Sculley and Heil

00:00 Adam Curry, John C. Dvorak. It's episode 737. I'm John C. Dvorak in Northern Silicon Valley while Adam is lost in the woods. This is no agenda. Hi there, I'm John C. Dvorak in Northern Silicon Valley and I'm going it alone today because I've done a couple of interviews we're going to use on the show. This is a filler show. Let's be honest about it. Adam is on vacation. He's taking a break and I don't blame him. And I'm kind of taking a break too. This is pre-recorded. but it's something we like to do to make sure that people get some good content anytime that we're doing something other than the show and we'll be doing the show again on Thursday so we want to remind everybody to definitely go to dvork.org slash na because we do need your support even for these shows.

00:44 I've got two interviews lined up for you, one with John Scully, the ex-CEO of Apple, who actually reveals quite a bit in this interview. I think anyone who's into the computer scene at all will get a lot of good information from it. That's followed by Bob Heil, the guy who does the microphones that most podcasters use. Fascinating guy, great interview. He just has a lot of stuff to tell us that's very interesting. So let's start right off with John Scully. And by the way, before we do that, I want to apologize. John Scully is using a Macintosh computer microphone, so he has an echoey sound. And I want to apologize in advance for that.

01:20 So let's begin right now with John Scully. I'm here with John Scully. John, hi. Hi, John. How are you? Pretty good. Now, you have a new book out that has to do with, I think, becoming an entrepreneur. I haven't read the book, but it sounds interesting. It's called Moonshot. It's called Moonshot. And as you know, John, Moonshot is a metaphor that's been around for a long time in Silicon Valley. When something happens that's so significant that the world is different after it happens and it was before It's called a moonshot picking up the metaphor of when President Kennedy back in 1961 said we're gonna put a man on the moon and return him safely within the decade and they did yes and usually the people who are involved in moonshots are walk away as billionaires rather quickly. Yeah. Well, this is not I'm not the man who created this moonshot, right and

02:10 And the moonshot at this time is not one product, but it's really several different technologies, cloud, mobility, data analytics, and coming soon, Internet of Things, which are growing at an exponential rate, as you know. And it's the derivative effect that I'm focused on, which is the market effect. that the market power is shifting from the large incumbent companies to customers and customers are more and more in control because they're paying more attention to the opinions and the recommendations of other customers than they are to the messages of the incumbent companies. And you can see that today with

02:55 so many ways in which things can go viral that when customers have something really good to say about a product or service, it gets out to many other people very, very quickly. And that's really a game changer. The technologies are rapidly commoditizing and the differentiation becomes how do you find better products and services that have extraordinary customer experience, hopefully disruptive delivery costs and can make customers happy enough that other customers want to tell about it and you can grow new businesses and there are a lot of examples out there right now. How is this different from word-of-mouth?

03:35 It's word of mouth. Back in my era in Silicon Valley, it was called word of mouth when the Apple 1984 commercial came out. There was no commercial internet in those days and it was all word of mouth. The people said, gee, did you see that commercial? And they passed it on and on. And we didn't even have cell phones as you recall in those days. Word of mouth today is technology enabled with all kinds of chat and photos and videos and other ways that people communicate. Has anybody actually studied this? Because it seems to me, as a skeptic, that word of mouth actually goes, I think you could probably trace it to the 1800s or even further back.

04:18 Well, you may be right and I'm a big believer in word of mouth. I mean if you can do things without having to use technology and it just happens with people talking to people, I think that's great. I think what's happening though, I think we're getting more transparency. People have better information, more information. They know more about products and prices and and being able to compare products and services than they ever could before. All of that is helping to shift the power to the customer having more say in how products become successful. It really changes the ground rules for marketing because big marketing spend isn't enough if you don't have a great product and service that people want. Well, that's always the case though. That's pre-internet.

05:04 I mean, if you don't have a good product, no matter what you do, you're not gonna sell much of it. Yeah, well, human nature doesn't change as quickly as technologies do. And so you're absolutely right that these things have been around a long time. It's just that they've been amplified as technology makes things more accessible to more people more often. Well, some of the stuff, I've been watching this, of course, and some of the things I've noticed is that of late, all the phenomenons you're describing are obfuscated somewhat by the gaming of the system by Google's analytic analysis of websites and when you, for example, if you try still use this as my main example, if I'm looking for the best weed whacker in the world, I cannot find it online.

05:47 I can, and then my Twitter followers, and I have a hundred thousand, I use them as crowd sourcing, which is a new phenomenon where you can actually go to a large audience at any time of the day or night and ask something and you get answers back. I can't get a definitive answer for the best weed whacker. I can't get a definitive answer for the best weed whacker using any search engine. I get nothing but sites that are exploitative, the ad sites where they sometimes do fake reviews and they get high rankings and they show the weed whacker they're actually selling coincidentally. And I'm not as much all in on much of this

06:25 Sort of thinking because I see too many products that are not getting the word of mouth and there and but all the opportunities are out there that Facebook is out there the Twitter's out there all these systems are out there for somebody to to make hay and I'm seeing still seeing a lot of stuff that doesn't catch on what can be done if you have a product and let's make the assumption this is a good product and not a crappy product that nobody wants. What happens if it fails? Well, if it's a good product and people are saying bad things about it, maybe it's not as good as you thought it was. So I think that, for instance, if you go to Trustpilot, they will put the ratings of products and services out there, and they'll put the bad ones there with the good ones. Many companies, when they're trying to

07:16 promote their own product and service of course only put up the nice things that people say and I think that Eventually people see through that and realize that they're only getting one side of the story. The reality is that what you're saying is certainly true for some things, but it's not true for all things because we're seeing companies, let's take Uber for example, which everyone would agree is a pretty successful company, that they aren't a technology company. They are an infrastructure company that's figured out a better way to deliver a service that people find really useful. For instance, in San Francisco, I believe that the taxi industry was about $140 million a year prior to Uber coming out.

08:05 And post-Uber, the taxi industry is still about $140 million a year. So it didn't change much. On the other hand, Uber has about a $400 million plus revenue per year for its service in San Francisco. So somebody thought it was worth using this service. and it expanded the market because as you know when it's a rainy day and you're trying to get a taxi and there are a lot of people in town in San Francisco, it's not an easy thing to do. So I think that the technologies are not what people are buying. They're not buying the technologies. They're buying better services as they hear about them and often it's word of mouth. Someone says, gee, did you try this new service called Lyft or did you try this new service called Airbnb

08:51 Or you could try TaskRabbit or whatever these new services happen to be. So word of mouth is still a big way in which customers get better information, but sometimes that word of mouth is using technology, telecommunications. You know, it's funny you mentioned the Uber numbers and that it hasn't really hurt the taxi business, even though it's perceived that it did. And the taxi people, of course, are moaning because they figure that that money should be theirs. Yeah. Well, maybe if they offered a better service. I mean, I live in the East Coast. When I'm in New York, they're trying to get a taxi when they have a shift change, and particularly when it's raining.

09:33 and it's just horrible out and you want to get a taxi, it's impossible. And so Uber is a godsend in that particular situation. And of course they'll legislate against it. Yeah, well because we live in a democracy that is largely structured around special interests and always has been. Right. Yeah, actually I don't have high hopes for long-term Uber because I know they're going to just screw with them forever. Well, you can see it's not just in the US, it's country after country is coming after them and banning them for various reasons.

10:08 Nobody likes them because they think they're taking away an industry that already exists. But San Francisco is an interesting insight, the fact that the taxi industry didn't go away and actually expanded, which only points out to me that people were pretty fed up with the service that taxis offer and there wasn't any alternative. So, you know, there was still plenty of demand out there, there just wasn't enough supply. And Uber helped fill that supply, so did Lyft. Yeah, you know I felt this was the same scenario not to go off the track too far But when Napster came out I always harp on this with the industry when Napster appeared and it was a free. It was a sharing system The Year the last year of Napster was the highest sales of CDs in the history of the music industry in fact if CDs sales began to

11:03 increase once Napster arrived. And the logic of this for me was that people discovered new music because you would go on to Napster and you'd get a song that you liked and you wanted a copy of it and you'd find somebody's library of what they had and you'd notice that they had a lot of stuff that you liked. And then as you went down the library you saw stuff you never heard of but the guy seemed to have the same taste as you so you try it out and you say, well this band is terrific I'll go buy their CD. A lot of people did that. And of course the industry didn't see it that way. They just saw it as out and out theft. And Pride come before a fall, they decided it was more important to have this ownership taken to an extreme. And they hurt themselves.

11:51 Yeah, well that's a wonderful story and you know that you just gave a perfect example of customers paying attention to other customers because you look around you see what other people are doing and say gee that's pretty interesting and that's a perfect example of customers assuming a bigger role in how decisions are made. Now if you were to coach an entrepreneur with some new ideas You've seen a lot of them come and go over the years and I want to talk a little bit about that about your I think overlooked Running of Apple for a decade and increasing its sales tenfold which people seem to always be befuddled by What is the one thing that an entrepreneur? Does and yet you've seen them do over and over again that they shouldn't do it all is there anything that comes to mind?

12:47 Well, you can, to be an entrepreneur, you need to be an optimist and you need to believe in something. And you hopefully become passionate enough about it that you will do whatever it takes to try to make it successful. Unfortunately, that can also make you blindsided to the fact that there may be obstacles in your way. It may not be quite as good in the eyes of the customer as it is in your eyes. and we often become a victim of our own success. You get a little bit of success and it goes to your head. If you take it to a bigger scale, John, you and I both remember in the 1990s when Intel and Microsoft dominated the technology world as the internet became commercial with the World Wide Web and client-server became more and more important.

13:42 Interesting thing is that was only a decade later and both Intel and Microsoft missed mobile. And you say, well, how could these really smart people, because they are smart people, how could they miss something that was so obvious after it happened? And so we discovered that when you're in the entrepreneurial world, the only reason for an entrepreneurial company to exist is because it can take risks and do things that other big companies may not be able to move as quickly with. And the big companies may be terrific at scaling, but they aren't particularly terrific at being able to pivot when an industry goes through a fundamental change. So I think for entrepreneurs, you've got to be constantly scanning the landscape. I remember one of the great lessons I learned from working with Steve Jobs was what Steve used to call zooming.

14:34 And he said, you know, let's zoom out and kind of look at things beyond our own industry and then try to connect the dots. And of course, the example when I was working with him was, you know, he zoomed out and connected the dots between beautiful calligraphy that he had been exposed to at Reed College and the incredible engineering workstations using graphics. interface that Xerox PARC was working on at that time and of course he understood personal computers because he did introduce the Apple II. And so he said, gee, imagine if you could connect the dots and take things that are in entirely different domains that may not be obvious to other people.

