Podcast 348

Freelance Nation. Live from Los Angeles, California on Road Trip 2015! First, an update on the trip to LA from Phoenix. All the way from the desert to the sea. With a massive Orwellian wind farm in between. If wind power accounts for around one percent of all energy production in the US (effectively zero worldwide), does it make sense to subsidize an industry and ruin a perfectly good valley? We leave the news updates for another time, in this podcast, Los Angeles is home to the entertainment industry and there are 13 and a half million people living here, sometimes it seems like no one works. Almost everyone is always home! In reality, many work on projects at home, or freelance different jobs. You see a lot of people in the coffee shops, seemingly wasting time, but usually they’re working. One of those freelancers talked to the Bob Davis Podcasts about getting started on the production side of the TV, Commercial and Film business. You hear from a lot of actors on this subject, but not very often from production people; the people who work behind the scenes on some of your favorite shows and movies. Most of them start freelancing, at the bottom. What’s freelancing all about? Moreover, can this model of freelancing — something Angelenos working in the entertainment business have been doing for decades — be the model for how work gets assigned and done, in the future? This is an especially pertinent question given the advent of new technology. Of course, we’re live from Mobile Podcast Command Unit 8, using the brand new power unit, thanks to X Government Cars

Podcast 299

Weekend Update! What starts as a weekend update ends up as a romp through the mind of Bob Davis. Oh yeah, this podcast looks at the latest numbers for Clint Eastwood’s winning ‘American Sniper’, and suggests petty Hollywood Envy is perhaps behind much of the snark. The fact that people are getting sub-prime and insanely long auto loans, goosing new car sales and endangering the financial system is a concern of Honda, which says it will not offer 84 month loans, concerned its customers might end up so upside down they won’t be able to buy another car for like, a while. And an Asteroid Fly-By has NASA atwitter since 2004 BL86 (that’s its name) is huge and is coming very close to earth this weekend. Don’t worry, it’s path takes it almost a million miles away from the Earth — well outside the orbit of the moon — but it would be crazy if an asteroid like this one hit the earth, wouldn’t it? Thus begins the listener’s off the rail journey, discussing bad documentaries on Netflix, Nazis and the Final Solution, stories and movies which might include asteroids hitting the earth and turning Minneapolis and Saint Paul into an equatorial (and wonderfully tropical) paradise, aliens living on the moon, or maybe its human beings on the moon ’cause they have a time machine, alien women in spacecraft and more. So. Much. More. Closing it all out, another ice age is on the way since there have been no sun spots and according to scientists, the last time this happened was the 17th century, when people wore ermine collars, and we can’t forget the rich environmentally conscious Davos attendees this weekend, shelling out forty thousand dollars a head to attend this ridiculously useless conference to complain about inequality, and global warming, and rub elbows with Pharrell Williams and Al Gore. Sigh. Get your weekend started right, with the Bob Davis Podcasts. Don’t forget to join Bob Davis this weekend at the SD-61 Chili Dinner AND CONTEST in South Minneapolis, Sunday January 25th. Sponsored by Baklund R&D.