Podcasts about Hopper

A listener said their life isn't dramatic enough for a story. This episode proves them wrong — with 4 AI prompts you can try today. Every artist has a story. Hopper painted his loneliness. Morandi painted the same bottles for 40 years. Your story doesn't need to be dramatic — it needs to be yours. These 4 prompts use AI to interview you, pull your story out, and save it so every caption, bio, and email already knows who you are. In this episode: Why you can't see your own story (and why that's normal) Real artists with "boring" lives who became legends 4 copy-paste prompts to pull your story out How to save your story as a context file Prompt 1 — The Origin Story Interview: I'm an artist and I need help discovering and articulating my story. I want you to interview me — ask me questions one at a time, wait for my answer, then ask a follow-up that digs deeper. Start with how I got into art. Don't accept surface-level answers — if I say "I've always liked drawing," ask me WHEN and WHERE and WHAT I was drawing and WHY. Keep going until you feel like you have enough material to write a compelling origin story. Then write it for me in first person, in a warm conversational tone — not a formal bio. Something I could read on a podcast or put on my website. Keep it under 300 words. Prompt 2 — The "Why This" Interview: Now I want you to interview me about WHY I create what I create. Ask me about my subject matter, my medium, my style. Dig into why I chose these — was it intentional or did I stumble into it? Is there a personal connection to my subjects? Don't let me get away with "I just like it" — help me find the deeper reason. When you have enough, write a short paragraph (150 words max) I can use when someone asks "Why do you paint/photograph [subject]?" Prompt 3 — The Piece Story: I'm going to describe one specific piece of art I've made. I want you to interview me about it — where I was when I made it, what was happening in my life, what I was feeling, why I chose the composition/colors/subject. Then write me a short story (100-150 words) I could use as the caption or description for this piece. Make it personal and specific — not generic art-speak. Prompt 4 — The Bio Generator: Based on everything we've discussed in this conversation, write my artist bio in three versions: 1. ONE SENTENCE — for social media profiles and quick intros. 2. ONE PARAGRAPH — for show applications, website about page, email signatures. 3. FULL PAGE — for press kits, gallery submissions, and detailed about pages. Use a warm, conversational tone. Avoid art-world jargon. Make it sound like ME, not like a museum placard. Resources mentioned: ChatGPT Projects — save your story as context Claude Projects — save your story as context Know an artist who thinks they don't have a story? Send them this episode. Related episodes: The Artwork Didn't Change. The Story Did. (Jan 2026) Context is Still King. If You Use It. (Jan 2026) Steal These Prompts (May 2025)

The Kouri Richins murder trial is two weeks away and the prosecution is facing a credibility crisis on multiple fronts.Defense attorneys just filed a motion accusing lead detective Jeff O'Driscoll and investigator Travis Hopper of intimidating state witnesses. Text messages attached to the filing allegedly show O'Driscoll threatening one witness with arrest and jail if she didn't submit to prep sessions she had refused. His message reportedly included a threat to return with "a warrant and a catch pole for the dog." A second witness claims Hopper warned that their immunity agreement could be revoked for declining additional interviews.This follows months of pretrial battles over evidence and witness credibility. In January, defense attorneys questioned O'Driscoll's truthfulness during suppression hearings about whether he knew Richins had an attorney when he interviewed her. Summit County brought in outside counsel to investigate. The defense also revealed that Robert Crozier — the man prosecutors say supplied the fentanyl that killed Eric Richins — has recanted, now claiming he sold OxyContin, not fentanyl.Prosecutors maintain substantial evidence still supports the charges. Judge Richard Mrazik denied Richins' third bail request in November, finding the recantation creates holes but not enough to undermine the case.Kouri Richins has pleaded not guilty to aggravated murder and maintains her innocence. She's been held in Summit County Jail since May 2023. Jury selection begins February 10th.#TrueCrimeToday #KouriRichins #EricRichins #UtahMurderTrial #WitnessIntimidation #FentanylPoisoning #RobertCrozier #CarmenLauber #JudgeMrazik #TrueCrimeNewsJoin Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/@hiddenkillerspodInstagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/tonybpodListen Ad-Free On Apple Podcasts Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/true-crime-today-premium-plus-ad-free-advance-episode/id1705422872This 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.

Collin, Whitney, and Doug have ACTUALLY reached the absolute end! We bring it home with the epilogue of Stranger Things 5 – ‘The Rightside Up'. Come along as we chat about accepting what happened – including Hopper's recycled (?) ring, Jonathan's failed attempt at geography, and that sweet Lumax moment. Plus, we announce our dead pool winner! And, of course, Music, one last Where in the World Is…?, and Superlatives. Do your best Debra Winger rasp and join us! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

https://m.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?sid=tindogpodcast&_pgn=1&isRefine=true&_trksid=p4429486.m3561.l49496 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Stranger Things Season 4 Promotional poster Showrunner Matt Duffer Ross Duffer Starring Winona Ryder David Harbour Millie Bobby Brown Finn Wolfhard Gaten Matarazzo Caleb McLaughlin Noah Schnapp Sadie Sink Natalia Dyer Charlie Heaton Joe Keery Maya Hawke Brett Gelman Priah Ferguson Matthew Modine Paul Reiser No. of episodes 9 Release Original network Netflix Original release May 27 – July 1, 2022 Season chronology ← Previous Season 3 Next → Season 5 List of episodes The fourth season of the American science fiction horror drama television series Stranger Things, marketed as Stranger Things 4, was released worldwide on the streaming service Netflix in two volumes. The first set of seven episodes was released on May 27, 2022, and the second set of two episodes was released on July 1. The season was produced by the show's creators, the Duffer Brothers, along with Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, Iain Paterson, and Curtis Gwinn. The season stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Priah Ferguson, Matthew Modine and Paul Reiser. Jamie Campbell Bower, Cara Buono, Joseph Quinn, Eduardo Franco, Mason Dye, Sherman Augustus, Tom Wlaschiha, and Nikola Đuričko appear in recurring roles. The season received highly positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances, visuals, action sequences, realistic themes, soundtrack, emotional weight, and the darker, more mature tone, though some criticized the lengthier episode runtimes. The first volume of the season received 13 nominations for the 74th Primetime Emmy Awards, including Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, winning five; the second volume received five nominations for the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards.[1][2] Premise Set in March 1986, eight months after the events of the third season, the fourth season is split between three different plotlines. The first plotline takes place in Hawkins, Indiana, where a series of mysterious teenage murders begin haunting the town. Eddie Munson, leader of the Hellfire Club, Hawkins High School's Dungeons & Dragons group, becomes a prime suspect in the murders after senior cheerleading captain Chrissy Cunningham dies in his trailer, so Dustin Henderson, Lucas and Erica Sinclair, Max Mayfield, Steve Harrington, Nancy Wheeler, and Robin Buckley begin investigating to clear Eddie's name. While other classmates, lead by Jason Carver, hunt Eddie. The group discovers that the true perpetrator is a powerful being who resides in the Upside Down, whom they dub "Vecna" after a Dungeons & Dragons character. The second plotline involves Mike Wheeler visiting Eleven, Will Byers, and Jonathan Byers at their new home in Lenora Hills, California. Due to the events in Hawkins and the imminent danger to her friends, Eleven, after being arrested for assaulting her bully, goes with Dr. Sam Owens to a secret facility in the Nevada desert to regain her powers, an operation titled the Nina Project, where she is reunited with Dr. Martin Brenner and forced to confront her past in Hawkins National Laboratory with the aid of an isolation tank. While the U.S. Military, lead by Lt. Colonel Jack Sullivan, is simultaneously searching for Eleven, Mike, Will, Jonathan, and their new friend Argyle attempt to reach Eleven before she regains her powers. The third plotline follows Joyce Byers and Murray Bauman as they venture to Russia upon learning that Jim Hopper may still be alive. Meanwhile, Hopper is held in a Soviet prison camp in Kamchatka, where he and the other inmates, including Dmitri Antonov, are forced to battle a Demogorgon that the Russians have captured.

Presenting Sponsor Thirdzy!  https://thirdzy.com/JAZZYPromotion Code for 15% off: JAZZYEveryday we take a break from the busy work day to catch our breath, hang out with friends and talk about the world of Sports, Entertainment and specifically CrossFit. Today we talk about Jayson Hopper on Cam Haynes' Podcast.  How deep is too deep, 100?  We all have biases and that is what makes it so interested.  Finally, we give away an open Registration.

In this episode of This Week in Solar, Aaron Nichols sits down with Abby Hopper for a thoughtful conversation on what's ahead for SEIA, how leadership in solar is evolving, and why community and collaboration matter more than ever.We appreciated the mention of Navigating the Grid and Kellie Macpherson of Radian Generation during the discussion — a reminder of how important open dialogue and shared perspectives are as the industry continues to change.Be sure to listen to the full episode of This Week in Solar, and explore more conversations shaping grid reliability, compliance, and leadership on Navigating the Grid: https://open.spotify.com/show/6KBALbb3w1Dc864mbdM7P1

Stranger Things x 1 John 3:1 x 2 Timothy 1:7 x Psalm 91:2Your daily crossover of faith and fandom! Experience daily Biblical encouragement from nerdy Christian podcasters, bloggers, and content creators. Join the Nerd of Godcast community at www.NOGSquad.com

Welcome to the Cedar Lake Podcast! We hope you are inspired and fulfilled by this week's message from Pastor Neil Hopper. If you would like to know more about us visit our website at CLCC.church. https://www.instagram.com/cedarlake_cc/

RSS/iTunes/Spotify We’re going GUESTLESS and UNTETHERED on this episode of YOU DON’T KNOW DICK, and what a long, strange trip it is! We’re checking out the Roger Corman-directed 1967 film THE TRIP starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper – and written by Jack Nicholson – and it’s full of surreal visuals, mind-expanding dialogue and hippy nonsense! Roger Corman went on an LSD trip as prep for the film, and he imbues it with plenty of independent energy (helped by Fonda and Hopper filming guerilla style on the streets of LA), but is it consciousness expanding weirdness or boring nonsense? Let’s find out!The post Episode 309 – You Don't Know Dick – The Trip (1967) first appeared on Cinema Smorgasbord.

Stranger Things S1E6 – “The Monster” | Full Episode Discussion & BreakdownThe Upside Down gets even darker in Stranger Things Season 1, Episode 6: “The Monster.” Eleven loses control of her powers, Hopper uncovers shocking secrets, and Jonathan and Nancy take the fight directly to the creature.In this episode, we break down the biggest moments, theories, and character arcs while exploring why this chapter is a major turning point in Season 1.

This episode marks the beginning of a new era. In it, I share what's been quietly rearranging itself over the past two years. The endings, the pause, the identity shifts, and the deeper operating principles now guiding my life and work.I talk about:•why I chose to let go of LITO Academy•what radical personal sovereignty looks like in practice•the decision to step back into authorship and change my handle to DannyBunny.co•the re-crowning of LITO as Living In True Ownership•new expressions of this work, including In Your Pocket, The Circle, and the platform I'm co-building, Hopper•and why music has become an essential part of how I stay alive and alignedThis isn't an announcement episode in the usual sense. It's a naming of a season. A return to centre. An invitation to stand in right relationship with the work we create, and with ourselves.If you've been sensing a shift in your own life, this one's for you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join Andrew and Matt as they roll the 10-sided dice for one last trip into the upside down. Our guys channel their inner Rockin Robins for a special needle drop as they Hopper around the musical moments from season 5 of Stranger Things. #Rip4EverBarbListen, like and follow! IG: @toptrackpodEmail: toptrackpodcast@gmail.comFacebook: Top Track Bar and GrillBlueSky: @toptrackpod

https://m.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?sid=tindogpodcast&_pgn=1&isRefine=true&_trksid=p4429486.m3561.l49496 Stranger Things Season 3 is set in the summer of 1985, focusing on the new Starcourt Mall in Hawkins, which becomes a hub for teens but hides a secret Soviet plot to reopen a gate to the Upside Down, with the Mind Flayer returning to possess townspeople, leading to massive battles, character shifts like Billy's transformation, Steve and Robin's new partnership, and ultimately Hopper's apparent sacrifice and the Byers family's departure with Eleven.

Kathleen, Miles and Kirk re-watch Stranger Things 5 Chapter 6 ‘Escape From Camazotz'. On Christmas Day, this episode was like a fire house of moving pieces, let's digest this 3rd to last chapter for real!Our podcast is about positivity for Stranger Things. Forever dig-dugging into why it's good and why love itJoin us in discussion from Jonanthan and Nancy's Goo Room break up to Max and Holly's Red Mind World podcast. We talk about Vecna's re-breaking of his spy Will, the demo-dog kerfuffle at the hospital and Kali, Hopper and Mike's opinions on Eleven's future!We finish with Kirk's Funny Moment, Kathleen's Feeler Moment and Miles' Music Moment of the episode.We'll be back for Chapter 7 "The Bridge' on 1/23Twitter/Instagram/YouTube: StrangerStill22.

Former Homeless Outreach Team members join MoHugs to discuss working with the unhoused community members and lessons learned.

Evan Hopper of Quell returns to talk about the new album “Of Lungs and Ashes”. Evan has been a long time Know Associate of the Horsemen and specifically been a contributor to the EWB Patreon series Hollywood Babylon.  Additionally, he has been a long time friend of mine over the years.   Intro:    “All of the Dark Things” – Mike Hill Outro: “The Acasual Void” – Quell

Stranger Things Series Finale: Episode 378 - It all comes down to this. On this episode of Normies Like Us, we're heading back to Hawkins one last time to talk about the final stretch of Season 5 and the series finale of Stranger Things. The bikes are parked, the gates are closing, and a show that defined a decade of genre TV has officially come to an end. We dig into the biggest moments from the last part of the season, the emotional hits, the character send-offs, and whether the finale delivered on all those years of buildup. Who stuck the landing? Which arcs paid off? What surprised us, disappointed us, or completely wrecked us? We break down the themes, the nostalgia, the horror, and the spectacle—without pretending we aren't a little sad to leave this world behind. Did Stranger Things finish strong? Did it give the Party the ending they deserved? And where does the whole series land now that the Upside Down is (finally) behind us? Light the Christmas lights one more time and join Normies Like Us as we say goodbye to Hawkins.

This week Pastor Neil Hopper continues his message about getting Back to Basic. This message focuses on Faith. We hope you are inspired and fulfilled by this week's message. If you would like to know more about us visit our website at CLCC.church. https://www.instagram.com/cedarlake_cc/

The conversation continues! Welcome to Part 2 of our listener feedback extravaganza for "The Rightside Up," the Stranger Things series finale that gave us so many emotions we're still processing. Hosts Darrell and Addi are back with even MORE of your incredible contributions because you weren't done sharing your thoughts, theories, and feelings about how this epic saga concluded. In this episode, we're diving into your reactions to the 1989 epilogue, Dustin's unforgettable valedictorian speech and Eddie Munson tribute, each character's future, Hopper's romantic proposal to Joyce, and that beautiful final scene of Holly and her friends starting their own D&D campaign in the Wheeler basement.  We're also sharing your personal stories about what Stranger Things has meant to you over the past nine years, how the show impacted your life, and what you'll miss most about this journey. Whether you're finding hope in Mike's belief that El survived, cherishing the chosen family bonds that carried the group through, or simply grateful for the community we built together, this final listener episode celebrates everything Stranger Things gave us. Thank you for being part of this incredible adventure. Always. Connect with The Stranger Things Podcast: Facebook community Twitter Instagram Contribute Listener Feedback

The conversation continues! Welcome to Part 2 of our listener feedback extravaganza for "The Rightside Up," the Stranger Things series finale that gave us so many emotions we're still processing. Hosts Darrell and Addi are back with even MORE of your incredible contributions because you weren't done sharing your thoughts, theories, and feelings about how this epic saga concluded. In this episode, we're diving into your reactions to the 1989 epilogue, Dustin's unforgettable valedictorian speech and Eddie Munson tribute, each character's future, Hopper's romantic proposal to Joyce, and that beautiful final scene of Holly and her friends starting their own D&D campaign in the Wheeler basement. The post TSTP 83- Listener Feedback Part 2 for The Rightside Up appeared first on Golden Spiral Media- Entertainment Podcasts, Technology Podcasts & More.

https://m.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?sid=tindogpodcast&_pgn=1&isRefine=true&_trksid=p4429486.m3561.l49496 Stranger Things Season 2 (Fall 1984) deepens the mystery of the Upside Down, focusing on Will Byers being haunted and possessed by a massive shadow entity, the Mind Flayer, which uses him as a spy to spread its influence in Hawkins through underground tunnels, while Eleven discovers her past and reunites with friends, and the gang faces new threats like Demodogs, leading to a fight to close the gate and save Will and the town. New characters, including the pragmatic Max Mayfield, join the crew, and storylines explore the aftermath of Season 1, including Barb's legacy and Hopper's secret with Eleven. Key Plot Points: Will's Possession: Will suffers from terrifying visions of the Mind Flayer after a tentacle attaches to him, becoming a puppet for the monster's hive mind. The Mind Flayer's Plan: The shadow monster tries to expand the Upside Down into their world, creating tunnels beneath Hawkins. Eleven's Journey: El lives hidden with Hopper but eventually leaves to find her mother and learns about her origins, returning to help her friends. New Threats: The group encounters Demodogs (Demogorgon pups), and Dustin adopts a creature he names Dart, a pollywog from the Upside Down. New Faces: Max Mayfield (Max) arrives as a new student, challenging the group dynamic, while Joyce dates Bob Newby. Justice for Barb: Nancy and Jonathan team up with conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman to expose the truth about Barb's death.