15:14 why those dots should be connected. And in his case, he wanted to build a product that would say computers aren't just for business and technical people, engineers, scientists, you know, computers are for non-technical people to do creative things. and why not enable people to be able to publish and make the machines affordable and make them easy to use. And so he went off an entirely different path than where other people were working at the time. Well, that's what entrepreneurs have to do. They have to see things in different ways and connect the dots. Steve's brilliance was he knew how to simplify, you know, once he connected the dots. Many entrepreneurs don't know how to simplify.

15:54 they connect the dots, but they forget that you've got to make it a great experience for the customer or the customer probably is not going to fall in love with it as much as you do. Well, that brings me to an interesting question and something I've thought about, I talk about, but I don't think I've ever asked you or anybody about the thinking that happened during the early era of 1990. You were at Apple from what years? I joined the beginning of 1983 and left in the beginning of 1993. 93 you quit? I did. I didn't quit actually, I was pushed out. Right, you were. You were pushed out because of some strategy, I guess, strategy issues with the board. There was, and I don't know if this is on your watch or not, but there was a moment in time where the Mosaic browser came out and it was native to the Macintosh.

16:50 It was not available on anything else. During the same period where this browser first appeared on Macintosh and nothing else, Apple could have possibly cornered the market on the internet. But instead, the company fell prey to... there was a kind of a strange thinking going on during this early era of the browser-based internet, which introduced the mouse to the interface of the internet. Before that, everything was graphic. You could go to use Go Free. Everything was command line. During this transitional period where Apple could have taken over the place,

17:33 Apple came out with something called, I think it was eWorld or it was a clone of AOL and Microsoft was coming out with MSN as a information service, not like devolved into. So you had, and everybody, not everybody, I definitely was not saying this, but I have documentation of plenty of pundits saying, oh, well the internet's great, but AOL is really great and that's where everything's gonna go, To me, by the way, the way I see things, AOL became Facebook. in terms of its community orientation. Anyway, everyone was pushing this and everybody seemed to have gotten suckered into believing that these information utilities, you know, beginning with CompuServe, the source, AOL was the heavy hitter at the time of 92, 93. And then MSN came along and then I think it was again eWorld or something that Apple had, which was actually kind of nice.

18:35 It was interesting to me that everybody got suckered into going into this old-fashioned model, sticking with the AOL style of online communication as opposed to the net, which came out and Mosaic then evolved into Netscape, which went on the PC, and the next thing you know, the whole world has changed. What was going on during that era? Well, I can fill in some of the gaps. First of all, Mosaic happened after I left, while I was there. Okay, well then that is a plus for you. Yeah, okay, but let me fill in some interesting little details, what you said. First of all, many people don't realize that AOL almost went bankrupt. Steve Cage came to me in about 1980,

19:28 Seven or eight I remember the exact year and he couldn't make a payroll so we agreed to make a payroll in return for him licensing Apple some of his technology That was used to create the world So that was that's one data point And so we actually owned I think about 5% of a wellness as part of that deal the second thing that happened was that We were working with Cray Computer and the University of Illinois in Urbana. and we had come up with a product that Bill Atkinson, the first software engineer at Apple, whoever worked at Apple, Bill had created something called HyperCard. And HyperCard was a prototyping tool, if you recall, and it was used as a prototyping tool on the Mac to connect Macs over the internet to the Cray XMP48 supercomputers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

20:32 campus and at that campus I believe that Mark Andreessen was an engineering student. Yes. Computer science student there. Yes, true. And so he was, you know, involved with, I think, some of that prototyping of HyperCard on the Mac connected to the Cray XMP48. Then, years later, we were actually working, not years later, but in 1987, we were working on something called the Knowledge Navigator. which was never a real product, it was a vision of what computers might look like 20 odd years into the future. There's a project I was working on with Alan Kay.

21:17 And George Lucas had given me some insight that we could simulate what this would look like, even though we couldn't make it from a technology standpoint. So we made a simulated video of it, which was called the Knowledge Navigator video. And I used to take it around the world to kind of give people some inspiration that Apple really did have a future beyond what it was doing in those days. So, out of that came the team that worked on that, Hugh Dufferley and Doris Mitch went on to a new company that was formed after I left Apple that was called Netscape. And you remember Mark Andreessen came to Netscape, created the Netscape browser and it was called The Navigator.

22:05 And Hugh Dudley, the same designer who worked on the Knowledge Navigator, was the one who worked on that Netscape. So what you find in Silicon Valley, this is very typical Silicon Valley, as you know. Things move around. One thing pollinates, another thing pollinates, another thing. And that's what makes Silicon Valley so unique, is that people move around, their ideas move around, and you get the benefit of people being able to take advantage of little bits of innovation that happened in many different places. Now, MSN actually came way after I had left because until Tim Berners-Lee had created the World Wide Web with HTML and HTTP,

22:46 There wasn't any way to build a browser on top of the World Wide Web. And it wasn't until the browser had been built and Bill Gates saw that all of a sudden Netscape came out of nowhere with a browser running on the World Wide Web. And it was some time after that, not too long after that, that he started MSN. The thing that's amazing to me about MSN, I believe to this day that MSN still loses money. which seems really quite amazing considering that it's been around so long. I guess it still has a fairly high user base to it. But those things didn't all happen at the same time. At least in my era, we didn't have any obvious way to go and build things

23:34 on a communications network because we weren't maybe smart enough to do what Tim Berners-Lee did, which was to create the World Wide Web. You may remember back in those days, John, when Apple was working on General Magic. and another company called Newton, and we were in those days expecting we would have to build our own telecommunication system, you know, because there wasn't any way to deliver data, you know, over circuit switch lines at that point in time. So General Magic was a Venture that we funded at Apple and then we brought in AT&T because we need telecommunications and we brought in Sony As a partner as well because we needed the consumer electronics help Newton Was all about Communications as well. But in those days all we had was the ability to communicate, you know Maybe four or five feet from from one Newton to another Newton

24:32 And of course it got slammed because the handwriting didn't really work. Yeah, it was funny. But the irony of that is that we had to work with a man named Herman Hauser, who was the creator of the Acorn computer in the UK, professor at Cambridge University. And he had developed a unique processor for the Acorn. And we worked with him to modify that work into a processor that was called ARM. Advanced Research Machine, I think it stood for. And we own 43% of the arm at Apple because it was completely designed. All the design of it, because it was the first object-oriented programming language application on a low-powered microprocessor.

25:23 That was the first low-powered microprocessor that could handle object-based calls. And so everything in the arm was designed around the Newton. So, Newton was not successful, but Newton actually made 800 million dollars because Apple eventually sold the 43% they owned in arm, that Newton had owned, for 800 million dollars. Which, by the way, kept the doors open at Apple just before Steve Jobs came back. It was one of the really important decisions Gil Emelio made. And it gave them the cash to buy next. So it's interesting how you can connect the dots by lots of things that happen with many people doing a lot of innovation along the way, things that you don't often find in history books. No, that story about the arm is a fascinating one, I do know it. You wonder if they were a little more successful during the Emilio era, which he was

26:20 tended to be blamed for Even though he's a from I think it was some national semiconductor of Silicon Valley mainstay He was blamed for being I think not being Silicon Valley enough or at least an ambitious enough But it would be more interesting to me if they had kept arm To this day because it's become a very popular company and pot and very important product well, you know, it's market cap today is 26 billion dollars and So 43% of that would be pretty good. The ARM core is in something like 7 billion mobile devices, 7 billion mobile devices around the world. So it went on to become pretty important. And a lot of the original Newton technology is still found in many smartphones today. Now you got involved with smartphones. Very few people in the United States know about this.

27:18 But I since I do a podcast called the no agenda show which you should listen to sometime In fact if you type no agenda into Google, you'll see I think seven pages of you know, whatever So I was watching I watched foreign news broadcasts and I was watching it was I believe was France 24 then cat and they did a huge profile of you on that network and About your phone company, which you apparently started I guess a year or two ago, and it's already doing it quite a quite a decent business You want to tell us a little bit about that sure well?

27:55 I have a number of businesses over in Asia, you know, so I co-founded a firm called Inflection Point, which we are buying supply chain companies, everything from IT components to finished IT goods all throughout the ASEAN countries, that's Southeast Asia, India, places like that. And we like many people observed over there that, wow, smartphones are really catching on and that part of the world is just switching from 2G to 3G. That there's literally billions of young people who want to own their own smartphone, move from the feature phones, which now you can buy for less than $20 over there, but they wanted to move to smartphones, but they couldn't afford $600 for an iPhone or for a high-end Samsung phone.

28:49 So what we observed was that the because we're selling to a lot of these contract manufacturers in China We said gee the technology has really commoditized and we could actually build a very high quality smartphone without having to invest virtually anything into R&D and And because we're already in the supply chain business, we don't really have to invest much into the administration around that business, because we know these markets around the world from a distribution standpoint. And so using a frugal expense model for our overhead, leveraging the commoditization of smartphone technology,

29:35 We pulled together a really incredible Silicon Valley design team, and I can't mention all the names at this point until our products are out on the market, but they're people I had worked with over the years. You would recognize all the names. And we said we will really double down on industrial design. and we will design the best possible smartphones we can, and we'll optimize them around things that are important in places like Africa, where you've got a two-hour bus ride to get home, and when you get home, you have no electricity, and you want to listen to music or watch the cricket scores or football scores. And so we optimize around giving people extra battery life,

30:18 things that were important. We've attuned the sound to, much as Beats tuned the sound to hip-hop, we tune the sound to optimize for the types of music in different parts of the world, things like that. So we've actually built a, looks like pretty successful business. Several hundred, we'll do, I guess, between three or four hundred million revenue this year. We're profitable this year and we're growing very, very fast and we are in the emerging markets. We don't sell in Europe or the United States. We're into Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, Vietnam. I'm just headed off to East Africa, Tanzania and Kenya.

31:02 We're in all the Middle East countries, both the UAE, the GCC countries, we're moving into the CIS countries, which are the former Soviet countries. We're not going to Russia this time for a bunch of reasons, but there's literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of young people, the number is really over billions of young people who are in that teenage to early 20s who aspire to a smartphone, but have a pretty high taste standard of wanting it to be the same kind of cultural instrument that shows off and says, here's my personality. They just don't want something coming out of a Chinese factory that looks like a generic phone. So that's the idea of it.

31:48 It's never going to be Jiaming. It's not going to be a world beater, but it does create an opportunity for us to build what we think can be a really nice business. Now this to me, when I first heard this story, what's the name of the product by the way before I ask this question? It's called OBI. Simple name. People can check it out I'm sure on the web. Yeah, OBI. What comes to mind is like this is something that had to happen eventually because you're right, the commoditization, if we're going to go by Moore's law, things are going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to the point where they're, you know, what is right now the minimum cost from scratch of the bag of parts, the best you could absolutely do for a smartphone?

