Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode, originally published on January two thousand fifteen, is called tech Stuff Listens to Negative Land. Negative Land being a kind of outsider music group, transgressive music group, if you, If you will, also ties into topics that we've talked about recently on tech Stuff, like copyright and fair use. And I hope you enjoy how many time zones there are in the Soviet Junion. Power and all that. That's power. We've got so much power. That's ridiculous. Power, power and power. What you're hearing is the work of a performance group called Negative Land. The band creates interesting sounds from accommodation of electronics, musical instruments, and an enormous library of pre recorded audio from sources as diversus political speeches to music numbers to old television commercial guest I spoke with Mark Hustler, one of the founding members of Negative Land. Our conversation lasted for more than two hours and we talked about topics like art, music, intellectual property, and more. Well, this episode has highlights from that conversation. I really learned a lot. And the first thing I wanted to know was how Mark got interested in this type of art in the first place. I was really into all kinds of music as a teenager, and there was just some kind of record that I wanted to hear that didn't seem to exist. And so at some point when I was sixteen or seventeen, you know, I said, well, I want to let's make We're gonna make that record, and that's who we did, and it came out when I was still in high school. The we in this case was Mark Hustler and Richard Lyons. Others would join Nega of Land over the years, including Don Joyce, who hosts the band's weekly radio show, and Ian Allen, who passed away in early The group's membership changed many times throughout its existence, and each member contributed a unique perspective, and the band has always been about experimentation. You've got a good beginning list and trial and era. It's just a pend again on breaking the records of the radio. We've been around an extremely long time I've actually known the guys in the group for thirty six years. Our first record came out of Night and for some reason which I don't really quite understand, we all just love strange, weird, funny noises and found things and reusing stuff in ways they weren't intended to be used. And so our very first recordings were making tape loops, or you could cut real to real recording tape and stick one end to the other and they repeat over and over again, you know, and echo, and you could stick pieces of metal into with guitar and make the guitar string sound all strange. And we were recording things off the TV and radio and our parents, you know, baking in the kitchen and the sound of the our dog barking outside, and all this stuff made its way into our into our recorded work, and it was kind of surreal data koufy collage. We also put in beats and sometimes sang little songs, and it had a somewhat pop kind of sensibility to it in a way, in a screwy sort of way, too stupid great or dumb five six ideottics. The experiments would evolve into projects, and while the tools the band used to create their sounds would change, the medium in which they worked would remain sound collage. Collage is a medium that I think is one of the easiest art forms in the world, whether it was sound or film or visual art, to do something really crappy. It's really only easy to do collage and just have it be really mediocre. And I but to to to really get it to where it's it's it's at a level that we think meets that you know, our our standard. You know, it requires a lot of work and thinking about it. And we've had lots of pieces that get to a point, but they're just not there yet, you know, and we sit on them for six months or even a year later we'll go back. In fact, the band might sit on a piece for decades. One piece Negative Land recently revisited is a work called Like a Cattle Act the Gun by the late Well. I was thinking of a Cadillac Cadillac, got Wreck, Cadillac, Catillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Catillac, Lack, Cadillac, Lack, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Lack, Cadillac, La Cadillac, Catillac Alan First worked on the piece back in the nineteen eighties. Before his death, Alan gave his blessing to Negative Land to revisit and finish the recording. Alan was also instrumental in shaping the band's cultural and social perspectives. Before long, the band was using its quirky techniques not just to make interest sounds, but to provide commentary on various issues. It just kept being really interesting that you could use collage, you know, to talk about stuff in this way that invited the listener to work on figuring out what you were getting at into some degree. You know, we don't spell everything out, but we try to do something where it's both about stuff, but there's some thing about it. It's open enough that you're engaged and you're drawn in and you're trying to work with it, and hopefully that's the place where you know, you get something out of it that's interesting and it's and different for every person who hears it. And because so many of the sounds Negative Land uses in its collage work are taken from other sources, you can't just assume that what you're hearing and what the band itself thinks are necessarily the same thing. While we do sometimes actually write song lyrics and do songs. Most of the spoken word you hear in our work is appropriated in collage, So it's not us saying it. We're not It is not the author's voice. You're hearing that. It's what we chose to use. Well did we choose to Is it because we agree with it? We disagree with it, we like it, we hate it. We think it's funny, stupid, smart, sad, creepy, annoying, you know, surreal, And usually for negative Land, will the things we pick to you is will usually be something that will be of many of those things all at the same time. Listen, this is not all that shouting, all that noise. Ian Allen's involvement would lead to another pivotal moment in negative lands development, meeting Don Joyce. Joyce is a radio DJ who not only joined Negative Land, but also helped create a venue for the group to express themselves to a larger audience. It's called over the Edge for Negative Land. One of the kind of laboratories for us to work on new ideas and try out new stuff is our weekly radio show. It's called Over the Edge. It's been on, it's still on to this day, and it's three hours of audio collage that's always about a theme of some sort or another. And Negative Land member Don Joyce is the one who has been kind of the steward of keeping that flame alive all these years. He uses old radio station cart machines. If any of you out there are radio makers or listeners are old enough to know, he uses old school dead analog technology to play dude live cut ups stuff on the air. Yeah, we get to try out stuff and occasionally the ideas of emerge from that that we think are good enough to take out and turn into studio recordings or maybe a live show. And for those Negative Land fans who want to explore that material, band member Tom Maloney has been hard at work transferring files to archive dot org so that the thousands of hours of programming will become available to anyone with an Internet connection. It's a mind blowingly huge amount of work that will be available for free. As any artist will tell you, art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Art doesn't just reflect the world around us. It comments on that world. We see elm of the artist's thoughts and feelings within his or her art. And while you might think that creating a collage out of appropriate material limits and artists ability to comment upon the world, you'd be wrong. As Mark explained to me, collage is just another artistic medium, not significantly different from any other means of artistic expression. Basically, to me, our work is no different than somebody lives in a cave ten thousand years ago who takes a stick out of the fire and uses the burnt end to draw on the cave wall what's outside of his cave, which could be buffalo or a mammoth, you know. So that's no different than me taking a computer, a tape deck, a cassette deck, a real tool, chape recorder, a digital capturing device, and I'm capturing the world around me that I live in the world. It's in my home, the world it's outside my door. And that world is not just walls and furniture and trees and blue sky and buildings. It's advertisements, it's logos, pop songs, it's media. Absolutely everywhere you go person needs. That's great, and so negative lands are often comments on these facets of life. The way messages are communicated to us and how we are expected to react to them amusing, And there's Another conversation happening as well, one about ideas ownership and the peculiar institution has changed the way we treat concepts. Corporations who are immortal, who now have these ideas of intellectual property. They own this stuff, so they want to profit from it. They've privatized it. They've all said, you can consume it, will sell it to you, but don't ever think of messing with it. Don't think about doing anything with it, because we own it's our property. And I'm kind of saying, well, no, it's not just your property, because it's inside my head. You know, it's in my brain. So I'm gonna I think I'm allowed to do things that have been inserted into my brain. You know, I don't want to see your giant pepsi billboard every time I drive into town, but I do, so you know, yes, I'm going to take some of your pepsi ad and I'm going to cut it up and I'm gonna use it in something that maybe makes fun of you. And in this case, it was a project negative landid called Dyspepsi. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, what you're compiling is going to be a positive reflection of what Pepsi is all about and the makers of their advertising. So I think it's fair to say that if that's all the case. Uh yeah, this is part of the marketing spin of PEPs of Call. One of my favorite pieces by the band involves a surreal heard radio call in show. This is Pennywise, Joan your next Nie, Sue, How can I help? Jim? I really have a problem with ampulse buying. I never have money left for anything. That's a piece called truth and advertising, and that was where we were able to take it so that every time the talk show host hung up on the caller to go to the next caller, it was the same caller over again and over again because of how we were able to edit it together and that was all done. We've always used to call those edits razor takes, because those were done with analog, real to real recuoriers and we would cut them with a razor blood, you know, to rearrange those things. Okay, let's go to line four. This is Pennywise. I'm Jim Phillips and your name is Bob. Hi, Bob, what can I do for you? I get confused by all the claims main commercials. This is pennywise line stakes you're on and your name is. I think it definitely kind of grabs your attention. There's a real rhythm, there's a real musicality to the way the voice has been is the repeats itself and folds back in on itself. But but also so it gets that something that actually is a real thing, which is about how advertising impacts us and how advertisers maybe aren't telling you the truth, you know. And I don't think it's didactic. I don't think it's having handed I don't think it's like we are we're wagging wagging our finger at you about the subject. But it does kind of get get it out there. We'll be right back with more of tech stuff. Listens to Negative Land after these messages, it really hit me that what Mark and negative Land are doing is incredibly challenging. Anyone can grab a dozen or so clips of sound and edit them together to make something new, but to create something that has a sense of musical rhythm that can be entertaining and that can also be a comment on our culture is extraordinary. It explains how the group can work on a project for years before it's ready to be released. Once it is released, that work can get a lot of attention. Negative Land is no stranger to criticism, controversy, or even legal action. In fact, one of their most famous works landed the group in legal trouble for several years. But it all started out innocently enough. A fan at a show of ours handed as a cassette and uh at a show that we were printing in Portland, Oregon, and it had outtakes of top for D d J. Casey Cason having a really bad day in the studio. Casey Cason, as you know, just passed away this summer, and I think the engineer's revenge was to get these tapes out to some people in the public via cassette. Now, back then, the Internet didn't exist, and so this stuff had a very very limited audience of just people sharing this stuff. And I think if it had come out now, we wouldn't have been inspired to make that record that we made, because everyone would have had it. But we had something that was kind of seemed very precious, you know, and you know, and and rare, and it was also you know, Peter Pants funny and just so inspiring, and he was trying to do a dedication to a family's dead dog, and he was trying to introduce a new song by a band he got the name of their country of origin incorrect, but a band who's been around as long as Negative Land has You Too. That's the letter You and the New World Too. The four Man Band features Adam Clayton on bank, Larry Moren on drums, Dave Evan's nickname the Edge on if this is both nobody cares. These guys are from England and we'll give it. It's a lot of wasted name that don't mean diddaly And we ended up using doing a kind of a weird mutated cover version of a YouTube song. We had Negative Land member David Wills the weather Man, do his own dramatic reinterpretation of Bono's lyrics. We used the casey caseum stuff. The song was I still found what I'm looking for and kind of at the end when we were deciding how to present it, we ended up deciding to call the whole thing you Too, by Negative Land, And originally it was actually going to be You with a dash between the U and the two, because that's actually how the U. That's a slight variation on you two's name, which has no dash in the you tube is the airplane, the spy plane that was shot down, and it's where you two stole their name from. In the course of designing the whole thing, our graphic designer we were working with a guy named Randall hunting Uh. He suggested that we could make the the hell what am I making the airplane of the YouTube airplane itself, which we were using as part of the cover design. What about making that the dash? And how about we could make the U two really huge and negative Land really small. I think he was just kind of joking, you know, like because of course you wouldn't really do that, because that would be insane, right. But of course when we saw it, we said, that's great, genius, you know, yes, that's what we're gonna do. This is even better. We're gonna make it look like something it isn't. As it turns out, this particularly mischievous release would have a long lasting effect on the group. It didn't take long for you two's management to respond, and it came out and two weeks after it came out, or I think maybe it was less maybe ten days after it came out. You Two's record label and their publisher. Uh at the instigation of You Two's manager. We only found that out about fifteen years later. But yeah, they suit us for copyright infringement, trademark infringement. Uh. It has lots of swearing on it, courtesy of Casey case So they sued us for defamation of character for associating this foul language with the clean count image of the band You Two. They sued us for failure to get a license to do a cover version of a song because we change the lyrics. You can do a cover version and just pay a licensing fee, but if you change the lyrics, you have to get permission. And they also suit us for fraud, saying it was a get rich quick scheme intended to dupe millions of innocent YouTube fans into you know, buying this record so we could make you know, lots of money. So they through everything we could think of at us. We had to really look at what we were doing, even more deeply than we ever had, you know, and really examine if it was worth the fight. You know, do we really want to destroy our lives and lose at the tiny bit of money we might be making. And we you know, we were gonna lose a lot by choosing to fight it, but we we really felt like it was you know, it was it was a fight that needed to happen because at the time there was nobody making any smart, thoughtful cultural arguments about this from a progressive point of view. It was just lawyers, and it was just so it was just all very conservative, you know, thinking around money, profit in ownership in ways that just were culturally very very smart. And we've been headed this amazing opportunity because we've been had sued on behalf of the largest rock band on the planet Earth. So we thought, well, maybe we could use as a platform to talk about this stuff. And that turned into an odyssey that took up the next four or five