So welcome to some talk about Slack or Slack Talk as the title goes, Social Learning Across Content Coalition, which many of you know was announced on Monday of this week with many participants across the content provider, publisher, library, and aggregation space. So what we wanted to do in this session today is bring together some of the members from those different perspectives and talk a bit about what's going on with Slack, why we in particular find it so interesting, and why we hope that you will as well. To kick us off, Dan Whaley, man of the week here at the conference, it was going to talk in a little bit more detail if you have missed it about what Slack is and what it's doing. And then we'll go into some questions that I've prepared and hopefully you will have questions as well that we can share with our speakers and have a lively conversation for this last Friday of I annotate. And welcome back Delmar. We're glad that you found your way back. So Dan, I'm going to hand it over to you and I believe you're going to show some slides for us. Yeah. So I'll show a few slides. I won't make this long. I think this is more useful if it's just a discussion, but just give a little bit of a background here. This coalition, social learning coalition, which we seemed to have named Slack. We had experimented with a lot of different things, but such as it is. So the basic premise here is that is this is really a kind of user focused and user centric premise in that students and teachers need tools at work. The same quote unquote, no matter where they are, not a set of different tools that are geared to do the same thing, but are implemented differently on every single different content platform that they go to. So in the way that you might build an extension that you can take with you around the world, how do you bring common capability to you as you travel to different content platforms even within the course of a single day as a student or as a teacher. So the idea was formed to kind of build a coalition of content platforms, publishers, tool providers and so forth to work towards this vision where social learning can take place anywhere in the same way, regardless to your vendor. We built, even though some of the applications of this might not necessarily be social learning, the social learning as a frame felt like a good home and a good kind of conceptual basis foundation to build this on and that's why we call it a social learning coalition. So more specifically with regard, you know, kind of technically in terms of how these the different content platforms, LMS is tool providers work that there is a standard called LTI, which is really foundational to the experience of students on in most major kind of institutions on a daily basis. And tools can inherit or can be built into the LMS and can inherit the services and authentication and so forth. It's called the learning tools or operability standard. But there's a lot of asterisks in that and usually only one tool or one content platform can kind of inherit that session at a time. It's more difficult to swap them back and forth to swap that information and that the session and authentication information back and forth is very clumsy. LMS is don't implement this in very sensible ways a lot of the times content platforms are very uneven in terms of how content is rendered and made available. And ultimately that this from from our perspective in terms of trying to implement this, it's led to challenges, a variety of different challenges, which we think a kind of a common approach can improve on. So the goal was to organize a coalition of platforms, work to identify the obstacles, make proposals about how they could be addressed, and then work towards implementations, and we're kind of work in the open and share best practices with each other. So that the ask in particular of participants was fundamentally that they agree with a vision that they would explore what doing this would mean for their own platforms and then prioritize that work over time, collaborate with a group and achieving those goals and be public about it. So we'll work ultimately towards a set of technical recommendations for content members across a series of different areas and demonstrate initial examples of the implementation of those. And then see if in particular if any of those recommendations make sense to be incorporated upstream into some of the existing standards frameworks in particular LTI. We are in touch with IMS. They are interested in and I think excited about this. We have some of our first conversations that will happen over the next couple weeks with with their groups. It may make sense to form a in an IMS working group to help implement this. And if that's one of the primary outcomes of this coalition and it helped in a sense pulling this group together help to illustrate that and that the primary work happen in authenticated relation related parts of this discussion happens in IMS. That's totally fine with us are, you know, from my perspective, our goal is only to see this happen. Anybody is welcome to join that ultimately wants to enable powerful social educational experiences across content platforms and shares this commitment to user experience and interoperability. If that describes you then please reach out this email address is good one for contacting us or reach out to any of the members. Right now we've got 16 members from kind of a range of different kinds of platforms. Barnes and Noble, Daisy Ebsco free ebook, which is also Eric Helman works at the project Gutenberg. Institutions like gal day UC Davis also another another kind of range of members probably an equal number of these that are in final discussion discussions about joining that we think will probably be coming over the next coming weeks and months. There's a website here with some videos of people kind of explaining in their own words from these different projects, why did this makes sense and in terms of their own objectives and goals. Check it out. And thanks. Thanks, Dan. That's fantastic. So, I mentioned we have some of the coalition members joining us here today and I would like them to just briefly, you know, introduce themselves or though some of you may have met them in an earlier sessions and just tell us a little bit about their organization. And then we'll be moving moving through some questions in particular about the coalition. Mark Graham I know you've met a number of folks already through presentations at this event. But if you could just briefly introduce yourself a little bit about your organization and we'd love to hear that. Sure, great. Thank you very much Heather and Dan. My name is Mark Graham I managed the way back machine at the Internet archive. Yes. I can hear you. Great. This is our 25th anniversary year. And so we're really happy to be celebrating that we're a nonprofit library, whose mission is universal access to all knowledge. We do our work a number of ways we take analog material we digitize it we preserve it and make it available. And we also collect digital information we preserve it and make it available. For us it's all about what we call bits in and bits out we bring in a lot of material and we we push out a lot of material in a number of different formats specifically books. We've we have digitized more than four million books. Academic papers with scholar.archive.org we've we've archived more than 28 million open access journal articles, television news we've been digitizing dozens of television news channels 24 seven for the last better part of 10 years. The government documents, millions and millions of them I'll talk a little bit about that we do with the Mueller report I think further on music including for example more than a quarter of a million 78s that we've digitized and made available on the web and the voice services like Alexa and Google etc. And of course the web today we archived more than a billion URLs a day, and that's about 20,000 a second, and then those are accessed at the rate of about 5000 a second. We work really hard to make our services available to as many people as possible, and in through especially through integrations with platforms like Wikipedia, and including integrations with browsers like Bray browser for example, and browser extension so I'm super excited about what's going on here with Slack because we're you know, but the bottom line is we everything that we can do to accelerate and improve and enhance issues that people have around content discovery, access use, and then most importantly, an understanding of context, which often happens within a sharing environment is critically important to to learning and and engaging in in our society. I have some other comments about that but I'll stop. I'll stop there there we go. Heather I've finished nothing else. All right. Well thank you very much for having me it's a pleasure to speak with you. I'm Nathaniel Lee corporate strategist at ebsco information services. I'm a student provider of scholarly research and educational content to libraries. And so a large focus of for us is helping that information be consumed in the most effective ways. We think a lot about how do we identify future sources of growth and how do we make our products work better for our customers. The question statement is to transform lives by providing reliable relevant information when how and where people need it. And so, with something like Slack, we think a lot about what is integration with the right content tools and the right delivery mechanisms look like, because it's one thing to have the resources available it's another thing entirely to consume them in the right context. I'm planning in by the way for my counterpart from PM Donna Shaw. If you go to the video site you'll see a lovely video that she recorded on behalf of ebsco. She's ebsco's representative with Slack really focusing on making sure that the way that we talk about interoperability and standards around LTI and things like that that we're really aligned to internal development. So happy to be here. So my name is Delmar Larson. I'm a professor of chemistry at UC Davis. I'm the founder and director of the LibreTechs project. The LibreTechs project is run as a not for profit organization. One leg is in the other leg is as a project out of UC Davis and the goal of the project is meant in order to be able to disseminate we are open educational resource content to academia and outside of academia anyone who's interested in reading and utilizing it. The the stick of our project just to try to build a centralized infrastructure that can be curated and openly edited and then correspondingly customized for individual faculty or individual campus use a key aspect Obviously in consuming textbooks whether it's traditional or it's current modern or the future is the ability in order to interact with it in the past that used to be by writing in your book and oftentimes our books are quite written into at least my books are But in the modern age that involves annotation infrastructure like hypothesis. So the ability in order to couple hypothesis infrastructure in order to allow students in order to engage in these active Activities using our content is exceedingly of interest and we've been working with hypothesis and several projects primarily authentication and other mechanisms of using it to constructively empower the usage of the LibreTechs project. So I'm happy to be here. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of broad scale initiatives like this when Dan reach out to me initially to to get involved in the project he said it's kind of along the lines of the annotating all knowledge coalition it's going to bring together folks to have those conversations That might not ordinarily happen. So I'd love to hear feedback for those of you who recently joined on on the value that you see in kind of putting these collaborative forums together. Mark, do you want to start Oh gosh I don't know so much has been said about this and I just want to underscore the videos that Dan painstakingly got from from various of us and I listened to all of them last night watched all of them last night and I learned a lot so I'm going to put a plug in there to amplify what has been been said by so many of the other members of the coalition To me I'm here because representing the Internet Archive and there are many other engineers and people at the Internet Archive that I'll be working to liaison with and bring the conversation back to but frankly more than anything else is to is to learn and be inspired And and and understand opportunities that might exist out there that we can participate in to help integrate the services specifically the services of the Internet Archive into the larger learning environment but you know also I think this whole question of learning Social learning I think social learning is like social distancing. I don't understand why we use the word social distancing is just distancing this physical distancing actually and social learning. I get that like learning together, but there's also the concept like lifelong learning or just, you know, just in time learning. And and I you know I think it was a conversation about like in the classroom or academia and in another context and I was just reflecting that with regard to learning These days for the last you know year and a half the learning for many of us has been up in the context of COVID Right. So the question is like, you know, learning about issues important to our health and, in fact, our lives and the lives of our of our countries right at the health lives academic And and business etc all of it. And so where are we doing that learning we're not doing that learning in the classroom. We're not doing that learning based upon much of what we had learned in the classroom historically we're doing that learning on on social media, and by and large We're doing it on Twitter and on Facebook and on tiktok and on new sites, many of which aren't even actually new sites in the traditional way they're, you know, there are sites that have a particular point of view sponsored by an organization that you might not even be aware of So I think context is critically important in these times and part of the context can come through the social aspects of what we're talking about here so I know that's kind of a long winded way of saying I'm here to try to help learn about ways that the Internet archive as a resource as a library can be more useful to to people. Overall, and I'll just give one specific example, for example when if someone is on a Wikipedia article, they're reading Wikipedia article and they want to go further. We're working to help ensure that anytime there is a reference to some external resource via a website or a book or an academic paper or some other resource that that resource is available in a digital format. And it's accessible via a click, and it's reliably accessible, such that if something happens on the original source, then there's a backup of it. And, and in addition to that to go further, and to say what additional resources could be made available to the person who's on the Wikipedia article to help them go further in their exploration. So that's just a very practical example of where we're trying to take some of the resources that are available from the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine and extend them out into the larger information ecosphere. Thanks so much, Mark. Nathaniel, I know EBSCO are huge proponents of collaborations with with libraries. But if you could tell us a little bit about, again, the importance of collaboration for EBSCO and maybe, you know, one particular idea that you think might potentially come from this collaboration. Yeah, sure. So I think I'll start with the kind of where EBSCO is today. We see our strength, well, a large part of it just being a content provider. We have partnerships with over 16,000 publishers and we're in tens of thousands of libraries. And so anytime you have that type of positioning, you have to, I think, think critically about making that content as accessible as possible. And so when we, you know, in logistics, also in software, you know, thinking about what is the quote, final mile of delivery, right? It's not just, you know, if you really want to find it, you can go and authenticate and get to that resource in the way that is there. But also when you're searching at your point of need or when it's being assigned in the LMS, our students are able to actually access it at their convenience and faculty able to pass it along. And so historically we've integrated with standards, LTI is a good example of that. And we've had products that support that in indirect and indirect ways. But we see this as increasingly important. And I think I would just point at this post by A16Z, the venture capital firm with Andreessen Horowitz, the person who first popularized software is first eating the world. And there's this great guest post right now that's talking about the resurgence of social, right? So everyone thought social was dead after Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, you know, afterwards, you know, it's done with. But we're kind of entering a social 2.0 wave. You have platforms like Clubhouse and Spotify Green Room, which were just launched this week. Facebook Audio Rooms, which are all about essentially helping people to engage in new ways virtually. But, you know, different medium now instead of text or post, we're talking about audio. And I think that in traditional fields like classroom teaching and even research, like Mark said, social is almost like an unnecessary word there because they've always been social. It just so happens that now the technology is following suit. Thanks so much. And in moving over to you, Delmar, the open educational resources as a concept is fantastic and really the idea of collaboration and sharing just down into the DNA there. So maybe I could ask you the same question that Mark and Nathaniel answered, just what is sort of the impetus for your participation and perhaps one thing that you think you might work on as a result? Well, so the key aspect of OER, as many people probably know, the O and OER is open, which obviously is meant for freely distribution of content. You know, what we're trying to do is not necessarily distribute content because there's a variety of mechanisms in order to go about doing that. We're trying to centralize it and provide a mechanism to curate the content and to customize the content for individual faculty at individual campuses. And the key aspect in terms of doing that is to realize, and it's not really much of a realization, that the concept of a class is intrinsically a social aspect. So the ability in order to interact with your faculty or with your professor or instructor of record is critical, but also the ability to interact with your peers in studying, grading and doing certain things. And that hasn't changed significantly when we've switched to online activities. In fact, it's that social aspect that's in part been diminished or at least had significant limitations by moving online. Well, we've been by trying to capitalize on how we have traditionally been interacting in classrooms is how we want and interacting with textbook is how we actually want to be able to ensure the social aspect is coupled into the textbooks that are hosted on our project. And that entails several different use cases that we try to push and on I mentioned the ability in order to edit the content of the side of the pages which is, you know, intrinsic to just the ability to base annotation capabilities, but the ability in order to generate effective learning circles or effective either class participation or subgroup participation is quite critical in terms of being able to maximize the learning experience and the utilization of the textbook to catalyze that as exceedingly important. And what we're trying to get off of this thing is to establish the best practices that can be implemented into our, our infrastructure with a shared authentication so that people can come in faculty can realize how they can actually utilize these tools effectively in order to be able to extend what is traditionally done in the classroom, or the computers nowadays or for your screens in order to be able to really maximize the educational experience and there's a variety of different workflows that we have there we want to be able to establish the best practices for doing that and then being able to utilize that scale for the users that we have. There was a second part of that question which I've completely forgotten. So, I think you touched a little bit some of the things that you might like to do. Is there more that you want to add on that front. Well, the social aspect is particularly important one of the aspects, obviously, but one of the key aspects that we've been trying to address is a central authentication infrastructure rotate that when a student comes in, irrespective of where they happen to come from that they have the ability in order to capitalize on these tools as quickly as possible. And again, not necessarily within all this hierarchical approach that I talked about. And that's a key aspect that we've been working on. The other aspect that we've been particularly interested in is being able to extend the concept of annotation to not just be the ability in our right pages down whether they happen to be for the class or for faculty for providing information of that, or even for reviewers in order to help facilitate the curation, but the ability in order to embed different types of concepts or different types of form factors of information. For example, the ability to insert questions into the site or phrase that interactive questions that can act as homework in order to facilitate the next level of interoperability or interactivity between the students and the content. And other source of materials that I think is the next stage of annotation capabilities. So we're very excited about that. Great. Thanks so much. And Dan, you know, you talked a little bit about why it was so important to create this coalition in the first place, but I'd love to hear your take on why Hypothesis is so committed to collaborative organizations, whether it's from the W3C standard on through other industry groups. And maybe some of the things that you're thinking about in relation to partners who are not able to join us. Thanks. Yeah, I think the collaborative nature, I mean, there's two, two big reasons to work in groups like this.  