#263 – An Interview with Fran Blanche

Fran Blanche: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Recorded August 19th, 2015. Episode 263. An interview with Fran Blanche.

Dave Jones: Hey, it's Fran, again. Hey, it's Dave, again.

Fran Blanche: Hey, it's Chris, again, on The Amp Hour. Welcome.

Dave Jones: Welcome, Fran. Hey. One of our most requested people.

Fran Blanche: Wow. You are. Well, thanks. It's quite an honor to be on The Amp Hour show.

Dave Jones: Well, thank you. It's an honor to have you. Tell us, well, tell the audience, for those who don't know you, who are you? What do you do?

Fran Blanche: I'm basically an average goofball. For some reason, I'm popular in electronics, but sort of do everything, you know, music and electronics and vlogging and sewing and other kinds of stuff. So, just ended up making a video channel and people started subscribing. And before you know it, people are requesting me to be on a big show like The Amp Hour.

Dave Jones: That's it. We're making personal appearances next. That's right, right. Yeah.

Fran Blanche: That's pretty much the story. So, I'm done. Thanks.

Dave Jones: It was great to have you on, Fran. Career over. Yeah. It's always great to have a fellow video blogger on. And, of course, you did, or are potentially still doing, I don't know, the Dinosaur Den with Bill Hurd, who's been on the show before. Yeah. That was great. Well, it wasn't on a podcast. I was about to say podcast. It's not. It's a streaming show, isn't it? It's a live streaming show?

Fran Blanche: No, it's recorded. Oh, it's recorded. Okay. It's recorded. It's a blog.

Dave Jones: Yeah, but it's recorded one take, isn't it? That's kind of what I mean.

Fran Blanche: Yeah. We edit it down. Oh, okay. You know, like we goof off a lot, so we have to edit out a lot. Right. Because we like to ramble, and we sort of get off track and get into really interesting discussions about things that are off topic, and so we edit it down, try and get it under an hour. You've got to fit in perfectly.

Dave Jones: That's exactly what we do every week. Yeah.

Fran Blanche: Mind is the editing under an hour. Mind is the editing, yeah, because we don't really edit.

Dave Jones: We just leave in the waffle, you know, like we're doing right now.

Fran Blanche: Delicious waffle.

Dave Jones: Extra waffles. Mmm, waffles. So you're famous in the music industry for your Frantone gear. Tell us about that.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, I'm probably most known for Frantone, but I've been doing that for 20, plus years now. Started in 94 doing Frantone. Is that before Chris was born? I wish I was that young. Yeah, it was way back in the 20th century. Yeah. Before the interwebs. Right. Yeah. We had steam-powered cars, and we talked to each other on paper with these pencils. We have to write everything down. It was, yeah, a long time ago. But sort of, I taught myself electronics kind of while I was working to doing this, managing this rental shop. It was like an equipment rental shop where they rent, you know, party tables and popcorn machines. Oh, right. And chainsaws and so. Chainsaws, right.

Fran Blanche: Okay. Freaky party.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, everything. So you get a lot of experience. And the guy who owned the business used to be one of the executive manufacturers, like a VP of manufacturing at Digital Computer Corporation back in the 60s and 70s and 80s in their heyday, and he had lots of stories about them, you know, developing instant replay for the NFL, which was a digital video storage back in the early 70s for instant replay. And, you know, the memory storage systems that they developed before, you know, the hard drives and such. And so we talked a lot about, you know, electronics. And he was like, well, you know, I'd really want to get into doing, make, you know, a business manufacturing something again, making some kind of widget, you know, didn't really know what, just kind of making something. And around that time, I had tinkered together a pedal just because I needed one. Gone. I was.

Dave Jones: This is a musical pedal. Yeah, it's a pedal.

Fran Blanche: Well, yeah, it's a little fuzz box. It's like me who don't know. Yeah, I was in a band.

Dave Jones: What is a fuzz box? Please explain it for the non-musically inclined like myself.

Fran Blanche: It just basically takes a perfectly good, clean signal and really messes it up in a desirable way.

Fran Blanche: That warm sound, right?

Fran Blanche: Fuzz boxes come in different sort of shapes and sizes. There's different flavors to them. Some of them are overdrives and some of them are clippers using diode rectifiers to clip, you know, clip the waveform. Overdrives use just to push the signal into another device to get that clipping, you know, using just clipping the amplifiers. And some of the fuzz boxes, the older ones used underbiasing, like, you know, underbiasing the transistors to get them to sort of go non-linear. which sounded great but you know they'd be very unpredictable because even like with early fuzz boxes even like changes in temperature would change sometimes yeah it wouldn't work so but there are different ways of doing it and my effects through the years have exploited different means of creating distortion to create different varieties so all my effects boxes are different they're all based on different principles some are clippers, some are overdrive, some are combinations of things, some are use compression some of them have you know parallel distortion chains which add and sort of mix different harmonics and get different more richer sound but yeah so over the years grand tone kind of grew although I didn't actually finish my story about how I started but basically basically this guy Mert and I we started frantone because he wanted to do manufacturing and we started making these boxes under the frantone name but it was sort of a risky thing back in those days there really wasn't a boutique anything like boutique pedals so we really weren't sure if people would you know buy a pedal made by a company that wasn't a huge huge manufacturer which wasn't fender or somebody exactly I mean because back in those days it was an effects pedal was just an accessory you know Fender, Ibanez, Gibson these large companies they made guitars, they made amplifiers and they made effects pedals that you know they sort of would upsell with some other kind of gear but starting a company just making effects was kind of a new idea back then

Dave Jones: and how did you get your foot in the door like selling to

Fran Blanche: distribution yeah for sure

Dave Jones: it was brutal actually

Fran Blanche: I learned you know learning the ins and outs and arounds of the music merchandising world it was a very long curve actually which is why like in 98 I actually shut down frantone and went to work for my competition I worked for electroharmonics which was a big pedal manufacturer in New York and I worked for them for a couple years and it was actually through working with them that I actually got inspired to just do frantone again full time and left in 2000 to start up frantone in Brooklyn again and that was sort of the restart and so yeah

Fran Blanche: I have an electroharmonics pedal right now sorry to say I don't have a frantone pedal but I have a

Fran Blanche: which EH pedal do you have?

Fran Blanche: I actually have the vocal I forget what it's called it's got like a vocoder on board just because I love vocoders and it's actually so it's a vocal pedal and it does like chorus and it does harmonies and whistling and stuff like that I can look it up but

Dave Jones: so these are things that you whack on the ground in front of you as you're playing your guitar and you use your foot to like okay I want to whack this effect in now bam and that's

Fran Blanche: yeah if you if you watch concert videos if they do like crane shots and where you see the stage you'll see like usually you see like huge boards just splattered with effects pedals

Fran Blanche: 9 volt plug-ins everywhere right yeah

Fran Blanche: and if and if there's a frantone pedal on the stage it's always front and center right in the front nice like right there awesome so I've noticed that

Dave Jones: some actually look like like a real pedal like an accelerator car pedal but others are like a box with like three knobs on them with like a big metal button in front right is that like those metal buttons are they yeah

Fran Blanche: well the word pedal it really does come from that fact that the first pedals were like foot adjustable actually pedals like little teeter totters because they came from the old organ controls you know the original pedals of course yes right for organ controls and also lap steel players you know country western lap steel players were the first to use pedals and like the original like wah pedals came from from lap steel tone controls which had like a little pedal that if you turned it left and right you could adjust the tone and if you adjust it you know down and up you adjust the volume and then you know and so that's sort of how it evolved but the word pedals now it's just a catch all word for anything on the floor with a button on it I got it

Fran Blanche: yeah sometimes it's called stamp boxes too right stamp boxes

Fran Blanche: right

Dave Jones: how do you not stomp on the knobs and things that's just I guess you have to just well you do

Fran Blanche: well you do yeah I can't right which is why you know when you design an effects pedal you want to take that in consideration you know try and put the knobs out of the way and and I always

Dave Jones: I thought the knobs would go like on the back side and they wouldn't go on the top they go on the back

Fran Blanche: some people design them that way right to have the controls completely out of the way

Dave Jones: so why don't you do that on yours

Fran Blanche: just aesthetics

Dave Jones: oh of course right yeah

Fran Blanche: I know some guitarists that actually end up they actually they modify the actual the knobs are big enough that they can use their like the foot or the toe of their shoe to actually modify the tone without actually bending down oh really yeah

Fran Blanche: yeah yeah well I did some pedals like that with the what I call a speed knob which is an oversized knob that you could actually use the side of your foot to adjust yeah so yeah but usually you you you design the layout of the pedal in such a way that if you stomp your foot on it that you don't change the settings and also I always use half watt pots alpha pots which have you have to apply some torque to get them to adjust so they're not too easy to just bounce around like them yeah that's nice

Fran Blanche: for shipping and moving around like when if you're touring and stuff right

Fran Blanche: well in touring rigs the knobs always get turned around so roadies they'll tape the knobs in position on amplifiers and pedals and stuff so yeah

Fran Blanche: do you know so I was going to ask about this I've always kind of romanticized the idea of effects pedals and stuff like that I always told myself well if I did that then I get to go hang out with rock stars and stuff like that yeah it could happen so Dr. Z is an amp manufacturer who's actually in Cleveland and I know there's a bunch of people that play Dr. Z amps and so I wonder do you get to hear about people that are using your Frantone stuff like on the road I do yeah

Fran Blanche: I never really sold a lot direct because I always had dealers that sell so it was usually just a rare occasion if I sold something direct to an artist but usually people would buy from a dealer in some other town that was just stocking my pedals but occasionally I would hear about it about someone buying a pedal but I never really made a list I never hounded people to tell me what celebrities were buying but they do and you know occasionally if I'm watching one of those video channels I'm watching a live show and we'll take a shot of the stage and I'll see one of my pedals sitting there or I get word that it's on an album someone will tell me oh I just used a pedal on a record or something which is cool it's one of the perks yeah right

Fran Blanche: I sold that to low cost to you yeah you better use it you better put me in the liner notes

Fran Blanche: over the years I've gotten to meet a lot of my heroes and either hang out with them or get to know them one way or another either through my products or through other work so I think there was a time about about eight or nine years ago where I started making a list of all the famous people that I had met and when it got to 100 I stopped so fantastic

