John Cohn | Play and Prototyping with the Veremin project | In the Open with Luke and Joe

Luke Schantz: What you're about to hear is a new podcast and livestream show entitled In the Open with Luke and Joe. In this series, my co- host Joe Sepi and I bring you conversations with community and technical leaders from the world of opensource and enterprise tech. We do this live, twice a month on Fridays at 12 noon Eastern Time. You can catch us on a variety of streaming platforms, or here as a replay on your favorite podcast app. To find out all the details, go to ibm. biz/ intheopen. There, you will find our show schedule, an embedded player of the live streaming video, as well as embeds of past episodes. Or you can link directly to the podcast page with ibm. biz/ intheopenpodcast. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoy our new series In the Open with Luke and Joe. Welcome to In the Open with Luke and Joe. I'm your host, Luke Schantz, and here's my co- host Joe Sepi. And a big welcome to our guest, IBM fellow John Cohn. Before we get to our show, don't forget to like and subscribe. Thank you for joining us for another installment of In the Open with Luke and Joe. Today, I am pleased to bring you a conversation with the creative and technical powerhouse John Cohn. We're going to be talking about the role of play and prototyping in John's work. To explore this theme, we will be digging in to the Veremin project. Veremin is an opensource, browser- based video instrument. It uses computer vision to track movement and converts those data points into music. But before we welcome our guest, John, let's say hello to our co- host, Joe Sepi.

Joe Sepi: Hey, Luke. How's it going?

Luke Schantz: I am doing well, Joe. Happy to be back on another episode of In the Open with you.

Joe Sepi: Yes, always a pleasure. I know we're both in Connecticut, but this weather is crazy. It was like spring was emerging, 70- degree weather, and then April Fools, we got snow, and I've got snow today too. It's 28 degrees. It's crazy, but that's the weather. That's how it goes.

Luke Schantz: It is. And I feel like Connecticut is like a micro climate because you've got this elevation and it's close to the coast. I think you're 30 minutes away, and I didn't see any snow. I think we need to check in on some weather API, like microclimate weather API here.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, we should do that. Do some comparisons here, just the distance.

Luke Schantz: Without further ado, though, let's bring in our guest, John Cohn.

Joe Sepi: Hey, John.

John Cohn: Hey. What you guys talking about snow? I'm in northern Vermont. I'm looking at a ton of snow. Yesterday, my wife and I were hiking just near the house in waist- deep snow, but-

Joe Sepi: Wow.

John Cohn: ...down where I am, it's just pretty dusty.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, you're way up there near Burlington, right?

John Cohn: Yep.

Luke Schantz: Cool.

Joe Sepi: I lived in Bennington for a little while. I love Vermont.

John Cohn: Oh my gosh.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. But I've lived everywhere. I've been all around.

John Cohn: Wow, that's great. I love it up here. It is like a maker's paradise.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it seems like it. It's a real kind of creative hub, whatever you'd want to call it.

John Cohn: One of everything. Yeah. I love it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's really cool.

Luke Schantz: Before we get into the Veremin project, John, maybe you could give a little bit of a self- introduction to our listeners who might not be familiar with your work or where you're coming from.

John Cohn: Oh my gosh. Well, it all started 62 years ago on a snowy day in New York City. And now, I'm here. Let's see, I grew up, to the extent that I grew up, in Houston, Texas, in the middle of the space race, 1960s. I wanted to be an astronaut, and I came to realize I wasn't good- enough looking to be an astronaut. Actually, my mom just found this article, this little piece of paper that I wrote, that said I wanted to go to MIT and I wanted to be an engineer. And I did both of those, so that was a while ago. Yeah, went to MIT because it was as far from Houston as I could get. I like Houston, I don't want to sell it short, but-

Joe Sepi: No, Houston's great.

John Cohn: Yeah. Houston in the summertime might be a little tough. Yeah. But came up here, I went to MIT and have really never escaped the orbit. I'm like a huge... Let's see, is that backwards? I can never-

Joe Sepi: No, it's good.

John Cohn: I helped form VOMIT, Vermont's Own MIT club. And I went there, I was electrical engineer. Took my junior year, went to Austria because I thought I wanted to be a historian because I heard it was good future in it. And I decided hell no, I'm going to be an engineer. Came back and joined IBM. I used to hitchhike up here. I had a friend from Texas. I live in beautiful Jonesville, Vermont, population 600, in a slightly haunted schoolhouse with my beautiful IBM issued wife. And I just started my 40th year at this place, which is crazy.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

John Cohn: That's a pretty simple view. Three beautiful kids. My middle son Sam passed away several years ago, which I have to get out there soon because it kind of is a part of who I am. Have had a really good career life, enjoy working with people about just geeking out on science.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Lots of stuff there. I'm curious, when did you think about IBM? And sorry, I know we're all IBMers so I don't want to spend too much time on this. But coming up in the space time in our country, I know IBM was really involved in that, but were you later on that got involved with IBM? I'm just curious.

John Cohn: In answer to your question, Joe, I think about IBM every waking second, of course. And IBM is so big that it actually warps space time. You mean space time... Inaudible was really something about it. Because I said I wanted to be an astronaut. Every kid that I knew, male or female, several of the astronauts' kids went to our school. And there was a horrible fire in Apollo A, and Chaffees went to our school and I knew the Grissoms, and it was... What was fascinating about it is that everybody was into science and everyone wanted to be a scientist and it certainly influenced the way that my brother and I came out.

Joe Sepi: That's amazing.

John Cohn: So it definitely, and I think that the power of something like that, to galvanize everybody's energy, is something we need to find. Maybe climate is it. But to have everybody on board and thinking about the same thing, you've seen it with the, am I allowed to say COVID?

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

John Cohn: But it has been really fascinating from a technology standpoint how that's been a major, " Okay, we're all going over here." And I think that's been really interesting. So I'm a big believer in the power of collective enthrallment.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. I feel fortunate. My next door neighbor won the Nobel Prize for virology most recently. He and his wife are both research virologists. We talk to them all the time, especially with the pandemic. And it's been really fascinating to have those conversations with research virologists. It's really fascinating.

John Cohn: Wow. You're the closest I'll ever get to a Nobel Prize. Inaudible. That's great.

Joe Sepi: It was shocking. When it was announced I was like, " Wait, that's Charlie, my neighbor. That's amazing."

John Cohn: That's fantastic.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, we made him a cake. It was nice.

John Cohn: A Nobel cake?

Joe Sepi: Yup.

John Cohn: That's great.

Joe Sepi: Cool.

