All right. Jenny Larson, come on up. Jenny Larson is from the Salvage Vanguard Theater. Shay Little is here, and he's representing Big Medium, Canopy, and Boom. Frank Rodriguez is here. He's a senior policy advisor for Mayor Adler. And finally, you know him from the cover of the Austin Chronicle just a month or so ago. This is John Reedy, the Austin Creative Alliance. So either the sky is falling, or everything's OK, and I don't know. On a 1 to 10 scale, each of you, literally just the number. 10 meaning everything's great. And one is we should all move to Portland as soon as possible. Where are we with regards to these big questions about creative class? Way to go. How concerned are each of you on a 1 to 10 scale? Start with me? Yeah. Somewhere in the 3 to 4 range? Is 1 very concerned, and 10 is not concerned, or vice versa? Let's go with 10. We're very concerned. Oh, I have to switch, then. All right, so you're 7 to 8. All right, 7 or 8? Yeah. In terms of strictly speaking about creative space, 10. In terms of affordability, I would say 9. I would say 7 or 8. Maybe 9 if I have to move to Portland. Is creative space. I mean, we spent some time at lunch today, the group of us. A lot of talk was about space and square footage, and whether we're pricing out creatives. Is that where this conversation begins and sort of ends? How important is the space element to all this? Six weeks, or maybe even five weeks. So for me personally, for my organization and actually beyond me personally, it's a big deal. And I will say it's a big deal because in the next nine months, another venue is gone. So it's two sort of cornerstones in the Austin creative economy that are leaving in a year. So it's a big deal. This is a done deal? Yes. You know, I would point out that stages equals jobs. So when we lose stages, we lose gigs for artists. And when we don't have gigs for artists, artists don't live here. So it really goes to the kind of city we want to be.  Not that there's not audiences. Not that you're not presenting what audiences want to see, et cetera. This is a fiscal, rent-based reality that you're. Correct. Tell me more about that. So here's the math. We have 100 seat theater. We serve a diverse audience, but primarily very young, demographic. Our highest ticket price would be about $25 a head. So if we sold out every single night, every single seat, we would still only make up about a fifth of what it costs to put on production. So ticket prices and demand don't make a difference in the equation. The other side of that is that we do rent our space out to artists in the community. And we believe very strongly in keeping that affordable because that's something we believe in, but also because artists can't afford to pay a whole lot, especially if you're brand new to the community.  Invite people for $5 a ticket. That becomes impossible when the overhead for organizations like a salvage vanguard and, for example, the Rude Max is too high to keep that affordable for both our audiences as well as our artists. Did you, in a sense, good guy yourself out of business? I guess so. But I'll sleep well at night doing that. No, I mean, it's one of those things where, in terms of the business model, we can't. There's only so much that we can charge for performance. And it's not because the quality isn't good. And we talked about this at lunch a bit as well. But there is a mindset that an audience has about how much they are willing to pay for that live experience. And we don't want to price out the population of Austin. We want to be inclusive. We want to have a $15 ticket that anyone in any neighborhood that we plant ourselves in can afford, they can come. We aren't willing or interested in charging $45 to come and see a play, because we think that that art and that culture should be for everyone. And something I said also at lunch is there are so many Austinites getting priced out of Austin in general. Let's not price them out of a play, too. Let's not price them out of being able to come to their neighborhood arts hub and see a film for $3, an improv show for $5.  But when we hear her story, generally the response, if you look at the Facebook comments, is, well, what's the city doing? The city's doing nothing. The city talks about this being the live music capital of the world. And being this arts hub, and they make money off of this, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and everyone wants to point the finger at the city. Well, the city, so you heard the personal narrative of somebody really going through this time of transformation and hardship. The city of Austin, through the mayor's office, undertook an initiative called the omnibus resolution. I think everybody knows about that. The resolution calls for some proactive actions to tackle these issues of affordability, the lack of working space, the lack of housing, the lack of a safety net for musicians and creatives. And in writing that omnibus, and I had a big hand helping the mayor with that, we talked about policy interventions and what can the city do to move the ball forward on these issues. And we gave the city staff 90 days to come up with a proactive plan, and I've seen the results of that. And some of that is good. Some of it probably needs more work in terms of coming in with bigger, bolder ideas. When you talk about affordability, it's really part of the larger issue of affordability. The city needs 44,000 affordable units right now. The city produced 5,000 units last year. That's the gap. It's a significant gap. And so we're thinking big in the managed office. We're looking at things like a strike fund where we'll bring in $50 million of private equity, combined with $150 million of debt, do that $200 million. And with that, we'll be able to buy properties and make them affordable. And that includes apartments, Class C and D apartments for living spaces, as well as properties that creatives can develop affordable places to work in a way as well. So we're trying to think outside the city box and look at innovative and bold ways to kind of approach this. Including all this bucket of interventions is the idea that the tourism market that's benefited the city in a enormous way, $1.8 billion in economic impact significant. But very little of that has gotten into the music and creative economy. And so the question for us is how do we leverage that tourism to really get down to increasing the creatives earnings and their income. And that's kind of the thing that we're really focused on. As well as those that, as well as keeping people out of harm's way through a safety net. And so we're looking at ideas of, for example, one idea is to bring creatives more into the safety net by helping subsidize their premiums for health insurance so we can get them into Obamacare, for example. So different ways of approaching this, the four areas are the lack of affordable space. One thing I haven't talked about is kind of the ecosystem and kind of the gaps in the ecosystem for creatives. We don't have a full-fledged functional economy until we get those parts of the ecosystem incorporated. You look at other cities that call themselves music cities. They're indeed music cities because they have this ecosystem functioning. We are a live music capital of the world. That doesn't mean we're a music city per se at this point. Yeah, I mean, John, you guys each sort of looked at what the problems are here. Also what other cities are doing. Are we behind as a city in answering a lot of these tough questions? Well, we're here in San Francisco, but that's a disaster. So we're behind Denver, we're behind Nashville, we're behind Minneapolis, we're behind Pittsburgh. We studied cities that made strategic investments in creative space and having creative space leads to creative jobs. And when you empower ownership of a group like Jenny's, she ends up paying her artists more. So this is all related. We wanna figure out how other cities have empowered their theater companies and their music venues to own their space. And I think we're getting there. I know the mayor is on board with looking into that. Frank's doing a great job, but we're starting from behind. I think we're starting from a place where we've taken for granted for so long that Austin was just unutterably, inalterably cool. And you know what was the coolest city in America in the 60s? Detroit. And look where it was in the 80s. So Austin is not necessarily always gonna be this way. And as we become a big city, we can't depend on it just organically happening. We have to make a community determination that we're gonna invest in this and then figure out how. Cause that's what we see other cities having done. But I mean, does that take a, as much as a resolution or a study, does that take sort of a reprogramming of people?  