Fran Blanche: so my hunch was right I should have started doing pedals at some point but you're right never did

Fran Blanche: yeah yeah I think it's a little probably a little past the

Fran Blanche: yeah

Fran Blanche: you know past the curve oh yeah

Fran Blanche: so I wanted to also ask about because the other thing that I remember from my past when I used to play guitar I remember there was this guy who called himself analog man you know what I'm talking about and he took these Ibanez one of the brands that Fran mentioned Ibanez the TS9 which is like a newer model and then he like retrofitted them to sound like the older model and that's the one that like Hendrix played or something like that TS808 was the Hendrix model or something like that and so I went and I bought one and then later on after I started actually learning more about electronics after I you know exited my guitar phase into the the electronics phase of my life when I stopped playing guitar I'm like the dude literally switched out a germanium transistor and he switched out a silicon for a germanium and a blue led and he charged $85 for it

Fran Blanche: that's cheap what are you talking about that's a that's a pretty good you know it's a pretty good profit margin yeah right

Dave Jones: so this this whole industry like with the effects pedals and everything else and a lot of this music stuff it's entirely subjective right it's like oh I like the sound of that you know peach fuzz frantone you know box so I'm going to use that you know I love that thing it's got nothing to do with specs or anything else right

Fran Blanche: well it's partly there's a lot of it there's a lot of it that is subjective I think most of the industry is subjective but but there's there's different levels I mean in the pro gear stuff it's all about the specs so so if you're

Dave Jones: the pro state yeah like mics and things like that well I mean

Fran Blanche: if you're designing anything for for you know for professional use or for touring acts especially stuff that's got to be performance ready and you know there's especially like my pedals they're it's not just about the audio it's also about the rugged design the kit you know the hardware the the way that the pedals actually built to be able to withstand shock to be able to be thrown and kicked around for years and years and not break industrial

Fran Blanche: design almost

Fran Blanche: very much so I used to I used to boast back in the early days that you could take a frantone pedal and you could drive over it with a car and then plug it and just play it because I made them so that would make

Dave Jones: a great video that would make a great promo video you have to do it

Fran Blanche: yeah back in the days when I used to fly I had an idea that I was going to actually drop one out of a plane into a field and like land in the field and like

Fran Blanche: plug it in and start playing

Dave Jones: oh that would be awesome do it yeah well yeah all you could do is go to a local airport hire a plane and a pilot it's not as easy these days throw it out the side it's not as easy these days as it was way back in the day yeah they're a

Fran Blanche: little they take it a little

Fran Blanche: seriously now for some reason what if what if you went skydiving and then you're like oh this pedal fell out of my pocket I totally forgot about it

Fran Blanche: yeah I thought there'd be a liability issue

Dave Jones: maybe just hook it to the bottom of a quad carter and let it drop

Fran Blanche: there you go 400 feet you can do that

Fran Blanche: easy okay well there you go you see now you're thinking you're thinking 21st century absolutely I'm thinking 20th century airplanes planes are so

Fran Blanche: 20th century

Fran Blanche: yeah exactly small planes are so 20th century so um so anyway Dave the um you got uh you got a board that I that I shipped like internationally I did

Dave Jones: the LVDC board

Fran Blanche: yeah so what did you think of that thing when you got it when you got to hold it

Dave Jones: it's just fascinating it's just I've still got a couple of chips from it by the way I had to keep a couple of little chips that pulled out from the video before I shipped it on can you give us

Fran Blanche: some context here Dave I'm sorry

Dave Jones: I don't know what this is it's the um launch vehicle digital computer for the Saturn 5 rocket um and I've done a video on which we'll have to link in and Fran's done a whole she did yeah I've seen some of the some of Fran's videos but I don't know x-rayed and everything

Fran Blanche: I watch Fran's videos but not yours Dave sorry

Dave Jones: oh okay yeah of course you don't watch any of my stuff

Fran Blanche: no I'm sorry

Dave Jones: anyway so yeah it's the one of the boards we do we still do we know which one I don't think we ever found out did we

Fran Blanche: no I wasn't able to

Speaker ?: there's so many

Fran Blanche: boards in it yeah there's uh was several dozen like less than a hundred I think it was uh boards in the in the main unit but um yeah the I was never able to there was like no number on the board it wasn't like no you couldn't

Dave Jones: get in the info but yeah it was like it's actually surprisingly modern they're like a ceramic sort of hybrid uh package in these like surface mount clips which were kind of like convert them into surface mount packages right this is back in the 60s and because the um Apollo program and the um space program actually pioneered you know computers and modern uh construction techniques and all sorts of stuff and it's got like a is it an eight layer board or something it's 12 12 12 12 layer board

Fran Blanche: and like it's that's what time frame is this the 60s or 70s

Dave Jones: 60s probably

Fran Blanche: yeah the original design wasn't it yeah well the original design came from around 6061 when it was proposed and then the first prototypes were built around 63s it was Gemini era uh yeah it was built during the Gemini era

Fran Blanche: that's crazy

Fran Blanche: and the other thing that you know I really never talked about is the fact that the the computer was it was liquid cooled so the entire the entire computer was uh immersed in in cooling liquid uh which went through which was pumped through the whole uh case uh and then kept at a constant temperature uh but yeah it's um and you had the resistors underneath you had the semiconductors on the top it was pretty revolutionary uh for its time

Dave Jones: and yeah it's it's incredible and we're not talking like super density here these chips contain like a couple of transistors each right well they they had to be

Fran Blanche: rad hardened because they were gonna they were gonna have to operate out of the atmosphere uh and um so there was there they didn't take any chances with any they did rather than experimenting with something new like like the microchip technology that used on the Apollo guidance computer which uh which they were able to refine a little later the LVDC had to be designed sooner because they had to have the rocket before they needed the command module so so there was a bit of a curve there so rather than using like any like really new experimental technology they went with this hybrid technology they're using dyes that they'd used for a while they were using you know very established um um technologies with building up the hardware but putting it in a really compact little package so that's what those little hybrid uh SLD packages are

Fran Blanche: that's crazy and this

Dave Jones: is using transistor resistor logic you know like it's a

Dave Jones: it's a

Dave Jones: it's a it's a

Dave Jones: it's a it's a

Dave Jones: it's a yes it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a

Fran Blanche: but they had transistors in there just for buffers and inverters but in typical dTL fashion but yeah it's just resistors and diodes and um using diode logic which was you know it was very fast it was cool it didn't produce a lot of heat uh and it was uh super reliable so yeah

Dave Jones: and and they had like a you know like a hundred of these boards all in this module all liquid cooled as you said and and there were

Fran Blanche: three and there were also three identical redundant computers computers to yep so yep so they had like a hundred boards or so in each um computer case and then they had three of them which ran in parallel they ran the same program in parallel and then they had a voting system so uh so two out of three if there was a failure or an inconsistency in the programming or in the processing of the telemetry you know for the real-time guidance system uh that it would uh there was a the two two would win whatever the decision would be yeah so uh and they had like they had acoustic delay lines in there and like in the rocket like glass delay lines that they got to work in a inside this shuddering vibrating vibrating massive right we'll just average out all of the all of the vibration right so it's it's the loudest it's the loudest thing humans ever invented right the loudest machine ever invented it was saturn 5 and yeah like how loud like it was yeah it was like the loudest uh human made machine uh at the at the time yeah uh decibels i couldn't tell you but it was definitely

Fran Blanche: yeah i guess that's kind of dependent on distance too right i mean uh well yeah but staying close enough you're gonna get liquefied anyway so so nice to say

Fran Blanche: that inside of the rocket it was probably at the loudest and that's actually where they put the delay lines so that was quite a challenge that's

Dave Jones: incredible yeah

Fran Blanche: that's crazy

Dave Jones: fascinating things about the and and sort of sad things about the saturn 5 rocket we still have not we couldn't make it today the saturn 5 rocket because the well the um all the basically most of the technical stuff for it is gone isn't it they threw it away it's missing or whatever it's like

Fran Blanche: able to uh you wouldn't be able to build another one no you wouldn't be able to build another one yeah you'd have to start from scratch uh and which is what they're doing with orion you know and they're building a new system which you know this this heavy launch system which will be the the this the most powerful rocket uh since the saturn

Fran Blanche: isn't it just like you put a bunch of stuff on top of a thing that explodes upwards isn't that kind of i know i said stupid things about space in the past and then recanted them later yeah i think

Dave Jones: werner von braun would say there's a bit more science to it than that yeah you

Fran Blanche: can uh you can google the go upper five oh yeah the xkcd thing i'm

Fran Blanche: looking at that right now actually yeah i

Fran Blanche: haven't seen that what's that the go upper five you'll have to link that in yeah i think there's somewhere in there where it says uh yeah it says like up go or five the up go or five yeah yeah yeah and the pointy end goes has to point to space and if it's not pointing to space you're not gonna have a very good day

Dave Jones: the people box it was

Fran Blanche: trying to use the ten thousand ten thousand common words in english i know that and to to actually explain this um explain this very complicated thing that's why it's written so

Dave Jones: oddly right oh dear is is it inevitable here's something that sprung to mind is it inevitable that given enough time anything would um you know we would just lose the information on this stuff you would think that like you know this was before the internet so everything was written down on paper you know the blueprints drawings you think they would have kept them right you think they could actually survive uh very

Fran Blanche: little of it's very little survives actually it was on my mind today just this very very thing that um they like the the lvd support like the the board that we got to experiment on for example and like the the lvdc board that i have in my collection the one i did not disassemble um a lot of people ask me you know how could you possibly get this board where did it come from and i said well it might be really rare today to be able to get a piece of apollo hardware but you know 20 30 years ago there were tens of thousands of contractors in throughout the country that were throwing away tons of apollo hardware industrial surplus not just the parts but the machinery the special you know custom purpose-built machines just to do one operation for one part um there were there were there was an unbelievable amount of machinery and raw materials and parts that were thrown out because and the vast majority probably i if i'd estimate maybe 95 98 percent of everything built for the apollo program was thrown out after the apollo program went over very only a small percentage of it actually ended up in hardware that flew um but for for every but for every contractor that made a component they had to have spares and they had to have years of uh testing samples and they had to have you know buildings full of machinery and you know uh just the hundreds of thousands of people that made the millions of parts and so in the 70s and 80s these companies they were purging you know buildings full of records and like all the films and audio tapes and records they had to keep for testing every single part it all got thrown out because it was just there was so much of it you know because money

