Podcast appearances and mentions of Harry Potter

Is Lanterns officially the first massive television hit of James Gunn's DCU? With the Lanterns finale right around the corner, new numbers claim the HBO series is averaging approximately 19 MILLION viewers per episode. On today's Kristian Harloff Show, we break down the reported viewership numbers for Lanterns, the response to the season so far, and what its success could mean for Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Green Lantern, and the future of DC Studios. With the finale approaching, we'll also look back at the season and discuss whether Lanterns has lived up to the hype. Has the series successfully established Aaron Pierre's John Stewart as one of the major characters of the new DCU? And where does Kyle Chandler's Hal Jordan go from here? NO FINALE SPOILERS YET — we'll save the full season and finale spoiler discussion until after the episode airs. We also have a potentially enormous development for Hollywood. Warner Bros. and Paramount are preparing to become Skydance, and a new trailer promoting the merger is highlighting the absolutely enormous collection of franchises that will exist under the combined company. We're talking DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Top Gun, Mortal Kombat and many more. What happens when this many major entertainment properties exist under one corporate umbrella? And most importantly for DC fans, what does this mean for James Gunn and Peter Safran's DC Studios? #Lanterns #GreenLantern #JohnStewart #HalJordan #AaronPierre #KyleChandler #DCU #DCStudios #JamesGunn #WarnerBros #Paramount #Skydance  #MovieNews #TVNews #KristianHarloffShow

It started with a lie in a church and ended with a murder charge in a bedroom. In between: eighteen months, 107,000 text messages, and a relationship that psychotherapist Shavaun Scott says followed a trajectory she's seen before — with an ending she says the psychology was always building toward.Scott joins Tony Brueski for a three-part interview covering the full arc of the relationship between Caleb Flynn and Alleigha Botner in the case of Ashley Flynn's death. Part one starts at CLC church in Miami County, Ohio, where Flynn — a 36-year-old worship team volunteer and former American Idol contestant — met Botner, a 21-year-old intern. Scott dissects the power imbalance: the age gap, the spiritual authority, the “roommate” narrative, and the theatrical gestures — AI love songs, matching Harry Potter tattoos — that built a sealed world around a younger woman.Part two maps the eighteen-month holding pattern. Flynn wanted wife, children, reputation, and mistress — all of it, permanently. Botner set deadlines. Flynn broke them. She left in January. He came back on Valentine's Day. Scott explains the intermittent reinforcement and the sunk-cost fallacy that made the pattern self-sustaining.Part three confronts the 107,000 texts and the escalation from marriage complaints to casual references to Ashley's death. Botner testified she texted “I want to kill her.” Scott reads the complicity debate through both psychologies and then turns the entire question: if Flynn had recommitted to Ashley, how safe was the woman carrying every text he'd ever sent?One arc. One question running underneath all three parts: was this always heading toward the ending it reached, or was there a moment it could've been stopped?Listen Anywhere You Get Podcasts: https://pod.link/1655749292 Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod?sub_confirmation=1 Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#CalebFlynn #AlleighaBotner #HiddenKillers #AshleyFlynn #CalebFlynnTrial #TrueCrime #ShavaunScott #AmericanIdol #TrueCrimePodcast #RelationshipPsychology

The Caleb Flynn murder trial has produced evidence, testimony, and more than 107,000 text messages. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski not to relitigate the evidence but to read the psychology — a three-part interview that traces the arc from church volunteer to murder defendant through the relationship that allegedly drove it.Part one starts where the relationship started: CLC church in Miami County, Ohio. Flynn was 36, married, embedded in worship leadership. Botner was 21 and interning. Scott maps the power imbalance — the age gap, the spiritual “halo effect,” the “roommate” narrative — and explains why each detail is a clinical finding, not just a biographical footnote. The AI-generated love songs and matching Harry Potter tattoos that sound absurd in a courtroom are the gestures Scott calls most significant.Part two follows the eighteen-month holding pattern. Flynn wanted his wife, his children, his church reputation, and his mistress — simultaneously and permanently. Botner set a January deadline for him to leave Ashley. He ignored it. She left. On Valentine's Day, he returned. Scott explains the intermittent reinforcement and the sunk-cost fallacy that kept Botner locked in despite receiving nothing she'd been promised.Part three confronts the 107,000 texts and their escalation. Botner testified under oath that she texted “I want to kill her” about Ashley. The public debate over her complicity has split hard. Scott reads both sides, then turns the lens: if Flynn had chosen to stay with Ashley, how safe was the woman carrying all of his darkest admissions? Scott says the danger ran in both directions — and identifies when this stopped being a relationship and became something lethal.Listen Anywhere You Get Podcasts: https://pod.link/1655749292 Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod?sub_confirmation=1 Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#CalebFlynn #AlleighaBotner #HiddenKillers #AshleyFlynn #CalebFlynnTrial #TrueCrime #ShavaunScott #AmericanIdol #TrueCrimePodcast #RelationshipPsychology

Phil and Emily are joined by Monica Castillo, film critic for The A.V. Club, to open a Halloween-season mini-series on all five of Guillermo del Toro's 2000s films with The Devil's Backbone (2001). In the last week of the Spanish Civil War, twelve-year-old Carlos is left at a remote orphanage run by Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), where an unexploded bomb sits in the courtyard, the groundskeeper Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega) is hunting for hidden Republican gold, and a drowned boy named Santi is still whispering in the halls. It opened against Harry Potter and Monsters, Inc. and made $6.5 million on a $4.5 million budget, and Phil is watching it for the first time.The three dig into why del Toro's ghosts are sad rather than shock machines (Ebert's line that ghosts should have their reasons comes up more than once), the Carlos-and-Santi chase at the midpoint as one of the scariest sequences in his whole filmography, and the film's argument that the real monster is the man with the keys, not the boy in the water. They also get into the limbo-water fetus jars, the 19th-century ghost story bones under the Civil War setting, and how this movie sets up Pan's Labyrinth five years early. There's a real case here for The Devil's Backbone as the purest version of what del Toro does: a haunting where the injustice is the point and the ghost is just asking for it to be seen. Mournful, beautiful, and quietly furious. Same as the movie. Next week: Blade II with Roxana Hadadi.Follow the show & guest:Podcast Like It's... - https://www.instagram.com/podcastlikeitsPhil Iscove - https://www.instagram.com/pmiscoveEmily St. James - https://www.instagram.com/emilystjamsMonica Castillo - https://www.instagram.com/mcastimovies 

Disney built its reputation on immersive environments, elaborate backstories, and spaces where even the smallest details help tell a story. This week, Lauren and Eric look at the newly remodeled Disney Wonders store at Disneyland Paris and ask whether Disney's push toward modern minimalism is stripping away some of the personality fans expect. From the richly themed Disney Stores of the 1990s to Animal Kingdom Lodge, Cars Land, World Showcase, and Pandora, they explore what makes great theming work and why people notice immediately when it is missing. Plus, they consider whether changing tastes, operating costs, and the next generation of shoppers could eventually push themed retail back in the opposite direction. HIGHLIGHTS • Disneyland Paris replaces a heavily themed 1990s-era Disney Store with the more minimalist Disney Wonders boutique. • Lauren and Eric ask why modern Disney retail spaces increasingly resemble contemporary malls rather than immersive Disney environments. • A look back at the maximalist theming of classic Disney Stores, restaurants, and entertainment destinations from the 1990s. • Animal Kingdom Lodge, Wilderness Lodge, the Polynesian, Port Orleans, and other resorts show how detailed storytelling can transform a space. • Pandora, Cars Land, Liberty Square, World Showcase, and even Universal's Harry Potter lands demonstrate what happens when designers fully commit to a theme. HOSTS • Lauren Hersey - X/Twitter: @laurenhersey2 | Instagram: @lauren_hersey_ • Eric Hersey - X/Twitter: @erichersey | Instagram: @erichersey | Website: strongmindedagency.com FOLLOW • Facebook: @JimHillMediaNews • YouTube: @jimhillmedia • TikTok: @jimhillmedia SUPPORT Support the show and access bonus episodes and additional content at https://www.patreon.com/jimhillmedia. PRODUCTION CREDITS Edited by Eric Hersey - https://strongmindedagency.com If you would like to sponsor a show on the Jim Hill Media Podcast Network, reach out today. https://www.jimhillmedia.com/sponsor/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

AI-generated love songs. Matching hidden Harry Potter tattoos. A 36-year-old worship team volunteer and a 21-year-old church intern. Those details from the Caleb Flynn murder trial sound like they belong in different stories. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott says they belong in exactly the same one — and she joins Tony Brueski to explain why.Flynn was a former American Idol contestant volunteering on the worship team at CLC church in Miami County, Ohio. Botner was an intern at the same church, fifteen years younger, single, and navigating her first experience with this kind of power gap. Scott starts with the neurological reality: at 21, Botner's prefrontal cortex was still developing. The part of the brain that evaluates risk, reads manipulation, and weighs long-term consequences wasn't finished yet. Flynn's was.The church setting did something specific. Scott explains how spiritual environments create a cognitive shortcut called the “halo effect” — where a man's role in worship translates directly into personal trust. When Flynn told Botner his wife was “just a roommate,” that line didn't register as a tactic. It registered as vulnerability. Scott says it activated what she calls a fixing instinct — the pull to help a man trapped in a loveless marriage rather than recognizing the narrative as a recruitment tool.The theatrical gestures — the AI songs, the tattoos — sound absurd from a witness stand. Scott says they're a blueprint. Each one constructed a private world shared by only two people. Combined with the secrecy the affair required, Botner was systematically separated from every person who might've intervened. Scott maps the relationship to clinical patterns she's treated in her practice, connecting what looked like romance to what it was.Listen Anywhere You Get Podcasts: https://pod.link/1655749292 Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod?sub_confirmation=1 Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#CalebFlynn #AlleighaBotner #HiddenKillers #AshleyFlynn #CalebFlynnTrial #TrueCrime #ShavaunScott #AmericanIdol #TrueCrimePodcast #ChurchAffair

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski to map what happened between Caleb Flynn and Alleigha Botner long before any murder charges — and why the church where they met matters as much as the 107,000 texts that followed.Flynn was a 36-year-old worship team volunteer and former American Idol contestant at CLC church in Miami County, Ohio. Botner was a 21-year-old intern. He was married with children. She'd never been in a relationship with that kind of power gap. Scott says the age difference alone creates conditions where manipulation goes undetected — at 21, the part of the brain that evaluates risk and spots long-term consequences is still developing. Flynn had fifteen years on her and a marriage he was hiding behind.The church setting amplified everything. Scott explains how spiritual authority generates a specific cognitive shortcut — what clinicians call a “halo effect.” A man embedded in worship leadership doesn't trip the same alarms a stranger would. When Flynn told Botner his wife was “just a roommate,” Scott says that narrative did something precise to a 21-year-old in that environment: it activated a desire to help instead of a desire to leave.The details that sound strangest in a courtroom — AI-generated love songs, matching hidden Harry Potter tattoos — are the ones Scott calls most clinically significant. She says they're tools for building a sealed-off world where only two people have access. Paired with the secrecy the affair required, Botner lost contact with every person who could've seen what was happening. Scott traces each element to its psychological function and explains what the pattern tells us about the eighteen months that came after.Listen Anywhere You Get Podcasts: https://pod.link/1655749292 Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod?sub_confirmation=1 Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#CalebFlynn #AlleighaBotner #HiddenKillers #AshleyFlynn #CalebFlynnTrial #TrueCrime #ShavaunScott #AmericanIdol #TrueCrimePodcast #ChurchAffair

She was 21. He was 36 and married with children. They met at a church where he volunteered on the worship team and she was an intern. Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins Tony Brueski to explain why every one of those details matters — and why they mattered before Caleb Flynn ever sent a text message about his wife.Scott starts with the age gap. At 21, Alleigha Botner's brain was still developing the capacity to evaluate risk and read long-term consequences. Flynn was a decade and a half ahead of her with a marriage, children, and a reputation he'd built at CLC church in Miami County, Ohio. Scott says that differential alone creates a power gap most people outside clinical practice don't fully appreciate.The church multiplied it. Scott explains how spiritual authority creates what clinicians call a “halo effect” — a shortcut where a man's connection to worship becomes a proxy for trustworthiness. Red flags don't land as warnings. They land as signs of a deep bond. When Flynn told Botner his wife was “just a roommate,” that narrative hit a 21-year-old in a church environment differently than it would've anywhere else. Scott says it activated a fixing instinct — the pull to rescue instead of run.Flynn gave Botner AI-generated love songs. They got matching hidden Harry Potter tattoos. Scott says those gestures aren't just immature or theatrical — they're the construction materials for a fantasy world where two people live inside a shared secret. The secrecy the affair demanded finished the job. Botner couldn't turn to the friends or family who would've seen through it. A psychotherapist can see the design. Scott explains why Botner couldn't.Listen Anywhere You Get Podcasts: https://pod.link/1655749292 Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspod?sub_confirmation=1 Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/ Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/ Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspod X Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#CalebFlynn #AlleighaBotner #HiddenKillers #AshleyFlynn #CalebFlynnTrial #TrueCrime #ShavaunScott #AmericanIdol #TrueCrimePodcast #ChurchAffair

