Music, Algae, and Passion Projects with David Schwartz

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with David Schwartz, magazine editor with one foot in the professional audio community and the other in the wonderful world of algae about Music, Algae, and Passion Projects.   Read his full bio below.

Help us continue to create great content! If you’d like to sponsor a future episode hit the support podcast button or visit www.environmentalprofessionalsradio.com/sponsor-form 

Showtimes: 
Time - NAEP Member Shoutouts
Time - Nic and Laura dive into marketing yourself
Time - Interview starts
Time - 
Time - 

Please be sure to ✔️subscribe, ⭐rate and ✍review. 

This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Guest Bio: 
David Schwartz is a highly accomplished figure in the world of music production and technology, best known for his work as the editor-in-chief of Mix magazine, a premier publication covering music production and recording technology. Additionally, David has been involved with prestigious events like the TEC Awards and NAMM, where he has facilitated discussions and shared his expertise through the TEC Tracks program. For the past 15 years David has maintained a fascination with algae and edits a webzine, algaeplanet.com, showcasing the expanding applications of micro- and macroalgae as well as documenting the news of the developing algae industry.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds, Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Nick and I discussed definitely diving down deep dialogues. Whoa. Oh my gosh, that was so good. We talked to David Schwartz about music, algae, and passion projects. And finally, giant kelp is a type of algae. It can grow up to 2 ft per day. That's crazy, and can grow down to 100 ft in depth. So how about that? There you go. Can that music. I was like, is she gonna say it or I don't know you're waiting I know, I know. I was like I got nothing for algae here. So, other than, oh gosh, was it giant algae like the kelp beds? Oh, that stuff, nothing but seals and sharks and death. So I. Watch some like Instagram reels of people like swimming through that stuff, and I think like, would I do that? That sounds scary. I don't think I would do it at all. It seems very scary. It seems extremely, I don't, I don't like it. 

Oh gosh, yeah. Yeah, maybe hit that music. 

Hello, loyal listeners. 

NAEP has several working groups if you're interested in getting involved or adding experience to your resume. Those working groups include biological resources, brownfields and remediation, cultural resources, emerging professionals, geos. Spatial resources, Nipah practice, offshore wind, socioeconomics, transportation, technology, and water and coastal resources. Check those out at www.naep.org.

Let's get to our segment. 

Feel like your entire work is passion projects. True. You have a lot of different interests and you follow them with what I would call vim and vigor, great passion, some would say. Yeah, I just, yeah. You have passion projects, so. It's interesting. I just saw something, I think it was Jim Carrey talking about his dad, who he's like, he could have been a comedian, but, you know, there's no money in comedy, so he worked until he was 60 and then he was fired, and now he couldn't do the thing that he knew how to do. So he's like, if you're going to live your life, you might as well try to follow your dreams because you can fail at just existing and surviving. You can fail at that, you might as well fail at something you love. And I just, I don't know why, but I thought that was poignant. I thought that was, you know, it was kind of like, I don't know. I don't know what your take on that is, but I like the message. I like the idea, you know, you might as well try. Yeah, no, I think that's great. I'm listening to you and also trying to figure out how to fit in more alliteration. So in case you didn't know our challenge for today was to speak in alliteration, always, always alliteration. 

Current challenge accepted. So, yes, yeah, I totally agree with that. And our guests today, David, were talking about his passion projects, and I think often people start their passion projects after they've retired or they're too busy with their day job that they don't think that they have time to do something that they're just interested in or something. But for me, I was just telling someone this the other day, I didn't quit my 9 to 5 to create myself another job. Yeah. I quit it so that I could only work on things that I love and only, I have the wonderful opportunity to say no to whatever I want to say no to. And so why would I choose something I'm not passionate about or that isn't a passion project? Yeah, I mean, we've talked about on the show before, right? It, it sounds scary, it sounds intimidating. What if you fail? You know, always pops into your head, but you're gonna fail. I have failed many times. Yeah. That's what I love to tell people. It's like everybody's failed. Everyone has failed at something. Yeah, it's a learning opportunity and you know, if you have a support system, you're never truly alone, you're never truly out there. And if you don't have a support system, then listen to old episodes on how to build your network and uh. But failure is subjective. 

