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Louis Tomlinson, former member of One Direction - one of the most successful and era-defining bands in history, opens up about X Factor fame, the band's split, the loss of Liam Payne, fatherhood, grief, and life after global superstardom for the first time, revealing the highs and lows that defined his journey. As a solo artist, Louis has released two chart-topping albums, amassed over 4.5 billion streams, and recently dropped his new single “Lemonade” ahead of his upcoming album “How Did I Get Here?”. Beyond music, he's carved his own path as the founder of the self-curated Away From Home Festival and the unisex streetwear label 28 Clothing. In this powerful, candid conversation, he reveals: ◼️How he finds strength through loss, following the deaths of his mother, younger sister, and former bandmate, Liam Payne. ◼️How he rebuilt his self-worth after feeling like he wasn't good enough ◼️Why a promise to his mother still drives everything he does today ◼️Why becoming a father changed how he sees life, pressure, and legacy ◼️His journey re-defining success and identity after reaching the pinnacle of the music industry. ◼️His upcoming album, 'How Did I Get Here', and his newfound happiness as inspiration. (00:00) Intro (03:40) Your Mother's Role in Your Life (04:27) Louis' Siblings (05:21) Do You Think Fame Changed You? (11:29) Boot Camp (13:16) Reflecting on One Direction (17:44) Having the Confidence to Push Back Against the Record Label (26:29) Relationship With Alcohol (28:12) What Advice Would You Give Your Younger Self? (29:42) Feeling Like the Weak Link in the Band (33:23) Solo Record Label After the Band Split Up (34:34) The Impact of Your Success on Your Family (37:46) Zayn's Decision to Leave the Band (41:41) Grieving the End of One Direction (42:28) The Meeting That Ended the Band (45:10) Career Decline After One Direction (48:01) Dealing With Comparing the Past to Now (54:09) Ads (56:11) Balancing Career and Personal Life (57:22) Your Mother's Death (59:40) Finding Out Your Mum Was Sick (1:02:38) Going on Stage After Your Mum's Death (1:06:45) Advice for People With Grief (1:09:15) Experience With Anxiety (1:10:47) Remembering Louis' Sister (1:11:18) Moving Through Grief (1:18:31) Felicite's Struggles (1:20:42) Why He Doesn't Speak About These Tragedies Often (1:25:38) Your Relationship With Liam Payne (1:29:41) Liam's Death (1:39:43) Challenge With Having Children When Famous (1:44:08) Ads (1:45:16) Louis' New Music (1:47:46) How Much Does Love Come Into Your Album? (1:50:01) Where Are You on Your Journey of Happiness? Follow Louis: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3KG2uDG X - https://bit.ly/435ovlC Facebook - https://bit.ly/47aMx14 TikTok - https://bit.ly/48lj1qu YouTube - https://bit.ly/4q0bh3q You can listen to Louis' new music, here: Lemonade Out Now - https://bit.ly/3KWsBX0 How Did I Get Here? - Album out 23rd January - https://bit.ly/3WpcAeH US + EU + UK Tour - On sale Friday 10th October - https://bit.ly/4o9psSd The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: 1Password - Find out more at https://1password.com/doac SimpliSafe - https://simplisafe.com/DOAC to save 50% on a SimpliSafe home security system. Adobe Express - http://ADOBE.LY/STEVEN
Greg is a global expert in brand storytelling. He's won international awards across advertising, film, and television. Helping start-ups to Fortune 500s, brands like Adobe, Capgemini, Google, Qantas, and Virgin use him when they want to tell a stronger story. He's literally written the book on brand storytelling - 'Creating a Blockbuster Brand' has just been released. Connect with Greg here:https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-logan/narrativity.com Don't forget to download our FREE LinkedIn Post Templates for High Impact Posts here:https://www.thetimetogrow.com/ecsposttemplates
Kelsey's Top 5 CliftonStrengths are: Positivity, Strategic, Maximizer, Ideation and Adaptability Kelsey Linnartz is the artist and founder of LinnArtzy (yes, the name comes from her last name and a constant compliment, "you're so artsy"). She uses her top 5 strengths of Positivity, Strategic, Maximizer, Ideation, and Adaptability every day as an entrepreneur and creative. She's a live fashion illustrator who draws guests at parties and brand events—think personalized fashion sketches created on the spot. She's worked with brands like Neiman Marcus, Alice & Olivia, Adobe, Kendra Scott, and a bunch of others, which still feels pretty surreal. Originally from Fort Worth, Texas, Kelsey studied fashion design at Texas Tech University. She launched LinnArtzy in 2020 when the world needed some extra encouragement. Now she gets to do this full-time, which is honestly a dream. After almost 5 years in NYC, she recently moved to Charleston, where she now works out of her art studio downtown. Kelsey travels often for events and collaborations. She's all about celebrating the good moments and adding some brightness to the tough ones—mixing fashion illustration with calligraphy and a whole lot of encouragement. You can learn about LinnArtzy here! Find out your strengths by taking the CliftonStrengths Top 5 Assessment Workshops and Coaching with Barbara Culwell Subscribe & Leave a Review on Embrace Your Strengths
In this episode of Scratch, Eric chats with Will Pearson, Co-Founder of Ocean Bottle, the brand turning reusable bottles into vehicles for global impact. One of the biggest takeaways from Will's story is how Ocean Bottle has made impact completely non-negotiable in its business model; every purchase is tied directly to measurable change. Rather than chasing the traditional direct-to-consumer routes, the brand leaned into B2B partnerships as its true growth engine, scaling faster through collaborations like Ed Sheeran's tour than through paid ads. Will also highlights that in a purpose-driven category, the goal isn't to outcompete others but to grow the category as a whole. Ocean Bottle's marketing reflects this mindset, relying on storytelling backed by proof, from the Change Collective initiative to transparent reporting on every kilo of plastic collected. Ultimately, the key learning for marketers is clear: purpose isn't dead; it is evolving. And partnerships are how purpose-led brands grow.Watch the video version of this podcast on Youtube ▶️: [coming soon]
Fiverr just fired 30% of its staff and announced it's becoming an “AI-first company.” On paper, it sounds innovative. In reality, it's poetic justice. The platform that devalued design and turned creativity into a $5 commodity just found a faster, cheaper replacement of its own bargain basement graphic designers...artificial intelligence. This isn't just about Fiverr. It's the clearest proof yet that shortcuts, cheap clients, and race-to-the-bottom thinking always come back to bite.Here's the uncomfortable truth: most graphic designers that helped build the monster, is now being replaced by it. By chasing low prices, skipping process, and trading craft for convenience, they became the very data that AI now feeds on. Meanwhile, the few designers who built real strategy, process, and brand value are standing strong and watching the collapse from the sidelines with popcorn.This week on The Angry Designer Podcast, we expose Fiverr's AI-first announcement for what it really is: a desperate move wrapped in PR spin. We break down what it teaches every real designer about protecting their designs and their future in this AI fuel hungry environment. This isn't just a takedown. It's a wake-up call about how easily creative platforms can turn your work into their training data, and how to make sure that never happens to you.In this episode you'll discover- Why Fiverr's collapse proves cheap design was never sustainable- The hidden fine print that lets companies like Fiverr and Adobe use your creative work for AI- How real designers can use AI to their advantage instead of becoming its next victimThis isn't about Fiverr, it's about the entire creative industry. Because if you think staying cheap, fast, and convenient is your competitive edge, you're already designing your own extinction. The future doesn't need more Fiverr designers. It needs thinkers, leaders, and creators who value the process as much as the product.Stay Angry our Friends –––––––––––Join Anger Management for Designers Newsletter at https://tinyurl.com/mr4bb4j3Want to see more? See uncut episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/theangrydesigner Read our blog posts on our website TheAngryDesigner.comJoin in the conversation on our Instagram Instagram.com/TheAngryDesignerPodcast
Send us a textGreg Logan: The Power of Storytelling – Turning Brands into BlockbustersIn this episode of Navigating the Customer Experience, we are joined by Greg Logan, a global leader in brand storytelling who has spent over 30 years helping the world's biggest brands—from Adobe and Netflix to Virgin and Qantas—connect with audiences through stories that reach both the head and the heart. With award-winning experience in advertising, television, and film, Greg has built his company, Narrativity, on a powerful idea: brands can learn the secrets of Hollywood storytelling to become loved, not just known.In this episode, Greg shares his remarkable journey from a 10-year-old fascinated by TV commercials to a top creative at Leo Burnett, where he spent 17 years shaping global campaigns. After a successful career in advertising, he transitioned to entertainment, selling reality show ideas to major U.S. networks. But when he realized that brands were being told why they should tell stories but not how, Greg combined his knowledge of advertising and entertainment to develop storytelling formulas that now help businesses worldwide emotionally engage customers.Greg breaks down the three keys to connecting with audiences through storytelling. First, use structure—every story needs a clear beginning, middle, and end. Second, make the audience the hero, not the brand. Your business is the wise guide that helps them achieve their quest. Finally, start with the customer's greatest tension—what keeps them up at night—and end with their greatest love—what they truly desire. By triggering emotion first, you capture attention and make your brand memorable. Greg illustrates this with a powerful case: a New Zealand water company that transformed its message from rational facts to emotional storytelling, landing products in Whole Foods and other major retailers.He also shares a deeply moving example from his work with a palliative care organization. Using his “quest formula,” they defined their purpose as “giving people their best death possible”—a phrase that brought everyone in the room to tears and perfectly captured their true value. For Greg, these are the stories that matter most.When it comes to technology, Greg has a balanced approach to AI. While he appreciates its efficiency, he cautions that AI-generated writing often sounds generic. His tip: use AI to edit, not replace your voice—and give it personality by prompting it to write like your favorite celebrity. He also recommends checking out his new tool, storytellingquiz.com, which helps businesses evaluate and strengthen their brand story.Greg recently released his book, Creating a Blockbuster Brand: Hollywood's Storytelling Secrets For Your Business, designed to give readers practical, page-by-page value. A book that has deeply influenced him is The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff—a beautifully simple blend of philosophy and wisdom through Winnie the Pooh.Looking ahead, Greg is excited about his new collaboration with UK-based BoltAI and their product, Foretold, which uses storytelling principles to help companies innovate faster and smarter by testing new ideas directly with consumers. It's storytelling not just for marketing—but for invention.Greg's guiding mantra during challenges? “Suck it up.” It's a reminder that as entrepreneurs, we choose this path—and perspective turns frustration into fuel.Connect with Greg: Instagram: @gregloganofficial | LinkedIn: Greg Logan | Website: narrativity.comBooks Mentioned: Creating a Blockbuster Brand by Greg Logan The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff
Send us a textWhat do Barbie, Star Wars, and your coaching business have in common? Hollywood storytelling expert Greg Logan reveals the blockbuster formula—and puts me in the hot seat to transform my AI Book Coaching brand. No script, no prep, just real coaching.Greg Logan is the author of Creating a Blockbuster Brand and founder of Narrativity.com. After decades in advertising and working with big names like Google, Adobe, Virgin, Kellogg's, and United Airlines, he now helps coaches, healers, and entrepreneurs craft stories that captivate clients and build credibility.
Live from Amazon Accelerate, Joe and Adobe's David Devisser unpack the new Adobe Express integration with Amazon Ads. You will see how to discover policy-ready templates, connect your Creative Asset Library, run real-time checks, and export to the right specs in one flow. Key takeawaysYou can start from Amazon Ads templates inside Express, then customize quickly. Real-time policy checks and safe-zone guidance catch issues before export. Export automates spec fitting for video, including bitrate and frame rate, then saves back to your library.
Wes Ott covers today's top tech stories. DoorDash unveils Dot, an autonomous delivery robot. Adobe releases its free Premiere video editing app for iPhone. California governor signs first-of-its-kind AI safety law.
Wes Ott covers today's top tech stories. DoorDash unveils Dot, an autonomous delivery robot. Adobe releases its free Premiere video editing app for iPhone. California governor signs first-of-its-kind AI safety law.
Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, joins Rapid Response to share what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in today's software-driven economy. Field also reflects on the pressures and opportunities of leading as a next-generation, tech-native CEO, and offers practical advice on upskilling in an AI-powered world.Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
What happens when confidence stops being a performance and starts becoming who you are? In this episode of the She Built It® Podcast, I sit down with Sara Anderson, founder of Lead Out Loud and creator of The Resonance Method™, a three-pillar framework helping visionary women amplify presence, influence, and leadership. Sara shares her journey from acting in LA, to tech, to coaching leaders at companies like Adobe, Workday, and Cerity Partners. We talk about the cost of “performing confidence,” how to dismantle imposter feelings, and why visibility feels so vulnerable, but is the key to unlocking your next level of leadership.If you've ever hesitated to speak up in a room, or felt like your polish erased your power, this conversation will remind you: confidence isn't about proving yourself, it's about resonance, trust, and showing up as your real self.
Figma burst into the public eye in 2022 after Adobe was blocked from buying the design startup for $20 billion. This chapter set the stage for an even bigger milestone at Figma: a splashy IPO this summer at nearly double that valuation. Dylan Field, Figma's co-founder and CEO, joins Rapid Response to share what distinguishes Figma from competitors, and why design is increasingly at the center of every industry in today's software-driven economy. Field also reflects on the pressures and opportunities of leading as a next-generation, tech-native CEO, and offers practical advice on upskilling in an AI-powered world.Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
On This Week's episode of "The Marketing Stir" Vincent welcomes Janet Dulsky, Director of Retention Marketing at Adobe, to the podcast to discuss the how, and why, to keep your customers loyal.
Ever wondered why making tables accessible is so tricky? Or why it matters at all? In this lively episode of Chax Chat, Chad Chelius and Dax Castro break down the nuts and bolts of accessible tables with practical tips that draw on their decades of hands-on experience. From the essential differences between visual and programmatic accessibility, to real-world table fails (and how to fix them!), they share their secrets to creating documents that truly work for everyone. You'll learn why a table title isn't just for looks, how to pick the right headers, and get a behind-the-scenes look at how screen readers navigate data. Whether you're wrangling rows in Word, untangling PDFs, or just trying to help your team pass accessibility audits, this episode is packed with actionable advice and quick wins. Discover how the smallest details—like summary tags, color choices, and even WHERE you put your footnotes—can make a world of difference in digital accessibility. Join Chad and Dax for a deep dive that will have you rethinking the tables in all your digital projects!