As a freshman at Yale in the spring of 1974, Dan Schlesinger broke the school's record in the 6-mile run. That record was previously held by a guy named Frank Shorter. Remember this for your next running trivia game.Schlesinger did much more in his running career, and also on the long, twisting path that eventually led to his current work as a fine artist. In the 1982 NYC Marathon, Schlesinger came out of seemingly nowhere to finish third in 2:11:54. He was beaten only by Alberto Salazar and Rodolfo Gomez. The next spring Schlesinger placed eighth at Boston with a personal best time of 2:11:37.That made him a strong contender in the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials, and Schlesinger was super-fit, as he describes in this podcast. But sometimes things don't always work out the way you hope. He had similar bad luck in preparing for the 1988 Trials.Then he got on with life, finding a job as a translator in Korea and gaining his legal degree at Harvard. This career path didn't excite Schlesinger, so he began dabbling in various art forms.One thing led to the next, and he eventually gained the assignment to illustrate all the Harry Potter books in Japan. These volumes sold more than 20 million copies, and launched Schlesinger into the fulltime art work he has pursued ever since. Indeed, his newest project is an illustrated book out in mid October that's called Injury Blues And The Red Running Shoes. It's personal, colorful, humorous at times, and intended to inspire injured runners to believe they'll soon be back on the road again. Like Dan himself.To see a portfolio of Schlesinger's artwork, go here. WHERE TO FIND "RUNNING: STATE OF THE SPORT"Use your smartphone to download our podcast from Apple, Spotify, or YouTube Podcasts. Once you've selected your favorite app, search for "running state of the sport."With your computer, tablet, or smartphone, you can also listen direct to “Running: State of the Sport” at the below internet links.APPLESPOTIFYYOU TUBEAUDIBLEI HEARTPOCKETCASTS

Vi har hatt besøk av Morten AKA Fluffkitten. Der ble det mye tullprat, men også snakk om håp og drømmer. #MortenvilmøtedegEr du glad i Harry Potter, gaming eller anime?Join Discord serveren vår!https://discord.gg/4J5hG8RStøtt oss gjerne på patreon: https://www.patreon.com/spillkveldSosiale medier:https://www.instagram.com/nordremedia/https://www.facebook.com/filmkamerateneyoutube/https://twitter.com/NordreMedia

Ein grosser Dank geht an die wunderbare Autorin Lailafee! Hier könnt ihr diese und viele weitere Geschichte mitlesen:https://www.fanfiktion.de/u/LailafeeDas Fanart ist von mir, BandeleArt, mit Hilfe von verschiedenen AI's und meinen Bearbeitungskünsten angefertigt:https://www.instagram.com/bandeleart/

This episode is sponsored by Factor – Head to https://factormeals.com/super50off and use code super50off to get 50% off and 1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year. This episode is sponsored by Raycon – Go to https://buyraycon.com/supercarlinOPEN to get 20% off. Today J dives into Horace Slughorn's memory to find out if he had a secret son hiding in plain sight this whole time.  Who was the obsessive love he warns about in potions class?  What does it have to do with the Crouch family and was Barty Crouch screaming the truth at us this whole time?! #HarryPotter #SuperCarlinBrothers

This week on Collecting Weekly, InArt is back in the Wizarding World with two major new 1/6 scale figures: Harry Potter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! We're breaking down both figures, from the portraits and tailoring to the accessories, rooted hair, display options, and all the details InArt has packed into these highly anticipated releases. With Harry in his Triwizard Tournament gear and Voldemort at the height of his power with Nagini and the Elder Wand, there's a lot to talk about. How do these new figures stack up against InArt's previous Harry Potter releases, and are these the versions collectors have been waiting for? #InArt #HarryPotter #Voldemort #LordVoldemort #HarryPotterFigures #InArtHarryPotter #InArtVoldemort #GobletOfFire #DeathlyHallows #HarryPotterCollectibles #WizardingWorld #SixthScale #SixthScaleFigures #1SixthScale #ActionFigures #FigureCollectors #CollectingWeekly #CWLive #ToyNews #PremiumCollectibles

John Williams

*This episode originally aired on Patreon in 2025*Join me for a break down of Chapter 15 of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 'Aragog', in which Harry and Ron follow the spiders, Fang gets defanged by treacle toffee, and Aragog speaks perfect English.... 'Breaking Down Bad Books' is a podcast analysing trashy bestsellers from a literary perspective.Sign up to be a patron at www.patreon.com/breakingdownbadbooks for access to exclusive bonus episodes breaking down Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban every week, as well as a back catalogue analysing Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed, and The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner.Read along with me and let me know your thoughts on Instagram @breakingdownbadbooks or email me at breakingdownpod@gmail.com.Hosted by Nathan Brown, who you can find on Instagram @nathanbrown90 or YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@nathanpatrickbrown. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/breaking-down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Am 31. Oktober wird ein elfjähriges Mädchen das Ende der Welt herbeiführen. Zumindest laut einer Prophezeiung – und jeder weiß, dass Prophezeiungen unfehlbar sind. Glücklicherweise gibt es da ein Paar unwahrscheinlicher Helden. Hermione Granger und Draco Malfoy erklären sich selbstlos dazu bereit, ihren gegenseitigen Hass und ihren jahrelangen Kleinkrieg beiseitezulegen, um das Mädchen zu finden und die Apokalypse aufzuhalten. Wenn sie nur sicher sein könnten, dass sie auch das richtige Kind haben … Für Fans von Terry Pratchett und dramatischer Ironie: eine Komödie der Irrungen und Wirrungen zweier Menschen, die so hartnäckig in Verleugnung aller Tatsachen leben, dass sich schließlich das Schicksal höchstpersönlich einmischt.

For the Love of Star Wars. Matt & John share a special discussion about their love of Star Wars, how it keeps the show going after all these years, and what they hope to see in the fan base going forward. Instead of a relentless wave of negativity, join them for a positive recharge as they share what makes being a Star Wars fan so special, and why they're so happy to share their discussions with the world.HostJohn Mills and Matthew RushingIf you're looking for the best Star Wars podcast to hear spirited discussions that embrace the fun of the Galaxy Far, Far Away with none of the fandom baggage, you found it! So long as you're waiting to refuel at docking bay 94, look around our creator-focused network of podcasts with all the best of Star Trek, a deep-dive read of Harry Potter's magical world, analysis of film's greatest directors, and breaking news from top names in international film festivals, and so much more!Send us your feedback!Twitter: @TheJediMasters   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheNerdParty/ Email: http://www.thenerdparty.com/contactSubscribe & Review in Apple PodcastsMake sure you follow us on X @TheJediMasters + leave us a review and rating!

Chapter 31 - The Battle of Hogwarts, covered by Abby!Harry Potter saves an enemy, Crabbe destroyed a horcrux for us (thanks!), and our besties finally kiss. But also this is one of the most devastating chapters in the series. New episode out now, link in bio! ⚡️

After a little vacation, Bridget returns with a laundry list of opinions to discuss and Brookes shares stories from a recent concert adventure.-Join our Discord community, subscribe to our Twitch channel, follow us on social media, and more!"Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby's ‘grave'" - The Guardian-Fighting With Friends is a member of the Eclectic Cult Media Network.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/fighting-with-friends-1. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Harry Potter und Oceans ElevenDie Mysteriumsabteilung bleibt weiterhin mystisch. Eine Binsenweisheit, aber wichtig für diese Folge. Denn wir erfahren, dass die Räume alle miteinander verbunden sind. Ein Labyrinth durch das Harry und seine Freunde durchstolpern, aber die Todesser sich geschickt bewegen. Haben sie das etwa alles monatelang geplant und die Mysteriumsabteilung ausgespäht? *Hier dramatische Musik einfügen*Und obwohl die sechs von mehreren ausgewachsenen und gut vorbereiteten Todessern verfolgt werden, schaffen sie es irgendwie sich wieder zu finden. Da endet aber auch ihr Glück und einer nach dem anderen gehen unsere Helden zu Boden. Die einzigen, die es schaffen stehen zu bleiben sind Harry uuuuund Neville! Doch die Schlinge um sie zieht sich immer enger. Was nun? Und was geht eigentlich bei Sophia im Keller vor sich? Erfahrt es in der neuen Folge :)Viel Spaß beim Zuhören!Hier geht's zu unserem Whatsapp-Kanal: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbB8C00CRs1obJUivo2ZWir haben auch eine Patreon-Seite!Schaut doch mal vorbei, es gibt Bonus-Episoden, Sticker und andere aufregende Dinge! Besucht uns auf den sozialen Netzwerken, unserer Webseite und erzählt euren Freunden von uns! Vielleicht haben die ja auch Lust auf einen Harry-Potter-Podcast!Patreon: www.patreon.com/happypotterDiscord: discord.gg/QpJfFSXY73Facebook: www.facebook.com/happypotterpodcastInstagram: @happypotterpodWebseite: https://shows.acast.com/happy-potterUnd wir haben jetzt auch Playlists mit unseren Lieblingssongs:Martins Playlist:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2IBxDsPVm1UdNBiW2QkgEJ?si=rU6HLkoFQfGGjvab8g8yEQ&pi=e-bKuIHap7RWCuSophias Playlist:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kuOP0TujMhrqOWzLwUH1O?si=9LIZkc2nQTOajHPaqpP_RA&pi=e-tc6w0NgQRo-WDieser Podcast wurde in der Prophezeiung vorhergesehen! (Munkelt man.)Wer das liest, ist bezaubernd.

Send us Fan MailThis week's movie has it all: romance, music, dancing, throat slitting, human pies!This week Sarah sings us the song of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This 2007 adaptation of the classic stage musical once again reunites director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp. Depp plays a man seeking revenge in 1800's England, who hides under the guise of a simple barber. With the help of his maniacal new friend (the always delightful Helena Bonham Carter), he kills his way through London while she bakes the victims into pies to hide the evidence.Join us as we discuss trying to imagine Angela Lansbury murdering someone, how many Harry Potter alumni were cast in this film, and just how much we love Anthony Head.So sharpen your razors, take a seat in the barber chair, and remember: don't get too scared!

THE WHOLE CREW IS BACK IN STUDIO!

Victoria and Stuart return with the gang to the school for witchcraft and wizardry as Harry and the hand face more dramas in their second year at Hogwarts.

ÉPISODE 82 - Je discute avec Sara-Ève et Noélie, toutes les deux âgées de 11 ans, pour en savoir plus sur leur amour pour Harry Potter. Devenez membre PATREON » https://patreon.com/harrypotterquebec/ Suivez Harry Potter Québec Instagram » https://instagram.com/potter.quebec/ Facebook » https://facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565206755057 * Le balado est produit à des fins de divertissement et est destiné à un usage privé non-commercial. Il s'adresse à tous les sorciers et sorcières qui attendent encore leur lettre de Poudlard. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Welcome to Part One of ‘Yer A Wizard', a Harry Potter Sleep Saga where you are the main character. This is the beginning of your adventure as a wizard. Sitting in your room at the end of summer, you are greeted by a friendly Owl, who is carrying a mysterious and magical letter in its beak… a letter addressed to you! The letter reveals something to you, that deep down you have always known… You are a Wizard. You journey into the heart of Diagon Alley, and visit the many fantastical shops to collect all of your supplies ready for the new term, meeting friendly and exciting characters along the way, before spending a relaxed evening in the Leaky Cauldron, and settling down for sleep. This is a long story, designed to be enjoyed over multiple listens, or giving you that extra time to fall asleep peacefully.  I hope you enjoy Part One of ‘Yer A Wizard' - A Harry Potter Inspired Sleep Saga by Sleepy Cat. *With the rise of AI generated content, I feel it appropriate to reassure you that I am a human creator, with a deep love of storytelling, meditation and sleep. I work on my own to bring you as many varied tracks as possible, and I hope you continue to enjoy my creations!* If you would like to enjoy ad-free content, exclusive sleep stories, live readings and more, then you can join our wonderful Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/sleepycatmeditations  This track was originally released on YouTube in 2021. Writing, Voiceover & Edits property of © Sleepy Cat Meditations (est. 2020). All rights reserved.  Music by Liborio Conti, Kevin Macleod, Feslyann Studios, YouTube Audio Library & Enlightened Audio (all appropriate rights / licenses obtained) SFX are Homemade or from Freesound/YouTube Audio Library Note: There is no intentional copyright infringement in this meditation. This is an original sleep meditation and story, based loosely on the fictional world of Harry Potter, created by J.K. Rowling  

Banijay Americas announced that LUMINISCENCE, its immersive show created by LOTCHI, part of Banijay Live, opened at Sacramento's Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament on September 17, 2026. The Sacramento run is part of Banijay Americas' growing international reach, which turns notable sacred and historic spaces into settings for music, storytelling, and digital artistry. Performances continue on select dates through the end of 2026, in three versions: live choir and orchestra, live choir only, or recorded music with voice-over. The Cathedral is lit with 360-degree video mapping while guests hear the story of the landmark's history. Bishop Jaime Soto is quoted saying there could be no more fitting home for the show than the Cathedral, and LOTCHI co-founder Romain Sarfati praises the building's architecture and its place in Sacramento's history. Ticket prices vary by type of experience, discounts are available, and details are at luminiscence.com/sacramento.Clayton Ferguson is the Executive Producer and General Manager at Banijay Americas, where he oversees Luminiscence North America—an ambitious live entertainment venture blending storytelling, technology, and large-scale audience experiences. With more than two decades at the intersection of creativity and commerce, Ferguson has led global initiatives for powerhouse brands including Disney, NBCUniversal, Marvel, Sony, and Warner Bros. His work spans theme park development, touring exhibitions, and immersive productions tied to major IP such as Harry Potter and Jurassic World. In September, he brought that expertise to Sacramento with the debut of Luminiscence, a groundbreaking experiential production set to anchor downtown as a new cultural destination.