32:38 Well, you can actually do them for less than we do because we're not going for the absolute cheapest out there. I mean, there are people who are literally standing out in big, you know, malls selling smartphones and feature phones, you know, and they have them in their pockets. You know, you can buy them like you can buy watches in Tiananmen Square for, you know, $25, $35, $45. That's not the market we're going after. The price points we're focused more, you know, start around, just under $100 and then we have the mainstream of our products is more like $150 US and then we also sell higher end products which are

33:24 In the high $200s, $270, $280, the BOM, the bill of materials on those products are usually about half of whatever price they're selling. So if it's a product that's selling for $100, you've got maybe $50 of bill of material parts in it. I mean, the old rule, there used to be a 4x factor and then there's been 3x factor and then I guess with these because the volume of sales is so high you don't need to put your multiple so high. Well, the other thing is because we're already in the supply chain business and distribution business and we run our businesses in Asia, we are very comfortable with businesses that have margins that US companies just would walk away from. In other words, we can go in with a product that has a 8, 9, 10% gross margin

34:17 and can have an operating profit of 1.5 to 2% and we're thrilled. Whereas most companies would say, well why would I want to be in that business? But remember, we own the business. The second thing is that we had looked last year at acquiring Blackberry. And we'd actually lined up the capital to do it. I have a team up in Toronto as part of our organization. So we have teams in London, Toronto, Singapore, Delhi, various places around the world. And we saw that when we were doing the due diligence on BlackBerry, we saw that they had 7,000 people working on their headset business.

35:01 And we were negotiating, if they hadn't pulled the auction, we were hoping to sell it to the handset business to Lenovo and we would keep the BlackBerry Enterprise server business, which is what we really, service business, which is what we really wanted. But in the process of studying it, we said 7,000 people. So I asked our team CEO, I said, so how many people would you need to run a handset business like that? He said, oh, between 50 and 100. And that's when our eyes started to open and we said, wait a minute, why are we trying to buy this company? We have most of the skills already inside of our businesses. What if we took a serious look at building our own company from scratch? And that's what we're doing. Well, I have to tell you, you're the first Silicon Valley guy over the last, I don't know, five or six years that I've ever heard take the make side of the make-buy decision. It's like everybody buys, nobody makes.

35:59 Well, we don't make either. Remember? I know, but I'm just talking about you do make, but I'm saying you didn't buy somebody, you didn't take the easy way out. I'll just buy them and it will run their business, maybe do a better job. Well, think of it this way. Remember, I grew up in a commodity industry called soft drinks. There is very little difference inside the bottle between a Pepsi and a Coke. So I was pretty comfortable selling a commodity product and building a distinct personality for it. And in the technology world, the way to build a distinct personality is, you know, it's all in the design. It's not the marketing. So we watched what Xiaomi was doing with their flash sales in China.

36:44 and they don't spend any money in marketing. We watched Google when they started, they didn't spend any money on marketing. We said if we have really, really cool design, we understand distribution channels, and we understand frugal expense models, and we're comfortable in a business where we don't have any overhead to speak of, so we can actually make money at price points where the traditional companies like HTC and Sony and others are hemorrhaging losses, maybe that's worth trying. at least so far so good. That's one of about 15 companies I've got, but it's one that kind of tells a different story than what you might hear. Yeah, and it's also quite interesting because when I first heard about OB and read about the model and what you're up to, I said to myself, why doesn't Nokia do this exact same thing? They've been in the business, they've got

37:37 supply chains locked up. They have all these opportunities and they just didn't do anything. I don't know, you know, maybe they just felt the whole thing was to just sell to Microsoft once they got their, the camel got its head in the tent. Well, the challenge Microsoft has now that they own Nokia, you remember they paid 7.2 billion dollars for it, they've laid off about 30,000 people since they bought it, they're still, last I heard, hemorrhaging hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter, and they just announced that they're going to come out with a Nokia brand, remember changing the rest of the product line to

38:13 Lumina They're going to come out with a Nokia brand product that they're going to sell at a $70 price point Well, I can tell you with their R&D at Microsoft and their overhead at Nokia slash Microsoft There's no other way in the world. They can make any money So they may choose to treat it like MSN and say well we can we don't have to make money here We'll make money somewhere else. But the reality is if you're a new company, we had to say, you know We're not going to go into this unless we can see how we're going to make money at it. And we actually will this year, we'll be profitable. You have no, zero plans to ever bring these phones into the United States? No, certainly not. Here's why. I was part of the founding efforts of a company called Metro PCS. Oh, yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't the founder, but I was one of the original investors. I thought that was an outstanding product.

39:06 It was an outstanding product. Roger Lindquist was the CEO. He was visionary, he was terrific, and it was just a joy to work with him. And I was kind of like a marketing resource board member and an early investor in the company. But in any event, that was built on the same model that the rest of the world is, which is a prepaid model, not a contract. And the US, because we are primarily a contract model, the cost of the phone is buried into the two-year service contract and the carriers are really in control of the sales channels. And so it's really, really hard for someone to break into this business. So you see someone like Motorola now on

39:45 have owned by Lenovo is doing brilliantly in the emerging markets around the world. It's been really successful for Lenovo, but they don't really try to sell much in the United States. It's just too hard to crack the distribution channels and the contract sales model. So there's not any big logic why we would come to the US unless we came up with a radically different strategy. But even Jiaming has said don't look for us to come to the US for maybe four or five years. And of course they're having amazing success, certainly in China, but then moving into India and other markets, but only in the emerging markets.

40:23 What do you think the future for the Apple iPhone is? It's become a cult item, a prestige item. It's definitely not marketed like anything else. Very wisely gets higher margins because of this pent-up perpetual demand for newer ones that the public has, or at least the people who are All in on the iPhone, I would say, Milieu or Colt maybe. But it seems to me that it's a very expensive product that can't be around forever.

41:01 By the way, I'm saying this as the guy who said this will never fly. Even though I never saw the iPhone, I made these predictions because I was goaded into it, I will say. But I admire the product. I think it's a great product. I think it opened the doors to all kinds of cool stuff. But it seems to be an expensive bottle of wine that is not that much better than the other cheaper bottle of wine. Yeah, well, when we first looked at getting into the, what I'll call the budget mobile economy in the emerging markets, I looked at it as being like this is a pretty big expanding niche of the mobile device market. I now realize it isn't a niche, it is the market. And the anomaly is really Apple, you know, at the premium end. You know, Apple's the BMW sort of of the auto industry analogy.

41:58 So, what does Apple do? Well, Apple is actually doing some really smart things, I think. First of all, if you go back to WWDC, the Worldwide Developer Conference, last June, they announced platforms on platforms. They announced vertical platforms. They announced HealthKit. They're doing a home kit. They're presumably working on a car kit. So they're going into these verticals and building not just the horizontal platform that they have, the smartphone wars, OS wars with Google, but they're going in and they're building

42:35 another layer up which are these vertical platforms and they're actually made I do a lot of health care health care is one of my domains I've got five companies in health care that they're going into the health care industry and they're having quite a bit of success but of the top I think 19 major hospital systems in the US they're already in about half of them and they are having a huge impact on on getting doctors who are notorious about doing anything with technology, who actually feel comfortable with them. And as you know, as sensors become more prevalent and built into more things, and particularly medical devices, and they get better and better, and data analytics get better and better, I think Apple's going to find a nice franchise in healthcare. They are, I think, behind the curve versus

43:26 Google in terms of the connected home, because Google has Nest and Dropcam and some other things. But my guess is you'll see Apple take their iOS technology. What's not apparent I think to everybody, but I know you know this, is that about 80% of everything that Apple sells is based now on iOS. Because I think it's smart that their iPhone is about 70% and and their iPad is about 10%, so that gets them to 80%. And there's a lot of speculation that the Mac OS will eventually move over to the ARM, and it'll take on more and more of the characteristics of iOS. So I think they are gonna take iOS across televisions, I think they'll take iOS, not television sets per se, but I mean more the OTT type services, over-the-top services. And I think that you'll see Apple

44:19 take that big investment that they have in iPhone, which is with the iOS and then the various other things like iTunes and app stores on top of it, and they're going to continue to verticalize it, would be my guess. Because you just can't keep those high margins and just be like Google. I mean, look at Samsung. Samsung is literally getting killed. because they got Xiaomi and Micromax and some of these regional phones coming up with very, very good products looking more and more like the iPhone at half the price or less of what the iPhone is selling. And poor Samsung is sitting there with incredible investments in research and development, huge overhead, huge marketing spend. They spend more on marketing than Apple does by a lot.

45:09 four or five times more. And so they've got a completely broken model. So if anyone is going to fall first, it's not Apple, it's going to be Samsung. And my guess is Samsung is going to retreat back into making components and moving into their other clients. They sell washing machines and refrigerators and stuff like that. So my guess is you'll see Samsung moving away from this high performance on smartphones. There's been a lot of discussion about this recently. Samsung is also, for some unknown reason, developing its own OS. What is the thinking behind that? Is it when you use Android, is it an expensive proposition?

45:49 Well, they've been working, it's called Tizen, and they've been working on Tizen for many years. They just, I think, are in the process of releasing a Tizen phone. I don't think anybody wants it. So my guess is it's not going to do very well. But Tizen is going to be the operating system that they intend to use for their Internet of Things, all of their connected appliances and things of that sort. And it may make some sense there. I'm just not knowledgeable enough to know the specifics on it. The other interesting thing with what Samsung has done in the Galaxy 6, their newest phone which comes out at the Mobile World Congress, they aren't using a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and that's really big news. In other words, they are retreating back to things they can control with hardware because that's what they're experts at. As you know, they started a Silicon Valley

46:43 of campus a few years ago with the announced purpose of really becoming a major innovative force in software, but that's yet to happen. No, to say the least. Have you heard of any other operating systems for phones that are floating around maybe kind of under the radar? There are a few. I'm just trying to... What is the one that begins with U? I can't remember, but I think it's almost irrelevant. Why does anybody want another operating system when you get Android for free? So my guess is Ubuntu, I think it's called. Oh, Ubuntu, yeah. Yeah, Ubuntu did make a comment. That's a Linux operation, obviously. And the guy made a comment that they're going to... In fact, this has been for over a year or maybe two that there's been discussion about

47:41 an operating system for phones that is going to be a Linux product of some sort, even though Android is also a Linux product. I don't think that's the biggest news around. Sometimes people invent things that don't really need to be invented. The Linux world would be nice if it actually got its act together. I have a Linux box, a couple of them, and they're great. And you get all kinds of free software and you can load them up with... make it functional so it's just you wouldn't know the difference really but there's still these things missing and they can't seem to get around it like Adobe for example refuses to put any of its products on Linux because, and this story I'm told is because Warnock was irked