On Tuesday, DoorDash unveiled Dot, a small robot it built in-house that can autonomously drive on roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks to deliver food and small packages at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. Dot is designed to look friendly and even cartoonish — painted bright red, with big LED eyes and a mouth that swings open to reveal where it holds your food — though some would argue it's slightly creepy. Also, Adobe's popular video editing app Premiere is available on iPhone starting today, following the company's announcement of its plans to release the app on mobile earlier this month. The Android version of the app is under development, Adobe says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Are We Living Through the BIGGEST Crisis of Purpose & Meaning in History? 3 in 5 young Americans believe that their life lacks purpose. This isn't just a statistic, it's a silent epidemic reshaping mental health, identity and future...So, how do we fix it? In this DOAC debate, Greg Koukl (Christian), Alex O'Connor (atheist), and Dr K (psychiatrist) explore why so many feel lost, whether God is the answer, how death anxiety drives our search for meaning, and how YOU can find direction…today. This isn't just a discussion. It's a confrontation with life's hardest challenge: finding meaning, and how faith, reason, and spirituality compete to fill the void. Greg Koukl is a Christian apologist, speaker, and founder of Stand to Reason, Alex O'Connor is a philosopher, writer, and host of the Cosmic Skeptic channel, and Dr K, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, mental health educator, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. Together, they discuss: ◼️If God gave you a purpose…what does that actually mean? ◼️Why “do what makes you happy” is terrible advice for finding meaning ◼️How comfort is quietly killing your sense of purpose ◼️The shocking truth about modern loneliness and identity loss ◼️The “paperclip problem” that exposes religion (00:00) Intro (02:27) Atheist vs Christian vs Spiritualist (05:24) What Is Purpose? (12:56) Is Meaning Necessary? (17:24) What's the Point of This Conversation? (18:53) Can Humanity Find Its Purpose? (36:55) Is It Important to Be Curious About God? (42:14) Is Modern Society the Reason for a Meaning Crisis? (42:46) What Is Meaning and Why Do People Feel the Lack of It? (51:20) The Problem of Consciousness (1:06:56) How to Find Meaning (1:25:45) Is Agnosticism the Truth? (1:35:13) Ads (1:36:11) Do We Each Have a Specific Purpose or Is It Self-Chosen? (1:39:59) Dharma and Karma (1:48:28) Can We Have a Fulfilling Life Without a Transcendent Purpose? (2:20:02) Ads (2:22:23) How to Create a Meaningful Life as an Agnostic (2:40:05) Is Alex on His Way to Getting Closer to God? (2:51:59) How to Remove the Feeling of Being Lost in Life (3:05:23) What to Do When You Feel Stuck (3:11:27) Closing Thoughts Follow Alex: YouTube: http://bit.ly/3KCRM0B Substack: http://bit.ly/46GsExC Instagram: https://bit.ly/4mBNW5o Follow Greg: X - https://bit.ly/4nMy80v Stand to Reason - https://bit.ly/4pFtYJG A Gift to DOAC Listeners from Stand to Reason: Download "How God Rescues Broken Souls” from Greg Koukl's book, The Story of Reality, at http://bit.ly/3It65o4 You can purchase ‘The Story of Reality', here: https://amzn.to/4nGNft3 Follow Dr K: YouTube - https://bit.ly/48wUuig Instagram - https://bit.ly/48xxSy3 Twitch - https://bit.ly/42zkAO3 You can purchase Dr K's book, ‘How To Raise a Healthy Gamer', here: https://amzn.to/4norKgr The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Adobe Express - http://ADOBE.LY/STEVEN Plaud - https://www.plaud.ai/pages/steven use DOAC22 for 22% off Note and NotePin Function Health - https://Functionhealth.com/DOAC with code DOAC100 for $100 towards your membership
Kendall Berg and Sara Anderson go deep into why authentic confidence isn't about “faking it until you make it”—it's about rewiring your nervous system so your leadership presence becomes undeniable. From grounding exercises that calm anxiety before high-stakes meetings to mindset shifts that make you more memorable in the boardroom, this episode unpacks the hidden mechanics of influence that no one teaches you in corporate training. Sara explains how nervous system regulation directly impacts clarity, vocal control, and body language. She shares a client story of a senior leader who broke through a years-long ceiling after mastering these techniques, proving that leadership isn't about credentials alone—it's about resonance. Together, Kendall and Sara reveal how trust, likability, and authentic connection matter far more than polished perfection when it comes to career growth. In this episode, we discuss: How can nervous system regulation improve leadership confidence? Why does likability matter more than technical skills for career growth? What visualization exercises actually reduce anxiety before big meetings? How do gender dynamics and bias impact visibility at work? What mindset shifts help leaders move from polished to truly authentic? ⭐️Get our FREE Accomplishments Tracker: https://fabulous-butterfly-83716.myflodesk.com/n8yzvrtw9v That Career Coach Want to know more about Kendal Berg, that career coach? Follow her on Instagram: @thatcareercoach_ Check out her courses on the website: https://stan.store/thatcareercoach
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
In this episode, Conor and Bryce chat with Sean Parent about AI and Cursor!Link to Episode 253 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)SocialsADSP: The Podcast: TwitterConor Hoekstra: Twitter | BlueSky | MastodonBryce Adelstein Lelbach: TwitterAbout the Guest:Sean Parent is a senior principal scientist and software architect managing Adobe's Software Technology Lab. Sean first joined Adobe in 1993 working on Photoshop and is one of the creators of Photoshop Mobile, Lightroom Mobile, and Lightroom Web. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple's successful transition to PowerPC.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2025-08-21Date Released: 2025-09-26C++ Under the SeaBetter codeAdobe ASL Adam & Eve ArchitectureAdobe Software Technology LabASL LibrariesRust Programming LanguageIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8
Figma's (FIG) IPO was one of the most anticipated in tech, and the stock price action was CRAZY! After the initial fervor, the price has pulled back significantly. Is this the buying opportunity investors have been waiting for?CSI is taking a deep dive into Figma's first earnings report as a publicly traded company to find out.In this video, we cover:✅ New Acquisitions: Figma is already putting its IPO cash to work, acquiring Payload (a content management software company) and Modify (an AI-focused model context protocol).✅ The Big Vision: How these acquisitions fit into Figma's goal to become the go-to platform for creating usable software, easily and intuitively.✅ The Financials: We break down Q2 ✅ Future Outlook: Management is guiding for a growth slowdown to 33% for Q3 and taking a hit on margins for the sake of expansion. Is this a red flag or a smart long-term play?✅ The Verdict: Is Figma stock a buy, sell, or hold at its current price? We give our final analysis and key takeaways.Timestamps:[00:00:00] What Figma Does: A review of Figma's end-to-end platform that helps companies with fast, agile software development from ideation to shipping.[00:02:45] Q2 Acquisitions: Breaking down the purchases of Payload, a Content Management System (CMS), and the AI coding startup, Modify.[00:04:45] AI Strategy & New Products: How Figma is using AI to be a disruptor with new tools like Figma Make, Draw, Sites, and Buzz, which were announced at its Config developer conference.[00:06:45] Model Context Protocol (MCP) Explained: Understanding how Figma connects designs to LLMs for coding assistance, with its Gen AI product housed on Amazon AWS.[00:08:30] Q2 Earnings & Valuation: Analyzing the first public report with $250M in revenue and a $26B+ market cap, compared to Adobe's failed $20B acquisition offer from three years prior.[00:10:30] CapEx & Hidden Costs: Exploring why even an "asset-light" company like Figma spends millions on physical hardware and cloud infrastructure from partners like AWS.[00:12:30] Future Financial Guidance: Breaking down the outlook for Q3 and the full year, including an expected growth slowdown and lower margins to fuel expansion.[00:14:05] Our Investment Strategy: Why we are being patient due to the high valuation and would only consider a very small Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA) approach if we were to buy now.What are your thoughts on Figma's strategy? Let us know in the comments below!
Is Authenticity Quietly KILLING Your Career? Former Secret Agent Evy Poumpouras reveals how being “real” at work can SABOTAGE your leadership, and breaks down elite strategies for emotional control, communication, confidence, and power. Evy Poumpouras is a former U.S. Secret Service Special Agent, NBC Crime & Law Enforcement Analyst, and bestselling author of Becoming Bulletproof. She protected U.S. Presidents, interrogated high-risk criminals, and learned first-hand how the world's most powerful leaders control emotion, command respect, and stay composed under pressure. In this groundbreaking episode, she explains: ◼️The 1 psychology trick that instantly makes people respect you ◼️Why you shouldn't care about people's feelings ◼️The 5 habits you must get rid of to earn influence ◼️How to tell if someone is lying to you ◼️Why most people stay miserable forever (00:00) Intro (02:24) Why People Are Drawn to Your Mission (05:23) People Waste Time Overthinking Instead of Changing (09:33) Forget About The Past (12:37) Being Stuck in the Identity You've Built (18:59) The Secondary Game: Why People Don't Overcome Problems (25:10) You Can't Change People (30:16) How Steve Builds His Confidence (35:44) Stop Being Driven by Fear (38:37) How to Self-Regulate Your Emotions (40:25) Should You Be Your Authentic Self at Work? (49:17) Which Gender Tells Lies Better? (51:27) How to Build Confidence (57:07) Why Small Challenges Matter More Than Big Ones (1:03:08) Lessons From the Best Decision Makers (1:10:25) Ads (1:11:23) Why Your Tone of Voice Matters (1:18:46) The Importance of Body Language (1:38:12) Dealing With Offensive People (1:44:26) How to Become Unprovokable (1:55:36) How Friends Influence Who You Are (1:57:29) Ads (2:03:51) How Poor Performers Impact the Team (2:07:18) Why You Might Look Like an Easy Target (2:20:31) Charlie Kirk and Threats on Social Platforms (2:23:59) How Social Media Reduces Empathy (2:30:44) School and Mass Shootings (2:36:09) Could Anything Have Prevented Charlie Kirk's Death? (2:41:18) What Are You Most Afraid Of? Follow Evy: Instagram - https://bit.ly/4aN4q4D Twitter - https://bit.ly/4c4TErD Website: http://bit.ly/3K89id3 Evy's BBC Maestro course ‘The Art of Influence' can be found HERE: http://bit.ly/4nFGTJT You can purchase Evy's book, ‘Becoming Bulletproof', HERE: https://amzn.to/46n6cdS The Diary Of A CEO: ◼️Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼️Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook ◼️The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt ◼️The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb ◼️Get email updates - https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt ◼️Follow Steven - https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Adobe Express - http://ADOBE.LY/STEVEN Pipedrive - http://pipedrive.com/CEO Plaud - https://www.plaud.ai/pages/steven use DOAC22 for 22% off Note and NotePin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Welcome to the Alan Smithee Podcast in which hosts Scott Simmons, Katie Hinsen & Michael Kammes talk about the latest news in production, post production, entertainment, tech and beyond. In this episode the gang's conversation centers around the annual Science and Technical (Sci-Tech) Emmys, significant innovations presented at the IBC trade show, and emerging guidelines around AI use in media production. The discussion also examines the Television Academy's AI task force, which has introduced broad ethical guidelines for AI use in production. And of course, there's a bunch of really cool things to get excited about. Show Notes:Sci Tech emmys: https://www.televisionacademy.com/features/news/awards-news/2025-engineering-250902TV Academy AI Guidelines: https://deadline.com/2025/09/tv-academy-ai-guidelines-members-1236528315/IBC 2025https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/tv-tech-unveils-best-of-show-winners-at-ibc-2025Blackmagic Resolve 20.2Blackmagic ProDock for iPhone 17 AnnouncedBlackmagic Design Brings ProRes RAW to DaVinci Resolve and Pocket 4KASUS ProArt Display OLED PA27USD Monitor Introduced - A Dedicated Filmmaking Monitor90 new, modern effects, transitions and animations, all included in your plan. These tools are powered by Adobe's recent acquisition of Film Impact, whose high-value library is now seamlessly built into Premiere Pro.Avid Content Core and more: https://www.avid.com/press-room/2025/09/avid-unveils-new-ai-and-automation-breakthroughs-to-accelerate-storytelling-ibc2025Nikon ZR (R3d) https://www.provideocoalition.com/introducing-the-nikon-zr-cinema-camera/Kyno update!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! iPhone 17Blackmagic Camera ProDock: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/media/release/20250910-01Review 17 Pro: https://www.provideocoalition.com/review-iphone-17-pro-max/Photographers review: https://youtu.be/KIwKEIMjBLM?si=awqppgG-sW_kR9YxOne Cool ThingKatie: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-beat-impostor-syndrome/id1677016372?i=1000726844767Michael: Personal setup upgrade: https://prompterpeople.com/flex-plus-16-9-15-rgb-ips-3g-sdi-hdmi-teleprompter/Scott: CineMath for iOS https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cinemath/id6742495949?uo=2
The B2B SaaS market is experiencing a significant slowdown with growth rates dropping, while traditional marketing channels deliver diminishing returns in an increasingly saturated landscape.• Marketing benchmarks show companies growing faster than 20% spend 10-15% of revenue on marketing, while slower-growing firms spend only 7-9%• Digital channels like SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), and email are seeing declining performance metrics despite increased spending• Today's B2B buyer completes 80% of their journey independently, yet companies still allocate 70% of go-to-market resources to sales• "What's old is new again" – smaller, intimate events and personalized interactions are outperforming scalable digital tactics• Successful companies balance brand marketing (awareness) and demand generation (conversion) equally• Effective positioning requires elevating problems to the executive level by articulating significant business impact• AI isn't changing what we should measure but enables better personalization at scale across industries and personas• The brand versus demand debate represents a false dichotomy – both work synergistically to drive growthThe rules of B2B marketing are being rewritten before our eyes. In this revealing conversation with marketing benchmark expert Omar Akhtar and go-to-market guru AJ Gandhi, we unpack the surprising reality that most B2B SaaS companies are facing: we're effectively in a recession. Growth rates have plummeted from over 30% to just 11-20%, while traditional digital channels deliver diminishing returns despite increased spending.What's behind this troubling trend? Market saturation, poor tool integration, rapid commoditization, and fundamental shifts in buyer behavior all play a role.The most compelling insight? Companies growing faster than 20% annually are investing 10-15% of revenue in marketing, with a balanced approach between brand awareness and demand generation.Whether you're managing a marketing team, leading sales, or driving overall growth strategy, this episode offers critical benchmarks and tactical approaches for navigating today's challenging landscape. AJ Gandhi: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjaigandhi/AJ Gandhi is a distinguished Go-To-Market (GTM) leader and executive community builder. He currently serves as a Board Member for Plum Acquisition Corp. Additionally, he is a Limited Partner at Stage 2 Capital and GTMfund. AJ is also a co-founder of the GTM Leader Society. Just recently, AJ served as Chief Growth Officer for Marlin Equity Partners and held significant roles at Salesforce, Ring Central, Bain & and McKinsey. AJ is an alumnus of UC Berkeley and Harvard Business School.Omar Akhtar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omarbilalakhtar/Omar Akhtar is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Benchmarker, leading research on marketing excellence for B2B tech. Previously, he was Head of Research at Altimeter, a Prophet Company, where he advised Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and Netflix, on marketing, data, and content strategies. Omar got his undergraduate degree in economics from Ohio Wesleyan, and then got a Masters in Journalism from Columbia.Website: https://www.position2.com/podcast/Rajiv Parikh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajivparikh/Sandeep Parikh: https://www.instagram.com/sandeepparikh/Email us with any feedback for the show: sparkofages.podcast@position2.com