More bad fanfiction stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... When it comes to bad fanfiction, My Immortal is generally one of the first that people will bring up... And that's because this terrible fanfic is either a legitimate attempt at humor or the author's attempt at creating something meaningful. Both possibilities are equally terrifying. Poorly written Harry Potter fanfic is inbound! Buckle up!! It doesn't matter what your background is, you always need to treat people like people and not use them simply to get off. Neckbeards seem to learn this lesson particularly slow and it really does make my blood boil... So we must bring it to light so others don't suffer alone. For your fill of neckbeard stories we've got you covered with the freshest weeaboo, niceguy, and neckbeard happenings on reddit. Stick with ReddX for your daily dose of cringe with a side-dish of relatability. You might even feel good for dessert... But who can say? ------------------------------------------------------------ #fanfiction #myimmortal #harrypotter Discord: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/daytondo... PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReddX... Amazon link to my mic: https://amzn.to/3lInsRR ReddX merch: https://teespring.com/stores/r... Character art: https://twitter.com/DarkleyStu... Creepypasta channel: https://www.youtube.com/Dayton... Gaming channel: https://www.youtube.com/dayton... Wifey's channel: https://www.youtube.com/channe... ------------------------------------------------------------ Playlists: Full neckbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All neckbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... All legbeard stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... RPG Horror Stories: https://www.youtube.com/playli... Weeaboo tales: https://www.youtube.com/playli... ------------------------------------------------------------ Podcasts: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/... Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/reddxy iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/... Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/fe... Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/... Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podc... Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/us/show... Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podc... JioSaavn: https://www.jiosaavn.com/shows... Also on Castbox, Audible, and iHeartRadio! Have you ever met a neckbeard or a nice guy? They are frustrating to deal with, but luckily you aren't alone! These r/neckbeardstories from Reddit are among the top posts of all time and include some of the funniest Reddit stories ever posted on the neckbeard stories subreddit! rSlash NeckbeardStories have all kinds of funny neckbeards in them, but especially the nice guy. And the weeaboo. There is a wide spectrum of neckbeards, and this is but a small slice of it. Listening to ReddX's neckbeard stories playlist is a great experience! These neckbeard stories Top Posts of All Time from Reddit are made for you to enjoy any time you feel like it, so be sure to save my rSlash neckbeard stories playlist to your favorites! While there are many rslash channels that read r/neckbeard stories and r/prorevenge from reddit, each channel has their own way of performing them. Some of the top rSlash entitled parents channels I recommend checking out are the original rSlash, Redditor, fresh, r/Bumfries, VoiceyHere, Mr Reddit, Storytime and Darkfluff. These Reddit story channels inspired me to start my own Reddit story channel, with a focus on Entitled Parents stories and at times going into the r/pettyrevenge and r/choosingbeggars subreddit as well. Because most of my audience prefers Entitled Parents stories of Reddit, I tend to just stick with reading the r/EntitleParents Top Posts of All Time. But I also enjoy getting up close and personal with neckbeards and weeaboos from time to time. Subscribe to ReddX for the freshest daily Reddit content. I post relatable readings of Reddit posts and Reddit stories every single day! Journey with me as I relate these amazing Reddit stories to my personal life journey. I'm greatly inspired by the top reddit posts of all time videos and reddit stories on YouTube which is why I started doing them myself. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... Discord: https://discord.gg/Sju7YckUWu Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/daytondo... PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/daytondo... Patreon: http://patreon.com/daytondoes Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/daytond... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ReddX... Merch: https://reddx-shop.fourthwall....

They boys are hyped after Nashville SC exacted some revenge on FC Toronto for their surprising win a couple weeks ago, and the big excitement of this game was the opportunity to see Joe Willis in goal once more.  It might be the last time the crowd gets to chant "Joe Says No", and that's got the boys feeling quite nostalgic, so they're listening to Chris Stapleton wax poetic about their favorite city.  Let's not forget how magical the night was, between fans dressed like their favorite Harry Potter characters or Hany Mukhtar casting spells on the field, it was a wonder to behold.  And while no one may be able to explain why Sam Surridge keeps sailing his shots high, one thing everyone can agree on is that Reed Baker-Whiting is coming into his own.  Forget Miami, Vancouver and Cincinnati - they boys say Nashville's real enemy is FIFA, who insists on disrupting play every time Nashville starts to get some real momentum going.  At least the team isn't owned by some Middle Eastern magnate who wants to cheat to win like the owners of Manchester City.  No, Nashville SC can win straight up, and they're doing it this season as they are coasting to a possible Supporters Shield trophy.  But first, they'll have to take care of business at Austin and against Kansas City, so the boys look ahead past the international break at these matchups and make some predictions about the final stretch of the MLS season.  And they drink beer.

The Summer of 2026 may be over, but Winter is Coming.This week Andy, Ash, Stu and Ed look ahead to the biggest films and TV shows arriving between October 2026 and January 2027. From Tom Cruise's mysterious next project Digger!, to Clayface, Crystal Lake, Godzilla Minus Zero, Blade Runner 2099, Dune: Part Three, Harry Potter, The Beekeeper 2 and much more, the lads ask what should be on your watchlist, what's destined to disappoint, and what could become the next big surprise hit.The Short Short Film Film Review returns with Laura Living Backwards, the award-winning Midlands-made sci-fi short from Kate Horlor. With an ingenious time-travel concept, a fantastic lead performance from Sarah Feltham, and enough ideas to embarrass most modern Doctor Who episodes, the team discuss why this tiny production has left such a big impression.Finally, the Cruise Cruise reaches Mission: Impossible III (2006). Tom Cruise recruits TV wunderkind J.J. Abrams, Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers one of the most chilling villains of the 2000s, and Ethan Hunt attempts the most impossible mission of all: settling down and living a normal life.Of course, no discussion of 2006 Tom Cruise would be complete without another trip into Scientology Watch. This week it's South Park vs Scientology. Xenu goes mainstream, Tom Cruise becomes a cartoon punchline, Suri is born, Paramount loses patience, and the Church discovers something more dangerous than government investigators, journalists, or rival religions:A joke.With the usual blend of blockbusters, nonsense, cults, time travel, impossible missions, and animated character assassinations, it's time once again to take Cruise Control.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, we discuss episodes seven and eight of Tea Leaves, our version of the Harry Potter TV show. We go back in time and watch the inception of James and Lily's relationship, and what role Snape plays in driving them together. Episode eight sees Dumbledore's Army disbanded and Umbridge in control of Hogwarts. Enjoy!Topics/Summary:·      1:57 We begin with …. Harry? No, it's James Potter. This is an episode back in time. James is around his fifth year of Hogwarts, enjoying the last of the summer before returning to school. He eats breakfast with his parents then goes out into the picturesque English village to walk the forest with Sirius.·      13:53 Off to Hogwarts. James is a very popular student, and we see him switch into Hogwarts mode as he greets all his fans on the Hogwarts Express. James isn't totally kind however, and it becomes extremely obvious.·      35:46 Back to Harry for episode eight. Classes are going well for him. Firenze has replaced Trelawny as divination professor. The DA is learning how to cast a patronus, and Umbridge learns about their secret meetings. She decides to act.·      50:12 Umbridge runs Hogwarts with a sharp eye. Snape and Harry continue their occlumency lessons, but Malfoy interrupts and calls Snape away. Harry takes that opportunity to learn something more about Snape, but he comes away with a different image of his father.  ThePotterDiscussion@gmail.comthepotterdiscussion.comNox

Hosted by Ellen and Abigail, we embark on a magical journey through the pages and frames of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In this episode we cover the second half of Chapter 24: The Wandmaker and the rest of the very short somewhat corresponding film scene. While we love Harry Potter, we do not condone or agree with its creator's ignorant opinions. We stand with the trans community.  We post weekly podcast episodes comparing and contrasting the Harry Potter books to the movies. Please subscribe and join us as we delve into our favorite book series and the films that brought them to life.  Follow us on Podbean: https://fawkessakepod.podbean.com/ to get the episodes as early as possible! Check out our website at ForFawkesSakePodcast.com for all of our latest news, blogs, and more!  Find us at the handles below: Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok: @FawkesSakePod and Reddit @ r/forfawkessakepodcast Join us on TikTok to stitch Potter Pondering responses and see other random videos! If you would like to share your own Sorting Hat Story with us to read on a future episode or have any other questions, email us at FawkesSakePod@gmail.com. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get the episodes sooner! If you have Apple, please Rate and Review us! (send us an email to let us know you did and we will also send you a sticker!) If you don't have Apple, you can leave us a recommendation on our Facebook page to get a sticker. We also have a Patreon Program. Become a patron for extra podcast perks, including swag, monthly Potterheads, A History episodes, access to our Discord Channel, and more! Check it out here: https://www.patreon.com/fawkessakepod. As always, any support you can give is greatly appreciated!

What if you could bring a piece of science fiction into the real world to make parenting just a little bit easier? Would you choose a Star Trek holodeck, a robotic helper like Rosie from The Jetsons, or perhaps sneak a little fantasy into the conversation with Hermione's Time-Turner from Harry Potter? Those are just a few of the possibilities Charles and Joe consider in another wildly nerdy episode of Wise_N_Nerdy: Where Fatherhood Meets Fandom! The episode kicks off with the Question of the Week: “What item from sci-fi would make parenting so much easier?” Charles and Joe explore the parenting possibilities of futuristic technology and fictional gadgets, with several science-fiction favorites making an appearance—and a couple of fantasy items sneaking into the discussion. Because when you're talking about making parenting easier, apparently the rules about what counts as sci-fi can get a little flexible! Then the Roll of the Dice sends the dads straight into some spectacularly terrible Bad Dad Jokes. The dice have spoken, and unfortunately, there is no technology in existence capable of preventing the groans that follow. Next up is “What Are You Nerding Out About?”, where Joe introduces Charles to a new LitRPG he's been checking out: The Grand Game. Naturally, one LitRPG quickly turns into a much larger conversation as they discuss other popular titles in the genre, including The Primal Hunter and Dungeon Crawler Carl. If you're a fan of progression fantasy, LitRPG adventures, dungeon crawling, leveling systems, and stories where characters get increasingly ridiculous abilities, there's plenty here to fuel your reading—or listening—list. Meanwhile, Charles has something completely different to nerd out about: Dragon Con. After experiencing the convention, Charles shares his excitement about everything that makes Dragon Con such a unique celebration of fandom, from the incredible atmosphere to the people and experiences that make the convention memorable. The dice then bring us to the “Parliament of Papas”, where Charles and Joe react to a discussion about Dragon Con badge ribbons and Swag n Seek. Are convention ribbons and the hunt for swag creating problems, or are they simply another part of the fun and culture surrounding Dragon Con? The dads dig into the debate and consider the different perspectives surrounding convention etiquette, collectibles, and the sometimes chaotic nature of fandom. Finally, the episode wraps up with “Daddy, Tell Me A Story”, where Charles shares some exciting news about what's coming next in his professional life. He's getting ready to take on a new role as a teacher at an EMT training center, opening up a new chapter that combines his experience and knowledge with the opportunity to help train the next generation of emergency medical professionals. From futuristic parenting technology and terrible dad jokes to LitRPG recommendations, Dragon Con adventures, convention debates, and a major professional change, this episode is packed with the kind of unexpected twists and nerdy conversations you've come to expect from Wise_N_Nerdy. Whether you're a parent, a sci-fi fan, a LitRPG reader, a Dragon Con attendee, or just someone who enjoys a good dad joke, there's something here for you. Find your FAMdom and join Charles and Joe for another adventure where fatherhood meets fandom! Wise_N_Nerdy: Where Fatherhood Meets Fandom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nous explorons le chapitre 37 d'Harry Potter et l'Ordre du Phénix : «La prophétie perdue»...Invitée de cet épisode : Florence, auditrice de l'émission.0:00 Introduction16:15 Chapitre1:36:24 Meilleur personnage & renommage1:47:15 La volièrePour prolonger l'aventure Harry Potter avec nous :Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/frequence934Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/frequence934Discord : https://discord.com/invite/ps7FgM2bfGTwitch : https://www.twitch.tv/stream9troisquartsNotre volière : frequence934@gmail.comou à : Fréquence 9 3/4, Espace Conquérant, 3 Place Jean Nouzille 14000 Caen FRANCEAccédez à des contenus exclusifs sur Patreon : https://www.patreon.com/frequence934Soutenez-nous sur Tipeee : https://fr.tipeee.com/frequence934Thème musical :Moonlight Hall, de Kevin MacLeod (Licence CC BY 3.0)Jérémy & Marina ⚡Soutenez-nous sur Patreon et Tipeee !

