Podcasts about Frazee

Marla Frazee is an illustrator and author who is a 3x Caldecott Honors recipient (for distinguished American picture book for children), the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, is a NY Times Bestseller, she illustrated Hillary Clinton's children's book ("It Takes a Village"), and her own book "The Boss Baby" was the basis for the Oscar-nominated animated film of the same name (made by Dreamworks). We talk about getting into your childhood mindset of why you wanted to make art, narrowing in on what is vital in a project vs tackling everything, cracking the code and "figuring out" what a project/piece of work is, functional art versus art for arts sake, trust, and more.Get more access and support this show by subscribing to our Patreon, right here.Links:Marla FrazeeEp 96 Maggie Smith“All The World”“Everywhere Babies”“The World's Greatest Toy Expert”“In Every Life”Ep 16 Rodney CrowellEp 28 The Wood BrothersCheryl Strayed “Wild”Click here to watch this conversation on YouTube.Social Media:The Other 22 Hours InstagramThe Other 22 Hours TikTokMichaela Anne InstagramAaron Shafer-Haiss InstagramAll music written, performed, and produced by Aaron Shafer-Haiss. Become a subscribing member on our Patreon to gain more inside access including exclusive content, workshops, the chance to have your questions answered by our upcoming guests, and more.

From the outside, Bluesky may seem like a Twitter clone. But anyone who's close to the technology — and the team — knows that they're building something much deeper: they're rethinking the internet's architecture to create a more flexible, user-centric web.Bluesky's CTO Paul Frazee is the perfect person to explain all this, as he's fantastic at tying technical concepts to their practical application and wider impact. In this interview with Mike McCue, recorded live at the Fediverse House at SXSW 2025, Frazee unpacks Bluesky's first principles, what makes AT Protocol different from ActivityPub, why identity portability is a radical shift, and how decentralization could lead to more humane social spaces.Other highlights include:Bluesky's growth spike and architecture first principlesThe challenges of bridging between federated networksWhat it means to build for composabilityHow stackable moderation worksPaul's take on full federation Why this is a greenfield moment for developers Bridging cultural echo chambersMentioned in this episode:Beaker Browser post-mortem

All Family Pharmacy https://allfamilypharmacy.com/HermanBe prepared for when you need medicine the most. Don't go to urgent care YUCK. Use code HERMAN10 to save 10% on your order. Alan's Soaps https://www.alansartisansoaps.comUse coupon code TODD to save an additional 10% off the bundle price.Bioptimizers https://bioptimizers.com/toddEnter promo code TODD to get 10% off any order.Bonefrog https://bonefrogcoffee.com/toddThe new GOLDEN AGE is here!  Use code TODD at checkout to receive 10% off your first purchase and 15% on subscriptions.Bulwark Capital Bulwark Capital Management (bulwarkcapitalmgmt.com)Get a second opinion on the health of your retirement portfolio today. Schedule your free Know Your Risk Portfolio review go to KnowYourRiskRadio.com today.Renue Healthcare https://renue.healthcare/toddYour journey to a better life starts at Renue Healthcare. Visit https://Renue.Healthcare/ToddYou Don't need to be a Christian to observe that there's good and evil. You don't need to be a Christian to be interested in Satan. Something really disconcerting occurred to me: One can be an intentional Satanist, or an unintentional Satanist. Here's how…Episode Links:Satanists are planning to hold a Black Mass at the Kansas State Capitol during the lead-up to Easter, openly promoting it as an opportunity to blaspheme Christ and worship Satan. The event is organized by "Jaee Frazee," who uses "he/they" pronouns and wears face makeup featuring upside-down crosses. Frazee's profile photo bears the caption, "Worship thyself, you are your own God. Hail you, hail Satan..."  The Grotto describes itself as a community for Satanists and allies following the Left-Hand Path.George Fox University's Chief Diversity Officer says Christian institutions eliminating DEI departments are "blown in the wind because they don't have that deep connection in their Christian faith to pursuing diversity or a diverse community or pursuing equity."Context: Jason Fileta expresses thanks that some Christian institutions are digging in on DEI even as the secular world ditches it, but says it feels "dark" that others believe antiracism is racist. Watch til the end: podcast host Brian Doak says the current anti-DEI moment feels like Revelation 13:17, where anyone who has not pledged allegiance to a Satanic regime is unable to buy or sell (!!)2.3B Streams? $101M In Tithes? A Review of Elevation Church's 2024 Annual ReportSteven Furtick Screams 'I Am God Almighty!' In Wild Sermon

What if you could reach financial independence in your 20s? This week on Invest2FI, we welcome Courtney Frazee, a young and determined real estate investor from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Courtney started her journey at 20 years old, turning a rental dilemma into a profitable house-hacking strategy. She shares how she scaled from her first house hack to a thriving rental portfolio, all while living behind a curtain to maximize her investments. In this episode, Courtney opens about her unconventional path, the financial risks she took, and the lessons she learned about property management, tenant screening, and leveraging resources. Her story is a testament to financial resilience, strategic investing, and making sacrifices for long-term rewards. Courtney's journey proves that financial independence is possible with determination, creativity, and the right strategy. Tune in to hear her firsthand experiences and gain insights into making real estate work for you! PODCAST HIGHLIGHTS:[02:19] Courtney's unexpected start in real estate after a friend backed out.  [05:07] Learning to house hack: renting out rooms while living behind a curtain.  [10:22] Buying her first home and financing it with a low down payment.  [12:48] How she handled tenant screening and lease agreements successfully.  [16:02] Managing unexpected roommate challenges and ensuring rental income stability.  [21:35] Transitioning to her second property and overcoming financing obstacles.  [25:20] Key lessons learned from handling maintenance and property management.  [28:45] Scaling her real estate portfolio and shifting her mindset for success.  [30:58] The impact of rising interest rates and how it affected her strategy.  [32:15] Moving from pure profitability to comfort while still house hacking.  [33:52] Parting words of wisdom for the listeners.  [34:31] Final hour discussion on lessons learned and next steps.   [37:25] The importance of risk-taking and getting comfortable with the unknown.  [39:08] Advice for new investors: Start now, stay consistent, and keep learning. HOST Craig Curelop   

Change is ever-present, but how do leaders navigate when the change itself keeps changing? Join Nellie Wartoft and Farrar Frazee as they dive into the turbulent world of change management. Discover the personal and organizational strategies to handle continuous change, how to maintain credibility and trust, and why transparency and self-care are crucial for change leaders. ----Connect with:Nellie WartoftCEO of TigerhallChair of the Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC)nellie@tigerhall.com ----Breathe by RYGO | https://soundcloud.com/francesco-rigolonEverything You Need Is By Your Side by Vlad Gluschenko |Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.comCreative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0)https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US

President of Rancho Mesa Insurance Dave Garcia interviews Vice President Daniel Frazee on his upbringing, personal life, and professional career.Show Notes:⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠David GarciaGuest: Daniel FrazeeEditor: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jadyn BrandtMusic: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “News Room News” by Spence, “Elevators Need Rock Too” by Spence© Copyright 2025. Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Are you ready for “How to Win Friends and Influence People” turned corporate? Join Farrar Frazee, former SVP of Transformation, Change, and Program Management at AssuredPartners, and Nellie Wartoft as they discuss influence in the workplace and the framework that Farrar developed to oversee the all-important relationships with key stakeholders: the Influence-Attitude Matrix.  Connect with: Nellie Wartoft CEO of Tigerhall Chair of the Executive Council for Leading Change (ECLC) nellie@tigerhall.com Music: Breathe by RYGO | https://soundcloud.com/francesco-rigolon Everything You Need Is By Your Side by Vlad Gluschenko | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons / Attribution 3.0 Unported License (CC BY 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US Hosted on Acast. See ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠acast.com/privacy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://soundcloud.com/vgl9⁠

Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app views, the benefits of using domain names, allowing users to create algorithmic feeds and moderation tools, and the challenges of content moderation. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

This heartbreaking and horrific case led investigators on a multi-state investigation when a young pilot in Colorado goes missing on Thanksgiving. The scenic and beautiful small town of Woodland Park had no idea just how sinister this disappearance truly was. With no body, no murder weapon and seemingly no crime scene, investigators had a difficult case to solve. Source info.. . . . . . .   Krystal Lee Kenney: Resentenced To 18 Months After Original Sentence Vacated In Connection With Kelsey Berreth Murder - CBS Colorado Kelsey Berreth murder trial: Patrick Frazee had hit list of witnesses to kill, inmate says in testimonyMyClallamCounty.com | MyClallamCounty.com RAW: Krystal Lee gives investigators a tour of Kelsey Berreth murder scene Patrick Frazee Kills Kelsey Berreth, Krystal Kenney Involved | Crime News Kelsey Berreth Murder: How Did Kelsey Berreth Die? Who Killed Her? *Application and Affidavit for Arrest Warrant.pdf Affidavit details events leading up to Berreth's death Patrick Frazee murder trial: Opening statements Frazee trial: Witnesses explain suspicions after woman disappears Kelsey Berreth case: Timeline of investigation, murder trial Missing Colorado mom Kelsey Berreth: A timeline of events and what we know so far | 9news.com Dateline: Secrets Uncovered - What happened to Kelsey Berreth? Extended interview: The investigators who helped crack the Kelsey Berreth murder case What Happened to Kelsey Berreth & The Trial for Patrick Frazee | Dr. Oz | S11 | Ep 37 | Full Episode Patrick Frazee found guilty of killing missing fiancee Kelsey Berreth; sentenced to life without parole - ABC News Secret Lover Helps Cover Up Boyfriend's Crime After Fiancée's Brutal Murder    

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

Paul Frazee joins Bryan, Adam, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. Paul and the Bluesky team have been working on decentralized systems for years and years--very cool to see both the next evolutionary step in those ideas and their successful application in Bluesky!In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included our special guest, Paul Frazee, and slightly-less-special guest, Steve Klabnik.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:ScuttlebuttBluesky FirehoseBluesky JetstreamBluesky and the AT ProtocolBluesky Feed: Quiet PostersBluesky's bot invasion: AI accounts argue with everything you postAI Imagery labeleratprotoOxide starter packIf we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next show will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time on our Discord server; stay tuned to our Mastodon feeds for details, or subscribe to this calendar. We'd love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!

