A Data Driven Retrospective: A Look Back Through Seven Seasons and 360 Episodes
In this landmark 360th episode of Data Driven, we take a full-circle journey back through the past seven seasons, exploring the highs, lows, and everything in-between. Frank and Andy, in their signature style, veer off the beaten path, offering listeners not just a trip down memory lane, but an off-road adventure filled with insights, laughter, and a few unexpected detours.
Join us as we reflect on where we’ve been and, more importantly, where we’re headed next in the ever-evolving landscape of data and technology. It’s an episode you won’t want to miss, complete with the wisdom and whimsy that only Frank and Andy can provide.
Moments
00:00 Simpsons celebrates 360 episodes, announces new shows.
06:48 Struggling with impostor syndrome, sibling dynamics, and survival.
14:37 Experiments with AI feedback, brief show intros.
20:19 Challenging start, surprised by success in audio.
25:17 Uneven distribution; learned from former Microsoft colleague.
29:47 Struggle with communication, engineer writes terse responses.
35:47 Detective describes transit system in detail.
38:25 Relieved when Amazon took over sci-fi series.
43:28 Discussing latest blog post on OpenAI’s capabilities.
52:15 Obfuscation and difficulty in accessing information persist.
56:41 Equal time for Democrats and Republicans in media.
01:02:36 December is a mad time due to birthdays.
01:05:06 Originally planned as a video podcast, logistics issues.
01:09:44 360-degree journey concludes with data-driven discussions.
Transcript
Welcome to Episode 360 of the Data Driven Podcast.
Speaker:I'm your host, Bailey, the semiscient master of ceremonies,
Speaker:guiding you through the vast realms of data and technology with what you might
Speaker:call a British charm. In today's special episode, we've
Speaker:come full circle, 360 degrees to be exact.
Speaker:Frank and Andy, your beloved data aficionados, embark on a
Speaker:retrospective adventure looking back at the twists, turns,
Speaker:and tremendous tales from the past 7 seasons. It's a bit
Speaker:like time travel, but with fewer paradoxes and more data
Speaker:insights. But in true Frank and Andy fashion, our
Speaker:journey doesn't follow a straight path. Expect a labyrinth of
Speaker:tangents, day tours, and, of course, the occasional
Speaker:tech related rabbit hole. It's what makes this podcast the
Speaker:treasure trove of information and entertainment it is.
Speaker:So whether you're here for the data, the wit, or just to hear if
Speaker:Frank and Andy ever managed to stay on topic, you're in the right place.
Speaker:Hello, and welcome to Data Driven. And you know what,
Speaker:Andy? What? I have said that now officially
Speaker:360 times. 360
Speaker:times. Right. That's right, ladies and gents, boys and
Speaker:girls, AIs of various levels of sentience.
Speaker:Trying to make the episode future proof. Yeah. So this is show
Speaker:number 360. Wow. And one of the
Speaker:things I liked about the Simpsons there's many things I like about the Simpsons, but
Speaker:they but they would instead of celebrating, like, episode 100 or 200, like,
Speaker:normal shows do, they'd be like, this is the 4 100 and third episode. Woo
Speaker:hoo. Special. So I thought
Speaker:360 would be a good way to kind of
Speaker:talk about the journey this far and some of the cool projects we have going
Speaker:on now, which in in our virtual green
Speaker:room before we hit the record, we were talking about.
Speaker:Right? So first off, on my
Speaker:end, the big one the
Speaker:big moment of news is not
Speaker:technology related, believe it or not. But it is super cool.
Speaker:It is super cool. So there's a couple of shows that you will
Speaker:hear, that you've already heard, and there's some that are kind
Speaker:of in stuck in development limbo. More on that later.
Speaker:But I refer to an ongoing court case.
Speaker:Sometimes I'll even refer to it as an ongoing custody case.
Speaker:That is closed now because we have finally adopted,
Speaker:my wife's cousin. And,
Speaker:Andy's clapping if you're watching the video, but I think he was on mute.
Speaker:Because he would cough and then you clap. But no. We finally adopted him. So
Speaker:we now have 3 boys, officially legal. He's my son.
Speaker:Just with, like, the other 2, and, he
Speaker:he's an awesome kid. He,
Speaker:he's a lot of fun. He's such a happy boy.
Speaker:And considering kind of all the things that had happened, it's just in the
Speaker:circumstances of his birth, which are pretty bad, and kind of the
Speaker:fighting that went around to who gets to keep him, who gets
Speaker:to adopt him, basically.
Speaker:You know, because of I wanna avoid future legal
Speaker:complications. I won't go into those. Sure. But it
Speaker:looks like it's over. So, you know, he's he's part of the family, and he's
Speaker:been part of the family, I guess, since birth because he's a relative, but he's
Speaker:part of our little cluster since he came in a little bit with us in
Speaker:July. And, it's funny I did the
Speaker:math is that when he starts kindergarten Mhmm. My
Speaker:oldest graduates from high school, like, the same time. Wow.
Speaker:So when I did the math and I was like, boy, I am a glutton
Speaker:for punishment. No. It's a
Speaker:wonderful thing. I and I say that as a
Speaker:father who had children. Let's see. My first,
Speaker:daughter was born when I was
Speaker:18. Oh, wow. That's a little young,
Speaker:and I don't recommend it. But, you know,
Speaker:god is good, and it worked out well, and, she's
Speaker:awesome. And my last child, my
Speaker:son, my second son, was born when I
Speaker:was 44. So,
Speaker:also, kind of 8 I'm I'm not hitting the median.
Speaker:Okay? But Mhmm. But I've got the range.
Speaker:So when what I learned through both
Speaker:those experiences because I had 2 daughters from my first marriage, and they
Speaker:they grew up that you know, they were basically grown. I would
Speaker:say I think I think Penny was either 18 or
Speaker:about to turn, like, within a week and a half 18 when
Speaker:I'm I married Christy, my my second wife. And
Speaker:then we started having, children, and we had 3 more
Speaker:then. And it's having done this twice gives gives a
Speaker:perspective. And have being older and having children,
Speaker:Frank, I think it's, you know, it's I I don't
Speaker:wanna say it's better because it's not, but it's different because you know what to
Speaker:expect. And that's that's a big deal.
Speaker:Because that first time, you anyone, any parent having a first
Speaker:child has is having a child for the very first time. I mean,
Speaker:that that sounds Right. Circular. I I get it,
Speaker:but, a bit of a tautology. But it's true.
Speaker:You don't know what you don't know until you actually go and have
Speaker:a child. And I always tell my my older daughter and I joke with
Speaker:her, all the time. I should say old dust because I've got
Speaker:3. I tell her I you were the beta child. You know?
Speaker:So we had to learn how to be parents with you. Her and my
Speaker:my with my second wife. Our
Speaker:older son is her first. Right. Right. Sort of
Speaker:thing. He's also a a bit of a beta child as well. So
Speaker:but congratulations. Every child is different too. Like, you know, with the first
Speaker:and kind of, like, having gone through it now three times or in the process
Speaker:of going through it. Yeah. But one thing
Speaker:I noticed with the littlest guy
Speaker:is
Speaker:I know now that this time is short.
Speaker:Yeah. And I appreciate the little things.
Speaker:Not that I didn't with the older 2, but it was when you're
Speaker:your first child, you don't know what to expect. You're like, oh my god. Oh
Speaker:my god. Oh my god. What am I doing? Right? A lot of impostor
Speaker:syndrome with the first kid.
Speaker:And then with the second one, you think that, we've done this before. It's
Speaker:no big deal, but
Speaker:you're thrown for a loop because it's a default leader for their personality.
Speaker:Mhmm. And then you have to keep if they're close enough in age, you have
Speaker:to keep them both alive, which becomes this whole
Speaker:thing, and then they interact with each other. And I'm an only child, so,
Speaker:like, this is completely, like seeing the sibling relationships
Speaker:develop is completely foreign to me. Right. Right. And
Speaker:my wife isn't. So she's like, you can't like, I remember the first time I
Speaker:came back from a conference, And I bought I
Speaker:used to bring, like, either a souvenir or, like, a swag thing from the show,
Speaker:and I only got one. That was a
Speaker:mistake. Right? Right?
Speaker:And I thought imagine Roberta addressing that. Yes.
