Podcasts about ephemeral

This Thursday and Friday, April 17 and 18, EMPAC at RPI in Troy, New York presents the Ephemeral Organ Festival. The presentations this week feature a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose works explore dance and movement as a means of experiencing memory, history, and Black lived experience. Tara Aisha Willis is Curator of Theater & Dance at EMPAC and she joins us to tell us more.

Hello Interactors,Spring at Interplace brings a shift to mapping, GIS, and urban design. While talk of industrial revival stirs nostalgia — steel mills, union jobs, bustling Main Streets — the reality on the ground is different: warehouses, data centers, vertical suburbs, and last-mile depots. Less Rosy the Riveter, more Ada Lovelace. Our cities are being shaped accordingly — optimized not for community, but for logistics.FROM STOREFRONTS TO STEEL DOORSLet's start with these two charts recently shared by the historian of global finance and power Adam Tooze at Chartbook. One shows Amazon passing Walmart in quarterly sales for the first time. The other shows a steadily declining drop in plans for small business capital expenditure. Confidence shot up upon the election of Trump, but dropped suddenly when tariff talks trumped tax tempering. Together, these charts paint a picture: control over how people buy, build, and shape space is shifting — fast. It all starts quietly. A parking lot gets fenced off. Trucks show up. Maybe the old strip mall disappears overnight. A few months later, there's a low, gray building with no windows. No grand opening. Just a stream of delivery vans pulling in and out.This isn't just a new kind of facility — it's a new kind of urban and suburban logic.Platform logistics has rewritten the rules of space. Where cities were once shaped by factories and storefronts, now they're shaped by fulfillment timelines, routing algorithms, and the need to move goods faster than planning commissions can meet.In the past, small businesses were physical anchors. They invested in place. They influenced how neighborhoods looked, felt, and functioned. But when capital expenditures from local firms drop — as that second chart shows — their power to shape the block goes with it.What fills the vacuum is logistics. And it doesn't negotiate like the actors it replaces.This isn't just a retail story. It's a story about agency — who gets to decide what a place is for. When small businesses cut back on investment, it's not just the storefront that disappears. So does the capacity to influence a block, a street, a community. Local business owners don't just sell goods — they co-create neighborhoods. They choose where to open, how to hire, how to design, and what kind of social space their business offers. All of that is a form of micro-planning — planning from below. France, as one example, subsidizes these co-created neighborhoods in Paris to insure they uphold the romantic image of a Parisian boulevard.But without subsidies, these actors are disappearing. And in the vacuum, big brands and logistics move in. Not softly, either. Amazon alone added hundreds of logistics facilities to U.S. land in the past five years. Data centers compete for this land. Meta recently announced a four million square foot facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana. It will be their largest data center in the world.These buildings are a new kind of mall. They're massive, quiet, windowless buildings that optimize for speed, not presence. This is what researchers call logistics urbanization — a land use logic where space is valued not for what people can do in it, but for how efficiently packages and data can pass through it.The shift is structural. It remakes how land is zoned, how roads are used, and how people move — and it does so at a scale that outpaces most municipal planning timelines. That's not just a market change. It's a change in governance. Because planners? Mayors? Even state reps? They're not steering anymore. They're reacting.City managers once had tools to shape growth — zoning, permitting, community input. But logistics and tech giants don't negotiate like developers. They come with pre-designed footprints and expectations. If a city doesn't offer fast approval, industrial zoning, and tax breaks, they'll skip to the next one. And often, they won't even say why. Economists studying these state and local business tax incentives say these serve as the “primary place-based policy in the United States.”It forces a kind of economic speed dating. I see it in my own area as local governments vie for the attention (and revenue) of would-be high-tech suitors. But it can be quiet, as one report suggests: “This first stage of logistical urbanization goes largely unnoticed insofar as the construction of a warehouse in an existing industrial zone rarely raises significant political issues.”(2)This isn't just in major cities. Across the U.S., cities are bending their long-term plans to chase short-term fulfillment deals. Even rural local governments routinely waive design standards and sidestep public input to accommodate warehouse and tech siting — because saying no can feel like missing out on tax revenue, jobs, or political wins.(2)What was once a dynamic choreography of land use and local voices becomes something flatter: a data pipeline.It isn't all bad. Fulfillment hubs closer to homes mean fewer trucks, shorter trips, and lower emissions. Data centers crunching billions of bits is better than a PC whirring under the desk of every home. There is a scale and sustainability case to be made.But logistic liquidity doesn't equal optimistic livability. It doesn't account for what's lost when civic agency fades, or when a city works better for packages than for people. You can optimize flow — and still degrade life.That's what those two charts at the beginning really show. Not just an economic shift, but a spatial one. From many small decisions to a few massive ones. From storefronts and civic input to corporate site selection and zoning flips. From a lived city to a delivered one.Which brings us to the next shape in this story — not the warehouse, but the mid-rise. Not the loading dock, but the key-fob lobby. Different function. Same logic.HIGH-RISE, LOW TOUCHYou've seen them. The sleek new apartment buildings with names like The Foundry or Parc25. A yoga room, a roof deck, and an app for letting in your dog walker. “Mixed-use,” they say — but it's mostly private use stacked vertically.It's much needed housing, for sure. But these aren't neighborhoods. They're private bunkers with balconies.Yes, they're more dense than suburban cul-de-sacs. Yes, they're more energy-efficient than sprawl. But for all their square footage and amenity spaces, they often feel more like vertical suburbs — inward-facing, highly managed, and oddly disconnected from the street.The ground floors are usually glazed over with placeholder retail: maybe a Starbucks, a Subway, or nothing at all…often vacant with only For Lease signs. Residents rarely linger. Packages arrive faster than neighbors can introduce themselves. There's a gym to bench press, but no public bench or egress. You're close to hundreds of people — and yet rarely bump into anyone you didn't schedule.That's not a design flaw. That's the point.These buildings are part of a new typology — one that synchronizes perfectly with a platform lifestyle. Residents work remote. Order in. Socialize through screens. The architecture doesn't foster interaction because interaction isn't the product. Efficiency is.Call it fulfillment housing — apartments designed to plug into an economy that favors logistics and metrics, not civic social fabrics. They're located near tech centers, distribution hubs, and delivery corridors, and sometimes libraries or parks outdoors. What matters is access to bandwidth and smooth entry for Amazon and Door Dash.And it's not just what you see on the block. Behind the scenes, cities are quietly reengineering themselves to connect these structures to the digital twins — warehouses and data centers. Tucked into nearby low-tax exurbs or industrial zones, together they help reshape land use, strain energy grids, and anchor the platform economy.They're infrastructure for a new kind of urban life — one where presence is optional and connection to the cloud is more important than to the crowd.Even the public spaces inside these buildings — co-working lounges, shared kitchens, “community rooms” — are behind fobs, passwords, and management policies. Sociologists have called this the anticommons: everything looks shared, but very little actually is. It's curated collectivity, not true community.And it's not just isolation — it's predictability. These developments are built to minimize risk, noise, conflict, friction. Which is also to say: they're built to minimize surprise. The kind of surprise that once made cities exciting. The kind that made them social.Some urban scholars describe these spaces as part of a broader “ghost urbanism” — a city where density exists without depth. Where interaction is optional. Where proximity is engineered, but intimacy is not. You can be surrounded by life and still feel like you're buffering.The irony is these buildings often check every sustainability box. They're LEED-certified. Near transit. Built up, not out. From a local emissions standpoint, they beat the ‘burbs'. But their occupant's consumption, waste, and travel habits can create more pollution than homebody suburbanites. And from a civic standpoint — the standpoint of belonging, encounter, spontaneity — they're often just as empty.And so we arrive at a strange truth: a city can be efficient, dense, even walkable — and still feel ghosted. Because what we've optimized for isn't connection. It's delivery — to screens and doorsteps. What gets delivered to fulfillment housing may be frictionless, but it's rarely fulfilling.DRONES, DOMICILES, AND DISCONNECTIONI admit there's a nostalgia for old-world neighborhoods as strong as nostalgia for industrial cities of the past. Neighborhoods where you may run into people at the mailbox. Asking someone in the post office line where they got their haircut. Sitting on the porch, just waitin' on a friend. We used to talk about killing time, now we have apps to optimize it.It's not just because of screens. It's also about what kinds of space we've built — and what kind of social activity they allow or even encourage.In many suburbs and edge cities, the mix of logistics zones, tech centers, and residential enclaves creates what urban theorists might call a fragmented spatial syntax. That means the city no longer “reads” as a continuous experience. Streets don't tell stories.There's no rhythm from house to corner store to café to school. Instead, you get jump cuts — a warehouse here, a cul-de-sac there, a fenced-in apartment complex down the road. These are spaces that serve different logics, designed for speed, security, or seclusion — but rarely for relation. The grammar of the neighborhood breaks down. You don't stroll. You shuttle.You drive past a warehouse. You park in a garage. You enter through a lobby. You take an elevator to your door. There's no in-between space — no casual friction, no civic ambiguity, no shared air.These patterns aren't new. But they're becoming the norm, not the exception. You can end up living in a place but never quite arrive.Watch most anyone under 35. Connection increasingly happens online. Friendships form in Discord servers, not diners. Parties are planned via private stories, not porch swings. You don't run into people. You ping them.Sometimes that online connection does spill back into the real world — meetups, pop-ups, shared hobbies that break into public space. Discord, especially, has become a kind of digital third place, often leading to real-world hangouts. It's social. Even communal. But it's different. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Less rooted in place, more tied to platform and notifications.None of this is inherently bad. But it does change the role of the neighborhood as we once knew it. It's no longer the setting for shared experience — it's just a backdrop for bandwidth. That shift is subtle, but it adds up. Without physical places for civic life, interactions gets offloaded to platforms. Connection becomes mediated, surveilled, and datafied. You don't meet your neighbors. You follow them. You comment on their dog through a Ring alert.This is what some sociologists call networked individualism — where people aren't embedded in shared place-based systems, but orbit through overlapping digital networks. And when digital is the default, the city becomes a logistics problem. Something to move through efficiently…or not. It certainly is not something we're building together. It's imposed upon us.And so we arrive at a kind of paradox:We're more connected than ever. But we're less entangled.We're more visible. But we're less involved.We're living closer. But we don't feel near.The irony is the very platforms that hollow out public space are now where we go looking for belonging. TikTok isn't just where we go to kill time — it's where we go to feel seen. If your neighborhood doesn't give you identity, the algorithm will.Meanwhile, the built environment absorbs the logic of logistics. Warehouses and data centers at the edge. Mid-rises in the core. Streets engineered for the throughput of cars and delivery vans. Housing designed for containment. And social life increasingly routed elsewhere.It all works. Until you want to feel something.We're social creatures, biologically wired for connection. Neuroscience shows that in-person social interactions regulate stress, build emotional resilience, and literally shape how our brains grow and adapt. It's not just emotional. It's neurochemical. Oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin — the chemistry of belonging — fire most powerfully through touch, eye contact, shared space. When those rituals shrink, so does our sense of meaning and safety.And that's what this is really about. Historically cities weren't just containers for life. They're catalysts for feeling. Without shared air, shared time, and shared friction, we lose more than convenience. We lose the chance to feel something real — to be part of a place, not just a node in a network.What started with two charts ends here: a world where local agency, social spontaneity, and even emotion itself are being restructured by platform logic. The city still stands. The buildings are there. The people are home. But the feeling of place — the buzz, the bump, the belonging — gets harder to find.That's the cost of efficiency without empathy. Of optimizing everything but meaning.And that's the city we're building. Unless we build something else. We'll need agency. And not just for planners or developers. For people.That's the work ahead. Not to reject the platform city. But to remake it — into something more livable. More legible. More ours. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

If you're enjoying the show, why not consider supporting it on Patreon? You'll get access to lots of new bonus content, including my other podcast, Patron Deities! Thanks to Ray Otus for our thumbnail image. The intro music is a clip from "Space Quest" by ROBOVALJEAN, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

They're short-lived but much anticipated! Spring ephemerals are a sign of sunnier days and warmer weather, which we could really use here in West Michigan. Featured shrub: Legend of the Small fothergilla.

Are ephemeral tattoos real, and can you win money in a court of law for getting one? Can you trust a hairdresser in a bad wig? We ask the hard questions

El miedo no tiene por qué controlarte, ni a ti ni a tus acciones. En este episodio te revelo 10 estrategias efectivas para enfrentar cualquier tipo de miedo: desde el miedo al ridículo hasta el miedo a la muerte. Si alguna vez has sentido que el miedo te paraliza, este episodio te dará herramientas prácticas y fáciles de aplicar. ¡No dejes que el miedo tome las riendas de tu vida!

In the '90s, ads were like monuments. Today, they disappear faster than a Snapchat story. New research from LO:LA suggests we're trading brand immortality for algorithmic dopamine hits—and the cost is steeper than anyone predicted. Can your brand balance the two? Find out here: https://www.thelolaagency.com/post/the-age-of-ephemera-how-the-lack-of-permanence-in-modern-advertising-impacts-brands London : Los Angeles (LO:LA) City: El Segundo Address: 840 Apollo Street Website: https://www.thelolaagency.com

Diarmuid Gavin takes us to Japan on The Pat Kenny Show this week!As the countries cherry Trees bloom in the Sakura season, Japan braces itself for a time of natural theatre across the country.

Guest: James Campbell, CEO, Cado Security Chris Doman, CTO, Cado Security Topics: Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) vs Cloud Investigation and Response Automation(CIRA) ... what's the story here? There is an “R” in CDR, right? Can't my (modern) SIEM/SOAR do that?  What about this becoming a part of modern SIEM/SOAR in the future? What gets better when you deploy a CIRA (a) and your CIRA in particular (b)? Ephemerality and security, what are the fun overlaps? Does “E” help “S” or hurts it? What about compliance? Ephemeral compliance sounds iffy… Cloud investigations, what is special about them? How does CSPM intersect with this? Is CIRA part of CNAPP?   A secret question, need to listen for it! Resources: EP157 Decoding CDR & CIRA: What Happens When SecOps Meets Cloud EP67 Cyber Defense Matrix and Does Cloud Security Have to DIE to Win? EP158 Ghostbusters for the Cloud: Who You Gonna Call for Cloud Forensics Cloud security incidents (Rami McCarthy) Cado resources  

The Curve of Time, Chapter 61 — An Ephemeral Wind, in which Zeno experiments with his new power.Followed by musings on how examining logical extremes is helpful.Explore more at www.writtenbyrufus.com where you can join in a discussion of this chapter at the bottom of the text version of this episode.

In this episode I discuss 10 plants that are coming into flower right now:Virginia BluebellsDutchman's breeches BloodrootEastern spring beautyTrout lilyRed trilliumStarflowerWood anemonesRound-lobed hepaticaCutleaf ToothwortNew today in my Woodcraft shop:Toasted Holly Cooking Spoon - Judson Carroll Woodcrafthttps://judsoncarrollwoodcraft.substack.com/p/toasted-holly-cooking-spoonEmail: judson@judsoncarroll.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/southern-appalachian-herbs--4697544/supportRead about The Spring Foraging Cookbook: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-spring-foraging-cookbook.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRP63R54Medicinal Weeds and Grasses of the American Southeast, an Herbalist's Guidehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2023/05/medicinal-weeds-and-grasses-of-american.htmlAvailable in paperback on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C47LHTTHandConfirmation, an Autobiography of Faithhttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2023/05/confirmation-autobiography-of-faith.htmlAvailable in paperback on Amazon:https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C47Q1JNKVisit my Substack and sign up for my free newsletter:https://judsoncarroll.substack.com/Read about my new other books:Medicinal Ferns and Fern Allies, an Herbalist's Guide https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/11/medicinal-ferns-and-fern-allies.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMSZSJPSThe Omnivore's Guide to Home Cooking for Preppers, Homesteaders, Permaculture People and Everyone Else: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-omnivores-guide-to-home-cooking-for.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BGKX37Q2Medicinal Shrubs and Woody Vines of The American Southeast an Herbalist's Guidehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/06/medicinal-shrubs-and-woody-vines-of.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B2T4Y5L6andGrowing Your Survival Herb Garden for Preppers, Homesteaders and Everyone Elsehttps://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/04/growing-your-survival-herb-garden-for.htmlhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X4LYV9RThe Encyclopedia of Medicinal Bitter Herbs: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-encyclopedia-of-bitter-medicina.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5MYJ35RandChristian Medicine, History and Practice: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2022/01/christian-herbal-medicine-history-and.htmlAvailable for purchase on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09P7RNCTBHerbal Medicine for Preppers, Homesteaders and Permaculture People: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/2021/10/herbal-medicine-for-preppers.htmlAlso available on Amazon: www.amazon.com/dp/B09HMWXL25Podcast:  https://www.spreaker.com/show/southern-appalachian-herbsBlog: https://southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com/Free Video Lessons: https://rumble.com/c/c-618325 Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/southern-appalachian-herbs--4697544/support.

Another gem from Grieg's Lyric pieces Op. 12, known as either "Elfin dance" or "Fairy dance". The Scandinavian elves are actually more like fairies or sprites than fantasy elves, and this music captures their short but energetic dance show succinctly!Video: https://youtu.be/6rEWZVMIC3k

Make sure to use the vocab word this week!

Today my guest Katherine Butler Schofield who is a professor of South Asian Music and History at King's College London. She is the author of the recent book Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858.  She also hosted a podcast series called The Histories of the Ephemeral on the same theme. We talked about the history of classical music in India - from Natyasastra to Dhrupad and to khayals and qawallis. about Aurangzeb's relationship with music, the sacking of Delhiand it's influence on hindustani classical music, the powerful tawaifs of that time, and much more. Recorded January 24th, 2025. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Connect with Ideas of India Follow us on X Follow Shruti on X Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Intro (00:02:17) - The Nāṭyaśāstra and Tasting Music (00:09:29) - Raga Style and Persian Influences (00:18:35) - The Influence of Intoxicants (00:19:42) - Aurangzeb and Other Courtly Characters (00:33:37) - Aurangzeb's Demise and Its Effect on Music (00:43:15) - Traveling Musicians and the Spread and Rise of Different Forms (00:49:49) - Development of Tomri (00:55:37) - What Makes Punjab So Different (00:59:17) - The Tawaif (01:02:06) - The Stories of Sophia Plowden and Khanam Jan (01:18:07) - Outro

In this episode of BarhamTalks, Theos Gracious Barham reflects on the fleeting nature of life and how our experiences shape us. While life may be short, the impact of our actions and stories can last far beyond our time.Discover how embracing the present moment, building meaningful connections, and sharing hope can make life richer and more fulfilling. Tune in for simple, real stories that inspire us to live fully and treasure each day.Don't forget to share this uplifting episode with friends and family! Every new day is a chance to make things better.

Joe is the greatest guy in the universe.  Toppie provides evidence by reading from true life found letters written to Joe.  We are sure you will agree after listening... Joe is THE GREATEST GUY IN THE UNIVERSE... EVER, EVER, EVER!!!!!!!!!!!! Write to Toppie at Smellcast@aol.com. Leave a comment on Toppie's blog!  Friend Toppie on Facebook by emailing him YOUR FB name and link, then Toppie will find YOU and friend you! 

#403: Josiah Jones 2 -- Filming Jeff Mercier for Ice Climbing Film "Ephemeral" by Chris Ward

We're back with a deeper dive into the 2024 Data Security Incident Response Report, which features insights and metrics from 1,150+ incidents in 2023.This episode dives deeper into information governance and preservation.Questions & Comments: jsherer@bakerlaw.comand lrecord@bakerlaw.com

In this episode, Mandy (@mandyleft) talks with photographer and filmmaker Marta Arjona (@marjonablasco).   They began by discussing Marta's short films Dolors and Peaceful Wind. They also talked about using expired films and some of Marta's favorites.   Marta was the recent recipient of a community grant from Ilford for her project ePhemeral. The nature of dance is that a dancer will never move exactly the same twice, so each performance is unique. Capturing it on film makes it eternal.   They finished up with the reoccurring segments FFS (For Film's Sake) and PACS (Pleasing Analogue Camera Sounds) and Marta gave a shoutout to Cuarto Color Lab (@cuartocolorlab).

Ephemeral and Evergreen Epiphanies_Allen Hilton_1.5.25 by Covenant Presbyterian

Robert Caulk is responsible for directing software development, enabling research, coordinating company projects, quality control, proposing external collaborations, and securing funding. He believes firmly in open-source, having spent 12 years accruing over 1000 academic citations building open-source software in domains such as machine learning, image analysis, and coupled physical processes. He received his Ph.D. from Université Grenoble Alpes, France, in computational mechanics. Unleashing Unconstrained News Knowledge Graphs to Combat Misinformation // MLOps Podcast #279 with Robert Caulk, Founder of Emergent Methods. // Abstract Indexing hundreds of thousands of news articles per day into a knowledge graph (KG) was previously impossible due to the strict requirement that high-level reasoning, general world knowledge, and full-text context *must* be present for proper KG construction. The latest tools now enable such general world knowledge and reasoning to be applied cost effectively to high-volumes of news articles. Beyond the low cost of processing these news articles, these tools are also opening up a new, controversial, approach to KG building - unconstrained KGs. We discuss the construction and exploration of the largest news-knowledge-graph on the planet - hosted on an endpoint at AskNews.app. During talk we aim to highlight some of the sacrifices and benefits that go hand-in-hand with using the infamous unconstrained KG approach. We conclude the talk by explaining how knowledge graphs like these help to mitigate misinformation. We provide some examples of how our clients are using this graph, such as generating sports forecasts, generating better social media posts, generating regional security alerts, and combating human trafficking. // Bio Robert is the founder of Emergent Methods, where he directs research and software development for large-scale applications. He is currently overseeing the structuring of hundreds of thousands of news articles per day in order to build the best news retrieval API in the world: https://asknews.app. // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: https://emergentmethods.ai News Retrieval API: https://asknews.app --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Rob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rcaulk/ Timestamps: [00:00] Rob's preferred coffee [00:05] Takeaways [00:55] Please like, share, leave a review, and subscribe to our MLOps channels! [01:00] Join our Local Organizer Carousel! [02:15] Knowledge Graphs and ontology [07:43] Ontology vs Noun Approach [12:46] Ephemeral tools for efficiency [17:26] Oracle to PostgreSQL migration [22:20] MEM Graph life cycle [29:14] Knowledge Graph Investigation Insights [33:37] Fine-tuning and distillation of LLMs [39:28] DAG workflow and quality control [46:23] Crawling nodes with Phi 3 Llama [50:05] AI pricing risks and strategies [56:14] Data labeling and poisoning [58:34] API costs vs News latency [1:02:10] Product focus and value [1:04:52] Ensuring reliable information [1:11:01] Podcast transcripts as News [1:13:08] Ontology trade-offs explained [1:15:00] Wrap up

Meditation, guided or not, and green noise is something I use just about daily to help me with all the stimuli that comes with daily life. Sit with yourself a bit and hear what there is to be heard. This one was for me. Hope you enjoy, too. 

