So what I've tried to do here is give a kind of high level overview of some of the trends that I think are affecting the space of content today. Try to share some of my vocabulary and reflection, which hopefully will inform some of the discussion that follows. As I was asked to think about content, I do what I often do and punch the word into Google Image Search, which is an activity I really recommend doing, because it up pops all kinds of interesting things. That if we read them, we discover some new insights. One of the things that popped up was this image that sort of highlights the word content. But in the process of looking at it, I came to realize that the top order definition of content, where it comes from, is that which is contained as to be contents of a bottle or in a table of contents. And so that puts in my mind the crisis of content may well be that content is no longer contained, that it has become unmoored. I think there are enormous opportunities there, but I think it means we can't think about content in the same ways that we have thought about it in the past. Again, let me figure out what it is I'm doing here that makes. I'm figuring it out. OK, there's this. I see. It's on the left and the right. There we go. OK, I've got it. I figured it out. So this slide, which also popped up when I touched in the word content, asked the question, which is more important content or design? And this is a kind of eternal debate among the technology industries. And their answer, which is the one that I would agree with, is use. That is, what's our relationship to content? How are we using content? And specifically, how does content travel through culture? Is it core? What's central here? So what I have here in the talk are six propositions about how content is changing or how our new relationship to content. And the first of these is content is transmedia. Now, the word transmedia simply means across media, that there is a relationship across media. My last book, Convergence Culture, began with the question that convergence was widely understood as a technological phenomenon. It is, which black box does the media functions flow through? And today, the winner might well be the iPad or some equivalent tablet technology, but also the iPhone in which all of the media functions flow. I argue that we should think culturally about convergence as the flow of content across media platforms, but in an integrated or systematic or sustained way. And what I described as transmedia were particular modes of storytelling, which exploited the resources of both old and new media or the relationship between old and new media. So Hunger Games might be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Hunger Games, of course, was a book, and the content traveled into film in a way that we could describe throughout the history of motion pictures at a simple adaptation. But before the film opens, there's this online campaign around Hunger Games, which takes its core metaphor, that is, of the districts, the competitions, the sponsors, and uses that to solicit the participation and activity of fans and consumers. So basically, they're trying to get the fans to tweet about the release of this game by unlocking content city by city, depending on how many people in that city participate. So the metaphor they use is, is your district unlocked? That is, do you have access? If your district shows a certain level of activity, then, in fact, the sponsors will kick in and give you rewards. And so it takes the metaphors of the story and uses them to encourage us as influencers to become part of the social media campaign around the film. This is a piece of content that's traveled pretty far and wide over the last three or four months. It's a TED talk from 2023. That is, it's created around the film from Methius, which opens in another month. The TED talk was a structure that many of us in this room probably know. You probably watched TED talks videos on the internet. They created a fictional TED talk and had the spokesman for a future corporation speak as if he was speaking to TED in 2023. And threw that out there. Immediately, people who liked TED started circulating. It's a cool idea. It becomes part of the story. And it's one of a number of videos that the promoters of Methius have circulated in advance of the film's release, helping to flesh out our understanding of the story, the world, the sort of what the situation is in this particular film. So that precedes the release of a film. Here we see some of the comic books that follow from the release of television series. So Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Whisper, three American shows, have moved into comics at various points in the run of the series. Buffy most notably created an eighth series. There were seven run series, seven television-based series around Buffy. The eighth series was comics. And they simply moved the viewership from television into comics. And they engaged with that. Many of the fans crossed over and read the comics as a continuation of the series. So all of this could be described as what I talk about in convergence culture as trans-media storytelling, which is a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purposes of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So the words in color there are the kind of key words that it's about systematic spread or dispersal of pieces of information across multiple delivery channels. So the web, comics, film, television, printed books, physical live presentations in various parts of the world that's coordinated and unified. Trans-media is not just, I have a television show and I put it on Hulu in the same episodes and it's on the air, it's on Hulu. That may cross media, but it's not about a new content. It's something new emerging around that. And it's not about expanding outward the story as it touches other media. And that's where this idea of unique contribution comes into play. In the United States, trans-media has become the buzzword that the entertainment industry is talking about right now. The producer's guild of America created a trans-media producer, job category. Many programs are creating trans-media departments. There's an enormous interest in how we build content in such a way that it moves across platforms. This is actually not a brand new idea. I always think of L. Frank Baum, the creator of Wizard of Oz as the father of modern trans-media. Many of us think of the Wizard of Oz as a two-hour movie stirring Judy Garland as a simple story beginning, middle, and end. In fact, Baum wrote more than 20 novels set in the world of Oz. And beyond that, beyond that, also had theater presentations that extended those stories and re-imagined those characters, created a series of both short and feature-length films under his own production company, which added more layers to the Oz stories. Created either one-time rival comic strips, one by Baum and one by Dinslow, his illustrator, extending the characters in the world of Oz out in a variety of directions. And to coordinate it all, L. Frank Baum himself toured on Valdiville in the music hall in the UK lecturing as the royal geographer of Oz. So he saw Oz not as a story or even a story system, but as a world, and a world that could be explored through many stories focused around many different characters across many different media. And that's the really modern idea of trans-media. What we've added to that mix is network consumption. That is, how people are consuming stories, how they're engaging with stories, changes in a culture where we have networked computing. This is Kim Moses, the producer of a show called Ghost Whisperer. She's one of a number of content creators in the United States who increasingly sees audience building as a central part of their jobs. So she had a show that was aimed at teenagers and was gonna air at 9 p.m. on Friday night, which is typical date night in the United States. And she looked at the history and showed in almost every show that it debuted in that time slot, it lasted less than a season, and said, how do I get to the point that I can go on this indication? Is how do I produce four to five series of this program in order to get to the point where it's lucrative to sell off the episodes? And she said, I've gotta build my audience. And so she used trans-media and fan participation to create opportunities around the show so that people felt more deeply invested in the content. Then the result was she created a show that lasted five seasons. And so she met her goal. And she calls this 360 engagement, but it's really what we call trans-media that's at the heart of her strategy. There's been a shift in how trans-media is understood from world building or story building to with Glee increasingly performance at the center of Glee. You can imagine them taking the story of this high school and telling it across multiple media, but really they've taken the songs from Glee and played them out across multiple media. And it becomes a driver of the music industry to the point that the Glee cast now have more number one hits in the United States than either Elvis or the Beatles. Kind of extraordinary accomplishment for two years of a television production, right? It's reshaped the landscape of music. And it's done it through commercial releases, but what we see here are grassroots appropriations of Glee on YouTube. These are people lip syncing or karaokeing versions or doing animated music videos for versions of the songs. And all of that exists on YouTube. We can assume that the producers of Glee could, if they wanted to have shut that stuff down, sent out a cease and desist letter. Many companies have done that. They've chosen not to. And we have to see that's a moment where participation has been the central value of their strategy. That is allowing people to sing the songs of Glee and share what they do with each other creates a sense of value around that content, which is part of what's driven the sales of those songs. All right, my second big idea, content's participatory. So by participatory I mean people are given things