Detroit 1-8-7: new Michael Imperioli vehicle a long way from Law & Order
September 21, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
After Michael Imperioli’s successful (yet always meant to be temporary) stint as a detective on Law and Order, it was a matter of time before someone gave him a similar role on full time basis. But rather than the new Law and Order spinoff L&O: Los Angeles, Imperioli has instead surfaced on the new ABC drama Detroit 1-8-7. That’s a reference to the precinct (some have assumed it’s the local area code, but there are no area codes beginning with a “1″), which is located in a rough neighborhood in the Motor City. Imperioli’s character is the centerpiece as a ten year veteran detective who’s odd and prickly but gets results – while his new partner is in his first day as a detective and is trying to juggle his new assignment with the fact that his wife is about to go into labor. Naturally, they don’t hit it off.
The show tries to pull off 1970′s grit (if such a thing ever existed) and some kind of Ocean’s Eleven-style snappiness. At its best, it works: Imperioli delivers condescending advice to his new partner by calling him on the phone from a few feet away. Meanwhile, the partner’s newbie status is thus far being milked primarily for comic relief. The rest of the cast includes an elder detective who is near the end of his career yet still wants to do the job right, a young tough female detective whose primary role thus far is to be angry, and some others who, upon watching the pilot episode, didn’t even register. Oh, and there’s the autopsy doctor who appeared for a few seconds and sported bruises from roller derby incident.
Still, the characters have the potential to develop over time (if ABC gives it that time). However, the show may not be able to overcome are the fact that the cases the detectives are trying to solve are (thus far) forgettable. And the show’s Detroit setting appears to be mere happenstance; sure, it’s a city where everything has gone wrong lately and crime is commonplace, but if they hadn’t made it clear that this was a show set in Detroit, viewers could have just as easily mistaken it for being set in a bad neighborhood of Los Angeles.
One thing is clear, though: this is no New York show. And it’s not Law & Order, where the detectives disappear halfway through and lawyers have to clean up the rest of the case. The plots are wrapped by the detectives themselves one way or the other. The good news for those viewers who always felt that the characters on Law & Order never got to develop due to the strict nature of the scripts may be pleased that the characters on Detroit 1-8-7 will apparently be given some room to run. The real question is whether Imperioli’s sarcastic prick of a do-gooder turns out to be someone audiences can fully get behind, and whether the rest of the characters can stand out. There’s nothing terribly original about the show or its premise, but in an age when law enforcement dramas keep inching further and further away from anything approaching normalcy, this one does have a window of opportunity open.
Not to give anything away, but don’t take your eyes off the screen during the pilot episode’s final moments. It’s one of those twists that’ll either have you rolling your eyes or anxiously awaiting episode two – or perhaps both.
Verizon tries to lure iPhone users to Flash-based “Rule The Air” site
July 2, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Verizon is attempting to take advantage of the concocted iPhone 4 reception controversy by running a new series of television ads which, while not directly saying so, imply that iPhone users would be better off if they instead signed up with Verizon and switched to one of the carrier’s various fake iPhone models instead. One little problem though (and we’re not talking about the absurdity of the notion that an iPhone user would switch to an Android phone based on the unsupported claims of a Verizon television commercial): the website which Verizon attempts to steer viewers toward, RuleTheAir.com, is based on Adobe’s ancient Flash technology. That’s right: Verizon’s plan is to lure iPhone users to a propaganda website aimed at convincing them to give up their iPhone, a website which won’t even load on their iPhone in the first place. Nice try Verizon, but this ad campaign might be even dumber than the one last year which attempted to label the iPhone as a discarded misfit toy; meanwhile the iPhone continues to absolutely clobber Verizon’s Android phones in marketshare by a margin of more than three to one. Here’s a hint, Verizon: get Apple to let you sell the real iPhone, then you can stop embarrassing yourself with these stupid and ineffective TV ads.
Hulu iPhone app price tag angers fans, should not have been a surprise
June 30, 2010 by Beatweek · 5 Comments
The Hulu Plus app for iPhone is free, but unlike the television content on hulu.com, the content available through Hulu’s app comes with a price tag. This should be a surprise to precisely no one. The original Hulu business model, in which users could watch full length television episodes for free on a website an exchange for sitting through the embedded ads, is failing for the same reason that the traditional network television business model is failing: viewers skip ads. Unlike with a DVR, where viewers can fast forward through the ads, Hulu viewers don’t have such an option. But they do have the ability to mute the ad and go do something in another program on their computer, such as checking their email, in order to kill the fifteen seconds during which Hulu’s ads run. So it’s not a surprise that with Hulu’s ads being ignorable and advertisers not getting their money’s worth, the service is now looking at pay-for models, and decided that the iPhone userbase would be its testbed.