Speaker:Yes. My lovely wife would be like We can't do that. Like,
Speaker:and even now with, like, the littlest one, I'm like, but he's a baby. He
Speaker:can't she's like, it doesn't matter. I was like, okay. Right. So
Speaker:but it's interesting to kinda see that. And it's
Speaker:cool to see the my oldest kind of really grow into being
Speaker:a young man, but also growing into being a a
Speaker:big brother twice over. And
Speaker:my middle now middle child is kind of was used to being
Speaker:the the baby of the family. Yeah. Now it's not
Speaker:job. I will I think he was excited that he was no longer the
Speaker:baby. Okay. But then he realized, wait, I'm no longer the baby.
Speaker:I lose. He knew all the bad things he would lose,
Speaker:but he only he realized the good things he would lose too. So it's kind
Speaker:of interesting. He's kind of developed into it really well too. So it's it's
Speaker:Yeah. It's worked out well. And the little guy is just, you know, the missing
Speaker:puzzle. My my sister-in-law basically
Speaker:said, like, he's the missing puzzle piece you didn't know was missing. Aw.
Speaker:And he, like, really fits in really well. Like and he's just
Speaker:it's it's interesting to see see the personalities develop and, like, interact
Speaker:with each other. That is that is really cool,
Speaker:and I I didn't say it before, but congratulations. Thank
Speaker:you. Thank you very much. I think you I've told you. You know?
Speaker:Yes. But not Like, day of, I think, when we went to the courthouse. Oh,
Speaker:absolutely. Yeah. You did say congratulations, but up until the
Speaker:moment I swear if you're
Speaker:still listening, we are gonna talk about technology, but hold on. Hold on.
Speaker:Up until the moment, the judge basically put the hammer down
Speaker:literally. We
Speaker:were expecting certain parties to show up
Speaker:Yeah. And stop the process.
Speaker:So that's all I'll say. Yeah. Up to and including physical
Speaker:violence against me, the judge, or the building. So that's
Speaker:the kind of things I've been living with over the last Goodness, Frank. That's,
Speaker:like, what, year or so? Because we met him about a year, and we met
Speaker:him met him end of January last year. Okay. Because this the we didn't know
Speaker:he existed. He was he's about 18 months old now, so he's about 4 months
Speaker:Yeah. Before we even knew we existed, and we're like and he was in the
Speaker:foster care system in Pennsylvania. And we're
Speaker:like, you know, we just bought this big new house.
Speaker:We're just across the state line more or less. Right.
Speaker:And why and then one day, I
Speaker:will tell all about this, but I'm gonna wait for certain parties to
Speaker:pass away. Because
Speaker:as of yet, they haven't figured out how to sue you beyond the grave.
Speaker:Not yet. But Not yet. With AI. With AI,
Speaker:anything's possible. But now that we're back talking about
Speaker:AI, I think it's interesting because
Speaker:with my first child, I wasn't in the AI space. Right? I
Speaker:was in Right. I was still in the silver light world, which
Speaker:kinda crazy to even say that out loud.
Speaker:If my second one, I was in AI space,
Speaker:and I really got to appreciate like, fully
Speaker:appreciate, not just from, like, a parental level Yeah. But from a
Speaker:developmental psychology and kind of engineering aspect of a cognitive
Speaker:way, how language developed, how learning happens.
Speaker:And now I'm seeing the relationships build between the 3
Speaker:separate nodes, if you will, and that's
Speaker:fascinating to see. And maybe not to anyone
Speaker:who's not an only child. If you're an only child, if you're if you have
Speaker:siblings, you kind of you live through that experience. Yeah. I did
Speaker:not. So, that's needed.
Speaker:To be fair, I'm the oldest of, there were 5 of us.
Speaker:You know, mom had 5 boys, and,
Speaker:it's, I it's just as foreign to me to think about
Speaker:what it would be like to to be an only child. So I don't
Speaker:I really don't say one's better than the other, and I don't think that's what
Speaker:you're saying at all. No. No. No. Not at all. But it's the but they
Speaker:are different. Well, you know, it's funny. When I was a kid, a lot of
Speaker:people would say to me, like, oh, it must be terrible being an only child.
Speaker:I'm like, I don't know. I think it's pretty flipping awesome.
Speaker:And I didn't always say flipping if you get my drift. I do.
Speaker:But where it did stop becoming awesome is about
Speaker:the age. I was about about 25 when I realized that my parents were getting
Speaker:older. And I realized the consequence of that.
Speaker:Yeah. And I had that I call
Speaker:it an uh-oh moment around age 25. Like, uh-oh.
Speaker:Right? It's on me. Like, there's no one else.
Speaker:Yeah. Like and and and and and I
Speaker:know from experience with other family members and things like
Speaker:that, even if there is a sibling, one sibling tends to take
Speaker:the brunt of the load for for many reasons. Legit, illegitimate,
Speaker:fair and unfair. Right? Yep. Yep. So
Speaker:even then, it's not a guarantee, but
Speaker:but still, there's someone who can understand your growing
Speaker:up circumstances in a way that really no one else can.
Speaker:I don't know. So Yeah. Yeah. So as a kid, it's
Speaker:an awesome ride. The second half of it, not
Speaker:so much. Yeah. I try to think of a movie that starts off really
Speaker:good, but then turns terrible.
Speaker:Can't really think of 1, but you get the gist. I do. I mean, it's
Speaker:show 360, so we have to, like, kinda hit all the our notes of, like,
Speaker:movie reference. That's true. You know?
Speaker:We'll have to come up. We'll we'll have a movie reference. I know us. Maybe
Speaker:we'll have Bailey come up with one if we don't. We will do it.
Speaker:Speaking of Bailey, I'm doing an experiment,
Speaker:and this was an experiment inspired by some other happenings where
Speaker:the thought I had was, well, what if you had AIs
Speaker:delivering a short kinda newsy podcast
Speaker:about AI. And then you said you're like, dude, there's already YouTube
Speaker:channels that do this. I'm like, no. No. No. But they don't tell you they're
Speaker:an AI. Right? It's always that quasi so is it so we
Speaker:we now have a a a second AI entity,
Speaker:and her name is Jen, Jen
Speaker:AI. Get it. Right. So clever. And because now
Speaker:we can say everyone's talking about Jen AI.
Speaker:So I did the first couple of rounds of experiments, and I passed the round
Speaker:to people that I mean, we've gotten the feedback that Bailey is both
Speaker:an interesting aspect of the show, but also if she talks for
Speaker:too long, it becomes very obvious that it's an
Speaker:AI. Right? So, that's
Speaker:why if you notice, I kind of I try to keep her intros,
Speaker:to a minute plus or minus, like, 5 seconds. Right?
Speaker:Just because I get it. I I we we do listen to the feedback.
Speaker:I do like keeping her because it's always cool to,
Speaker:like, have a an intro of what the show is gonna be about. Right?
Speaker:And you or me could do it, true, but
Speaker:they're about to hear us for, like, 35 to 40 to to an hour. So
Speaker:they're in this store hour. So I'm pretty sure pretty sure it's nice to hear
Speaker:a different voice. So so I actually found a new,
Speaker:AI voice that sounds very human like and
Speaker:that's the voice for Gen AI. And then I was thinking the first
Speaker:iteration, the first recording and it's on YouTube. We're gonna start
Speaker:in a separate podcast channel. Because at one point, if you go back in the
Speaker:history long enough, I did do, like, a daily kind of show of
Speaker:news and AI or in Tano. Mhmm. But that was when I
Speaker:was unemployed in between jobs, and I had
Speaker:2 kids. And one of them wasn't
Speaker:a toddler. One of them actually, at the time, one
Speaker:of them was, actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But the
Speaker:gist is is that I also got the feedback is that it
Speaker:starts if it starts polluting the feed, people
Speaker:people will do that. And if you look at successful podcasters, we'll use Joe Rogan.
Speaker:Right? Love him, hate him, admire him, loathe him, whatever.
Speaker:He has a the main show, and those shows are anywhere
Speaker:from 2 to 3 hours. I think I saw 1 on the feed. It was
Speaker:4 hours, which Wow. I can't imagine. But there's
Speaker:also a series of YouTube channels as well as, I think, a
Speaker:podcast RSS feed where it's called JRE clips, Joe
Speaker:Rogan experience clips, which is just like segments. Which
Speaker:is good because very few people are gonna sit through the entire
Speaker:2, 3 hours. Right. In fact, when I was driving back and forth to
Speaker:Pittsburgh for the visitations with said child,
Speaker:I would that was when I started listening to it because it was, like, this
Speaker:one kind of narrative you could listen to on the drive. It's about 3 hours.
Speaker:Right? So the problem is is that because of language reasons, I realized I
Speaker:couldn't do it if there were kids in the car, which I think
Speaker:solidifies our statement of we try not to have profanity.