Number one, the, you know, there's, there's a work to be done to help bring kind of interoperability and, and, you know, kind of overall kind of ecosystem improvements that work, the more that we can be informed by the needs of the different parties in the ecosystem. The second reason, though, is there's definitely an importance in signaling in that, like, for instance, I'll just give you an example of one, one capability that is, you know, something we're very focused on. Right now, in order to launch, for instance, Hypothesis over a reading assignment in the LMS, you've got to go in as a teacher and say that you want to add this Hypothesis module to this reading. So only teachers that want to invite it into the classroom, and only when they decide that they want annotation as part of the module, are, is that, is that fundamental capability going to be there on that reading. Really, what needs to happen is that administrators at universities need to be able to flick it on for every student to be able to use in any class on any reading as just a basic default capability that's present everywhere. And, and when all the students, when students realize, now maybe an instructor can go and turn it off specifically if they don't want, you know, for this particular assignment or generally for their class to have that capability, you know, that's an anti pattern for them, great. But in, you know, for the teacher who hasn't heard of it yet or doesn't care or whatever with the students can still go into the document together and work together to help each other. That's, that's amazing, kind of more present that it is in the more places, you know, the more beneficial. In order to get, you know, these LMS organizations that would need to be implementing this kind of capability in this much broader way in order to get attention in their product backlogs and prioritize things. It's super important to have, you know, a group of people that they recognize as their peers. They're saying that this is important to them. And so for us, the biggest value, one of the biggest values of bringing this together is to let people know that it's a priority for, you know, some of the biggest content platforms and so forth in the space. Thanks. That's very helpful. It was interesting to me to go through the discussion process with a lot of the partners, you know, who are now in place. And we all know from COVID the importance of being able to access a variety of digital learning materials. And that's something that was evident, you know, much earlier for those who are instructors and students in the space. But perhaps you could, and back to you, Dan, just talk about some of the challenges when hypothesis started to integrate more closely, you know, with the LMS. Some of these walled gardens or proprietary challenges that raised their head that ultimately led to where we are here today. Well, just I'll mention two simple things. And I, for me, it's not, I don't think of these as walled gardens. I mean, we all know that there are walled gardens out there. But this is not a walled garden problem. This is this is really just a problem with the web being a very uneven place with lots of different technologies that's implemented in some places one way and another place another another way like for instance some screen reader or page readers, book readers, the, you know, you can't select text. And, you know, that's a fundamental, you know, kind of a capability super important for annotation. And so if we're going to have broad annotation or capabilities that can lay across content platforms that rely on some of these fundamentals, then I think it's important to highlight those. What are the things that are important about the way content is represented, you know, that are necessary for, for, you know, these kinds of third party, you know, or interoperable experiences. So the second thing is, in terms of passing authentication around and sharing authentication, there's a lot that's built into LTI. But there's a lot that's not quite specified yet and which needs, which isn't even related to necessarily to the LTI standard that has to do with how these things can get passed or inherited back, you know, between kind of tools and platforms and so forth. And in a way, this is kind of taking some of the work like, for instance, LTI 1.3 and really digging into the use cases for it and more fully expressing those and doing that together with a broad selection of different platform providers. Thanks. Nathaniel, I know that EBSCO is very much focused on student outcomes and making sure that those outcomes are successful. From your perspective in talking with different EBSCO partners and incorporating different things, either into the Discovery Service or into EBSCO host, could you talk about the value around, you know, interoperability and standards in that regard? I know you mentioned LTI, but maybe did we go a little bit deeper for it? Well, I guess I would say there's three large outcomes that I can maybe four to break the consulting rule, help faculty more easily assign materials, help students actually get more of the supplemental content delivered at the point of need. And I think part of that speaks to the affordability issue. When you think about how do students use our content today, a lot of it's for outside of the scholarly research context. You have the, it's really about writing papers. It's really about, you know, finding the quality, authoritative research. And a lot of that is supplemental in the educational context. And so our resources might be used alongside OER type resources like Libra text. And so in that type of context, what we want to do is make that information be more easily pulled when faculty members are thinking about how can they, you know, affordably run out their curriculum content. So that's one of those use cases. Another use case is just the library themselves. That's a large focus for us as a company. We spend a lot of our time really supporting the needs of librarians, whether they be academic or in this case as well, K through 12. And a lot of our library customers are focused on curriculum development and helping support the faculty and student needs around that. And so those are kind of like the high level outcomes. In terms of the actual kind of day one, you know, what is that going to entail? I think we're very much watching to see how this is going to evolve and kind of be different than something like a lot of the LTI standards work and what IMS Global has done. I think one of the reasons we were really excited about joining this early on was because of the leadership with Dan and Heather and their work around W3C standards. We think that even if it's, even if there are early stage opportunities in the market and there's a couple different directions that can go if you have strong leadership, then there's a lot that you can do. Thanks so much. And so Delmar, just as an OER company, I would imagine there's a lot of startups in the tool space that are kind of reaching out to you guys about potential integrations and the like. One of the, I think, potential benefits for a coalition like this would be having more interoperability would make it easier for outside tool creators to participate in the space. Could you talk a little bit about, you know, how Liebertex has found that process to be in the past and maybe what you look forward to perhaps shifting in that regard? Let me answer that and maybe answer my version of that question in order to get that across. And this probably applies to all of academia or all of EDAC, but certainly in the OER community, I think it's somewhat of a wild, wild West, although things are getting a little bit better in terms of standards, because there's really no standards out there in terms of how we store things, how we transfer things. And even the, or at least some standards that do exist are oftentimes very not 100% reliable in order to be able to do stuff. For example, we have OER content stored in a variety of different formats. We have stuff as LaTeX, we have stuff as text files, we have websites, we have various packages that you can store content and distribute. And it's a very hodgepodge of different things. And currently, there is no single standard across the whole OER infrastructure for content to be distributed on one region or the other. That's one of the reasons why a significant part of our effort is what I refer to as harvesting, which is involving someone in the order of 100 undergraduate students at UC Davis. They're largely plowing through and manually integrating content into our platform. Now, it's not that we're necessarily establishing a standard per se, although we are by bringing everything into our platform and then centrally standardizing in the underlying code and how we store it. So there's the point of that is that there's quite a lot of need for interoperability in establishing the source standards that Slack is implementing in the OER infrastructure. And obviously, multiple platforms have started to in the OER landscape have started to grow up, especially many of them that are for profit that have identified a niche of somehow still being OER but still trying to make profit off of the whole situation, which is quite an interesting balancing act that they're able to do. But as these new projects are formed and start to grow, the need for interoperability is certainly very critical in order to be able to implement that. And that's what I'm hoping that Slack is able to pursue and establish, at least within the annotation sphere. Thanks. I remember one of the very first workshops I participated in when I joined hypothesis was an OER workshop and just the multiple layers that annotation could bring to a completely reusable and remixable resource like OERs. You can have the students learning collaboratively from each other, you can have the instructors working together with the students because you can also have the network of instructors who are using the resource, use it as a back channel to share tips and best practices, and even have the, the authors and the creators of the project, making their own internal annotations, you know, for future editions so it was kind of mind blowing to hear, you know, kind of all of those, those, you know, facets for for annotation across across OER. Mark, you're sort of kind of touched a lot of different parts of the industry, you know, given your role there at the Internet Archive and with the Wayback Machine. And I'm just wondering, you know, we've talked about the folks who are participating in Slack, you know, thus far, if you have thoughts on, you know, how the initiative might even ultimately, you know, be broadened what other voices might be beneficial to have in the conversation moving forward. Yeah, most certainly, you know, I have ideas about specific organizations and individuals and initiative, et cetera, I won't go into them right, right, right now, but, but I do want to make some other comments. I mean, I actually do want to call out some challenges here that the world is not moving in, in the