years of all of our lives. I could say literally every day of my life for the next four or five years, literally, I was dealing with some aspect of it. The FBI got involved, there were threats made against Casey. We tricked you Tube's guitarist The Edge, into an interview he didn't know we were anyway, all kinds of stuff. It's all documented in a book we put out called Fair Use. The Story of the Letter You in the numeral who which actually shows you the behind the scenes facts, lawsuits, press releases, phone calls, transcriptions, everything you're never supposed to see when these cases settled out of court is all there in the book in short chapters, so it makes good bathroom reading. Ultimately, the band settled out of court and their album was withdrawn, but that was only the beginning of the battle. Negative Land only settled because there was literally no way for the group to afford to fight the charges in court. They wished to argue that their appropriation fell under fair use, that they were creating art from appropriation the same way that other artists had for years. Andy Warhol's famous works were commentaries on consumerism and pop culture. How could that instance be okay? But Negative lands work be considered illegal. The experience with you two ended up having the opposite effect on the band than what was intended. It's been endlessly fascinating, and then when we got you know, actually sumed for doing it, it politicizes more. It actually made us kind of bear down on wanting being more committed to doing this work than ever before. And uh, it's certainly kept it really really interesting. While Negative Land has always been interested in culture and consumerism. The legal proceedings brought to light the complicated matter of copyright and fair use, which became a new focus for mark. Copyright is meant to protect the owner of an original work of authorship. In the United States, it's defined as such a work quote fixed in a tangible medium of expression end quote. It covers all works, whether published or unpublished. Now, it doesn't protect facts ideas methods of operation. Some of those can be protected under other means, like trademarks or patents. As soon as you have your original work in a fixed tangible form, it's protected by copyright. That tangible form doesn't have to be a piece of paper, it can be code. The law provides for protection of works that require a machine or device in order for someone to see or experience it. Registering a copyright is a way of ensuring protection of your work. Technically, your work is protected even without registration, but registering creates an official legal document that establishes your authorship in case you should ever have to pursue a claim of infringement against someone else. If you were to create an original work but not register the copyright, it's possible someone else could steal your work and register it under his or her own name, making a claim of ownership more complicated. The concept of copyright dates all the way back to seventeen ten, and it's changed significantly over the years. Yeah, it was like twelve thirteen, fourteen years the Statute of Queen Anne. And whenever I do lectures about this, which I've done quite a few, it's very rare that people actually know this, because it sounds shocking to hear it now, because copyright nowadays lasts for the life of the creator. Plus it's seventy years seventy two seven three. The Statute of an establishes copyright lasting fourteen years for new unpublished works, works that had already been published, and we're under ownership of some party or another, we're granted twenty one years of protection. Ever since copyright was established in British law, people and entities have attempted to expand its protection. According to Mark, this trend has become truly destructive, largely due to the rise of a particular type of institution, this very strange creature called the corporation. And we've decided to give corporation these rights as if they're human. We give them free speech rights. What I would argue, has led to the total destruction of democracy in this country. But we we give them all these the perks and privileges of being a human being, none of the responsibilities, none of you know, when a corporation does things that lead to the deaths of thousands of people, we we don't we don't seem to give the corporation the death penalty, unfortunately. But because corporations are immortal, in fact, they're not like anything human at all. They from their perspective, understandably they want to profit from their property forever. And since we've decided that ideas are property, intellectual property, you know, it all sort of it Also, you can see how this all starts to play out in this very bizarre way, um that eventually goes kind of off the rails, you know, at this point. And that's kind of what what negative Land got drawn into was. Because our work does appropriate things and makes this collage and to to talk about the culture and the country and the world we live in. We found that our work was kind of colliding, you know, head first into these these these ideas about copyright, which had just become completely crazy, you know, just ridiculous. I agree with a lot of what Mark saying. He and I both acknowledge that copyright has an important role. People who create original works should have some measure of protection so that they can receive compensation for their work. A world without copyright could be chaotic and unfair, but so can a work old with copyright that extends well beyond what its creators intended. We'll be back with more of tech stuff listens to negative Land in just a moment. Remember when I said that copyright protection originally only lasted fourteen years for new works. The story has changed significantly today in the United States, a new original work last the life of the author plus an additional seventy years. This has had enormous implications in the publishing, music, and artistic spheres. It's a balancing act. And that's what kind of has been lost in a lot of the conversation about all this is that it's it's kind of treated like it's an omnipotent property right of some sort. And that's why I was saying that when copyright first began, it was an incredibly short period of time. But but the this was not some radical idea that would be that short. In fact, it was that that was a conservative idea, you know, that was that seemed on enough, you know, to give you a chance to profit from your your creativity. And I should also add that just the very idea of taking the word intellectual and property and jamming them into each other to make one expression is very strange when you think about it, that we've decided that ideas are things, you know. It's it's an incredibly abstract idea, and it and it only is true because we've all just sort of agreed that it's true. Though in the case of negative Land, we decided that we didn't really like that particular hallucination and we wanted to ignore it a lot. This shift towards extending protection beyond the life of the creator has had other consequences as well. Corporations that own intellectual property go to great links to protect that property. If there's a prospect of generating revenue off of an original work, it's worth investigating how to protect it. This leads to ideas like digital rights management, which is intended to provide protection to corporations, but often has the unintended consequence of negatively impacting the honest consumer more than any pirate. As Mark explains this is a problem that the industry itself is painfully aware of and yet isn't sure how to change. I was actually at a conference on copyright law in Washington, d C. And I remember speaking to somebody who was from the r I double A that I said, this is what do you guys talk about behind closed doors? You know, isn't it kind of bizarre that you're basically taking legal action against your customers? I mean, you don't you you realize that every twelve fourteen year old kid growing up basically hates you, you you know, just knows the cat is out of the bag about how absolutely ugly your business is and how you take advantage of artists, etcetera, etcetera. He kind of sheepishly kind of said, well, yeah, we kind of look at it like chemotherapy, and I just hope that that the patient doesn't completely die, you know, during given the treatment that we're giving it. You know. But yes, we're perfectly aware that this just comes off really horribly, you know, but we don't know what else to