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We're talking with Andrew Hopper, Lead Pastor of Mercy Hill Church in North Carolina. Planted in 2012 with just 30 people, Mercy Hill has grown into a multi-campus, fast-growing church known for its gospel clarity and sending culture. In this conversation, Andrew shares why adoption and foster care have become central expressions of Mercy Hill's mission—and how those practices flow directly out of the gospel. He also unpacks the heart behind his book, Chosen: Building Your Family the Way God Builds His. Is your church unsure how to engage big social needs without drifting from the gospel? Are you looking for a way to mobilize people beyond church walls while keeping discipleship front and center? Andrew offers a clear framework for doing both. Doing good as a sign of the kingdom. // Andrew addresses a common tension churches feel between community engagement and disciple-making. Mercy Hill refuses to treat these as competing priorities. Acts of service—whether foster care, adoption, or family restoration—are not the kingdom itself but signposts pointing to it. Meeting tangible needs creates openings for gospel conversations. These ministries don't replace evangelism; they amplify it by demonstrating the heart of God in visible ways. A church’s collective heartbeat. // Mercy Hill's deep involvement in adoption, foster care, and family restoration didn't start as a top-down strategy but emerged organically from the gifts and passions within the church. Many leaders and members have adopted children themselves, shaping the church's collective heartbeat. Rather than attempting to address every social issue, Mercy Hill chose to focus deeply on a few—believing churches are most effective when they lean into the specific good works God has prepared for them. This focus has mobilized hundreds of families and created a powerful witness in their community. Rope-holding and shared responsibility. // Not everyone is called to adopt or foster, but everyone can hold the rope. Drawing from the William Carey analogy, Mercy Hill equips members to support families on the front lines through prayer, childcare, meals, financial help, and presence. Over time, they've learned that rope-holding works best when built on existing relationships rather than formal assignments. The goal is to ensure no family fights alone in what Andrew describes as intense spiritual warfare. Big vision with baby steps. // Mercy Hill isn't afraid to cast a bold vision—whether for global missions, adoption, or church planting—but they pair that vision with accessible next steps. Prayer nights, giving opportunities, short-term service, and relational support allow people to grow into greater obedience over time. High challenge without guilt creates healthy discipleship. Why Andrew wrote Chosen. // Andrew wrote Chosen: Building Your Family the Way God Builds His not to promote a program, but to give churches a theological foundation for engaging adoption and foster care. The book weaves together Andrew's family story, Mercy Hill's journey, and a deeply gospel-centered motivation rooted in Scripture. Designed to be used individually or in groups, Chosen includes discussion questions and practical guidance for churches or small groups wanting to explore this calling in community. Andrew's prayer is that the book would catalyze thousands of Christian families to participate meaningfully in caring for vulnerable children and families. Gospel-driven motivation. // Underneath everything is Andrew's conviction that gospel motivation outlasts guilt. Behavior rooted in grace goes further than behavior driven by pressure. Adopted people adopt people. Chosen people choose people. That theological clarity fuels Mercy Hill's sending culture, their community impact, and their ongoing growth. To explore Andrew's resources on adoption, foster care, and grab his book, Chosen, visit andrewphopper.com/chosen or follow him on Instagram @andrewphopper. You can learn more about Mercy Hill Church at mercyhillchurch.com. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Portable Church Your church is doing really well right now, and your leadership team is looking for solutions to keep momentum going! It could be time to start a new location. Maybe you have hesitated in the past few years, but you know it's time to step out in faith again and launch that next location. Portable Church has assembled a bundle of resources to help you leverage your growing momentum into a new location by sending a part of your congregation back to their neighborhood on Mission. This bundle of resources will give you a step-by-step plan to launch that new or next location, and a 5 minute readiness tool that will help you know your church is ready to do it! Click here to watch the free webinar “Launch a New Location in 150 Days or Less” and grab the bundle of resources for your church! Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. We have got a multi-time guest on, and you know what that means. That means that I really respect, deeply admire, and want you to listen up, and today is no exception. Excited to have Andrew Hopper with us. He is the lead pastor of a church that they should be following, that you should be following. He’s a lead pastor of Mercy Hill Church with five locations, if I’m counting correctly, in North Carolina, and is repeatedly one of the fastest growing churches in the country. I love this church on many levels. They’re centered on the gospel and have a radical commitment to sending people to the nations. They have a desire to make disciples and multiply churches. Andrew, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.Andrew Hopper — Man, I’m so pumped to be here. Love the podcast. Really appreciate it, man.Rich Birch — Yeah, I’m honored that you would come back. For folks that that don’t know Mercy Hill, give me a bit of a kind of an update. Tell us a little bit about the church.Andrew Hopper — Yeah.Rich Birch — Maybe update us from last time you were on.Andrew Hopper — Yeah, man. So just real quick, planted in 2012. We had 30 people, all you know kind of young professional age, and man, just really believe that God could do something incredible ah through, you know just through our our open hands, and he did.Andrew Hopper — And so it’s been 13 years. It’s crazy. We’ve been sort of pushing the same boulder up the same mountain for 13 years, just flywheel kind of concept and keep pushing. And ah the Lord has done an incredible thing, like you said, five campuses. And man, just moved into a new home and hub. That was from last time we had a chance. That’s been really great. Andrew Hopper — We were in a rented location for a long time as our main like broadcast campus. We’re a video-based multi-site. And so um it’s ah it was a three or four-year journey to raise the money and build this new facility. But we’re in, and the Lord has really blessed that with tons of new people, highest baptisms, sent ones, first time guest numbers, all everything that we’ve done. This has been a, you know, we’ve gone been on a ride – praise God for that. It’s it’s, um, it’s for his sake and his renown, but this year has been unlike the others. So it’s been…Rich Birch — Yeah, you were saying beforehand, it’s like 30 or something like 30 some percent year over year growth. That’s insane to keep up with.Andrew Hopper — It is man. And the, and the giving does not, uh, you know, the giving doesn’t happen.Rich Birch — Reflect that yet.Andrew Hopper — So it’s, it’s like, we’re trying to do ministry on a budget of a church that’s 3000, but a church that’s running 4,500. And it’s like, how do you do that effectively without killing everybody?Rich Birch — Nice.Andrew Hopper — All your staff, I mean, so, but we’re, we’re learning, man, we’re figuring it out. It’s fun. We got, we just planted our sixth church. So that’s apart from the campuses. This is first time, Rich, we’ve planted a church in our own city.Rich Birch — Oh, nice. That’s cool.Andrew Hopper — It’s been really, a really cool dynamic and it’s been fun. He’s doing great. Man, it was a college student that we met when he was 19 years old at North Carolina AT&T 10 years later. He’s an elder here. He’s done a lot of different things. And man, he goes and plants a new church in Greensboro about five minutes from one of our campuses and they’re doing great.Rich Birch — Wow. Yeah, that’s so good. Well, the thing, there’s lots I love about Mercy Hill, but one of the things that I’ve loved about your church from the you know the chance we’ve had to journey a little bit over the years about it is you just have real clarity around the mission, this idea of making disciples, multiplying churches. It’s like that has been rock solid from the beginning. When you think about we want churches to have discipleship at its core, this idea of a church that actually grows people up in their relationship with Christ. What matters most at the foundation? How are you keeping that so foundational to you know what’s happening at Mercy Hill?Andrew Hopper — Yeah, I think um I think that we always sort of bought into kind of what we see in Acts 2 as a little bit of a flywheel. We call it gather, group, give, go. A lot of churches have something like that.Andrew Hopper — The the difference, I think, at Mercy Hill a little bit than what I see ah in in in a lot of churches that we help mentor and coach is that 2020 hit and everybody was like, man, what is a church? What is discipleship? What are we going to do now? And and people were kind of… And I do think it was and it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t just me. I mean, our, you know, our executive pastor Bobby, he was really integral in this. We sort of really doubled down on no, I kind of think the church is going to come back. Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — And I kind of think what we were doing is sort of what our church is set up to do. It kind of a brand thing. We are sort of a big box sending brand. And that, you know, for us, when we look at Acts 2, we’re like, dude, the gathering, there’s no more there’s no more important hour for discipleship and evangelism. And I know there’s a lot of things written against that. And people are kind of almost like downplaying it. Andrew Hopper — We’re just like, man, we just don’t believe it. We believe people need to be in a group. You know, we they need generosity is lead step in discipleship, give. And we got to teach people that there’s a mission bigger than themselves. And if we do that, it’s going to funnel more people into the gathering. Andrew Hopper — So I think fundamentally what I would say, we need to get, you know, we could talk about our value, you know we can talk about values to gospel and [inaudible] identity, but I think landing on you know, it’s very hard now to, to not get a word salad book form or thing. When you ask somebody, how are you making disciples? It can just be like…Rich Birch — Right. Very vacuous. Who knows what that means? Yeah.Andrew Hopper — For us, it’s just been a very clear, simple process.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — Like, man, we believe if someone is in the gathering, if they’re in relationship, if they’re being pushed on generosity, and if they’re living for a mission bigger than themselves, that’s a current of maturity that will move them. They just get in the stream, they’ll move.Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so good.Andrew Hopper — that’s kind of So you know for us, I think that’s as, you know we’ve we’ve tried to simplify things there.Rich Birch — Yeah. And, and your last episode, I’ve pointed a ton of people to it, uh, to really, and we really unpack a lot of what you talked about there in more detail.Andrew Hopper — Right. Yeah.Rich Birch — You’re going to want to go back and, uh, and listen to that. You’ve reached as a church, you’ve reached a lot of people who don’t grow up in church that it’s like, there’s a lot of people who are there. You know, we used to say we ain’t your mama’s church, but mama didn’t go to church, you know? So, you know, and it’s been a long time that people were there. What challenges have you seen, you know, helping move people from curiosity into real ongoing discipleship? So like, I think there are, we’re seeing a swell of attendance across the country. People are like, oh, I’m kind of interested in this, but we got to move them from just, oh, this is something interesting to like, oh, I’m actually want to grow my relationship with Jesus.Andrew Hopper — Yeah, I mean, and it’s it’s funny too, Rich, you probably have a better bird’s eye view of this than I do. But I feel like churches that have been faithfully growing for like the last 10 years, they’re not really doing a lot different now. Or even though there’s this big swell happening, what I do think is that some churches have sort of decided like, oh, clarity does matter.Rich Birch — Yes. Yeah, that’s true.Andrew Hopper — And don’t try to be friends with the culture. We’re going to speak in and be prophetic. And, you know, even even to the you know Proverbs 25:26 says, you know, there’s there there’s no there’s no benefit in a muddied spring. You know, it’s like you got to be sort of you got to figure out if we’re going to be clear.Andrew Hopper — So, I you know, for me, I think like and you’re right, we do reach most of the people that we reach that are in the camp that you’re talking about our college age. We reach a lot of people, though, ah that are, you know, they’re they’re coming back to the faith because they’re a southerner.Rich Birch — Sure.Andrew Hopper — You know, they they kind of they kind of were, you know, they they did have some church in their background. They’re coming back. Their kids are not only born, but they’re realizing they’re sinners and they don’t have answers. They’re trying to figure that out.Rich Birch — Right. Right.Andrew Hopper — They’re coming back to church.Andrew Hopper — And, you know, I think the biggest thing that moves people from like interest into a decision point is just being very clear on this is what the gospel is. This is the life it compels you to. Are you going to be in or out?Andrew Hopper — One of the things we say at Mercy Hill a lot is like, man, if you’re if you’re just intrigued, you know, if you’re interested, you’re not going to stay at Mercy Hill because we’re never going to let you, you’re going to get pushed every week. And it’s like, man, people are not really in or like that. I’m not going to do that. You know, they’re just like, no I’m not going to sit here and get like pushed every single week on something I don’t really… And the flip side is when people say, all right, you know what? Stake in the ground. I’m in.Rich Birch — Yeah, we’re doing this, yep.Andrew Hopper — I wanna look like this, I want to build my life on this. It’s like, well, now, you know, it’s it’s man, I’m hopefully, you know, putting tools in the belt every single week to live that life.Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, it’s good. I do think there was a time where people wandered into our churches where I don’t think that happens as much anymore. I think people, when they arrive, they come with questions, with live active questions that they’re trying to wrestle with, kind of regardless of where they’re they’re at in their journey.Andrew Hopper — Yeah.Rich Birch — And they’re what you to your point around, you know, there’s no benefit in a muddy stream. People aren’t looking for anything that sounds like, well, what do you think? Because the reason why they’re there is because they’re asking questions. And so, you know, they’re they’re looking for clarity, like I think you’re saying. Rich Birch — Well one of the things I love about your church is there’s a high commitment to, you’re you’re you’re tearing down what I think is a false dichotomy. Sometimes I think when churches come to this idea of outreach or making a difference in their community, there’s this there can be this gap or false dichotomy between doing good in our communities and making disciples. Like we gave that up at some point. We were like, you can’t, you know, we can’t do both of those things for some reason. Why, why did we do that? Why did we, as churches say, we can’t both make a difference in our communities and also make disciples?Andrew Hopper — Yeah, I think it’s, I actually have a lot of sympathy for the fundamentalist leaning. I know it sounds a little bit weird. Rich Birch — No, that’s fine.Andrew Hopper — Churches that led from the, you know, from the good do good in your city kind of thing. I don’t think they’re right, but I do have sympathy for that because I understand how quickly that sort of, you know, is so hijacked by liberal, by theological liberalism to where it’s finally man we’re digging wells and wherever but we’re not talking about who the true source of living water is. Like we don’t want to be offensive we just want to do good without speaking the whole you know you know live your life as a Christian only use words if necessary, whatever, you know. And and I so I understand why people kind of fled and have fled that.Andrew Hopper — Like, you know, I’ve even had our church before when I when I talk about adoption or we we have a ministry, and a ministry called No More Spectators. We’re like moving people towards community ministry. And we had people kind of going on like, oh, my gosh, this seems like a sign of like churches start going this way and then they lose the gospel.Andrew Hopper — And I’m like, well, the reason you’re kind of feeling like that is because a lot of churches have done that. You know, you’re not [inaudible] like that just out of nowhere. Now, of course, I think it’s a little bit immature and we’ve got to push through. The way we talk about it, Rich, is, man, we want to do good in our community as signs of the kingdom coming.Andrew Hopper — They are not building the kingdom. You know, if we go repaint a house or house a homeless person, one day that person would parted with that house, whether they, you know, get messed up and leave or whether they do great and then would die one day, you know.Andrew Hopper — Or, if we have, ah you know, if we go and, and you know, we’re going to, for example, we have ah ah a family in our church that they need a ramp built because, man, the the brother is struggling with MS and he’s, they’re they’re fighting it like Christians do. We’re going to go do that. You know, we’re going to go build that ramp. That ramp’s going to rot and die one, you know, rot and rot away one day. And, you know, whether it’s 100 years from now or whatever.Andrew Hopper — Like it’s not literally the kingdom. But when the outside world sees us engage and, you know, our church will talk about this primarily when we think about community ministry, we think about it in terms of adoption, foster care and families count, which I can talk to you about. I think it’s bringing a sign of the kingdom that is to the community around us to say, hey, this is not the gospel. But it sure points to the gospel. Rich Birch — Right, right.Andrew Hopper — You know, it’s a pretty good signpost of like, yeah, there’s a kingdom coming where kids aren’t separated from their parents, you know. And and so that’s kind of the way that we think about, it’s not, you know, it’s not the kingdom. It’s a sign of the kingdom that is coming.Rich Birch — Yeah, let’s let’s dive in. So adoptions, foster care, families count. These are not small issues. Like you started with like putting a ramp on, painting somebody – those are like, okay, I can organize my head around that. And then we jump to what I think are obviously significant. How, it can be easy, I think, for church leaders it can be easy where, you know, we got a lot of fish to fry in our own backyard. When you see big problems like that, help us unpack that. Why do you as a lead pastor, why are you passionate about these issues? Why are these the things that you’ve chosen?Andrew Hopper — I think it’s, man, I think it’s great. I mean if you can’t if you don’t mind I’ll go back and give you a little bit of context. I’m a context [inaudible]… Rich Birch — Yeah, absolutely. Let’s do it. Yeah. Andrew Hopper — …number one so I always want to frame it in where we’ve been. But the short answer to the question is I think that every church because it is made up of individual believers that have individual gift matrix, you know they’re they’re gifted the church is gifted in a unique way because the people which are the church are gifted in a unique way, right? Andrew Hopper — And so to me, you know, slapping, you know, a top down every single church has to to manifest signs of the kingdom in X way, which, for for example, I’m not to pick on it, but like, you know, the whole diversity church kind of movement. I love you know, if that’s your brand, that’s awesome. That’s great. Go, go bring signs of the kingdom in that area. But you know what people do is they take their thing and then slap it on every single church. You know, this is the sign of the kingdom that you have to manifest.Andrew Hopper — I don’t think that. It takes every kind of church to reach a city because there’s all you know, there’s every kind of people in the city. Right? For us, though, and I think for a lot of churches that that maybe are are made up a little bit like we are, I think there is a lot of meat on the bone for adoption, foster care, families count ministry. And I think churches could be greatly helped by latching on to maybe, you know, something in particular, maybe this, maybe this specifically. How we got there, Rich, was we had we had, you know, huge movement in our church in 2019. I was very convicted.Andrew Hopper — Some of the exponential stuff was coming out, you know, mobilizing people outside the walls of the church. And I really was, man, I was just really affected by that. And I don’t want the dichotomy, you know, I don’t want, well, you your people serve in the church and not outside the church. It’s like, no, most people serve outside the church. If you watch them, they are serving inside the church as well. It’s it’s like a it’s like, man, you know, just just because serving inside the church is not the finish line, don’t demonize it because it is a starting place.Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — So it’s like, I don’t like that kind of whole thing. But but it did affect me to say, OK, what are we doing to push to the outside? So we we we did a thing. You would have loved this, man. But it except for the fact that it didn’t really work that good. OK, it was awesome.Andrew Hopper — It was, we still have the domain name – nomorespectators.com – I had the tagline: Jesus didn’t die to create spectators. He died to create servants, not spectators, workers, not watchers. We, man, you could go to nomorespectators.com and, you know, it was like, it was like a funnel for all of these community ministry opportunities in our city. So it was, you know, people from the housing, you know, authority type stuff would post things. And it was, it was all this kind of, it had a bunch of stuff in it. Andrew Hopper — In the end of the day, great idea. It was a little too complex. Our people latched on to the foster care, pregnancy network, you know, ended up being families count, Guardian ad Litem and adoption. So our guy that was over all that at the time our sending director, which is hard for me to have a good idea that ends up dying hard, okay that’s just tough for me.Rich Birch — You had a great sticky statement and everything. Come on.Andrew Hopper — I’m the king of sunken cost bias. Okay. Like, I’m like, dude. And so finally around 2020, he came to me and he said, bro, I know this is hard for you. Cause it was like a two year initiative. He’s like, this is hard. He said, No More Spectators needs to just turn into Chosen. And it needs to be like, you had this idea for 30 different things. It just, this needs to be our niche, man. You know, we we don’t do a lot of these other things, but we do this really well.Andrew Hopper — And it was hard for me. Ultimately, it was great wisdom by them, not me. And we started going down that road. And partly, I think it’s because, Rich, is heart is near to my heart. I have an adopted daughter. A lot of our staff have adopted kids. We just have a guy right now. Our associate director of first impressions at the Rich campus is in Texas right now, you know, bringing their daughter home.Andrew Hopper — I mean, so it’s just, and so it’s sort of started to morph into, and the the the big thing I’ll say, and I, you know, I’ve been talking a lot here, but the big thing I’ll say is, if you think about the way I just ah described all that, it doesn’t start with the need in the community. It starts with the gift matrix of the church. The poor we will always have with us. Like there there is no there’s no scenario until Jesus comes back that there’s no kids that need to be adopted, you know.Rich Birch — Right, right.Andrew Hopper — And it’s just the reality of it. And so there’s always going to be need in the community. It’s more about, okay, what are the Ephesians 2:10 works that your church, because the church is made up of people who are individually called, what are the you know what are those works that God has set out for your church? Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — And, you know, so for us, we just felt like, dude, this is a a heartbeat thing. Our people got more, they get more fired up. The greatest thing I’ve ever been able to mobilize our people for prayer for is go to the abortion clinic and pray. I mean, a thousand people on their face in the pavement. It’s like, it just strikes a chord with our church and who we are. So we wanna run after that.Rich Birch — Yeah. Well, I love that. And we’re going to dig out a bunch of this, but let’s think about it first from a perspective of somebody who’s maybe attended your church. They just started. They’re they’re relatively new, you know. The idea of something as weighty as adoption or foster care, that’s a big ask. And you know when you yeah how do I experience that as someone who’s just new? What are some ways that I could get plugged in? What does that look like? That, that, cause I, I’m hard, it’s hard to imagine that I go from zero to, to, you know, adoption, you know, how do I end up or flying to Texas to, you know, pick up a kid. That’s a lot. Help me understand. How are you, cause I know you guys are so good at moving people along from kind of where they are to where you’re hoping to – what’s that look like? What’s the kind of, how do you bring people along in this?Andrew Hopper — Man, totally. I think you’re right. I think it’s a combination of big vision on one end and then baby steps on the other. But the big vision matters.Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — Like we don’t want to be scared of the big vision. So, you know, for example, our weekender process, which I know you talked about some, you know, that weekender process, you know, people literally for years, we would give them a passport application in the weekender process. Because we’re like you’re at this church you’re probably going to be overseas at some point on a mission trip. And so to me it’s like people are like dude that probably scares the crap out of people. And it’s like well, I mean we want to make sure they know what they’re getting into, you know. We’re not telling them they got to do that tomorrow… Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — …but that is the, and then and then there’s all these baby steps, right? Like hey come to you know, every February we do Sent weekend. Come to the prayer night. Like that’s a baby step. That’s not you getting on a plane to go to Nepal. But you know hey we’re doing this missions offering at the end of the year, like maybe get you know. So there’s all these I would say that our the way we think about Chosen ministry, which again: adoption, foster care, families count, and rope holding, which is a big part of this discussion… Rich Birch — Okay. Andrew Hopper —…is that way. It’s big vision on the front end so we’re never going to tell somebody, hey you know, I know you could never do this. Like I’ll never…I think people can do it and they should. Or or you know more Christians than are should. At the same time we’re also not guilting anybody. Like so I’m I you know the the first thing I’ll tell people is like, hey, you know we start talking about adoption. I always say always say, hey, we have not lined up a bunch of little kids in the lobby for you to take one home today, okay. And then I’ll tell them, that’s next week.Rich Birch — That’s great.Andrew Hopper — Okay, so yeah but and we we try hard to like put some levity in it. Man, we’re not everybody’s not going to do that. In fact, a minority, of a small minority is going to do it. But everyone can be involved and there are baby steps.Andrew Hopper — So we try to highlight giving, man. Like if you someone adopts from Mercy Hill, we pay 25% of their adoption. Okay.Rich Birch — Wow. Yep.Andrew Hopper — If they’re a member and they’re in a community group, they get 25%. All right, well, you know, we’re going to connect that. Like, man, you you are never going to adopt. You feel like that’s, but it’s like, well, I give $100 a month to the church. Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — Well, hey, what? You know, you’re you are you are supporting.Rich Birch — We’re making a difference.Andrew Hopper — We do parents night out, you know, for all of our foster and adoptive parents. We do it quarterly. It’s like, hey, those are opportunities to come and serve, man. You can serve the meal you can do. We do rope holding, which I know we’ll probably talk about. But but the the idea of rope holding is just like, man, I’m not going to do this, but I can be in the corner for somebody. They’re in my community group. I want to be their first call if they need a babysitter or they need, you know, a gift card, or whatever they need.Andrew Hopper — So I think, man, we try to do big vision. You know, we’re going we’re going to set a huge vision, you know, for 2030 for 2030. Actually, we just hit our vision for 2025, which is 200 adoptive or foster families. There’s a lot of ways people can be involved with it.Rich Birch — So good. There’s, I think thing I would encourage friends who are listening in, you really should be following Mercy Hill, Andrew, because I do think you’re a very unique communicator where you, and you just described it. And I think to you, it’s just like, that’s just what you do. But this idea of like, you’re calling people to a high bar, but you’re not leveraging shame, guilt. you know, it’s, and I think so many times our language can kind of lean in that direction. Or we can, if we really are trying to push people towards something, or we can just undersell the vision. You know We can be like, oh, it’s not that it’s not that big of a deal. You know It’s not for everybody. So I would encourage people to listen in.Rich Birch — Talk to me about rope holding. How is that, what’s that look like? Unpack what that looks like a little bit.Andrew Hopper — Yeah, so rope so the the the rope-holding analogy, which a lot of your listeners probably gonna already know this, but you know William Carey, Andrew Fuller, William Carey, father of modern missions, he’s he he he makes the statement, “I’ll dangle at the end of the rope in the pit, if you’ll hold the rope,” talking to Fuller. And Fuller held the rope for him. Like, you know, Carey the mission field, Fuller’s raising money, preaching sermons, organizing mission boards. So that’s kind of the picture. Right.Andrew Hopper — So we say, all right, not everybody is going to go down into the pit of foster care adoption, even even families count. I mean, these are these are massive spiritual warfare battlegrounds you know um which is one of the reasons why our church wants to be involved so much. I mean you if you want to talk about getting to the you can do all the rhetoric in the world, brother, you want to get to the very bottom of societal issues, you you be involved in somebody’s story that’s trying that’s trying to get their kids back from the foster care system. You’re trying to help them with that. I mean, every you could fatherlessness, poverty, drug abuse. I mean, everything you can think, you know.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — So this this is just spiritual war. So what we tell people is like, hey, man. If we got people that are mobilizing for for adoption and foster care, we better have people in their corne,r because the enemy is going to bring his war machine.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — And we see it all the time. I mean, you’re going to see, you know, a family steps in to adopt and you’re going to start seeing them, you know, there can be sickness. They can have marital problems. They can have financial things that come up. They can begin to believe lies, frustrations. I mean, There’s just so they can become, you know, their their heart can start getting hard toward the system. I mean, there’s so many things that come at them. And so what we say is we need people in their corner, right. Andrew Hopper — Now, it’s funny because like the way our church has operated was at first we said, all right, we’re going to we’re going to do, you know, the the community group is going hold the rope for the people. And and that that was fine. The problem is when we really kicked off this ministry, so many people got involved that it became overwhelming to the group. So we said we got to start this… Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — …rope holding ministry. The rope holder ministry is good. It’s like, what does a rope holder do? They kind of do whatever the person needs them to do. Rich Birch — Right. Andrew Hopper — So there are examples of the rope holding ministry going really well, where it’s like, hey, man, they’re they’re helping with ah child care with the other kids when they’re going to foster care appointments in court. And or, hey, we’re we’re helping you do some things around the house whenever you’re overseas doing your adoption, which is going to put you three weeks in country. You know, there are some good examples like that. Andrew Hopper — But the other thing that we’ve learned is, you know, foster care and adoption families that are that are walking through this, they’re going through a very trying time. And to just pair them with somebody they don’t know and say, hey, look, here’s your supporter, it can be a little bit like, oh, that’s awesome, and then they never reach out to them.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — They never reach out – the rope holder’s ready.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — But it’s just like, dude, I don’t I don’t know you. And this is a hard time.Rich Birch — Who are you? Yeah, yeah.Andrew Hopper — And so what we’re trying to figure out now as we reboot that rope holder idea is, you know, how how do you kind of integrate relationships they’ve already had? Almost like, hey, do you have this massive pool of people called rope holders? Or when an adoptive family comes up, you say to them, hey, who can we shoulder tap, rope holder for you.Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — And then we’ll train them.Rich Birch — Oh, that’s cool. Yeah.Andrew Hopper — But not have this pool, but say for you, we’ll put them in. So that’s kind of what we’re, so as part of our reboot for 2030, you know, that’s sort of what’s in our mind right now.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool.Andrew Hopper — We have a whole playbook for the way we’ve done it, which anybody, you know, if anybody wants any of those things, they can go to AndrewPHopper.com/chosen. And I can send you any of that stuff we have, but on the rope holder side, you know, just full transparency, we’re still, you know, kind of, of you know, and I’m sure it’ll always be that way that we make an improvement.Rich Birch — Yeah, always trying to make it better. Yeah. And I want to, yeah, at some point in this journey, you decided, hey, we’ve got to put this vision and framework into writing, like we and you actually ended up writing a book, and friends who are listening in, I want to encourage you to pick up a copy of this book. Listen, we’re almost half an hour in. I know you’re interested in this. This is the kind of thing you, Andrew’s a trusted leader. He’s, I’ve had a chance to take a peek at the book. This will be super helpful for you. But, but that’s a lot of effort to put this together into a book. What pushed you from just leading this ministry to ultimately saying, hey, I want to capture this into a resource that could help other people?Andrew Hopper — Well, you know, Rich, I never really saw myself as like a writer, just like a practitioner, man. Let’s just keep keep working on the thing and going.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — And truthfully, I got approached. Hey, would you have any interest in writing? You know, New Growth Press is the one that’s editing this book and putting it out. And it was funny, though, because the second I was asked, I was like, man, I know what we should do [inaudible] that should be what we should do. It’s it’s our it’s it’s my story’s family story with our special needs child that we’ve adopted. It’s our church’s journey. But more important than either of those two things, it’s a grounding in the gospel-centered motivation. Because I think that is what is so important. We don’t do guilt motivation. And you know, cute kids and sad, cute kids and and sad stories are good reasons, but they you need a great reason, because it’s hard. Rich Birch — That’s good. Yep.Andrew Hopper — You know, and the great reason is of course, adopted people adopt people. And so we delve way into the helplessness of our spiritual condition, how God adopted us and then how, you know, that provides a deep motivation for us to go and do the same for others.Rich Birch — Can you unpack that a little bit more? Because I think this is, ah to me, a core part of the book that I think is really helpful. Even if you’re maybe listening in, you’re thinking, okay, I’m not sure adoption or foster care is necessarily the thing, but you unpack this idea of gospel rather than guilt. And can you talk us through, you know, how, yeah, just talk us through that part, that concept a bit more. Just double click on that a little bit.Andrew Hopper — Yeah. So, you know, when we think about behaviors that flow from the Christian life, there’s really only two ways to think about it, right? Like one of them is we try to do things in order that God would approve of us, you know, that he would, you know, he would, ah he would, he would let us in his family, you know, those those types of things. And we, you know, this is for a lot of Baptistic world, which I am, this was kind of like, wow, this is really revolutionary, but that was 20 years ago – Keller and all that. You know, we just started understanding what more of a gospel center motivation. Andrew Hopper — Of course, the other way to think about Christian behaviors is you are part of the family because of what Christ has done for you. And the family has a culture. The family works a certain way. There’s fruit that will pop out in your life, not so that you can gain entrance into the vine. That’s not how it works. Like, ah you know, you don’t you don’t produce fruit to get in the vine. You produce fruit because you’re in the vine. Andrew Hopper — And so, you know, when we think about like like Titus 2, for example, we think about how the grace of God appears to all men, teaching us not just salvation, but teaching us to obey his commands. So there’s something about salvation that and is inherent to the gospel-centered motivation of of of going out, living the Christian life. You know, it’s it’s kind of the John Bunyan idea when they said, man, if you, you know, if you keep preaching this gospel message, people are going to do whatever they want to do. And he said, no, if I keep preaching this gospel message, people are going to do whatever God wants them to do. Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — You know, and so I think what we’ve done in this book is just say, hey, that that is true universally in our Christian life. Like if I’m not tithing and I’m stingy, I can do motivation in two ways. Number one, how dare you, you piece of trash that you never, you know why would you never give? Look what God, you know, blah blah blah, blah, blah, guilt, guilt, shame, shame. Right. Andrew Hopper — Of course, the other way to say is like, man, what kind of riches has God given you in the gospel? And what kind of inheritance do you now have as a son of the king? It’s like, all right, that’s powerful, you know, and it will it will take us places that guilt never can. Guilt will work for a while. You can put fire under somebody and it’ll move them. But if you put it in them, they’ll run through a wall, you know. Rich Birch — So true.Andrew Hopper — And so it’s like it’s like, hey, OK, so you could do it with all these different things. We’ve tried to take this book and do that with adoption to say, all right.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — We know James 1:27, we need to care for the fatherless and the orphan. We understand. I mean, dude, there ain’t, when you talk about metaphors, there’s two big ones, marriage and adoption, you know? And so if you want to do adoption well, we can do it from two motivations. One motivation is look how many kids need. That’s all and that’s all true. That moves my heart. You know, look, can you believe this story of this kid? And that’s fine.Andrew Hopper — Of course, you could do guilt, too. Like, how dare you, you know, have this nice, happy family and not go adopt a little poor orphan kid. You know, you could do guilt. All those things will be fine. They’ll put fire under you a little bit. But if you want to put the fire in someone that is going to carry them through the long haul of all this stuff, I think it’s better to start with: All right. There’s kids that need to be chosen. Were you chosen?Andrew Hopper — You know, so like one of the you know, one I’ll give you an example. We know of a family here in the tribe. They’ve got an awesome son that is 20-something years old, kids got Down syndrome, and they adopted him from Ecuador. And his story was one day a carpenter was working on this building and he heard cries coming out of a dump, like a trash heap. This child had just been born and been left you know with his deformities had just been left for the dumpster. Andrew Hopper — And they brought him to the orphanage. And next thing you know, you know about three or four years later, he got adopted by this family that we know. And that family’s father, he said, Eddie’s story is my story. I was pulled from a trash heap by a carpenter. And if you it’s like that is powerful. Rich Birch — Right. Yes.Andrew Hopper — You know, when you start thinking about, man, in my sin, I was one who had no part and parcel in the kingdom of God. I was headlong in rebellion. I had rejected. I was not a son. And God lavished his love upon me, that I would be called his child. And if if that has happened to me spiritually, how could I not want to do that? Or at least help those. you know I’m not saying that’s a call for everybody, but be involved in others that are doing that as well.Andrew Hopper — And so that’s what we say. Adopted people, adopt people, chosen people, choose people. And hey, I didn’t answer your last question. Rich Birch — That’s fine.Andrew Hopper — Okay. Your last question was, why did we write the book? Very simply, I think more people just need to think about what I just said. You know, and I think churches do. And I think that if, you know, a lot of churches have adoption-minded people and a little bit of of fuel in that fire might create some really cool ministry in that church. And this book lays really well for being like, man, make it a small group resource for eight weeks. You know, it’s got questions at the end of each chapter.Andrew Hopper — Like my my prayer is that this book would catalyze tens of thousands of Christian adoptions. Rich Birch — Wow. Andrew Hopper — And that’s why we wrote the book.Rich Birch — Yeah. It’s and I thought the same thing as I was looking through it, that this would be a great resource for a small group, a great resource as a staff training thing. Because again, I think there’s two things happening on two levels. From my perspective, there’s what you’re actually talking about – adoption, but then there’s how you talk about it. And I think even both of those, I think could be interesting as a as a staff team to kind of unpack and think about. How do we ensure that what we’re doing is so gospel-infused. That’s part of why i love you as a communicator. I think you do such a good job on that. It’s just fantastic. So I would strongly encourage people to pick it up.Rich Birch — Help me understand the connection. So Mercy Hill is known for, or at least from my perspective, known as a sending church. You know, the thing, one of the and I’ve told again, I told you this before, you’re the first church leader I’ve ever bumped into that has connected new here guests to number of missionaries sent. This like idea of like this funnel of how do we move people all the way along to that? I think that’s incredible. How does that kind of sending culture and adoption, how does that fit together? How does that help kind of fuel the flywheel of what’s happening at Mercy Hill?Andrew Hopper — Well, you you helped me think about this when you came and did our one day for our for our Breaking Barriers group, you know, for the pastoral trainings that we do. Because in your church growth book, you talk about how, ah you know, community ministry is used as an evangelism tool. I’m not, I’m probably butchering the way you talk about it.Rich Birch — Yep. Yep. Oh, that’s good. Yep. That’s great.Andrew Hopper — That was like a big light bulb for me because because we we definitely do that, but we have not leveraged the communications of that.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — And so, um you know, for us now, what we’re trying to really think about is how does our adoption of foster care ministry and rope holding and families count ministry, how does that create open? We call them open doors, right? Rich Birch — Yep.Andrew Hopper — Like, how does it create open doors, questions in the community, where people come in? And we’ve seen it. You know, so like when we’re talking about the sending culture, that pipeline starts when new people get interested in faith, they get interested in church.Andrew Hopper — And, you know, like, for example, we we had a guy, we just did a historic video. Man, he’s saved, baptized, serving now, ah or, you know, family, young family, prototypical Mercy Hill guy, like, man, just you know blue collar heart, white collar job, just that. I mean, just everything we talk about. Right. He’s our he’s kind of our guy. And the way he got connected was his boss had signed up to be a rope holder. And it just blew his mind. Like, why would a guy take limited time and go help these families? I mean, he of course, he thought it was a good thing. But it really intrigued them. Andrew Hopper — And so we’ve tried to we’re trying to leverage more of the communication side. It’s tricky. You don’t want to be like, hey, look at us you know in the community. At the same time, I’m like, man, this year, you know when we’re going to do a pretty significant upgrade to some of the there our foster care system has, there’s a house that has a backyard and the backyard is where families come to play with kids, play with their kids they’re trying to get back from the foster care.Rich Birch — Right. Yep.Andrew Hopper — And we’ve said like, you know what, man, if these parents are putting in, that needs to be like the best, the best backyard, and you know?Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, absolutely. 100%.Andrew Hopper — And so, you know, we’re, we’re going to do a significant investment in some, you know, whatever…Rich Birch — Play structures and yeah. Andrew Hopper — …like a, you know, whatever, like a pergola type thing. They’re going put a shed out there. All going to connect it, pavers, all that stuff is what we want to do. And, you know, we’re, we’re looking at that and I’m going like, yeah, I mean, I get it. Like you don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, but at the same time, that’s not for us. That’s for people that are interested to say like, why would a church do that? You know, like why do they care so much?Andrew Hopper — And it’s because, Hey, sign of the kingdom. We want to build families through adoption. We want to restore families through foster care and families count. This is part of that. So we’ve tried to we’ve tried to use it as a way. And I would really encourage church leaders to think about that. Like, hey, is your community ministry actually an evangelism strategy?Rich Birch — Right. Yeah, that’s good. Love that. And yeah, I would encourage you continue to encourage you to think through those things because I do think that there’s, we’ve seen that there’s huge opportunity for folks who don’t normally attend church. They’re interested the way I’ve said in other contexts is they see it as a good thing. We see it as a God thing. We’re not going to fight them over the semantics of it at the front end. Because like you say it’s it’s the kingdom puncturing through that grabs their attention and you’re like oh what what you know what’s going on there? It’s a first step – how do we encourage those people? Rich Birch — Like on that backyard project, I no doubt if you’re rallying a bunch of guys to go work there, I know that there are guys in your church who have friends who they could invite who don’t attend church who maybe would never walk in your church who’d say, hey, will you come and work for a Saturday for a couple hours and swing a hammer and help us do this thing? Let me explain what this is about.They absolutely would show up, right? 100% they’d show up and and they’ll get intrigued by that. And they’ll be like, oh, what’s going on there? That’s that’s fantastic. Rich Birch — Well, friends, unabashedly, I want you to pick up copies of, not just a copy, copies of this book. So where do we want to send people to pick up copies, that sort of thing?Andrew Hopper — Yeah, man, they can just go to andrewphopper.com/chosen. Rich Birch — Perfect. Yep.Andrew Hopper — The book’s out so they can pick up a copy. I mean, it’s also just like on Amazon or whatever, but that link will take you straight to New Growth Press.Rich Birch — Right.Andrew Hopper — So, yeah, man, would love it. Would love to hear from anybody who’s using it well in a church context um to catalyze Christian adoption.Rich Birch — Love it. Anything else you want to share just as we close and how can people track, go to the website, other places we want to send them as we close up today.Andrew Hopper — Also on Instagram, we have a lot of stuff on Instagram, andrewphopper on Instagram. Yeah, the last thing I would say as a closing thought, Rich, is you know, the Christian adoption boom has sort of happened 20 years ago. People started talking about this a lot more. And now you can feel in some of the podcast world and all that, there’s a bit of a backlash, not not to don’t do it, but also like, hey, no one told us how hard this was going to be. Andrew Hopper — You’re dealing with traumatic situations, kids that have been brought, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s crazy. One thing I try to do in this book is I try to say, Hey, that’s not a good reason to take our ball and go home, you know.Rich Birch — That’s good.Andrew Hopper — Instead we just need to try to shoot as straight as we can. And I do that in this book, man. It is hard. It’s you’re on the front lines of spiritual war. I mean, it’s almost like, dude, the, the, the greatest transfer of faith from one generation to another happens in the home. We love it when adults get saved. I get that. But let’s be honest. Statistically, where does it normally happen? Right. Rich Birch — Yeah. Kids. Andrew Hopper — And so if you got a home that’s broken apart, that Christians are trying to put back together, what did we think Satan was going to do? You know, and so instead of taking our ball and going home, let’s just call it what it is, and then ask the Lord to steel our spine… Rich Birch — That’s good. Andrew Hopper — …and to move forward with the mission. So, yeah, man, I’d love for people to pick it up. And I appreciate the time to talk about it today.Rich Birch — Andrew, thanks so much. Appreciate you. Just want to honor you for the work you do. You’re a great leader. And I love how God’s using you and your church to make a difference. Thanks for being on the show today.Andrew Hopper — Thanks, brother.

