It’s based on facial recognition technology.

Ticketing is broken, can anybody fix it? Will anybody fix it?

That’s what Nathan Hubbard has set out to do, the man who used to run Ticketmaster, he’s raised double digit millions and…

I first saw a demonstration last September, when it was in stealth. But now, since it’s public, I returned to the outfit to get an update. Rival used to be in a WeWork space. Now it’s in an old Howard Hughes hangar in Playa Vista. Everybody’s huddled over a MacBook Pro attached to a big screen, what are they doing?

Well, we’ve got a security problem in the events business. People may now be afraid to go. What if we knew everybody in attendance? You buy a ticket, scan a selfie, and then you gain entrance via facial recognition, a la iPhone X. But it’s much more sophisticated than that. There’s depth-analysis. To make sure you can’t trick the system with a photo. And at every entrance there are cameras attached to the ubiquitous metal detectors, with an effective rate of essentially 100%, yes, the technology’s just that good, and if there is a problem, since all your info is digitized, someone on site can help you out, you don’t have to go to the box office, they can take care of you on the spot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But what about minors?

You don’t have to scan their faces if you don’t want to. Their tickets can be attached to yours.

What about resale?

Well, that’s at the whim of the artist, the event producer.

So let’s continue to focus on the user experience.

When you get inside the building, you can get an offer to upgrade, via AI, i.e. artificial intelligence, you can see the viewpoint from that specific seat you’re deciding whether to upgrade to. And other offers can be pushed to your phone, based on your frequency, ticket price, a whole host of data points.

Now you’re worried about privacy. But are you willing to trade some for security and a better experience? And you already upload your photo to Facebook, and as for the data points re your face, those can’t be reverse engineered, or so they tell me. And all the data will sit on Rival’s computers and…

Well, actually Amazon Web Services. You see infrastructure begets innovation. Kinda like broadband, no YouTube without it.

Kinda like WeWork, it allows you to start small and upgrade.

But what about buying that ticket to begin with?

Well…

They’ve sent drones into the buildings. So you can see the viewpoint from every seat, every price point, right on your handset. And price points are unlimited, as opposed to the thirty two on Ticketmaster’s system.

So, your face is the ticket.

However…

Rival realizes it’s got to contend with a ticketing edifice.

So…

Rival can issue paper tickets if the promoter wants…

Let’s now switch to the business side.

This is how it works. A venue makes an exclusive deal with a ticketing company, for an advance and a percentage of the ticketing fees. That’s right, the fees don’t all go to Ticketmaster, only the ignorant believe that.

But no one really knows who the ticketholder is, the primary site is not in control of transfer, it’s a veritable madhouse.

Now right now, you can buy primary and secondary seats on Ticketmaster. The irony is that Ticketmaster makes more on secondary than primary, which is why you read that Taylor Swift shut down the secondary on Ticketmaster to clear out primary tickets, and that worked. You see all the money is in ticketing and…

Back to Rival.

Rival does have exclusive deals with venues. One of which will launch within a year. Household names. Others are presently locked up in exclusives, with expiration dates as far from now as five years or as close as a year and a half. Rival takes a percentage. It’ll give an advance if that’s what a building wants, but… Rival believes it can increase the gross. By upselling food and beverage, other perks. Imagine if you’re a regular customer and got free entrance into the club, or a free drink, wouldn’t you like that? It’s all doable, right now, on the handset, I saw it in action.

So, once again, back to basics.

Right now, it takes weeks for humans to input ticketing info into the system.

That’s instant on Rival.

And, Rival can plug into existing systems, like Ticketmaster. Rival can sell tickets itself, and also allow tickets to be sold on third party sites. Controlling everything from price point to change of access. That’s right, the third party sites, like StubHub, will be tied into Rival’s system. So, if someone sells their ticket, the new holder uploads his photo. And, the underlying promoter/artist can take a cut of the transaction.

Or, an artist can decide to artificially price tickets. I.e. sell to hardcore fans untransferable tickets for forty five bucks. Or give the best seats to hardcore fans. Or…

The options are unlimited.

So really, it’s about security and customer satisfaction. We all want to be known, we all want to be respected.

And speaking of respect, on sales can be staggered, so you’ll have time to pick your seat, look at the drone footage, see what you want, as opposed to now, when you take what you can get for a hot show.

The usual suspect players don’t want change. But they can see how the lack of change is hurting them. And the primary players are utilizing antiquated systems, to truly solve the problems you’ve got to build from the ground up.

And if it all sounds complicated, on one hand it is.

But on the other it isn’t.

You go online and pick your seat, just as you do now, but with much more information. You can see the viewpoint from the seat you’re choosing. Truly, via drone footage, not that you need to know it was shot by a drone.

And you can take your time to choose your ticket.

And you can walk right into the venue without pulling out your wallet. You don’t have to worry about forgetting your tickets, your face is the ticket.

And since the system knows who you are, you get treated better, especially if you’re a regular customer.

And you can buy food and merch via your face.

And on the back end, promoters have much more flexibility, and many more options to make money. They know who the ticketholder is. They can treat them right.

Sound like a solution?

Seems like it to me!

Nanette | Official Trailer

You want to watch this.

No, you NEED to watch this.

But you probably won’t, you probably won’t log into Netflix, and when you hear the half-hour of soft-spoken lesbian jokes you’ll be wondering, is that all there is? Is she even gonna get back to Nanette?

No and no.

I’ve had a weird day. I woke up early to go to the cancer ward, to get a rituxan infusion for my pemphigus. No, I don’t need no sympathy, I’m doing quite better as a matter of fact, other than the fact that I’m still taking prednisone, albeit only 5mg, but it still might take me three or more months to get off it. You see you can’t go cold turkey, you crash, they told me this, I didn’t believe it, I dropped two milligrams…and I was climbing the walls. So now, the doctor wants me to alternate days, starting in two weeks, that’s right 5mg one day, none the other, she wants to “wake up my adrenal glands.” And I’m scared, I don’t want to do it, even though I have to. I’ve got to get off this damn prednisone, it’s messing me up, making me eat everything in sight.

So the Cedars-Sinai cancer infusion ward is at 9090 Wilshire. The southeast corner. You wouldn’t recognize it from the outside. Looks like an office building, an expensive one. But you take the elevator to the second floor and…

There’s a wide open space with about thirty to fifty chairs, I haven’t counted them, and in each one sits a cancer patient, getting an infusion. They give you your own personalized TV, the seats are plush, but the experience..?

I can’t speak for anybody else. I don’t have cancer, except that I do, but not one that needs chemo, but first they start with the Benadryl, which puts you out while it simultaneously gives you restless leg while the medication drips into your arm and you want to be anywhere but there, physically, never mind emotionally. You’re locked to your seat. Oh, you can go to the bathroom, you just take your tower of medication with you. But then it’s back to the seat. It’s an endurance test. And since I’ve endured it three times before, they make it faster, but still, you just grit your teeth. It’s like having a baby, when it’s done you forget about it, but during it…

And you’re surrounded by all these people. Young ones, old ones, rich ones, poor ones…cancer doesn’t care about your bank account. Some come with loved ones. The Big C is the greatest equalizer. That’s right, rituxan is a lymphoma drug, but they get it much more often, every two weeks ad infinitum. I get more, but I only get it every two weeks every six months.

So…

I Ubered there and back. You can’t drive yourself. And when I got back to the house I felt like crap. I normally go out for a celebratory meal, a hamburger, but there was no way I could drive, I held my head in my hands, Felice suggested I take a nap, I ultimately did, and when I woke up…

I ate a bag of potato chips. That’s right, Garlic & Onion. After I finished off the bag of Ridges as well as the Salt & Vinegar one. Wise sent me a bunch, you can see them here:

Wise delivers!! pic.twitter.com/8fO2B5CJse

— Bob Lefsetz (@Lefsetz) June 12, 2018

and I can’t resist. I’ve been through too much. I wanted to feel good, and food is my way to do it. My father always thought a good meal would help. I used to turn to alcohol, you can live without that, but food..?

And then we finished watching “Goliath,” I don’t recommend it. The first season was superb, Billy Bob Thornton was exquisite. But it should have ended there. Too many times they continue series they should not, then again, the second season of “Fauda” was better than the first, but I’m not sure they should have a third, what other storyline could they pursue? But this actress Nina Arianda, who plays Patty Solis-Papagian in “Goliath,” she’s a talent, she’s a star, you can see it when… You can see Meryl Streep acting, you believe this person is the character. But it’s more than that, she’s a marvel. And the stunt casting gets in the way. My old friend Steven Bauer, he gets fifteen minutes. David Cross? Mark Duplass? Lou Diamond Phillips? Why? Are these actors that down on their luck, or did they believe this would enrich the story or..?

I don’t know.

Now one perk of my gig is people make recommendations. Let me set you straight, when you send me your own stuff, forget about it. When you send me something with ten YouTube views, no. We live in a world if even the work is fantastic, I can’t make it a hit. And almost nothing is fantastic. It’s your job to get it noticed. Sorry, but that’s the world we live in. Unless I trust you.

But I neither knew nor trusted the guy who recommended “Nanette.”

But I did Google it. I was somewhat intrigued. A comedy special on Netflix. An Australian woman. And when “Goliath” finished, I pulled it up, I told Felice to humor me, give it a few minutes.

