BlackBerry (2023) — "You want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful the sacrifice, the greater you'll be."

Weird way. Mm hmm, yep. What can I do for you? Okay? Picture a cell phone and an email machine all in one thing.

There is a free wireless internet signal all across North America and nobody has figured out how to use it. It's like the Force. Sorry, have you seen Star Wars? No, that guy is sketchy. I don't think he's sketchy.

That the guy's a shark. I know how to market it, and I know who we can sell it to. But I want fifty percent of the company and I've got to be CEO. I don't know who you think you are, but deal, are you joking? We are in a race to get this thing to market, and bearing you're behind.

I need a prototype. I'll do it perfectly or I don't do it. Mike, are you familiar with the saying perfect is the enemy of good? Oh? Good enough is the enemy of humanity?

What do you call it? It's called a BlackBerry? Hum? Try typing with your songs. Get this baby in the head, that every fortune five hundred executive you can you.

Call them crack ferries? Sure, there's doghead. Come with us, sir. No, you want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful to sacrifice, the greater you'll be.

If we put more phones on these networks, they're going to crash. You need to sell a million blackberries. In the middle of the off the track. Do you know what the sentence is? Are multi million dollars?

Don't crown? What are you doing? I'm doing it at whole. You guys have no idea to own a company. I don't.

Why are you ated this entire market? You said they were the best engineers in the world. You said they're the best engineers in Canada. Why are they paying it? I shouldn't say they're paying me ten million dollars?

Yeah, I mean too. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am still your host, Chris Dashu, much to the chagrin at least some of you out there. And I'm joined by my two good friends all the way from West Texas. He's your friend of mine.

He's the professor of Media and Communications all the way out there in the lovely land of Lubbock. Your friend of mine, doctor David Pearl Mutter. Hello, and also joining me. He's been on one episode before. Mark Stashu, my dad, former telecom lawyer, which has no reason to be mentioning this.

At the top of this we swear hello. And on this episode of the Culture Cast, we are continuing to look at films that I don't know doctor Pearl Mutter wanted to talk about. So there you go. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about another tech film. It's a little bit similar to Jobs, maybe a little bit more fun than Steve Jobs.

It definitely has Jay barroshell in it, which Jobs did not. Can you imagine if Steve Jobs was played by Jay barroshell Man that would have been weird. But no, we're talking about twenty twenty threes Canadian directed BlackBerry. So the film is directed by Matt Johnson on a screenplay by Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller. It's based on Losing the Signal, the untold story behind the extraordinary rise and spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jackie McNish and Sean Silkoff.

Stars I already mentioned j Barshell as Mike Lazaridis, stars Glenn Howardton yes the Golden God himself from Always Sonny as Jim Balsley, and Matt Johnson. The director plays Doug Fragan. We have a couple other people in there, Carrie Elwist shows up for a cup of coffee. Sal Rubinek is there because I guess he got confused and wandered onto set. Who knows.

But the film is about the rise and fall of BlackBerry, the device that some of you may have heard of, your parents probably used, and none of us use now at all period. So, uh, doctor pearl Mutter, I'm gonna kick it to you first because you picked this film, and then mark to you afterwards. Why did we pick this film and what did you think, doctor pearl Mutter? Well, I picked this film and you mentioned the word that I don't often use, because it was ground into me that I'm supposed to be a dispassionate analytical student of film. It was fun.

I enjoyed this film. It was a romp, another word I don't use very often. I think it falls onto the category of business film, but also sort of action adventure. It moves along extremely quickly. I had read the book when this movie was coming out, because I was always interested in this story.

It was adjacent to some of the work that I've done, and it's not the book, it's elements of the book to tell a great story that there's an Italian phrase that I don't know Italian, but it's like the essence of the truth, if not necessarily the truth. But I found it to be fun to watch and I could sit there and just go through it. Second, I think a lot of modern television shows, and this is getting me back into deep serious critic have a problem in creating distinctive, distinguished in characters like that you can just after you've watched the film, or maybe in the first five minutes, you understand maybe not everything about them and who they are. And we'll talk about the fact that this film blessedly does not have a lot of flashbacks of somebody as a five year old and their father is yelling at them when they're trying to drive their tricycle or something like that.

But these characters, within the first five to ten minutes of the film, we read them pretty deeply. And I immediately thought of not because any one of these characters was like Kirk Spock and doctor McCoy, but like the immediacy that like, oh, I understand this guy is all about this, and we learn complexities. But I just thought that was such a great important storytelling note that you can distinguish between characters. There's just not all gray and interchangeable, which I think is a problem a lot of places. I did think, as I said earlier hinto that, is that this is a good lesson on how to take parts of a true story to tell the essential story, if not the complete story.

This is not the seventy hours that they probably would have needed to explain all the nuances. They tell us, only tech stuff which is relevant to propelling the story along. I said, it was fun if you think about it. A lot of the scenes in this movie consist of business meetings and watching engineers put screwdrivers and pins into circuit boards, and that usually isn't the basis of fun and adventure. But they picked moments and revealing instances that again just kept that story moving forward.

And then last for my students, what I would say is this is an untold story. I mean the Steve Job story. A lot of people, especially maybe over thirty five, know the Steve's Job story or the high points of the low point of the Steve Job story. But like the other side that like, hey, the world used to be ruled by somebody else and they were unthrowned. That's an important one.

This is the origins of our overstressed, over communicated world where people have to wake up at two am because their boss texts them that people are always worried about keeping their job because new technology is going to come along and disrupt and change everything. I tell my students, Yeah, I drove an oldsmobile. I took pictures with the Kodak camera. My first job in the movie industry was a place called Blockbuster. And of course I have to explain this to my students five six years ago, maybe longer, no longer than that, when Sears was still an operating business.

When I would tell my students this, I would say, I used to shop at Sears. So I asked a class of four hundred undergraduate students, how many of you have shopped at Sears recently? And only one young woman raised her hand out of four hundred. And I looked at her and I said, did your grandmother find what she was looking for? And she said, yes, How did you know it was I went there with my grandmother?

Well, of course, because nobody under the age of fifty was going to see us anymore. These these great businesses with CEOs and boards and billion twenty billion dollar valuations like BlackBerry went out of business, and every CEO knows that and doesn't want to be the next one in the textbook. And so I think all of these combined to make it a film worth watching. Go ahead, Mark, So. You know, to me, this is kind of a romp down memory lane.

