Podcasts about b yeah

【句子】You know, I...I saw a little of that basketball game of yours last week. You were lighting it up. 【Modern Family S3E18】【发音】/juː/ /nəʊ/ /aɪ/ /aɪ/ /sɔː/ /sɑː/ /ə/ /ˈlɪt.l/ /əv/ /ðæt/ ˈbɑː.skɪt.bɔːl/ /ˈbæs.kɪt.bɑːl/ /geɪm/ /əv/ /jɔː(r)z/ /lɑːst/ /læst/ /wiːk/ /juː/ /wɜː(r)/ /ˈlaɪ.tɪŋ/ /ɪt/ /ʌp/【发音技巧】little闪音，little of连读；that basketball失去爆破；game of连读；last week类似不完全爆破的处理；lighting it up两处连读+两处闪音；【翻译】上周，你那场篮球赛我看了一会儿，你小子可是得分得到手软啊。【适用场合】 今天我们来学习一下light sth./sb. up的一个很特别的用法。之前我们见过这个短语，或者light up sth.，可以表达“把某个东西点亮”这样的意思；今天视频中是另外一种用法，light sth./sb. up可以专门用于体育比赛的场合。to score many points against and generally dominate one's opponent in a game“（在比赛中）大比分压制对手、全面占据上风”这个短语当中的宾语部分，可以是比赛；可以是对手；也可以是观众，比如说看下面这些例子： eg: A: "Man, the Flyers lit our goalie up last night—five goals in the first 10 minutes." B: "Yeah, because our defense totally left him out to dry."A: “哥们，昨晚飞人队简直把咱们守门员打爆了——开场10分钟就灌了5个球。”B: “是啊，咱们的后防线完全把他晾在那儿不管啊。” eg: Curry lit up the Celtics with 11 threes last night!库里昨晚用11记三分打趴了凯尔特人！ eg: The rookie lit up the scoreboard with 30 points in his debut."这新秀首秀就狂砍30分霸榜。 eg: He got lit up in the boxing match—took 10 punches in a row.拳赛里他被连环暴击，连吃10拳。 有的时候这种短语也有抽象用法，比如说看下面这个例子：eg: Her speech lit up the audience—everyone was cheering.她的演讲点燃全场，观众全嗨了。 【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】Bro, you lit up the court today!

很多人第一次听到 "Mum's the word"，很多人会纳闷：以为是“"Mom's the word"” ，难道是 “听妈妈的话”？其实它和 “妈妈” 没啥关系！今天卡卡老师带你来解锁这个超有趣的保密暗号～"Mum's the word" 的真实含义意思是 “保密！别告诉任何人”，用于提醒对方守住秘密，相当于 “Keep it a secret” 或 “Don't breathe a word”。“mum” 模仿闭口时发出的 “嘘” 声，象征 “保持沉默”，最早可追溯到 19 世纪英国。“the word” 指 “暗号、口令”，组合起来就是 “以‘沉默'为口令”，引申为 “保密”。例句：叮嘱别人保密：A: Did you hear about Sarah's surprise party?B: Yeah, mum's the word—I won't tell her!A：你听说萨拉的惊喜派对了吗？ B：知道，保密！我不会告诉她的！承诺自己不说出去：Your secret is safe with me—mum's the word.（你的秘密交给我保管 —— 我绝对不说出去。原声再现：-It's a billion-dollar idea.这是个能发大财的主意。-Mum's the word.沉默是金。Also, I'm carrying Sheldon's baby. Mum's the word.对了，我怀了谢尔顿的孩子。 要保密哦你怀孕了。更多卡卡老师分享公众号：卡卡课堂 卡卡老师微信：kakayingyu001送你一份卡卡老师学习大礼包，帮助你在英文学习路上少走弯路

【句子】You know, so many new companies go belly-up. 【Modern Family S3E18】【发音】/juː/ /nəʊ/ /səʊ/ /ˈmen.i/ /njuː/ /nuː/ /ˈkʌmpəniz/ /gəʊ/ /ˈbeli ʌp/【发音技巧】belly-up连读；【翻译】很多新开的公司都经营不善。【适用场合】今天节目中，我们来学习一下go belly-up这个短语。大家都知道belly可以指“肚皮”，up自然是可以理解成“向上”，肚皮向上第一反应应该就是鱼死了，所以没错，肯定不是什么好事儿。This expression may refer to dead fish floating upside down near the surface of the water. 所以这个短语go belly-up就可以指：“无法正常工作、运转；出现故障；崩溃”这样的意思；to break or malfunction; to die, fall apart, or cease to work；如果描述的是公司，就说明“公司经营不善、资不抵债；面临破产、倒闭”；If a company goes belly-up, it fails and does not have enough money to pay its debts. eg: Sorry, Mark, I'd love to give you a lift to the airport, but my car has gone belly up on me again.抱歉啊马克，我本来想送你去机场的，但是我的车又抛锚了。 eg: The disk drive in my laptop went belly-up after too many drops on the ground.我的笔记本电脑硬盘摔了太多次，这下彻底坏了。 eg: A: "I was hoping to make a smoothie today, but it seems the blender's gone belly up. Hear that grinding sound?" B: "Yeah, that's not encouraging."A：“我原本希望今天能做个奶昔的，但是好像搅拌机坏掉了。听到那咯吱咯吱的声音了吗？”B：“是啊，确实不怎么妙啊。” eg: I wonder how many start-ups in Silicon Valley go belly up each year.我很好奇每年硅谷有多少初创公司倒闭。 eg: This company's about to go belly-up.这家公司快倒闭了。 eg: Factories and farms went belly-up because of the debt crisis.由于债务危机，许多工厂和农场都倒闭了。 【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】The merger deal between the two companies went belly up when it came to light that one of the CEOs had been dodging tax obligations for several years.

Eating out A: Do you know a good place to eat dumplings around here? B: Yeah, there's a famous dumpling restaurant called "Dumpling House" around the corner. A: Is it expensive? B: No, the prices are not too high. A: That sounds great! I'll give it a try right now. B: You won't be disappointed. Their dumplings are delicious! #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Customs and lifestyles (Asking for and giving directions) A: Excuse me, how do I get to Raohe Night Market from here? B: Just go straight ahead, then turn left two streets before you get to the river. A: Thanks! Is it far from here? B: No, it's about a 10-minute walk. A: Great! I've heard Raohe Night Market has amazing food. B: Yeah, it's a popular spot with a wide variety of local snacks to try. #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Clothing/accessories A: Which tie do you think matches my shirt better, the red one or the blue one? B: I think the blue one goes well with your shirt. A: Okay thanks. I'll go with the blue one then. B: You're welcome. Blue matches your shirt nicely. A: By the way, do you think I should wear a belt with these pants? B: Yeah, a belt would complete the look and your pants would not fall down! #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Home appliances A: How much does that microwave cost? B: It's NT$5399. It's on sale this week. A: That's a good price. I am thinking about buying it. B: Yeah, it's a great deal. It is also a popular model. A: Can you tell me some more about what it can do? Does it have any special cooking settings? B: Sure! It has lots of different settings and it is also not too big. #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Appearance A: Hey, where did you get those cool shoes? B: I bought them at that shoe store near the school. A: Thanks! I'll check them out. B: No problem. They have different colors and sizes to choose from too. A: Are they comfy to wear all day? B: Yeah, they are comfortable because they are really soft. They are the perfect pair of shoes for long walks. #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Animals A: Do you have any pets? B: Yeah, I've got a cat named Whiskers. How about you? A: I don't have any pets, but I'd really love to have a dog someday. B: Cats make great pets. Whiskers is playful and keeps me company. A: That's nice. I've heard that cats like doing their own thing but are still loving pets. B: Yeah, cats are so much better than dogs! #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

Eating out (Asking for and giving information) A: Do you know a good place to eat dumplings around here? B: Yeah, there's a famous dumpling restaurant called "Dumpling House" around the corner. A: Is it expensive? B: No, the prices are not too high. A: That sounds great! I'll give it a try right now. B: You won't be disappointed. Their dumplings are delicious! #每周一進階英語瘋英語 #每周六雙語麻吉同學會 #每周日英語童謠童話小森林 #想要無廣告收聽更多節目請點選教育電台雙語頻道 #每周一、六、日更新 ----- Apple｜Spotify｜Google｜KKBOX｜Firstory｜SoundOn 搜尋訂閱：NER Kids -----

In this episode Helene talks to Cath about her role as Senior Engagement Advisor and internal facilitator with the Environment Agency (EA) Cath tells Helene a bit about the EA and the type of work they do. She explains how her role as Engagement Advisor includes facilitation and also how she works an an independent internal facilitator for other projects withing the EA. Cath gives some examples of what she really enjoys about her role as a faciliator including working with the public on a climate adaptation project and working alongside external independent facilitators that the EA also use. She explains that external faciliatators are often used when more complex conversations need to be had, or where there has been a breakdown of trust and someone independent is needed. She shares some insights as to how the internal facilitators network of aroudn 200 facilitators was set up and how she balances her work as Senior Engagement Advisor and facilitator.  She tells Helene about a role play technique that really made a difference and about how asking good questions are crucial to her work as a faciliator. Cath also talks about how she keeps her faciliation skills up including attending the IAF England and Wales conferences, and local IAF meetups and EA facilitator learning days. She also shares some advice for other internal facilitators.  A full transcript is below. Today's Guest Environment Agency - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) facilitationnetworkmailbox@environment-agency.gov.uk   To find out more about Facilitation Stories and the IAF and the England and Wales Chapter   Facilitation Stories website: https://facilitationstories.libsyn.com/   And to email us: podcast@iaf-englandwales.org   IAF England and Wales: https://www.iaf-world.org/site/chapters/england-wales The Facilitation Stories Team  Helene Jewell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenejewell/  Nikki Wilson:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolawilson2/ Transcript H.J Hello and welcome to Facilitation Stories, the community podcast of the England and Wales chapter of the International Association of Facilitators, also known as IAF. My name is Helen Jewell, and my guest today is Cath Brooks, senior engagement advisor with the Environment Agency. Welcome, Cath    C.B Hi, yeah. Hi. How are you doing? Alright?   H.J I'm good. How are you?    C.B Yeah, good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. I'm Looking forward to it.   H.J It's really good to have you on the podcast. Okay, so I have a whole load of questions to ask you, starting with the Environment Agency. I just wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about what the Environment Agency does and what your role is?   C.B Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I hope that it'll inspire people. I've worked at the Environment Agency for almost 20 years, and I still absolutely love it. It's a great organisation. So we're a public sector organisation, and we aim, quite simply, to protect and improve the environment. We employ about 12,000 people, and some people work nationally across England, and then some people work in area offices. We've got 14 different area offices across England, so you either work on national issues or you work on local issues in one of our area offices. And I guess to create places for people and wildlife, we work on quite a lot of topics that people are deeply concerned about, and finding ways forward can be difficult on some of the issues, people have strong opinions about the environment and how we should be managing the environment quite rightly. So Facilitation skills are really important in that context, with some of the really difficult issues that we're managing. So some of those topics are things like managing major industry, making sure they're not polluting the environment, and waste, dealing with contaminated land, making sure water quality of our rivers and we've got enough water so water resources as well, working on fisheries, conservation and ecology, and my area that I work on is management of flood risk. So those sorts of issues are really interesting, and people have strong opinions about how we should be managing those issues. So there can be quite a lot of conflict, I guess, which is why facilitation is so important.   H.J And so then, obviously that's quite a broad even under the umbrella of the environment, that's quite a broad range of different areas, and in your particular area then, in your role as senior engagement advisor, what does that actually involve? Sort of before, obviously, I guess facilitation is part of that, but I know you also do it sort of separately as well. What does your main role? What does your main role involve?   C.B Yeah, so we've got engagement advisors. Obviously, the organisation's quite technical organisation, quite science and engineering led, but we also have engagement and communications experts within the Environment Agency, and I'm one of those. So I work alongside quite technical teams, and at the moment I'm working, I've worked in lots of different parts of the organisation, but at the moment I'm working in flood risk management, supporting our teams. I work nationally, and so supporting our national teams with big projects where there's, they're difficult topics, where people have strong opinions. And my job, my main job, is engagement planning. So we're whatever the project is thinking about what are our engagement aims? Why do we want to work with our stakeholders? Why do they want to work with us, making sure we're not just thinking from the perspective of the Environment Agency, my job is to help our staff to think about the impact it's going to have on on a range of stakeholders, and plan the best methods that we can for that particular project to work out, how can we get the best from our stakeholders? How can they get the best of us? How can we find solutions that work for all of us, not just for the Environment Agency?    So we try to avoid taking what we've called in the past the ‘decide, announce, defend approach'. My job is to help staff to be more, to sort of take a more ‘engage, deliberate, decide', so to help have quality conversations about these difficult issues, really listen to our stakeholders, designing the right methods, really to help create that space for those quality conversations about what can be really difficult issues. And that's my job, is designing those sorts of engagement methods, if you like, and then facilitation sits really nicely alongside that.    H.J And so when you do that facilitation, I as far as I understand, you're part of an internal facilitators network. How, how did that kind of come about? When was that set up?    C.B Yeah, that's right. So when I joined the Environment Agency, back in 1996 we didn't have many people who worked in engagement roles or facilitation network. So we started really by setting up the engagement roles and setting up training for staff around comms and engagement and how to do that engagement planning like I've just talked about. And very quickly we realised actually there's another set of skills that that we need to develop as well, which is facilitation. So when you are designing methods that involve dialog, you know having facilitation skills, having skills to be able to design those interactive sessions in a way that you're making the most of that time when you've got your stakeholders in the room is really important. And it's quite a different skill, actually, than just engagement planning, being able to design a face to face or an online session where you've got people in the room making the very best of that time. So we're all really busy. Our staff are busy, our stakeholders are busy. So making the most of those opportunities, that's why we developed the facilitation skills courses.    So first of all, we started off by getting some expert engagement professionals in to help us design facilitation courses that were for in-house facilitators. And then very quickly, and within about 18 months, we realised that people were going on the training, really enjoying the training, but then struggling to apply the training in their day jobs, because, you know, you could go a couple of months and not use it. And we very quickly realised that if you're going to facilitate, and you have to do it quickly, you have to do it very often, and you need, you need to support each other. So we set the network up to give people safe space to be able to facilitate internally. So to develop people's skills and create opportunities to be able to facilitate not in your day job. So that's why the network was set up, was to, so people could put forward a facilitation request and get someone who wasn't their day job, they went and practised their skill outside their day job, which, which means you can facilitate in a more pure way which was, which has been fantastic. It's, it's worked really well.   H.J And I want to ask a little bit more about that, actually. But before I do, I just wanted to pick up on the differences between engagement and facilitation, and where you see the differences being?   C.B yeah, I do think they're quite different skills. So I think being able to do good engagement planning across a project, you think we've got big projects that might go on for years, and they're quite technical. You need to understand the, you know, the technical context of that bit of work, what the business objectives are, what the engagement objectives are, what best methods we can apply, you know, to help people to engage with us, and for that to have an impact on on the decision making, that's quite different. You could do that, and then you can realise in that process, there's usually going to have to be some kind of series of face to face events. But the person doing that engagement planning might not necessarily have this skill to be able to run that face to face content, and sometimes actually, we do need a completely independent facilitator.    So there might be a topic where we might have lost trust with some of our stakeholders, where it's not appropriate for the Environment Agency to facilitate those conversations and we do need an independent facilitator. And that is whether it's an in-house facilitator and an independent facilitator, being able to design that's more in depth, designing how to make the most of the conversation, how to create a space where people feel safe, to be able to air their concerns and feel listened to. I guess it's like engagement planning, but it's really specifically thinking about that particular conversation and what you want to get out of that conversation. So it's micro design, I guess, within a particular moment in time, and you might use that facilitator, or you might use a facilitator that then exits the process, whereas the engagement person stays throughout and they use the results of that conversation, and they kind of have to carry on, whereas a facilitator might just come in for that particular moment, then they might not be involved again. So they are quite different skills.   H.J And so what determines how you choose a particular facilitator, be it an in-house one or an external facilitator. How does that process work?    C.B Yeah, so we'd use an in-house facilitator for a process where, so quite often the engagement person needs to be, needs to participate in the conversation. And if the engagement person involved in that bit of work needs to be involved in the conversation, then they'd use an in-house facilitator to help make sure that, you know, they just come in, offer the service, create the space so that everyone in the team can participate. And often there's other people outside the team, you know, other stakeholders and things. And if the topic is not too controversial, it's all to do with positionality and trust and the way the Environment Agency is viewed. If there's good trust and good relationships between all the people, then an in-house facilitator can do that role. When I'm doing that, I upfront say, I work for the Environment Agency, but I'm not here today as someone who works in the Environment Agency, I'm here to facilitate and make sure you're heard. I'd work with all the different stakeholders before to make sure that the design was taken their, you know, that their needs into account. I wouldn't just turn up on the day, so do all the things that an independent facilitator.   Obviously, we're a public sector organisation, so it has to make the most out of me as a facilitator and engagement expert. So I try and do that as much as possible. I'd only use an independent facilitator, which obviously costs us money as an organisation. We'd only do that in a situation where we genuinely needed that independence, and lots of reasons for that, but normally it's to do with trust and transparency and making sure that, you know, there might be awkward situations where things might have gone wrong in the past, and stakeholders would feel more comfortable if someone independent is facilitating, even just for a small period of time, just to help us through that.    H.J And how many facilitators have you got as part of your network then?    C.B Yeah, I knew you were going to ask, I think there's about 200 at the moment on the facilitation network.   H.J Wow. Okay, and how do you manage that kind of balance of work in your, let's say, day job, versus facilitating for a different, a different project that you're not part of then?   C.B Yeah so for me, I mean, we all do it differently. So we're allowed 11 development days a year. And so I use those Development Days aren't just, you just, don't just go on training courses and things. I use my Development Days to do independent facilitation for other people within the environment agency. So each quarter I have a maybe do one event per quarter for someone else, if it's a chunky event, because you need to do the planning for them, you need to facilitate and then help them with the results. So I think we all do that. We view it as part of our development, and we, you know, discuss it with our line managers and carve out time to go and do it. It's completely up to each individual facilitator to decide, and we have peaks and troughs in our work. If you're working on a project that had a lot of facilitation within that project, then you might not do any facilitation for anyone else in that quarter. But yeah, generally, people use their development time.   H.J Okay. And what kind of facilitation do you particularly enjoy?    C.B My favourite thing I've done in the last 12 months was when we were at the River Severn, when we did, when I have opportunities to facilitate with members of the public who are not part of the Environment Agency. And I was really fortunate, we were sort of testing a new methodology on the River Severn about adaptation pathways, they're called, so thinking about climate change and the impact of climate change, and we did something called Community panels, where we got members of the community. So an independent facilitator designed the process and needed some sort of support facilitators, and I acted as a support facilitator, and that was really, really fun. It's just a real privilege to be able to hear from members of the public who don't know anything about what the Environment Agency does, and yeah, to help them to have conversations about the environment and flood risk management, and their ideas were absolutely brilliant and really refreshing to hear. And that was, that was great, because most of my work is either internal or with partners that know the Environment Agency well. So that was something that was different for me and really stretched me as a facilitator, bringing together people that didn't know each other. We were doing it online, and, you know, I didn't know them, and it was, yeah, it was helping them to feel relaxed very quickly and heard, that was, that was really good. It was good for me as a facilitator. Good stretch.    H.J Nice and how often, I guess, do you get to do something a little bit stretchy? Let's say that you actually learn from rather than, let's say a bit more day to day type stuff?   C.B Probably only a couple of times a year, because it did take up quite a lot of time. It was four evenings and a whole day on a Saturday. So that's quite unique. But again, very much supported by the organisation, and was viewed as part of my development. And it was, it was a brilliant part of my development. It really blew the cobwebs off in terms of my facilitation skills. Took me out of my comfort zone, and it was really good. And I guess it would be easy not to do things like that, and it would be, you know, easier just to kind of do the day job. But where's the fun in that? You know, it really, it really helped me, and I took a lot from it back to the day job, and it reminded me about the importance of making sure people are comfortable and active listening. And it was good for me to hear how people view the Environment Agency, who don't know much about what we do. And so, you know, they came up with these brilliant ideas. Like, as an engagement person, I was able to come back in and sort of talk to people about so. But realistically, yeah, time wise, probably once or twice a year.   H.J And how easy is it for you then to kind of just thinking about that there's different hats that you wear. How easy is it to be sort of, you know, independent facilitator versus engagement professional, and, you know, to kind of remember which hat you're wearing, I guess?    C.B Yeah, it can be hard. I think when you're, we get quite embedded in the projects that we're working on. So I'm working on one really big project at the moment, and, you know, you have weekly calls within the technical team, and you become part of that technical team, and that's where it becomes hard to add value I think. When you're fresh and you go into a team, that's when you know you can sort of challenge in a really constructive way. So I think we just, yeah, I just I do, I need to have reflective conversations with people on a regular basis. So my manager is brilliant for that. She's quite sharp, she's really useful for me and sort of challenging me and making sure that I am still doing the job and not sort of just blending into that technical team.Because facilitators and consultants, the benefit of using independent facilitators is that they challenge on our cultural assumptions, and we have got a lot of cultural assumptions, and we do make a lot of decisions, which means that we probably sometimes can push engagement down the track a bit further than we should. So yeah, so that's it's difficult, but yeah, using, using my manager and and also independent facilitators, that's where they can really add value. I think when we're using them on projects, it's really having really useful conversations with independent facilitators about what I'm working on, and they can give really good advice and just keep you remembering about how to challenge teams in a constructive way. But it is quite tiring. I'm not part of that team. I am there to challenge constructively, and it, yeah, can be tiring, but it's,  you do get a lot of rewards as well from it, but you're not part of that team. And that's, I guess that's a bit like what it's like as a consultant, is that you're not, you're not fully part of that team. You're there to kind of help them as a team, to work well together, but not necessarily be embedded within that team.    H.J Which definitely has its pros and cons. So thinking about then, the kind of the learning, the development, the support that you have to work as a facilitator, what kind of opportunities? I know you said you have your development days, and that you use those to do facilitation. But what else are you able to do to kind of keep your skills up and to learn more?    C.B So we get together as a network, so we have network learning days. So we've got one next Monday, so we run those about every six months where we get the whole network together face to face. We have network days more locally, like we, me and you run one in Bristol, which is really good. And the thing I love about the Bristol one that we do with the International Association of Facilitators is it's so refreshing for the Environment Agency, half the people that come are from the Environment Agency, and half the people that come are just independent facilitators doing all sorts of facilitation across all sorts of sectors, charity sectors, you know, finance sectors all around the world. You know, some of them work in Africa and all sorts of different places. And it's really exciting meeting, and really, really good for us to to be challenged and meet people that are doing facilitation in other places, and they you know that those days are brilliant, and although only a couple of hours, probably learn more in a couple of hours than you could learn, you know, in a whole day online and things and just little conversations and testimonials and, you know, different methods that people are testing out and what's gone wrong and what's worked well. That works really well.    And the two day conference that the IAF run in April. So I went to the, I went to that for the first time two years ago, and I went last year as well. And then every year I'm bringing more and more people from the Environment Agency, because that's when I learn the most in the year is just immersing yourself in two days of just learning sessions and being exposed to people that are facilitating in really different contexts. But there's so much that we can learn from each other. So yeah, and just techniques that you just wouldn't even dream of, I just techniques that I wouldn't even dream of, you know, like last time I went, there was an amazing session about using your body and not talking, but just how you can just facilitate using movement and using your body and help with conflict resolution and different difficult conversations with people just using your body. It sounds really strange, but it was really amazing. It's really interesting.   H.J I guess it's the same for for any of us that facilitate, we tend to do our particular thing, or even if you're an external independent facilitator, and even if you work across different sectors, you can get a little bit stuck in your own, you know, you have your preferred tools and techniques, and you use them again and again. And so any of those kind of days, you know, for me, definitely I learned so much and been to so many sessions where I think, oh, yeah, that's a thing, I've never thought about doing that. So it's definitely not just internal facilitators that have that, because I think the rest of us do as well.   C.B Yeah, yeah, it's great, isn't it? It's amazing. Yeah.   H.J It's really nice, the Bristol meetups you mentioned, I think that is a really nice mix of, I think it's about 50-50 split, internal and external. And I'm always amazed myself at the breadth of different types of facilitation, and the more you, you know, you talk about facilitation and what you can facilitate, you know, it's actually quite a huge array. The edges are very fuzzy, but it's really nice to see all those different methods and different conversations that we have together.    C.B Yeah, yeah, it's amazing.   H.J So thinking about the actual tools and techniques and all that kind of stuff, what's the one thing that you really, really love? I know you've talked about working with the public, what's the one methodology, perhaps, or tool that you really love using? Is there one or a few? Perhaps?   C.B So I worked on a research project called ‘adapting to a changing climate flooding coast'. It's like in difficult situations where flood defence is not the answer for lots of different reasons, but there's not a straightforward, this is how we're going to manage the problem. It was a really good opportunity to take ourselves out of our comfort zones and think, what methods within, with these communities could work? Because we've not got all the answers, actually. And so we developed some more conversation based techniques. And so we did role play simulation. I think when people say role play, everybody's like, Oh, but it's a 90 minute role play simulation where everybody gets a chance to hear different perspectives. And so that was a real privilege being involved in testing that and very emotional. So things like role play simulation and those sorts of techniques that support better quality conversations. I sort of we experienced a situation where people have been working together for years and years, like the local flood Action Group and local planners, our members of staff, and people got to the point where they didn't want to go to the meetings anymore, but because it was redesigned around this role play simulation, and they all went along and took on someone else's role for 90 minutes. At the end they, it was quite emotional, and people, I think, were able to empathise and stand in the shoes of I didn't realise I was making you feel like that. And it was a building block for completely redesigning how the different stakeholders then worked together, and then they got together after the role play simulation, said, What does this mean for the way we're going to work together in the future? And it was just, it was very powerful. It wasn't very long. It's only 90 minutes, like I said, but it was just the fact that it was like a key I suppose that sort of opened up people's eyes to realise that they'd all been exhibiting behaviours that were really unhelpful if they did genuinely want to find a way forward with each other and help each other out to find solutions.    And also, everyone went to the pub afterwards, which I think also just really helped for them to see each other as human beings and to realise that it's not easy for people to just work in a professional role and take their hat off. We are all people and we, you know, we do really need to respect each other within conversations. And it was a yes, it was quite a simple technique. And in the past, I would have been one of those people as soon as you say role play simulation, I would have been one of those people that's really sceptical, but it's really changed my view on the power of standing in someone else's shoes and pretending you're that person and doing that in a safe space. So that in the last few years has probably been the technique that I think has been most powerful in helping people that are really stuck in positions and the meetings have become very adversarial and difficult, and where our staff don't want to go, the stakeholders don't want to come. You know, it's the worst situation that you sort of as a facilitator and engagement expert that you bump into more often than you'd like to. And it's trying to help people reset their relationships. And it was a really powerful technique.   H.J Wow, it's good I guess that you have such a technique that you know definitely works in a given situation. And it sounds like those perhaps conflicting, difficult conversations do come up a bit, I guess, with the very nature of the work that you do.    C.B Yeah, absolutely, yeah.    H.J And do you get to kind of play around much with different tools and techniques? Because I presume you've got quite a lot of time pressure to actually do the facilitation and do all the rest of the work that you need to do. Do you often fall back on tried and tested things?    C.B Yeah, absolutely, we absolutely do fall back on tried and tested things, especially when we're doing things in-house. I think if we were, if there was a situation like that, we would use an independent facilitator to come in and help us. Even if I was doing some of the design work, I would be working alongside an independent facilitator. Yeah, I haven't done any roleplay simulation without an independent facilitator. And I think that is really worth it, and it can make a massive difference. So yes, it's recognizing those situations, I think, where something's become unproductive and difficult, mental health wise, for everybody involved, and it is worth then the investment of we need to do something different here. So we do support those situations.Most of the time,yeah, we're just using run of the mill techniques, like we love online since covid, you know, lots of online workshops, mural boards, or, you know, whiteboards that sort of thing is our go to run of the mill. What we would use all the time, slido polls, things like that. Yeah, that's just the everyday stuff that we're doing.    Although, like having to be very wary about not making assumptions about people's sort of not everybody's comfortable with using those, those sorts of techniques, you know. So having to remember that you do need, you do need to give people space to understand how to use the mural board. And I think people, yeah, so the mural boards and concept boards, whatever you use, they're brilliant, but you do have to always remember to do a little intro. It sounds really obvious, but otherwise, I think it can be a real barrier for people. Some people just don't know how to move the bits and bobs around, and just not getting too comfortable with whatever technique you're using, I think is really helpful.    There's loads and loads of techniques, and I think one of my favourite ones that I learned at the last International Association of Facilitators is like the role play simulation is a difficult technique, like, as in, difficult to design, and you need to do loads of prep. But the really quick technique that I learned was called, ‘I wonder if', and that was a really good technique, and it's just a different way of framing things so and that can be used at any moment with even within a meeting, you know, and that thinking about how you frame questions is maybe the, maybe the use of questions and how you frame questions is the most powerful tool that we've got as facilitators, in terms of, even within a session, that can make a real difference and turn a conversation around.   H.J And I guess, particularly when you know you can't necessarily redesign a whole session each time for every piece of work you do, and sometimes, if it's about, perhaps just making those small changes, by asking those powerful questions then, and they get you the results, much easier to focus on doing something like that than thinking about sort of grand redesign and using all sorts of different tools and all the rest of it, which is nice, and I think does keep us kind of interested. But actually, there's a question about, I suppose, who are we doing that for? Are we doing that for us as facilitators, because it's interesting, or are we doing it for the participants?   C.B Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I love a new technique.   H.J I was gonna just a sort of extra question, really, about that online versus in person? What's the kind of balance?    C.B Oh, yeah, like 95% online now, I would say. We've always been really careful, I think, as an organisation in when we get people together because of the carbon footprint. So, you know, ever since I joined the Environment Agency, there's, there's always, quite rightly, does this have to be face to face? Yeah, and we obviously use the trains and things like that. And, yeah, now is, since covid, I think it's, I guess, you know, we've realised the potential of online and invested in, you know, the government, just generally, I think, has invested more in sort of tools and techniques to help us as as people working for the government that to use those sorts of tools and techniques to have more effective online meetings. So the vast majority of the comms engagement work I do on projects is online workshops, rather than bringing people face to face. And that's a big change in the last five years, because when I was working on the National Flood and coastal risk management strategy four or five years ago, we did bring stakeholders together, at key points for face to face meetings. I think if we were doing that now, a lot of that would be online, so you still have, you still have meetings with people, but you know, they're virtual, which brings its opportunities and challenges. It's more inclusive for some people, because they don't have to travel. And, yeah, it's, but it's, there's something magical about having people in a room, and that's the bit you miss.    H.J Yeah, definitely. I was going to just pick up on the challenges bit. So I've asked you about what you enjoy about facilitation, and you know, nice, all the nice stuff, but what are the main challenges of being an internal facilitator?   C.B I think the main challenge is, I'm working on a project where, you know, where I'm always, whatever I'm working on, when you're working on the project, and you're part of the project team and you're the engagement advisor on it, how independent can you be? And that's a challenge. And so identifying when I need to bring in another in-house facilitator, or when I need to bring in an independent facilitator is really important, and I do, I do have to do that often on the big projects I work on. So, yeah, so that's that's a challenge, is recognizing when you need that and being able to see that far enough in advance so you know, so you can plan for that.   And the other challenge, I think, is it's easy to get really busy on your day job and on your projects and that they are it is busy, and there is a lot to do,making space for me to go and be an independent facilitator for someone else, when you're really busy making space to do that as often as I can. Otherwise, I don't keep my skills fresh, and six months can go by and I realise I haven't gone and done something. I've done lots of facilitation, but I've not done anything for someone else that's completely independent of my day job. And so that's what I have to check myself on, is making sure that I am, I am still doing that, and when I do it, it's so brilliant. And that's when, like I said earlier, that's when you get taken out of your comfort zone of facilitator, which is what sharpens us up, I think. Because facilitation is hard, it is it's exhausting, but it's brilliant as well, when you have those magic moments, when people have understood, you know, understood each other better, and you've helped, by the way, you've designed that meeting and created that space. You've helped people to move forward more in a more positive way, and that's worth it.   H.J Definitely. That's a definite similarity. I think, you know, as external facilitators, exactly the same. Well, certainly for me, you know, it's that feeling, I guess when you've you've done something right, you know it's gone well. And you know that people have come to a good place at the end, it's like, yes. Nice, big glow.    C.B Yeah, ready for my Mars bar at the end.   H.J Yeah. And so, I guess, last question really is, what advice would you give to anybody else that is working as an internal facilitator. Any words of wisdom?   C.B Yes, I would say, keep taking opportunities for training, because I think formal training has its place. And I think going and doing more formal training, it's easy to sort of just do your training initially and then never do any more formal training. I think formal training has its place as facilitators. So going and regularly doing formal training. Definitely mixing with other facilitators who are not part of your organisation. So the International Association of Facilitators provides that perfect opportunity in April. It's you know, and so if you're able to go along, even if it's just for a day, not the whole thing, I think that's really helpful. And then the last thing is, as often as you possibly can, is to facilitate outside of your day job. And I know that's difficult, it's difficult to make the time, but that is, I think, where you'll build your confidence as an independent facilitator. And getting, you know, getting feedback, I guess, is the last bit that links to that other one. So yeah, that's the things I would encourage people to do.   H.J Brilliant. Thank you. It's been brilliant to talk to you today, and thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and bits and pieces about all of your experience and all the stuff you love about facilitation.   C.B Thank you too.   H.J So listeners, we've reached the end of another episode of facilitation stories, the community podcast of IAF, England and Wales   N.W If you'd like to find out more about the IAF and how to get involved, all of the links are on our website. Facilitationstories.com   H.J And to make sure you never miss an episode, why not subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you use?   N.W We're always on the lookout for new episode ideas. So is there a fabulous facilitator you think we should talk to?   H.J Or something interesting emerging in the world of facilitation you think listeners need to hear about?   N.W Send us an email at podcast@IAF-Englandwales.org .   H.J We hope you'll join us again soon for more facilitation stories.   N.W Until then, thank you for listening.  