Show Notes for the Billy Newman Photo Podcast View links at wnp.app Explore outdoor photography, technical media projects, stories from backcountry expeditions, and insights from the creative process with Billy Newman—photographer, author, and podcast producer. Connect, learn, and follow along. Quick Links: Portfolio: billynewmanphoto.com/photographs Studio: wphoto.co Posts: billynewmanphoto.com/posts Photo Books: billynewmanphoto.com/books Amazon Author: amazon.com/author/billynewman Podcast Episodes: Billy Newman Photo Podcast: Listen here Relax with Rain: Listen here Night Sky Podcast: Listen here Connect With Billy Newman: Email: billy@billynewmanphoto.com Instagram: @billynewman LinkedIn: billynewmanphoto X (Twitter): @billynewman Recommended Books: Landscape Portfolio (PDF): Download Black and White Photography (PDF): Download Working With Film (PDF): Download Western Overland Excursion (PDF): Download Support the Podcast & Photography Projects: Make a sustaining financial donation: Visit Support Page Podcast Forward: The Billy Newman Photo Podcast blends real-world outdoor adventure, technical insight, and practical photography tips. [Music] Hello and thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Billy Newman Photo Podcast. I’m talking about a photograph that I made on the Oregon coast today doing Blue Hour probably. I think it was after the sun had set. It was sort of like the golden hour to talk about right as the hour as the sun is setting into sunset. The blue hour they also talk about as after the sun goes down there’s a lot of those blue kind of purple tones that show up in the atmosphere or you know in the clouds and in the water. There’s just a lot more of that tone as the sun drops and it’s a spectrum shift from what we see in the daylight to what we see at night time. But I think this was a photograph taken on the Oregon coast. I think your band-in if I’m right. And I really liked this photo. It just had it wasn’t really a big structure in the wave or a big curl or anything like that. That would be that’d be really striking but I really appreciate this photograph as kind of a close-up look at I just sort of the dreamy feeling of being on the coast. But it was definitely a photograph that I liked a lot and I like that line in the skies as it cuts across as you can kind of see at the top there there’s a bit of like a cloud break that goes down and that’s where we get a lot of that light from the sky in the background that kind of cuts underneath that big brim of cloud that goes over the top of the snet that causes a lot of bounce from the ground back up to the sky and then back down and you get a cooler or you get a defused sort of soft light in that effect which I think is really cool. You can see more of my work at billyneuminphoto.com. You can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think you can look up billyneumin under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film, on the desert, on surrealism, on camping. Some cool stuff over there. Finished up that camping trip I was doing up the mountain creek there in the cascades a couple days ago. That was that like Wednesday. I think it was like maybe like Tuesday, Tuesday night to Wednesday morning. I think that was this super moon that was coming up that night if I remember right and that was pretty cool. It was cool to see the full moon up there and they always talk about the super moon which is kind of a I don’t know it’s a little bit of a misnomer but it’s cool to see too that I think they talk about happening every six months or so. Really it’s just kind of the oscillation of a bit of the eccentricities and the orbit of the moon that make it I think about 25,000 miles closer that it’s maximum and then maybe about 25,000 miles further away and it’s distant maximum but I think it’s really like a little bit of a sliver larger than it normally would be. If you notice though it’s a thing I learned way back and I think they they they show it in a scene in Apollo 13 but if you put your hand all the way out and you put your thumb up at all times you’re able to cover the entire full moon just with your thumbnail. It’s pretty wild but you got kind of always like visualize the moon is being this really big thing in the sky and really a lot of the time it’s it’s just as big as your thumbnail at arm’s reach which is kind of a trip but it’s kind of a it was cool to see the super moon that night it was really bright it was cool to kind of watch around and kind of look at how it was illuminating the forest and the trees and the mountains and stuff around me that was kind of nice to see cold that night though man I tell you so I have a 15 degree sleeping bag and that’s great 15 degrees is fine but and 15 degrees really is is more than adequate for most circumstances that I ended up in and during the summertime where it’s I don’t know it’s just not too big of a concern about how cold it gets but when it says 15 degrees it really means you’re going to be comfortable down to somewhere around 35 degrees but anywhere under 30 degrees is a pretty uncomfortable experience I think it means you’re going to stay alive that until it’s about 15 degrees so if it were me again buying something for maybe I don’t know a more heavy three season camping experience most of the time probably a lot of the nights out that I do even though I like to go at all times a year it seems like the majority of nights I go out are during the summer months or during like pretty fair weather seasons but if I were going to buy again which I’m going to try and get like a two or three sleeping bag system going if I was going to buy again I’d probably get a zero degree or maybe a negative 15 degree you know I could really use the warms because man what I noticed is even if it was just a little bit down to what would have been probably maybe I don’t know 29 or something like that it was you know it was a bit below freezing who knows how cold it really was it was only like an elevation of 2500 feet and it was a canyon I thought it was a clear night but I thought it would be relatively sheltered and yeah it was a lot of it was a lot of ice on my window when I woke up and it was a cold cold night to sit through too so yeah that 15 degree bag was just hold up out there but yeah if I was going to go again I think they have like a zero degree bag and then down below that they have like a negative 15 and like maybe like a negative 30 degree bag negative 30 sounds like a real warm like down back so I think mine’s a synthetic bag they talk about this sometimes where there’s like differences in the the thermal insulation qualities of the material that your sleeping bag is made out of and I think that the for it was it was an improvement actually you know above whatever cotton we were using for a while they were using wool stuff which was pretty smart that that works really well to be an insulating material and it doesn’t all right it works well with moisture and stuff and all the other things we know about marina wool is really cool everybody knows about that kind of stuff but we had like you know those really terrible big cotton sleeping bags way back those erupted and I don’t know if they were really even that insulating then they switched over to those synthetic materials which is probably all oil based is that sound right like a petroleum based like plastics product that was made out of synthetics I think that’s how they spin up a lot of those those I don’t know just those synthetic types of materials that they’re making these nylons out of so I think that was how all out of this this synthetic stuff had been made but really I think what they they talk about being the superior insulator is down and that’s what I’d hope to try and find as another zero degree or negative 15 degree sleeping bag would be a negative 15 degree down bag which is normally a bit more expensive you know when you’re looking around at the price points for these different sleeping bags if you’re trying to get into some colder weather camping stuff what you’re going to find is at those name brand or you know not even name brand this is a just a a bespoke manufacturer for a quality technical outdoors product is going to be very expensive and so that’s where you’re going to find I don’t know well you know three three 99 for a sleeping bag two 99 four 99 six 99 I’ve seen like a lot of pretty expensive prices out there I think Nimo makes some bags that are looking pretty cool that I’ve seen recommended a few times I’ve heard a big agnus they make tens most of the time though right they’re tank up and here aren’t they yeah stone glaciers one that I keep hearing kind of pop up here and there now for some sense marm it I think got some bags all right eyes so is you know a retailer of recreational equipment they’re closed right now though so I don’t even know if you could get an order from anyone like that but but they have some bags I think that’s where my synthetic bag was from that I’ve been using for the last I don’t know seven years or so so that’s it’s been fine but I also tested out the sleeping mat I got I got a new thermo rest sleeping mat and now big news it’s pretty exciting guys stay tuned it’s uh yeah it’s a larger sleeping mat than I have before but it’s a coded one with the I think it’s kind of like I don’t know it’s ballistic now but it’s that nylon coating over it so it’s not just the rubber mat at the base of it so you can throw it on the ground or on the semi abrasive materials that it would be outside and it’s working great I think it’s about one inch thick or so it’s about 25 inches wide at the shoulder point and it’s long enough to fit my old body which is probably a new one for me so yeah I got a solid camp mat I think for the last like three years I’m sleeping on one that goes flat about four hours after you start sleeping so that’s kind of nice to swap out I don’t know why I put up with it for so long really should do that sleep is like one of the best things you can get you know if you can figure out just like a couple easy things to take care of when you’re out camping or out in the woods and stuff it’s it’s probably sleep I mean that’s like the thing that takes you know and it’s frustrating too because when like even the last one I’m talking about didn’t sleep very well way too cold part of it you know enough shelter enough stuff that was kind of comfortable but really as it is yeah it’s like oh I need to I need to figure out a couple other extra things to kind of throw in there but yeah there’s just a couple things you can figure out when you’re going camping like how to stay warm or how to be comfortable when you do go or like when you are sleeping it’s like one of the most important and most I don’t know effective things you can do to kind of improve the way that a trip goes because like yeah I can be like I can be brutal the next day if you don’t get any sleep the night before which is probably the first half dozen camping trips of the year you know this first half dozen or so overnight to the year I’m just always kind of groggy and like oh why don’t I have to get up right now which is sort of how it was Wednesday morning when I woke up yeah I popped up and I think it was probably about five a.m. or so that I that I got up I think it was just about first light the sun had come up yeah but there’s a little bit of light up in the sky and the stars were kind of washed out by the blue sky so I hopped up and the fire was out I think from the night before like I was mentioning how those the sticks had worn out and the colds had started burning down even I think by the time I was near the end of my last podcast so I hopped out and the the back windows were clear there wasn’t any frost on it but the front window the windshield was ice over pretty hard really I mean it looked like it was you know like coated in water and then froze over solid so it wasn’t even just kind of like a fluffy bit of white frost or something that had built up on it through fog it just looked like a hard coating of just a nice sheet over the windshield so that no great I don’t have an ice scraper or something with me I’m thinking it’s me you know who needs an ice scraper I’m taking a sip of coffee so yeah I don’t know I grabbed a box I think it was a piece of cardboard out of the back that I could kind of flex around a bit through that over the windshield tried to run the truck for a bit try to warm it up it took a while too but yeah scraped off some ice scraped off a whole big enough to kind of get started on the drive and then prepped to take off but yeah I took some photos and stuff around the campsite for a bit first in the morning nice draw on the valley like I was talking about that goes up to that that ridge point that you can kind of see off in the distance and I think I could see like the the fire from the smoke or the smoke from the fire of the neighboring campers over there I don’t know if I’d mentioned it well yeah I definitely didn’t last one how they were they’re kind of doing brotes out in the on the road around sunset I think I got a little clip of it on video but yeah it’s like four or five of them and these kind of beater late 90s four by four trucks doing spins out in the dirt roads so looks fun I don’t know but they were I think getting the fire going and stuff in the morning too or whatever they had going from the night before if you can see a plume of it coming up from that area they would have been camping in over by the the creek bed downhill and yeah it was cool it took some photos and stuff that morning walked around kind of cleaned up the camp a little bit put the fire stuff out and jumped in the truck had that little hole in the ice to see through and then yeah popped on a podcast and cruised down the road and so what I was trying to do was it was take off down to a couple other spots along the creek while it was still morning and then head down ultimately to the area where the lake started to build up and so kind of how it works is like it kind of flows down the creek and then there’s a dam at a point ultimately and then back right behind the dam is a reservoir where that creek is kind of built up and I guess now is yeah a body of water out there so drove down a ways and took some photographs of the creek and the morning light and some of the water and stuff coming through I really like that kind of affected the the sort of early spring kind of fresh snow melt mountain creek stuff that just sort of looks really crisp and forested and natural and then I came down a ways further to a bridge that kind of cuts across the span of the creek as it starts to sort of widen out into the reservoir area and it looks like a you know a big stretch of calm water out on the edge of the the bridge where I think two different groups that were doing some fishing in the morning and yeah it seems like people are still out it was a busy area up there is still still definitely pretty fully populated set of people you know even during this lockdown period there’s a bunch of people out there hanging out in fishing I think it was two different different groups it too maybe they were they were all kind of connected but yeah they were they were out there with a couple lines over the bridge and they were picking up a couple things and things so I saw a lady that was pulling up in a little a little blue kayak to the ramp on the first day and on her what is that thing you know when you you run it through the gilling at you got the fish and stuff anyway just she pulled up with like got it is like four or five trout or something on her on her in her kayak I don’t know that’s where I’ll leave it I guess but she pulled up with four or five trout so I figured these guys these guys were doing a little bit of trout fish out there which sounds fun it’s a nice clear crisp morning stuff like I was saying so yeah it sounds like it’d be nice to be out there for a couple hours doing sufficient and yeah it looked like they were they were up to it they were getting a couple things it’s cool to a son osprey that they took off I think over the lake area just at that time and would kind of like pull up at certain spots over the water kind of back flap to hold in the same spot and look under water and see if there was something and then I don’t know didn’t see enough or didn’t see a prime opportunity and then we’re gonna swoop off and then take off to a different section of the lake and do it again so watch that about three or four times try to take a couple pictures of the area which you’re nice too I like the photographs that I got that morning it’s got to got a nice nice look to it really you know a lot of the time the photographs really look a lot better when you just select the right time of day to be somewhere which you know is obvious but just the types of colors and the types of saturation and dynamics that you get in the the look of a pretty simple you know set of trees and water it just comes off a lot better when it’s it’s just the right type of light it’s really amazing to to kind of see what differences it makes when it’s a cloud a day or a sunny day or a morning or an evening or midday really it seems like the dynamics of the light change so much that you can get like a totally different look in the photo which is always kind of interesting to pay attention to and sort of see how that how that goes what changes about it and sort of how that affects the photographs that you’re making I mean you can have you know some cool at any time of day but it’s kind of cool to figure out how it works for you or how it works or what I’m trying to do is how how to figure out how how it works for my photographs and what I’m trying to do which is nice I don’t know it was cool going out there and climbing around the creeks and stuff in the morning and taking a couple photos and water and osprey and going over to the lake area that’s trying to work on similar stuff to what I’ve done before but kind of that mirrored look of the really calm water as it spreads across the lake in the morning and then the reflection of the the bright blue kind of pre-sunlit sky or how is it you know like before the sun is actually up over the horizon there’s not a lot of intensity so it’s just kind of a softer blue glow in a lot of ways and then there’s still enough illumination that you can see the greens and the trees and sort of the soft calm water in the morning before it gets kind of agitated through the rest of the day so nice kind of peaceful looks to the the photos and sort of the natural stuff that I like to go kind of capture you know really ultimately though there’s some nice stuff up there and I was really like happy to kind of photograph some of the some of what I was looking for but I was also also frustrated in the area too I think there was a there’s is a little more choked off than what I normally like like there wasn’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for