It’s not a bad idea in theory, as iPhone users are the type who are willing to pay $200-300 for the cellphone they want, as opposed to the majority of the population who still chug along on whatever free flip-phone was tossed at them during contract renewal. But Hulu has apparently mistaken taste for chumpiness, as the company thought it could suddenly get iPhone users to pay for a service whose one and only claim to fame was that it was free.
Hulu’s problem is that by offering a crappy television experience through a lame webpage for years and using the “but it’s free!” mantra to build an audience, Hulu ended up attracting the kind of users who won’t pay for anything unless they absolutely have to (and yes, a portion of the iPhone userbase does fit this description). Now that the free model has been proven not to work, Hulu now faces going back to its overly thrifty audience with its hand out, asking for money that it’ll never get from them. Worse, by virtue of gaining a “crap but free” reputation, Hulu will now have significant difficulty marketing its pay-for service to those members of the public who are willing to spend their money but only on quality stuff. If Hulu had charged a bit for its service from the start and had used that revenue to improve its user experience, the company might now be able to sell its product to those who are willing to open their wallets. But once you’re known for being a “crap but free” kind of service, you’re generally stuck with that model for better or worse.
Keep in mind that Hulu is owned by the television networks themselves and was started simply so those networks could have a bigger bargaining chip when it came to negotiating with Apple about television shows in the iTunes Store (its the same reason, in fact, that the major record labels convinced Amazon to launch AmazonMP3, which not coincidentally, is now being held back by its “crap but cheap” reputation). As Hulu has only ever existed as a pawn in a larger tactical strategy, its original business model is no longer working, and its sudden attempts to move to a different strategy are being met with outrage by existing users and indifference among potential new users, one wonders how much longer Hulu will be around one way or the other. On the other hand, the iTunes television model, in which users pay two to three dollars to “own” an episode that they’ll most likely only watch once before discarding, hasn’t exactly been a success either.
So even though it’s killing the television industry financially, driving the highest quality shows off the air, and pushing us further into reality TV hell, most of us will continue to stick with our DVRs until something finally gives. But considering how thoroughly Hulu is being run through the shredder today by iPhone users who have made it clear through their posted App Store comments that they have no intention of ever paying a dime for something as crappy as Hulu, one has to wonder what if anything will save television.
New iPad TV ad suggests Apple can ramp up inventory
May 13, 2010 by Beatweek · 2 Comments
Apple has rolled out a new television ad for its iPad which foregoes the music soundtrack of the previous in favor of a narrator who confidently explains the various kinds of things that the tablet computer can be used for in general terms while the accompanying shots of the device in action go into greater detail. The ad begins by asking “What is iPad?” before answering the question with words like thin and beautiful and phrases like “lasts all day” before highlighting what is perhaps one of the iPad’s greatest by-design strengths: “You already know how to use it.”
Interestingly, the commercial references the ” tow hundred thousand” of App Store apps that are compatible with the iPad, rather than the five thousand or so apps that are specifically optimized for the iPad’s larger screen.
The newest iPad television ad suggests that Apple is indeed interested in educating potential users on the kinds of things that the device can be used for, as opposed to the company’s earlier strategy of seemingly preferring to allow users to figure that out for themselves. This suggests that Apple now considers the earliest round of “early adopters” to have passed and is now going after the mainstream who are likely looking to identify specific practical uses for the iPad before buying. This broader strategy comes even as the company faces inventory issues resulting from higher than expected initial U.S. sales, suggesting that Apple believes it can effectively ramp up inventory as needed.
Fringe reverts to monster of the week formula after brilliant episode
April 24, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Fringe is at its best when the ever-twisting back story of its characters is revealed in a consisten slow drip over the course of an episode; while most episodes feature a “monster of the week” or a bizarre death to be investigated by Olivia and the Bishops, but the cases are rarely as memorable as what we learn about the characters themselves. Last week the show took a bold leap when it spent the entire episode revealing the story of how Peter and Walter and the alternate universe actually played out when Peter was a kid. It was one of the series’ best episodes to date – and yet it was almost too much goodness, like too much of your favorite candy on Easter morning. But it was a long time in coming, and a brilliant payoff for fans.