I had a first row seat to most of what this movie talks about, not obviously what's going on inside BlackBerry, but what went on in the telecommunications industry in the in the during the period of time that this relates to. I was the chief legal officer for one of the largest paging companies in the United States during the nineties, had black. Laden, Mark what paging is to our audience. I let's go further back than even this movie goes. Yeah.

So, so pagers are a device for those that have never seen one, are held one device that clipped on your belt that someone would send you a message. Initially they were voice pagers, so someone would dispatch a short ten second message that would go off on your phone. On your pager, you would run to a payphone. Another thing probably most people have never seen, and you know, call back to the number that was you know that was given to you via the pager. That was then followed by digital pagers that they would only show a phone number and you would call the phone number that was displayed on the device.

And then there were things called alphanumeric pagers which would then have you could actually put text messages like what today we do on the cell phones, that you could also put on a pager. Pagers were one way. They did not have a way to recommunicate back. You had to complete the communication via payphone or otherwise. Remember this is the nineties.

There was no cell phones. Well there were cell phones, but they were incredibly expensive. Pagers have existed since the probably the forties, so you know, it's it was an old technology. And obviously what these guys did was they made it two way. There were other two way you know, the industry, the paging industry near the end of its life, which would have been the early two thousands, had two way pages as well.

Different technology, but similar idea. Okay, so one, you know what makes this film interesting to me is, like I said, I had a front row seat to what was going on with blackberries. Was a user of a BlackBerry in the early two thousands. I could kind of relate some of the things that were going on there and some funny stories about that. The second thing that I think I'm very interested in, and they really didn't do a heck of a lot with here, which is they really didn't explain why it died.

They you know, they talk a little bit about it with the iPhone, but there, you know, I was in the paging industry and we actually exited stage right just before the collapse of the paging industry because we realized a Cellular was going to replace us entirely. And they made the iPhone look like the reason that BlackBerry died, But quite frankly, the reason they died is Cellular generally SMS s our Message Service which everybody uses today or now you know what it is, text or URCS Rich Communications Service basically replaced what the BlackBerry did. Then then text messages back and forth. BlackBerry generally didn't send pictures. So third obviously was a user of the Palm Pilot, so I'm very familiar with kind of what was going on there, another kind of romp down memory lane.

It was probably they didn't throw in the Newton two because the Newton was in there at the same time as the pomp pilot. The other thing. The other two things that are very interesting here that are again I'm kind of a ramp down memory lane, is the stock option backdating scandal. So you know this basically they talk about the CEO going and backdating all these options. They talk about at the end kind of the sec you know, basically letting him off the hook with you know, some fines and other things.

What they don't really talk about, and I think is the most interesting is backdating of stock options was widespread in the technology industry. BlackBerry was not alone in doing this. In fact, there's a very prominent law firm in Silicon Valley that I believe had opinions suggesting you could do backdating a stock options, which I've always found to be fascinating because I never thought that it was appropriate thing to do. But there was, you know, support for what he was actually doing. In fact, I know of companies that did exactly what they did this.

The board would grant options and then they would pick the date at the stock price was the lowest in the last thirty days or thirty days forward, not on the price that the date the options were actually granted by the board and the last thing that I think again, I robbed down memory lane, given that everybody now has a smartphone, you know, and the iPhone is the progenitor to that. Uh, they don't, you know, they don't really explain how the iPhone really transformed the entire industry. Uh, the iPhone was not just oh it replaced BlackBerry. The iPhone creamed an entire segment of the telecommunication industry. It creamed all of the pagers, It creamed all the two wave pagers, It creamed the blackberries.

It quite frankly clean cleaned the flip phones, candy bar phones, et cetera. It became the new norm and it, you know, the iPhone was a huge cultural shift and we we live it today. We don't anybody that was not around with the introduction of the iPhone and had a flip phone or a brick or you know, any number of phones that were before that don't really understand how consequential the iPhone was. This movie helps show that it killed off an industry. The iPhone really is what killed it.

It was the text messaging that was made easier by the iPhone. But text messaging was dying before this died. The last thing I'll say is is one of the ways that killed this industry, killed the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry, they said had unlimited messaging. Cellular didn't have unlimited messaging at the beginning either.

When unlimited messaging came with cell phones and you weren't charged, then the BlackBerry basically became obsolete. You know, there was almost nothing they could do to survive because you know, am I going to carry two devices or I'm going to carry one? The cell phone wins out. It's got more functionality, got more everything than the BlackBerry ever would have in it's in its technology space. I think you could have made a movie like this about MySpace, since we've had the Facebook movie already and we never got the MySpace movie.

You could make a movie like this about MySpace because in a lot of ways, it's a similar story. It's a product that was useful at its creation ended up being the prototype and the jumping point for other things, but because those other things end up doing what it did better than it did, which happens especially in an indust is like a technology driven industry, where it's always kind of building on itself unless you are willing to innovate along with the rest of the innovators, you will get left behind even if you know again, like even if you have haptic clicking on your screen. Wow, Like you know, Jay Barroschell is trying to pitch. He's like, oh, we're gonna have haptic clicking like a BlackBerry, but a touch screen.

It's like, the have to clicking is not what anybody cares about. But you know that's fine. That's that your perception. You're missing the kind of point here as to what the benefit of your product was. And that's kind of the MySpace thing again.

I mean, my space still exists. BlackBerry, I guess technically still exists, but it doesn't exist the way that it did. And when doctor Permutter and I talked about the Steve Jobs film Jobs not Steve Jobs, which is also a Steve Jobs movie, I know, a confusing sentence that only makes sense written down on paper. We talked, and I think doctor Permutter, you said it specifically that we are living in Steve Jobs's world now, and this world that we live in is a creation of Steve Jobs. And I mean, if you watch this movie, you really understand because this movie, even though this movie took place effectively in my lifetime, most of this movie is taking place.

If not, I believe all of this movie is taking place in my lifetime. The pre iPhone days feel so just bizarre. Even watching television footage from pre two thousand and eight, pre two thousand and seven feels bizarre. It feels just antiquated in a way that post iPhone things didn't. And it again it speaks to like Mark and Doctor Promoter have both said, like, we have this idea here of an industry being changed from the inside out by people, and then being changed even further from the inside out, and the people that were one kind of tier above can't figure out how to get further down into the kind of weeds of things because they're just left out in the cold.

And it's not of their own fault. I mean it is, but it isn't, but it is. I mean, Steve Jobs is a singular mind, and it's hard to compete with a singular mind. I'm not saying Mike Lazaridis and Jim Falsely weren't. They're very good technology and business people, but Steve Jobs was a visionary period and for good and for bad unfortunately, Like that's you know, if you're able to execute on the vision of what you're coming up with.