Happy New Year! You may have noticed that in 2025 we had moved toward YouTube as our primary podcasting platform. As we'll explain in the next State of Latent Space post, we'll be doubling down on Substack again and improving the experience for the over 100,000 of you who look out for our emails and website updates!We first mentioned Artificial Analysis in 2024, when it was still a side project in a Sydney basement. They then were one of the few Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross' AIGrant companies to raise a full seed round from them and have now become the independent gold standard for AI benchmarking—trusted by developers, enterprises, and every major lab to navigate the exploding landscape of models, providers, and capabilities.We have chatted with both Clementine Fourrier of HuggingFace's OpenLLM Leaderboard and (the freshly valued at $1.7B) Anastasios Angelopoulos of LMArena on their approaches to LLM evals and trendspotting, but Artificial Analysis have staked out an enduring and important place in the toolkit of the modern AI Engineer by doing the best job of independently running the most comprehensive set of evals across the widest range of open and closed models, and charting their progress for broad industry analyst use.George Cameron and Micah-Hill Smith have spent two years building Artificial Analysis into the platform that answers the questions no one else will: Which model is actually best for your use case? What are the real speed-cost trade-offs? And how open is “open” really?We discuss:* The origin story: built as a side project in 2023 while Micah was building a legal AI assistant, launched publicly in January 2024, and went viral after Swyx's retweet* Why they run evals themselves: labs prompt models differently, cherry-pick chain-of-thought examples (Google Gemini 1.0 Ultra used 32-shot prompts to beat GPT-4 on MMLU), and self-report inflated numbers* The mystery shopper policy: they register accounts not on their own domain and run intelligence + performance benchmarks incognito to prevent labs from serving different models on private endpoints* How they make money: enterprise benchmarking insights subscription (standardized reports on model deployment, serverless vs. managed vs. leasing chips) and private custom benchmarking for AI companies (no one pays to be on the public leaderboard)* The Intelligence Index (V3): synthesizes 10 eval datasets (MMLU, GPQA, agentic benchmarks, long-context reasoning) into a single score, with 95% confidence intervals via repeated runs* Omissions Index (hallucination rate): scores models from -100 to +100 (penalizing incorrect answers, rewarding ”I don't know”), and Claude models lead with the lowest hallucination rates despite not always being the smartest* GDP Val AA: their version of OpenAI's GDP-bench (44 white-collar tasks with spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoints), run through their Stirrup agent harness (up to 100 turns, code execution, web search, file system), graded by Gemini 3 Pro as an LLM judge (tested extensively, no self-preference bias)* The Openness Index: scores models 0-18 on transparency of pre-training data, post-training data, methodology, training code, and licensing (AI2 OLMo 2 leads, followed by Nous Hermes and NVIDIA Nemotron)* The smiling curve of AI costs: GPT-4-level intelligence is 100-1000x cheaper than at launch (thanks to smaller models like Amazon Nova), but frontier reasoning models in agentic workflows cost more than ever (sparsity, long context, multi-turn agents)* Why sparsity might go way lower than 5%: GPT-4.5 is ~5% active, Gemini models might be ~3%, and Omissions Index accuracy correlates with total parameters (not active), suggesting massive sparse models are the future* Token efficiency vs. turn efficiency: GPT-5 costs more per token but solves Tau-bench in fewer turns (cheaper overall), and models are getting better at using more tokens only when needed (5.1 Codex has tighter token distributions)* V4 of the Intelligence Index coming soon: adding GDP Val AA, Critical Point, hallucination rate, and dropping some saturated benchmarks (human-eval-style coding is now trivial for small models)Links to Artificial Analysis* Website: https://artificialanalysis.ai* George Cameron on X: https://x.com/georgecameron* Micah-Hill Smith on X: https://x.com/micahhsmithFull Episode on YouTubeTimestamps* 00:00 Introduction: Full Circle Moment and Artificial Analysis Origins* 01:19 Business Model: Independence and Revenue Streams* 04:33 Origin Story: From Legal AI to Benchmarking Need* 16:22 AI Grant and Moving to San Francisco* 19:21 Intelligence Index Evolution: From V1 to V3* 11:47 Benchmarking Challenges: Variance, Contamination, and Methodology* 13:52 Mystery Shopper Policy and Maintaining Independence* 28:01 New Benchmarks: Omissions Index for Hallucination Detection* 33:36 Critical Point: Hard Physics Problems and Research-Level Reasoning* 23:01 GDP Val AA: Agentic Benchmark for Real Work Tasks* 50:19 Stirrup Agent Harness: Open Source Agentic Framework* 52:43 Openness Index: Measuring Model Transparency Beyond Licenses* 58:25 The Smiling Curve: Cost Falling While Spend Rising* 1:02:32 Hardware Efficiency: Blackwell Gains and Sparsity Limits* 1:06:23 Reasoning Models and Token Efficiency: The Spectrum Emerges* 1:11:00 Multimodal Benchmarking: Image, Video, and Speech Arenas* 1:15:05 Looking Ahead: Intelligence Index V4 and Future Directions* 1:16:50 Closing: The Insatiable Demand for IntelligenceTranscriptMicah [00:00:06]: This is kind of a full circle moment for us in a way, because the first time artificial analysis got mentioned on a podcast was you and Alessio on Latent Space. Amazing.swyx [00:00:17]: Which was January 2024. I don't even remember doing that, but yeah, it was very influential to me. Yeah, I'm looking at AI News for Jan 17, or Jan 16, 2024. I said, this gem of a models and host comparison site was just launched. And then I put in a few screenshots, and I said, it's an independent third party. It clearly outlines the quality versus throughput trade-off, and it breaks out by model and hosting provider. I did give you s**t for missing fireworks, and how do you have a model benchmarking thing without fireworks? But you had together, you had perplexity, and I think we just started chatting there. Welcome, George and Micah, to Latent Space. I've been following your progress. Congrats on... It's been an amazing year. You guys have really come together to be the presumptive new gardener of AI, right? Which is something that...George [00:01:09]: Yeah, but you can't pay us for better results.swyx [00:01:12]: Yes, exactly.George [00:01:13]: Very important.Micah [00:01:14]: Start off with a spicy take.swyx [00:01:18]: Okay, how do I pay you?Micah [00:01:20]: Let's get right into that.swyx [00:01:21]: How do you make money?Micah [00:01:24]: Well, very happy to talk about that. So it's been a big journey the last couple of years. Artificial analysis is going to be two years old in January 2026. Which is pretty soon now. We first run the website for free, obviously, and give away a ton of data to help developers and companies navigate AI and make decisions about models, providers, technologies across the AI stack for building stuff. We're very committed to doing that and tend to keep doing that. We have, along the way, built a business that is working out pretty sustainably. We've got just over 20 people now and two main customer groups. So we want to be... We want to be who enterprise look to for data and insights on AI, so we want to help them with their decisions about models and technologies for building stuff. And then on the other side, we do private benchmarking for companies throughout the AI stack who build AI stuff. So no one pays to be on the website. We've been very clear about that from the very start because there's no use doing what we do unless it's independent AI benchmarking. Yeah. But turns out a bunch of our stuff can be pretty useful to companies building AI stuff.swyx [00:02:38]: And is it like, I am a Fortune 500, I need advisors on objective analysis, and I call you guys and you pull up a custom report for me, you come into my office and give me a workshop? What kind of engagement is that?George [00:02:53]: So we have a benchmarking and insight subscription, which looks like standardized reports that cover key topics or key challenges enterprises face when looking to understand AI and choose between all the technologies. And so, for instance, one of the report is a model deployment report, how to think about choosing between serverless inference, managed deployment solutions, or leasing chips. And running inference yourself is an example kind of decision that big enterprises face, and it's hard to reason through, like this AI stuff is really new to everybody. And so we try and help with our reports and insight subscription. Companies navigate that. We also do custom private benchmarking. And so that's very different from the public benchmarking that we publicize, and there's no commercial model around that. For private benchmarking, we'll at times create benchmarks, run benchmarks to specs that enterprises want. And we'll also do that sometimes for AI companies who have built things, and we help them understand what they've built with private benchmarking. Yeah. So that's a piece mainly that we've developed through trying to support everybody publicly with our public benchmarks. Yeah.swyx [00:04:09]: Let's talk about TechStack behind that. But okay, I'm going to rewind all the way to when you guys started this project. You were all the way in Sydney? Yeah. Well, Sydney, Australia for me.Micah [00:04:19]: George was an SF, but he's Australian, but he moved here already. Yeah.swyx [00:04:22]: And I remember I had the Zoom call with you. What was the impetus for starting artificial analysis in the first place? You know, you started with public benchmarks. And so let's start there. We'll go to the private benchmark. Yeah.George [00:04:33]: Why don't we even go back a little bit to like why we, you know, thought that it was needed? Yeah.Micah [00:04:40]: The story kind of begins like in 2022, 2023, like both George and I have been into AI stuff for quite a while. In 2023 specifically, I was trying to build a legal AI research assistant. So it actually worked pretty well for its era, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So I was finding that the more you go into building something using LLMs, the more each bit of what you're doing ends up being a benchmarking problem. So had like this multistage algorithm thing, trying to figure out what the minimum viable model for each bit was, trying to optimize every bit of it as you build that out, right? Like you're trying to think about accuracy, a bunch of other metrics and performance and cost. And mostly just no one was doing anything to independently evaluate all the models. And certainly not to look at the trade-offs for speed and cost. So we basically set out just to build a thing that developers could look at to see the trade-offs between all of those things measured independently across all the models and providers. Honestly, it was probably meant to be a side project when we first started doing it.swyx [00:05:49]: Like we didn't like get together and say like, Hey, like we're going to stop working on all this stuff. I'm like, this is going to be our main thing. When I first called you, I think you hadn't decided on starting a company yet.Micah [00:05:58]: That's actually true. I don't even think we'd pause like, like George had an acquittance job. I didn't quit working on my legal AI thing. Like it was genuinely a side project.George [00:06:05]: We built it because we needed it as people building in the space and thought, Oh, other people might find it useful too. So we'll buy domain and link it to the Vercel deployment that we had and tweet about it. And, but very quickly it started getting attention. Thank you, Swyx for, I think doing an initial retweet and spotlighting it there. This project that we released. And then very quickly though, it was useful to others, but very quickly it became more useful as the number of models released accelerated. We had Mixtrel 8x7B and it was a key. That's a fun one. Yeah. Like a open source model that really changed the landscape and opened up people's eyes to other serverless inference providers and thinking about speed, thinking about cost. And so that was a key. And so it became more useful quite quickly. Yeah.swyx [00:07:02]: What I love talking to people like you who sit across the ecosystem is, well, I have theories about what people want, but you have data and that's obviously more relevant. But I want to stay on the origin story a little bit more. When you started out, I would say, I think the status quo at the time was every paper would come out and they would report their numbers versus competitor numbers. And that's basically it. And I remember I did the legwork. I think everyone has some knowledge. I think there's some version of Excel sheet or a Google sheet where you just like copy and paste the numbers from every paper and just post it up there. And then sometimes they don't line up because they're independently run. And so your numbers are going to look better than... Your reproductions of other people's numbers are going to look worse because you don't hold their models correctly or whatever the excuse is. I think then Stanford Helm, Percy Liang's project would also have some of these numbers. And I don't know if there's any other source that you can cite. The way that if I were to start artificial analysis at the same time you guys started, I would have used the Luther AI's eval framework harness. Yup.Micah [00:08:06]: Yup. That was some cool stuff. At the end of the day, running these evals, it's like if it's a simple Q&A eval, all you're doing is asking a list of questions and checking if the answers are right, which shouldn't be that crazy. But it turns out there are an enormous number of things that you've got control for. And I mean, back when we started the website. Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the reasons why we realized that we had to run the evals ourselves and couldn't just take rules from the labs was just that they would all prompt the models differently. And when you're competing over a few points, then you can pretty easily get- You can put the answer into the model. Yeah. That in the extreme. And like you get crazy cases like back when I'm Googled a Gemini 1.0 Ultra and needed a number that would say it was better than GPT-4 and like constructed, I think never published like chain of thought examples. 32 of them in every topic in MLU to run it, to get the score, like there are so many things that you- They never shipped Ultra, right? That's the one that never made it up. Not widely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure it existed, but yeah. So we were pretty sure that we needed to run them ourselves and just run them in the same way across all the models. Yeah. And we were, we also did certain from the start that you couldn't look at those in isolation. You needed to look at them alongside the cost and performance stuff. Yeah.swyx [00:09:24]: Okay. A couple of technical questions. I mean, so obviously I also thought about this and I didn't do it because of cost. Yep. Did you not worry about costs? Were you funded already? Clearly not, but you know. No. Well, we definitely weren't at the start.Micah [00:09:36]: So like, I mean, we're paying for it personally at the start. There's a lot of money. Well, the numbers weren't nearly as bad a couple of years ago. So we certainly incurred some costs, but we were probably in the order of like hundreds of dollars of spend across all the benchmarking that we were doing. Yeah. So nothing. Yeah. It was like kind of fine. Yeah. Yeah. These days that's gone up an enormous amount for a bunch of reasons that we can talk about. But yeah, it wasn't that bad because you can also remember that like the number of models we were dealing with was hardly any and the complexity of the stuff that we wanted to do to evaluate them was a lot less. Like we were just asking some Q&A type questions and then one specific thing was for a lot of evals initially, we were just like sampling an answer. You know, like, what's the answer for this? Like, we didn't want to go into the answer directly without letting the models think. We weren't even doing chain of thought stuff initially. And that was the most useful way to get some results initially. Yeah.swyx [00:10:33]: And so for people who haven't done this work, literally parsing the responses is a whole thing, right? Like because sometimes the models, the models can answer any way they feel fit and sometimes they actually do have the right answer, but they just returned the wrong format and they will get a zero for that unless you work it into your parser. And that involves more work. And so, I mean, but there's an open question whether you should give it points for not following your instructions on the format.Micah [00:11:00]: It depends what you're looking at, right? Because you can, if you're trying to see whether or not it can solve a particular type of reasoning problem, and you don't want to test it on its ability to do answer formatting at the same time, then you might want to use an LLM as answer extractor approach to make sure that you get the answer out no matter how unanswered. But these days, it's mostly less of a problem. Like, if you instruct a model and give it examples of what the answers should look like, it can get the answers in your format, and then you can do, like, a simple regex.swyx [00:11:28]: Yeah, yeah. And then there's other questions around, I guess, sometimes if you have a multiple choice question, sometimes there's a bias towards the first answer, so you have to randomize the responses. All these nuances, like, once you dig into benchmarks, you're like, I don't know how anyone believes the numbers on all these things. It's so dark magic.Micah [00:11:47]: You've also got, like… You've got, like, the different degrees of variance in different benchmarks, right? Yeah. So, if you run four-question multi-choice on a modern reasoning model at the temperatures suggested by the labs for their own models, the variance that you can see on a four-question multi-choice eval is pretty enormous if you only do a single run of it and it has a small number of questions, especially. So, like, one of the things that we do is run an enormous number of all of our evals when we're developing new ones and doing upgrades to our intelligence index to bring in new things. Yeah. So, that we can dial in the right number of repeats so that we can get to the 95% confidence intervals that we're comfortable with so that when we pull that together, we can be confident in intelligence index to at least as tight as, like, a plus or minus one at a 95% confidence. Yeah.swyx [00:12:32]: And, again, that just adds a straight multiple to the cost. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.George [00:12:37]: So, that's one of many reasons that cost has gone up a lot more than linearly over the last couple of years. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis. We report a cost to run the artificial analysis intelligence index on our website, and currently that's assuming one repeat in terms of how we report it because we want to reflect a bit about the weighting of the index. But our cost is actually a lot higher than what we report there because of the repeats.swyx [00:13:03]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And probably this is true, but just checking, you don't have any special deals with the labs. They don't discount it. You just pay out of pocket or out of your sort of customer funds. Oh, there is a mix. So, the issue is that sometimes they may give you a special end point, which is… Ah, 100%.Micah [00:13:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, we laser focus, like, on everything we do on having the best independent metrics and making sure that no one can manipulate them in any way. There are quite a lot of processes we've developed over the last couple of years to make that true for, like, the one you bring up, like, right here of the fact that if we're working with a lab, if they're giving us a private endpoint to evaluate a model, that it is totally possible. That what's sitting behind that black box is not the same as they serve on a public endpoint. We're very aware of that. We have what we call a mystery shopper policy. And so, and we're totally transparent with all the labs we work with about this, that we will register accounts not on our own domain and run both intelligence evals and performance benchmarks… Yeah, that's the job. …without them being able to identify it. And no one's ever had a problem with that. Because, like, a thing that turns out to actually be quite a good… …good factor in the industry is that they all want to believe that none of their competitors could manipulate what we're doing either.swyx [00:14:23]: That's true. I never thought about that. I've been in the database data industry prior, and there's a lot of shenanigans around benchmarking, right? So I'm just kind of going through the mental laundry list. Did I miss anything else in this category of shenanigans? Oh, potential shenanigans.Micah [00:14:36]: I mean, okay, the biggest one, like, that I'll bring up, like, is more of a conceptual one, actually, than, like, direct shenanigans. It's that the things that get measured become things that get targeted by labs that they're trying to build, right? Exactly. So that doesn't mean anything that we should really call shenanigans. Like, I'm not talking about training on test set. But if you know that you're going to be great at another particular thing, if you're a researcher, there are a whole bunch of things that you can do to try to get better at that thing that preferably are going to be helpful for a wide range of how actual users want to use the thing that you're building. But will not necessarily work. Will not necessarily do that. So, for instance, the models are exceptional now at answering competition maths problems. There is some relevance of that type of reasoning, that type of work, to, like, how we might use modern coding agents and stuff. But it's clearly not one for one. So the thing that we have to be aware of is that once an eval becomes the thing that everyone's looking at, scores can get better on it without there being a reflection of overall generalized intelligence of these models. Getting better. That has been true for the last couple of years. It'll be true for the next couple of years. There's no silver bullet to defeat that other than building new stuff to stay relevant and measure the capabilities that matter most to real users. Yeah.swyx [00:15:58]: And we'll cover some of the new stuff that you guys are building as well, which is cool. Like, you used to just run other people's evals, but now you're coming up with your own. And I think, obviously, that is a necessary path once you're at the frontier. You've exhausted all the existing evals. I think the next point in history that I have for you is AI Grant that you guys decided to join and move here. What was it like? I think you were in, like, batch two? Batch four. Batch four. Okay.Micah [00:16:26]: I mean, it was great. Nat and Daniel are obviously great. And it's a really cool group of companies that we were in AI Grant alongside. It was really great to get Nat and Daniel on board. Obviously, they've done a whole lot of great work in the space with a lot of leading companies and were extremely aligned. With the mission of what we were trying to do. Like, we're not quite typical of, like, a lot of the other AI startups that they've invested in.swyx [00:16:53]: And they were very much here for the mission of what we want to do. Did they say any advice that really affected you in some way or, like, were one of the events very impactful? That's an interesting question.Micah [00:17:03]: I mean, I remember fondly a bunch of the speakers who came and did fireside chats at AI Grant.swyx [00:17:09]: Which is also, like, a crazy list. Yeah.George [00:17:11]: Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was something about, you know, speaking to Nat and Daniel about the challenges of working through a startup and just working through the questions that don't have, like, clear answers and how to work through those kind of methodically and just, like, work through the hard decisions. And they've been great mentors to us as we've built artificial analysis. Another benefit for us was that other companies in the batch and other companies in AI Grant are pushing the capabilities. Yeah. And I think that's a big part of what AI can do at this time. And so being in contact with them, making sure that artificial analysis is useful to them has been fantastic for supporting us in working out how should we build out artificial analysis to continue to being useful to those, like, you know, building on AI.swyx [00:17:59]: I think to some extent, I'm mixed opinion on that one because to some extent, your target audience is not people in AI Grants who are obviously at the frontier. Yeah. Do you disagree?Micah [00:18:09]: To some extent. To some extent. But then, so a lot of what the AI Grant companies are doing is taking capabilities coming out of the labs and trying to push the limits of what they can do across the entire stack for building great applications, which actually makes some of them pretty archetypical power users of artificial analysis. Some of the people with the strongest opinions about what we're doing well and what we're not doing well and what they want to see next from us. Yeah. Yeah. Because when you're building any kind of AI application now, chances are you're using a whole bunch of different models. You're maybe switching reasonably frequently for different models and different parts of your application to optimize what you're able to do with them at an accuracy level and to get better speed and cost characteristics. So for many of them, no, they're like not commercial customers of ours, like we don't charge for all our data on the website. Yeah. They are absolutely some of our power users.swyx [00:19:07]: So let's talk about just the evals as well. So you start out from the general like MMU and GPQA stuff. What's next? How do you sort of build up to the overall index? What was in V1 and how did you evolve it? Okay.Micah [00:19:22]: So first, just like background, like we're talking about the artificial analysis intelligence index, which is our synthesis metric that we pulled together currently from 10 different eval data sets to give what? We're pretty much the same as that. Pretty confident is the best single number to look at for how smart the models are. Obviously, it doesn't tell the whole story. That's why we published the whole website of all the charts to dive into every part of it and look at the trade-offs. But best single number. So right now, it's got a bunch of Q&A type data sets that have been very important to the industry, like a couple that you just mentioned. It's also got a couple of agentic data sets. It's got our own long context reasoning data set and some other use case focused stuff. As time goes on. The things that we're most interested in that are going to be important to the capabilities that are becoming more important for AI, what developers are caring about, are going to be first around agentic capabilities. So surprise, surprise. We're all loving our coding agents and how the model is going to perform like that and then do similar things for different types of work are really important to us. The linking to use cases to economically valuable use cases are extremely important to us. And then we've got some of the. Yeah. These things that the models still struggle with, like working really well over long contexts that are not going to go away as specific capabilities and use cases that we need to keep evaluating.swyx [00:20:46]: But I guess one thing I was driving was like the V1 versus the V2 and how bad it was over time.Micah [00:20:53]: Like how we've changed the index to where we are.swyx [00:20:55]: And I think that reflects on the change in the industry. Right. So that's a nice way to tell that story.Micah [00:21:00]: Well, V1 would be completely saturated right now. Almost every model coming out because doing things like writing the Python functions and human evil is now pretty trivial. It's easy to forget, actually, I think how much progress has been made in the last two years. Like we obviously play the game constantly of like the today's version versus last week's version and the week before and all of the small changes in the horse race between the current frontier and who has the best like smaller than 10B model like right now this week. Right. And that's very important to a lot of developers and people and especially in this particular city of San Francisco. But when you zoom out a couple of years ago, literally most of what we were doing to evaluate the models then would all be 100% solved by even pretty small models today. And that's been one of the key things, by the way, that's driven down the cost of intelligence at every tier of intelligence. We can talk about more in a bit. So V1, V2, V3, we made things harder. We covered a wider range of use cases. And we tried to get closer to things developers care about as opposed to like just the Q&A type stuff that MMLU and GPQA represented. Yeah.swyx [00:22:12]: I don't know if you have anything to add there. Or we could just go right into showing people the benchmark and like looking around and asking questions about it. Yeah.Micah [00:22:21]: Let's do it. Okay. This would be a pretty good way to chat about a few of the new things we've launched recently. Yeah.George [00:22:26]: And I think a little bit about the direction that we want to take it. And we want to push benchmarks. Currently, the intelligence index and evals focus a lot on kind of raw intelligence. But we kind of want to diversify how we think about intelligence. And we can talk about it. But kind of new evals that we've kind of built and partnered on focus on topics like hallucination. And we've got a lot of topics that I think are not covered by the current eval set that should be. And so we want to bring that forth. But before we get into that.swyx [00:23:01]: And so for listeners, just as a timestamp, right now, number one is Gemini 3 Pro High. Then followed by Cloud Opus at 70. Just 5.1 high. You don't have 5.2 yet. And Kimi K2 Thinking. Wow. Still hanging in there. So those are the top four. That will date this podcast quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I love it. I love it. No, no. 100%. Look back this time next year and go, how cute. Yep.George [00:23:25]: Totally. A quick view of that is, okay, there's a lot. I love it. I love this chart. Yeah.Micah [00:23:30]: This is such a favorite, right? Yeah. And almost every talk that George or I give at conferences and stuff, we always put this one up first to just talk about situating where we are in this moment in history. This, I think, is the visual version of what I was saying before about the zooming out and remembering how much progress there's been. If we go back to just over a year ago, before 01, before Cloud Sonnet 3.5, we didn't have reasoning models or coding agents as a thing. And the game was very, very different. If we go back even a little bit before then, we're in the era where, when you look at this chart, open AI was untouchable for well over a year. And, I mean, you would remember that time period well of there being very open questions about whether or not AI was going to be competitive, like full stop, whether or not open AI would just run away with it, whether we would have a few frontier labs and no one else would really be able to do anything other than consume their APIs. I am quite happy overall that the world that we have ended up in is one where... Multi-model. Absolutely. And strictly more competitive every quarter over the last few years. Yeah. This year has been insane. Yeah.George [00:24:42]: You can see it. This chart with everything added is hard to read currently. There's so many dots on it, but I think it reflects a little bit what we felt, like how crazy it's been.swyx [00:24:54]: Why 14 as the default? Is that a manual choice? Because you've got service now in there that are less traditional names. Yeah.George [00:25:01]: It's models that we're kind of highlighting by default in our charts, in our intelligence index. Okay.swyx [00:25:07]: You just have a manually curated list of stuff.George [00:25:10]: Yeah, that's right. But something that I actually don't think every artificial analysis user knows is that you can customize our charts and choose what models are highlighted. Yeah. And so if we take off a few names, it gets a little easier to read.swyx [00:25:25]: Yeah, yeah. A little easier to read. Totally. Yeah. But I love that you can see the all one jump. Look at that. September 2024. And the DeepSeek jump. Yeah.George [00:25:34]: Which got close to OpenAI's leadership. They were so close. I think, yeah, we remember that moment. Around this time last year, actually.Micah [00:25:44]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. Yeah, well, a couple of weeks. It was Boxing Day in New Zealand when DeepSeek v3 came out. And we'd been tracking DeepSeek and a bunch of the other global players that were less known over the second half of 2024 and had run evals on the earlier ones and stuff. I very distinctly remember Boxing Day in New Zealand, because I was with family for Christmas and stuff, running the evals and getting back result by result on DeepSeek v3. So this was the first of their v3 architecture, the 671b MOE.Micah [00:26:19]: And we were very, very impressed. That was the moment where we were sure that DeepSeek was no longer just one of many players, but had jumped up to be a thing. The world really noticed when they followed that up with the RL working on top of v3 and R1 succeeding a few weeks later. But the groundwork for that absolutely was laid with just extremely strong base model, completely open weights that we had as the best open weights model. So, yeah, that's the thing that you really see in the game. But I think that we got a lot of good feedback on Boxing Day. us on Boxing Day last year.George [00:26:48]: Boxing Day is the day after Christmas for those not familiar.George [00:26:54]: I'm from Singapore.swyx [00:26:55]: A lot of us remember Boxing Day for a different reason, for the tsunami that happened. Oh, of course. Yeah, but that was a long time ago. So yeah. So this is the rough pitch of AAQI. Is it A-A-Q-I or A-A-I-I? I-I. Okay. Good memory, though.Micah [00:27:11]: I don't know. I'm not used to it. Once upon a time, we did call it Quality Index, and we would talk about quality, performance, and price, but we changed it to intelligence.George [00:27:20]: There's been a few naming changes. We added hardware benchmarking to the site, and so benchmarks at a kind of system level. And so then we changed our throughput metric to, we now call it output speed, and thenswyx [00:27:32]: throughput makes sense at a system level, so we took that name. Take me through more charts. What should people know? Obviously, the way you look at the site is probably different than how a beginner might look at it.Micah [00:27:42]: Yeah, that's fair. There's a lot of fun stuff to dive into. Maybe so we can hit past all the, like, we have lots and lots of emails and stuff. The interesting ones to talk about today that would be great to bring up are a few of our recent things, I think, that probably not many people will be familiar with yet. So first one of those is our omniscience index. So this one is a little bit different to most of the intelligence evils that we've run. We built it specifically to look at the embedded knowledge in the models and to test hallucination by looking at when the model doesn't know the answer, so not able to get it correct, what's its probability of saying, I don't know, or giving an incorrect answer. So the metric that we use for omniscience goes from negative 100 to positive 100. Because we're simply taking off a point if you give an incorrect answer to the question. We're pretty convinced that this is an example of where it makes most sense to do that, because it's strictly more helpful to say, I don't know, instead of giving a wrong answer to factual knowledge question. And one of our goals is to shift the incentive that evils create for models and the labs creating them to get higher scores. And almost every evil across all of AI up until this point, it's been graded by simple percentage correct as the main metric, the main thing that gets hyped. And so you should take a shot at everything. There's no incentive to say, I don't know. So we did that for this one here.swyx [00:29:22]: I think there's a general field of calibration as well, like the confidence in your answer versus the rightness of the answer. Yeah, we completely agree. Yeah. Yeah.George [00:29:31]: On that. And one reason that we didn't do that is because. Or put that into this index is that we think that the, the way to do that is not to ask the models how confident they are.swyx [00:29:43]: I don't know. Maybe it might be though. You put it like a JSON field, say, say confidence and maybe it spits out something. Yeah. You know, we have done a few evils podcasts over the, over the years. And when we did one with Clementine of hugging face, who maintains the open source leaderboard, and this was one of her top requests, which is some kind of hallucination slash lack of confidence calibration thing. And so, Hey, this is one of them.Micah [00:30:05]: And I mean, like anything that we do, it's not a perfect metric or the whole story of everything that you think about as hallucination. But yeah, it's pretty useful and has some interesting results. Like one of the things that we saw in the hallucination rate is that anthropics Claude models at the, the, the very left-hand side here with the lowest hallucination rates out of the models that we've evaluated amnesty is on. That is an interesting fact. I think it probably correlates with a lot of the previously, not really measured vibes stuff that people like about some of the Claude models. Is the dataset public or what's is it, is there a held out set? There's a hell of a set for this one. So we, we have published a public test set, but we we've only published 10% of it. The reason is that for this one here specifically, it would be very, very easy to like have data contamination because it is just factual knowledge questions. We would. We'll update it at a time to also prevent that, but with yeah, kept most of it held out so that we can keep it reliable for a long time. It leads us to a bunch of really cool things, including breakdown quite granularly by topic. And so we've got some of that disclosed on the website publicly right now, and there's lots more coming in terms of our ability to break out very specific topics. Yeah.swyx [00:31:23]: I would be interested. Let's, let's dwell a little bit on this hallucination one. I noticed that Haiku hallucinates less than Sonnet hallucinates less than Opus. And yeah. Would that be the other way around in a normal capability environments? I don't know. What's, what do you make of that?George [00:31:37]: One interesting aspect is that we've found that there's not really a, not a strong correlation between intelligence and hallucination, right? That's to say that the smarter the models are in a general sense, isn't correlated with their ability to, when they don't know something, say that they don't know. It's interesting that Gemini three pro preview was a big leap over here. Gemini 2.5. Flash and, and, and 2.5 pro, but, and if I add pro quickly here.swyx [00:32:07]: I bet pro's really good. Uh, actually no, I meant, I meant, uh, the GPT pros.George [00:32:12]: Oh yeah.swyx [00:32:13]: Cause GPT pros are rumored. We don't know for a fact that it's like eight runs and then with the LM judge on top. Yeah.George [00:32:20]: So we saw a big jump in, this is accuracy. So this is just percent that they get, uh, correct and Gemini three pro knew a lot more than the other models. And so big jump in accuracy. But relatively no change between the Google Gemini models, between releases. And the hallucination rate. Exactly. And so it's likely due to just kind of different post-training recipe, between the, the Claude models. Yeah.Micah [00:32:45]: Um, there's, there's driven this. Yeah. You can, uh, you can partially blame us and how we define intelligence having until now not defined hallucination as a negative in the way that we think about intelligence.swyx [00:32:56]: And so that's what we're changing. Uh, I know many smart people who are confidently incorrect.George [00:33:02]: Uh, look, look at that. That, that, that is very humans. Very true. And there's times and a place for that. I think our view is that hallucination rate makes sense in this context where it's around knowledge, but in many cases, people want the models to hallucinate, to have a go. Often that's the case in coding or when you're trying to generate newer ideas. One eval that we added to artificial analysis is, is, is critical point and it's really hard, uh, physics problems. Okay.swyx [00:33:32]: And is it sort of like a human eval type or something different or like a frontier math type?George [00:33:37]: It's not dissimilar to frontier frontier math. So these are kind of research questions that kind of academics in the physics physics world would be able to answer, but models really struggled to answer. So the top score here is not 9%.swyx [00:33:51]: And when the people that, that created this like Minway and, and, and actually off via who was kind of behind sweep and what organization is this? Oh, is this, it's Princeton.George [00:34:01]: Kind of range of academics from, from, uh, different academic institutions, really smart people. They talked about how they turn the models up in terms of the temperature as high temperature as they can, where they're trying to explore kind of new ideas in physics as a, as a thought partner, just because they, they want the models to hallucinate. Um, yeah, sometimes it's something new. Yeah, exactly.swyx [00:34:21]: Um, so not right in every situation, but, um, I think it makes sense, you know, to test hallucination in scenarios where it makes sense. Also, the obvious question is, uh, this is one of. Many that there is there, every lab has a system card that shows some kind of hallucination number, and you've chosen to not, uh, endorse that and you've made your own. And I think that's a, that's a choice. Um, totally in some sense, the rest of artificial analysis is public benchmarks that other people can independently rerun. You provide it as a service here. You have to fight the, well, who are we to, to like do this? And your, your answer is that we have a lot of customers and, you know, but like, I guess, how do you converge the individual?Micah [00:35:08]: I mean, I think, I think for hallucinations specifically, there are a bunch of different things that you might care about reasonably, and that you'd measure quite differently, like we've called this a amnesty and solutionation rate, not trying to declare the, like, it's humanity's last hallucination. You could, uh, you could have some interesting naming conventions and all this stuff. Um, the biggest picture answer to that. It's something that I actually wanted to mention. Just as George was explaining, critical point as well is, so as we go forward, we are building evals internally. We're partnering with academia and partnering with AI companies to build great evals. We have pretty strong views on, in various ways for different parts of the AI stack, where there are things that are not being measured well, or things that developers care about that should be measured more and better. And we intend to be doing that. We're not obsessed necessarily with that. Everything we do, we have to do entirely within our own team. Critical point. As a cool example of where we were a launch partner for it, working with academia, we've got some partnerships coming up with a couple of leading companies. Those ones, obviously we have to be careful with on some of the independent stuff, but with the right disclosure, like we're completely comfortable with that. A lot of the labs have released great data sets in the past that we've used to great success independently. And so it's between all of those techniques, we're going to be releasing more stuff in the future. Cool.swyx [00:36:26]: Let's cover the last couple. And then we'll, I want to talk about your trends analysis stuff, you know? Totally.Micah [00:36:31]: So that actually, I have one like little factoid on omniscience. If you go back up to accuracy on omniscience, an interesting thing about this accuracy metric is that it tracks more closely than anything else that we measure. The total parameter count of models makes a lot of sense intuitively, right? Because this is a knowledge eval. This is the pure knowledge metric. We're not looking at the index and the hallucination rate stuff that we think is much more about how the models are trained. This is just what facts did they recall? And yeah, it tracks parameter count extremely closely. Okay.swyx [00:37:05]: What's the rumored size of GPT-3 Pro? And to be clear, not confirmed for any official source, just rumors. But rumors do fly around. Rumors. I get, I hear all sorts of numbers. I don't know what to trust.Micah [00:37:17]: So if you, if you draw the line on omniscience accuracy versus total parameters, we've got all the open ways models, you can squint and see that likely the leading frontier models right now are quite a lot bigger than the ones that we're seeing right now. And the one trillion parameters that the open weights models cap out at, and the ones that we're looking at here, there's an interesting extra data point that Elon Musk revealed recently about XAI that for three trillion parameters for GROK 3 and 4, 6 trillion for GROK 5, but that's not out yet. Take those together, have a look. You might reasonably form a view that there's a pretty good chance that Gemini 3 Pro is bigger than that, that it could be in the 5 to 10 trillion parameters. To be clear, I have absolutely no idea, but just based on this chart, like that's where you would, you would land if you have a look at it. Yeah.swyx [00:38:07]: And to some extent, I actually kind of discourage people from guessing too much because what does it really matter? Like as long as they can serve it as a sustainable cost, that's about it. Like, yeah, totally.George [00:38:17]: They've also got different incentives in play compared to like open weights models who are thinking to supporting others in self-deployment for the labs who are doing inference at scale. It's I think less about total parameters in many cases. When thinking about inference costs and more around number of active parameters. And so there's a bit of an incentive towards larger sparser models. Agreed.Micah [00:38:38]: Understood. Yeah. Great. I mean, obviously if you're a developer or company using these things, not exactly as you say, it doesn't matter. You should be looking at all the different ways that we measure intelligence. You should be looking at cost to run index number and the different ways of thinking about token efficiency and cost efficiency based on the list prices, because that's all it matters.swyx [00:38:56]: It's not as good for the content creator rumor mill where I can say. Oh, GPT-4 is this small circle. Look at GPT-5 is this big circle. And then there used to be a thing for a while. Yeah.Micah [00:39:07]: But that is like on its own, actually a very interesting one, right? That is it just purely that chances are the last couple of years haven't seen a dramatic scaling up in the total size of these models. And so there's a lot of room to go up properly in total size of the models, especially with the upcoming hardware generations. Yes.swyx [00:39:29]: So, you know. Taking off my shitposting face for a minute. Yes. Yes. At the same time, I do feel like, you know, especially coming back from Europe, people do feel like Ilya is probably right that the paradigm is doesn't have many more orders of magnitude to scale out more. And therefore we need to start exploring at least a different path. GDPVal, I think it's like only like a month or so old. I was also very positive when it first came out. I actually talked to Tejo, who was the lead researcher on that. Oh, cool. And you have your own version.George [00:39:59]: It's a fantastic. It's a fantastic data set. Yeah.swyx [00:40:01]: And maybe it will recap for people who are still out of it. It's like 44 tasks based on some kind of GDP cutoff that's like meant to represent broad white collar work that is not just coding. Yeah.Micah [00:40:12]: Each of the tasks have a whole bunch of detailed instructions, some input files for a lot of them. It's within the 44 is divided into like two hundred and twenty two to five, maybe subtasks that are the level of that we run through the agenda. And yeah, they're really interesting. I will say that it doesn't. It doesn't necessarily capture like all the stuff that people do at work. No avail is perfect is always going to be more things to look at, largely because in order to make the tasks well enough to find that you can run them, they need to only have a handful of input files and very specific instructions for that task. And so I think the easiest way to think about them are that they're like quite hard take home exam tasks that you might do in an interview process.swyx [00:40:56]: Yeah, for listeners, it is not no longer like a long prompt. It is like, well, here's a zip file with like a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint deck or a PDF and go nuts and answer this question.George [00:41:06]: OpenAI released a great data set and they released a good paper which looks at performance across the different web chat bots on the data set. It's a great paper, encourage people to read it. What we've done is taken that data set and turned it into an eval that can be run on any model. So we created a reference agentic harness that can run. Run the models on the data set, and then we developed evaluator approach to compare outputs. That's kind of AI enabled, so it uses Gemini 3 Pro Preview to compare results, which we tested pretty comprehensively to ensure that it's aligned to human preferences. One data point there is that even as an evaluator, Gemini 3 Pro, interestingly, doesn't do actually that well. So that's kind of a good example of what we've done in GDPVal AA.swyx [00:42:01]: Yeah, the thing that you have to watch out for with LLM judge is self-preference that models usually prefer their own output, and in this case, it was not. Totally.Micah [00:42:08]: I think the way that we're thinking about the places where it makes sense to use an LLM as judge approach now, like quite different to some of the early LLM as judge stuff a couple of years ago, because some of that and MTV was a great project that was a good example of some of this a while ago was about judging conversations and like a lot of style type stuff. Here, we've got the task that the grader and grading model is doing is quite different to the task of taking the test. When you're taking the test, you've got all of the agentic tools you're working with, the code interpreter and web search, the file system to go through many, many turns to try to create the documents. Then on the other side, when we're grading it, we're running it through a pipeline to extract visual and text versions of the files and be able to provide that to Gemini, and we're providing the criteria for the task and getting it to pick which one more effectively meets the criteria of the task. Yeah. So we've got the task out of two potential outcomes. It turns out that we proved that it's just very, very good at getting that right, matched with human preference a lot of the time, because I think it's got the raw intelligence, but it's combined with the correct representation of the outputs, the fact that the outputs were created with an agentic task that is quite different to the way the grading model works, and we're comparing it against criteria, not just kind of zero shot trying to ask the model to pick which one is better.swyx [00:43:26]: Got it. Why is this an ELO? And not a percentage, like GDP-VAL?George [00:43:31]: So the outputs look like documents, and there's video outputs or audio outputs from some of the tasks. It has to make a video? Yeah, for some of the tasks. Some of the tasks.swyx [00:43:43]: What task is that?George [00:43:45]: I mean, it's in the data set. Like be a YouTuber? It's a marketing video.Micah [00:43:49]: Oh, wow. What? Like model has to go find clips on the internet and try to put it together. The models are not that good at doing that one, for now, to be clear. It's pretty hard to do that with a code editor. I mean, the computer stuff doesn't work quite well enough and so on and so on, but yeah.George [00:44:02]: And so there's no kind of ground truth, necessarily, to compare against, to work out percentage correct. It's hard to come up with correct or incorrect there. And so it's on a relative basis. And so we use an ELO approach to compare outputs from each of the models between the task.swyx [00:44:23]: You know what you should do? You should pay a contractor, a human, to do the same task. And then give it an ELO and then so you have, you have human there. It's just, I think what's helpful about GDPVal, the OpenAI one, is that 50% is meant to be normal human and maybe Domain Expert is higher than that, but 50% was the bar for like, well, if you've crossed 50, you are superhuman. Yeah.Micah [00:44:47]: So we like, haven't grounded this score in that exactly. I agree that it can be helpful, but we wanted to generalize this to a very large number. It's one of the reasons that presenting it as ELO is quite helpful and allows us to add models and it'll stay relevant for quite a long time. I also think it, it can be tricky looking at these exact tasks compared to the human performance, because the way that you would go about it as a human is quite different to how the models would go about it. Yeah.swyx [00:45:15]: I also liked that you included Lama 4 Maverick in there. Is that like just one last, like...Micah [00:45:20]: Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, it is the, it is the best model released by Meta. And... So it makes it into the homepage default set, still for now.George [00:45:31]: Other inclusion that's quite interesting is we also ran it across the latest versions of the web chatbots. And so we have...swyx [00:45:39]: Oh, that's right.George [00:45:40]: Oh, sorry.swyx [00:45:41]: I, yeah, I completely missed that. Okay.George [00:45:43]: No, not at all. So that, which has a checkered pattern. So that is their harness, not yours, is what you're saying. Exactly. And what's really interesting is that if you compare, for instance, Claude 4.5 Opus using the Claude web chatbot, it performs worse than the model in our agentic harness. And so in every case, the model performs better in our agentic harness than its web chatbot counterpart, the harness that they created.swyx [00:46:13]: Oh, my backwards explanation for that would be that, well, it's meant for consumer use cases and here you're pushing it for something.Micah [00:46:19]: The constraints are different and the amount of freedom that you can give the model is different. Also, you like have a cost goal. We let the models work as long as they want, basically. Yeah. Do you copy paste manually into the chatbot? Yeah. Yeah. That's, that was how we got the chatbot reference. We're not going to be keeping those updated at like quite the same scale as hundreds of models.swyx [00:46:38]: Well, so I don't know, talk to a browser base. They'll, they'll automate it for you. You know, like I have thought about like, well, we should turn these chatbot versions into an API because they are legitimately different agents in themselves. Yes. Right. Yeah.Micah [00:46:53]: And that's grown a huge amount of the last year, right? Like the tools. The tools that are available have actually diverged in my opinion, a fair bit across the major chatbot apps and the amount of data sources that you can connect them to have gone up a lot, meaning that your experience and the way you're using the model is more different than ever.swyx [00:47:10]: What tools and what data connections come to mind when you say what's interesting, what's notable work that people have done?Micah [00:47:15]: Oh, okay. So my favorite example on this is that until very recently, I would argue that it was basically impossible to get an LLM to draft an email for me in any useful way. Because most times that you're sending an email, you're not just writing something for the sake of writing it. Chances are context required is a whole bunch of historical emails. Maybe it's notes that you've made, maybe it's meeting notes, maybe it's, um, pulling something from your, um, any of like wherever you at work store stuff. So for me, like Google drive, one drive, um, in our super base databases, if we need to do some analysis or some data or something, preferably model can be plugged into all of those things and can go do some useful work based on it. The things that like I find most impressive currently that I am somewhat surprised work really well in late 2025, uh, that I can have models use super base MCP to query read only, of course, run a whole bunch of SQL queries to do pretty significant data analysis. And. And make charts and stuff and can read my Gmail and my notion. And okay. You actually use that. That's good. That's, that's, that's good. Is that a cloud thing? To various degrees of order, but chat GPD and Claude right now, I would say that this stuff like barely works in fairness right now. Like.George [00:48:33]: Because people are actually going to try this after they hear it. If you get an email from Micah, odds are it wasn't written by a chatbot.Micah [00:48:38]: So, yeah, I think it is true that I have never actually sent anyone an email drafted by a chatbot. Yet.swyx [00:48:46]: Um, and so you can, you can feel it right. And yeah, this time, this time next year, we'll come back and see where it's going. Totally. Um, super base shout out another famous Kiwi. Uh, I don't know if you've, you've any conversations with him about anything in particular on AI building and AI infra.George [00:49:03]: We have had, uh, Twitter DMS, um, with, with him because we're quite big, uh, super base users and power users. And we probably do some things more manually than we should in. In, in super base support line because you're, you're a little bit being super friendly. One extra, um, point regarding, um, GDP Val AA is that on the basis of the overperformance of the models compared to the chatbots turns out, we realized that, oh, like our reference harness that we built actually white works quite well on like gen generalist agentic tasks. This proves it in a sense. And so the agent harness is very. Minimalist. I think it follows some of the ideas that are in Claude code and we, all that we give it is context management capabilities, a web search, web browsing, uh, tool, uh, code execution, uh, environment. Anything else?Micah [00:50:02]: I mean, we can equip it with more tools, but like by default, yeah, that's it. We, we, we give it for GDP, a tool to, uh, view an image specifically, um, because the models, you know, can just use a terminal to pull stuff in text form into context. But to pull visual stuff into context, we had to give them a custom tool, but yeah, exactly. Um, you, you can explain an expert. No.George [00:50:21]: So it's, it, we turned out that we created a good generalist agentic harness. And so we, um, released that on, on GitHub yesterday. It's called stirrup. So if people want to check it out and, and it's a great, um, you know, base for, you know, generalist, uh, building a generalist agent for more specific tasks.Micah [00:50:39]: I'd say the best way to use it is get clone and then have your favorite coding. Agent make changes to it, to do whatever you want, because it's not that many lines of code and the coding agents can work with it. Super well.swyx [00:50:51]: Well, that's nice for the community to explore and share and hack on it. I think maybe in, in, in other similar environments, the terminal bench guys have done, uh, sort of the Harbor. Uh, and so it's, it's a, it's a bundle of, well, we need our minimal harness, which for them is terminus and we also need the RL environments or Docker deployment thing to, to run independently. So I don't know if you've looked at it. I don't know if you've looked at the harbor at all, is that, is that like a, a standard that people want to adopt?George [00:51:19]: Yeah, we've looked at it from a evals perspective and we love terminal bench and, and host benchmarks of, of, of terminal mention on artificial analysis. Um, we've looked at it from a, from a coding agent perspective, but could see it being a great, um, basis for any kind of agents. I think where we're getting to is that these models have gotten smart enough. They've gotten better, better tools that they can perform better when just given a minimalist. Set of tools and, and let them run, let the model control the, the agentic workflow rather than using another framework that's a bit more built out that tries to dictate the, dictate the flow. Awesome.swyx [00:51:56]: Let's cover the openness index and then let's go into the report stuff. Uh, so that's the, that's the last of the proprietary art numbers, I guess. I don't know how you sort of classify all these. Yeah.Micah [00:52:07]: Or call it, call it, let's call it the last of like the, the three new things that we're talking about from like the last few weeks. Um, cause I mean, there's a, we do a mix of stuff that. Where we're using open source, where we open source and what we do and, um, proprietary stuff that we don't always open source, like long context reasoning data set last year, we did open source. Um, and then all of the work on performance benchmarks across the site, some of them, we looking to open source, but some of them, like we're constantly iterating on and so on and so on and so on. So there's a huge mix, I would say, just of like stuff that is open source and not across the side. So that's a LCR for people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.swyx [00:52:41]: Uh, but let's, let's, let's talk about open.Micah [00:52:42]: Let's talk about openness index. This. Here is call it like a new way to think about how open models are. We, for a long time, have tracked where the models are open weights and what the licenses on them are. And that's like pretty useful. That tells you what you're allowed to do with the weights of a model, but there is this whole other dimension to how open models are. That is pretty important that we haven't tracked until now. And that's how much is disclosed about how it was made. So transparency about data, pre-training data and post-training data. And whether you're allowed to use that data and transparency about methodology and training code. So basically, those are the components. We bring them together to score an openness index for models so that you can in one place get this full picture of how open models are.swyx [00:53:32]: I feel like I've seen a couple other people try to do this, but they're not maintained. I do think this does matter. I don't know what the numbers mean apart from is there a max number? Is this out of 20?George [00:53:44]: It's out of 18 currently, and so we've got an openness index page, but essentially these are points, you get points for being more open across these different categories and the maximum you can achieve is 18. So AI2 with their extremely open OMO3 32B think model is the leader in a sense.swyx [00:54:04]: It's hooking face.George [00:54:05]: Oh, with their smaller model. It's coming soon. I think we need to run, we need to get the intelligence benchmarks right to get it on the site.swyx [00:54:12]: You can't have it open in the next. We can not include hooking face. We love hooking face. We'll have that, we'll have that up very soon. I mean, you know, the refined web and all that stuff. It's, it's amazing. Or is it called fine web? Fine web. Fine web.Micah [00:54:23]: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. Yep. One of the reasons this is cool, right, is that if you're trying to understand the holistic picture of the models and what you can do with all the stuff the company's contributing, this gives you that picture. And so we are going to keep it up to date alongside all the models that we do intelligence index on, on the site. And it's just an extra view to understand.swyx [00:54:43]: Can you scroll down to this? The, the, the, the trade-offs chart. Yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah. This, this really matters, right? Obviously, because you can b