Someone from the outside can be, oh, they quit, or, oh, they're not doing that anymore, you know. But if you know you gave it your all or if you just lost interest, sometimes doing work or trying to collect the money on your thing that you love turns it into something you hate. And that's a big revelation for some people, and I've had the same thing. Maybe you think you love writing, but the minute you try to get paid to be a writer and you have someone else trying to tell you how it should sound or editing your work, you're like, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. I know it's not failure. No, no, it's like learning. It's just learning. It's all it is. It's like with comedy for me, it is. Would you say lessons learned? Yeah, jeez, I mean, only, but like. Like comedy is like, like my favorite example of using that. Like it is a beautiful thing. I love being on stage and getting people to laugh. I hate doing all the work leading up to it. You know, it's hard work. You have to work so hard to get to that joke that actually fits. And I love it. I love that moment. But like, I have to have an element of improv or I can't do it at all, and that's hard, and it's just hard. But, you know, I learned I was a good public speaker, right? 

I learned that I can do just about anything, and I'm really proud of that, but Yeah, not for me. It's not, I wouldn't be great at that. Yeah, I think one of the hardest things, and one of the things we talked to David about is, OK, you've got two very different interests. How do you work both of those? Because sometimes it's like, even for myself, it's like, OK, putting film festival hat on today and in 2 hours, I'm going to switch and turn into career coaching person and then switching again. It's not that it's, I think it does suck some energy trying to do that. And some people may enjoy it and some people may not, but if you do have different varying interests, you do have to find some way to sort of organize them into your life, I guess. Yeah, and like, all of it's about self-discovery, right? We're all learning about who we are as people, you know, as you go through, you, you learn new things, like it's just there's always some joy around the corner, um. And discovering a new talent or something like that, right? But like how you do it because I think how you and I would do creative would be slightly different. Like, I don't know how you do, like, do you regiment how you do things? Are you like, I'm working on art director for 5 minutes or you know, like 2 hours, and then I'm going to be career coach for 3 hours and then I have lunch and then I do some others. How do you break it out? I do try to do that. I have sort of 

You don't have my planner that I use every day, and the planner says, I'm doing this first, this first, this first, not everything, everything first, this first, this 2nd, this 3rd. at once, Nick. Leave me alone. That's what it feels like. Everything's a priority, but I do try to work on it. OK, I'm doing the film fest now, because then I open that set of tabs on my computer and I'm working on that and I'm finishing that, and my brain is in that space, and then I can close it and move on to book publishing. But it doesn't always work cleanly like that, you know. Sometimes it's like, wasn't I supposed to be doing this and I'm 4 hours and I haven't started? Yeah, that's me. That's me a lot. Or like I'll be doing in the middle of doing something like rabbit holing, you know, whatever they call it, hyper focusing, that's a new term for it. And then like, I'll have an idea to shoot into my brain from out of nowhere, uh, and it can completely derail me sometimes, like mid conversation, it can be mid-thought, and I'm like, yeah, I wonder how Batman does get a suit on. Scrubs syndrome. Yeah, yes, I mean, Scrubs is a really good representation of how my brain works. That's very much like JD's just. Yeah, mhm, so it's pretty funny. Yeah, I was talking to a friend recently and they're like, are you here? And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, you're not here. Sorry, sorry, you, you caught me. I am here, I promise. Like, mm, you know, you just reminded me, if you've seen Fleabag, and I know we're, we're already along on this, but if you've seen Fleabag, it's very important to this conversation. 

You know, ah, I don't know if I have. I know I know it, but did I watch it? I don't know. All right, I'm going to slightly spoil something about the show and I'm apologizing in advance and giving people space to skip ahead. It's not a huge spoiler, but the premise of the show is that she talks to the camera, right? She talks to the audience. And in the second season, she meets someone who really sees her for who she is, and he notices when she does that. It's, yes, I've seen it. And it's wonderful to see him be like, what are you doing? Where, where'd you just go? You know, and that's what it reminds me of. It's exactly that's how I felt when this person did that to me. I was like, wow, you called me out. What do you mean? You just said something about my neck. I don't mean it was so funny, um, really, really thoughtful. I thought that was great, very much worthwhile, especially that second season is incredible. Good show. Yes. With a really, you know, interesting ending. So, anyway, that that, you have 2 sets of homework, one watch fleabag, and to build some alliteration into your day. There we go. Sounds swell. We should stop Oh, let's get to our interview. 

Welcome back to EPR. 