This video is sponsored by Proton VPN – go to https://protonvpn.com/JVSB to get 70% off a two year plan.  This video is also sponsored by Faire – Sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order, up to $100 at https://faire.com/jvsb  Today J and Ben face off once more to find out who knows more about The Boy Who Lived, The Chosen One: Harry Potter.  As the main character, questions about Harry could come from ANYWHERE and span all 7 books - Have our Quiz Masters managed to stump the guys? Play along with us :: https://supercarlinbrothers.com/j-vs-ben-max-difficulty-chosen-one-harry-potter-quiz/  #HarryPotter #SuperCarlinBrothers Special Thanks to these Quiz Masters:Fate3841, Firemon6000, Hermione Baggins, Mercedes, MrTeacher, Kellbell, Peyton Taylor, Elizabeth Potter, Tina's Hotdog Sophie, TrexDog, Julie Sherwood, LifeIsLavely, Crafty Lizard, Teghan Denlinger, Denise, Bradferd, Elfish Princess

Find our review of Prisoner of Azkaban here: https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/alostplot/episodes/2026-09-19T10_51_47-07_00 In this episode of the Lost Plot Podcast, hosts Avalon and Maverick delve into the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series, 'Goblet of Fire.' They discuss the film's darker tone, character development, and the challenges of adapting a lengthy book into a movie. The conversation highlights the evolution of Harry Potter's character, the significance of side characters, and the consequences faced by the protagonist as he navigates a more complex world. The duo shares their favorite and least favorite scenes, suggesting improvements for a potential remake, and ultimately reflect on the film's impact within the Harry Potter series.#harrypotter #gobletoffire #jkrowling #alostplot #film 