Mal and Jo take a trip to Hawkins one last time to dive deep into the ‘Stranger Things' finale! (00:00) Intro (04:13) Opening Snapshot (28:57) Operation Beanstalk, Part 1: Lab Edition (46:21) Operation Beanstalk, Part 2: Sending Joyce Up That Tower (01:00:51) Operation Beanstalk, Part 3: Time Travel-ish… (01:14:32) A Reminder of Kali's Powers (01:21:20) Hopper Freaks Out (01:34:14) The Teens (and Joyce) Reach the Abyss (01:40:26) You Know Who Is Running? The Kids. (01:50:28) Meanwhile, Sigh, the Military (02:04:07) Vecna and Henry and One and Will and THE MIND FLAYER (02:19:41) The Party vs. the Mind Flayer (02:35:50) Cue the Prince (02:48:27) 18 Months Later (03:05:40) Dustin Henderson Graduates (03:16:41) Hawkins Forever (03:23:07) Hopper and Joyce Go To Enzo's (03:25:13) I Want to Believe Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Mallory Rubin Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Social: Jomi Adeniran Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this special look inside the Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist Program, LA Opera's Senior Director of Artistic Planning Paul Hopper is joined by Young Artist Emily Damasco. Today, Emily and Paul chat about early opera memories, pierogi pizza, the intersection of arts and health, and the two roles Emily will be singing on the LA Opera mainstage this season in "Akhnaten" and "The Magic Flute." You can get your tickets to see this young soprano soar at LAOpera.org.

