they didn't have control over it, just, like, the bulk orders methodology, where they would buy the whole entire supply. And what I've seen over the years, be it Apple, Google, or anything else, is, like, that was...in that example, that's a game publisher, EA, flexing control, right? But more and more companies are flexing control on a platform like now with Facebook or advertising. If you think about what Google used to do, Google used to provide a lot more insights when you had your own website. You used to know your own keywords. You used to know a lot of things about your users who come through. More and more, Facebook and Google try to stop that. And they're really the ones determining your own user personas for you. So, you become dependent upon them. So, I wanted to say, okay, from a business standpoint, how do you implement control and privacy where it's permissioned? And encryption was one of the answers that I came to. But then it was, how do you make encryption functional then to actually execute on control? Because unless the system is secure, faster, cheaper, better, it's never going to get adopted. VICTORIA: That makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. And you mentioned your founder. I'm curious, how does your founder kind of complete what you needed to be able to get the business up and running and off the ground? WENDELL: He has a robotics degree, so he had launched several products that had failed. And he wanted to learn marketing after they had failed. So, we have a similar like mindset about, like, control and functionality for how something may or may not work, and that allowed us to communicate well. So, like, I have a lot of friends and stuff. But the thing that allows me and my co-founder to work really well is that we come from things in different angles, but we have the same language that we speak. So, like, that's what I was talking about before, like, LTMs or otherwise, like, language really matters from how you can move something forward when you're talking in different industries. And just with him, there's a lot of stuff that you don't have to say. You can skip a lot of filler and then go straight to what something might be or a solution or something. Or if we have to jump to a tech abbreviation, to a market abbreviation, to a financial abbreviation, he's one that can follow along with me really quickly and then teach me a lot of things about operational execution because he's great at operations. I am not great at operations. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. And I think you're making a good point about, like, a shared language. And it reminds me of any product that you're building; if you want to sell it to a company and you want them to adopt it, you have to consider their language, their belief system, how to influence change within the organization. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that with your experience at PrimeLab. WENDELL: I'll give you an example of a market that we decided to go after. So, instead of just working at, like, healthcare markets where you have, like, GDPR...for people who don't know GDPR or HIPAA, HIPAA is for the United States. GDPR is the EU privacy requirements, right? For the right to be forgotten and everything else. So, these are vernaculars that you need to know. But the requirements of each one is very different, and these are markets that we've learned being in tech and likewise. But we wanted to change it up. So, I wanted to go after the entertainment market as a whole, namely because after meeting with some select people, including a stunt man, this is going back a few years ago, I started to realize that the entertainment market was getting kind of screwed over quite a bit from a tech standpoint. Basically, tech goes through this thing where...someone wrote a great article about this. It's called Enshittification. But, basically, where they go they try to take over a whole entire market, where first they're providing great value to your users. And then, gradually, you enshittify your product to provide greater value to your investors. And then, gradually, you suck all of the value out of the room for both. Right now, if you look at Sora, what OpenAI is trying to do in entertainment, [inaudible 16:08], you kind of can see that happening. They're going, "Hey, here's a great value for it." And they're really pushing that stuff off. But the thing about the entertainment market that I think is really interesting is it's basically thousands and thousands of small businesses that are constantly going, it's so chaotic. It's not like tech and startups. There's a lot of overlay of, like, you know, people are looking for that top quartile film that's going to make the money back, and then long-term royalties that they can earn off of it, right? Whereas in tech, they're looking for those huge markups as well. So, I was really fascinated by it, but it was something that, like, we had to learn. Like it was something that I didn't know otherwise. So, it was literally...how we learned it was we took our tech stuff, and we would walk SAG-AFTRA strike lines. We would walk strike lines. We would go to entertainment events, and we would demo what we were trying to do, and we would show them. And then, oftentimes, we got really negative feedback right off the bat. And we're like, "No, no, no, so, you know, this is for you. Like, you could control. Like, this is going to help you." And then, after doing that enough times, talking to the SAG-AFTRA lawyers, and everything else from there, and all of the creatives, the creatives were coming to us and giving us ideas how to explain it because there's, like, three different formats. You have tech, business, creatives in the entertainment industry. And it's like, we could talk to the tech people. We could talk to the business people. But you really need the creatives. And, like, the wording of each one, like, each group of those is vastly different. So, having the creatives be able to explain something in 90 seconds that used to take me a couple of hours to dive into became really valuable. And also, in tech, like, you have this thing where it's feature creep, where you're like, oh, I'll add this, this, and this. Just to hear very coldly and bluntly, like, "If it does X, I'm interested. If it does Y, I'm not interested." That was very interesting or refreshing of, like, "Yes, you're going to solve these problems. But I need sign-off for everything in there." And it's kind of weird in the entertainment part, too. Like, you want to solve a problem without being a competitor to another vendor because you need so many different sign-offs. And if you're a competitor to another vendor, to a certain point, maybe that's going to cause a hiccup with sign-offs because there's 18 different cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, just so many different people that need to say, "Yes," all the way through with it. VICTORIA: Thank you. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm curious, Joe, if you have an answer for that question as well, like, any experiences about navigating change and putting new products in place at different clients, different industries? JOE: I don't think I've had the same kind of resistance. Like, I haven't been on the front lines the way you described, like, literally in the, you know, going and talking to people on strike. I think I have more indirect experience talking to the people who are doing that. And certainly, like, I think there's generally a resistance to bringing in new technology without eliminating the old way of doing things if that makes sense. Like, people want the old ways of backup. Like they want to be able to go back to paper, which I empathize with. But that's frequently been a challenge for the people I've worked with is that they don't fully embrace the new process, which significantly reduces the value they would get from using it. I don't know if that's something you've encountered with PrimeLab. WENDELL: So, we were building another company of mine many, many, many years ago. I was building a website for this lumber company, and I remember showing up, and the owner was there. But it was his son that had commissioned it, and the owner didn't know about the website. And I was like, "Oh yeah, we'll get the website going." He goes, "Oh, this web thing it's a fad. It's never going to happen. You don't need websites. It's faxes." That's how everything would happen. But secretly, what was happening is they would get an order. They would print it off, and then they would fax it. So [laughs], I always thought that was crazy. VICTORIA: I mean, one of my local bars still just writes the order on a ticket and sends it on a clothesline down to the grill. So [laughs], sometimes old is good. But I think that you know, I want to hear more about where you found or how you found a product-market fit for PrimeLab and where that AI really becomes useful and ethical in the industry you're focusing on WENDELL: How I look at PMF (product-market fit)...and if you hear me just say PMF, that's what that means. So, how I look at PMF is I'm a little different in the fact that when I look at a product, or a technology, I don't just look at, like, so you have foundational tech. Like, okay, this is encryption. This is control, right? Now, where's the market that has the biggest problems with it? So, I like to go out and actually talk to those people. Because, like, when you're implementing tech, or you're implementing the product itself, it's different. So, you're like, you have the underlying infrastructure, but whether that's a button or a simple API that you need to build so it works different to hit that PMF...are you familiar with the term build a better mousetrap? VICTORIA: I don't think so. JOE: I'm familiar, but I'd still love to hear you describe it. WENDELL: So, in business school, and likewise, they will tell you "If you build a better mousetrap, people will come, and they will buy your product." So, like, it's a common thing where they're like, "Build a better mousetrap. People will come. They'll be there." And the thing that you learn with consumer product goods and marketing, though, is they actually built a better mousetrap, and it failed. And the reason why it failed is you had a mousetrap that was roughly a cent versus another mousetrap that was three cents. And I think this is in the '60s or so. The other mousetrap was reusable, so it executed a lot better, and everything else is more humane. But what they didn't understand is that it was wives most of the time that would have to actually handle this. And they didn't want the mouse alive, and they didn't want to reuse the trap. They wanted them to actually be disposed of right away. So, by not understanding the market, even though they built a better mousetrap, they'd missed the point. Like, the main problem to solve wasn't killing the mouse or having it be reusable. The main problem to solve was, like, getting rid of the mouse. So like, if you have a solution for getting rid of the mouse, the next thing is your execution for it. Like, does it hit the actual market, which is the fit aspect? Like, every product is a little bit different where you look at, like, how does this fit in? So, in this case, fit is very important for, like, disposing of the mouse, which is why you also have, like, you know, mouse poisons are popular, even though they're terrible because they die somewhere and, hopefully, you don't see them. And it's like sight unseen, right? Now, I'm glad, like, that's changing and stuff. But it's understanding even if you have a solution to something, you need to understand what your market wants out of your solution, and it's not going to be an abstract. It's going to be an emotional, like, execution-based process. So, you kind of have to go, all right, this is my market. This is kind of my fit. But the actual product I'm building is going to change to make sure it works all the way through with this. I was advising a startup many, many years ago, and they were building this CRM software on Android for South America. And I think they were building it for Android 6 or 7 at the time. But the market that they were targeting, they all ran Android 4.1. So, they spent a little over a million dollars building for the wrong version of Android that wouldn't even work on that version of the system. Like, it was one of those things where they were required to build it for that. But they didn't understand the actual market, and they didn't spend enough time researching it. So, it's like you get the Bay Area groupthink. If they had actually spent the time to analyze that market and go, "Oh, they run, you know, an inexpensive phone. It's 4.1. It's low RAM," now you can design a product. If you want it to be a CRM, you're going to, like, chunk up the system more. Like, you're going to change all that instead of just wasting a million dollars building something that now you basically have to start over again from scratch. VICTORIA: That seems like he got off cheap, too. People make way bigger mistakes that cost way more money [laughs] because they [inaudible 24:13] WENDELL: Well, that wasn't me. That was an investor that -- VICTORIA: Oh no. I mean, yeah, not just them. Yeah. WENDELL: He's like, "What would you do?" And I was like, "You should sell this company or sell your stake ASAP because that's a really bad sign." JOE: I have found that the answer nobody ever wants when you're doing product validation or testing product fit is, "You should not build this product." The idea that the software just shouldn't be written is universally unpopular. WENDELL: Yes [laughs]. That's, you know, that's part of the reason why it took me so long to do PrimeLab is because, like, it took a long enough for the software to actually need to be written, if that makes sense. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: What does success look like now versus six months or even five years from now? WENDELL: I take a different approach to this because I have so many friends that have sold their businesses. They raise and everything else. I look at success as instead of an exit or another large thing, like, literally, we turned down a billion-dollar term sheet offer. I didn't like the terms. I didn't like what it would do from the control standpoint of the technology. What I care about is go-to-market and, like, adoption and actually getting the tech out there in a way that has market penetration but, like, that adds value to every person's life. VICTORIA: Yeah, maybe say more about that. Like how do you see AI and this technology you have with PrimeLab benefiting people and benefiting the industry that you're working within? WENDELL: So, the current AI models are kind of weird. They're basically just filter systems because they communicate in pixel space and then go down to functional space. It's the GPU. GPUs are actually terrible to use for AI. This is why you have dedicated AI chips getting built. Hopefully, the RISC-V chipset does actually do something because that's a chipset that I think it's an open-source chipset, but you can actually especially build models on it. So, I think that we're going to see a lot more in the RISC-V chipset where it's like, this is just for one particular image, or this is just for explosions, or this is just for touching up all these different points in the actual individual, like, microcontroller module data that ends up compiling to move forward with it. But the AI models now it's like you took the internet, and you're trying to ask it a probability question, what I was talking about before, where it's not an absolute. So, it's like, if I want to do an OCR system or anything, I take an image. It's got to say, "This is..." letters; it's going to recognize that. So, there's, like, multiple models and algorithms that need to run on that whole entire process. You even have artificial data, but all of that information is an approximation. It's not an absolute. If you want absolute, you can get a lot of absolute data from the actual hardware devices themselves. You know, take a Sony camera. You could see the lighting. You could see the raw information, everything else there. But because of how expensive it is, people compress it. Like, take YouTube where it's compressed, and now you're training off of it. You're trying to compress it more and then run an algorithm so that you don't have to actually process those large, raw files all the way through. That's just a bad infrastructure for compute. You're trying to reduce, but you're also trying to utilize what you own for rights, same thing, contextual, or anything else there. There's no value in a model. Once a model is out there, it's