Speaker:And I think for the first time, we actually bleeped it out a couple of
Speaker:shows ago with Luke. I forget his last name, but
Speaker:Luke Diaz? Yeah. The venture capital
Speaker:guy. So Yeah. And there's another show by a very brilliant man named
Speaker:Benjamin. His first name's Ben.
Speaker:That there's a lot of profanity in that. So the
Speaker:Yeah. The effort to edit that out Yeah. That would be
Speaker:that would be hard. And this this may be a good
Speaker:segue. This is an excellent segue. I was teeing it up. Thank you,
Speaker:Frank. Just not consciously. That thank you.
Speaker:We started another thing. We're always starting things. And
Speaker:we started recording on Teams, and we'll
Speaker:say things in the shows like if you're watching this video. And we said it
Speaker:for the longest time, but we didn't have the videos
Speaker:posted anyway for, people to see them.
Speaker:So a couple of 3 months ago, we
Speaker:found a a platform that would, work, I think, work
Speaker:well, and it managed a lot of the, stuff behind the
Speaker:scenes for managing subscriptions. So people wanna
Speaker:sign up and, you know, and watch shows
Speaker:indefinitely. That that's available. And
Speaker:then if you get you know, you watch what's available out there and go, alright.
Speaker:I've I've done you know, it's a long weekend and you binge watch all of
Speaker:the data driven, media TV parts.
Speaker:And and that's what it's called. It's, it's a data driven media dot
Speaker:TV. It the the link right now
Speaker:does not have an SSL on it. So if you go to HTTP
Speaker:colon wackawackawackaw datadrivenmedia.tv,
Speaker:it will redirect you to the official site that's kinda
Speaker:managed by the platform. And it has it does have an SSL on
Speaker:it. So when you sign up, you're not your stuff's not at risk.
Speaker:Right now, it's 4.99 a month is what we've got
Speaker:it set at, and we'll probably experiment with price because I
Speaker:know us. We do that. There's a 1st month for 3.99.
Speaker:You sign up, try it out. Again, if you don't like it, you
Speaker:can cancel it at any time. And in addition to that, there's the your
Speaker:first 7 days are free. So, like, almost
Speaker:every other subscription service, you sign up and you put in your credit
Speaker:card information. But then you if you
Speaker:cancel before the free part's done, then it doesn't cost
Speaker:you anything. So, again, HTTP, not an
Speaker:s, colon /data driven
Speaker:media dot tv. And to be fair, when Frank
Speaker:and Frank got the original domain, datadriven.tv for
Speaker:the podcast, this was the thought back in 20 was it
Speaker:2016? 2017? 2017. Yeah. Yeah. And that
Speaker:that we the idea was to do video,
Speaker:and it just it turned out to be,
Speaker:hard. It's probably the best way to say it. It's difficult
Speaker:and challenging. So we just launched with the audio part of
Speaker:it, and I'm still shocked that the
Speaker:audio has done as well as it does. The podcast has done as well, and
Speaker:that's really because of all of you. So if you're listening
Speaker:to the audio, if you wanted to go over and watch the video,
Speaker:see see me and Frank, and, you know, and kind
Speaker:of follow along the show. I was gonna say the unedited
Speaker:version, but we do so little editing these
Speaker:days. Right. It's only it's only, like, there's a couple of green
Speaker:room conversations you could kick out, you know, catch up on. The security one is
Speaker:awesome. This week in security, is that what it is? Or the
Speaker:security guys? Yeah. The the the green room presentation, I would say and
Speaker:that was a good show. Was almost as good as the show. Like Yeah.
Speaker:And see that that's so well. We'll edit out the stuff before
Speaker:Frank begins, the intro. Right. You know? We'll
Speaker:edit that out in the audio. That's included in the video.
Speaker:Right. And so they and the reason it was a good segue when we were
Speaker:talking about, you know, potential profanity, which we've and we and
Speaker:all of our guests have done a great job at at limiting. Right. There was
Speaker:one show, It's very intelligent guy. I listened to the
Speaker:show, and I've been around enough people
Speaker:who use profanity, and they're not angry when they do
Speaker:it. It's their way of speaking that I can separate those
Speaker:2. Not everybody's like that, and I'm not judging. I'm just
Speaker:saying. And and and if you knew me outside of a professional
Speaker:context dude, I grew up in New York City and North
Speaker:Jersey. What Come on. What do I call it, Frank, when you start?
Speaker:Go Jersey on you. That's right. Frank goes Jersey every now and then.
Speaker:So so so, like, so, like and that was kind of that and and this
Speaker:is a good example of, like, we're doing a retrospective. That was
Speaker:my NPR voice. But,
Speaker:you and I had a big debate about this. It was like I'm like,
Speaker:look. I get it. Like, I I wanna
Speaker:leave it in because we had a big debate. Like, I wanna leave it in.
Speaker:Right? Our podcasting platform and, apparently, a lot of them now have a flag of
Speaker:this episode is explicit. Right. Right? But
Speaker:then we kinda went back and forth on that and basically what you said, and
Speaker:I was just like and plus, I know that
Speaker:a lot of us listen to podcast with little ears
Speaker:in the car. Right? Yeah. And a big I wouldn't say
Speaker:problem. Like, his problems go as pretty good. Like, I would love to listen to,
Speaker:you know, the latest Joe Rogan when I was driving up to Pittsburgh. But
Speaker:Right. You know, how do I explain, like, you know, to my,
Speaker:you know, 9 year old, like, yeah. You shouldn't use bad words. He goes, but
Speaker:Joe Rogan has you know, made a $1,000,000,000 deal, and he uses bad words. I
Speaker:was like, okay. You know, like, it it so rather than have
Speaker:those awkward conversations, we decided
Speaker:to not publish it yet until I can get the
Speaker:time to bleep it through. And what's interesting
Speaker:is, I actually used AI to
Speaker:find the profanity. Right? So we have interesting.
Speaker:Yeah. Because yeah. I mean, I I do listen to the whole show, but, like,
Speaker:if I'm editing about I have my editing, like, mindset on.
Speaker:I need to do it quick. Right? And I tend to do it quick. So
Speaker:what I'll do is so what I did was I just ran it through. We
Speaker:use something called cast magic. And you know what? I'm gonna go
Speaker:out there on a limb and say, I will provide a affiliate link. You should
Speaker:totally check out Cast Magic. It's freaking awesome. Because, basically,
Speaker:what it does, all the show notes
Speaker:since, what, maybe, like, 6 months to a year now have been done with Cast
Speaker:Magic. So Cast Magic will let you
Speaker:upload an audio and or
Speaker:video now apparently. So, and
Speaker:then it'll create a a transcript. You identify the
Speaker:speakers. Right? Because you're basically marking up. It'll it'll identify when you're talking, when I'm
Speaker:talking. Yep. Right? But
Speaker:it'll also run a series of AI prompts against it.
Speaker:Like, here's the title for the show. There's here's the key moments. So if you
Speaker:look at last maybe 15, 20 episodes, those
Speaker:key moments have been selected by AI. And if I don't like it, I can
Speaker:regenerate it, but it works out really well. Yeah.
Speaker:Because that is it's not labor intensive. That's not the right word. It's time
Speaker:intensive. Yeah. And I think if there's anything I've learned over the past, let's
Speaker:say, 5, 6 years is that time is the true currency.
Speaker:It's true. Time is the true measure of wealth, and it's
Speaker:the only thing that's ever really fairly distributed across life.
Speaker:Talent's not, looks are not, money is not.
Speaker:Yeah. You name it. It's probably not evenly distributed. However,
Speaker:I've learned this from a guy I used to work with at Microsoft because he
Speaker:he was he had this whole rant, and we were
Speaker:stuck in a car ride from, like I say stuck like
Speaker:it's a bad thing, but we were stuck in a
Speaker:in a in an Uber ride from Sea Tac to Redmond. And, you
Speaker:know, hit the traffic the wrong way, that
Speaker:could not that's not a trivial drive. So
Speaker:for for my for my peeps in the in the
Speaker:DC Beltway area, it's like going from from
Speaker:Silver Spring to Tysons Corner,
Speaker:rush hour, or any time of day. Like, could be
Speaker:15 minutes, could be 3 hours. And if you hit the
Speaker:jackpot, could be 6 hours. Ask me how I know that one.
Speaker:So, long story short,
Speaker:the topic of gaming came up because there's a bunch of nerds in the car.