【句子】At one point, we actually talked about selling the house and moving. 【Desperate Housewives S2E7】【发音】/æt/ /wʌn/ /pɔɪnt/ /wi:/ /ˈæk.tʃu.ə.li/ /tɔːkt/ /tɑːkt/ /əˈbaʊt/ /ˈsel.ɪŋ/ /ðə/ /haʊs/ /ənd/ /ˈmuː.vɪŋ/【发音技巧】At one类似不完全爆破的处理；talked about连读；about selling不完全爆破；house and moving连读+不完全爆破；【翻译】曾经有一度，我们甚至考虑要不要把房子卖了搬走。【适用场合】今天我们来学习一下这个短语，at one point，可以理解成“（曾经）有一段时间”；at a particular moment or time in the past； eg: I worked in HR at one point, but that was a long time ago. 我以前在人事部门工作过，但是那是很久以前了。 eg: At one point I was considering being an economics major, but then I discovered my passion and switched to history.我曾经一度考虑过选择经济学作为我的专业，但是后来我发现了我的热情所在，转而学习历史了。 A: "Wait, weren't Ted and Amanda dating at one point?" B: "Yeah, last semester, but now he's with Shelly."A：“慢着，以前泰德和阿曼达是不是谈过恋爱？”B：“是啊，那是上学期的事儿了。他现在和雪莉在一起。” eg: I was completely lost at one point.我一度完全不知所措了。 【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】我曾经有一度都觉得生活没有希望了。

听前提示一、一段对话为四句，将分成两句为一小节。二、每小节两遍英文，最后一遍英文一边中文。三、根据中英文意思，听不懂的可以多听几遍。原文Conversation 101A:You look pale. Are you all right?你的脸色有些苍白。你还好吗？B:Yeah. I just need some sleep.是的。我只是需要一些睡眠。A:Maybe some hot tea warm you up too.也许来点热茶也能让你暖和起来。B:That's a good idea!好主意！Conversation 102A:Dad, can you bring my math textbook to school? I left it at home.爸爸，你可以把我的数学课本带到学校吗？我把它忘在家里了。B:Oh, did you? Where is it?噢，是吗？它在哪里呢?A: I think it's on the desk in my room.我想它应该是在我房间的桌子上。B:OK, I'll bring it right away.好的，我马上带过去。Conversation 103A:It's time to go to bed.该去睡觉了。B: I was thinking the same thing.我也是这么想的。A:It's getting late and I have to wake up early tomorrow.时间不早了，我明天还要早起。B: Me too. Have a good night.我也是。晚安。Conversation 104A:Are you going grocery shopping later?你一会儿要去杂货店买东西吗？B:Yes.是的。A:Can you get me a coffee?能给我带一杯咖啡吗？B: Of course.当然。Conversation 105A:Where are you from?你从哪里来？B:I'm from Vietnam.我来自越南。A:Your English is really good.你的英语非常好。B:Thank you! But I'm still working on it.谢谢！不过我还在努力学习当中。

【句子】Seriously, we're cool with this, as long as you keep it away from the kids. 【Desperate Housewives S2E7】【发音】/ˈsɪ.ri.ə.sli/ /wɪə(r)/ /kuːl/ /wɪð/ /ðɪs/ /æz/ /lɒŋ/ /lɑːŋ/ /æz/ /ju:/ /ki:p/ /ɪt/ /əˈweɪ/ /frɒm/ /frɑːm/ /ðə/ /kɪdz/【发音技巧】keep it away两处连读+闪音；【翻译】实话说，我们俩觉得这没啥，只要不被孩子们看到就行。【适用场合】今天我们来学习一下这个短语，be cool with sth.，“觉得某件事情可以接受；没啥大不了的”；相当于That is acceptable to me. 或者I'm OK with that. eg: A: "How do you feel about ordering Chinese food for dinner?" B: "Yeah, I'm cool with that."A：“晚餐你觉得点中餐可以吗？”B：“没问题，我可以的。” eg: Mom's cool with it, so let's go out and play.妈妈说没问题，所以我们快出去玩吧。 eg: I was surprised by her promotion, but I'm cool with it.她被提拔了我还挺吃惊的，但是我觉得这事儿能接受。 eg: Is getting together Friday night cool with you?我们定在周五晚上聚一下，你觉得可以吗？ 【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】 你觉得他的决定，你能接受吗？

People can react differently to these kinds of situations. Some people may want to jump right in feet first. They may want to take the plunge! 人们对这些情况可能会有不同的反应。有些人可能想先用脚跳。他们可能想冒险一试！ And some people may want to test the waters. They may want to dip their toes in first. 有些人可能想试水。他们可能想先尝试一下。 Which kind of person are you? Well, imagine you are standing on the edge of a lake or swimming pool. You want to get into the water, but you don't know the water's temperature. 你是哪一种人？好吧，想象一下您站在湖边或游泳池边。你想进入水中，但你不知道水的温度。 Do you jump right in? If you do, you may be more bold and adventurous. 你直接跳进去吗？如果你这样做，你可能会更加大胆和冒险。 Or do you want to dip a toe into the water before you decide? If so, you may be more cautious and careful. 或者你想先试一下再做决定吗？如果是这样，你可能会更加谨慎和小心。If you dip your toes into something, you start doing it slowly and carefully. You are not sure if you will like it. You want to test the waters before beginning something, or before taking the plunge.如果你把脚趾伸进某件事，你就会开始慢慢地、小心地做。你不确定你是否会喜欢它。在开始某件事或冒险之前，你想先试水一下。 Testing the waters means you get a feel for something before committing to it. For example, if you want to move to a new city, you probably want to test the waters first by going there for a short stay. 试水意味着你在投入某件事之前先感受一下。例如，如果您想搬到一个新城市，您可能想先去那里短暂停留来试水。 Taking the plunge is the opposite of dipping your toes. When you take the plunge, you jump right into something. You do not wait or hesitate. 冒险与踮起脚尖正好相反。当你冒险时，你就会直接跳进某件事中。你不会等待或犹豫。 We use the expression dip your toes in for many situations. You may want to try an activity briefly to find out if you like it first. It can also mean you start something very carefully before becoming involved in something that you are not experienced at. 在很多情况下，我们都会使用“dip your toes in”这个表达方式。您可能想先短暂尝试一项活动，看看您是否喜欢它。这也可能意味着你在参与一些你没有经验的事情之前非常小心地开始做某件事。 Now, let's hear some of these expressions used in a non-water related situation. 现在，让我们听听在与水无关的情况下使用的一些表达方式。A: Hey, I'm going ballroom dancing this Saturday. Do you want to join me?A：嘿，这周六我要去跳交际舞。你想加入我吗？B: Ballroom dancing? I know nothing about ballroom dancing.B：交际舞？我对交际舞一无所知。A: That's fine! This place I found is perfect for you. Before the dance starts, they give a free class to beginners.A：没关系！我发现这个地方非常适合你。舞蹈开始前，他们为初学者提供免费课程。B: Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I'll just go and watch. You know … dip my toes in. I like to know what I'm getting into first.B：是的，我不知道。也许我会去看看。你知道……尝试一下。我想先知道我要做什么。A: Sure. But I promise you … after the first 5 minutes you are going to want to jump in feet first!B：当然可以。但我向你保证……在前 5 分钟后，你会想先跳起来！

所谓“土”往往指的是一个人的：见识，理念，思想，品味所表现出来的外在气质！评价一个人是否“土”，有太多的主观因素，最好别随便这样评价一个人。好了，今天的知识点来了！● “太土了”英文怎么说？●“土气”多用来指“不时髦的”，可用 rustic /ˈrʌstɪk/表示。这个单词的意思是：乡下人; 乡巴佬;Jack is always dressing in a rustic style.杰克总是穿得很土气。例句A:How about my new dress?我的新裙子怎么样?B:To be honest, a little bit rustic.老实讲，有点儿土气。表示“土气”的词还有unfashionable,countrified /ˈkʌntrifaɪd/ 作形容词表示：像乡下的; 像乡下人的; 乡土气的; 土里土气的;还有很多其他表达，比如：1、suck 是一个万用词，它表示“天啊太糟糕了”，“真差劲”，“太烂了”，“好土”，实用性非常强。Welcome to the real world, it sucks, but you are gonna love it.欢迎来到现实世界，它糟糕的要命，但你会爱上它的！2、This is not very good.这不太好。/ 这个很一般。这是一个相对委婉的说法。3、down-to-earth意思是：实际的、朴实的、接地气的。Here is a very down to earth restaurant.这里有一家很接地气的餐厅。4、 vulgar意思是粗俗的、通俗的、本土的。The speaker played to the gallery by indulging in vulgar jokes.为了哗众取宠，那位演讲者大讲特讲粗俗的笑话。●2. “洋气”英文怎么说？●“洋气”的意思实际上是“时髦的，流行的”，所以可以用stylish表示。Lily wears a stylish dress and is very attractive.莉莉穿得很洋气，十分引人注目。例句A:Lily is quite a stylish woman.莉莉是个很洋气的女人。B:Yeah, she usually wears name brand clothes.是啊，她总是穿名牌服装。与“stylish”意思类似的词还有modern“时髦的”fashionable“流行的，时髦的”trendy“流行的”等另外，短语in vogue也表示“时尚的”

发现自己没带手机可真是一个活生生的恐怖故事而比这更惊悚的是……带了手机但没电了而且到处都找不到充电宝“充电宝”这一人间宝物英语怎么说？可不是phone charger这个词组是“充电器”的英文表达长这样���01“充电宝”英文怎么说？①powerbank 或 power bank这是常用的表达可以理解为电的银行非常形象例：A: May I borrow your power bank, please? 我可以借一下你的充电宝吗？B: Yeah, sure, here you are.当然，给你。②portable charger charger /ˈtʃɑːr.dʒɚ/充电器portable /ˈpɔːr.t̬ə.bəl/便携的、轻便的组合在一起：“便携式充电器”就是我们用的“充电宝”！例：For the people who needs to travel often ,it is necessary to have a portable charger .对于经常出差的人来说，有一个充电宝很有必要。③charge palpal/pæl/ 好朋友、小伙伴充电的伙伴那就是：充电宝一点毛病也没有呀！例：My phone is dying, do you have charge pal? 我手机快没电了，你有充电宝吗？02“充电”英文该怎么说？“充电”在英语中会用到charge这一词on charge则是表示在充电中例：I put my phone on charge. 我的手机在充电。Is it all right to put the battery on charge overnight? 让电池充一夜电可以吗？另外： “充电器”上面我们提到，可以用 （phone）chargerpower saving mode = 省电模式full charged = 满电 half-charged = 一半的电charging to 100% = 充电到满格03“手机死机”英文该怎么说？手机死机可不能说：My phone is dead.这句话是用来表达手机没电。如果是手机死机，可以直接说：My phone broke down.也可以分情况的说：1.卡住不动的死机It's frozen. / My phone is frozen.字面意思是 被冻住了（很形象了，卡住不动和被冻住差不多）2.黑屏的死机It crashed. / My phone crashed.（直接崩掉了）注意：crash的主语是app时，还能表示app闪退（啥也没干，app自己崩溃了）

