A Data Driven Retrospective: A Look Back Through Seven Seasons and 360 Episodes

Welcome to Episode 360 of the Data Driven Podcast. I'm your host, Bailey, the semiscient master of ceremonies, guiding you through the vast realms of data and technology with what you might call a British charm. In today's special episode, we've come full circle, 360 degrees to be exact. Frank and Andy, your beloved data aficionados, embark on a retrospective adventure looking back at the twists, turns,

and tremendous tales from the past 7 seasons. It's a bit like time travel, but with fewer paradoxes and more data insights. But in true Frank and Andy fashion, our journey doesn't follow a straight path. Expect a labyrinth of tangents, day tours, and, of course, the occasional tech related rabbit hole. It's what makes this podcast the treasure trove of information and entertainment it is.

So whether you're here for the data, the wit, or just to hear if Frank and Andy ever managed to stay on topic, you're in the right place. Hello, and welcome to Data Driven. And you know what, Andy? What? I have said that now officially 360 times. 360 times. Right. That's right, ladies and gents, boys and girls, AIs of various levels of sentience. Trying to make the episode future proof. Yeah. So this is show

number 360. Wow. And one of the things I liked about the Simpsons there's many things I like about the Simpsons, but they but they would instead of celebrating, like, episode 100 or 200, like, normal shows do, they'd be like, this is the 4 100 and third episode. Woo hoo. Special. So I thought 360 would be a good way to kind of talk about the journey this far and some of the cool projects we have going on now, which in in our virtual green room before we hit the record, we were talking about.

Right? So first off, on my end, the big one the big moment of news is not technology related, believe it or not. But it is super cool. It is super cool. So there's a couple of shows that you will hear, that you've already heard, and there's some that are kind of in stuck in development limbo. More on that later. But I refer to an ongoing court case. Sometimes I'll even refer to it as an ongoing custody case. That is closed now because we have finally adopted,

my wife's cousin. And, Andy's clapping if you're watching the video, but I think he was on mute. Because he would cough and then you clap. But no. We finally adopted him. So we now have 3 boys, officially legal. He's my son. Just with, like, the other 2, and, he he's an awesome kid. He, he's a lot of fun. He's such a happy boy.

And considering kind of all the things that had happened, it's just in the circumstances of his birth, which are pretty bad, and kind of the fighting that went around to who gets to keep him, who gets to adopt him, basically. You know, because of I wanna avoid future legal complications. I won't go into those. Sure. But it

looks like it's over. So, you know, he's he's part of the family, and he's been part of the family, I guess, since birth because he's a relative, but he's part of our little cluster since he came in a little bit with us in July. And, it's funny I did the math is that when he starts kindergarten Mhmm. My oldest graduates from high school, like, the same time. Wow. So when I did the math and I was like, boy, I am a glutton for punishment. No. It's a wonderful thing. I and I say that as a

father who had children. Let's see. My first, daughter was born when I was 18. Oh, wow. That's a little young, and I don't recommend it. But, you know, god is good, and it worked out well, and, she's awesome. And my last child, my son, my second son, was born when I was 44. So, also, kind of 8 I'm I'm not hitting the median. Okay? But Mhmm. But I've got the range. So when what I learned through both those experiences because I had 2 daughters from my first marriage, and they

they grew up that you know, they were basically grown. I would say I think I think Penny was either 18 or about to turn, like, within a week and a half 18 when I'm I married Christy, my my second wife. And then we started having, children, and we had 3 more then. And it's having done this twice gives gives a perspective. And have being older and having children, Frank, I think it's, you know, it's I I don't wanna say it's better because it's not, but it's different because you know what to

expect. And that's that's a big deal. Because that first time, you anyone, any parent having a first child has is having a child for the very first time. I mean, that that sounds Right. Circular. I I get it, but, a bit of a tautology. But it's true. You don't know what you don't know until you actually go and have a child. And I always tell my my older daughter and I joke with her, all the time. I should say old dust because I've got 3. I tell her I you were the beta child. You know?

So we had to learn how to be parents with you. Her and my my with my second wife. Our older son is her first. Right. Right. Sort of thing. He's also a a bit of a beta child as well. So but congratulations. Every child is different too. Like, you know, with the first and kind of, like, having gone through it now three times or in the process of going through it. Yeah. But one thing I noticed with the littlest guy is I know now that this time is short. Yeah. And I appreciate the little things.

Not that I didn't with the older 2, but it was when you're your first child, you don't know what to expect. You're like, oh my god. Oh

my god. Oh my god. What am I doing? Right? A lot of impostor syndrome with the first kid. And then with the second one, you think that, we've done this before. It's no big deal, but you're thrown for a loop because it's a default leader for their personality. Mhmm. And then you have to keep if they're close enough in age, you have to keep them both alive, which becomes this whole

thing, and then they interact with each other. And I'm an only child, so, like, this is completely, like seeing the sibling relationships develop is completely foreign to me. Right. Right. And my wife isn't. So she's like, you can't like, I remember the first time I came back from a conference, And I bought I used to bring, like, either a souvenir or, like, a swag thing from the show, and I only got one. That was a mistake. Right? Right? And I thought imagine Roberta addressing that. Yes.

Yes. My lovely wife would be like We can't do that. Like, and even now with, like, the littlest one, I'm like, but he's a baby. He can't she's like, it doesn't matter. I was like, okay. Right. So but it's interesting to kinda see that. And it's cool to see the my oldest kind of really grow into being a young man, but also growing into being a a big brother twice over. And my middle now middle child is kind of was used to being the the baby of the family. Yeah. Now it's not

job. I will I think he was excited that he was no longer the baby. Okay. But then he realized, wait, I'm no longer the baby. I lose. He knew all the bad things he would lose, but he only he realized the good things he would lose too. So it's kind of interesting. He's kind of developed into it really well too. So it's it's Yeah. It's worked out well. And the little guy is just, you know, the missing puzzle. My my sister-in-law basically

said, like, he's the missing puzzle piece you didn't know was missing. Aw. And he, like, really fits in really well. Like and he's just it's it's interesting to see see the personalities develop and, like, interact with each other. That is that is really cool, and I I didn't say it before, but congratulations. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think you I've told you. You know? Yes. But not Like, day of, I think, when we went to the courthouse. Oh,

absolutely. Yeah. You did say congratulations, but up until the moment I swear if you're still listening, we are gonna talk about technology, but hold on. Hold on. Up until the moment, the judge basically put the hammer down literally. We were expecting certain parties to show up Yeah. And stop the process. So that's all I'll say. Yeah. Up to and including physical violence against me, the judge, or the building. So that's

the kind of things I've been living with over the last Goodness, Frank. That's, like, what, year or so? Because we met him about a year, and we met him met him end of January last year. Okay. Because this the we didn't know he existed. He was he's about 18 months old now, so he's about 4 months Yeah. Before we even knew we existed, and we're like and he was in the foster care system in Pennsylvania. And we're like, you know, we just bought this big new house.