John Cohn: I should also say that the main thing is that I'm a nerd. If I really had to define myself, I would say I am a very proud and dedicated nerd. And I hope that, I don't know who's out there right now, but I hope that we've got nerds at their desks out there.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: That's a great place to parlay into one of the themes that we are going to talk about today, which is the significance of play and how that ties into prototyping. And I think one of the things I think we're trying to really get to in this show is trying to, yes, there's business problems to solve, yes, there's technical challenges that happen that we have to deal with. But I think a lot of the best stuff and a lot of what motivates us as engineers and technologists and scientists is this just passion and love for the technology and learning and playing, so I know that... Maybe set us up for that and let us know your methodology there and then how a project like Veremin comes out of that.

John Cohn: Okay. Yeah. And that's something that's a long and hard one lesson. I've always been nerdy and always been working with my hands and I recognized that that's what doing stuff, projects in my... My parents treated us with benign neglect and didn't care what we did in the garage, so we had all sorts of crazy stuff going on there, my brother and I. As a matter of fact, when they moved up to Boston, I had to go down and dismantle our lab and I found almost World War III worth of chemicals in there. That was interesting. But I found that when I went to MIT in particular, but also everywhere else I've been, in IBM in particular, that the people who always come into it with that passion, that how I'm going to learn, most people in our fields, electrical engineering... I'm much more of an electrical engineer than I'm a computer person. But I came to it tinkering. And somewhere I started to realize that even myself and then I notice in coworkers that you just make less time for it because just stuff comes in, all the things that you got to do and you get promoted and trying to make a living and trying to create a family. And if you're not careful you start to lose it. And what happened when, for me with play, it started to become back into focus really when I started having kids because, like most neurotic Jewish academics, I suck at sports. Am I allowed to say suck?

Joe Sepi: Sure.

John Cohn: Am I allowed to say sports?

Joe Sepi: You're allowed to say whatever.

John Cohn: The guy who's going to go through or fall around, that's the inaudible one, right?

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Sure.

John Cohn: I wasn't going to be that guy. But when you go outside in the backyard and blow stuff up, it was a really nice bonding moment with kids. And I found that the more science- y kind of stuff, the stuff that I enjoyed, that I did with them, the more they got into it. Then I got dragged into their schools and then the neighboring schools and pretty soon, I think at last count, I've been in front of about 60, 000 kids. And especially the weirder I look, the better off that actually works. But I mentioned about our son's passing, I have three beautiful boys. Max is the oldest who works at Meow Wolf. Do you know about Meow Wolf?

Luke Schantz: No.

John Cohn: Go look up Meow Wolf. Oh, it's amazing. It started in Santa Fe. I digress. But it started in Santa Fe. But he is an amazing maker. He has a 5, 000 watt cutting laser, he writes code, he welds, he 3D prints. But this is an indoor experience park. Started in Santa Fe. They just opened in Las Vegas and they're opening in Boulder soon.

Luke Schantz: Wow.

John Cohn: Anyway, he does that. Our youngest son Gabe is a biochemist. That's why your Nobel Prize story, he's a third year PhD student in cancer biology. And our middle son Sam, as I mentioned, passed away in an accident when he was 14 on vacation in Florida, which was... How long you got? That was a tough thing. Surprisingly though, I found that playing was what brought me back to this world. And I found specifically making stuff was therapeutic, but making stuff with other people, especially kids, was just like, " Hey, that feels good," and it felt right. And I started making things with people. I reflected on this. Actually, what kind of gelled the thought, I was doing it, but I didn't really stop and say, " That's really my message," until our youngest one, Gabe, asked me to give a talk. I was the honors keynote at their graduation, at the high school graduation, which was kind of... We're in a town of 600 people near a town of 4, 000 people and everybody knows everyone, and I was all nervous about giving this talk because if you suck in that size town. But I ended up coming up with the idea that what would I tell myself if I could go back in time to when I was, say, 17 or 18? And it was really that I wish I had, well, that I would want to reinforce or not to work so hard and to play more. And that message, I found that to be such a powerful thing, even for work. What we do at IBM is you... We've got technology, we're trying to understand it. The only way to understand stuff is to try it and take that playful attitude. You don't always know something's going to work. You don't always use something for its intended purpose. You sometimes have to break things. You often have to fail. And all of those things inaudible playful, " Can I make something cool?" And as I found through my career, moving towards the Veremin question, is that the more cool stuff you make, the easier it is. First of all, I don't like talking about things that I don't know how to do, but you're always in this... In my new job, in AI, I'm not an expert yet. I'm trying to learn my way and that's how I ended up with the Veremin. And I found that doing experiments like that not only helps you grow your own skills, but it's a great icebreaker. It's great because you could collaborate with people outside of your organization. You can continue to collaborate with students. Even in a client situation when meetings go horribly wrong, bringing out some gadget that you made that uses the technology you're doing, it's incredibly... it's an icebreaker and it's a source of collaboration. What happened with the Veremin, as perfect example, I was moving from, I was a chief scientist of the Munich IOT Center, which was a super fun job, but it meant getting on an airplane every other week to go to Munich from Jonesville, Vermont. Because they keep saying they're going to build a tunnel and they just never finished it. So I was learning more about AI and when I got to the MIT IBM lab, where I work, which is such a super amazing place, we should talk about that, I was thinking, " I don't know much about AI so I better start playing around with it and learning." And I build Tesla coils. Do you know what those are? They're menacing devices that set up big meter long sparks. And I had this idea that I wanted to use AI to control a Tesla coil. So I put together something using, so I was learning TensorFlow, I'm a PyTorch person now, but TensorFlow, and on top of it there was a trained model called PoseNet, which is a motion capture thing. They had some great people who put TensorFlow out and did a really great job of having a bunch of little demos, little open- source demos. And there was a PoseNet thing using Tensor JS so that the model actually runs native in a phone or something. So I started hacking on that and piece something together with Node- RED. Do you know about Node- RED?

Joe Sepi: Of course.

John Cohn: We should talk about Node- RED. I'm one of the grand great uncles of Node- RED. I'll tell you about that inaudible. But basically crafted something crafty together that used PoseNet, a kind of a hacked example, used MQTT and turned into somewhat beautiful music. Then I was lucky enough to meet somebody in one of the IBM developer outreach groups, Bob Barbosa. You ever run across him?