Fran Blanche: right i mean that's i mean honestly that's what it comes down to it's like yeah hey we need to keep making money this stuff's just sitting here taking up room and

Dave Jones: there was probably a sense of like you know done and dusted kind of thing right apollo done tick moon

Fran Blanche: done yeah well after 74 it was that it was made clear that they weren't going to build another saturn so um everyone pretty much bailed very quickly on the replacement parts and such and you know it's just the the space that all that equipment took up you know um had to be cleared and so all the machinery went to salvage all the parts got auctioned off and and if you were a collector back in the 70s and 80s i mean you could go down to huntsville alabama and go to an auction and put down 20 bucks for a skid full of uh you know a boxes of parts and walk away with exactly and so a lot of people did that and actually my board came from a guy who just you know won a blind auction down there and and the board was one of the one of the things in the box so it's like that that reality

Fran Blanche: show where they they bid on uh the yeah storage storage units yeah storage wars yep space storage wars exactly that's

Dave Jones: really sad we have we entered because it's a different world today right everything's digital right nobody keeps paper copies of anything anymore hardly right in engineering design yeah well we're freaks right we're i mean i'm

Fran Blanche: still using typewriters so yeah okay but

Dave Jones: the yeah most of the world is um yeah is like all digital is that better or worse it's more ephemeral do you think it's

Fran Blanche: more ephemeral the the the the i think

Dave Jones: the in terms of long term you know guy who

Fran Blanche: makes funky titles ask the question what does ephemeral mean what is the definition of ephemeral sorry yeah i apologize my i

Fran Blanche: look these words up temporary uh yes you see the there um i think that young people who grew up with the internet there is a sense of believing in the internet as a permanent thing but it's it's completely dependent on our technology i mean if we suffered a natural disaster where we would lose the ability to maintain the internet or to or if we have an environmental catastrophe like of global warming for example where where we lose the ability to maintain our technological infrastructure to to keep building computers and to to keep um story all that data yeah exactly um we could have a technological tumble where we lose our ability to do high-end engineering or high-end manufacturing could happen and then you know we lose everything um because we don't have libraries because we don't have books because we don't have anything written down and centuries in the future and you know there's this um theory which you can read about where people have written about this idea of a that were that the current time like this the early 21st century could be in the future a a technological black hole because as standards change as technologies change where you know like if like you could imagine if the whole world were store if the entire knowledge of the world was stored on three and a half inch floppies you know where where would it be today uh so you could take that you know ahead of a century or two and see that um all of our technologies today that we used to store our information won't exist in 100 years 200 years and and even if the records did exist no one would know how to decipher them or read them you

Dave Jones: know so we shorter time span than that we've talked about this on the show before about you know keeping development tools and things like that for only for projects that are like you know less than a decade old you know because the development tools just change and like if you don't keep a copy of it you won't be able to get it again and you keep

Fran Blanche: fran and i were talking uh when we were sitting on the show she's still on uh xp and it's like right because of the dev tools yeah i

Fran Blanche: mean like totally i'm doing this i'm actually doing this on an xp computer right so um which

Fran Blanche: is now that's not unusual i mean like about yeah

Dave Jones: yeah i know that there's production test gear which i've designed um that is still running windows 3.11 right and dos stuff i mean because like yeah because there was no reason to update it yet you still need to use this to actually produce stuff and you know yeah it's i thought that the library of

Fran Blanche: congress was storing all of my tweets though i thought that was a thing or is that when i

Dave Jones: tweet the president that's important to

Fran Blanche: store yeah yeah i mean like someone's printing this stuff out somewhere right

Dave Jones: yeah we're on a they're printing it out on a daisy wheel printer right right right yeah right okay dot matrix like no no not that modern dot matrix daisy wheel do you know what a daisy wheel printer is i do not you young whippersnapper sorry sorry oh it's it was where you would actually have a wheel it's it's like a typewriter you know you would actually have a wheel that's why they caused it a daisy wheel that would and around the edge of the wheel they would actually have the letter you know each letter actually formed as a little thing which strikes the strikes through the ribbon right just like on a typewriter and and that daisy wheel and then the computer would select which character it wants boom and a little hammer had come down and it'd press against the ribbon it would hammer that letter onto the page so you've got this beautifully formed letter instead of it being made out of dot matrix yeah all it took was three minutes for letter right yeah it was hopeless back in the day you know because they started out as nine pin dot matrix printers and the

Fran Blanche: quality was awful well when i was when i was younger i used to i had a job working in a in a computer room where they actually had a printing room in the building where they just did the printing for the this mainframe which took up three other rooms and they had these and they were printing out what is this magic you speak of yeah well yeah this is this is back when they had computers you know allow me to look this up in my pocket computer yeah exactly but in the printing room they had these large high-speed printers that printed out forms that used a steel ribbon that moved at really high speed and then the the they had strikers that you know every single position for a character would have a striker in a stationary position and the ribbon would just spin at super high speed and as the paper would come up it would you know the strikers would be synchronized to hit the right character when it lined up you know the right spot and you know and the the forms would run continuously that was high-speed printing back in back in the 80s early 80s yeah and then you had form bursters which were which which would separate the um the forms they could they come out of the printer and you put them in this other kind of weird machine that would like cut them up and everything for for mailing it's like uh that's that's what it was like you know back in the day

Fran Blanche: i've seen things man i've seen things

Dave Jones: but yeah like those daisy wheel printers couldn't be beat if you wanted like a nice beautiful text quality you know dot matrix just didn't cut the mustard i'm afraid yeah you could also get fancy fancy you know ones that had like 36 pins or

Fran Blanche: whatever well you also had um i think the selectric the ibm selectric 3 ibm selectric yeah um i think the the three had an interface where you you would actually store you could store documents and then print out and that that those are very high speed too so um that the later uh ibm selectric series could interface with computers and be used as a like a print like a

Dave Jones: computer printer i wonder if anyone anyone's still using those somewhere uh some nuclear bunker down in

Fran Blanche: some dmv like what it's like the selectric i'm staring at one right now on my desk so fantastic

Fran Blanche: that'll do it yeah yeah yeah yeah what do you what do you just use it for like

Fran Blanche: writing is it like the i i use it to type characters on paper um and you can read them yes and you can read them with without uh without like need of electricity uh so uh yeah yes yeah yeah it's a fancy thing

Fran Blanche: what do you what do you use it for uh i use it for typing

Fran Blanche: but what do you mean to people what do you i don't think i'm really using i don't think i'm really explaining the definition of what type means

Fran Blanche: type letters what do you use it for though i say what was those letters you speak of yes yeah is that like email but on paper after you print them out is that what that

Fran Blanche: yeah exactly it's uh it's like a form of email only it's like real

Fran Blanche: one of my favorite comedians talks about uh uh uh when the phone book arrives and he says it's like when the uh they print out part of the internet for you to throw away oh goodness no but seriously do you do you find that you um i know some people like they they uh they they prefer typewriters for you know just uh for the creative process and kind of like writing uh writing i always see novelists talking about that with with books and stuff like that is it is it stuff is it a certain type of writing or is it just any anything you write

Fran Blanche: differently when you type it's um yeah there's uh and there are certain writers who prefer uh specific mediums that i mean there i there are certain writers who prefer to write in longhand who prefer to

Dave Jones: type on a typewriter um is that because of the permanency of it you've got to think more about

Fran Blanche: before you actually hit the keys or it's slower well yeah i think you don't you don't type at least i don't type as fast as if you're on a word processor because you can go back and alter it that's what i'm

Dave Jones: talking about the word processor yeah easy to correct things so yeah i think there's uh you there's more

Fran Blanche: of a thinking process ahead of time before you actually put your words into type it's it's uh yeah it's a different uh it's definitely different type of thinking who's who's the author of that um

Dave Jones: uh the um hugely popular um that tv show um the you know the medieval one god what's it called um game of thrones game of thrones that game of thrones author george or uh yeah somebody he um yeah uses like a dos machine he uses like wordstar or something on a like an old ibm you know 8086 dos wordstar thing um because he says well it does the job i don't need anything better you know and he stores them on like five and a quarter floppies or something so apparently like even his yeah all of his modern books game of thrones books so yeah there was some um he's not done with the

Fran Blanche: series yet either though so he's probably run out of discs right yep yeah i i i love how it when all

Dave Jones: the fans um said you know hurry up and finish the next book he said f off you know like just like just like that it was great you know like do it when i'm goddamn good and ready

Fran Blanche: uh so friend you find it though that you you are in the similar boat like of like uh it uh it triggers certain things like creatively or what yeah i like writing letters you know i'm a

Fran Blanche: i'm a letter writer so um yeah i haven't said a letter i still well well i think i did i i not

Fran Blanche: yeah and i typed it where when when with the board with the board man yeah seriously oh it's the board oh right okay right how do you think you understood what the hell was going on there right

Fran Blanche: you forgot about my hand typed letter to go with my with with the saturn sorry with the saturn 5 board that i sent you yes thank you just look like a word document i swear i mean nothing to you i feel so ashamed you're seeing another vlogger aren't you

Dave Jones: god the secret's out i'm sorry friend i'm sorry i still i i still use fountain pens i've got a

Fran Blanche: large collection of fountain pens and uh quills and uh typewriters and um you know i still i still i have my own uh wax letter seal and stuff like that so so yeah um you know i i'm sort of fond of

Fran Blanche: letters so and i live in philadelphia so you know i was going to ask you about this so first off uh word up to the to the old school american towns that no one really cares about anymore i guess philly people care about more than cleveland but uh i love philly i love philadelphia so much my buddy

Fran Blanche: lives out there yes we uh we have pretzels and a and a bell that's got a crack in it that's right

Fran Blanche: ben franklin probably had some french ladies over there at some point

Fran Blanche: well he had he had lots of ladies um at many points yeah for for many decades i was telling people that you know but if it weren't for ben franklin getting a bunch of french guys laid we wouldn't have won the war because that's really what it was you know yeah john adams was uh he was always pissed off you know that uh franklin was so popular but he you know he knew how to get people to do things by yeah yeah um port wine and and women you know went a long way to to getting uh

Fran Blanche: to getting us to uh defeat the british yeah right all those people that signed the declaration independence most of them were wasted a lot of them were wasted on franklin's uh port wine which