Today we have David Schwartz with us. David is a magazine editor with 1 ft in the professional audio community and another in the wonderful world of algae. Welcome, David. Hi, thank you for having me, Laura. Awesome. I'm excited to talk to you today because like me, you are in multiple industries, and I know that confuses a lot of people when I tell them what I'm doing. So I'd like to start off with talking a little bit about, you have a long career in the music and media industry, and you've also gotten along the way, deeply involved with LG through your magazine work. So which one of those came first and then how do they kind of blend together? Well, really, publishing for me goes back to my early days, where I grew up in a musical family. Music was everywhere. My father played in the symphony orchestra in our town, and for most of the year, we'd have 4 big kettle drums in our living room, where he would rehearse for the concerts and various things. So there was, there was always this music there, and then I think the Beatles really have something to do with this for me. I saw them on Ed Sullivan when I was a kid, and it just left such an impression that I said to myself, there's something there that my future is gonna connect with. And so I very quickly formed a band with some of my best friends and Nice. We had a great time playing and eventually recording, and so the idea of recording music became a driving force for me. When I went to college, I went into engineering school first and then into a business program, but all along I was playing in bands, and that's really what meant a lot to me. So music was really way first back in those days, if you'd asked me about algae. I would have said, oh, is that the stuff we try to avoid in the lake and clean up and have a tough time getting rid of and smells bad and I didn't have any conception at all of what algae was at that point. I think that's still what most people think. Yeah, well, I've developed a real respect for it.

 We're kind of skipping ahead here. What got me into publishing was my first job out of college was working at a recording studio in San Francisco, a place called Wally Hyder Recording. And the San Francisco sound was really happening at that studio. On any particular day, there'd be Jefferson Airplane in recording, Santana, the Grateful Dead. And all, all the San Francisco bands were playing there, and so that was just a magical time for me. Eventually, after spending time at that studio, wouldn't come back to it because there's some interesting things that happened there. I got involved with a group of people who were doing a small private studio for jingle production. There were 6 of us, as it turned out, we were all, well, we saw ourselves as songwriters and musicians, and we had our own recording facility so we could do that. But along the way, we found that as many recording studios have experienced, there are times and frequent times. When you're building in the studio, you're adding a room, you're putting in a window, you're, the saws and the hammers are going. And if you're recording in the other room and there's all this construction noise, it becomes a problem. So when we had assignments like doing a, a jingle for a shoe store or whatever local groups that we were producing. for, we found very often that we couldn't record in our own studio at the time to meet the deadline, so we'd find another studio, take our stuff over there and work with other studios. The more we did that, the more sophisticated it became, and so, We found that, oh, if we had a string section to do, we'd go to this particular studio, or if we had horns, we'd go to that studio, or this studio had a good drum booth. It was really hard though, for the average person, I think, to know what was going on in the studios back then. This was in the late 70s. 

Studios were kind of an underground operation. No signs on the doors or anything like that. So, one day we had this thought, and I asked one of my partners what she thought of it, and the idea was, what if we did a directory of recording facilities? Something where a producer might shop for recording services and get to know what a particular studio might have available, you know, what kind of mixing console, what kind of monitor speakers, what kind of microphones, things that engineers and producers tune into. So one thing led to another and we, we were Kind of obsessed with the idea. So we took off for about a, well, we thought it was gonna be a month from the, the studio that we were working in to do some research, to go around and interview studio owners and document what they had going on. And we took the idea to a publisher in the Bay Area. This is all happening in the Bay Area. He said, we'll publish that if you like. And so we thought we'd have a one-shot directory of what the Bay Area studios were like. And as it turned out, once we published it, we started getting calls from all over the country saying, oh, come here, do that. Here, we need it. We need this in LA. We need this in Nashville. We need this in New York. So we didn't go back to our studio like we thought we would. We just kind of Riding this wave that kept getting bigger and bigger, and eventually we started doing these regional versions, and then the people from these regions would write us and call us and say, Hey, we just got a new such and such mixing console. We're, we've just gone from 8 tracks to 24 tracks. We've got to update what we're doing. 