48:32 when Ghost's script was invented and he thought it was a you know, it's gonna ruin him and so he just has a grudge against the I think it's just a corporate thing now. I think the thing to watch John is if there's a new operating system, it probably needs to be for the internet of things where you've got low-powered sensors and power management is a big deal. As you know, the smartphone operating systems, you've got a lithium-ion battery in there, they're pretty big. But what do you do with the little miniaturized sensors all over the place? I'm a co-founder of a company called Misfit in Silicon Valley, and we do a lot of research

49:12 sensor-based products but we have six-month battery life. One of our major focuses is how do you extend the length of battery time on these sensor-based products. It's a very different set of challenges than when you're dealing with smart phones. Do you have high hopes for the Internet of Things? That's one thing I wanted to get to last here, which is the Internet of Things. I've been to a couple of them, kind of showcases of where they have the Internet of Things items. I'm not immediately a fan of the idea of Internet of Things because this harkens back to me to the, I guess, the late 80s when IBM was touting the idea that the washing machine would call the washer repairman and that

48:32 when Ghost's script was invented and he thought it was a you know, it's gonna ruin him and so he just has a grudge against the I think it's just a corporate thing now. I think the thing to watch John is if there's a new operating system, it probably needs to be for the internet of things where you've got low-powered sensors and power management is a big deal. As you know, the smartphone operating systems, you've got a lithium-ion battery in there, they're pretty big. But what do you do with the little miniaturized sensors all over the place? I'm a co-founder of a company called Misfit in Silicon Valley, and we do a lot of research

49:12 sensor-based products but we have six-month battery life. One of our major focuses is how do you extend the length of battery time on these sensor-based products. It's a very different set of challenges than when you're dealing with smart phones. Do you have high hopes for the Internet of Things? That's one thing I wanted to get to last here, which is the Internet of Things. I've been to a couple of them, kind of showcases of where they have the Internet of Things items. I'm not immediately a fan of the idea of Internet of Things because this harkens back to me to the, I guess, the late 80s when IBM was touting the idea that the washing machine would call the washer repairman and that

49:56 and personal area operating system where you have a, I think, pre-Bluetooth where you have some sort of little network around you that did things and got you into the Walmart and put your name up on a board and all that sort of thing. I've always found these to be unnecessary to anyone's normal life. Yeah, so here's where I think you have to start. It's not in the consumer space. So yes, you know, Tony Fidel did a beautiful product with Nest and Dropcam is cool and GoPro will probably add sensor communications. So those things are cool, but that's not this trillion dollar industry that IDC talks about.

50:54 The place where it's really going to have an impact, I believe, starts in manufacturing. And we're already seeing that manufacturing is returning rapidly to the US, but obviously not with the same jobs. And it's using more and more of what McKinsey has labeled the digitization of work. And so the people who are behind the McKinsey digitization of work effort are GE, Cisco, Intel, maybe IBM, I'm not sure, but certainly the first three. And they're betting heavily on it. So if you're GE and you're making jet aircraft engines,

51:32 you put 200 sensors on it, and as it's flying over the Pacific, it's reporting back, theoretically I'm told, maybe actually in real time, and it's looking at the outside air pressure, it's looking at the internal thermal conditions, it's looking at the speed of the rotors, it's looking at the use of fuel at those different speeds and pressures. and it's making real-time adjustments on both safety issues and fuel consumption issues. So that's a very practical example of Internet of Things. It has nothing to do with hooking up your refrigerator to automatically order milk when you run out. I'm a skeptic of that too. So I think it's going to be more industrial, commercial things that are going to be less expensive, and I think that the

52:25 People to watch are not the people who are necessarily particularly creative It's the big old lumbering companies like GE and Intel and Cisco and others Who may well be defining it another one is what has been labeled as smart cities IBM is working on smart cities Cisco is working on it the idea of smart cities is if you could simplify the effort that people have to find a parking space you can save fuel. If you can manage the traffic patterns more efficiently so that the traffic lights are able to adapt to whatever the traffic is at a particular time of day, in a particular location, depending on traffic, you can save gasoline. If you have a very hot day and you want to turn down the number of cycles that the air conditioning is used in commercial buildings,

53:20 So, it's imperceptibly smaller than change than what people could even recognize, but it saves an incredible amount of fuel. That's another example. So, these things aren't particularly sexy, but they're real and they probably will take It's not like introducing the iPhone or introducing Google. These aren't moon shots. These are things that are just going to work their way into our society and our economy. But I do think, ultimately, it will be big. Now, the estimates are, and it just astounds me, the numbers I hear thrown around, 50 billion wireless connected devices by the early 2020s, 17 trillion dollar cumulative industry.

54:01 by 2030. And so these numbers are so large I can't even get my head around it. So I think it will happen, but I'm not sure if it will happen in a way that's as dramatic as introducing an iPad or an iPhone. Well, you know, we have a company in Berkeley that's involved in this. They make sensors that are placed around traffic signals at intersections, and they have them all over the place. I think they've got a couple of them outfitted around here and they give you a variable pattern for the way the lights work. It's kind of interesting. I don't think it's flawless, because I have one near me and I've got to go visit these guys because I think they're probably right. It doesn't sound sexy at any of these levels because it's not. It doesn't involve consumer electronics, which seems to be the only thing that people would deem as sexy. I don't think new traffic signaling systems could ever be thought of as that. Is there anything that you see before we're going to wrap up?

55:03 Is there anything that you see in the consumer electronics space? Because you always have actually been more of a mass-market consumer electronics type of guy, so far as your marketing is concerned. Is there anything that you see out there that people should maybe pay some attention to and they're not? Yeah, absolutely. For the last eight years I've been really deeply into health care and uh... telemedicine and things of that sort and uh... the consumerization of health care is one of the biggest things that's already starting to happen now it's going to be every bit as big as electronic banking remember how skeptical people were twenty five years ago about electronic banking and uh... ATM machines well it's going to be massive in the healthcare industry because more and more of the responsibility for your own wellness and health

55:58 for cost reasons and for better health reasons are going to be turned over to people to manage themselves or manage members of their family. And it means that medical devices are going to be able to monitor things, we're going to be able to customize health for individuals. As you know in healthcare you've got hospitals, doctors, and you've got insurance payers and none of them share information with each other. And if you're a chronic care patient who has five or six specialists, none of those specialists share information with each other. So there's a long way to go to improve health care. And rather than trying to change all of the, you know, incredible legacy

56:41 illogic things that have built up our healthcare system. It's a lot easier to start fresh and start with the consumer slash patient and start to give them better tools and work your way back and monitor them and create new data information on these patients. That's what we're doing at a company I have called MDLive. We have another one called Rally Health. We sold to United Healthcare, which is a consumer engagement company. Again, I always do the consumer side of it. I've got still, I guess, four others like that. I'm very enthusiastic about the opportunities for the consumerization of healthcare and many, many derivative businesses that will come out of it.

57:23 I guess it would account for the popularity or at least the experimental popularity of these. Fitbit type Operations where you wear something and it helps you figure out what you're up to. Yeah. Well, you know some of that's novelty I mean, I'm a founder of a company called misfit in Silicon Valley We just raised a 40 million dollar round on a hundred seventy five million free and we were way over subscribed So but we're doing a lot more than just the devices. I mean, they're quickly commoditizing. We're heavily into data analytics so we'll have about 240 people in the company this year and

58:02 and most of them are in the software and data analytics side of the business. We're very big in Asia. We sell in 51 countries. And whether the Fitbits and those type of products, you know, the first generation, it's kind of like looking at the early personal computers. You know, they sort of tell you that there's something interesting going to happen, but they aren't really the interesting things themselves. We're gonna see some incredible advancements. For instance, sleep is one of the areas I'm particularly interested in. Sleep deprivation is the highest uh... cause of lost work worker productivity in america and that there are lots of things we can do beyond just uh... sleep apnea in terms of uh... improving people's you know wellness through sleep uh... you have high comorbidity which means high correlation between uh... sleep apnea and other chronic diseases like uh... COPD and PSTD and uh... type 2 diabetes hypertension

58:58 congestive heart failure, things of that sort. That's where the big cost of our healthcare system is. And these things are all tied together. Particularly the returning veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. We were working with the VA hospitals two and a half years ago, and we saw this crisis that suddenly has caught everybody by surprise. that the VA hospitals weren't giving very good service and there was a backlog of over two years for some procedures with these vets. We were seeing it all. I remember sitting around with my colleagues saying, you know, somebody is going to discover a crisis here in a year or two, and of course, here it is. So I don't know why these things are so much a surprise to people even in the VA or the government, but they're pretty obvious when you're sitting there, you know, watching as

59:52 someone in the industry themselves, in the private sector side. How many companies are you running or are you part of? I do no heavy lifting. I don't run a single company. I help found several of them. I'm an investor. I'm on the board of many of them. I like private companies, not public companies. I'm a brain maker. I bring in the strategic relationships and open doors and recruit talent, things of that sort. So I'm involved in about 15 of these. Now, as I recall, you were up in Vermont or New Hampshire or someplace like that for a while. Maine. Maine, right. Yeah, Maine, which is a far cry from Silicon Valley. And now you're in Florida, which is a far cry from Maine. Well, Maine, I went to, in fact,

58:58 congestive heart failure, things of that sort. That's where the big cost of our healthcare system is. And these things are all tied together. Particularly the returning veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. We were working with the VA hospitals two and a half years ago, and we saw this crisis that suddenly has caught everybody by surprise. that the VA hospitals weren't giving very good service and there was a backlog of over two years for some procedures with these vets. We were seeing it all. I remember sitting around with my colleagues saying, you know, somebody is going to discover a crisis here in a year or two, and of course, here it is. So I don't know why these things are so much a surprise to people even in the VA or the government, but they're pretty obvious when you're sitting there, you know, watching as

59:52 someone in the industry themselves, in the private sector side. How many companies are you running or are you part of? I do no heavy lifting. I don't run a single company. I help found several of them. I'm an investor. I'm on the board of many of them. I like private companies, not public companies. I'm a brain maker. I bring in the strategic relationships and open doors and recruit talent, things of that sort. So I'm involved in about 15 of these. Now, as I recall, you were up in Vermont or New Hampshire or someplace like that for a while. Maine. Maine, right. Yeah, Maine, which is a far cry from Silicon Valley. And now you're in Florida, which is a far cry from Maine. Well, Maine, I went to, in fact,

1:00:45 You probably remember Bob Metcalf. Oh yeah. So Bob's one of my very best friends and he and I lived near each other in Woodside and we lived near each other up in Maine in the summertime and we co-founded an organization called HopTech and we were back in the 90s helping demystify high technology for non-technical people and we brought in a lot of you know friends from MIT and Carnegie Mellon and Stanford and various places to you know help us with it and So there's quite an interesting technical related community up in Maine in the summertime, especially out of the Boston area and

1:01:27 So I was there but then I got divorced and so I don't go to Maine anymore. So I'm now down in Florida and I spend time in New York and I'm out in California usually a couple times a month as well. All right, well I think that'll conclude it. We should talk again sometime in the maybe in the next six months or something and catch up with the latest. Sounds good. Bye-bye. Thanks, John. That was John Sculley. I hope you got something out of that. I want to remind everybody that we do have a show coming up on Thursday. We have a show coming up twice a week every week and it's going to be live again Thursday morning. Dvorak.org slash NA. We will be naming all the people that became executive producers for these last two shows on that show and crediting everybody as usual for helping us. Dvorak.org slash NA. We do need your continued support.