From the earliest days of open-weight models to becoming the neutral routing layer for more than 10 million developers, OpenRouter is one of the clearest bets that the future of AI will be multi-model. In this episode, OpenRouter co-founder & CEO Alex Atallah, with AMP's Anjney Midha returning with swyx to unpack how OpenRouter emerged from the first wave of Llama, Alpaca, Mistral, and Midjourney, why model diversity mattered before it was consensus, and how a company dismissed as “just a wrapper” became critical infrastructure for the AI ecosystem.We go deep on the product and distribution lessons behind OpenRouter: why model labs can spend billions training a checkpoint and still struggle to get it into developers' hands, how Mistral helped prove the value of a competitive inference marketplace, why OpenRouter chose focus over expanding into fine-tuning, memory, and other adjacent products, and how its rankings became a real-time map of how AI usage was changing. Alex also explains OpenRouter's early experiments with model fusion, why they deleted the first version and brought it back years later, and how the platform grew to more than 10 trillion tokens per day.Finally, Anjney explains why Stripe and OpenRouter fit together, why token fraud may become one of the defining security problems of the AI economy, and why the next wave of fraud won't just come from humans but from autonomous agents attacking increasingly valuable token flows.We discuss:* Why OpenRouter bet early that no single AI model would win everything* Alpaca, Llama, and open models becoming impossible to ignore* Why Discord's early AI deployments exposed the limitations of closed models* Why model labs can spend billions on training and still fail at distribution* How OpenRouter became a neutral distribution layer for model developers* Why VCs dismissed OpenRouter as “just a marketplace” or “just a wrapper”* The Mistral price war and the first real proof of an inference marketplace* How Midjourney scaled through Discord and what it taught the AI ecosystem* Why crypto infrastructure became a dress rehearsal for generative AI* OpenRouter vs. LM Arena and why their missions are fundamentally different* Why focus became one of OpenRouter's biggest strategic advantages* Anthropic's early focus on AI pair programming and coding* The OpenRouter products that were prototyped but never launched* MOM, OpenRouter's early Mixture of Models experiment* Why model fusion failed in 2024 — and why it works much better now* How OpenRouter's leaderboard became a live map of the AI industry* OpenClaw, auto-routing, and agents reshaping AI usage* How OpenRouter reached 10+ trillion tokens per day* Why inference gateways are increasingly becoming targets for fraud* Why Stripe's fraud infrastructure is strategically important to OpenRouter* The coming rise of agentic fraud and attacks on the token economy* What changes and what stays the same as OpenRouter joins StripeAlex Atallah* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexatallah/* X: https://x.com/alexatallah* Website: https://alexatallah.comAnjney Midha* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjney/* X: https://x.com/AnjneyMidha* AMP: https://www.amppublic.com/Timestamps00:00:00 Introduction00:02:12 Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model Bet00:06:04 Discord, Open Models, and OpenRouter's Origins00:14:28 Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong Bet00:17:27 Why Model Labs Struggle With Distribution00:23:04 “Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouter00:27:58 Bootstrapping OpenRouter Through Community00:36:16 Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI Ecosystem00:43:38 Mistral and the Birth of the Inference Marketplace00:47:10 OpenRouter vs. LM Arena00:52:08 Focus, Anthropic, and Roads Not Taken00:59:34 Mixture of Models and Model Fusion01:02:44 Sonnet, OpenClaw, and OpenRouter's Explosive Growth01:09:03 Why Stripe Acquired OpenRouter01:12:45 Fraud and the Emerging Token Economy01:17:47 The Coming Wave of Agentic Fraud01:19:07 What's Next for OpenRouter at StripeTranscriptIntroduction: OpenRouter, Marketplaces, and Pub-Sub as a Product PrincipleSwyx [00:00:00]: Okay, we are here in Anja's house, which is where all big startups in San Francisco start.Anjney Midha [00:00:08]: Howdy.Swyx [00:00:08]: And, congrats on Cursor, Mistral. I don'- God knows what else. You got so much stuff going on.Anjney Midha [00:00:17]: There's, there's a lot going on. Well, OpenRouter is probably the - has been the most, I would say, like, one I'm excited about recently.Swyx [00:00:24]: Yeah. And we have Alex, first time on the pod, but,Anjney Midha [00:00:27]: Thanks for having me.Swyx [00:00:27]: You've been in the IE a few times. I appreciate every time you've shown up, for the community. Congrats. I just, like, what a journey. When I was looking back at your past posts, one of the earliest principles that I saw you write as a product person is sub as a product principle. And I wanted - you to maybe explain how you think about what should exist in the world.Anjney Midha [00:00:49]: Yeah. The sub piece, which was early 2023, I didn't think about it until we talked like 10 minutes ago, is about how there is like a way of thinking about products as an intersection between subscribing to data and publishing data. And marketplaces are an easy example of this. You have suppliers that are publishing some product to a SKU. And the SKU is like a sub topic that a consumer is subscribing to and just going to, like, consume whenever they want. And humans consume in a very, like, discreet, ad hoc way. It's not very scalable. all their attention is on the topic when they're buying the thing, and their attention is nowhere else when that happens. agents and consumers of inference don't act like that. They're consuming continuously, and they're changing the SKUs that they consume from all the time. So OpenRouter is like a blend between a normal API experience and a marketplace where we create model slug. We have the auto router. We have all kinds of, like, product SKUs that you can subscribe to. And then you can, like, continuously add, like, derive value and make decisions based on those consumers.Alpaca, Llama, and the Multi-Model BetSwyx [00:02:11]: Yeah. This is something that was more consensus now, but not consensus when you guys started, which was that there is such a demand for swapping models and changing things out and, that people would not use the native SDKs. I guess, for each of you, what was your realization moment that this would be it? I, - You've, you've given a talk at EIE about Alpaca as,Anjney Midha [00:02:33]: Yeah.Swyx [00:02:33]: One of your inspiring moments.Anjney Midha [00:02:35]: Alpaca, I can, like, rehash the Alpaca moment for a sec. Like, the very beginning, at the end of 2022, OpenAI was the only game in town. There was, like, OpenAI, Cohere,Swyx [00:02:47]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:02:48]: And then a smattering of, like, early attempts at open weight models.Swyx [00:02:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:02:54]: When Llama came out in January of 2023, it was like, “Wow, really exciting. This is really big.” It outperforms 3 on, one or two benchmarks. but you can't chat with it. It wasn't like - It wasn't an engaging model, but it seemed like someone just needed to fix a couple things and do some RLHF on it to get it all the way there. And Alpaca was the first model that I saw that did that. It only took $600 to do. A team at Stanford generated a bunch of synthetic data, tuned Llama, and made Alpaca, billion parameter model. Or was - Maybe it was thirteen billion parameters. And it was so good. Like, I was just, like, on an airplane using it. I, - in many cases, I, like, you could not discern a ChatGPT versus an Alpaca result. And I figured if it was this easy to make a model, one, we have a whole new way of monetizing data for the first time. you can just, like, take really valuable data and turn it into a service in $600. and that cost will probably go down over time.Swyx [00:04:03]: When you - So sorry. when you say monetizing your data as, what eventually will become an MCP endpoint or as a training data for a model?Anjney Midha [00:04:12]: Yeah, training data for a model.Swyx [00:04:13]: Awesome.Anjney Midha [00:04:13]: Like, an abstract way of saying like, “Hey, I have this data.”Swyx [00:04:15]: Compress it into a model.Anjney Midha [00:04:16]: Like, it makes sense for me in my product, but, like, I could repackage it in the form of a model and sell it. And so it's just a whole new business model for the economy. It also, of course, provides, like, a way of following what Frontier Labs are doing, but in a way that, like, a single developer or a small team of developers can roll on their own. And so - Whenever you have an example of that, like a breakout app that's doing really well, and then some framework for imitating it with - in your own flavor, you have an immediate ecosystem of, like an immediate ecosystem, like, should arise because there's just a huge gap between the, like, decisions that the single company is making and all of the variations in those decisions that, like, a wider ecosystem can create themselves. And so then, you need a marketplace to, like, discover all of those, services and all of those products. There wasn't any place on the internet that, like, was like a home base for LLMs in terms of seeing how much they were being used and seeing who was using them and why.Swyx [00:05:29]: The closest would be Hugging Face.Anjney Midha [00:05:30]: Hugging Face was the closest at the time, yeah.Swyx [00:05:31]: They just started Hugging, like, a few years ago before that.Anjney Midha [00:05:34]: Yeah, and Hugging Face also didn't have the closed-source models.Swyx [00:05:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:05:38]: And they didn'- you couldn't use the models at the time. and there wasn't data about who was using them. There were, like, a bunch of differences between OpenRouter and Hugging Face, and those differences felt really critical to me, especially when I was just trying to learn about LLMs and, like, why people are choosing, like, Different little ones that are emerging over time.Discord, Open Models, and the Origins of OpenRouterSwyx [00:06:03]: Got it. And then, Ansh, no stranger to wanting more model diversity, at the time, you're a couple of years into your Anthropic journey, which we covered in the previous podcast as well. What was your introduction to Alex?Alex Atallah [00:06:16]: Well, the introduction was, I think, thirteen years before that.Swyx [00:06:20]: Oh.Alex Atallah [00:06:20]: But the OpenRouter handshake happened right over there, if you remember.Anjney Midha [00:06:23]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:24]: Which - So Alex and I, met, I believe as sophomores now, if I remember at the Stanford Review,Anjney Midha [00:06:32]: That's rightAlex Atallah [00:06:32]: Meeting for the first time.Anjney Midha [00:06:33]: I think so, yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:06:35]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:06:35]: So Stanford Review was the libertarian newspaper on campus at Stanford that Peter Thiel started back in the day. And, whatever-- for whatever reason, I, Alex and I both showed up to one of the meetings, and I remember, the editor-chief was a mutual friend of ours. Lisa was really a really great editor-chief, where, part of an editor-chief's job is to assign responsibilities to people and make sure the work gets done. and I, I may be misremembering the details, but I remember wanting to. It was surprising to me that at the time there was no dedicated technology section in the newspaper.Alex Atallah [00:07:11]: YouSwyx [00:07:13]: Because it's political, right?Alex Atallah [00:07:14]: It is primarilySwyx [00:07:14]: Like, it's talkingAlex Atallah [00:07:15]: It originally started as like aAnjney Midha [00:07:16]: Yes.Swyx [00:07:17]: Yeah, states and all those things.Alex Atallah [00:07:17]: Correct.Swyx [00:07:18]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:07:18]: But it, - To take us back in time, you may remember this, but, there was this technology, legislation that was being debated called, the Net Neutrality Act. And net neutrality is, like, inherently this political concept, right? It's, it's about the regulation of - internet broadband access. And so there was a community of us who were technologists, but also debating the politics of the technology. And I thought the Review would be a great place - to, like, write about that. And I was working on, I think, a net neutrality article, and I remember proposing, “Well, maybe we should start a technology section.” And Alex was one of the only people who said, “Yes, that would be cool.” And said. I forget whether we ended up writing stuff together, but - that's when we first met,Alex Atallah [00:08:03]: Was 2011 or twelve. I forget which year it was. It was one of those.Anjney Midha [00:08:09]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:08:09]: It was at Old Union, if I remember correctly.Alex Atallah [00:08:11]: That's where we used to meet. But, along the way, Alex and I have had a chance to, To hang out often. And probably the time when we had the most professional overlap was when I was running the platform at Discord, and it had become this explosive platform for cryptoSwyx [00:08:32]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:08:32]: And NFTs in the middle of the pandemic.Swyx [00:08:35]: Which also, by the way, you were in charge of safety and security as well, right?Alex Atallah [00:08:38]: I was the head of platform, which meant all of the crypto - the DAO and NFT launch security debugging fell onSwyx [00:08:45]: And their phishing and.Alex Atallah [00:08:47]: The phishing, the social engineering attacks, the katana DDoS that we were getting hit by. but it's around the time I first started teaching security at scale at Stanford, CS 153. And Alex was on the, - at OpenSea at the time, and I was trying to figure out how we could defend against all these attacks that we were. Like, and at peak, I forget, if you remember how much NFT volume was running throughSwyx [00:09:10]: DiscordAlex Atallah [00:09:10]: Discord, but it was, like, a meaningful amount of, like, it was, like, several billion dollars in NFT volume of GMV, so to speak, were running through the platform, and it was all coming from OpenSea. It was these, like, buy, sell,Swyx [00:09:20]: TheAlex Atallah [00:09:21]: ServersSwyx [00:09:21]: The D in DAO is Discord.Alex Atallah [00:09:25]: Yes. And so that's when I think we had hung out professionally. But a year after that, OpenAI gave Discord early access to GPT. Sorry, three. No, it was five. Yeah, five, which is the RL version of three. And that's around the time we made a Discord bot with, OpenAI for internal deployment, and that's when I realized we would need. Like, since I was part of the deployment team.Anjney Midha [00:09:50]: What was the use case?Alex Atallah [00:09:51]: There were two that were. And there's, there's a post now called “Discord is Your Place for AI with Friends” that somebody sent me recently that I wrote, and published in twenty-three. But There were two use cases. One was Clyde, which was the - like, a party friend inside of Discord that could help you set up your Discord server and talk to you about onboarding and get your friends to hang out more. and then there was content moderation. And one of the realizations we had with content moderation was - it would refuse to moderate. Like, it would just refuse our prompts because the The training was. We were very early in the training era, and it would just. Our prompts would trigger it, its, like, guardrails. And we told OpenAI, “Hey, guys, we need access to the weights because if we're gonna be doing content moderation at scale, we had 250 million monthly active users, we need more reliability that the model will do what we need it to.” And they said, “Well, sorry, guys, that's not how this works. We're a closed-source company.” And so that was my first realization that we needed open models, and the enterprises would need more control over capabilities, and then ultimately would need some control plane or management system to orchestrate these open models. But there weren't no good - there were no good open alternatives until maybeAlex Atallah [00:11:10]: Six months later when Llama came out. And six months after that, I led the series A into Mistral, which was started by Guillaume and the Llama team. And - That, - Around that time is when I remember hearing about Alex launching OpenRouter and going, “These worlds are gonna collide, and I don't know when it'll make sense to team up.” But Alex was so early and could see. I think he was totally right about this ecosystem starting with Llama that then needed, like, a, an easy layer to manage for, especially for. I was approaching it from the enterprise perspective because I had been that, like, the. As the VP of platform at Discord, it was my job to ensure that when we deployed models to, like, 250 million users, they did what we wanted them to. And that was very hard, because if you outsourced it to the labs and they controlled the guardrails and their guardrails are their safety policies. Forbid the model from responding to your prompts. That was quite catastrophic.Swyx [00:12:05]: Yeah. But what, a moderation is the thing that they want to support. And obviously, beyond that, they would - OpenAI would work with you, presumably to give you a moderation endpoint, which they offer for free.Alex Atallah [00:12:16]: It was an interesting use case, that - So they did give us a moderation endpoint. However, as you guys know, every Discord server is like a mini deployment of itself. And so the use case was instead of having human moderators that have to interpret the norms of the community, you just give the, - Often, like every, subreddit, Discord servers, public ones have their own rules that the user, the users create.Swyx [00:12:41]: Oh, yeah. We run the LinkedIn Discord in. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:12:43]: And then humans used to read those norms and then enforce it every day manually, like observing each message in these communities. And these communities have like millions of users. So we had a 5,000+ person team globally in the, on the Discord content moderation team. These are outsourced contractors who had a really tough job. And so the idea was instead, if you could give the norms of that server To the LLM, then the LLM would do custom moderation for that server. It's almost like a, like context moderation for that server. And many of those servers' norms just violated OpenAI's rules. And so - It was like we had our own custom eval. So each server had its own custom eval. But Discord-- at the time, OpenAI's evals, we were all soAlex Atallah [00:13:28]: Primitive in our thinking about how to deploy these LLMs that often the training prompts were super handed. It said, “Oh, anything about Harry Potter, anything that has trademarked content, don'- refuse.” And if it was a fan - Harry Potter fan community, this is a real use case, that had content moderation, the LLM would just refuse.Swyx [00:13:48]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:13:49]: And that was just not precise enough.Anjney Midha [00:13:52]: Another one that we heard was like if someone was trying to write like a detective story, and there's one chapter with a lot of violence, like maybe someoneAlex Atallah [00:14:01]: RightAnjney Midha [00:14:01]: Like kills someone, the LLMs would just refuse to, like, help with that part of the story.Alex Atallah [00:14:07]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:14:07]: And then - like, we used to be like, okay, this is not like structurally inherent to LLMs. There must be, like, some choice out there so that I can, like, switch to another model, when I'm getting, like, a refusal or a bad result from the main one that I have. And that, like, tension also drove me for a marketplace.Why “One Model Wins” Was the Wrong BetSwyx [00:14:28]: Yeah. I think that is well accepted now. What was it like back then when you were raising or, starting this? did people get it? what was the, some of the struggles? I like getting stories out of him about how other VCs don't get it. So like anything you wanna, talk about, now - Let's, let's call it, that the early journey of OpenRouter is done, right? You can obviously talk about some of the early days stuff.Anjney Midha [00:14:54]: Well, I was gonna say that, like, the biggest objection we got is big model win, which is - all of theSwyx [00:15:03]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:04]: Huh?Swyx [00:15:04]: Scaling laws.Anjney Midha [00:15:05]: Yeah, scaling laws, and natural network effects are just gonna accrue to one company, which will be - It'll be a Google-style monopoly, just like how Google won the search market, by a large margin, and you'll just be fighting for scraps at the end. That was probably the biggest objection we got. it is interesting that Google won the search engine race with such a huge margin. I think, like, had there been more interesting benchmarks or had, like, search engines been, - had people, like, seen them a little bit more like LLMs where they're services that you can build companies on top of, that might not have been the case. but LLMs don't merely have a user interface. They're also, like, ways of building entirely new businesses. And, a Google-level monopoly would be like the Dutch East India Company times, quadrillion in magnitude because the whole economy ends up, like, depending on the one monopoly as well. So it didn't seem like would be a really crazy outcome if that happened. And it's also less likely because the economics of, like, creating good competitors are much, like, much more decentralizable.Alex Atallah [00:16:25]: Everything Alex said is true, And I came at it from a completely different perspective, whichSwyx [00:16:31]: Yes, this is why we're here.Alex Atallah [00:16:32]: The scaling laws were never - In my mind, were always a feature, not a bug for why OpenRouter would be very valuable. Because, I was one of the first investors in Anthropic, and it was obvious to me that other researchers in our friends - I went to grad school for machine learning, and I just had a lot of friends in the ML community who it was very obvious to us that the bitter lesson holds. And so I was like, “Oh, fantastic. Now we have at least two proof points that compute scaling works.” It was OpenAI and Anthropic. and by the time I think we decided to team up on OpenRouter, I had already invested in Mistral and Black Forest Labs and Luma. So there was multiple model companies and teams that I was, working with.Why Model Labs Struggle With DistributionSwyx [00:17:14]: But you did other modalities, whereas this is literallyAlex Atallah [00:17:16]: Across different modalities, yesSwyx [00:17:17]: Text.Alex Atallah [00:17:18]: Exactly. And it was so obvious to me that an ecosystem of different kinds of models were being created, and that this whole narrative of, like, Only one company will dominate like Google was, well, like maybe true, but one, I don't believe that. But two, there was so much extraordinary innovation happening across several different research teams. But the shared problem I was noticing across all of them was often, the research teams were fantastic at figuring out how to reason about new capabilities. They think in terms of capabilities, but never - like, are not developer mindset-oriented. Like, what happens after the training is done and the checkpoint comes out? Like, you'd be shocked how, like, similar the early training teams at OpenAI, sorry, Anthropic, BFL, Mistral, were in their, like, default approach to. Taking their research out of the, lab and scaling their impact, which is often, oh, the checkpoint is done, put it out as an API, done, and then there'd be crickets. in the case of Claude, the first Claude checkpoint was done a year before they released it internally. And then ChatGPT came out, and we decided, okay, yes, it's a good idea to release a Claude version externally.Alex Atallah [00:18:34]: And they had no plan, like no plan for how to get developers to try it out. And so if you go to the Claude one blog post, you'll notice there are, like, three developer examples for users of the API, and one is a Discord bot, and the second is Vivian, my wife's startup called Juny Learning, ‘- And then there was, like, Notion, because these were all friends of, like, the Anthropic Because that's how - like, last minute the planning was around, hey, once the model's done training, how do you get it out to the world? There was no distribution platform that understood what developers needed, all the key management, provisioning, like, simple, like, endpoint management, versioning control. Like, all these things that the scientists and researchers go, “ that's plumbing. I don't really think about it.”Swyx [00:19:15]: Implementation detail.Alex Atallah [00:19:16]: Right. And instead, Alex came at it from that perspective. And so, it was so obvious to me that, like, every single lab I was funding would spend - like, literally sometimes billions of dollars into training, and then a checkpoint would be done, and there'd be crickets, like, during early access because they're like, “Oh, that's right.”Alex Atallah [00:19:35]: It's hard to use a checkpoint to make anything. You need a whole bunch of plumbing around it to make it usable by a developer. And so by the - I think - it was so obvious to me that a distribution platform like OpenRouter was critical to have in the ecosystem if we wanted there to be competition to Google. Like, unless-- ‘cause with Google, DeepMind is done training a new checkpoint, and then they push a button, and it gets blasted out across all their surfaces from Google Docs to,Swyx [00:20:01]: Everywhere, even if I don't want it.Alex Atallah [00:20:02]: Everywhere. You wanna know about, like, on Android, like, overnight, they can deploy a new checkpoint to, like, a billion devices, right? And that invisible infra advantage, distribution advantage, most people don't realize, but until OpenRouter showed up, - you had to think about all of that yourself as a model lab. And it was very daunting. at Anthropic, I think it took, well, more than twelve months to get to our first 10 million in revenue. And in contrast with Black Forest Labs, I remember the early days, you guys had a conversation with the BFL team, and, it was so simple for OpenRouter to say, “Oh, no problem. Like, the day you launch, we can send 1 million developers to you.” that was crazy. That was like a step function change in, like, an hour.Swyx [00:20:46]: Is that a real number, a million?Alex Atallah [00:20:47]: I,Swyx [00:20:48]: Okay. All right.Alex Atallah [00:20:48]: I think today it's, like, 4 million. How many developers are on OpenRouter today?Anjney Midha [00:20:52]: Over ten,Alex Atallah [00:20:54]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:20:54]: Over 10 million, but, like, it's, it's hard to, youAlex Atallah [00:20:59]: I, yeah, I don't know how to. Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:00]: We do a lot of, like, account duping work, but, noAlex Atallah [00:21:04]: If you could get 1,000 developers, just to put in context If you get 1,000 developers who try the model on day one after you release it and just, like, do inference and give you feedback, that's a thousandAnjney Midha [00:21:15]: That's hugeAlex Atallah [00:21:16]: More developers than they knew how to get to on their own.Swyx [00:21:19]: Well, BFL had a reputation, but yes.Alex Atallah [00:21:21]: They had one in Stable Diffusion.Swyx [00:21:22]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:23]: And with Mistral, I don't know if you guys remember, but the first checkpoint they released was, like, torrents. It was, like, torrent weights.Swyx [00:21:31]: Yeah, they just put up a magnet link.Alex Atallah [00:21:33]: Yeah, there was no API.Anjney Midha [00:21:34]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:21:34]: Because they didn'- they weren't infra people.Alex Atallah [00:21:37]: ? Like, it's like, okay, download these weights, and you guys go figure out how to host it.Swyx [00:21:39]: Well, he has a story on his side, yeah.Anjney Midha [00:21:41]: Yeah, in addition to the, like, building a really good developer experience around it, the marketing that we do on, like, for different models is totally different and perceived totally differentlyAlex Atallah [00:21:54]: RightAnjney Midha [00:21:54]: From the marketing that a model lab does for itself.Alex Atallah [00:21:56]: Yes, 1,000%.Anjney Midha [00:21:57]: Right? We are like a, neutral layer looking at this market like it's a big dark room with all the corners completely obscure to users, and users are walking into the room and, like, feeling aroundAlex Atallah [00:22:09]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:09]: And trying to figure out what objects to grab off the tables and, like, build into, their companies. And it's just an insane way of working. Like, models are not products where you can just enumerate all their features onto a web page. They're all black boxes, including the open weight ones. So you need to, like, shine lights on all corners of this room, so that people can see what makes this model good, and you need the company shining that light to be a neutral third party, which is what we specialize in. So the, like. It'- In addition to developer experience, there's also, like, a very important, like, marketing and product packaging componentAlex Atallah [00:22:50]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:22:50]: And a way of, like, routing and discovering models becomes, like, critical to your market as a provider or a model lab or a server tool and more in the future.