Yeah, that's a huge part of it. And we're not new to the affordability discussion at all. It's been going on. And I think earlier today we talked about this seems to be a old Austin versus the new Austin issue. And that's been happening ever since Austin started growing. I mean, back to the 1800s, when all of a sudden there's these huge shifts and it's like, oh, Austin back in 1801 was better. It's a, I think it'll continue to be an issue. We'll continue to see Austin grow and we'll watch the newcomers come in cause they wanna be here. They wanna be around the creativity. And it's just something that we have to embrace and figure out how to, I think, the ACA is working on initiatives to work with that and help grow it. And part of that is education. And that is across the board. It's across institutions. In the visual arts realm, the fact that we're city-to-size and have so few museums and institutions, I think is a huge issue. So in the case of the salvage vanguard, when it goes away, what's the short-term and long-term implications of that situation? For salvage vanguard? No, I think for the city. For the city. I don't know. I mean, really, I'm wondering where people are gonna do their performances because we have maybe 300 theaters in the city and one of them is actually closed right now and in the process of trying to open again and then the other two of us are done in a year. So then where is that mid-size theater space? It's not out there, it doesn't exist. Because the next step up is the Rollins, which is considerably also more expensive for these artists who are brand new in taking all these risks. And then there's some tinier. And I vacillate on, you know, other cities start to look really appealing to the community, absolutely. But then I also think, okay, so does that just mean we're going to be doing theater illegally in more small places and, you know, there's sort of site-specific stuff that we are like, buy a ticket and then we'll let you know where we are. I don't know, like this DIY thing. Because we are a city. I guess if you were running your own Uber. Right. I mean, the city, like the DIY art scene is sort of what the city is built on. And I would argue the music scene started as very DIY as well as this performance art scene. So I think that that energy will persist, but there has, I mean, something's gotta give. I'm as curious about what that is as anyone else. I'm hopeful that the omnibus leads to some actions that do create permanent space for creatives in Austin. We need it. We need those mid-sized, smaller theaters. If we don't get that space, then I can imagine a large portion of artists leaving. Yeah. I mean, I'm curious about the trickle-down. So for instance, if this glorious old Austin idea that we have, for instance, in music was based on the fact that three guys could live in an apartment for 150, 175 bucks a month, play two or three gigs a week, you know, up and down, not even leaving Sixth Street, pay their rent, pay their groceries, and then gig all, I mean, and then rehearse all day. And they don't have a day job to worry about. They can concentrate on the art, et cetera. That model obviously doesn't work now. Well, that'll never happen again. Well, right, so that'll never happen again. And I think as a result in the music portion of this conversation, you're not seeing the kind of bands that had that kind of opportunity to develop that kind of ethic and craft and whatever. And if they have developed it, they've had it developed in a different way. So that's the trickle-down there of just where we've gone from $175 and rent to whatever it is now. What? The trickle-down now of this kind of stuff. I want to back up though. All right. I just want to, the missing piece is not mentioned in cities that have been successful, there are six cities who have been successful strengthening their cultural identity amid strong growth. And the one element that is missing in Austin so far is investment from the business community. And investment, not in a way that says we want a specific return, but investment that empowers arts groups to be entrepreneurial, to do what's best for them. And no strings investment even. Knowing that they trust that these groups have been around long enough, been successful long enough to use the money in a way that's gonna be great. I think the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust is a perfect example of that. And the Denver Theater District did a good job of that. Where they didn't do a great job of connecting the business community to arts soon enough with San Francisco. Which is becoming hollowed out of mid-level spaces.  And you're always gonna have that higher end of symphony and ballet and stuff because that's what, we see that, we've agreed that a world-class city has that. I would argue that a world-class city also has the middle at all levels. Not just, and we're losing that. Is the middle not powerful enough to shake down these businesses for the money? Or I just don't think that even myself, I was a band manager for, I still manage bands. So I come from the music business. We just haven't been engaged. I don't know that, when did you guys start thinking about this stuff, Shay, and these people make art? I think that there's something about changing the narrative for investors and businesses. Because what I'm facing as we're out there looking for our next home and talking to different developers and exploring conversations is, well, how much can you pay in rent? Like, that's what everyone wants to know. And, well, I can't pay that much in rent, but what I can do is anything you build around me is going to be hoppin'. People are gonna move to that neighborhood, they're gonna eat in those restaurants, they're gonna drink in that bar, and it will become a thriving part of the city. So it's sort of like getting that kind of understanding of like, this is where you will make your money.  Are the developers short-sighted? Yeah. I mean, because if you're gonna bring people in business and whatnot, I mean, I don't know that it works for your thing, but the bottom of one of these buildings. It is, because ultimately, they wanna be able to make their buck. And any way that they're looking at this puzzle, like say they've got this plot of land, or they've got this building, they're renovating, any way they look at putting the pieces in that puzzle, my piece is never gonna be as attractive as if they throw me out and put this other thing in that can pay the four times the rental rate that I can. I think it comes back to the culture that you brought up earlier, that we don't have the culture of support.   And not having a real robust middle and having our middle kind of getting eaten out from under us is just eroding the ecosystem. And so it makes it harder for that ingrained philanthropy or just mentality of support from the community at large. I sometimes laugh at these studies. They just keep coming and they keep presenting in very fancy form. That's not a study. John did one. That's a proposal. And yet, talk to me about at a government level, these are important because you then can present them to the council and say, here's a problem. And I mean, everyone's got problems in all the other sectors too. And this is something, these censuses and these reports have a value on a city level, right? So the underlying reason we did the omnibus was because we had felt that we were studying to death and it was time for action and we gave the staff 90 days to come up with something. We also realistically knew that 90 days they weren't gonna come in with a magic wand to solve everybody's problems. So we've been doing also the staff, Mayor Staff, is you mentioned earlier about corporations. You know, I was previously, I was a board chair of the Mexican Museum. And the one thing I learned doing that was it was not a philanthropic base in Austin to really support cultural institutions. And as hard as we tried, we could not bring in the support that we needed. So fast forward now to today and how we're reaching out to corporations and defining platforms that they feel comfortable in participating in, for example, when it's technology where, and I shouldn't name names, but you know, so one company that says we will participate if we can come in on a technology business purpose. And so what we're trying to do is tie in what the corporations think they need to get marketing exposure, brand name exposure so they can support creatives. And we're trying to bridge that gap by working with them. And which is not easy to do, but so Austin today is a lot different from when I was at the museum trying to raise money. And you have these corporate citizens, in some cases, one or the other went to a very large corporation that's in town that just recently arrived, said, I said, basically the question was why haven't you participated in kind of working with us on some of these issues? So nobody's asked, nobody's come to them. So the first question is who is doing the outreach up there? I know we talked about support for cultural festivals and things like that, but I'm talking about kind of on a different level and also from a different level just giving you support for your institution, really funding a community fund and those monies then can be distributed back to helping folks with their space needs or whatever needs they have. Do you think, man? Go ahead. Do you think there's a way to frame the argument to them so that that money be less strings attached and more about supporting the overall cultural vitality and vibrancy? Like they don't get a specific tech and vanish from that, but they get to be in this city and this city is still exciting. Yeah, well, there's a sweet spot there that we always try to reach. You know, where you have a business needs that are being met, which you also have kind of a city needs being met. That's kind of the area that we try to explore and kind of work through. Do you think we can get that case made? Are they open in that case? I think so because the companies that are here now want to be good corporate citizens and you have Goober here, who? I have Goober. Google. You're out, man. You got to go. Can you delete that from the film? So we have, I say Goober because today we were joking about the right sharing issue, which is really dominant in our office. Oh, is there a right sharing issue? There's a right sharing issue. And I lived kind of in the outskirts of town, in the hill country, and I was joking that I was going to start the right sharing program called Goober for anyway that's what I'm saying. For me, Barry, in those folks, right? I think there's potential in entering to those discussions and kind of working through them. It's hard work and it's reframing kind of the discussion. So when we started this on the discussion, the thing that we worried about, the mayor, myself and others worried about, is that you have these artists that are getting eight, seven, eight