So this week’s episode was bound to be something of a letdown. While advertisements teased the notion of present-tense advancement of last week’s past-tense revelations, the episode started off with its usual monster of the week. While the initial interaction between Peter and Walter seemed promising, the whole thing was quickly derailed in favor of chasing down the mystery of the dead bodies and the gooey stuff found on the floor of a warehouse.
The show is what it is; no reason to have expected it to do anything other than revert to its standard formula. But last week’s episode, in showing what Fringe can be at its absolute best, made this week’s standard episode pale in comparison – even with the payoff ending, which we won’t reveal in case you didn’t see it – which will change the show forever, if the producers don’t pave over the revelation come next week.
Smashing Pumpkins to perform new song on Leno tonight
April 20, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Smashing Pumpkins will perform a new song from their work-in-progress album Teargarden by Kaleidyscope on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonight. The song, a trippy mid temp affair entitled Widow Wake My Mind, is one of a handful of song which have so far been debuted from the new album, which is being released one song at a time (as each song is written) via free download and will stretch to a total of forty-four songs over a period of two to three years. Founding singer-guitarist Billy Corgan still leads the band, while the drummer’s chair is now filled by twenty year old newcomer Mike Byrne, who was selected through an open audition process.
Corgan recently told Beatweek about the new Smashing Pumpkins song, the new album, the new drummer, and various other Pumpkins related topics.
Also scheduled for the Tonight Show tonight are Heidi Klum and Ken Jeong. Jimmy Fallon follows with Rosario Dawson, the NFL’s Tony Siragusa, and New Kids On The Block.
Train to perform “Hey, Soul Sister” on Regis today
April 19, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Train, the San Francisco based band who are seeing their biggest chart success in years with current single “Hey, Soul Sister” will be performing the song on Regis and Kelly this morning. The band, who’ve scored hits over the years with songs such as Drops of Jupiter and Calling All Angels, have named their latest album Save Me, San Francisco in honor of their hometown.
Today’s television performance precedes a marathon touring effort which will kick off April 30th in Oklahoma and run non stop through September 4th in Illinois, with tour dates on both coasts in between plus a side trip to Australia and New Zealand in June.
Train previously performed “Hey, Soul Sister” on CSI: New York, with lead singer Pat Monahan portraying a fictional singer in the accompanying episode.
Sharon Osbourne will also appear on the Regis episode.
NeverShoutNever’s Chris Drew speaks with Beatweek ahead of TV debut
April 9, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Nineteen year old musician Christofer Drew, better known by his stage name of Never Shout Never (or NeverShoutNever, he tells us he doesn’t much care which way you spell it), will be making his television debut on Carson Daly tonight but spoke with Beatweek beforehand about his debut album What Is Love?, why so many of the songs on the album are under the three minute mark, and his mixed feelings toward technology in an interview which will be part of the April 14th issue of Beatweek Magazine.
He also informed Beatweek of his plans to remain based out of his native Missouri: “I just actually purchased a house there,” he said of his hometown. “That’s gonna be my homestead for awhile. I’m gonna build a little studio in the garage. I’m pretty stoked about it.”
On other musicians who end up moving to big cities like Los Angeles or New York to pursue their dreams: “That’s how you get lost. That’s the last thing I want. I just want to stay a small town kid and do this for a job.”
Beatweek’s full interview with Never Shout Never’s Christopher Drew will be published in Beatweek Magazine next week, and will also be available to read in full for free on Beatweek.com. In the mean time you can find his debut album here and we’ll be tuning in tonight to catch him performing on Carson Daly on NBC. Other guests on the episode include Gillian Jacobs and Dan Mintz.
Norah Jones adds tour dates
April 3, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
After releasing her guitar-tinged album The Fall late last year, Norah Jones doesn’t appear to be looking to slow down as she’s announced additional tour dates to an already crowded calendar which features U.S. shows in April, May, and June before heading to Europe for several July dates and then coming back to the U.S. for a single Lilith Fair 2010 appearance in August.
She’s also just debuted the music video for new single Young Blood, which is currently available in iTunes, and will perform on the Ellen Degeneres show on April 22nd.
The full list of U.S. and European tour dates is available at NorahJones.com.