just weights moving it back and forth. The value is in the data and the applications. So, the actual data itself that's going in. So, if you have just lava scenes, like, having all that data for lava, and I want to put it in a background, now I can do that, but more importantly, it's not about just adding it into the background. The thing that is often missed is contextually the output. So, like, say I want to do a financial report. Rather than having the data of all financial reports out there, what I want as the input is my financial data. And what I want as, like, a fine-tuning output is an example of the reports that were generated. And I don't want those reports as the input to inform the output because that's where you get a hallucination. Maybe it starts grabbing financial data from someone else. And I also think we're in store for a lot more hacks because with not just poisoning data, which we do in the functional space, if someone tries to access it. But, I mean, literally, there's the story...I think the guy was in Hong Kong, where they faked his board all the way through with it. Because you have agents acting and executing on people's behalf, you're going to have systems where people go onto the hardware and start generating fake financial numbers. And now that's going to get reported. Or you pay an invoice that you weren't supposed to pay because someone manipulated your AI agent. And a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now from Microsoft and everything else that's not really where the models will go. It's great to do it, but it's kind of like we're in the dial-up stage of AI. Like [chuckles], dial-up has its use cases and stuff, but it's nowhere near what the tech will look like in the future, and it's nowhere near how it will function. And one of the big pushbacks that you see, like, from Google, from all these different places, like, they want your attention. But at the end of the day, Google's an ad company. Facebook's an ad company. It's not in their best interest to have hyper-localized data that you control for your models and likewise. They want it in the cloud. They want it used there, where they can control that data, and they can monetize and advertise for you. But at the same time, like AI models work the best, and AI applications work the best when the data set is limited, so it can't hallucinate, and when the outputs are actually controlled to what it should be from an informed standpoint. So, where we're at this is just in the beginning stages of stuff. VICTORIA: That's really interesting. Thank you so much for sharing. I think if you could go back in time when you first started PrimeLab and give yourself some advice, what would you say? WENDELL: You know, I lived through the Great Recession. The Great Recession informed me a lot more. The things that I didn't understand this time...like the Great Recession, was market contributors doing stuff that impacted everyone with their spend and their adoption, and how those things were. But the Fed raising interest rates, which is, you know, Silicon Valley Bank failed and stuff like that, that dynamic of those startups and, like, how much startups power everything, like, I would have advised myself to pay more attention to the Fed and those market dynamics going forward. Because what changed is it's not just the Silicon Valley Bank failed it, you know, Rippling went down, for instance, which would pay therapists in Florida and all kinds of stuff. Like, it broke so many different things. It caused bottlenecks in business that we're still going through. Like, everyone's like, "Oh, we're getting back to normal." Really not. It's still, like, delayed all the way through it. The AI aspect is really getting back to normal, where people are really pushing AI. But if you look at SaaS and other industries, it really, really slowed down. And the reason why that matters is, like, in my field, production and timelines matter. So, when you have that plus, you know, the entertainment strike and everything else, you have things where the actual production of things starts slowing down immensely. Whereas AI is one of the few things that you still have innovations because that never really slowed down, same thing with the models. But all the rest of the industries and stuff have really slowed down. And understanding what that means from an operational execution standpoint...it's a good thing I have my co-founder [inaudible 32:24]. It matters quite a bit because it means your team sizes have to change, how you handle certain clients has to change. Because once those companies start downsizing or laying off people for whatever reason like, that's going to change how you're working with them, and their requirements are going to change as well. VICTORIA: And what do you see on the horizon as a challenge or a big hurdle that you face as a company or as an industry? WENDELL: You know, the entertainment market's really interesting from all the different sign-offs. The challenge is more execution of timeline. So, like, if you're doing something with, like, Nvidia and the healthcare thing, it could take years. If you're doing something in, like, the IoT space, you know, also years. If you do something in the entertainment space, it could take weeks to months, except the large studios. The larger studios, it could take a couple of years as well. But going to market, I think, is a very big challenge, not just for us but the whole entire industry. I mean, there's a reason why Sam Altman came down to LA to meet with studios, to try and get stuff moving forward. And I think one of the things that he's forgetting is like, you think of Netflix. Netflix is streaming. In order for that to work, they needed Roku, and they needed Kevin Spacey because [chuckles]...it's crazy to say that, but House of Cards is kind of what made it, right? And Hollywood was mostly boxing them out quite a bit. Same thing with Blockbuster otherwise. They had to drop a hundred million dollars, a large enough bankable star at the time that would really push something forward. And they had to basically really push Roku out there so that they had PMF across the board. What that means, though, is, like, Netflix is paying for content like crazy, right? So, this is kind of enshittification in a process. So, they're paying for content like crazy. So, now Hollywood's making money. They like it. At the studios, they don't love it when their stuff's going there because maybe it's less money, but now they start cutting the seasons short. They start cutting...it's a lot more algorithmic-driven. You have the ad systems that sort of come out. So, now, like, Netflix is not just doing ads where the customer experience is getting worse, but now, also, the business experience for those partners selling stuff is also getting worse, and all that value is getting driven to Netflix. Like, that's the tech system and Hollywood's learned that. But, like, when you're looking at the next adoption, like, they're hesitant for that. Just like a lot of stuff with AI, they're hesitant because they're thinking about all the power and control that they gave up. But you have to show how they're going to make money. You can't just cut costs, right? If you can't show how they're going to make money, you're not going to get adopted. That's kind of what I like there because so much of tech is about saving costs and being more efficient. In the entertainment industry, it's not just those two things. It's how can I make more money? And it's going to, like, ooh, you can monetize your content through training samples and stuff like that. So, our model goes exactly against what the large tech companies have where they want to take content, train on it, like the search engine does, suck the value off Sam Altman's Sora. Ours goes, all right, this is your content. Only you own this. You can take your own content, train it, and then perform this operation on it that is more efficient likewise. And if you choose to monetize it in any way, shape, or form, we can just take the functional space, not all the images and no one will ever see it, and take that functional space for training so that you can actually monetize from that as well. VICTORIA: I love that. Super interesting. Thank you so much for sharing. And do you have any questions for me or for Joe? WENDELL: I've noticed a lot of differences on, like, applications and how systems are built. So, I'm kind of curious about you guys' standpoint about applications, you know, the Apple Vision Pro. Facebook just said they'd start licensing out their AI system, or Meta, whatever. So, you have the comparisons to Android versus iOS that's happening, stuff like that. So, I'm really curious about, like, you guys' thoughts on the Vision Pro and that ecosystem. JOE: Well, I can't speak for all of thoughtbot, but I can say that, to me, it was interesting to see that get released. And it's been interesting to see how aggressively Meta and Apple have been pursuing the various VR markets. Like it reminds me of when television companies and studios worked really hard to get 3D movies to be a thing. WENDELL: [laughs]. JOE: Because I think they just ran out of things that people are asking for. Like, people were interested in getting better resolutions up to a point. Like, they wanted better packaging. But it got to a point where it was like, they didn't want to give anybody anything they were asking for. So, they were like, what if it's in 3D? And, like, for years, it seemed like Apple was really on top of seeing what people really wanted, and being able to present a very well-prepared version of that product before other companies were able to. And, personally, it's not what I saw with the Apple Vision Pro. Like, it wasn't the obvious missing space that was there when the iPhone or the iPad showed up. WENDELL: Yeah, I always go back to, like, the "Why?" question. You know, previously when...even just before we had talked, I was talking about comparative religions, and why that's so valuable is because it really teaches you...again, I've had this conversation before, but the comparative religions, if you think about religion as a tech company, they're always trying to solve why. Like, why did the sun come up? Why did this happen, right? And you always have to do that. So, apply that to technology, Google or Apple, why does this product exist? And when you get to, like, it just existed to make money, I think that's really the 3D thing. Whereas, like, why did the iPhone exist? It existed to solve this problem of being portable on the go and getting information in the way that we communicated, too. VICTORIA: Yeah. I think the Apple Vision Pro appeals to a very specific market segment and that that segment is not me [laughter]. I, actually, during COVID...after...it was, like...yeah, we're still in COVID. But during the pandemic, I moved from DC to California. And to connect with some old friends, I bought a VR headset and decided to go to virtual coffee with them. And it just makes me nauseous. And it actually affects...quite a lot of women get nauseous in VR. For some people, the look—the capability is really exciting. They have the extra money to spend on gadgets, and that's what they like. And it's very appealing, and the, like potential, is really interesting. I just find it for myself. Personally, I'm more drawn to tech that's not maybe cutting edge but solves problems for actual people. And kind of why I'm interested in PrimeLab, what you were mentioning is just how artists can use this technology to protect their creative work. To give that power back to people and that control over their content, I think, is really interesting rather than...I'm not really sure what I would do with the Apple Vision Pro [laughs]. Like, the early ones, I mean, it's cool. It's fun. I definitely enjoy it. Like, I sometimes like to learn about it, but it's not my passionate genre of tech that I normally go for. WENDELL: Going back to what you just said about, like, control, like, part of the thing is because of the hash IDs that we put into place, like, you don't need analytics. You don't need cookies or anything else, like the content holder. Basically, like, if you have a TV set or something and you want to stream content to it, you can actually see that information directly yourself. So, it takes the person generating it and the person viewing it. It forms...we call them function access keys. It forms a one-to-one relationship, basically, where you guys know if you want to know what you want to know, but then you choose to give access to the platform if you want to, which changes the dynamic of control quite a bit. And it's interesting because when you look at platforms like the Apple Vision Pro, and you look at Apple's whole entire system as a whole, just trying to lock in people, I think it's interesting because something like what I just described, Apple can't really stop. It's how compute works. So, if people want to use it, there's nothing they could do to stop it from being used. So, I'm really interested in the product stuff and just more about, like, how...and I'm curious what you guys think on this, too. Especially as you see phones and processors and everything else, I'm really interested in, like, how these things come about, like, how things are actually built and developed and the why for that, like, in the everyday use. So, like, the Apple Watch it started off as a fashion thing, which looked like a money grab, and then the why was, oh yeah, fitness. So, just curious if you guys have seen any other products out there that you're like, oh, this really resonates with me and the why. JOE: Yeah, I'm not really a gadget person, but I think the idea of taking some of the capabilities that we've gotten with the internet and with phones and making them hands-free was interesting. And that, to me, was what I think started pushing the development of products like the Apple Watch or Google Glass. Like, I think that hands-free capability, the trade-off became rewarding in the fitness field, but I think it's more generically applicable. I think that technology it's too obtrusive in other scenarios and too bad at its job to do some of the things it could do. And people got creeped out by Google Glass. But it doesn't really seem like the Vision Pro fits in there. Something being successful hands-free means it becomes less obtrusive, whereas the Vision Pro is like you become a cyborg. VICTORIA: Do you have anything else you would like to promote? WENDELL: I wouldn't say necessarily promote as much as like people with ideas or aspirations, like, I think it's important that you think counter to what everyone else is doing. There's that line of, like, when everyone else is running in one direction, run the other. And it's like, if you have a business or startup idea, really think about your market. Like, think about why you're doing what you're doing, and don't be afraid to just go out there and talk to people. You will get value no matter who you talk to. So, like, I'm a hugely tech-based person. My wife is a therapist, and I learn from her everyday things about emotional intelligence and all kinds of things that I would be an idiot otherwise. But also, learn, like, you can always learn something from someone. Like, take the time to listen to them. Take the time to actually, like, try and figure out what's one thing I can learn from someone, even if, you know, I learn stuff from my daughters even. Like, don't put things in boxes. Like, try to think outside of like, how can I ask a question to learn? VICTORIA: I love that advice. That's great. WENDELL: Have you guys used Suno before? VICTORIA: That's music, right? Music AI. WENDELL: All right, I got to show you guys this. We're going to create you a quick theme song. Like, this is what I mean by, like, it's an interesting solution for why. VICTORIA: That does sound fun. I like the ones...like my friend's a doctor, and she uses AI to take her conversation she's having with patients and automatically fill out her notes. And it saves her, like, 20 hours of documentation every week. Like, I like that kind of app. I'm like, oh, that makes a lot of sense. WENDELL: What's a style of music that you guys really like? JOE: Swedish pop VICTORIA: Like ABBA [laughs]? I'm down for an ABBA Giant Robots theme song. Sounds great. WENDELL: I think you're going to like this. [Music Playing] VICTORIA: These are awesome. They're super fun. Thank you so much. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on X @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time.  AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at: referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions. Special Guest: Joe Ferris.