1:02:16 So let's move on to Bob Heil who is a microphone designer but also was a sound guy who is very famous for creating the big wall of sound that became popular with the power trios of the 70s. He's a very interesting character. I had a good time talking to him. So I'm talking here with Bob Heil, who is, you're in Illinois. I actually am in Missouri right now. That's where my home, my station lab and all that is. The Ozarks, but our plant is back in Illinois. So you're up in the Ozarks, around Branson or someplace like that? Uh-huh. We're about 35-40 minutes north of Branson, just north of Springfield, Missouri. I've been in the Ozarks a couple times in Arkansas and one of the things I think is cool, they have wineries up there. Yeah. And one of them just actually makes some dynamite product

1:03:13 This Familia something or other, I can't quite remember their name, but they make a tremendous high quality wines. Drive up there sometime and get some. It's a nice wine growing area, I have to say. So how did you get started in audio in the first place? I guess it all comes about because of ham radio. So what made you become a ham in the first place? One of my high school chums when I was a sophomore, actually it's kind of a I had been playing accordion when I was 10. I think everybody was issuing an accordion in those days. My high school chum, his dad was the organist at the Baptist Church in Marissa, Illinois, a little town of 2,000 people out in the coal fields of southern Illinois. His dad was also the music director at the grade school.

1:04:14 I was about 12 years old. I used to go down to his house because he had a brand new Hammond organ and his son was my best bud there and I'd go down and play that organ and went down there one time and I heard all of this stuff in the back a bunch of tones and stuff and after got through playing the old Hammond organ I went back there and my friend George was learning the Morse code to get his ham radio license and Long story short is that I followed him and a couple of years later, I got my license and we became very involved in ham radio. Also at the same time, very involved in the organ situation. My mother and father bought me a B3 when I was 12 years old, which was really something in those days. It was actually a C2 model.

1:05:08 Both of those hobbies kind of went together and they were hobbies at that time. But then I ended up becoming the substitute organist at the Fox Theater at the age of 15 for Stan Can. I became his protege. He taught me so much stuff about the Wurlitzer. And I learned to listen. This is important in that we had to voice and tune those six, seven thousand pipes in that Fox organ. And he taught me how to listen.

1:05:45 harmonically dissect what you're hearing. It's not just in tune, but does the note beside it have the same harmonic characteristic as a note above it and so on. And you had to go through thousands of pipes and they all had to sound the same harmonically and of course in tune. Well, I learned how to listen. It was just a real blessing. That's how it started. I played about 15 years professionally and had a pipe organ in a restaurant in St. Louis. I built that pipe organ, built the pipes and stuff over at Wick's Pipe Organ in Highland, Illinois. Martin Wick became a very dear friend. But I could do all the electronics of it too, a lot of relays and all kinds of switches and stuff.

1:06:38 The the two just They just fit together so well in my life. I try to explain a little bit more I the funny thing is about this tuning by ear and listening to harmonics versus just in tune Notes, I've heard this from motorcycle repairmen that are really good they say that they their real instrument at the end of the tuning cycle is the here and What the cylinder sound like as it gets to come out of the pipes. It's really a listening process More than anything else what so you're you're so if I took a and just tuned Say 20 pipes just by the notes with a tuning device How would that differ from some harmonic information being missed out on well? They would be in tune you would know it immediately if they're not in tune however

1:07:34 One of them might have more mid-range sound than the other. One might have more top end than the other. One might have a little lower frequency than the other. Now that has nothing to do with the pitch. It has to do with what it sounds like. And like in the pipe organ, we have ranks, sets of pipes, anywhere from 61 out of 90 plus pipes in a rank would have a clarinet. They actually sounded exactly like a clarinet. That would be from one inch out to 16 foot. And as you go, let's take middle C, you can see that in your mind, middle C.

1:08:25 As you go to D, right beside it, or E, or F, as you run up and down those two or three notes, are they harmonically perfect? Do they both have the same balance of highs, mids, lows? Of course, they would be in tune, but we're talking about the harmonic content. of how they sound to each other because we want them to all sound the same. There are two adjustments on pipes. One at the top that you lengthen or shorten the pipe for the pitch. The other one is down on the reed.

1:09:06 there's a reed in the bottom of that clarinet pipe. Same thing with the trumpet pipes. We actually have bells of brass trumpets from one inch to 16 foot, and they look exactly like a trumpet. They are the bells of trumpets, but instead of somebody blowing in them, It's set into a chest that has air valves in it. You push the key, it causes air to come up. That's how it works. But they all have to be harmonically related to the next one beside it. How long does it take to tune something like that? An instrument like that, it could be days, it could be a week. You still play?

1:09:54 Oh yeah, I just played a concert Friday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma. the Sooner Chapter of the American Theatre Organist. A very nice instrument that the club has restored over the years and they have it in a technical college theater. We had a whole bunch of people there and I still play. I love playing these concerts in these old theaters. Then Friday morning I played at the Miami Coleman theater just a gorgeous theater in Miami, Oklahoma. That's just across the line of Missouri Arkansas and where they all meet right there together Can't in fact I went Missouri Kansas back to Missouri right there in the corner is Miami and they have a gorgeous little organ and I played there too And I'll be doing more concerts this summer there. Are you yes? I love playing

1:10:51 Do you like going around the country playing alien instruments like different organs? Because they're all, I guess, there's very few of them that are standardized. Especially in big churches, they would all be different. Yeah, the only thing is I don't play any church stuff. It's all theatrical stuff, Wurlitzers and all the Wurlitzers basically were the same. The consoles were the same. The clarinet stop, you can just close your eyes. They're right here about 1 o'clock. The diapason stops at about 2 o'clock. The trumpets are here and so on. So the consoles are laid out the same and you can pretty much have no problem with that. The situation is how they perform, how they work, and if they're tuned and voiced properly and so on. And yes, you're right, they all differ no matter what they are. It's kind of fun and of course that's part of the artistry of

1:11:46 an old theater organist is to be able to pile on a strange instrument and make it sound really good. And that's part of it. So this ear development where you fine-tuned your abilities for your sensory awareness of the differences in the harmonics, that evolved into you becoming, I guess, where you are today insofar as the microphones are concerned. But in between, you were the guy who did a lot of rock concerts. And from what I understand,

1:12:22 Pretty much invented the idea of the wall of sound Literally a wall of sound where there's so much noise coming out. It just blows people away Yeah, that was an interesting thing. I had played all those years and I got really tired I Got married wanted to stay home at night a little bit. So I was very fortunate I go back to my little hometown 50 miles southeast st. Louis, Marissa, Illinois and I was so fortunate, I got a Hammond organ franchise and opened a little music store there. That's pretty amazing because I had worked for them when I was 19, 20 years old. I was a demonstrator at the NAMM shows and their music shows. I would play the organ to demonstrate it in their booth and so on.

1:13:16 So I knew the right people and I said, okay, let's see if I can do this and it happened. I got a Hammond Organ franchise. So I started selling lots of Hammond Organs because I was well-known in the St. Louis area because of playing at the Fox and the restaurants and the TV and the radio and all that, but it was very strange that I started getting these kids would come in with their amplifiers and never forget one of the first he came in and he had this box and he said this a music store and I said yes sir what's up yeah my amplifiers broke and it was a Fender guitar amp I'd never seen one

1:13:57 Being a ham radio operator, I was very inquisitive. I turned it upside down and what did I see? A pair of 5U4 and a pair of 6L6 as well. Those are common parts of a modulator in our ham transmitters. I turned him upside down and I knew exactly what he probably tried to make it go to 12 and it only went to 10 and blew it up. So I had to spare parts there and in about 15-20 minutes I had it fixed. And he was just freaked out. Oh my goodness, you didn't even have one of them schematic. No, I didn't have one of them schematic things.

1:14:34 The word started flying around Southern Illinois and the St. Louis area. There's this guy with a soldering iron and the band started coming to me to fix their stuff. Then at the same time, the promoters in St. Louis, one of them called me one time and wanted to rent a Hammond organ. and that just parlayed into all kinds of things because in those days Hammond Organ stores were Steinway dealers and all that. You couldn't even walk in a store unless you were in a suit practically. Well here I was, this freaky little music shop I started in Southern Illinois and you could

1:15:15 by Hammond Organ there and we started renting them. Renting them like Janis Joplin and all these great bands that would come through Stevie when he was a little baby. But the promoters had to rent Hammond Organ. Ted knew that if he came to downtown, they'd have to have this much PA. I started going to these rock concerts and I'm going, what is going on? They have these little bitty junky little columns with four or five speakers in them to fill a 15,000 seat room. You got to be kidding. And so another blessing hits me one day about 67, that would have been.

1:15:59 I rolled by the Fox Theater, hadn't been there now in a few years, I wanted to say hi to the stage manager. I roll up to the back door and here's these great big speakers out in the alley. So I said, what's going on here? He said, oh, we're putting in new speakers. I said, what's all those out in the alley? Oh, we're throwing them away. I said, really, can I have them? So I went and got a truck and hauled these Altec A4s. Now an Altec A4 is huge. Yes, I'm very familiar with that speaker. Yeah, they're huge. They're 10 foot wide and about 6 or 8 high. I had four of them. And I had some JBL horns I acquired and some tweeters and I needed to get some amplifiers. I had heard that Macintosh was pretty good so I bought a bunch of Macintosh amps. And the next thing you know I had this really far out PA. And I didn't know no one else had not done this.