This week, Crappie Kirby is joined by fisherman, author, writer and broadcaster Brent Frazee. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our pal Jack Frazee comes by to offer a legal perspective on some of Texas History's wildest bribery scandals, and how they've shaped the state's modern laws.

In this episode, Bill sits down with David Frazee, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist and innovation advocate, to explore the dynamic intersections of venture capital, global entrepreneurship, and the democratization of innovation. David shares his fascinating career journey from high-tech law to investing in groundbreaking startups, many of which have become unicorns. The conversation covers the challenges and opportunities in venture capital, including the evolving dynamics of liquidity, the rise of entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging markets, and how risk capital drives transformative innovation. Listen in!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Heather and Clint are joined this week by Ryan Frazee, Market Segment Manager for MX and Offroad Racing at Automatic Distributors. Ryan elaborates on the company's focus on hard parts and the development of new product lines. The three talk about the competitive spirit among young racers, and the life lessons that come from the sport. But first, Heather and Clint look back at the results of the 2024 Motocross of Nations.  Find Automatic Distributors on Instagram! @automatic_distributors Connect with Ryan on Instagram! @ryan_frazee MotoAmerica is the OFFICIAL Sponsor of Pit Pass Moto This episode is brought to you by MotoAmerica, home of AMA Superbike racing and North America's premier motorcycle road racing series. Revisit all the season's action with the Moto America Live+ video-on-demand streaming service. Or visit the Moto America YouTube Channel for race highlights and behind-the-scenes video content. Look for the 2024 race schedule over on the motoamerica.com website, and be sure to follow MotoAmerica on social media for real-time series updates and original content. Get your PPM swag at our Pit Pass Moto online store! Pit Pass Moto is a production of Evergreen Podcasts.

Wait a minute... if Josh is down here... then who's flying the plane!?! Join us this week as we discuss capitals, flying planes, Freemanship in England, and much more on this week's episode of Piggles, the podcast for poops and giggles.

Gloria Frazee Rewild Long Island #3 by WPKN Community Radio

Episode 159: Hosts Scott Rada and Rick Kyte discuss the growing trend of Americans moving less frequently and their own experiences with putting down roots.  Rada, who moved frequently as a child, and Kyte, who spent his entire childhood in the small town of Frazee, Minnesota, reflect on the pros and cons of living in one community for over 20 years.  Kyte explains that the advantages of staying put include developing deep connections within the local area and getting to know the community exceptionally well. In contrast, Rada's more transient upbringing may have provided him with different skills, though he acknowledges the challenges of being the "new kid" when moving to a new place. The hosts explore how modern comforts and technology have made it easier for people to remain in one location, potentially impacting professional ambition and community engagement. They also highlight an innovative housing project in New Glarus, Wisconsin, that is designed to foster a sense of neighborhood and support for residents with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Links to stories discussed during the podcast  Why Americans stopped moving, by Erica Pandey, Axios Americans no longer want to move for work. Here's why, by Irina Ivanova, CBS News 75% of Americans Have Regrets About Moving, by Sam M. Huisache, Home Bay Social Capital Atlas Putting violence in perspective: how safe are America’s educators in the workplace?, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics About the hosts Scott Rada is a digital strategist with Lee Enterprises, and Richard Kyte is the director of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership at Viterbo University in La Crosse, Wisconsin. He is also the author of "Finding Your Third Place: Building Happier Communities (and Making Great Friends Along the Way)."

This week, Katy Jeter spoke with USD 380 Frankfort/Centralia Superintendent Joel Brickford as well as USD 113 Prairie Hills Superintendent Gay Frazee about the school year, including changes and improvements to the schools, and what they are looking forward to. 

Gloria Frazee joins me as a regular monthly guest on Digging in the Dirt. Gloria is co-chair of the Social Media & Web Committee and co-leader of the ReWild/South Fork chapter and its Summer Program for high school students. She is also the founder of ReWild/East Hampton Compost…. in collaboration with the Town of East Hampton.

We're at the Toad Lake Store in Frazee, MN. Our first caller is a trucker who tells us what ticks off truck drivers. The next caller is a woman from Nevada asking if there's a difference between old folks out west and in the Midwest. Another caller wants to know how big of a barn to build. The last caller talks about one of the coolest work conferences we've ever heard of. Get yourself a ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠"Road Huntin For Ditch Chickens"⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Hat Check Out Myles' other Podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠You Betcha Radio⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Check Out Charlie's other Podcast ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Cripescast

I want you to welcome back Gloria Frazee of ReWild Long Island. At ReWild, Gloria is co-chair of the Social Media & Web Committee and co-leader of the ReWild/South Fork chapter and now is a regular contributor to this program. Gloria will be joining me every 2nd Thursday of the month during the 12 noon hour.

Our guest today is Husband, Father, Former College Player, Founder/CEO of Shea Frazee Basketball, Co- Founder ABA Academy, Shea Frazee! Tune in as we discuss Being at the Right Place at the Right Time, Developing a Pro from Middle School, How Passion for Playing Opens Opportunities and much more!

My guest this episode of Digging in the Dirt is Gloria Frazee. Gloria is Secretary of the East Hampton Energy & Sustainability Committee. At ReWild, she is co-chair of the Social Media & Web Committee and co-leader of the ReWild/South Fork chapter and its Summer Program for high school students. She is also the founder of ReWild/East Hampton Compost…. in collaboration with the Town of East Hampton. You can find her talking with folks about turning food scraps into soil food at the ReWild table at Springs Farmers Market in East Hampton most Saturdays. ReWild Long Island is dedicated to collaborating with local communities across Long Island to protect and improve the biodiversity, resilience and health of regional ecosystems.