It was shot in the Sydney Opera House. I’ve never been inside. But amazing how great architecture can draw tourists, isn’t that what you think about when you think about Sydney? Or the Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum, in Bilbao?

And, like I said, the star of “Nanette,” Hannah Gadsby, is a lesbian.

She describes herself as a fat, ugly lesbian, as a matter of fact. But she’s done with the self-deprecatory comedy, she may be done with comedy all together, she keeps repeating that mantra.

They don’t let you stretch. Garth Brooks tried to be a rocker and was rejected. But his shows are closer to KISS than Willie Nelson. But we don’t allow people to change, we want them to be the same damn thing over and over again. We laugh at them when they experiment.

But when it resonates…

“Nanette” resonates.

So Hannah says she’s afraid to give up comedy. Because all she’s got is an art history degree, and that was nearly twenty years ago. What is she gonna do for a living?

That’s the little voice in our head, that’s what makes us sell out. At dinner last night I met a woman who started in finance, she gave it up to be in entertainment, she’s very successful, although she moonlit for a while before she committed. She went to Duke. It’s a path, they don’t want you to color outside the lines, and if you do…

You may end up broke, or behind.

So Hannah Gadsby says she was accosted by a guy who thought she was hitting on his girlfriend. But when he realized at the bus stop that she was a girl, he stopped shoving her.

But much later, Hannah said this was untrue. He beat the crap out of her. And she didn’t go to the police or the hospital because she was too ashamed. She’s a self-hating homosexual, they taught her this in school, growing up in Tasmania, it’s hard to get rid of your upbringing.

And when a man tells her to stop taking antidepressants for her art, Hannah disabuses him of the notion that Vincent Van Gogh was unmedicated, arguably that’s why he painted such vivid yellows.

And suddenly, you’re getting a survey course on art history. Hannah hates Picasso. Is down on cubism. And it’s all because Picasso took advantage of a seventeen year old girl, while he was married, as a matter of fact.

And then there’s a whole riff on celebrities, especially men, how we don’t want to ruin their reputations, we must save their reputations, but how about those who were hurt?

And then back to Picasso, how cubism offered multiple perspectives. But where was Hannah’s perspective, where is a woman’s perspective?

And the lesbians think Hannah doesn’t do enough lesbian jokes. And she doesn’t want to jump around in the gay parade, she doesn’t fit in there either. She’s got to apologize for herself, make jokes, but tonight, tonight, she’s gonna tell her real story.

And she reveals personal details that illustrate she knows what she’s talking about, I ain’t gonna ruin it by telling you those now. But she makes you realize, we’re all just people, women have gotten a bad shake, but it’s not only them, but all the oddballs. She just wants to connect with someone, feel a member of the group.

Just like me.

Like I said, you’re gonna be disappointed at first. But then you’re gonna be riveted, and what Hannah says will not leave you, it will be stuck in your brain, ain’t that the power of art, when the work itself changes lives as opposed to the penumbra, the hype, the shenanigans.

This is powerful stuff. It changed me, it’ll change you.

And now she’s dead.

It’s one of my great life regrets, I threw away the invitation to her birthday party. I remember exactly where it happened, dropping it through the grate during recess. I’m not sure she saw me do it. Maybe I blocked it. But somehow she knew, and we were friends.

This was second grade, maybe third. Back in the sixties, before it was de rigueur to invite your whole class to the festivities. You only invited friends. But you got to a certain age where you only wanted the same sex, before you got to that age when you wanted both sexes once again. And somehow, the boys in my class, decided they didn’t want to go. So they threw away the invites, and I did too. Call it peer pressure, call it trying to look cool, but it’s troubled me ever since.

I thought life would go on forever. That I’d ski at every ski area in the world. But time is running out of the hourglass, yet I still believe. Call it blind optimism, like someday I’m going to become rich and famous. You need that carrot in front of your eyes. But when the destination is pulled away…

I got into the internet early, for someone of my age. I got a free subscription to AOL before most people knew what it was. Not that I used it much. I did have a modem, 1200kbps. I had to buy the program “Microphone” to make it work. I printed out conversations on my dot matrix printer. This was too much effort. AOL was less effort, but it wasn’t until a college student read what I wrote in “Pulse” and asked me if I had an e-mail address that I dove in deep. She told me she had a boyfriend. It turned out she’d never met him, he went to a college hundreds of miles away. This was when this was incomprehensible. I’d have experiences online and people would be dumbfounded, they had no idea what I was talking about.

And then I started to look up people I knew.

For a while there, I was the only person findable. An old college buddy, a summer camp friend, they saw me on the internet and made contact, it was groovy, it gave me a little thrill to make these connections, in the late nineties, long before Facebook, long before you realized you’d never lose touch with anybody you ever knew in your life. Oh, you could stop looking for them, but your digital breadcrumbs were searchable, findable, you could not hide.

