Inside the least woke college in America
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I'm Yasmin Gagne. I'm Josh Christensen. And this is Most Innovative Companies. ♪

On today's episode, Fast Company Senior Staff Editor Max Uffberg on the University of Austin. The course titles are things like The Invasion of Ideology into Evolutionary Biology. El Acoustic CEO Laurel Vissi on using sound to create immersive experiences. There's no standard for live concerts today. Sound is an underrated sensory experience. You know, we take it for granted. And as always, keeping tabs. Hitler doesn't have to exist in the despicable me world. But first, here's the download.

The news you need to know this week in the world of business and innovation. For the first time since the pandemic, McDonald's sales have dropped. I'm going to get myself a McDouble real soon. In their quarterly earnings report, McDonald's revealed that the same store sales went down 1%. The fast food chain hasn't seen a quarterly sales decline since Q4 of 2020.

Meanwhile, McDonald's is attempting to bring customers back with limited time discounts like Free Fry Friday and the return of the $5 value meal. What are your plans for Free Fry Friday? Are you caroling? Are you going out and putting up decorations? Trust and believe I will go get some fries, though. Oh, hell yeah. This is what journalism is fueled by. Elon Musk reposted a deepfake of Kamala Harris on X, violating his own platform's rules.

The video shows Harris calling herself the ultimate diversity hire, which like, what does that even mean? When it was first posted, it was labeled Kamala Harris campaign ad parody in all caps and

But Musk reposted it without any context. Senator Amy Klobuchar responded in a Threads post, writing that Musk could be unleashing an entire election season of fake AI voice and image-altered content with no limits, regardless of party. This is what I've heard a lot about is people's concerns about, like, deepfakes and AI-generated propaganda. But, I mean, I don't think we had any barriers to propaganda before. You know what I mean? Like, there's been plenty of it for years.

And that's not going away. So be careful. Check those posts before you repost them. Anyways, with the Olympics underway in Paris, France has already faced two attacks on their infrastructure. Hours before the opening ceremony, saboteurs targeted the high-speed railway signaling cables. And later, broadband service cables were cut in multiple locations. So be careful out there. I also heard a report about dengue fever...

In France as well. So just all sorts of things going on in France right now. JPMorgan Chase will bar customers from using its credit cards to repay installment loans, the kinds you see on a checkout page that say, buy now, pay later. The loans have become increasingly popular with Afterpay, Klarna, PayPal, and others.

Capital One made the same restriction back in late 2020. Yeah, it is free to take out a loan to repay a loan, but I think that's actually something people do. Yeah, I mean, this is one of those like squeaky wheel that doesn't need to get the grease sort of situation. Maybe just like let's have less debt. Let's have an economic system fueled by less debt overall. Yeah.

And finally, Meta has agreed to a record $1.4 billion settlement with the state of Texas over the company's use of biometric data from users' photos and videos without their consent.

If you remember back in 2011, there was this feature called tag suggestions where it would suggest people to tag in your photos or videos. And that's when the company began storing billions of biometric identifiers without telling users or asking for their permission. Big no-no. This was a violation of a Texas law around online data protection. I can't believe that was in 2011. I guess things were pretty advanced then. Yeah.

I don't know if it was a very, like, accurate feature as I remember it. And that's the news you need to know today.

Josh, what is the biggest lesson you learned in college? The biggest lesson I learned in college is that if you get the study guides in a large lecture class, you don't have to go to any class, just the midterm review and the final review. And then you can ace it. No, that's not true. I was actually like a goody two shoes in college. I went to every class I rarely missed. Uh,

I mean, I was a theater major, so I don't know if anything's necessarily applicable. What about you? You actually went to a good school and studied an equally useful studies course. Right. Comparative literature. People know what that is.

Honestly, I think a theater major is more applicable. I'm good in the room. I know two languages in addition to English that I don't use. Yeah, that's true. You do speak French and Spanish. You did use Spanish to report the Deliveristas feature. But we're actually talking about colleges because in our next segment, we're talking about one of the weirdest institutions of higher education we've seen.

This spring, a lot of colleges, including mine, of course, made headlines because of student protests around the Israel-Hamas conflict. But prior to that, higher education had already been facing some big challenges. A Gallup poll found that just 36 percent of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. And that's a 10 percent drop from 2018 and more than 20 percent drop from 2015.