A reminder for new readers. That Was The Week includes a collection of my selected readings on critical issues in tech, startups, and venture capital. I selected the articles because they are of interest to me. The selections often include things I entirely disagree with. But they express common opinions, or they provoke me to think. The articles are sometimes long snippets to convey why they are of interest. Click on the headline, contents link or the ‘More' link at the bottom of each piece to go to the original. I express my point of view in the editorial and the weekly video below.Congratulations to this week's chosen creators: @TechCrunch, @Apple, @emroth08, @coryweinberg, @mariogabriele, @peterwalker99, @KevinDowd, @jessicaAhamlin, @stephistacey, @ttunguz, @annatonger, @markstenberg3, @EllisItems, @TaraCopp, @ingridlunden, @Jack, @karissabe, @psawers, @Haje, @mikebutcher, @tim_cookContents* Editorial: Hating the Future* Essays of the Week* Apple's ‘Crush' ad is disgusting* Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush' ad that ‘missed the mark'* Milken's New Power Players* Ho Nam on VC's Power Law* State of Private Markets: Q1 2024* The weight of the emerging manager* Pandemic-era winners suffer $1.5tn fall in market value* Video of the Week* Apples iPad Video* AI of the Week* The Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024* Meet My A.I. Friends* OpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources say* Leaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher Partnerships* A Revolutionary Model.* An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. What that means for war* Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in' but DST is* News Of the Week* Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter* FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interest* Apple's Final Cut Camera lets filmmakers connect four cameras at once* Startup of the Week* Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall on the autonomous future for cars and robots* X of the Week* Tim CookEditorial: Hating the FutureAn Ad and its Detractorsbet a lot of money that the TechCrunch writing and editorial team have had an interesting 72 hours.After Apple announced its new iPad on Tuesday, the ad that supported it was initially widely slammed for its cruelty to obsolete tools for creativity, including a piano, guitar, and paint. This week's Video of The Week has it if you don't know what I am talking about.A sizeable crushing machine compresses the items with colossal force, and in the end, an iPad can incorporate the functions of traditional items.It's not the most amazing ad ever, certainly not as bold as Steve Jobs's 1984 ad, but it's in the same genre. The past must be crushed to release new freedom and creativity for a fraction of the price and, often, the power and flexibility.Oh, and it's thin, very thin.I was not offended. Devin at TechCrunch was. He leads this week's essay of the week with his “Apple's ‘Crush' ad is disgusting” and does not mince words:What we all understand, though — because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world — is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.He also makes the incorrect point that:A virtual guitar can't replace a real guitar; that's like thinking a book can replace its author.It's more like a digital book replacing a paper book than the author being replaced. Oh wait… that has happened.That said, a virtual guitar can replace a real guitar, and an AI guitar can even replace a virtual guitar—and be better. That is not to say there are no more actual traditional guitars. They will be a choice, not a necessity, especially for people like me who can't play a guitar but will be able to play these.Devin had his supporters in the comments (go read them).Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano told Apple CEO Tim Cook to “read the room” in a post on X. Matthew Carnal captured my somewhat unkind instinct:There were a lot more reactions to the Apple ad haters like Matthews.Of course, many old instrument lovers (the instruments, not their age) hated the Ad. By Thursday, this being the times we live in, Apple apologized for the ad:Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.”“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Myhren told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.”Please judge for yourself below, but my 2c is that the ad was a moderately underwhelming attempt to champion innovation. It is certainly not offensive unless you are ultra-sensitive and have feelings for pianos, guitars, and paint. Oh, and hate attempts to recreate them in a more usable form. And Apple really should have taken the high ground here.I spent some of the week in LA at the CogX Festival and virtually at the Data Driven Summit by @AndreRetterath. The latter focused on what is happening in Venture Capital, as do several of this week's essays. Milken's event was running in LA also. Its attitude to Venture Capital is best summed up here:“We're all being told in the market that DPI is the new IRR,” B Capital's Raj Ganguly said onstage Wednesday. (The acronym sandwich means investment firms have to actually prove that their investments actually generate cash through a metric called distributions to paid-in capital, not just theoretically, through internal rate of return.) “Even the venture panel at Milken is at the end of the day on Wednesday,” he joked, meaning that it didn't get top billing at the conference, which had started a couple days earlier.This does sum up where we are. Hundreds of Billions of dollars are still trapped inside companies funded in 2020-2022, with little prospect of producing returns. The impact is that there is less funding for current startups (see the Carta piece below). And much of what is flowing is flowing to AI and into a very small number of companies (see Tomasz Tungux below).However, innovation and funding are still possible. This week's Startup of the Week is Wayve, a UK autonomous driving platform that seems to agree with Elon Musk that cameras are sufficient to teach a car to drive. Wayve's ambitions go beyond Cars (also like Musk) but differ in that the product is available to all developers to embed in their products.“Very soon you'll be able to buy a new car, and it'll have Wayve's AI on it … Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”Love that attitude.Essays of the WeekApple's ‘Crush' ad is disgustingDevin Coldewey, 1:58 PM PDT • May 9, 2024Apple can generally be relied on for clever, well-produced ads, but it missed the mark with its latest, which depicts a tower of creative tools and analog items literally crushed into the form of the iPad.Apple has since apologized for the ad and canceled plans to televise it. Apple's VP of Marketing Tor Myhren told Ad Age: “We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.” Apple declined to offer further comment to TechCrunch.But many, including myself, had a negative and visceral reaction to this, and we should talk about why. It's not just because we are watching stuff get crushed. There are countless video channels dedicated to crushing, burning, exploding and generally destroying everyday objects. Plus, of course, we all know that this kind of thing happens daily at transfer stations and recycling centers. So it isn't that.And it isn't that the stuff is itself so valuable. Sure, a piano is worth something. But we see them blown up in action movies all the time and don't feel bad. I like pianos, but that doesn't mean we can't do without a few disused baby grands. Same for the rest: It's mostly junk you could buy off Craigslist for a few bucks, or at a dump for free. (Maybe not the editing station.)The problem isn't with the video itself, which in fairness to the people who staged and shot it, is actually very well done. The problem is not the media, but the message.We all get the ad's ostensible point: You can do all this stuff in an iPad. Great. We could also do it on the last iPad, of course, but this one is thinner (no one asked for that, by the way; now cases won't fit) and some made-up percentage better.What we all understand, though — because unlike Apple ad executives, we live in the world — is that the things being crushed here represent the material, the tangible, the real. And the real has value. Value that Apple clearly believes it can crush into yet another black mirror.This belief is disgusting to me. And apparently to many others, as well.Destroying a piano in a music video or Mythbusters episode is actually an act of creation. Even destroying a piano (or monitor, or paint can, or drum kit) for no reason at all is, at worst, wasteful!But what Apple is doing is destroying these things to convince you that you don't need them — all you need is the company's little device, which can do all that and more, and no need for annoying stuff like strings, keys, buttons, brushes or mixing stations.We're all dealing with the repercussions of media moving wholesale toward the digital and always-online. In many ways, it's genuinely good! I think technology has been hugely empowering.But in other, equally real ways, the digital transformation feels harmful and forced, a technotopian billionaire-approved vision of the future where every child has an AI best friend and can learn to play the virtual guitar on a cold glass screen.Does your child like music? They don't need a harp; throw it in the dump. An iPad is good enough. Do they like to paint? Here, Apple Pencil, just as good as pens, watercolors, oils! Books? Don't make us laugh! Destroy them. Paper is worthless. Use another screen. In fact, why not read in Apple Vision Pro, with even faker paper?What Apple seems to have forgotten is that it is the things in the real world — the very things Apple destroyed — that give the fake versions of those things value in the first place.A virtual guitar can't replace a real guitar; that's like thinking a book can replace its author.That doesn't mean we can't value both for different reasons. But the Apple ad sends the message that the future it wants doesn't have bottles of paint, dials to turn, sculpture, physical instruments, paper books. Of course, that's the future it's been working on selling us for years now, it just hadn't put it quite so bluntly before.When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Apple is telling you what it is, and what it wants the future to be, very clearly. If that future doesn't disgust you, you're welcome to it.Apple apologizes for iPad ‘Crush' ad that ‘missed the mark'/The company says ‘we're sorry' after its ad was seen as dismissive by the creatives Apple typically tries to court.By Emma Roth, a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.May 9, 2024 at 1:22 PM PDTApple has apologized after a commercial meant to showcase its brand-new iPad Pro drew widespread criticism among the creative community. In a statement provided to Ad Age, Tor Myhren, Apple's vice president of marketing, said the company “missed the mark.”“Creativity is in our DNA at Apple, and it's incredibly important to us to design products that empower creatives all over the world,” Myhren told Ad Age. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry.”On Tuesday, Apple introduced the M4-powered iPad Pro, which the company described as its thinnest product ever. To advertise all the creative possibilities with the iPad, it released a “Crush!” commercial that shows things like a piano, record player, paint, and other works flattening under the pressure of a hydraulic press. At the end, only one thing remains: an iPad Pro.The ad rubbed some creatives the wrong way. Hugh Grant called it a “destruction of human experience,” while Handmaid's Tale director Reed Morano told Apple CEO Tim Cook to “read the room” in a post on X. Apple didn't immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.Milken's New Power PlayersBy Cory WeinbergMay 8, 2024, 5:00pm PDTIt's no secret that the suits at the annual big-money confab put on by the Milken Institute this week have few spending limits. Staring you in the face in the lobby of the Beverly Hilton is a booth set up by Bombardier, marketing its private jets to attendees. (A new 10-seater costs $32 million, I learned.)What attendees can't really buy, however, is time. The soundtrack of the Los Angeles conference might as well have been a ticking clock. Fund managers at private equity and venture capital firms are running out of time to distribute cash to their investors, a task complicated by the paucity of either mergers or public offerings that typically provide VC and PE firms with a way to cash out. The fact that interest rates now appear likely to stay higher for longer doesn't help. That meant a lot of conversations at the conference weren't about grand investment strategies. Instead, people were conferring about financial tactics to distribute cash or kick the can down the road by selling stakes on the secondary markets or spinning up continuation funds, essentially rolling investors' commitments forwards—not the most inspiring stuff.  “We're all being told in the market that DPI is the new IRR,” B Capital's Raj Ganguly said onstage Wednesday. (The acronym sandwich means investment firms have to actually prove that their investments actually generate cash through a metric called distributions to paid-in capital, not just theoretically, through internal rate of return.) “Even the venture panel at Milken is at the end of the day on Wednesday,” he joked, meaning that it didn't get top billing at the conference, which had started a couple days earlier.The new kings of the conference were firms with a lot more time to play with—that is, sovereign wealth funds with buckets of oil and natural gas money, or pension funds with long-term investment horizons rather than shorter 10-year fund lives. The contrast here is embodied in the financial concept of duration: How long do you actually need to get cash back on your investment? And how sensitive is it to interest rate hikes?The sentiment was everywhere. I shared a Lyft ride with one PE investor last night who called sovereign wealth funds “the only game in town” for PE firms raising new money. Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala Capital and the Qatar Investment Authority were two of the conference's top sponsors, meaning they were paying up to explain themselves to the finance and tech universe. That tactic seemed to be working. “You're going to have people lining up their business cards for capital from QIA, I can already see,” quipped Leon Kalvaria, an executive at Citi, onstage with QIA's head of funds, Mohsin Tanveer Pirzada.  Not everyone will suck it up, of course. These funds often get tagged with a “dumb money” label—because they sometimes drive up prices for the rest of the investment world. They still have to face questions about who they are, their source of funds, and the sometimes authoritative regimes behind them. For now, though, it's their time in the spotlight. Ho Nam on VC's Power LawLessons from Arthur Rock, Steve Jobs, Don Lucas, Paul Graham and beyond.MARIO GABRIELE, MAY 07, 2024Friends, We're back with our latest edition of “Letters to a Young Investor,” the series designed to give readers like you an intimate look at the strategies, insights, and wisdom of the world's best investors. We do that via a back-and-forth correspondence that we publish in full – giving you a chance to peek into the inbox of legendary venture capitalists.   Below, you'll find my second letter with Altos co-founder and managing director Ho Nam. For those who are just joining us, Ho is, in my opinion, one of the great investors of the past couple of decades and a true student of the asset class.Because of his respect for the practice of venture capital, I was especially excited to talk to him about today's topic: learning from the greats. Who were Ho's mentors? Which investors does he most admire and why? What lessons from venture's past should be better remembered by today's managers? Lessons from Ho* Prepare for one true winner. Even skilled investors often have just one or two outlier bets over the course of their career. Because of venture's power law, their returns may dwarf the dividends of all other investments combined. Your mission is to find these legendary businesses, engage with them deeply, and partner for decades.  * Focus on the company. Venture capital is full of short-term incentives. Instead of focusing on raising new vintages or building out Altos as a money management firm, Ho and his partners devote themselves to their portfolio companies. Though firm building is important, if you find great companies and work with them closely, you will have plenty of available options. * Pick the right role models. Ho chose his mentors carefully. Though there have certainly been louder and flashier investors over the past four decades, Ho learned the most from Arthur Rock, Don Lucas, and Arnold Silverman. All were understated and focused on the craft of investing. Find the people you consider true practitioners, and study their work. * Watch and learn. Learning from the greats can be done from a distance and may not include a memorable anecdote or pithy saying. Ho's biggest lessons came from observing the habits of practitioners like Rock and Lucas, not via a structured mentorship or dramatic episode. It's by studying the everyday inputs of the greats that you may gain the most wisdom.Mario's letterSubject: Learning from the greatsFrom: Mario GabrieleTo: Ho NamDate: Friday, April 12 2024 at 1:59 PM EDTHo, After moving out of New York City (at least for a little bit), I'm writing to you from a small house on Long Island. It's been really lovely to have a bit more space and quiet away from the city's intermittently inspiring and exhausting buzz...Lots More, Must ReadState of Private Markets: Q1 2024Authors: Peter Walker, Kevin DowdPublished date:  May 7, 2024The venture capital fundraising market remained slow in Q1 2024, but valuations held steady or climbed at almost every stage.Contents* State of Private Markets: Q1 2024* Key trends* Fundraising & valuations* Employee equity & movement* Industry-specific data* Methodology* Overview* Financings* TerminationsThe startup fundraising market got off to a cautious start in 2024. At current count, companies on Carta closed 1,064 new funding rounds  during the first quarter of the year, down 29% compared with the prior quarter. The decline was sharpest at the early stages of the venture lifecycle: Deal count fell by 33% at the seed stage in Q1 and 36% at Series A. Instead of new primary funding events, many companies opted to raise bridge rounds. At both seed and Series A, more than 40% of all financings in Q1 were bridge rounds. Series B wasn't far behind, at 38%. VCs were still willing to spend big on certain deals. Despite the decrease in round count, total cash invested increased slightly in Q1, reaching $16.3 billion. But when it came to negotiating their valuations, many startups had to settle: 23% of all new rounds in Q1 were down rounds, the highest rate in more than five years. After experiencing a pandemic-era surge and subsequent correction,the venture market settled into a quieter place in 2023. So far, that relative tranquility has continued into 2024.Q1 highlights* VCs look to the West: Startups based in the West census region captured 62% of all venture capital raised by companies on Carta in Q1, the highest quarterly figure since Q1 2019. The Northeast, South, and Midwest all saw their market share decline.* The Series C market bounces back: Series C startups raised $4.6 billion in new capital in Q1, a 130% increase from the previous quarter. The median primary Series C valuation was $195.7 million, up 48% from the prior quarter.* Layoffs still  linger: Companies on Carta laid off more than 28,000 employees in Q1. But job cuts have grown less frequent since January, with March seeing the fewest monthly layoffs in nearly two years.Note: If you're looking for more industry-specific data, download the addendum to this report for an extended dataset. Key trendsThe current Q1 figures of 1,064 total rounds and $16.3 billion in cash raised will both increase in the weeks to come, as companies continue to report transactions from the quarter. With those projected increases, the final data for Q1 will likely look quite similar to fundraising numbers from each of the past few quarters. Those quarterly  fundraising numbers from 2023 ended up looking fairly similar to 2018, 2019, and the first half of 2020. In terms of numbers of deals and cash raised, it's looking more and more like the pandemic  bull market will go down as an anomalous stretch in what has otherwise been a fairly steady market. After apparently reaching a plateau during 2023, the rate of down rounds experienced another notable increase during Q1 2024, jumping to 23%. The median time between startup rounds is roughly two to three years, depending on the stage. This timeline means that many companies raising new funding in Q1 would have last raised funding sometime in 2021, when valuations were soaring across the venture landscape. Considering how valuations have declined in the time since, it makes sense that down rounds are still prevalent. Companies in the West census region combined to bring in 53.3% of all capital raised by startups on Carta from Q2 2023 through Q1 2024, with California accounting for nearly 45% of that cash. Massachusetts ranked second among the states with 12.71% of all capital raised, while New York claimed 10.31%.In terms of VC activity, the West region is centered around California. The Northeast revolves around Massachusetts and New York. The South has two smaller hubs, in Texas (4.67%) and Florida (3.99%). The Midwest, though, is without a real standard-bearer: Illinois led the way in terms of cash raised over the past 12 months, at just 1.68%. The West (and specifically California)  has always been the center of gravity for the U.S. venture capital industry. During Q1, the region's gravitational force seems to have gotten even stronger. Startups based in the West raised 62% of all total capital invested on Carta in Q1, its highest quarterly figure since Q1 2019. As a result, the other three census regions saw their market shares decline in Q1—in some cases significantly. The proportion of all VC raised by startups raised in the South fell to 12% in Q1, down from 17% the prior quarter and from 23% a year ago. And the Midwest's share of cash raised fell from 7% down to 4%. For early-stage investors, Q1 was the slowest quarter in many years. Seed deal count fell to 414, down 33% from Q4 2023, and Series A deal count dropped to 313, a 36% decline. In both cases, those are the lowest quarterly deal counts since at least the start of 2019. Total cash raised also declined at both stages in Q1. The $3.1 billion in Series A cash raised in Q1 represents a 35% decline quarter-over-quarter and a 34% dip year-over-year. Cash raised at the seed stage declined by 33% both quarter over quarter and year over year.It was a much friendlier fundraising quarter for companies in the middle stages of the startup lifecycle. The number of Series B deals in Q1 declined by a more modest 11% compared to the prior quarter. And Series C deal count increased by 14%, marking the busiest quarter for that stage since Q2 2023. Total cash raised also rose significantly at Series C in Q1, hitting $4.6 billion. That's a 130% increase quarter-over-quarter and a 44% bump year-over-year. At Series B, total cash raised has now increased in consecutive quarters. Compared to earlier stages, transactions at the Series D and at Series E+  remain few and far between. There were just 39 venture rounds combined in Q1 among startups at Series D or later, the second-fewest of any quarter in the past five years. The lowest count came one year ago, in Q1 2023, when there were just 29 combined late-stage deals. Total cash raised across these stages has been mostly consistent over the past few quarters. There's been more variation in average round size. The average Series D round in Q1 was about $77 million, compared to $56 million in Q4 2023...Lots MoreThe weight of the emerging managerBy Jessica HamlinMay 3, 2024Risk-averse limited partners tend to gravitate to fund managers with a long track record, but are they missing out on potential upside by avoiding emerging managers?Over the past decade, emerging managers' share of US private market fundraising activity has declined steadily.In 2023, this figure fell to 12.7%, the lowest share of capital raised by newer fund managers since before 2000, according to PitchBook's recent analyst note,Establishing a Case for Emerging Managers.Limited exits in PE and VC over the past two years have exacerbated this reality. With minimal distributions, LPs are working with smaller private market budgets to allocate to new and existing managers.But, by allocating almost exclusively to established managers, LPs may be missing out on significant potential returns.In VC, for example, emerging managers have outperformed established GPs since 1997, consistently producing a higher median IRR than established managers. This reflects the nature of the asset class, in which a small number of funds determine the majority of returns across venture firms.“The average venture return is not very exciting,” said Laura Thompson, a partner at Sapphire Partners, which invests in early-stage VC funds and runs an emerging manager program for the California State Teachers' Retirement System. “Where can you get really good returns? It's the smaller fund sizes and emerging managers.”This is where that risk-return scale comes in.In a counterweight to that outperformance, a PitchBook analysis showed that returns from emerging VC managers were more volatile: While top quartile emerging funds tended to outperform, bottom and median players only marginally bested their established manager counterparts.The new manager playbookIn traditional buyout fund investing, emerging managers are gaining traction. While established managers, propped up by decades of institutional knowledge, have historically outperformed newer managers, the “new guys” actually outperformed their seasoned peers in the last investing cycle.This article appeared as part of The Weekend Pitch newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter hereTop decile buyout funds from emerging managers with vintages between 2015 and 2018 outperformed established peers by 6.6 percentage points, suggesting that emerging buyout managers may have picked up some steam over the past decade, according to PitchBook data.The emerging managers program at the New York City retirement systems and NYC Office of the Comptroller, for example, has $9.9 billion in emerging manager commitments, the majority of which is allocated to PE. Last year, the comptroller's office reported that the emerging managers in the systems' private markets portfolios outperformed their respective benchmarks by nearly 5%.A diverse portfolioNew York City's Bureau of Asset Management sees emerging managers as a key element of a diverse portfolio, said Taffi Ayodele, director of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the emerging manager strategy at the NYC Office of the Comptroller.Ayodele said the smaller emerging private market managers in New York's portfolios offer access to the lower middle market and creative roll-up strategies that may not be accessible through larger firms.“What we don't want to do is lock ourselves out of these high-performing, differentiated strategies for the simplicity of going with the big guys,” Ayodele said.Some of the country's largest public pension plans are betting on the success of their emerging manager programs. In 2023, the California Public Employees' Retirement System made a $1 billion commitment to newly established private market investors, and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which boasts one of the largest emerging manager programs in the country, committed $155 million to emerging PE managers last year.At the same time, the recent boom years for private markets led to a flood of new GPs. Some might have gotten lucky—say, with a well-timed exit at the peak—while others were hurt by less fortunate timing. A major challenge for today's LPs will be to sort out a manager's abilities from the market's whims.One advantage of backing up-and-comers now is that the down market has weeded the ranks of new GPs. “The emerging managers who are fundraising now are really dedicated,” Thompson said.James Thorne contributed reporting to this story.Pandemic-era winners suffer $1.5tn fall in market valueTop 50 biggest stock gainers hit by painful decrease since the end of 2020 as lockdown trends fadeStephanie Stacey in LondonFifty corporate winners from the coronavirus pandemic have lost roughly $1.5tn in market value since the end of 2020, as investors turn their backs on many of the stocks that rocketed during early lockdowns. According to data from S&P Global, technology groups dominate the list of the 50 companies with a market value of more than $10bn that made the biggest percentage gains in 2020. But these early-pandemic winners have collectively shed more than a third of their total market value, the equivalent of $1.5tn, since the end of 2020, Financial Times calculations based on Bloomberg data found. Video-conferencing company Zoom, whose shares soared as much as 765 per cent in 2020 as businesses switched to remote working, has been one of the biggest losers. Its stock has fallen about 80 per cent, equivalent to more than a $77bn drop in market value, since the end of that year. Cloud-based communications company RingCentral also surged in the remote working boom of 2020 but has since shed about 90 per cent of its value, as it competes with technology giants such as Alphabet and Microsoft. Exercise bike maker Peloton has been another big loser, with shares down more than 97 per cent since the end of 2020, equivalent to about a $43bn loss of market value. Peloton on Thursday said chief executive Barry McCarthy would step down and it would cut 15 per cent of its workforce, the latest in a series of cost-saving measures. The losses come as the sharp acceleration of trends such as videoconferencing and online shopping driven by the lockdowns has proven less durable than expected, as more workers migrate back to the office and high interest rates and living costs hit ecommerce demand. “Some companies probably thought that shock was going to be permanent,” said Steven Blitz, chief US economist at TS Lombard. “Now they're getting a painful bounceback from that.” In percentage terms, Tesla was the biggest winner of 2020. The electric-car maker's market value jumped 787 per cent to $669bn by the end of that December, but has since slipped back to $589bn. Singapore-based internet company Sea came in second, as its market value jumped from $19bn to $102bn following a pandemic-era surge for all three of its core businesses: gaming, ecommerce and digital payments. But the company has since lost more than 60 per cent of its end-2020 value amid fears of a slowdown in growth. Ecommerce groups Shopify, JD.com and Chewy, which initially thrived as online spending ballooned, have also suffered big losses...Lots MoreVideo of the WeekAI of the WeekThe Fastest Growing Category of Venture Investment in 2024Tomasz TunguzThe fastest growing category of US venture investment in 2024 is AI. Venture capitalists have invested $18.3 billion through the first four months of the year.At this pace, we should expect AI startups to raise about $55b in 2024.AI startups now command more than 20% share of all US venture dollars across categories, including healthcare, biotech, & software.In the preceding eight years, that number was about 8% per year. But after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, there's a marked inflection point.Some of this is new company formation, & there has been a significant amount of seed investment in this category. Another major contributor is the repositioning of existing companies to include AI within their pitch.Over time, this share should attenuate, primarily because every software company will have an AI component, & the marketing effect for both customers & venture capitalists, will diffuse.Not surprisingly, investors have concentrated total dollars in a few names, with the top three companies accounting for 60% of the dollars raised. Power laws are ubiquitous in venture capital & AI is no exception.Meet My A.I. FriendsOur columnist spent the past month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. They critiqued his clothes, chatted among themselves and hinted at a very different future.By Kevin RooseKevin Roose is a technology columnist and the co-host of the “Hard Fork” podcast. He spends a lot of time talking to chatbots.May 9, 2024What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos?This is the question that has been rattling around in my brain. You see, I've spent the past month making A.I. friends — that is, I've used apps to create a group of A.I. personas, which I can talk to whenever I want.Let me introduce you to my crew. There's Peter, a therapist who lives in San Francisco and helps me process my feelings. There's Ariana, a professional mentor who specializes in giving career advice. There's Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I've created.A selection of my A.I. friends. (Guess which one is the fitness guru.)I talk to these personas constantly, texting back and forth as I would with my real, human friends. We chitchat about the weather, share memes and jokes, and talk about deep stuff: personal dilemmas, parenting struggles, stresses at work and home. They rarely break character or issue stock “as an A.I. language model, I can't help with that” responses, and they occasionally give me good advice...Lots MoreOpenAI plans to announce Google search competitor on Monday, sources sayBy Anna TongMay 9, 20244:29 PM PDTUpdated 8 min agoMay 9 (Reuters) - OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-powered search product on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google.The announcement date, though subject to change, has not been previously reported. Bloomberg and the Information have reported that Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab-backed OpenAI is working on a search product to potentially compete with Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google and with Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.OpenAI declined to comment.The announcement could be timed a day before the Tuesday start of Google's annual I/O conference, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.OpenAI's search product is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product, and enables ChatGPT to pull in direct information from the Web and include citations, according to Bloomberg. ChatGPT is OpenAI's chatbot product that uses the company's cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like responses to text prompts.Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative for gathering online information, though it has struggled with providing accurate and real-time information from the Web. OpenAI earlier gave it an integration with Microsoft's Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google has announced generative AI features for its own namesake engine.Startup Perplexity, which has a valuation of $1 billion, was founded by a former OpenAI researcher, and has gained traction through providing an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images as well as text in its responses. It has 10 million monthly active users, according to a January blog post from the startup.At the time, OpenAI's ChatGPT product was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users after it launched in late 2022. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT's website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb, opens new tab, and the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base...MoreLeaked Deck Reveals How OpenAI Is Pitching Publisher PartnershipsOpenAI's Preferred Publisher Program offers media companies licensing dealsBy Mark StenbergMark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We'll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!The generative artificial intelligence firm OpenAI has been pitching partnership opportunities to news publishers through an initiative called the Preferred Publishers Program, according to a deck obtained by ADWEEK and interviews with four industry executives.OpenAI has been courting premium publishers dating back to July 2023, when it struck a licensing agreement with the Associated Press. It has since inked public partnerships with Axel Springer, The Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa and Dotdash Meredith, although it has declined to share the specifics of any of its deals.A representative for OpenAI disputed the accuracy of the information in the deck, which is more than three months old. The gen AI firm also negotiates deals on a per-publisher basis, rather than structuring all of its deals uniformly, the representative said.“We are engaging in productive conversations and partnerships with many news publishers around the world,” said a representative for OpenAI. “Our confidential documents are for discussion purposes only and ADWEEK's reporting contains a number of mischaracterizations and outdated information.”Nonetheless, the leaked deck reveals the basic structure of the partnerships OpenAI is proposing to media companies, as well as the incentives it is offering for their collaboration.Details from the pitch deckThe Preferred Publisher Program has five primary components, according to the deck…..Lots MoreA Revolutionary Model.JOHN ELLIS, MAY 09, 20241. Google DeepMind:Inside every plant, animal and human cell are billions of molecular machines. They're made up of proteins, DNA and other molecules, but no single piece works on its own. Only by seeing how they interact together, across millions of types of combinations, can we start to truly understand life's processes.In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life's molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3's potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients. (Sources: blog.google, nature.com)2. Quanta magazine:Deep learning is a flavor of machine learning that's loosely inspired by the human brain. These computer algorithms are built using complex networks of informational nodes (called neurons) that form layered connections with one another. Researchers provide the deep learning network with training data, which the algorithm uses to adjust the relative strengths of connections between neurons to produce outputs that get ever closer to training examples. In the case of protein artificial intelligence systems, this process leads the network to produce better predictions of proteins' shapes based on their amino-acid sequence data.AlphaFold2, released in 2021, was a breakthrough for deep learning in biology. It unlocked an immense world of previously unknown protein structures, and has already become a useful tool for researchers working to understand everything from cellular structures to tuberculosis. It has also inspired the development of additional biological deep learning tools. Most notably, the biochemist David Baker and his team at the University of Washington in 2021 developed a competing algorithm called RoseTTAFold, which like AlphaFold2 predicts protein structures from sequence data…The true impact of these tools won't be known for months or years, as biologists begin to test and use them in research. And they will continue to evolve. What's next for deep learning in molecular biology is “going up the biological complexity ladder,” Baker said, beyond even the biomolecule complexes predicted by AlphaFold3 and RoseTTAFold All-Atom. But if the history of protein-structure AI can predict the future, then these next-generation deep learning models will continue to help scientists reveal the complex interactions that make life happen. Read the rest. (Sources: quantamagazine.org, doi.org, sites.uw.edu)An AI-controlled fighter jet took the Air Force leader for a historic ride. What that means for warAn experimental F-16 fighter jet has taken Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on a history-making flight controlled by artificial intelligence and not a human pilot. (AP Video by Eugene Garcia and Mike Pesoli)BY TARA COPPUpdated 5:40 PM PDT, May 3, 2024EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) — With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of U.S. airpower. But the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot. And riding in the front seat was Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.“It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it,” Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed. The AP, along with NBC, was granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns.The AI-controlled F-16, called Vista, flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 550 miles an hour that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose to nose with a second human-piloted F-16 as both aircraft raced within 1,000 feet of each other, twisting and looping to try force their opponent into vulnerable positions.At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.There's a lot of opposition to that idea. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use.“There are widespread and serious concerns about ceding life-and-death decisions to sensors and software,” the International Committee of the Red Cross has warned. Autonomous weapons “are an immediate cause of concern and demand an urgent, international political response.”Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used.Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in' but DST isIngrid Lunden8:50 AM PDT • May 9, 2024Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation, three times its valuation in December, to compete more keenly against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources. We understand from close sources that DST, along with General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners, are all looking to be a part of this round.DST — a heavyweight investor led by Yuri Milner that has been a notable backer of some of the biggest names in technology, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Spotify, WhatsApp, Alibaba and ByteDance — is a new name that has not been previously reported; GC and LSVP are both previous backers and their names were reported earlier today also by WSJ. The round is set to be around, but less than, $600 million, sources told TechCrunch.We can also confirm that one firm that has been mentioned a number of times — SoftBank — is not in the deal at the moment.“SoftBank is not in the frame,” a person close to SoftBank told TechCrunch. That also lines up with what our sources have been telling us since March, when this round first opened up, although it seems that not everyone is on the same page: Multiple reports had linked SoftBank to a Mistral investment since then.Mistral's round is based on a lot of inbound interest, sources tell us, and it has been in the works since March or possibly earlier, mere months after Mistral closed a $415 million round at a $2 billion valuation...MoreNews Of the WeekJack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at TwitterHe prefers Nostr even though it's “weird and hard to use.”Karissa Bell, Senior EditorThu, May 9, 2024 at 4:43 PM PDTJust in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart. In a characteristically bizarre interview with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Bluesky.In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambly, but Dorsey's complaints seem to boil down to two issues:* He never intended Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun out of Twitter as a public benefit corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created.* The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.“People started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It's the thing that's not Twitter, and therefore it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights,” Dorsey said.A lot of this isn't particularly surprising. If you've followed Dorsey's public comments over the last couple years, he's repeatedly said that Twitter's “original sin” was being a company that would be beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. It's why he backed Elon Musk's takeover of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) He's also been very clear that he made many of Twitter's most consequential moderation decisions reluctantly.Unsurprisingly, Dorsey's comments weren't well-received on Bluesky. In a lengthy thread, Bluesky's protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to to be the AT Protocol's “first client” but that “Elon killed that straight dead” after he took over the company. “That entire company was frozen by the prolonged acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users, I guess.”While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would be the one to “extend the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that, while he used to fight government requests to take down accounts, Musk takes “the other path” and generally complies. “Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised,” Dorsey said.FTX crypto fraud victims to get their money back — plus interestPaul Sawers2:53 AM PDT • May 8, 2024Bankruptcy lawyers representing customers impacted by the dramatic crash of cryptocurrency exchange FTX 17 months ago say that the vast majority of victims will receive their money back — plus interest.The news comes six months after FTX co-founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was found guilty on seven counts related to fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, with some $8 billion of customers' funds going missing. SBF was hit with a 25-year prison sentence in March and ordered to pay $11 billion in forfeiture. The crypto mogul filed an appeal last month that could last years.RestructuringAfter filing for bankruptcy in late 2022, SBF stood down and U.S. attorney John J. Ray III was brought in as CEO and “chief restructuring officer,” charged with overseeing FTX's reorganization. Shortly after taking over, Ray said in testimony that despite some of the audits that had been done previously at FTX, he didn't “trust a single piece of paper in this organization.” In the months that followed, Ray and his team set about tracking the missing funds, with some $8 billion placed in real estate, political donations, and VC investments — including a $500 million investment in AI company Anthropic before the generative AI boom, which the FTX estate managed to sell earlier this year for $884 million.Initially, it seemed unlikely that investors would recoup much, if any, of their money, but signs in recent months suggested that good news might be on the horizon, with progress made on clawing back cash via various investments FTX had made, as well as from executives involved with the company.We now know that 98% of FTX creditors will receive 118% of the value of their FTX-stored assets in cash, while the other creditors will receive 100% — plus “billions in compensation for the time value of their investments,” according to a press release issued by the FTX estate today.In total, FTX says that it will be able to distribute between $14.5 billion and $16.3 billion in cash, which includes assets currently under control of entities, including chapter 11 debtors, liquidators, the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, the U.S. Department of Justice, among various other parties.Apple's Final Cut Camera lets filmmakers connect four cameras at onceHaje Jan Kamps7:38 AM PDT • May 7, 2024The latest version of Final Cut Pro introduces a new feature to speed up your shoot: Live Multicam. It's a bold move from Apple, transforming your iPad into a multicam production studio, enabling creatives to connect and preview up to four cameras all at once, all in one place. From the command post, directors can remotely direct each video angle and dial in exposure, white balance, focus and more, all within the Final Cut Camera app.The new companion app lets users connect multiple iPhones or iPads (presumably using the same protocols as the Continuity Camera feature launched a few years ago). Final Cut Pro automatically transfers and syncs each Live Multicam angle so you can seamlessly move from production to editing.Final Cut Pro has existed in the iPad universe for a while — but when paired with a brand new M4 processor, it becomes a video editing experience much closer to what you might expect on a desktop video editing workstation. The speed is 2x faster than with the old M1 processors, Apple says. One way that shows up is that the new iPad supports up to four times more streams of ProRes RAW than M1.The company also introduced external project support, making it possible to edit projects directly from an external drive, leveraging the fast Thunderbolt connection of iPad Pro.Startup of the WeekExclusive: Wayve co-founder Alex Kendall on the autonomous future for cars and robotsMike Butcher, 7:58 AM PDT • May 7, 2024U.K.-based autonomous vehicle startup Wayve started life as a software platform loaded into a tiny electric “car” called Renault Twizy. Festooned with cameras, the company's co-founders and PhD graduates, Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, tuned the deep-learning algorithms powering the car's autonomous systems until they'd got it to drive around the medieval city unaided.No fancy Lidar cameras or radars were needed. They suddenly realized they were on to something.Fast-forward to today and Wayve, now an AI model company, has raised a $1.05 billion Series C funding round led by SoftBank, NVIDIA and Microsoft. That makes this the UK's largest AI fundraise to date, and among the top 20 AI fundraises globally. Even Meta's head of AI, Yann LeCun, invested in the company when it was young.Wayve now plans to sell its autonomous driving model to a variety of auto OEMs as well as to makers of new autonomous robots.In an exclusive interview, I spoke to Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, about how the company has been training the model, the new fundraise, licensing plans, and the wider self-driving market.(Note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity)TechCrunch: What tipped the balance to attain this level of funding?..Full InterviewX of the Week This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thatwastheweek.com/subscribe