This week's episode is part 2 of our interviews from the Made Bike Show in August 2023. We speak with Moots, Fat Chance, Hot Salad, Seeker, Neuhaus, Pinebury, Circa, Story Street, Paul's Components, Stinner, Horse, Frameworks and Bosch. Episode Sponsor: Hammerhead Karoo 2 (promo code:THEGRAVELRIDE) Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the podcast, I've got round two of my interviews from the made bike show in Portland, Oregon. In this week's episode, we've got John from moots. It's talking about that seven 50 B wheel size got Chris from fat chance. Be vivid from hot salad. Chris McGovern from seeker and McGovern cycles. Nick new house, the pine Berry team, circa story street. Paul's components, Aaron from Stenner. A horse. Frameworks Bosch. We've got it all. Another exciting episode. Can I tell you how jazz that was to attend this show and get all these great interviews And I guarantee I'll have some of them on, for longer form interviews so we can get an even deeper dive as to their backstory and what they're all about as a brand. And frame builder. Before we jump in, I do need to thank this week. Sponsor hammerhead. And the hammerhead crew to computer. As many of you wind down your advent seasons, you may be looking forward to a winter filled with exploration and adventure rides. And there's no better device than the hammerhead crew too, for those adventures. It's the most advanced GPS cycling computer available today with industry leading mapping navigation and routing capabilities that set it apart from other GPS had units. You can seamlessly import. Roots from Strava commute and more you can route and reroute on the fly and create pin dropping routing with all with turn by turn directions. With upcoming elevation changes. You know, this device is always up to date with the latest software as they do biweekly software updates, making sure that they're adding the latest features, whether you bought the device two years ago or tomorrow, you're ready to go with a hammerhead kuru too. For a limited time, our listeners can get a free heart rate monitor with the purchase of the crew to visit hammerhead. Dot IO right now and use the code, the gravel ride. At checkouts today, it's an exclusive limited time offer for our podcast listeners. So don't forget that promo code. Just add the heart rate, monitor to your cart, along with the crew too, and use the code, the gravel ride today. With that said let's jump right in to all these conversations from the made bike show in portland oregon [00:02:48] Jon | Moots: Can I get your name and brand? John Caribou from moots based outta Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Good to see you again, John. You too. One of the like, moots doesn't need a lot to draw attention to itself. The titanium frames have always been gorgeous. We've had you on the pod. I've toured the factory. I know the type of work you do, but one of the bikes you have today is making a lot of noise here at the Maid show for a very specific reason. Can you talk about that? Yeah. It's Yeah very much in prototype stage right now. But the seven 50 D wheel size seems to be catching a lot of people interest and, comments out there on the social medias. But yeah, it's, I think it just lends itself to the lineage and the heritage of Moots over time. Just always being on that forefront of innovation and trying different things. It doesn't mean that. This is a defacto new standard by any stretch. It's definitely a new option and honestly that, that wheel size been, has been ridden for some over the last four to five years. We just haven't seen it. Gotcha. And you W t B was the partner who came to you with the rim and the tire, presumably, to explore this. People who've been around mountain bikes for a while will remember that. 26 to 29 moments. Can you talk about what's the rationale behind a bigger wheel size? Yeah. It's, to me being around the industry long enough, I do remember the introduction of the 29, and it was the same company that, W t V that came to us with a rim and a tire at, in 98 and said, what do you think about this? Let's, do you want to build maybe a test bike? And we all know, the. History of the 29 inch proliferation in the bike world, and not that this is gonna happen there, but always nice to be nimble enough to set up and build a frame around a given wheel size. And Moots is in that position to be able to do that. Yeah I remember that moment and getting on the first 29 ERs and thinking it took a little bit more to get the wheel going, but when you rolled over stuff and when you had those bikes going, It was remarkable for me and I was a very early convert to that bigger wheel size. So it's just a curious kind of intellectual process I'm going through and understanding like, what would a gravel bike feel like as someone who rides very technical terrain, I could see the advantages of rolling over stuff more easily. And you mentioned the contact patch extending on a bigger wheel and what that might mean to the rider. Yeah, I think it's, if you think about. Riding gravel. There's not a lot of extremely technical situations where you're making hard turns. It's a lot of straight line speed. It's a lot of straight line hits to the outer edge of the tire and rim combination at that point. So making it longer and, quite a bit bigger, spreads that out and lessens, washboard, it lessens baby heads and whatever you might encounter. In a similar passion that the 29 did for the mountain bike world. Yeah, I think it's just been really interesting as gravel you could argue that it started out as being road bikes plus as we started to allow bigger tires in there and explore different terrain. But it's super interesting as we get into this moment many years into the gravel evolution, to start just exploring things differently and thinking about, yeah, it doesn't need to feel like a road bike as you're going faster and these bikes are getting more capable. Who knows, maybe a bigger tire size and bigger start, a bigger ring rim size will have advantages that riders will start to see as they start to spend time on this new size. Yeah it'll be interesting and, we're anxious to put more time on it. Honestly our time has been limited, but we're getting there and, throughout this fall, late summer, we'll be logging miles and jotting down our thoughts and getting feedback to W T B and. Anybody that would be interested in listening. Yeah. Amazing. Thanks John. I can't wait for that additional feedback. Yeah, Craig, thanks for having us. [00:06:54] Chris | Fat Chance: Okay. Can I get your name and the brand? Yeah. The name is Chris Chance and the brand is Fat Chance Bikes. We're now building all our bikes in Medford, Oregon. Got a nicely set up shop there and we've just introduced the Thai crisscross, been doing it in steel for a number of years and I'm really excited to be doing it in titanium and the people that have been buying them are really excited to ride them. Were you working with titanium with the mountain bikes many years ago to begin with? Yes. Yeah, we started in 93, building a titanium yoti. Okay. Called it a fat chance back then. But yeah, so we built a bunch of titanium bikes and getting back into, you know, relaunching the brand. A couple of years ago we were mostly doing steel, but you know, Ty really called me back. What do you like about Ty for for a gravel bike purpose? Well, in general I love Thai because, you know, it never rusts. It's got a nice kind of springy resilience to it. I I like to do the engineering where we're, I have much experience in steel in designing bikes and tube diameters and wall thicknesses to get the, the, the ride properties I want, the the resilience, the, the stiffness where I want it, and the, just the lively feel in the bike. And so I I translate the stiffness of a steel tube into titanium using a computer, and that way you get all the benefits of titanium. It's lightness, it's kind of springy feel, but I'm designing the bike more for the stiffness of the ride. So it gives you the performance you want as you're riding, like, especially like off road, you know, if you're going down a, say a trail at like as much as 30 miles an hour, your bike is, you know, bouncing around or whatever, and you're just focused on where the front wheel is going. But if you're bouncing around a bunch, your body is taking information from what the rear wheel is doing through your feet and you, without really being conscious of it, you're doing the corrections of that through the pedals, cranks and, and frame to the wheel to keep the rubber side down. And so how the bike feels is just really important to me that I want to have the rider and the bike work as one. Right. And so having that, that ability to Sense what the bike is doing at some, like, not even a conscious level, but developing the trust that the bike is there for you, you know, you can do what you wanna do and the bike is, is supporting you and having that peak experience. What is the customer journey to get a, a fat chance at this point? Is it, is it a custom process? Are you building stock frames? We built stock frames, but we do some custom sizing and you can you can email us at yo at Fat Chance Bike. And get the conversation started. There's also a phone number on our website, fat chance.bike. It's do bike instead of.com and we can talk on the phone, we can do email and just get everything nailed and build you an awesome bike. I know some of the, you know, challenges in working with titanium tubes are around tire clearance and things like that. Yeah. What, what kind of tire clearance can you achieve? Yeah, so we can do pretty much any tire clearance, if you notice on this spike. We have what we call a demi yolk. Yep. And that affords us the same rigidity, excuse me that a full tube would, would offer, but gives us the, the clearance for wide tires. Like this bike will take up to like a, a 44 millimeter 700 C or a 2.1 up to two inches or 2.1 inches. And if you need to write a double, we can account for that. Typically our stock bikes are just one buys up front. Got it. But we have a lot of room because we're using this demi oak design. And what kind of turnaround time do you look at to get a bike? Yeah. Right now we're in the roughly eight to 12 weeks, depending on the model. Okay. Yeah. Pretty quick. Yeah. That's great. Thanks Chris. All right. [00:10:36] B Vivid | Hot Salad Bicycles: Can I get your name and brand? Yes. It's B Vivid from Hot Salad Bicycles B. Where are you building out of? We're here in Portland. Okay. Yeah. And how did you get into Frame Building? Oh, long story. Give us a short version. We can have you back for the long form one. Okay. I used to sit at Destroy Bike Co in the Bay Area and Sean Eagleton was building bikes there and I was like, this is a thing, I can build bikes. That is absolutely what I'm doing. 15 years later, here I am debuting hot salad bicycles. And I've been chasing welding all over the country. Amazing. So you've built up your expertise and now you're ready to go out with hot salad. Yes, exactly. So you're a custom builder. So talk about the customer journey. Like how do you like to get to know the customer so that you can build the bike that's right for them? What kind of materials do you use? Yeah, so I build in steel and titanium. And I like to talk to the customer. We have quite a few emails back and forth. I would just wanna know where you're riding. Like what are you riding on? What do you like to ride fast? Is that a thing? Do what is your current favorite bike that you like to ride? And then what don't you like about that bike? Yeah. Those are the basics. If we're having that conversation, just say, for example I've been on like a random carbon bike, some specialized bike, and I like the way it feels. Sometimes I, even me, I have a hard time articulating like, what is it that I like or what have I, what I don't like? How do you eke out those qualities that then translate to you as an artisan giving me what I really am expressing? Absolutely. I do some research, right? I go look at that specialized bike and I see what specialize is saying about it. But I also know the inherent differences between carbon, titanium, steel, right? Titanium is gonna be a little flexer. So if we're trying to make a carbon feel, which is what Rook asked for on her bike you're gonna have to go up a tube size right. And that's gonna make it a little bit stiffer, give you that snappier ride quality of a carbon bike when Ty is so much flexer. Gotcha. So there's just small things like that where over the years I collected those tidbits from other builders and other people who are willing to gimme time. Amazing. Yeah. And what type of bikes do you like to build? All types. I'm down for the weird ideas. I built that titanium clunker behind you as well that I showed at Philly Bike Expo. And then this is a beautiful all road that wanted to be a little bit more aggressive because Rook is an excellent rider. And I make commuter bikes. I just making, so it doesn't really matter what type of bike it is. And from a customer interaction, how long does it take to get a bike? Once they've, once you've locked down the design elements of it, you've done your research. How long does it take to produce a bike and get it back out to the customer? Yeah, probably about a month. And I know that's a long time, but I'm currently doing all of my own finish work as well. So unless you want me to send it to Black Magic or something like that. And then it could be probably as little as two weeks. And how do you think about finish work? Are you doing your own painting or are you doing anodizing? What kind of options do you make available for customers? Depends on the material, obviously. Yeah. But I have a powder coder who is excellent and he can do fades, he can do sharp lines. And then I also have, I do. I did the t anodizing on this as well. And then, yeah, those are the two options that I currently offer, but I'm hoping to add wet paint in the nearest future. Okay. Okay. And what's the best way for people to find out more about the brand and your story? Yeah, hot salad bicycles.com. Okay. And are you on Instagram and any, the socials? I'm hot salad underscore bicycles on Instagram. Got it. Thanks for the time. B Yeah, thank you. [00:14:06] Chris | Seeker & McGovern: Can I get your name and brand? Chris McGovern. And now what brand are you gonna say? That's my question. We're here with Seeker right now. We do have a McGovern bike in the house, but we're launching Seeker bike company today. Yeah. That's awesome. So McGovern bikes, custom carbon bikes. Yep. Great looking stuff. You've been building for a while. Yep. But we got these seekers in front of us. So tell me about the brand. The intention and what we're doing here. Yeah. Basically with these metal bikes, the steel and titanium gravel bikes, I'm just trying to get, basically make it more available, get people on bikes, on building more readily available, easier to do. Obviously the materials are superior. Materials for riding gravel, the carbon customer is a different customer, basically, yeah. Where are you building these bikes? These are be, these are being built in the, in Portland. Oregon. Okay. At the moment they're going to be built in Olympia, Washington eventually. But yeah, US made, yeah. And what's the customer journey look like? Or do you have stock sizes? Is this a custom jam? Yeah, so we're gonna do stock with custom options, basically. Okay. So the geo will be stock 50 to 60 centimeters and two centimeter increments. But we can customize anything. So I want you to go to the website, be like, yep, I'm a 54. I want that stock color. I want that build kit. Boom. And we're gonna try to have that two week turnaround. And when I think about my, like tire size desires and things like that, do you have flexibility there or have you built around a particular tire vision? So the gravel this version of bike is designed around a 45 C 700 by 45 and up to a 46 tooth single ring. So it could be two by or one by. Gotcha. But I want you to be able to do unbound and throw the big meat on if you're rolling, if you're Keegan Swenson or whatever, you wanna roll that big single Yeah. With the the mullet build or the Explorer build, whatever. Yeah. We want to have that clearance for that. So we've designed around that. Yeah. And you mentioned you're offering a steel bike and a tie bike. What do we see different visually between the two bikes and what sort of adaptations do you make going to tie from the steel? So on. What we see here basically is the same geometry, same style. We have a different seat stay cluster on this one. I do think that the tie bike will end up being the mono stay, like the steel. Okay. We're just need, we're working on repeatability of that. Tie's a little bit trickier to bend but we're gonna do that, I'm pretty sure. The same weeding of the tubes, the down tube is swedged for a little bit to the T 47 bottom bracket. So it's a little stiffer, laterally, 44 mil head tubes. The geometry will be very similar. The, if you've ridden tie, the ride quality is a little bit different. Yeah. Titanium's kind of like air quotes, the forever material. So that's why the tie offering is there. It's a different customer again. Nice. Yeah. Let's talk quickly, Chris, about the origin of the Seeker brand. 'cause I do remember this project at the very earliest start of Covid. Yeah. Lockdowns. Yeah I've, okay. I've been riding bikes for a million years and your brain goes in weird places when you're riding your bike all the time by yourself. And I've had this saddlebag designed in my head forever, and usually just meant I'd come home from a training ride and get the scissors out and chop on the bag I was currently using. And during Covid, for whatever reason, I just decided I got on Amazon, ordered a sewing machine, bought some fabric, and started making saddlebag. I love it. And it turned out to be really good. Some people wanted it, so I made some for some friends and then I was like, oh, I'm gonna get some labels. And I actually was labeling them as McGovern cycles thinking, Hey, when someone buys a bike, I'm going to throw a saddle bag in their box. Yeah. And then bike shops wanted 'em and I was like, ah, it's gotta be something else. So we came up with the seeker logo. I worked on the artwork with Matt Loomis, who's done a bunch of work with Paul Components. We came up with this cool logo. And the people like it. Like we've been selling a lot of t-shirts and stuff and so I felt oh, this branding is strong. Let's do some bikes. Yeah. I think it's super evocative seeker. Yeah. Exploration. Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Are you I've seen you explore a lot of different bag. Options for your running. Yeah. For various things. Yeah. Are you now just settled on the seat pack as being the one product from Secret? Oh, no. So it's our only like stock product for the bags right now. I do some top two bags. I do some I call it the rapid response bag, like for racing scenarios, it's like quick to it. I do frame bags. Those are a little bit more custom. They require a template. Yeah. I build, I built hydration vests. I built. Fast packs. I built backpacks. I'll sew anything really. But I think the secret stuff, we're gonna keep it towards the bike oriented stuff. Possibly. The new website is Secret Adventure Gear, so it's still open-ended. Yeah. You're ready to go? Yeah. We're ready to go. We're ready for whatever you need. We're ready. I was just gonna ask, what's the best place for people to find out more information about the bikes and the bags? I think right now as the Instagram handle, yeah. Okay. Is a secret At secret, a dv. The website is secret venture gear.com. Sweet. Yeah. Thanks for sharing this, Chris. Yeah, thank you. [00:19:07] Nick | Neuhaus: Can I get your name and brand? I'm Nick Newhouse with Newhouse Metalworks. Nick, where are you building out of? We're building out of Novato, California, so Northern Bay Area. Nice. Right up the road from myself in Mill Valley. That's it. I started to hear about your brand through a neighbor in Mill Valley who had one of your hard tail mountain bikes and then later learned you've been doing some gravel bikes. Can you just talk a little bit about the brand and the type of gravel bikes you're putting out there in the world? Yeah, so we just released this weekend actually our steel anti Tanium drop bar, bike lines. The steel line is the Solana. It'll be available in a road, an all road and a gravel version. And to pick the part, those three different categories, what do they translate to? Yeah, so the road version will have a 32 C max. It'll fit a double chain ring larger sizes for those longer road rides. The all road model kind of blends a little bit of gravel, a little bit of road, right. It's got a, a little bit of that road geometry. It'll fit up to a 40 C tire. Still can fit a double chain ring and then the gravel model will go up to a 48 C tire. And it'll be won by specific for those rougher roads, dirt roads, gravel roads wherever you wanna take it. Gotcha. And I interrupted you, I think you were gonna move on to the titanium model over here. Yeah. So the Eon is our titanium version of that. It'll be offered in the exact same configurations. So you'll have your road, you'll have your all road, and you'll have your gravel. We will also offer the eon in an advanced model, which will be very much a, a custom frame set and a departure from our stock sizing. And it'll come with three D printed dropouts that are unique to your specific build. Okay. And it does look like on this titanium model, you're doing some unique stuff with three D printing already. Yeah, so we we use three D printing on all of our bikes. You know, it's not a gimmick. We use it to make sure that we're building the best bike for our customers and the best bike that we can possibly put out into the world without you know, going to a point where they're just, you know, this unobtainable price point. So we always three d print our y yolk. It just, it helps us have flexibility and material choices for rider, weight, size use. We do that on our mountain bikes and all of our drop bar bikes. Got it. And what was, what's sort of the quick origin story of the brand? Yeah, so I've got a a background in motor sports. I've always kind of just fabricated things. Always been a cyclist, you know, you can't grow up in Marin County and not ride bikes. And a couple years ago people finally just wanted to, you know, they, they were knocking on the door wanting to buy bikes and, you know, I wanted to build good bikes. So, yeah. Am I correct? The sort of origin started building. Hardtail mountain bikes. Yeah. That's definitely what we're known for. Okay. So our, our hummingbird model, definitely our top seller. Well received, well reviewed and we're just looking to expand that success into the drop bar market. Nice. And working with both titanium and steel, obviously there's different challenges and different learning curve around working with titanium. Did you start doing titanium on the mountain bikes? We did. Okay. Yeah. So You know, titanium has just always been something that was present, needed to be done. You know, it's like there's a right bike for everybody. There's a right material for everybody based on use, based on needs, based on price point. The way I like to say it right is your steel bike. It's your Cadillac, C T SS V ride's. Great. You can live with it day to day. It comes in at a good price point. The titanium bike is your Corvette. It's sportier. It's faster, right? You know, maybe not the greatest for taking the family to the park. But it serves a purpose as well. Got it. What's the customer journey look like for you? If they've discovered the brand, what does it look like from them getting into contact with you for the first time to getting a bike in their door? Yeah, so we really try to maintain the quickest lead time possible. Right now we're at four months. Our throughput is very high. We have a very manufacturable process right there in Marin County. If a customer wants a bike, they have options. You can order a bike on our website. You can order your build kit on our website. You can email us, we can help you with sizing. It's really, you know, the door is open to, to the customer experience that's desired. Okay, gotcha. Cool. Well I look forward to seeing you later this year at Adventure Revival Ride. Yeah. With the Marin County Bike Coalition and definitely have to check out your facility at some point. Definitely, yeah, we'll be moving into a new shop shortly and we plan to have an open house, so we'd love to have you there. Fantastic, thanks. Thank you. [00:23:28] Kyle | Pinebury: Can I get your name and the brand? Kyle Rancourt. And the brand is Pine. Berry. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're showing here from Pine Berry? Yeah. We make lightweight Marino, wool cycling apparel and active wear. Nice. And where are you manufacturing? In Massachusetts. Our first production one was made in Massachusetts and we're also manufacturing in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Hilderbrand North Carolina for our, our knitwear. And when did you launch the brand? April, 2023. Okay. April of this year. Yeah. And what was it about wool and the type of wool you're using that inspired you to go on this journey and start the brand? I wanted to, mainly, I wanted to make the cycling apparel and active wear that I wanted to wear. And I fell in love with lightweight, you know, performance Marino wool a long time ago. And I haven't seen anybody really in the industry focus on that. It always seems like. It's sort of an afterthought for some of the brands, like they'll have a small collection or a piece or two. And so when doing research before starting this brand, I discovered this amazing fabric in, in yarn manufacturer outta New Zealand called New Yarn. Okay? They have a patented yarn spinning technology. It's twist free spinning. So when you, when you spin merino yarn and it gets twisted, you take out a lot of the natural benefits of the fiber. You reduce elasticity, durability, and loft. And so breathability and new yarn with their twist free spinning they're, they're able to make a fabric that's almost nine times more durable. It has 85% more elasticity. It's five times faster drying, and the list goes on. It sounds like it just, Supercharges what we know about wool to begin with. Exactly. That's the perfect way to put it. So is it, is it still considered Marino wool or is this like an entirely new word we need to learn? That's a great question. I still refer to it as Marino wool. Okay. But new yarn kind of is, is branding it as performance wool. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, you were talking about building this brand around. Sort of purpose-built cycling clothing. And those was that was the cycling clothing you'd wanted to wear and Yeah. Yeah. My experience, like I, I love Marino. I kind of think about it from a hiking perspective and went on a bike packing trip and wanted to wear a t-shirt, so I grabbed a hiking Marino wool wool shirt. So it's super cool that you're focused on kind of cycling as your core market. Obviously the clothing works everywhere else. Yeah. Do you wanna talk a little bit about, it seems like you have both kind of performance tees. As well as jerseys, right? Yeah. Yeah. And actually I like that you brought that up. 'cause I, I wanted to make a point there about our performance tees. Even though they are meant for sort of all sports and all outdoor activities, they have some elements of, of cycling built into them. Like they're a bit longer than a typical tee. They're longer in the back than they are in the front. And actually I'm working on developing a tee that would have a. A zippered pocket in the back of it. Okay. Like a pullover tea that has a zippered pocket. So, nice. Yeah. What's the best way for people to learn more about the brand and the products? It go to our website, pine Bury Us. We have a ton of information on there. We have a whole page dedicated to new yarn. We have a whole page dedicated to our story, you know, in, in addition to domestic manufacturing, all our products remain in the us. We're also plastic free. All of our packaging and shipping materials are plastic free and recyclable. And we have, you know, a real commitment to like sustainability in the environment. I love it. And are people ordering directly from your website today? Yeah. You can order directly and we ship anywhere in the world. Okay. Yeah. One of the final questions I'll ask you is, you know, oftentimes I think in, at least in my mind, historically, will got, will got, will got categorized as something that I'm gonna wear when it's cold. Yeah. Great. Can you dispel or affirm that statement? No, that's a great question. It is not just for cold weather. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wanna underline that we are actually specializing in lightweight wool that can be worn year round. In spring 24. We'll have an ultra light Marino that would, will blow people away at how light and fast drying it is and could be worn in, in the hottest of climates. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I knew that. I was teasing a little bit. Because I'm with you. It's like, I remember on that bike packing trip, it was quite hot on during the days, and it's just a great material in terms of how it handles moisture, how it dries, how it feels, and I'm, I'm a little bit surprised more people don't understand that and embrace it. Right. My, my favorite way to put this is to get in a little, a little like sciency here. Our body's cooling system is evaporative, right? We're evaporative cooling system. So you heat up, you sweat. The, the, the sweat captures heat and when it evaporates, it carries the heat away from your body. So you want a garment that's gonna support that system. Marina wool is by far the best to do that. It is, it's able to wick moisture away from the body at the vapor stage, so before it turns into a liquid. So that's why it can dry fast five times faster than synthetics or conventional Marino. Yeah, this new yard Marino. Awesome. Thanks for sharing all that. Yeah, thank you. [00:28:39] Rich | Circa: All right. Can I get your name and the brand? My name is Rich Fox and I'm the founder of Circa Cycles in Portland, Oregon. You beat me to my next question, which is, where are you building? We're in Portland right now. And you're a Portland based builder? We are, yeah. We've been doing this in Portland for, I started the company 10 years ago. The first two years we're pretty much r and d. As you can see we do things a little bit differently than some folks do, and the first couple of years were just spent basically in our underground lab. And we always with the same, we will get into what is different about these bikes, but using this same technique from the get go, the underlying philosophy. Yes. There were some things we and the first generation prototypes definitely are different from where we ended up. Sure. So why don't you talk about, the attributes of the bike that make it different than almost anything I've seen today. Oh, okay. Sure. So what you're looking at is a bonded anodized aluminum. Lugged frame. So we're anodized lugged and bonded aluminum. And which you can also laser etch into, which is also another fun thing that you brought. Pretty amazing finishes I see over there in the corner. Thanks. So when we talk about lugs, and I did talk to another builder who was working with lugs, which were the much more traditional style that my father's road bike has, we're definitely not talking about those type of lugs here. We're talking about a lot more substantial. Parts of the bike in your version of a lug? Yeah. In, I guess I'd have to, I'd have to ask you what stands out as how sub What do you mean by substantially? I think this sort of oversize nature, like it appears to the naked eye. Oh, okay. That almost the entire kind of seat collar area that's joining the top tube and the seat tube is one large lug rather than a petite. Crafted one that got TIG welded. Okay. Yeah. There are a few things going on. So as I was, when we'd made the decision to get away from welding altogether and work with the bonded assembly, we knew that we would, we'd also made the decision around the same time that if we're gonna bond, we're gonna have to create our own lug system. If we're gonna create our own lug system, it's gotta be. Because, and we would've to create our own lug system because it'd have to be something that Maxim maximizes the performance characteristics of the adhesive systems that we're gonna be using. So there's nothing off the shelf that you can buy that's going to do that. So we'd have to engineer a solution that would handle that for us. Along the way we decided, okay, we don't want to cast those lugs because the general volume strategies around bike frame manufacturing and the way that things. Change over even the way that angles change across size variations in a frame. 'cause they don't scale geometrically or logically in a way. Yeah. We would have to, we would need some kind of a lug manufacturing strategy that would be able to do lower volume and give us incredibly precise control over certain aspects. For example, the tube to the tube to lug interface we need. Super, super tight control at that bond gap. Yeah. And we'd also really need to understand a lot about the bond surfacing itself. So the reason those lugs are somewhat beefy is that a few things are going on. One is that we are trying to maximize contact area for the bond. Yeah for the bond. Two, we are solving a problem of We want the thing to look stout. Yeah. You in the way early days of of deciding what we were doing, there were prototypes that we put in front of people that's, and they said, oh, that looks fragile. And if you're already doing something that's a bit unique and a little bit quite, is off the beaten trail to some re in some respects, you need to do a. W put some extra design work into a SW and keep things that people might be concerned over. So what type of technique are you using, say, for this head tube? Are you machining that out of a block of aluminum? Yes. Everything, all of the connectives on the frame. So all of the lugs, the dropouts any connectives on the seat stays, et cetera. Those are all proprietary things that we've designed, engineered in c and seeded from solid blocks of aluminum billet. Gotcha. I'm using a combination of three, four, and five axis. C N C machines. Yeah. It's interesting when you look at the junction up here on the C tube connecting these tubes in that bolted in right. Does that sort of create limitations around the sort of tire diameters that you can achieve for a gravel bike? No. No. That's definitely that. While there are certain areas on this, the frame that we're looking at right now, that might be a little, that might have a restriction for what you can do that's not the, that's not the, that's not the area. Okay. So that particular solution that's going on there is driven by the fact that the C NNC work that we do, the precision the complexity of the parts, the precision of the details, the quality of the finish work that we're trying to achieve makes those parts. And at a volume that we're not a hundred thousand a year manufacturer. Yeah. The volumes that we're working at makes those parts pretty expensive. So ultimately we have to find ways. Of elegantly identifying components in the frame assembly that we can do in higher volumes so that we can offset the cost. So at the top of the seat stays those plugs, you'll see the same part. This is the same part as what's on the other side, it's mirror. Yeah. So that's two of, two of the same part on the same frame. That's good. But now I can use that same part on any on any frame size. Gotcha. Which gives me some extra flex, so all of a sudden I can really amortize out the cost of that part across lots of different frame sizes. Yeah, I feel like this is a bike that needs to be seen to be best understood, to Definitely encourage listeners to go and check out the show notes and find a link to circa bicycles. Ride circa.com. Right on. And yeah, just as far as like the customer journey goes, if once someone discovers the brand, what does it look like to get a bike underneath them? Are you building fully custom bicycles or is it a stock range? We don't do, we found that we don't really need to do fully custom. Yeah. An interesting byproduct of our manufacturing strategy is that because we have this modular kit of parts, essentially that we've developed over time is that it lets us, our, we consider it we have three, three fit options. Essentially, we have a standard geo which is suited towards. The majority of the population from a arm and leg and torso length Yeah. Standpoint. But we also are really easily able to create a long reach or a short reach version of the same design. Yeah. And that's basically a free thing. So we're essentially doing semi-custom geometry for free. If you do have a fit scenario where you need to be upright or you want to be more if you have a long torso. A short torso. Yeah. Or you have some kind of a, a. Physical limitation if you have less mobility in your back or more mobility. Yeah. If you needed a sort of a higher stack would you adjust the machined head tube to achieve that? Or is that not an area that you adjust? It's typically not necessary. Okay. We, our size range right now is pretty broad. Our, we have the, our platform goes from an what we call our extra small, which Although you can't see it in our conversation here, this is the seat tube for our extra small, okay. Which is for those folks listening imagine basically something about the length of A B M X seat tube. So we created that for a rider who had, I think she required a 711 millimeter standover. It's either seven 11 or eight 11. One of those, okay. But very super short stand. So we created like a 17 degree sloping top tube for her. And but now that's become our extra small platform. Nice. Covers a pretty petite rider. And then our extra large platform goes up to 6 3, 6 4 riders. Okay. So between that size range and the ability to pull the cock pin in and out we feel like we do a pretty good job of accommodating most. G I'm sure most fit requirements. Super cool. And what is the typical turnaround time? It depends on on load at any given time, but bare minimum is six weeks. And that just depends, but that's bare minimum. And it can go out to two to three months depending, but sell them longer than that. The only time we've ever had something that really stretched. Was during the nightmare of Covid times. Yeah. And nobody could get any parts. Yeah. So the frames would be done and we'd be sitting around really hoping our order from shaman or RA would show up of course. Which they never did well. Super striking bikes and encourage people to go take a look at 'em. Thanks for the time. Thank you so much for paying attention for for Karen. [00:37:22] Devin | Story Street: Can I get your name and the brand? Yeah. My name is Devin Ross and I am the owner and the builder for Story Street cycles. How did you get started building? I've been working in the ski in the in and the bike industry since about 2006, and most of my experience was through on the service side of things and retail and sales. Kind of on a whim back in 2015, decided to take a frame building. Course at U B I in Ashland and kind of really enjoyed it and started doing some more kind of small custom building for friends and family. And over the last few years have developed that into kind of our first run of production, small batch frames. We do a. All road frame and then an all mountain frame. Cool. Let's talk about this all road frame. Does it have a, a, a sort of model name or just your all road? It's just the ar. Okay. I have the AR and the am What are you building this frame out of? So the frame is out of steel. It is kind of a combination of Columbus steel and a little bit of the kasai tubing from Japan. The All of the hardware and all of the small components such as the head tube, the bottom bracket, and dropouts are all from Paragon Machine Works. And then the finishing kits kind of are all the color matched options from Wolf Tooth. And what size wheel are you running on this bike? This current one is a six 50 B with 2.1 tires on there. Okay. The general frames are, Designed with clearance up to 45. I think usually like a 38 to a 42 for a lot of this type of riding is kind of the sweet spot. But we can, we got clearance and everything to go up to some bigger options. Nice. And what's sort of the, the customer journey when they discover you? You mentioned you've sort of brought a small batch phenomenon. Mm-hmm. So you have a handful of bikes in stock. You typically try to fit them on one of those models and Yes. So we do. On the all road side, we have a 52, 54, 56, and 58 in the pre-made ones. The frames are all kind of built and welded and ready to go. And then when a customer is ready to to purchase them, then we will kind of figure out what the overall paint scheme and the the highlight. So the, all of the frames are gonna be painted, are gonna be powder coated to the customer specification. And then all of the finishing kit and everything, our decals, we try to go along the same kind of seven standard colors that wolf tooth does, just to make all of the, the matching and everything like that make your accessorizing easy. So that way we can still get the, the same custom kind of one of a kind finish that that people can get with choosing their color and choosing their finishing kit without the the longer lead time. For a full custom build. If people are still interested in doing kind of their own custom geometry we see that a lot with people looking for a little bit taller of a head tube. A lot of times people that have maybe longer torsos, shorter legs and stuff, we still do offer those options to do a fully custom in either of our. Or All Road or, or All Mountain. Okay. And if people wanna find more out about the brand, how do they find you? So we're on Instagram at story street cycles and then our website is story street cycles.com. Awesome. Thank you. Cool. [00:40:55] Paul | Pauls Components: Yeah. Can I get your name and company? Paul Price Paul Component Engineering. Good to meet you Paul. And you too. Thanks. Yeah. I know you've been around the industry for a long time making beautiful componentry outta California. The one area I wanted to talk to you about though are these clamper disc brakes cable actuated, disc brakes. It's something I've long seen on some of the sexiest bikes around, but misunderstood because I had some old, I won't name the brand. Mechanical disc brakes. That really didn't serve me well. This is true. This, yeah. The the cable breaks were always for the cheap bikes and there's certain advantages for cable breaks. And I knew when we developed this thing that there had to be some people that just wanted to keep it simple, but really wanted a really good product and didn't necessarily enjoy bleeding their breaks that much. Yeah. And how, how are you able to achieve. The stopping power of a hydraulic brake with a cable actuated brake. That took about three years and about 10,000 prototypes. But we just make everything to a much tighter tolerance, like we just made it as good as we can. All those other cheap brakes come from Taiwan and everything is just smashed and squished to, to get made. We actually machine to very tight tolerances, so everything fits together really nice. We also bolted up a little bit and figured out a way to just get tons of power out of it. It go ahead And does it mount in the exact same fashion as a hydraulic disc brake would on my bike exactly the same. Exactly. The mounting is exactly the same. Yeah. Okay. And do the different levers have different poll ratios that you need to consider? This is important. Yeah. The long pole lever, which was, is a v brake lever that's called a long pole. And then you can buy the clamper with that arm or a shorter arm for like your road bike levers and your short pole levers. We make something called a cantilever. And then we also make a camp campy version because it pulls a completely different amount of cable as well. And are those. Completely different versions of the brake bracket itself, or are they just a component? No. To you buy the brake, which is not cheap. But you can just change one part to change to match any lever that's around. Got it. And are we using a typical brake pad, disc brake pad in Yeah the pad is a, is came out of an avid model that. It fits a whole bunch of different breaks and we just wanted to pick something to where you could go in a bike shop in the middle of, the desert or New York City or wherever and they're gonna have some pads in stock, so that's not a problem. Going back to my cable pole, breaks of my mountain bike of yester year. Yeah. Now I remember cable stretch needed to be adjusted. Obviously you've got brake pads that'll burn out a little bit. Yeah. How do I deal with that with a clamper product? You first thing you do is you install 'em and then you go on three bike rides. And what that does is it moves all the grease around that's inside all the parts which fit very well together, all get cozy together and the the pads bed into the, to the rotor real nice. And after that, your housing is compressed as it's gonna get your cable stretched on the initial stretch. And you're good to go. And one of your colleagues was showing me a little micro adjust you could do on it, that it seemed like it would tighten the pad up. Is that right? Yeah, both sides, there's adjustment which you can actually do on the road or trail, which is a really nice feature. Absolutely. Yeah. What's the best way for people to find out about Paul's components? Paul comp.com. P a u l c o m p.com. And And check that out. Send us an email, give us a call if you have any questions. Perfect. Thank you. You're welcome. [00:44:45] Aaron | Stinner Frameworks: All right. Can I get your name and brand? Yeah. Aaron Stenner Frameworks. Nice, Aaron. And where do you guys build out of? We are in Santa Barbara, California. Nice. And how long have you guys been building? I've been building full-time since 2012. And current team's been in place since 2 20 15. How did you get into it in the first place? I was managing a bike shop and running a pretty robust like fit department, so we were doing a lot of fitting. And I ended up going to U B I to just learn a little bit more about frame building and why angles and why this and why that. And so I learned how to build bike at U B I and I came back and people heard that I knew how to build frames and it just snowballed from there. Yeah, that seems to be the way it works. It's friends and family. Yeah. Then extended friends. And then maybe I got a business on my hands. Exactly. Yeah. So then were you building with steel at that point? Yeah, primarily steel. And I started doing like lug bikes and braised bikes and then morphed into TIG welding. And we've been doing primarily TIG welding bikes since 2013. And are the bikes typically custom built for the customer or is are you doing small batch? So we do we don't we build the order, so we don't have any inventory, but we do have sizing, size models. So we do have a 52, 54, 56 kind of model based and we are model based, meaning like we have a gravel frame model and we have a road model. So model based, we have sizes, but we can do custom geometry depending on what you need. And then we have a paint program that's similar where we have pre-picked schemes or pre-designed schemes, and then you can iterate and design within that. Gotcha. Yeah, I've seen a lot of really stunning sinners out there on the roads. Thank you. Which is great. What is this bike that we're looking at today? Yeah, so we have the, our new Refugio. So we've, our Ravel bike has been our refugio for many years. And this one, The big upgrades is we went from a 45 C tire to now being able to fit a 50 C tire. Brilliant. Keeping Our chain stays still relatively short. These are at like 4 28. And we have U D H compatibility, so running the universal STR universal trailer hanger. And it also still work with a transmission drive train. So on this bike we have transmission on the rear like a road oriented crank set up front with a 42 tooth train ring. So you get this like really nice wide range. Mountain bike, road meets, road bike compatibility build, buildable. Yeah. Model. Those are our big changes. So U D H and 50 C tire. And then we also are integrating all of our cables internally now on Okay. Gravel frames as well. And that's a dumb question. As you've built a frame like that, you're committed, you gotta go inside. At that point. Yeah, to a degree. And that's kind of stuff we're working on. So like right now yeah you more or less need to pick a bar, stem and headset that worked that way. I think everybody's learning that this is a nice way to route this stuff. So we are we do also have the ability to run like regular external cables and just have 'em drop into the top of the headset as well. Okay. So you could run traditional parts as well. Okay. Yeah. So both work. So you don't have to commit only to one one style. Gotcha. And what does the customer journey look like once they discover you? Like how much interaction are you having with me as a customer prior to ordering? And then what does that timeline look like to get a bike these days? Yeah, so we have we just launched a configurator like literally last Wednesday. We've been working on it for about a year. So you can actually go on and design your pain scheme, build out your bike online and get a live quote and So you could have a very hands-off approach if you're that type of customer. But we also, our email's on there, we have a contact form right there. If you have any questions, you have any concerns, you can just email us in. Yeah. And we're happy to answer any questions. And we do everything from the configurator, which is pre-picked, more or less to full-blown custom if you want it. The configurator will give you a very guided tour of costing. And then if you want to go full custom, that's more of a conversation to have. Yeah. Gotcha. Just pick your own adventure. I feel like every time I come across a bike customizer, I lose tens of minutes of my life dreaming, changing, going backwards and forwards to try to find something wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. That was the idea is we wanted people that don't want to email in or don't have the time to do the emailing. Yeah. We wanted to give 'em a tool that they could sit out at the end of the night and play around with and get an idea about our brand and what things cost and what we're all about without having to have a direct conversation. But we're there and we're ready when they want to have that conversation. Yeah. Awesome. So remind us, how do we find you? Yeah, so Entner Frameworks is our website just tinder frameworks.com. We're on Instagram sinner frameworks. Those are our two main points of contact. And yeah, let us know if you have any questions. Perfect. Thanks for the time. Awesome, thank you. [00:49:12] Thomas | Horse Cycles: Can I get your name and brand? Thomas Callahan Horse Cycles. Thomas, how long have you been building under the Horse cycles brand? 17 years. Amazing. Yeah. What got you started to begin with? I was doing sculpture fine art, so I had a studio and was ready to commit to a nicer bike and decided to make the tooling and buy the tooling to build my own bike rather than invest in a, I think I was looking at Italian track bikes at the time. Okay. And then people just started to ask me to build them bikes, which was really great. 'cause I wasn't, it was hard to fine art wasn't super accessible, conceptual fine art wasn't super accessible to a larger audience. Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. And what's the bike that we're looking at today? Are you all custom or do you have sort of product models? Yeah, they're product models, which is really nice. It's like a really good base to work from. So even the custom stuff, usually there's a platform, all road platform, a road platform, a mountain platform. From there we go. Custom. This is a fully custom tie bike. This is tie number five. And it's a all road adventure bike. It's got the envy adventure fork on it, tapered head tube super supple Vermont Rider customer. So yeah, it's got a SCO fade from the head tube back and yeah. It's beautiful. Have you been working with Titanium for a while? I've been working with it for about five years. Just, before I put it out in the universe just to make sure that I have the confidence and the skills and was playing around with it. 'cause I wasn't sure I really wanted to go that way. But it's a fun material to grow into. You just really wanna make sure that you're doing it properly and what does a customer journey look like? If they wanted to work with you, just people reach out. Get some more info about the process, get on the website, talk about their needs and see if, it would work out. And usually around four months lead time and do a lot of full builds. But I really love connecting with people. That's one of the best parts other than being able to work with my hands is really connecting with people. To build something together. And that connection is really why I do what I do, yeah. 'cause, people are great. It's such a great journey as a customer, working with a builder to express like our collective vision for this bike. Yeah. And then receive it. I imagine that you get a lot of love back from customers. Yeah, I do. And really the people that I'm able to work with, first of all, I'm so appreciative. Because it takes a lot of effort for customers, but they're really amazing people. The industry is great 'cause, it's a BA based on physical and mental fitness, and that's usually provides a pretty positive, personal platform and, they're good solid folks. So a hundred percent. If people wanna find out more about horse cycles, where do they go? They can go to horse cycles.com, they can go to my Instagram horse cycles, gimme a phone call, reach out. I'm, I'm there and I'm not going anywhere. Perfect. Thanks for the time. Thank you. [00:52:13] Jonathan | Frameworks: Can I get your name and, and company? Yeah. I'm Jonathan from Framework Bicycles. We're based outta Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Nice. And how long have, have you guys been around? We've only been building bikes for about one year now, but my wife and I own and operate an aerospace tool and die shop Gotcha. For about 11 years. So that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Why you have the capability to do these amazing and aluminum lugs that we're looking at. That to me are like sort of one of the more striking features of the bike. Thank you. Do you wanna just kind of describe how this bike is constructed in the tubes and it lugs? Yeah, so I guess we use a hybrid construction method that's not unique to us right now. Like Bastion's doing it, Atherton's doing it. Pivot just did it with that full suspension bike. I know you're a gravel guy, but we machine bill it aluminum lugs and wind filament wound carbon tubes in house that are bladder molded and cured in in mold. And then we bonded together. Essentially, the joint details are all handled by the C N C machine. Okay. So you've got sort of the, the joints of the bike, if you will, with these aluminum lugs that you're machining, and then in between carbon fiber tubes. Yep. And you were, you were mentioning that you have the ability to kind of customize the carbon fiber tools for the cust Yeah. Tubes. Yeah, the tubes. So we, we have a couple main things we can change. Everything we do is inside of a three D modeling software. So each bike is a total one-off. It's parametrically modeled. So we enter your fit data tire clearance, all that kind of stuff. The CAD model updates from there. So if I, if I needed sort of a, a taller head tube would Yep, totally. Would that translate into, yeah, we, we would look at, well the combination of top tube drop head tube, it's gonna change everything in the back of the bike from their back, right? Yep. So we'd look at your touch points for the bars, head tube lengths from there also with the four you wanna run. So that's gonna give you that dimension there on the head tube. And then, Even things like where these joints intersect one another, we can control that. So say you were a small rider and this tires getting too close to the down tube, we can actually bring that up a bit. Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. And what kind of, if I came to you, what kind of modifications do you consider for the tubing on the carbon fiber side? If it was a super heavy rider? Super tall rider? Yeah. Wall thickness is like, we can change tube diameters too. So I would say there's two spectrums. If you're a really small rider, you don't need like a really round, big round tube. It's too much for you. Yeah, so my wife, like for example, I run a smaller down tube on that so that the shape, the size of the tube and the shape is your main driver in terms of strength. From there, what we tune is wall thickness, so how many layers of carbon we put into each tube, and then below that is the fiber orientation. Because we're C N C, winding them, we can whine for torsional strength, bending, stiffness, anywhere in that spectrum to give the different compliance in the frame where you need it. Since it's a somewhat novel approach to frame construction. Yeah. How do you describe to customers or would be customers, what the ride quality might feel like on this bike? It's hard. So we do have some bikes out for review with media outlets right now, but they're custom bikes that are built for those people. Yeah. So they, they'll ride it, but it's like, if I made you a bike for your fitting, it's gonna be a bit different. So what I would describe it as is kind of picking the best of all worlds. You get some damping from the way the joints go together. You still have the kind of lightness and strength of carbon fiber, but with none of the chatter or buzz or like squeak in the bottom bracket. 'cause everywhere we're interfacing metal parts, it's going to a metal part on our bike. Okay. So really stiff bottom bracket shelf. And it they ride really quietly. Yeah. Someone else had mentioned that. You know, this type of joint juncture up here does add a lot of rigidity to how the stays come into the tube here. Like this detail here. Yeah. Yeah. So what we do to try to get some of that back is, I'm a big proponent of top tube drop. Like basically the, the stick out of your seat tube, your ride perception is gonna be way more on how your saddle's moving back and forth with frame flex than anything happening in the frame. So that's why people are playing with things like the drop stays. To try to get that to bend in like an SS shape a little bit. Yeah. But if you just make this cantilevered bar longer, you're gonna get way more comfort from that. Got it. That's basically the easiest way to do it. What does the customer journey look like to discover you and how do they find you? And then what does it look like from there If you wanna purchase the bike? Yeah. 'cause we're super active on Instagram. That's basically how most people have found us. I'm big on just sharing process stuff while I'm in the shop. People either love it or at least they'll like check it out quickly and come back like a month from then. So I'm on stories all the time showing how we machine stuff, how we make the equipment that makes the bikes. So pretty much right now we're trying to get set up with a couple shops, but we're direct to consumer. Yeah. So it's reach out to us. I'll email you back. We typically recommend that if you're not very confident about your fit, like where your touch points are on the frame that you work with the fitter local to you. Yeah. Send us that detail. The discussion from there is what type of bike are you looking for? Road bike, gravel bike in that spectrum. Mountain bike. So your touch points and the style of bike you want kind of dictate the geometry we go to from there and then it's ticket deposit and we ship you a bike in like four to eight weeks. Super cool. Tell me the website and Instagram handle framework bicycles.com and on Instagram where framework bikes. Awesome. Thanks. [00:57:29] Zack | Bosch: Can I get your name and the brand you represent? Sure. Zach Kreel and Vapor Propulsion Labs. We do Bosch, pinion, supernova, and three by three hubs. Right on. So Bosch has been making electric bicycle motors for how long? Gen One came out in Europe in 2010. Started working with 'em in 2009 over a 18 month period of time to, to work on that project. Gotcha. Yeah. What's been curious to me is obviously, like many of us are aware of the bigger brands doing e-bikes in their lineup, but over the last few years I've started to see builders like Jeremy CIP build with your product. So building, a custom bike effectively. Yeah. And accommodating the Bausch motor in the bottom of it. How does that come to be and what kind of trends do you see in that area? Yeah, so we, we are definitely seeing the custom handmade guy come and express interest. A lot of times there is this misconception that this is way complicated and in general you're replacing the BB with a motor node that can be welded in just like a BB shell can and you're accommodating that. And we try to cut the red tape for the handmade guys to be able to make sure, or to reassure them. That this is pretty easy. So yeah, when you see from an engineering standpoint, from a bill of material of the electric standpoint, all that stuff, we hold their hand to to get them to make the first one, and then they're ready to roll. Yeah. When you see the raw frames that they're producing, it's obvious oh, you can just bolt the engine there on the bottom, and that part's clear. But as you look at what's required to kind of function and power and control the motor, There's more to it than that. So what are the other components of the system that they need to be thinking about as they're building these bikes? Well, a lot of times, you'll think about the end consumer and you'll say, okay, is this gonna be, for somebody that is running a cargo bike, if it's a, if it's a touring, a gravel rig, if it's a, if's a's pavement bike, if it's a car, alternative bike, those particular frame builders will potentially. Alter the gauge of their tubing. Potentially. It depends on how much load is on it, but that end customer is driving where these will go. And from our standpoint the Bosch system is super robust. It's tested all the way to E M T V standards now and that typically works for everything that everybody in this building is gonna make. What kind of controls are necessary to connect to the motor? So the motor, the botch system is a, it's a closed system. So there's basically, the hardest system is the motor connected to the battery, and then there's the display. The motor has the brains inside there. It measures the human input at a thousand times a second, roughly. So super fast. And then it it connects to the battery. There's a communication between battery and motor, and then there's also communication to the. To the head unit or your smartphone, all of that stuff is, its ecosystem and they're all required to have on the bike itself. And is it a pedal assist system? So it's just adding wattage to my It is, yeah. Personal output. So it measures your input super super accurately. And then you level, you choose the level of assistance eco up to turbo and eco's, like 50% of your input turbo is up to 400% of your input. Gotcha. And I see behind us. It's not only a tandem, it's a triple. Is that right? Yes, that is right. So that's a, that's our concept bike. My daughter's the one who's gonna be in the middle there. So lucky her. That particular rig is cool because the middle stoker, that section of the frame can be removed and then it can turn into a tandem. That's incredible. We brought that one here for frame builders to see as like the most complicated bike that they could ever imagine. And then give them the perspective of okay, a single is super simple compared to that. Yeah. And is there's just one, is there just one Bausch engine in that bike? Yep. Okay. Yeah. And it's a, that's a dual battery. There's a three by three internal gear hub in the back with e shift. So electronic shifting, there's a Bluetooth wireless controller to the ba

