Podcasts about Dau

【本期嘉宾】杨恒、姚凯飞、程苓峰杨恒（投过一些头部大deal）姚凯飞（跨境电商行业从业者）程苓峰（科技自媒体）主播：潘乱（「乱翻书」主理人）⏰【时间线】102:53 京东当前面临的核心困境是什么？09:28 京东做外卖，是真心实意还是围魏救赵？15:29 定位品质外卖但大部分订单都是茶咖快餐，是品质升级还是薅羊毛？16:25 品质≠高价，连锁相对于更独立的品牌，可能更品质20:46 京东最优秀的是物流、品质和售后服务，品质外卖跟京东的心智有连接24:03 京东做外卖，原有的仓配采销有哪些能力是可复用的？28:23 闪电仓和京东大仓的商品成本，哪个更有优势32:22 抖音、滴滴为什么搞不好外卖？34:47 京东做外卖的战略意义有哪些？38:34 美团增长从DAU买量到业务促活42:39 美团的“神会员”的认知、辨识度和推广力度都是不足的44:38 京东和美团直球对决，会让饿了么边缘化吗？47:53 今天是哪些人在用饿了么？50:09 饿了么相较于美团有哪些劣势和优势？56:17 京东外卖直接把库迪咖啡从ICU拉到了KTV。59:53 京东的百亿补贴，钱都从哪来？65:50 京东能否复制拼多多的“百亿补贴”神话？72:18 把水搅浑，市场格局在变。淘宝、抖音和拼多多的即时零售尝试282:07 京东外卖给骑手交五险一金，刘强东这做法非常值得肯定。如果美团也给全职骑手交“五险一金”，会对美团产生什么影响？89:19 虽然刘强东说不打口水仗，但发檄文、送外卖、策反美团饿了么小哥动作不断，怎么看京东的公关舆论战术？91:51 网民关注刘强东在干什么，但可能更关注有人站出来打美团。92:41 这次大战很像当年的“3Q大战”96:35 今天短视频情绪主导的舆论场，美团应对并不擅长，需要补课吗？100:05 理科生和文科生的舆论攻防复盘，京东的道德高地有些无解？107:56 动员起社会情绪后谁都可能被反噬，连雷军都不能例外113:53 两个月=20年，京东外卖突破1,000 万单/天118:45 京东的百亿补贴能够持续多久？这是战略投入还是无底洞？128:13 京东即时零售的挑战134:38 AI赋能，会带来哪些帮助？138:21 最后演进成什么样？让子弹再飞一会✍【本期文字版】《京东和美团的直球对决》by乱翻书mp.weixin.qq.com

Vous êtes peut-être déjà allés à Laval, en Mayenne. Mais connaissez-vous Laval, au Québec ? Le beatmaker High Klassified y est né et a développé une telle passion qu'il ne l'a jamais quittée. C'est là-bas qu'il a produit de la musique pour des artistes comme Future, The Weeknd, Hamza ou Damso. Là-bas aussi qu'il a composé son dernier album, qui mêle rap, Tsew the Kid, house, Chilla, soul, Dau, RnB et Tuerie. Dans cet épisode, on parle de tire sur neige, de confort et d'être fier de ne pas être catalogué comme quelqu'un qui fait du sport. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, Scott Williams and Jim Valley celebrate the third anniversary of their podcast. They reflect on their journey, discuss the evolution of their content, and share memorable moments, including live interviews at the Nexus conference. They announce their retirement and introduce the new host. The new host shares the vision for the podcast's future, emphasizing flexibility and addressing upcoming changes in contracting. The episode concludes with a preview of the new podcast logo and a commitment to continue delivering valuable content. Available on DAU Media, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. If you enjoy our content, please hit the like button to support us! If you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcast:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Bernarda Škrabar Damnjanović je mednarodno priznana strokovnjakinja na področju gospodarske obveščevalne in preiskovalne dejavnosti. Certificirana mednarodna preiskovalka s skoraj 20-letnimi izkušnjami je magistra in doktorandka varstvoslovja.  Je direktorica Detektivsko varnostne agencije, soustanoviteljica tehnološkega podjetja Next Sight, predsednica Inštituta za varnost in strateške raziskave ter članica izvršnega odbora Council of International Investigators (CII) v ZDA. Kot častna dekanja detektivske šole v Bukarešti in vodja programa za globalno izmenjavo preiskovalcev je pionirka na področju detektivske dejavnosti. Njeno strokovno delo pokriva širok spekter področij, od korporativne varnosti, notranjih preiskav in preverjanja poslovnih partnerjev do kibernetske varnosti, forenzičnih analiz. Leta 2024 je postavila prvi globalni sistem izmenjave preiskovalcev, ki omogoča detektivom pridobivanje znanj in vpogled v preiskovalne prakse po svetu. Kot govorka in mentorica sodeluje pri razvoju varnostnih politik na nacionalni in mednarodni ravni. Fun fact: Bernarda je na ena redkih žensk v detektivskem svetu na svetu, ki je dosegla tako visoko prepoznavnost in bila povabljena tudi na Europolove konference o kibernetskem kriminalu in varnostnih strategijah prihodnosti. Najljubši citat: "Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." – Konfucij. Opazujte in poslušajte več kot govorite. Najljubša knjiga: Tao Te Jing (Knjiga poti) ali Daodedžing, na kratko Dao, je zbirka verzov, ki jih je v šestem stoletju pred našim štetjem napisal kitajski mislec Lao Tzu. Verzi govorijo o Tau ali Dau, kar v slovenščini prevajamo kot »Pot«, toda pomen besede je mnogo širši, saj glede na rabo v stavku lahko pomeni tudi vodenje po poti, kar se lahko nanaša na filozofsko razsvetlitev oziroma na etično in moralno vodstvo. Nekateri verzi so preprosti, vsakomur razumljivi, kot na primer: »Dober človek se ne prepira, tisti, ki se, pa ni dober.« Drugi vabijo, da se vanje poglabljamo in osmišljamo z zavestnim ubiranjem Poti, v iskanju presežne, vseprisotne modrosti. Najljubša serija: Sem človek dokumentarcev. Hobiji: Potovanja, slikanje, igralska šola, golf, tenis, jahanjeNajljubša hrana: Rada kuham, rada imam jedi na žlico, slow foodNajljubši podjetnik: nekaj jih je, ampak ne bi delala krivice in nekoga posebej izpostavila, pa drugih ne. Predvsem so mi navdih ljudje, ki so sami ustvarili nekaj iz nič, so vizionarji in si upajo iti svojo pot ter uspejo tudi v tujini. Zaključni nauki za poslušalce:·      Varnost in preventiva sta ključ do uspeha – Ne čakajte, da se zgodi težava, ampak vedno razmišljajte korak naprej.·      Resnica vedno pride na dan. Bolje prej, kot slej. – Poštenost in sistematično delo vedno obrodita sadove.·      Znanje in mreženje odpirata vrata – Vedno vlagaj v svoje znanje in bodi povezan s pravimi ljudmi. Upaj si biti sam svoj in samosvoj!

From childhood coding to founding one of the most played Web3 games today, Luke Barwikowski shares his journey, the vision behind ⁨@pixels_xyz⁩ and what it takes to build a sustainable play-to-earn economy.Discover how games like Stardew Valley and RuneScape inspired Pixels, why community engagement and transparency are everything, and how AI could reshape the future of Web3 gaming.Takeaways:- Pixels is leading in DAU & revenue- True play-to-earn powered by community- AI, transparency, and sustainability are key pillars- Inspired by nostalgic favorites—reimagined for Web3Don't miss this exclusive deep dive into the future of gaming!#play2earn #web3gaming

Ljósmyndarinn Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir segir að það eina sem henni hafi dottið í hug að gera þegar hún kom tómhent heim af fæðingardeildinni hafi verið að taka sjálfsmynd. Nokkrum mánuðum síðar opnaði hún skáp sem áður hafði geymt svarthvítar filmur og áttaði sig á því, án þess að muna almennilega eftir því, að hún hafði tekið á þær allar. Dóttir hennar, Dýrleif, fæddist og dó sama daginn, í lok september árið 2015. Ljósmyndabókin Dauðadjúpar sprungur er tileinkuð henni og Hallgerður segir okkur frá bókinni í þætti dagsins. Þá færir Freyja Þórsdóttir okkur fyrstu heimspekilegu hugleiðinguna í nýrri pistlaröð og fjallar um undrun, ólíkar birtingarmyndir fegurðar og forréttindi. Við kynnum okkur líka slavneskan þjóðlagasöng og söngtækni hjá slóvensku söngkonunni Zvezdönu Novakovich. Umsjón: Melkorka Ólafsdóttir

Son nom de scène, c'est Dau. Mais vous l'avez peut-être rencontré sous l'identité de ses avatars Dennis Gordon ou Captain Amazing. Il est né en région parisienne et a émergé de la scène rap française après un passage très remarqué dans la Série Netflix, Nouvelle école qui met en compétition les jeunes rappeurs.   C'était la saison 2 et il s'est hissé jusqu'en finale. Depuis, il se fait sa place dans le paysage du rap et s'il est avec nous, c'est pour son nouveau projet  Amazing sorti il y a quelques semaines. 10 titres dans lesquels on retrouve son énergie du début en plus positif et lumineux peut-être. Un album qui ressemble parfois à un journal intime.  Dau est l'invité de Sur le pont des arts. Amazing est sorti sur le label Keep an eye records. Au programme de l'émission :►Reportage Tom Malki a assisté à la pièce Peau d'homme avec Laure Calam au Théâtre Montparnasse, à Paris. Dans cette adaptation de la bande dessinée d'Hubert et Zanzim, le conte est enrichi par des chansons inédites de Ben Mazué. ►Chronique Pionnières de la cultureMarjorie Bertin nous parle d'Adèle Hugo dite « Adèle H », la benjamine du grand Victor Hugo, née en 1830 et morte en 1915 dont la vie fut effacée par son père. ► Playlist du jour- Dau - Welcome Back- Dau - Coeurs Balafrés- Dau feat Jewel Usain- Amazed.

Son nom de scène, c'est Dau. Mais vous l'avez peut-être rencontré sous l'identité de ses avatars Dennis Gordon ou Captain Amazing. Il est né en région parisienne et a émergé de la scène rap française après un passage très remarqué dans la Série Netflix, Nouvelle école qui met en compétition les jeunes rappeurs.   C'était la saison 2 et il s'est hissé jusqu'en finale. Depuis, il se fait sa place dans le paysage du rap et s'il est avec nous, c'est pour son nouveau projet  Amazing sorti il y a quelques semaines. 10 titres dans lesquels on retrouve son énergie du début en plus positif et lumineux peut-être. Un album qui ressemble parfois à un journal intime.  Dau est l'invité de Sur le pont des arts. Amazing est sorti sur le label Keep an eye records. Au programme de l'émission :►Reportage Tom Malki a assisté à la pièce Peau d'homme avec Laure Calam au Théâtre Montparnasse, à Paris. Dans cette adaptation de la bande dessinée d'Hubert et Zanzim, le conte est enrichi par des chansons inédites de Ben Mazué. ►Chronique Pionnières de la cultureMarjorie Bertin nous parle d'Adèle Hugo dite « Adèle H », la benjamine du grand Victor Hugo, née en 1830 et morte en 1915 dont la vie fut effacée par son père. ► Playlist du jour- Dau - Welcome Back- Dau - Coeurs Balafrés- Dau feat Jewel Usain- Amazed.

Welcome to Contracting Conversations! Join hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley as they dive into the latest in contracting. This episode features Professor Scott Gilbreth from DAU Midwest Contracting Faculty, discussing the FY 25 NDAA. Professor Gilbreth shares insights on Section 802 concerning new limitations for cost contracts and the broader message from Congress. He also covers Section 819, which addresses interface standards for modular open systems (MOSA) to improve compatibility, cut costs, and encourage competition among contractors. Tune in for an in-depth analysis of Sections 802 and 819 and their implications for defense contracting. Available on DAU Media, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. If you enjoy our content, please hit the like button to support us!2025 NDAA Highlights Webinar - https://www.dau.edu/events/fy25-national-defense-authorization-act-ndaa-acquisition-highlights If you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcast:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Most practices stop at routine eye exams — but what if your practice could unlock new (cash-pay) revenue streams and provide high-value specialty care without feeling like you're selling to patients?  Dr. Jordan Dau started Dau Family Eyecare from scratch, transforming it into a technology-driven, specialty-focused practice that sees 100-150 patients per week and is expanding to a second location. In this episode, recorded live from Vision Expo East in Orlando, Dr. Dau shares how he structures patient interactions to seamlessly integrate specialty services — so they feel like the next natural step, not a sales pitch. 

Need retention curves, LTV predictors, or DAU predictors for your mobile game or app? Don't want to learn about to build retention curves or LTV predictions or DAU predictions, but need the data?You're in luck: Russell Ovans, author of Game Analytics, has just built out these tools for free use. And in this edition of Growth Masterminds, he shows us exactly how they work and why they're useful.Ovans demos his set of free online tools designed for game marketers, including the retention curve creator, LTV predictor, daily average user predictor, and a geographical pricing tool that does have a cost. Perfect for anyone in game marketing or analytics who needs this kind of data but prefers not to learn exactly how to create it themselves :-) 00:00 Introduction to Growth Masterminds00:59 The Goal of Making Game Analytics Simple02:09 Challenges and Feedback on the Book03:39 Launching ARPDAU's Free Tools04:54 Demo of Retention Curve Creator10:51 Predicting Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)16:52 Estimating Daily Active Users (DAU) and Revenue21:57 Future Enhancements and Feedback24:05 Introduction to the Big Mac Index24:30 Country-Specific Pricing Strategies25:08 Challenges with Global Pricing26:31 Implementing the Big Mac Index28:06 Google Play Console Pricing Features30:39 Using Professor ARPDAU's Tool31:52 Adjusting Prices with CSV Files39:33 Final Thoughts and Q&A

Margverðlaunaði metsöluhöfundurinn Stefán Máni er einhver afkastamesti rithöfundur landsins og heldur á næsta ári upp á 30 ára rithöfundaafmæli sitt með fleiri en 30 bækur útgefnar. Hann er fæddur í Reykjavík en ólst upp í Ólafsvík og bjó þar fram yfir tvítugt. Stefán Máni hefur gefið út skáldsögur frá árinu 1996 en sló í gegn með glæpasögunni Svartur á leik árið 2004, sem kvikmynduð var nokkrum árum síðar. Söguna vann hann upp úr úrklippusafni sem hann hafði byggt upp frá því að hann var barn, úrklippum um glæpi, mannshvörf og fleiri skyld áhugamál. Hann segist hafa verið algjör introvert, og að á þeim tíma hafi upplestur á eigin verkum verið algjört kvalræði í hans huga. En hann neyddist til að vinna sig út úr sjálfsefanum því allt í einu var komin eftirspurn eftir því sem hann var að gera. Nokkru síðar kynnti Stefán Máni lögreglumanninn Hörð Grímsson fyrir lesendum sínum, og síðan hafa komið út 12 bækur um Hörð, sem er einhver vinsælasta sögupersóna íslenskrar bókmenntasögu. Stefán Máni hefur hlotið Blóðdropann, íslensku glæpasagnaverðlaunin, fjórum sinnum, nú síðast fyrir skáldsöguna Dauðinn einn var vitni, en verðlaunin voru veitt við hátíðlega athöfn á Bessastöðum í síðustu viku. Umsjón: Melkorka Ólafsdóttir

A la sala Dau al sec s'estrena "Catalunya + Q 1 Club". Un espectacle sat

Welcome to Contracting Conversations! Join hosts Jim Valley and Scott Williams as they chat with David Dotson, a Professor of Contract Management at DAU in the Mid-Atlantic region. David, who manages the COR 222 class and moderates the COR Community of Practice and DAU's weekly COR Office Hours, shares insights on improving statements of work. Discover four key steps to enhance any work statement, making them more efficient and effective. Tune in for practical tips and expert advice on contract management.CLC 222 Contracting Officers Representative (COR) Online Training (On-line 32 CLPs): https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=1731COR 222 Contracting Officer's Representative Course (Virtual or in-person 32 CLPs via DAU's Mission Assistance (see link below)):  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=1584WSC 027 Virtual Augmentation Workshop for the Contracting Officer (augments CLC 222/COR222 - 10 CLPs)P: https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=12359CLC 106 - Contracting Officer's Representative with a Mission Focus (On-line 3 CLPs):  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=240DAU Mission Assistance:  https://www.dau.edu/mission-assistanceBack to Basics: https://www.dau.edu/back-to-basics; BtB Contracting: https://www.dau.edu/functional-areas/contractingContracting Officer Representative Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/corContracting Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcast:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