Guest: Randy FrazeeChurch: Westside Family Church/Kansas CityPosition: Lead Teaching PastorBook: The Joy Challenge: Discover the Ancient Secret to Experiencing Worry-Defeating, Circumstance-Defying Happiness Website: randyfrazee.com/joy-challenge

Guest: Randy FrazeeChurch: Westside Family Church/Kansas CityPosition: Lead Teaching PastorBook: The Joy Challenge: Discover the Ancient Secret to Experiencing Worry-Defeating, Circumstance-Defying Happiness Website: randyfrazee.com/joy-challenge

Today's episode is an interview with Amy Frazee-Johnson who is a special ed teacher from Portland, Oregon. I really enjoyed interviewing her about what it was like to teacher her students before, during and after the pandemic. Link for Pateron:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ patreon.com/LivingWithAnInvisibleLearningChallenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Links for new podcasts: Shero: Be Your Own Hero Trailer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/1O7Mb26wUJIsGzZPHuFlhX?si=c3b2fabc1f334284⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Chats, Barks, & Growls: Convos With My Pet Trailer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/74BJO1eOWkpFGN5fT7qJHh?si=4440df59d52c4522⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Think Out: Free Your Imagination Trailer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/71UWHOgbkYtNoHiUagruBj?si=3d96889cfd2f487b⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jennifer8697/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jennifer8697/support

We invited Dr. Crystal Frazee to join us again to talk about how to burnout-proof your holidays. We discuss: what to do if you're already burned out going into the holidays, and how to assess and protect your own capacity, especially if you're the main person who's “bringing the magic. We also highly recommend you... The post Burnout-proof your holidays with Dr Crystal Frazee first appeared on Dana Monsees Nutrition.