Enter the University of Austin. No, we are not talking about UT Austin, which is only a few miles away. We're talking about the weird, kind of conservative one. The University of Austin claims to be a new type of higher education institution that offers students, quote, the fearless pursuit of truth rather than, I suppose, an opportunity to drink too much and...

attend some lectures. Yeah. The privately funded nonprofit has reportedly received $200 million in private donations. Here to tell us more is friend of the pod, Fast Company senior staff editor Max Uffberg. Welcome back to the show, Max. Hey, thanks for having me. So before we go into what the University of Austin, Texas is, tell us a little bit about the school's president, Pano Kanelos.

Why did he want to build a new college? So UATX is, in a lot of ways, Pano's brainchild. He was actually the president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. And he had been, for the last couple of years really, concerned about what he perceived as growing illiberalism on campuses across the U.S. He, kind of by happenstance, with a group of

similarly minded folks like Barry Weiss and Joe Lonsdale eventually. But actually, it was Barry Weiss, the sort of controversial writer, former New York Times opinion writer, who suggested, well, why don't you start something of your own? And I think the way Pano told it to me, he was a little reluctant. You know, he had a good job at St. John's College. But once he got connected, I think, with Joe Lonsdale, who obviously is a is a

well-moneyed venture capitalist could put up some of the funds to sort of get this thing off the ground, then he decided to take a shot on it.

I do think that the way that this college was started sounds like how just about every podcast is started. Someone tells their friend, you should start your own. Funny enough, the college was announced on a sub stack, which is also kind of like a podcast. So that's crazy. You mentioned it's sort of preoccupation or Canelo's is preoccupation with creeping illiberalism on college campuses. What does that mean?

I think it kind of goes back to

Fear of cancellation. Got it. So it's like against cancel culture. Right. There's a there's a fear that like it's no longer comfortable to be conservative on a lot of college campuses or college campuses aren't welcoming to more conservative viewpoints in terms of like speaker engagements or visiting professors. And I mean, it is worth saying that that is actually many Americans, regardless of whether they're liberal or conservative, feel that college campuses are becoming less

sort of more illiberal places. So what's interesting is like you have people on the left saying they're silencing us on the left and you have people on the right saying they're silencing us on the right.

Yeah. When actually they're mostly 18 year olds. They are. Yeah. That's something I think about a lot. I think there's a reality on college campuses where it's mostly just drunk kids trying to get to class. But it's also I think it's fair to mention also when we talk about like conservative viewpoints, we're not really talking about, oh, lower corporate tax rates and states' rights. We're talking about like the culture wars. Right. It's having on the extreme side, it's like

having, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos, the firebrand sort of provocateur coming on campus. Or, you know, it could be protesting someone like Barry Weiss, who is more of a sort of heterodox than anything else. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I want to talk about the funding in a second. But first of all, tell me about the school setup. What does the building look like? How many students is the school accepting? And what is the curriculum like?

So they've rented one floor of the Scarborough building in downtown Austin, which is this very beautiful historic art deco space. And it looks a lot like a startup, basically. I mean, there are classrooms, but there are like sort of minimalist aesthetics and it all kind of looks very...

and functional in a way that like kind of resembles a series A. Doesn't smell like weed yet. It doesn't smell like weed and it doesn't have like that musty feel that a lot of old schools have. But I mean, I don't know, maybe after like a couple of years, it'll adopt those things. I'm

I'm thinking of like classic depictions of startup spaces where it's like beanbag chairs, weird like pods and like foosball tables. Well, not quite the foosball beanbag chair sect of startups. It's a series B startup. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, yeah, they got that Andreessen Horowitz money now. Yeah, I mean, it is a beautiful building. It's probably three or four miles away from UT Austin. But compared to UT Austin, which has its own campus, this is very much like a floor in the middle of bustling downtown Austin.

And in the fall, it starts enrolling students. There's only about 100 of them, right? Yes. So the inaugural class will be 100 kids. They are fully funded for all four years. So right as a way. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, you know, it makes sense. Like if you have a new school, you have to learn kids and you're giving them full rides. But it's actually not such an expensive school. Tuition will be about $32,000 a year, which is

I mean, it's a ton of money, but compared to a lot of other schools, it's not that bad. Relatively low. Yeah. Yeah, I think. I mean, it's certainly more than a state school, but it's not like an egregious cost. I think on the level of a private college, it's probably on the low end, if not like the very low end. Yeah. Exactly. And how many professors are there? There are...