La soul est américaine, comme Wolfgang Valbrun et Michelle David. Démonstration dans cette double #SessionLive ! (Rediffusion) Notre 1er invité est Wolfgang Valbrun. Il est invité dans la #SessionLive pour la sortie de l'album Flawed By Design. Wolfgang Valbrun est un auteur-compositeur-interprète né et élevé dans l'État de New York, dont la carrière musicale s'est épanouie en Europe, notamment à Paris où il s'est installé à l'adolescence.Sa mère lui a donné une éducation musicale précoce qui couvre un large spectre, de Bob Marley à Bobby McFerrin, de Billy Joel à Elton John et de Charles Aznavour à Grace Jones, le tout infusé d'une touche de Kompa, la saveur musicale haïtienne qui a influencé de nombreuses scènes musicales caribéennes.Les premières années de Wolf ont été marquées par des périodes tumultueuses, car il déménageait régulièrement entre différents pays en raison de la séparation de ses parents. C'est lorsqu'il s'est installé à Paris que sa vie a pris un tournant décisif. La transition vers une nouvelle culture et un nouvel environnement a exigé une transformation complète, laissant derrière lui les repères familiers qu'il avait connus auparavant.Guidé par des cousins plus âgés, il s'éloigne du rock américain qui définissait ses goûts et s'immerge dans le monde de la soul, du jazz, du hip-hop et de la musique brésilienne. Des artistes comme Erykah Badu, The Roots, Seu Jorge et Gilberto Gil ont marqué son parcours musical. Les horizons de Wolfgang se sont élargis pour embrasser une riche diversité de genres, laissant une empreinte indélébile sur sa jeune âme d'artiste.À la fin de ses études secondaires, Wolfgang cherche à changer d'air. Il passe une année au Venezuela où la salsa, le merengue, la cumbia et le calypso charment et forment ses sens musicaux. De retour au pays, il auditionne pour rejoindre le groupe de funk parisien « Marvellous », où il rencontre Thierry Lemaitre, avec qui il écrit et joue depuis lors.Wolfgang a ensuite rencontré ses futurs collègues James Graham et Adam Holgate en jouant avec Marvellous aux côtés du groupe britannique de soul The Tastemakers.Par un coup du sort, Hillman Mondegreen, leader du groupe The Tastemakers, a proposé à Wolfgang de rejoindre son nouveau projet ephemerals en tant que chanteur et Wolf a saisi sa chance de montrer son talent à un public international.Le premier album des Ephemerals, Nothin Is Easy, est un classique de la soul avec une touche de modernité, les chansons de Mondegreen étant un véhicule parfait pour la voix distinctive de Wolf, qui apporte un élément-clé d'émotion et de puissance à la musique du groupe.Titres interprétés au grand studio :- Where Is The Peace Live RFI- Paris, extrait du CD- Sun Don't Shine Live RFI.Line Up : Wolfgang Valbrun (Lead Vocal), Adam Holgate (Guitar), Thierry Lemaitre (Sax), James Graham (Keys), Charlie Fitzgerald (Bass), Rhi Williams (Drums) et Damian McLean- Brown (Trumpet).Son : Benoît Letirant, Jérémie Besset.► Album Flawed By Design (Jalapeno Rd 2024).YouTube - Web - Facebook - instagram  Puis la #SessionLive reçoit Michelle David & The True-Tones pour la sortie de l'album Brothers & Sisters.Élevée à New York dans une église, Michelle David a commencé à chanter à l'âge de quatre ans et a rejoint son premier groupe, The Mission of Love, un an plus tard. Au cours de sa carrière, elle a parcouru le monde avec la comédie musicale de Broadway Mama, contribué à des pièces de théâtre à succès tels que The Sound of Motown, Glory of Gospel et Mahalia, et enregistré pour des artistes tels que Diana Ross et Michael Bolton. Tout cela s'est produit avant la sortie de six albums de gospel acclamés par la critique avec les True-Tones. Avec leurs grooves entraînants, leurs voix puissantes et leurs mélodies fortes, Michelle David & The True-Tones ont déjà conquis de nombreux festivals et de nombreux clubs.Avec le nouvel album du groupe, Brothers & Sisters, première sortie sous Record Kicks, Michelle David & the True-Tones crée un voyage sonore qui résonne avec l'esprit soul de leurs concerts. Le nouvel album a été enregistré en direct - avec le groupe au complet, simultanément dans une seule pièce, ce qui donne un son énergique, authentique et captivant. Michelle David & the True-Tones utilisent leur plateforme artistique pour inspirer un changement positif, encourageant les auditeurs à les rejoindre dans un voyage de réflexion, de compassion et de responsabilité collective. Dans un monde plein de défis, Brothers & Sisters émerge comme un phare musical, éclairant le chemin vers un avenir où l'héritage de l'amour et de la lumière perdure.Titres interprétés au grand studio :- Brothers and Sisters Live RFI voir le clip - Cold Cold World, extrait du Cd voir le clip - That is You Live RFI.Line up : Michelle David (Chant), Onno Smit (Guitare basse), Paul Willemsen (Guitare basse), Bas Bouma (Batterie), Bart van der List (Trompette), Paul van de Calseijde (Sax tenor), Claus Tofft (Congas) +Claire Simon (Traductrice).Son : Benoît Letirant, Mathias Taylor.► Album Brothers & Sisters (Record Kicks 2024).Web - facebook - Instagram.

La soul est américaine, comme Wolfgang Valbrun et Michelle David. Démonstration dans cette double #SessionLive ! (Rediffusion) Notre 1er invité est Wolfgang Valbrun. Il est invité dans la #SessionLive pour la sortie de l'album Flawed By Design. Wolfgang Valbrun est un auteur-compositeur-interprète né et élevé dans l'État de New York, dont la carrière musicale s'est épanouie en Europe, notamment à Paris où il s'est installé à l'adolescence.Sa mère lui a donné une éducation musicale précoce qui couvre un large spectre, de Bob Marley à Bobby McFerrin, de Billy Joel à Elton John et de Charles Aznavour à Grace Jones, le tout infusé d'une touche de Kompa, la saveur musicale haïtienne qui a influencé de nombreuses scènes musicales caribéennes.Les premières années de Wolf ont été marquées par des périodes tumultueuses, car il déménageait régulièrement entre différents pays en raison de la séparation de ses parents. C'est lorsqu'il s'est installé à Paris que sa vie a pris un tournant décisif. La transition vers une nouvelle culture et un nouvel environnement a exigé une transformation complète, laissant derrière lui les repères familiers qu'il avait connus auparavant.Guidé par des cousins plus âgés, il s'éloigne du rock américain qui définissait ses goûts et s'immerge dans le monde de la soul, du jazz, du hip-hop et de la musique brésilienne. Des artistes comme Erykah Badu, The Roots, Seu Jorge et Gilberto Gil ont marqué son parcours musical. Les horizons de Wolfgang se sont élargis pour embrasser une riche diversité de genres, laissant une empreinte indélébile sur sa jeune âme d'artiste.À la fin de ses études secondaires, Wolfgang cherche à changer d'air. Il passe une année au Venezuela où la salsa, le merengue, la cumbia et le calypso charment et forment ses sens musicaux. De retour au pays, il auditionne pour rejoindre le groupe de funk parisien « Marvellous », où il rencontre Thierry Lemaitre, avec qui il écrit et joue depuis lors.Wolfgang a ensuite rencontré ses futurs collègues James Graham et Adam Holgate en jouant avec Marvellous aux côtés du groupe britannique de soul The Tastemakers.Par un coup du sort, Hillman Mondegreen, leader du groupe The Tastemakers, a proposé à Wolfgang de rejoindre son nouveau projet ephemerals en tant que chanteur et Wolf a saisi sa chance de montrer son talent à un public international.Le premier album des Ephemerals, Nothin Is Easy, est un classique de la soul avec une touche de modernité, les chansons de Mondegreen étant un véhicule parfait pour la voix distinctive de Wolf, qui apporte un élément-clé d'émotion et de puissance à la musique du groupe.Titres interprétés au grand studio :- Where Is The Peace Live RFI- Paris, extrait du CD- Sun Don't Shine Live RFI.Line Up : Wolfgang Valbrun (Lead Vocal), Adam Holgate (Guitar), Thierry Lemaitre (Sax), James Graham (Keys), Charlie Fitzgerald (Bass), Rhi Williams (Drums) et Damian McLean- Brown (Trumpet).Son : Benoît Letirant, Jérémie Besset.► Album Flawed By Design (Jalapeno Rd 2024).YouTube - Web - Facebook - instagram  Puis la #SessionLive reçoit Michelle David & The True-Tones pour la sortie de l'album Brothers & Sisters.Élevée à New York dans une église, Michelle David a commencé à chanter à l'âge de quatre ans et a rejoint son premier groupe, The Mission of Love, un an plus tard. Au cours de sa carrière, elle a parcouru le monde avec la comédie musicale de Broadway Mama, contribué à des pièces de théâtre à succès tels que The Sound of Motown, Glory of Gospel et Mahalia, et enregistré pour des artistes tels que Diana Ross et Michael Bolton. Tout cela s'est produit avant la sortie de six albums de gospel acclamés par la critique avec les True-Tones. Avec leurs grooves entraînants, leurs voix puissantes et leurs mélodies fortes, Michelle David & The True-Tones ont déjà conquis de nombreux festivals et de nombreux clubs.Avec le nouvel album du groupe, Brothers & Sisters, première sortie sous Record Kicks, Michelle David & the True-Tones crée un voyage sonore qui résonne avec l'esprit soul de leurs concerts. Le nouvel album a été enregistré en direct - avec le groupe au complet, simultanément dans une seule pièce, ce qui donne un son énergique, authentique et captivant. Michelle David & the True-Tones utilisent leur plateforme artistique pour inspirer un changement positif, encourageant les auditeurs à les rejoindre dans un voyage de réflexion, de compassion et de responsabilité collective. Dans un monde plein de défis, Brothers & Sisters émerge comme un phare musical, éclairant le chemin vers un avenir où l'héritage de l'amour et de la lumière perdure.Titres interprétés au grand studio :- Brothers and Sisters Live RFI voir le clip - Cold Cold World, extrait du Cd voir le clip - That is You Live RFI.Line up : Michelle David (Chant), Onno Smit (Guitare basse), Paul Willemsen (Guitare basse), Bas Bouma (Batterie), Bart van der List (Trompette), Paul van de Calseijde (Sax tenor), Claus Tofft (Congas) +Claire Simon (Traductrice).Son : Benoît Letirant, Mathias Taylor.► Album Brothers & Sisters (Record Kicks 2024).Web - facebook - Instagram.

The Black Dahlia Murder | Mindreaper | The Convalescence | Rivers of Nihil | Heteromorphic Zoo | Dååth | Insurrection | Avtotheism | Zealed | Shadohm | Entheos | NightWraith | Dying Awkward Angel | Exuvial Music On This Mixtape: The Black Dahlia Murder: "Aftermath" taken from the album "Servitude" Mindreaper: "The God I Am" taken from the album "Withering Shine (...Into Oblivion)" The Convalescence: "No Survivors" taken from the album "Harvesters Of Flesh And Bone" Rivers of Nihil: "Post-Mortem Prostitution" taken from the album "Hierarchy" Heteromorphic Zoo: "Napalm" taken from the EP "New World" Dååth: "Deserving Of The Grave" taken from the album "The Deceivers" Insurrection: "Nemesis" taken from the album "Obsolescence" Avtotheism: "Incarnations of Hush" taken from the album "Reflections of Execrable Stillness" Zealed: "Divination" taken from the single "Divination" Shadohm: "Ripped Apart" taken from the album "Through Darkness Towards Enlightenment" Entheos: "Life in Slow Motion" taken from the album "An End to Everything" NightWraith: "Whispers of Dragonflies" taken from the album "Divergence" Dying Awkward Angel: "The Magical World of The Dead" taken from the single "The Magical World of The Dead" Exuvial: "Necrotic Dissolution" taken from the album "The Hive Mind Chronicles Part I: Parasitica" Thanks for listening! I hope you enjoyed listening to this as much as I enjoyed making it! Interviews, reviews, and more at www.dreamsofconsciousness.com

On this episode of This Week in Moab we mark National Native Heritage Month in discussions with local Indigenous organizers Sandra Billie from Seekhaven and Ricky Begay from Grand County Schools' Native American Club in advance of their 11/16/24 event (https://www.seekhaven.org/nativeamericanheritagemonth.html. We learn about a collaboration between the Storied Self and Ephemeral on the next story slam theme ‘Vessels' on November 19th (https://www.instagram.com/p/DCUdrHMR9WZ/). And Deborah Lin and Ariel Atkins discuss a new statewide initiative to support women and girls in Utah called A Bolder Way Forward in advance of Lin's visits to Emery, Grand and San Juan Counties to meet with the community. (https://www.usu.edu/uwlp/a-bolder-way-forward/overview)

Une femme équatorienne est décédée quelques jours après que les personnes en deuil à ses funérailles aient été choquées de la trouver vivante dans son cercueil.Traduction :In Ecuadorean woman has died days after mourners at her funeral were shocked to find her alive in her coffin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Une femme équatorienne est décédée quelques jours après que les personnes en deuil à ses funérailles aient été choquées de la trouver vivante dans son cercueil.Traduction :In Ecuadorean woman has died days after mourners at her funeral were shocked to find her alive in her coffin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert Mertens' fiber sculptures push the boundaries of traditional craft, blending scale, decay, and resilience into hauntingly beautiful works. His upcoming solo show, Ephemeral Threads, showcases large-scale woolen sculptures that explore themes of mortality and impermanence, where materials like steel wool rust and evolve over time. Inspired by his personal battle with cancer, Mertens' art transforms fear into beauty, inviting viewers to confront the fragility of life. Don't miss this compelling exhibition on Artsy.net, running from September 15th, 2024, to January 15th, 2025, exclusively on Artsy.net. We are excited to offer artists a unique opportunity to present an Online Exclusive Solo Show on the Artsy collectors platform! This is your chance to showcase your work to a global audience, connect with collectors, and gain the visibility your art deserves. Whether you're an emerging or established artist, this is a chance to take your career to the next level and be seen by thousands of art lovers and collectors worldwide. What you get: Solo show on the Artsy collectors' platform Global exposure to collectors and art enthusiasts Professional support in curation, writing, and promotion Opportunity to connect with a diverse art community How to apply: Submit up to 10 pieces of artwork Provide a short artist bio and statement Share your portfolio or website link Our goal is to amplify diverse voices in the art world, and we want to hear from you! Don't miss out on this opportunity to elevate your practice and join a network of artists making an impact. Applications are open for a limited time, so act fast! For more information and to apply, visit TheBureauOfQueerArt.com #callforart #callforartist #callforartists #callforarts #callforartists #callforartwork #callforartistsubmission We can't wait to see what you've been creating!

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art

Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Dr. Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and establish a solid foundation for the classic in the history of taste. To her surprise, that history instead revealed repeated episodes of soaring and falling reputations, rediscoveries of long-forgotten artists, and radical shifts in the canon, all of which went so completely against common knowledge that it was hard to believe it was true. Where does the idea of the timeless classic come from? And how has it become so fiercely contested? By recovering disputes about works of art from the eighteenth century to the close of the twentieth, in Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art (Yale University Press, 2024) Dr. Gurstein takes us into unfamiliar aesthetic and moral terrain, providing a richly imagined historical alternative to accounts offered by both cultural theorists advancing attacks on the politics of taste and those who continue to cling to the ideal of universal values embodied in the classic. As Gurstein brings to life the competing responses of generations of artists, art lovers, and critics to specific works of art, she makes us see the same object vividly and directly through their eyes and feel, in all its enlarging intensity, what they felt. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Katy Kidd's latest creation—a mesmerizing - printed wedding dress—takes center stage in Efímero | Vida, Muerte, & Arte, weaving together themes of love, loss, and transformation. Inspired by Día de Muertos and her experiences with love, the Denver-based artist explores the fleeting nature of relationships in stunning detail. This one-of-a-kind piece, adorned with marigolds, wedding cakes, and whimsical Disney birds, captures Kidd's playful yet poignant reflections on the ever-evolving nature of love. Don't miss this captivating work in Mexico City or online at Artsy.net. Apply now for our Art Week CDMX and Foto(grafía) 2025 INCUBATOR groups and participate in our international exhibitions during the most active international art market in Mexico. We accept applications directly on our website at a reduced cost for the Incubator online residency. THEBUREAUOFQUEERART.COM #QueerArt⁠ #QueerArtists #ArtCommunity #LGBTQArt #QueerCreatives #TheBureauOfQueerArt #ArtistResidency #SupportArtists #SupportQueerArtists #AlliedArtists #supportlgbtqart

Back again after what feels like a confusingly short amount of time. Seleucus III has no son to succeed him, making him the first king since his great-great-grandfather without a direct heir. So, let's put Seleucus III behind us... This episode draws upon material from previous episodes.

Gm! In this episode, we're joined by Andrea Fortunio, Co-founder of MagicBlock! We discussed the current state of the Solana gaming industry, AAA vs Mobile gaming, and the benefits of Ephemeral Rollups. Additionally, we dove into the security implications of utilizing optimistic rollups in onchain gaming. We ended the episode with coverage of MagicBlock's current timelines, and their experience in the A16z accelerator. Enjoy! Resources MagicBlock Engine footage: https://x.com/magicblock/status/1802717656102978040 – Follow MagicBlock: https://x.com/magicblock Follow Andrea: https://x.com/supermarioblock Follow Jack: https://x.com/whosknave Follow Lightspeed: https://twitter.com/Lightspeedpodhq Subscribe to the Lightspeed Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/lightspeed Utilize the Solana Dashboard by Blockworks Research: http://solana.blockworksresearch.com/ -- DragonSwap is the DeFi Hub on Sei's Layer 1, allowing users to swap, provide liquidity, and farm! Built on Sei's sub-second execution environment, DragonSwap is transforming the DEX landscape by building an “onchain CEX” that leverages chain-abstracted AVSs, enabling users to buy any asset on any chain.  With tons of incentives already available, September will bring even more to Sei users with partners like Stargate and Frax! Start farming on Sei today by visiting https://dragonswap.app/ -- Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/43o3Syk Subscribe on Apple: https://apple.co/3OhiXgV Subscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3OkF7PD Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ -- (00:00) Introduction (05:07) Why Run Games Fully Onchain? (11:42) The Solana Gaming Industry (15:47) AAA Games vs Mobile Gaming (18:05) Sei Ad (18:31) The Benefits of Ephemeral Rollups (36:41) Security Implications of Optimistic Rollups for Onchain Gaming (40:10) Why Not Build A L2? (46:16) MagicBlock Timelines (50:55) A16z Accelerator & Crypto Gaming Sentiment -- Disclaimers: Lightspeed was kickstarted by a grant from the Solana Foundation. Nothing said on Lightspeed is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Mert, Jack, and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Blog: www.taminglightning.net Instagram @taminglightning Support on Patreon.com/taminglightning Guest: www.studioswine.com Instagram: @studioswine Hello lightning Tamers this is episode number 61. And in today's podcast, I'll be joined by Alexander Groves one half of the duo known as Studio Swine. Alex and their partner Azuza Murakami had decided to make this arrangement to manage tending to the lovely family they are raising. Just incase anyone is wondering! Who are Studio Swine?  The SWINE in Studio Swine, an acronym for "Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers," is a pioneering collective founded in 2011 by Azusa Murakami (JP) and Alexander Groves (UK). Their collaborative journey traverses the realms of art, design, and technology, forging new frontiers in the exploration of light, materials, and human experience. In this episode, we'll dive into the mesmerizing world of neon and plasma artworks, exploring Studio Swine's fascination with light and materials. From their thought-provoking installations like "Wave. Particle. Duplex." to their upcoming neon installation in South Korea, Alexander will share their insights, inspirations, and the challenges of working at the intersection of art and technology. Join us as we unravel the creative journey of Studio Swine, where innovation meets imagination and the possibilities are limitless. Welcome to the podcast Alexander!   Time Stamps [0:53] Meet Studio Swine [2:58] The Art of Curiosity [7:16] Exploring Materiality and Audience [7:48] The Journey of Studio Swine [10:19] Ephemeral Tech Explained [26:33] Collaborating with Experts [27:53] The Community of Neon Artists [29:18] The Allure of Plasma [31:59] The Power of Experience [40:17] Under a Flowing Field [49:36] Balancing Safety and Creativity [59:28] The Art of Learning [1:05:48] Taming the Invisible World