Can AI revolutionize media without sacrificing creativity and jobs? My latest episode was recorded spontaneously at the Streaming Media Conference in New York, starting with media cartographer Evan Shapiro to explain and caution us about the current media landscape, especially regarding connected TV challenges. Evan, who helmed and shaped the conference, walks the innovation talk, opting to spark  debate and dialogue instead of the usual talking head format.  "We wanted this to be a collision of different points of view and honest conversations about the real problems the media universe is facing right now," Evan explained. Per his keynote conversation with Paramount Advertising COO Steve Ellis, Evan stressed how interoperability will be the lifeblood of premium CTV content to stay competitive against tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Walmart...or face big changes in business. "The notion of interoperability now is just table stakes. If you're gonna compete against Google and Amazon on connected television, that's how you're gonna have to operate." Catch Evan's POV on that, the new Nielsen Gauge, and more in his extensive content offerings: https://linktr.ee/ESHAPTV Next, Robert Tercek joined to tackle some of the most controversial topics in artificial intelligence and media, from legal battles over using copyrighted works for training LLMs to fears of AI displacing jobs. Robert is a renowned strategist, global authority on digital innovation, award-winning author, and educator -- AND the co-host of The Futurists podcast (which is emblematic of his approach to digital creativity and embracing AI.) He says the media industry has often reacted to technological advances (remember Hollywood's reaction to the VCRs?) with trepidation, but he challenges dystopian views, saying AI should be seen as a powerful tool, not a threat. "My recommendation is you should lean into AI. Right now is a great time to get smart about it. This is a tool that potentially can give you superpowers." Providing an unexpected master class in copyright history and best practices, his was a passionate plea for embracing change and innovation. "Half of humanity is below average as writers. If ChatGPT can make that half consider themselves better writers, then that's a net win for humanity." And as I joked, "and a net loss for me as a writer?" (Note: These show notes were partly AI-assisted!) Not to worry, as he believes unique human qualities like curiosity remain irreplaceable, even as AI levels the playing field. (Don't miss my discussion on synthetic voice in Epi 20 with John Rosso, as well.)  Read about Robert at: https://roberttercek.com/ And subscribe now so you don't miss Part 2 with more insights from Evan, joined by 17-year-old Braden Blacker who is already leveraging digital media full time to “disrupt the creator economy.” These engaging discussions offer a balanced perspective on ensuring CTV, AI, and content advances enhance, not hurt, human creativity. Listen, learn, and join us in welcoming the future.   Key Moments: 01:13 Media Cartographer, Evan Shapiro with candid Media Industry Insights 03:36 Creating Debates for a More Compelling Conference 08:58 Robert Tercek on AI and Media, Copyright Changes and Jobs 15:41 The Positive Potential of AI 21:12 Blended Authorship and Copyright Evolution 26:03 AI's Role in Creative Expression, and the Future of Writing 31:28 Synthetic Voices and AI in Media 35:53 Opportunities and Ethical Considerations in AI Connect with Insider Interviews: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderinterviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InsiderInterviewsPodcast/ YouTube: https://bit.ly/InsiderInterviews-YouTubePlaylist LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mossappeal “X”: https://www.twitter.com/insiderintervws (And find E.B. on Threads as @mossappeal)

Episode #290.5 | Patreon Unlock: THE McPHERSON TAPE (aka UFO ABDUCTION) is a cult classic considered to be the first found footage horror film. The movie, which was roughly shot on VHS, features a family being abducted by Alien Grays on the eve of a young girl's birthday and sparked controversy among the UFO community not once, but twice! But does the horror hold up? Fire up your VCRs it's time to go back to the 1980's. For more episodes like this, visit: https://www.patreon.com/bigfootcollectorsclub BCC is brought to you by... Hims: Start your free trial today at hims.com/bcc. -- LINKS Trailer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVr2Dm44ni8 Watch on YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5urY8yDSko 1990's Remake (ALIEN ABDUCTION: INCIDENT AT LAKE COUNTY) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPIO72sJZNU -- SHOW INFORMATION Bigfoot Collectors Club is produced by Riley Bray. Listener-Files Submissions: BigfootCollectorsClub@gmail.com. Instagram: https://bit.ly/3W7izlL | Twitter: https://bit.ly/3CDTpo2 Patreon - BCC The Other Side: https://bit.ly/3CGjYcd BCC Linktree: https://linktr.ee/bigfootcollectorsclub Our theme song is “Come Alone,” by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Follow Suneaters on Spotify https://bit.ly/3XnD4vS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The health care sector has long struck me as having environments and dynamics that would benefit a lot from using digital signage technology. Accurate information is critically important, and things change quickly and often - in ways that make paper and dry erase marker board solutions seem antiquated and silly. But it is a tough sector to work in and crack - because of the layers of bureaucracy, tight regulations and the simple reality that medical facilities go up over several years, not months. People often talk about the digital signage solution sales cycle being something like 18 months on average. With healthcare, it can be double or triple that. The other challenge is that it is highly specialized and there are well-established companies referred to as patient engagement providers. So any digital signage software or solutions company thinking about going after health care business will be competing with companies that already know the industry and its technologies, like medical records, and have very established ties. LG has been active in the healthcare sector for decades, and sells specific displays and a platform used by patient engagement providers that the electronics giant has as business partners. I had a really insightful chat with Tom Mottlau, LG's director of healthcare sales. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT David: Tom, thank you for joining me. Can you give me a rundown of what your role is at LG?  Tom Mottlau: I am the Director of Healthcare Sales for LG. I've been in this role for some time now; I joined the company in 1999 and have been selling quite a bit into the patient room for some time.  David: Has most of your focus through those years all been on healthcare? Tom Mottlau: Well, actually, when I started, I was a trainer when we were going through the digital rollout when we were bringing high-definition television into living rooms. My house was actually the beta site for WXIA for a time there until we got our language codes right. But soon after, I moved over to the commercial side and healthcare, around 2001-2002.  David: Oh, wow. So yeah, you've been at it a long time then. Much has changed!  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir.  David: And I guess in some cases, nothing has changed.  Tom Mottlau: Yep. David: Healthcare is an interesting vertical market for me because it seems so opportune, but I tend to think it's both terrifying and very grinding in that they're quite often very large institutions, sometimes government-associated or university-associated, and very few things happen quickly. Is that a fair assessment?  Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. There's a lot of oversight in the patient room. It's a very litigation-rich environment, and so there's a bit of bureaucracy to cut through to make sure that you're bringing in something that's both safe for patients and protects their privacy but also performs a useful function.  David: I guess the other big challenge is the build-time. You can get word of an opportunity for a medical center that's going up in a particular city, and realistically, it's probably 5-7 years out before it actually opens its doors, right? Tom Mottlau: That's true. Not only that but very often, capital projects go through a gestation period that can be a year or two from the time you actually start talking about the opportunity.  David: And when it comes to patient engagement displays and related displays around the patient care areas, is that something that engineers and architects scheme in early on, or is it something that we start talking about 3-4 years into the design and build process?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the part that's schemed in is often what size displays we're going to need. So, for example, if somebody is looking to deploy maybe a two-screen approach or a large-format approach, that's the type of thing that is discussed early on, but then when they come up on trying to decide between the patient engagement providers in the market, they do their full assessment at that time because things evolve and also needs change in that whole period that may take a couple of years you may go as we did from an environment that absolutely wanted no cameras to an environment that kind of wanted cameras after COVID. You know, so things change. So they're constantly having those discussions.  David: Why switch to wanting cameras because of COVID?  Tom Mottlau: Really, because the hospitals were locked down. You couldn't go in and see your loved one. There was a thought that if we could limit the in-person contact, maybe we could save lives, and so there was a lot of thought around using technology to overcome the challenges of contagion, and so there was even funding dedicated towards it and a number of companies focused on it  David: That's interesting because I wondered whether, in the healthcare sector, business opportunities just flat dried up because the organizations were so focused on dealing with COVID or whether it actually opened up new opportunities or diverted budgets to things that maybe weren't thought about before, like video? Tom Mottlau: True, I mean, the video focus was definitely because of COVID, but then again, you had facilities where all of their outpatient procedures had dried up. So they were strained from a budget standpoint, and so they had to be very picky about where they spent their dollars.  Now the equipment is in the patient room, but at the end of the day, we're still going to get the same flow of patients. People don't choose when to be sick. If it's gonna be either the same or higher because of those with COVID, so they still need to supply those rooms with displays, even though they were going through a crisis, they still had to budget and still had to go through their day-to-day buying of that product.  David: Is this a specialty application and solution as opposed to something that a more generic digital signage, proAV company could offer? My gut tells me that in order to be successful, you really need to know the healthcare environment. You can't just say, we've got these screens, we've got the software, what do you need?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Everything we do on our end is driven by VOC (voice of customer). We partner with the top patient engagement providers in the country. There are a handful that are what we call tier one. We actually provide them with products that they vet out before we go into production.  We go to them to ask them, what do you need? What products do you need for that patient? I mean, and that's where the patient engagement boards, the idea of patient engagement boards came from was we had to provide them a display that met, at the time, 60065 UL, which is now 62368-1, so that they can meet NFPA 99 fire code.  David: I love it when you talk dirty. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that.  David: What the hell is he talking about?  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. Basically, what it boils down to is we want to make sure that our products are vetted by a third party. UL is considered a respectable testing agency, and that's why you find most electronics are vetted by them and so they test them in the patient room. It's a high-oxygen environment with folks who are debilitated and life-sustaining equipment so the product has to be tested.  We knew that we had to provide a product for our SIs that would meet those specs as well as other specs that they had like they wanted something that could be POE-powered because it takes an act of Congress to add a 110-amp outlet to a patient room. It's just a lot of bureaucracy for that. So we decided to roll out two units: one of 32, which is POE, and one that's 43. Taking all those things I just mentioned into consideration, as well as things like lighting.  Folks didn't want a big night light so we had to spend a little extra attention on the ambient light sensor and that type of thing. This is our first offering. David: So for doofuses like me who don't spend a lot of time thinking about underwriter lab, certifications, and so on, just about any monitor, well, I assume any monitor that is marketed by credible companies in North America is UL-certified, but these are different grades of UL, I'm guessing?  Tom Mottlau: They are. Going back in the day of CRTs, if you take it all the way back then when you put a product into a room that has a high-powered cathode ray tube and there's oxygen floating around, safety is always of concern. So, going way back, probably driven by product liability and that type of thing. We all wanted to produce a safe product, and that's why we turned to those companies. The way that works is we design a product, we throw it over to them, and they come back and say, okay, this is great, but you got to change this, and this could be anything. And then we go back and forth until we arrive at a product that's safe for that environment, with that low level of oxygen, with everything else into consideration in that room.  David: Is it different when you get out into the hallways and the nursing stations and so on? Do you still need that level, like within a certain proximity of oxygen or other gases, do you need to have that?  Tom Mottlau: It depends on the facility's tolerance because there is no federal law per se, and it could vary based on how they feel about it. I know that Florida tends to be very strict, but as a company, we had to find a place to draw that line, like where can we be safe and provide general products and where can we provide something that specialized?  And that's usually oxygenated patient room is usually the guideline. If there's oxygen in the walls and that type of thing, that's usually the guideline and the use of a pillow speaker. Outside into the hallways, not so much, but it depends on the facility. We just lay out the facts and let them decide. We sell both.  David: Is it a big additional cost to have that additional protection or whatever you want to call it, the engineering aspects?  Tom Mottlau: Yes.  David: So it's not like 10 percent more; it can be quite a bit more? Tom Mottlau: I'm not sure of the percentage, but there's a noticeable amount. Keep in mind it's typically not just achieving those ratings; it's some of the other design aspects that go into it. I mean, the fact that you have pillow speaker circuitry to begin with, there's a cost basis for that. There's a cost basis for maintaining an installer menu of 117+ items. There's a cost basis for maintaining a Pro:Centric webOS platform. You do tend to find it because of those things, not just any one of them, but because of all of them collectively, yeah, the cost is higher. I would also say that the warranties tend to be more encompassing. It's not like you have to drive it down to Ted's TV. Somebody comes and actually remedies on-site. So yeah, all of that carries a cost basis. That's why you're paying for that value.  