Speaker:And this one guy had basically purchased a,
Speaker:might have been Star Wars Galaxy, one of the big massively
Speaker:online things, right, which I don't play because I know it's a massive
Speaker:time sink and that will become my life. So it's just easier to avoid it.
Speaker:And so he's he was really into it. He he
Speaker:people were giving him the business,
Speaker:on he bought a premade character at, like, level 60 or level
Speaker:100. Right? And people were like, yeah. I shouldn't have done
Speaker:that. You cheated. Blah blah blah blah blah. And then he had this excellent
Speaker:stump speech on the value of time. And he's like,
Speaker:look, I have a life. I have kids. I think his twins were born. I
Speaker:I I don't know. I have a job. I have this. I have a career.
Speaker:I just wanna play a game, and, you
Speaker:know, I don't mind trading money for time because and then he went on
Speaker:this whole thing, like, you know, you know, I have the same number of hours
Speaker:in a day that Bill Gates has.
Speaker:Remember, all Microsoft nerds. Right? So we're and this is before Elon was in the
Speaker:top billionaire list. Right? I have the same number of hours a day that
Speaker:he does versus the beggar on the street versus anyone in the world. It's
Speaker:how I spend that money. And if you look at how Bill Gates spends his
Speaker:time or spends his money, it's really more of optimized his time. So what does
Speaker:that tell you? And I was like, woah.
Speaker:Because when they were talking about the online game, it's a great point. And Yeah.
Speaker:I love to get him on the show. I don't think he does AI though,
Speaker:but he'd be an interesting character.
Speaker:But the interesting point because, like, during part of the conversation, again, it was a
Speaker:long drive. I can't when I start talking about this particular online game,
Speaker:I kinda tuned it out because, well, I don't wanna know how good it is.
Speaker:Right? The less I know, the better. The further I
Speaker:am away from the event horizon, the better. So when he started talking about,
Speaker:you know, the the time focusing and goes, like, wow, that's really good.
Speaker:I think that's a really good idea, and that that kinda stuck with me. It's
Speaker:one of those things that kind of just lodges itself in the corner of your
Speaker:brain, and you start thinking about it. The short of it is is that by
Speaker:using these AI tools, we can produce more content. And if you notice, we've been
Speaker:really good with that over the last, you know, few months of
Speaker:putting out a show weekly or if not twice weekly. Because we did a
Speaker:bonus show on leap day. Because I figured, bonus day, bonus,
Speaker:whatever. There we go. It's a great idea, but you're absolutely right.
Speaker:The the the impact that I'm seeing
Speaker:LLMs have these days Right. Is
Speaker:more in, force multipliers,
Speaker:in time savings, and that sort of stuff. And I had a
Speaker:my my recent anecdote about that happened in the past couple of
Speaker:weeks where I was responding to a request for a
Speaker:proposal. And I don't know if you've ever had an opportunity
Speaker:to to look at RFPs. They vary. This one was
Speaker:relatively short for a a project that was probably
Speaker:gonna last, more than a year. And,
Speaker:you know, and they were doing this very,
Speaker:rigid process where you
Speaker:got the RFP. You had a couple of weeks to
Speaker:collect and send in the questions. And then the week after
Speaker:that, the proposal was due. You were gonna send in your proposal.
Speaker:You got one shot at the questions. And I was like, what?
Speaker:I'd like to I'm sure I'm gonna have more questions after I get these answers.
Speaker:Right. I can't do that. I'd like to sit down and talk to the people.
Speaker:Can't do that. It's like, I've gotta
Speaker:communicate using this writing. So at the end of
Speaker:it, when I got all of my questions back,
Speaker:we're running out of time, and I needed to, you know, to
Speaker:respond to the proposal. And I sat down with 1 of the
Speaker:engineers who would end up working with me for over a year,
Speaker:drafted a really quick, you know, like, 4 sentences,
Speaker:copied and pasted that, and then I used chatgptchatgpt4,
Speaker:and said, restate this,
Speaker:you know, so that it's not as terse. I didn't use this this
Speaker:prompt. But in my mind, I I the first prompt I thought of
Speaker:was, you know, make it not seem like an engineer wrote
Speaker:it, which to be fair,
Speaker:I struggle with communicating with my wife whom I love
Speaker:dearly, not like an engineer would
Speaker:respond to it. One of my mentors told me years ago,
Speaker:and it like you were mentioning the conversation, it stuck.
Speaker:His boss had told him to go do some sales stuff.
Speaker:And he bring an engineer, and he said, I
Speaker:want you to talk to them like you're talking to your wife. And
Speaker:that was good advice, but that wouldn't work for me as well as it would
Speaker:for him because he was better at communicating with his wife than I am.
Speaker:But did the GPT did it. 1st pass,
Speaker:Frank. Me and the engineer looked at that, and we said
Speaker:copy and paste and send, And we ended up sending that. So 2
Speaker:things came to mind when you said that. 1, I married an
Speaker:engineer. So fun
Speaker:fact, 1st engineer I dated, I end up marrying. I don't know. Maybe
Speaker:there's causation correlation, but it would be unwise
Speaker:for me to do any more experimentation. Right? I would have to agree
Speaker:with this. That's that's my attempt at rim
Speaker:shot. The other thing is I sent you this joke last night on,
Speaker:YouTube shorts. Right? I saw it. An engineer goes to hell.
Speaker:This is the joke. It's really funny. That's so funny. Engineer
Speaker:goes to hell, and the devil sees him and was
Speaker:like, what are you doing here? And he goes, I don't know. So he he
Speaker:he's like, it's too hot here. I'm gonna I'm gonna build an air conditioning system.
Speaker:So he builds an air conditioning. Hell becomes cool again and livable. Right?
Speaker:And he makes a bunch of other improvements because every time he sees something wrong.
Speaker:And god's talking to the devil and he goes, how's things
Speaker:down there? I bet it's hot. He goes, actually, no.
Speaker:And he's like, what do you mean? Oh, yeah. This guy came here. He's an
Speaker:engineer. He made all these improvements. And he was like, well, that's a mistake. He
Speaker:clearly shouldn't be there. He has to come to heaven. And he goes, no. You
Speaker:know, he goes, no. I'm keeping him. I'm keeping him. He goes,
Speaker:yeah. Well, I'll sue you. And then the devil just looks at them and laughs
Speaker:at him. Where are you gonna get a lawyer?
Speaker:That's so mean. I know. I've somewhat
Speaker:as someone who spent the last a a good part of the last, 15 months
Speaker:with lawyers. I understand why you sent
Speaker:it to me. I got it I thought it was funny. I thought laughed, and
Speaker:then I was like, I know why Frank sent us. Law lawyers are
Speaker:good when they're on your side. Right? True. And you had a great lawyer. But
Speaker:Our our lawyer was awesome. She was the best. She
Speaker:when family law is a different animal, and I
Speaker:never had to encounter. But Yeah. Somebody once said it's the best way to
Speaker:be to get financially and emotionally drained in 1
Speaker:in 1 fell swoop. And I could totally see it. Like, it because there's, like,
Speaker:this is part of the I don't know, man. It's just if you can avoid
Speaker:it Yeah. Highly recommend you do. I I I I would I would
Speaker:give it a Yelp review of do not recommend, you know, 0 stars.
Speaker:But people don't go there typically by choice, I guess. But it's just a
Speaker:it's just a as particularly when you're dealing with, like, the social
Speaker:welfare system, it's just dismal. You know, we were we would
Speaker:be there in waiting rooms, and there would be, other kids there waiting to see,
Speaker:you know, their pet it's it's just god awful. It's the only
Speaker:way I can the only way I can say it, and meet our
Speaker:language requirements. There there we go. Yes.
