Podcasts about Amazonian

Hi friends, we will be on hiatus for the fall. To tide you over, we're putting up some favorite episodes from our archives. Sadly, the guest featured in this week's archive pick—Karen Bakker—passed way last month. Her colleagues at UBC posted a rememberance here.  ——— Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock's display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can't hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we're oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock's display, what other sounds might we be missing out on? My guest today is Dr. Karen Bakker. Karen is Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. In the book, Karen dives into rich realms of sound that, for one reason or another, humans have tended to ignore. In this conversation, Karen and I discuss the twin fields of "bioacoustics" and "ecoacoustics." We talk about "deep listening" and "digital listening", "infrasound" and "ultrasound." We discuss why sound is such a ubiquitous signaling medium across the tree of life. We consider the fact that scientific discoveries about sound have often been resisted. We touch on debates about whether animal communication systems constitute languages, and discuss new efforts to decode those systems using AI. We also talk about turtles, bats, plants, coral, bees, and—yes—peacocks. If you enjoy our conversation, I strongly recommend Karen's book. It's really bursting with insight, science, and stories—all presented with unusual clarity. Another year of Many Minds is drawing to a close and we're about to go on a brief holiday hiatus. But first a little end-of-year ask: What topics or thinkers would you like to see us feature in 2023? If you have any ideas, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. Alright friends, I hope you enjoy the holidays. And I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Karen Bakker.   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – A range of bat sounds are available on the website of Dr. Mirjam Knörnschild (who was previously featured on the show!). 4:30 – The winner of the 2014 ‘Most Beautiful Sound in the World' contest was a recording of a froggy swamp in Malaysia. 10:30 – A popular article profiling the relatively young field of “bioacoustics.” A recent academic article by Dr. Bakker and a colleague about “conservation acoustics” in particular. 11:30 – A popular article about the use of acoustic technologies to discover and monitor whale populations. 17:00 – A research article about the involvement of infrasound in peacock mating displays. 23:30 – A research study showing that coral larvae move toward reef sounds. 28:00 – A review paper by Camila Ferrara and colleagues about sound communication in Amazonian river turtles. 31:00 – A research article by Heidi Appel and a colleague about plants responding to the sounds of leaf-chewing. 35:00 – A recent historical study of Karl von Frisch and his work with honey bees. A recent study suggesting the possibility of play in bumble bees (not honey bees). 42:00 – A popular article profiling the field of “biosemiotics.” 48:00 – An essay by Dr. Bakker about honeybee communication and how technologies may be helping us understand it. 53:00 – Dr. Bakker recommends books by Indigenous scholars Robin Wall-Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass), Dylan Robinson (Hungry Listening), and John Borrows. Dr. Bakker recommends: A number of examples of the “sounds of life” are collected at Dr. Bakker's website, here. The same site also includes recommendations for getting involved in citizen science. In addition to the books by Indigenous scholars listed above, Dr. Bakker recommends work by Monica Gagliano. You can read more about Karen's work on her website and follow her on Twitter.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) (https://disi.org), which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd (https://www.mayhilldesigns.co.uk/). Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala (https://sarahdopierala.wordpress.com/). You can subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. **You can now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!** We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit our website (https://disi.org/manyminds/), or follow us on Twitter: @ManyMindsPod.

Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the various intricacies and pitfalls of Microsoft licensing. Wes and Corey discuss what it's like to work closely with a company like Microsoft in your day-to-day career, while also looking out for the best interest of your mutual customers. Wes explains his history of working both at and with Microsoft, and the changes he's seen to their business models and the impact that has on their customers. About WesWes Miller analyzes and writes about Microsoft security, identity, and systems management technologies, as well as Microsoft product licensing.Before joining Directions on Microsoft in 2010, Wes was a product manager and development manager for several Austin, TX, start-ups, including Winternals Software, acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Prior to that, Wes spent seven years at Microsoft working as a program manager in the Windows Core Operating System and MSN divisions.Wes received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.Links Referenced: Directions on Microsoft Website: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/getwired LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmiller/ Directions on Microsoft Training: https://www.directionsonmicrosoft.com/training TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. So, I write a newsletter called Last Week in AWS, which has always felt like it's flying a little bit too close to the sun just because having AWSes name in the title of what I do feels like it's playing with copyright fire. It's nice periodically to talk to someone—again—who is in a similar boat. Wes Miller is a Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. To be clear, Directions on Microsoft is an analyst firm that talks primarily about Microsoft licensing and is not, in fact, part of Microsoft itself. Have I disclaimed that appropriately, Wes?Wes: You have. You have. And in fact, the company, when it was first born, was actually called Microsoft Directions. And they had a reasonably good relationship with Microsoft at the time and Microsoft cordially asked them, “Hey, could you at least reverse that so it corrects it in terms of trademark.” So yes, we're blessed in that regard. Something you probably would never get away with now, but that was 30 years ago.Corey: [laugh]. And now it sounds like it might as well be a product. So, I have to ask, just because the way I think of you is, you are the folks to talk to, full stop, when you have a question about anything that touches on Microsoft licensing. Is that an accurate depiction of what it is you folks do or is that just my particular corner of the world and strange equivalence that gets me there?Wes: That is our parts of the Venn diagram intersecting because that's what I spend a lot of time talking about and thinking about because I teach that with our company founder, Rob Horwitz. But we also spend an inordinate amount of time taking what Microsoft is talking about shipping, maybe servicing, and help customers understand really, as we say, the ‘So, what?' What does this mean to me as a customer? Should I be using this? Should I be waiting? Should I upgrade? Should I stay? Those sorts of things.So, there's a whole roadmapping side. And then we have a [laugh]—because licensing doesn't end with a license, we have a whole side of negotiation that we spend a lot of time, we have a dedicated team that focuses on helping enterprise agreement customers get the most successful deal for their organization, basically, every three years.Corey: We do exactly that with AWS ourselves. I have to ask before we dive into this. In the early days, I felt like I had a much better relationship with Microsoft. Scott Guthrie, the head of Azure, was on this show. A number of very highly placed Microsoft folks were here. And over the years, they more or less have stopped talking to me.And that leaves me in a position where all I can see is their actions and their broad public statements without getting any nuance or context around any of it. And I don't know if this is just a commentary on human nature or me in particular, but I tend to always assume the worst when things like that happen. So, my approach to Microsoft has grown increasingly cynical over the years as a result. That said, I don't actually have an axe to grind with them from any other perspective than as a customer, and occasionally that feels like ‘victim' for a variety of different things. What's your take on Microsoft as far as, I guess, your feelings toward the company?Wes: So, a lot of people—in fact, it used to be more so, but not as much anymore, people would assume I hate Microsoft or I want to demonize Microsoft. But the irony actually is, you know, I want people to remember I worked there for seven-and-a-half years, I shipped—I was on the team that shipped Windows XP, Server 2003, and a bunch of other products that people don't remember. And I still care about the company, but the company and I are obviously in different trajectories now. And also, my company's customers today are also Microsoft's customers today, and we actually have—our customers—our mutual customers—best interest in mind with basically everything we do. Are we helping them be informed? Are we helping them color within the financial lines?And sometimes, we may say things that help a customer that aren't helping the bottom line or helping a marketing direction and I don't think that resonates well within Microsoft. So sure, sometimes we even hear from them, “Hey, it'd be great if you guys might want to, you know, say something nice once in a while.” But it's not necessarily our job to say nice things. I do it once in a while. I want to note that I said something nice about AAD last week, but the reality is that we are there to help our mutual customers.And what I found is, I have found the same thing to be true that you're finding true that, unfortunately, outbound communications from them, in particular from the whole company, have slowed. I think everybody's busier, they've got a very specific set of directions they're going on things, and as a result, we hear very little. And even getting, trying to get clarification on things sometimes, “Did we read that right?” It takes a while, and it has to go through several different rungs of people to get the answer.Corey: I have somewhat similar relationships over the years with AWS, where they—in many cases, a lot of their executives prefer not to talk to me at all. Which again, is fair. I'm not—I don't require any of them to do it. But there's something in the Amazonian ethos that requires them to talk to customers, especially when customers are having a rough time. And I'm, for better or worse, the voice of the customer.I am usually not the dumbest person in the universe when it comes to trying to understand a service or make it do something that, to me, it seems that it should be able to do. And when I actually start having in-depth conversations, people are surprised. “Wow, you were super pleasant and fun to work with. We thought you were just going to be a jerk.” It's, yeah, it turns out I don't go through every meeting like it's Twitter. What a concept.Wes: Yeah, a lot of people, I've had this happen for myself when you meet people in person, when they meet your Twitter persona, especially for someone who I think you and I both come across as rather boisterous, gregarious, and sometimes people take that as our personas. And I remember meeting a friend in the UK for the first time years ago, he's like, “You're very different in person.” I'm like, “I know. I know.”Corey: I usually get the, “You're just like Twitter.” In many respects, I am. Because people don't always see what I'm putting down. I make it a point to be humorous and I have a quick quip for a lot of things, but it's never trying to make the person I'm engaging with feel worse for it. And that's how I work.People are somewhat surprised when I'm working in client meetings that I'm fun and I have a similar sense of humor and personality, as you would see on Twitter. Believe it or not, I haven't spent all this time just doing a bit. But they're also surprised that it tends to drive toward an actual business discussion.Wes: Sure.Corey: Everything fun is contextual.Wes: Absolutely. That's the same sort of thing we get on our side when we talk to customers. I think I've learned so much from talking with them that sometimes I do get to share those things with Microsoft when they're willing to listen.Corey: So, what I'm curious about in the context of Microsoft licensing is something that, once again, it has intruded upon my notice lately with a bunch of security disclosures in which Microsoft has said remarkably little, and that is one of the most concerning things out there. They casually tried to slide past, “Oh, yeah, we had a signing key compromised.” Which is one of those, “Oh, [laugh] and by the way, the building's on fire. But let's talk about our rent [unintelligible 00:07:44] for the next year.” Like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. What?”That was one of those horrifying moments. And it came out—I believe I learned about this from you—that you needed something called E3 licensing—sorry, E5 licensing—in order to look at those audit logs, where versus E3, which sounded like the more common case. And after a couple of days of, “Explain this,” Microsoft very quickly wound up changing that. What do all these things mean? This is sort of a foreign concept to me because AWS, for better or worse, does not play games with licensing in the same way that Microsoft does.Wes: Sure. Microsoft has, over the years, you know, they are a master of building suites. This is what they've done for over 30 years. And they will build a suite, they'll sell you that suite, they'll come back around in three to six years and sell you a new version of that suite. Sometimes they'll sell you a higher price version of that suite, et cetera.And so, you'll see products evolve. And did a great podcast with my colleagues Rob and Mary Jo Foley the other day where we talked about what we've seen over the last, now for me, 11 years of teaching boot camps. And I think in particular, one of the changes we have seen is exactly what you're being exposed to on the outside and what a lot of people have been complaining about, which is, products don't sit still anymore. So, Microsoft actually makes very few products today. Almost everything they sell you is a service. There are a handful of products still.These services all evolve, and about every triennium or two—so every three to six years—you'll see a price increase and something will be added, and a price increase and something will be added. And so, all this began with the BPOS, the first version of Office 365, which became Office 365 E3, then Microsoft 365 E3 then Microsoft 365 E5. And for people who aren't in the know, basically, that means they went from Office as a subscription to Office, Windows, and a bunch of management tools as a subscription, to E5, basically, it took all of the security and compliance tools that many of us feel should have been baked into the fundamentals, into E3, the thing that everybody buys, what I refer to still today as the hero SKU and those security and compliance fundamentals should have been baked in. But no, in fact, a lot of customers when this AAD issue came out—and I think a lot discovered this ad hoc for the same reason, “Hey, we've been owned, how far back in the logs can we look?” And the answer is, you know, no farther than 90 days, a lot of customers hit that reality of, what do you mean we didn't pay for the premium thing that has all the logging that we need?Corey: Since you sat on this for eight months before mentioning it to us? Yeah.Wes: Exactly, exactly. And it's buried. And it's one of those things that, like, when we teach the licensing boot camp, I specifically call out because of my security background, it's an area of focus and interest to me. I call out to customers that a lot of the stuff we've been showing you has not questionable valuable, but kind of squishy value.This piece right here, this is both about security and compliance. Don't cheap out. If you're going to buy anything, buy this because you're going to need it later. And I've been saying that for, like, three years, but obviously only the people who were in the boot camp would hear that and then shake their head;, “Why does it have to be this difficult?” But yeah. Everything becomes a revenue opportunity if it's a potential to upsell somebody for the next tier.Corey: The couple of times I've been asked to look at Azure bills, I backed away slowly as soon as I do, just because so much of it is tied to licensing and areas that are very much outside of my wheelhouse. Because I view, in the cloud context, that cost and architecture tend to be one of the same. But when you bolt an entire layer of seat licensing and what this means for your desktop operating systems on as well as the actual cloud architecture, it gets incredibly confusing incredibly quickly. And architectural advice of the type that I give to AWS customers and would give to GCP customers is absolutely going to be harmful in many respects.I just don't know what I don't know and it's not an area that interests me, as far as learning that competency, just to jump through hoops. I mean, I frankly used to be a small business Windows admin, with the products that you talked about, back when XP and Server 2003 and a few others, I sort of ruled the roost. But I got so tired of surprise audit-style work. It felt like busy work that wasn't advancing what I was trying to get done in any meaningful way that, in a fit of rage, one day, I wound up exploring the whole Unix side of the world in 2006 and never went back.Wes: [whispering] That's how it happened.Corey: Yep.Wes: It's unfortunate that it's become so commonplace, but when Vista kind of stalled out and they started exploring other revenue opportunities, you have Vista Ultimate Enterprise, all the crazy SKUing that Vista had, I think it sort of created a mindset within the company that this is what we have to do in order to keep growing revenue up and to the right, and you know, shareholder value be the most important thing, that's what you've got to do. I agree entirely, though, the biggest challenge I could see for someone coming into our space is the fact that yes, you've got to understand Azure, Azure architecture, development architecture, and then as soon as you feel like you understand that, somebody comes along and says, “Well, yeah, but because we have an EA, we have to do it this way or we only get a discount on this thing.” And yeah, it just makes things more cumbersome. And I think that's why we still see a lot of customers who come to our boot camps who are still very dedicated AWS customers because that's where they were, and it's easier in many regards, and they just want to go with what they know.Corey: And I think that that's probably fair. I think that there is an evolution that grows here that I think catches folks by surprise. I'm fortunate in that my Microsoft involvement, if we set things like GitHub aside because I like them quite a bit and my Azure stuff as well—which is still small enough to fit in the free tier, given that I use it for one very specific, very useful thing—but the rest of it is simply seat licenses for Office 365 for my team. And I just tend to buy the retail-priced one on the internet that's licensed for business use, and I don't really think about it again. Because I don't need, as you say, in-depth audit logs for Microsoft Word. I really don't. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time believing that that's true. But something that immediately crops up when you say this is when you talk about E3 versus E5 licensing, is that organization-wide or is that on a per-seat basis?Wes: It's even worse than that. It usually comes down to per-user licensing. The whole world used to be per device licensing in Microsoft and it switched to per user when they subscript-ified everything—that's a word I made up a while ago—so when they subscript-ified everything, they changed it over to per user. And for better or worse, today, you could—there's actually four different tiers of Microsoft 365. You could go for any one of those four for any distinct user.You could have one of them on F1, F3, E3, and E5. Now, if you do that, you create some other license non-compliance issues that we spend way too much time having to talk about during the boot camp, but the point is, you can buy to fit; it's not one-size-fits-all necessarily. But you run into, very rapidly, if you deploy E5 for some number of users because the products that are there, the security services and compliance services ironically don't do license compliance in most cases, customers can actually wind up creating new license compliance problems, thereby basically having to buy E5 for everybody. So, it's a bit of a trapdoor that customers are not often aware of when they initially step into dabbling in Microsoft 365 E5.Corey: When you take a look at this across the entire board, what is your guidance to customers? Because honestly, this feels like it is a full-time job. At scale, a full-time job for a department simply keeping up with all of the various Microsoft licensing requirements, and changes because, as you say, it's not static. And it just feels like an overwhelming amount of work that to my understanding, virtually no other vendor makes customers jump through. Sure there's Oracle, but that tends to be either in a database story or a per developer, or on rare occasions, per user when you build internal Java apps. But it's not as pervasive and as tricky as this unless I'm missing something.Wes: No, you're not. You're not missing anything. It's very true. It's interesting to think back over the years at the boot camp. There's names I've heard that I don't hear anymore in terms of companies that were as bad. But the reality is, you hear the names of the same software companies but, exactly to your point, they're all departmental. The people who make [Roxio 00:16:26] still, they're very departmentalized. Oracle, IBM, yeah, we hear about them still, but they are all absolutely very departmentalized.And Microsoft, I think one of the reason why we do get so many—for better or worse, for them—return visitors to our licensing boot camps that we do every two months, is for that exact reason, that some people have found they like outsourcing that part of at least trying to keep up with what's going on, what's the record? And so, they'll come back every two, three, or four years and get an update. And we try to keep them updated on, you know, how do I color within the lines? Should it be like this? No. But it is this way.In fact, it's funny, I think back, it was probably one of the first few boot camps I did with Rob. We were in New York and we had a very large customer who had gotten a personalized message from Microsoft talking about how they were going to simplify licensing. And we went to a cocktail hour afterwards, as we often do on the first day of the boot camp, to help people, you know, with the pain after a boot camp, and this gentleman asks us well, “So, what are you guys going to do once Microsoft simplifies licensing?” And Rob and I just, like, looked at each other, smiled, looked back at the guy, and laughed. We're like, “We will cross that bridge when we get to it.”Corey: Yeah, people ask us that question about AWS billing. What if they fix the billing system? Like, we should be so lucky to live that long.Wes: I have so many things I'd rather be doing. Yes.Corey: Mm-hm. Exactly. It's one of those areas where, “Well, what happens in a post-scarcity world?” Like, “I couldn't tell you. I can't even imagine what such a thing would look like.”Wes: Exactly [laugh]. Exactly.Corey: So, the last time we spoke way back, I think in 2019, Microsoft had wound up doing some unfortunate and fairly underhanded-appearing licensed changes, where it was more expensive to run a bunch of Microsoft things, such as server software, most notably SQL Server, on clouds that were not Azure. And then, because you know, you look up the word chutzpah in the dictionary, you'll find the Microsoft logo there in response, as part of the definition, they ran an advertising campaign saying that, oh, running many cloud workloads on Azure was five times cheaper than on AWS. As if they cracked some magic secret to cloud economics. Rather than no, we just decided to play dumb games that win worse prizes with cloud licensing. How did that play out?Wes: Well, so they made those changes in October of 2019, and I kind of wish they'd become a bigger deal. And I wish they'd become a bigger deal earlier so that things could have been, maybe, reversed when it was easier. But you're absolutely right. So, it—for those who don't know, it basically made licensing changes on only AWS, GCP, and Alibaba—who I never had anybody ask me about—but those three. It also added them for Azure, but then they created loopholes for themselves to make Azure actually get beneficial licensing, even better than you could get with any other cloud provider [sigh].So, the net takeaway is that every Microsoft product that matters—so traditionally, SQL Server, Windows Server, Windows client, and Office—is not impossible to use on AWS, but it is markedly more expensive. That's the first note. To your point, then they did do that marketing campaign that I know you and I probably had exchanges about at the time, and it drove me nuts as well because what they will classically do is when they tout the savings of running something on Azure, not only are they flouting the rules that they created, you know, they're basically gloating, “Look, we got a toy that they didn't,” but they're also often removing costs from the equation. So, for example, in order for you to get those discounts on Azure, you have to maintain what's called Software Assurance. You basically have to have a subscription by another name.If you don't have Software Assurance, those opportunities are not available to you. Fine. That's not my point. My point is this, that Software Assurance is basically 75% of the cost of the next version. So, it's not free, but if you look at those 5x claims that they made during that time frame, they actually were hand-waving and waving away the [assay 00:20:45] costs.So, if you actually sat down and did the math, the 5x number was a lie. It was not just very nice, but it was wrong, literally mathematically wrong. And from a—as my colleague likes to say, a ‘colors person,' not a numbers person like me, from a colors person like me, that's pretty bad. If I can see the error and your math, that's bad math.Corey: It just feels like it's one of those taxes on not knowing some of the intricacies of what the heck is going on in the world of Microsoft licensing. And I think every sufficiently complex vendor with, shall we say, non-trivial pricing dimensions, could be accused of the same thing. But it always felt particularly worrisome from the Microsoft perspective. Back in the days of BSA audits—which I don't know at all if they're still a thing or not because I got out of that space—every executive that I ever spoke to, in any company lived in fear of them, not because they were pirating software or had decided, “You know what? We have a corporate policy of now acting unethically when it comes to licensing software,” but because of the belief that no matter what they came up with or whatever good faith effort they made to remain compliant, of course, something was not going to work the way they thought it would and they were going to be smacked with a fine. Is that still the case?Wes: Absolutely. In fact, I think it's worse now than it ever was before. I will often say to customers that you are wildly uncompliant while also being wildly overcompliant because per your point about how broad and deep Microsoft is, there's so many products. Like, every company today, every company that has Project and Visio still in place today, that still pays for it, you are over-licensed. You have more of it than you need.That's just one example, but on the other side, SQL Server, odds are, every organization is subtly under-licensed because they think the rule is to do this, but the rules are actually more restrictive than they expect. So, and that's why Microsoft is, you know, the first place they look, the first rug they look under when they do walk in and do an audit, which they're entitled to do as a part of an organization's enterprise agreement. So BSA, I think they do still have those audits, but Microsoft now they have their own business that does that, or at least they have partners that do that for them. And places like SQL Server are the first places that they look.Why? Because it's big, found money, and because it's extremely hard to get right. So, there's a reason why, when we focus on our boot camps, we'll often tell people, you know, “Our goal is to save you enough money to pay for the class,” because there's so much money to be found in little mistakes that if you do a big thing wrong with Microsoft software, you could be wildly out of compliance and not know about it until Microsoft-or more likely, a Microsoft partner—points it out to you.Corey: It feels like it's an inevitability. And, on some level, it's the cost of doing business. But man, does that leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.Wes: Mm-hm. It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And I think—you know, I remember, gosh, was it Munich that was talking about, “We're going to switch to Linux,” and then they came back into the fold. I think the reality is, it absolutely does put a bad taste.And it doesn't leave customers with good hope for where they go from here. I mean, okay, fine. So, we got burned on that thing in the Microsoft 365 stack. Now, they want us to pay 30 bucks for Copilot for Microsoft 365. What? And we'd have no idea what they're even buying, so it's hard to give any kind of guidance. So, it's a weird time.Corey: I'm curious to see what the ultimate effect of this is going to be. Well, one thing I've noticed over the past decade and change—and I think everyone has as well—increasingly, the local operating system on people's laptops or desktops—or even phones, to some extent—is not what it once was. Increasingly, most of the tools that I find myself using on a daily basis are just web use or in a browser entirely. And that feels like it's an ongoing problem for a company like Microsoft when you look at it through the lens of OS. Which at some level, makes perfect sense why they would switch towards everything as a service. But it's depressing, too.Wes: Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why, particularly after Steve left, they changed focus a lot and really begin focusing on Microsoft 365 as the platform, for better or worse. How do we make Microsoft 365 sticky? How do we make Office 365 sticky? And the thing about, like, the Microsoft 365 E5 security stuff we were talking about, it often doesn't matter what the user is accessing it through. The user could be accessing it only through a phone, they could be a frontline worker, they could be standing at a sales kiosk all day, they could be using Office every single day, or they could be an exec who's only got an iPad.The point is, you're in for a penny, in for a pound at that point that you'll still have to license the user. And so, Microsoft will recoup it either way. In some ways, they've learned to stop caring as much about, is everyone actively using our technology? And on the other side, with things like Teams, and as we're seeing very, very slowly, with the long-delayed Outlook here, you know, they're also trying to switch things to have that less Win32 surface that we're used to and focus more on the web as well. But I think that's a pretty fundamental change for Microsoft to try and take broadly and I don't anticipate, for example, Office will ever be fully replaced with a fat client like it has on Windows and the Mac OS.Corey: Yeah, part of me wonders what the future that all looks like because increasingly, it feels more than a little silly that I'm spending, like, all of this ever-increasing dollar figure on a per-seat basis every year for all of Microsoft 365. Because we don't use their email system. We don't use so much of what they offer. We need basically Word and Excel and once in a blue moon PowerPoint, I guess. But that's it. Our fundamental needs have not materially shifted since Office 2003. Other than the fact that everything uses different extensions now and there's, of course, the security story on top of it, too. We just need some fairly basic stuff.Wes: And I think that's the case for a lot of—I mean, we're the exact same way at Directions. And I think that's the case for a lot of small and even into mid-size companies. Microsoft has traditionally with the, like, Small Business Premium, they have an offering that they intentionally only scale up to 300 people. And sometimes they'll actually give you perks there that they wouldn't give away in the enterprise suite, so you arguably get more—if they let you have it, you get more than you would if you've got E5. On the other side, they've also begun, for enterprises, honing in on opportunities that they may have historically ignored.And when I was at Microsoft, you'd have an idea, like, “Hey, Bob. I got an idea. Can we try to make a new product?” He's like, “Okay, is it a billion-dollar business?” And you get waved away if it wasn't all a billion-dollar business. And I don't think that's the case anymore today, particularly if you can make the case, this thing I'm building makes Microsoft 365 sticky or makes Azure sticky. So, things like the Power Platform, which is subtly and slowly replacing Access at a minimum, but a lot of other tools.Power BI, which has come from behind. You know, people would look at it and say, “Oh, it's no Excel.” And now it, I think, far exceeds Excel for that type of user. And Copilot, as I talked about, you know, Microsoft is definitely trying to throw things in that are beyond Office, beyond what we think of as Microsoft. And why are they doing that? Because they're trying to make their platform more sticky. They're trying to put enough value in there so you need to subscribe for every user in your organization.And even things, as we call them, ‘Batteries not Included' like Copilot, that you're going to buy E5 and that you're still going to have to buy something else beyond that for some number of users. So, you may even have a picture in your head of how much it's going to cost, but it's like buying a BMW 5 Series; it's going to cost more than you think.Corey: I wish that there were a better path forward on this. Honestly, I wish that they would stop playing these games, let you know Azure compete head-to-head against AWS and let it win on some of its merits. To be clear, there are several that are great. You know, if they could get out of their own way from a security perspective, lately. But there seems to be a little appetite for that. Increasingly, it seems like even customers asking them questions tends to hit a wall until, you know, a sitting US senator screams at them on Twitter.Wes: Mm-hm. No, and then if you look carefully at—Microsoft is very good at pulling just enough off of the sweater without destroying the sweater. And for example, what they did, they gave enough away to potentially appease, but they didn't actually resolve the problem. They didn't say, “All right, everybody gets logging if they have Microsoft 365 E3,” or, “Everybody gets logging, period.” They basically said, “Here's the kind of logging you can get, and we're going to probably tweak it a little bit more in the future,” and they will not tweak it more in the future. If anything, they'll tighten it back up.This is very similar to the 2019 problem we talked about earlier, too, that you know, they began with one set of rules and they've had to revisit it a couple of times. And most of the time, when they've had an outcry, primarily from the EU, from smaller cloud providers in the EU who felt—justifiably—that Microsoft was being not—uncompetitive with Azure vis-à-vis every other cloud provider. Well, Microsoft turned around and last year changed the rules such that most of these smaller cloud providers get rules that are, ehh, similar to what Azure can provide. There are still exclusives that only Azure gets. So, what you have now is basically, if you're a customer, the best set and cheapest set is with Azure, then these smaller cloud providers give you a secondary—it's close to Azure, but still not quite as good. Then AWS, GCP, and Alibaba.So, the rules have been switched such that you have to know who you're going to in order to even know what the rules are and to know whether you can comply with those rules with the thing you want to build. And I find it most peculiar that, I believe it was the first of last month that Microsoft made the change that said, “You'll be able to run Office on AWS,” which was Amazon WorkSpaces, in particular. Which I think is huge and it's very important and I'm glad they made this change, but it's weird because it creates almost a fifth category because you can't run it anywhere else in Amazon, like if you were spinning something up in VMware on Amazon, but within Amazon WorkSpaces, you can. This is great because customers now can run Office for a fee. And it's a fee that's more than you'd pay if you were running the same thing on Microsoft's cloud.But it also was weird because let's say Google had something competitive in VDI, but they don't really, but if they had something competitive in VDI, now this is the benefit that Amazon has that's not quite as good as what Microsoft has, that Google doesn't get it at all. So, it's just weird. And it's all an attempt to hold… to both hold a market strategy and an attempt to grow market share where they're still behind. They are markedly behind in several areas. And I think the reality is, Amazon WorkSpaces is a really fine offering and a lot of customers use it.And we had a customer at our last in-person boot camp in Atlanta, and I was really impressed—she had been to one boot camp before, but I was really impressed at how much work she'd put into making sure we know, “We want to keep using Amazon WorkSpaces. We're very happy with it. We don't want to move anywhere else. Am I correct in understanding that this, this, this, and this? If we do these things will be aboveboard?” And so, she knew how much more she'd have to pay to stay on Amazon WorkSpaces, but it was that important to the company that they'd already bet the farm on the technology, and they didn't want to shift to somebody else that they didn't know.Corey: I'm wondering how many people have installed Office just through a standard Microsoft 365 subscription on a one-off Amazon WorkSpace, just because they had no idea that that was against license terms. I recall spinning up an Amazon WorkSpace back when they first launched, or when they wound up then expanding to Amazon Linux; I forget the exact timeline on this. I have no idea if I did something like that or not. Because it seems like it'd be a logical thing. “Oh, I want to travel with just an iPad. Let me go ahead and run a full desktop somewhere in the cloud. Awesome.”That feels like exactly the sort of thing an audit comes in and then people are on the hook for massive fines as a result. It just feels weird, as opposed to, there are a number of ways to detect you're running on a virtual machine that isn't approved for this. Stop the install. But of course, that doesn't happen, does it?Wes: No. When we teach at the boot camp, Rob will often point out that, you know, licensing is one of the—and it's true—licensing is one of the last things that comes in when Microsoft is releasing a product. It was that way when he was at the company before I was—he shipped Word 1.0 for the Mac, to give you an idea of his epoch—and I was there for XP, like I said, which was the first version that used activation—which was a nightmare—there was a whole dedicated team on. And that team was running down to the wire to get everything installed.And that is still the case today because marketing and legal make decisions about how a product gets sold. Licensing is usually tacked on at the very end if it gets tacked on at all. And in fact, in a lot of the security, compliance, and identity space within Microsoft 365, there is no license compliance. Microsoft will show you a document that, “Hey, we do this,” but it's very performative. You can't actually rely on it, and if you do rely on it, you'll get in trouble during an audit because you've got non-compliance problems. So yeah, it's—you would hope that it keeps you from coloring outside the lines, but it very much does not.Corey: It's just a tax on going about your business, in some ways [sigh].Wes: Exactly. “Don't worry, we'll be back to fix it for you later.”Corey: [laugh]. I really appreciate your taking the time to go through this with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to keep up with what you're up to?Wes: Well, obviously, I'm on Twitter, and—oh, sorry, X, whatever.Corey: No, we're calling it Twitter.Wes: Okay, I'm on—I'm on—[laugh] thank you. I'm on Twitter at @getwired. Same alias over on [BlueSky 00:35:27]. And they can also find me on LinkedIn, if they're looking for a professional question beyond that and want to send a quiet message.The other thing is, of course, go to directionsonmicrosoft.com. And directionsonmicrosoft.com/training if they're interested in one of our licensing boot camps. And like I said, Rob, and I do those every other month. We're increasingly doing them in person. We got one in Bellevue coming up in just a few weeks. So, there's opportunities to learn more.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:35:59]. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me again, Wes. It's appreciated.Wes: Thank you for having me.Corey: Wes Miller, Research VP at Directions on Microsoft. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry, insulting comment that will no doubt be taken down because you did not sign up for that podcasting platform's proper license level.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