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yep. Bob-

John Cohn: Oh, what an amazing guy. He's just great solid front end, backend, and a good designer. And so he helped me take my really crafty multi, three piece kind of thing and actually make it into something pretty elegant. So we did that and I'll tell you, I did it just for fun, did it just as a learning exercise, but I've had so much fun with that thing. A couple years ago I was at NeurIPS, which is the main, it's the biggest AI conference in the world. And I walked into a room, I hope not offending anybody by saying this, but there were a bunch of demos, some from our companies, most not from our company, but frankly pretty boring, except for one robot thing that tried to force food into your mouth. That was cool. But most of them were boring. And I sat down next to a friend of mine, another IBM person, and I said, " Oh, let me show you what I'm working on." I flipped open my laptop, brought up the Veremin version 0. 0. 0. 1 or something like that, was playing around with it, will show you that, and all of a sudden we had a crowd and I was like, " This is good." And since then I've used that thing to, again, just to interface it. We were talking before the show, I use it to interface to physical devices. So it runs my Tesla coil, it's a MIDI controller, but I've now just recently with another student who's just over the hill, worked out a way of creating it as a general purpose MQTT interface, so I'm now running a big robot with it and a 30- foot keyboard. What else have I interfaced it to? Anyway, long answer, but because it's fun.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, exactly. That's really cool. There's so much there to dig into.

John Cohn: Is there a way we can show that thing?

Joe Sepi: Yeah, let's inaudible-

John Cohn: I just realized I'm talking about it and maybe people, " Ooh, there's Luke."

Luke Schantz: Here I am.

John Cohn: Is he alive? Oh wait, you look frozen.

Luke Schantz: Uh- oh. Let me refresh it here. I got a lot going on.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I'm going to fire up mine too. Maybe we can get-

Luke Schantz: Fire up yours.

Joe Sepi: Yep.

Luke Schantz: This is a lesson of you should make a video backup.

Joe Sepi: I have my MIDI inaudible-

John Cohn: Oh, I have that. I have that. Oh, did you actually hook it into a MIDI keyboard?

Joe Sepi: I did, but I don't know, I haven't gotten that part to work yet.

John Cohn: Okay. It takes a little bit of...

Joe Sepi: Inaudible.

John Cohn: Or can I share a screen?

Luke Schantz: Yeah, you can share a screen.

John Cohn: But you won't be able to hear me. Is that correct?

Joe Sepi: Maybe not. Why don't I share my screen?

Luke Schantz: Yeah, Joe, share your screen.

John Cohn: Gotcha, show me your screen.

Joe Sepi: Let's do this. Share screen. That one's fine. We'll probably get into the weird, yep, that thing.

John Cohn: Inaudible. Yes, as I said, somewhat beautiful music. And if you actually pull down the... Couple things. First of all, pull down the... Yeah, there. You'll see more functions than should ever be there, but you can control on PoseNet some of the matching accuracy, et cetera. But you can also turn on several other things. You can turn on how modal it is, whether it's in a minor key. And right now, actually, one thing I'm working on right now is my wife is, I should say my wife worked at IBM for a while, her late father- in- law worked there and, between us, we have 84 years of IBM, so she's sort of a techno neat nerd yoga teacher. And do you know what a harmonium is? These kind of things that you meditate to. So I'm trying to build a chanting device that uses Veremin. So it's got some tonal things, you can set the tone, you can set the vertical height fraction if you want discreet notes, da duh, or you want it more continuous. You can also turn... If you have a MIDI controller hooked into your computer. By the way, so far, runs on iOS, Android, Windows and iOS reasonably reliably. But it can output MIDI and, as I just mentioned, it'll also work with an MQTT broker and will follow where your nose is and your eyes are, where your shoulders are. You can get all your whole body, but you can get an idea of where your wrists are. So I have a robot's arm, it's in pieces right now, but as you go like this, it follows your gaze. So it walks around with you and adjusts to the distance that you are and you can wave your arms around, and it's totally insane, actually.

Joe Sepi: That's really cool. That sounds amazing.

Luke Schantz: That is so interesting. Two thoughts I wanted to mention, I love that you have a Tesla coil that controls this and I'm a huge Nicola Tesla fan. Oh, go ahead.

John Cohn: I have seven Tesla coils.

Luke Schantz: What? As soon as the pandemic's over, Joe and I are taking road trip up-

Joe Sepi: Oh yeah, road trip.

Luke Schantz: ...to see your Tesla coils. But I'm a huge fan of Tesla. I worked on this opera about Tesla before. So we went down this whole rabbit hole of research. And apparently, now people know what this is. Maybe you've seen it at a maker faire. But back in the day, apparently, he would just turn this thing on in a room full of people and really terrify them. And his attitude was like, " What? This is cool. You should like this." He really scared people with it. The other thing I was going to mention, this' so interesting that you have Veremin and now you're adapting it working with your wife, I remember a story that Theremin himself, his wife was a dancer and he made a stage size... He basically turned a whole stage into a theremin so that she could dance and have the performance be both musical and dance.

John Cohn: Who's really famous is his consort. I don't know what's the appropriate word for... but Clara Rockmore, you should check her out. She died in the nineties. Actually, he died in the nineties too. But she was a violist, which is... Wait, which is bigger, violin or viola?

Joe Sepi: Viola is where you sit with it, almost a cello.

John Cohn: No, no, it's a joke. No, they're the same size, just violinist's heads are bigger. No, but she was a violist and she actually developed a muscle tremor and so she performed, you should go check this out. She's got this crazy Rachmaninoff and Saint- Saëns things playing. And here's another, Theremin, he was in the United States at the time, and he had RCA make a hundred thousand of these theremins because he was pretty sure it was going to replace the piano, which he totally got wrong. But right before the second World war, he moved back to Russia. And in 1995, right before he died, he got... he may have actually gotten it after he died, but he got an award for working on the bugs that were in the US embassy. Inaudible that was kind of interesting.

Luke Schantz: Oh, very interesting.

John Cohn: Yeah, he was kind of cool. Yeah. But I've seen some of that dance stuff. Do you know Tod Machover at MIT?

Joe Sepi: No.

John Cohn: He's a father of Guitar Hero, but he's done some amazing full stage kind of interactive sound sets. I do a lot of interactive art, is my go- to outside of work.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

John Cohn: Yeah. But I think the idea of nonsense... Real technology applied to nonsense is very effective.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's a great concept. I love that.

Luke Schantz: And it's like you said, you may be doing this thing because it's fun or it's nonsense, but you don't know what's actually going to come from it. In that sense it's very much like science or pure research. You don't have an outcome necessarily. You need to discover and then...

John Cohn: Yeah. Exactly. You need to be open to the fact that you might be on the wrong place. Now it's been very interesting, but especially one of the things that I found that, things like the Veremin are very useful for, is getting people to lean into AI. I just have been on... The governor of Vermont that asked of me and a group of other people on a task force for AI, and we started the year before COVID and just finishing up, and one of the things I realized is that there's a lot of misunderstanding and fear and non- nuanced conversations going on. So one of the things I'm trying to do is we're working on... Vermont's kind of a brave little state and it's small enough that you can get stuff done. We're trying to get more AI... Well, actually, start by getting more computer science into the schools, starting at middle school and then having some stuff about AI where you can get people interested in it, they can understand what it can do, what it can't do, it shouldn't do, and actually a way of starting the conversation with something fun. I'm working with right now, just a parallel thing, are you familiar with the programming language Scratch that inaudible?