I had to try and you know utilize the ones that I found but there wasn’t as many opportunities as I had hoped for for kind of an opened up wide scene that you could set up a landscape photo and there wasn’t a lot of elements to really work with it was just sort of a you know that’s like some rolling hills off to a green hill so sometimes I’m trying to find some stuff that’s a little bit more dynamic and it’s look than that but it’s fun though even as it is anyway though I’m trying to I think maybe like I was mentioned last one I got stuck and turned around but the snow and I didn’t want to deal with any of that right now but in the next weeks and stuff I want to get up to Mount Jefferson or Mount Washington or a couple of these other wilderness areas that they have a few kind of visual landmarks that would be worth taking an observation of you can check out more information at billynewmanphoto.com you can go to billynewmanphoto.com afford slash support if you want to help me out and participate in the value for value model that we’re running this podcast with if you receive some value out of some of the stuff that I was talking about you’re welcome to help me out and send some value my way through the portal at billynewmanphoto.com for slash support you can also find more information there about patreon and the way that I use it if you’re interested or are feel more comfortable using patreon that’s patreon.com for slash billy newmanphoto I wanted to talk today about some stuff that I’ve been doing this last week for the last few weeks I’ve been talking about some outdoor stuff and some things kind of related to the lockdown pandemic stuff but I kind of changed what I was talking about a little bit for this podcast but I wanted to get into was some of the training stuff I’ve been looking into around logic pro 10.5 that has just come out recently and I thought it’d be kind of kind of cool to go over a little bit of an overview of some of the new features and stuff that are there and some of the stuff that you can do with a digital audio workstation and why why I’d bother talking about it but I think it was about about a year ago or so I was talking about setting up the studio in the house that I’m not here and how I was getting a PC computer ready to go is an older one is I think like something from some test up I had around from from 2010 or 11 or so yeah yeah about that time and I remember getting that computer setup with a I think it was yeah I had like windows 10 on it and then I was using I think the same audio interface usb out into the computer and then I downloaded I downloaded sonar the new version of sonar that you can get for free I think it had been owned by what was k-quack sonar and then I think Gibson had bought out k-quack and so it became Gibson sonar and then I think Gibson decided that wasn’t going to be part of their business anymore so I think they just kind of shut it down essentially but then sold that off to band lab and band lab is a I think a one or it’s another internet company they have kind of a simplified digital audio workstation app that you can use to kind of create a demo or something like that but what they had done is they they’d gone through I guess and had purchased probably for a relatively inexpensive price or I don’t know I assume since they’re just they’re just keeping it and kind of hardly maintaining it or you know doing a bit to maintain it but they took the the sonar platinum program the full digital audio workstation multi-tracking tool and they made it free for people to use and for people to get but I think it’s only a Windows only program so you got to have Windows 10 to run it so I did that yeah and and sonar was a program that I’d work with before for doing some some studio multi-tracking stuff I think years ago probably around like 2012-2013 when I was when I was working with some friends to set up some studio equipment stuff was cool we had like a big sound craft ghost that was laid out and then we had a bunch of a bunch of channels kind of running into that from from the microphones they were using to track this band and then that all went into a pretty old computer was amazing what it could do you know for just a you know it’s probably like a 2 gigabyte of RAM you know smaller hard drive 2004 or 5 6 era PC computer no I probably wouldn’t need that much right there’s something about that time but that’s what we used yeah that’s like all we had all we had with us we had a I think it was like a pre-sowness audio interface and then we got like like an eight-channel audio interface that was really cool you know we had like eight eight digital audio channels coming into the interface which means we could track eight live channels into sonar at a time and it didn’t even hit up you know even on that old machine and so it was interesting how that architecture worked to do some editing stuff but so sonar is what I had been using before for some stuff really audition Adobe edition is what I’d use most for some of this kind of the more simple radio broadcast style stuff and that’s what I had learned to use when I was at when I was at a radio station doing an internship years and years ago back in 2008 right summer 2008 and did that and they used the Adobe edition version 1.5 to do all their radio production edits and yeah I remember going in taking calls with the production guy I don’t know somebody calling into do like a I think they would do like a water level report it was really interesting radio that station you know you could figure but they would have like this I don’t know something you know it’s it’s 1245 and here’s your local water level report for July 28th or something and then it would be some lady that would call in from a department that would measure the stuff and she would give her water report and the production guy you’d record it and then produce that and then it’d be prepped to go out on air later you know it was like a spot that a DJ would trigger upstairs and so we’d kind of walk through using audition to do those steps and so learning that as a program is probably the first one that I’d done which a product probably goes back to high school or before that when I was doing editing stuff but but sonar back to sonar was some of the stuff that I’d used probably give it more for the for the music you know like trying to like track a band or do like multi-tracking projects but so yeah that’s what I’d used a bit that’s why I thrown on this windows 10 PC to do some audio production stuff for this podcast workflow that I was trying to get into and it’s cool it works really well but but I stepped using that computer a while ago I think the the windows 10 computer that I’m talking about had a power supply go bad which could be replaced pretty easily and and is on a to-do list of mine but since then I’ve really just been relying on kind of like I had mentioned just recording recording onto the device and then using Adobe addition to do the post production work on my MacBook which is I don’t know it’s just it’s just a more it’s just a better workflow and stuff for the most part so I’m kind of sticking with that but recently to get to the point as you are all excited logic pro 10.5 has come out now logic as yet to be mentioned in this podcast logic pro is the program that was produced by Apple as the professional digital audio work station and so there’s garage band which probably a lot of people have some experience with and garage band is sort of the trimmed down simplified home user version of a program like like logic pro and they’ve done that intentionally I think it’s the same team that generates the two programs and if you if you look at them or you look at their interfaces and you look at the types of access you have to things you really do see a familiar similarity to it which is cool so if you’ve used something like garage band in the past for home projects you won’t really have as big of a difficulty moving into a more professional digital audio workstation environment like logic pro 10 so I think it was logic pro 10 just you know 10 zero it came out when I don’t probably like 2013 or so I think that was that was sold for 200 bucks so it was like a purchase price of 199 and then since then you get the point updates for free or you know as included with your original purchase so just recently I think there had been like 10.4 before this and then now they’ve moved on to 10.5 and 10.5 I think it’s probably the biggest as noted by you know playing in new sources as noted as one of the most significant feature updates that logic has had probably in years and years I mean I think this is the first end of the concert removed and updated some of those legacy items that have been in there since 2003 or four or five you know it was just some of these legacy products that were that were originally put in there is including their interfaces too it looks like a 2002 interface for for you know like there’s these synthesizer interfaces where these these weird knobs that you have to these weird just rotating features of the interface it looks like it looks ridiculous I don’t know there were any other way to explain it but it’s it’s pretty wild for some of the some of the stuff that’s just remained in computer computer systems for a long time but for 10.5 they try to go through and update a lot of that stuff and it’s really interesting there’s a lot of cool new features in logic 10.5 so logic is real similar to sonar which is I guess kind of why I mentioned it and at least from my experience as similar you guys would probably think it’s similar to I don’t know what people that are listening probably actually have some well no one’s listening what do we say if someone were to bother to try and find some information out about logic and they ended up listening to this podcast they probably have had some information about it or they would be coming from from an experience with avid’s pro tools and pro tools is like the industry standard for multitracking DAW software and I’ve never used it I’ve never opened pro tools I’ve never seen pro tools you know in in its process at all I don’t know I’ve got I’ve looked at a couple videos or something but yeah I have no I have no experience working in pro tools and I don’t know I’m not a fan of avid’s software overall you know for pro tools or for or for the avid system of a video editing stuff either I’m just I’m not I’m not really that interested in the kind of stuff that they put together and it really for price and stuff too it just seems kind of kind of over done a little bit so I’m pretty happy with with some of the other the other more available tools that are in the consumer computer market I mean I think it’s like 800 bucks or something still to get to get avid’s pro tools and I think that in the past it was you know insanely more than that even well you know kind of proprietary back in the past it was more difficult now I think M audio is a partner with pro tools and so in the past if you have pro tools you have a lot of proprietary pro tools audio interfaces that you had to use if you wanted to set up your studio to work seamlessly with the pro tools software now I think they’ve made a deal with M audio which is sort of like a less expensive audio interface manufacturer they’ve had like interfaces and microphones and you know they’ve got like an array of I think they’ve got like some studio monitors they’ve got some interfaces they’ve got like keyboards is a big one that they’ve got I’ve got a keyboard over here from M audio and what is it yeah M audio less expensive they make pro tools interfaces which is cool now so that they’ve got a partnership with pro tools and I think that they’ve been trying to make that more accessible to musicians probably because it’s become a more competitive market with well really with like logic logic pro I think I think the industry standard set is I don’t know it always seems like more secure than it should be you know that doesn’t it doesn’t seem like an absolute the pro tools should be the the digital audio workstation of of engineers across the world but for whatever reason it’s just kind of taken over and and as those people you know are still still in those positions I think that’s that’s just with tat and audio recording school it’s like a standard even though there’s a lot of other good other good services and choices out there I think I’ve seen soar and logic taught a lot too so I don’t know they’re definitely competitive and and as I’ve been hearing more there’s there’s I don’t know there’s produced you know music producers that are coming out saying oh yeah I do a lot of a lot of my work in in logic and then there’s you know there’s a whole class of music producers that are logic based producers are stone our based producers are and all right it seems to kind of rotate around every couple years for for who’s doing water you know who wants to look cool people that use pro tools one of the cool probably a lot of time so back to back to old logic pro 10.5 here’s the good stuff so thanks a lot for checking out this episode of the Billy Newman photo podcast hope you guys check out some stuff on billyneuminfoadow.com a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage some good links to other other outbound sources some links to books some links to some podcasts links to some blog posts all pretty cool yeah check it out at billyneuminfoadow.com thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the podcast bye see you next time [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
In this episode of Scratch, Eric chats with Lili, the Chief Marketing & Experience Officer of Barclays US Consumer Bank, about how she brought a challenger mindset from the hospitality and entertainment industry into one of the biggest banking players in the world. Lili shares how her experience at MGM shaped her approach to customer experience, and how she's transformed Barclays to be more customer-centric, putting real people at the heart of every journey. Innovation at Barclays doesn't start with technology; it starts with people: Lili introduced live client call listening for executives and designed accountable customer journeys to keep the brand ahead in a fast-changing industryThe conversation also explores the delicate balance between digital efficiency and maintaining the human touch, why curiosity is now an essential skill for marketers, and the ways CMOs can leverage insights from outside their own category. Packed with practical advice and real-world examples, this episode is a must-watch for anyone looking to drive customer-focused growth and bring humanity back into marketing.Watch the video version of this podcast on Youtube ▶️: https://youtu.be/MgNhEchujRY
Elizabeth Figura is a Wine developer at Code Weavers. We discuss how Wine and Proton make it possible to run Windows applications on other operating systems. Related links WineHQ Proton Crossover Direct3D MoltenVK XAudio2 Mesa 3D Graphics Library Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. Intro [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Elizabeth Figuera. She's a wine developer at Code Weavers. And today we're gonna talk about what that is and, uh, all the work that goes into it. [00:00:09] Elizabeth: Thank you Jeremy. I'm glad to be here. What's Wine [00:00:13] Jeremy: I think the first thing we should talk about is maybe saying what Wine is because I think a lot of people aren't familiar with the project. [00:00:20] Elizabeth: So wine is a translation layer. in fact, I would say wine is a Windows emulator. That is what the name originally stood for. it re implements the entire windows. Or you say win 32 API. so that programs that make calls into the API, will then transfer that code to wine and and we allow that Windows programs to run on, things that are not windows. So Linux, Mac, os, other operating systems such as Solaris and BSD. it works not by emulating the CPU, but by re-implementing every API, basically from scratch and translating them to their equivalent or writing new code in case there is no, you know, equivalent. System Calls [00:01:06] Jeremy: I believe what you're doing is you're emulating system calls. Could you explain what those are and, and how that relates to the project? [00:01:15] Elizabeth: Yeah. so system call in general can be used, referred to a call into the operating system, to execute some functionality that's built into the operating system. often it's used in the context of talking to the kernel windows applications actually tend to talk at a much higher level, because there's so much, so much high level functionality built into Windows. When you think about, as opposed to other operating systems that we basically, we end up end implementing much higher level behavior than you would on Linux. [00:01:49] Jeremy: And can you give some examples of what some of those system calls would be and, I suppose how they may be higher level than some of the Linux ones. [00:01:57] Elizabeth: Sure. So of course you have like low level calls like interacting with a file system, you know, created file and read and write and such. you also have, uh, high level APIs who interact with a sound driver. [00:02:12] Elizabeth: There's, uh, one I was working on earlier today, called XAudio where you, actually, you know, build this bank of of sounds. It's meant to be, played in a game and then you can position them in various 3D space. And the, and the operating system in a sense will, take care of all of the math that goes into making that work. [00:02:36] Elizabeth: That's all running on your computer and. And then it'll send that audio data to the sound card once it's transformed it. So it sounds like it's coming from a certain space. a lot of other things like, you know, parsing XML is another big one. That there's a lot of things. The, there, the, the, the space is honestly huge [00:02:59] Jeremy: And yeah, I can sort of see how those might be things you might not expect to be done by the operating system. Like you gave the example of 3D audio and XML parsing and I think XML parsing in, in particular, you would've thought that that would be something that would be handled