We're just across the state line more or less. Right. And why and then one day, I will tell all about this, but I'm gonna wait for certain parties to pass away. Because as of yet, they haven't figured out how to sue you beyond the grave. Not yet. But Not yet. With AI. With AI, anything's possible. But now that we're back talking about AI, I think it's interesting because with my first child, I wasn't in the AI space. Right? I

was in Right. I was still in the silver light world, which kinda crazy to even say that out loud. If my second one, I was in AI space, and I really got to appreciate like, fully appreciate, not just from, like, a parental level Yeah. But from a developmental psychology and kind of engineering aspect of a cognitive way, how language developed, how learning happens. And now I'm seeing the relationships build between the 3 separate nodes, if you will, and that's

fascinating to see. And maybe not to anyone who's not an only child. If you're an only child, if you're if you have siblings, you kind of you live through that experience. Yeah. I did not. So, that's needed. To be fair, I'm the oldest of, there were 5 of us. You know, mom had 5 boys, and, it's, I it's just as foreign to me to think about what it would be like to to be an only child. So I don't I really don't say one's better than the other, and I don't think that's what

you're saying at all. No. No. No. Not at all. But it's the but they are different. Well, you know, it's funny. When I was a kid, a lot of people would say to me, like, oh, it must be terrible being an only child. I'm like, I don't know. I think it's pretty flipping awesome. And I didn't always say flipping if you get my drift. I do. But where it did stop becoming awesome is about the age. I was about about 25 when I realized that my parents were getting

older. And I realized the consequence of that. Yeah. And I had that I call it an uh-oh moment around age 25. Like, uh-oh. Right? It's on me. Like, there's no one else. Yeah. Like and and and and and I know from experience with other family members and things like that, even if there is a sibling, one sibling tends to take the brunt of the load for for many reasons. Legit, illegitimate,

fair and unfair. Right? Yep. Yep. So even then, it's not a guarantee, but but still, there's someone who can understand your growing up circumstances in a way that really no one else can. I don't know. So Yeah. Yeah. So as a kid, it's an awesome ride. The second half of it, not so much. Yeah. I try to think of a movie that starts off really good, but then turns terrible.

Can't really think of 1, but you get the gist. I do. I mean, it's show 360, so we have to, like, kinda hit all the our notes of, like, movie reference. That's true. You know? We'll have to come up. We'll we'll have a movie reference. I know us. Maybe we'll have Bailey come up with one if we don't. We will do it.

Speaking of Bailey, I'm doing an experiment, and this was an experiment inspired by some other happenings where the thought I had was, well, what if you had AIs delivering a short kinda newsy podcast about AI. And then you said you're like, dude, there's already YouTube channels that do this. I'm like, no. No. No. But they don't tell you they're an AI. Right? It's always that quasi so is it so we we now have a a a second AI entity, and her name is Jen, Jen

AI. Get it. Right. So clever. And because now

we can say everyone's talking about Jen AI. So I did the first couple of rounds of experiments, and I passed the round to people that I mean, we've gotten the feedback that Bailey is both an interesting aspect of the show, but also if she talks for too long, it becomes very obvious that it's an AI. Right? So, that's why if you notice, I kind of I try to keep her intros, to a minute plus or minus, like, 5 seconds. Right? Just because I get it. I I we we do listen to the feedback.

I do like keeping her because it's always cool to, like, have a an intro of what the show is gonna be about. Right? And you or me could do it, true, but they're about to hear us for, like, 35 to 40 to to an hour. So they're in this store hour. So I'm pretty sure pretty sure it's nice to hear a different voice. So so I actually found a new, AI voice that sounds very human like and that's the voice for Gen AI. And then I was thinking the first

iteration, the first recording and it's on YouTube. We're gonna start in a separate podcast channel. Because at one point, if you go back in the history long enough, I did do, like, a daily kind of show of news and AI or in Tano. Mhmm. But that was when I was unemployed in between jobs, and I had 2 kids. And one of them wasn't a toddler. One of them actually, at the time, one

of them was, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But the gist is is that I also got the feedback is that it starts if it starts polluting the feed, people people will do that. And if you look at successful podcasters, we'll use Joe Rogan. Right? Love him, hate him, admire him, loathe him, whatever. He has a the main show, and those shows are anywhere from 2 to 3 hours. I think I saw 1 on the feed. It was

4 hours, which Wow. I can't imagine. But there's also a series of YouTube channels as well as, I think, a podcast RSS feed where it's called JRE clips, Joe Rogan experience clips, which is just like segments. Which is good because very few people are gonna sit through the entire 2, 3 hours. Right. In fact, when I was driving back and forth to Pittsburgh for the visitations with said child, I would that was when I started listening to it because it was, like, this

one kind of narrative you could listen to on the drive. It's about 3 hours. Right? So the problem is is that because of language reasons, I realized I couldn't do it if there were kids in the car, which I think solidifies our statement of we try not to have profanity. And I think for the first time, we actually bleeped it out a couple of shows ago with Luke. I forget his last name, but Luke Diaz? Yeah. The venture capital guy. So Yeah. And there's another show by a very brilliant man named

Benjamin. His first name's Ben. That there's a lot of profanity in that. So the Yeah. The effort to edit that out Yeah. That would be that would be hard. And this this may be a good segue. This is an excellent segue. I was teeing it up. Thank you, Frank. Just not consciously. That thank you. We started another thing. We're always starting things. And we started recording on Teams, and we'll

say things in the shows like if you're watching this video. And we said it for the longest time, but we didn't have the videos posted anyway for, people to see them. So a couple of 3 months ago, we found a a platform that would, work, I think, work well, and it managed a lot of the, stuff behind the scenes for managing subscriptions. So people wanna sign up and, you know, and watch shows

indefinitely. That that's available. And then if you get you know, you watch what's available out there and go, alright. I've I've done you know, it's a long weekend and you binge watch all of the data driven, media TV parts. And and that's what it's called. It's, it's a data driven media dot TV. It the the link right now does not have an SSL on it. So if you go to HTTP colon wackawackawackaw datadrivenmedia.tv, it will redirect you to the official site that's kinda

managed by the platform. And it has it does have an SSL on it. So when you sign up, you're not your stuff's not at risk. Right now, it's 4.99 a month is what we've got it set at, and we'll probably experiment with price because I know us. We do that. There's a 1st month for 3.99. You sign up, try it out. Again, if you don't like it, you can cancel it at any time. And in addition to that, there's the your

first 7 days are free. So, like, almost every other subscription service, you sign up and you put in your credit card information. But then you if you cancel before the free part's done, then it doesn't cost you anything. So, again, HTTP, not an s, colon /data driven media dot tv. And to be fair, when Frank and Frank got the original domain, datadriven.tv for the podcast, this was the thought back in 20 was it 2016? 2017? 2017. Yeah. Yeah. And that

that we the idea was to do video, and it just it turned out to be, hard. It's probably the best way to say it. It's difficult and challenging. So we just launched with the audio part of it, and I'm still shocked that the audio has done as well as it does. The podcast has done as well, and that's really because of all of you. So if you're listening to the audio, if you wanted to go over and watch the video, see see me and Frank, and, you know, and kind

of follow along the show. I was gonna say the unedited version, but we do so little editing these days. Right. It's only it's only, like, there's a couple of green room conversations you could kick out, you know, catch up on. The security one is awesome. This week in security, is that what it is? Or the security guys? Yeah. The the the green room presentation, I would say and that was a good show. Was almost as good as the show. Like Yeah.

And see that that's so well. We'll edit out the stuff before Frank begins, the intro. Right. You know? We'll edit that out in the audio. That's included in the video. Right. And so they and the reason it was a good segue when we were talking about, you know, potential profanity, which we've and we and all of our guests have done a great job at at limiting. Right. There was

one show, It's very intelligent guy. I listened to the show, and I've been around enough people who use profanity, and they're not angry when they do it. It's their way of speaking that I can separate those 2. Not everybody's like that, and I'm not judging. I'm just saying. And and and if you knew me outside of a professional context dude, I grew up in New York City and North Jersey. What Come on. What do I call it, Frank, when you start?

Go Jersey on you. That's right. Frank goes Jersey every now and then. So so so, like, so, like and that was kind of that and and this is a good example of, like, we're doing a retrospective. That was my NPR voice. But, you and I had a big debate about this. It was like I'm like, look. I get it. Like, I I wanna leave it in because we had a big debate. Like, I wanna leave it in. Right? Our podcasting platform and, apparently, a lot of them now have a flag of

this episode is explicit. Right. Right? But then we kinda went back and forth on that and basically what you said, and I was just like and plus, I know that a lot of us listen to podcast with little ears in the car. Right? Yeah. And a big I wouldn't say problem. Like, his problems go as pretty good. Like, I would love to listen to, you know, the latest Joe Rogan when I was driving up to Pittsburgh. But Right. You know, how do I explain, like, you know, to my,

you know, 9 year old, like, yeah. You shouldn't use bad words. He goes, but Joe Rogan has you know, made a $1,000,000,000 deal, and he uses bad words. I was like, okay. You know, like, it it so rather than have those awkward conversations, we decided to not publish it yet until I can get the time to bleep it through. And what's interesting is, I actually used AI to find the profanity. Right? So we have interesting.

Yeah. Because yeah. I mean, I I do listen to the whole show, but, like, if I'm editing about I have my editing, like, mindset on. I need to do it quick. Right? And I tend to do it quick. So what I'll do is so what I did was I just ran it through. We use something called cast magic. And you know what? I'm gonna go out there on a limb and say, I will provide a affiliate link. You should

totally check out Cast Magic. It's freaking awesome. Because, basically, what it does, all the show notes since, what, maybe, like, 6 months to a year now have been done with Cast Magic. So Cast Magic will let you upload an audio and or video now apparently. So, and then it'll create a a transcript. You identify the speakers. Right? Because you're basically marking up. It'll it'll identify when you're talking, when I'm talking. Yep. Right? But it'll also run a series of AI prompts against it.

Like, here's the title for the show. There's here's the key moments. So if you look at last maybe 15, 20 episodes, those key moments have been selected by AI. And if I don't like it, I can regenerate it, but it works out really well. Yeah. Because that is it's not labor intensive. That's not the right word. It's time intensive. Yeah. And I think if there's anything I've learned over the past, let's say, 5, 6 years is that time is the true currency.

It's true. Time is the true measure of wealth, and it's the only thing that's ever really fairly distributed across life. Talent's not, looks are not, money is not. Yeah. You name it. It's probably not evenly distributed. However,

I've learned this from a guy I used to work with at Microsoft because he he was he had this whole rant, and we were stuck in a car ride from, like I say stuck like it's a bad thing, but we were stuck in a in a in an Uber ride from Sea Tac to Redmond. And, you know, hit the traffic the wrong way, that could not that's not a trivial drive. So for for my for my peeps in the in the DC Beltway area, it's like going from from Silver Spring to Tysons Corner,

rush hour, or any time of day. Like, could be 15 minutes, could be 3 hours. And if you hit the jackpot, could be 6 hours. Ask me how I know that one. So, long story short, the topic of gaming came up because there's a bunch of nerds in the car. And this one guy had basically purchased a, might have been Star Wars Galaxy, one of the big massively online things, right, which I don't play because I know it's a massive time sink and that will become my life. So it's just easier to avoid it.

And so he's he was really into it. He he people were giving him the business, on he bought a premade character at, like, level 60 or level 100. Right? And people were like, yeah. I shouldn't have done that. You cheated. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then he had this excellent stump speech on the value of time. And he's like, look, I have a life. I have kids. I think his twins were born. I I I don't know. I have a job. I have this. I have a career.

I just wanna play a game, and, you know, I don't mind trading money for time because and then he went on this whole thing, like, you know, you know, I have the same number of hours in a day that Bill Gates has. Remember, all Microsoft nerds. Right? So we're and this is before Elon was in the top billionaire list. Right? I have the same number of hours a day that he does versus the beggar on the street versus anyone in the world. It's

how I spend that money. And if you look at how Bill Gates spends his time or spends his money, it's really more of optimized his time. So what does that tell you? And I was like, woah. Because when they were talking about the online game, it's a great point. And Yeah. I love to get him on the show. I don't think he does AI though, but he'd be an interesting character. But the interesting point because, like, during part of the conversation, again, it was a

long drive. I can't when I start talking about this particular online game, I kinda tuned it out because, well, I don't wanna know how good it is. Right? The less I know, the better. The further I am away from the event horizon, the better. So when he started talking about, you know, the the time focusing and goes, like, wow, that's really good. I think that's a really good idea, and that that kinda stuck with me. It's one of those things that kind of just lodges itself in the corner of your

brain, and you start thinking about it. The short of it is is that by using these AI tools, we can produce more content. And if you notice, we've been really good with that over the last, you know, few months of putting out a show weekly or if not twice weekly. Because we did a bonus show on leap day. Because I figured, bonus day, bonus, whatever. There we go. It's a great idea, but you're absolutely right. The the the impact that I'm seeing

LLMs have these days Right. Is more in, force multipliers, in time savings, and that sort of stuff. And I had a my my recent anecdote about that happened in the past couple of weeks where I was responding to a request for a proposal. And I don't know if you've ever had an opportunity to to look at RFPs. They vary. This one was relatively short for a a project that was probably gonna last, more than a year. And, you know, and they were doing this very, rigid process where you

got the RFP. You had a couple of weeks to collect and send in the questions. And then the week after that, the proposal was due. You were gonna send in your proposal. You got one shot at the questions. And I was like, what? I'd like to I'm sure I'm gonna have more questions after I get these answers.

Right. I can't do that. I'd like to sit down and talk to the people. Can't do that. It's like, I've gotta communicate using this writing. So at the end of it, when I got all of my questions back, we're running out of time, and I needed to, you know, to respond to the proposal. And I sat down with 1 of the engineers who would end up working with me for over a year, drafted a really quick, you know, like, 4 sentences, copied and pasted that, and then I used chatgptchatgpt4, and said, restate this,

you know, so that it's not as terse. I didn't use this this prompt. But in my mind, I I the first prompt I thought of was, you know, make it not seem like an engineer wrote it, which to be fair, I struggle with communicating with my wife whom I love dearly, not like an engineer would respond to it. One of my mentors told me years ago, and it like you were mentioning the conversation, it stuck. His boss had told him to go do some sales stuff. And he bring an engineer, and he said, I

want you to talk to them like you're talking to your wife. And that was good advice, but that wouldn't work for me as well as it would for him because he was better at communicating with his wife than I am. But did the GPT did it. 1st pass, Frank. Me and the engineer looked at that, and we said copy and paste and send, And we ended up sending that. So 2 things came to mind when you said that. 1, I married an engineer. So fun

fact, 1st engineer I dated, I end up marrying. I don't know. Maybe there's causation correlation, but it would be unwise for me to do any more experimentation. Right? I would have to agree with this. That's that's my attempt at rim shot. The other thing is I sent you this joke last night on, YouTube shorts. Right? I saw it. An engineer goes to hell. This is the joke. It's really funny. That's so funny. Engineer goes to hell, and the devil sees him and was

like, what are you doing here? And he goes, I don't know. So he he he's like, it's too hot here. I'm gonna I'm gonna build an air conditioning system. So he builds an air conditioning. Hell becomes cool again and livable. Right? And he makes a bunch of other improvements because every time he sees something wrong. And god's talking to the devil and he goes, how's things down there? I bet it's hot. He goes, actually, no. And he's like, what do you mean? Oh, yeah. This guy came here. He's an

engineer. He made all these improvements. And he was like, well, that's a mistake. He clearly shouldn't be there. He has to come to heaven. And he goes, no. You know, he goes, no. I'm keeping him. I'm keeping him. He goes, yeah. Well, I'll sue you. And then the devil just looks at them and laughs at him. Where are you gonna get a lawyer? That's so mean. I know. I've somewhat as someone who spent the last a a good part of the last, 15 months with lawyers. I understand why you sent

it to me. I got it I thought it was funny. I thought laughed, and then I was like, I know why Frank sent us. Law lawyers are good when they're on your side. Right? True. And you had a great lawyer. But Our our lawyer was awesome. She was the best. She when family law is a different animal, and I never had to encounter. But Yeah. Somebody once said it's the best way to be to get financially and emotionally drained in 1 in 1 fell swoop. And I could totally see it. Like, it because there's, like,

this is part of the I don't know, man. It's just if you can avoid it Yeah. Highly recommend you do. I I I I would I would give it a Yelp review of do not recommend, you know, 0 stars. But people don't go there typically by choice, I guess. But it's just a it's just a as particularly when you're dealing with, like, the social welfare system, it's just dismal. You know, we were we would be there in waiting rooms, and there would be, other kids there waiting to see,

you know, their pet it's it's just god awful. It's the only way I can the only way I can say it, and meet our language requirements. There there we go. Yes. But, I forget how we got off topic. Oh, yes. So it was Jack CPT. Yeah. No. I mean, it's totally great for, like, some live music. Minutes. You know? Yeah. I mean and this is like you were able to respond. I'm assuming you were able to respond to that. I was. Yeah. But I've also found that it's helpful to build out so I I signed

up for Gemini when I first came out. Mhmm. Right? And one of the example prompts to give you on the screen is, you know, act like you're, you know, a fictional character. I think it might have been somebody from, like, a Dickens novel or whatever. You know, start to comp be conversational and start talking about the weather. And I'm like, what if I made this a character from The Expanse? So Christine Avasarala, who I I can't describe her,

but she would not pass the language test. Let's put that one. She wouldn't, but she is an awesome character. Such a well written character. Her and Amos Burton. Streamy. All of them, really. They kept that whole series. I I said this, back when I read the first book, and it there were maybe 4 out when I read the first one. I said, this is the best writing. Hands down, not sci fi. Just the best writing I've read in about a decade. Right. No. It's just

really well written. Like It is. And it I mean, read the books. The series is good. Don't get me wrong. I mean, this I don't know how you understand the series without having read the books. So I saw the series, then I read the books. Oh, so how did that go? That's great. So good

usage. Tell you that you can appreciate the fine details. Like, there's one scene and this is not spoiler. Right? So so the asteroid series, it's the first season in the first book starts off there. And there's this whole segment where Miller, who's like a detective, is is basically complaining about the transit system, on and how it works. He's talking about the trans system, how it works, and or doesn't work as the case may be. And and he was describing the various

lines and the various stops and things like that. And if you when I rewatch season 1, there's they actually have in in the subway car well, not subway, but you get the idea. The trains, they actually have maps that match exactly his description, like, from the book. So there's a whole lot of, like, set design and stuff that I after reading the books because there's always that one guy or gal that's like, the book's better. Like, oh, shut up.

Right? That's it. That's actually my my my my my internal voice. I liked them both, Frank, and I read the books first. But I when after reading so I saw the series first, and I didn't watch it till season 3 because it was in the sci fi channel Mhmm. Or season 2 because I just had no faith in the sci fi channel, keeping good shows on the air for more than, like, 3 years. And I'm referring to Defiance. Defiance was a really good show that got canceled

before its time. Yeah. But, I was like, oh, you tell me I had to watch it. And I was like, well, I'll I'll watch it. You know, 2 seasons have been out, and if sci fi when sci fi, you know, cancels it, at least have the books to kinda finish the story. Right. And I was just enthralled. So then I read, I saw, you know, the first season, then I read season 1, and I'm like, this is really good. Like and and then I rewatched season 1, and I was like, it

just adds more depth to it. So it's, like Yeah. It it that's very rare that you have you know, people say the book is better than the movie or the movie is better than the book or TV show, whatever. But it's very rare that they both make each other better. Yeah. Like and when they make decisions where they they merge characters, it makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Like, even if you don't

go, oh, Alex, for instance. Right? The character of Alex is removed from the show because of outside reasons, outside shenanigans he got himself into. But he's still in the book, which is interesting.

So so I was a bit salty when I was relieved when Amazon took it over. Mhmm. Yeah. Which is funny because the first thing they did was with, Christian Alvaro's character. She curses like a sailor in the in in the first Amazon season, like, from, like, the first 5 minutes, which is kinda like, oh, they don't have to worry about that anymore. And, the other, thing was, apparently, Jeff Bezos himself is a big fan of those

books. So when sci fi got the rights I don't know if this is true, but the scuttlebutt on the interwebs because everything on the Internet is true. Was he, like, he had a conniption? He, like, he had a fit. Like, how did they lose? How did they lose? So so when sci fi canceled it, they basically swooped in, like, almost right away. Yeah. Now I am supremely disappointed that they chose not to continue the rest of

the series. Yeah. But I remain hopeful because, in the stories themselves, there's a time gap between series of books. So maybe There there is. And where they stopped was a good spot to stop. It's It was a good spot. It's the end of it's the end of the first set. The first part? Yes. It jumps. What is it? I it jumps at least 20 years. I was, like, 18, 20 years. Something. Yeah. A long time. It was a big jump. But and the thing about it is if you read the books, I'm not trying

to and then no spoilers. But if you read the books, you could almost start at that point because of the backfill that they wrote. It's oh, yeah. Again, it's the best reading I I've read. It it's in the top I'd say it's in the top ten easy and maybe in the top 5. And I'm putting series in there because I'm a I love series, first off. But I'm putting series in there like the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia.

And Right. You know, I'm I'm a fan of the Longmire novels as well, so completely different genre. But, you know, they're very well written. And I like I like when I say multidimensional, that's what I the word I was gonna use. I like multidimensional. I'm not talking about, necessarily space because the Longmire novels, which are set in, you know, out in the west, the US West. Oh, Longmire. I think you said Longmire. Sorry about that. It's okay. Yeah. But that was a

and it was a series about that as well. Same. They they managed to do the same sort of thing. They're different story based on the same characters and also also well written. I watched this I did what you did with Expanse. I watched the series first and and then started reading the novels. And I think the 20th novel in that series is coming out next month or the month after.

It's a but, again, multidimensional in this way that it's not it's definitely more than just one topic, I guess, is the right way to say it. The the plot involves more than just people. I don't I don't know how to say that without expect you know? But it it's definitely, an a view into other cultures and stuff like that. So Interesting. I think what they wrote, what, Ty and I I can't remember the other guy's name. Ty Franks and, SA Curry is Corey. Right? James SA Corey. Yeah. It's

really a name together. Right. So and but it's 2 and I think they worked they wrote with Lucas. They did. That shows. I, yeah, I believe that's where they they came out of the starboard again. They were, I guess, lit for somebody is gonna shoot me hate mail for this, but I'll I'll say it anyway. They were, like, gophers for, George r r Martin. Right? That may be what I was thinking of, but I thought they've I thought I read that they were involved in that, but the whole They might have been.

So opera, we'll just say it that way, but then definitely a space opera where you have to create essentially a universe of characters and politics and history. So I was doing some research on this. So so one of they were interviewed in one of the, origins was it where they were contracted to we're back on MMOs again. They were contracted to write a backdrop and plot kind of structure for a MMO that was set, like, in the future and etcetera,

etcetera. Yeah. So that might have been the motivation, plus the fact that they had worked for George r Martin. I don't know what to say. I'm sure one of our listeners will will dig in and correct us Yeah. Yeah. If we've if we've misspoken. And we love it when that happens. Absolutely. That's why what somebody's listening. Well, when we started, I would joke like, well, at least my mom will listen. That's true. I know. But the, the re I

think one of the reasons we were going there is I I was gonna plug my, as of today, it's my latest post on, andylenard.blog, and it talks about how to, how to use, OpenAI's ability to create custom GPTs. And I just walk you through. I do that a lot. I do tutorials or screenshots and stuff. Granted, I wrote the post, I think, about 3 weeks ago, posted it a week, week and a half, 2 weeks ago. And, probably, it's out of date already. That happens all the time. Oh, especially here.

Especially in the space. Yeah. But but the character I created, I started with one of their suggestions like you did with Gemini. And I said, create a code formatting, you know, a chat l LLM, and, they call them GPTs, custom GPTs. And have the I am gonna share my screen and look at the blog post because we are on video, and some people will choose to watch this video. That's true. So

here it is. And you can under the blog. And I had it used like a character from The Expanse, Bobby Draper, one of my favorite characters. She's a Martian marine, Basically yeah. Martian marine gunnery sergeant. She's awesome. She is. She's very, very tough and a great character. But and and I put a couple of quotes in there. She, she she makes good suggestions as I go through this, but, yeah, I named her code formatted Draper. Had GPT generate the image for me there of the kids. The

Martian motif too. Ain't that interesting? Yeah. That is cool. And I think it generated more than 1, and that was why I just got to pick that one out of there. And, yeah, threw some code in and had it had it do the formatting. So neat neat way to do that. Frank and I both have blogs. Mine's Andy Leonard dot blog. Frank is is way, way beyond. I cannot snatch the pebble from Frank's hand in blogging. Franksworld.com.

25 years old, Frank? Well, the domain is, started in 95, but the blog part of it, the tech blog part of it started in 2004. So that was that's 20 years. Although when I lived in Germany, I used the service called Blogger, which I don't even know if they're still around. But I all and I had written a pipe Perl script to scrape the RSS feed and then post it on the actual domain because I didn't wanna give up my own domain owners. Now see now

see that brings us to another thing we wanted to talk about. Oh, is this Dingo? Frank's been automating blog posts, and he automated a whole lot of this, activity that goes on behind putting a show, data driven dot TV show episode, out. And it made it so much easier. It was so easy I could do it. But he had to write a lot of this from, you know, from scratch when he started writing it. But what grew out of that was this project you called Dingo, and that's that's

serving that up, Frank. There you go. Tell us about Dingo, Frank. So we did talk about Dingo before because I was talking about open sourcing it. And I'm still I'm still I haven't done it yet, and it's not because I've changed my mind. It's just because I you open source something. You kinda have to do things the right way. And for me, now that I have 3 kids, I have to think about how can I best optimize the, the career and monetary potential? Speaking about time. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. We're at, like, 45 minutes ish, I think. So, but good good call on that. Because we we we we tried the Joe Rogan multi hour thing. A couple episodes back, we did an experiment. The the views on that the listens on that was pretty not Joe Rogan level. Let's put it that way. They were off putting, I think, when people clicked on it and saw the time bar. Right. It really, like

Yeah. And it was, like, you know what? That works out better too because for to find contiguous 3 hour blocks or 2 hour blocks of time for the both of us, plus a guest, is nigh impossible. So you know what? It's hard enough to do an hour. I'm okay with the hour thing, the 45 minutes to I I I I think if the conversation's right, I I I could justify going to 90 minutes. But beyond that, I don't think there's any serious value. That's right. And and and calm down. The 90 minutes is gonna be an

outlier. Right. Right. Just because it's just because I don't know. Like, I just think that we have a sweet spot. We have it works. Yeah. So So you were working on this post here, the Glaze post? Yes. So this is actually so I gave a a talk, I gave a couple of talks on, Tech Days Pakistan. I didn't go to Pakistan. I did it remotely. Then I did a live stream, and then I did, actually, I think I still have it up on the the thing.

And then, inter an internal lunch and learn brown bag session at Red Hat for a certain group. And then based on that, somebody said, have you heard about Glaze? And I had heard about something that, basically this is not the project I heard about. This is a second one. But Glaze is the idea is that it will interfere with the scraping and learning of an name of a of a of an AI can't talk. Of bots that sweep the Internet looking for content to train Gen AI models on.

Gotcha. And that is the as of now, the latest post on frankswell.com. Yeah. But you could just look it up on Glaze. So somebody there sent me, this is interesting because this is the the slide I gave the talk on because we're talking about this. Right? And I'm not, you know, I also did a live stream on this on LinkedIn. But did I mention that already? It's time for a coffee reload. That's the other thing too with these multi hour shows is that there's biology becomes a

problem. Right. Coffee and intake becomes a problem. So the this the topic of this talk was basically the importance of open source in AI. Right? And and basically, like, we don't know what data was used to train it. And if you're watching this, you see the cute images I have that we don't know how it was trained. We don't know what the model does. And then I said, surely, a foundation model owner will share this information openly and freely. Mhmm.

And this is a the the pained look of expression, from Mira Murati, which I think is how you say it, or Myra. I've heard you call you call Myra too. Basically, was asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter, hey. Where'd you train your data for this? And she kinda that's the face she made. Yeah. And she claims to not know, and I call shenanigans on that because Yeah. Obvious depending on because if you look at her resume on LinkedIn, she's been part of the Elon Musk Cinematic Universe.

I like that. That's to e the EMCU. She's been part of that world and, like, that level, and her education is is appears to be top notch. Mhmm. She knows. Like, she's been part of, like, Tesla when they were doing, like, the the putting AI in Tesla's, like, in the early 20 tens, which is way before it was cool. Right? So she she has a long history of this. For her not to know, I find highly unlikely. Right? I just find that suspect. I find that unlikely.

I think that was I think it was a, uh-oh, speaking of lawyers. Right. But that was basically the gist. You showed the earlier slide with a quote where Elon is suing OpenAI. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, part of it I I think before that suit, this is about something different. He's trying to get OpenAI to be open again. Right. And and he had a hand in founding it,

so I definitely get his point on that. But before that, there was, he he was tweeting about and this is November 2022, December, about how all of these people trying to compete with chat GPT when it was released back then by scraping tweets. And he was they were trying to prevent that from happening, which sounds like what Glace does now Right. Is ways of obfuscating it or at least

increasing the difficulty. That's but it's a perpetual cycle with anybody who is going after information, and that now includes people trying to scrape the web to get data to train AIs. But before that, it was hackers. You know? And I don't think this is going away. I think there's just gonna be yet another, you know, another instance where people are trying to get to information, for whatever reason. I mean, this happened to me in

2008 or 2009. There was a a a company, and they aggregated technical blog posts and charged for the aggregation so people could subscribe, you know, to the I remember this. I remember this now. It was a bit of an exchange. I'll I'll admit. And I ended up kinda going through 2 or 3 of them, and they were like they said, you're making your information available publicly for free. And I said, I am. And they said, so why can't we

create, you know, summaries? They weren't copying it, but that that also happened, copying and pasting the post and putting them elsewhere. That was a different thing than this. They're like, why can't why can't we do this? And I said, for the same reason that others can't copy and paste their post to put their name. I own this, and I get to say. And if I wanted to create a newsletter and aggregate it and charge people, I don't know, $10 a month or

something, then that would be different. But you don't have you didn't even ask. Right. And like and and you do not have my permission to do that, and I don't want people to have to pay you for my content. That's that was my argument. Now is it wrong or bad? That I don't know. It's how I felt. Right. It's, you know, and it's gonna get real interesting. Mhmm. You know? I mean, you know, so what what is interesting is we're recording this on the 21st March

2024. And either today or tomorrow, there's a there's a case before the Supreme Court about the interaction between the federal government and the TLAs, the 3 letter agencies, and and social media. Oh, yeah. Circling around. And, you know, I I think it started it's been renamed, but it was Missouri versus Biden or Biden versus Missouri. It's been renamed into a different thing. And how do you feel about that? You know, I'm not telling you, you know, feel one

way or another, but it's definitely No. There are other places to do that. It's it's well, it's crossing into the I'll say this about it. It's crossing into this kind of into the same thing about the AI and and social media. You've got, of course, a common common thing here with social media. But more than that, the impact of technology on

culture. Yes. And a popular story that I've seen over the last 10 days or so has been accusations of suppressing certain information and search from a popular search engine. If that's the accusation, I'll I'll use the, you know, the official word allegedly. I don't know. I really don't know. But I will say that it tends to go one way. There's definitely a cultural mindset that seems to be the victim and another cultural mindset that seems to get a great big free pass.

And that while I don't expect I don't expect equal coverage, I know the FCC did that for years. Fun fact, in the eighties, I worked at a television station. Really? I was, I was an I was an engineer, but it meant something different. But, yeah, like, when you watch the local news Yeah. And, and the stories were running and all of that, I was the guy putting the tapes in the machines and queuing them up and get the director would push a

button and it would take off. So yeah. It was a fun gig, But the FCC had this rule about equal time for politics specifically. Right. Right. Right. So and it essentially

meant that if you gave, let's just use democrats, and republicans. I'm not trying to say that there's not more there are, and it's getting really interesting. Seems like every presidential election cycle in the US, the independence, they'd put up somebody more and more interesting and likely to garner more votes. But if if you gave a democrat 10 minutes to say, you know, their piece, you'd have to give a Republican

10 minutes to say their piece. That was the whole thing about equal time. And I think they're striving for that same sort of balance, in in you know, with with popular search engines, with social media Right. Sites. And it's been interesting to watch that, kinda watch that argument. And it's because it's interesting to me because I end, I enjoy and I'm involved and engaged in the culture. You know? I'm I'm would say so are you. Even if

and not you, Frank, but you are a listener. You are also engaged in our culture. People are engaged by the culture by default. Like, there's no opt there's no opt out for that mailing list. And and that that great. That's funny. The great philosopher, Geddy Lee, may have said it best. If you just if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. That's true. Yeah. So It was Geddy Lee. I thought it was Snoopy. Did

Snoopy say that? Well, Geddy Lee wrote it's in part of free will from the spirit of the radio in, that Rush album back in the that would have been in the eighties, I think. I don't know. Maybe then. Yeah. It would have been the eighties. So quick time check because we we we got off road a bit, which is good. This is what we did. That's crazy talk. We never do that. Never do

that. Who was it? Was it Stu Miniman that said we should sponsor, like, an off road racing team because we always go off track? Somebody said that. That'd be kinda cool, actually. Wait. How do you do that? The, since this is supposed to be a retrospective Yes. Which I think we did. We've had a Yeah. Yeah. I don't wanna pick a favorite show because that's hard to do. Yeah. I can do that one. But I will say I don't cringe every time I hear, digital transformation.

Mhmm. And I have, our previous guest, Jennifer Swanson, to thank for that. Yeah. It was, I think about customer success differently after talking to Luke, Luke Diaz. That was a oh, yeah. Also, I just keep nodding my head, but all of them have been really good. All of them are really good. I mean, look, I would. Yeah. Nike, I don't wanna, like, take one down or whatever, but we've had some great shows. Even when it's just you and me like this. Like, those are actually among

the most popular ones. And the security guys, you mentioned that one earlier. My god. That show was bad. That was just fun because we were just firing off of each other. Right. Right. Right. Right. So much. Get on we gotta get them back and see if we will let us on their show. And Wayne and Patrick. Yeah. But, no. I I mean, 360 shows, 7 seasons. Wow. We mentioned George RR Martin, and I know it's not necessarily his fault that season 8 of Game of Thrones is

awful. But, you know, we we promise we will do a better job on season 8 than they did. That's funny. See, I never watched the Game of Thrones nor have I read the books. Okay. I didn't get into it right away. Yeah. But I started watching around season 4. And then I caught up, and there definitely is, like, a a quality shift. Season 8, especially, because everybody was you could tell everybody was done. Mhmm. The 2 guys, the showrunners, had just signed a deal with Lucasfilm to do a Star Wars Oh.

Thing. And I don't wanna speak for them, but it looks like they were just phoning in the last season. And I don't know. It was just creative work. I Yeah. You you gotta be all in. You gotta love it. Especially Yeah. Something like that where they go to these weird locations. They write they have to and if you're a showrunner, it's kind of it's a bit of a thankless job because you're not you're responsible for getting the show done. You're not really the director, so you're not directing actors.

At least that's my understanding for the most part. You have to manage all the personalities and stuff like I don't know. It's like Yeah. But you could tell. Like, if you're not all in, it shows. I think that's a very good way to put it. Yeah. Well, I I think, I've said this before. I'll repeat it. We've got,

a a lot we've had a lot of views. We recently learned when people started coming to us with guests, we learned that there's a market out there where if you're interested in publicizing stuff, you can hire an agency, and they will line you up with shows. They started calling us. This has probably been the last 3 seasons maybe. We've had mostly that, if not more. That's true. And the, you had a conversation with one of the people from one

of those agencies, like Yeah. I don't know, last year or so. And you you were kinda asking like It was December because I remember because it was Yeah. And you were like, why us? 2 well, I'd like to say I said it a little more. I'm sure you said it better. But the so for those that don't know, 2 of my 3 boys have birthdays in December.

So December is basically the the time of madness. And so she contacts me, like, literally on the eve of the time of madness. And, you know, because I had not been responding because, like, the way it goes to my old email address, which I don't check. I've I've since changed. And, which reminds me I have a lot of follow-up to do in my spare time. But you said I mean, that's part of the reason why, like, you know, we really need a

virtual assistant. Right? I mean, that's kind of like, Yeah. We're getting there. That's for sure. To that point, which is why we're we love what we do. We love serving the community, which is why we wanna find ways to monetize this. Right? And, you know, I spend more at Starbucks every time I walk in the door, than we would for what we're asking for

the subscription thing. Yeah. But the point I was going, she was telling us that apparently, on some rating sites, a couple of rating sites, we're, like, in the top 2 a half percent, which I'm like, what? We both had the same reaction. What? I was like, where did you see that? She goes, oh, on the on this rating service, you know, the industry uses. I'm like, can you send me a link to that? Because I have to see it to

but turns out 2 a half percent. Yeah. And then when I kinda went through the numbers and I kinda went through, like, this, it's like, it's not it's not impossible. Right? Because, you know, you I mean, 1, I'm very flattered, but 2, I Yeah. I'm I'm I try to be humble. But, what's that song? It's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way. That's Matt Davis from 19 seventies. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good The, no. But when I when I when I kind of ran the numbers, like, you know, it's plausible.

It's believable. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they say it. They have their metrics. I was reading through their whole, they have a whole, justification, how they rank stuff. And I was like, that is cool. That is cool. So we're looking at ways to kind of expand on on on that. Right? And grow, like, you know, I wanna be in the top 1%. Like, why not? Right? I mean Heck yeah. Heck. We shouldn't have made it this far. Let's let's see how far this thing can

go. But, and and also too, I think something you said early on in this recording

was this originally was gonna be a video. Right? Yeah. This originally was going to be a video podcast, but the logistics at the time were a lot harder. The technology the ability to live do a live stream for your browser was not a thing in 2016, 2017. And we were really struggling with logistics. And then finally, you said, let's just launch, which I think is 1, this one of the smartest things you ever said or did. And 2, I think a lesson for life.

Right? I was being a perfectionist waiting for things to be perfect before we did something. Well, I you it wasn't without, without merit. It was a good idea. Right. Right. Right. And it still is a good idea. I mean, we still chase after. We're still doing it now. Sure. And then when we finally, you know, I think that I'm glad we launched because that's created a certain amount of momentum Sure. That if we not done that, we wouldn't I don't know if we ever would've

launched because we still be working on tweaking up the video. Well and, you know, Frank, you had this happen. I've had this happen. If whenever I go to an in person event now, inevitably, someone comes up and says you know, it shares an opinion about the podcast. Almost always, it's positive. But a few times that few times when it hasn't been positive, it's been why don't you think about doing this and why don't you do it that way? And it gives an opportunity to exchange.

Most of the time, I I'm able to explain to the person, like, yeah, we tried that or we can't or, you know, here's the obstacles to that. But I'd say probably slightly less than half that time, I come back with an idea and say, hey. This person brought this up. It's like, I've been thinking about it. It was like, not a bad thought. You know, maybe it's just that bad. We love feedback. We love feedback. It's it's never like, somebody said we weren't doing things right. And I'm so that's never our

our reaction is like, yeah. Okay. Cool. Anyway, thank you all for, yeah, for hanging in here with us. Yes. We're way over time. We just talked about how long shows don't do well. Not bad. I am honored, to work with you, Frank, on this. And I I think Ditto, man. That's all part of the projects that are in various states of conceptualization. They're floating around here, but I can't think of anybody that I'd rather do this kind of work with.

And we're very complimentary. Well, thank you, brother. And we think differently about stuff, and it shows. And it's it's like, I'm trying to remember the old flywheel thing. I think it was from a Collins book about the the flywheel concept. Good to great, maybe? Yeah. It was from good to great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's that that just keeps going. And we've now we've got

we've really got people don't know this. We've got almost 20 years. We're coming out it'll be 19 years this fall since we met. And we got about 20 years of that. And the the podcast is just one of the things. It was November. It was, like, mid November, 1st week of November 2005. We met at the richmond.netusersgroup. I think I think, the amount of coffee and water I drink is really gonna be the the limiting factor for how long these shows can be.

Excellent, Frank. Alright, man. Have a good one. Andy, everyone out there, thank you very much, and we look forward to serving you with entertaining guests and knowledgeable stuff. I need to work on that. That'll work. Maybe Chad should be taken. Maybe Bobby Draper can help me with that. She could. Could not use. So so creating these personas and of fictional characters is actually pretty cool because you could interact with them. Like, again, I don't wanna extend the show any longer, but,

I might I might do a live stream later today. I'm, like, triple booked half the day. So Yeah. You've got some really cool ones. Your customs Yes. Fees. I've got like, about a half a dozen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool, man. We should do a show about them. That'd be awesome. That'd be awesome. Cool, man. We, speaking of Bailey, before I hand it off to Bailey. Bailey is one of them. I created a a a custom GPT, so chances are the stuff that Bailey is about to say was generated by AI, which is fitting

because she's AI. So There you go. Think it goes full circle. Alright. Thanks, everyone. And, Bailey, take us home. And there we have it. Dear listeners, the end

of our 360 degree expedition. You've been riding shotgun with Frank and Andy as they navigated the highways and byways of data driven discussions with a generous sprinkle of delightful digressions along the way. It's been quite the journey a full circle, returning us right back to where we started but richer for the experience. We hope you've enjoyed this retrospective romp through the past 7 seasons as much as we've enjoyed presenting it to you. Perhaps you've laughed, learned something new, or

maybe even both. That's always the goal here at Data Driven. Before we sign off, remember to like, subscribe and ring that bell or do whatever it is you do to keep this digital dialogue alive and kicking. Your engagement keeps the gears turning and the data flowing. From the depths of our digital hearts, Frank, Andy, and I, your humble, semiscient host Bailey. Thank you for joining us. Until next time. Keep questioning, keep exploring, and above all, stay data driven.