1:16:57 And I get a call one day from that stage manager at the Fox. This would have been in 70, 71. Hey, you still got those speakers? And I said, yeah. Do they work? I said, yeah, I got them hooked up. He said, here, talk to this guy. They came in here tonight and their PA didn't show up. He handed the phone to Jerry Garcia. The Grateful Dead showed up at the Fox Theater, my beloved Fox. I've been hanging around in since I was 15. They had no PA and I told him what I had he said well get it up here and they were incredibly impressed because it was something special and there's an article you can go on the internet into Google and put the night rock and roll sound was born and

1:17:48 And there was a guy there that obviously was there because every word of that is true and how it happened. Out of there that night they took us right out of there on tour to finish up their tour because they had no PA It had got confiscated the night before and they hit st. Louis by the Drug agents and the FBI and whatever because their sound guy wasn't supposed to be out of the state of California I was and put all that together So again, it was another blessing that happened to me these things just happened and I

1:18:24 From there, we hit the front page of Billboard that we had this little store in Southern Illinois got the Grateful Dead sound contract and all kinds of promoters and people and managers were calling me. In 1971, I got a call from the Who and that started another one. I was just bombarded with people wanting that PA. So we built two more and we had three of them on the road during the 70s. We did all kinds of stuff with Humble Pie and Frampton and of course Joe Walsh. That's how I really started that scene was back in 68. I got with Joe's James gang and Joe and I after I was on tour with him a couple of weeks found out we were both hams and it changed our whole relationship. I mean it's a relationship you could only dream for because

1:19:19 It wasn't any kind of, oh gosh, he's a rock guitarist or a star or whatever. He's a ham radio friend of mine and we just have so much fun together, wiring things and blowing things up and all that. That's how it really all started, right there in that late 60s, early 70s with this monster PA that I had built. And then Joe wanted to go on his own and he started Barnstorm. He wanted to put that together. So he and I put it together. I helped him get all the equipment together. And then we had to figure out how he was going to do this song he wrote called Rocky Mountain Way.

1:20:02 He had recorded it in a studio and used Pete Drake's, what he called talking actuator. It was a little bitty three inch speaker and a funnel. It was real, in the studio it was fine, but it was real weak, it wasn't very strong. And he said, how are we going to do this live? So Joe and I got a big old 250 watt JBL driver and built a little low pass and a little high pass filter, put it together and the TalkBox was born. And I didn't think about it much, it was Joe's thing, I didn't think beyond that. But all of a sudden when that song became a hit, I thought, whoa, I better do something. So we started building them in our plant where we were building amplifiers and speakers and all this sound gear.

1:20:53 We did a lot of firsts in there. We built the first modular mixer, the first modular power amp, all these many many things, thousands of speaker cabinets. Paul Klipsch was a great, great mentor of mine. Paul called me one day and wanted to come and visit me and he did and we became great friends and he helped me so much learn a lot about acoustics and how to match speakers to the boxes you're building and tune them in free air and all of this. And it just become a marvelous thing. And that plant was where we developed this TuckBox

1:21:32 And Peter Frampton's little girlfriend, Penny McCall, called me one day and she said, I have got to have a Christmas present for Peter. This would have been 74. I said, well, just hang on. I had known Peter because we had done dozens and dozens of concerts with Humble Pie when he came over here. When he left the group, of course, we continued with Humble Pie, Steve Marriott and the group. I sent that talk box to Penny and she gave it to him. Frampton ended up with one of the Heil Talk Boxes for Christmas and you can write the rest of Peter's history. I got rich with that thing. There's a nice video on our website. There's a whole bunch of videos where you got to sit down with Joe.

1:22:24 Charlie Daniels and all kinds of people, but one of them is with Peter in Nashville a couple years ago. It's really great because we were reminiscing all the days that he and I met on the road and did so many things and then how important to talk box was to his career. I was talking to you the other day about standing waves floating around in an audience. which is one of the things that Grateful Dead and maybe one other band, I think the Charlatans that used to be in the West Coast accomplished this feat. And it was used for the purposes of making you feel funny in the audience and if you were on certain drugs it would be enhancing. Now you're familiar with their ability to do that and how it's accomplished. Is there any way you can even explain it to anybody?

1:23:20 Well, I can take you back to late 30s with Paul Klipsch. Paul Klipsch was hired by the government. They gave him about, I think it was 200 acre or whatever, a large ammunition depot in Hope, Arkansas, around Hope, Arkansas. And he had developed this horn. It was so big, he built it on the back of a flat bed of a 40-foot semi. And this was a horn that after he got it all together, got it tuned and all this with the speakers on, it would do like two cycles, one or two way down inaudible to you. And when you walked in front of it, you didn't know what hit you. It was really weird. You couldn't hear anything.

1:24:19 But the senses of your body would just go crazy and it was going to be a weapon on the front line in Europe for World War II. Fortunately, the war ended and of course before he got it done, he never got to take it on the front line, but it was out in his I call it his play toy. It was really a workshop for him. He had like a one-room schoolhouse with all of his gear and stuff. Then he had his plant where he built his folded horns. But he had this huge horn and it was going to be a weapon. That's kind of where you're going with this is that you can cause your senses to go just

1:25:16 crazy with all these super low frequencies that you can't hear but it causes you to go and just you don't know what's happening. Well there was an element of that in this particular sound because it didn't really have anything to do with the music. Right, right. It would just do some subharmonic frequencies way down at one, two, two to five cycles way down in there. You didn't hear it because there was no actual tuning or tone to it, but it was just, it was movement of air, a lot of air. And that's what happens is your, the senses of your body know that and it's really an amazing thing. It's very rarely performed. Now, did he keep, did Klipsch keep that big giant horn?

1:26:15 I don't know. It probably is there. It's rather interesting. I remember one day he took me down in the basement of this one-room schoolhouse. We couldn't even get in it. It just had all kinds of what I call carcasses of speaker cabinets. He stood on the steps and said, ìSee that? That's how I did this and that one did this.î And he's pointing out all of these prototypes or experiments or whatever. I can't answer but I would imagine that is in that basement still. Now, they're doing a thing at Clipse, they're forming a museum for some of his very early work so that might be part of it.

1:26:57 He was an amazing man and did so much for audio. I still remain my thinking that he was the father of hi-fi. Between him and George Wright, the great theater organist who was my great mentor, George had some wonderful recordings of the Wurlitzer and they were well done in the 54, 567 on the Hi-Fi label. This record album would get down to 30 cycles.

1:27:33 easily, but it also had a 32-foot board in it. That sucker would get down to 16 cycles. And the hi-fi guys loved it. He almost had a hit that got up on the top ten called Quiet Village. Yeah, there was an orchestration of that. Also, Martin Denny, I think, did a play. George Wright had the one that the hi-fi guys went nuts. You'd go into hi-fi shops in the 50s, they were playing Quiet Village of George Wright's on that Wurlitzer because that thing would rattle your bottom end like nothing. That coupled with the Klipsch horns was an amazing thing that happened to progress the hi-fi industry.

1:28:23 Why didn't you go into that business? You seemed like you were set up to go into amps, guitar amps, reel amps, speakers, that whole scene. But you've gravitated to microphones. Yeah, it's a great question and I don't know why. The way things happened in my life that I got thrusted into in the interest of building things and Doing all these things. I You know, I think the big changes was Joe Walsh's friendship when we got together with the James King I mean we were doing some things that nobody was doing in that industry and I just got carried away and you can't do it all so that's what happened So how did you get started with microphones? Because that's what you're known for more than anything else right now Well, I got tired of being on the road. Oh all those years. Well, there's one reason I

1:29:25 Well, in 1980, 1981, so long in there, the music scene also changed. A lot of my big artists were not on the road. I didn't know where music was going. Punk rock came in and that was a whole different scene that I didn't know much about. So I sold my whole rig. I said, see ya. And I closed that section of my life and my career. Sold the PAs off and they kept working. In fact, Townsend bought half of it and took it back to England. He was renting it out to young bands. But anyway, I came back home. I hadn't been on the ham radio in about 12 years. And I turned on my Collins KWM2 and I'm going, what in the world happened to this?

1:30:16 Because all I heard was this big rumble, boomy bassy bottom end. And I'm going, what happened to Art Collins' articulate audio? It was gone. Now what is this? So I contacted some of these stations and yeah, I got my new Kenwood and I got my new Yasi. What is that? Well, these are new rigs made in Japan. They're great. Well, they might have been great, but they didn't sound very great. They were not articulate. Articulation is extremely important. So what we ended up hearing was stuff like this. It's like, whoa, don't I sound great? No, I can't understand what you're saying. So I thought, hmm, we need to do something about this. So I did. We built the first equalizer. It was a little box that I had taken the bass and treble

1:31:13 ...sections out of one of my mixing consoles. We had built thousands of them, bass and treble... ...and a little battery-operated box you could plug your Kenwood mic or whatever mic that just sounded awful... ...and you could equalize it. And just like I just demonstrated it with a little bit of equalization... ...it became very articulate. Articulation is important in ham radio because we want to get the spoken word across. I did a thing for QST, that's a magazine from the ARRL and I wrote an article on how to build that equalizer.

1:31:59 It was a cover award for the July 1982 issue and I didn't even know they had a cover award and we started seeing all kinds of people come to me, hey build this for us, because I showed you how to build it. Just go out and buy your parts and build it. That's what Ham Radio Operators did. So then I called back a few workers in my plant, we started building, we built thousands of those little equalizers. Then I got the idea along about 1984 You know, we could build a microphone that had that articulation in it. And so we started building microphones for the ham radio industry and we have become the leading manufacturer worldwide for headsets and microphones to that industry. And it's really quite

1:32:51 We've done so much for so many groups, and we're talking groups like the group that just went to Navassa, the group that's out right now. These guys will collect a lot of money. We're talking half a million dollars. We're not talking $10 here. over a year or two, these clubs and stuff, they'll get this money together and they find some desolate island that nobody even lives on and they'll take all the gear out there, fly helicopters, however they can get there.

1:33:28 and talk to people around the world for two weeks and it gives ham radio operators a chance to talk to somebody like that and get their confirmation card and all that. Well, they use our microphones almost exclusively because of that articulation value. They have to cut through all the noise and the many, many stations on. And so that's how we got that going. And it's been there and we just were constantly, I just came up with a brand new headset that's just released this last month. But about six, seven years ago, Joe called me. We had a home in California for a number of years, just out there kind of having fun. And it was a second home to just get away from it. Spent a lot of time with Joe in those days.

1:34:21 He said, hey, come here, I want to talk to you. Come up here. So I go to his home in Studio City and we sat down in his kitchen and he had an SM58. And he said, you got to do something with this. What do you mean I got to do something with that? He said, well, he said it doesn't sound very good. I said, well, yeah, but that's what you use. Yeah, right. That's what we used when you and I were doing this years ago. But he said now they've all moved off to China. And I didn't know that. I said, what do you mean? this stuff is just facsimiles of what they did back in the 60s. And so, I'll do something for you here. Okay, there's an SM58. I didn't do anything to the console, I just changed the microphones. It lost all of its articulation, it lost all of its presence, it lost all of its glory. You're on an SM58? This is an SM58 I'm talking about. And this is one of the new Chinese versions?