Top Stories for January 6th Publish Date: January 6th From the BG AD Group Studio Welcome to the Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. Today is Tuesday, January 6th and Happy Birthday to Malcolm Young I’m Peyton Spurlock and here are your top stories presented by KIA Mall of Georgia. Lawrenceville's new downtown hotel rising ahead of schedule Lawrenceville resident kicks off new year by winning $1 million in the Georgia Lottery The Latest: US strikes Venezuela, captures Maduro and his wife All of this and more is coming up on the Gwinnett Daily Post podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen daily and subscribe! Break 1: Kia Mall of Georgia - Sugar Hill Ice Skating Rink STORY 1: Lawrenceville's new downtown hotel rising ahead of schedule Lawrenceville’s dream of a downtown hotel has been a slow burn—years of planning, delays, and setbacks. But now? It’s finally happening, and faster than anyone expected. The Lawrence Hilton Tapestry, a boutique hotel nestled between the Lawrenceville Lawn and Arts Center, is set to open mid-2026. Or maybe even earlier. “We’re ahead of schedule and under budget,” said City Manager Chuck Warbington. Brickwork is already going up, and the weather’s been a surprising ally—minimal rain, no freezing temps. The hotel will feature 120 rooms, meeting spaces, a chef-driven restaurant (Bellfire), and a bar (Old Nick’s). Plus, 200 new parking spots in the city-owned deck below. This project’s been a decade in the making, delayed by COVID and financing hurdles. But now, Lawrenceville’s vision of a walkable, thriving downtown is finally within reach. STORY 2: Lawrenceville resident kicks off new year by winning $1 million in the Georgia Lottery Three Georgians are starting 2026 a whole lot richer—millionaires, in fact. Among them? A lucky winner from Lawrenceville, along with two others from College Park and Grovetown. Their $1 million prizes came from the Georgia Lottery’s second-chance Georgia Millionaire drawing, announced right as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s. Talk about a way to ring in the new year. The Georgia Millionaire scratcher offers $10,000 instant prizes and a shot at the big one through second-chance entries. STORY 3: The Latest: US strikes Venezuela, captures Maduro and his wife The United States launched a military operation early Saturday, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, in a move that’s already shaking the world. By morning, he was aboard a U.S. warship, blindfolded and bound for New York to face drug trafficking charges. President Trump, speaking on Fox News, called the operation “genius” and confirmed the U.S. would oversee Venezuela’s next steps. “We’ll be involved very much,” he said. The fallout was immediate. Venezuela’s U.N. ambassador condemned the strike as a “colonial war,” while China and Russia slammed the U.S. for violating international law. Meanwhile, in South Florida, Venezuelan exiles celebrated, waving flags and chanting “Liberty!” Maduro’s capture marks a dramatic escalation in U.S.-Venezuela tensions. Trump dismissed criticism over bypassing Congress, calling his opponents “weak” and insisting the operation was necessary. “The tyrant is gone,” said Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.874.3200 for more info. We’ll be right back Break 2: Ingles Markets STORY 4: ART BEAT: Beat those January blues with exciting Gwinnett arts events Feeling the post-holiday slump? The decorations are packed away, the parties are over, and—ugh—football season’s almost done. So now what? Here’s an idea: throw on that big coat, brave the chill, and dive into Gwinnett’s arts scene. Plays, concerts, art classes—there’s plenty to shake off the winter blahs. On Jan. 11, the Gwinnett Symphony Orchestra and Youth Orchestra team up for a concert at Discovery Theatre in Lawrenceville. Mozart, Strauss, and even Anderson’s quirky “The Typewriter” are on the program. Tickets? Head to www.tix.com. Prefer visual art? The Hudgens Center in Duluth has three exhibits running through January, including “Sketching with Buck,” a stunning collection of hand-drawn architectural sketches from around the world. Or maybe you’re itching to create? The Suwanee Arts Center offers classes like “Watercolor Landscapes” (Jan. 7 and 14) and “Drawing Basics” starting Jan. 17. Winter doesn’t stand a chance. STORY 5: Meet the first babies born in 2026 at hospitals in Gwinnett New Year’s Eve is exciting enough—countdowns, confetti, champagne. But imagine if Jan. 1 was also your birthday. That’s exactly the case for a few lucky babies born in Gwinnett hospitals as the calendar flipped to 2026. At 12:44 a.m., Julian Alessandro Sanchez made his debut at Northside Hospital Gwinnett in Lawrenceville, becoming their first baby of the year. Over at Northeast Georgia Medical Center in Braselton, Brittany and Ryan Hopper of Hoschton welcomed twin boys—Koen Anthony at 4:58 a.m. and Kaden Michael at 5:14 a.m. The Hopper family even received a gift basket from the hospital’s Auxiliary and Safe Kids program. We’ll be right back. Break 3: EAGLE THEATRE Gentleman’s Guide STORY 6: Gwinnett police offering free women's basic self-defense course The Gwinnett County Police Department is hosting a self-defense program for women 16 and up, and honestly, it’s something every woman should consider. The Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) course isn’t just about learning moves—it’s about building confidence, awareness, and practical skills to stay safe. Over four sessions (Jan. 20, 22, 27, and 29, from 6–9 p.m.), participants will dive into risk awareness, avoidance strategies, and hands-on defense techniques. It wraps up with a live simulation—because practice makes perfect, right? Held at the Gwinnett Police Training Center in Lawrenceville, spots fill fast. Don’t wait. Call 678.442.6520 or visit GwinnettCounty.com/RAD to register. STORY 7: Norcross Grad Mason Kaplan Earns NCAA Elite Scholar-Athlete Award Norcross alum Mason Kaplan just added another impressive accolade to his already stacked resume. On Saturday, the Illinois State linebacker snagged the NCAA FCS Football Elite Scholar-Athlete Award—one of the most prestigious academic honors in college football. Here’s the deal: this award isn’t just about being good on the field. It’s for the student-athlete with the highest GPA at the finals site of an NCAA championship. And Kaplan? He’s rocking a 4.0 in grad school, studying the psychology of sport and physical activity. Oh, and he’s also president of ISU’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee. What’s wild? Kaplan started his college career as a quarterback, playing two seasons at Valparaiso and one at Illinois State before an injury sidelined him in 2024. This year, though, he’s made a seamless (and dominant) transition to linebacker, helping lead the Redbirds to Monday’s FCS National Championship in Nashville. We’ll have closing comments after this Break 4: GCPL Passport Signoff – Thanks again for hanging out with us on today’s Gwinnett Daily Post Podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger podcast, the Marietta Daily Journal, or the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at www.gwinnettdailypost.com Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. 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In this episode of Scene N Nerd, hosts Sarah Belmont and Will Polk ring in the New Year with a deep dive into the highly anticipated finale of Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 2. As they unravel the emotional highs and lows of the concluding chapters, they discuss the show's character dynamics, particularly focusing on Will's long-awaited coming out moment and the implications of his newfound powers.