Probably about 20 professors right now. And the, you know, the credentials range, but like they're all certainly coming from

real academia. They don't get tenure. They're on five-year contracts. And part of the thinking there is that this will incentivize good performance. And I think Pano and his ilk have a theory that tenure is maybe kind of broken and at this point is doing more harm than good in terms of

engagement among professors. The curriculum you described actually seems pretty normal. Is that fair to say? There's like a core curriculum, like a series of class requirements you need to take, and then you specialize, right? Yeah, you specialize. I mean, so right now there's only one degree that you can get from UATX, and that is a degree in liberal arts. Now, they'll tell you that that is a

intentional and that the program wants to build a well-rounded individual. That is true, I'm sure. It's also strategic because if you want to get a nursing degree, you have to go through a totally separate accreditation system within a state. That makes sense. One liberal arts degree is like sort of the one umbrella thing you need.

So I want to go back to the funding now. How did he get funding to start this thing? You brought up Joe Lonsdale earlier. I mean, just give us a background on all this. Barry Weiss connected Kanellos with Joe Lonsdale, who was one of the co-founders of Palantir. He now runs a VC group in Austin. And Lonsdale gave an initial $10 million donation.

And that obviously is huge if you want to start a school. But more than that, he also sort of connected Canelo's with this network of donors and people who are skeptical of the status quo in the university system. It's the same mindset that you're hearing from some of the like Silicon Valley bigwigs who are turning against the Democrats. Bill Ackman. Yeah. I mean, they're like terrified of what they call the woke mindset. And so these are folks who think

universities are broken, we need to build something new. And here comes someone with what they think is a great idea and they're happy to give money. It's kind of amazing because they announced the school in 2021, Kanellis did.

And by 2024, they've raised north of $200 million. Wow. That's a lot of money. Right. I mean, this does come at a time when, you know, a lot of smaller private universities are struggling and shuttering. So you have that kind of in the backdrop of this so far, like resounding success story.

And it's currently, it's in the middle of an accreditation process. So does that mean they anticipate that by the time their crop of undergrads graduates, they will be accredited? Yeah. I mean, so accreditation just takes a couple of years. It's just a long process.

drawn-out process, but they were given what's called degree-granting privileges. So basically, that's the state saying, this is not a scam, you can grant degrees, and you will become an accredited school. Well, they're not saying you will, but the hope is that they will become an accredited school in a couple years. So, you know...

So for all of, you know, University of Austin's talk of having a sort of new approach to running a college, it seems like a fairly standard curriculum and also a pretty traditional funding model. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I mean, I think that is one of the points of critique is these guys talk about how they're sort of rethinking the system. And at the end of the day,

They're getting donor money from the likes of Joe Lonsdale and Harlan Crowe, the conservative mega donor who sort of quietly supported Clarence Thomas in some ways. And so skeptics of UATX would say, first of all, are you really reinventing the wheel? Also, for a school that claims to represent open inquiry and free speech,

You're getting money from Harlan Crow. And now a counterpoint to that would be Harlan Crow gives money to a lot of things. You know, that's true. Well, this this is always the case on the very base level of being like, OK, higher education has a lot of issues. I don't think anyone would argue with that on some level. Well, there is one key difference between.

University of Austin plans to make a bunch of money in a way that's different from other private higher education institutions. Tell us about that. There's like an IP play, right? They want to license IP that they create through the school. So like whether that means a new technology. Now, that's not anything new, right? Like schools own IP platforms.

I mean, that's a huge part of their sort of models. Also, they have this partnership with the University of Guatemala, and the idea is to automate the administrative systems. And they want to then license out that tool to other universities in the U.S. as a, you know, sort of streamlining the administrative functions. They're taking a very sort of tech-centric approach to higher ed. So Fox News described University of Austin as a free speech haven for

Is that how Kanellos would characterize it? He would, yes. It's still so early. Like, we haven't had the sort of inaugural class yet, so it's hard to say whether that's a fair characterization. They haven't invited, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos to speak and seen the reaction yet. Well, they haven't invited Milo, but they did invite RFK Jr., which we'll talk about later. Right, we will get that. Oh, yeah, let's save that for dessert. Exactly.