to do. People are engaged in grassroots ways with the content of media. So what we're seeing here are people stenciling Spider-Man's logo for the new movie onto walls all across the United States, right? Now this is a curious moment because the commercial producers of Spider-Man authorized this, right? They gave kits and encouraged people to do things with their content in advance of the campaign. The city governments didn't necessarily authorize this. And so there's been legal battles as people have stenciled illegally Spider-Man logos on buildings across the country, things that the official promoters couldn't have done themselves, but they've encouraged people to vandalize buildings in order to promote their movies. And this is what it points to you as the kind of weird way in terms of what is and isn't permitted in terms of our participation at the current time. Now this is a good example of a looser sense of participatory culture. This is the Wikipedia page for the concept of fan fiction. So Wikipedia itself is a kind of participatory culture that is the development of an encyclopedia through grassroots contributions. It uses principles of collective intelligence, people building on each other's knowledge and pooling knowledge to create something bigger than any individual could do, and a kind of large-scale project. Fan fiction is a different kind of participatory culture where fans are taking the stories of their favorite TV shows, films, or comics, and extending them through the grassroots storytelling, writing original short stories and novels around hundreds if not thousands of different media franchises around the world and distributing primarily through the internet. So here we see one layer of participatory culture commenting on another. So here's what I mean by participatory culture. This is from a white paper I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on youth and new media. I subscribe, participatory cultures is having relatively low barriers for engagement and participation, having strong support for sharing creations with each other, having an informal mentorship, typically where more experienced participants help younger, newer participants learn, and I'm carefully trying to avoid age there because it's sometimes young to old rather than old to young, the layers in which learning is taking place. The members believe their contributions matter and they care about each other's opinions of themselves and their work. And that could be description of gamer communities, fan communities, Wikipedia, a whole range of things that are defining the current digital moment. And I write there, not every member must contribute but all must believe they're free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. By the way, this is an example of participatory culture because like I said, I like to punch words into the Google image search so I punched the word participatory culture and the slide came up. So when it made it somewhere else to explain my concepts in my white paper and I looked at it and I thought it's a better slide than I was gonna make anyway so I'll take their slide and incorporate it into my presentation. And that's sort of the way participatory cultures operate, that I create something, throw it out into the world, other people respond to it, tinker with it, improve upon it and that exchange can go both directions over an extended period of time and that's a driving force I think in terms of where our culture is at. Now I wanted to distinguish participatory culture from Web 2.0 and these things often are getting conflated. Web 2.0 is a specific set of technological and business practices which builds on the public's desire to participate in order to create a revenue stream of some sort. Participatory culture doesn't intrinsically create a revenue stream. Participatory culture could trace its roots back to folk cultures for example where cultures produced an exchange freely without being commercialized. It existed in the shadow of mass media for most of the 20th century and it's also been the rallying point for the public's desire to have a greater role in cultural creation and circulation. So I think it's important to keep those two things separate that the business aspect is Web 2.0 but if we look at any given Web 2.0 company we don't see the kind of nice harmony of consumer and producer that O'Reilly describes in his what is Web 2.0 document what we see is friction. We see consumers pushing back over data surveillance and privacy issues over copyright or censorship issues over branding and advertising issues that over membership and fee structures then almost every case where we've empowered people to participate through Web 2.0 companies there have been frictions between what the company wants to do to make money and what the public wants to do in order to participate in exchange culture with each other. And until we actually see them as separate forces we may not fully understand where those frictions are coming from or be able to tease out the new relationships as they emerge. All right, third point, content is remixable. So here we see an example of remixable content. This is someone has taken images from Pixar's Toy Story and created their own version of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's movie. And it's sort of the playfulness of malleability of content in the current world that in a world where everyone participates where all content is digitized it becomes relatively easy to transform content from one form to another. Sometimes by the production company doing so and as in this case and many others consumers taking ownership of that content and repurposing it for their own reasons. Sometimes for cultural, just fun, the laws as they would say in the internet sometimes for political purposes. So this is a film called Right Wing Radio Duck that remixed footage from Walt Disney's Donald Duck cartoons with the Right Wing Radio host Glenn Beck in the United States to comment on the sort of worldview of sort of paranoid conservative media in the United States. What's interesting is the Right Wing Radio in terms attack this saying it had to be funded by the Obama administration because it was so well crafted. And it turns out it was made by a 24 year old college student in his dorm room, right? It's the shift in production capability that goes on now makes it really hard to separate out grassroots produced media from commercial produced media or even governmental media since they are all circulating through YouTube or similar platforms. This is an example of how the political effect of this plays itself out. So this guy featured in all four of these images is Pepper Spray Cop. And Pepper Spray Cop was a university of California Davis Campus Policeman who pepper sprayed a group of protesters from the Occupy movement that were sitting peacefully on the lawn of the university. Now historically this would have been a campus news story maybe a local news story. It happened on Saturday by Monday there were 200 mashups of Pepper Spray Cop in a variety of situations. Some explicitly political like the scene there of the sort of Lady Liberty some old movies this has been her some sort of famous paintings people peacefully gathering but in that process of this video these images being produced and circulated the result was that many more people saw this video and this image and it became an icon now of the Occupy movement in the United States not by a single news coverage but by the dispersal of that coverage across many different remixes that took place. We can think of these as kind of the people's editorial cartoons that just as the editorial cartoonist in the newspaper finds a memorable image to personify a set of current events and tries to fix them in the public imagination these are a series of bids to do the same thing and in fact in this case it's not a single image that people will remember but the Pepper Spray Cop himself as he moves across all of these media platforms. So the next fourth point is a content that is spreadable that is it circulates through the culture and that's the focus of my upcoming book Spreadable Media which is coming out in January and someone appropriated spreadable media as a concept and said because everyone keeps saying spreadable media sounds like butter sounds like jam someone created this image that circulates on the internet that says spreading media preserves culture. So it plays on the word jam being a kind and preserve meaning much the same thing. So let's think in terms of and this is the sort of where it comes from white paper I and some of my graduate students wrote calls it doesn't spread it's dead which is sort of intending to put spreadability against stickiness, stickiness being the idea you build something on the web and you attract eyeballs and you hold them there as long as you can and collect rints on it spreadability is a logic of circulation that is things gain value as they travel through the culture. So here's an example of a recent success of spreadable media and so many of you in the room will know 2020-2012 created by invisible children a relatively small, a non, relatively ununderknown nonprofit organization under San Diego, California that created this 30 minute video about a Ugandan warlord and child soldiering and so forth through it into circulation and it hit extraordinary success. So if you look at this these are some of the so-called viral successes of the web, the wedding dance, evolution of the dance, Charlie bit my finger, dramatic gopher, David after the dentist and probably most of you in this room know at least some of these videos on this list which reached a critical mass over time. We get down to the other end we see Old Spice, Susan Boyle, Cooney 2012. Now what this chart shows us is how many days it took for each of these videos to reach 70 million views. So what we see is it took Susan Boyle video seven days to get 70 million views. It took by comparison, the wedding dance 589 days to reach 70 million views. And it took Cooney 2012 four days to reach that level of visibility. By point of