In this episode, we've got all the inside scoop on Amazon Accelerate 2023 that you might have missed! Our host, Bradley Sutton, dives deep into the exciting announcements and their implications for Amazon FBA sellers. From the eagerly awaited dates for the next Prime Deal Days to cutting-edge AI features like Generative AI for building your listings inside Amazon and the AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant, we've got you covered. Plus, we explore game-changing updates, new tools, and features like the  Amazon Shipping ground package delivery service, Amazon Supply Chain updates with inventory management, customer loyalty analytics dashboard, and sustainability solutions that are set to reshape the Amazon seller landscape. We also talked about the Buy with Prime integration inside Shopify and shared relevant numbers on how D2C E-commerce businesses are crushing it with this new feature. Tune in to discover how these developments could impact your Amazon business and stay ahead of your competitors. It's a must-listen episode for anyone in the world of Amazon selling and don't forget to let us know what you think of these announcements! Also, don't forget to catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue in the Amazon unBoxed Event in New York this October 24th to up-level and up-skill your Amazon advertising knowledge.  In episode 493 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: 02:05 - Dates For The Next Prime Deal Days Released! 02:40 - Featuring A Seller Success Story From A Helium 10 User 03:45 - Enterprise Solutions Integrated In Partner Seller App 04:09 - Emerald Notifications 05:23 - AI-backed Seller Messaging Assistant 06:35 - Generative AI For Listing Building 07:54 - Bradley's Feedback On This AI Feature After Tests 13:22 - A New Seller Homepage 13:40 - One Page Listing Management Page 14:23 - Buyer Abuse Protection 16:05 - Veeqo Multi-Channel Shipping 17:01 - Amazon Shipping Ground Package Delivery Service 18:44 - Supply Chain By Amazon (More Than Amazon Global Logistics) 20:54 - Automatic Inventory Replenishment with FBA 23:48 - Let's Get Into Day 2 Announcements 24:43 - Customer Loyalty Analytics Dashboard 26:26 - Fit Insights Tool 28:45 - Voice Of The Customer Dashboard 30:16 - Two-Tap Ratings 31:50 - New Seller Wallets 32:10 - Buy with Prime with Shopify 33:28 - Interesting Stats From Buy with Prime integration with Shopify 35:18 - Potential Sales Lift 37:16 - View In Your Room Feature Improvements 38:42 - Ships On Product Packaging Program 40:46 - Sustainability Solutions Hub 41:24 - What Do You Think Of All These Announcements? 42:29 - Catch Bradley, Helium 10, and Pacvue In The Amazon Unboxed Event ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On Youtube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Did you miss Amazon Accelerate? Don't worry. In this episode I'm giving you guys everything that you missed out on all the announcements and how it affects US sellers. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. We know that getting to page one on keyword search results is one of the most important goals that an Amazon seller might have. So track your progress on the way to page one and even get historical keyword ranking information and even see sponsored ad rank placement with keyword tracker by Helium 10. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash keyword tracker.   Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am Your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and I'm going to be going over everything that happened at Amazon Accelerate. Well, maybe not everything, but all the key points. There might be a couple things I missed, but there's a lot of interesting things that were announced at Amazon Accelerate. I'm going to keep it real. Like I say, this is BS free. No, there might be a couple things I think is not that exciting. I'm going to keep it real. Let you guys know, it's just my opinions here. So I wanted to give you guys kind of like a rundown of all the like I don't know Like 25 different announcements or 30, or even more than that. As you notice, I'm wearing my old school Helium 10 shirt here and the reason is because back when Helium 10 used to use this logo, you never would have gotten me to say, like in a million years, that Amazon would be announcing the kind of things that they have been at Amazon Accelerate the last couple years. I mean like the things that they're dropping, that I'm going to talk about today, and the things that they talked about last year. It was, you know, I would have bet a million dollars if I was a betting person that no, the Amazon would never give this kind of analytics or Amazon would never do this or that. But, man, you know, hats off to Amazon because they're really trying to come through for the sellers.   Bradley Sutton: So before I get started here, real quick kind of breaking news. If you didn't, you know here last week it's not Amazon Prime Day, but what is it called like? Prime Deal, that Prime Deal days prime something or other? Anyways, the second Prime Day, what a lot of people are calling the second Prime Day. They dropped the dates, for it's actually going to be October 10th and 11th. So mark your calendars. If you guys were preparing for deals or things like that, October 10th and 11th is, I think it's called deal day, something like that. So you know, normally I drop that in the weekly buzz, but I'll give you guys that information a couple days early.   Bradley Sutton: Alright, let's go ahead and hop into Amazon Accelerate. I was there. It was my first time at Amazon Accelerate and it was actually cool. They actually started off with like the whole entire event was started off with a Helium 10 customer. Alright, so Hemlock Park is a customer that you know we've talked about. He's actually been on the podcast Mikey from there and they did this like full profile in front of everybody about how his business is and you know how he makes these candles and you know, really, really cool to see you know Helium 10 customer front and center, like that. But you know, let me know what do you guys think? Like what if Amazon would ask you to, like you know, show your brand, you know, would you be down to do that? You know, so many sellers, I think, are afraid of showing their brand to the whole entire world, literally like now, everybody knows what, what Mikey's products are, right. So just something to think about. You know what? Would you take the publicity that you know coming on full stage from Amazon, or would you be like now, I'm good, amazon, you go pick somebody else, alright?   Bradley Sutton: First, couple of announcements you know wanted to talk about for Accelerate nothing that exciting. One of them is was Enterprise Solutions. They announced that they had 15 more software companies and solutions that are integrated into their seller partner App Store. That the seller partner App Store is like what Helium 10 and other tools like it are connected to you, but now they're connecting with like enterprise level, you know once, like QuickBooks even so, if you use QuickBooks for accounting, that's actually now integrated into the seller partner App Store. Another announcement was Emerald Notifications. Alright, so Emerald is this beta program that are doing, where some of these seller apps like you know Helium 10 can deliver notifications about things that are happening in our software in your seller central dashboard. Some of you guys might have gotten an email about that a little while ago and you guys thought it was spam or something like that. So it's real. You know Helium 10 is part of that program amongst many others.   Bradley Sutton: That's what they announced at Amazon Accelerate, and basically the way that they described is they said hey, we're trying to make it easier for you to manage and act on key business updates from your third party apps. That was word for word, verbatim from their announcement. Now, if you're wondering how do you activate it in your account, let me just show you how. Go to your seller central account and then you are going to want to go to apps and services and then manage your apps. Alright, once you do that, you're going to get to the other page here and it'll have all your you know software that you're connected with, and you're going to have to find Helium 10 and hit reauthorize alright. So you're going to want to hit reauthorize after doing that or whatever other apps that you have that you can connect to, and then what's going to happen is you'll now start being eligible for those notifications, alright.   Bradley Sutton: The next announcement was an AI back seller messaging assistant, and what this is is for customer service. Basically, you know how customers, if they have a question about their shipping or a question about the product you know those kind of questions go directly to Amazon. That's not anything new. That's always been the case, one of the advantages of Amazon. You don't have to take care of a lot of your customer service, like hey, where's my shipment? Like I don't know, amazon's one who shipped it right, you don't have to worry about those kind of things. But anyways, amazon is integrating AI into there in order to save even more of the questions and so, like now, it's going to be almost instantaneous, like somebody says, hey, where's my shipment? And AI is instantly answering them, saying, hey, here's the shipping and here's where it's going to go, or here's, you know, if you're eligible for a refund, all kinds of generic questions they are. Now have an AI that powers, instead of having to wait for a person you know might take some time to answer the questions and you know, theoretically speaking, this might help because you know, maybe in that time that a buyer is having to wait for the answer. Maybe they just decided to cancel their order or like it right. So hopefully, hopefully, this will, you know, kind of lessen those.   Bradley Sutton: Now, the first big announcement of the day that got, you know, people kind of excited was about AI and listing billing. It was kind of funny when they first were announcing that they were going to announce that they were bringing it on the stage. And I won't forget, like they had the like the product manager for there. It's like this Amazonian, like his 50s and 60s, and he's like running out there like he's you saying, bolt to the stage. And he was like super excited. Like I was sitting there in the front row, I thought he was going to do like a crowd dive or something he was running so fast, but hey, he was excited. The crowd got excited because they really hyped up this AI tool that you know we talked about on the weekly buzz a while back.   Bradley Sutton: So what does this consist of? This announcement of their AI listing builder tool? Well, they announced a press release also. It says Amazon launches generative AI to help sellers write product descriptions. And so, basically, it's going to, you know, very similar to what, you know, helium 10 has has had for a while in listing builder. Basically, what they're saying is hey, right here, word for word, says to get started, sellers only need to provide a brief description of their product, in a few words or sentences, and then Amazon will generate high quality content for the review. Sellers can refine these if they want to, or they can directly submit the automatically generated content to the Amazon catalog.   Bradley Sutton: Now you know, I'm going to raise my Bradley Sutton flag, my BS flag, a little bit here, especially when they say you know, really high quality. I don't think it's there yet. I'm not trying to throw Amazon under the bus. I have very strong faith that it's going to get there. You know, remember, this is not Amazon like creating their own. You know their own. You know magic system here they're probably using. You know AI tools out there, just like you know helium 10 uses. You know chat, gpt.   Bradley Sutton: But they tried to make it seem like, you know, for example, they gave a, an example here where you can just enter mouse pad with gel wrist right and then you'd be able to get like this, full, full listing. No, that's not the case Now. I tested it like we had this custom or this, this kind of case study I'm doing where I've made at least coffin shaped bath tray and I actually just, you know, actually threw in, you know, a description that was not just like five or six words, you know, just about four or five sentences and the output that it gave me. It just copied the input that I said in the description and that was the product description and then it copied it again and that was the bullet point number one and there was only one more bullet point and then there was no more bullet points in the title. Let me see if I could show it to you guys here. In the title it called it 32 inch black plastic coffin bathtub tray. All right, now the cool thing is hey, it adds spooky decor. I actually know that that is one of the main keywords here, spooky decor, but it called it plastic. I didn't say it was plastic. And then, even though that was the title, when you go to the description, the second bullet point or the first bullet point somewhere here it says hey, this is made with wood, so you got it right once. But in the title.   Bradley Sutton: So, guys, this is not, do not expect this yet yet to be. You know some all encompassing thing that's going to. You know, allow you to just snap your fingers and create listings. It obviously needs a lot of work If you're interested in using AI. For now I would stick with listing builder. You know that exact same listing of a test for the coffin tray. I actually created it in listing builder and I put that. You know, very similar, prompt. But obviously the difference is, you know, in listing builder I can add all of my keywords that I had found from Cerebro you know that are relevant to that niche, and then you know, listing builders try to incorporate those keywords, which is still very important. You know, for the Amazon algorithm that you, so you can get searchable. So I'm curious, you know, maybe the reason why it made such a terrible listing is because there's not that much data, you know, on coffin bath trays, and so it was kind of struggling. But maybe if I tried to do like collagen peptides, who knows, maybe I could just write collagen powder and it would make this amazing, amazing listing for me. Now, that being said, that tool might not be at its peak yet.   Bradley Sutton: However, they were giving a sneak peek at some pretty exciting announcements. They said coming soon, sellers are going to be able to submit a URL or a photo of a product and then the AI can generate reviews somehow. So you know, in my mind they were kind of saying, without really saying it maybe you have a dot com business and you've got this Shopify listing or maybe even, who knows, maybe a listing on another website like Walmart. You enter that in and then it could create an actual Amazon listing. You know that'd be pretty cool If that happened, even just like an image of a product and it would create a listing. That is pretty cool. And another thing that they said is is it's going to be available for existing listings to edit it. You know, right now it's if you want to test this out. It's only available to be done with a brand new listing if you're going to start it. But they do say that it's going to come in the future.   Bradley Sutton: Now this is something that had me a little bit worried. All right, let me read this next announcement that they said. They said hey, we'll also enrich your existing listings to ensure your products have all the details that customers want to help you drive more sales. We'll use AI to automatically generate missing attributes. First of all, that's excellent. I'm not worried about that at all. You know like that would be great for those attributes. You know, sometimes we don't know all the attributes that are needed in the back end and then we have the missing and we could be suppressed and stuff. So if Amazon AI can do that, beautiful, we'd love. We'd love to see that. But here, check this out.   Bradley Sutton: The second part We'll also use AI to automatically generate and improve titles, bullet points and descriptions based on data in Amazon's catalog. You'll be able to review any changes and make edits if desired. Now, that part has me worried because we all know that. You know, sometimes when Amazon kind of changes your title, it's not always great and you got you know like what if, all of a sudden, for my product, amazon use that AI thing that I just showed you guys and it wants to call my coffin bath tray, which is made of wood, a plastic coffin tray? And just terrible listing. So hopefully these things are not going to happen until their AI is a little bit more robust, which I'm sure it is, you know. But the second part is I definitely want to be able to click a button that says no, I do not want to implement those changes because you know all you helium 10 users out there, 99% of you are going to be better at making the listing than any AI. I'll just tell you that right now, ai, as far as if you're talking about optimizing your listing, for you know the algorithm and things like that All right, like, like you know, you've got all the data. You know even more data than the AI is going to have. You know, I know that sounds kind of like a audacious thing to say, but you know, those of you guys who know, know, know what's up. You know, like you guys can, can, you know, look across different categories of different keywords? And I think the technology for AI to do that is still too far off yet. But anyways, hopefully they're not going to be automatically just changing our listings without letting us know. I don't think they're going to do that.   Bradley Sutton: Another minor announcement that they did was about the seller homepage. You know most of you guys were opted into that new seller homepage and one of the benefits they said of this new homepage is that you can take away those widgets. You know, sometimes the seller central homepage had all kinds of like little things that you know just cluttered the screen. But now you can, you can hide those. So they talked about that in case you guys didn't know. Another thing that kind of teased it's not ready yet they talked about how you know we have all kinds of different listing dashboards in order to. You know, there's one for fixing inactive listings, there's one for managing listings. There's a dashboard to improve your listing. So what they're working on is a new one page, you know, catch all everything that has to do with your listings in seller central and it's going to have the actions that you need to take and everything's basically beyond that page. And I guess they have the beta program going right now and it said that, you know, with this beta group, sellers are being able to take actions 40% faster than the current way of having to go to all these different listing management pages.   Bradley Sutton: Another announcement they made was buyer abuse protections. You know we definitely like that. We know, although we always know that there's there's some bad players out there on the customer side and so they're implementing AI and other things in order to help kind of detect that. They quote seller selling partners can leverage Amazon's machine learning based buyer risk evaluations and specialized abuse risk investigations to protect your business. All right, so that's a bunch of fancy. You know press release kind of words there. But in a nutshell, the way they explained it is this is gonna help protect you against fraudulent orders, fraudulent claims. It says it's gonna potentially save millions of dollars on refunds and actually probably the point that I think got some applause from people, that says they announced that to address the issue of reviews, amazon has worked to automate and sanitize the sanitize I love that word, that's literally their word, that they said on stage to sanitize the process of suppressing reviews for abusive accounts in real time. All right, so we don't know exactly in the past how the Amazon kind of policed reviews, but you could see it happening, like, if you're using the Helium 10 Chrome extension, you ever look at the review history of a product and then you'll notice that all of a sudden 3,000 reviews got lost and then 2,000 reviews got added back. You probably seen that and were thinking that was a Helium 10 mistake or something. No, what was happening was Amazon would just like quarantine thousands of reviews or hundreds of reviews at a time and I guess, like you know, do some kind of audit on it and then just put back the ones that were okay. So if this, if I'm understanding this correctly, that process in the future might be now in kind of like a real time.   Bradley Sutton: Another announcement that you know may not affect a lot of you guys there's this Amazon company called I think it's called VCO, v-e-e-q-o and it's like a multi-channel shipping software. So kind of like you know me, I don't use that, I use like Snapscom, but it's very similar to that where it integrates with your seller central and then you could, you know, print shipping labels and things like that. And so they made an announcement that you know they've negotiated the cheapest shipping rates in the business and usually you can only get like the same price, no matter, you know, if I use Snapscom or if I'm using I don't know like ShipStation or something like that. Right, it's almost always the same exact price, like even my Snapscom price is the same as if I buy postage or UPS ground from Amazon. But if you use VCO, you can actually save an additional 5% off by getting credit. So that's like another announcement that they made. So if you use VCO or if you're interested in that, make sure to check that out.   Bradley Sutton: Now the next big announcement was a launch of Amazon shipping. All right, so Amazon shipping is basically a new program where they're kind of gonna be be, you know, competing with FedEx and UPS. Now this I found very interesting because you know it's been, it's been rumored to happen for a long time and now it is happening. You know, in some cities there's only like 15 cities and basically this is gonna be just just what you think is a UPS and FedEx. You know like it's a package delivery service to to fulfill not only just your Amazon like fulfilled by merchant orders, but you can technically fulfill anything. You know like you've got a dot com website and you wanna have Amazon actually pick up the shipment and then deliver it in like two to five days, including Saturdays and Sundays, at a low cost and then no extra fees for residential or weekend delivery. You wanna be able to track the packages in real time, get photo on delivery when the order is delivered. This is now coming. You know you're gonna be able to do that. So again, you don't even have to like be a you know Amazon Prime seller, fba seller to take advantage of this.   Bradley Sutton: Now a couple of things I'm wondering about is you know how you can't do like drop shipping or shipping from Amazon for Walmart? You know I used to. I used to make oh my goodness, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars drop shipping like Walmart to Amazon and vice versa. I mean it's curious, like would you be able to use Amazon shipping as a shipper and fulfill stuff you're selling Walmart? I would assume. No, I would assume Walmart would not want that. But anyways, you know if you sell on other platforms. You know this could be something that you can use.   Bradley Sutton: Another big announcement was Amazon supply chain, or they called it supply chain by Amazon, and automated solution to help so it was quickly and reliably ship products around the world. So this is kind of like they were talked about this as being an end to end system of shipping where it goes all the way from your you know factory you know picking up at the factory, you know getting it out of the country wherever it's gonna be importing through customs, you know all the way to Amazon and it takes it to another level. This is like more. We're talking about more than just through what Amazon global logistics was. Some of the things that they talked about in their press release was that these new prices for this new system are gonna reflect this counts of up to 25% on cross-border transportation that it said. You're also gonna have a streamlined domestic inbound transportation to AWD. All right.   Bradley Sutton: Awd is the Amazon warehousing they're through with their partnered carrier program. All right, so you can be able to save 25% on the already lower cost that you might have been having. So you're gonna have an expanded AWD offering with reduced prices. Those of you who are already using it, the AWD rates are gonna be now 80% lower than FBA storage fee, so that AWD is kind of like using Amazon as a 3PL, if I were to try and oversimplify it. But if you're doing AWD, compared to maybe you were just storing things in FBA and getting long-term fees, you're gonna save 80%, which is kind of a pretty impressive right.   