Podcasts about Blah

What, huh, Marsupial Gear isn't Australian, but there is a Kangaroo on it? Ian makes a startling discovery about his new, favourite bino harness. The guys talk about the importance of quality gear. Mark gives an update of his Buffalo burgers, his Buff skull trophy preparation and the benefits of maceration. Jono shows off his Biltong machine. The guys debate the value of a good sous vide. Together they figure out what exactly is a gaucho, and of course talk about what's next on the hunting and fishing calendar… Welcome to Blah, Blah, Blah Round 4

Welcome to our Samhain Special! Ghoulishly good Celtic with titles like Haunted Bones, The Gravediggers Jigs, The Witch and The Scariest Room. Plus, chilling tales of Lord Bateman,The Cremation of Sam McGee and the wicked old woman in the wood with Weila Waila. We could go on, but you know what Dracula would say about that, "Blah, blah, blah!" Join us if you dare for Celt In A Twist!   Kasir - Haunted Bones Crooked Still - Ain't No Grave  The Real McKenzies - The Cremation Of Sam McGee  CANCON LQR - Muffins & Coffins  The Popes - Black Is The Colour  Jim Moray - Lord Bateman  Altan - The Gravediggers Jigs Old Blind Dogs - Terror Time  The Young Dubliners - Weila Waila  Cecile Corbel - Dellum Down  Kaia Kater feat. Aoife O'Donovan - The Witch CANCON The Chair - The Scariest Room  Flogging Molly - The Seven Deadly Sins  Yoko Pwno - The Black Cat (feat. Acolyte)  Mary Jane Lamond - Boise Monsters  CANCON   59:04

This hour celebrates music in our community! Jesse Lin from the Green Bay Press-Gazette sticks around for this segment where we feature local artist and business owner Jay Jay from Over East Studios. He joins the show to talk about the music scene in Green Bay. One of the messages he's trying to make is that, while Green Bay is known for sports, the music scene is up and coming and he travels the country to bring back ideas from larger markets and works to implement them here. Then James Baker and Chris Pretti from the documentary film "Green BLAH!" are back to update us on dates that have been added to the showing of the movie. It features background information on the underground movement of punk rock in Greater Green Bay. Maino and the Mayor is a part of the Civic Media radio network and airs Monday through Friday from 6-9 am on WGBW in Green Bay and on WISS in Appleton/Oshkosh. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to https://civicmedia.us/shows to see the entire broadcast line up. Follow the show on Facebook and X to keep up with Maino and the Mayor! Guests: James Baker, Chris Pretti, Jesse Lin, Jay Jay

This week, I covered "Leslie and Ben" from season 5. The groups scrambles to BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.... LESLIE AND BEN GET MARRIED!!! Intro/general nonsense (00:09) "Leslie and Ben" (10:19) citizensofpawnee@gmail.com @citizensofpawneepodcast @parksrecmemes New episodes every Tuesday. *Recorded Sunday, October 20th, 2024, not the 21st as stated in episode.

CEOs of publicly traded companies are often in the news talking about their new AI initiatives, but few of them have built anything with it. Drew Houston from Dropbox is different; he has spent over 400 hours coding with LLMs in the last year and is now refocusing his 2,500+ employees around this new way of working, 17 years after founding the company.Timestamps00:00 Introductions00:43 Drew's AI journey04:14 Revalidating expectations of AI08:23 Simulation in self-driving vs. knowledge work12:14 Drew's AI Engineering setup15:24 RAG vs. long context in AI models18:06 From "FileGPT" to Dropbox AI23:20 Is storage solved?26:30 Products vs Features30:48 Building trust for data access33:42 Dropbox Dash and universal search38:05 The evolution of Dropbox42:39 Building a "silicon brain" for knowledge work48:45 Open source AI and its impact51:30 "Rent, Don't Buy" for AI54:50 Staying relevant58:57 Founder Mode01:03:10 Advice for founders navigating AI01:07:36 Building and managing teams in a growing companyTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and there's no Swyx today, but I'm joined by Drew Houston of Dropbox. Welcome, Drew.Drew [00:00:14]: Thanks for having me.Alessio [00:00:15]: So we're not going to talk about the Dropbox story. We're not going to talk about the Chinatown bus and the flash drive and all that. I think you've talked enough about it. Where I want to start is you as an AI engineer. So as you know, most of our audience is engineering folks, kind of like technology leaders. You obviously run Dropbox, which is a huge company, but you also do a lot of coding. I think that's how you spend almost 400 hours, just like coding. So let's start there. What was the first interaction you had with an LLM API and when did the journey start for you?Drew [00:00:43]: Yeah. Well, I think probably all AI engineers or whatever you call an AI engineer, those people started out as engineers before that. So engineering is my first love. I mean, I grew up as a little kid. I was that kid. My first line of code was at five years old. I just really loved, I wanted to make computer games, like this whole path. That also led me into startups and eventually starting Dropbox. And then with AI specifically, I studied computer science, I got my, I did my undergrad, but I didn't do like grad level computer science. I didn't, I sort of got distracted by all the startup things, so I didn't do grad level work. But about several years ago, I made a couple of things. So one is I sort of, I knew I wanted to go from being an engineer to a founder. And then, but sort of the becoming a CEO part was sort of backed into the job. And so a couple of realizations. One is that, I mean, there's a lot of like repetitive and like manual work you have to do as an executive that is actually lends itself pretty well to automation, both for like my own convenience. And then out of interest in learning, I guess what we call like classical machine learning these days, I started really trying to wrap my head around understanding machine learning and informational retrieval more, more formally. So I'd say maybe 2016, 2017 started me writing these more successively, more elaborate scripts to like understand basic like classifiers and regression and, and again, like basic information retrieval and NLP back in those days. And there's sort of like two things that came out of that. One is techniques are super powerful. And even just like studying like old school machine learning was a pretty big inversion of the way I had learned engineering, right? You know, I started programming when everyone starts programming and you're, you're sort of the human, you're giving an algorithm to the, and spelling out to the computer how it should run it. And then machine learning, here's machine learning where it's like actually flip that, like give it sort of the answer you want and it'll figure out the algorithm, which was pretty mind bending. And it was both like pretty powerful when I would write tools, like figure out like time audits or like, where's my time going? Is this meeting a one-on-one or is it a recruiting thing or is it a product strategy thing? I started out doing that manually with my assistant, but then found that this was like a very like automatable task. And so, which also had the side effect of teaching me a lot about machine learning. But then there was this big problem, like anytime you, it was very good at like tabular structured data, but like anytime it hit, you know, the usual malformed English that humans speak, it would just like fall over. I had to kind of abandon a lot of the things that I wanted to build because like there's no way to like parse text. Like maybe it would sort of identify the part of speech in a sentence or something. But then fast forward to the LLM, I mean actually I started trying some of like this, what we would call like very small LLMs before kind of the GPT class models. And it was like super hard to get those things working. So like these 500 parameter models would just be like hallucinating and repeating and you know. So actually I'd kind of like written it off a little bit. But then the chat GPT launch and GPT-3 for sure. And then once people figured out like prompting and instruction tuning, this was sort of like November-ish 2022 like everybody else sort of that the chat GPT launch being the starting gun for the whole AI era of computing and then having API access to three and then early access to GPT-4. I was like, oh man, it's happening. And so I was literally on my honeymoon and we're like on a beach in Thailand and I'm like coding these like AI tools to automate like writing or to assist with writing and all these different use cases.Alessio [00:04:14]: You're like, I'm never going back to work. I'm going to automate all of it before I get back.Drew [00:04:17]: And I was just, you know, ever since then, I mean, I've always been like coding like prototypes and just stuff to make my life more convenient, but like escalated a lot after 22. And yeah, I spent, I checked, I think it was probably like over 400 hours this year so far coding because I had my paternity leave where I was able to work on some special projects. But yeah, it's a super important part of like my whole learning journey is like being really hands-on with these things. And I mean, it's probably not a typical recipe, but I really love to get down to the metal as far as how this stuff works.Alessio [00:04:47]: Yeah. So Swyx and I were with Sam Altman in October 22. We were like at a hack day at OpenAI and that's why we started this podcast eventually. But you did an interview with Sam like seven years ago and he asked you what's the biggest opportunity in startups and you were like machine learning and AI and you were almost like too early, right? It's like maybe seven years ago, the models weren't quite there. How should people think about revalidating like expectations of this technology? You know, I think even today people will tell you, oh, models are not really good at X because they were not good 12 months ago, but they're good today.Drew [00:05:19]: What's your project? Heuristics for thinking about that or how is, yeah, I think the way I look at it now is pretty, has evolved a lot since when I started. I mean, I think everybody intuitively starts with like, all right, let's try to predict the future or imagine like what's this great end state we're going to get to. And the tricky thing is like often those prognostications are right, but they're right in terms of direction, but not when. For example, you know, even in the early days of the internet, 90s when things were even like tech space and you know, even before like the browser or things like that, people were like, oh man, you're going to have, you know, you're going to be able to order food, get like a Snickers delivered to your house, you're going to be able to watch any movie ever created. And they were right. But they were like, you know, it took 20 years for that to actually happen. And before you got to DoorDash, you had to get, you started with like Webvan and Cosmo and before you get to Spotify, you had to do like Napster and Kazaa and LimeWire and like a bunch of like broken Britney Spears MP3s and malware. So I think the big lesson is being early is the same as being wrong. Being late is the same as being wrong. So really how do you calibrate timing? And then I think with AI, it's the same thing that people are like, oh, it's going to completely upend society and all these positive and negative ways. I think that's like most of those things are going to come true. The question is like, when is that going to happen? And then with AI specifically, I think there's also, in addition to sort of the general tech category or like jumping too fast to the future, I think that AI is particularly susceptible to that. And you look at self-driving, right? This idea of like, oh my God, you can have a self-driving car captured everybody's imaginations 10, 12 years ago. And you know, people are like, oh man, in two years, there's not going to be another year. There's not going to be a human driver on the road to be seen. It didn't work out that way, right? We're still 10, 12 years later where we're in a world where you can sort of sometimes get a Waymo in like one city on earth. Exciting, but just took a lot longer than people think. And the reason is there's a lot of engineering challenges, but then there's a lot of other like societal time constants that are hard to compress. So one thing I think you can learn from things like self-driving is they have these levels of autonomy that's a useful kind of framework in driving or these like maturity levels. People sort of skip to like level five, full autonomy, or we're going to have like an autonomous knowledge worker that's just going to take, that's going to, and then we won't need humans anymore kind of projection that that's going to take a long time. But then when you think about level one or level two, like these little assistive experiences, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction with those. So what you see really working is the level one autonomy in the AI world would be like the tab auto-complete and co-pilot, right? And then, you know, maybe a little higher is like the chatbot type interface. Obviously you want to get to the highest level you can to build a good product, but the reliability just isn't, and the capability just isn't there in the early innings. And so, and then you think of other level one, level two type things, like Google Maps probably did more for self-driving than in literal self-driving, like a billion people have like the ability to have like maps and navigation just like taken care of for you autonomously. So I think the timing and maturity are really important factors to include.Alessio [00:08:23]: The thing with self-driving, maybe one of the big breakthroughs was like simulation. So it's like, okay, instead of driving, we can simulate these environments. It's really hard to do when knowledge work, you know, how do you simulate like a product review? How do you simulate these things? I'm curious if you've done any experiments. I know some companies have started to build kind of like a virtual personas that you can like bounce ideas off of.Drew [00:08:42]: I mean, fortunately in a company you generate lots of, you know, actual human training data all the time. And then I also just like start with myself, like, all right, I can, you know, it's pretty tricky even within your company to be like, all right, let's open all this up as quote training data. But, you know, I can start with my own emails or my own calendar or own stuff without running into the same kind of like privacy or other concerns. So I often like start with my own stuff. And so that is like a one level of bootstrapping, but actually four or five years ago during COVID, we decided, you know, a lot of companies were thinking about how do we go back to work? And so we decided to really lean into remote and distributed work because I thought, you know, this is going to be the biggest change to the way we work in our lifetimes. And COVID kind of ripped up a bunch of things, but I think everybody was sort of pleasantly surprised how with a lot of knowledge work, you could just keep going. And actually you were sort of fine. Work was decoupled from your physical environment, from being in a physical place, which meant that things people had dreamed about since the fifties or sixties, like telework, like you actually could work from anywhere. And that was now possible. So we decided to really lean into that because we debated, should we sort of hit the fast forward button or should we hit the rewind button and go back to 2019? And obviously that's been playing out over the last few years. And we decided to basically turn, we went like 90% remote. We still, the in-person part's really important. We can kind of come back to our working model, but we're like, yeah, this is, everybody is going to be in some kind of like distributed or hybrid state. So like instead of like running away from this, like let's do a full send, let's really go into it. Let's live in the future. A few years before our customers, let's like turn Dropbox into a lab for distributed work. And we do that like quite literally, both of the working model and then increasingly with our products. And then absolutely, like we have products like Dropbox Dash, which is our universal search product. That was like very elevated in priority for me after COVID because like now you have, we're putting a lot more stress on the system and on our screens, it's a lot more chaotic and overwhelming. And so even just like getting the right information, the right person at the right time is a big fundamental challenge in knowledge work and these, in the distributed world, like big problem today is still getting, you know, has been getting bigger. And then for a lot of these other workflows, yeah, there's, we can both get a lot of natural like training data from just our own like strategy docs and processes. There's obviously a lot you can do with synthetic data and you know, actually like LMs are pretty good at being like imitating generic knowledge workers. So it's, it's kind of funny that way, but yeah, the way I look at it is like really turn Dropbox into a lab for distributed work. You think about things like what are the big problems we're going to have? It's just the complexity on our screens just keeps growing and the whole environment gets kind of more out of sync with what makes us like cognitively productive and engaged. And then even something like Dash was initially seeded, I made a little personal search engine because I was just like personally frustrated with not being able to find my stuff. And along that whole learning journey with AI, like the vector search or semantic search, things like that had just been the tooling for that. The open source stuff had finally gotten to a place where it was a pretty good developer experience. And so, you know, in a few days I had sort of a hello world type search engine and I'm like, oh my God, like this completely works. You don't even have to get the keywords right. The relevance and ranking is super good. We even like untuned. So I guess that's to say like I've been surprised by if you choose like the right algorithm and the right approach, you can actually get like super good results without having like a ton of data. And even with LLMs, you can apply all these other techniques to give them, kind of bootstrap kind of like task maturity pretty quickly.Alessio [00:12:14]: Before we jump into Dash, let's talk about the Drew Haas and AI engineering stuff. So IDE, let's break that down. What IDE do you use? Do you use Cursor, VS Code, do you use any coding assistant, like WeChat, is it just autocomplete?Drew [00:12:28]: Yeah, yeah. Both. So I use VS Code as like my daily driver, although I'm like super excited about things like Cursor or the AI agents. I have my own like stack underneath that. I mean, some off the shelf parts, some pretty custom. So I use the continue.dev just like AI chat UI basically as just the UI layer, but I also proxy the request. I proxy the request to my own backend, which is sort of like a router. You can use any backend. I mean, Sonnet 3.5 is probably the best all around. But then these things are like pretty limited if you don't give them the right context. And so part of what the proxy does is like there's a separate thing where I can say like include all these files by default with the request. And then it becomes a lot easier and like without like cutting and pasting. And I'm building mostly like prototype toy apps, so it's like a front end React thing and a Python backend thing. And so it can do these like end to end diffs basically. And then I also like love being able to host everything locally or do it offline. So I have my own, when I'm on a plane or something or where like you don't have access or the internet's not reliable, I actually bring a gaming laptop on the plane with me. It's like a little like blue briefcase looking thing. And then I like literally hook up a GPU like into one of the outlets. And then I have, I can do like transcription, I can do like autocomplete, like I have an 8 billion, like Llama will run fine.Alessio [00:13:44]: And you're using like a Llama to run the model?Drew [00:13:47]: No, I use, I have my own like LLM inference stack. I mean, it uses the backend somewhat interchangeable. So everything from like XLlama to VLLM or SGLang, there's a bunch of these different backends you can use. And then I started like working on stuff before all this tooling was like really available. So you know, over the last several years, I've built like my own like whole crazy environment and like in stack here. So I'm a little nuts about it.Alessio [00:14:12]: Yeah. What's the state of the art for, I guess not state of the art, but like when it comes to like frameworks and things like that, do you like using them? I think maybe a lot of people say, hey, things change so quickly, they're like trying to abstract things. Yeah.Drew [00:14:24]: It's maybe too early today. As much as I do a lot of coding, I have to be pretty surgical with my time. I don't have that much time, which means I have to sort of like scope my innovation to like very specific places or like my time. So for the front end, it'll be like a pretty vanilla stack, like a Next.js, React based thing. And then these are toy apps. So it's like Python, Flask, SQLite, and then all the different, there's a whole other thing on like the backend. Like how do you get, sort of run all these models locally or with a local GPU? The scaffolding on the front end is pretty straightforward, the scaffolding on the backend is pretty straightforward. Then a lot of it is just like the LLM inference and control over like fine grained aspects of how you do generation, caching, things like that. And then there's a lot, like a lot of the work is how do you take, sort of go to an IMAP, like take an email, get a new, or a document or a spreadsheet or any of these kinds of primitives that you work with and then translate them, render them in a format that an LLM can understand. So there's like a lot of work that goes into that too. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:24]: So I built a kind of like email triage system and like I would say 80% of the code is like Google and like pulling emails and then the actual AI part is pretty easy.Drew [00:15:34]: Yeah. And even, same experience. And then I tried to do all these like NLP things and then to my dismay, like a bunch of reg Xs were like, got you like 95% of the way there. So I still leave it running, I just haven't really built like the LLM powered version of it yet. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:51]: So do you have any thoughts on rag versus long context, especially, I mean with Dropbox, you know? Sure. Do you just want to shove things in? Like have you seen that be a lot better?Drew [00:15:59]: Well, they kind of have different strengths and weaknesses, so you need both for different use cases. I mean, it's been awesome in the last 12 months, like now you have these like long context models that can actually do a lot. You can put a book in, you know, Sonnet's context and then now with the later versions of LLAMA, you can have 128k context. So that's sort of the new normal, which is awesome and that, that wasn't even the case a year ago. That said, models don't always use, and certainly like local models don't use the full context well fully yet, and actually if you provide too much irrelevant context, the quality degrades a lot. And so I say in the open source world, like we're still just getting to the cusp of like the full context is usable. And then of course, like when you're something like Dropbox Dash, like it's basically building this whole like brain that's like read everything your company's ever written. And so that's not going to fit into your context window, so you need rag just as a practical reality. And even for a lot of similar reasons, you need like RAM and hard disk in conventional computer architecture. And I think these things will keep like horse trading, like maybe if, you know, a million or 10 million is the new, tokens is the new context length, maybe that shifts. Maybe the bigger picture is like, it's super exciting to talk about the LLM and like that piece of the puzzle, but there's this whole other scaffolding of more conventional like retrieval or conventional machine learning, especially because you have to scale up products to like millions of people you do in your toy app is not going to scale to that from a cost or latency or performance standpoint. So I think you really need these like hybrid architectures that where you have very like purpose fit tools, or you're probably not using Sonnet 3.5 for all of your normal product use cases. You're going to use like a fine tuned 8 billion model or sort of the minimum model that gets you the right output. And then a smaller model also is like a lot more cost and latency versus like much better characteristics on that front.Alessio [00:17:48]: Yeah. Let's jump into the Dropbox AI story. So sure. Your initial prototype was Files GPT. How did it start? And then how did you communicate that internally? You know, I know you have a pretty strong like mammal culture. One where you're like, okay, Hey, we got to really take this seriously.Drew [00:18:06]: Yeah. Well, on the latter, it was, so how do we say like how we took Dropbox, how AI seriously as a company started kind of around that time, that honeymoon time, unfortunately. In January, I wrote this like memo to the company, like around basically like how we need to play offense in 23. And that most of the time the kind of concrete is set and like the winners are the winners and things are kind of frozen. But then with these new eras of computing, like the PC or the internet or the phone or the concrete on freezes and you can sort of build, do things differently and have a new set of winners. It's sort of like a new season starts as a result of a lot of that sort of personal hacking and just like thinking about this. I'm like, yeah, this is an inflection point in the industry. Like we really need to change how we think about our strategy. And then becoming an AI first company was probably the headline thing that we did. And then, and then that got, and then calling on everybody in the company to really think about in your world, how is AI going to reshape your workflows or what sort of the AI native way of thinking about your job. File GPT, which is sort of this Dropbox AI kind of initial concept that actually came from our engineering team as, you know, as we like called on everybody, like really think about what we should be doing that's new or different. So it was kind of organic and bottoms up like a bunch of engineers just kind of hacked that together. And then that materialized as basically when you preview a file on Dropbox, you can have kind of the most straightforward possible integration of AI, which is a good thing. Like basically you have a long PDF, you want to be able to ask questions of it. So like a pretty basic implementation of RAG and being able to do that when you preview a file on Dropbox. So that was the origin of that, that was like back in 2023 when we released just like the starting engines had just, you know, gotten going.Alessio [00:19:53]: It's funny where you're basically like these files that people have, they really don't want them in a way, you know, like you're storing all these files and like you actually don't want to interact with them. You want a layer on top of it. And that's kind of what also takes you to Dash eventually, which is like, Hey, you actually don't really care where the file is. You just want to be the place that aggregates it. How do you think about what people will know about files? You know, are files the actual file? Are files like the metadata and they're just kind of like a pointer that goes somewhere and you don't really care where it is?Drew [00:20:21]: Yeah.Alessio [00:20:22]: Any thoughts about?Drew [00:20:23]: Totally. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of potential complexity in that question, right? Is it a, you know, what's the difference between a file and a URL? And you can go into the technicals, it's like pass by value, pass by reference. Okay. What's the format like? All right. So it starts with a primitive. It's not really a flat file. It's like a structured data. You're sort of collaborative. Yeah. That's keeping in sync. Blah, blah, blah. I actually don't start there at all. I just start with like, what do people, like, what do humans, let's work back from like how humans think about this stuff or how they should think about this stuff. Meaning like, I don't think about, Oh, here are my files and here are my links or cloud docs. I'm just sort of like, Oh, here's my stuff. This, this, here's sort of my documents. Here's my media. Here's my projects. Here are the people I'm working with. So it starts from primitives more like those, like how do people, how do humans think about these things? And then, then start from like a more ideal experience. Because if you think about it, we kind of have this situation that will look like particularly medieval in hindsight where, all right, how do you manage your work stuff? Well, on all, you know, on one side of your screen, you have this file browser that literally hasn't changed since the early eighties, right? You could take someone from the original Mac and sit them in front of like a computer and they'd be like, this is it. And that's, it's been 40 years, right? Then on the other side of your screen, you have like Chrome or a browser that has so many tabs open, you can no longer see text or titles. This is the state of the art for how we manage stuff at work. Interestingly, neither of those experiences was purpose-built to be like the home for your work stuff or even anything related to it. And so it's important to remember, we get like stuck in these local maxima pretty often in tech where we're obviously aware that files are not going away, especially in certain domains. So that format really matters and where files are still going to be the tool you use for like if there's something big, right? If you're a big video file, that kind of format in a file makes sense. There's a bunch of industries where it's like construction or architecture or sort of these domain specific areas, you know, media generally, if you're making music or photos or video, that all kind of fits in the big file zone where Dropbox is really strong and that's like what customers love us for. It's also pretty obvious that a lot of stuff that used to be in, you know, Word docs or Excel files, like all that has tilted towards the browser and that tilt is going to continue. So with Dash, we wanted to make something that was really like cloud-native, AI-native and deliberately like not be tied down to the abstractions of the file system. Now on the other hand, it would be like ironic and bad if we then like fractured the experience that you're like, well, if it touches a file, it's a syncing metaphor to this app. And if it's a URL, it's like this completely different interface. So there's a convergence that I think makes sense over time. But you know, but I think you have to start from like, not so much the technology, start from like, what do the humans want? And then like, what's the idealized product experience? And then like, what are the technical underpinnings of that, that can make that good experience?Alessio [00:23:20]: I think it's kind of intuitive that in Dash, you can connect Google Drive, right? Because you think about Dropbox, it's like, well, it's file storage, you really don't want people to store files somewhere, but the reality is that they do. How do you think about the importance of storage and like, do you kind of feel storage is like almost solved, where it's like, hey, you can kind of store these files anywhere, what matters is like access.Drew [00:23:38]: It's a little bit nuanced in that if you're dealing with like large quantities of data, it actually does matter. The implementation matters a lot or like you're dealing with like, you know, 10 gig video files like that, then you sort of inherit all the problems of sync and have to go into a lot of the challenges that we've solved. Switching on a pretty important question, like what is the value we provide? What does Dropbox do? And probably like most people, I would have said like, well, Dropbox syncs your files. And we didn't even really have a mission of the company in the beginning. I'm just like, yeah, I just don't want to carry a thumb driving around and life would be a lot better if our stuff just like lived in the cloud and I just didn't have to think about like, what device is the thing on or what operating, why are these operating systems fighting with each other and incompatible? You know, I just want to abstract all of that away. But then so we thought, even we were like, all right, Dropbox provides storage. But when we talked to our customers, they're like, that's not how we see this at all. Like actually, Dropbox is not just like a hard drive in the cloud. It's like the place where I go to work or it's a place like I started a small business is a place where my dreams come true. Or it's like, yeah, it's not keeping files in sync. It's keeping people in sync. It's keeping my team in sync. And so they're using this kind of language where we're like, wait, okay, yeah, because I don't know, storage probably is a commodity or what we do is a commodity. But then we talked to our customers like, no, we're not buying the storage, we're buying like the ability to access all of our stuff in one place. We're buying the ability to share everything and sort of, in a lot of ways, people are buying the ability to work from anywhere. And Dropbox was kind of, the fact that it was like file syncing was an implementation detail of this higher order need that they had. So I think that's where we start too, which is like, what is the sort of higher order thing, the job the customer is hiring Dropbox to do? Storage in the new world is kind of incidental to that. I mean, it still matters for things like video or those kinds of workflows. The value of Dropbox had never been, we provide you like the cheapest bits in the cloud. But it is a big pivot from Dropbox is the company that syncs your files to now where we're going is Dropbox is the company that kind of helps you organize all your cloud content. I started the company because I kept forgetting my thumb drive. But the question I was really asking was like, why is it so hard to like find my stuff, organize my stuff, share my stuff, keep my stuff safe? You know, I'm always like one washing machine and I would leave like my little thumb drive with all my prior company stuff on in the pocket of my shorts and then almost wash it and destroy it. And so I was like, why do we have to, this is like medieval that we have to think about this. So that same mindset is how I approach where we're going. But I think, and then unfortunately the, we're sort of back to the same problems. Like it's really hard to find my stuff. It's really hard to organize myself. It's hard to share my stuff. It's hard to secure my content at work. Now the problem is the same, the shape of the problem and the shape of the solution is pretty different. You know, instead of a hundred files on your desktop, it's now a hundred tabs in your browser, et cetera. But I think that's the starting point.Alessio [00:26:30]: How has the idea of a product evolved for you? So, you know, famously Steve Jobs started by Dropbox and he's like, you know, this is just a feature. It's not a product. And then you build like a $10 billion feature. How in the age of AI, how do you think about, you know, maybe things that used to be a product are now features because the AI on top of it, it's like the product, like what's your mental model? Do you think about it?Drew [00:26:50]: Yeah. So I don't think there's really like a bright line. I don't know if like I use the word features and products and my mental model that much of how I break it down because it's kind of a, it's a good question. I mean, I don't not think about features, I don't think about products, but it does start from that place of like, all right, we have all these new colors we can paint with and all right, what are these higher order needs that are sort of evergreen, right? So people will always have stuff at work. They're always need to be able to find it or, you know, all the verbs I just mentioned. It's like, okay, how can we make like a better painting and how can we, and then how can we use some of these new colors? And then, yeah, it's like pretty clear that after the large models, the way you find stuff share stuff, it's going to be completely different after COVID, it's going to be completely different. So that's the starting point. But I think it is also important to, you know, you have to do more than just work back from the customer and like what they're trying to do. Like you have to think about, and you know, we've, we've learned a lot of this the hard way sometimes. Okay. You might start with a customer. You might start with a job to be on there. You're like, all right, what's the solution to their problem? Or like, can we build the best product that solves that problem? Right. Like what's the best way to find your stuff in the modern world? Like, well, yeah, right now the status quo for the vast majority of the billion, billion knowledge workers is they have like 10 search boxes at work that each search 10% of your stuff. Like that's clearly broken. Obviously you should just have like one search box. All right. So we can do that. And that also has to be like, I'll come back to defensibility in a second, but like, can we build the right solution that is like meaningfully better from the status quo? Like, yes, clearly. Okay. Then can we like get distribution and growth? Like that's sort of the next thing you learned is as a founder, you start with like, what's the product? What's the product? What's the product? Then you're like, wait, wait, we need distribution and we need a business model. So those are the next kind of two dominoes you have to knock down or sort of needles you have to thread at the same time. So all right, how do we grow? I mean, if Dropbox 1.0 is really this like self-serve viral model that there's a lot of, we sort of took a borrowed from a lot of the consumer internet playbook and like what Facebook and social media were doing and then translated that to sort of the business world. How do you get distribution, especially as a startup? And then a business model, like, all right, storage happened to be something in the beginning happened to be something people were willing to pay for. They recognize that, you know, okay, if I don't buy something like Dropbox, I'm going to have to buy an external hard drive. I'm going to have to buy a thumb drive and I have to pay for something one way or another. People are already paying for things like backup. So we felt good about that. But then the last domino is like defensibility. Okay. So you build this product or you get the business model, but then, you know, what do you do when the incumbents, the next chess move for them is I just like copy, bundle, kill. So they're going to copy your product. They'll bundle it with their platforms and they'll like give it away for free or no added cost. And, you know, we had a lot of, you know, scar tissue from being on the wrong side of that. Now you don't need to solve all four for all four or five variables or whatever at once or you can sort of have, you know, some flexibility. But the more of those gates that you get through, you sort of add a 10 X to your valuation. And so with AI, I think, you know, there's been a lot of focus on the large language model, but it's like large language models are a pretty bad business from a, you know, you sort of take off your tech lens and just sort of business lens. Like there's sort of this weirdly self-commoditizing thing where, you know, models only have value if they're kind of on this like Pareto frontier of size and quality and cost. Being number two, you know, if you're not on that frontier, the second the frontier moves out, which it moves out every week, like your model literally has zero economic value because it's dominated by the new thing. LLMs generate output that can be used to train or improve. So there's weird, peculiar things that are specific to the large language model. And then you have to like be like, all right, where's the value going to accrue in the stack or the value chain? And, you know, certainly at the bottom with Nvidia and the semiconductor companies, and then it's going to be at the top, like the people who have the customer relationship who have the application layer. Those are a few of the like lenses that I look at a question like that through.Alessio [00:30:48]: Do you think AI is making people more careful about sharing the data at all? People are like, oh, data is important, but it's like, whatever, I'm just throwing it out there. Now everybody's like, but are you going to train on my data? And like your data is actually not that good to train on anyway. But like how have you seen, especially customers, like think about what to put in, what to not?Drew [00:31:06]: I mean, everybody should be. Well, everybody is concerned about this and nobody should be concerned about this, right? Because nobody wants their personal companies information to be kind of ground up into little pellets to like sell you ads or train the next foundation model. I think it's like massively top of mind for every one of our customers, like, and me personally, and with my Dropbox hat on, it's like so fundamental. And, you know, we had experience with this too at Dropbox 1.0, the same kind of resistance, like, wait, I'm going to take my stuff on my hard drive and put it on your server somewhere. Are you serious? What could possibly go wrong? And you know, before that, I was like, wait, are you going to sell me, I'm going to put my credit card number into this website? And before that, I was like, hey, I'm going to take all my cash and put it in a bank instead of under my mattress. You know, so there's a long history of like tech and comfort. So in some sense, AI is kind of another round of the same thing, but the issues are real. And then when I think about like defensibility for Dropbox, like that's actually a big advantage that we have is one, our incentives are very aligned with our customers, right? We only get, we only make money if you pay us and you only pay us if we do a good job. So we don't have any like side hustle, you know, we're not training the next foundation model. You know, we're not trying to sell you ads. Actually we're not even trying to lock you into an ecosystem, like the whole point of Dropbox is it works, you know, everywhere. Because I think one of the big questions we've circling around is sort of like, in the world of AI, where should our lane be? Like every startup has to ask, or in every big company has to ask, like, where can we really win? But to me, it was like a lot of the like trust advantages, platform agnostic, having like a very clean business model, not having these other incentives. And then we also are like super transparent. We were transparent early on. We're like, all right, we're going to establish these AI principles, very table stakes stuff of like, here's transparency. We want to give people control. We want to cover privacy, safety, bias, like fairness, all these things. And we put that out up front to put some sort of explicit guardrails out where like, hey, we're, you know, because everybody wants like a trusted partner as they sort of go into the wild world of AI. And then, you know, you also see people cutting corners and, you know, or just there's a lot of uncertainty or, you know, moving the pieces around after the fact, which no one feels good about.Alessio [00:33:14]: I mean, I would say the last 10, 15 years, the race was kind of being the system of record, being the storage provider. I think today it's almost like, hey, if I can use Dash to like access my Google Drive file, why would I pay Google for like their AI feature? So like vice versa, you know, if I can connect my Dropbook storage to this other AI assistant, how do you kind of think about that, about, you know, not being able to capture all the value and how open people will stay? I think today things are still pretty open, but I'm curious if you think things will get more closed or like more open later.Drew [00:33:42]: Yeah. Well, I think you have to get the value exchange right. And I think you have to be like a trustworthy partner or like no one's going to partner with you if they think you're going to eat their lunch, right? Or if you're going to disintermediate them and like all the companies are quite sophisticated with how they think about that. So we try to, like, we know that's going to be the reality. So we're actually not trying to eat anyone's like Google Drive's lunch or anything. Actually we'll like integrate with Google Drive, we'll integrate with OneDrive, really any of the content platforms, even if they compete with file syncing. So that's actually a big strategic shift. We're not really reliant on being like the store of record and there are pros and cons to this decision. But if you think about it, we're basically like providing all these apps more engagement. We're like helping users do what they're really trying to do, which is to get, you know, that Google Doc or whatever. And we're not trying to be like, oh, by the way, use this other thing. This is all part of our like brand reputation. It's like, no, we give people freedom to use whatever tools or operating system they want. We're not taking anything away from our partners. We're actually like making it, making their thing more useful or routing people to those things. I mean, on the margin, then we have something like, well, okay, to the extent you do rag and summarize things, maybe that doesn't generate a click. Okay. You know, we also know there's like infinity investment going into like the work agents. So we're not really building like a co-pilot or Gemini competitor. Not because we don't like those. We don't find that thing like captivating. Yeah, of course. But just like, you know, you learn after some time in this business that like, yeah, there's some places that are just going to be such kind of red oceans or just like super big battlefields. Everybody's kind of trying to solve the same problem and they just start duplicating all each other effort. And then meanwhile, you know, I think the concern would be is like, well, there's all these other problems that aren't being properly addressed by AI. And I was concerned that like, yeah, and everybody's like fixated on the agent or the chatbot interface, but forgetting that like, hey guys, like we have the opportunity to like really fix search or build a self-organizing Dropbox or environment or there's all these other things that can be a compliment. Because we don't really want our customers to be thinking like, well, do I use Dash or do I use co-pilot? And frankly, none of them do. In a lot of ways, actually, some of the things that we do on the security front with Dash for Business are a good compliment to co-pilot. Because as part of Dash for Business, we actually give admins, IT, like universal visibility and control over all the different, what's being shared in your company across all these different platforms. And as a precondition to installing something like co-pilot or Dash or Glean or any of these other things, right? You know, IT wants to know like, hey, before we like turn all the lights in here, like let's do a little cleaning first before we let everybody in. And there just haven't been good tools to do that. And post AI, you would do it completely differently. And so that's like a big, that's a cornerstone of what we do and what sets us apart from these tools. And actually, in a lot of cases, we will help those tools be adopted because we actually help them do it safely. Yeah.Alessio [00:36:27]: How do you think about building for AI versus people? It's like when you mentioned cleaning up is because maybe before you were like, well, humans can have some common sense when they look at data on what to pick versus models are just kind of like ingesting. Do you think about building products differently, knowing that a lot of the data will actually be consumed by LLMs and like agents and whatnot versus like just people?Drew [00:36:46]: I think it'll always be, I aim a little bit more for like, you know, level three, level four kind of automation, because even if the LLM is like capable of completely autonomously organizing your environment, it probably would do a reasonable job. But like, I think you build bad UI when the sort of user has to fit itself to the computer versus something that you're, you know, it's like an instrument you're playing or something where you have some kind of good partnership. And you know, and on the other side, you don't have to do all this like manual effort. And so like the command line was sort of subsumed by like, you know, graphical UI. We'll keep toggling back and forth. Maybe chat will be, chat will be an increasing, especially when you bring in voice, like will be an increasing part of the puzzle. But I don't think we're going to go back to like a million command lines either. And then as far as like the sort of plumbing of like, well, is this going to be consumed by an LLM or a human? Like fortunately, like you don't really have to design it that differently. I mean, you have to make sure everything's legible to the LLM, but it's like quite tolerant of, you know, malformed everything. And actually the more, the easier it makes something to read for a human, the easier it is for an LLM to read to some extent as well. But we really think about what's that kind of right, how do we build that right, like human machine interface where you're still in control and driving, but then it's super easy to translate your intent into like the, you know, however you want your folder, setting your environment set up or like your preferences.Alessio [00:38:05]: What's the most underrated thing about Dropbox that maybe people don't appreciate?Drew [00:38:09]: Well, I think this is just such a natural evolution for us. It's pretty true. Like when people think about the world of AI, file syncing is not like the next thing you would auto complete mentally. And I think we also did like our first thing so well that there were a lot of benefits to that. But I think there also are like, we hit it so hard with our first product that it was like pretty tough to come up with a sequel. And we had a bit of a sophomore slump and you know, I think actually a lot of kids do use Dropbox through in high school or things like that, but you know, they're not, they're using, they're a lot more in the browser and then their file system, right. And we know all this, but still like we're super well positioned to like help a new generation of people with these fundamental problems and these like that affect, you know, a billion knowledge workers around just finding, organizing, sharing your stuff and keeping it safe. And there's, there's a ton of unsolved problems in those four verbs. We've talked about search a little bit, but just even think about like a whole new generation of people like growing up without the ability to like organize their things and yeah, search is great. And if you just have like a giant infinite pile of stuff, then search does make that more manageable. But you know, you do lose some things that were pretty helpful in prior decades, right? So even just the idea of persistence, stuff still being there when you come back, like when I go to sleep and wake up, my physical papers are still on my desk. When I reboot my computer, the files are still on my hard drive. But then when in my browser, like if my operating system updates the wrong way and closes the browser or if I just more commonly just declared tab bankruptcy, it's like your whole workspace just clears itself out and starts from zero. And you're like, on what planet is this a good idea? There's no like concept of like, oh, here's the stuff I was working on. Yeah, let me get back to it. And so that's like a big motivation for things like Dash. Huge problems with sharing, right? If I'm remodeling my house or if I'm getting ready for a board meeting, you know, what do I do if I have a Google doc and an air table and a 10 gig 4k video? There's no collection that holds mixed format things. And so it's another kind of hidden problem, hidden in plain sight, like he's missing primitives. Files have folders, songs have playlists, links have, you know, there's no, somehow we miss that. And so we're building that with stacks in Dash where it's like a mixed format, smart collection that you can then, you know, just share whatever you need internally, externally and have it be like a really well designed experience and platform agnostic and not tying you to any one ecosystem. We're super excited about that. You know, we talked a little bit about security in the modern world, like IT signs all these compliance documents, but in reality has no way of knowing where anything is or what's being shared. It's actually better for them to not know about it than to know about it and not be able to do anything about it. And when we talked to customers, we found that there were like literally people in IT whose jobs it is to like manually go through, log into each, like log into office, log into workspace, log into each tool and like go comb through one by one the links that people have shared and like unshares. There's like an unshare guy in all these companies and that that job is probably about as fun as it sounds like, my God. So there's, you know, fortunately, I guess what makes technology a good business is for every problem it solves, it like creates a new one, so there's always like a sequel that you need. And so, you know, I think the happy version of our Act 2 is kind of similar to Netflix. I look at a lot of these companies that really had multiple acts and Netflix had the vision to be streaming from the beginning, but broadband and everything wasn't ready for it. So they started by mailing you DVDs, but then went to streaming and then, but the value probably the whole time was just like, let me press play on something I want to see. And they did a really good job about bringing people along from the DVD mailing off. You would think like, oh, the DVD mailing piece is like this burning platform or it's like legacy, you know, ankle weight. And they did have some false starts in that transition. But when you really think about it, they were able to take that DVD mailing audience, move, like migrate them to streaming and actually bootstrap a, you know, take their season one people and bootstrap a victory in season two, because they already had, you know, they weren't starting from scratch. And like both of those worlds were like super easy to sort of forget and be like, oh, it's all kind of destiny. But like, no, that was like an incredibly competitive environment. And Netflix did a great job of like activating their Act 1 advantages and winning in Act 2 because of it. So I don't think people see Dropbox that way. I think people are sort of thinking about us just in terms of our Act 1 and they're like, yeah, Dropbox is fine. I used to use it 10 years ago. But like, what have they done for me lately? And I don't blame them. So fortunately, we have like better and better answers to that question every year.Alessio [00:42:39]: And you call it like the silicon brain. So you see like Dash and Stacks being like the silicon brain interface, basically forDrew [00:42:46]: people. I mean, that's part of it. Yeah. And writ large, I mean, I think what's so exciting about AI and everybody's got their own kind of take on it, but if you like really zoom out civilizationally and like what allows humans to make progress and, you know, what sort of is above the fold in terms of what's really mattered. I certainly want to, I mean, there are a lot of points, but some that come to mind like you think about things like the industrial revolution, like before that, like mechanical energy, like the only way you could get it was like by your own hands, maybe an animal, maybe some like clever sort of machines or machines made of like wood or something. But you were quite like energy limited. And then suddenly, you know, the industrial revolution, things like electricity, it suddenly is like, all right, mechanical energy is now available on demand as a very fungible kind of, and then suddenly we consume a lot more of it. And then the standard of living goes way, way, way, way up. That's been pretty limited to the physical realm. And then I believe that the large models, that's really the first time we can kind of bottle up cognitive energy and offloaded, you know, if we started by offloading a lot of our mechanical or physical busy work to machines that freed us up to make a lot of progress in other areas. But then with AI and computing, we're like, now we can offload a lot more of our cognitive busy work to machines. And then we can create a lot more of it. Price of it goes way down. Importantly, like, it's not like humans never did anything physical again. It's sort of like, no, but we're more leveraged. We can move a lot more earth with a bulldozer than a shovel. And so that's like what is at the most fundamental level, what's so exciting to me about AI. And so what's the silicon brain? It's like, well, we have our human brains and then we're going to have this other like half of our brain that's sort of coming online, like our silicon brain. And it's not like one or the other. They complement each other. They have very complimentary strengths and weaknesses. And that's, that's a good thing. There's also this weird tangent we've gone on as a species to like where knowledge work, knowledge workers have this like epidemic of, of burnout, great resignation, quiet quitting. And there's a lot going on there. But I think that's one of the biggest problems we have is that be like, people deserve like meaningful work and, you know, can't solve all of it. But like, and at least in knowledge work, there's a lot of own goals, you know, enforced errors that we're doing where it's like, you know, on one side with brain science, like we know what makes us like productive and fortunately it's also what makes us engaged. It's like when we can focus or when we're some kind of flow state, but then we go to work and then increasingly going to work is like going to a screen and you're like, if you wanted to design an environment that made it impossible to ever get into a flow state or ever be able to focus, like what we have is that. And that was the thing that just like seven, eight years ago just blew my mind. I'm just like, I cannot understand why like knowledge work is so jacked up on this adventure. It's like, we, we put ourselves in like the most cognitively polluted environment possible and we put so much more stress on the system when we're working remotely and things like that. And you know, all of these problems are just like going in the wrong direction. And I just, I just couldn't understand why this was like a problem that wasn't fixing itself. And I'm like, maybe there's something Dropbox can do with this and you know, things like Dash are the first step. But then, well, so like what, well, I mean, now like, well, why are humans in this like polluted state? It's like, well, we're just, all of the tools we have today, like this generation of tools just passes on all of the weight, the burden to the human, right? So it's like, here's a bajillion, you know, 80,000 unread emails, cool. Here's 25 unread Slack channels. Here's, we all get started like, it's like jittery like thinking about it. And then you look at that, you're like, wait, I'm looking at my phone, it says like 80,000 unread things. There's like no question, product question for which this is the right answer. Fortunately, that's why things like our silicon brain are pretty helpful because like they can serve as like an attention filter where it's like, actually, computers have no problem reading a million things. Humans can't do that, but computers can. And to some extent, this was already happening with computer, you know, Excel is an aversion of your silicon brain or, you know, you could draw the line arbitrarily. But with larger models, like now so many of these little subtasks and tasks we do at work can be like fully automated. And I think, you know, I think it's like an important metaphor to me because it mirrors a lot of what we saw with computing, computer architecture generally. It's like we started out with the CPU, very general purpose, then GPU came along much better at these like parallel computations. We talk a lot about like human versus machine being like substituting, it's like CPU, GPU, it's not like one is categorically better than the other, they're complements. Like if you have something really parallel, use a GPU, if not, use a CPU. The whole relationship, that symbiosis between CPU and GPU has obviously evolved a lot since, you know, playing Quake 2 or something. But right now we have like the human CPU doing a lot of, you know, silicon CPU tasks. And so you really have to like redesign the work thoughtfully such that, you know, probably not that different from how it's evolved in computer architecture, where the CPU is sort of an orchestrator of these really like heavy lifting GPU tasks. That dividing line does shift a little bit, you know, with every generation. And so I think we need to think about knowledge work in that context, like what are human brains good at? What's our silicon brain good at? Let's resegment the work. Let's offload all the stuff that can be automated. Let's go on a hunt for like anything that could save a human CPU cycle. Let's give it to the silicon one. And so I think we're at the early earnings of actually being able to do something about it.Alessio [00:48:00]: It's funny, I gave a talk to a few government people earlier this year with a similar point where we used to make machines to release human labor. And then the kilowatt hour was kind of like the unit for a lot of countries. And now you're doing the same thing with the brain and the data centers are kind of computational power plants, you know, they're kind of on demand tokens. You're on the board of Meta, which is the number one donor of Flops for the open source world. The thing about open source AI is like the model can be open source, but you need to carry a briefcase to actually maybe run a model that is not even that good compared to some of the big ones. How do you think about some of the differences in the open source ethos with like traditional software where it's like really easy to run and act on it versus like models where it's like it might be open source, but like I'm kind of limited, sort of can do with it?Drew [00:48:45]: Yeah, well, I think with every new era of computing, there's sort of a tug of war between is this going to be like an open one or a closed one? And, you know, there's pros and cons to both. It's not like open is always better or open always wins. But, you know, I think you look at how the mobile, like the PC era and the Internet era started out being more on the open side, like it's very modular. Everybody sort of party that everybody could, you know, come to some downsides of that security. But I think, you know, the advent of AI, I think there's a real question, like given the capital intensity of what it takes to train these foundation models, like are we going to live in a world where oligopoly or cartel or all, you know, there's a few companies that have the keys and we're all just like paying them rent. You know, that's one future. Or is it going to be more open and accessible? And I'm like super happy with how that's just I find it exciting on many levels with all the different hats I wear about it. You know, fortunately, you've seen in real life, yeah, even if people aren't bringing GPUs on a plane or something, you've seen like the price performance of these models improve 10 or 100x year over year, which is sort of like many Moore's laws compounded together for a bunch of reasons like that wouldn't have happened without open source. Right. You know, for a lot of same reasons, it's probably better that we can anyone can sort of spin up a website without having to buy an internet information server license like there was some alternative future. So like things are Linux and really good. And there was a good balance of trade to where like people contribute their code and then also benefit from the community returning the favor. I mean, you're seeing that with open source. So you wouldn't see all this like, you know, this flourishing of research and of just sort of the democratization of access to compute without open source. And so I think it's been like phenomenally successful in terms of just moving the ball forward and pretty much anything you care about, I believe, even like safety. You can have a lot more eyes on it and transparency instead of just something is happening. And there was three places with nuclear power plants attached to them. Right. So I think it's it's been awesome to see. And then and again, for like wearing my Dropbox hat, like anybody who's like scaling a service to millions of people, again, I'm probably not using like frontier models for every request. It's, you know, there are a lot of different configurations, mostly with smaller models. And even before you even talk about getting on the device, like, you know, you need this whole kind of constellation of different options. So open source has been great for that.Alessio [00:51:06]: And you were one of the first companies in the cloud repatriation. You kind of brought back all the storage into your own data centers. Where are we in the AI wave for that? I don't think people really care today to bring the models in-house. Like, do you think people will care in the future? Like, especially as you have more small models that you want to control more of the economics? Or are the tokens so subsidized that like it just doesn't matter? It's more like a principle. Yeah. Yeah.Drew [00:51:30]: I mean, I think there's another one where like thinking about the future is a lot easier if you start with the past. So, I mean, there's definitely this like big surge in demand as like there's sort of this FOMO driven bubble of like all of big tech taking their headings and shipping them to Jensen for a couple of years. And then you're like, all right, well, first of all, we've seen this kind of thing before. And in the late 90s with like Fiber, you know, this huge race to like own the internet, own the information superhighway, literally, and then way overbuilt. And then there was this like crash. I don't know to what extent, like maybe it is really different this time. Or, you know, maybe if we create AGI that will sort of solve the rest of the, or we'll just have a different set of things to worry about. But, you know, the simplest way I think about it is like this is sort of a rent not buy phase because, you know, I wouldn't want to be, we're still so early in the maturity, you know, I wouldn't want to be buying like pallets of over like of 286s at a 5x markup when like the 386 and 486 and Pentium and everything are like clearly coming there around the corner. And again, because of open source, there's just been a lot more com