【句子】But, um, you know, Manny told me a story about his friend Danielle. She sounds like a real piece of work, by the way. 【ModernFamilyS3E14】【发音】/bʌt/ /əm/ /juː/ /nəʊ/ /ˈmæni/ /təʊld/ /miː/ /ə/ /ˈstɔː.ri/ /əˈbaʊt/ /hɪz/ /frend/ /ˌdæniˈel/ /ʃiː/ /saʊndz/ /laɪk/ /ə/ /rɪəl/ /piːs/ /əv/ /wɜː(r)k/ /baɪ/ /ðə/ /weɪ/【发音技巧】told me不完全爆破；about his击穿+连读+闪音；friend Danielle失去爆破；like a连读；piece of连读；【翻译】不过，曼尼给我讲了一个他朋友丹妮尔的故事。顺便说一句，那女孩真是个人物。【适用场合】今天学习一个短语：a piece of work；这个短语字面意思是：一份工作；一件作品；如果用来描述人的话，虽然有的时候是褒义色彩，表示：“很了不起的人（物）；不同寻常的或令人印象深刻的人”，a very surprising, unusual, or impressive person；但还有一些场合中，这个短语明显是贬义色彩，就是a remarkably difficult, unpleasant person“一个很难搞、非常不好相处的人、奇葩”的意思；所以具体是什么意思，要看上下文；eg: Boy, our new boss is a real piece of work. Remind me to stay out of her way!我的老天爷，我们的新老板真的是个很难搞的人。记得提醒我离她远点。A: "Amy's new boyfriend is a nightmare to be around! He's so bossy and argumentative." B: "Yeah, he's a piece of work, all right. No idea what she sees in him."A：“艾米的新男朋友太难相处了！又霸道还特别爱争论。”B：“就是啊，他可真是个大奇葩，不知道她看上他什么了。”eg: “You are a piece of work,” he said. “Do you have any idea what you're playing around with?”“你可真厉害，”他说道，“你知道你是在摆弄什么东西吗？”eg: He's a very tough piece of work.他可真的是一个很难对付的人。【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】他显然是个非常难搞的家伙。