Bradley Sutton: They're gonna have new multi-channel distribution capability and what that means is that Amazon selling partners will sell across multiple who sell across multiple sales channels, including online and brick and mortar. Keeping everything in stock is a challenge, so this is going to be able to move your inventory in bulk from AWD Amazon's warehousing to any sales channel so that you can replenish across the board, not just Amazon. So that's gonna be something coming. And something that I found interesting was automatic inventory replenishment with FBA all right. So if you're using this whole supply chain system, they're gonna be like replenishing inventory into the fulfillment centers, like from AWD, without you having to forecast.   Bradley Sutton: So, again, color me skeptical at first, just because I'm like, hey, I've seen some of Amazon's inventory forecasting recommendations and in the past it's been kind of trash in my opinion. Sorry, you know Amazon, but Amazon's definitely improving in that and so. But this would be interesting. Like I'd be curious as to what the algorithm that they're gonna use, how it's gonna work. But imagine a world where you don't even have to like worry about sending your inventory to Amazon Prime. You used to have like, hey, I'm ordering 10,000 units from my factory in China. It's going to Amazon's warehouses and I can just gonna trust Amazon to put them into FBA. You don't fulfill your orders from. You don't fulfill your orders directly from AWD to the customer. It has to go to FBA warehouses first. But imagine a world where you're not going to have to worry about that anymore. So that would be kind of interesting as well.   Bradley Sutton: So there's another you know interesting announcement that happened on day one. I mean, I can't believe we're still on day one here. Couple other things from day one. There was escalate. My case was something that was in beta where you know there's gonna be like a button in seller essential where you can like escalate if you're having trouble with support. That's coming soon and that includes talking to a live support agent. It's something funny.   Bradley Sutton: Seller poll you guys ever see those seller polls in your seller essential dashboard? Well, you know, they ask it. Hey, guys, please keep providing feedback. Now I'll keep it real here. Most of those polls have been pretty, pretty good lately, but sometimes we get a kick out of the ones Like I actually saved one of my all time favorites.   Bradley Sutton: This was, you know, a while back. It says my account is safe from being suspended unexpectedly. Strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree. So, like you know, we all made fun of some of these polls like this that people would get back in a day because I don't think any of us thought that we were safe from being suspended. But you know, honestly, if I were to be honest, I have been suspended unexpectedly. That was like a good four or five years ago. I think was the last time that happened. You know, if I were to get my sentiment here, you know I put probably strongly disagree. You know three years ago when I took this screenshot, but maybe now I'd be like I neither agree or disagree, like I still see. You know horror stories out there, but you know I haven't been suspended in a while and now Amazon has new systems in place that actually, where they would call you before they suspend you. So that didn't exist three or four years ago. So you know they're getting better. But anyways, the point being, don't just laugh at these polls. These are important. Most of them are important for you to get some to give Amazon your feedback.   Bradley Sutton: All right now, going to day two, a couple again minor announcements that I'm not sure affect much of you. One was called flexible customer financing, aka FCF program. You're gonna be able to enable your customers to purchase your eligible product's interest fee using installment options. So, like you know, maybe like you got a $200 product or $300 product, you can. It sounds like you're gonna be able to activate this like, hey, buy now, pay later, kind of thing sounds like. But the important part of this is that if customers opt into that, they don't have to pay right away. But guess what? You get the funds right away, if I understand this correctly. So that would be pretty cool, you know, because that would kind of suck if, yeah, let people buy this $1,000 thing and paid off over six months and you're getting, like, payments for it over six months. That would not fly right. So that would be kind of cool if this can help your sales.   Bradley Sutton: Another announcement is that there's now a customer loyalty analytics, or there's going to be a customer loyalty analytics dashboard, so it allows you to segment customers based on loyalty and analyze, segment purchase patterns and perform targeted engagement to increase your overall lifetime customer value. So they put out a press release on this and it's pretty interesting because it says, hey, new features will give sellers a comprehensive understanding of the customer sentiment for existing products from reviews and also returns. And it gave an example like hey, there's an outdoor recreation brand, they're trying to design a new tent. They'll easily be able to understand what drives customer complaints and satisfaction with the tents today. Like so it might give you like a niche kind of analysis. And it says upcoming enhancement to the tool will provide the ability to select different time periods, analyze trends over time, benchmark customer sentiment against best sellers in the category. You know that benchmarking thing sounds pretty cool and so this is something to look out for that's going to be available later this year in the US, uk, germany, france, italy and Spain, and then Japan to follow, and, instead of localized insights, will also provide a deeper understanding of customer preferences in the country. So it's not just like looking at, you know a category across all of Amazon, but you're looking at a country basis. So again, something interesting, cool announcement to look forward to.   Bradley Sutton: Another thing that Amazon release is something called fit insights tool. It's going to be backed by AI and this is for those of you who are mainly like in the apparel category, you know, which is historically one of the, you know, the one that has the most returns and issues and with reviews and things like that. But it's going to be analyzing the reviews and the size charts and kind of like how people identify themselves as what size they are and then compare it to like what size you're saying the product is, or, yeah, your shirt or socks or whatever, and then it's going to give you like suggestions, like you know what you know you probably should move your size tier up a little bit, because people who say that they're waist 38, you know they're complaining about your product because they say it's too big. So you might want to, you know, put it, call this a size 36 instead of a 38 or whatever the case may be. So you know I don't sell in the apparel, so this doesn't affect me at all. But what about you? You know you guys who are selling leggings or shirts or pants or things like that. You know, I'm sure you guys have all kinds of crazy horror stories about return. So if AI can help with that process you know it's called again, it's called fit insights. It's going to be available a beginning in October. Look out for more announcement on that. We'll probably have that in the weekly buzz.   Bradley Sutton: Another minor announcement that has to do with Amazon warehouses, called computer vision based detection. All right, so they gave this demo where they're showing like vision technology where things are going on the conveyor belts, going to you know orders and stuff, and then this AI is going to like see if there's a problem with, like, an expiration date, somehow, like on the package, or maybe the box is damaged, right, and then it's going to stop it from going to the customer. So I have, you know, face value seems okay. I'm just not fully convinced this is going to make a huge impact. I think the thing that all of us are more concerned about is when products go back to Amazon. You know it's like can we please take a look at these boxes and obviously realize that the customer didn't put the pack back in the box or it's used or things like that. Please don't put it back in inventory. This is a start. This is a start, though, you know, because you know, sometimes maybe like a forklift runs over a package, but it's still somehow it gets on the conveyor belt and then gets to the customer and they get upset because they get a super damaged box and then they return it. So in that situation, this will probably kind of like help, help with that, with that kind of stuff, and then, starting in 2024, you'll actually get a report on all the packages that Amazon kind of like stopped, you know, thanks to this new robotic vision thing that it has.   Bradley Sutton: Voice of the customer dashboard was their next announcement. That's actually something that exists now, but it talked about what is coming to this dashboard. Basically, they said they're going to launch three new, improved features that will give you more insights into what's going on to help you build customer loyalty, and these include key phrases from customer feedback. I'm not sure if that means reviews, because you know customer feedback is something different than reviews, so I'm not completely sure about that. Number two, category benchmarking and trend analysis to give you the tools to compare your performance against similar products. And then, number three, deeper key performance metrics broken down by customer feedback score. Quote unquote was part of their announcement for that. So if you're using that VOC, or voice of the customer dashboard. Look out for those three enhancements soon.   Bradley Sutton: Add to cart seller profile pages. That was another announcement. You guys know what the seller profile page is. That's where you click on the storefront, you know from a listing, and then it takes you to the page where the feedback is and the address of the seller and stuff. Well, there's nothing that allow you to necessarily buy the product before, but now, as you can see, they have an add to cart button Now for the product that maybe they were clicking on. So that's something that's already new. And then they talked about potentially, you know, maybe even having some other cross-selling where it has other products right there on this page that somebody could add to cart.   Bradley Sutton: Another announcement I really didn't understand. I wish I could have followed up on this, but it was called two tap ratings and in this session or not session, but in this announcement they were talking about how two tap ratings simplifies the seller rating process and customers have indicated that seller ratings are a critical data point in their shopping journey. So two tap ratings eliminates the written feedback requirement, simplifying the end to end review experience. So that's what the announcement was, but I'm like, wait a minute. Hasn't there just been this two tap rating for like a couple of years now, which is why the number of ratings is so much higher than the number of written reviews?   Bradley Sutton: So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement was. Maybe it's about from the actual write a customer review button on orders, like if you were to open up your mobile app right now, your Amazon buyer app, and then you know, hit an order and says write a review, you kind of do there have to leave a written review, I think. So maybe that part is gonna be changed. But I know there's like a page where you can go where Amazon just gives you these messages like hey, rate this product, you don't have to write nothing, you just like click the rating right there and that's it. So I'm not exactly sure what this announcement is, but my speculation is that from the write a review button there, you can just start leaving ratings there, but this might increase the number of ratings you know you get, which is, you know, for some customers or for some of you guys. You guys would love that. Some others were like man, this kind of sucks, I barely get any written reviews now and I really want written reviews. So maybe some of you think that's a negative. Another day.   Bradley Sutton: Two announcement was that a seller wallet where it's this is coming, where you can take your funds you know, your before you get, actually get dispersed and then you can use it to, like you know, make a wire transfer to your, to your vendors or your suppliers, things like that. You know we've had that with a group Alta, helium, 10, alta for a while, but now it's coming to a seller central. Next announcement was a little bit bigger, so it was kind of like there's a little bit of thunder being stolen because they announced it, the, you know, a couple of weeks ago about the Shopify and buy with Prime. But they talked a lot about buy with Prime. The thing that was like shock, shocking was they actually brought out the VP, or a VP of Shopify to the Amazon accelerate stage. So he actually came right on stage and even the, even the Amazonian who introduced him, was like hey, you know, a year ago I wouldn't probably not have imagined bringing this person on stage. And that was because, as we've talked about in the weekly buzz before, they had all kinds of beef. You know, in the old days, you know, shopify wanted all that smoke. They were. They were like saying, hey, if you use buy with prime on Shopify, you're against our terms of service and this and that. So, yeah, that's kind of like nobody would have ever guessed that a VP of Shopify would be on stage at Amazon accelerate, but they were talking about buy with prime. And so, in general, you know, regardless of it was Shopify or not, buy with prime has been out, you know, for a year now. They talked about how some of the stats for buy with prime, you know what kind of stats it's had for for sellers. For example, one brand said that nine out of every 10 buy with prime orders were from customers new to their brand. A newer feature was buy with prime cart is starting to see early success. So before it was kind of like if you had buy with prime, it was just for one product. But now they're rolling this out where you can, like you know, have multiple Amazon or, you know, fba supplied products and then you can actually add them to the cart and then the customer on Shopify or whatever, woocommerce or whatever, can go ahead and check out instead of just having to buy them one by one and the this, this, this feature the merchants who use it say that they increased a 15% increase in buy with prime units per order. Another announcement from the buy with prime is that they introduced you know, or they talked how they introduced reviews from Amazon so that you can display your Amazon reviews on your website at no additional costs, and they said that early results show that merchants who who added the Amazon reviews to their website have 38% increase in shopper conversion. So this is especially probably for those who are newer, have new websites and have zero reviews on there. And then another thing that they announced was buy with prime assist, which gives merchants the option to offer 24, seven cost post order customer service through Amazon at no additional costs, using a real time chat feature. So, yeah, this was definitely interesting to see.   Bradley Sutton: You know, I've never used by with prime and never even had a my own. I mean like not in like 20 years I haven't had my own website as far as my Amazon, my Amazon products go. So what about the rest of you? Has anybody of you guys out there use by with primer ready for, like, maybe WooCommerce or another website? Be curious to see. You know what you guys, you know how that's worked out for you.   Bradley Sutton: Another couple announcements, just really quick. Let me just speed through these last few ones here. There's the potential sales lift. You guys ever seen that from the dashboard? It's like where, where Amazon will tell you hey, you know, if you use a plus content, you know you can make a gazillion dollars. You know, I kind of like make light of that. But yeah, I think a lot of us were like this is such nonsense. You know, like I remember one time it was something yeah, put a plus content in your pink coffin shelf and you'll increase sales by $2,000 a month. I'm like, what are you talking about, bro? Like there's, there's not even $2,000 of pink coffin shelves sold in a year. That's like wrong. So that's probably why a lot of us wanted to even hide some of those widgets on the seller central dashboard back in the day, which is what they you know they we talked about earlier today.   Bradley Sutton: But let me tell you guys it's improved. You know I'm not. I'm not again, I'm not trying to throw Amazon on the bus. I just want to show you guys that Amazon actually gets better. I actually haven't looked at those in a long time and I'm looking at it live right now where it says under growth opportunities. Hey, this coffin egg tray says if you increase improved conversion by create, creating a plus content, you could have an $88 sales lift over 90 days. That sounds reasonable. That's like four egg trays. You know, if I put a plus content could I increase sales by four, eight trays. That sounds very reasonable, but then again it's not fully completely working. That coffin bath tray test I said if I put a plus content I'm going to get an $8 and 66 cents sales lift. I'm like this is a $4 product. How am I going to get an $8 sales lift? It's not perfect, but, guys, it is getting better. Don't just overlook it. If you're like me, who are just like, oh, I'm just going to ignore all of those because they're so far off, I think their algorithms that they have working on it is definitely a lot better. So so make sure to check that out. And anyways, the announcement that they had was this potential sales lift is going to be available for a lot other kind of things like manager experiments and 20 other catalog attributes. So 20 other things they're going to be. They're going to give you a little thing that says, hey, if you do this to each of those 20 things, you could get this kind of sales lift.   Bradley Sutton: Another cool feature they talked about was view in your room table top. So you guys ever seen the helium 10 coffin shelf or other products like furniture? And then it has a button where it says view in your room, but it puts it on the floor right, like it's mainly for like chairs and tables and stuff, and then you can kind of it's using augmented reality for your product and then you can just kind of like with your mobile app see how that product looks in the room. Well, now they said, hey, this is going to, we're rolling out the room table top feature. So instead of just looking how it would look on the floor, you're like who's going to put a coffin shelf on the floor? You know it's going to be like hey, put it on this countertop or this egg tray, how does it look in your kitchen island, and things like that. So this is coming soon.   Bradley Sutton: So in the past it wasn't something you opted into or or could ask Amazon to give you, like the helium 10 coffin shelf. We didn't do anything special. It just all of a sudden started showing up with that augmented reality. So I have a feeling based on what they were saying at Accelerate that there's now going to be some kind of controllability you're going to have where you can potentially opt into the program or send them like 3D images or something and get into there. So we actually have some follow up meetings with that department to try and see, you know, how maybe helium 10 can can help in this. But that would be pretty cool for those of you who have products that go on table tops or counter tops or things like that, being able to integrate augmented reality for your customers who have the mobile app.   Bradley Sutton: Another thing honestly I was not excited about it all, it's actually kind of scared a little bit was ships in product packaging program. All right, so it's allowing you the opportunity, it says, to ship customer orders in your own custom branded packaging without additional Amazon boxes. All right, now this could go both ways. Already, this happens sometimes and actually, you know, some of us are kind of upset when it might happen, like if you guys have like some super fancy gift box or like some nice, really nice packaging, you don't want Amazon just taking that and then slapping all their logos and and or their logos, but they're they're, you know, slapping their shipping labels and stuff on it and then having that really nice package getting all scuffed up and then it's like all torn up by the time it gets the customer. And so you know like right now I'm actually doing a brand new coffin shelf package where it's like a box, shape like a coffin and it's going to be like a super nice giftable thing. But if Amazon ships in that box, you know that kind of sucks. Now, where this is better is you know Amazon might be charging you extra shipping because it has to use extra packaging.   Bradley Sutton: So this, this article or this announcement where they talk about how, because of the ability now to ship in your own packaging in the future, maybe it's going to save you in the fulfillment costs. But I don't know for me. I most of my products. I don't want that. There's a couple of products I have that that I don't really care about the packaging much, and you know they could go ahead and slap a shipping label on there. I don't care, especially if it's safe. Saves me some money. But I'm I'm curious what you, which boat are you guys in? You know would you say, yes, I want to save, you know, a few cents on packaging and you know it also saves the environment too, you know, because you're not having to to have all this cardboard you know around, or are you like, do you have fancy packaging and you and you want that put into an outside box? Anyways, this new feature is going to have enrollment in January of 2024. So you got a couple of months to think about which which boat you would be in. They also announced the sustainability solutions hub. You can look up there. You know, on seller central, if you want more news I'm running out of time here and the last one that they announced, again that you can check in seller central, was a climate some new climate pledge friendly badges that are coming, and it's interesting. Their data shows that if you have that climate pledge friendly badge, it actually drives 10% more page views than if you didn't have it. So it might be something you might want to get onto your listing, and they're going to have three new ways in order to, you know, to have that. So there you have it, guys.   Bradley Sutton: I'm sure I missed a couple of things here, but but that was probably the majority of what they talked about that this year's Amazon Accelerate it was my first time there had a blast. I couldn't even go to all the parties because I was working in the nights. I had a whole bunch of like webinars I was doing in China and things like that. So I got I missed all the parties but I heard it was really great. There was like two, 3000 people, you know, really high quality. They had the DJ from the Beastie Boys was like the DJ for the events and and they had Tracy Ross there as a celebrity, you know speaker. Really really cool event, really well organized. You know what, what you would expect from Amazon. So, guys, next year I'm sure it's going to be back again Highly, highly, highly recommend going there because you know Amazon, there's nothing like it, you know where. I mean, I didn't even do all of it and I probably would drop 30 different news items there that they launched. So it's a one set, once a year event and definitely go.   Bradley Sutton: It's not the only event that Amazon does. Amazon does a little bit higher end kind of more advertising. So it's really the event that's happening in October, october 20, I want to say 25th and 26th or 24th to 26th in New York City. It's called Amazon Unboxed. So you want a similar event but more focused maybe on on advertising and if you're you know bigger sellers, make sure to register for that one. Amazon Unboxed, ilium 10 and Pacview definitely will have teams there, so be great to to meet you guys in person at that one. I hope you enjoyed this recap. If you guys want follow-ups for me to talk about any of these announcements a little bit more in depth, make sure to reach out. Don't forget to follow on Instagram Sirius Sellers podcast. See you guys in the next episode.