right direction in a lot of ways around, I think, some of the values that the Dan and others have been promoting and that certainly Brewster Kale at the Internet Archive and others in this world of open. You know, so let's be specific. A lot of Amazon owns the bulk of the market in ebooks, and the Kindle platform either on their hardware or the way I read all of my books or the Kindle software on an iPad is a closed environment by and large. News more and more is people are consuming through apps on their Android and iOS devices. And those apps, the Apple News app, which I think President Biden said he gets most of his news from the Apple News platform is a closed environment. If I want to annotate, I can't necessarily even annotate for a variety of technical reasons, the forget access to the information, it may be even encrypted on the device. So being able to annotate a book, for example, and then share that I can do it to some degree within that closed environment. Right. So, you know, Apple and Amazon and others have done a pretty decent job of serving their constituencies within their environments but not across environments. So I think we need to like just call that for what it is and it's not a healthy movement for an open learning and social and collaborative ecosystem. The flip side of it is that there are examples and opportunities where things are open and connected and accessible. I just this morning and we get comments from donors at the United Archive and this one just came in this morning. I said, after I read the New York Times obituary for Leonard, for chief Leonard Crow Dog, spiritual leader at Wounded Me and learned he released an album of ceremonial songs in 1972. I began a frustrating and futile search online. Well, the flip, the rest of the story is that we had archived, we had digitized and made available that recording from 1972 and it's available from the Internet Archive. The person had to come to us and search in our system for some reason it wasn't well indexed on Google but wouldn't it be nice if someone had taken and annotated the New York Times article with a further reading additional links so in a collaborative way we could have built on each other's works. So stitching together in an overlay of the web and other related resources to connect together the different platforms and services and information resources over time. I think that's the vision opportunity that Dan and others here at the coalition are pursuing. I just also add that the bit I spoke a fair amount about Wikipedia and work that we're doing to connect I think Wikipedia and Wikipedians are a natural ally in this effort. Government documents, I've spoken about this at length but very briefly, when the Mueller report was released there were more than 2000 footnotes in it. Only seven of them were clickable and so we work with Digital Public Library of America and others and we did primary research and we found more than 700 of the referenced documents and we added links to them both within the EPUB, we published an EPUB, we also used a modified version of the hypothesis client with a modified version of PDF.js to make an open accessible annotated version of the Mueller report. Now you might think okay that's interesting and useful and it's there but it's actually a lot harder than that because there's one particular document referenced in the Mueller report that I think has gone through five different revisions or declassification review processes since it was first published. So this is a living process of knowledge discovery and an opportunity to make that more accessible to people who want more context for what it is they're paying attention to. I could go on but I think suffice to say that this is a big open field and I'm happy to be in it with the people here and many other people around the world and not just English and not just North America but this is really a global opportunity and need especially in the context of the splinter net that we experience whether it be a splinter net divided up through technology and limited access and there's been reports this last week for example especially with regard to China and some of the early research about COVID that has already been disappeared off of platforms at scale. There's a major article about that in the LA Times yesterday but also language and culture and other kind of barriers that had that separate us from each other and conversations of shared shared interest. Oh and by the way splinter net is the name of a book if you want to read more about the splinter net that there's a book by that title. Thank you so much. I love splinter net I remember when I first started annotating and I was a little bit hesitant to do public annotations one of the things I do is I pick an interesting article about spiders or about a museum and I would go through and add links to related resources so it can be a really worthwhile activity and it will be great. Let's get together like an annotate a thong and look that's all do that's all do that. I want to talk about accessibility because Dan you had that in your initial slides on the coalition and that was something that came up in a lot of conversations with potential partners if folks have watched the videos. You know you'll see George Kirscher is very active with Benetech and Daisy you know talking about some of the things that can be done for the visually impaired. We have a video that will be coming shortly with Professor Raja Kushnagar at Gallaudet University talking about how they might be able to utilize social learning on on campus and beyond there but but but Dan. You know it's not always the easiest thing to wrap their brains around so could you talk a little bit about accessibility and play. Yeah, accessibility is super important. You know I won't go too much into that except to say it's not only in a lot of places mandated and regulated you know as part of the learning experience increasingly but it's just good practice. To make things as accessible to as many people as possible and you know I think the field first kind of got started around needs of the disabled but really the larger paradigm is just about making things easier to use in more more ways for more people more time. And there's some already when you bring hypothesis to a document for instance just from our perspective. You introduce more complexity and more navigational considerations and you know things like screen readers having to interact with both the content and then the interaction that's going on. And how for instance highlight highlights are inserted into the text of the page and kind of how do you use that in a in a way that fits with within screen reader software is is a particular challenge and it needs to be addressed as part of, you know, an overall effort to try to solve this problem. Thanks and you know Delmar, the open educational resources are frequently created directly by faculty in the field, sometimes on short term grants from their institution or their library or beyond. But they require a lot of effort to initially create and to maintain are there unique accessibility challenges around that type of content have other best practices that you can point people to around accessibility. Well there are certainly significant issues associated with this massive parallelized effort and generating we are across a variety of sources and the issues behind it from the accessibility perspective is that accessibility. While almost everyone and I would like to believe everyone wants to make their resources fully accessible to the greatest possibility possible the the rules and the mechanisms in order to do that are oftentimes quite difficult for the average faculty to be able to master. So you have a faculty member that is a subject matter expert in a specific field, and they spend their effort focusing on writing that content. And the only best way I can see this thing operating at scale is to have a specific team dedicated in order to be able to then take what was constructed in the OER and then move it forward in the accessibility perspective. In our case we have several accessibility people are external experts we have a gaggle of students that just go through and digest and update things and right now they're actually going through a variety of different of our technologies in order to help update the VPAT that we have. But that team also uses hypothesis as a mechanisms or identify various components that they want to be able to update. And that's part of the general curation workflow that we have in order to facilitate reading because it's the most effective way in order to be able to identify issues and to update them and such. So that perspective is exceedingly important from the importance of curating the content so that you're not just providing an overlay of content or an overlay of comments to be able to take those comments and make them actionable in order to be able to go back to the original content and update them so they're actually then addressed. And that's a key component of making curatable living libraries and not a repository of what I refer to as dead libraries or zombie like libraries is somewhere in the middle where things are sometimes editable and sometimes not. For example, a pile of PDFs is probably one of the worst repositories in order to be able to do that irrespective of the ability in order to provide important annotations on top of it. You're unable to update that. So it's a key aspect that that we have to deal with an OER. But also that hypothesis and social annotation that helps to facilitate us addressing. Thank you, Nathaniel. I know of course, given the variety of institutions that that EBSCO is working with globally that that accessibility, you know, must be key. But I wonder, in addition to accessibility, which is already a big topic, more and more we speak about, you know, inclusivity and equity. You know, if you could talk just a little bit about how that comes into play at EBSCO as well. Sure. Yeah, I mean, I was actually going to build off what Delmar said first just about the accessibility piece, because it just in terms of getting access to the to the article itself and the whole comment about PDF. We were definitely seeing that pain point in that issue when you just kind of extract the PDF and then you and you go dump it and you try to do all this interaction around it. Yes, you can you can have a certain layer level of functionality, but it's different than actually being able to interact with the content and pull it and actually have it be able to be modified when there are changes down the line. And so that's one of the reasons why we did the effort around the LTI and the. Sorry, I'm blanking the name of the product faculty select and curriculum builder are a couple of our products in this space, because we were finding that faculty members were just kind of downloading PDFs and trying to re upload them elsewhere to do functionality. You know on the equity equity piece that that's obviously a harder challenge and as a content company, one that we have to face in a lot of ways. I saw a comment in the chat about publishing in general and I think one of the unique challenges that EBSCO faces as an aggregator is that we have to think about. Are we curating from the right places are we indexing the right literature are we, you know, Western focused or are we able to get a global enough perspective. It is something that we work through a lot. I think I will say, you know that at a high level. The way that our products are set up. We have. We have different teams that are constantly looking at how to improve just not just the the content, but also the software pieces. I just I just realized I have been talking for a long time. I guess from an accessibility standpoint, I would say that I'm less close to a lot of the technical work that we're doing. But one of the things that I do know is that our product managers try to ground in the practice of of how other institutions are actually implementing it well. And so one of the things that we did is we partnered with the Carroll Center for the blind in Massachusetts to try to better understand, at least from a UI standpoint, how to users actually interact with the products. There's actually some really helpful resources out there that just speak to when you approach the product development life cycle and and and all of that. There's a lot of assumptions that you bring into it just looking at the software, but you wouldn't realize that it's completely different if you're interacting with it in a different way. You have to like actually, you know, hold down the software and you have to build these different features in to be able to let visually impaired users hear the prompts are getting back change where items are displayed and all of that. And so I think for us as a software company, we focus a lot on kind of the the UI elements from a content perspective. We also have teams that are looking at the at the kind of equity around content and curation for sure. There was just something I'd like to throw in here because there's some conversation about cost and money and all the rest of that. You know, I think to the degree that we can open up options and and work against lock in, then then that's going to be good for for people to be able to make choices with maybe they can't today. So I'm going to give you just an example. There's a platform by Follett called Destiny and it's a popular platform in schools across America. On their website, they say that they support they integrate with open standards like OER. I don't know what that means because OER is not a standard. And if you click on the link, it's actually a dead link. But if you try to like, if you're a teacher and you want to use a book, let's say the diary van Frank in your classroom, the diary van Frank through the Follett Destiny system costs $27 per student per year to license. Okay. And and there are other options within that platform for the teacher or if there are the teacher probably doesn't have time to figure out what what they are etc. I just think that in general terms, you know, opening up opportunities for people to be able to be more have more choice, more choice is is is good. And there's one other comment about the environment that we're talking about. I spoke a little earlier about these closed gardens, you know, the apples and the the the Amazon's etc. There's another dynamic going on, which is feeds in general. The fact that most of the most people are getting most of their information these days, not by going to some place and seeing something within a semi static context like say a Wikipedia article. They're getting it from a stream of information that's flowing by from one of a number of services like TikTok or Twitter, etc. And there's some certain fundamental dynamics about that that I think are not really healthy from a information diet perspective. I mean, the one is that you just get a snapshot of whatever the stream is it's going by right and you it's almost random that you're going to get what it is or there's a hyper focus on the idea of new the newest stuff is somehow more interesting or enticing than the stuff that maybe happened. And the other was it is the persistence. How do you address this that's passing by it's it's inherently ephemeral in a variety of ways, even from going back and say I saw that on Facebook where the heck was that I can't even find where it was. And so I just think that that annotation and ability to quote something to compare and contrast these are fundamental qualities of critical thinking, and so the degree that we can help make tools that can support critical thinking process by enabling the ability to persistently and reliably quote something and to be able to compare and contrast it is is is useful and and yet another reason why this coalition is so critically important. Dan I want to give you an opportunity to come in on the accessibility and equity questions. Well, I mean on on accessibility, I think, you know, I kind of spoke to that I think before I will provide one additional example which is in trying to, you know, we went through the this is a process called WCAG, which stands for Web content addressability guidelines, which is kind of a standard for excessive meeting accessibility. And, you know, and it's pretty complicated and we actually brought in an outside consultant to go through the whole thing and, you know, make sure that we were meeting, you know, these guidelines and in important ways and and they provided a whole mess of questions that we took them through engineering and the whole thing took like six months to go through and make sure that we were addressing every single thing required, you know, necessary to go meet these guidelines. And then we had George Kershaw from Benetech call us a little bit later after that ago, you know, some of our folks are really having an issue. It turns out that that actually the screen readers fundamental issue was using hypothesis and the big surprise to me was that the screen reader interoperability wasn't necessarily one of the checkboxes that we need to, you know, to meet for WCAG 2.1. And actually the problem turns out to be bigger than like a hypothesis thing that that when in on in Microsoft windows in when you select text inside of a screen reader like JAWS or NBDA, that the selection is kept is held secret in a private buffer inside that application and isn't even available to the browser itself. And so from hypothesis perspective, you couldn't when you want to go to annotate that text isn't even kind of there to work with. So that's a really fundamental problem that we reached out to NBDA. They're willing to actually modify the way NBDA works and extend it to be able to support this use case which is great and scheduled that work for August. So that's just an example. And now we're trying to reach out to the right people at JAWS and do the same same kind of work. This is just an example of how I think working together, we can help solve some of these problems that are kind of larger problems than any one single, you know, vendor or participant or whatever. It's wonderful Dan that through the process with hypothesis, those kinds of challenges were were able to come to light. I think, you know, all of us benefit from affordances that may have been initially put into a place for for one particular reason but then there's all sorts of other scenarios where where they can be tremendously helpful. I do want to just loop back a bit to talk, you know, Mark said he had a bunch of ideals of some other folks that, you know, we might want to consider inviting, you know, to the coalition and I'm sure that the Delmar and Nathaniel do as well. So maybe Mark, you could kick us off with a couple folks that you think would really bring a lot to this coalition. Oh, I mean, yeah, there's just the usual suspects that I would start start with that I mean creative commons, wikipedia. The thing about wikipedia, a lot of people don't realize is this the wiki media foundations, principally the US and in the German, but there's 321 wikipedia sites, different language editions, and those are really separate communities of and make their own decisions that make their own priorities. So, yeah, I just think the open culture world in general is certainly why I would put focus and not not to say that the for profit world, you know, doesn't have a role in an impact and certainly to the degree that we could reach out and involve the organizations that I was commenting on earlier, I mean, the apples and the the Amazons of the world, I think that that would be useful. I was especially encouraged by by David's presentation at the earlier session today about the work that Google is doing. And so I didn't see their name on the list either, but but you know, this isn't about getting names on a list right this is about actually coming up with some proposals and making some reference recommendations and inspiring and supporting each other in the process. And so far, for me at least with regard to the Internet Archive, this has already been a fruitful endeavor. Wonderful Delmar. I don't think I can say anything that Mark didn't already say there quite beautifully. The the opportunity of various people jumping on board is certainly meaningful in order to move the thing forward. But there are always the usual suspects in order to ask for I would need to think a little bit more in terms of how to try to perhaps make the the infrastructure set up in order to get the smaller enterprises that collectively can scale up quite significantly but an individual level is not quite easy in order to target. And I'm not able to actually provide any clear examples off the top of my head in terms of what fits into that category but I'm sure there are many of them out there. That's that's okay that's what the ongoing conversations with the coalition are going to be for Nathaniel. Mark put it so well, but if I had to say without naming names because I could get in trouble here, the other content providers, you know you have textbook providers and publishers you have other content aggregators that in our industry EBSCO is not the only one we may be one of the largest but there are others out there. There are traditional scholarly publishers as well many of whom already partnered with hypothesis and EBSCO works with many of them as well so I see that there is an opportunity. EBSCO and oftentimes we participate in these types of initiatives and we really don't intend for it to be like, you know we're doing it in lieu of our publisher partners but rather in conjunction with hopefully be the goal. I'm seeing some suggestions in the chat and Dan, we as Dan mentioned there's a number of conversations that are, you know, in process and ongoing, what you see in the sort of first round participants are the folks, you know with with vision. So we couldn't be more excited to have you guys participating. And there will be some additional participants added, you know in the coming week so watch for some videos and and the like there. Dan, do you want to talk just a little bit more maybe about some of the the segments that we're going after. Yeah, I mean, I won't. There's tons of folks out there, but I will target one group in particular to with with special attention and that is the LMS platforms themselves. You know, they really are in a, you know, not surprisingly central role with