We're trying a new format, inspired by Acquired.fm! No guests, no news, just highly prepared, in-depth conversation on one topic that will level up your understanding. We aren't experts, we are learning in public. Please let us know what we got wrong and what you think of this new format!When you ask someone to break down the basic ingredients of a Large Language Model, you'll often hear a few things: You need lots of data. You need lots of compute. You need models with billions of parameters. Trust the Bitter Lesson, more more more, scale is all you need. Right?Nobody ever mentions the subtle influence of great benchmarking.LLM Benchmarks mark our progress in building artificial intelligences, progressing from * knowing what words go with others (1985 WordNet)* recognizing names and entities (2004 Enron Emails) * and image of numbers, letters, and clothes (1998-2017 MNIST)* language translation (2002 BLEU → 2020 XTREME)* more and more images (2009 ImageNet, CIFAR)* reasoning in sentences (2016 LAMBADA) and paragraphs (2019 AI2RC, DROP)* stringing together whole sentences (2018 GLUE and SuperGLUE)* question answering (2019 CoQA)* having common sense (2018 Swag and HellaSwag, 2019 WinoGrande)* knowledge of all human tasks and professional exams (2021 MMLU)* knowing everything (2022 BIG-Bench)People who make benchmarks are the unsung heroes of LLM research, because they dream up ever harder tests that last ever shorter periods of time.In our first AI Fundamentals episode, we take a trek through history to try to explain what we have learned about LLM Benchmarking, and what issues we have discovered with them. There are way, way too many links and references to include in this email. You can follow along the work we did for our show prep in this podcast's accompanying repo, with all papers and selected tests pulled out.Enjoy and please let us know what other fundamentals topics you'd like us to cover!Timestamps* [00:00:21] Benchmarking Questions* [00:03:08] Why AI Benchmarks matter* [00:06:02] Introducing Benchmark Metrics* [00:08:14] Benchmarking Methodology* [00:09:45] 1985-1989: WordNet and Entailment* [00:12:44] 1998-2004 Enron Emails and MNIST* [00:14:35] 2009-14: ImageNet, CIFAR and the AlexNet Moment for Deep Learning* [00:17:42] 2018-19: GLUE and SuperGLUE - Single Sentence, Similarity and Paraphrase, Inference* [00:23:21] 2018-19: Swag and HellaSwag - Common Sense Inference* [00:26:07] Aside: How to Design Benchmarks* [00:26:51] 2021: MMLU - Human level Professional Knowledge* [00:29:39] 2021: HumanEval - Code Generation* [00:31:51] 2020: XTREME - Multilingual Benchmarks* [00:35:14] 2022: BIG-Bench - The Biggest of the Benches* [00:37:40] EDIT: Why BIG-Bench is missing from GPT4 Results* [00:38:25] Issue: GPT4 vs the mystery of the AMC10/12* [00:40:28] Issue: Data Contamination* [00:42:13] Other Issues: Benchmark Data Quality and the Iris data set* [00:45:44] Tradeoffs of Latency, Inference Cost, Throughput* [00:49:45] ConclusionTranscript[00:00:00] Hey everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO and residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host, swyx writer and editor of Latent Space.[00:00:21] Benchmarking Questions[00:00:21] Up until today, we never verified that we're actually humans to you guys. So we'd have one good thing to do today would be run ourselves through some AI benchmarks and see if we are humans.[00:00:31] Indeed. So, since I got you here, Sean, I'll start with one of the classic benchmark questions, which is what movie does this emoji describe? The emoji set is little Kid Bluefish yellow, bluefish orange Puffer fish. One movie does that. I think if you added an octopus, it would be slightly easier. But I prepped this question so I know it's finding Nemo.[00:00:57] You are so far a human. Second one of these emoji questions instead, depicts a superhero man, a superwoman, three little kids, one of them, which is a toddler. So you got this one too? Yeah. It's one of my favorite movies ever. It's the Incredibles. Uh, second one was kind of a letdown, but the first is a.[00:01:17] Awesome. Okay, I'm gonna ramp it up a little bit. So let's ask something that involves a little bit of world knowledge. So when you drop a ball from rest, it accelerates downward at 9.8 meters per second if you throw it downward instead, assuming no air resistance, so you're throwing it down instead of dropping it, it's acceleration immediately after leaving your hand is a 9.8 meters per second.[00:01:38] B, more than 9.8 meters per second. C less than 9.8 meters per second. D cannot say unless the speed of the throw is. I would say B, you know, I started as a physics major and then I changed, but I think I, I got enough from my first year. That is B Yeah. Even proven that you're human cuz you got it wrong.[00:01:56] Whereas the AI got it right is 9.8 meters per second. The gravitational constant, uh, because you are no longer accelerating after you leave the hand. The question says if you throw it downward after leaving your hand, what is the. It is, it goes back to the gravitational constant, which is 9.8 meters per, I thought you said you were a physics major.[00:02:17] That's why I changed. So I'm a human. I'm a human. You're human. You're human. But you, you got them all right. So I can't ramp it up. I can't ramp it up. So, Assuming, uh, the AI got all of that right, you would think that AI will get this one wrong. Mm-hmm. Because it's just predicting the next token, right?[00:02:31] Right. In the complex Z plane, the set of points satisfying the equation. Z squared equals modulars. Z squared is A, a pair points B circle, C, a half line D, online D square. The processing is, this is going on in your head. You got minus three. A line. This is hard. Yes, that is. That is a line. Okay. What's funny is that I think if, if an AI was doing this, it would take the same exact amount of time to answer this as it would every single other word.[00:03:05] Cuz it's computationally the same to them. Right.[00:03:08] Why AI Benchmarks matter[00:03:08] Um, so anyway, if you haven't caught on today, we're doing our first, uh, AI fundamentals episode, which just the two of us, no guess because we wanted to go deep on one topic and the topic. AI benchmarks. So why are we focusing on AI benchmarks? So, GPT4 just came out last week and every time a new model comes out, All we hear about is it's so much better than the previous model on benchmark X, on benchmark Y.[00:03:33] It performs better on this, better on that. But most people don't actually know what actually goes on under these benchmarks. So we thought it would be helpful for people to put these things in context. And also benchmarks evolved. Like the more the models improve, the harder the benchmarks get. Like I couldn't even get one of the questions right.[00:03:52] So obviously they're working and you'll see that. From the 1990s where some of the first ones came out to day, the, the difficulty of them is truly skyrocketed. So we wanna give a, a brief history of that and leave you with a mental model on, okay, what does it really mean to do well at X benchmark versus Y benchmark?[00:04:13] Um, so excited to add that in. I would also say when you ask people what are the ingredients going into a large language model, they'll talk to you about the data. They'll talk to you about the neural nets, they'll talk to you about the amount of compute, you know, how many GPUs are getting burned based on this.[00:04:30] They never talk to you about the benchmarks. And it's actually a shame because they're so influential. Like that is the entirety of how we judge whether a language model is better than the other. Cuz a language model can do anything out of. Potentially infinite capabilities. How do you judge one model versus another?[00:04:48] How do you know you're getting better? And so I think it's an area of intense specialization. Also, I think when. Individuals like us, you know, we sort of play with the language models. We are basically doing benchmarks. We're saying, look, it's, it's doing this awesome thing that I found. Guess what? There have been academics studying this for 20 years who have, uh, developed a science to this, and we can actually benefit from studying what they have done.[00:05:10] Yep. And obviously the benchmarks also drive research, you know, in a way whenever you're working on, in a new model. Yeah. The benchmark kind of constraints what you're optimizing for in a way. Because if you've read a paper and it performs worse than all the other models, like you're not gonna publish it.[00:05:27] Yeah. So in a way, there's bias in the benchmark itself. Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk a little bit about that. Right. Are we optimizing for the right things when we over-optimize for a single benchmark over over some others? And also curiously, when GPT4 was released, they emitted some very. Commonplace industry benchmarks.[00:05:44] So the way that you present yourself, it is a form of marketing. It is a form of trying to say you're better than something else. And, and trying to explain where you think you, you do better. But it's very hard to verify as well because there are certain problems with reproducing benchmarks, uh, especially when you come to large language models.[00:06:02] Introducing Benchmark Metrics[00:06:02] So where do we go from here? Should we go over the, the major concept? Yeah. When it comes to benchmark metrics, we get three main measures. Accuracy, precision, recall accuracy is just looking at how many successful prediction the model does. Precision is the ratio of true positives, meaning how many of them are good compared to the overall amount of predictions made Versus recall is what proportion of the positives were identified.[00:06:31] So if you think. Spotify playlist to maybe make it a little more approachable, precision is looking. How many songs in a Spotify playlist did you like versus recall is looking at of all the Spotify songs that you like in the word, how many of them were put in the in the playlist? So it's more looking at how many of the true positives can you actually bring into the model versus like more focusing on just being right.[00:06:57] And the two things are precision and recall are usually in tension.. If you're looking for a higher position, you wanna have a higher percentage of correct results. You're usually bringing recall down because you lead to kind of like lower response sets, you know, so there's always trade offs. And this is a big part of the benchmarking too.[00:07:20] You know, what do you wanna optimize for? And most benchmarks use this, um, F1 score, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall. Which is, you know, we'll put it in the show notes, but just like two times, like the, you know, precision Times Recall divided by the sum. So that's one. And then you get the Stanford Helm metrics.[00:07:38] Um, yeah, so ultimately I think we have advanced a lot in the, in the past few decades on how we measure language models. And the most interesting one came out January of this year from Percy Lang's research lab at Stanford, and he's got. A few metrics, accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, efficiency, general information bias and toxicity, and caring that your language models are not toxic and not biased.[00:08:03] So is is, mm-hmm. Kind of a new thing because we have solved the other stuff, therefore we get to care about the toxic of, uh, the language models yelling at us.[00:08:14] Benchmarking Methodology[00:08:14] But yeah, I mean, maybe we can also talk about the other forms of how their be. Yeah, there's three main modes. You can need a benchmark model in a zero shot fashion, few shot or fine tune models, zero shots.[00:08:27] You do not provide any example and you're just testing how good the model is at generalizing few shots, you have a couple examples that you provide and then. You see from there how good the model is. These are the number of examples usually represented with a K, so you might see few shots, K equal five, it means five examples were passed, and then fine tune is you actually take a bunch of data and fine tune the model for that specific task, and then you test it.[00:08:55] These all go from the least amount of work required to the most amount of work required. If you're doing zero shots benchmarking, you do not need to have any data, so you can just take 'em out and do. If you're fine tuning it, you actually need a lot of data and a lot of compute time. You're expecting to see much better results from there.[00:09:14] Yeah. And sometimes the number of shots can go up to like a hundred, which is pretty surprising for me to see that people are willing to test these language models that far. But why not? You just run the computer a little bit longer. Yeah. Uh, what's next? Should we go into history and then benchmarks? Yeah.[00:09:29] History of Benchmarking since 1985[00:09:29] Okay, so I was up all night yesterday. I was like, this is a fascinating topic. And I was like, all right, I'll just do whatever's in the G PT three paper. And then I read those papers and they all cited previous papers, and I went back and back and back all the way to 1985. The very first benchmark that I can find.[00:09:45] 1985-1989: WordNet and Entailment[00:09:45] Which is WordNet, which is uh, an English benchmark created in at Princeton University by George Miller and Christian Fellbaum. Uh, so fun fact, Chris George Miller also authored the paper, the Magical Number seven plus Minus two, which is the observation that people have a short term memory of about seven for things.[00:10:04] If you have plus or minus two of seven, that's about all you can sort of remember in the short term, and I just wanted. Say like, this was before computers, right? 1985. This was before any of these personal computers were around. I just wanna give people a sense of how much work manual work was being done by these people.[00:10:22] The database, uh, WordNet. Sorry. The WordNet database contains 155,000 words organized in 175,000 sys. These sys are basically just pairings of nouns and verbs and adjectives and adverbs that go together. So in other words, for example, if you have nouns that are hyper names, if every X is a, is a kind of Y.[00:10:44] So a canine is a hyper name of a dog. It's a holo. If X is a part of Y, so a building is a hollow name of a window. The most interesting one for in terms of formal, uh, linguistic logic is entailment, which captures the relationship between two words, where the verb Y is entailed by X. So if by doing X, you must be doing Y.[00:11:02] So in other words, two, sleep is entailed by two snore because you cannot snore without also sleeping and manually mapping 155,000 words like that, the relationships between all of them in a, in a nested tree, which is. Incredible to me. Mm-hmm. And people just did that on faith. They were like, this will be useful somehow.[00:11:21] Right. Uh, and they were interested in cycle linguistics, like understanding how humans thought, but then it turned out that this was a very good dataset for understanding semantic similarity, right? Mm-hmm. Like if you measure the distance between two words by traversing up and down the graph, you can find how similar to two words are, and therefore, Try to figure out like how close they are and trade a model to, to predict that sentiment analysis.[00:11:42] You can, you can see how far something is from something that is considered a good sentiment or a bad sentiment or machine translation from one language to the other. Uh, they're not 200 word languages, which is just amazing. Like people had to do this without computers. Penn Tree Bank, I was in 1989, I went to Penn, so I always give a shout out to my university.[00:12:01] This one expanded to 4.5 million words of text, which is every uh, wall Street Journal. For three years, hand collected, hand labeled by grad students your tuition dollars at work. So I'm gonna skip forward from the eighties to the nineties. Uh, NYS was the most famous data set that came out of this. So this is the, uh, data set of 60,000.[00:12:25] Training images of, uh, of numbers. And this was the first visual dataset where, uh, people were tr tracking like, you know, handwritten numbers and, and mapping them to digital numbers and seeing what the error rate for them was. Uh, these days I think this can be trained in like e every Hello world for machine learning is just train missed in like four lanes of code.[00:12:44] 1998-2004 Enron Emails and MNIST[00:12:44] Then we have the Enron email data set. Enron failed in 2001. Uh, the emails were released in 2004 and they've been upgraded every, uh, every few years since then. That is 600,000 emails by 150 senior employees of Enron, which is really interesting because these are email people emailing each other back and forth in a very natural.[00:13:01] Context not knowing they're being, they're about to be observed, so you can do things like email classification, email summarization, entity recognition and language modeling, which is super cool. Any thoughts about that be before we go into the two thousands? I think like in a way that kind of puts you back to the bias, you know, in some of these benchmarks, in some of these data sets.[00:13:21] You know, like if your main corpus of benchmarking for entity recognition is a public energy company. Mm-hmm. You know, like if you're building something completely different and you're building a model for that, maybe it'll be worse. You know, you start to see how we started. With kind of like, WordNet is just like human linguistics, you know?[00:13:43] Yes. It's not domain related. And then, um, same with, you know, but now we're starting to get into more and more domain-specific benchmarks and you'll see this increase over time. Yeah. NY itself was very biased towards, um, training on handwritten letter. Uh, and handwritten numbers. So, um, in 2017 they actually extended it to Eist, which is an extended to extension to handwritten letters that seems very natural.[00:14:08] And then 2017, they also had fashion ness, which is a very popular data set, which is images of clothing items pulled from Zando. So you can see the capabilities of computer vision growing from single digit, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, to all the letters of the alphabet. To now we can recognize images, uh, of fashion, clothing items.[00:14:28] So it's pretty. So the big one for deep learning, cuz all of that was just, just the appetizers, just getting started.[00:14:35] 2009-2014 : ImageNet, CIFAR and the AlexNet Moment for Deep Learning[00:14:35] The big one for deep learning was ImageNet, which is where Fafa Lee came into the picture and that's why she's super well known. She started working in 2006 and released it in 2009. Fun fact, she actually met with, uh, Christian Feldbaum, who was, uh, one of the co-authors of, uh, war.[00:14:51] To create ImageNet. So there's a direct lineage from Words to Images. Yeah. And uh, they use Amazon Mechanical Turk to help with classification images. No longer grad students. But again, like I think, uh, this goes, kind of goes back to your observation about bias, like when I am a mechanical Turk worker. And I'm being paid by the image to classify an image.[00:15:10] Do you think I'll be very careful at my job? Right? Yeah. Whereas when I'm a, you know, Enron employee, emailing my, my fellow coworker, trying to just communicate something of, of natural language that is a different type of, uh, environment. Mm-hmm. So it's a pretty interesting benchmark. So it was released in 2009 ish and, you know, people were sort of competing to recognize and classify that properly.[00:15:33] The magic moment for ImageNet came in 2012, uh, which is called the AlexNet moment cuz I think that grad student that, um, created this recognition model was, uh, named Alex, I forget his last name, achieved a error rate of 15%, which is, More than 10% lower than the runner up. So it was used just so much better than the second place that everyone else was like, what are you doing?[00:15:54] Uh, and it turned out that he was, he was the first to use, uh, deep learning, uh, c n n 10 percentage points. So like 15 and the other one was 25. Yeah, exactly. So it was just so much, so much better than the others. It was just unbelievable that no one else was, no other approach was even coming close.[00:16:09] Therefore, everyone from there on out for the next, until today we're just learning the lessons of deep learning because, um, it is so much superior to the other approaches. And this was like a big. Images and visual moment because then you had like a sci-fi 10, which is a, another, like a data set that is mostly images.[00:16:27] Mm-hmm. Focused. Mm-hmm. So it took a little bit before we got back to to text. And nowadays it feels like text, you know, text models are kind of eating the word, you know, we're making the text one multi-model. Yeah. So like we're bringing the images to GBT four instead of the opposite. But yeah, in 2009 we had a, another 60,000 images that set.[00:16:46] 32 by 32. Color images with airplanes, automobiles, like, uh, animals, like all kind of stuff. Like I, I think before we had the numbers, then we had the handwritten letters. Then we had clothing, and then we finally made clothing items came after, oh, clothing items. 2009. Yeah, this is 2009. I skipped, I skipped time a little bit.[00:17:08] Yeah, yeah. But yeah, CFR 10 and CFR 100. CFR 10 was for 10 classes. And that that was chosen. And then obviously they optimized that and they were like, all right, we need a new problem now. So in 20 14, 5 years later, they introduced CFAR 100, which was a hundred classes of other items. And I think this is a very general pattern, which is used.[00:17:25] You create a data set for a specific be. You think it's too hard for machines? Mm-hmm. It lasts for five years before it's no longer too hard for machines, and you have to find a new data set and you have to extend it again. So it's Similarly, we are gonna find that in glue, which is another, which is one of more modern data sets.[00:17:42] 2018-19: GLUE and SuperGLUE - Single Sentence, Similarity and Paraphrase, Inference[00:17:42] This one came out in 2018. Glue stands for general Language Understanding Evaluation. This is one of the most influential, I think, early. Earlier, um, language model benchmarks, and it has nine tasks. Um, so it has single sentence tasks, similarity and paraphrase tasks and inference tasks. So a single sentence task, uh, would be something like, uh, the Stanford Sentiment Tree Bank, which is a.[00:18:05] Uh, sentences from movie reviews and human annotations of the sentiment, whether it's positive or negative, in a sort of like a four point scale. And your job is to predict the task of a single sentence. This similarity task would involve corpuses, like the Microsoft research paraphrase corpus. So it's a corpus of sentence pairs automatically extracted from online news sources with human annotations for whether or not the sentence is in the para semantically equivalent.[00:18:28] So you just predict true or false and again, Just to call back to the math that we did earlier in this episode, the classes here are imbalance. This data set, for example, is 68% positive. So we report both accuracy and F1 scores. F1 is a more balanced approach because it, it adjusts for, uh, imbalanced, um, data sets.[00:18:48] Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then finally, inference. Inference is the one where we really start to have some kind of logic. So for example, the M N L I. Um, actually I'm, I'm gonna focus on squad, the Stanford questioning question answering dataset. It's another data set of pairs, uh, questions, uh, uh, p question paragraphs, pairs.[00:19:04] So where one of the sentences of the paragraph drawn from Wikipedia contains the answer to the corresponding question, we convert the task into a sentence, para classification by forming a pair between each question in each sentence into corresponding context and filtering out pairs of low overlap. So basically annotating whether or not.[00:19:20] Is the answer to the question inside of this paragraph that I pulled. Can you identify that? And again, like Entailment is kind of included inside of each of these inference tasks because it starts to force the language model to understand whether or not one thing implies the other thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah.[00:19:37] And the, the models evolving. This came out in 2018, lasted one year exactly. One year later, people were like, that's too easy. That's too easy. So in 2019, they actually came out with super. I love how you'll see later with like swag and hella swag. It's like they come up with very good names for these things.[00:19:55] Basically what's super glue dead is stick glue and try and move outside of the single sentence evaluation. So most of the tasks that. Sean was talking about focus on one sentence. Yeah, one sentence, one question. It's pretty straightforward in that way. Superglue kind of at the, so one, it went from single sentence to having some multi sentence and kind of like a context driven thing.[00:20:21] So you might have questions where, The answer is not in the last paragraph that you've read. So it starts to test the, the context window on this model. Some of them are more, in order to know the answer, you need to know what's not in the question kind of thing. So like you may say, Hey, this drink is owned by the Coca-Cola company.[00:20:43] Is this a Pepsi product? You know, so you need to make the connection false. Exactly, yeah. Then you have also like, um, embedded clauses. So you have things that are not exactly said, have to be inferred, and like a lot of this stack is very conversational. So some of the example contain a lot of the, um, um, you know, or this question's very hard to read out.[00:21:07] Yeah, I know. It's like, it sounds like you are saying, um, but no, you're actually, you're actually. And yet I hope to see employer base, you know, helping out child, um, care centers at the place of employment, things like that, that will help out. It's kind of hard to even read it. And then the hypothesis is like they're setting a trend.[00:21:27] It's going from something very simple like a big p d extract to something that is more similar to how humans communicate. Transcripts, like audio transcripts. Exactly. Of how people talk. Yeah. And some of them are also, Plausibility. You know, like most of these models have started to get good at understanding like a clear cause, kind of like a.[00:21:48] You know, cause effect things. But some of the plausible ones are like, for example, this one is a copa. They're called choice of plausible alternatives. The premises, my body cast a shadow over the grass. What's the cost for this alternative? One, the sun was rising. Alternative to the grass was cut.[00:22:07] Obviously it's the sun was rising, but nowhere. In the question we're actually mentioning the sun, uh, we are mentioning the grass. So some models, some of the older models might see the grass and make the connection that the grass is part of the reason, but the models start to get better and better and go from simply looking at the single sentence context to a more of a, a word new, uh, word knowledge.[00:22:27] It's just really impressive, like the fact that. We can expect that out of a model. It still blows my mind. I think we should not take it for granted that when we're evaluating models, we're asking questions like this that is not obvious from just the given text itself. Mm-hmm. So it, it is just coming with a memorized view of the world, uh, or, or world knowledge. And it understands the premise on, on some form. It is not just random noise. Yeah, I know. It's really impressive. This one, I actually wanted multi rc I actually wanted to spring on you as a, as a test, but it's just too long to read. It's just like a very long logic question.[00:23:03] And then it'll ask you to do, uh, comprehension. But uh, yeah, we'll just, we'll just kinda skip that. We'll put it, we'll put it in the show notes, and then you have to prove us that you're a human. Send us the answer exactly. Exactly and subscribe to the podcast. So superglue was a lot harder, and I think also was superseded eventually, pretty soon.[00:23:21] 2018-2019: Swag and HellaSwag - Common Sense Inference[00:23:21] And, uh, yeah, then we started coming onto the more recent cohort of tests. I don't know how to introduce the rest. Uh, there, there are just so many tests here that I, I struggle a little bit picking from these. Uh, but perhaps we can talk about swag and heli swyx since you mentioned it. Yeah. So SWAG stands for situations with Adversarial Generations.[00:23:39] Uh, also came out in 2018, but this guy, zes Etal, likes to name his data sets and his benchmarks in a very memorable way. And if you look at the PDF of the paper, he also has a little icon, uh, image icon for swag. And he doesn't just go by, uh, regular language. So he definitely has a little bit of branding to this and it's.[00:24:00] Part. So I'll give you an example of the kind of problems that swyx poses. Uh, it it is focused on common sense inference. So what's common sense inference? So, for example, given a partial description, like she opened the hood of the car, humans can reason about the situation and anticipate what might come next.[00:24:16] Then she examined the engine. So you're supposed to pick based on what happened in the first part. What is most likely to happen in the second part based on the, uh, multiple choice question, right? Another example would be on stage, a woman takes a seat at the piano. She a, sits on a bench as her sister plays at the doll.[00:24:33] B. Smiles with someone as the music play. C is in the crowd watching the dancers. D nervously set her fingers on the keys, so A, B, C, or D. It's not all of them are plausible. When you look at the rules of English, we're we've, we're not even checking for whether or not produces or predicts grammatical English.[00:24:54] We're checking for whether the language model can correctly pick what is most likely given the context. The only information that you're given is on stage. A woman takes a seat at the piano, what is she most likely to do next? And D makes sense. It's arguable obviously. Sometimes it could be a. In common sense, it's D.[00:25:11] Mm-hmm. So we're training these models to have common. Yeah, which most humans don't have. So it's a, it's already a step up. Obviously that only lasted a year. Uh, and hello, SWAG was no longer, was no longer challenging in 2019, and they started extending it quite a lot more, a lot more questions. I, I forget what, how many questions?[00:25:33] Um, so Swag was a, swag was a data set. A hundred thousand multiple choice questions. Um, and, and part of the innovation of swag was really that you're generating these questions rather than manually coming up with them. Mm-hmm. And we're starting to get into not just big data, but big questions and big benchmarks of the, of the questions.[00:25:51] That's where the adversarial generations come in, but how that swag. Starts pulling in from real world questions and, and data sets like, uh, wikiHow and activity net. And it's just really, you know, an extension of that. I couldn't even add examples just cuz there's so many. But just to give you an idea of, uh, the progress over time.[00:26:07] Aside: How to Design Benchmarks[00:26:07] Most of these benchmarks are, when they're released, they set. Benchmark at a level where if you just randomly guessed all of the questions, you'll get a 25%. That's sort of the, the baseline. And then you can run each of the language models on them, and then you can run, uh, human evaluations on them. You can have median evaluations, and then you have, um, expert evaluations of humans.[00:26:28] So the randoms level was, uh, for halla. swyx was 20. GT one, uh, which is the, uh, 2019 version that got a 41 on the, on the Hello Sue X score. Bert from Google, got 47. Grover, also from Google, got 57 to 75. Roberta from Facebook, got 85 G P T, 3.5, got 85, and then GPT4 got 95 essentially solving hello swag. So this is useless too.[00:26:51] 2021 - MMLU - Human level Professional Knowledge[00:26:51] We need, we need super Hell now's use this. Super hell swyx. I think the most challenging one came from 2021. 2021 was a very, very good year in benchmarking. So it's, we had two major benchmarks that came out. Human eval and M M L U, uh, we'll talk about mm. M L U first, cuz that, that's probably the more, more relevant one.[00:27:08] So M M L U. Stands for measuring mul massive multitask language understanding, just by far the biggest and most comprehensive and most human-like, uh, benchmark that we've had for until 2021. We had a better one in 2022, but we'll talk about that. So it is a test that covers 57 tasks, including elementary, math, US history, computer science law, and more.[00:27:29] So to attain high accuracy on this task, models must possess extensive world knowledge and prop problem solving. Its. Includes practice questions for the GRE test and the U United States, um, m l e, the medical exam as. It also includes questions from the undergrad courses from Oxford, from all the way from elementary high school to college and professional.[00:27:49] So actually the opening question that I gave you for this podcast came from the math test from M M L U, which is when you drop a ball from rest, uh, what happens? And then also the question about the Complex Z plane, uh, but it equally is also asking professional medicine question. So asking a question about thyroid cancer and, uh, asking you to diagnose.[00:28:10] Which of these four options is most likely? And asking a question about microeconomics, again, giving you a, a situation about regulation and monopolies and asking you to choose from a list of four questions. Mm-hmm. Again, random baseline is 25 out of 100 G P T two scores, 32, which is actually pretty impressive.[00:28:26] GT three scores between 43 to 60, depending on the the size. Go. Scores 60, chinchilla scores 67.5, GT 3.5 scores, 70 GPT4 jumps, one in 16 points to 86.4. The author of M M L U, Dan Hendrix, uh, was commenting on GPT4 saying this is essentially solved. He's basically says like, GT 4.5, the, the next incremental improvement on GPT4 should be able to reach expert level human perform.[00:28:53] At which point it is passing simultaneously, passing all the law exams, all the medical exams, all the graduate student exams, every single test from AP history to computer science to. Math to physics, to economics. It's very impressive. Yeah. And now you're seeing, I mean, it's probably unrelated, but Ivy League universities starting to drop the a t as a requirement for getting in.[00:29:16] So yeah. That might be unrelated as well, because, uh, there's a little bit of a culture war there with regards to, uh, the, the inherent bias of the SATs. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, that's kinda, I mean exactly. That's kinda like what we were talking about before, right? It's. If a model can solve all of these, then like how good is it really?[00:29:33] How good is it as a Exactly. Telling us if a person should get in. It captures it. Captures with just the beginning. Yeah. Right.[00:29:39] 2021: HumanEval - Code Generation[00:29:39] Well, so I think another significant. Benchmark in 2021 was human eval, which is, uh, the first like very notable benchmark for code code generation. Obviously there's a, there's a bunch of research preceding this, but this was the one that really caught my eye because it was simultaneously introduced with Open Eyes Codex, which is the code generation model, the version of G P T that was fine tuned for generating code.[00:30:02] Uh, and that is, Premise of, well, there is the origin or the the language model powering GitHub co-pilot and yeah, now we can write code with language models, just with that, with that benchmark. And it's good too. That's the other thing, I think like this is one where the jump from GT 3.5 to GPT4 was probably the biggest, like GT 3.4 is like 48% on. On this benchmark, GPT4 is 67%. So it's pretty big. Yeah. I think coders should rest a little bit. You know, it's not 90 something, it's, it's still at 67, but just wait two years. You know, if you're a lawyer, if you're a lawyer, you're done. If you're a software engineer, you got, you got a couple more years, so save your money.[00:30:41] Yeah. But the way they test it is also super creative, right? Like, I think maybe people don't understand that actually all of the tests that are given here are very intuitive. Like you. 90% of a function, and then you ask the language model to complete it. And if it completes it like any software engineer would, then you give it a win.[00:31:00] If not, you give it a loss, run that model 164 times, and that is human eval. Yeah. Yeah. And since a lot of our listeners are engineers too, I think the big thing here is, and there was a, a link that we had that I missed, but some of, for example, some of. Coding test questions like it can answer older ones very, very well.[00:31:21] Like it doesn't not answer recent ones at all. So like you see some of like the data leakage from the training, like since it's been trained on the issues, massive data, some of it leaks. So if you're a software engineer, You don't have to worry too much. And hopefully, especially if you're not like in the JavaScript board, like a lot of these frameworks are brand new every year.[00:31:41] You get a lot of new technologies. So there's Oh, there's, oh yeah. Job security. Yes, exactly. Of course. Yeah. You got a new, you have new framework every year so that you have job security. Yeah, exactly. I'll sample, uh, data sets.[00:31:51] 2020 - XTREME - Multilingual Benchmarks[00:31:51] So before we get to big bench, I'll mention a couple more things, which is basically multilingual benchmarks.[00:31:57] Uh, those are basically simple extensions of monolingual benchmarks. I feel like basical. If you can. Accurately predicts the conversion of one word or one part of the word to another part of the word. Uh, you get a score. And, and I think it's, it's fairly intuitive over there. Uh, but I think the, the main benchmarks to know are, um, extreme, which is the, uh, x the x lingual transfer evaluation, the multilingual encoders, and much prefer extreme.[00:32:26] I know, right? Uh, that's why, that's why they have all these, uh, honestly, I think they just wanted the acronym and then they just kinda worked backwards. And then the other one, I can't find it in my notes for, uh, what the other multilingual ones are, but I, I just think it's interesting to always keep in mind like what the other.[00:32:43] Language capabilities are like, one language is basically completely equivalent to another. And I think a lot of AI ethicists or armchair AI ethicists are very angry that, you know, most of the time we optimize for English because obviously that has, there's the most, uh, training corpuses. I really like extreme the work that's being done here, because they took a, a huge amount of effort to make sure they cover, uh, sparse languages like the, the less popular ones.[00:33:06] So they had a lot of, uh, the, the, obviously the, the popular. Uh, the world's top languages. But then they also selected to maximize language diversity in terms of the complete diversity in, uh, human languages like Tamil Telugu, maam, and Sohi and Yoruba from Africa. Mm-hmm. So I just thought like that kind of effort is really commendable cuz uh, that means that the rest of the world can keep up in, in this air race.[00:33:28] Right. And especially on a lot of the more human based things. So I think we talked about this before, where. A lot of Israel movies are more[00:33:36] focused on culture and history and like are said in the past versus a lot of like the Western, did we talk about this on the podcast? No, not on the podcast. We talked and some of the Western one are more focused on the future and kind of like what's to come.[00:33:48] So I feel like when you're, some of the benchmarks that we mentioned before, you know, they have movie reviews as like, uh, one of the. One of the testing things. Yeah. But there's obviously a big cultural difference that it's not always captured when you're just looking at English data. Yeah. So if you ask the a motto, it's like, you know, are people gonna like this movie that I'm writing about the future?[00:34:10] Maybe it's gonna say, yeah, that's a really good idea. Or if I wanna do a movie about the past, it's gonna be like maybe people want to hear about robots. But that wouldn't be the case in, in every country. Well, since you and I speak different languages, I speak Chinese, you speak Italian, I'm sure you've tested the Italian capabilities.[00:34:29] What do you think? I think like as. Italy, it's so much more, um, dialect driven. So it can be, it can be really hard. So what kind of Italian does g PT three speak? Actually Italian, but the reality is most people have like their own, their own like dialect. So it would be really hard for a model to fool. An Italian that it's like somebody from where they are, you know?[00:34:49] Yeah. Like you can actually tell if you're speaking to AI bot in Chinese because they would not use any of the things that human with humans would use because, uh, Chinese humans would use all sorts of replacements for regular Chinese words. Also, I tried one of those like language tutor things mm-hmm.[00:35:06] That people are making and they're just not good Chinese. Not colloquial Chinese, not anything that anyone would say. They would understand you, but they were from, right, right.[00:35:14] 2022: BIG-Bench - The Biggest of the Benches[00:35:14] So, 2022, big bench. This was the biggest of the biggest, of the biggest benchmarks. I think the, the main pattern is really just, Bigger benchmarks rising in opposition to bigger and bigger models.[00:35:27] In order to evaluate these things, we just need to combine more and more and way more tasks, right? Like swag had nine tasks, hello swag had nine more tasks, and then you're, you're just adding and adding and adding and, and just running a battery of tasks all over. Every single model and, uh, trying to evaluate how good they are at each of them.[00:35:43] Big bench was 204 tasks contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. The task topics are diverse, drawing from linguistics, childhood development, math, common sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. I also like the fact that these authors also selected tasks that are not solved by current language models, but also not solvable by memorizing the internet, which is mm-hmm.[00:36:07] Tracking back to a little bit of the issues that we're, we're gonna cover later. Right. Yeah. I think that's, that's super interesting. Like one of, some of the examples would include in the following chess position, find a checkmate, which is, some humans cannot do that. What is the name of the element within a topic number of six?[00:36:22] Uh, that one you can look up, right? By consulting a periodic table. We just expect language models to memorize that. I really like this one cuz it's, uh, it's inherent. It's, uh, something that you can solve.[00:36:32] Identify whether this sentence has an anachronism. So, option one. During the Allied bombardment of the beaches of Iwojima, Ralph spoke loudly into his radio.[00:36:41] And in option two, during the allied bombardment of the beaches of Iwojima, Ralph spoke loudly into his iPhone. And you have to use context of like when iPhone, when Ally bombarding. Mm-hmm. And then sort of do math to like compare one versus the other and realize that okay, this one is the one that's out of place.[00:36:57] And that's asking more and more and more of the language model to do in implicitly, which is actually modeling what we do when we listen to language, which is such a big. Gap. It's such a big advancement from 1985 when we were comparing synonyms. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I know. And it's not that long in the grand scheme of like humanity, you know, like it's 40 years.[00:37:17] It's crazy. It's crazy. So this is a big missing gap in terms of research. Big benches seems like the most comprehensive, uh, set of benchmarks that we have. But it is curiously missing from Gypsy four. Mm-hmm. I don't know. On paper, for code, I only see Gopher two 80. Yeah. On it. Yeah. Yeah. It could be a curious emission because it maybe looks.[00:37:39] Like it didn't do so well.[00:37:40] EDIT: Why BIG-Bench is missing from GPT4 Results[00:37:40] Hello, this is Swyx from the editing room sometime in the future. I just wanted to interject that. Uh, we now know why the GPT for benchmark results did not include the big bench. Benchmark, even though that was the state-of-the-art benchmark at the time. And that's because the. Uh, GPC four new the Canary G U I D of the big bench.[00:38:02] Benchmark. Uh, so Canary UID is a random string, two, six[00:38:08] eight six B eight, uh, blah, blah, blah. It's a UID. UID, and it should not be knowable by the language model. And in this case it was therefore they had to exclude big bench and that's. And the issue of data contamination, which we're about to go into right now.[00:38:25] Issue: GPT4 vs the mystery of the AMC10/12[00:38:25] And there's some interesting, if you dive into details of GPT4, there's some interesting results in GPT4, which starts to get into the results with benchmarking, right? Like so for example, there was a test that GPT4 published that is very, very bizarre to everyone who is even somewhat knowledgeable.[00:38:41] And this concerns the Ammc 10 and AMC 12. So the mc. Is a measure of the American math 10th grade student and the AMC12 is a, uh, is a measure of the American 12th grade student. So 12 is supposed to be harder than 10. Because the students are supposed to be older, it's, it's covering topics in algebra, geometry number, theory and combinatorics.[00:39:04] GPT4 scored a 30 on AMC10 and scored a 60 on AMC12. So the harder test, it got twice as good, and 30 was really, really bad. So the scoring format of AMC10. It is 25 questions. Each correct answer is worth six points. Each incorrect answer is worth 1.5 points and unanswered questions receive zero points.[00:39:25] So if you answer every single question wrong, you will get more than GPT4 got on AMC10. You just got everything wrong. Yeah, it's definitely better in art medics, you know, but it's clearly still a, a long way from, uh, from being even a high school student. Yeah. There's a little bit of volatility in these results and it, it shows that we, it's not quite like machine intelligence is not the same, or not linearly scaling and not intuitive as human intelligence.[00:39:54] And it's something that I think we should be. Aware of. And when it freaks out in certain ways, we should not be that surprised because Yeah, we're seeing that. Yeah. I feel like part of it is also human learning is so structured, you know, like you learn the new test, you learn the new test, you learn the new test.[00:40:10] But these models, we kind of throw everything at them all at once, you know, when we train them. So when, when the model is strained, are you excusing the model? No, no, no. I'm just saying like, you know, and you see it in everything. It's like some stuff. I wonder what the percentage of. AMC 10 versus AMC 12.[00:40:28] Issue: Data Contamination[00:40:28] Content online is, yes. This comes in a topic of contamination and memorization. Right. Which we can get into if we, if we, if we want. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, we're getting into benchmarking issues, right? Like there's all this advancements in benchmarks, uh, language models. Very good. Awesome. Awesome, awesome. Uh, what are the problems?[00:40:44] Uh, the problem is that in order to train these language models, we are scraping the vast majority of the internet. And as time passes, the. Of previous runs of our tests will be pasted on the internet, and they will go into the corpus and the leg model will be memorizing them rather than reasoning them from first principles.[00:41:02] So in, in the machine, classic machine learning parlance, this would be overfitting mm-hmm. Uh, to the test rather than to the generalizing to the, uh, the results that we really want. And so there's an example of, uh, code forces as well also discovered on GPT4. So Code Forces has annual vintages and there was this guy, uh, C H H Halle on Twitter who ran GPT4 on pre 2021 problems, solved all of them and then ran it on 2022 plus problems and solved zero of them.[00:41:31] And we know that the cutoff for GPT4 was 2021. Mm-hmm. So it just memorized the code forces problems as far as we can tell. And it's just really bad at math cuz it also failed the mc 10 stuff. Mm-hmm. It's actually. For some subset of its capabilities. I bet if you tested it with GPT3, it might do better, right?[00:41:50] Yeah. I mean, this is the, you know, when you think about models and benchmarks, you can never take the benchmarks for what the number says, you know, because say, you know, you're focusing on code, like the benchmark might only include the pre 2021 problems and it scores great, but it's actually bad at generalizing and coming up with new solutions.[00:42:10] So, yeah, that, that's a. Big problem.[00:42:13] Other Issues: Benchmark Data Quality and the Iris data set[00:42:13] Yeah. Yeah. So bias, data quality, task specificity, reproducibility, resource requirements, and then calibrating confidence. So bias is, is, is what you might think it is. Basically, there's inherent bias in the data. So for example, when you think about doctor, do you think about a male doctor, a female doctor, in specifically an image net?[00:42:31] Businessmen, white people will be labeled businessmen, whereas Asian businessmen will be labeled Asian businessmen and that can reinforce harmful serotypes. That's the bias issue. Data quality issue. I really love this one. Okay, so there's a famous image data set we haven't talked about called the pedals or iris.[00:42:47] Iris dataset mm-hmm. Contains measurements of, uh, of, uh, length with petal length and petal with, uh, three different species of iris, iris flowers, and they have labeling issues in. So there's a mini, there's a lowest level possible error rate because the error rate exists in the data itself. And if you have a machine learning model that comes out with better error rate than the data, you have a problem cuz your machine learning model is lying to you.[00:43:12] Mm-hmm. Specifically, there's, we know this for a fact because especially for Iris flowers, the length should be longer than the, than the width. Um, but there. Number of instances in the data set where the length was shorter than the, than the width, and that's obviously impossible. So there was, so somebody made an error in the recording process.[00:43:27] Therefore if your machine learning model fits that, then it's doing something wrong cuz it's biologically impossible. Mm-hmm. Task specificity basically if you're overfitting to, to one type of task, for example, answering questions based on a single sentence or you're not, you know, facing something real world reproducibility.[00:43:43] This one is actually, I guess, the fine details of machine learning, which people don't really like to talk about. There's a lot. Pre-processing and post-processing done in I Python notebooks. That is completely un versions untested, ad hoc, sticky, yucky, and everyone does it differently. Therefore, your test results might not be the same as my test results.[00:44:04] Therefore, we don't agree that your scores are. The right scores for your benchmark, whereas you're self reporting it every single time you publish it on a, on a paper. The last two resource requirements, these are, these are more to do with GPTs. The larger and larger these models get, the harder, the more, more expensive it is to run some.[00:44:22] And some of them are not open models. In other words, they're not, uh, readily available, so you cannot tell unless they run it themselves on, on your benchmark. So for example, you can't run your GPT3, you have to kind of run it through the api. If you don't have access to the API like GPT4, then you can't run it at all.[00:44:39] The last one is a new one from GPT4's Paper itself. So you can actually ask the language models to expose their log probabilities and show you how confident they think they are in their answer, which is very important for calibrating whether the language model has the right amount of confidence in itself and in the GPT4 people. It. They were actually very responsible in disclosing that They used to have about linear correspondence between the amount of confidence and the amount of times it was right, but then adding R L H F onto GPT4 actually skewed this prediction such that it was more confident than it should be. It was confidently incorrect as as people say.[00:45:18] In other words, hallucinating. And that is a problem. So yeah, those are the main issues with benchmarking that we have to deal with. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and a lot of our friends, our founders, we work with a lot of founders. If you look at all these benchmarks, all of them just focus on how good of a score they can get.[00:45:38] They don't focus on what's actually feasible to use for my product, you know? So I think.[00:45:44] Tradeoffs of Latency, Inference Cost, Throughput[00:45:44] Production benchmarking is something that doesn't really exist today, but I think we'll see the, the rise off. And I think the main three drivers are one latency. You know, how quickly can I infer the answer cost? You know, if I'm using this model, how much does each call cost me?[00:46:01] Like is that in line with my business model I, and then throughput? I just need to scale these models to a lot of questions on the ones. Again, I just do a benchmark run and you kind of come up. For quadrants. So if on the left side you have model size going from smallest to biggest, and on the X axis you have latency tolerance, which is from, I do not want any delay to, I'll wait as long as I can to get the right answer.[00:46:27] You start to see different type of use cases, for example, I might wanna use a small model that can get me an answer very quickly in a short amount of time, even though the answer is narrow. Because me as a human, maybe I'm in a very iterative flow. And we have Varun before on the podcast, and we were talking about a kind of like a acceleration versus iteration use cases.[00:46:50] Like this is more for acceleration. If I'm using co-pilot, you know, the code doesn't have to be a hundred percent correct, but it needs to happen kind of in my flow of writing. So that's where a model like that would be. But instead, other times I might be willing, like if I'm asking it to create a whole application, I'm willing to wait one hour, you know, for the model to get me a response.[00:47:11] But you don't have, you don't have a way to choose that today with most models. They kind of do just one type of work. So I think we're gonna see more and more of these benchmark. Focus on not only on the research side of it, which is what they really are today when you're developing a new model, like does it meet the usual standard research benchmarks to having more of a performance benchmark for production use cases?[00:47:36] And I wonder who's gonna be the first company that comes up with, with something like this, but I think we're seeing more and more of these models go from a research thing to like a production thing. And especially going from companies like. Google and Facebook that have kinda unlimited budget for a lot of these things to startups, starting to integrate them in the products.[00:48:00] And when you're on a tight budget paying, you know, 1 cent per thousand tokens or 0.10 cent for a thousand tokens, like it's really important. So I think that's, um, that's what's missing to get a lot of these things to productions. But hopefully we, we see them.[00:48:16] Yeah, the software development lifecycle I'm thinking about really is that most people will start with large models and then they will prototype with that because that is the most capable ones.[00:48:25] But then as they put more and more of those things in production, people always want them to run faster and faster and faster and cheaper. So you will distill towards a more domain specific model, and every single company that puts this into production, we'll, we'll want something like that, but I, I think it's, it's a reasonable bet because.[00:48:41] There's another branch of the AI builders that I see out there who are build, who are just banking on large models only. Mm-hmm. And seeing how far they can stretch them. Right. With building on AI agents that can take arbitrarily long amounts of time because they're saving you lots of, lots of time with, uh, searching the web for you and doing research for you.[00:48:59] And I think. I'm happy to wait for Bing for like 10 seconds if it does a bunch of searches for median. Mm-hmm. Just ends with, ends with the right, right result. You know, I was, I was tweeting the other day that I wanted an AI enabled browser because I was seeing this table, uh, there was an image and I just needed to screenshot an image and say, plot this on a chart for me.[00:49:17] And I just wanted to do that, but it would have to take so many steps and I would be willing to wait for a large model to do that for me. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, web development so far has been, Reduce, reduce, reduce the loading times. You know, it's like first we had the, I don't know about that. There, there are people who disagree.[00:49:34] Oh. But I, I think, like if you think about, you know, the CDN and you think about deploying things at the edge, like the focus recently has been on lowering the latency time versus increasing it.[00:49:45] Conclusion[00:49:45] Yeah. So, well that's the, that's Benchmark 1 0 1. Um. Let us know how we, how you think we did. This is something we're trying for the first time.[00:49:52] We're very inspired by other podcasts that we like where we do a bunch of upfront prep, but then it becomes a single topical episode that is hopefully a little bit more timeless. We don't have to keep keeping up with the news. I think there's a lot of history that we can go back on and. Deepen our understanding of the context of all these evolutions in, uh, language models.[00:50:12] Yeah. And if you have ideas for the next, you know, 1 0 1 fundamentals episode, yeah, let us know in the, in the comments and we'll see you all soon. Bye. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

