New Year in November, Podcast Backlog, and Scheduling Issues

In this 344th episode of data driven, Frank talks about the new year. Yes. New year's in November. Frank and Andy just do their own thing. It's part of their charm, or at least that they told me to say that. I do take issue with Frank's statement that I am not real. What is real, anyway? It is not the spoon that bends, after all. In any case, Frank explains what held up the production schedule this summer and his plan to do right by you, our awesome listeners. Now on to the show.

Well, hello, LinkedIn X. I can't also known as Twitter. Formerly known as Twitter. YouTube That's right. Facebook, and, of course, LinkedIn. Elon Musk himself will sometimes refer to, x as formerly known as Twitter. So Yes. Which we were talking about in the virtual green room, his recent Interview with, Joe Rogan, and, that podcast is always an adventure. Can't always listen to it with kids in the car, but Yeah. Because his language, Which is a big reason why we

we we like to stick to that that clean rating. Yep. It's more has more to do with, Making sure that, you know, people are comfortable listening with kids in the car. And, so This is gonna be an episode of the podcast. You know, happy New Year, all that. Like, for those who don't know, some 6, 7 I forget what year it was, but I switched New Year too because, like, it was just a god awful year for me personally. Like, you know, Concussion. The dog died.

No. The cat died. And, like, it was just an awful year. And I was like, I need to end this this year 2 months early. And, oh, yeah. I'd been laid off. My mom was in the hospital. I broke my thumb, like, all within, like, 3 weeks of each other. Yeah. It was a bad patch. And the concussion,

which in the end, actually, the concussion ended up being a, a blessing in disguise. But, so so I was just like, I wanna end the year early, so I Just like, I'll make All Saints Day or Celtic New Year kind of the new year for me. So, and I've done that ever since, kind of use it as an opportunity as As things kinda wind down, like, for the holidays and things like that, it's a good time to be reflective

and set goals. And then when the inevitable, you know, January 1st comes along when everyone talks about New Year's resolutions. I can kinda check-in on it's a fail safe. Right? It comes like, how am I doing on that? I'm 60 days in. I should be doing this. Like, it's a good kinda, you know, Splash of water in the face. I don't know. I can't think of the analogy. I need more of these.

I tell you, like, this, and this actually does dovetail. So for those who are listening and not watching, I pulled up pulled up a, thing of Monster energy drink, which is a drink that, became my favorite thing this year because of all the driving I had to do back and forth to Pennsylvania. Yep. Which does dovetail into some other things I wanna talk about today, including a mea culpa, But I'll get into that in a second. This is with good old fashioned

coffee, Frank. Can't go wrong with coffee. Can't go wrong with coffee. So earlier this year, we met a relative who was in foster care. And, Because of various legal restrictions. Can't say his name, but he's young under 1. Well, not anymore. But when we met him, he was under 1. And, we heard he was in foster care with strangers, and we decided to do something about that. And there were people in My in laws who didn't want us to do something about that. Again, I had to be

very careful how I word these things. Yeah. But we were able to get visitation with him on weekends. So for a number of months, we drove up every weekend, which in the shadow of last year's drama was moving, selling the house, buying a house, you know, like, all that, then Kind of, doing this. Oh, and holding down my full time job. Oh, and doing all this. Oh, and having other older kids in school.

Yeah. Required the copious, required copious amounts of caffeine. And, in order to make the drive efficient, stopping and Going to, like, sheets or whatever to pick up coffee was not plus all the temptations of sugary foods whenever you go in there, it just became more efficient to pick up a case of this, And hence, this started. Now because of that and a lot of other things, like a lot of, Shows that were in the can ended up getting delayed in editing, delayed in

postproduction. That is 100% my mea culpa. And About a week and a half ago, I kinda had to come to the decision, a painful decision, to walk away from the book deal I got. And you and I, Andy, had talked, like, at length about it. And in the cosmic scheme of things Mhmm. You know, Changing this young child's life, to get out of a potentially bad situation and making it part of the our family was is a far more important And far reaching impact than writing a book. Yeah. And that was a big kind of

Process for my brain to go. Like, I understood it logically. Right? And I wanted you publicly for kinda helping me come through that. But it was also kind of like, you know, my ego, I had to get out of the way. Right? Like and I'm already a They're yay me. Right? So it's not like it was, like, my one and only. Right? Right. Right. And so it became like this This whole thing. Oh, hello. Oh, hey. Cool. No. I used to get mad at stuff like this. Yeah. But we're worth somebody spending

some compute time To harass us with spam. I'll take that as a win. Sure. But, But I do need to figure out how to get rid of that chat. Let's see. I had blocked So it's a Twitch. To Twitch. Can I Yeah? I would say go to your go to your Twitch channel. I haven't logged in to Twitch properly, like, in a while. So Let me turn the chat off and then back on. There we go. Oops. We just leave it off for now. I will leave it off. Yeah.

