[00:00.000 --> 00:04.000]  Okay, so I'm a consultant, author, educator.
[00:04.340 --> 00:08.100]  I've written a bunch of books, but the ones I have now are these two.
[00:08.420 --> 00:15.240]  I've had one book or another on entertainment control systems and networking technology for live shows since the 90s.
[00:15.820 --> 00:21.340]  I just early retired from Citi Tech in the part of CUNY, my local one stagehand.
[00:21.620 --> 00:26.640]  We have this thing called ETCP certification in the live production industry.
[00:26.640 --> 00:28.440]  I actually helped to write that test.
[00:28.440 --> 00:30.120]  And I've done a little bit of everything.
[00:30.240 --> 00:38.820]  I've worked in feature films, concerts, theater, theme park kind of stuff, all this stuff because I'm old and been doing this a long time.
[00:39.080 --> 00:41.500]  Also a photographer and storm chaser.
[00:41.500 --> 00:44.440]  I've actually done... and this is my eighth talk at HOPE.
[00:44.440 --> 00:48.080]  I don't think I've done any two on even related topics.
[00:48.100 --> 00:51.340]  So I sort of did one on this idea, but this is a new one for this.
[00:51.480 --> 00:55.000]  So are there anybody here that works backstage or has worked backstage?
[00:55.700 --> 00:56.580]  Oh, good.
[00:56.720 --> 00:58.860]  I'd say like maybe 20%, something like that.
[00:59.080 --> 01:02.100]  I'm going to skip through this, but we'll get moving here.
[01:02.840 --> 01:08.460]  So what we're going to talk about today is this hypothesis that I had like a few years ago.
[01:08.640 --> 01:17.400]  I kind of had this realization like, oh, it seems like our technology is not evolving as fast as it was when I first started in the industry.
[01:17.400 --> 01:26.420]  So if you're old like me, I turned 60 this year or last year, it wasn't obvious because it's kind of a slow process going through.
[01:26.740 --> 01:31.180]  People new to our industry or new to live production are going to be like, oh, this is the way it is.
[01:31.300 --> 01:32.780]  So there's been some big changes.
[01:32.980 --> 01:38.380]  And this is sort of the classic, you know, exponential curve and the stuff we've seen this before.
[01:38.920 --> 01:45.640]  So the idea is that, you know, in the live show production, this is now what we would call mature technology.
[01:45.860 --> 01:50.260]  So going to the great source of Wikipedia for this, I think it's a pretty good definition.
[01:51.120 --> 01:52.200]  I'll just read some of this.
[01:52.560 --> 01:58.200]  Technology has been in use for long enough that most of the initial faults and inherent problems have been removed or reduced by further development.
[01:58.340 --> 02:01.760]  So this is something like, it's here, it's not changing a whole lot.
[02:03.040 --> 02:07.960]  Key indication of mature technology is ease of use for both non-experts and professionals.
[02:08.220 --> 02:13.600]  So when I started doing this stuff a long time ago, it was difficult to get in, it was difficult to get the gear.
[02:13.880 --> 02:15.440]  Now you can just buy it online, right?
[02:15.640 --> 02:19.900]  So it doesn't mean you don't know how to use it, but you have that idea.
[02:20.440 --> 02:26.180]  Also, we see less sort of advancement, sort of big... I haven't talked this loud in a long time.
[02:28.200 --> 02:35.940]  Sort of see big, not so many sort of, you know, really dramatic changes and stuff going through.
[02:36.520 --> 02:40.000]  And the, like, it's really now we're sort of in incremental stage.
[02:40.080 --> 02:43.280]  I think I have some evidence to talk about that.
[02:43.720 --> 02:45.740]  Mature doesn't mean perfect or good.
[02:45.920 --> 02:50.980]  I mean, the example I would use, this is like, you know, hand washers and the dryers in the bathroom.
[02:51.300 --> 02:52.760]  Like that's been around a long time.
[02:52.960 --> 02:55.340]  It still works like 50% of the time for me, right?
[02:55.340 --> 03:00.360]  So that's something like, even though it's been around for a while, it's what we would call mature.
[03:00.540 --> 03:03.500]  It doesn't mean everything's been, it's not going to work for everybody all the time.
[03:04.720 --> 03:06.140]  So just a little bit of history.
[03:06.620 --> 03:17.660]  So what we often refer to, and there's no real authority on this that I'm aware of, but we kind of often, we think of the dawn of the modern show production era was Beatles at Shea Stadium.
[03:17.800 --> 03:19.080]  Actually, not too far from here.
[03:19.220 --> 03:20.160]  Shea Stadium's gone.
[03:20.420 --> 03:21.460]  It's Citi Field now.
[03:21.460 --> 03:25.860]  But it's just the, I don't know what direction we're pointing, but a couple of miles from here.
[03:26.980 --> 03:30.800]  This was a, really by today's standard, this is a pretty primitive production.
[03:31.080 --> 03:34.260]  So no stage roof, no backdrop, no stage lighting.
[03:34.360 --> 03:35.660]  This is just the stadium lights on.
[03:35.660 --> 03:38.200]  You can see very underpowered PA.
[03:39.920 --> 03:41.080]  No stage monitors.
[03:41.220 --> 03:46.580]  If you see the movie or the film from that concert, they're like, oh, they can hear.
[03:46.800 --> 03:51.340]  That's because they played, you know, six hours a night in Hamburg all those years.
[03:51.520 --> 03:54.020]  Like, they didn't really need to hear each other to be able to play.
[03:54.180 --> 03:57.140]  So today, like, nobody would be able to work that way.
[03:57.620 --> 04:00.960]  No video, no iMag, none of that image magnification.
[04:01.160 --> 04:03.140]  So really primitive by today's standards.
[04:03.840 --> 04:05.560]  But you could say it's a success.
[04:05.560 --> 04:08.460]  This is just a quote from my downstairs neighbor in Brooklyn.
[04:09.140 --> 04:10.000]  She was there.
[04:10.240 --> 04:12.540]  She was the president of the Beatles fan club in Queens.
[04:12.820 --> 04:15.000]  This was like a life changing thing for her.
[04:15.160 --> 04:17.880]  You know, I don't know what, she was 12 or 13, something like that.
[04:19.320 --> 04:22.660]  But even she's saying, you know, you really couldn't understand what they were saying.
[04:22.800 --> 04:24.540]  But you can kind of tell they were speaking.
[04:24.740 --> 04:28.120]  But they were just so overwhelmed by the screams and all that kind of stuff.
[04:28.120 --> 04:34.480]  And, you know, even today with like the biggest sounds that we have, you can't really compete with a big crowd making a lot of noise.
[04:34.800 --> 04:38.160]  A friend of mine was on tour with Dave Matthews once in Madison Square Garden.
[04:38.400 --> 04:40.820]  And I went and was standing in the mix position next to him.
[04:41.080 --> 04:43.660]  And they had, you know, a sing-along kind of song.
[04:43.900 --> 04:46.340]  And the mixer actually just turned down and went like this.
[04:46.760 --> 04:46.980]  Right?
[04:47.100 --> 04:50.060]  Because you're not going to, like, push the band up over that.
[04:50.180 --> 04:50.920]  Because what's going to happen?
[04:51.000 --> 04:51.720]  You're going to get louder.
[04:52.020 --> 04:53.420]  Crowd's going to get louder like this.
[04:53.540 --> 04:57.420]  So you cannot compete with a stadium full of screaming people, right?
[04:58.620 --> 05:02.580]  So from our profession, our professional view, this is really kind of a failure.
[05:03.080 --> 05:07.360]  And Bob McCarthy is an old friend of mine who's really a pioneer in live sound.
[05:07.660 --> 05:11.100]  I mean, any tremendous exam...
[05:12.220 --> 05:12.620]  Sorry.
[05:13.760 --> 05:15.900]  Again, I really haven't spoken this in a long time.
[05:17.140 --> 05:20.040]  Just tremendous innovations in live sound that he was part of.
[05:20.200 --> 05:22.320]  But he had this great quote that I got from the article.
[05:22.480 --> 05:26.980]  Like, it was kind of remarkable that he did this show, like, without the technology to do it.
[05:26.980 --> 05:29.160]  Some promoter was like, oh, we're going to do this.
[05:29.280 --> 05:33.100]  And then they call up some production firm, like, 50,000 people.
[05:33.220 --> 05:33.420]  What?
[05:33.540 --> 05:34.560]  You know, we can't do this.
[05:34.720 --> 05:35.980]  So, but they did it anyway.
[05:36.220 --> 05:41.160]  And I actually didn't realize that there was two concerts at Shea Stadium.
[05:41.260 --> 05:42.820]  So the second one, it's kind of interesting.
[05:43.100 --> 05:44.940]  You look at the first one, here's the setup.
[05:45.180 --> 05:48.780]  The second one, actually, they started improving things, right?
[05:49.100 --> 05:50.400]  Much different stage setup.
[05:50.560 --> 05:51.340]  There's, like, security.
[05:51.600 --> 05:53.200]  There's, like, a VIP area now.
[05:53.200 --> 05:54.580]  Of course, you've got to have that.
[05:55.540 --> 05:59.420]  Oh, and these I have from here, from a guy who was there online.
[06:01.060 --> 06:04.740]  Tony G, whoever that is, found this old site that he has there.
[06:04.860 --> 06:06.060]  It has a lot of great photos in here.
[06:06.240 --> 06:08.780]  I have all this stuff linked out for my website.
[06:08.900 --> 06:13.540]  But you can kind of see in here, the, you know, really this is, like, primitive by today's standards.
[06:13.660 --> 06:21.360]  But now, I think, still no stage monitors, but some amps, a little bigger speakers, still way underpowered by any modern standards.
[06:21.540 --> 06:25.440]  But that's the tools they had in 1965 to do this thing.
[06:26.860 --> 06:28.020]  Come back up here.
[06:28.540 --> 06:31.020]  One thing, just sort of trivia with that, that show didn't sell out.
[06:31.140 --> 06:34.200]  There was 11,000 tickets available for it, which is kind of amazing.
[06:34.440 --> 06:37.520]  Because even back then, I mean, this was the throes of Beatlemania, right?
[06:37.520 --> 06:44.220]  So, okay, so, um, the idea here, I talked about this a little bit before.
[06:44.900 --> 06:46.920]  There was sort of these three phases, right?
[06:47.040 --> 06:56.860]  Early days, that's from Greek theater up to, um, really through, you know, starting, again, we saw the modern era, like 1965, roughly.
[06:57.240 --> 07:06.200]  And then around about 1985, which also when I got out of college, we hit this crazy rapid acceleration period where, like, all kinds of things started going nuts.
[07:07.000 --> 07:11.300]  And then around about 2010, we hit some kind of maturity point.
[07:11.840 --> 07:13.880]  Uh, research for this, I kind of lived it.
[07:14.000 --> 07:18.040]  So this is, you know, when I was a kid, if you wanted a lighting console, you had to build one.
[07:18.340 --> 07:22.300]  That thing is, like, wrong and illegal and dangerous by so many different ways.
[07:22.300 --> 07:23.240]  It's kind of insane.
[07:23.680 --> 07:27.660]  Um, but, you know, these days, you can just buy some stuff on Amazon.
[07:27.800 --> 07:29.540]  You can, you know, you can have this.
[07:29.780 --> 07:31.960]  It doesn't cost that much, made in China, whatever.
[07:33.040 --> 07:36.120]  Um, sorry, a couple of, and I'll show you a couple other photos on here.
[07:36.560 --> 07:38.260]  Um, and you can kind of see this.
[07:38.400 --> 07:41.460]  I just have this sort of visual resume thing on my website.
[07:41.460 --> 07:43.400]  You can see, but it went through that.
[07:43.400 --> 07:48.780]  And then when I was working on some films back in the eighties, uh, I'll go over that one in a second.
[07:48.980 --> 07:51.460]  You can kind of see, I think this is relevant for this show.
[07:51.720 --> 07:54.440]  You, you can see the computer technology we have.
[07:54.580 --> 07:55.280]  That's PDP.
[07:55.400 --> 07:56.660]  I can't remember if that's seven or 11.
[07:56.820 --> 07:58.100]  Somebody probably knows upstairs.
[07:58.620 --> 08:00.180]  Um, that's our computer.
[08:00.180 --> 08:03.420]  We were doing motion control camera stuff with that back then.
[08:03.920 --> 08:08.460]  Um, we had some really genius programmers to do this stuff.
[08:08.580 --> 08:10.160]  I was just like the kid with the soldering arm.
[08:10.240 --> 08:13.620]  I was very kind of fortunate to be there in that time and be around all this stuff.
[08:13.700 --> 08:15.300]  This is for a movie called Making Mr. Right.
[08:15.600 --> 08:18.940]  The hand painted globe back there on a really overkill robot.
[08:19.340 --> 08:24.840]  Um, but this is what, you know, we were doing in 19, you know, late 1980s for this stuff.
[08:25.260 --> 08:26.700]  Um, back in the year.
[08:27.000 --> 08:32.220]  Um, so I had this started thinking about this and I wrote a couple articles that were published in 2019.
[08:32.800 --> 08:34.400]  Those are linked out from my website.
[08:34.620 --> 08:36.200]  I'll have that again at the end.
[08:36.400 --> 08:38.240]  Uh, really sort of laid out this idea.
[08:38.440 --> 08:50.020]  And so I went through this and I, I, this started like as a napkin sketch and I'm like, well, I can kind of develop this idea, but I kind of, I made a timeline of this stuff, which again is linked out from the website if you want to look at the detail.
[08:50.220 --> 09:00.140]  So the details here, obviously I'm not expecting anybody to like go through all this stuff, but what I did is I kind of plotted out sort of seminal shows, like what the innovations were on each one.
[09:00.680 --> 09:09.560]  And then kind of came up with this idea that around here in this middle period, the crazy acceleration period, there was just these one big crazy, you know, show after another.
[09:09.840 --> 09:17.160]  And then around about 2010 from about there on, it's not, of course there's still innovation, but these shows are kind of looking the same.
[09:17.280 --> 09:18.240]  They're not looking all that different.
[09:18.480 --> 09:20.560]  These are professional associations, same thing.
[09:20.560 --> 09:24.500]  We're not having like 12 new professional associations come in now.
[09:25.300 --> 09:31.160]  And then down here, these are each of the technologies in each area.
[09:31.300 --> 09:32.720]  So like lighting, sound, and so on.
[09:33.040 --> 09:34.160]  Green is sort of the development.
[09:34.620 --> 09:37.500]  Red would be what I call sort of a mature idea.
[09:37.840 --> 09:47.280]  So a lot, again, you know, the date is roughly around 2010 for most things, which now, even now is, what, 13, 14 years ago.
[09:47.940 --> 09:48.840]  You get the idea.
[09:49.100 --> 09:56.140]  You don't need to get all the details for here, but you kind of can see, at least by my methods here, there was a lot of kind of development.
[09:56.600 --> 09:59.360]  None of these things really existed much before that period.
[09:59.640 --> 10:02.460]  Then a whole lot of them existed, and now they're all kind of stable.
[10:02.680 --> 10:06.160]  So this has a lot of implications for a lot of stuff that we're doing.
[10:07.980 --> 10:08.880]  Talk about that.
[10:08.880 --> 10:11.420]  So what does a mature setup look like?
[10:11.540 --> 10:14.480]  So this is in Citi Field, not too far from the old...
[10:14.480 --> 10:17.320]  I think it's like across the parking lot from the old Chase Stadium site.
[10:17.580 --> 10:19.820]  This is what a more modern show looks like.
[10:20.040 --> 10:21.920]  Stage roof, big backdrop.
[10:22.440 --> 10:25.800]  There's the modern stage lighting, moving lights, all this kind of stuff.
[10:26.100 --> 10:27.700]  High-powered PA up behind here.
[10:27.820 --> 10:30.180]  This is a little bit old now, but you get the idea.
[10:30.760 --> 10:33.540]  Stage monitors, of course, like people wouldn't work without that now.
[10:33.700 --> 10:35.960]  Even today, it'd be a lot of in-ears.
[10:36.200 --> 10:38.300]  Big video walls in the back.
[10:38.300 --> 10:40.740]  This was actually 15 years ago, right?
[10:40.880 --> 10:43.340]  So this was Paul McCartney at Citi Field.
[10:43.600 --> 10:47.300]  One of the same guy who played there in 1965, you know, down the road.
[10:47.820 --> 10:54.980]  But this is sort of the... the point is there's this huge change from that very primitive setup you saw there to this one.
[10:55.740 --> 10:58.300]  And also there's a lot of other things that are sorted out.
[10:58.440 --> 11:01.240]  Like they're on a different... the audience is now out on the field.
[11:01.400 --> 11:02.260]  That's been sorted out.
[11:02.360 --> 11:04.140]  There's this like plastic stuff all over the field.
[11:04.480 --> 11:05.500]  The audience is much closer.
[11:05.500 --> 11:08.200]  We have a lot more security procedures in place.
[11:08.400 --> 11:14.180]  Like all these things that would make a modern show are all in place, but this is 15 years ago, right?
[11:14.460 --> 11:21.500]  So, you know, again, today they'd be slightly different speakers, slightly different, you know, little cheaper, brighter, moving light, that kind of stuff.
[11:21.580 --> 11:24.300]  But really not much change from 15 years ago to now.
[11:25.440 --> 11:30.080]  And again, I have on the web here, let's go look at this.
[11:32.600 --> 11:35.080]  Again, on Flickr, a bunch of photos here you can see.
[11:35.140 --> 11:39.220]  And this is... I have this all linked out, but you kind of get the idea that now, like when they played...
[11:39.220 --> 11:48.200]  Before they were like out here in the field and the audience is in the stands, they kind of realize it's not great to have like 150 feet between the performers and the audience.
[11:48.200 --> 11:48.700]  Right?
[11:48.940 --> 11:52.560]  So now they're way out here in center field, the audience is out here.
[11:52.720 --> 11:54.240]  I just think they sold some seats as well.
[11:54.420 --> 11:57.480]  But you can do this now because we've... all these things are sorted out.
[11:57.660 --> 11:58.620]  We've got video.
[11:59.900 --> 12:03.200]  And somewhere in here you'll see there's like big picture backstage.
[12:05.080 --> 12:06.860]  Yeah, it's again security procedures.
[12:07.300 --> 12:09.820]  I'm trying to get ahead to the... we're looking for one photo here.
[12:11.040 --> 12:15.000]  Yeah, here you can see we got big... we call this IMAG, image magnification.
[12:15.000 --> 12:23.880]  So now, and I'd say the extreme example of this now is the Sphere that just opened in Las Vegas, which is now like the band is insignificant.
[12:23.880 --> 12:25.000]  It's just about video.
[12:25.160 --> 12:26.720]  So I have a lot of thoughts about that.
[12:26.880 --> 12:29.760]  I actually did some consulting work on that back pre-pandemic.
[12:30.440 --> 12:33.740]  I could talk about that for an hour, but we'll see when we're together with that.
[12:34.640 --> 12:35.800]  So what does all this mean?
[12:35.900 --> 12:45.360]  The basic ideas as an industry now in the entertainment technology field and also in show production and safety, like all these things, we know how to do this stuff now.
[12:45.620 --> 12:51.280]  So that we ended up with sort of big three technologies, rigging, obviously very... there's a lot of safety implications.
[12:51.580 --> 12:57.880]  We have a certification for that now, electrical distribution, also safety implications.
[12:58.200 --> 13:08.020]  This particular show, this is Ramstein, Ramstein, I don't know how you pronounce this correctly, but there's like, you know, on the Facebook groups about show production, they show like the power layout for this thing.
[13:08.240 --> 13:09.040]  It's insane.
[13:09.300 --> 13:15.640]  It draws so much power, but they put this in and out in a couple days for a one-off, one or two performances of show.
[13:16.040 --> 13:27.560]  And, you know, all this crazy flame effects and pyro, sound, lighting, like, because we have all these mature tools now, you can kind of leverage that out and do all this crazy stuff for a tour.
[13:27.560 --> 13:32.660]  Like this is kind of... to do this in even 1980-something would be like a theme park attraction.
[13:32.660 --> 13:35.140]  It's like built and then runs for 20 years.
[13:38.080 --> 13:40.540]  And then networking, this is sort of my area specialty.
[13:40.940 --> 13:45.940]  I've written my books about, but basically anything we're going to build today, we're going to move bits around.
[13:46.040 --> 13:51.340]  I was actually in the meeting today of the ESTA Control Protocol Working Group, just talking about networking.
[13:51.340 --> 13:56.120]  We have some old protocols we still use, but any future development is going to be based on Ethernet.
[13:56.380 --> 13:59.100]  It's just that's the thing, cheapest, easiest way to do anything.
[13:59.720 --> 14:00.800]  So what does this mean?
[14:01.420 --> 14:09.340]  Like I said, we used to be always inventing this stuff, but now we've got a lot of standardization and really an immense amount of knowledge in the industry now.
[14:09.340 --> 14:14.600]  Again, if we can like pull something like that off on a tour, it's kind of unbelievable, right?
[14:14.880 --> 14:22.700]  Just the amount of like decades now of know-how and have sorted things out and engineering and problem-solving, all these things.
[14:22.820 --> 14:25.360]  But now we have this mature toolset.
[14:26.420 --> 14:30.680]  Also we have, as I said, I just retired from 24 years of teaching.
[14:31.740 --> 14:34.100]  I taught at a CUNY school down in Brooklyn.
[14:34.340 --> 14:37.560]  I really feel like we're a trade show.
[14:37.700 --> 14:38.320]  We're still there.
[14:38.480 --> 14:38.960]  I'm not there.
[14:39.180 --> 14:40.560]  I struggle with the tents.
[14:40.860 --> 14:42.220]  But it's a trade now.
[14:42.320 --> 14:43.600]  Being a stagehand is a trade.
[14:43.840 --> 14:53.240]  You know, when I got into it, it was mostly kind of middle-class white people that would sort of get into this thing or the alternative like kind of insane pirate kind of, you know, nutty people.
[14:53.700 --> 14:55.960]  That was sort of where the world came from.
[14:55.960 --> 14:58.440]  Now it's really a professional industry.
[14:58.740 --> 15:10.060]  I had a lot of students over the years that came up, grew up in the city, you know, you know, worked in their parents' tire shop or bodega or whatever, and then ended up doing professional entertainment production.
[15:10.060 --> 15:12.680]  So it's like a real trade now.
[15:13.780 --> 15:15.780]  Also the gear doesn't go obsolete as fast.
[15:15.980 --> 15:17.080]  These actually aren't working now.
[15:17.220 --> 15:19.840]  But even those lights are really old.
[15:20.020 --> 15:22.680]  Those are the modern thing, what you would buy today.
[15:22.860 --> 15:23.680]  You buy the LED version.
[15:23.680 --> 15:25.420]  That's about 20 years old now.
[15:25.640 --> 15:30.740]  That speaker form sort of matured in the mid, late 90s, early 2000s.
[15:31.420 --> 15:37.820]  So now this stuff, you know, don't tell administrators, but like when you put an investment in something, it's going to last a while.
[15:37.880 --> 15:39.700]  Unless, if you buy good quality stuff anyway.
[15:40.240 --> 15:41.300]  Also, it's kind of interesting.
[15:41.700 --> 15:43.680]  I went to school for theater.
[15:43.900 --> 15:48.440]  I came out, the first thing I did was work on some feature films like Little Shop of Horrors, The Manhattan Project.
[15:49.900 --> 15:53.320]  It was kind of a different world because they still did lighting and all this stuff.
[15:53.500 --> 15:58.660]  But it was like different brands, different types of fixtures, different connectors, different power.
[15:58.900 --> 16:00.620]  So we were in these sort of parallel worlds.
[16:00.720 --> 16:02.120]  It's all merged together now.
[16:02.280 --> 16:05.760]  There are things that are more used in film and video production than live stuff.
[16:05.940 --> 16:08.860]  But there's a lot of crossover between all this stuff.
[16:08.860 --> 16:12.520]  And now all the connectors and power distribution, all that stuff is all sort of stable.
[16:13.000 --> 16:14.540]  Also, we see it in eSports.
[16:15.080 --> 16:18.400]  Home Haunts are doing like crazy stuff with now, that stuff now.
[16:18.540 --> 16:21.120]  And again, you can buy, you know, you could do...
[16:21.120 --> 16:25.900]  Not going to get the high-end professional stuff that you want to put on a big, you know, Taylor Swift tour or something.
[16:26.240 --> 16:28.740]  But I mean, you can get workable stuff now on Amazon.
[16:28.760 --> 16:29.600]  It's kind of crazy.
[16:32.400 --> 16:39.640]  So I think one thing that was sort of interesting to me, like I spent my entire career just like kind of scrambling to keep up with a new thing.
[16:39.760 --> 16:42.580]  I have to enjoy that, which is, you know, it's good for me.
[16:42.700 --> 16:45.260]  But it's not great as like to build a profession.
[16:45.260 --> 16:49.420]  So now a lot of people that come in now, learn how to do this stuff now.
[16:49.580 --> 16:54.440]  Most of those tool sets they're going to learn, I would wager are going to last in their career, right?
[16:55.460 --> 17:01.960]  Also, what's kind of fascinating is having these mature tools means that the tools kind of drift out into other types of usages.
[17:02.640 --> 17:06.520]  And if we get some time at the end, I have some examples of that.
[17:07.060 --> 17:16.020]  Also, I talked about this a little bit before, but after the like, the weather tragedy at the Indiana State Fair, 15 years ago, I'm terrible at dates.
[17:17.540 --> 17:23.140]  That was where a stage got blown down by a spear thunderstorm, absolutely inexcusable in every way.
[17:23.140 --> 17:24.300]  I'm just a storm chaser.
[17:24.320 --> 17:24.920]  I looked at the radar.
[17:25.040 --> 17:26.240]  I'm like, why you still have a show?
[17:26.320 --> 17:26.780]  What are you doing?
[17:26.780 --> 17:27.680]  I'm not a meteorologist.
[17:28.100 --> 17:31.300]  Now we have event meteorologists, we have procedures, notifications.
[17:31.800 --> 17:36.440]  And now you still see these, you know, I used to write up a blog entry every time we'd see these things.
[17:37.180 --> 17:39.500]  These days, you don't see many in the U.S., which is great.
[17:39.760 --> 17:45.400]  You still see some, you know, like I get a lot of things from like stage collapsing in India or some places like that.
[17:45.400 --> 17:52.060]  But a lot of these procedures, like in the, in the sort of industrialized world, like it's, it's sorted out.
[17:52.160 --> 17:53.600]  We know how to do it again, right?
[17:53.880 --> 18:01.600]  And now you'll see like, I don't know, you don't even see quite as much bitching from fans when there's a weather cancellation and stuff too.
[18:05.720 --> 18:12.140]  Which is great because, you know, it's not worth, you know, our adage, you know, we're kind of hard where the show must go on.
[18:12.360 --> 18:14.760]  But in reality, nobody goes to show to get hurt, right?
[18:14.920 --> 18:16.940]  So this is kind of ridiculous.
[18:17.480 --> 18:29.300]  In the theatrical world, there's a big backlash against the insanity of our sort of work culture is the one I came up, where you're just expected to, you know, work yourself to death all the time forever for no money and whatever.
[18:29.300 --> 18:38.420]  That turns out, like if you're trying to really have a diverse workforce and by every, in every way, it doesn't work to have unpaid interns.
[18:38.640 --> 18:44.680]  So kind of all these things that were obvious for a long time, really became, came to a head around the COVID time.
[18:44.820 --> 18:48.780]  And now there's a lot of theaters that are getting, like they're having to pay people.
[18:48.940 --> 18:51.600]  And this was a big issue here in New York.
[18:53.200 --> 18:58.300]  The public theater and the couple other off-Broadway theaters have been non-unit for a long time.
[18:59.040 --> 19:03.920]  are both in the, in sort of the process of ratifying contracts to be in the stage head union.
[19:04.120 --> 19:06.500]  So this is all, I think, part of the same thing.
[19:06.620 --> 19:10.460]  And I think really, you know, when I was in college, like you just work all night.
[19:10.620 --> 19:18.000]  That's what you did there, you know, in like rock and roll world, there's just tremendous amount of drugs because they're just constantly working all the time.
[19:18.160 --> 19:21.300]  Now it's a really, really professional world and that kind of stuff.
[19:21.300 --> 19:24.500]  And we really don't have an excuse for these things, unplanned all-nighters.
[19:24.620 --> 19:29.920]  Like if you know you're going in and out of a hotel and you got to work 24 hours or something, that's one thing.
[19:30.080 --> 19:32.520]  You have a weather event, obviously those type of problems.
[19:32.620 --> 19:36.840]  But if it's like a routine thing, like we've done this long enough now, we kind of know what's needed.
[19:37.800 --> 19:39.020]  I talked about that.
[19:39.160 --> 19:49.360]  But I would wager now that if, you know, if we get in a time machine and jump 10, 20 years forward, I don't think it's going to look a lot different if you go backstage.
[19:49.620 --> 19:57.660]  So if you took somebody from that Beatles concert and dropped them at that Paul McCartney concert, they, you know, they understand what the function or anything is, they would be lost.
[19:57.780 --> 19:59.000]  They wouldn't know how to operate anything.
[19:59.420 --> 20:00.180]  Everything's digital.
[20:00.540 --> 20:01.440]  They wouldn't get it.
[20:01.720 --> 20:04.940]  I'm, again, who has a time machine or a crystal ball.
[20:05.100 --> 20:14.800]  But, um, I would see looking at these trends, I think what the, the procedures and standards we have now are likely going to be not going to change that much in the next 10 to 20 years.
[20:14.800 --> 20:16.040]  Why is that?
[20:16.220 --> 20:17.620]  There's this thing called the Lindy effect.
[20:17.880 --> 20:20.780]  Um, I think it's an interesting idea.
[20:21.080 --> 20:24.280]  The basic concept of it is, uh, just to read off here a little bit.
[20:24.500 --> 20:30.740]  Um, the expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology proportional to their current age.
[20:30.880 --> 20:35.280]  So basically that means if something's been around a long time, it's likely going to be around a lot longer.
[20:35.620 --> 20:35.920]  Right?
[20:36.420 --> 20:38.420]  Um, that's sort of summarized here.
[20:38.800 --> 20:41.860]  Um, there's a little, a little better written than what I just said.
[20:41.860 --> 20:47.220]  Um, so that we see this with a lot of, again, we know how to use this stuff.
[20:47.260 --> 20:50.460]  And I have some examples, very specific examples from our industry.
[20:50.520 --> 20:55.460]  But there's some things now that really should be replaced that aren't because they're 40 years old.
[20:55.620 --> 20:56.700]  Everybody knows how to use it.
[20:57.260 --> 21:00.620]  Um, there's millions of the products out there in the world now.
[21:01.180 --> 21:03.540]  Um, so I talk about this.
[21:03.800 --> 21:10.580]  These are specific in our industry, but like the core lighting technology probably running these lights is from 1986.
[21:11.500 --> 21:14.320]  It obviously should probably could and should be replaced.
[21:14.480 --> 21:16.260]  I can say that as a sound, sound person.
[21:16.500 --> 21:23.120]  Um, but it's not going to be because there's a billion, literally, you know, maybe not a billion, but there's millions of these devices out there.
[21:23.120 --> 21:28.360]  Just because there's some new technology doesn't mean everybody's just going to throw out the old thing and start over, right?
[21:28.760 --> 21:33.400]  The new technology has to really offer something compelling in order to make it, you replace the old one.
[21:33.800 --> 21:35.940]  Uh, and we're still using like time code.
[21:35.940 --> 21:39.860]  It's this thing we use to synchronize a lot of different media and lighting and stuff now.
[21:40.040 --> 21:42.620]  That goes back actually to like the moon launch program.
[21:42.900 --> 21:46.900]  Um, and then MIDI show control is still used on Broadway to connect things together.
[21:46.900 --> 21:47.780]  That's from 1991.
[21:48.420 --> 21:51.460]  So obviously we have much better solutions for this.
[21:51.640 --> 21:56.260]  They're kind of catching on a little bit, but I think it's this idea of like, you know, we've been doing it.
[21:56.300 --> 21:57.280]  We've always been doing this way.
[21:57.400 --> 22:01.560]  We're just going to keep doing it away that way until something displaces.
[22:02.620 --> 22:08.020]  Uh, so where does the, the, the, of course, there's going to be innovation and new ideas.
[22:10.340 --> 22:14.040]  I think now that goes into like connectivity and integration and optimization.
[22:14.180 --> 22:15.100]  That's where we see it.
[22:15.100 --> 22:16.800]  I have a lot more about this in the article.
[22:17.020 --> 22:19.580]  Like I went and interviewed a lot of people that do this stuff.
[22:19.780 --> 22:26.080]  And the, uh, a lot of people are saying, yeah, the, you know, what we're making now is faster, cheaper, lighter, lighter weight.
[22:26.300 --> 22:29.200]  You know, that type of stuff is not like, oh, here's a whole new thing.
[22:29.500 --> 22:34.880]  It's like the example I have in the article is like there's a company called Tate Towers that makes all these stage decks.
[22:35.120 --> 22:36.800]  Like every concert tour uses them.
[22:37.180 --> 22:38.420]  Most concert tours use them.
[22:38.820 --> 22:42.140]  You know, they, that stuff's been around since the late sixties.
[22:42.140 --> 22:46.140]  Their latest version just was the same thing, but you can assemble with no tools.
[22:46.300 --> 22:47.920]  So it went together faster, right?
[22:48.000 --> 22:49.160]  It packed on the truck better.
[22:49.300 --> 22:50.120]  So it's cheaper.
[22:50.320 --> 22:54.060]  You needed, you know, less of a crew or less crew experience, uh, to do it.
[22:55.040 --> 22:58.280]  In, uh, you know, again, in the data world, everything's on Ethernet now.
[22:58.440 --> 22:59.460]  So it's much easier.
[22:59.820 --> 23:04.680]  Uh, and my, one of my second book is on, uh, the second book I have available just from last year.
[23:04.680 --> 23:08.940]  Uh, extractor from the old one, but this is on show controls about integrating systems together.
[23:09.160 --> 23:14.600]  In the old days, it would be like, oh, this thing has this connector and takes this protocol and does this.
[23:14.760 --> 23:17.060]  Now it's like, oh, we just plug it in on Ethernet.
[23:17.220 --> 23:19.140]  We just have to sort out the protocols, right?
[23:19.340 --> 23:21.360]  Is it UDP, whatever, doing this thing?
[23:21.880 --> 23:24.740]  Um, so that's much more of the integration optimization world.
[23:24.840 --> 23:26.680]  I think there's still tremendous potential in that.
[23:26.680 --> 23:32.480]  Um, but I think again, these ideas, oh, and the idea of like this sort of incremental process, progress.
[23:33.140 --> 23:40.640]  So, um, you know, sort of Holy Grail would be kind of like Princess Leia, Star Wars projection, where we could just put a 3D figure there.
[23:40.940 --> 23:44.840]  Um, if you'd built that today, you would still need to rig it.
[23:45.020 --> 23:47.020]  You'd have to give it power, probably a lot.
[23:47.140 --> 23:48.480]  And you have to get it data, right?
[23:48.680 --> 23:49.640]  How will we do that?
[23:49.780 --> 23:54.320]  The same rigging we got today, same electricity, same, uh, networking stuff.
[23:54.320 --> 23:59.780]  Um, and then also, you know, there's a lot of talk, a lot of hype about like holograms.
[23:59.860 --> 24:00.940]  None of those are holograms.
[24:01.120 --> 24:04.440]  Those are, you know, the thing, it's like Tupac on the big screen or whatever.
[24:04.700 --> 24:07.260]  Coachella from five years ago has got all this media stuff.
[24:07.720 --> 24:09.500]  In reality, that's Pepper's ghost effect.
[24:09.500 --> 24:11.100]  That's like 150 years old.
[24:11.400 --> 24:15.000]  Um, and you go see, uh, Rise of the Resistance at Disney.
[24:15.200 --> 24:18.020]  It's one of the most amazing, uh, dark rides ever made.
[24:18.160 --> 24:21.280]  There's some really, really well done Pepper's ghost in there.
[24:21.520 --> 24:23.080]  It's, it's such a cool effect.
[24:23.080 --> 24:25.660]  We're still...
[24:26.120 --> 24:28.320]  Better was to model it and integrate it better.
[24:28.740 --> 24:31.440]  And then the big thing about, I saw a couple of people nod their heads who've seen it.
[24:31.620 --> 24:33.160]  Go watch some right through videos.
[24:33.320 --> 24:35.060]  I have, I have a few more I'll go through in a minute.
[24:35.220 --> 24:43.120]  But, um, what they really did with that is you, if you're gonna immerse yourself in some world, which is the goal of theme parks, the ultimate immersion buzzword.
[24:43.920 --> 24:48.820]  Um, really the way to do that is to, you know, they, you go in there, you don't see a speaker.
[24:48.820 --> 24:52.180]  You don't see a light, you don't see a video projector, you don't see a sensor, right?
[24:52.340 --> 24:56.940]  They're all so well integrated into the place because they've been doing it for a long time.
[24:57.040 --> 24:58.080]  They know how to do it.
[24:58.140 --> 25:00.080]  You can pre-visualize on the stuff now, right?
[25:00.080 --> 25:02.040]  So that's all the ideas with that.
[25:03.260 --> 25:10.920]  Again, another, uh, you know, again, really, uh, in, you know, amazing, uh, production from the Super Bowl 2023.
[25:11.400 --> 25:12.900]  If you haven't seen this, go watch it online.
[25:13.060 --> 25:13.720]  It's pretty cool.
[25:13.880 --> 25:17.640]  They fly these platforms down out, out of the stadium roof.
[25:17.840 --> 25:22.340]  Uh, this was done by Tate, this company out in, uh, Lidus PA that does all this stuff.
[25:22.340 --> 25:32.000]  Um, really amazing thing, but it's based on standard winches, standard control systems, standard pre-visualization, but they're just optimizing everything.
[25:32.160 --> 25:37.160]  So they actually, they control the camera movement for the, the main, you know, if you watch it, it's pretty incredible.
[25:37.220 --> 25:43.520]  There's a shot way up there in the tracks and the thing that's run by the automation people, the show automation people, not the broadcast people.
[25:43.520 --> 25:52.540]  Um, uh, Rihanna there, like, she's on that platform, she's attached to the platform, but she's using a standard fall arrest harness that a stagehand would use.
[25:52.760 --> 25:53.040]  Right?
[25:53.140 --> 25:55.260]  Because it's rated, known, all that kind of stuff.
[25:55.960 --> 26:00.700]  Um, so I think what's kind of fascinating, they did a presentation at USAIDT.
[26:01.400 --> 26:07.200]  The, um, one of the, the biggest challenges in the whole process was getting enough aircraft cable in time.
[26:07.580 --> 26:07.940]  Right?
[26:08.040 --> 26:11.780]  It's not like, oh, we've got to invent a 3D winch, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[26:11.780 --> 26:17.140]  They're like, no, we need all the aircraft cable from, you know, the United States by a month from now.
[26:17.500 --> 26:22.480]  So that's just a logistics challenge, still important, but, um, that's the challenge now.
[26:22.600 --> 26:25.800]  Rather than we need to invent this thing, we just like, we know how to do it, we have to optimize.
[26:27.800 --> 26:28.160]  Right?
[26:28.300 --> 26:29.440]  There are guys talking about that.
[26:30.080 --> 26:33.700]  Um, so I don't have on my list BR, AR, et cetera.
[26:33.880 --> 26:36.180]  I don't really, these are all amazing technologies, obviously.
[26:36.540 --> 26:39.180]  But they get hyped to just ridiculous amounts.
[26:40.080 --> 26:41.360]  And sort of the wide field.
[26:41.620 --> 26:45.700]  Uh, if any of this stuff is going to replace live shows, it would have done it during the pandemic.
[26:45.940 --> 26:46.040]  Right?
[26:46.220 --> 26:50.700]  That was the event that if we were going to just put everything online, we would have done it.
[26:50.780 --> 26:51.660]  It would have stayed there.
[26:51.780 --> 26:51.880]  Right?
[26:51.980 --> 26:52.960]  Because we're all on there.
[26:53.100 --> 27:00.280]  And I don't know about you, but I watched like every sort of experiment in live production on, you know, during the lockdown.
[27:00.280 --> 27:01.540]  They were all terrible.
[27:01.820 --> 27:05.060]  Like there wasn't, it's just like, you know, it's just watching a live TV broadcast.
[27:05.380 --> 27:05.440]  Right?
[27:05.540 --> 27:06.780]  We already know how to do that.
[27:07.060 --> 27:09.360]  There's amazing live TV broadcast.
[27:09.920 --> 27:11.160]  Not the same as being there.
[27:11.320 --> 27:11.400]  Right?
[27:11.460 --> 27:12.280]  Just doesn't do it.
[27:12.940 --> 27:15.600]  Um, so why I think I have those things.
[27:15.820 --> 27:18.040]  So this is what I call Huntington's theorem, my theorem.
[27:18.560 --> 27:22.540]  Um, if a technology is affordable and hasn't gone on, it's not gonna.
[27:23.100 --> 27:23.500]  Right?
[27:23.640 --> 27:28.640]  So this is the thing to me, like I saw a pretty amazing VR in 1993 or something.
[27:28.640 --> 27:32.280]  And Jaron Lanier was there, like this is gonna change the world and do all this stuff.
[27:32.400 --> 27:33.160]  And I'm like, it's cool.
[27:33.440 --> 27:35.920]  Has some great applications, but like it's not changing our world.
[27:36.040 --> 27:36.140]  Right?
[27:36.660 --> 27:43.440]  Um, so I think again, if it's desirable and it's affordable, it'll catch on.
[27:43.620 --> 27:45.120]  So I'll have an example of this in a minute.
[27:45.360 --> 27:51.780]  Uh, but there's a long tradition of people like this new thing wouldn't, you know, the thing I have here that of course I'm selling.
[27:51.940 --> 27:52.900]  Gonna change the world.
[27:53.120 --> 27:57.120]  It's like anybody that's saying it's gonna change the world, you really need to be skeptical about that.
[27:57.240 --> 27:57.320]  Right?
[27:59.300 --> 28:02.760]  Um, so, and also you would see like the affordability is relative.
[28:02.940 --> 28:09.700]  I think this is the one to me that was outside of my really expertise, but you look at common idea, this idea.
[28:09.840 --> 28:12.360]  First it was Google Glass, like, oh, this is gonna be the thing.
[28:12.500 --> 28:17.520]  And now it was the Apple, which I'm totally drawing a blank on the name, Vision Pro, right?
[28:19.480 --> 28:23.240]  Again, nothing to knock the technology, but I think it's kind of like anti-social.
[28:23.680 --> 28:25.980]  Um, and also it didn't catch on, right?
[28:26.040 --> 28:27.880]  They were already kind of like phasing it out a little bit.
[28:28.040 --> 28:30.240]  And then if you talk to somebody like, oh, it's gonna be the thing.
[28:30.320 --> 28:31.680]  I'm like, when?
[28:31.680 --> 28:34.740]  Again, you know, people with money were buying it.
[28:35.340 --> 28:39.260]  You know, it hasn't really caught on in a way to displace anything.
[28:40.240 --> 28:42.980]  Again, for gaming, whatever at home, fantastic.
[28:42.980 --> 28:43.600]  That's great.
[28:43.600 --> 28:45.540]  I'm talking about in the live industry.
[28:45.760 --> 28:57.860]  And there's a big theme park trade show every fall called IAPA, which is really, it's the funnest trade show to go to because they like give away pretzels and pizza stuff in the aisle and they have roller coasters inside.
[28:58.300 --> 29:07.920]  So pre-pandemic, I don't remember what year it was, but every roller coaster manufacturer had a roller coaster where you sat on the roller coaster, but then put a VR helmet on.
[29:08.180 --> 29:12.660]  I'm like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard because you're already in an amazing experience.
[29:13.480 --> 29:14.920]  It didn't make any sense.
[29:15.080 --> 29:16.080]  Of course, that's gone, right?
[29:16.160 --> 29:17.300]  It didn't catch on.
[29:18.380 --> 29:21.640]  So an example of this, again, my world is live shows.
[29:21.640 --> 29:22.680]  I'm talking about that.
[29:22.860 --> 29:23.760]  I kind of went through all these.
[29:25.160 --> 29:26.500]  I'm going to get onto this.
[29:26.660 --> 29:28.360]  But, so a personal example for me.
[29:28.580 --> 29:33.120]  So this, when I worked for that company in 1980s, we built film projectors for Pink Floyd.
[29:33.280 --> 29:33.880]  That's one of them.
[29:34.720 --> 29:37.480]  And then it was Pink Floyd minus Roger Waters.
[29:37.620 --> 29:39.900]  And Roger Waters actually rented one that we built.
[29:39.900 --> 29:42.120]  We had to build another one for Pink Floyd and all that stuff.
[29:42.620 --> 29:43.340]  Film projector.
[29:43.740 --> 29:44.460]  Massive thing.
[29:44.800 --> 29:45.160]  Crazy.
[29:45.500 --> 29:47.540]  Like, we made it into it.
[29:47.680 --> 29:49.980]  And again, I was the kid with the soldering iron.
[29:50.180 --> 29:52.740]  Although I did like program the PLC that's soldered to this thing.
[29:55.360 --> 30:02.620]  But, but what we were doing back then, when we're trying to, so they have to, the band has to synchronize to the film, right?
[30:02.840 --> 30:08.080]  Film in particular, you can't really, you can speed up, slow it down a little bit, but this is a mechanical thing.
[30:08.260 --> 30:09.140]  You can tweak it.
[30:09.240 --> 30:12.020]  I'm making this up maybe plus five or 10%, maybe.
[30:12.380 --> 30:15.540]  But you really can't do much with it in terms of that.
[30:15.700 --> 30:18.520]  So really the band has to lock themselves to the film.
[30:18.660 --> 30:19.660]  So how do you do that?
[30:19.720 --> 30:25.640]  We put a quick track, metronome, like, you know, or an audio count, like one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.
[30:26.260 --> 30:31.800]  On the audio optical track of the film, it goes out through the monitor system into the headphones for Nick Mace.
[30:31.800 --> 30:33.340]  I think it's Nick Mason, the drummer, right?
[30:33.660 --> 30:37.460]  But he would have to count in, keep the tempo in order to sync up to the film.
[30:37.680 --> 30:40.700]  So me, I'm like, this doesn't make sense.
[30:40.820 --> 30:43.400]  We should be letting them play and let, and track them, right?
[30:43.600 --> 30:44.920]  So that seemed to be the idea.
[30:45.040 --> 30:46.900]  It wasn't just me, but a lot of people thought that.
[30:47.100 --> 30:50.840]  And in the 1990s, we started getting the capability to do that stuff.
[30:52.880 --> 30:54.520]  There's a really amazing show.
[30:54.600 --> 30:55.440]  I have this on my website.
[30:55.680 --> 31:01.180]  It was called George Lucas Super Live Adventure, 1990-something, where they're doing a lot of stuff.
[31:01.340 --> 31:06.820]  And this was produced by Feld, who produced the Ringling Brothers' back, but they also do like Disney on Ice, a lot of...
[31:06.820 --> 31:08.500]  What's the other one that's out now?
[31:08.740 --> 31:10.540]  It was the Marvel Universe Live.
[31:10.720 --> 31:12.600]  It's something, Jurassic something, whatever.
[31:14.400 --> 31:22.240]  So they were doing all that back then where, you know, somebody would shoot a laser over there, it hit a sensor, that would trigger a pyro cue, and this.
[31:22.420 --> 31:25.320]  And my friends actually, like, soldered all this stuff and made it work.
[31:25.900 --> 31:27.260]  None of that's done anymore, right?
[31:27.480 --> 31:32.800]  This all kind of peaked, I would say, in about 2005, with Cirque du Soleil's car still running.
[31:33.120 --> 31:34.120]  Really incredible show.
[31:34.240 --> 31:37.620]  I actually just saw it earlier this year, first time in 15 years.
[31:38.180 --> 31:43.000]  That actually has... you might not even notice it, but there's... the performers are controlling a lot of the video in that.
[31:43.140 --> 31:45.000]  They're controlling their own flying rigs.
[31:45.000 --> 31:51.560]  There's this crazy deck, you know, the size of this theater, that goes up and down, that basically has a touch screen on it.
[31:51.640 --> 31:53.300]  This was pretty incredible for 2005.
[31:53.740 --> 31:56.600]  They were, like, overclocking PCs to kind of do this stuff.
[31:56.940 --> 32:01.000]  Now, first off, nobody cares anymore about, you know, that kind of interactivity.
[32:01.120 --> 32:06.840]  They'll just, like... basically now they just synchronize themselves to a lockdown track, and that seems to be good enough.
[32:07.340 --> 32:08.480]  But it was possible.
[32:08.480 --> 32:11.400]  So, we did it in my school in 2006.
[32:11.680 --> 32:15.880]  We made a... used a piece of software called MediaLine, and a thing called a virtual orchestra.
[32:16.400 --> 32:18.920]  And we used this video playback software called WatchOut.
[32:19.100 --> 32:20.760]  We had it so you could conduct videos.
[32:21.040 --> 32:22.980]  So, like, the conductor would just conduct.
[32:23.260 --> 32:26.500]  The video would track them, plus or minus, you know, until the video fell apart.
[32:27.260 --> 32:28.640]  2006, published it.
[32:29.000 --> 32:29.760]  Nobody cared.
[32:29.760 --> 32:32.560]  So, I was totally wrong about this because...
[32:32.560 --> 32:35.920]  So, here, that technology became... we just felt like this was inevitable.
[32:36.140 --> 32:38.700]  Like, we're gonna give all the control back to the performers.
[32:39.040 --> 32:41.200]  It turns out the performers don't want it, right?
[32:41.380 --> 32:48.040]  I remember when I was in college, I did sound for a dance concert, and I went out and bought the CD.
[32:48.280 --> 32:49.540]  They were like, oh, we're playing this song.
[32:49.720 --> 32:51.360]  So, I go buy the CD of this song.
[32:52.120 --> 32:53.980]  Actually, it was after college, if I'm buying a CD.
[32:54.880 --> 32:58.980]  And we play it in the technical rehearsal, and the dancers freaked out.
[32:58.980 --> 33:00.340]  We're like, this tempo is wrong.
[33:00.460 --> 33:01.660]  I'm like, it's the CD.
[33:01.940 --> 33:02.540]  Like, you know.
[33:02.820 --> 33:06.300]  Turned out that they had rehearsed in the rehearsal hall to a cassette.
[33:06.580 --> 33:09.220]  They played so many times, the cassette tapes stretch.
[33:09.420 --> 33:10.900]  It slowed the tempo down.
[33:11.040 --> 33:12.420]  And they were sensitive to it.
[33:12.500 --> 33:14.840]  It was off by 3%, 2%.
[33:14.840 --> 33:16.580]  And they're like, this is crazy.
[33:16.600 --> 33:18.040]  And they eventually figured it out.
[33:18.160 --> 33:19.940]  They went to the correct tempo on the CD.
[33:20.560 --> 33:23.820]  But so, the performers are, like, amazingly sensitive to this stuff.
[33:24.060 --> 33:25.080]  There's a great article.
[33:25.320 --> 33:26.480]  I think it was a New Yorker.
[33:27.980 --> 33:30.280]  So, when Brian Eno was working with U2.
[33:31.480 --> 33:32.500]  Oh, it's David Eagleman.
[33:32.660 --> 33:33.840]  This, like, brain science guy.
[33:34.020 --> 33:35.740]  The article is about him, if you want to go look it up.
[33:37.180 --> 33:40.020]  They had Larry Mullins Jr., the drummer from U2.
[33:40.300 --> 33:41.200]  They're in the studio.
[33:41.200 --> 33:45.040]  And he's complaining to them that the quick track tempo was wrong.
[33:45.200 --> 33:48.080]  And they're like, look, it says 120 right here.
[33:48.200 --> 33:48.640]  I had it calibrated.
[33:49.220 --> 33:49.880]  You know, what are you going to tell me?
[33:49.880 --> 33:52.700]  Turns out, like, so he had made him turn it down.
[33:52.800 --> 33:54.700]  I don't know, 1%, 2%, 3%.
[33:55.760 --> 33:58.140]  Turns out, it was some analog device.
[33:58.340 --> 33:59.380]  It dripped it out of time.
[33:59.560 --> 34:00.220]  He was right.
[34:00.220 --> 34:01.580]  He could hear absolute tempo.
[34:01.880 --> 34:03.460]  And they went and corrected it.
[34:03.540 --> 34:04.740]  And that's how they recorded it.
[34:04.920 --> 34:08.100]  So, performers and musicians are, like, amazingly sensitive to this stuff.
[34:08.380 --> 34:10.940]  They're perfectly happy if you just give them a solid tempo.
[34:11.320 --> 34:16.820]  And that means if you have a solid tempo, you don't need very speed, anything, any of that kind of stuff.
[34:17.500 --> 34:19.500]  So, I haven't had time to research it yet.
[34:19.660 --> 34:27.380]  But fascinating to me, when you just had Phish and The Grateful Dead and The Sphere, those are bands that are notorious for jamming and not having the same setlist.
[34:27.500 --> 34:28.760]  They did have a limited setlist in there.
[34:29.120 --> 34:33.780]  If you're going to put video at that scale, it's not something you can just sort of, you know, play out of a laptop.
[34:35.280 --> 34:36.580]  I haven't researched this yet.
[34:36.660 --> 34:38.900]  I know they have kind of a VJ guy for, like, one number.
[34:38.900 --> 34:40.420]  But mostly, I think it's locked down.
[34:40.920 --> 34:42.880]  That means the drummer's getting a click in his ear.
[34:43.400 --> 34:44.980]  So, I'll find out about that.
[34:45.160 --> 34:46.660]  It just happened more recently.
[34:46.800 --> 34:47.760]  I haven't had time to do it.
[34:48.200 --> 34:52.500]  But anyway, the basic idea is that this stuff now, there's software called Ableton.
[34:53.180 --> 34:58.480]  This is just basically all this variable speed stuff is available basically for free now.
[34:58.580 --> 35:01.160]  You buy the software, it's built in, you don't have to build anything.
[35:01.580 --> 35:04.380]  Turns out 99% of the performers don't want it.
[35:05.580 --> 35:10.280]  So, this is my idea about, you know, the idea became affordable.
[35:10.700 --> 35:11.640]  No one wanted it.
[35:11.860 --> 35:13.960]  So, you know, it's still a cool thing.
[35:14.120 --> 35:17.520]  There's a couple of edge cases with some dance company or whatever will do something with it.
[35:17.880 --> 35:20.380]  But basically, our idea, this sort of technological...
[35:21.020 --> 35:22.760]  Sorry, I'm tapping the thing for the streaming people.
[35:23.720 --> 35:29.940]  The idea of this sort of technological sort of, you know, its inevitability was totally wrong.
[35:30.620 --> 35:32.620]  And I think that's true in a lot of cases.
[35:32.860 --> 35:36.780]  So, I'm literally, in my to-do list, I'm going to research this more and find out.
[35:37.140 --> 35:39.380]  AI, again, I'm not that worried about it for us.
[35:39.540 --> 35:44.760]  I think, obviously, most AI, what they call AI today is not even anything like AI.
[35:45.060 --> 35:48.360]  It's this sort of terrible language prediction or image generation stuff.
[35:49.240 --> 35:50.720]  It does create useful tools.
[35:50.860 --> 35:52.140]  You're trying to get ideas or whatever.
[35:52.480 --> 35:55.140]  A lot of interesting copyright ideas because nothing comes out of AI.
[35:55.140 --> 35:56.180]  AI is copyrightable, right?
[35:56.360 --> 35:58.460]  It's not machines can't own copyright.
[35:58.700 --> 36:00.040]  And nobody really wrote that stuff.
[36:00.340 --> 36:05.900]  So, if you're going to make a cartoon character out of AI, no corporation is going to do that because they can't own it, right?
[36:06.080 --> 36:08.700]  So, from the why... again, I'm looking at it from the why perspective.
[36:08.940 --> 36:11.260]  I'm not... I don't really... I'm not really worried about that.
[36:11.600 --> 36:17.660]  And the reason is, I mean, there is people on the stream watching this right now, but we're here in the same room.
[36:17.940 --> 36:19.000]  You know, I was here two years ago.
[36:19.120 --> 36:20.000]  I was just getting over COVID.
[36:20.100 --> 36:22.180]  I still came in here to do this stuff, right?
[36:25.140 --> 36:25.900]  This kind of stuff.
[36:26.320 --> 36:28.700]  And then some people crave live experiences.
[36:29.060 --> 36:31.580]  The example I always know... I always give for this is...
[36:31.580 --> 36:32.660]  Does anybody know what this is?
[36:35.900 --> 36:37.860]  That's this thing called DreamHack.
[36:38.140 --> 36:44.120]  So, that means all those people brought their computers into the same room and played video games in the same room.
[36:45.180 --> 36:48.260]  So, technologically, there's absolutely no reason to do this, right?
[36:48.440 --> 36:55.080]  You've got online streaming, high-speed everything, really fast monitors, low-latency network connections.
[36:55.280 --> 36:56.500]  Like, you can sit at home and do this.
[36:56.920 --> 36:59.180]  Not the same as being, you know, with your friends.
[36:59.300 --> 37:01.040]  And you think, well, maybe COVID killed this.
[37:01.680 --> 37:02.920]  Nope, here's the one.
[37:03.100 --> 37:05.600]  I just checked this here.
[37:06.300 --> 37:08.280]  And this one, this... they have one coming up.
[37:08.360 --> 37:09.640]  They just had a big one in Europe.
[37:10.040 --> 37:12.420]  This one's coming up in Atlanta in three days.
[37:12.660 --> 37:14.400]  So, if you want to go down to Atlanta...
[37:14.400 --> 37:15.700]  They're still doing this again.
[37:21.200 --> 37:22.540]  They're still building space together, right?
[37:22.640 --> 37:23.460]  And kind of look at that picture.
[37:23.600 --> 37:24.900]  It's insane, right?
[37:25.080 --> 37:30.420]  But even if you look at this thing, this is actually a great event for my industry now because what do they got?
[37:30.860 --> 37:31.300]  Cosplay.
[37:31.640 --> 37:33.660]  They have live events.
[37:33.800 --> 37:35.140]  They'll have eSports things.
[37:35.400 --> 37:38.420]  They'll have... they were talking about the crowd, all this stuff.
[37:38.700 --> 37:39.580]  They have vendors.
[37:39.860 --> 37:40.400]  They have all this.
[37:40.480 --> 37:41.800]  I mean, look at even just here.
[37:42.100 --> 37:43.580]  Crazy moving light rigs.
[37:44.040 --> 37:45.940]  Big sound systems back there.
[37:46.340 --> 37:47.380]  Like, this is more stuff.
[37:47.380 --> 37:53.880]  This is a hundred times what the Beatles had in 1965, and it's for a bunch of people to play video games and look at the screen.
[37:54.860 --> 37:57.040]  So... but I mean, what is it that they're doing?
[37:57.180 --> 37:58.440]  It's not about the video games.
[37:58.560 --> 38:01.320]  It's about the socialization, about being in the same room with people.
[38:01.520 --> 38:11.480]  So, from my perspective in the wide performance world, like, I've never worried about this because nothing in several thousand years has displaced this idea that we're together in one place.
[38:14.380 --> 38:15.940]  So... oh good, I still got time here.
[38:15.940 --> 38:26.760]  And so... this technological maturity, so more from the... to the live storytelling impact, I think we can really paint now instead of bending the paint brush, right?
[38:27.120 --> 38:36.580]  So in... when... from... in my time, you know, like I said, from 85 to about 2010, like, every time we're like, oh, you don't want that lighting console because it doesn't do this.
[38:36.700 --> 38:37.200]  It's gonna throw it out.
[38:37.300 --> 38:38.220]  Oh, we have a new speaker.
[38:38.360 --> 38:38.820]  Throw that out.
[38:38.920 --> 38:39.660]  New projectors.
[38:40.140 --> 38:42.940]  This is a... almost certainly a DLP projector.
[38:43.120 --> 38:44.960]  That just matured like 15 years ago.
[38:44.960 --> 38:54.200]  I remember we used to go to these projector shootouts where they have radically different technologies and you go look at them all in the same place, you know, in sort of lab conditions next to each other.
[38:54.600 --> 38:55.400]  That's all saw.
[38:55.700 --> 38:58.780]  So this picture is from a really amazing show in Vegas called Particle Inc.
[38:59.260 --> 39:00.780]  or by a company called Particle Inc.
[39:01.120 --> 39:02.420]  That was the previous show.
[39:02.560 --> 39:03.740]  They just opened in the Luxor.
[39:03.900 --> 39:04.780]  I haven't been able to see it yet.
[39:04.860 --> 39:05.920]  I'm gonna get out there this year.
[39:06.060 --> 39:06.820]  I hope it makes it.
[39:08.340 --> 39:09.620]  Very low budget show.
[39:09.860 --> 39:13.580]  But that's like, you know, an Epson projector you can buy off of Amazon.
[39:14.040 --> 39:16.500]  And a software called Q-Lab runs the whole thing.
[39:17.180 --> 39:23.960]  It just runs on an Apple, you know, really a reasonable, powerful machine, but nothing like what we needed before.
[39:24.620 --> 39:29.180]  So now it's sort of giving these tools out to other groups that could never have had them before.
[39:29.180 --> 39:31.040]  Like you could have done that scene.
[39:31.260 --> 39:37.840]  It doesn't make sense without watching the video, but you could have done that scene in Disney in 1985, 1995, or whatever.
[39:38.000 --> 39:39.940]  They would have spent $10 million on it, whatever.
[39:40.620 --> 39:46.900]  Now it's like some artists got together in a warehouse in Las Vegas with a couple of projectors and some really good ideas.
[39:50.180 --> 39:52.320]  They have some AR stuff in there.
[39:52.540 --> 39:54.840]  I think the producers told them they had to have it.
[39:55.520 --> 39:59.320]  But now it's like it opens it up to all kinds of other people with that.
[40:00.500 --> 40:01.180]  Let's see.
[40:01.440 --> 40:03.040]  Let's make sure I don't run out of time here.
[40:03.760 --> 40:05.020]  I'm going to come back to the end.
[40:05.120 --> 40:11.080]  But yeah, obviously all of this parallels this maturity idea with other things like computers and networking.
[40:12.100 --> 40:13.920]  We've scaffolded off of all that stuff.
[40:14.240 --> 40:16.520]  Consumer tech, you know, phones, all these things.
[40:16.900 --> 40:17.860]  Movies, TV, streaming.
[40:18.040 --> 40:18.940]  I think it's kind of...
[40:18.940 --> 40:20.960]  I just was watching The Boys the other day.
[40:21.520 --> 40:26.080]  Like one episode that is like a feature film from 1985, right?
[40:26.740 --> 40:28.940]  The budget's not equivalent to that.
[40:29.080 --> 40:37.700]  But that's because the tools and the practices and the production capabilities and the visual vocabulary, all these things are just in the industry now.
[40:37.860 --> 40:39.200]  And you can do that, right?
[40:39.500 --> 40:41.980]  I think it was shot in Vancouver or Toronto or somewhere.
[40:42.140 --> 40:43.540]  But they have the expertise.
[40:43.540 --> 40:44.680]  They have the technology.
[40:44.680 --> 40:46.980]  And there's a lot of like crazy CGI and that stuff.
[40:46.980 --> 40:51.580]  But this would have been something like, you know, you know, like complexity.
[40:51.980 --> 40:52.780]  I don't know if that's really true.
[40:53.300 --> 40:58.920]  Complexity of a big movie, you know, 25 years ago, is now in a thing that would have 80 episodes.
[40:58.920 --> 41:00.860]  They release every week, right?
[41:01.000 --> 41:04.820]  Even you can think about that too in the sort of fight choreography.
[41:05.760 --> 41:08.540]  Every aspect of it now is sorted out, right?
[41:08.840 --> 41:11.440]  Except for the, you know, you still have...
[41:11.440 --> 41:14.920]  I just saw the headline about the Alex, the Russ shooting.
[41:14.920 --> 41:19.500]  Horrible tragedy where the cinematographer got shot with Alec Baldwin.
[41:20.920 --> 41:21.940]  What happened there?
[41:22.180 --> 41:23.200]  Completely inexcusable.
[41:23.400 --> 41:24.260]  We know better, right?
[41:24.360 --> 41:27.200]  That's just people not following basic safety procedure, period.
[41:27.720 --> 41:28.920]  There's nothing new in that.
[41:29.460 --> 41:31.000]  There's... it's inexcusable, right?
[41:31.160 --> 41:32.180]  We know how to do that.
[41:33.240 --> 41:35.460]  Also, I think from fans, it's kind of interesting.
[41:36.800 --> 41:42.600]  I'm listening to this thing called a really amazing podcast called History of Rock Music and 500 Songs.
[41:42.700 --> 41:43.600]  Anybody heard of this thing?
[41:44.820 --> 41:46.100]  Oh, one person over here.
[41:46.240 --> 41:50.040]  I think in the older people like me, it goes through all the music that we grew up with.
[41:50.200 --> 41:59.840]  But then the basic idea, like literally episode zero of the podcast, he has a whole sentence in there, paragraph in there about rock music is over, right?
[42:00.000 --> 42:03.240]  And it's hard for me to understand that because that was like...
[42:03.240 --> 42:05.400]  Again, the same thing was happening in the 70s.
[42:05.500 --> 42:06.040]  We were getting...
[42:06.040 --> 42:07.780]  My first concert was Led Zeppelin, you know?
[42:07.780 --> 42:10.880]  So it seemed like, oh, there's always going to be a new thing.
[42:11.300 --> 42:12.400]  Not... it's not true.
[42:12.580 --> 42:14.260]  Like that form died out.
[42:14.480 --> 42:16.740]  Now there's certainly big concert tours.
[42:16.900 --> 42:17.760]  There's big pop stars.
[42:17.960 --> 42:23.780]  But I don't think any... if you look at like the top 50 on Spotify or YouTube, like none of it you would call rock music.
[42:24.380 --> 42:28.200]  It's all some kind of hybrid pastiche of a lot of different things.
[42:28.420 --> 42:31.380]  Like it or not, the idea is it's matured in there.
[42:31.520 --> 42:37.940]  And this was an interesting article in the Times from last year about the whole idea of culture coming to a sandstone.
[42:38.320 --> 42:43.160]  So I have some quibbles of the author of this article, but I think it's the same thing, right?
[42:43.280 --> 42:45.740]  I think it's... I don't know if it's all related to the technology.
[42:45.980 --> 42:56.940]  And we just sort of heard in the last presentation here, they're talking about like information warfare and all these things because we're at this kind of weird point where all these things have sort of matured and aren't likely to change all that much.
[42:57.200 --> 43:00.940]  And we're just sort of wrestling with that idea with that.
[43:01.860 --> 43:10.960]  And then in the live entertainment theater, there's a lot of kind of forces colliding with that same idea that's cultural maturity.
[43:11.260 --> 43:19.180]  Theater in general is in big trouble because they really kind of just counted on this sort of older subscription audience for a long time.
[43:19.180 --> 43:22.020]  When they, after COVID, a lot of them were older people.
[43:22.020 --> 43:23.320]  They're like, we're not going out anymore.
[43:23.540 --> 43:26.720]  And they were making stuff that doesn't get 20-year-olds into the theater.
[43:26.920 --> 43:29.860]  So all of a sudden they're... and all the pandemic funding ran out.
[43:30.120 --> 43:32.140]  So there's a lot of stuff going on with that.
[43:32.560 --> 43:33.600]  College is in trouble.
[43:34.040 --> 43:43.580]  Like I just want... I just got out of this, but my colleagues are telling me like the group of 17-year-olds coming in right now is the largest group for the next 17 years, right?
[43:43.580 --> 43:47.640]  So the college... even eligible population is declining.
[43:47.860 --> 43:56.840]  At the same time, the need for college... and I, you know, I have a master's degree, so I'm, you know, not talking about myself, but the need for college going forward also declining.
[43:57.000 --> 44:00.440]  So I think you're going to see a lot of colleges closing the next decade here.
[44:00.560 --> 44:01.300]  It's already started.
[44:01.500 --> 44:04.720]  So we're at a weird kind of cultural reflection point with that.
[44:05.380 --> 44:07.780]  And then also, anybody been to Meow Wolf?
[44:08.160 --> 44:08.720]  Seen that?
[44:10.020 --> 44:11.520]  Let's see, how much time do I got?
[44:11.740 --> 44:13.640]  Oh yeah, and we're also seeing it's really good.
[44:14.520 --> 44:18.080]  The younger generation coming up in live entertainment is like...
[44:18.080 --> 44:20.760]  My generation is like, you just... this is what you do.
[44:20.920 --> 44:21.500]  It's your life.
[44:21.700 --> 44:24.340]  You work a kabillion hours until you drop dead.
[44:24.540 --> 44:27.080]  You know, like if you're... you have the flu, you go to work.
[44:27.540 --> 44:28.480]  Nothing stops you.
[44:28.620 --> 44:29.280]  The show must go on.
[44:29.620 --> 44:32.420]  Younger people, they're like, yeah, I want the weekend off there.
[44:32.520 --> 44:33.160]  I'm not doing that.
[44:33.160 --> 44:35.080]  So that's like reshaping everything.
[44:35.260 --> 44:36.340]  It's kind of fascinating.
[44:37.460 --> 44:38.520]  Talked about that.
[44:38.840 --> 44:39.600]  Talked about that.
[44:40.700 --> 44:45.980]  And then, go back here for one second, just show you a few other things.
[44:46.160 --> 44:47.880]  So some other things just going on.
[44:48.540 --> 44:51.960]  Like this, I got a few more minutes and I'll see if there's any time for questions here.
[44:52.220 --> 44:53.820]  This is a really remarkable show.
[44:53.960 --> 44:59.180]  And right before the pandemic at Universal Studios, that is just a massive curved LED wall.
[44:59.340 --> 45:01.560]  But there's three-dimensional scenery in front of it.
[45:05.100 --> 45:09.700]  The key is, it's so well integrated.
[45:10.180 --> 45:13.440]  You really, it's hard to tell unless you're really a geek like me.
[45:13.560 --> 45:16.600]  Like I went with my friend who worked with theme parks for 20 other years.
[45:16.720 --> 45:20.260]  His wife, who's been to a lot of theme parks, she was actually fooled by a few effects.
[45:20.460 --> 45:21.220]  There's nothing against her.
[45:21.540 --> 45:25.100]  She's just not a geek going, oh, look, there's six pixels off on the, you know.
[45:25.100 --> 45:29.280]  So for the average person, it was like a magic method and it just worked.
[45:29.420 --> 45:30.280]  It was amazingly well.
[45:30.660 --> 45:33.120]  Again, whether you like the show or not, that's sort of a different idea.
[45:33.280 --> 45:36.240]  But that's kind of an incredible thing.
[45:36.660 --> 45:39.400]  David Byrne did a thing out at Denver Center.
[45:39.500 --> 45:42.880]  It was just a brief thing called Theater of the Mind.
[45:43.160 --> 45:46.620]  It was pretty interesting, but you know, my colleague worked on that.
[45:47.440 --> 45:50.780]  I actually got to meet David Byrne in our theater when they were doing this thing.
[45:52.220 --> 45:55.720]  They had to make, you know, again, a lot of really incredible stuff.
[45:55.840 --> 45:57.520]  And they didn't really have to invent anything for that, right?
[45:57.720 --> 45:59.600]  They had to make some circuit boards to do this and that.
[45:59.700 --> 46:03.720]  But they used some off-the-shelf software called MediLon to run this thing.
[46:04.240 --> 46:05.860]  Same thing we used to use in the Haunted House.
[46:06.020 --> 46:07.040]  That's the Particle Link show.
[46:07.540 --> 46:11.100]  This one I like because it's the Church of Cannabis in Denver.
[46:12.620 --> 46:13.660]  It's kind of amazing.
[46:13.660 --> 46:17.980]  They put on like a really insane light show.
[46:18.180 --> 46:24.380]  They kept saying no pictures, but then half the presentation was about rebelling against authority, so I took pictures anyway.
[46:26.080 --> 46:30.540]  But what's interesting is the... I was discreet about it because I'm sensitive to people about that.
[46:30.700 --> 46:33.120]  But I get to the end here...
[46:33.900 --> 46:35.860]  Let me try to find it down here.
[46:35.920 --> 46:36.280]  Here we go.
[46:36.520 --> 46:39.100]  Whole thing run off of a piece of software on a Mac.
[46:39.600 --> 46:42.620]  A little analog Mac keyboard, some speakers they got.
[46:43.600 --> 46:48.640]  So again, they just had the good ideas to do this and the drive to do it.
[46:48.700 --> 46:50.120]  It's a way for them to make some money.
[46:50.340 --> 46:51.300]  It was very well done.
[46:51.780 --> 46:55.700]  And then Meow Wolf, of course, they have four locations now.
[46:56.040 --> 46:56.760]  There's a new one inside.
[46:56.840 --> 46:58.380]  I've been to all the ones except the one in Texas.
[46:58.620 --> 47:02.220]  So this is kind of a crazy artist collective from Santa Fe.
[47:02.460 --> 47:04.360]  And it was funded by George R.
[47:04.560 --> 47:04.760]  Martin.
[47:05.760 --> 47:06.940]  I have it on my website.
[47:07.140 --> 47:09.960]  But I can't remember the first one, let's say, ten years ago, roughly.
[47:11.360 --> 47:12.700]  It was just insane.
[47:12.900 --> 47:15.080]  But there's really not a lot of technology in it.
[47:15.160 --> 47:18.980]  It's just incredible construction and just really brilliant ideas.
[47:20.000 --> 47:22.420]  So now it's become like a big corporation.
[47:22.500 --> 47:25.220]  They have one in Denver, one in Las Vegas, one in Dallas.
[47:25.960 --> 47:28.580]  Probably not in New York because the space would be too expensive.
[47:28.780 --> 47:29.720]  The ticket would be too expensive.
[47:30.620 --> 47:32.640]  And basically what it is, you walk in.
[47:32.740 --> 47:35.240]  It's kind of fascinating because you just walk into this thing.
[47:35.380 --> 47:38.500]  And there's like all these spaces and there's no instruction.
[47:38.940 --> 47:40.560]  There's nobody there telling you what to do.
[47:40.880 --> 47:45.560]  The one in Santa Fe, like you kind of go in and you enter this thing through, crawl through the refrigerator.
[47:45.860 --> 47:47.660]  And now you're in like a whole other world.
[47:47.860 --> 47:50.080]  And there's a back story that's kind of in there.
[47:50.340 --> 47:54.560]  Sleep No More in New York, which is closing this month, which is now.
[47:54.660 --> 47:56.340]  I can't believe it ran as long as it can.
[47:56.340 --> 47:59.880]  That's sort of the same idea with that, the truly immersive thing.
[48:00.100 --> 48:03.380]  But what really makes it immersive is they just build a lot of stuff, right?
[48:03.480 --> 48:06.840]  The technology is there and it's solid, but it's, again, these techniques.
[48:06.840 --> 48:11.200]  It's not just the, you know, sort of tech, you know, really technical stuff.
[48:11.460 --> 48:12.480]  There's rising resistance.
[48:13.300 --> 48:16.520]  I could go on and on about this, but I think you kind of get the idea.
[48:16.600 --> 48:19.980]  Oh, and definitely it's a little questionable whether it's going to come back this year.
[48:20.460 --> 48:25.920]  It got canceled last year, but this thing, Theater Bazaar in Detroit, one of the most amazing things I've ever been to.
[48:25.920 --> 48:28.640]  I went once because my friend's band was playing in there.
[48:28.780 --> 48:31.340]  And then I broke my foot the next year and then it was COVID.
[48:31.660 --> 48:33.560]  There are some rumors that it might be done.
[48:33.820 --> 48:37.040]  I hope not because it's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.
[48:37.540 --> 48:40.540]  And what's amazing about it, so this is Zombo.
[48:41.100 --> 48:43.600]  You look around, like when I first saw this, I looked at all...
[48:43.600 --> 48:45.220]  This is in the Masonic Hall in Detroit.
[48:46.300 --> 48:51.440]  There's a lot of things in there, I guess, are shocking to Detroiters, but like I have a lot of friends in the Coney Island Sideshow.
[48:51.540 --> 48:56.120]  And so I'm like just sort of focusing on a guy stabbing through his arm while somebody's gasping at me.
[48:56.220 --> 48:57.500]  Like, oh, right, this is shocking.
[48:57.880 --> 48:58.420]  I forget.
[48:58.740 --> 49:02.600]  But if you look, I looked at all the photos from before and like there was one guy that did most of the photos.
[49:02.600 --> 49:04.720]  I'm like, man, he's really tweaking that color.
[49:04.880 --> 49:05.500]  Like, what's he doing?
[49:05.600 --> 49:06.300]  Like, everything's orange.
[49:06.580 --> 49:13.000]  Turns out, part of their deal, they change every light bulb in the building.
[49:13.120 --> 49:16.400]  In every public space in the building, they have that certain orange color.
[49:16.560 --> 49:19.680]  So it's just a really amazing curation of these ideas.
[49:19.920 --> 49:25.220]  And that's something where, again, if you're going to be immersed in something, like that's what it takes to do it.
[49:25.780 --> 49:31.900]  They obviously have lighting sound video in the show, but there's not like, I don't think really technology enabled that.
[49:31.900 --> 49:36.100]  But the maturity of all these ideas is really kind of what made that possible.
[49:36.380 --> 49:38.660]  And I think I'm out, really out of time here.
[49:38.860 --> 49:41.320]  And there's another show coming in here after a year, but...
[49:41.320 --> 49:42.840]  Oops, hit the right thing.
[49:43.060 --> 49:43.520]  There we go.
[49:44.760 --> 49:45.640]  The right at the end.
[49:45.920 --> 49:47.780]  But the, put my website up here.
[49:48.260 --> 49:49.760]  I have a lot more on there.
[49:50.380 --> 49:51.340]  If you get...
[49:51.340 --> 49:52.320]  And then...
[49:52.320 --> 49:53.900]  I had to do it this way.
[49:54.060 --> 49:54.420]  Sorry.
[49:54.580 --> 49:55.900]  I can't click and talk in the same...
[49:55.900 --> 49:56.320]  There we go.
[49:56.460 --> 49:57.440]  So that's my website.
[49:58.300 --> 50:00.040]  I have a lot more of this stuff on there.
[50:00.220 --> 50:01.560]  I also have a contact form.
[50:01.560 --> 50:02.660]  You want to get in touch with me or anything.
[50:03.080 --> 50:05.680]  But I think if there's any questions, again, thanks for coming out so late.
[50:06.220 --> 50:07.260]  Any questions for anybody?
[50:07.980 --> 50:08.520]  Oh, thank you.
[50:10.480 --> 50:12.420]  I think I saw a hand over there.
[50:14.240 --> 50:14.900]  I'm sorry?
[50:15.760 --> 50:17.780]  Oh, so yeah, it's fascinating.
[50:19.260 --> 50:23.380]  I think, again, this is Jim Dolan from Madison Square Garden built this thing.
[50:23.940 --> 50:27.640]  He owns the Knicks, the Rangers, Madison Square Garden, the Beacon.
[50:28.460 --> 50:32.380]  And now when this was built, I hadn't signed some NDA stuff.
[50:32.520 --> 50:37.940]  I can't say some of it, but the idea that's publicly known as his idea was this is going to be like the new thing.
[50:38.100 --> 50:40.560]  They're going to go one there, one here, one in London.
[50:40.760 --> 50:42.400]  And they're going to tour these things around.
[50:42.840 --> 50:44.360]  It's such an insane building.
[50:44.480 --> 50:45.260]  I think it was $2 billion.
[50:46.740 --> 50:52.480]  And the thing is, I haven't seen a live show in there, but I saw the movie, which I can rant about for another hour another way.
[50:53.280 --> 51:00.280]  But basically, the video is so overwhelming that the sort of human scale in it is really lost.
[51:00.440 --> 51:05.800]  But my sister, who's a big deadhead, she went to see Three Nights of the Dead a couple weeks ago.
[51:06.020 --> 51:09.080]  She said it was the most... she saw them 30 times or whatever.
[51:09.080 --> 51:11.440]  She said it was the most incredible deadhead I've ever done.
[51:11.940 --> 51:19.300]  So, can you... but the big... the big problem with it is the... it's so expensive and it's such a peculiar building.
[51:19.400 --> 51:22.840]  They have a pre-vis... pre-vis studio in California.
[51:23.060 --> 51:25.760]  So, you go, you can like pre-visualize the media over there.
[51:25.900 --> 51:29.520]  But to make media for that, you can't just be like, oh, we're on tour.
[51:29.800 --> 51:36.280]  I'm going to play this menu tonight and this one tomorrow, which is the economics of even a Taylor Swift tour or something, right?
[51:36.280 --> 51:44.300]  And then it's so big, it's like 17,000, 18,000 seats, that the classic sort of Vegas residency model doesn't make economic sense either.
[51:44.540 --> 51:47.280]  Because like Celine Dion was like 3,000, 4,000 seats.
[51:47.660 --> 51:51.360]  Like that kind of number you can fill every night, 200 nights a year, makes sense.
[51:51.480 --> 52:00.960]  But to put 17,000, 20,000 seats in there... but so far, they've been able to charge 5,000, 6,000, 7,000, you know, thousand dollars a seat, which is the way you have to do it for that.
[52:01.200 --> 52:05.220]  I don't know how... it seems to me that novelty will wear off, but I've been wrong before.
[52:05.220 --> 52:13.280]  So, but as a... I'm really glad, uh, that Dolan built this building because I, you know, he really is... there's a lot of issues with this guy.
[52:13.840 --> 52:20.260]  Um, like if you go... if you sue them and you try to go to the Madison Square Garden, they have facial recognition that will throw you out of the building.
[52:20.280 --> 52:21.500]  So you literally can't walk in.
[52:21.580 --> 52:22.520]  They have it as a sphere too.
[52:23.000 --> 52:25.140]  Um, so there's a lot of issues with that guy.
[52:25.280 --> 52:28.820]  But I, as a impresario, I give him tremendous credit for like...
[52:28.820 --> 52:31.620]  I thought when the pandemic hit, cause they already had the steel in the ground.
[52:31.620 --> 52:32.960]  I thought that would be the end of it.
[52:33.100 --> 52:34.100]  But, uh, yeah.
[52:34.240 --> 52:34.780]  So we'll see.
[52:34.980 --> 52:37.180]  It's more like, yeah, again, I'm glad they did it.
[52:37.600 --> 52:43.700]  Um, I saw the movie in there several months after it opened and like one third of the screen blacked out, you know, more than once.
[52:43.820 --> 52:48.980]  And my former student who had like built the whole system, like, oh yeah, that's video driver card number 12.
[52:49.180 --> 52:50.260]  Like, you know, having problems with that.
[52:50.460 --> 52:59.140]  But when the entire is really about video and I went with a friend of mine who runs a circus company, uh, and you're looking at it, you really can't do anything else in there.
[52:59.140 --> 53:00.780]  It's just a big video thing.
[53:01.000 --> 53:03.780]  And had they built it, I didn't even realize this until I sat in there.
[53:04.140 --> 53:15.520]  Had you built it like an actual planetarium where the performers were in the middle, then that way everybody's looking past the performers to the video, then it really could have been an amazing experience as sort of human scale thing.
[53:16.200 --> 53:29.780]  But right now your choice is either on the floor where you're looking at the performers and then the video is literally 200 feet over your head, or you're in the worst seats in Madison Square Garden in a very steep rake, and then way down there is, you know,
[53:29.860 --> 53:30.660]  the edge or whatever.
[53:30.820 --> 53:34.820]  You two, it's like the little speck, but of course they'll make their faces 100 feet tall.
[53:35.000 --> 53:35.880]  So, I don't know.
[53:35.980 --> 53:37.080]  We'll see what happens with it.
[53:37.140 --> 53:38.980]  The economics is the big problem, I think, really.
[53:39.280 --> 53:43.500]  But as a new, you know, this goes back to my affordability idea.
[53:43.500 --> 53:47.080]  Like, as a new form, I don't think it's, it doesn't have much of a future in that way.
[53:47.280 --> 53:51.380]  As an experiment and a novel building, again, hats off to them for building it.
[53:51.820 --> 53:53.460]  I guess one more question than any more.
[53:55.480 --> 53:57.820]  It's almost 10 o'clock, I can't believe I've been inside so long.
[53:58.420 --> 53:59.520]  All right, well, thanks very much.
[53:59.660 --> 54:01.280]  It was really fun to be here.