by the, the standard library of whatever language the person was writing their application as. [00:03:22] Jeremy: So that's interesting that it's built into the os. [00:03:25] Elizabeth: Yeah. Well, and languages like, see it's not, it isn't even part of the standard library. It's higher level than that. It's, you have specific libraries that are widespread but not. Codified in a standard, but in Windows you, in Windows, they are part of the operating system. And in fact, there's several different, XML parsers in the operating system. Microsoft likes to deprecate old APIs and make new ones that do the same thing very often. [00:03:53] Jeremy: And something I've heard about Windows is that they're typically very reluctant to break backwards compatibility. So you say they're deprecated, but do they typically keep all of them still in there? [00:04:04] Elizabeth: It all still It all still works. [00:04:07] Jeremy: And that's all things that wine has to implement as well to make sure that the software works as well. [00:04:14] Jeremy: Yeah. [00:04:14] Elizabeth: Yeah. And, and we also, you know, need to make it work. we also need to implement those things to make old, programs work because there is, uh, a lot of demand, at least from, at least from people using wine for making, for getting some really old programs, working from the. Early nineties even. What people run with Wine (Productivity, build systems, servers) [00:04:36] Jeremy: And that's probably a good, thing to talk about in terms of what, what are the types of software that, that people are trying to run with wine, and what operating system are they typically using? [00:04:46] Elizabeth: Oh, in terms of software, literally all kinds, any software you can imagine that runs on Windows, people will try to run it on wine. So we're talking games, office software productivity, software accounting. people will run, build systems on wine, build their, just run, uh, build their programs using, on visual studio, running on wine. people will run wine on servers, for example, like software as a service kind of things where you don't even know that it's running on wine. really super domain specific stuff. Like I've run astronomy, software, and wine. Design, computer assisted design, even hardware drivers can sometimes work unwind. There's a bit of a gray area. How games are different [00:05:29] Jeremy: Yeah, it's um, I think from. Maybe the general public, or at least from what I've seen, I think a lot of people's exposure to it is for playing games. is there something different about games versus all those other types of, productivity software and office software that, that makes supporting those different. [00:05:53] Elizabeth: Um, there's some things about it that are different. Games of course have gotten a lot of publicity lately because there's been a huge push, largely from valve, but also some other companies to get. A lot of huge, wide range of games working well under wine. And that's really panned out in the, in a way, I think, I think we've largely succeeded. [00:06:13] Elizabeth: We've made huge strides in the past several years. 5, 5, 10 years, I think. so when you talk about what makes games different, I think, one thing games tend to do is they have a very limited set of things they're working with and they often want to make things run fast, and so they're working very close to the me They're not, they're not gonna use an XML parser, for example. [00:06:44] Elizabeth: They're just gonna talk directly as, directly to the graphics driver as they can. Right. And, and probably going to do all their own sound design. You know, I did talk about that XAudio library, but a lot of games will just talk directly as, directly to the sound driver as Windows Let some, so this is a often a blessing, honestly, because it means there's less we have to implement to make them work. when you look at a lot of productivity applications, and especially, the other thing that makes some productivity applications harder is, Microsoft makes 'em, and They like to, make a library, for use in this one program like Microsoft Office and then say, well, you know, other programs might use this as well. Let's. Put it in the operating system and expose it and write an API for it and everything. And maybe some other programs use it. mostly it's just office, but it means that office relies on a lot of things from the operating system that we all have to reimplement. [00:07:44] Jeremy: Yeah, that's somewhat counterintuitive because when you think of games, you think of these really high performance things that that seem really complicated. But it sounds like from what you're saying, because they use the lower level primitives, they're actually easier in some ways to support. [00:08:01] Elizabeth: Yeah, certainly in some ways, they, yeah, they'll do things like re-implement the heap allocator because the built-in heap allocator isn't fast enough for them. That's another good example. What makes some applications hard to support (Some are hard, can't debug other people's apps) [00:08:16] Jeremy: You mentioned Microsoft's more modern, uh, office suites. I, I've noticed there's certain applications that, that aren't supported. Like, for example, I think the modern Adobe Creative Suite. What's the difference with software like that and does that also apply to the modern office suite, or is, or is that actually supported? [00:08:39] Elizabeth: Well, in one case you have, things like Microsoft using their own APIs that I mentioned with Adobe. That applies less, I suppose, but I think to some degree, I think to some degree the answer is that some applications are just hard and there's, and, and there's no way around it. And, and we can only spend so much time on a hard application. I. Debugging things. Debugging things can get very hard with wine. Let's, let me like explain that for a minute because, Because normally when you think about debugging an application, you say, oh, I'm gonna open up my debugger, pop it in, uh, break at this point, see what like all the variables are, or they're not what I expect. Or maybe wait for it to crash and then get a back trace and see where it crashed. And why you can't do that with wine, because you don't have the application, you don't have the symbols, you don't have your debugging symbols. You don't know anything about the code you're running unless you take the time to disassemble and decompile and read through it. And that's difficult every time. It's not only difficult, every time I've, I've looked at a program and been like, I really need to just. I'm gonna just try and figure out what the program is doing. [00:10:00] Elizabeth: It takes so much time and it is never worth it. And sometimes you have to, sometimes you have no other choice, but usually you end up, you ask to rely on seeing what calls it makes into the operating system and trying to guess which one of those is going wrong. Now, sometimes you'll get lucky and it'll crash in wine code, or sometimes it'll make a call into, a function that we don't implement yet, and we know, oh, we need to implement that function. But sometimes it does something, more obscure and we have to figure out, well, like all of these millions of calls it made, which one of them is, which one of them are we implementing incorrectly? So it's returning the wrong result or not doing something that it should. And, then you add onto that the. You know, all these sort of harder to debug things like memory errors that we could make. And it's, it can be very difficult and so sometimes some applications just suffer from those hard bugs. and sometimes it's also just a matter of not enough demand for something for us to spend a lot of time on it. [00:11:11] Elizabeth: Right. [00:11:14] Jeremy: Yeah, I can see how that would be really challenging because you're, like you were saying, you don't have the symbols, so you don't have the source code, so you don't know what any of this software you're supporting, how it was actually written. And you were saying that I. A lot of times, you know, there may be some behavior that's wrong or a crash, but it's not because wine crashed or there was an error in wine. [00:11:42] Jeremy: so you just know the system calls it made, but you don't know which of the system calls didn't behave the way that the application expected. [00:11:50] Elizabeth: Exactly. Test suite (Half the code is tests) [00:11:52] Jeremy: I can see how that would be really challenging. and wine runs so many different applications. I'm, I'm kind of curious how do you even track what's working and what's not as you, you change wine because if you support thousands or tens thousands of applications, you know, how do you know when you've got a, a regression or not? [00:12:15] Elizabeth: So, it's a great question. Um, probably over half of wine by like source code volume. I actually actually check what it is, but I think it's, i, I, I think it's probably over half is what we call is tests. And these tests serve two purposes. The one purpose is a regression test. And the other purpose is they're conformance tests that test, that test how, uh, an API behaves on windows and validates that we are behaving the same way. So we write all these tests, we run them on windows and you know, write the tests to check what the windows returns, and then we run 'em on wine and make sure that that matches. and we have just such a huge body of tests to make sure that, you know, we're not breaking anything. And that every, every, all the code that we, that we get into wine that looks like, wow, it's doing that really well. Nope, that's what Windows does. The test says so. So pretty much any code that we, any new code that we get, it has to have tests to validate, to, to demonstrate that it's doing the right thing. [00:13:31] Jeremy: And so rather than testing against a specific application, seeing if it works, you're making a call to a Windows system call, seeing how it responds, and then making the same call within wine and just making sure they match. [00:13:48] Elizabeth: Yes, exactly. And that is obviously, or that is a lot more, automatable, right? Because otherwise you have to manually, you know, there's all, these are all graphical applications. [00:14:02] Elizabeth: You'd have to manually do the things and make sure they work. Um, but if you write automateable tests, you can just run them all and the machine will complain at you if it fails it continuous integration. How compatibility problems appear to users [00:14:13] Jeremy: And because there's all these potential compatibility issues where maybe a certain call doesn't behave the way an application expects. What, what are the types of what that shows when someone's using software? I mean, I, I think you mentioned crashes, but I imagine there could be all sorts of other types of behavior. [00:14:37] Elizabeth: Yes, very much so. basically anything, anything you can imagine again is, is what will happen. You can have, crashes are the easy ones because you know when and where it crashed and you can work backwards from there. but you can also get, it can, it could hang, it could not render, right? Like maybe render a black screen. for, you know, for games you could very frequently have, graphical glitches where maybe some objects won't render right? Or the entire screen will be read. Who knows? in a very bad case, you could even bring down your system and we usually say that's not wine's fault. That's the graphics library's fault. 'cause they're not supposed to do that, uh, no matter what we do. But, you know, sometimes we have to work around that anyway. but yeah, there's, there's been some very strange and idiosyncratic bugs out there too. [00:15:33] Jeremy: Yeah. And like you mentioned that uh, there's so many different things that could have gone wrong that imagine's very difficult to find. Yeah. And when software runs through wine, I think, Performance is comparable to native [00:15:49] Jeremy: A lot of our listeners will probably be familiar with running things in a virtual machine, and they know that there's a big performance impact from doing that. [00:15:57] Jeremy: How does the performance of applications compare to running natively on the original Windows OS versus virtual machines? [00:16:08] Elizabeth: So. In theory. and I, I haven't actually done this recently, so I can't speak too much to that, but in theory, the idea is it's a lot faster. so there, there, is a bit of a joke acronym to wine. wine is not an emulator, even though I started out by saying wine is an emulator, and it was originally called a Windows emulator. but what this basically means is wine is not a CPU emulator. It doesn't, when you think about emulators in a general sense, they're often, they're often emulators for specific CPUs, often older ones like, you know, the Commodore emulator or an Amiga emulator. but in this case, you have software that's written for an x86 CPU. And it's running on an x86 CPU by giving it the same instructions that it's giving on windows. It's just that when it says, now call this Windows function, it calls us instead. So that all should perform exactly the same. The only performance difference at that point is that all should perform exactly the same as opposed to a, virtual machine where you have to interpret the instructions and maybe translate them to a different instruction set. The only performance difference is going to be, in the functions that we are implementing themselves and we try to, we try to implement them to perform. As well, or almost as well as windows. There's always going to be a bit of a theoretical gap because we have to translate from say, one API to another, but we try to make that as little as possible. And in some cases, the operating system we're running on is, is just better than Windows and the libraries we're using are better than Windows. [00:18:01] Elizabeth: And so our games will run faster, for example. sometimes we can, sometimes we can, do a better job than Windows at implementing something that's, that's under our purview. there there are some games that do actually run a little bit faster in wine than they do on Windows. [00:18:22] Jeremy: Yeah, that, that reminds me of how there's these uh, gaming handhelds out now, and some of the same ones, they have a, they either let you install Linux or install windows, or they just come with a pre-installed, and I believe what I've read is that oftentimes running the same game on both operating systems, running the same game on Linux, the battery life is better and sometimes even the performance is better with these handhelds. [00:18:53] Jeremy: So it's, it's really interesting that that can even be the case. [00:18:57] Elizabeth: Yeah, it's really a testament to the huge amount of work that's gone into that, both on the wine side and on the, side of the graphics team and the colonel team. And, and of course, you know, the years of, the years of, work that's gone into Linux, even before these gaming handhelds were, were even under consideration. Proton and Valve Software's role [00:19:21] Jeremy: And something. So for people who are familiar with the handhelds, like the steam deck, they may have heard of proton. Uh, I wonder if you can explain what proton is and how it relates to wine. [00:19:37] Elizabeth: Yeah. So, proton is basically, how do I describe this? So, proton is a sort of a fork, uh, although we try to avoid the term fork. It's a, we say it's a downstream distribution because we contribute back up to wine. so it is a, it is, it is a alternate distribution fork of wine. And it's also some code that basically glues wine into, an embedding application originally intended for steam, and developed for valve. it has also been used in, others, but it has also been used in other software. it, so where proton differs from wine besides the glue part is it has some, it has some extra hacks in it for bugs that are hard to fix and easy to hack around as some quick hacks for, making games work now that are like in the process of going upstream to wine and getting their code quality improved and going through review. [00:20:54] Elizabeth: But we want the game to work now, when we distribute it. So that'll, that'll go into proton immediately. And then once we have, once the patch makes it upstream, we replace it with the version of the patch from upstream. there's other things to make it interact nicely with steam and so on. And yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's, I got it. [00:21:19] Jeremy: Yeah. And I think for people who aren't familiar, steam is like this, um, I, I don't even know what you call it, like a gaming store and a [00:21:29] Elizabeth: store game distribution service. it's got a huge variety of games on it, and you just publish. And, and it's a great way for publishers to interact with their, you know, with a wider gaming community, uh, after it, just after paying a cut to valve of their profits, they can reach a lot of people that way. And because all these games are on team and, valve wants them to work well on, on their handheld, they contracted us to basically take their entire catalog, which is huge, enormous. And trying and just step by step. Fix every game and make them all work. [00:22:10] Jeremy: So, um, and I guess for people who aren't familiar Valve, uh, softwares the company that runs steam, and so it sounds like they've asked, uh, your company to, to help improve the compatibility of their catalog. [00:22:24] Elizabeth: Yes. valve contracted us and, and again, when you're talking about wine using lower level libraries, they've also contracted a lot of other people outside of wine. Basically, the entire stack has had a tremendous, tremendous investment by valve software to make gaming on Linux work. Well. The entire stack receives changes to improve Wine compatibility [00:22:48] Jeremy: And when you refer to the entire stack, like what are some, some of those pieces, at least at a high level. [00:22:54] Elizabeth: I, I would, let's see, let me think. There is the wine project, the. Mesa Graphics Libraries. that's a, that's another, you know, uh, open source, software project that existed, has existed for a long time. But Valve has put a