respect to the kind of switching mechanism of how student, you know, the classroom paradigm and pattern kind of works from clicking on a student, you know, a lesson going through and, you know, kind of learning. And there's a lot that they can do to really open up and enable a lot of the different kind of paradigm, different paradigms and so forth that we're talking about. So, we're super interested in, you know, kind of advancing those conversations and beginning to get them to the table which they're interested. And I think that's them seeing that there's real interest from their peers will help. Also, we've begun some conversations with folks at like zoom and YouTube and so forth, but I would say non traditional education providers, but ones that can be extremely powerful in terms of, you know, how if you know there's a larger set of you know kind of programs and patterns of practices here could participate, you know, very, very much and, you know, in these kind of this kind of work so really excited for that for those conversations to. So I think we have we have a few more minutes. So if you can squeak your question in, if you get it in now but if I'd like to ask a question that was part of the videos are for folks who like Mark and I who've watched all the videos, in my case, numerous times. We did close those interviews by asking if there is advice you'd give to folks who are her considering whether or not they should join. So maybe we can do just a quick rapid fire around Nathaniel, you didn't get to make that video yourself. You know Donna made that and she did an amazing job but what suggestion would you have for folks who may be on the fence or wondering if this initiative is right for them. Well, I think my advice is going to be more for the larger kind of corporate or even just larger organizational because I'll speak to how Donna and I were able to kind of help others see the vision as well. I guess like anything it's about understanding is this is going to happen and how fast is this going to happen and does the world needs moving this way and if so, are you kind of a central agent are you just part of it and just trying to help understand where where does your organization sit right so if you're a provider of content and which case and your primary use cases around teaching and learning, then it's really important that it gets accessed in the right ways. If you're a technology company, then it's really more about are we going to get the right types of engagement with our users, or if you are, you know, you have a very strong nonprofit mission and you're trying to figure out how do we better engage with our community. I mean this is a very good way to demonstrate that you're interested in and making the move. And so internally it was just kind of showing the momentum that that's been made on this initiative outlining at a high level on what other standards like LTI for that's, I know we talked about that a lot that this talk but that's just the one that keeps coming up over and over again, and just understanding LTI exists, we integrate with LTI, many others integrate with LTI have a lengthy Q&A with Dan and Heather that went for a couple weeks just about how is this going to be different than that.  They're trying to help build documentation and workflows that ideally would take LTI to another level. Thanks and Delmar, I want to give you an opportunity. I think I may have mentioned or quoted Nike when I actually did it was just do it. I'm not entirely sure what the downside is in terms of being in part of this the slack other than being able to dedicate the time in order to be able to see the, or to participate actively into it. Other than that, Nathaniel did a pretty beautiful job in terms of taking the different scopes of individuals and why they want to be able to get involved into it. Mark? I have nothing more to add to this. Thank you. I'll just quote what you said in the video that you wanted to turn the question around and say why not participate. Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it. But you know, this conversation in the chat right now about who pays for this stuff. I don't know. I'm not coming at this from a position of scarcity. There's a lot of resources and money out there. This is about alignment of our priorities as a society with regard to the technology that we're building and the services that we're providing. The we already spend literally trillions of dollars on worldwide education and specifically around want to put a plug in for the OER community. My wife happens to run OER Commons, which is a leading OER aggregation and distribution library service. And it's like it's not, I don't think it's a matter of a lack of dollars. We're spending dollars like never before on entertainment and on education. But it's a matter of how we're prioritizing that spend and helping to ensure that we're maximizing the human benefit for this. And we shift even a small amount of the dollars that are already being spent into a thoughtful application of tech technology and services that they can universally benefit humanity. You know, there was a comment earlier about how maybe I had a US centric view. I'm sure I do a bias and I try to work against that. You know, UNESCO, for example, has a program around OER is very active and certain countries do as well where countries have mandated that education and resources have to be have to be open and accessible. In many cases, the money is already being spent by by university, either paid for through tuition or through through taxes, etc. So I don't know. I don't I think it's a matter of choice about how we prioritize for outcomes and less about a scarcity model of not enough money to get to get these things done. Thanks, Mark. It's been a pleasure to hear from all of you and I'll turn over to Dan for the for the last word to close this up. I think Mark's finale was a great one to end on and I just thanks for everybody for coming and now we're ready to get started and get to work.


All right. Here we are. It is another episode of Let It Be Talk. Thank you for joining me. We're going to be sitting down today talking about all kinds of stuff that has been going on in this last week. Sometimes you just cannot believe the amount of music and film and comedy news that just hits in just a few days. It's like, wow. Anyway, welcome aboard. It is September 11th and I want to thank you guys for coming out to my shows in La Jolla, California over the weekend. I did five headline and shows and the audiences were just incredible. And man, it is a it is a workout to do five one hour shows in a weekend. It is to stay focused and to be engaged with the audience or remember the new material, some of the old just mixing it all up and having a great time. It was it was awesome. And thank you La Jolla Comedy Store. Mike, Vin, and Ryan for having me out there. And I did the podcast out there, Mike, Vin's La Jolla Comedy Store podcast. And that'll be coming out pretty soon. Anyway, also, no matter what year it is or how long it's been, I constantly want to send love to everybody that lost somebody on September 11th. And I never take that lightly. I'll never forget it. And I just want to say that real quick. Doesn't matter how many years pass. It is definitely a deep, deep wound in America and a dark, dark time and a massive, brutal wound to New York City. So I want to get that out there just to just to get that straight people. We've got to send our love. Anyway, we got a lot to talk about today. Yes, we do. And we can start that right off with what seemed to be a massive, massive, just boom across the internet with AC DC dropping a little nugget over the weekend. Whenever AC DC drops something, of course, it's going to immediately grab my attention a long lifetime loving AC DC freak that I am. Most of you know that I love AC DC.  A man. I have a man tattooed on my body and doing a tribute to Bond for a long, long time. And just madly in love with the band. That's pretty much it. And I like to say that I am, of course, I totally love the band. But there are those people out there who are whatever band they love. And we're going to talk about a few of them this on this episode, one being AC DC, the other being the Rolling Stones. There are the fans. Then there are the crazies, you know, no matter what the band does.  This is it.  And, you know, I think that's a good thing when you have a band and you have super fans. You know, I mean, it's so hard to keep people interested in something, especially, you know, five years, 10 years, but, you know, 40, 50 years, people are still into something that is very, very rare these days. So my point is, I'm going to be talking about some stuff with AC DC.  But, you know, I've said it many times, I love this band, I love Metallica, I love the Stones, but there's bands that I just absolutely love. And there's parts of it that I don't love. And I'll, and I'll be honest about it. But I still love the band, you know, AC DC, I don't like the fly on the wall record. And that's just the honest truth, Metallica, I don't like the load and reload records, but I love saying anger.  And I love saying, I love saying anger. And on this week of the 20th anniversary of it.  And just watch the dummies.   Anyway, so unless you were sleeping under a rock, there's no way that you did not hear this little snippet of AC DC. And they drop a, I don't know, maybe it was a 35 second, 40 second recording of them rehearsing. If you want blood, you got it. And then immediately on the bottom of it, it said, the boys have been rehearsing, getting ready for power trip. And Cliff Williams has come out of retirement and drummer Matt Luge will be on the kit. And look, I've been, I've been in the, around the music biz and I've, of course, been an AC DC fan, like I said, a zillion years. I was like, who? Now I had talked about it last week that there were rumblings that Phil was not going to be able to do the show. And in classic AC DC form, they do not tell you anything. And this is how it's always been with that band. And it is why they have that giant mystique still. And which is really still stuns me that I had them on the podcast for long, long form interviews, because it, you know, it doesn't really go down with those guys. It's always like five, 10 minutes snippets. And it's very locked in. The record was wrote between 90 and 91. We recorded with Mud Langer, whatever. It's just business. Still to this day, you rarely know anything about Angus. I know personally, not for a fact, but it has to be a fact that he is a billionaire. There's just no way they've made so much money. You don't hear about that.  