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: Oh, yeah.

John Cohn: So the good folks at Scratch have created a really nice extension program and I'm working with a glow in the dark, brilliant woman, 13- year- old woman my named Isha who lives in New Jersey, that is... They have a plug- ins construct and they've started to build little AI componentry, including PoseNet, the thing that we just showed. Long complicated story, but the Veremin influenced some of that, which was fun. But I'm working with this woman Isha on creating a little curriculum around make your own AI in something like Scratch, which is purely a play, just for fun kind of thing. And I just think it's such a great thing and, say, it gets your own skills going but it also gets conversations going. And my sort of world domination thing is I think if you can get kids interested and not just... and thoughtful, things like ethics and stuff like that, you can get them talking, it's a great vector to get the rest of society, their parents and then... So that's my plan for mind control.

Joe Sepi: Start with the kids.

John Cohn: Yeah, no, I think kids actually are very interested in, they're just... Kids these days. Because of open- source, when you go into an average high school, you're going to find a group of... I'm very involved in FIRST Robotics. Do you know what that is? Yeah. So I'm the state sort of first robotics, first tech challenge champ. Champion sounds like I did something good. I'm the inaudible. And any high school you go into, even in the most remote parts of our rated little remote rural state, you'll find kids because of the open- source things and Arduino and Raspberry Pie that know, that could actually hack together some simple AI. So it blows my mind.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, it's really interesting. Kids are really absorbing all the stuff and they...

John Cohn: As a matter of fact, I'm not a big Java programmer. I thought that was what my grandpa used or something. But I had a high school junior in South Burlington, Vermont teach me how to use Android studio, to do these robots stuff. I learned so much from that guy. You know how to use debugger online and stuff like that. So I think you sometimes go in one of these... technical humility, that you go in going, " I know everything. I'm going to tell them all about this stuff." And you really learn even these students can teach you stuff.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, for sure.

John Cohn: And I don't mean that just metaphorically, they're smarter than you are.

Luke Schantz: And I think that's one of the most interesting things about a career in technology is that you're never done. It is this constant learning process. And like you said, even if you happen to be a subject domain expert in one area, there's going to be so many things that you don't know about. And while that can be daunting, it's also really positive because it means it's always a good time to get an involved, and if you put some effort in a short period of time, you can get up to speed. It's a process, right?

John Cohn: Yeah. And it's such an interesting thing. I was meditating on that a little bit too, is that you got to... That goes back to what I just said about maybe technical humility is that if you.... Now on my fourth or fifth career at IBM or as a grownup, to the extent that I am, and when you go into one of those new areas. So I was, for the first 30 years... I'm a chip guy, so I work on the software used to design chips and really know that field. I have a strict policy of every 30 years you do something different. Then since then I was in a corporate strategy and then help start the IOT of the Internet of Things brand and IBM and then now I'm doing this AI stuff. And each time you go in, knowing that you don't know it. And it's, again, playful, you got to be playful because you can't really fake it till you make it. That's not fair to yourself or to anyone else, especially as you get more senior. I'm fairly senior in IBM and people expect because I have a title, they expect you to know everything about it and you have to go in there and explain that you're learning too. And I think that's good messaging, that's good modeling for young career people because the scariest thing in the world is when I meet somebody who thinks they know everything. Because I know what I don't know, I hope. So this has been really a fun exercise, trying to retool PyTorch for example.

Joe Sepi: It's good to be humble and open to these sorts of things. And I found that too, when I started at IBM and I was doing more advocacy and evangelism work and talking about things, it was scary. And one of the things I needed to learn was it's okay to not know everything and to be open to that and, " You have a hard question. I don't know the answer. I'm going to go try to find it out and then I'll get back to you." And I think that's a good way to approach things. Then you learn, and you can share that learning.

John Cohn: I think open has just made that so much easier, the fact that you can go and find stuff on the outside. And one thing, I don't know how much we're supposed to pitch IBM here, but the thing that I love about it is you can find every kind of person, from Nobel Prize winning physicists to economists to ethnomusicologists. We even had a corporate comedian. But you can find this... It's a question of, again, making sure that you can locate those folks. But I just think that the world is so much better connected now. I grew up in a... My first love was, I was a telephone hobbyist.

Joe Sepi: Oh.

John Cohn: Is that the right? Yes. That's a story.

Joe Sepi: What does that mean? Are we talking about Erlang, right? Was that telephone stuff or...? Luke, you've inaudible-

Luke Schantz: I think he's talking about phone freaking.

John Cohn: Yeah, I was a phone freak.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, yeah, okay.

John Cohn: I got caught when I was... Is this one okay, is this an okay thread?

Luke Schantz: I think so.

John Cohn: We can edit it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: I think so. Inaudible limitations.

John Cohn: I was thinking about how I learned that. I went down to the Rice University library and the good people at Bell System had published all of their in- band signaling and we, me and my two friends, would just go through this stuff and that's how.... Then there was, I remember, it was a big innovation because there was a 300 baud telephone modem call- in that we would change gears with and follow them, a Hacker magazine back then. That all happened when I was a minor. So I was told, when I became a real grown up, that would disappear. And just right before I was going to graduate from MIT, literally three weeks before I was going to graduate, I got hauled into the campus police inaudible and there was an FBI person there and there was an incident, which I had nothing to do with. I really didn't. I only found out about what happened afterwards. My expunged record had somehow been respunged and there was a lot of circumstantial evidence. It was one of the people, the guy's girlfriend, had the same last name as mine, which is in my culture like Smith. But they thought they've caught me and I was like... But anyway, but where was I going? Oh, I was going because in the day we had to go to the library and get those paper things, they're called books, and do it. Now, you can just throw stuff out on the interwebs and find people who know people. And I think it's just such, it's so fascinating how easy it is to get things started now. I love it.

Joe Sepi: So true.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, it really is. And I hear what you're saying, even if you know about, say, one microcontroller platform and you try to dive into another, there is this learning curve and read the manual, but there's no shortcutting the shortcut. It's actually, you're saying, the information's there, you just got to grab it. I went crazy around my house this past winter with all of these temperature and humidity sensors, so I have all of these little guys and I put them on all of these ESP inaudible boards, or 8266. And then look, this is the data I collected, this is all the temperatures in different places in my house. Now I'm at the stage where it's like, " Oh, I want to analyze this. I'm going to build these dashboards. Could I get some kind of AI custom thermostat? We'll see." But this is what I've been playing with and it's...

John Cohn: If you're not comfortable move three inches to the left?

Joe Sepi: Well, Luke is redoing his house, I have a lot of meetings with Luke, and so sometimes he's in a bundled up blanket inaudible all this field data there.