lot of, uh, funding and effort into it, the Linux kernel in various different ways. [00:23:17] Elizabeth: the, the desktop, uh, environment and Window Manager for, um, are also things they've invested in. [00:23:26] Jeremy: yeah. Everything that the game needs, on any level and, and that the, and that the operating system of the handheld device needs. Wine's history [00:23:37] Jeremy: And wine's been going on for quite a while. I think it's over a decade, right? [00:23:44] Elizabeth: I believe. Oh, more than, oh, far more than a decade. I believe it started in 1990, I wanna say about 1995, mid nineties. I'm, I probably have that date wrong. I believe Wine started about the mid nineties. [00:24:00] Jeremy: Mm. [00:24:00] Elizabeth: it's going on for three decades at this rate. [00:24:03] Jeremy: Wow. Okay. [00:24:06] Jeremy: And so all this time, how has the, the project sort of sustained itself? Like who's been involved and how has it been able to keep going this long? [00:24:18] Elizabeth: Uh, I think as is the case with a lot of free software, it just, it just keeps trudging along. There's been. There's been times where there's a lot of interest in wine. There's been times where there's less, and we are fortunate to be in a time where there's a lot of interest in it. we've had the same maintainer for almost this entire, almost this entire existence. Uh, Alexander Julliard, there was one person starting who started, maintained it before him and, uh, left it maintainer ship to him after a year or two. Uh, Bob Amstat. And there has been a few, there's been a few developers who have been around for a very long time. a lot of developers who have been around for a decent amount of time, but not for the entire duration. And then a very, very large number of people who come and submit a one-off fix for their individual application that they want to make work. [00:25:19] Jeremy: How does crossover relate to the wine project? Like, it sounds like you had mentioned Valve software hired you for subcontract work, but crossover itself has been around for quite a while. So how, how has that been connected to the wine project? [00:25:37] Elizabeth: So I work for, so the, so the company I work for is Code Weavers and, crossover is our flagship software. so Code Weavers is a couple different things. We have a sort of a porting service where companies will come to us and say, can we port my application usually to Mac? And then we also have a retail service where Where we basically have our own, similar to Proton, but you know, older, but the same idea where we will add some hacks into it for very difficult to solve bugs and we have a, a nice graphical interface. And then, the other thing that we're selling with crossover is support. So if you, you know, try to run a certain application and you buy crossover, you can submit a ticket saying this doesn't work and we now have a financial incentive to fix it. You know, we'll try to, we'll try to fix your, we'll spend company resources to fix your bug, right? So that's been so, so code we v has been around since 1996 and crossover, I don't know the date, but it's crossover has been around for probably about two decades, if I'm not mistaken. [00:27:01] Jeremy: And when you mention helping companies port their software to, for example, MacOS. [00:27:07] Jeremy: Is the approach that you would port it natively to MacOS APIs or is it that you would help them get it running using wine on MacOS? [00:27:21] Elizabeth: Right. That's, so that's basically what makes us so unique among porting companies is that instead of rewriting their software, we just, we just basically stick it inside of crossover and, uh, and, and make it run. [00:27:36] Elizabeth: And the idea has always been, you know, the more we implement, the more we get correct, the, the more applications will, you know, work. And sometimes it works out that way. Sometimes not really so much. And there's always work we have to do to get any given application to work, but. Yeah, so it's, it's very unusual because we don't ask companies for any of their code. We don't need it. We just fix the windows API [00:28:07] Jeremy: And, and so in that case, the ports would be let's say someone sells a MacOS version of their software. They would bundle crossover, uh, with their software. [00:28:18] Elizabeth: Right? And usually when you do this, it doesn't look like there's crossover there. Like it just looks like this software is native, but there is soft, there is crossover under the hood. Loading executables and linked libraries [00:28:32] Jeremy: And so earlier we were talking about how you're basically intercepting the system calls that these binaries are making, whether that's the executable or the, the DLLs from Windows. Um, but I think probably a lot of our listeners are not really sure how that's done. Like they, they may have built software, but they don't know, how do I basically hijack, the system calls that this application is making. [00:29:01] Jeremy: So maybe you could talk a little bit about how that works. [00:29:04] Elizabeth: So there, so there's a couple steps to go into it. when you think about a program that's say, that's a big, a big file that's got all the machine code in it, and then it's got stuff at the beginning saying, here's how the program works and here's where in the file the processor should start running. that's, that's your EXE file. And then in your DLL files are libraries that contain shared code and you have like a similar sort of file. It says, here's the entry point. That runs this function, this, you know, this pars XML function or whatever have you. [00:29:42] Elizabeth: And here's this entry point that has the generate XML function and so on and so forth. And, and, then the operating system will basically take the EXE file and see all the bits in it. Say I want to call the pars XML function. It'll load that DLL and hook it up. So it, so the processor ends up just seeing jump directly to this pars XML function and then run that and then return and so on. [00:30:14] Elizabeth: And so what wine does, is it part of wine? That's part of wine is a library, is that, you know, the implementing that parse XML and read XML function, but part of it is the loader, which is the part of the operating system that hooks everything together. And when we load, we. Redirect to our libraries. We don't have Windows libraries. [00:30:38] Elizabeth: We like, we redirect to ours and then we run our code. And then when you jump back to the program and yeah. [00:30:48] Jeremy: So it's the, the loader that's a part of wine. That's actually, I'm not sure if running the executable is the right term. [00:30:58] Elizabeth: no, I think that's, I think that's a good term. It's, it's, it's, it starts in a loader and then we say, okay, now run the, run the machine code and it's executable and then it runs and it jumps between our libraries and back and so on. [00:31:14] Jeremy: And like you were saying before, often times when it's trying to make a system call, it ends up being handled by a function that you've written in wine. And then that in turn will call the, the Linux system calls or the MacOS system calls to try and accomplish the, the same result. [00:31:36] Elizabeth: Right, exactly. [00:31:40] Jeremy: And something that I think maybe not everyone is familiar with is there's this concept of user space versus kernel space. you explain what the difference is? [00:31:51] Elizabeth: So the way I would explain, the way I would describe a kernel is it's the part of the operating system that can do anything, right? So any program, any code that runs on your computer is talking to the processor, and the processor has to be able to do anything the computer can do. [00:32:10] Elizabeth: It has to be able to talk to the hardware, it has to set up the memory space. That, so actually a very complicated task has to be able to switch to another task. and, and, and, and basically talk to another program and. You have to have something there that can do everything, but you don't want any program to be able to do everything. Um, not since the, not since the nineties. It's about when we realized that we can't do that. so the kernel is a part that can do everything. And when you need to do something that requires those, those permissions that you can't give everyone, you have to talk to the colonel and ask it, Hey, can you do this for me please? And in a very restricted way where it's only the safe things you can do. And a degree, it's also like a library, right? It's the kernel. The kernels have always existed, and since they've always just been the core standard library of the computer that does the, that does the things like read and write files, which are very, very complicated tasks under the hood, but look very simple because all you say is write this file. And talk to the hardware and abstract away all the difference between different drivers. So the kernel is doing all of these things. So because the kernel is a part that can do everything and because when you think about the kernel, it is basically one program that is always running on your computer, but it's only one program. So when a user calls the kernel, you are switching from one program to another and you're doing a lot of complicated things as part of this. You're switching to the higher privilege level where you can do anything and you're switching the state from one program to another. And so it's a it. So this is what we mean when we talk about user space, where you're running like a normal program and kernel space where you've suddenly switched into the kernel. [00:34:19] Elizabeth: Now you're executing with increased privileges in a different. idea of the process space and increased responsibility and so on. [00:34:30] Jeremy: And, and so do most applications. When you were talking about the system calls for handling 3D audio or parsing XML. Are those considered, are those system calls considered part of user space and then those things call the kernel space on your behalf, or how, how would you describe that? [00:34:50] Elizabeth: So most, so when you look at Windows, most of most of the Windows library, the vast, vast majority of it is all user space. most of these libraries that we implement never leave user space. They never need to call into the kernel. there's the, there only the core low level stuff. Things like, we need to read a file, that's a kernel call. when you need to sleep and wait for some seconds, that's a kernel. Need to talk to a different process. Things that interact with different processes in general. not just allocate memory, but allocate a page of memory, like a, from the memory manager and then that gets sub allocated by the heap allocator. so things like that. [00:35:31] Jeremy: Yeah, so if I was writing an application and I needed to open a file, for example, does, does that mean that I would have to communicate with the kernel to, to read that file? [00:35:43] Elizabeth: Right, exactly. [00:35:46] Jeremy: And so most applications, it sounds like it's gonna be a mixture. You're gonna have a lot of things that call user space calls. And then a few, you mentioned more low level ones that are gonna require you to communicate with the kernel. [00:36:00] Elizabeth: Yeah, basically. And it's worth noting that in, in all operating systems, you're, you're almost always gonna be calling a user space library. That might just be a thin wrapper over the kernel call. It might, it's gonna do like just a little bit of work in end call the kernel. [00:36:19] Jeremy: [00:36:19] Elizabeth: In fact, in Windows, that's the only way to do it. Uh, in many other operating systems, you can actually say, you can actually tell the processor to make the kernel call. There is a special instruction that does this and just, and it'll go directly to the kernel, and there's a defined interface for this. But in Windows, that interface is not defined. It's not stable. Or backwards compatible like the rest of Windows is. So even if you wanted to use it, you couldn't. and you basically have to call into the high level libraries or low level libraries, as it were, that, that tell you that create a file. And those don't do a lot. [00:37:00] Elizabeth: They just kind of tweak their parameters a little and then pass them right down to the kernel. [00:37:07] Jeremy: And so wine, it sounds like it needs to implement both the user space calls of windows, but then also the, the kernel, calls as well. But, but wine itself does that, is that only in Linux user space or MacOS user space? [00:37:27] Elizabeth: Yes. This is a very tricky thing. but all of wine, basically all of what is wine runs in, in user space and we use. Kernel calls that are already there to talk to the colonel, to talk to the host Colonel. You have to, and you, you get, you get, you get the sort of second nature of thinking about the Windows, user space and kernel. [00:37:50] Elizabeth: And then there's a host user space and Kernel and wine is running all in user, in the user, in the host user space, but it's emulating the Windows kernel. In fact, one of the weirdest, trickiest parts is I mentioned that you can run some drivers in wine. And those drivers actually, they actually are, they think they're running in the Windows kernel. which in a sense works the same way. It has libraries that it can load, and those drivers are basically libraries and they're making, kernel calls and they're, they're making calls into the kernel library that does some very, very low level tasks that. You're normally only supposed to be able to do in a kernel. And, you know, because the kernel requires some privileges, we kind of pretend we have them. And in many cases, you're even the drivers are using abstractions. We can just implement those abstractions kind of over the slightly higher level abstractions that exist in user space. [00:39:00] Jeremy: Yeah, I hadn't even considered the being able to use hardware devices, but I, I suppose if in, in the end, if you're reproducing the kernel, then whether you're running software or you're talking to a hardware device, as long as you implement the calls correctly, then I, I suppose it works. [00:39:18] Elizabeth: Cause you're, you're talking about device, like maybe it's some kind of USB device that has drivers for Windows, but it doesn't for, for Linux. [00:39:28] Elizabeth: no, that's exactly, that's a, that's kind of the, the example I've used. Uh, I think there is, I think I. My, one of my best success stories was, uh, drivers for a graphing calculator. [00:39:41] Jeremy: Oh, wow. [00:39:42] Elizabeth: That connected via USB and I basically just plugged the windows drivers into wine and, and ran it. And I had to implement a lot of things, but it worked. But for example, something like a graphics driver is not something you could implement in wine because you need the graphics driver on the host. We can't talk to the graphics driver while the host is already doing so. [00:40:05] Jeremy: I see. Yeah. And in that case it probably doesn't make sense to do so [00:40:11] Elizabeth: Right? [00:40:12] Elizabeth: Right. It doesn't because, the transition from user into kernel is complicated. You need the graphics driver to be in the kernel and the real kernel. Having it in wine would be a bad idea. Yeah. [00:40:25] Jeremy: I, I think there's, there's enough APIs you have to try and reproduce that. I, I think, uh, doing, doing something where, [00:40:32] Elizabeth: very difficult [00:40:33] Jeremy: right. Poor system call documentation and private APIs [00:40:35] Jeremy: There's so many different, calls both in user space and in kernel space. I imagine the, the user space ones Microsoft must document to some extent, but, oh. Is that, is that a [00:40:51] Elizabeth: well, sometimes, [00:40:54] Jeremy: Sometimes. Okay. [00:40:55] Elizabeth: I think it's actually better now than it used to be. But some, here's where things get fun, because sometimes there will be, you know, regular documented calls. Sometimes those calls are documented, but the documentation isn't very good. Sometimes programs will just sort of look inside Microsoft's DLLs and use calls that they aren't supposed to be using. Sometimes they use calls that they are supposed to be using, but the documentation has disappeared. just because it's that old of an API and Microsoft hasn't kept it around. sometimes some, sometimes Microsoft, Microsoft own software uses, APIs that were never documented because they never wanted anyone else using them, but they still ship them with the operating system. there was actually a kind of a lawsuit about this because it is an antitrust lawsuit, because by shipping things that only they could use, they were kind of creating a trust. and that got some things documented. At least in theory, they kind of haven't stopped doing it, though. [00:42:08] Jeremy: Oh, so even today they're, they're, I guess they would call those private, private APIs, I suppose. [00:42:14] Elizabeth: I suppose. Uh, yeah, you could say private APIs. but if we want to get, you know, newer versions of Microsoft Office running, we still have to figure out what they're doing and implement them. [00:42:25] Jeremy: And given that they're either, like you were saying, the documentation is kind of all over the place. If you don't know how it's supposed to behave, how do you even approach implementing them? [00:42:38] Elizabeth: and that's what the conformance tests are for. And I, yeah, I mentioned earlier we have this huge body of conformance tests that double is regression tests. if we see an API, we don't know what to do with or an API, we do know, we, we think we know what to do with because the documentation can just be wrong and often has been. Then we write tests to figure out what it's supposed to behave. We kind of guess until we, and, and we write tests and we pass some things in and see what comes out and see what. The see what the operating system does until we figure out, oh, so this is what it's supposed to do and these are the exact parameters in, and, and then we, and, and then we implement it according to those tests. [00:43:24] Jeremy: Is there any distinction in approach for when you're trying to implement