So then we found we had to keep repeating this database, so it was accurate. That evolved into turning it into a monthly. Magazine by adding editorial to it, selling advertising in it, and treating it like a magazine, which we had really no experience, although the publisher that we were doing this under, you know, had a, an active magazine in the Bay Area, Bay Area Music, it was called Bam magazine. So, it's sort of a long-winded way to say how I got in publishing. Well, I like that you just sort of fell into it, you know, you had an idea and, and it worked. Yeah, doesn't always happen like that, you know, we've tried a lot of other things that Stalled for one reason or another, but this one seemed to pick up steam. I think it was partly or largely the times that we were in. At that point, it was really, we didn't know it until afterwards, looking back, but it was kind of the beginning of the semi-professional movement in the recording industry where it used to be, there was this big divide between the professional studios and the home recorders, you know, somebody at home would have like a Two track TA or whatever, and a microphone and that was about it. And the professional studios were kind of like clinical environments, you know, laboratories, white lab coat kind of operations. But then something in the middle started emerging, and it was both, it came there from both directions. The professional companies that were making equipment. saw that there was beginning to be a market of people who wanted to have more artistic control over what they were doing. 

So they started making equipment that was a little more artist friendly. And then at the other end, the consumer manufacturers started to see that their clients were getting more sophisticated, and so they wanted to meet that sophistication with Machines that gave more flexibility, more ability, we kind of fell into the middle of that spectrum. And so companies saw us as, as being a great place to advertise and they started competing for to be on our cover shot and, uh, be the studio of the month and all that kind of stuff. So it was, it was a really good time and we grew very quickly. Yeah, that's cool. So does, has that evolved or did that come and go or did it evolve into websites? Well, it's still going. It's in its 45th year, maybe, well, close to the 50th actually. So yeah, that's been going on all along and now it's not as thick a magazine as it once was. But that's, you know, largely due to the whole publishing industry is print advertising has gone through a real evolution and it's so much moved to the internet. So it's, it still exists in print, it also exists online. Called Mix Online. The name of the magazine was Mix Magazine. So, yeah, it still survives. Nice. Uh, so music came first, clearly, and then, so when did AlG start making an appearance in your life? Well, I never predicted that this would happen, but one day, about 17 years ago, I moved from Los Angeles to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I had kind of semi-retired at that point. But I got here and I fell in love with Santa Fe. It's just such a cool town. But I, I wanted something to do here, something to connect with. And I was trying to think, well, if I were gonna start over with some new skill, what would it be? There wasn't enough of the music industry here in in this town to make a good living. Sure. And so I, I started thinking about what's, what are my values, what's important to me, what do I want to grow with here? And I started thinking about renewable energy. 

And at first I thought in the terms of photovoltaic electricity, solar panels, and solar energy just in general, I said I wanted to know more about that. And so I went to, there was a very aggressive, successful community college here in Santa Fe, Santa Fe Community College. And the avant-garde in many ways. They had a, so I went to them and I figured they would have a, a solar energy program. I found out that they didn't, or at least they didn't yet. They were looking at it. But what they did have was a program on biofuels using algae, and the reason they had that was because the technology was being developed in Some large businesses in the state of New Mexico that were growing algae to convert to capture the oil in it, and convert it to fuel, basically, to compete with gasoline because the price of gas at that time was skyrocketing, and so the government, in general, the scientific community, was looking for an alternative. To petroleum, and they were looking at algae because algae is basically fresh petroleum. It's, you know, 100 million years of sitting on the bottom of the ocean and accumulating with some dinosaurs, and eventually it becomes something that you can mine or pump out of the ground and process it and turn it into fuel. So I was fascinated by that, and I said, OK, I'll sign up for that program. And it was an associate's degree program about 30 hours, and learned about cell biology and, and the process, which I just loved. It was so fascinating. During the course of it, the main instructor, we found that this is such a new area that there was not, not really any course of study, no curricula that was widely known, because this is very experimental at the time. So the way he would teach was he would find magazine articles, the occasional magazine articles, search the landscape for news and profiles of companies that were in this area. After I graduated, I thought, well, you know, there's an opportunity here. 

I could do what he's doing and bring together some business associates to put a, what we thought was rather than do a print magazine at that point, that would make more sense to Do something online. So, we, I got together with a couple of friends that I'd worked with at the print magazine, and we started an online magazine about algae. OK, wait, hold on. So you started the magazine with those people before in a music fashion. Did you have to twist arms or explain yourself about wanting to start one in algae? Well, it was actually easier than I thought. About the time that I was going to school, two people that I used to publish with, one was an ad director from my previous magazine days and, uh, publishing partner, and the other was, uh, a former art director who had developed web skills and was also a webmaster at this point. They've both gotten in touch separately in talking about what we were each doing and interested in, it just kind of fell into place that, OK, well, you're doing something in this algae field, there's probably a lot of information and knowledge that people don't know that We could explore and publish and see how it goes. So we did that, we started, we've gone through two different versions of this. The first one was called Algae Industry Magazine, and we would, you know, interview people at companies that were doing. Algae-related developments and innovations. And we did that for about 10 years, and then we went through a shuffle, did some personnel changes. And because the industry had gone through a big change, we kind of stepped back and said, OK. If we were doing this from the start again, what would we do differently? 