Doesn't look like he drives. He doesn't have any flashy cars on Instagram. He doesn't show off his multiple houses. I did see a house that he had built a few years ago, which is pretty, pretty interesting. You could Google that. Anyway, so that's the classic form. You're looking at it. You're going, wait a minute. What are they even talking about? Who's Matt Luge? And then some people were like, Cliff Williams out of retirement. And like people were stunned on that. And yeah, I mean, Cliff retired. He said it right on my podcast that when they put out the last record that, you know, he would probably only do maybe four shows. Maybe he said it was interesting. He was dead honest. I said, do you see yourself touring with AC DC? Of course, COVID had happened and all of that. But he just said, no, no. And I was stunned that it didn't get more press than it did. It got a little bit of press, but it was funny that, I mean, right there, you know, Cliff is pretty old. Let me look it up real quick here. I think he is the oldest in the band, Cliff Williams, let's see here. And then, you know, we're sitting there going like, well, what happened? He's 73. Okay. So yeah, it's pretty old. Not the Jagger old, of course, you know, and not the Stones old, but also the Stones aren't playing at 120 dB, full tilt, screaming rock. They are a rock band, but they are not, you know, they don't have background singers. They don't have keyboards. They don't have horns. They are just playing screaming rock. And it is very difficult to play insane loud rock as you get older. And the endurance and the beating, the beating that it does on your brain, and of course you're hearing, but hopefully you're wearing hearing earplugs and stuff.  Yeah, he had retired.  Angus still has that kind of wiry fire. I'm sure Angus really doesn't have any hobbies other than playing in AC DC is his life. And that is his full on call of duty. So right away, millions and millions of comments. And of course I had questions too. And then I remember this is an interesting call I got about, not a call, it was a text about a month ago. And it was from Brad Wilk, who's a good friend of mine, and I have yet to been able to get him on the phone. And I don't know if they made him sign an NDA or what, but I was texting with Brad said, Hey, do you want to get some tacos? And he said, I'll have to get back to you next week. I'm headed to the UK for an interesting audition. And I was like, with who? And he's like, I can't say.  But when this announcement happened, I started thinking, wait a minute, that had to be it.  But I'm sure he had to sign an NDA. You know, I did when I heard the new record. I told that story a long time ago. I went in, they made me sign these papers if I said anything. And for, you know, over a year, people are like, nope, no ACDC, they're done. There's no record. And meanwhile, I'm sitting there going, fuck, I heard the record right in the office at Sony. This is crazy, you know. Anyway, so then of course, when they make the announcement, people are like, what? No, Phil Rudd. Now, what we do know is Phil Rudd was able to go to Canada to do the record. Now I will tell you this right now. Canada is the most strict country to get into on the planet.  You got to go in there and then you got to explain what happened. They might let you in if you pay 250 bucks. It's a, it's a brutal process. I remember there was a sound man on a tour on, he got arrested for weed years ago. He could never go into Canada. Same with Joey Diaz. Joey Diaz could never go into Canada. If you have any kind of arrest, track record, felony, stuff like that, you can't go in. So a lot of people are saying it's probably because of his legal problems in the US or sorry, in his New Zealand, you know, that thing with the attempted kidnapping and to hire someone to murder back when he was tweaking. Wild man, that press hit. And you know, a lot of people think it's from that. Now I thought about it for a minute and I was like, I don't, I don't, I don't know if it's that because you can get into the US pretty easy.  But the honest truth is they do let you in. It's pretty easy to get into the US. So I don't know really if it's the legal stuff, because I'm telling you, like I just said, Canada is insanely hard to get into. Now, AC DC, I said it a little while ago, are definitely billionaires. They can pay anyone to get in. They could just say, who do we talk to? Here's $100,000. Here's some lawyers. Let's get this in here. So I don't know if it's that legal thing. I really, I really am not, I'm not too sure on that. Now, who knows? Maybe Phil said, Hey, man, I want this amount. And they said, no, I don't know what it is. But I do know when they announced AC DC was playing power trip, I didn't even know who might be singing. And I said this before, but you know, Brian had the ear damage, had to leave the band. We know that Axel filled in, finished the tour, and then they went away for a long time. Then they secretly did a record. Brian was singing.  And we're like, Oh, okay. Once the COVID stuff maybe is all taken care of, they can go out and tour. Brian is not saying other than in the studio, in years, live an AC DC full set, which is usually around two to two and a half hours. He has not done that in a long time. He is saying at the Taylor Hawkins Memorial, and he sang a couple songs with the band at the O2 Arena. I didn't know who the band was, but I think they did back in black. I watched it. Yeah, they did back in black and they just shook me all night long. And you know, it's got to be a struggle for him at his age now. And like I said, I do attribute to Bond Scott every couple years. I'm in excellent shape. I work out at Eat Clean. And I will tell you this right now.  And if you haven't done it in five, six, seven years, it's going to be even harder. So lots of questions immediately hit the internet. Who's Matt Luj? I'm assuming that's how you say his name. L-A-U-G. Is that how it is? Let's see. Yeah, L-A-U-G. Who's that? I bet he's never had his name Google so much.  That was funny, man, because when I looked at it, it was like Matt Luj is an American drummer who has played with many bands such as Alanis Morissette. He played on Jagged Little Pill and then Taylor Hawkins joined the band. So he was, I guess, kind of a studio guy. Alice Cooper slashes Snape Pit. He's 55, couple years younger than me, from South Carolina, and moved to L-A, did the Jagged Little Pill record in 95, played in a reformed autograph. Remember them? Turn up the radio.  They got lucky, they got a big hit, and made it all the way through the tour and got the bonus. He's also a drummer with Mike Campbell's dirty knobs. I've seen Mike Campbell's dirty knobs. I do not remember the drummer, and I can see why, because if I go see Mike Campbell, I'm just looking at the guitars the whole time. He was like, oh, what guitar is he playing now? Anyway, that says on September 9th, 2023, ACDC and NASDAQ were performing with Matt Luj. Is it Luj or Laug? I don't know, because I haven't heard his name yet, so it could be Matt Laug, it could be Matt Luj. I'm not sure.  Lots of questions here. My first question is, when they did announce they were playing Power Trip, like I said, they didn't say who was in the band for a little while, and then I think they might have got a little nudge because maybe the Power Trip promoters, Golden Voice, were like, well, make sure you drop the lineup so we can get the ticket selling. I did think ACDC could just really sell out anything just with the logo, and then people later would question who's in the band. They buy the tickets right away, and then they go, wait, who's in the band? It's weird that we're at that state of ACDC of who would be in the band. Why isn't Phil Rudd doing the gigs? Why isn't Simon Wright back in? A lot of people did some internet sniffing around, saw that Chris Slade had gigs, so he wasn't going to be in. He'd been drumming on and off with him for years, and a lot of people thought, bring back Simon Wright from the flick of the switch tour on. He was playing, and there were those names going around, and I thought, well, the drummers, I thought they could do it. Yeah, Brad Wilk, of course, but Steve Gorman. Steve Gorman plays my Bond Scott tribute. He does the bulk of the drumming on those. I have different people play. Of course, Bill Burr has played drums. He's one of the drummers on the Bond Scott Bash, so is Brad Wilk, so is Dave Lombardo. There's a lot of guys that play drums on the Bond Scott Bash, but the main drummer is always Steve Gorman, and this guy has got the Phil Rudd feel. Another guy that could do it, I thought, was Ronnie Crawford, who was the drummer in the early Bond Scott tribute stuff, and an old drummer in my band who played with, fuck, what was her name? I forget her name now. That girl that had the glasses, the nerdy woman that had the big hit. I can't even remember her name. My brain doesn't work anymore, man. Anyway, my point is, they didn't really say who was in the band, and then they kind of dropped it, and it showed Phil, Stevie, Brian, Angus Cliff, and they're going, wow, okay, cool. This is, this is fucking, man, we get to see Phil Rudd again. This is going to be great. And then it didn't happen.  And for that, you can go to the old Twitter now called X, which no one calls it X, and I don't think anybody ever will. It's a lot like a football stadium when they rename it like Candlestick in San Francisco. Everybody just called it the stick forever.  So they drop the clip, power up, listen to rehearsals of the boys powering up with Cliff Williams who's coming out of retirement for the festival and Matt lag Luge Logue on drums.  They're just so wrong. Then there's other people that are just, I don't know. So first comment, needs more wash on that hi hat too tight and more treble and gain on the main guitar.  And I didn't go, hmm, hi hat sounds a little, what the fuck? You know, insane. Now I never cared for Chris Slade's drumming in AC DC. I loved him in the firm. Chris Slade is a fantastic drummer.  Absolutely not. There's dudes, you know, when they change drummers, the band completely changes to somebody, you can just feel it. You're just, you're just rocking and you're, in your mind you're like, hmm, something's different here. A lot of people don't know, they're just fired up.  Here comes, have a drink on me.  They're not doing that. But Chris Slade was not my favorite in the band. And Simon Wright was so long ago that I couldn't even tell you what it was, you know? But to put those comments up is funny. But man, people are fucking, people are kind of angry, you know? And, and this is these type of people. It was, they've been around for a long time.  These bands are numb doing. They're still doing arenas. They've heard it for years. They don't even, it goes in one ear out there.  You know what they hear? That's what they hear.  That is what they hear.    Without Phil, it's not AC DC. I know he'd play great. He was playing at home and I saw him and I listened to him. I don't think this was decided by him. I think the band kicked him out. Phil is my friend and I know him good. I know him good. I love that one. Oh my God. Like I said, I don't think it's the legal stuff either. So let's see here. It is amazing these comments that they really blow my mind on here. Of course, you know, you get the bottom of the barrel on Twitter. Absolutely the bottom. Now a lot of people are thinking a tourist is going to be announced and I don't think so. Let's see here. Where is Phil? Everybody. Phil, love that you're including if you want blood and mixing up the set list hasn't seen the set list at all. This comment hasn't seen the set list at all. One song, if you want blood, doesn't even know if it's in the set list. Could just be jamming it, you know? Could just be trying a bunch of different songs. No idea of the set list.  