And then, around the turn of the century, a little while thereafter, everybody started to pop up.

First I looked for old girlfriends. In some cases it took me years, a decade, to find every single one, because they get married and change their names. You’ve got no idea where they’re living. I found my two Camp Laurelwood girlfriends. I found that woman I met on the train to Boston. I never made contact, never ever, I just liked feeling good that whatever we shared was still there in the ether.

And then Facebook hit and zealots started collecting friends, isn’t that why I moved to California, to get away from all that? I hate the pecking order, I don’t want to discuss my SATs, where I went to college was meaningless until they protested Charles Murray and it was all over the news last year. But I like it that way.

But I also like that all my old buddies are still out there, living their lives. I peek in on them from time to time.

My old ski girlfriend ended up very close to where I met her, in Southern Vermont. She’s a teacher, moving from gig to gig.

I don’t think I’d connect with any of them today, we’d relive the old times and lack further conversation. But, like I said, I like that they’re still out there, chugging along.

But not Judy.

Judy was not prissy. Not a girly-girl. And when she finally popped up on the radar, it occurred to me she might be gay.

She didn’t show up for years. There are certain people who live off the radar screen. They don’t play online, whether it be by age or choice.

But there she was, in Aspen. Really? I’ve been to Aspen so many times!

At first I found out she planted flowers.

Hmm… What kind of job is that?

Then I read about her sports adventures, but there was no marriage record, no man involved.

And part of me wanted to apologize to her, not in some twelve step way, but because it continues to haunt me, ’til this day. I acted badly, AND I LIKED HER! She was NICE! She was COOL! She probably thinks I’m a jerk and I’m less worried about her perception of me than…wanting not to hurt anybody.

I don’t want to hurt anybody. If you’re a public figure, acting badly, it’s fair game. But if you want to make fun of a friend, trick somebody, call them a bad name, that’s happened to me too many times, I’m not gonna do it, and when I’ve done it, I’ve felt awful thereafter, like that letter we sent to Brad…

So, with these people who go through my brain, like I said, I check up on them. And I have no idea why Judy Budzik’s name passed through me tonight, I decided to look her up on my phone.

And her name showed right up in the Google results. This had never happened before. Ah, there must be more information!

And I clicked through and found her obituary. I was shocked, she died at the end of 2016.

But the picture didn’t look like her. I knew it was her, because they said she was from Fairfield, she went to Andrew Warde, but then I clicked through to the Connecticut obit and…

It was her. The same smile on her face.

It happened suddenly, she left behind a cat and her friend Kristin.

Now what?

And that’s when I realized, it’s happening, the tribe is being thinned, people are being cleaved off.

Robert took his own life. I think about how much he’s missed. For ten years, I thought about him every damn day.

Chip got the Big C! He used to call me after midnight, he was convinced he was gonna beat it, but now he’s dead too.

Sometime it will be my time. After all, Judy was only 63. And her birthday was only three days after mine.

So now it all doesn’t matter. She’s gone, the only person who might remember, and for all I know, she might have forgotten, even soon thereafter.

And I realized I could go that fast too, in Judy’s case it was sudden.

But even more I realized life is not forever. It doesn’t make sense. You’re young and trying to get ahead, you think it’s a game. Then you get old enough to know the joke is upon you, it’s not about possessions and achievements. Sure, it’s about meaning, but even more it’s about family and friends, laughs and experiences. Which can’t be toted up.

I know, I know, they’re separating babies from their parents. I abhor this as much as you do. But this endless Trumpism has defeated me. We on the left keep crying foul and it makes no difference, and even if we win this one, we’ve lost on the big issues, and it doesn’t look like we’re ever gonna win.

So it comes down to the personal. How we live our lives. How we treat one another.

I treated Judy Budzik badly. It’s haunted me for decades. Should it still?

I don’t know.

That’s right, Mr. RealNetworks himself! You know, RealPlayer, the default audio and video player from the turn of the century, ultimately superseded by Windows Media and…there was a lawsuit over that, Microsoft lost, RealNetworks got paid.

Anyway, Rob grew up in NYC and went to Yale and from there was on the ground floor at Microsoft. He left the Redmond monolith and started RealNetworks, left to become a VC, and then returned. Along the way, there was not only RealPlayer, but purchase of the PBA (that’s right, the PROFESSIONAL BOWLERS ASSOCIATION) a huge chunk of what is now Rhapsody/Napster and a passion for politics.

If you want to know what your life would have been like if you went into tech as opposed to music. If you want to know the vision of a player in the tech world. If you want to know what it’s like playing in Asia, this is the podcast for you!

P.S. Recorded live, at the Music Media Summit in Santa Barbara.
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