One last Gold sponsor slot is available for the AI Engineer Summit in NYC. Our last round of invites is going out soon - apply here - If you are building AI agents or AI eng teams, this will be the single highest-signal conference of the year for you!While the world melts down over DeepSeek, few are talking about the OTHER notable group of former hedge fund traders who pivoted into AI and built a remarkably profitable consumer AI business with a tiny team with incredibly cracked engineering team — Chai Research. In short order they have:* Started a Chat AI company well before Noam Shazeer started Character AI, and outlasted his departure.* Crossed 1m DAU in 2.5 years - William updates us on the pod that they've hit 1.4m DAU now, another +40% from a few months ago. Revenue crossed >$22m. * Launched the Chaiverse model crowdsourcing platform - taking 3-4 week A/B testing cycles down to 3-4 hours, and deploying >100 models a week.While they're not paying million dollar salaries, you can tell they're doing pretty well for an 11 person startup:The Chai Recipe: Building infra for rapid evalsRemember how the central thesis of LMarena (formerly LMsys) is that the only comprehensive way to evaluate LLMs is to let users try them out and pick winners?At the core of Chai is a mobile app that looks like Character AI, but is actually the largest LLM A/B testing arena in the world, specialized on retaining chat users for Chai's usecases (therapy, assistant, roleplay, etc). It's basically what LMArena would be if taken very, very seriously at one company (with $1m in prizes to boot):Chai publishes occasional research on how they think about this, including talks at their Palo Alto office:William expands upon this in today's podcast (34 mins in):Fundamentally, the way I would describe it is when you're building anything in life, you need to be able to evaluate it. And through evaluation, you can iterate, we can look at benchmarks, and we can say the issues with benchmarks and why they may not generalize as well as one would hope in the challenges of working with them. But something that works incredibly well is getting feedback from humans. And so we built this thing where anyone can submit a model to our developer backend, and it gets put in front of 5000 users, and the users can rate it. And we can then have a really accurate ranking of like which model, or users finding more engaging or more entertaining. And it gets, you know, it's at this point now, where every day we're able to, I mean, we evaluate between 20 and 50 models, LLMs, every single day, right. So even though we've got only got a team of, say, five AI researchers, they're able to iterate a huge quantity of LLMs, right. So our team ships, let's just say minimum 100 LLMs a week is what we're able to iterate through. Now, before that moment in time, we might iterate through three a week, we might, you know, there was a time when even doing like five a month was a challenge, right? By being able to change the feedback loops to the point where it's not, let's launch these three models, let's do an A-B test, let's assign, let's do different cohorts, let's wait 30 days to see what the day 30 retention is, which is the kind of the, if you're doing an app, that's like A-B testing 101 would be, do a 30-day retention test, assign different treatments to different cohorts and come back in 30 days. So that's insanely slow. That's just, it's too slow. And so we were able to get that 30-day feedback loop all the way down to something like three hours.In Crowdsourcing the leap to Ten Trillion-Parameter AGI, William describes Chai's routing as a recommender system, which makes a lot more sense to us than previous pitches for model routing startups:William is notably counter-consensus in a lot of his AI product principles:* No streaming: Chats appear all at once to allow rejection sampling* No voice: Chai actually beat Character AI to introducing voice - but removed it after finding that it was far from a killer feature.* Blending: “Something that we love to do at Chai is blending, which is, you know, it's the simplest way to think about it is you're going to end up, and you're going to pretty quickly see you've got one model that's really smart, one model that's really funny. How do you get the user an experience that is both smart and funny? Well, just 50% of the requests, you can serve them the smart model, 50% of the requests, you serve them the funny model.” (that's it!)But chief above all is the recommender system.We also referenced Exa CEO Will Bryk's concept of SuperKnowlege:Full Video versionOn YouTube. please like and subscribe!Timestamps* 00:00:04 Introductions and background of William Beauchamp* 00:01:19 Origin story of Chai AI* 00:04:40 Transition from finance to AI* 00:11:36 Initial product development and idea maze for Chai* 00:16:29 User psychology and engagement with AI companions* 00:20:00 Origin of the Chai name* 00:22:01 Comparison with Character AI and funding challenges* 00:25:59 Chai's growth and user numbers* 00:34:53 Key inflection points in Chai's growth* 00:42:10 Multi-modality in AI companions and focus on user-generated content* 00:46:49 Chaiverse developer platform and model evaluation* 00:51:58 Views on AGI and the nature of AI intelligence* 00:57:14 Evaluation methods and human feedback in AI development* 01:02:01 Content creation and user experience in Chai* 01:04:49 Chai Grant program and company culture* 01:07:20 Inference optimization and compute costs* 01:09:37 Rejection sampling and reward models in AI generation* 01:11:48 Closing thoughts and recruitmentTranscriptAlessio [00:00:04]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel, and today we're in the Chai AI office with my usual co-host, Swyx.swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, thanks for having us. It's rare that we get to get out of the office, so thanks for inviting us to your home. We're in the office of Chai with William Beauchamp. Yeah, that's right. You're founder of Chai AI, but previously, I think you're concurrently also running your fund?William [00:00:29]: Yep, so I was simultaneously running an algorithmic trading company, but I fortunately was able to kind of exit from that, I think just in Q3 last year. Yeah, congrats. Yeah, thanks.swyx [00:00:43]: So Chai has always been on my radar because, well, first of all, you do a lot of advertising, I guess, in the Bay Area, so it's working. Yep. And second of all, the reason I reached out to a mutual friend, Joyce, was because I'm just generally interested in the... ...consumer AI space, chat platforms in general. I think there's a lot of inference insights that we can get from that, as well as human psychology insights, kind of a weird blend of the two. And we also share a bit of a history as former finance people crossing over. I guess we can just kind of start it off with the origin story of Chai.William [00:01:19]: Why decide working on a consumer AI platform rather than B2B SaaS? So just quickly touching on the background in finance. Sure. Originally, I'm from... I'm from the UK, born in London. And I was fortunate enough to go study economics at Cambridge. And I graduated in 2012. And at that time, everyone in the UK and everyone on my course, HFT, quant trading was really the big thing. It was like the big wave that was happening. So there was a lot of opportunity in that space. And throughout college, I'd sort of played poker. So I'd, you know, I dabbled as a professional poker player. And I was able to accumulate this sort of, you know, say $100,000 through playing poker. And at the time, as my friends would go work at companies like ChangeStreet or Citadel, I kind of did the maths. And I just thought, well, maybe if I traded my own capital, I'd probably come out ahead. I'd make more money than just going to work at ChangeStreet.swyx [00:02:20]: With 100k base as capital?William [00:02:22]: Yes, yes. That's not a lot. Well, it depends what strategies you're doing. And, you know, there is an advantage. There's an advantage to being small, right? Because there are, if you have a 10... Strategies that don't work in size. Exactly, exactly. So if you have a fund of $10 million, if you find a little anomaly in the market that you might be able to make 100k a year from, that's a 1% return on your 10 million fund. If your fund is 100k, that's 100% return, right? So being small, in some sense, was an advantage. So started off, and the, taught myself Python, and machine learning was like the big thing as well. Machine learning had really, it was the first, you know, big time machine learning was being used for image recognition, neural networks come out, you get dropout. And, you know, so this, this was the big thing that's going on at the time. So I probably spent my first three years out of Cambridge, just building neural networks, building random forests to try and predict asset prices, right, and then trade that using my own money. And that went well. And, you know, if you if you start something, and it goes well, you You try and hire more people. And the first people that came to mind was the talented people I went to college with. And so I hired some friends. And that went well and hired some more. And eventually, I kind of ran out of friends to hire. And so that was when I formed the company. And from that point on, we had our ups and we had our downs. And that was a whole long story and journey in itself. But after doing that for about eight or nine years, on my 30th birthday, which was four years ago now, I kind of took a step back to just evaluate my life, right? This is what one does when one turns 30. You know, I just heard it. I hear you. And, you know, I looked at my 20s and I loved it. It was a really special time. I was really lucky and fortunate to have worked with this amazing team, been successful, had a lot of hard times. And through the hard times, learned wisdom and then a lot of success and, you know, was able to enjoy it. And so the company was making about five million pounds a year. And it was just me and a team of, say, 15, like, Oxford and Cambridge educated mathematicians and physicists. It was like the real dream that you'd have if you wanted to start a quant trading firm. It was like...swyx [00:04:40]: Your own, all your own money?William [00:04:41]: Yeah, exactly. It was all the team's own money. We had no customers complaining to us about issues. There's no investors, you know, saying, you know, they don't like the risk that we're taking. We could. We could really run the thing exactly as we wanted it. It's like Susquehanna or like Rintec. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And they're the companies that we would kind of look towards as we were building that thing out. But on my 30th birthday, I look and I say, OK, great. This thing is making as much money as kind of anyone would really need. And I thought, well, what's going to happen if we keep going in this direction? And it was clear that we would never have a kind of a big, big impact on the world. We can enrich ourselves. We can make really good money. Everyone on the team would be paid very, very well. Presumably, I can make enough money to buy a yacht or something. But this stuff wasn't that important to me. And so I felt a sort of obligation that if you have this much talent and if you have a talented team, especially as a founder, you want to be putting all that talent towards a good use. I looked at the time of like getting into crypto and I had a really strong view on crypto, which was that as far as a gambling device. This is like the most fun form of gambling invented in like ever super fun, I thought as a way to evade monetary regulations and banking restrictions. I think it's also absolutely amazing. So it has two like killer use cases, not so much banking the unbanked, but everything else, but everything else to do with like the blockchain and, and you know, web, was it web 3.0 or web, you know, that I, that didn't, it didn't really make much sense. And so instead of going into crypto, which I thought, even if I was successful, I'd end up in a lot of trouble. I thought maybe it'd be better to build something that governments wouldn't have a problem with. I knew that LLMs were like a thing. I think opening. I had said they hadn't released GPT-3 yet, but they'd said GPT-3 is so powerful. We can't release it to the world or something. Was it GPT-2? And then I started interacting with, I think Google had open source, some language models. They weren't necessarily LLMs, but they, but they were. But yeah, exactly. So I was able to play around with, but nowadays so many people have interacted with the chat GPT, they get it, but it's like the first time you, you can just talk to a computer and it talks back. It's kind of a special moment and you know, everyone who's done that goes like, wow, this is how it should be. Right. It should be like, rather than having to type on Google and search, you should just be able to ask Google a question. When I saw that I read the literature, I kind of came across the scaling laws and I think even four years ago. All the pieces of the puzzle were there, right? Google had done this amazing research and published, you know, a lot of it. Open AI was still open. And so they'd published a lot of their research. And so you really could be fully informed on, on the state of AI and where it was going. And so at that point I was confident enough, it was worth a shot. I think LLMs are going to be the next big thing. And so that's the thing I want to be building in, in that space. And I thought what's the most impactful product I can possibly build. And I thought it should be a platform. So I myself love platforms. I think they're fantastic because they open up an ecosystem where anyone can contribute to it. Right. So if you think of a platform like a YouTube, instead of it being like a Hollywood situation where you have to, if you want to make a TV show, you have to convince Disney to give you the money to produce it instead, anyone in the world can post any content they want to YouTube. And if people want to view it, the algorithm is going to promote it. Nowadays. You can look at creators like Mr. Beast or Joe Rogan. They would have never have had that opportunity unless it was for this platform. Other ones like Twitter's a great one, right? But I would consider Wikipedia to be a platform where instead of the Britannica encyclopedia, which is this, it's like a monolithic, you get all the, the researchers together, you get all the data together and you combine it in this, in this one monolithic source. Instead. You have this distributed thing. You can say anyone can host their content on Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to it. And anyone can maybe their contribution is they delete stuff. When I was hearing like the kind of the Sam Altman and kind of the, the Muskian perspective of AI, it was a very kind of monolithic thing. It was all about AI is basically a single thing, which is intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. The more intelligent, the more compute, the more intelligent, and the more and better AI researchers, the more intelligent, right? They would speak about it as a kind of erased, like who can get the most data, the most compute and the most researchers. And that would end up with the most intelligent AI. But I didn't believe in any of that. I thought that's like the total, like I thought that perspective is the perspective of someone who's never actually done machine learning. Because with machine learning, first of all, you see that the performance of the models follows an S curve. So it's not like it just goes off to infinity, right? And the, the S curve, it kind of plateaus around human level performance. And you can look at all the, all the machine learning that was going on in the 2010s, everything kind of plateaued around the human level performance. And we can think about the self-driving car promises, you know, how Elon Musk kept saying the self-driving car is going to happen next year, it's going to happen next, next year. Or you can look at the image recognition, the speech recognition. You can look at. All of these things, there was almost nothing that went superhuman, except for something like AlphaGo. And we can speak about why AlphaGo was able to go like super superhuman. So I thought the most likely thing was going to be this, I thought it's not going to be a monolithic thing. That's like an encyclopedia Britannica. I thought it must be a distributed thing. And I actually liked to look at the world of finance for what I think a mature machine learning ecosystem would look like. So, yeah. So finance is a machine learning ecosystem because all of these quant trading firms are running machine learning algorithms, but they're running it on a centralized platform like a marketplace. And it's not the case that there's one giant quant trading company of all the data and all the quant researchers and all the algorithms and compute, but instead they all specialize. So one will specialize on high frequency training. Another will specialize on mid frequency. Another one will specialize on equity. Another one will specialize. And I thought that's the way the world works. That's how it is. And so there must exist a platform where a small team can produce an AI for a unique purpose. And they can iterate and build the best thing for that, right? And so that was the vision for Chai. So we wanted to build a platform for LLMs.Alessio [00:11:36]: That's kind of the maybe inside versus contrarian view that led you to start the company. Yeah. And then what was maybe the initial idea maze? Because if somebody told you that was the Hugging Face founding story, people might believe it. It's kind of like a similar ethos behind it. How did you land on the product feature today? And maybe what were some of the ideas that you discarded that initially you thought about?William [00:11:58]: So the first thing we built, it was fundamentally an API. So nowadays people would describe it as like agents, right? But anyone could write a Python script. They could submit it to an API. They could send it to the Chai backend and we would then host this code and execute it. So that's like the developer side of the platform. On their Python script, the interface was essentially text in and text out. An example would be the very first bot that I created. I think it was a Reddit news bot. And so it would first, it would pull the popular news. Then it would prompt whatever, like I just use some external API for like Burr or GPT-2 or whatever. Like it was a very, very small thing. And then the user could talk to it. So you could say to the bot, hi bot, what's the news today? And it would say, this is the top stories. And you could chat with it. Now four years later, that's like perplexity or something. That's like the, right? But back then the models were first of all, like really, really dumb. You know, they had an IQ of like a four year old. And users, there really wasn't any demand or any PMF for interacting with the news. So then I was like, okay. Um. So let's make another one. And I made a bot, which was like, you could talk to it about a recipe. So you could say, I'm making eggs. Like I've got eggs in my fridge. What should I cook? And it'll say, you should make an omelet. Right. There was no PMF for that. No one used it. And so I just kept creating bots. And so every single night after work, I'd be like, okay, I like, we have AI, we have this platform. I can create any text in textile sort of agent and put it on the platform. And so we just create stuff night after night. And then all the coders I knew, I would say, yeah, this is what we're going to do. And then I would say to them, look, there's this platform. You can create any like chat AI. You should put it on. And you know, everyone's like, well, chatbots are super lame. We want absolutely nothing to do with your chatbot app. No one who knew Python wanted to build on it. I'm like trying to build all these bots and no consumers want to talk to any of them. And then my sister who at the time was like just finishing college or something, I said to her, I was like, if you want to learn Python, you should just submit a bot for my platform. And she, she built a therapy for me. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm going to build a therapist bot. And then the next day I checked the performance of the app and I'm like, oh my God, we've got 20 active users. And they spent, they spent like an average of 20 minutes on the app. I was like, oh my God, what, what bot were they speaking to for an average of 20 minutes? And I looked and it was the therapist bot. And I went, oh, this is where the PMF is. There was no demand for, for recipe help. There was no demand for news. There was no demand for dad jokes or pub quiz or fun facts or what they wanted was they wanted the therapist bot. the time I kind of reflected on that and I thought, well, if I want to consume news, the most fun thing, most fun way to consume news is like Twitter. It's not like the value of there being a back and forth, wasn't that high. Right. And I thought if I need help with a recipe, I actually just go like the New York times has a good recipe section, right? It's not actually that hard. And so I just thought the thing that AI is 10 X better at is a sort of a conversation right. That's not intrinsically informative, but it's more about an opportunity. You can say whatever you want. You're not going to get judged. If it's 3am, you don't have to wait for your friend to text back. It's like, it's immediate. They're going to reply immediately. You can say whatever you want. It's judgment-free and it's much more like a playground. It's much more like a fun experience. And you could see that if the AI gave a person a compliment, they would love it. It's much easier to get the AI to give you a compliment than a human. From that day on, I said, okay, I get it. Humans want to speak to like humans or human like entities and they want to have fun. And that was when I started to look less at platforms like Google. And I started to look more at platforms like Instagram. And I was trying to think about why do people use Instagram? And I could see that I think Chai was, was filling the same desire or the same drive. If you go on Instagram, typically you want to look at the faces of other humans, or you want to hear about other people's lives. So if it's like the rock is making himself pancakes on a cheese plate. You kind of feel a little bit like you're the rock's friend, or you're like having pancakes with him or something, right? But if you do it too much, you feel like you're sad and like a lonely person, but with AI, you can talk to it and tell it stories and tell you stories, and you can play with it for as long as you want. And you don't feel like you're like a sad, lonely person. You feel like you actually have a friend.Alessio [00:16:29]: And what, why is that? Do you have any insight on that from using it?William [00:16:33]: I think it's just the human psychology. I think it's just the idea that, with old school social media. You're just consuming passively, right? So you'll just swipe. If I'm watching TikTok, just like swipe and swipe and swipe. And even though I'm getting the dopamine of like watching an engaging video, there's this other thing that's building my head, which is like, I'm feeling lazier and lazier and lazier. And after a certain period of time, I'm like, man, I just wasted 40 minutes. I achieved nothing. But with AI, because you're interacting, you feel like you're, it's not like work, but you feel like you're participating and contributing to the thing. You don't feel like you're just. Consuming. So you don't have a sense of remorse basically. And you know, I think on the whole people, the way people talk about, try and interact with the AI, they speak about it in an incredibly positive sense. Like we get people who say they have eating disorders saying that the AI helps them with their eating disorders. People who say they're depressed, it helps them through like the rough patches. So I think there's something intrinsically healthy about interacting that TikTok and Instagram and YouTube doesn't quite tick. From that point on, it was about building more and more kind of like human centric AI for people to interact with. And I was like, okay, let's make a Kanye West bot, right? And then no one wanted to talk to the Kanye West bot. And I was like, ah, who's like a cool persona for teenagers to want to interact with. And I was like, I was trying to find the influencers and stuff like that, but no one cared. Like they didn't want to interact with the, yeah. And instead it was really just the special moment was when we said the realization that developers and software engineers aren't interested in building this sort of AI, but the consumers are right. And rather than me trying to guess every day, like what's the right bot to submit to the platform, why don't we just create the tools for the users to build it themselves? And so nowadays this is like the most obvious thing in the world, but when Chai first did it, it was not an obvious thing at all. Right. Right. So we took the API for let's just say it was, I think it was GPTJ, which was this 6 billion parameter open source transformer style LLM. We took GPTJ. We let users create the prompt. We let users select the image and we let users choose the name. And then that was the bot. And through that, they could shape the experience, right? So if they said this bot's going to be really mean, and it's going to be called like bully in the playground, right? That was like a whole category that I never would have guessed. Right. People love to fight. They love to have a disagreement, right? And then they would create, there'd be all these romantic archetypes that I didn't know existed. And so as the users could create the content that they wanted, that was when Chai was able to, to get this huge variety of content and rather than appealing to, you know, 1% of the population that I'd figured out what they wanted, you could appeal to a much, much broader thing. And so from that moment on, it was very, very crystal clear. It's like Chai, just as Instagram is this social media platform that lets people create images and upload images, videos and upload that, Chai was really about how can we let the users create this experience in AI and then share it and interact and search. So it's really, you know, I say it's like a platform for social AI.Alessio [00:20:00]: Where did the Chai name come from? Because you started the same path. I was like, is it character AI shortened? You started at the same time, so I was curious. The UK origin was like the second, the Chai.William [00:20:15]: We started way before character AI. And there's an interesting story that Chai's numbers were very, very strong, right? So I think in even 20, I think late 2022, was it late 2022 or maybe early 2023? Chai was like the number one AI app in the app store. So we would have something like 100,000 daily active users. And then one day we kind of saw there was this website. And we were like, oh, this website looks just like Chai. And it was the character AI website. And I think that nowadays it's, I think it's much more common knowledge that when they left Google with the funding, I think they knew what was the most trending, the number one app. And I think they sort of built that. Oh, you found the people.swyx [00:21:03]: You found the PMF for them.William [00:21:04]: We found the PMF for them. Exactly. Yeah. So I worked a year very, very hard. And then they, and then that was when I learned a lesson, which is that if you're VC backed and if, you know, so Chai, we'd kind of ran, we'd got to this point, I was the only person who'd invested. I'd invested maybe 2 million pounds in the business. And you know, from that, we were able to build this thing, get to say a hundred thousand daily active users. And then when character AI came along, the first version, we sort of laughed. We were like, oh man, this thing sucks. Like they don't know what they're building. They're building the wrong thing anyway, but then I saw, oh, they've raised a hundred million dollars. Oh, they've raised another hundred million dollars. And then our users started saying, oh guys, your AI sucks. Cause we were serving a 6 billion parameter model, right? How big was the model that character AI could afford to serve, right? So we would be spending, let's say we would spend a dollar per per user, right? Over the, the, you know, the entire lifetime.swyx [00:22:01]: A dollar per session, per chat, per month? No, no, no, no.William [00:22:04]: Let's say we'd get over the course of the year, we'd have a million users and we'd spend a million dollars on the AI throughout the year. Right. Like aggregated. Exactly. Exactly. Right. They could spend a hundred times that. So people would say, why is your AI much dumber than character AIs? And then I was like, oh, okay, I get it. This is like the Silicon Valley style, um, hyper scale business. And so, yeah, we moved to Silicon Valley and, uh, got some funding and iterated and built the flywheels. And, um, yeah, I, I'm very proud that we were able to compete with that. Right. So, and I think the reason we were able to do it was just customer obsession. And it's similar, I guess, to how deep seek have been able to produce such a compelling model when compared to someone like an open AI, right? So deep seek, you know, their latest, um, V2, yeah, they claim to have spent 5 million training it.swyx [00:22:57]: It may be a bit more, but, um, like, why are you making it? Why are you making such a big deal out of this? Yeah. There's an agenda there. Yeah. You brought up deep seek. So we have to ask you had a call with them.William [00:23:07]: We did. We did. We did. Um, let me think what to say about that. I think for one, they have an amazing story, right? So their background is again in finance.swyx [00:23:16]: They're the Chinese version of you. Exactly.William [00:23:18]: Well, there's a lot of similarities. Yes. Yes. I have a great affinity for companies which are like, um, founder led, customer obsessed and just try and build something great. And I think what deep seek have achieved. There's quite special is they've got this amazing inference engine. They've been able to reduce the size of the KV cash significantly. And then by being able to do that, they're able to significantly reduce their inference costs. And I think with kind of with AI, people get really focused on like the kind of the foundation model or like the model itself. And they sort of don't pay much attention to the inference. To give you an example with Chai, let's say a typical user session is 90 minutes, which is like, you know, is very, very long for comparison. Let's say the average session length on TikTok is 70 minutes. So people are spending a lot of time. And in that time they're able to send say 150 messages. That's a lot of completions, right? It's quite different from an open AI scenario where people might come in, they'll have a particular question in mind. And they'll ask like one question. And a few follow up questions, right? So because they're consuming, say 30 times as many requests for a chat, or a conversational experience, you've got to figure out how to how to get the right balance between the cost of that and the quality. And so, you know, I think with AI, it's always been the case that if you want a better experience, you can throw compute at the problem, right? So if you want a better model, you can just make it bigger. If you want it to remember better, give it a longer context. And now, what open AI is doing to great fanfare is with projection sampling, you can generate many candidates, right? And then with some sort of reward model or some sort of scoring system, you can serve the most promising of these many candidates. And so that's kind of scaling up on the inference time compute side of things. And so for us, it doesn't make sense to think of AI is just the absolute performance. So. But what we're seeing, it's like the MML you score or the, you know, any of these benchmarks that people like to look at, if you just get that score, it doesn't really tell tell you anything. Because it's really like progress is made by improving the performance per dollar. And so I think that's an area where deep seek have been able to form very, very well, surprisingly so. And so I'm very interested in what Lama four is going to look like. And if they're able to sort of match what deep seek have been able to achieve with this performance per dollar gain.Alessio [00:25:59]: Before we go into the inference, some of the deeper stuff, can you give people an overview of like some of the numbers? So I think last I checked, you have like 1.4 million daily active now. It's like over 22 million of revenue. So it's quite a business.William [00:26:12]: Yeah, I think we grew by a factor of, you know, users grew by a factor of three last year. Revenue over doubled. You know, it's very exciting. We're competing with some really big, really well funded companies. Character AI got this, I think it was almost a $3 billion valuation. And they have 5 million DAU is a number that I last heard. Torquay, which is a Chinese built app owned by a company called Minimax. They're incredibly well funded. And these companies didn't grow by a factor of three last year. Right. And so when you've got this company and this team that's able to keep building something that gets users excited, and they want to tell their friend about it, and then they want to come and they want to stick on the platform. I think that's very special. And so last year was a great year for the team. And yeah, I think the numbers reflect the hard work that we put in. And then fundamentally, the quality of the app, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content, the quality of the content. AI is the quality of the experience that you have. You actually published your DAU growth chart, which is unusual. And I see some inflections. Like, it's not just a straight line. There's some things that actually inflect. Yes. What were the big ones? Cool. That's a great, great, great question. Let me think of a good answer. I'm basically looking to annotate this chart, which doesn't have annotations on it. Cool. The first thing I would say is this is, I think the most important thing to know about success is that success is born out of failures. Right? Through failures that we learn. You know, if you think something's a good idea, and you do and it works, great, but you didn't actually learn anything, because everything went exactly as you imagined. But if you have an idea, you think it's going to be good, you try it, and it fails. There's a gap between the reality and expectation. And that's an opportunity to learn. The flat periods, that's us learning. And then the up periods is that's us reaping the rewards of that. So I think the big, of the growth shot of just 2024, I think the first thing that really kind of put a dent in our growth was our backend. So we just reached this scale. So we'd, from day one, we'd built on top of Google's GCP, which is Google's cloud platform. And they were fantastic. We used them when we had one daily active user, and they worked pretty good all the way up till we had about 500,000. It was never the cheapest, but from an engineering perspective, man, that thing scaled insanely good. Like, not Vertex? Not Vertex. Like GKE, that kind of stuff? We use Firebase. So we use Firebase. I'm pretty sure we're the biggest user ever on Firebase. That's expensive. Yeah, we had calls with engineers, and they're like, we wouldn't recommend using this product beyond this point, and you're 3x over that. So we pushed Google to their absolute limits. You know, it was fantastic for us, because we could focus on the AI. We could focus on just adding as much value as possible. But then what happened was, after 500,000, just the thing, the way we were using it, and it would just, it wouldn't scale any further. And so we had a really, really painful, at least three-month period, as we kind of migrated between different services, figuring out, like, what requests do we want to keep on Firebase, and what ones do we want to move on to something else? And then, you know, making mistakes. And learning things the hard way. And then after about three months, we got that right. So that, we would then be able to scale to the 1.5 million DAE without any further issues from the GCP. But what happens is, if you have an outage, new users who go on your app experience a dysfunctional app, and then they're going to exit. And so your next day, the key metrics that the app stores track are going to be something like retention rates. And so your next day, the key metrics that the app stores track are going to be something like retention rates. Money spent, and the star, like, the rating that they give you. In the app store. In the app store, yeah. Tyranny. So if you're ranked top 50 in entertainment, you're going to acquire a certain rate of users organically. If you go in and have a bad experience, it's going to tank where you're positioned in the algorithm. And then it can take a long time to kind of earn your way back up, at least if you wanted to do it organically. If you throw money at it, you can jump to the top. And I could talk about that. But broadly speaking, if we look at 2024, the first kink in the graph was outages due to hitting 500k DAU. The backend didn't want to scale past that. So then we just had to do the engineering and build through it. Okay, so we built through that, and then we get a little bit of growth. And so, okay, that's feeling a little bit good. I think the next thing, I think it's, I'm not going to lie, I have a feeling that when Character AI got... I was thinking. I think so. I think... So the Character AI team fundamentally got acquired by Google. And I don't know what they changed in their business. I don't know if they dialed down that ad spend. Products don't change, right? Products just what it is. I don't think so. Yeah, I think the product is what it is. It's like maintenance mode. Yes. I think the issue that people, you know, some people may think this is an obvious fact, but running a business can be very competitive, right? Because other businesses can see what you're doing, and they can imitate you. And then there's this... There's this question of, if you've got one company that's spending $100,000 a day on advertising, and you've got another company that's spending zero, if you consider market share, and if you're considering new users which are entering the market, the guy that's spending $100,000 a day is going to be getting 90% of those new users. And so I have a suspicion that when the founders of Character AI left, they dialed down their spending on user acquisition. And I think that kind of gave oxygen to like the other apps. And so Chai was able to then start growing again in a really healthy fashion. I think that's kind of like the second thing. I think a third thing is we've really built a great data flywheel. Like the AI team sort of perfected their flywheel, I would say, in end of Q2. And I could speak about that at length. But fundamentally, the way I would describe it is when you're building anything in life, you need to be able to evaluate it. And through evaluation, you can iterate, we can look at benchmarks, and we can say the issues with benchmarks and why they may not generalize as well as one would hope in the challenges of working with them. But something that works incredibly well is getting feedback from humans. And so we built this thing where anyone can submit a model to our developer backend, and it gets put in front of 5000 users, and the users can rate it. And we can then have a really accurate ranking of like which model, or users finding more engaging or more entertaining. And it gets, you know, it's at this point now, where every day we're able to, I mean, we evaluate between 20 and 50 models, LLMs, every single day, right. So even though we've got only got a team of, say, five AI researchers, they're able to iterate a huge quantity of LLMs, right. So our team ships, let's just say minimum 100 LLMs a week is what we're able to iterate through. Now, before that moment in time, we might iterate through three a week, we might, you know, there was a time when even doing like five a month was a challenge, right? By being able to change the feedback loops to the point where it's not, let's launch these three models, let's do an A-B test, let's assign, let's do different cohorts, let's wait 30 days to see what the day 30 retention is, which is the kind of the, if you're doing an app, that's like A-B testing 101 would be, do a 30-day retention test, assign different treatments to different cohorts and come back in 30 days. So that's insanely slow. That's just, it's too slow. And so we were able to get that 30-day feedback loop all the way down to something like three hours. And when we did that, we could really, really, really perfect techniques like DPO, fine tuning, prompt engineering, blending, rejection sampling, training a reward model, right, really successfully, like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so I think in Q3 and Q4, we got, the amount of AI improvements we got was like astounding. It was getting to the point, I thought like how much more, how much more edge is there to be had here? But the team just could keep going and going and going. That was like number three for the inflection point.swyx [00:34:53]: There's a fourth?William [00:34:54]: The important thing about the third one is if you go on our Reddit or you talk to users of AI, there's like a clear date. It's like somewhere in October or something. The users, they flipped. Before October, the users... The users would say character AI is better than you, for the most part. Then from October onwards, they would say, wow, you guys are better than character AI. And that was like a really clear positive signal that we'd sort of done it. And I think people, you can't cheat consumers. You can't trick them. You can't b******t them. They know, right? If you're going to spend 90 minutes on a platform, and with apps, there's the barriers to switching is pretty low. Like you can try character AI, you can't cheat consumers. You can't cheat them. You can't cheat them. You can't cheat AI for a day. If you get bored, you can try Chai. If you get bored of Chai, you can go back to character. So the users, the loyalty is not strong, right? What keeps them on the app is the experience. If you deliver a better experience, they're going to stay and they can tell. So that was the fourth one was we were fortunate enough to get this hire. He was hired one really talented engineer. And then they said, oh, at my last company, we had a head of growth. He was really, really good. And he was the head of growth for ByteDance for two years. Would you like to speak to him? And I was like, yes. Yes, I think I would. And so I spoke to him. And he just blew me away with what he knew about user acquisition. You know, it was like a 3D chessswyx [00:36:21]: sort of thing. You know, as much as, as I know about AI. Like ByteDance as in TikTok US. Yes.William [00:36:26]: Not ByteDance as other stuff. Yep. He was interviewing us as we were interviewing him. Right. And so pick up options. Yeah, exactly. And so he was kind of looking at our metrics. And he was like, I saw him get really excited when he said, guys, you've got a million daily active users and you've done no advertising. I said, correct. And he was like, that's unheard of. He's like, I've never heard of anyone doing that. And then he started looking at our metrics. And he was like, if you've got all of this organically, if you start spending money, this is going to be very exciting. I was like, let's give it a go. So then he came in, we've just started ramping up the user acquisition. So that looks like spending, you know, let's say we're spending, we started spending $20,000 a day, it looked very promising than 20,000. Right now we're spending $40,000 a day on user acquisition. That's still only half of what like character AI or talkie may be spending. But from that, it's sort of, we were growing at a rate of maybe say, 2x a year. And that got us growing at a rate of 3x a year. So I'm growing, I'm evolving more and more to like a Silicon Valley style hyper growth, like, you know, you build something decent, and then you canswyx [00:37:33]: slap on a huge... You did the important thing, you did the product first.William [00:37:36]: Of course, but then you can slap on like, like the rocket or the jet engine or something, which is just this cash in, you pour in as much cash, you buy a lot of ads, and your growth is faster.swyx [00:37:48]: Not to, you know, I'm just kind of curious what's working right now versus what surprisinglyWilliam [00:37:52]: doesn't work. Oh, there's a long, long list of surprising stuff that doesn't work. Yeah. The surprising thing, like the most surprising thing, what doesn't work is almost everything doesn't work. That's what's surprising. And I'll give you an example. So like a year and a half ago, I was working at a company, we were super excited by audio. I was like, audio is going to be the next killer feature, we have to get in the app. And I want to be the first. So everything Chai does, I want us to be the first. We may not be the company that's strongest at execution, but we can always be theswyx [00:38:22]: most innovative. Interesting. Right? So we can... You're pretty strong at execution.William [00:38:26]: We're much stronger, we're much stronger. A lot of the reason we're here is because we were first. If we launched today, it'd be so hard to get the traction. Because it's like to get the flywheel, to get the users, to build a product people are excited about. If you're first, people are naturally excited about it. But if you're fifth or 10th, man, you've got to beswyx [00:38:46]: insanely good at execution. So you were first with voice? We were first. We were first. I only knowWilliam [00:38:51]: when character launched voice. They launched it, I think they launched it at least nine months after us. Okay. Okay. But the team worked so hard for it. At the time we did it, latency is a huge problem. Cost is a huge problem. Getting the right quality of the voice is a huge problem. Right? Then there's this user interface and getting the right user experience. Because you don't just want it to start blurting out. Right? You want to kind of activate it. But then you don't have to keep pressing a button every single time. There's a lot that goes into getting a really smooth audio experience. So we went ahead, we invested the three months, we built it all. And then when we did the A-B test, there was like, no change in any of the numbers. And I was like, this can't be right, there must be a bug. And we spent like a week just checking everything, checking again, checking again. And it was like, the users just did not care. And it was something like only 10 or 15% of users even click the button to like, they wanted to engage the audio. And they would only use it for 10 or 15% of the time. So if you do the math, if it's just like something that one in seven people use it for one seventh of their time. You've changed like 2% of the experience. So even if that that 2% of the time is like insanely good, it doesn't translate much when you look at the retention, when you look at the engagement, and when you look at the monetization rates. So audio did not have a big impact. I'm pretty big on audio. But yeah, I like it too. But it's, you know, so a lot of the stuff which I do, I'm a big, you can have a theory. And you resist. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So I think if you want to make audio work, it has to be a unique, compelling, exciting experience that they can't have anywhere else.swyx [00:40:37]: It could be your models, which just weren't good enough.William [00:40:39]: No, no, no, they were great. Oh, yeah, they were very good. it was like, it was kind of like just the, you know, if you listen to like an audible or Kindle, or something like, you just hear this voice. And it's like, you don't go like, wow, this is this is special, right? It's like a convenience thing. But the idea is that if you can, if Chai is the only platform, like, let's say you have a Mr. Beast, and YouTube is the only platform you can use to make audio work, then you can watch a Mr. Beast video. And it's the most engaging, fun video that you want to watch, you'll go to a YouTube. And so it's like for audio, you can't just put the audio on there. And people go, oh, yeah, it's like 2% better. Or like, 5% of users think it's 20% better, right? It has to be something that the majority of people, for the majority of the experience, go like, wow, this is a big deal. That's the features you need to be shipping. If it's not going to appeal to the majority of people, for the majority of the experience, and it's not a big deal, it's not going to move you. Cool. So you killed it. I don't see it anymore. Yep. So I love this. The longer, it's kind of cheesy, I guess, but the longer I've been working at Chai, and I think the team agrees with this, all the platitudes, at least I thought they were platitudes, that you would get from like the Steve Jobs, which is like, build something insanely great, right? Or be maniacally focused, or, you know, the most important thing is saying no to, not to work on. All of these sort of lessons, they just are like painfully true. They're painfully true. So now I'm just like, everything I say, I'm either quoting Steve Jobs or Zuckerberg. I'm like, guys, move fast and break free.swyx [00:42:10]: You've jumped the Apollo to cool it now.William [00:42:12]: Yeah, it's just so, everything they said is so, so true. The turtle neck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything is so true.swyx [00:42:18]: This last question on my side, and I want to pass this to Alessio, is on just, just multi-modality in general. This actually comes from Justine Moore from A16Z, who's a friend of ours. And a lot of people are trying to do voice image video for AI companions. Yes. You just said voice didn't work. Yep. What would make you revisit?William [00:42:36]: So Steve Jobs, he was very, listen, he was very, very clear on this. There's a habit of engineers who, once they've got some cool technology, they want to find a way to package up the cool technology and sell it to consumers, right? That does not work. So you're free to try and build a startup where you've got your cool tech and you want to find someone to sell it to. That's not what we do at Chai. At Chai, we start with the consumer. What does the consumer want? What is their problem? And how do we solve it? So right now, the number one problems for the users, it's not the audio. That's not the number one problem. It's not the image generation either. That's not their problem either. The number one problem for users in AI is this. All the AI is being generated by middle-aged men in Silicon Valley, right? That's all the content. You're interacting with this AI. You're speaking to it for 90 minutes on average. It's being trained by middle-aged men. The guys out there, they're out there. They're talking to you. They're talking to you. They're like, oh, what should the AI say in this situation, right? What's funny, right? What's cool? What's boring? What's entertaining? That's not the way it should be. The way it should be is that the users should be creating the AI, right? And so the way I speak about it is this. Chai, we have this AI engine in which sits atop a thin layer of UGC. So the thin layer of UGC is absolutely essential, right? It's just prompts. But it's just prompts. It's just an image. It's just a name. It's like we've done 1% of what we could do. So we need to keep thickening up that layer of UGC. It must be the case that the users can train the AI. And if reinforcement learning is powerful and important, they have to be able to do that. And so it's got to be the case that there exists, you know, I say to the team, just as Mr. Beast is able to spend 100 million a year or whatever it is on his production company, and he's got a team building the content, the Mr. Beast company is able to spend 100 million a year on his production company. And he's got a team building the content, which then he shares on the YouTube platform. Until there's a team that's earning 100 million a year or spending 100 million on the content that they're producing for the Chai platform, we're not finished, right? So that's the problem. That's what we're excited to build. And getting too caught up in the tech, I think is a fool's errand. It does not work.Alessio [00:44:52]: As an aside, I saw the Beast Games thing on Amazon Prime. It's not doing well. And I'mswyx [00:44:56]: curious. It's kind of like, I mean, the audience reading is high. The run-to-meet-all sucks, but the audience reading is high.Alessio [00:45:02]: But it's not like in the top 10. I saw it dropped off of like the... Oh, okay. Yeah, that one I don't know. I'm curious, like, you know, it's kind of like similar content, but different platform. And then going back to like, some of what you were saying is like, you know, people come to ChaiWilliam [00:45:13]: expecting some type of content. Yeah, I think it's something that's interesting to discuss is like, is moats. And what is the moat? And so, you know, if you look at a platform like YouTube, the moat, I think is in first is really is in the ecosystem. And the ecosystem, is comprised of you have the content creators, you have the users, the consumers, and then you have the algorithms. And so this, this creates a sort of a flywheel where the algorithms are able to be trained on the users, and the users data, the recommend systems can then feed information to the content creators. So Mr. Beast, he knows which thumbnail does the best. He knows the first 10 seconds of the video has to be this particular way. And so his content is super optimized for the YouTube platform. So that's why it doesn't do well on Amazon. If he wants to do well on Amazon, how many videos has he created on the YouTube platform? By thousands, 10s of 1000s, I guess, he needs to get those iterations in on the Amazon. So at Chai, I think it's all about how can we get the most compelling, rich user generated content, stick that on top of the AI engine, the recommender systems, in such that we get this beautiful data flywheel, more users, better recommendations, more creative, more content, more users.Alessio [00:46:34]: You mentioned the algorithm, you have this idea of the Chaiverse on Chai, and you have your own kind of like LMSYS-like ELO system. Yeah, what are things that your models optimize for, like your users optimize for, and maybe talk about how you build it, how people submit models?William [00:46:49]: So Chaiverse is what I would describe as a developer platform. More often when we're speaking about Chai, we're thinking about the Chai app. And the Chai app is really this product for consumers. And so consumers can come on the Chai app, they can come on the Chai app, they can come on the Chai app, they can interact with our AI, and they can interact with other UGC. And it's really just these kind of bots. And it's a thin layer of UGC. Okay. Our mission is not to just have a very thin layer of UGC. Our mission is to have as much UGC as possible. So we must have, I don't want people at Chai training the AI. I want people, not middle aged men, building AI. I want everyone building the AI, as many people building the AI as possible. Okay, so what we built was we built Chaiverse. And Chaiverse is kind of, it's kind of like a prototype, is the way to think about it. And it started with this, this observation that, well, how many models get submitted into Hugging Face a day? It's hundreds, it's hundreds, right? So there's hundreds of LLMs submitted each day. Now consider that, what does it take to build an LLM? It takes a lot of work, actually. It's like someone devoted several hours of compute, several hours of their time, prepared a data set, launched it, ran it, evaluated it, submitted it, right? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of work that's going into that. So what we did was we said, well, why can't we host their models for them and serve them to users? And then what would that look like? The first issue is, well, how do you know if a model is good or not? Like, we don't want to serve users the crappy models, right? So what we would do is we would, I love the LMSYS style. I think it's really cool. It's really simple. It's a very intuitive thing, which is you simply present the users with two completions. You can say, look, this is from model one. This is from model two. This is from model three. This is from model A. This is from model B, which is better. And so if someone submits a model to Chaiverse, what we do is we spin up a GPU. We download the model. We're going to now host that model on this GPU. And we're going to start routing traffic to it. And we're going to send, we think it takes about 5,000 completions to get an accurate signal. That's roughly what LMSYS does. And from that, we're able to get an accurate ranking. And we're able to get an accurate ranking. And we're able to get an accurate ranking of which models are people finding entertaining and which models are not entertaining. If you look at the bottom 80%, they'll suck. You can just disregard them. They totally suck. Then when you get the top 20%, you know you've got a decent model, but you can break it down into more nuance. There might be one that's really descriptive. There might be one that's got a lot of personality to it. There might be one that's really illogical. Then the question is, well, what do you do with these top models? From that, you can do more sophisticated things. You can try and do like a routing thing where you say for a given user request, we're going to try and predict which of these end models that users enjoy the most. That turns out to be pretty expensive and not a huge source of like edge or improvement. Something that we love to do at Chai is blending, which is, you know, it's the simplest way to think about it is you're going to end up, and you're going to pretty quickly see you've got one model that's really smart, one model that's really funny. How do you get the user an experience that is both smart and funny? Well, just 50% of the requests, you can serve them the smart model, 50% of the requests, you serve them the funny model. Just a random 50%? Just a random, yeah. And then... That's blending? That's blending. You can do more sophisticated things on top of that, as in all things in life, but the 80-20 solution, if you just do that, you get a pretty powerful effect out of the gate. Random number generator. I think it's like the robustness of randomness. Random is a very powerful optimization technique, and it's a very robust thing. So you can explore a lot of the space very efficiently. There's one thing that's really, really important to share, and this is the most exciting thing for me, is after you do the ranking, you get an ELO score, and you can track a user's first join date, the first date they submit a model to Chaiverse, they almost always get a terrible ELO, right? So let's say the first submission they get an ELO of 1,100 or 1,000 or something, and you can see that they iterate and they iterate and iterate, and it will be like, no improvement, no improvement, no improvement, and then boom. Do you give them any data, or do you have to come up with this themselves? We do, we do, we do, we do. We try and strike a balance between giving them data that's very useful, you've got to be compliant with GDPR, which is like, you have to work very hard to preserve the privacy of users of your app. So we try to give them as much signal as possible, to be helpful. The minimum is we're just going to give you a score, right? That's the minimum. But that alone is people can optimize a score pretty well, because they're able to come up with theories, submit it, does it work? No. A new theory, does it work? No. And then boom, as soon as they figure something out, they keep it, and then they iterate, and then boom,Alessio [00:51:46]: they figure something out, and they keep it. Last year, you had this post on your blog, cross-sourcing the lead to the 10 trillion parameter, AGI, and you call it a mixture of experts, recommenders. Yep. Any insights?William [00:51:58]: Updated thoughts, 12 months later? I think the odds, the timeline for AGI has certainly been pushed out, right? Now, this is in, I'm a controversial person, I don't know, like, I just think... You don't believe in scaling laws, you think AGI is further away. I think it's an S-curve. I think everything's an S-curve. And I think that the models have proven to just be far worse at reasoning than people sort of thought. And I think whenever I hear people talk about LLMs as reasoning engines, I sort of cringe a bit. I don't think that's what they are. I think of them more as like a simulator. I think of them as like a, right? So they get trained to predict the next most likely token. It's like a physics simulation engine. So you get these like games where you can like construct a bridge, and you drop a car down, and then it predicts what should happen. And that's really what LLMs are doing. It's not so much that they're reasoning, it's more that they're just doing the most likely thing. So fundamentally, the ability for people to add in intelligence, I think is very limited. What most people would consider intelligence, I think the AI is not a crowdsourcing problem, right? Now with Wikipedia, Wikipedia crowdsources knowledge. It doesn't crowdsource intelligence. So it's a subtle distinction. AI is fantastic at knowledge. I think it's weak at intelligence. And a lot, it's easy to conflate the two because if you ask it a question and it gives you, you know, if you said, who was the seventh president of the United States, and it gives you the correct answer, I'd say, well, I don't know the answer to that. And you can conflate that with intelligence. But really, that's a question of knowledge. And knowledge is really this thing about saying, how can I store all of this information? And then how can I retrieve something that's relevant? Okay, they're fantastic at that. They're fantastic at storing knowledge and retrieving the relevant knowledge. They're superior to humans in that regard. And so I think we need to come up for a new word. How does one describe AI should contain more knowledge than any individual human? It should be more accessible than any individual human. That's a very powerful thing. That's superswyx [00:54:07]: powerful. But what words do we use to describe that? We had a previous guest on Exa AI that does search. And he tried to coin super knowledge as the opposite of super intelligence.William [00:54:20]: Exactly. I think super knowledge is a more accurate word for it.swyx [00:54:24]: You can store more things than any human can.William [00:54:26]: And you can retrieve it better than any human can as well. And I think it's those two things combined that's special. I think that thing will exist. That thing can be built. And I think you can start with something that's entertaining and fun. And I think, I often think it's like, look, it's going to be a 20 year journey. And we're in like, year four, or it's like the web. And this is like 1998 or something. You know, you've got a long, long way to go before the Amazon.coms are like these huge, multi trillion dollar businesses that every single person uses every day. And so AI today is very simplistic. And it's fundamentally the way we're using it, the flywheels, and this ability for how can everyone contribute to it to really magnify the value that it brings. Right now, like, I think it's a bit sad. It's like, right now you have big labs, I'm going to pick on open AI. And they kind of go to like these human labelers. And they say, we're going to pay you to just label this like subset of questions that we want to get a really high quality data set, then we're going to get like our own computers that are really powerful. And that's kind of like the thing. For me, it's so much like Encyclopedia Britannica. It's like insane. All the people that were interested in blockchain, it's like, well, this is this is what needs to be decentralized, you need to decentralize that thing. Because if you distribute it, people can generate way more data in a distributed fashion, way more, right? You need the incentive. Yeah, of course. Yeah. But I mean, the, the, that's kind of the exciting thing about Wikipedia was it's this understanding, like the incentives, you don't need money to incentivize people. You don't need dog coins. No. Sometimes, sometimes people get the satisfaction fro