“Just a Wrapper”: Why VCs Misunderstood OpenRouterAlex Atallah [00:23:03]: And this value, to your earlier point about how many VCs, like, just don't. One of my biggest frustrations is that venture capitalists, many of them, like, just don't have any operating experience in the field. so unlike a traditional investor who's just maybe come up through the ranks as, like, a associate working on financial modeling or maybe hasn't been a real operator in the field for, like, more than ten years, which is a big part of the industry now, I had just arrived at a16z, like, a year after running the platform. And so I knew what the challenges were of, like, building a real - great developer experience and like, being able to create a working piece of software with a model. And there were a few, I won't name names, but there were investors who were looking at OpenRouter, and, felt at the time, like, when I would compare notes with people, that it was just, I quote unquote, “just a marketplace.”Swyx [00:23:59]: Yeah, just a thin layer, just aAlex Atallah [00:24:00]: CorrectSwyx [00:24:00]: JustAlex Atallah [00:24:01]: A wrapper or whatever on other people's APIs. And I was like, “You have no idea how strategic the value that OpenRouter has created by being able to orchestrate even three.” APIs in production. The amount of both engineering work and community design that goes into getting that live and running in production at the scale the OpenRouter team had started just doesn't happen by default. And that was one of the things that stood out to me about Alex from the earliest days. Like, he just understood, like, - from a systems perspective, like, how do you get these flywheels going? Like, that stood out to me with OpenSea when we were working together on the NFT integration at Discord. Like, Alex had a level of community-- like, systems thinking on how you get these flywheels going that most scientists and machine learning people just don'tAlex Atallah [00:24:48]: Think of. Like, we often think in terms of training.Swyx [00:24:52]: It's a linear stage.Alex Atallah [00:24:53]: It's this linear pipeline.Swyx [00:24:53]: There's no loop yet.Alex Atallah [00:24:54]: Yeah. It wasn't until much later that the modern context feedback loop cycle really got standardized in the industry. But at the time, if you remember, machine learning was like. Like, mostly we did a lot of ML, like, when I was in grad school on a laptop. So you just, like, download a dataset, ran some ablations, and you looked at the loss curves, and you're like, “Great, I made AI.” And the idea that you have to, like, deploy those capabilities, collect feedback trajectories, then, like, put those into a continuous loop, like, came much later. And it was very counterintuitive to the - like, the traditional AI mindset. I do remember doing the investment phase for, OpenRouter, I just didn't try and educate a bunch of other VCs on why it was not just a marketplace. I was like, “ what? I'm just gonna invest.”Anjney Midha [00:25:41]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:25:41]: And I'm going to, like, take the opportunity to partner with Alex, and if - no other VCs get it, that's totally fine. ‘Cause at the time, - it was not obvious, I think, to several of the investors that, like, OpenRouter was not more than just a wrapper around APIs. And - that infuriated me. And I was like, “ what? I don't have time to debate you. I'm - we're gonna, we're gonna invest.” And then I think, like, a month later, Matt Murphy marked it up by 10x. Like, - I think. I forget what the exact money was and so on, but, to his credit, Menlo Ventures realized, “Okay, there's much more strategic value here as well.” Maybe you didn't hear all these conversations behind the scenes But that frustrated me a lot. there's a lot of this, like, opining about wrappers. and if you're like, “Oh, an app is just a wrapper on a model,” then, like. And, OpenRouter is, like, this wrapper on top of other APIs, and this is the most stupid, reductive framework.Alex Atallah [00:26:31]: And so it's clearly somebody who has no experience deploying product at scale.Swyx [00:26:34]: It's the thing you dismiss other things with. Like, you're a - everyone's a wrapper on everything, right? Like, and there's, there's some Some wrappers have value.Alex Atallah [00:26:40]: Investors are wrappers and LPs, right?Alex Atallah [00:26:42]: Like venture capitalists. So, yeah, it's all wrappers down, all down to bare metal, I guess, and like energy.Swyx [00:26:46]: Yeah, there - When I started the whole AI engineer, I guess, the coining, in 2023, like, that was, like, the number one pushback is that this is no value. You should just train models.Anjney Midha [00:26:56]: Right.Swyx [00:26:57]: And, yeah, obviously this is, like. you guys are one of the testaments to the fact that you can build very valuable wrappers, but also very valuable model companies.Alex Atallah [00:27:06]: It's so, hard to be. Like, the day a model launches, the fact that you have an OpenRouter, endpoint for that model frequently at the top of Hacker News on day one, people don't realize the amount of work that goes into accomplishing that. And OpenRouter used. Like, that would happen over and over again, and I remember going, “People have no idea how hard that is.”Alex Atallah [00:27:30]: That's not.Swyx [00:27:31]: Yeah, we've covered some of the inference engineering that goes behind,Alex Atallah [00:27:34]: YesSwyx [00:27:34]: Some of - with Base Ten and all those. Well, today you have, all those, like, cool code name things that people guess what Oxy Alpha is and all those things. But, like, I guess one of the things that you're teasing is, how do you get that initial flywheel going, right? Because today you have your scale and your reputation, all these things, so obviously you - you're driving immense distribution. But when you were early on, when it's mostlyBootstrapping OpenRouter Through CommunityAlex Atallah [00:27:55]: The bootstrap, yeah.Swyx [00:27:56]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:27:56]: What was the bootstrap like?Anjney Midha [00:27:58]: To bring it back to early Discord days, I think we, like, initially connected with. This is an OpenSea story, technically. But, and we initially connected when you were at Discord, and we talked about, like, - the Axie Infinity server.Alex Atallah [00:28:13]: Oh, yes. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:28:14]: This server was, like, the biggest server at theAlex Atallah [00:28:17]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:28:17]: At Discord.Alex Atallah [00:28:18]: That's right.Anjney Midha [00:28:19]: And you were like, constantly bumping up theAlex Atallah [00:28:22]: The limits on the server. Oh, my GodAnjney Midha [00:28:24]: Of how many people could be in the server.Swyx [00:28:24]: For those who don't know, like, 10% of Philippines was Axie.Alex Atallah [00:28:29]: Was on that server. That's a big hit.Swyx [00:28:31]: It was, like, a meaningful contributor to the GDP of the country.Alex Atallah [00:28:33]: It was an NFT, like, crypto game, but itSwyx [00:28:35]: It was like a Pokémon breeding thing.Anjney Midha [00:28:36]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:28:36]: Yeah. Similar. Yeah. There was battling, there was breeding, and then there was, like, a marketplace for trading.Swyx [00:28:43]: Earn as well.Alex Atallah [00:28:45]: Yeah, earn. And, like, the graphics were really cute and fun, and you like, you get emotional about your Axie that you make. So to, like, start a community like that, which we had to do many times at OpenSea with every early project, for us to create a marketplace for it, we need to make sure that the, like, the community wants it.Anjney Midha [00:29:09]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:29:09]: And it's like building something that people want and going and telling them about it. Like, you can do that on a one basis, but there's way higher leverage to do that in a community where everyone can talk to you at the same time. So we spent a lot of time, like, building things that the community really wanted. We did the same thing for OpenRouter. And, like, the Axie community was one of, like, a zillion communities we did that with. And Anj, like, saw us doing it and. ‘Cause you could just see people sharing OpenSea links constantly in that Discord. Like, users sharing links is a really clear indicator that, like, something important is going on. So we spent, a lot of time, like, first figuring out what the gap is in the technology that people care about. Like, what was the actual problem that needs to be solved? in early LLM days, it was, OpenAI refusing to finish the prompt or,Anjney Midha [00:30:09]: YeahAlex Atallah [00:30:10]: To, like, complete the task. It was also.Anjney Midha [00:30:13]: Inability to customize models. and so there are communities that, like are just completely blocked on that issue, and those are the communities that are most useful to learn about and dive into and explore.Alex Atallah [00:30:28]: Something that really struck me at that time, - as I was just hearing your talk, I remember noting - you may not remember this, but we - we had these, like working, Zoom calls that we were doing a sprint around for, like this OpenSea integration with Discord. and, we'd, we'd - it was myself, my engineering team. I think you were there. And I remember, Alex, in the middle of one of those calls, just like there was like silence. we were all like, “Oh, yeah, this totally makes sense. Let's do this.” And then there's - every, like everybody aligned. And Alex was like, “No, this makes no sense to me.” And everyone's - I remember going, “What? Like, it works. Like, you click on a link and this, then it bounces you out to, like, OpenSea.” And he was like, “It's not a good user experience. Yeah, we should not do this.” And I remember going, he was the only one person out of all of us to raise his hand and go, yes, it made sense from a technical implementation perspective. Like, we were bouncing the user out into the, into OpenSea. And so it kinda checked the box of the product manager's requirements on both sides. But Alex went one step further and was like, “ what would be better, guys? If we just embedded the experience right here inside of Discord so the link opened up as an embedded iframe, and you can just check out right there.”Alex Atallah [00:31:47]: And not one person on the call, and there's like seven of us who had met, like, week after week.Swyx [00:31:52]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Alex Atallah [00:31:53]: And it's the guy who doesn't work for Discord.Swyx [00:31:55]: Like, technically, you benefit if they bounce.Alex Atallah [00:31:57]: Exactly. And that was, like, adversarial. To keep the user inside of Discord would be adversarial to OpenSea. And yet Alex put that user experience first. And I was like, “That's special.”Swyx [00:32:08]: Wow.Alex Atallah [00:32:08]: Because it's very hard to have somebody who's technical like Alex and understands the developer flow, but also understands the best user experience and wants to prioritize that. And that's two sides of the flywheel that if you can get spinning, like is often hard to stop. And you just reminded me, like that one was one of those moments where I go, I - I realized I gotta be better at user experience because I should have been the one who came up with that, and I didn't. And I learned from you. And, I think that went into one of our case studies for the PM training program at Discord.Swyx [00:32:34]: Whoa.Alex Atallah [00:32:36]: I don't know if it there is Because ofSwyx [00:32:38]: You need an Alex is the conclusion.Alex Atallah [00:32:40]: Yeah. You need an Alex. And this is why I'm not, nobody should be surprised why Stripe decided like they had to buy OpenRouter because it's a really rare combination of people who understand the machine learning community, the developer experience, and the user experience. And putting all that together has resulted in this extraordinary scale that very few other marketplaces have been able to achieveWindow AI, BYOM, and Finding the Right Form FactorSwyx [00:33:02]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:33:02]: Over the last, five years.Swyx [00:33:04]: Yeah. Well, we should talk about the other reasons for acquisitions, whichAlex Atallah [00:33:07]: Yes, we should.Swyx [00:33:07]: You've written about. I wanna proceed somewhat chronologically as well. So - there is a point that, one of the questions that, Dave from H of Zero sent in was, when did it - really started to work? And you brought up Mixtral. I don't know if you wanna bring up that story.Alex Atallah [00:33:22]: Oh, yeah.Swyx [00:33:23]: Which obviously you overlap with, so.Anjney Midha [00:33:26]: Yeah, the MoE was. I don't know when. there's no like one moment where I was like, “Oh, this is, officially starting to work.” It wasSwyx [00:33:36]: The moment where you had a Chrome extension, like, really super early on.Anjney Midha [00:33:39]: Oh, yeah. But, well, - yeah. So before OpenRouter, I wanted to, like, explore a bring-your-own-model experiment. And,Swyx [00:33:47]: Which anyone familiar with crypto is like, yeah, Phantom and all these things.Anjney Midha [00:33:50]: Yeah. So it felt like doing a MetaMask analogy for AI would be a fun way of exploring that. And at the time, there were no AI apps. There were probably as many AI apps that were, like, hitting AI - like, hitting an LLM via an API call as there were, like, games just doing it in JavaScript. like there was a, there was a moment in time where it could have been the case that web apps call LLMs through the browser, like through some desktopAlex Atallah [00:34:27]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:34:27]: Managed app that is controlled by the user. and of course, there are like, I think, many reasons that did not happen. But back when the days were that primordial, I built a Chrome extension called Window AISwyx [00:34:43]: With Plasmo.Anjney Midha [00:34:44]: With Plasmo.Swyx [00:34:45]: I had come across early on, and I was like, “Who's gonna use this?” You did.Anjney Midha [00:34:49]: Plasmo had a couple, like, I think Phantom was using it. there were some other, like real companies using it.Alex Atallah [00:34:56]: It was like a shim.Swyx [00:34:57]: React for Chrome extension. It compiles to allAnjney Midha [00:35:00]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:00]: I see.Anjney Midha [00:35:00]: Like Next.js for Chrome extensions.Swyx [00:35:01]: Next.js, Next.js.Alex Atallah [00:35:02]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:03]: And yeah, built Window AI on top of it. The creator of Plasmo, like started contributing code to Window AI, in GitHub, and that turned out to be Louis VicchiAlex Atallah [00:35:15]: Oh, you'Anjney Midha [00:35:15]: Who is the founder of OpenRouter.Alex Atallah [00:35:17]: That's right. You have told me this is how you met Louis. Yes.Anjney Midha [00:35:19]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:35:19]: Okay.Anjney Midha [00:35:20]: So, that allowed users to like configure which model they wanted to use for a web page in their browser, and then, like the app would just call out to that model when it needed to do things. not the right form factor for LLMs, but, it's like fun experiment. You learn a lot, and like I open sourced it. And the main learning is like, okay, this has to be an API, and it has to look a little bit - like, there has to be more of a developer experience here and more of a discovery experience as well. Like, I don't know where to use these models, and a little Chrome extension is not gonna help me discover. It's not enough real estate. I need more space. I need visuals. I need graphs. I need, examples. I need images. I need to, like, I need to be able to, like explore both as a human and as an agent.Crypto, Midjourney, and the Early Generative AI EcosystemAlex Atallah [00:36:10]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:36:10]: So that's how OpenRouter came to be.Alex Atallah [00:36:13]: A meta point that.Alex Atallah [00:36:16]: I think is underappreciated, but Alex is reminding me, is that we were quite lucky that we were so. we were, like, adjacent to the crypto community in those days. Because in hindsight, crypto ended up being like a dress rehearsal for generative models, right? If you think about the Axie experience, Alex is totally right, there were not that many AI apps at the time. And while I was dealing-- my job was to be the head of platform at Discord, which meant to be a general purpose place for communities and friends to create-- for developers to create apps and bots and, other services that could be deployed across Discord. And while 80% of the attention at the time was being spent on crypto, because that's where all the NFT volume was, there was, like, twenty percent of my time I was spending with a friend, who would get hotbot with me and ask me for. We would play Magic: The Gathering on weekends, and he was working on a little Discord bot that could take a text input and turn it into an image, and it was called Midjourney. YouSwyx [00:37:15]: Is that David?Alex Atallah [00:37:15]: It was David Holz.Alex Atallah [00:37:16]: He was a good friend. And David and I have both been failed ARVR founders, in the before that. And, I remember this. Midjourney was one of the fastest-growing communities we had after Axie Infinity started to peter off. And many of the, like, the abstractions and the infrastructure decisions we made to scale Axie happened just in time because they. Axie did this and then fell off a cliff. And then as Midjourney was taking off, we, like, explicitly decided to help David make the server, the Midjourney server, as the primary place for interaction with the model, because it was very hard for people to understand how to use the model if they couldn't see other people using it and copy them. And so the single-player Midjourney web app on its own, like midjourney.com, had, like, terrible retention because people would show up, they'd see this empty field. It's like E 2, and they would type in, like, cat or dog. And it was, like, paralyzing for them to have this blank canvas that they had to fill because they'd never used an AI model before. But instead, in a Discord server, you could see other people using it and riff off of their prompt, and the engagement was off the charts. And so scaling, Midjourney from zero to, like, 10 million monthly actives was a much smoother approach Axie Infinity. And so,Swyx [00:38:29]: Don't forget the best of four pictures, and you choose one.Alex Atallah [00:38:31]: The best, yeah, and then the other, weSwyx [00:38:32]: Which is the feedback loop.Alex Atallah [00:38:33]: The RLHF feedback loop, which, by the way, separately, like, Tom Brown, David and I used to play Magic: The Gathering on weekends. And so, like, it was one group of friends would hang out, and we'd. Like, these concepts were all being discussed all the time. But, there was.Alex Atallah [00:38:47]: I think there were few of us who bridged both the crypto worlds and the AI worlds. And compared to crypto, where it was - the question was always, what's the use case, for this technology? There was never any need to ask that for AI because it's, like, the use case was so visceral. It was like, I can create now anything at - I can imagine. I can write novels, I can code. And the infrastructure that those of us who believed in the distributed systems, like, value of crypto, like the censorship resistance part, found this use case that was explosive. And I think between Midjourney, the, Claude was a Discord bot launch, that we were using internally as an LLM. ElevenLabs had a TTS model that we had on Discord as well. Like, Discord became this petri dish for, like, early apps to innovate. And I don't think it's a coincidence that they found a home there before OpenRouter gave the world, like, a public home store or, like, a, storefront. Discord was this, like, almost petri dish storefront that - had, like, piggybacked on the infra we'd built for crypto communities. And then I think Alex was one of the first people to realize, wait a minute, like, these apps need their own home, on the internet. And then OpenRouter, to me, was a continuation of that community's needs. And of course, there was the crazy distribution that you enabled for a lot of these developers.Why OpenRouter Couldn't Just Live Inside DiscordSwyx [00:40:07]: So then my question is, how come you were. My perception is OpenRouter is not that Discord-centric, right? You have a Discord.Anjney Midha [00:40:14]: Yeah.Swyx [00:40:14]: And you use it to engage your community, but it's not like Midjourney where, like, no, that is like the primary way people experience OpenRouter.Anjney Midha [00:40:21]: Yeah, Midjourney, like, it really helps to see visually really quickly how people are using the model and how to prompt it.Swyx [00:40:29]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:29]: And I think that is partly why the server was so critical. It's like it is the user experience. It adds a ton.Swyx [00:40:36]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:40:37]: And you can go the whole mile with just, like, prompting via Midjourney, like, the, via the Midjourney Discord server, getting your images and then sharing them and having fun. For OpenRouter, for LLMs, like, you need a lot of user experience around LLMs to make them, like, really usable.Swyx [00:40:54]: Charge point.Anjney Midha [00:40:55]: And yeah.Anjney Midha [00:40:57]: The, like, seeing the examples of other people is also not as useful because it's a lot of stuff to read. It takes a long time.Swyx [00:41:03]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:41:04]: You need, like, based integration. Not possible to do in a Discord server. You need, Or technic- it's possible. I shouldn't say that. It's just not a great developer experience. you need, like, - you need governance for. At the point where you got based integration, now you need governance for managing the LLMs that have access to it, the data policies, which teams. All that stuff needs a lot more than a Discord server can provide. So it's justSwyx [00:41:30]: YeahAnjney Midha [00:41:30]: It's not the right.Alex Atallah [00:41:32]: Well, in addition, you're not wrong, but also there's the very important distinction that, Midjourney was an end user application.Swyx [00:41:40]: Right.Alex Atallah [00:41:40]: And, that's why Discord, which has 250 million monthly end consumers, made, it made sense for Discord to be a host for that application experience. What I knew was gonna happen soon after Midjourney found explosive product-market fit, because we. I think when Midjourney launched, from launch to $100 million revenue run rate, it was less than eight months. And shortly thereafter, Stable Diffusion launched. And, all of us used to hang out in the Discord server. There, I think it was the,Swyx [00:42:13]: The Stability Discord?Alex Atallah [00:42:14]: It was theSwyx [00:42:16]: Yeah, LAION.Alex Atallah [00:42:16]: Yeah, the LAION Discord server.Swyx [00:42:17]: The image community that spawned Stable Diffusion.Alex Atallah [00:42:19]: The image community. Yeah. And so when Stable Diffusion came out, I realized- Oh, now other people can build their own Midjourney.Alex Atallah [00:42:27]: Because until then, Midjourney did not have an API, so they were a stack company, right? They were training their own models, and they were deploying them as an application. But if you wanted to build your own Midjourney, there was no API of that quality. and I think E two was still quite primitive. Like, Midjourney had great quality. And then when Stable Diffusion came out, suddenly there was this new person who - there was - this new capability in the world, which is a developer could create their own Midjourney. And that, I think, created the need for something like OpenRouter, because then you need an API to. If you - if you had the creativity of David Holz and you had Stable Diffusion as the model and you wanted to put these things together, how could you do that without having to figure out how to host the weights? And what OpenRouter, - the shape of OpenRouter enabled is that. Right? When you have open model alternatives to closed applications, OpenRouter's value in the world becomes extraordinary because now any developer can just show up and use theStable Diffusion and the Need for a Model API LayerSwyx [00:43:20]: You just love model diversity.Anjney Midha [00:43:21]: Did you just say the shape of OpenRouter?Alex Atallah [00:43:23]: Oh, no.Anjney Midha [00:43:25]: Were you in cloud? What is this the real Han?Alex Atallah [00:43:26]: I've been, I've been - I'm, I'm misaligned now. I've been overtrained. I've been using Cloud way too much, haven't I?Swyx [00:43:34]: Claude-ish is what people would say.Alex Atallah [00:43:35]: Claude-ish. Oh, God, I gotta untrain myself.Swyx [00:43:38]: Okay. - And I just wanna cap off the Mistral side. my TLDR is there was a Mistral price war, is what they called it, right? Like, round about NeurIPS is twenty-three or twenty-four.Mistral and the Birth of the Inference MarketplaceAnjney Midha [00:43:47]: Yes. DecemberSwyx [00:43:48]: They launched, the Mistral 8x7B, and like the price went down like 80%.Anjney Midha [00:43:54]: Yeah.Swyx [00:43:54]: To me, that's very positive because it's like the first, like, real competition to host Mistral. Is there more?Anjney Midha [00:44:01]: Yeah, that was. I'm, like, trying to remember it, all the things that happened. It. Like, we saw that model come out and immediately saw people say that it was the best model in the world.Alex Atallah [00:44:15]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:15]: Like, this was, to my knowledge, the first time an open weights model was called that in real seriousness.Swyx [00:44:22]: It's hype, right? Is it?Anjney Midha [00:44:25]: It was hype. It was hype. It was also, like, hype from AI influencers at the time. And there were many examples where it was, like, outperforming four. So people really wanted to try it out and see, is this gonna be true for me too? And if so, at what price? And, the, like, inference landscape was really messy.Alex Atallah [00:44:49]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:44:50]: We cleaned it up. - it allowed, like, providers to compete on price, so we could give you just the best price in one spot. And so it was, I think, the first clear example of, like, a provider marketplace working in a way that adds value to end developers.Alex Atallah [00:45:08]: Sean, you may not remember this, but I think we met for the first time a few days after Mistral came out at NeurIPSAnjney Midha [00:45:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:15]: At a luncheon.Swyx [00:45:16]: Yeah. That's where I also met BFL as well. Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:45:18]: And Guillaume was there.Swyx [00:45:19]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:45:19]: I was at NeurIPS at that time.Alex Atallah [00:45:20]: You were there too. And, we had just announced the Mistral investment, and I remember Guillaume was over there, and I remember turning to Guillaume and asking him, Like, “Is it is all the. Like, how are you feeling after the launch of Mistral and seven B?” And, him in his typical French fashion was like, “ it's a, it's an okay model. It's not that good.” And I was like. It was so, in contrast. But I remember him also saying that part of the reason he felt a lot of people Thought that it was better than four was because of the speed. - it was an MoE model that they had, like, absolutely figured out how to make super efficient. It was on the Pareto frontier. And this is an important thing about LLMs, right? Sometimes when they're faster, you think they're smarter, even though, like, if you did, N of, these common, like, evals that are - you do seven tries, and I don't remember. I think we should go back and figure out what the data says, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out, oh, on an N of seven attempts, four was smarter on evals, but the perception of on, like, or correctness would be smarter or more accurate. But, people, like, from a human preference perspective felt that it was faster because it - or smarter because it's so fast.Swyx [00:46:36]: Yeah. And most queries do not take that levelAlex Atallah [00:46:39]: Don't take that. That's true.Swyx [00:46:40]: Right? So this is the start of humans as routerAlex Atallah [00:46:42]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:42]: Which then eventually becomes OpenRouter as router of like theAlex Atallah [00:46:45]: Oh, that's interesting way to think about it. Yeah.Swyx [00:46:47]: Like, because humans are the routing mechanism. Like, I will ask the fast model first, and then if, like, oh, not good enough, I'm gonna upgrade manually.Alex Atallah [00:46:52]: Yes.Swyx [00:46:53]: But then he's gonna auto it.Alex Atallah [00:46:54]: I didn't, I hadn't thought of it that way, but that makes sense.Swyx [00:46:57]: Which then there's, there's a lot more techniques, like fusion. Fusion is the thing that we should talk about. Before I move on to those things, I just want to close off the early years. one thing that I observe, which you are also an investor in Arena.OpenRouter vs. LM ArenaAlex Atallah [00:47:10]: Right.Swyx [00:47:10]: And we talked about Midjourney having that feedback loop of, A, B, C, D, and choosing that very. being very important. And you understand the flywheel. So how come you didn't build Arena, and how come Arena didn't build OpenRouter?Anjney Midha [00:47:23]: Well, Arena started before OpenRouter, right?Swyx [00:47:27]: They had the school projectAnjney Midha [00:47:29]: Yeah, LMSwyx [00:47:29]: And then it became a company.Anjney Midha [00:47:31]: LM Arena, yeah.Swyx [00:47:32]: So, but, and I know you had some Arena experiences, like the up comparison type things.Anjney Midha [00:47:37]: Yeah.Swyx [00:47:37]: But you never really went as hard as Arena did.Swyx [00:47:40]: And,Anjney Midha [00:47:40]: In doing up experiences?Swyx [00:47:42]: Yes. And LM Arena did have a router project based on LM Arena ELOs, which they never commercialized.Anjney Midha [00:47:48]: It's hard to do a company that does both because one company is taking data and selling it, and the other company really can't by default. So, I think there is, like, a branding reason that there are two companies here. like, when you set up OpenRouter, there's no training, there are no prompts, right, aside from what your provider policy set. Like, OpenRou- like, OpenRouter can't see your prompts or completions. If you want to see that as an org, you have to opt into it and enable it. And so we're, like, pretty conservative and careful about data policy and security. And privacy. And LM Arena is like, their business model is like oriented around the labs and,Swyx [00:48:34]: Because they give it for free, right? You don't give it for free to give it for free.Anjney Midha [00:48:37]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:48:38]: But we do give some. We like have free endpoints too, but like those free endpoints, we, I think we're not collecting any prompts. We're not like monetizing the data unless you, opt into it for some reason.Alex Atallah [00:48:48]: This comparison. you're not the first person to ask me this, and Alex knows this, but I was the interim, like the founder, like first CEO of Arena for the first five months when, and we were helping Anastasios and Waylin spin out of Berkeley. And, I did invest in that before, OpenRouter, but it was very strange to me the comparisons that outside, folks would make between the two projects because the missions were completely different. The founding entity for Arena, we called it the AI Reliability Institute because it was there as an eval service. Like the data, so to speak, that they were originally, offering the labs was how do you make the evaluation of models more reliable than like the state of the art at the time, which was like really just finger in the wind.Alex Atallah [00:49:38]: That's what Anastasios and Waylin's PhD work was as scientists at Berkeley, was on statistical methodologies for correcting, eval estimates, based on like intrinsic biases and how you collected the data.Swyx [00:49:54]: Yes.Alex Atallah [00:49:54]: AndSwyx [00:49:54]: Style control.Alex Atallah [00:49:55]: Style control and stuff like that. And which is very much like a, hey, how. If you're a scientist and you're trying to. the highest expectation customer for Arena was always like a training and, like a researcher at a lab. Whereas the highest expectation customer from my perspective that Alex like really understood and was the mission was to serve was like a developer, right? Who then takes the result of the research and then produces an application that's deployed to the world. It was a completely different problem and person that these two teams were focused on. And so from the outside in. I don't know if you remember this, but I have a distinct memory of a few weeks before we did the term sheet, together for OpenRouter, I'd given you a call because we were trying to get a pooled data set together from OpenRouter and from Arena to, create like an open source repository of prompts. these projects were so different in their goals that it was totally normal to me to be like, “Oh, yeah, let's call Alex and see if he'd want to team up on pooling data,” because they're so different. We need. We don't have that data at all. We. Like, we didn't have API prompts. We didn't, we didn't have like what developers want to do with the models, which is very different from what researchers inside a model lab want to do before releasing the model.Swyx [00:51:15]: Yeah.Alex Atallah [00:51:15]: Does that make sense? And so to this day, I think you see that this difference, even though at a 30,000-foot level you could. I guess you could conclude that Arena and OpenRouter are adjacent, but, the roadmaps, the missions and so on at the time at least were like in very different directions.Swyx [00:51:36]: That ideal customer, I get. I totally get that.Alex Atallah [00:51:39]: Yes.Swyx [00:51:39]: As a founder, I want to own everything, right?Alex Atallah [00:51:41]: That's possible.Swyx [00:51:42]: Like this is clearly an adjacency that I'm like gonna explore that.Anjney Midha [00:51:45]: Own everything meaning like you don't know what to do yet, so you wanna like make sure you catch PMFocus, Anthropic, and Roads Not TakenAlex Atallah [00:51:51]: No, I think what heAnjney Midha [00:51:52]: As quickly as possible.Alex Atallah [00:51:53]: You want to own the entire infrastructure space, and so you expand to whatever demand you can capture.Swyx [00:51:58]: You want to have a play in each end.Alex Atallah [00:51:59]: Yeah, I think that's, that's hard, in reality, because serving multiple customers is difficult.Swyx [00:52:05]: Clearly, this is the one focus, right?Alex Atallah [00:52:08]: Yeah.Anjney Midha [00:52:08]: Yeah. I still think even in the age of AI, like focus is,Alex Atallah [00:52:12]: Is criticalAnjney Midha [00:52:13]: Underrated and critical, not just because you end up with a better product by focusing your humans on it, but also because the world knows what your focus is.Alex Atallah [00:52:22]: One thousand percent.Anjney Midha [00:52:23]: The world can map like, “Oh, I have this issue. Which brand out there is going to help me with that issue? This is the brand that's known for that focus.”Alex Atallah [00:52:31]: Yes.Anjney Midha [00:52:32]: So like if I want real attention on this issue, like this really matters to me, I should go with the brand that cares the most about it.Alex Atallah [00:52:39]: To underscore Alex's point about how important focus is, in the early days of Anthropic, it was not easy to. Like people think that the early days of Anthropic were like super easy because they were on their 3 guys who left, but it was very