comparison, the highest rated show on American television gets about 40 million viewers in its peak episode. Hunger Games which opened that same weekend probably had 15 to 17 million viewers depending on how we calculate from box office numbers to tickets. But either way, Cooney 2012 dwarfed the highest rated show on American television and the top grossing film in the US that year up until The Avengers and over the four days that it opened. Now the people talking to the people at San Diego they say they expected about half a million views over about a two month period of time. They were completely and literally blown away to the point of personal destruction as some of you know what happened with Jason Russell as this video rolled out by the sheer speed with which this stuff spread not by broadcast media, but by network communication of people passing this along to other people. Again, Susan Boyle did much the same thing, right? On Susan Boyle's case, we're gonna part of what's interesting is that it spread far faster than the commercial sector could keep up with. So even though Fremantle, the production company that Britain's Got Talent has commercial deals with American networks, once it became clear that Susan Boyle was interesting in the States, they had no way to move fast enough to put Britain's Got Talent on the air. You know, I couldn't put it on broadcast, they couldn't get it on the cable, they couldn't work the deal out with iTunes, they couldn't get the deal going with Hulu. In fact, it only place you could watch Britain's Got Talent in the US was through pirates, right? There was no legal means to watch this content if you became invested in that story. The speed of spread was far faster than the commercial sector's ability to keep up. Now, long-term, they caught up when the albums released in the United States, it sold more, outsold Whitney Houston and a number of other major albums released that year. And they made a lot of money because the public had become so invested in Susan's success story that they were ready to support the release of the album and became a big commercial success in the US without ever a commercial release of the TV content around it. But the grassroots circulation is what built in. Now, this is not as the media likes to call it viral media, right? I think viral media as a model is all about a loss of agency on the part of consumers. Here's Neil Stephenson, the science fiction writer describing viral media in terms of we're all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas like mass hysteria or a tune that gets in your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. No matter how smart we get, there's always this deep irrational part that makes us potential host for self-replicating information. So look at all the ways in which we are denied agency in this comment that it's about susceptibility, mass hysteria, something trapped in our heads, it's irrational. We're host bodies for something that's self-replicating. In fact, invisible children built a strategy, used people who consciously chose to participate, they spread it because the content meant something to them and they made decisions about which networks ascend it to, which communities to spread it to, what messages to attach to it. So we're not gonna get anywhere understanding this stuff or if we derive it as viral, which is why we're arguing for spreadability. So the theory of spreadability is a theory of circulation. If we think about traditional models of media, they're based on distribution. That is, Fremantle made a decision, we're gonna air Britain's Got Talent in the US, not in America, and that's distribution. Circulation is grassroots sort of hybrid system, partially top down, corporately controlled, but still increasingly bottom up, shaped by unauthorized uses of people choosing to pass content along based on their own choices, not based on what's available to them on the broadcast dial. And as that happens, certain content gets enormous visibility, not by being pumped out by broadcast, but by the way it's spread by the consumers. Now that content could be commercial as it is in the case of Susan Boyle, it could be non-profit as in the case of invisible children's Cooney 2012, or it could be totally amateur content like Charlie bit my finger, but either way it's traveling through system circulation. Now, I use the word unauthorized use very cautiously here because I'm trying to avoid the word piracy. And piracy seems to be where people automatically go to describe this process. I want to hold it in vain not because I'm trying to justify piracy, but because I think the category has to be looked at very, very closely to sort of the moral charge of the word piracy shuts down conversations we should be having about who benefits from these acts of circulation. Piracy assumes it's not only unauthorized, but also destructive. Whereas in the case of Susan Boyle, unauthorized acts of circulation increased the value of the album when it was released. And this is increasingly true. It is companies that know how to monitor and respond to unauthorized circulation can find ways to profit from those processes even if it means losing control over the flow of content. And I think that's the paradox that we increasingly want to pay attention to that unauthorized circulation can decrease the value because it loses rents and revenue that you might have gotten. It may and may appreciate the value, right? It may increase the value both in terms of appreciating the meaning of the value and appreciating the economic value of the content. So if we look at what happened, this is a map that social flow has done of the circulation of Cooney 2012. And what we see here is several interesting patterns. This is the tweets going out, passing this content along is what we see over the first four days of its circulation. We see invisible which stands here for invisible children is probably the largest category of circulating this content. And we see Jason Russell, the producer is probably the second largest. So that's the authorized flow of the content as shaped by the organization. We see Kirsten Bell there who was a minor celebrity. She's the star in a show called Veronica Mars. And part of the strategy of Cooney 12 was to get fans to put pressure on celebrities to use their social media to up the visibility of the content. And she's the first celebrity to respond. So she crops up quite early. The interesting things there are the circled areas here which show us Dayton, Ohio, Birmingham, Alabama, Noblesville, Indiana, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh. These are the cities that have the largest cluster of people sending out the Cooney 2012 message. What's interesting is New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, even Chicago and Atlanta which might have been traditionally the media hubs are not what's showing up here. What's showing up here is small to middle sized cities in the middle of the country where invisible children work through churches and college groups to build a base of support over about eight years that was ready to pass along its content. So the first wave, the strongest push comes from a set of networks they built over time that they wanted to spread this content. The video ends with the urge above all pass this along and that invitation to pass it along enable these groups to do it. This is interesting because this is a portal of the flow of Twitter messages that accompanied Cooney 12. We see some interesting things. One is that invisible children has been described as a stealth Christian organization which is to say in the United States it works with churches, it also works with schools. It doesn't have an explicitly religious message because it couldn't and get into American schools where there's a strong separation of church and state. What happens when it starts to spread is the church based population is the first to grab hold of this and spread it and we can see it with the size of God, Jesus, life, love. Those are words that are probably tied to Christian circulation of the video. And we see the next level down in size or university student, music, play, fan which probably is the university based words and circulation which suggests as this stuff spreads it's not just one message for one group but a variety of groups that are localizing the message as it enters into very specific networks that results in that content spreading. And I think that's very much part of the world we're involved with. Am I completely out of time or? Okay, let's keep going then. So we can think of this as having some impact on global politics, right? I have a soft view of the so-called Twitter revolutions as they're tied to Arab Spring. I think particularly as we talk about Iran, Twitter probably played very little role in the actual industry organizing but it plays a much bigger role from the experts I've talked to in shaping global awareness of these events that is where Twitter plays a role is in getting messages that might be blocked by governments or traditional media channels out of the protesters world and into the world of their supporters overseas. And in case of Iran and Egypt there's large diasporic communities of users around the world who were there ready to pass on that content and reframe it or recontextualize it for their local consumer groups. And so in a sense, the Arab Spring became spreadable media content in the ways in which it passed along. As that happened, at least in the United States the message that went out was CNN fail, right? That the people were tweeting alongside spreading grassroots conversations from the streets of Tehran, they were saying, where is CNN? Where is professional journalist in all of this? Because it's not that they wanted to displace professional journalists with messages from the streets but rather they wanted their agenda, their interest to drive what journalists covered. And they expected someone who had foreign policy expertise, connections to government spokesmen, fact-checking capability to follow behind them and clear up the misinformation that was