David: You mentioned that you sell or partner with patient engagement providers. Could you describe what those companies do and offer? Tom Mottlau: Yeah, and there's a number of them. Really, just to be objective, I'll give you some of the tier ones, the ones that have taken our product over the years and tested and provided back, and the ones that have participated in our development summit. I'll touch on that in a moment after this. So companies like Aceso, you have Uniguest who were part of TVR who offers the pCare solutions. You have Get Well, Sonify, those types of companies; they've been at this for years, and as I mentioned, we have a development summit where we, for years, have piled these guys on a plane. The CTOs went off to Korea and the way I describe it is we all come into a room, and I say, we're about to enter Festivus. We want you to tell us all the ways we've disappointed you with our platform, and we sit in that room, we get tomatoes thrown at us, and then we make changes to the platform to accommodate what they need. And then that way, they're confident that they're deploying a product that we've done all we can to improve the functionality of their patient engagement systems. After all, we're a platform provider, which is what we are.  David: When you define patient engagement, what would be the technology mix that you would typically find in a modernized or newly opened patient care area? Tom Mottlau: So that would be going back years ago. I guess it started more with patient education. If Mrs. Jones is having a procedure on her kidney, they want her to be educated on what she can eat or not eat, so they found a way to bring that patient education to the patient room over the TVs. But then they also wanted to confirm she watched it, and then it went on from there.  It's not only the entertainment, but it's also things that help improve workflows, maybe even the filling out of surveys and whatnot on the platform, Being able to order your culinary, just knowing who your doctor is, questions, educational videos, all of those things and then link up with EMR. David: What's that?  Tom Mottlau: Electronic medical records. Over the years, healthcare has wanted to move away from paper, to put it very simply. They didn't want somebody's vitals in different aspects of their health stored on a hand-scribbled note in several different doctor's offices. So there's been an effort to create electronic medical records, and now that has kind of been something that our patient engagement providers have tied into those solutions into the group.  David: So, is the hub, so to speak, the visual hub in a patient care room just a TV, or is there other display technology in there, almost like a status board that tells them who their primary provider is and all the other stuff?  Tom Mottlau: So it started as the smart TV, the Pro:Centric webOS smart TV. But then, as time went on, we kept getting those requests for, say, a vertically mounted solution, where somebody can actually walk in the room, see who their doctor is, see who their nurse is, maybe the physician can come in and understand certain vitals of the patient, and so that's why we developed those patient engagement boards that separately. They started out as non-touch upon request, we went with the consensus, and the consensus was we really need controlled information. We don't want to; we've had enough issues with dry-erase boards. We want something where there's more control in entering that information, and interesting enough, we're now getting the opposite demand. We're getting demand now to incorporate touch on the future models, and that's how things start. As you know, to your point earlier, folks are initially hesitant to breach any type of rules with all the bureaucracy. Now, once they cut through all that and feel comfortable with a start, they're willing to explore more technologies within those rooms. That's why we always start out with one, and then over the years, it evolves.  David: I assume that there's a bit of a battle, but it takes some work to get at least some of the medical care facilities to budget and approve these patient engagement displays or status displays just because there's an additional cost. It's different from the way they've always done things, and it involves integration with, as you said, the EMR records and all that stuff. So, is there a lot of work to talk them into it?  Tom Mottlau: Well, you have to look at us like consultants, where we avoid just talking folks into things. Really, what it has to do with is going back to VOC, voice of the customer, the way we were doing this years ago or just re-upping until these boards were launched was to provide a larger format, and ESIs were dividing up the screen. That was the way we always recommended. But then, once we started getting that VOC, they were coming to us saying, well, we need to get these other displays in the room. You know, certain facilities were saying, Hey, we absolutely need this, and we were saying, well, we don't want to put something that's not rated for that room. Then we realized we had to really start developing a product that suits that app, that environment, and so our job is to make folks aware of what we have and let them decide which path they're going to take because, to be honest, there are two different ways of approaching it. You can use one screen of 75”, divide it, or have two screens like Moffitt did. Moffitt added the patient engagement boards, which is what they wanted.  David: I have the benefit, at least so far, of being kind of at retirement age and spending very little time, thank God, in any kind of patient care facility. Maybe that'll change. Hopefully not.  But when I have, I've still seen dry-erase marker boards at the nursing stations, in rooms, in hallways, and everywhere else. Why is it still like that? Why haven't they cut over? Is it still the prevalent way of doing things, or are you seeing quite a bit of adoption of these technologies? Tom Mottlau: Well, it is, I would say, just because we're very early in all this. That is the prevalent way, no doubt.  It's really those tech-forward, future-forward facilities that are wanting to kind of go beyond that and not only that, there's a lot of facilities that want to bring all that in and, maybe just the nature of that facility is a lot more conservative, and we have to respect that. Because ultimately they're having to maintain it. We wouldn't want to give somebody something that they can't maintain or not have the budget for. I mean, at the end of the day, they're going to come back to us, and whether or not they trust us is going to be based upon whether we advise them correctly or incorrectly. If we advise them incorrectly, they're not going to trust us. They're not going to buy from us ten years from now.  David: For your business partners, the companies that are developing patient engagement solutions, how difficult is it to work with their patient record systems, building ops systems, and so on to make these dynamic displays truly dynamic? Is it a big chore, or is there enough commonality that they can make that happen relatively quickly? Tom Mottlau: That's a very good question, and that's exactly why we're very careful about who's tier one and who we may advise folks to approach. Those companies I mentioned earlier are very skilled at what they do, and so they're taking our product as one piece of an entire system that involves many other components, and I have full faith in their ability to do that because we sit in on those meetings.  Once a year, we hear feedback, we hear positive feedback from facilities. We see it but it really couldn't happen without those partners, I would say. We made that choice years ago to be that platform provider that supports those partners and doesn't compete with them. In hindsight, I think that was a great choice because it provides more options to the market utilizing our platform.  David: Well, and being sector experts in everything that LG tries to touch would be nightmarish. If you're far better off, I suspect I will be with partners who wake up in the morning thinking about that stuff. Tom Mottlau: Yeah. I mean, we know our core competencies. We're never going to bite off more than we can chew. Now granted, we understand more and more these days, there's a lot of development supporting things like telehealth, patient engagement, EMR and whatnot. But we're also going to make sure that at the end of the day, we're tying in the right folks to provide the best solution we can to patients. David: How much discussion has to happen around network security and operating system security?  I mean, if you're running these on smart TVs, they're then running web OS, which is probably to the medical facility's I.T. team or not terribly familiar to them.  Tom Mottlau: Yeah, that's a very good question. Facilities, hospitals, and anything that involves network security bring them an acute case of indigestion, more so than other areas in the business world. So these folks, a lot of times, there's exhaustive paperwork whenever you have something that links up to the internet or something that's going to open up those vulnerabilities. So, Pro:Centric webOS is actually a walled garden. It is not something that is easily hacked when you have a walled garden approach and something that's controlled with a local server. That's why we took that approach. Now, we can offer them a VPN if there is something that they want to do externally, but these systems were decided upon years ago and built with security in mind because we knew we were going to deploy in very sensitive commercial environments. And so not so much a concern. You don't need to pull our TV out and link up with some foreign server as you might with a laptop that you buy that demands updates. It's not anything like that because, of course, that would open us up to vulnerability. So we don't take that approach. It's typically a local server and there is the ability to do some control of the server if you want a VPN, but other than that, there is no access.  David: Do you touch on other areas of what we would know as digital signage within a medical facility?  Like I'm thinking of wayfinding, directories, donor recognition, video walls, and those sorts of things. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. I mean, we see everything. Wayfinding needs have been for years and years now, and those are only expanding. and we start to see some that require outdoor displays for wave finding. So we do have solutions for that.  Beyond displays, we actually have robots now that we're testing in medical facilities and have had a couple of certifications on some of those. David: What would they do?  Tom Mottlau: Well, the robots would be used primarily to deliver some type of nonsensitive product. I know there's some work down the road, or let's just say there's some demand for medication delivery.  But obviously, LG's approach to any demand like that is to vet it out and make sure we're designing it properly. Then, we can make announcements later on about that type of stuff. For now, we're taking those same robots that we're currently using, say, in the hotel industry, and we're getting demand for that type of technology to be used in a medical facility.  David: So surgical masks or some sort of cleaning solutions or whatever that need to be brought up to a certain area, you could send in orderly, but staffing may be tight and so you get a robot to do it. Tom Mottlau: Absolutely. And that is a very liquid situation. There's a lot of focus and a lot of development. I'm sure there'll be a lot to announce on that front, but it's all very fluid, and it's all finding its way into that environment with our company.  All these future-forward needs, not only with the robots but EV chargers for the vast amount of electric vehicles, we find ourselves involved in discussions on all these fronts with our medical facilities these days.  David: It's interesting. Obviously, AI is going to have a role in all kinds of aspects of medical research and diagnosis and all those super important things.  But I suspect there's probably a role as well, right down at the lobby level of a hospital, where somebody comes in where English isn't their first language, and they need to find the oncology clinic or whatever, and there's no translator available. If you can use AI to guide them, that would be very helpful and powerful.  Tom Mottlau: Let me write that down as a product idea. Actually, AI is something that is discussed in the company, I would say, on a weekly basis, and again, I'm sure there'll be plenty to showcase in the future. But yes, I'd say we have a good head start in that area that we're exploring different use cases in the medical environment.  David: It's interesting. I write about digital signage every day and look at emerging markets, and I've been saying that healthcare seems like a greenfield opportunity for a lot of companies, but based on this conversation, I would say it is, and it isn't because if you are a more generalized digital signage software platform, yes, you could theoretically do a lot of what's required, but there's so much insight and experience and business ties that you really need to compete with these patient engagement providers, and I think it would be awfully tough for just a more generalized company to crack, wouldn't it?  Tom Mottlau: I believe so. I mean, we've seen many come and go. You know, we have certain terms internally, like the medicine show, Wizard of Oz. there's a lot out there; you really just have to vet them out to see who's legit and who isn't, and I'm sure there are some perfectly legitimate companies that we haven't worked with yet, probably in areas outside of patient education we, we have these discussions every week, and it's, it can be difficult because there are companies that you might not have heard of and you're always trying to assess, how valid is this? And, yeah, that's a tough one.  David: Last question. Is there a next big thing that you expect to emerge with patient engagement over the next couple of years, two-three years that you can talk about?  Tom Mottlau: You hit the nail on the head, AI. But you know, keep in mind that's something in relative terms. It has been relatively just the last few years, and it has been something that's come up a lot. It seems there's a five-year span where something is a focus going way back, it was going from analog to digital.  When I first came here, it was going from wood-clad CRT televisions to flat panels, and now we have OLED right in front of us. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of progression in this market. And I would say AI is one of them, and Telehealth is another; I guess we'll find out for sure which one sticks that always happens that way, but we don't ignore them.  David: Yeah, certainly, I think AI is one of those foundational things. It's kind of like networking. It's going to be fundamental. It's not a passing fancy or something that'll be used for five years and then move on to something else. Tom Mottlau: Yeah, true. But then again, also, it's kind of like when everybody was talking about, okay, we're not going to pull RF cable that went on for years and years because they were all going to pull CAT5, and then next thing, you know, they're saying, well, we have to go back and add CAT5 because they got ahead of themselves, right? So I think the challenge for any company is nobody wants to develop the next Betamax. Everybody wants to develop something that's going to be longstanding and useful, and so it's incumbent upon us to vet out those different solutions and actually see real practical ways of using it in the patient room and trusting our partners and watching them grow. A lot of times, they're the test beds, and so that's the benefit of our approach.  By providing that platform and supporting those partners, we get to see which tree is really going to take off.  David: Betamax, you just showed your age.  Tom Mottlau: Yes, sir. That made eight tracks, right?  David: For the kiddies listening, that's VCRs. All right. Thanks, Tom. That was terrific.  Tom Mottlau: Thank you very much, sir.  David: Nice to speak with you. 