Mario Rodriguez is GitHub's Chief Product Officer. And he believes that CoPilot and other AI advances will unleash a wave of creativity and enable a billion people to be software developers.Mario says the definition of “software developer” will have to change as non-professionals discover that they can make apps, too. And the way they do so will look very different: “It's gonna feel a lot more like how kids play. ​​It's like you create something you play with and you're like, Nope. Then you instruct it again… It's going to be real time development.”On this episode of CRAFTED., Mario gets us excited about the future of software development!Takeaways:Mario says we've lost some of the creativity of the early days of the web; AI is helping bring it backWith AI, it's getting much easier (for non-professional developers) to build “micro experiences” and other ephemeral apps that just serve one purpose. The craft of product management must change with AI, because building with non-deterministic AI is so tricky to get rightWhen building with AI, run your scenario multiple times. Test your prompts repeatedly. You will get different responses each time. Are they all helpful to your user? Invest in offline evaluation when building with AI or else you'll have lots of problems later. Psychology is key. How will users react if AI tells them something subjective? Mario has seen CoPilot users get upset, e.g. “Nope, you're completely wrong. I know what I'm doing. You are a machine. I am not gonna ask you to ever review my code.” Don't optimize for just one metric. Mario says you should have three or so that you evaluate in concert. Product sense matters! Prompt engineering is real. How you can better prompt your CoPilotKeeping developers in flow is critical. How much time do developers spend on “sense-making” vs. coding? How much time do they spend waiting for reviews? These are some of the questions GitHub asks when evaluating developer productivity. Mario came to the US from Cuba when he was in high school. His father is an electrical engineer and his mother is a teacher. Both influence him greatly.Mario founded a charter school in rural North Carolina because “everyone should have access to amazing education.”System thinking and evaluating things from first principles are key skills for the future. CRAFTED. is brought to you in partnership with Docker, which helps developers build, share, run and verify applications anywhere – without environment confirmation or management. More than 20 million developers worldwide use Docker's suite of development tools, services and automations to accelerate the delivery of secure applications. CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where CRAFTED. host Dan Blumberg and team can help you take a new product from zero to one... and beyond. We specialize in early stage product discovery, growth, and experimentation. Subscribe to CRAFTED., follow the show, and sign up for the newsletter

I'm joined by Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, as we deep dive on innovative startup ideas, our frameworks to building products people love, and our thoughts on the current software landscape. 1)  The "Scratch-off Ad" app idea:• Full-screen ad you scratch off with your finger• Blow into mic to clear "dust"• Chance to win prizes/coupons• Global, once-a-day experiencePotential: Massive user base, high engagement 2) "Shower Door Sketch" app concept:• Simulates drawing on steamy shower glass• Ephemeral canvas that fogs up & clears• Add shower sounds for immersion• Screenshot to save ideasPerfect for creative brainstorming!3) Key insight: Bring real-world experiences to digital• Leverage mystery, surprise, uncertainty• Create moments that can't be replicated• Tap into universal human experiences"There's some sort of deeper universal things to tap into here." - Jason4)  The power of limitations in software:• Time-based experiences (HQ Trivia)• Visit-once websites• Apps with "open hours"Creates scarcity & increases perceived value 5) Hobbyist ethos missing in modern software:• Early internet had more quirky, fun projects• Less focus on monetization, more on exploration• Need for "weirder" apps and experiencesChallenge: How can we make the internet weird again? 6)  Cozy software movement:• Make apps feel warm, comfortable• Contrast to clinical, cold modern design• Focus on user experience & delightGoal: Create software people genuinely enjoy using Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 