circulating through Twitter. But there was an immediacy about Twitter that led to this kind of level of engagement. This is another example of spreadable media in a foreign policy context. This is a group of Palestinians marching through the occupied territory in a protest march. And this group marches every week, shoots a video of their encounter with the Israeli guards and so forth. And the videos get a few hundred supporters watching them. This particular week, they chose to paint themselves blue as the Navi from James Cameron's Avatar walked through the occupied territory saying sky people, you can't take our land. And recorded this confrontation with the Israeli troops who were very baffled by how to respond to an army of blue people marching upon the fence and put it out via YouTube where it got millions of hits and got covered by the media all over the world. So this became a politics of spreadable media, of taking entertainment content as a baseline from which to reframe a set of political issues and throwing out circulation. Counting in the novelty effect, just like in the pepper spray comp, they get people to spread it along and to engage with that content in a new way. And we're gonna see more and more of that. It's a kind of odd sort of protest, right? Now everyone probably won't have to paint themselves blue, but keep in mind that protest across early modern Europe, people painted themselves as Moors or Amazons in order to protest the government. And in my country, people, my founding fathers, painted themselves red as the Native Americans that throw tea into the Boston Harbor, there's a long tradition of masks of the other being used as the face of a protest. And there's a continuity, I'd argue, between these people and the Moors or the Amazons for which most of Europe were still imaginary people, people they didn't directly know that they were mimicking in some way through their protest. And so there's a continuity here, I think, to draw not just an exoticism of it. All right, point five, content is now global, right? So in this system, if we think about the Coney 2012, the striking thing was we'd got so many responses so quickly from people in Africa, right? There was a debate that was going on between the Western advocates of invisible children and the Ugandan Prime Minister went on YouTube and responded to the video, very other people corrected statements of fact in the video using YouTube. So it was a very porous system. In the past, that video, if it had been on television in the US, wouldn't have reached Europe, let alone Africa. There would not have been the back and forth that took place around it. So in some ways, the controversy around Coney 2012 tells us about global circulation. This is a scene from Smash on a contemporary American television series and they have an entire sequence in Bollywood. The language of Indian cinema is now being incorporated into the mainstream American popular culture, not because there's been a huge wave of commercial distribution of Bollywood in the United States. It largely still remains at ethnic grocery stores and ethnic theaters, underground video circulation, but because there's an enormous awareness of Bollywood in the United States and it becomes a language you can then use to incorporate into fictional shows. Further along that path might be anime, Japanese animation, which 20 years ago in the US, you literally couldn't get it on the air and so it had very little economic value. It entered the US through informal trades of video and then through networks of fan subbers who take the episodes, translate them from Japanese and English, put on unauthorized subtitles, put them into circulation. To commercial interest, moving in to take advantage of the market that had been developed informally and there's a kind of weird moral economy between the fans who are trying to build a base for anime support and the commercial distributors who tap that base in order to sell their content. So this is not a case necessarily of conflict between pirates and industry. It's a case where in fact industry has used pirates to take the initial risk of introducing new content into the marketplace and then use the data they got from that to begin to circulate things more carefully. My colleague Nancy Bame has talked about the Swedish music world in much the same way, where many Swedish bands now do concert tours in the US without ever releasing albums there because of the use of MP3, because of allowing certain things to be pirated and spread. It creates a demand for that music in the United States. Further down the scale, but moving fast is Nollywood, the Nigerian video industry, which is now the third largest media producer in the world, built entirely out of pirates in the marketplace, beginning to take proceeds from pirate and American media and putting it into local production and then using piracy as the first wave to get that content out to consumers and build a market in other parts of Africa and now in parts of Europe and the United States. It is a growth industry by a kind of weird collaboration between pirates and producers. The last point is content may well be increasingly independent in this new environment. That is to say that while mass producers have certain advantages still that they will always have in terms of commanding top visibility, independent producers have more opportunities than ever before to get their films into circulation and get them in front of people. It's still, they're still an uphill battle, but compared to the gatekeeping function of traditional film festivals and art houses and a handful of major distributors, they now have the capacity to appeal over the heads of the commercial structure directly to their consumer base. So this film, Inc., sort of fantasy film, low-budget fantasy film that got pretty big pit hit in the US by going directly to BitTorrent. As the filmmakers say, they tried to get commercial distributors, they couldn't, so they put it uploaded at the BitTorrent and they got half a million viewers in the first week on BitTorrent. And now if you go to Amazon, you can see it's selling very briskly. It has enormous support. And Amazon, they moved from illegal distribution to illegal circulation, illegal distribution. And the result is that they've now, certainly not a huge success by any stretch, but a niche success as an independent film. This is another film that sort of had some impact here in Europe so far, hasn't reached my country yet, but Iron Sky was produced heavily by a crowdsourcing crowdfunding model where most of the cost of production and a large amount of the special effects were generated by the audience in collaboration with the producer. And that in turn built base of support, a niche base of support for this film before it was ever released. And they're sort of around the world, there are people who really want to see Iron Skies, this kind of space Nazis comedy that was produced. And I think we'll be hearing more about that model. In fact, if we look at the models of independent production and circulation today, there's a complete loop we could point to. So Kickstarter in the US at least has become a micro-funding entity that people propose projects there directly to the public and say, would you like to invest a small amount now in realizing a project that you might like to consume later? And many independent films, comic books, games, music, get their initial seed funding, get started not by appealing to funding agencies or governmental bodies, but now in the US appealing directly to the public. The film called Zombies is a crowd sourced film, which is to say that they put out a call on the internet, they wanted to make a zombie movie, and they asked the public to provide shots. And so anyone with their camcorder shot the footage of zombies doing this, they described all the points they needed in their story, and they got all the shots from the public, and then they edited it together to create the finished film. And Brave New Films is a left of center documentary company in the US, which uses what I call crowd surfing, which is to say that they don't distribute to theaters, they distribute through Netflix and YouTube and encourage their supporters to hold screenings in their living room to invite their friends over to collect money and donate back to the organization to fund the next film. So while there's no one I've seen so far who uses all three of these, in theory you could take a film from conceptualization all the way through distribution, you know, via work collaborations between independent filmmakers and a community of support. Now what this means is that those filmmakers who have built-in bases of support have the greatest opportunity under the system. So it's no accident that Lost Zombies is a zombie movie, right, everyone knows what a zombie movie looks like. So getting the crowd to contribute to a zombie movie, fairly easy thing to do. So fantasy, horror, science fiction that have built-in fan bases do well in these clients, but so do films for minorities of one sort or another. Films for gay and lesbians, films for women, films for various racial, ethnic, minorities, immigrant populations, and for political minorities on both the right and the left, these models make sense as a means of building awareness, getting funding and rowing around traditional gatekeepers to get your content out to a public slash market that may be interested in what you're producing. The people that we most heard by this are the traditional art cinema directors who are individuals expressing their own worldview, but those are the ones who benefited the most under state subsidies, film festivals, art museums, the traditional routes of circulation. So it's not clear if this takes anything away from them. In fact, if anything, it may take away competition for funding through those traditional agencies as these groups move in another direction. But that's where content generation is likely to come from as we look to the next generation of media producers. So on that note, I will end and open it up for questions and dialogue.