do. As Mark points out, the concepts of ownership are deeply ingrained in culture and economic models. That's not to say ownership is bad. But it does complicate matters, particularly when we extend the concept of ownership to institutions that could potentially live forever. But there are limits to copyright, and not just in how long protection lasts. You don't have to wait until the work goes into public domain before you can talk about it in some other format. For example. This brings up the concept of fair use. Well, here's an example. Anyone listening, I'm sure you've read a review of a book or seen a review of a movie on your television or digital device. And that's where fair use comes into play. When you review that, you don't have to get permission to use a clip of the film, You don't have to get permission to excerpt from the book. That's considered fair use. You were using someone else's intellectual property within your intellectual property to talk about that other intellectual property now, and so fair use was trying to acknowledge that, and fairious had four factors to it. But the first one, I think was you know, are you are you using any bit of someone else's intellctual property? The next one was you know how much of it are you using? And in what way are you are? Are you not transforming it in some way or changing it, And what is the context in which it is reappearing. Is it in a different medium, is it in a different market? Could there be some confusion between what you've done and the original in some way. So there's these different factors that are supposed to be weighed when the courts are looking at these things. And for many, many years, the courts didn't look at all four factors. They just looked at the first one, did you use some of it? Well, if you did, then you're a thief and you lose, you know, and you're you know, you're you're you're the bad guy here. And for many, many years, that's kind of how the courts look at things, and that's why there's a lot of really bad legal decisions that have been made over the years. Um So the laws haven't changed, you know. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any any smart, progressive legal changes to intellectual property law. There haven't been any cases that have gone through the court systems to really do that in a long long time, and this is a big problem. Fair use is something that ends up being decided in a court on a case by case basis. Fair use is a defense there's no codified set of rules that lets you create a checklist to make sure you won't be sued. You could create a work that sites of pre existing peace owned by someone else and follow all the rules and still get sued. You might eventually win that court case, but it's going to cost you just to be involved. Some entities, like YouTube respond to copyright infringement notices by immediately taking down the infringing material. Sometimes this happens automatically, and the content owner has to flip a virtual switch to allow the other video to go back up online. So if you create a video series in which you critique films or television or some other form of media, you could run into the issue of having your work taken down. Even if you're following the rules. You could get that video restored if it meets fair use criteria, but it takes a lot of effort. If all original works were truly original, perhaps I would see this entire system as being tough but fair. But the truth is no work is truly original. Creators have influences. Art doesn't bloom spontaneously in a vacuum. The real question is to what extent does a work stand up on its own versus relying upon the pre existing work that influenced it. That's not an easy or an expensive question to answer. This is deprogramming the universal media netted well as for Negative Land, they released a new album them late in two thousand fourteen called It's All in Your Head. It's a college piece that examines religious beliefs, not necessarily specific beliefs, but why we believe things in the first place. You're listening to It's All in your Head FM monotheism but in stereo. The project was born of discussions within Negative Land itself. None of us had ever talked to each other about our religious beliefs. I mean, I've known these guys, some of them since i was a teenager, and we had to work all that out because in fact, we don't all agree. You know, there's atheists, there's a NaSTA, you know, there's there's different perspectives on this, and we had to be sure that that was all reflection in the work as well. Um, So that that was another really interesting kind of behind the scenes part of creating the whole thing. So we would have huge debates over single words that we're being used in it. You know, one sentence that what is it going to be there, We're gonna cut it out, you know, typical, just super c D negative planned, you know, obsesso, you know, microscopic thinking that we we do the poetry, we reached to arts to try to begin to articulate what those things are. And I think that we have to acknowledge that we're in this realm when we begin to talk about this, and if we take the symbols and don't acknowledge that they're symbols, then we get into this triple. The album is organized on a pair of CDs referred to as acts. If you buy the physical album, your packaging is a King James version of the Bible. There was a limited edition version packaged and copies of the Kuran, but it has since sold out. While the album takes a critical look at belief systems, it also avoids passing judgment. Sections of the album explore ideas such as how the brain processes information to how cultures define and interpret beliefs. Mark explains why the group chose to package the album inside a Bible, but having it inside of a Bible framed it in this way that I personally just love, you know, and I think all of us just love the idea that you're using the Bible as a repurposed found object, and also anyway that the Bible is the liner notes you know, to the record. I've listened to the album in full and found it provocative. There were times that it made me think, in times when I had a very strong emotional reaction to what was going on in the album. It's the sort of reaction I imagine many artists hope for when they create their works, and it marked a very different experience to listening to audio entertainment than what I've become used to. It's rare these days that I'll sit down to listen to an album in full. I'm more likely to listen to my entire music collection on shuffle or even a larger collection streaming online following some cryptic algorithm that supposedly anticipates what I'll want to hear next. But that's not how Negative Land intends you to listen to their work. I actually when I give people copies of our of our music, and I say, you know, I know it's a lot to ask in this day and age, but wait until I don't care if it's a year from now, Wait until you have an actual hour of your toy to do nothing else except just listen to this thing from beginning to end. And um, and I think you might enjoy it, I said, if you just have it on in the background or just listen to separate tracks, I said, it won't even make sense. It will probably even just be annoying. And so It's All in your Head is like that. It's too complete. It's it's one complete work. It's got two acts to it, but it's very much designed to be listened to in its entirety. We had a huge debate about whether or not to put track points in it for for downloading and for CDs, because it kind of suggests or encourages people to put it into random shuffle play. But we also don't like the idea of trying to control someone's experience that much and just have to be one long track. Plus I know people will just break it up into tracks anyway. Negative Lands It's All on Your Head is available for purchase from their website negative land dot com. That's n e g A T I v l A n d dot com that wraps up the episode. Tech Stuff listens to negative Land. It was a really cool experience to get to talk to someone and they're a pro coach to making sort of transgressive music that has a real point of view. It was something that I don't get to do that often. And big thanks to Noel Brown of you know, ridiculous history and stuff they don't want you to know fame because he's the guy who got me in touch with negative land in the first place. So big thanks to him. And that wraps up this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, please reach out to me. Do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio and I love all things tech. It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode, originally published on January two thousand fifteen, is called tech Stuff Listens to Negative Land. Negative Land being a kind of outsider music group, transgressive music group, if you, If you will, also ties into topics that we've talked about recently on tech Stuff, like copyright and fair use. And I hope you enjoy how many time zones there are in the Soviet Junion. Power and all that. That's power. We've got so much power. That's ridiculous. Power, power and power. What you're hearing is the work of a performance group called Negative Land. The band creates interesting sounds from accommodation of electronics, musical instruments, and an enormous library of pre recorded audio from sources as diversus political speeches to music numbers to old television commercial guest I spoke with Mark Hustler, one of the founding members of Negative Land. Our conversation lasted for more than two hours and we talked about topics like art, music, intellectual property, and more. Well, this episode has highlights from that conversation. I really learned a lot. And the first thing I wanted to know was how Mark got interested in this type of art in the first place. I was really into all kinds of music as a teenager, and there was just some kind of record that I wanted to hear that didn't seem to exist. And so at some point when I was sixteen or seventeen, you know, I said, well, I want to let's make We're gonna make that record, and that's who we did, and it came out when I was still in high school. The we in this case was Mark Hustler and Richard Lyons. Others would join Nega of Land over the years, including Don Joyce, who hosts the band's weekly radio show, and Ian Allen, who passed away in early The group's membership changed many times throughout its existence, and each member contributed a unique perspective, and the band has always been about experimentation. You've got a good beginning list and trial and era. It's just a pend again on breaking the records of the radio. We've been around an extremely long time I've actually known the guys in the group for thirty six years. Our first record came out of Night and for some reason which I don't really quite understand, we all just love strange, weird, funny noises and found things and reusing stuff in ways they weren't intended to be used. And so our very first recordings were making tape loops, or you could cut real to real recording tape and stick one end to the other and they repeat over and over again, you know, and echo, and you could stick pieces of metal into with guitar and make the guitar string sound all strange. And we were recording things off the TV and radio and our parents, you know, baking in the kitchen and the sound of the our dog barking outside, and all this stuff made its way into our into our recorded work, and it was kind of surreal data koufy collage. We also put in beats and sometimes sang little songs, and it had a somewhat pop kind of sensibility to it in a way, in a screwy sort of way, too stupid great or dumb five six ideottics. The experiments would evolve into projects, and while the tools the band used to create their sounds would change, the medium in which they worked would remain sound collage. Collage is a medium that I think is one of the easiest art forms in the world, whether it was sound or film or visual art, to do something really crappy. It's really only easy to do collage and just have it be really mediocre. And I but to to to really get it to where it's it's it's at a level that we think meets that you know, our our standard. You know, it requires a lot of work and thinking about it. And we've had lots of pieces that get to a point, but they're just not there yet, you know, and we sit on them for six months or even a year later we'll go back. In fact, the band might sit on a piece for decades. One piece Negative Land recently revisited is a work called Like a Cattle Act the Gun by the late Well. I was thinking of a Cadillac Cadillac, got Wreck, Cadillac, Catillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Catillac, Lack, Cadillac, Lack, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Cadillac, Lack, Cadillac, La Cadillac, Catillac Alan First worked on the piece back in the nineteen eighties. Before his death, Alan gave his blessing to Negative Land to revisit and finish the recording. Alan was also instrumental in shaping the band's cultural and social perspectives. Before long, the band was using its quirky techniques not just to make interest sounds, but to provide commentary on various issues. It just kept being really interesting that you could use collage, you know, to talk about stuff in this way that invited the listener to work on figuring out what you were getting at into some degree. You know, we don't spell everything out, but we try to do something where it's both about stuff, but there's some thing about it. It's open enough that you're engaged and you're drawn in and you're trying to work with it, and hopefully that's the place where you know, you get something out of it that's interesting and it's and different for every person who hears it. And because so many of the sounds Negative Land uses in its collage work are taken from other sources, you can't just assume that what you're hearing and what the band itself thinks are necessarily the same thing. While we do sometimes actually write song lyrics and do songs. Most of the spoken word you hear in our work is appropriated in collage, So it's not us saying it. We're not It is not the author's voice. You're hearing that. It's what we chose to use. Well did we choose to Is it because we agree with it? We disagree with it, we like it, we hate it. We think it's funny, stupid, smart, sad, creepy, annoying, you know, surreal, And usually for negative Land, will the things we pick to you is will usually be something that will be of many of those things all at the same time. Listen, this is not all that shouting, all that noise. Ian Allen's involvement would lead to another pivotal moment in negative lands development, meeting Don Joyce. Joyce is a radio DJ who not only joined Negative Land, but also helped create a venue for the group to express themselves to a larger audience. It's called over the Edge for Negative Land. One of the kind of laboratories for us to work on new ideas and try out new stuff is our weekly radio show. It's called Over the Edge. It's been on, it's still on to this day, and it's three hours of audio collage that's always about a theme of some sort or another. And Negative Land member Don Joyce is the one who has been kind of the steward of keeping that flame alive all these years. He uses old radio station cart machines. If any of you out there are radio makers or listeners are old enough to know, he uses old school dead analog technology to play dude live cut ups stuff on the air. Yeah, we get to try out stuff and occasionally the ideas of emerge from that that we think are good enough to take out and turn into studio recordings or maybe a live show. And for those Negative Land fans who want to explore that material, band member Tom Maloney has been hard at work transferring files to archive dot org so that the thousands of hours of programming will become available to anyone with an Internet connection. It's a mind blowingly huge amount of work that will be available for free. As any artist will tell you, art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Art doesn't just reflect the world around us. It comments on that world. We see elm of the artist's thoughts and feelings within his or her art. And while you might think that creating a collage out of appropriate material limits and artists ability to comment upon the world, you'd be wrong. As Mark explained to me, collage is just another artistic medium, not significantly different from any other means of artistic expression. Basically, to me, our work is no different than somebody lives in a cave ten thousand years ago who takes a stick out of the fire and uses the burnt end to draw on the cave wall what's outside of his cave, which could be buffalo or a mammoth, you know. So that's no different than me taking a computer, a tape deck, a cassette deck, a real tool, chape recorder, a digital capturing device, and I'm capturing the world around me that I live in the world. It's in my home, the world it's outside my door. And that world is not just walls and furniture and trees and blue sky and buildings. It's advertisements, it's logos, pop songs, it's media. Absolutely everywhere you go person needs. That's great, and so negative lands are often comments on these facets of life. The way messages are communicated to us and how we are expected to react to them amusing, And there's Another conversation happening as well, one about ideas ownership and the peculiar institution has changed the way we treat concepts. Corporations who are immortal, who now have these ideas of intellectual property. They own this stuff, so they want to profit from it. They've privatized it. They've all said, you can consume it, will sell it to you, but don't ever think of messing with it. Don't think about doing anything with it, because we own it's our property. And I'm kind of saying, well, no, it's not just your property, because it's inside my head. You know, it's in my brain. So I'm gonna I think I'm allowed to do things that have been inserted into my brain. You know, I don't want to see your giant pepsi billboard every time I drive into town, but I do, so you know, yes, I'm going to take some of your pepsi ad and I'm going to cut it up and I'm gonna use it in something that maybe makes fun of you. And in this case, it was a project negative landid called Dyspepsi. Hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, hopefully, what you're compiling is going to be a positive reflection of what Pepsi is all about and the makers of their advertising. So I think it's fair to say that if that's all the case. Uh yeah, this is part of the marketing spin of PEPs of Call. One of my favorite pieces by the band involves a surreal heard radio call in show. This is Pennywise, Joan your next Nie, Sue, How can I help? Jim? I really have a problem with ampulse buying. I never have money left for anything. That's a piece called truth and advertising, and that was where we were able to take it so that every time the talk show host hung up on the caller to go to the next caller, it was the same caller over again and over again because of how we were able to edit it together and that was all done. We've always used to call those edits razor takes, because those were done with analog, real to real recuoriers and we would cut them with a razor blood, you know, to rearrange those things. Okay, let's go to line four. This is Pennywise. I'm Jim Phillips and your name is Bob. Hi, Bob, what can I do for you? I get confused by all the claims main commercials. This is pennywise line stakes you're on and your name is. I think it definitely kind of grabs your attention. There's a real rhythm, there's a real musicality to the way the voice has been is the repeats itself and folds back in on itself. But but also so it gets that something that actually is a real thing, which is about how advertising impacts us and how advertisers maybe aren't telling you the truth, you know. And I don't think it's didactic. I don't think it's having handed I don't think it's like we are we're wagging wagging our finger at you about the subject. But it does kind of get get it out there. We'll be right back with more of tech stuff. Listens to Negative Land after these messages, it really hit me that what Mark and negative Land are doing is incredibly challenging. Anyone can grab a dozen or so clips of sound and edit them together to make something new, but to create something that has a sense of musical rhythm that can be entertaining and that can also be a comment on our culture is extraordinary. It explains how the group can work on a project for years before it's ready to be released. Once it is released, that work can get a lot of attention. Negative Land is no stranger to criticism, controversy, or even legal action. In fact, one of their most famous works landed the group in legal trouble for several years. But it all started out innocently enough. A fan at a show of ours handed as a cassette and uh at a show that we were printing in Portland, Oregon, and it had outtakes of top for D d J. Casey Cason having a really bad day in the studio. Casey Cason, as you know, just passed away this summer, and I think the engineer's revenge was to get these tapes out to some people in the public via cassette. Now, back then, the Internet didn't exist, and so this stuff had a very very limited audience of just people sharing this stuff. And I think if it had come out now, we wouldn't have been inspired to make that record that we made, because everyone would have had it. But we had something that was kind of seemed very precious, you know, and you know, and and rare, and it was also you know, Peter Pants funny and just so inspiring, and he was trying to do a dedication to a family's dead dog, and he was trying to introduce a new song by a band he got the name of their country of origin incorrect, but a band who's been around as long as Negative Land has You Too. That's the letter You and the New World Too. The four Man Band features Adam Clayton on bank, Larry Moren on drums, Dave Evan's nickname the Edge on if this is both nobody cares. These guys are from England and we'll give it. It's a lot of wasted name that don't mean diddaly And we ended up using doing a kind of a weird mutated cover version of a YouTube song. We had Negative Land member David Wills the weather Man, do his own dramatic reinterpretation of Bono's lyrics. We used the casey caseum stuff. The song was I still found what I'm looking for and kind of at the end when we were deciding how to present it, we ended up deciding to call the whole thing you Too, by Negative Land, And originally it was actually going to be You with a dash between the U and the two, because that's actually how the U. That's a slight variation on you two's name, which has no dash in the you tube is the airplane, the spy plane that was shot down, and it's where you two stole their name from. In the course of designing the whole thing, our graphic designer we were working with a guy named Randall hunting Uh. He suggested that we could make the the hell what am I making the airplane of the YouTube airplane itself, which we were using as part of the cover design. What about making that the dash? And how about we could make the U two really huge and negative Land really small. I think he was just kind of joking, you know, like because of course you wouldn't really do that, because that would be insane, right. But of course when we saw it, we said, that's great, genius, you know, yes, that's what we're gonna do. This is even better. We're gonna make it look like something it isn't. As it turns out, this particularly mischievous release would have a long lasting effect on the group. It didn't take long for you two's management to respond, and it came out and two weeks after it came out, or I think maybe it was less maybe ten days after it came out. You Two's record label and their publisher. Uh at the instigation of You Two's manager. We only found that out about fifteen years later. But yeah, they suit us for copyright infringement, trademark infringement. Uh. It has lots of swearing on it, courtesy of Casey case So they sued us for defamation of character for associating this foul language with the clean count image of the band You Two. They sued us for failure to get a license to do a cover version of a song because we change the lyrics. You can do a cover version and just pay a licensing fee, but if you change the lyrics, you have to get permission. And they also suit us for fraud, saying it was a get rich quick scheme intended to dupe millions of innocent YouTube fans into you know, buying this record so we could make you know, lots of money. So they through everything we could think of at us. We had to really look at what we were doing, even more deeply than we ever had, you know, and really examine if it was worth the fight. You know, do we really want to destroy our lives and lose at the tiny bit of money we might be making. And we you know, we were gonna lose a lot by choosing to fight it, but we we really felt like it was you know, it was it was a fight that needed to happen because at the time there was nobody making any smart, thoughtful cultural arguments about this from a progressive point of view. It was just lawyers, and it was just so it was just all very conservative, you know, thinking around money, profit in ownership in ways that just were culturally very very smart. And we've been headed this amazing opportunity because we've been had sued on behalf of the largest rock band on the planet Earth. So we thought, well, maybe we could use as a platform to talk about this stuff. And that turned into an odyssey