In this episode of Screens in Focus, Diana and Sam dive into the emotional and intense series finale of Stranger Things Season 5. They share personal reactions to the finale,  including moments that genuinely moved them and reflect on the impact this series has had over the years. From Mike, Eleven, Will, and Hopper to the full ensemble, they explore friendships, growth, and the endurance of the team, highlighting heartfelt, surprising, and epic moments. They also discuss theories about the upcoming spinoff, the storytelling mastery of the Duffer Brothers, and their own emotional responses while adding clips to enhance the discussion. Chapters & Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction and Initial Reactions 01:26 Nostalgia and Emotional Impact 02:33 Character Dynamics and Key Moments 04:49 Heartfelt Moments and Character Growth 11:10 Epic Battles and Teamwork 14:17 Bravery and Sacrifice 19:09 Reflections and Theories 32:00 18 Months Later: Life After the Finale 38:08 Reflecting on Character Endings 38:43 Max's Graduation Mystery 40:47 The D&D Finale and Emotional Closure 42:43 Character Check-In and Final Reflections 46:44 Rapid Fire Fun and Favorite Moments 50:13 Laugh Out Loud Moments 52:47 Characters We'll Miss the Most 54:45 Hopes for a Spinoff and Favorite Seasons 57:40 Duffer Brothers' Storytelling Mastery 01:00:32 Parting Thoughts on Stranger Things 01:04:30 TV and Movie Recommendations Follow and subscribe to Screens in Focus. Website: www.screensinfocus.com Email: screensinfocus@gmail.com  X https://x.com/screensinfocus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/screensinfocuspodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/screensinfocus  Feedback and TV/Movie Recommendations:    Google voice (669) 223-8542‬  Free background music from JewelBeat.com: www.jewelbeat.com  