Dave Jones: apparently uh it was very fun yeah it was just at this huge orgy they just decided to pin this thing you know hey hey sign this sign this man what is it man so it'll be awesome trust me just

Fran Blanche: yeah screw the british whatever uh so why uh how'd you end up in philly what what's up with what's

Fran Blanche: the story there just always been there my well no i've lived in pennsylvania most of my life you know um i'm uh you know born and raised uh in the outskirts of philly which back in the old days was just the rural expanse of pennsylvania but now it's you know it's all built in now but um but yeah i mean i'm i've always been around philly so um it's just uh just sort of other than the 10 years i spent in new york i've uh pretty much always been around here cool so yeah no and i know there's

Fran Blanche: there's like a really big like art community around there now and i've i've seen some of your stuff too like like you i mean like you you know a lot of artists are in the area and stuff right i mean

Fran Blanche: like um yeah there it is a big art town it always has been you know we've got a great we've lots of great museums galleries and um so and not just you know music sculpture painting it's always been a hub um and in old city there are still clubs that have existed for you know you know either 100 or several hundred years that are that do like arts clubs that have flourished in philly for since the colonial days even so yeah but yeah it's and you know franklin too you know was uh you know an artist and uh publisher and uh scientist so there's always been this um sort of tradition in the franklin tradition of kind of doing everything under the sun uh like the polymath style right

Fran Blanche: yeah you know which i think you know describes you as well right i mean like i think that you do a lot

Fran Blanche: of interesting things and that's that's a very similar thing yeah i dabble you know i i i hate to be idle so i just sort of fill up my time doing projects uh so yeah i do tend to do a lot yeah

Dave Jones: somebody on twitter asked um how is the uh how is the uh project going with the diskey i ran out of time and money

Fran Blanche: um what is this project sorry i don't know sorry oh okay well i get to play the dumb guy

Fran Blanche: yeah it's uh it's a little um it the project is a little overblown because i i i made i started a project last year or at least i announced or start talking about the project last year although i've been doing it for a while to um to build a reproduction of the um of the display that was in the apollo guidance computer the the diskey interface the you know display keyboard it's the famous one with the

Dave Jones: keyboard and the you know that they use in apollo 13 movie oh okay okay okay thing yeah so but i set

Fran Blanche: out to do a reproduction of the actual display uh electrolutinous and display um which you know i went to the smithsonian i got access to real apollo diskies i got to disassemble and look at some real apollo hardware um but i you know so i was so so jealous of that well you know it got uh the blogger started looking at the project i was doing and so people were saying that i was going to build a whole diskey and make an operational diskey and i i was never going to do that i didn't have access to to that kind of information didn't have enough information to reproduce the whole system but i i was setting out to rebuild the the actual display itself and uh and i have all the the data it's just it ended up being such an expensive project because the um to get the machining done for the case and also to get the chemistry because i in order to get the chemistry i have to order directly from the from the manufacturer and they don't sell in small quantities i have to buy industrial quantities so goodness so it was getting to be like a project that was going to cost me about you know between five and five and ten thousand dollars to finish um so and you know so i'm still waiting to get you know the 10 grand in funding and the and the you know the three four hundred hours in time

Dave Jones: that sounds like the harder part to be honest yeah so isn't that supposed to be easy these days

Fran Blanche: with crowdfunding huh yeah money is but not time you can't crowd yeah right yeah i know you can't

Fran Blanche: magically produce time yeah yeah but you can't really crowdfund something that no one's going to

Dave Jones: get anything out of you know yeah i know you gotta like sell t-shirts or something yeah it's yeah yeah i backed the apollo diski you know i think i i gotta i backed i backed the stompy project just

Fran Blanche: based on the bumper sticker to be honest so i think if you come up what is the stompy project it was a six-legged rideable uh robot the the 18 foot two-person rideable robot out of

Fran Blanche: did they actually build it they did yeah oh did you get to ride you didn't even get a ride it's

Fran Blanche: actually uh gee was one of the founders and he's the one who's doing that new i don't know if you saw the thing where the the large mechatronic robot that challenged japan challenged japan what yeah what are they gonna you guys didn't hear about this oh no we can talk about it on here too uh yeah no there was uh so so they got they ended up they did a first kickstarter where they they built a huge robot they wanted to do like a robot league where they're fighting each other and then that kind of fell flat they didn't get their kickstarter autodesk supported them for a while and gee and i i think matt uh i forget i forget matt's i think it's matt uh but they were building that thing and then they just started a new kickstarter where they challenged japan to an actual 15 20 foot robot battle and then same kind of thing where it's like you can it's gonna be like america versus japan all right so i'll probably back that too just for the bump just for the bumper sticker i mean honestly like i think it has more power than we think here folks to be honest i

Fran Blanche: mean like so yeah well i know the i know that the japanese have been joneson to have robots battle for like decades so yeah exactly right you know ever since the days of godzilla yeah well you know we need the robots to defeat godzilla i mean how are you gonna defeat godzilla if you don't have

Fran Blanche: the robot army ready right exactly yeah so so anyways what i'm trying to say though is if uh if you need some funding for this project i think that it's totally doable to to do it based on bumper stickers like i sent i i recreated the the chaos of the apollo 13 thing or something i don't i don't

Dave Jones: know it would have to be much there um there's a or there was or is a crowdfunding campaign to restore um armstrong's original suit that he wore on the surface apparently they're they're restoring that um i think the smithsonians involved in it and uh i can't remember the name of it but yeah that was very recently i just checked that out and i think it reached his funding goal they wanted like i don't

Fran Blanche: know half a million bucks or something well it was only a few months ago they they found armstrong's private stash of artifacts um his widow oh yeah really yeah he had he had uh one of the cameras and a bunch of stuff they took to the moon that he had kept private no one knew about it wouldn't you i didn't hear about that okay yeah ah yeah here it is i've got the article up yes the

Dave Jones: smithsonian um their first online crowdfunding project they raised um uh a 719 000 they wanted 500 1000 to restore armstrong's uh suit so yeah apparently that's going to happen so they're going to restore it and put it back in because apparently you know it's like with age of course what is it 50 years old right well the spacesuits yeah well the spacesuits have been degrading for

Fran Blanche: decades because they were they were made out of uh they were they used a lot of um dissimilar materials to to create them uh which over time yeah there was like there was like 18 layers weren't there or something well yeah they they used a lot of like latex and brass and things that react that you know in storage have reacted with one another so the various layers have yeah have been destroying like the closures were brat had brass and latex and other materials all in you know in contact with one another and they've they've been disintegrating for decades so yeah they really

Dave Jones: weren't designed to last no no that's right they were designed to a job as everything in a potloid was you know exactly and and the entire program you know so yep lucky that we've got anything left well after all this time you know that's a long time you know it's 50 years that's a long time

Fran Blanche: well all of the flown stuff is still around uh so i mean the smithsonian and uh you know huntsville and and various other places they a lot of the hardware both the flown stuff and the stuff that

Dave Jones: was used in testing is still around i've seen the original apollo 11 command module so um oh you've been to the you've been to dc i've been to the smithsonian yes i have yep i've been to the air and space museum it's awesome love to go again and spend more time there

Fran Blanche: apparently they've changed locations too i didn't realize that that they moved they moved some of

Fran Blanche: this stuff yeah uh there's a new location for the for the stuff that does that didn't fit in oh it's like an overflow okay right they've got a very they've got a larger facility that's outside the city for the that's where they have the concord and they've got the shuttle and yeah all the other

Fran Blanche: blackboards out there or something like that is that right uh the that's actually in the main

Fran Blanche: uh well it is okay i haven't been oh no the sr 71 yeah it would be uh outside that they have yeah that'd be too big to be inside so they have the x1 and uh oh and the x15 and in the original

Dave Jones: yep i've seen that yeah they do but yeah they have to post a photo of me with the apollo 11

Fran Blanche: capsule maybe i've got one somewhere yeah i did a little video tour when i was down there for a couple days uh um i got sort of did a walkabout through the the old museum on the mall uh and before i went to the uh storage facility in second day so so i ended that video too um got some good shots of the um apollo 11 equipment and such so yeah it's an amazing place to and in the in the early days um if you look at old archival photos when they first opened up the um the air and space museum they didn't they didn't have all the protection on some of the artifacts like you could you know um right yeah what do you like walk up and like grab something or what yeah there was yeah it was it was different i think that i think i saw some early photos where they originally had like the capsules displayed without the shrouds on them and stuff i think they kind of put them on very early but um but i think

Dave Jones: yeah that reminds me when i first went to england i went to the british museum right and i was just i wandered in the door and just there like right in the doorway i wandered past and i went that's the rosetta stone and i went you know i looked at like i was and it was just like sitting there it was just like sitting there and it was just like a rope like there was a kind of sort of a rope there you know and i went i think that that's damn it that's the rosetta so you know here i am just touching the rosetta stone you know nobody cares right and then i went back like you know eight years later 10 years later and now it's all oh yeah it's all encased in a big security thing you know and it's

Fran Blanche: like yeah right now it's the rosetta stone that's been touched by a crazy aussie that's been touched

Dave Jones: by a crazy aussie exactly yeah so yeah extra valuable ah the old days you know when they didn't care

Fran Blanche: right yeah i think about that too with like the uh when i was out in vegas doing the the tour of the the hoover dam and stuff like that that used to be like you could walk anywhere you could like walk up to the sherbans and stuff like that now it's like it's a totally different tour than what it used to be because of that because it's like for safety but then also yeah you know like preserving the actual and terrace and all that sort of crap yeah all that yeah i mean but but mostly the mostly just preserving the the artifact kind of thing so i want the old days back please how did you get it how did you get in all this space stuff as well i mean like so it was mostly just interest based

Fran Blanche: around the oh i've always i mean i i watched the um i watched the apollo 11 moon landing on tv you know back when it happened and um i've always uh from the my my earliest memories i've always been fascinated with um nasa and space and apollo and so um yeah it's just been a lifelong interest as i think a lot of people yeah who grew up during that time you know that really kept you know the kind of embodied their childhood you know uh you know moon moon helmets and uh astronaut ice cream anything yeah anything well this is before them but um you know uh anything moon related uh was just sort of um um sort of uh that's what childhood was like you know it was moon yeah it was everything back then