And again, Steve Jobs eventually did it can be globally transformative. I mean again, there are plenty of examples like this of globally transformative things. I like that this is a smaller scope story. And it's not about the products that change the world. It's more about the products that change the way we did things and the way industries did things for a time, and like Mark said, and like doctor Pearlmutter said, affected the way business is done now.

The kind of always on call culture that's expected in that grind and hustle culture that a lot of people my age and younger have rejected in a lot of ways because it's not healthy. I mean, it's healthy in again, it's a balance, really obvious. That's where this comes from. Like you said, Mark, it's the connectivity of things that the BlackBerry really was important. Yeah, you know, I'll say this much first place.

This this is obviously a microcosm. This is a story about. A company and a technology. It killed. The iPhone killed a lot more than this company.

By the way, the thing they don't talk about, I'm surprised they didn't. In the in credits, BlackBerry ended up with a huge patent lawsuit that basically creamed it. At the end, I believe it was billions of dollars of damages for basically infringing on other people's patents in its technology. Uh, not unusual in the techno, in the in the telecommunications industry, there's patents up all over the place. But then you know, the deathnell comes through other things as well, not just technology, because I don't think very few companies could survive what ended up happening with the with the patent lawsuit.

But the other thing I'll say is you know that the story you talk about like MySpace paging was a to me is a much better story in some respects because one way, pagers because they've been around for a long time, and the industry completely didn't see it coming. I mean, it just completely cleaned their clock. You went from things with you know, uh, probably one hundred million users at its peak to nothing in less than a couple of years, okay, hollowed out industry that had you know, billions of dollars in equity value. They got creamed out very quickly. So yeah, the what you talk about the always on this the one thing that I don't think is accurate, which is having lived through the paging world and having lived through the BlackBerry world, it is not akin to what's happening today.

Okay, uh there, it was all one to one messaging. Paging in first place, you could decide whether to call back or not. So let's just start with that. I mean, you know, people expect you to call back when you got it paid. But at the end of the day, they understood you.

You know, you didn't have a phone right there, so you had to you know, access a payphone or do whatever. So you know, that's one thing. You know, BlackBerry was more so you know they talk about, you know, people using it in meetings and stuff. Absolutely, people were communicating to each other in meetings using Blackberries. It was kind of a secret under the table communication mechanism.

But at the end of the day, it's nothing like what you have today, because I think today is fueled by the social media that didn't exist when the BlackBerry exists. It was still a communication device, not a social media device. So if I wanted to talk to you, Chris, I can only talk to you. I couldn't talk to Prometer at the same time, and we couldn't all have these kind of weird gang together and O. There were groups you could do, and there's other things like that you could do, but it's nothing like what you have today with Facebook and everything else.

It just didn't exist. So, you know, saying that you're always on et cetera and email, Let's remember email wasn't that pervasive in the nineties. The Internet did not get started until, you know, in terms of becoming commercially available until the midnight you know, kind of a more broad kind of base thing. So you know it was today is that this is kind of show you where the start of it was, But I'm not sure you can equate that to this, but we have today. Yeah, it's interesting to me.

Again, one of the things that I appreciated this film is that we had no origin story flashbacks. We have these characters and there's no flashback to when they were five. There's I mean, there's no there's there's there's none of the silliness that's in so many films that where they have to go back in time to explain a character in the present time. It's just told within the story, Like you feel like, what is what is the background with Jim like his obsession with hockey, African masks, his character of being this like out Steve Job is seeing Steve Jobs sometimes in his harshness with people like what is that not relevant? What's relevant is in the moment.

And you're absolutely right, Mark, And this is something I lived through myself, like teaching it and talking about it. And in two thousand and eight when I wrote this book Blog Wars, about the rise of what was then the premier social media platform for political engagement, political blogs, which, of course it's interesting how they've almost completely disappeared. Now my students don't talk about I think I'll blog or I'll go check a blog, right, but you could see the beginnings like in the nineties. I remember I was teaching the same class I've taught for almost thirty years, which is Introduction to what used to be called Introduction to Mass Communication. And now this semester during the summer twice, I'm teaching Introduction to median Communication.

And I do give my students origin stories of like Dwight Eisenhower used television advertising because there was a relatively new medium the nineteen forty nine called television and New York Ad Agency said you know, we can use this to help sell you during the campaign, and they created ads for a political campaign. Wow, And you can still see I like Ike, you know, and the man from Abilene and you can still see those ads today. So I'm always interested in how things started small and then got gigantic and you could see early elements of what is successful. What this film does, I think personally effectively is it takes this slice of this fear that you can see in the face of the character of Mike Lazaridi's who's this Obviously we're told he is a genius engineer.

He is a genius engineer, right, and he fiddles with the technology, is able to create things which are astounding. But you can see the very beginning when he meets Jim Balseley that he's realizing we're missing something. We're missing an element on the crew of the spaceship, right, of somebody who's going to like actually move us forward, who's going to handle the business end, the negotiations end. And he shows is early fear, which unfortunately a lot of very successful companies did not. And there are a lot of stories to tell, right like Kodak famously had patents for digital photography.

Knew it wasn't like Kodak had no idea there was something called digital photography. But from the books I've read, I read two books about CODEC. They made a decision, Hey, we are a chemical company. We sell chemical. If we get into this digital thing, we're going to take away from our chemical business and we're going to hurt ourselves.

So why would we hurt ourselves? Same thing with Blockbuster, which had the opportunity to heavily get into streaming, had a huge revenue stream to invest, but said no, no, we've got these stores. We can't abandon these stores. That's our revenue. And I see it in my career at twice I've been a quote manager unquote, a director of a school, dean of a college, and part of my job was alumni outreach and fundraising.

So I got a chance to meet thousands of a alumni. And just like law school graduates, our graduates are everywhere because everybody has a marketing department or a communications department and so on. And I was really interested. About fifteen years ago, I was talking to a guy who was the manager of a small, medium sized about a thousands of people reported through indirectly or directly to him, and he was talking about a new idea that they were judging, and he said, you know, the board opposed it at first, but the interns all liked it, so we decided to go with that. And I thought, nineteen sixties, I don't think that would have been the path to making the decision.