million dollars in hotel occupancy tax monies. And the issue has always been in the past, is that you have the commercial music that makes a raid on the seven or eight million dollars. And we didn't want that, we didn't want to encourage that anymore. This is not a situation that anybody benefits from. So going into it, we said, commercial music, you will not go after this money. And we reassured the arts folks that they were safe. So when we did this on of us, which is music and arts and put it together, we felt like we had accomplished a peace treaty of sorts. Well, when I talk to people like Jenny or Shay in the visual or performing arts or dance or any of that, and I'm a music guy, I do business with the Mohawk and Empire and Continental Club. When I talked to them, I was hearing the same things, the same things, it was the cost of rent. And so we finally did a survey, Don Pitts, the music office gave us 150 music venues. We surveyed our membership, which is over 400. We had 230, Kiwi, how many, 230? Responses, 52% of them expect that they can't afford to renew their current lease because of the rent increase that they expect. Between 100 and 100 to 250% increases is what some of these spaces have been told by their landlords they're gonna be seeing. So we saw what Frank alluded to is that the problems and the challenges on music and arts are the same. So they need to come together and work together. And I gotta commend the mayor's office for taking that kind of preemptive action and saying, no, it's gonna be one thing. It's not gonna be arts and in music or it's a united effort. And I gotta give the mayor props for that. I mean, I was gonna try to go this whole time without saying prop one, but we've already failed there. So let's say, and I'm jumping ahead to what's really the end of the conversation, but you've got the situation with prop one. So your theater's going out of business. Very likely there's no fun, fun, fun. There's a bunch of situations all in a short little window where people in a more legitimate way than the way they've been whining before get to say, Austin isn't what it used to be and might not be ever again what it was. Because, hey, look at this, this festival that was not a big corporate entity, it's gone. This theater is gone. We're somehow anti-technology for this prop one situation.  Is that a problem? And then more of a problem becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy where the whiners win. Well, first of all, I think Uber and Lyft should have given $8 million to the arts and music. And they would have won the election. So what a waste, right? But you just made me really sad. I came to school here, I've been here 28 years. I still think Austin is an amazing city. I get to travel to other cities. Austin's still a great place, a great community. But yeah, we can't let the whiners win. We have to turn the conversations not towards, oh, this sucks, towards a community consensus, but we're doing this. We're doing it, we're fixing it. And if we can get out of this culture of complaint and this idea that the pie is finite and start thinking about how to grow the pie, we can all win. And in 20 years, Austin will still be cool. So how do you... Thanks. So the question becomes how you leverage the growth, right? Well, that's what our proposal said is about. When you take the growth and all the money coming to town and you give that money a way to express itself in arts and culture and music, you have opportunity and the problems kind of solve themselves. We've seen that happen in other cities. They channel that business growth and their population growth into creating new audiences and new investment in their creative sectors. We just have to show, we have to put the roadmap out there and I think the mayor has really done a great job and the council in general started that conversation. We're just 10 years too late. I mean, there is no magic bullet, there's no magic wand, but what would be... What's at the top of your priority list where if they would do this, and I don't know who they is, it could be the people, it could be customers, it could be the city, if they would do this, things would be able to turn a corner in your sector. What would that thing be? I guess that they is the city because I don't see other private individuals doing it. So the city would provide space and I think it could start off with a private program to provide a resource center, more space for artists of all disciplines. I think a key issue that we're facing is this conversation isn't happening enough. And so for us to be able to convene and to have space and to have it basically be a sanctioned space and have it be affordable to do that experimentation and exercise your creative practice, but also to gather and convene and talk about it and continue the conversation because there is no one-size-fits-all solution. This will continue to be the issue, affordability will be a conversation and not only affordability, but other aspects that we just should all get together and talk about and really convene and just work through solutions and issues and try to get ahead of them instead of being reactive to those problems. So I figured that space and trying to support those opportunities and trying to nurture the conversations, the convening of the creative sector is a huge issue. Jenny, same question, essentially. Yeah, so I kind of the same answer. I would very much like for the city to identify underutilized real estate and to lease it to my organization for a dollar a year for the next 90 years. That's what I want. And that's crazy, right, Frank? Like from a city level, that could never happen. Or could it? A year and a half ago I was in Havana, Cuba. I went on a fact-finding tour and the mind shift there to see musicians be musicians. It's all they did. Artists be artists. And it was just such a paradigm shift for me. It took me three days to realize that musicians were musicians there. They didn't have to do anything else. They didn't have to wait on tables. They didn't have to do the work in the kitchen. They didn't have to, they were musicians. They were artists. And I'm not proposing, Mayor, I added that we go to a socialist economy here. Why not?  Those are the things you need to affect, and how do you affect those? You have to affect those with subsidies. You have to, the government has to intervene. Whether it writes a check or whether it brings about resources from the outside, that's the answer. This isn't gonna solve itself by crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. Because the growth of this economy is leaving a lot of people behind. It's not, it's, you know, every day we get their headlines, Austin top, 3.1% unemployment, Austin tops in patents, Austin tops, et cetera, et cetera, the other, the other headlines we get are a top in economic segregation, the top in unaffordability, and so on. And you know, so for us, it's a, today I was telling somebody, I was in six meetings, before the six meetings, the topic was affordability. It's on our minds all the time. But the answer is gonna have to be government intervention. I mean, it's for, when you get past all the talk, it's gonna be figuring out a way when you have density occurring and how to tax some of that density for affordability. And a subset of that should be for musicians and creators. John, is there something that came out of, for instance, this report? Yeah. Dude, government intervention. Yeah. That surprised you that you couldn't have seen coming? Out of the research we did? Yeah, and the, or the, you know, the music survey that led to the omnibus. No, none of the, none of the surveys surprised me because I work in the sector. I work with musicians and I work with theater artists and I see them every day. So I wasn't surprised by that. It was nice to have a data set that you could point to. Some people don't just take the anecdotal. You have to have those numbers for some people to get the case. I didn't need them, but I'm glad we have them. The thing that surprised me about our research was kind of what I said earlier, that smart cities with government intervention have managed to turn their economic growth and their population growth into new growth in their art sector. We haven't, but there's a way to do it. And that's what's in that packet, some of it. But you know, if I can get back to that first question of space, yes, but even more so land. Because the biggest obstacle is, you know, if you've got a capital campaign for $40 million to build an arts education campus, which some of our members are working on, the biggest chunk of that budget is the land. And that shouldn't be, the facility should be that. But if you wanna be central in Austin right now, where you need to be, if you're gonna serve the largest group in the community because we have such poor transportation options, you can't be out in 620 where the land is cheap and expect to serve underserved people. So the land is the biggest part. And that is the obstacle that if what Jenny said is not outrageous, the Film Society and Zac Scott Theater, the Film Studios are on city-owned land with long-term, almost free leases. And it was in 2006 that the community decided as a whole that it was worth having those facilities where they were and giving them stability for a very long term. Because now Zac can grow its education programs, the Film Studios can grow its business. And we also know that stability like that for arts groups leads to higher pay for the artists that work for them. So that would be the biggest thing that anybody could do. It doesn't have to be the city. Hell, Google, excuse me, could buy a bunch of land and give it or lease it or whatever to the creative sector. But in a market like this, where the real estate is on fire, land, that's the number one thing. So I mean, everyone agrees we've got a