Dave Jones: it was like everything you know these guys were heroes like you know that you know now it's bloody stupid singers who can't sing and all that sort of crap right youtube stars right yeah youtube yeah pathetic youtube stars and uh and you know but back then like you know the heroes and the famous people were the uh astronauts and before that like people don't realize like back in the early uh 20th century right you know and at the um start of the century like you know scientists were the rock stars sure right the einsteins and everyone else right they were like the most famous people in the world they're the ones who were on the celebrity gossip pages sure thomas edison and nikola tesla and

Fran Blanche: you know alexander graham bell they were the heroes of the age yeah they were they were yeah what's

Fran Blanche: happened i weep for the future how do we get back there come on let's let's hear let's hear your

Fran Blanche: suggestions and we'd have to have like uh we'd have to like do videos uh about electronics that people could see on this okay interwebs um and uh people would have an option of putting pushing a button that doesn't really like exist but it's like a it's like a drawing of a button and if they pushed that drawing of a button then they would actually become a subscriber to this show they could see whether or not they like something right yeah yeah right yeah we could think about that maybe that's not such a good idea maybe we'll try that but you know um i don't think it'll catch on yeah it's a long shot but you know we could do some try something like this you know um you know maybe

Fran Blanche: people maybe people watch it you know someday someday we can dream we can dream i bet there's

Dave Jones: no money in that no one's gonna do it no you'd have to also you'd have to invent stuff that changes

Fran Blanche: the world that's that's some sort of the harder thing to do i you know i i do wonder you know is there are the days uh when an individual could invent something that changed the world are those days really over i mean the the singular inventor like tesla like um like philof arnsworth uh you know like uh like edwin armstrong these people who um came up with fundamental principles fundamental designs that that really the whole world got formed around um you know because you're never going to have uh another another try you know the the triode can only be invented once super heterogyning can only be invented once so are we beyond the age of discovery where where pretty much uh technologies are just going to be so sophisticated so complex so deep that no individual will be uh responsible for something new

Dave Jones: this is actually a big debate in the nobel prize circles because it's becoming you know almost impossible these days to especially in the physics side of things to uh you know invent something on your own that you win a sole nobel prize for for example it's always you know a massive team it's

Fran Blanche: always you know you need this all of cern yeah yeah yeah like you need the whole cern reactor you need

Dave Jones: the whole you know yet somebody has to win the prize and right it's like you know and that's much talked about you know gone and pretty much everyone's saying yeah gone are the days where somebody can just win it on their own i think through research they did on their own part of

Fran Blanche: that is is mythos as well right so like some of it is like like okay so well obviously edison but like even like philofarnsworth and tesla like they have like the lone wolf like inventor type thing but it's like look they had they had assistants they had like they were doing a lot of on the shoulders of giants too well yeah and of course everyone does that right i mean it's not like obviously you know we are broadcasting across the internet right and we are we are talking about electronics and we we don't really necessarily understand at the base level but like uh you know like yeah all of these things you know like there are other people but it's also about figure heads and i think that you know there there are definite exceptions like tesla i think you know i've i've been reading his uh have you guys read the the colorado springs journal you know what that is

Fran Blanche: no i have his book of um i have the compendium of his writings but i i haven't read uh some of the

Fran Blanche: other related works to so basically it was like he his his journal from when he spent like like the late the late late uh 19th century like 1898 onward i think he was in colorado springs and he was just doing experiments right and like and like reading about that stuff it's it's it's nuts because it's like just reading all of this circuit theory where it's like you know he's talking about jars where it's really capacitors and stuff like that but like like this guy this guy really knew his stuff but even still like you know like he had assistants he had people running experiments for him

Fran Blanche: along the along the way so sure well i mean but edison even more so because uh edison was a superior he was an administrator where he had he had hundreds of engineers working for him you know i doubt that edison other than perhaps maybe with the exception of the phonograph there wasn't a single thing that the edison and edison had hundreds of thousands of patents and but there probably wasn't any single machine that he actually designed and built um after the first ones but there were like people like edwin armstrong who came up with uh you know super heterodyning and frequency modulated audio um you know these these were you know there were scientists and inventors who were singularly like really just out on their own uh so but you know again you know i mean like again sorry sorry

Fran Blanche: to sorry to like question this but like how substantiated is that because even i think about like so i think about like like an elon musk these days right like people like like personally personally i i review the guy but like he's not inventing anything like honestly he's not but i imagine i imagine 30 30 years down the line his mythos is going to be like oh well he invented the tesla car

Fran Blanche: you know i don't think so i mean it's i think people are pretty uh pretty aware that he is he is very much like edison he's an administrator of of science and a dreamer and everything yeah he's the one who like a monitor almost yeah yeah yeah i would think that the comparisons between edison and musk are strong because they they're they're kind of the same kind of person you know a very good administrator bring together talent uh bring it under one roof uh very driven um for research you know there's a lot of commonality between those two two camps you know between the the the edison uh you know edison and um and and musk and you know spacex it it you know he's all about research um you know product development research and materials um you know he's expanding into solar power and so is you know he's he's definitely the new edison i i definitely would see him that way in the best way possible right but

Fran Blanche: so you're saying but you're saying that there's still there's still the people out there that are the

Fran Blanche: the solos so you said like the armstrong the well i i wonder if there really is room because uh there's just there's so much um so much fundamental science is already known it's it's very difficult to imagine that that individuals will make profound discoveries of anything yeah um because the um it's in the physical sciences and electronics and in mathematics uh the the outer realms are it's very very dicey to really think that there are even frontiers i mean even like in physics the the the debate has been for decades whether physics is really like has reached the frontier where

Fran Blanche: there's there's just we don't have super string versus whatever else is out there type of stuff

Fran Blanche: you're going beyond experimental science so are you is are you really discovering are you really discovering things are you making up reality when you can't when you can no longer um prove your ideas through experimental application right measurement type stuff yeah yeah so you know in there in lots of frontiers in science it's like you're hitting the wall of human understanding there's there's there's a cognitive limit and even stephen hawking had worried about you know where the where the actual limit of human understanding is uh you know where the in where the any individual will simply not be able to understand or comprehend or or process beyond a certain point and that's where you get into the idea that uh that teams of people have to do projects or that um computers have to to solve our problems for us we have to build ai type stuff you know yeah we have to build computers to understand for us and of course when we do that you know are we writing ourselves out of the equation and are we handing over our future and our dependence on machines that we build that we will soon cease to understand ourselves you know well so that's the danger yeah and i do wonder if um the 20th century really was the age of the human inventor and if the 21st 22nd centuries are going to be the age of machine and machines that invent things you know we'll have to find out yeah my gut tells me

Dave Jones: not so much as you might think oh it's possible look dave's on the side of not robots again that's weird folks that's weird you know yeah everyone craps on about ai and you know the you know the famous hawking mask hawking mask and who else got together recently and you know oh we shouldn't build you know autonomous was wasn't it wasn't right it was yeah yeah yeah there was that's right yeah three of them got together at some robot conference and and warned everyone that yes we should not pursue this path of you know um machines that can think you know like you know fully autonomous robots that can think etc you know the whole terminator thing um that's what it's pretty much all about yeah i yeah well you know yeah i think they're probably right but they're not you know it's not going to be like it's not going to happen you know in the next decade or two you know it's like you know there's

Fran Blanche: that company skynet they're doing good work i i trust them i think it'll work out really well you know they've got sounds good yeah they've got gangbusters yeah yeah they've got this uh machine that i think it's gonna do the world a lot of good skynet you know remember that you know i have the t800 but

Fran Blanche: i was wondering i think next year i might get the t900 but then after that i don't know what else there will be

Dave Jones: yeah it's probably have you seen the new movie there's another movie really there's another

Fran Blanche: terminator yes oh my god no yeah have you seen the new one didn't they like cgi schwarzenegger to

Dave Jones: make him look like 30 years younger or something yeah yeah yeah yeah and he fights himself yeah it's cool um no but that was yeah that was fascinating it was like yeah the you know the skynet was like you know modern mobile phones you know the intelligence that goes into modern phones and everything and there was this huge countdown the premise of the movie if you haven't seen it's not really a spoiler

Fran Blanche: but yeah tune out now when you say new one what do you mean like in the past two years do you mean

Dave Jones: like the one that was like okay yeah the terminator what is it salvation or whatever what's the latest terminator i just went to see it like i don't know it's like the rocky films you know i gave up

Fran Blanche: after rocky nine or something but is it this new uh this new terminator movie is this the one is mr t in this one or is this the one with mr t is this the one with uh is dolf wangren in this terminator i pity the fool

Dave Jones: i pity the fool

Chris Gammell: i pity the fool don't give me no back talk sucker put your jibba jibba first name mister middle name period last name t jettapool jettapool jettapool jettapool jettapool don't give me no back shut up what the hell is that

Fran Blanche: what the hell was that it's mr t he's uh he's right in here with me

Dave Jones: oh i love it uh terminated genesis sorry terminated genesis is the latest one yes it came out this year year i just saw it a couple of months back and the whole like the premise of it is that like you know the whole world is waiting for this sky you know this is huge global countdown the skynet company or whatever you know it's like counting down it's going to be the latest operating system that you know goes in everybody's smartphones and smart devices is going to connect everything to everything and it's going to you know have all the bells and whistles and um you know make your toast and all that sort of jazz and yeah that was the whole premise behind it was that it it took over you know everyone was waiting for it it was so you know it was going to tie everything together and i don't know it's just that's the thing that's why i think it's not going to happen because everything all systems are different like you know you can't just go you know oh yeah it's you know a super robot will be able to you know put artificial intelligence in it will be able to