But the board actually said, Okay, if eighteen to twenty year old to twenty two year olds are telling us we need to do this, we probably need to do this. And that does show a shift of realizing that we are dominant in the market, right, and MySpace was dominant in the market. We could do the geo cities story too, right, the live journal story. There's so many like forgotten the Internet, the forgotten civilizations like the Hittites and the Assyrians. You know, we just have their ruins somewhere in some archive.

Where's the Napster story, doctor Pearl Buttter, That's what I want, the Napster, the LimeWire story. Yeah, there's so many of these. But it also was fascinating to me this new world where at least the smart CEOs and maybe they're thinking they're doing this too much. They're saying, like disruption like, I swear to God, my father was a business professor, and I had this conversation with him in the nineteen nineties. People didn't use the word disruption in business meetings in nineteen sixty seven.

Now, if you're a CEO and you don't like have your ted talk and talk about disruption, you're not considered to be a qualified CEO. So I'm fascinating how this movie, for young people and for like people my age, talks about sort of the shift in how companies viewed themselves and were run. Yeah. But you know the other thing that I find fascinating about this movie, and again I liked it has a beginning and an end, and it's encapsulizes again. But I think you could do it otherwise, perhaps other industries, perhaps that were deeper impacted by what was happening.

But you know, you talk about him being a brilliant engineer, but the problem that had to be solved was not solved by him. It was solved by all these guys the CEO brought in from Google and other places. And I mean that's what got him in the stock option backdating problem, right. He needed to get these people with particular expertise that BlackBerry didn't have. There's a fantastic line in the movie which Chris introduced this as a Canadian movie, and it is a very Canadian movie.

I mean, most of the movie takes place in Waterloo, Canada, and it's about a company that was once the wealthiest company in Canada, like the entire country of Canada. Right, But there's that moment right where he is asked. He's told, like, I thought, we had the smartest engineers in the world here right in this company. And he says, the smartest engineers. How the Canadian Board of Sensors let that through.

I mean, look, it's not a knock on Canadian engineers. The fact is what they needed was people. So the interesting thing is they needed two groups of people. Obviously, the engineers at BlackBerry understood their technology and understood how their technology worked. But one of the things that was critical was understanding how the telecommunications networks themselves operated.

Google's an interesting one because they really don't. They didn't at the time understand how telecommunications, but they understood how the Internet worked. Okay, they understood IP, they understood the Internet protocols, etc. Which is ultimately where I think they had to take this in order to increase. The interesting thing they don't talk about is the reason they were able to stick more users on the system was it's a speed rate issue.

So you know, again you'll remember this, David, if you were in the if you were doing anything in computers in the sixties and seventies, used to be called the BOD rate, right, how fast a communication could go over a line, you know. And Chris, could you play the sound effect of the squeal of a modem? Yeah. The the issue was when they first came out, everybody was five twelve k, which is really slow. Okay, five twelve bod and then you went to ten twenty four and you kept going up in increment.

As you increased the speed, you increase the number of users you could have, the amount of traffic you could handle, and so to some extent, my guess is I knew it in the paging industry. I don't know it which specifically whatspect the BlackBerry's technology. My guess is, and it wasn't make for a very interesting story. Is you had to increase the speed at which everything went over the network, because if you double the speed, you doubled them. A number of people you could have on the network.

You triple the speed you could do a vice versa, and it went up in multiples of you know, two or four. So you know, that was interesting. I do have an interesting kind of aside I'll relate. So blackberries are very pervasive. In the early two thousands, there was a very famous corporate raider who was acquiring another company and he had a president of one of his companies was in the boardroom and he had a BlackBerry and he was, you know, you know, the corporate raider was, you know, doing whatever he wanted to acquire this particular company that I'm aware of, and the president was taking a message on BlackBerry.

The corporate raider reached over, grabbed the BlackBerry and threw it against the wall and busted it and said, I don't want any these believity belief things in my meetings. Okay, So I do think, you know, at the senior levels they really rejected this. I actually had a company that I was with that refused to allow people to have blackberries, even if you're working on one hundred million dollar deals. You actually had to take a telephone call. Hey, there's a doc.

I been waiting for you to review that you had to then go on email to pick up because he refused to have you know, BlackBerry they found him and so insidious a device. Okay, Now, obviously we're way past that now with with iPhones, tech messaging, et cetera. But you know, at that early stage, there was a lot of resistance. Yeah, I have in my email, sorry Chris, your dad and having a really great conversation the kids. We'll let the kids talk later.

Who didn't live through Yeah, I lived through it, but I didn't have a BlackBerry. I just remember dating at it. I remember I remember being at a super Bowl that I went to when I was in college with my family and finding someone's BlackBerry underneath my seat. That was the one and only time I ever found and saw a BlackBerry. I didn't have one.

I had a I had a one of those Nokia phones with the extend antenna, and then I went from that. To a otherwise know it as a candy bar phone. Yeah, I went to an iphon. I went to an iPhone, So I never I never had a BlackBerry. I will tell you though, I do like the tactile feel of a keyboard on a phone.

I think, what's funny is with the things coming back into the world, not nostalgia wise, but just you know. I mean, if you look at the way the kids today, kids not the kids, but kids today dress, They're wearing things that were popular in the nineties. Bagg ear, jeans, flared at the bottom, looser clothing like that's was a trend in the nineties. I think that the tactile feel of a keyboard is something that there is out there for people now within the world of the use of technology, because I am sure that there are people that, you know, Mike Lazaridis or not, would want to have a haptic clickety clack keyboard. And you know what, I am one of those people that wouldn't mind that.

I actually don't mind that. When I used to have an Xbox three sixty and I would game online, I had a little keyboard thing you plugged into the bottom and it had a little keyboard on the bottom. You cook, a cook, that's you know that. I appreciate that, and I can't be the only one. But in this day and age, everything is touched screen.

You know, if it's not a touch screen, it's it's more strange than if it does have a keyboard. Yeah, The other thing that the movie doesn't really explain is, and this is critical, is you know the kind of the tension with Bell Atlantic and BlackBerry and the iPhone. So when the iPhone originally came out, it was exclusive to AT and T. They paid more money than you can imagine in order to have an exclusive right to sell the iPhone. Everybody else didn't have access.

There was no other device that was similar to the iPhone at the time, so you know, they were desperate to get some sort of device that would compete with the iPhone when they realized that the iPhone was going to blow the market up. Because I think the iPhone exclusivity ran for more than a year, I want to say, two or three years. So you know, imagine you're sitting in Bell Atlantic's boardroom as a cellular provider and your competition has a device you can I get access to and it's blowing the market up, right. That is you know, they don't really talk about that was kind of the impetus for them trying to find another device, them, you know, going to China, doing all these things because they had to do something to try to compete.