App review: Discovery Channel
New in iProng Labs: a hands-on review of the Discovery Channel app for iPhone and iPod touch, available for free in the App Store…
review by Eric Nguyen
The Discovery Channel app is best thought of as the Discovery Channel’s YouTube channel, if it had one. The first thing you see once the program loads is a list of clips from various Discovery Channel shows such as Man vs. Wild, Deadliest Catch, and Mythbusters. These aren’t actual episodes, but rather short clips, each only a couple minutes long. For example, the current most-viewed video is titled “Moments of Impact: Big Cat Attack,” and is a couple minutes worth of an captured African leopard’s escape and attempt to climb into a ranger’s car through the driver’s side window. There are about 30 seconds of actual video in there, but the slow-motion replay and narration lengthen it to a couple minutes. This is perhaps the best way to watch the Discovery Channel: in short snippets with limited commercial interruption, varied enough that it’s impossible to become bored.
In fact, once you start playing a video from a list (say, Latest Videos or a particular TV show), after a short pause at the end of each clip, the next one will start—so, it’s a lot like watching a really varied Discovery Channel episode. There are some commercials that play in front of videos, but they only show up every once in a while. The problems with the video content involve the formatting and processing of the videos, rather than the videos themselves. First, I noticed a couple videos with noise levels that were much louder or softer than normal. This wasn’t too big of a problem, but given that the makers of the app also control all of the content, it shouldn’t be that difficult to standardize all of the videos. The second issue I noticed had to do with how each video looked on screen. The quality was fine for an iPhone screen, but by default the video size is smaller than the screen itself, leaving black borders all around the video. It is easily possible to zoom in so that the video fills the screen horizontally, but that should be done by default.
The app also has other features less-related to video clips. The most useful of these are the Discovery Channel TV schedules. You can see the schedule for the rest of the day, or if you’re searching by show, you can see the next time that show will air. It’s pretty useful if you don’t want to have to use a TV guide. Other features include quizzes, Discovery Channel photo galleries, and science news (in video format). Of course, these are not the main attraction of the program—that would most definitely be the video clips.
Speaking of video, it’s important to remember that this app is doesn’t have any actual TV shows in it, just short clips. It does, however, have links directly to each show in the iTunes Store, so if you really like a clip you can easily get more, albeit for money.
Overall, it’s safe to say that the Discovery Channel app is a great way to soak up some time while waiting for the bus. The video clips are short enough that you can probably fit one in before the bus comes, yet still long enough to be interesting. The extra features are icing on the cake. If the app creators could figure out a way to fix the video issues this app would be pretty great. Also nice would be a simpler interface—currently, some important functionality (like video search) is buried in the ‘More’ tab. It’s good to know that it’s there, but a good iPhone app should also have core functionality such as that be intuitively accessible. In the meantime, though, I’ll definitely be keeping this app.
The Discovery Channel app is available for free in the App Store.
Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV
August 7, 2008 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
New Media Expo has seen its share of notable podcasters take the keynote stage, and this year is no different as Gary Vaynerchuk of the popular video podcast Wine Library TV is set to deliver the Thursday morning keynote address. Intent on bringing wine to the masses, Gary has had massive success in using New Media tools to promote his show, and he’s been tapped to appear on mainstream outlets ranging from Conan O’Brien to Ellen Degeneres. I recently caught up with Gary to get some background on how he’s made this far, as well as a preview of what attendees can expect from his upcoming keynote address.
A lot of people start a podcast about some random topic, maybe something they just want to explore a little more, but in your case you grew up around wine, right?
Yes. You know, I come from a place of, I’d like to hope and think, a little bit of knowledge. It’s something I did my whole, basically my whole career, before I started a video blog, was, you know, the wine retail business. And I lived and breathed wine 24-7-365. So it’s definitely something I’m comfortable and obviously, you know, hopefully a little bit knowledgeable about.
This is a family business. What did your family think when you first said, I’m gonna do a wine-tasting video podcast, video blog, and it’s supposed to help business? Were they skeptical?
You know, I think at that point I’d gained so much street cred within, you know, the world. I mean really it’s my dad and I, so really he was the only that I had to kind of really talk about it with. But I’ve been running operations for a decade, and you know, when you take your family business from three million a year to fifty million a year, you’ve got some credibility, you know? You’re allowed to play a little bit. And so I think that, you know, just like my parents have been, I think they were very confident that there was something behind it and that I wasn’t doing this for kicks and giggles. But regardless, I’ll be honest with you, this was something I just knew I had to do. And you know, it really wasn’t even so much for day to day Wine Library business. It was really more about changing the culture of wine and doing something that made me happy. So that’s really what was most important to me.