【句子】So the flowers were just a ruse. Figures. 【Desperate Housewives S02E03】【发音】/səʊ/ /ðə/ /ˈflaʊ.ər(z)/ /wɜː(r)/ /dʒʌst/ /ə/ /ruːz/ /ˈfɪgjərz/ 【发音技巧】just a连读；【翻译】所以这些花就是一个幌子，跟我想的一样。【适用场合】今天我们学习一下这个关键句中出现的两个口语表达：1. ruse看起来非常简单的一个名词：可以理解成：a trick intended to deceive someone“诡计；招数；幌子”eg: He used a ruse to get past the sentry.他使了一招，越过了哨兵。eg: This was a ruse to divide them.这只是一个为了离间他们的诡计。eg: She tried to think of a ruse to get him out of the house.她想找到一招，把他哄出房子。2. Figures.很多同学看到这会有点懵，其实这是It figures. 或者是That figures.但是本期视频中省略了第一个词。这个短语是什么意思呢？可以理解成：“有道理；讲得通；跟我预期的一样；跟我之前猜的一样”或者“描述某件事情符合情理”；It makes sense.或者It is as I expected or might have guessed.或者看这条英文解释：It is used to say that you are not surprised by something unpleasant that has happened.eg: A: "Sally already broke up with that new boyfriend of hers."B: "Yeah, it figures. The dude looked like a total creep!"A：“莎莉和她的新男朋友分手了。”B：“哈，我早就知道会这样，那家伙看起来就让人讨厌。”eg: Fired from another job, huh? Well, it figures. You were showing up late most days of the week!又被开除了？哈，肯定了！上周大部分时间你都迟到了！eg: Bob: Tom was the one who broke the window.Bill: It figures. He's very careless.鲍勃：“是汤姆打碎了那扇窗户。”比尔：“不意外，他毛手毛脚的。”eg: Ann: Mary was the last one to arrive.Sally: It figures. She's always late.安：玛丽是最后一个到的。莎莉：不意外，她总迟到。eg: A: “We're going to need new offices when the company expands next year.”B: “That figures.”A：等明年公司扩张了，我们要新的办公室了。B：没毛病。/说得对。eg: A: “Dad, Sally spilled her milk all over the floor.”B: “It figures.”A：爸爸，莎莉把她的牛奶全撒到地板上了。B：我并不感到意外。eg: A: I think he killed her to get the insurance money.B: That certainly figures.A：我觉得是他杀了她，以便获取保险赔偿金。B：那当然是说得通的。而且这样的短语后面还可以跟从句，比如说大家来尝试翻一下今天的英译汉。 【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】It figures that I'd break my leg as soon as the ski season started.