So we don't really have a good sense of the curriculum yet, right? Because classes don't start for a few months. But in the interim, University of Austin has been hosting these forbidden courses programs, which are basically like unaccredited courses

Incredible name, though. That's good. Incredible. Great branding. The Forbidden Courses do give some preview, right, into their pedagogical leanings. And the course titles are things like The Invasion of Ideology into Evolutionary Biology. If you think they are a conservative project that stands for nothing but hating wokeness, this course will probably validate that.

That belief? So it's eugenics is essentially what you're saying. Well, the questions are like, is sex binary or are there human races? Gotcha. Their argument is like, we're just having open discourse around this stuff. The counterpoint is these are a lot of the topics that they're fixated on. You know, there's some members of faculty, I think, in the piece you talked about, Dorian Abbott, for example, who already have that ideological leaning, right? Like he doesn't like affirmative action.

Right. Yeah. I mean, they've put together a real murderer's row of heterodoxes and sometimes canceled people. There's Dorian Abbott. There's also Larry Summers, who... Really? Yeah. He's on the board of advisors.

And, you know, Larry Summers is he's not like a progressive, but he's a Democrat and he's part of the establishment. I mean, he ran Harvard. Yeah. So I think there was this sort of perception when the school launched, at least in some circles, and there was this sort of framing of the school as like a total scam. I don't think that's fair. They're on the path to accreditation. They have very real established people in their orbit. The next sort of

phase of UATX is to just try to operate as a normal school and show people that they're just a school that is maybe ideologically leaning in one way or the other, but like

There's no sleight of hand here. Right. That makes a lot of sense. And the school has stated its commitment to sort of academic neutrality. Do you buy that? It's hard to say at this point, honestly. I mean, I talked to Kanelos for a while. He seemed very genuine in his beliefs. Like, you have a big enough faculty that they have different motivations and different beliefs, so it's hard to say as a whole that...

They would argue that whereas the traditional school is more concerned with setting you up for a job,

UATX's concern is, yes, getting you a job, like, of course, but also equal parts making you into a well-rounded, thoughtful, curious individual. But again, like the actual curriculum, as far as we know, or at least the structure of curriculum is not that different, right? Like there's what they call the Polaris Project, which is essentially a capstone program that like most or many schools have. So the question will be,

Is the material or like the way it's taught actually going to differ from the mainstream established schools? To come back to sort of the Israel-Hamas war, I think all of us saw protests on college campuses a couple of months ago, still ongoing in some cases.

How does the University of Austin think about that? I asked Morgan Marietta, who is the former UT Arlington polysidine, who's now heading the politics program at UATX. He stepped down from UT Arlington after he hosted sort of a Q&A around the Israel-Hamas war, the Israel-Palestine conflict. And he

Things got fiery. People were sort of shouting down some of the folks on stage. Gotcha. As he tells it, the school then wanted him to like clear any future speaking engagements with the school, which he says is a violation of academic freedom. The way he sees it, the protests are not conducive to a learning environment. They're not

Making these points in a... It's not about the content of your speech. It's about the way you're talking to me. Is that fair? Yeah, I think that would be the way he puts it. And UATX, interestingly, didn't shy away from a good marketing opportunity.

When they posted on X, formerly Twitter, they posted a video of UT Austin protests. So that's like protests occurring a few, like a mile away at UT Austin. And they posted videos, these like sort of violent protest imagery. And then...

the caption, they burn it down, we build anew. So like pretty incendiary. And I was, honestly, I was kind of surprised when I saw it because they have this affiliation with people like Barry Weiss, who is certainly not one to back down from controversies. Depending on how you view quote unquote wokeness, that's going to shade how you view the school. And like, if you think the school is

totally right and institutions are unfair to people who are to the right of center, then you probably see UATX's marketing materials and general aura online as being a welcome change. If you aren't, you're like, these guys are so opportunistic in this very serious moment, and they're also kind of trolling people.

I am trying to set aside my insufferable leftiness in talking about this story. It is interesting for that to come out at a time when like, I think Harvard just made an official decision that they would no longer take political stances on things publicly. Right. And I did talk to Pano and some of the other people about this like positioning. And they say, we're not taking issue with someone's argument. We're taking issue with the way it's

conveyed or the way it's expressed. Interesting. You can do with that what you will. You might think it's fair or not fair, but that's what they say. Can we talk about RFK? We sure can. RFK came to a sort of donor soiree that the school hosted during South by Southwest. He did a sit down conversation on stage and

And it didn't take that long for him to start talking about vaccines. And RFK noted vaccine skeptic. Read one scientific study.

and say, oh, autism is being caused by vaccines. I had to read hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies. Sort of interesting and maybe telling about the school was like, they say to stand for open inquiry and debate and discussion. So you have RFK Jr. on stage spouting off about vaccines. No one challenged that, any of his claims? This whole idea that we heard during COVID of trust the experts, that's not a thing.