Usually when you think wine you’re thinking connoisseurs, upper class two hundred dollar bottles of wine. But you’re going in a whole different direction, right? You’re aiming more toward the masses with Wine Library TV.
Yeah, you know I felt that I can leverage New Media to show people a cooler, more exciting wine culture, something that people could wrap their head around. I just feel that wine is on a pedestal that it has no interest in being on. It’s way to foofy-foofy in society. I think of it as a product that brings people together and is pretty awesome, and I wanted to shed a different light on Pinot. And I felt I could do that leveraging social media, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, you know, things of that nature, and that’s what I’ve been very passionate about. And luckily, somewhat successful.
You’ve been promoting the show using the social networks you mentioned. You do the show every day, and of course you’re still running your business. Why is it important to carve out time to do things like, you know, posting little random stuff on Twitter all day?
It’s actually become my full-time job. My day to day operations at Wine Library I’ve been handing off more and more every day. It’s important because you want to be part of the conversation and you want to engage your community. You know, it’s very important to me for me to put myself out there and spend time with people and, you know, answer wine questions or questions about other things whether it’s marketing or branding or business. I just want to be part of the conversation. I want to be with the people. And so it’s my lifeline. It’s my oxygen. I need it. So it’s not only important, it’s really everything.
So are you one of these folks who kind of goes nuts when Twitter goes down or the “replies” tab gets broken?
No, because I get about a thousand emails a day. So actually I think I’m relieved, so I can actually go do the emails, cause I don’t want to keep those people waiting too long. You know, I’ve always got something to do. So obviously Twitter’s fun and when it goes down there’s another place to go, you know, whether it’s Facebook or Pownce or my inbox or somewhere else.
The show is about wine tasting, so why are you on there licking rocks and eating dirt and stuff like that?
You know, episode 148 is a real historic episode of Wine Library TV. It’s when I did that. It was to show people what I did to build my palette, and how I built my palette when I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, to get into wine but my parents wouldn’t let me drink. I would read the tasting notes of wine and I would then go out and basically taste those things. So a Blackberry, Black Current, Cassis, you know, rocks. Whatever, you know, oyster shells, grass, black pepper. Whatever it took, I wanted to taste those things so that I could then pick them up, the subtleties of them in wine. Obviously if I’ve never had Cassis, how the heck was I gonna know what it tasted like when I tasted it in wine? And so that was a very important process of my career, even though it seems extreme, it was a big foundations of my palette.
When you’re on Conan or Ellen it seems like the thing that they want to focus the most on is eating the weird stuff. Do you feel like they’re trying to make it into a gimmick, whereas you have a more legitimate reason for doing it?
Yeah I think at some point maybe, but don’t forget I don’t care because I get the trade-off of getting millions of people to find out who I am and maybe come to the show and see what we’re doing, you know? And it is funny, and it is fun, and you know, I’m more than comfortable in making fun of myself. You know, I’m a New York Jets fan, I can handle a lot. So I just think it’s a part of the process, it’s one dimension. You know, I feel comfortable that I have a lot of dimensions, and so I hope that people start out by seeing it and being curious. And I’m sure some people will see that and be turned off by it and I respect that. But you know, I’m gonna work my face off and work real hard to show up on their radar again, and then hopefully when they see it the second or third or fourth time, they realize there’s a lot going on here.
I know there are lot of people who watch your show who are not necessarily a wine drinker, they just find the show entertaining. But for someone who’s never really gotten into wine, maybe they’ve taken a sip here and there but it’s just never caught on, what would be the first steps that they should take to become a wine drinker?
We should realize that wine is probably one of the only luxury items out there that doctors allow us, we can’t even eat anymore, right? I mean wine is like the one thing everybody agrees is healthy. So it’s a healthy beverage too. It’s phenomenal, it tastes great, and everybody hates it at first, and I think people need to wrap their head around that. Ninety percent of the people that taste wine for the first time dislike it. But then there’s a flip of a switch. And so the big thing to understand is you need to try as many different things and you need to trust your own palette. I don’t want to hear people rolling up on me anymore saying I’m sorry, I have an unsophisticated palette, you know? Nobody needs to be sorry for what their taste buds are. So go out, try different wines, don’t take it too serious, and I think what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna have an epiphany wine. You’re gonna be out with friends or doing something, watching games, drinking something. And you’re gonna taste something and be like wait a minute, this is pretty serious, I like this. And then the journey begins.