After four years of fighting monsters from another dimension, the the Hawkins heroes face their final battle—one that will determine not just the fate of Hawkins, but whether Eleven can ever escape the cycle of being hunted. Join hosts Darrell and Addi as we break down "The Rightside Up," the epic series finale that brings the Stranger Things saga to its emotional conclusion. We dissect the climactic showdown in the Abyss as El, Kali, and Max infiltrate Vecna's mind while the Party battles the Mind Flayer's physical form, analyze Holly's heroic leadership as she guides the kidnapped children to safety, and explore Vecna's tragic origin story revealed through Will's connection to the hive mind—discovering that Henry Creel was an innocent boy corrupted by the Mind Flayer. From Joyce's cathartic revenge with her axe to Hopper's devastating vision of Sara, from the explosive exotic matter collapse to that gut-wrenching final goodbye between El and Mike at the gate, we're covering every moment of this finale. But the story doesn't end with Vecna's death—we jump forward to 1989 for the kid's high school graduation, where Dustin delivers an unforgettable valedictorian speech honoring Eddie Munson's legacy, and we witness each character's future unfold. We break down the emotional epilogue showing where everyone ends up: Robin at Smith College, Steve coaching baseball and teaching sex ed, Nancy at the Herald, Jonathan making films at NYU, and Will finding a fresh start embracing his identity. We also explore the biggest question the finale leaves us with—did Eleven really sacrifice herself, or did she and Kali pull off one final illusion to escape the government's hunt forever? Mike's D&D theory gives us hope, and we're sharing our take on this bittersweet ending. From Hopper's proposal to Joyce to that final shot of Holly and her friends starting their own D&D campaign, this series finale honored the journey while saying goodbye to the characters we love. Whether you're celebrating the victories, mourning the losses, or debating El's true fate, this breakdown covers it all. Thank you for being part of this adventure with us—always. Connect with The Stranger Things Podcast: Facebook community Twitter Instagram Contribute Listener Feedback