Speaker:But, I forget how we got off topic. Oh, yes. So it
Speaker:was Jack CPT. Yeah. No. I mean, it's totally
Speaker:great for, like, some live music. Minutes. You know? Yeah. I mean
Speaker:and this is like you were able to respond. I'm assuming you were able to
Speaker:respond to that. I was. Yeah. But I've also found that it's
Speaker:helpful to build out so I I signed
Speaker:up for Gemini when I first came out. Mhmm. Right? And one of
Speaker:the example prompts to give you on the screen is, you
Speaker:know, act like you're, you
Speaker:know, a fictional character. I think it might have been somebody from, like, a Dickens
Speaker:novel or whatever. You know, start to comp be conversational and start
Speaker:talking about the weather. And I'm like, what if I made this a
Speaker:character from The Expanse? So Christine Avasarala,
Speaker:who I I can't describe her,
Speaker:but she would not pass the language test. Let's put that one. She wouldn't, but
Speaker:she is an awesome character. Such a well written character. Her and
Speaker:Amos Burton. Streamy. All of them, really. They kept
Speaker:that whole series. I I said this, back
Speaker:when I read the first book, and it there were maybe 4 out when I
Speaker:read the first one. I said, this is the best writing. Hands
Speaker:down, not sci fi. Just the best writing
Speaker:I've read in about a decade. Right. No. It's just
Speaker:really well written. Like It is. And it I mean, read the books. The series
Speaker:is good. Don't get me wrong. I mean, this I don't know how you understand
Speaker:the series without having read the books. So I saw the series,
Speaker:then I read the books. Oh, so how did that go? That's great. So good
Speaker:usage. Tell you that you can appreciate the fine
Speaker:details. Like, there's one scene and this is not spoiler. Right? So so the
Speaker:asteroid series, it's the first season in the first
Speaker:book starts off there. And there's this whole segment where
Speaker:Miller, who's like a detective, is
Speaker:is basically complaining about the transit system, on
Speaker:and how it works. He's talking about the trans system, how it works, and or
Speaker:doesn't work as the case may be. And and he was describing the various
Speaker:lines and the various stops and things like that. And if you
Speaker:when I rewatch season 1, there's they actually have in in the
Speaker:subway car well, not subway, but you get the idea. The trains, they actually
Speaker:have maps that match exactly his description, like,
Speaker:from the book. So there's a whole lot of, like, set design and
Speaker:stuff that I after reading the books because there's always that one
Speaker:guy or gal that's like, the book's better. Like, oh, shut up.
Speaker:Right? That's it. That's actually my my my my my internal voice.
Speaker:I liked them both, Frank, and I read the books first. But I
Speaker:when after reading so I saw the series first, and I didn't watch it till
Speaker:season 3 because it was in the sci fi channel Mhmm. Or
Speaker:season 2 because I just had no faith in the sci fi channel,
Speaker:keeping good shows on the air for more than, like, 3 years. And I'm
Speaker:referring to Defiance. Defiance was a really good show that got canceled
Speaker:before its time. Yeah. But,
Speaker:I was like, oh, you tell me I had to watch it. And I was
Speaker:like, well, I'll I'll watch it. You know, 2 seasons have been out, and
Speaker:if sci fi when sci fi, you know,
Speaker:cancels it, at least have the books to kinda finish the story.
Speaker:Right. And I was just
Speaker:enthralled. So then I read, I saw, you know, the first season, then I
Speaker:read season 1, and I'm like, this is
Speaker:really good. Like and and then I rewatched season 1, and I was like, it
Speaker:just adds more depth to it. So it's, like Yeah. It it that's very rare
Speaker:that you have you know, people
Speaker:say the book is better than the movie or the movie is better than the
Speaker:book or TV show, whatever. But it's
Speaker:very rare that they both make each other better. Yeah.
Speaker:Like and when they make decisions where they they merge characters,
Speaker:it makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Like, even if you don't
Speaker:go, oh, Alex, for instance. Right? The character of Alex is
Speaker:removed from the show because of outside reasons, outside
Speaker:shenanigans he got himself into. But
Speaker:he's still in the book, which is interesting.
Speaker:So so I was a bit salty when I was relieved when Amazon
Speaker:took it over. Mhmm. Yeah. Which is funny because the first
Speaker:thing they did was with, Christian Alvaro's
Speaker:character. She curses like a sailor in
Speaker:the in in the first Amazon season, like, from, like, the first 5 minutes,
Speaker:which is kinda like, oh, they don't have to worry about that anymore.
Speaker:And, the other,
Speaker:thing was, apparently, Jeff Bezos himself is a big fan of those
Speaker:books. So when sci fi got the rights
Speaker:I don't know if this is true, but the scuttlebutt on the interwebs because everything
Speaker:on the Internet is true. Was he,
Speaker:like, he had a conniption? He, like, he had a fit. Like, how did they
Speaker:lose? How did they lose? So so when sci fi canceled it, they basically swooped
Speaker:in, like, almost right away. Yeah. Now I am
Speaker:supremely disappointed that they chose not to continue the rest of
Speaker:the series. Yeah. But I remain hopeful because,
Speaker:in the stories themselves, there's a time gap between
Speaker:series of books. So maybe There there is. And where they stopped
Speaker:was a good spot to stop. It's It was a good spot. It's the end
Speaker:of it's the end of the first set. The first part? Yes.
Speaker:It jumps. What is it? I it jumps at least 20
Speaker:years. I was, like, 18, 20 years. Something. Yeah. A long
Speaker:time. It was a big jump.
Speaker:But and the thing about it is if you read the books, I'm not trying
Speaker:to and then no spoilers. But if you read the books, you could almost
Speaker:start at that point because of the backfill that they
Speaker:wrote. It's oh, yeah. Again, it's the best reading I I've read.
Speaker:It it's in the top I'd say it's in the top ten
Speaker:easy and maybe in the top 5. And I'm putting series in there
Speaker:because I'm a I love series, first off. But I'm putting series in
Speaker:there like the Lord of the Rings and the Chronicles of Narnia.
Speaker:And Right. You know, I'm I'm a fan of the Longmire
Speaker:novels as well, so completely different genre.
Speaker:But, you know, they're very well written. And I
Speaker:like I like when I say multidimensional, that's what I the word I
Speaker:was gonna use. I like multidimensional. I'm not talking about,
Speaker:necessarily space because the Longmire novels, which are set
Speaker:in, you know, out in the west, the US West. Oh, Longmire. I think you
Speaker:said Longmire. Sorry about that. It's okay. Yeah. But that was a
Speaker:and it was a series about that as well. Same. They they managed to do
Speaker:the same sort of thing. They're different story based on the same
Speaker:characters and also also well written. I watched this I did
Speaker:what you did with Expanse. I watched the series first and
Speaker:and then started reading the novels. And I think the 20th novel in that
Speaker:series is coming out next month or the month after.
Speaker:It's a but, again, multidimensional in this way that
Speaker:it's not it's definitely more than just
Speaker:one topic, I guess, is the right way to say it.
Speaker:The the plot involves
Speaker:more than just people. I don't I don't know how to say that without expect
Speaker:you know? But it it's definitely, an
Speaker:a view into other cultures and stuff like that.
Speaker:So Interesting. I think what they wrote,
Speaker:what, Ty and I I can't remember
Speaker:the other guy's name. Ty Franks and,
Speaker:SA Curry is Corey. Right? James SA Corey. Yeah. It's
Speaker:really a name together. Right. So and but it's 2
Speaker:and I think they worked they wrote with Lucas. They
Speaker:did. That shows. I, yeah, I believe that's where they they came out
Speaker:of the starboard again. They were, I guess, lit
Speaker:for somebody is gonna shoot me hate mail for this, but I'll I'll say
Speaker:it anyway. They were, like, gophers for, George
Speaker:r r Martin.
Speaker:Right? That may be what I was thinking of, but I thought they've I thought
Speaker:I read that they were involved in that, but the whole They might have been.
Speaker:So opera, we'll just say it that way, but then definitely a space opera
Speaker:where you have to create essentially a universe of characters
Speaker:and politics and history. So I
Speaker:was doing some research on this. So so one of they were interviewed in one
Speaker:of the, origins was it where they were contracted to
Speaker:we're back on MMOs again. They were contracted to write
Speaker:a backdrop and plot kind of structure for a MMO
Speaker:that was set, like, in the future and etcetera,
Speaker:etcetera. Yeah. So that might have been the motivation, plus the fact that
Speaker:they had worked for George r Martin. I don't know what
Speaker:to say. I'm sure one of our listeners will will dig in and correct us
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. If we've if we've misspoken. And we love it when that happens.
Speaker:Absolutely. That's why what somebody's listening.
Speaker:Well, when we started, I would joke like, well, at least my mom will listen.
Speaker:That's true. I know. But the, the re I
Speaker:think one of the reasons we were going there is I I was gonna plug
Speaker:my, as of today, it's my latest post on,
Speaker:andylenard.blog, and it talks about how to,
Speaker:how to use, OpenAI's ability to create
Speaker:custom GPTs. And I just walk you through. I do that a lot. I do
Speaker:tutorials or screenshots and stuff. Granted, I wrote
Speaker:the post, I think, about 3 weeks ago, posted it a
Speaker:week, week and a half, 2 weeks ago. And, probably, it's out of
Speaker:date already. That happens all the time. Oh, especially here.