It wasn't just BlackBerry had a problem. The entire industry had a problem. Some of these things are hinted at. This a really great scene there where one of the engineers is talking to another one there in BlackBerry Central, Hey, this iPhone. They're going to have an application store where anyone can design an application and anyone can download an application.

And again, to my students, this is like and then they invented oxygen, and people breathed it like, it's so inconceivable that one would not have apps of their own choosing and hundreds of thousands, millions of choices. Now you're both right, because in my students and I love to have these conversations with them, I see two things going on at the end of my email as an automatic signature. One of the things I learned as a manager was to be really careful about communicating with people after hours, because I would be maybe I'm working on something and it would be midnight, and I'd go like, Okay, yeah, I'd like this person tomorrow morning at eight o'clock to take a look at this because it's important.

So I would say, hey, Joe, could you look at this? This is important. And the very first time I started as a manager, and then I realized, Oh, their staff and I'm their supervisor, and Joe will wake up at seven o'clock, come into work, check his email and panic because the boss sent him an email at midnight and he waited eight hours to respond. And so I learned not only to tell people like, look, I will physically call you on the phone if there is an actual emergency. Anything else you get from me, it's not an emergency.

That's the only time you'll hear from me. And I put at the bottom of my email in a cursive font, and please know my working hours may not be your working hours. You do not feel it is necessary to respond outside of your normal schedule because I was so worried about like, you know, some twenty three year old staff or panicking there. Yeah, it taither. My experience is different, I mean quite frankly.

You know, people responded whenever they needed to respond. But you know, just again, the legal profession is a little bit different than I suspect the company you were in, and it is more of a twenty four by seven kind of environment. But you know, I got people get emails at midnight. They're not expected to respond by one am. You know, they'll respond when they get to it.

But yeah, I understand, and I think my students have revolted in some ways. Like they On the one hand, they're on social media a lot, right, and they're expressing themselves on social media, and they're posting and sharing and doing things which is were science fiction to me teaching introduction and mass communication in the nineteen sixties. On the other hand, there really is a sort of rejection and like, man, I'd like to be in a house in the woods with no electricity and and just get my bucket of water from the well and have no connection too. They're both operating in this in the mind at the same time. But you know what, a.

Lot of it they live in the forest, like Uncle Ted hun huh, doctor doctor promoter Ted Kaczynski out there just chilling in the cabin. No technology for mea Walden's pond, right. But I'll say this much a lot of it is caused by the people themselves. But you know, managers, there are managers that I obviously expect people to respond immediately, et cetera. But I'm not sure that that is the majority or even even even a significant portion of it.

But people want to be connected. People are curious people are you know, this has become part of their lives to do this, and you know it is it becomes addictive, of course. And I don't mean addictive in the sense of, you know, like you know, drugs, but it's addictive in the sense of you feel left out if you're not seeing what's going on and right now all the time. I'll say the other thing that they don't really talk about in this movie, and it's a very interesting kind of aspect. And I'll build on what you said about the app store.

What makes the app store so fundamental to the success of the iPhone and everything else is, yeah, applications, but more important, it allows you to personalize the device to your needs and wants. Okay, so before the iPhone, there was a lot of people figuring out how to do different kinds of cases. Right, I want my phone have a different case than yours. That's how I express my individualism, right, is how my different kind of phone I have, or a different kind of case, or I might have things that dangle for my phone or whatever. To heck, the iPhone took that to the next level with the app So you know, I'm sure if I put my iPhone next to yours.

We got entire We have some apps that overlap, but lots that don't. And it allows you to personalize. And one of the things that BlackBerry unli like palm Pilot did is it didn't I don't think it really opened up to third party developers. Pompilot did that. Pompilot had third party development and it was a fairly robust industry people developing PalmPilot apps and putting it for the Pompilot.

And I think a lot of them were free. There might have been something that we're paid. I don't know, but you know, if you build a closed environment and don't have any way to personalize it, it's a problem. And what's curious about it is the iPhone is known as a walled guard right. You can only get things on the iPhone generally if they come through the app store.

In order to get them on the app store, you have to go through Apple. Apple basically has to approve it, et cetera. It's interesting that Apple built an app store that allowed third party development because they are a walled guarden. But you juxtapose that with Google and the Android operating system that you can do anything you want, right, you know, the play store. The play store, you could basically at the beginning upload any than you wanted for download on any phones, anytime, anywhere kind of thing.

An entirely different approach, quite frankly, more of an Internet approach than a walled garden approach. But you know, it was interesting that Apple took that approach, and it is I think one of the reasons that BlackBerry probably failed, but by not allowing people to have third party apps on those phones. By the way, I don't think you could have customized cases for Blackberries either. Pagers. You couldn't, so I suspect the BlackBerry.

You know, it was black and that was the color you got. It's kind of like the original modelty forward right heavy color you want as long as its black well. And it's because again, like some of what is being I guess in my mind, that's what makes this story so different from the story of the iPhone is when you see the story of the iPhone, at least in the dramatic sense in my time, i'd in the real sense, but in the dramatic sense, you get the sense that just to juxtapose this against the Steve Jobs movie again, the Michael Fossbender one he understood that people wanted to just do with the device. It wasn't necessary like purpose driven as much as just like, you have the opportunity to do something with this that you have never done before.

And Steve Jobs was taking a kind of running header that that was part of going to be part of what drove the kind of the consumer trends is that people were gonna want to, like you said, Mark express themselves with their phone, with their technology. And I'm not saying that Balsilly and Buddies over at Palmpile or BlackBerry understood didn't understand that. I just don't think that they were necessarily interested in that. I don't think that that was their goal. I think that their goal was to make a product that allowed for the ease of communication between people, which is kind of I mean, you know, and utilizing something that's I mean, obviously this all comes from something being utilized that wasn't being utilized before.

I mean, they talk about it at the beginning of the movie. He's like, there's this network that nobody's using, and we understand how to use it, and no one else has been able to take advantage of it, and that allows you to communicate in a more efficient way. They're not sitting there going we want to be able to put apps on there or anything else, and that comes down to a device that feels more personal to you, which changes how you use technology. I mean, computers in the home were so important because you could do what you wanted with it, the ability to use it how you chose, And we didn't really have that with phones until the iPhone, which was I mean but even early on, like it took a long time for the iPhone app store to get where it is now, I mean, it was awful for years because even Apple didn't understand the ramifications of what they had on their hands, which is what they mean they do now.