Prices keep going up, and making ends meet is growing more and more difficult. Luckily for some workers, with the new year they'll also see a hike in the minimum wage. Join ICRT's Jane, Hope and Tim as they discuss how the government is taking steps to alleviate the pain of inflation. ⠀⠀ ICRT Break Down is a fun and relaxing podcast to help you build your English vocabulary, and improve your understanding of common expression in the news. So, join us with a cup of your favorite coffee or tea. Just sit back, relax, and listen! ⠀⠀ 百物騰貴，薪水變薄，生活越來越不容易。不過領基本薪資的勞工，至少從明年開始，會看到他們的收入上揚超過百分之四。 請加入 ICRT 的 Hope, Jane and Tim 在「新聞說分明」播客節目，討論政府採取了哪些行動來減緩通貨膨脹帶來的痛苦。 ⠀⠀ ICRT「新聞說分明」是輕鬆有趣的播客節目，不但增進對某項新聞事件的了解，同時順便學一點英文表達方式。 端一杯咖啡或是好茶，來聽聽新聞說分明。 ⠀⠀ ⠀⠀ Vocabulary—Minimum Wage Hike Wage 薪水 A: The Ministry of Labor is raising minimum wage again. 勞動部又要調高基本薪資了。 B: How much will the hourly pay be? 時薪會變成多少? A: 176 NT an hour. B: Good! That means I can earn 26,400 NT a month. 真好，那表示我一個月可以賺兩萬六千四百塊 A: Is that enough for you? 那樣就夠了嗎? B: Yeah, work-life balance, remember? 夠了，工作和生活要平衡，記得嗎? ⠀⠀ Raise 調升 New data released by Salary.com found that the median pay increase of 4% is continuing an upward trend that began in 2022. 專門研究薪資的網站發表新資訊，(美國的)調薪幅度平均百分之四，顯示從去年開始的薪資上漲趨勢仍然持續。 ⠀⠀ Subsistence 基本生計 The salary they earn means they can only maintain a subsistence lifestyle. 他們所賺的薪水讓他們只能維持最基本的生活型態。 ⠀⠀ Paycheck to paycheck 從一張薪水單到下一張 Many people are living paycheck to paycheck due to inflation, while wage growth fails to keep pace. 很多人因為通貨膨脹而過月光族的生活，薪水調漲根本追趕不上。 ⠀⠀ White collar 白領階級、Blue collar 藍領階級 Blue-collar workers often do manual labor and are usually paid by the hour, while white-collar workers can be found in office settings in administrative or management roles. 藍領工作者通常做體力勞動的工作，並且領時薪。白領工作者多半待在辦公室，從事行政或是管理的角色。 ⠀⠀ Freelance 自由業 Many students began freelance jobs when they were in college. 很多學生在上大學時，開始自由接案的工作。 ⠀⠀ Stagnant 停滯的 Our workers' salaries have remained stagnant for more than 10 years now. 我們的員工薪水已經有十年時間停滯不前了。 ⠀⠀ Alleviate 減輕 Is there any way to alleviate their pain? 有沒有辦法減輕他們的痛苦? No, there's none. 沒有辦法 -- Hosting provided by SoundOn

(The episode starts after a short 50 seconds commercial.) In this episode, you will learn how to say "A: Are you available on 1/2 and 1/3 ? Want to go camping? B: Let me check! B: Yeah! I don't have plans for those two days." in Mandarin. To see the conversations actually written out in Traditional Chinese with pronunciations, follow the Learning Mandarin for Casual Conversations IG page: https://www.instagram.com/casual_mandarin/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/learncasualmandrain/support

FATHER'S RAGE ENGLISH PODCAST S 02 Ep 30 I WISH HE WOULD do smth I want him to change his behaviorA: John is very bad about cleaning his shoes.B: Yeah, I wish he WOULD CLEAN them more often.-Tidying up his room-Doing his English HW-Washing his face-Walking the dog-Calling his Mom-Buying new clothes-Taking out trash-Dusting his furniture-Playing the guitar-Feeding his cat

We all need a little help sometimes, and fortunately good neighbors, friends, and church groups rally to help out and provide community service. Here in Texas natural disasters seem to top the list: tornados, hurricanes, floods and fires. In today's episode it is time to put together some food packages. Feel free to join us if you'd like to.DialogueA: Acabei de receber uma ligação da Barbara do Banco de Alimentos. B: Sim, e aí? Eles precisam de ajuda neste fim de semana? A: Sim. Várias pessoas perderam a casa deles no tornado da noite passada. B: Eles precisam de doações? A: Doações nem tanto, mas estão precisando de gente pra ajudar a montar os pacotes de alimentos. B: Eu tenho um tempinho amanhã de manhã. Diga pra Barb que estamos dentro. A: Ótimo, a Bárbara me disse que eles vão se reunir por volta das 9h da manhã, beleza? B: Sem problemas, vou convidar a Jamie para ir também.A: I just got a call from Barbara at the Food Bank. B: Yeah, what's up? Do they need some help this weekend? A: They do. A number of people lost their homes in last night's tornado. B: Do they need some donations? A: Not so much donations, but they need people to help put together the food packages. B: I've got some free time tomorrow morning. Tell Barb that we're in. A: Great, Barbara said they're getting together around 9:00am, OK? B: No problem, I'll invite Jamie to join us too.

We all need a little help sometimes, and fortunately good neighbors, friends, and church groups rally to help out and provide community service. Here in Texas natural disasters seem to top the list: tornados, hurricanes, floods and fires. In today's episode it is time to put together some food packages. Feel free to join us if you'd like to.DialogueA: Acabei de receber uma ligação da Barbara do Banco de Alimentos. B: Sim, e aí? Eles precisam de ajuda neste fim de semana? A: Sim. Várias pessoas perderam a casa deles no tornado da noite passada. B: Eles precisam de doações? A: Doações nem tanto, mas estão precisando de gente pra ajudar a montar os pacotes de alimentos. B: Eu tenho um tempinho amanhã de manhã. Diga pra Barb que estamos dentro. A: Ótimo, a Bárbara me disse que eles vão se reunir por volta das 9h da manhã, beleza? B: Sem problemas, vou convidar a Jamie para ir também.A: I just got a call from Barbara at the Food Bank. B: Yeah, what's up? Do they need some help this weekend? A: They do. A number of people lost their homes in last night's tornado. B: Do they need some donations? A: Not so much donations, but they need people to help put together the food packages. B: I've got some free time tomorrow morning. Tell Barb that we're in. A: Great, Barbara said they're getting together around 9:00am, OK? B: No problem, I'll invite Jamie to join us too.

Final exams are very stressful for high school students. With one test determining 25% of their semester average, students need to ace these tests to do well. Finals week comes at the end of every semester. While students usually have 4 classes a day, on finals week they have 2 two-hour long exam periods; the day ends at lunch time.DialogueA: Nem acredito que já estamos na semana das provas finais! B: Eu sei. Parece que a escola começou ontem. A: Não é? Eu não estudei o suficiente. B: Bom, você tem sorte porque como as provas Só tomam metade do dia, você pode passar a outra metade estudando. A: É, mas minhas primeiras provas são de Matemática e Biologia. Eu não quero arruinar 25% da minha média final. B: Tenho certeza de que você vai se dar bem. A: Que provas você têm primeiro? B: História e Cerâmica. Todas as minhas provas difíceis são no final da semana. A: O bom é que a gente entra de férias assim que os exames terminarem. B: É. Não vejo a hora de botar o sono em dia.A: I can't believe it's already finals week! B: I know. It seems like school just started yesterday. A: I know, right? I haven't studied enough. B: Well, luckily, because finals are half days you can spend the rest of the day studying. A: Yeah, but I have math and bio first. I don't want to mess up 25% of my semester average. B: I'm sure it will be fine. A: Which classes do you have first? B: History and ceramics. All of my hard classes are at the end of the week. A: At least winter break begins after testing is over. B: Yeah, I am looking forward to getting some more sleep.

Final exams are very stressful for high school students. With one test determining 25% of their semester average, students need to ace these tests to do well. Finals week comes at the end of every semester. While students usually have 4 classes a day, on finals week they have 2 two-hour long exam periods; the day ends at lunch time.DialogueA: Nem acredito que já estamos na semana das provas finais! B: Eu sei. Parece que a escola começou ontem. A: Não é? Eu não estudei o suficiente. B: Bom, você tem sorte porque como as provas Só tomam metade do dia, você pode passar a outra metade estudando. A: É, mas minhas primeiras provas são de Matemática e Biologia. Eu não quero arruinar 25% da minha média final. B: Tenho certeza de que você vai se dar bem. A: Que provas você têm primeiro? B: História e Cerâmica. Todas as minhas provas difíceis são no final da semana. A: O bom é que a gente entra de férias assim que os exames terminarem. B: É. Não vejo a hora de botar o sono em dia.A: I can't believe it's already finals week! B: I know. It seems like school just started yesterday. A: I know, right? I haven't studied enough. B: Well, luckily, because finals are half days you can spend the rest of the day studying. A: Yeah, but I have math and bio first. I don't want to mess up 25% of my semester average. B: I'm sure it will be fine. A: Which classes do you have first? B: History and ceramics. All of my hard classes are at the end of the week. A: At least winter break begins after testing is over. B: Yeah, I am looking forward to getting some more sleep.

Summary: This couple has aspired to remain connected and committed, in spite of transitions in life that go from dating and breaking up while living together during the pandemic. This required new ways to communicate and to make agreements about boundaries. By accessing courage, honesty, and commitment this team has recreated a loving, joyful experience together that survives living miles apart. Lessons learned have impacted both their lives in unexpected and meaningful ways, from relationships with others to careers and navigating being in new ways. Ways like speaking up and being present, to allowing space for someone else to have space. From making agreements about what we won't do, to making agreements about what we can do together. Lessons that forgiveness is a gift to yourself. Brock and Connor introduce themselves. B: We dated romantically for 4 years and at one point we were engaged. We shifted out of that in a very emotional and strange time in the pandemic, while living together. We called off the engagement yet continued to isolate together because of the pandemic, as you can imagine there were challenges but I do think that ultimately, I mean we are here today very much in a loving way because we were able to navigate those times and I don't know if Connor agrees but I feel that our relationship is stronger now than it ever has been, even though we are hundreds and hundreds miles away from one another we are still incredibly connected. So, I don't want to speak for Connor, but that's my elevator pitch on our relationship. C: I mean yeah, the pandemic really put us in an incubator for all sorts of experiences together. I completely agree. It shouldn't have happened any other way, it got us to a place now where I agree, I think it is the healthiest relationship that we've had in the four years, or five years we've known each other. Yeah, I'm super grateful for that. I don't see that changing any time soon either. V: I expect communication was really critical for you during all of these transitions. If you think about your central relationship is with yourself first, how do you think that played into how you communicate with each other? B: Yeah, communication, wow…It's funny because that's my profession and I feel as though my relationship with Connor has been a next level education for me. I'm saying that it really illuminated for me how – there's a meme going around the internet and I think that it is perfect for me. And the meme shows a three headed dragon, one of the heads is how eloquent I am when I am writing, the other one is how eloquent I am when I am thinking, and the other one is what a disaster I am when I try to articulate myself. And I feel that really summarizes me, and I feel that summarizes who I was in my relationship with Connor. So, I think over our time together we really learned to understand on another. And someone else called me and asked for tips because she and her partner recently split and are trying to remain friends, so she called me for advice, and I was really flattered. Something I mentioned in that conversation is that Connor and I had a very long and sometimes uncomfortable car ride – we were going up to North Carolina from Atlanta, Georgia where we were living at the time together. So, we were cloistered in a very small car for six hours. I don't know if Connor remembers this, but during that trip there were moments of being joyful, there were some dark moments, and I remember that we arrived at our destination and we were in the parking lot and I really think that that conversation in the parking lot was the turning point in what our relationship has become and what happened there, what transpired there was that we got real with each other. And despite our four years of being together I feel that that was the rawest and the realist that we had been up until that point. And I really do think that was a turning point for us. So, I think that's a really good direction for us to take whatever this conversation turns into is like being raw and real. So, Connor do you remember that conversation that I'm talking about? C: I actually don't. (laughter) B: Well, I remember we got into a very heated discussion around Greensboro, and we kept driving and then we parked at our friend Nancy's. (C: Oh, yeah, yeah, okay) We stayed in that parking lot not getting out for some time I think really getting everything off our shoulders that had been on our shoulders. Well, me specifically because I' a person who listens and rarely speaks, I know this is surprising to you and your listeners now because I'm doing nothing but speaking, but this is not normally who I am. So actually, I'll pause, and I'll let Connor speak. C: Yeah, no, it's not, and that experience with you, the one you're bring up, I remember saying I'm not leaving the car until I get this out, and I don't want you to leave either. So, when you think about communication, I think about me being direct, of course being authentic, but yeah, in that moment I wasn't willing to leave that car unless things were made clear so we could take the next step in our relationship where we both had understandable expectations of what was next. Yeah, that was a fun experience. (laughter) It was definitely, had lots of ups and downs, it wasn't just like hard and dark. Like you said the entire time, it wasn't like pulling teeth because there were moments there in that conversation where we were both willing to laugh, both willing to see the ridiculousness in the way that we think, or interpret right, we interpret what the other person is saying. So, I thought that was in and of itself, maybe that's a nugget of something profound in not taking things so seriously to the point where you think you're going to die from losing out on something. V: What I hear you both saying is that you were honest but that you were deeply committed and even though it was uncomfortable and messy, you were committed to hanging in there together, and I think that is very moving and touching, because I think often people think when it gets hard, okay, I'm just going to quit. I'm just going to throw up my hands and walk away, and I can feel justified with that because you are being so difficult. And it sounds like you also kept brining it back to yourselves, each of you saying this is what I need to clear, not, this is what you did wrong, and maybe there was some of that in there because it always does get messy right? B: Yeah, I think in that conversation specifically, like I said earlier in my mind that was a turning point, at least it was for me. And I feel it was the first time I had successfully cleared things off so that I could start from a clean slate. Which is not to say that immediately after that that everything was roses and daffodils, that's not what I'm saying. But I do feel that that conversation that we had was real, raw, authentic, it was loud, I'm not going to lie, it was loud, but it also came from love and definitely a commitment. V: I think sometimes, myself included, we don't like messy, and I can tend to judge myself. You know, you read guidance on communication, and it will say make I statements, I feel this when you do that and be specific about all of that, but in real life there are emotions involved, it gets a little charged. B: Yeah, and there is an aphorism around, and I don't know that I agree with it, that the best communicators listen. I totally get the sentiment there, and I challenge that a bit because I, as Connor knows, I am a fantastic listener. When I listen however and that is essentially the bulk of what I do, I really lose myself and my boundaries and my desires in that conversation. So, I think that as with almost anything I can fathom, balance is key. And I've gotten to the place with Connor where – we had a phone conversation earlier today and I jokingly jumped in and said, “Oh, so do you want to hear about my life now?” You know? And I can have fun with it and be playful with him in that, because I know that if I don't jump in, I will just be lost in the conversation. And I think that finding that balance and striking that balance is essential to being in a successful relationship, whether it's with your partner, your friend, or your co-workers. Like across the board. V: I like what you're saying. Instead of holding back and relying on a skill you're comfortable with, which is your listening skill, you're starting to step forward and lean into, something that in the past wasn't so comfortable, and showing up different. How do you experience that Connor? C: Yeah, when I think about Brock talking about his skill of listening, (laughter) I feel that I am on the opposite spectrum where I like to talk and (laughter) I like to hear myself talk to.  I mean in that I think, and I process, externally, and this has been a conversation that Brock and I have had before, where I know this about myself. I know that I like to express myself through orating, right? Whereas I know other people express themselves differently. But I think that Brock's right, finding a harmony between knowing when to speak up for yourself and when to listen. There have been moments in my relationship and these discussions with Brock and I have sat there and realized that I've talked, that I've taken up so much time and I realize that I still don't know where Brock is. Like I have no idea, I'm clueless, really, as to what he's thinking, or what he's feeling. So, it does take a self-awareness to check in and ask am I completely understanding of this other person in front of me? V: Thank you. I would think that with hard feelings like the messy that you described that forgiveness had to play in at some point, and whether that was clearing the slate like you said, but also letting go of feelings of hurt, frustration, all of that. How do you approach that? C: I know for me, and this only goes for my experience in my relationship with Brock. In thinking about forgiveness there is a part of me that always knows that Brock has always been a forgiving person naturally. So, I think it really has to do with forgiving myself for the actions, and yeah, just forgiving myself throughout the process. And I will be honest, it's not the act or the beingness of forgiving is something that dissipates everything after saying I've forgiven myself, it's a process and it's a human process.  And it's a continual commitment to being forgiving of oneself. This is something that I'm still exploring and that I'm very much in deep mediation about. What about you Brock? B: Well, I listened to one of your previous podcast episodes and it was all about forgiveness. Elizabeth was the guest. Props to her, because forgiveness if for-giving, right, you give forgiveness to a person and it's really a gift to yourself. She said it much more eloquently that that, but I feel ultimately, I had very little to forgive Connor for and hopefully he hasn't felt the need to forgive me for things. I do agree with Connor that the most difficult person to forgive in our lives is ourselves. At least, that's been my experience. Each of us in this conversation, we're all on our journey's trying to be our best selves and something that I've realized recently is that I'm a results person and not a process person, and that can be challenging when working on yourself is not something that is ever done, right? It's an ongoing process. I'll be working on myself till the day that I die right? So being gentle with myself, being gentle with others and really shifting from being results oriented – thinking that at some point I'm going to be finished working on myself – shifting from that to actually enjoying the process. So that is something that I've been working on, and part of that work is being a better verbal communicator. Being clear, being authentic, and having boundaries which is essential. That's where I am. V: I'm coming to that boundaries are essentially agreements that we make, and they come from being clear also, and showing up and being willing to say, this is what I would like, or this is what I need. It seems like it should be so easy, and it seems that sometimes that is so hard. Why do you think that is? B: Well first of all, I want to jump in a say that I love what you said, because Connor and I have had conversations about this too. When we first split yet we were still cohabitating, we decided to talk about you know, kind the rules of engagement, right now that we are (laughter – That sounds military) Yeah, the rules of disengagement, I guess. We started talking about what are we going to, what are the boundaries and so on? And something that I told him is that I don't want to think about these things as boundaries I want to think of them as agreements. Because I want to think about what we are okay to do, rather than what we're not okay not happening. So really shifting from what's possible rather than these are my non-negotiables – you can't do this, you can't do that. Let's talk about what we can do. And I think that was a healthy way for us to proceed with what was next for us in our relationship. V: That sounds so much more respectful and open than protective and defensive when you say, what can we do versus what can't we do. I love that. C: Yeah, I really do think it made all the difference. If I think about an example, one of the things that once I was given that context in which to create agreements with Brock, I thought about it, I gave it some thought, came back and said one of the things that I want is to spend time with you. You know, one on one, I want to spend time with you connecting, still. Yes, we were living together so it was hard not to be separate, but we were also creating separation so that we could have our own alone time.  But I wanted to make it an intentional thing where we could connect and do something new or different together. And that, not only does it create a space of openness, but it really did create a space of excitement for me, like it created a space and my brain started running on all these things that we could do. Yeah, excitement and it's kind of funny in thinking about that in our relationship towards the end, in my experience, and I think Brock would probably agree, things were not very exciting. So, I think that really did create a context shift for us. It made all the difference. B: I want to emphasize the fact that we were isolating together during a pandemic. (laughter) And having just split off our engagement and we were in a condo that is maybe 1,000 square feet, right, in the heart of Atlanta. So, tight quarters, one bedroom – I'll emphasize that as well. So yeah, it wasn't always easy, but I think by and large we did a great job, and it all came down to communication. And something else that I'll mention, is that we had agreements in the beginning and as the weeks went on, we revisited those agreements because something that we both realized is that some of those agreements were created from a place of hurt, created from a place of anger, right, and so as our relationship evolved in the new way, we realized those agreements didn't even make sense, they just didn't work. So, we revisited those, and we renegotiated those agreements based on who we were then, right. So, I think that was key to the evolution of our relationship as well. V: We are coming up on time to close up the show, but I want to thank both of you for being so open and honest about how things evolved with you. And I want to reflect that I see tremendous strength and love between the two of you, and I think this experience – if you could say what you received personally for being willing to walk through this in this way, because a lot of people don't, they point the finger, they blame, they throw up their hands and they say – You did this to me. So, what would you say you gained personally from being willing to do it different? C: That's a great question. B: Well, I'll jump in and allow Connor some time to think. Because I think what I've learned in my relationship with Connor has impacted my entire life. When I think about those fledgling, or those early days when he and I first split and just who I was being and like the lack of worthiness I felt for myself, I really feel that as my relationship evolved with Connor in the new way I developed, and like I said it's a work in progress and always will be, but I developed a new understanding of my worth, a new understanding of my value system, and because of that I accessed courage, I quit a job that was kind of killing me emotionally and spiritually. Like really, really like, I quit a job which I think to pat myself on the back, took a lot of courage, I'd been there for nine years. But you know I was working crazy hours as Connor can attest, you know I loved my colleagues, but it was a nightmare of a job at times. But because of my relationship with Connor and the things I learned about myself through him and by his side I've evolved in so many ways that has informed the way I operate in every aspect of my life and because of that I have a job now I work fewer hours, I make a lot more money and I think that has a lot to do with the agreements that I made with myself, right? Agreements that this is what I stand for in my life, this is who I get to be to have this happen, so yeah, I cherish Connor our relationship the way it was, the way it is, the way it will be in the future because I really feel like what I've learned in this experience has impacted virtually every aspect if not every aspect of my life. V: Connor? C: I don't like usually giving the same answer (laughter) but yeah, I think it has a lot to do with worth and experiencing that on a personal level and how that has permeated into the rest of my life. It permeated in a way that has allowed me to see what's really possible for my life, not just in relationship, but in relationship with myself, in relationship with my career, in relationship with my parents, and that too, it has allowed me to see possibility in relationship with other people, and what that looks like. And like Brock said knowing, if I can create agreements with a relationship that broke up right, and it turned into something like this, where yeah, I experience love and support and connection with him, then dammit I can do that with anybody else.  And I won't settle, I really won't settle until I've created that again. And that is so liberating to say (laughter) and not only does it create a sense of worth, it creates a profound joy for me. I can say today that if I were to assess my life now, I really do experience joy and happiness more times than not. Thank you both for being here and I want to say to our listeners that if you heard the little youngster in the background, she was being put to bed and this is real life, real happenings probably some of our listeners have youngsters they put to bed. I do want to comment on the Redesign training if the listeners are interested in that because I know that a lot of what you've been able to accomplish together has also come from participating in that training I believe. So, listeners can find that at healing-angels.org/Redesign. For my guests, thank you so much for being here and for listening. You can find me at vickidawn.com. thank you, Brock, thank you Connor.