Speaker:Especially in the space. Yeah. But but the character I created, I
Speaker:started with one of their suggestions like you did with Gemini. And I
Speaker:said, create a code formatting,
Speaker:you know, a chat l LLM, and,
Speaker:they call them GPTs, custom GPTs. And have the I am
Speaker:gonna share my screen and look at the blog post because we are on video,
Speaker:and some people will choose to watch this video. That's true. So
Speaker:here it is. And you can under the blog. And I had it used like
Speaker:a character from The Expanse, Bobby Draper, one of my
Speaker:favorite characters. She's a Martian marine,
Speaker:Basically yeah. Martian marine gunnery sergeant. She's awesome.
Speaker:She is. She's very, very tough and
Speaker:a great character. But and and I
Speaker:put a couple of quotes in there. She, she she makes
Speaker:good suggestions as I go through this, but, yeah, I named her code formatted
Speaker:Draper. Had GPT generate the image for me there of the kids. The
Speaker:Martian motif too. Ain't that interesting? Yeah. That is cool.
Speaker:And I think it generated more than 1, and that was why I just got
Speaker:to pick that one out of there. And, yeah, threw some code in and
Speaker:had it had it do the formatting. So
Speaker:neat neat way to do that. Frank and I both have blogs. Mine's Andy Leonard
Speaker:dot blog. Frank is is way, way beyond. I cannot
Speaker:snatch the pebble from Frank's hand in blogging. Franksworld.com.
Speaker:25 years old, Frank? Well, the domain is,
Speaker:started in 95, but the blog part of it, the tech blog
Speaker:part of it started in 2004. So that was that's 20
Speaker:years. Although when I lived in Germany, I used the service called Blogger, which I
Speaker:don't even know if they're still around. But I all and I had written
Speaker:a pipe Perl script
Speaker:to scrape the RSS feed and then post it on the actual
Speaker:domain because I didn't wanna give up my own domain owners. Now see now
Speaker:see that brings us to another thing we wanted to talk about. Oh, is this
Speaker:Dingo? Frank's been automating blog posts,
Speaker:and he automated a whole lot of this, activity that goes on
Speaker:behind putting a show, data driven dot TV show episode,
Speaker:out. And it made it so much easier. It was so easy
Speaker:I could do it. But he had to write a lot of this
Speaker:from, you know, from scratch when he started writing it. But what
Speaker:grew out of that was this project you called Dingo, and that's that's
Speaker:serving that up, Frank. There you go. Tell us about Dingo,
Speaker:Frank. So we did talk about Dingo before because I was talking about open sourcing
Speaker:it. And I'm still I'm still I haven't done it yet, and it's not because
Speaker:I've changed my mind. It's just because I you open source
Speaker:something. You kinda have to do things the right way. And for me, now that
Speaker:I have 3 kids, I have to think about how can I
Speaker:best optimize the, the
Speaker:career and monetary potential? Speaking about time.
Speaker:Oh, yeah.
Speaker:Yeah. We're at, like, 45 minutes ish, I think. So,
Speaker:but good good call on that. Because we we we we tried the Joe Rogan
Speaker:multi hour thing. A couple episodes back, we did an
Speaker:experiment. The the views on that the listens on that was pretty
Speaker:not Joe Rogan level. Let's put it that way. They were off putting, I think,
Speaker:when people clicked on it and saw the time bar. Right. It really, like
Speaker:Yeah. And it was, like, you know what? That works out better too because for
Speaker:to find contiguous 3 hour blocks or 2 hour blocks of time for the
Speaker:both of us, plus a guest, is nigh
Speaker:impossible. So you know what? It's hard enough to do an hour.
Speaker:I'm okay with the hour thing, the 45 minutes to I I I
Speaker:I think if the conversation's right, I I I could justify going
Speaker:to 90 minutes. But beyond that, I don't think there's any serious
Speaker:value. That's right. And and and calm down. The 90 minutes is gonna be an
Speaker:outlier. Right. Right. Just because it's just
Speaker:because I don't know. Like, I just think that we have a sweet spot. We
Speaker:have it works. Yeah. So
Speaker:So you were working on this post here, the Glaze post? Yes.
Speaker:So this is actually so I gave a a talk, I gave a couple of
Speaker:talks on, Tech Days Pakistan.
Speaker:I didn't go to Pakistan. I did it remotely. Then I did
Speaker:a live stream, and then I did, actually, I think I still
Speaker:have it up on the the thing.
Speaker:And then, inter an
Speaker:internal lunch and learn brown bag session at Red Hat
Speaker:for a certain group. And then based on that,
Speaker:somebody said, have you heard about Glaze? And I had heard about
Speaker:something that, basically this is not the project I heard
Speaker:about. This is a second one. But Glaze is the idea is that it will
Speaker:interfere with the scraping and learning of an name of a of a
Speaker:of an AI can't talk.
Speaker:Of bots that sweep the Internet
Speaker:looking for content to train Gen AI models on.
Speaker:Gotcha. And that is the as of now, the latest post on
Speaker:frankswell.com. Yeah. But you could just look it up on Glaze. So
Speaker:somebody there sent me, this is interesting
Speaker:because this is the the slide I gave the talk on
Speaker:because we're talking about this. Right? And I'm not, you know,
Speaker:I also did a live stream on this on LinkedIn. But did I mention that
Speaker:already? It's time for a coffee reload. That's the other thing too with these
Speaker:multi hour shows is that there's biology becomes a
Speaker:problem. Right. Coffee and intake becomes a problem.
Speaker:So the this the topic of this talk was basically the importance of open source
Speaker:in AI. Right? And and basically, like, we don't know what data was used
Speaker:to train it. And if you're watching this, you see the cute images I
Speaker:have that we don't know how it was trained. We don't know what the model
Speaker:does. And then I said, surely, a foundation model
Speaker:owner will share this information openly and freely. Mhmm.
Speaker:And this is a the the pained look of expression,
Speaker:from Mira Murati, which I think is how you say it, or Myra. I've heard
Speaker:you call you call Myra too. Basically, was
Speaker:asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter, hey. Where'd you train your data for
Speaker:this? And she
Speaker:kinda that's the face she made. Yeah.
Speaker:And she claims to not know, and I
Speaker:call shenanigans on that because Yeah. Obvious depending on
Speaker:because if you look at her resume on LinkedIn, she's
Speaker:been part of the Elon Musk Cinematic Universe.
Speaker:I like that. That's to e the EMCU.
Speaker:She's been part of that world and, like, that level, and her education
Speaker:is is appears to be top notch. Mhmm.
Speaker:She knows. Like, she's been part of, like, Tesla when they were doing, like, the
Speaker:the putting AI in Tesla's, like, in the early 20 tens, which is way before
Speaker:it was cool. Right? So she she has a long history of this. For her
Speaker:not to know, I find highly unlikely.
Speaker:Right? I just find that suspect. I find that unlikely.
Speaker:I think that was I think it was a, uh-oh, speaking of
Speaker:lawyers. Right.
Speaker:But that was basically the gist. You showed the earlier slide with a quote
Speaker:where Elon is suing OpenAI. Yeah. Yeah. And,
Speaker:you know, part of it I I think before
Speaker:that suit, this is about something different. He's trying to get OpenAI to be
Speaker:open again. Right. And and he had a hand in founding it,
Speaker:so I definitely get his point on that. But before
Speaker:that, there was, he he was tweeting
Speaker:about and this is November 2022,
Speaker:December, about how all of these people trying
Speaker:to compete with chat GPT when it was released back then by
Speaker:scraping tweets. And he was they were trying to
Speaker:prevent that from happening, which sounds like what Glace does
Speaker:now Right. Is ways of obfuscating it or at least
Speaker:increasing the difficulty. That's but it's a perpetual
Speaker:cycle with anybody who is going after
Speaker:information, and that now includes people trying to scrape the web to get data
Speaker:to train AIs. But before
Speaker:that, it was hackers. You know? And I don't think this is going away.
Speaker:I think there's just gonna be yet another, you know,
Speaker:another instance where people are trying to get to information,
Speaker:for whatever reason. I mean, this happened to me in
Speaker:2008 or 2009. There was a a a
Speaker:company, and they aggregated
Speaker:technical blog posts and charged for the
Speaker:aggregation so people could subscribe, you know, to the I remember
Speaker:this. I remember this now. It was a bit of an exchange.
Speaker:I'll I'll admit. And I ended up kinda going through 2
Speaker:or 3 of them, and they were like they said, you're making your information
Speaker:available publicly for free. And I said, I
Speaker:am. And they said, so why can't we
Speaker:create, you know, summaries? They weren't copying it, but that that also
Speaker:happened, copying and pasting the post and putting them elsewhere.
Speaker:That was a different thing than this. They're like, why can't why can't we
Speaker:do this? And I said, for the same reason that others can't copy and
Speaker:paste their post to put their name. I own this, and I get
Speaker:to say. And if I wanted to create a newsletter and
Speaker:aggregate it and charge people, I don't know, $10 a month or
Speaker:something, then that would be different. But you
Speaker:don't have you didn't even ask. Right. And like and and you do not
Speaker:have my permission to do that, and I don't want people to have to
Speaker:pay you for my content. That's that was my
Speaker:argument. Now is it wrong or bad? That I don't know.
Speaker:It's how I felt. Right. It's,
Speaker:you know, and it's gonna get real
Speaker:interesting. Mhmm. You know?
Speaker:I mean, you know, so what what is interesting is we're recording
Speaker:this on the 21st March
Speaker:2024. And either today or
Speaker:tomorrow, there's a there's a case before the Supreme
Speaker:Court about the interaction between the federal
Speaker:government and the TLAs, the 3 letter agencies,
Speaker:and and social media. Oh,
Speaker:yeah. Circling around. And, you know, I I think it started it's been
Speaker:renamed, but it was Missouri versus Biden or Biden
Speaker:versus Missouri. It's been renamed into a different thing. And how
Speaker:do you feel about that? You know, I'm not telling you, you know, feel one
Speaker:way or another, but it's definitely No. There are other places to
Speaker:do that. It's it's well, it's crossing into the I'll say this about it. It's
Speaker:crossing into this kind of into the same thing about the AI
Speaker:and and social media. You've got, of course, a common common
Speaker:thing here with social media. But more than that,
Speaker:the impact of technology on
Speaker:culture. Yes. And a popular story that I've
Speaker:seen over the last 10 days or so has been
Speaker:accusations of suppressing certain
Speaker:information and search from a popular search engine.
Speaker:If that's the accusation, I'll I'll use the, you know, the official word
Speaker:allegedly. I don't know. I really don't
Speaker:know. But I will say that it
Speaker:tends to go one way.
Speaker:There's definitely a cultural mindset that seems to be
Speaker:the victim and another cultural mindset
Speaker:that seems to get a great big free pass.
Speaker:And that while I don't expect I don't
Speaker:expect equal coverage, I know the FCC did that for years.
Speaker:Fun fact, in the eighties, I worked at a television station.
Speaker:Really? I was, I was an I was an engineer, but it meant something different.
Speaker:But, yeah, like, when you watch the local news Yeah. And,
Speaker:and the stories were running and all of that, I was the guy putting the
Speaker:tapes in the machines and queuing them up and get the director would push a
Speaker:button and it would take off. So yeah. It was a fun gig,
Speaker:But the FCC had this rule about equal time for politics
Speaker:specifically. Right. Right. Right. So and it essentially
Speaker:meant that if you gave, let's just use
Speaker:democrats, and republicans. I'm not trying to say that
Speaker:there's not more there are, and it's getting really interesting. Seems like
Speaker:every presidential election cycle in the US, the
Speaker:independence, they'd put up somebody more and more interesting and
Speaker:likely to garner more votes. But if if you gave a democrat
Speaker:10 minutes to say, you know, their piece, you'd have to give a Republican
Speaker:10 minutes to say their piece. That was the whole thing about equal time. And
Speaker:I think they're striving for that same sort of
Speaker:balance, in in you know, with with
Speaker:popular search engines, with social media Right. Sites.
Speaker:And it's been interesting to watch that,
Speaker:kinda watch that argument. And it's because it's
Speaker:interesting to me because I end, I enjoy and
Speaker:I'm involved and engaged in the culture. You know?
Speaker:I'm I'm would say so are you. Even if
Speaker:and not you, Frank, but you are a listener. You are also engaged in our
Speaker:culture. People are engaged by the culture by
Speaker:default. Like, there's no opt there's no opt out for that mailing list. And and
Speaker:that that great. That's funny. The great philosopher,
Speaker:Geddy Lee, may have said it best. If you just if you choose not to
Speaker:decide, you still have made a choice. That's true.
Speaker:Yeah. So It was Geddy Lee. I thought it was Snoopy. Did
Speaker:Snoopy say that? Well, Geddy Lee wrote it's in part of free will from the
Speaker:spirit of the radio in, that Rush album back in the that would have been
Speaker:in the eighties, I think. I don't know. Maybe then. Yeah. It would
Speaker:have been the eighties. So quick time check because we we
Speaker:we got off road a bit, which is good. This is what we did. That's
Speaker:crazy talk. We never do that. Never do
Speaker:that. Who was it? Was it Stu Miniman that said we should
Speaker:sponsor, like, an off road racing team because we always go off track?
Speaker:Somebody said that. That'd be kinda cool, actually. Wait. How do you do
Speaker:that? The, since this is supposed to be a retrospective Yes. Which I think we
Speaker:did. We've had a
Speaker:Yeah. Yeah. I don't wanna pick a favorite show because that's hard to do. Yeah.
Speaker:I can do that one. But I will say I don't cringe
Speaker:every time I hear, digital transformation.
Speaker:Mhmm. And I have, our previous guest,
Speaker:Jennifer Swanson, to thank for that. Yeah.
Speaker:It was, I think
Speaker:about customer success differently after talking to Luke, Luke
Speaker:Diaz. That was a oh, yeah. Also, I
Speaker:just keep nodding my head, but all of them have
Speaker:been really good. All of them are really good. I mean, look, I would. Yeah.
Speaker:Nike, I don't wanna, like, take one down or whatever, but we've had some great
Speaker:shows. Even when it's just you and me like this. Like, those are actually among
Speaker:the most popular ones. And the security guys, you mentioned that one
Speaker:earlier. My god. That show was bad. That was just fun because we were just
Speaker:firing off of each other. Right. Right. Right. Right. So much. Get on we gotta
Speaker:get them back and see if we will let us on their show. And Wayne
Speaker:and Patrick. Yeah. But,
Speaker:no. I I mean, 360 shows, 7
Speaker:seasons. Wow. We mentioned George RR Martin, and
Speaker:I know it's not necessarily his fault that season 8 of Game of Thrones is
Speaker:awful. But, you know, we we promise we will do a
Speaker:better job on season 8 than they did.
Speaker:That's funny. See, I never watched the Game of Thrones nor have
Speaker:I read the books. Okay. I didn't get into it right
Speaker:away. Yeah. But I started watching around
Speaker:season 4. And then I caught
Speaker:up, and there definitely is, like, a a quality shift.
Speaker:Season 8, especially, because everybody was you could tell everybody was done.
Speaker:Mhmm. The 2 guys, the showrunners,
Speaker:had just signed a deal with Lucasfilm to do a Star Wars Oh.
Speaker:Thing. And I don't wanna speak for
Speaker:them, but it looks like they were just phoning in the last season.
Speaker:And I don't know. It was just creative work.
Speaker:I Yeah. You you gotta be all in. You gotta love it. Especially
Speaker:Yeah. Something like that where they go to these weird locations.
Speaker:They write they have to and if you're a showrunner, it's kind of it's a
Speaker:bit of a thankless job because you're not you're responsible
Speaker:for getting the show done. You're not really the director, so you're not directing actors.
Speaker:At least that's my understanding for the most part.
Speaker:You have to manage all the personalities and stuff like I
Speaker:don't know. It's like Yeah. But you could tell. Like, if you're not all in,
Speaker:it shows. I think that's a very good way to put it.
Speaker:Yeah. Well, I I
Speaker:think, I've said this before. I'll repeat
Speaker:it. We've got,
Speaker:a a lot we've had a lot of views. We
Speaker:recently learned when people started coming to us with
Speaker:guests, we learned that there's a market out there where if you're
Speaker:interested in publicizing stuff, you can hire an agency,
Speaker:and they will line you up with shows. They started
Speaker:calling us. This has probably been the last 3 seasons maybe. We've
Speaker:had mostly that, if not more. That's true. And
Speaker:the, you had a conversation with one of the people from one
Speaker:of those agencies, like Yeah. I don't know, last year or so. And you
Speaker:you were kinda asking like It was December because I remember because it was Yeah.
Speaker:And you were like, why us? 2 well,
Speaker:I'd like to say I said it a little more. I'm sure you said it
Speaker:better. But the
Speaker:so for those that don't know, 2 of my 3 boys have birthdays in December.
Speaker:So December is basically the the time of madness.
Speaker:And so she contacts me, like, literally on the eve of
Speaker:the time of madness. And, you know,
Speaker:because I had not been responding because, like, the way it goes to my old
Speaker:email address, which I don't check. I've I've since changed.
Speaker:And, which reminds me I have a lot of follow-up to do in
Speaker:my spare time. But you said
Speaker:I mean, that's part of the reason why, like, you know, we really need a
Speaker:virtual assistant. Right? I mean, that's kind of like, Yeah. We're getting there.
Speaker:That's for sure. To that point, which is why we're we love what
Speaker:we do. We love serving the community, which is why we wanna find ways to
Speaker:monetize this. Right? And, you know, I spend more at Starbucks every time I
Speaker:walk in the door, than we would for what we're asking for
Speaker:the subscription thing. Yeah. But
Speaker:the point I was going, she was telling us that
Speaker:apparently, on some rating sites, a couple of rating sites, we're, like, in
Speaker:the top 2 a half percent, which
Speaker:I'm like, what? We both had the same reaction. What? I
Speaker:was like, where did you see that? She goes, oh, on the on this rating
Speaker:service, you know, the industry uses. I'm like, can you send me a link
Speaker:to that? Because I have to see it to
Speaker:but turns out 2 a half percent. Yeah. And then when I kinda went through
Speaker:the numbers and I kinda went through, like, this, it's like, it's not
Speaker:it's not impossible. Right? Because, you know, you I mean, 1, I'm
Speaker:very flattered, but 2, I Yeah. I'm I'm I try to be
Speaker:humble. But, what's that song? It's hard to be
Speaker:humble when you're perfect in every way. That's Matt Davis
Speaker:from 19 seventies. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good
Speaker:The, no. But when I when I when
Speaker:I kind of ran the numbers, like, you know, it's plausible.
Speaker:It's believable. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they say it. They have their metrics. I
Speaker:was reading through their whole, they have a whole,
Speaker:justification, how they rank stuff. And I was like, that is cool.
Speaker:That is cool. So we're looking at ways to kind of expand on on on
Speaker:that. Right? And grow, like, you know, I wanna be in the top
Speaker:1%. Like, why not? Right? I mean Heck yeah. Heck. We shouldn't have made
Speaker:it this far. Let's let's see how far this thing can
Speaker:go. But,
Speaker:and and also too, I think something you said early on in this recording
Speaker:was this originally was gonna be a video.
Speaker:Right? Yeah. This originally was going to be
Speaker:a video podcast, but the logistics at the time were a lot harder. The
Speaker:technology the ability to live do a live stream for your browser was not
Speaker:a thing in 2016, 2017. And we were
Speaker:really struggling with logistics. And then finally, you said, let's just launch,
Speaker:which I think is 1, this one of the smartest things you ever
Speaker:said or did. And 2, I think a lesson for life.
Speaker:Right? I was being a perfectionist waiting for things to be
Speaker:perfect before we did something. Well, I you it
Speaker:wasn't without, without merit. It was a good idea. Right. Right. Right.
Speaker:And it still is a good idea. I mean, we still chase after. We're still
Speaker:doing it now. Sure. And then when we finally,
Speaker:you know, I think that I'm glad we
Speaker:launched because that's created a certain amount of momentum Sure.
Speaker:That if we not done that, we wouldn't I don't know if we ever would've
Speaker:launched because we still be working on tweaking up the video. Well and, you know,
Speaker:Frank, you had this happen. I've had this happen. If whenever I go
Speaker:to an in person event now, inevitably, someone comes up
Speaker:and says you know, it shares an opinion about the podcast.
Speaker:Almost always, it's positive. But a few times that few times when it
Speaker:hasn't been positive, it's been why don't you think about doing this and why don't
Speaker:you do it that way? And it gives an opportunity to exchange.
Speaker:Most of the time, I I'm able to explain to the person, like,
Speaker:yeah, we tried that or we can't or, you know, here's the
Speaker:obstacles to that. But I'd say probably slightly
Speaker:less than half that time, I come back with an idea and say, hey. This
Speaker:person brought this up. It's like, I've been thinking about it. It was like, not
Speaker:a bad thought. You know, maybe it's just that bad. We love feedback. We love
Speaker:feedback. It's it's never like, somebody said we weren't doing
Speaker:things right. And I'm so that's never our
Speaker:our reaction is like, yeah. Okay. Cool.
Speaker:Anyway, thank you all for, yeah, for hanging in here
Speaker:with us. Yes. We're way over time. We just talked about how long shows don't
Speaker:do well. Not bad. I am honored,
Speaker:to work with you, Frank, on this. And I I think Ditto,
Speaker:man. That's all part of the projects that are in
Speaker:various states of conceptualization. They're floating around here, but
Speaker:I can't think of anybody that I'd rather do this kind of work with.
Speaker:And we're very complimentary. Well, thank you, brother. And we
Speaker:think differently about stuff,
Speaker:and it shows. And it's
Speaker:it's like, I'm trying to remember the old flywheel
Speaker:thing. I think it was from a Collins book about the the flywheel
Speaker:concept. Good to great, maybe? Yeah. It was from good to great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker:And it's that that just keeps going. And we've now we've got
Speaker:we've really got people don't know this. We've got almost 20 years. We're
Speaker:coming out it'll be 19 years this fall since we met.
Speaker:And we got about 20 years of that. And the the podcast is just one
Speaker:of the things. It was November. It was, like, mid November, 1st
Speaker:week of November 2005. We met at the
Speaker:richmond.netusersgroup.
Speaker:I think I think, the amount of coffee and water I drink is really
Speaker:gonna be the the limiting factor for how long these shows can be.
Speaker:Excellent, Frank. Alright, man. Have a good one. Andy,
Speaker:everyone out there, thank you very much, and we look forward to
Speaker:serving you with entertaining guests and knowledgeable
Speaker:stuff. I need to work on that. That'll
Speaker:work. Maybe Chad should be taken. Maybe Bobby Draper can help me with that.
Speaker:She could. Could not use. So so creating these
Speaker:personas and of fictional characters is actually pretty cool because you could interact with them.
Speaker:Like, again, I don't wanna extend the show any longer, but,
Speaker:I might I might do a live stream later today. I'm, like, triple booked
Speaker:half the day. So Yeah. You've got some really cool
Speaker:ones. Your customs Yes. Fees. I've got like, about a half a
Speaker:dozen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool, man. We should do a show about
Speaker:them. That'd be awesome. That'd be awesome. Cool, man. We,
Speaker:speaking of Bailey, before I hand it off to Bailey. Bailey is one of them.
Speaker:I created a a a custom GPT, so chances are the stuff
Speaker:that Bailey is about to say was generated by AI, which is fitting
Speaker:because she's AI. So There you go. Think it
Speaker:goes full circle. Alright. Thanks, everyone. And, Bailey,
Speaker:take us home. And there we have it. Dear listeners, the end
Speaker:of our 360 degree expedition. You've been
Speaker:riding shotgun with Frank and Andy as they navigated the highways and
Speaker:byways of data driven discussions with a generous sprinkle of
Speaker:delightful digressions along the way. It's been quite the journey
Speaker:a full circle, returning us right back to where we started but
Speaker:richer for the experience. We hope you've enjoyed this retrospective
Speaker:romp through the past 7 seasons as much as we've enjoyed presenting it
Speaker:to you. Perhaps you've laughed, learned something new, or
Speaker:maybe even both. That's always the goal here at Data
Speaker:Driven. Before we sign off, remember to like, subscribe
Speaker:and ring that bell or do whatever it is you do to keep this digital
Speaker:dialogue alive and kicking. Your engagement keeps the gears
Speaker:turning and the data flowing. From the depths of our digital
Speaker:hearts, Frank, Andy, and I, your humble,
Speaker:semiscient host Bailey. Thank you for joining us. Until
Speaker:next time. Keep questioning, keep exploring, and
Speaker:above all, stay data driven.
About the author, Frank
Frank La Vigne is a software engineer and UX geek who saw the light about Data Science at an internal Microsoft Data Science Summit in 2016. Now, he wants to share his passion for the Data Arts with the world.
He blogs regularly at FranksWorld.com and has a YouTube channel called Frank's World TV. (www.FranksWorld.TV). Frank has extensive experience in web and application development. He is also an expert in mobile and tablet engineering. You can find him on Twitter at @tableteer.