The two leads of Dreamworks' Forgotten Island nerd out about Harry Potter, their favorite films and Filipino culture.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe, Alex and Brent discuss another Major Moment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, "The Sacking of Severus Snape"!   Open Butterbeer or Butterbeer Not News You Can Use September Giveaway Major Moments - The Sacking of Severus Snape Spellio Revelio - Piertotem Locomotor Community Emails   Joe - @CustomVinylLush Alex - @AtariAlex Brent - @BrentAllenLive Show - @TalesFromGH TikTok- @TFGHshow   Tales from Godric's Hollow is your One-Stop Shop for ALL things magical in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter!   Email - TalesFromGodricsHollow@gmail.com Facebook - www.facebook.com/talesfromgodricshollow  Instagram - www.instagram.com/talesfromgodricshollow Podchaser - www.podchaser.com/TFGH   Special Shout Out to our Producers/Sponsors AND Headmistresses, The Mysteriously Haunted Headmistress of Beauxbatons Academy and our Headmistress of Ilvermorny, Kori A!   Thank you to ALL of the Patreon supporters!!! We can't do all of this without you all!   Support us on PATREON! www.Patreon.com/TalesFromGodricsHollow   Spellio Revelio and E-Mail sounds/beds came from https://musicradiocreative.com/

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:05:00 GMT http://relay.fm/material/586 http://relay.fm/material/586 Andy Ihnatko and Florence Ion Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! clean 3644 Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! Links and Show Notes: Googlebook: The laptop your Android phone has been waiting for Googlebook combines the best of Android and ChromeOS with up to 10 years of updates Pixel phones are now getting a Harry Potter ad disguised as a theme pack Mighty Mike Plays exposed. : r/youtube