I do think it's like with him, there is an element of like where to even start. That's true. If I heard him give a speech, I'd be like, what part of this do I even go for first? So to close this out, we're coming to the end of summer.

University of Austin has opened its fall enrollment. What kinds of students are interested in attending? Like who applied for this university? They got a pretty big applicant pool, right? Like a couple thousand people applied to this first hundred student class. I spoke to a

Two students, but I had a really longer conversation with one 18-year-old woman who got into Columbia. She got into really good schools. Girl. A lot of them are pretty high caliber students. Their tuition is paid, which is a big deal. Right. Yeah, free tuition goes a long way. Also, though, it's a small school and they've already established some sort of strategic partnerships. There's sort of a startup incubator that's a few blocks away that's pretty big here in Austin. And they're

they're sort of facilitating an exchange there. So like they're saying, hey, if you come here, you're going to get sort of the royal treatment because like there's only 100 of you. So we're going to really look after each of you. But the woman I talked to, she said that she wished she could have gone to school in New York. I don't know, like

A decade ago or something, because she says now it's like the most dangerous city in the world, which is sort of a conservative talking point that's demonstrably untrue. Yeah. And I mean, I wasn't my place to tell her, like, you should reconsider. So I didn't you know, I wasn't going to push back on that, really. Yeah. But, you know, Barry Weiss went to Columbia. Woke him up.

Barry Weiss, noted member of the woke mob. Woke mob was in the building. Yeah, exactly. Well, this was great, Max. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about this. Thanks for having me. We'll be back with Max for Keeping Tabs. But first, a quick break, followed by my interview with El Acoustic CEO, Laurent Vissi. ♪

Okay, we're back and now we're going to hear a conversation I had with El Acoustic CEO Laurent Vessi. We talk about how the 40-year-old company is still creating new innovations in sound design, especially at live events like concerts and plays. Laurent believes that sound quality and design is an underappreciated part of a production that when done well has the ability to create an immersive experience.

What we do is connecting the audience with the artist. And to do that, we create sound systems and methods of amplifying audio content so that the audience at a concert

in a theme park, in a sports venue, can really experience great audio and have an amazing experience. That makes a lot of sense. I was watching a movie from the 90s recently and realized how different it is to hear people walking in the background. So I think I have some sense of how important sound design here. Before your current role in business operations and strategy, you were mostly in R&D. How

How do you think about L Acoustics' global strategy? We start with the fundamentals with a mission. And our mission is, like I said, to connect the audience to the art and the performers through great sound.

So when we think about strategy, we think about, we don't really actually think about revenue growth. You know, we're a privately held company. So we kind of set our own strategy. We don't have external investors that we have to report to. But everything goes back to our mission and what markets and what sectors really value sound or where can we bring a better audio experience for the fans and the audience.

And wherever there is a shared experience, sound is involved and art is involved, then we try to see if our technologies can make that experience better. Our DNA comes from touring. You know, touring is where the company started.

The company invented the line array, which are the, you know, if you go to a concert today, you'll see the speaker bananas on each side of the stage, to put it simply. So our company invented that back in the 90s and changed kind of the way live sound was deployed at those concerts. And 50% of the major festivals use our systems, for example, and about 30% of

of the top 100 tours use our systems as well. But since then, we found a lot of other applications, whether it's in sports or it's in theaters and musical, and now even in hospitality, where sound matters. And we found out that if we apply our technologies and sometimes we saw small tuning or some small adjustments in electronics or software, we can elevate that experience as well.