And the changes that were happening were, one, the fuel, the biofuel part of the whole operation became questionable because the cost of developing it, after all, the scientific research, was not competitive with the price of petroleum. And so, people in this business thought that, well, Eventually, this will work once the economies of scale set in, but that's gonna be a while down the road. So what else can we do with algae? That question came up, and the answer came back, Well, there are a lot of things once we start to look into the research and development of it. So, the other thing was, there's really two main areas of algae, micro and macroalgae. Microalgae is the single cell stuff that you look at under a microscope. Macroalgae is the ocean. Seaweed that can grow up to 200 ft or so long, you know, the kelp side of it, but also I don't like to get in my toes at the beach. Exactly, but if you see a little gold mine there, you know, some people see it very differently. So, the reality is that I like to say when I'm talking with people about it, that saying algae is not unlike saying animals. It's such a broad general category of living beings. There are hundreds of thousands of different strains of algae, uh, both microalgae and I'd say tens of thousands of strains of macroalgae. And if you look at them individually, certainly not all of them have been explored, but a lot have been explored. And they're finding that each one has capabilities and different chemical and organic structures to them, and each one kind of lends itself to different applications, just as animals are, you know, there's land animals and there's water-based animals, and some of them are vicious and bite people or poison. Same thing with algae. Some of them are dangerous or toxic. 

A lot of them though, have great potential in resource development. The way people in the industry look at algae now is at its cultivation potential, either in the water or on land, and what it can be made into, what can be extracted from. So oil still can be extracted from it, but there are much higher value properties that can be generated from algae. From foods and feeds. To properties of algae that help control the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, for example. Yeah, algae eats carbon dioxide and gives off oxygen, so it's been doing that for 2 billion years. And so that's a very valuable thing that Alchi contributes. But there are a lot more things that are being developed almost every day, and that's what gives us material to write about in our magazine. That magazine right now is called AlgaePlanet.com. And so it really goes into all the things that are being done that we think would be of interest, both in micro and macroalgae. Yeah, that sounds really interesting. The number of different applications for it, the different species toxification, like, I think, you know, a lot of our audience are people who are maybe looking for what their next career is going to be or their first career and It sounds like, you know, this is possibly some emerging work that people could look into or just even search around your site and see what's happening. There are many opportunities. I think some of the most exciting ones. There's a group in California called Sway in the Berkeley area, uh lovely group. People. And what they're developing is they're converting seaweed to plastic replacement stuff. Like, I think about this, I feel guilty about this every time I unwrap some cellophane or some saran wrap and rip it off and put it on something, and then Wad it up and throw it away, and I think there's gotta be a better way than this. Well, this group in Berkeley, and there are other groups around the world doing this too, working on plastic packaging replacement with organic subs alternatives that are biodegradable. 

Biodegradability is a big factor in all this stuff because You know, we are drowning in plastics right now, other unwanted materials. So the idea of replacing some of those even toxic waste situations with something as humane, let's say, as algae-based plastics, that's gonna be a huge area. And while there are maybe a handful of companies around the world that are developing that right now, in a few years, when the cost is equivalent to the alternative, I think there are gonna be a lot of people that rush in that direction to be a part of that development. Is there a general, I'm sure there's lots of ways that this happens, but as far as harvesting it, is there certain numbers of methods or one most used method? That's a good question. There are a lot of different ways, you know, from very personal, like, you know, at the personal and, a lot of people are growing their own spirulina right now. It's easy to grow, it's healthy. I know people who grow it in a fish tank, scoop it every day, and put it in their glass of orange juice. Right. And when it's fresh, it has no taste to it. I think some people have a problem with it when It's not fresh and it kind of smells like the ocean and has that marine taste to it. Yeah fishy exactly, but if it's fresh, you don't have to deal with that problem. So in that way, you can scoop it up with a cheese cloth and strain it. At an industrial level, there are all kinds of ways it's grown and collected and concentrated, dewatered they call it, to turn it from a muddy consistency into more of a paste, and then that can be extruded into Noodles or equivalent to noodles, for example, some people buy that and use it, put it in salads. Dry it, crumble it up, and it's more and more food applications are being developed. And there's a group, we did a story recently about a team of Brazilian, I forget the university in Brazil, but a team of PhD students who made their thesis around improving the taste and the aroma of algae, which doesn't sound like much until you Think about the people who are developing algae into food and having to deal with that issue, and try to convince people that, well, it's really healthy, don't mind the flavor of it. 