This time around I chat with Amy the Amazonian, famed twitch streamer and arena breaker! She's incredibly cool and I was thrilled to get to chat with her as a long time fan of her crazy arena hacks. This show was sponsored by CoolStuffInc, Quiver, and Archidekt!

Elisabeth Elliot was a young missionary in Ecuador when members of a remote Amazonian indigenous people group killed her husband Jim and his four colleagues. And yet, she stayed in the jungle with her young daughter to minister to the very people who had thrown the spears, demonstrating the power of Christ’s forgiveness. On Tuesday's Mornings with Eric and Brigitte, author Ellen Vaughn provides a unique and intimate point of view into how Elisabeth Elliot navigated the world and continued to contemplate what she coined as the "impenetrable mystery" of the relationship between God's will and human choices.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Have you ever wondered about the intersections of poverty, colonialism, and access to healthcare? Join us for a rich conversation with Dr. Eric Wetzel, a professor of biology at Wabash College and a dedicated parasitologist, as he unravels these complex issues through his lens of neglected tropical diseases. With a unique teaching approach that illuminates life and healthcare access in impoverished communities, Dr. Wetzel sparks 'light bulb' moments that challenge and reshape our understanding of global health.From the picturesque landscape of Pennsylvania to the Amazonian rainforest of Peru, Dr. Wetzel walks us through his captivating life journey. He shares his work in invertebrate zoology, his immersive student trips that expose the harsh realities of lack of healthcare access in remote communities, and the Wabash Global Health Initiative which he leads. Together we explore the fascinating world of parasites and their role in global health. Dr. Wetzel also dives into the concept of 'neglected tropical diseases', coined by Dr. Peter Hotez, and their ties to the Millennium Development Goals. The trip doesn't end there. Join us as we traverse the streets of a Lima slum community, offering a unique perspective of mutual learning with the locals. We discuss the real-life risks and challenges faced by these communities and the profound impact it has on the students' assumptions about global health. So, whether you're a global health enthusiast or simply intrigued by the world of parasites, this episode promises to leave you with insights that broaden your perspective on health and poverty. Don't miss out on this enlightening journey with Dr. Eric Wetzel!__________________Support the PodcastClick here to send in a one time or monthly donationJoin the Podcast Mailing list: https://www.globalhealthpursuit.com/mailing-list Make sure to follow Hetal on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook!Email her at hetal@globalhealthpursuit.com.Thank you so much. We deeply appreciate you.