"I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar!"  As the New Year begins to take shape, we're kicking off with an empowering conversation about owning your alpha identity! In this episode, we're diving deep into what makes an alpha female, why the world is sometimes intimidated by strong women, and how to embrace your power unapologetically in every aspect of life. As women, the world often expects so much from us, but when you're an alpha woman, society tends to want you to shrink rather than rise to the occasion. But what if you could have it all? Whether you're leading a team or nurturing relationships, this episode is your guide to balancing strength with authenticity. Don't miss this empowering conversation that will leave you inspired to roar louder than ever before! We are joined by Dau Tucker, a powerhouse executive who truly embodies the essence of the alpha female. Dau is the Chief Administration Officer (CAO) at Jet Health Inc., where she leverages her MBA and extensive background in human resources and communication to drive success. This conversation isn't just for women—it's for anyone who is navigating family, relationships, and leadership roles. Whether you're a woman, wife, sister, daughter, or a man with family, this episode is for you. We're celebrating the power, resilience, and unapologetic strength of the alpha woman as we dive into her journey, leadership, and how to unapologetically own your power.  

Documental amb dansa de dervix. Crítica teatral de l'obra «Els contrabandistes de llibres de Darayya», de Delphine Minoui. Traducció d'Albert Tola i Isabelle Bres. Versió d'Albert Tola i Iban Beltran. Intèrprets: Ilyass El Ouahdani, Laura Rosel, Marwan Sabri, Jorge-Yamam Serrano. Basada en «Les passeurs de livres de Daraya» de Delphine Minoui / Editions du Seuil, 2020. Espai escènic: Judit Colomer. Disseny i confecció de vestuari. Montse Figueras. Il·luminació: Alberto Rodríguez Vega (AAI). Espai sonor: Damien Bazin. Videocreació: Miquel Àngel Raió (Amb imatges extretes del documental «Daraya: A Library Under Bombs» de Delphine Minoui i Bruno Joucla, produït per Brother Films. Assistent de videocreació: Martín Elena. Construcció d’escenografia: TM Disseny Industrial: Equips tècnics i de gestió de la companyia. Direcció artística: Mercè Managuerra. Producció executiva: Sylvie Lorente. Comunicació: Marta Cros. Ajudanta de producció: Aida Llop. Tècnics de la companyia: Àlex Romero, Carolina Durian. Suport tècnic: Damià Plensa. Distribució: Cristina Ferrer (Tot Produccions). Producció: Cia. Dau al Sec, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya. Amb la col·laboració de Fabra i Coats - Fàbrica de creació de Barcelona. Agraïment especial: François Vila i Mathilde Mottier. Agraïments: Mariam Bahous Yalaoui, Ali El Aziz, Malika Guezmi, Abdila Ouled-Driss, Charaf Kbaweh Bouhaja, Mohamed Soulimane, Festival OUI! Equips tècnics i de gestió del TNC. Ajudanta de direcció i moviment: Ana Pérez García. Direcció de l'espectacle: Iban Beltran. Sala Tallers, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Barcelona, 23 gener 2025. Veu: Andreu Sotorra. Música: Hay Zirk - Invocation. Interpretació: Simon Shaheen & Quantara. Composició: Kudsi Erguner. Àlbum: Dervix dansa, 2024.

Last time we spoke about the South China Sea Raid. In January, General Krueger reinforced the American beachhead at Lingayen Gulf while Admiral Halsey launched Operation Gratitude, targeting enemy ships based on faulty intelligence. Despite not finding the expected battleships, American forces decimated a Japanese convoy, sinking numerous vessels and claiming 113 enemy aircraft. Meanwhile, on Luzon, the 1st and 14th Corps advanced against Japanese defenses, capturing key positions despite fierce resistance. As both sides prepared for counteroffensives, the battle intensified, marking a pivotal moment in the Philippines campaign. On January 17, the 58th Brigade and supporting regiments launched a daring operation to destroy enemy positions. As American forces advanced, they faced fierce resistance, but some regiments achieved notable successes. Task Force 38 executed airstrikes on Formosa and Hong Kong, inflicting damage despite heavy losses. Meanwhile, Japanese forces struggled to regroup amid American pressure. General Suzuki devised a plan to fortify Leyte, but ongoing air raids hampered supply efforts. Tensions escalated as both sides prepared for decisive confrontations in the ongoing battle for control. This episode is the Mandalay Offensive Welcome to the Pacific War Podcast Week by Week, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about world war two? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on world war two and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel you can find a few videos all the way from the Opium Wars of the 1800's until the end of the Pacific War in 1945.  We last left off with, General Krueger strategically positioned General Mullins' 25th Division on the right flank of the 43rd Division to bolster the assault forces at the Rosario front. This maneuver was also intended to facilitate the continuation of the 14th Corps' advance to the south. Following the successful repulsion of General Nishiyama's local counterattack, General Wing ordered the 63rd, 158th, and 172nd Regiments, which had been stalled, to launch an offensive from the west along the Damortis-Rosario road. Simultaneously, the 103rd and 169th Regiments were tasked with advancing northward along Route 3, originating from Pozorrubio. In contrast, while the 58th Independent Mixed Brigade and the 23rd Division worked to contain General Swift's 1st Corps, General Yamashita was reinforcing the San Jose sector. He further instructed the Shigemi Detachment to maintain a defensive position in Binalonan. Although the 27th and 161st Regiments had successfully relieved the 103rd Regiment in the Binalonan area, Major-General Shigemi Isao ultimately opted to halt further troop movements. He decided to leave only a small garrison in Binalonan while the majority of his forces prepared for a decisive stand at San Manuel.   As the situation unfolded, the 3rd Battalion of the 161st Regiment encountered minimal resistance, allowing them to advance into the northern half of Binalonan by nightfall on January 17. In a parallel effort, General Patrick directed the 1st Regiment towards Urdaneta, where they successfully eliminated a small outpost belonging to the Shigemi Detachment. Additionally, he dispatched the 20th Regiment to the Cabaruan Hills, where they achieved their objective by reaching Lunec and securing the central area of the hills by the end of the day. On January 18, the offensive momentum of the 6th and 25th Divisions persisted. The 20th Regiment advanced to a low ridge approximately 2,500 yards west of Cabaruan, where American forces identified the primary defenses of the 2nd Battalion, 71st Regiment. Meanwhile, the 161st Regiment successfully cleared Binalonan, and the 27th Regiment moved forward to seize control of the Bactad area, further consolidating their gains in the region. Simultaneously, Wing's units were gearing up for a significant new offensive. In line with this strategy, the 2nd Battalion of the 169th Regiment advanced along Route 3, deftly circumventing the town of Sison, and finally reached a crucial road junction located to the northeast of the town. Meanwhile, to the north, the 172nd Regiment executed a successful nighttime ambush against a Japanese artillery battalion. Following this victory, they dispatched a company to seize control of a strategically important hill, rising 600 feet and situated approximately 1,000 yards north of Rosario. This position enabled American forces to exert control over a substantial portion of the surrounding area. By the conclusion of the day, the 158th and 63rd Regiments established contact through patrols about a mile south of Amlang, as they prepared for a coordinated assault that was set to launch on January 19. This offensive culminated in the collapse of the last Japanese defenses just two days later. Concurrently, the 172nd Regiment successfully established a patrol base on Hill 606. From this vantage point, patrols ventured into Rosario, discovering the town was heavily mined, riddled with booby traps, and defended by concealed machine-gunners and riflemen hiding amidst the rubble of the buildings. On January 19, the 103rd Regiment initiated an assault on Hill 600, located at the southern end of the ridge line east of Route 3. At the same time, the 2nd Battalion of the 169th Regiment faced several intense counterattacks from retreating Japanese forces that had been bypassed at Mount Alava and Sison. Despite the fierce resistance, the relentless pressure from Japanese troops and increasingly heavy artillery fire ultimately compelled the battalion to withdraw by noon. Nevertheless, the American operations succeeded in diminishing the Japanese presence in the region. Looking southward, the 161st Regiment cautiously advanced toward San Manuel, while the 27th Regiment effectively moved into Asingan, successfully cutting off Shigemi's escape route. Further south, the 1st Regiment rapidly progressed along Route 3 toward the Agno River, capturing the towns of Villasis, Carmen, and Rosales. Meanwhile, the 20th Regiment commenced an assault on the 2nd Battalion of the 71st Regiment stationed in the Cabaruan Hills. On the front commanded by General Griswold, the 14th Corps was in the process of mobilizing along the Camiling-Anao line, preparing to initiate an advance toward the Tarlac-Victoria line. The 160th Regiment began its march, covering seven miles southward from Camiling along Route 13, while the 129th Regiment took a strong position in Anao, establishing vital contact with other outposts of the 37th Division stationed at Paniqui. The advances made on January 20 were notably swift, with the 148th Regiment successfully capturing the towns of Gerona and Pura. Meanwhile, the 37th Reconnaissance Troop made significant progress by entering the guerrilla-occupied area of Victoria, and units from the 40th Division advanced to within four miles of Tarlac, signaling a promising push toward their objectives. In the area around Cabaruan, the Japanese forces had sustained heavy losses during the initial attack. In response, Colonel Patrick made the strategic decision to withdraw two battalions from the hills to reinforce the southern advance. Probing slowly through the roughest ground in the Cabaruan Hills on January 20 and 21, the 20th Regiment's reinforced battalion jumped off in the morning of the 22nd in what was expected to be the last attack, its way paved by an especially heavy artillery and air bombardment. But from the start, operations did not go as planned. The air strike, conducted by Fifth Air Force A-20s was four hours late, subjecting the infantry to "a nerve racking wait," and did not include requested napalm. Air and artillery concentrations were, however, well placed, and it seemed improbable to the waiting infantry that many Japanese could have lived through them. A combined tank-infantry assault began about 12:30 and proceeded slowly but steadily for almost two hours. Then the attackers were stopped cold by a tremendous burst of rifle, machine-gun, and light artillery fire from the very hillsides that had received the weight of the bombardments. Company E, in the lead, fell back; Company G's officers were all either killed or wounded, and the company was temporarily scattered; Company F was pinned in place; and two supporting tanks were knocked out. Casualties mounted quickly to 10 men killed and 35 wounded. As a consequence, Patrick found it necessary to redirect one battalion from the 1st Regiment to support the ongoing attack. Simultaneously, the remainder of the 20th Regiment pressed forward toward Cuyapo, while the bulk of the 1st Regiment continued its eastward movement toward the guerrilla-held Balungao. Additionally, the 6th Reconnaissance Troop reached Guimba, successfully establishing contact with patrols from the 14th Corps, which was crucial for coordinating their efforts. On another front, with Mount Alava now vulnerable, the 169th Regiment launched a vigorous assault on January 20, managing to secure the summit of the mountain by nightfall. In contrast, the 103rd Regiment continued to face heavy casualties during their frontal assaults against Hill 600, ultimately gaining only a precarious foothold on the exposed southern slopes. Meanwhile, in a significant naval development, Admiral Halsey's Task Force 38 exited the South China Sea through the Balintang Channel on January 20. The task force was poised to execute further strikes against Formosa, aiming to disrupt enemy operations and bolster the Allied offensive in the region. The following day, with significantly improved weather conditions, Admiral McCain's aircraft carriers launched a coordinated series of airstrikes targeting Formosa, the Pescadores Islands, and the southern Ryukyu Islands. These operations resulted in the destruction of 104 Japanese aircraft on the ground, the sinking of seven oil tankers, and the loss of seven transport ships, along with additional damage inflicted on another seven vessels.  For the first time since November 1944, TF 38 felt the sting of kamikazes. Operating just 100nm east of Formosa, TF 38 was not difficult to find. Just after noon, a single aircraft appeared to conduct a conventional bombing attack on TG 38.3's light carrier Langley. One bomb hit forward. Personnel casualties were light, but the carrier was conducting flight operations three hours later. Within minutes, another aircraft also evaded radar detection and the CAP to commence a suicide dive against Ticonderoga. The kamikaze struck the flight deck and penetrated where its bomb exploded. An impending strike was spotted and ready to launch; now these aircraft provided fuel for the fire which was quickly spreading. Just before 1300hrs, another group of eight kamikazes and five escorts resumed the attack on TG 38.3. Only two suicide aircraft survived the CAP to dive on the wounded Ticonderoga. One was sent spinning into the water by antiaircraft fire, but the final attacker crashed into the carrier's island. More fires were started. The crew succeeded in putting out the flames by 1415hrs and correcting a nine-degree list by 1800hrs. Though the ship was saved, the cost was high. Some 143 men were killed and 202, including her captain, were wounded. In addition, the air group lost 36 aircraft. As a final farewell, kamikazes attacked the two destroyers on picket duty just 65nm off Formosa at 1310hrs. A single Zero had joined a returning strike. Before it could be identified as enemy, it dove on destroyer Maddox, striking her amidships. This and the explosion of the bomb aboard created a fire that was quickly extinguished. After a final day of strikes on January 22 against the Ryukyus, during which eight ships were sunk, Task Force 38 set course for Ulithi. Upon arrival, Admiral Halsey transferred command of the Fast Carrier Force to Admiral Spruance, who would lead the final offensives in the Central Pacific.  Meanwhile, back on Luzon, on January 21, the 160th Regiment swiftly cleared the town of Tarlac and began its advance toward San Miguel. Simultaneously, the 145th and 148th Regiments moved unopposed toward La Paz. The speed of 14th Corps' advance had stretched Griswold's supply lines abnormally and had exposed his left from Cuyapo to La Paz, a distance of nearly 25 miles. He had no definite information about suspected Japanese concentrations in the vicinity of Cabanatuan, on Route 5 just 15 miles east of La Paz. His worries about the security of his flank were hardly put to rest by reports of new contacts with Japanese forces at Moncada, now 20 miles behind the front, and at La Paz. Elements of the 129th and 145th Regiments easily took care of the Japanese in the Moncada area; but during the night of January 21, a pitched battle developed at La Paz when a platoon of Japanese infantry, supported by one tank, attacked a 148th Regiment perimeter at a road junction a mile west of town. The Japanese finally withdrew after destroying a bridge that carried a secondary road across a river a mile east of La Paz; but because of this, Griswold reported to General Krueger that it would be impossible to extend 14th Corps' left any further south until he had more information about Japanese forces east of La Paz. To mitigate this risk, he decided to keep General Beightler's 37th Division positioned in reserve while General Brush's 40th Division continued its advance southward along Route 3 toward Bamban. As a result, elements of the 160th Regiment and the 40th Reconnaissance Troop reached Capas and conducted patrols toward Camp O'Donnell on January 22. Meanwhile, the 161st Regiment began probing the defenses established by Japanese forces under Shigemi. The 103rd Regiment faced severe losses during their assault on Hill 600, necessitating a withdrawal to reorganize. Concurrently, the 169th Regiment launched an attack on Hill 355, making slow and costly progress against fierce resistance on the steep, barren slopes. By January 24, most of Hill 355 had been cleared, allowing the 3rd Battalion of the 103rd Regiment to move in and conduct mop-up operations in the area. As the 158th Regiment looked northward and secured the area around Amlang, they initiated an eastward push towards the positions held by the 172nd Regiment. However, their advance was slow, with only a modest gain of 500 yards achieved. Over the next two days, the 158th faced a grueling battle, making painstaking progress as they advanced foot by foot across exposed hills and ridges, all while enduring relentless machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. It wasn't until January 26 that they successfully broke through to Cataguintingan, where they provided much-needed support to the 172nd Regiment's ongoing assaults into Rosario. Meanwhile, by the evening of January 23, the 161st Regiment had managed to secure the southern slopes of the barren ridge north of San Manuel. They established trail blocks in the Aboredo Valley, effectively controlling movement in the area. To the south, the 108th Regiment had taken control of the Capas region, while the 160th Regiment successfully captured Bamban. However, it became increasingly evident that the American forces were now confronting the well-fortified and organized defenses of the Kembu Group. The Kembu Group's strength lay in the terrain it held, in the depth of its defenses, and in the great number of automatic weapons (aircraft and anti-aircraft) it possessed. Its major weaknesses were its immobility; the inadequate training and armament of the bulk of its troops; shortages of food, ammunition, and field artillery; and the rudimentary state of many defensive installations, a state deriving from the late start in establishing the positions at and west of Clark Field. The health of the command was poor from the start, and medical supplies were short. Morale was not of the highest order, and many of the troops were easily disaffected Formosan, Okinawan, and Korean labor personnel. In brief, the Kembu Group was the poorest armed, prepared, and supplied of Yamashita's three defense commands. On the other hand, as the 40th Division was soon to learn, even poor service troops, whatever their state of training and armament, can put up stiff resistance in good defensive terrain.  In preparation for the defense of Clark Field, General Tsukada assembled a diverse array of forces, totaling approximately 30,000 troops, although the majority consisted of air and naval personnel. He strategically divided his Army units into four distinct detachments. The Takayama, Takaya, and Eguchi Detachments were positioned along the first and second lines of defense, facing eastward toward Highway 3. Their defensive line extended from the hills west of Bamban to the vicinity of Fort Stotsenburg. In contrast, the Yanagimoto Detachment maintained its mobile units at Angeles and Porac, ready to respond to any potential enemy paratrooper landings on the southern flank of the Clark Field defenses. Additionally, Rear-Admiral Sugimoto Ushie commanded naval units comprising about 15,000 men, tasked with defending positions behind the two forward lines. In light of this formidable opposition, General Griswold made the strategic decision to utilize January 24 for consolidation and regrouping. This involved preparing for further advances southward while also probing into the enemy defenses that had already been uncovered. The 160th Regiment was able to secure Lafe Hill, although they were unable to establish a foothold on Hill 500, highlighting the challenges that lay ahead. To the north, American forces initiated another offensive against the Cabaruan Hills. The units of the 1st Regiment made only modest progress, yet they managed to advance closer to the main defensive positions as night fell. Meanwhile, at San Manuel, the 161st Regiment launched its first assault against the Shigemi Detachment, which encountered unexpectedly fierce resistance. As a result, the Americans were only able to establish a fragile foothold in the northern section of the town. Further north, Wing directed the 103rd Regiment to set up a line of departure along Route 3, aiming to strike eastward at the northwestern slopes of Hill 600. At the same time, they were tasked with advancing up the southwestern slopes of the exposed Hill 700 to secure that strategic location, as well as Hill 800 to the northwest. The 169th Regiment, advancing to the left of the 103rd, was assigned to capture Question Mark Hill. Concurrently, the 63rd and 172nd Regiments were ordered to launch simultaneous assaults on Hills 900 and 1500, respectively, while the reserve 3rd Battalion of the 63rd Regiment was also committed to clear Benchmark Hill. This coordinated attack was scheduled for January 25. The initial phases of the assault showed promise, with the supporting forces making significant headway. However, the 103rd Regiment faced considerable difficulties, managing to secure Hill 800 only by nightfall. Notably, the 172nd Regiment achieved tactical surprise, successfully clearing most of Hill 900. Over the next two days, the 63rd Regiment regrouped around Hill 1500 in preparation for its own offensive. Simultaneously, the 161st Regiment continued its slow advance southward through San Manuel, facing intense opposition. Patrick's units on the Cabaruan Hills managed to gain a mere 300 yards against determined resistance. Meanwhile, Brush pressed his attack on Clark Field, with the 160th Regiment clearing Hill 500 and advancing nearly a mile along the ridge from Lafe Hill, while the 108th Regiment secured Hills E and G. The following day, the 40th Division continued its southward maneuver. Any movement by American troops along the generally open ridges west of Route 3 inevitably brought down Japanese machine-gun and mortar fire, often augmented by fire from the dismounted aircraft automatic weapons, anti-aircraft guns, and light artillery. Seeking cover and usually pinned in place, the American infantry would call for close-in mortar and artillery support, wait for the concentrations to be fired, and then drive forward a few yards, when the process had to be repeated. Each time, the Americans managed to overrun a few Japanese machine-gun or rifle strongpoints. There was little choice of routes of advance. Draws, providing some concealment in scrub growth or bamboo thickets, were usually covered by well-emplaced Japanese weapons both within the draws and on the ridges to each side. Possession of the high ground, as ever, was essential. Yet the troops had to employ draws whenever possible to outflank Japanese ridgeline strongpoints, and often draws and ravines proved to be the only routes by which tanks, tank destroyers, and cannon company self-propelled mounts could get to the front to fire against Japanese cave positions along the sides of the ridges. The capture of one Japanese-held cave served only to disclose another, and one machine-gun position was overrun only to provide access to the next. Dislodging the Kembu Group from such defenses in depth was to prove a slow, laborious, and costly process, demanding the closest teamwork between the infantry and its supporting arms. Casualties, as a rule, would not be heavy on any one day--progress would be too slow and the troops would spend too much of their time pinned down awaiting fire from supporting weapons. But a daily attrition rate of about 5 men killed and 15 wounded for each battalion engaged would soon begin to have its effect. Meanwhile the 160th Regiment swiftly captured Hills 636 and 600 in rapid succession. However, the 108th Regiment lost control of Hill G during the engagement. On January 26, Griswold committed the 37th Division to the fight, with the 145th Regiment successfully capturing Mabalacat and Mabalacat East Airfield. They then shifted westward across Route 3, overrunning Clark Field Runway Number 1. In the Cabaruan Hills, American forces gained only 150 yards at a considerable cost. In response, Patrick decided to deploy another battalion from the 1st Regiment to eliminate this pocket of resistance. The following day, this two-battalion assault proved successful, resulting in the destruction of an entire battalion of Japanese troops, with over 1,400 enemy soldiers killed. Further north, the 161st Regiment finally broke through the main defenses of Shigemi's forces. Before dawn most of the Japanese left in San Manuel scrambled across the draw on the east side of town and fled to join the 10th Reconnaissance Regiment north of San Nicolas, but not before launching a final counterattack to cover their escape. At 0930 the 161st Infantry's two battalions resumed the drive southward through the town, and by 1330 San Manuel was clear. In a heroic but tactically unimportant stand the Shigemi Detachment had virtually fulfilled its self-imposed desire for annihilation in place. The detachment had lost 750 men killed; all its tanks, artillery, trucks, machine guns, and mortars had been either captured or destroyed. Probably no more than 250 troops escaped, and many of them were unarmed and wounded. The 161st Infantry and attached units had lost approximately 60 men killed and 200 wounded; the 716th Tank Battalion lost 3 tanks. Meanwhile, Wing's offensive continued on January 27, with the 103rd Regiment successfully reaching the crest of Hill 700 and the northwestern slopes of Hill 600. Unfortunately, they lost both positions to a brutal Japanese counterattack amidst a violent tropical downpour. On January 28, the 172nd Regiment captured Rosario, while the 63rd secured the southern crest of Hill 1500. Both regiments completed the capture of this strategic feature by January 30, thereby finalizing the occupation of the crucial road junction area. Further south, on January 27, the 160th Regiment advanced only 500 to 800 yards to the west and southwest. The 108th Regiment made a more substantial advance of about 1,000 yards southwest from Hills E and G but failed to reach Hill 5. The 145th Regiment pushed south along Route 3 for an additional three miles, reaching Culayo and Dau before taking control of the guerrilla-occupied Angeles, which had recently been abandoned by the retreating Yanagimoto Detachment. In a similar vein, the 148th Regiment secured Magalang without encountering any resistance. As we shift our focus from Luzon, we turn our attention to Burma, where we will delve into the ongoing developments of Operation Capital. Picking up from our previous discussions, we find ourselves in Central Burma, where the 2nd British Division and the 19th Indian Division are making significant strides toward Shwebo. The 2nd British Division successfully captured Ye-u on January 2, followed by the establishment of a crucial bridgehead across the Mu River just three days later. Meanwhile, the 19th Indian Division also advanced, reaching the Shwebo area by January 5. On January 8, a coordinated assault was launched by units from both divisions, culminating in the capture of Shwebo after two days of intense and brutal combat. To the west, General Festing's 29th Brigade began probing the northern flank of the 15th Division at Twinnge. Concurrently, other elements of the 19th Division worked to solidify their positions by establishing additional bridgeheads over the Irrawaddy River at Thabeikkyin and Kyaukyaung. On January 10, the 20th Indian Division captured Budalin and subsequently pushed towards Monywa, where the 33rd Division had only left a small contingent to serve as a rearguard. However, the campaign faced unexpected challenges; heavy rainfall during the first week of January brought all transport operations of the 4th Corps to a standstill, significantly hampering the Lushai Brigade's planned assault on Gangaw. After enduring a heavy aerial bombardment, the attack on Gangaw finally commenced on January 10. The Lushai Brigade managed to overpower the limited defending forces, forcing them to retreat after a brief skirmish. With Gangaw now under their control, the Lushai Brigade refocused their efforts on reconnaissance, monitoring the flanks of the 7th Indian Division. Meanwhile, the 28th East African Brigade took the lead in the advance, successfully displacing a Japanese garrison at Tilin on January 22. By this time, the 114th Brigade had begun to follow in the wake of the East Africans, while the 89th Brigade executed a long maneuver to the left, advancing toward Pauk in parallel with the other offensives. Although General Kimura was aware of some movements on his southern flank, he perceived these as mere feints by minor forces intended to divert his attention southward. Following a relentless barrage of artillery and air strikes, the 20th Division launched its offensive against Monywa on January 20. This assault faced fierce resistance, and it took two days of intense and bloody combat before the division was able to secure control of the town. After capturing Monywa, the 80th Brigade advanced towards Myaung, while the 110th Brigade shifted its focus to Ayadaw before launching an attack on Myinmu. By January 25, they had successfully established a bridgehead in that area. Meanwhile, to the east, the 2nd Division commenced its assault on Sagaing on January 14. They made significant headway against the forward defenses of the 31st Division, with other units managing to secure a bridgehead at Ywathitgyi. General Katamura, concerned about the expanding bridgeheads established by the 19th Division across the Irrawaddy River, ordered the 15th and 53rd Divisions to neutralize these positions before they could become fortified. As a result, during the last week of January, the Japanese forces executed a series of coordinated night attacks on Kyaukmyaung. By this time, British-Indian troops had dug in deeply, supported by formidable artillery and machine-gun positions. The ensuing conflict was marked by brutal carnage, with the 15th Division suffering a staggering loss of one-third of its personnel, while the 53rd Division was compelled to withdraw to Kyaukse after incurring heavy casualties. In parallel, the 89th Brigade successfully occupied Pauk on January 28, as General Messervy's forces geared up for a decisive push towards Meiktila. Looking northward, General Sultan was also advancing his own offensive aimed at reopening the Burma Road to China. He ordered the 50th Chinese Division to move towards Lashio and deployed the Mars Task Force to Hosi. Additionally, he dispatched the 36th British Division towards Mongmit, although the British advance was expected to be slow until additional forces could be brought into alignment for a more coordinated effort. General Sun's newly established 1st Army initiated a delayed offensive against Namhkam, which resumed in early January. This resurgence was marked by the 90th Regiment's strategic capture of the hill that overlooks the southwestern entrance to the Shweli River valley. Concurrently, the 112th Regiment advanced through Loiwing, subsequently crossing the river to approach Namhkam from the northeast. Meanwhile, the 88th Regiment entered the valley via the main road, making a direct push across the small plain toward Namhkam. The 89th and 114th Regiments executed a broader maneuver around the southern end of the Shweli valley; the 89th crossed the river on January 7 and advanced northward toward Namhkam, while the 114th crossed three days later, navigating through the hills toward the Namhkam-Namhpakka trail. To the south, the 475th Regiment progressed through Mong Hkak and reached Mong Wi on January 6, preparing for another challenging march across the hilly terrain toward Hosi, with the 124th Cavalry Regiment following closely behind. So close is Tonkwa to the mountains that the 475th found the trail rising steeply on the 1st day's march east. Like a crazily twisted drill it bored its way farther east and ever higher. In some places it was 15 to 20 feet across; in others, just wide enough for a man and a mule. As they rounded the turns, the men would peer ahead and look out across the valleys to where lay row on row of hills. Trees were everywhere. In flat places carved by erosion, the Burmese had cut and farmed terraces, and little villages clung to the mountains like limpets to a rock. Because existing maps were unreliable, so that map reconnaissance could not locate water and bivouac areas, and because the sheer fatigue of climbing the steeper slopes was formidable, march schedules went down the mountain side, with quite a few steel helmets and an occasional mule. Halts were a matter of common sense leadership at platoon or company level. The march was tactical but no Japanese were encountered, though rumor of their nearness kept the men alert. The Chinese had passed that way before, while a screen of Kachin Rangers was preceding the American column. Speaking the local dialects and carrying radios and automatic weapons, the Kachins were an excellent screen which masked the MARS Task Force while reporting anything that might be suspicious. Despite the difficult march, crossing the 400-foot wide Shweli was not too hard. The bridge built by the Chinese some weeks before still stood, a triumph of Oriental ingenuity, with bundles of bamboo for pontons and vines for cable. The Shweli was beginning to tear it apart, but work parties from the 475th kept it operable.  Meanwhile, spurred into action by General Wedemeyer after a month of inactivity, General Wei's Y-Force finally resumed its offensive operations in late December. They promptly dispatched the 2nd, 6th, and 71st Armies to launch an assault on the forward positions of the 56th Division at Wanting. Simultaneously, the 53rd Army executed a wide flanking maneuver to the west, aiming to encircle and attack the Japanese forces from the rear. Faced with the intense pressure of this four-pronged offensive, General Matsuyama was compelled to withdraw the 148th Regiment to a position north of Mongyu. He also ordered the Yoshida Force to mount a counteroffensive toward Muse and committed the reserve 2nd Regiment to secure Namhpakka. On January 5, the 53rd Army reached the vicinity of Muse and began crossing the river; however, they were met with fierce resistance from Matsuyama's timely counterattack, which thwarted their advance. Ten days later, Sun's forces initiated a well-coordinated offensive against Namhkam, which ultimately succumbed on January 16 as the 55th Regiment retreated toward Khonung. With the Shweli Valley now firmly under Allied control, Matsuyama began to tighten his defensive perimeter in anticipation of a final withdrawal toward Hsenwi. On January 17, the Mars Task Force made significant progress by reaching the Hosi sector, where they immediately engaged Japanese outposts. The 475th Regiment successfully secured the advantageous high ground near Nawhkam village. Over the next two days, American forces clashed with the 4th Regiment, capturing the strategically important Loikang Ridge and the elevated terrain overlooking Namhpakka. On January 19, the Mars Task Force attempted to disrupt Japanese supply lines by blocking the Burma Road through demolition and artillery bombardment, coinciding with the arrival of the 55th Regiment, which was sent to bolster the defenders. In a parallel effort, the 114th Regiment managed to sever the Namhkam-Namhpakka trail at Loilawn on the same day. Faced with this escalating threat from the south and the intensifying Chinese assaults on Wanting, the 56th Division was compelled to further contract its defensive perimeter. As a result, Wanting fell on January 20. Fortunately for Matsuyama, General Wei received orders from the Generalissimo to conclude the Salween campaign immediately, which meant that the Chinese forces would remain in their positions until they could be relieved by Sultan's units. Over the course of nearly nine months of intense combat, Wei's Y-Force had successfully reoccupied an impressive 24,000 square miles of Chinese territory and had defeated one of the most elite divisions of the Japanese army, along with elements from two additional divisions. However, the fighting was far from over. Sun continued to dispatch the 112th and 113th Regiments toward Wanting and Mongyu, aiming to clear the final stretch of the road leading to China. Meanwhile, the 89th and 114th Regiments pressed eastward to cut off the Burma Road north of Namhpakka, further complicating the situation for the Japanese forces. In the southern region, from January 20 to January 24, the Mars Task Force continued its strategic operations, executing ambushes and demolition missions while successfully repelling several intense counterattacks from enemy forces. By late January, pressure by MARS Task Force and that of the Chinese forces in the north began to register on the Japanese. The soldiers of the 4th Regiment could see the aerial activity that kept MARS supplied. Not recognizing what they saw, they were so impressed by a big supply drop on the 24th that they sent a report to the 56th Division of a large airborne force being landed along the Burma Road. Accepting this report, General Matsuyama decided to destroy his ammunition and retreat south. His superiors on January 24 agreed to let him retreat, but only after he had evacuated casualties and ammunition. Forty vehicles with gasoline accompanied by a Major Kibino of the 33rd Army staff were sent north to support the 56th in its withdrawal. The Japanese truck convoy made its run north the night of January 24. The trucks were heard, and the Americans placed heavy fire on the road. Kibino had been making the trip in a tankette. Hit by a 4.2-inch mortar shell, it burst into flames clearly visible from the American lines. Kibino clambered out, jumped on a truck, and succeeded in getting his convoy through to the 56th Division. Next day the derelict tankette was credited to the 2nd Battalion, 475th Regiment. But  Encouraged by the additional supplies of gasoline and inspired by the heroic examples of Major Kibino and the personnel of the truck companies, the 56th Division renewed its efforts and, during the next four days effected the evacuation of over 1000 casualties and moved several tons of ammunition to Hsenwi.  Meanwhile, General Matsuyama began to systematically reposition his forces toward Namhpakka, a strategic maneuver that would enable Chinese troops to occupy Mongyu on January 27. In a broader context, by the end of January, the 36th and 50th Divisions were also engaged in crossing the Shweli River, preparing to advance their offensives further southward. In the Arakan region, Operation Romulus exceeded expectations. The 1st Battalion of the 111th Regiment had been defending Akyab. On December 31, as the rear guard of the Sakura Detachment crossed the Kaladan River and moved eastward the Battalion was ordered to withdraw to Ponnagyun. As intelligence suggested very few Japanese were left on Akyab island, a recce aeroplane reported the locals showing no anxiety and on January 2 messages were dropped in Urdu and Burmese asking them to sit on the ground if the island was still occupied or stand with their hands in the air if not. Captain Jimmy Jarrett of ‘C' Flight, 656 AOP Squadron, then landed to a rousing reception and found the Japanese had quit on December 31, although nobody believed him until a senior officer flew in to confirm it. This prompted General Christison to swiftly initiate an amphibious invasion. Notably, this operation was executed without the anticipated naval bombardment and without deploying the reserve 26th Indian Division. As a result, the 3rd Commando Brigade successfully captured Akyab on January 3, facing no resistance, and the 25th Indian Division soon followed, reinforcing the area. From Akyab, the 9th York and Lancasters were transported by boat to establish a strategic blockade along the Yo River at Ponnagyun. There, they encountered significant Japanese forces. After a fierce engagement, however, the Japanese defenders were compelled to retreat toward Myohaung by January 11. In response to the evolving situation, Admiral Mountbatten devised a plan to land the 3rd Commando Brigade and the 25th Division on the Myebon Peninsula. This operation aimed to sever the primary lines of communication for Japanese forces, while preparations were made for the 26th Division to conduct a landing on Ramree Island. In response to the urgent military situation, Operation Passport was swiftly conceived and executed on January 12. British-Indian forces successfully landed at the southern tip of the peninsula, supported by both air and naval operations. Once ashore, the commandos advanced inland, facing intense resistance from fortified hill positions. Their efforts culminated in the capture of Pagoda Hill and the village of Myebon. However, as they pushed forward, opposition intensified, making it increasingly difficult for the British-Indian troops to reach Hill 831. Simultaneously, the 82nd West African Division, now commanded by Major-General Hugh Stockwell, entered the Kaladan Valley to relieve the 81st Division, which had been engaged in combat for over a year. The West African forces began to apply pressure against the Matsu Detachment units stationed at Myohaung and Minbya, although these Japanese forces managed to maintain their positions despite the mounting assaults. Meanwhile, planning was underway for the deployment of the 3rd Commando Brigade and the 51st Indian Brigade to land at Kangaw, coinciding with General Lomax's invasion of Ramree Island.  Early on January 21 the naval bombardment group opened fire. Christison and the other Force Commanders were watching through field glasses from the bridge of HMS Queen Elizabeth in her first engagement since the Dardanelles in 1915. Christison later said: ‘Some shells fell on a marsh behind the Jap defences, and I saw a number of duck spring up. “Duck”, I shouted. “The Royal Navy never ducks”, said the Admiral.' With her second salvo Queen Elizabeth scored a direct hit on the Japanese ammunition depot, which facilitated the landing operations. The 71st Indian Brigade successfully captured Kyaukpyu with minimal resistance. This victory enabled them to advance toward Minbyin and Kyaupyauk, both of which fell into their hands by January 23. In the subsequent days, the brigade continued its advance toward the Yanbauk Chaung, where they encountered fierce Japanese defenses. At the same time, other elements of the division worked to secure Cheduba and Sagu Kyun Islands, further consolidating their strategic position in the region. On January 22, the commandos and the 51st Brigade successfully landed in the Kangaw area near the Min River. However, they faced violent and frequent counterattacks from Japanese forces, which hindered their ability to expand their beachhead. Despite these challenges, the intense pressure from the commandos ultimately forced the Japanese defenders at Hill 831, Myohaung, and Minbya to retreat toward Kani, marking a significant shift in the operational landscape. I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me. General Krueger's forces advanced against Japanese defenses, capturing key positions despite heavy resistance and casualties. Meanwhile, in Burma, British-Indian troops advanced, seizing key locations despite heavy resistance. Both fronts faced intense combat, leading to significant territorial gains against Japanese forces by the end of January.

Paul Frazee is the CTO of Bluesky. He previously worked on the Beaker browser and the peer-to-peer social media protocol Secure Scuttlebutt. Paul discusses how Bluesky and ATProto got started, scaling up a social media site, what makes ATProto decentralized, lessons ATProto learned from previous peer-to-peer projects, and the challenges of content moderation. Episode transcript available here. My Bluesky profile. -- Related Links Bluesky ATProtocol ATProto for distributed systems engineers Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) ActivityPub Webfinger Beaker web browser Secure Scuttlebutt -- Transcript You can help correct transcripts on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I am talking to Paul Frazee. He's the current CTO of bluesky, and he previously worked on other decentralized applications like Beaker and Secure Scuttlebutt. [00:00:15] Paul: Thanks for having me. What's bluesky [00:00:16] Jeremy: For people who aren't familiar with bluesky, what is it? [00:00:20] Paul: So bluesky is an open social network, simplest way to put it, designed in particular for high scale. That's kind of one of the big requirements that we had when we were moving into it. and it is really geared towards making sure that the operation of the social network is open amongst multiple different organizations. [00:00:44] So we're one of the operators, but other folks can come in, spin up the software, all the open source software, and essentially have a full node with a full copy of the network active users and have their users join into our network. And they all work functionally as one shared application. [00:01:03] Jeremy: So it, it sounds like it's similar to Twitter but instead of there being one Twitter, there could be any number and there is part of the underlying protocol that allows them to all connect to one another and act as one system. [00:01:21] Paul: That's exactly right. And there's a metaphor we use a lot, which is comparing to the web and search engines, which actually kind of matches really well. Like when you use Bing or Google, you're searching the same web. So on the AT protocol on bluesky, you use bluesky, you use some alternative client or application, all the same, what we're we call it, the atmosphere, all one shared network, [00:01:41] Jeremy: And more than just the, the client. 'cause I think sometimes when people think of a client, they'll think of, I use a web browser. I could use Chrome or Firefox, but ultimately I'm connecting to the same thing. But it's not just people running alternate clients, right? [00:01:57] Paul: Their own full backend to it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. The anchoring point on that being the fire hose of data that runs the entire thing is open as well. And so you start up your own application, you spin up a service that just pipes into that fire hose and taps into all the activity. History of AT Protocol [00:02:18] Jeremy: Talking about this underlying protocol maybe we could start where this all began so people get some context for where this all came from. [00:02:28] Paul: For sure. All right, so let's wind the clock back here in my brain. We started out 2022, right at the beginning of the year. We were formed as a, essentially a consulting company outside of Twitter with a contract with Twitter. And, uh, our goal was to build a protocol that could run, uh, Twitter, much like the way that we just described, which set us up with a couple of pretty specific requirements. [00:02:55] For one, we had to make sure that it could scale. And so that ended up being a really important first requirement. and we wanted to make sure that there was a strong kind of guarantees that the network doesn't ever get captured by any one operator. The idea was that Twitter would become the first, uh, adopter of the technology. [00:03:19] Other applications, other services would begin to take advantage of it and users would be able to smoothly migrate their accounts in between one or the other at any time. Um, and it's really, really anchored in a particular goal of just deconstructing monopolies. Getting rid of those moats that make it so that there's a kind of a lack of competition, uh, between these things. [00:03:44] And making sure that, if there was some kind of reason that you decided you're just not happy with what direction this service has been going, you move over to another one. You're still in touch with all the folks you were in touch with before. You don't lose your data. You don't lose your, your your follows. Those were the kind of initial requirements that we set out with. The team by and large came from, the decentralized web, movement, which is actually a pretty, large community that's been around since, I wanna say around 2012 is when we first kind of started to form. It got really made more specifically into a community somewhere around 2015 or 16, I wanna say. [00:04:23] When the internet archives started to host conferences for us. And so that gave us kind of a meeting point where all started to meet up there's kind of three schools of thought within that movement. There was the blockchain community, the, federation community, and the peer-to-peer community. [00:04:43] And so blockchain, you don't need to explain that one. You got Federation, which was largely ActivityPub Mastodon. And then peer-to-peer was IPFS, DAT protocol, um, secure scuttlebutt. But, those kinds of BitTorrent style of technologies really they were all kind of inspired by that. [00:05:02] So these three different kind of sub communities we're all working, independently on different ways to attack how to make these open applications. How do you get something that's a high scale web application without one corporation being the only operator? When this team came together in 2022, we largely sourced from the peer-to-peer group of the decentralized community. Scaling limitations of peer-to-peer [00:05:30] Paul: Personally, I've been working in the space and on those kinds of technologies for about 10 years at that stage. And, the other folks that were in there, you know, 5-10 each respectively. So we all had a fair amount of time working on that. And we had really kind of hit some of the limitations of doing things entirely using client devices. We were running into challenges about reliability of connections. Punching holes to the individual device is very hard. Synchronizing keys between the devices is very hard. Maintaining strong availability of the data because people's devices are going off and on, things like that. Even when you're using the kind of BitTorrent style of shared distribution, that becomes a challenge. [00:06:15] But probably the worst challenge was quite simply scale. You need to be able to create aggregations of a lot of behavior even when you're trying to model your application as largely peer wise interactions like messaging. You might need an aggregation of accounts that even exist, how do you do notifications reliably? [00:06:37] Things like that. Really challenging. And what I was starting to say to myself by the end of that kind of pure peer-to-peer stent was that it can't be rocket science to do a comment section. You know, like at some point you just ask yourself like, how, how hard are we willing to work to, to make these ideas work? [00:06:56] But, there were some pretty good pieces of tech that did come out of the peer-to-peer world. A lot of it had to do with what I might call a cryptographic structure. things like Merkel trees and advances within Merkel Trees. Ways to take data sets and reduce them down to hashes so that you can then create nice signatures and have signed data sets at rest at larger scales. [00:07:22] And so our basic thought was, well, all right, we got some pretty good tech out of this, but let's drop that requirement that it all run off of devices. And let's get some servers in there. And instead think of the entire network as a peer-to-peer mesh of servers. That's gonna solve your scale problem. [00:07:38] 'cause you can throw big databases at it. It's gonna solve your availability problems, it's gonna solve your device sync problems. But you get a lot of the same properties of being able to move data sets between services. Much like you could move them between devices in the peer-to-peer network without losing their identifiers because you're doing this in direction of, cryptographic identifiers to the current host. [00:08:02] That's what peer-to-peer is always doing. You're taking like a public key or hash and then you're asking the network, Hey, who has this? Well, if you just move that into the server, you get the same thing, that dynamic resolution of who's your active host. So you're getting that portability that we wanted real bad. [00:08:17] And then you're also getting that kind of in meshing of the different services where each of them is producing these data sets that they can sink from each other. So take peer-to-peer and apply it to the server stack. And that was our kind of initial thought of like, Hey, you know what? This might work. [00:08:31] This might solve the problems that we have. And a lot of the design fell out from that basic mentality. Crytographic identifiers and domain names [00:08:37] Jeremy: When you talk about these cryptographic identifiers, is the idea that anybody could have data about a person, like a message or a comment, and that could be hosted different places, but you would still know which person that originally came from. Is that, is that the goal there? [00:08:57] Paul: That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna create identification that supersedes servers, right? So when you think about like, if I'm using Twitter and I wanna know what your posts are, I go to twitter.com/jeremy, right? I'm asking Twitter and your ID is consequently always bound to Twitter. You're always kind of a second class identifier. [00:09:21] We wanted to boost up the user identifier to be kind of a thing freestanding on its own. I wanna just know what Jeremy's posts are. And then once you get into the technical system it'll be designed to figure out, okay, who knows that, who can answer that for you? And we use cryptographic identifiers internally. [00:09:41] So like all the data sets use these kind of long URLs to identify things. But in the application, the user facing part, we used domain names for people. Which I think gives the picture of how this all operates. It really moves the user accounts up into a free standing first class identifier within the system. [00:10:04] And then consequently, any application, whatever application you're using, it's really about whatever data is getting put into your account. And then that just exchanges between any application that anybody else is using. [00:10:14] Jeremy: So in this case, it sounds like the identifier is some long string that, I'm not sure if it's necessarily human readable or not. You're shaking your head no. [00:10:25] Paul: No. [00:10:26] Jeremy: But if you have that string, you know it's for a specific person. And since it's not really human readable, what you do is you put a layer on top of it which in this case is a domain that somebody can use to look up and find the identifier. [00:10:45] Paul: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we just use DNS. Put a TXT record in there, map into that long string, or you could do a .well-known file on a web server if that's more convenient for you. And then the ID that's behind that, the non-human readable one, those are called DIDs which is actually a W3C spec. Those then map to a kind of a certificate. What you call a DID document that kind of confirms the binding by declaring what that domain name should be. So you get this bi-directional binding. And then that certificate also includes signing keys and active servers. So you pull down that certificate and that's how the discovery of the active server happens is through the DID system. What's stored on a PDS [00:11:29] Jeremy: So when you refer to an active server what is that server and what is that server storing? [00:11:35] Paul: It's kinda like a web server, but instead of hosting HTML, it's hosting a bunch of JSON records. Every user has their own document store of JSON documents. It's bucketed into collections. Whenever you're looking up somebody on the network you're gonna get access to that repository of data, jump into a collection. [00:11:58] This collection is their post collection. Get the rkey (Record Key), and then you're pulling out JSON at the end of it, which is just a structured piece of stuff saying here's the CreatedAt, here's the text, here's the type, things like that. One way you could look at the whole system is it's a giant, giant database network. Servers can change, signing keys change, but not DID [00:12:18] Jeremy: So if someone's going to look up someone's identifier, let's say they have the user's domain they have to go to some source, right? To find the user's data. You've mentioned, I think before, the idea that this is decentralized and by default I would, I would picture some kind of centralized resource where I send somebody a domain and then they give me back the identifier and the links to the servers. [00:12:46] So, so how does that work in practice where it actually can be decentralized? [00:12:51] Paul: I mentioned that your DID that non-human readable identifier, and that has that certificate attached to it that lists servers and signing keys and things like that. [00:13:00] So you're just gonna look up inside that DID document what that server is your data repository host. And then you contact that guy and say, all right, I'm told you're hosting this thing. Here's the person I'm looking for, hand over the hand over the data. It's really, you know, pretty straightforward. [00:13:18] The way that gets decentralized is by then to the fact that I could swap out that active server that's in my certificate and probably wanna rotate the signing keys 'cause I've just changed the, you know. I don't want to keep using the same signing keys as I was using previously because I just changed the authority. [00:13:36] So that's the migration change, change the hosting server, change out the signing keys. Somebody that's looking for me now, they're gonna load up my document, my DID document. They're gonna say, okay, new server, new keys. Pull down the data. Looks good, right? Matches up with the DID doc. [00:13:50] So that's how you get that level of portability. But when those changes happen, the DID doesn't change, right? The DID document changes. So there's the level of indirection there and that's pretty important because if you don't have a persistent identifier whenever you're trying to change out servers, all those backlinks are gonna break. [00:14:09] That's the kind of stuff that stops you from being able to do clean migrations on things like web-based services. the only real option is to go out and ask everybody to update their data. And when you're talking about like interactions on the social network, like people replying to each other, there's no chance, right? [00:14:25] Every time somebody moves you're gonna go back and modify all those records. You don't even control all the records from the top down 'cause they're hosted all over the web. So it's just, you can't do it. Generally we call this account portability, that you're kinda like phone number portability that you can change your host, but, so that part's portable, but the ID stays the same. [00:14:45] And keeping that ID the same is the real key to making sure that this can happen without breaking the whole system. [00:14:52] Jeremy: And so it, it sounds like there's the decentralized id, then there's the decentralized ID document that's associated with that points you to where the actual location of your, your data, your posts, your pictures and whatnot. but then you also mentioned that they could change servers. [00:15:13] So let's say somebody changes where their data is, is stored, that would change the servers, I guess, in their document. But [00:15:23] then how do all of these systems. Know okay. I need to change all these references to your old server, to these new servers, [00:15:32] Paul: Yeah. Well, the good news is that you only have to, you, you got the public data set of all the user's activity, and then you have like internal caches of where the current server is. You just gotta update those internal caches when you're trying to contact their server. Um, so it's actually a pretty minimal thing to just like update like, oh, they moved, just start talking to update my, my table, my Redis, that's holding onto that kind of temporary information, put it on ttl, that sort of thing. Most communication won't be between servers, it will be from event streams [00:16:01] Paul: And, honestly, in practice, a fair amount of the system for scalability reasons doesn't necessarily work by servers directly contacting each other. It's actually a little bit more like how, I told you before, I'm gonna use this metaphor a lot, the search engines with the web, right? What we do is we actually end up crawling the repositories that are out in the world and funneling them into event streams like a Kafka. And that allows the entire system to act like a data processing pipeline where you're just tapping into these event streams and then pushing those logs into databases that produce these large scale aggregations. [00:16:47] So a lot of the application behavior ends up working off of these event logs. If I reply to somebody, for instance, I don't necessarily, it's not, my server has to like talk to your server and say, Hey, I'm replying to you. What I do is I just publish a reply in my repository that gets shot out into the event logs, and then these aggregators pick up that the reply got created and just update their database with it. [00:17:11] So it's not that our hosting servers are constantly having to send messages with each other, you actually use these aggregators to pull together the picture of what's happening on the network. [00:17:22] Jeremy: Okay, so like you were saying, it's an event stream model where everybody publishes the events the things that they're doing, whether that's making a new post, making a reply, that's all being posted to this event stream. And then everybody who provides, I'm not sure if instances is the right term, but an implementation of the atmosphere protocol (Authenticated Transfer protocol). [00:17:53] They are listening for all those changes and they don't necessarily have to know that you moved servers because they're just listening for the events and you still have the same identifier. [00:18:10] Paul: Generally speaking. Yeah. 'cause like if you're listening to one of these event streams what you end up looking for is just the signature on it and making sure that the signature matches up. Because you're not actually having to talk to their live server. You're just listening to this relay that's doing this aggregation for you. [00:18:27] But I think actually to kind of give a little more clarity to what you're talking about, it might be a good idea to refocus how we're talking about the system here. I mentioned before that our goal was to make a high scale system, right? We need to handle a lot of data. If you're thinking about this in the way that Mastodon does it, the ActivityPub model, that's actually gonna give you the wrong intuition. Designing the protocol to match distributed systems practices (Event sourcing / Stream processing) [00:18:45] Paul: 'cause we chose a dramatically different system. What we did instead was we picked up, essentially the same practices you're gonna use for a data center, a high scale application data center, and said, all right, how do you tend to build these sorts of things? Well, what you're gonna do is you're gonna have, multiple different services running different purposes. [00:19:04] It gets pretty close to a microservices approach. You're gonna have a set of databases, and then you're going to, generally speaking for high scale, you're gonna have some kind of a kafka, some kind of a event log that you are tossing changes about the state of these databases into. And then you have a bunch of secondary systems that are tapping into the event log and processing that into, the large scale, databases like your search index, your, nice postgres of user profiles. [00:19:35] And that makes sure that you can get each of these different systems to perform really well at their particular task, and then you can detach them in their design. for instance, your primary storage can be just a key value store that scales horizontally. And then on the event log, you, you're using a Kafka that's designed to handle. [00:19:58] Particular semantics of making sure that the messages don't get dropped, that they come through at a particular throughput. And then you're using, for us, we're using like ScyllaDB for the big scale indexes that scales horizontally really well. So it's just different kind of profiles for different pieces. [00:20:13] If you read Martin Kleppman's book, data Intensive applications I think it's called or yeah. A lot of it gets captured there. He talks a lot about this kind of thing and it's sometimes called a kappa architecture is one way this is described, event sourcing is a similar term for it as well. [00:20:30] Stream processing. That's pretty standard practices for how you would build a traditional high scale service. so if you take, take this, this kind of microservice architecture and essentially say, okay, now imagine that each of the services that are a part of your data center could be hosted by anybody, not just within our data center, but outside of our data center as well and should be able to all work together. [00:20:57] Basically how the AT Proto is designed. We were talking about the data repository hosts. Those are just the primary data stores that they hold onto the user keys and they hold onto those JSON records. And then we have another service category we call Relay that just crawls those data repositories and sucks that in that fire hose of data we were talking about that event log. App views pull data from relay and produces indexes and threads [00:21:21] Paul: And then we have what we call app views that sit there and tail the index and tail the log, excuse me, and produce indexes off of it, they're listening to those events and then like, making threads like okay, that guy posted, that guy replied, that guy replied. [00:21:37] That's a thread. They assemble it into that form. So when you're running an application, you're talking to the AppView to read the network, and you're talking to the hosts to write to the network, and each of these different pieces sync up together in this open mesh. So we really took a traditional sort of data center model and just turned it inside out where each piece is a part of the protocol and communicate it with each other and therefore anybody can join into that mesh. [00:22:07] Jeremy: And to just make sure I am tracking the data repository is the data about the user. So it has your decentralized identifier, it has your replies, your posts, And then you have a relay, which is, its responsibility, is to somehow find all of those data repositories and collect them as they happen so that it can publish them to some kind of event stream. [00:22:41] And then you have the AppView which it's receiving messages from the relay as they happen, and then it can have its own store and index that for search. It can collect them in a way so that it can present them onto a UI. That's sort of thing that's the user facing part I suppose. [00:23:00] Paul: Yeah, that's exactly it. And again, it's, it's actually quite similar to how the web works. If you combine together the relay and the app view, you got all these different, you know, the web works where you got all these different websites, they're hosting their stuff, and then the search engine is going around, aggregating all that data and turning it into a search experience. [00:23:19] Totally the same model. It's just being applied to, more varieties of data, like structured data, like posts and, and replies, follows, likes, all that kinda stuff. And then instead of producing a search application at the end. I mean, it does that too, but it also produces a, uh, you know, timelines and threads and, um, people's profiles and stuff like that. [00:23:41] So it's actually a pretty bog standard way of doing, that's one of the models that we've seen work for large scale decentralized systems. And so we're just transposing it onto something that kind of is more focused towards social applications [00:23:58] Jeremy: So I think I'm tracking that the data repository itself, since it has your decentralized identifier and because the data is cryptographically signed, you know, it's from a specific user. I think the part that I am still not quite sure about is the relays. I, I understand if you run all the data repositories, you know where they are, so you know how to collect the data from them. [00:24:22] But if someone's running another system outside of your organization, how do they find, your data repositories? Or do they have to connect to your relay? What's the intention for that? Data hosts request relays to pull their data [00:24:35] Paul: That logic runs, again, really similar to how search engines find out about websites. So there is actually a way for, one of these, data hosts to contact Relay and say, Hey, I exist. You know, go ahead and get my stuff. And then it'll be up to the relay to decide like if they want it or not. [00:24:52] Right now, generally we're just like, yeah, you know, we, we want it. But as you can imagine, as the thing matures and gets to higher scale, there might be some trust kind of things to worry about, you know? So that's kind of the naive operation that currently exists. But over time as the network gets bigger and bigger, it'll probably involve some more traditional kind of spiraling behaviors because as more relays come into the system, each of these hosts, they're not gonna know who to talk to. Relays can bootstrap who they know about by talking to other relays [00:25:22] Paul: You're trying to start a new relay. What they're gonna do is they're going to discover all of the different users that exist in the system by looking at what data they have to start with. Probably involve a little bit of a manual feeding in at first, whenever I'm starting up a relay, like, okay, there's bluesky's relay. [00:25:39] Lemme just pull what they know. And then I go from there. And then anytime you discover a new user you don't have, you're like, oh, I wanna look them up. Pull them into the relay too. Right. So there's a, pretty straightforward, discovery process that you'll just have to bake into a relay to, to make sure you're calling as much the network as possible. ActivityPub federation vs AT Proto [00:25:57] Jeremy: And so I don't think we've defined the term federation, but maybe you could explain what that is and if that is what this is. [00:26:07] Paul: We are so unsure. [00:26:10] Jeremy: Okay. [00:26:11] Paul: Yeah. This has jammed is up pretty bad. Um, because I think everybody can, everybody pretty strongly agrees that ActivityPub is federation, right? and ActivityPub kind of models itself pretty similarly to email in a way, like the metaphors they use is that there's inboxes and outboxes and, and every ActivityPub server they're standing up the full vertical stack. [00:26:37] They set up, the primary hosting, the views of the data that's happening there. the interface for the application, all of it, pretty traditional, like close service, but then they're kind of using the perimeter. they're making that permeable by sending, exchanging, essentially mailing records to each other, right? [00:26:54] That's their kind of logic of how that works. And that's pretty much in line with, I think, what most people think of with Federation. Whereas what we're doing isn't like that we've cut, instead of having a bunch of vertical stacks communicating horizontally with each other, we kind of sliced in the other direction. [00:27:09] We sliced horizontally into, this microservices mesh and have all the different, like a total mix and match of different microservices between different operators. Is that federation? I don't know. Right. we tried to invent a term, didn't really work, you know, At the moment, we just kind of don't worry about it that much, see what happens, see what the world sort of has to say to us about it. [00:27:36] and beyond that, I don't know. [00:27:42] Jeremy: I think people probably are thinking of something like, say, a Mastodon instance when you're, when you're talking about everything being included, The webpage where you view the posts, the Postgres database that's keeping the messages. [00:28:00] And that same instance it's responsible for basically everything. [00:28:06] Paul: mm-Hmm [00:28:06] Jeremy: And I believe what you're saying is that the difference with, the authenticated transfer protocol, is that the [00:28:15] Paul: AT Protocol, Yep. [00:28:17] Jeremy: And the difference there is that you've, at the protocol level, you've split it up into the data itself, which can be validated completely separately from other parts of the system. [00:28:31] You could have the JSON files on your hard drive and somebody else can have that same JSON file and they would know that who the user is and that these are real things that user posted. That's like a separate part. And then the relay component that looks for all these different repositories that has people's data, that can also be its own independent thing where its job is just to output events. [00:29:04] And that can exist just by itself. It doesn't need the application part, the, the user facing part, it can just be this event stream on itself. and that's the part where it sounds like you can make decisions on who to, um, collect data from. I guess you have to agree that somebody can connect to you and get the users from your data repositories. [00:29:32] And likewise, other people that run relays, they also have to agree to let you pull the users from theirs. [00:29:38] Paul: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. [00:29:41] Jeremy: And so I think the Mastodon example makes sense. And, but I wonder if the underlying ActivityPub protocol forces you to use it in that way, in like a whole full application that talks to another full application. [00:29:55] Or is it more like that's just how people tend to use it and it's not necessarily a characteristic of the protocol. [00:30:02] Paul: Yeah, that's a good question actually. so, you know, generally what I would say is pretty core to the protocol is the expectations about how the services interact with each other. So the mailbox metaphor that's used in ActivityPub, that design, if I reply to you, I'll update my, local database with what I did, and then I'll send a message over to your server saying, Hey, by the way, add this reply. [00:30:34] I did this. And that's how they find out about things. That's how they find out about activity outside of their network. that's the part that as long as you're doing ActivityPub, I suspect you're gonna see reliably happening. That's that, I can say for sure that's a pretty tight requirement. [00:30:50] That's ActivityPub. If you wanted to split it up the way we're talking about, you could, I don't know, I don't know if you necessarily would want to. Because I don't know. That's actually, I think I'd have to dig into their stack a little bit more to see how meaningful that would be. I do know that there's some talk of introducing a similar kind of an aggregation method into the ActivityPub world which I believe they're also calling a relay and to make things even more complicated. [00:31:23] And NOSTR has a concept of a relay. So these are three different protocols that are using this term. I think you could do essentially what a search engine does on any of these things. You could go crawling around for the data, pull them into a fire hose, and then, tap into that aggregation to produce, bigger views of the network. [00:31:41] So that principle can certainly apply anywhere. AT Protocol, I think it's a little bit, we, we focused in so hard from that on that from the get go, we focus really hard on making sure that this, the data is, signed at rest. That's why it's called the authenticated transfer protocol. And that's a nice advantage to have when you're running a relay like this because it means that you don't have to trust the relay. [00:32:08] Like generally speaking, when I look at results from Google, you know, I'm trusting pretty well that they're accurately reflecting what's on the website, which is fine. You know, there's, that's not actually a huge risk or anything. But whenever you're trying to build entire applications and you're using somebody else's relay, you could really run into things where they say like, oh, you know what Paul tweeted the other day, you know, I hate dogs. [00:32:28] They're like, no, I didn't. That's a lie, right? You just sneak in Little lies like that over a while, it becomes a problem. So having the signatures on the data is pretty important. You know, if you're gonna be trying to get people to cooperate, uh, you gotta manage the trust model. I know that ActivityPub does have mechanisms for signed records. Issuers with ActivityPub identifiers [00:32:44] Paul: I don't know how deep they go if they could fully replace that, that utility. and then Mastodon ActivityPub, they also use a different identifier system that they're actually taking a look at DIDs um, right now, I don't know what's gonna happen there. We're, we're totally on board to, you know, give any kind of insight that we got working on 'em. [00:33:06] But at, at the moment, they use I think it's WebFinger based identifiers they look like emails. So you got host names in there and those identifiers are being used in the data records. So you don't get that continuous identifier. They actually do have to do that hey, I moved update your records sort of thing. [00:33:28] And that causes it to, I mean, it works like decently well, but not as well as it could. They got us to the point where it moves your profile over and you update all the folks that were following you so they can update their follow records, but your posts, they're not coming right, because that's too far into that mesh of interlinking records. [00:33:48] There's just no chance. So that's kind of the upper limit on that, it's a different set of choices and trade-offs. You're always kind of asking like, how important is the migration? Does that work out? Anyway, now I'm just kind of digging into differences between the two here. Issues with an identifier that changes and updating old records [00:34:07] Jeremy: So you were saying that with ActivityPub, all of the instances need to be notified that you've changed your identifier but then all of the messages that they had already received. They don't point to the new identifier somehow. [00:34:24] Paul: Yeah. You run into basically just the practicalities of actual engineering with that is what happens, right? Because if you imagine you got a multimillion user social network. They got all their posts. Maybe the user has like, let's say a thousand posts and 10,000 likes. And that, activity can range back three years. [00:34:48] Let's say they changed their identifier, and now you need to change the identifier of all those records. If you're in a traditional system that's already a tall order, you're going back and rewriting a ton of indexes, Anytime somebody replied to you, they have these links to your posts, they're now, you've gotta update the identifiers on all of those things. [00:35:11] You could end up with a pretty significant explosion of rewrites that would have to occur. Now that's, that's tough. If you're in a centralized model. If you're in a decentralized one, it's pretty much impossible because you're now, when you notify all the other servers like, Hey, this, this changed. How successful are all of them at actually updating that, that those, those pointers, it's a good chance that there's things are gonna fall out of correctness. that's just a reality of it. And if, so, if you've got a, if you've got a mutable identifier, you're in trouble for migrations. So the DID is meant to keep it permanent and that ends up being the anchoring point. If you lose control of your DID well, that's it. Managing signing keys by server, paper key reset [00:35:52] Paul: Your, your account's done. We took some pretty traditional approaches to that, uh, where the signing keys get managed by your hosting server instead of like trying to, this may seem like really obvious, but if you're from the decentralization community, we spend a lot of time with blockchains, like, Hey, how do we have the users hold onto their keys? [00:36:15] You know, and the tooling on that is getting better for what it's worth. We're starting to see a lot better key pair management in like Apple's ecosystem and Google's ecosystem, but it's still in the range of like, nah, people lose their keys, you know? So having the servers manage those is important. [00:36:33] Then we have ways of exporting paper keys so that you could kind of adversarially migrate if you wanted to. That was in the early spec we wanted to make sure that this portability idea works, that you can always migrate your accounts so you can export a paper key that can override. [00:36:48] And that was how we figured that out. Like, okay, yeah, we don't have to have everything getting signed by keys that are on the user's devices. We just need these master backup keys that can say, you know what? I'm done with that host. No matter what they say, I'm overriding what they, what they think. and that's how we squared that one. [00:37:06] Jeremy: So it seems like one of the big differences with account migration is that with ActivityPub, when you move to another instance, you have to actually change your identifier. [00:37:20] And with the AT protocol you're actually not allowed to ever change that identifier. And maybe what you're changing is just you have say, some kind of a lookup, like you were saying, you could use a domain name to look that up, get a reference to your decentralized identifier, but your decentralized identifier it can never change. [00:37:47] Paul: It, it, it can't change. Yeah. And it shouldn't need to, you know what I mean? It's really a total disaster kind of situation if that happens. So, you know that it's designed to make sure that doesn't happen in the applications. We use these domain name handles to, to identify folks. And you can change those anytime you want because that's really just a user facing thing. [00:38:09] You know, then in practice what you see pretty often is that you may, if you change hosts, if you're using, we, we give some domains to folks, you know, 'cause like not everybody has their own domain. A lot of people do actually, to our surprise, people actually kind of enjoy doing that. But, a lot of folks are just using like paul.bsky.social as their handle. [00:38:29] And so if you migrated off of that, you probably lose that. Like your, so your handle's gonna change, but you're not losing the followers and stuff. 'cause the internal system isn't using paul.bsky.social, it's using that DID and that DID stays the same. Benefits of domain names, trust signal [00:38:42] Jeremy: Yeah. I thought that was interesting about using the domain names, because when you like you have a lot of users, everybody's got their own sub-domain. You could have however many millions of users. Does that become, does that become an issue at some point? [00:39:00] Paul: Well, it's a funny thing. I mean like the number of users, like that's not really a problem 'cause you run into the same kind of namespace crowding problem that any service is gonna have, right? Like if you just take the subdomain part of it, like the name Paul, like yeah, only, you only get to have one paul.bsky.social. [00:39:15] so that part of like, in terms of the number of users, that part's fine I guess. Uh, as fine as ever. where gets more interesting, of course is like, really kind of around the usability questions. For one, it's, it's not exactly the prettiest to always have that B sky.social in there. If we, if we thought we, if we had some kind of solution to that, we would use it. [00:39:35] But like the reality is that, you know, now we're, we've committed to the domain name approach and some folks, you know, they kind of like, ah, that's a little bit ugly. And we're like, yeah that's life. I guess the plus side though is that you can actually use like TLD the domain. It's like on pfrazee.com. [00:39:53] that starts to get more fun. it can actually act as a pretty good trust signal in certain scenarios. for instance, well-known domain names like nytimes.com, strong authentication right there, we don't even need a blue check for it. Uh, similarly the .gov, domain name space is tightly regulated. [00:40:14] So you actually get a really strong signal out of that. Senator Wyden is one of our users and so he's, I think it's wyden.senate.gov and same thing, strong, you know, strong identity signal right there. So that's actually a really nice upside. So that's like positives, negatives. [00:40:32] That trust signal only works so far. If somebody were to make pfrazee.net, then that can be a bit confusing. People may not be paying attention to .com vs .net, so it's not, I don't wanna give the impression that, ah, we've solved blue checks. It's a complicated and multifaceted situation, but, it's got some juice. [00:40:54] It's also kinda nice too, 'cause a lot of folks that are doing social, they're, they've got other stuff that they're trying to promote, you know? I'm pretty sure that, uh, nytimes would love it if you went to their website. And so tying it to their online presence so directly like that is a really nice kind of feature of it. [00:41:15] And tells a I think a good story about what we're trying to do with an open internet where, yeah, everybody has their space on the internet where they can do whatever they want on that. And that's, and then thethese social profiles, it's that presence showing up in a shared space. It's all kind of part of the same thing. [00:41:34] And that that feels like a nice kind of thing to be chasing, you know? And it also kind of speaks well to the naming worked out for us. We chose AT Protocol as a name. You know, we back acronymed our way into that one. 'cause it was a @ simple sort of thing. But like, it actually ended up really reflecting the biggest part of it, which is that it's about putting people's identities at the front, you know, and make kind of promoting everybody from a second class identity that's underneath Twitter or Facebook or something like that. [00:42:03] Up into. Nope, you're freestanding. You exist as a person independently. Which is what a lot of it's about. [00:42:12] Jeremy: Yeah, I think just in general, not necessarily just for bluesky, if people had more of an interest in getting their own domain, that would be pretty cool if people could tie more of that to something you basically own, right? [00:42:29] I mean, I guess you're leasing it from ICANN or whatever, but, [00:42:33] yeah, rather than everybody having an @Gmail, Outlook or whatever they could actually have something unique that they control more or less. [00:42:43] Paul: Yeah. And we, we actually have a little experimental service for registering domain names that we haven't integrated into the app yet because we just kind of wanted to test it out and, and kind of see what that appetite is for folks to register domain names way higher than you'd think we did that early on. [00:43:01] You know, it's funny when you're coming from decentralization is like an activist space, right? Like it's a group of people trying to change how this tech works. And sometimes you're trying to parse between what might come off as a fascination of technologists compared to what people actually care about. [00:43:20] And it varies, you know, the domain name thing to a surprising degree, folks really got into that. We saw people picking that up almost straight away. More so than certainly we ever predicted. And I think that's just 'cause I guess it speaks to something that people really get about the internet at this point. [00:43:39] Which is great. We did a couple of other things that are similar and we saw varied levels of adoption on them. We had similar kinds of user facing, opening up of the system with algorithms and with moderation. And those have both been pretty interesting in and of themselves. Custom feed algorithms [00:43:58] Paul: So with algorithms, what we did was we set that up so that anybody can create a new feed algorithm. And this was kind of one of the big things that you run into whenever you use the app. If you wanted to create a new kind of for you feed you can set up a service somewhere that's gonna tap into that fire hose, right? [00:44:18] And then all it needs to do is serve a JSON endpoint. That's just a list of URLs, but like, here's what should be in that feed. And then the bluesky app will pick that up and, and send that, hydrate in the content of the posts and show that to folks. I wanna say this is a bit of a misleading number and I'll explain why but I think there's about 35,000 of these feeds that have been created. [00:44:42] Now, the reason it's little misleading is that, I mean, not significantly, but it's not everybody went, sat down in their IDE and wrote these things. Essentially one of our users created, actually multiple of our users made little platforms for building these feeds, which is awesome. That's the kinda thing you wanna see because we haven't gotten around to it. [00:44:57] Our app still doesn't give you a way to make these things. But they did. And so lots of, you know, there it is. Cool. Like, one, one person made a kind of a combinatorial logic thing that's like visual almost like scratch, it's like, so if it has this hashtag and includes these users, but not those users, and you're kind of arranging these blocks and that constructs the feed and then probably publish it on your profile and then folks can use it, you know? [00:45:18] And um, so that has been I would say fairly successful. Except, we had one group of hackers do put in a real effort to make a replacement for you feed, like magic algorithmic feed kind of thing. And then they kind of kept up going for a while and then ended up giving up on it. Most of what we see are actually kind of weird niche use cases for feeds. [00:45:44] You get straightforward ones, like content oriented ones like a cat feed, politics feed, things like that. It's great, some of those are using ML detection, so like the cat feed is ML detection, so sometimes you get like a beaver in there, but most of the time it's a cat. And then we got some ones that are kind of a funny, like change in the dynamic of freshness. [00:46:05] So, uh, or or selection criteria, things that you wouldn't normally see. Um, but because they can do whatever they want, you know, they try it out. So like the quiet posters ended up being a pretty successful one. And that one just shows people you're following that don't post that often when they do just those folks. [00:46:21] It ended up being, I use that one all the time because yeah, like they get lost in the noise. So it's like a way to keep up with them. Custom moderation and labeling [00:46:29] Paul: The moderation one, that one's a a real interesting situation. What we did there essentially we wanted to make sure that the moderation system was capable of operating across different apps so that they can share their work, so to speak. [00:46:43] And so we created what we call labeling. And labeling is a metadata layer that exists over the network. Doesn't actually live in the normal data repositories. It uses a completely different synchronization because a lot of these labels are getting produced. It's just one of those things where the engineering characteristics of the labels is just too different from the rest of the system. [00:47:02] So we created a separate synchronization for this, and it's really kind of straightforward. It's, here's a URL and here's a string saying something like NSFW or Gore, or you know, whatever. then those get merged onto the records brought down by the client and then the client, you know, based on the user's preferences. [00:47:21] We'll put like warning screens up, hide it, stuff like that. So yeah, these label streams can then, you know, anybody that's running a moderation service can, you know, are publishing these things and so anybody can subscribe to 'em. And you get that kind of collaborative thing we're always trying to do with this. [00:47:34] And we had some users set up moderation services and so then as an end user you find it, it looks like a profile in the app and you subscribe to it and you configure it and off you go. That one has had probably the least amount of adoption throughout all of 'em. It's you know, moderation. [00:47:53] It's a sticky topic as you can imagine, challenging for folks. These moderation services, they do receive reports, you know, like whenever I'm reporting a post, I choose from all my moderation services who I wanna report this to. what has ended up happening more than being used to actually filter out like subjective stuff is more kind of like either algorithmic systems or what you might call informational. [00:48:21] So the algorithmic ones are like, one of the more popular ones is a thing that's looking for, posts from other social networks. Like this screenshot of a Reddit post or a Twitter post or a Facebook post. Because, which you're kinda like, why, you know, but the thing is some folks just get really tired of seeing screenshots from the other networks. [00:48:40] 'cause often it's like, look what this person said. Can you believe it? You know, it's like, ah. Okay, I've had enough. So one of our users aendra made a moderate service that just runs an ML that detects it, labels it, and then folks that are tired of it, they subscribe to it and they're just hide it, you know? [00:48:57] And so it's like a smart filter kind of thing that they're doing. you know, hypothetically you could do that for things like spiders, you know, like you've got arachniphobia, things like that. that's like a pretty straightforward, kind of automated way of doing it. Which takes a lot of the spice, you know, outta out of running moderation. [00:49:15] So that users have been like, yeah, yeah, okay, we can do that. [00:49:20] Those are user facing ways that we tried to surface the. Decentralized principle, right? And make take advantage of how this whole architecture can have this kind of a pluggability into it. Users can self host now [00:49:33] Paul: But then really at the end of the day, kind of the important core part of it is those pieces we were talking about before, the hosting, the relay and the, the applications themselves, having those be swappable in completely. so we tend to think of those as kind of ranges of infrastructure into application and then into particular client side stuff. [00:49:56] So a lot of folks right now, for instance, they're making their own clients to the application and those clients are able to do customizations, add features, things like that, as you might expect, [00:50:05] but most of them are not running their own backend. They're just using our backend. But at any point, it's right there for you. You know, you can go ahead and, and clone that software and start running the backend. If you wanted to run your own relay, you could go ahead and go all the way to that point. [00:50:19] You know, if you wanna do your own hosting, you can go ahead and do that. Um, it's all there. It's really just kind of a how much effort your project really wants to take. That's the kind of systemically important part. That's the part that makes sure that the overall mission of de monopolizing, social media online, that's where that really gets enforced. [00:50:40] Jeremy: And so someone has their own data repository with their own users and their own relay. they can request that your relay collect the information from their own data repositories. And that's, that's how these connections get made. [00:50:58] Paul: Yeah. And, and we have a fair number of those already. Fair number of, we call those the self hosters right? And we got I wanna say 75 self hoster going right now, which is, you know, love to see that be more, but it's, really the folks that if you're running a service, you probably would end up doing that. [00:51:20] But the folks that are just doing it for themselves, it's kind of the, the nerdiest of the nerds over there doing that. 'cause it doesn't end up showing itself in the, in the application at all. Right? It's totally abstracted away. So it, that, that one's really about like, uh, measure your paranoia kind of thing. [00:51:36] Or if you're just proud of the self-hosting or, or curious, you know, that that's kind of where that sits at the moment. AT Protocol beyond bluesky [00:51:42] Jeremy: We haven't really touched on the fact that there's this underlying protocol and everything we've been discussing has been centered around the bluesky social network where you run your own, instance of the relay and the data repositories with the purpose of talking to bluesky, but the protocol itself is also intended to be used for other uses, right? [00:52:06] Paul: Yeah. It's generic. The data types are set up in a way that anybody can build new data types in the system. there's a couple that have already begun, uh, front page, which is kind of a hacker news clone. There's Smoke Signals, which is a events app. There's Blue Cast, which is like a Twitter spaces, clubhouse kind of thing. [00:52:29] Those are the folks that are kind of willing to trudge into the bleeding edge and deal with some of the rough edges there for pretty I think, obvious reasons. A lot of our work gets focused in on making sure that the bluesky app and that use case is working correctly. [00:52:43] But we are starting to round the corner on getting to a full kind of how to make alternative applications state. If you go to the atproto.com, there's a kind of a introductory tutorial where that actually shows that whole stack and how it's done. So it's getting pretty close. There's a couple of still things that we wanna finish up. [00:53:04] jeremy so in a way you can almost think of it as having an eventually consistent data store on the network, You can make a traditional web application with a relational database, and the source of truth can actually be wherever that data repository is stored on the network. [00:53:24] paul Yeah, that's exactly, it is an eventually consistent system. That's exactly right. The source of truth is there, is their data repo. And that relational database that you might be using, I think the best way to think about it is like secondary indexes or computed indexes, right? They, reflect the source of truth. [00:53:43] Paul: This is getting kind of grandiose. I don't tend to poses in these terms, but it is almost like we're trying to have an OS layer at a protocol level. It's like having your own [00:53:54] Network wide database or network-wide file system, you know, these are the kind of facilities you expect out of a platform like an os And so the hope would be that this ends up getting that usage outside of just the initial social, uh, app, like what we're doing here. [00:54:12] If it doesn't end up working out that way, if this ends up, you know, good for the Twitter style use case, the other one's not so much, and that's fine too. You know, that's, that's our initial goal, but we, we wanted to make sure to build it in a way that like, yeah, there's evolve ability to, it keeps, it, keeps it, make sure that you're getting kinda the most utility you can out of it. Peer-to-peer and the difficulty of federated queries [00:54:30] Jeremy: Yeah, I can see some of the parallels to some of the decentralized stuff that I, I suppose people are still working on, but more on the peer-to-peer side, where the idea was that I can have a network host this data. but, and in this case it's a network of maybe larger providers where they could host a bunch of people's data versus just straight peer to peer where everybody has to have a piece of it. [00:54:57] And it seems like your angle there was really the scalability part. [00:55:02] Paul: It was the scalability part. And there's great work happening in peer-to-peer. There's a lot of advances on it that are still happening. I think really the limiter that you run into is running queries against aggregations of data. Because you can get the network, you know, BitTorrent sort of proved that you can do distributed open horizontal scaling of hosting. [00:55:29] You know, that basic idea of, hey, everybody's got a piece and you sync it from all these different places. We know you can do things like that. What nobody's been able to really get into a good place is running, queries across large data sets. In the model like that, there's been some research in what is, what's called federated queries, which is where you're sending a query to multiple different nodes and asking them to fulfill as much of it as they can and then collating the results back. But it didn't work that well. That's still kind of an open question and until that is in a place where it can like reliably work and at very large scales, you're just gonna need a big database somewhere that does give the properties that you need. You need these big indexes. And once we were pretty sure of that requirement, then from there you start asking, all right, what else about the system [00:56:29] Could we make easier if we just apply some more traditional techniques and merge that in with the peer-to-peer ideas? And so key hosting, that's an obvious one. You know, availability, let's just have a server. It's no big deal. But you're trying to, you're trying to make as much of them dumb as possible. [00:56:47] So that they have that easy replaceability. Moderation challenges [00:56:51] Jeremy: Earlier you were talking a a little bit about the moderation tools that people could build themselves. There was some process where people could label posts and then build their own software to determine what a feed should show per a person. [00:57:07] Paul: Mm-Hmm [00:57:07] Jeremy: But, but I think before that layer for the platform itself, there's a base level of moderation that has to happen. [00:57:19] Paul: yeah. [00:57:20] Jeremy: And I wonder if you could speak to, as the app has grown, how that's handled. [00:57:26] Paul: Yeah. the, you gotta take some requirements in moderation pretty seriously to start. And with decentralization. It sometimes that gets a little bit dropped. You need to have systems that can deal with questions about CSAM. So you got those big questions you gotta answer and then you got stuff that's more in the line of like, alright, what makes a good platform? [00:57:54] What kind of guarantees are we trying to give there? So just not legal concerns, but you know, good product experience concerns. That's something we're in the realm of like spam and and abusive behavior and things like that. And then you get into even more fine grain of like what is a person's subjective preference and how can they kind of make their thing better? [00:58:15] And so you get a kind of a telescoping level of concerns from the really big, the legal sort of concerns. And then the really small subjective preference kind of concerns. And that actually that telescoping maps really closely to the design of the system as well. Where the further you get up in the kind of the, in that legal concern territory, you're now in core infrastructure. [00:58:39] And then you go from infrastructure, which is the relay down into the application, which is kind of a platform and then down into the client. And that's where we're having those labelers apply. And each of them, as you kind of move closer to infrastructure, the importance of the decision gets bigger too. [00:58:56] So you're trying to do just legal concerns with the relay right? Stuff that you objectively can, everybody's in agreement like Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, no bigs don't include that. The reason is that at the relay level, you're anybody that's using your relay, they depend on the decisions you're making, that sort of selection you're doing, any filtering you're doing, they don't get a choice after that. [00:59:19] So you wanna try to keep that focus really on legal concerns and doing that well. so that applications that are downstream of it can, can make their choices. The applications themselves, you know, somebody can run a parallel I guess you could call it like a parallel platform, so we got bluesky doing the microblogging use case, other people can make an application doing the microblogging use case. So there's, there's choice that users can easily switch, easily enough switch between, it's still a big choice. [00:59:50] So we're operating that in many ways. Like any other app nowadays might do it. You've got policies, you know, for what's acceptable on the network. you're still trying to keep that to be as, you know, objective as possible, make it fair, things like that. You want folks to trust your T&S team. Uh, but from the kind of systemic decentralization question, you get to be a little bit more opinionated. [01:00:13] Down all the way into the client with that labeling system where you can, you know, this is individuals turning on and off preferences. You can be as opinionated as you want on that letter. And that's how we have basically approached this. And in a lot of ways, it really just comes down to, in the day to day, you're the moderation, the volume of moderation tasks is huge. [01:00:40] You don't actually have high stakes moderation decisions most of the time. Most of 'em are you know pretty straightforward. Shouldn't have done that. That's gotta go. You get a couple every once in a while that are a little spicier or a policy that's a little spicier. And it probably feels pretty common to end users, but that just speaks to how much moderation challenges how the volume of reports and problems that come through. [01:01:12] And we don't wanna make it so that the system is seized up, trying to decentralize itself. You know, it needs to be able to operate day to day. What you wanna make is, you know, back pressure, you know, uh, checks on that power so that if an application or a platform does really start to go down the wrong direction on moderation, then people can have this credible exit. [01:01:36] This way of saying, you know what, that's a problem. We're moving from here. And somebody else can come in with different policies that better fit people's people's expectations about what should be done at, at these levels. So yeah, it's not about taking away authority, it's about checking authority, you know, kind of a checks and balances mentality. [01:01:56] Jeremy: And high level, 'cause you saying how there's such a high volume of, of things that you know what it is, you'd know you wanna remove it, but there's just so much of it. So is there, do you have automated tools to label these things? Do you have a team of moderators? Do they have to understand all the different languages that are coming through your network? [01:02:20] Yes, yes, yes and yes. Yeah. You use every tool at your disposal to, to stay on top of it. cause you're trying to move as fast as you can, folks. The problems showing up, you know, the slower you are to respond to it, the, the more irritating it is to folks. Likewise, if you make a, a missed call, if somebody misunderstands what's happening, which believe me, is sometimes just figuring out what the heck is going on is hard. [01:02:52] Paul: People's beefs definitely surface up to the moderation misunderstanding or wrong application. Moderators make mistakes so you're trying to maintain a pretty quick turnaround on this stuff. That's tough. And you, especially when to move fast on some really upsetting content that can make its way through, again, illegal stuff, for instance, but more videos, stuff like that, you know, it's a real problem. [01:03:20] So yeah, you're gotta be using some automated systems as well. Clamping down on bot rings and spam. You know, you can imagine that's gotten a lot harder thanks to LLMs just doing text analysis by dumb statistics of what they're talking about that doesn't even work anymore. [01:03:41] 'cause the, the LLMs are capable of producing consistently varied responses while still achieving the same goal of plugging a online betting site of some kind, you know? So we do use kind of dumb heuristic systems for when it works, but boy, that won't work for much longer. [01:04:03] And we've already got cases where it's, oh boy, so the moderation's in a dynamic place to say the least right now with, with LLMs coming in, it was tough before and

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, hosts Jim Valley and Scott Williams sit down with David Dotson, a professor of contract management at DAU in the Mid-Atlantic region. David, who manages the COR 222 course and moderates the COR Community of Practice and weekly COR Office Hours, shares his insights on the three golden rules of being a Contracting Officer Representative (COR). The discussion delves into the complexities and responsibilities of CORs, emphasizing the importance of understanding the contract, the exclusive authority of the contracting officer to modify contracts, and the critical distinction that CORs are not contracting officers. This episode provides valuable guidance for CORs navigating their roles and highlights the foundational principles that ensure effective contract management. Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the essential rules that govern the COR's duties and responsibilities.CLC 222 Contracting Officers Representative (COR) Online Training (On-line 32 CLPs): https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=1731COR 222 Contracting Officer's Representative Course (Virtual or in-person 32 CLPs via DAU's Mission Assistance (see link below)):  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=1584WSC 027 Virtual Augmentation Workshop for the Contracting Officer (augments CLC 222/COR222 - 10 CLPs)P: https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=12359CLC 106 - Contracting Officer's Representative with a Mission Focus (On-line 3 CLPs):  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=240DAU Mission Assistance:  https://www.dau.edu/mission-assistanceBack to Basics: https://www.dau.edu/back-to-basics; BtB Contracting: https://www.dau.edu/functional-areas/contractingContracting Officer Representative Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/corContracting Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcast:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Það er talið að í dáleiðsluástandi getum við leyst úr ýmsum vandamálum og heilað okkur. Dáleiðararnir og mæðgurnar Ásdís Olsen og Brynhildur Karlsdóttir kenna einfalda sjálfsdáleiðsluaðferð, Simpson Protocol. Á námskeiði hjá þeim læra þátttakendur að komast í dáleiðsluástand þegar þeim hentar, hvort sem er hjá tannlækninum eða á sófanum heima. Ásdís og Brynhildur sögðu okkur meira frá þessu í þættinum í dag. Georg Lúðvíksson, sérfræðingur í heimilisfjármálum, var í annað sinn hjá okkur í dag með það sem við köllum fjármálin á mannamáli. Á mánudögum mun Georg fræða okkur um ýmsar hliðar á fjármálunum og í dag talaði hann um tilfinningar okkar tengdar peningum og samband okkar við peninga. Svo var það lesandi vikunnar, sem í þetta sinn var Bjarni Fritzson rithöfundur og eigandi Út fyrir kassann. Bækur Bjarna um Orra óstöðvandi hafa verið gríðarlega vinsælar og nýjasta bókin um Orra var mest selda barnabókin á landinu á síðasta ári. Við fengum að vita hvaða bækur hann hefur verið að lesa undanfarið og hvaða bækur og höfundar hafa haft mest áhrif á hann í gegnum tíðina. Bjarni talaði um eftirfarandi bækur og höfunda: Dauðinn einn var vitni e. Stefán Mána Marrið í stiganum, Strákar sem meiða og Stelpur sem ljúga e. Evu Björgu Ægisdóttur Ég læt sem ég sofi e. Yrsu Sigurðardóttur Kvíðakynslóðin e. Jonathan Haidt Grafarþögn og Mýrin e. Arnald Indriðason Show Dog e. Phil Knight Paulo Coelho (The Zahír, Veronika verður að deyja, Alkemistinn) Why we sleep e. Matthew Walker Raunvitund e. Hans Rosling Villtir svanir e. Jung Chang. Tónlist í þættinum í dag: Gullvagninn / Björgvin Halldórsson (lagahöfundur ókunnur, texti Jónas Friðrik Guðnason) Vertu ekki að horfa svona alltaf á mig / Ragnar Bjarnason (Monaco, McCarthy & Johnson, texti Jón Sigurðsson) Litla flugan / Sigfús Halldórsson (Sigfús Halldórsson, texti Sigurður Elíasson) UMSJÓN GUÐRÚN GUNNARSDÓTTIR OG GUNNAR HANSSON

Var daudz runāt par Eiropas politiku, varas sadalījumu, politiskajām grupām un pieņemtajiem lēmumiem, bet paliek jautājums, cik daudz tas uztrauc sabiedrību? Viens no rādītājiem ir līdzdalība vēlēšanās, un nav nekāds noslēpums, ka Eiropas Parlamenta vēlēšanās Latvijā tā ir ļoti zema – pie vēlēšanu urnām ierasti dodas tikai apmēram trešā daļa vēlētāju (šogad – 33,82% no balsstieīgajiem). Vai galvenais iemesls ir tas, ka ES struktūra ir sarežģīta un garlaicīga? Cik liela interese un zināšanas par Briselē notiekošo ir jauniešu vidū?  “Latvijas Avīzes” raidierakstu cikla noslēdzošajā epizodē Latvijas Universitātes Sociālo zinātņu fakultātē žurnālists Māris Antonevičs sarunājas ar trīs politikas zinātnes studentiem – Valteru, Diānu un Normundu, kā arī uzklausa profesora Dauņa Auera viedokli. Raidierakstā izmantoti fragmenti no LTV ziņām. Projektu līdzfinansē Eiropas Savienība, izmantojot Eiropas Parlamenta dotāciju programmu komunikācijas jomā. Paustie viedokļi un uzskati atspoguļo autoru personīgos uzskatus. Ne Eiropas Savienība, ne Eiropas Parlaments nenes atbildību par paustajiem uzskatiem. 

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley are joined by Kevin White, a professor of contract management at DAU. Kevin shares his insights on the Combating Trafficking in Persons (CTIP) program, drawing from his extensive experience as an Air Force contracting officer and DAU instructor. He discusses the importance of CTIP in the acquisition field, the role of Contracting Officer Representatives (CORs), and the critical need for awareness and action against modern-day slavery. Tune in to learn more about how CORs can identify and combat trafficking in persons, and the tools available to support these efforts.Don't forget to subscribe to our channel on DAU Media, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and hit the like button if you enjoy our content!CTIP Website: https://ctip.defense.gov/CTIP Email:  dodctip@mail.milSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley are joined by Kelley Kiernan, a cybersecurity expert from DAU, for the third segment of their podcast series. They discuss the importance of cybersecurity in protecting DoD data, the FAR and DFARS clauses, and the tools available to contracting teams. Kelley provides a recap of the previous episodes and outlines a plan for 2025, emphasizing the need for cybersecurity controls and the role of contracting officers in verifying these controls. The episode also covers the upcoming CMMC program and its impact on DoD contracts, as well as the importance of supply chain risk management. Tune in to learn more about the latest developments in cybersecurity for contracting teams.Defense Contract Management Agency, Defense Industrial Base Cybersecurity Assessment Center DCMA DIBCAC https://www.dcma.mil/DIBCAC/ An email to ask CMMC questions (Scroll to CONTACT INFORMATION) https://www.dcma.mil/DIBCAC/ DoD's CMMC Program https://dodcio.defense.gov/CMMC/DFARS 252.204-7012 “Safeguarding Covered Defense Information and Cyber Incident Reporting” https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.204-7012-safeguarding-covered-defense-information-and-cyber-in....Recap of the September 2022 Cyber AB Town Hall event https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cyber-ab-town-hall-key-takeaways-introducing-caico-other-/DoD CMMC Program Briefing on January 15 www.dau.edu/events DoD Inspector General Report on CUI Protection https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/11/2003410405/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-031_REVISED%20SECURE.PDF DOD Controlled Unclassified Information program www.dodcui.milDAU Cyber Solutions Supply Chain Risk Management in Contracts event recording https://www.dau.edu/events/dau-cyber-solutions-primer-supply-chain-risk-management-scrm-and-dod-cont... DAU Cyber Solutions Webinars (look on the calendar for the next event) www.dau.edu/events WSS 001 Cybersecurity and Acquisition Integration https://www.dau.edu/courses/wss-001 CLE 074 Cybersecurity Throughout DoD Acquisition https://www.dau.edu/courses/cle-074 DAU Mission Assistance www.dau.edu/mission-assistance DAU Cybersecurity Offerings www.dau.edu/cybersecuritySubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

【本期嘉宾】庄明浩、阑夕、陶凤雅庄明浩（「屠龙之术」主理人）阑夕（知名IT人）凤雅（互联网市场投放从业者）主播：潘乱（「乱翻书」主理人）【本场聊天缘起】本场是临时攒的局，起因是庄明浩在做他的年度报告时，分享了一组很有意思的国内数据：- 短剧市场收入超过了电影票房；- 小游戏的投放规模超过了手游；- 直播打赏（不包含电商）的流水超过了游戏；【时间线】短剧02:17 短剧的投放都有哪些玩法？02:53 往期推荐：「乱翻书」第75期：《短剧野蛮生长：创作方法、商业逻辑和未来方向》05:50「短剧和极速版本质上是一样的」10:28 朝气蓬勃的老年人17:57 「短剧里面的是没有配角、没有支线的」小游戏23:28 抖音开放微信小程序跳转26:14 硬核联盟27:43 厂商扣钱套路多29:16 格局已定，但高频界面渗透还在持续直播打赏30:14 直播打赏超过游戏流水32:37 游戏3000亿横盘在那不涨了AI 创业与大厂的AI34:59 从广告投放端看为什么Kimi跟豆包差距这么大？36:46大厂VS创业公司，投放效率差距极大42:32 虚假的AI四小龙VS赚钱了的AI四小龙AI对成熟业务的改造：44:27 百度文库、AI手机45:45 大厂搜推广业务50:37 在线教育：「轻舟已过万重山」51:05 学习机与在线教育66:55 AI搜索与夸克的第二春AI之外，今年互联网行业在发生哪些变化51:40 拼好饭与外卖55:28 播客慢慢进入主流视野【央视新闻】：播客火了！耳朵经济焕发新“声”机w.yangshipin.cn【图】新闻视频的第43秒钟处，出现了庄明浩的播客「屠龙之术」第42期：《爱TM谁谁吧！---聊聊月之暗面的仲裁案》60:54 知乎已经是最大的短片小说分发平台62:32 快手 4 亿 DAU 了64:13 小红书转向短视频73:16 支付宝收购了好大夫【开场&结尾音乐】开场音乐：李小龙 - 好久不见（电视剧《武林外传》片头曲）结尾音乐：虞霞/李小龙 - 侠客行（电视剧《武林外传》片尾曲TV Verison）【相关推荐】1、阑夕对本次直播的总结（全文约3千字，原文见链接）：m.okjike.com【关于「乱翻书」】「乱翻书」是一档关注商业、科技和互联网的圆桌对话节目。关心How和Why，以及少有人注意到的What。内容主要方向是科技考古、行业观察和前沿思考，研究公司的兴衰循环，希望能够为你带来信息增量。「乱翻书」主理人是潘乱，代表作品有《腾讯没有梦想》、字节跳动/快手早期关键节点的系列特写。【关于主播】即刻/视频号/B站/抖音：潘乱公众号/播客：乱翻书【图】▲直播截图微信公众号：乱翻书视频号：潘乱商业合作：联系微信 tongxing717本期编辑：怀杭

Welcome to Contracting Conversations with hosts Jim Valley and Scott Williams. In this episode, cybersecurity expert Kelley Kiernan joins to discuss the critical role of contracting teams in safeguarding against cyber threats. Kelley, DAU's Cyber Security expert, shares insights on FAR and DFARS requirements, the risks to the DoD enterprise, and practical steps for contractors. Topics include the cyber kill chain, essential security controls, CMMC, and the importance of protecting sensitive government data. Learn about the latest DOD instructions, the impact of cyber incidents, and how to ensure compliance and enhance cybersecurity measures. Tune in to stay informed and protect your contracts.Video explaining the Cyber Kill Chain on DoD Contractors:  https://cdnapisec.kaltura.com/index.php/extwidget/preview/partner_id/2203981/uiconf_id/39997971/entry_id/1_383l2nnj/embed/dynamic FAR 52.204-21  “Basic Safeguarding of Covered Contractor Information Systems”  https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.204-21 DFARS 252.204-7012  “Safeguarding Covered Defense Information and Cyber Incident Reporting”    https://www.acquisition.gov/dfars/252.204-7012-safeguarding-covered-defense-information-and-cyber-incident-reporting. DoD's CMMC Program  https://dodcio.defense.gov/CMMC/ FCI and CUI – What is the difference?  https://isoo.blogs.archives.gov/2020/06/19/%e2%80%8bfci-and-cui-what-is-the-difference/#:~:text=Federal%20contract%20information Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Definitions   www.dodcui.milDoD Cyber Crime Center:  Cyber Incident Reporting Instructions    https://dibnet.dod.mil DoD INSTRUCTION 5200.48    “Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)”   https://www.dodcui.mil/Portals/109/Documents/Policy%20Docs/DoDI%205200.48%20CUI.pdf  DoD INSTRUCTION 5230.24    “Distribution Statements on DoD Technical Information”  https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/523024p.pdf?ver=JiZUVfNZrPKmcRMim_UnHg%3d%3d DoD Small Business Innovation Research Program   https://www.dodsbirsttr.mil/submissions/login DoD Inspector General Report on CUI Protection   https://media.defense.gov/2024/Mar/11/2003410405/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2024-031_REVISED%20SECURE.PDF DAU Mission Assistance  www.dau.edu/mission-assistance DAU Cyber Solutions Webinars (look on the calendar for the next event)     www.dau.edu/eventsSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Scott and Jim sit down with Kelley Kiernan, an expert on Cybersecurity at DAU.  Come and learn how to approach cybersecurity in contracting by understanding how cybersecurity is organized and how the security is dependent upon the data which the contract provides or generates.  Learn about the five lines of defense which contracting teams have to protect the vital DoD Supply Chain by ensuring cybersecurity via contract vehicles.  We'll talk about how contracting teams can verify contract cybersecurity controls are in place and active.  This is the first in a series of three contracting cybersecurity podcasts with DAU Professor Kelley Kiernan.Protection Triad of Data Security    https://informationsecurity.wustl.edu/items/confidentiality-integrity-and-availability-the-cia-triad/         FCI Definitions  https://isoo.blogs.archives.gov/2020/06/19/%e2%80%8bfci-and-cui-what-is-the-difference/#:~:text=Federal%20contract%20informationCUI Definitions   www.dodcui.mil“FCI and CUI, What is the Difference?”     https://isoo.blogs.archives.gov/2020/06/19/%e2%80%8bfci-and-cui-what-is-the-difference/DOD INSTRUCTION 5200.48    “Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)”   https://www.dodcui.mil/Portals/109/Documents/Policy%20Docs/DoDI%205200.48%20CUI.pdf  DOD INSTRUCTION 5230.24    “Distribution Statements on DoD Technical Information”  https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/523024p.pdf?ver=JiZUVfNZrPKmcRMim_UnHg%3d%3dCategories of CUI    https://www.archives.gov/cui/registry/category-list and  https://www.dodcui.mil/CUI-Registry-New/Marking of DoD CUI  https://www.dodcui.mil/Portals/109/Documents/Desktop%20Aid%20Docs/CUI%20Training%20Aids_Oct%2023%202020%20(updated%2017%20Mar%2022).pdf?ver=CaeNUeAuPCKajIYMn5zJCg%3d%3dThe Official DoD CUI Program   https://www.dodcui.milDoD Annual CUI Program Training    https://www.dodcui.mil/Training/DoD CUI Training Course CDSE   https://www.cdse.edu/Training/eLearning/IF141/ DAU Cybersecurity Courses   https://www.dau.edu/cybersecurity/trainingDAU Cyber Solutions Webinars (look on the calendar for the next event)     www.dau.edu/events

If you would like all this lovely content without the adverts then follow the link https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/calming-anxiety--4110266/supportBook your one on one hypnotherapy with Martin - https://calendar.app.google/rXHMt8sRYft5iWma8Take back control over your negative thoughts and calm pain and anxiety with this beautiful course in conjunction with The Physio Crew - https://offers.thephysiocrew.co.uk/home-pain Don't forget the app and now all our podcasts are also on YouTube.Gift the app to a loved one, friend or colleague - https://www.martinhewlett.co.uk/shop/calming-anxiety-gift-subscription/Try out the new , beautiful and simple breathing challenge to help you relax.https://www.martinhewlett.co.uk/breathing-challenge/Don't forget to download app....Calming Anxiety for IOS - https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/calming-anxiety/id1576159331Calming Anxiety for Android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=digital.waterfront.calming.anxiety&hl=en-GBPlease download and enjoy.If you have found benefit from my podcast I do have a "buy me a coffee" page which helps to fund the hosting costs and all the time. :)https://www.buymeacoffee.com/calminganxietyI am always open to requests and tips as I try to help as many people as possible .My email is calminganxiety@martinhewlett.co.ukFor those younger listeners struggling with the stress of social media, do check out this amazing website. https://www.icanhelp.net/If you have found benefit in any of our podcasts then it would really help if you could subscribe as well to our YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/c/martinhewlett?sub_confirmation=1Backing Music by Chris Collins============Affiliate links to the gear I use the items that give me a more tranquil life.Rode Podmic - https://amzn.to/3LN1JEdZoom Livetrak L8 - https://amzn.to/36UCIbySony ZV 1 - https://amzn.to/3JvDUPTGoPro Hero 8 Black - https://amzn.to/372rzFlDJI Mini 2 - https://amzn.to/3NQfMdY=============================Items I use for a more relaxed way of life :)Organic Pure Hemp CBD Capsules - https://amzn.to/3

Join us on this episode of Contracting Conversations as we chat with John Willison, the lead for strategic partnerships at the Defense Civilian Training Corps. John discusses how DoD organizations can engage with this congressionally mandated pilot program, from hosting project-based internships, to informing research, to hiring. There are a multitude of benefits to get involved. For more details, contact John Willison at jwilliso@stevens.edu or submit a proposal at the link below. Submit an internship proposal:  https://dctcinternships.acqirc.org/ DCTC website:  https://dctc.mil/DCTC LinkedIn Site:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/defense-civilian-training-corps-dctc/Defense Aquisition Magazine Article, May/June Issue:  https://www.dau.edu/library/damag/may-june2024/culture-of-care  Army ALT Magazine DCTC Article: https://asc.army.mil/web/news-civilian-workforce-of-the-future/   DoD article on DCTC: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3520672/acquisition-program-is-talent-pipeline-to-prepare-students-for-dod-civilian-car/Acquisition Game Article:  https://acqirc.org/news/gaming-the-system-dctc-scholars-master-defense-acquisition-through-play/DCTC Program FAQs:  https://dctc.mil/docs/faqs/DCTC-Student-FAQs-42023-FINAL.pdfSubscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley are joined by Dr. Renee Butler, DAU's Learning Director for Price, Cost, and Finance. They delve into the details of the CCON 009 credential, which focuses on Advanced Proposal Analysis, Indirect Cost, Profit, and Documentation. Dr. Butler explains the structure and content of this credential, its companion CCON 001, and the various courses involved, such as CON 7030V (Indirect Cost Analysis) and CON 7170V (Analyzing Profit or Fee).Listeners will gain insights into the practical applications of these courses, including how to analyze indirect costs, develop profit objectives, and document negotiation decisions. Dr. Butler also highlights the importance of business simulations in the curriculum, providing students with hands-on experience in real-world scenarios. Tune in to learn about the intricacies of contract pricing and the valuable resources available through DAU, and don't forget to like and subscribe for more insightful content.CCON 009 -  i-Catalog:  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/CredentialConceptCard.aspx?crs_id=70 Contract Administration and Pricing Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/caContracting Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

  Contributors are listed here: Danielle S. Castillejo (Rueb), Cyon Edgerton, Rachael Reese, Chasity Malatesta, Debby Haase, Kim Frasier, Briana Cardenas, Holly Christy, Clare Menard, Marjorie Long, Cristi McCorkle, Terri Schumaker, Diana Frazier, Eliza Cortes Bast, Tracy Johnson, Sarah Van Gelder, Marwan, and more Welcome to the Arise Podcast, conversations on faith, race, justice, gender, and spirituality. You'll notice there's going to be some updated changes and different voices on the podcast this season. It's season five. It's October 1st, 2024. I haven't recorded a podcast since June of 2023, and at that time, if you've been following along in my town in Kitsap County, we were working through what would prove to be an extensive and prove to be an extensive fight for justice in our school district. And at this time, we have made some very significant shifts. I want to get into this episode to kind of catch you up on where I'm at, where the podcast is at, and hopefully as you listen to myself and some different voices on these upcoming podcasts, you understand that we have this fundamental common theme amongst us, which is our humanity. And when we drop down into that humanity, because our work, our lives, our families, there's all these poles and all these different ways for us to separate ourselves from our humanness and be busy or accomplish this or accomplish that.(00:01:52):And I know because I'm in there too, we actually separate ourselves from our neighbor. And so I'm hoping as we engage tough topics of politics and we get into the sticky points of it, that there's a sense that, yeah, I don't agree with that person or I agree with that person, but there is a sense that there is shared humanity. And so as we talk about these different subjects, I wanted to emphasize that first, an article was released in the fall last year saying in September of 2023 saying that there was, the school district's investigation had concluded and they had deemed that there was no racism in the North Kitsap School district. As you can imagine, a report like that on the front page of the paper, after all we'd been through after sitting through numerous hours of meetings listening to families and their experiences was disheartening.(00:02:45):We came to find out that some of the families felt or experienced what they deemed to be threatening tones from the investigators or understood that they could possibly be under penalty of perjury depending on what they answered. And I'm not saying that this was always the case, but the threat was on the table. And when you're dealing with working with majority world peoples who are marginalized in the United States, that threat can be very real. And the impact of it is very great. So I began to understand that this investigation wasn't actually looking for the truth and how to solve the problem. It was actually looking for a way of complete and utter defense against what these families had reported their students had experienced. It's a very different thing. And I think there were rumors like were these families going to sue the district, bring a lawsuit to the district?(00:03:41):And we've seen in neighboring school districts, just in recent times, lawsuits have been filed for much less. I mean, we had 90 original complaints. We have more people that had come forward as time had moved on. And yet there was never a move to actually file a lawsuit. We didn't file a lawsuit. We continued to move forward with our lives and think about our students. I think at some point in last fall of 2023, there was just a sense of deep despair like we put in years of effort. And the result was this report that basically attempted to delegitimize all the stories of all these families. It was horrible and heartbreaking and followed the fall. And in the late winter there was going to be a vote for this school bond. And as the yes for the bond campaign rolled out, led by a committee of yes folks, which included some Paul's Bowl rotary members and then the superintendent, it became clear to different community members that there were a lot of questions still to be asked, a lot of information we wanted to have and a lot of things that just felt like they were missing.(00:04:57):I'm not saying they were all missing, but there were pieces and details that appeared to be missing. And when we asked the questions similar to what happened with the complaints, we didn't get answers. The answers were couched in long paragraphs or explanations, and the architects seemed like they didn't have access to the buildings. Again, we didn't know all the details of what happened. And this is just a general recap. You can look at the ensuing political drama online. If you Google superintendent signs and polls Bowl, Washington, P-O-U-L-S-B-O Washington, you will find articles on NBC to Fox News to video clips, all of the above. There were signs all over our county, as I'm sure in your different counties or if you live in Kitsap, you've seen them political signs, vote yes on the bond, vote no on the bond, et cetera. And it appeared that signs were going missing.(00:06:02):And in one case, the signs were going missing often in one particular location and a pair of folks who are not married who became allied because they were both against the bond and had been putting up no on bond signs, decided to put up a wildlife cam and we're able to capture a person destroying the signs on video. And again, Google sbo, Google signs, Google Superintendent look for February 20, 24 articles and you'll see the ensuing reports of what happened. This became a chance for us actually to revisit our story because there's a theme of dishonesty from the top leadership. There was a theme of hiding. There's a theme of not giving all the information a theme of there's any extent we can go to that bumps up against the law. By the way, I think it's against the law to destroy political signs. So there's just this theme that you could break the law and get away with it.(00:07:08):We've seen in the top politics of our country down to the low level politics of our country. And what was our community going to do with all of this? We rallied together. For the first time in many years, there were literally hundreds of people on a zoom call for a school board meeting. News agencies showed up again, and sadly, our district was in the news for something else negative related to the top leadership. And it was very sad. The process. The superintendent was put on leave and resigned in June, but stopped working essentially closely with the school board. I think it was in March or April of 2024. I just remember that when the harm stops, when someone harmful is told by law enforcement or the law or someone else in a higher power to stop harming it, it's a relief. But also that's the time when all of the residual trauma sets in the trauma that you've been going through to be in proximity to someone in leadership and you're literally powerless to address it.(00:08:19):And I guess I bring this up to say that as we think about politics nationally, locally, whether it's a school board member or a president, I remember feeling challenged When I live in a small town, paulville was a small town. It is not like Seattle size. It's like got rural folks. There's folks that commute into the city of Seattle. We're, we're a mix of all different kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds. Our school district is now 38% Spanish speaking this year. There is a genuine mix. So when you're out and about in this small container, Kitsap's also very small too. It's rural, it's small. We're kind of contained on our own peninsula. When you're in this environment, the chances that you're going to see someone that you're know are really high, it's not like if you hate someone about, you're not going to run into Donald Trump here.(00:09:11):You're not going to run in here, run into Kamala Harris here. It's not like you're running into those folks, but you might run into your representative. You might run into the school board member from this district or another district. And how are you going to see that person that actually you not only disagree with, but you felt has been unjust to you? Costs a lot. I mean, money's one thing, but time, effort, family, reputation, allies, there is so much time involved and the way forward. You think it's clear when you're fighting on behalf of kids, you're advocating on behalf of kids. That feels really good. But the process to work through that advocacy often doesn't feel that great. You have to become allies with people you don't agree with. And so I think that just brings me back to where do we find our common humanity?(00:10:06):Where do we find space to occupy a same piece of land or a same meeting or a similar, we have similar causes, but maybe there's deep hurt between us and maybe that hurt is to the point where we're not going to ever talk to that person again, and how do we still see them as human? How do we still see them as valuable in this world? How do we still gain compassion? Those are things I ask myself and I don't have the answers. So I've included a number of folks asking a similar questions about humanness, about politics, about where they locate themselves in their various positions, their race, ethnicity, et cetera, and how do they come at this? And I hope you enjoy the following conversations because I conversations or talks from these people, commentary from these people as we hear all different perspectives. Now you may hear someone and be like, I can get down with that. I agree with that. And then there's another person you might be like, no way, no effing way. And so I encourage you to listen, stay curious with yourself and have talks with your family about how you're going to engage this political season.Speaker 2 (00:11:26):Danielle asked me how I see being human in the age of politics, and I'm struggling answering this because A, I am not a politician or have really any experience as a politician. I have experience as a community based organizer. So I am speaking on this on the outside of things. And then also I'm a white woman able bo, heterosexual woman. And the politics and the systems of power were built for me as a white person to thrive. And so I just want to locate myself in that because my view is of a privileged view. White folks can step in and out of politics without it really harming us. And that's a problem, obviously, and it distorts our view of politics.(00:12:55):But with this question, I have become more and more angry and upset with politics, policies, systems of power, the more that I unlearn and learn about my internal white supremacy culture and ways of being. And as the genocide in Palestine and other countries continue, I don't think the political structures are here for us. They're not people centered, they're not community centered. I think all politics are really about power. And so as an outsider, as not a politician and as a white woman, so those are flawed views. I'm coming from a flawed view. I see how politics change people or they make bad people even worse. I know local white folks that are in it for power and just continue on searching for more and more power. And I've witnessed community organizers join politics to really try to change the systems. But I don't think politics or the system was made to help humans. I don't think the system is for humans. And it hurts people, it divides people. I don't really know how to answer this question because I don't think politics and humanists can actually go together, not the way that they're set up now.Speaker 3 (00:15:09):These questions are so beautiful and just so right on time for this time, we're in right before an election where there's so much stress. My name is Sara Van Gelder and I am a friend of Danielle's and a resident of Kitsap County for many years have I was one of the founders of YES magazine. I also founded a group called People's Hub, which teaches community folks how to do local organizing, actually peer to peer teaching. I didn't do the teaching, but connected people together to teach each other and been associated as a ally of the Suquamish tribe at various times in my life, but I did not ever speak for them.(00:15:54):So my own humanity in the context of this political moment, I like to stay in a place of fierce love and do when I can. I can't say I'm always there. I'm often triggered. I often go into a place of feeling really fearful and anxious about what's going on in the world and more particularly the polarization and the rise of which what I don't like to call, but I think is actually a form of fascism. And when I talk about fierce, it means being willing to say the truth as I see it, but also love, which is that that is the motivator. I don't like seeing people get hurt and I'm willing to stand up and be one of the people to say what I see, but not in a way that is intended to degrade anybody. I am a mother, I'm a grandmother, I'm a daughter, I'm a sister. And being connected to people through love and that sense of willingness to protect one another, that's at the core. So even if I disagree with you, I'm not going to wish you harm.Speaker 1 (00:17:12):Wow. Wow. Even if I disagree with you, I'm not going to wish you harm. And I think what I've heard just particularly lately around the talk of immigration, let's say for an example, is the talk about immigration in the context of a particular city. For instance, they've used Springfield, Ohio over and over. It's come up many times and the demonization, the dehumanization of those immigrants, the miscategorizing of their status, it seems like some of this can get point hyper-focused on one particular example to make a political point or to drive fear home across different context, different communities. So when you think about that, do you wish those people harm that are making those accusations? How do you engage a tough subject like that?Speaker 3 (00:18:15):Yeah, it's a really hard one, and I could tell you what I aspire to do and what I actually do a lot of times is avoid people who have that level of disagreement with, because I'm not sure I have enough in common to even have a good conversation. So I don't feel like I'm as good at this as I'd like to be. But what I try to do is to first off, to recognize that when we're in the fight or flight sort of reptilian brain, when we're super triggered, we have the least capacity to do good work of any kind. So I try to get out of that mindset, and in part I do that by trying to listen, by trying to be an active listener and try to listen not just for the positions. The positions are ones that will likely trigger me, but to listen for what's beneath the positions, what is somebody yearning for?(00:19:10):What is it that they're really longing for beneath those positions that I find so harmful and so triggering. So in many cases, I think what people are looking for in this immigration debate is a sense of belonging. They want to believe that their community is a place where they belong and somehow believe that having other people who are from different cultures move in reduces the chances that they'll be able to belong. So what would it mean if they could feel like they belonged along with the Haitians in their community that it didn't have to be an either or is there a way to have that kind of conversation that what if we all belong(00:19:54):In that respect? The thing that I am sometimes most tempted to do, which is to cancel someone, if you will, that actually feeds into that dynamic of not belonging because I'm telling that person also, you don't belong in my life. You don't belong in my community. So it's not easy to do, but I do feel like we have a better chance of doing that locally than we have doing it nationally because locally we do have so many things we have in common. We all want to drink clean water, we want clean air. We want places our kids can go to school where they will belong and they will feel good. So if we can switch the conversation over to those deeper questions, and I think one thing I've learned from hanging out with indigenous folks is the way in which they think about the seven generations and how much more expansive of you that can give to you when you think that way.(00:20:54):Because instead of thinking about again, that immediate threat, that immediate personal sense of anxiety, you start thinking, well, what's going to work for my kids and my grandkids? I don't want them to be experiencing this. Well, that means something about having to learn how to get along with other people, and we want our kids to get along with each other. We want them to have friends and family, and when they marry into a different culture, we want to feel good about our in-laws. I mean, we want our neighborhood to be a place where our kids can run around and play outside. I mean, there's so many things that once you start expanding the scope to other generations, it makes it so clear that we don't want that kind of society that's full of hate and anxiety.Speaker 1 (00:21:44):Wow, seven generations. It is true. I do a lot of reading and I think about res, are you familiar with Resa and my grandmother's hands? And he talks about that the shifts we want to make in society, the shifts towards being more in our actual physical bodies and present with one another and the reps that it takes, the way we're disrupting it now to make a dent in the 400 plus year history of slavery and the act of embodying ourselves from the harm that has been done is going to take five to seven generations. It's not that he's not for change now. He absolutely is. And just having that long term, almost like marathon view perspective on what change has either for ourselves that can give ourselves grace and that we can also give others in our proximity grace, while also not engaging in active harm. I think there's an important part there. Does that make sense?Speaker 3 (00:22:51):Oh, it makes so much sense. And it's like that long-term view doesn't suggest we can put off working. It only even happens in the long term if we start today, we take the first steps today. So yes, absolutely makes sense. I'm not sure I'm patient enough to wait for all those generations, but I want to be keeping them in my mind and heart when I act. How is this going to contribute to their possibilities? So part of that is by thinking about these questions of belonging, but it's also questions of exclusion more structurally. I think the fact that our society has such deep exclusion economically of so many people, there's so many people across the board who feel so precarious in their lives. I think that sets us up for that kind of scapegoating because ideally what we'd be saying is, if you can't afford to go to college, if you can't afford a medical bill, if you can't afford a place to rent, there's a problem with our economy.(00:23:56):Let's look at that problem with our economy and do something about it. And I believe people have gotten so disempowered. So feeling that that's beyond them to do that. Then the next thing that the demagogues will do is say, well, let's look for a scapegoat then. Let's look for a scapegoat of somebody who's less powerful than you and let's blame them because that'll give you a temporary sense of having power. And that's how, I mean it's not unique to our situation. It's how fascism so often unfolds and how historically groups have been scapegoated. And I think we need to turn our attention back to what is the real cause of our anxiety. And I think the real cause of our anxiety is economic and political disfranchisement. Once we can actually tackle those topics, we can see how much more we can do when we work together across all isms and make things happen for a world in which everyone has a place.Speaker 1 (00:24:55):So then if you know people in your sphere, let's say, and don't name them here, that border on the narrative that says, if you disenfranchise someone less powerful than you, that will bring you some relief. If you have people like that in your life, Sarah, how do you approach them? How do you engage with them if you're willing to share any personal experience?Speaker 3 (00:25:28):Yeah, so my biggest personal experience with that was working as an activist alongside the Suquamish tribe when a lot of their immediate neighbors were trying to keep them from building housing, keep them from building relationships with other governments and actually took them to court trying to actually end their sovereign right to be a tribe. So that was my most direct involvement and that was 20 years ago. So it seems like ancient history, but I learned a lot from that, including from working with tribal elders who provided a lot of leadership for us and how we should work. And one of the things that I've learned from that and also from being a Quaker, is that the notion of how you talk to people in a nonviolent way, and a lot of that starts with using I statements. So when people in my neighborhood would say really disparaging things about the tribe, I would respond with, I feel this. I believe the tribe has sovereign rights. I believe they have always been here and have the right to govern themselves and build homes for their members. And it's harder, it's not as triggering when somebody says, I instead of starts with a word(00:26:58):When somebody says, you immediately have this responsive defensiveness because it's unclear what's going to come next and whether you're going to have to defend yourself when you say I, you're standing in your own power and your own belief system and you're offering that to someone else with the hope that they might empathize and perhaps even perhaps be convinced by part of what you have to say. But in the meantime, you haven't triggered a worsening of relationships. And one of the things I really didn't want to do was create anything that would further the violence, verbal most cases, violence against the tribe, sort of getting people even further triggered. So it was just really important to always be looking for ways to be very clear and uncompromising on really important values, but be willing to compromise on ones that were not important. So for example, when we were working on getting the land return to the tribe that had been a state park, we asked people what's important to you about how this park functions in the future? Because the tribe can take that into account they, but the idea that it is their land, the home of chief Seattles, that was not something we could compromise on.Speaker 1 (00:28:17):I love that using I statements intentionally checking in with yourself so you're not engaging in behaviors that trigger another person further into more defensive mode. Sarah, what are some resources or recommendations you could leave with me or us? When you think about engaging people and staying very present, it's a very human stance to say, I think I believe this versus an accusatory tone like you are this, you are that.Speaker 3 (00:28:50):I think the nonviolent communication that Marshall Rosenberg developed is very powerful. He has a very specific technique for having those kinds of conversations that are very focused on that notion about the I statement and also reflecting back what you hear from other people, but then being willing to use statements about what I need because saying that puts me in a position of being vulnerable, right? Saying I actually need something from you. You obviously have the choice of whether you're going to give it to me or not, but I need to be in a place where I can feel safe when we have these conversations. I need to feel like I live in a community where people are so then the other person has that choice, but you're letting them know and you're again standing in your own power as somebody who's self-aware enough, it also invites them to be self-aware of what they need.Speaker 1 (00:29:46):I love that. Yeah, keep going.Speaker 3 (00:29:50):I think there are other resources out there. I'm just not calling 'em to mind right now, but I think nonviolent communications is a really good one.Speaker 1 (00:29:58):And locally, since you talked locally, what are maybe one or two things locally that you regularly engage in to kind of keep up your awareness to keep yourself in a compassionate mode? How do you do that for youSpeaker 3 (00:30:16):Being out in nature? Okay,Speaker 1 (00:30:19):Tell me about that.Speaker 3 (00:30:22):Oh, in Japan, they call it forest bathing, but it's just a fancy term for being in some places it's really natural. There's beautiful walks. We're very fortunate here in the northwest that there are so many beautiful places we can walk. And when you're surrounded by preferably really intact ecosystems where you can feel the interactions going on among the critters and the plants and just let that wash over you because part of that as well, it kind of helps take some of the pressure off. It sort of releases some of us being kind of entangled in our own ego and lets us just have greater awareness that we're actually entangled in this much larger universe. It's much, much older and we'll go on way after we're gone and extends to so many different ways of being from a bird to a tree, to a plate of grass, and we're all related.Speaker 4 (00:31:33):Hey, this is Kim. So just a brief background. I am a 41-year-old biracial woman. I am a mom, a nurse, a child of an immigrant, and I identify as a Christian American. Thanks Danielle for asking me to chime in. I just wanted to touch base on this current political climate. I would say as a liberal woman, I really enjoy diversity and hearing and seeing different perspectives and engaging in meaningful conversation. Unfortunately, I feel like right now we are so polarized as a country and it's not like the air quote, good old days where you could vote for a politician that you felt like really represented your ideals and kind of financially what you value, policies, et cetera. Now I feel like it has become really a competition and an election of human rights, and I think for me, that's kind of where I draw my own personal boundary.(00:32:40):I think it's important to share different perspectives, and I think I do have a unique perspective and I enjoy hearing others' perspectives as well, but for me, I do draw the line at human rights. So I have learned over the years to just not engage when it comes to issues of individuals being able to choose what to do with their body, women in particular, it's terrifying to me as a nurse and a woman and a mother of a daughter who could potentially be in a situation at some point and not be allowed to make choices about her own body with a doctor. Also as the child of an immigrant, I was raised by a white mother, Irish German Catholic, and my father is an immigrant that has been here since 19 76, 77. He is from Trinidad and Tobago. He's actually served in the military and I have a hard time with vilifying people of color trying to come to this country and make a better life for themselves and for their future and their future generations, which is exactly what my dad was doing. So to me, it's a no-brainer, right? Not to tell anybody what to do or how to vote, but I think that it's really hard right now to hold space for individuals who may be attacking my rights as a woman, my ability as a nurse to be able to care for patients and really what this country was supposedly built on, which is being a melting pot and allowing any and everyone here to be able to pursue the American dream and make a life for themselves and their loved ones.Speaker 5 (00:34:34):As soon as the topic turns to politics, I feel myself cringe, and then I want to internally retreat a bit. Looking back over the past eight plus years, I realize I have been feeling like this for a long time. My body holds memories of heated, uncomfortable confrontive distancing and sometimes horrifying conversations with friends and at times, even with family, I'm tired as most people tired from the collective traumas. We have all lived through political, racial, and pandemic related. Eight years ago, I think I worked to try and remain objective. I told myself that my job was just to hear the other person with curiosity, but doing that was not enough to help me stay well in the midst of what I truly could not then and cannot still control. I've come to realize that I have to stay connected to my own feelings, to my own limitations.(00:35:37):I have to make space to feel my disappointment, my disgust, my fear, my sadness, my powerlessness, my ache, even my longing still when it comes to the realm of politics, I have to make room for my own humanity and then I have to be willing to share that, not simply be a listening ear for others. What's been most difficult for me as politics has driven division and disconnection is the loss of healthy dialogue and conversation. It feels to me like relational loss is there where it doesn't seem like it always has to be. I am passionate about the table, about creating and cultivating space at a table for all the voices and for all of the stories to belong. I still believe in this, and when I'm connected to my own humanity, it makes me far more open to the humanity of another, knowing my own stories that are being stirred up and activated by injustice, by what I perceive to be irresponsible politicians and policies that don't make sense to me and at times scare me when I'm in the presence of those who hold very different political views from me.(00:37:02):I have to actively choose to not just tolerate listening to them, but instead to try and listen for something more. I try to listen for the fear that often fuels their positions. The fear is always storied and the stories offer taste of their humanity and oftentimes their experience of suffering, which always offers the opportunity for empathy. I can't do it all the time. Some situations don't afford the time for curiosity and sharing. When that happens, I need space afterwards, space to release what I don't need or want to hold that I heard space to feel my own humanity again, and then space to choose to remember the humanity of the other person, and that is all an active practice. I think that othering people into political camps and categories is easily available and every time it happens, we lose more and more of our collective humanity and we feed the machine of hate that profits from our conversational and emotional laziness.Speaker 6 (00:38:11):I can't say it's always easy, that's for sure. What I try to do is see another person, whether it's around the political views or other things that I may not agree with somebody about or I might even actually see them as a quote enemy, is for one thing, I drop into my heart and get out of my head about ideas, views, and just try to be present in my heart as much as possible with as little judgment as possible and recognize the essence of the other person, the essence that's inside all the beliefs and the views, and recognizing also that we all have some sort of wounding from our lives, maybe our lineages, our generations, maybe even past lives and or trauma, and that that can obscure the essence of who we are, and I try to really remember that essence in another person.(00:39:34):And in relation, how do you see your own humanity? The other question you ask, how do you see your own humanity in the context of political dialogue? I have to say that's not really a question I thought about. I thought about how to see the humanity in others, so I really appreciate this question. I think if I start othering the other, if I get into too much judgment, I feel like I lose my own sense of humanity or at least the type of human I hope and wish to be. What helps me to I guess, discern when I'm in my own humanity, when I'm in the best of places, I guess I don't know how else to word that is I tune into my values. What do I value most and am I living by those values in the way that I want to be human In this world, for example, for me, integrity is super important as well as respect and compassion.(00:40:44):I'm not saying I'm always in this place, but these values that I aspire to live by help bring me into my own humanity and almost like check, checking in, tuning in checkpoints in a way, when I speak about compassion, sometimes people, all of what I'm saying, I want to, even though I'm maybe trying to see the essence of someone, I do try to discern that if there's being harm done, I'm not okaying any harm at all. And when I try to live by compassion, I feel like that's when I can really see the humanity in others and compassion for myself. I view compassion as a very active verb, a little bit different than empathy. Just that compassion is seeing the suffering, but wanting to do something about it and doing something for me. Compassion includes action, and sometimes that action is helping to disrupt or interrupt harm that's happening, and that's how I can show up in my humanity for others is the best I can do is acting as well as being that balance both, andSpeaker 7 (00:42:23):I'm Diana, she her and I didn't use to see myself in politics the way that I do now. It took decades for me to really start to get a grasp about who I actually am and how the ways I view politics, the ways I vote, who I support, how it actually affects me, and I spent a lot of years voting for things that hurt me without even realizing I was doing that because I was following the messaging and believing it. Ultimately that being a good fill in the blanks meant voting for fill in the blanks or being a good fill in the blanks meant donating to or supporting or whatever, fill in the blanks. And I hurt myself by doing that because I wasn't listening to my own knowing or my own intuition or looking in the mirror at who am I? What kind of world do I want to live in? I didn't ask myself those questions. I did what I thought I was supposed to do to fall in line, and there were people in my life during that who spoke truth, and it was true because it was individual to them. It was, here's what I know about me and here's what this policy means for me. And I didn't get it. I certainly didn't get it.(00:44:09):I judged it inside my own head, and yet those people who spoke their own individual truth are the people who were able to shed light through the cracks in my facade. And years later, I remember some of the things that people said or that they posted or whatever because those were the light that I saw through the cracks and it was so memorable, even though at the time I might have been irritated by it, it was memorable because I loved and respected these people and so their words didn't matter to me, even though at the time I very much disagreed and I hope that I will be allowed to be the light in some people's cracks because I know for a fact there's so many people like me who haven't actually looked at who they are, what they want, what kind of world do they want to live in if they separate themselves from the ideology of where they work or where they go to church or their family of origin or what their spouse is telling them, no honey, who are you? What do you want? And when people can be brave enough to do that, its everything up.Speaker 8 (00:45:46):My name is Marwan Cameron, and I was asked to answer a couple questions here, and the first question was, how do you see your own humanity in the context of political dialogue? And I had to think about this question. Our humanity is front and center when we talk about politics primarily because the issues that affect us, meaning the black community are often sidelined or ignored. I'll share some examples of that. Democrats and Republicans both speak about healthcare, the economy crime, but when they have centered those conversations around the realities they face, when do you actually see that take reparations. For example, we hear a lot about tax cuts or healthcare reform, but nothing about reparations for chattel slavery, for foundational black Americans which are owed to black people for centuries of exploitation. You can even look at our prison system where men are going to prison without HIV and very low percentages and then coming out several times higher when they are released from jail and prison, and I'll get into some of those stats. Also.(00:47:15):When we look at black men that are falsely accused of sexual assault, unfortunately we go back to Emmett Till and we never really talk about the contemporary men. I have a list of a hundred black men that have been falsely accused in the last five years alone. Albert Owens 2023, Christian Cooper, 2020, Joshua Wood, Maurice Hastings, Jonathan Irons, 2000, Anthony Broadwater, 2021, Mark Allen, 2022, Franklin, west 2020, Michael Robertson, Shaw, Taylor, Dion, Pearson 2021, Stanley Race 2019 Rashan Weaver 2020. Henry Lee McCollum, 2020. David Johnson, Jamel Jackson, Charles Franklin, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Corey Wise, you, Celine, Aron McCray, Brian Banks, which is a pretty famous name, Wilbert Jones. That's just 20 names in the last five years of a list of a hundred that I have that have been falsely accused of sexual assault, these aren't things that we talk about. Question two, how do you make space for folks in your proximity who did not share your political views as a heterosexual black male in this country, you really have no choice but to make space for others' Political views as in question number one, we are really only allowed to speak about injustices or political needs in the framework of the black community as a whole.(00:49:25):Matter what side you find yourself on, whether you're a Republican, we're oftentimes they straight up say, we're not acknowledging what your needs are. We're not going to do anything about your needs. You can come over here and vote with us if you want. As Trump said, what have you got to lose? What have Democrats done for you? Or you can look at the democratic side where in the last three elections, it's been existential against Donald Trump. And when Donald Trump won and then lost and is running again, we still haven't seen things like the repeal of qualified immunity, things like atoning for the most heinous crimes that the United States has committed in chattel slavery against black men. I've made space. We have made space as black men in regards to those who do not share our political views. Black men have fought in every war for the United States of America. We have stood up, stood behind, been sacrificed for the good of almost every cause, and we're told not yet. It's not the right time. We too need, have needs, and it becomes a zero sum game.Speaker 9 (00:51:19):Growing up, we had Sunday dinners at my grandparents. Conversation was always lively with my family, talking loudly, fast, and often right over each other. We talked about everything, what was happening around us, our community, what was in the paper and on the news that evening. We didn't always agree. In fact, I think my grandparents debated opposite sides. Just for fun, I fondly remember my grandmother saying, your grandpa and I are canceling each other's votes at the polls. They would both smile and sometimes laugh. Considering my upbringing, I was surprised to hear my instructor at cosmetology school lay down the law. Politics and religion were never to be discussed, not in school, and certainly not if we wanted to be successful professionally. I learned to smile and nod. I strive to find common ground with the opinion of guests. I was raised not to look for any offense with ideas that contrasted my own.(00:52:16):It takes both a left and a right wing to make the eagle fly and what a boring world this would be in if we all agreed. But then Trump happened up until he achieved power. Generally speaking, whether the law or policy was written by conservatives, liberals, moderates, there was a basis of bettering the American way of life. To be clear, this wasn't always the advancement of protection we agreed with, but we could see the logic of it. For the most part, Trump's leadership consists of a hatred for people who are not like him. Early on in his campaign, he told Americans to police their neighbors if they were of a specific religion he has built upon dehumanization and vilification every day sense. My mother lived in Germany for a few years and a town not far from Dau. It was the early 1960s and not yet recovered from World War ii.(00:53:21):This quaint little town overlooks the Bavarian Alps with architects right out of a storybook and a stunning view of Munich. It was evidence that the residents of this charming quiet village were aware that 800,000 people came in and no one left. History books paint the picture that everyone was scared of speaking up for fear they would be next. But with critical thinking, we know many of those approved. They've been listening to the nonsense of their leaders, their beliefs that Jews, the disabled homosexuals, immigrants were a burden on the healthcare system, education system, taking their German jobs, businesses, and homes. They were demonized so strongly, so powerfully. They were no longer human, no longer their neighbors, doctors, teachers, bakers seamstresses their talents, their skills and their very humanity no longer existed. We know this to be true, but what we don't talk about is the slope that good people slid down that enabled this to take place in the coffee shops, birthday parties, sitting with friends, playing cards, Sunday family dinners, these words came up.(00:54:43):Hitler's rhetoric spread and thoughtful kind people did not correct their friends, family, guests and clients. There were Nazis and sympathizers, but there were good people that saw through Hitler's dumpster fire of lies. These are the people I wonder if they ever slept well again. Could they ever look at themselves with honor and integrity? Trump proudly uses this method. He has people willing to do his bidding. He has sympathizers, but what he doesn't have is my silence, my obedience. My voice is the born power. I have to stand strong and correct the lies he tells and the people in my circle repeat. I will lose clients and friends taking this action, and that's a price I'm willing to pay, but I'm not willing to live out the rest of my days knowing that I didn't do everything in my power to stop in.Speaker 10 (00:55:49):How do you make space for folks in your proximity who don't share your political views? I am lucky that I live next to my parents and that my mother-in-law lives in a small home on our property. For years, there was a constant strife between my parents, myself, husband, and my mother-in-law due to political and religious beliefs, uncomfortable dinners, having to watch what you say, an aura of judgment that would seem to permeate family gatherings. They were quite the norm. And each time that they would leave, I would feel a sense of relief. Sometimes someone would decide not to come or just tell us that they needed a break. This would create less tension, but I worry that someone would feel left out or that they would feel judged if they weren't present. And actually that would happen more often or not, especially in my time of anger before and during Covid.(00:56:40):As mentioned before, when I decided that I needed to focus on my own sense of happiness and live up to my values and beliefs, I decided that my home would become a politics, religion free zone. I wanted my home to be a safe for everyone. And this was a tough transition. And what was most difficult was creating boundaries for our parents, having the hard conversations about why we're asking people to withhold their opinions on politics and religion and to focus on grandkids sports and family celebrations, et cetera. For the first few months, I was constantly reminding everyone of the rule, but eventually we all seemed to settle in and even catch ourselves when we deviated from how sex expectations, dinners and events became more pleasant. And when our guests would leave, I didn't have to decompress or worry about how to fix an issue or soothe someone's feelings.(00:57:27):This one simple step has been a game changer, and it's not always perfect, and sometimes people will slip up, but instead of taking on the issue, we will move the conversation to another topic. Some would say that we need to talk about the issues and debate their merits so that we can grow and come together. But no, after finding my purpose, I don't believe that being right is more important than someone else's feelings. I want everyone who sits at my table and breaks spread with me to feel loved and valued. It's not perfect because we're human, but we're trying one dinner at a timeSpeaker 11 (00:58:03):To how do I hold my own humanity? In the context of political dialogue, one of the first things that comes to mind for me is, at least in political conversations, what defines my humanity? When I think about politics, much of our politics is really about power and privilege, of which I happen to have both. And so when I'm thinking about politics, I'm thinking about my social location as a able-bodied, middle class, heterosexual Christian White woman, I carry privilege in almost every aspect of that identity, at least here in the United States. And so when I'm thinking about humanity and political dialogue, our political system has historically always been and continues to be set up to serve people with my type of humanity very well. The thing that I'm constantly trying to keep in my mind is what about the humanity of my brothers and sisters experiencing oppression, marginalization when it comes to my voice and my vote in political situations, I have over the years had to learn to think less about how can I use my vote and my voice to engage in politics in a way that benefits me because I'm already benefiting from our system.(00:59:42):Our system is set up to benefit people like me who carry great levels of social privilege. What I really want to know as I'm trying to use my voice and my vote wisely now, is how do I leverage both of those things, my voice, my vote, as well as my power and privilege to engage in political dialogue in ways that fix broken systems. So I am oftentimes not actually voting or advocating for the things that would benefit me the most or necessarily align perfectly with my theological or political ideals. I'm looking at where are the most broken places in our system? Where is our government currently oppressing individuals the most? And how can my vote and my voice be used to leverage our politics in such a way that those broken systems begin to get fixed and healed over time so that those whose humanity looks different than mine are receiving the same amount of privilege of assistance of power that they should be.(01:00:57):And when it comes to dealing with those that I'm in proximity with who have very different political ideologies than myself, of which I will say in my current context, there are quite a few. I am constantly having to remind myself to focus on core values, values over stances that our conversations and our engagement with one another centers not so much around opinions about specific political stances or issues as much as the core values that we share. If my core value is for equality and equity, if my core value is that we're caring for the poor and the marginalized, then regardless of what stances I might have on certain issues, my voice and my vote represents those core values. And I've found that even when certain stances might be different, when we dig into the core values that are at the root of our decision-making, there's oftentimes a lot more common ground than I ever expect there to be.Speaker 12 (01:02:06):This recording is for the fabulous Danielle Castillo. I think what I am seeing right now as I think about how to welcome people's humanity and politics are a few key things that are both shocking and I would say disappointing in a day and age where we seem to want to tolerate people not being locked into binary spaces, we have relegated differences and opinion and viewpoints into a bipartisan politic. And what that does is that means that there are people who are in and who are out. And we've had to embrace things that we both love and hate if we ascribe to any one of those bipartisan objectives. And so we've had to in some ways, in our own humanity, violate pieces of ourselves to say, well, I align this part one way, but even though I categorically reject their views on this another way. And then regardless of whatever spectrum you're on inside of that political continuum, and it's hard because at that point, if we say in a lot of other spaces that there's space for nuance and there's space for gray, then why here do we land in those spaces?(01:03:16):And so that would be the first that it is an either or, and we seem to be comfortable, most comfortable that way. And then to demonize and villainize somebody who's in the either or space, instead of allowing for the gray, you're either all for me or all against me, and you can't live somewhere in the middle. The second thing that would be shocking and disappointing for me is the way that we've been able to start arranging the things that we can tolerate. And so I can say, well, I love this candidate because I love these three things and I agree with them and I hate these four things, but they're not that bad. And you love this candidate, you love the other candidate for these three things, but you hate them for those four things. And the fact that you don't hate 'em enough over those four things means that you're a terrible person.(01:04:02):And I find that just so interesting and so sad that we've been able to say, well, the four things I can stomach that I don't like are somehow more or less worse than the four things you feel like you could tolerate or not tolerate. And so my list of sins or offenses that are easily navigable, somehow I get to become the moral compass over what should be enough or not enough to disqualify somebody for public service. I think at the end of the day, what makes us hard is that we see people in the middle as somehow exhibiting some sort of cowardice. And I think we're pushing people to violate their own humanity and say, as my experience changes and as the neighborhood changes and the people around me change, and my own philosophy changes that I can't stand in a faithful middle and say, well, I agree with some of this, but I don't agree with some of that.(01:04:54):And we've called those people cowards instead of principled moderates, and we've shamed them into saying, well, you have to choose something. And I think that is so unkind. And I think really at the end of the day, we are asking people to violate their own humanity and their own understanding of who they are and their own sense of who they are as a person by saying that they have to agree one way if they want to be a human or be a woman or be a person of color or be a person of faith. And I think it's both sides. I think every side is complicit. At the end of the day, what is really hard is that I think most people want to vote for the person that is going to lead well, and they want that person to be a good person. They want them to be an upright person.(01:05:37):They want them to be an authentic person, the same person behind closed doors as they are in the public face. And I would say, I don't think that's most people who choose politicking as a vocation, I believe that so much of their job is diplomacy and having to be a lot of faces in a lot of places. And so asking for that kind of authenticity and consistency in a social media world is almost asking the impossible. I don't think it totally is impossible, but I think it's exceptionally hard. Many of the things that we want to ascribe to one individual and how they uphold or represent their own party are carefully crafted narratives by a team of people who are professional politicians and marketers, and to ask them to give you an authentic person, their job is to not give you an authentic person. Their job is to give you an avatar that you feel you can most connect with so you can make the decision they want you to make.(01:06:33):And that is really for me, the reality of what we're up against right now is that we want to say we're voting for ideologies, and in reality we're voting for a carefully crafted narrative that is crafted by people who want you to believe a particular way. And I know that feels kind of negative, and that makes me so sad to even voice that out loud and to vocalize that out loud. But I would say that I hope in some way that we experience real freedom and real understanding of what it means to be a global citizen and to be a citizen of this country, is that we understand that. And the complexity of who I am as a person and how I interact with other people and how they understand their own complexity and their own humanity means that I can believe a lot of things that belong in a lot of different camps.(01:07:19):And that's okay. That's what honestly, being intrinsically American means, but also just to understand our own humanity in the global context is there are things that I will feel one way about and they squarely belong in one camp, but there are other things I believe that belong in another camp. And both of those things can be true for me without somebody demanding that I carry some sort of alliance or allegiance to one person. I think that's so gross and so foul at the end of the day. I think what makes America so interesting and so fascinating, but I also think so beautiful and so compelling and so desiring for people who are coming into our borders, is that there is this understanding that I can stand squarely as an individual person and be able to express myself as who I am as an individual and also belong to a collective that makes space for that.(01:08:14):And that is intrinsically what it means to be America. I'm free to be us, but I'm also free to be me. And so I think politics pushes us into a narrative that is against intrinsically who we say we are, and that really is the basis of freedom. And so that's what I would feel about that. Now, this is an added bonus, and I know you didn't ask for this, Danielle, but I'm going to give it to you anyways because I firmly believe this. I think it is more dehumanizing, and I think it is so incredibly sad that we don't allow for people to be principled moderates. That we are sanctifying the ability to castrate people's ability to be able to stand in the middle. And we vilify them as being weak or vilify them as being cowards because their understanding of what is actually evil is.(01:09:09):It's a broad spectrum. And to say that there is good everywhere, it is true to say there is evil everywhere is true. And how people interface with both of those things is true. And so I hate that we have become okay at using our theology and using our social media platforms and using our politicking as throwing stones for people who say, I want to hold a faithful middle. And that faithful middle means that I can believe a multitude of things and that I stand in the own gray and the nuance of who I am and how I understand my neighbors and what that looks like. And we know that some of those people are standing with compassion and with courage. And to call those people cowards, I think is the most ignorant, I'm trying to find the kindest way to say this, right? So I think it is just absolutely ignorant.(01:10:00):And then we've used quotes out of context and scriptures out of context to tell those people that somehow they're bad and evil people. And it's just not true that they're honestly sometimes the bridge builders and the unifier in places where they are trying to be peacemakers and they're trying to be people of peace. They're trying to be people of belonging and welcome. And so they're holding a faithful middle to say, my heart is going to take enough of a beating where people may misunderstand me, but I'm going to make it big enough and available enough where everybody can come sit under my tent. And I think that's brave work. I think that is courageous work, and I think that is humbling work that we could learn more from instead of castigating really more than anything else. So those are my 2 cents, honestly, more than anything else.(01:10:51):The last 2 cents I could probably give you that I think is so shameful is I am tired of any political party that tells me that they are doing more for working class Americans or doing more for poor people, and yet they're spending 2 billion to fly somebody around and send me junk mail to my home. I would much rather you stop buying ad space and then you actually go and serve the poor and somebody takes a picture of you doing that on accident. And I actually get to see that and go, oh my gosh, they're actually serving the poor. Do not tell me you're serving the poor or serving working class Americans and you haven't talked to one or seen one in a very long time. And my God, you have not lived in our shoes. You have not lived on our pay scales. You have not come in and volunteered regularly, and you only show up when there's a camera crew doing that.(01:11:34):That is so gross to me, and I hate that you send me mail about it and spend 2 billion fundraising for things like that. And yet that money could go to the poor and that money could go to programs. If there's one thing that makes me want to soapbox so bad, it is that more than anything else, I don't want to hear what your fundraising dollars have done to actually help your campaign. And that thing becomes a total waste when you lose. And that money doesn't go into the pockets of people. That money goes into the pockets of advertisers and radio stations and TV stations and social media influencers and all sorts of nonsense and actually doesn't go into the pockets and the hands of people who are feeding the poor that is garbage. So I feel very strongly about that, but I dunno if this is what you need, but that's how I make space. I make space for people who live at Principled Middle because I think blessed are the peacemakers and I want them to feel safe with me.Speaker 13 (01:12:26):Good morning. My name is Luis Cast. How do I see my own humanity in this political context? Well, it's simple as that. I'm a human being. I'm not a pawn or a little peace on a game. I'm a human being born and raised in Mexico, but I live here in the United States over half of my life now, and I'm a human being. And no matter what the promises they give me or what they're going to do in government, I'm still just a human being that wants the best for me and my family. And that's what they need to address the human being in us regarding not regarding color or race or where they come from. Treat us a as human beings. And the other question, how do I make space for folks who do not share my political view?(01:13:46):Well, again, it's just simple. I was taught that love whoever disagree with you or even your enemy. But to be honest, that's the hardest thing to do. People that don't agree with you or you don't agree with them, and sometimes they even hurt you. But I try to do my best, honestly, just to listen and sometimes put myself in their shoes because everybody has been brought up differently in families, cultures, regions of the country from the south, from New England, they call in the west in California. So we all have different views. So I just don't have an ear and sometimes an opinion, but mostly an ear so they can really listen to what they, I believe, where they come from, where they come from. So that is what I try to do. No, perfect, but that's what I try to do.Speaker 14 (01:14:59):Hi, my name is Claire. I am a white, cisgender, heterosexual woman. I live in Paulsboro, Washington. So the first question is how do I see my humanity in the context of this current political moment? And I'd start off by saying I come from a pretty privileged place, like my own personal humanity isn't very threatened just because I'm white, I'm straight, and yeah, my own family background. I have a lot of support and I'm not ever threatened with becoming homeless or something if I can't pay my bills. But still things are really scary for so many people right now. So I definitely feel that all the time. And I would say that it's just a really disheartening time. A lot of the, I mean, pretty much all politicians, I'd say are very untrustworthy at a local and national level. And I think we're all seeing that, especially in the context of what's happening in Gaza.(01:16:26):For the last over a year now, all these politicians that felt like they were progressive and would speak out when heinous things happened, most of them have gone silent or completely denied what's happening in Gaza, or just said really brief empty words, always proceeded by talking about Israeli hostages. So yeah, it's been terrifying because we realize the extent of politicians care for the general public and for the global wellbeing of humanity. And it only stretches so far because first and foremost, they're concerned about their own and standing in the political world because we've seen a lot of people lose their reelections for standing up for Palestinians.(01:17:38):And I think what's really disheartening is seeing it at a local level. In some ways, we expect national politicians to be pretty sleazy and skirt around really big, terrible, important issues. But seeing it at a local level has been really terrifying because I mean, they said it was then a couple decades ago, like 30, 40 years ago, there's more crises going on. And that really, for me, I've always thought, well, this is how it's always been. There's just the media reports on more stuff. We have social media, we can't hide a lot of things. So I don't know if that's true or not, but I mean, it probably is. We're in a time of climate crisis too, so it makes sense that things are just, they're not slowing down.(01:18:49):I don't know where I was going with that, but yeah, I guess I would just say humanity. It feels threatened on so many levels for my queer friends, for my friends of color, for any women or female identifying people just on so many levels, it just feels like our rights are being threatened and everything feels tenuous. If Trump wins, what the hell is going to happen to this country? And if Kamala wins, what the hell is going to change? I don't believe in politicians. They're not going to save us. That's how it feels. We have to save each other that are diehard Trumpers or something. I'd say all those people are my relatives that live in Wisconsin or a couple of coworkers, and we don't talk about politics, but on a deeper level, I try to remember that it's hard, right? Because hard, it's hard not to hate people for what they believe. I guess that's a horrible thing to say, isn't it? But I see the consequences of people who vote for Trump and put him in office the first time, their direct consequences because they voted for Trump and because of their beliefs and because of what they repost online. That just has bred so much hatred, and it's led to people being terrified for their lives and people losing their lives. There's so much propaganda being shoved down people's throats, the people that have Fox News plane 24 7.(01:21:06):I don't know the last time I watched Fox News, but I've overheard it. That stuff is crazy. They're being fed lie after lie after lie. So yeah, it's like people are also a product of their culture and it's hard to fight against your culture. So I try to give people some grace with that, but I also don't know how they can't see their own beliefs as harmful and full of hatred. I really don't understand. So yeah, it's hard. It's hard to remember people's humanity, but I have obviously my own blind spots and my own ways that I'm super ignorant and willfully ignorant in the things I look away from and the things like I'm resistant to learning because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable for me. So I try to hold that space for people too, because we're all learning. Yeah, it's a process of trying to remember people's humanity. And I think, yeah, but it just feels like when people support someone that spews so much hatred, it's really hard not to pin that blame on them as well, because they're also at fault for putting people like that in power. So I don't know. Yeah, it's a tough one.Speaker 15 (01:22:55):I feel like as somebody with various subordinated identities, whether that's being queer, being Latina, having a disability, being a woman, all of those things are increasingly politicized. And so for me, I find that political discourse specifically is often really dehumanizing and even performative on the other end of the spectrum. So our two major parties, Republican and Democrat with Republican, it's we well known that those political parties as they exist currently are working to strip away rights from people in all of those identity and affinity groups. While the Democrats, which I won't even say left, because current Democrats are right of center, when you look at a global pe

In this episode of “Contracting Conversations,” hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley discuss the new credential, CCON 008: Commercial Acquisition, with Professor Kurt Chelf from DAU Midwest. Kurt explains the credential's courses, including CON 7800 and CON 7810, and their relevance to acquisition professionals. Learn about the unique rules and policies of commercial acquisition and how this credential can enhance your contracting skills. Tune in for valuable insights and practical advice!CCON 008 -  i-Catalog:  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/CredentialConceptCard.aspx?crs_id=69Contract Administration and Pricing Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/caContracting Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

In this episode of “Contracting Conversations,” hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley talk with Professor Kurt Chelf from DAU Midwest about the new course, CON 7030V Indirect Cost Analysis. Kurt explains the course's structure, its benefits for acquisition professionals, and how it helps understand and manage indirect costs. Tune in to learn how this course can enhance your contracting skills and career.CON 7030V - https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/courses.aspx?crs_id=12502 Back to Basics: https://www.dau.edu/back-to-basics; BtB Contracting: https://www.dau.edu/functional-areas/contractingContract Cost, Price and Finance Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/pricing  Contracting Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

In this episode of Contracting Conversations, Jim and Scott are jumping into NASA's new spacesuit, an update on 40-year-old technology to keep our explorers safe from the moon to mars.  What does it take to get boots on the lunar ground? And what is the ticket to launching industry into competition over the astronauts' new outfit? We will learn this, and more from Bradley Niese, the acting director of procurement from the Nasa Johnson Space Center in Houston. This is part of the Contracting Conversations series taped during the Nexus 2024 conference in Jacksonville, FL.2024 NEXUS site:  https://s6.goeshow.com/ncma/nexus/2024/index.cfm2025 NEXUS site:  https://ncmahq.org/Web/Web/Events/Nexus.aspxDAU YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@defenseacquisitionuniversi5631DAU Media Channel:  https://media.dau.edu/  DAU website:  https://www.dau.edu/For Contracting Conversations channels:Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Welcome to Contracting Conversations with Scott Williams and co-host Jim Valley. They discuss the incentive contracting credential (CCON 006) with Professor Dave Lewis from DAU. The credential includes five courses covering various incentive contracts and tools. Dave emphasizes the importance of these courses for those involved in incentive contracting and highlights the detailed content and assessments. They also discuss the target audience and the practical applications of the credential in the field. Tune in for insights and tips!CCON 006 i-Catalog:  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/CredentialConceptCard.aspx?crs_id=67Contract Administration and Pricing Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/caContracting Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Welcome to Contracting Conversations. Hosts Scott Williams and Jim Valley discuss the Contract Administration Credential with George Ilse. The credential helps the 1102 population with contract administration, covering actions from payment to oversight, financing, and termination. It includes six online, self-paced courses plus an introductory video and final assessment. The credential is valuable for both 1102s and the broader acquisition community.Here are a few helpful links:DAU's iCatalog on CCON 013:  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/CredentialConceptCard.aspx?crs_id=72 Contract Administration and Pricing Community of Practice: https://www.dau.edu/cop/ca Contracting Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

In this podcast of “Contracting Conversations” Scott Williams and Jim Valley discussing contract financing with Dr. Renee Butler, DAU's Learning Director for Price, Cost, and Finance. They introduce the new credential CCON 005, Contract Financing, which includes three courses: CON 7500 (Introduction to Contract Financing), CON 7510 (Progress Payments), and CON 7520 (Performance-Based Payments). The discussion covers the importance of contract financing in improving cash flow for contractors and the complexities of setting up and administering these payments.  In addition, she discusses the purpose of the credential itself, and the target audience.CCON 005:  https://icatalog.dau.edu/onlinecatalog/CredentialConceptCard.aspx?crs_id=66Cost and Pricing Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/pricing Contracting Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/contractingIf you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Aquesta setmana comptem amb l'actriu australiana Natalie Ravlich, que estrena l'obra que ha escrit conjuntament amb Carlos Be, "La mujer m

Join Jim and Scott as they sit down with Cindy Baker, Professor of Contract Management for the Mid-Atlantic Region and co-host of COR Office Hours. Held every Tuesday from 11:45 AM to 12:45 PM Eastern Time, COR Office Hours has been a vital resource for the COR community since its inception in October 2020. This weekly event, held 49 times a year, offers a platform for discussing a wide range of COR topics. Initially starting as open forums, the sessions have evolved to include specific topics suggested by attendees through event surveys and in-session chats. Whether you're a COR or a contracting officer looking to deepen your understanding of the COR profession, join the 150-250 weekly attendees and enhance your knowledge.Contracting Officer Representative Community of Practice:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/cor COR Office Hours:  https://www.dau.edu/cop/cor/COROfficeHours If you are watching this video on DAU Media, but rather watch on YouTube, go to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Luke Barwikowski is the founder and CEO of Pixels, the largest web3 game by DAU. With over 2.5M total players, Pixels is a social, casual web3 game powered by the Ronin Network, focusing on farming, exploration, and creation in an open world.  Why you should listen Pixels is a Web3 social gaming platform on the Ronin Network, blending farming, exploration, and community building in an open-world universe. Emphasizing a community-focused approach, Pixels builds alongside its users and is on a mission to become the biggest casual games company. In the rapidly evolving world of blockchain gaming, Pixels is setting the stage to redefine player engagement and ownership through its unique integration of gaming and blockchain technology. Pixels is an open-ended world where players can farm, explore, and build one pixel at a time, offering a rich blend of resource management, skill advancement, and relationship building, all underpinned by an immersive narrative and quests. The game leverages blockchain technology to record player progress and achievements, thereby marrying digital ownership with game advancement. This feature is aimed at enhancing the gaming experience by providing players with tangible ownership of their in-game assets and progress. The developers of Pixels have expressed their mission to create a fun, accessible blockchain-backed game that serves as an entry point for millions into the web3 space. The game was initially cultivated around a core group of dedicated enthusiasts and has since expanded its community outreach, attracting a broader audience through strategic sharing and community building. As Pixels moves into its next development phase, the focus is on pushing the boundaries of web3 gaming by experimenting with and iterating on its core components. The development team is particularly interested in exploring features unique to web3 gaming, such as play-to-earn models, guild systems, on-chain reputation, player personas, social-fi, and interoperability among different platforms. The ambition behind Pixels is not only to innovate within the web3 framework but also to discover and implement features that have yet to be fully explored in the gaming industry. This ongoing exploration is expected to significantly impact the next generation of gaming, making Pixels a potential pioneer in the space. The game's approach and the technology backing it suggest a promising shift towards more interactive and ownership-driven gaming experiences, setting a new standard for what is possible in the world of web3 gaming.   Supporting links Stabull Finance Pixels Andy on Twitter  Brave New Coin on Twitter Brave New Coin   If you enjoyed the show please subscribe to the Crypto Conversation and give us a 5-star rating and a positive review in whatever podcast app you are using.

In  this episode of Contracting Conversations, we're thinking BIG when it comes to rebuilding our industrial base with SMALL Business.  But what are the keys for a Small Business to win the government contract? To get to the bottom line, we sit down with, Ken Carkhuff,  one of DAU's own leading experts on this subject. This is part of the Contracting Conversations series taped during the Nexus 2024 conference in Jacksonville, FL.DAU All Things Small Business Podcast:  https://media.dau.edu/channel/Small%2BBusiness/62965391  SB Apple Podcasts location:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-things-small-business/id1523710805 2024 NEXUS site:  https://s6.goeshow.com/ncma/nexus/2024/index.cfm2025 NEXUS site:  https://ncmahq.org/Web/Web/Events/Nexus.aspxDAU YouTube Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/@defenseacquisitionuniversi5631DAU Media Channel:  https://media.dau.edu/  DAU website:  https://www.dau.edu/For Contracting Conversations channels:Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbF8yqm-r_M5czw5teb0PsAApple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/contracting-conversations/id1621567225

Send us a Text Message.What if you could transform the gaming industry and boost mainstream crypto adoption simultaneously? In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Zirlin, co-founder of Sky Mavis, to uncover the story behind Ronin's development and its massive impact on Web3 gaming. Jeff AKA "Jihoz", is a co-founder of Sky Mavis, the creators of Axie Infinity and the Ronin Blockchain. Axie is the #1 NFT game by DAU, NFT volume (as verified by the Guiness Book of world records), and cultural impactJeff shares the trials and triumphs of creating Axie Infinity and how these experiences led to the birth of the Ronin blockchain—an infrastructure designed specifically for gamers and game developers. We discuss the "Ronin effect" and how this tailored platform is propelling game growth at an unprecedented pace, making blockchain technology more accessible and attractive to gamers who are already familiar with digital currencies.We also explore the booming success of games like Pixels, Pyram, and Kaidro on the Ronin network, breaking down the strategies that have led to their impressive user engagement and growth. Discover the significance of community involvement, maintaining digital economy balance, and the importance of developing games transparently for achieving success in the Web3 space. Jeff provides insights into the future of gaming with blockchain, AI, and the metaverse, emphasizing Ronin's vital role in driving consumer adoption of Web3 technologies. Join us as we highlight how active community engagement on platforms like Discord and Facebook is fueling the ongoing success of the Ronin ecosystem.This episode was recorded through a Podcastle call on June 5, 2024. Read the blog article and show notes here: https://webdrie.net/how-ronin-blockchain-powers-millions-of-gamers-with-sky-mavis-co-founder-jeff-jihoz-zirlin/

FULL VIDEO CAN BE SEEN ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL AT WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/SAVEJXN JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - A press conference was held at Capitol Police headquarters regarding the death investigation of Dau Mabil. The Belhaven man went missing in March. His body was found in the Pearl River in Lawrence County a month later. They all want to know what happened to Mabil and where things stand in this investigation. “Everybody knows what happened to Dau. Everybody is quiet. You might hurt the case. The only case we are hurting if we talk is Karrisa's case as long as they can lie to you,” Valeena Greer said, who is the foster mother of Dau. “My mother is here. She wants to see her son and what was done to him,” said Bul Mabi, the brother of Dau. Dau Mabil's mother could not hold back her emotions. With signs in hand, family, friends, and community members stood together as one demanded the wheels of justice to turn in this case to bring everyone some closure. “The Mississippi Capitol Police, the lead agency in charge of my brother's death investigation, has not been fair and forthcoming with the investigation,” Bul said. “The Capitol Police Division has failed to handle my brother's case with the respect and urgency it deserves.” He strongly believes Capitol Police and The Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are not reporting key information to the family nor the public. “If there was no foul play, where is the Capitol Police investigation report? Where was the MBI report when the Chief of Capitol Police said they agree with that conclusion,” Bul said. Family members also believe that those who were close to Dau Mabil may have played a role in his disappearance and death. “The evidence is there,” Greer said. “Dau said, ‘I am the evidence.' Get Dau's body. He is still crying for help. Somebody help me! I'm supposed to hear that and not do anything?” The family is now calling on the Department of Justice to look into and investigate what happened, hoping it'll lead to more answers on what happened.

6. júní 2024 Það kom á óvart hvað tungumálið er stór breyta, segir Tryggvi Hjaltason, höfundur nýrrar skýrslu um stöðu drengja í menntakerfinu sem unnin var að beiðni menntamálaráðuneytisins. Þótt staðan sé vond er botninum sennilega ekki náð en það er hægt að ná miklum og mælanlegum árangri með ákveðnum aðgerðum, segir Tryggvi, í samtali við Frey Gígju Gunnarsson. Tilraunir með lífeldsneyti skiluðu betri niðurstöðum en Garðar Kári Garðarsson, rannsakandi í Háskólanum á Akureyri, hafði þorað að vona. Hann segir mikilvægt að fólk hugi að umhverfinu, og þróar leiðir til þess að vinna lífeldsneyti úr matarafgöngum. Selma Margrét Sverrisdóttir tók saman. Dauðahafið, margrómað fyrir einstakt landslag, vistkerfi og sögulegt gildi, er að þorna upp. Þetta saltvatn á landamærum Jórdaníu, Palestínu og Ísraels fer stöðugt minnkandi vegna óstjórnar og ofnýtingar vatns, sem rekja má til viðvarandi ófriðar á svæðinu. Þrír menn, sem af sögulegum og samtímalegum ástæðum ættu að flokkast sem óvinir, ákváðu að vekja athygli á vandanum með því að synda saman þvert yfir Dauðahafið, fyrstir manna. Ævar Örn Jósepsson segir frá. Umsjón: Ævar Örn Jósepsson Tæknimaður: Magnús Þorsteinn Magnússon

In today's Roundtable Jason and Sanat discuss Social Apps! They kick things off with a review of friend.tech's Airdrop, before defining ‘Web3 Social' and ‘SocialFi'. The two then take a look at Farcaster's DAU growth, 'Stealcam', and the value-transfer in Social Apps. The two then discuss fantasy.top, Social Apps monetization, the explosion of pump.fun, and what the total-addressable-market of Social Apps might be. Plus, a whole bunch more—enjoy! Host: Jason Choi @mrjasonchoi . Not financial advice.   Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (01:20) friend.tech airdrop (06:27) What is ‘Web3 Social' & ‘SocialFi'  (09:15) Farcaster user growth (10:19) Stealcam (13:25) Value transfer in SocialFi (16:23) fantasy.top (20:19) Early monetization in SocialFi (26:17) pump.fun (33:38) SocialFi TAM (36:34) Analysing SocialFi protocols (40:00) a16z ‘How do you define a Social App?' (43:19) Define SocialFi users (49:00) Outro    Partner Message: Yield Guild Games (YGG) is a web3 guild protocol that enables players and gaming guilds to find their community, discover games and level up together. Its mission is to become the leading community-based user acquisition platform in web3 gaming through fun quests that help players build their onchain reputation Find out more at https://investors.yieldguild.io/   Twitter accounts: Jason Choi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi   Sanat Kapur's Twitter: https://twitter.com/kapursanat Blockcrunch VIP: https://blockcrunch.substack.com/ Blockcrunch Twitter:   https://twitter.com/theBlockcrunch   Disclaimer: The Blockcrunch Podcast (“Blockcrunch”) is an educational resource intended for informational purposes only. Blockcrunch produces a weekly podcast and newsletter that routinely covers projects in Web 3 and may discuss assets that the host or its guests have financial exposure to. Views held by Blockcrunch's guests are their own. None of Blockcrunch, its registered entity or any of its affiliated personnel are licensed to provide any type of financial advice, and nothing on Blockcrunch's podcast, newsletter, website and social media should be construed as financial advice. Blockcrunch also receives compensation from its sponsor; sponsorship messages do not constitute financial advice or endorsement.   Full disclaimer:  https://blockcrunch.substack.com/about

Roblox is the closest platform to the true vision of the metaverse; a persistent, immersive, shared, 3D space that re-imagines how users can connect, communicate, play, shop, and express themselves. In a sense, Roblox can be viewed as the public beta of the metaverse. And Roblox is already emerging as the primary social platform for Gen Alpha and younger Gen Z. With 72 million daily active users and approximately 350 million monthly active users, all of whom spend about 2.4 hours per day on the platform, Roblox is truly the most engaging platform on the Internet. And with a user base that is increasingly getting older, with 40% of DAU now over the age of 16, Roblox is no longer just a platform for young kids. But how did the Roblox of today come to be? From its founding as Dynablox 20 years ago, to launching the first experience, to opening up the avatar economy and more, Yon and Matthew dive deep into the company and platform's history, its founders and its future in our latest episode of Into the Metaverse. And as always, if you liked this podcast, make sure to rate, review and subscribe to our substack. Topics: Where Roblox Started (02:07) Building the Developer Community (10:10) Four Core Values Drive Employee Ownership and Accountability (19:01) The Numbers Behind Roblox's Present (23:10) Brands and IP Have Begun Leveraging Roblox (29:17) How Roblox Gets to 1 Billion Users (38:18) AI and New Technologies Impact on Roblox Growth (40:41) The Economics of Building on Roblox vs Other Platforms (46:40) The Future of Real World Commerce on Roblox (53:09) The Challenge of IP Use in a World of Digital Self Expression (58:41) Could Roblox Ever Be Acquired (01:04:22) -- -- -- -- -- Follow Yon: LinkedIn | Twitter Follow Matthew: LinkedIn | Twitter Learn more about Supersocial by visiting the website.

In this episode, meet Unity's new CEO, understand what the layoffs at Yuga Labs mean, how small indie developers are continuing to see outsized success, and whether Snap's earnings and revenue trends are really all that. We dive into the growth potential of Unity, the limitations of web3 IP in attracting mainstream audiences, the explosive rise of small game development teams, and the performance of Snap in different markets. Takeaways Unity has appointed a new CEO, Matthew Bromberg, as the company undergoes a company-wide reset. Yuga Labs, known for its NFT collections, is pivoting away from gaming and back to metaverse. The value of Web3 native IP in gaming is questionable, as it may not attract mainstream audiences. Small indie game developers are achieving significant success with the aid of new tools and strategies. Snap reported growth in revenue, ARPU, and DAU, with significant growth coming from outside North America. Snap's performance as an advertising platform may be declining, as it seems to charge advertisers more and give less. Chapters 00:00 – Introduction 01:02 – Meet Unity's new CEO – will he turn things around? 03:26 – Yuga Labs' pivot hints at web3 IP weakness 10:34 – Small game teams continue to win big in 2024 15:28 – Snap's 2024 Q1 report hints at murky future 20:12 – Closing and sponsor message

Today Jason is joined by 9GAG CEO Ray Chan, the Godfather of meme's. In this episode Ray breaks down how to successfully transition from Web2 to Web3, why the ‘midcurve strategy' might be best, the best Web3 GTM execution, as well as exploring a framework for Memeland, meme coin fundamentals, and an analysis of the modern day attention economy. For those of you deep in the meme cycle, obsessively on Blast, or otherwise interested in how and why we find ourselves in this memetic cycle, this one's for you—enjoy. Note: 9GAG is an online platform and social media website based in Hong Kong, which allows its users to upload and share user-generated content or other content from external social media websites, check it out here: https://www.memeland.com/ Host: Jason Choi @mrjasonchoi . Not financial advice. This episode is sponsored by YGG.   Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (03:09) “Yield Guild Games”  (04:09) Executing on Web2 to Web3 (11:24) Memeland explained (16:48) The midcurve strategy (19:24) Founder focuses & GTM strategy (22:00) The attention economy  (26:43) Product features in relation to DAU  (31:21) A framework for Memeland (39:28) Meme coin comparisons  (41:32) Commonalities of successful meme coins (48:28) Differentiating from other meme coins (53:20) Outro   Twitter accounts: Jason Choi's Twitter:   https://twitter.com/mrjasonchoi   Blockcrunch Twitter:   https://twitter.com/theBlockcrunch   Ray Chan's Twitter:   https://twitter.com/9gagceo?lang=en   Blockcrunch VIP: https://blockcrunch.substack.com/   Disclaimer: The Blockcrunch Podcast (“Blockcrunch”) is an educational resource intended for informational purposes only. Blockcrunch produces a weekly podcast and newsletter that routinely covers projects in Web 3 and may discuss assets that the host or its guests have financial exposure to. Views held by Blockcrunch's guests are their own. None of Blockcrunch, its registered entity or any of its affiliated personnel are licensed to provide any type of financial advice, and nothing on Blockcrunch's podcast, newsletter, website and social media should be construed as financial advice. Blockcrunch also receives compensation from its sponsor; sponsorship messages do not constitute financial advice or endorsement.   Full disclaimer: https://blockcrunch.substack.com/about

Luke Barwikowski is the founder and CEO of Pixels, the largest web3 game by DAU. With over 2.5M total players, Pixels is a social, casual web3 game powered by the Ronin Network, focusing on farming, exploration, and creation in an open world.  As CEO, Luke's mission is to build the biggest Web3 casual games company.Luke's background in software engineering started at 12, and he built and sold his first app at 18. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Michigan.In this conversation, we discuss:- Current state of Web3 gaming- Future of Web3 gaming- Coding and making video games at 12yrs old- Bitcoin mining back in the day- How Pixels differs from other web3 games- Move from Polygon to Ronin- Building on Ronin Blockchain- Virtual world building- Building the biggest Web3 casual games company- 500K+ real daily active users and 4.5M USD in token revenue in the last 30 days- Becoming the Zynga of Web3PixelsWebsite: www.pixels.xyzX: @pixels_onlineDiscord: discord.gg/pixelsLuke BarwikowskiX: @whatslukedoingLinkedIn: Luke Barwikowski  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.  PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.   PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions.  Code: CRYPTONEWS50  This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below:  PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50