that took up the next four or five years of all of our lives. I could say literally every day of my life for the next four or five years, literally, I was dealing with some aspect of it. The FBI got involved, there were threats made against Casey. We tricked you Tube's guitarist The Edge, into an interview he didn't know we were anyway, all kinds of stuff. It's all documented in a book we put out called Fair Use. The Story of the Letter You in the numeral who which actually shows you the behind the scenes facts, lawsuits, press releases, phone calls, transcriptions, everything you're never supposed to see when these cases settled out of court is all there in the book in short chapters, so it makes good bathroom reading. Ultimately, the band settled out of court and their album was withdrawn, but that was only the beginning of the battle. Negative Land only settled because there was literally no way for the group to afford to fight the charges in court. They wished to argue that their appropriation fell under fair use, that they were creating art from appropriation the same way that other artists had for years. Andy Warhol's famous works were commentaries on consumerism and pop culture. How could that instance be okay? But Negative lands work be considered illegal. The experience with you two ended up having the opposite effect on the band than what was intended. It's been endlessly fascinating, and then when we got you know, actually sumed for doing it, it politicizes more. It actually made us kind of bear down on wanting being more committed to doing this work than ever before. And uh, it's certainly kept it really really interesting. While Negative Land has always been interested in culture and consumerism. The legal proceedings brought to light the complicated matter of copyright and fair use, which became a new focus for mark. Copyright is meant to protect the owner of an original work of authorship. In the United States, it's defined as such a work quote fixed in a tangible medium of expression end quote. It covers all works, whether published or unpublished. Now, it doesn't protect facts ideas methods of operation. Some of those can be protected under other means, like trademarks or patents. As soon as you have your original work in a fixed tangible form, it's protected by copyright. That tangible form doesn't have to be a piece of paper, it can be code. The law provides for protection of works that require a machine or device in order for someone to see or experience it. Registering a copyright is a way of ensuring protection of your work. Technically, your work is protected even without registration, but registering creates an official legal document that establishes your authorship in case you should ever have to pursue a claim of infringement against someone else. If you were to create an original work but not register the copyright, it's possible someone else could steal your work and register it under his or her own name, making a claim of ownership more complicated. The concept of copyright dates all the way back to seventeen ten, and it's changed significantly over the years. Yeah, it was like twelve thirteen, fourteen years the Statute of Queen Anne. And whenever I do lectures about this, which I've done quite a few, it's very rare that people actually know this, because it sounds shocking to hear it now, because copyright nowadays lasts for the life of the creator. Plus it's seventy years seventy two seven three. The Statute of an establishes copyright lasting fourteen years for new unpublished works, works that had already been published, and we're under ownership of some party or another, we're granted twenty one years of protection. Ever since copyright was established in British law, people and entities have attempted to expand its protection. According to Mark, this trend has become truly destructive, largely due to the rise of a particular type of institution, this very strange creature called the corporation. And we've decided to give corporation these rights as if they're human. We give them free speech rights. What I would argue, has led to the total destruction of democracy in this country. But we we give them all these the perks and privileges of being a human being, none of the responsibilities, none of you know, when a corporation does things that lead to the deaths of thousands of people, we we don't we don't seem to give the corporation the death penalty, unfortunately. But because corporations are immortal, in fact, they're not like anything human at all. They from their perspective, understandably they want to profit from their property forever. And since we've decided that ideas are property, intellectual property, you know, it all sort of it Also, you can see how this all starts to play out in this very bizarre way, um that eventually goes kind of off the rails, you know, at this point. And that's kind of what what negative Land got drawn into was. Because our work does appropriate things and makes this collage and to to talk about the culture and the country and the world we live in. We found that our work was kind of colliding, you know, head first into these these these ideas about copyright, which had just become completely crazy, you know, just ridiculous. I agree with a lot of what Mark saying. He and I both acknowledge that copyright has an important role. People who create original works should have some measure of protection so that they can receive compensation for their work. A world without copyright could be chaotic and unfair, but so can a work old with copyright that extends well beyond what its creators intended. We'll be back with more of tech stuff listens to negative Land in just a moment. Remember when I said that copyright protection originally only lasted fourteen years for new works. The story has changed significantly today in the United States, a new original work last the life of the author plus an additional seventy years. This has had enormous implications in the publishing, music, and artistic spheres. It's a balancing act. And that's what kind of has been lost in a lot of the conversation about all this is that it's it's kind of treated like it's an omnipotent property right of some sort. And that's why I was saying that when copyright first began, it was an incredibly short period of time. But but the this was not some radical idea that would be that short. In fact, it was that that was a conservative idea, you know, that was that seemed on enough, you know, to give you a chance to profit from your your creativity. And I should also add that just the very idea of taking the word intellectual and property and jamming them into each other to make one expression is very strange when you think about it, that we've decided that ideas are things, you know. It's it's an incredibly abstract idea, and it and it only is true because we've all just sort of agreed that it's true. Though in the case of negative Land, we decided that we didn't really like that particular hallucination and we wanted to ignore it a lot. This shift towards extending protection beyond the life of the creator has had other consequences as well. Corporations that own intellectual property go to great links to protect that property. If there's a prospect of generating revenue off of an original work, it's worth investigating how to protect it. This leads to ideas like digital rights management, which is intended to provide protection to corporations, but often has the unintended consequence of negatively impacting the honest consumer more than any pirate. As Mark explains this is a problem that the industry itself is painfully aware of and yet isn't sure how to change. I was actually at a conference on copyright law in Washington, d C. And I remember speaking to somebody who was from the r I double A that I said, this is what do you guys talk about behind closed doors? You know, isn't it kind of bizarre that you're basically taking legal action against your customers? I mean, you don't you you realize that every twelve fourteen year old kid growing up basically hates you, you you know, just knows the cat is out of the bag about how absolutely ugly your business is and how you take advantage of artists, etcetera, etcetera. He kind of sheepishly kind of said, well, yeah, we kind of look at it like chemotherapy, and I just hope that that the patient doesn't completely die, you know, during given the treatment that we're giving it. You know. But yes, we're perfectly aware that this just comes off really horribly, you know, but