Yeah, two things I'll say. One, even the flip phones and the candy bar phones had apps, right, they were different, they weren't as they weren't the same kind that we have today. There were much more rudimentary. But the second thing I'll say, and as you compose and you compare this with the Jobs movie, this is very much an engineering centric company, and I think this does really explain a lot of what happened in it. It's the we were we will build it and they will come is an engineering theory, which is, I'm going to build the best product that has all these neat things.

I think tactile feel is what everybody wants. I can build it in, I can make it great. I can do all that without asking people what they want. Right, And I think when you think about what Jobs was doing, I don't know that he's a great engineer. He was able to tap into what people wanted, not what they could, not what they could Actually, you know, oh, I can make it go faster.

Well, who cares? What you care about is personalizing. I care about having apps, I care about having all this other stuff. That's what's important to me. Not it goes faster.

Who cares? That's an engineering thing. And you know, engineers can get really excited about it. And I think that really shows here and again the juxtapose between the players here obviously all the engineers. That's the way they thought about the world.

I'm not sure that you know that they able to ever overcome that. And I think they tried, but I don't think they really rununderstood what they were up against. That's a really good point. The user experience part of this, the user centeredness, and Jobs himself, like in the movie. And then I was when we talked about the Steve Jobs movie with Michael Fastbinder together Chris and I mentioned that I had read the book.

It was loosely based on by Walter Isaacson, the Big eight hundred page I think biography of Jobs, and one of the seminal moments in the book which is not in the movie, but I understand because the movie was sort of focusing on three events within somebody's life. And we were talking about biopicks and how that was a good biopick because it didn't feel it needed to check the boxes of everything. Here's Napoleon when he first was toilet trained, you know, check, Let's move on to something else. Right. This BlackBerry movie, again partly fictional, but it picked events that propelled forward the story and left a lot of other stuff unexplained for good for good reason.

But in the Jobs book there's a moment where and I have a connection to this because, as I mentioned last time, I'm teaching this class intro to mass communication is the nineteen nineties, and I have a week on the internet and this is nineteen ninety six, right, and I had just published an article on presidential website like Bill Clinton put up his team put up a website where you could go and get Bill Clinton's positions on issues of the day, which is a revolutionary thing to have direct access, not to have to read a newspaper to a quick to the hell a quick story. Some of you go back and look the Lincoln Douglas debate debates between Abraham Lincoln running for president in eighteen sixty and Stephen Douglas, very famous, you know, talked about the history of communications.

How did Lincoln get the text? Because he was he was extemporaneous for most of them. He had notes, but he but they were talking for six hours. He got newspapers over the next couple of weeks to get the transcripts, because reporters sat in the front row and wrote things down, and that's how he found out what he said. And by the way, he picked opposing newspapers because he figured they'd be more complete about taking notes.

But the point was that the world of communications at that time. Nineteen ninety six, I'm in the classroom and a student comes to my office and he says, professor, I want to show you something. And he downloads a song from Napster, which was probably illegal undoubtedly, undoubtedly in my state of Louisiana computer But the next week in class, I say, gosh, you know, I know the music industry is going to have to do something. And I actually threw out the term digital jukebox right like, because we were paying twenty three dollars for a CD with one good song. Maybe you vaguely remember this mark and they didn't.

It took Steve Jobs. And in the book Steve Jobs, there's a meeting between Steve and the president of Sony where the president of Sony basically admits they have not been able to solve this problem, and Steve Jobs says, well, here's how you solve this problem. And part of it was ignore the engineers, think what the user experience is going to be, and then engineer towards that rather than saying, hey, engineers, build whatever you want and then we'll tell the public. That's what you got to take. And I don't mean to say all engineer today, if you go to engineering school, you learn to be very ux centered because you have to be.

You wouldn't get a job if you didn't care at least somewhat about that. But I think this film did a really good job of showing that of like, you can be the best engineer in the room, but that doesn't mean your product is going to be successful. But there's I mean, the world is littered with products like this that you know are great that you know, they do fantastic things and you know, but they don't solve a you know what people want, right, And it's a it's not a criticism of engineering. It just does does show the engineering culture that is is you know, centered around Hey, you know I can just add this, this will make it great or this is really important and it may not be what the people want, and you know, that's it.

There are lots of businesses that fail because they they just don't catch on with what people really want. It's not a criticism of them, it's just that's what happens. Well, and that's I mean, that's kind of you know what I was speaking to. And especially you know, I think you kind of see that. You see that a little bit in this movie when you have and again, for whatever reason, Carrie Elwis is in this movie for like five minutes as Carl Yankowski, who's in charge of Pomp Pilot.

He shows up and he tries to like pitch to them what the change would be if these two things came together, and Lazariti is embalsily like they do not see what he is getting at as a benefit to their product, even though he says, you know, even though they kind of essentially an old lie to his facing. Oh yeah, that's great, you know whatever. But it's again, I think to your point, Market speaks it this idea of like the people involved don't always have their finger on the pulse of what is wanted. They think they know, and for everyone that thinks they know, there's one person that actually does. And whether or not that person actually ever gets listened to is also another story.

I mean, you know, to go back to the Jobs movie and to compare it to this. In this movie, we have the the Wosniak adjacent character is the way I would I would call him because he is somewhat Wosniak adjacent. Matt Johnson, who plays Doug Fragan, who is the kind of the hippie of the three of Balsaly, Lazaritis and Fragan, and he, you know, he and Lazaritas. You know, Lazaritis has this moment of like where he can choose to not go down a certain path, and you can see that Fragan is going down that other path of like this is an engineering thing. This is this Like we're still in the garage essentially, we're still watching movies.

We're still doing that, you know, Friday movie night and all that. And you know, Lazaritus goes down the other route with Michael Ironsides, which I loved. By the way, having Michael Ironside in this movie is just like the like the the corporate you know, like the corporate raider from Hell. I mean, he's just as he's playing a very specific kind of character in this movie, and I appreciate it. You know, gets the job done and there you go.

He was It's this movie isn't the same universe as Starship Troopers. Michael Lorris I was. A total recall. Even that was a deleted scene where he transports back. From Yeah, no kid, but he has to set him straight.