John Cohn: I was thinking about that crowdsourcing of information and when I was a little boy. It was shortly after Sam passed, I was in Shanghai and I saw, this was 2007, and I saw the wall size, building size TV screens at the time, and so I bought some of... Now you see this stuff everywhere, but at the time I bought a bunch of this stuff. This was more recent generation. But I couldn't find, there was no documentation. But the documentation that was there, obviously it was in Chinese, but it was poorly documented and it was all for video. This was for wall size video. And so I bought a couple meters of it to make a hack, of course, and I sort of just got on a oscilloscope and tried to reverse engineer what was coming out of the controller because I had a little bespoke controller. And I was early in, that was pretty early in the times of things like Make magazine and stuff. And I found a kid I didn't meet until a decade later that could help me figure out how the fades work. Again, this is more recent generation stuff, but I was so amazed that we had actually, we had exchanged all this information, we had put out an open- source, I was first on a basic stamp. You remember the basic stamp? And then we had-

Luke Schantz: Oh, yeah.

John Cohn: And then we had redone it on PIC controllers. And then we eventually did it on Arduino. I think some of our code actually ended up in some of the Adafruit stuff that I use now. And it was just this kind of weird group of people coming together to decipher something. I built a thing for Burning Man. I go to a festival called Burning Man with a bunch of people and I bought 20 meters of this stuff for the two wheels. And this, I remember being up there three o'clock in the morning, soldering at the top of something, trying to get something to work, which eventually worked, which was good. But I just love this idea of collective... Right now in IBM research we have this idea of communities of discovery, the whole idea that you don't necessarily have to have all the skills in your one little pod to be able to figure something out. You can put it out there and people can collaborate and still compete in the open world, but still figure out ways of solving problems that are of mutual interest. I just totally, that was unthinkable when I was a tadpole, tad one, maybe.

Luke Schantz: Go ahead, Joe.

Joe Sepi: No, that's amazing stuff. I'm curious what's going on for you right now and what's coming up in the future? What are you excited about that's on the horizon?

John Cohn: I'm very interested in how you get the public more interested in AI. That's one thing. And just in science in general. I'm super fascinated. I was on a project related to COVID. I was peripherally related to the group that just the health passports coming out in New York state, we were working on a tool, we've developed a tool for doing contact tracing using Bluetooth. But Bluetooth was inaccurate because it goes through walls, for example, and it can be two meters off on a two- meter accuracy measurement. We're using phones, just unaltered phones to do ultrasonic confirmation so you can remove false positive. So I really like this idea of Code for Good and I've been getting more involved in something that IBM does called Call for Code, IBM is a sponsor of Call for Code. And I believe that you can turn on that switch in anyone. But in a student that says she or he can use their technical chops to do some good in the world, I think that's a lifelong enablement, if you can turn on that, " I like doing that. I can do that, and my skills can make a difference in the world." That's just a great magnifier. It's like a fantastic Ponzi scheme you can... So that is one thing I'm working on. And I'm also, as much as I love technology for purpose, I'm also, as I said before, a big believer in technology for no reason at all because it's fun. So right now I'm working on, do you know the band Phish?

Joe Sepi: Yeah, of course.

John Cohn: They're Vermont buddies. So Mike Gordon, the bass player's a good friend. And in 2013, me and my friend Homer built him a 30- foot keyboard that was interactive so that people who attended the shows, in his words, his band was in smaller venues than Phish, but it was an interactive thing that would allow people in the audience to play it. And it was completely beer proof. So now, I'm rerigging it to run off of Easter run- on using a tool called Max/ MSP. Do you know what that... or Ableton?

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

John Cohn: Yeah. He wanted to make it simpler because he wants to have it as more of a toy, and so I'm rerigging it for his house so that it all runs on a Raspberry Pi 4. So that's what I'm doing this afternoon. My boss isn't listening. And actually interfacing it to the Veremin, of course.

Joe Sepi: Cool.

John Cohn: ... justfor fun, so you can sweep and have it go... But we're always into making. I think that the idea of spectacle, making a science a little bit bigger and a little bit more surprising than people expect is a really good way of getting people into it. I've been doing this for work with kids and work in schools for now three decades, to the point where their kids are now being impacted by it, which I totally love. I love it when a kid comes up and says, " I remember you came in and shocked the teacher," or whatever. But anyway, so I'm looking forward to doing more hands- on stuff. I think I've earned, I believe, the time to go putter, so that's what I'm doing. More puttering for good.

Joe Sepi: Yep. And for play.

John Cohn: Yeah, definitely for play.

Joe Sepi: That's amazing.

Luke Schantz: That's so interesting what you were saying about the communities of discovery. And I just wanted to mention, I also am involved in the Call for Code and that we just did this podcast for Call for Code. It's all about getting started. And one of the main themes of the podcast is exactly what you just said is, first of all, the starting kits and the prompts for Call for Code have expertise baked into them. But really, whether you win or not, the whole process that is outlined there is exactly like this communities of discovery that you mentioned, where it's about getting engaged within that Slack channel, within your own community, finding subject- matter experts. One of the teams that won, I think, last year or the year before, two years ago, Prometeo, they didn't win the first year and then they went and got with an actual wildfire fireman who was an expert in that space, and then having that subject- matter expert on the team allowed them to revamp the idea and then end up winning. And I hear stories over and over like that; the more you actually... It's a little bit of risk maybe opening up and saying, " I don't know," or asking for help or talking to people, but the more you actually do that, I hear these amazing stories about how this fantastic stuff comes out of it.

John Cohn: Yeah. That sends me on two riffs. One, on the Call for Code thing, one of the things that I'm so excited about is actually a mechanical thing. So this past year, or past year and a half, I helped at MIT, we built a super computer named Satori, which is named after my dog who unfortunately passed away this year. But it was number four green computer, supercomputer, in the world.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

John Cohn: And the process of doing that... Yeah, it's been pretty fun because it was in a kind of storyline. It was built using POWER9 processors, which I worked on everything up through POWER7, but they were still using the same design methodology, so I actually had to learn how to use these. And I recognized one of the things about how do you make technology consumable, because just trying to get something in use at MIT is really interesting because there's so many, there's 23 different departments; physics, electrical engineering, humanities is one department. But we had so many different things coming at us, we had to make it as simple to use as possible. So we really do a lot of work with things like just simple Python stuff and Jupyter Notebooks. And what I'm working on now with the people in global university programs is trying to get all of... IBM has some fascinating technology around climate. We have things like weather company, we have PAIRS, we have a lot of data science stuff. We have the Mayflower magic boat thing, or research boat. We have all of these components and they all... What we're trying to do is bring them into a single, very consumable component based on OpenShift. So what we're doing is basically creating a code- ready container that will you be able to come down and in 90 seconds be in Jupyter Lab, whether you're running on your laptop or you're running on a hosted supercomputer, like Satori. So I've been spending a lot of time trying to, what's the easiest way to... how do you make something that's intrinsically complex, it's rich and deep, but how do you make that accessible and usable in a form that everyone can see? So I'm spending a lot of time learning coming backwards from an outsider's perspective to say, " Okay, here are the tool sets that I can assume that someone would know. How do I make some of our more complex..." I don't know if you know about PAIRS, but it's this really cool spatial temporal database around the sort of community of discovery thing. How do you make that really consumable so you don't have to go through a bunch of proprietary interfaces? So I'm learning a lot about that. But can I change, can I go back to another thread or do you want me-

Joe Sepi: Please.