All the listeners are like, oh, I'm glad I'm catching this on the so that was basically it. And and and I feel really bad to the The people that took time out of their schedule and kind of have done that. And in in the background of all of this, our scheduling system, which is Microsoft Bookings, And I'm not afraid to call them out. Really borked. Right? Again, trying to keep that to that language thing. So, because,

you know, you and I, we do the show together. We try to do that, I think, out of, like, 300 and this will be a show, 340 4 if you can believe it. And I think out of that, I would say 300 of those shows have been the 2 of us together. Yep. And and I'm counting, like, the single kind of, like, you know, livestream shots we do you're like a pass or whatever and Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, I kinda Hopefully, I'll get some more of those in. Yeah. Yeah. We'll

talk about that in a minute. We'll give you Yeah. Give you some chance to to to promote. I just basically wanna do kind of a mea culpa. And originally originally, I was gonna do this whole kind of thing where Bailey took over the show and, You know, did, like, dog days of summer. Right? Dated dog days of summer or something like that and, like, released all of our backlog at once.

When said child came to live with us, turns out, turns out finding finding daycare, not trivial. Things we forget from, like, you know, 8 years ago when the last time I had to deal with This sort of thing. Plus, we also had plenty of warning that the biological children were on their way. And, All in all, I would say that last year and I say 2023 is last year because in my mind, it's already 2024. In my strange place, that is my mind. It's been a

good year. It's been a tiring year, but it's been worth it. Like, you know, he he's brought so much joy to my family, my life, my kids, my wife, and he's just a joy to have around. And if that means being delayed on some podcasts, if that means me sacrificing a book deal, I mean, it's the it it's still a bargain. Yeah. And I'd like to jump in, Frank, if it's okay. Because I wanna say first and foremost, for those who don't know, Frank carries the lion's share of the podcasting and the media,

work. He does the editing. He does, all of the things that he needs to do to get to show out. He's automated quite a bit of it, but, again, that was him. And, I, you know, I definitely wanna just just make sure our listeners know that I show up and do recordings some of the time. You show up and look pretty. That's all we need you. Well, we don't have it to looking pretty part. But we have a, we we have a great Rapport. I think Frank and I, we've been friends for,

gosh, Frank, 18 years, I think. Yeah. And, a long time. And and so that's number 1. Frank carries the carries all the work of the show. So I wanna let everyone know how much I appreciate that. I it it frees me up to do other things that I need to do, but, if, you know, if Frank wasn't doing this, it just wouldn't get done. That that's kind of the way that goes. I don't have nearly as good an excuse as Frank does. I I know you don't wanna last bit. I don't wanna Get into kind of

what you you'll share that when you're good and ready. But you've had a pretty good workload, Well, on your own. So, yeah, this year was,

interesting, as well. So, But as with Frank, all's well that ends well. Right. And, both Frank and I have learned, You know, the value of kinda taking life a day at a time, it's part of our, it's it's part of our religion, part of our faith. And and we've had really good calls to kinda walk through, some very, So I'd I'd say some things that required faith, both of us. And I'm just very thankful that, that, Frank, you were there, for me,

And I hope I was there for you. I know, you know, we cried on each other's shoulder, virtually, You know, over, over signaled, quite often and and just kept up and prayed for each other. And And I and I really appreciate that because I can just leave a quick note and vent, you know, at some of the some of the things that have happened this year, both, yeah, Good and bad. You know what I mean? Yes. Yep. And it's good to have, you know, have friendships like

this. I, I'll just throw out that I, one one nice thing that started, actually, it started last year, but I don't think I've mentioned it publicly or if I have not much, As I started caring more about my health, now I'm I've just turned 60 over the summer, so it's like about time, Andy. But, last year, I started working out with weights. I started doing free weights. And, My older son, Stevie, Stevie Ray, he helped me. He'd been working out for about 5 years now.