You know. It's like it's like jobs in Jobs when he's you know, when Wozniak is like, give us, give the engineers some credit, He's and jobs like no, and he's like I've been, I've been, You've been answer asking this question for thirty years now. I'm not gonna do it. And there's some of that in this movie where it's like, you know what. In Jobs, he shows that the engineers like why Jobs was able to reject the engineers, and why Jobs was able to say he could reject the engineers.

In this movie, it almost is the counterpoint of like, you can't reject the engineers forever because at the end of the day, as we see at the end of the movie with Lazaritas in his you know, you know the unit where all these units are stored and he starts picking them up and listening to him and he hears that hum that he talks about at the beginning of the movie. With products made in China, it's like, this is why you don't ignore the engineer, because the engineers do know what they're talking about. They are the ones that make the product. But it's sometimes they are myopic and scope of what they're trying to do and want, and they're just trying to make an interesting product. The end user doesn't matter.

I mean, you do see that in Jobs when they're asking him about the system being closed and they're like, who would want that? And he's like, well, that's what I want. It's like, well, that might not be what the users want. He's like, I don't care, that's what I want. And I think it's Wosniak says, you know, we're not making products with your like failings, We're not making products with your faults.

We're trying to make perfect products here for the users. And it's like this, there's some of that here where Lazaritis and Frank and like they they are somewhat immutable in their beliefs of what they want to do. I mean Lazaritis in that meeting with sal Rubink's character where he's like, yeah, it's gonna have a click screen, It's like, Jesus, dude, that's not what people want. Like people don't want that. They still can't get out of their own way in some respects, and that's where you have Jim Balsley, who again can't get out of his own way.

But that's also because then again, like Mark mentioned with the back dating of the stock options, you know, you sometimes have to do things to get things done that aren't necessarily the most above board. And there are people in all aspects of business, in the business world or the world in general, that live in a grayer area than some of us do. Some of us are a gray area that's charcoal, and some of us live in a gray area that's actually gray. And sometimes people like that get things done. And look, I'm sure you'll say this, Mark, plenty of people were doing this that didn't get in trouble.

Well, I mean it was fairly ramp in Silicon Valley, especially the backdating. But you know one thing you mentioned about pomp Pilot. You know they don't mention in the movie because obviously it's not about pomp Pilot. You don't see pompilots around anymore either. No, God, no, right now.

The interesting thing, and I think this does show a bit of hubris. The reason why they didn't combine with pom Pilot was because they were going to get diluted too much and they weren't going to get their net worth where they thought it was so he could go buy the penguins and put him in Hamilton. Okay, So there is a lot of greed in this movie and a lot of things are driven by it, especially by that character. And you know, had they combined with pom Pilot, would they have been a more effective competitor against the iPhone? Could they have perhaps killed iPhone and it's in its infancy maybe.

I mean, that's a that's an interest because if you think about the pomp Pilot, which they didn't talk about in the movie, other than you know that that one set of things, it had a lot of what the iPhone ended up having. It had third party apps, it had a screen, it had a touch screen. You could you know, send messages, you could do a lot of things with it that ended up being what the iPhone had. And had it had the connectivity that the BlackBerry did, it might have very well killed the eye phone and its infancy. But because of their own net worth greed, they never let that go through well.

And I like the scene where we have Balsely running through the airport talking to the AT and TCO and he's like, you know, there's only you know, there's only one minute in a minute. It's like, you know, you're go only sell sixty minutes in a minute in an hour. It's like that that ultimately becomes what this is is, how do we figure out a different way to charge people without there being a cap on it, without there being a ceiling of usefulness, and we just sell them data would just sell them data. We'll just sell them data. And that's that is what ends up becoming the death knell of BlackBerry.

Really part of it is what data was BlackBerry ever gonna use unless they made a device that was effectively an iPhone, which then is not a BlackBerry anymore. Then it's just an iPhone. That's the thing that ultimately wills out towards the end of the movie is nobody has an idea that's different from an iPhone. It's just an iPhone derivative at this point, And to be fair, more or less, every thing at this point that is a phone is an iPhone derivative. Even if you have a phone that's not an iPhone, it looks like an iPhone.

It's a big screen, and that's kind of all that phones are anymore unless you buy a phone that is specifically not that with the intention of it not being that. But pretty much now every phone is a is a screen that you touch, which came from one place and has been derivative out of control by everybody else. But because of course it has, it's the most successful phone to ever be created in terms of user accessibility and interface. The other thing I'd add mark is that. Of course, the technology graveyard of ancient civilizations is littered with successful innovations that were then bought by a giant corporation that thought they could buy their way to innovation, and then it collapsed.

You know, two thousand and five, News Corporation says okay, five hundred and eighty million dollars for MySpace, and then six years later, justin Timberlake, MySpace for thirty five million dollars. Right, So what happened in those six years? That's something. And I don't think I actually had a MySpace page, but I remember MySpace was a massive place where people put their stuff, you know, their their their pages, and you know, it was basically you could have your own web page through through MySpace. And of course this was before the as you mentioned, the rise of social media and the mid two thousands of Facebook and everything that we have now.

But I think this movie is a really good one for my students to watch to ask, like, in a company, how can you innovate? What is my role? What different strengths people bring? Teamwork? You know, for students, what they hate the most is what's probably the most important for them to learn is group projects.

If you asked a classroom full of students, like, who is excited about doing a group project? You would, I mean, they wouldn't boo me, but they would boo the idea. Yeah. Like, but I say, look, guys, life is a group project. If you're going to work anywhere except that cabin in the woods with no running.

You can't even work for yourself without working with other people. Take it. Take it from me, like as a group project. And I thought it did really well here in showing how these three people Doug, Mike and Jim did have these strengths that played off each other. Maybe there could have been more on that, and they were certainly not successful in the long run, like you know, Kirksbach and McCoy.

But like it did show that you can't have a workplace where everybody is like you, that you need the strength of different personalities and different skill sets working together. So I thought, in being a business movie, that was sort of a helpful lesson. Maybe not in this particular case for more than ten years, but still. Yeah, But you know, I don't think we should I don't think we should focus on the fact that it failed. It was very successful at the time.

It was unable to move beyond where it was. Some of it was because of their own inherent limitation in the way they thought about the world. But I will tell you that when the iPhone came out, there were lots of people that said it wasn't going to be any more successful than the new okay. So you know, it wasn't like iPhone comes out, everybody says it's brilliant all of a sudden, it's it's wildly successful. That's not that that's that's not the world, okay, because there's a couple of things.