something that's at the user level versus the kernel level? [00:43:33] Elizabeth: No, not really. And like I, and like I mentioned earlier, like, well, I mean, a kernel call is just like a library call. It's just done in a slightly different way, but it's still got, you know, parameters in, it's still got a set of parameters. They're just encoded differently. And, and again, like the, the way kernel calls are done is on a level just above the kernel where you have a library, that just passes things through. Almost verbatim to the kernel and we implement that library instead. [00:44:10] Jeremy: And, and you've been working on i, I think, wine for over, over six years now. [00:44:18] Elizabeth: That sounds about right. Debugging and having broad knowledge of Wine [00:44:20] Jeremy: What does, uh, your, your day to day look like? What parts of the project do you, do you work on? [00:44:27] Elizabeth: It really varies from day to day. and I, I, a lot of people, a lot of, some people will work on the same parts of wine for years. Uh, some people will switch around and work on all sorts of different things. [00:44:42] Elizabeth: And I'm, I definitely belong to that second group. Like if you name an area of wine, I have almost certainly contributed a patch or two to it. there's some areas I work on more than others, like, 3D graphics, multimedia, a, I had, I worked on a compiler that exists, uh, socket. So networking communication is another thing I work a lot on. day to day, I kind of just get, I, I I kind of just get a bug for some program or another. and I take it and I debug it and figure out why the program's broken and then I fix it. And there's so much variety in that. because a bug can take so many different forms like I described, and, and, and the, and then the fix can be simple or complicated or, and it can be in really anywhere to a degree. [00:45:40] Elizabeth: being able to work on any part of wine is sometimes almost a necessity because if a program is just broken, you don't know why. It could be anything. It could be any sort of API. And sometimes you can hand the API to somebody who's got a lot of experience in that, but sometimes you just do whatever. You just fix whatever's broken and you get an experience that way. [00:46:06] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask about the specialized skills to, to work on wine, but it sounds like maybe in your case it's all of them. [00:46:15] Elizabeth: It's, there's a bit of that. it's a wine. We, the skills to work on wine are very, it's a very unique set of skills because, and it largely comes down to debugging because you can't use the tools you normally use debug. [00:46:30] Elizabeth: You have to, you have to be creative and think about it different ways. Sometimes you have to be very creative. and programs will try their hardest to avoid being debugged because they don't want anyone breaking their copy protection, for example, or or hacking, or, you know, hacking in sheets. They want to be, they want, they don't want anyone hacking them like that. [00:46:54] Elizabeth: And we have to do it anyway for good and legitimate purposes. We would argue to make them work better on more operating systems. And so we have to fight that every step of the way. [00:47:07] Jeremy: Yeah, it seems like it's a combination of. F being able, like you, you were saying, being able to, to debug. and you're debugging not necessarily your own code, but you're debugging this like behavior of, [00:47:25] Jeremy: And then based on that behavior, you have to figure out, okay, where in all these different systems within wine could this part be not working? [00:47:35] Jeremy: And I, I suppose you probably build up some kind of, mental map in your head of when you get a, a type of bug or a type of crash, you oh, maybe it's this, maybe it's here, or something [00:47:47] Elizabeth: Yeah. That, yeah, there is a lot of that. there's, you notice some patterns, you know, after experience helps, but because any bug could be new, sometimes experience doesn't help and you just, you just kind of have to start from scratch. Finding a bug related to XAudio [00:48:08] Jeremy: At sort of a high level, can you give an example of where you got a specific bug report and then where you had to look to eventually find which parts of the the system were the issue? [00:48:21] Elizabeth: one, one I think good example, that I've done recently. so I mentioned this, this XAudio library that does 3D audio. And if you say you come across a bug, I'm gonna be a little bit generics here and say you come across a bug where some audio isn't playing right, maybe there's, silence where there should be the audio. So you kind of, you look in and see, well, where's that getting lost? So you can basically look in the input calls and say, here's the buffer it's submitting that's got all the audio data in it. And you look at the output, you look at where you think the output should be, like, that library will internally call a different library, which programs can interact with directly. [00:49:03] Elizabeth: And this our high level library interacts with that is the, give this sound to the audio driver, right? So you've got XAudio on top of, um. mdev, API, which is the other library that gives audio to the driver. And you see, well, the ba the buffer is that XAudio is passing into MM Dev, dev API. They're empty, there's nothing in them. So you have to kind of work through the XAudio library to see where is, where's that sound getting lost? Or maybe, or maybe that's not getting lost. Maybe it's coming through all garbled. And I've had to look at the buffer and see why is it garbled. I'll open up it up in Audacity and look at the weight shape of the wave and say, huh, that shape of the wave looks like it's, it looks like we're putting silence every 10 nanoseconds or something, or, or reversing something or interpreting it wrong. things like that. Um, there's a lot of, you'll do a lot of, putting in print fs basically all throughout wine to see where does the state change. Where was, where is it? Where is it? Right? And then where do things start going wrong? [00:50:14] Jeremy: Yeah. And in the audio example, because they're making a call to your XAudio implementation, you can see that Okay, the, the buffer, the audio that's coming in. That part is good. It, it's just that later on when it sends it to what's gonna actually have it be played by the, the hardware, that's when missing. So, [00:50:37] Elizabeth: We did something wrong in a library that destroyed the buffer. And I think on a very, high level a lot of debugging, wine is about finding where things are good and finding where things are bad, and then narrowing that down until we find the one spot where things go wrong. There's a lot of processes that go like that. [00:50:57] Jeremy: like you were saying, the more you see these problems, hopefully the, the easier it gets to, to narrow down where, [00:51:04] Elizabeth: Often. Yeah. Especially if you keep debugging things in the same area. How much code is OS specific?c [00:51:09] Jeremy: And wine supports more than one operating system. I, I saw there was Linux, MacOS I think free BSD. How much of the code is operating system specific versus how much can just be shared across all of them? [00:51:27] Elizabeth: Not that much is operating system specific actually. so when you think about the volume of wine, the, the, the, vast majority of it is the high level code that doesn't need to interact with the operating system on a low level. Right? Because Windows keeps putting, because Microsoft keeps putting lots and lots of different libraries in their operating system. And a lot of these are high level libraries. and even when we do interact with the operating system, we're, we're using cross-platform libraries or we're using, we're using ics. The, uh, so all these operating systems that we are implementing are con, basically conformed to the posix standard. which is basically like Unix, they're all Unix based. Psic is a Unix based standard. Microsoft is, you know, the big exception that never did implement that. And, and so we have to translate its APIs to Unix, APIs. now that said, there is a lot of very operating system, specific code. Apple makes things difficult by try, by diverging almost wherever they can. And so we have a lot of Apple specific code in there. [00:52:46] Jeremy: another example I can think of is, I believe MacOS doesn't support, Vulkan [00:52:53] Elizabeth: yes. Yeah.Yeah, That's a, yeah, that's a great example of Mac not wanting to use, uh, generic libraries that work on every other operating system. and in some cases we, we look at it and are like, alright, we'll implement a wrapper for that too, on top of Yuri, on top of your, uh, operating system. We've done it for Windows, we can do it for Vulkan. and that's, and then you get the Molten VK project. Uh, and to be clear, we didn't invent molten vk. It was around before us. We have contributed a lot to it. Direct3d, Vulkan, and MoltenVK [00:53:28] Jeremy: Yeah, I think maybe just at a high level might be good to explain the relationship between Direct 3D or Direct X and Vulcan and um, yeah. Yeah. Maybe if you could go into that. [00:53:42] Elizabeth: so Direct 3D is Microsoft's 3D API. the 3D APIs, you know, are, are basically a way to, they're way to firstly abstract out the differences between different graphics, graphics cards, which, you know, look very different on a hardware level. [00:54:03] Elizabeth: Especially. They, they used to look very different and they still do look very different. and secondly, a way to deal with them at a high level because actually talking to the graphics card on a low level is very, very complicated. Even talking to it on a high level is complicated, but it gets, it can get a lot worse if you've ever been a, if you've ever done any graphics, driver development. so you have a, a number of different APIs that achieve these two goals of, of, abstraction and, and of, of, of building a common abstraction and of building a, a high level abstraction. so OpenGL is the broadly the free, the free operating system world, the non Microsoft's world's choice, back in the day. [00:54:53] Elizabeth: And then direct 3D was Microsoft's API and they've and Direct 3D. And both of these have evolved over time and come up with new versions and such. And when any, API exists for too long. It gains a lot of croft and needs to be replaced. And eventually, eventually the people who developed OpenGL decided we need to start over, get rid of the Croft to make it cleaner and make it lower level. [00:55:28] Elizabeth: Because to get in a maximum performance games really want low level access. And so they made Vulcan, Microsoft kind of did the same thing, but they still call it Direct 3D. they just, it's, it's their, the newest version of Direct 3D is lower level. It's called Direct 3D 12. and, and, Mac looked at this and they decided we're gonna do the same thing too, but we're not gonna use Vulcan. [00:55:52] Elizabeth: We're gonna define our own. And they call it metal. And so when we want to translate D 3D 12 into something that another operating system understands. That's probably Vulcan. And, and on Mac, we need to translate it to metal somehow. And we decided instead of having a separate layer from D three 12 to metal, we're just gonna translate it to Vulcan and then translate the Vulcan to metal. And it also lets things written for Vulcan on Windows, which is also a thing that exists that lets them work on metal. [00:56:30] Jeremy: And having to do that translation, does that have a performance impact or is that not really felt? [00:56:38] Elizabeth: yes. It's kind of like, it's kind of like anything, when you talk about performance, like I mentioned this earlier, there's always gonna be overhead from translating from one API to another. But we try to, what we, we put in heroic efforts to. And try, try to make sure that doesn't matter, to, to make sure that stuff that needs to be fast is really as fast as it can possibly be. [00:57:06] Elizabeth: And some very clever things have been done along those lines. and, sometimes the, you know, the graphics drivers underneath are so good that it actually does run better, even despite the translation overhead. And then sometimes to make it run fast, we need to say, well, we're gonna implement a new API that behaves more like windows, so we can do less work translating it. And that's, and sometimes that goes into the graphics library and sometimes that goes into other places. Targeting Wine instead of porting applications [00:57:43] Jeremy: Yeah. Something I've found a little bit interesting about the last few years is [00:57:49] Jeremy: Developers in the past, they would generally target Windows and you might be lucky to get a Mac port or a Linux port. And I wonder, like, in your opinion now, now that a lot of developers are just targeting Windows and relying on wine or, or proton to, to run their software, is there any, I suppose, downside to doing that? [00:58:17] Jeremy: Or is it all just upside, like everyone should target Windows as this common platform? [00:58:23] Elizabeth: Yeah. It's an interesting question. I, there's some people who seem to think it's a bad thing that, that we're not getting native ports in the same sense, and then there's some people who. Who See, no, that's a perfectly valid way to do ports just right for this defacto common API it was never intended as a cross platform common API, but we've made it one. [00:58:47] Elizabeth: Right? And so why is that any worse than if it runs on a different API on on Linux or Mac and I? Yeah, I, I, I guess I tend to, I, that that argument tends to make sense to me. I don't, I don't really see, I don't personally see a lot of reason for, to, to, to say that one library is more pure than another. [00:59:12] Elizabeth: Right now, I do think Windows APIs are generally pretty bad. I, I'm, this might be, you know, just some sort of, this might just be an effect of having to work with them for a very long time and see all their flaws and have to deal with the nonsense that they do. But I think that a lot of the. Native Linux APIs are better. But if you like your Windows API better. And if you want to target Windows and that's the only way to do it, then sure why not? What's wrong with that? [00:59:51] Jeremy: Yeah, and I think the, doing it this way, targeting Windows, I mean if you look in the past, even though you had some software that would be ported to other operating systems without this compatibility layer, without people just targeting Windows, all this software that people can now run on these portable gaming handhelds or on Linux, Most of that software was never gonna be ported. So yeah, absolutely. And [01:00:21] Elizabeth: that's [01:00:22] Jeremy: having that as an option. Yeah. [01:00:24] Elizabeth: That's kind of why wine existed, because people wanted to run their software. You know, that was never gonna be ported. They just wanted, and then the community just spent a lot of effort in, you know, making all these individual programs run. Yeah. [01:00:39] Jeremy: I think it's pretty, pretty amazing too that, that now that's become this official way, I suppose, of distributing your software where you say like, Hey, I made a Windows version, but you're on your Linux machine. it's officially supported because, we have this much belief in this compatibility layer. [01:01:02] Elizabeth: it's kind of incredible to see wine having got this far. I mean, I started working on a, you know, six, seven years ago, and even then, I could never have imagined it would be like this. [01:01:16] Elizabeth: So as we, we wrap up, for the developers that are listening or, or people who are just users of wine, um, is there anything you think they should know about the project that we haven't talked about? [01:01:31] Elizabeth: I don't think there's anything I can think of. [01:01:34] Jeremy: And if people wanna learn, uh, more about the wine project or, or see what you're up to, where, where should they, where should they head? Getting support and contributing [01:01:45] Elizabeth: We don't really have any things like news, unfortunately. Um, read the release notes, uh, follow some, there's some, there's some people who, from Code Weavers who do blogs. So if you, so if you go to codeweavers.com/blog, there's some, there's, there's some codeweavers stuff, uh, some marketing stuff. But there's also some developers who will talk about bugs that they are solving and. And how it's easy and, and the experience of working on wine. [01:02:18] Jeremy: And I suppose if, if someone's. Interested in like, like let's say they have a piece of software, it's not working through wine. what's the best place for them to, to either get help or maybe even get involved with, with trying to fix it? [01:02:37] Elizabeth: yeah. Uh, so you can file a bug on, winehq.org,or, or, you know, find, there's a lot of developer resources there and you can get involved with contributing to the software. And, uh, there, there's links to our mailing list and IRC channels and, uh, and, and the GitLab, where all places you can find developers. [01:03:02] Elizabeth: We love to help you. Debug things. We love to help you fix things. We try our very best to be a welcoming community and we have got a long, we've got a lot of experience working with people who want to get their application working. So, we would love to, we'd love to have another. [01:03:24] Jeremy: Very cool. Yeah, I think wine is a really interesting project because I think for, I guess it would've been for decades, it seemed like very niche, like not many people [01:03:37] Jeremy: were aware of it. And now I think maybe in particular because of the, the Linux gaming handhelds, like the steam deck,wine is now something that a bunch of people who would've never heard about it before, and now they're aware of it. [01:03:53] Elizabeth: Absolutely. I've watched that transformation happen in real time and it's been surreal. [01:04:00] Jeremy: Very cool. Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for, for joining me today. [01:04:05] Elizabeth: Thank you, Jeremy. I've been glad to be here.
Lauren Pisciotta, a former assistant to Kanye West, has accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her during a studio session in 2021, which was co-hosted by Sean "Diddy" Combs. Pisciotta alleges that she was given a drink laced with an unknown drug, leaving her disoriented and impaired. She claims to have blacked out after consuming the drink and only learned years later that she had been assaulted. According to Pisciotta, West later admitted that they "hooked up" at the event, a revelation that shocked her as she had no memory of the incident.In addition to these allegations, Pisciotta also claims West subjected her to sexual harassment throughout her employment. She described instances where West sent her explicit messages and photos, and even forced his way into her hotel room in 2021, attempting to assault her. Pisciotta's lawsuit, which was initially filed for wrongful termination, was amended to include these new claims of sexual assault and harassment, further complicating West's ongoing legal issues.to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comsource:LAUREN PISCIOTTA vs. KANYE WEST, ET AL. - Adobe cloud storage
Preston Luke went from small-town senior photographer to creator, educator, and creative director with an audience of 1M+ across Instagram and TikTok. In this conversation, Preston breaks down the practical steps behind turning your photo brand into a creator business—while staying sane and protecting your love for the craft.We cover:The photographer → creator pivot (and why he paused client work to open new doors)Content systems, editing help, and posting cadence that fueled rapid growthPitching and delivering for brand partners (Nikon, Adobe, SanDisk, Best Buy)Building a business that goes beyond sessions: presets, workshops, and Slate StudiosThe senior-model team engine he built across 30+ school districtsMental health, a 250-lb weight-loss journey, and taking a strategic break when growth got heavyConfidence vs. imposter syndrome (and why “showing up” as the brand matters)
Adobe's Head of Product-Led Growth shares the joys, challenges and opportunities that come with managing growth efforts at an iconic company. She talks about the power of leveraging a unique customer community and being ready to embrace constant evolution. She lets us in on what she sees as the 3 most valuable skills for product growth managers - and her list may surprise you.Chapters:4:05 Adobe's proprietary onboarding layer5:40 Aligning with organizational goals7:13 Wrangling data across a vast ecosystem 9:48 Critical partnerships: leadership and data science12:10 How to apply correlation analysis13:40 Identifying user habits that signal success15:15 A broad set of funnels21:30 Deepti's path to PLG24:15 Her number-one skill for growth product managers26:44 AI helps us get to the “so what” faster31:00 Thinking through the ways your customers want to consume AI32:40 How product management itself is evolvingWhere to find Deepti:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deeptipradeep/Resources:Adobe https://www.adobe.com/Box https://www.box.com/homeLitmus https://litmus.io/Deloitte https://www.deloitte.com/in/en.htmlAppCues https://www.appcues.com/
“When your mental health is suffering so acutely that you can't work, the last thing you need is a catchphrase like the currently trendy “quiet cracking”. You need to understand that no one in corporate America is coming to save you. But we've got some ideas that might help.” Listen for more on the latest Bad Boss Brief.Welcome to the Bad Boss Brief — your no-BS guide on how NOT to be an a*****e at work. Hosted by an executive and an executive coach, we dive into real stories and practical insights on bad bosses, better leadership, and unpack how to recognize if you're the problem.Together, we bring over 50 years of exec-level scars from Intel, Apple, Adobe, Publicis, and Nikon — plus a creative edge from our work in advertising, marketing, and the arts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit badbossbrief.substack.com/subscribe
SleepMe: Visit https://sleep.me/impact to get your Chilipad and save 20% with code IMPACT. Try it risk-free with their 30-night sleep trial and free shipping. Vital Proteins: Get 20% off by going to https://www.vitalproteins.com and entering promo code IMPACT at check out Hims: Start your free online visit today at https://hims.com/IMPACT. Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Tailor Brands: 35% off https://tailorbrands.com/podcast35 Found Banking: Try Found for FREE at https://found.com/impact In this high-stakes edition of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu takes the stage solo to confront one of the most urgent and transformative phenomena of our lifetime: the rise of artificial intelligence. With a trademark blend of hard data and compelling storytelling, Tom breaks down how rapidly AI is outperforming every previous technological shift—from electricity to the Internet—threatening millions of jobs and forcing an unprecedented global economic pivot. In Part 1, Tom maps out the core economic upheaval caused by AI, revealing what makes certain jobs doomed for extinction while others remain resilient. Pulling lessons from the rise and fall of industry titans like Kodak and Adobe, Tom arms you with a crystal-clear framework for assessing whether your career is safe—or already on thin ice. Whether you're worried about threats or searching for opportunity, this episode will help you see the seismic changes ahead and adapt to avoid being left behind. FOLLOW TOM: Instagram: @tombilyeuTikTok: @tombilyeuTwitter: @tombilyeuYouTube: Tom Bilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thanks to improved accuracy and new form factors, wearables have evolved from novelty step counters to tools that can predict illness, nudge healthier behaviors, and even influence alcohol consumption. But can they really bridge the gap between consumer wellness and enterprise healthcare?In this episode, ŌURA CEO Tom Hale discusses the lessons his team has learned from developing one of the most widely used health-tracking devices. We explore what draws people to wearables, what sustains their engagement, and how these tools may be shaping behavior and healthcare itself. We cover:
In this episode of the Canadian Investor Podcast, we break down Canada’s latest inflation read and the Bank of Canada’s rate cut, framing what “sticky core” means for investors. We then turn to earnings and look at Adobe’s AI narrative vs. a maturing growth profile, Affirm’s BNPL momentum alongside credit risk, and Dollar Tree’s value push contrasted with Dollarama’s margin machine. Tickers of stocks discussed: ADBE, AFRM, DLTR, GSY.TO Check out our portfolio by going to Jointci.com Our Website Our New Youtube Channel! Canadian Investor Podcast Network Twitter: @cdn_investing Simon’s twitter: @Fiat_Iceberg Braden’s twitter: @BradoCapital Dan’s Twitter: @stocktrades_ca Want to learn more about Real Estate Investing? Check out the Canadian Real Estate Investor Podcast! Apple Podcast - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Spotify - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Web player - The Canadian Real Estate Investor Asset Allocation ETFs | BMO Global Asset Management Sign up for Fiscal.ai for free to get easy access to global stock coverage and powerful AI investing tools. Register for EQ Bank, the seamless digital banking experience with better rates and no nonsense.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
All links and images can be found on CISO Series. Check out this post for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week's episode co-hosted by me, David Spark, the producer of CISO Series, and Geoff Belknap. Joining us is our sponsored guest, Kara Sprague, CEO, HackerOne. In this episode: Shadow AI as a control problem Rethinking identity for autonomous agents When process meets momentum Beyond blocking: channeling AI usage Huge thanks to our sponsor, HackerOne Discover how AI innovators like Adobe, Anthropic, and Snap are using AI to find and fix vulnerabilities across the software development lifecycle. HackerOne, the global leader in offensive security solutions, reveals all in the CISOs' guide to securing the future of AI. Download it now to see how AI can strengthen your security posture. Learn more at https://www.hackerone.com/
Sara Anderson is the founder of Lead Out Loud and creator of The Resonance Method™, a framework that helps visionary leaders embody magnetic executive presence, read unspoken dynamics, and shape narratives that move people and ideas forward.Drawing on her background in tech, public speaking coaching, and leadership development, Sara has worked with executives at Adobe, Workday, and Cerity Partners. She blends science-backed strategy with deep emotional intelligence to create inside-out transformations—equipping leaders to lead boldly, visibly, and in full resonance with who they are. While she works with leaders across industries and levels, Sara is especially passionate about helping women step into unapologetic visibility and influence in the rooms where they belong. Connect With Sara: Influence Audit: https://saraanderson.simplero.com/page/670331 Website: https://saraanderson.co/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saraandersoncoaching/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sara.anderson___/
Unlock the future of recruiting with this episode of The Full Desk Experience. In this special FDE+, host Kortney Harmon sits down with Matt Strain — seasoned technology leader, AI educator, and founder of The Prompt. Drawing on his experience as Adobe's former Head of Innovation, Matt brings a fresh perspective on how artificial intelligence is reshaping the recruiting and staffing industry.In their conversation, Matt explores why curiosity, resilience, and a willingness to experiment are essential traits for executives and recruiters who want to stand out in the age of AI. He shares real-world examples of how AI can streamline everything from sourcing and screening to assessment and selection, while also emphasizing where human judgment and trust remain irreplaceable. Along the way, he introduces a practical framework of mindset, skill set, and tool set that leaders can use to navigate uncertainty, integrate AI confidently, and drive stronger outcomes.Whether you're dipping your toes into AI for the first time or looking to refine your strategy, this discussion offers hands-on insights you can put into practice right away. Tune in to discover how to transform AI-driven curiosity into a true competitive advantage._________________Follow Matt Strain on LinkedIn at: LinkedIn | MattFollow Crelate on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/crelate/Want to learn more about Crelate? Book a demo hereSubscribe to our newsletter: https://www.crelate.com/blog/full-desk-experience
Iterating has become the business norm—but project teams are struggling to keep up with the relentless pace of change. How can change management professionals and project leaders help? We discuss this with: Sharon Casey, director, change management, Adobe, Austin, Texas, USA: Casey discusses how the persistent pace of change is affecting project teams and contributes to change fatigue. She also explains how change practitioners can support project professionals and teams going through change—sharing how her team's “service tiers” offer assistance—and ways to ensure project teams and senior stakeholders buy into change initiatives. Plus, how artificial intelligence is helping leaders at Adobe learn to better manage change. Senkodi Murugesan, CPMAI, PMP, previously a project manager at Howden, a Chart Industries company, Chennai, India: Murugesan discusses how change has evolved through his career, how to find opportunities amid sudden change on a project, and he shares an example of how he led teams through a major tech change. He also explains why an agile mindset is crucial when it comes to leading project teams through change.Key themes[02:08] How the increasing pace of change affects teams[04:02] Building buy-in for change—and avoiding burnout[09:16] How Adobe change practitioners support teams during change[11:18] Using AI to assist project leaders during change initiatives [16:15] A project professional's perspective on how managing changed has evolved[18:51] Helping teams through major tech changes [21:38] An agile mindset: A must-have for project leaders handling change
The 5 things you need to know before the stock market opens today: Lawyers for President Trump are asking an appeals court to let his bid to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook continue before next week's Open Market Committee meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent continues interviewing candidates for next Fed chair, Adobe shares are heading up, RH is under pressure, and AI tech firm Super Micro has begun to ship Nvidia Blackwell chips worldwide. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernen, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Follow Squawk Pod for the best moments, interviews and analysis from our TV show in an audio-first format. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
“If you look very intensely and slowly things will happen that you never dreamed of before.” This Aaron Siskind quote neatly sums up the deeply contemplative discussion we had with landscape photographers John Paul Caponigro and Joel Simpson in this week's podcast. Siskind's name is mentioned several times in our chat—as are many other 20th century photography legends—making this show both an exploration of photo history and an exercise in a holistic way to envision and record the world around us. Our focus on landscape quickly diverges from realistic depictions in favor of terrain that celebrates abstraction and metaphor. Follow along as we unpack the unwieldy term Pareiolia—the tendency to see familiar things in otherwise random patterns—and discover unique pathways to relate to the natural world. As John Paul Caponigro aptly points out, “I think of every exposure that I make as having a conversation with the subject and myself. I think of every move that I make in Photoshop as having a conversation with the image that started one way and is developing in another. And I ask, you know, what does the image want?” Guests: John Paul Caponigro & Joel Simpson Episode Timeline: 3:30: Joel Simpson describes his early landscapes as a way to re-experience being elsewhere. 9:24: Pareidolia: what it means and its relationship to Joel's photographs. 13:24: John Paul's relationship to the term pareidolia: a way to find patterns and make sense out of chaos. 19:12: The influence of Gestalt psychology when interpreting abstract patterns and photographing the bare bones of the earth. 24:55: Differences between making pictures with the aid of pre-visualization vs going in empty and refining ones' vision in post using digital tools. Plus insights about getting beyond the imitation phase to find a path to originality in your work. 35:58: How do you know when your unique vision from the pictures you make are ready to be released into the world? 42:12: Episode Break 43:24: John Paul's approach to post-processing—using the tools as a laboratory to make multiple iterations. 47:00: Joel describes the discoveries he made when finessing photos of a wonderous landscape from Zhangjiajie, China. 50:21: How does AI factor into crafting an authentic vision, plus the mind as the original AI. 1:03:18: Using photography to tap into things that haven't yet been discovered and elicit a sense of wonder from viewers' responses. 1:06:50: Joel and John Paul talk about the places that inspire their respective photographic projects. Guest Bios: John Paul Caponigro is a digital media pioneer, combining his painting background with a variety of photographic processes using the latest in digital technology. His work is about the perception of nature and the nature of perception. Widely respected as an authority on creativity, photography, and fine art printing, John Paul's images and writings are widely published in periodicals and books, and he's been a contributing editor to a variety of magazines and websites. He's also author of the video training series R/Evolution and the book “Adobe Photoshop Master Class,” now in its second edition. As a highly sought-after speaker and educator, John Paul has presented lectures and workshops around the globe. His art has been exhibited internationally, and his prints are housed in numerous public and private collections. Select clients include Adobe, Apple, Canon, Kodak, and Sony, and he is a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, Epson's Stylus Pros, and X-Rite's Coloratti. Joel Simpson began making pictures as a teen in the 1960s, turning pro in 2002. Since that time, he's had more than 50 exhibitions in the US and abroad. His work has also been widely published and received numerous awards, including a Nautilus Gold Award for Art and Photography for his 2019 book Earthforms: Intimate Portraits of our Planet. His new book, Faces in the Rocks: Beyond Landscape to Psycho-Geological Photography, organizes his discoveries about the aesthetics of abstract and figurative forms in the earth, concluding with a tongue-in-cheek collection of imagined extra-terrestrial landscapes and future cityscapes. In addition to his career in photography, Simpson holds a PhD in comparative literature, and spent 22 years as a professional jazz pianist. He lives in Union, New Jersey. Stay Connected: John Paul Caponigro Website Instagram Facebook YouTube 1980's Guardian advertisement “Multiple Points of View” Joel Simpson Website Instagram YouTube Credits: Host: Derek Fahsbender Senior Creative Producer: Jill Waterman Senior Technical Producer: Mike Weinstein Executive Producer: Richard Stevens