This week we're talking to Matthew Hodgson, one of the founders of Matrix - a network for secure, decentralised communication, and CEO/CTO of Element - a communications platform built using Matrix, about the regulatory environment matrix lives in, the difficulty of and the passion for interoperable communications at matrix, and the complications of building an encrypted communications platform both technically and in this day and age. Links for description: - Matrix: https://matrix.org/ - Element: https://element.io/ - Telegram's encryption: https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-encryption-end-to-end-features/ - Blah: https://www.vanillaplus.com/2014/05/22/2663-tim-brasil-deploys-amdocs-unified-communications-for-blah-service/ - Anatel Brazil Whatsapp arrest: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/facebook-exec-jailed-in-brazil-as-court-seeks-whatsapp-data-idUSKCN0W34WA/ - eEuropean commission 42 point going dark plan: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/first-insight-42-key-points-of-the-secret-eugoingdark-surveillance-plan-for-the-new-eu-commission - Clipper chip: Listen to our podcast - https://privacyinternational.org/video/5332/cryptowars-short-history-encryption-politics - Online Safety Act: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer - Liberty on the Online Safety Act: https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Joint-civil-society-briefing-on-private-messaging-in-the-Online-Safety-Bill-for-Second-Reading-in-the-House-of-Lords-January-2023.pdf - Adam Langley: https://www.imperialviolet.org/ - Pond.org: https://medium.com/@undercomm/secure-communication-pond-4985bfe85a2c - 'We kill people based on metadata' https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/05/ex-nsa-chief-we-kill-people-based-on-metadata - PI and ICRC report: https://privacyinternational.org/report/2509/humanitarian-metadata-problem-doing-no-harm-digital-era - Matrix P2P tracker: https://arewep2pyet.com/ - Alec Muffett v Matthew Hodgson: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/28/23000148/eu-dma-damage-whatsapp-encryption-privacy - PI's take on the Digital Markets Act: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5356/what-digital-markets-act-and-what-does-it-mean-our-privacy-and-wider-rights - Apple enable RCS: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/10/24171315/apple-messages-rcs-ios-18-imessage-green-bubble - Chat Control: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ - Cyber Resilience Act: https://privacyinternational.org/advocacy/5060/our-position-eu-cyber-resilience-act-cra

In this episode, Louise shares another success story from the Badass Breakthrough Academy, featuring Chrissy, a yoga instructor and studio owner. She shares how personalized coaching helped her navigate the challenges of perimenopause and menopause, including hormonal changes, weight gain, mood swings, joint pain and unexpected mental health impacts. Chrissy highlights the importance of customizing fitness and nutrition plans to suit individual needs instead of relying on one-size-fits-all programs.Key tips include balancing blood sugar, reducing inflammation, and adding practical health hacks to a busy life. Chrissy stresses that strength training as we age isn't just about getting stronger—it's about building resilience and balance. They also talk about the benefits of shorter, consistent workouts, keeping muscles and bones healthy, and pacing exercises for long-term success.Focusing on body positivity and embracing life's changes, Louise, as one of the world's leading health and fitness experts, also explores the freedom that comes with self-acceptance and learning how to work with your unique female body's changing needs in a way that fits your lifestyle for realistically sustainable success. Together, they encourage active women to take charge of their holistic well-being and confidently embrace their unique journeys. Join us for this empowering discussion full of practical tips for unstoppable health and fitness at any age.Visit https://www.breakingthroughwellness.com/ for a free nutrition guide, to learn about our new Membership or book a FREE 30-MINUTE CONSULT. Our industry-leading 1:1 Academy for active women and runners is filling fast, so don't wait!Learn more about Chrissy's virtual yoga, reiki and self-care support for busy women and active moms here: https://www.ahealthyandhappyyou.com/ Follow Chrissy on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/ahealthyandhappyyou/Episode Highlights:(0:00) Intro to Chrissy and her fitness journey(4:55) Struggles with perimenopause symptoms and weight gain(9:53) The benefits of personalized coaching and lifestyle changes(11:56) Understanding the importance of carbs and balancing blood sugar(16:23) Practical hacks for incorporating health into daily life(28:23) Reducing inflammation and managing hot flashes naturally(32:078) The power of advocating for your health and personal care(59:13) OutroTune in weekly to "Maximizing Fitness, Physique, and Running Through Perimenopause" for a simple female-specific science-based revolution. Let's unlock our best with less stress!I'd love to connect!Instagram

With day to day triathlon training, it can be hard to enter every workout feeling strong and energized. On this episode, Coaches Elizabeth James and Ryan Tibball share their strategies for beginning every workout in a positive place. How is your body feeling? What is your personal ideal workout time? How dialed in is your nutrition and hydration? Are you getting enough recovery? All of these are important for maintaining energy levels. Elizabeth and Ryan cover all of this and more to help you start your next workout better energized!

Tony 'The Portugeeza' Bryant is back in his monthly slot, taking a look at the news in Portugal with Carl.AKA 'The Portugeeza', he has been known to upset the social media apple cart with his outspoken, albeit fun observations as an expat in Portugal. (An anagram of Tony Bryant is 'rant by Tony'!)Follow The Portugeeza on www.instagram.com/theportugeeza and www.facebook.com/theportugeeza--- Visit www.goodmorningportugal.com for:This week's 'Portuguese Point of Interest''Portuguese Property of The Week'Portuguese 'Treat of the Week'Our Go Motoring Portugal! Car of The WeekHow to buy Euros the stress-free and more competitive wayHelp on how to move to Portugal (-:Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-good-morning-portugal-podcast-with-carl-munson--2903992/support.