One people didn't see it that way. I could tell you, having worked with a company that was in the cellular industry at the time, we did not start selling data until in you know, into the late you know late you know, eights nines and into the early you know teens. Why because that wasn't what we thought people wanted. And when we found out that they ultimately wanted it, we obviously could offer it. Uh, but you know, it was not it was not immediately a parent And that's what people and and I'll say this much, people don't realize that cellular data data over cell phones existed back into the nineties, just nobody, nobody could ever figure out the use case, never could figure out what would make it go.

The iPhone is what made it go because finally people could figure out how to use this new thing that wasn't minutes, it wasn't you know, just voice. But until then, I mean, it existed for years before. I mean there were you know, AT and T had built a data network and was offering you know, cellular data services in the early two thousand, long before the iPhone, but they didn't have many users because no one could figure out how to use it what it was useful for. So but you know, I. Think as you look at this team, they were very successful.

The fact that they ultimately failed is is probably less about there. They had a you know that their working relationship didn't work. It's just they didn't have the vision to really understand where the world was going. And not alone. There were a lot of other people that were in a similar situation.

By the way, if you look up the biography of these people, they're all like fabulously wealthy. Oh yeah, it's good, no one, no one feels there's nobody to feel sorry for in any of this, Like yeah, yeah. I mean know that one guy that I mean he is one of the wealthiest people in all of Canada, right because he cashed out when the stock was at its peak. Yeah, right, which is by the way, again, that takeaway is that a lot more people have made a lot of money on failure. I mean that there's a reason why, and I mean nobody who doesn't know, who doesn't understand it, should do this.

But like there's reason. There's puts as well as calls in stock options, and a lot of people have made money on stocks going down as much there or selling out. I looked up the biography of Jim Ball Silly and like, wow, he's had an amazing He gave a huge amount of money to education, Like the University of Waterloo has a school named after him. He's in the way scholarships. Actually, it sounds like he's having a super fun life.

He does not own, you know, an HL hockey team, but like I think he has front row seats and he lives. So yeah, this is also a good movie to sort of And again I always think through the eyes of my students, so like to define what is success, right, Like I mean, at the television show that's adjacent to this was was the HBO show Succession, which is a meditation on succession, like in like king's dying and who will take over their kingdom, but also like succession in success And I think that's always a good question to ask because different eras maybe redefine it. In succession, you have a group of billionaires who are all struggling for power, and a normal person would go like, wait a minute, if you lose this struggle for power, you get to sit on your seven billion dollars and feel sorry for yourself.

Right, So wasn't it that what they said in jobs? It's like they're the they're the most well dressed people in the unemployment line, Like yeah, you don't tell you know they're going to. Yeah they have the biggest houses on the unemployment line or something. Yeah. Absolutely, But I mean I would I thought that they, you know, they should have at the end explained that these guys all ended up being very wealthy, because the the impression you're left with is that the company ended up being a failure and they all, you know, are on the bread line, you know, with their with their pans out looking for food, and that's not what happened.

I think I think that's for Doug, We're told Doug is like one of the richest men in Canada, and like even USA, people with their prejudice about can they realized that's probably pretty rich, you know. Yeah, yeah, but I don't I think it were just maybe another sentence of that would have explained. I don't think we're thinking any of them are on a bread line. Well, I mean, well, when you think our companies, what a breadline is, by the way. Well, but you think about company failure, I think a lot of people would associate that with economic failure as well, right, and and it you know, clearly these people sold a lot of them sold at the peak, right, And that's where I think Doug did.

And in fact, that's what I believe the Wikipedia page says, which means, you know, he took the money off the table when it was there. Now, I have been with companies where the senior management was against anybody it thought it was it was disloyal to take money out, so people ended up being worth hundreds of millions and then ended up being begging for money from a bankruptcy court at the end. Okay, I've seen that movie. So you know, as I think about this, you know, that was one of the things I first looked up and said, Okay, so what really happened these guys economically, and they they're not they're not they're not poor that they may not be as rich as they'd like to be well, And I. Think that, you know, to bring this kind of full circle all the way back to the top, you know, I think that is maybe for your student's doctor promoter.

And I think Mark, like you've mentioned, success and failure is somewhat relative in a lot of ways. I mean, these guys were successful and failed at the same time. I mean those two things can almost be somewhat true at the same time. I mean, their business was going out of business, and it's not like it just stopped one day. I mean BlackBerry still exists.

They don't make phones. They are a communication solutions company now, which okay, I mean it was a company that worked on communications, So that makes sense, I guess. But to bring it all the way, like I said, back to the top, like, success is very relative, and when you look at the success that they did or didn't have, it's, like you said, Mark, it's better to know how it all ended up. Because the movie I think kind of fumbles it right at the end and can't can't do it, can't do the story bit just as it needs. You know, what reminds me of is a sports figure, you know, right, the guy you know, we all talk about Babe Ruth and all the home runs he hit, but we don't talk about the latter years where he wasn't very sixs right.

We remember him for his success. And you know, in business you have to think about that as well. Did it when they were they were very successful. It's like, you know, they were making every jump shot three points for being made. They were the top of the game.

They were doing all this that's to be applauded. The fact that they ended up bailing is no different than the sports athlete who can't make three point shots anymore. I mean to say, it happened, right, and it happened to them. Michael Jordan played for the Wizards. I know everybody likes to forget that, but Michael Jordan played for the Wizards.

So well, Doctor Perlmutter, thank you so much for bringing this one down the pipeline. I was not going to watch it otherwise, not because I didn't want to, but because I watched so many movies. But I'm a huge fan of Glenn Howardton, which you know, he's great. I mean as a fan of Always Sunny. To have him in a like somewhat dramatic role but still being mean to everyone.

It it was. It was very much exactly what I was hoping for. So thank you for thank you for programming this one. It was very good. So if you want to find me and the other things that I work on in the other conversations at the bri Us have had about films, you can find that overt weirdingwaymedia dot com where this show and so many other fantastic shows can be found, like the Projection Booth, adestv Ladies, and so much more.

So head on over there check those out. Like rate and review this show on iTunes or Spotify. Please iTunes first, Spotify second. If I have a choice, your choice is whichever one you want to pick. Just like, rate and review the show wherever you get it.

If you want to kick a couple of dollars, our way Patreon dot com slash culture cast is where you can do that. But ultimately, liking and rating and reviewing the show is even more helpful than money. Doctor Pearl Mutter doctor statue. Technically both of you, thank you so much for your time and candor. On a like Mark said, a trip down memory lane and as always, we'll catch you on the next episode.

From the Books, for the Books, from the Boss, the Books f