Welcome back to another episode of The Video Store Podcast, where we dive deep into the shelves to bring you some of the most intriguing, thought-provoking, and often overlooked gems in cinema history. Today, we're venturing into the realms of science fiction and the boundaries of human perception with four films that, each in their own right, challenge our understanding of reality, humanity, and the universe at large.First up, we have "The Quiet Earth" from 1985. This New Zealand sci-fi classic explores the profound and eerie calm after a scientific experiment gone awry seems to leave a lone scientist as the last man on Earth. The film is celebrated not just for its intriguing premise, but also for its breathtaking final scene, which has had film fans arguing for decades. The solitude and desolation captured in the film are palpable, making it a must-watch for those who appreciate the more introspective side of science fiction.Next up is "Enemy Mine," also from 1985. This film stands out for its exploration of themes of racism, camaraderie, and survival under the most unlikely circumstances. Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr.'s performances are the heart of this story. They portray two soldiers from opposing sides of an interstellar war, stranded on a desolate planet. Their journey from enemies to friends is a powerful commentary on understanding and tolerance that resonates just as strongly today.Moving on to a slightly earlier film, I am recommending the mind-bending world of "Altered States" from 1980. Directed by Ken Russell and based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, this movie takes us on a psychedelic journey through the human psyche. In it, William Hurt's character experiments on himself with a mixture of sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs. The visual effects used to depict his experiences were groundbreaking at the time and remain impressively evocative, painting an often disturbing picture of the potential and peril of pushing the boundaries of human consciousness.Lastly, we have the environmental cautionary tale "Silent Running" from 1972. Directed by Douglas Trumbull, who was known for his special effects work on "2001: A Space Odyssey." This film tells the story of a botanist on a space station dedicated to preserving Earth's last natural environments. It's a poignant, ahead-of-its-time commentary on environmentalism and loneliness The highlights are Bruce Dern's compelling performance and the unforgettable presence of the small, yet endearing, service robots, Huey, Dewey, and Louie (love em).Each of these films explore themes that are as relevant today as they were when they were first released. From the solitude of "The Quiet Earth" and the unlikely alliance in "Enemy Mine" to the exploratory depths of "Altered States" and the environmental message of "Silent Running." Like all good SF films, they invite us to question, reflect, and marvel at the possibilities beyond our current understanding.So, whether you're a long-time fan of the genre or just looking for something different to watch this weekend, these films should provide plenty of food for thought. Thanks for joining me on this journey through the stars and the depths of the human mind. Until next time, keep those VCRs powered up.Subscribe to the Video Store Podcast* The Video Store Podcast* Apple Podcast* RSS This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.videostorepodcast.com

S5-E16, Grab your favorite pint glass and join Rick and me as we embark on a craft beer adventure, where we'll explore the unexpectedly delightful collision of sweet and sour tastes from North Carolina's prized breweries. Our candid exchanges and laughter fuel a session that's not just about the beer but the stories behind them. As Billy takes a day off, we take this opportunity to indulge in Divine Barrel Brewing's Berliner Weisse and Hot Fly Brewing Company's blueberry cheesecake beer, while weaving in tales of pranks that never came to fruition—think tuna fish jokes, but we keep it all clean for your ears.Around the campfire, Dutch oven cooking transforms into an art form, and we're no strangers to its magic. Whether we're chatting about the golden crisped perfection of a cowboy casserole or the joy found in tweaking recipes to suit our campsite cravings, we're sharing tips and stories that will inspire your next outdoor meal. It's not just about the food, though; it's about the experiences that come with gathering around a warm fire under the stars, cheddar bay biscuits in hand, and the camaraderie that makes it all worthwhile.Finally, we're taking a nostalgic road trip through the twists and turns of technological evolution, from remote controls and Blockbuster nights to the digital era's streaming services. We're reminiscing about the simple joys of VCRs and video rental stores, contrasting them with today's high-speed internet and gaming graphics that have become a staple of modern living. So, whether you're sipping on a sour ale or nostalgic for the past, come laugh, reflect, and share in the comfort of good company and conversation—it's a podcast episode that's as cozy as your favorite blanket.Support the showwww.anotherreasontodrink.com

Does God speak through movies? You bet he does!Join Rachel and her sister co-hosts as they share some of their favourite classic films that had the biggest impact of their own spiritual journey. Vintage movie buffs are welcome! From “Pollyanna” to “Field of Dreams” and the classic “Star Wars” franchise, spiritual insights are available in every medium when we look for them.Grab your popcorn and let's talk about films and faith. Warning: this episode contains references to archival items such as VCRs. If you are under 25 you may need to ask an elder for guidance or use google history for reference.Produced in partnership with @rhemanewcastle

Tony grew up in Chicago with an Italian immigrant background. His interests transitioned from aspirations of musical stardom and psychiatry to writing six books. His latest work, "The Analog Era," delves into the differences between past and present generations, focusing on the impact of divorce on families and societal changes. Technological Shifts: The conversation reflected on the technological changes from simpler times like the era of Pong, Nintendo, and VCRs to today's sophisticated digital landscape. They highlighted how excessive reliance on screens and technology impacts creativity and comprehension, stressing the importance of critical thinking and human interaction. Generational Changes & Parenting: Tony emphasized the differences in parenting styles, noting the decline in fortitude, comprehension, and critical thinking among younger generations. He stressed the significance of teaching kindness, good grades, and instilling strong family values. Impact of Divorce on Society: The conversation explored the societal changes triggered by increasing divorce rates since the 1980s. Tony shared personal experiences, noting the disruption divorce causes in a child's life and its broader impact on societal issues like homelessness, drug addiction, and identity crises. Promotion of "The Analog Era": Listeners were directed to find Tony's book, "The Analog Era," available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He plans to establish a website and social media presence under the name "The Analog Era" to share content related to the book and his thoughts on societal topics

Welcome to the first episode of The Video Store Podcast, where we dive deep into the shelves of cinematic history to bring you some must-watch recommendations. Today, we're taking a trip back to the 1980s, a golden era of cult classics and hidden gems. So, grab your popcorn and let's get started.First up, we have "The Blood of Heroes" (1989), a gritty post-apocalyptic adventure that takes the term "underdog story" to new heights. Starring Rutger Hauer in a very memorable role, this film mixes the gritty atmosphere of a devastated world with the spirit of sportsmanship in a way that's both thrilling and thought-provoking. If you're a fan of dystopian narratives with a twist, this one's for you.Next on our list is "The New Kids" (1985). This thriller dives into the life of a brother and sister duo who, after the death of their parents, move to a new town only to face a gang of merciless bullies ruled by James Spader. It's a gripping tale of resilience and revenge, with performances that capture the raw emotion of the characters' plight. For those who love a good underdog story with a dash of 80s flair, "The New Kids" is a must-see.Moving on, we have "Ruthless People" (1986), a dark comedy that stands out for its wicked sense of humor and brilliant plot twists. Starring Danny DeVito and Bette Midler, this film tells the story of a man who plans to kill his wealthy wife, only to find out she's been kidnapped. What ensues is a hilarious mix-up of plans, double-crosses, and unexpected alliances. It's a riot from start to finish, showcasing the comedic genius of its cast."Tuff Turf" (1985) brings us a tale of teenage rebellion and romance. James Spader stars as the rebellious new kid in town, navigating the tough streets of Los Angeles while trying to win the heart of a gang leader's girlfriend. This film perfectly captures the essence of 80s teen dramas, complete with a rocking soundtrack and plenty of style.Thanks for reading Video Store Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.Lastly, we have "Runaway Train" (1985), a high-octane thriller that's as much about action as it is about the human spirit. Jon Voight and Eric Roberts deliver powerhouse performances as two escaped convicts on a runaway train, with no control and no place to go. It's a gripping tale of survival and freedom, with stunning cinematography that makes you feel like you're right there with them.There you have it, five films from the 1980s that are sure to entertain, thrill, and maybe even move you. Whether you're in the mood for action, comedy, drama, or a bit of everything, these recommendations are guaranteed to deliver. So, dust off those VCRs, or find these classics online, and let the movie marathon begin. Until next time, happy watching.Subscribe to the Video Store Podcast* The Video Store Podcast* Apple Podcast* RSSThanks for reading Video Store Podcast! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.videostorepodcast.com

In this episode, Andrew and Julie chat with guest John Crepezzi, a veteran in the Ruby community, founder of All Aboard Bootcamp, and currently a Software Engineer at Jane Street.  Today, they discuss John's experience running a coding bootcamp, share insights on teaching programming, and emphasize the importance of community in learning.  Additionally, they explore functional programming in OCaml, highlighting how functional programming can be implemented in Ruby.  Also, John dives into the potential impact of AI, particularly language models like ChatGPT, on education and software development, and there's a discussion on resume writing for new coders and future trends in AI and automation. Hit download now to hear more! [00:01:08] Julie introduces John, her former bootcamp instructor, and he tells us about himself and his extensive experience on the Ruby community. [00:02:14] Andrew asks John about the gem he is most proud of creating, and he explains his pride in the “ice_cube gem” for recurring date math. [00:04:30] John discusses the technical challenges and community contributions to ice_cube. [00:05:25] Julie discusses her positive experience with All Aboard Bootcamp and how the bootcamp helped her connect different programming concepts.  [00:07:26] John describes his teaching philosophy for covering a broad amount of material quickly and he stresses the importance of learning to ask the right questions. He uses a metaphor from the movie “Tommy Boy” to emphasize teaching practical skills.[00:11:26] John relates the approach to teaching with the usefulness of ChatGPT and Julie expresses her preference for receiving explanations in small chunks and using bullet points for clarity. John discusses how LLMs can assist in refining questions before providing answers. [00:12:49] Andrew asks about AI's role in teaching and its potential impact. John, an AI professional,  offers his perspective on AI in the short and term, specifically its ability to understand and respond to human language. He speculates on the future of human computer interaction, where structured systems may become unnecessary as LLMs bridge the communication gap. [00:16:03] Andrew agrees with John's vision of the future, acknowledging the inefficiencies in current user flows. John compares the evolution from programming VCRs to using DVRs to the potential of LLMs simplifying interaction with technology. [00:16:55] John describes the motivation behind starting a bootcamp and the realization of the industry's selection bias towards already skilled programmers. He shares the story of how the high cost of bootcamps and their screening processes inspired him to teach a more accessible camp. [00:21:10] Julie is impressed by John's ability to manage the bootcamp alongside his full-time job, family responsibilities, and other commitments. She also talks about the final project of the bootcamp, where John acted as a project manager and provided structure and guidance. [00:23:31] Andrew inquires about what John thinks is the number one mistake new programmers make on their resume.  John emphasizes the importance of highlighting projects on a resume, especially for those transitioning from another industry, and advises focusing on the outcomes and transferable skills gained from previous experiences.[00:25:35] John considers formatting critical for resumes, suggesting less content with more white space and a clear hierarchy can be more effective than too much information.[00:26:44] Another thing John advises is keeping resumes to one page unless there's a compelling reason for more, like academic positions or extensive project work.[00:27:18] Reflecting on the bootcamp, John wishes he had sought more assistance with grading and feedback to reduce the workload. [00:28:34] John praises the students, particularly Julie, for fostering a supportive community outside of the classroom.[00:31:07] Discussing programming languages, John expresses his favor for OCaml and functional programming, arguing that functional patterns can be beneficial even in languages like Ruby. [00:32:13] Find out where you can follow John online. [00:32:58] We end with John reaffirming his love for Ruby and expresses enthusiasm for its future and mentioning his work with Eileen on Active Record and Rails' influence on web frameworks in other languages. Panelists:Andrew MasonJulie J.Guest:John CrepezziSponsors:GoRailsHoneybadgerLinks:Andrew Mason X/TwitterAndrew Mason WebsiteJulie J. X/TwitterJulie J. WebsiteJohn Crepezzi X/TwitterJohn Crepezzi GitHubice_cube 0.16.4All Aboard BootcampAbout the bootcamp (John's story)RailsConf 2023-Functional Patterns in Ruby by John Crepezzi (YouTube)OCaml (00:00) - Introduction to the Episode (01:08) - Meet John Crepezzi: Ruby Community Veteran and Bootcamp Founder (02:14) - John's Pride in Creating the "ice_cube gem" for Date Math (04:30) - Technical Challenges and Community Role in Developing ice_cube (05:25) - Julie's Transformative Experience at All Aboard Bootcamp (07:26) - John's Teaching Philosophy: Quick Learning and Practical Skills (11:26) - ChatGPT's Role in Teaching: Enhancing Question Refinement (12:49) - AI in Education: John's Perspective on Future Trends (16:03) - From VCRs to AI: Evolution of User-Technology Interaction (16:55) - The Genesis of John's Bootcamp: Addressing Industry Biases (21:10) - John's Journey: Balancing Bootcamp with Personal Life (23:31) - Common Resume Mistakes for New Programmers (25:35) - John's Tips on Effective Resume Formatting (26:44) - Importance of Conciseness in Resumes (27:18) - John Reflects on Bootcamp Challenges and Workload Management (28:34) - Fostering a Supportive Community in the Bootcamp (31:07) - John's Advocacy for OCaml and Functional Programming in Ruby (32:13) - Discover Where to Follow John Online (32:58) - John's Ongoing Passion for Ruby and Its Evolving Impact