Today's guest, Nicholas Carlini, a research scientist at DeepMind, argues that we should be focusing more on what AI can do for us individually, rather than trying to have an answer for everyone."How I Use AI" - A Pragmatic ApproachCarlini's blog post "How I Use AI" went viral for good reason. Instead of giving a personal opinion about AI's potential, he simply laid out how he, as a security researcher, uses AI tools in his daily work. He divided it in 12 sections:* To make applications* As a tutor* To get started* To simplify code* For boring tasks* To automate tasks* As an API reference* As a search engine* To solve one-offs* To teach me* Solving solved problems* To fix errorsEach of the sections has specific examples, so we recommend going through it. It also includes all prompts used for it; in the "make applications" case, it's 30,000 words total!My personal takeaway is that the majority of the work AI can do successfully is what humans dislike doing. Writing boilerplate code, looking up docs, taking repetitive actions, etc. These are usually boring tasks with little creativity, but with a lot of structure. This is the strongest arguments as to why LLMs, especially for code, are more beneficial to senior employees: if you can get the boring stuff out of the way, there's a lot more value you can generate. This is less and less true as you go entry level jobs which are mostly boring and repetitive tasks. Nicholas argues both sides ~21:34 in the pod.A New Approach to LLM BenchmarksWe recently did a Benchmarks 201 episode, a follow up to our original Benchmarks 101, and some of the issues have stayed the same. Notably, there's a big discrepancy between what benchmarks like MMLU test, and what the models are used for. Carlini created his own domain-specific language for writing personalized LLM benchmarks. The idea is simple but powerful:* Take tasks you've actually needed AI for in the past.* Turn them into benchmark tests.* Use these to evaluate new models based on your specific needs.It can represent very complex tasks, from a single code generation to drawing a US flag using C:"Write hello world in python" >> LLMRun() >> PythonRun() >> SubstringEvaluator("hello world")"Write a C program that draws an american flag to stdout." >> LLMRun() >> CRun() >> VisionLLMRun("What flag is shown in this image?") >> (SubstringEvaluator("United States") | SubstringEvaluator("USA")))This approach solves a few problems:* It measures what's actually useful to you, not abstract capabilities.* It's harder for model creators to "game" your specific benchmark, a problem that has plagued standardized tests.* It gives you a concrete way to decide if a new model is worth switching to, similar to how developers might run benchmarks before adopting a new library or framework.Carlini argues that if even a small percentage of AI users created personal benchmarks, we'd have a much better picture of model capabilities in practice.AI SecurityWhile much of the AI security discussion focuses on either jailbreaks or existential risks, Carlini's research targets the space in between. Some highlights from his recent work:* LAION 400M data poisoning: By buying expired domains referenced in the dataset, Carlini's team could inject arbitrary images into models trained on LAION 400M. You can read the paper "Poisoning Web-Scale Training Datasets is Practical", for all the details. This is a great example of expanding the scope beyond the model itself, and looking at the whole system and how ti can become vulnerable.* Stealing model weights: They demonstrated how to extract parts of production language models (like OpenAI's) through careful API queries. This research, "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models", shows that even black-box access can leak sensitive information.* Extracting training data: In some cases, they found ways to make models regurgitate verbatim snippets from their training data. Him and Milad Nasr wrote a paper on this as well: Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models. They also think this might be applicable to extracting RAG results from a generation.These aren't just theoretical attacks. They've led to real changes in how companies like OpenAI design their APIs and handle data. If you really miss logit_bias and logit results by token, you can blame Nicholas :)We had a ton of fun also chatting about things like Conway's Game of Life, how much data can fit in a piece of paper, and porting Doom to Javascript. Enjoy!Show Notes* How I Use AI* My Benchmark for LLMs* Doom Javascript port* Conway's Game of Life* Tic-Tac-Toe in one printf statement* International Obfuscated C Code Contest* Cursor* LAION 400M poisoning paper* Man vs Machine at Black Hat* Model Stealing from OpenAI* Milad Nasr* H.D. Moore* Vijay Bolina* Cosine.sh* uuencodeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:01:14] Why Nicholas writes* [00:02:09] The Game of Life* [00:05:07] "How I Use AI" blog post origin story* [00:08:24] Do we need software engineering agents?* [00:11:03] Using AI to kickstart a project* [00:14:08] Ephemeral software* [00:17:37] Using AI to accelerate research* [00:21:34] Experts vs non-expert users as beneficiaries of AI* [00:24:02] Research on generating less secure code with LLMs.* [00:27:22] Learning and explaining code with AI* [00:30:12] AGI speculations?* [00:32:50] Distributing content without social media* [00:35:39] How much data do you think you can put on a single piece of paper?* [00:37:37] Building personal AI benchmarks* [00:43:04] Evolution of prompt engineering and its relevance* [00:46:06] Model vs task benchmarking* [00:52:14] Poisoning LAION 400M through expired domains* [00:55:38] Stealing OpenAI models from their API* [01:01:29] Data stealing and recovering training data from models* [01:03:30] Finding motivation in your workTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO-in-Residence at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're in the in-person studio, which Alessio has gorgeously set up for us, with Nicholas Carlini. Welcome. Thank you. You're a research scientist at DeepMind. You work at the intersection of machine learning and computer security. You got your PhD from Berkeley in 2018, and also your BA from Berkeley as well. And mostly we're here to talk about your blogs, because you are so generous in just writing up what you know. Well, actually, why do you write?Nicholas [00:00:41]: Because I like, I feel like it's fun to share what you've done. I don't like writing, sufficiently didn't like writing, I almost didn't do a PhD, because I knew how much writing was involved in writing papers. I was terrible at writing when I was younger. I do like the remedial writing classes when I was in university, because I was really bad at it. So I don't actually enjoy, I still don't enjoy the act of writing. But I feel like it is useful to share what you're doing, and I like being able to talk about the things that I'm doing that I think are fun. And so I write because I think I want to have something to say, not because I enjoy the act of writing.Swyx [00:01:14]: But yeah. It's a tool for thought, as they often say. Is there any sort of backgrounds or thing that people should know about you as a person? Yeah.Nicholas [00:01:23]: So I tend to focus on, like you said, I do security work, I try to like attacking things and I want to do like high quality security research. And that's mostly what I spend my actual time trying to be productive members of society doing that. But then I get distracted by things, and I just like, you know, working on random fun projects. Like a Doom clone in JavaScript.Swyx [00:01:44]: Yes.Nicholas [00:01:45]: Like that. Or, you know, I've done a number of things that have absolutely no utility. But are fun things to have done. And so it's interesting to say, like, you should work on fun things that just are interesting, even if they're not useful in any real way. And so that's what I tend to put up there is after I have completed something I think is fun, or if I think it's sufficiently interesting, write something down there.Alessio [00:02:09]: Before we go into like AI, LLMs and whatnot, why are you obsessed with the game of life? So you built multiplexing circuits in the game of life, which is mind boggling. So where did that come from? And then how do you go from just clicking boxes on the UI web version to like building multiplexing circuits?Nicholas [00:02:29]: I like Turing completeness. The definition of Turing completeness is a computer that can run anything, essentially. And the game of life, Conway's game of life is a very simple cellular 2D automata where you have cells that are either on or off. And a cell becomes on if in the previous generation some configuration holds true and off otherwise. It turns out there's a proof that the game of life is Turing complete, that you can run any program in principle using Conway's game of life. I don't know. And so you can, therefore someone should. And so I wanted to do it. Some other people have done some similar things, but I got obsessed into like, if you're going to try and make it work, like we already know it's possible in theory. I want to try and like actually make something I can run on my computer, like a real computer I can run. And so yeah, I've been going on this rabbit hole of trying to make a CPU that I can run semi real time on the game of life. And I have been making some reasonable progress there. And yeah, but you know, Turing completeness is just like a very fun trap you can go down. A while ago, as part of a research paper, I was able to show that in C, if you call into printf, it's Turing complete. Like printf, you know, like, which like, you know, you can print numbers or whatever, right?Swyx [00:03:39]: Yeah, but there should be no like control flow stuff.Nicholas [00:03:42]: Because printf has a percent n specifier that lets you write an arbitrary amount of data to an arbitrary location. And the printf format specifier has an index into where it is in the loop that is in memory. So you can overwrite the location of where printf is currently indexing using percent n. So you can get loops, you can get conditionals, and you can get arbitrary data rates again. So we sort of have another Turing complete language using printf, which again, like this has essentially zero practical utility, but like, it's just, I feel like a lot of people get into programming because they enjoy the art of doing these things. And then they go work on developing some software application and lose all joy with the boys. And I want to still have joy in doing these things. And so on occasion, I try to stop doing productive, meaningful things and just like, what's a fun thing that we can do and try and make that happen.Alessio [00:04:39]: Awesome. So you've been kind of like a pioneer in the AI security space. You've done a lot of talks starting back in 2018. We'll kind of leave that to the end because I know the security part is, there's maybe a smaller audience, but it's a very intense audience. So I think that'll be fun. But everybody in our Discord started posting your how I use AI blog post and we were like, we should get Carlini on the podcast. And then you were so nice to just, yeah, and then I sent you an email and you're like, okay, I'll come.Swyx [00:05:07]: And I was like, oh, I thought that would be harder.Alessio [00:05:10]: I think there's, as you said in the blog posts, a lot of misunderstanding about what LLMs can actually be used for. What are they useful at? What are they not good at? And whether or not it's even worth arguing what they're not good at, because they're obviously not. So if you cannot count the R's in a word, they're like, it's just not what it does. So how painful was it to write such a long post, given that you just said that you don't like to write? Yeah. And then we can kind of run through the things, but maybe just talk about the motivation, why you thought it was important to do it.Nicholas [00:05:39]: Yeah. So I wanted to do this because I feel like most people who write about language models being good or bad, some underlying message of like, you know, they have their camp and their camp is like, AI is bad or AI is good or whatever. And they like, they spin whatever they're going to say according to their ideology. And they don't actually just look at what is true in the world. So I've read a lot of things where people say how amazing they are and how all programmers are going to be obsolete by 2024. And I've read a lot of things where people who say like, they can't do anything useful at all. And, you know, like, they're just like, it's only the people who've come off of, you know, blockchain crypto stuff and are here to like make another quick buck and move on. And I don't really agree with either of these. And I'm not someone who cares really one way or the other how these things go. And so I wanted to write something that just says like, look, like, let's sort of ground reality and what we can actually do with these things. Because my actual research is in like security and showing that these models have lots of problems. Like this is like my day to day job is saying like, we probably shouldn't be using these in lots of cases. I thought I could have a little bit of credibility of in saying, it is true. They have lots of problems. We maybe shouldn't be deploying them lots of situations. And still, they are also useful. And that is the like, the bit that I wanted to get across is to say, I'm not here to try and sell you on anything. I just think that they're useful for the kinds of work that I do. And hopefully, some people would listen. And it turned out that a lot more people liked it than I thought. But yeah, that was the motivation behind why I wanted to write this.Alessio [00:07:15]: So you had about a dozen sections of like how you actually use AI. Maybe we can just kind of run through them all. And then maybe the ones where you have extra commentary to add, we can... Sure.Nicholas [00:07:27]: Yeah, yeah. I didn't put as much thought into this as maybe was deserved. I probably spent, I don't know, definitely less than 10 hours putting this together.Swyx [00:07:38]: Wow.Alessio [00:07:39]: It took me close to that to do a podcast episode. So that's pretty impressive.Nicholas [00:07:43]: Yeah. I wrote it in one pass. I've gotten a number of emails of like, you got this editing thing wrong, you got this sort of other thing wrong. It's like, I haven't just haven't looked at it. I tend to try it. I feel like I still don't like writing. And so because of this, the way I tend to treat this is like, I will put it together into the best format that I can at a time, and then put it on the internet, and then never change it. And this is an aspect of like the research side of me is like, once a paper is published, like it is done as an artifact that exists in the world. I could forever edit the very first thing I ever put to make it the most perfect version of what it is, and I would do nothing else. And so I feel like I find it useful to be like, this is the artifact, I will spend some certain amount of hours on it, which is what I think it is worth. And then I will just...Swyx [00:08:22]: Yeah.Nicholas [00:08:23]: Timeboxing.Alessio [00:08:24]: Yeah. Stop. Yeah. Okay. We just recorded an episode with the founder of Cosine, which is like an AI software engineer colleague. You said it took you 30,000 words to get GPT-4 to build you the, can GPT-4 solve this kind of like app. Where are we in the spectrum where chat GPT is all you need to actually build something versus I need a full on agent that does everything for me?Nicholas [00:08:46]: Yeah. Okay. So this was an... So I built a web app last year sometime that was just like a fun demo where you can guess if you can predict whether or not GPT-4 at the time could solve a given task. This is, as far as web apps go, very straightforward. You need basic HTML, CSS, you have a little slider that moves, you have a button, sort of animate the text coming to the screen. The reason people are going here is not because they want to see my wonderful HTML, right? I used to know how to do modern HTML in 2007, 2008. I was very good at fighting with IE6 and these kinds of things. I knew how to do that. I have no longer had to build any web app stuff in the meantime, which means that I know how everything works, but I don't know any of the new... Flexbox is new to me. Flexbox is like 10 years old at this point, but it's just amazing being able to go to the model and just say, write me this thing and it will give me all of the boilerplate that I need to get going. Of course it's imperfect. It's not going to get you the right answer, and it doesn't do anything that's complicated right now, but it gets you to the point where the only remaining work that needs to be done is the interesting hard part for me, the actual novel part. Even the current models, I think, are entirely good enough at doing this kind of thing, that they're very useful. It may be the case that if you had something, like you were saying, a smarter agent that could debug problems by itself, that might be even more useful. Currently though, make a model into an agent by just copying and pasting error messages for the most part. That's what I do, is you run it and it gives you some code that doesn't work, and either I'll fix the code, or it will give me buggy code and I won't know how to fix it, and I'll just copy and paste the error message and say, it tells me this. What do I do? And it will just tell me how to fix it. You can't trust these things blindly, but I feel like most people on the internet already understand that things on the internet, you can't trust blindly. And so this is not like a big mental shift you have to go through to understand that it is possible to read something and find it useful, even if it is not completely perfect in its output.Swyx [00:10:54]: It's very human-like in that sense. It's the same ring of trust, I kind of think about it that way, if you had trust levels.Alessio [00:11:03]: And there's maybe a couple that tie together. So there was like, to make applications, and then there's to get started, which is a similar you know, kickstart, maybe like a project that you know the LLM cannot solve. It's kind of how you think about it.Nicholas [00:11:15]: Yeah. So for getting started on things is one of the cases where I think it's really great for some of these things, where I sort of use it as a personalized, help me use this technology I've never used before. So for example, I had never used Docker before January. I know what Docker is. Lucky you. Yeah, like I'm a computer security person, like I sort of, I have read lots of papers on, you know, all the technology behind how these things work. You know, I know all the exploits on them, I've done some of these things, but I had never actually used Docker. But I wanted it to be able to, I could run the outputs of language model stuff in some controlled contained environment, which I know is the right application. So I just ask it like, I want to use Docker to do this thing, like, tell me how to run a Python program in a Docker container. And it like gives me a thing. I'm like, step back. You said Docker compose, I do not know what this word Docker compose is. Is this Docker? Help me. And like, you'll sort of tell me all of these things. And I'm sure there's this knowledge that's out there on the internet, like this is not some groundbreaking thing that I'm doing, but I just wanted it as a small piece of one thing I was working on. And I didn't want to learn Docker from first principles. Like I, at some point, if I need it, I can do that. Like I have the background that I can make that happen. But what I wanted to do was, was thing one. And it's very easy to get bogged down in the details of this other thing that helps you accomplish your end goal. And I just want to like, tell me enough about Docker so I can do this particular thing. And I can check that it's doing the safe thing. I sort of know enough about that from, you know, my other background. And so I can just have the model help teach me exactly the one thing I want to know and nothing more. I don't need to worry about other things that the writer of this thinks is important that actually isn't. Like I can just like stop the conversation and say, no, boring to me. Explain this detail. I don't understand. I think that's what that was very useful for me. It would have taken me, you know, several hours to figure out some things that take 10 minutes if you could just ask exactly the question you want the answer to.Alessio [00:13:05]: Have you had any issues with like newer tools? Have you felt any meaningful kind of like a cutoff day where like there's not enough data on the internet or? I'm sure that the answer to this is yes.Nicholas [00:13:16]: But I tend to just not use most of these things. Like I feel like this is like the significant way in which I use machine learning models is probably very different than most people is that I'm a researcher and I get to pick what tools that I use and most of the things that I work on are fairly small projects. And so I can, I can entirely see how someone who is in a big giant company where they have their own proprietary legacy code base of a hundred million lines of code or whatever and like you just might not be able to use things the same way that I do. I still think there are lots of use cases there that are entirely reasonable that are not the same ones that I've put down. But I wanted to talk about what I have personal experience in being able to say is useful. And I would like it very much if someone who is in one of these environments would be able to describe the ways in which they find current models useful to them. And not, you know, philosophize on what someone else might be able to find useful, but actually say like, here are real things that I have done that I found useful for me.Swyx [00:14:08]: Yeah, this is what I often do to encourage people to write more, to share their experiences because they often fear being attacked on the internet. But you are the ultimate authority on how you use things and there's this objectively true. So they cannot be debated. One thing that people are very excited about is the concept of ephemeral software or like personal software. This use case in particular basically lowers the activation energy for creating software, which I like as a vision. I don't think I have taken as much advantage of it as I could. I feel guilty about that. But also, we're trending towards there.Nicholas [00:14:47]: Yeah. No, I mean, I do think that this is a direction that is exciting to me. One of the things I wrote that was like, a lot of the ways that I use these models are for one-off things that I just need to happen that I'm going to throw away in five minutes. And you can.Swyx [00:15:01]: Yeah, exactly.Nicholas [00:15:02]: Right. It's like the kind of thing where it would not have been worth it for me to have spent 45 minutes writing this, because I don't need the answer that badly. But if it will only take me five minutes, then I'll just figure it out, run the program and then get it right. And if it turns out that you ask the thing, it doesn't give you the right answer. Well, I didn't actually need the answer that badly in the first place. Like either I can decide to dedicate the 45 minutes or I cannot, but like the cost of doing it is fairly low. You see what the model can do. And if it can't, then, okay, when you're using these models, if you're getting the answer you want always, it means you're not asking them hard enough questions.Swyx [00:15:35]: Say more.Nicholas [00:15:37]: Lots of people only use them for very small particular use cases and like it always does the thing that they want. Yeah.Swyx [00:15:43]: Like they use it like a search engine.Nicholas [00:15:44]: Yeah. Or like one particular case. And if you're finding that when you're using these, it's always giving you the answer that you want, then probably it has more capabilities than you're actually using. And so I oftentimes try when I have something that I'm curious about to just feed into the model and be like, well, maybe it's just solved my problem for me. You know, most of the time it doesn't, but like on occasion, it's like, it's done things that would have taken me, you know, a couple hours that it's been great and just like solved everything immediately. And if it doesn't, then it's usually easier to verify whether or not the answer is correct than to have written in the first place. And so you check, you're like, well, that's just, you're entirely misguided. Nothing here is right. It's just like, I'm not going to do this. I'm going to go write it myself or whatever.Alessio [00:16:21]: Even for non-tech, I had to fix my irrigation system. I had an old irrigation system. I didn't know how I worked to program it. I took a photo, I sent it to Claude and it's like, oh yeah, that's like the RT 900. This is exactly, I was like, oh wow, you know, you know, a lot of stuff.Swyx [00:16:34]: Was it right?Alessio [00:16:35]: Yeah, it was right.Swyx [00:16:36]: It worked. Did you compare with OpenAI?Alessio [00:16:38]: No, I canceled my OpenAI subscription, so I'm a Claude boy. Do you have a way to think about this like one-offs software thing? One way I talk to people about it is like LLMs are kind of converging to like semantic serverless functions, you know, like you can say something and like it can run the function in a way and then that's it. It just kind of dies there. Do you have a mental model to just think about how long it should live for and like anything like that?Nicholas [00:17:02]: I don't think I have anything interesting to say here, no. I will take whatever tools are available in front of me and try and see if I can use them in meaningful ways. And if they're helpful, then great. If they're not, then fine. And like, you know, there are lots of people that I'm very excited about seeing all these people who are trying to make better applications that use these or all these kinds of things. And I think that's amazing. I would like to see more of it, but I do not spend my time thinking about how to make this any better.Alessio [00:17:27]: What's the most underrated thing in the list? I know there's like simplified code, solving boring tasks, or maybe is there something that you forgot to add that you want to throw in there?Nicholas [00:17:37]: I mean, so in the list, I only put things that people could look at and go, I understand how this solved my problem. I didn't want to put things where the model was very useful to me, but it would not be clear to someone else that it was actually useful. So for example, one of the things that I use it a lot for is debugging errors. But the errors that I have are very much not the errors that anyone else in the world will have. And in order to understand whether or not the solution was right, you just have to trust me on it. Because, you know, like I got my machine in a state that like CUDA was not talking to whatever some other thing, the versions were mismatched, something, something, something, and everything was broken. And like, I could figure it out with interaction with the model, and it gave it like told me the steps I needed to take. But at the end of the day, when you look at the conversation, you just have to trust me that it worked. And I didn't want to write things online that were this, like, you have to trust me that what I'm saying. I want everything that I said to like have evidence that like, here's the conversation, you can go and check whether or not this actually solved the task as I said that the model does. Because a lot of people I feel like say, I used a model to solve this very complicated task. And what they mean is the model did 10%, and I did the other 90% or something, I wanted everything to be verifiable. And so one of the biggest use cases for me, I didn't describe even at all, because it's not the kind of thing that other people could have verified by themselves. So that maybe is like, one of the things that I wish I maybe had said a little bit more about, and just stated that the way that this is done, because I feel like that this didn't come across quite as well. But yeah, of the things that I talked about, the thing that I think is most underrated is the ability of it to solve the uninteresting parts of problems for me right now, where people always say, this is one of the biggest arguments that I don't understand why people say is, the model can only do things that people have done before. Therefore, the model is not going to be helpful in doing new research or like discovering new things. And as someone whose day job is to do new things, like what is research? Research is doing something literally no one else in the world has ever done before. So this is what I do every single day, 90% of this is not doing something new, 90% of this is doing things a million people have done before, and then a little bit of something that was new. There's a reason why we say we stand on the shoulders of giants. It's true. Almost everything that I do is something that's been done many, many times before. And that is the piece that can be automated. Even if the thing that I'm doing as a whole is new, it is almost certainly the case that the small pieces that build up to it are not. And a number of people who use these models, I feel like expect that they can either solve the entire task or none of the task. But now I find myself very often, even when doing something very new and very hard, having models write the easy parts for me. And the reason I think this is so valuable, everyone who programs understands this, like you're currently trying to solve some problem and then you get distracted. And whatever the case may be, someone comes and talks to you, you have to go look up something online, whatever it is. You lose a lot of time to that. And one of the ways we currently don't think about being distracted is you're solving some hard problem and you realize you need a helper function that does X, where X is like, it's a known algorithm. Any person in the world, you say like, give me the algorithm that, have a dense graph or a sparse graph, I need to make it dense. You can do this by doing some matrix multiplies. It's like, this is a solved problem. I knew how to do this 15 years ago, but it distracts me from the problem I'm thinking about in my mind. I needed this done. And so instead of using my mental capacity and solving that problem and then coming back to the problem I was originally trying to solve, you could just ask model, please solve this problem for me. It gives you the answer. You run it. You can check that it works very, very quickly. And now you go back to solving the problem without having lost all the mental state. And I feel like this is one of the things that's been very useful for me.Swyx [00:21:34]: And in terms of this concept of expert users versus non-expert users, floors versus ceilings, you had some strong opinion here that like, basically it actually is more beneficial for non-experts.Nicholas [00:21:46]: Yeah, I don't know. I think it could go either way. Let me give you the argument for both of these. Yes. So I can only speak on the expert user behalf because I've been doing computers for a long time. And so yeah, the cases where it's useful for me are exactly these cases where I can check the output. I know, and anything the model could do, I could have done. I could have done better. I can check every single thing that the model is doing and make sure it's correct in every way. And so I can only speak and say, definitely it's been useful for me. But I also see a world in which this could be very useful for the kinds of people who do not have this knowledge, with caveats, because I'm not one of these people. I don't have this direct experience. But one of these big ways that I can see this is for things that you can check fairly easily, someone who could never have asked or have written a program themselves to do a certain task could just ask for the program that does the thing. And you know, some of the times it won't get it right. But some of the times it will, and they'll be able to have the thing in front of them that they just couldn't have done before. And we see a lot of people trying to do applications for this, like integrating language models into spreadsheets. Spreadsheets run the world. And there are some people who know how to do all the complicated spreadsheet equations and various things, and other people who don't, who just use the spreadsheet program but just manually do all of the things one by one by one by one. And this is a case where you could have a model that could try and give you a solution. And as long as the person is rigorous in testing that the solution does actually the correct thing, and this is the part that I'm worried about most, you know, I think depending on these systems in ways that we shouldn't, like this is what my research says, my research says is entirely on this, like, you probably shouldn't trust these models to do the things in adversarial situations, like, I understand this very deeply. And so I think that it's possible for people who don't have this knowledge to make use of these tools in ways, but I'm worried that it might end up in a world where people just blindly trust them, deploy them in situations that they probably shouldn't, and then someone like me gets to come along and just break everything because everything is terrible. And so I am very, very worried about that being the case, but I think if done carefully it is possible that these could be very useful.Swyx [00:23:54]: Yeah, there is some research out there that shows that when people use LLMs to generate code, they do generate less secure code.Nicholas [00:24:02]: Yeah, Dan Bonet has a nice paper on this. There are a bunch of papers that touch on exactly this.Swyx [00:24:07]: My slight issue is, you know, is there an agenda here?Nicholas [00:24:10]: I mean, okay, yeah, Dan Bonet, at least the one they have, like, I fully trust everything that sort of.Swyx [00:24:15]: Sorry, I don't know who Dan is.Swyx [00:24:17]: He's a professor at Stanford. Yeah, he and some students have some things on this. Yeah, there's a number. I agree that a lot of the stuff feels like people have an agenda behind it. There are some that don't, and I trust them to have done the right thing. I also think, even on this though, we have to be careful because the argument, whenever someone says x is true about language models, you should always append the suffix for current models because I'll be the first to admit I was one of the people who was very much on the opinion that these language models are fun toys and are going to have absolutely no practical utility. If you had asked me this, let's say, in 2020, I still would have said the same thing. After I had seen GPT-2, I had written a couple of papers studying GPT-2 very carefully. I still would have told you these things are toys. And when I first read the RLHF paper and the instruction tuning paper, I was like, nope, this is this thing that these weird AI people are doing. They're trying to make some analogies to people that makes no sense. It's just like, I don't even care to read it. I saw what it was about and just didn't even look at it. I was obviously wrong. These things can be useful. And I feel like a lot of people had the same mentality that I did and decided not to change their mind. And I feel like this is the thing that I want people to be careful about. I want them to at least know what is true about the world so that they can then see that maybe they should reconsider some of the opinions that they had from four or five years ago that may just not be true about today's models.Swyx [00:25:47]: Specifically because you brought up spreadsheets, I want to share my personal experience because I think Google has done a really good job that people don't know about, which is if you use Google Sheets, Gemini is integrated inside of Google Sheets and it helps you write formulas. Great.Nicholas [00:26:00]: That's news to me.Swyx [00:26:01]: Right? They don't maybe do a good job. Unless you watch Google I.O., there was no other opportunity to learn that Gemini is now in your Google Sheets. And so I just don't write formulas manually anymore. It just prompts Gemini to do it for me. And it does it.Nicholas [00:26:15]: One of the problems that these machine learning models have is a discoverability problem. I think this will be figured out. I mean, it's the same problem that you have with any assistant. You're given a blank box and you're like, what do I do with it? I think this is great. More of these things, it would be good for them to exist. I want them to exist in ways that we can actually make sure that they're done correctly. I don't want to just have them be pushed into more and more things just blindly. I feel like lots of people, there are far too many X plus AI, where X is like arbitrary thing in the world that has nothing to do with it and could not be benefited at all. And they're just doing it because they want to use the word. And I don't want that to happen.Swyx [00:26:58]: You don't want an AI fridge?Nicholas [00:27:00]: No. Yes. I do not want my fridge on the internet.Swyx [00:27:03]: I do not want... Okay.Nicholas [00:27:05]: Anyway, let's not go down that rabbit hole. I understand why some of that happens, because people want to sell things or whatever. But I feel like a lot of people see that and then they write off everything as a result of it. And I just want to say, there are allowed to be people who are trying to do things that don't make any sense. Just ignore them. Do the things that make sense.Alessio [00:27:22]: Another chunk of use cases was learning. So both explaining code, being an API reference, all of these different things. Any suggestions on how to go at it? I feel like one thing is generate code and then explain to me. One way is just tell me about this technology. Another thing is like, hey, I read this online, kind of help me understand it. Any best practices on getting the most out of it?Swyx [00:27:47]: Yeah.Nicholas [00:27:47]: I don't know if I have best practices. I have how I use them.Swyx [00:27:51]: Yeah.Nicholas [00:27:51]: I find it very useful for cases where I understand the underlying ideas, but I have never usedSwyx [00:27:59]: them in this way before.Nicholas [00:28:00]: I know what I'm looking for, but I just don't know how to get there. And so yeah, as an API reference is a great example. The tool everyone always picks on is like FFmpeg. No one in the world knows the command line arguments to do what they want. They're like, make the thing faster. I want lower bitrate, like dash V. Once you tell me what the answer is, I can check. This is one of these things where it's great for these kinds of things. Or in other cases, things where I don't really care that the answer is 100% correct. So for example, I do a lot of security work. Most of security work is reading some code you've never seen before and finding out which pieces of the code are actually important. Because, you know, most of the program isn't actually do anything to do with security. It has, you know, the display piece or the other piece or whatever. And like, you just, you would only ignore all of that. So one very fun use of models is to like, just have it describe all the functions and just skim it and be like, wait, which ones look like approximately the right things to look at? Because otherwise, what are you going to do? You're going to have to read them all manually. And when you're reading them manually, you're going to skim the function anyway, and not just figure out what's going on perfectly. Like you already know that when you're going to read these things, what you're going to try and do is figure out roughly what's going on. Then you'll delve into the details. This is a great way of just doing that, but faster, because it will abstract most of whatSwyx [00:29:21]: is right.Nicholas [00:29:21]: It's going to be wrong some of the time. I don't care.Swyx [00:29:23]: I would have been wrong too.Nicholas [00:29:24]: And as long as you treat it with this way, I think it's great. And so like one of the particular use cases I have in the thing is decompiling binaries, where oftentimes people will release a binary. They won't give you the source code. And you want to figure out how to attack it. And so one thing you could do is you could try and run some kind of decompiler. It turns out for the thing that I wanted, none existed. And so I spent too many hours doing it by hand. Before I first thought, why am I doing this? I should just check if the model could do it for me. And it turns out that it can. And it can turn the compiled source code, which is impossible for any human to understand, into the Python code that is entirely reasonable to understand. And it doesn't run. It has a bunch of problems. But it's so much nicer that it's immediately a win for me. I can just figure out approximately where I should be looking, and then spend all of my time doing that by hand. And again, you get a big win there.Swyx [00:30:12]: So I fully agree with all those use cases, especially for you as a security researcher and having to dive into multiple things. I imagine that's super helpful. I do think we want to move to your other blog post. But you ended your post with a little bit of a teaser about your next post and your speculations. What are you thinking about?Nicholas [00:30:34]: So I want to write something. And I will do that at some point when I have time, maybe after I'm done writing my current papers for ICLR or something, where I want to talk about some thoughts I have for where language models are going in the near-term future. The reason why I want to talk about this is because, again, I feel like the discussion tends to be people who are either very much AGI by 2027, orSwyx [00:30:55]: always five years away, or are going to make statements of the form,Nicholas [00:31:00]: you know, LLMs are the wrong path, and we should be abandoning this, and we should be doing something else instead. And again, I feel like people tend to look at this and see these two polarizing options and go, well, those obviously are both very far extremes. Like, how do I actually, like, what's a more nuanced take here? And so I have some opinions about this that I want to put down, just saying, you know, I have wide margins of error. I think you should too. If you would say there's a 0% chance that something, you know, the models will get very, very good in the next five years, you're probably wrong. If you're going to say there's a 100% chance that in the next five years, then you're probably wrong. And like, to be fair, most of the people, if you read behind the headlines, actually say something like this. But it's very hard to get clicks on the internet of like, some things may be good in the future. Like, everyone wants like, you know, a very, like, nothing is going to be good. This is entirely wrong. It's going to be amazing. You know, like, they want to see this. I want people who have negative reactions to these kinds of extreme views to be able to at least say, like, to tell them, there is something real here. It may not solve all of our problems, but it's probably going to get better. I don't know by how much. And that's basically what I want to say. And then at some point, I'll talk about the safety and security things as a result of this. Because the way in which security intersects with these things depends a lot in exactly how people use these tools. You know, if it turns out to be the case that these models get to be truly amazing and can solve, you know, tasks completely autonomously, that's a very different security world to be living in than if there's always a human in the loop. And the types of security questions I would want to ask would be very different. And so I think, you know, in some very large part, understanding what the future will look like a couple of years ahead of time is helpful for figuring out which problems, as a security person, I want to solve now. You mentioned getting clicks on the internet,Alessio [00:32:50]: but you don't even have, like, an ex-account or anything. How do you get people to read your stuff? What's your distribution strategy? Because this post was popping up everywhere. And then people on Twitter were like, Nicholas Garlini wrote this. Like, what's his handle? It's like, he doesn't have it. It's like, how did you find it? What's the story?Nicholas [00:33:07]: So I have an RSS feed and an email list. And that's it. I don't like most social media things. On principle, I feel like they have some harms. As a person, I have a problem when people say things that are wrong on the internet. And I would get nothing done if I would have a Twitter. I would spend all of my time correcting people and getting into fights. And so I feel like it is just useful for me for this not to be an option. I tend to just post things online. Yeah, it's a very good question. I don't know how people find it. I feel like for some things that I write, other people think it resonates with them. And then they put it on Twitter. And...Swyx [00:33:43]: Hacker News as well.Nicholas [00:33:44]: Sure, yeah. I am... Because my day job is doing research, I get no value for having this be picked up. There's no whatever. I don't need to be someone who has to have this other thing to give talks. And so I feel like I can just say what I want to say. And if people find it useful, then they'll share it widely. You know, this one went pretty wide. I wrote a thing, whatever, sometime late last year, about how to recover data off of an Apple profile drive from 1980. This probably got, I think, like 1000x less views than this. But I don't care. Like, that's not why I'm doing this. Like, this is the benefit of having a thing that I actually care about, which is my research. I would care much more if that didn't get seen. This is like a thing that I write because I have some thoughts that I just want to put down.Swyx [00:34:32]: Yeah. I think it's the long form thoughtfulness and authenticity that is sadly lacking sometimes in modern discourse that makes it attractive. And I think now you have a little bit of a brand of you are an independent thinker, writer, person, that people are tuned in to pay attention to whatever is next coming.Nicholas [00:34:52]: Yeah, I mean, this kind of worries me a little bit. I don't like whenever I have a popular thing that like, and then I write another thing, which is like entirely unrelated. Like, I don't, I don't... You should actually just throw people off right now.Swyx [00:35:01]: Exactly.Nicholas [00:35:02]: I'm trying to figure out, like, I need to put something else online. So, like, the last two or three things I've done in a row have been, like, actually, like, things that people should care about.Swyx [00:35:10]: Yes. So, I have a couple of things.Nicholas [00:35:11]: I'm trying to figure out which one do I put online to just, like, cull the list of people who have subscribed to my email.Swyx [00:35:16]: And so, like, tell them, like,Nicholas [00:35:16]: no, like, what you're here for is not informed, well-thought-through takes. Like, what you're here for is whatever I want to talk about. And if you're not up for that, then, like, you know, go away. Like, this is not what I want out of my personal website.Swyx [00:35:27]: So, like, here's, like, top 10 enemies or something.Alessio [00:35:30]: What's the next project you're going to work on that is completely unrelated to research LLMs? Or what games do you want to port into the browser next?Swyx [00:35:39]: Okay. Yeah.Nicholas [00:35:39]: So, maybe.Swyx [00:35:41]: Okay.Nicholas [00:35:41]: Here's a fun question. How much data do you think you can put on a single piece of paper?Swyx [00:35:47]: I mean, you can think about bits and atoms. Yeah.Nicholas [00:35:49]: No, like, normal printer. Like, I gave you an office printer. How much data can you put on a piece of paper?Alessio [00:35:54]: Can you re-decode it? So, like, you know, base 64A or whatever. Yeah, whatever you want.Nicholas [00:35:59]: Like, you get normal off-the-shelf printer, off-the-shelf scanner. How much data?Swyx [00:36:03]: I'll just throw out there. Like, 10 megabytes. That's enormous. I know.Nicholas [00:36:07]: Yeah, that's a lot.Swyx [00:36:10]: Really small fonts. That's my question.Nicholas [00:36:12]: So, I have a thing. It does about a megabyte.Swyx [00:36:14]: Yeah, okay.Nicholas [00:36:14]: There you go. I was off by an order of magnitude.Swyx [00:36:16]: Yeah, okay.Nicholas [00:36:16]: So, in particular, it's about 1.44 megabytes. A floppy disk.Swyx [00:36:21]: Yeah, exactly.Nicholas [00:36:21]: So, this is supposed to be the title at some point. It's a floppy disk.Swyx [00:36:24]: A paper is a floppy disk. Yeah.Nicholas [00:36:25]: So, this is a little hard because, you know. So, you can do the math and you get 8.5 by 11. You can print at 300 by 300 DPI. And this gives you 2 megabytes. And so, every single pixel, you need to be able to recover up to like 90 plus percent. Like, 95 percent. Like, 99 point something percent accuracy. In order to be able to actually decode this off the paper. This is one of the things that I'm considering. I need to get a couple more things working for this. Where, you know, again, I'm running into some random problems. But this is probably, this will be one thing that I'm going to talk about. There's this contest called the International Obfuscated C-Code Contest, which is amazing. People try and write the most obfuscated C code that they can. Which is great. And I have a submission for that whenever they open up the next one for it. And I'll write about that submission. I have a very fun gate level emulation of an old CPU that runs like fully precisely. And it's a fun kind of thing. Yeah.Swyx [00:37:20]: Interesting. Your comment about the piece of paper reminds me of when I was in college. And you would have like one cheat sheet that you could write. So, you have a formula, a theoretical limit for bits per inch. And, you know, that's how much I would squeeze in really, really small. Yeah, definitely.Nicholas [00:37:36]: Okay.Swyx [00:37:37]: We are also going to talk about your benchmarking. Because you released your own benchmark that got some attention, thanks to some friends on the internet. What's the story behind your own benchmark? Do you not trust the open source benchmarks? What's going on there?Nicholas [00:37:51]: Okay. Benchmarks tell you how well the model solves the task the benchmark is designed to solve. For a long time, models were not useful. And so, the benchmark that you tracked was just something someone came up with, because you need to track something. All of deep learning exists because people tried to make models classify digits and classify images into a thousand classes. There is no one in the world who cares specifically about the problem of distinguishing between 300 breeds of dog for an image that's 224 or 224 pixels. And yet, like, this is what drove a lot of progress. And people did this not because they cared about this problem, because they wanted to just measure progress in some way. And a lot of benchmarks are of this flavor. You want to construct a task that is hard, and we will measure progress on this benchmark, not because we care about the problem per se, but because we know that progress on this is in some way correlated with making better models. And this is fine when you don't want to actually use the models that you have. But when you want to actually make use of them, it's important to find benchmarks that track with whether or not they're useful to you. And the thing that I was finding is that there would be model after model after model that was being released that would find some benchmark that they could claim state-of-the-art on and then say, therefore, ours is the best. And that wouldn't be helpful to me to know whether or not I should then switch to it. So the argument that I tried to lay out in this post is that more people should make benchmarks that are tailored to them. And so what I did is I wrote a domain-specific language that anyone can write for and say, you can take tasks that you have wanted models to solve for you, and you can put them into your benchmark that's the thing that you care about. And then when a new model comes out, you benchmark the model on the things that you care about. And you know that you care about them because you've actually asked for those answers before. And if the model scores well, then you know that for the kinds of things that you have asked models for in the past, it can solve these things well for you. This has been useful for me because when another model comes out, I can run it. I can see, does this solve the kinds of things that I care about? And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. And then I can decide whether or not I want to use that model or not. I don't want to say that existing benchmarks are not useful. They're very good at measuring the thing that they're designed to measure. But in many cases, what that's designed to measure is not actually the thing that I want to use it for. And I expect that the way that I want to use it is different the way that you want to use it. And I would just like more people to have these things out there in the world. And the final reason for this is, it is very easy. If you want to make a model good at some benchmark, to make it good at that benchmark, you can find the distribution of data that you need and train the model to be good on the distribution of data. And then you have your model that can solve this benchmark well. And by having a benchmark that is not very popular, you can be relatively certain that no one has tried to optimize their model for your benchmark.Swyx [00:40:40]: And I would like this to be-Nicholas [00:40:40]: So publishing your benchmark is a little bit-Swyx [00:40:43]: Okay, sure.Nicholas [00:40:43]: Contextualized. So my hope in doing this was not that people would use mine as theirs. My hope in doing this was that- You should make yours. Yes, you should make your benchmark. And if, for example, there were even a very small fraction of people, 0.1% of people who made a benchmark that was useful for them, this would still be hundreds of new benchmarks that- not want to make one myself, but I might want to- I might know the kinds of work that I do is a little bit like this person, a little bit like that person. I'll go check how it is on their benchmarks. And I'll see, roughly, I'll get a good sense of what's going on. Because the alternative is people just do this vibes-based evaluation thing, where you interact with the model five times, and you see if it worked on the kinds of things that you just like your toy questions. But five questions is a very low bit output from whether or not it works for this thing. And if you could just automate running it 100 questions for you, it's a much better evaluation. So that's why I did this.Swyx [00:41:37]: Yeah, I like the idea of going through your chat history and actually pulling out real-life examples. I regret to say that I don't think my chat history is used as much these days, because I'm using Cursor, the native AI IDE. So your examples are all coding related. And the immediate question is, now that you've written the How I Use AI post, which is a little bit broader, are you able to translate all these things to evals? Are some things unevaluable?Nicholas [00:42:03]: Right. A number of things that I do are harder to evaluate. So this is the problem with a benchmark, is you need some way to check whether or not the output was correct. And so all of the kinds of things that I can put into the benchmark are the kinds of things that you can check. You can check more things than you might have thought would be possible if you do a little bit of work on the back end. So for example, all of the code that I have the model write, it runs the code and sees whether the answer is the correct answer. Or in some cases, it runs the code, feeds the output to another language model, and the language model judges was the output correct. And again, is using a language model to judge here perfect? No. But like, what's the alternative? The alternative is to not do it. And what I care about is just, is this thing broadly useful for the kinds of questions that I have? And so as long as the accuracy is better than roughly random, like, I'm okay with this. I've inspected the outputs of these, and like, they're almost always correct. If you ask the model to judge these things in the right way, they're very good at being able to tell this. And so, yeah, I probably think this is a useful thing for people to do.Alessio [00:43:04]: You complain about prompting and being lazy and how you do not want to tip your model and you do not want to murder a kitten just to get the right answer. How do you see the evolution of like prompt engineering? Even like 18 months ago, maybe, you know, it was kind of like really hot and people wanted to like build companies around it. Today, it's like the models are getting good. Do you think it's going to be less and less relevant going forward? Or what's the minimum valuable prompt? Yeah, I don't know.Nicholas [00:43:29]: I feel like a big part of making an agent is just like a fancy prompt that like, you know, calls back to the model again. I have no opinion. It seems like maybe it turns out that this is really important. Maybe it turns out that this isn't. I guess the only comment I was making here is just to say, oftentimes when I use a model and I find it's not useful, I talk to people who help make it. The answer they usually give me is like, you're using it wrong. Which like reminds me very much of like that you're holding it wrong from like the iPhone kind of thing, right? Like, you know, like I don't care that I'm holding it wrong. I'm holding it that way. If the thing is not working with me, then like it's not useful for me. Like it may be the case that there exists a way to ask the model such that it gives me the answer that's correct, but that's not the way I'm doing it. If I have to spend so much time thinking about how I want to frame the question, that it would have been faster for me just to get the answer. It didn't save me any time. And so oftentimes, you know, what I do is like, I just dump in whatever current thought that I have in whatever ill-formed way it is. And I expect the answer to be correct. And if the answer is not correct, like in some sense, maybe the model was right to give me the wrong answer. Like I may have asked the wrong question, but I want the right answer still. And so like, I just want to sort of get this as a thing. And maybe the way to fix this is you have some default prompt that always goes into all the models or something, or you do something like clever like this. It would be great if someone had a way to package this up and make a thing I think that's entirely reasonable. Maybe it turns out that as models get better, you don't need to prompt them as much in this way. I just want to use the things that are in front of me.Alessio [00:44:55]: Do you think that's like a limitation of just how models work? Like, you know, at the end of the day, you're using the prompt to kind of like steer it in the latent space. Like, do you think there's a way to actually not make the prompt really relevant and have the model figure it out? Or like, what's the... I mean, you could fine tune itNicholas [00:45:10]: into the model, for example, that like it's supposed to... I mean, it seems like some models have done this, for example, like some recent model, many recent models. If you ask them a question, computing an integral of this thing, they'll say, let's think through this step by step. And then they'll go through the step by step answer. I didn't tell it. Two years ago, I would have had to have prompted it. Think step by step on solving the following thing. Now you ask them the question and the model says, here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the following approach and then like sort of self-prompt itself.Swyx [00:45:34]: Is this the right way?Nicholas [00:45:35]: Seems reasonable. Maybe you don't have to do it. I don't know. This is for the people whose job is to make these things better. And yeah, I just want to use these things. Yeah.Swyx [00:45:43]: For listeners, that would be Orca and Agent Instruct. It's the soda on this stuff. Great. Yeah.Alessio [00:45:49]: That's a few shot. It's included in the lazy prompting. Like, do you do a few shot prompting? Like, do you collect some examples when you want to put them in? Or...Nicholas [00:45:57]: I don't because usually when I want the answer, I just want to get the answer. Brutal.Swyx [00:46:03]: This is hard mode. Yeah, exactly.Nicholas [00:46:04]: But this is fine.Swyx [00:46:06]: I want to be clear.Nicholas [00:46:06]: There's a difference between testing the ultimate capability level of the model and testing the thing that I'm doing with it. What I'm doing is I'm not exercising its full capability level because there are almost certainly better ways to ask the questions and sort of really see how good the model is. And if you're evaluating a model for being state of the art, this is ultimately what I care about. And so I'm entirely fine with people doing fancy prompting to show me what the true capability level could be because it's really useful to know what the ultimate level of the model could be. But I think it's also important just to have available to you how good the model is if you don't do fancy things.Swyx [00:46:39]: Yeah, I would say that here's a divergence between how models are marketed these days versus how people use it, which is when they test MMLU, they'll do like five shots, 25 shots, 50 shots. And no one's providing 50 examples. I completely agree.Nicholas [00:46:54]: You know, for these numbers, the problem is everyone wants to get state of the art on the benchmark. And so you find the way that you can ask the model the questions so that you get state of the art on the benchmark. And it's good. It's legitimately good to know. It's good to know the model can do this thing if only you try hard enough. Because it means that if I have some task that I want to be solved, I know what the capability level is. And I could get there if I was willing to work hard enough. And the question then is, should I work harder and figure out how to ask the model the question? Or do I just do the thing myself? And for me, I have programmed for many, many, many years. It's often just faster for me just to do the thing than to figure out the incantation to ask the model. But I can imagine someone who has never programmed before might be fine writing five paragraphs in English describing exactly the thing that they want and have the model build it for them if the alternative is not. But again, this goes to all these questions of how are they going to validate? Should they be trusting the output? These kinds of things.Swyx [00:47:49]: One problem with your eval paradigm and most eval paradigms, I'm not picking on you, is that we're actually training these things for chat, for interactive back and forth. And you actually obviously reveal much more information in the same way that asking 20 questions reveals more information in sort of a tree search branching sort of way. Then this is also by the way the problem with LMSYS arena, right? Where the vast majority of prompts are single question, single answer, eval, done. But actually the way that we use chat things, in the way, even in the stuff that you posted in your how I use AI stuff, you have maybe 20 turns of back and forth. How do you eval that?Nicholas [00:48:25]: Yeah. Okay. Very good question. This is the thing that I think many people should be doing more of. I would like more multi-turn evals. I might be writing a paper on this at some point if I get around to it. A couple of the evals in the benchmark thing I have are already multi-turn. I mentioned 20 questions. I have a 20 question eval there just for fun. But I have a couple others that are like, I just tell the model, here's my get thing, figure out how to cherry pick off this other branch and move it over there. And so what I do is I just, I basically build a tiny little agency thing. I just ask the model how I do it. I run the thing on Linux. This is what I want a Docker for. I spin up a Docker container. I run whatever the model told me the output to do is. I feed the output back into the model. I repeat this many rounds. And then I check at the very end, does the git commit history show that it is correctly cherry picked in