There's no way. Let's see. I'm absolutely gutted that Phil is not there. I thought we were going to get a proper chance to see the boys together one last time. I'm gutted. Doesn't even close to expressing my disappointment actually. Excellent. Thank you, ACDC. Love you guys. Please record and release the festival. Without Phil, it's not ACDC.  I want my money back. I bought tickets. I'm coming from Oklahoma. Can we please get a farewell tour announcement? No, Phil. No ACDC. Fucking. Sounds awesome, but no Phil. Sounds dreary, fellas. Would love to hear Brian sing jailbreak. That is all. It goes on and on and on, and that is, of course, the world of the internet that we live in. A lot of people are asking me if I'm going to go to Power Trip. I've been saying I want to go to Power Trip. I'm not quite sure. These days, I want to do stand-up comedy before anything. If I'm booked to do some stand-up comedy, I will skip any concert these days, any of them. There's only a few bands that I go to see these days because I know it's going to be so insane. It would be like Tool, Metallica, it would be Denco who aren't playing anymore. It would be the Mars Volta, which I'm going to see. It would be Mastodon. It would be Rival Sons. It would be Marcus King. It would be Shadeh if she ever played again. It would be Nick Cave who I'm going to see. Stuff that's really rare to see and kind of outside the box, they're going to do super different set lists. They're going to barely play all year, other than Metallica who's been touring like crazy. I love seeing them no matter what because it's a lot like AC DC. They just come out every year and kill and it's a great, great thing. I do not know if I will see AC DC. That's coming from me, a super fan. It was supposed to be, what was it? AC DC and Ozzy? Now Ozzy's off, right? It's AC DC and Judas Priest. Is that right? I forget the line because it's an Iron Maiden. Let me look real quick because it's been so long since that announcement. I can't really remember. Power, Trip, Motherfuckers. I do want to go all three nights, but I don't want to miss doing comedy. That's just the truth, man. I just love doing stand-up. Here it is. Where's the second line? Of course, G&R is on. First day is G&R Iron Maiden, second day AC DC Priest and Metallica Tool. If I'm going and I have to pick one day, it's going to be Metallica Tool.  Tool is just unreal. Every time you see them, I just cannot believe how good this band is. It is unreal how original they are, how incredible live sounding they are, and then Metallica, just right now on that tour, just blistering it. That is my thoughts on the AC DC stuff.  But not really sure because the last time I saw AC DC was the two weeks before Brian left the band, and it was in Vegas at the MGM Arena, which by the way, I'm getting ready to do with Bill Burr for the Formula One. We're going to be doing comedy in Vegas for the Formula One weekend. So if you're out in Vegas, get a ticket to the MGM Arena. And don't forget, I'm doing Madison Square Garden with Bill also. I just want to throw a little plug in there for that.  The band was so good.  It was just incredible. So that is my thoughts on AC DC. I do not think they will do a massive tour. I think they might maybe do, let's say, 10 shows total, 50 year anniversary, be something like Wimbledon. It'll be something like something huge other than Power Trip, which is huge.  But there's no way they're going to do a full tour. I just don't think that unless they're going to replace Cliff and Brian can actually sing a lot of gigs, I don't think they're going to do a giant... I know they got to do something for a 50 year anniversary. And I said it before, I think it'd be cool if Angus Young and Friends Tour and just toured America with some insane musicians doing the band during Bon Era, doing Brian Era, full celebration, different guys on drums and guitars and everything, and Angus just tearing it up. Like when you see Angus play, sometimes he sits in once in a while with Guns N' Roses. Super cool, he did that out of Coachella. So that would be cool if Angus wants to just keep playing until he's 100. I'd love to see that. So that's my thoughts. And DM me, or don't even DM me, just tweet at me on Twitter or Instagram and tell me what you think. Which by the way, I did mention speaking of Staying in Shape and Rock and James Hetfield.    People are just, I've come to the conclusion that I need to name my comedy special People Are Garbage. But anyway, I want to shout out to Hetfield because this guy is looking amazing.  There's a photo of him on Instagram a couple days ago.  COVID is out of my blood. Let's do it.  Perfect. I don't need the tank top. I don't need a tank top on Hetfield. Tank top. I'm not a tank top guy. Tank tops are fucking, they're gross, man. I never understood the tank top. They're fun in the 70s.  And with your Nike blazers.  I will say that. I will say that. But man, does he look good? Let's pour one out, man. Let's give a shout out. We lost Jimmy Buffett and Gary Wright last week. I was never a Jimmy Buffett fan. But I didn't hate him or anything. I respected what he built. He had like Pina Colada song and sold out sheds every year. He had like his parrot heads. And like the dead, the same people would go see him all over. He created this full party atmosphere like, you know, we're out on a yacht. You know, the the president of Yacht Rock, so to speak. I was never a fan of the music, but he was, you know, solid human. You could tell having a great time all the time, giving his fans everything.  We did lose Gary Wright the same week.  Talk about an underrated guy. Gary Wright dream weaver is played on the radio every day, every day. Dream weaver is on the radio. And his other song, Love is Alive. That's on the radio every day.  Just hearing that intro to dream weaver. Just spacey cool out just closed my eyes again. Hopped aboard the dream weaver.  My God, that is a great song. It is not dated. It sounds amazing. It could be a flaming lip song, man. You know, it's it's just so good. So bummer we lost a couple of greats there. We're losing them. It's getting them.    That's another reason I've got full minimalist just going to wake up each day and enjoy it.  I told you I did have some things to talk about with the Stones. They dropped a new song this week Angry and I you know I enjoy when I do Instagram live and people want my thoughts on what I think of things and I have often most of my life in the last 15 years have said promote what's great not what you hate. I firmly believe in that. I think that life is way too hard and it's way too easy to shit on people way too easy and you know let's just promote what we do like about someone. So people always ask me what do you think of this because I know they want to try to get some negative negative response from me. You know people love the negativity. The entire internet seems to be fueled by negativity. They love it. They love to trash. They love to hear trash. They love to spread drama and rumors. They love to get your thoughts and then go to the other person. You know what Dean Delray said about you.  I asked him on his Instagram live and he said no. There's a lot of stuff I don't like. If somebody asked me I'm honest. That's not for me. You know it's been a common fact. Recorded millions of times on here that I'm not a fan of fish and that's fine. I like trade. Trade is a great player. I saw him in fairly well but people will ask you over and over. You like wean. You like fish. You like clutch. How come you don't like wean. How come you don't like fish. And I don't think you really need to don't you don't need to explain yourself while you don't like something because it you know dude when I was young my mom put some broccoli up on the plate on the table there.  And you know she didn't each day try to put broccoli on my plate again. Here's broccoli. I told you I don't like broccoli. Why don't you like broccoli. I don't know. I put it in my mouth. It's not for me.  I love broccoli. You should like broccoli. No I don't like broccoli.  So the new AC or the new Rolling Stones song came out angry. What do you think. And I didn't care for it. I thought that it was you know I respect that they are going for kind of a modern songwriting vibe. I'm not even quite sure if the Stones wrote it because I haven't seen the song credits yet. I don't know if there's an outside writer or if you know I do know that Jagger likes to stay current. I'm surprised that Jagger never put a kind of a hip hop song on a Stones record because he does like to gather flavors and incorporate it into the Stones starting all the way back to the beginning of the Stones with blues and that is the you know ground floor of the Rolling Stones.  At 80 years old they've got a new record coming out. Jagger being 80. Keith coming up on 80. We got two original members left. Ron Woods there. He came in later on but I am in awe of the amount of amazing music they put out. Over all these years I am in awe that they still sell out stadiums.   The new song I did not like.   I think people look over a big part of their catalog that I think is amazing and it is hard to even look at that music as amazing to a lot of people because we are looking at stuff like sticky fingers, some girls, exile on Main Street tattoo you black and blue. It is only rock and roll.  I get it. But the 80s and 90s Stones I think are some incredible, incredible records that not a lot of people talk about and so I thought I would put together a list because I think personally I think the Stones could do one night with just the 80s and 90s Stones songs and blow your fucking mind. Any of these songs I am going to read if the Foo Fighters, if it was a Foo Fighters song or if it was a let's say you know any new band right now, a Marcus King song or you know a Neil Francis song.  Anyway so I put together a list for you guys and make a song, a playlist for yourself of Stones and I didn't include Tattoo You because the whole thing is a masterpiece and a lot of people look at the Stones as Tattoo You, the last great Stones record. That is what a lot of people say and so I didn't include that. It's one of my top three, top four Stones records ever. It was also one of the best tours I've ever seen. So I started off with 1983 so Tattoo You is 81.   Undercover the night she was hot, Tattoo You up and Too Much Blood. A lot of people have never even heard she was hot, Tattoo You up and Too Much Blood. I guarantee probably 90% of the people out there on this listening this never heard of that. Undercover the night was the single and it is fantastic. 86 they did a record called Dirty Work.  They're on a couch came out in 86. It had one hit to the body great song not a great record but they had a cover Harlem Shuffle that kind of got them through with the radio play but one hit to the body fantastic. Now in 89 they put out what I consider one of the greatest Stones records since Tattoo You. If they would have went Tattoo You and then Steel Wheels it would have been head explosion and I've said this for years I cannot tell you how great Steel Wheels is.