land problem? Yes. Yes. Do we have a, I mean, we touched on this a little, but do we have an audience problem? I mean, in that the audience also is facing their own property tax problems, their own childcare problems, their own transportation problems. And then if they want to go out for a night, they're going to spend X number of dollars out on top of their already high cost of living. And then they have to prioritize what they do within the arts. Do we have to reprogram? I will say no, just because it's very, very painful for me. We're five weeks from having to move and every time I go to my theater, the parking lot is full, both of the theaters are full, the gallery is full of people drinking and so happy. Like, because I'm breaking up with the building. So it's hard. So no, I mean, the audience is there because that's part of the thing is this new Austin, I actually would argue has a lot of income. They have a lot of money to spend. And they're interested in doing cool things, cool, unique things. They moved to Austin because we were this cool, unique city where they could have these hip experiences. And so they're coming to the work. I mean, the situation is what with you? You'll end up moving somewhere else? Yeah, I mean, we're actually literally still in the process of trying to find our next home, but yeah. And this is a little easier than music in that you're carrying an aesthetic to the next place. I mean, is it easier to carry a theater? I mean, it's difficult for a music venue as we've seen. Right, I think it's different because the requirements to have a theater space, a black box space are much more difficult because you can put up a stage in a corner of a bar and you can put music on it. So the requirements are a little bit more in-depth to create a high functioning professional theater space. So yeah, it's harder. It's more expensive to flip a space to be used that way, for sure. I mean, can we track a decline in output in actual art at this point? I mean, gosh, that's hard. We talk about it a lot. Most of the artists I manage are in their mid-20s and they face a completely different set of circumstances than when I was in my mid-20s in my cohort, some of whom were here at the Runex and we all got started in the mid-90s, 20 years ago. Things were really different, but maybe it's a testament to the human spirit. There's an awful lot of work being made in Austin and an awful lot of audience consuming it. The single biggest problem is that none of these businesses are high margin enough where they can just flip a switch and increase revenue to meet their landlord's expectations of what he should be getting for that piece of land or that property. That highest and best use conversation bringing all the money out of it is not helpful to what we do.  Which is why you need government intervention. And it doesn't have to be completely top down, but there's incentives, there's programs, there's redevelopment plans, there's all kinds of tools government can use to... Look, the bottom line is that I'm privy to a music venue that we all know and love that might be closing because their rent is about to double. And their landlord expects that they can pay that because he knows that there's some major corporation out there, international, that can sit on that location and pay that rent and not make a dime. Because they're gonna put a hotel there later. Eventually, yeah. So that's a pickle, man. That's a puzzle that I don't even, I don't know. Frank knows. But at what point to put...  Where do we get to the point where nobody's staying in that hotel because they killed the second week of ACL and because Fun Fun Fun's gone and because why do we come here? That's what happened in Detroit. Yeah. That's what happened in Detroit. They killed their cultural life and eventually the rest of the city died afterwards. So I don't know when that point is, but at least we're yelling about it now. No, no, no. Is there, I mean, in the best case scenario from the city perspective, what's most realistic, most quickly, I guess, that really solves any of these problems? Well, from the perspective of venues, particularly our venues, there's some permitting code enforcement changes that we can make to make life easier for those venues to stay profitable. I see the arts folks shaking their head, yes. So that's, you ever seen the right things? Okay. And then from a standpoint of investment dollars that I mentioned earlier, reaching out, implementing the mayor's strike fund, acquiring properties on a short-term basis is to prioritize these facilities and problems solve those quickly. So this whole thing needs a time horizon, so the longer-term things, the bigger ideas, you don't focus on those so much that you forget about the venues that are closing before us and the theaters and so forth. So it's a mixed strategy, different things, different interventions, they keep you's network, but different interventions on a time horizon and different sources of income. The city has a little bit of money. The budget process is coming up. There's some things probably we can do in that budget process on a very short-term basis and on a bigger basis is to reach out again to corporate America and foundations and so forth to see a fund that then can reallocate monies for community benefit with regard to venue protections, enhancements, et cetera. The other thing is that, so the development, the way the city funds affordability is through cutting deals with developers on different levels, for different areas and so forth, different formulas. And I mentioned earlier, one idea there wrote, an idea is to slice some of that money out for creatives and that can be done. It's a matter of political will. The city recognizes $4 billion is the economic impact for total creatives, including musicians. The city knows that that's the golden goose. They know that's the golden goose. And we had these music town halls, art town halls recently. And all that, aside from getting good input, all that was to show force, a show of force that the community's coming together on these issues, making noise and going to the council and saying this is a priority and reminding council that this is a lead, this is a win, this is the thing that cuts the wind for us, music and creative artists. Unless, and I'm just, this is just cynically popped into my head, unless the council thinks these are people that don't vote. And isn't that, aren't these people who, the people most affected by this stuff are really good at Reddit and not really good at voting, right? I would, I mean, I don't know. It's my impression, but it may be wrong. I mean, the younger artists I know don't vote in city elections. The musicians that I work with, I manage Mother Falcon and I manage Ruby Jane. So that's a total of almost 20 kids, 26 and under. Never talk about city stuff, except bitching that they need to take it over when they get drunk. So, and that's a drag, but that's what got their attention because they don't pay attention. It would be nice if the creative sector could wield the kind of influence that environmentalists and the neighborhood associations do, but that's building a movement and we don't have time. I mean, we don't have 10 years to build a political movement around arts and culture. We have to get some things done in the short term. But I mean, but the problem with not building a movement is you're relying on the goodwill of the government whom this government may not be the same government, what, three years left, however long? Right. I mean, I don't know, it's two years left. We're trying to have to. Two, yeah, yeah. You just keep bumming me out, man. I think you make a good point because 65,000 Austinites signed the petition to get Prop 1 on the ballot and 35,000 voted for it. That's a pretty big disparity. And can we, if there was something to go to election in the creative realm, can we guarantee that we'd have our supporters there to get behind it? And I, it's hard to say. I mean, I've been to a few of the Omnibus public hearings and I'm kind of blown away by how few people show up. I mean, there was a good crowd, but not nearly the amount of people that I wanted to see there just like yelling and screaming and saying support Jimmy, support SVT, rude mix. There should have been a lot more people there. I mean, there's nothing in one sense sexier than the arts, and on the other hand, this kind of conversation is not sexy at all. So, I mean, is that part of the problem? Is that this is all wonky stuff? Oh yeah. You know, when it comes to the artists that are engaged in it, I mean, there's very few people of an artistic bent who want to get involved in this too. There's some of them, I see some of them in the room, but by and large, the personality that gets into the arts is not the same personality that wants to get involved in this stuff, you know? My wife is a musician. This kind of stuff makes her feel dirty in a way, you know, she just wants to be pure and make work. You know, I will argue, though, that when we made our press release in the fall, there was such a huge outpouring of response and support and the hair pulling and the gnashing. And a lot of those people have ended up showing up at some of our volunteer days that have come up and we've got a few more coming up in June as we prepare to move and people are showing up, signing up their present. I think that with the creative class, a lot of them are actually at work right now. And they were at the hearing and they all have five jobs. I'm someone with three. So I think that it's hard to be present all the time. And I know that a lot of the creative class that does vote, they're waiting for cues from me and other community leaders that I see in the room to say, this is the meeting you have to show up. Because I think about, and not to bring something totally different political into the room, but I'm going to, when everyone dressed in orange and gathered at the Capitol, that was a lot of my community. That was a lot of my creative community there. It's those same people and they actually are very passionate and political and we're fighting a lot right now about the primaries on Facebook and all the things. So they actually, they want to be present. I think it is about a time management thing and a capacity thing. And a lot of these meetings have been spread out and not advertised very well. By the city, frankly, I have been someone who has been emailing council members and people in different city departments constantly since I found out we were losing our Lisa. I am the squeaky wheel. They are all very tired of me. But that's how I found out any of these 10 hauls were happening because I emailed Ora Houston for the 100th time to nag at her and she was like, show up at one of these things. And there was one that night and I had no idea that they were even happening. So where was I supposed, where was that information? Especially when I'm someone who's constantly talking to the city, where was that information? So I think it's more complicated than we're all just lazy. Did I say that? Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to, Jenny, and Frank too. I hear a lot of people who are just like, the city of Austin can't get anything done. I mean, when they look at transportation in the city, when they look at what I think was arguably a really bungled situation with the ride sharing and the big picture stuff, Austin, all they can do is build buildings is what people tell me. Bureaucracy is a slow-moving beast. Everything within the city is very, very slow-moving and there are a lot of rules and red tape and so there's all of that to get through. But we also had a completely different city council, I think with a very capitalist agenda. I'm sorry, I'll bring socialism into the room again. And this new 10-1 district dean, I think I'm curious to see how that changes, how policy works and happens. And I'm curious to see how this new 10-1 district dean and the omnibus together can maybe propel change a little bit faster than the typical snail pace of the city. We're about to open it to questions, but let's end with this. What's the most, I'm surprising myself with a nonsynical view of it. What's the most encouraging thing that's happened lately that's made you say, oh, okay, well, this might all work out? Is there something, one thing we can point to where there's been something encouraging lately? And we'll go down the line. Yeah, it would have to be the omnibus resolution and the first time in history for the Joint Commission meeting between arts and music. The conversations are happening and I think council's asking staff to look at it and that's a huge step. Well, Sparkle, all that he just said and add that I think that the artists who are living here and creating work are still creating really high-quality, exciting artistic experiences. Well, Echo, what they said, and I would also add that in spite of the challenges, you mentioned about output earlier, I think the output is just robust as ever. You see great art, you hear great music and in spite of the difficulties, the creative class, the creative artist has risen beyond that. And that just shows their tenacity and their ability to adapt to whatever obstacles come their way. John? Well, I'm gonna ditto all that and just, it's a watershed moment, it really is. And I would add that when you have a guy like Frank and Mary Adler talking about big bowl solutions, that opens the door to some of the stuff that I've seen other cities do. So that's what's most exciting to me. All right, and then one additional thing. So you got this room full of people here who by the nature of being in this group or active in the community, et cetera, they then can go and do what? What would be the most useful thing for somebody in this room to do to have an impact on this situation? Buy a ticket right now for something happening in Austin. Yeah, or, I mean, the visual arts suffer from a lack of ticket sales. So come to my gallery and drink a free beer and buy art. Well, I mean, should they be careful to buy something from the little guy? Like, I mean, in other words, I'm sure a lot of people have been to a lot of big events in this room in the last however long. Is it equally important to go? Yeah, that is such a great idea. Well, I mean, I know, but I'm just saying, like, buy a ticket, does it? I mean, open your Chronicle, find something you've never heard of before. Maybe email me first and I'll tell you it's good. Thank you. And also be advocates, because, I mean, we can only advocate so much for what we do and we need more people out there advocating as well. And it's just, it'll take, it'll take all of us working together to have an actual cultural shift in Austin. All right, I already see your hands. Go ahead. Oh, that was a perfect situation. All right, well, there's hands over here. I saw yours in the green. Go ahead. I live in Austin. I consider myself part of the creative class. I'm a writer. I'm also a producer, so I think about the business side of things. And I'm here tonight because I care about Austin's tradition and history. You can tell by my accent, I'm from Ireland. I've lived in the States for a couple of decades. It's really hard to be a new person in Austin and be supportive of the conversation and the narrative that everybody here is selling about the arts. Because even coming here tonight, we don't realize we're stuck from my perspective as someone who's arrived in Austin in the last five years. We're stuck in a narrative of scarcity, as you pointed out. We're stuck in a narrative of us versus them. And one of the thems is people who just moved to Austin. Like, I bring business to Austin every month. I make films, I bring in crews, I employ local crews. And when I come to something like this, I constantly feel like I'm the enemy. And I know you don't mean me to feel like that, but I do. And that's the narrative that we are discussing. We live in an era where in the last five years, a group of 20 and 30-year-olds, those 26-year-olds we were knocking, raised $40 million and bought a mountain in Utah so that they can bring their friends in and artists and writers and performance and theater people and bring in art installations and spend time every weekend with chefs, curating an amazing immersion experience so that people can enjoy the arts. But they didn't do it from a place of scarcity. They did it from a place of abundance. And they didn't do it because a town in Utah wanted to make it possible with their government. They did it by talking. Yeah, my question is, and I know honestly, I would say like, I would invite you to think about this. I think it's important for the future and for the conversation you're saying. There would have been no Mollier if King Louis hadn't moved him into Versailles and paid for him to be an artist. If you alienate the tech community and the people who raised the $40 million, many of them live here in Austin. None of them apart from me are here tonight because they don't feel like they get to be part of this conversation. If a group of 26-year-olds can raise $40 million to support the arts on a private mountain in Utah, I believe the city of Austin that I love so well can raise $40 million to support the arts and build a community here by partnering with the tech community and with all of the other venture capitalists who are here in town and taking some of the burden off the city and to look at it as a partnership. So I guess my question is, like, what do you guys think about that? What are the plans, the big hopes, the bold visions and the dreams rather than the complaints and the alienations we have to band together? What are we gonna do to make that happen? Well, I think I mentioned earlier the outreach to the tech community to integrate them into the music and arts ecosystem. Other areas we're looking at is the new medical school, for example, and the new teaching hospital and how music and medicine can work together. So we're trying to find partnerships that normally people don't think about so that we can bring in and find sweet spots for both sectors. And that's a big priority of ours. That's really one of the building blocks of how we see ourselves. We're kind of working through this issue of affordability because the city of Austin's not gonna ride a $40 million check, I can tell you that. It's not gonna happen, but it's looking outside the city. And, you know, we're fortunate that we have, it's a plug for the mayor, I guess. It's fortunate that we have a mayor that isn't thinking in terms of government thought, which is the government's gonna solve our problems. But government has a role here too and we have some really bright people that are spinning out these ideas that we're using to kind of move forward. But I totally agree with your comment and I think we're working on that, on that basis. I'm gonna, yeah, go ahead. I totally agree.  Austin was cool then, it's cool now. It's about passing on our ethos and that's what bothers me is that we won't have our ethos if we don't have industrialized or creative industries. So I do wanna point out, I also agree with Frank about this idea of building a fund and I'd like to see the tech community get into it. The problem that I would say is that so far when I talk to tech people, they wanna attach strings to that fund. They wanna know what they get out of it directly and I wanna change that conversation with them to say, what you get is an amazing city to run your business in. So thank you for bringing up, especially that old versus new man, I'm sick of hearing about that.  