In this episode of the backend engineering show I describe an interesting bug I ran into where the web server ran out of ephemeral ports causing the system to halt.  0:00 Intro 0:30 System architecture  2:20 The behavior of the bug 4:00 Backend Troubleshooting 7:00 The cause 15:30 Ephemeral ports on loopback

On the night of Summer Solstice 1986, Larry Harvey and Jerry James built and burned an eight-foot wooden figure on San Francisco's Baker Beach surrounded by a handful of friends. Burning Man was born.This summer, the 39th annual Burning Man gathering begins to assemble on a vast dry lake bed in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, the nomadic ritual's home since 1990. An estimated 80,000 people will come.During production of our Keepers series, chronicling activist archivists, rogue librarians and keepers of the culture and free flow of information, we received this message on the Keepers Hotline:"Hello Kitchen Sisters, I am a rogue archivist, the archivist for Burning Man. Come to Burning Man headquarters and I'll show you the collection. Cheers.” —LadyBee, Archivist & Art Collection Manager, Burning ManHow do you archive an event when one of it's driving principles is "leave no trace," where The Burning Man is in fact burned? What is being kept and who is keeping it? We journey into the archives of this legendary gathering to find out.Produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell, mixed by Jim McKee.

Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. Today, Emily chats with BAMPFA Chief Curator Margot Norton. In this Episode, Margot discusses her background, including her move from New York to Berkeley and her previous roles at the Whitney Museum and the New Museum. She describes an upcoming exhibition titled 'To Exalt the Ephemeral,' which focuses on impermanent art. She shares the transformative potential of museums, her inspiration from artists like Pepón Osorio and Eva Hesse, and her experience working with UC Berkeley students. The exhibition highlights experimental materials, memory, photography, and ends with a video installation by Joan Jonas. Then of course, "Three Questions" with Margot sharing her curatorial career and inspirations.About Curator Margot Norton:Margot Norton is the Chief Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). She is formerly the Allen and Lola Goldring Senior Curator at the New Museum, New York. She organized the 2021 New Museum Triennial Soft Water Hard Stone, co-curated with Jamillah James. Norton joined the New Museum in 2011 and has worked on a number of exhibitions, curating and cocurating presentations by Carmen Argote, Diedrick Brackens, Sarah Lucas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Pipilotti Rist, Mika Rottenberg, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, and Kaari Upson, among others. In 2017, she curated the Eighth Sequences Real Time Art Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Georgian Pavillion at the 2019 Venice Biennale with artist Anna K.E.. Before she joined the New Museum in 2011, Norton worked as a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum, New York. She has contributed to and edited numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, and regularly lectures on contemporary art and curating. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University, New York.Find more from Margot HERE.   Follow Margot on Instagram:  @MargotNortonTo learn more about BAMPFA's Exhibit, "To Exalt the Ephemeral" CLICK HERE. --About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:Emily is a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women's Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWilFollow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast--CREDITS:Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson. Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 LicenseThe Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions. For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com

Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast! Today, we're switching things up a bit. While we usually focus on investments, this time we're diving into finance. Our guest is Emmanuel Daniel, an author, entrepreneur, and corporate strategist. As a global thought leader on the future of finance and its impact on business and society, Emmanuel is a member of the Forbes Business Council and was listed as a top 10 global influencer in the "FinTech Power50" in both 2021 and 2022. He is also the founder of the research publication and consulting house, TAB Global. In this episode, we're discussing... Transformation of Banking: The digitization of banking has drastically changed the industry, making transactions faster and more efficient. Future of Finance: As industries become more digitized, the nature of assets and investments will continue to evolve, impacting how people view and manage wealth. Global Economic Dynamics: The intertwined economic relationship between the US and China showcases the complexity of global trade and the significant impact of geopolitical decisions. US Economic Strengths: The US excels in information handling and liquidity in capital markets, setting it apart from other economies. Socialism vs. Capitalism: The US has largely rejected the socialist model, focusing on market-driven solutions, whereas other countries like Sweden and Norway provide examples of successful socialist policies. Local Community Influence: In the US, the role of local communities is crucial in creating social safety nets, reflecting the nation's diverse approach to balancing market forces and social needs.   Resources from Emmanuel LinkedIn | Emmanuel Daniel's website | The Great Transition Resources from Mike and Nichole Gateway Private Equity Group |  REI Words |  Nic's guide

Darren Tu joins Scott Hanselman to explore the new UI in Azure Cloud Shell and ephemeral (non-persistent) Cloud Shell sessions. Learn more about the Azure Cloud Shell container image and how to engage the team on GitHub. Chapters 00:00 - Introduction 01:03 - Old Cloud Shell UI 01:33 - New Cloud Shell UI 02:15 - Ephemeral sessions 04:25 - Exploring the new UI 05:15 - Accessing Cloud Shell 06:17 - Cloud Shell container contents 07:45 - Switching session settings 08:30 - Azure / CloudShell GitHub repo 10:17 - Wrap-up Recommended resources What is Azure Cloud Shell? Access your Azure Cloud Shell Azure / CloudShell repo on GitHub Azure Cloud Shell product page Create a Pay-as-You-Go account (Azure) Create a free account (Azure) Connect Scott Hanselman | Twitter/X: @shanselman Azure Friday | Twitter/X: @azurefriday Darren Tu | LinkedIn: /in/darrentu/

This lecture discusses key ideas from the 20th century philosopher, novelist, and essayist Albert Camus' work The Myth of Sisyphus Specifically it examines the section "Ephemeral Creation" in the third part of work. Camus discusses the possibility of an "ascesis" of he absurd that would remain true to it despite our tendency to succumb to hope. He discusses how this would work for the creative novelist, and the role that revolt, freedom, and diversity play To support my ongoing work, go to my Patreon site - www.patreon.com/sadler or Buy Me A Coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/a4quydwom If you'd like to make a direct contribution, you can do so here - www.paypal.me/ReasonIO - or at BuyMeACoffee - www.buymeacoffee.com/A4quYdWoM You can find over 3,000 philosophy videos in my main YouTube channel - www.youtube.com/user/gbisadler Purchase The Myth of Sisyphus - amzn.to/304vSIQ