1:35:33 Yes, well, it's this one's about oh, this one's about I think six or seven years old. Yeah No, it doesn't sound and you sounded better before So then he said you got to do something here The other thing is the pattern if you're not right in front of it forget it here you get real thin and all that I'll go back and this is our premium primo vocal mic the PR 35 and again, trust me. I I did nothing to the console. I'm just unplugging and plugging a microphone. And this is what Walsh and I came up with. He had the idea of building a large diaphragm dynamic and nobody's done it. Sure tried it, but they failed. And I know that for a fact because one of their engineers was a good friend of mine and we used to talk about it a lot. Oh gosh, 15 years ago they tried it and failed.

1:36:34 And I never thought about it anymore, but Joe wanted to do things and so we started building all kinds of crazy things. I did it for Joe. I never looked beyond that because I'm building microphones for ham radio. Nobody's going to come in and tilt the Sennheisers and the Shures and all of that. No, that's crazy. Well, I was wrong. We came up with products that are just blowing these things away. Why are they blowing them away? Because it's new technology that two crazy ham radio operators come up with on a kitchen table.

1:37:13 I mean that's just, I just think about it so much John and it's again, it's a miracle that happened in my life and Joe is a big part of it. And every time I would come up building him something, he'd go pass it around to his buddies and the first thing you know these things became predominant in the rehearsal halls out in California. And today it's amazing, hundreds and hundreds. the Super Bowl, the Idina Menzel sang the national anthem on this very microphone, the PR35.

1:37:49 and award shows and just on and on and on and on. There are so many people, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Daniels, just so many artists of today because the microphone works. Carrie Underwood's words about it is she said, this is my instrument. So no matter what they bring on the stage, I don't care. This, the PR35, is her instrument. I never thought about that before, but it's true. A microphone is an instrument. It's just being heralded by so many people. We're very blessed again by the fact that we were able to bring all this to being. One of the big factors in how good it sounds is not only the sound of it, but the pattern

1:38:44 I'll move now I'm off 90 degrees to the side, 90. No other dynamic microphone will do that. No. You got to be sitting right in front of it. Now I'm right in front of it. Now I'm moving it 90 degrees. I just went 180 degrees. You probably never heard a change in that audio. Try that with any other microphone and you know the minute you get away from it, you got to, it's got to be on your, right on your lips or it it loses its value. And so then we started building things for the broadcast industry and as you well know, Leo Laporte found it and on and on. There's so many, we've got over a thousand broadcast stations that's taken their 1966 designed RE20s that was the creation of another ham radio friend of mine, Al Khan,

1:39:41 And that is now being built in China and it's just so sad to see these guys the young kids that now own Those big companies because the founders and the dreamers are gone. They're just copying what grandpa did in China That's not good. There are all kinds of new ways to do things and new materials and that's what we have done. I took the ideas that Joe gave me and here we are. We're very blessed again that we can do all this. It's fun to be able to help artists and broadcast guys.

1:40:23 podcasters, man, we have just got just a ton of podcast guys using our PR 40 because the PR 40 is it's become the god of the broadcasters. And again, it's a large diaphragm. And Joe said to me one time, are you going to do this? Remember that big antenna you had? You had a huge antenna and me turned that around. Man, I didn't hear you. So can't you do that to the microphone? And I get to thinking about that and I go back into my little office station in Ham Radio Station in Illinois. And I'm going, yeah we can. It's all about phasing. You take two microphones and you put them together, you got three DB plus, it's great. But if one of them's out of phase and you're talking to them, you got nothing. Nothing. Well why can't you do that to the rear? We did.

1:41:20 And we're the only microphone, dynamic microphone, that's all we're doing is dynamics, that has more than 40 dB of rejection. That's almost unheard of. It's impossible. Well, yeah, it's possible with any of our microphones and they all do it, every one of them, because Joe gave me that idea. I never thought about applying antenna theory to a microphone, but I did. and it's all about phasing. And I got three and a half acres of antennas out here behind me. I love antennas. I've loved them all my life. Since I was 15, man, I was a freak for antennas. And here I've got phased arrays on 75 meters. I've got phased arrays on 40 meters. These are all wire antennas out here. And when I flip the switch, it reverses them. And so I can cause my signal to go to LA

1:42:20 All right, and I'm right here in the center of the country now, right in the middle of where Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma meet. That's basically where I am. I can throw my signal just by throwing a switch and cause my transmitter to be heard on the East Coast or to be heard on the West Coast. And you gain a lot of power, so to speak, the ability for them to hear you or you to hear them by just reversing the phase. That's what I did in the microphones. Nobody else is doing it. You're getting very weak rear rejection from these microphones. You get a lot of feedback and all that stage wash and noise coming off of a stage with big amplifiers. That's why they love the Heil microphones, because they don't hear all that junk. And there again, it's ham radio coupled with learning to listen.

1:43:19 and learning to listen to those that want something. And you know, there's a lot of that going on too. You try to talk to an engineer today and he doesn't want to talk to you. He's not going to change anything. He knows it all. He went to school for that. So I'm not her. I know more than you do. Well, I think the artists know more than any of us as to what they need and want. And we are so happy. I have a microphone that Paul Rogers asked me to build him and I did. I have a microphone that Charlie Daniels wanted me to build for his sound man, wanted me to build for him. We even call it the PR31BW for Bob Workman. That's the number on the microphone. Bob Workman came up with this working with Charlie Daniels and did I take credit for it? Heck no, I didn't. It wasn't my idea but he did take my PR30

1:44:13 the big diaphragm and reworked it a little bit, but we named that microphone after him. On and on and on. And we listen intently to our artists because they know. And that's I think the real foundation of High El Sound. We've been doing that for decades and we're very thrilled about this. And we're coming up on our 50th year, John. I can't believe it, but we are. It still continues. My wife now owns the company and I just stay here in the Ozarks and she says, you just invent stuff. Have you thought about modernizing the condenser mic which seems to me to be mostly based on a 1947 design still? No, I don't like condensers. I never have liked condensers and I've proven we don't need condensers. And when I say that a lot of people say, yeah right, this guy's crazy. Until

1:45:11 they spend time with our PR30s. It is an amazing microphone. It's a large diaphragm dynamic. What's wrong with condensers? They're too sensitive. They pick up the whole room. They have no good rear rejection. So you can't use any of that where you really need rejection. Every single solitary condenser has this... Raspy top end every one of them $5,000 did $2. They all have this if you're listening gotta listen and that bugs me Why do we have to put up with that? Then you got to have this stupid phantom power So I said no and it was Joe and I we both agreed. You know what? I think we can do the same job or better with a dynamic and

1:46:02 I will say the PR-40, if you listen to one, it sounds like one of the best condenser mics that you can imagine. What about lavaliers? There's a little sub-segment of the market that's needed badly for, and many of those are condensers. I know that and I have never touched that and boy do I get so many people asking me. They say, wow, look what you did to the dynamic. Well, you'll never be able to do that with a dynamic, I don't believe. But I need to start looking into that because maybe we can. I've been so busy with all this other stuff and I need to do it.

1:46:44 I need to start focusing on some of that. The last couple of years have been headlong into a couple of huge ham radio projects with the new headset, the new Pro 7. So I'm pretty much finished and we're on the market with it and it's getting great reviews. I might have to look into that. That might be my next project, John, because I do know the dynamics are a real scourge. Yeah, I would be very interested in what you come up with for that because I think lavaliers, which are used more and more and more by even amateur videographers. Because you can't really if you're on the field and you got your you're using a Canon 5d To take videos with somebody you got them mic'd up. You have to have mic'd up You can't you can hold a mic in front of them, then it's just kind of clunky But they're mic'd up and they can and people when they're mic'd up. They also feel more at ease When they're discussing something as opposed to having a mic thrust into their face. I

1:47:42 Right and so well that that's what I'm saying the dynamics of those the dying did not that that dynamic range the transient response of the Things are just a scourge. Yeah, I know you need to fix it and that's what needs to that's what needs to be addressed And it seems like nobody wants to address those issues of dynamics the dynamic range to all of that of the lavaliers and that's what we need to Maybe look at next two knows where we go. Yeah, that'd be great So what's what is your best-selling mic right now? And by the way, I mean that's hard to say It's probably the PR 40 and the PR 35 They'd be running a race together and but right behind it is to PR 30 I still maintain for me that 30 is it it's just a gorgeous microphone it is it is the condenser replacement and

1:48:41 I have a lot of broadcasters using a PR-30. It doesn't have quite the low end. I rolled the last octave of the PR-40 off. I left the mid-range articulation and the top end the same, but it's not quite as broad, which is really needed in a lot of applications of recording and so on. But it also sells well. But there's no question, the 40 and the 35 are in the horse race as to who's first. Well I use a 30 and a 40. I like the 40 the best and that's the one I recommend people buy. Especially podcasters. It's not as though you're going to get your full frequency response over something like Skype, but at least if you're giving Skype the best possible signal, it usually comes out okay on the other side.

1:49:33 Well, John, it's all about what we talked about in the beginning. It's the harmonics. A lot of people don't quite understand that. But even though you're rolling your equipment off, in this case Skype or the mixers or whatever, even though you roll it off at maybe what, 45, 50, 60 cycles, there's something about this harmonic issue that when you speak in that microphone there are some rich harmonics showing up at 60 and 90 or 60 and 80, this depends on your voice. But you get some harmonic issues from that wide response of the PR-40 and that's one of the things about it that it just makes it sound stunning and even though you're not using the whole

1:50:31 range directly, you are harmonically. And that's why I always for broadcast, podcast and so on, I also recommend the 40. There's just nothing that'll touch it. Do you ever worry that there's a component one because you you source your components from all over the place you're not you're not building the circuit necessarily with the old single you know like a resistors and a soldering gun. You so you source from here and there including your diaphragms and all the electronics that go in the case and everything else So you ever worried or think about? One component being so critical that you don't even know it's critical and then you get something changes and all of a sudden now the microphone sounds Doesn't sound what it should sound like is that like I would be worried sick about that personally. No, no, and the reason is I

1:51:28 that we don't receive products built. We receive components from various countries in the UK, Malaysia, South America, Japan, Taiwan. These all get shipped and I design them right here where I'm sitting in my what I call my station lab. It's my ham radio station and my lab. This is where I do it all. I just this morning received another piece for this new product we're doing in Ham Radio. They really have made an improvement on it and I of course accepted it and now that will go into this new product instead of one that I did a couple of weeks ago.