Fran Blanche: do everything i think the threat of yeah no i think the threat of artificial intelligence is a very subtle one because i i think it's something that over over time uh degrades the that the human position in in the culture that we created true you know and so you know we're looking at is uh you know over time people will you know it's like these days especially younger people i think they there is a mindset among a lot of young people that that somehow the younger generation is smarter than the previous generation but of course it's not that they're smarter they're they just have access to information quickly and yeah there's this there's this um misconception of um in the western culture of trying to equate the idea of access to information and intelligence being the same the idea being that if you can if you can um recite facts and figures that you're smarter than someone who can't recite those facts and figures this has not to do with actual processing it's just you know rote knowledge so the idea that if you have a smartphone and you can look up anything quickly that all of a sudden you're smarter because you have all this knowledge at your fingertips and so you're you're more intelligent so i think that you know the as time goes on is artificial intelligence which is it's going to happen it's already happening where intelligence systems are going to be doing more of the heavy lifting for humans uh and so i think the pervasiveness of electronics in everyone's lives and the pervasiveness of of um of devices that in people's routines jobs education um and just this idea that we carry around these mobile computers that are linked to uh like a skynet google-like thing anyway you know it's sort of like it's already here but as time goes on is the reliance on these systems becomes more and more of a crutch you know people aren't going to be educating themselves reading books uh they're not going to have a thorough knowledge of a subject they're just going to have piecemeal knowledge because they're just going to look it up when whatever they need and so the reliance on the technology the reliance on the artificial intelligence uh over time would it would end up substituting our human culture in a lot of ways and and and i think even today it does because i you know i did a rant a couple years ago about um the problem with apollo hoax conspiracy videos on youtube that whenever i put up an apollo video yeah these hoax videos and it used to be that when i would upload the video and you know it would you go through the list of description and it would say well keywords put some keywords for this video and it would put all the suggested keywords and all the keywords it would suggest to be like conspiracy you see alien you know all the hoax stuff but you know and i did a rant there where i explained to people that i remember that that if you watch youtube that people are unaware that when they're watching youtube they are they are being manipulated by software you know yes human beings are being guided their emotions and their reaction and what they think are being altered and programmed by software that is guiding their emotional and uh and their decision making based on what's being presented and their education as well exactly well yeah and the life experience and what you know so when we talk about the danger of ai well it's already here in a way because as people grow up with the internet you know they're what the the the search results they're given when they put in a search for a web search or as they're trying to educate themselves or learn on the internet that the information is presented to them in a very structured way in a very sort of intentionally pointed way intentionally pointed um by software not by people that the the culture evolves around this machinery so that people grow up to be altered and change behavior gets changed by computers their language gets changed by computers and so this artificial the the sort of the the subtle danger as of the artificial intelligence is that as the decades go on the human beings that come you know in subsequent generations they become formed by these machines and it's already happening and that's really the cusp the danger that these very very the most intelligent people on the planet are talking about and because they they can easily see that process and um so it's already here it's going to happen it's already happening um what it means for humanity well um we're all going to find out so do you find

Fran Blanche: you that do you find that you're on the on the side of so personally i'm on the side of get on friendly with the robots become the master of the robots you know make profit from the robots do you find you're on that side of it or do you find you're on the side of not in robots general for ai robotics whatever right do you find you're on that side of it do you find you're on the side of well let's prevent

Fran Blanche: what do you what do you see there robots well robots as well right so like you know the provider of of AI as well. I think the idea of what you're saying, what you're proposing is the idea that robots being the physical enforcers of an artificial intelligence. No, no, no.

Fran Blanche: Whatever this evil, potentially evil or even benevolent force

Fran Blanche: is, right? I'm not really using the word evil. It's like I said, the subtle danger of AI is just as I described how it transforms the culture and the individual because human beings are being sculpted by algorithms rather than personal experience, rather than their peers, their human peers. So it's already happening and it will continue to be more pervasive. I think what is subtle today will, it's like the frog in the frying pan analogy. You take a frog and throw it into a hot frying pan, it's going to jump out. But if you put the frog in a cold frying pan and you slowly raise the temperature very, very gradually, it'll just sit in there until it cooks to a crisp. And that's sort of the very gradual erosion of these sort of artificial systems in human culture. So the ultimate effects of that won't be seen for decades.

Fran Blanche: So what I'm asking though is do you rebel against it as we notice it now, with that slow fry, do we rebel against it now though? Are you saying though? Or are you saying that we just have to wait and see?

Fran Blanche: Some do. I mean, I think, I think, I mean, I myself, I embrace some of the technology and I avoid a lot of it. You know, that there's, there are many perils in it. And I think that the, the fact that people wouldn't think that there are any perils in it is probably the most perilous part. You know, there are dangers in these new technologies and, you know, maintaining our human selves, like you asked, you know, what do I do with a typewriter? Well, I do, what I do with a typewriter, a piece of artificial intelligence would never do. You know, it's, it's a, there are human things that we can't break away from simply because it's more convenient to abandon them in like writing.

Dave Jones: Is, is this social algorithm, you know, that we're being guided by these social, socially by these algorithms, is that any better or worse than human guiding though? Because, you know, people are brought up in a certain society, you know, if you're, politics or what? Yeah. Well, basically if you're brought up into a crime family or something, or you're brought, brought up into some cult or something, you know, that's going to be your social, you're being socially engineered. Exactly. In exactly the same way as, you know, so is it, is it any better or worse?

Fran Blanche: It's just, it's the same, but you know, I, I think that, but it's not human, right? You know, you could look at, you know, like fascism, you know, as a completely human construct, but you know, the, but the effect of, like, of like fascism in Germany, you know, what happened to, how culture can be transformed by an ideological movement, by, you know, by small forces that can make drastic cultural changes that alter the world, you know, and, you know, this can be religiosity, religiosity, I guess that's a word, or, you know, it can be theological, it can be ideological, it can be political, but in the human world, you know, these, we see these things as dangers, but when we apply these same, these same powers to an artificial construct, we somehow see it as being benign because it, it can't like hold a gun or, or fire a nuclear missile, when, well, soon, these artificial constructs will be able to shoot a gun and fire a missile, and so, you know,

Fran Blanche: it already happened, right? The, the gun, the gun toting, quadcopter.

Dave Jones: The gun toting drone, yeah.

Fran Blanche: So,

Fran Blanche: you know, I, again, I think that the, the subtle dangers of AI will, won't be, probably won't be fully realized for, for decades, but the, the dangers are certainly there for our cult, for culture, and for, you know, for the human side of our world, which we have basically created, you know, over thousands of years, this human world will, will soon be guided to a great extent by these artificial systems, and managed by these artificial systems, and, and the more,

Dave Jones: It's almost an unavoidable, an unavoidable danger.

Fran Blanche: Well, it is, but if, if you don't, if you don't want to engineer into all of these systems, if you engineer out the human aspects, which is really what the, the, like, the, the logical,

Fran Blanche: It happens for economic reasons a lot of times, right? I mean,

Fran Blanche: you know, we create these,

Fran Blanche: You want to pay someone, you pay the computer, or you don't pay the computer, right?

Fran Blanche: We create these systems for convenience and to do the heavy lifting, but, you know, at a certain point, the, you know, the systems that are doing all the work are also maintaining all of the control, So, the more that we hand over, like, the more that we hand over our money to an even, even more abstract thing than cash, then, of course, money becomes something that becomes very hard for an individual to control or to acquire. So, you know, that there are far-reaching cultural, economic, and just living consequences to building all these autonomous systems.

Dave Jones: I'll tell you where the litmus test is going to be. This is my prediction. Self-driving cars, autonomous, so, you know, cars, autonomous cars that everyone's crapping on about, right? I think that'll be the litmus test for society because you've got to put your trust, your life on the line to that autonomous system. And people, some people, like a lot of people, enjoy driving too. So, it's going to be a real litmus test. for, you know, like, yeah, you really have to commit to this thing to really make it work, right? And will enough people commit to it to make self-driving cars a thing, a dominant force? It's a good

Fran Blanche: point, you know, I, and, again, there are advantages to self-driving cars because, you know, most people drive like crazy people. So, you know, the, but it's, there's a lot of sort of autonomy in travel anyway. Like, you know, aircraft are mostly flown by wire now. There's actually very little pilot control in most flights, you know, it's almost all flown by wire. And a lot of, you know, a lot of travel is

Dave Jones: automated. So, you know. But would, I guarantee you, nobody would get on a plane that does not have a pilot. Nobody. Well,

Fran Blanche: you know,

Dave Jones: it's interesting

Fran Blanche: because, you know, a friend of mine is a pilot, a current pilot, and there is surprisingly, a very, a great deal of talk in the industry about automating planes because there are actually a lot of, a lot of airlines that do want to take the pilots out of the cockpit and fly completely by wire. It's, it's, it's, it's not surprising. It's a very strong, um, uh, motivator economically and otherwise. Uh, and of course with the recent, uh, you know, events, uh, where pilots have, you know, downed planes on purpose, you know, there's even more impetus to take the pilot out, you know, it's like war games, you know, the movie war games where it starts out with the guys in the, you know, in the bunker with the keys and they don't do it and they pull the guys out, they put a computer in there and now the computer is going to do it. And so, that's always the seduction of having the automated system take over for the human being and of course we pay for that security that convenience, that reliability by giving up our humanity in the process. So, you know, we are, we are a biological flawed species and so, the more that we seek to eliminate the flaws and the imperfections in our culture, the more that we rely on these artificial constructs, the more we dehumanize ourselves by taking out the randomness and the mistakes and the fallibility. So, you know, there are consequences to this.

Speaker ?: So,

Fran Blanche: so yeah, it's, it's going to happen. Like you said, it's unavoidable but, you know, I think it's not all going to be great. Certainly.

Fran Blanche: Fascinating. So, Fran, what do you, so we're talking about the potential future of the, the dystopian future. But what about the, what about the optimistic future? What do you, what are you working on these days? What do you, what are you excited about?

Fran Blanche: Well, the relaunch Frantone, you know, I've got Frantone's relaunching so I'm, I'm glad I'm not having to do the actual manufacturing anymore. That's pretty great. But it's going to,

Fran Blanche: Who's doing your manufacturing? Sorry. Yeah.

Fran Blanche: Well, the Barefoot Electronics, they, they have a line of effects pedals that they've had for, for years and they've got a manufacturing operation out in St. Louis, Missouri. And they're going to, they're going to be doing all the manufacturing for Frantone. but they're, they've been retooling for months and, and getting, you know, all their, their facilities sort of altered to match my old facilities, to, to match my coding process and, and to, to get the,

Dave Jones: the quality.

Fran Blanche: Coding process? The coding, yeah. I used to, I used to do all of my own machining and coding and silk screening. So, I, I had a, to construct it. Oh,

Dave Jones: so I thought these were analog pedals. They are. Are we talking computer code? Or a code? No,

Fran Blanche: co, co, C-O-A-T-I-N-G. Oh,

Speaker ?: C-O-A-T-I-N-G.