Die Götter waren gnädig und haben Gundrid Rettung in Form einer Goblin-Mannschaft geschickt. Gemeinsam machen sie sich auf den Weg um ihre Gefährten und die "Kaiserlich Hochgeboren" zu finden. Was sie tatsächlich erwartet ist so grausam dass sich die Thorwalerin noch wünschen wird lieber bei den Fischen gelandet zu sein. Denn plötzlich ist er da: der nicht aufzuhaltende Sog der Träume aus der Tiefe. Und der Träumende ist nur noch eine blasse Erinnerung an den wundervollen Barden, der er mal war. Kolkja, Kolkja... Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach, Klaudia Szabo, Fahrenbruch, Stefanie, Sunny und Tarek Wennige und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

  Hour 2 of A&G features... CEO of United Way, Dan Leroy talks to A&G about what is really happening in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene Greg Gutfeld goes over Howard Stern's interview of Kamala Harris What's happening in Chicago & their schools makes CA look reasonable A hobby becomes a sport Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

  Hour 2 of A&G features... CEO of United Way, Dan Leroy talks to A&G about what is really happening in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene Greg Gutfeld goes over Howard Stern's interview of Kamala Harris What's happening in Chicago & their schools makes CA look reasonable A hobby becomes a sport Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If yesterday's "A" was for someone you didn't know, today's "B" comes from someone you likely do - Greta Thunberg. In late 2021, she spoke in Italy and used a refrain of "Blah. Blah. Blah" to point out the hypocrisy of political leaders thus far on true reduction of carbon and other climate changing gases. Jesus the Christ, also a truth-teller, had pointed words for the hypocrites of his time. I imagine, he - like Greta would have similarly strong words for political leaders and candidates today who are not acting with urgency - even as natural disasters continue to illustrate a changed climate. NOTE: I misspoke Greta's age - her Bday is Jan 3, 2003 - and thus 21 years old. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/presence/support

Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Monday October 7, 2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Monday October 7, 2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

AGAIN LIFE IS TOO LIFESo the wild adventurer has returned and the missing audio file recovered. Only it's very short. Oh so short. And so the difficulties and tedium of editing sessions with missing spaces has engulfed me. I have succumed to needing an extra week. But do not worry! Next week: episode!Pledge/donate on Patreon: www.patreon.com/thatdndpodcastSend feedback to: ThatDnDPodcast@Gmail.comVisit our website: http://www.thatdndpodcast.comAmazon Link: http://www.amazon.com/?rw_useCurrentProtocol=1&tag=thdnpo07-20

Das war's. Die Windtänzer liegt unwiderruflich am Meeresgrund. Kapitänin Gundrid Hallarsdottir treibt auf offener See während ihre Mannschaft, falls man sie noch als "ihre" bezeichnen kann, an Bord der Karacke gerettet wird. Und wenn Swafnir ihr Rufen nicht erhört...Die Kapitänin zählt ihre letzten Stunden. Doch der Walgott hat seinen ganz eigenen Humor wenn es um ein Rettungskommando geht und die wichtigste Lektion im Leben der Thorwalerin steht ihr noch bevor. Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach, Klaudia Szabo, Fahrenbruch, Stefanie, Sunny und Tarek Wennige und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

Hey! I'm Johnny Profane… back after a 6-month bout of the "shys" to launch Season 5 of AutisticAF Out Loud. Missed you guys… But I'm here now, at least for the moment... Let's do something great with that moment, shall we?This seems like the perfect occasion to talk about Time… and how it passes. A crucial topic… whether you're autistic or ADHD, wonder if you are, have kids or a loved one, work with some, or work to support us…I want to give you my experience of autistic time. Which is not chained to clocks or calendars. And different enough from what most folks expect… that I've struggled for two years… just to use my words. So I've turned to art. Which is both adult and intense at points…Some of the images are available as posters. And stick around to the end for a special AI-generated treat. Google's NotebookLM creates a lively dialogue between two AI commentators to break down the key ideas… especially for non-autistics. It's like having digital study buddies to help process all this time-bending stuff!Every clock is a handgun pointed at my headIIIEvery clock is a handgun pointed at my headEvery tick, tick… fucking tickTolling Fear, Doom… dreadClick. Slide. Cock… click.Every night a mantra echoes through my headTV static… a crazy-making humSinging Dream, Drempt… dead…Not done. Not done. Not done… undone.10, 9, 8… Dread7, 6, 5… Fear4, 3, 2… BEEP.Shoot the moon… or the country next doorCountdown. Deadline. Bow down… dead.Bound behind doors, bound in my headPace, paces, pacing… pacedEvery BEEP.Of the phone.Stops…my heart. . . . I crash out with a scream for escapeIIWoodsDeep woodsDeepest woodsMy ears flyfrom bird songto bird song.A raptor circles then spiralsCrossing lines now deadWind steals my breathTaking words never saidThis skin bag of atmosphereBreathes new airWhen the sun risesFirst it is coolThen it gets warmThe day passesClouds above my head.Shaped by windOutside my bodyThe same windInside my bodyThesamewindYet…I10, 9, 8… Dread7, 6, 5… Fear4, 3, 2… BEEP.Shoot the moon… or the country next doorCountdown. Deadline. Bow down… dead.Every clock is a handgun pointed at my headzeroThe Māori must be a wise people. They really get autistic time.Or at least, Keri Opai did back in 2017. That's when he coined their new dictionary entry for autism, Takiwātanga, “in his or her own time and space.”Keri is an author, educator, and social activist. He certainly knew of the Western Medical Model of autism. But… it seems, Keri's childhood pal, Peter, was autistic. So Keri just could not bring himself to define us as broken.No medical pathology in Keri's words. No disabling pity. Rather, respect. Even admiration…He, and his people, saw what many of us feel. Our deep connection with natural rhythms. Our walk through the world at our own pace. On our own path. Maybe in our own dimensions of time & space.Takiwātanga. A dictionary definition born out of love. It captures the heart of my autistic life — a different walk through time and space.Reflecting on Keri's compassionate wisdom… My guess is that the Māoris, at least, are glad we're on the planet. Not because of our needs. Because of our contributions. Rooted in our different perceptions, our outsider experiences.Let's dive deeper into Māoris, autism, and our journey through time perception. After this quick word, got bills to pay…[ad]This podcast is supported solely by listeners like you. We believe no one should have to pay to be autistic. Which is why we offer all our autistic information for free. To ensure this resource remains available for those who can't afford it, consider choosing a paid subscription at johnnyprofaneknapp.substack.com. Link in the description.So, maybe the Māoris offer the understanding we autistics need. But Western science still struggles to catch up. Their “Autistic Spectrum”? A laundry list of supposed problems… like “Time Blindness.” Only a problem from an ableist point of view. In an industrialist society.Problems that might be strengths in a different time, a different place.Try as I might, I could never measure my time by checking off boxes under “Goals Met.” Like how many widgets I punch out each hour. Which has nothing to do with my quality of life... which is very much wrapped up in the joy of my process.Why do I want to make you feel how I experience time as an autistic person? How can we understand each other... care for each other... if we don't explore each other?Why do I use art? Because research trends and terms change with the times... like all things human made. I could wave my hands and quote “neuroplasticity” & “quantum effects” all day and into the night. But that would negate my words in a few years. When the whole research paradigm changes… yet again.But raw human experience endures. So… I offer you poetry. So… I offer you images.So… I welcome you into my world.#AutisticAF Out Loud Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. To leave a one-time tip of any amount, please visit Ko-Fi.Right up front, every time…We autistics are not all the same.Example: Most folks know autistic kids and adults may have sensory differences. What most don't know? Some of us are not overwhelmed by loud noise, bright lights, big crowds.Some of us are exhilarated… by them.And some… like me… experience a bit of both…So then, what do we share in common as autists? An UN-common sensitivity and reaction to extreme sensory input. Yet, we respond in individual ways… because we've lived different lives.Keep that in mind as I discuss my personal experiences of time, memory… thought. Both research and personal stories show we autists experience time in ways uncommon for most humans.But each of us experiences time differently. Even as polar opposites.In My Autistic TimeWant me for dinner? I may bust a gut to please you. AND yet…I'll end up mumbling some variation of “I have no freaking clue how so much time could have passed... um, again.”But get me focused… particularly on my passions… writing or music?I effortlessly monitor… fractions of a second...To hit precisely…The right hesitation… of that one… musical note.Or the perfect combo… of word choice… and white space…That.Makes…The phrase.Now, weirdly, any period much longer than a day? All kinda melts together. I can forget to send in a vital Social Security form, thinking, “I just got it yesterday. I still got time…” Weeks later. Months later. Too much later…Or I might pick up a convo in mid-sentence when I see a friend. From the last time I saw him. Which coulda been two jobs… and a career or so... ago.Like I have one button on my clock, “NOW.” And for bonus points, its alarm function has no mega-freaking clue… How long it takes to complete any task invented by any human.At any time in history.Or any space we've ever occupied."Sure, hon, I'll make dinner tonight! That fake rice-a-roni I make takes 14 minutes to boil. I'll see ya in about 20.” One annoyed emoji and an hour later…

Dogs are Smarter than People podcastWe've started a series of paid and free posts and podcast episodes about writing bestsellers. Our first post about this is here. To see them all just look up “hit novel” or “bestselling” in the search bar.Whew. Blah. Blah. Blah. Right? Not a bestselling way to start a podcast episode.What's a better way?Well, according to Jack Hall who wrote Hit Lit, “In most bestsellers, there's a central character who sets off on a journey that takes her from rustic America into turbulent urban landscapes, where her agrarian values either help her succeed or doom her to failure. Almost as often, the heroes of bestsellers make an exodus in the opposite direction, from the pressures of cities to the bucolic countryside.”Think the Epic of Gilgamesh.Think the Wizard of Oz.Think Star Wars.Think Twilight.Think Outlander.Jason Hellerman for NoFilmSchool writes, “The "fish out of water" idiom refers to a character who is removed from their normal day to day and has to catch up with their new outlook on the world. This writing trope is very popular in TV pilot episodes, action movies, and across almost any genre.“If the character adapts fast to the new environment, it's said they are like ‘a duck takes to water.'"You might be a city girl in the country or a country boy in the city or just a Hallmark Christmas movie character, but there's something that resonates in that trope, something that makes a bestseller.Hall takes it a bit deeper saying that it's about mythic identities. We see it in elections. The midwestern dad VP choice. The hillbilly boy done good VP choice. The outsider. The insider. We create myths where every single person in the middle of America is a part of “Heartland” full of “hardworking blue-collar” peeps.“Red state vs blue state. Working-class vs corporate elite. Virtuous vs decadent,” Hall writes.These polarities become mythic, gigantic, and they popularize stereotypes and polarize views.“While we all know these labels are bogus, they are so ingrained in our sense of national identity that we reflexively embrace them even as we discount their accuracy,” Hall writes.Books that argue both sides of these polarities and tensions? They tend to be the bestsellers.DOG TIP OF THE PODDon't be afraid to explore new experiences to make the best story of your life that you can!RANDOM THOUGHT LINKShttps://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2024/09/21/mouse-airplane-meal-emergency-landing/75324632007https://shepherdexpress.com/puzzles/news-of-the-weird/news-of-the-weird-week-of-october-3-2024SHOUT OUT!The music we've clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License. Here's a link to that and the artist's website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It's “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome. We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here. Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot! Subscribe

MEET THE AUTHOR Podcast: LIVE - Episode 176Originally aired Wednesday October 2,2024 Featuring Author JOSEPH CARRABIS ABOUT JOSEPH: Joseph Carrabis is the author of over a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories, including the Nebula-recommended Cymodoce and the Pushcart nominated The Weight. Raised by his maternal grandfather John, Joseph developed a thirst for knowledge that would motivate him to seek immersion within indigenous societies all over the world. These experiences compelled Joseph to help others and have inspired his writing. In addition to writing fiction, Joseph is the author of internationally best-selling non-fiction. Prior to becoming a full-time author, Joseph sat on several advisory boards including the Center for Multicultural Science and the Journal of Cultural Marketing Strategy. He was a Senior Research Fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California, and served with the UN/NYAS Scientists Without Borders program. Joseph was born in Melrose, MA, and currently lives in Nashua, New Hampshire with his wife, Susan, and their four-legged child, Boo. Blah blah blah... Personally, I think I'm rather boring and dull. I figured that wouldn't make good copy so I asked a bunch of friends how they'd describe me. Everybody said I was "intriguing". That's a nice double-edged word, don't you think? Kind of like something you want to stare at from a distance or with a good, solid, thick piece of steel reinforced glass between you and whatever you're looking at. Me, if I think something's intriguing, I want to know more about it but I don't want to get too close while getting to know more about it. Know what I mean?...Links to watch or listen to all episodes at: https://indiebooksource.com/podcast

Jennifer Bourget from Counting Stars joins the show again to tell us about a new cafe they've opened in Green Bay. Counting Stars and the new cafe will work tirelessly to decrease barriers hindering inclusiveness in all life aspects. Jennifer calls the organization a "community of support." Then, James Baker and Chris Pretti are on to talk about the underground punk rock scene that took place in Northeast Wisconsin. Jame and Chris have assembled a new documentary called "Green Blah! - The History of Green Bay Punk Rock". The film tracks the story back to the late 70's. Did you know Bart and Cherry Starr went to a punk rock show? Maino and the Mayor is a part of the Civic Media radio network and airs Monday through Friday from 6-9 am on WGBW in Green Bay and on WISS in Appleton/Oshkosh. Subscribe to the podcast to be sure not to miss out on a single episode! To learn more about the show and all of the programming across the Civic Media network, head over to https://civicmedia.us/shows to see the entire broadcast line up. Follow the show on Facebook and X to keep up with Maino and the Mayor! Guests: Jennifer Bourget, James Baker, Chris Pretti

Kolkja's Albträume nehmen mittlerweile Ausmaße an die ihn an den Rand des Wahnsinns treiben. Und mit seinem Verstand und dieser immensen Belastung beginnt auch langsam das Gefüge der Mannschaft zu bröckeln. Jetzt wird sich zeigen ob Gundrid sich als Kapitänin und Freundin beweisen kann - doch die Welle aus Chaos und Misstrauen rollt bereits an... Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach, Klaudia Szabo, Fahrenbruch, Stefanie, Sunny und Tarek Wennige und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

Blah blah blah, Stuff happened, other stuff was said, stuff announced, The best Gaming Podcast 491 Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5zKbGokI0oI6SeZrHTfJjA/join Each Friday ACG and some pals get together to discuss games, life, books, movies and everything else. New home of the ACG Best Gaming Podcast Follow me on Twitter for reviews and info @jeremypenter -JOIN the ACG Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ACGVids/ https://www.patreon.com/AngryCentaurGaming

New bits are F FDR, Yenta Breath Alert, Comedy Ego Protection & Burnt Marshmallow Man. 

“Blah, blah, blah” and “yada, yada, yada” have had plenty written about them. But there's a longtime cousin of these phrases that's much less understood. We use it all the time, yet it's not in the dictionary. It's not even Google-able. In this episode, we investigate the linguistic mysteries of the Five Dah Phenomenon. Featuring linguist & philosopher Paul Saka, and psychologist Helen Abadzi. If you know what this week's mystery sound is, tell us at mystery.20k.org. Follow Dallas on Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. Watch our video shorts on YouTube, and join the discussion on Facebook. Find the right doctor, right now at zocdoc.com/20k. Get a discount on your NordVPN plan at nordvpn.com/20k Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com/20k. Get a free Netsuite KPI Checklist at netsuite.com/20k. Episode transcript, music, and credits can be found here: www.20k.org/episodes/blahblahblah Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WICHTIG!!! Content Notes sensible Inhalte: Anspielung an Dissoziation, Schizophrenie und suizidale Gedanken, Beschreibungen von körperlicher Gewalt Kolkja hat ein mysteriöses Ei aus Stein gefunden und dessen Inhalt führt die Mannschaft der Windtänzer ein Stückchen näher an den Schatz der Sumurrer. Doch wäre es eine gute Geschichte wenn es einfach einfach wäre? Oh nein , bei Swafnir, oh nein. Und ehe Gundrid sicht versieht stecken sie und Kolkja irgendwo zwischen Kunst und Kuriosem und kämpfen gegen Piraten um Bares und Rares. Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach, Klaudia Szabo, Fahrenbruch, Stefanie, Sunny und Tarek Wennige und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

Gundrid und Kolkja sind dem verlorenen Schatz der Sumurrer vielleicht wirklich näher gekommen. Doch das Bruchstück der Schatzkarte wirft Fragen auf. Der Weg führt die Mannschaft der Windtänzer nach Maraskan und diese Insel hat ihre ganz eigenen Regeln und Bräuche. Also preiset die Schönheit Bruderschwester und gebt gut Acht...der Dschungel und die verlassenen Tempel haben besondere Bewohner ��� Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

On this episode of the Character Outs podcast, we talk about the good ol' apology. Wait, you mean the kind I have to give? No. Ew. Knock it off. I am NOT here for that. Omg, you feel that way about apologies too?? YES! WE CAN DO THIS!!!! We grew up in a toxic family where an apology was: ~forced ~coerced ~weaponized When in reality in a healthy and safe relationship an apology is: ~sincere ~genuine ~leads to both parties to being vulnerable We talk about why we feel that ick associated with giving an apology and how we can get past it. We got this...

Blah blah blah.

Ben Maller talks about the Steelers preparing as if Justin Fields will continue to be the starter, Micah Parsons saying he's not worried about his uncertain future, where the panic meter is on Bryce Young, Too Much or Not Enough, and more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today we're talking about The Corruption Within by CosmicVoid! A game about finding your family AND the Book of Secrets.Get The Corruption Within on itch.io! Check out CosmicVoid's other games on itch.io!---Discussed in the episodeEnglish diarist Samuel Pepys, article on Wikipedia---Visit our website!Support the show on Kofi!Follow us on Twitch!Follow the show on Bluesky!Check out The Worst Garbage Online!---Art by Tara CrawfordMusic by _amaranthineAdditional sounds by BoqehProduced and edited by AJ Fillari---Timecodes:(00:00) - The Looming Wet. (00:29) - Not really a "come down" experience (02:07) - What is The Corruption Within? (03:38) - Talking about the people and the mansion | General Discussion (09:29) - The SpoOoOoOky part of the show | Spoiler Discussion (21:12) - The story starts moving | Spoiler Discussion (27:39) - CW: CHILD DEATH (28:38) - Blah blah blah the rest of the story | Spoiler Discussion (42:50) - Good! | Spoiler Discussion (45:23) - Big Takeaways (45:39) - AJ's Big Takeaway (46:48) - Kim's Big Takeaway (51:07) - Come shitpost with us!  

Leinen los! Die Mannschaft der Windtänzer ist zurück und Kapitänin Gundrid Hallarsdottir sucht nach 3 langen, nicht sehr abwechslungsreichen Jahren auf See nach einem Abenteuer. Wie gut,dass es ihrem Gefährten Kolkja genauso geht und er kurzerhand beim Glücksspiel an geheime Informationen kommt...Informationen über den vergessenen Schatz der Sumurrer. Sind es nur leere Worte eines betrunkenen Admirals gewesen oder warten tatsächlich irgendwo da draußen Türme aus Gold gefüllt mit Edelsteinen auf sie? Finden wir es heraus! Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

I never knew what to wear while pregnant, what to buy ahead of time, what would change postpartum, and I feel like everyone said something different so I really couldn't decide what to shop for and ended up just feeling really BLAH the whole time I was pregnant, but then felt pretty good postpartum once I did some shopping. So I do not have the answers for others since it's true that everyone is different, but I thought it might be helpful to share what worked for me in case anyone else is trying to figure this out for themselves either with pregnancy or postpartum! Or if you are just curious for the distant future or as a friend.  A few of my favorite maternity and nursing friendly pieces: https://shopmy.us/collections/226601

Blah blah blah, Beast Wars Second once and for all!Subscribe to our Patreon to access exclusive content at https://www.patreon.com/lazorcombVideo Version:https://youtu.be/otkiUjc4Jf0Show Links:https://linktr.ee/lazorcombJoin The Lazor Comb Discord:https://discord.gg/AEMkmvud3kBuy a TOO MUCH ENERGON! t-shirt:https://www.teepublic.com/user/too-much-energon ★ Support this podcast ★

Na wenn das mal kein überraschendes Wiedersehen ist :) Auch wenn Hendrik sich bisher eher hätte Kiel holen lassen als ein Sequel für die HörSpieler zu meistern ist Staffel 6 nun eben genau das geworden: die Fortsetzung der Geschichte von Kapitänin Gundrid und ihrem mittlerweile sehr seetauglichen Gefährten Kolkja. Und man kann es in diesem Spotlight erahnen; Chrissie und Jascha haben Bock auf weitere spannende Abenteuer an Deck der Windtänzer. Freut euch mit uns auf eine Geschichte sondergleichen, auf eine grandiose Mannschaft und auf Lieder, Lieder, Lieder! Wir danken Ulisses Spiele für das Vertrauen und die Zusammenarbeit und unseren Patreon-Unterstützenden AvaPaws, Daniel S, Dr. Winter, Jan Taro Svejda, Phex, David Thörner, Hans Werner Grolm, Linda Reimers, Michael Vedder, Caro Scholz, DerWuffelRuff, Sebastian Kreppel, Zawunc, Aaron, Blah, Christian Gläßer, Christoph, Christoph Küng, David Nieß, Kitty, moonisstabby, Nhazrel, Sascha Schwarz, Thengyll, Tobi Achenbach und allen, die dieses Projekt möglich machen!! In dieser Staffel gilt unser besonderer Dank dem DSA Archiv für die Informationen über die vergessenen Teile Aventuriens. Wenn auch du die Träume aus der Tiefe mit geldlichen Mitteln unterstützen möchtest kannst du auf patreon.com/diehoerspieler die unterschiedlichen Mannschafts-Positionen entdecken.