So we're trying to eliminate the objections here. I think there's a great uh future in that. Another company in, in the Bay Area that's working with red algae and processing that. Into alternative bacon. It actually has a flavor, if it's cured a certain way, it has a flavor that's somewhat like bacon. Interesting. And so if you're a vegan and you miss the taste of Bacon, this could be your opportunity. Oh yeah, I would try that. But there's also some larger scale things that are really interesting that are being done. One of them that I think is really exciting also is there's a type of seaweed called asparagopsis, and it's mainly grown in southern Australia, but what they found with it in trials have been they've fed it to cattle. Now, you know, you probably know the cattle produce methane from their burps. I thought it was their farts, but I was corrected it's their burps. Hey, facts that we need to know. Yeah, well, if you're gonna do an illustration, it makes a difference. So, what they found was that if they fed this a small amount of it to the cow in their normal feed, say, a handful of, of this dried asparagopsis, it cut down their methane generation by 90%, up to 90%. So if you look at the methane in the atmosphere, the CH3, which is About 20 times more dangerous than carbon dioxide, even though it has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere. The 1.5 million cattle around the world produce around, it's been measured as about 12% of the methane in the atmosphere. If you eliminate 90% of that, if every cow happened to be convinced to eat this stuff, that would make a major change in the atmosphere in a positive direction. So this is an area that's being developed right now. 

Oh, that's fascinating. So, those are all really cool and such various uses of it, and I, I like, so there's so many things that I like, especially for Our career seekers, you know, the main message in your story about just seeing a problem and tackling it, learning what you need to learn about it and going for it and just seeing what happens, but also, you know, that algae is an industry you could look into for thesis projects and a lot of new. Merging things. We're getting close to time, so I want to touch on also your balancing these two different roles that you have. So do you still play music? Not professionally. I tinkle around on the piano at home every once in a while just for old time's sake. But, uh, no, I, I haven't pursued my musical aspirations in a while. But you are still involved in the industry, right? Yeah, and I work with a lot of artists. I sort of have a, you might call me an executive coach to a number of really good musicians that are That I believe in and who are open to discussions about advancing their careers and, and where I'm at Leo the Nm situation, let me just put in a plug for NAM is the largest music trade show in the world. Where people who make musical instruments come together with people who sell those instruments. So manufacturers on one side, music stores on the other side. It's where they come together and exchange information and learn about each other and just have all this wonderful input. And a lot of musicians show up at that show as well, as you can imagine. I mean, up to this year, I think there were 65,000 people at this show for 4 days. 

The role that I play there is educational. For about the last 15 years, I have been organizing a lot of the panel discussions and master classes and keynotes that go on in the educational areas. Mainly in the professional audio side of things, that's sort of my background and passion still. Yeah, although I, I don't make music anymore in a professional way, I'm still involved in it from the sidelines. Right. I feel like I'm the opposite. I'm not actually an environment working environmental professional these days, but I'm still involved in the environment by doing the this podcast and environmental career coaching that I do. Sometimes you just have to stay involved with the things you love in an alternative way than your day to day paycheck, right? I think that's the secret of life. I think you're doing a spectacular job of keeping that feeling alive, that your passion is so important to what you're doing, and if you can Leverage the technology with your passion, then everybody wins. So, congratulations for doing what you're doing. Yeah, likewise, and I think that's a good messaging for everyone because I don't know if you have the same thing, but some people are like, how are you doing so much or why are you doing so much? And then I've met other people who have told me, I met a woman at a conference recently who's who I was telling her all the things I was doing, and then she was like, Oh, I'm an actress and I'm a writer and I'm a this and that. And she was like, You make me feel. Normal. Um, you know, she felt a lot of people like to make her feel like she's doing too much or she's weird because she's got all these different passions. But do you have advice for someone who's looking into or wanting to do something outside of what people normally expect from them? Well, on a general level, find the things that you love, combine them with opportunities that exist for those particular interests and skills, and immerse yourself into it. You know, nothing comes instantly. You have to really apply yourself. You have to feel like if you believe in it enough, if you're willing to go to the wall with it, you will eventually succeed. It may take time, it will take time, but use your passion as an accelerator. Yeah, I love that. 

We have a segment on here called Field Notes, and this is where we talk to Environmental professionals and others about their experience in the field. So your field might be music, it could be the conference that you or the trade show that you go to, things like that. Do you have a memorable story? We encourage listeners to message, actually you can actually now email your story into us if you'd like to at info@environmentalprofessionalsradio.com, and we will try to read them on the air. 

But David, do you have a funny story, met a famous person, anything that's memorable moment in the field for you? Funny story. Well, Well, this is kind of a strange story, but that works, that works. We like strange, we like weird. I'll, I'll tell you the punch. I'll tell you the punch line first though, and then I'll kind of try to explain it. When you come to my house, if you ring my doorbell, the ring is the intro to Louie Louie. Everybody gets a kick out of that. So the story behind that, where that came from was Back in my magazine days, I used to interview artists and, you know, professionals. So one day I was called by some friends to do an interview with Garth Brooks, and this was in his early days. He just had two albums out, I think. And so I went to the concert in Mountain View. Where he was performing and uh his chief engineer invited me to come back after the show. And so took me into Garth's dressing room to meet him, and uh we started talking, and somehow we got on the subject of a song of his called The Dance. Which was his first hit song, beautiful song, and it had this little piano riff that kind of starts it out. I commented on that to him that I like that riff and he sort of I don't know if you've ever seen this, but he sort of has this stare. I mean, he, he, he, he has laser eyes that look right through your head. And he, he looked at me like that and said, maybe you could help me with something. I've always wanted that thing that we're talking about. I've always wanted that as my doorbell greeting. Do you know anything, any kind of doorbell that you can record into? Something like that? I thought about it for a minute. I said, I don't, but I love the idea. That's a random question. I said, I can imagine a lot of song intros or things that little instrumental short pieces that I could imagine being my doorbell. So I said, I don't know any company that does that, but as it turns out, I was leaving for Tokyo the next day, and I had an afternoon open before this conference I was going to. 

And I said, Well, I'm staying in the Ginza, which is the neighborhood that has a lot of electronic stores and department stores. I said, I, I'll look around there, cause if anybody has something like that, It'll be in the Ginza. So, I go there the next day, I look around, couldn't see anything that you could record into as a doorbell. The only thing I saw was this, I call it a grandmother's toy doorbell, that you could turn this little plastic wheel and we play Anchors Away, or, you know, Mary had a Little lamb or something like that, which was not what he had in mind, but, you know, a step in that direction. So I came back and I was fascinated. Still, I couldn't get it out of my mind cause I was thinking of all these songs I'd like to have as my doorbell ring. So I thought, you know, maybe I could build one, get a sampling circuit and an amplifier and a speaker and a little transmitter. Anyway, over the course of the next month, just playing around with some basic electronics, I made one and I put it up on my doorbell. I was living in the Napa Valley at that time, and so I put it on my front door. The first time it got used, my cousin, Got married at my place that I had this nice front yard with a lot of rose bushes. And so he and his, uh, his bride wanted to, you know, set up at my front yard. So we were gonna have the, the rehearsal dinner the night before. So we thought it was a new toy at that point. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun if we got a bunch of people that sounded drunk to sing Here Comes the Bride and use that as the doorbell greeting. Which we did, and it was really funny and everybody loved it. Here comes from. It was, uh, but from there, uh, I put the guitar intro from Layla on for a while. I had the Beatles, uh, intro to When I'm 64. If you think about it, it's a great little doorbell tune. Oh yeah, yeah. Do do do do do do. So I, I got kind of obsessed with it and some engineer friends came over one day and said, oh man. We should turn this into a product, you know, I know a lot of people would love it. So we started developing it, doing, you know, reducing it to a prototype, and eventually I, I saw Garth again, and I took a prototype to him, and he liked it, but it wasn't finished yet, so I couldn't deliver it to him. 