Joe Sepi: No, no, go ahead.

John Cohn: That what

John Cohn: you said, Luke, a couple minutes ago about the ability to ask for help, we were working on that before. One thing we hadn't talked about, which I am contractually incapable of not mentioning in every conversation, is that... inaudible, Luke, but I was in a reality show a couple years ago on Discovery and that was a pretty weird experience, and it was stem, it was Discovery Channel's show called The Colony. Totally stupid. Really stupid premise. It had this ridiculous premise like that there was this global pandemic. It was really weird because actually there were 10 of us, me and nine crazy people, and we're still very close, and we all had this weird early in the pandemic, but we didn't think it was early, we do a lot of events and we all did a virtual event for a seventh grade class in Toronto about the pandemic. And I realized as we were all talking that we were all having this post- traumatic reaction to the pandemic because that was what we were supposedly living. And even though no one lost touch with reality, but it felt very strange. But the whole thing, going back to what you said, Luke, is that it was the whole idea of inventing under constraint, but that we didn't have the internet that they knew of. That's another story. We didn't have the tools we needed, et cetera. And we all started by hoarding our projects, whatever it was. Like, " I'm going to do this all right, and if I'm going to succeed, everybody's going to... No, it's mine," and blah blah blah. I remember the moment that it clicked for me that asking for help was not a sign of weakness. It was a sign of intelligence. I was trying to turn a car over so I could take out the alternator. We were making a generator that burned wood, that's a long story, and I was going to try to turn this car over by myself. And one of my, I was hired to be the book smart guy, and the street smart guy who was six four and my dear friend now came over and said, " Professor, you beep." And he just called four of us and we just picked the car up and went... I was like, "Hmm." It just was a really interesting thing. But the idea of asking for help is not a sign of weakness. And if you're an ability to give help and do it freely, that's really what's behind open- source. It was just a really fundamentally cool, that was a cool event.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's interesting. I don't want to use the word successful, but I think people who are able to ask for help and recognize these gaps that they may have to further whatever it is they're working on, well, that's how, again, I don't want to use the word success, but how you reach what your goal is.

John Cohn: I think you redefine success. If you define success as something that is a rarefied component that if you get some of mine, I have less, you act in a wrong way. If you say, like you said, Joe, if the success is achieving the goal of whatever it takes, then my success is your success. And that's really, that's fundamentally what open- source is, right?

Joe Sepi: Yeah, exactly.

John Cohn: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: I think a lot of our listeners might be familiar with the cloud side of that, how that happened, how we've gotten from having to build your own DIY infrastructure as a service, monitoring and all of this. But this totally brought back memories when you mentioned basic stamp and PIC chip. I remember when I had gone back to school for new media stuff, and to do a project that involved electronics, you needed this whole little team. It was a big deal and you'd make this really janky prototype board. Everybody would just do that over and over and never really achieve a level of excellence from the project. And then fast forward, two or three years later, I'm using, it was the wiring board, then it was pre Arduino, but the wiring board by myself, I was able to do this, quite elaborate for the time. I was using Max/ MSP, I'm using the wiring board and I'm creating this interactive museum exhibit. And it goes to show, for years and years, people were recreating the wheel over and over, but then as soon as it got into an open- source place, you could just go right to creating that differentiating value.

John Cohn: Yeah, you raised the level of innovation. Exactly. And I think the maker movement... Wait, Luke, was it you that... Did you work at 3rd Ward?

Luke Schantz: Yeah, yeah. I had a studio there and I taught classes there. I was one of the first to teach the 3D printing in New York. I had one of the early MakerBot and stuff.

John Cohn: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, because I think that's when it started to hit me that what was happening in the software world was actually able to happen in the physical world. Just a quick, I'm just remembering this. My oldest son, our oldest son who works at Meow Wolf used to live in 147 foot derelict ferry boat that was just outside Luke's window. Do you remember that story I was telling you about?

Luke Schantz: I do. I do remember. His boat too.

John Cohn: It's still there. The Shemanchi. If you go on in Google Maps and look up where 3rd World was, where 3rd Ward was, say that twice, on Morgan Ave, the boat is still there and it's hard to miss. So you can just go down and you can see it. You can even see the swimming pool. And the roof where I always remember because I would go down there when I was working in Armonk, and my wife and I, if she was with me or we would camp on the roof of the building because the 147- foot boat was a pirate hippie hangout and it was impossible to sleep, so I would sleep on the top, looking at 3rd Ward. And then at 5: 30 when the airplanes from JFK started taking out, I'd put on my sport jacket and drive to Armonk. It was great.

Joe Sepi: That's amazing. Oh, cool.

Luke Schantz: I love that.

John Cohn: Armonk being IBM headquarters, inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah. I used to live over in Westchester. And then when I started working at IBM just four years ago, I'm an infant in IBM terms, but you couldn't throw a stick without hitting an IBMer. And at the local café, I met this couple and they're like 88 and 91 and the guy retired from IBM and he worked there for 50 years. He created the computerized EKG machine. What's his name? Maybe even Ray, gosh, I'm forgetting his last name. We'll connect later and share that.

John Cohn: Not Ralph Gomery, is it?

Joe Sepi: No, inaudible I can't remember his last name now. It was Ray something or other. I'll look it up maybe in a second. But just amazing, so many people that were doing interesting things through the years there.

John Cohn: It's such an amazing family. And the diaspora, the people who are still in there and people who have retired and moved to other places, it is like the biggest family in the world. One of the things that was very interesting about this last year... Until I started working at the MIT lab at the very end of 2018, but before that, I spent my entire adult life traveling all over the place and had so many friends in IBM. It was very interesting this year. I don't know, you both felt that, is how much I missed the human contact, but also how much I now realize that we could travel a whole lot less. I'm glad I got to, but it was very interesting though. But what a incredible community of people.

Joe Sepi: I know. Ray Bonner, that's who it was.

John Cohn: No, I knew who he is, yeah.

Joe Sepi: You know Ray?

John Cohn: No, I knew who he is. No, he was before my time, believe it or not.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, he's amazing. He and his wife are really sweet people.