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Maria comes on to talk to Inmn about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the state of aid going to Gaza, and the obstacles the powers that be have erected to prevent aid from arriving. Guest Info Maria Elle is a wing nut anarchist Jewish dyke extremist whore anti-Zionist psycho who writes poetry, conspires against the Empire, and organizes for collective liberation. You can find her on IG @Lchiam.Intifada or @bay2gaza Gaza Freedom Flotilla: freedomflotilla.org International Solidarity Movement: palsolidarity.org International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network: ijan.org Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Maria on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin. And today we're going to be talking about a kind of different lens of preparedness than we normally talk about...or no--well, I guess we always kind of talk about it. But we're...you know, we're not we're not going to be talking about a skill today as much as the importance for figuring out how to provide aid when the powers that be: governments and nations that we absolutely don't put our trust in but...are trapped by fail to do that or purposefully obstruct it. And today we're going to be talking about the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and organizing efforts around that and trying to bring critical aid to Gaza. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on that network. [singing] Doo doo doo doo doo. **The Ex-Worker Podcast ** 01:24 The Border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on a map. It's a power structure. A system of control. The Border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world and the Border is tearing it apart. The Ex-Worker podcast presents No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America, a serialized audio book in 11 chapters released every Wednesday. Tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast. **Inmn ** 02:04 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I know we had you on the Stranger's podcast recently for your poetry collection, which everyone should pause right now and go and listen to another hour long podcast episode first and then come back and listen to this...or don't. Or listen to it afterwards. Anyways, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and a little bit about yourself and your involvement with the Freedom Flotilla? **Maria ** 02:44 Absolutely. Yes. Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Maria. She/her pronouns. I am a Jewish, anti-Zionist, anarchist, I don't know, organizer, agitator--whatever you want to call it--from the Ohlone of xučyun (Huichin), aka Oakland, California. And I am.... I've been involved doing Palestine Solidarity work since I was a teenager. Originally, I came to awareness around what was happening in Palestine during the assault on Gaza in 2008 and got involved in the student movement and the student occupations that were happening back then. And then actually got kicked out of university as a result of that, which ended up being perfect because I got the opportunity to join the International Solidarity Movement doing work on the ground in Palestine, which is an amazing group that folks should look up. They were defunct for a little bit during COVID but have come back and are working again basically bringing comrades and activists from around the world to stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance on the ground in Palestine. So I had that opportunity and then I came home and got involved in organizing back here and was not.... So the flotilla, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has.... So, freedom flotillas have been sailing, trying to break the siege on Gaza since 2008. Basically, a flotilla--for those who don't know--is a group of boats. So it's a group of boats from.... Our flotillas or group of boats from all over the world. There's over 30 countries that are involved sending comrades and activists to break the siege on Gaza. And so these boats are filled--our current boat--is filled with 5000 tons of food and medical aid that we are attempting to bring directly to Gaza in defiance of Israel's illegal naval blockade. These.... Like I said, these missions have been happening since 2008, trying both to bring aid to Gaza and to bring awareness, international awareness, of Israel's blockade and kind of getting a lot of international notoriety 2010 When the Mavi Marmara, a Turkicsh ship that was part of the flotilla, was attacked. And nine people were murdered in that process. And it made headlines at the time and brought a lot of awareness to the ongoing siege on Gaza. And then since then there have been many attempts to break the siege. This year, of course, is a different context. And it's a little bit hard to know what to expect. As you know, as many of us already know, there has been a genocide happening in Palestine since 1948. But the particular intensified moment of genocide that we're in creates a different context that we don't totally know what to expect. But we are determined to sail. We are determined to break Israel's illegal siege on Gaza. And especially now more than ever, while there's been a humanitarian crisis in Gaza for a very long time, and this blockade has been happening for 18 years, the famine that is now gripping Gaza is unprecedented. And we are seeing mass death, especially in the north of Gaza, and that is spreading throughout Gaza. Now with the most recent attacks on Rafah, the situation just gets more and more dire every day. One of the goals of the Freedom Flotilla is to emphasize that this is not a natural disaster. You know, there's.... A lot of the way that this gets covered in US media and global media is as if this was a humanitarian--people use the word, "humanitarian crisis," and they use the word "famine." And both of those things are true. And they're also a little bit misleading because this famine is being intentionally created by Israel as a tool of genocide. Israel controls the flow of all aid moving into Gaza and is intentionally and carefully counting how many calories it is allowing into the Gaza Strip in order to intentionally keep the population on the verge of starvation in order to cripple the resistance. This needs to be highlighted. This isn't.... It isn't like they don't know how to get the aid in. It is not logistical obstacles. They try to make it seem like this is, "Oh, how can we possibly get aid in?" Israel has closed every barrier. Like, the fact that we even need to go by sea is insane. They could open the land crossings, which would be the most effective way, but they absolutely refuse. And the United States, our so-called government that has the power to do that and has the power to force the--probably the only government in the world--with the power to force Israel to open the land crossings--is instead building this pier, spending millions of dollars of wasted money that could be being used on aid or, you know, on stopping Israel. And this long drawn out project that now isn't even functioning due to like "climate" or "weather." I can't even remember what they said. There's some kind of structural damage. I mean, they put all this money into it and like still can't deliver aid somehow. And we're supposed to believe that that's a coincidence. Meanwhile, we have a plan to,within three days, effectively deliver all of this aid to Gaza by simply having a basic little fold-out pier that we have packed on the ship that could unfold, deliver the aid, and then we can leave again. It's actually really simple. It's not complicated. None of this has to be complicated. It's being intentionally made complicated as a tool of genocide and as a tool of hiding what Israel is intentionally doing. So that's really a big part of what the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is about. I would say that it's rooted, ultimately, in the principles of DIY and direct action, which are fundamentally anarchist principles to me, and to many of us, the basic idea that no one is going to do this but us. If we want something done, we have to do it ourselves. We cannot rely on these so-called governments who, many of whom around the world claim to support Palestine and give lots of lip service to the need for aid to get in and even for Palestinian Liberation. Other governments, such as our so-called government, have done nothing but contribute to and fund and exacerbate this genocide, still give lip service to "Oh, we need to get aid into Israel," but they're not going to do anything. At best, they don't care. At worst, they actively want this to happen. We cannot wait for them. We've been trying.... Like, you know, not that.... You know, fight by every means necessary. I really do believe in a diversity of tactics. And at the same time, we need to be honest with ourselves that there is no amount of pressure that we can really put on the Biden administration that is going to change the US' has strategic Imperial interest in propping up Israel, you know? And there's no amount of electoral or domestic pressure within the existing system that we can put in that will change the fact that Israel is a beacon of US imperialism in the Middle East. It is a central part of US imperialism's operation globally. And not only our military imperialism but our economic imperialism. So as many of you may already know, and many of you may not, a big part of the impetus for this genocide has to do with global trade and global shipping. So, after the Suez Canal crisis, we saw.... It became clearer than ever to the international community, how delicate the infrastructure of global shipping is. We saw with the simple breakdown of one ship in the Suez Canal, the global economy was brought to a halt. And it is unacceptable-- [Interrupted] **Maria ** 10:18 It's so fragile. And we saw its fragility even more with COVID and with the plague. And it has become clear to the West that having such an important chokehold located in Egypt is not strategic for them. And so Israel has a plan to build what they're calling the Ben Gurion Canal, which is going to be directly north of Gaza, within missile range of of Gaza to be clear, that would be an alternative to the Suez Canal and that would allow for Israel's, and therefore the United States', control over global shipping in a way that we do not currently have. So the depth of the economic investment in committing this genocide is deeper than even natural gas off the coast of Gaza, which a lot of us have also seen headlines about. And a lot of us already know Chevron's interest and BP's interest in colonizing Gaza and eliminating Hamas in order to secure access to that natural gas, but even beyond that, in order to facilitate the construction of the Ben Gurion Canal. With that much at stake, with both fossil fuels and global shipping at stake, there's a no amount of pressure that we can put up on the Biden administration to get them to like, hear truth, you know? If we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And no one is going to do this but us. And I think that the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, the amount of aid that we can actually deliver it with one flotilla is a drop in the bucket. The principle that we are trying to communicate to the world, and that we've seen in many places, is that we can't wait. We have to...we have to show up. We have to be there for our Palestinian siblings. We have to be there for our siblings around the world. And we have to do it ourselves. You know, I think we saw a similar thing with the Great March of Return, and I'm extremely inspired by the Great March of Return of Palestinians coming from Lebanon and breaking through the border there. And we, you know, continue to be inspired by Palestinian resistance globally and to work in concert with that resistance in order to do whatever we can to stop this genocide, both in the immediate sense and in the ongoing sense of Israel's colonization of Palestine from the river to the sea. **Inmn ** 10:18 It's so fragile. **Inmn ** 12:35 Golly, thank you for that very--I will call it a little bit of a rant thing. That was incredible and very informative. And now I have like 100 questions. **Inmn ** 12:47 I have 100 more things to talk about but lay it on me. **Inmn ** 12:51 Um, I think like, or.... I don't even know where to start. Actually, there's this funny place that I want to start, which I'm maybe gonna feel funny about and is maybe like.... Whatever, I don't think it's me feeling nihilistic about it as much as like confused by imaging in..... So I, as a lot of us have been seeing a lot of news graphics, infographics. And I saw this one recently that was talking about "planned distraction." And it was like this thing that was like, "Israel's really counting on Americans being distracted by Memorial Day weekend to intensify the assault on Rafah." And I was just like, I don't think Israel's thinking about what random Americans are doing. Like, as you say, I don't think there's any amount of pressure that we can put on institutions like the Biden administration to change those things. **Maria ** 14:30 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know. I mean, nobody really knows. I do think that it's worth noting that the last major assaults on Rafah began during the Superbowl also. So I mean, it's...who knows, maybe they are thinking about it. And Israel is very much concerned with its public image. [half interrupts self] Well, it's complicated, right? They are very much concerned with their public image and they're also on a genocidal, psychotic rampage, which is causing all sorts of domestic tensions. And Israeli domestic politics are a whole nother can of worms. You know, there isn't one--like anywhere--there isn't one unified Israeli interest. Israel, like every other country, is a contestation of political forces with central goals but also pulling at each other and pulling itself apart. And we actually are seeing Israeli domestic-- [Interrupts self] I think it's also very worth noting that last summer before the assaults on Gaza, before the most recent assault on Gaza began, we saw the first ever domestic Israeli social movement, really since the creation of the state. There was an actual--I mean, you know, fairly tame but for Israel significant--uprising of Israelis against their government. And several months later, this genocide happens, right? And this is not a coincidence. We've seen this kind of pattern time and time again, where a state in order to secure domestic unity will declare war or genocide on a foreign enemy. I think it's also worth noting that the plans for this--while October 7th may have been the the spark--the plans for this were very much already in place. And it is very clear from how quickly and strategically and efficiently they have acted that they have just been waiting for this opportunity. So I think that's worth emphasizing. I think, and then I just also want to clarify, as far as like "no amount of domestic pressure," I think that there's...I want to be clear that, like I said, I believe deeply in a diversity of tactics. And I do think that we need to do everything. And I think that there is very--like, I'm not saying that we should all just go to Palestine. I think there's very important roles for us to play here in the United States in organizing. But we need to be realistic about how we're gauging our targets. So we're never going to be able to appeal to the moral or even political interests of--as far as like electoral political interests--of these things. We...I think...I personally think that our best hope is to challenge their economic function, right, and to make this cost so much that they cannot continue. And that's a lot. It has to cost a lot because they have a lot to gain. But you know, what? We have a lot to lose. We have everything to lose and everything to gain. And we need to make this cost more than they can imagine. **Inmn ** 17:28 Yeah. And yeah, maybe to be clear, the infographic that I was seeing, it was like, its suggestion was like, you know, "Get on the phone and call your congress people." And I was just like, you know, yeah, "by any means necessary," and whatever people can do, but I was like, I don't think the one thing stopping.... It framed it in this way--I am gonna get off this topic very quickly and spent too much time on this--but it framed it in this way of like, "Oh, if Americans just weren't so distracted by barbecuing over the weekend then genocide and then Gaza would have been over," and I was just like...that. Okay, whatever. Anyway, a real question. So I think maybe something that I've been curious, I guess, about is some of the like geopolitical--or like, specifically like geographical--forces at work where.... Like for the.... Can you tell me about waterways, waterways in and around Israel and Gaza? Like I guess like what is the proposed route? Or like, what are some of the.... Like, how get Flotilla? **Maria ** 18:48 How get Flotilla. **Inmn ** 18:49 How blockaded? **Maria ** 18:52 Through the Mediterranean. So we had originally, we had originally planned to sail from Turkey, from Istanbul, and I was actually in Istanbul with hundreds of other people. We were, our bags were packed, the boat was full, we were ready to sail, and the mission was bureaucratically sabotaged by Israel. This was several weeks ago. **Inmn ** 19:13 Is this the flag thing? **Maria ** 19:14 Yeah, so Israel has tried many different avenues to sabotage the Flotilla, including physical sabotage of the ship. But one--and this has happened for many years--but one tactic they have not tried before, and that we were not prepared for, was that they pressured.... So I don't know how much people know about shipping. But every ship that leaves a port has to pass to sail under a flag, a national flag. As far as I understand, any ship that doesn't sail under a flag is technically considered a pirate ship. [says incredulously, laughing] So if we wanted to leave and be allowed to leave by the Coast Guard, we would have to have a national flag. And usually those flags have nothing to do with the mission. You basically buy a flag to sail under. It's interesting. It's actually kind of like a side hustle for a lot of poorer countries, they sell their flags at a cheaper rate and with less bureaucracy. So I think most international shipping actually happens under the flag of the Philippines. But we were gonna sail under the flag of Guinea Bissau, which was a flag of convenience. And Israel put immense--Israel in the United States--put immense pressure on Guinea Bissau to withdraw the flag. And so the flag was withdrawn literally the day we were supposed to depart, like bags packed and ready to go. And, you know, we could have...like the captain could have, I suppose, made the choice to sail anyway, but then that would have forced a confrontation with the Turkish Coast Guard, rather than with the Israeli naval blockade, which people felt wasn't...wasn't worth it. You know, for better or worse. Whatever. The people thought it wasn't worth it. And that it was a better plan to just try to get another flag. So the flotilla is delayed as we are searching for another flag. That process is well underway. And I am hoping.... We'll have more information within the next week about where that is at and when and where we're planning to sail from. It's not sure that we'll be sailing from Turkey anymore at this point. Turkey would have been about a three day sail to Gaza. And at this point we might have to be looking at somewhere further out. TBD. **Inmn ** 21:27 Like somewhere further out to escape the influence of Israel putting pressure on those local areas? **Maria ** 21:36 Yeah, so there was a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure put on the Turkish Government. And Turkey, while it gives incredible lip service to supporting a free Palestine, is actually deeply economically dependent on Israel. And the domestic politics there is a whole can of worms. Anyway, I don't know where that's at. That's not part of the...that's not the team that I'm on. You know? I'm doing a lot of more of a social media and grassroots organizing here in the US. So I'm not one of those people figuring that part out. But, I mean, we can all see, we all basically know the general geopolitics of that region and how complicated it is for any country in the world to allow us to sail because of the possibility of antagonizing Israel, and what that can mean as a nuclear power and as a proxy of the United States in the region. But we will. We'll find a place that we will do it. Inshallah, very soon. And that is underway. I think as far as what's happened in the past, so what's happened in the past, most of the Flotillas have not--actually all of the Flotillas--have not actually made it to Gaza. They are pretty consistently stopped, often in international waters--which is illegal--before arriving. There are no ports in Gaza that one could land at. So like we said, we had this plan with a pier that can unfold. In the past Israel has stopped the flotilla with its naval blockade. In 2010 the ships were famously--one of the ships in particular--was famously attacked, and nine people were were murdered in that process. Since then, there have been no fatalities. No one has been matyred. But everyone pretty much has been arrested and deported. **Maria ** 21:37 From like international waters? [Said confused like it sounds sketchy] **Maria ** 23:40 I think they get brought into Ashdod, usually, and deported from there, like on an Israeli vessel or whatever. I don't know. I haven't been on any of the flotillas before. This will be my first journey. One of my aunts was really involved in them for many years, so I learned a lot about the process, and I've been following the process, since 2010. She's been very involved in--or she was--very involved in it. Gail Miller, may her name be for blessing. So I've been following it but this is my first actual mission joining. **Inmn ** 24:14 Cool. Um, yeah, it's...I don't know, it's.... Thinking about waterways has been something that's been really interesting with a lot of the goings on in and around the genocide in Gaza, like specifically with like...it was fun to see countries like Yemen be like, "Oh, we're gonna blockade Israel or we're gonna blockade shipping routes for Israel shit." And interesting to hear you talk about the connections to global shipping, because then that turned into this big global shipping catastrophe. And like the US and Israel were like "We're protecting global shipping lanes for like the good of Capitalism..." **Maria ** 25:14 One of the first honest things they've said. Yeah, absolutely. I think even with that, it's worth remembering too, just kind of going back to what I said, that the governments of the world are not acting. It wasn't the Yemeni government who took that action. You know, it was it was the Houthis. And overwhelmingly, we see that is not governments anywhere, but rather people working with conviction and solidarity who can actually stop the infrastructure of global trade, can actually stop...can actually have some real impact on this genocide, right? Like, that's one of the only meaningful...you know, people know that acronym BDS, It's boycott, divestment, and sanctions, which is...was a movement in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle that the Palestinian anti-apartheid struggle has adopted, and that has been a global call for some time now. And one of the only real meaningful BDS actions we've seen has been by the Houthis, in that way, you know, actually interfering with Israeli shipping. **Inmn ** 26:15 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay, that's, interesting to hear. I feel like this is a topic that I've tried really hard to learn about on the internet and every time I do it's deeply confusing. And I get more confused because there's a lot of propaganda from the US and from Israel about, like, you know, who's enacting these blockades and whatever reasons that they make up. I saw...I was reading a little bit about the 2010 flotilla where, either like before or after it, Israel was making these wild accusations that the flotilla was working with Al Qaeda or had all these connections to groups they labeled as terroristic. And then the claims were withdrawn later because everyone was like, "Literally what the fuck are you talking about?" **Maria ** 27:15 Yeah, absolutely. And, of course, they're always going to do that, you know, and they're always going to try any possible means to antagonize and paint any kind of resistance is terrorism, which is also what we're seeing in Gaza, right? They will paint five-year old children as terrorists, you know? They have no shame and and they've gotten so far...they've spiraled so deep into their own narrative that they have really lost the plot. It's kind of wild. **Inmn ** 27:46 Yeah. Yeah. I think there's...it's like this thing that's been happening for quite some time, which seems like less obvious to people who have been paying attention, but like, I feel like a decade ago, or a decade and a half ago--wow, time happens--there, like you said, Israel has had these moments of being deeply concerned with their public image and then these moments of just the veil coming off and being like, which is happening there, it's happening here in the United States, it's happening everywhere, just fascistic forces becoming less concerned with what their public images are and just owning being terrible and fucked up. Being like, "Who's gonna stop us?" **Maria ** 28:39 Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, like I said, Israeli domestic politics are a total mess, but there is definitely a stronger and stronger faction that feels that way. And just thinking about it also, to bring it back to sort of the actual mission of the Flotilla, which is to deliver aid, and.... Well, it's twofold, right? It's to deliver aid and it's to break the siege and highlight the injustice--and not just injustice but absolute insanity--of the fox guarding the hen house here, so that all aid flowing...coming into Gaza has to be searched and is being monitored by Israel, and the sort of intentional, as I spoke to in the beginning, of the intentional famine that is being constructed there. And, you know, we saw in the news in March, that we were on the...we're at a tipping point of mass starvation. And that tipping point has been tipped. We are seeing unprecedented famine happening in Gaza. And I wanted to bring it back to that because I also want to just think a little bit about contextualizing what famine means. You know, I mentioned before that people often treat--like the media often treats this as a natural disaster or something or tries to paint it as a natural disaster-- **Inmn ** 29:53 Yeah, it "just happened" **Maria ** 29:54 --as an intentional act of war and genocide. And I think that we have to frame it that way and we have to both make sure that aid is getting in immediately, and to recognize that this is political, that no matter how much money we send to the Red Cross, if aid isn't being allowed to cross isn't helpful, which is not to say don't donate. Donate. And donate, specifically, to Palestinian mutual aid funds, which are the most grassroots opportunities, the most direct way to get funding, and you can find that...I can direct you, at the end, towards different places to donate The Middle East Children's Alliance has been able to get a lot of aid directly in. There's also a lot of, there's a group called Bay to Gaza Mutual Aid, which has collected a bunch of on the ground places to help people in Gaza. So just to be clear, I'm not saying not to donate. You definitely should. And we have to recognize that without an end to this, to the siege and to the bombardment, and the occupation, aid can only go so far. And I think it's important to contextualize that, to remember that this isn't...this phenomena also isn't unique to Palestine, right, this ideathat the global media treats famine as somehow a "natural phenomenon," when in reality, it's politically constructed. It's not just for Palestine, It's true all over the world. And we're seeing that especially in..... I think you can't actually talk about Gaza right now without also talking about Darfur and Sudan and what's happening there. And I think even more than in Gaza, famine--the politically constructed famine--that affects Africa, and specifically, that affects Black people in Africa, is often treated as "inevitable," and "natural," when it is very much politically constructed. And what we're seeing in Sudan, and the genocide that is taking place in Sudan right now, and the famine that is gripping Sudan right now, is every bit as politically constructed, is every bit as entwined with resource wars with the UAE and Saudis, race for controlling natural gas and resources, and for having a monopoly over those things. And this is this genocide is being directly funded by the UAE, which the United States will not challenge because of our strategic alliances there. And the people being targeted by this genocide are overwhelmingly African agriculturalists who have continued to keep that land fertile and producing food when it is more within the interest of the imperialist powers, and particularly the UAE, to have the land become arid so that it can become extraction sites for minerals and fossil fuels. So all that to say, a big part of the goal of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is to politicize famine itself, because it is political. **Inmn ** 32:53 Yeah. Yeah, I know, it's hard to actually think of a famine, like a historical famine, that is actually not a political tool, or like an act of genocide. It's like we...when we...when we think of it, even like the word that we have, it's like when we think of famine, we think of there being a lack of something, we think of there being some kind of disaster that is just like, "Oh, the conditions just made it so that food couldn't be produced." And it's...it's never that. And, at least in English, like we don't really have a word for enacted famine that I can think of that isn't just genocide or that isn't just like purposeful starvation. It's like this entire language lacks a word for this tool that is used. **Maria ** 33:51 Caloric warfare. **Inmn ** 33:54 Yeah, um, I guess like kind of change tack a little bit, I feel like I'm using you as my filter for trying to learn about things on the internet and like running into so many weird like blocks that I'm like, I have no idea what's going on because the global media apparatus is horrible. But what.... I guess like what's going on with world government efforts to like get like food and aid into Gaza? Like I know there's been like a lot of back and forth with what like the UN is doing to get in food and it seems like that's not happening anymore? **Inmn ** 34:40 Where was the pier being built? And, like, what, like there weren't other peirs? **Maria ** 34:40 Right. I mean, one of the most bizarre things that's been happening that has been a lot of the efforts right now is airdrops. So people are like, "There's no way to get aid into Gaza. We have to literally drop it from the air," which is not only unhelpful, but has actually been dangerous and had has caused injury and the destruction of the aid being delivered and has been, shockingly, both ineffective and unsafe. Meanwhile, you could just cross the border, right? We shouldn't even have to be going in through the sea. There's not even.... Like we're going through the flotilla because we feel like that is our best chance of getting in. But there are... like, Egypt shares a border with Gaza. The Rafah crossing a should be open, and people should be able to bring in aid by land. And there's some aid that is crossing there. But as we've seen, to the extent that Israel will let anything in there, which has been very limited, there are settler...civilian--so-called civilians--although, they're not civilian, because they're armed to the teeth with AK--well not AK-47s but M-16s--actively blocking and looting and destroying trucks that are delivering aid to Gaza. I'm just like, can you even imagine? Like, could you imagine? It's hard like.... Like, what goes through your mind? What lives in your heart to destroy food, going to starving children? You know, I.... Whatever. But like, that's actively happening, you know. And so yeah, the airdrops have been a lot of like, you know, this whole US pier that I think I spoke to earlier that they're trying to construct this peir, they constructed this peir. It was pseudo operational for a minute. Now, it's non-operational, again, spending millions of dollars for this basically theater, when the US could, in a heartbeat stop sending aid to Israel and end this whole thing. **Maria ** 36:45 Off the coast of Gaza. It's a floating pier. So yeah, it's whatever.... It's a floating pier off the coast of Gaza. No, it's...I mean, it's honestly, like it's a whole charade. To be honest. Like the United States could, tomorrow, stop this but they won't. **Inmn ** 37:08 Yeah. And it's like the excuses are always these like strange logistical, bureaucratic excuses. Of like, "Oh, I don't know, the pier, the pier didn't work out. Or like, if only we could secure the border crossings, then aid could flow freely through." [Said sarcastically] **Maria ** 37:29 Right, exactly. Which, you know, is a common thing that we see globally too. We see it in this country to some degree like the crisis at the US-Mexico border, which I believe you're at right now. Like, they treat it like..... They treat so much of the humanitarian crisis that's happening there as if it were an impossible problem to solve when it's a very similar situation. It's a intentionally constructed political crisis. **Inmn ** 37:55 Yeah. And it's like, you know, there's a kind of, I guess, famous zine--or maybe people haven't read that one in a while because it's been a long time. But there's a scene called Designed To Kill, which is exactly how the US-Mexico border works. It's like the way that you hear government talk about it, they talk about it as if like, "Oh, we just can't do literally a single thing about it. We have billions of dollars, but we just can't solve this problem." And it's like--this is gonna sound weird--but it's like when you hear Border Patrol talk about like, like, "If only we could figure out how to stop people from coming in," which is not anything that I would ever want, but is what the government talks about. And it's like, you're not trying to do that. If you were trying to do that, it would be quite easy to do that. Like you have designed a system to funnel people in, to exploit them through private prisons, to psychologically terrify, and kill people. **Maria ** 39:06 Absolutely. **Inmn ** 39:06 It is a sick and twisted thing. It is a disaster of your own creation that you then LARP as being the humanitarian actors for, for like public image. Like Border Patrol has a.... Border Patrol has a search and rescue unit. They have like a helicopter that they tote around. [Affirmative sounds from Maria] Fucking absurd. 