we don't know what else to do. As Mark points out, the concepts of ownership are deeply ingrained in culture and economic models. That's not to say ownership is bad. But it does complicate matters, particularly when we extend the concept of ownership to institutions that could potentially live forever. But there are limits to copyright, and not just in how long protection lasts. You don't have to wait until the work goes into public domain before you can talk about it in some other format. For example. This brings up the concept of fair use. Well, here's an example. Anyone listening, I'm sure you've read a review of a book or seen a review of a movie on your television or digital device. And that's where fair use comes into play. When you review that, you don't have to get permission to use a clip of the film, You don't have to get permission to excerpt from the book. That's considered fair use. You were using someone else's intellectual property within your intellectual property to talk about that other intellectual property now, and so fair use was trying to acknowledge that, and fairious had four factors to it. But the first one, I think was you know, are you are you using any bit of someone else's intellctual property? The next one was you know how much of it are you using? And in what way are you are? Are you not transforming it in some way or changing it, And what is the context in which it is reappearing. Is it in a different medium, is it in a different market? Could there be some confusion between what you've done and the original in some way. So there's these different factors that are supposed to be weighed when the courts are looking at these things. And for many, many years, the courts didn't look at all four factors. They just looked at the first one, did you use some of it? Well, if you did, then you're a thief and you lose, you know, and you're you know, you're you're you're the bad guy here. And for many, many years, that's kind of how the courts look at things, and that's why there's a lot of really bad legal decisions that have been made over the years. Um So the laws haven't changed, you know. Unfortunately, we haven't seen any any smart, progressive legal changes to intellectual property law. There haven't been any cases that have gone through the court systems to really do that in a long long time, and this is a big problem. Fair use is something that ends up being decided in a court on a case by case basis. Fair use is a defense there's no codified set of rules that lets you create a checklist to make sure you won't be sued. You could create a work that sites of pre existing peace owned by someone else and follow all the rules and still get sued. You might eventually win that court case, but it's going to cost you just to be involved. Some entities, like YouTube respond to copyright infringement notices by immediately taking down the infringing material. Sometimes this happens automatically, and the content owner has to flip a virtual switch to allow the other video to go back up online. So if you create a video series in which you critique films or television or some other form of media, you could run into the issue of having your work taken down. Even if you're following the rules. You could get that video restored if it meets fair use criteria, but it takes a lot of effort. If all original works were truly original, perhaps I would see this entire system as being tough but fair. But the truth is no work is truly original. Creators have influences. Art doesn't bloom spontaneously in a vacuum. The real question is to what extent does a work stand up on its own versus relying upon the pre existing work that influenced it. That's not an easy or an expensive question to answer. This is deprogramming the universal media netted well as for Negative Land, they released a new album them late in two thousand fourteen called It's All in Your Head. It's a college piece that examines religious beliefs, not necessarily specific beliefs, but why we believe things in the first place. You're listening to It's All in your Head FM monotheism but in stereo. The project was born of discussions within Negative Land itself. None of us had ever talked to each other about our religious beliefs. I mean, I've known these guys, some of them since i was a teenager, and we had to work all that out because in fact, we don't all agree. You know, there's atheists, there's a NaSTA, you know, there's there's different perspectives on this, and we had to be sure that that was all reflection in the work as well. Um, So that that was another really interesting kind of behind the scenes part of creating the whole thing. So we would have huge debates over single words that we're being used in it. You know, one sentence that what is it going to be there, We're gonna cut it out, you know, typical, just super c D negative planned, you know, obsesso, you know, microscopic thinking that we we do the poetry, we reached to arts to try to begin to articulate what those things are. And I think that we have to acknowledge that we're in this realm when we begin to talk about this, and if we take the symbols and don't acknowledge that they're symbols, then we get into this triple. The album is organized on a pair of CDs referred to as acts. If you buy the physical album, your packaging is a King James version of the Bible. There was a limited edition version packaged and copies of the Kuran, but it has since sold out. While the album takes a critical look at belief systems, it also avoids passing judgment. Sections of the album explore ideas such as how the brain processes information to how cultures define and interpret beliefs. Mark explains why the group chose to package the album inside a Bible, but having it inside of a Bible framed it in this way that I personally just love, you know, and I think all of us just love the idea that you're using the Bible as a repurposed found object, and also anyway that the Bible is the liner notes you know, to the record. I've listened to the album in full and found it provocative. There were times that it made me think, in times when I had a very strong emotional reaction to what was going on in the album. It's the sort of reaction I imagine many artists hope for when they create their works, and it marked a very different experience to listening to audio entertainment than what I've become used to. It's rare these days that I'll sit down to listen to an album in full. I'm more likely to listen to my entire music collection on shuffle or even a larger collection streaming online following some cryptic algorithm that supposedly anticipates what I'll want to hear next. But that's not how Negative Land intends you to listen to their work. I actually when I give people copies of our of our music, and I say, you know, I know it's a lot to ask in this day and age, but wait until I don't care if it's a year from now, Wait until you have an actual hour of your toy to do nothing else except just listen to this thing from beginning to end. And um, and I think you might enjoy it, I said, if you just have it on in the background or just listen to separate tracks, I said, it won't even make sense. It will probably even just be annoying. And so It's All in your Head is like that. It's too complete. It's it's one complete work. It's got two acts to it, but it's very much designed to be listened to in its entirety. We had a huge debate about whether or not to put track points in it for for downloading and for CDs, because it kind of suggests or encourages people to put it into random shuffle play. But we also don't like the idea of trying to control someone's experience that much and just have to be one long track. Plus I know people will just break it up into tracks anyway. Negative Lands It's All on Your Head is available for purchase from their website negative land dot com. That's n e g A T I v l A n d dot com that wraps up the episode. Tech Stuff listens to negative Land. It was a really cool experience to get to talk to someone and they're a pro coach to making sort of transgressive music that has a real point of view. It was something that I don't get to do that often. And big thanks to Noel Brown of you know, ridiculous history and stuff they don't want you to know fame because he's the guy who got me in touch with negative land in the first place. So big thanks to him. And that wraps up this episode. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes, please reach out to me. Do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.