Fran Blanche: Oh, C-O-A-T-I-N-G. Sorry. I thought you said Coding. Coding. It's my Philadelphia accent, you know, coding. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's Philly, you know? It's Philly. Yeah. What's going on?

Fran Blanche: I'm coding some stuff today. I got some pedals to get done. Yeah. Got to get pedals

Fran Blanche: and get it coated. Get it coated.

Fran Blanche: Yeah.

Fran Blanche: Yeah. And get them out to the family. You know, that's great. Yeah. Coding. Right. Painting. Coding. Yeah. So, you know, I, but they're reproducing my coding process and such to get the finish to look the same and such. So, but I'm really glad that I'm going to be able to do that. I'm going to get the Prantone line back into production and then start designing new pedals to add to the line. So it's actually going to be expanded over the next few years.

Fran Blanche: and that's going to mean a transition for me because I'm going to get out of the fashion world and get back in the music business because I can't do both. So, you know, over the next year I'll be, I'll be retiring, you know, one business and getting back into the other. So, so there'll be changes and lots of work.

Fran Blanche: What's the fashion world? So I don't know about the fashion world. Like the corset stuff. you don't know.

Fran Blanche: Yeah. I'm, Oh, you've probably never heard of this, but it's her,

Dave Jones: it's her handle on Twitter.

Fran Blanche: I know the handle on Twitter, but I don't know about the actual business side. I know about contour corsets is your Twitter handle,

Fran Blanche: but yeah, well, it's for, for many years I've been, uh, considered by many to be the, the foremost anatomical, this porcet designer. I do a lot of very difficult, uh, in the world. In the world. Yeah. As Clarkson would say, uh, but I'm, yeah, I'm going to be, I'm going to be retiring from that. So, yeah, can't do both.

Dave Jones: Uh,

Fran Blanche: it takes a,

Dave Jones: right. So, so you had to make a decision or was the decision obvious? It was pretty obvious. Did you just see more future in there? Well, or just, it's more fun. Um, maybe the audio side or it's just better for business.

Fran Blanche: It's, you know, I, well, I've always been a maker of stuff. So, um, you know, making things sort of, it's sort of has an equal footing as far as, uh, like importance in my life. You know, I'm just always making things, but as far as it's, it's really just a matter of time and economics. You know, it's, there's only so many hours in the day. Yeah. So many days in the year. So, um, and I'm, you know, I'm not really young enough to pull 90 hour weeks every week without any days off anymore. So, yeah, it's one or the other. You can't really be at the helm of two full-time companies at my age. There's just not enough coffee in the world to be able to pull it off. So, yeah, you have to compromise. But Frantone will be the priority going into 2016. So it's just going to be another transition. But that'll be the near future, certainly. And more vlogging, hopefully.

Dave Jones: Oh, excellent. That's what I was going to ask. What sort of volumes are we talking about with these pedals? Is it like dozens, hundreds, thousands? What sort of is a typical run?

Fran Blanche: It's going to be pretty good. We're shooting for fairly large runs. So, you know, over the course of a year, it's going to take...

Dave Jones: How big is a run?

Fran Blanche: Yeah, like, you know, a hundred.

Dave Jones: Or is it a corporate secret?

Fran Blanche: Yeah. In the hundreds. So it's in the hundreds. In the hundreds, yeah, a month.

Dave Jones: That's kind of what I expected for like a boutique kind of effects pedal.

Fran Blanche: These are handmade. They're still going to be handmade. There's just... They've got a... You know, it's not like... It's not going through like some factory with... Product with like assembly line workers just putting in a part. They hand mount the parts on the board. You know, they do... Right. You know, they do hand reflow. So they do their pick and place all by hand. They don't have pick and place machines. So it's... Oh, you've got surface...

Dave Jones: You've got this newfangled surface mount rubbish in there, do you?

Fran Blanche: It's going to be... Some of the designs are going to be shrunk down. And we're going to hybrid some of the reissues, I think. Right. Because there were some limitations in the case size and such. So... Oh, okay. So yeah, some of it will be hybrid. Some will be through hole. So... And there are some components... Because a lot of the analog components that I relied on for so long, a lot of them aren't available anymore. Like the 8038 and such have been long extinct for like... Yeah, and of course. Yeah, for decades now. So there are going to be some...

Fran Blanche: Sorry, what is an 8038?

Fran Blanche: It's a signal generator chip. Three... You young whippersnapper. Three...

Speaker ?: I know.

Fran Blanche: I call myself an analog person. I don't know. Yeah, I know.

Dave Jones: You don't know the 8038.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, well, you know, all of the old... Like the interstell chips and, you know, the bucket brigade chips and a lot of the analog signal generators and stuff, they're all sort of gone the way of the dodo. So there will be some compromises and some redesigns just based on the parts that are available. So there's a lot of work to go through in relaunching a line that's sort of been on... You know, has one foot in the 20th century and one foot in the 21st century. So there will be some redesigning along the way, certainly.

Fran Blanche: You bringing people on to help with that or no? I do all the design work.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, I do all the design work. It's sort of the way I do it. But I have all the help in all the production, you know. Oh, that's good. Yeah, and also Barefoot, you know, they do all the sourcing and stuff so they can source all the available components and everything. So they do a lot of the work in that regard. But it's definitely a team effort now.

Fran Blanche: Well, I've just been thinking about... So I've been doing some stuff with, like, switching converters lately and just kind of thinking about, like, you know, I'm buying all these switching... Like, it's not like buck converters are expensive, but a lot of it's like... I could go and take, you know, a dollar... Yeah, a 50-cent chip, right? I could buy a 50-cent buck converter from a TI or Maxim or whoever. And, like, all of that stuff is interesting and it's very, very custom. But, like, to be honest, a lot at least with the buck converter kind of stuff, it's like, okay, well, there's feedback and I need to control signal and that kind of thing. But outside of that, it's mostly, like, you know, a FET and, you know, maybe some capacitors and resistors for the feedback to a network. But, like, all of that stuff can be replaced with a micro. And so I wonder if it's the same kind of thing for you where it's like, you know, maybe this 8038 chip is no longer available or it's hard to find, but, like, is it possible to go and do a redesign with a micro and that kind of thing? Or is that just kind of like... Sure. Wash your mouth out. I know. Is that strictly for voting where it's like, oh, oh, oh, my God, no. I mean, like, you could still be controlling analog components.

Dave Jones: Where's the passion? Where's the passion in that?

Fran Blanche: No, I'm just saying that, like, you know, it's not even a... It's not like you're, like, blowing electronics out of the water. You're just re-engineering for reality, right? I mean, like, that's what it is, where it's like, oh, well, now I need to control for, you know, I need to have a comparator and I have a comparator on board this micro and I need to have an ADC and I have this ADC and this micro. I'm just wondering, is there any leeway for that kind of thing? Or is it like Dave said, where it's, I have to wash my mouth out?

Fran Blanche: Yeah, you got to start washing. I think there is a marketing... Put him in his place. That's it. There is a marketing... That's okay.

Fran Blanche: I mean, that's okay. I know I can have that, you know.

Fran Blanche: Well, there is a sort of a marketing concern. Of course, frantone has always been completely analog, but, you know, I also do digital design, but, you know, the idea of having a hybridization of an analog pedal with the idea that you're going to put, like, you know, some FPGA in there or a microcontroller or some kind of pick or something to do an operation that used to be done with a very simple ASIC, you know, an analog ASIC. Analog, yeah. So, like, the 8038 signal generator...

Fran Blanche: It's simple until you can't buy it anymore, though, right? I mean, like, that's what it comes down to.

Fran Blanche: Well, it does, but, you know, there's something to be said for a really good sine wave generator that doesn't have a clock that you got to filter out. I mean, you know, there's noise problems and everything, and so from a fidelity standpoint, you really don't want to have a clock running in your pedal if you can avoid it, if you want to have an analog pedal. But, you know, like the 8038 was, you know, a revolutionary chip for its time and it was, you know, it's great because it had such a good filter, transistor, you know, waveform filter to be able to create a pretty good sine wave. But there are other solutions. I mean, you can create wean bridge circuits, you know, to get a really good sine wave. But, of course, it's very hard to alter them.

Dave Jones: You have to go back to the light bulb. Yeah. Yep, you got to go back to the light bulb regulator. And then, you know... In the wean bridge, the old HP. Exactly.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, the 200, the 200 oscillator, right? Yep, the HP 200A. Right, yeah. No, no, I don't argue with any of that stuff. I'm just saying that, like, it's a struggle between... I mean, this is honestly an internal struggle for me, too, right? I've done a lot of analog stuff and now I'm kind of in the supply chain side, too. But it's just like a struggle between, like, the realities of the modern-day supply chain and, you know, like, I would rather re-engineer a solution that has a micro in it and maybe has a DDS to generate a waveform versus, you know, being like, oh, well, I have to go buy these parts on eBay secondhand that are desoldered from a board in China. You know what I mean? Like, that's like... That feels like the contrast to me. I mean, do you feel that?

Fran Blanche: Yeah, I mean, I don't... It's not one extreme or the other. I think that you can be creative and re-engineer a circuit that's not as convenient. It's probably got a lot more parts in it because you can't get a dedicated chip. But I don't think it's a matter of just either going digital substitute or having to go with, you know, repurposed parts from pools. You know, I think that there's definitely middle ground, but I'm very interested just in a philosophical way of trying to keep analog electronics alive. And if that means maybe coming up with custom ASICs that do, you know, the same job but maybe have to do a custom chip or coming up with ways of doing, you know, maybe FPGAs that can perform functions in a way that really emulate an analog chip, maybe. But I think that, you know, trying to stay in the analog realm is important for audio. Yeah, for sure.

Fran Blanche: You lose so much, even at the edge cases of, you know...