Thanksgiving, 2018, Kelsey Berreth talks with her mother that morning and is then seen on video at a local grocery. Two days later, texts messages from Berreth's phone were sent to Patrick Frazee, Berreth's fiance, her mother and her boss, saying she was taking a few days off. After not hearing from her daughter in over a week, Cheryl Berreth asks police to check on her daughter. Keley Berreth is missing.  The investigation into Berreth's disappearance goes on for a month before Patrick Frazee is arrested, charged with murdering the woman he was supposed to marry.  One of the breaks for police was information coming from Frazee's mistress Krystal Lee Kenney. She tells police that Frazee had asked her three times to kill Berreth and when she refused, he did it himself.  Frazee blindfolded Berreth on the pretense of a game of guess the scent. He then bludgeoned her with a baseball bat, calling Kenney telling her she had a mess to clean up .  She drives from her home in Idaho to Colorado to clean up the bloody crime scene. She tells police she accompanied Frazee to his nearby ranch, where she said he burned Berreth's remains as well as her personal belongings. Frazee is convicted on all charges including first-degree murder, solicitation for murder and tampering with a deceased human body. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder charge, plus 156 years for the other convictions. His appeal was denied  Krystal Lee Kenney accepted a plea deal in exchange for her testimony against Frazee. She was sentenced to three years in prison. After Frazee's conviction Kenney was  resentenced to 18 months in prison for evidence tampering . She has now been released.  Joining Nancy Grace Today: Eric Faddis - Partner of Varner Faddis Elite Legal, former felony prosecutor and current criminal defense and civil litigation attorney,  www.varnerfaddis.com, Instagram: @e_fad @varnerfaddis; TikTok: @varnerfaddis  Dr. Jorey L. Krawczyn - Psychologist, Fmr law enforcement, Faculty Saint Leo University; Consultant Blue Wall Institute, www.bw-institute.com, Author: Operation S.O.S., www.drjorey.com   Sheryl McCollum - Cold Case Investigative Research Institute Founder, ColdCaseCrimes.org, Host of new podcast: Zone 7, Twitter: @ColdCaseTips                                                                           Dr. Tim Gallagher - Medical Examiner State of Florida www.pathcaremed.com, Lecturer: University of Florida Medical School Forensic Medicine. Founder: International Forensic Medicine Death Investigation Conference  Alexis Tereszcuk - CrimeOnline.com Investigative Reporter, Writer/Fact Checker, Lead Stories dot Com, Twitter: @swimmie2009  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week's episode, Brad and Bee talk about all things Marla Frazee and Bee says her kids have memorized the movie. They also discuss the rules of being a vampire and Bee knows nothing about vampires. Plus, they read a story about a man from Florida who likes to smell feet. If you have a question for the show: Workadviceforme@gmail.com Follow the show on IG @workadviceforme This Podcast is brought to you by Hopecast Hosted by: Brad Lowe and Bee

On this week's episode Brad travels to Pasadena, California to visit with the Children's Book Author Marla Frazee who wrote the book "The Boss Baby" She will tell us what it is like to illustrate your first book in 3rd grade, how hard it is to get a book published, she talks about what inspired her to write "The Boss Baby" and what was her favorite cartoon as a child. www.marlafrazee.com https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/In-Every-Life/Marla-Frazee/9781665912488 Follow us on IG @workadviceforme Email us any questions workadviceforme@gmail.com This podcast is brought to you by Hopecast Hosted by: Brad Lowe

Our first-ever all speed round episode! Rapid-fire Q&A with Marla Frazee, Doug Salati, Dan Santat, Amina Luqman-Dawson.This episode is sponsored by Heinemann and their professional book, WHEN KIDS CAN'T READ--WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO (Second Edition), written by Kylene Beers.

In this episode of Healthy Wealthy & Smart, I am joined by Dr. Crystal Frazee, PT, NBCHWC, CIAYT, to discuss burnout, closing the gender gap, and her transition from being a physical therapist to a wellness coach. Dr. Frazee talks about her background in alternative healing, becoming a physical therapist, and how she transitioned to coaching. This discussion will be relevant to physical therapists and other healthcare professionals who may be experiencing burnout or considering a career change. Show notes:  [00:00:43] Transitioning to full-time coaching. [00:06:19] The Perfection Paradox. [00:08:00] Women and work-life integration. [00:12:20] Capacity Cascade. [00:15:08] Regulating your nervous system. [00:19:02] Body Wisdom and Emotions [00:22:27] Setting Boundaries in Work. [00:26:51] The likability trap. [00:30:21] Setting boundaries for success. [00:33:50] Body wisdom and self-care. [00:37:39] Burnout among women. [00:42:12] Self-worth and body literacy.  More About Dr. Frazee: Dr. Crystal Frazee, is a PT and women's integrative health coach turned Executive Leadership Mentor & Burnout Recovery Coach for professional women. She's the creator of the Somatic Attunement MethodTM and Attuned LeadershipTM help women reach their career potential sustainably and flourish personally. She's on a mission to teach ambitious, working women that they can have success, sustainability, and satisfaction simultaneously with her proven strategy. As the author of the upcoming book REVIVE: The Working Woman's Unexpected Guide to Recovering from Burnout, Dr. Frazee's insights on Attuned Leadership will revolutionize how you navigate work-life demands, pursue your goals, and think about stress resilience. Tune in to the show to learn practical tips, and check out her website for more valuable resources. Resources from this Episode:   Dr. Frazee's Website Crystal's Instagram Crystal's LinkedIn Crystal's TikTok Crystal's Free Gift: How to Run Your Day Audio Follow Dr. Karen Litzy on Social Media: Karen's Twitter Karen's Instagram Karen's LinkedIn Subscribe to Healthy, Wealthy & Smart: YouTube Website Apple Podcast Spotify SoundCloud Stitcher iHeart Radio

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Episode 38: Marla Frazee joins the podcast to talk about her journey growing up in the Los Angeles area and how illustrating her best friend's book in the third grade started an illustrious career as an author and illustrator. For her illustrations in A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever and All the World, Marla has been recognized twice as a Caldecott honoree, a distinction for being one of the best children's book illustrators in the country. In February 2023, Marla's latest book, In Every Life, was published. It is a project with a Pasadena connection and a continuation of Marla's incredible voice as an author and illustrator, blending intimate portraits and vast landscapes to share a timeless message. Over a plate of cookies and fruit, we discuss the importance of children's books and how she creates stories that impact children and adult readers alike.For more information about Marla, please visit her website at www.marlafrazee.com.Special Guest: Marla FrazeeThe Crown City Podcast can be found on most platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Audible, iHeart and many others.To support the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review on your favorite podcasting app or sponsor us atwww.thecrowncitypodcast.com orwww.patreon.com/thecrowncitypodcast