What is your personal favorite project that you use Dell Acoustics on? Oh, wow. It's like asking me which one of my children do I prefer, right? Which child? I am asking you. Yep. Some projects are a little bit special because we've had such a long-term relationship. For example, you know, the Hollywood Bowl in LA. We started working with them back in 2004. So it's actually been 20 years. And it's been really great because we learn from each other. You know, we deployed...

new technologies at the ball and we learn from that as well. So that's kind of a special project. In terms of sound quality or connections and emotions, you know, a couple come to mind. I mean, the Adele residency in Las Vegas uses our latest immersive technology called ELISA. It's a fantastic show. I mean, she's amazing, of course. You know, it all starts with a performer. She's incredible and incredible to connect with

with the audience in a 4,000 seat venue. But the technology really enhances that. There's so much dynamic and so much movement without taking over the art, just enhancing it. It's a great, great experience. You know, I want to talk a little bit about Elisa. First of all, give us a broad overview of the technology, but then tell us how you partner with artists or is there kind of a dialogue with them? First of all, you know, Elisa, why Elisa? I'm

I mentioned the speaker bananas on each side of the stage, right? That's kind of the basic deployment that you find at most of the concerts today. Well, that's called a stereo deployment, right? You have a left and right speakers and that's great if you're

in the middle of the venue and you get the stereo image from those two speakers. But if you ever sat on the side of the venue or a little bit more in the back, you notice that actually what you hear is not what you see. The performer may be in the middle of the stage, but the sound may come from the right side of the stage. So that creates a bit of a disconnect.

And with ELISA, we actually reconnect what you see and what you hear by being able to position sound anywhere

anywhere you want across the stage or even around the audience. You know, you mentioned about hearing people walking behind you in movies. We kind of do that for live sound and live concert. So that's what ELISA does. It's kind of a canvas for music creators and music producers and artists to position sound in three dimensions the way they want. And so because of that, we've changed those discussions where sound used to be

very much a technical affair right the the artist yeah just wanted to know okay make sure the audience hears you know hears me and has a great time but now there's some creative questions that we have to ask the artist and the musical director in terms of you know where do you want sound to be that question sometimes shocks them but it's like what do you want sound to follow the artist when they move on stage you know do you want the lead guitar to be forward when there's a lead

Do you want the drums and the percussions to be narrow or wide? These are all questions that we don't have the answers to. We have the tools and we give them the options. But these are creative questions that the artist and their creative team need to answer. And when you're setting up at a Resorts World or First Avenue or whatever, are those permanent sound installations or do you just do it for those concerts? Tell me what that looks like.

So when it comes down to venues for concerts, live venues, usually in a venue that is from a few hundred seats to four to five thousand seats, the installation is permanent. So First Avenue, for example, have permanently installed systems that every artist is going to play on. We designed a system and installed it in a way that is going to be convenient for every artist.

And every artist is going to have a little bit of a different take on the content and how the sound is going to be played, especially at Results World.

But the canvas is the same. And when you get into the largest venues like arena size or stadium, that's when usually the system is being brought in and rented out for the show. And that's usually what is referred to as touring. You know, a partnership that has been pretty buzzy recently is your partnership with the Broadway show The Outsiders. It won a Tony Award for sound design. And actually, I want to bring in one of our producers, Blake, who got to go see it.

I figured we'd ask him a little bit about his experience, and then you can kind of talk us through the hyper-real immersive sound you used. Hi, Yasmin. Hi, Laurent. Nice to see you again. Good to see you too. Blake, tell us a little bit about what the sound design was like. I feel like anywhere the actors were on the stage, everything felt like it was in your face, in the middle, centered to you.

And we did a sound tour after the play. The sound designer, his first name is Cody, he showed us speakers all over the theater. He knows that most people who were watching the play were high school kids. He wanted to get their attention. And he's saying that they have short tenses fans. So the best way to do that is to create a soundscape that is very similar to their AirPods or earphones.

He said that there have been so many times of seeing high schoolers be on their phone while the play is going and then the play goes so that they put the phone down because they're like, oh, wow, this sounds amazing. That's crazy. Because they're hearing everything from all over the place. You don't even see the orchestra or the band that's playing. That's all like, I believe, underneath the stage. You're not seeing any of that stuff, but it sounds like it's right there. ♪

I'm curious, you know, technically what goes into transforming a space like this? And talk us through numbers too, you know, how expensive is it to install this many microphones in a theater? So for this show, Cody designed 200 speakers that were installed in the theater. So that's actually installed on a temporary basis. We will come down at the end of the show, which is traditional for Broadway. And we're going to be installing 200 speakers.

In terms of budget, it was not a lot more expensive. I believe we were between 10 to 20% more than a regular Broadway show. What's great with Elisa is that because you can position the sound anywhere across the stage...

When they start talking in dialogues, you have the actor's voice coming from where he is on stage right and the actor on stage left coming from. So right away, you know who is talking and your brain doesn't have to do that connection. So that's a big help in terms of making it natural and feel like if you were in a much smaller theater where you would actually hear the actual voices of the actors without amplification.

Anytime, like the main character of the story, like Ponyboy, anytime he would get hurt, he'd get kicked in the face by a Sosh or the opposite gang squad. You would feel the ringing or you would hear the ringing of what happened to him. So it would signify, oh, he got, he blacked out. Like he's not here anymore. Or one of my favorite times of the sound being used is when he was being drowned. Yeah.

He's being drowned in a well. And anytime he would come up for air, you would hear all the fight choreography, what's going on. His friends trying to help him out while the opposite rival gang is drowning him. Anytime they would dunk his head back in the water, you sound like you're drowning with him. It's like you're right there with him. Gotcha. Absolutely. Yeah, those are two great examples of sound effects.

that are enhancing the show without being gimmicky at all. But it was so, so well done. I mean, you started out as a touring company and artists are using Elisa on tour like Bon Iver. Tell me about how those partnerships come about. You know, are you pitching them to artists or artists asking for it? Who actually ends up paying you the money, I guess? We're still in the early phase of adoption. And what we're seeing is touring is all about being in and out of a venue very quickly, right? So artists

It's all about efficiency. It's all about truck space. It's all about, you know, budget in a way. So we've seen the adoption the fastest is in the residencies that you mentioned. You know, it's Katy Perry or Carrie Underwood at Results World. It's Adele. You know, it's ABBA in London. So it always goes up to the artists. Some are more involved than others in the technology, but it always goes back to artists.

Okay, do you want to do this? And how do you want your music to be experienced? Touring is obviously not the most sustainable practice, but you all practice something called green touring, according to your website. And I'm curious what that is.

In our core, since the very beginning, have been a company that was green before green. We use 46% of recycled components in our speakers. The idea of transporting a large amount of equipment into trucks and on planes is something that we take seriously and we try to find solutions. When we invented the line array, that had a huge impact already on the amount of equipment that was being transported.

And now we just launched a new generation of speakers, which is 30% less weight and half of the truck space. So when we launched it last year, the first tour was Ellen Fisher in Germany, and they were able to reduce the number of trucks by two.

carrying half of the weight and the volume of a typical tour while maintaining the same, even better audio experience. So that's the first step. It's reducing the weight, reducing the volume of the sound system so that when they have to be carried from one venue to the other, it's a lot more efficient and more green. For the larger venues, there's also the possibility of sourcing locally the systems.

and avoiding having to transport the systems from city to city eventually, but at least from continent to continent. And today we've solved actually that problem because we have a network of 400 companies that have systems locally and bands and artists today rarely transport a system from Europe to America, for example, or America to Asia. You know, they'll tour with trucks in Europe or they'll tour with a truck in...

the US, but when they go to Europe, they don't fly it anymore. They used to fly the system across. Do you see yourself doing more sound design for theme parks? Do you see yourself doing more Broadway shows? What are some of the sort of areas that you're growing your business in? Of course, there are new markets that we're going after, but I think more generally what we realized because the company is celebrating its 40-year anniversary this year is that we've been on a journey to create the best shared sound experience.

But there's still some things that prevent us from having a great experience. If you've been listening to a concert in a sports arena, for example, the effect of the venue and the space, the acoustics of the space has a big impact on. And when artists tour, they know that, you know, some venues will sound better than others, even though it's the same artist and it's the same equipment. So those variables of controlling the acoustics and controlling the quality of the experience is important.

really what we're going to try to focus on and having a fully holistic experience for concerts but also for wellness in hospitality whether it's in cruise ship it's in sports but we would love to be able to get to a point where the

the sound experience meets certain standards. Just like the movie theaters, in a way, you know, have come to establish a standard. There's no standard for live concerts today. We're always surprised that sound is an underrated standard.

sensory experience. You know, we take it for granted in many ways, but we feel that more and more spatial audio is taking over, you know, with Apple Music. And I think the new generation is more and more exposed to what sound can be and how spatial audio can enhance the experience. As long as, again, there's a shared experience and audio is valued and we can bring a better experience, I think we're going to be there. Is there any band or artist, historical or current, that you are dying to work with?