39:32 I know. I know. Yeah. I mean, I think that you know, I believe you were involved with No More Deaths at the US-Mexico border for a long time, and I think that there's a very similar principle as with the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, that the people who created this crisis are not going to be the ones to stop it. And if anyone's going to do something, it has to be us. We have to do something. Because, yeah, the colonizer isn't going to stop colonizing unless we do something about it. **Inmn ** 40:03 No. And it's like we can't count on.... It's like, we.... Like a lot of people, I think have this, like this myth or hope or whatever that like, "Oh, well, if things ever get really weird, like the UN will step in," or something. And it's like the UN has proceeded to literally fucking nothing. Or it's like the...like, what is it? The I forget the acronym for that court, the UN court, the world.... **Inmn ** 40:31 Yeah. Yeah, the ICJ making rulings towards Israel about, "We want you to stop the genocide." And they're like, "Well, we're not going to do it." And it's like the ICJ does literally fucking nothing. **Maria ** 40:31 The ICJ 40:47 I mean, I believe that ICJ is interesting. The ICJ did issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, which, as far as I can tell, only means that there's like, certain countries he maybe can't go to or like, if he loses this war, which inshallah, he will, that there could be potentially be consequences for him. But that really, like, you know, it's all about real politics. That really just depends on how the war itself goes, you know? Like the international arrest warrants issued in Nazi Germany only were meaningful because Germany lost the war. I just wanted to, I mentioned No More Deaths early and I realized that probably not all the listeners know what that is. So I just thought I'd say No More Deaths is mutual aid project at the US-Mexico border. Grassroots, mostly anarchist lead from what I understand, project. Once upon a time, at least. **Inmn ** 41:45 Let's say anarchistic. **Maria ** 41:48 There we go, there we go. That [NMD] provides mutual aid that both has like emergency medical care and food and also like hikes the desert searching for people who are lost and helping evacuate people who are in need and giving direct aid at the Border despite the Border Patrol's attempt to criminalize those efforts. Which I know a lot of our listeners have probably been involved in. I believe you were. I went out there for...a long time ago. I went out there to do that. But I do think that there's powerful mutual aid projects like that happening here in Turtle Island, too. So it's worth shouting them out. **Inmn ** 42:29 Yeah, and it's like there's a lot of really interesting parallels between all of these mutual aid projects, and also the systems that create the need for them. Where, I don't know, there's so many Israeli defense contractors that got hired to build the virtual--like Elbit Systems got hired to build the virtual wall in the Border and it's like, the similar systems that get used in Palestine. And there's.... It's freaky. There's this, in Arizona, there's this company trying to build like a water pipeline from the Gulf of Mexico to Scottsdale or something. And it's the same Israeli company that builds pipelines through...or like distillation centers in Palestine. 43:28 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we see similar collaborations with Cop City in Atlanta. It's all, it's a global war machine. And we see it functioning exactly the way it's intended to function. But you know, we also have a power to be a cog in that machine. And I am weirdly optimistic a lot. I actually have a lot of faith that we can, you know, this machine can't operate without us, especially us here in the heart of Empire. Like this is in so many ways the veins of empire where so much of it is plotted and executed right here on Turtle Island. And we're uniquely positioned in a lot of ways to clog those arteries. We just have to find the courage and the confidence and the organization to make it happen. And I have so much faith in our ability to do that. Yeah, before, before we run out of time--I don't know if we're coming up on time or not. But I wanted to just also make sure that there's--and I mentioned this, but I just want to give it enough space that this crisis did not start in October. And it also didn't start with the siege of Gaza 18 years ago. This has been a crisis that has been exhibiting in its current form since 1948, since the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba, which is the genocide of the Palestinian people in order to create the State of Israel and really for longer than that, since Zionist immigration began in the 1880s. And this crisis didn't start now and it's not going to stop when the bombs stop falling on Gaza. This crisis will not end until the settler, ethnic national...the settler, nationalist ethno state of Israel is dismantled. And really until the whole global system of settler colonialism--and all of the national states--are dismantled. But to look specifically at Palestine, like there is no...this is not over until Zionism is over. Zionism needs to be ended, and that the settler ethno state of Israel needs to be ended. And that until all Palestinians have a right to return to their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to move freely in their homelands, until all Palestinians have a right to autonomy and self governance within their homelands. And by self-governments, I don't just mean to have a State, but to be able to have agency over their own lives and their own decisions. And until that, the struggle isn't over, and it can't be. And, you know, I think I'm actually very hopeful about this moment, I think that there is...that there is an incredible not, just an outpouring of support for the Palestinians, but incredible recognition of the state of global colonialism in the 21st century and its relationship to resource extraction and what we can do to stop it and I know that the Palestinian.... Like part of the reason that people around the world have responded to what's happening in Palestine the way they do is because this really resonates with so many indigenous people's struggles everywhere. Indigenous people all over the world see their struggle in the struggle with Palestinians and are rising up all over the world and it is very much a global struggle and very much that to free Palestine is in so many ways to free the world. **Maria ** 43:28 Yeah, yeah. Um, I know that you're...you've been part of some...part of this larger project...movement...coalition? I don't know words. But are there...are there ways that people can plug into this? Like if someone's like, "Yo, I got a boat. I want to join the flotilla." Can they do that? 47:25 I don't know about a boat. Well, I mean, if you've got a big boat. These are big boats we're talking Yeah, these are these are big boats. But um, I would say in general, yes. So the website is freedomflotilla.org. You can also find it on all the social medias, but especially you can find it on you know, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram. Also, specifically for those in the so-called San Francisco Bay area, we have our Bay to Gaza contingent that is...we are currently growing and expanding and getting ready to sail, so you can follow us on Instagram @Bay2Gaza. We're also on TikTok and Twitter, and you can reach out to us there if you're interested in supporting or getting involved. My Instagram is @lchaimIntifada. You can also message me there. I check that a little bit more. And, yeah, reach out. We're definitely still recruiting. We don't know exactly when we're going to sail yet. But we need all types of support. And especially, you know, in a lot of ways, this is a media project. This is about shedding light on a phenomenon. So especially folks who have skills in media are very much needed right now. Both legacy media but also social media. **Inmn ** 48:41 Yeah, yeah. Cool. Um, as we get...I guess, get to the end of time--our time, not the end of all time--are there any other things that you wanted to talk about? Any questions that I didn't ask you that you wanted to just touch on? I feel like I had 100 more questions that I will never remember until we stop the recording. And then I'll remember them. 49:11 Happy to keep talking after we stop the recording. But um, no. I mean, I think yeah, like I said, please, the best way to follow us is on social media. And please reach out if you are interested. And I would say other than that, taking the principle of the Flotilla, the principle that nobody is going to do this if we don't, and that we cannot depend on governments or higher powers to make change. We have to make it ourselves, and apply that to all of your organizing. Apply that to the ways, the strategic ways that you're thinking about challenging genocide and occupation and colonialism everywhere that you are, you know. I think that most of our organizing does need to be done at home where we live. And the message that I want people to take away, personally, from the Flotilla is that if we want change, we have to make it ourselves. And to use that framework, and I think...I think what that really is, is the framework of direct action, personally. I think that the word "direct action" has really lost its meaning. And a lot of activists spaces on Turtle Island in particular, people kind of think that direct action just means chaining yourself to something. And I am firmly of the belief that direct action means...it can mean three things. It can mean destroying something that needs to be destroyed, interfering with something that needs to be interfered with, and creating something that needs to be created. And you're doing it directly as opposed to protest, which is when you're asking power to do it for you. And I think there's a role for both. I think there's a role for protests and there's a role for direct action. But we should know what the difference is when we're framing our strategy, and encourage people to look to a framework of direct action and of destroying what needs to be destroyed, creating what needs to be created, and interfering with what needs to be interfered with. So I'd say that other than getting involved with the Flotilla, just holding those principles and all of our organizing, **Inmn ** 51:05 Yeah. And, can I add a little suggestion to that? **Maria ** 51:12 Please. **Inmn ** 51:13 Also in the realm of when thinking about taking direct action, when thinking about protesting, like whenever, it's like making sure that these things that we're doing are community driven and not relying on, I don't know, political parties, or even nonprofits to guide us through taking action. Like, the only ways that we're going to make it through this is if we do it and can't wait for people with more power to just hand it over. **Maria ** 51:55 Absolutely. And I think that's true on the micro sale scale of mutual aid, which is why we do mutual aid projects and it's also true on the macro scale of how this world will change. And, you know, to me, that's what anarchism is. So... **Inmn ** 52:07 Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming on again. And yeah, listeners, if you want to hear more from Maria, then you can find her on social media or you can go and listen to the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness podcast and you can listen to us talk--honestly, a lot...mostly more about Gaza and the fuckery that is Zionism but through poetry and Maria's beautiful poetry collection, Escape Plan, which you can go check out on the Strangers in a Tangle Wilderness podcast. 52:47 And more about the West Bank, which I didn't get to talk about in this interview. And I'm realizing that was something I missed. But I do talk about that in the other one. 52:53 Do you wanna talk about it now? **Maria ** 52:54 I don't want to add that as like a little side note, but I do just want to say that speaking of like distractions, while this genocide in Gaza has been taking place, Israel has been annexing land in the West Bank at an unprecedented rate, and that the violence, but also the land loss happening right now, is a crisis that needs to be confronted directly. I do talk about that more in the other podcast. **Inmn ** 53:16 Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll see you next time. And I hope that.... **Maria ** 53:26 Free Palestine! **Inmn ** 53:27 Great. Yes. Happen. Free Palestine. I got all the words. At least 10 of them. **Inmn ** 53:40 Thank you so much for listening to Live Like the World is Dying. If you enjoy this podcast, then go do mutual aid. Break the siege of Gaza by any means necessary. But also, if you enjoyed this podcast and you want us to continue to put it on and do other cool stuff, then you can support the podcast and the best way to support the podcast is by talking about it. Tell people about it. If the people that you want to learn more about the weird myths, political myths, constructed to keep us not doing things, then tell them about Like Like the World is Dying. You can also support the show by supporting it financially. And you can do that by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can go to our website, tangledwilderness.org and find cool things like books and games and other stuff that we sell and make there. Or you can find us on Patreon and at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And yeah, you can get all sorts of fun things--we're gonna call them fun things--through the Patreon. You can get a zine mailed to you every month, like Maria's poetry collection--well, I guess you missed out on getting that one mailed to you, but you can get other future ones mailed to you-and also you can get us to thank or acknowledge things on your behalf. And we would like to thank these wonderful people and organizations. Thank you Reese, Jason, aiden, alium, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea. Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah. And a special shout out to one of our Patreon subscribers who told us that when they have more money, they're going to get the $20 a month tier so that they can get Hoss the dog another acknowledgement, we're just going to thank Hoss the dog like 20 times. Thank you, Hoss the dog. [Chanting] Hoss the Dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog, Hoss the dog times 20. Times a million. Thanks all of y'all. Maria, is there anyone you would like to thank in particular today? **Inmn ** 56:34 Oh, I wasn't ready for that question. I'm sorry. That's fine. The people of Palestine, the Palestinian resistance. **Inmn ** 56:44 Hell yeah. Thanks for all and we'll see you next time. freedomflotilla.org, palsolidarity.org, and ijan.org Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Tav and Inmn talk about the utility of waterways and the ways that industrialization has changed our relationship to waterways. Inmn learns new terrifying things about river rafting and how river guides really come up with the scariest things to name potential dangers. Guest Info Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Tav on Waterways **Inmn ** 00:15 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be revisiting a subject that we've talked about before which is paddling on water. And we're going to talk a lot about rivers and we're gonna talk about—a little bit about planning trips and just generally the importance of getting to know your local waterways, with some specific contexts on places that are really cold. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo! **Inmn ** 01:43 And welcome back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about what you—what you do in the world and what you're excited to talk about today? **Tav ** 01:59 Yeah, I'm Tav and I'm a, I guess broadly a wilderness guide from so-called Canada. Yeah, I've worked everywhere from the East Coast to Newfoundland, up to the Yukon. And yeah, I'm mostly a paddling guide, so everything from whitewater rafting, to sea kayaking, to canoeing, but I've also been known to guide hiking trips, and yeah, pretty much that's what I do. **Inmn ** 02:32 Cool, cool. That's—I feel like, you know, we've had people come on and talk about like, like arctic hiking, or hiking, or paddling, mostly in the desert, and I feel like—maybe this is just me having a very not understanding of all of these things for the most part. But what—I'm curious about, like, what kind of changes, like, in places where it gets super cold and you're having to be in the water? Which sounds cold. It sounds very cold to me.  **Tav ** 03:06 Um, yeah, I think the main thing is that it really depends on what—well, first of all, what time of year it is and, like, what exactly you're doing or planning on doing. So if you're going to be running rapids, you're certainly going to get wet. And so we have these things called dry suits, which are, well, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a suit that keeps you dry. They have these rubber gaskets on your wrists and your neck. So it, like, suctions completely to your neck and your wrists and the rest of its waterproof, including the feet. And you usually have, like I have these, call them river boots, and you just put them on over the suit. And then you're nice and protected. And you can wear warm stuff underneath if it's super cold out. But personally, I run hot. So generally, I find that like, just a base layer underneath is good enough for me. Because as soon as, like it really traps in all that air, so you stay pretty, you stay pretty warm. Even if you're in like really freezing water. But in other times of year, like to be honest, in the summer here, it gets pretty hot, like people—people don't really think of it. It's not like it's frozen year round. Obviously the waters running at a certain point and, especially these days, the summers can get up to, you know, like 30 degrees. And yeah. **Inmn ** 04:40 Cool. I'm gonna pretend I know what the conversion is on that. Wow, that's hot. **Tav ** 04:46 Yeah, I mean, it is pretty—it's probably not hot for you coming from the desert actually. But yeah, I think, I think broadly the biggest thing is always, at least for me, dressing as if you're gonna fall in the water. Unless it's really hot out. If it's really hot out and you fall in, it kind of feels great. But, but if it's chilly, you always dress like you're gonna go in the water, and not like you're just gonna have a nice day on the river. And yeah. **Inmn ** 05:25 Well, I guess like, I'm curious about, like, what the kind of preparedness like like, what—like, what do you what do you do if you fall in the water? What do you do if you fall in the water and you get wet? Like, what's—and your dry suit doesn't keep you dry? These scary questions that I have about being in the wilderness and being cold and wet.  **Tav ** 05:50 For sure. Definitely, I mean, so the first thing that's gonna happen it—and again, it all really depends on where you fall out. And like, because rivers are a very dynamic environment, actually, as one of my coworkers put it to me. He was more on the hiking side of things. And he told me that like paddling really scared him, because if something goes wrong on the river, you're still moving down the river as this thing is going wrong. So you have to like deal with the problem, but also maybe deal with a hazard that's like right in front of you. And then it's always about, like, figuring out what the best course of action is in regards to, like, dealing with the hazard, but also, you know, saving the person, and making sure everybody else who's still in the boat is safe. But I think broadly, what I tend to tell people if I'm taking them on a trip that's going to involve whitewater, is: the safest place on the river is in the boat. And if you're not in the boat, you should be on shore. So if I'm gonna, like, enter a bunch of rapids—and the other thing is actually, before I say that, you need to know, like, how to swim if you're gonna like be in whitewater. They call it a defensive swimming position. And you kind of sit back like you're in a lawn chair, and put your feet forward. And that way, if you like smashed into a rock, it's not your face that smashes into a rock, it's your feet. And you just kind of, like, you should have a lifejacket on. So that'll keep you floating. And, and then there's also, like, an offensive swimming position, which I wouldn't normally teach somebody, that's, yeah. Anyways, so yeah, so if I'm about to enter a bunch of rapids, I'll tend to tell people like, hey, if you do fall out, and for whatever reason you can't get back to the boat, you need to swim to the left shore or the right shore. Because sometimes it might not be safe to swim a certain direction and people don't know that and they're just gonna panic and swim whatever way seems the best. But if you let them know beforehand, like, hey, swim left, if something goes really wrong, I don't know, then they'll at least know the safer way to swim. Yeah. And then other than that, like, we have, I guess, a couple tools in our arsenal—and this should be the same with rivers everywhere. We'll have throw ropes, which are just some buoyant rope. And it's in a bag, and you throw it at people. And they should hopefully grab on to it and then you can pull them in to safety. And then there's obviously, again, like, as with all things, it can get more and more complicated depending on what the problem is. Actually, this one place I worked—I wasn't on this trip, but there was a person who got stuck on a piece of debris in the middle of a rapid which is, like, absolutely horrifying, especially because we've run that river—or that section of the river, like, a million times and that's never happened. So there was well, so—this is kind of insane, but there was a an old mill there, like a lumber mill. Or maybe it was a paper mill. I don't know, it was some industrial thing. And rather than, like, you know, when it went out of business, disposing of all the waste properly, they just decided, hey, there's this big river right there. Let's just throw the whole factory in the river. Why not? So there was all this big machinery and like metal under the water, and a lot of the rapids are actually created by that like big hunks of metal and stuff. But anyways, we had no idea that that, like, was there. And maybe it was just like the water level was perfectly right that day or perfectly wrong that day. But yeah, this person got like caught on their swim shorts, like, right on the piece of metal. And they were stuck in the middle of a rapid. So I cannot imagine what my friends went through trying to rescue that person. It must have been pretty terrifying. But yeah, so in situations like that, it would be like a much more complicated rescue than just like throwing a rope at them and hoping for the best. So yeah. **Inmn ** 10:23 Wow, that is—you unlocked a new fear for me. I thought that Blix had like gotten all of my fear out of me, you know, in horrible things that can happen in a river, and new fear unlocked. Thanks.  **Tav ** 10:39 Yeah.  **Inmn ** 10:43 What do you—I guess I'm curious—I guess my guess is, because boats, you just—I didn't know, boats are super interesting to me because, like you said, it's like the boat keeps moving down the river. And so it's like, I want to be like, okay, like, what, like, you know, what do you do if there's an emergency? What do you do if someone needs to be like, medivaced from an area like that? And I guess I'm expecting the answer is: put him in the boat and keep going. But—which is like a cool one interesting thing about boats, is they keep going?  **Tav ** 11:20 Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, it really depends. Like everything is situational, right?  **Inmn ** 11:26 Yeah yeah yeah.  **Tav ** 11:27 And you really have to assess the situation and figure out what the best course of action is. Like, the best thing to do might be to like pull over and call EMS and hope they can land like a bush plane or a helicopter near you, or get to a place where they can land it. I had this one evac where a lady actually had a stroke on the river.  **Inmn ** 11:53 Oh no. **Tav ** 11:53 Yeah, I was pretty terrible. I was the only person there with, like, you know, decent medical training. I'm not like a doctor or anything, but I have my wilderness first responder and all that fun stuff. And yeah, so it was just like me and these other guides, who had, like, some training, but not as much as me. And my coworker—love this guy, he's amazing—but he said that she had a concussion. And I was like, this is not a concussion. This is a stroke. Yeah. And so, so yeah, so what ended up happening is we had to take one of the boats and—honestly, mad respect to my to my coworker for this—he got her down like a 45 minute section of river and like 15 minutes. We were just lucky because we had a raft there with an oar frame on it. And those, like—an oar frame is just like, you know, like a rowboat— **Tav ** 12:51 —with like, the two oars and you're like rowing it. It's that, but you like, it's a big metal frame, and you like strap it down to the rafts. So instead of—like, if you have less than the ideal number of people, you can just have one person paddle the boat. So in that case, it was actually my group, where I only had like two people. So I just ended up strapping the warframe on because it's easier than having them paddle. So anyways, my coworker took that boat and just, like, ripped down the river faster than anybody ever has probably since then. So, so yeah, I mean, in that case, like, it was a serious medical problem, we couldn't deal with the problem, you know, you need to like, get that person to definitive care as fast as possible. And in that situation, we were close enough to the end, that the best thing to do was to just call EMS, get them to bring an ambulance to the takeout and get her there as fast as possible. But you might not be in a situation where that's, you know, plausible, you might have to call a bush plane or something like that. Or, even worse, like a bush plane can't come and you're stuck for like days with somebody with a serious medical problem. That can happen, unfortunately. Yeah. **Inmn ** 12:51 Oh okay.  **Inmn ** 14:18 Yeah. Yeah. I feel like—and I think this is a topic for another time—but I really want to—folks listening out there. This is my plug to our audience. I would really love to talk to someone at some point about like, like we have this idea in, like, wilderness first aid, response, etc. I have like an expired wilderness EMT. I haven't done that work in a very long time and my brain has totally fallen out of it. But like, interested in this conversation of like, long term care in, like, when definitive care is very far away, you know, like, how to troubleshoot situations where it's like, yeah, definitive care is days away. Definitive care is a week away. And I'm like really interested in talking to someone about that. So if that feels like you, Tav, or ambient listener, then send us a message. **Tav ** 15:31 Yeah, I can't say that's exactly my area of expertise. I can offer like, an anecdote from a friend of mine, who— **Inmn ** 15:41 Oh yeah. Love anecdotes. **Tav ** 15:43 —it's pretty, it's pretty grim. I'm not gonna lie. This guy is friend of mine, he's much older than me. He's been doing this river guide stuff for his whole life. And he's had lik three people die in his arms.  **Inmn ** 16:00 Oh my god.  **Tav ** 16:01 Yeah. But like that's, unfortunately, the reality of the situation where, if you're that far away, and someone's not getting there, and there's a serious problem, and you can't deal with it, that's what happens. Right? That's the unfortunate fact of existence. And it's pretty horrifying to realize. Also from a somewhat selfish perspective, like, if I continue along this career path that could very well be me telling another young person and a few years like, oh, yeah, this one horrible thing happened to me. And yeah, like, I've definitely seen my fair share of, like, pretty intense situations that could have gone pretty badly. Thankfully, I haven't had anybody die on any of the excursions I've been on. But be I've had some pretty close calls there. So yeah. It is it is something to always consider, like, when you're heading off on a trip that's going to be far away from a hospital or civilization, I guess. That, yeah, like you are far away, and you need to have a certain level of confidence in yourself to deal with the situations that you might need to deal with. But also, in that, like, for me, it comes with a certain level of, like, risk acceptance. And like, everybody has a different level of risk tolerance. You might not be the person who's going to go, like, on a month long trip through the wilderness. That might not be okay with you. And that's fine, it's not for everybody. You know, in my case, the way I tend to look at it is, like, if there's a problem I can't deal with—pretending I'm alone in this scenario—like, if there's a problem I can't deal with myself, and it's so serious that I'm gonna die, like, in a few minutes, then like, I just accept that, like, that's what's gonna happen. Like, if I can't deal with the problem, and I can't call for help with the problem and it's that bad anyways, then I'm alread—can I swear on this? Is this a no swearing show? **Inmn ** 18:31 Oh, yeah, you can, yeah. **Tav ** 18:32 I can swear? Okay, I was gonna say, I'm already in a lot of shit if that's—if that's happening. So for me, my risk tolerance, I mean, it might be higher than others. But I don't know—it's just like, something you have to accept when it comes to taking risks. I mean, you can be prepared and informed and know everything and still an accident can happen. And then you just have to accept that, yeah, accidents happen, and it might be a really big, bad accident. So, so yeah. **Inmn ** 19:06 Yeah. Yeah, that' very true. I feel like—I feel like there's a lot of aspects of our societies that have kind of—have had our, like, brains adapt to this idea that, like, that there is always a solution to something. And I feel like this was like a big thing with, like, with COVID, like, for a lot of people, was the expectation that there was a solution to something, and a lot of people, like, getting to the ER and being like, oh, there actually isn't a solution right now—or there isn't like a one 100%, like guarantee that this problem can be fixed. And yeah, I don't know. It's—I think that's the thing that I've been thinking a lot about, is how our societies have kind of expected there to always be a guaranteed solution to something that there might not be a solution to. And I think that's like—I think that's getting more extreme as things in the world change more. There's—when we are used to certainty, there is now more uncertainty. That is an articulate thought, I'm gonna stand by it. **Tav ** 20:42 Yeah. No, I mean, definitely. Like, I could see that in society at large, actually, now that you mentioned it. But like, yeah, I mean, with regards to wilderness travel, I think anybody who does this sort of thing, like you have an understanding of the risk involved, and like what—you know, there's things that you can deal with there and there's things you can't deal with. And, yeah, like, but I mean, okay, you know, I also don't want to scare people. It's not—like, yes, you have to kind of look within yourself and accept that something bad might happen. But at the same time, I've done, like, I don't even want to know how many 1000s of hours of paddling in my life. And I, yeah, I've had, like, some problems. But I think a lot of those kind of stem from the fact that it's my job. And I'm taking people out there who aren't necessarily prepared for what they're going to—like, they go online and they're like, oh, I want to go on a guided paddling trip. And they Google, whatever, paddling in the Yukon. And then they find this company and they book a trip and they go. And that's all the preparation and thought that they put into it. Where—and that's exactly what they're paying for, I guess, if you look at it from like a service perspective. They're paying for somebody else to do all of that thought. And what I'm, what I do, like, independently—like if somebody listening wanted to go out paddling, if you just, like, talk to somebody who knows what they're doing locally—like join your local paddling club, a lot of places have those, or like find a group online—and like, learn from people or learn from the Internet. We have a lovely resource of, like, all of the information anyone could ever want. So, yeah, it doesn't have to be dangerous. I think most of the danger, and most of the dangerous situations I've been in, happen simply because it's my job to take unprepared people out into the wilderness. And, like, that kind of sucks. I—that's why I'm not actually working as a guide this summer. One of the reasons is because I'm pretty tired of dealing with unprepared people in the wilderness because it's stressful. It's really stressful. And yeah, so I mean, I guess the the main point is, like, it doesn't have to be dangerous as long as you're prepared. And I think that's a pretty great theme, considering this show. **Inmn ** 23:43 Yeah, yeah. And it's—I don't know, like, I totally understand the outlook of someone who's like, yes, I want to pay someone else to be prepared for me. And it's like, you know, reality is very different from, like, adventure tourism. But like, it's funny because it's a thing that is like a little antithetical to preparedness in general. And I'm divorcing adventure tourism and preparedness, like, because they're different things.  **Tav ** 24:21 Yeah. **Inmn ** 24:21 But, yeah, it's like, that is the thing that we're always trying to talk about on this show is, like, if in our own lives, like, if we are all more prepared than it—then like your prepper friend has to, like, do less when stuff goes wrong because everyone's a little bit prepared.  **Tav ** 24:41 Yeah, for sure.  **Inmn ** 24:44 I kind of want to switch tacks a little bit though and talk about this other thing. So I'm curious—I guess in, like, in the Yukon specifically, like, there's places where I live that I'm, like, okay, yes, that is a less accessible place via like roads and things like that. But I'm curious kind of like what the Yukon and, like, that whole area is like in terms of, like, history of transportation and stuff like that. Because, like, waterways have played kind of like a pretty large part in that from what you've told me before this—and now I sound like it's something I already knew.  **Tav ** 25:27 Yeah, for sure. To be honest, it's not just the Yukon. Throughout this country we call Canada, if you actually look at all of Canadian history, like, Canada's like three companies in a trench coat. Always has been. And it was founded on fur trading. Right. And how that was done is basically, like, white people came over, and then they met the ndigenous people. And they were like, wow, these people move pretty far and they have some neat boats. And then they kind of co-opted those boats. And of course, Indigenous people and Metis people took part in the fur trade as well. A very large part, to be honest, in making sure a lot of white people didn't just die in the wilderness. Yeah, but like throughout this entire nation's history, every single place is really connected by water. Like that's just how people got around. Everywhere from, like, the far north, the Inuit had kayaks and—actually dogsleds. ou know, when the sea froze in the winter, they had greater mobility, because—I mean, and they're still moving over water, it's just frozen water, which is kind of like land. But it, yeah, so every single place in this entire so-called country is connected by water in some capacity. And I think that really forms the way that I look at places now. Because yes, we use roads to get around now. But very likely, there is another way to get anywhere you want to get. Because all of these settlements are built on rivers, on lakes, on the ocean, and the way people got there is probably on a boat, and not on a car because we didn't have cars 400 years ago. So yeah, I guess I just, I think it's really important to recognize that and recognize that it's still very very possible to go extremely long distances. And, you know, reach inaccessible, quote/unquote places with relative ease, to be honest. So actually, something that's pretty insane to me—it's mind boggling, to be quite honest: the longest river system in the country is the Mackenzie River. And it's technically, like, if you go by names, it's a bunch of different rivers that are connected. But it's really, like, from source to sea—I don't actually remember how many kilometers it is. But you can go from Alberta, like, around Jasper, if anybody knows where that is, all the way to the Arctic Ocean on a single river. And you can do that in like a single summer, too. And throughout that whole river, there's a bunch of towns. And a lot of them are not accessible by road, but they are very easily accessible by the river. So if you really think about it, like, in my mind, they're not inaccessible places. They seem inaccessible because of our modern transportation infrastructure, which, you know, makes anything that doesn't have a road seem like it's impossible to get to and you have to spend thousands of dollars and fly or whatever. But really, all it takes is, like, one person in a canoe and you can just go anywhere you want. Yeah. **Inmn ** 29:31 Yeah, that stuff is super interesting. It's like the—I don't know, it's like, I get on some level that, you know, cars are convenient. I love being able to drive somewhere. But it's like, I don't know, obviously cars are also terrible and we need different—we need something different before the planet dies. But It's like also this thing that, like, it's like car—I imagine that like switching over a transportation system to be, like, based on moving around on the river versus based on, like, driving around on some roads that demolish a bunch of shit. It also, like, divorces us from nature and like any connection that we have to, like, the natural landscape that we are using. And, like, used to be on the river and now it's put the remains of petrified trees in your thing and blast around on concrete or whatever. I don't know. It's just funny. **Tav ** 30:43 Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely—cars are—I wish I could just live out of a canoe. But that, I can't do that. I mean, I live in my car right now. So I get their convenience. But I do think that as, like, as things progress and the climate gets worse and worse, and I mean, even now, this is probably going to mean absolutely nothing to you—Oh, you know what, actually, I was in Alaska, like, the other day. And it's actually a bit cheaper than here. But the gasoline that I purchased was $5.50 American per gallon, which I think is $1.67, or .68 per liter. What I normally—like in the Yukon, it's like 1$.80 to $1.90 per liter right now, which, it's getting pretty unaffordable to go large, long distances in a in a car. And I think that like as this progresses, like—they're not getting—these prices are not getting cheaper, inflation is continuing, and it's quickly going to become really hard, I think, for your average person to go anywhere in a vehicle when it's costing them, like, over $100 to fill a single tank. And that's, I think, where we have to return to what we did historically, which is travel on rivers. And I mean, it's not even just returning to, like, historical transport, I guess. Like we can still use road infrastructure, a lot of people bike everywhere. And you can go pretty long distance—like actually, it's super common in the Yukon to see people biking the entire Klondike highway, or the entire Dempster highway, like all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is pretty awesome. **Inmn ** 31:27 Whoa.  **Tav ** 32:03 Yeah, yeah, I see them all the time, actually. Yeah, so—but anyways, the point being like, as we're getting, like, priced out of these things that we once took for granted, we're gonna have to understand that, like, people think about collapse and preparedness from really local perspective. And I think that's great. Really, I think getting more local is awesome. But I think what people also forget about is the fact that, like, we still are really an interconnected species. And we always have been, even before modern globalization. Like people really were traveling very far to go trade or whatever, on rivers or on the sea. And I think it's important to recognize that we probably should still be doing that because it does strengthen everybody's community. Like, just, I don't know, checking in on the community next door, or, you know, a few kilometers down the river is important too and, you know, sharing, I guess. Like, I guess there's inter-community preparedness and then intra-community preparedness. And I like to think that, like, using the environment and more specifically the waterways to like stay connected, even when we can't drive everywhere, is is pretty important. **Inmn ** 34:15 Yeah, I don't know. We live in a—we live in a strange world now. Um, I, you know, I didn't know this for a while and finding it out kind of blew my mind in a funny little way. But um, as far as like the eastern half of the United States is, like, someone told me that it is technically an island because you can circumnavigate the, like, eastern half of the United States and a boat. And this has, like, always kind of blown my mind. Like I'm not going to remember what the actual waterways all are, but it's like you can go from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi—whichever one of those lakes connects to the Mississippi—and like take the Mississippi down and then, like, get out into the Gulf and like sail around Florida, and like sail up the Atlantic, and then, like, through—it might be through a series of rivers and it might require using a canal, but you can like, get right back into the Great Lakes system. Like the Hudson Bay, or something. And— **Tav ** 34:50 —probably the same. I mean, if I was gonna do that I'd do the St. Lawrence River. **Inmn ** 35:47 But cool. Yeah. I don't actually know what these waterways are. **Tav ** 35:52 Yeah, for sure. I spend, like, way too much time of my life, like, I'm looking at a map and being like, okay, where does this river lead, and I'm, like, follow the river, like, all the way to its source. And then I go, like, all the way to the sea. And I'm like, okay, that's how far I can get there. But what if I portaged to this lake, and then I take that lake to this river. And like, anyways, I have, like, a whole folder have these like map files of just, like, random paddling routes that I've planned out. And I probably won't get to do all of them. But, yeah, I just, I am kind of a nerd in that I just like to go figure out, like, how I can get around places. Yeah. It's really crazy. Like, once you start—once you realize, like, your mind is opened up to the fact that, like, you can travel, basically anywhere on a boat, all you have to do is look at the blue lines on a map and trace them and figure out how you get from point A to point B using them. And I think it's also actually important to note that, like—so in a context of—yeah, like, in a context of a world where we're not able to use our highways and stuff. Like that, following a river or a creek, even if you don't have a boat, is a great way to make sure you know where you're going. Because, yeah, like, I mean, it's like a really obvious landmark. And you can just follow it the whole way. Especially in places where rivers are super seasonal, like, part of the year, it might literally just be like a bit of gravel, and you can just walk on it all the way to where you're going. Yeah, so I think that's also important to mention, that they're not—it's not just boats, it's just that they're very convenient ways to traverse a landscape, especially one that's, like, heavily forested. There might not be like a lot of other clearings nearby, so yeah. **Inmn ** 38:01 Yeah. Um, have you—so this like folder of, like, wacky routes—I'm gonna call them wacky routes—have you gotten to—could you tell us about a creative, like, trip that you took via waterways. Or, like, what's like the longest that you've traveled in like—I don't have words for the things that I'm asking you... **Tav ** 38:28 Yeah. Honestly, like, the longest trip I've ever done is unfortunately with my job, and that would be about a 10 day trip on the Yukon River. But—and that's just, it's mostly like a time thing. Like I said, you know, I—it's—we live in this cold place, and the water's only running for, like, a certain amount of time. And unfortunately, I've made it my livelihood to, like, spend my entire summer taking other people on trips. So in terms of my, like, crazy, wacky trips, I haven't gotten to do, like, any of the big ones that I want to actually do. Because, you know, they take, like, a month or more. And I just don't have a month because I need to make money.  **Inmn ** 39:17 Yeah. **Tav ** 39:18 But I'm hoping that will change this summer. I'm planning on a very long trip at the end of August, and it should be awesome.  **Inmn ** 39:28 Cool. **Tav ** 39:29 But yeah, so. So yeah, I guess in that respect, I haven't done any of those like ones that I concoct that are kind of wild. But I do like to just go and explore, like, little waterways and figure out, I don't know—I just like find a river and I'll go upstream. Or, actually a few days ago I did—I went just downstream and I I literally walked back to my car at the end, it was just a day thing. And that kind of sucks, being alone, because you're like, oh, cool, I did this river. And now I'm gonna just like walk back to my car and drive and pick up my boat. But yeah, I wish I had more cool stories of me on my own doing things that I want to do, but capitalism exists and all my fun river stories are with tourists that I'm taking. So. **Inmn ** 40:31 Yeah, that makes sense. What is this trip that you're planning gonna be like? **Tav ** 40:40 Yeah, so actually I have a couple different options in that regard, and it is kind of gonna depend on, like, what's on fire and what's not on fire. So, but my main route that I want to take is, basically, it'll be I think 1000–1500 kilometers. And, yeah, and it'll be from this place called Eagle Plains, which is, like, in the Arctic—it's like right kind of on, slightly below the Arctic Circle, on the Dempster highway. And I'll start on the Eagle River, and then go through a series of other rivers. I'll reach Old Crow, which is the furthest north settlement in the Yukon. And then I'll take the Porcupine all the way across Alaska—I'll cross into Alaska. And that'll take me down to the Yukon River. I'll hit up a couple towns on the Yukon River in Alaska, and then I'll get off at the last point where there's road access. That the trip that I'd like to do if the fires allow me. **Inmn ** 41:58 Yeah, yeah. Um, what—are there—I guess like, when planning—when planning a trip that is not, like, a super pre established, I guess, route or something, are there any things that that are important to consider or important to, like, prepare for? **Tav ** 42:19 Yeah, for sure. The first thing is, I wouldn't recommend doing a non pre established route unless you kind of know what you're doing. But the second thing is that, like, basically, my strategy is: I figured out the route. I map it out. And then I scour the internet for information on any of these rivers. So in this case, all of the rivers—it's actually very likely somebody has done this route before. Like, I'm definitely not the only person to think of it. At the very least, some Indigenous people did it, 100%, before I did. **Tav ** 43:01 Yeah. **Tav ** 43:02 Yeah. But yeah, it's a pretty obvious one, as far as routes go. It's just a bunch of rivers, and they all kind of feed into each other. There's no, like, crazy portages I hope—there shouldn't be any crazy portages or anything like that. I have heard one of the rivers runs pretty low sometimes, so I might have to, like, drag my boat along. But um, yeah, so. So yeah, and that—like I met people who've done the route up to Old Crow before. So I know that—I've heard about that portion from a couple of people that I know. And, yeah, other than that, I look online. And, like, you just have to kind of incessantly Google until something comes up about the river you want. And like, it's probably going to be some like, weird, obscure blog from 2006 where someone's like, I paddled this river with my friends and it was cool. And like, it might not even have, like, all the information that you need. But, like, to me, a lot of the time I'm like, okay, cool, if someone did it, that means it's probably fine, right. And that's kind of my strategy. Like, you're not gonna get all of the information you want. But you can get a lot of information just by, like, scouring the internet. And actually, go to your local bookstore. If you're going to like plan a river trip near you, go to a bookstore—or not your local bookstore if it's not near you. Go to the bookstore there and look for maps, because they probably have maps of local places. And if they don't have maps, you should ask them where to get maps, because they probably know where to get maps. I know in Canada, though, you can go on natural resources, Natural Resources Canada, and they should have like topographic maps of the entire country if you need, like, that kind of math. But you can also just, like, go on Google. But, um, but yeah, I guess mostly it comes down to getting information from wherever you can get your information from, whether that's people who've done it, the internet, or your local bookstore. And the second thing is, if you're doing a route you're unfamiliar with, especially if you're alone, you have to be cautious, and you have to know what to look for. And you have to be able to react really quickly to situations. Actually, literally a couple of days ago I was paddling this river in Alaska and the water's really low because of the time of year. And I was coming around a bend and there was a sweeper right across the river. And what happened is the river really, really narrowed, like, in this section. And it just, like, it went right for the sweeper—a sweeper is a tree that's like right across the water. So if you think about it, like, a broom, it'll be like right over up the surface. And then there's all these like branches on the way. And I think there was like a log and there's like other stuff underneath the sweeper. It was not a fun thing to be like hurtling towards really quickly. And yeah, so I was alone. And I, like, swung my boat around and, like, jumped out—because like, it was really low water so that it was shallow, which made it much easier to just, like, jump out of my boat as fast as possible and, like, drag it on shore. But like, it's stuff like that, where you're not necessarily expecting it and then you're like, oh shit, like, I need to deal with this right now. Get out of the way. And I actually lost my paddle it went down—I got it. It's fine. That's why you always have a spare paddle. That's the moral of the story. Have two paddles.  **Inmn ** 47:09 I feel like the moral of the story is: river guides continue to come up with horrifying names for dangers in the river. I thought I had heard the worst but "sweeper" is—sorry this is uh, this is a call back to Blix telling me about, like, just the—I forget what they're—I feel like one of them was called a "blender," and I— **Tav ** 47:35 Blender? I dunno about a blender. Maybe American river guides have different names for stuff. I don't know. I don't know. To me, the most horrifying feature on a river is an undercut. And it's unfortunately something that comes up a lot in places where the rivers freeze. So what will happen is like the banks will be covered in ice. And if you're—and if you're paddling at that time of year, there'll be undercuts along the whole riverbank, like the whole way down the river. And an undercut is basically just where the current goes like underneath a ledge right? At the worst case, it can be, like, a recirculating current under there. So like you get sucked under in like basically an underwater cave. And then it just, like, like, circles you around underneath and like an underwater cave and you just, like, sit there and die.  **Inmn ** 48:30 [Quietly] God. **Tav ** 48:30 Yeah, so that's what an undercut is. And then like the ice undercuts and kind of terrifying, something to be aware of if you're going to be paddling a river during spring or fall. Yeah, those are—to me, that's the most terrifying thing. Because like a lot of other stuff, there's like a way to kind of get around it or, like, you know, figure it out. But if you get sucked into an undercut you're kind of boned. Like you're pretty—there's not a lot you can do. **Inmn ** 49:03 Yeah. **Tav ** 49:04 Especially if you're alone. There's other people—I've heard of someone who got sucked into an undercard on the Ottawa River actually. And, like, there's this—I don't remember the name of the rapid, but there's this one part that's like this crazy undercut. And someone got sucked in there. And they got a rope on them somehow. And they had a truck, like a pickup truck. And they were pulling them out of the current with a pickup truck and the rope snapped. And, like, the pickup truck couldn't even go against the current. Like they were just stuck under—that person didn't live. But yeah, like it can be pretty—those are—yeah, again, that's like the most extreme horrifying thing I think to me, but... **Inmn ** 49:50 Stay away from—I know we're just—we're talking about our rivers are cool, but everyone's stay away from rivers. Golly. That's not my actual advice. **Tav ** 50:02 I think it—no—they're definitely—like that's the thing, right? They're definitely a force of nature. I always like to tell people: you will never win a fight against a river. But that doesn't mean you should be afraid of going on the river always, like, yeah, I feel like I've been talking about a lot of negative bad things that can happen. And I don't want to freak people out. Rivers are really nice and cool, and they help you get places, and it can be really fun. It's not all whitewater. Like, the Yukon River is a giant—like it's a highway. It's like, huge, flat river. It goes like 10 kilometers an hour or something crazy. Like, you can paddle it super fast. And there's, like, basically no hazards. Like, there's like some log jams and like stuff like that, but they're very easily avoided. And it's, yeah, as far as, like, as far as rivers go, if you want to go a long distance and not have to worry about any of that scary, complicated stuff, the Yukon river is fantastic. Actually, every year there's a race called the Yukon River Quest, where people paddle from Whitehorse to Dawson City, it's like 730 kilometers, and yeah, people are doing that in like, three days. Well, less than three days actually. Like they're times because you have to like stop-there's a mandatory rest point where you have to sleep for a certain number of hours, and they don't count that towards the final time, but basically the the race lasts like three days. That's like paddling nonstop. But to be honest, if you think about the fact that you don't have a motor, and you're not in a car or anything like that, and you're traveling 730 kilometers in three days, that's crazy. And there's like no hazards. It's so crazy. **Inmn ** 50:18 That's really cool.  **Tav ** 50:32 Yeah, you can go really fast and get places on certain rivers. **Tav ** 51:21 Cool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, that sounds fun now. Now that sounds fun.  **Tav ** 52:09 Yeah.  **Inmn ** 52:12 Um, we're kind of coming up to the end of our time. Is there anything else you want to say about waterways, or paddling, or any questions that I didn't ask you that you're like, golly, why didn't Inman asked me about this.  **Tav ** 52:29 Yeah, um, I guess mainly just—I think I didn't get to talk about oceans as much as I would have liked to. But, like, I think the main thing I would hope people can take away from this is that it's really important to learn about the water near you, if that's the ocean, if that's a river, if that's a lake. You know, learn about whatever boa, the Indigenous people in your area use to travel on that water, because it's probably really well suited for it, to be honest. And yeah, just learn about your local waterway, learn about the ecosystem. I didn't get to talk about that as much too, but—because I'm really into traveling rivers—but they're also sources of food and just, like, life for everyone, you know. So learn about what animals live there, learn about how to help your river, and—or the ocean. And just learn about your local water and have some kind of relationship with it, whether that's, like, paddling or, like, picking blueberries on the riverbank. I think it's just important that everybody is aware of water and the life that it brings us and how it connects all of us. Yeah. I think that's that's it.  **Inmn ** 54:00 Cool. That seems like a great—that is a better place to end on than the blender—the sweeper—whatever that terrifying name was. Is there anything that you want to shout out, whether it's places people can find you on the internet where you would like to be found, or projects, or just anything you want to plug or shout out?  **Tav ** 54:25 Um, yeah, like, I guess I have a tiny YouTube channel that like doesn't have really much—it's mostly just my music, if anybody cares at all. It's, um, I'm birchbark online. You can find me there. That's whatever. But I think the main thing I want to plug is: go have a nice day by the water and be nice to yourself. **Inmn ** 55:00 Cool. That's a great thing. I'm going to go find water. I think there's water here right now.  **Tav ** 55:08 Awesome. **Inmn ** 55:08 I will try. Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. **Tav ** 55:14  Yeah, for sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me. **Inmn ** 55:21 Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then go learn more about your local waterways. And also come up with a new and terrifying name for a river obstacle so that I might live in fear of water forever. But also, if you liked the show, you can support it. And you can support it by telling people about the show, or doing stuff that involves an algorithm. I don't actually really know anything about any of that. But there is stuff that one can do. Also, if you would like to support the show, you can support it financially. And you can support it financially by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can find us at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And you can sign up for different tiers. There's a super basic tier where you just get discounts. I mean, not just you, you get discounts and you get access to digital content. And there's another tier where you can get a zine that we send you every month, and it's a really cool zine. Sometimes it's a short story, sometimes it's poetry, sometimes it's an essay about something. And they're all really cool. And you can listen to those features in audio form on our other podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, and you can listen to interviews with the author, it's really cool. And in all of the ways that you support our publisher financially, it goes towards paying our audio engineer, and paying our transcriptionist, and maybe one day paying the hosts and the guests of the show. And, yeah, that's all that. We would like to give some special shout outs to some of our patrons who support us at the acknowledgement level. And just to plug how cool the acknowledgement level is: If you give us $20 a month, which goes towards us doing really cool things, then you can get us to shout out, acknowledge, or thank an organization, yourself, someone that you love, or a fictional and theoretical concept on all of our shows—except for things like, you know, if you ask us to think the Empire, we're not going to thank the Empire. So don't try. But we would like to give some special things to these folks: Thank you, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patolli Erik, Buck, Julia, CatGut, Marm Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, Anonymous funder, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much for making this show and so many other projects possible. 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