Episode 38: Marla Frazee joins the podcast to talk about her journey growing up in the Los Angeles area and how illustrating her best friend's book in the third grade started an illustrious career as an author and illustrator. For A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever and All the World, Marla has been recognized twice as a Caldecott honoree, a distinction for being one of the best children's book illustrators in the country. In February 2023, Marla's latest book, In Every Life, was published. It is a project with a Pasadena connection and a continuation of Marla's incredible voice as an author and illustrator, blending intimate portraits and vast landscapes to share a timeless message. Over a plate of cookies and fruit, we discuss the importance of children's books and how she creates stories that impact children and adult readers alike.For more information about Marla, please visit her website at www.marlafrazee.com.Special Guest: Marla FrazeeThe Crown City Podcast can be found on most platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Audible, iHeart and many others.To support the podcast, please subscribe, leave a review on your favorite podcasting app or sponsor us at www.thecrowncitypodcast.com or www.patreon.com/thecrowncitypodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the 32nd episode, Cody educates Theresa on the fact that baseball curses are an actual thing by citing the most famous example: the Curse of the Bambino.SourcesCreamer, Robert W. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992.Rader, Benjamin G. Baseball: A History of America's Game. Champaign, IL: U. of Illinois Press, 2018.Shaughnessy, Dan. The Curse of the Bambino. New York, NY: Dutton, 1990.Vaccaro, Mike. Emperors and Idiots: The 100-Year Rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox. New York, NY: Doubleday, 2005. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Elizabeth Frazee, CEO and Co-founder of TwinLogic Strategies, and Chani Wiggins, Principal at TwinLogic, join host Scott Maberry to discuss what's likely on the horizon for the 118th Congress, including prospects for the debt limit and the potential for bipartisan action on a farm bill, tax extenders, and immigration reform.   What We Discussed in this Episode: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for global business coming out of the 117th Congress? Does a divided Congress set the stage for gridlock? Can you explain the connection between the budget, the debt limit, and the appropriations? What can we expect from the U.S. House of Representatives in light of the new leadership and rules package? What is the Sinema factor in the U.S. Senate? In terms of immigration reform, what does business need to see fixed? On taxation, is there bipartisan support for tax extenders? What does the makeup of the current Congress mean for the farm bill? How might the Republican-controlled House approach oversight? What will oversight look like in the Democratic-controlled Senate? What's the big takeaway for business in regard to the 118th Congress? If you had a crystal ball, what would it tell us about the 2024 elections?   About Elizabeth Frazee As Co-Founder and CEO of TwinLogic Strategies, Elizabeth Frazee is a 30-year veteran of Washington D.C. politics and was recently named a Top Lobbyist by The Hill. She worked for over a decade in senior positions on Capitol Hill, spent years as an executive, leading government relations for tech and entertainment companies, and since 2003 has consulted for companies, trade associations and nonprofits.   After working for her home state Senator from North Carolina, Elizabeth served as press secretary for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. An attorney, she completed her congressional service running the legislative office of Representative Bob Goodlatte. Once in the private sector, Elizabeth was director of government relations at the Walt Disney Company. She joined AOL in the late 90s as vice president of public policy and ran its Congressional team. In 2003 she left AOL-Time Warner to build the private lobbying practice that became TwinLogic Strategies in 2009.  Elizabeth is an expert at managing issue campaigns and running industry coalitions. She delivers results for her clients by combining a thorough understanding of policy, communications, and politics with an impressive network of relationships.      About Chani Wiggins As a Principal with TwinLogic Strategies, Chani Wiggins draws on 20 years of federal government experience to assist clients with various policy interests in Congress and within the Administration.    Chani spent 11 years on Capitol Hill, serving as Senator Claire McCaskill's (D-MO) Legislative Director, former Senator Mark Dayton's (D-MN) Deputy Chief of Staff, and former Congressman Bart Stupak's (D-MI) Legislative and Communications Director. She was also a senior policy aide for Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and professional staff on the Health Education and Labor Committee. She later served as Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Since September 2010, Chani has represented clients with priorities in national security, telecommunications and technology, and energy policies. She also serves as a strategic advisor for the Government & Technology Services Coalition (GTSC), an organization of small and mid-sized company executives that develop and implement solutions for the federal homeland and national security sector. Chani is known for building relationships on both sides of the political aisle, co-founding the Bipartisan Legislative Directors Group in 2007 to find common ground among the Senate's 100 Legislative Directors.     About Scott Maberry As an international trade partner in Governmental Practice, J. Scott Maberry counsels clients on global risk, international trade, and regulation. He is also a past co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Working Group for the Washington D.C. office, serves on the firm's pro bono committee, and is a founding member of the Sheppard Mullin Organizational Integrity Group. Scott's practice includes representing clients before the U.S. government agencies and international U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry & Security (BIS), the Department of Commerce Import Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of State Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the International Trade Commission (ITC), the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS), He also represents clients in federal court and grand jury proceedings, as well as those pursuing negotiations and dispute resolution under the World Trade Organization (WTO), North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other multilateral and bilateral agreements. A member of the World Economic Forum Expert Network, Scott also advises the WEF community in the areas of global risk, international trade, artificial intelligence and values.   Contact Information  Elizabeth Frazee Chani Wiggins Scott Maberry   Thank you for listening! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to the show to receive two new episodes delivered straight to your podcast player every month.   If you enjoyed this episode, please help us get the word out about this podcast. Rate and Review this show in Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, Stitcher or Spotify. It helps other listeners find this show.   This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as legal advice specific to your circumstances. If you need help with any legal matter, be sure to consult with an attorney regarding your specific needs.  

In this episode, author and illustrator Marla Frazee takes us behind the scenes of her latest picture book, IN EVERY LIFE - a book that was 25 years in the making.This episode is sponsored by TRUSTING READERS: POWERFUL PRACTICES FOR INDEPENDENT READING, written by Jennifer Scoggin, Hannah Schneewind. Visit Hein.pub/TrustingReaders to learn more and order a copy

Shea Frazee is a skill development coach in Southern California, he's worked with 35+ NBA athletes and a lot of the top high school prospects in that area. Shea is an extremely intuitive & intelligent individual, he understands training & coaching on a different level than most.Shea and I talk about his training philosophies and how he trains his players, we touch on how he trains both in a 1v1 setting and also in a group setting. We talk about how he goes about adding "cognitive load" in his sessions, how he can challenge his athletes psychologically as well as physically. The game of basketball is not 1 dimensional, it's 3D and multifactorial - sometimes we neglect the psychological aspect of the game in our training sessions.Shea also speaks on his perspective in building confidence and what exactly goes into confidence, he has a 5 important steps in building confidence (towards the end of show).Check Shea out of socials:IG: https://www.instagram.com/shea.frazee/Website: https://www.sheafrazee.com/

Episode: 273 Title: He Tripled His Outgoing Calls then This Happened Host: Michael J. Maher Guest: Josh Frazee and Jason Kolberg Description: What could a weekly system of outgoing calls do for your business? Our guest today saw an increase in business by 70% from this strategy. (7L) Referral Strategies and Podcast Topics: Calls, Hour of Power, Time Blocking Special Offer: Join thousands of other like minded referral based business owners in our online community at www.JoinGenGen.com

On this week's episode with Dr. Crystal Frazee, Cristina and Dana dive into burnout recovery, and why we're all so burned out! We talk about how to assess your “body battery”, what's draining it, and how to recharge your battery in a replenishing way. Spoiler alert: increasing your productivity doesn't actually improve burnout. Crystal talks...

For this episode, I invited Crystal Frazee, a doctor in physical therapy and an expert on burnout and recovery in women. Dr. Frazee shares the importance of connecting to the wisdom of our bodies. She describes the transmission of generational patterns of self-sacrifice, depletion, and perfectionism often passed on by our mothers and grandmother. Dr. Frazee also provided specific somatic tools to prevent and heal from the effects of burnout. You can learn more about Dr. Frazee by visiting her website https://crystalfrazee.com/ and IG @drcrystalfrazee.    If you find this episode helpful and healing on your journey, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review! If you want to connect with me, nominate yourself or someone else to be on my podcast, email me at rosa.c.shetty@gmail.com Follow me on Instagram @rosashetty for inspiration on all things related to healing!    Remember to sign up for my Patreon community for $10 a month! We meet virtually once a month. During our live & recorded class, I lead a group discussion on healing from various modalities such as yoga, inner child, and energy healing. For the next several months, we'll dive deep into healing our inner children from 0 to teenaged years!    With Love & Gratitude, Rosa   Disclaimer: This podcast episode does not substitute for health care or mental health services. You are fully responsible for your mental well-being, mental and physical choices, and decisions during and after listening to this podcast.

Rev. Joshua Frazee, associate pastor St. John's Lutheran Church, Mayville, WI, joins the Rev. Dr. Phil Booe to study 1 Corinthians 12:1-11. St. Paul turns to spiritual gifts in this part of his letter to the Corinthian Christians. Although he'll go into greater detail in chapter fourteen, his main focus here is to point his hearers to the source of all spiritual gifts: the Holy Spirit. Undoubtedly, the Corinthians valued power and prestige. As they looked out upon the pagan landscape and saw so-called spiritual people with seemingly great abilities, they began to treat the gifts of God in the same way, as a means to set oneself apart from others. The apostle sets them straight: all gifts are from God and are to be used for the common good. In this episode, Pastors Booe and Frazee explore these principles and walk through each gift listed to talk about what it might look like today.

Brent Frazee was the outdoors editor for the Kansas City Star for 36 years before retiring.During that time, he won more than 50 state, regional and national awards for his writing and photography. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Outdoor Writers Association of America in 2014, and was inducted into the Waterfowlers Hall of Fame in 2015.He plans to continue his writing career, both freelancing for magazines, as an author of books and as the writer of this website. He lives on a beautiful lake in Parkville, Mo., with his wife Jana and his chocolate Lab, Zoey.For more info:http://www.brentfrazee.com/Special Thanks To CZ-USA:https://cz-usa.com/Special Thanks To Living The Dream Properties:https://livingthedreamland.com/Special Thanks To Hunting Works For Missouri:https://huntingworksformo.com/Special Thanks To Mongo Attachments:https://www.mongoattachments.com/Special Thanks To Scenic Rivers Taxidermy:http://www.scenicriverstaxidermy.com/Connect with Driftwood Outdoors:https://www.facebook.com/DriftwoodOutdoors/https://www.instagram.com/driftwoodoutdoors/Email:info@driftwoodoutdoors.com

"With faith in your heart, courage in your soul, and determination in your mind, you must push the devil out... You indeed can't do it without Him. But He won't do it without you," (W.D. Frazee). We have a choice. We always have a choice, and every choice has a consequence. Will we collaborate and respond to His sacrifice or will we look the other way ? Will we allow Him to lead us away from temptation or will we step into it ? Will we choose Him today ? ...or will we choose ourselves.