Fran Blanche: Well, it's just also power because, I mean, if you're talking about a 9-volt battery-powered pedal, you know, you don't want to have a computer in there, you know, you want it to... You want the battery to last a little while and you don't want it to generate a lot of noise. You don't want switching noise. You don't want clock noise. You don't want to have to deal with those issues, you know, when you're dealing with something that is high fidelity and something that's being engineered to have some soul to it, you know. When you're dealing with audio, you spend a lot of time mulling over, you know, really small differences in values and such as trying to get a tonality, a performance, a dynamic performance out of a circuit that has sort of a living, breathing soul to it that you can feel, not just hear. And there's a lot of that in doing audio work with amplifiers, pedals, a lot of that sort of visceral, again, human, on a human level and on an emotional level. And if you... You wouldn't know it if you've never listened to a hi-fi, but people I bring in here to listen to my Model A, my all-tube hi-fi, especially younger people, they are just absolutely astonished, just totally blown away by the experience of listening to the sound coming out of a completely analog system, playing a record, you know, through a valve amplifier with no digital processing, with no compression, something that, you know, with completely linear reproduction and tremendously wide dynamic range. They're like, is it supposed to sound that quiet? Is it supposed to sound that way? And I was like, yeah, this is... The records get very... Your records get really quiet

Dave Jones: and they get really loud. Paul is dead. So, yeah,

Fran Blanche: but, you know, I can just hear Paul is dead in the background. Yes, that's right, Dave. Yeah. Now, I don't know. I don't personally prescribe to that. No offense, but, I mean, like, I don't... I don't... I've listened to some really high-end systems before and I just... I'm so... I don't care. Not emotional about it. I'm not. Yeah, not emotional. I mean, like, I just... I can't... I can't separate myself from the technology. Like, I know... I feel like some of that is experience-wise and, like, some of that I definitely respect, but, like, every time, like, someone's like, oh, you gotta hear my turntable going through my Class A, like, I've had a friend who did that to me and he's like, yeah, you gotta hear this thing, like, listen to Dark Side and I'm like, cool, but I hear the popping of the needle on the record and I don't give a shit because I hear this... I hear this noise and it's like... And then I go listen to the MP3 with the 320 kilobit per second, like, like, near reproduction and it's like, my ear just can't pick it up because I was a drummer and I've destroyed my ears over the years and so at that point I'm like, I don't care, you know what I mean? Like, I don't mean to sound rude, but I think I... You're a hopeless case, Chris. You're a lost cause. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's gone. He's gone. I'm right on the edge, you know, like, I'm right on the edge, I'm like, that new style, like, I just, I don't feel it, you know? I've never lit a candle to listen to a record, you know what I mean?

Fran Blanche: You're a lost cause, Chris, I wouldn't even be able to get into the subtle definitions of fidelity and high order harmonics.

Fran Blanche: Can we do, like, weekly lessons? Can maybe, like, I can, like, we can call each other up and, like, you could, like, explain this stuff to me. I think we're looking at a...

Dave Jones: It is a niche business right there, Frank. I think we're looking at a,

Fran Blanche: I think we're looking at a whole new podcast here. Yeah, like an onsite, like a... Chris to school about fidelity.

Fran Blanche: That's right, like, I could be on a couch and I'd be like, Fran, I can't hear the harmonics.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the fidelity experience.

Fran Blanche: I can't, I can't, I don't care about LPs anymore.

Dave Jones: I'll tell you what, like, going back to the construction quickly, before, because probably running out of time, but, um, quickly about what I would do with the construction of these things, you know, the 80, uh, you know, the 803.8 and all those sort of thing, obsolete parts. Yeah. The way I would do it, of course, is not go digital. I would actually develop an ultra miniature surface mount board that sort of like tried to duplicate the functionality of that.

Dave Jones: that would be, yeah. Use modern technology, you know, and like, yeah, here it is. Here's my little custom module that I put my heart and soul into. Maybe you have a micro

Fran Blanche: that controls a digital part kind of thing. Oh,

Dave Jones: get away.

Fran Blanche: I'm just saying.

Fran Blanche: Yeah, but Dave's saying is it's sort of what I would, yeah, make up your own, custom, like a hybrid, your own custom hybrid. Replaced. Yeah, yeah. Totally. I mean, there's, you know, it's a limited number of transistors in there, maybe a few hundred transistors, it wouldn't be impossible. Yeah,

Dave Jones: but,

Fran Blanche: but,

Dave Jones: but with today's modern, you know, ultra small parts, you could get this, you could feasibly, you can get a thousands of them made, you could use them in all your products. It's feasible. Kind of thing. It's not, it's feasible. I would, I would standardize on that. I'd put a lot of engineering into that.

Fran Blanche: No, that's sort of what I was saying that, you know, I would come up with some kind of a reproducible solution in an analog form that, that, that you could, like you said, make a product that would then become like itself, like a, you know, reusable. You could sell it on a time. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah,

Dave Jones: totally. So yeah, that, do you have the same problem I have? The IDO3A has been discontinued.

Fran Blanche: exactly.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Fran Blanche: Although, you know, a Wimbridge would be a lot cheaper to do. Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah. But once again, you know, build it all onto a module and, you know, like, well, yeah, I mean,

Fran Blanche: I had a hand doing that with my own TTL logic. I was built, building these little tiny little TTL chips, two-sided boards. Right. Yep. Could plug in, but so it's, I remember those. It's a doable thing, especially with, with surface mount getting ever, ever smaller. So yeah, anyone with a reflow oven can come up with their own sort of custom chip.

Dave Jones: Cause I, I'm staring at the functional block diagram from an 8038 right now. There's a, there's two current sources, a couple of comparators, a flip flop, a couple of buffers and a sign converter. Well,

Fran Blanche: the only thing you'd really have to build is a sign converter because you, you can, they still make the, what's it? The 566, is the two wave form. Right. Yes. So you can still get the, the, the, the triangle wave generator. You don't have to worry about that. You really just need, you really just need the sine wave buffer. And then that can be built, built totally discreet. There's no question about that. Yeah. Yeah, totally. So, yeah, there, you know, so, but there, those kinds of challenges, you know, we'll, we'll be hitting, uh, and trying to reproduce, uh, 20th century electronics with 21st century realities.

Fran Blanche: like the chip printer. We'll be printing Pentium fours with the chip printer.

Dave Jones: Oh God. Oh God. You just ruined the entire episode, Chris.

Fran Blanche: Apparently I already did with all the analog, uh, my, busting my analog, uh, you know, the facade of apparently I care. Chris,

Fran Blanche: I'm going to write you a letter on my typewriter.

Fran Blanche: Oh, you do that.

Fran Blanche: And you will receive my fury in, in seven to 10 days. In paper form that I will document. Yeah, that's right.

Fran Blanche: Carried via the USPS, the most modern of institutions. Yes. Oh, that's okay. I look forward to, you know, I do, I do envy some of that stuff that you were talking about earlier about the, you know, the permanence of the, the documentation type of thing. Like that, that stuff, that's not to be underestimated for sure. Like the angry emails that I send to Dave, those will not be preserved over time.

Fran Blanche: Nothing, nothing, nothing in the virtual realm would be preserved over time. That's the issue is, you know, the, um, in centuries to come, it's only going to be printed materials. I mean, motion picture films will be gone. And, uh, in time, I mean, phonograph records will no longer be able to be played, um, as centuries go on. So, uh, it's, it's, it's kind of going to be this technological black hole where 500 years from now, they'll still have books that were printed in the 19th century. And then they'll have, you know, some photographs, then the photographic prints from the 20th century. And then around, you know, 2010, 2020, it's just, all the records just ceased to exist. And we don't have anything, you know, there's no more pictures, there's no films, there's, there's, there's, there's, we have no more documentation of the culture. It's like, what happened? Who knows? And, you know, people laugh today, but that's just the reality because everything we do today, it's all going to disappear. Like,

Fran Blanche: it's just not going to be saying that the EV blog will not make it past the, you know, sadly,

Fran Blanche: sadly. Yeah.

Fran Blanche: I think,

Fran Blanche: uh,

Fran Blanche: I think that the, I'm cool with this.

Fran Blanche: I think that our time spent on YouTube is for, it's for Nye. Yeah.

Dave Jones: It's for all. Yeah. It's for North. All. Yeah. Can't beat entropy. It's just gonna. Okay.

Fran Blanche: So Dave, we're, we're going to have to start converting everything over to 35 millimeter film while we can. I was going to say, you guys should print, print frame by frame.

Dave Jones: I just mentioned, I just mentioned that in my last video, actually, that my blogs are now shot in 70 millimeter, uh, print and audio is recorded onto eight track tapes. And if you want a copy, please send a stamp self-addressed envelope. And I will ship you a copy of the 70 millimeter and the eight track tapes.

Fran Blanche: Okay. Um,

Dave Jones: I just mentioned that in my last episode. Uh,

Fran Blanche: I'll put my order in for that. You know, I got my own projector and my own eight track player and recorder. So that'll, that'll, I'm already compatible. And if you need someone to convert those eight tracks into a quarter track master, the 15 IPS that, you know, I'd be able to do that. Sweet.

Dave Jones: Well, thank you very much, Fran, for being on the show, even though Chris ruined the whole, I'm sorry.

Fran Blanche: This has been the most enjoyable five hours that I've ever spent doing a show.

Fran Blanche: Five hours. Five? Is this five?

Fran Blanche: Does it seem that long? It seems that long.

Fran Blanche: Is this like five space hours?

Fran Blanche: It's actually been about two and a, two and a half, 20.

Fran Blanche: No. One and three quarters.

Dave Jones: considering that it's Thursday here in Australia and it's only Wednesday in Yankee land.

Fran Blanche: all this happened yesterday. So, but thanks, thanks for having me. It's been great.

Fran Blanche: It was really good to talk.

Fran Blanche: Where can people follow you and catch you? I'm on those, I'm on those, their interwebs. Twittery. Yeah. You know, you can Google Fran and pretty much when you type in Fran BL, it auto completes my name and you can learn all the sorted mystery and stuff that I do. So, but yeah, I'm on the Twitters and the YouTubes and I don't think the MySpace page is gone and all those other things. So, but yeah, you can get me at frantone.com, you know, for updates and such. And, and also, and also, I'm probably linked in on the EEV block probably here and there. yeah,

Dave Jones: yeah, definitely.

Fran Blanche: All right. Yeah. Thank you,

Dave Jones: Fran.

Fran Blanche: It's been a pleasure. Hopefully we can chat some other time about other stuff that has, you know, no consequence.

Fran Blanche: Indeed. It was good talking to you, Fran. Great.

Fran Blanche: Thanks. See ya. Bye. Bye.

Fran Blanche: Bye.

Speaker ?: Bye. Bye. Bye.