The fire's miles away. We don't need to leave. We'll wait. We've got time. If things change, we'll drive out. Maybe we should go. Stop making excuses. Leave and live. Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne.


The way you want to spec is you want to try and get a wand as early as possible, right? And then you want to go five and one spec then five in spirit tap one in shadow focus then five in holy spec five in divine fury Then you come into here. You go three powered shield two martyrdom Then one in a focus three in meditation and then what I'll probably do I Think there's one or two more points after that till 40. I'll probably chuck it either in shadow focus or in pain


Aloha. Welcome to The Creative Life, brought to you by the American Creativity Association in collaboration with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Darlene Boyd, ACA Chair, and Phyllis Bleece, ACA Association President, joins me in hosting today's show as we explore the secrets of top innovators with today's guest, Rosemary Rine. Rosemary joins us from her home in Cuenca, Ecuador. Rosemary is a renowned award-winning author and internationally sought after creativity consultant. Originally from the United States, she has lived a creative life in Latin America for 15 years. Her passion is helping organizations and more than 100 global fellows from around the world develop a culture of innovation. Welcome Rosemary to The Creative Life. Perhaps the best way to start off is if you would briefly tell us about this adventure you have with innovation minds and in particular your role. Oh well Aloha and congrats to the American Creativity Association. Now more than ever we need creativity and innovation in our life and thank you for inspiring the curiosity with this program. Well my journey with innovation minds I began as an in-person facilitator of creativity and innovation and one of the frustrations I had was that innovation would happen in these once a year events but in fact innovation is needed every day and every way that we look at both business and life. So I was very fortunate to be invited to be one of the innovators interviewed by the team at innovation minds who had identified four blockers innovation. What was stopping companies from being more innovative and developing a technology solution as we move into the era of AI and technology that would enable us to make creativity and innovation part of everyday workflow and particularly in the times that we live in and the hybrid world that many of us are working in. So yes resume you said you were asked to be one of the consultants with innovation minds who are innovation minds and you know how do we contact and be in contact with that group and also what is the foundation for the four blocks to innovation. How did you discern what those four blocks are? Well actually innovation minds was formed it was a Silicon Valley startup developed by the innovators at LinkedIn and PayPal who got together with their frustrations and created this organization that would have an end-to-end solution not just idea management but also how do you go from idea to implementation. So I was very thrilled to be one of not only the participants in terms of what was blocking us but to be part of interviewing top innovators what are these four blockers to innovation and then to create a solution that's going to tackle that. So in fact innovation is part of what we do in everyday workflow and we can talk about those blockers Phyllis if you if you'd like to.  Okay well the first one I wanted to talk about is non-scalable process which is once and done or one hit wonders innovation does not happen in this one aha moment and doesn't happen with this one group and we also have day to day work so we should be innovating every day. So how do you create a system and framework so that it's incorporated innovation is incorporated into daily workflow in both the real and the virtual world. So blocker number one is you need to have a sustainable framework you don't want to be have the future of a blockbuster that stopped with innovation with one product one and things are changing so rapidly which gets to blocker number two which is prioritizing today's work over tomorrow's ideas and I always love to give resources to those that are watching that are entrepreneurs that are innovators and right now online you can find a 2022 trend hunter report that shows how the pandemic is radically changing how we think how we learn how we love and it's so critical we can't wait till we get through the pandemic these changes are happening a fast and furiously so for example we've got the work from home culture to contend with and by the way people that work from home are not as motivated as those that are working in the office so how do we engage with them a second trend is artificial intelligence how are you using artificial intelligence to engage your customers with your brand and the example that comes to mind is idea you know people are no longer going many people are not comfortable with in-person shopping so idea has an awesome qr code that you actually go into your living room you put the qr code you take that magic blue sofa you put it in your living room your family does weight lifting and has fun interacting with the furniture so how are you engaging with this new consumer who's staying at home and prefers the safety and convenience of shopping from it help and third of course is health and safety how is your brand looking at health and safety that's a trend that we really can't wait to think about how we're going to tackle that so for example not only are we going to see more physical safety in locations but they even have innovative projects or products such as smart mirrors that you look in the mirror and the whole family gets their biometrics measured the children have cartoons that they can brush their teeth longer because they're engaged with the mirror so technology is changing at the speed of light as we become more health and wellness oriented and the fourth trend of course is concern for our planet and taking care of our planet how is your brand innovating so not only are you creating innovative products like a vietnamese company created a biodegradable mask made of coffee beans i'm from Ecuador so of course that appealed to my sensibility but how is your company lowering your environmental footprint so the second blocker is you can't afford to wait for innovation because things are changing so quickly and the third showstopper or inhibitor that that really was the foundation of innovation minds is lack of strategic alignment and sponsorship if you don't have an executive sponsor to move this forward it won't happen angel investors for entrepreneurs and interestingly enough the diversity of the team one of the things we created at innovation minds is like a e harmony profile so we get diverse team members working on that innovation project not people that are all thinking the same way through innovative profiles and the fourth one which i think everyone who is in business is thinking about today is talent isn't engaged and motivated and you might reference in academic journals the great resignation low estimates are 25 of us because we were staying put during the pandemic are going to be looking for new job opportunities so how do we keep you engaged so with all of those blockers in mind we created an all in one solution that tackles engagement that tackles how do you get the right people on the team and by the way make it simple so you're not going to all these multiple platforms you're not going to a facebook and an event bright but you're actually combining everything in one piece of software as well as in person facilitation that makes it engaging and fun what is it i'm sorry i know you have a question darling but you said you've got an all in one solution it won't innovate the rest of your lives but the one thing it will do is it will make it seamless so we have a tool that we provide to both small and large businesses one client i recently worked with was red bull in which you can have this combination of in person as well as virtual engagement so when you think about creativity and innovation you think about post-it notes well imaginative innovation was as engaging as a facebook feed for example where you have innovation snacks and you're matched with individuals who have an interest in solving those challenges by the way one of the top motivators how do you keep employees engaged during this hybrid time is to give them a challenge to solve they people want a mission and want a purpose so how do you engage that that hybrid workforce you get them engaged and use technology as a tool but not the only tool so we do in person events as well well i i just i'm really excited about your examples and many things i hadn't thought about but what comes to mind is i'm listening to you i was bringing myself back to thinking about just the idea of vaccination and some of the barriers that we received all right so every day the shifts in how vaccines would be distributed for example and the politics involved any comments that you might have for us and oh i am so happy that you know politics yeah at at the beginning of the pandemic if you were in the us you watched it on cnn you probably watched it on bbc ecuador was listed as the worst place to be in the pandemic with bodies on the street and it was horrid and no vaccinations no vaccines were available which is exactly why i thought you might be a perfect person to talk about it was such a challenging time um my husband and i celebrated our combined 145th birthday virtually because we were in lockdown mode but what i'm so thrilled to share is the power of creative problem solving and innovation last week world health announced that ecuador is leading the world in vaccination rates and they applied creative problem solving and process i talked about a sustainable framework this was a time during political transition as the us experienced but we were able to accomplish this by looking at really innovative ways to actually use for example polling registrars to to reach at-risk communities and rural areas so i'm very pleased today and let's keep our fingers crossed that we continue that that is one practical example of how when you get head heart and and and mind connected and you apply creative problem solving miracles do happen what what do you do in the process when what do you do to come up against the show stoppers and the blockers when they're not moving when those blockers you think you've utilized all your strategies that you've mentioned but yet you're still hitting a wall how do you get true or above that wall well yeah the the wall still occur for example you have organizational change i'm working with a client right now of a major corporation where there's change at the top and so the focus on innovation can be challenging i think our principles of change management which are bite-sized chunks and progress you need to show i i think about the example of an uber why is it we're going to wait for an uber because we can see the car coming right i think when we think of innovation is all this one big thing it's a major initiative we need to make these incremental increases and show employees that we're getting somewhere i will say that's so important i'm a big believer in applying creativity and allowing innovation and creative thoughts to thrive which is why creative problem solving itself i think is a miracle because it stops us from premature evaluation of ideas through divergent and convergent thinking but so important that we not only have that sustainable framework in place but we make sure at the beginning of the initiative which is why we do a lot of hand-holding at innovation minds with clients to make sure they're going to be successful by having both executive sponsorship in person as well as virtual touchpoints and we always keep in mind the key motivation of individuals you know not only are there very cool things that you can do like virtual coffee houses and virtual wine clubs i love that one by the way um where they're setting bottles of wine to everyone and they're they're finding unique and creative ways so that employees can play so always keeping in mind that even though technology is an aid it's always the heart of human connection well if you would allow me before i ask uh phyllis to come up with her her thoughts because because i'm sure she has many i don't want to leave your mention of creative problem solving without bringing forth that there are many models for problem solving that we come across but the models that that i feel are bring most success are those that go repeatedly in the process from the creative to the critical so in other words you're going from creative thinking to critical thinking creative thinking then back again to critical thinking and reevaluating i would assume you would agree i absolutely would agree and i think there is a marriage between creative problem solving and we've used design thinking and other we have a thongs framework the sharkathon the makeathon cool names for different ways to get people engaged but one component that i'm a big believer in is ideas need implementation so one of the things we did in innovation lines is we made sure that ideas don't stop in the idea bank that it sees its way through to project management and implementation and one of my pet peeves has always been how do we measure innovation and so using employee engagement measures and other measures will help us kind of put a spotlight on the importance of innovation every day equal to that of productivity so you between you we're talking about creative problem solving and there's been years of a creative problem solving institute at sipsy at the new york university at syracuse and when and our audience is hearing this and it's rolling off our tongues but we're talking about years of process and work so if you look up online just google creative problem solving or cps we're not just using it generically that's a term of art that embraces a lot of modalities for creative for generating creative ideas like um and in you know brainstorming alliteration there's just there are there are very strategic and well thought through steps to this quote creative problem solving unquote discipline and uh and we're we're jockeying around these terms because we're it it's our craft and but i want to move to the personal side and you talked about having creativity one of the blocks is not using innovation every in an everyday way but it's just kind of an annual event and what are some of the secrets to embracing innovative habits and thinking on a daily basis i know this is something you and your company have really spent time looking at if you could share that with the audience for sure and the global fellows i work with um you know it goes back for me to there was a Harvard study on the power of the word the cause and believe it or not when you use that magic word you increase retention from 60 to 93 percent so for example if you have a teenager who won't clean up their room uh you just don't say well why do you what's what's the because for them not because i said so that doesn't work but giving them a powerful motivator so everything from filling out a form tell me the why so when i think about personal creativity what is my personal why now my husband and i've been married for 28 years um we uh every year it probably looks kind of dorky but we have a marriage state of the marriage retreat and we talk about 10 10 and 10 10 things we want to be say and do and we have that as a framework at the beginning of the year and sometimes we do things differently but we we have a discussion about what are those critical because points for us um when i teach speak when i teach global fellows how to speak english it's not to speak english it's what is the because behind that are they looking to work internationally for example so knowing your because not only important in business but yourself as well i think another um component that i think about is we talked about applying creative problem solving and trying to put a little bit of innovation in your life every day now i authored go wild survival skills for business and life uh for park university and i went into the wilderness and became a wilderness expert and learned that there are five keys to surviving and business and life which is the premise of the book but one thing that was very important to me is my understanding of the power of nature and the nature of inspiration so spending time with nature i tell my clients those five minute vacations that you can spend mind walks all kinds of different techniques using nature as a tool and then one i know darlene you and i met at a creative problem solving institute conference find your tribe i am such a firm believer even in covid i have found a way to find my tribe of five you should have that individual who supports you that individual who you have fun with that individual who will call you out on your stuff and say i'm not sure you're thinking you know the right way on this you should have that individual that engages you and gives you new ideas my one book i read recently was you become the five people you spend time with i want to spend it with really cool people who will stretch my thinking and you think differently than i do and of course both of you realize in these days of political division how magical is it that we can speak of two individuals with different thoughts and and and and discuss ideas just as we're doing with think tech kawaii when you mentioned tribe i i've been thinking about tribe quite a bit lately and what i find intriguing when i think about my tribe is how we gravitate to each other over the years and and as we often say about friends you can talk to a friend from years ago and it's as if you never broke away you just take off where you've left off and and i think that is important about tribes i find it interesting too that you so you suggest to have i heard you correctly five in your start five yeah at least a tribe of five we have we have tribal meetings virtually really you are a wild woman so i i think i personally find something intriguing about your adventurous life that not only do you visit these places and i don't and live in them i don't think you're there as a tourist if i understand what i've heard from you you actually immerse yourself and become part of that culture could you suggest a couple examples that that you've done i know in close to rica it seems that it seemed that you had all kinds of excursions and adventures for sure and yes we were pretty committed that we would not live in an enclave of of expats and we we purposely and with intention not only do we take courses from the university here in ecuador even though spanish is my second language so there there is a barrier there that you need to overcome but we do try to not only mingle with international citizens who are residing here but try to go to local events understand the culture you know my i've also done some recruiting for executives and i often say to them you know you have a real winning candidate if you find someone who's lived somewhere else in the world there is something about living somewhere else not as a tourist but living somewhere else and so many of the students that i'm working with are in the process of immigrating from brazil to italy because they have national italian heritage for example and they're taking that jump that leap because they want to live life as an adventure a learning adventure and as long as you're you're ready to have embarrassing moments to have times where you do not understand what is happening and you can laugh about it and you know i i often say to my students if you can say two words in any language you will survive please and thank you learn basic courtesies and i have to say that one challenge i have had is when people who visit here or think about living here constantly make comparisons with their home country because i think when you make the move and if you are thinking about an international lifestyle that you need to embrace all that it is have you learned not to make that comparison yourself how long did it take you to shed that you know what i have to shed when i talk with my family back home and they see the pictures on facebook of my amazing life and they say but don't you miss it back home and i i kind of bite my tongue a little bit because there are so many things i love about this country and also the united states of course is my home country i'll always be a us citizen gave me opportunities and i still work with so many clients there but i've learned to appreciate each culture for what it brings and my one of my teaching moments is never to make generalizations about women men populations because it just doesn't apply we're all unique god-given creatures it doesn't sound like you have any regrets do you do you ever think of a regret now and then i'm sure there are life regrets at 28 i opened uh and converted an 1840 historic building in kate may new jersey young and entrepreneurial i had a half a million dollar sba loan when i was 28 years of age went on into business i'm sure mistakes along the way but uh i have to say that the decision to move to a foreign country particularly latin america was a blessing for us but i always love to go home i'm going to be i i was soon as we're able to travel um i certainly will look forward to my own little creature comforts that i miss back in the us phyllis yes um rosemary you've talked about working with innovation officers that sounds like a job title and i think the audience would be really interested to know how do you become an innovation officer and who's hiring them and if you are already one what could you do better to to encourage other companies to add more of what you do this is a whole new industry is it not it really is and just yesterday i was with a student in saudi arabia uh virtually of course and she just received her certification to be a chief innovation officer and dubai and abu dubai as you might be aware have so many incredible innovations happening and so she's working with a nonprofit to encourage uh an incubator for entrepreneurs modeling in part what silicon valley has done you will find a lot of chief innovation officers in the silicon valley area but companies i would encourage companies to reach out to us at innovation minds certainly we can we can point you in the right direction connect you with other innovation officers we do a podcast with innovators and not only cheap innovation officers but um almost like i might at one point i had a business card for my dog called cfo chief fund officer one and an agent and he was i got more clients by giving business cards i can tell you but um really it's that it's that art of not only knowing the process of innovation so i would explore that um and there are groups certainly online of of innovation officers but really exploring how employee engagement is really at the heart of it all because in the end people are the ones powering the engine think think mahalo is we say in hawaii for that and i'll turn it over back to you darlene i think we're in the last gas i would like to know more about what people do to become an innovative officer or be able to apply and there is a blog on the library at think tecawaii of all of our shows on the creative life and after each show there you can add information and you can look there for ways to look up getting qualified and certified and create a problem solving so i encourage people to look online after the show is over but off to you darlene yes and and rosemary i i really have enjoyed as i always do hearing your repertoire and your advice and your suggestions and i do thank you for the time that you've given us and i suppose phyllis it's might be helpful to mention to our viewers since we have talked about creative problem solving that in the next few shows coming up over the next two months i believe we will have some of the heads of those uh institutes that that we've somewhat referenced jarard putio from buff state with the the famous creative problem saw overseeing the famous creative problem solving institute so we would encourage our visitors to keep with us and i i think we might be able to build our own little tribe here if we have that opportunity so with that thank you for joining us today for today's think tecawaii show the creative life with creativity consultant guest rosemary rine the primary takeaway from today's show is perhaps a better understanding of how to navigate through and override blockers to organizational innovation in business and in our personal lives join us in two weeks for the next show of the creative life journey on behalf of my colleague and host phyllis please and our guest remacy excuse me rosemary rosemary rine and myself aloha


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Let's look in on police headquarters. The time is close to midnight. Mannequin is holding down the desk while the sergeant is out for a bite to eat. Oh, sure, they wish the sergeant would get back. They'd like me little trundle bed and some short eye. Oh. Take it easy, Mannequin. You will get hurt. You always wanted to meet the blue beetle. Well, here he is. It's no use to struggle the blue beetle as strong as the new one.  And I'll carry you into the room where you keep the fingerprint files. There you are. No, I'm over my shoulder. You go up, sexy. There we are. No. Just lie there like a good little boy. I want to examine his files. Type 27B, 28B, 29, 30, 31B, Yes, that looks like it. Fingerprints of Joe Bugsmagati and his photograph. Yes, Mr. Bugsmagati, those are your fingerprints, all right? You're the guy that stole that murder gun. Well, Mr. Bugsmagati, you're going to get nipped by the blue beetle and nipped hard. Reach for the ceiling, Mr. Blue Beetle. Ah, the beautiful daughter of the police commissioner. Don't move, I'll shoot if you do. I have no intention of moving unless it's to step within the aura of such a charming person as yourself is done. What are you doing here? And why are you gagged and tied up off of the mannequin there? I'm here to obtain evidence against the opium gang your father is trying to round up. I tied up off of the mannequin there to prevent his interfering. Why didn't you enlist his aid? After all, he's working on this case. The blue beetle works alone. But how do I know you're working for rather than against my father? Well, if my charming captain will lower that toy revolver which he's holding in an un-too-steady hand, the blue beetle will tell her something to gladden her father's heart. Very well. But don't try any tricks. Not a trick, my dear young lady.  How do I know you'll keep your promise? Let this seal my promise. Good night, my sweet. I'd like to linger after that kiss, but the blue beetle has a duty to perform.  He's gone. Maybe to die alone. No, I can't let him. I must help him. I must, I must. Like a bloodhound on the trail once he gets the sense, the blue beetle's spent on his mission. And like the bloodhound, he'll never let up till he runs his quarry to earth. But close on his heels goes the commissioner's daughter, determined to have a part in the roundup of the nefarious gang of dopeheadlers. Little did she know that close behind as she hurried down the darkened street, a car was slowly following her. There she goes. That's the commissioner's girl. Let's never know. Wait, wait till she passes that streetlight. Now, don't you go. Make her sloppy and keep it quiet. Okay, boss. Excuse me, lady. What? Who are you? Let me go. I'll stick this gag in her mouth. Now open the door. We got it for her. The commissioner will pay his big dough to get his darling daughter back alive. There is the blue beetle. Will the blue beetle be able to rescue the beautiful daughter of the police commissioner? Will he locate the hideout of the dope ring? Will he be able to collect enough evidence to convict them? The violent night down by the waterfront two powerful cars are speeding along.  But who is this lone occupant of the second car? Ah, yes. It is the blue beetle. That looks like the car that passed me the day I was machine gun. I'll just follow her. It may lead me to the dopeheadler's hangout. They suspect me. They've got a machine gun pointing out of the rear. There it goes.  That super-shatter-proof glass is good, but I don't know how good. All right, you rats, how do you like this? I must have got their driver, their car zigzagging. Oh, now they're speeding up. Well, here we go again. They're slowing down. They're turning into their warehouse. My gang, all right. Just the spot I was headed for. Now, Mr. Bugs McGotty for the final showdown. Closing the iron doors of the warehouse. I'll soon blast them up with my special bomb that the firms made for me. All right, you mugs. Don't close that door. I'll blow you all to kingdom come. That's a bug. That's a bug. Go ahead, Joe McGotty. Go ahead and shoot. I recognize you. Joe Bullock can't hurt the Blue Beetle. What did I tell you? Now it's my turn. Here goes your door, and I'm coming right in and mop up. Here I come. You better drop your guns or I'll let you have another bomb. This here's for us. Right to the cheetah. Okay, you wise-dive Blue Beetle. Cross your little bomb and blow the police commissioner's daughter to kingdom come. Along with us. They've got Mary Donald. Stop bluffing, McGotty. You can't fool me. She's not the commissioner's daughter. She's one of your mob and she goes with you. I'll give you three seconds to drop your guns. One. Two. Okay, Blue Beetle. You win. Now release the commissioner's daughter to the crossbar. That's more like it. Thomas Donnelly, here's some handcuffs. Slipple on those gangsters and bring me their guns. That's better. Thomas Donnelly, you keep those men covered while I have a look around. That's a nice collection of dope you've got in these cans here. Here comes the law. Wait until the DA gets through with you. There'll be a few less criminals in this world.  My father will reward you handsomely. The Blue Beetle seeks no reward, Miss Donnelly. He seeks only justice. Justice for the underdog and safety for the citizens of this great city. You take this gun and keep those mugs covered. The police will be here any minute. I have no desire to meet them. But who are you? Please tell me. I can only tell you this. I'm the man who kissed you twice in one night. Oh. My respect to your father, Miss Donnelly. Tell him the Blue Beetle will always be at his service and running down criminals of all time. In his fast motor car spread the Blue Beetle, leaving the commissioner's daughter on guard over Bugs McGarty and his band of criminals. We're close behind him speeds another car, a police car. Will the Blue Beetle be overtaken and unmasked? A head of stop light is changing from green to red. Will the Blue Beetle defy the traffic regulations to avoid discovery? Or will he obey the rules of safe driving? This is the Blue Beetle himself. I've been following you for a mile. I thought I'd catch you at this stop light. Come on, me bucko. I'll ride the running board back to the police station and no funny business or I'll blow your brains out. So it's you again, Officer Mannequin. I'd love to take you for a ride. No, no, not at that. It's me that's taking you for a ride. I saw you drive out of that warehouse back there. So you were in with those door peddlers. That's nice figuring, Officer Mannequin. It'll be detective, Mannequin. After I turn you in, now get going, Mr. Blue Beetle. Too bad, Mannequin. We have to take such a lonely winding road along the waterfront. Listen, Mr. Blue Beetle, the slightest move on you will be Mr. Dead Beetle. Oh, yeah? Listen, you're interfering with my worst patrolman, Mannequin. So there you go. Ride out the running board into the river.  Good night, Detective Mannequin. And so the mysterious and thrilling character known as the Blue Beetle, after rounding up a gang of criminals, slips away to let the police take credit for cleaning up the dope like it. The next morning, patrolman Dan Garrett drops in for a visit with Dr. Franz. Well, Daddy, I see you let the police take all the credit again. Sure. I can't let my buddies down. According to newspaper reports, your friend Mannequin got tossed into the river by some of the gangsters whom he had kept in single-handed. So that's his story. That ain't the way I heard it. I bet the Blue Beetle had something to do with it. Well, you'd win your bet. You know, when I met him this morning, he had the sniffles, and he said he caught a cold. So I asked him if he'd been in swimming without his sweat. And did he get wise to the swimming gang? Yeah, after a minute. He wanted to know how I knew he'd been in the water. I told him I heard it from one of the boys. Hey, Doc, you heard the latest news? I know. No way. What is it? The authorities have got wind of a plot to sabotage that new army pursuit plane that's being tested tomorrow out of the flying field. Sabotage? That's my speed. Maybe I can get him at the tail of the flying field. Hello, Doc. I got to get over to headquarters. Though some nation is envious of Uncle Sam's superiority in the manufacture of aircraft, what will happen at the airfield? Will the Blue Beetle be able to uncover this plot in time? Will he be able to run the criminals to earth? Those are all questions which will be answered in the next edition of the Blue Beetle. The copyrighted box feature appearing in Mystery Men Comics Magazine. On sale at your newsstand. The Blue Beetle is on the air twice a week on this same station. Consult the broadcast schedule in your local newspapers. And don't forget to listen in.


Autonomous exploration of materials design space is hindered by its high-dimensionality and a scarcity of data. In this work, we present AlphaFlow, a self-driven lab guided by reinforcement learning that enables accelerated discovery and optimization of multi-step canastries. This article was authored by Amanda A. Vogue, Robert W. Epps, Daniel T. Yanomoto, and others.