In today's episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, we discuss some intriguing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on our lives and businesses. We explore the shift to virtual platforms like Zoom and the concept of "Cloudlandia," drawing comparisons to changes brought about by historical pandemics. Dan and I consider opportunities that can emerge from unexpected times. Our discussion ranges from societal shifts driven by technologies in the past to possibilities of the future.   SHOW HIGHLIGHTS Dean talks about the transformative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including transitioning from live events to digital platforms, and the potential opportunities arising from these changes. Dan brings historical context to the discussion, comparing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to historical events such as the Black Plague and the Roman Empire. We explore the power of technology and how it has reshaped society, from cars to cable TV, and the upcoming "golden plateau" in technological advancements. We delve into the world of virtual coaching and how the pandemic has highlighted its untapped potential. Dan discusses the human nature and how it remains constant throughout history, reflecting on significant technological changes in the 20th century and their effects on society. We consider the concept of a "golden plateau" in technological advancements, discussing the impact on our lives and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected our reliance on technology. Dean shares his experience with transitioning to virtual workshops and how Zoom meetings might herald a new era in history. Dan shares a fascinating narrative about twin sisters born in Germany before the Berlin Wall, exploring their life choices, and their adaptation to a rapidly changing world, underscoring the intersection of history, capitalism, and technology. We discuss the concept of normalization, how individuals adapt differently to new situations, and how we've navigated the trials and triumphs of life during the pandemic. Dan offers insights into how the shift from serfdom in England during the Black Plague led to a greater appreciation of workers' value, and how this historical perspective may shed light on our current situation. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: Do you realize that the recordings of everything we say are being analyzed right now at the National Security Agency? Dean: I bet that's true, don't doubt this for a minute. Dan: It's the best part of their week. Dean: Hey guys, they're back Down the road. That's funny. Dan: They don't think it's funny. Dean: Oh man. Well, how are you after our absence last week? Dan: Yeah, yeah, it's been great. You know things are company-wise. It's our best year ever, top line and bottom line, oh look at you Congratulations. That's exciting. Given where we were two, three years ago, this feels good. That was a long time underwater, yeah boy, oh boy. Dean: Me too, I mean. Much like you, the majority of a lot of my income came from live events, like during my break through the blue 20 events and stuff like that. So yeah, it's weird, I'm just talking about it the other day that you know what was kind of this last year. It's almost coming up on 2021, 22 to almost four full years, right, yeah? Dan: next. Dean: If you think 20 was when it started, right. So yeah, almost all yeah, here almost all of 2023. But I look at the last three, it's been a blur. This last seems like just yesterday. We were in Phoenix at the Free Zone Summit. Dan: At the Boulder, yeah, at the Boulder, it wasn't shut down. Dean: But I think what was really, what really threw me off was we nobody knew how long this was going to last and every I just felt like, okay, well, we'll just kind of flatten the curve, this will go out through the summer and then by the fall we'll be back and everything should be fine, but I'm sure you were thinking that same thing and then, as soon as we flattened the curve, then we kept getting the new you know the new waves, and that went on, like you know, three, three or four times. So weird. Dan: So let me ask you a question what's the biggest idea you've had? Only because you went through what happened over the last three years, three, four years. Dean: I think the whole idea of Cloudlandia really formed then. Because that when I realized that the key is that we could just as easily gather in Cloudlandia and that I shifted everything from being kind of a mainland in-person business to being 80% mainland in-person, 20% on the phone or otherwise, and that was a big realization, and now realize, like I really I haven't been North of I4, interstate 4. I've been North of I4 in four years. I haven't had to. I've 100% migrated to Cloudlandia with invitations and you know people coming to. If they want to spend time in the mainland they come to. But so that was a big that was a big shift. And we're back now to. So I'm back now, you know, revenue wise, back to pre-COVID days, you know. But then we got. You know, I think that the future is a hybrid, you know, I think there's still lots of mainland opportunities, I think, that line of thinking, that realization of mainland in Cloudlandia, and you know the roles of each. Dan: You know it's really interesting. I did a lot of in-person workshops because I was doing the 10 times program beforehand, but this year I'll do 64 coaching sessions. Okay. Dean: Live days, you mean. Dan: Well, live events, so they're not days, sorry. So I'll do 64 this year, and only eight of them will be in person. Dean: Oh, okay, that's what I was saying, that's what I meant. So you're counting like connector calls Connector. Dan: Yeah. Dean: Okay, yeah. And the thing about it I think are a nice suite. Those are two hours. Two hours yeah. Dan: Yeah, those are the perfect suite spot. Yeah, and it was forced upon us only because we had no. There's nothing as decisive as no alternative, absolutely. Dean: Yeah, I hear you, I'm really excited. Dan: But once we created this alternative when we came back to full-time, I mean, the company as a whole is back to full-time live sessions, yeah, and. But we've added these two-hour sessions, which were only possible because our clients at nightbase got on to Zoom willingly or not, they got on to Zoom. And it was so useful creating these little two-hour sessions. That's a huge plus, that's a huge gain for us to have them and they're an entity into themselves. You know they have their own value and would not have gone there for two reasons. One there was no reason to. And secondly, there was no, there was no ability to, but we acquired this capability because of what happened. I was reading the history of the plague, which was not a single thing. It was a series. Of this is I'm talking about the 1200s and 13-legs, right, yeah? On the Black Plague and it hit in the early part of. It hit worse in England of all the European countries and got hit worse. And England was a feudal country. They had warlords and they had serfs. They had peasants, the king was warlord and there were lesser warlords, but each of them had their serf universe around them, and these were the worker bees. They did all the work and the plague was an equal opportunity killer. It killed from top to bottom. There was no class in England that was immune to the plague, because it was infectious, because they intermingled all the time. Everybody was densely populated and it was so devastating that a lot of estates just folded up, a lot of warlord estates folded up because they didn't have workers. They didn't have workers. They had lost so many workers. So what happened is that the workers realized suddenly that they had a value, in other words, that you can't run the place without us. And so they started wandering the field to the highest buyer, the person who would pay them the most and give them the best deal. So in history. it's probably the biggest shift of servants becoming three agents and where they went off the land and they went into the towns. They went into the city and they became hired workers. But they could name their price, because if they didn't like the price, they could go to somebody else and say would you offer me a higher price? And what happened is that the merchant classes suddenly became more important than the landed aristocrats. Okay, because they had business coming in. Where the land has one economic system, it's the crops. And they just decided you know, I couldn't do that. But previous to the plague they were condemned to the land, they were condemned to their occupation. They were condemned to the land, they didn't move. But after the plague they did. And so England which got hit the worst I think they had five plagues in a period of 50 or 60 years and all equally devastating. But they gained the most of the country because they got rid of serfdom in the 1200s where, for example, by comparison, in Russia it didn't happen until the beginning of the 20th century and Germany didn't happen until 1850. Okay, and it was just because of the peculiar geography and the peculiar density of the British population. And then they started talking about rights. They started talking about individual rights and everything along with employment, and freedom follows money. But I was just thinking about that, what it must have been like the year before the first plague and the year after the fifth plague. What had happened to people's lives back then? Dean: I mean it's so fascinating to me, Dan, because I remember in college and high school Western civ classes were like get through that and write your Gordon Rule essay and we've gone with it. And here it wasn't really like figuring out of the supply to you. To me as a college kid, that's what you're thinking, but now it's. The thing that fascinates me is this whole history of Western civilization, of how we kind of came into this thing. There's a funny meme going around on TikTok right now where women ask their husbands or boyfriends or whatever how often do you think about the Roman Empire? The meme is to turn your camera on and just ask your husband or whatever how often do you think about the Roman Empire? And it's pretty interesting because the answers that they're giving like a lot of them, are think about it all the time and you think about how much it came from. You know, came from. Dan: And they didn't know, and the way they didn't know. Yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. That's what are they thinking? About they're thinking about the Roman Empire. That's the Roman Empire. Now, that shocks me actually. Dean: But you strike me as a guy who often thinks about the Roman Empire, you know. Dan: Yeah, I do. Dean: Not many people, dan, I don't know anybody else to have a conversation that starts up. You know I've been thinking about the Black Plague lately. Yeah, only here, welcome to the Blue Land, because you hear such a conversation, that is you know, we just had about five. Dan: We just had about five tripwires at the National Security Agency. But if we didn't know, that the majority of husbands were thinking about the Roman Empire you know, it's kind of like when have we been? We didn't pick up on this Right. What's that mean? Dean: Yeah, but you know the interests that they were giving was. You know one? A couple of the guys were engineers and they constantly thinking about you know the. Roman Empire thinking about others are the one guy's. They was a martial artist. Thinking about the Roman, you know gladiators and Like constantly thinking about all things. The Rome, you know and it's funny because you're, you know. You look at your Euclid, you know yeah, I'm before the Roman your foundational thing. Dan: Right, exactly, but I mean, I mean actually if there was any Civilization that benefited from Euclid, it was the Romans. They were great builders. Yeah, you know, yeah, and all that depended upon the books of Euclid, every everything that they did. Yeah, well, it's an interesting thing. You know, I have a constant belief that human nature is a constant in the. I mean, we tend to think that people are radically different because of the means that they use at one particular era of you know history from another side that well, that that means they were really different people, and I said I don't think they are. I think they have a constant. You know they have a constant motivation to kind of utilize whatever they have available to them, and Oftentimes that requires that they have to create an entirely new structures and new processes, and and so the so you know, I don't feel, you know like I was born in the 40s, I lived, you know, I was conscious beginning in the 50s and my sense is that, as far as how people were, you know what human nature was, I don't see much of a difference. I certainly don't see it in myself, you know, I just sample of one feel any different. Dean: I Think I still. Dan: I'm very much in touch who I was when I was eight years old. Dean: Yeah, me too. Yeah, I think about that a lot like that, because I have been and we've had conversations about the reflection on. You know, I think you know we've had to be the ages your 22 years older. Than me that you've had a whole mother. You know generation of, you know the experience from 1944 to 1966 with the pretty. That's a pretty, yeah, that's a lot of happen. You know, yeah. Yeah, and I look at the. You know the 22 years from 1966 to 88 were really. I marked 1988 as basically the end of the analog life. You know that that the beginning of the digital live, and though digital stuff kind of start happening in 70s, there was a real practical here. We started getting real practical applications of digital stuff. But that first 22 years of my life was Really analog and I'm thankful that I had that experience, because I think there's something you know to that. I don't know whether it, I don't know practically, whether what we you know the fondness that I feel for either Nostalgic or you know, but it was a different, it was a different world. Dan: It was a very different world yeah. Yeah, well, going on that book, the, you know the big change you know, yeah, from the book, wonderful book that you sent me, which I consume. You know the. I was born right at the payoff period of the first 50 years. Dean: You know yeah. Dan: That's it. Yeah and you know I've been talking to people decades older than myself who had gone through the real huge impact of the you know, the cars, the electricity, the you know light everywhere. You know movies, radio, movies, radio and the beginning of television. You know that and you know, you know I mean. I remember People gathering in rooms to watch this thing called television. You know, I remember you know it was like a big event. Dean: We just got our television. Dan: come on over, we're going to have a buffet dinner and we're all going to sit around and watch our. Dean: TV dinners and jiffy pop popcorn, yeah, yeah. Dan: It was rudimentary, I mean, but the big thing about it was it had a liveliness to it because the Programs were not recorded, they were live. No, everything was still live. And you know and think about where we are now. That Live TV. Well, first of all, I don't watch it in the heaven for a while. But I think a lot of people just said why should they schedule when I get to watch what I want? Dean: Well, it seems a little undignified. Dan: Yeah, it seems it seems feudal Feudal in both senses of the word. Dean: Yeah, what a feudal way of doing what I want to watch, you know, but you think about that was largely there was no change between the way you were watching television in 1948 and the way you were watching television in 1988. It was really the main. It was still as Scheduled you had to be yeah, you had maybe one more. Dan: You had maybe one more channel, you know I went to. Cnn start. Well then you had the cable. Yeah, that's what I mean. Dean: At the 80s you had more options for it. Yeah, but it wasn't until it wasn't until the late 80s that you had more option. I mean, the VCR brought a synchronicity and, yeah, freed you from at least you could shoot, gave you choice and Detached from the scheduling of it. But nobody could figure out how to Record stuff. Yeah it was a look. You know, 90% of the VCRs were still flashing 12 yeah, you know nobody can even program the clock for it, let alone Learn how to record Programs. You know so mostly. You had Blockbuster to go and give yourself some Choice, but that took from 1948 to 1988 to get to that point. And that big middle, that big Golden plateau, that I think that's a good term for it. Right, is that golden? Dan: plateau of. 0:18:39 - Dean: All of those things being in place. That happened in the big change. All those things you mentioned electric and on radio, tv, movies, flight, automobile, all of those things climb, climb, exponential improvement to 1950. And then we had that golden plateau where there wasn't much innovation on those things but it was really settled into