Join Bradley Sutton in this episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast as we explore the vital importance of search volume metrics for Amazon sellers. We'll reveal why accurate search volume data is crucial for making informed decisions on listing optimization, PPC campaigns, and more. We'll discuss how to gauge demand in a niche and prioritize keywords effectively, while also addressing the limitations of Amazon's own search volume metrics. Listen in as Bradley addresses the misinformation circulating in the industry, particularly a misleading LinkedIn post comparing search volumes from Helium 10, Data Dive, and Jungle Scout. The episode highlights the flawed methodologies used in such comparisons and the significant differences between normalized and denormalized search volumes. Bradley clarifies the historical changes Amazon made to its search volume data and emphasizes the importance of fact-checking and accurate representation in tool comparisons. Lastly, we'll highlight the importance of maintaining civility in discussions about Amazon tools, particularly when it comes to the accuracy of search volume data. After conducting comparison tests, where we matched Helium 10's data against Amazon's only normalized search data, Brand Analytics, Helium 10 achieved an impressive 93.5% accuracy rate. In comparison, Jungle Scout scored 41.9% accuracy when evaluated against Search Query Performance, which uses a denormalized search metric. It's crucial that we provide our audience with reliable information. We are committed to addressing misleading information in future episodes, ensuring that our listeners receive the most insightful and accurate information. Thank you for your support, and stay tuned for more in-depth analysis. In episode 590 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about: 01:52 - Accurate Amazon Search Volume Metric Importance 06:30 - Keyword Sales Is The Best Metric 07:11 - Addressing Misleading Information 12:19 - Debunking Jungle Scout's Blog On Keyword Accuracy Analysis 17:30 - Search Frequency Rank And Why It's Important 20:27 - Normalized vs. Denormalized Searches 20:58 - The History Of Search Volume In Amazon 21:22 - Understanding Normalized and Denormalized Searches 25:31 - Stop Comparing Apples to Oranges 26:20 - Let's Do A Real Test 27:42 - How Accurate Is Helium 10's Search Volume? 29:18 - Jungle Scout and Data Dive vs Search Query Performance Data 32:20 - Confusion Over Jungle Scout Search Volume History 35:45 - Bradley's Final Message ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Transcript Bradley Sutton: Search volume is one of the most important metrics for Amazon sellers to help make decisions like Listing, Optimization, PPC and more. Now, who has the most accurate search volume out there Jungle Scout and Data Dive or Helium 10? Well, spoiler alert in today's case. Today I'm going to show you that Helium 10 wins with a 93.5% accuracy, with Jungle Scout coming in second at 41.9%. How cool is that? Pretty cool. I think. You want to know what keywords are driving the most sales for listings on Amazon. To do that, you need to know what highly searched for keywords the product is ranking for, maybe at the top of page one. You can actually find that out in seconds by using Helium 10's keyword research tool, Cerebro. Now, that's just one of the many, many functions that make this tool my favorite tool in the whole suite, and it's the most powerful keyword research tool ever created for e-commerce sellers. For more information, go to h10.me/cerebro. Don't forget to use the Serious Sellers Podcast discount coupon SSP10. Bradley Sutton: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And today, guys, we are going to have a special episode where I'm going deep. I spent a couple of nights without sleep working on this because things got me real riled up on this. All right, this is an important topic to me, and there's just so much misinformation out there that I was like I got to set the record straight. Bradley Sutton: Now the question is who has the most accurate search one? Well, of course, the first answer would be Amazon itself has the most accurate, because they're the ones who are providing information. Now, sometimes, though, it's not always the most useful though, like, for example hey, I'm trying to do research into a niche that I'm not selling in. Yet you're a little bit limited with being able to see search volume in Amazon. Search Query Performance for an existing listing. Great, all right. Uh, that shows you denormalized numbers. We're going to talk about what that means a little bit later. But if you're looking at, hey, well, the keywords that I'm getting traction for already, what is my search volume? There's nothing better out of a great apples to apples comparison as that. Now, the drawback there is you can only see what you're already ranking for you can't really like, put in your competitors and see their search volume. But again, obviously this is Amazon's platform. They've got the most accurate search volume. I'm sure they have multiple search volume metrics, some of which Amazon sellers can get at. Bradley Sutton: But let's just talk about this. Take a step back. Why is search volume important? Why do Amazon sellers rely on this metric so much? Well, there's a lot of different reasons. Maybe you're just looking for demand in a certain niche, for example. Hey, I'm looking into selling in this category. I don't see many products here with sales, so I can't really estimate demand because there's not enough sales. Maybe it's something newer, but there's a lot of search volume, right, because you could have a lot of search volume for something, but no sales yet because there's no competitors yet. All right, so that's something exciting. That's where search volume could be important. What about you've already decided to make a product right? The number one reason that we need search volume is prioritization. What do I mean by that? Let's say I've identified 200 equally relevant keywords. Obviously, all keywords aren't equally relevant. Let's just play devil's advocate and say we've got 200 keywords. That we've done in all of our keyword research and I need to put them in my listing. Bradley Sutton: Now, can you put 200 unique phrases in phrase form in your listing to send those relevancy signals to Amazon, to let Amazon know hey, this is my product. You know, you always want to put your most important keywords in phrase form in your listing. No, you don't have room for 200 separate phrases. You maybe have room for 15, 20, 25. Well, how do you prioritize? Which ones you're going to put in phrase form, which ones you're going to concentrate on? Right, if all things were equal, the one thing that is different is search volume, right? Hey, my most search ones of these equally relevant keywords. That's what I'm putting in phrase form. The most search ones of the most relevant. That's what's going in my title, right? Similar with you. Know, when you're deciding what you're going to do for PPC, hey, am I going to try to equally target all 200 words? No, I might try and like target 20 words at first, 30 words at first. Again, relevancy is the most important. But then the next metric is search volume. All right, you know, I'm not going to try and put a whole bunch of 1 million search volume keywords in one campaign and then another campaign with an equal number of keywords that have 100 search volume. That just wouldn't make sense, right? So, I'm sure all of you would agree with me that a search volume is something that is important. Helps us in many different ways as Amazon sellers. Bradley Sutton: Now here's the interesting thing. It's not always the number itself as the most important. When you think about search volume for prioritization, it's really the order in which they're in, right? That's one of the factors, not just the number itself, like, for example, um, you look at google trends, uh, google trends is not search volume, right? People have been using google trends for years and it's a scale of one to 100. Helps you prioritize, right? Brand Analytics, which you guys know I love. You know there's no search volume number in Brand Analytics. That's the data point that amazon gives and has been giving for like what, four or five years now. There's no search volume in there. It's just giving you an order. It gives you search frequency rank. Bradley Sutton: You're totally able to prioritize keywords not based on a search volume number. Like, if all you had was Brand Analytics and zero search volume number, guess what You'd be able to do almost everything you do right now, right? Even if there was no Helium 10, no Jungle Scout, no, anything. You just had Brand Analytics, no search volume numbers at all. That's enough information to prioritize. Now you might have to make your own little formulas or something like that to try and see hey, I only want the search frequency rank from, from, you know, 500,000 and up, or 500,000 below, I should say, you know. Or a hundred thousand and below, you know. Of course, you know you might have to do something, but still, you could get around, uh, get along without the actual search volume number. So, it's not necessarily the search volume number that's the most important. Again, it is which ones are searched more in comparison with whatever other keywords you have, right? Bradley Sutton: Now, of course, the best way to prioritize even more than just search volume itself or search order, is keyword sales, right? Not all keywords are created equal, right? You could have a 500,000-search volume keyword that generates, you know, the products on the page generate a hundred sales only because there's low, low buyer intent. You could have another keyword that's 500,000-search volume and it could generate a thousand sales because there's a lot more buyer intent. So actually, the best metric, of course, to prioritize if you're talking about, hey, what's going to potentially bring me the most sales is keyword sales. Bradley Sutton: Now, are you able to see estimated keyword sales by keyword? Yeah, Helium 10 can help you with that. Jungle Scout doesn't have that. I would assume that Data Dive doesn't. I have access to a Jungle Scout account. I don't have access to a Jungle Scout account. I don't have access to data. I can only monitor the biggest competitors out there. So, Jungle Scout, the last time I checked, no keyword sales. I would assume data doesn't. But if I'm mistaken, I apologize. Bradley Sutton: Now, why am I even doing this episode? How did this drama all get started and why am I so worked up?  Now, before I even get into this, let me just give a kind of disclaimer here. I'm pretty passionate about this subject. I might get a little worked up in this episode. I hope nobody takes anything personal. I'm even going to blur names over here. People can probably figure out by looking at posts and stuff where the party's involved. But again, I'm not trying to call somebody in particular out. So, I hope this doesn't come off as oh, I'm trying to like fight somebody in the backyard or something like that. All right, I just really get worked up about this kind of topic and when people are throwing Helium 10 under the bus, or when people are misleading others, intentionally or not, who are you know? Known figures like it just bothers me, all right. So again, I'm not going to try and throw any name, drop here personal names. I apologize if anybody ahead of time, if anybody gets offended. I'm just stating the facts. All right, just the facts, ma'am. All right. Bradley Sutton: Now, how did this all get started? It all got started with this LinkedIn post. Uh, that's somebody. I have no idea who this person is, I'm not connected to them, but somebody I think they tagged me. Uh, people tag me all the time on LinkedIn. I'm not that great on LinkedIn. I don't do the whole, you know, interaction with other people's posts, like I'm supposed to. But anyway, somehow this post did get on my radar and I have nothing against this guy who made this post. He, he's not an influencer in this space where I could say, oh, he should definitely know better, whatever. But anyways, here is how this post looks like on LinkedIn. Bradley Sutton: He was like hey, Helium 10 versus Jungle Scout versus Search Query Performance, comparison of search form. So, when I saw it, I barely skimmed it, because I get so many of these tags every day. I don't interact with hardly any of them, but he was like hey, why does helium 10 display three to four times lower search volume compare to Jungle Scout and Search Query Performance? Bradley, what are your thoughts? Blah, blah, blah. I use 80 keywords to compile the data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, at the time I didn't really even look very closely at this, because I think I saw this graph that he gave and it didn't even show the keywords or anything. I'm like okay, it is what it is. This is just one of those things that I get tagged like on a million times. Bradley Sutton: But then what happened later is at the top of my feed, somebody who I am connected to and again is at the top of my feed. Somebody who I am connected to and again who I think is a very, one of the most respectable, uh, respected, people in the space, put out this message where he reposted it and was like hey, this, this dude did an analysis where he did 80 keywords that analyze with Data Dive and Jungle Scout compared to Helium 10. And he was questioning which one is most accurate and I told him to check Search Query Performance. All right, so there's strike one. I'm like why would you do that? What does Helium 10 have to do with Search Query Performance? All right, we're going to talk about that. Why? Why, this is such like a no brainer. Like why in the world is this person doing that? But let me keep going here. He says oh, after doing this, he found that Data Dive was within 5% accuracy for this keyword and Helium 10 had a deviation of 70. All right, this data is crucial. Bradley Sutton: So now, all of a sudden, I'm starting to get pissed. I'm like this this is ridiculous. Helium 10 has nothing to do with Search Query Performance. Uh, you know whether Data Dive or Jungle Scout is. You know, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But like, why are you even bringing Helium 10 into this conversation? It's ridiculous that this other guy had mistakenly compared the two, thinking it was the same. But again, he doesn't work for a SaaS company. He doesn't know. You know the ins and outs of he's not monitoring. You know other companies and knows what they base their search volume. But I wouldn't expect this individual to have no. And I even, when this like, I think you probably want to delete this post, you know, couple of times. I said, I was like, I don't think this is a good look you know for you to like put out misinformation like trying to say that, oh Data Dive, Jungle Scout is 5% off of this amazon data point, but Helium 10 somehow has that 70% off. But they never took down the post. I'm like alright, that's when I started not sleeping, like two nights in a row of just like data crunching and preparing for this episode. I'm like all right, you asked for it. Now, again, I told you guys, I wouldn't make it personal, but I get worked up about this. Bradley Sutton: Anyways, it wasn't just this, things were escalating even more. Like a high-level executive from Jungle Scout hops on this thread and says, oh, we consistently see similar results in our own validation and hear similar feedback from customers, you know, basically talking about, oh, that Jungle Scout is so close to this Search Query Performance, but then Helium 10 is so far off. Supposedly they validate this all the time. And this is what and they hear this from customers all the time. Like what is going on? More misinformation from somebody who's respected in the industry. Like why are you saying this nonsense? This is happening now. Bradley Sutton: But then a couple of months ago, uh, somebody forwarded me a blog, uh, on March 21st, that Jungle Scout put out Jungle Scout versus Helium 10, a comprehensive review. Uh, march 21st, 2024. You see it right here, dun, dun, dun. Like you see the big logos you know, versus each other. Now this blog, anyways, was just, oh, my goodness, there were so many inaccurate things in there, it just boggled my mind, really got me upset, but like I never did anything at that time, it was just all of this now together, kind of like put me over the edge. Bradley Sutton: But the one part, that of that blog that has to do with this, was a big section they had on Keyword Accuracy Analysis. Who is more accurate Jungle Scout or Helium 10 for search volume? Keyword search volume information? And look at what they said in this blog. They're like hey, amazon provides Search Query Performance and we found that Jungle Scout was way more accurate than Helium 10's keyword tool. On average, keyword Scout showed a positive 10.93% difference from the search volume provided by Amazon and Helium 10 showed a negative 58% difference. See the info below. And we chose keywords from Search Query Performance. And again, so like hey, if Jungle Scout wants to compare themselves to Search Query Performance, fine, if that's what they're basing their search volume on, go ahead. But why are you bringing Helium 10 into this conversation? Helium 10, uh search volume has nothing to do with Search Query Performance search volume. Bradley Sutton: But then I'm looking at this, this, this case study that they supposedly did, and it just didn't make sense. It was like potty pads Helium 10, 11, three, 93 search volume. All right, this is, this is like their big expose to show how Helium 10 is different. Now, first of all, the number is just super weird here. Even according to them, uh, Amazon had 10,000, Helium 10 had 11,000, but somehow the difference was negative, 8%, like we were under. Like that, that's not right, like we're over according to this, but anyways, that's not important. Bradley Sutton: I was trying to find out okay, in in Helium 10, we, we have history that goes back five years for a search volume. Okay, I think Jungle Scouts got only has two years, but anyways, Helium 10, 393. I was like, let me try to find where that is. And I kept having to go back and back in time to try and find out when in the heck they were pulling this data. And, lo and behold, I found this 11,393 number on 9/24, wait for it, guys 2022. So, this is a new blog. The date is 2024. And they're pulling some data point from September, like two years ago, two years, literally two years ago. So, I was like, well, that's weird, it did really Jungle Scouts numbers uh, you know, look like this way. Bradley Sutton: Back then. Now that's where things started getting weird. I was like this whole article just doesn't make sense because, uh, again, you know, they were saying that, hey, Jungle Scout said 10,800. And so, if they were taking Helium 10 in September of 2022, I was like, well, what really Jungle Scout said, such a close number to search, create performance. So, I look back in Jungle Scout to that same date of September of 2022 and started adding the numbers up. I was like no, look, these are weekly search volume that Jungle Scout is giving and it's like 6,000, 6,000, 5,000. I mean, we're talking like 20, 30,000. Where in the world is Jungle Scout saying that they were 10,800. Bradley Sutton: Now I think maybe what happened was, later Jungle Scout changed, you know, after 2022 changed our whole search volume a model, because they made announced that they were trying to follow the search, create performance. So, I'm assuming they did go to like the denormalized number. I didn't realize at the time that they actually backdated and went back in time and maybe changed all their search volume numbers from before Helium 10 numbers don't change once we have the search one. That's there permanently. But anyways, I'm not sure that's the reason, but I could not find where Jungle Scout was 10,800. Because if I went back in time right now using Jungle Scout, it's way more than that. Bradley Sutton: But anyways, these things were just like oh, really making me mad. Like LinkedIn, a bunch of people saying these crazy things, and then here's Jungle Scout blogs again. That's what kind of upsets me when people with authority you know who people trust is putting out misinformation to try and pump themselves up. Like, no, if you want to pump yourself up, pump yourself up with facts. Like why are you pulling in wrong information? So now that's when I was like, ok, fine, let me go and do a deep dive no pun intended, on this original guy's post. Well, again, I don't know who he is, I have nothing against him personally, but I'm looking here and, like I said, there was no even keywords mentioned here. So, I was like, well, I can't even double check this information and then just weird things were happening. First of all, you know, remember the other individual who I respect was trying to say, oh yeah, Helium 10 is off by 70%. That's not even what this guy was saying in his post. He was saying Helium 10 was off by 70% from Jungle Scout. I'm like why are we even doing it? Why are you comparing Jungle Scout with Amazon? But then you're just comparing Helium 10 with Jungle Scout. Bradley Sutton: And then take a look at this, the way they were calculating the numbers for some of these. He's saying Search Query Performance says zero and Helium 10 and Jungle Scout are saying a certain number, but then somehow that means a Jungle Scout is a hundred percent off. So, if Search Query Performance is saying zero and Jungle Scout says a certain number, that's infinity percent off. You know, like you shouldn't even have counted that, bro, like I don't even know what. That's not the way you do. I'm not a data scientist, I'm not a mathematician at all, but I'm pretty sure you can't just say it's 100% off when you're comparing something with the number zero. But anyway, so his numbers of 5% off for Jungle Scout and 70% off of Helium 10, the whole thing is bogus, right. Like it wasn't an accurate test and he shouldn't have even done it anyways, as I'm going to show in a little bit, because Helium 10, again has nothing to do with Search Query Performance. Now Jungle Scout has said multiple times, even in this thread hey, you know, we're close at Search Query Performance, so go ahead and compare Jungle Scout to Search Query Performance. Guess what I'm about to do that you know in a few minutes here. Uh, so that part was fine. But again, why are you all trying to bring Helium 10 into this conversation? Now you might be wondering well, what is Helium 10 search? I'm going to get to that in a little bit. Bradley Sutton: Now, another funny thing about this one you know graph that this guy came up with is the numbers. Instead of showing that, you know, Jungle Scout is so close If you can take this numbers for granted it actually shows that Jungle Scout is way off. Remember I told you, what's more important than the actual number is the order in which, uh, the number of searches is presented. Right, the order, the search frequency, rank. That's the important thing. Take a look at this guy's own graph, like, for example again, I don't know the keywords here because he didn't put it but look at this keyword a, let's just call this keyword a. He's saying Search Query Performance was 6,000. Okay, and this keyword B was 5,000 something. Okay. Bradley Sutton: So, you know, if you were going to prioritize one keyword over the other, which one would be the priority. With the actual Amazon data, it would be keyword A right Because it says it has 6,000 search volume. But then look at in his own chart, the Jungle Scout numbers. Or for those same keywords, keyword A only 3,000 search volume. So, the number is far, way, far off. But again, nothing wrong with a number being off. That's not what's important. The importance is the order. But his keyword B Jungle Scouts, keyword B was 4,000 search volume. So, it actually not only was way off in the search form. It was prioritizing the wrong order. So, if you were going by Jungle Scouts, you would have prioritized keyword B, because keyword B has 4,000 search volume and keyword A only had 3000, but guess what? Search Query Performance was completely opposite. So, he thought he was like maybe trying to hype up Jungle Scouts supposedly 5% accuracy but actually he was exposing something where it's off. Bradley Sutton: Now, as I started reading this more and I found you know what this entire thing was off because he was taking Jungle Scouts search volume from right now, or you know the last time Jungle Scout checked, which was August 10th. Okay, he was comparing it to Search Query performance all the way from July 1st through the end of July. So, we're not even talking about an apples versus apples comparison here. So, like again this whole original post, kind of like a waste of time here. But what happened was is people started jumping on this and that was what. That was what made me mad and nobody, nobody checked this. Bradley Sutton: It's like all these people jumping on this post and say, yeah, this is exactly what we see and we find the same numbers ourselves, and another person said, you know is reposting this and saying look at you know, uh, how accurate Jungle Scout and Data Dive are. But this whole thing was just a ridiculous post in the first place and none of these respected people should have been posting this information. I'm sure maybe I'll do that sometimes, maybe I'll just get so happy that somebody is hyping up Helium 10 and maybe I don't fact check, fact check, uh. But if it has to do with, like throwing a competitor under the bus, you're never going to find me throwing a competitor under the bus If I haven't, like, fact checked everything, like I literally spent the last 48 hours fact checking all of this before I make this podcast here to make sure I'm doing my due diligence and I'm not putting out misinformation, and that's what I would expect others to do as well. But again, you know, regardless of all these numbers being wrong, the whole premise of this was wrong, even if he picked the perfect numbers, because he's trying to compare things to Helium 10, which is based on normalized searches, and Search Query Performance is based on denormalized, and Jungle Scout is denormalized too in day to day because they've been open to say, hey, we're comparing ourselves to Search Query Performance, so they actually said that they were changing to denormalized a couple of like about a year and a half ago. Now let's get a little bit more into the history of search volume on Amazon so you can kind of understand how we got to this normalized versus denormalized. Now Amazon years ago like 2018 around there actually made a search volume that is normalized the actual number that Helium 10 designed its algorithm after it was available in the API to like software tools, and Helium 10 was the very first one to get access to it, and so we've got the most historic search volume data out there Now. Bradley Sutton: Normalized means how many times pretty much somebody typed in a search term. So, if I search coffin shelf right now, that's one search. But then if I search that same keyword 10 hours from now, you know within 24 hours the search volume that Amazon counts as normal. Normalized means it still only counts as one. If I click to page two, it only counts for one. If I click back on my browser after I was on page two, it still only counts as one. There's only one search that somebody did in 24 hours. Bradley Sutton: Now, denormalized means hey, I search coffin shelf right now, there's one search. I click on a product on that page, I click back on my browser. Guess what that's? Another search. I click another product and I click back. There's another search. There're three searches. Now I click to page two of the search results. Guess what that's counted as a search. Now we're up to four. Five hours later I come back to my computer and I search again that same exact keyword. Guess what that's five? I hit refresh on my browser for whatever reason. Guess what that's six? So, D? Uh, norm, denormalized means it's counting six searches, six search volume for that one individual, whereas normalized, which is what the original Amazon search volume is based off of, it's only counting one. Bradley Sutton: Now, before, when Amazon first started product opportunity explore and Search Query Performance, amazon still was basing their search volume on normalized searches. But then they made this big announcement all over the place in about April May of 2023, that says, hey, we are changing our model. This was plastered all over the place in Search Query Performance we're changing our model to be denormalized, and they explained exactly what denormalized meant, and that was like what I was talking about. And so, what was the difference in the search volume number Once Amazon moved it? I actually have some screenshots. Take a look at this. This is from a post I made because I used to talk about denormalized and normalized all the time. So, here's a post I made in one of our Facebook groups If you look at the coffin shelf niche, all of the keywords put together for 360 days was 85,000 searches. That's the normalized search volume. But then Amazon changed Search Query Performance and opportunity explorer to denormalized and now what was a 360-day search volume? Take a look at this screenshot here 406,000. It was like a five to one difference. Almost you see how big of a difference that made it. When they went to the Dean uh, normalized. And so again, this is why I was thinking that hey, like, hey, every all these respected, you know executives in the industry, they know this stuff. I mean that was all over Amazon. Um, I'm sure they've got to know these things and we weren't keeping, we were not hiding this. Bradley Sutton: I would just talk about this nonstop Episode 433 of this podcast. You'll see I talked about the normalized versus denormalized Episode 435 of the podcast, episode 485. I actually had the Search Query Performance team from Amazon come on the podcast and they did a complete breakdown of what normalized versus denormalized meant. Even up to like a month ago I had Mansoor on the podcast he was talking about normalize versus denormalized in episode 584. So, this is not like some industry secret. All right, everybody should know what normalize versus denormalized means and that Helium 10 has always been based on the normalized. Bradley Sutton: Now you might ask me like which one is better? Now, that's a subjective thing. Everybody can like their own kind of search volume. But for me I like the normalized searches better because to me that's more of an indication of what I'm trying to get at. I want to, I'm trying to find out how many customers are searching for this product and the normalized will count that one, that search volume, as one, but the denormalized counts it as five or six, just because they're clicking around on the browser. So, to me the more accurate number is the normalized search because you know it tells me hey, in this one instance there's one customer who is looking for it, or there was 100 customers who are looking for it, whereas on the other one I'm not sure how many times somebody was clicking around. That number just is kind of inflated. So that's why I personally like normalized. But hey, if somebody might have a use case for denormalized, I'm not sure what it would be, but let me know why you think that one might be better. Either way, you're still going to be able to prioritize it's. It shouldn't be that far off. But yes, Search Query Performance is going to be different than Brand Analytics, Amazon versus Amazon data, even though it's both from Amazon, because it's normalized versus denormalized. That's why the order is actually different, even when you're comparing those two. Bradley Sutton: So again, that's one of the reasons why I was getting so upset that they were all posting about this is because it's not. We're not even talking about comparing apples to apples. It's kind of like in this post, everybody was jumping on the bandwagon and saying, hey, look at, Jungle Scout is a tangerine orange, very close to a blood orange, right, ooh, that's very nice that they're close. Great, you're comparing an orange to an orange, good on you. But then they're coming in and saying, oh, but look, Helium 10 is an apple or a Granny Smith apple. Look how far off it is from this blood navel orange. Like, why are we even comparing this Granny Smith apple? We're not even trying to be an orange, or if there were Jungle Scout orange. Bradley Sutton: Anyways, where not even trying to be an orange, were just trying to be an apple that's all were tying to do. So, why are you trying to bring us into this conversation about oranges, right. So, that was when I became so upset. But now, looks like, you know what, let's go and let's do a real test. You know like here, ah, I think we all agree that how bogus is this test that was done was and how useless it is. But like, all right, let's go ahead and take Brand Analytics. Let's compare that to Helium 10. Let's take Search Query Performance, let's compare it to Jungle Scout. And who has the most accurate search volume. Who has the most actionable search order. Bradley Sutton: So, what I did was I spent like much of the last 48 hours just like diving deep into their information. All right, I pulled in the Brand Analytics search frequency rank for 31 keywords that have to do with like coffin shelves and stuff. All right, I took the Search Query Performance from each week though the exact week that matched the Brand Analytics, and then, four weeks, I pulled out all of these keywords one by one, because I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to use pivot tables and V lookups and stuff. So, I took these one by one, the search ones, because remember that one guy's test was based on a number from July. I'm like, no, let's make it apples to apples. Here's Jungle Scouts number as of eight, 10, which is a full month number. Let's take the eight, three to eight, 10 search rate performance. Let's take the seven, 28 to eight, three. Let's add up those four weeks and make it a month and let's compare it. All right. So, I took all of that, I went in and I took all of the Jungle Scout numbers. Bradley Sutton: I went into Helium 10 and I took all of the magnet numbers for the search volume and I was like, all right, let's go ahead, put this stuff to the test and then so let's take a look, all right. So, first of all, why do I say, where did I get that 93.5 accuracy for Helium 10? Well, remember, there is no public search volume that you can compare one V one, the number of Helium 10, but what kind of normalized search do we have in Amazon that we can compare with Helium 10 Brand Analytics? So here, the first test I did was I took the Brand Analytics 31 keywords that have to do with coffin shelves and then I took Helium 10 and I got all the search volume of those same exact keywords. And then I sorted Brand Analytics keywords in the search frequency rank order, because that means you know the higher or the lower the number of search frequency rank, the more that it's searched Right. And then I ordered the Helium 10 one in the order of descending search volume order and guess what? It was almost identical. The first 29 keywords was 100% the exact same order. Only on the 20 or the 30th keyword here did things, uh, get out of whack and two of them were flipped coffin pet bed and glass coffin. Helium 10 had in the wrong order compared to Amazon Brand Analytics. So that is a 93.5% accuracy. How cool is that? All right, only two off. So, can you trust Helium 10 search volume? Is Helium 10 accurate a hundred percent? Well, maybe not a hundred percent 93.5%, all right. So there that part of the story is done. Helium 10, 93.5% accuracy. If you're comparing it to the only normalized data point we have, which is Brand Analytics. Bradley Sutton: Now what about Jungle Scout? With Jungle Scout, what I did was I took the all of the Search Query Performance for four weeks. Right, I took four exact weeks and added it all up, so we have a full 30 day or one month search volume number uh goth, uh 121,000. Uh, gothic decor a hundred thousand, so on and so forth. And then I took the Jungle Scout search volume from the tool, their 30-day search volume. So here in Jungle Scout you can see where I got that information of 83,903. This is the exact search volume 30 day for the keyword goth. And if I actually click on their details, I can see when that date was from, because the very last date that they have in the system is August 10th. Okay, so we are like on a apples to apples comparison here, because search group performance was also based on the week, the month ending October or August 10th. Bradley Sutton: And so, the first thing, remember Jungle Scout data dive. Everybody loves to compare. Jungle Scout is so accurate compared to a Search Query Performance. Let's look at the raw number. Remember, spoiler, like I said before, like I don't think the number is the most important thing, but if you guys are going to flaunt your uh accuracy, is that really true? Let's take a look. If you compare the month search volume of Search Query Performance versus Jungle Scout, on average, look at this it's 44% off, 46% off, 44% off, 71% off, 84% off. As a matter of fact, on average, it's a total of 34.5% off. Okay, 34.5% off is the number, but what? What if you say, okay, forget about the search volume number? You know search volume, you know? Actually, I don't think that 34.5% is that bad. If something has 10,000 searches and then it really has 7,000, is that the end of the day? You know, probably not right, but again, I'm just calling this out because they're trying to say, oh, our numbers and our data shows that we're 5% off. You know always. No, all right. Bradley Sutton: Now the other thing is remembered I said that search position, the order of search, is actually arguably more important than the search volume. So how off was Jungle Scout compared to Search Query Performance? The very first 11 keywords, Jungle Scout was 100% on, but then things got off the rail, and almost every other keyword was out of order. For example, coffin box was the 17th most searched term for Jungle Scout, but it was the 12th most searched term for Search Query Performance. And that is where I got the number of 41.9% accurate, because only 13 out of 31 had the right order of keywords 41.9%. How many did Helium 10 have when compared to Brand Analytics? 29 out of 31, which is the 93.5%. So again, whose search volume is more accurate between Data Dive and Jungle Scout and Helium 10? Helium 10 wins with 93.5% and Jungle Scout with 41.9%. Bradley Sutton: But then something was bothering me. Let me show you exactly what I mean. So, what was bothering me was when I looked at the Jungle Scout search volume history, I noticed that week by week, they actually had a weekly search volume, which I thought was actually pretty cool. I was like, oh, that's nice, they give the exact search volume for 30 days, but then weekly. But then it didn't add up. Like if you add up these last four weeks it does not add up on Gothic Decor to 68 000. Like wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. How can the week uh be different? I was thinking, oh, maybe, maybe you know it's 28 days and so they need to. You know there's two days extra and I couldn't get it to like Jive. Bradley Sutton: But then I figured out what Jungle Scouts doing and they're actually doing something similar to Helium 10. They're actually basing their monthly search volume on a weekly velocity of the last day, the seven days, which is actually, actually, like I said, that's what Helium 10 is doing and that's good on Jungle Scout for figuring that out. That's the best way to present it. But you know you might be confused if you might think that Jungle Scout was doing something weird in the numbers, because the monthly doesn't add up to what the weekly is. But watch this. This is what I figured out. Look at, the very last week of this Gothic Decor keyword had 15,982. If we take 15,982 divided by seven days, and then we multiply that by 30 days seven days, right. And then we multiply that by 30 days, that is the number 68,494. And that's what their exact search volume for the full month is. Bradley Sutton: So, then I thought, wait a minute, maybe I was shortchanging Jungle Scout on this. I was just taking their, their number at raw data, their exact 30-day number, and comparing it to 30-day Search Query Performance. But if the real number is the week search volume because that's what it seems like they're basing their whole month off, I should just be comparing apples to apples and compare their latest week to Search Query Performance, latest week, right, again, if they're trying to be Search Query Performance, that would be a better comparison. So, I was like, oh, who knows, maybe the numbers are going to look better, did it? Let's take a look. Bradley Sutton: The first thing that I tested was just the percentage off on the week. So again, I'm comparing the Jungle Scout super specific week number with the Search Query Performance week number and it was off 48%. It was 48% lower than Search Query Performance. I'm like, nope, no help there, this is actually worse. This actually made it worse Now that I got the real number because, remember, their month data, for whatever reason, was only off by 34%. This is off by 48%. So, then the next thing, I was like, okay, well, let me go and maybe the order is a little bit better. You know how? For from the, if I'm comparing the one week to the other week, is the order of the search volume at least better than before? Nope, 35.4% accuracy. Bradley Sutton: Jungle Scout and Data Dive versus Search Query Performance, even when you're just comparing the week. So, no matter what way you spin this around, well, no matter what way you look at it, Jungle Scout and data diver just way off from Search Query Performance. Now, I don't mean to sound like I'm exaggerating. I've said this a few times before. I don't think numbers being far off is that big of a deal. Like, if you're 30% off, you're within the realm of possibility. But again, I'm bringing this out because, oh my God, do you know how many, how many blogs Jungle Scout has come out with saying oh, we are 5% more accurate than Helium 10, 11%. This is a big deal. And they're making a big deal out of 11% or something which I don't agree with those numbers in the first place. But even so, how can they be saying that when all their search volume numbers are literally 30% off and Helium 10 is 93% accurate? So anyways, guys, hope you guys stuck with me to the end. Bradley Sutton: I usually don't get so worked up like this, but I used to argue on the internet all the time. That was how I got discovered at Helium 10 was. I would always go on Facebook groups and start arguing with people who had misinformation, and I I've kept to myself for a while, but I just this, this just latest uh episode just kind of upset me and I was just like I just want to set the record straight again. I don't have anything personal against anybody involved in this this. You know people writing the blogs or the, or the people you know posting on LinkedIn and stuff. But it's my advice to every you know people out there who are respecting you know like there are people you know I guess I'm one of them Like is it still kind of strange for me to think like that? Bradley Sutton: But if you're a public figure in the Amazon world or any world, be careful what you post. You know, like be proud of your company. Nothing wrong with that. I mean you, you you've worked really hard to build up your company in the Amazon ecosystem. By all means, be proud of it. You know, um, I'm proud of my company. Bradley Sutton: Otherwise, why would I put a Helium 10 logo on my basketball court and do all the other crazy stuff? I do nothing wrong with being proud of your company, but don't put out misinformation just to. You know, kind of like elevate your company, or I would hope that nobody even here is doing that purposely, but then the alternative if it wasn't on purpose. It means that you're just like not even fact-checking and not even making sure that you're putting out the correct information, because you just want to, you know, hype yourselves up and try and throw Helium 10 to the bus. It doesn't even have to be Helium 10. Bradley Sutton: I don't care who we're talking about. It could be Jungle Scout versus Data Dive or whatever comparison you're going to do. Guys, just let's keep it civilized. Talk about facts if you want to talk about facts, but don't try and sensationalize certain things and paint the wrong picture, because people listen to those of us who have these kinds of platforms on the internet and they take our word at face value, and so that's a heavy responsibility. Bradley Sutton: And I'm not saying to totally misrepresent the entire way that a company does things or misrepresent my own accuracy, you know, and just hope that nobody calls me out on it. But anyways, um hope you guys found this interesting because, like I said before, search volume is important and you got to know who you can trust, and I think it's hands down. This has proven that. Hey, you are going to be able to trust Helium 10 with your search form, because we've got the most accurate out there at 93.5%. So, um, thank you guys for tuning in, and I'm going to do some other exposés now because I'm still riled up about some of these crazy blogs. It's time to set the record straight. But hope you guys enjoyed this episode and we'll see you in the next one.

Al and Jonnie go through all the news while Al was on holiday. Timings 00:00:00: Theme Tune 00:00:30: Intro 00:02:10: What Have We Been Up To 00:16:13: Game Releases 00:34:54: Game Updates 01:09:23: Other News 01:15:30: New Games 01:26:09: Outro Links Critter Crops Gourdlets Song of the Prairie Garden Witch Life Reel Fishing: Days of Summer Harvest Moon: Home Sweet Home Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid Usagi Shima Echoes of the Plum Grove Outbound Coral Island “1.1” Update Coral Island Humble Games Issue Roots of Pacha “1.2” Update Sun Haven “Teleportation” Update Moonstone Island “Cooking” Update Disney Dreamlight Valley Roadmap Cult of the Lamb “Unholy Alliance” Update Mika and the Witch’s Mountain Roadmap Fields of Mistra Roadmap Ova Magica Roadmap Horticular Roadmap Concerned Ape Promises not to charge for DLC Overthrown Steam Page Hearty Hank Plush Sakuna Anime Marvelous Restructuring Pathless Woods Everbloom Hamster Garden Ritual of Raven Cat Cafe Manager 2: Big City Bliss Contact Al on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheScotBot Al on Mastodon: https://mastodon.scot/@TheScotBot Email Us: https://harvestseason.club/contact/ Transcript (0:00:31) Al: Hello farmers, and welcome to another episode of The Harvest Season. My name is Al, (0:00:36) Jonnie: And my name is Johnny. (0:00:38) Al: and we’re here today to talk about Cottagecore games. (0:00:40) Jonnie: Woo! (0:00:44) Al: What happened to diving, you might say. We’re not… not farmers, we’re divers. No, not this week, (0:00:50) Al: you’re not, because… complicated reasons, but we’re not doing the last episode of the day of the (0:00:56) Al: the day of the month today. We’re doing that probably in two weeks time. But who knows? (0:01:01) Al: You’ll find out why. I’ll explain it in the next episode why this is all changed. But (0:01:06) Al: yeah, I had all this organized and then something happened and now we’re changing things up. (0:01:13) Al: So that will come. Don’t worry, your final episode. Maybe a break might be good. I don’t (0:01:24) Al: know. I’ve still not heard from anyone whether they think it’s too much day of the diver (0:01:27) Al: or not. But don’t worry, we’re not going to go back to that. (0:01:31) Al: For most games, it was just a funny one-off thing. We’ll see what people think of it. (0:01:38) Al: Yes, stuff to come. Watch this space. This episode, I’m back from my month away, so we (0:01:45) Al: are going to talk about news. That’s it. There’s so much news. I didn’t count it the last moment, (0:01:50) Jonnie: There’s so much news. (0:01:52) Al: but there’s like over 20 pieces of news to talk about. It’s quite wild. (0:01:54) Jonnie: Yeah. (0:01:55) Jonnie: There’s a lot of news. (0:01:58) Jonnie: This is what happens when you go away for a month, Al. (0:02:01) Al: Oh, I know. But, you know, it’s fine. It’s good. What’s the worst that can happen? This (0:02:09) Al: is what the worst that can happen. Before that, Johnny, what have you been up to? (0:02:14) Jonnie: What have I been up to? I tried a cute little game called creatures of ever (0:02:21) Jonnie: Which is available (0:02:23) Jonnie: via game parts (0:02:24) Al: I feel like I’ve heard of this. (0:02:27) Jonnie: It’s uh, I I guess it’s kind of like a open world (0:02:34) Jonnie: Creature tamer with a giant asterisk next to it (0:02:41) Jonnie: a sort of an adventure-y style game. (0:02:43) Jonnie: Um… (0:02:44) Jonnie: And it’s kind of set out, it’s a game that’s set out into zones and I was playing through the first zone and I was having a really good time with it and I was like “this game’s like really cool” (0:02:55) Jonnie: So the core concept is… (0:02:57) Jonnie: I mean, there’s a problem that I have with the game and it’s part of the story that they’re telling. (0:03:02) Jonnie: I guess Mars blows for the story, but the concept of the game is that you are there to save the planet that is dying by capturing all of their animals. (0:03:14) Jonnie: And convincing the inhabitants of the planet to leave, which comes with a lot of… (0:03:19) Al: Is that saving a planet or is that saving what’s on a planet? (0:03:23) Jonnie: Well, it’s very much saving what’s on the planet. (0:03:26) Jonnie: And it comes with very strong, I guess, colonial style overtones of “look at me, the outworlder that’s here to tell you the locals what is best” (0:03:37) Jonnie: Which, you know, is… like, they are telling an appropriate story with it, but it doesn’t necessarily make it fun. (0:03:44) Jonnie: To be playing the character with the colonial vibes for a bit. (0:03:48) Jonnie: Anyway, that’s about the… they actually epic handle it in a way that’s likely fine. (0:03:53) Jonnie: The taming mechanic is music, so you have a flute and different creatures will respond to different songs and you form a bond with them (0:04:02) Jonnie: And you take them to the bot that zaps them up so you don’t permanently get any of them (0:04:09) Jonnie: But when you’ve changed something, you can pair with it and use it to explore the world. (0:04:14) Jonnie: And each of the creatures has different abilities, which I thought was a really cool concept. (0:04:19) Jonnie: You tame something and then it can help you access a new area. (0:04:24) Jonnie: And then I got to the second area, and all of the creatures looked slightly different, but they all had the same abilities. (0:04:31) Jonnie: And the game started to feel very copy and paste at that point, kind of like they had… (0:04:38) Jonnie: And there was only five different creatures in the first area, so it wasn’t like there was a massive… (0:04:42) Jonnie: Yeah, it was like I’d explored 20 (0:04:44) Jonnie: different creatures and then they’d run out of ideas and I explored five and (0:04:45) Al: Yeah, so I guess don’t go into it expecting lots of like, you know, if you go into it (0:04:47) Jonnie: then it felt like they ran out of ideas which was a bit of a (0:04:54) Al: because it’s a creature collector, you’re probably going to be disappointed, but… (0:04:58) Jonnie: Yeah, a hundred percent (0:05:00) Al: How’s the exploration and the movement and stuff like that? (0:05:03) Jonnie: It’s fine, it’s neither good nor bad it kind of feels like going back to (0:05:11) Jonnie: the sort of ps2 era of games like where (0:05:15) Jonnie: Exploration was largely just walking around the world and you had a jump and you would do certain things that would break down a wall (0:05:22) Jonnie: But until then that wall was kind of largely just there it fit the feels very (0:05:28) Jonnie: reminiscent of that (0:05:30) Jonnie: Which is yeah, it’s neither good or bad. It’s it’s good in the sense that it feels like intentional, but it’s bad in the sense that (0:05:38) Jonnie: Exploration games have moved well past that (0:05:42) Al: Yeah, you’re you’re not really exploring so much as following up maze. (0:05:48) Jonnie: Correct (0:05:49) Al: OK, it’s interesting. (0:05:51) Al: It looks quite nice. (0:05:52) Jonnie: Yeah, yeah, it does look nice (0:05:55) Jonnie: Also weird thing so I got to the end of the second area and when you finish the story there (0:06:00) Jonnie: The game basically tells you like (0:06:03) Jonnie: Once you leave you can’t come back to this area (0:06:06) Jonnie: So be sure you’ve done everything and I’m like but I’m not sure that I’ve done everything because there’s no (0:06:11) Jonnie: Tracking of whether or not I’ve done all of the things so that was unfortunate and at that point (0:06:12) Al: yeah. And you really can’t go back to the area. (0:06:18) Jonnie: I don’t know because at that point I was kind of like I think I’m I’m (0:06:23) Jonnie: Okay with the time but I had with (0:06:26) Al: Oh, OK, fair enough. That seems weird to have distinct areas, but then say you can never (0:06:34) Jonnie: Yeah, and I think I get why they did it in like I think it’s mild story spoilers (0:06:43) Jonnie: Is there justification for doing it, but I don’t think that’s a good reason for doing it (0:06:46) Al: Oh, are the areas destroyed? (0:06:50) Al: Oh. (0:06:50) Jonnie: No, no, I think it’s more to do with like characters leaving the area and needing to be in another area and (0:06:59) Jonnie: Then kind of just be like well the story doesn’t bring you back to this area. So let’s (0:07:04) Jonnie: not let you go back. (0:07:05) Jonnie: So. (0:07:06) Al: Okay. I mean, I guess maybe that’s why they don’t have a like completion (0:07:11) Al: percentage for that area, right? Because that would be frustrating. (0:07:14) Jonnie: Yeah, but there’s like things in the world that you can come across to find and interact. (0:07:21) Jonnie: They’re not collectibles as such, but they’re collectibles, right? (0:07:26) Jonnie: So that part really broke my brain and was slightly frustrating. (0:07:32) Jonnie: But I will say, I think the idea of playing music to tame animals was like a very cool (0:07:38) Jonnie: idea and I think that was well implemented where like the song. (0:07:44) Jonnie: The songs and the way you did that with the creatures of the world felt really good and (0:07:47) Jonnie: really clever and I kind of just wish that there was, yeah, you know what this game feels (0:07:51) Jonnie: like to me? (0:07:52) Jonnie: It feels like they had a really good idea. (0:07:55) Jonnie: They wanted to make a game much bigger than their budget allowed and so they had to copy (0:08:00) Jonnie: and paste a few things where I’m sure they had more different ideas, but making games (0:08:05) Jonnie: is really expensive. (0:08:07) Jonnie: That’s what this game feels like to me and I wish they had more money to make the game (0:08:07) Al: Yes, yep, yep. Fair enough. (0:08:10) Jonnie: they probably had in their heads. (0:08:12) Jonnie: But that’s what I’ve been up to. (0:08:14) Jonnie: How? What have you been? (0:08:17) Al: Well, so while I’m away for my month in the summer, I don’t have a huge amount of time (0:08:22) Al: for games, but what I did manage to play was Chicken Journey. I don’t know if you remember (0:08:28) Jonnie: Chicken, I’m tired (0:08:28) Al: this game, Johnny. I mean, it’s not Cottagecore. We talked about it on the podcast once because (0:08:36) Al: chicken. (0:08:38) Al: But basically it’s a side scrolling RPG where you play as a chicken with some mild platforming (0:08:48) Al: to it. It’s not particularly challenging, right? Like don’t go into it expecting platforming (0:08:55) Al: challenges. That’s not what there is. It’s more kind of puzzle-y in that you kind of have to (0:09:01) Al: figure out how to get through an area which involves some platforming and involves, you know, (0:09:07) Al: switches and stuff like that and making sure you do things in the right order and finding (0:09:12) Al: your way out of very simple mazes. It’s fun, I think. It’s not a hugely long game, so I (0:09:20) Al: finished it in, I think, 10 hours, which, I mean, for me is a good length of a game (0:09:26) Al: just now. But yeah, it’s not particularly long. And I basically have 100% of it. There’s (0:09:31) Al: one Steve achievement I don’t have and that’s just because… (0:09:37) Al: I need to go to like two different areas and go in the, what they call it, like the temples (0:09:44) Al: that I went into and get to the highest level again because I missed one thing in each of them. (0:09:50) Al: And I’m like, oh, can I really be bothered with that? It’s not like I’m doing something (0:09:54) Al: challenging that I’ve not done before. It’s just doing the same thing again and not missing one (0:09:59) Al: thing. So yeah, we’ll see, but… (0:10:03) Jonnie: then you will do it. It’s not a we’ll see, we know you will do it. Everyone’s been listening to this show. (0:10:07) Al: I don’t know, maybe I’ll forget about it and it won’t niggle at my brain the entire time (0:10:12) Al: I’m playing a different game. I don’t know. (0:10:14) Jonnie: really niggling at your brain now we all know how to sense we could pretend we (0:10:18) Jonnie: don’t if you want to do that like that’s that’s fine (0:10:21) Al: Yeah, so I think the problem is, right? Like, I very rarely 100% games. (0:10:29) Al: I’m trying to remember if there was a game I 100%ed before or not, but I 100%ed the newest (0:10:34) Al: Kirby game in the 3D one. That was the first game of (0:10:37) Al: the game. I’m like, I’m not doing that again two more times or a time and a half more. Like, (0:10:59) Al: that’s not fun, right? And oh, please. (0:11:02) Jonnie: Yeah. Have you ever 106%ed a game? (0:11:07) Al: Please don’t start this conversation with me. I will. If you’re going to disagree with (0:11:12) Jonnie: I just say these things to needle you out. That’s it. That’s it. (0:11:22) Al: me, whether you agree with me or not, Johnny, I know this because you will either disagree (0:11:25) Al: with me or you’ll agree with me, but you’ll find it more fun to disagree with me. But (0:11:29) Al: if you add stuff to your game that takes the completion to more than a hundred percent and (0:11:37) Al: add a second percentage, do not just add on to that. Because the whole point of a hundred (0:11:43) Al: percent is to say you’ve done everything, right? And if I’ve done everything and like say you (0:11:49) Al: play like, let’s take Hollow Knight, right? That’s a good example. I think that’s like (0:11:52) Al: 117% or something now. I can’t remember exactly, but there’s some annoying percent and it’s (0:11:57) Al: just, it might even be a decimal. I honestly think it might be a decimal, but I can’t remember. (0:12:04) Al: do you know when you’re done, right? This is the problem. (0:12:07) Al: Is that the whole point of having a percentage counter is when you get to 100%, you’ve done (0:12:12) Al: everything. Now, if you add more things and you either decrease the percentage for everybody, (0:12:19) Al: so you say, “Oh, you were on 100%?” No, you’re not on 100%, right? That’s one option. Or you (0:12:24) Al: add a second one and say, “This is for the new content that’s been added.” The idea that you (0:12:28) Al: would come in, and because it’s all very well and good if you played it at the beginning, (0:12:32) Al: and then you played the second update, and you played the third update. But me coming to it, (0:12:38) Al: and I hadn’t played it before any of the updates, literally, I have to google what (0:12:42) Al: the correct percentage number is to know when I’ve done everything. That’s weird, and confusing, (0:12:49) Al: and not fun! (0:12:50) Jonnie: Yeah, but like Hollow Knight’s a bad game, so it’s natural that they would have bad design. (0:12:59) Al: Oh, fun. Well, I mean, I don’t really care about that one. (0:13:00) Jonnie: I’m just trying to get you some hate mail here, Al. (0:13:06) Jonnie: But going back to Chicken Journey, whatever it is, I feel like you’re so close, right? (0:13:07) Al: Enjoyed Hollow Knight. (0:13:10) Al: Yes. (0:13:15) Jonnie: Because I’m kind of with you that I don’t really care about 100%ing games, (0:13:21) Jonnie: and then it’s kind of like, well, I might as well. (0:13:23) Al: Yes, you’re correct. That’s the real thing. That’s it. There’s no other reason why I would do it, (0:13:29) Al: is because there’s one achievement left, and I’ve got… I actually think I have two of the three (0:13:34) Al: things, I’m just not sure which of the two I haven’t done. I know which one I’ve definitely done, (0:13:42) Al: and I know there are two others, one of which I’ve done, one of which I’ve not. So it’s possible I (0:13:47) Al: go find the one that I’ve not found, and I find it, and I don’t have to do the second one, and (0:13:51) Al: and that’s me done, so it might only be one thing I’ve got left to do. (0:13:53) Jonnie: Yeah, you’re definitely gonna do this. (0:13:53) Al: Of course I’m going to do it, but not just now, because I’ve picked up another game, (0:13:55) Jonnie: It just makes sense. (0:13:59) Al: a game that Johnny is jealous I have access to now, and that is Mika and the Witches Mountain. (0:14:05) Al: I mean, you could have kick-started it. I kick-started it. Kickstarters got the code a week (0:14:12) Al: before release, so I have been playing that. I’m not going to give away too much just now, (0:14:18) Al: but I will say that I am having fun. That is what I’m going to say just now. (0:14:22) Jonnie: It’s a very ominous way of saying you’re having fun. (0:14:26) Al: Ah, it’s… (0:14:27) Al: OK, let me… I’ll say one other thing. The controls were not what I expected with flying, (0:14:33) Al: but I understood… In a initially bad way, but then I understood why they are doing what they’re (0:14:33) Jonnie: In a good way or a bad way? (0:14:35) Jonnie: Oh. (0:14:40) Al: doing, and it leads to more things to progress in the game. (0:14:47) Jonnie: I feel like my interpretation of what you just said is that flying has a limited (0:14:54) Jonnie: Time and you can add to that capacity over time, which would make sense (0:14:56) Al: Yeah, pretty much. Not quite, but kind of, yeah. It’s one of these things where I was (0:15:04) Al: expecting, and I don’t know why I was expecting this, but I was expecting that the flying (0:15:08) Al: is just like, you get on your broom and you can fly wherever, you can go up and down, (0:15:13) Al: but it’s not that. And so, because my brain was in that mode, I was expecting the controls (0:15:19) Al: to be specific things, but it’s not that, and therefore my brain had to get used to (0:15:23) Al: the fact that the controls are different. (0:15:25) Jonnie: Ah, interesting. I don’t think I had that expectation going in from a lot of the videos. (0:15:26) Al: And that’s fair. Yeah, no, that’s, and that’s fair. That’s probably just a me thing. But (0:15:33) Al: anyway, well, I’ll talk more about it in a future episode, maybe. We’ll see. (0:15:36) Jonnie: And by the time this episode’s out, I believe the game is out. (0:15:42) Al: Yes. Yeah, it comes out on Wednesday, the 24th. So Johnny will be playing it while this (0:15:46) Jonnie: So I hope your friend is enjoying playing Mika. (0:15:50) Al: episode’s out. I mean, I think you’ll enjoy it, Johnny. I really hope you enjoy it. I (0:15:58) Al: don’t think it’s not a bad game. It’s a good game. It just took my brain a bit to get used (0:16:04) Al: to it, but I think now I’m used to it, I’m very much enjoying it. And I will say more (0:16:09) Al: in the future! (0:16:12) Al: That’s what we’ve been up to. (0:16:14) Al: OK, so as I have done in some previous episodes, where we have just an insane amount of news, (0:16:21) Al: I have chunked it into different sections. (0:16:24) Al: So this is going to be the game releases section. (0:16:26) Al: So that’s games that either have released just about to release, or haven’t released (0:16:32) Al: yet, but is news about their release. (0:16:34) Al: It’ll make sense when we get to the next section. (0:16:36) Al: So first of all, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 games. (0:16:42) Al: They’re out now, or given us the release– no, five? (0:16:46) Al: Right, three games. (0:16:47) Al: Why am I doing this? (0:16:48) Al: Right, let’s just go these one by one. (0:16:50) Al: I was trying to make it go quicker. (0:16:52) Al: It’s going to be confusing. (0:16:53) Jonnie: I really like the, like, there’s something about Krita Crops that when I first like watch a video or see something of it, I’m like, does this look good? (0:16:53) Al: Critter crops, right now. (0:16:55) Al: Anything to say on that. (0:17:07) Jonnie: And then the more I watch it, the more I’m like, I actually think I am very into this art style, it just takes a bit to get into and I don’t know, I like the idea of growing critters, what can I say? (0:17:17) Jonnie: This game looks kind of cute and silly and I… (0:17:18) Al: You are a sucker for creature collectors, let’s be honest. (0:17:24) Jonnie: Yeah, I am. 100%. Um, and the only other thing to say is that it’s 10% off. Oh no, that was till the end of July. Don’t worry, I can’t read. Why is it still on your Steam page? (0:17:33) Jonnie: Uh, we’re in August. Oh my god, I was… Okay, anyway. Uh, Krita Crops is out, it looks great. (0:17:33) Al: This is how long it’s been, Johnny! (0:17:40) Al: This game came out, I think, like two days after our last episode or something. (0:17:42) Jonnie: Uh… (0:17:44) Jonnie: Um… (0:17:45) Al: 22nd of July. (0:17:46) Al: Yeah, nearly a month ago this came out. (0:17:48) Jonnie: Yeah, that looks cute, very excited. (0:17:49) Al: Oh, it’s even better. (0:17:53) Al: I think it came out one day after the last episode was recorded. (0:17:57) Jonnie: » [LAUGH] (0:17:57) Al: Not released. (0:17:58) Al: Amazing. (0:17:59) Al: Fine. (0:18:00) Al: Whatever. (0:18:01) Al: Yeah, I agree with the art style. (0:18:03) Al: If you ever see it, you’re like “ugh” and then you go “no, no, this is a very deliberate (0:18:07) Al: and interesting art style” like because initially you just think “oh, it doesn’t look very (0:18:11) Al: good” but then you realize it’s different and I like it. (0:18:14) Jonnie: Yeah, that’s I think that’s exactly it, right? It’s not, um, I think you would like an initial glance, you could look at it and think, yeah, like you said, it’s not a good art style. I actually think it is an intentional art style and they’re just trying something that a lot of games are afraid to try. (0:18:30) Al: I agree. And it’s not pixel art, so. Not that I’m saying the pixel art’s bad, but I like (0:18:35) Al: when not everything is the same. Speaking of pixel art, Gurdlitz announced a release (0:18:42) Al: date and it’s now in the past. So Gurdlitz is now out. “You wrote IDO mode!” exclamation (0:18:50) Al: mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. (0:18:54) Jonnie: Yeah, gauntlets has idle mode (0:18:57) Jonnie: So like rusty’s retirement (0:18:58) Jonnie: You can have your gauntlets little island be just like a little banner on the bottom of your screen while you’re doing other stuff (0:19:04) Jonnie: Which is amazing (0:19:08) Jonnie: Gauntlets for those who don’t remember is like the (0:19:11) Jonnie: Chill city builder where you’re building a city for (0:19:15) Jonnie: vegetables (0:19:17) Jonnie: to come and live and (0:19:19) Jonnie: It looks super cute. There’s no real goals (0:19:24) Jonnie: but (0:19:26) Jonnie: What they do say in their release trailer is that (0:19:30) Jonnie: When gauntlets come to your island, they kind of come with a leaf and by interacting in the world (0:19:37) Jonnie: That kind of makes them happy and the more gauntlets you make happy unlocks more stuff for you to build (0:19:43) Jonnie: So there is a there is a little bit of a gameplay loop that they have built into it, which seems amazing (0:19:49) Jonnie: The idea of it having the little idle mode option is (0:19:54) Jonnie: kind of cool. I’m very excited to try this out as a little idle game. (0:19:59) Al: And it is five dollars. (0:20:01) Al: Go buy it like I’m not like with this. (0:20:05) Al: I’m not even I mean, it is on sale just (0:20:07) Al: now for is it minus 20 percent off, which is just wild. (0:20:11) Al: But yeah, I’m not waiting for like, oh, I’m going to wait until it’s 90 percent. (0:20:14) Al: No, go buy it now. (0:20:16) Al: Right. Unless you have real financial issues. (0:20:19) Al: It’s a fiver. Go buy it. (0:20:21) Al: There we go. (0:20:21) Jonnie: Pretty much, that’s what I’ll be doing. (0:20:25) Al: I’m doing it right now. (0:20:28) Al: Right. What is next? (0:20:29) Al: I have Song of the Prairie. (0:20:31) Al: There are one point all (0:20:34) Al: will be out by the time this episode comes out. (0:20:36) Al: But I think it’s oh, no, it’s out now. (0:20:38) Al: It is out now. (0:20:39) Al: This was August 1st. (0:20:41) Al: It’s out now. (0:20:42) Al: Woo! (0:20:44) Jonnie: I don’t know much to say about Song of the Prairie other than it looks like someone thought (0:20:49) Jonnie: what if Harvest Moon was kind of good and then they made the skin. (0:20:53) Al: I think many people have tried, have thought, had that thought process. (0:20:57) Jonnie: Yeah this looks very like Harvest Moony though. (0:21:01) Jonnie: I don’t know why there was something more about this one that kind of linked me to a (0:21:06) Jonnie: Harvest Moon than other games. (0:21:10) Al: Fair. Yeah, I like the look of this game, there’s nothing about it that makes me go (0:21:14) Al: a must play this though I think is the thing. Like if this came out maybe four years ago, (0:21:19) Al: I would probably be right on it, but I’m like okay, that’s fine. (0:21:24) Jonnie: I agree, it seems like it’s reviewing pretty well on Steam though, so that’s that’s good (0:21:30) Al: Oh yeah, that’s good. All reviews is very positive, nearly 80% SteamDB rating. (0:21:38) Al: Garden which life have announced that they? (0:21:40) Al: They’re releasing on the 12th of September, and I think that I believe that’s not early access. That’s just straight into. (0:21:48) Jonnie: Yeah, this, this is like the word salad game of like we, we took the words gardening and (0:21:55) Jonnie: witch and we put them together. (0:21:57) Jonnie: And I’ve said many times on the show that we don’t need any more witchy gardening games. (0:22:04) Jonnie: And unfortunately, that is how I feel about this game. (0:22:07) Jonnie: There is just nothing about this one stands out to me. (0:22:11) Al: Yeah, I hate the name. It’s a terrible name. Get a better name. I think I’m probably similar. (0:22:17) Al: I like the look of it. I feel like a broken record right now, but I like the look of it. (0:22:24) Al: But yeah, nothing is telling me I must have it right now. (0:22:29) Al: Real fishing days of summer have announced that their release date is the 28th of October, (0:22:35) Al: and that will be on Switch and PS5. I mean, I’m not going to buy a real fishing game now. (0:22:38) Jonnie: yep (0:22:41) Al: I’m sorry. (0:22:42) Jonnie: me either bluetooth fishing (0:22:45) Al: I’m not against fishing in general. I mean, we have this conversation time and time again. (0:22:50) Al: We’ve got another game to talk about later that’s adding fishing when it really doesn’t (0:22:53) Al: feel like it needs to. But what I definitely don’t want is realistic fishing. That just (0:23:01) Al: feels like the worst. So yeah, no, please, no. Thank you. Please, I’m thinking. (0:23:01) Jonnie: me either. Yeah. (0:23:08) Al: Harvest Moon, Home Sweet Home, speaking of Natsume. (0:23:11) Al: And no please no. Announced that their game is coming out on Friday, two days after this (0:23:18) Al: episode comes out, the 23rd of August, the day before my birthday. They say that they’ve released (0:23:26) Al: a gameplay trailer, but it’s kind of hard to see what the gameplay is because all they do in this (0:23:32) Al: is have people talking to people and running around. Like they’re not really showing a huge (0:23:37) Al: amount of things. There’s some cut scenes and stuff like that. (0:23:41) Al: I feel like we have different definitions of gameplay trailer but it looks pretty standard (0:23:47) Al: Harvest Moon game and I don’t really want that on a mobile device. We’ll see what happens. (0:23:55) Jonnie: Yep, I found it exactly the same way. I watched the trailer and I thought that sure looks like (0:24:00) Jonnie: some Harvest Moon gameplay but it did not tell me what the gameplay loop of this was at all. (0:24:06) Jonnie: So it feels like they’re basically saying if you like the idea of Harvest Moon and you want that (0:24:12) Jonnie: on your phone then this is the game for you and if you don’t know what any of those words mean then (0:24:17) Jonnie: you can probably give this one a miss. (0:24:20) Al: Yeah, probably. I don’t like to promise things very often, but we’re going to cover this (0:24:25) Al: game because I think this is the sort of game that it’s possible this could be good. I don’t (0:24:32) Al: think it’s going to be good, but it’s possible it could be good. But don’t buy this game (0:24:37) Al: yet. Wait. We’ll play it. We’ll tell you what it’s like. (0:24:39) Jonnie: Well, and it makes sense. It makes sense for us to cover because the Cottagecore game on (0:24:46) Jonnie: mobile, I think we would all love a really good version of that, and I don’t know that (0:24:53) Jonnie: there’s been one yet. So the hunt continues for something that sort of fills that niche in a way (0:24:59) Jonnie: that is very satisfying. (0:25:01) Al: Yeah, the problem is that what most of them are is just the same game but on mobile and (0:25:07) Al: that doesn’t… I mean, Stardew did it fine, but the problem is it’s still the same game, (0:25:14) Al: just different controls for it, and yeah, exactly. And so the problem is you need to (0:25:16) Jonnie: and generally worse controls, right? (0:25:21) Al: rethink what a game should be for mobile, and Stardew wasn’t trying to do that. Stardew (0:25:25) Al: was just “Oh, people want my game on mobile, that’s fine, let’s do that and see how people (0:25:29) Al: we’d interact with it and that’s that’s fine. (0:25:31) Al: That’s, you know, he wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel for that, but if someone wants to make a good game, a good farming game for mobile, they need to think about the entire thing from scratch and this just looks like it is Harvestment in the Winds of Anthos with a different story and on a smaller screen. (0:25:50) Jonnie: I agree, yeah. We’ve talked a lot more about this game than I thought we would. (0:25:56) Al: Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Natsumon 20th Century Summer Kid, which, fun fact, they (0:26:04) Al: changed the name on the Steam page. So they’ve added the English translation to this game (0:26:09) Al: on Steam and on Switch, so that’s the news. But the funny thing I found is I’m pretty (0:26:14) Al: sure on Steam it used to be called Natsumon 20th Century Summer Vacation, because that’s (0:26:19) Al: the literal translation from Japanese. But then apparently when they’ve localized it, (0:26:24) Al: changed the name. Which is fine. (0:26:27) Al: It’s just weird that they added the name initially as a different translated version, (0:26:32) Al: and then decided that that wasn’t what they were going with for the name. (0:26:35) Jonnie: I mean the name still makes sense I guess so that’s (0:26:38) Al: Yeah, no, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s just, (0:26:42) Al: it’s weird that they had a name in English and changed what that was. (0:26:49) Jonnie: Yeah, I don’t know. I can’t get over the fact that this game is like a million dollars. (0:26:53) Jonnie: It’s so expensive. (0:26:56) Al: Um, yeah, it’s not cheap. (0:26:59) Jonnie: And it looks so bad for like… (0:27:02) Jonnie: And I get that that’s kind of like the style, but like… (0:27:06) Jonnie: Paying what? This game must be like 50 American dollars or something like that and it’s just like… (0:27:14) Jonnie: You could buy pretty much every other game that we’ve talked about (0:27:17) Jonnie: and still not have paid as much (0:27:19) Jonnie: as you could pay for this game (0:27:21) Jonnie: I just don’t (0:27:23) Jonnie: Who’s buying this? (0:27:23) Al: Me, apparently. (0:27:27) Al: Well, yes, we know that. (0:27:28) Jonnie: Well, Al, you have a problem (0:27:33) Al: We know that. (0:27:34) Al: Thankfully, my money is finite, so I can’t buy literally everything. (0:27:39) Al: Speaking of buying literally everything, Usagi Shima is coming to steam. (0:27:45) Al: Now, interestingly, so this was free on mobile, and I had ads and you could pay to get rid (0:27:53) Al: of the ads, but it was like five quid or something, so of course I did that. (0:27:56) Al: Oh, no, did it have ads? (0:27:58) Al: I don’t think it did have ads. (0:27:59) Al: It was just like an in-game purchase to get a bunch of… (0:28:01) Jonnie: think you could just pay to buy the like it was yeah it was just a hey do you (0:28:06) Jonnie: want to support me then you can do this (0:28:08) Al: Yeah, which was a no-brainer for this game. So it’ll be interesting to see whether that (0:28:11) Jonnie: yes (0:28:13) Al: will be the same for Steam or not. I don’t see any information about how much it will (0:28:16) Al: be yet, but the Steam page is up. It looks like it’s going to be on Windows and Mac. (0:28:23) Al: So yeah, it’s a fun game. I mean, if you’ve listened to us talk about Asagashima before, (0:28:29) Al: it’s exactly what you’re expecting, and it’s the exact same game. It’s just got (0:28:34) Jonnie: which is awesome I think that makes total sense and like I would say if it’s ten dollars or less (0:28:41) Jonnie: it’s kind of just an instant buy um if it if it does have a purchase price which I think would (0:28:46) Al: Yep. (0:28:47) Al: It’s different, right? Steam is different from mobile, and I think you can get away (0:28:47) Jonnie: not be a bad thing right to just say like hey give us five bucks for this game (0:28:57) Al: with charging money on Steam where you wouldn’t be able to on mobile, because I think the (0:29:01) Al: thing is that if you go free on mobile with an option to give money, you’re much more (0:29:05) Al: likely to get more people doing it, and therefore, people will go, “Oh, I like this game. Fine, (0:29:10) Al: I’ll put the money in.” Whereas if you don’t try it first, you might not be willing to (0:29:16) Al: pay for it upfront. Whereas on Steam, especially with the game now being popular, and people (0:29:21) Al: know it, and people like it, they’ll be like, “Oh, finally, it’s coming to Steam. I’m excited (0:29:25) Al: about that. Yes, I will buy that.” The smallest piece of news is the Echoes of the Plum Grove (0:29:26) Jonnie: Absolutely (0:29:30) Al: is now on Mac. Done. I still haven’t played this game. I really need to play this game (0:29:32) Jonnie: Cody you go play it (0:29:38) Al: because I love everything that it’s doing in terms of death. (0:29:44) Jonnie: Yeah. I can’t remember. Someone in the Slack, it might have been Cat, was playing it, and (0:29:54) Jonnie: they were saying they were having a really fun time with it, and this game weds me out (0:29:58) Jonnie: every time I kind of remember that it exists, because everything they’re doing around death (0:30:02) Jonnie: seems super cool and super interesting, and not what you expect when you first see the (0:30:06) Jonnie: now available on Mac. Picture is very cute, and you can imagine someone being like, “Ooh, (0:30:10) Jonnie: what’s this?” and looking into it and being like, “Oh my god!” (0:30:10) Al: Yeah, that’s the thing that’s most fun about it, is the art style is so cutesy, but you (0:30:17) Al: die in this game, and it’s hard not to die. It’s proper survival. You die and then you (0:30:24) Al: play as someone else, you know? Yeah, I guess the question is, I don’t know what happens (0:30:26) Jonnie: As your children, I’m pretty sure it’s like a generation. (0:30:33) Al: if you don’t have kids. Is that game over, or do you play as someone else in the village? (0:30:35) Jonnie: Game over. (0:30:36) Jonnie: I don’t actually know. (0:30:37) Al: don’t know. Anyway, yeah. (0:30:41) Al: That was meant to be the shortest piece of news. (0:30:45) Al: Outbound, cozy camper van exploration crafting game. (0:30:50) Al: That’s apparently what they’re listed as on Kickstarter. (0:30:53) Al: Don’t know why. (0:30:54) Al: They’re Kickstarters live now and they have well and truly hit (0:30:59) Jonnie: ah look this is a yeah I know you said I could have backed the me be here in the (0:31:05) Jonnie: witches mountain kickstarter but like how long ago did you have to back this that one because (0:31:09) Jonnie: like their their date for you know beta access is end of 2025 which makes total (0:31:14) Jonnie: sense like i’m not saying like that’s too long or anything like that making games takes a long time (0:31:19) Jonnie: but like and they’ve met the they’ve met the the kickstarter thing like don’t bother just wait for (0:31:26) Al: So I’ll tell you why. I’ll tell you why I kickstart games. I kickstart games because (0:31:34) Al: it’s like a little present to future me. I buy a game and then two, three years later (0:31:42) Al: I get a free game. It’s great. But it is, it is free. I haven’t paid for it at that (0:31:44) Jonnie: One, it’s not free, Al, and I know that you know this, and now you’re just saying… (0:31:52) Al: point in time. (0:31:54) Jonnie: You have paid for it, though, that is in fact how that has worked, (0:31:58) Jonnie: and you might not even get the game. (0:32:01) Jonnie: I would be pretty confident that this one is in fact going to come out, (0:32:05) Jonnie: because everything that I’ve shown looks very good. (0:32:09) Jonnie: Which, you know, there’s some tricky vertical slice stuff that people can do in trailers and stuff, (0:32:15) Jonnie: I would be shocked if this is a game that doesn’t see the light of day, (0:32:21) Jonnie: because it looks pretty good. (0:32:23) Al: Well, and it’s, it’s also, it’s the same developer that did Above Snakes. So they’ve proven that (0:32:28) Al: they can do a Kickstarter for a game and then release a game. Yeah, very different vibe, (0:32:30) Jonnie: Interesting, I don’t think I knew that it was the same developer, but uh, so yeah 100% (0:32:37) Al: which is always good when you’ve got like, get your developer who can do both, right? (0:32:42) Al: Very, very different. And I like that, but this is what I really love about indie game (0:32:48) Al: development, right? Is when they go, I’ve got a weird idea that I want to do for a game (0:32:53) Al: to do it. And then they’re like, and I’ve got this completely different idea for a completely (0:32:57) Al: different style of game. And then they do it. And if you’re successful, the first one, (0:33:02) Al: you will probably be successful at the second one because people like your first game, like (0:33:06) Al: this game funded in two hours. (0:33:08) Jonnie: Yeah, I mean that’s not a surprise like I think everything this game is doing is just really tapping into (0:33:14) Jonnie: Something that people are feeling (0:33:17) Jonnie: right now (0:33:18) Al: Yes this is the game that is for some reason adding fishing I don’t know why (0:33:22) Jonnie: Boo (0:33:23) Al: they’re adding it as a stretch goal away with your fishing don’t make me fish of (0:33:25) Jonnie: Boo (0:33:27) Jonnie: That’s a good reason to not back the Kickstarter (0:33:28) Al: course I’m gonna fish yeah yeah I’m like please stop we’ve no well the problem is (0:33:34) Al: right they’ve got fishing as the next one and then beekeeping after that and (0:33:39) Al: I’m like can we do the beekeeping and without the fishing but (0:33:42) Jonnie: 100%. Yeah. I think what I’m most curious with this game is like, what is the actual game? (0:33:50) Al: I deriving around and building your insane house on top (0:33:57) Jonnie: Right but like I said so in a lot of you know the games that we cover the gameplay loop is (0:34:02) Jonnie: very driven around you’ve got your plot of land and you are using that to produce (0:34:07) Jonnie: money or resources or other stuff that then enables all of those upgrades. (0:34:12) Al: Yeah, I see where you’re pointing. I think the point is exploration, and so you are going (0:34:17) Al: from point A to point B, via a million other points, and everything you do is with the (0:34:23) Al: goal of getting there, I think. It’s not particularly clear, which is fine because maybe they’re (0:34:30) Al: not 100% sure how it’s going to pan out, and they’ve very much been working on the core (0:34:37) Al: concept of the game. We’ll see. I’ve backed it, of course. (0:34:42) Jonnie: Yeah, look, I thought about it, and then I saw, I’m like, if I’m backing it, it would be to play the alpha. (0:34:47) Jonnie: And then I’m like, I don’t, why would I want to play an alpha? I’ll just wait for it to come out. (0:34:51) Al: Fair enough. (0:34:52) Al: Look, we know I have a problem with Kickstarters. (0:34:55) Al: Speaking of having a problem with Kickstarters, we’re now going on to the Game Updates section, (0:35:00) Al: which is about updates to games that are already out. (0:35:05) Al: The first one is Coral Island, the 1.1 is out now. (0:35:09) Al: I think this came out like just after the last episode came out, yet the 23rd of July. (0:35:16) Al: I think that is the day before the last episode where we had news. (0:35:21) Al: But we’d recorded like two days before that or something. (0:35:22) Jonnie: Yeah. (0:35:25) Al: So thanks, Coral Island. (0:35:27) Jonnie: And for those who don’t remember, this is 1.1 in brackets. Actually, it’s 1.0, and we’re now actually finished. (0:35:27) Al: Well, yeah, yes, they’re literally calling it Finale Land and Sea Update. (0:35:40) Al: They’re literally calling it the Finale, right? (0:35:45) Al: This is what the game was meant to be. (0:35:47) Al: They’re adding in stuff that didn’t exist in the first game that should have, like your (0:35:50) Al: town rank system. (0:35:51) Al: Finally added the top rank of it. (0:35:54) Al: They’ve added people in the sea that you can actually talk to. (0:35:58) Jonnie: When one of the headings in the 1.1 update (0:36:00) Jonnie: is storyline completion, we released a game (0:36:04) Jonnie: and the storyline was incomplete. (0:36:06) Al: Uhhh… (0:36:08) Al: Yes. (0:36:09) Al: Well, I- I- (0:36:10) Jonnie: But look, we’ll stop poking fun, (0:36:12) Jonnie: ‘cause I feel like this game has had some challenges (0:36:15) Jonnie: in the background, but there is a lot, I think, (0:36:17) Jonnie: to be excited about for 1.1 update. (0:36:24) Jonnie: Yes, it is finishing the game, (0:36:26) Jonnie: that there is, you know, like, I feel like they’ve– (0:36:28) Jonnie: I’ve also listened to a lot of feedback. (0:36:30) Jonnie: I’m just scrolling through all of the patch notes (0:36:32) Jonnie: because one of my favorite sort of spouse interactions. (0:36:36) Jonnie: For those that don’t recall, I think (0:36:38) Jonnie: when you get married in Coral Island, (0:36:40) Jonnie: your partner becomes a soulless husk (0:36:43) Jonnie: that stands in the house and does nothing. (0:36:46) Jonnie: And they have a bullet point that says you can now (0:36:48) Jonnie: hug and kiss your spouse once daily (0:36:50) Jonnie: to get some point in the relationship with it. (0:36:50) Al: Once, once daily. (laughs) (0:36:58) Jonnie: Uh, and I think it’s meant to reach, to get some points in the relationship, so you can, like, I think the implication is meant to be to feel like that you can continue to build the relationship, but to get some point in the relationship makes it feel like, “So the marriage is not entirely pointless, so…” (0:37:09) Al: Yeah, this is definitely a translation issue because they’re, I think they’re from the (0:37:17) Al: Philippines, the developers. So yeah, let’s not be too harsh on the English, but yes, (0:37:18) Jonnie: Uh, I believe that’s correct. (0:37:25) Al: it does feel a little bit perfect, accidental. (0:37:29) Jonnie: that one was just it was yeah that one was accidentally perfect um and when I was ready (0:37:33) Jonnie: through because it was about halfway through all of all of the updates it would give me a good (0:37:38) Al: like having some point in a relationship. But now we get to talk about the problems and that is that (0:37:46) Al: Coral Island was being published by Humble Games. And if you’ve not heard this already, Humble Games (0:37:52) Al: no longer humbles or games. It basically no longer exists as a thing. Humble Bundle still exists (0:38:02) Al: because Humble Games was separate. It’s like there’s the Humble company and then there’s (0:38:07) Al: this humble bundle and how– (0:38:08) Al: which is a problem for some things, including the fact that humble games were– the other (0:38:35) Al: thing they do as well as publishing is they did porting, so they were (0:38:39) Al: they were working on the switch port for coral island, no more. (0:38:47) Al: Shall I just use their own words? (0:38:51) Al: First of all, oh my word. (0:38:55) Al: I need to say that they were, they didn’t, the first apparently they found out about this was (0:39:00) Al: the same way everybody else found out about it. Nobody contacted them to say that this was happening. (0:39:06) Al: We’d like to say something to you today. (0:39:08) Al: We’ve been given that Humble Games’ recent “restructuring” - the most amazing word you can use for firing everybody - leaves consoles in a place of uncertainty. (0:39:16) Al: However, we see this as an opportunity to share what we can. (0:39:20) Al: To start, we share in your frustrations regarding the lack of an Incentive Switch port of Coral Island. (0:39:24) Al: Over the years, there’s a lot we’ve wanted to say in the spirit of transparency about many different things, but continue to be unable to do so because of the publishing agreement and NDA we have in place. (0:39:34) Al: The impact of Humble Games’ restructuring on Coral Island remains uncertain for all (0:39:38) Al: things related to consoles, whether porting or pushing hotfixes. I believe that they (0:39:44) Al: already have a port on Xbox and PlayStation, it was just Switch that was missing. So that’s (0:39:49) Al: why they’re talking about updates. (0:39:51) Al: As they are responsible for these platforms, we’ve been in communication with our lawyer (0:39:54) Al: since we found out about the restructuring on social media to figure out how to navigate (0:39:59) Al: this new situation. For example, we have an upcoming hotfix for the 1.1 update nearing (0:40:04) Al: release for Steam. We have no idea how to get this update out to other platform players (0:40:08) Al: and have a backend permission on console platforms to push updates out. We only have (0:40:13) Al: access to the Steam backend. Because of this, the only thing we can do for Switch Makers (0:40:18) Al: effective immediately is offer a key exchange to the Steam platform. We will offer key changes (0:40:23) Al: for as long as we are able to. Please email for a key change. Blah. Oh, and then they (0:40:28) Al: go, we will, I missed this last paragraph. We’ll keep you posted on developments once (0:40:33) Al: we have more information. We know it effing sucks, but we hope you understand. And they (0:40:39) Al: say effing, but this is still a family friendly podcast. There’s a lot of subtext and a lot (0:40:47) Al: of text in that update. (0:40:50) Jonnie: There certainly is. It’s just a tough situation for them to be in, right, like it seems like there is very little they can actually do about it. (0:41:06) Al: Yeah, it also sounds like they’re struggling to keep up with the the key exchanges (0:41:11) Al: There’s lots of people complaining in the comments that they haven’t had their key exchange. I (0:41:17) Al: Am very glad that I exchanged my key (0:41:22) Al: Two years ago when I when I got my steam deck and I was like I’m just gonna get this on Steam if I can (0:41:27) Al: And they let me do it. So I’m glad I did all the way back then (0:41:30) Al: I find it very interesting that they are very clearly saying that they (0:41:37) Al: I have not been allowed to say stuff because of NDAs (0:41:39) Al: But they’re saying they’re not allowed to say stuff because of NDAs possibly because they’re like well who’s gonna soon as nobody exists in the company (0:41:47) Jonnie: I feel like the NDA’s thing is normal, and it feels like we’re just seeing a frustration (0:41:54) Jonnie: over the last few years, sort of leaking out a little bit in this statement, which seems (0:41:59) Jonnie: totally understandable, because publishing games is hard, and publishing to multiple (0:42:04) Jonnie: platforms is hard, and sometimes you get in situations where the developers are not the (0:42:10) Jonnie: ones with the power in these relationships, and I think this is unfortunately what has (0:42:16) Al: Yep, and this is the thing you need to remember about Kickstarters. You are paying money (0:42:24) Al: for a promise of something that is not a legally binding contract. You are funding this and (0:42:30) Al: there is a chance that you get nothing out of it. So bear that in mind. Don’t be like (0:42:35) Al: me. Don’t Kickstart everything. I think I’ve only had two things that I just haven’t got (0:42:43) Al: from kickstarters. But it’s not fun when (0:42:46) Al: it happens. And there are a lot of disappointed people in the comments, (0:42:50) Al: because it’s all very well saying we’ll give you a key exchange. (0:42:52) Al: But if the switch is your only. (0:42:56) Jonnie: Anyway, it’s even harder, I don’t know, they said they’ve got a hotfix coming for 1.1 for Steam, obviously. (0:43:04) Jonnie: But if you’re a PlayStation or Xbox player, what does this hotfix fix? (0:43:10) Jonnie: You know, and the fact that there are potentially some significant bugs or glitches in those consolvations (0:43:20) Jonnie: that there’s no real idea of when or if they will even get this hotfix. (0:43:26) Al: Well, yeah, I guess we’ll just have to see what happens. (0:43:31) Al: Next we have the 1.2 update for Roots of Patria is out now. (0:43:36) Al: This is the one, I think we talked about this a few months ago. (0:43:40) Al: This is the one that adds child labour, I mean, isn’t that why we have children? (0:43:42) Jonnie: Hell yeah. (0:43:46) Jonnie: Finally, children will be useful for something. (0:43:51) Al: Not for child labour, but for adult labour in 18 years time, right? (0:43:55) Jonnie: Mmm, I don’t know. I feel like I feel like that’s inefficient get them started young (0:43:57) Al: We also have the sunnable, I mean, you played Roots of Patria? I can’t remember. (0:44:07) Jonnie: I I have played a little bit of roots of patcher. I (0:44:12) Jonnie: liked what it was trying to do but equally I was playing roots of patcher at the same time I was getting into coral island and (0:44:18) Jonnie: Coral island one out in that battle (

In this new episode we give our non-spoiler review of the new “Alien: Romulus” movie and play a new championship edition of the Cameo game, as well as a couple new Missle Anus stories. The post Blah Blah Podcast Episode 273: Kwong Dynasty appeared first on Blah Blah Inc..

Fuzzy human scum heads lately here at BGP headquarters. Nothing will stop the onslaught of killer punk tunes that the world bestoweth upon us. New stuff (like the blessings from Fuzzed Atrocities Japan), stuff we've never played, and random stuff. Had to mess with the set list because Blogger flagged it. Apologies! Hit us up at brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com and download our music on our Bandcamp page.471 Playlist:Punker Cement...Greenland Every day is misery 0:49 Bipolar Once A Junk**, Always A Junk** Upset Conditions IN ALWAYS LOSE 0:23 MISSILE STRATEGY MISSILE STRATEGY Alberta Nuke 1:56 Rubber Cement EP 2024 Fuzzed Atrocities Japan Commandeering… 3:40 TRASH COMPACTOR BURIAL 2024 Fuzzed Atrocities Release Beerfriend (bkgrd) 3:23 Butchers Bill American Trash MDI WI Blind Faith 1:30 WARBASTARD WARBASTARD 2020 BOOTLEG DEMO Milwaukee CANS 1:08 Abi Ooze Of Power//No Surprise Cassingle Portland no peace 1:10 BLEACH DEMO 2024 Beach Impediment Manmade Hell 1:06 Disarm Existence Demo 1985 Oregon Ballad… 0:09 REZERECTED, rectumisXmaximus Sickening Sight… FUCKOFF/GOHOME 0:31 REZERECTED... Sickening Sight... Fuzzed Out 1:10 ROLEX Grimly Forming / ROLEX Split Side B - Part Two 1:43 phobiarecords Panikattack - Ett Sista Farväl LP Painters Tapes MI Shanked 1:32 Easers Easers PV Recs Pressure 1:41 Möney + Sprgrs *A**B* Summer 04' - Misled Youth (bkgrd) 3:25 Welfare Scouts Boom Box + More Fresno TO FREE 0:44 HUMAN RADIATION RELEASE L.A. …Spree 1:32 Grimly Forming Grimly Forming / ROLEX Split Italy Non Esisto 1:18 Lucta Eterna Lotta Cuties 1:35 Berzerk V/A The Recess Romp 3 Argentina Desesperado 1:01 sentimiento fatal S/F Quebec Un des peu 1:35 PUST PUST - EP Solo Project Nunca confíes en un hippie okupa (never trust a hippie squatter) 1:44 Distro.cefalia Requiem II Human Wreck - Total Defeat 1:05 Warcycle, Semtex 87, Gaoled, Territory, Total Defeat & No Future TS50 - Noise Not Money 7" Budapest Solo NUKLEÁRIS BÁBEL 1:00 ZAVAR KI A FELELŐS? KC I Don't Even Like You 1:09 Carrie Fast Food Punk Rock Ohio Feeding Them Glue 1:20 Circus Promo Second Generation (bkgrd) 3:14 Meatwagon Arrival IGNORANT F 1:25 XGRIFOX XGRIFOX ENCARCELADO 0:48 XGRIFOX XGRIFOX 2 Dead Weight 1:44 Bloody Wankers Blah! Bummer Tapes Portland 50 Cans 1:20 22RE 22RE Demo Milwaukee Sociopath 2:10 Splatter Pattern Scum of the City - 2020 demo Nova Scotia Power Must End 1:00 FRAGMENT 2020 Bandcamp Single Philly Combat Conditions 1:25 HALLUCINATION S/T Chicago TLC NO SCUMS 0:33 Anomaly Demo Landlords - 1-2-X-U (Wire) 1:37 G.T.R.R.C G.T.R.R.C III FL Robot 1:20 Cherry Cheeks No Ticket The End (bkgrd) 4:19 The Separation Demo 07 Extinction Burst L.A. Can't Fix Stupid 1:13 HOUSE ARREST 2024 Demo Other ways to hear BGP:Archive.org#471 on ArchiveApple PodcastsYouTube PodcastsPunk Rock Demonstration - Wednesdays 7 p.m. PSTRipper Radio - Fridays & Saturdays 7 p.m. PSTContact BGP:brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com@Punkbot138 on Instagram@BrosGrimPunk on XMore Music:Bandcamp - Follow us and download our albums: Brothers Grim Punk, Fight Music, and more!YouTube - tons of our punk playlists, from Anarchy to Zombies!

Blah sports week has been saved by the Canadians, once again.

Discover the keys to financial success in your voiceover business with our latest episode featuring the savvy money boss herself, Danielle Famble. Learn how to categorize your business expenses to maximize tax benefits and streamline your finances. From new equipment to that signature lipstick you love, learn how to turn everyday purchases into strategic business investments. Danielle shares her expert advice on the importance of collaborating with accountants and bookkeepers to ensure every dollar spent works for you, boosting both profitability and business accountability. Our conversation also includes actionable tips for managing your finances effectively, focusing on understanding profit and loss statements. Regularly reviewing your financial statements can prevent overspending and foster business growth, and we provide the know-how to keep your budget healthy. 00:01 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey bosses, Anne Ganguza here. Are you ready to take the next step in your voiceover career? At Anne Ganguza Productions, I specialize in target marketed coaching and demo production that gets you booked. If you're thinking about elevating your performance or creating an awesome demo, check me out at annganguzacom.  00:22 - Intro (Announcement) It's time to take your business to the next level, the boss level. These are the premier business owner strategies and successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a boss a VO boss. Now let's welcome your host, nne Ganguza.  00:41 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Hey everyone, Welcome to the VO Boss podcast and the Boss Money Talk series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm delighted to bring back our resident money boss, Danielle Famble, to the show.  00:55 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Danielle- hey Anne.  00:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yay, welcome. How are you today?  00:58 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Hey, I'm great. How are?  00:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) you doing? I'm doing awesome. Well, danielle, I bought a new lipstick for the show, a new lipstick the new Red Boss lipstick. Those people that know me know that I'm all about my lipsticks and I talk about my lipstick brand and I use my lipstick and my colors for my branding, for my business. And I started to think, well, okay, can I expense this lipstick? Right, can I expense this lipstick? And so I chatted with my accountant to find out if it was possible to do that, and you know what it is. So I am so excited that I can now put lipstick. And we all know about these headphones. I was like, yeah, I know I could have expensed these headphones. It's a business expense, but guess what this lipstick is too.  01:45 And I think it's important for bosses to understand a little bit I think more about. We talked in our last episode about how important education was to the bosses. It's important to educate yourself on the basics of, let's say, bookkeeping for your business, like what sorts of things do you spend money on and how do you categorize them. I think that's an important aspect of bookkeeping. What are your thoughts on that, danielle?  02:09 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Oh yeah, that's really important. It's important to know how your business is working and bookkeeping is sort of the daily ledger of what money is coming in and going out for your business, knowing even the basics of bookkeeping and the basics of bookkeeping. In our last conversation, our last episode, we talked about the bookkeepers or people that you might have on your team, which they may be doing it, but you, as the VO boss, should understand even just the basics of bookkeeping for your business. So you know, when I spend money on this lipstick or these headphones or a new microphone, these are expenses that can be expense for my business. And what are the categories that you can expense things in your business. I recently bought a ticket to go to another one of the voiceover conferences and so I was thinking, okay, how am I expensing this? What account am I using for it? Making sure it's in my business account and it's going to be expense for continuing education. So I know the different categories and what you can expense in your business.  03:09 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And I think it's so important because before I actually had an accountant and I was trying to do this all on my own and I'm like, well, all right, at least I learned that I needed to have right. We talked how important it was to have that separate business account.  03:20 But, then all of a sudden it was like what are my expenses, right? I just started throwing everything in and then it would always ask me what's the category? And I'm like, oh, I didn't think about what are the categories that are useful in your bookkeeping for voiceover? And I thought, wow, there's equipment, my internet connection. How do I classify that right? Subscriptions.  03:40 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) SourceConnect. Even I pay for extra storage with Google, with my Gmail. That kind of thing can be expensed. The people that you work with. So we talked about the bookkeepers and the CPAs paying them for their services.  03:55 Working with professionals, so professional fees there are so many things.  04:00 That's what's great about running a business is that you get to make money and then you can expense all of these different things and then you're taxed on that.  04:10 It's completely the opposite, for as a person, you get taxed on the money that you bring in, right, and then anything else is sort of just like deductions but like running a business is really amazing. That's why I love getting into the weeds about money and finances and bookkeeping, because once you learn how to sort of not play the game but kind of play the game, you can really make your business work for you much more efficiently. So learning about what it is that you're trying to do and making sure by being educated through a CPA or just finding you know education on your own, making sure that you can expense that appropriately for your business, sure, legally, in a tax efficient way, you can do a lot because we we use our bodies for our business. The chair that I'm sitting in in my studio is like an expensive ergonomic chair that normally I would not have ever purchased, but I'm in this chair for hours and so back support is really important, so that was part of the furniture of my office space.  05:13 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And even medical that isn't covered by insurance, right? Medical expenses? Because is my Peloton? Is that an expense for my business?  05:19 And I love what you said about knowing these things right and understanding the basics of what can be expense.  05:26 What category am I putting it in? Because when I first started, I all of a sudden thought, oh God, there's categories. And then I didn't really categorize them properly, or I didn't quite know what categories to create, I mean. But in the end, when you look at your profit and loss statement, which is something that's so very basic to any accounting, right, I would look at the number and I'd say expenses, and it would be one big lump sum and I'd be like, well, what did I spend my money on? Right? And so that's where I think the importance of being able to categorize things really comes into play. And the fact is is that when you know about categories and things that you can expense for your business, it opens up the door of so many possibilities. It allowed me to confidently say, all right, I can do this, knowing that I'll be able to expense it for my business, and I think it helps me to actually go forth more confidently and also be more willing to try new avenues to grow my business.  06:21 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, the confidence that comes from the education is second to none. And I will say, the best place to get that level of education for your business, for the business that you, vo Boss, are running not my business or Ann's business, but your specific business is to go to the person who has the knowledge about the numbers of your business it makes no sense to expense everything and who has the knowledge about the numbers of your business. It makes no sense to expense everything and then at the end of the year it looks like you made no profit because, again, the idea of running a business is to make a profit. It's not just to break even. We want to make money. That's why we're here.  06:58 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And, by the way, if you report to the government that you've lost money for over five years in a row, they're going to start getting suspicious. And then the audit will come and, by the way, I've been audited twice and.  07:09 I'm not ashamed of it because there's no foul play there or anything like that. I mean, literally, it's just when you run a business and you make money, they get a little bit interested in it and you can't have any red flags show up. And if you're going to be expensing everything and not showing a profit for a certain amount of time, then it might get a little bit suspicious. So you really need to work with someone, I think, that has an awareness of what's in the realm of reality, so that you're not necessarily taking advantage, even though I have my accountant. I literally purchased Rocket Money last year because I had so many subscriptions and I lost track of them, and that's like a big thing. Now is everything digital, is you're buying a subscription to it? I had subscriptions I forgot about right, and so I paid, of course, a subscription price to use rocket money. And then the funny thing about it is that if you do rocket money, they'll go and they'll find all your subscriptions, and then ultimately, you can even say at the end I'm like, oh gosh, do I really need to pay seven? I think it was $7 a month. Do I need to pay $7 a month to Rocket Money now Because they found all my subscriptions. They also offer to reduce the amount of money for your subscriptions because they'll go and negotiate with the companies to get a better rate.  08:22 A lot of times you can say you know what I mean, I just can't afford it. I'm getting ready to cancel. And then they'll renegotiate with you. But you can also renegotiate with Rocket Money and say I can't afford the $7. And they'll say, well, what do you feel is fair? And so I said, all right, I can pay $3 a month. And so guess what? I? That's fantastic. But I've already paid them for two years.  08:42 And all of a sudden I realized down at the bottom, I was thinking about canceling. And then they're like, hey, why don't you pay us what you think is fair? I said, all right, well, I can do this. Suffice to say, it's just one of those things that it helps you to really identify, like where your money is going. And so categories to me seem to be such a fundamental part of basic accounting and bookkeeping. And so what are some other like? If you look at a profit and loss statement, like I know some people, their eyes are maybe glazing over Profit and loss. It seems so formal. But what sorts of things are we going to be looking at when we see a profit and loss statement Like what's important for us to know as business owners?  09:22 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) The main thing with a profit and loss statement is it really is sort of the name of it Profit, how much came in? How much money did the business make in this given period of time? Let's say it's a quarter or a month and I've been receiving monthly profit and loss statements. But how much money did you make during this given period of time and how much money went out during that same given period of time?  09:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Inflows, outflows.  09:45 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Inflows and outflows, how much came in, how much went out. I think it's really important to first think about how much came in, because you have a lot of control over that. That could be how much you're quoting for your clients, how many jobs that you've done, what your bookings are like. You have control over that aspect of it and you also have control over the loss side of it. How much is going out? So things like your subscriptions, which for me, I will say, when I really started like digging into my profit and loss statement, when I looked at subscription, I was like, well, what am I spending my money on? This is so much, it's crazy, crazy. Apple. Google Source.  10:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Connect Internet connection.  10:27 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Internet connections Internet connections, all the things. Quickbooks, yes, quickbooks.  10:32 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) My account.  10:32 - Intro (Announcement) All these different things.  10:34 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I mean it's just like I probably just named $100 just in that you know. Yeah, so it's knowing what is going out. Subscriptions for me is huge. Also, sometimes equipment but I don't buy a lot of equipment for my business that often Like, yeah, maybe I'll buy another microphone or an interface or an extra cable just in case For me.  10:57 And again, this is something that a VO boss can look at their business and say, what do I need for my business? And then you'll know, okay, this is the category and this is how it's going to affect my profit and loss. But normally for me anyway, my business with the profit and loss, with the monthly expenses, it's really those subscriptions. And I think I love what you said about Rocket Money, where you can take a look and see like, do I really need all these subscriptions? And then you can kind of tune what is going out on your profit and loss statement. Another aspect would be the people that you pay. So if you have an assistant or a bookkeeper or if you're working with a CPA or whatever else that's going on. And it really is kind of going back to personal finance. It's kind of like looking at your budget for the month how much is going out for your budget every month in your home and then how much is coming in. It's the same kind of thing.  11:50 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) So profit and loss, your profit. And then, of course, what are some other, let's say, terms that you might see on a profit and loss statement, and I'm thinking like expenses right, obviously or inflows, outflows, assets I know I see that term a lot. What do you consider to be an asset in a voiceover, in a VO business?  12:11 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) So, assets are anything that you own, that your business owns. I consider assets to be things like my booth is an asset. I could sell my booth for a certain amount of money, and so that's an asset. My microphone is an asset. My interface is an asset, any sort of like business furniture, that kind of thing those are the assets.  12:33 A physical item, a physical item Like what the business owns. I'm a physical item, but my voice is the business, and so I am an asset of my business as well. I mean, you can't sell me.  12:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) You can sell your voice.  12:47 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yes, I license the use of my voice. I sell my voice, but really, assets are anything that your business owns, but those are things that may or may not show up in your monthly profit and loss. Well, they might show up in your monthly profit and loss, but for me, when I'm looking at it, I'm looking at expenses.  13:04 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, when I'm looking at my overview, I'm seeing assets in there. So that was just a term that I thought oh God, assets. It just seems so foreign. You know what I mean Because I'm not a financial person, so to speak. I mean, but I have to be a financial person enough to understand what I'm looking at on any given month or any given report, a profit and loss statement Also, so I know. Another term that I've seen on my reports is liabilities. What would be my liability?  13:31 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Liabilities would also be like your debt, so what you owe For me? I put most of my expenses on my business's credit card, yes, and then I pay that off at the end of the month, so I'm seeing sort of a rotating liability.  13:46 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, I was going to say your credit card would be considered a liability then right, because that's something that you owe on.  13:51 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Right, and for me that's, generally speaking, what it looks like in this business.  13:56 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yeah, that makes sense. And one note that I'll say about my I have a business credit card, which is I think it's one of the best. In addition to that separate business account, having a business credit card makes it so, so easy. I have a business credit card and a business debit card, and it makes it so easy to keep track because, again, everything is like electronic these days, and so I can feed it in as a stream into my QuickBooks, and so the only issue I have, though, is I have a business American Express Now my American Express.  14:28 In and of itself, that credit card categorizes things, but it doesn't necessarily categorize it as it comes into QuickBooks, so that's something that my bookkeeper or accountant will do to make sure that we know, okay, what was that $100 charge or what was that charge that just came through, that charge that just came through, and so I think that having a if you can keep it simple we talked about that before if you can keep it simple, having a business card that you use just for business expenses and that can include, like, maybe, paying stuff online or physically buying like a new mic, or going out and buying dinner for voiceover people during a meetup, right, that kind of thing. I will always use my business card so that that can just go automatically into my expenses.  15:12 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Absolutely. I do the same thing. My business credit card is through Chase and what's interesting is that Chase will do its best to categorize things, but it's not quite right all the time and then bring it into QuickBooks, because I have QuickBooks automatically linked to. Chase. It's not the same thing. So part of the basics of bookkeeping for me is making sure that I have done the homework of categorizing it correctly in Chase and in.  15:44 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) QuickBooks. That's a good point.  15:46 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Really, the person who's doing the QuickBooks, more or less, has in the past been my bookkeeper, but I'm starting to take more responsibility for it because my bookkeeper makes assumptions and will ask me about it. But I have the single point of truth because I was the one who swiped it. Sometimes I'm like what was that? What version of Danielle swiped that card?  16:07 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) for that thing I always be like what is this charge? I would say, bosses, it's so important to do. When you do have a business card, a business credit card or a business debit card, it's like really visit those transactions like frequently, because there'll be a lot of times when it'll be fresh and you'll be like I have no idea who that vendor is Like, what is that charge for? I have no idea who that vendor is Like, what is that charge for? And if you can immediately just kind of make that adjustment, it's going to be so helpful, rather than waiting until the end of the month and then saying, oh my gosh, I have no idea who this vendor is, and then maybe you find out you have that subscription you've paid for six months in a row and you didn't need it. So I think it's important to always be checking those expenses all the time and looking at them, because sometimes and I will say this as a girl who loves to shop and I love to shop online Amazon has ruined me.  16:51 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) I'm just saying I'll tell you Same, same.  16:54 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) I need it now. I need everything because Amazon seems to sell everything and I need it before 24 hours. This is a side note, but anytime I work through another vendor and it takes like five days to ship, I'm like really what? Yeah, you don't have that two-day shipping what is that what's going on? And then when Amazon delays the order, I'm like what? Like I get angry, but anyways, I digress.  17:14 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) No, but you're making a really good point and I'll speak from personal experience, because this is something that I did not do for the longest and I'm currently in the moment going through three or four months ago of expenses because I didn't do it even though yeah, my bookkeeper will, but I'm sort of like after the fact, following up on what my bookkeeper did, because maybe it is or is not the correct yes thing to categorize.  17:38 It's something that can be done at the end of the week and it takes just a few moments, yeah, but if you put a little bit of time into it more frequently, it will save you hours and googles and headaches later.  17:53 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Calling. I agree I don't do it as much as I should either, and it's just one of those things that when you have to go back and figure out, oh my God, what was that expense? So I think it's important absolutely that you are looking at your cards and your debits and outgoing expenses and, of course, incoming as well. The other thing that I want to talk about is the fees. Right, Because the fees are not something that aren't automatically handled all the time by QuickBooks. When you have a I guess you call it a feed your bank feed right, it could be things coming in from PayPal. Well, PayPal takes a certain amount, a percentage, for transactions. Stripe takes a certain percentage, Everybody does. Quickbooks takes a certain percentage. You have to account for that in your bookkeeping and that is an important thing to categorize, because maybe you think you're making $100, but in reality you're making $98.53. And so that becomes an important thing.  18:43 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) It's incredibly important too, because, yes, you are not making the $100 to your point that you think you are, but that fee is a business expense, that fee is a cost of doing business, and so it does need to be accounted for appropriately. Now, does that mean that I am the person going through and marking every single fee?  19:03 No, that is why I have eventually outsourced that to a bookkeeper, but I do need to know the difference between how much should have come in and these fees, because the fees are an expense and those expenses do add up. So when you're looking at your profit and loss it's like whoa, what is this? You should understand that some of this is fees. Some of it is Danielle swiping the card for whatever thing, maybe a subscription, or maybe buying something for my business. But you should know the difference. And then that actually gives you the opportunity to decide and plan and budget for your business. Oh yeah, so if I can see what's going on with my expenses, maybe I've been spending a little bit too much on subscriptions. If I can cut that back, then I can use that additional money to take a class or to do a coaching or whatever. It gives you the knowledge and it arms you with like what you need to be financially responsible for running your business.  20:00 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And also it helps you to determine as well what to charge. Yeah, because sometimes I take fees into account. I do believe that fees are part of being a business. So I'm not that one person who says, can you pay me friends and family? Because if it's a business, I mean I'm willing to pay that. I mean, if I can get away with it, sure, not paying that fee, but in reality I'm a business.  20:24 So I've come to accept that there will be a fee and so if I want to make it accountable, right, I'm going to have to pay that fee. So I might. Then, instead of charging $100 for the job, I might charge $125. And then I've accounted for that fee in my head, but I haven't told anybody that I'm accounting. Necessarily, the company doesn't need to know that I'm charging $25 more because I want to account for that fee, or whatever I decide to do. I mean, that's one thing is being aware of those expenses as you are getting paid will help you to determine your fair compensation. And of course, we always like to say that you are worth it. Yes, you are, so price yourself appropriately.  21:03 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) And I think being aware it means really looking at like the data of your business. That's how you become aware. Really looking at like the data of your business, that's how you become aware.  21:13 If you allow someone else to deal with it, then you're not really aware of what's going on with your business and you're missing out on some opportunities for maybe charging more or maybe how you can save money because you're spending a certain amount more than you should or more than you've budgeted. Staying on top of the basics of the bookkeeping really kind of keeps you aware of what's going on in your business. Again, I'll say I've not done a great job at this in the past and I'm learning from my negligence in the past is really that like. If I can keep my mind and my eyes on the day-to-day expenses and profit in my business, that actually makes me feel so much more confident and competent when I am requesting or making a quote for a certain amount of money. However, I'm running my business.  21:59 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) It's giving me so much more confidence because I know the day-to-day data of my business financially speaking, yeah it is absolutely important and, as I was alluding to before, being an online girl, like an online shopper, when I went off on that tangent of Amazon, sometimes it's like a little bit of an addiction. It's like here, click, buy, and it's so easy. And again, it's so easy to not look right, it's so easy to not look at your credit card expenses, or so easy to like kind of avoid it. And I'm that person. I'm willing to admit it. I mean, I've been in denial. I might have had a month or two where I was like way overspent, I shouldn't have purchased that.  22:36 But I think keeping your eyes on your finances it's kind of like you know, I've been on this health journey, right, and before I wouldn't look at the scale, I would not look, I did not weigh myself for a long, long time and now, all of a sudden, when you're watching right, it makes you become more conscious and it keeps you more on top of things.  22:51 So I do believe it's very important for you to really check those finances, check the bookkeeping, and it'll really, like you said, make you feel so much more confident and so much more competent right in running that business, because you will have a handle on. Okay, I know that I'm not really utilizing this subscription software anymore, so I can maybe give that up and then maybe invest in something else. So it really clears the path for you to grow. And I think that is one thing that is so important in our businesses that we should always be looking for opportunities to grow and financial anything should not be inhibiting us from doing that. If you can find ways to save, find ways to be aware of your finances and understand, oh, I can save something here, so that means I can invest more here, that's just going to give you a whole lot more confidence moving forward.  23:41 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, I love that. And also, if you're not sure and you have questions, the best place to ask those questions or the best person to ask those questions is to the person who knows your business intimately and also what the implications are. So that would be an accountant or that would be some sort of professional. It's not going to the Facebook groups and saying, hey, can I expense? Blah, blah, blah, because what I can expense in my business may be different than what you can expense in your business and my revenue and ability to expense certain things in my business can maybe withstand me spending a certain amount of money on a certain category.  24:16 So my answer might be not the right answer for your business. So I think it's really important to educate yourself. Find the perfect person to educate you, and it's someone who knows your business. And if you don't work with an accountant already, find someone, have them look at the numbers of your business. And if you don't work with an accountant already, find someone, have them look at the numbers of your business and then they can tell you specifically the answer to your specific unique business.  24:39 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) And they can help you set up those categories which we say are so important, right and then? So I would say absolutely kind of, to recap right, your essentials of bookkeeping are to really keep an eye on a daily, weekly basis on inflows and outflows, understand your categories and if you don't know how to categorize something, you can certainly talk to your bookkeeper or someone knowledgeable that can help you with that. And is it an expense, yes or no? You can find out more that way and ask someone that this is what they do for a living I mean, I'm a big proponent of that and educate yourself on the basics of looking at a profit and loss statement, because I think that's going to be so important in helping you to really organize and make plans and strategize your goals for the future.  25:24 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Absolutely.  25:26 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Oh, another wonderful Money Talks with Danielle today. Thanks so much for joining me again. I'm looking forward to our next podcast, Thanks and me too.  25:36 - Danielle Famble (Co-host) Yeah, I love it. I love talking money.  25:38 - Anne Ganguzza (Host) Yes, and a big shout out to IPDTL you too can connect and network like bosses. Find out more at IPDTLcom. Bosses, have an amazing week and make sure to check those books. We'll see you next week.  25:52 - Intro (Announcement) Bye, guys, bye join us next week for another edition of vo boss, with your host and ganguza, and take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at vobosscom and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies and new ways to rock your business like a boss. Redistribution with permission. Coast-to-coast connectivity via IPDTL.   

Blah blah blah blah RUSH blah blah BLAH blah BLAH! Blah blah blah I GOT A SONG. Audio Clippies: Fishin' in the Dark - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Rocketown - Michael W. Smith My Place in This World - Michael W. Smith The Spirit of Radio - Rush Limelight - Rush Freewill - Rush Tom Sawyer - Rush Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison 

In this episode of the MindHack Podcast, we sit down with Tanith Carey, a psychology author and Gestalt psychotherapist-in-training, to explore the often overlooked issue of anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. Drawing from her latest book, "Feeling 'Blah'? Why Life Feels Joyless and How to Recapture Its Highs," Tanith delves into the relentless stressors of modern life and how they affect our brain's reward system, effectively taking it 'off line.'Tanith shares her personal journey with anhedonia and provides a deep understanding of how our high-speed, high-stress lifestyles contribute to this condition. Rather than pursuing the elusive concept of happiness, Tanith focuses on finding moments of joy in our challenging world. She offers actionable strategies to help listeners reclaim these moments despite the pressures of modern life.Join us as we uncover the biochemical underpinnings of joy and learn practical steps to navigate the complexities of the modern world, ensuring you can overcome anhedonia and find joy in everyday life. This insightful discussion is packed with expert advice and real-world solutions to help you reconnect with life's pleasures. Don't miss this episode if you're looking to transform your life and rediscover joy amid today's stressors.About this GuestWebsiteTwitterInstagramFacebookLinktreeLinkedInYouTubeListen on Apple PodcastListen on SpotifyDownload as an MP3Feeling 'Blah'?: Why Life Feels Joyless and How to Recapture Its Highs by Tanith CareyOther books herePeople & Other Mentionsmesolimbic pathwayAndrew HubermanAnhedoniaADHDBurnoutFMRI ScanLearning to Listen, Listening to Learn: Building Essential Skills in Young Children by Mary Renck Jalongo

On today's episode, Jonathan and Sy have a catch-up conversation on the assassination attempt, the Vance VP pick, Biden stepping down, and Harris stepping up. Then they talk with UCLA professor Robert Chao Romero about:-        What everyday life was like for immigrants during Trump's administration-        How MAGA Christians' treatment of immigrants reveals a lack of spiritual discernment-        What Professor Romero would say to immigrants who think voting won't make a difference-        And the complicated, diverse politics of Latine voters in AmericaMentioned in the Episode-            Our anthology, Keeping the Faith-            Tamice Spencer-Helms reading an excerpt of Faith Unleavened-            Professor Romero's Instagram-            And his book, Brown ChurchCredits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscriptIntroduction[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Robert Romero: In the context of the life of worship, we are to reflect upon scripture, upon the 2000-year-old tradition of the church, and to add Latino theology, en conjunto, or in community, with the local church, with the global church, with the church that's there with Jesus right now, even. And there has to be a continuity, a harmony between new scriptural interpretations and our ancestors that have gone before us. And so if you just run that test [laughs], that criteria, the MAGA movement through that doesn't make any sense.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. This is gonna be an interesting episode. Today we're breaking our format a little bit because just so many things have happened since the last time that we recorded. I don't know if you've noticed, Jonathan, a couple of things happened in the news [laughs] since the last time we recorded this show.Jonathan Walton: A few historical events.Sy Hoekstra: Just a few historical events. So we're still gonna have an interview with one of the authors from the anthology that we published on Theology and Politics. This week it will be Robert Chao Romero, who is a lawyer, history PhD, professor, pastor, activist. No big deal, the usual combination of the regular career path that everyone takes. But before we do that, we are going to spend some time talking about the assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the JD Vance pick for Vice President, Joe Biden stepping down, the almost certain nomination of Kamala Harris. And while we will probably talk about a couple of the resources that we've highlighted in our newsletter on those subjects, we're not gonna formally do our Which Tab Is Still Open this time around. There's just too much…Jonathan Walton: There's a lot. There's a lot.Sy Hoekstra: …to talk about, and we wanted to get all that in. Plus the really, really great interview with Professor Romero. But before we get into all of that, Jonathan.Jonathan Walton: Hey, if you like what you hear and read from KTF Press and would like for it to continue beyond the election season, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber, and encourage others to do the same. We've got a ways to go before we're going to have enough people to sustain the work we're doing after the election. So if that's you, go to KTFPress.com, sign up, become a paid subscriber, and then tell a friend to do the same thing. That gets you all the bonus episodes of this show, access to our monthly Zoom chats with the two of us and some other great subscribers. And so go to KTFPress.com and subscribe.The Assassination Attempt on Donald TrumpSy Hoekstra: Alright Jonathan. Let's start with the big one. Well, no, they're all big ones.Jonathan Walton: No, they're all big for different people, for different reasons [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: For very different reasons.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: The assassination attempt in Pennsylvania at the rally, just before the RNC. The media reaction to this, Jonathan, has struck me as a little bit odd. I don't know what you've been thinking, but let's hear what you're thinking, what your reaction to the assassination attempt was and to the conversation around it.Not Taking Part in the News Spectacle of the AssassinationJonathan Walton: Yeah. So my immediate reaction was, okay, if this had happened in 2016, I think I would've pulled my phone up and writing things, processing, trying to figure things out, all those kinds of things. When I heard this news, I was on the beach in California with my family, and I honestly was not troubled. And that was weird to me. I was not worried, I was not concerned. I thought to myself, “Man, if I was orienting my life around the decisions of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, I would probably be losing my insert word [laughs], but I'm not.” And I also thought about, oh, if I am someone on the quote- unquote left, my brain would be spinning. How is this gonna be politically, what's the impact? Blah, blah, blah. And I just wasn't. And so in that immediate moment, I felt empathy for folks that were feeling that type of dissonance.And the way that I felt towards Donald Trump actually came from a conversation I had with Priscilla, because she was sharing and just the reality that we don't want to participate in the spectacle of it. Reality in TV is an oxymoron that shouldn't exist. Our lives are not entertainment. The intimacies of life should not be broadcast and monetized and commented on as though all of us are all of a sudden now in a glass, I mean [laughs], to reference not the book, but just the image. But that all of us are now like a glass menagerie that we can just observe one another and comment as if we're not people. Those are the initial feelings that I had.Why Wasn't the Shooter Considered Suspicious?Jonathan Walton: The last feeling that I had was actually highlighted by someone from our emotionality activist cohort. He said that he felt angry because the shooter was labeled as suspicious, but not dangerous. And he said, if this had been a BIPOC person, Black, indigenous person of color, there would've absolutely been a response.Sy Hoekstra: Especially at a Trump rally.Jonathan Walton: At a Trump rally, there would've been a response to a suspicious person of color. That would've been fundamentally different place as evidenced by the very real reality, I think a few days later at an event where there was a Black person that was killed by the police [laughs] near a political rally. So I think there, no, there was an altercation, there was a very real threat of violence between these two people, but the responses to Black people and people of color and the impoverished and all these different things that it, it's just a fundamentally different thing because they saw this 20-year-old kid who isn't old enough to buy alcohol, but old enough to get his hands on an AR-15 to scope out a place and shoot someone wasn't seen as a threat. And I think that is a unique frustration and anger, because I hadn't thought about that, but I hold that too.Sy Hoekstra: Just to emphasize that he was, the local police officers actually did try and flag this person as someone who was suspicious. They didn't do anything about it, but they noted it. You know what I mean?Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Which is even more… Like his behavior was suspicious enough for him to be noticed by law enforcement, but they didn't actually do anything, and then they reported it to whoever was running campaign security, and they didn't do anything about it either.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I don't know. Yes, that is a good and sad point, and I appreciate you bringing it up.We Have to Insist on the Value of Trump's LifeJonathan Walton: Well, what about for you?Sy Hoekstra: I mean, I guess my response to, two different angles of response to it. One is to anybody, I know there are people out there who are like, “Trump is a fascist, Trump is a threat to democracy, I just wish he'd been hit in the head.” And I don't think anyone in, I haven't heard anybody in the mainstream media or politicians or anyone saying that, because that would be too far for them in their [laughs] policies and their politeness and all that. But there are people thinking it, and I just, I don't know. I just have to say that we can't do that.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely not.Sy Hoekstra: We can't be the people who dehumanize somebody to that degree. I agree that he's a fascist and that he wants to, and that he is a huge threat to our democracy and all of that. But to then say, “I wish he was dead,” that puts you on his level. That makes you like him, the person who mocks when other people have had assassination attempts on them, like Nancy Pelosi or Gretchen Whitmer. Or who encourages and stands behind all the people who were in the January 6th riot that did actually kill people, right?Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: You don't become him, is what I'm saying to anybody who's thought or been tempted to have those thoughts. We still have to stick to the image of God and everybody as a principal. Even when it's genuinely tempting not to, because there are serious considerations on the other side of that argument [laughs] if that makes sense.Jonathan Walton: Yes, yes.Sy Hoekstra: It's a terrible thing to talk about, but it's, I think it's worth addressing.Jonathan Walton: Absolutely.We Do Not Need to Tone Down Our Rhetoric about Trump's Threat to DemocracySy Hoekstra: But I also have to say the opposite side of like, we must call for unity. We must call to lower the political rhetoric and the political temperature. When it comes to Donald Trump, that is ridiculous.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: That is a, you can't do that [laughter]. And the reason is, first of all, he's the one mocking other people's attempts that have happened on their lives, or riots that actually led to people dying, right?Jonathan Walton: Yes. Yes.Sy Hoekstra: So for him or the people who support him to say, “Oh, now we need to call for unity or rhetoric to come down,” it's hypocritical on their part. Now, that doesn't matter. I'm not trying to just be like whatabouting the Republicans. But the issue is like, there's different kinds of heated political rhetoric. When you obviously accuse somebody of being a threat to democracy, that's a charged statement for sure that you shouldn't say lightly. However, the people who are arguing it now are arguing it on the basis of Donald Trump's words and actions [laughs]. They're making a real good faith argument based on actual evidence. It's heated nonsense political rhetoric when Donald Trump says that there's an invasion at the southern border…Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: …and you're just painting poor people who are fleeing violence, trying to find safety in an opportunity in America as invaders who are here to, well, like he said, killers and rapists and drug dealers and whatever.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: When you're just painting with a broad brush, when you're creating stereotypes, when you're just trying to slide people into a category, that's dehumanization and that's what can lead to violence. When you're actually making an argument against something that people have actually done, like words that people have said and actions that they have taken, that's a different story. And it is true that in a country of 320 million people, even if you make a good faith argument based on facts, that somebody's a threat to democracy, somebody might take that as a reason to shoot at them. But that's not anything over which we have any control.Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: That doesn't mean you stop saying things that are true because they're… you know what I mean? That then I wouldn't say anything about anybody. I would just keep my mouth shut all the time. I can't make any arguments about anything because what if somebody just happens to at the wrong moment take that as license to go attack somebody?Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So all of that stuff seemed like nonsense to me. And then people were like, “Oh, don't talk about how it's gonna help his campaign.” Of course, it's gonna help his campaign. And of course the Republicans are going to use it to help his campaign. We need to be realistic about what we're talking about here [laughs] in the context of our conversation. So I think those were my reactions to all of this. I think because as soon as he was shot at, I, because he wasn't hit, I knew he was fine. So I wasn't particularly scared about it. I didn't have like a lot of emotions around the thing itself, because the guy missed him [laughs].Americans Condemning Political Violence is HypocrisyJonathan Walton: Yeah. I think I'll also say too, it's the idea that all of a sudden, we are gonna step out and condemn political violence, let's be clear. There's an exceptional level of political violence enacted by the United States every single day against its own people, against people around the world. There are 900 bases where political violence is happening. We tried to assassinate a leader a few months ago in the Congo. Let's be clear that the reality of that statement too is just ridiculously hypocritical and ignorant.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: Right. Like just Biden did rattle off some political violence that I think we, the quote- unquote dominant cultural narrative is okay with calling out, but we also have to just name the reality that we are actively participating in things that are politically violent.Sy Hoekstra: All the time.Jonathan Walton: Yeah [laughs] all the time. For example [laughs], Biden said, oh, yeah, we're not gonna ship bombs to Israel anymore, and the reality is we shipped thousands of bombs.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: That level of comfort with ignorance and hypocrisy and the dissemination, or just sharing that widely, is also something not about the event itself, but our dominant narrative response and the legacy media's response was just, that was disheartening to say the least.Sy Hoekstra: It's a very good point. And I would point out that Trump himself had a general in Iran assassinated [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right. Yes.Sy Hoekstra: It's just like, it's complete nonsense.Jonathan Walton: He did. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: For us to be like, “Where does political violence come from in America? I don't know.”Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: The many presidential assassinations and lynchings and pogroms and everything else. Like what? I don't know.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: We should note, by the way, as I'm listening to you talk, Jonathan's at home and children are not in school, they're home from daycare [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Oh, yes. Yes. Our house is very full. Thank you for being gracious.Sy Hoekstra: You'll hear some adorable little voices in the background. I'm sure everyone will enjoy it all.The VP Pick of J. D. VanceSy Hoekstra: Jonathan, let's talk JD Vance. What are you thinking about this pick [laughs]?Vance Is Everything Trump Wishes He Was, and Could Lead for a Long TimeJonathan Walton: Oh, Lord! I think the thing that bothers me about JD Vance, as my daughter screams [laughs], is Donald Trump picked someone who reflects all of the values that he has and wants to espouse.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: So Donald Trump would love to say that he grew up poor and is a working class man, all those things. He's not, but JD Vance, quote- unquote, is. He desperately wants to say he made it and served his country and all the… No, he didn't.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: But JD Vance is a Marine and quote- unquote actually built a business. Now, JD Vance is also exceptionally misogynistic, exceptionally patriarchal, exceptionally individualistic in the way that Bootstrap Republicanism tries to embody itself. And so he chose someone at the same time that did not have the apprentice. That did not go on reality television. That did not spend his life entertaining people, so I think he is going to be taken seriously, which is why he's dragging Donald Trump in the polls. I think what happened is the wholesale remaking of a section of the Republican party that has now taken it over, and he chose a leader that could be the voice of that for the next 25 years. And that I think is sad [laughs] because I do believe in a pluralistic society where people can share ideas and wrestle and make good faith arguments and argue for change and all those things.So I don't want some one party event that happens. At the same time, I think it is exceptionally unnerving and unsettling and destabilizing for someone who holds such views against women that we will absolutely see, obviously when we talk about Kamala Harris. But what he, what Donald Trump blessed and sent out, JD Vance will now bless and send out for the next few decades at least. And that if you wanted to give a new, like a reiteration of Strom Thurmond, here we go. He's 38, he could be talking and on TV and doing things for the next 50 years, and that is deeply unsettling for me.Vance Is a Sellout, but That Probably Won't Matter MuchSy Hoekstra: It's also interesting that he's someone who's doing it as a sellout.Jonathan Walton: Oh, yeah. A thousand percent.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Meaning he was not… he was a never Trumper for a while. He called Trump possibly America's Hitler at one point. And now he totally turned around once he ran for Senate because he saw where the wind was blowing.Jonathan Walton: Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: If nothing else, his Silicon Valley background lets him understand disruption and how to capitalize on uncertainty and when things are changing [laughs]. So yeah, that's an interesting one to me. I kind of wondered if that would make Trumpers not trust him or even not trust Trump, because he isn't… So much of the Trump worldview that he tries to inculcate in people is us versus them, and we need to demand loyalty because there's so much danger out there coming at us. And so a guy who flip flops to become a pro-Trump person, like a lot of… I don't know, there have been a lot of politicians like that who have been distrusted, but maybe he's just famous enough that it doesn't matter. I'm not sure. We'll see as it goes on. There's a possibility that he weakens the enthusiasm of Trump voters, but I don't actually know.Jonathan Walton: They chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” So I don't put that beyond them, beyond anybody.Sy Hoekstra: I see. They can always separate Trump from anybody else, basically.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: He's the exception no matter what [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right, right, right.Vance Helps with the Tech World, but He's Unexperienced and Hasn't Accomplished MuchSy Hoekstra: Another thing about him is, well, there's a couple of things. One is he is, he was a pick, at least in part to court tech billionaires. He's a Peter Thiel protege. He's basically promising to deregulate all kinds of tech related things. He is helping Trump secure the support of Musk and Zuckerberg and everybody else.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So, I don't know. He was a strategic pick in that sense, I guess. He's also one that was a strategic pick when they were facing Joe Biden.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Which they're not anymore, and it's an interesting, I don't know, it'll be a different kind of calculation. Now, I've heard some rumblings that some Republicans kind of regret the choice at this point because [laughs] it's gonna be such a different race.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: It's also incredible to me that the entire Republican ticket now has a total of six years of government experience [laughter]. It's just like, so Trump has done it for four years. Vance has done it for two, that's all we got. Six years.Jonathan Walton: Right, right.Sy Hoekstra: Kamala's got that beat like by multiples, by herself with no running mates [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Right, right, right.Sy Hoekstra: So anyways, that's just kind of a remarkable thing. Vance is also totally, he hasn't done much in the Senate in terms of bills that he's introduced, but he has introduced things that haven't gone anywhere that are just like a bunch of transphobic and anti-DEI and all that kind of legislation. So he's been not doing much, but ideologically on doing the kinds of things that Trump wants a senator to do. So that's another part of the pick, which is also depressing. But let's move on from that sad one.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Biden Stepping Down, Harris Taking OverSy Hoekstra: Jonathan, what are we thinking about Biden stepping down and the almost certain, possibly the only legal available nomination of [laughter] Kamala Harris to be the President of the United States?The Dynamics of White Boomers Passing Power to Younger BIPOCJonathan Walton: So, yeah, the first thing that I thought of when Biden said he was stepping down was that I knew he was gonna step down when he got COVID.Sy Hoekstra: Huh.Jonathan Walton: I think that's a very interesting thing because when we were in California traveling this past few weeks, we knew four families that got COVID. And then I checked the numbers and I realized, oh, like the numbers in cities are going up because they're still testing water, right? And obviously the most susceptible people are older people and people with chronic health problems. And he is an older person [laughs]. Like, it was another thing…Sy Hoekstra: I don't know if you noticed.Jonathan Walton: …that says you're old, right? Like, and that, that Steve Bannon was right. He started the old train a long time ago, and it has run its course and run him out of the election. So I was not surprised that he was dropping out. The second thing about it though is, and I don't know if there's more writing about this. If you're listening to this and you have read some analysis or commentary, I'd love to read it. But I wonder how boomers are transitioning from positions of power, and if they are or not [laughs]. Because Joe Biden, I think, signifies a generation of people that don't know how to let go of power. And he said that in his speech. He said like, “I have to give up ambition.”And so I think that was an interesting, that's just an interesting thing to think about as there is a very significant, I think in the trillions of dollars' worth of transfers of wealth from that generation to their children and grandchildren. The billionaires that have been minted in the United States are just people inheriting money. So it's just a fundamentally different thing around wealth and power that's happening, I think, as it is power quote- unquote, is given from one older White man to a middle aged Black woman. Right? Black and South Asian. And so the other thing I thought about with Joe Biden is that he also was on the ticket that coordinated Obama.And so he's the meat in the middle of this sandwich that I think is also very interesting [laughs], that he leveraged his power to effectively potentially elect the first two Black presidents of the United States.Sy Hoekstra: Now, to be fair, he did run against the first one in the primary [laughs].Jonathan Walton: He did, and he lost, and then he joined a ticket, right?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.What We Can and Can't be Grateful to Biden ForJonathan Walton: And so, I think it's interesting that that's a thing. I will also say, for all the people, left, right, center, wherever you place yourself, thanking him and praising him and all these different things, I'm just not on that train.Sy Hoekstra: Huh? Why?Jonathan Walton: I've thought a little bit about this, and I'm continuing to think about this, but there's a tension that I feel generally for the processes and the participation and the hard decisions that we have to make every day that require necessary compromise and then violence as a result. And so when we talk about being grateful for things, like, “Oh, Jonathan, aren't you grateful for like soldiers, or grateful for America?” And it's like, the first thought that I have is, thankful to who for what? Who am I thanking, what am I thanking them for? And I think it's because I just have this resistance, and I desire this purity that only is found in Jesus. This purity, this wonder, this beauty, this justice, this love that is blemishless, right? So I find myself, it's very difficult for me to be like, “Thank you Joe for this work that you did 10 years ago, this work you did five years ago.” It's hard. I'm just like, you know, thanks.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, I see.Jonathan Walton: Blessings on you on the rest of your life. I hope that you are able to flourish and receive all the things that God has. It's very general, very cursory. I don't carry this deep respect, appreciation or anything like that. And I think that just comes from like, I attach people to institutional violence and he represents a lot, a staggering amount of institutional violence. Even though he fought for lots of good things, it's like, yeah, it's hard for me to get on that appreciation bandwagon of the last 50 years of service.Sy Hoekstra: I totally understand that. I thought you were talking about, because a thing that I think you can acknowledge is difficult to do is to step down.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: In the situation that he's in, there are so many people telling him not to. It's so easy, especially if you have that ambition that he's obviously had his whole life.Jonathan Walton: For his whole life, yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Decades, he has wanted to be president, right?Jonathan Walton: [laughs]. Right.Sy Hoekstra: And he just wants to hang onto it and…Jonathan Walton: Let me into the sandbox! Let me in [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: And it's hard to just admit, “I'm tapped out guys. I can't do this anymore.”Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: That is not an easy thing to do. And I do, in spite of all the criticisms that I a hundred percent agree with you with about the time that he spent in the presidency and in Congress and everything else, that's hard. And I can acknowledge when somebody did something hard that is helpful for the country [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.Sy Hoekstra: And because it is hard, I did not expect it. It's interesting that you did, but I didn't know that was coming.Harris and Why Representation is ImportantSy Hoekstra: I also, when it comes to Harris, who by the way, I said Kamala earlier. I'm trying not to do that, because it can't be that the two, Hillary and Kamala, we use their first names. Everybody else we use their last names [laughs].Jonathan Walton: The soft misogyny. I hear you, you're right.Sy Hoekstra: Everybody calls her Kamala though. It's like hard not to.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So I'm not the guy to explain why her running is so historically important in any detail, and there's gonna be a lot of very shallow attempts at talking about representation in the mainstream media. Which is why in the newsletter, I pointed people back to Tamice's book, because in the book that we published, Faith Unleavened, Tamice Spencer-Helms, the author, has a really great excerpt that we published and actually put as a episode of this podcast feed. I'll have the link in the show notes where she talks about, like Kamala Harris just comes at the end of the excerpt, but it's in the context of her talking about the stories of generations of women in her family and how they've served as a barrier or a bulwark against White religion and Whiteness destroying their lives.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And the story ends in a scene that has never once failed to make me tear up [laughs] even though I edited it like 15 times [laughter] when we were making the book. It ends with her and her grandmother, and her grandmother's basically on her deathbed watching Kamala Harris get sworn in as vice president. And she does an incredible job of emphasizing the power and meaning of something like that happening without really talking about it. You know what I mean? It just is because it's part of her story as she puts it, like the story that Blackness is telling in America. So it's very, very good. If you haven't read it, I would go back and just grab a couple of tissues.And for me, I won't just let that story sit there, and the fact that it is important to sit there, because look, I have a lot of criticisms of Kamala Harris' policies [laughs] as a former prosecutor, as her foreign policy, as all those kinds of things, and I am willing to let all of that sit in tension together. And I will move on with my life, but I don't know if you have more thoughts about that, Jonathan.Resisting the Bigotry that Is Coming for HarrisJonathan Walton: Yeah. The only thing that I would say, and actually it's already happening. But the level of anti-Black, anti-woman, racist, misogynistic, patriarchal flood that is about to happen, will be unprecedented.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: Online right now, even on Fox News, like on Fox News this morning, one of their commentators said, “Kamala Harris is the original ‘hawk tuah girl,' that's how she got to where she is.” Now, if you don't know what that is, I'm gonna explain it very quickly in ways that I hope are not dehumanizing to the person that actually did this and the people that it was said about. But there was a young woman who was taped on TikTok, who was asked about how to get a man more aroused. And she said, you gotta do that Hawk Tua, and that really gets them going. There's a slice of the internet, which we are all becoming more familiar with if you're online, that still desires the Girls Gone Wild videos of the 1990s, the centering of men constantly in sexual pleasure and relationships, and the picture of women only being able to succeed or excel if they are in service to men, and absolutely never achieving anything or earning anything on their own merit.And so I think Ketanji Brown Jackson, when she was certified and confirmed as a Supreme Court nominee, I think will give a slice of the anti DEI, anti CRT, anti-Black female, anti-female narrative, but that will pale in comparison to what we are about to see. And I think followers of Jesus need to resist that at every single level. At every single level if we can. Individual, in our own hearts, like us saying “Vice President Harris” is a way not to participate. Right? Like in an interpersonal level, like not… we have to check other people with this nonsense. And then in an institutional and ideological level, we actually need to communicate as followers of Jesus, that there is no place in the kingdom of God… and I would want to it to be nowhere in the world, for misogyny and misogynoir. Like this mix of anti-Blackness and anti-feminism and patriarchy. So that's the only other thing that I would say, is I just strongly desire in the most emphatic terms I can without using profanity that  [Sy laughs] we need to stand against them. We need to stand against that as followers of Jesus and people invested in the flourishing of other people and ourselves.Sy Hoekstra: It's going to happen. Like you said, it will be a ton. And just thinking back on all the absolute nonsense that was said about Obama over the eight years that he was president. I don't know how much we've progressed from there.Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: And so I just, it will be even worse…Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: As we've already seen, like you've said.Jonathan Walton: With all of that, there's a lot of things to process. There's frustration, anger, numbness, curiosity. Maybe some people are feeling peace. I don't know anybody who's feeling joyful about our political process right now. And so, as we are processing and trying to find hope in times of crisis and things that are difficult, I really want to commend to our listeners the resource that we created called Pace Yourself. So to pray, assess, collaborate, and establish, like to actually engage as a follower of Jesus in community for the long term.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: If you are someone who's sitting here listening and thinking to yourself, “I need a resource like this, I want community like this, I want to engage in this way,” if you're a subscriber already, it's in your inbox. Just search [laughs] in your KTF Press and look through your newsletters that you've received every Thursday. Also, if you are not a subscriber, you could get it for free. Just go to KTFPress.com and become a free subscriber. And it'd be better if you became a paid subscriber, but [laughs] I understand if you don't wanna do that right now. But go to KTFPress.com, become a free subscriber and get that resource. And I also want to comment to you like, we do not have to do these things alone. And so if you are a paid subscriber, you could also join our monthly chats and conversations so that there's a space. It may not be at your church, it may not be at your job, it may not be at your kitchen table. You'll at least have a one-hour Zoom call to talk with some people who want to be redemptive forces in the world. So we'll lay that out there as well.Sy Hoekstra: Absolutely. We've had two of them and they've been really great.Jonathan Walton: Amazing.Sy Hoekstra: And we hope we see you all at the next one.Introducing the Interview Guest, Robert Chao RomeroJonathan Walton: Now we're gonna get into our great interview with Robert Chao Romero. Professor Romero is an associate professor in the UCLA departments of Chicano and Chicana studies. Also, the Central American Studies Department and the Asian American Studies Department. He received his PhD from UCLA and Latin American History. He's also a lawyer with a JD from UC Berkeley. Romero is the author of several books, including Christianity and Critical Race Theory: A Faithful, Constructive Conversation, Brown Church: Five Centuries of Latina/o Social Justice, Theology and Identity, and The Chinese in Mexico: 1882-1940. The Chinese in Mexico received the best book award in Latino/ Latina studies from the Latin American Studies Association, and Brown Church received InterVarsity Press' Reader's' Choice Award for the best academic title.Romero is also an ordained minister and a faith rooted community organizer. Now, we talked to him about the everyday reality of the lives of immigrants under the Trump administration, what those lives tell us about the spiritual state of the MAGA movement, and the diverse and complicated politics of Latine voters in America. And guys, a lot more. Alright, let's get into the interview.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Robert, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust today.Robert Romero: It's great to reconnect after a while.The Everyday Suffering of Immigrants under TrumpSy Hoekstra: Yeah, thank you. Just to get started, let's take a… I don't know, a kind of sad walk down memory lane [laughs]. Thinking back to the Trump administration, obviously you have a lot of experience both in immigration, the immigration law world, and in just the world of immigrant churches. And I'm wondering if you could give people a reminder or a picture of what the immigration world was like during the Trump administration.Robert Romero: Sure, I can share a story of one of my students. So in the beginning of the Trump administration, I was teaching a big lecture class, like 400 students. And there was a young woman who came up to me after class one day and said, “Professor Romero, can I get the lecture slides from the last few classes?” And I'm like, “Yeah, sure. What's happening?” And she said, “My mom has papers, she has legal documentation, but she was swept up by an immigration raid in her workplace, and I had to go home and watch my kids, and it took six days before we could find her.”Sy Hoekstra: Oh, wow.Robert Romero: And that's when I knew, oh my gosh, this is gonna be really bad. And so one of the things that launched things off in the Trump world with regards to immigration was an executive order that he passed, which took away any type of prioritization with regards to deportation. Now, the Obama administration was no friend to immigrants, and that's another conversation. But in theory, at least the Obama administration had a prioritization as to kind of who immigration would target as priorities for deportation. And on top of that list before was people with serious criminal convictions, who were undocumented with serious criminal convictions, and then families were at the very bottom. And there was kind of this internal policy. What the Trump administration did through that executive order is take away any type of prioritization, as imperfect as that prioritization was.So my student's mother and the people at her workplace, families, people who had worked in the US for 30 years, they were put on the same level and prioritization as someone who had many serious criminal offenses, for example. And I can tell you that also happened with Pastor Noe Carias that we worked with. He was an Assemblies of God pastor who came to the US in the eighties fleeing civil war. He had his own business, US citizen wife and two US citizen kids, and he was threatened to be deported. So many stories like that, it just created chaos and pain throughout the lives of millions of people.Sy Hoekstra: I'm glad that you brought up that one executive order deprioritizing things, because that's not something that made the headlines. And I know because my wife who listeners to the show would be familiar with, was an immigration attorney at the time, and she was dealing with all these tiny little things that did not make the headlines or whatever, that the Trump administration would just adjust, that would just make things that much harsher and that much more cruel on immigrants. And the result was like the human cost that you were just explaining. And then on the service providers on top of that, it was like if you have to drop everything you're doing and spend a bunch of time making new arguments or appealing cases, or in some cases dropping everything to bring a big class action lawsuit to try and stop some rule change or whatever, that is a decrease in your capacity, that then means you can't work with more people.Like my wife spent a lot of time where she was just taking no new cases on, she was just appealing all the cases that had been denied because of ridiculous rule changes that eventually got overturned. But in the meantime, a whole bunch of clients that would've been eligible for green cards lost the opportunity or whatever. And so I very much appreciate you bringing that perspective.Robert Romero: I remember another example. I remember at the time, the Diocese of San Antonio, Texas, that's one of the largest Catholic diocese in the whole country. They were trying to sponsor a special religious worker and [laughs] their application got denied because ICE wanted proof that they were a legitimate 501 C3 corporation [laughs] the Diocese of San Antonio.Sy Hoekstra: The Catholic church?Robert Romero: The Catholic church, yeah [laughs]. And it's like those kinds of shenanigans.Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.MAGA's treatment of Immigrants Reveals a Lack of Spiritual DiscernmentJonathan Walton: Wow. Oh man. I'm gonna attempt to ask this question without going down too many rabbit trails because that just sounds ridiculous [laughs]. But in your essay, you said, “Jesus warns us soberly in Matthew 25, that our response to immigrants and the poor is a barometer of the sincerity of our relationship with God,” end quote. To you, what does all that stuff we just talked about reveal spiritually about the MAGA movement?Robert Romero: So that interpretation of Matthew 25, that our response to the poor and immigrants reflects our heart with God, that's an ancient tradition. Ancient Christian interpretation, thousands of years. And I think that what that reveals about the MAGA movement, it shows how much the culture of US nationalism that's embedded within MAGA has become so conflated with Christianity in the US that people have lost discernment. They've lost discernment. In other words, this is one of my reflections over the last couple of months. When you really get down to it, these issues that we're talking about, it's a discernment process, spiritual discernment process between what is culture, what is the gospel, what happens when the gospel becomes invited into a culture, and how do you distinguish between the gospel and culture?And now here's the tricky part [laughs]. The gospel has only expressed itself and always only expresses itself through culture. First the gospel came through the Jewish people, enculturated in that context, then became enculturated in the Greco-Roman Hellenistic context among Turkish people, among North Africans [laughs] among Persian people, among all these people. Then it became enculturated later on in more Western Europe, and then in about a thousand AD, like the Vikings, and Christianity becomes enculturated. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's just the reality. And theologians talk about a process though of discernment with regards to enculturation. What is a biblical contextualization of the gospel in a local culture and what's not.And what they say is that the way that you discern, is that in the context of the life of worship, we are to reflect upon scripture, upon the 2000-year-old tradition of the church. And to add Latino theology, en conjunto, or in community, with the local church, with the global church, with the church that's there with Jesus right now, even. And there has to be a continuity, a harmony between new scriptural interpretations and our ancestors that have gone before us. And so if you just run that test [laughs], that criteria, the MAGA movement through that doesn't make any sense. And we can talk more about that, but that's what I've been… thank you for giving me the chance to just throw that out on you, because that's what I've been thinking about. I've been dying to share it and to process it with people.Sy Hoekstra: The immediate response from people in the MAGA movement is, well, from Christians in the MAGA movement at least, would be, we're the orthodox ones and the people who oppose us are the ones with the new interpretations of scripture that are going off the rails and trying to destroy American culture and et cetera, et cetera.Robert Romero: Sure.Sy Hoekstra: So why are you coming to such a radically different conclusion?Robert Romero: So first of all, orthodoxy means right praise, correct praise. That's what it means. So, as we said, this criteria, the context of the life of worship. So as people are worshiping Jesus, we're bearing one another's burdens, we're taking communion, we're praying to God. That's the context first of all that this discernment takes place. And you look at scripture, 2000 verses of scripture that talk about God's heart for the poor, and the marginalized and immigrants, Matthew 25, among about a hundred other verses. So first of all, MAGA would've to contend with that. Tradition, the tradition of the church for 2000 years from the earliest church records where they said it in the Greco-Roman world. “These Christians are so strange. They worship this…” I'll just paraphrase, “They worship this Jesus, but they belong to every culture.You cannot distinguish them by their dress or their language or their clothing, but by the way, they love one another, and they care for those that are poor and marginalized.” And there is a historical record of 2000 years of the church. And what MAGA is doing, it is not in continuity with that 2000 years of church tradition en conjunto, in community, because as Americans, we're so individualistic. People think, I'm gonna go into my prayer chamber, I'm gonna pray for two days and whatever I come out thinking about immigrants, God spoke to me. Doesn't work that way. It's like in community, all these things, the context of the life of worship, scripture, tradition of 2000 years in community with the local church, the global church, and also what theologians talk about is like another principle of continuity again.Whatever MAGA is saying has to… MAGA Christians, at least, there has to be continuity with 2000 years. And if you look at the history, I challenge anybody, there's no continuity there. Anti-immigrant sentiment, there's no continuity. And so that's what I would say first and just to kind of throw out a big concept there, the major concept that we're talking about, it's called inculturation. Inculturation. And how does the gospel enter a culture and transform it? How does a gospel enter a culture and heal it? But sometimes what happens is that a culture can become so culturally Christian that people confuse just the culture with the gospel. And if you run through this criteria, this ancient criteria of discernment, you'll find that's why prophets arise. And that's what's happened with MAGA.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. That's a helpful distinction, I think. Because you could also say, well, there's another tradition starting with the eastern half, the Roman Empire becoming Christian and creating Christian empires for a couple thousand years, right? But I think you're saying that just the phrase, “that's why prophets arise” [laughs], I think is the helpful distinction for me. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: You write about this a little bit in Brown Church, your other great book. There's this unhealthy syncretism, this marriage that has happened. And when you said the word “Orthodoxy” I immediately thought of a conversation I had with a wonderful person on Instagram. I am being facetious. But she said Israel is a nation ordained by God to exist in all these different things around 1948. And then and she said that's the orthodox view, is what she said. What would be your response to someone who divorces their belief in Jesus from the scriptural basis of Jesus and the tradition of, that missión integral, the conjunto that you're talking about, when they make that divorce, what do you do besides go to your prayer closet and pray for them [laughter]?Robert Romero: Yeah. I think that you go to the roots. If those of us who call ourselves Christians, we follow Jesus, and Jesus lived in history in a very specific moment in time, and he had 12 disciples and apostles, and he shared a message with them that he was the Messiah expected by the Jewish community. And that through this Messiah, the whole world would be transformed and saved and redeemed, there's a core message that was passed on from Jesus to the 12, to the leaders, the bishops that they appointed, to established churches. And there was, for the first 300 years of the church, lots of writings, lots [laughs] that established orthodoxy.So there was a core orthodoxy that Jesus established to use that term. I mean, it's anachronistic. Core message. That core Christian message was passed on to the 12. The 12 passed it on a majority consensus as to what that core was, to leaders that they appointed in Egypt, in Turkey [laughs], in Persia, in North Africa. And they had people that they appointed, and there were writings that developed. So, in other words, what I'm saying is you can trace what this major consensus of orthodoxy was pretty clearly through the historical record. And this is what I'm saying about history [laughs]. If you put MAGA through that, it's not in harmony with it.I'll say this though, if you use this criteria, this healthy criteria that have been established by theologians over the millennia, Christianity is not the same as the left either. I wanna make that clear as possible [laughs]. There are lots of Christians who make the same mistake and conflate Christianity with the cultural left, and it's not the same either. So there's room for abundant nuance and complication, but at the same time, there is a complicated, thoughtful process. And one of the things that disturbs me so much is that for the last five or 10 years, with all of the social disruptions in every arena of society, you have this positive desire to try to figure it out. Like what's right, what's wrong? And you have some people who are just holding on to this cultural Christianity, this cultural nationalism as indistinguishable from Christianity.You have some folks who are at the same time going the other extreme and throwing away 2000 years of very imperfect, but still the Christian movement. And things are just so disruptive, this process, I would hope this criteria again, and this is a work in progress for me, of we discern the difference between Christ and culture. We discern what aspects of culture are positive reflections of the gospel or not, or what's represents cultural impurity and what represents the unique reflection of the image of God through culture. We discern that. And I wanna share a quote that I think expresses the mess of the last 500 years. This is from an article by a Filipino theologian, José De Mesa. He's one of my favorite theologians.He is citing missionaries who were going to go to China in 1659. The quote again from 1659, “Can anyone think of anything more absurd than to transport France, Italy, or Spain or some other European country to China? Bring them your faith, not your country.”Jonathan Walton: There you go.Robert Romero: That's it [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bring them your faith, not your country.Robert Romero: Bring them your faith, not your MAGA movement.Reacting to People Who Think Voting Won't Make a Difference for ImmigrantsSy Hoekstra: I wanna transition a little bit because everything we've talked about so far is a little bit aimed at the MAGA movement, or at White Christians in America. But again, talking about my wife, her family is from Haiti, and during the 2020 election, she made some calls for the Biden campaign down to Miami and to, there's a lot of Haitian voters there, it's a swing state, they needed people calling. So she called potential Haitian American voters and was talking to them about the election. And she had some fascinating conversations [laughs]. But she had a couple people in particular who I think represent a certain segment of immigrants or the one or two generations after immigrants to the US who are not White.And they basically said, what on earth is the point of voting for Biden versus Trump? You were talking before about the Obama administration, and they were just like, Trump, Obama, Bush, we get treated the same. We get deported, we get forgotten, we get left behind. We get approached every four years to put somebody in power who then doesn't really do anything for us. What do you say to that kind of hopelessness?Robert Romero: Yeah. First of all, I totally get it and understand it, because it feels that way so much, so often. So I would first approach it on that level of like, okay, let's process. What are we feeling here? I get it. And then I would say, well, I guess I have a response just as a human being, and then a response as a Christian. So those are kind of related, but different things. I mean, just as a human being, as a US citizen, there was a substantial difference in the treatment of immigrants under the Trump administration. It was just like, it made people suffer. Millions of more people suffered in very specific ways when the policies changed under Trump. Again, under Obama, again, I don't think that he is perfect either, and he caused a lot of harm, but things were way worse. They got way worse.We didn't think they could be, but they got in very practical, specific ways under Trump. So depending upon who we vote for with respect to this topic of immigration, it makes a difference. It makes a huge difference. And that's because every president has the constitutional authority to set immigration policy on their own. They can't pass immigration laws, that's Congress's job, but they can pass hundreds of policies carte blanche, which is what Trump did, at their own discretion and mess people's lives up. That's what I would say. Like just as a human being, and in terms of Trump's potential to come back into office. Just as a human being, oh my gosh, I want our democracy to just survive.And he's signaled so many times that he's willing to just overturn the rule of law, and we can talk about that too. So that's just as a human being. Now, as a Christian [laughs], it's like, I know that there's no perfect candidate, and Jesus is not a Republican or a Democrat. And I know people go off the rails on both sides. At the same time, Christians, I think in good faith, can hold some different political perspectives. If we do that, run through that discernment process that I mentioned, we can come to good faith differences of opinion. We really can. That's just a hundred percent true.Jonathan Walton: I like how you said good faith differences.Robert Romero: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: That feels very [laughs] very important.Robert Romero: [laughs] Yes.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] Because I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, I would love to see an experience like good faith differences, where the other person isn't just dehumanized to the point of like, it's okay to do violence. That the reality that the first step towards violence against someone is dehumanization.Robert Romero: Yeah.The Diversity of Latine Voting and Politics in the USJonathan Walton: And so can we have good faith disagreement. And going along with that, I listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot of news, sometimes healthily, sometimes to just cope, I think the information [laughs]. But a lot of media outlets like The Run-Up on the New York Times, or Politico, or NPR, they make a big deal out of polling, saying Latine voters, particularly men, are somewhat more pro-Trump than they have been in recent years. And like, what are your thoughts on that talking point? And the diversity of Latin experiences and political thought in America?The Effect of Latin America's Racist History, and its Leftist DictatorshipsRobert Romero: Yeah. I mean, I don't doubt that those stats are somewhat true. I mean, I don't know. I haven't studied them. But I think that within, again we talk about this inculturation process, and how the gospel gets interwoven with bad aspects of culture, sinful even. And, but how the gospel also at the same time, when it engages a culture, it transforms the culture and heals the culture too. And our diverse Latin American Latino peoples, we've got both [laughs]. We have the sin [laughs] and our own colonial history of 500 years that is just as racist as the US history. Just as racist. And so I think that when it comes to more people supporting Trump, and I want to distinguish the support of Trump from a pre-Trump Republican party.Again, not that it was perfect or anything, but I wanna make that distinction [laughs], because there are some Latinos who just feel more aligned with again, the Republican party 15 years ago or something, for some reasons that are not entirely bad. Now, the folks that support Trump and Trump's racism, again, we're super, the Latino people are so diverse in every way imaginable. Politically, socially, economically, racially, ethnically, culturally, religiously. So I wanna make that disclaimer. But at the same time, we have our own 500 years of racism and colonial racist values that are within us. And so if a Latino male voter says, I like Trump because he's just, because I wanted to kick out all the immigrants or something like that, [laughs] then that's where that comes from.And it also comes from holding racist values in Latin America, bringing it here and wanting to fit into the racial system here. I'll say one last example. So in Latin America, for 500 years to this present day, there's a legacy of everybody wants to be called Spanish, quote- unquote.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Robert Romero: Because you had a racial hierarchy and caste system officially for about… let's see, 1492 to 1820 officially, this caste system. And just like in the US, you had a certain legal caste system, these terms of White, which was a legal category, Black, Indian and so forth. In Latin America you had the same thing, but the different terms. They were like Spanish and Black and Indian and Mestizo and Mulatto. And at one point they had dozens of terms. But that created the society in which people who were social climbers wanted to be considered Spanish. And to this day, some people will say that I'm Spanish. And doesn't mean… it's fine if someone's like, if someone immigrated from Spain to Mexico that's great. But we're not talking about that. We're talking about like, no one in their family has been to Spain like in 400 years.So Spanish is sort of, saying I'm Spanish is like a MAGA person saying, “Well, I'm White,” or something. It's like this, it can be. Not always so extreme, but now imagine someone that comes from that context in say Mexico, I can speak for my own context. They come to the US, they find a different racial hierarchy, and they wanna fit in with power. So you become Ted Cruz.Jonathan Walton: [laughs]. This is true.Robert Romero: You become Marco Rubio. Where you're willing to sort of just like… Actually, this is the term, this is another use of the term enculturation. You enculturate yourself fully to the dominant White racist narrative so that you can gain acceptance. And that's what happens. And so I think that some of those Latino Trump voters, again, if they're doing it, I mean, there's other reasons too. But if they're doing it because as an explicit endorsement of anti-immigrant policies, then I would say this is a lot of what's going on. Now, to be fair, some Latinos, and not without reason, are kind of scared off by, like they come from socialist countries that have really in a lot of pain and hurt. And they hear someone on the extreme left of the Democratic party reminding them too much of what it was like in Nicaragua [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Or Cuba or whatever.Robert Romero: Or Cuba. Yeah, I mean, I remember I was talking to a Cuban taxi driver who had just come to the US five years ago, and he said, “I'd rather someone shoot me than send me back to Cuba.” That's what he said. So it's like, I think there's that going on too. Again, not that that's a hundred percent right or whatever, but it's understandable and I get it too.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, right.Robert Romero: So yeah. Some people just vote Republican no matter what, because of those reasons, and those are not just for no reason.Jonathan Walton: Right. Right, right. There's a history and a context there too that all, all that makes sense. All that makes sense.Outro and OuttakeSy Hoekstra: Thank you so much for that question and all the other insight you've given us. If people want to follow you online or see some of your work, where would you point them?Robert Romero: Sure. So my full name is Robert Chao Romero, C-H-A-O. And if you use that name, you can find me in all the usual places.Jonathan Walton: There aren't a lot of Chao Romeros out there, you sure? [laughs].Robert Romero: Yeah [laughs]. There was one. One person wrote me actually [laughs], but other than him, I think I'm the only one. [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: A guy wrote you just to say we have the same name, I can't believe it [laughter]?Robert Romero: Yeah He was in Brazil or something and he is like, “Is this a coincidence?” But anyways, it's neither here nor there, but, so if you look up my name, you can find me in the usual places, social media.Sy Hoekstra: Great.Jonathan Walton: Nice. Nice.Sy Hoekstra: They'll find all your books [laughs]. And we've put some of them in our newsletter and some of the other stuff, and we highly recommend all of it.Robert Romero: Thank you.Sy Hoekstra: So thank you so much for being with us on the show today. We really appreciate it.Jonathan Walton: Yeah, thank you so much.Robert Romero: It's my pleasure.[the intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Thank you all so much for listening. Please remember to support what we do and keep this work going beyond this election season. Go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber. Get all the bonus episodes of this show, access to those monthly subscriber chats we were talking about earlier and a lot more. You can also get the anthology and read Professor Romero's essay and everybody else's essays at keepingthefaithbook.com. Alright. Our theme song as always is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra. Our podcast Art is by Robyn Burgess, transcripts by Joyce Ambale, editing by Multitude Productions. We thank you all so much for being here, and we will see you in two weeks.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, sheaking Jesus... What? Sheaking?Sy Hoekstra: Sheaking Jeshush.Jonathan Walton: I don't even know what that means. Okay, [Sy laughs]. This is a public episode. 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In this special edition of the show we do a SPOILER review of “Deadpool & Wolverine” as well as a few shorter reviews of some recent movies such as “Longlegs,” “Maxxxine,” and more! The post Blah Blah Podcast Episode 272: Daddy Longlegs appeared first on Blah Blah Inc..

This week, Carol gets her feet out, Nick sends an emoji and they help with in-flight etiquette and with a tardy new friend

Jesus/Guys, Now What?, Possum Trot, God and the Stars, Listener Uniform Update, Gratitude, Prayer, Hansen 2038, Movie V/O Guy, Politics   Quotes: “Pray God's blessings on people that drive you crazy.” “He's not safe but he's good.”  “In a world of blah, blah, blah.”

SirenAI sharing moments with me on this self reflection episode. Blah blah blah rant rant rant.   Learn anything? Thoughts? Connect more on my Newsletter https://www.chonacas.com/newsletter/   pick up some collectibles: https://www.chonacas.com/merch/ social platforms: stay connected: https://www.chonacas.com/links Currently I am at Château d'Esclans. Where are you located? Leave it in the comments and please share with one other person leave a 5 star review if you enjoyed this episode.      

You didn’t think we’d miss this, right? Weekly episodes, from now on, on the regular channel! Listen to us how we discuss the most important thing in season 2: the new title sequence. And some other stuff, like child murder.Download the episode!TorrentOur iTunes page.Previous episodes.Podcast RSS feed.Stefan on Twitter.Stefan's blog.Sean on Twitter.

Dr. Amy Killen is here to unravel the mysteries of testosterone, bioidentical hormones, and the secrets to skin health and longevity. Dr. Killen, an international speaker and pioneer in regenerative and integrative medicine, brings a wealth of knowledge from her clinical practice in Utah, where she introduces cutting-edge therapies like the full-body stem cell makeover. From discussing the nuances of hormone replacement options to decoding the aging process, this conversation offers a holistic roadmap for listeners seeking to optimize their health and vitality at every stage of life. Tune in for a deep dive into hormonal balance and lifestyle strategies with Dr. Amy Killen on this enlightening episode. To view full show notes, more information on our guests, resources mentioned in the episode, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep237 Dr. Killen is a multifaceted professional blending her expertise as an international speaker, clinical practice owner, entrepreneur, author, and media figure to advocate for holistic wellness. With a background in emergency medicine, she champions efficient therapeutic access and strives to democratize cutting-edge treatments through education and patient empowerment.  Check out our fasting membership at resetacademy.drmindypelz.com. Please note our medical disclaimer.