Or that you would have loved to work with personally? One of the...

historical artists that we worked with that was the first one to take our flagship system was Radiohead. That's been a band that I've always liked personally and that worked closely with us. And for some reason, you know, maybe with the timing, because then Tom York started doing their own thing, and Elisa was taking off, but we never worked with them on Elisa. So that would have been fantastic because

The other one I have to mention, because I know it probably, unfortunately, won't happen, but it's will be Pink Floyd. And we've done David Gilmour's tour, but they were so advanced in terms of how they approach sound already in the 70s in terms of the specialization of their content.

It would have been great to work with them on this. For the little anecdote, it's after going to a concert of Pink Floyd that our founder, Christian L., decided to start at Acoustic. So it would be a four-circle kind of moment. Well, this was great, Laurent. Thank you for coming on the show. Thanks a lot for having me.

Okay, we are back with Max, and it's time to wrap up the show with Keeping Tabs. This is where each one of us shares a story, trend, or piece of pop culture we've been following. And Max, since you're our guest, what are you keeping tabs on? I am keeping tabs on the rolling endorsements coming in for Vice President Kamala Harris. Most recently, the Obamas endorsed her. I did see that video. She was like, oh my God, you're both there. You know?

Fun aunt vibes. Yes. As maybe like less glamorous, but kind of interesting. Don Davis, who is a centrist Democrat who had condemned her handling of the southern border, also endorsed her earlier today, I think, which, you know, just shows like.

The party has really fallen in line here. Yeah. They're all back in there. And it makes sense. Not much time left before the convention. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? I have to talk about it. We got to talk about couches and shady things.

So for those of you who haven't been online, it's important to say that this is not based in fact, but someone fabricated a... Not based in fact, as far as we know. Someone fabricated a fake section of writing in Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance's book that described J.D. Vance having sexual relations with a couch and...

And it's just kind of caught fire online. And there's memes and fan cam edits. Twitter has never been better. It's just really funny. All of the different edits. And it got to the point where then the AP...

put out an article that was one of their debunking fact-checking articles. The headline was, No, J.D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. And then people saw that and that started going viral. And then the AP took down that article, which just strides and affected the whole thing even more.

It's just incredible. It's so wild. The AP said they didn't know how the story was published. They say it didn't go through the editing process. So maybe some rogue AP employee thought it was funny. Who's a legend, by the way. Yeah. So good. That's wild. I mean, it's insane, but I think it's almost like the least of J.D. Vance's worries, his rollout as...

The VP pick, particularly with the switch to Kamala as the nominee, has just not gone well. He's had polls come out where his approval rating is like quite bad and even lower in where he's from in Ohio and in Appalachia area states.

And there's other reports now that apparently Trump is considering dumping him as the VP nominee. I don't think those are actually real or going to happen or can happen, but still. Do you feel like the last week or two on X has felt like old school Twitter? It has, I think. Yeah, it has felt like old school Twitter for the first time in a while. And that's nice to see and not good for humanity. Yeah.

It seems like everyone's just being goofy right now. Yeah. In a really nice way. Because there's so much material.

Totally. For both candidates. Yeah, it's all the way. It's the meme election. It truly is. Yaz, what are you keeping tabs on? As some listeners may know, I am like a diehard Minions fan. It's my biggest boomer trait. I read a sad interview about the Minions. Like, I read a sad interview with the Despicable Me writers, and he said that

The Minions movies are implanted memories, so Minions don't have to face the fact that they were created in a lab, which is really dark. Oh, God. That said, the one part of the Minions canon that remains hilarious to me is the fact that they help every villain in history, and then they get stuck in an Arctic cave for 150 years so that they didn't have to help Hitler. I was actually about to ask, do they? No, so they get stuck in the Arctic during that time.

They helped Dracula. They were cool with Genghis Khan. Yeah, that's also, that's a crazy concept. Because, okay, sure, a hundred years, you get to like skip the Hitler bits, but there's still a lot of

dictators who had a real impact on like people's grandparents lives that you're saying the minions yeah just like Pol Pot exactly the minions are famously really bad at helping people like they accidentally kill Dracula because they try and surprise him on his birthday and he gets burned by the sun that's pretty funny you know

I feel like they didn't need to explain the lore at this. They could have just been like, they're cute yellow dudes that helped this Steve Carell dude. Yeah. Once you start saying, like, they weren't there with Hitler, then you're in trouble. Like...

And also putting the despicable me world in the context of the world. You can just be like, no, there's nothing bad that happens. Hitler doesn't have to exist in the despicable me world. It's true. Anyway, I love them. And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Max, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.

Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, editing by Julia Xu, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.