a much improved life and life style Because of those things. You know now every I had electricity, air conditioning, telephone, car in the driveway, pv in the living room. You know All of those things were. That was like the basic, that was the basic amenity package for American life circa 1950 to 1980, you know, yeah, and that's bathroom bathroom is where there was no bath and no shower. Dan:Yeah, right exactly. Dean: Very funny that the thing now and this is where I firmly believe that period from 1975 to two-week years of AI, a couple more years to develop, with that same sort of climbing, climbing, exponential improvement in things. But I think that we're approaching level golden plateau, where the next thing is going to be settled into the benefits of using all the things that we have now, of really settling into those utilization of this new baseline, like every home. Now it's interesting that the basic amenity package for life now includes some sort of a smart phone, access to the internet and streaming smart television service. So all of that as the baseline package, though for the digital plateau here. Dan: Yeah. Dean: It's pretty exciting. Dan: Yeah, and I feel that, and I think that World Affairs are dictating that this is now going to be the only thing available for people to do, because my feeling is that COVID delivered a first stunning blow to both your ability and your desire to travel. I think people are much more at home or stay in place today than they were four years ago around the world. I'm not just in North America, but in the whole world. Dean: That geography does come into place, right, like your position, your outpost, your mainland outpost to Cloudlandia, like I think about I've just been watching you know, with just a perplexing. I can't even imagine what it's like to be living in Israel right now, like that entire, or Ukraine I mean you think about these things how insulated we are right now from the reality. Dan: Well, like there's one aspect. You know, israel comparatively has a very small population. That's why the equivalent of what happened with the first 24 to 48 hours was way beyond what 9-11 did to the United States. Dean: Absolutely yeah. Dan: Yeah, because it's the equivalent of 40,000, you know if you compare. Israeli population of the US. You know, the US's population is 45 times bigger than Israel. So the 3,000 out of 40, you know, 45 times it's significant, but it's, you know, it's not that big, it's like 40,000, I mean, if you wanted to translate it, it's like, you know, it's like 40 to 50,000 people have died. But the other thing is the call up to war, because it is a declared war. They've moved 300,000 working-age people into the military, now their full-time military. So what's that do to the economy? you know what's you know, and so my sense is that Israel, which is a very advanced technological country, is now going to go through an amazing period of artificial intelligence, dealt with everything that moves in their economy. Dean: Yeah, I mean when you amplify too, especially the proximity to it. When you look at the, you know it might be a 145th of the population, but it's also, you know, a hundredth or less of the geographic area of the. United States, you know. Dan: Yeah, it's basically New Jersey you know, I mean the land area of New Jersey is about equal to and they're comparable yeah, yeah and when you look at that and you realize that's not like even in Ukraine. Dean: As you know the size of the Ukraine, if you're you know kind of there's a place to distance from what's going on the eastern border of Ukraine. If you're on the western side you're kind of a little bit insulated from it. But you know, it's just. It's amazing to me, dan. I can't even imagine. Dan: Yeah, well, you know actually my experience of this because I was, you know, technically in a war zone when I was in South Korea. Dean: I was going to say you were in a war zone. Yeah. Dan: Well, south Korea, and we were maybe a hundred miles from the DMZ, okay, uh-huh, but you were conscious and we had five alerts in the year and a half that I was there and that meant there was an incursion on the DMZ, the demilitarized zone. I can tell you the demilitarized zone is very militarized, you know, and so there would be, you know, a squad of American troops or the other UN troops would be ambushed. You know they would ambush, and immediately the country you know, and this was the military, the US Park, you know 40, 45,000, and then you had. You know you had other troops, the Turks, the Turkish. The Turks had a big contingent there, but immediately you knew what to do, you would do that. So in Israel they've had the rocket attacks now going back seven or eight years. Okay, and they immediately the sirens go off. Everybody knows what to do. So there I was, that the closer you are to the danger, the less scary it seems, because it's normal, you've normalized anything. And three or four days, you've normalized the situation. Okay, you've normalized it. Seeing it from a distance, you know you're imagining what that situation would do to the Four Seasons, right, yeah? Dean: I'm sitting like I'm in my courtyard right now and it's just, it's the perfect temperature. It's so quiet, you know, because there's nothing around me. I just can't even imagine if bombs started landing or somebody started running through the neighborhood. Dan: Yeah, but on the other hand, I mean, you've been there for decades, you know in the area and you have. You know what? Two, three hurricane alerts a year. Dean: Well, people in people in Toronto. Dan: I mean a hurricane for people in Toronto, oh yeah. You know, actually almost the entire what I would say. The the water overflow situation in Toronto was hugely created because of a hurricane in the 1950s that killed 200 people in Toronto because of sudden rushing water in parts of the city where people were caught. It was like a riptide. You know it was like a riptide and they had to reconfigure their entire drainage system. You know when heavy rains and everything like that. So that's an example, you know, an example of someplace that doesn't have this kind of situation. When they get a big one, they have to rethink everything. You know. And but the type of a situation we had in Toronto in 1953, I wasn't here, but as a matter of fact, I'm not here today, I'm in Chicago. Dean: But just talking about it. Dan: You know I try to get some distance between me and any potential problem, but you know I mean it's a violation of normal and in Israel, my feeling when I was there it's been about two and a half weeks in Israel and I got a sense that everybody knew what to do with trouble. Okay, they knew what to do with. There was a kibbutz that we visited and these people had been in Gaza, that they had lived in Gaza before it was given back to the Palestinians 2005, 2006, I think it might have been somewhere around there and they were talking. The woman said that there was the start of trouble had started and there were bombings and there were shootings and she had three kids and they went out the front door and she heard the bombs, she heard the shooting and they all came rushing back in and they said they're shooting in the streets and she said, well, go out the back. No, out the back, wow and the reason is, I mean, they had already rehearsed it, but they had to go to school. Dean: Yeah, go help the back. Dan: Okay, yeah, she said well just go out, just go out. They had a back gate and no, there was a back route and everything like that so what it says is that having something like this happened was the normal part of their experience Right, yeah, that's just and they were all tacking every. We were up at the Lebanese border and we just visited this community. That's the furthest northern, most Israeli settlement town. You know, it's not big, you know, a couple hundred people. Everybody was packing, everybody had a six-quat, you know. And so funny because there was a UN troop between them and the Whoever was on the other side of the border and and he said aren't you scared? He says I'll tell you who's scared, as the UN people, they're really scared. Okay, because we kind of believe that they favor the Terrorists. You know, our belief is that the UN protects the terrorists, you know. But if you went to the northern, above the border and you asked the Lebanese, they said we feel that the UN Favors the Israelis. You know, uh-huh. So I said if trouble starts off, who gets shot first? I? He says, well, the UN troops. And he says I even got a guy on the shoot. Dean: Oh my goodness I've got a guy I know the guy right Normalizing no I don't know how to yeah no, normal is normal. Dan: Yeah, we're great normalizing species. Humans are a normalizing species. You know that. Dean: Reminded me of. There was a cartoon where the, the Cheap dog and the wolf were, you know, clocking in for their job. Today, fred, they ask each other at the clock in, and then they did work. He tried to steal the sheep and he tried and foil them. Dan: You know, yeah what'd you do last time? What'd you do tonight? Last night, you? Dean: know, you know what are you gonna do what? Dan: what are you gonna do today? Oh, you know the usual, yeah. And so people, you know you, you know real, realize that we were standing in line. We came through the Toronto security yesterday and and if you were, if you had nexus or you had what's the general term for nexus is where they yeah, yeah. I get global entry. I just look, you know, and they're really. The Machines are really sophisticated. Use, come up the machine yeah it has an arrow going upwards and said look into the camera. And I looked into the camera and there was about a five seconds. Say your identity, you know, you're confirmed. Yeah, and see the an art, you know. And that's become normal. Yeah, but in the not because we find business class and we have nexus and the other thing people were having to take off their shoes. Okay, yeah, this is 2024, and they have to take off their shoes to go through, you know, to go through the machine and and I said this was because one guy, one guy. Yeah, 25 years he was fine from London to New York and he was trying to detonate his shoes. And and he was a clutch, and so they caught him and they took him away, and immediately, because of one guy not two in two different situations, but one guy in one situation he had immediately. Everybody has to take off their shoes. It's just one guy. You know why don't you have a little area where you have to walk across? You know it's on the floor and it can detect explosives you know, and it's a trapdoor, so they immediately drop you into the. The cleaner, the cleaner who was that? Dean: Land security right, yeah, yeah who was that guy? Dan: I said we'll never know. We'll never know. Yeah, but it's interesting and you know it's a pain, you know, and that's why we have nexus and that's why we've adapted cloudland via Bypass. You know, the machine knows me. Yeah, that's it's really important is that the machine knows you. Yeah, but there's a thing about normalizing, you know, and but my feeling you know the famous, you know it's the adaptation curve, you know it's a yeah, you know it starts at one end, then there's a big bulge and then it goes down the other end my sense is that people's ability to normalize is unequal. I think you and I are pretty fast to normalize. Dean: I think the two of us and that and it's a reward for being a DD you think, yeah, I think so too, you're probably right. Dan: Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting thought. Lon, lon, quick start, lon, quick start a DD. I think you normalize really fast. You know, I normalize really fast yeah. I remember it was Friday, the 13th of March, when I was in Chicago, and it's funny because Friday was the 13th. This is. Sunday, but we're talking, yeah, and, and I was coaching a workshop, but it was about 60% of what its normal numbers were. You know, I think we normally had 50 and I think we had maybe 30. And then when we got together After the workshop, before Babs and I went home to flew back home to Toronto, she says we've had a powwow all the leadership in the company and we've decided we're gonna have to close down All workshops for three months. Okay, it's March, we're gonna close down all workshops until, because we're people just aren't going to be showing up and I need to put the word out that we're not gonna do it that time and. I was tired, I'd done four workshops a week, and so we went to the airport, we got on the plane and I'm Halfway home and I said zoom, we're gonna switch over to zoom. This is the opportunity switch over, zoom. And I hit the ground the next morning. Well, it was Saturday, but by Monday I said okay, what will it take to turn everything we do 100% into zoom? Yeah, yeah. I and we have clients today who we haven't seen Since early 2020, who still haven't made the adjustment right. Yeah, I think they can't normalize and what it? Dean: was. I think that when I first started doing zoom I Was doing, I was trying to do the same thing as the break through blueprint, but by zoom, like three days, same thing. We're just, instead of being in the boardroom, you're in your home, you know, and I think we realized about Zoom fatigue kind of thing. It's sitting three days in zoom Full day is a long with a big ass, and I think that you and I both have come to the realization that like two hours more frequently is the is a better Two hours is the right amount of time and I found this beautiful time zone From three o'clock to five o'clock Eastern time. He gets me. I go to Hawaii on one end, even to the you know, this side of Australia where it's six am, you know, at three pm in the afternoon, all the way to Lichtenstein on the other end where it's, you know, ten o'clock at night. That Swap of the Western world is really what's available in yeah, and. Yeah, that's our. Dan: Yeah, our stretches from Pakistan, Well, stretches from Mumbai, because Mumbai is further to the east and Pakistan to New Zealand, and I'm just saying people who show up for zoom cults. You know the? Yeah, yeah yeah and everything. Yeah, lichtenstein, that's really interesting. Dean: Do whites, do well often they're husbands. Dan: That's perfect. Nsa that's a money laundering. We have the very first space. Dean: So I started doing this specific like I do a lead conversion workshop and a lead generation workshop, which are four sessions specifically about that micro topic, two hours each four weeks in a row and the very first one that I did. We had someone from Hawaii and Lichtenstein and all points in between. It was really the perfect thing. Dan: Yeah, I mean we adjusted throughout the day depending on our, you know. I mean I'll have six free zones, six free zone, two hour free zone. Dean: I'd love quarter. Dan: Connector calls are amazing and if they're big you know they have a lot of people they take on one quality, and if they're like a handful of people, they take on another quality. They're different for you. You don't have to have breakout groups if you have five people, you know, because the group is the breakout group, yeah, and everything like that. But I think this we're in for one of those periods and I agree with your thesis that we've had sort of a 50 year move to the new game period of history. Dean: Okay. Dan: And I think the politics and the economics of the end of the 50 years are radically different than the politics and the economics where you started the 50 years. That would have been true from 1950, from 1900 to 1950. Dean: And that was something. Let's talk about that for a minute, because there might be some clues into what happened. Dan: Well, there were no empire in the 1900, the whole world was organized according to empires. There were six or seven major empires by 1950. They were all gone. All those empires had gone away. Okay, I mean, great Britain still retained a global reach that used to be their empire, but it was now called the Commonwealth. Okay, and it wasn't British troops being stationed in those places. Dean: You, know it was this that they. Dan: What held it together was British law and British political structures, and English language and the pound, you know the. Dean: I mean franchise basically. It was a franchise, ideological, political. Dan: Yeah, and the US changed the least of all those countries. I mean from a lifestyle standpoint. It changed a lot of technological, but it's basic structure and process of how the country is run stayed exactly the same. It was the Constitution in 1900. And it was the Constitution in 1950 and then 2020. And it was