John Cohn: Yeah. Yeah. I was actually born in Ardsley. Do you know where that is?

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

John Cohn: But then my parents moved to Houston because my dad was a sports promoter, which was very interesting. But we still found some, I don't know what we used to talk about, but... like on two different planets inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Well, I thought about this early on. Houston and Burlington actually seem similar to me. They're creative places that have... Am I crazy? I don't know.

John Cohn: No. I would say that Burlington has not discovered Mexican food. I love Houston. Yeah. It's got a great art culture, actually.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. I mean, I guess inaudible-

John Cohn: There's a very cool kind of avant garde art and music thing there that I was super into.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking about too. I drove around the country for a while once and played a show there and it was this open warehouse and there were a bunch of punk kids and creative types running around, and it just seemed really rich.

John Cohn: Yeah. My brother, who is a world famous surgeon, inventor guy down there was part of a group called The Urban Animals. They were, remember, a street skating? They had this whole punk rock street skating, inventing club thing. And this was in the seventies and eighties. I was like, " What was going on?" And let's just say that wasn't the Texas of my youth, but it was really, it's a very cool place. I'll have to meditate on the Burlington is the Houston of Northwestern Vermont though inaudible. It must be the climate.

Joe Sepi: Is Rocky Erickson from Houston? I don't know if you're familiar with Rocky from the 13th Floor Elevators.

John Cohn: Oh my gosh. I love the 13th Floor Elevators, but no, I don't know.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, he was the lead singer, guitar player and they were in Texas. And that's a whole nother-

John Cohn: I'm kind of an Americana Townes Van Zandt. I'm a lousy guitar player.

Joe Sepi: I love Townes.

John Cohn: Yeah. He took a hit off my beer. And Jerry Jeff Walker died. Did you hear that?

Joe Sepi: I didn't hear that.

John Cohn: Yeah.

Joe Sepi: Wow.

Luke Schantz: I think we should continue this conversation on...

John Cohn: Oh, sorry.

Luke Schantz: No, I meant these are actually topics that Joe and I are talking about. We should have another hobby podcast where we talk more about the arts and culture, and I think we are going to do that.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

John Cohn: I find that in any professional setting, like this of course, professional setting, when you start getting into people's individual passions, that is always a very interesting thread. And especially when you can mix them. That's the whole taking back to the technical play where I've met musicians and artists. Been my whole thing is trying to enable... I'm not artistic or musical, but I love helping give somebody a technical boost, who's got a vision, an artist or a musician.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. And it seems that, I think the three of us are good examples, I'm finding at IBM that there's enough freedom to bring some of your creativity to your work.

John Cohn: Oh, absolutely. And I hope it's okay to say this. People ask me, " How could you live in a big company like that?" And I have found it to be the most amazing playground, even though most of my career I've been doing real hardcore delivery of real products and stuff like that. I think that just the range of passions that people bring to it. And I think the company has this, it gets trite, they call it the culture of wild ducks. And I think on a day- to- day basis you go, " Where is that culture?" But honestly, the people I know who have been most successful there and lasted longest have that culture. And I bet that's true in other big companies. So you have to develop... You need a culture, and then you can have a counterculture. I think our countercultures are really where a lot of our spark comes to feed back into our culture.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, and I'm finding too, the wild duck stuff is sometimes just under the surface and there's something there and then you're like, " Oh." I was sharing something with a friend, a colleague, and it was my music stuff and he's like, "Oh, this reminds me of music back in Chicago not too long ago." I was like, "I used to live in Chicago and a lot of these songs I wrote when..." And it's like, " Oh, wow, okay." You've got a little wild duck underneath the surface too. It's interesting.

John Cohn: And what's interesting, can I... Are we out of time or can I riff on wild duck inaudible? So one thing that was very interesting, this whole wild duck thing, it was one of our founders, it was TJ Watson Sr., I think, who talked about wild duck. It's a Danish child's story about a duck that went the wrong way, blah blah blah. But we sometimes paint that as being somebody who looks crazy or acts crazy or says crazy stuff. But it's really something very different. And a couple of years ago we had one of these value jams things, that IBM puts everybody together and says, " What do we collectively believe?" I could give us great points for really, really trying to do that. And there was... treasure your wild ducks was theme 47 or something. It was one of those things. And I got called to, on a Friday, to be in New York City on Tuesday because they were going to film something on wild ducks. And I'm honestly, just because I got crazy hair, I just cut it. People say, " Oh, you're a wild duck." And it's really not that. It's not that you look crazy or act crazy or say crazy stuff. It's really that idea of being persistent about an idea that isn't popular, just doing it because it's the right thing, even if it's not the right thing. And I kind of sat there as we were filming these short segments and one after the other, my colleague got up and told some crazy story of something that, some thing where they had fixed the world. And I was like, "I'm not going to do that." So when I had a turn to talk, I talked about, actually it was a technician that I worked with, Doug Luelle, and back in the day in Burlington. He was a quiet guy, still quiet guy, and he had a crazy idea about how to do layout for these memory chips. He just persisted and persisted and everyone, including myself, kept telling him he was wrong and he got me to do a code and my code is terrible. And somebody saw my code and they said, " Let me redo that for you." Anyway, in the end, his idea prevailed and it really made a big difference. And it wasn't because he was wild or flamboyantly crazy or real out there. It was because he had this crazy idea and he knew it was right. And I thought that was... So that's the story I told. And I just told it again.

Joe Sepi: That's great.

John Cohn: Wild. Here's to the wild ducks.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, exactly.

Luke Schantz: Yeah, that resonates and that's been my experience as well. For work stuff, everybody I've ever reached out to has been nothing but gracious, especially with becoming a podcast guest or other things that are more, like you're saying, deliverable based. People have been really gracious. But once you get to know folks and you scratch the service a little bit, you find these really interesting, like maybe they're into crafting or maybe they're into some sort of really enthusiastic, into some sort of sport, cycling. It really is an amazing ecosystem of folks. And what I've learned too over the past few years is how much it overlaps with that open- source community we talked about. Pretty much throughout every significant open- source community you're going to find IBMers contributing.

John Cohn: Yeah. I think it's a technical generosity. You get that idea inaudible you pay it forward, but it comes back to you indirectly, somehow, or even if it... doesn't matter. But I think that's one of the most phenomenal inventions of the internet. Or I think it really comes from that because I think it allowed people at any point to contribute at any level, totally flattened that you didn't have to be part of a big organization or anything like that. And I think that is a huge improvement in our humanity because it's not just a technical thing, but it's the ability to contribute on whatever level at whatever place on equal footing with big institutions, small institutions. I love that.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I think contribute and collaborate, work together too.