This week, Kelley tells the prequel to Maggie Lena Walker's story and covers Elizabeth Van Lew, an abolitionist who worked as  a spy for the Union during the American Civil War. Despite her loyalty as a patriot, she would pay for her actions for the rest of her life. Then, Emily covers the Scythians, the real-life inspiration for the legends of Amazonian warriors! Grab your sword and kick down a confederate statue because we're wining about herstory!Support the show

Welcome to another episode of Outrage + Optimism, where we examine issues at the forefront of the climate crisis, interview change-makers, and transform our anger into productive dialogue about building a sustainable future. Back together following our break, the hosts discuss the devastating extreme weather events that have been happening across the world and they encourage us to think about how these changes within the global climate are impacting all our environments. Looking ahead to the next few months, we'll cover the major climate events, all requiring critical decisions to be made in this important decade. They also explore some positive news stories that have happened over the last month, including the vote by Ecuadorians to halt oil drilling in the biodiverse Amazonian national park. We have a fascinating and passionate interview from the incredible Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, he gives us an honest account of what he feels are the top political obstacles to climate solutions. Music this week comes from the very talented Hilang Child, a British-Indonesian alt-pop artist, songwriter and drummer from South London!   NOTES AND RESOURCES   Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore Twitter | Instagram | Facebook Watch AG's New TED Talk - ‘What The Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You To Know'   -   Hilang Child Website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube   Pre-Save or Stream the new single - ‘Lapwings' Extra Listening - ‘Seimbang​/​Balance'   -   Learn more about the Paris Agreement.   It's official, we're a TED Audio Collective Podcast - Proof! Check out more podcasts from The TED Audio Collective   Please follow us on social media! Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn

KCSB's Zoha Malik interviews UCSB anthropology professor Michael Gurven about his research regarding the impact of COVID-19 on the remote, small-scale Tsimane indigenous group in Bolivia, and how such research could help better understand how to equip such groups with strategies and healthcare in the future.

What constitutes a life well lived? When Darcy Gaechter turned 35, her life was everything she had hoped it would be. She had a loving partner, a rewarding job as a kayak expedition guide, and hard-won fame within the competitive world of whitewater kayaking. By her own measures, she was living the dream. And yet, many of her friends and family looked at her life and saw only what she did not have - a husband, children, a traditional high-paying office job. Listening to them, doubts began to take root in Darcy's mind. Maybe, she decided, it was finally time to surrender her wild lifestyle and join the more stable - if not more boring - upper crusts of well-behaved society. But before she could do that...she had one final adventure to take. It was an adventure so ambitious, so wild and deadly and unprecedented, that she believed it could cure her of her seemingly bottomless desire to tackle these quests, to chase the next horizon. And thus, mere months after her birthday, she found herself dipping her paddle into the frigid source waters of the Amazon, ready to kayak through its innumerable dangers - natural and manmade - in the following months. Whether you're interested in kayaking, Amazonian culture and indigenous history, the interpersonal dynamics of expeditions, or all of the above, this episode is sure to engross you - from beginning to end. FIND DARCY Follow Darcy on Instagram @darcygaechter, and hear about her latest projects, events, and more on her website. The book she wrote about her Amazonian adventure is called Amazon Woman: Facing Fears, Chasing Dreams, and a Quest to Kayak the Longest River From Source to Sea. Get your copy today online or at your favorite bookstore (we especially love local bookstores)! Want to kayak with Darcy? Book a trip with her adventure company, Small World Adventures, and enjoy some of the best paddling Ecuador has to offer. SOCIAL Share the show with your friends! Subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening, follow @armchairexplorerpodcast on Instagram and Facebook, check out Armchair Explorer's website, and learn more about APT Podcast Studios on their website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Buddy Levy's River of Darkness: The Adventure of Francisco Orellana - Explore the captivating journey of Francisco Orellana in Buddy's book "River of Darkness," a remarkable tale that reads like fantasy fiction but is undeniably true. Join us as we delve into the odyssey of Orellana, which traces the monumental first European voyage across the vast Amazon basin. With limited provisions, Orellana and his men courageously ventured over 1500 miles into uncharted territory, chronicled by Gaspar de Carvajal. Discover the legacy Orellana left in the Amazon basin, including naming the Rio Negra, and his interactions, often tumultuous, with numerous native tribes, including Amazonian women. The richness of details is astounding, too extensive to cover here—so we urge you to get your hands on "River of Darkness." Don't miss Buddy Levy's engaging conversation with Pete A Turner on the Break It Down Show, available now on your favorite podcast platform. And for an in-depth exploration, grab your copy of "River of Darkness" on Amazon at   Please support the Break It Down Show by doing a monthly subscription to the show  All of the money you invest goes directly to supporting the show!   For the  of this episode head to  Haiku Voyage through the wild, Orellana's truth unveiled, Amazon's secrets.   ​​Similar episodes: Lord Nelson  Bryan Fuller  Rico Alvies  Join us in supporting Save the Brave as we battle PTSD.  Executive Producer/Host: Pete A Turner  Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev  Writer: Dragan Petrovski  The Break It Down Show is your favorite best, new podcast, featuring 5 episodes a week with great interviews highlighting world-class guests from a wide array of shows.

Trump's bond set $200,000 in efforts to overturn Georgia election. Store owner murdered over Pride flag she flew in front of her store. Ecuadorians vote to stop oil drilling in Amazonian national park. You can subscribe to Five Minute News with Anthony Davis on YouTube, with your preferred podcast app, ask your smart speaker, or enable Five Minute News as your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing skill.  Join our Patreon for bonus content, commentary and more, at patreon.com/fiveminutenews Subscribe to our YouTube channel membership www.youtube.com/fiveminutenews Five Minute News is an Evergreen Podcast, covering politics, inequality, health and climate - delivering independent, unbiased and essential world news, daily.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Hacks to Supercharge Your Amazon Business with Former Amazonian John Derkits Episode Summary: In this highly informative episode, Adam Heist returns to the show and sits down with former Amazon employee and e-commerce expert John Derkits. They dive deep into 15 hacks that every Amazon seller should know. From leveraging Amazon Posts to optimizing for mobile shoppers, these strategies are designed to elevate your Amazon business to new heights. About the Guest: John Derkits - *Previous Roles*: Worked at Amazon and for a major aggregator. - *Entrepreneur*: Built his own brands and has helped others exit their businesses successfully. - *Persona*: Known for being highly intelligent and an all-around great human being. Key Hacks & Tips: HACK 1: Amazon Posts Infinite Content Harness the power of Amazon Posts to create infinite content and improve your brand's visibility. HACK 2: Stack Amazon Influencers + Attribution for Greater Bonuses Combine influencer partnerships with Amazon Attribution to maximize bonuses and optimize ROI. HACK 3: ShipmentmakerPro's FC Scorecard Avoid stock-outs by steering clear of Fulfillment Centers (FCs) with backlogs, using ShipmentmakerPro's FC Scorecard. HACK 4: Activate Instock Headstart to Improve Availability Ensure your product is always available by activating Instock Headstart. HACK 5: SQP Shipping Speed Data Identify the best ASINs for PEDs by analyzing SQP Shipping Speed Data. (Discussed in last week's newsletter) HACK 6: Recover the Buy Box Determine the exact price point necessary to regain control over the Buy Box. (Also explained in a previous newsletter) HACK 7: Image Ratio for Mobile Shoppers If the majority of your customers are mobile shoppers, adjust your main image to a 5:6 ratio for better visibility. HACK 8: MobileCards Chrome Extension Preview your mobile shopping experience by using the MobileCards Chrome extension. HACK 9: Use Oxolo for Quick Video Creation Enhance your Product Detail Pages (PDPs) with videos created in less than 15 minutes using Oxolo. This can lead to a 9.7% lift in sales. HACK 10: FBA Damaged Opt-Out Prevent Amazon from selling damaged inventory and affecting your reviews by opting out of Warehouse Deals. HACK 11: Earn List-Price Strike-Through Get a 3.9% sales lift by setting your Standard price as your List price and running a 24-hour coupon at 50% off. HACK 12: Product Lifecycle Support Cut your return rate by 50% or more with Product Lifecycle Support. (PRO TIP: Use OnSite Support for this service) HACK 13: Increase PPC Ad Spend Limit Extend your payback period by 30+ days by increasing your PPC ad spend limit. HACK 14: LandingCube for Customer Data Use LandingCube to qualify and tag traffic while capturing customer emails. HACK 15: Inventory Funding Options Access more affordable inventory funding through SBA 7a Express Lines of Credit and Securities-Backed Loans.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who represented Al Gore in his legal challenge to the 2000 presidential election, wrote this week that the only difference between then and now is the candidate's name is Donald Trump. 5) Latest indictment of Donald Trump described as legal equivalent of Jackson Pollock painting—random paint splashes on canvas; 4) House Republicans ask National Archives for all records for which President Biden used an alias during Obama administration; 3) State of Hawaii and power company warned of fire danger in West Maui before deadly blaze; 2) Excess deaths among white collar Americans began to surge in late 2021—what can possibly be the cause?; 1) Villagers in remote Amazonian jungle claim they're being terrorized by aliens. FOLLOW US! Twitter X: @SkyWatch_TV YouTube: @SkyWatchTVnow @SimplyHIS @FiveInTen Rumble: @SkyWatchTV Facebook: @SkyWatchTV @SimplyHIS @EdensEssentials Instagram: @SkyWatchTV @SimplyHisShow @EdensEssentialsUSA TikTok: @SkyWatchTV @SimplyHisShow @EdensEssentials SkyWatchTV.com | SkyWatchTVStore.com | EdensEssentials.com | WhisperingPoniesRanch.com

Thirty percent of patients with treatment-resistant depression attempt suicide at least once during their lifetime. Can a psychoactive tea brew from the Amazon help? Dr. Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, a neuroscientist and research engineer in Brazil, reveals the results of a randomized controlled trial examining the impact of Ayahuasca on suicidality. Dr. Fontes and her team have conducted a number of studies testing the effects of this Amazonian brew on humans using FMRI techniques. She explains exactly what is happening to the brain when someone takes Ayahuasca, discussing everything from the default mode network to Shannon entropy to neurotrophic factors. Finally, she shares why this medicine may be a lifesaver for people with treatment-resistant depression. Dr. Fontes' papers: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=WmhroXIAAAAJ&hl=en

As those of Hindu persuasion and background increasingly take up the reins of governments in the post-Christian West, will they bring Sati back-- Persecutions are stepping up in Hindu and Muslim countries, and Hindus and Muslims are increasingly involved in US and UK politics. The worldview switch will have consequences in the world. What is the big lesson for the remnant of Christians remaining in the West-- --This program includes- --1. The World View in 5 Minutes with Adam McManus -Four young kids survived Amazonian plane crash, Did Hawaii's pro-abortion legislation anger God--, Skittles pushes sexual perversion- --2. Generations with Kevin Swanson

On today's episode: Genes that pose risks in advanced age may show benefits when we're younger. We all want to know if social media is making our uncles more polarized in our echo chambers… well scientists are figuring it out! Probably. All that and more today on All Around Science... LINKS: SOURCES Alzheimer's gene associated with increased fertility in Amazonian women | ASU News Did Facebook fuel political polarization during the 2020 election? It's complicated. US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study THEME MUSIC by Andrew Allen https://twitter.com/KEYSwithSOUL http://andrewallenmusic.com

It's so much more than “climate change”.The most biodiverse regions of the world are under threat. Beyond the models, the data, the papers and the Twitter spats, the world's ecosystems are collapsing under the pressure of mankind's interference, extraction and exploitation. The Amazon, the world's largest tropical rainforest, has been mined, plumbed and sawed for its resources to the extent it may soon become a carbon emitter as its systems begin to decay. Protecting it is vital in the fight against our own destruction. Paul Rosolie set out to do just that when he was 18 years old.Paul is a conservationist, writer, speaker, filmmaker, protecting 55000+ acres of Amazonian habitat and wildlife Director of JungleKeepers and Tamandua Expeditions. His memoir, Mother of God, documents his years spent deep in the jungle fighting to save it. Paul joins me to discuss this and more. He reveals the gifts of the Amazon and the lessons to be learned from its inhabitants. He also explains the limitations of typical conservation efforts due to the pressures of our globalised financial system. Finally, he gives a vision for what conservation could be in the future—and a call to action for those who understand the depth of the emergency.Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis—and what to do about it. Support the project with a paid subscription. Get full access to Planet: Critical at www.planetcritical.com/subscribe

An Amazon Forest Summit in Brazil is bringing together leaders from Amazonian countries to address urgent protection measures for the rainforest and its people. Brazil's Minister for Environment is calling for evidence-based policies, as Indigenous tribes seek laws to ensure their survival.

Episode 150 of The Adventure Podcast features Nat Geo explorer, biologist, and conservationist, Dr Rosa Vásquez Espinoza. Rosa is of Peruvian-Andean and Amazonian descent, and grew up learning about traditional medicine from her grandmother in their backyard's "natural pharmacy". She now travels to the most extreme environments, from the Amazon Rainforest to Yellowstone's acidic, boiling waters, to discover new antibiotics, stingless bees, and green chemistry tools. Rosa speaks passionately and intelligently about the importance of indigenous knowledge and involving local communities in scientific research. This episode is an insight into the incredibly exciting, varied and critical world of frontline field science. It's unlike any other episode we've done. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/the-adventure-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cattle Ranching, Palm Oil Plantations and Other Agrobusiness Drivers of Deforestation, Fraud and Violence Against Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples, Bolsonaro's Crimes and the Need for Due Diligence and Accountability in Financing and Supply ChainsDiscussion with Gabriella Bianchini on the importance of the Amazonian biome to the local environment and our planet and the current threats to the rainforest. We discuss the history of deforestation in Brazil's Amazon, including the ecocide under Bolsonaro and the current agrobusiness drivers, with a focus on cattle ranching and palm oil plantations. We also discuss land grabbing and violence against local communities and indigenous peoples and threats to and murder of environmental defenders. Additionally, we discuss how companies and financial institutions in the Global North are trading with and financing Amazonian destruction and violent land grabbing and legislative efforts to require accountability for failing to undertake due diligence in supply chains and investment. For More Info:https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/amazon-palm/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/violence-torture-and-threats-continue-allege-land-and-environmental-defenders-amazonian-brazil-palm-oil-regionefenders-amazonian-brazil-palm-oil-region/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/open-letter-to-the-brazilian-minister-of-foreign-affairs-on-escazu-agreement/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/defending-the-defenders-why-brazil-must-prioritize-ratification-of-the-escazu-agreement/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/new-documentary-short-looks-at-a-communitys-struggle-for-land-in-the-brazilian-amazon/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/big-beef-watch/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/press-releases/new-tracking-tool-launched-monitor-amazon-deforestation-meatpacker-supply-chain/https://www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/who-needs-climate-justice-in-brazil/https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/17/rainforest-mafias/how-violence-and-impunity-fuel-deforestation-brazils-amazonhttps://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/brazil-criminal-networks-target-rainforest-defendershttps://theconversation.com/historic-amazon-rainforest-fires-threaten-climate-and-raise-risk-of-new-diseases-146720https://films.nationalgeographic.com/the-territoryhttp://climatecasechart.com/non-us-case/the-planet-v-bolsonaro/

The Lost City of Z by David Grann. It's an adventure story for many ages. This tells the story of an English General paving the way for Amazonian exploration.The first of my book reviews on the podcast. It has taken me months and months to gain the courage to record this. I know it is not my best work but I hope you find one nugget of joy out of this episode.Enjoy and come back for more!10/10 I love deathly adventure!Instagram: @ty_casey102LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ty-casey-0aab14a7/

Trauma, Crisis and Brokenness are part of the human experience and as pastors, disciple-makers and Bible teachers we need to be aware of how God's Word and God's Spirit empower us to listen well, speak carefully and actually HELP people. Krista Fox speaks about her experience as a missionary in in the Amazonian region of Brazil in Belem, Para working with individuals involved in prostitution, sex trafficking and refugees. She is the founder of Applied Care for Trauma which partners with other organizations, churches, and mission fields to equip Christians to work with brokenness and trauma in their people. Krista is originally from Denver, CO where she served in ministry with their first church plant until they left for the mission field. She and her family, her husband Kyle of 21 years and their 2 sons, lived and served as missionaries in the Amazonian region of Brazil in Belem, Para for 8 years. She and her husband planted Calvary Chapel Belém where Krista also served as the women's ministry leader as well as developed and led the Proverbs 24:11 ministry (a ministry dedicated to individuals involved in human trafficking and prostitution). Krista and her family have currently transitioned from the missions field to Southern California.Krista has been involved in ministry for over 16 years. She has a masters degree in counseling and is currently pursuing her doctorate's degree in Counseling:Traumatology. Her heart's desire is to see the hurt healed and walking with the Lord. She is currently developing a new ministry, Applied Care for Trauma (ACT), which offers trainings and encouragement to churches/ministries who desire to counsel/discipline the hurting people in their care in a Biblical, practical and effective manner.Resources Mentioned: The White Umbrella : Walking with Survivors of Sex Trafficking - Mary Frances Bowley https://www.amazon.com/White-Umbrella-Walking-Survivors-Trafficking/dp/0802408591 Community-Based Psychological First Aid: A Practical Guide to Helping Individuals and Communities during Difficult Times - Gerard Jacobs https://www.amazon.co.uk/Community-Based-Psychological-First-Aid-Individuals-ebook/dp/B01GW5XP9OWhat NOT to say to a survivor of assault - Justin Holcomb “I know how you feel.”“I understand.”“You're lucky that ____________ didn't happen.”“It'll take some time, but you'll get over it.”“Why don't you tell me more details about what happened?”“Don't worry, it's going to be all right.”“Try to be strong.”“Out of tragedies good things happen.”“Time heals all wounds.”“It was God's will.”“You need to forgive and move on.”“Calm down and try to relax.”“You should get on with your life.” Visit https://www.netgrace.org/resources/what-to-say-to-a-victim for the complete article Recommended Expositors Collective Episodes: Justin Holcomb on preaching and care for those who have survived sexual assault: https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2022/12/20/preaching-gods-grace-to-the-disgraced-with-justin-holcomb Preaching Hope In Darkness - Karen Mason and Scott Gibson : https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2021/1/12/preaching-hope-in-darkness-karen-mason-and-scott-gibson Recommended Episodes: Riley Taylor's groundbreaking and exemplary message on homiletics: https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2018/8/14/episode-8-seven-lessons-on-homiletics Mike Neglia on Christ Centred Preaching: https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2022/5/10/preaching-gospel-centered-sermons-mike-neglia Jon Tyson : https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2021/12/21/theology-that-cannot-be-dismissed-power-that-cannot-be-denied-jon-tysonBryan Chapell: https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2022/9/13/pulpit-flourish-vs-pastoral-care-with-bryan-chappell Teaching the Bible to Real People - John Whittaker https://www.expositorscollective.com/podcast/2023/1/3/teaching-the-bible-to-real-people-with-john-whittakerFor information about our upcoming training events visit ExpositorsCollective.com The Expositors Collective podcast is part of the CGNMedia, Working together to proclaim the Gospel, make disciples, and plant churches. For more content like this, visit https://cgnmedia.org/Join our private Facebook group to continue the conversation: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ExpositorsCollective

In this episode we explore the history of the breast. We'll unpick some myths about Amazonian warriors and supposed witches, before uncovering the complex power dynamics of wet nursing and breast-feeding culture. Gender and class collide with disablism when you dig into who breast fed their own child. And if that doesn't sound like enough we explore the strange things that were believed to come out of the nipples and what they were thought to indicate! Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up to date with our latest podcasts, videos and events. Subscribe here: https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/sign-our-heritage-newsletter Website: www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Credits Researcher and presenter: Laura Burgess has been a volunteer with RCPE Heritage since 2021 after completing her MA in History from UNC Charlotte. Editor and producer: Sarah E Hayward completed her PhD in Museums and Heritage Studies at Kingston University London in 2023. She has been a volunteer with RCPE Heritage since 2021. She has a passion for archival research and she loves to explore creative ways to assemble and share the hidden stories she uncovers. Researcher and presenter: Olivia Howarth is a volunteer with RCPE Heritage, a recently qualified archivist, heritage enthusiast and self-proclaimed lifetime nerd with an interest in medical history. Historical clip: Frank Rowntree compilation recordings. Part 1, Track 14. Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In the first half-hour, Tiokasin speaks with Elizabeth Woody (Warm Springs, Yakama and Diné), executive director since 2018 of The Museum at Warm Springs in Warm Springs, Oregon. The Museum opened its doors to the public on March 14, 1993 and is celebrating its 30th anniversary throughout 2023 with special exhibits, public programs and events. Built to Smithsonian Institution professional standards, The Museum's mission is to preserve, advance and share the traditions, cultural and artistic heritage of The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon. Elizabeth is an internationally renowned poet, author, essayist and visual artist. She is also an educator, mentor, collaborator and community leader. In 2016, Elizabeth became the first Native American to be named Oregon's Poet Laureate. Find out more about The Museum at Warm Springs at museumatwarmsprings.org In the second half-hour, Tiokasin talks with Charles Lyons and Christian Poirier about Charles' July 11, 2023 article for the environmental news site Mongabay, titled “Six months on, the Yanomami crisis continues amid rising violence.” The article was produced with funding from Earth Journalism Network. Charles, who is based in Rio de Janeiro, is a multimedia journalist and filmmaker. He is currently making a documentary film about former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. He is senior consultant for Amazon Aid Foundation. Last year, Charles produced coverage of the 2022 Brazilian election for PBS NewsHour, which included two long-form reports –– one on deforestation in the Amazon; the other on Indigenous rights. Prior to that, he received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to produce and edit coverage of the pandemic in Brazil, also for PBS NewsHour. He is currently writing a series of articles on illegal gold mining in Amazonian countries for Mongabay. Christian Poirier is a senior member of Amazon Watch's team. Having coordinated the Brazil Program since 2009, Christian helped lead international solidarity campaigns to halt the construction of large Amazon dams and to call on the global private sector to cease its complicity in environmental destruction and human rights abuses in the Amazon. He has more than 20 years of experience in the fields of international development and advocacy, focusing on environmental, agrarian, and social justice issues. Read Charles' article at https://bit.ly/43wEXJ8 Production Credits: Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Lakota), Host and Executive Producer Liz Hill (Red Lake Ojibwe), Producer Karen Ramirez (Mayan), Studio Engineer, Radio Kingston Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Audio Editor Kevin Richardson, Podcast Editor Music Selections: 1. Song Title: Tahi Roots Mix (First Voices Radio Theme Song) Artist: Moana and the Moa Hunters Album: Tahi (1993) Label: Southside Records (Australia and New Zealand) (00:00:22) 2. Song Title: Joy'All Artist: Jenny Lewis Album: Joy'All (2023) Label: Blue Note/Capitol (00:28:39) 3. Song Title: Mad World Artist: Michael Andrews feat. Gary Jules Album: Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets (2001) Label: Down Up Down Music (00:56:20) AKANTU INTELLIGENCE Visit Akantu Intelligence, an institute that Tiokasin founded with a mission of contextualizing original wisdom for troubled times. Go to https://akantuintelligence.org to find out more and consider joining his Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/Ghosthorse 

Join us for Men's Therapy Podcast Episode 1! I couldn't think of a better guest to have on than my friend and colleague Brad Wetzler. He's traveled the world from Amazonian jungles, Greenland's melting ice cap, the high-tech industrial parks of India, the Indonesian archipelago, and Star City, Russia's center for space travel. He comes on the show today to share his story of growth, healing, and belonging. Brad's Links: bradwetzler.com https://www.facebook.com/bradwetzlerwriter Instagram: @bradwetzler Twitter: @bradwetzler

Continuing his journey through X-Men continuity, Monte reads X-Men: Messiah Complex, a huge crossover X-Men event published from October 2007-January 2008 and involving four different X-books. This event marks a huge shift in X-Men continuity and is the climax of the events set in motion in the House of M in 2005.Next week we will all be back in a regular episode talking about Nubia: Real One, an alternative origin story for Amazonian queen & superhero Nubia.Monte's theme this season is best-selling superhero comics of all time. Veronica's theme is stories from the DC Young Adults graphic novel imprint.***Check out the inaugural crossover of the Hall of Pods, our new podcast network! We discuss Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness with The Fandom Optimists, Cape Corner, and True Believers: a Comics PoDCast! Find all of our links here. Email us at sjwcomicspodcast@gmail.com, or check out our social media at:https://twitter.com/sjwcomicscasthttps://www.instagram.com/sjwcomicscast/

原子彈之父奧本海默，為了終結戰爭，他必須測試毀滅性武器，做出撼動全人類的重要決定！克里斯多夫諾蘭編劇執導，席尼墨菲，麥特戴蒙，小勞勃道尼等眾星雲集，【奧本海默】7月21日大銀幕震撼登場，IMAX同步上映！ https://pse.is/54uu2y -- 《不斷網會客室》帶你挖掘網路世界下的運作原理和秘辛，從AI、去中心化、國際參與到全球網路治理，各種硬核科普冷知識，深入淺出娓娓道來。本節目由TWNIC台灣網路資訊中心和台灣資訊社會研究學會共同製作。 https://bit.ly/43r8Yde －－－－以上訊息由 SoundOn 動態廣告贊助商提供－－－－ Good afternoon, I'm _____ with today's episode of EZ News. **Tai-Ex opening ** The Tai-Ex opened down 25-points this morning from yesterday's close, at 16,737 on turnover of $4-billion N-T. The Tai-Ex plunged by more than 294-points on Thursday as investors await the outcome of a trip to China by U-S Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and amid concerns America's central bank will continue to hike interest rates this month. **About Time Technologies Offering Free Checks after Smartwatch Fire ** A local smartwatch manufacturer says it will compensate the family of a 10-year-old schoolboy who sustained second-degree and first-degree burns after the device he was wearing caught fire. According to New Taipei-based About Time Technologies, it will also offer the family free testing of all models in its Herowatch series. The company has also issued apologizes to customers for the incident and says it will have the device examined by a third party to determine the reason it caught fire, if the customer agrees to that. The statement comes after the smartwatch caught fire on June 30. The 10-year old now requires skin grafts (植皮). The National Communications Commission says it could order a recall of the battery used in the smartwatch pending an investigation. **Pakistan Death Toll Rises Due to Monsoon ** Officials in Pakistan say the death toll from two weeks of monsoon rains rose to at least 55 on Thursday after at least 12 people died in weather-related incidents. The eastern city of Lahore had a record-breaking downpour the previous day, flooding many streets and disrupting normal life. Officials say since Wednesday, 19 people have died in the city due to collapsing roofs and electrocution (觸電死亡). Heavy rain also continued to lash Pakistan, overflowing the main rivers in the Punjab province, prompting the disaster management agency to be on high alert for fear of flash floods. **Twitter Threatens to Sue Meta Over Threads App ** Twitter has threatened (威脅) to sue rival Meta over its new Threads app, according to multiple media reports. Ira Spitzer reports. **Brazil Amazon Deforestation Drops ** New government data indicates that deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest dropped 33.6% in the first six months of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's term. From January to June the rainforest had alerts for possible deforestation covering 2,650 square kilometers, down from 4,000 square kilometers during the same period last year under former President Jair Bolsonaro. This year's data includes a 41% plunge in alerts for June, which marks the start of the dry season when deforestation tends to (傾向於) jump. Lula campaigned last year with pledges to rein in illegal logging and undo the environmental devastation under former President Jair Bolsonaro. Next month, Lula will preside over a meeting in Belem, bringing together heads-of-state from all Amazonian nations to discuss means to effectively cooperate in the challenging region. Lula has promised to end net deforestation in Brazil's Amazon by 2030. That was the I.C.R.T. news, Check in again tomorrow for our simplified version of the news, uploaded every day in the afternoon. Enjoy the rest of your day, I'm _____.

Proverbs 1:20-33 “Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesman to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it. The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.” J.I. Packer, Knowing God.  Proverbs 3:5–8 (ESV) — 5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. 7 Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. 8 It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones. + Don't be Ignorant + Don't be Idle + Don't be Irate Proverbs 19:3 (ESV) — 3 When a man's folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord.

 HEALTH NEWS   People who consume curry live longer Effect of Vitamin E Supplementation on Chronic Insomnia Disorder in Postmenopausal Women  Losing a parent early in life impacts a person's immune system as they age, study finds Energy drinks cause insomnia, nervousness in athletes Acai and brain health: Has study unlocked Amazonian fruit's neuroprotective effects? Online cognitive training not effective in reducing ADHD symptoms, finds major review  

Danniele Miller is the Program Manager for Daughters for Earth, a campaign and fund that aims to inspire all women to engage in climate change action by mobilizing $100 million for on the ground, women-led efforts to protect and restore the Earth. Her passion for the environment is deeply influenced by the many women who paved the way to build a more sustainable world before her. Her past experience ranges from managing composting operations at a campus farm to local climate grassroots advocacy, and fundraising. She is a senior fellow through the Environmental Leadership Program and holds a B.S. in Environmental Science from Wilson College and a Masters in Environmental Law & Policy from Vermont Law School. Danniele currently resides in the Washington D.C. metro area with her husband and their two rescue dogs. In her spare time, she loves horseback riding, hiking in the mountains, art, and gardening. UPDATES: Daughters for Earth passed its one-year anniversary since launching in March 2023. In just one year, Daughters granted $1.4M to nearly 60 women-powered projects that are protecting and restoring the Earth in 28 countries and the Arctic. You can explore the projects, which range from women protecting the Amazonian rainforest to rewilding college campuses, here. Additionally, Daughters for Earth recently launched their inaugural Wise Daughters Council, an independent group of women from around the world to guide our philanthropic giving in an inclusive and just way, leading up to our next round of funding in fall 2023. To stay updated on more news and events from Daughters for Earth, you can join their newsletter here. To learn more about Danniele Miller and Daughters for Earth: Website: https://daughtersforearth.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daughtersforearth/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Daughters4Earth Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daughters4earth/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daughters4earth/

Mezzo-soprano, Lore Lixenberg and composer, Karen Power team up with Amazonian birds and Namib Desert critters for a sonic adventure in Language, Land, Sea.

That four children managed to survive for 40 days in the Amazonian jungle is an astonishment that we'll be working through for years to come. Unsurprisingly, search efforts spared no expense in terms of expertise and technology, even going so far as to enlist the help of local shamans. In this episode, we explore the persistent theme of the occult in both Scripture and contemporary culture.  

Episode - 45 - Would you eat a Mushroom in cyberspace, with In this mind-expanding episode, join us as we delve into the fascinating intersection of AI, virtual reality, and psychedelic cyber alchemy. Our guest, a cyber alchemist and explorer of cyberspace, takes us on a thought-provoking adventure through the realms of consciousness and technology. The conversation kicks off with a deep dive into the power of alchemical self-portraits and their connection to the inner child. Discover how the guest's artwork serves as a gateway to uncovering hidden elements of the subconscious mind. We explore the symbology and evolution of these self-portraits, showcasing their transformative impact on personal growth. Next, we explore the concept of a virtual psychonaut community, symbolized by the cyber mushroom. Learn how this platform enables individuals to share their psychedelic experiences and trip reports, fostering a sense of connection and exploration within the virtual realm. The dialogue then shifts to the fusion of AI and virtual reality creation. Discover the guest's innovative approach to using artificial intelligence as a cyber alchemical tool. We explore how AI-driven technologies can generate immersive virtual reality worlds, paving the way for shared trips and deep explorations of the mind. The conversation takes an intriguing turn as we explore the common flood myth present in different cultures. Uncover the shared narratives found in Amazonian shamanism, Egyptian pyramids, and Abrahamic religions, shedding light on humanity's collective consciousness and the lessons embedded in these myths. Prepare to be captivated by an exploration of the evolutionary impact of psychedelics. Drawing inspiration from Terrence McKenna's Stone Age theory, we discuss how psychedelics have the potential to unlock untapped potential in the human brain, fostering greater intelligence and expanding consciousness. The mind-body connection takes center stage as we delve into the profound relationship between our physical and mental states. From hay fever remedies to intuitive knowledge retrieval, we explore the mysterious ways in which the body communicates with the mind and the possibilities for further exploration and understanding. Look ahead to the future of cyber culture as our guest shares insights into the evolution of consciousness and the rise of cyber activism. Discover their vision for the next five to ten years, including the self-sustaining business model for cybermushroom and the exciting upcoming appearances at festivals and panel discussions. Join us on this mind-bending episode as we navigate the uncharted territories of AI, virtual reality, and psychedelic cyber alchemy. Prepare to question your perception of reality and contemplate the profound impact of technology on our collective consciousness. --------- EPISODE CHAPTERS --------- (0:00:03) - Psychedelic Cyber Alchemy and Psychological Tasks (0:15:31) - From Art to Cyber Worlds (0:27:16) - Virtual Reality and Cyber-Delics (0:40:43) - Pyramids and Technology's Future (0:53:22) - Nature, Knowledge, Psychedelics (1:02:28) - Exploring Telepathy, Technology, and Consciousness (1:12:35) - AI's Impact on Employment and Life (1:16:14) - The Future of AI and Reality (1:24:02) - Weekly Show Wrap-Up --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ryan-john-hewitt/message

Former President Donald Trump has been indicted on 37 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act - Wayne Resnick accompanies Bill to unpack everything we know. Then, four Columbian siblings survived in the Amazon Jungle for six weeks following the crashing of a plane they were on, and the story is simply remarkable.

  The Show Notes   Music is a f*!@ing sacred space Intro June 10th rehearsals Interesting Fauna      - Scinax pyroinguinis, a new Amazonian frog species Religious Moron of the Week      - Rachel Campos-Duffy Damian Handzy's Facts That'll Fuck Y'up      - Churches, Washington, Museums, more… Tell Me Something Good      - Max Kolomatsky's Flyer Hacking Show close  Mentioned in the Show  Scinax pyroinguinis Saturday, June 10th – George Hrab Band Live in the Garden Bethlehem Rose Garden, 6:00 – 8:30pm Not A Con!Nov. 3 at 10am – Nov. 4 11:30 pm https://georgehrab.hearnow.com https://georgehrab.bandcamp.com ...................................  SUBSCRIBE! You can sign up at the Geologic Podcast page or at Subscriber.GeorgeHrab.com where you can learn more about the perks of being a Geologist or a Geographer. If you've already subscribed, stop by Subscriber.GeorgeHrab.com to check out the archived content which we at the Geologic Universe are rolling out in phases. As always, thank you so much for your support! You make the ship go. ................................... Sign up for the mailing list: Write to Geo! A reminder that the portal to the Geologic Universe is at GeorgeHrab.com. Thanks to Joseph Kolasinski, our webmaster. Check out Geo's wiki page, thanks to Tim Farley. Have a comment on the show, a Religious Moron tip, or a question for Ask George? Drop George a line and write to Geo's Mom, too!

