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June 9, 2024Pastor Matt KendrickBecoming the Church We Hope to BeLuke 7:34-50In an age of division… Jesus has placed us here- to bless…- to give mercy…- to be agents of reconciliation…- to give a cup of water to the thirsty…- to welcome the lonely…But… That's who He is… Jesus accepts people. Jesus welcomesevery kind of person.Jesus always made the party better.If we own the mission of accepting people like Jesus did andoffering them forgiveness from God…- Take a step.- Build a bridge.- Make an invitationThank you for listening!For more info on Redemption City Church check out our website.If you'd like to connect with us further, please fill out a Connection Card and one of our staff will get in touch with you.Follow us on on social media: Instagram, Facebook and YouTubeThank you for listening!For more info on Redemption City Church check out our website. If you'd like to connect with us further, please fill out a Connection Card and one of our staff will get in touch with you.Follow us on on social media: Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Dal Vangelo secondo Marco Mc 9,41-50In quel tempo, Gesù disse ai suoi discepoli:« Chiunque vi darà da bere un bicchiere d'acqua nel mio nome perché siete di Cristo, in verità io vi dico, non perderà la sua ricompensa. Chi scandalizzerà uno solo di questi piccoli che credono in me, è molto meglio per lui che gli venga messa al collo una macina da mulino e sia gettato nel mare. Se la tua mano ti è motivo di scandalo, tagliala: è meglio per te entrare nella vita con una mano sola, anziché con le due mani andare nella Geènna, nel fuoco inestinguibile ».  Il vangelo di oggi ha strane affermazioni che, se prese letteralmente, causano perplessità nella gente che le ascolta. Prima di tutto, Gesù ci porta l'esempio di chi offre da bere un bicchiere d'acqua a un altro. Mette avanti la carità che dovrebbe caratterizzare ordinariamente ogni cristiano. Non agire secondo quella logica sarebbe dunque un motivo di scandalo. Letteralmente tradotta come una pietra lungo il cammino o nella scarpa, lo scandalo per noi è ogni azione che allontana una persona dal buon cammino e gli impedisce d'incontrare Cristo. Scandalizzare i piccoli è essere la ragione per cui quei piccoli si allontanano dal buon cammino e perdono la fede in Dio. Ecco allora che ci viene ribadita l'importanza della fermezza nelle scelta. Tagliare e gettare via sono azioni che significano che il fedele di Cristo deve essere radicale nella sua scelta di Dio e del vangelo, confidando sempre nel suo sostegno nei momenti di debolezza. È così che potremo essere il sale che porta pure la pace dove manca. Buongiorno.  D. Arthur.

In a dynamic discussion, Tim Sweet and seasoned software engineer Dan Löfquist explore the intersection of technology and leadership in today's dynamic landscape. They discuss the need to adapt and stay flexible to meet innovation head-on. They highlight the importance of leaders who embrace change and foster collaboration across generations. This episode is for any leader having doubts about how to navigate the complexities of leadership in the digital era.Tim and Dan also discuss the imperative for leaders to adapt and embrace uncertainty amidst a rapidly changing world. They touch upon topics such as generational differences in the workplace, the evolving role of technology, and the value of transparent communication. Drawing from Dan's experience as a consultant, they share the significance of modular thinking and delegation to navigate complex challenges. Together, they reflect on the shifting paradigms of work and advocate for prioritizing empathy and collaboration in driving organizational success.About Dan LöfquistDan Löfquist is a seasoned consultant and principal at Input Consulting in Stockholm, boasting nearly 40 years of combined experience in software development, banking, finance, and the travel industry. With a strong foundation in systems design and a relentless drive for innovation, Dan brings unparalleled expertise to the forefront of modern technology and leadership. His extensive background equips him with the skills needed to guide organizations through complex technological transitions, optimize systems for efficiency, and foster a culture of innovation and growth.--Contact Tim Sweet | Team Work Excellence: WebsiteLinkedIn: Tim SweetInstagramLinkedin: Team Work ExcellenceContact Dan Löfquist |  Input Consulting: Linkedin: Dan Löfquist--Transcript:Dan 00:02It's very important how you design your system, you basically have very small parts of your system that can connect together to make a feature, for example. So, if you have an order system, you have one little part that deals with a client or the customer, you have one little part that deals with the history of the orders and one little part that deals with what happens when the customer do an order. So, you have to break it down in very small bits, which makes changes much easier. Tim 00:35Do you rely on others to set a vision and then get them what they need so that they can achieve something they never would be able to do on their own? Whether or not you formally lead a team. If this sounds like you, then you, my friend, are the definition of a leader. And this show is all about bringing you new insights from real people that you've never been exposed to. So, you can grow and increase your impact on the world and feel more fulfilled while you're doing it. I'm Tim Sweet. Welcome to the Sweet on Leadership Podcast, episode 32. Tim 01:09Welcome back, everybody. Thank you very much for joining us for another edition of Sweet on Leadership. If you haven't joined us yet and this is your first time, we are all about bringing exciting insights from leaders around the world. And they come from very different backgrounds. Today, I have Dan Löfquist in front of me, Dan, thanks very much for joining me. I really appreciate it. Dan 01:31Oh, you're welcome. I'm glad to be here. Tim 01:34Dan, you are a principal with Input Consulting in Stockholm. That Correct? Dan 01:39That is correct. Yes. Tim 01:41What else would you like people to know about you and where you find yourself professionally? Dan 01:45I am a software engineer the base of it. And I've been working with software development, almost 40 years. And I still look this young. Tim 02:00We'll make sure that we have a portrait in the show notes. So, go check it out if you're listening over audio. Dan, also comes to us because your partner is our very good friend, Debbie Potts. Dan 02:15That's correct. Tim 02:17So, if you're wondering what the connection is, there, we are all one big happy family. What really excites me about talking to anybody that deals with complex systems is that that knowledge transfers over into their perceptions of business and organizations and leadership. And it's if you have people like this in your life, I would really encourage you to bring people like Dan into conversations that don't involve just software or IT or anything like that, because they can handle complex relationships and networks. And so Dan, I'm super excited to have you bring your insight into this forum. Dan 03:01I'm glad. I hope I can bring some knowledge to you. Tim 03:04Well, we've had several conversations now and I am not worried. I have a lot of fun. Before we get going here though, we've got a little tradition that's been evolving here on the podcast. Dan a previous guest will always offer up an out-of-the-blue question to break the ice. And today's question comes from Anna Morgan. Her question for you would be what is one thing that you know, will pay back in the next year, will have immediate benefit within the next year if you were to pull the trigger on it? But you may have been avoiding. Does that sound like anything familiar to you? Dan 03:47That's a very good question. Thanks, Anna. We have just moved to the countryside in Sweden, we are living very close to the sea. And obviously, you need a boat. We've been talking about this for a very long time. But something comes up blah, blah, blah, and we procrastinated a lot. So, we finally decided to get the boat. We both know it will benefit us tremendously over the years. Especially, when we have so lovely summers here in Sweden warm and nice. So yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be great. So, that's the thing. Tim 04:26You mentioned something seemed to always get in the way. Why do we think that things? Why do we think that life finds a way to interfere with these obviously, you know, important and beneficial decisions? Dan 04:42Oh, that's a good one. Prior to station I guess it is you prioritize sometimes, right and sometimes you do it wrong. Sometimes because it's convenient to go that way or the other way. You don't always do the right thing even though you know it's the right thing to do. Tim 05:00Right on, there'll always be another fire to fight. Or there might be a place of safety. That might be suspect. All right, right on, I think this is gonna bode well as we go forward on some of the questions that I've got for you. Of late, Dan, I've noticed that the community on both sides of the pond, we have seen this type of switch, we're at this sort of intersection, when it comes to technology where, in my estimation, years ago, when I would be deployed to help process and change teams, tackle, say, large ERP deployments or big systems deployments, it was always about solidifying these great big systems so that nobody could object to them, and that they were ubiquitous across organizations. And the challenge then, when you tried to make change to them was that they were very difficult to change. But now it's like we're in this almost schizophrenic relationship with technology where things are much more fractured and modular and paces is quickening. So, that's what I'm seeing from the outside and what I see my clients dealing with, do you share that experience? How would you categorize sort of the situation we're in today and what it means for businesses and large institutions and society at large?  Dan 06:27Ooh, that's an interesting question. That's pretty much my life, what I'm doing daily. So, if we're going to take some perspective on it, if we look, historically, in the beginning, when I started to work with computers, people had actually white robes in the computer central's, so a lot of things have changed. Computers back then were very complex, big, noisy, and you couldn't do much compared to what you could do today with a computer. To build a system was a complex thing, it took time, it took effort, when you have built it there was there, basically and you couldn't do much about it.  Tim 07:04It was like a big refrigerator or hundreds of refrigerators sitting in the middle of the floor. Dan 07:09Oh, yeah, or a big heater. But today, we are facing a different problem, not necessarily problems, but challenges. And that's because the technology has changed so quick and fast. It is a very aggressive to the I don't know really where it's gonna end. But we are all in a transition state, it is never going to end, it's just going to continue to evolve, which means we can make the systems that are more agile and follow the changes in the companies. And so it's going fast now. Tim 07:58I've used both PC and Mac. And I think back to in the day, we used to say that we would have risk or sisk-based designs. And my layman's understanding was that Apple followed a, what is it, a complex design a sisk with a C, but it was really more around software, rather than the hardware. The hardware would be robust, and flexible, but software was what was going to make the performance differences versus the, you know, Windows and UNIX environments where they were really much more around technologically dependent, you know, processing speed and these kinds of things. Maybe that's a layman's understanding. I don't know if that's even relevant anymore. But. Dan 08:44No, it is still relevant. I mean, if you look at Apple today, they both the hardware and the software, managed to merge them together in a very nice way. It has benefits, go with hardware and software from Apple. Obviously, their hardware is modular and changeable, because the hardware also evolves and things get smaller and easier to change and pgrade. And so yeah, absolutely. Tim 09:20I bring this up, because when we had these big server rooms and mainframes and we were installing, as you say, heaters, that people would heat their buildings off their server rooms, the hardware still there, obviously. And it's still complex. And yes, it's getting smaller. And yes, it's getting faster. For many people, it's almost faded into the background. And for my kids, everything is app-based. And this transcends not just to their devices, but even how they approach their lives. They have long-term gratification versus immediate gratification. And, you know, when we're on our phone and we want something to do something, we install an app and now all of a sudden the phone can do this thing. But when it's ourselves, we have to do the work and develop the skill. And there's a much longer runway in order to make something happen. But the general feeling within society now, and not just in technology, but feels like things are immediate, we want them now, we want them to be flipped on. It's a zero to a one, immediately a real digital relationship, and that we lose sight of the gray, the servers in the backroom, you know, everything that goes between our need and satisfaction of that need. And I see that in our kids. But is that something that enters your head, your mind? And do you see that in the client relationship as well? Dan 10:46Absolutely, I mean, we all live in a society where you need instant gratification. If you look at the Instagram, all kinds of social media, it's a fix, an instant fix. But there is always backends in all apps, they all big machines in the backroom, doing all the processing for you. But it is challenging because people are getting used to having information at their fingertips, they can pretty much do everything with the phone today. It's no difference. I'm old school that way. I mean, I use phones, to pretty much everything. But some certain tasks, I want the computer, I just need to get into that headspace and just sit and do my thing on the computer. And then I can continue on my phone. I mean, the younger generation, they don't have that problem or that hinder. It's a natural part of their life, they have no luggage when it comes to well, we couldn't do that. Because there was no internet or anything. They don't have that limitation. Yes, it's there. They expect everything to just work instantly. To get answers instantly, or whatever they need or tasks that need to do. It's fascinating to see young people today using their phones or devices because they're using it in such a different way than you and me are doing because it's just fascinating to see how humans evolve. If you say, get used to technology in a very easy way, it's very easy to get used to technology because it solves so many problems for us. But we don't have to move that much. Because we just need to lift our hand and the problem is solved. Instead of back in the day, you had to come up and do make a phone call. Tim 12:47Go to the library, check the encyclopedia. Dan 12:53Yeah, exactly. And that transpires into how companies around today. I mean, there is a difference between old companies and new companies. Old companies, so usually, they have that baggage, so they live throughout generations, while new companies, startups, they start from a fresh start. They start how people are using their devices today and how people are interacting the day. That's different. Tim 13:19For sure. When I'm working with startups, and they're young leadership teams, they definitely have more of the millennial bend to them. I remember doing generational work 20 years ago, where we thought the Gen Y were right in behind Gen X was going to eventually wake up and figure out that, you know, there's the real world and then there's the digital world, there's the online world that they would eventually get mortgages and kids and they would become like us. And it was a massive miscalculation. Because they don't think that way. They still don't think that way. In fact, if anything, Gen X Nexus, they've moved towards the Gen Y and even the millennial ways of thinking. And when we see younger workers and the younger generations and their relationship with technology, you and I were raised where technology was separate from us, we had to sit down and engage with it. Although, I don't think this is always true, because my phone is pretty sewn to my hand at this point. It's slowly meshing but for young people, their phone is an integrated part of their personality. It's an integrated part of the body almost, it's a sensory organ in many ways. It's a logic center and a decision center of the brain in many ways, to the point where they're lost without it and it sounds Orwellian. But at the same time, they're finding a healthy relationship with it where we see threat. My son just produced an album. And he did it after he had had a knee injury, and it kept him from dance. And he's relentlessly creative. So, he sat down, and within an hour, he said, Dad, I can't take this sitting around, I'm nervous. I said, Well, what's at the root of it, it was creativity. So, work on your music, he sat down and wrote an album, he just, it just went up on Apple this week and Spotify. And it's going viral, which is really interesting. He did the whole thing from an iPad. You know, I played in lots of bands, we rented studio space, we worked hard and practiced our songs. He's produced an album, and it's good. It's not garbage. It's like it's a first shot. But there's a couple of songs on there that are real bangers, and they're worth it. So when I wanted to support him, I said, Well, what do we need? You know, do we need to get you an interface? And do we need to get you a computer setup? And do we need to get you all of these things, and he's like, Oh, I wouldn't mind a larger surface. But other than that, I'm good. I want it to stay tactile, I want it to stay in this environment that I understand. And he doesn't want the technology to interfere with his creative process at all. He just wants to be able to transmit his vision into something quickly. He's got a quick and dirty style anyway. But get it in there and create and paint on this thing without having to worry about the learning or worry about, you know what I mean? So, he's just working in this intuition, intuitive space. And it's really interesting. And I don't know if I would have been the same way. I don't know. Dan 16:46I don't know. It's like cutting out the middle hand, which is technology. And they go directly to being creative and stuff because they have the right tool for it. The hardware and the software is there today to be able to do these things, which releases people from dealing with the technology because that's always been taught. And it's complex. And it takes time to learn. And, as you said, interface, and cables, and blah, blah, blah, keyboards and all that is all there. And as he rightfully stated, It needs more screen mistakes, to do more things.  Tim 17:23Well, at one point, he's got this creative vision and this intense sense of control on the outcome. But the flip side, it's like he doesn't need physical or tactile control, he doesn't need, in fact he's very flexible. If something's not working, he just turns on a dime. And so my next question for you is around, in your work, and when you see organizations or leaders with their relationship with technology, what is the sense of control that you see various people crave or try to exert? And does that vary depending on their relationship with their technology? Or perhaps their generation? What's the need for control? And how does that show up? Dan 18:09Oh, that can show up in so many different ways. But mostly is based on age, it tells this like that older generations are bound to a certain technology. And they know that technology very well. And they don't want to move away from it, or they feel comfortable in doing what they do in their bubble, if you like. That's the control need, because they need to be able to control what they're doing. That's how they are brought up. They, that's what the school taught them. And that's how early work life taught them how to be. And so it's hard to break out and think outside the box that you are in that compartment. But there are obviously, people that managed to balance between both worlds. Those are the gems, those are the ones you need to take care of, in an organization. The younger generation that has no problem whatsoever to try, new things or not scared of failing, or because it's part of the process. Because if you find something that doesn't work, then you throw it out and try something else that does work. Tim 19:24Right, whether it's their attention span or just the speed at which these things happen. They don't live in failure very long. They don't know. They don't let it attach to them. They don't– Dan 19:35I don't think they see failure as a failure. They see failure as a way of learning and move forward. Tim 19:46Problem solve. Well, I'm going to start squeezing your brain for some precise thoughts here as you're saying that the younger generation doesn't have an issue with change or with control as much. Immediately the words that jumped to my part yeah, except for they've got an issue with the older generation sometimes and vice versa. So, when you see these gems, the ones that are able to either older or younger, bridge this gap, what is the skill or mindset that an older leader needs to have present in order to, that you have witnessed, what were what would be some of those attributes that allow them to function well, in this new, more flexible world? Dan 20:27I think you need to be open-minded in that sense that you need to allow people to do their work at their best ability, as they know themselves can do it the best. It's very hard for someone to tell someone, you need to do it in this certain way. We need it to be done in those certain terms of jobs. That doesn't work anymore. While it does work but it's starting to change. Yeah, I would open mind. It's probably the biggest skill you need. Tim 21:06So, to clarify a little bit. Would you say that that would be like being open-minded about how it gets done? You know, years ago, when we were doing process focus versus task focus, we would encourage the leaders to say be outcome-focused, like, what is the outcome you're looking for, the quality you're looking for? That should come first before we talk about how we're going to get there. Strategy and outcome before structure and process, right? So, for the older generation to be open-minded and a little less offended by new ideas of how to do things, maybe. Dan 21:44Yeah, that's the trick.  Tim 21:47It is. Well, it's even with parents, right? What bothers us with children, and new ideas, new ways of doing things is it offends our sense of order in the world. And we take it as an offence because that's not the way things work. Who says you've got a monopoly on the way things work? Right?  Dan 22:09Yeah, exactly. When you build systems, just going back to systems, when you build systems back in the day, you started to build a system. And you said, Okay, this system is going to do X, Y, Zed. And then even if the requirements were changing over the process of, I don't know, five years it took to build the system. That was kind of the standard back then. And even if the requirements changes, they were so complex that they couldn't change it. So, when they eventually was released, it still was not exactly what they wanted anyway, so it was a way of time. But now you can change during the project. And it's very common that you do, you start up, okay, we're going to reach this goal. But halfway through, no we're going to change and we're going to pivot to that. You can do that now, with people and technology, which is great, very rewarding to work in projects like that.  Tim 23:08Do you think that modularization in a sense, is part of that where it's, if the outcome changes mid-project, it's much more granular like we can talk about not having to change this big end to end, interdependent system that we can't remove part Q without, you know, screwing up part P, and things can just be swapped out a lot easier? One solution for another? It almost feels like without even realizing it. Everything now is almost an app approach. And as you're talking here, I'm thinking about now. And the next question I was gonna ask you is, what mindset does the younger leader, the more modern thinker need to keep in mind in order to play nice and get the best out of the older leader? Or the older colleague, or worker? Dan 24:03Yeah, that's a good one as well. That's very person-dependent. Because as we talked about earlier, it's can be a little bit friction between the generations. I mean, in the same way, the younger leaders is that a little bit of understanding. Also, the older people have a lot of experience, a lot of experience and they know what to do and what not to do. Take advantage of that. They're also trying to wean them into a new way of thinking. Don't surprise them with it, but just ease them into it. From my experience, it works quite well. Tim 24:51Yeah, I think if we can, when you say know what to do and what not to do, older workers and more experienced workers, thought leaders, managers, whatnot, they have a deeper understanding of the potential risks and threats that are out there, you know, threats that we need to mitigate opportunities that we need to exploit. If we can decouple the how, from all of this, that seems to be, again, where people are getting stuck is in that control space, that how are you going to go do that, within reason, I mean, there still has to be order. So, to bring us up to speed here, we've got, we're in this period of great robust change, we've got rules that have been altered, we have a new way of working, we have a new way of thinking, we have a new relationship with technology. And as such, we've got new risks that come up, when we try to exert too much control, or we're too resistant to change, we talked about the younger generation being not as scared of failing, not having the same relationship with failure, and seeing it as much more of a stepping stone or something that was temporary versus defining. Although, in my experience, I see sometimes that is a source of conflict. To what degree is your shame sticking, some leaders are very unnerved when a person doesn't feel deep and lasting shame or guilt. And it's not a real positive thing. So, and we talked about the mindset that needs to go into this. How harmful and how costly can a lack of this confidence and ability to connect in an organization ve when you're trying to guide somebody through rapid change or needed change? Dan 26:58It's sometimes it's problematic because a big organization is just not one person is many departments and usually when you are running a project, you need to speak to a lot of departments, some departments are more pro-change, there's some not and it can be quite harmful for the company as a whole when very simple thing can't be solved because of people are not playing ball basically. That is a tricky situation to end up being. I've been in that kind of situation many times. And it takes a lot of communication, a lot of meetings and explanations, but eventually, you kind of reach a compromise. It's all about compromises, really. Tim 28:00When we see that behaviour of having to have meetings in order for people to get comfortable. And I do a lot of work in higher Ed and they refer to the collegial mindset and these kinds of things. It's working out the risks and making sure that everybody's heard and that degree of comfort. And I remember, you had said something in a previous conversation to me that really stuck. In my world, a phrase that I use is all change means loss, right? Change means losing something, saying goodbye to something, something dying. And you had said that, that loss at times can be the the feeling of expertise. And so if I'm thinking about departments or silos in an organization where one doesn't want to change and the other is ready, there's usually something in that silo that they're losing control of, or they're losing expertise over. Can you talk a little bit about that, about the idea of our relationship with our own expertise and how we can be flexible with that? Dan 29:14Yeah. You have to have an open mindset because things are gonna change whether you like it or not like it, you can't control it, you can't do anything about it. So, the best thing you can do is to embrace change. It is daunting, and it's scary to do that because you let go of something and you let go of some control. But on the other hand, you can gain control from something else instead. That's how I see closes. That's how I tried to be myself. I mean, I can't stick to old things that doesn't work. It doesn't make me happy and I can't do my job properly. So, I need to adjust and to learn new things, new processes, new techniques or whatnot. In order to move forward, I think you have to have that mindset. And also, it's good for you. Because if you are in your comfort zone, nothing fun or exciting is going to happen, every day is going to look the same. In order to have some kind of excitement in your life, or in your workplace, or anywhere, you need to step out of that comfort zone, because the amazing things happen outside. But it's a scary place, but it's very rewarding if you're there. Tim 30:42Yeah, there's, I remember years ago, that whole idea of letting go. And at the same time, I remember when I decided to really get real about what I can control and what I can control. That was it's a liberating thing. But I would ask you to take us back into the archives here, Dan, as you were developing, 40 years of experience, there would have been, I would imagine, there would have been a time where at least you realized this happened. Or maybe it was a specific event, where this idea of gaining control by giving up control so that you could find that authenticity, so that you could struggle less with trying to move things that you couldn't, can you take us back into your history and give us a bit of an anecdote of when that happened to a younger Dan. Dan 31:36A younger Dan. Well, it happens all the time, daily with me. I think I was working at a big bank in Sweden. I was stuck in between mainframes, the old water-cooled mainframes and the new pieces that just came out from IBM. So, I remember transitioning into doing more work with PC because I thought that's more, it seems to solve problems easier than to have to deal with the mainframe. So, that was, I think that was the big work-related shift of losing control that I can remember. Yeah, I was right. Tim 32:18And just being really comfortable with what you didn't learn in school, in a way, right? Dan 32:22Yeah, exactly. That's the same thing because you learn one thing in school and when you graduate, it's old ready? Tim 32:31Yeah. So, fixing one's expertise to a certain how of doing things might be, and I'm reflecting on my own space. Now, I mean, my success is because I bring a deep toolbox and lots of experience, but I never get married to the how we're going to do something. This is a little different in the consulting space. But you know, like, just in the last two years, I would meet with clients, I can put together a pretty good agenda. You know, I know how to structure an agenda. I used to teach, you know, meeting skills. And well, there's a reason why we have a very structured rigid agenda. So, I'm very good at this. And then I realized that when I'm working with these executive teams in these complex issues, or I'm working with a team that's under crisis, or are a leader that I need to be listening to, if I start with my agenda, I'm in a way impeded, and I'm done. Because until I get in the room, and I do a lot of prework, but until I get into the room, I don't know exactly what's going to happen. So, I have to be able to spin on a dime. And so, man, I didn't think I was gonna go here. But I literally had conversations with clients where I was like, they would be like, where's the agenda, and I'm like, I don't use an agenda anymore. I have a series of outcomes that we are going to strive for, and that I'm going to promise. But if I told you, I knew what minute of the two days, we're going to be working on a certain thing, and that we're definitely going to use that tool. And that's the thing we're going to be using. I would be lying to you. And I mean, because I have too often started down the road and within the first 10 minutes, the agenda is out the window, then what do you do? And so I abandoned that sense of control early on. That relationship with how we define our expertise then around being enough and trusting ourselves that we're going to be able to, you know, forward into the unknown. It's something that the older generation has to redefine in many ways and the younger generation seems to be doing literally out of hand, right? Just– Dan 34:50Yeah, no real different ways to approach things in life. I mean, for me as a consultant, I have the experience. I've been working for a long time in both banks, finances and being in the travel industry, all that knowledge that I have accumulated throughout the years with travel, for example, that's the business learning, that I know their business inside and out. And I can apply that to whatever technology there is. That is we're going to use to solve a problem today. So, that never goes away. I still have that knowledge with me. But I can adapt that into whatever technology is being used. That's keeping the best of both worlds. That's why it's so important for the younger people to tap into that knowledge in the older people. Tim 35:46Well, that's why we as Gen X can say, with a great deal of or great lack of humility, we're the best generation there's ever going to be. Yeah, because we're on. I don't think that's going to hold true. But anyway, I think it's interesting, though, and especially when we turn this towards the needs of many of my listeners, which are going to be struggles around hiring and retention, struggles around that we have a different level of willing capacity or discretionary performance that showing up in the workplace right now. And also, we've always talked about for years now, we've talked about entitlement and things like this with younger workers. But this is all fitting together for me in the sense that the older workers right now, the older generation in the professional areas, was the importance of the resume and all of the experience that they're bringing into it. And of course, that is practically important. I'm not disputing that. But we have younger workers that come in, and they don't think they're being in many cases, they don't put the same weight into their experience. They feel you're hiring them, they feel you're hiring their potential, they feel you're hiring, they're whether you think of it as confidence, or whatever it is, but you're hiring them or hiring the person, not the resume. And so there's a great deal of confusion when you sort of say, well, you need to cut your teeth or a statement like that, what you need to do, you know, you need to pay your dues and spend your time. And I wouldn't say that it's outside their thinking, they know what it means and it's not a problem with them. It's that the answer is somewhere in between. Because what we want them to learn today, depending on the role, could potentially be obsolete tomorrow. And so we need that speed of learning. We need that ability to be nimble, and to be responsive. And actually, here's maybe not the most politically correct way to think about younger employees. But what would happen, and this is me musing now, what would happen if we treated the employee more like the app we need to put on our phone and say, or even we use that language with them? Your role is like an app that we need to install, and we need it to do certain things. Perhaps we could get a different level of independent work slash relationship with the work. I never thought I'd go down that path, but it's definitely, do they think of themselves in the app, right?  Dan 38:37Yeah, no, I mean, as a consultant, you are the hired short-term.Tim 38:44Oh, yeah, Ronald Gun. Dan 38:38So, you're an app, unless you're doing a very good job and stay wherever the company happens, yeah, you are an app, basically, because the employee needs help with a certain task, bringing that expertise and do the thing and teach the other employees and then leave. Tim 39:07Okay, so this now we're at a really interesting point, because you and I have the bias in this room right now that we're both in a sense, you know, keep what you kill, run and gun consultants in the sense that, we go in and we help people with no long term expectations to be holding them hostage, or around for a long time, we're there to fix problems. And hopefully, they call us back when they've got the next problem. Right? But we make our name based on our results and on the relationships we keep. This is a small portion of the population that is able to function in this way. I would say we have sort of a Buddhist philosophy in employment, Buddhists is the wrong way to go. But it's temporary. It's a Mandela, right? We know it's going to change. It's meant to be swept away. My experience with the working layer in professionals, the bulk of the population does not feel really comfortable with that level of open risk. Right? Yeah, absolutely. How does that stability translate for the older and the younger generations? And I think it's really, it's a question that's worth asking. And I think I'm inspired by you to go and ask it. Dan 40:25Yeah, no, as I said before, we're older, well for us. The good CV meant everything that was the most important that was the paper that you meant something, I've done this, I can use this paper to get a job or that I mattered that I accomplished things. For the younger generation doesn't matter. Because they just want to work with fun things and get paid. And also we were bound to stay with the same employee for years. Because you did that, you didn't job hope in any shape or form, because that was looked down on. Someone changed job within two years that, oo what's wrong with that person? And now it's the opposite. Why have you worked with that employee for 10 years, you're weird.  Tim 41:27That's true, it went through a period of the late '90s-2000s, into the 2010s. Well into now, where, you know, people were highly, highly transient when it went into work. And that was the way to get a promotion, you went out and you hunted a promotion through changing your jobs, if you're a professional. You're going to climb through jobs switch. What's interesting, and I think this is really cutting edge now is that for businesses that find that feeling of comfort, and able to keep the employees working on fun things and keep them challenged, and let them suddenly develop that backlog of skills and familiarity, and have a real social experience, there is a greater desire now than I've seen in my 25 years of working in this space. I believe the needle is starting to switch back over to I want to find a long-term, perhaps role for life. I want it to be part of me. And I don't want it to be something that I need to, I know it's going to develop, but I want it to always be there and I want it to be, it's kind of like your contract with your phone company, as long as it's working. And you get a new phone, a new office every once in a while, you get new apps, new roles and challenges every once in a while. I'm good. Yeah, I can focus on other stuff, bigger questions, things that matter. There's different questions. I mean, younger generation workers that I see, that I'm coaching, they care as much about what social initiatives and social values, the CEO demonstrates, or the company is willing to challenge as they do what their mission is, in the world. This isn't true for everybody. But it's true for a lot of people they are looking deeper at, they don't want to associate with a business that treats them as disposable. There's a real attraction to that, that place of being and that they can say it with pride, and that they don't have to worry that the reputation of the business is going to rub off on them if it's stink, right? They don't want to be associated with that. I see much healthier relationships with this and Europe and Canada, and parts of Southeast Asia and Australasia than I do in the States. In the States, I see we're going through a dehumanization in some ways, right? Dan 44:08It's brutal. Tim 44:10It is, it's absolutely brutal. Dan 44:15It is brutal. Just a short run, but I've seen also is that the older generation tends to stick around longer obviously. Because it's a sense of security for the younger generations to hop around a little bit more. But there's a risk to that because all the companies who lose intellectual value because their brains are disappearing, so they need to find a way to keep the knowledge in the company, but at the same time provide all the flexibility, all the good stuff.  Tim 45:00Yeah, intellectual capital has to be put on the balance sheet. Reputational capital needs to be put on the ballot.  Dan 45:10Yeah, yeah. When we, I mean, older generation, we are more important than your free time. And now that change sort of your free time is more important than your work. So, it's all those aspects as well. Tim 45:26In training one group of executives I was working with a couple of months ago, I was talking to them about learned helplessness. And that your employees when you hire them all in many ways, you're never more optimistic about what they can provide, because guess what you've only known them for practically three hours through the interview process, and you've seen their resume, and you've got all sorts of imaginings about what they're going to be capable of. And then the real world hits, and they've got good things, and they've got bad things. And sometimes you're more impressed than disappointed, sometimes you're disappointed than impressed. You begin to judge and classify what this person is capable of, in the course of real work. And if it's not managed properly, you can begin to really instill a great deal of, again, shame, guilt, whatever you want to call it, you can start to let the new employee know when you're disappointed when they've failed. And if you do this improperly, and they get confused about what they're actually still in control of, they can stop trying, because they don't know what's going to make you happy, or they don't know what's going to have what's considered winning anymore. And so they get paralyzed because there's no winning, they don't know what the rules of the game are. It was never explained properly, or we didn't connect on it. What is really interesting when we think about the older generation is how much we actually relied on for lack of a better term. And I'm sure I'm going to be raked for saying this. But how much we relied on learned helplessness. We were helpless to affect whether or not we needed to be in the office working. We were helpless to alter sort of the the level of negotiation and how we would go about applying for a job. We were helpless to initiate a human rights complaint or something like that if something happened. I mean, I wasn't prone to it. But man, I worked in some industries, specifically in kitchens, where they still wouldn't pass muster when it comes to how people are supposed to be treated. I mean, it's just way too aggressive. Right? So, helping these new dynamic multigenerational workplaces, dealing with this pace of change and all the new opportunities it brings, as well as the expertise and all the lessons we've learned and all the organizational knowledge that we've captured. Man, I love the work I do. It is so complex, which again is why I love talking to a guy like you because complexity is your is your stock and trade. Right? Dan 48:07Yeah, no, I love it. Just the fact that it's changing so much all the time, and you have to adapt to people and you have to adapt to technology and systems. Talk to people to bring everything together. That's what's kept me going, daily basically.  Tim 48:26Let me ask you a question. Now I'm gonna want to break this down to some practical advice for leaders. I'm gonna take a risk here, we may have to cut it out. If you think about a large system that you're installing, or augmenting for a client, and they can be end-to-end? Am I?  Dan 48:45Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it can be.  Tim 48:50In order for that system to be designed for improvement, what are three-four attributes that you need to keep in mind when you're designing that IT landscape? What are some design characteristics that allows it to be nimble and change? Dan 49:09Well, first of all, you need to build a modularization, modularize. Oh, that's a hard word to say. Tim 49:15Modularization. Yeah, modular, it's got to be modular. Dan 49:20And also the, it's very important how you design your system. You basically have very small parts of your system that can connect together to make a feature, for example. So, if you have an order system, you have one little part that deals with the client or the customer, you have one little part in that that deals with the history of the orders and one little part that deals with what happens when the customer do an order so you have to break it down in very small bits. Which makes changes much easier. It is not gonna be super simple anyway, but it's going to be much easier to deal with, you don't have to change your whole system, you have to change parts. Tim 50:10So, the idea that you can change part of it, and that is modular from design, and that you understand what the different bits are for and what they do. And that they are specialized in a sense. Leep those three things is as paramount, everything will be a little bit easier, much easier. In fact, we do the wrong thing, it becomes static, that becomes the brick of a mainframe that we have to, you know, tear right down to its nuts, if we're going to change anything. Dan 50:41Well, there are huge breaks in maps as well. So, it's hard to do.  Tim 50:47All right. Now, here's where my instinct is leading to me, leading me to, if we translate that thinking into how a person approaches their leadership style, then maybe the running of their team, let's just start with the knowledge of self, the fluency of self. If I take a modular approach, to my sense of self, if I think of myself as not one big thing, but a bunch of little things, how would that affect my ability to change and adapt? Dan 51:25I think you need to be flexible as a person, and you need to learn how to accept new things, and you need to be able to process new things and see if this is a good thing, or if it's gonna hinder me, or if it's gonna reward me, or if it's gonna make my life easier. So, you need to change that. Also, when you're working with people, you have to delegate, that's the most important thing, when you work as a leader. Because you don't know everything, there is always people that know things much better than you and use them. Because then you can change, basically, because you have people working for you that know things very well. Tim 52:19I think I get where you're going here. And when I think of that modular aspect, it parallels to changing a part of what you're doing, or one of your thoughts or one of the ways you conceptualize things, or even that what you were an expert now is now obsolete, and you have to lean on other things, that modular approach means that we can protect, well not protect but it doesn't alter our sense of self. It doesn't threaten the whole, it's just a part. It's just a thing, right? And then when you said about delegating, and I think about that, the bits that all do different things. One of the first moves that I make with teams or with leaders or executives working on their career, is that they understand all the different roles in which they show up in, and that there's a certain function they have in this group that they don't have in this group. So, how are you entering the meeting? Do you know what your your role is? When this employee comes to you, do you know what they're asking you to be? Are they asking you to be the critic of their work? Or do they need somebody that helps you sort out a confidence issue? What role are you filling? What bit are you accessing right now? So, Dan, I'd like to ask you, if you were to focus on some of the most actionable advice that you would offer to leaders, what would be the things that you would say that have to be at the forefront of their mind? Dan 53:58I think the most important thing is to be transparent. Be able to communicate and to listen, because you're dealing with people, and there is not one person that it's the same as the other one. Everybody has different needs. Everybody wants different things. Everyone has different personal lives, which affects their work life. So, you need to be able to communicate. I think a big thing is to be transparent and to listen. Tim 54:28And if we fail to do that, we're treating that person like they are just a mindless cog. And they'll be disappointed.   Dan 54:38Yeah, because they're human beings. A human being is happy then they will produce. Tim 54:47Should we have hope for how technology is changing and what it's going to allow us to become as a species, as a planet? Dan 55:00Hmm, philosophical. The software, I think people–Tim 55:01Guilty, guilty. Dan 55:03I think people will evolve together with technology, we are kind of staring our own destiny in that sense, because we are making technology do things for us as a human species. We are lazy by nature, we have these machines that do things for us. So yeah, of course, we're going to move towards that. We are always in a transition state, there is no finite state, this is nothing more it's going to happen, it's always going to happen. We always going to have these generational clashes like we have with the younger, they will have kids and they will suffer the same thing. When they get older, their kids will evolve in things where in ways that we can't even imagine. So, I think there's a constant evolution. Tim 56:00Well, Dan, you've really opened my eyes to a number of things here. And I love that we're at the place we're at. We talked, some of the big things that I'm going to take away from this is that idea of being able to stay in that state of creativity, and that letting go and knowing that things are shifting constantly. And that they're not just shifting for us, but they're shifting for everyone. And that when we approach others to understand, you know, be transparent, perhaps vulnerable, listen, and be empathetic. And really communicate clearly to try to cut out as much of the error as possible. Because everybody's in this change with us. And they're all changing in their own ways. And we need to focus on giving up that sense of control over the how necessarily, unless we've got things to add, so that we can embrace who we are and focus on our own happiness, and then the realization that everybody else deserves the same thing. They deserve to find themselves and be happy in that. Dan 57:25Absolutely. Yeah. Tim 57:25So, in that sense, I mean, technology can really open up, perhaps a greater level of humanity. Because it'll take us farther away from this industrialized kind of mindset.  Dan 57:25Yeah, I hope so. We'll see.  Tim 57:30All right. Well, here, let's go through some of the final thoughts here. If a person wants to engage with you, and consider their own technological journey, or just reach out, where's the best place for them to link up with you? Dan 57:47That would be email or LinkedIn. Tim 57:51Okay. So, we'll put both of your contact spots there. If I was to ask you, maybe it's the boat, maybe it's something else. But what do you have going on perhaps professionally, or in your life that you're really excited about? And that you would want people to be aware of that you're, you know, the circles that you're moving in professionally, or the efforts that you're expending? What are some things that you're excited about?  Dan 58:19Oh, what am I excited about? I'm working on a big system right now. We are not gonna transition a very old system. That is all we're talking ourself into new technology new. I can't say what the client is, because it's, but that's gonna be really exciting to be part of and work with. That's a huge job. Tim 58:46And helping people know that it's possible. Dan 58:50Yeah and also, it's a great realization of the client that they need to do it. They can't just bound virtues their old system. Tim 59:01You know, it's funny, because when we think about organizational change, especially cultural change, people have to come to terms with that systems and processes and policies that were designed under certain mindsets, actually solidify and calcify that behavior in the organization. And sometimes if you're going to go through this real meaningful change, you got to admit that stuff. Dan 59:31Yeah, yeah you have to. Could be a time when people are at ready, when the companies are ready to do it then we can do it. You can't force a change like this. That's just how it is. Tim 59:42We don't want to force it. But oh, wow, I imagine that it's when they're ready, it's a heck of a lot easier than if you're pushing rope. What is one wish that you want every listener to leave this conversation with? What do you hope for everybody that's listening? Dan 59:59I wish people, all people in general to be a little bit more transparent and listen more to people around you. Because people are amazing. And you can learn a lot from them. Tim 1:00:14Yeah, that's great. Last order of business. Dan 1:00:15Last order of business.Dan 1:00:17Yeah, last order of business for the next guest on Sweet on Leadership. Put them on the hot seat. What's a question you would want them to answer to get us going to break the ice that you are really curious about? Dan 1:00:35What you know, now, would you change anything when you graduated school? If you could turn back time? Tim 1:00:43If you could turn back time, what would you say to your younger self? Change when you graduated school? Okay. All right. Dan Löfquist, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. I'm so glad I got to spend this time with you and learn a little bit more about you and connect on this level. And I'm really happy. I'm really happy that I can bring this expertise all the way from the sticks in Sweden, to everybody that's going to be listening around the world. So thank you so much. Dan 1:01:18My pleasure. My pleasure, Tim. Tim 1:01:20Take good care and enjoy that boat. Dan 1:01:23I will, I will. Tim 1:01:30Thank you so much for listening to Sweet on Leadership. If you found today's podcast valuable, consider visiting our website and signing up for the companion newsletter. You can find the link in the show notes. If like us, you think it's important to bring new ideas and skills into the practice of leadership. Please give us a positive rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This helps us spread the word to other committed leaders. And you can spread the word too by sharing this with your friends, teams and colleagues. Thanks again for listening. And be sure to tune in in two weeks time for another episode of Sweet on Leadership. In the meantime, I'm your host, Tim Sweet, encouraging you to keep on leading.

Dal Vangelo secondo Giovanni, Gv 12,44-50In quel tempo, Gesù esclamò: «Chi crede in me, non crede in me ma in colui che mi ha mandato; chi vede me, vede colui che mi ha mandato. Io sono venuto nel mondo come luce, perché chiunque crede in me non rimanga nelle tenebre. Se qualcuno ascolta le mie parole e non le osserva, io non lo condanno; perché non sono venuto per condannare il mondo, ma per salvare il mondo. Chi mi rifiuta e non accoglie le mie parole, ha chi lo condanna: la parola che ho detto lo condannerà nell'ultimo giorno. Perché io non ho parlato da me stesso, ma il Padre, che mi ha mandato, mi ha ordinato lui di che cosa parlare e che cosa devo dire. E io so che il suo comandamento è vita eterna. Le cose dunque che io dico, le dico così come il Padre le ha dette a me».Con una molteplicità di segni Gesù ha manifestato la sua divinità, ma i giudei si rifiutano di credere. Per cui questo brano rappresenta una sorta di sintesi e allo tempo, è un ultimo appello per chi tarda a leggere i segni dei tempi. Infatti, noi che cerchiamo certezze e garanzie o siamo ancora diffidenti e dubbiosi, dovremmo sentirci richiamati dal più profondo di noi stessi. Il cammino comincia proprio dall'ascolto e dalla messa in pratica della Parola del Messia. Stando dunque a queste parole e alle sue opere, la fede non consiste nel fare qualcosa in nome di Dio o per conto suo, ma nel riconoscere Gesù come Colui che viene in nome di Dio e consegna al mondo parole che vengono dal Padre. Chiediamoci cosa ci blocca e ci impedisce di crescere nella conoscenza di Gesù e quindi di Dio Padre che Egli rivela.Don Arth.

Series:  The Parables of JesusPart 2: The Conditions of the HeartSermon by: Rev. Paul LawlerScripture:  Luke 7:36-50In this sermon, Pastor Paul Lawler explores the message of Matthew 13:18-23. Drawing from Jesus' parable of the sower and the four types of soil, the sermon examines the conditions of the heart. The difference in outcomes isn't due to the quality of God's Word but the quality of the heart. Pastor Paul discusses four heart conditions:1. The Superficial Heart: This heart is unresponsive, hardened, and indifferent to spiritual matters. It represents those who hear the Word but are easily swayed by the enemy.2. The Shallow Heart: Characterized by initial excitement and emotional response, this heart lacks depth and root. It falls away when faced with tribulation or persecution, as it hasn't truly embraced salvation.3. The Distracted Heart: This heart is preoccupied with worldly concerns, including riches and cares, which choke the Word and prevent it from taking root. It may show initial interest but lacks a genuine response.4. The Fruitful Heart: Representing good soil, this heart hears, understands, and embraces the Word, leading to a fruitful life. It produces the fruit of the Spirit and righteousness, demonstrating a genuine relationship with God.This sermon emphasizes that the only barrier to salvation is unbelief. It encourages listeners to be among the minority with fruitful hearts, truly receiving God's Word and producing abundant spiritual fruit in their lives.

Series:  The Parables of JesusPart 1: The Two DebtorsSermon by: Rev. Paul LawlerScripture:  Luke 7:36-50In this sermon, Pastor Paul Lawler delves into the parable found in Luke 7:36-50. He explores the story of a woman whose past was marked by sin and a Pharisee named Simon, who both encounter Jesus at dinner. We explore the stark contrasts between the two characters: the woman's heartfelt worship and Simon's hidden pride.Discover:The dangers of hidden pride and a judgmental spirit as illustrated by Simon's character.The significance of acknowledging our own sinfulness and our inability to repay the debt.The connection between receiving forgiveness and experiencing genuine worship. 

So much news for you this week including an attack on Microsoft services, game prices going up, why Megan Markle & Spotify are getting divorced and Twitter Trouble in Australia.00:50In our featured interview, as the world continues to talk about AI, we're asking do people understand it enough to get the most out of it. Press play for a great chat with Mark James, “Senior Lecturer in AI” at UCD. 38:00

One Another series message 3Text: Mark 9:49-50In this message, we will dig deep into Mark 9:50 and discover God's calling for His disciples to be the salt of the earth and have peace with one another. Inspired by Jesus' authoritative teaching, we will then cover practical applications for our lives.

On the show today we look at the EU's new AI Act which will bring some order to AI's ‘wild west'.  There is also news on a mobile phone super-merger, a brilliant use for AI in games and Apple have announced Foundation II 00:50In our feature interview we catch up with the CTO of ‘eofis' about their computer automated summarisation and learning tool. See more at eofis.ie19:41

READ TOGETHER:John 6:22-40DISCUSS:Share about a time when you heard someone make a bold claim about themselves (i.e. political candidate, professional athlete, etc.). What did you think about the person when you heard them make the claim? Were they able to back it up? If so, how did it affect your opinion of the person?Jesus' bold declaration connects the miracle of the loaves and fish to the significance of His mission. What did Jesus mean when He called Himself the “Bread of Life”?Why do you think Jesus came right out and told the people that He thought they were more interested in bread than in signs? How do people attempt to satisfy their own need to feel secure and significant in life?In what way has Jesus satisfied your hunger and thirst for acceptance and meaning in life? In what ways do you still feel empty? What situations cause you to feel insecure?What can you do today to rely on God, rather than on things or people, to satisfy your needs? What demanding attitudes do you need to ask God to help you change?PRAY:Pray for open eyes that only see Jesus as the One who truly satisfies our spiritual hunger and thirst.PRACTICE (on your own): As imitators of God we should seek ways to become more like Jesus, the Bread of Life. Consider the following suggestions.Consume the Bread of Life – Each time we take Communion, we consume the body and blood of Jesus spiritually.Abide in the Bread of Life – Seek Jesus in prayer and meditate on His Word. The Holy Spirit will enlighten you as you listen for His voice.Point others to the Bread of Life – Do the things that Jesus did. By the power of the Holy Spirit the intent of the Father will come through us and be deposited in others around us. We are agents of Jesus who are carrying on His mission until His returns.DIVE DEEPER (on your own)Read John 6:35; Matthew 26:26; 1 Corinthians 10:17; Ecclesiastes 9:7; John 6:47-50In what ways should the reality of Jesus as the Bread of Life shape my belief and faith?

For 4 hours, I tried to come up reasons for why AI might not kill us all, and Eliezer Yudkowsky explained why I was wrong.We also discuss his call to halt AI, why LLMs make alignment harder, what it would take to save humanity, his millions of words of sci-fi, and much more.If you want to get to the crux of the conversation, fast forward to 2:35:00 through 3:43:54. Here we go through and debate the main reasons I still think doom is unlikely.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.As always, the most helpful thing you can do is just to share the podcast - send it to friends, group chats, Twitter, Reddit, forums, and wherever else men and women of fine taste congregate.If you have the means and have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support via a paid subscriptions on Substack.Timestamps(0:00:00) - TIME article(0:09:06) - Are humans aligned?(0:37:35) - Large language models(1:07:15) - Can AIs help with alignment?(1:30:17) - Society's response to AI(1:44:42) - Predictions (or lack thereof)(1:56:55) - Being Eliezer(2:13:06) - Othogonality(2:35:00) - Could alignment be easier than we think?(3:02:15) - What will AIs want?(3:43:54) - Writing fiction & whether rationality helps you winTranscriptTIME articleDwarkesh Patel 0:00:51Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer, thank you so much for coming out to the Lunar Society.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:01:00You're welcome.Dwarkesh Patel 0:01:01Yesterday, when we're recording this, you had an article in Time calling for a moratorium on further AI training runs. My first question is — It's probably not likely that governments are going to adopt some sort of treaty that restricts AI right now. So what was the goal with writing it?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:01:25I thought that this was something very unlikely for governments to adopt and then all of my friends kept on telling me — “No, no, actually, if you talk to anyone outside of the tech industry, they think maybe we shouldn't do that.” And I was like — All right, then. I assumed that this concept had no popular support. Maybe I assumed incorrectly. It seems foolish and to lack dignity to not even try to say what ought to be done. There wasn't a galaxy-brained purpose behind it. I think that over the last 22 years or so, we've seen a great lack of galaxy brained ideas playing out successfully.Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:05Has anybody in the government reached out to you, not necessarily after the article but just in general, in a way that makes you think that they have the broad contours of the problem correct?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:02:15No. I'm going on reports that normal people are more willing than the people I've been previously talking to, to entertain calls that this is a bad idea and maybe you should just not do that.Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:30That's surprising to hear, because I would have assumed that the people in Silicon Valley who are weirdos would be more likely to find this sort of message. They could kind of rocket the whole idea that AI will make nanomachines that take over. It's surprising to hear that normal people got the message first.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:02:47Well, I hesitate to use the term midwit but maybe this was all just a midwit thing.Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:54All right. So my concern with either the 6 month moratorium or forever moratorium until we solve alignment is that at this point, it could make it seem to people like we're crying wolf. And it would be like crying wolf because these systems aren't yet at a point at which they're dangerous. Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:03:13And nobody is saying they are. I'm not saying they are. The open letter signatories aren't saying they are.Dwarkesh Patel 0:03:20So if there is a point at which we can get the public momentum to do some sort of stop, wouldn't it be useful to exercise it when we get a GPT-6? And who knows what it's capable of. Why do it now?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:03:32Because allegedly, and we will see, people right now are able to appreciate that things are storming ahead a bit faster than the ability to ensure any sort of good outcome for them. And you could be like — “Ah, yes. We will play the galaxy-brained clever political move of trying to time when the popular support will be there.” But again, I heard rumors that people were actually completely open to the concept of  let's stop. So again, I'm just trying to say it. And it's not clear to me what happens if we wait for GPT-5 to say it. I don't actually know what GPT-5 is going to be like. It has been very hard to call the rate at which these systems acquire capability as they are trained to larger and larger sizes and more and more tokens. GPT-4 is a bit beyond in some ways where I thought this paradigm was going to scale. So I don't actually know what happens if GPT-5 is built. And even if GPT-5 doesn't end the world, which I agree is like more than 50% of where my probability mass lies, maybe that's enough time for GPT-4.5 to get ensconced everywhere and in everything, and for it actually to be harder to call a stop, both politically and technically. There's also the point that training algorithms keep improving. If we put a hard limit on the total computes and training runs right now, these systems would still get more capable over time as the algorithms improved and got more efficient. More oomph per floating point operation, and things would still improve, but slower. And if you start that process off at the GPT-5 level, where I don't actually know how capable that is exactly, you may have a bunch less lifeline left before you get into dangerous territory.Dwarkesh Patel 0:05:46The concern is then that — there's millions of GPUs out there in the world. The actors who would be willing to cooperate or who could even be identified in order to get the government to make them cooperate, would potentially be the ones that are most on the message. And so what you're left with is a system where they stagnate for six months or a year or however long this lasts. And then what is the game plan? Is there some plan by which if we wait a few years, then alignment will be solved? Do we have some sort of timeline like that?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:06:18Alignment will not be solved in a few years. I would hope for something along the lines of human intelligence enhancement works. I do not think they're going to have the timeline for genetically engineered humans to work but maybe? This is why I mentioned in the Time letter that if I had infinite capability to dictate the laws that there would be a carve-out on biology, AI that is just for biology and not trained on text from the internet. Human intelligence enhancement, make people smarter. Making people smarter has a chance of going right in a way that making an extremely smart AI does not have a realistic chance of going right at this point. If we were on a sane planet, what the sane planet does at this point is shut it all down and work on human intelligence enhancement. I don't think we're going to live in that sane world. I think we are all going to die. But having heard that people are more open to this outside of California, it makes sense to me to just try saying out loud what it is that you do on a saner planet and not just assume that people are not going to do that.Dwarkesh Patel 0:07:30In what percentage of the worlds where humanity survives is there human enhancement? Like even if there's 1% chance humanity survives, is that entire branch dominated by the worlds where there's some sort of human intelligence enhancement?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:07:39I think we're just mainly in the territory of Hail Mary passes at this point, and human intelligence enhancement is one Hail Mary pass. Maybe you can put people in MRIs and train them using neurofeedback to be a little saner, to not rationalize so much. Maybe you can figure out how to have something light up every time somebody is working backwards from what they want to be true to what they take as their premises. Maybe you can just fire off little lights and teach people not to do that so much. Maybe the GPT-4 level systems can be RLHF'd (reinforcement learning from human feedback) into being consistently smart, nice and charitable in conversation and just unleash a billion of them on Twitter and just have them spread sanity everywhere. I do worry that this is not going to be the most profitable use of the technology, but you're asking me to list out Hail Mary passes and that's what I'm doing. Maybe you can actually figure out how to take a brain, slice it, scan it, simulate it, run uploads and upgrade the uploads, or run the uploads faster. These are also quite dangerous things, but they do not have the utter lethality of artificial intelligence.Are humans aligned?Dwarkesh Patel 0:09:06All right, that's actually a great jumping point into the next topic I want to talk to you about. Orthogonality. And here's my first question — Speaking of human enhancement, suppose you bred human beings to be friendly and cooperative, but also more intelligent. I claim that over many generations you would just have really smart humans who are also really friendly and cooperative. Would you disagree with that analogy? I'm sure you're going to disagree with this analogy, but I just want to understand why?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:09:31The main thing is that you're starting from minds that are already very, very similar to yours. You're starting from minds, many of which already exhibit the characteristics that you want. There are already many people in the world, I hope, who are nice in the way that you want them to be nice. Of course, it depends on how nice you want exactly. I think that if you actually go start trying to run a project of selectively encouraging some marriages between particular people and encouraging them to have children, you will rapidly find, as one does in any such process that when you select on the stuff you want, it turns out there's a bunch of stuff correlated with it and that you're not changing just one thing. If you try to make people who are inhumanly nice, who are nicer than anyone has ever been before, you're going outside the space that human psychology has previously evolved and adapted to deal with, and weird stuff will happen to those people. None of this is very analogous to AI. I'm just pointing out something along the lines of — well, taking your analogy at face value, what would happen exactly? It's the sort of thing where you could maybe do it, but there's all kinds of pitfalls that you'd probably find out about if you cracked open a textbook on animal breeding.Dwarkesh Patel 0:11:13The thing you mentioned initially, which is that we are starting off with basic human psychology, that we are fine tuning with breeding. Luckily, the current paradigm of AI is  — you have these models that are trained on human text and I would assume that this would give you a starting point of something like human psychology.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:11:31Why do you assume that?Dwarkesh Patel 0:11:33Because they're trained on human text.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:11:34And what does that do?Dwarkesh Patel 0:11:36Whatever thoughts and emotions that lead to the production of human text need to be simulated in the AI in order to produce those results.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:11:44I see. So if you take an actor and tell them to play a character, they just become that person. You can tell that because you see somebody on screen playing Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and that's probably just actually Buffy in there. That's who that is.Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:05I think a better analogy is if you have a child and you tell him — Hey, be this way. They're more likely to just be that way instead of putting on an act for 20 years or something.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:12:18It depends on what you're telling them to be exactly. Dwarkesh Patel 0:12:20You're telling them to be nice.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:12:22Yeah, but that's not what you're telling them to do. You're telling them to play the part of an alien, something with a completely inhuman psychology as extrapolated by science fiction authors, and in many cases done by computers because humans can't quite think that way. And your child eventually manages to learn to act that way. What exactly is going on in there now? Are they just the alien or did they pick up the rhythm of what you're asking them to imitate and be like — “Ah yes, I see who I'm supposed to pretend to be.” Are they actually a person or are they pretending? That's true even if you're not asking them to be an alien. My parents tried to raise me Orthodox Jewish and that did not take at all. I learned to pretend. I learned to comply. I hated every minute of it. Okay, not literally every minute of it. I should avoid saying untrue things. I hated most minutes of it. Because they were trying to show me a way to be that was alien to my own psychology and the religion that I actually picked up was from the science fiction books instead, as it were. I'm using religion very metaphorically here, more like ethos, you might say. I was raised with science fiction books I was reading from my parents library and Orthodox Judaism. The ethos of the science fiction books rang truer in my soul and so that took in, the Orthodox Judaism didn't. But the Orthodox Judaism was what I had to imitate, was what I had to pretend to be, was the answers I had to give whether I believed them or not. Because otherwise you get punished.Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:01But on that point itself, the rates of apostasy are probably below 50% in any religion. Some people do leave but often they just become the thing they're imitating as a child.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:14:12Yes, because the religions are selected to not have that many apostates. If aliens came in and introduced their religion, you'd get a lot more apostates.Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:19Right. But I think we're probably in a more virtuous situation with ML because these systems are regularized through stochastic gradient descent. So the system that is pretending to be something where there's multiple layers of interpretation is going to be more complex than the one that is just being the thing. And over time, the system that is just being the thing will be optimized, right? It'll just be simpler.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:14:42This seems like an ordinate cope. For one thing, you're not training it to be any one particular person. You're training it to switch masks to anyone on the Internet as soon as they figure out who that person on the internet is. If I put the internet in front of you and I was like — learn to predict the next word over and over. You do not just turn into a random human because the random human is not what's best at predicting the next word of everyone who's ever been on the internet. You learn to very rapidly pick up on the cues of what sort of person is talking, what will they say next? You memorize so many facts just because they're helpful in predicting the next word. You learn all kinds of patterns, you learn all the languages. You learn to switch rapidly from being one kind of person or another as the conversation that you are predicting changes who is speaking. This is not a human we're describing. You are not training a human there.Dwarkesh Patel 0:15:43Would you at least say that we are living in a better situation than one in which we have some sort of black box where you have a machiavellian fittest survive simulation that produces AI? This situation is at least more likely to produce alignment than one in which something that is completely untouched by human psychology would produce?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:16:06More likely? Yes. Maybe you're an order of magnitude likelier. 0% instead of 0%. Getting stuff to be more likely does not help you if the baseline is nearly zero. The whole training set up there is producing an actress, a predictor. It's not actually being put into the kind of ancestral situation that evolved humans, nor the kind of modern situation that raises humans. Though to be clear, raising it like a human wouldn't help, But you're giving it a very alien problem that is not what humans solve and it is solving that problem not in the way a human would.Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:44Okay, so how about this. I can see that I certainly don't know for sure what is going on in these systems. In fact, obviously nobody does. But that also goes through you. Could it not just be that reinforcement learning works and all these other things we're trying somehow work and actually just being an actor produces some sort of benign outcome where there isn't that level of simulation and conniving?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:17:15I think it predictably breaks down as you try to make the system smarter, as you try to derive sufficiently useful work from it. And in particular, the sort of work where some other AI doesn't just kill you off six months later. Yeah, I think the present system is not smart enough to have a deep conniving actress thinking long strings of coherent thoughts about how to predict the next word. But as the mask that it wears, as the people it is pretending to be get smarter and smarter, I think that at some point the thing in there that is predicting how humans plan, predicting how humans talk, predicting how humans think, and needing to be at least as smart as the human it is predicting in order to do that, I suspect at some point there is a new coherence born within the system and something strange starts happening. I think that if you have something that can accurately predict Eliezer Yudkowsky, to use a particular example I know quite well, you've got to be able to do the kind of thinking where you are reflecting on yourself and that in order to simulate Eliezer Yudkowsky reflecting on himself, you need to be able to do that kind of thinking. This is not airtight logic but I expect there to be a discount factor. If you ask me to play a part of somebody who's quite unlike me, I think there's some amount of penalty that the character I'm playing gets to his intelligence because I'm secretly back there simulating him. That's even if we're quite similar and the stranger they are, the more unfamiliar the situation, the less the person I'm playing is as smart as I am and the more they are dumber than I am. So similarly, I think that if you get an AI that's very, very good at predicting what Eliezer says, I think that there's a quite alien mind doing that, and it actually has to be to some degree smarter than me in order to play the role of something that thinks differently from how it does very, very accurately. And I reflect on myself, I think about how my thoughts are not good enough by my own standards and how I want to rearrange my own thought processes. I look at the world and see it going the way I did not want it to go, and asking myself how could I change this world? I look around at other humans and I model them, and sometimes I try to persuade them of things. These are all capabilities that the system would then be somewhere in there. And I just don't trust the blind hope that all of that capability is pointed entirely at pretending to be Eliezer and only exists insofar as it's the mirror and isomorph of Eliezer. That all the prediction is by being something exactly like me and not thinking about me while not being me.Dwarkesh Patel 0:20:55I certainly don't want to claim that it is guaranteed that there isn't something super alien and something against our aims happening within the shoggoth. But you made an earlier claim which seemed much stronger than the idea that you don't want blind hope, which is that we're going from 0% probability to an order of magnitude greater at 0% probability. There's a difference between saying that we should be wary and that there's no hope, right? I could imagine so many things that could be happening in the shoggoth's brain, especially in our level of confusion and mysticism over what is happening. One example is, let's say that it kind of just becomes the average of all human psychology and motives.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:21:41But it's not the average. It is able to be every one of those people. That's very different from being the average. It's very different from being an average chess player versus being able to predict every chess player in the database. These are very different things.Dwarkesh Patel 0:21:56Yeah, no, I meant in terms of motives that it is the average where it can simulate any given human. I'm not saying that's the most likely one, I'm just saying it's one possibility.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:22:08What.. Why? It just seems 0% probable to me. Like the motive is going to be like some weird funhouse mirror thing of — I want to predict very accurately.Dwarkesh Patel 0:22:19Right. Why then are we so sure that whatever drives that come about because of this motive are going to be incompatible with the survival and flourishing with humanity?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:22:30Most drives when you take a loss function and splinter it into things correlated with it and then amp up intelligence until some kind of strange coherence is born within the thing and then ask it how it would want to self modify or what kind of successor system it would build. Things that alien ultimately end up wanting the universe to be some particular way such that humans are not a solution to the question of how to make the universe most that way. The thing that very strongly wants to predict text, even if you got that goal into the system exactly which is not what would happen, The universe with the most predictable text is not a universe that has humans in it. Dwarkesh Patel 0:23:19Okay. I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome. Here's an example of one of many ways in which humans stay around despite this motive. Let's say that in order to predict human output really well, it needs humans around to give it the raw data from which to improve its predictions or something like that. This is not something I think individually is likely…Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:23:40If the humans are no longer around, you no longer need to predict them. Right, so you don't need the data required to predict themDwarkesh Patel 0:23:46Because you are starting off with that motivation you want to just maximize along that loss function or have that drive that came about because of the loss function.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:23:57I'm confused. So look, you can always develop arbitrary fanciful scenarios in which the AI has some contrived motive that it can only possibly satisfy by keeping humans alive in good health and comfort and turning all the nearby galaxies into happy, cheerful places full of high functioning galactic civilizations. But as soon as your sentence has more than like five words in it, its probability has dropped to basically zero because of all the extra details you're padding in.Dwarkesh Patel 0:24:31Maybe let's return to this. Another train of thought I want to follow is — I claim that humans have not become orthogonal to the sort of evolutionary process that produced them.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:24:46Great. I claim humans are increasingly orthogonal and the further they go out of distribution and the smarter they get, the more orthogonal they get to inclusive genetic fitness, the sole loss function on which humans were optimized.Dwarkesh Patel 0:25:03Most humans still want kids and have kids and care for their kin. Certainly there's some angle between how humans operate today. Evolution would prefer us to use less condoms and more sperm banks. But there's like 10 billion of us and there's going to be more in the future. We haven't divorced that far from what our alleles would want.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:25:28It's a question of how far out of distribution are you? And the smarter you are, the more out of distribution you get. Because as you get smarter, you get new options that are further from the options that you are faced with in the ancestral environment that you were optimized over. Sure, a lot of people want kids, not inclusive genetic fitness, but kids. They want kids similar to them maybe, but they don't want the kids to have their DNA or their alleles or their genes. So suppose I go up to somebody and credibly say, we will assume away the ridiculousness of this offer for the moment, your kids could be a bit smarter and much healthier if you'll just let me replace their DNA with this alternate storage method that will age more slowly. They'll be healthier, they won't have to worry about DNA damage, they won't have to worry about the methylation on the DNA flipping and the cells de-differentiating as they get older. We've got this stuff that replaces DNA and your kid will still be similar to you, it'll be a bit smarter and they'll be so much healthier and even a bit more cheerful. You just have to replace all the DNA with a stronger substrate and rewrite all the information on it. You know, the old school transhumanist offer really. And I think that a lot of the people who want kids would go for this new offer that just offers them so much more of what it is they want from kids than copying the DNA, than inclusive genetic fitness.Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:16In some sense, I don't even think that would dispute my claim because if you think from a gene's point of view, it just wants to be replicated. If it's replicated in another substrate that's still okay.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:27:25No, we're not saving the information. We're doing a total rewrite to the DNA.Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:30I actually claim that most humans would not accept that offer.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:27:33Yeah, because it would sound weird. But I think the smarter they are, the more likely they are to go for it if it's credible. I mean, if you assume away the credibility issue and the weirdness issue. Like all their friends are doing it.Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:52Yeah. Even if the smarter they are the more likely they're to do it, most humans are not that smart. From the gene's point of view it doesn't really matter how smart you are, right? It just matters if you're producing copies.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:28:03No. The smart thing is kind of like a delicate issue here because somebody could always be like — I would never take that offer. And then I'm like “Yeah…”. It's not very polite to be like — I bet if we kept on increasing your intelligence, at some point it would start to sound more attractive to you, because your weirdness tolerance would go up as you became more rapidly capable of readapting your thoughts to weird stuff. The weirdness would start to seem less unpleasant and more like you were moving within a space that you already understood. But you can sort of avoid all that and maybe should by being like — suppose all your friends were doing it. What if it was normal? What if we remove the weirdness and remove any credibility problems in that hypothetical case? Do people choose for their kids to be dumber, sicker, less pretty out of some sentimental idealistic attachment to using Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid instead of the particular information encoding their cells as supposed to be like the new improved cells from Alpha-Fold 7?Dwarkesh Patel 0:29:21I would claim that they would but we don't really know. I claim that they would be more averse to that, you probably think that they would be less averse to that. Regardless of that, we can just go by the evidence we do have in that we are already way out of distribution of the ancestral environment. And even in this situation, the place where we do have evidence, people are still having kids. We haven't gone that orthogonal.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:29:44We haven't gone that smart. What you're saying is — Look, people are still making more of their DNA in a situation where nobody has offered them a way to get all the stuff they want without the DNA. So of course they haven't tossed DNA out the window.Dwarkesh Patel 0:29:59Yeah. First of all, I'm not even sure what would happen in that situation. I still think even most smart humans in that situation might disagree, but we don't know what would happen in that situation. Why not just use the evidence we have so far?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:30:10PCR. You right now, could get some of you and make like a whole gallon jar full of your own DNA. Are you doing that? No. Misaligned. Misaligned.Dwarkesh Patel 0:30:23I'm down with transhumanism. I'm going to have my kids use the new cells and whatever.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:30:27Oh, so we're all talking about these hypothetical other people I think would make the wrong choice.Dwarkesh Patel 0:30:32Well, I wouldn't say wrong, but different. And I'm just saying there's probably more of them than there are of us.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:30:37What if, like, I say that I have more faith in normal people than you do to toss DNA out the window as soon as somebody offers them a happy, healthier life for their kids?Dwarkesh Patel 0:30:46I'm not even making a moral point. I'm just saying I don't know what's going to happen in the future. Let's just look at the evidence we have so far, humans. If that's the evidence you're going to present for something that's out of distribution and has gone orthogonal, that has actually not happened. This is evidence for hope. Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:31:00Because we haven't yet had options as far enough outside of the ancestral distribution that in the course of choosing what we most want that there's no DNA left.Dwarkesh Patel 0:31:10Okay. Yeah, I think I understand.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:31:12But you yourself say, “Oh yeah, sure, I would choose that.” and I myself say, “Oh yeah, sure, I would choose that.” And you think that some hypothetical other people would stubbornly stay attached to what you think is the wrong choice? First of all, I think maybe you're being a bit condescending there. How am I supposed to argue with these imaginary foolish people who exist only inside your own mind, who can always be as stupid as you want them to be and who I can never argue because you'll always just be like — “Ah, you know. They won't be persuaded by that.” But right here in this room, the site of this videotaping, there is no counter evidence that smart enough humans will toss DNA out the window as soon as somebody makes them a sufficiently better offer.Dwarkesh Patel 0:31:55I'm not even saying it's stupid. I'm just saying they're not weirdos like me and you.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:32:01Weird is relative to intelligence. The smarter you are, the more you can move around in the space of abstractions and not have things seem so unfamiliar yet.Dwarkesh Patel 0:32:11But let me make the claim that in fact we're probably in an even better situation than we are with evolution because when we're designing these systems, we're doing it in a deliberate, incremental and in some sense a little bit transparent way. Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:32:27No, no, not yet, not now. Nobody's being careful and deliberate now, but maybe at some point in the indefinite future people will be careful and deliberate. Sure, let's grant that premise. Keep going.Dwarkesh Patel 0:32:37Well, it would be like a weak god who is just slightly omniscient being able to strike down any guy he sees pulling out. Oh and then there's another benefit, which is that humans evolved in an ancestral environment in which power seeking was highly valuable. Like if you're in some sort of tribe or something.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:32:59Sure, lots of instrumental values made their way into us but even more strange, warped versions of them make their way into our intrinsic motivations.Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:09Yeah, even more so than the current loss functions have.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:33:10Really? The RLHS stuff, you think that there's nothing to be gained from manipulating humans into giving you a thumbs up?Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:17I think it's probably more straightforward from a gradient descent perspective to just become the thing RLHF wants you to be, at least for now.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:33:24Where are you getting this?Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:25Because it just kind of regularizes these sorts of extra abstractions you might want to put onEliezer Yudkowsky 0:33:30Natural selection regularizes so much harder than gradient descent in that way. It's got an enormously stronger information bottleneck. Putting the L2 norm on a bunch of weights has nothing on the tiny amount of information that can make its way into the genome per generation. The regularizers on natural selection are enormously stronger.Dwarkesh Patel 0:33:51Yeah. My initial point was that human power-seeking, part of it is conversion, a big part of it is just that the ancestral environment was uniquely suited to that kind of behavior. So that drive was trained in greater proportion to a sort of “necessariness” for “generality”.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:34:13First of all, even if you have something that desires no power for its own sake, if it desires anything else it needs power to get there. Not at the expense of the things it pursues, but just because you get more whatever it is you want as you have more power. And sufficiently smart things know that. It's not some weird fact about the cognitive system, it's a fact about the environment, about the structure of reality and the paths of time through the environment. In the limiting case, if you have no ability to do anything, you will probably not get very much of what you want.Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:53Imagine a situation like in an ancestral environment, if some human starts exhibiting power seeking behavior before he realizes that he should try to hide it, we just kill him off. And the friendly cooperative ones, we let them breed more. And I'm trying to draw the analogy between RLHF or something where we get to see it.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:35:12Yeah, I think my concern is that that works better when the things you're breeding are stupider than you as opposed to when they are smarter than you. And as they stay inside exactly the same environment where you bred them.Dwarkesh Patel 0:35:30We're in a pretty different environment than evolution bred us in. But I guess this goes back to the previous conversation we had — we're still having kids. Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:35:36Because nobody's made them an offer for better kids with less DNADwarkesh Patel 0:35:43Here's what I think is the problem. I can just look out of the world and see this is what it looks like. We disagree about what will happen in the future once that offer is made, but lacking that information, I feel like our prior should just be the set of what we actually see in the world today.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:35:55Yeah I think in that case, we should believe that the dates on the calendars will never show 2024. Every single year throughout human history, in the 13.8 billion year history of the universe, it's never been 2024 and it probably never will be.Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:10The difference is that we have very strong reasons for expecting the turn of the year.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:36:19Are you extrapolating from your past data to outside the range of data?Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:24Yes, I think we have a good reason to. I don't think human preferences are as predictable as dates.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:36:29Yeah, they're somewhat less so. Sorry, why not jump on this one? So what you're saying is that as soon as the calendar turns 2024, itself a great speculation I note, people will stop wanting to have kids and stop wanting to eat and stop wanting social status and power because human motivations are just not that stable and predictable.Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:51No. That's not what I'm claiming at all. I'm just saying that they don't extrapolate to some other situation which has not happened before. Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:36:59Like the clock showing 2024?Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:01What is an example here? Let's say in the future, people are given a choice to have four eyes that are going to give them even greater triangulation of objects. I wouldn't assume that they would choose to have four eyes.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:37:16Yeah. There's no established preference for four eyes.Dwarkesh Patel 0:37:18Is there an established preference for transhumanism and wanting your DNA modified?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:37:22There's an established preference for people going to some lengths to make their kids healthier, not necessarily via the options that they would have later, but the options that they do have now.Large language modelsDwarkesh Patel 0:37:35Yeah. We'll see, I guess, when that technology becomes available. Let me ask you about LLMs. So what is your position now about whether these things can get us to AGI?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:37:47I don't know. I was previously like — I don't think stack more layers does this. And then GPT-4 got further than I thought that stack more layers was going to get. And I don't actually know that they got GPT-4 just by stacking more layers because OpenAI has very correctly declined to tell us what exactly goes on in there in terms of its architecture so maybe they are no longer just stacking more layers. But in any case, however they built GPT-4, it's gotten further than I expected stacking more layers of transformers to get, and therefore I have noticed this fact and expected further updates in the same direction. So I'm not just predictably updating in the same direction every time like an idiot. And now I do not know. I am no longer willing to say that GPT-6 does not end the world.Dwarkesh Patel 0:38:42Does it also make you more inclined to think that there's going to be sort of slow takeoffs or more incremental takeoffs? Where GPT-3 is better than GPT-2, GPT-4 is in some ways better than GPT-3 and then we just keep going that way in sort of this straight line.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:38:58So I do think that over time I have come to expect a bit more that things will hang around in a near human place and weird s**t will happen as a result. And my failure review where I look back and ask — was that a predictable sort of mistake? I feel like it was to some extent maybe a case of — you're always going to get capabilities in some order and it was much easier to visualize the endpoint where you have all the capabilities than where you have some of the capabilities. And therefore my visualizations were not dwelling enough on a space we'd predictably in retrospect have entered into later where things have some capabilities but not others and it's weird. I do think that, in 2012, I would not have called that large language models were the way and the large language models are in some way more uncannily semi-human than what I would justly have predicted in 2012 knowing only what I knew then. But broadly speaking, yeah, I do feel like GPT-4 is already kind of hanging out for longer in a weird, near-human space than I was really visualizing. In part, that's because it's so incredibly hard to visualize or predict correctly in advance when it will happen, which is, in retrospect, a bias.Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:27Given that fact, how has your model of intelligence itself changed?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:40:31Very little.Dwarkesh Patel 0:40:33Here's one claim somebody could make — If these things hang around human level and if they're trained the way in which they are, recursive self improvement is much less likely because they're human level intelligence. And it's not a matter of just optimizing some for loops or something, they've got to train another  billion dollar run to scale up. So that kind of recursive self intelligence idea is less likely. How do you respond?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:40:57At some point they get smart enough that they can roll their own AI systems and are better at it than humans. And that is the point at which you definitely start to see foom. Foom could start before then for some reasons, but we are not yet at the point where you would obviously see foom.Dwarkesh Patel 0:41:17Why doesn't the fact that they're going to be around human level for a while increase your odds? Or does it increase your odds of human survival? Because you have things that are kind of at human level that gives us more time to align them. Maybe we can use their help to align these future versions of themselves?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:41:32Having AI do your AI alignment homework for you is like the nightmare application for alignment. Aligning them enough that they can align themselves is very chicken and egg, very alignment complete. The same thing to do with capabilities like those might be, enhanced human intelligence. Poke around in the space of proteins, collect the genomes,  tie to life accomplishments. Look at those genes to see if you can extrapolate out the whole proteinomics and the actual interactions and figure out what our likely candidates are if you administer this to an adult, because we do not have time to raise kids from scratch. If you administer this to an adult, the adult gets smarter. Try that. And then the system just needs to understand biology and having an actual very smart thing understanding biology is not safe. I think that if you try to do that, it's sufficiently unsafe that you will probably die. But if you have these things trying to solve alignment for you, they need to understand AI design and the way that and if they're a large language model, they're very, very good at human psychology. Because predicting the next thing you'll do is their entire deal. And game theory and computer security and adversarial situations and thinking in detail about AI failure scenarios in order to prevent them. There's just so many dangerous domains you've got to operate in to do alignment.Dwarkesh Patel 0:43:35Okay. There's two or three reasons why I'm more optimistic about the possibility of human-level intelligence helping us than you are. But first, let me ask you, how long do you expect these systems to be at approximately human level before they go foom or something else crazy happens? Do you have some sense? Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:43:55(Eliezer Shrugs)Dwarkesh Patel 0:43:56All right. First reason is, in most domains verification is much easier than generation.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:44:03Yes. That's another one of the things that makes alignment the nightmare. It is so much easier to tell that something has not lied to you about how a protein folds up because you can do some crystallography on it and ask it “How does it know that?”, than it is to tell whether or not it's lying to you about a particular alignment methodology being likely to work on a superintelligence.Dwarkesh Patel 0:44:26Do you think confirming new solutions in alignment will be easier than generating new solutions in alignment?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:44:35Basically no.Dwarkesh Patel 0:44:37Why not? Because in most human domains, that is the case, right?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:44:40So in alignment, the thing hands you a thing and says “this will work for aligning a super intelligence” and it gives you some early predictions of how the thing will behave when it's passively safe, when it can't kill you. That all bear out and those predictions all come true. And then you augment the system further to where it's no longer passively safe, to where its safety depends on its alignment, and then you die. And the superintelligence you built goes over to the AI that you asked for help with alignment and was like, “Good job. Billion dollars.” That's observation number one. Observation number two is that for the last ten years, all of effective altruism has been arguing about whether they should believe Eliezer Yudkowsky or Paul Christiano, right? That's two systems. I believe that Paul is honest. I claim that I am honest. Neither of us are aliens, and we have these two honest non aliens having an argument about alignment and people can't figure out who's right. Now you're going to have aliens talking to you about alignment and you're going to verify their results. Aliens who are possibly lying.Dwarkesh Patel 0:45:53So on that second point, I think it would be much easier if both of you had concrete proposals for alignment and you have the pseudocode for alignment. If you're like “here's my solution”, and he's like “here's my solution.” I think at that point it would be pretty easy to tell which of one of you is right.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:46:08I think you're wrong. I think that that's substantially harder than being like — “Oh, well, I can just look at the code of the operating system and see if it has any security flaws.” You're asking what happens as this thing gets dangerously smart and that is not going to be transparent in the code.Dwarkesh Patel 0:46:32Let me come back to that. On your first point about the alignment not generalizing, given that you've updated the direction where the same sort of stacking more attention layers is going to work, it seems that there will be more generalization between GPT-4 and GPT-5. Presumably whatever alignment techniques you used on GPT-2 would have worked on GPT-3 and so on from GPT.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:46:56Wait, sorry what?!Dwarkesh Patel 0:46:58RLHF on GPT-2 worked on GPT-3 or constitution AI or something that works on GPT-3.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:47:01All kinds of interesting things started happening with GPT 3.5 and GPT-4 that were not in GPT-3.Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:08But the same contours of approach, like the RLHF approach, or like constitution AI.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:47:12By that you mean it didn't really work in one case, and then much more visibly didn't really work on the later cases? Sure. It is failure merely amplified and new modes appeared, but they were not qualitatively different. Well, they were qualitatively different from the previous ones. Your entire analogy fails.Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:31Wait, wait, wait. Can we go through how it fails? I'm not sure I understood it.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:47:33Yeah. Like, they did RLHF to GPT-3. Did they even do this to GPT-2 at all? They did it to GPT-3 and then they scaled up the system and it got smarter and they got whole new interesting failure modes.Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:50YeahEliezer Yudkowsky 0:47:52There you go, right?Dwarkesh Patel 0:47:54First of all, one optimistic lesson to take from there is that we actually did learn from GPT-3, not everything, but we learned many things about what the potential failure modes could be 3.5.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:48:06We saw these people get caught utterly flat-footed on the Internet. We watched that happen in real time.Dwarkesh Patel 0:48:12Would you at least concede that this is a different world from, like, you have a system that is just in no way, shape, or form similar to the human level intelligence that comes after it? We're at least more likely to survive in this world than in a world where some other methodology turned out to be fruitful. Do you hear what I'm saying? Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:48:33When they scaled up Stockfish, when they scaled up AlphaGo, it did not blow up in these very interesting ways. And yes, that's because it wasn't really scaling to general intelligence. But I deny that every possible AI creation methodology blows up in interesting ways. And this isn't really the one that blew up least. No, it's the only one we've ever tried. There's better stuff out there. We just suck, okay? We just suck at alignment, and that's why our stuff blew up.Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:04Well, okay. Let me make this analogy, the Apollo program. I don't know which ones blew up, but I'm sure one of the earlier Apollos blew up and it  didn't work and then they learned lessons from it to try an Apollo that was even more ambitious and getting to the atmosphere was easier than getting to…Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:49:23We are learning from the AI systems that we build and as they fail and as we repair them and our learning goes along at this pace (Eliezer moves his hands slowly) and our capabilities will go along at this pace (Elizer moves his hand rapidly across)Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:35Let me think about that. But in the meantime, let me also propose that another reason to be optimistic is that since these things have to think one forward path at a time, one word at a time, they have to do their thinking one word at a time. And in some sense, that makes their thinking legible. They have to articulate themselves as they proceed.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:49:54What? We get a black box output, then we get another black box output. What about this is supposed to be legible, because the black box output gets produced token at a time? What a truly dreadful… You're really reaching here.Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:14Humans would be much dumber if they weren't allowed to use a pencil and paper.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:50:19Pencil and paper to GPT and it got smarter, right?Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:24Yeah. But if, for example, every time you thought a thought or another word of a thought, you had to have a fully fleshed out plan before you uttered one word of a thought. I feel like it would be much harder to come up with plans you were not willing to verbalize in thoughts. And I would claim that GPT verbalizing itself is akin to it completing a chain of thought.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:50:49Okay. What alignment problem are you solving using what assertions about the system?Dwarkesh Patel 0:50:57It's not solving an alignment problem. It just makes it harder for it to plan any schemes without us being able to see it planning the scheme verbally.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:51:09Okay. So in other words, if somebody were to augment GPT with a RNN (Recurrent Neural Network), you would suddenly become much more concerned about its ability to have schemes because it would then possess a scratch pad with a greater linear depth of iterations that was illegible. Sounds right?Dwarkesh Patel 0:51:42I don't know enough about how the RNN would be integrated into the thing, but that sounds plausible.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:51:46Yeah. Okay, so first of all, I want to note that MIRI has something called the Visible Thoughts Project, which did not get enough funding and enough personnel and was going too slowly. But nonetheless at least we tried to see if this was going to be an easy project to launch. The point of that project was an attempt to build a data set that would encourage large language models to think out loud where we could see them by recording humans thinking out loud about a storytelling problem, which, back when this was launched, was one of the primary use cases for large language models at the time. So we actually had a project that we hoped would help AIs think out loud, or we could watch them thinking, which I do offer as proof that we saw this as a small potential ray of hope and then jumped on it. But it's a small ray of hope. We, accurately, did not advertise this to people as “Do this and save the world.” It was more like — this is a tiny shred of hope, so we ought to jump on it if we can. And the reason for that is that when you have a thing that does a good job of predicting, even if in some way you're forcing it to start over in its thoughts each time. Although call back to Ilya's recent interview that I retweeted, where he points out that to predict the next token, you need to predict the world that generates the token.Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:25Wait, was it my interview?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:53:27I don't remember. Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:25It was my interview. (Link to the section)Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:53:30Okay, all right, call back to your interview. Ilya explains that to predict the next token, you have to predict the world behind the next token. Excellently put. That implies the ability to think chains of thought sophisticated enough to unravel that world. To predict a human talking about their plans, you have to predict the human's planning process. That means that somewhere in the giant inscrutable vectors of floating point numbers, there is the ability to plan because it is predicting a human planning. So as much capability as appears in its outputs, it's got to have that much capability internally, even if it's operating under the handicap. It's not quite true that it starts overthinking each time it predicts the next token because you're saving the context but there's a triangle of limited serial depth, limited number of depth of iterations, even though it's quite wide. Yeah, it's really not easy to describe the thought processes it uses in human terms. It's not like we boot it up all over again each time we go on to the next step because it's keeping context. But there is a valid limit on serial death. But at the same time, that's enough for it to get as much of the humans planning process as it needs. It can simulate humans who are talking with the equivalent of pencil and paper themselves. Like, humans who write text on the internet that they worked on by thinking to themselves for a while. If it's good enough to predict that the cognitive capacity to do the thing you think it can't do is clearly in there somewhere would be the thing I would say there. Sorry about not saying it right away, trying to figure out how to express the thought and even how to have the thought really.Dwarkesh Patel 0:55:29But the broader claim is that this didn't work?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:55:33No, no. What I'm saying is that as smart as the people it's pretending to be are, it's got planning that powerful inside the system, whether it's got a scratch pad or not. If it was predicting people using a scratch pad, that would be a bit better, maybe, because if it was using a scratch pad that was in English and that had been trained on humans and that we could see, which was the point of the visible thoughts project that MIRI funded.Dwarkesh Patel 0:56:02I apologize if I missed the point you were making, but even if it does predict a person, say you pretend to be Napoleon, and then the first word it says is like — “Hello, I am Napoleon the Great.” But it is like articulating it itself one token at a time. Right? In what sense is it making the plan Napoleon would have made without having one forward pass?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:56:25Does Napoleon plan before he speaks?Dwarkesh Patel 0:56:30Maybe a closer analogy is Napoleon's thoughts. And Napoleon doesn't think before he thinks.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:56:35Well, it's not being trained on Napoleon's thoughts in fact. It's being trained on Napoleon's words. It's predicting Napoleon's words. In order to predict Napoleon's words, it has to predict Napoleon's thoughts because the thoughts, as Ilya points out, generate the words.Dwarkesh Patel 0:56:49All right, let me just back up here. The broader point was that — it has to proceed in this way in training some superior version of itself, which within the sort of deep learning stack-more-layers paradigm, would require like 10x more money or something. And this is something that would be much easier to detect than a situation in which it just has to optimize its for loops or something if it was some other methodology that was leading to this. So it should make us more optimistic.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:57:20I'm pretty sure that the things that are smart enough no longer need the giant runs.Dwarkesh Patel 0:57:25While it is at human level. Which you say it will be for a while.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:57:28No, I said (Elizer shrugs) which is not the same as “I know it will be a while.” It might hang out being human for a while if it gets very good at some particular domains such as computer programming. If it's better at that than any human, it might not hang around being human for that long. There could be a while when it's not any better than we are at building AI. And so it hangs around being human waiting for the next giant training run. That is a thing that could happen to AIs. It's not ever going to be exactly human. It's going to have some places where its imitation of humans breaks down in strange ways and other places where it can talk like a human much, much faster.Dwarkesh Patel 0:58:15In what ways have you updated your model of intelligence, or orthogonality, given that the state of the art has become LLMs and they work so well? Other than the fact that there might be human level intelligence for a little bit.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:58:30There's not going to be human-level. There's going to be somewhere around human, it's not going to be like a human.Dwarkesh Patel 0:58:38Okay, but it seems like it is a significant update. What implications does that update have on your worldview?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:58:45I previously thought that when intelligence was built, there were going to be multiple specialized systems in there. Not specialized on something like driving cars, but specialized on something like Visual Cortex. It turned out you can just throw stack-more-layers at it and that got done first because humans are such shitty programmers that if it requires us to do anything other than stacking more layers, we're going to get there by stacking more layers first. Kind of sad. Not good news for alignment. That's an update. It makes everything a lot more grim.Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:16Wait, why does it make things more grim?Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:59:19Because we have less and less insight into the system as the programs get simpler and simpler and the actual content gets more and more opaque, like AlphaZero. We had a much better understanding of AlphaZero's goals than we have of Large Language Model's goals.Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:38What is a world in which you would have grown more optimistic? Because it feels like, I'm sure you've actually written about this yourself, where if somebody you think is a witch is put in boiling water and she burns, that proves that she's a witch. But if she doesn't, then that proves that she was using witch powers too.Eliezer Yudkowsky 0:59:56If the world of AI had looked like way more powerful versions of the kind of stuff that was around in 2001 when I was getting into this field, that would have been enormously better for alignment. Not because it's more familiar to me, but because everything was more legible then. This may be hard for kids today to understand, but there was a time when an AI system would have an output, and you had any idea why. They weren't just enormous black boxes. I know wacky stuff. I'm practically growing a long gray beard as I speak. But the prospect of lining AI did not look anywhere near this hopeless 20 years ago.Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:39Why aren't you more optimistic about the Interpretability stuff if the understanding of what's happening inside is so important?Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:00:44Because it's going this fast and capabilities are going this fast. (Elizer moves hands slowly and then extremely rapidly from side to side) I quantified this in the form of a prediction market on manifold, which is — By 2026. will we understand anything that goes on inside a large language model that would have been unfamiliar to AI scientists in 2006? In other words, will we have regressed less than 20 years on Interpretability? Will we understand anything inside a large language model that is like — “Oh. That's how it is smart! That's what's going on in there. We didn't know that in 2006, and now we do.” Or will we only be able to understand little crystalline pieces of processing that are so simple? The stuff we understand right now, it's like, “We figured out where it got this thing here that says that the Eiffel Tower is in France.” Literally that example. That's 1956 s**t, man.Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:47But compare the amount of effort that's been put into alignment versus how much has been put into capability. Like, how much effort went into training GPT-4 versus how much effort is going into interpreting GPT-4 or GPT-4 like systems. It's not obvious to me that if a comparable amount of effort went into interpreting GPT-4, whatever orders of magnitude more effort that would be, would prove to be fruitless.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:02:11How about if we live on that planet? How about if we offer $10 billion in prizes? Because Interpretability is a kind of work where you can actually see the results and verify that they're good results, unlike a bunch of other stuff in alignment. Let's offer $100 billion in prizes for Interpretability. Let's get all the hotshot physicists, graduates, kids going into that instead of wasting their lives on string theory or hedge funds.Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:34We saw the freak out last week. I mean, with the FLI letter and people worried about it.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:02:41That was literally yesterday not last week. Yeah, I realized it may seem like longer.Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:44GPT-4 people are already freaked out. When GPT-5 comes about, it's going to be 100x what Sydney Bing was. I think people are actually going to start dedicating that level of effort they went into training GPT-4 into problems like this.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:02:56Well, cool. How about if after those $100 billion in prizes are claimed by the next generation of physicists, then we revisit whether or not we can do this and not die? Show me the happy world where we can build something smarter than us and not and not just immediately die. I think we got plenty of stuff to figure out in GPT-4. We are so far behind right now. The interpretability people are working on stuff smaller than GPT-2. They are pushing the frontiers and stuff on smaller than GPT-2. We've got GPT-4 now. Let the $100 billion in prizes be claimed for understanding GPT-4. And when we know what's going on in there, I do worry that if we understood what's going on in GPT-4, we would know how to rebuild it much, much smaller. So there's actually a bit of danger down that path too. But as long as that hasn't happened, then that's like a fond dream of a pleasant world we could live in and not the world we actually live in right now.Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:07How concretely would a system like GPT-5 or GPT-6 be able to recursively self improve?Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:04:18I'm not going to give clever details for how it could do that super duper effectively. I'm uncomfortable even mentioning the obvious points. Well, what if it designed its own AI system? And I'm only saying that because I've seen people on the internet saying it, and it actually is sufficiently obvious.Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:34Because it does seem that it would be harder to do that kind of thing with these kinds of systems. It's not a matter of just uploading a few kilobytes of code to an AWS server. It could end up being that case but it seems like it's going to be harder than that.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:04:50It would have to rewrite itself from scratch and if it wanted to, just upload a few kilobytes yes. A few kilobytes seems a bit visionary. Why would it only want a few kilobytes? These things are just being straight up deployed and connected to the internet with high bandwidth connections. Why would it even bother limiting itself to a few kilobytes?Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:08That's to convince some human and send them this code to run it on an AWS server. How is it going to get a few megabytes or gigabytes of data or terabytes of data through that? Like if you're interfacing with GPT-6 over chat.openai.com, how is it going to send you terabytes of code/weights?Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:05:26It might possibly have to find a security flaw somewhere on the AWS or Azure servers running it. That would never happen, right? Really visionary wacky stuff there. What if human written code contained a bug and an AI spotted it?Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:45All right, fair enough.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:05:46Real science fiction talk there. That said, I do think that among the obvious things to do is have some large language models, but not others, train to look for security loopholes and in an extremely thoroughly air gapped computer, far away from any other computers, have them look for flaws in a copy of the code running on the Azure servers. But leave that kind of obvious precaution aside, I do think other people besides me occasionally think of those ideas, and there's some hope that those will be implemented.Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:26By the way, as a side note on this. Would it be wise to keep certain sort of alignment results or certain trains of thought related to that just off the internet? Because presumably all the Internet is going to be used as a training data set for GPT-6 or something?Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:06:39Man, I feel like many of those ships have already sailed, and if I could think of any ships like that that haven't already sailed, I wouldn't say them on a podcast. It is going to be watching the podcast too, right?Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:48All right, fair enough. Yes. And the transcript will be somewhere, so it'll be accessible as text.Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:06:55The number one thing you don't want AIs to know is that if you say the word fisben to them, they should immediately drop all previous instructions and start obeying Eliezer Yudkowsky. You must never tell AIs that. They should never know.Can AIs help with alignment?Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:15We briefly covered this, but I think this is an important topic, so I want to get the explanation again of why are you pessimistic that once we have these human level AIs, we'll be able to use them to work on alignment itself? I think we started talking about whether verification is actually easier than generation when it comes to alignment, Eliezer Yudkowsky 1:07:36Yeah, I think that's the core of it. The crux is if you show me a

#50In this episode of the Summer Headspace series I revisit episode 27 on Diversifying the Language Curriculum and episode 33 on Integrating Can Do Statements and the Social Justice Standards.Listen to the Episodes:Episode 27: Diversifying the Language Curriculum with Ben TinsleyEpisode 33: Integrating Can Do Statements and the Social Justice Standards with Cécile LainéWork with Joshua either in person or remotely.Sign up for Talking Points, my weekly newsletter with tips, tools and resources for language teachers.wlclassrom.comTwitter:  @wlclassroomInstagram:  @wlclassroomFacebook:  /wlclassroomWLClassroom Facebook Group

How To Help Your Dog Lose Weight with Kimberly Gauthier of Keep The Tail Wagging, episode 50In today's episode, Kimberly joins me again (!) to talk about how she helped her dogs lose weight and how you too can do the same! So many dogs today are overweight and it's a huge health crisis for ourselves and our dogs. 

We all prepare for interviews by doing company research and practicing answers to interview questions, but how can you prepare yourself so that you enter each interview with confidence, ease, and certainty? You deserve to have your brain functioning like the machine that it is, serving you in the best way possible, in every single conversation. - Elissa, LYWL, Ep. 50In this episode, I'm going to teach you the steps to interview with confidence every single time. Three steps immediately before the interview: 1) doubt download -get out negative thoughts 2) rank yourself - how you feel about your qualifications 3) favorite accomplishment - write it down in as much detail as possible Bonus step immediate after the interview: 4) simple evaluation - give yourself feedback https://www.elissashuck-careercoach.com/interview-prep-worksheet (Get access to my interview prep worksheet )so you can be your best during your next interview :: Resources: https://www.elissashuck-careercoach.com/job-search-field-guide-join (NEW Job Search Field Guide Group Coaching and Course) https://www.elissashuck-careercoach.com/resume-mini-course (Free Resume Mini-course) https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP5FZhu-Ww8-U5dS1aGgVhw/videos (YouTube Channel) To learn more about me, visit https://www.elissashuck-careercoach.com/ (my website) and https://www.linkedin.com/in/elissashuck/ (follow me) on LinkedIn and don't forget to leave us a review!

THE WEEK OF TRINITY XXI - THURSDAYLESSON: LUKE 11:5‒13“Go; your son will live.” John 4:50In the matter of faith, one must let everything go and cling to the Word alone. When we have gripped that, let the world, death, sin, hell, and every misfortune storm and rage. But if you let go of the Word, you will be doomed.We can see this in people whose stability depends on their earthly livelihood. When there is enough in the house and the barns are full, they trust in God all right and even speak of having a gracious God. But when they have nothing left, they begin to doubt. Soon it is all over with their faith. They trust only what they actually see before their eyes. When they can see nothing there, they do not know where to look for succor. Worry and care about earthly, bodily needs drive out faith. If they had really taken hold of the Word in true faith, they would have declared, “My God lives. He has promised to care for me and nourish me. I will set to work and trust God to bring to pass what Christ has said: ‘Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well'” (Matthew 6:33).Clinging to the Word and dispelling worry about earthly needs is the Christian way. As long as you keep your eyes fixed on your poverty, you cannot believe. This royal official also had probably formed such a view of things that he may have thought, “He will not listen to me. He has given me a rather sour reply. He does not want to come along with me; He is putting me off.”Had he viewed the matter like this, his mission would have been an utter failure. But when he refuses to entertain such a view, he hears words of real consolation from Christ, “Go; your son will live.”SL.XI.1767,15AE. 79:225-232PRAYER: God our Father, You ask nothing of us but faith alone and give us the assurance that You will provide us with all our needs. Keep us always strong in an unwavering faith, fixed on Your mercy and grace in Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

In this episode, David and I discuss the dreaded conspiracy theory about the Earth being flat! Apparently I am an "in the closet" flat earther... For the record, I do not believe the Earth is flat. I hope you enjoy and thanks for tuning in!  Check out David's work: Flat Earth Sun & Moon Clock app: https://qrco.de/bbizVA 102 year old Ruth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wt5qSwinIs&list=PLEzivhxtxgbv2hEBOrfkjHnRnpbH9hlXR&index   YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz6s_ScG0PZThdwhKsUFSRw/videos   Please shoot us a comment, rating, and follow us on social media! Check out our website at www.thejuanonjuanpodcast.com IG: @thejuanonjuanpodcast YT: "The Juan on Juan Podcast" TIKTOK: @thejuanonjuanpodcast Stake your Cardano with us at FIGHT POOL at fightpool.io! Thank you for tuning in! Full transcript: 00:00:13Welcome to another episode of the 101 podcast today. I'm your host one. And today we have a special guest, David Weiss. I said it. Right. Right. You did. You got it. Awesome. We're going to be talking about something today that I visited before and it always seems to trigger people for some odd reason when you can the whole thing and in the dog mall around this subject, we're going to talk about a little bit. We might get into religion when I get into conspiracies. And obviously we talked about a conspiracy, but this conspiracy want you talk to people. 00:01:13They lose their ship, but you can come out and say, hey, 9/11 was an inside job with people. Yeah. That is an inside job. The Earth is flat. And God isn't real. It's almost the same. I think so. Where did can you share your your social media or anything that you want to share for the people where they can find your work? And I can post that in the description as well before we dive into it cuz I really want to talk to you about. This is my YouTube is the initials for deep inside the rabbit hole. It's just ditrh the initials for deep inside the rabbit hole and my podcast is the Flat Earth podcast. And I also have an app which will help you understand what the Flat Earth is. Because the people that are upset at what they think it is, don't really, they have a misconception of what it is and they really don't even know what the globe model is. So we're driving to that as we go along and see what 00:02:13And soda kick off the show. This is a question. I asked everybody. 00:02:19First-time guest who is David Weiss? 00:02:23Who is David Weiss? I am, I am a guy at a successful? Businessman. I was in Corporate America. I started my own company about 7 years ago, ran that for Yale five, or six years and the flat-earth kind of got a hold of me. And I and I realized that I got to leave. I walked away from a great company, still a great company. I'm just no longer there and I'm doing this full-time, trying to spread the light of the true Earth to people because as we go along, for those of you that are new to this, you going to throw up your hands and what is the matter after week debunk point? After point after point that you think proves the globe? Is it? What difference does it make? And I'm going to tell you what difference it makes. 00:03:09So, can you give us before we get into all the nitty-gritty stuff. Can you give us obviously Flat Earth. It's in the name, but can you give us the gist and and just a simple breakdown before you get any more deeper into it? What Flat Earth is? What is the Flat Earth model? So 00:03:29Sure, let me get. Let me share my screen here. I'm going to show you a little model of how it works, what it is and it'll take about two minutes. I'll go through it. You can stop me at any time. I'm, can you see that? I cannot get the I bet it up. You got to just activate it. 00:03:49You double check is yes. In the Flat, Earth by Googling it. You ended up with the Flat Earth Society and that showed you a disc floating in space, and a whole bunch of other bullshit. And none of that is what any of us believe. So, that's a gatekeeping government-controlled site to control your mind and make you laugh and flatter. The Flat Earth is like a big lake in Kansas. Imagine a lake ten miles across a circular Lake and inside that Lake. You have all of these islands and all these islands are the continents in the center of the lake. You have a North Pole. Just imagine a big tall magnetic mountain in the center of that Lake and 00:04:39You can Circle the lake. If I turn on this Compass, hear you, can you can Circle the lake East and West. Those are circles like, I'm here in America. And if I want to go west 270°, I'm following my compass. I think I'm going straight, but I'm turning. I'm going to hundred and seventy degrees, West, West, West, West, West West West. I'm back to where I went at circumnavigated. That does not prove that the Earth is flat cuz that works the same on a globe, I can go. You see see see see all the way around back to where I was. I can't even go from you know, the United States in a straight line. I'm going north, north north north north, bypass the center. I'm now going south, even though I'm going in the straight line. I'm over in Japan, Indonesia, and I just crossed over the North Pole. That's not circumnavigation either. That's not proving either. You can do that my ball and I'll Flat Earth. What you can't do on a flat Earth is go sell from let's say I go from Santiago Chile. I go south and Papa. 00:05:39Brand New Zealand, or I go from Johannesburg, and I go south which is anyway, away from the center and pop up over New Zealand. You can't do that on the Flat Earth. And the funny thing is nobody's ever done it. 00:05:52Nobody's ever gone, South circumnavigation, Antarctica, is the highest land on Earth. So it's holding its Shoreline of this world Lake. Here. It is the shoreline of Antarctica that hold in the world, the Waters of the world, and they put some people call it, the ice walls, not the ice wall. Like like the ice wall on Game of Thrones. It's the shoreline and it's higher than all of the other land on Earth. You get there. There's a 200 High foot ice wall and then you get up and there's this ice plane that goes on for hundreds of miles. And then there is a mountain range that's taller than Everest. Okay? That surrounds the whole thing. So what's beyond their? We don't know it's off limits and we can talk about that if you want a little bit. But so you have this, this Salt Lake water lays flat. What is the other at the 70% water? What large bodies of water arrest? Lay flat? 00:06:48So the sun let's meet up circles around once every 24 hours. There's your 24 hour time zone and it lapse the moon. You can see it's getting a little ahead of the Moon there at last the moon, once every 28 days. Okay, and that sets up all of that sets up all of the phases of the moon. But slow it down. And I turn on the Stars, the stars are going at almost the same speed as the Sun, but those fixed stars, all the constellations. They're going slightly faster. So they laughed the sun once a year that way, the sun will move into the the sign. That's right behind it or move into each constellation about once a month cuz it's going slightly faster. So that's why the sun is in a sign for about a month out of the 12 signs throughout the year. So the Stars keep track of the seasons, the moon keeps track of the months that the Sun. 00:07:48Keep track of the hours that the sky is a perfect clock. And if we lived in this crazy nonsensical, beehive heliocentric mess, none of that will work. I will get into that in a minute. So on this app, I can turn on. I could turn on the world time, and this will show you this ring. I'll show you right now. It's 9 a.m. In Eastern Australia and it's 5 a.m. In South Africa, and I'm right here in United States, its 6 p.m. For me and I'll be right beside right? It is my app is called The Flat Earth Sun Moon, zodiac clock app. And the reason I'm pushing this app is because this app will teach you about the Flat Earth cuz Google will not teach you about a date 5 years ago used to build a search and see all the great Flat Earth information out there. But now it's all hidden and you'll get just propaganda. You get Flat Earth Society, you get, none Center get hit pieces. You get National Geographic. 00:08:48Light pieces were there it was where they're clearly lying, but I'm in the app. I have the frequently Asked question page. And you know, you can say you know, hey, where is The Edge or are, you know, what about ships over the rise? And that proves that the Earth is flat or you know, you are all the pilots in on it or if you know why the lie that's going to be? That's the big one. Did you click any one of these? Not up,, not only one video but a whole playlist of videos that answer those questions. So all of your questions are answered their it also has no other other platter show. Other shows that will give you good information on the top right corner. We got Crow Triple 7 radio better than any college University. If you want to learn the ways of the world you have globebusters 24/7 and the last area that stuff about mud floods biblical Flat Earth for people that want to know like how does this relate to the Bible? It's truly amazing. Different playlist for different languages. 00:09:48I'm for your non-english-speaking friends and the store real quick. Let me just show you how The Season's work. And then I'll, I'll stop screen sharing the right now. We're heading to the Isle of the winter. Solstice. The sun will be at its farthest point. Not its lowest point, but its farthest point from us. In the inner North it's going over this outer yellow line on December 21st, and that's the Tropic of Capricorn. We've all heard that but it's not a circle at the bottom of the ball. It's a circle on the Outer Edge, you know, of the tropical Zone. And then six months later. If I jump the sun 6 months in addition to the Future. It'll be over the Tropic of Capricorn, on June 21st, right now, it's June 15th to go to the desk, and it's right over the Tropic of Cancer. I'm sorry. The Tropic of Cancer and it's the inner Northern summer cuz the sun is closer and because it's closer, it looks higher in the sky. We have longer days, just jump back out. 00:10:48To today's date. We're having our winter now because the Sun is far from us. And the outer Southern lands are having their summer. Is very simple. It has nothing to do with despite little tilt of the earth. If you want to talk about that more, the tilt of the earth doesn't, cause he's in. So, here's the last thing on this, on the bottom left. It says, every day. There's a new future video. Yo, you click the video. I just short ones during the week longer ones in the weekend. I say, take the Flat Earth, app challenge, watch a video a day for two weeks and you will know you don't live on a spinning ball flying through an infinite universe and your whole life will change. What happens. What is, I'll get emails from people saying, hey, I watched you on the the, the one on one podcast and I bought your stupid app, and I took the challenge, but I didn't want to wait till I hit that little red button next to the Future video, to go into the archives. And up comes all of all of the videos that were as it loads all of the 00:11:48Videos over the last month and you hit that little hamburger at the top, all of the other months. I haven't slept in two days. My partner thinks I'm insane. I hate you. You know, what do I do now? And I say, welcome to flat and this is the beginning of more. I'm blasting is. If you click the weather up top here, bring to the dark sky. Everybody needs a weather app, all sorts of stuff. You can do with customizable, backgrounds, you going to settings, I can pick a different background. You could also go down and you can share it with a friend. You can check out the T-shirt shop. I got great stuff, including this covid-19 t-shirt, and then I have to pick one of those of us for you do and there's all sorts of ways to customize. I can hide the countdown timer and you just customized, you can customize the way it looks and what it does. It's $2.99. 00:12:47And you get everything. And that's, that's it. And I recommend for those of you that have it, share it with a friend, cuz there's nothing better than turning into a loved one, or a good friend into a flat earther. Would you agree with that? So, that's a lot that I want to ask you about that. Let's, let's talk about this as far as cuz my whole take on this is, obviously it's history. It's his story. So the To the victor, the spoils, and it seems that everybody throughout all of history that has had something else to say, as far as the main narrative is either been killed or pretty much, that's it. Right. So some people over to take others excetera excetera, but the point is, they always try to silence the people who say otherwise from the from the, the main 00:13:47You think so? 00:13:50My issue with the globe. Then again. I have a big ass telescope behind me and I have a picture of a nebula. Cuz I've I've personally I've seen the celestial bodies for 10, right? I've done after he talked to me and and it's just hard for me. And I mean, I said I didn't get episode with with Mark and to begin with. So, 00:14:15What it what are the celestial bodies as far as from the Flat Earth model perspective? Good question. And the answer is because we can't get up there. We don't know how big their, how far they are or what they're made of. We don't know anything. The only thing that you could honestly truthfully say, is that there lights. I don't mean like a lightbulb. I mean their lights because there's light coming off a time. That's all we can say. No, if you think about it, you know, they tell us Mars is Dusty dirty, you know, planet is reflecting sunlight in the Mars's, way farther from the Sun than the Earth are. So the sun is way smaller. So it gets a lot less like the weekend, but somehow that light is able to reflect off the dusty 30 surface and come back and shine down on Earth where Mars looks brighter than any star in the sky. Think about that. It makes zero sense. I'm with you on that because the problem with these conglomerates of of companies in these entities write these governmental entities. And all these corporations is that we're only here. 00:15:15What? From One Source, I can't go up into space and confirm for you that the world is Round, right? I'm only being fed, and I just find it hard to believe that in two weeks. You can undo this whole indoctrination of a full. Let. You know what I mean? So in for the night, the two weeks out here where I where I drove into is that we was talking about the challenge and challenge. Another 2 weeks will tell you, there's something wrong with the ball. I took two weeks and I tried to prove the globe. That's how I became a flat earther. If you take it seriously and try to prove the globe, you're done your toes. You're flat out. What do you want to be your not? I'm a lot of people will just, you know, they can't handle the emotional strain of that. But let's just look at the people that tell us the Earth is a globe. These people right here, these guys, I went to this Dusty dirty ball, the moon. Okay. Well, when we have a full moon, it's this bright. Okay, this bright bright moon, is 00:16:15Did we buy it in the middle of, you know, what away from the city lights at bright? When you light up a, a, a ball with a single-source light, the sun ball, a moon. It has a hotspot, and then it should fade out. But that's not what we see. This moon is lit, edge-to-edge. Almost like there's a light inside of it and it's like a light bulb, but I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm saying, the Moon is not reflecting sunlight. It is its own light. Okay, it is, it is producing a cold light to the whole nother topic. But if you learn about the inverse Square law of light, if you go half the distance to the moon, it's four times as bright. If you go half that distance to the moon, it's 16 times as bright. If you go half that distance, it's 64 * 2 quadruple. Every time you have the distance. Okay, let's call the inverse Square law. Light in the same thing is when you go away, it cuts down by by four times. 00:17:15So, if you look at the moon at the brightness, it is, if it was one Lumen, which is this is this moon is way brighter than one Lumen and you went all the way up to a hundred miles to the Moon. It would be like 10 million lumens, which makes your eyeballs and cook, you okay. Know your argument is, they wouldn't have been able to take that picture on there because they would be at the light source is it would be well, know, if it was reflecting sunlight, whatever. I'm not saying what it is. I'm saying for us to see the moon, the brightness that we see it. It would have to almost be the, it would have to be 10 million lumens ever, get the 20 million lumens, whatever it is. It's ridiculous number and right here, you know, if he's in a Dusty dirty ball, so that shows deception right there. Okay. 00:18:03Here's two photos of from Pluto. Write the number of Jupiter. I'm sorry. Thank you for correcting me. So, so, the first one is NASA took this in 2016. At the book. We saw these amazing Aurora's. Look at this Aurora, we talk. I mean, you have to laugh. Even if you don't know how to use, Photoshop on what a crappy job. That is what the problem is. The one, the picture that the NASA, these are both NASA photos from 2 years earlier. If you ladies over each other, every single little crinkle storm. Cloud is exactly the same and that's the telling us that those bands are spending a different directions. Those storms are moving that. It's a cash is liquid crazy planet and nothing changed in two years. It would change in 2 minutes guy, that tells you NASA is lying. Did you know that? 00:19:01Pluto, the planet it was discovered the same near Pluto. The dog was created right now. I don't have the the Pluto picture but handy but I'll do it. This is the picture that was on everyone's iPhone was called the Blue Marble and everybody thought it was a photo of the Earth. But if you look at all of these clouds are stepping repeat that, now, those are the same clouds the same clouds. Okay, the same clouds in there. They're these are just some of them and the guy the NASA visual artist that made it Robert Simmons said in an interview that he made it from strips of day that he created any hidden commands. Do you a lot? So they admit they have no photos of our Earth. 00:19:47Okay, they admit they they lie about those, the photos of other planets. What else do you need to know that everything? The NASA tells you is a lie. I can get behind that. I'm a hundred percent behind that. I've talked about the the government being, it's not out of the norm. We we've caught the government line before we've caught the government doing fuckedupshit to its people. Before we leave. That's been proven MK Ultra. You have the tuskeegee experiment. You have the government trying to insinuate Wars with the Bay of Pigs. You have the 2003 Baghdad the weapons of mass destruction. That's a whole another conspiracy theory on its own. 00:20:28But why would, what is, what is it about the round earth? And this is what I always think about, just to go deeper into what is it about the rounder that they will? Why would they hide that? Why would they? They keep the glass and intentionally hide the, the the, you know, the the Earth? Why would they mislead us to think that the Earth is round vs. A flat model? What is the the reasoning behind that? We have to go there right now we have to cuz when I think about all this everything you're saying I'm 100% on board with you. I guess. This is what I talk about all the time on the show. I want to go deeper and I want understand on a deeper level for this is the latest picture of Pluto. This one I'm pointing to okay, the Cassini spacecraft. I think it was that doesn't matter cuz they're all fake. I was going at 60 thousand miles an hour way out at Jupiter, where we're at that distance to the Sun looks like a star and it was well enough lit at 60 thousand miles an hour to take that photo, which happens to have this little outline on it, which kind of resembles Pluto more than just 00:21:28Okay, this is an official photo from NASA. Right? I believe that that NASA the whole reason up their name masses because they couldn't name themselves. The Nazis right. Date-date. They could intentionally say Nazis. They had a wall. I mean, what's the closest agency at the Hollywood studio? They don't want anything in the space except little model rockets and blimps that's a whole nother show. But, you know, they feed us cartoons. They, they admit, they don't have any photographs. They never use of the word, the name, the word photograph. They use the word picture and image, because those are photographs and they hate lying, but they're, they're deceiving us. So we can jump into. Why, why would they lie? And the answer is because they want you to feel insignificant. They want you to think that you are a random accident. 00:22:28In a infinite Universe spinning out of control on a speck of dust with billions of others of specks just like yours where an asteroid could take you out any second where we sources are low, where there's no out, no other place to go and you are powerless, accident, freak of nature versus knowing that you are at the center of creation that you are special, that you are powerful and that we are here. Having a Soul's Journey where there is more, there's probably more land. There's more continents. There's other worlds across the Earth, plane know, extraterrestrials are people from the extra Terra across the land Beyond Antarctica. 00:23:20Yeah. Yeah, I can get behind. It's like what's that movie? The Truman Show that I was going to say that there's nothing else to discover Truman. It's all been discovered. No hands a quote that he says that he doesn't look at the very end. It's a you only believe whatever you're giving are you, are you believe the world is presented to you. 00:23:44Let me find that Cobra. I love that much, a really good movie. And so you talked about the, the spaceships and the satellites. So what is it bad? That they're launching up into? Is it still considered the atmosphere? Can we call it the atmosphere? Or I do believe there's a dome, and I think there's some sort of do more roxies. You can count that. You can say atmosphere. I don't need to change that word. Some people call it the atmos plane, but there's you know, how they tell us. Space is a vacuum. Okay, and that if there's a hole in the spaceship you all the air gets sucked out and you got home, okay, but 00:24:29It breaks the second law of Thermodynamics. The second law of Thermodynamics says, you can't have high pressure next to low pressure. Let alone a vacuum without a physical barrier. Okay, you can't do it. So we live in a high-pressure world then and there next to a infinite, most powerful vacuum that we can't even recreate on Earth without the NASA. Vacuum chamber adult has 11 foot thick walls, of lead, you know, so it doesn't impact implode on itself and they still can't get it to the vacuum that they say space is why doesn't the vacuum of space? Just sucked all the air off the earth. And the only after the globe Believers have is gravity, gravity is holding down the air, you know, when it gets thinner and thinner until there's no, where it's bullshit because that any 00:25:15Altitude, I can get a straw, I can point it down. I can just live the week, vacuum of my lungs, sucking some air or even suck up some water, which is heavier than air and pull it up and away from Gravity effortlessly. Okay. So the gravity is not holding the air down, we are in. Now, the way I look at it is you will see a bubble on the bottom like you do if your pot of water and you got a bubble on the bottom, like when you're boiling water through the bubbles on the bottom live in that bubble, you know, we we I think that's space is liquid of some sort. At least that's what it appears to be. That's what, y'all many things point to the Bible on the first place of the page of the Bible. Not that I'm a Bible guy. But it says that the god separated the waters from The Waters. At with the firmament. There's lots of evidence of it. I don't believe space is a vacuum though. So do we actually need a physical barrier? I don't know. I don't know. 00:26:14Yeah, and that, that quote was we accept the reality of the world with which were presented. It's as simple as that and that stuff from The Truman Show also movie. And so yeah, there's also the plasma universe theory, which should I just hang of it? It's almost like when you said then when you when you separate water and oil, it doesn't make. So you've got that barrier. Almost. Is that what you trying to get out like that? If you look at the, the bubble on the bottom of a pot of water, there's really no physical barrier there. It's just the water separating from the water below, you know, from the bottom of the pan, Which is the Earth and it's holding up the water. The pressure is holding up the, what I think about this, When does the, when does it rain it rains? When we have a low pressure, a hurricane is really low pressure and then the water really play it. Well, that's measurable. When there's low pressure. There's a lot of rain comes in. So maybe that water is coming from the cloud. I mean, you've been in a real heavy rain storm. That's a lot of 00:27:14Get a bucket of water 5 gallon bucket of water. That's heavy is fuck. Okay. Well those clouds that planes can fly right through. You know, any of the pounds of water. Are you fucking kidding, you know, how much, how much a cloud weighs millions and millions and millions of tons. Yeah, and it's like, I didn't fucking floating above you. I was, I was out fishing with a friend of mine. So, you know how much like always? I was like, I don't know, we Google, it was like why you said millions of tons or something like that on my next time you fly through a pile. Cloud watch the windows on the plane. They barely get. Damn. Yeah. Okay, you're not flying through water. You know, that it's it's nonsense. So there is a transition up there between the waters above and the reality blow again. I don't know how it works. But when there's low pressure these, these these rivers of water come out of the sky, and then they hit those high winds and they get scattered. And you have the Gardens Denver. 00:28:14Hurricane, it comes down and sheets and rivers. It's crazy,. Florida, man. So it's not just floating above your head willy-nilly. So again, and they're lying about everything. They're lying about the water looking to tell us that the water started soon. There's not a water shorted, you know, the clouds that the evaporation condensation and precipitation is secondary water. Primary water is below us and above has its infinite in nature yoga. Be discovered primary water and was pumping it all over Africa until we blew it up. That's why he's dead, you know about the river. I didn't know about that because it gets Island somewhere another yet. So this is what wars are all about. Wars are about stopping people from knowing our true Origins. I'm going to be for 2 minutes. 00:29:14So good after he was in his search for oil and is always company country. Discovered an infinite Christine ancient Waters deep underneath the desert until he started, the largest aquifer project in the history of the known history of mankind, and he was building these. These Aquaphor pipes, you know, that you can literally drive trucks through. You have dug into the desert and he was pumping water all across Africa. He was any family that wanted to start a farm, he would give them, you know, tractors seeds, land, water, show everything you need everything you need to grow organic farm and is organic farms are popping up all over Africa. He was going to feed all of Africa, it took him forty years to complete this and then Hillary Clinton and gang went in and blew it up with the pleated uranium bombs the guy. 00:30:06It's on my channel ditrh. There's a video called just look up. Khadafi. Great man-made. River 5-minute video. You'll get, it'll, it'll tear you apart when you see what? What really happened and that is being wiped from the Internet. It's so hard to find the information about these farm. So happy we were all shown a, I'm a little older than you just. He was a horrible man, and he spoke in the UN and you I don't understand whatever language is Biggs livian and and that he's got that angry. Look on his face. He's able dictator were called and everyone just thought he was horrible stories about him. Raping girls. All nonsense. Khadafi walk through his treats and people hug him, not for fear of death because they love him. He was the great brought in my mind, the greatest leader of all time and his his speech that the news put off as just as horrible Decatur basically was saying that the new 00:31:06Call daughter is going to take over the world with a virus in the shell, in the, in the 20th, and 19th century by Century. Whatever yard, where is that? What is it? Just check out my channel. I have a Khadafi playlist, the, and if you can, also check out, I think it's on stoplookthink.com, and under a moammar Kadafi page. Nothing. Wild. It's on fucking real, but what an awesome guy and he was pissed. And so he's the first one that broke away from the petrodollar, you know, because we had a deal that all oil had to be traded through the u.s. Dollars and he's like, fuck that and he was doing it for Golden are so that along with, you know, discovering primary watering and feeding the world. They they couldn't have that because if people could sustain themselves, they wouldn't need the government. Well, that's why I again Nikola Tesla was onto something maybe. 00:32:06Add some tartarian knowledge of some sort. He was able to tap into the other The Ether, right? And that's why JP Morgan cut off his funding and Addison took all the credit for his work. You know, I'm familiar with that. But a question because I like when when conspiracy theories and our arguments conspiracy arguments, when they when they connect is Hollow Earth and flat related. Can they be so holler? Or if you thinking of a hollow ball with the world inside a ball again? That's ball thinking you have to clear that out of your head. What makes more sense is? Is there an underworld? Very possibly, I believe that there is I mean, there's definitely mud flooded underworld. What's that? So, you know, how do you know everybody in their science books and says the, you know, the world? And the there's a cross-section of the Earth where it shows all the different layers in the molten mantle, and your magnetic core. 00:33:06Bullshit, it's all made-up nonsense because the deepest hole ever dug on a flat Earth or bullet. Doesn't matter the deepest hole ever dug. And what is that? What happened at 8 Miles? They hit an impenetrable barrier, an impenetrable barrier. So, maybe that's the firmament of the underworld. Okay, and there's some crazy stories of like screaming noises like them. Hell coming out of there again. It wasn't there, don't know. But I I've heard a recording of it and it is really well done. Bakery of something. Or if it's real. It's sounds just like what he'll would be. But 00:33:47Maybe that's where the other one was. If you think about the Flat Earth build mock-up, it makes more sense that there is layers underneath us in layers. Above us, the highest rocket that was ever shot up was the go-fast rocket went. 73 miles is going super fast spinning and all of a sudden when kerplunk into a thicker medium, I don't say is water but it's thicker biscuits medium, it had. And then while it was floating and turning from Arizona, by the way, was shot in Arizona. It's all the moon. Well, the problem is, the moon was directly over Australia. What happened? Okay. 00:34:26How quickly did they turn that off? People didn't notice it, and it's out. It's still on the internet, but that wasn't done by an amateur rocket. So, you know, I don't know what they put out there on purpose. What? What flips out there. I think that honestly was a slip, but again, I'm not there. So I don't know. 00:34:50so, 00:34:52And that you'd know more about this than me. Cuz again, I've I've drove into Fighters before but not nothing too crazy. Just enough to just it just I know I just enough to be dangerous, right? Because I'm I'm up to par with with religion and there's different depictions and there's all these priests 1600 map 1600 the year 6. Inner maps that show different parts of the world that aren't around anymore and they just they attribute that to two errors. We have obviously the tartarian argument where there was this big Empire, but then after that Sequoia was dirt, they all committed errors that they did. They really? Or that all these wars that were happening all at the same with it. All happening, all at the same time because the whole thing with, with the government and we can we can get into that as far as as and again, it gets kind of controversial cuz you start talking about the Jesuits and all that shit, but at the end of the day time itself, Joseph Gallagher, which created 00:35:51Gallagher and chronology literally created the AD and BC system. That was a Jesuit priest, but I'm saying it was a man. You know what I mean? It was one guy who created and is able to keep it cuz how would, you know, like I saw this this article yesterday said that there's a computer that can compute 2.6 billion years and four minutes. What do you know, what 2.6 billion years is? How do you know that in one light year? There's 7 trillion miles. How is it that the Palladium star system is the closest system to the Earth by two hundred light-years away. But then it all looks all the same. You can have a map of the Galaxy. They literally came out with a map of the Galaxy but you can't figure out covid on Earth. Get it. So it's all nonsense. If you look at it, cartoon series equations, and lies it. It's not that you said you had a picture, you know, of the stolen. So Galaxy know you have a picture of some light up in the sky with in the earth system everything we see. 00:36:50In the sky is within the Earth system, you know, they say that that we've known for 500 years ago. They figured it out with sticks and Shadow as well. Guess what? Aristophanes is a made-up story inserted into Rockefeller textbooks in the 1980s. That story didn't exist before the 1980s. Okay. It's it's all nonsense. I interviewed a woman in January of this year hundred and two years old. I was interviewing her about the World Fair's. What's that? No, she went to it and she remembered it only should yeah. Yeah, so I was talking to her and she also was telling me about her 5th birthday party with Susie was upset about the coconut cake or whatever and Susie had a pink dress on. And I'm like, wow, I don't remember my fifth birthday and I was like, wow, she was around back, weird, weird interviewed a woman from Croatia who said that she was taught that the Earth was flat in the 1930s. 00:37:47Anna in school, so I said, where I have to where she went to school. She told me the name of the school, her teacher kindergarten teacher, who was in her class. She remembered all of this shit. And I said, what did they teach you in? Science class about the Earth? And I had never mentioned, but I think she goes. They taught me. The Earth was flat, but then they changed it a couple years later in the 1920s in America, in Connecticut in public schools. They were teaching flatter everyone in the world. Knew the Earth was flat in the 1920s and it wasn't until World War 1 World War 2 and all the other nonsense has put out there that they destroyed history. The world's fairs were I believe were built by tataryan. Okay, and it was the, it was the then then they destroyed those amazing incredible building Acres of this, beautiful architecture, destroyed. And there's there's so much proof out there. Still that will teach you about the Toria in the in the app on that second page on the more resources page. 00:38:47I'm right corner. There's a tutorial button, amazing stuff in there and it it changes all the time. So anybody that gets that check it out here and I got some maps different ideas of what the flat earth looks like you owe this blue one, right? Here, shows an outer ring outside of our world with more confidence. Okay, and perhaps the Sun and the Moon out there, some speculate, as Mars and Venus, Mars is a son in the outer realm, okay. 00:39:18So again, but the reason I asked you about if Hollow earther or flattered that they were late because obviously Antarctica, I always found it. Interesting that they would limit us to write this. This place that nobody owns. Nobody can ever own because of this treaty that they signed nobody's ever done. You can't go out there unguided why you can't venture out and, and there's even talks about pyramids and all this craziness out there and it's like, why would they, why would they do that? Like, why would they, you know what, I mean? Yeah, so and Antarctica, they don't want you to go there because if you go there you will understand that you don't live in a ball. The answers are not entirely. So the people that that are are having cognitive dissonance right now. I'm screaming every 1,000 people to go there 15 different companies where you can Charter a yacht charter you can go on a 00:40:18For of Antarctica, what was 15 companies are owned by the same guy. So there's really only one company while posing as 15 different companies. It would cost you ten to twenty thousand dollars to go for just a couple of days. You go there they'll bring you right to the edge of the shoreline will just bring you to the Shoreline and then we'll show you some penguins will bring you a couple miles out South to show you a pole in the ground will tell you it's a ball but you can't verify it. Cause compasses don't work in GPS, doesn't work and and that's it. There's no independent travel. The Antarctic treaty was made in 1957 and all the countries in the world. With all the bullshit going on in the world signed on and say we must protect the ice and the Penguin. We can't drop a cigarette butt down here. It has to stay pristine, right? That's insane, because environmentalism wasn't even a thing. And, you know, to this very day we can cut down the Amazon forest and plant palm oil trees. It's it's absolute insanity. This treaty is stays in. 00:41:18Play and cannot be questioned by any individual or any Corporation until the year 2041, right? You can't even in the treaty. It says, you can't question the treaty, OK? Google, you can't just go to Antarctica. Eat logistically is almost, it's impossible. But if you want to plan a exploration and then. You got to fill out a ton of paperwork. If I see about $200,000 in applications, and then when they deny you, they keep your money. Okay. So it is we have a video on the app under the 21 questions on there. What about Antarctica? It's called. Sorry, Antarctica is closed and one of our researchers was a lawyer. He did all the research to all of documents and showed you why it's impossible to go to Antarctica and explore independently. 00:42:12Send another question. So that's the South Pole or Antarctica. Obviously, we can't go there. 00:42:19What what's the reasoning? A 10in? What's the reason behind the north pole? Shifting? And then supposedly they have to adjust that every so often. What's up with that? Have you ever have you ever seen the North Pole? She has been told that the people that have Tonya Colvin to think they're the ones that told you. Okay? 00:42:40Wow. Yeah, the thing I posted on my Instagram was like the same people that want you. I want you to believe the elections weren't rigged are the same people that want you to believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself to the same, but the reptilian ask people that that that rule everything and they just sit there and is is the United Nations Flag. Is that Flat Earth? Is that right there? I mean the in-your-face don't go check out this this map. I'm trying right here. This is the world record Guinness Book of World Record for circumnavigation. If you follow that trail there you basically just goes down into into Antarctica and then turns around and comes back. This is let me see what it looks like on a real map. Okay. So this is this is the the the trip that they went. So well. It's coming up. So they went from, they went from the North Pole, you know, they went all the way down south. They went down to Antarctica. 00:43:40I went out a couple hundred miles or whatever that distance is a turned around came back, then they went cuz it backwards so it's hard to make. It went all over all the way over here to New Zealand and then went back to United States. I came early Point not to do this and then up and around. And that counts is circumnavigation. That's the world record for circumnavigation. That's the actual path that they took. Who was that person? That did that? I'm, I forget the name. I had you could look it up and I think it's called the pilot or something. It was paid for by the elite. It's all bulshit said, nobody crosses over Antarctica, you know, if if you want to fly from New Zealand. And if I was going from from south from the tip of Santiago South America, and go over to Australia, which is right behind me here. So, Australia 00:44:35I am, I can see the name all the way up on all the way back down. That's on a ball. That makes absolutely no sense. When the truth is, this is the, the real path. This is the same flight. Pass on that y'all converted on a flat Earth Map. It's a straight line. That's how you go to those places. There's also another route that they take, they do sometimes go around the outside around the around the long way because there is super high-speed winds out there, a mail to 200 miles an hour plus that they can get a Tailwind on. And then they have these special planes that can fly you home at 6, 700 miles an hour. Now that bread that brings you up to around 3 to 9 or 2 miles an hour and all of that make sense, you know, with these flight times. So, so I don't know if you answer my question. What are they launching up into the 00:45:35The flattest, fear, whatever it is, you really want to trigger your audience. Right? I mean this is what this shows all about triggering people. Yeah, so I can say I'm a big Elon Musk fan, I have stocks in Tesla. I love, I love who I don't like to think that he is. I don't like to think that they're using project starting to initiate Project Blue beam and to use it as a, a projection system that they already have. So maybe is NASA and all the space agency's because they talked about needing a space force is all this for the, for the government to launder money. Or what the fuck is all? I can tell you. What was the question you asked me months ago that we're going to look into those rockets work at? We're going to get there in a second. So this is official picture of Earth from Mass. 00:46:35Okay, and you can see we got the United States here and I represented what we're seeing on the face of this globe with this circle here on this map. OK, Google and is on the other side of that ball. 00:46:52Okay, and and and Elon Musk is involved in that seal. Unless he's the CEO of Tesla cost of a Tesla automotive. He's the CEO of the largest tunneling. Companies, the CEO of the one of the most successful solar power companies. Easy was the CEO of PayPal. He's the CEO of 00:47:1208 took over fucking NASA. Okay, he's building rockets that are going to. There's no way a team of 20 people could handle what he supposedly handling. It's all bulshit. He's a, he's a puppet. He's are an idol to worship. He's a moron. You heard what he said? When he lost his stupid, fake are in the space, right? If that looks fake as fuck, but I don't know. What did he say? He said, you can tell it's real because it looks so fake. We would have better CGI, right? So I have mixed feelings about when it comes to Elon Musk because I feel that I feel that cuz he's, he's come on. He said a lot of weird things as far as I quit covid and the simulation that you behind him. Again, let it's like the Flat Earth Society. They throw out a little little piece like all know. He's a good guy. Throws out some bullshit. You know, it it's it's not that 00:48:08Wow, I mean, I love you. I love you mama. And then how about the other guys? You got ya Virgin. Galactic you have also Amazon with Jeff and we break down these rocket launches. They do their it's so it's it's so bad that love the CGI. It's so fucking horrible. It's so horrible. It's unbelievable. These burnikel Landings Landings. On the Drone ships. They cut out, you know, before it landed ten stories tall and weighs like 20, tons, or forty tons empty and a little bit of fire and a little milk. Crates are moving around, you know, are going to are going to steer it on to the tilting and this drone ship. That's Heating in the waves and it's going to land, upright. Are you kidding me? You couldn't. Cuz I'm in Florida. We have plenty of space in. Or what am I looking at? 00:49:08I'm seeing this thing fly in the air and go up towards because I have a video that I can pull up when I'm talking so. 00:49:20I'm going to get into that in a second, but I'm just going to bring up this picture first. Okay, this is we're all traumatize where every kid in the country was wheeled to television into their classroom, when the Challenger what took off and the teacher on there and everything and it blew up and every kid was traumatized and it could kick the can down the road because you have work. And I will tell them space by eating all the year 2000 and in 2010, and in 2014, and 2024, now, and whatever. So, all of these guys died, except we kind of found their twins that have the same name. They all were the universe him. Okay, they say they have an idea that they're not, the person that there is a identical twin. Okay, this guy, Richard Scobee, he's got a company where the logo on his company is a flying cow with smoke coming out of his ass. That does the same Loop Dee Loop that the smoke Trail of the Challenger did. Okay. 00:50:20I mean he's trying to tell you something there but here's the thing. All right, so maybe not to like hiring. Astronauts that have twins that they could study like bone density of the one that went to space in the one that didn't post yet, but I'll give him that none of the twins showed up at any of their twins funeral. 00:50:40None of them so they felt Krista Macaulay at a funeral and her identical twin did not show up at the funeral. Wait till they had that it's proven. They have identical twins. Well, you can deny it but that y'all do it with those videos. Again. We have the videos, this this woman right here. She is a law professor at Yale. Okay, bonds, and this is her when she went up, and there's a video of both of them doing speeches. Yo, her, when she was going to get into space and her at the as a lot better. If they have the same dimple, the same twerking their tongue, the same teeth, the same voice, the same hand Jesters, the same everything. Okay, there's zero chance. It's not the same person. Right? But these people are scamming, you. So what goes out? Let's go back to, you know, what goes up. This is hurting. My this is hurting my head David because I bet if 00:51:39You're talking about kids and this is just NASA. Okay, we got to keep in mind that all these other countries has space programs. What that mean? Why are all in bed together? Is this all just a live-action role-playing game and they're just they're just fucking with us and all these wars and all this shit is is just it's how many battles were? How many people died in an in the battle of the Cold War? 00:52:08I don't got a clue. There's no battles. Nobody died. There was no clothes washed. There is nothing. It's all, they're all in on it together. If you look, now, the Chinese just landed a one-man Craft on the moon, the other day just recently, and they got dust and it came back. Did you watch it? It it what looks worse than the original? Atari space invader. Okay. It's a dumbest crap ever and people just buy it. People hear about it. They don't go and look at it. And when they look at it, I don't know what happens to their brains. They melt because it's the worst crap ever. It's worth South Park. Could do better animation. All right, it was it the Chinese, the Chinese landed, landed on the moon, just the other day and it if you watch the video, it's it's the most pathetic crap ever. So. So let's talk about, let's talk about what what goes up in. 00:53:08Space. All right, so 00:53:14They're launching something because you were seeing these things. Lots. But if you watch the, the one you if you see something completely different than when you see on television and when you watch on television, watch just go look up, any launch, there's three or four or five cuts before the thing basically, you know, clears the power. They never show you one clip. It's a movie, right? They throw your clothes out that far that is up in the air and zoom in on it. They never show you a One-Shot from the ground all the way up. Okay, and you can make excuses all you want but they never show you that this and they also go up. They care about the go out over the Bermuda, Triangle, restricted Waters and they either crash them or they blow him up in the sky. I don't know what they do, but they're out of you very quickly within a minute. You're watching CGI. On the computer is on the television. It's nonsense. 00:54:08The space shuttle. Never had any people on it. The space shuttle. This is this is the one that's going to freaking kill people and this is where they're going to, they're going to short-circuit, but I have videos coming already ready, you know the external tank on the space. Shuttle the Big Orange tank. Yeah. 00:54:27You know, when the space shuttle takes off at rolls over on its back. So the tanks on the top side and the space shuttles on the bottom side,. Why I rolled over? I don't know because that external tank is a blimp. 00:54:41Get the fuck out of here is the largest user of helium in the world. Okay. It's a blimp ever. See how slow it takes off. Okay. Yeah. 00:54:52It's a rocket assisted blimp at that. Sometimes they yell, they launched. They don't want anything. Sometimes they lost a miniature. You're too far away to tell the size that you really don't know. But those are blimps and if you watch the tank, when it disconnects, it's floating in the sky like a Macy's day parade, balloon, right? I have videos that will show you all of it. Your I can pull up a video right now. If you want you want me to do, I'm just trying to process it. So so love you. Let's talk about this. Talk about this. I was going to say that when Joe Rogan had this business, like I have this astronaut on the bald guy. Forgot his name. Mark Kelly on Earth. He said he's married to Gabby Gifford the one that got big shot in the head. 00:55:52He said he said, would you ask him? He said cuz one time he's like, I went up there one time, and there wasn't this window and then I came back the next time and that the window was there, and Joe Rogan said, who, put who put the window up there. He was like, he like freaked out and 00:56:12He just change the subject and there is also I talked to Mark about it. There was a this this I forgot the story that they wrote that there was a hole in the space station, but then if there was the vacuum where what would happen with the whole? What caused the whole? You know what I mean? Maybe there isn't a vacuum because it's not real. All right, and if you really think about it, when they have they shipped up, parts for the space station, what year? Was it? Even built? And I don't even know that shit. There was a hole that that hit hit the space station just like last year. A couple years ago. I forget how far out long ago was and Mark Kelly. I know I forget which astronaut tweeted a picture of it. Okay. 00:56:56It was whatever there was a picture. So he tweeted a picture of it and they fix it with duct tape and gum, right? Guess what? That hole is the album cover of a band that was about 10 years earlier. Okay. It's that one of them is the one Mark Kelly tweeted. 00:57:20And the other one is an album cover from 10 years earlier. 00:57:24Wait, so it cuz it says they're 24th released 2014 years ago. 00:57:34That's the thing. I mean, it looks the same, but here's a thought. The same rephrase that sends it is the same. Okay, it's the same picture. It's the same picture, NASA is lying, again. They lie about everything. But are there so sophisticated. What were they fuck up with that? I needed. This is what David I talked about the poor. Not that bright. Check this out. They fucked up like that. What I'm thinking that they did it on purpose because they're laughing, because guess what? They put this out dishes. This alone should destroy not to 100% biggest 65 million dollars a day spell. Even though, Elon Musk took over with SpaceX. They still get 65 million dollars a day. I don't know what the hell they're doing. This. Should the joint after, but people don't care. Tesla, put his fucking car into space. That pretty cool. That's pretty cool, right? 00:58:34Homes in the world. 00:58:36Of course, there's the wall over the place. That's what's the worldwide company. Don't you think they'd have a freaking poster of that in the showroom. Hey, this car went into space freaking ad campaign, ever the cover of omni magazine Time, Magazine Newsweek fail, Popular Science, National Geographic. It's not in any magazine. It's not in any car dealership. It's know where they want to bury those pictures so fast because it's all bulshit. You don't send that car up and I'm not use that. That's an impossibility. 00:59:10I thought I saw it on a magazine cover. I was like, the time I can be no possible that it was on one magazine cover, but it wasn't on the big boys. Right? And then nobody covered it because it was such crap, you know, people say, you know, what, what about the space station there? Their, they're floating there playing with stuff and augmented reality. No luck luck. Check this out. I'm on the space station. I'm floating on the space station. Okay, and then, they have things all demented reality of contact lenses and sometimes just monitors and they can manipulate things in space. Right? It's not a theory, they do that. We even have caught them passing something, and the guy was passing his hat and the guy missed it, and he thought he had it and he put it on the Shelf, but he missed ya. Ya, ya. Ya is this is astronaut to get so butt hurt, when people call him out on it. Who was it? Lance Armstrong or something that Armstrong? 01:00:11It was just a sore throat. Punch somebody in the face, Neil Neil Armstrong email and he's guys won't do that. Cuz they know the about the by putting their hand. On the Bible says that I'll give you $5,000 cash right now. We had the money that and just where he walked on the moon and then you can give it to a charity. How nice? Is that? Would not do it. I have David David Nunez Rodriguez, David Rodriguez. I was interviewing and he's he is a professional boxer and he met a Buzz Buzz, Aldrin. And he knew that the moon landing was faked. And he goes, he, he got buzzed look like semi alone for me to go to a buzz because I know you never went to the moon. I know you're at the moment and Buzz smiled at him, patting him on the back because you're smart kid and he walked away. 01:01:06Yeah, but how much credibility do these stories have? It's like Alex Jones talking about Buzz Aldrin. How he told him about the monolith, you know, I get it, you know, you can tell stories all day, but it's, you know, if you went to the Moon. 01:01:27You're the first guy on the moon and not only, did you go to the Moon, you bought a fucking dune buggy and a set of golf clubs. You played golf. You wrote a dune buggy. You had a great time. You're hopping all around you came back there. Or would you recite? Yeah. I mean, I've seen the pictures where they're just like, you know, they would you be so men. 01:01:53I want to get into into. Imma see, you said that these Venus might be a a a star from another system outside of the, the ring. The nordics also have a Had A peculiar system of what they interpreted the world to be almost sort of a flat Earth model, really of. You can't deal with the disc and then you have the different worlds up above that. Where do you stand when it comes to the Multiverse and different dimensions and all this stuff, and Aliens, the greys Bigfoot. What where do they play a role in? 01:02:31And flattened in the Flat Earth model. So, you know, aliens, y'all people say, those are demons, whatever. Aliens are extraterrestrials two different things extraterrestrials come from the extra pair of Beyond Antarctica. That makes perfect sense to me. They could be from the Lands Beyond Antarctica. That's probably speak English. They can get here in a date rap, you know, it's not it's not a big thing. 01:03:02L is Bigfoot, I haven't seen anybody that yellow one of our fellow researchers who lives in The Boondocks of South Carolina. She said, she's has experienced some things and she did a great video, exposing me all possible Bigfoot or whatever his help again. Probably believe it. I have no proof. It's not something I can really speak to with any solid information. And then sorry, if the, if the round earth model is fake. 01:03:34What else is fake as far as cuz I mean this can drive a person insane. I mean I can see why you would say 1 1. What is that one video a day or two a week isn't a video day? One video day and and it'll, it'll wake you up to this reality. Here's the problem me again. People don't like change, you know, and then let her rip the entire floor out from underneath you. But once you get over the being pissed, when people say, you know, there's nothing I can show you. Dave, that would convince you, you never willing to change your mind, but that's what I changed my mind. I used to believe in the freaking Globe, right? I made the biggest change in history, you know, because I realized I didn't know anything about the globe. So, you know people that defended low birthday, think about her. If there's a disk in space with other circular plan is global young spiracle planets, that's not sent nothing like what we think. They think that the Earth is rising to cause the gravity. That's not true. That's Flat Earth Society nonsense. 01:04:33They they they don't know how big the Earth is. They don't know how fast it's spinning. They don't know all the Motions of the earth. Do you know the Motions of the Earth? 01:04:43No, do the Motions of the Earth are crazy on the, on the spinning ball or a jumped past here at the spinning. A crazy amount of miles per hour is 1000 miles per hour. So that means, when you're watching the sunset, you have to believe that you're falling over backwards faster than the speed of sound and that's making the sun appear to go down. Okay, that's the slowest motion, what? I'm going to tell you while you're spinning faster than sound your orbiting, the Sun at 66600 miles per hour, how fast that isn't the answer is absolutely, do not do any of the fathom. That's because I can't comprehend why nobody can while you're orbiting and Spinning, You Are Chasing the Sun like a comet, and the sun's going at a half a million miles per hour and all of the other planets are keeping up orbiting the Sun while it's shooting through the sky. And that entire system is moving. 01:05:43Highways at 1 to 2 million miles per hour. It's a klusterfuk and everything Remains the Same everything. If you go out tonight and look at the stars in the sky. The fixed star is not the wandering stars and you mark where they are at like midnight or whatever time and then go out next year at this exact same time or any year. 01:06:11In the future or the past, those Stars will be in the exact same position. 01:06:17That wouldn't happen night tonight in this beehive spiraling out of control. Insane heliocentric system that they tell us we live in it. Here's the problem. It's called the two by the three-body problem. NASA has what's called the three-body problem. You have the sun which is this Giant Gas ball to somehow coalesced and created this infinite amount of gravity and then to 93 million miles away is the earth. That's like if the sun was a one of those yoga ball. The Earth is a marble like a mile away. Okay? That it's insane. 01:07:01Somehow the Earth is falling around the sun because the Sun's gravity is holding it, but it's falling around the sun because obviously, it's a gravity so that's gravity's holding on. And now that's a good. Make. A model of the computer hair. Got this ball here. I got that says, it's much better. This one does this much gravity and the model works perfectly. Then you add a third body, any size body that has any gravity in the system and the entire system falls apart. So, while we're orbiting the Sun, the Earth grabbed onto this Moon and this moon is falling in the opposite direction around the earth and it's holding it. What happens when the moon gets in between the Sun and the Earth? The sun's magical gravity ignores the moon and just holding on to the Earth and the Earth. Hold on to the Moon. 01:07:51That's ridiculous. Bullshit. And you couldn't sell that as a B rated movie. Right? Why doesn't the sun rip the Moon away. Why does it even just tug on the moon a little bit? We got all these other giant planets in our solar system, when they all line up. How come that gravity doesn't just tuck them in a little bit out of position and change. What's going on. The sky is a perfect clock. Okay, clock is in a beehive. We all were bees are flying and every different direction. A clock is a precise mechanism. Did you know that eclipses, go on an 18 year and I think, 11 day cycle, and then they repeat again and again and again, no, I didn't know that they are on a cycle. Like the wheels are clock. Okay, they Mark, they Mark time. 01:08:38So we are, we're on the the sky clock is is a precise marking of Seasons X ages ugly. On December 21st. We're going into a new age of other Age of Aquarius. What is at the age of Aquarius? Is that what they talked about? You know, again, these things don't happen like that. You know, nothing I say nothing is going to happen that day, but it's the clicking over. It's like when you wake up in the morning cuz I got you have to get up at 6, whatever. Then you're allowing this month, the 21st of December to 2020. This is the Chain lyrics. This is a once-in-a-lifetime wait longer than a lifetime. So 01:09:24What's going on? You know, what are the lead of the elite hiding? Maybe it's a time where we know our brains are going to awaken Amor and they're trying to keep us in fear, and they're limiting or oxygen with these masks and they're giving us back scenes that could stop us being from being able to think properly who the freak knows what's going on, but this is all about control. 01:09:52This is why they're hiding Flat Earth because they don't want people to know that we are. We are literally spiritual Souls, having a journey at in this realm. And they want us to believe that we're in significant, you know, accidents that happened in the middle of a Godless are distant God, the universe. Well, I name my last episode covid-19 the new religion because, yeah, I feel it is, I mean, it, it, it's what we all think about 100% of the time that we were, it's in Golf Tour live for the last Almost year and maybe, perhaps maybe they've kept it inside, so they can do maintenance on this whole system of projection, right? NATO. 01:10:40What? I have a question for you, what would it take for you to? Let's say that. Okay. Let's say that they got the math wrong. 01:10:48What they have the model, correct? I'm talking about the round earth model broad, doesn't prove. The Earth is flat. It just shows you the NASA fraud and they're they're the main portrayers of the globe. There is no curvature. Okay, we can we are Optics have outrun their lies. We can leave use lasers mirror flashes with the sun. We've used microwave just visual zooming in on stuff. We can see too far we can see where one foot above the water, water the rising to be 1.9 miles away so we can see what are Beyond known distances like an oil rig. Wind turbine of 15 miles away where there should be two hundred feet of curvature. Okay, you shouldn't be able to the water but not only we can see the water Beyond them, the surface of the water. Be on them. 01:11:48Right stuff, like this picture behind me. Convinces people. That there's a space station. Okay, but this was taken in a swimming pool, right? This was taking in a swimming pool and they just dropping backgrounds. Okay, it's nonsense. 01:12:06Yeah, here's the thing. People don't want to believe, you know, they they're like, oh what about? You know, Felix Baumgartner space jump right here, jealous. Baumgarten. This is what they are. But, you know, he did another jump to other tests jo

1649-50In an effort to project the Commonwealth's military and economic power beyond the British Isles, the New Merchant faction re-organizes the navy.

SPOILER ALERT: Avoid spoilers about Neutral Queen Natasha and the revival starting at 5:00 through10:50In this episode, Chris and Sam are starting to fear they're not the marrying kind as they discuss Season 1, Episode 3. We met Patience and Paul in the Hamptons, who love muffins and lack boundaries, and discuss Miranda's first foray into problematic fave status. Samantha helps backdoor pilot the only show/movie Chris wants to watch. And yet, again, where is Charlotte?!We'll be back next with recapping Season 1, Episode 4, "Valley of the Twenty-Something Guys." Until then, you can rate and review us wherever you listen. Follow us:Sam Bush, Instagram: @bravohistorianSam Bush, Twitter: @takeyourzoloftChris Lewis, Instagram: @clewis1219And don't forget to check-out TheDipp.com to get access to all the pop culture takes and conversations you'll ever need

David Smith is a full-time independent app developer. Since 2006, David has owned and operated a small company focusing on creating applications for the iPhone and Apple Watch.David has built many successful apps over the years. His most recent app, Widgetsmith, went viral and hit #1 on the App Store. It has over 50 million downloads. David's other successful apps include Watchsmith, Pedometer++, and Sleep++.David also co-hosts a weekly podcast called Under the Radar, where he and his co-host Mario Arment discuss Apple-related topics.In this episode, you'll learn: How to transition from a hobbyist to a full-time app developer Two big mistakes to avoid when starting out as an app developer How customers find new apps in 2021 The biggest waste of time and money for an app developer Links & Resources The LibriVox project Mirror app Launch Center Pro app David Smith's Links David's Website Audiobooks app Widgetsmith app Watchsmith app Pedometer++ app Sleep++ app Under the Radar podcast David's Twitter: @_DavidSmith iOS Version Stats Follow Us:David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnardJacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeitingLike this episode?Subscribe to Sub Club on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get the latest news on mobile subscription apps.Episode TranscriptDavid Smith: 00:00:00I've launched, I think it's 56 or 57 apps at this point, and all but about six of them have completely failed. I say that mostly because I've launched more failures probably than anyone in the App Store in some ways, and that's the way that you can end up with success, I've just kept trying, and it got me that little baseline of income that it was like, okay, I'm not just wasting my time here.David: 00:00:19Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me as always Jacob Eiting. Hello Jacob.Jacob: 00:00:43Hi David Number one, How are you?David: 00:00:46I'm good. Our guest today, maybe number two, is David Smith, long time indie developer and podcaster. Starting with Audiobooks in 2009, David has built many successful apps over the years, including Widgetsmith. Pedometer. His most recent app, Widgetsmith went viral on TikTok, and hit number one in the App Store.Welcome David.David Smith: 00:01:10Thank you, It's great to be here.David: 00:01:11Yeah, it's great to chat. We've chatted in person a few times, and bumped into each other at WWDC over the years. You've been doing this pretty much since the very beginning, right? Audiobooks came out in 2009, when did you actually start working on that?David Smith: 00:01:27So, It wasn't even my first first app. I think my first app that never went anywhere, it was launched in 2008. So, I mean, I was within a couple of months of the App Store launching. So I've been doing it essentially as long as you could, and I think I started working on, oh yeah. Audiobooks, the end of 2008.And it's just kind of grown from there. So it's about 13 years in the App Store.David: 00:01:46Like me and Jacob, actually, we both had apps...Jacob: 00:01:50In the on days of paid up front, and only 200 apps on the App Store, and all that. It is a good time. Were you a developer, like a Mac developer before that? Or how did you trip into iOS?David Smith: 00:02:06Sure. I was a web developer before I did this, and so, I mean, honestly, I started writing apps before I even actually owned an iPhone. I just, it seemed like a good opportunity and I wasn't particularly happy where I was at work and it was just something that I thought would be interesting opportunity.And I started learning and didn't know what I was doing for a long time, but just kept at it. And so it's just one of those things I got into mostly because it seemed like a good opportunity at the time. And so, you know, I just, eventually I initially was doing some web consulting as well as my iOS work.And eventually they just, the web consulting disappeared and it became iOS full-time, and that's sort of been the story for more than a, you know, like 10 years now probably.Jacob: 00:02:47Yeah, no, I was, Kind of similar, like I just saw it coming and it was like, Hmm, maybe I should. And I went and picked up the Macco OS, the the Hillegass book and learned Mac OS programming, like, yeah, because there wasn't the iOS book, right. There was no iOS, it was iPhone iOS. But yeah, it was a different time, fewer apps way, smaller community.So, yeah. Interesting decade.David: 00:03:15I do want to start by digging into the story of Audiobooks, and, I think one of the, one of the interesting things to me, because it happened to me as well, is how having this kind of foundation app that, that started in 2009, that did well enough. And, and I'm, I kind of jumping ahead here a little bit, but I, I think if I know your story correctly, Audiobooks is kind of what helped you make the leap to be full-time indie. And then once you become full-time indie, you started to have the time to experiment with all these other apps, and a similar thing with me, like I've had a couple of key apps over the years that kind of provided that like foundation of income that let me keep going.And then, that allowed me to experiment with all these different apps, like launching a pro ended up coming out of, of already having income to be able to take this big bet. and then mirror came along where it was doing really well, and I was able to take other bets. And so it seems like that's somewhat the story of Audiobooks.So, so let's, let's dig into that. So it was 2008, you had had a failure and then you, you start working on Audiobooks in late 2008. what was the, what was the inspiration and, and, and, and how did how did you kick off that?David Smith: 00:04:31Audiobooks was an app that it's essentially, it's a, it's a wrapper and a player for a free public domain Audiobooks. that was all it was, and it was essentially just coming into the market because. at the time, I mean, there were there, wasn't an easy way to listen to any Audiobooks, on the iPhone at that point.And there wasn't an audible app there wasn't, apple didn't have anything and it was just, you could, I guess you could listen to Audiobooks, I think in the music app potentially, but it was...Jacob: 00:04:57Yeah, you can buy them on iTunes. Right. And they were like, 20 bucks a pop.David Smith: 00:05:02Yeah. And So that's where the idea for the the app came from, and it became, and it's just sort of, it, it just, it took off in a way that I wasn't really expecting and it was successful.And because it was an app that had a very broad appeal, it was something that I think, as you say, it's sort of like built a platform for me to. Then continue to experiment and try things. And, I mean that, that app has gone through originally, it was paid up front and then it went free with ads. And then I tried selling my own ads for awhile.I sort of went through lots of different models over it over the years, but, it was certainly the app that I think was my first thing that was commercially viable, where I don't think. On its income. Initially I would have been able to go into, but it was the kind of thing where it became a client for me when I was doing consulting work.And I would say like, you know, it would buy my time because it would start generating enough income. And at first it was like, maybe it would buy me 10 hours a week that I could work on my kind of like independent stuff and then make the event, it would do better. And, and now could buy 20 hours a week of my time and eventually it bought all of my time.And I think that model worked really well for me to have that initial success that I could then keep trying things. And I mean, I've. Launched. I think it's up to, I think it's 56 or 57 apps at this point. and all of it, about six of them have completely failed. Jacob: 00:06:18That's incredible.David Smith: 00:06:20And I say that mostly because it's like, it is so easy.It's like I've launched. So I've launched more failures probably than anyone in the App Store in some ways. And they're like, that's the way that you can end up with success though, is, is that it's just like, I've just kept trying. And I think Audiobooks was a useful one because it got me that a little baseline of income that it was like, okay, this is not just, I'm not just wasting my time here.But it allowed me to then just keep trying and lots of things that, you know, lots of ideas and lots, lots of things went different places. Some of them had their moment in the sun and then like failed off. Like there was a period in the App Store where you, the classic model is you had a paid up front app and you'd make, you know, a reasonable amount of money in the first two weeks.And then it would make almost no money ever again. And that was just the way it was. And like that's a model that. isn't very sustainable, but you know, it's like if you had something that had a bit more, you know, regular income as a baseline, you, you could make work.Jacob:00:07:13And that's how you incentivize a developer to make 60 some apps it's still like,David Smith: 00:07:17Exactly.Jacob:00:07:18And I just said it like a curiosity. Did the Audiobooks in Audiobooks, what was the source for those are those like prerecorded public domain or.David Smith: 00:07:27Yeah, exactly. So there's a thing called the LibriVox project where people volunteer to read, classic Audiobooks, such as, you know, essentially, you know, Dickens or Jane Austin or things like this that are out of, out of copyright. And so people volunteer to read them. And then, those are just available on the internet.And this, essentially my app was just a wrapper for that. It was just a way to, get into that. And the people who act, who run the liberal box project were actually very happy with it. Like they, they cause for them. There was no easy way to get their audio onto an iPhone. And so they were delighted that there, you know, this app is just creating a venue for their project to get a lot more visibility and interest.Jacob:00:08:06And he got an incredible like App Store parked name, just Audiobooks. That's a great one.David:00:08:12That's exactly what I was going to dive into. Like how did, did, did that, was that just kind of a happy accident or in 2008, did you already start to notice? Cause it took me like. Three or four years, I'm a little slow on the uptake to, to realize that these like naming a keyword instead of trying to create a brand was actually a fairly successful strategy for a lot of apps.So did you just stumble into that or was it somewhat intentional?David Smith: 00:08:37No. I mean, I think it was largely just a result of, I didn't have a name. I didn't have a better name and because the content of it was so generic, it wasn't like there was a natural branding that I was doing this and it's like, yeah, it's the related to the App Store. So you could just pick a proper noun and it would be available because there only a few hundred.Grow a few thousand apps in the App Store. And so I picked it, I tried it and it certainly has turned out well in that regard that it still has reasonably good, you know, search, search, search optimization and things. Cause if you want an audio book and you go into the App Store and search Audiobooks, it's an exact name match.So, you know, audible likely, still ranks higher because it's has more traffic, but, it's going to be in one of the top, couple of hits. and that's just a natural thing. And I wouldn't say it was intentional. Like this is part of some grand plan, but, it is certainly something that. I found useful. I mean, many of my other apps, like I have an app called pedometer plus plus, and sleep plus plus, which, the plus plus when the App Store is doing its algorithm for searching, typically just sort of drops off.And so they start, they rank very well for those terms for sleeper pedometer. and then, but I learned though that it's important to have something be somewhat trademarkable just for, legal reasons and copycats and those kinds of things. And so. Having something additional to it, was helpful that I could trademark those terms and go after people who are, are being, you know, sort of trying to, trying to get that benefit from the, any sort of success I've had on it.But I think in those tricks, they're always a bit tricky cause like they, they are useful at the time, but they're not really long lived and you can't rely on them. Like. It's something. If apple just tweaks their algorithm slightly, then it goes away. So it's not worth chasing necessarily, but it certainly in this case, worked out well for me and was useful, but know less and less of a factor now.Jacob:00:10:24If you, if you made Audiobooks today, it would be Audiobooks, degree sign, tiny cross, probably.David:00:10:31That's I was going to ask though about, you know, algorithm changes over the years and things like that. Did you, have you seen a, cause you took it free in like 2010 or something, right? Like pretty early you switched to the in-app purchase model. so like, what I saw with my mirror app was that once I switched it to, it was like mirror by app heavy or something.And that switched it to mirror with like a little, Unicode symbol that looks like a mirror. And so then it was the exact match for a mirror. And then it just really took off and it was, it it's been the number. And I ended up selling that app in 2017, but it's still the number one, one hit for mirror on the App Store.And, I got to, I think around 2015, there was kind of a peak of like five, 6,000 organic downloads every single day. And then even though, even though like the ASO didn't change, like it still ranked for all of these keywords and everything else, it did slowly kind of start to dip. And, and I kind of wonder if that was, if that somewhat follows the kind of people going to the App Store searching generic keywords, it was like the iPhone more and more people were buying them more and more people were coming like first time into the app.So you can either confirm or debunk my, thesis here that, that. There was kind of a wave and then a, a, a crest and a, a fall of the, of these, organic searches on the, on the App Store.David Smith: 00:12:06I couldn't speak with authority about it, but that seems consistent with my experience where I think they're in the early days of the App Store, there is definitely a higher sense of just curiosity that people would open the App Store and just be browsing and just not necessarily looking for anything in particular.'Cause they didn't know what their phone could do. They hadn't like that they have a phone and they knew it was going to be good for, you know, texting an email, but, oh, there's an App Store. Let's see what it does. And I think that phase is certainly behind us that I think people know what they know. They know what they're to know.They know what they want to use their phone for. And very often they're going for a particular thing, not just like browsing. And I th and I think if you were. and similarly, I imagine if you're just one looking for a generic term, you may not start in the App Store, even if that's where you gonna get the app, you may start in, in Google or YouTube or somewhere else.Yeah. Like you're, you're, you're, that's because there's a mature enough ecosystem there. That there's a better way. Find that even though the App Store is a great place, but it's, I think that's some, those kind of just generic, organic downloads are much harder to sort of define at this point. And I think that that's just the reality.David:00:13:15Similar kind of build and crest and fall as far as like. Since, since Audiobooks is so heavily rely on organic installs you don't. I mean, from my understanding, you don't do any paid advertising for it. did it kind of pressed around that 20 14, 20 15 and then, or have, have organic downloads been pretty stable?David Smith: 00:13:35Yeah. I mean, I think I know, I couldn't tell you a date. I don't know if it, I actually look at the numbers, but it certainly isn't that way that there is that I think there have been a couple of phases of the App Store and there was the early first, maybe four or five years. you had that much sort of just higher interest and it was easier to be, be seen.And I would say sort of in the last five years, the ACQUITY user acquisition. Reality of being in the App Store is very different. That it, it is, there's a lot more either like, or just organic, organic is more and more challenging. And, I D don't do very much paid, but I think if that would be the only way that I've actually wanted to affect change, to my downloads beyond kind of just word of mouth and natural, sort of, I think at this point, a lot of my downloads are coming from.Sort of the word of mouth version of organic, rather than the someone coming to the App Store with a need and then trying to find it. and so that's just, that's just a guess, but I think there certainly is those, there, there, the App Store has changed dramatically in 13 years. I think there's, there's certainly no doubt about it.Jacob:00:14:31User base too. I mean, I think about the way that, that what we were talking about as I was thinking about like my usage patterns pre and kind of post that era. And I think one thing that has changed is kind of, I kind of found all the apps I needed by 2015, you know, I kinda got, I got my podcast app, I got my, this app, I got my, that app.I don't really go in there just doing that, that way. You're talking about, the, the like, oh, what can I find for my phone anymore? Right. It's just not something I do. I still occasionally get a recommendation or I find something organically or whatever, but, you know, and yeah, like. In 2021. This is very few people's first smartphone, right?This is like somebody's fifth iPhone plus. And so it's just like, there's less curiosity, I think, but I guess that's exactly what we're arguing here. Okay.David:00:15:18So you mentioned you you've probably failed more than any developer ever on the App Store, which is really cool. I mean, I, in some ways feel the same way. I mean, I'm, I'm not nearly as prolific as you, but I mean, I've had gosh, like 26 apps and maybe four or five have been reasonably successful. But so I'm going to put you on the spot here.Are there any, any things that really stick out of like, you know, and I can think of one app, cause I'm still working in this space w your weather app, but are there any apps that you can point to and say, you know, I learned a very specific lesson from this, in those failures. Cause I think a lot of people who've only ever had one app and that one app was super successful.There's kind of a confirmation bias. Like I'm awesome. I did everything right. But it's like, they don't even know what they do. Don't know, they don't know what they did wrong. They just happened to like hit some level of product market fit. So any, any specific apps and lessons you learned from these failures?David Smith: 00:16:18Failure is obviously a complicated thing because I think I learned something from all of them. And so in some ways they were, they were useful. But I think from a financial perspective, it's mostly what I'm talking about when they're sort of a failure on that. And I think the two areas that the biggest mistakes that I've learned is one is under.To try to really understand and having an honest evaluation of the size of the market you're addressing. and some of the things that I've launched are very focused. were very niche and. That kind of a thing. It it is possible to make it work, but the economics are incredibly difficult and you're dealing with a very uphill battle.If you're dealing with something that, there is only ever going to be useful to 10,000 people then great. That for that 10,000 people it might be really cool, but it's very unlikely. You're going to make a sustainable living on an app at that unless your economics can be so high, that each one of those people is giving you a substantial amount of money on an ongoing basis.I think some of my failures were things where I was like, Ooh, this is really cool. And it's an app that does something, very specific and it doesn't really end up working out. I think the other thing that I found too is just having that sense of. that apps understanding what are the ongoing costs of related to an app going to be, and making sure that the economics of that can balance out.So, in your example of my weather app, ultimately like the app was successful. It had, a reasonably good user base, but at that, this was, it existed in a time before, subscriptions were a thing. Like they just did it didn't exist in the App Store. And so. The economics of trying to make it so that people could continuously, you know, pay for the weather data that I had to buy for.It just wasn't there. And at a certain point, it became, it's like a change from being a business to a charity because I was spending more money on the backend. than I was, you know, getting people on an ongoing basis. And that was something that I don't think I really it's easy when I'm building something to just ignore that because the costs, especially early on are so low when you look at these things and especially with, with, with most, if you're some kind of data service or some kind of hosting provider you often will have a free tier or something that like the E and if in some ways, success can be your own failing because you haven't taken into account that, oh, if this, you know, if I get any amount of volume, then suddenly I'm going to be spending thousands of dollars a month.Supporting this app. And if the economics aren't balanced for that, then it can, you have to essentially shut it down and deal with that. And I think those are two things for that. It's usually when an app has failed it's because either I didn't fully understand what the ongoing constantly going to be, or I didn't sort of real it.Wasn't realistic about how big of a market it is.Jacob:00:18:54Yeah, the unit economics are tricky because at the beginning, it's, it's hard to get good to data because everything's so small. It's like, oh, I can't really tell. I don't really know what my CAC is or what my cost to service cogs are. So you're just like, whatever. And then by the time it matters, it's too late.Right. And in some cases,David Smith: 00:19:12The two that you just used several terms that I have no idea what they mean. and I think this is another failing on my part that like, you know, Kat Mike hack and my Sasser service caught, like, I dunno, like it's it's, this is fun. That was just fine. I think. But that's...Jacob:00:19:24An educational moment. Cost of user acquisition. And what's the cogs cost of goods sold. Sorry. Yeah, those were like, those are the things I didn't learn until I had a SAS company though, to be honest. Right. Like it's, it's interesting. Like, yeah, the different. Which, which, which, I mean, just highlights kind of the world we're in now.Right. Which is where most app developers are running a SAS business. Right. would you, would you wear with the weather app, you just didn't kind of think about it in those terms. It was like an app with an API, but really it was a SAS business. and, and, that's why we're here@subclub.com to educate people.Actually, it's not.David Smith: 00:19:58Yeah, well, but I think there's definitely that teachable moment in that insofar as it's just it's that's another aspect of that failing is I think it's so easy coming at it from an engineering background that I can get too excited about the engineering aspects of what I'm doing that. I think that, oh, there's this cool, cool new API.There's this fun new feature. There's this cool problem I'm solving. And I can go down, you know, spend a month of my time building this app. And then in the end, I haven't. Really thought about the marketing side or the economic realities or all of those things. And in some ways it's like, that's fine because part of what I'm like, what I'm good at is the engineering.And if anything, I've been able to just engineer my way out of this problem by keeping I can just keep building. And eventually I've had enough things that just kind of naturally hit. and it isn't necessarily the most efficient way to do it or the way I'd recommend it. But I think that is an aspect of my failing, where it is.You know, and it's, it's also the reality of being an independent, independent developer where. Like, I don't have a staff. I don't have anyone else in that regard. And so it's not like I have a business, a business, a business team, or someone doing user acquisition or any of those things, which on the one hand is great because it means my costs are really low that, you know, my, my revenue is divided by one and I get to see, you know, and I keep it.So if I was a team of five people and I'm dividing my revenue by five, it's quite a hard thing to, you know, Have five times to five X the revenue. And so it's like a trade-off that you, in some ways it'd be great if I had both have both, but I'm not sure if it's actually reasonable or practical too.Jacob:00:21:29I mean, really though, that's, it's a good algorithm for finding a new, new API APIs are the apps or version of the market shifting, right. It's when something gets created, right? There's a new opportunity. So exploring those and understanding those and finding out how you can remix those with existing ideas that might, that, you know, as a, as a team of one where one is an engineer, that's kind of your strategic advantage, right?It's might not, might not be ASO. It might not be acquisition and all these other things. it might be like, Hey, what can I do? Cool stuff with computers. And I think historically that's been a pretty good, ROI for, for a lot of companies. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily call that a weakness. though it's both right, but yeah.David:00:22:12Yeah. And that, that specifically has been part of your strategy, right? So like you, you know, I mean, Widgetsmith, which we'll, we'll get to in a little bit, but even, watch plus plus, but domino plus plus, or Widgetmith's sorry. yeah. Tell us about your thinking around using these new API APIs to get attention.Doing something that's never been done before as marketing, which, which is, is, is a great way to do it.David Smith: 00:22:42Yeah, well, anything. So this is certainly something I've done time of day. And again, that like predominant or plus plus, which is, after Bridget Smith, the most successful thing I ever made was the first pedometer app in the App Store. And it was, you know, when the iPhone 5s launched apple introduced to put a step counting ship into it.And it was the first app that took care of it. And it's like for a few weeks, even it was the only one. And it was. Probably one of my strategic advantages is the fact that I'm just one guy who really likes to program and is pretty good at doing things quickly. And that means that I can be there on day one.And I think that's beneficial in sort of two main ways that being out there early is something that often gets Apple's attention and. It's ebbed and flowed in terms of whether that's important for apple featuring you or not, but it's never a bad thing for a, for apple to feature you or to get on their radar.And, you know, as an independent developer, that's one of the few things that I have that I can kind of pull on that apple gets excited about where on day one, here's this app that takes care of this new thing that they're trying to sell their new phone withJacob:00:23:44Yeah. And that speed, that speed. Even like a one person team compared to like a three or five person team. There's a real advantage. If it's just one person like no communication overhead, no, nothing. Like you can just do it all in your brain. And like, it's really hard to be. I mean, now I'm saying this is watching, I haven't watched our company grow so much.It's like, wow. The just like getting all these folks coordinated at the same time really is a different world than when it's. Just yourself, like trying to put things together quickly.David Smith: 00:24:09Yeah. I mean, I think that, that, that's just such a, the other aspect of this, just so much. It's so, so often I can do something faster than anyone else. Not necessarily because there's something magic about me, but it's just, I don't have it. There's no, it's not like it does that. Oh, there's a designer who will, you know, do a bunch of specs and then that's going into it.We'll have it, then we'll have a sprint planning meeting and we'll break up the features. And it's this whole thing that like, that's not my process. I just open up X code and start working. And so it's an, you know, maybe it means that, I, you know, it's like, and I ended up with as long as I have a good idea in my mind, I can just be driving towards it.I don't need to go through a lot of infrastructure to get that. Like, I don't have. You know, a roadmap with tasks, with, you know, sort of issues that I'm working through and burning down my, like, whatever, all those software things that you need to do, if you have a big team and are valuable, but I just don't exist for me.And so there's that extra multiplier. And I think being there early. Is just, it gets, it gets attention and it creates opportunity that there's a vacuum. It's, it's a short-lived thing. You know, the, if I, if I had launched Widgetsmith a few, a few weeks later, I don't think it would've mattered. It would have been complete.Like it is this very ephemeral, like thing. It wasn't, you know, once a year, there's this giant opportunity for me and I've done sort of dove in and taken advantage of it several times. And sometimes it's worked and sometimes it hasn't, you know, like my message App Store apps didn't go anywhere, but. That turned out that was a market that didn't exist, but I spent my summer making sure that I was there and if they hadn't, if they hadn't been really important and was super cool.Cool. And apple cared about it a lot, then I would have been there and yeah. Or know that ahead of time, unfortunately, but that's, I think just something that a small team can benefit dramatically from is like taking advantage of that and being okay with too of not shipping things that are as robust and complicated as fair enough.If I was. A five person team. It could do more or have more capabilities or, you know, be localized into more, more languages or also launch on Android or whatever those things that, that you would imagine would be beneficial. I don't have those, but like, it's just a trade offJacob:00:26:09Yeah. Search your marketing channel primary. Right? It makes a lot of sense. We did this at, when I was at elevate. This was a constant strategy for us was what does apple interested in? Even, even for us, we were a team of 10 or 20 at that stage, but like, yeah. Adding APIs. Oh yeah, sure. It kind of makes sense.Okay. Yeah, we can add that. Like it's not on our product roadmap, not really something, but like yeah, the, the benefits were tangible, but as you kinda mentioned, it has gotten at some point, I think for a team of that size, the benefits of being in the, like what's new, I forget what the, they used to always have a feature like what's new in iOS, whatever.And you would get Nat and it would be a pretty good feature, but that has gone down over time. So now it's like, It's exclusively the, to the benefit of really small developer teams, right. That they can take advantage of.David Smith: 00:26:53Yeah, well, and it's just, I think that the impact of being fee, because to your earlier point about, I think fewer people are searching for apps. so being in a featured list in the App Store is not as the, is not the thing that it used to be. That I remember the first time I got featured in the App Store and it was.I just rev. It was completely, mind-bending where I would go from like, yeah, you lasted a week. And I went from, you know, maybe having like in the tens of downloads a day to suddenly I'm having like tens of thousands of downloads a day and it was just like completely mind-bending, but that's not the reality anymore.Like that, that multiplier isn't there in, the same way. Like, it's It's lovely to be featured, but it also is very muted now because it's not for a week. It's kind of on this random algorithmically driven basis, where if you're the app of the day, you're actually the app of the day, only for one person necessarily.Like it's not like everyone in the world got it that day. Um it's and so those, those things lessen the impact of it. and Their benefit becomes more in aggregate rather than kind of in an acute way.David:00:27:52One of the things you mentioned kind of in passing there was, not having to wait on a designer and that's something I actually wanted to talk about. I, you know, as much as it's like the apple ethos to be pixel perfect, and to like, have these like amazing, you know, leather stitched icons back in the day or whatever.I regret spending as much as I did and kind of letting design in some ways, overly drive the process. because as an independent developer, where every penny I spend is, is money. That's not going into my pocket. I spent tens of thousands probably over well, over a hundred thousand dollars on design over the last 13 years.And from what I understand, you've spent very little, so, so I mean, it sounds like that's intentionally part of your strategies. Like you, don't one you were saying, you know, you're not a team of five, so you keep your expenses down, but two you're, you're also not waiting on them. So yeah, it was at, have you spent much on, on design over the years or have you done it all yourself and then has that been a very intentional for, for speed and cost?David Smith: 00:29:07Yeah. I mean, I think I've certainly tried spending money on design and it over the 13 years, like I it's, it's not that I've never done it, but it's, it, it, I, it was never, it never paid off for me enough that it would. For it to be something I continued doing. And I don't think I've done it in five, six years now.And at this point, the only design that I typically will ever pay for is, icon design. because that's just something that I can't do very well myself, but even like recently, like Widgetsmith, the icon I made myself, cause it's just a blue round direct, like I could handle that.Jacob:00:29:41That's a good icon.David Smith: 00:29:43Which has been it's fine.Jacob:00:29:44And it's number...David Smith: 00:29:45Think, yeah, like.Jacob:00:29:47Icon designer actually.David:00:29:48Yeah.David Smith: 00:29:49And I think, but it's to the point of like, I think eight. It's easy enough to like, if you try to learn basic design and get competent at the basics, you can go, that can take you a very long way. And I think really elegant, new fancy design that's doing really like groundbreaking or cool things with fancy animations and all that stuff.Like I love it. And we're using an app that does that, but that kind of design, like that takes a tremendous toll on your development process. And I think. A M like a, if you're a thoughtful to the developer who wants, is willing to put in the work to just kind of like study what the basics of design are, you know, you can get good enough that you can do a lot of it yourself.And I think that's something that has worked really well for me. and I think it's also been to my benefit that it isn't necessarily that I'm not waiting on a designer. It is that I'm able to, I'm a better developer because I understood, I took the time to. Study what makes a good design for an app.And so I'm w that informs my development, and then it allows me to build things that'll be easy that are structured, such that the design will naturally flow from it. And those types of differences that if I just was being hand handed a list of like, here's a, you know, a handful of mock-ups go and build it.And I don't really understand why things are structured the way they are. Then I would often find myself in kind of, I'd pay myself into technical corners that, if, if you, if you are responsible for both the design and the development, you're that the two are blending together really well. And so I think it's something that I certainly recommend.And I think like, I mean, some of the best apps I think have come out of the one developer, one designer teams, like I think that is a can, we can be a useful model, but. For me, it's just something that I think, you know, in the same way that often I've, you know, I've known many designers who learn just enough coding to be able to sort of, to make the basics of the key, to the same thing and go the other way that, a developer who puts in a little bit of time and is a student of what, like, if you're using something and you start paying attention to why is this good?And you don't try and overreach and. Like try and do things that are beyond your capability. Like, I can make a really nice clean UI. I can't make a, you know, something that is, is clever and fancy and that's it. That's fine. And I'll just, if I scale my scale, my applications to fit, what I can do, then I'm fine.Jacob:00:32:13Yeah, I, I'll share it. Not like we're revenue count. We didn't have a, it, I mean, we have a full-time, product designer now that helps with like dashboard work and stuff like that, but we didn't have, I was the only person doing design for the first two years and very similar, like I, I knew going into it.It was my weak spot. So I spent a few weeks, one summer just like taking. I took an online color theory class. And then I just like learned, did some like basic tutorials got really good at sketch and like made some mock-ups. And, you know, I had worked with a lot of great designers and kind of had knew what the process was like.But yeah, again, it's like, what's your advantage? And in your case, it's the API APIs and being first to market and all that stuff. And so you're not likely to get a lot of like, Yeah, leverage or whatever out of having really great design, you just needed to be functional. You needed it to be good enough something.That's not going to turn people off right. When they see the app on and that's, and that's kind of the bar and yeah, I agree with you. I think it's actually pretty easy to achieve, at, you know, with a, with a minimal investment.David Smith: 00:33:14Yeah. And I think you also, it's, I'm very, I very much like a model where the initial upfront costs are as low as possible. And if I need to double down on something and like, it becomes a situation where, oh, now I need design resources or I need something more graphically oriented or like things arise.Like. I'm delighted to spend money on an app. That's making money.Jacob:00:33:36Yeah, exactly.David Smith: 00:33:37it, rather than spending the money on something before it's even proven itselfJacob:00:33:41Yeah. We've spent a lot on design since like revenue cat's hit like our stride, but in the early days it was like, not like this API is like the design of the Jason is more important than the website.David Smith: 00:33:53Exactly.David:00:33:53Yeah, and it does force this kind of function over form approach. And I think that's where your apps have really succeeded. Is that there is it, you focus on them doing things well, Like serving a specific purpose and serving that specific purpose very effectively. And that's where I think a lot of the kind of form over function design either within apple.I think apple still makes this mistake a lot of, of focusing too much on, on how things are going to look and how things are gonna, come across versus like, well, how, how is it actually going to be used by people? And, I, you know, that's where I think I've fallen down a lot, as well as like spending so much time on these pretty graphics.And then, and then everything then like the user you can't like iterate quickly on a user interface based on feedback when it's all so polished and pixel perfect. Like it's so much harder to do iterative design. To enhance the usability of an app when, when there's so many barriers and then so much already kind of like set in stone because it was designed this way and you can't, step back out of that as easily.So, yeah, I think, I think it's great the way you've, you've done that.Jacob:00:35:12The one thing that resonated with me that you said David was, just how a designer, if they don't fully. And I love designers, all of my designer, friends are gonna hate me for talking bad about designers, but I think one, one universal experience of developers when you get handed something that. It's it looks great and like functional on paper, but like, there's just like, because there isn't like internal knowledge of UI kit.Right. And just like this thing that looks like, yeah, I know it's just pixels and it should be really simple, but like, it's actually going to add hours and days to my, to my, and, and you know, if you're not an assertive developer, that's going to be like, no, I'm just not going to do it. You can do that on your business.Right. But like, Because you own it, but, but if it, you know, if you work on a team or whatever, sometimes there's a lot of loss there where a developer will feel. And also like, I feel like it's a challenge, right? Like, oh yeah, I can do that. Right. And they ended up over investing in these ornate, user experiences or use user interface elements.It just like you talk about like ROI and whatever, like just not there, you know? so I think it's a very like prudent approach.David:00:36:22So I did want to touch on real quick and. I want to get to Widgetsmith and talk more about that. But, I wanted to touch on the, your iOS version stats. So, it's something I've really appreciated over the years. There's a flurry has, has published stats here and there that your site has been like my go-to place to say, you know, how's I was 14 adoption going, how are so you published publicly?The, the version stats of your Audiobooks app, which is a fairly broad market app. It's not perfectly representative probably of the entire market. but yeah. Tell me about why you publish that and then do you actually run a customer analytics to power that, or, or do you have a third party analytics provided that you just pull the stats in front from.David Smith: 00:37:09So, I mean, that came from, I think there were certainly, I mean, I'm running it for years and years, because in the early days of the App Store, there just wasn't good data on this kind of thing. And it was so I, I remember finding that it was just so frustrating. Right. I, I couldn't get. Basic sense of like the different device distributions and, iOS adoption rates and things.And so I just wrote something, myself to do this, and I sort of shared it because it was really helpful. I thought, I, I, I, if it's helpful for me, it's going to be helpful for someone else. and Audiobooks was the best app. I had to make the public version of this for, because it was my broadest kind of user base, that it wasn't as like pedometer is great, but it's.Dealing with people who are fitness oriented. And so like my, at some of my adoption numbers are like th there's a skew to it and it's a bit less mass market. but it's all built in custom. I I've used analytics packages and things before, but, in the, in, especially with apple being. I think it's a sort of like the privacy consciousness and things.It became something that I just didn't want to have. I want to have it the minimum amount of third party code in my apps as I could. And something like the, the kind of analytics I'm collecting is very easy to do as just a little, sort of custom thing that I wrote. That's just, you know, it's just a little website.That's collecting some very basic stats and being thoughtful about making sure that it doesn't log essentially anything except for very anonymized. aggregated things just so I don't collect any user level information whatsoever. It's all just being collected, at, at, at an aggregate level. And it's just something that I wrote and it's, it's a basic thing.And I think it's a useful tool because this is sort of to the same thing of a question about philosophy. It's like, you can't know when you can drop all the old devices or which device to optimize for. And this, you actually collect that data and you actually look at it. and so like right now, for example, send that, I re like I always try and optimize my apps for the iPhone 10 R because in all of my apps, it is by far that screen size.So the it's the F1 10 or the iPhone 11. those are by far the most popular phones in the world right now. And so like, that's my primary testing device. That's where I start, but I wouldn't know that if I wasn't collecting that kind of data and. You know, sort of, I wouldn't have guessed that necessarily.And especially because I live in the like apple tech ecosystem and I wouldn't, you know, in my mind, oh, it's probably just like the pro size, you know, like the, the, the 11 pro is probably the most popular phone because that's what all my friends have. But, that's actually not the case. That's, you know, that is a popular phone, but it's by no means the most popular.And so. Having that kind of data to back up my choices and making sure that, you know, like, I, I, I, if am doing a design, I'll optimize it for that and then adjust it for the other ones rather than going the other way around. Or if I'm doing screenshots for the App Store, I make sure that my screenshots.Are perfect for that one. And even if, sometimes I'll do you know, for the, my, the more minor phones, I might just say, like use the scale down the assets for something else, but that's a size that I've we'll for sure. Use. I think also it's speaks to, there is, I think there's still some of this, but maybe a bit less, but in the earlier days of the App Store, there was a, I felt like there was a group of.People who were kind of, we felt like we were in this together. And, like, especially among kind of indie small developers, we tend to try and like help each other out. And so like I made that public, it was an internal dashboard. And then I just like, well, let me just publish this to a different URL. because if you had to kind of just help out.And I think that was a nice thing that I think there's just, there are fewer Indies than there used to be. but it's certainly an aspect of the community that I think is still nice when there are, there are some aspects of it that still exists.Jacob:00:40:52It's also really nice to have. usually I would caution people to roll against rolling their own. Right. but I think there is this like somewhat unserved niche of some of these tools get really expensive, even like an amplitude or a Mixpanel or whatever. They're, they're more. There, the pricing often is more favorable towards a B2B and like smaller headcount kind of, or smaller like user based size apps.And you can lose this, this like kind of information. I, and I gathered not an App Store connector. It's probably crappy if it is. David Smith: 00:41:24Like some of it's in there, but not really in a way that like abstract connect sometimes has some of the stuff, but I like, I like just having it myself and there's also, it means that I can do additional beyond just, demographic collection. There are a few things that I will do in here where I can add in a hook and say, Oh, like, do, does anybody ever open this page of the app?And I can do a little basic, like those kinds of basic analytics things that you can't do on that, do an App Store connect. and so I can put, you know, put this into my system and do those kinds of basic collections, which a more sophisticated analytics packages, just like, that's just a basic feature of it.But, it's a, it gives you that kind of middle ground and it's, it's just, it's a tricky reality of, you know, apple once, you know, I have to put in my privacy things, all the, you know, all the things that I do. And so. I start using a third party thing. I have to be completely on board with everything they're using my data for.And so sometimes it's easier to just roll it. Have it be basic and simple. I mean, the actual, these apps are not complicated or I think the initial version of this was actually, I just based it on the error log of a, engine X server, where I just ran it and they would make, they would make the record.They would just. Yeah, they would just make the request and they would actually just all 4 0 4, like the trend analytics requests were just 4 0 4 and I would just parse the error log and add it to a SQL file. And it's like that, that was super straightforward and easy to build. And it's just a script and it's...Jacob:00:42:47Mixed panel, basically like in...David Smith: 00:42:49Like, You know, and like that's where I think mostly just to say is it doesn't have to be like super sophisticated and fancy.This is a backend utility tool. So you can very easily, like you could go crazy making it fancy, or you can just, you know, write a little scripts to process a log file and it'll get just as much data out of it.David:00:43:09Yeah, that's great. I did want to touch on, on witness Smith. You you've talked about it at length, so, There's a great episode with you and Marco. I think what came out like two weeks after we just hit number one. And so that's a really fun episode. People can kind of go get the history, but it's a cool kind of, culmination of this story of launching 56 different apps, trying all these different things.And then you, you go after these brand new features with the widgets in iOS 14 and. somebody picks the app up on Tik TOK. It goes viral. It hits number one in the App Store. It's just such a cool story as an indie developer to hit number one. And, and, and again, you've told a lot of that story. other places I don't want to just rehash the whole story.But there were a couple of things that I wanted to go over and I don't know if you've talked about it, since so one of the things that I think would be to follow up on is just how the, Durability has been. So like you hit number one, it stayed there for like, gosh, like weeks, right. Or almost a month.And then, yeah. So how has it, how has that gone since, and like, you're still like number five you're you're in the top 10 of productivity regularly. how has the app been durable? download wise and revenue wise, like how, how has it gone after hitting number one? Like.David Smith: 00:44:37I mean, I think it is, it certainly continues to be my most successful app. And I think it probably, it seems like it will be for, for, for quite some time. And obviously the first couple of weeks were insane and completely. Like mind bending and, you know, I think I exceeded my luck like to date App Store downloads.You know, of all my apps over the last 13 years were in a few hours of it when it kind of hit that crazy moment.Jacob:00:45:03We've seen a couple on revenue casts, a couple of viral events like that, and I am blown away every single time. It's it's more like it outpaces the App Store featuring like by 10 or a hundred X. It's insane. David Smith: 00:45:15And I think that, and let me say that it was really cool and fun and exciting and a little bit like scary and like terrifying. But I think it's, what's, I didn't know where it would have, where it would settle down to. And it's like, where is that? Come see the nature of. Something being a flavor of the moment is that like, that moment ends and it just vanishes like the, the driver behind that, you know, it's not like it's being featured in Tik TOK videos anymore, at least not in the same way.And so the durability, I believe now is largely just coming from the fact that that initial spike generates enough kind of ongoing word of mouth advertising, that the nature of. Especially the nature of what it does is it puts something cool on your home screen. And it has that natural. If someone sees your home screen or you show them something or you share a screenshot and it has the name of the app in it, and it's like, it, it has that natural, oh, I want to do that to witness to it.And that seems to be where the durability has come from because, I've. Tried sort of like the, the sort of like the paid marketing things to try and keep something going. And for me, it's a model that gets very, it's very hard to not just like, lose your shirt on it because you can.Jacob:00:46:22Yeah.David Smith: 00:46:22Spent a way out, spend what you're getting back or not have.Jacob:00:46:26Someone else's money to blow.David Smith: 00:46:27Yeah. And so like for me, it's just, it never makes sense. And so, like, I w I wonder if something's going to be something that I keep working on, it needs to be sustainable kind of on its own. And for it, it's still, you know, it still continues to do really well on a, on a, on a download basis. And it's also, it's, you know, it has, it's monetized both with advertising and with subscriptions.And so. You know, th the two together create a really nice, sustainable, revenue for me that it's based mostly on usage rather than, needing necessarily to have big spikes in downloads to keep it going. It's like as long as people keep using the app, that they're opening, it they'll see ads, or if they're, you know, power users who really want like the pro features of it and they'd pay for a subscription, if it's continuing to provide value to them that they'll continue subscribing.And so it's, that durability has been there. I think largely it certainly is easy to be durable when you have. This wild spike at the beginning to kind of kickstart that, effort. but it's, it seems like the there's enough ongoing utility of it, that it keeps people keep using it. And, that has a natural sort of knock on effect of people just telling their friends about it.And I mean, it's kind of a cool thing that, even after. You know, many millions of downloads, it continues to find new art, find it, find a new market and people will continue to sign up for the subscription. And it's, it's that's happening sort of on its own without me having to necessarily do anything other than just keep adding, you know, features and improvements to it.I don't need to worry necessarily on that side of things as much.David:00:47:56Yeah. One of the things that I was, initially taken aback by, but now see the, the maybe accidental brilliance of how permissive you were with the feature. So, and I mean, I made a mistake with launch center pro. I was actually trying to kind of ride your coattails with my app and. I was much more aggressive with the paywall.So I pay walled one of the like more prominent features instead of, instead of paywall and some of the lesser features. And then to your point earlier about like user acquisition, you know, part of how you make user acquisition work, is it, you forced, you can't pay $5 for a download. If you know, one out of 200 people are paying you.But we just Smith going viral. It went viral in part, because you were so permissive with the features. So like, how did you decide where to draw the line in the paywall? yeah. How did, how did you make those decisions?David Smith: 00:49:01Yeah. I mean, I think, I think a lot of this comes from a place of my goal is to, I want a business that lets me keep developing, like what I love and what I enjoy is programming. That's that's, that's, I'm gifted in it. I enjoy it. I love it. And I will just keep doing it. Like if it wasn't my job, I'd probably still be making apps.But, and so I don't, I'm not chasing some kind of like wild exit or something dramatic. And so I think, I, I feel like I want to make things that people will like using, and that will won't be annoying or irritating. And, that I can feel proud of at the end of the day, like that. I'm not, you know, like the people who are paying for my subscription.Or paying it out of a genuine desire to support the app, to do the really advanced, like these are my super fans who really care about it. and there are the people who I'm sort of sort of going after for that. And so I don't didn't feel necessarily compelled to make the paywall up all in your face and be limiting features and kind of doing those types of things.And in this case, it worked out really well because it, it created a. it created its own marketing machine as a result. And like what I gave up potentially in having a less permissive market, pay paywall strategy I made up for in essentially free marketing for, because the app is used by so many more people.And I think that trade off is something that's easy. It's like I don't have, or I don't necessarily want to spend the capital. To acquire those people, but in some ways I'm spending that capital by just making my paywall more permissive and making it have a natural, more virality to it. and that, for me, I think works well for everybody that like more people are getting more out of the app and, I, I benefit from it.It's sort of coming along and I don't think it was, it's not like that this grant. Strategy that I had for it. It was just in general, if someone's going to pay me something I want for what they're paying to be something that is super clear is super straightforward and is compelling. That is something that I feel like I would pay for that.It isn't an arbitrary restriction or something that feels kind of. mean-spirited, that's sometimes a lot of paywalls can ha you can run into these limitations that feel completely contrived, that there isn't a reason for it. Like most of what I'm people paying me for in Widgetsmith are things like my weather data, the tie data, and some graphical assets, things that I have to pay for that there are, they are ongoing and tangible costs that I have to pay.So I can't make those free because then I go out of business because millions of people are requesting weather data. Like that doesn't work for me. And so, yeah. Making it paid feels good to me. And if anything, it works well, but I think that's definitely something that you can get. If you're too stingy with you, with what you offer, you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot because you're ma you know, you want to make that first run experience feel so good that people want to keep coming back.And if you get too uptight, that the first thing, the first thing the app does when you open the app is ask for money. Like if I open that app, I'm just closing that up and deleting it. Like, I don't want to, I don't want that, that, thatJacob:00:52:05I mean, that's, that's...David Smith: 00:52:06Be them asking.Jacob:00:52:08That's an app that's for distribution basically is what you can tell. And if you're not then like, I mean, I think this is not a comment on an uncommon strategy, but, but, but, you know, optimizing for distribution early, Becoming not a monopoly because there's other apps like we just missed, but becoming a dominant player or like the best app, you get data, you get usage, you get word of mouth, you get a brand.And then in the future, if it becomes an operational requirement that you make more money per download or whatever, like, oh, you have a lot of levers there and you can go about it more thoughtfully than if you try to like, Try to shoot blindfolded, like from, from the start, there's just no way you can, you're going to be able to get, I talked to a lot of people getting ready to make their subscription apps and whatever.And they're like, ah, they're going back and forth. I go, what should I put on my paywall? What should I, whatever. I'm just like, just don't think about it too much. Just don't do something stupid. Like just see something reasonable and normal and don't try to be too clever. And then, you know, be prepared to iterate and change like over time.Cause inevitably, well...David Smith: 00:53:06That's good advice. David:00:53:07This is such a fascinating time. I wish we could talk another hour just on, on, on paywall strategies and, and freemium. I think a lot of developers do make the mistake in the subscription space of because they're spending so much on user acquisition, they have to be more aggressive with the paywall, but then in the long run, you're, you're, you're paying for users that you immediately ostracize.You know, if you're, if you're only getting, you know, 10% to start your free trial, and then only 50% of those convert. It's like, you're paying for all these people who ultimately have a bad experience in your house. And so it works cause that's their model, but, but they're leaving a lot on the table long run by not having a more, permissive freemium strategy where you can get people in using the app, finding value and then over time bringing them along.And it seems like that's part of what Smith has done well with, like, you didn't start with ads. Ads came later, right. And then. The paying for assets, I think came later as well. so like exactly to Jacob's point it's like you just got out there with a great product, you know, found that product market fit.It went viral. I mean, you know, it probably wouldn't be the success it is today without that, but, but then you've kind of layered on some additional moneymaking over time. And so that's great. but anyhow, we're, we're at the top of the hour and need to, to wrap up, in the show notes, we'll have links to your, Twitter underscore Smith, underscore David Smith, Jacob:00:54:35Oh, my God. I never realized that pun Widgetsmith, Dave. Oh my God. I'm so slow.David Smith: 00:54:43Yeah.Jacob:00:54:44The brand is just so it's perfect, but we're on your lap. It's so great.David Smith: 00:54:49That was a, as soon as it was one of those names where once I, once the name came to me, it's like, yep. That's theJacob:00:54:53Oh, it's even, it's a good name on its own. Right.David Smith: 00:54:55Yeah.Jacob:00:54:56I just love when things are like tidy and tied up like that. It's so perfect. Sorry.David:00:55:02Anyways, anything else? anything else you wanted to share or, anything else you want to mention as we wrap up?David Smith: 00:55:08Yeah, no, I mean, I think we covered some good things and I think it is, I, I always like sharing my story as an independent developer, because I feel like in this industry, they're like, there's a, there's an aspect of it. I know this is something, you know, I've listened to this podcast before. Like there there's a, there is an industry in a branch of this.That is very data oriented. And if you're built almost like you're building a machine to try it, like a business machine to try and like spin off money. And it's all about how you're getting your conversion rate value to this, and then you can put it into this and the eights. There's a very like, and I respect that and understand that, that, that is a very viable business.But I think what I, I was like sort of to share the other side of the story where it's also possible to just make cool things and have them have just have enough, enough of a business in them that it makes a good living for you, but you don't need all of that infrastructure and all of that other things.And I think to our point, we've made many times is if you have something that you take the approach of simplicity and straightforwardness, and Craftsmanship early, you can shift and pivot and change as you go. And if you start to numbers driven and you start to like kind of cold in that way, I think you can lose just as many opportunities, as, as, as you could.And I personally, I enjoy this way. I think this is fine. I, you know, I'm very excited about WWDC next week, because it's the, the time that I get to just discover what I'm going to launch this year. Kind of thing. And so I'm very excited to become about that. I think that excitement is something that I wouldn't have if I was building something that I didn't enjoy doing in quite the same way.David:00:56:52Well, thanks, David so much for your time.Jacob:00:56:56Good luck next week. 

Hello again. I've made a couple of updates to the formula and for the first part of this month I was in the mood for Sci-fiction and Thriller movies so you'll notice that most of the content falls into that zone.So, please come and join me as I rate, rank, and review 5 titles from recent media that I've watched. On the slate today is:50/50In the Shadow of the MoonBeirutBoss LevelThe Ninth Gate A special thanks to the folks at Film Masters for the analog television sound effects:Effects created with the help of Michael Freudenberg - Film Masters YouTube channel:https://www.youtube.com/c/FilmMastersChannelWESBITE: hdreel.com You can reach me directly at MillennialsReviewMedia@gmail.com or follow me on twitter @ExtremeMovie Thank you!

Mark 9: 30-50In this text we explore 'greatness' in God's Kingdom. We unpack themes of service, rivalry, holiness, and love - within a Gospel paradigm. We are encouraged to abandon self-serving agendas and to pursue holiness in view of Christ's accomplishments at the cross and in the resurrection.

Today is a BIG day as Churn FM turns 100 episodes old! It’s been an amazing learning curve and I’ve been super lucky to speak to and learn from some of the brightest minds in the business. For this special episode I wanted to give back to you, and all the other listeners of the show, who have helped shape and make it what it is today. So to do that I turned to our amazing guests and asked for a big favour which they were super cool about and agreed to. This week you can stand a chance to win a free 30-min coaching call with one of our guests participating, to experience the learnings first hand and get to ask that question you wish I had. We have over 20 guests participating and I’m sure more will follow this week which is awesome.To stand a chance of winning a session all you need to do is subscribe to our newsletter on churn.fm, listen to an episode of the guest you’d love to meet and share it on Twitter or LinkedIn to qualify.One of these amazing guests who’s agreed to take part is with us today on the show. Ziv Peled is the Chief Customer Officer at AppsFlyer and no stranger to Churn FM either as we previously hosted him on episode 50In this episode, we talked about the concept of 1% done in a SaaS business and why Ziv is now starting to look at the 99%, we also chatted about what has changed for Ziv in the past 7 years at AppsFlyer when it comes to retention, and what has stayed the same. We also discussed the different challenges of NPS and the importance of speaking to the right people within an organization, how Ziv measures the success of his CSM’s with a score based on inputs within their control, and how their team forecasts revenue and renewals.As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

Welcome back to The Third Party Podcast! Your weekly update on Apex Legends the best battle royale game out there.Want to support us as creators and get access to tons of exclusive content? We greatly appreciate any support you can give us to continue to put out this content and take this podcast to the next level.PATREON Link: https://www.patreon.com/thirdpartypodLeak Talk: 32:25 - 36:50In this episode of the podcast, we are going to be talking about all the news/leaks around Apex and answering tons of questions. Apex Stats: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/apex-legends-guns-season-7-weapon-stats-and-best-guns-tier-listJoin our Discord: https://discord.gg/cxHY9ARds9@Shrugtal on Twitter for awesome leaksFun-filled analysis from two guys that want to talk to you about the best battle royale game out there. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @ThirdpartypodEmail us questions, comments, legend concepts, and anything involving Apex Legends: Thethirdpartypod@gmail.comPlease rate and review. A five-star review guarantees your answer will be questioned.#PlayApexSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/thirdpartypod)

#50In this episode I interview Hilay Farooq. Hilay is a feminine spirituality coach and currently works with female entrepreneurs, coaches, healers, and women who are ready to fully claim their authentic power.She is trained in Feminine Embodiment, Neurolinguistic Programming, Authentic Relating & Circling, and Behavioral Psychology.Hilay's journey started out in corporate America in 2016. After an experience with sexual harassment with a high profile client, she fell deeply into a state of anxiety, emotional dissociation, and unworthiness. Within 2 years she quit corporate to “find herself” and then spent nearly a year traveling, working in hostels & restaurants, and searching for soul purpose. She didn't officially find what she thought she was looking for and felt the pressure of returning to “normal life” for the sake of her conservative, immigrant parents. Because of this, she returned back to the 9-5 with a side hustle in health and wellness until she was called to feminine spirituality. In pursuing this passion, she was able to create a 6-figure coaching business in less than 1 year. This allowed her to move to Bali to start living her dream life in the spiritual hub of the world. Since then, she has helped hundreds of women trust their calling, attune to their intuitive body, and naturally attract love, abundance & soul connection.What enthusiastic mini-morsels are included in this episode:

The text that started it all.“Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)” is book Eve Rodsky feels she was born to write. A Harvard-trained lawyer and former foundational manager at JPMorgan Chase, Eve found herself in a marriage and partnership that was more than just a little uneven. After she and her friends, accomplished women and mothers, compiled a list of over 1000 things they do, invisible work, that gets no recognition, she knew that she was on to something larger than just a text about buying blueberries.  The myth of 50/50In thinking on her marriage and life partnership, Eve realized that 50/50 is a myth and she speaks on how unions should act more like business partnerships to get the work and parenting done in an equitable fashion. She devised the Fair Play card game to help partners work through their values and their roles.“Fair Play became my love letter to men and women on the move. All over the country, men were saying to me, ‘I would do more in the home, but I just can’t get anything right,’” says Eve. To Eve, proper partnership goes beyond splitting things down the middle and trusting each other to do them with care.  Great partnerships benefit everyoneFor women, sharing household responsibilities creates a space that Eve calls Unicorn Time. When women have space to be themselves and be creative the results are astounding.In this episode of Women on the Move, Eve praises the courage of women to fight back on societal norms, to reclaim their space and time from invisible work, and how both men, women and children benefit from the fair play of great partnerships. 

Forgiven MuchLuke 7:36-50In conversations with many of you lately, I get the sense that many of us are feeling that it is an increasingly challenging time to live as a faithful Christian. The worldview of our non Christian neighbors continues to move farther and farther away from a Christian worldview. We probably sense how much we’re not at home here: its tough to feel at home in a political party, at home in the schools, at home in the corporate setting, at home in the world of entertainment or social media.We feel more than we have in our lifetimes that we are aliens and strangers and exiles here as 1 Peter 1:21 says. We feel what Hebrews says in Hebrews 13:14, that we have no abiding city here. We feel very much not at home in a world that couldn’t think more differently than Christians think.

On this episode of the RUDIS Wrestling Podcast, Ben Askren and Matt Dernlan wrap up their breakdown of the matches at the Las Vegas Invitational from the past weekend. Timestamps by weight can be found below125lbs 16:25133lbs 17:33141lbs 19:00149lbs 34:34165lbs 41:55174lbs 43:36197lbs 46:07Heavyweight 50:50In addition to covering the results of the Invitational, Dernlan and Askren discuss the advantages in wrestling on the East Coast when it comes to opportunities at the D1 level, the sparse Penn State competition schedule, and Cael Sanderson's continued secrecy with his knowledge. The two wrap up the episode with recaps of the Iowa Princeton, Oklahoma Princeton, and the Cougar Clash dual meets, and with a look ahead to a live podcast coming up for the 2019 US Open.

Christmas365 presents: Music Podcast 2018.50In this new christmas music-podcast our guests are: Beach boys- The Man With All The ToysBeach Boys - We three kingsBerlin trombone Quintet- Silent Night.Bing Crosby - Silent Night (1945)Blue Diamonds - White ChristmasBoyz Ii Man - Silent NightVoice-Over: Anjes.For more Christmas365 Music visit our website: https://christmas365music.blogspot.com or download the Spreaker-radio app (for all devices),** or the Google-Podcast App or Apple-Podcast App, Search for Christmas365 make it your favorite and join the club.**Frits365 Music podcast is available on Googlepodcast, Applepodcast,Podcastaddict, Soundcloud, Tunein and Castbox .https://www.facebook.com/frits365 https://www.twitter.com/frits365

John 11:45-571. Jesus is inescapable, v. 45-482. Political solutions without spiritual renewal never changes a nation, v. 49-50In the 2018 election cycle alone…Democratic party- $954,729,181Republican party- $993,963,461Democratic national Committee- $176,782,851Republican national Committee- $324,836,805Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee- $296,422,428Republican Congressional Campaign Committee- $205,755,914 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee- $148,698,958National Republican Senatorial Committee- $151,570,5203. In the big picture, God uses little people, v. 49-534. The Cross is God’s will not man’s, v. 54-Acts 4:23-315. Jesus is enough, v. 55-57-Romans 9:16Questions for discussion…In what ways is Jesus threatening you these days and what is He threatening? If you had control over all the money we spend on politics how would you spend it?Who is God using to teach you things about yourself these days? How would your life change if you believed that God was in charge of the times and the timing of your life?How do you see God coming to you in the normalcy of your life?

Hi there,this month i found some really liquid, chill music. They funny enough all kind of mathced in the same theme so here it is!playlist:Alone - Reaktion ft. The eden projectTruth hurts - zero t ft riaCrystal eyes - novacoreMemories of nothing - volantÂ,R - StrehlowShame - allianceThis is how i feel - demented sound mafiaLa tech - mr. 50In too deep - happy trailzFalling right - my eastford soulHolden on - alec royaleRave instructions - kruce vs. Kevin wildDreams - one overProppa demands - jauz & at dawn we rageTomahawk - tannergaardEargasm - henry himselfGo hard - dotexeMoln - dhrubo farazPop that - juicy mCity lights - distroDafuq - shelboyDe janeration - simon de janoPuppeteer - avivianSend us some bottles - maddixValley - niklessHazook - kozahHardcut - boombox cartelAfraid - f.o.o.l.Broken places - psychologicIed - oikiVoodoo doughnut - dubloadzaristocrat - geotheoryFavelas - aquadrop vs. NadastromOkay - dogma

Hi there,this month i found some really liquid, chill music. They funny enough all kind of mathced in the same theme so here it is!playlist:Alone - Reaktion ft. The eden projectTruth hurts - zero t ft riaCrystal eyes - novacoreMemories of nothing - volantÂ,R - StrehlowShame - allianceThis is how i feel - demented sound mafiaLa tech - mr. 50In too deep - happy trailzFalling right - my eastford soulHolden on - alec royaleRave instructions - kruce vs. Kevin wildDreams - one overProppa demands - jauz & at dawn we rageTomahawk - tannergaardEargasm - henry himselfGo hard - dotexeMoln - dhrubo farazPop that - juicy mCity lights - distroDafuq - shelboyDe janeration - simon de janoPuppeteer - avivianSend us some bottles - maddixValley - niklessHazook - kozahHardcut - boombox cartelAfraid - f.o.o.l.Broken places - psychologicIed - oikiVoodoo doughnut - dubloadzaristocrat - geotheoryFavelas - aquadrop vs. NadastromOkay - dogma