Garage sales, also known as yard sales or tag sales, are a great excuse for homeowners to get rid of clutter by selling their items. They usually last a day, and buyers come to hunt one-of-a-kind items for a cheap price.DialogueA: Olha, esse livro parece interessante e só custa 25 centavos. B: Nossa, que pechincha! A: Eu tava dando uma olhada, esse garage sale* tá cheio de coisa legal. B: É, eu achei essa vela bacana. Meio carinha, mas eu acho que dá pra barganhar. A: Você realmente precisa de mais uma vela? B: Claro! A: Você chegou a ver as roupas? B: Vi, foi onde eu achei essa jaqueta... e esse pula-pula pogo esquisito. A: Esse aí a gente definitivamente não precisa! B: Tá bom, vou botar de volta.A: Hey, this book looks interesting, and it's only 25 cents. B: Dang, that's a steal. A: I've been looking around; this garage sale has some pretty cool stuff. B: Yeah, I found this cool candle. Kinda pricey, but I think I can bargain with them. A: Uh, do we really need another candle? B: Um yes! A: Did you even get a chance to see the clothing? B: Yeah, that's where I found this jacket… and this weird pogo stick. A: We definitely don't need that! B: Okay.... I'll put it back.

Garage sales, also known as yard sales or tag sales, are a great excuse for homeowners to get rid of clutter by selling their items. They usually last a day, and buyers come to hunt one-of-a-kind items for a cheap price.DialogueA: Olha, esse livro parece interessante e só custa 25 centavos. B: Nossa, que pechincha! A: Eu tava dando uma olhada, esse garage sale* tá cheio de coisa legal. B: É, eu achei essa vela bacana. Meio carinha, mas eu acho que dá pra barganhar. A: Você realmente precisa de mais uma vela? B: Claro! A: Você chegou a ver as roupas? B: Vi, foi onde eu achei essa jaqueta... e esse pula-pula pogo esquisito. A: Esse aí a gente definitivamente não precisa! B: Tá bom, vou botar de volta.A: Hey, this book looks interesting, and it's only 25 cents. B: Dang, that's a steal. A: I've been looking around; this garage sale has some pretty cool stuff. B: Yeah, I found this cool candle. Kinda pricey, but I think I can bargain with them. A: Uh, do we really need another candle? B: Um yes! A: Did you even get a chance to see the clothing? B: Yeah, that's where I found this jacket… and this weird pogo stick. A: We definitely don't need that! B: Okay.... I'll put it back.

Mini-dialogues A: It's a beautiful day. B: Yeah, it is. A: Are you here for the music festival? B: Yes. I'm crazy about music. A: Nice. By the way, I'm Peter. B: Hi, Peter. My name is Jenny. ----- ▍教育電臺 ▍官網:https://bit.ly/39ISswV ▍粉絲團:https://bit.ly/nerpodcastlink ▍線上收聽:https://bit.ly/3cyxBhE Powered by Firstory Hosting

Mini-dialogues A: Excuse me, please. Is there a convenience store near here? B: Uh…there's one on Green Street. Just turn right here. A: Thanks. Oh, and are there any bookstores around here? B: Yeah. There's one just across the street. A: Oh, yeah. I see it. Thanks. ----- ▍教育電臺 ▍官網:https://bit.ly/39ISswV ▍粉絲團:https://bit.ly/nerpodcastlink ▍線上收聽:https://bit.ly/3cyxBhE Powered by Firstory Hosting

Mini-dialogues A: How are you doing? Are you okay? B: Not so good. I have a terrible headache. A: Really? That's not good! You should go home and get some rest. B: Yeah, you're right. A: It's important to get enough rest. ----- ▍教育電臺 ▍官網:https://bit.ly/39ISswV ▍粉絲團:https://bit.ly/nerpodcastlink ▍線上收聽:https://bit.ly/3cyxBhE Powered by Firstory Hosting

Mini-dialogues A: What's the weather going to be like tomorrow? B: It's going to be hot and humid. A: I can't stand it. I really hate summer. B: Yeah. Me, too. A: I like autumn. It's nice and cool. B: And it's often cloudy. ----- ▍教育電臺 ▍官網:https://bit.ly/39ISswV ▍粉絲團:https://bit.ly/nerpodcastlink ▍線上收聽:https://bit.ly/3cyxBhE Powered by Firstory Hosting

Mini-dialogues A: So, is your brother here? B: Yeah, he's right over there. A: Oh, which one is he? B: The one with brown eyes and short hair. The guy in the black jeans. A: You mean the one by the table? He looks handsome. B: No! That's my father. My brother's the one next to the TV. ----- ▍教育電臺 ▍官網:https://bit.ly/39ISswV ▍粉絲團:https://bit.ly/nerpodcastlink ▍線上收聽:https://bit.ly/3cyxBhE Powered by Firstory Hosting

All-nighters are commonly pulled by teenagers or young adults. While some all-nighters are pulled because of the need to get in extra hours in for studying, most are pulled to watch TV, text friends, and eat snacks. They usually happen on weekends or holidays, because everyone feels quite tired in the following day. Enjoy the episode.DialogueA: Quer varar a noite hoje? B: Eu tava planejando isso mesmo, então, vambora. A: Você ainda tá vendo Grey’s Anatomy? B: Tô. Tô na décima quinta temporada. Posso te contar o que tá acontecendo pra você poder assistir comigo. A: Tá, mas não enrola muito. Eu vou fazer um lanchinho pra gente enquanto você me conta o que eu perdi. B: Hummm a gente pode fazer massa de cookie? A: Claro, mas você tem que ajudar. Procura aí uma receita sem ovos e sem farinha crua. B: Tá. Achei uma no Pinterest. Deixa que eu pego os ingredientes e você pega as tigelas e as xícaras de medida. A: Nossa! Essa massa de cookie tá uma delícia! Vamos começar a ver? B: Vamos. Mas se prepara... você perdeu coisa a beça.A: Hey do you want to pull an all-nighter tonight? B: I mean… I was planning to anyways, so sure. A: Are you still watching Grey’s Anatomy? B: Yeah, I’m on season 15. I can catch you up on what’s going on so you can watch with me. A: Alright, just keep it short. I’m gonna make us a snack while you tell me what I missed. B: Ooh can we make cookie dough? A: Sure, but you have to help me out. Start looking for a recipe without eggs or raw flour. B: Okay I found one on Pinterest. I’ll get the ingredients and you get the bowls and measuring cups. A: Wow! This cookie dough tastes great! Let’s start watching? B: Okay, just be prepared… you missed a lot.

All-nighters are commonly pulled by teenagers or young adults. While some all-nighters are pulled because of the need to get in extra hours in for studying, most are pulled to watch TV, text friends, and eat snacks. They usually happen on weekends or holidays, because everyone feels quite tired in the following day. Enjoy the episode.DialogueA: Quer varar a noite hoje? B: Eu tava planejando isso mesmo, então, vambora. A: Você ainda tá vendo Grey’s Anatomy? B: Tô. Tô na décima quinta temporada. Posso te contar o que tá acontecendo pra você poder assistir comigo. A: Tá, mas não enrola muito. Eu vou fazer um lanchinho pra gente enquanto você me conta o que eu perdi. B: Hummm a gente pode fazer massa de cookie? A: Claro, mas você tem que ajudar. Procura aí uma receita sem ovos e sem farinha crua. B: Tá. Achei uma no Pinterest. Deixa que eu pego os ingredientes e você pega as tigelas e as xícaras de medida. A: Nossa! Essa massa de cookie tá uma delícia! Vamos começar a ver? B: Vamos. Mas se prepara... você perdeu coisa a beça.A: Hey do you want to pull an all-nighter tonight? B: I mean… I was planning to anyways, so sure. A: Are you still watching Grey’s Anatomy? B: Yeah, I’m on season 15. I can catch you up on what’s going on so you can watch with me. A: Alright, just keep it short. I’m gonna make us a snack while you tell me what I missed. B: Ooh can we make cookie dough? A: Sure, but you have to help me out. Start looking for a recipe without eggs or raw flour. B: Okay I found one on Pinterest. I’ll get the ingredients and you get the bowls and measuring cups. A: Wow! This cookie dough tastes great! Let’s start watching? B: Okay, just be prepared… you missed a lot.

Some people simply love sports and others just kind of don’t care. In this episode we get to talk to one of those who seems to have that extra sports gene. And for those of you who love sports too, this is your lesson about basketball and we love to play it so much. Enjoy.DialogueA: Sabe pai, é raro ver alguém que gosta mais de basquete do que você. B: É, pode ser, eu sou só um velho rato de academia que ficou esgotado e devagar. A: Então, por que é que você gosta tanto de basquete? B: Sabe, é aquela sensação de quando você finge que vai pra direita, vira à esquerda, e deixa o defensor comendo poeira... A: Nada é mais lindo do que o barulhinho da cesta de chuá entrando direto. B: E pra mim o melhor é quando você bloqueia um arremesso e a bola bate lá na terceira fila da arquibancada. A: E você podia enterrar a bola? B: Sabe, eu nunca fui muito bom com as enterradas, mas com certeza fazia um gancho lindo.A: You know dad, it’s rare to see anyone who loves basketball as much as you do. B: Yeah, that might be true, I’m just an old gym rat who happens to be worn out and slow. A: So why do you love basketball so much? B: You know, it’s the feeling you get when you fake to the right, drive to the left, and then leave that defender in the dust… A: For me is that cool swish sound when its nothin’ but net! B: And for me the best is when you block a shot and knock the ball clear into the third row of the fan seats. A: So, could you dunk it? B: You know, I never was really great at dunking it, but I had a sweet hook shot for sure!

Some people simply love sports and others just kind of don’t care. In this episode we get to talk to one of those who seems to have that extra sports gene. And for those of you who love sports too, this is your lesson about basketball and we love to play it so much. Enjoy.DialogueA: Sabe pai, é raro ver alguém que gosta mais de basquete do que você. B: É, pode ser, eu sou só um velho rato de academia que ficou esgotado e devagar. A: Então, por que é que você gosta tanto de basquete? B: Sabe, é aquela sensação de quando você finge que vai pra direita, vira à esquerda, e deixa o defensor comendo poeira... A: Nada é mais lindo do que o barulhinho da cesta de chuá entrando direto. B: E pra mim o melhor é quando você bloqueia um arremesso e a bola bate lá na terceira fila da arquibancada. A: E você podia enterrar a bola? B: Sabe, eu nunca fui muito bom com as enterradas, mas com certeza fazia um gancho lindo.A: You know dad, it’s rare to see anyone who loves basketball as much as you do. B: Yeah, that might be true, I’m just an old gym rat who happens to be worn out and slow. A: So why do you love basketball so much? B: You know, it’s the feeling you get when you fake to the right, drive to the left, and then leave that defender in the dust… A: For me is that cool swish sound when its nothin’ but net! B: And for me the best is when you block a shot and knock the ball clear into the third row of the fan seats. A: So, could you dunk it? B: You know, I never was really great at dunking it, but I had a sweet hook shot for sure!

Most American children attend a summer camp over the long break. There are many different kinds of camps, such as sports camps, art camps, and dance camps. While some camps are day camps (where campers are dropped off for the day then picked up in the afternoon), other are sleepaway camps, and campers spend 1-2 weeks away from home living on camp grounds. Around the age of 16, campers become counselors-in-training.DialogueA: Nem acredito que tô no grupo da Mary esse ano! Ela é sempre tão legal! B: É mesmo, eu também adoro ela! Ela foi minha monitora uns anos atrás. A gente fez um montão de atividades de arte. Agora que sou monitora, quero fazer a mesma quantidade de atividades de arte. A: Você sabe qual é a faixa etária do seu grupo? B: Sei, os pequenininhos. A: Tá animada? B: Tô! Eles são cheios de vontade pra tudo e a verdade é que querem participar de todas as atividades da colônia de férias, até as mais bobas. A: Ui, mas isso significa que você tem que ficar de olho neles. B: Não deve ser tão difícil assim. A: Ia ser uma tragédia se você perdesse um deles. B: Que isso! Eu não vou perder uma criança!A: I can’t believe that I am in Mary’s group this year! She is always so nice! B: Yeah, I love her too! She was my counselor a couple of years ago. We did a ton of art projects. Now that I am a counselor, I wanna do just as many art projects. A: Do you know what age group you’re gonna be working with? B: Yes, the little kids. A: Are you excited? B: I am! They are so enthusiastic about everything and actually want to participate in all of the camp activities, no matter how silly they are. A: Yikes, I guess that means you’ll have to really keep track of them, though. B: How hard could it be? A: Well it’d be pretty bad if you lost one. B: What?! I’m not gonna lose a camper!

Most American children attend a summer camp over the long break. There are many different kinds of camps, such as sports camps, art camps, and dance camps. While some camps are day camps (where campers are dropped off for the day then picked up in the afternoon), other are sleepaway camps, and campers spend 1-2 weeks away from home living on camp grounds. Around the age of 16, campers become counselors-in-training.DialogueA: Nem acredito que tô no grupo da Mary esse ano! Ela é sempre tão legal! B: É mesmo, eu também adoro ela! Ela foi minha monitora uns anos atrás. A gente fez um montão de atividades de arte. Agora que sou monitora, quero fazer a mesma quantidade de atividades de arte. A: Você sabe qual é a faixa etária do seu grupo? B: Sei, os pequenininhos. A: Tá animada? B: Tô! Eles são cheios de vontade pra tudo e a verdade é que querem participar de todas as atividades da colônia de férias, até as mais bobas. A: Ui, mas isso significa que você tem que ficar de olho neles. B: Não deve ser tão difícil assim. A: Ia ser uma tragédia se você perdesse um deles. B: Que isso! Eu não vou perder uma criança!A: I can’t believe that I am in Mary’s group this year! She is always so nice! B: Yeah, I love her too! She was my counselor a couple of years ago. We did a ton of art projects. Now that I am a counselor, I wanna do just as many art projects. A: Do you know what age group you’re gonna be working with? B: Yes, the little kids. A: Are you excited? B: I am! They are so enthusiastic about everything and actually want to participate in all of the camp activities, no matter how silly they are. A: Yikes, I guess that means you’ll have to really keep track of them, though. B: How hard could it be? A: Well it’d be pretty bad if you lost one. B: What?! I’m not gonna lose a camper!

Americans may start applying for their learner’s permit when they are15 year old, after completing a course, either online or in a class. After obtaining their permit, student drivers are typically taught the rules of the road by their parents. Once a student driver is 16 and has completed 30 hours of driving, they may get their driver’s license. The event is one of life’s most important slices of life.DialogueA: Tá pronta pra sua aula de direção? B: Tô. Deixa só eu pegar meus óculos de sol. A: Hoje a gente vai treinar dirigir na estrada. B: Tem certeza? Não sei se estou pronta pra isso. A: Bom, a gente pode praticar numa rua mais tranquila hoje, se você quiser, mas um dia desses você vai ter que enfrentar uma estrada. B: Tá, tá bom. A: Você tá levando a sua licença? B: Tô, eu deixo no carro, na minha carteira. A: Tá. Agora, onde eu botei minhas chaves? B: Ah, não... de novo não....A: Are you ready for your driving lesson? B: Yeah. Let me just grab my sunglasses. A: Today we’re gonna practice driving on the highway. B: Are you sure? I don’t know if I’m ready for that. A: Well, we can practice on a less busy street today if you want, but eventually we need to get you on the highway. B: Okay, sounds good. A: Do you have your permit with you? B: Yeah, I keep it in the car inside my wallet. A: Okay. Where did I put my keys now? B: Oh no… not again…

Be down for =be up for 想做某事；有心情做某事in the mood forI am not really up for going out tonight.我今晚不想出去。I am not really in the mood to go out tonight.我今晚没有心情出去。口语中可以简单说出：I am down.意思是我想去。Be down with 好的，可以Be ok with 好的，可以A: Want to go grab some pizza?吃个披萨？B: Yeah, I am down with that.好的，可以。I am up for movies, but I am not down with your movie choice.我想去看个电影。但是你选的电影我觉得不行。We are going to the movies later tonight. Are you down?我们今晚晚些时候准备去看个电影。想一起吗？We are going to the movies later tonight. Are you up for it?我们今晚晚些时候准备去看个电影。想一起吗？Be done/through with做完，完成，用完I am done with my work. Let's grab a drink.工作做完啦。我们去喝一杯。I am done with my pen. Can I borrow yours?我的笔用完了。能借你的吗？Be down on sb. 批评某人My boss is always down on me. I don't know why.我老板总是批评我。我不知道为什么。

难度：三星【句子】As a young woman she fantasized a handsome millionaire would sweep her off her feet. 【Desperate Housewives S1E12】【发音】[æz] [ə] [jʌŋ] ['wʊmən] [ʃi:] ['fæntəsaɪzd] [ə] [ˈhæn.səm] [ˌmɪlɪə'neə(r)] [wʊd] [swi:p] [hɜ:(r)] [ɒf]/[ɑ:f] [hɜ:(r)] [fi:t] 【发音技巧】as a连读；sweep her击穿爆破；【翻译】成年之后，她幻想着能够有个钻石王老五让她陷入爱河。【适用场合】As a child she hoped to be kidnapped by a band of pirates.孩提时代，她希望自己能够被一伙海盗绑架。be kidnapped by sb. 被……绑架As a teenager she dreamt of being discovered by a Hollywood talent scout.少女时期，她梦想着自己能够被一位好莱坞星探发现。1. talent scouttalent 才艺scout 侦探之前节目当中也有出现过，就是星探的意思，挖掘艺人的这样一个职位。而且前不久，我们在460期节目中，还讲过了一个相关的短语，叫做：sb. is plucked from obscurity 从一种默默无闻的状态当中脱离出来，一举成名。所以及时的巩固复习也是非常重要的。As a young woman she fantasized a handsome millionaire would sweep her off her feet.成年之后，她幻想着能够有个钻石王老五让她陷入爱河。2. sweep someone off his/her feet 让某个人一见倾心、迅速坠入爱河to make sb. fall suddenly and deeply in love with you: eg: She's waiting for some hero to come and sweep her off her feet.她一直等着有个英雄出现，能够让自己一见倾心，一见钟情。eg: I was swept off my feet by her wit and charm.我完全为她的智慧与魅力所倾倒。有的时候，如果是工作的场合，sweep someone off his/her feet也可以用来指：to gain immediate and unquestioning support, approval, or acceptance by a person得到别人毫不犹豫的的支持、赞同、接纳But the years had flown by and still nothing exciting had ever happened to Martha Huber.但是岁月经年，激动人心的大事件，从未在Martha Huber身上发生过。其实我们前两天刚学完“光阴荏苒”那一期节目，Modern Family S2E1当中，我们学会了Time marches on. 光阴荏苒。3. 其实这里的fly by 意思非常的类似；时光飞逝这样的意思eg: Six months flew by, and it was time to come home again.六个月转瞬即逝，又到了该回家的时候了。【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】A: "Is Lucy still gushing about her new boyfriend?" B: "Yeah, he must have really swept her off her feet."

May day holiday五一假期We've got 4 days off on May day holiday.五一假期我们有四天假。International Workers' DayWorkers' DayLabour Day国际劳动节International Workers' Day is celebrated on May 1st. every year. 国际劳动节每年的五月一号来庆祝。Labour 劳动；体力劳动The car parts themselves are not expensive, it's the labour that costs the money.汽车零件本身并不贵，但人工费很高。Labour 分娩，生产She went into labour at twelve o'clock last night.昨晚12点她开始分娩。I was in labour for twelve hours with my first baby.我生第一个孩子用了12个小时。Labour the point反复强调，三番五次地说A: I don't mean to labor the point, but I'm just worried that there won't be enough food at the party.我并不想重复很多遍，但我只是担心聚会上没有足够的食物。B: Yeah, we know, you've said that 10 times now.是的，我们知道，你已经说了10次了。今日挑战翻译句子写在留言处和大家分享Farming has been mechanized, reducing the need for labour.【翻阅上一期内容即可查阅正确答案】【下一期内容的正确答案解析】

May day holiday五一假期We've got 4 days off on May day holiday.五一假期我们有四天假。International Workers' DayWorkers' DayLabour Day国际劳动节International Workers' Day is celebrated on May 1st. every year. 国际劳动节每年的五月一号来庆祝。Labour 劳动；体力劳动The car parts themselves are not expensive, it's the labour that costs the money.汽车零件本身并不贵，但人工费很高。Labour 分娩，生产She went into labour at twelve o'clock last night.昨晚12点她开始分娩。I was in labour for twelve hours with my first baby.我生第一个孩子用了12个小时。Labour the point反复强调，三番五次地说A: I don't mean to labor the point, but I'm just worried that there won't be enough food at the party.我并不想重复很多遍，但我只是担心聚会上没有足够的食物。B: Yeah, we know, you've said that 10 times now.是的，我们知道，你已经说了10次了。今日挑战翻译句子写在留言处和大家分享Farming has been mechanized, reducing the need for labour.【翻阅上一期内容即可查阅正确答案】【下一期内容的正确答案解析】

Connor has posted a photo of him and a couple dudes, and the internet (and Brandon) definitely have something to say about it. The guys dissect the photo and break down exactly why it was so controversial. Then on a completely unrelated note, Connor talks about why it hurts to swallow, and the guys talk about fasting, ketosis and why they leave their girlfriends off social media.   Key Takeaways: [4:34] The news of NFL player getting kicked off his team brings up Brandon's desire for equal opportunities up. He feels everyone should have the right to punch and get punched equally. [10:02] Connor has gotten grabbed a ton by both women and men on 6th Street. While he was definitely asking for it from at least the women, if the roles were reversed there would be way larger consequences. [12:25] Connor reads just a few of the 300+ comments from a photo where he is standing really close to a bunch of other dudes. [20:21] Connor thought about the deleting the photo, but it got even more likes than him alone or with a hot girl. [23:49] After time in the spotlight, both Connor and Brandon have trained themselves to not let any troll comments or negative words get to them at all. Trolls are usually sad and lonely people, and most times they are even fans of the person but just want attention. [30:12] Back to the Connor photo! It would have seemed a little less homoerotic if it was a video, they weren't standing so close together, their faces weren't so soft and their hands weren't positioned as though they were touching each other. [34:20] One of the many reasons both Connor and Brandon know they aren't gay is because they are messy, wear the same things over and over and are dirty. [43:39] Connor is thinking about doing a 72-hour fast to boost his immunity and kill off some old cells (autophagy). Your cells regenerate more quickly as you fast, and this may help his low-level cold or allergies. [47:48] Connor and Brandon both feel great when they are in ketosis, and Brandon tells Connor to try exogenous ketones.   Mentioned in This Episode: Connor Murphy Talks YouTube page: @ConnorMurphyTalks Brandon's YouTube page: @HighLifeWorkOut @KingKeto — Brandon Carter on Instagram @ConnorMurphyOfficial Adonyx Coaching Lean-Phuck Rob Lipsett Perfect Keto Adonyx Clothing   Quotes: “Last time on 6th Street at least a half a dozen girls would come up and grab my ass. I had no desire to arrest them though because I enjoyed it.” — C “There's a lot of gay looking pictures in the fitness community.” — C “When a guy who is not ripped poses without his shirt on, it's weird.” — B “Yeah, my girl got worried when she saw me post the photo.” — C “I see life as a porno; I know other guys are there but I don't want to pay attention to them.” — B “Unless you are gay, don't post a gay picture.” — B