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.