Jill Esbaum is on the #ReadingWithYourKids #Podcast to celebrate her hilarious and factual introduction to the Amazonian hoatzin—or stinkbird—and its surprising, incredible superpower. (Spoiler alert: it's more than just the stink!)  Stinkbirds have a lot in common with other birds: they have feathers, wings, and a beak. But they also have . . . a hidden superpower! This proud stinkbird papa would love to tell you more about it—if his adorable chick would quit interrupting him! You will love learning about the Stinkbird, and about Jill and her other books, on this episode of the podcast. Click Here To Visit Jill's Website - https://www.jillesbaum.com/  Click Here To Visit Our Website - www.readingwithyourkids.com 

Thanks to Alexandra and Pranav for their suggestions this week! Let's learn about manatees and sloths, including a surprising extinct sloth. Further reading: Sloths in the Water A West Indian manatee: A three-toed sloth: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Alexandra and Pranav, who wanted an episode about manatees. We'll also talk about another marine mammal, a weird extinct one you may never have heard of. The manatee is also called the sea cow, because it sort of slightly resembles a cow and it grazes on plants that grow underwater. It's a member of the order Sirenia, which includes the dugong, and sirenians are probably most closely related to the elephant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but there are a lot of physical similarities between the manatee and the elephant. Their teeth are very similar, for instance, even if the manatee doesn't grow tusks. The elephant has a pair of big chewing teeth on each side of its mouth that look more like the bottoms of running shoes than ordinary teeth. Every so many years, the four molars in an elephant's mouth start to get pushed out by four new molars. The new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth and start moving forward, pushing the old molars farther forward until they fall out. The manatee has this same type of tooth replacement, although its teeth aren't as gigantic as the elephant's teeth. The manatee also has hard ridged pads on the roof of its mouth that help it chew its food. Female manatees are larger than males on average, and a really big female manatee can grow over 15 feet long, or 4.6 meters. Most manatees are between 9 and 10 feet long, or a little less than 3 meters. Its body is elongated like a whale, but unlike a whale it's slow, usually only swimming about as fast as a human can swim. Its skin is gray or brown although often it has algae growing on it that helps camouflage it. The end of the manatee's tail looks like a rounded paddle, and it has front flippers but no rear limbs. Its face is rounded with a prehensile upper lip covered with bristly whiskers, which it uses to find and gather water plants. Every so often a manatee will eat a little fish, apparently on purpose. Since most herbivorous animals will eat meat every so often, this isn't unusual. Mostly, though, the manatee spends almost all of its time awake eating plants, often from the bottom of the waterway where it lives. It lives in shallow water and will use its flippers to walk itself along the bottom, and also uses its flippers to dig up plants. Its upper lip is divided in two like the upper lips of many animals, which you can see in a dog or cat as that little line connecting the bottom of the nose to the upper lip. In the manatee, though, both sides of the lips have a lot of muscles and can move independently. There are three species of manatee alive today: the West Indian manatee that lives in the Gulf of Mexico down to the eastern coast of northern South America, the Amazonian manatee that lives exclusively in fresh water in the Amazon basin, and the West African manatee that lives in brackish and fresh water. Sometimes the West Indian manatee will also move into river systems to find food. Back in episode 153 we talked about the Florida manatee, which is a subspecies of West Indian manatee. In the winter it mostly lives around Florida but in summer many individuals travel widely. It's sometimes found as far north as Massachusetts along the Atlantic coast, and as far west as Texas in the Gulf of Mexico, but despite its size, the manatee doesn't have a lot of blubber or fat to keep it warm. The farther away it travels from warm water, the more likely it is to die of cold. In the 1970s there were only a few hundred Florida manatees alive and it nearly went extinct. It was listed as an endangered species and after a lot of effort by a lot of different conservation groups,

The remarkable world of nature's hidden sounds and the way species communicate are being revealed by scientists using digital bioacoustics. Canadian scientist, Professor Karen Bakker, is an author and award winning researcher of digital innovation and environmental governance. A Rhodes Scholar with a PhD from Oxford University, she is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study. Her latest book is The Sounds of Life: how digital technology is bringing us closer to the worlds of animals and plants. The book looks at the work of thousands of researchers into non-human sounds using bio acoustics which Professor Bakker describes as a "planetary-scale hearing aid, enabling humans to record nature's sounds beyond the limits of human sensory capacities". She describes astonishing discoveries such as Amazonian sea turtles making 200 distinct sounds; bats remembering favors and holding grudges, and that tomatoes, tobacco and corn seedlings actually make noises.

Thanks to Richard from NC for suggesting Titanomyrma! Further reading: 'Giant' ant fossil raises questions about ancient Arctic migrations A fossilized queen Titanomyrma ant with a rufous hummingbird (stuffed) for scale: Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I'm your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a suggestion from Richard from North Carolina, who sent me an article about an extinct giant ant called Titanomyrma. This episode is short, but I think you'll find it interesting. We've talked about ants in previous episodes, most recently episode 185. Most ant colonies consist of a single queen ant who lays all the eggs for her colony, seasonally hatched males with wings who fly off as soon as they're grown, and worker ants. The worker ants are all female but don't lay eggs. Army ants have another caste, the soldier ant, which are much larger than the worker ants and have big heads and strong, sharp mandibles. In many species of ant, the worker ants are further divided into castes that are specialized for specific tasks. The biggest species of ant alive today is probably the giant Amazonian ant. The workers can grow over 1.2 inches long, or more than 3 cm, which is huge for an ant. It lives in South America in small colonies, usually containing less than 100 workers, and unlike most ants it doesn't have a queen. Instead, one of the workers mates with a male and lays eggs for the colony. The giant Amazonian ant can sting and its sting contains venom that causes intense pain for up to two days. Fortunately, you will probably never encounter these giant ants, and even if you do they're not very aggressive. Another contender for the biggest species of ant alive today is the Dorylus genus of army ants, also called driver ants, which we talked about in episode 185. It lives in Africa in colonies that have millions of members, and the queen is the largest ant known. A queen army ant can measure 2.4 inches long, or 63 millimeters, but worker ants are much smaller. Around 50 million years ago, giant ants related to modern driver ants lived in both Europe and North America. The genus is Titanomyrma and three species are known so far, found in Germany, England, Canada, and the American states of Tennessee and Wyoming. The Wyoming ant fossil was discovered years ago and donated to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, where it was stored in a drawer and forgotten about. In 2011 a curator found it and showed it to a paleoentomologist named Bruce Archibald. Dr. Archibald recognized it immediately as a fossilized queen ant even though it was the size of a hummingbird. He also realized it was very similar to a type of giant ant that once lived in Germany. The German discovery was the first Titanomyrma species discovered, and it's also the biggest known so far. The queen Titanomyrma gigantea grew up to 2.8 inches long, or 7 centimeters. Males grew up to 1.2 inches long, or 3 cm. The fossilized queen ants found have wings, with a wingspan of over 6 inches, or 16 cm. The other two known species are generally smaller, although still pretty darn big for ants.While they're not that much bigger than the living Dorylus queens, most of the size of a queen Dorylus ant comes from her enlarged abdomen. Titanomyrma ants were just plain big all over. Titanomyrma didn't have a stinger, so it's possible it used its mandibles to inflict bites, the way modern army ants do. It might also have sprayed formic acid at potential predators, as some ants do today. The biggest ants alive today all live in tropical areas, so researchers thought Titanomyrma probably did too. During the Eocene, the world was overall quite warm and parts of Europe were tropical. The northern hemisphere supercontinent Laurasia was in the process of breaking up, but Europe and North America were still connected by the Arctic. Even though the Arctic was a lot warmer 50 million years ago than it is now,