1:52:17 I am the guy, I say yeah, then I send it over to our plant, our production manager and our product manager. They all look at it, they listen to it, they too are trained, they've been doing this for years. Our service manager, she is amazing, she's been with me for 20 plus years. We all agree, yes, this is going to be a better component. Then those components come to our Illinois plant. All of the little things, the connectors, this, the resistors, the wire. all of the different things and then of course the diaphragms, the support, the shock mount for the diaphragms because a lot of our microphones have shock mounts internal in the microphones. And so if one of our suppliers let us down and they do not supply the parts at our level,

1:53:16 Then we'll go somewhere else. We'll find other manufacturers, but we've been doing this. Oh golly It's it was about 1985 I started Discovering you can't do it in America anymore. It's so sad John. You just can't find anybody to build parts in America they might be able to do it, but at ridiculous cost and of course you're not going to sell your products for that and So I have a parts broker. She is an amazing lady. She travels the world for the past 30 years, speaks seven languages and all she does is buy electronic components for different manufacturers. We're very happy that we're one of them since 1985. And she's also, she has a level, she knows what we want. So there's a wall up there that has to be broken if anything's gonna change. Well it never will because we won't let it.

1:54:21 I see. How many models do you have right now of mics? Oh, I don't know. You have like these capsules. Probably about 30. That's ham radio and all of it together. Each one of those, all these components come into our plant and we assemble them. We test them three times, three different people, three different times and three different aspects and then they're boxed and shipped out of there. Every microphone, the last test we have some studio JBL monitors, crown amplifier and a mixer and the last test there's three people in that plant.

1:55:07 that really know how to listen and we actually listen even though the scopes and on the second run went in the second testing station all of that's there I don't trust it there still. something about listening and no it's rare if it looks good on scopes and generators and all of the analytical gear fine it's going to be okay but once in a while there's just some little quirk it just doesn't sound right and these guys and gals know when they listen to it and that last third test through the JBL studio monitors

1:55:48 Yes, this is good or hmm. Something's weird. That one doesn't make it Are there any mics out there that you respect other than the your brand? I don't I don't listen to a lot of the others to be honest, so I don't know what I used to respect no because they're all facsimiles of what they what they used to be and what I grew up with and their founders are gone and They're they're they're not very good And that's why we're doing what we're doing. How long does a quality mic last? And is it appropriate to buy one on the used market ever? Well, you never know what somebody's done to one. I just got an email this morning from some guy. He bought a microphone from eBay.

1:56:38 Huh, somebody took that cartridge out of it and stuck something else in it and sold it with as our microphone and he took a picture of it. I'm going, God, why would anyone you feel sorry for? I guess if they blew it out, maybe they'd do that. Yeah. You never know what, well, are they going to take our element and put it in something else? They got, you never know what they're doing, but I have some microphones. Some of the very first ones we've built back in the early eighties. They're great. I still use them. They're fine as long as you haven't done something weird to them or spilled water on them or that kind of stuff. Why should people never blow into a microphone and is that still true? Of course it is because when you do that

1:57:29 You cause that diaphragm to exceed its travel design. The magnets in the voice coil have a specific tolerance of how far it can go. It's just like a piston in a car. That piston can only go so far down. And if it goes too far, you just destroyed the block. Same thing with microphones. If you blow in it, I see guys pound their hands on top of one. Man, it's the death of them because it might not cause it not to work just now, but it's going to cause a problem down the road where that diaphragm isn't as tight as it was because and then the transient response in the dynamic range is harmed because that force of air

1:58:22 Coming down on that is much greater than what it was designed to do and we take a lot of pride in all that. In fact, we are the only, absolute only microphone that the young rap artists now, they can cup it. That's something that just, oh, here a few years ago, I would go, Don't do that because when you put your hand around a microphone I can't do it to this one because I won't do it but I can do something like this. It sounds like this because you're you're causing the element to be put into a Tuned position it's in a cavity and when you cut a microphone, that's what happens I did that outside but let me show you something you can't see this but

1:59:16 I am now cupping to PR35. There's absolutely no change. I'll take my hand off the microphone. We created this microphone so that you can't detune the element. It's very important, because if you don't have that, if you did it to anything, a Shure, a Sennheiser, anything... It's going to sound like this. It's like a tunnel that it's in, because that's what happens to it. When we cut our microphone, it doesn't change it, because we designed it so you can't detune it.

1:59:58 That's become very popular in the artistry today. What is very happy? What about dropping the mic? People drop them on purpose, they drop by accident, they have them at the end of a mic stand and they throw them to the ground. Well, you probably will see no problem on it and many many times but again you might and that can happen to any microphone because you've got a The diaphragm sits over the top of the voice coil. The voice coil has got a magnet up inside it. A magnet of a link. What we do is we take the magnet structure when we build it and we mix boron and iron with it. This is something I don't think anybody else is doing at this level. And when we mix boron and iron

2:00:53 It makes that magnet 10 times stronger. That's why high-o microphones have this incredible transient response. That means that when you're singing or whatever and it goes to the bottom, it comes back fast. It's got a great fast attack. Snappy. That's all because of that. all of that iron mixture. Well, if you drop that, it might break. It's probably unlikely and I have a lot of microphones that guys drop and they'll bend the screen on top or something, but microphones still work.

2:01:33 It's not a huge issue, but it is. You shouldn't just beat them to death. But just like any other manufacturer microphones, ours probably will last just the same. What are your thoughts on ribbon mics? Well, to me, they're too sensitive in handling. You can't use them on tour. They're so sensitive because they've got a piece of aluminum stretched across a magnet. A ribbon. Yeah, and that ribbon can be destroyed just by dropping it or moving it harder, just carrying it around sometimes. So they're very fragile. I've wondered myself how do they ship a ribbon, Mike, without damaging it? Yeah, well, that's a good question.

2:02:31 But there again, I got one of the old original, I got two of them sitting over here, RCA's back in the 30s. 1944 I believe. Oh man, yeah. Those things were amazing, but they weigh about 30 pounds. They're huge, the magnet inside. The mic stands were half-inch pipe thread. You couldn't dare put them on the mic stands today. They sounded great, got a big bottom end, but you know what? The PR-40 sits right beside them and sounds very close.

2:03:08 I don't think we need all of that. And again, a lot of this is a fad. It's an ego. Oh, I got this. I got this. I only look at one thing and they have all lost it. In fact, one of the big companies, maybe the biggest used to have in their logo performance. They took that word out. They do not have the word performance anymore. We do. We love to talk about our performance because Our microphones are performers, as some of the many, many hundreds, if not thousands of top artists that are using our microphones because of the performance. That's why they use a microphone. They're not going to use a microphone if it doesn't sound good or has poor performance. Yeah, I agree. It's a big deal. I want to thank you for this chat. We've talked for about an hour.

2:04:08 You're definitely one of the most interesting people out there. I think you're kind of underrated, whatever that means. But the microphone revolution that you've done with these dynamic mics is pretty outrageous. And I think maybe you kind of sense this too, is that I'm glad you did it, but why did it have to be you? It seems as though this just should have happened anyway. Which is I think what Walsh was always just complaining, why does Bob Heil have to design a new mic because nobody else is doing it? There's a simple answer to that. And I got the answer many times from the artists that I run around with these days. We're the only company that listens and does something about it.

2:05:06 Many many times some of my friends who are an artist would ask the other microphone company say do this do that Oh, we have this model and it'll do that in the mirror They don't listen they they have this ego and they walk around with their nose in the air if it rained it probably dry They it's it's really sad because who knows better how a microphone should behave than the artist Yeah, the person who has to use it. That's my whole deal and it doesn't make any difference if that artist is a broadcaster, a podcaster, a musician or just somebody that uses a microphone in a ham radio station. They all have their thoughts and desires.

2:05:55 And we have always been that way. All of the people that have worked with me, for me, alongside me, we really take it seriously when somebody calls us and says something and we do something about it. Bob Workman is a great example. He's been with Charley Daniels forever. He's got 32 microphones of ours on the stage and he came to me one day and says, ìHey, I don't want to offend you or anything, man. We're good friends.î I said, ìWhat's up?î He says, ìThat PR30, what's in the bottom half of that?î I said, ìWell, nothing.î He said, ìAcoustically, there's nothing there?î I said, ìNo.î

2:06:37 I said, well, can I cut it in half and just use the top end? Does that sound the same? I said, yes, there's a plate in there. It doesn't sound any different. So we did. And we came up with the PR31BW for Bob Workman and the whole story and his pictures on the back of the box when you buy it. There's one, just one example, of course Joe's the biggest one where all the rest we talked about that, but we listen to these people and I don't care who it is. I mean it can be an artist with a million selling album, it can be a broadcaster in his little station and sitting in the wilds of Iowa, it could be a podcaster in his basement.

2:07:19 It doesn't make any difference of their level. It's a user of Heil microphones and if they talk to me and they have an idea, we're going to listen to them. And you know what? If we think it's viable and better, we do it. How did you get the microphone on the David Letterman set? I'm sorry? How did you get the microphone on the David Letterman set? Well, I learned about this. It's kind of an interesting thing because it I am watched lately, but they would switch it around it. Here's the deal one You know, they always had Johnny Carson's RCA 77 on that desk and it was on Dave's desk and one day the crew came in and that microphone was gone and Michael who is one of the audio engineers and

2:08:14 For the show told me this because I work with those guys they use some of our mics for the band and stuff And it's gone some back some years now when that happened because I asked him so how did I get there? He said hey, we were ready to tape what we gonna do he said I had a pr40 and I just stuck it up there and It's kind of interesting. That's sit there for years and then all of a sudden I see other microphones every once in a while. I'll see a Neumann and then all of a sudden the PR 40s back. But that's because somebody stole the RCA.

2:08:50 And that's the story I got from Michael and I can verify that time and time again, give you his phone number. But it's a strange deal but you know that microphone is a dummy. Oh yeah, it has to be because it's pointing in the wrong direction. Oh yeah, well, none of those microphones, they're all stage pipes. They're using lavaliers because they're running around and all of that. Now when Carson was there, that was a different story. They had an overhead boom and that microphone. But since lavaliers came in, that's what they've been using. But it's just a prop. We're very happy about the fact that a PR-40 has been on and off that desk a number of times. That's great.

2:09:35 So Bob, thanks for being with me. Well, I'm so happy to be here and I appreciate you taking the time to talk about some of our history. That was Bob Heil and I hope you enjoyed that interview along with the one earlier with John Scully and remind you that we do have a show on Thursday live 9 a.m. Pacific Time as usual at vorac.org slash NA for your continued support. I hope you enjoyed this interview. We don't do these that often but we do them once a year maybe. Maybe twice a year if you're lucky. A lot of people always want interviews, they always say, oh let's do some interviews. And no, we don't do them. This is how we do them if we're going to do them at all. And I want to thank you for listening to the show and I hope you'll be here on Thursday and continuing your support.

2:10:23 I'm John C. Dvorak from Northern Silicon Valley and in the absentia, Adam Curry from Europe. Adios, mofos. Dvorak.org slash N-A. Check it out. The ice caps are melting. The polar bears are dying. It's amazing. This is just amazing. It's amazing. That's amazing. Paris is amazing. That's amazing. This night has been amazing.