So if someone out there, it turns out that their favorite wine is some sort of wine that is cheap and everyone else makes fun of them for it, you’re saying that’s okay?
I think that’s great. I mean if you want to drink White Zinfandel or if you want to drink, you know, Yellowtail, that’s fine. But don’t drink it like it’s got the cure inside. I mean try different things. And way too many people find a wine they like and they drink it until, you know, they’re peeing out that flavor. And so I really would like to see people expand their palette, try as many different things, and that’s where I get really excited.
You’ve introduced some different terminology on your show, for instance there’s one that’s in the title of your book, you use it on your show all the time, “Bring Thunder.” What does that mean?
In high school when we used to play hoops and play NHL ’94 on Sega Genesis, if you did anything good, you brought thunder. You know, no matter what. If you picked up a girl, you brought thunder. It was just a term that me and my friends used, and you know, I just subtly brought it back somehow when I was doing Wine Library TV. People caught onto it and really enjoyed it, and it just kind of became a life of its own. And you know, it’s just a slang term that I’ve used from back in the old school that has just kind of been resurrected on WLTV.
So these are things, you say things like “sniffy-sniff” and “link that up,” these aren’t things that you’re sitting around trying to think up, this is the way you naturally speak?
I think those kind of things that you try to naturally think up become very non-authentic, which is going to kill you. Not that I haven’t said oh man, this is fun, let’s come up with more stuff. But I just can’t force it because the thing is, I black out when I do Wine Library TV anyway. So even if I had a really solid gameplan going in, it would be thrown out the window. So I kind of just go natural.
You say you black out, I’ve also read that this is unscripted, you don’t have cue cards or anything. So this is just from the top of your head once the camera’s rolling?
Straight from the hip, my man. Straight from the hip. Five hundred episodes almost, never an edit on WLTV, just we rip it. And that’s how it rolls. And so it’s how I feel comfortable. When I do national television, things of that nature, I actually get upset because they want to, except when I do Conan and when it’s live, you know? I mean, people just try to over-produce. And I think when it’s real and transparent and authentic, it dominates. And you know, that’s why I love improv comedy.
Did you know all along that you wanted your show to be video and not just audio?
No, I guess I didn’t, you know? The audio podcasting thing kind of slipped through my radar, I was just in the middle of building a forty thousand square foot store. I kind of very much paid attention to blogging, but you know, that whole thing kind of went and passed me by cause I’m just not an unbelievable writer, even though I wrote a book. And then audio had, you know let’s be honest, audio had like that one year window before video was kind of available as well. And in that window I kind of just was too busy. And then by the time I kind of got back onto paying attention to what was going on, video was available as well and it just felt like a more common, more obvious platform for me cause wine is pretty visual and I thought I could do a lot more things with being a little bit more visual and so that’s how that kind of happened.
How did you end up making the decision to this every weekday, as opposed to just once or twice a week, or something that would be easier on you?
Because I’m hungry and I’m raw like that. I don’t understand anything unless it’s at a hundred thousand miles an hour. And so if I was gonna do this, I was gonna do it for my community and my fanbase until I was gonna bleed out of my eyeballs. And so that’s just the work ethic that I come with. And so it just made sense. I felt listen, I could put out a lot more content, you know? I kind of make fun of myself that I don’t do it seven days a week.
You’re going to be giving a keynote address at New Media Expo on August 14th. Obviously we don’t want you to give away the whole thing here, because we want people to actually go and see it in person. But just in general, what can people expect from you when they go to see you give a speech like that?
Pure passion. Looking to give value. Not looking to go up there and brag about what I’ve done. Maybe try to give a blueprint to people being able to see or achieve the same kind of success as I’ve had in a genre or niche that is meaningful and passionate to their soul. Talk about different scenarios, and a crapload of Q&A so I can answer questions of what people really want to know about. And so, you know, that’s really where I’m gonna come from because that’s what’s most important to me. You know, when I speak, I’m there to help, I’m there to give, and I’m not up there to promote. And so that is going to be a massive, massive part of what I’m doing. And really trying to talk about this gold rush of personal branding and building community and giving back. I’ve got a lot of things I’m passionate about, and really we’ll see where the crowd is vibing, and I like to really adjust or mold into where I think the sense of direction is of the audience.