Luke Schantz: Absolutely, and you're right, even outside of tech. I went to this, it was called Orbital Bootcamp and it was like a personal development thing. It was right before I got the job at IBM. And one of the things... It was this guy Gary Chow in New York, and it was in the former Kickstarter headquarters. But one of the things they talk about there, and I think it really resonates with the open- source software, but again, can be applicable to anything, is working in the open is amazing because you might think you know what you're looking for, but if you work in the open and people see that, things are going to find you that you never would've even considered because you put it out there.

John Cohn: Exactly.

Luke Schantz: It could be as simple as blogging, just blog about what you're doing and opportunities that you never could have imagined are going to find you.

John Cohn: Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Joe Sepi: No, I was going to say, in the open, that's where we are.

John Cohn: Yeah. And I think that it's weird because it's sort of almost metaphysical, that you can manifest things. If you just put it out there, then things show up. I'm finding this conversation a little bit like that as I'm trying to metamorphosize myself for this new decade of my life, trying to figure that out. I just think that it's pretty amazing, even in these really struggling, these are tough times, but gives me this great sense of optimism and expectation what's going to show up in my inbox. And just two days ago, I had a reunion, just a chance reunion. I was an exchange student when I was a junior in college and I hadn't seen these people in 41 years. And for some reason I had bought a car, this was in Austria, but the guy was actually... had left a car in Houston and I bought this 1971 Volkswagen van Maggie from him, sight unseen. And we were on this reunion and I whipped out this key and he sent me this long letter about the history of that inaudible that car, which I hope is still driving around somewhere in California. But I was just like, " Oh my God," this was just a... came out of the cosmos to... just at the perfect time to reconnect across four decades. Just loved it.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, yeah. Cosmic collaboration.

John Cohn: Yeah.

Luke Schantz: So I think we should wrap it for today. But John, I think this has been a great conversation and what we should do actually is let's check back in soon, let's have you back on, maybe in the summer after you've been working on a few things. Maybe you could tell us what you've been up to.

John Cohn: Yeah, I've got a couple of projects that'll probably be... I'm working on a medical device right now. I think maybe I'd be able to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I would love that. And I'll tune in. I'm really glad to know you both and I'll tune in because sounds like there's... A couple of friends have mentioned that they listen to it, so I'm going to start listening to it too.

Joe Sepi: That's great. And next time, I was told that you blow things up, so next time we got to work that in too.

John Cohn: Yeah. Do you have time for another story?

Luke Schantz: Oh, absolutely.

Joe Sepi: Yeah.

John Cohn: This is a sad one. It's a very sad one. My really good friend Scott, who's one of the guys who's helped me build four of my Tesla coils. He's just an amazing inventor. Quiet guy, but very just real technical, passionate guy, super, super smart. He's working his way through pancreatic cancer and just had a bunch of gear, and we have had not just high voltage as a common hobby, but chemistry and pyrotechnics in particular. And you'll notice, I'm sitting on this side of the yoga space because that side of the yoga space is not safe to sit. But Scott had a whole bunch of chemicals and he just was thinking about life and we had to try to get... He wanted me to find homes for them. So we actually found that the university, I'm a professor at the University of Vermont as well, and that the... Actually, let me just think about whether I should say all this. Yeah, I think this is okay. So a lot of the chemistry gear that we had, which was a lot of it was pyrotechnic stuff that the Department of Chemistry took because they use it for doing... Our youngest son knows this guy who does all these chemistry demos. But I found that there were two chemicals in there, which had to come to light, guys with hazmat suits would go over to my friend's house. So this morning I had to go do one of these weird, I had a appointment to meet with the hazardous waste folks and had to sign all those papers and get rid of this stuff. And inaudible particularly, one was toxic, mercury, which luckily is going to get reused. And another happens to be, it was something that we had ready access to, but it is now, thanks to Breaking Bad, considered not good to have. So it was really something. It was so sweet, but anyway. So yeah, we can talk about pyrotechnics. I love pyrotechnics. Inaudible.

Joe Sepi: That's cool.

John Cohn: But safety third, as we say.

Luke Schantz: And once we're safe to be visiting and traveling again, I feel like that would be ripe for making of a YouTube video or of some sort of pyrotechnic demonstration.

John Cohn: There's a little bit, go look up Innovation Through Play, a video that I did with Ogilvy.

Joe Sepi: I saw that. I actually shared it with my family. But I found the half hour before the show, I was like, " Oh, this is John. The guy we're talking with today." It's really amazing video.

John Cohn: Oh, it's fun. Yeah.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. In fact, let me see if I can find it really quickly and put it up on there before we close the stream.

Luke Schantz: Oh yeah, let's put the link up to it.

Joe Sepi: Let's see. Boom. Add banner. That work. Show. Is this it?

John Cohn: No, that's part of it, but here, let me just...

Joe Sepi: I think the video is in that page.

John Cohn: Oh, it might be. I was told that it had a little bit too much fire for work. And that's a work inaudible. Oh, there's a YouTube copy of it, low res YouTube copy out there called, if you look up Innovation Through Play, YouTube.

Joe Sepi: Okay, we'll do that.

John Cohn: But there's a better Vimeo one. It was done by Sam Mazer who was at Ogilvy at the time.

Joe Sepi: Cool.

Luke Schantz: And I'll put it in the show note. I'll add it to the...

John Cohn: Okay, sure.

Luke Schantz: ...note on YouTube. And we're going to cross publish this as a podcast, I'll put it in the podcast note.

John Cohn: Yeah, inaudible.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, I'll look at it too and tweet it out, the thread of the show today, so we'll share.

John Cohn: Great. Super fun talking to you both. Really great.

Speaker X: Yes, same here.

John Cohn: And I'm here looking forward... I'll be listening going forward. So thank you very much for having me.

Joe Sepi: Yeah, thank you, John. I'd love to talk to you more too about, I don't know if this was pre- show, but the node space and Node- RED and all that stuff.

John Cohn: Oh yeah, yeah. So Nick O'Leary of Node- RED is... Now, he's actually going to go and be the CTO of a nonprofit that's pushing... That was done, by the way, as a... Node- RED started as a hackathon project.

Joe Sepi: Yeah. Yeah. Nick's a good friend of mine. We chat regularly.

John Cohn: Tell him close the loop. Tell him hi. I just talked to him, actually.

Joe Sepi: Cool. Yeah, so much fun. I really appreciate you.

John Cohn: Likewise. It's so great. And this is what it's about.

Joe Sepi: Yep.

John Cohn: Building the web here. All right, everybody, thank you so much. This is such a great way to end a week. Really was. So go out there, go make something beautiful.

Joe Sepi: Thank you.

Luke Schantz: Been a pleasure, John. Thank you.

John Cohn: Yeah, likewise. Bye- bye.

Joe Sepi: Cheers.