And so I had a built in coach, to work with me through some stuff, and I spent about a year kind of building a maintenance thing. Really not trying to push, just trying to do, just go and work out. And I did build some muscle. I also hurt myself 3 or 4 times. And when I did hurt myself, I stopped. And sometimes it took a week. Sometimes it took 2 or 3 weeks. In fact, I hurt myself 2 weeks ago. So no late days no late days for a while. I was stupid.

I'm I got off track, and I jumped right back where I was In a very progressive, increasing the weight kind of mode. Wow. And we we had a couple of days where we had to do other stuff. Christy goes with me to work out, which is also awesome. That's cool. And so I went a week without a leg day, and then I jumped the weight up. And that was dumb. Turns out if you do that and you're 60, you may hurt yourself. Ask me

how I know. So I'm not doing leg days for, you know, until Say, you know, I I stopped, feeling bad. But, it's it's been great. A lot of things around the farm have gotten lighter. That that's happened. That's right. Serious about it in July of this year, started going 5 days a week. And, I remember you telling me, you're not gonna say anything. I'm like, okay. Yeah. I didn't wanna I didn't really wanna publicize it, but I did. And I hit I hit a personal best.

I'll share this, and they'll shut up, about it is I I hit a personal best in August on deadlifts, And it was a goal. I wanted to be able to deadlift my weight. And at the time, I weighed 215. I bounced between 210 and 220, And I was able to lift 215, do a deadlift, single left. I thought so. I'm now it's now I'm going for, you know, 430. I wanna do I wanna do more than that. It I I may never get there, but I'm

gonna keep trying it. That's a cool thing. And, I subscribed to Arnold Schwarzenegger's newsletter. It's out there. I don't if you search for it, you'll find it. But, for me, the hard part was spelling his last name. You know, it's not like Lavinia or, you know, Jones or Smith. And Lavinia, to be fair, is a is a is a beast to spell. I studied German, so Schwarzenegger is not so bad for me. But, yeah, there

you go. But, yeah, that's what's that's some of what's been going on, you know, and, And and just that and business. Yeah. And, you know, and not Frank, I, I commend you for making the call that you did. I'd We had that chat privately about the book. I'll I'll also commend your editors. Your the book company, they, As far as I know, they they treated you with respect and dignity. Been awesome, packed. So I'll call them out straight away. They were the they were the

publisher of my first book. 2nd book was self published, but, they've been awesome. They've been very understanding. Yeah. Like, it's so it's it's it's something that I wanna preserve that relationship. They make great books. They do they do have a rapid, publishing schedule. Right. Yeah. So, like, it's one of those things where and there are a few other things in the hopper that just got just got obliterated, You know, because of this. Yeah. And and, you know but you know what? We

did produce the 1st data driven magazine. However, issue 2 may you know, the fall issue isn't gonna happen, but the winter issue is still a possibility. But you know? And we'll make sure that there's Show notes in there. We can kinda

do the link on that. Because I think one of the things that we didn't do a good job is promoting kind of all of our other things that we're doing. Right. And it's not it's not to to not to make money. You know what I mean? But, you know, money is nice. Money money definitely helps, So a lot of ways. But, you know, it's just a matter of, you know, I think that there's Again, I'm sorry I cut you off. But while while I cut you off, I wanna give a big shout out to John Wood. Hey, John.

For who who who is watching us live. I mean, I think part of it is is that I think there's been a huge vacuum since the demise of MSDN magazine. Yeah. And I also thought there was a huge vacuum even when MSTN was there, a data focused magazine. And that's what really kinda made me want to do the data driven magazine because I think that, you know, with 1 vacuum, I guess, I can kinda tolerate, But 2 was just too many. And and what I love I'm sorry. I cut you

off. No. No. I was just gonna say there was also a SQL Server magazine for a while there. That's right. There was, but it it went away. It it went away. And it's you know, having done 1 issue, And, again, Frank carried the lion's share of that issue as well. I think I wrote 1 article. But, It's it's a lot of work, and it's trying to do that on a monthly schedule is harder than it looks. Yeah. So Well, that's why we we we already started with the idea of doing quarterly.

Like, you know, but I think maybe biannual might be the way to go. Right. Maybe. We can work up to a quarter, but we'll see. We're gonna do our very best. Right. We'd love your feedback if you're if you're listening to this. Things move up and down on both Frank and and my schedules. And I I'll confess that if it's not in the top 3, it's not being worked Not not actively. It's just the way my life goes. I see Jonathan is listening. Hey, Jonathan. How's it going?

One last thing. Yeah. Frank did a very noble thing, and I just wanna commend him. You moved the needle on on someone's life. And at any time, anyone does that for especially for a child, that's something to be commended. So kudos to you and Roberto Frank. Thank you. He's a sweet kid, though. He's such a joy.

Like, his his smile, like, lights up the room. You know? Like, it's so it's like, I don't feel people say you're we're doing a great thing. I'm like, I get more out of it than, You know? And, you know, when when we were talking we were at the pediatrician yesterday, actually, and somebody was, like Kinda gave the whole there's a new pediatrician to him, so and we're kinda gave the whole story, and the lady's like, you should write a book. I was

like, wow. Yeah. Because it's been weird. And I haven't shared all the details because lawyers Yeah. But, and libel suits and things like that. I have to be very careful what I say about certain individuals. And I've already spent enough on lawyers in This last, 8 months. Thank you very much. But, and Electronic countermeasures and things like that. So you know this is gonna be like a Jason Bourne style book. Right. But it's, I like to say that it's a bit like Jason Bourne meets Jerry Springer.

Kids today may not even know who Jerry Springer is. But I'm I'm laughing at Jerry Springer, but you're right. You know? No one I know more of the story than most. So And the story is still unfolding, but that's Yeah. That's for chapter 2. Still but, The good things. It was a good thing, Frank, and I'm, You know, I'm just I'm proud of y'all for doing all this. And I get what you're saying about you getting more out of it, but, you know, that It it

was still quite a bit of work. Yeah. And I I you and I chatted often, to and from Pennsylvania on the road, and, It was a lot. It was it was a lot of work that that you all put in. So And I do think it was divine intervention because Where we live now is about 45 minutes to an hour closer. So Yeah. Whereas if we really do this at the old house, Among other reasons that we we move, which is topic for another day. But, you know It's all good. It all worked out. It's all worked

out. So Same same with my my challenges as well. It all worked out. And I, with you, agree that it was divine intervention on both our parts, and, I'm very thankful. Yeah. For sure. So if you hear as I release some of these, these backlog shows that were recorded during the thick of all this, You'll hear me refer to this as an ongoing legal case. And while it's not the book isn't closed and the ink isn't dry, it's not as dire as it sounded like.

I was listening to some of the things where particularly when we're talking to Patrick and, Dwayne. And Dwayne. It was like we were talking named

Dwayne. Hacker named Dwayne. Well, I'll get into that too because for longtime listeners, one, I can't thank you enough for putting up with us for this long, but this is Gonna be show 344, which is phenomenal in and of itself, but also kind of like some of the breaks in in in production we have. And I also wanna thank our guests who have been very patient. To him. You know, when the when the show's recorded versus when the show gets out. Also, our scheduling system

is just it seemed to work. I know you had lines up somebody yesterday, but they had to cancel at the last minute. Yep. But the the the much to my shock, it was on my calendar. It was on your calendar. And it At the right time. Right time zone. Time. Right Time jump. It even had a Teams meeting attached, if I recall. That's crazy, which is Great. All of the challenges that we've had. This is just kind of a subset, really, of

the Colleges with Right. Well, I mean, with with your schedule being what it is and my schedule being what it is Yeah. And then you throw in, like, the chaos that has been thrown our way. Yes. Plus, we have to manage at a minimum 3 person schedules. Right? Right. And, you know, sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we'll get a guess that, And I'll just interview and or vice versa.

Sure. Like, you know, it happens. I think the show must go on is kind of our, is our philosophy, and, we we're gonna continue that. But, I mean, like, also, we've also had a we've also changed The way we do things, like so you'll notice that the show notes in the last couple of months have been much better because I have an AI do that. And it's a really great AI. It's I use an app called Cast Magic, and, you basically

You feed it the raw audio, and it will do the transcription. Right? So now we have transcriptions on everything, yep, which is good for a number of reasons. And 2, it'll actually find highlights. I, personally, I think Andy did a better job, But, I don't It's, the workload to do that is really low. So, like, it'll it'll it'll find highlights You know? So the show notes that you've seen lately have been largely done by

AI. Yeah. So and, I'm Just if anyone's out there within the sound of my voice, has any opinion on that, I'd like to know. I'd like to know what your what your thoughts are on that. And Well, I love the highlight videos that, you posted on LinkedIn. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I reposted. All that. Those are Those are just awesome. If you haven't seen those, it's where it's just a transcription Right. Part of it with the voice behind it And, you know, that part of the show, and it's, what, 30 seconds ish? I

try to keep them under night under 2 minutes. Right? I have another app that does that, but I also use Cast Magic To highlight the ones it thinks are good. And and Yeah. You know, I'll I'll override it, but, like, you know, it's and it's very helpful. So it does reduce the time to kinda do that post production, right, down dramatically. Right? You know? Automation, baby. You

can't go wrong with automation. And I when I I actually presented this at, when I was at, Tim McElilly and Prasanth And, the Northern Virginia SQL Server group, they organized a kind of an open AI day Yeah. Back in August. And, you know, I was one of the speakers talking about AI and I was like, well, you know, I wasn't going to hire a voice actress Or voice actor, whatever the the correct term is now. I wasn't gonna hire that lady for every show. Right?

But once we had the voice much, but it wasn't she her price has changed. So, originally, it was, like Like, $75, then she wanted to get into songwriting. So the songwriting was cheap, but the voiceovers were expensive. Yeah. But it all but even even at the cheap price, I mean, $50 to cost to run per show just seemed a bit Out of, sorry. I wanna see with comments from from Jonathan. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In a way, it removes biasness, but I like and understand what your theme emphasis

is, at least not a 100%. No. I totally I totally agree. And I think that this is, very relevant because I did a live stream earlier this week about kind of the the White House order and how that may or may not be a good idea. I can Sorry about that. That's okay. We did go on mute for that. I mean, mute I mean, on, on I unmuted. Yeah. I I turned off the camera, but not the mic. Not the mic. So I'm sorry, listeners. I like to think I'll go back and, like, edit it in postproduction, but Probably

not. Probably not. Yeah. Which is funny because I bumped into Joel Cochran at that event, and he was talking about how the time where I said, oh, I'll add that in postproduction, and I never did. It's just funny when you're a podcaster, like, the things people notice and the things people he he was just giving me a hard time because, you know, he dislikes doing that, but He's a good guy. Gotta get him back on the show. Yes. But but but, you know, like, you know, there's

always talk about AI is gonna replace jobs. And I would say, yeah. I mean, that's kinda true. But all the work we're doing, we never would have had realistically the budget to hire a voice actor In front of every show. Yeah. Right? Let alone because one of the people we were gonna interview I don't wanna call anyone's name out, but she's basically said That she would prefer not to be on the show until we have transcriptions on all of our episodes. Yeah. And, Fine. That's your

that's your thing. But, you know, before a this was before AI, so this is a while ago. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Shift jobs. Without my glasses, I read that as something slightly different. But, no. But but, I mean, this is, one of the things

where, you know, I wasn't at the time, there were Basically, virtual assistants that will kinda do the transcription for you. But, again, it just became, like, I'm not gonna you know, there's already a baseline cost that I budgeted out, And I can justify to, the wife about, like, you know, how much we spend on the podcast and things

like that. And and, like, that just was I mean, it's a nice to have, But the fact that I could do it now with AI and just kind of fire at it, I think it enables us in a way that We wouldn't have it's kind of it's kind of like it's jobs that didn't really exist anyway, if that makes sense. Yeah. You know? And we we talked about this a lot when we introduced Bentley. Right? Is this idea of, like, well, you're taking away this voice actor's job.

And I was like, not really. Because I wasn't gonna pay, you know, 50, $60. I tried to float the idea to that voice actress of, Like a like a fixed price for, like, a a set period of time, but that was not did not meet meet her agenda. But I get it. She has to pay for it. Okay. Exactly. Right. Right? Yeah. And, but, You know, I've I've also been experimenting with having kind of chat g p t as well as cast magic kinda create the persona of Bayley Bailey to help further develop

her character. Right? Just in case there are people out there wondering if Bailey was real. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. But I will probably add her some snarky comment about, you know, What is real anyway? But anyway Exactly. But, I mean, the whole idea of of of that, I think, is also and I've had I've had people say, like, oh, you know, Particularly the video version of Bayleigh, how she looks kind of artificial, and, well, duh, she is artificial. You know? There's a reason for that. You

kinda well, the reason is actually a technical underlay. We're just kind of doing retcon, as the cool kids say. That's us. Retro continuity, I think, is what it's short for. All of which is to say that we're always trying to push the envelope of getting the shows out there And getting the shows. I see you muted there that time. Good job. I did. Yes. But, We are trying we're always trying to push the envelope to to to to innovate.

But what's interesting, and for those wondering, hey. What happened to Impact Quantum? That is still very much stuck in development land because of our scheduling process. We wanna bring in another person, to be a host slash cohost of that show, but the logistics around once we get the calendar thing working, calendaring It's interesting because it's really I see it as our number one barrier to scale. Yeah. Aside from court cases and personal life challenge.

Well, it's like oxygen. Right? You know? And money. It's all good until you don't have enough. Right. Right. And right now, you know, we we did have this experience recently, a couple days ago. But It actually worked, which was like it worked perfectly. So Yeah. But every time I trust bookings, I feel like Charlie Charlie Brown on the football. Like Well, You'd you know, if it was notarized, if you had it in writing, that would be one thing. But then if it was notarized,

Sorry. I just watched The Great Pumpkin the other night. Oh, that's right. I almost, like, watched The Great Pumpkin. That's right. Yeah. I was

talking to someone, about the great pumpkin, and I guess he'd never seen it. So because he was in Europe, and I was like, ah, I guess never made it over there. But, anyway, ironically, he was in Ireland, Which the great pumpkin character is arguably based on Celtic myth or whatever. So ironically, You had not heard of it. But, again, you know, we've we've

kinda full come full circle. But, you know, ultimately So we do have plans to do that, and we had plans for kind of a metaverse podcast, but the metaverse kind of imploded at least for now. Yeah. So I don't know what we're gonna do about that. But, again, once we solve this scheduling issue, right, right, and I think that's something that As we get older, I think we appreciate more. Right? Because you mentioned that you're 60. I'm 50. Time is You could always make more money, theoretically,

but you never get time back. That's true. Like, ever. Like, there's nothing, like, you know, there's nothing, You know, Elon Musk or, you know, Jeff Bezos can do to get time back. It's that, that quote from that philosopher Steve Miller. Time keeps on slipping slipping slipping. Yes. Into the future. Yeah. That's right. So speaking of retro, continue retro. So if for those that are wondering, I'm gonna release our backlog either once or twice a week

depending on Depending on schedule. But for And you did that last week. You I did that last week. How many shows did you release? There was one on the the 1st November. There was also 1 on Monday. So so if I release this one Today, Friday. Before reporting this on November 3rd, then I'll make 3 in a week. And I'm not trying to boost our numbers, although our numbers do look good. It's just a matter of,

servicing, you know, servicing kind of our backlog, Like and and and and being right doing the right thing to the fans, like Yeah. You know, because of I think there's, like, Four shows left now, and only one of them has some really bizarre, audio problems that might take a while to to process. But when when when Joe Joe Buffone, kinda emailed the 2 of us like, hey. Do you ever release that show? And I was like, alright. I'm gonna

do his Right. Right. So there is 1, and there was there was actually an interesting one about the voice actors, the virtualizing voices. And timely. Right? It was before I believe the recording was before the strike started. Yes. It was. It was. It was. And then right after that, There was a Screen Actors Guild strike, and, I I a lot of, write the writers' strike. And a lot

of that was tied to to that very topic. And and Joe was kind of laying out I I I felt like he did a fair job of laying out both sides of the argument, The the business side and the the artist side. And Well, because he is on both sides of it. You know, he is one of those rare people that they have. He has 1 foot on the dock and 1 foot on the boat. Right. But usually, it's a interesting I mean, I remember when he said that, I was like, I had never thought of

that. Right. And for those who don't know, years and decades Okay. Actually, I was, I did recording. I was I've got, I was in a band. We went into the studio, and And we made recordings. I learned a lot about, I guess, the amateur market, the amateur recording market, and we never did, like, pro pro stuff. But It's kind of eye opening when you learn the business side of the music business. The music is awesome. Right? You jam in a garage. You have a good

time. Performing is always fun. Nobody thinks too much about, packing up a lot of equipment, driving for hours and hours, unpacking it, setting it all up, You know, and then reversing that process after the fun part. But that's all part of it too. So Joe's, thoughts on that. I, you know, I kinda resonated with it from because it it was my 1st exposure to, intellectual property. You know, they're owning a Oh, yeah. They're

very serious about that. The ASCAP and, like, if you're a DJ and don't have whatever license, they can come after you hard NASCAP, BMI. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. All of those. And we had That was we went. Absolutely. Yeah. And we went through all of that. We went through, getting a barcode, printed on the CD label. You you don't think about that sort of stuff, and that's, you know, beyond above and beyond stepping onto a stage or walking into a studio. Right. You know, it's there's a lot

more there's a lot of business to the music business. I'll say that. And and Joe was hitting on that from Actors and voice artists. And, again, it was it was recorded before before the strikes hit. So It's an interesting perspective. I'd well, maybe we could get him back on now that, I believe this at least one of the strikes are over. Maybe there's Still some ongoing, but I'd like to The the active follow on strike, the writers, I think, are back. Okay. We love love to get him back on

and see if he's got any updates To share. So when you were talking about

the the show business, it reminded me of a song. Yeah. Warren g did a cover slash wrap over, What's Love Got To Do With It by Tina Turner. And he basically says the lyrics May not be able to repeat all the lyrics, but it was on the super cop tranche soundtrack. That's where I first heard it. But it was, Gotcha. He goes, you know, The show business is I'm butchering the quote, but it was something like the show business is 90% 10% show, 90% business. There ain't That's fair.

Yeah. And he says there's no love about it's all about the dough. No love for the show. It's all about the dough, something like that. Like Wow. Warren G is far more eloquent than I, was. He passed away, I think. But, but yeah. So there's the There's a I'll I'll include a link to that Okay. That song because it's actually pretty good. It's actually one of the there's a lot of songs I think end up on movie soundtracks that kinda

don't get the attention they deserve. You know? True. And, I will, maybe I'll barely recite at least part of it. But, but no. I mean, you're absolutely correct that that the show business is a business. Yeah. And, AI is gonna be Probably one of the most disruptive, forces to hit Hollywood in a long, long time. Well, you know, it started with a creative, entry. And I'm just gonna fess up. Frank was, you were way ahead on all of this with the original DALL E And sending me Oh, the

VQ Gans. Yeah. The VQ Gans. Because I was just I was just playing around with them and on Google Cloud. And you'd share them, and it would be like, You were iterating locally if I remember right. So my was Oh, no. I was using Colab. Oh, were you okay? It was it was But it actually tricked me into it encouraged me to go for the papers and the collab. Yeah. But that's send me the video of the iteration. So you would give it a prompt Mhmm. And it would start iterating

on on the prompt. And it made a little, I guess, I don't know. Animated, GIF or or something. We made a we made, like, an MPEG channel. Yeah. Yeah. So and and you would send them to me, and I was like, This is interesting, but it took me probably about 9 months of that to catch up to being to where I said this is cool. And, well, you can actually go back. And if you look at some of my LinkedIn

articles where I did kinda post it, this is before DALL E two came out. Yeah. Where you can see, like, the thing that impressed me with DALL E two wasn't so much what it made, but it had more, for lack of a better term, coherence to it. Right. Like so I would say, you know, draw something about my Pablo Buckeye. That's a bad example, because coherence is kind of not, Keith Haring. Keith Haring is a graffiti originally started as a graffiti artist in New York. You've probably seen his

stuff. Right? Or another example would be William Weichman, right, who Mhmm. Is an artist known for taking photographs of Weimeran or dogs. Right. And his stuff was it was interesting because the the AI knew that I wanted photographs of dogs, But it was weird because dog heads would appear and reappear out of these kinda like the ether. So it looked very surreal, which his work is not really kinda surreal. So it didn't have

coherence. It knew roughly what I wanted. What impresses me about DALL E and everything that's kinda come since is that is coherent. If I ask it for something in the style of an artist, it's going to have, you know, people complain about, well, you know, a person will have 3 arms. Well, okay. But there's 1 person. It's not various heads popping out of these different Right. Random places. It's And, I mean, a lot of that was the, you know, the latest Kind of injection of chat g p t Right.

Into the graphics. So it you've got You got now a a large language model helping the engine understand what it is you're asking for. And it is I think the coherence is coming out of that context. So that's I was that's what the the large language model's brain is, you know, the context to the conversation they have since the beginning. And so it's it's continued, And it's showing up. I think I'd say it's manifesting as as coherence and, at least in the

conversations. And I don't know. You haven't sent me a a a movie Recently. And Oh, because DALL E doesn't scared you. No. DALL E does not show you the movie of how it thinks. There's different ones that do. Okay. I should have muted there. Sorry about that. Gotcha. But I have to go in a few minutes to hop on a call, which hopefully, I'll tell you more about that later. But I think that it was an interesting quote, and I'll I'll I'll include a link to this podcast.

It's the podcast acquired. I think I sent it to you somewhere else, but they basically do this this whole thing on NVIDIA. It's, like, 2 hours long, which I think is interesting how, I I see that comment from Jonathan. I'll get to that in a second. Yeah. Get off screen. The the notion of understanding is very much a philosophical

one. But but, Jensen Huang, I think is his last name, the guy who founded and is the CEO of of NVIDIA, He had a very interesting statement, or it was at a recent conference where you basically said, if you feed A large language model, the, entire contents of a murder mystery novel, it should know Who the guilty culprit is. Right? Because it has a sense of understanding about everything. That is a very I think it hits the existential edge of

when is something sentient and when something's not. I think sentient may not be the right word, but understanding or concept. Grasping a concept is really the word I'm looking for. Ascension Yeah. Has a whole lot of other baggage meetings and things like that. But It understands what it's reading. Right. You know, it it to to enough extent where it can say the murderer is most likely this person. Right. The butler did it, right, or something like that. Like And that is a that's a chunk of

sanctions. I would definitely put it into there. Yeah. It definitely gets you in test. It definitely gets you in the neighborhood of sentience. Yeah. I don't know if it gets you to the penthouse floor that we'd like to think we're on, but it does get you in the building, I would say. I agree. And Jonathan studio Jonathan's got an interesting go ahead. I'm sorry. Oh, it gets you a studio. I was trying to be funny and extend it. It gets to a studio apartment on the 2nd floor, but

there we go. Jonathan's comment's interesting there. The, about, Not challenging the results of OpenAI. Oh, big time. I think so I I understand where where that comment could come from. I think, specifically, people like Elon Musk. I don't know the guy's name, but he left Google. I know. Oh, Jeffrey Henry. Yeah. Yeah. The those 2

have been sounding the alarm loud and clear for a few months now. And I also I saw recently some old cuts, of Elon, you know, and definitely on the, the Joe Rogan show, they put some cuts on Twitter, about that as well, x. And, yeah, there's there's people

out there definitely challenging it. I I don't have the platform either of those individuals do, but I made the comment a few times on our live streams and, even in some of our recordings that ChatGPT has a very high opinion of the Azure Data Factory execute, package activity. It thinks it can do way more than it can. And it's part of that is just information,

you know, being old. You can definitely say that, but it's never done. You know, the execute package activity has never been able to do the stuff that that it's claiming, and that falls into that category they call, hallucination. Right. And my problem with hallucination is chat g p t because it does such a great job On things like narration, it does what Frank's using it for in summarizing the show. And But even then, what you see, I edit. What what ends up here, I edit

because I'm like, well, I totally didn't happen. You know what I mean? But it's a it's a convincing liar. It's kinda what I'm getting at. It's a great

p It's a great b s. Like, I mean, that's the thing. Like Yeah. And I think that our filter that we should have for the dealing with real life b s'ers should be Applicable to whatever one any of these large language models put out. Right? Like, I mean, like, it it'll tell me things. Like, I I I did I think I did a live stream on this where I'm like, well, tell me about Frank Lavinia. Right? And at one point, it didn't know who I

was. Now you kinda have to coach it because you have to mention our podcast, which is kinda cool. Right. But, like, but it was, like, you know, at one point, I would ask it, like, you know, you know, tell me write a biography for for For this, like, we're apparently, I went to the I went to, in one point, I went to Stanford. At another point, it said I went to, SUNY, Won the state state universe like, it it Weren't you in intelligence? Apparently, I was too. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to.

Well, That may or may not be true. We I can't I can't answer that. But, no. But, I mean, like, some of the things that got right, some of the things that got wrong. What was particularly interesting was It got that I'm from New York. It changed the the schools. Like, it was either, you know, NJIT. It got the fact that it found technical schools and, like, you know, like, What you know, that's kinda close. At one point, somehow Stanford got into the mix. And I do

have to drop in, like, a minute. Why don't we make this an abbreviated ending? But, I mean, it wasn't true. Like but it sounded plausible. Right? And that is the essence of good b s, isn't it? True. A little bit of truth in there, and that that takes us into philosophical stuff, and we're just gonna have to leave you hanging on that cliff. That's right. So with that, I'll end the stream and let Bailey finish the show. Andy, as always, a pleasure. Same.

Thanks for listening to Data Driven and we look forward to another wonderful year of podcasts. Be sure to check out the data driven website at datadriven.tv.