Everett Berry, Growth and Open Source at Vantage, joins Corey at Screaming in the Cloud to discuss the complex world of cloud costs. Everett describes how Vantage takes a broad approach to understanding and cutting cloud costs across a number of different providers, and reveals which providers he feels generate large costs quickly. Everett also explains some of his best practices for cutting costs on cloud providers, and explores what he feels the impact of AI will be on cloud providers. Corey and Everett also discuss the pros and cons of AWS savings plans, why AWS can't be counted out when it comes to AI, and why there seems to be such a delay in upgrading instances despite the cost savings. About EverettEverett is the maintainer of ec2instances.info at Vantage. He also writes about cloud infrastructure and analyzes cloud spend. Prior to Vantage Everett was a developer advocate at Arctype, a collaborative SQL client acquired by ClickHouse. Before that, Everett was cofounder and CTO of Perceive, a computer vision company. In his spare time he enjoys playing golf, reading sci-fi, and scrolling Twitter.Links Referenced: Vantage: https://www.vantage.sh/ Vantage Cloud Cost Report: https://www.vantage.sh/cloud-cost-report Everett Berry Twitter: https://twitter.com/retttx Vantage Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoinVantage TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey:  LANs of the late 90's and early 2000's were a magical place to learn about computers, hang out with your friends, and do cool stuff like share files, run websites & game servers, and occasionally bring the whole thing down with some ill-conceived software or network configuration. That's not how things are done anymore, but what if we could have a 90's style LAN experience along with the best parts of the 21st century internet? (Most of which are very hard to find these days.) Tailscale thinks we can, and I'm inclined to agree. With Tailscale I can use trusted identity providers like Google, or Okta, or GitHub to authenticate users, and automatically generate & rotate keys to authenticate devices I've added to my network. I can also share access to those devices with friends and teammates, or tag devices to give my team broader access. And that's the magic of it, your data is protected by the simple yet powerful social dynamics of small groups that you trust.Try now - it's free forever for personal use. I've been using it for almost two years personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven't attempted to charge me for what's become an essential-to-my-workflow service.Corey: Have you listened to the new season of Traceroute yet? Traceroute is a tech podcast that peels back the layers of the stack to tell the real, human stories about how the inner workings of our digital world affect our lives in ways you may have never thought of before. Listen and follow Traceroute on your favorite platform, or learn more about Traceroute at origins.dev. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This seems like an opportune moment to take a step back and look at the overall trend in cloud—specifically AWS—spending. And who better to do that than this week, my guest is Everett Berry who is growth in open-source over at Vantage. And they've just released the Vantage Cloud Cost Report for Q1 of 2023. Everett, thank you for joining me.Everett: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: I enjoy playing slap and tickle with AWS bills because I am broken in exactly that kind of way where this is the thing I'm going to do with my time and energy and career. It's rare to find people who are, I guess, similarly afflicted. So, it's great to wind up talking to you, first off.Everett: Yeah, great to be with you as well. Last Week in AWS and in particular, your Twitter account, are things that we follow religiously at Vantage.Corey: Uh-oh [laugh]. So, I want to be clear because I'm sure someone's thinking it out there, that, wait, Vantage does cloud cost optimization as a service? Isn't that what I do? Aren't we competitors? And the answer that I have to that is not by any definition that I've ever seen that was even halfway sensible.If SaaS could do the kind of bespoke consulting engagements that I do, we would not sell bespoke consulting engagements because it's easier to click button: receive software. And I also will point out that we tend to work once customers are at a certain point at scale that in many cases is a bit prohibitive for folks who are just now trying to understand what the heck's going on the first time finance has some very pointed questions about the AWS bill. That's how I see it from my perspective, anyway. Agree? Disagree?Everett: Yeah, I agree with that. I think the product solution, the system of record that companies need when they're dealing with Cloud costs ends up being a different service than the one that you guys provide. And I think actually the to work in concert very well, where you establish a cloud cost optimization practice, and then you keep it in place via software and via sort of the various reporting tools that the Vantage provide. So, I completely agree with you. In fact, in the hundreds of customers and deals that Vantage has worked on, I don't think we have ever come up against Duckbill Group. So, that tells you everything you need to know in that regard.Corey: Yeah. And what's interesting about this is that you have a different scale of visibility into the environment. We wind up dealing with a certain profile, or a couple of profiles, in our customer base. We work with dozens of companies a year; you work with hundreds. And that's bigger numbers, of course, but also in many cases at different segments of the industry.I also am somewhat fond of saying that Vantage is more focused on going broad in ways where we tend to focus on going exclusively deep. We do AWS; the end. You folks do a number of different cloud providers, you do Datadog cost visibility. I've lost track of all the different services that you wind up tracking costs for.Everett: Yeah, that's right. We just launched our 11th provider, which was OpenAI and for the first time in this report, we're actually breaking out data among the different clouds and we're comparing services across AWS, Google, and Azure. And I think it's a bit of a milestone for us because we started on AWS, where I think the cost problem is the most acute, if you will, and we've hit a point now across Azure and Google where we actually have enough data to say some interesting things about how those clouds work. But in general, we have this term, single pane of glass, which is the idea that you use 5, 6, 7 services, and you want to bundle all those costs into one report.Corey: Yeah. And that is something that we see in many cases where customers are taking a more holistic look at things. But, on some level, when people ask me, “Oh, do you focus on Google bills, too,” or Azure bills in the early days, it was, “Well, not yet. Let's take a look.” And what I was seeing was, they're spending, you know, millions or hundreds of millions, in some cases, on AWS, and oh, yeah, here's, like, a $300,000 thing we're running over on GCP is a proof-of-concept or some bizdev thing. And it's… yeah, why don't we focus on the big numbers first? The true secret of cloud economics is, you know, big numbers first rather than alphabetical, but don't tell anyone I told you that.Everett: It's pretty interesting you say that because, you know, in this graph where we break down costs across providers, you can really see that effect on Google and Azure. So, for example, the number three spending category on Google is BigQuery and I think many people would say BigQuery is kind of the jewel of the Google Cloud empire. Similarly for Azure, we actually found Databricks showing up as a top-ten service. Compare that to AWS where you just see a very routine, you know, compute, database, storage, monitoring, bandwidth, down the line. AWS still is the king of costs, if you will, in terms of, like, just running classic compute workloads. And the other services are a little bit more bespoke, which has been something interesting to see play out in our data.Corey: One thing that I've heard that's fascinating to me is that I've now heard from multiple Fortune 500 companies where the Datadog bill is now a board-level concern, given the size and scale of it. And for fun, once I modeled out all the instance-based pricing models that they have for the suite of services they offer, and at the time was three or $400 a month, per instance to run everything that they've got, which, you know, when you look at the instances that I have, costing, you know, 15, 20 bucks a month, in some cases, hmm, seems a little out of whack. And I can absolutely see that turning into an unbounded growth problem in kind of the same way. I just… I don't need to conquer the world. I'm not VC-backed. I am perfectly content at the scale that I'm at—Everett: [laugh].Corey: —with the focus on the problems that I'm focused on.Everett: Yeah, Datadog has been fascinating. It's been one of our fastest-growing providers of sort of the ‘others' category that we've launched. And I think the thing with Datadog that is interesting is you have this phrase cloud costs are all about cloud architecture and I think that's more true on Datadog than a lot of other services because if you have a model where you have, you know, thousands of hosts, and then you add-on one of Datadogs 20 services, which charges per host, suddenly your cloud bill has grown exponentially compared to probably the thing that you were after. And a similar thing happens—actually, my favorite Datadog cost recommendation is, when you have multiple endpoints, and you have sort of multiple query parameters for those endpoints, you end up in this cardinality situation where suddenly Datadog is tracking, again, like, exponentially increasing number of data points, which it's then charging to you on a usage-based model. And so, Datadog is great partners with AWS and I think it's no surprise because the two of them actually sort of go hand-in-hand in terms of the way that they… I don't want to say take ad—Corey: Extract revenue?Everett: Yeah, extract revenue. That's a good term. And, you know, you might say a similar thing about Snowflake, possibly, and the way that they do things. Like oh, the, you know, warehouse has to be on for one minute, minimum, no matter how long the query runs, and various architectural decisions that these folks make that if you were building a cost-optimized version of the service, you would probably go in the other direction.Corey: One thing that I'm also seeing, too, is that I can look at the AWS bill—and just billing data alone—and then say, “Okay, you're using Datadog, aren't you?” Like, “How did you know that?” Like, well, first, most people are secondly, CloudWatch is your number two largest service spend right now. And it's the downstream effect of hammering all the endpoints with all of the systems. And is that data you're actually using? Probably not, in some cases. It's, everyone turns on all the Datadog integrations the first time and then goes back and resets and never does it again.Everett: Yeah, I think we have this set of advice that we give Datadog folks and a lot of it is just, like, turn down the ingestion volume on your logs. Most likely, logs from 30 days ago that are correlated with some new services that you spun up—like you just talked about—are potentially not relevant anymore, for the kind of day-to-day cadence that you want to get into with your cloud spending. So yeah, I mean, I imagine when you're talking to customers, they're bringing up sort of like this interesting distinction where you may end up in a meeting room with the actual engineering team looking at the actual YAML configuration of the Datadog script, just to get a sense of like, well, what are the buttons I can press here? And so, that's… yeah, I mean, that's one reason cloud costs are a pretty interesting world is, on the surface level, you may end up buying some RIs or savings plans, but then when you really get into saving money, you end up actually changing the knobs on the services that you're talking about.Corey: That's always a fun thing when we talk to people in our sales process. It's been sord—“Are you just going to come in and tell us to buy savings plans or reserved instances?” Because the answer to that used to be, “No, that's ridiculous. That's not what we do.” But then we get into environments and find they haven't bought any of those things in 18 months.Everett: [laugh].Corey: —and it's well… okay, that's step two. Step one is what are you using you shouldn't be? Like, basically measure first then cut as opposed to going the other direction and then having to back your way into stuff. Doesn't go well.Everett: Yeah. One of the things that you were discussing last year that I thought was pretty interesting was the gp3 volumes that are now available for RDS and how those volumes, while they offer a nice discount and a nice bump in price-to-performance on EC2, actually don't offer any of that on RDS except for specific workloads. And so, I think that's the kind of thing where, as you're working with folks, as Vantage is working with people, the discussion ends up in these sort of nuanced niche areas, and that's why I think, like, these reports, hopefully, are helping people get a sense of, like, well, what's normal in my architecture or where am I sort of out of bounds? Oh, the fact that I'm spending most of my bill on NAT gateways and bandwidth egress? Well, that's not normal. That would be something that would be not typical of what your normal AWS user is doing.Corey: Right. There's always a question of, “Am I normal?” is one of the first things people love to ask. And it comes in different forms. But it's benchmarking. It's, okay, how much should it cost us to service a thousand monthly active users? It's like, there's no good way to say that across the board for everyone.Everett: Yeah. I like the model of getting into the actual unit costs. I have this sort of vision in my head of, you know, if I'm Uber and I'm reporting metrics to the public stock market, I'm actually reporting a cost to serve a rider, a cost to deliver an Uber Eats meal, in terms of my cloud spend. And that sort of data is just ridiculously hard to get to today. I think it's what we're working towards with Vantage and I think it's something that with these Cloud Cost Reports, we're hoping to get into over time, where we're actually helping companies think about well, okay, within my cloud spend, it's not just what I'm spending on these different services, there's also an idea of how much of my cost to deliver my service should be realized by my cloud spending.Corey: And then people have the uncomfortable realization that wait, my bill is less a function of number of customers I have but more the number of engineers I've hired. What's going on with that?Everett: [laugh]. Yeah, it is interesting to me just how many people end up being involved in this problem at the company. But to your earlier point, the cloud spending discussion has really ramped up over the past year. And I think, hopefully, we are going to be able to converge on a place where we are realizing the promise of the cloud, if you will, which is that it's actually cheaper. And I think what these reports show so far is, like, we've still got a long ways to go for that.Corey: One thing that I think is opportune about the timing of this recording is that as of last week, Amazon wound up announcing their earnings. And Andy Jassy has started getting on the earnings calls, which is how you know it's bad because the CEO of Amazon never deigned to show up on those things before. And he said that a lot of AWS employees are focused and spending their time on helping customers lower their AWS bills. And I'm listening to this going, “Oh, they must be talking to different customers than the ones that I'm talking to.” Are you seeing a lot of Amazonian involvement in reducing AWS bills? Because I'm not and I'm wondering where these people are hiding.Everett: So, we do see one thing, which is reps pushing savings plans on customers, which in general, is great. It's kind of good for everybody, it locks people into longer-term spend on Amazon, it gets them a lower rate, savings plans have some interesting functionality where they can be automatically applied to the area where they offer the most discount. And so, those things are all positive. I will say with Vantage, we're a cloud cost optimization company, of course, and so when folks talk to us, they often already have talked to their AWS rep. And the classic scenario is, that the rep passes over a large spreadsheet of options and ways to reduce costs, but for the company, that spreadsheet may end up being quite a ways away from the point where they actually realize cost savings.And ultimately, the people that are working on cloud cost optimization for Amazon are account reps who are comped by how much cloud spending their accounts are using on Amazon. And so, at the end of the day, some of the, I would say, most hard-hitting optimizations that you work on that we work on, end up hitting areas where they do actually reduce the bill which ends up being not in the account manager's favor. And so, it's a real chicken-and-egg game, except for savings plans is one area where I think everybody can kind of work together.Corey: I have found that… in fairness, there is some defense for Amazon in this but their cost-cutting approach has been rightsizing instances, buy some savings plans, and we are completely out of ideas. Wait, can you switch to Graviton and/or move to serverless? And I used to make fun of them for this but honestly that is some of the only advice that works across the board, irrespective in most cases, of what a customer is doing. Everything else is nuanced and it depends.That's why in some cases, I find that I'm advising customers to spend more money on certain things. Like, the reason that I don't charge percentage of savings in part is because otherwise I'm incentivized to say things like, “Backups? What are you, some kind of coward? Get rid of them.” And that doesn't seem like it's going to be in the customer's interest every time. And as soon as you start down that path, it starts getting a little weird.But people have asked me, what if my customers reach out to their account teams instead of talking to us? And it's, we do bespoke consulting engagements; I do not believe that we have ever had a client who did not first reach out to their account team. If the account teams were capable of doing this at the level that worked for customers, I would have to be doing something else with my business. It is not something that we are seeing hit customers in a way that is effective, and certainly not at scale. You said—as you were right on this—that there's an element here of account managers doing this stuff, there's an [unintelligible 00:15:54] incentive issue in part, but it's also, quality is extraordinarily uneven when it comes to these things because it is its own niche and a lot of people focus in different areas in different ways.Everett: Yeah. And to the areas that you brought up in terms of general advice that's given, we actually have some data on this in this report. In particular Graviton, this is something we've been tracking the whole time we've been doing these reports, which is the past three quarters and we actually are seeing Graviton adoption start to increase more rapidly than it was before. And so, for this last quarter Q1, we're seeing 5% of our costs that we're measuring on EC2 coming from Graviton, which is up from, I want to say 2% the previous quarter, and, like, less than 1% the quarter before. The previous quarter, we also reported that Lambda costs are now majority on ARM among the Vantage customer base.And that one makes some sense to me just because in most cases with Lambda, it's a flip of a switch. And then to your archival point on backups, this is something that we report in this one is that intelligent tiering, which we saw, like, really make an impact for folks towards the end of last year, the numbers for that were flat quarter over quarter. And so, what I mean by that is, we reported that I think, like, two-thirds of our S3 costs are still in the standard storage tier, which is the most expensive tier. And folks have enabled S3 intelligent tiering, which moves your data to progressively cheaper tiers, but we haven't seen that increase this quarter. So, it's the same number as it was last quarter.And I think speaks to what you're talking about with a ceiling on some cost optimization techniques, where it's like, you're not just going to get rid of all your backups; you're not just going to get rid of your, you know, Amazon WorkSpaces archived desktop snapshots that you need for some HIPAA compliance reason. Those things have an upper limit and so that's where, when the AWS rep comes in, it's like, as they go through the list of top spending categories, the recommendations they can give start to provide diminishing returns.Corey: I also think this is sort of a law of large numbers issue. When you start seeing a drop off in the growth rate of large cloud providers, like, there's a problem, in that there are only so many exabyte scale workloads that can be moved inside of a given quarter into the cloud. You're not going to see the same unbounded infinite growth that you would expect mathematically. And people lose their minds when they start to see those things pointed out, but the blame that oh, that's caused by cost optimization efforts, with respect, bullshit it is. I have seen customers devote significant efforts to reducing their AWS bills and it takes massive amounts of work and even then they don't always succeed in getting there.It gets better, but they still wind up a year later, having spent more on a month-by-month basis than they did when they started. Sure they understand it better and it's organic growth that's driving it and they've solved the low hanging fruit problem, but there is a challenge in acting as a boundary for what is, in effect, an unbounded growth problem.Everett: Yeah. And speaking to growth, I thought Microsoft had the most interesting take on where things could happen next quarter, and that, of course, is AI. And so, they attributed, I think it was, 1% of their guidance regarding 26 or 27% growth for Q2 Cloud revenue and it attributed 1% of that to AI. And I think Amazon is really trying to be in the room for those discussions when a large enterprise is talking about AI workloads because it's one of the few remaining cloud workloads that if it's not in the cloud already, is generating potentially massive amounts of growth for these guys.And so, I'm not really sure if I believe the 1% number. I think Microsoft may be having some fun with the fact that, of course, OpenAI is paying them for acting as a cloud provider for ChatGPT and further API, but I do think that AWS, although they were maybe a little slow to the game, they did, to their credit, launch a number of AI services that I'm excited to see if that contributes to the cost that we're measuring next quarter. We did measure, for the first time, a sudden increase on those new [Inf1 00:20:17] EC2 instances, which are optimized for machine learning. And I think if AWS can have success moving customers to those the way they have with Graviton, then that's going to be a very healthy area of growth for them.Corey: I'll also say that it's pretty clear to me that Amazon does not know what it's doing in its world of machine-learning-powered services. I use Azure for the [unintelligible 00:20:44] clients I built originally for Twitter, then for Mastodon—I'm sure Bluesky is coming—but the problem that I'm seeing there is across the board, start to finish, that there is no cohesive story from the AWS side of here's a picture tell me what's in it and if it's words, describe it to me. That's a single API call when we go to Azure. And the more that Amazon talks about something, I find, the less effective they're being in that space. And they will not stop talking about machine learning. Yes, they have instances that are powered by GPUs; that's awesome. But they're an infrastructure provider and moving up the stack is not in their DNA. But that's where all the interest and excitement and discussion is going to be increasingly in the AI space. Good luck.Everett: I think it might be something similar to what you've talked about before with all the options to run containers on AWS. I think they today have a bit of a grab bag of services and they may actually be looking forward to the fact that they're these truly foundational models which let you do a number of tasks, and so they may not need to rely so much on you know, Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition and sort of these task-specific services, which to date, I'm not really sure of the takeoff rates on those. We have this cloud costs leaderboard and I don't think you would find them in the top 50 of AWS services. But we'll see what happens with that.AWS I think, ends up being surprisingly good at sticking with it. I think our view is that they probably have the most customer spend on Kubernetes of any major cloud, even though you might say Google at first had the lead on Kubernetes and maybe should have done more with GKE. But to date, I would kind of agree with your take on AI services and I think Azure is… it's Azure's to lose for the moment.Corey: I would agree. I think the future of the cloud is largely Azure's to lose and it has been for a while, just because they get user experience, they get how to talk to enterprises. I just… I wish they would get security a little bit more effectively, and if failing that, communicating with their customers about security more effectively. But it's hard for a leopard to change its spots. Microsoft though has demonstrated an ability to change their nature multiple times, in ways that I would have bet were impossible. So, I just want to see them do it again. It's about time.Everett: Yeah, it's been interesting building on Azure for the past year or so. I wrote a post recently about, kind of, accessing billing data across the different providers and it's interesting in that every cloud provider is unique in the way that it simply provides an external endpoint for downloading your billing data, but Azure is probably one of the easiest integrations; it's just a REST API. However, behind that REST API are, like, years and years of different ways to pay Microsoft: are you on a pay-as-you-go plan, are you on an Azure enterprise plan? So, there's all this sort of organizational complexity hidden behind Azure and I think sometimes it rears its ugly head in a way that stringing together services on Amazon may not, even if that's still a bear in and of itself, if you will.Corey: Any other surprises that you found in the Cloud Cost Report? I mean, looking through it, it seems directionally aligned with what I see in my environments with customers. Like for example, you're not going to see Kubernetes showing up as a line item on any of these things just because—Everett: Yeah.Corey: That is indistinguishable from a billing perspective when we're looking at EC2 spend versus control plane spend. I don't tend to [find 00:24:04] too much that's shocking me. My numbers are of course, different percentage-wise, but surprise, surprise, different companies doing different things doing different percentages, I'm sure only AWS knows for sure.Everett: Yeah, I think the biggest surprise was just the—and, this could very well just be kind of measurement method, but I really expected to see AI services driving more costs, whether it was GPU instances, or AI-specific services—which we actually didn't report on at all, just because they weren't material—or just any indication that AI was a real driver of cloud spending. But I think what you see instead is sort of the same old folks at the top, and if you look at the breakdown of services across providers, that's, you know, compute, database, storage, bandwidth, monitoring. And if you look at our percentage of AI costs as a percentage of EC2 costs, it's relatively flat, quarter over quarter. So, I would have thought that would have shown up in some way in our data and we really didn't see it.Corey: It feels like there's a law of large numbers things. Everyone's talking about it. It's very hype right now—Everett: Yeah.Corey: But it's also—you talk to these companies, like, “Okay, we have four exabytes of data that we're storing and we have a couple 100,000 instances at any given point in time, so yeah, we're going to start spending $100,000 a month on our AI adventures and experiments.” It's like, that's just noise and froth in the bill, comparatively.Everett: Exactly, yeah. And so, that's why I think Microsoft's thought about AI driving a lot of growth in the coming quarters is, we'll see how that plays out, basically. The one other thing I would point to is—and this is probably not surprising, maybe, for you having been in the infrastructure world and seeing a lot of this, but for me, just seeing the length of time it takes companies to upgrade their instance cycles. We're clocking in at almost three years since the C6 series instances have been released and for just now seeing C6 and R6 start to edge above 10% of our compute usage. I actually wonder if that's just the stranglehold that Intel has on cloud computing workloads because it was only last year around re:Invent that the C6in and the Intel version of the C6 series instances had been released. So, I do think in general, there's supposed to be a price-to-performance benefit of upgrading your instances, and so sometimes it surprises me to see how long it takes companies to get around to doing that.Corey: Generation 6 to 7 is also 6% more expensive in my sampling.Everett: Right. That's right. I think Amazon has some work to do to actually make that price-to-performance argument, sort of the way that we were discussing with gp2 versus gp3 volumes. But yeah, I mean, other than that, I think, in general, my view is that we're past the worst of it, if you will, for cloud spending. Q4 was sort of a real letdown, I think, in terms of the data we had and the earnings that these cloud providers had and I think Q1 is actually everyone looking forward to perhaps what we call out at the beginning of the report, which is a return to normal spend patterns across the cloud.Corey: I think that it's going to be an interesting case. One thing that I'm seeing that might very well explain some of the reluctance to upgrade EC2 instances has been that a lot of those EC2 instances are databases. And once those things are up and running and working, people are hesitant to do too much with them. One of the [unintelligible 00:27:29] roads that I've seen of their savings plan approach is that you can migrate EC2 spend to Fargate to Lambda—and that's great—but not RDS. You're effectively leaving a giant pile of money on the table if you've made a three-year purchase commitment on these things. So, all right, we're not going to be in any rush to migrate to those things, which I think is AWS getting in its own way.Everett: That's exactly right. When we encounter customers that have a large amount of database spend, the most cost-effective option is almost always basically bare-metal EC2 even with the overhead of managing the backup-restore scalability of those things. So, in some ways, that's a good thing because it means that you can then take advantage of the, kind of, heavy committed use options on EC2, but of course, in other ways, it's a bit of a letdown because, in the ideal case, RDS would scale with the level of workloads and the economics would make more sense, but it seems that is really not the case.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to come on the show and talk to me. I'll include a link in the [show notes 00:28:37] to the Cost Report. One thing I appreciate is the fact that it doesn't have one of those gates in front of it of, your email address, and what country you're in, and how can our salespeople best bother you. It's just, here's a link to the PDF. The end. So, thanks for that; it's appreciated. Where else can people go to find you?Everett: So, I'm on Twitter talking about cloud infrastructure and AI. I'm at@retttx, that's R-E-T-T-T-X. And then of course, Vantage also did quick hot-takes on this report with a series of graphs and explainers in a Twitter thread and that's @JoinVantage.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:29:15]. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Everett: Thanks, Corey. Great to chat.Corey: Everett Berry, growth in open-source at Vantage. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that will increase its vitriol generation over generation, by approximately 6%.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Today's episode features ethnobotanist and anthropologist, Dr. Glenn Shepard. This two-part discussion between Dr. Shepard and Dr. Plotkin covers an array of fascinating topics, including the role language plays in ethnobotany, shamanism in a changing world, and personal encounters and experiences with tobacco in indigenous Amazonian communities (revisit our most recent two episodes to brush up on tobacco!). In today's part two of this interview, we delve more deeply into tobacco use in indigenous Amazonian communities. Dr. Shepard also discusses his organization Rainforest Flow which is devoted to delivering clean water, sanitation, and hygiene programs to indigenous people in Peru's Amazon rainforest.   Episode Notes “A Deep History of Tobacco in Lowland South America.” The Master Plant : Tobacco in Lowland South America, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474220279.ch-002.  Descola, Philippe. The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle. New Press, 2009.  Emboden, William. Narcotic Plants. Collier Books, 1980.  Furst, Peter T. Hallucinogens and Culture. Chandler & Sharp Publishers, Inc., 1997.  Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History and Culture. Thomson Gale, 2005.  Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence. Routledge, 1994.  Hobhouse, Henry. Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants That Made Men Rich. Macmillan, 2012.  Marris, Emma. “The Anthropologist and His Old Friend, Who Became a Jaguar.” Culture, National Geographic, 4 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/160518-manu-park-peru-matsigenka-tribe-death-jaguar.  Narby, Jeremy, and Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge. New World Library, 2021.  Ott, Jonathan. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Natural Products, 1996.  Schultes, Richard Evans, and Albert Hofmann. Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use. A. Van Der Marck Editions, 1987.  Shepard, Glenn H. “Psychoactive Plants and Ethnopsychiatric Medicines of the Matsigenka.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, vol. 30, no. 4, 1998, pp. 321–332., https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.1998.10399708.  Steffensen, Jennifer. “The Reality (TV) of Vanishing Lives: An Interview with Glenn Shepard.” Anthropology News, vol. 49, no. 5, 2008, pp. 30–30., https://doi.org/10.1525/an.2008.49.5.30.  Wilbert, Johannes. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. Yale University Press, 1993.

In 2002 at the age of 23, after graduating university in Anthropology, Hamilton opened Blue Morpho, the first healing center in the Peruvian Amazon focusing on Amazonian natural medicine and the sustainable use of Amazonian Visionary Medicines. He is one of the first Westerners to be accepted into an Amazonian Traditional Plant Medicine Lineage and the first person in this field to be globally covered by western media including National Geographic Adventure, The New York Times, Oprah Magazine and Time. Blue Morpho has hosted thousands of plant medicine and psychedelic ceremonies with thousands of people from around the world.In this episode Hamilton Souther and Beth Weinstein discuss…▶ Hamilton's visions in his first ceremony that called him to study ayahuasca in the Amazon▶ The material realities of building a retreat center in the jungle▶ Dedication to healing and the medicine as a lifelong path▶ How plant medicines are now being used to optimize, not only to treat illness and trauma▶ The need for integration after ceremony, which is just the beginning of a long journey ▶ You receive the benefits of ayahuasca by making changes in your life after ceremony▶ The misunderstanding that the plants are here to be in service to you when they are in fact autonomous beings▶ Realizing that the problems you have in your life are interwoven with how you live▶ Should Westerners be serving traditional plant medicines?▶ How to know if you are skilled enough to serve plant medicine▶ Blue Morpho's ayahuasca facilitation training program, The Blue Morpho Academy▶ The implications of taking plant medicines out of their natural form and synthesizing new compounds▶ The properties and effects of angel/trumpet vine, a plant medicine similar to datura that is extremely dangerousHamilton Souther's Links & Resources▶ Website: https://bluemorphotours.com/▶ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bluemorphoretreats/▶ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlueMorphoRetreats/▶ Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/@BlueMorphoTours/featured

Today's episode features ethnobotanist and anthropologist, Dr. Glenn Shepard. This two-part discussion between Dr. Shepard and Dr. Plotkin covers an array of fascinating topics including the role language plays in ethnobotany, shamanism in a changing world, and personal encounters and experiences with tobacco in indigenous Amazonian communities (revisit our last two episodes to brush up on tobacco!). Join us today for part one of this captivating interview.   Episode Notes “A Deep History of Tobacco in Lowland South America.” The Master Plant : Tobacco in Lowland South America, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474220279.ch-002.  Descola, Philippe. The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle. New Press, 2009.  Emboden, William. Narcotic Plants. Collier Books, 1980.  Furst, Peter T. Hallucinogens and Culture. Chandler & Sharp Publishers, Inc., 1997.  Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History and Culture. Thomson Gale, 2005.  Goodman, Jordan. Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence. Routledge, 1994.  Hobhouse, Henry. Seeds of Wealth: Four Plants That Made Men Rich. Macmillan, 2012.  Marris, Emma. “The Anthropologist and His Old Friend, Who Became a Jaguar.” Culture, National Geographic, 4 May 2021, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/160518-manu-park-peru-matsigenka-tribe-death-jaguar.  Narby, Jeremy, and Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge. New World Library, 2021.  Ott, Jonathan. Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History. Natural Products, 1996.  Schultes, Richard Evans, and Albert Hofmann. Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use. A. Van Der Marck Editions, 1987.  Shepard, Glenn H. “Psychoactive Plants and Ethnopsychiatric Medicines of the Matsigenka.” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, vol. 30, no. 4, 1998, pp. 321–332., https://doi.org/10.1080/02791072.1998.10399708.  Steffensen, Jennifer. “The Reality (TV) of Vanishing Lives: An Interview with Glenn Shepard.” Anthropology News, vol. 49, no. 5, 2008, pp. 30–30., https://doi.org/10.1525/an.2008.49.5.30.  Wilbert, Johannes. Tobacco and Shamanism in South America. Yale University Press, 1993.