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:05:00 GMT http://relay.fm/material/586 http://relay.fm/material/586 An Awesome Accessory for an Android Phone 586 Andy Ihnatko and Florence Ion Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! clean 3644 Let's dissect the newly announced Googlebook laptop lineup, even though neither of us has touched it yet. Also, no one asked for the latest Harry Potter-themed Pixel Drop! Links and Show Notes: Googlebook: The laptop your Android phone has been waiting for Googlebook combines the best of Android and ChromeOS with up to 10 years of updates Pixel phones are now getting a Harry Potter ad disguised as a theme pack Mighty Mike Plays exposed. : r/youtube

Our new teen council met on September 14th to talk books and what was their favorite read this summer. Books discussed were: All time favs: Hunger Games School of Good and Evil 2 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Lockwood and Co. Twilght Books they would live in (if bad things didn't happen): Hogwarts Dungeon from Dungeon Crawler Carl Six of Crows Keeper of the Lost Cities Red Queen Favorites from this summer: Anne of the Green Gables Dungeon Crawler Carl Strange Case of Jeckyl & Hyde Queen of Shadows

There's something in the air! Wedding season has come to our chapter-by-chapter readthrough of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as we discuss Bill and Fleur's wedding in Chapter 8, "The Wedding," but this episode also features newlyweds Eric and Meg, fresh off of their own wedding! We ask 'who did it better?' and so much more. Welcome back to the show, Meg! We talk about Eric and Meg's wedding, and Andrew and Micah's repeated visits to the bar. Quizzitch: What is the name that the Lovegoods use for the gnomes? News covers recent casting updates for the upcoming HBO TV adaptation of Chamber of Secrets, including Arthur Weasley, Colin Creevey and Moaning Myrtle. Chapter by Chapter continues with Chapter 8 of Deathly Hallows, "The Wedding." Is Bill and Fleur's wedding the last time when these characters will get to let loose and have fun? Does holding the wedding this summer constitute an act of defiance? Is Harry at risk because he's merely present? Are the Weasleys at fault for organizing this event at a time like this? Would it be more impactful if Percy returned now, or later in the book, to make up with his family? Wedding battle! We compare Bill and Fleur's wedding to Eric and Meg's (recent) wedding, and Micah and Andrew vote on several categories. Viktor Krum is back! And he wants to fight Luna's dad. We discuss the disconnect around the Deathly Hallows symbol and historical tie-ins. Should Harry be more alarmed that Voldemort is seeking a foreign wandmaker, now that he knows who Gregorovitch is? Are Elphias Doge and Ron's aunt Muriel two sides of the same coin? Both present conflicting ways of remembering Dumbledore. Who is more correct? Doge or Muriel? Post Fantastic Beasts, what can we read into regarding Ariana's backstory here? Lynx Line: We ask our Patrons to share stories of their weddings OR of their dream weddings, and how they compare to Bill and Fleur's. Next week, we discuss Chapter 9 of Deathly Hallows, "A Place to Hide." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to http://betterhelp.com/super to get 10% off your first month.  Head to https://factormeals.com/super50off and use code super50off to get 50% off and 1 free breakfast item per box for 1 year. What if Slughorn's role in Voldemort's story began long before he explained Horcruxes to Tom Riddle? Today Ben dives into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Voldemort's past. From Merope Gaunt and the Slug Club to Tom's first connections at Hogwarts, we're tracing a theory that puts Horace Slughorn at nearly every turning point in Voldemort's rise. Then there's a strange run of luck involving Harry, the Half-Blood Prince's potion book, and Felix Felicis that may have helped bring Voldemort down. Did Slughorn accidentally help create the Dark Lord and give Harry the means to defeat him? Let's dive on in! #HarryPotter #SuperCarlinBrothers

On this episode we rate Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts on 5 topics : Facade, Story, Worth the Average Wait, Queue and Overall ride experience for our Ultimate Universal Orlando Ride Ranking. Join us in The Producers Club Follow us: LINKTREE   

This week, Hannah is settling into her new HR role, and let's just say… work is workin'.

A cast of non-celebrity American players feature on this season of “The Traitors: New Blood” – an unusually “Harry Potter”-inflected season, especially considering how radioactive J.K. Rowling's brand has become. (Why, exactly, are the Weasley twins here?) The cast is packed with standout personalities – a funeral director, a dog trainer, a mulleted executive, a 23-year-old, a baseball scout, a lawyer posing as a basketball coach – though some of these newly minted reality stars have done more strategic preparation than others. The first two episodes feature some classic “Traitors” blunders, including one that cruelly ended a blossoming showmance. Is “The Traitors” a dating show? Sadly, not at the moment.

Patrick Madrid fields heartfelt questions about faith, confession, and spiritual renewal, blending thoughtful advice with personal stories from listeners who share their journeys back to the Church. Conversations range from the impact of attending Mass at historic missions and the transformative power of confession after decades away, to practical dilemmas faced by Catholics navigating secular environments or family tensions. With an uplifting and compassionate tone, Patrick highlights the beauty, forgiveness, and peace found in rediscovering and embracing the Catholic faith. Patrick shares an email claiming he didn’t answer his question, so he answered it again. John (email) - Our Catholic faith is 1 Very deep, 2 it’s Beautiful, 3 it’s very forgiving, and 4 I find a lot of peace in it. (05:25) Kathleen - I watched Doc Martin when I got home from work. You said you watched Best Medicine. How did you react to this show? What did you think? (15:22) Jane - My friend has throat cancer and decided he didn't want to live anymore, so he ate nothing but junk food. Did my friend commit suicide by eating junk food? (21:16) Allyson - My grandson is a member of an Evangelical church. He was saying that leaders of this Church were thieves and that people never got the money. What can I say? (29:33) Steve - What was it like back in the days of Harry Potter? (43:13)

Kit Harington joins HSC for the first time! Kit rarely does longform interviews, so this is a treat. He and Josh dive into his career, from how he feels about GAME OF THRONES now, to his new adaptation of A TALE OF TWO CITIES, to his excitement about being part of the upcoming HARRY POTTER series. Plus, a check-in on his MCU future, a funny story about how he and wife Rose Leslie act in front of their kids, his nickname for Leonardo DiCaprio, & more! SUPPORT THE SHOW BY SUPPORTING OUR SPONSORS! Rula -- Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.rula.com/happy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ #rulapod Quince -- Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Quince.com/HAPPYSAD ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠for free shipping and 365-day returns. Limited Time Offer–Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15% OFF online with my code happy15 at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://huel.com/happy15.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ New Customers Only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show! UPCOMING EVENT! 10/13 -- Joe Manganiello in NY -- Tickets here: https://www.92ny.org/event/joe-manganiello-with-josh-horowitz-bloodlines Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices