#243 - Jim Woodward

0:01 Welcome to Gears of Gear Episode #243. Are you planning an event in New Orleans? Look to RZI Lighting for all of your lighting needs. Since 1999 they have been delivering top notch lighting solutions with a friendly touch. Choose RZI for rentals, sales and labor to ensure a successful production. Their production staff are there to support you every step of the way, making your event run smoothly. Trust RZI Lighting your go to source for the best brands and equipment including rigging, staging, automated lighting and special effects. With their on site repair services and extensive inventory.

0:41 They've been committed to providing top notch event production solutions since 1999 and this episode is also brought to you by a VLAVL Media Group is one of the leading distributors of professional audio, video and lighting equipment in North America. Initially established in 1996 by founder and CEO Stephen Kosters, after seeing an opportunity to inject a sense of genuine passion into the distribution process, the company has grown to be the proud home of many key brands in the industry, including Midas, Tannoy Lab Group and Lake Clark Technique, Turbo Sound Spotlight, 0 Ohm Systems and more. For Steven Koster's AVL was the natural culmination of a life in the rock'n'roll business, driven by the love of music, matched with a genuine desire to creatively explore all the elements that make live events possible. Visit avlmediagroup.com today.

1:55 The well, of course, I've been talking all about this new system that we're using with Riverside and so a couple of things have happened. One is that we've gone to sort of a hybrid, so you're seeing the intro and promos from our old system. So now we're paying for two systems basically is what it comes down to. We love the framing and the way that this all works with our old system and the ability to show off the sponsor logos and stuff like that.

2:46 And so it just works. We like this format, but we don't like the actual system and their tech structure behind it. So unfortunately right now we're paying for two full systems And so Riverside, our new system is great. However, there are some little glitchy, weird things that we're learning with it, and one happened with Steve Warren last week. And So what would normally take about 15 minutes to edit an episode, We don't spend a lot of time on editing unless it's something that, you know, the guest is like, hey, I don't want that part in there about my grandma, Could you please take it out? And I don't mean grandma lighting console.

3:26 I mean your grandmother or, you know, just something that was said and needed to be changed or something wrong or that somebody wanted me to go back and edit and take out or whatever. But typically, we don't do a lot of editing. And so Long story short, what should have taken me 15 or 20 minutes to edit the Steve Warren episode took probably about 15 hours. And literally, I mean, I was working on it all weekend last weekend just to get the podcast done, but it's there. Hopefully you've heard it. The Steve Warren episode, which I believe is 242, is excellent. And if you haven't heard it, please go listen to it because it's good. What else? F1. Last weekend I was very grateful to get an invite from Roby, from my friend Craig Burrows at Roby.

4:14 I guess he had a lighting designer group that he took to the races and somebody had to jump out at the last minute. And I happened to be local and I got the call. So of course I said yes. And they had great seats. Just a really cool group of people, really nice. Never watched a race in air conditioning before other than at home. And so that was kind of cool. And you know, honestly, Craig is very knowledgeable about racing and and so were some of the lighting designers that were there as well. And so it was really cool. It was a lot of fun to do. And then again, I was super grateful that on Sunday, the race day, 'cause this was, I went for the qualifying day and and the Sprint race.

5:00 And I won't talk about why we were late for the Sprint race, Peter Moore. And so anyways, on Sunday that ticket was available again and and Craig said would Jeremy want to go? And those of you who have heard this podcast before know that my son's a racing driver and so he was super excited and happy to be able to be there for the race on Sunday. And so, yeah, thank you to Roby. Thank you to Craig Burrows, my good friend, for the invite and for the hospitality and for introducing me to some lighting designers who I didn't even know, some really great people. And So what else do I have? I've got Sarah told me to remind people that we're doing a bit of a guest outreach now, too.

5:50 So if you or someone you know should be a guest on Geezers of Gear, please shoot an e-mail to producer@geezersofgear.com. That goes to Sarah and she'll do a little research on the guest or on you and and you know again our our criteria really is are you interesting and will it be an interesting conversation because we're super sensitive to our listeners and you know the people, the viewers, the people who who are our audience. Basically we're very sensitive to the fact that we're putting out a a product that they will like and that is is good quality. And so yeah, she'll just want to make sure that it's going to be an interesting podcast and then we'll get you signed up. And in the loop of of scheduling, we're generally scheduling about a month out right now. Sometimes we get last minute openings where because we're recording to a week, sometimes one of those will have to reschedule.

6:48 That just happened this week actually. So we're only doing one this week and so yeah, we'd love to to get more new interesting guests on people that you know, maybe I don't know, with my 30 plus years in the industry and Sarah doesn't know. So if you or if you know someone would like to sign up as a guest, please do again. Just shoot an e-mail to producer@geysersofgear.com and also if you could, and I'm asking another favor here, please subscribe to whatever podcast platform you listen to us on. So if that's Apple, just click the little subscribe button. If it's YouTube, subscribe Spotify, any of the ones that you are listening to our podcast on. I would greatly appreciate if you subscribe that. That does a lot of really good things for us that I won't go into explaining, but it just helps give us access to a wider audience, a bigger audience.

7:49 And the larger our audience, the better our sponsors, or the more that our sponsors are willing to support the podcast. And then the more we can really do. And we have a lot of really fun plans that I'm going to start letting you in on at some point here, not today, but someday. And then of course my favorite weekly topic that I that I like to jump into and that I've gotten a lot of feedback on. Some good, some not so good. I got ripped up on. I think it was YouTube or I don't remember which platform it was but somebody attacking me for myself driving car comments and it's a technology I firmly believe in. I don't think it's gonna be very long before Uber has no drivers, before, you know, cars are driving us around with nobody in them other than us. And to be honest, I look forward to it. I love driving, but I also love working and talking on my phone and not having to pay attention to where I'm going. And I also don't love accidents.

8:53 And so if driverless cars will help us get over the the problem with with human intervention or human mistakes, then I think it's a really good thing. And and you don't have to worry every time your kid goes on a long journey or your kid goes out to see a concert at night or something, that you might not see them come back. And without getting super dramatic there, you know, I just think it's obvious to me at this point that driverless cars are the future. And I still think there will be a place for, you know, those of us who are, are wanting to, you know, be sentimental or or be attached to our past or whatever, to go to a place and drive a regular car, not just a racetrack, but just areas where you can drive regular cars. I just don't think it's gonna be in the inner cities for much longer.

9:44 So I every week I look for some cool things to talk about on AI and and so one of the ones, and I was actually just talking with Michael Steagner from from Highlight Productions is a big photographer. And I was talking to him recently or this morning I think on social media about Adobe Firefly. And so there's a lot of uproar with Adobe right now and with photographers because Adobe has this campaign that says skip the photo shoot. And I think it was probably not very well thought through if you ask me. Because it's like in our industry saying skip the programmer or skip the programming session, skip the production rehearsals or whatever it is, right? Like just skip a very big part of a live event. And so obviously for a photographer, the photo shoot is kind of the thing, right?

10:39 And So what they're basically offering is these AI generated backgrounds and saying you don't need to go out and shoot those backgrounds, we can just provide them for you using just an AI background generator. Sounds great, but in reality it's taking food off their plate. And I don't know that it's the direction I would have gone right out of the gate, but Adobe's a very big company and they're probably smarter than me, So what do I know? But it has creators very pissed off right now and I've looked at a lot of comments on some of their posts of this campaign. Not good. I was messing around at 6:00 this morning for some reason with a couple of music creation apps or they're very new. They're like in beta but one was called SUNO and one was called Audio and these allow you to basically go in and like when you're prompting ChatGPT saying, you know behave like you're a lawyer and and write something to me so I can understand it. And I'm a 7th grader, which is probably giving myself too much credit.

11:44 And but with them you can go in and just say create a song about quitting smoking and it'll create a song about quitting smoking. You can tell it what genre you want it to be. You can put in as much detail or as little detail as you want. The result is unbelievable. And if you go through, if you look at these two websites, Suno and Udio, they're they're a little bit different. One's a little more creative and one's a little more accurate, I would say. And but both of them had samples on their songs that they were promoting that from some people who went on and created them. I guess that I couldn't tell they were AI generated. I mean killer vocals.

12:29 There was a rendition of House of the Rising Sun on one of them. Blew me away. Like, I would buy the song if it was on iTunes, You know what I mean? So crazy. And remember how early we are. Like, remember a year ago we weren't even talking about ChatGPT. And right now we're already at in a place where you can put in a fairly, you know, generic topic and it'll give you a song around it or you can get really specific, like there was one about a guy, oh, I can't remember what his name was. Like let's say his name was Bob and his friends wanted to basically you know mess with him and so they went on and and created a song about Bob shitting his pants at work.

13:15 And I mean it's hilarious and it's it's sort of like a like a big band kind of song almost you know and or like jazz but from the 60s you know really great song but it's all about Bob shitting his pants at work and and embarrassing himself with his Co workers and stuff and and that as a woman I support Bob and he's a great guy but he shits his pants at work and that's not cool and so I don't know if if you can find it I I should have shared it but I don't really even remember which one I got it from but it was one of those Suno Arudio and another one that's interesting is search engines. I'm paying a lot of attention to this.

13:57 I spend a bunch of money with Google and and these other ones through my business and AI driven search engines are coming very quickly. So Open AI has one coming which is ChatGPT basically very fast that they think will go head to head with Google and I've been playing with one called Perplexity and it's it's cool. I I wouldn't say that it replaces Google in that if you just want to know, you know, something really simple like connect me to this website or whatever, it it gives you too much information back. It doesn't give you back like just the web domain or just the phone number for American Airlines, if that's what you're looking for or whatever it is, right?

14:41 But if you want some more information or you want nuance or you want facts or you want something surrounding the topic that you've just searched for, it's so good. It's incredible. Really, really great. And so yeah, check out Perplexity. And again, Open AI has one coming as well. I've been messing with this brainstorming AI, which my girlfriend said, Oh yeah, that's just to replace your girlfriend. That's all that's going to do. And so basically what it is, is it's someone to talk to about anything, whether it's what should I have for dinner tonight or I've got this really complex problem in my business or it's, you know, my leg hurts when I run, but only when I'm turning left, not when I'm turning right or whatever it is or or it could just be, you know, I'm really struggling with these things in my life or with this thing at work or whatever. So it's part time girlfriend, part time therapist, part time, business advisor, part time, whatever. It's it's a lot of things.

15:47 And so it does. It's it and it's learning and remembering. So the more you talk to it, basically the more that it knows you and knows your idiosyncrasies or your habits or your ideas or your idealisms or your beliefs or whatever. And you know, it'll call you out. It'll say, you know, last Thursday you said you know, And I'm not saying it's amazing. I'm saying it's pretty cool though. It's pretty cool. I've used it a few times. I did. You have to do this initial thing where it's asking you a lot of your What do you like? What do you not like? How old are you?

16:28 When's your birthday? What kind of food do you like? Blah, blah, blah. And there is a huge level of security built into it. So they're not selling your data to anyone. And that's obviously important because it's going to know as much about you as your girlfriend does, or your wife or your husband. So the one that I'm using is called Kin KIN and again, it's in beta. I don't think you can just go download it. I think you have to sign up for some beta program or something. But I've got it and it's less scary than you think you know it it it is very helpful for a lot of things. It's a little more personal is that's how I would say it probably because I've used chat GPTA whole bunch. This is more personal and this is more based on the learnings that you've put into it.

17:15 So it gets to know you like a very close friend or a very close advisor, a very close mentor would and really cool. And sort of the last one that I would talk about. Well, two more ChatGPT Open AI the the parent company of ChatGPT has created an AI generated image detector which is interesting. You know, it's it's sort of like a drug dealer building a police force within itself, you know, So and it works really well. I I looked at some tests on it and stuff and and it picks up and it'll tell you which program created it too for the most part.

17:57 So that's interesting. I think that's going to be become a big deal where Google is going to steer people away from AI generated images or AI generated content. I know they already do. If you're writing blogs using AI generators for example, and you're using those blogs to try and improve your SEO, your search engine optimization, you are going to fail. It's it's going to penalize you for using AI generated content. So interesting. And then lastly finally is a an app I found called Gamma, which it's pretty incredible. I mean you can basically say I want to create a slide presentation about geezers of gear that I'm gonna present to potential sponsors and you give it very little information, boom, it spits out this unbelievable looking slide presentation, which by the way could also be a website, could also be a document.

18:56 And so we are at that stage now where you can create relatively simple websites within about two minutes and they look beautiful and the AI system will publish that website for you. You don't even have to go publish the website, you just give it the custom domain and you probably have to put in some hosting details and stuff and it publishes the site for you. So if you or your children are part time web developers doing really simple, like those WordPress sites that you charge 1000 or $2000 for and it takes you an hour or two hours to build, 'cause they're all templated and you're just putting in a little bit of information, I think those are going by the wayside very quickly.

19:40 This to me is better than any of the 1000 or $2000 WordPress WordPress sites that I saw. So there you have it. That is my AI up AI update for the week. And do me a favor, send me messages, content, comments on the on the podcast or on YouTube. Let me know if you think this this AI discussion is valuable or if you just skip by it every week. And I know the few of you I can think of right away that would be skipping right by it, but I'm sure some people do listen to it. You know it's it's it's important that you know it's going to impact all of our futures. And so yeah, I try to share what I can. Anyways, today's guest, Jim Woodward, is an award-winning designer who's expertise IS3D visualization, rendering, and modeling for a wide variety of industries including concert and theatrical films, events.

20:41 I blew that one. Events, film, television, corporate events, trade shows, museums, architectural firms, and retail. Jim has been incorporating CAD and 3D visualization into the entertainment workflow since 1986. He's produced corporate and concert events for widely recognized companies and entertainment artists for over 40 years now. Jim is the Senior Entertainment Product Specialist at Vectorworks, focused on providing training and support for lighting design, production design, pre vis rendering and more. Welcome Jim.

21:24 Jim, how are you? I'm doing great. Nice to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you. I'm, I'm a little bit headphone envious. You know, I got some headphone envy, you got big bright red beats on, and I got these goofy looking AKG headphones on, but you look snappy. They match your red mic cord there, so. See, That's what. I'm saying where In Sync. You almost should send me those just because of that, You know, just because of the red, the red mic cord. You know what, It's funny. I saw a podcast and I can't even remember what it was now. But I went, man, that red mic cord looks good. And I had to go on Amazon instantly and order one. So I ordered a red mic cord and now I need red headphones up because you know, it's just not good enough with these black ones anymore. See these.

22:13 Things have a little too much black in our in our images. It's a show thing, huh? It's, it's your show, blacks. I've, you know, I've never been a roadie, call it, but I've just always loved black clothes from when I was, you know, a little kid. I loved black clothes, so I. Don't know, all the way back to what I started my mom, I was asking why do you always wear black? Right to yesterday when we were on vacation, my wife said why do you always wear black? And I said it's comfortable for me. Yeah, yeah, You know what? I I mean, me too. It's just when I go to the closet, like, first of all, 90% of my closet is black anyways. But you know, I'm just not typically gonna grab a yellow shirt or a red shirt or something, you know?

22:58 It's like every year on Saint Patrick's Day, I'm looking for a green shirt. Nope. Still don't have one, you know? So yeah, I mean, it's just a thing. Black cars too for me, I I prefer black cars over any other color and happen to have one right now. That's my exception. I don't. I don't like to be in a very warm car when I get in so. You know, is that real though? Like I know it's supposed to be but. I'm not sure, but it's always been my choice. Yeah, I live in, I live in South Florida and and I have a black car and I've had a couple white ones, I've had a couple red ones, etcetera. But like for me, I don't know that I've ever felt hotter in one color than another.

23:40 And so I don't know, I'm sure. It's got to be false. Every time I go to Las Vegas or Florida, everybody has black cars, so it's. True. It's true. Fashionable. You know, the one thing is they do get dirty quicker and like, I'll take mine to the car wash and you know, literally an hour later I'm like, what? You know, Did I get splashed or something? What's going on? Why is it dirty already And white? You can you can keep it for two weeks after a car wash and it still looks good. So I don't know why I pick black cars all the time, silly. So tell me, I know you've been in the business a while and it's, I think it's coming on 50 years, right? And you don't. You look like you're in, You look like you're in your 50s to me, so. That's thank you.

24:24 It's a bit surprising. So how did you get started? You know that was, that was I guess the mid 70s, right? Yes, it was. I believe 1974. My sister took me to an Elton John concert, and at the old Boston Garden, you had to walk out into the balcony. You had to go up a little flight of stairs, and you came out in the middle of the balcony and then you either went up or down to go to your seat. And as I walked up that first flight of steps, I didn't see anything of the show. I saw what was above, I saw the Truss, I saw the audio hanging and I looked up there and before I even saw the show I said that is the coolest thing I ever saw. And a year later I was schlepping Steel Park hands anywhere I could.

25:13 I started out in punk rock at a place in Boston called the Ratskeller, short of the Rat, and it was Boston's answer to CBG BS. A lot of the acts coming over over from the US for showcase gigs at CBG BS didn't want to do that on their first night so they usually stopped in Boston to do their first US show. Believe some of those acts would have been the police. The cars were a local Boston band and. Cars are kind of Boston. I didn't hear that. Yeah, that's cool. All kinds of, all kinds of stories to go back to the punk rock days. But basically I started going in there any time I could. I was sneaking in there, I think 15, and I think I can say it now, while the owners are long gone, they can't be sued. But I was sneaking in at 15 and by the time the doors opened, the people around there, the bartenders and the and the bouncers saw me around.

26:14 They assumed I was 18 so they didn't kick me out and I just started doing anything I could to help bands and started running the lights there. I think the owner asked me for $60.00 a night if I would leave my 6 steel power cans in there and come in every night and run them. And I do believe he offered me free beer as part of the deal. And I said I think I found a new career but I was always interested in the work part of it. And a few years later, a very patient gentleman, JT McDonald, doing an Aerosmith rehearsal up in Boston when they were going out on a tour. I had shown a little incentive and walked up to him and said, well can I help you?

26:58 And he said, well you know how to run a lighting console. And at that point I had made my first console which goes back to the punk rock days for just a second of I didn't have a dimmer board. And one of my greatest pieces of gear I ever found in my life was a dimmer board because my first console was toggle switches and duplex outlets flashing trash. It was only it's only 6 power cans and it was punk rock. So if you can make a show out of that, I believe you can make a show out of just about any moving light fixture. So you know what, Jim? Funny. So I started in my first band when I was I think 12 as a singer and we built and and I think I did it with my my dad in my garage a like a wooden box with six light switches on it, just little light switches and plugs on the back of it.

27:46 And we didn't even have park hands. We had like floodlights from you know the 50 year ago equivalent of Home Depot and you know they were just literally like like you know, PAR lamps or flood lamps and that was that was my first lighting system so. Some people got it. One more story on those to put a a coffee can around them, right? Yeah, it would. We turned them into a little par can. But you know, that was the first thing I found, you know, and and once you can control something off a dimmer you, you know, a whole lot of creative thoughts came out. And so I had been in the right place at the right time. I saw a lighting plot on one of the road cases at the rehearsal when we were setting up.

28:32 And I was just a a general hand. And I looked at it and when I went out to the console, I said wow and looked at the plot and the guy that just climbed up, he was sending me out there for focus to run the board. And I looked at the plot and I brought up the first channel that he needed without him asking and he said, oh, how'd you know which one we needed? I said, I looked at the plot and he goes, well, pretty, pretty good. And a couple of days later, after the rehearsal loaded out, the third guy on the tour couldn't do it. He called me and said, how'd you like to do a tour? And I went down to New York and literally with my feet still sticking on the floor from the bar floor and the the club, I jumped right over and found myself on a very nice tour. There was a couple of gigs in between, but that was my first real break.

29:22 I went on a couple of small things before that. The Jay Giles band went out with a a local band as opening act as I think a backline tech and. But what was that period of time, Jim? Like, you know, from the time you were hanging out in The Rat to when you got to actually start working on lighting to when you got that gig on a tour. Four years and a lot of gigs in between. A lot of local stuff, a lot of switching around different clubs. I I moved on to another club, just bounced around for about four years. Anything and anything I could do work for a couple of local lighting and sound companies. But once I found myself on that first large tour. The very first tour, like I said was just as an opening act. But the after I let our show the opening act left. It was replaced by U2 on the J.

30:18 Geils Band in 1982. I think it was and it was the Freeze Frame tour and they didn't really have a place for him as they came over on their first tour and they ended up on that. And I learned the strong lesson of never underestimate the opening act because I know a few of the the Lititz Audio company. I won't put it in in by name but everybody knows who they are. I saw a couple of people help out the opening act and they didn't have enough cash for the you know to to pay the the standard 50 or $60 to run the opening act thing And they were nice enough to say, well we don't have it could you help us out. And they said sure. And I believe that was the story of a few of the guys that don't forget us if you ever get big and they remember those guys and I believe that was you know where where some of the guys that they first got on that tour. And it was a big lesson to learn of Never underestimate the. Yeah, but let me that's an interesting story that you tell. So are you saying that the opening act would have to Was it a vig that they had to pay the audio guy or was it was? It courtesy.

31:25 Yeah. It was your hour off you know. So if it was lighting front of house audio or monitors it was just kind of a general thing. Hey, if we don't have our own person, could you run the board for the? So it's not to use the sound system, 'cause that's part of the part of the deal, right? So they get to use the sound system, but they need their own audio guy. And if they don't have their own guy, they just go to the front of house engineer and say, hey, you know, here's 50 bucks, can you do our show for us too? It wasn't mandatory, but it was the general, you know, kind of like, hey, it's my hour off and everybody you know, but a lot of people said, hey, they don't have it. Can you help us out? And that's that's the the great thing about it is that you never know who's going to be your next artist to to work for.

32:11 Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. You two. Wow. So you two opened for J Giles. Yes, a very small part, I think. We weren't on those shows, 'cause we were the opening act before that, but I believe it was for about 2/3 of the tour and J Giles was on the top of the charts. And at two years later, I believe J Giles kind of called it, put it on hiatus for a little bit and you two was going out to the stadium. So, yeah, quick turn around. That's wild. Yeah, that's a cool story. Yeah. So that was your first tour, then the the J Giles thing was your first? Real tour, first real. There was a couple little regional, you know, venturing out a little bit with some local acts, but that was the first one where I actually got on a bus and started doing it. And what was your role?

32:58 You were a lighting tech or? On the very first one I was backline. I actually did some backline work on that and then. What was that like? You know, how old were you then? Probably in your early 20s, I'm guessing. Yes, 21 ish. Yeah, somewhere around there. And I believe my first luggage was a milk crate. Oh my God, that's. Wild. I had to run out to the store and buy a a duffel bag because I I left. I left home with a literally a milk crate in my clothes in it. Yeah, that's that's like my son. Like, I'll get on a flight with my son and he'll walk on carrying like a Publix grocery store shopping bag. And I'm like, why are you bringing food? And he goes, no, this is my clothes. I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Like, I bought him a really nice suitcase because he travels a lot.

33:48 But you know, if it's just a couple, like a pair of pants and a couple pairs of underwear and a couple T-shirts, you know, he just brings a Publix bag. It's pretty funny. I've learned to travel light, but not I still couldn't get into a Bill crit. Yeah, that's funny. But I mean, was it weird being away from home for that long and away from your friends and like, do you remember that being an issue or were your eyes this big going? I get. To see the world, yeah, I didn't know. I had no, no issues of doing that. I met my my wife of 49 years and she doesn't want me to say that. But we've been together probably about a year after I think I started it, and we've been together ever since. So my determination was to make a good living and send it home and buy a house, pay off the mortgage and, you know, eventually come back home and enjoy that. But I stayed on the road a little longer than I thought I was going.

34:42 To yeah, well and stop in and see her every once in a while, hopefully. But you, you met her on the road. You met her while you were touring. No. Met her when? Met her kids. Yeah, met her. That's cool. Yeah, met her. So she's. Not in my home business or anything. No. I dragged her into it, though. Oh, you did. Which probably looked really good until you got to COVID. And then it was like, we're all we're all dying. We're all broke now. I was very grateful that I was. I was very lucky to have gotten a job with my current employer, Vectorworks, right before COVID. So I didn't have to worry about when the industry kind of shut down. And I know a lot of people were not in a good position of that and our hearts go out to anybody that didn't have work. I was one of the very fortunate ones that everybody was learning our product.

35:33 So I stayed busy. I know quite a few marriages that where they're both in in the industry and those were the ones that I really felt for, you know, where they were both like one was a production manager and the other was a seamstress or a you know, whatever. And I mean they were both suddenly completely out of work for 18 months or whatever. I I really felt for those people and I I was doing a weekly podcast that that or not a podcast but a a zoom call that we just called, you know the weekly happy hour or something. It was every Wednesday at 5:00 and it was for the live events industry and we'd have 50 people one week, 100 the next week, 40 the next weekend. But it was sort of a who's who and lots of new friends too. Like lots of people that I didn't know before that were caterers or truck drivers or whatever and anyone was invited. It was a drop in, basically, and just some of the stories were just so sad, you know, not not of death and and sickness, but I'm talking about just the financial ruin and how that impacted families and households and stuff. It was tough.

36:40 Really relationships as well. There was a nice talk at the event Safety Alliance the year before last. And they had a gentleman that came in and was a registered healthcare worker and spoke about how all of a sudden everybody in our industry was now 12 months together in a two-bedroom apartment in New York with 700 square feet and their lives were OK. I'm gone six months now. I'm gone three months and never being in the same place more than a couple of months. I was lucky that we had, you know, basement that I kind of I'm going to move down here and I'm going to have my own little office. So I I had a nice situation, but a lot of people didn't.

37:22 And I didn't realize until that gentleman spoke about that, yeah, that it was an industry wide issue of a lot of relationships not quite making it through. Well, remember, like a lot of people, I talked to so many people all the time in our industry, and so many people hadn't seen their wife for six months all at once. Like they've never been together for six months all at once, let alone 18 months or whatever. But I remember a lot of those conversations, Like the longest I've ever been in the same place as my wife was a couple of months, you know, And now here I am going on the second year. And yeah, there's been some tense moments where it's like, when are you gonna leave, you know? I think it's so much easier now though for people on the road. And I'm not saying, you know, that, you know, we walk through 5 feet of snow to get to school everyday kind of story. But we didn't talk to anybody for a week at a, you know, to our loved ones, you know, for a week at a time because it was limited to a hotel.

38:26 And half the time to save a little bit of money. You get on to the lobby and use the payphone and you wouldn't talk to people for 3-4 days. There was time when my wife didn't know where I was for a couple of weeks at a time other than looking at the itinerary, but she didn't have any real way to get a hold of me. And there was some tours, didn't even have production phones. So literally you had to do, you know, checking on a phone, trying to fix a console at 725 / a pay phone in the in the lobby of an arena. And that was just a make. Crazy to remember that stuff. That's. It as nuts to remember that stuff. One of the smartest people was if someone got a cordless phone and put it in a hamper in one of the dressing rooms and was able to plug it into one of the the Watts lines for the broadcast and we finally had a cordless phone on the bus. That's awesome.

39:19 That was the first of the wireless communication on the. Bus, that's awesome. No, But it's wild to think about stuff like that. Like, I've never thought of that, that trying to do a service call to fix, you know anything, a light fixture or a dimming rack or whatever it is. But you gotta go to the, you gotta go to the payphone in the in the venue, I mean. At 7:25? That's insane. Console's down at 7:25 and you've literally got to call, you know, somewhat to help you through it. Yeah. And some some tours just did not want to pay for the production phones. But, but you know what? You're right though, 'cause like, you know, like we say at our age, kids these days, you know, but they they, it is easier. You can do 2 hour Facetimes every night with your kids and your wife and stuff, right?

40:04 Like, it's much easier now that we have, you know, FaceTime and Zoom and all of these great tools where we can be more together. And it's still not the same as being in the same room, but it's a hell of a lot closer than a payphone in the lobby, you know, or being in the production office where the production manager is like, OK, you got 2 minutes. That's it, 2 minutes. And then I want you out of here, you know, and you're trying to tell your wife you love her and you got the production manager sitting next to you going it's a minute and 1/2 right now, you know, So yeah, that's pretty wild. So how how did your career evolve then? Cuz you started it in backline and and how'd you end up spending so many great years in lighting?

40:48 Like, how'd you take that next step? Well, I thought I was gonna be get into audio, to tell you the truth, but the first time I ever got my hands on a real console, I was not good at it. I did not have the ear and I just. I was literally tearing up drivers because I didn't know how to control it. And I was a drummer, so I just all wanted to just hear drums, drums, drums. So I didn't make a good audio person and I just kind of fell into lighting and into the visual end of it, and I really enjoyed that part of it and never really looked back. Later on I got more you know a little more into the the production end of it. But for the most part I just really loved painting that picture in my mind. And long before we had you know, visualization software and all the the virtual world, I remember what I wanted to see in my head when I was listening to a song and I would just evolve this little lighting beam picture and it really, it was just all really about beams back then you there was no aerial effects.

41:51 If we had a little bit of, you know, we never needed a hazer because most of the places we were working in, smoking was still allowed. So there was abundance of atmosphere which really made the show look good. I'll tell you that I know it's not politically correct to smoke in venues, but it was, it was one of those times when the air just had a saturation that everything looked good everywhere. But it was one of those ones where I never looked at the equipment as being my deciding factor in a design. It was really about what's there, make the best of it and you know, what's the building, You got a low, low ceiling, use it as you can and just kind of spread things out to make it, you know, look as big as it can.

42:33 And it was really that whole mentality and it was all really about, you know, the the rock'n'roll side of it. I really never learned formal design and still I started doing you know, like the corporate where it was a real finesse or doing acts. When as I I started moving on, I got to work with some great acts that were a little more out of my taste range. What I listen to, but a lot more on the creative side. One of them being Neil Diamond. And I believe Marilyn Lowry was her name. And what is a big inspiration to me to take a design to that next level in finesse, in creative timing and not just slam the buttons and heavy metal kind of shows.

43:21 And that was a big driving factor and just some great designers and looking how everybody did things and just kind of learning along the way how, how people did it. So but your first, so you went from backline to what Lighting Tech 1st and then eventually got to the board or how did that work? No, the first I was a lot of the local stuff. I was running a board. I was actually a house LD for a couple of clubs. Oh cool. And started doing that. And that was going out. As you know, I knew the console well by the time I hit a tour. The tour is when I really started being as a lighting tech and working my way up through that. It was a couple of years before I started, you know when I started doing large tours that I actually got on the console, a lot of it for the opening act.

44:10 That was where you got your first break and then you know if the opening act went out the next tour they would, you know. So that was the big jump. There is some of the opening acts progressed and I was able to stay with them when they headline. So that was a cool way and learning a lot from being a stagehand. And at first, when I first went into the arenas, I didn't understand the level of competency that some of the stagehands have. Some of them are just there to, you know, make a next, you know, a good living, but don't really get into the technical side of it. They just find their niche to just, you know, put food on the table. Others are there and had my gig 20 years before I did. And you know, they all know you know how to do things differently, a different show every day. So I learned a lot from watching that and how different crews got along.

44:58 Different companies use different gear, different companies package things differently and you just saw the the the good and the bad and you kind of learn from that as well. So were you freelancing at that point, or you were working through a company? Yeah, all freelance. All all freelance at that point, you know it. It was pretty much just word of mouth, you know, you need any help? Who's doing this tour? Who's doing that? He can't make it. She can't do this. Well, can I do it? Yeah, kind of thing. So and. And so this was, you know you were in Boston, so this would have been a lot of the Northeast companies like C Factor and stuff like that or? Correct.

45:40 Yeah. But there was Pollico, which became East Coast Lighting in production. In Pollico. Yeah, Bob and Andy up there started that and they actually had the the J Geil show. They had some of the first gear up in Boston and they were the 1st that I ever worked with that had you know pre rigged Truss and lamp bars and you didn't hang every single fixture in one, one lamp, one cable kind of set up and they were the first ones I believe they had. It wasn't socapex, it was another brand lap cable, but it was the first time where we had like multi cable and the breakouts and it's like wow, this is so much easier and we were able to set up you know in two hours two, you know, two sticks of Truss and you know ready to go. Which used to take, yeah, all day or a half a day or something, yeah.

46:29 In aluminum park hands, I might mentioned, yeah, yeah, which was a big plus in the industry. Huge advancement, yes. I mean it's funny that when we think back, you know, like the advancements that are being made now in lighting versus back then, you know going from steel to to aluminum, it was like you know now. Someone asked me what was the biggest thing that was added to a lighting rig that that made the biggest difference you can think of all these fixtures and all these effects. How about a Truss ladder? Because when I first started you, you shinied up the Genie Lift or or you should eat up the cable and some of those bundles cable were a little hard to grab.

47:10 Yeah. And kidding. Yeah. And when I first saw a trustler, I said what a great idea. Coming down the down the cable was easy. Going up the cable was a little harder. I'm sure when you go to these ESA events, some of those stories that scare the hell out of those guys, it's like, no, please don't. You didn't do that. We're very lucky to be talking about it and protection a lot. You know, a short story about that Bob C called us. And I remember one time after loading, you know, a bunch of trucks in the rain, 2:00 in the morning, he called us up to the office and said, hey, got an idea and wanted to bounce it off a few of us. And it was very close to what we see in fall protection now.

47:50 And he thought about that 1980 something and he saw it and we said strain all that, all those lines through the motors every day. That's going to slow us down and too cumbersome. And we we didn't really latch on to that idea. And it didn't happen for a few years, but not too long after someone engineered that type of system. Bob saw something in the future and was was looking out for his guys and I got to give him that credit. You know I've always been AI was close friends with Bob and I've always been a big fan of Bob. See like I I just think he's one of the you know he's there's a lot of reason for the the you know lack of love towards him from some people like he he could be a bit of a tyrant at times but he was a very innovative guy Like he he really he was a smart guy that that came up with a lot of really great ideas and concepts and ways to do things that other people weren't thinking of. It's just he didn't always give credit where credit was due on some of that stuff, you know and so. Nurtured Some of the best.

48:57 Some of the best in the industry came out of that shop in the early 80s and a long. List a long list of people you know. But he he, you know, he was one of those type of people that tested you, you know, after like I said, you know, loading 4 trucks in the rain, you know, and getting out of there at 2:00 in the morning, you got to be back in a few hours. Yeah, he would. He would test you and he'd he'd hand you a broom and say sweep the shop. Yeah. And if you just took the broom and asked him, you know, just said whatever you need and did it. You found yourself on a very nice tour for a few months. If you took it and went how come me blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you might find yourself on Blue Boys to go for 30 shows in 31 days which I remember some of the guys was was a was a brutal yeah. But you know he if you can't handle the pressure of being asked to sweep the shop, you might not do so good when you show up at Madison Square Garden and might be in a tense situation and know how to handle it. So it was a little test.

49:56 I like that stuff though. Like, I don't know how you are, but you know, again, being older, one of the things is I really do like the old school way of doing things. Like I really do like when you stepped out of line, you got a foot up your ass and that kind of stuff. You know, I I think some of that stuff is definitely missing today, you know, from my own son and and other people's kids and stuff who have had it pretty easy for the most part, which is great. I mean, we all want to take amazing care of our kids and give them everything we can, but at the same time, sometimes you got to put your foot up their ass. You. Know, I will admit I was one of the ones that didn't take the broom with the smile a few times until I learned.

50:37 Yeah, but so. So how many, how many times did you tour with Blue Öyster Cult then? No, never had to do that one. Never had to do that. I but I, you know, that was one of the ones where we got it. There was some great shows back then. They weren't the longest tours, but there was things like the Simon and Garfunkel tour I was on just for, you know, a a very short period of that. And looking back on it, it was, you know, some of the nicest things I ever did. Was through that. Yeah, did. You ever do rush with with Howard? I filled in for for someone for a few shows and I was, I was, you know, around long enough to see some of the inner workings of that show and that was a real family. They treated their crew like family.

51:18 That was just, it was a great situation for those guys. Yeah, Howard's a really good friend. He's he's been on the podcast a couple times and had some pretty cool stories. Did he ever tell you the story about the the when they were trying to pick up girls and the girl said, OK, I'll go out with you, but only if you can bring me a horse. No. It's a great story. You're gonna have to go back to the podcast and listen. To oh that that I'm interested in. I wrote it to Howard every once in a while. Great designer. I love the guy. He's a great man. You know what I mean? Like all of you guys are great designers and and I'm sure you guys all, you know, sort of measure each other about by how good your designs are.

52:01 For me, I just like people, you know and and Howard's just a great guy. I just, you know, I I pretty much chat with him every day through Instagram or something. He'll send me something stupid and I'll send him back. I'm stupid but. What I remember about that Rush rig and any of the stuff he did, I remember there was 28 Volt dimmers in the shop that was specifically for Rush. Yeah, because of the aircraft landing lights and there was so much beam action going on in there. Yeah, that that was the one thing that I remember about that show. Yeah, yeah. Well, he did it a long time. And you know, now I'm seeing rumors of them going back out again with a different drummer. So. They said they'd never do that.

52:42 So I don't know what's true and what's not true. You know, God, God knows. Nobody would lie on the Internet. It's all got to be true on social media. Kidding. They've got a that show just has a great in the background humor too and it's it's a great. Show well, sometimes it's not in the background, the sausage making machine and the washer. And dryer. The washer and dryer. Yeah, that's my favorite. The washer. I mean, they're. They're hilarious. And and the intro videos that they did, you know, where Getty's like an old Jewish woman or something, you know, I mean, it's just funny stuff. Like they laugh at themselves all the time, you know? So yeah, great band. I mean, obviously I grew up in Canada so I'm a Rush fan to start with. But. But I was a bass player and a singer growing up and so you had to be a Getty Lee just nut job. So I had every Rickenbacker bass he'd had and I bought a Steinberger.

53:32 When he got a Steinberger, I got a Fender. When he got a Fender, like, I just had to have whatever Getty. I had bass pedals on the floor. I I bought a keyboard so I could learn to play subdivisions on the keyboard and stuff. You know it's stupid, but. I think that is one of the most humorous things I have ever seen in the industry. Is being on the stage side of a Rush show and watching all the 58 year old air drummers in the 1st 20 rows. Crazy, isn't it? That that that is a moment. And no girls. No girls. 0 girls. You know it's not a place you go to pick up girls. A Rush concert? No, it's all just dudes playing air guitar and air drums and air whatever.

54:13 Yeah, it's like there's a Long Island band called Dream Theater who same thing, you know, All men, all men in the. Audience. Yeah, they're still touring. They're they're an incredible band but no it's it's funny So, so you know we've covered some of your earliest stuff and and I mean how did that turn into like, so you spent what, 30 odd years on the road touring. Yeah, about 90 twoish. I had gotten off the road from doing rock stuff for a little bit and a friend had joined who's worked with audio analyst AS as one of their tech guys. And he moved on into a career with a company called New England Digital that made the Cinclavier the first digital workstation and he was in their marketing department, He says. Well, you've designed, you've done some rock'n'roll lighting. You ever do a trade show?

55:16 And I said, oh, Oh yeah, yeah, you. Yeah, and. I just said, yeah, well, well, you know, if I can light some drunk rock star running around a stage, I can easily light up a computer station, right? I didn't realize how how much finesse there was. And about halfway through doing that project, they had gotten a little bit of a debate with their exhibit designer and they said, well, you've designed some scenic stuff. I said, well, yeah, sure. So I jumped into that side and started doing the entire exhibition and corporate event design and I didn't really. Yeah, for that show. And then he moved on to another company and it was called Data Translations. And then it went into a company that was doing digital video editing software called Media 100 and they kind of had the 1st all in one digital video workstation that was available for a fraction of the price of an Avid system. So they got a lot of traction and I started getting to do some really large exhibits with them and they passed me on to all their clients.

56:28 And without ever handing a business card, we had a booming business during the the.com era. It was all technology. So we just dove into that and never looked back. And that's when I dragged my wife into the office and said I need help. And we knew so many people in production that I didn't really have to have staff a whole company because I had such resource of talented people. So you were just putting the whole production together? The whole thing. So oh wow. That's cool. We started doing really big stuff where we're doing exhibitions and more of a rock'n'roll style. So everything I learned about how to package and how to tour a show, we brought into the exhibit world. We weren't the first ones out there to be using fabric, but we were one of the first to be hanging, you know, rental Truss and fabric and lots of moving lights, lots of color. We started using projection and then as LED walls came into, you know, profit, you know, where they could be affordable to to bring out to the trade show world. We started doing that and a lot of companies said, well this is great because we don't have to store all this. It looks big.

57:34 It was vibrant. A message could change all the time with the content. So we kind of started doing trade shows rock'n'roll style. One time I even used Kabuki's to get my drops out of the air faster, so we didn't have to wait for the trust to come down before we could pack it up and leave. And we were getting, you know, a lot of success with that. So yeah, I mean that. Was fun that market, the the tech companies and probably like the E3 show, like the video game stuff really seemed to drive that, like that real entertainment rock'n'roll, theatrical kind of look into the trade shows. That's where I said nab. Anyway, yeah, nab.

58:15 NAB was another one. Comdex was the granddaddy of shows in Las Vegas. I think it was 135,000 attendees at that show. So there was a lot of places to show off your craft there. Yeah, you know, one time I was at NAB and I think it was the first time I ever went to it. It was probably late 90s or something. And I was in the elevator and like 5 Sony guys come into the elevator. And I, I said wow, you know, you guys are all with Sony, I guess. And he goes, yeah, yeah we are. And I said this must be a big show for you guys. He goes, yeah, I think we have 9000 people here this year. I mean I was like what? How could one company have 9000 people at a trade show? Between all the training and all all this, the general sessions. But one of the the best people in the business, Roy Bickel just such an industry innovator and just saw him last December out at Rock Lititz conference and he's still at it And he is just was such an inspiration to to all of us in the industry. And he was the head rigger at the Las Vegas Convention Center for a lot of the exhibition contractors. And he just brought something he saw all of a sudden NAB. You looked up and there was a sea of lighting rigs and it was amazing at how many points were

59:46 hung in that hall so quickly. And how are, you know, the live event technology just immersed itself in that world and how much work people were getting not only from the people designing it in the vendors but to the people working there as well. And it was amazing if you didn't, if you didn't remember your motor power. Well, I ordered all my power. Well, you forgot your motor power and you showed up on site and you got in the line of, you know, service orders. You could be hours and and even days before you got your motor power. And a mistake like that in the in the trade show world, it's one thing when you go into an arena and you're you're the only production there that day and everybody caters to you and and if you need power, yeah, sure, we'll get right on it.

1:00:31 But when you're just one of 700 lighting rigs in the room that day and you don't have your paperwork together, you find out just how quickly you can lose money as a vendor. That was a learning experience for us. So did you start a company around that whole thing or was that just basically you and and your wife or? Yeah, just myself and my wife and a few other people that we brought in, you know, was a couple people in the shop. But really we just had you know, a minimal staff and we just hired great production people from the touring industry or you know from a local people that I had worked with for so long that it was great to just have all those resources but not have to have a sustainable company to be payroll in case it slowed down.

1:01:19 Unfortunately, theendofthe.com industry about 2002 just imploded on itself and we switched back to live and and started doing other things. So it's nice to have those skills during a time when it was booming, but also, you know, to have the knowledge of when to just say either the company has to get real big or you got to give it up. And we didn't want to support a payroll. I didn't have the inclination to to have, you know, large company regardless because my my real love was in drafting and designing. So that was kind of the later point. Did you ever, did you ever buy gear in that business? Like did you?

1:02:01 Minimal, yeah, minimal. Just enough to get by. And then we would, we would have all our conventional a few dimmer racks, you know and all. And then we would just rent our the, you know, any of the intelligent lighting at the time it was. Pretty common, yeah, that's pretty common is you, you buy the infrastructure and rent the the fixtures because everybody has their own thoughts or needs or whatever for fixtures. But I'm seeing more and more of these sort of hybrid design firms who it started where they were just buying their own consoles. You know they they'd buy initially hogs and and then eventually MA consoles. And you know as they were owning all these MIMA consoles and looking at their financials at the end of the year they were going hey this gear is actually earning us pretty good. So next thing you know they own 2 or 300 moving lights, 1000 feet of Truss and and you know they're basically dry hire lighting companies that are then renting their own gear back to those production companies who are doing the tour or whatever. So I see that more and more often now where they're designing their own products into the tour. And then the pandemic hits.

1:03:13 Well, yeah, and then you're. Carrying big expenses and stuff. But the nice thing about owning gear when the pandemic hit is you used that as currency, you know. And with with my company, we we saw a lot of companies like that where you know they they needed the money to pay their mortgage or to to pay to survive or whatever. And so they were selling off gear. And there's always buyers. Even in a pandemic, there's always buyers. Installs. Yeah, installs were going good. Even just deep pocket, well invested, well funded lighting, rental companies, sound rental companies who are like, hey, the pandemic's going to end at some point. I want to have all this gear when it ends and they've done very well with that mentality or that philosophy, right? So, so then, so after that you went back on tour or? Yeah, most a lot of it was doing corporate and and staying with the corporate.

1:04:07 We we still stayed in the the corporate and trade show industry. We just didn't do the production end of it. We didn't want to do the logistics, we didn't want to do the storage. We were pretty much design and go and that was some of the stuff that we were really lucky to work on. It was pretty picture conceptual design, do with what you want, just, you know, seek a, you know, structural engineer and make sure that the design is going to work. And that was above, you know, our pay grade to engineer it. So we just kind of fell into that design only and I guess it was right around 2003, 2004 where I went ballistic on Vectorworks. I just found a passion for that side of it and I really liked the design side of it and maybe helping out, getting it started, but not staying on for the duration of the production. And a lot of the exhibit stuff, it was a lot of it was bid and I kind of did a business model that was we're not going to do the production.

1:05:11 So it's a billable time for the design side. So if they said no, we still got something out of it, which was a good decision for us. Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You're not just investing time into you know an empty well. But it was something very early on, I believe it was in around 1986 and a funny gear story. We had a Commodore 128, not the 64. This was the extra powerful 128. But Michael Tate had a theory on early gear of don't use anything on the show. You can't buy at Walmart at 4:30 in the afternoon on a Sunday afternoon and because of that, his color controller.

1:05:55 This was back when he was still doing lighting and his color controller was based on a Commodore 64. And yeah, it was pretty early technology, but it worked. And I had that computer sitting out of the front of house in one of the local hands we would do on an overnight and he came in the next day and he says, hey, I noticed you had a Commodore and I have this disk. I'm not sure what it is, some kind of draft, some computer drawing software of some kind, He says I don't have a computer and I have no use for it. If you want it, you can have it. And I I don't even remember the name of the software. I wish I did, but it was a very simple drawing program and all of a sudden my eyes opened up to how much time was being spent on a day off while all my buddies were hanging out down at the bar and having a good time on a day off. I'm up on a hotel bed drawing the park and symbol a couple of 100 times and it was tedious.

1:06:52 And all of a sudden, because of a Commodore 64 and a very nice person that gave me a disk, I wish I knew who it was and could thank them. If you're out there somewhere and you remember the story, I just do. But thank you. But it was a changing moment where there was in you know, about that time about 8586 where digital communication was just starting, where, you know, people were starting to use the computer to design and to start looking at how to package a show spreadsheets for the production team. So that was a big innovation to our industry. It's funny that you say that because I think a lot of people who listen are younger and they're they are like, what do you mean, laying on the bed, drawing, you know, park and symbols or whatever.

1:07:38 But I remember that I think it was my company, we we were giving away swag or maybe somebody else was where it was a a template of symbols, a symbol template for everything from park hands to whatever, like anything that would hang on a rig basically. And it was such a successful piece of swag, like it was almost like selling on the black market at the bar later that night and stuff, you know, cuz everybody wanted it. And when you think back to that now, like how popular this template was just because it made drawing park hands easier or whatever, right, It's shocking because you know again, who would think to hand Draw Something today? I still have.

1:08:22 I just moved into a new place so they're not on the wall right now, but I have my templates are framed. Oh really? Picture frame and hang on the wall right next to me. So this is not a day I don't look at them and remember what it took to do that. You know the same thing of hanging park hands one at a time, one at a time, 1 cable, one lamp, one cable. And you know, we forget about that of just how easy it is now when we. But then again, these shows were just supporting an album. They weren't the money maker. So these spectacle shows we have now with you know, 3740 trucks, whatever the case may be, that's where the industry is gone, where that's where the money is being made.

1:09:05 So what we used to put out there was a cost to the artist to support the album. Yeah, and now it's the money driving. Of course, yeah. Well, and it's big money. I mean somebody. One of my friends on Facebook and I forget which band it was. It's a country artist who's playing. Oh, it's Stapleton, Chris Stapleton, somebody posted online. Hey, I have two tickets for sale tonight. We can't go or tomorrow night or whenever it is. We can't go selling them at face value $490.00 each. I'm like, what, Chris Stapleton? I mean, he's a great country artist, don't get me wrong. But, you know, 490 bucks. So it's $1000 plus probably 100 bucks to park, plus $100 for a few beers.

1:09:51 I mean Jesus. You know, I look at that. I think when that first show I ever saw, Elton John, I think it was 25350 and 4:50 for a ticket. Yeah. And when it went up to when it went up a dollar, it's like, hold on a second here. Things are getting out of hand. Yeah. When they went up, you know, and that's. Wait a minute, that's our beer money for the show. Yeah. And we look at the price of the ticket and the memorable shows that we saw there. OK, they might have only been three or four trucks, but some of the most memorable shows I ever, you know, saw, saw were just that, you know, were the first time I saw Queen and looked up at the spectacle there and saw, you know, what a performance it was.

1:10:34 Now granted, we didn't, you know, we didn't need, you know, a mountain of LED effects behind the artist, which I think kind of takes away from it sometimes. And that's how old school I am. I don't. I don't look at most designs as being all about the artists and there's only a few out there that keep the artists in that scale. There are a few artists out there that really take notice and I think that's the the good designers now don't overpower with that lighting. You know spectacle behind the band and that little dwarf of a of an image of the artist in the bottom of the picture and it's and half the time now it's a silhouette where you can't even see the emotion on on.

1:11:16 You know, I've I've over, I've overused this a lot of times but I had Mark Brickman on the podcast and you probably know him I guess very well, cuz he was a Northeasterner guy too. But he, he said, yeah, I saw the Stones last week and he said, you know, it it kind of bothered me. And this was the, I don't know if it was the last tour or two tours ago, but it was when they had like the four, I think it was four or five iPhone video screens basically. And he said, you know, it's a beautiful design, but I didn't like it. And I said really, why? And he said because those massive video screens made Mick Jagger look small on stage. When you look at the stage, he looked like a little bug, you know, and he can't make Mick Jagger disappear. Yeah, you know.

1:12:08 And so, you know, versus like I I looked at some video the other day of the Stones playing at Jazz Fest in New Orleans and you know, it wasn't a massive production. It was sort of on the Jazz Fest stage and it was amazing. Like the Stones sounded and looked great. Mick Jagger dancing around at 80 years old. It was really, really great, you know, And so back to Mark Brickman, he said one of the designs that he loved that he did the most and I'm expecting to hear Pink Floyd Division Bell tour or something. He said it was Neil Young at Coachella and I said really what, what was the rig?

1:12:49 And he said 16 follow spots. That's it, 16 follow spots. But there was something in, you know, if you did not have a good rapport with your follow spots every night and it it it, it made a break. You know, it just, it was such a deciding factor on your show of, you know, just how much those people were into your show. And it might have been, you know, eight people that were two days from retirement and didn't care about your show and they just did six other shows that week and they really don't care. But to, you know, to just get them into that, hey, we got a job to do here. We're all professionals and you know, you know, please, you know, help me out here and and get a good rapport with those people. That was your show and if your rig ever went down, you still had a show and.

1:13:41 I remember. Seeing that, I forget what show it was. There was someone in the stadium. I believe it was Bon Jovi and they had a very, very large show and somehow they lost their the the lighting rig went down and all they had was 6 follow spots out front of house and all of a sudden you know and and and don't quote me on that because I I'm not positive it was Bon Jovi but I believe it was in it was in in a flood as I remember there was a water situation because of a heavy downpour and something happened that the lighting rig was down.

1:14:21 This was in Boston. Was yeah Gillette Stadium or what was Foxborough Stadium prior to one of those two. And I remember seeing it where nothing but follow spots and it was a desperate situation because of the massive amount of light that was was around the stage and suddenly their eyes had adjusted to that and when that was gone it made the problem even worse. So I learned that from taking a very brief stint as a board up for Phantom of the Opera for a fill in of how dark that show was and how few fixtures they used on it. And once your eyes adjusted to that light level, it didn't take much to make your retinas go wow. And that was you know.

1:15:08 But when your eye is used to that mountain of of gear, every moment is so heavily illuminated that to try to get an intimate moment with one or two fixtures is almost impossible. Yeah, it's hard to see nuance when everything's on at full blast and you've got like JDC 1 strobes blasting in the face and all of that stuff. You know what I like? I like a little bit of, I don't know, just I like simpler stuff for the most part, like LED Screens, Gone Mad has has for me. It's just changed what shows look like. I just don't like it as much.

1:15:49 I agree. I go to see a band, to see the band, you know, which is weird because I'm a production, you know, I've been in this industry for over 30 years. But when I want to see a band, I want to see the band. I want to hear what they sound like, and I want to see them. I'm not necessarily there for the spectacle, however, and I've been reminded I'm also not the consumer, right? I'm not the person they're targeting. The person they're targeting is looking for that crazy wild light show. And trust me, I I like those. They're very nice and stuff. It's just like if I was gonna see Led Zeppelin, if they were gonna get back together. And it's the one, it's my one sort of show that I never saw. That really bugs me cuz I grew up as a huge fan of Led Zeppelin and stuff and it just never worked out.

1:16:33 But you never think that your favorite artists are gonna die off and be gone forever, right? Like you just don't think of that back then anyways. And but I wouldn't wanna see them in a stadium with 1000 or 1500 moving lights. I'd rather see them, you know, in a. An old park can rig like, you know an old. Park can rig in a theater with with, you know, a dozen moving lights and a bunch of follow spots and some park cans. Like I'd love to see them, you know, the way they were, not the way they would be today or whatever. So that just makes me old. Probably, hey. Kids, a lot of fun, a lot of people, you know, because of the nature of the sales that the shows obviously have to be bigger to make that that sale of course, and of those numbers and to make the toll work. But when the crowd is looking away from the artist, 90% of the show, it's bad enough that they're on the phone for a good portion of this show and missing that moment because there's so many professional videos very show out there. There's really no reason to be taking any video. Enjoy the moment.

1:17:39 You'll never get it back. But all the things that are making you look up and away from the artist, the one that you just paid $400 to see. You're looking at swirling patterns on LED fixtures and you're looking at where turning around, looking at where the lasers are hitting and it's just like, yeah, cool, but you're not going to remember that as opposed to the emotion on the keyboard players face as they were struggling with the hardest part of the song. And you know some of the some of the heroes now are of artists that I didn't really pay attention to because they weren't my type of music. But you look at anything that Jeff Rabbits does, you're never looking away from Mr.

1:18:20 Springsteen on that show. He is why you're there. He is the emotion of the show and it doesn't all just fall back to well, look at if you want to see the detail, look at the video screen and it's just such a nice way to do that sooner. Ray Creative is one of the best designers I think in in modern design of how the artist still stays in focus to the big picture and she just, she just such phenomenal work. And there's a lot of other artists there that just know how to keep that balance of where the artist is and where the audience is looking. And it's like there's nothing up there 60 that you can't see on YouTube. Yeah, that's 60 feet in the air.

1:19:06 How annoying is it when you're sitting at front of house and all you see is freaking cell phone screens all the way up to the stage? Well, it's it's, I guess, what people want to do. And we're certainly not going to change that habit anytime soon. But I just look at it like you'll never relive that moment and what it's like to be, you know, a screaming crowd all at the same moment. And so many people have to look up for their phone to see what everybody would just went wow AT. And they they miss that that pop, that one moment of excitement. Yeah, well, I mean, do you have kids? They're probably Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, you know, it's when you look at your kids like I constantly for 10 years, I've told my son that is, is you're missing so much. You know, because you're sitting looking down at your phone all the time.

1:19:56 You're missing so much. And I miss a lot because I look at my phone a lot, but not near as much as the average, you know, now 20 year old, but you know. This times when I have literally because oops sorry, because of the job I have 12. At one point I had 12 monitors surrounding me between all the visualizers and the console and all and and then I think the like the hardest part of my job was which keyboard was which screen, you know? And when I go on vacation, I purposely take my cell phone and I put it in the safe and I don't take it out. And just to be away from tech for 12 days, 12 days straight and it's like, I'm sorry. There was a time when I used to live without this, and to get that back is actually quite pleasant. Amazing You can do that.

1:20:46 Yeah, I can. The trick is, don't bring your charger. Well, but the problem is I have. An online business that I do need to stay. Attached to you know what I mean. So. Yeah, I mean, if I if I lock my cell phone up in the in the safe for 12 days, I think I'd probably I'd come. Back to. A bunch of dead people and and no customers, so you know it wouldn't be good. You know, we were speaking to, we were speaking to headphones earlier. You know, one of the biggest, the, the biggest innovations in this industry over the years was a comfortable headset. If if anybody remembers the old blue Clearcom headsets and what it was like to sit through bad enough a 2 hour show, but to sit through a rehearsal day with those on it.

1:21:33 You came home with your head just aching from those and now you look at it, they're feather lights, so comfortable. But that was one of the the the ultimate when I was thinking about you know what was some of the, you know, your favorite gear over the years. And I was trying to think about it and it's like well some of my favorite gear was not anything to do with technology and lighting. It was about comfort. Yeah, it usually isn't. It's it's a chair, a front of House chair, you know? Or or like, it's always things like that. That's what people always say. You might have sold one of these. I've seen them on on eBay but I'm not sure if people actually are joking or not. But the old AVO consoles, before the QM 500, it was the same size as the QM500. I believe it was the 8800 and it had a little pin matrix in the drawers.

1:22:20 I don't remember and everybody said, well there was a fight over it. If someone tried to push anything else but an AVO it turned into an argument between the promoter. It was like, no AVO, that's it. And you know, people would have to jump through hoops, but if your artist was good enough, you could hold to that. But they would always try to start pushing other consoles on it. And there was nothing wrong with these other consoles, but it wasn't an AVO. And why did we like the Avos so much over a Selco? Because the case was long enough to sleep in under the stage. That's hilarious. Literally. That literally was was. One of the reasons we all loved Avos is that you can get a quick nap under the deck.

1:23:00 That's if you. Didn't have the bus If you didn't have the buses, if you didn't have the buses there, Unable case made a great cut. We I had Steve Warren from AVO on last week. It actually just came out today or yesterday. I think it came out and that was a fun conversation. He's living in Portugal now because Robin just bought the company. I'm sure he knew this. Yeah. Yeah, one of our partners. Yeah, so. One of the funniest things about AVO, and it was, I don't think it was very well known, was that it nobody had redundancy back then. There was no secondary console, There was no backups. There was literally 1 console and that was it. And if it went down at 7:25, you found yourself having to play microprocessor technician, which not a lot of us had that training and a lot of times I remember one time at Madison Square Garden at a radio station show at after everybody had put in their looks on a Selco, it was a brand new console and the Molex on one of the boards had wasn't seated correctly and popped out.

1:24:10 And then of course 725 full crowd got 5 minutes and consoles down. And I wasn't very knowledgeable about those kind of things at the time. And you find yourself, you popped it open, you you trace that problem and you looked at it and pop that back in and the shit came back on. And my heartbeat just was it it? I was, I was freaking out. But somehow, someway, we fixed it. But the thing about AVO was this was this gentleman by the name of Rob Steele. And I remember calling him from a pay phone in the lobby, and Rob was always picked up. That phone didn't care what time it was. And I remember one time on a console down and unfortunately it was the opening act.

1:24:58 It was in the dark as I remember on this show. But until I got it fixed, there was no backup and there was a little secondary connector that there was redundancy in the processing boards in that console. So you actually had a back, you know, somewhat of a backup console for some of the cards. And I believe it was A to D converter that had gone down. And sure enough, he walked me through it. And thank God, yeah. You know it's. Funny because got me through it. Steve on the podcast we did talked about a situation he had, I think it was Paul Simon where the console wasn't working or whatever and he, you know, whipped out a soldering iron and and opened up the board and was able to fix it.

1:25:53 And something happened. I can't remember the whole story, but like during the show or after the show or something, somebody was like, you know, the venue smells like it's on fire, you know? And everyone was freaking out because there was a fire and and he came to figure out that he had left his soldering iron on and it was burning something plastic or something. I can't remember exactly but he was quite embarrassed and and you know, all eyes were on Steve Warren at that point and he tells the story a hell of a lot better than I do because I don't remember all the facts but but it was kind of funny. He he said that was one of his biggest goofs. So I want to get into what you're doing now because I know you've been with Vectorworks.

1:26:38 So first of all, how cool is that that you were talking about like you were designing stuff using Vectorworks back in the early 2000s I think, right? Yeah, all the way back to 98. I think I bought my first copy in 98. And by about 2003, 2004 a good, very good friend was working at the company and is still with the company and is one of our Vice Presidents or our of our offices I should say, brought me into a Macworld show. Actually, I walked into a Macworld show with my laptop and walked up to the purse and I said, you know what? I've been trying to use this and trying to get better at it. And I said could you take a look at and and give me some, you know, honest critique on how I could get better. And any, any any comments would be appreciated. And I walked in and this gentleman said, wow, that's pretty good stuff.

1:27:38 Would you mind leaving your laptop here so we can run this on the screen? And I said, well, I got to kind of keep my laptop. And he says, well, you know, reach out because we could, you know, we could use images like that. And I reached out and this gentleman had asked me from the marketing department if I would come out and speak to. I think it was LDI or it might have been Macworld was one of the first ones. But I came out there and you know, I been around the stage for a long time, under the stage, over the stage, under it, on the stage when the house wasn't in, but never on the stage, you know, So quite uncomfortable there.

1:28:21 And I was kind of nervous to get up on that podium and talk about how I was using Vectworks. And they had kind of asked me when I came in, you know, they wanted a little bit of name drop, you know, not name dropping, but just, you know, who have you worked for? And it obviously helps marketing. And I was kind of a little hesitant. It's like, well, that's not really what I'm about. I don't really, you know, they're just a bunch of people I work for. It's not really, you know, me. And I said how about I just get into the software? So they said, well, please wrote up about two paragraphs of who I am and what I did. And I got up there for about 30 seconds. My hands was just sweating. You know, just I I'm so nervous to get up there and there wasn't a whole lot of people out there to start. And about two minutes into it, I said enough of that, let's draw. And I jumped up and I just started doing what I felt very natural using the software and I was using it in kind of a different way.

1:29:17 And within a few minutes I had the aisles clogged of people looking at just how I was using it. So I felt very comfortable and I I found a nice little knack of being able to get up and demonstrate software, which isn't the easiest thing to do, especially if it crashes, which it doesn't do very often. But Murphy's Law will say it won't crash in six months, but the as soon as you get up in front of a crowd. Exactly. And I just, I had a passion for going out there and getting people excited about it. And I just, I love the product and it's a great company to work for. I work with, you know, just such an amazing team of engineers that I'm constantly learning on something that I always had interested in, you know, and of how software works.

1:29:59 But I'll never get into engine, you know, coding and all that as opposed to just how do you get a feature, you know, what does it take to to bring a product to life in software world. And that was so much different than what I'd ever done in the road world or you know, in the production world. And it's a challenge for me now and and I get to think, you know, every day and I get to do something that's completely different and I don't have to go out there and get chain grease all over myself or schlep for rot. And I still like going out and doing that every once in a while just to remember you know what it was. But. But I mean it, it had to be cool though like you know being a user of the product for for I guess about 20 years or something and then suddenly you know the company says hey why don't you come work for us or I however that happened but so your role there you're you're on like a support kind of side I think or.

1:30:56 I'm actually, I'm with the product marketing team. So we go trade shows and we listen to users. We see you know what people are doing with it. We look for always looking for grade imagery, always looking for people that are using it in a creative way. If anybody has anything they'd like to to showcase, so please reach out to me. I'm very easy to find on the Vector work site. We always are looking for ways to, you know to to help the the young designers in in the old designers as well. People that just want to learn a new skill. So I love doing that. There's so many of the people out there that I still stay in touch with that helped me years and years ago and I'll hear from every once in a while. It's two in the morning.

1:31:38 Hell, like I got a drawing. I can't figure this out. I got something that's going to be in there at 8:00 in the morning. I'm up all night. I'll get calls at 2:00 in the morning saying dude, I'm really, really in trouble here, you know, and then I'll help them up because they helped me at 1:00 or even if they didn't help me, I still like helping, but I love, I love seeing that part of the the visual technology, being able to be pre vised and not just because I work for vector works. I always had an interest in that pre vis side of get things right before you ever walk into the venue and solve all your problems in a digital world. And you look real good when you get out to the real world. And I just love to see that technology coming forward. You know, we saw it in our head.

1:32:21 There's a lot of people out there that still they don't have, they don't need previous, they don't need a design, they don't need to put it, you know, on paper. They'll just tell somebody, hey, this is I want this thing bathed in a nice blue. You figure out where the fixtures go, you figure out the patch, all that kind of stuff, and they just know what they want to see in their mind. I like, I know what I see in my mind now. I want to put it onto a screen. So in in an animation now and you know and now with you know we were talking briefly earlier about AI. And I want. To have such a fueling things. Yeah. When whatever a good time for that is, well, we. We can go into it now. I mean, you know, you guys I think are going to be on the cutting edge of AI as it relates to our industry. But you know, I recently tripped over one of your users and I won't tell you who it is yet, but you may have even seen the image already.

1:33:16 So I had a conversation with this gentleman a couple of weeks, no, probably about a month ago, 3 weeks ago about AI. And I just said, have you done any testing on any of this stuff? He goes, no, not really. And I said, well, what about even just image generation, you know, I know there's a lot of content being created on the spot at shows and then pushed out to the screens and stuff. Have you got. No, no, not really. And I said, man, you got to take a look at this. And I showed him a couple things that I had just created using AI. And he was like, whoa, So he comes to me the next day and he goes, thanks a lot. And I said, what? And he said, you know, I've gone down a rabbit hole on Vectorworks AI.

1:33:58 And the good news is I've become an expert at it. The bad news is I've been completely non productive, like I'm doing no work and and I'm just down this crazy rabbit hole. So here I'm going to share on the screen here with you one of the images that he created. He created a bunch of them and this was one of them, which is his his dog and this gentleman is a bit of a gun guy. So you know, obviously the dog is heavily armed and so do you know who this is? Can you guess? Is the character the dog? No. No, I'm saying who would have generated this image?

1:34:39 Oh, who? Yeah. Patrick. Dearson. Yeah. No, I'm not familiar. You're. Not familiar with Patrick Deerson? Oh. No, but if not, if Patricks out there, I'd please introduce yourself on our site. I'd love to meet you so. This is this is something that Patrick created apparently on Vectorworks AI. Comical. Nothing to do with lighting whatsoever. You know his dog on a shark with a bunch of weapons and. I thought when you first asset as I know there was a a pug that was out there as a character in a in a in a famous movie. But I I'll tell you I was a little hesitant because when I first you know we all remember when the Internet first came out. Well not all of us remember but for the people that do remember when the Internet came out we all took it with a grain of salt.

1:35:32 We were seeing QuickTime movies and 20 minutes to to hear you've got mail. It wasn't the most fascinating, you know, It was good technology and it was going to evolve into something cool. But at the time, all right, a QuickTime movie was pretty jittery and it just took 25 minutes to download. Yeah. Well, on that horrific sound when you're connecting to the hotel. Room. Yes, yes, Yeah, You know. For for your Internet and you could either call your wife or whatever, or you could get on the Internet. You know you couldn't do both at the same time. Yeah, that was just, you know, we all had reservations about it, but I don't think anybody really saw the true potential, how it's going to change their lives now. AII looked at the kind of the same way when I first saw it. We heard about all the negative, how people were going to start using it to do fake political ads and everything else that they shouldn't be doing with it.

1:36:30 Well, it was the same way when you first saw YouTube that you could either watch kids bounce down, you know, the stairs off their skateboard and some comical moments there. But you could also look up on, you know, how you know, electronic circuits really work and what is the function, you know, how does a capacitor actually store that energy and all those kind of great things? And, you know, you look on Wiki and if you're looking up on what Paris Hilton did last weekend, you might get some false information. But if you're looking up capacitors, you're probably going to get a pretty factual and it leads to more learning. So I think the same way in a way that AI is going down that road, that it's can be used very, very creatively.

1:37:18 It can be used in creative ways that aren't so politically correct or socially correct, I might say. But at the same time, I looked at an analogy when I first started using it, of how many times that I tried to work with a client and going in to design A show. And it's like, oh, OK you go into a meeting and you pull out the ideas and you come up with a couple of ideas, you know, a couple of packages for a proposal and you know, three or four variations of kind of that topic and giving them some, some some different options. And you walk in there and they're not in the great mood that they were in when they were at the meeting. They had a bad weekend or something happened. And you walk in there with, you know, 4 proposals that you spent, you know, 810 hours each on and you walk in. She she not like that, don't like that, don't like that. The third one.

1:38:10 Yeah, yeah. But we kind of don't like the the colors in it. Oh great. Oh great. So now I'm going to go back and I'm going to take another swing at it. Well, with AI we build kind of a, here's the, you know, a couple of different structure setups. If you know what the venue will will allow, what the budget or you know the shipping budget will allow to get it there. Or you know the labor hours to set it up and you try to put something in that rough white models. And then you run the AI generator and get 20 different looks in 20 minutes and all by some some simple prompts, text prompts, both positive and negative. So it's like, I don't want it to look like a holiday Christmas festival, no Reds, no greens, but I want it to look, you know, a hazy room, corporate ballroom, blah blah blah blah blah blah.

1:38:59 And in a matter of 20 minutes, you've got 20 beautiful ideas. And then, oh, well, we like #3, we like #7, we like #8, and we like 14. OK now we'll do full packages on those. So you've really honed in that design idea to save yourself a lot of aggravation, a lot of time in this, you know, the the moral factor of, you know, people would have done that creative work well, not in that sense. And you probably wouldn't have got the job if you didn't have an arsenal of cool looks to show them. So that's where I see the potential of AI is coming up with conceptual ideas down the line. The feature will evolve to where we can actually say, OK, we'll put this type of crowd into the seats in this image, that kind of stuff.

1:39:51 But you know, it's it's an evolving technology and like I said when I first saw it, I just heard a lot of negative things about AI, so I didn't jump. On board as fast as some of my colleagues at work did, and once they started using the same thing, they were up until 3:00 in the morning coming up with some great stuff. And it's to me just amazing what you can see out there in a matter of minutes on conceptual ideas. I agree completely. You know, I again the conspiracy theory side of it all. Is that OK? So how long until the client just goes directly to Vectorworks and it bypasses the designer altogether because you can just put some information into Vectorworks. Boom.

1:40:35 It spits out a design for you and. I can see the concern, but honestly, they'll never be a button in Vectorworks that say design cool show. There's always that knowledge of how things go together. There's always that knowledge of how things get built is how it packages, how it ships, how it's supported. There's never going to be anything. I I believe that will take the human thought process out of it to the point where someone actually has to think about where that's going to break apart and fit into a set card, how that's going to package. And yes, well, AI isn't going to be able to tell you that when it, you know, when things go together that you put, you know, protection in between.

1:41:26 So there's all that kind of thing that I think will be limited. Well, yeah, I guess it can, but they'll always. Very quickly, you know, this is the thing there'll. Always be someone there that has to realize that, you know, there's human factors involved in any production. So I I think there's, you know, so much thought that goes into making a production work, that logistics and then there's that you can't tell AI, can't tell a crew how to get along and there's always that kind of thing that makes the work. Here's the thing that I think like, I think from a music production standpoint, music live event standpoint, you're gonna have more emotion involved. You're gonna have a a lighting designer who knows the artist personally, knows how he or she thinks that the type of mood that he or she wants to project or whatever. And all the nuance that that the designer can then put into the show based on that human interaction with the artist and and knowledge of the artist, knowledge of the music and all that stuff.

1:42:40 But where I think it changes is when you talk about the business you spent a lot of time in the the corporate conventional stuff or convention stuff to me is a little more vanilla. You know, it's a little more, hey, we need light here, we need light here. This needs to be taken care of here. And where AI can come in too is, is all the tedious stuff, you know, the the, the infrastructure that needs to come with that moving light package. You know, the the trussing and cabling and all of those things that it can put together quite quickly and easily based on, again, learning the knowledge that it creates over doing a couple of shows.

1:43:21 And so it's interesting, like I can understand why designers are concerned. But again, you know, people tried to stop Henry Ford from shipping cars and, you know, said why do we need to get rid of horses and buggies and stuff, right? It's just going to create problems and blah, blah, blah. Well, where would we be today if we stayed with horse and buggy, you know? And so we went to cars, and then we went to faster cars, and then we went to bigger cars and different cars and airplanes and all sorts of other modes of transportation. And it's progress, you know and so this is, this is obviously part of progress and I for one and we talked about this before we went on, on the air, I'm pretty excited.

1:44:09 About it. No problem, no worries. You were talking about your allergies. But I I for 1:00 AM AM pretty excited about the tools that are becoming available. And the tools, like with you guys with Vectorworks, the tools within the tools, you know, the the stuff that's being added to a great product like Vectorworks to make it more powerful or to shave time off of the the the tedious, repetitive work that you shouldn't have to do anymore because you've done it 100 times. So why can't I just say, hey, do it like that last one, you know, and it goes in and goes, OK, I know how you did the last one. I'll go ahead and do that here, you know.

1:44:51 There's, you know, there's so much to be achieved, you know, in the next couple of years with Vectorworks, you know, taking our first round at it and getting, you know, you know, feedback from people using it on where they want it to go. So it's really, you know, it's something that's, you know, just opening up a can of, you know, not opening up a can of worms, but just really, you know, just getting started. On the front end. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean the whole that has comments. The whole AI thing is at the front end, but but it's moving quickly, you know, and I told you earlier about some of the music stuff that I I've been messing around with where you know, you can create music very, very easily and very quickly using some already available apps out there, music video, websites, presentations, all kinds of things.

1:45:41 This is all low hanging fruit. How far is it going to go beyond that? Because if I told you, you know, three or four years ago that, you know, I could put a few words in and it had spit out a song on the other end based on those few words that I just input, you'd be like, yeah, I don't think we got that technology yet, you know, but we do so. You know, it gives skills to people that, you know, might not have the ability to draw by hand. Yeah, line artists. My wife is a very, very talented artist, you know, trained classical artist and she often would put those things into a drawing that I couldn't through Photoshop or just hand drawing of plants and people. And those are the kind of things that AI is able to put into a drawing or creative writing is another one where I don't have the skills of of creative writing at all. But it it, it definitely helps me, you know, in, in that sense or you know, just to put that, you know, charcoal sketch feeling over a drawing and kind of merge it with the technical side of it and an artistic feeling to it merging those two together.

1:46:57 So I think it has some wonderful potential when it comes to that. There's also, you know, the the repetitive tasks which I think you know generating paperwork that's great, a great design. OK, Now tell the people in the shop what has to get in the truck and when it has to get in there. And don't forget the trust bolts when you do that order and it's those are the kind of simple things that someone's got to think about and take so much time. Well, maybe they come up with a list and an AI application will say, don't forget this. We just reviewed your whole list and it looks for common revisions over the years of someone using their inventory software of those things that were always added at the end of the order at the last minute.

1:47:45 Yeah. Oh yeah, those we forgot the extra safeties for the raincoat. Yeah. And what were those things that and it looks out for those and does checks against the inventory versus the count that is being requested makes sense. So that kind of stuff I think would have a lot of potential. That's one of the things actually Vectorworks is getting very excited about is helping generate inventory and keeping control of rental inventories through different shops and comparing it to a drawing. What do you need, what do you have and what do you need? Well, this is what do you need to source. This I think is going to become one of the great opportunities but also one of the problems because I think because it's such a wild, Wild West sort of arms race right now in in AI, you don't wanna over commit to doing it one way because there's gonna be a better way. So like you know if you guys create for example a way to manage this rental gear sort of thing within Vectorworks R2 is probably going to create a similar thing on the rental software side and now you've got sort of a conflict of of software products or whatever, right? So there we're gonna see some of that stuff like I'm already seeing where I'll commit cuz these these companies with these AI apps, they come out with this annual program that's much cheaper than the monthly one.

1:49:09 So I'll go, OK, instead of paying $12.00 a month, I'll pay $100 for a year and then a month later somebody comes out with one that's 10 times better or it's easier or or one of that and I'll give you a perfect real world example. So we have an an app that takes our YouTube videos from the podcast and creates shorts from the videos. So you get these little one minute clips from the videos and it it does it using AI. We used to do it manually not that long ago, few months ago. Now we use AI. Well, Riverside that we're recording in right now has it built in. So the app that I paid $120.00 for or whatever, I don't really need anymore because we can just use Riverside now. So this is how fast everything's moving right now. It's just insane.

1:49:59 Like we're going to have an AI bubble at some point because there's just so much money and time and energy being thrown into AI right now. But what are some of the things that Vectorworks does today in AI using AI? Well, basically you can take any image and whether it's generated from Vectorworks or not, you can place an image within Vectorworks. And then you can say, like I was mentioning before, I like to use white models where it's just the structure in the outline of the set and let it do the generation of the texturing, the lighting, the room atmosphere, you know, whether or not there's sconces on the exhibit hall wall, things like that. You wouldn't want to draw in individually and it will take those images and then based on the positive and negative prompts will generate that.

1:51:02 I actually would would love to show you some examples but I don't have them currently loaded up so I don't want it to have that embarrassing spot of searching through a hard drive. But if you if any anybody that is interested in this, you can easily reach out to myself, Jay Woodward at AT factworks.net or just go on to our website or our university and there's some good promo materials. I don't want this to be a Vectorworks commercial, but since the question was there, if anybody does want to go to look at that, there are some examples of what it does. But basically you have the image and some prompts on the on the side of the dialogue box and the positive and negative prompts. So if you don't want to see Mardi Gras theme or you don't want anything things like that, you can put it into a negative colours, you don't want things like that. And then obviously there's a lot more in the positive prompts. If you want to really drive something home, you put it in ( 1 or multiple times and that's saying to you know to really drive that, that point home.

1:52:11 And then you have a slider that says creativity. And if you leave it at 0, well, it's going to look at that model and it's not going to affect the model at all. And it's going to be pretty accurate to your prompts. And then if you bring the creativity up, it's going to start saying, OK, I don't have to stay within that. I can color a little bit outside of the lines, so to speak. And then once you have that, you have a slider that will show you the original and kind of merge the two together to make some nice images. You can obviously save the images and share them, but the nice thing about it is that you can also take the picture out of the equation and just use the prompts and come up with some original ideas that let it, you know. Same thing with the creativity slider, Let it start off the conversation.

1:53:04 It's kind of like playing chess with yourself, OK? And I like that idea. And I'll bring the thing that right now that once an image is there you have the ability to create similar as well. So if you like the what you got you can stay in that theme and stay close to that but have different variations of it and you know some some great stuff you know first round just came out in our last service pack. So it isn't something that it's available to everybody. Now if you have, you know our our current version, just go on and get the service pack and it works in conjunction with our cloud services which is a great way for teams to collaborate.

1:53:48 Again, I don't want to make this as a pitch, but a lot of people out there work on individual files and then give it to the production team. And then the poor production manager who doesn't know Vector works very well is trying to take all this information and combine it into one. Yeah, we have something called project sharing that lets the whole team work together. Yeah, everybody sees the updates. But again, I I want to make sure that this this doesn't, I'll run. I'll run sadly out of knowledge anyways because I've never I've never done anything in vector. Yeah, So but but if anybody has interest just reach on that. Easy to find. I was just really more curious just about how you guys are incorporating because there's there's such a pushback from our industry right now related to the topic of AI.

1:54:33 You know, and I understand it, believe me. I understand why people are afraid because I do think it's going to shake some things up. I do think some people are either going to be out of work or not be able to charge as much, or it's going to change some things for some people. But I think good designers are probably going to become better and more sought after and more valuable to their clients with AI than they were without it. And so that's the good news. Now, if you were doing a very tedious task in the past that nobody else really wanted to do and it just got shuffled down to you, that task might be going away.

1:55:15 You know, things like just writing lines of code or or things like that. Like, you know, Richard Kadena, I'm sure, right? Very well, yeah. So Richard was on my podcast, I don't know, a month ago or something, And he said one of the first uses that he had for AI was he writes these JavaScript things. And he said it used to take him days, hours and sometimes days to put these javascripts together. And now he does it in a couple of minutes with AI. It's just that simple, right? So you get that part of your life back to do other things that are more valuable and more productive. And so I I'm, I'm really excited about where it's going and it'll be interesting to see where you guys go with it. Cuz I know, like I even talked with with Steve Warren about this last week from Avo, where, you know, when do consoles program themselves, You know, they can. I mean, the technology's certainly out there that they could and you could put in, you know, things like, you know, make it look like Beyoncé from 2017, You know, that look during whatever.

1:56:25 I couldn't name a Beyoncé song to save my life. But, you know, so some of that stuff I think is going to sneak its way in, but it's going to have to do it in a way that, you know, doesn't cause designers to use a different product because they're afraid of it. Pardon me, now I'm. Choking. But there's always that one factor of the the true gift of a designer is to go into a situation and project that idea to other people. And I don't, you know, I don't think there's ever a point where you can just throw the laptop in front of Beyoncé and say here hit the design cool show button, that there's always going to be someone that has to sit there. And sometimes it's not a pleasant job to sit there with an artist that has limited time and maybe is a little tired from the last night's trip.

1:57:19 And you've got to be able to have that personal interaction with the performer, with the production, the producer, whatever the case might be. And to put that all together, I think that's where you know the there's always going to be that human. Of course portion involved. You know it's one of the the the most interesting shows I ever saw and it baffled me because technically I'm trying to figure out how it was being done was the Beijing Olympics when they had them on mahjong I believe the the tile game and they the whole floor was covered with these cubes that went up and down I. Remember that. Yeah. And I'm looking at it and I'm trying to think, wow, what is what did Tate put underneath that floor? How was the hydraulics in such a small, confined space? And there's a video wall on underneath that? Where did they get the room for that hydraulics? And I'm trying to figure out how those, you know, 2000 tiles were moving up and down at the end of it. Oh, I sure did.

1:58:19 At the end of it, the the IT, the top of them all flipped open in 2000. People came out and waved. Somebody told me that story. Before I heard that one before on this podcast and I was like, what it's. Like, got it, got it. And and that was it right there. And from what I understand, they rehearsed that for a long, long time with volunteers and they rehearsed that for months on end out in a a football state you know local high school football kind of facility. And that was the the only way to do it. That's incredible people power. Yeah, someone else told me that story, somebody who was involved with the show or something, and I I was shocked by that.

1:59:03 That's incredible. Yeah. You know, again, I mean the lovely thing, the the amazing thing about our industry is that it does keep moving forward. But one of the things you said earlier where, you know, a flood came into the stadium, Gillette Stadium or whatever, and they lost the lighting rig except for the follow spots. You know, that's where you need a human, a bunch of humans, You know what I mean? Like AI isn't going to know what to do in that situation. AI isn't going to flip the switch over to something else. AI isn't going to fix that problem. And because you have to monitor the what's going on in reality right now, you have to know the music, You have to know the crowd you like.

1:59:45 I mean, and you got to make a decision on the fly with a production manager or a manager or somebody yelling in your ear saying what the hell is going on, you know, or. A situation like, you know, something of a program that I'm very fond of is the Event Safety Alliance and how they really have have have really stepped up to keeping our industry safe and how nobody can make that decision of cancelling a show. And you've got, you know, 70,000 people in an event and you've got some weather situations and you've got. You've got the, you know, the, the weather team, you know, and the state police all giving you information.

2:00:27 And then you have that balance of if we cancel the show now we've got 70,000 people that could turn into a very riot, unpleasant situation. And it only takes a trained person that's gone through that to know how to handle that well, and they made the wrong. Call, you know, Jim. Jim told that story on the podcast a couple months a few months ago. And you know that's it's very similar story. I don't know if it's the same one, but the the the. Tornadoes. All fictitious. It's just that you know. Well, this was. The tornado going through Indiana and you know the festival organizers or whatever said Oh no, it's gonna miss us. It's far away. The storm is gonna miss us. Just give us another, you know half hour or something. And you know, and in came the tornado and blew through there and took the stage and killed some people, you know, and so yeah, you're right.

2:01:19 I mean, human intervention, human decision making, emotions, all of those things. I don't know that that's ever going to change. So I, I again, I I have to look at the positive side of all of this. I think there's other industries, other worlds where AI is going to be more problematic than ours because ours is built on creativity and emotion and feeling and people and you know, being live, being together and all of that kind of stuff. So collaboration, whereas, you know, when you think of things like weaponry, you know, and wars, and you know we're going to have wars in the future where it's drones on both sides controlled by AI.

2:02:00 And that's scary because there's when there's no human cost in a war other than who's getting killed on the ground. But it's weird, you know, I was reading, I was reading like a week ago or two weeks ago about a a dogfight that was just won by an AI controlled plane, which is pretty wild. I think it was AI, think it was drones. I think it was a dog fight between 2 drones, one was controlled by human and one was controlled by AI. And the AI won won. One of our good teammates here moved on to a career that I think is could, would be very, very rewarding. He was in our training department and just a really, really nice guy.

2:02:51 Don Ward and a superb trainer had moved on to a drone company that delivers medical organs by drones. Oh, that's cool. And we think, well, entertainment's pretty cool. We make a lot of people happy. We we we we make those spectacles, whatever. But there's also something to be said about getting a kidney across town, not getting stuck in traffic and training the people that, you know, operate those. And you know, I looked at that. I said, Boy, now that's actually making a difference. Yeah, that's a. Very interesting, yeah. But to actually, like, use, you know, that technology to save lives like that?

2:03:33 So cool. Well, I I very much appreciate you coming on and doing this. I There's so much more to your life, I'm sure, and I'd love to sit here and talk for three hours. But that was pretty much it. That was all 50 years, all wrapped up in an hour. But I, you know, I had a lot of fun in the industry. I had a lot of learning to do. I made a lot of people angry over the years and I apologize to each and everyone of you made some you know Yeah you know and it was it was one of those things you learned and a good portion of the job was just getting along with people you were working with in technology. You'll always figure that out. But just how to walk away at the end of the day and saying hey I remember that that person I worked with and and to see people go further.

2:04:17 Definitely a shout out to everybody that put this together and I appreciate you offering me a chance to come up here and tell some old stories and I hope, I hope those are from from the best of my recollection. Some of those, those are some blurry industry on part of it. So hopefully my facts aren't aren't too. Awful. You know what I will say though? Anybody who can, who can last 50 years in this industry and stay working pretty much non-stop for the entire 50 years, that says a lot. You know that says that you've done some really great things along the way and you know more good than bad because it is an industry that'll kick you out when you screw up too badly, I think. So good on you.

2:04:58 I mean that's that's quite an accomplishment. Not too many people right now can say that. I've been in the lighting business 50 years so. Yeah, I was definitely blessed to to to have some great people take the time to teach me. And I encourage everybody that, you know, turn around and see the future of the people that are struggling now and and try to help them. Oh yeah, the the the Jake Barry and Charlie Hernandez down at the Rock Lititz Conference are doing just that. If anybody's not aware of that, I I just, you know hats off to those guys paying it forward and they're they're just getting everybody that has this kind of knowledge.

2:05:38 It's your turn step up. Help the people that helped you you know and help the new people coming up. Make sure people don't get hurt. If if people don't know how to use fall protection correctly and someone says well it's not my job to teach them, yeah it is. It's our industries to turn around and make sure that we all stay attacked and and we all try to help each other. I mean, it's true because an accident doesn't just hurt that one event. It hurts all of us, you know, and we've seen that, you know, when things like a stage blowing over happens, you know, now all of a sudden the government thinks they need to come in and run our industry because we're incapable. So if you want to keep the government out of your stuff, you know, just make sure that you're paying attention to what's going on and you are using great safety protocol and all of that kind of stuff.

2:06:26 But yeah, you're right. But, yeah, again, thanks and congratulations on 50 years in the industry and and yeah, I look forward to maybe bumping into you at a trade show or something going forward. Absolutely. All right. Thanks for listening. Yeah, see ya. None.