Hi there, I couldn't agree with you more about the old versus new but Andy, I wanted to answer one of your questions earlier and this is from a 2014 Austin Creative Alliance report and that 50% of Austin Creative Alliance memberships vote off your elections, which is 35% higher in the city of Austin at large to an average of 8 to 14%. We vote. Okay, maybe the youngish brand new voters don't know the power of the voice but the rest of us do. And then one of my questions is in the surprise of experience and what our audience is like, there's nothing more important to an artist than growing their audience, whether we're a visual artist or a musician or whoever responds to that unique voice we have is the most important thing we can find. So one of the cool things I just experienced is I had an exhibit during the West Austin studio tour in a public place and instead of waiting for people to show up to see art and hope that they showed up, people showed up and I got to say, hi, did you come to see the show or are you coming as a visitor? And they'd be like, oh, I'm visiting from blah, blah, blah. There are people speaking many languages, stumbling into an art show that happened to be in the right spot. And the best thing you can ever say is welcome. Welcome to Austin, welcome to my show. How can I help you have a better experience?  What else do you wanna go see or hear or eat today? And everybody says, people here are so friendly and the more we are insecure and you have to be in the know to know the best things to do. The coolest things I've seen are at the Continental Club where anyone can show up and you don't know who you're standing next to or during an art event and you're just talking to somebody and all you know is their first name is Mike and you don't know Mike who. And you're just having this really awesome conversation with someone, so my question is for everyone, not just you all, is how do we say welcome better? Welcome to this conversation, welcome to my events, welcome to our show, how can we do a better job and to keep that audience conversation open? Thanks. I'll just answer that. That's one of the reasons we wanna keep our ticket prices low.  And we rent to a really diverse array of people also because we want every community to feel like that is their house. And that's one of the things that's sad about its loss is that I think it was a very welcome space. So I mean I guess my answer then again goes back to that I think we know how to do it, I think we do do it well, I think that's why, oh do do, I think we do it well because people are still moving here, right? And I go back to that sort of affordability being a barrier in that welcome and then I again think there is some intervention for the keyword of the night that needs to happen to keep that affordability, to keep that welcome sign out. And also maybe pivoting the conversation from bitching and moaning to a bun as an opportunity because it's not a very fun conversation if you walk into it as a newbie. You're like all you hear is doom and gloom and that's real stuff but talking about doom and gloom over and over again is not solving doom and gloom. It's probably a more fun and vibrant conversation to get into, it's like let's build a theater district or let's build a whole new music hub or let's talk about building and not the way that things used to be. I got a question up front here. My question is more for the people who aren't on the stage which is the wealthy people who are moving here and benefiting from in my judgment the cultural capital that's been building over time and it feels a little unfair to preach to the choir and bear down on the city and say what are y'all gonna do about it when the people who are making all the money in our capitalist economy aren't up on the stage. They're out having fun and so it's this full circle thing of like we all need to be investing in the arts. Me who's an artist and the people who are coming here consuming the art or don't even know that it's happening and so when you ask the question what's the most useful thing I can do is ask people that I see who are benefiting from this totally freewheeling economy hey come to my show come see what's going on and like maybe you'll invest in the arts so I wanna turn the question back on everybody and say who do you know that you can ask to partake in the arts come to your stuff and not bear down on the city. The city has a lot of stuff y'all are taking care of the arts are part of it but we live in a capitalist economy where it's like go make some money as fast as you can and so I wanna start talking to those people and entice them with fun as opposed to the heaviness of the city what are you gonna do for me kind of thing. Class war. That could replace old verse new Austin. Isn't it already that? Go ahead back there. Yeah exactly. Several of you all particularly the guy in the blue check shirt which is so cool talk about it's been done in other cities. What other cities and what have they done? Well Minneapolis has invested over $500 million in creative infrastructure in the last decade. Denver's built the theater district. The Pittsburgh cultural trust has rehab almost a dozen venues and built new ones in a whole part of downtown that was derelict 30 years ago. Those are just the most easy pickings. New Orleans is killing us and cultural tourism. Of course they have a lot to work with in New Orleans. Jazz was invented there and probably funk too but we don't need to emulate exactly what other cities have done. What I wanna make the case is that look at all these successful examples of cities who brought a community wide investment to their arts and culture industries and we need to tailor it to what Austin needs. As a music town I think we would wanna lean towards music maybe more than Minneapolis did as a theater town and vice versa. But yeah I don't think there's a plan that you can pick up and move and impose on Austin. It's more about the overall pointing to examples like wow their cultural identity is stronger than it was 20 years ago. How did they get there? They invested half a billion dollars in facilities. How are we doing on time? Five more minutes? Okay. Let's get you right here. Yeah, right, oh well okay I'll come to you next. One thing that I actually pretty much know this answer but I'm pretty sure that other people in the room don't. I know Shay and Jenny and John and I know what an amazing hub your organizations are. So Big Medium, Salvage Vanguard, ACA. You are, you have under your umbrella an incredible number of small organizations who are providing a lot of really interesting work and I just wondered if you could give, if each of you could give a quick taste of sort of the gamut of the kind of small organizations you're supporting and the small organizations who are losing their space when you lose your space. Sure I'll pick it off. So Big Medium does the East Austin studio tour on the West Austin studio tour and we run two studio spaces, Canopy and Balm Studios and the studio tour is really kind of with the impetus and the creation of Big Medium as a formal nonprofit and a formal organization. And it started out of the need for artists to have spaces to show their work because Austin is at a lack of gallery spaces and at a lack for a market to support those gallery spaces so we said let's bring their audience to the studio space and it grew from 28 in 2003 to 460 in 2015 and we recently, five years ago, recently did the West Austin studio tour so it's the other half of Austin-ish. It's not the whole, it's not every inch of Austin but it's a big swath of it with East and West and that started with 260 artists and has now grown to 324 artists this year so we're seeing growth, we see abundance and it's exciting. The loss of space and the shifting of the dynamics there is affordability and people losing their studio spaces and kind of moving around Austin but we're not seeing this total drop-off in artists in the city. I mean it's still there, there's still lots of people creating stuff and that's the amazing thing about Austin is it is totally full of creatives and something that we should be supporting as best we can. I think the studio tour is a great example. Nick is an artist on the tour and it's an opportunity to go out there and bring those people and say, I mean we all have these advocates and say come to my space, go to these other spaces and support because there are shifts and that is just around affordability but currently it seems more or less sustainable. I mean growing, we're not seeing it flat or declining, it is still growing. We have a main stage theater that is 100 seats and then we have a studio space that's 50 seats and then we have a gallery that has about six to eight visual art exhibits a year. In our main stage, we host Kathy Dunhamrick Dance Company, Trouble Puppet Theater, Glass Half Full Theater, Dr. Mr. Productions, I don't know, there's a lot. I can't think of all the names. In the studio space we have Church of the Friendly Ghost, Heckelher, which is comedy, LaShonda Lester who just won Funniest Person in Austin, has a monthly series in our studio space. I don't know, we have about 50 different arts organizations and individual artists that use our space on a consistent basis and then I fill in all the other days with all of the other hundreds of people who call me for space, so. It's a huge loss, SVT going away as I, yeah. ACA, our direct services are mostly to emerging groups, everything from Mother Falcons Music Lab, which is a summer camp for classical musicians to learn how to kind of be rock and rollers, to dance pieces and theater work and visual art, you name it, we're really there and we move and change with the tides to meet the needs as they are currently, which is why you're seeing us get more active in advocacy because we looked around and we're like, we need somebody to pull these threads together and we're trying to get all the energy focused in the same direction. Not to lead it, not to run it, but to try to get everybody talking about the same big topics and grow that consensus in the community that we need to invest in the arts and creative sector. Let's get to that one question that I didn't get over here. And then we'll take the one in the back and we'll be done. All right, so go ahead. So quick question for you all. You pointed out that the one thing Austin is really good at right now is building things. So how do we turn this development and rapid expansion of the city into a positive reinforcement for the arts and cultures? So it's kind of an open question. Right. I think quite, it's kind of zoned out here. Which is... Break's over, man. Well, expansion of the city into benefiting the arts and cultures rather than just the corporate side. Well, you know, so the platform that we're using is this omnibus and it has different strategies in that resolution. And they focus on venue protection and then focus on kind of maintaining the safety net. It focuses on building up this ecosystem, having components of the music system put in place. We don't have a publishing. We don't have a good independent record label kind of organization, you know, those kinds of things. It speaks to issues of kind of developing the artist. You know, we talked earlier about artists kind of having their own silo kind of existence. And so recognize that, but how do you bring them into a process so you can develop their skills, their business skills maybe? And so they not isolate it. What you want is education and you want folks to develop their skill. So it's got a lot of things in there, a lot of approaches to those issues. So that's more than just kind of building buildings. It's building human capacity. It's building artistic capacity. And that's a form that we're using to kind of get to that issue. I think that a short like boom, boom, boom. Yeah, yeah, thank you. It's a three-headed monster. It is tapping the tech industry in corporate presence and this new Austin, absolutely. It is having government intervention. And what is the third thing? Rick Perry over here. All right, give all of you a clue. But I think it's like, it's all the pieces that we have to, oh, and a developer who is open to the arts, understands the arts and willing to take that risk on an investment. Last question, which was the one back there. Hey, y'all. My name is Jacques Colimo and I'm an artist in town and I consider myself a part of the creative class as well. And we keep talking about old Austin, new Austin, old Austin, new Austin. And I think, I think old Austin is a flexible term. All right, I mean, to some people, old Austin, people think of old Austin as a part of town. If you lived in East Austin and were black and brown, as a part of a community that was systematically oppressed over time, as in 35, if you lived west of it, you couldn't get basic utilities. And that was illegal. And they weren't afforded to you. So I think there's, this is symptomatic of a greater problem in East Austin. I think that we are outpricing our artists and we're very good at talking about that. But we're also outpricing our historical communities and our cultural communities. Yet we have this conundrum where investment capital is exploiting everything that's being created there. So the question becomes like, when are we going to start tackling this intersectionality? When are we going to start talking about black and brown communities, artists, so that places like Ballet Afrique, places like Ebony's Hunger at the Boretex don't sound like swan songs and that these places continue to thrive. So that we are sitting down with tech and corporate. And if they're not aware that this is a trend in our city by now and that everybody would be more than happy to sit down at the table and talk about how to encourage conscious investment, then we got to get the bigger picture in check. So one of the tricky parts of development of spaces for artistics is the issue of gentrification. And so when you start talking about moving artists into areas that are not gentrified, in the literature and the research, it says that that's kind of the first signal that gentrification is going to occur. And the city years ago decided to protect the aquifer and the deal was we're going to protect the aquifer and we're going to make downtown in East Austin the preferred development zone. That was the deal that was struck in the 80s with the Green Watson Council at the time. What nobody thought about was ways to protect those communities as the economic stimulation occurred. And so you have artists that moved into the area that were receiving low rent and were able to subside, but that brought along other dynamics. And so the tricky part here is how do you manage that process, how do you work within that process to make sure that the artists aren't the generators of this gentrification. And I'm not putting that on anybody here in this room because it's more than that. But there's a real dynamic there that the city hasn't gotten kind of a hold on yet. It hasn't kind of figured out a management approach. So we have, you see it every day in terms of investments in the community that have these unintended consequences. So it's kind of a runaway process, I think. There's people working on it all the time at the city with regard to how do we incorporate the gentrification strategies in everything we do here. But it's not a problem, it's been solved yet. You know, I met the other day with a group that's building a large complex, that wants to build a large complex in East Austin that's gonna provide a lot of what they deem as affordable creative space for makers and artists. But I can see, the antenna goes up, I can see that that's going to change the makeup of that area completely. So how does the neighborhood engage in that process? What are the ways that these things can kind of be talked about and discussed and kind of negotiated? Gentrification has two sides, it's got the good and the bad, you know? It's not just a one-sided thing. But I think the cities have still not come to grips with that issue. So I'm acknowledging your concern and I'm saying that it's just, it's kind of a process that's still underway. Is yours a really quick question? Is it possible to have integration and within this context of preservation, right? Can we also preserve and integrate as there is gentrification? Or does everything just have to stay the same? Is that what we all want? Well I think you make a good point and I don't know if Austin's gone too far or not, but I know that when a lot of the planning happened around 11th Street, all of the preservation was about buildings and not about people and not about the family's businesses that were there. And so basically what happened is that they saved all these buildings but they kicked all the brown people and all the brown businesses out and they put all of these businesses in that were really geared towards that white middle class money, that's it, money. And so I think that what has happened and this is global, this is like a global gentrification issue is the way that developers are looking about space and neighborhood and revitalization and I quote it because it's kind of a dirty word. Really, that's how I feel about it. But I do think that that's the answer but are we too far gone in Austin for that answer? Maybe, but I completely agree. When we look at a neighborhood growing, we have to actually talk to the neighborhood businesses that are there and get just as many of those businesses to stay in those buildings and then we can add these other boutique businesses or whatever but the integration has to be a part of it or we keep down that same road of pushing people out farther and farther. And with that, we are done. And with that, we are done. Today, Jenny, Frank, John, thank you.


Hey everyone, what if I told you the screen on this system when it's a switch pro at 720p Which is bigger than this could still be a retina display? Now what is a retina display? Well, that is a screen Resolution that is at a certain DPI level that leads you to be unable to tell Individual pixels now it sounds crazy to say 720p could ever be a retina display But we'll talk about this in a moment first I gotta remind you we are giving away a copy of monster hunter rise along with two twenty dollar Nintendo switch PlayStation or Xbox gift cards. It'll be user choice on that. That's three total winners this month head down to the description or the pinned comment to enter now The Nintendo switch pro is coming out Supposedly either this year late this year or early 2022 current reports have it slated for mass production this summer So coming out this holiday, however, obviously could be delays Maybe a certain game they want to launch with it Breath of the Wild 2 isn't ready to go yet. They want that to launch early next year Which would be interesting since Breath of the Wild 2 would then like bump up with Pokemon Arceus But whatever that's not my problem to worry about having too many good games coming around around the same time Is that really a problem besides to like my wallet? I don't know But what's interesting about the arguments over the switch pro is that one of the main Elements that people are kind of upset with assuming all the reports are true Is that the screen that they are upgrading to the OLED panel?  They're not even consumers that would buy a switch even if it had a 1080p panel But should we really be upset about that now? I've went through various retina calculators online to try to figure out Is it possible that 720p could be retina because after all it only puts out about 209 dpi at a seven inch screen well It turns out that yes, actually there is a certain distance that 720p becomes Retina and that distance at seven inches diagonal is 16 inches now That doesn't sound like much, but let's actually take a look at it. So I don't have an actual Take measure. I can't find it right now, but I do have this. This is a channel That is supposed to be to hide cables on a wall and according to the package It is 14 inches long So I'm gonna kind of like put it in my mouth and go sideways here and show you Roughly what 16 inches looks like if you were to play your switch at that distance on a switch pro to get the Retina display action. So here we go That's actually quite far when you think about it And most people aren't gonna like hold the switch out like this when they're playing and that that really wasn't what I was doing I just couldn't show it on camera perfectly But really it's about the same distance of if I take my hand on my hands Rest them on my desk while I'm sitting in my chair Which by the way my chair is cranked up all the way so that my legs are hitting the top of the table And I look down that's about 16 inches. So from this playing angle It would be a retina display for me on a switch pro. However, let's be real Most people don't necessarily play like that. They play like this hands hands on our armrest holding it like this Here you've got maybe, you know, eight to ten maybe 12 inches of distance at most Some people lay down in a bed where they might be like this. You know, basically the Hands resting on a table 16 inch perfect retina display Distance is something that does factually exist on switch But also let's just be real a lot of people are gonna get it So that is where some of the controversy comes in where people are saying screw this We should have 1080p because 1080p will get us to that 300 dpi or better, which is what Apple rates retina They won't even bother to talk about retina at under that Likely because they realize, you know, if people have a retina display, you know Hold it right here. Even though technically the distance from me to my monitor is more than 16 inches I mean, I even reach my arms fully out. I can't touch my monitor So I don't actually need the 300 dpi here to not see pixels. Although this is a bigger screen So take that for what you will it's only 1080p and I can see pixels on it But I mean again bigger display. So here's the thing I Honestly think that people are overblowing the 720p thing and it's actually the perfect choice for Nintendo on this platform and there's a couple reasons for it one We need to first talk about how important is resolution in the first place So if you look at this video here, which is put up a year ago I'll put a link to the full video down in the description a couple years back I was like back in 2018 when the iPhone XR was coming out, which is not a 1080p screen It is an iPhone that has an 828p screen and they pull put it up against the picophone or picophone Which has a 1080p screen and only costs $300 because a lot of the lol switch arguments gonna be lol You could get 1080p and you know a super cheap phone, right? Well, here's the thing They compare in a blind test to random people random consumers It everything's completely taped off. You can't tell what's an iPhone. What's the picophone? There's no brand bias and one by one by one by one literally everyone chooses the iPhone XR and Again, it's not because of the brand name. It's because of the screen They were debating which one had a better screen You would figure the picophone has a higher resolution and higher pixel density and more like a retina display For a phone would have one, but it didn't the iPhone XR did why better colors Okay better colors better contrast What do a bit more vivid picture and a more preferred viewing experience and everyone swore that that was a 1080p screen? But that's not the case. It turned out that people were choosing the lower resolution Screen because what they preferred were the actual colors So technically a switch pro is gonna be seven inches will technically be lower resolution than this one at 720p Because it's a bigger screen But this is a LCD panel versus OLED that OLED panels gonna have better color accuracy better whites deeper blacks and also by the way Hello, it's gonna be more vibrant. It's gonna have better contrast. It's going to be a better picture quality It's across the board going to look fundamentally better than this despite not upping the resolution So it's already going to feel like a big leap to many people and a much more pleasing experience to our eyes Just by the fact that it's an OLED panel and thus going to be more accurate and more pleasing and more vibrant and all that jazz So then why would they just go with 1080p? It could still be all that but also be 1080p Well 1080p obviously has more power draw. So let's start there One way for Nintendo to maximize battery life on a more powerful system That's gonna need more battery for the components is to find ways to cut battery elsewhere cutting battery in From 1080p to 720 saves them roughly 20% of battery use from the resolution change That is actually 20% that's great that could lead to longer battery life Now that's obviously an easy argument to make But what about an argument about the games because obviously games would look better at 1080p, right? Hmm. Yes and no. So if there was enough power under the hood in handheld mode to run games at a native native 1080p Absolutely, you're just costing yourself resolution for no reason and there probably will be enough power under the hood to run games that are native 1080p Well docked. Here's the thing most games and handled on this switch right here do not hit 720p Even from Nintendo Yoshi's Crafted World Fire Emblem 3 houses so many examples from Nintendo let alone the Witcher 3 Doom except that do not come close to hitting 720p more than a frame here or there and this matters because What we really want is enough power under the hood to get these games to run at a very good frame rate and a consistent 720p locked resolution That should be our goal to expect a leap from games that are running like the Witcher 3 as low as 360p to just run at 1080 No, it's gonna look even worse because you're blowing up a 360p image to a 1080p monitor It's going to look even worse You don't want that that that big of a change from resolution Output to resolution of the screen. It's going to look horrible. So It's a compromise. It's a compromise Okay, now there are some things that will be better naturally a lot of this is on developers But text size so text size in the game like Fire Emblem 3 houses very very tiny on this screen However on a slightly bigger screen that text will be slightly bigger and thus more readable on a 1080p screen It would be smaller now again that isn't the hardware's problem That's a developer problem developers should be like making dynamic text and making it Resized based on resolution output that is definitely something that should be happening And for some reason some developers just don't do it They lock in that text size that works on a big TV, but doesn't work on a little screen I still to this day don't know why developers do that, especially like Nintendo own developers that literally just make games for the switch Why I could see like, you know like doom or something that's multi-platform and you know that comes here And maybe they don't have things that mess with the text size Nintendo games to me don't have an excuse, but still it kind of proves a point That 720p is fine 720p is great 720p is a smart choice 1080p would just draw more power from the system while the system wouldn't even have the ability to run these games Indie games not include not you know indie games are kind of their own their own field Or maybe they could hit 1080p and they would benefit from it But AAA games and Nintendo games would not benefit from this 1080p Screen that everyone thinks should exist in here guys. This isn't a next-gen switch And I think that's another thing we just need to accept this switch coming out might be even two or three times more powerful than this switch It's still not a next-generation leap. It's just not Be happy that a 360p game like the Witcher 3 can now run at native 720 That's what we should be excited about Don't worry about the fact that oh my god. It's only 720 in 2021 Let me just tell you the people that are doing this They're not Nintendo fans. Not only that Nintendo fans. They weren't interested in the switch anyways They're looking for any reason to laugh at it and while we're we know while we're in this world of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and You know obviously like the 3090 graphics cards people are all about that 4k and that's great But guys I know there's phones. There's phones that have 4k screens. I get it. I Get it, but if you took a 4k phone and you put it next up to a 1080p phone that has better colors and better contrast People are gonna choose that 1080p phone There are things that matter more than resolution and Thankfully we're getting that with an OLED panel. So thank you Nintendo. We actually sell this back on Vita by the way Vita had a 540p OLED panel and then they released a slim model that had a like a 500p or whatever LCD and Man the colors and everything were just so much better than that old that all that panel at 540p looks good today And that's lower resolution than what we're gonna get on switch So what are we worried about? Absolutely nothing. That's what I say. Alright folks until we have some new news until Nintendo announces switch, bro. I am Nintendo Prime. I'm just kidding We're gonna have videos besides that hopefully some other good news coming today for Nintendo and other platforms Actually, there's a lot of news going on other platforms. I feel like it might be time for a prime news episode We have we have a lot to talk about with these other platforms Sony and Microsoft are killing it in the news right now. They some big things are happening So thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you in the next video