designed as a franchise nation right from the beginning, because each of the states is like a little fractal copy of the federal government, you know so and each of the states gets to adjust to the way that they deem important. You know, it's, it's everything. So I think, of all the people on the planet who have had to change the least over the last 50 years, I think Americans are the number one. Dean: You say well, what do you mean? Dan: I mean I had to do this and I had to do this and I said, yeah, that's yours, you know, I bet you have more conveniences, you have more comfort, you have more capabilities, but I would say your day to day life is not that much different, because it's so there's a guy on YouTube who has a channel where for years he's branched off into other areas now, but his main thing was, as a solo guy, just going with a GoPro camera to explore former Soviet territory and right Dean: it was just the guy on YouTube. His channel is called Bald and Bankrupt oh the guy. But he goes around and he gives you. He just goes and sees, like what is life like in Uzbekistan right now? You know like he goes and tours the areas and he's fascinated by the you know, soviet mosaics and the all the remnants of, you know grander times for Soviet it's all ruined, it's all ruined, absolutely. And so you see the day in a life of people because he goes and sort of, he speaks Russian well enough to get by. Dan: Get along. Dean: Yeah, and he'd be friends he'd be friends, locals and gets invited into their homes. And you know, you just see like what? What an amazing contrast to life in America. You know a capitalism life, then life after you know communism, where capitalism hasn't fully sunk in, even though it's an option, it hasn't sunk in. You know, in that way, and how desolate you know it's. The landscape is just bleak. You know, I mean everything is in this and and the roads and the infrastructure and everything is just crumbling and the bar resilient, I guess, in a way, right, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of. They're living normal life. Not I wouldn't say normal, but I mean normal. To that normal, no, normal, they consider it normal. They consider it normal. Yeah, yeah, normal life, yeah yeah, yeah, the. Dan: there was an article I read about twin sisters born in Germany, born before the wall went up, so this would be and, and one of them said, you know, we've got to get out. And they were. You know, they were young, very young at that time. And so the one with a lot of initiative did it and she was leaving behind her twin sister, who she was unusually close to, that close to, and she moved to the West Germany and other sister stayed in East Germany and they would correspond and they're under, you know, under very difficult conditions. They were able to visit with each other. The sister in East Germany couldn't go to the West but there was provisions that, you know, families could reunite for half a day or something like that. So, anyway, and then then the sister, who was, you know, more motivated, then got a chance to move to the United States and she moved to Iowa. Okay, and at a certain point, when the wall fell, you know, which was 1989, the sister, they made this. It took a year to plan it and everything else, just practically, because the sister in Germany just wasn't used to going anywhere. And they finally they flew to. She flew to Chicago and then to Iowa, and so they picked her up at the airport and she they were just driving from the airport to wherever the woman lived in Iowa the now American sister and they were going through just a normal supper and she said you're taking me through the wealthy section, Now you take. And they said this isn't the wealthy session, this is just no, this is just, this is just the way everything normal, yeah this is normal and that more or less paralyzed the sister because she had no mental structure to take in that this was just the way that Americans lived. And then they went to a supermarket, you know which was probably the land size of two football fields, you know, and just a normal, super, nothing special. I mean, yeah, and so they walked in, they says we've got a lot of shopping to do and everything. And she says, well, is there anything I can do? And she says, well, look about the aisles there, you see. You know, there's aisles one through 20, and just go to aisle number 11 and just turn the corner, you know, and take string with you, so he or lead, lead, bread, breadcrumbs, and so she says, but we're looking for corn flakes, some, of course, like. So anyway, and they agree, and they're both punctual, they're German. And so she says you know, in 20 minutes let's just meet right back here. And so the American sister is there, but the German sister, the East German sister, isn't. So she goes down to aisle 11 and her sister is right where the corn flakes were standing, mute. You know just looking at the corn flakes and she said there's 10 different kinds of corn flakes. How can I possibly choose? And she said I just grab one of them. And she said I can't comprehend. How do you make decisions here? How do you make? Decisions yeah yeah, it's a collision of two normals. Dean: Yes, you want. I mean Lupa talked about that coming to. America and going to the grocery store as you know like going just seeing all the things that were available. It's amazing. It's really interesting to hear her talk about her awakening to capitalism you know like as a because she came to America at 18, you know, or you know 20, I guess she was 20. Dan: And yeah seeing having her life Anying. Other siblings followed her yeah. Dean: Oh, she brought everybody, yeah, everybody over, but that yeah, she just well, I think, I think you have a different level of well, she's really the you know she's the. Dan: You know the great exhibit here of someone, the adaptation curve, you know. I mean she just like it was like when she had the chance. She didn't miss the chance to get out. Dean: But what I? Dan: remember most about her story because we were out to dinner a couple of times at the last free zone in Palm. Dean: Beach. Dan: And what I remember most was that the person who most protected their rather odd family in the Ukraine in Ukraine, was a KGB agent. Dean: Oh yeah. Dan: And you know so you know everything. You know what makes people normal is who they're connected to. You know what, who, are you? connected to, and you know, the more you're connected to people who have wider perspective than have greater capabilities, I think it's the faster you're able to adapt. Agreed, I think that's what I mean, since I talk to you all the time. What am I going to do? Wying about COVID? Yeah, I mean, regardless how I'm picking, you know, I've got a certain status to get to maintain. You know, reputation to maintain, yeah, yeah. Dean: I love it. I think the interesting thing, about MacCamp. We to think about this week is this in the context of the golden plateau that we're reaching here, and how to thrive in that golden Well, I think things are going to fall down, you know my my military money, energy, labor and transport you know, I think things are definitely. Dan: I can sense that things are slowing down. Like you know, the predictions in the high tech industry everything's going to get bigger and better, and that's you know, it's a straight upward line. Yeah but I too in infinity, and I says I don't think so, I think the mouth. Things really slowed down when they hit 1950. Oh, you know, I remember it as being a fairly tranquil period of 1950s, 1960s. You know, I agree, that's what I mean is very until you were born, and then, of course, things started to get in line and things shifted Right. Yeah, but I know I agree with you 100%. Dean: That was a. You know that all of that leveled into a stage of, you know, a plateauing of advancement. I mean, it wasn't, it was. You know, all those things you read about in the big change, those things were revolutionary. I mean, so all these baby boomers born into this plateau, that plateau, really didn't know a world before those big things, before electricity, television, all television, air conditioning, cars, roads, all of that. And then they grew up in brand new schools all the way up. You know the whole thing. Dan: Whole new neighborhoods. You know, they grew up in whole new neighborhoods, yeah. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Yeah, yeah, I think we're into that period again. I think we're going to you know go. And I was thinking that when people say bold things like cars, use an example of cars, of classic old time cars. You don't notice many classical cars that were produced too much after the fifties up until the eighties, you know right. You really to pick up on the late forties the forts were beautiful, the Chevy's were beautiful, the Lincoln's were beautiful and everything else, and they are saved because they didn't really they stylized, they certainly did not approve. I can think of only maybe two cars. I'm not a car guy, so your thing, but you know, and one is the Chevy Corvette which has maintained a certain classic look for 70 years, and the other one is the Camaro, both the Chevy and the Camaro, the Camaro is you know, is a hot car, but I can't think of any other. you know again, I'm not a car person, so I'm basing my confidence on ignorance here. But anyway, but the big thing is, but the fort thirties and forties is just full of these old classic cars. You know, and I think it was a high design period and you know, and I mean we certainly don't save any technology that much from that period of time. You know well it was not over. Tonight I've got, I still got my 19 Motorola television and oh, yeah, no exactly Six, six inches. And you know and everything like that. You know, nobody does that, but they do have radios from the forties. You know, people do have radios from the thirties and forties, you know, yeah, yeah, anyway. So how would we sum up today? Because we've shot through an hour and record time. I can't believe it. Dean: Well, I think my reflection right now is really going to be, I think, drawing the parallel, looking at who and what were the conditions for thriving in the period from the fifties to the eighties, you know, and on that, on the back of all of that advancement, and I think, if we're going to start doing some guessing and betting about what's going to thrive in the next 25 years, you know that we've reached this thing and I'm going to let it ride out to 20 as the peak of the plateau kind of, and see that period from, I think the period from 25 to 50, that 25 years is going to be. There's going to be a lot of parallels, I think, yeah, yeah, my sense is. Dan: I can just end with one little example from a 10 times connector I had. On Friday I was in a break up with three people. One of them was a marketer, one of them was a podcaster, and I'm just. The other one was an online educational company two women and a man and half their sharing was the progress they've made with AI during 2023. Okay, yeah. And I was very struck by their reports because they just talked about it and they were just talking normally about something that literally did not exist before November 30th last year. Dean: Okay, yeah. Dan: They were just talking as well. We're doing this with AI, we're doing this with AI, we're doing this with AI, and it was like yeah, we're saying, yeah, and we did this, we're doing this with electricity. We're doing this with electricity Right, right, exactly. And now I said I've gotten a keen insight just by your reports. Today you're sharing that this is what's going on in tens, hundreds of millions of places right now, and it's all subsurface, it's all below the surface. Okay. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And they're not talking about it as a big thing, they're just talking about it as a normal thing. Dean: Right. That's why I say by if we that and I think that's going to be expanded that if we that, by then this to 2025, that by then it's going to be, everybody's going to have a sense of what this is. You know, I think you're absolutely right Like we're literally just a year into AI. Dan: Yeah, I mean that's, I can see the report. I can just see the reports that are being written about our conversation today at the NSA. Oh, my goodness, people say we've got to have a meeting, we've got to have a meeting. Dean: They're on, they're on. Dan: They're not onto us. They're onto things that we didn't know about. Yeah, and what was the Roman Empire anyway? Is that an empire we should be paying attention to? Do we have contacts with Alrighty? Dean: Dean. Yeah, all right, I'll be here next week. I think I am. I'll be back in Toronto. Dan: I'll certainly be. I'll be in a position. Perfect, I will talk to you then. Thanks, dean, bye, Okay.

Welcome to today's episode of The Mindset Mentor Podcast, where today… I'm going to share with you what I believe is the best possible thing you could do for your future, starting today. If there's anything that we can all agree on about AI, it's that we knew it was coming eventually. If you really think about it, there once was a time where people rode horses to get everywhere… Then they developed cars… and planes… etc. VCRs turned into DVD players, which turned into internet streaming… Change is inevitable. The one thing that never changes, is that things will change. In this episode I'm not here to talk about AI, but I am here to use it as a reference point to help you understand why it's more crucial than ever before to start focusing on yourself, developing yourself both personally and professionally, and start getting comfortable with change. It's time to learn to adapt. I'm not here to put fear into you, and I will give you some great ideas in this episode on what you can start doing right away to make sure that you're not “left behind” as the world keeps moving forward. We're all on this journey together.If you like this episode… Make sure to share it with someone that needs to hear it and help us get the message out there so that together we can help make people's lives better and make the world a better place. And BY THE WAY:My first book that I've ever written is now available for pre-order. It's called LEVEL UP and It's a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.Within its pages, you'll discover powerful insights and practical steps that will revolutionize the way you approach your goals, personal motivation, and mental focus.

In this week's “Throwback Thursday / Where are they now?” segment, we hear from a reseller who specializes in retro electronics including vintage game consoles and typewriters.  Side Hustle School features a new episode EVERY DAY, featuring detailed case studies of people who earn extra money without quitting their job. This year, the show includes free guided lessons and listener Q&A several days each week. Show notes: SideHustleSchool.com Email: team@sidehustleschool.com Be on the show: SideHustleSchool.com/questions Connect on Twitter: @chrisguillebeau Connect on Instagram: @193countries Visit Chris's main site: ChrisGuillebeau.com If you're enjoying the show, please pass it along! It's free and has been published every single day since January 1, 2017. We're also very grateful for your five-star ratings—it shows that people are listening and looking forward to new episodes.

Seth Rogen joins the HDTGM Fast Family to go back to the franchise's inception with 2001's The Fast and the Furious, a movie where the big villain is a scared trucker trying to save his VCRs. LIVE from Largo in LA, they cover Dom & Letty's romantic motorboat, the cops' cappuccino obsession, the origins of Race Wars, and the difference between wet and dry NOS. Plus, Seth shares F&F producer Neal Moritz's lesson on "logic vs. cool" and June reveals she had no idea that Brian used to be a cop.  Go to www.hdtgm.com for tour dates, merch, and more.Follow Paul on Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/paulscheer/HDTGM Discord: discord.gg/hdtgmPaul's Discord: https://discord.gg/paulscheerCheck out Paul and Rob Huebel live on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/friendzone) every Thursday 8-10pm ESTSubscribe to The Deep Dive with Jessica St. Clair and June Diane Raphael here: listen.earwolf.com/deepdiveSubscribe to Unspooled with Paul and Amy Nicholson here: listen.earwolf.com/unspooledCheck out The Jane Club over at www.janeclub.comCheck out new HDTGM merch over at https://www.teepublic.com/stores/hdtgmWhere to Find Jason, June & Paul:@PaulScheer on Instagram & Twitter@Junediane on IG and @MsJuneDiane on TwitterJason is not on Twitter