So we're still working on it. And unfortunately, there's sad ending from there because my uh two partners both had personal tragedies. And we had to sort of disband the little development group we were doing. So we got that. Yeah, it was a very sad moment and disappointing in the long run. We did get a patent on it, but we just couldn't pursue it, and other companies, you know, stepped in and I think you can get various versions of it now. Anyway, so I have the prototype and I plays Louie Louie every time somebody comes over to my house. So I've got to thank for that. Yeah, very cool. You have the, the memory of the story, like we like to share these stories, so thank you for that. There's no help to anyone out there. They can't use this for anything. Well, I mean, I think there's some lessons there, right? You know, you saw a need for something. I think a lot of products and things are just started from someone's own personal need for something. So I think it's a great example of, like, go for it, you know, and If it's meant to be, it'll be, and if not, you tried it and you've got something cool to show for it and a great story, so. Good. Well, hopefully, uh, somebody will feel good about it out there. Right. Um, and then finally we talked about passion projects. You also make wine? Did, I lived in the town of Saint He. in the Napa Valley for about 6 years. And Saint Helena is a magical little town, about 5000, right in the heart of Cabernet Country in Napa, actually north of the town of Napa, about 15 miles. All these great wineries are there. Everybody in the town works in the wine business. So, my next door neighbor, Dave, we call him, had been the production director at Gallo. For 30 some years. People think of gallo as jug wine, which is 90%, but the other 10% is quality wine that comes under different labels and, you know, has, has grown in Sonoma and it's really good stuff. And so he worked on that part of the company, and he retired, and that's about the time that I moved up there and I met him, and we became good friends. And then the next door neighbor from him was the head winemaker at Spring Mountain Winery, very fine winery. And sitting around talking one day, neighbor Dave said, how would you like to make some wine with us, which is a question that no one has ever said no to. You know, and so it's, of course, what do we do first? And in his mind, I think he had the thought that, well, I've got a garage with room in it. Maybe we could put the barrels in there.

 And so we started, uh, well, the first year we, we did a second picking, you know what that is? That's, I don't. OK, well, when the field team picks the grapes, they kind of go through like a swarm of locusts, you know, collecting the grapes, but they, because of the speed and the efficiency, they basically just get the large clusters, which leaves small clusters. So, Very often, friends and family will do a 2nd picking of the small clusters and then make, you know, their hobby wins out of it. So that's what we did. We went through an 80 acre field, doing a 2nd picking, and we did all the steps of it. I remember stomping. It looked like a, a hot tub in my driveway, and I was wearing hip boots, stepping, you know. Eventually, we, we, we got other people to crush. But the first time through, we wanted to experience all of the parts of the operation ourselves. So we fermented the grapes, we put them in oak, and oak barrels for checking them every month or so, and then, you know, leaving them for two years in there, and then having a big bottling party and putting labels on and inserting the corks and foils and everything. And we would come up with about 100 cases. Which, which we would share amongst ourselves. Eventually though, our stuff was getting pretty good, and just for fun, we uh offered it to some restaurants to see if they'd like to put it on their wine list. To our surprise, there was a lot of good response. And we were on some very nice wine lists and In LA, and Malibu, a couple of really high-end restaurants in Malibu listed our wine for. Something like $92 or $94 a bottle and we thought, hey, we're just a hobby operation, but we could change over if we wanted to. Now that that would involve getting license and a lot of Stuff that that we had retired to avoid. Right, yeah, it's a whole different ball game. 

But it was a lot of fun and we had a great time with it, and so I don't do that anymore. That was about 10 years of a side gig that, you know, we didn't really make money from, but we made wine from. Yeah, it sounds like a fun experience. I didn't know stomping the grapes was something people did outside of. Lucille Ball doing it for ratings, so that's, that's pretty fun. Well, on a small scale, yeah, it's, it is fun. It's, and it depends who you're doing it with too, you know, it's if it's a party operation, then, then it's a party with a purpose. Right. Awesome. Well, we're out of time. I appreciate you being here and sharing these stories, but is there anything you want to talk about that we didn't touch on? No, I think you covered a lot of territory and I think Well, what I would believe it is, you know, something like algae wasn't obvious or even on the radar for me for a long time. And I think everybody's got something equivalent to that, that they could be great at if they only knew what it was. You know, so I think your interests, your passions, your skills, if you stir that pot up long enough, you'll find things will emerge from it that you hadn't thought about before, that are right up your alley. So I, I just encourage people to see alternative ways of thinking about what they do for a living. Fantastic. I love that. That's a great place to leave it, and where can people get in touch with you? Probably best through Algae Planet. So I'm David@algae.com , that's A L G A E.com. Awesome. Thanks so much, David. Yep. Thank you. I'm sure this is fun. This was fun. OK, be well. That's our show. Thank you, David, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review. 

See everybody. Oh shoot. Bye.