https://bbvproductions.co.uk/products/Faction-Paradox-The-Confession-of-Brother-Signet-AUDIO-DOWNLOAD-p389922366 The first season of the American science fiction horror drama television series Stranger Things premiered worldwide on the streaming service Netflix on July 15, 2016. The series was created by the Duffer Brothers, who also serve as executive producers along with Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen. This season stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Cara Buono, and Matthew Modine, with Noah Schnapp, Joe Keery, and Shannon Purser in recurring roles. The first season of Stranger Things received critical acclaim, in particular for its originality, homages to the 1980s, characterization, tone, visuals, and performances (particularly those of Ryder, Harbour, Wolfhard, Brown, Heaton and Modine). Premise The first season begins on November 6, 1983, in a small town called Hawkins. Researchers at Hawkins National Laboratory open a rift to the "Upside Down," an alternate dimension that reflects the real world. A monstrous humanoid creature escapes and abducts a boy named Will Byers and a teenage girl. Will's mother, Joyce, and the town's police chief, Jim Hopper, search for Will. At the same time, a young psychokinetic girl who goes by the name "Eleven" escapes from the laboratory and assists Will's friends, Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson, and Lucas Sinclair, in their efforts to find Will.[1] Cast and characters See also: List of Stranger Things characters Main cast Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers[2] David Harbour as Jim Hopper[2] Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler[3] Millie Bobby Brown[3] as Eleven ("El") Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson[3] Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair[3] Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler[3] Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers[3][4][5] Cara Buono as Karen Wheeler[6] Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner[7] Recurring Noah Schnapp as Will Byers Joe Keery as Steve Harrington Shannon Purser as Barbara "Barb" Holland[8] Joe Chrest as Ted Wheeler Ross Partridge as Lonnie Byers[9] Rob Morgan as Officer Powell John Paul Reynolds as Officer Callahan Randy Havens as Scott Clarke Catherine Dyer as Connie Frazier Aimee Mullins as Terry Ives[10] Amy Seimetz as Becky Ives Peyton Wich as Troy[11] Tony Vaughn as Principal Coleman Charles Lawlor as Mr. Melvald Tinsley and Anniston Price as Holly Wheeler Cade Jones as James Chester Rushing as Tommy H. Chelsea Talmadge as Carol Glennellen Anderson as Nicole Cynthia Barrett as Marsha Holland Jerri Tubbs as Diane Hopper Elle Graham as Sara Hopper Chris Sullivan as Benny Hammond Tobias Jelinek as lead agent Robert Walker-Branchaud as repairman agent Susan Shalhoub Larkin as Florence ("Flo") Episodes See also: List of Stranger Things episodes No. overall No. in season Title Directed by Written by Original release date 1 1 "Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers" The Duffer Brothers The Duffer Brothers July 15, 2016 On November 6, 1983, in Hawkins, Indiana, a scientist is attacked by an unseen creature at a U.S. government laboratory. 12-year-old Will Byers encounters the creature and mysteriously vanishes while cycling home from a Dungeons & Dragons session with his friends Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson and Lucas Sinclair. The following day, Will's single mother Joyce Byers reports his disappearance to the police chief Jim Hopper, who starts a search but assures Joyce that almost all missing children are quickly found. The lab's director, Dr. Martin Brenner, investigates an organic substance oozing from the lab's basement, claiming that "the girl" cannot have gone far. A nervous young girl wearing a hospital gown wanders into a local diner. The owner, Benny, finds a tattoo of "011" on her arm and learns that her name is Eleven. Brenner, monitoring the phone lines, sends agents to the diner after Benny calls social services. The agents kill Benny, but Eleven manages to escape using telekinetic abilities. Joyce's phone short circuits after receiving a mysterious phone call that she believes is from Will. While searching for Will in the woods, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas come across Eleven. 2 2 "Chapter Two: The Weirdo on Maple Street" The Duffer Brothers The Duffer Brothers July 15, 2016 The boys bring Eleven to Mike's house, where they disagree on what to do. Mike formulates a plan for Eleven to pretend to be a runaway and seek help from his mother, Karen. Eleven refuses, however, revealing that "bad men" are after her. Will's brother Jonathan visits his estranged father Lonnie in Indianapolis to search for Will, but Lonnie rebuffs him. Hopper's search party discovers a scrap of hospital gown near the lab. After recognizing Will in a photograph and demonstrating her telekinesis, Eleven convinces the boys to trust her, as they believe she can find Will. Using the Dungeons & Dragons board, Eleven indicates that Will is on the "Upside Down" side of the board and is being hunted by the "Demogorgon" (the creature). Mike's sister Nancy and her friend Barbara 'Barb' Holland go to a party with Nancy's boyfriend Steve Harrington. Searching for Will near Steve's house, Jonathan secretly photographs the party. Joyce receives another call from Will, hears music playing from his stereo, and sees a creature coming through the wall. Left alone by the swimming pool, Barb is attacked by the Demogorgon and vanishes. 3 3 "Chapter Three: Holly, Jolly" Shawn Levy Jessica Mecklenburg July 15, 2016 Barb awakens in the Upside Down: a decaying, overgrown alternate dimension. She attempts to escape but is attacked by the Demogorgon. Joyce believes Will is communicating through pulses in light bulbs. Hopper visits Hawkins Lab, and the staff permits him to view doctored security footage from the night Will vanished, leading Hopper to investigate Brenner and discover his involvement with Project MKUltra and that a woman named Terry Ives alleged years earlier that Brenner took her daughter. Eleven recalls Brenner, whom she calls "Papa," punishing her for refusing to hurt a cat telekinetically. Steve destroys Jonathan's camera after discovering the photos from the party. Nancy later recovers a photo of Barb, simultaneously realizing that Barb is missing. Returning to Steve's house to investigate, Nancy finds Barb's untouched Volkswagen and encounters the Demogorgon but manages to escape. Joyce paints an alphabetic board on her wall with Christmas lights, allowing Will to sign to her that he is "RIGHT HERE" and that she needs to "RUN" as the Demogorgon comes through the wall. Believing Eleven knows where Will is, the boys ask her to lead them to him. Eleven leads them, to their frustration, to Will's house. From there they follow emergency vehicles to a nearby quarry just as Will's body is recovered from the water. 4 4 "Chapter Four: The Body" Shawn Levy Justin Doble July 15, 2016 Joyce refuses to believe that the body found at the quarry is Will's. Mike feels betrayed by Eleven until she proves that Will is still alive, channeling his voice through Mike's walkie-talkie. The boys theorize that Eleven could use a ham radio at their school to communicate with Will. Nancy notices a figure behind Barb in Jonathan's photo, which Jonathan realizes matches his mother's description of the Demogorgon. Nancy tells the police about Barb's disappearance. She later fights with Steve, who only cares about not getting in trouble with his father. Hopper has suspicions regarding the authenticity of the body found in the quarry when he learns that the usual coroner was sent home. Hopper confronts the state trooper who found it and beats him until he admits he was ordered to lie. The boys sneak Eleven into their school to use the radio, while Joyce hears Will's voice through her living room wall. Tearing away the wallpaper, she sees him. Eleven uses the radio to channel Will talking to his mother. Hopper goes to the morgue and finds that the body is a fake, and, suspecting that Brenner is responsible, breaks into the lab. 5 5 "Chapter Five: The Flea and the Acrobat" The Duffer Brothers Alison Tatlock July 15, 2016 Hopper searches the lab before being knocked out by the lab's guards. The boys ask their science teacher, Mr. Clarke, if it would be possible to travel between alternate dimensions, to which he answers that there could be a theoretical "gate" between dimensions. Hopper awakens at his house and finds a hidden microphone, realizing that Joyce was right the whole time. The boys follow their compasses, searching for a gate that could disrupt the Earth's electromagnetic field. Eleven recalls memories of being placed in a sensory-deprivation tank to telepathically eavesdrop on a man speaking Russian; while listening, she came across the Demogorgon. Fearing another encounter with the Demogorgon, Eleven redirects the compasses. Lucas misinterprets this as an act of betrayal, leading Mike and Lucas to fight and Eleven to telekinetically fling Lucas away from Mike. While Dustin and Mike tend to the unconscious Lucas, Eleven runs off. Nancy and Jonathan formulate a plan to kill the Demogorgon. While searching in the woods, they come across a small gate to the Upside Down. Nancy crawls through it but inadvertently draws the Demogorgon's attention. Jonathan unsuccessfully tries to look for Nancy, as the gate to the Upside Down begins to close. 6 6 "Chapter Six: The Monster" The Duffer Brothers Jessie Nickson-Lopez July 15, 2016 Jonathan pulls Nancy back through the gate. That night, Nancy is afraid to be alone and asks Jonathan to stay in her bedroom. Steve, attempting to reconcile with Nancy, sees them together through her bedroom window and assumes they are dating. Joyce and Hopper track down Terry Ives, who is catatonic and tended by her sister Becky. Becky explains that Terry was a Project MKUltra participant while unknowingly pregnant and that Terry believes Brenner kidnapped her daughter Jane at birth due to her supposed telekinetic and telepathic abilities. Nancy and Jonathan stockpile weapons to kill the Demogorgon, theorizing that it is attracted by blood. Steve is brutally beaten up in a fistfight with Jonathan after he insults Will and calls Nancy a slut. Jonathan is arrested and held at the police station for beating up Steve and inadvertently punching one of the responding officers in the face. Eleven walks into a grocery store and shoplifts several boxes of Eggo waffles. Searching for Eleven, Mike and Dustin are ambushed by two bullies but are rescued by her, as she uses her powers to break one bully's arm after he attempts to kill Mike. Eleven collapses and recalls being asked by Brenner to contact the Demogorgon and, in her terror, inadvertently opening the gate. She tearfully admits to Mike that she is responsible for allowing the Demogorgon to enter this dimension. Lucas sees agents, who have tracked down Eleven, preparing to ambush Mike's house. 7 7 "Chapter Seven: The Bathtub" The Duffer Brothers Justin Doble July 15, 2016 Lucas warns Mike that agents are searching for Eleven. Mike, Dustin, and Eleven flee the house. Eleven telekinetically flips one of the vans that block their path as the kids escape. Lucas reconciles with Mike and Eleven, and the kids hide in the junkyard. Nancy and Jonathan reveal their knowledge of the Demogorgon to Joyce and Hopper. Hopper also learns that Eleven is with the kids. The group contacts the kids, and everyone meets at the Byers' house. Joyce and Hopper realize that Eleven is Jane Ives. The group asks Eleven to search for Will and Barb telepathically, but her earlier feats have weakened her. They break into the middle school and build a makeshift sensory deprivation tank to amplify Eleven's powers. After telepathically entering the Upside Down again, Eleven finds Barb dead and Will alive, hiding in the Upside Down version of his backyard fort. Realizing that the gate is in the basement of the lab, Hopper and Joyce break into the lab and are apprehended by security guards. Nancy and Jonathan sneak into the police station to retrieve the weapons they purchased previously, planning to lure and kill the Demogorgon. In the Upside Down, the Demogorgon breaks into Will's fort. 8 8 "Chapter Eight: The Upside Down" The Duffer Brothers Story by : Paul Dichter Teleplay by : The Duffer Brothers July 15, 2016 Hopper, haunted by the death of his daughter Sara from cancer years earlier, gives up Eleven's location to Brenner, who in exchange allows Hopper and Joyce to enter the Upside Down to rescue Will. Nancy and Jonathan cut their hands to attract the Demogorgon at the Byers' house. Steve, intending to apologize to Jonathan about their fight, arrives just as the Demogorgon appears. Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan fight the Demogorgon and light it on fire, forcing it to retreat to the Upside Down. Meanwhile, Eleven and the boys hide in the middle school when Brenner and his agents arrive to kidnap Eleven; she kills most of them before collapsing from exhaustion. As Brenner and his remaining agents pin Eleven and the boys down, the Demogorgon appears, attracted by the dead agents' blood, and attacks Brenner and the remaining agents as the boys escape with Eleven. Hopper and Joyce enter the Upside Down's version of the Hawkins library, where they encounter several corpses of the Demogorgon's victims, including Barb, and find Will unconscious with a tendril down his throat. Hopper revives him using CPR after removing the tendril. The Demogorgon corners the kids, but Eleven recovers from her exhaustion and disintegrates it, causing them both to disappear. Will recovers in the hospital, reuniting with his family and friends. One month later, it is Christmas and Nancy is back together with Steve, and both are friends with Jonathan. Will coughs up a slug-like creature and has a vision of the Upside Down, but hides this from his family. Production Development Ross (left) and Matt Duffer, the creators of the series Stranger Things was created by Matt and Ross Duffer, known professionally as the Duffer Brothers.[12] The two had completed writing and producing their 2015 film Hidden, which they had tried to emulate the style of M. Night Shyamalan, however, due to changes at Warner Bros., its distributor, the film did not see a wide release and the Duffers were unsure of their future.[13] To their surprise, television producer Donald De Line approached them, impressed with Hidden's script, and offered them the opportunity to work on episodes of Wayward Pines alongside Shyamalan. The brothers were mentored by Shyamalan during the episode's production so that when they finished, they felt they were ready to produce their own television series.[14] The Duffer Brothers prepared a script that would essentially be similar to the series' actual pilot episode, along with a 20-page pitch book to help shop the series around for a network.[15] They pitched the story to a number of cable networks, all of which rejected the script on the basis that they felt a plot centered around children as leading characters would not work, asking them to make it a children's show or to drop the children and focus on Hopper's investigation in the paranormal.[14] In early 2015, Dan Cohen, the VP of 21 Laps Entertainment, brought the script to his colleague Shawn Levy. They subsequently invited The Duffer Brothers to their office and purchased the rights for the series, giving full authorship of it to the brothers. After reading the pilot, the streaming service Netflix purchased the whole season for an undisclosed amount;[16] the show was subsequently announced for a planned 2016 release by Netflix in early April 2015.[17] The Duffer Brothers stated that at the time they had pitched to Netflix, the service had already been recognized for its original programming, such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, with well-recognized producers behind them, and were ready to start giving upcoming producers like them a chance.[15] The brothers started to write out the series and brought Levy and Cohen in as executive producers to start casting and filming.[18] The series was originally known as Montauk, as the setting of the script was in Montauk, New York and nearby Long Beach locations.[17][19] The brothers had chosen Montauk as it had further Spielberg ties with the film Jaws, where Montauk was used for the fictional setting of Amity Island.[20] After deciding to change the narrative of the series to take place in the fictional town of Hawkins instead, the brothers felt they could now do things to the town, such as placing it under quarantine, that they really could not envision with a real location.[20] With the change in location, they had to come up with a new title for the series under the direction from Netflix's Ted Sarandos so that they could start marketing it to the public. The brothers started by using a copy of Stephen King's Firestarter novel to consider the title's font and appearance and came up with a long list of potential alternatives. Stranger Things came about as it sounded similar to another King novel, Needful Things, though Matt noted they still had a "lot of heated arguments" over this final title.[21] Writing The idea of Stranger Things started with how the brothers felt they could take the concept of the 2013 film Prisoners, detailing the moral struggles a father goes through when his daughter is kidnapped, and expand it out over eight or so hours in a serialized television approach. As they focused on the missing child aspect of the story, they wanted to introduce the idea of "childlike sensibilities" they could offer and toyed around with the idea of a monster that could consume humans. The brothers thought the combination of these things "was the best thing ever". To introduce this monster into the narrative, they considered "bizarre experiments we had read about taking place in the Cold War" such as Project MKUltra, which gave a way to ground the monster's existence in science rather than something spiritual. This also helped them to decide on using 1983 as the time period, as it was a year before the film Red Dawn came out, which focused on Cold War paranoia.[14] Subsequently, they were able to use all their own personal inspirations from the 1980s, the decade they were born, as elements of the series,[14][22] crafting it in the realm of science fiction and horror.[23] The Duffer Brothers have cited as influence for the show (among others): Stephen King novels; films produced by Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Robert Zemeckis, George Lucas and Guillermo del Toro; films such as Alien and Stand by Me; Japanese anime such as Akira and Elfen Lied; and video games such as Silent Hill and The Last of Us.[21][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] With Netflix as the platform, The Duffer Brothers were not limited to a typical 22-episode format, opting for the eight-episode approach. They had been concerned that a 22-episode season on broadcast television would be difficult to "tell a cinematic story" with that many episodes. Eight episodes allowed them to give time to characterization in addition to narrative development; if they had less time available, they would have had to remain committed to telling a horror film as soon as the monster was introduced and abandon the characterization.[15] Within the eight episodes, the brothers aimed to make the first season "feel like a big movie" with all the major plot lines completed so that "the audience feels satisfied", but left enough unresolved to indicate "there's a bigger mythology, and there's a lot of dangling threads at the end", something that could be explored in further seasons if Netflix opted to create more.[32] While explaining their intentions for the show, the Duffers adamantly stated their intentions to not explain the mythology in the show so they could leave a mystery and lot for the audience to speculate over their lack of understanding by the season finale, which they accepted but asked to be explained about at the very least, which they found like a really good exercise as they spent quite a bit of time with their writers' room figuring out exactly what the Upside Down would actually consist for, writing a 20-page mythology document whose details wouldn't be clarified for the audience until the show's fifth and final season.[33] Regarding writing for the children characters of the series, The Duffer Brothers considered themselves as outcasts from other students while in high school and thus found it easy to write for Mike Wheeler and his friends, and particularly for Barbara "Barb" Holland.[21] Joyce Byers was fashioned after Richard Dreyfuss's character Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as she appears "absolutely bonkers" to everyone else as she tries to find her son Will Byers.[34] Other characters, such as Billy in the second season, have more villainous attributes that are not necessarily obvious from the onset; Matt explained that they took further inspiration from Stephen King for these characters, as King "always has really great human villains" that may be more malicious than the supernatural evil.[35] Casting The Duffers cast David Harbour as Sheriff Hopper believing this was his opportunity to play a lead character in a work. In June 2015, it was announced that Winona Ryder and David Harbour had joined the series as Joyce and as the unnamed chief of police, respectively.[2] The brothers' casting director Carmen Cuba had suggested Ryder for the role of Joyce, which the two were immediately drawn to because of her prominence in 1980s films.[14] Levy believed Ryder could "wretch up the emotional urgency and yet find layers and nuance and different sides of [Joyce]". Ryder praised that the show's multiple storylines required her to act for Joyce as "she's out of her mind, but she's actually kind of onto something", and that the producers had faith she could pull off the difficult role.[36] Upon being offered the role, Ryder felt intrigued at being given the pilot's script due to know knowing what streaming was and finding it "terrifying", with her sole condition to the Duffers for accepting the role being that, if a Beetlejuice sequel ever materialized as she and Tim Burton had been discussing since 2000, they had to let her take a break to shoot it, a condition the Duffers agreed and ultimately proved to work out when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was greenlighted years later.[37] The Duffer Brothers had been interested in Harbour before, who until Stranger Things primarily had smaller roles as villainous characters, and they felt that he had been "waiting too long for this opportunity" to play a lead, while Harbour himself was thrilled by the script and the chance to play "a broken, flawed, anti-hero character".[21][38] Additional casting followed two months later with Finn Wolfhard as Mike, Millie Bobby Brown in an undisclosed role, Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson, Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair, Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler, and Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers]].[3] In September 2015, Cara Buono joined the cast as Karen Wheeler,[6] followed by Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner a month later.[7] Additional cast who recur for the first season include Noah Schnapp as Will,[3][5] Shannon Purser as Barbara "Barb" Holland,[8] Joe Keery as Steve Harrington,[39][5] and Ross Partridge as Lonnie Byers,[9] among others. Actors auditioning for the children's roles read lines from Stand By Me.[14] The Duffer Brothers estimated they went through about a thousand different child actors for the roles. They noted that Wolfhard was already "a movie buff" of the films from the 1980s period and easily filled the role, while they found Matarazzo's audition to be much more authentic than most of the other audition tapes, and selected him after a single viewing of his audition tape.[15] As casting was started immediately after Netflix greenlit the show, and prior to the scripts being fully completed, this allowed some of the actors' takes on the roles to reflect into the script. The casting of the young actors for Will and his friends had been done just after the first script was completed, and subsequent scripts incorporated aspects from these actors.[32] The brothers said Modine provided significant input on the character of Dr. Brenner, whom they had not really fleshed out before as they considered him the hardest character to write for given his limited appearances within the narrative.[34] Filming The brothers had desired to film the series around the Long Island area to match the initial Montauk concept. However, with filming scheduled to take place in November 2015, it was difficult to shoot in Long Island in the cold weather, and the production started scouting locations in and around the Atlanta, Georgia area. The brothers, who grew up in North Carolina, found many places that reminded them of their own childhoods in that area, and felt the area would work well with the narrative shift to the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.[20] The filming of the first season began on September 25, 2015, and was extensively done in Atlanta, Georgia, with The Duffer Brothers and Levy handling the direction of individual episodes.[40] Jackson served as the basis of the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana.[41][42] Other shooting locations included the Georgia Mental Health Institute as the Hawkins National Laboratory site, Bellwood Quarry, Patrick Henry High School in Stockbridge, Georgia, for the middle and high school scenes,[43] Emory University's Continuing Education Department, the former city hall in Douglasville, Georgia, Georgia International Horse Park, the probate court in Butts County, Georgia, Old East Point Library and East Point First Baptist Church in East Point, Georgia, Fayetteville, Georgia, Stone Mountain Park, Palmetto, Georgia, and Winston, Georgia.[44] Set work was done at Screen Gem Studios in Atlanta.[44] The series was filmed with a Red Dragon digital camera.[34] Filming for the first season concluded in early 2016.[41] While filming, the brothers tried to capture shots that could be seen as homages to many of the 1980s references they recalled. Their goal was not necessarily to fill the work with these references, but instead to make the series seem to the viewer like a 1980s film.[21] They spent little time reviewing those works and instead went by memory. Matt further recognized that some of their filming homages were not purposely done but were found to be very comparable, as highlighted by a fan-made video comparing the show to several 1980s works side by side.[14][45] Matt commented on the video that "Some were deliberate and some were subconscious."[14] The brothers recognized that many of the iconic scenes from these 1980s films, such as with Poltergeist, was about "taking a very ordinary object that people deal with every day, their television set, and imbuing it with something otherworldly", leading to the idea of using the Christmas light strings for Will to communicate with Joyce.[21] The brothers attributed much of the 1980s feel to set and costume designers and the soundtrack composers that helped to recreate the era for them.[14] Lynda Reiss, the head of props, had about a $220,000 budget, similar to most films, to acquire artifacts of the 1980s, using eBay and searching through flea markets and estate sales around the Atlanta area. The bulk of the props were original items from the 1980s with only a few pieces, such as the Dungeons & Dragons books made as replicas.[46] Visual effects To create the aged effect for the series, a film grain was added over the footage, which was captured by scanning in film stock from the 1980s.[34] The Duffers wanted to scare the audience, but not to necessarily make the show violent or gory, following in line with how the 1980s Amblin Entertainment films drove the creation of the PG-13 movie rating. It was "much more about mood and atmosphere and suspense and dread than they are about gore", though they were not afraid to push into more scary elements, particularly towards the end of the first season.[34] The brothers had wanted to avoid any computer-generated effects for the monster and other parts of the series and stay with practical effects. However, the six-month filming time left them little time to plan out and test practical effects rigs for some of the shots. They went with a middle ground of using constructed props including one for the monster whenever they could, but for other shots, such as when the monster bursts through a wall, they opted to use digital effects. Post-production on the first season was completed the week before it was released on Netflix.[14] The title sequence uses closeups of the letters in the Stranger Things title with a red tint against a black background as they slide into place within the title. The sequence was created by the studio Imaginary Forces, formerly part of R/GA, led by creative director Michelle Doughtey.[47] Levy introduced the studio to The Duffer Brothers, who explained their vision of the 1980s-inspired show, which helped the studio to fix the concept the producers wanted. Later, but prior to filming, the producers sent Imaginary Forces the pilot script, the synth-heavy background music for the titles, as well as the various book covers from King and other authors that they had used to establish the title and imagery, and were looking for a similar approach for the show's titles, primarily using a typographical sequence. They took inspiration from several title sequences of works from the 1980s that were previously designed by Richard Greenberg under R/GA, such as Altered States and The Dead Zone. They also got input from Dan Perri, who worked on the title credits of several 1980s films. Various iterations included having letters vanish, to reflect the "missing" theme of the show, and having letters cast shadows on others, alluding to the mysteries, before settling into the sliding letters. The studio began working on the title sequence before filming and took about a month off during the filming process to let the producers get immersed in the show and come back with more input. Initially, they had been working with various fonts for the title and used close-ups of the best features of these fonts, but near the end the producers wanted to work with ITC Benguiat, requiring them to rework those shots. The final sequence is fully computer-generated, but they took inspiration from testing some practical effects, such as using Kodalith masks as would have been done in the 1980s, to develop the appropriate filters for the rendering software. The individual episode title cards used a "fly-through" approach, similar to the film Bullitt, which the producers had suggested to the studio.[48] Music Main articles: Music of Stranger Things and Stranger Things (soundtrack) The Stranger Things original soundtrack was composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon of the electronic band Survive.[49] It makes extensive use of synthesizers in homage to 1980s artists and film composers including Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Goblin, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, and Fabio Frizzi.[50] According to Stein and Dixon, The Duffer Brothers had been fans of Survive's music, and used their song "Dirge" for the mock trailer that was used to sell the show to Netflix.[49][51] Once the show was green-lit, the Duffers contacted Survive around July 2015 to ask if they were still doing music; the two provided the production team with dozens of songs from their band's past to gain their interest, helping to land them the role.[49] Once aboard, the two worked with producers to select some of their older music to rework for the show, while developing new music, principally with character motifs.[51] The two had been hired before the casting process, so their motif demos were used and played over the actors' audition tapes, aiding in the casting selection.[51][52] The show's theme is based on an unused work Stein composed much earlier that ended up in the library of work they shared with the production staff, who thought that with some reworking would be good for the opening credits.[49] The first season's original soundtrack, consisting of 75 songs from Dixon and Stein split across two volumes, was released by Lakeshore Records. Digital release and streaming options were released on August 10 and 19, 2016 for the two volumes, respectively, while retail versions were available on September 16 and 23, 2016.[53][54] In addition to original music, Stranger Things features period music from artists including The Clash, Toto, New Order, The Bangles, Foreigner, Echo and the Bunnymen, Peter Gabriel and Corey Hart, as well as excerpts from Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter and Vangelis.[54][55] In particular, The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" was specifically picked to play at pivotal moments of the story, such as when Will is trying to communicate with Joyce from the Upside Down.[54] Music supervisor Nora Felder felt the song "furthered the story" and called it an additional, unseen, main character of the season.[56]

This episode of All Pop, No Culture is fully dedicated to Stranger Things Season 5 — the final chapter of one of the biggest shows of the decade. Kevin, Mia, Dillon, Andrew, and Salony share their reactions to the season, examining the highs, lows, and emotional beats that defined the finale. The team discusses the acting, pacing, and visual changes that shaped the final stretch of episodes, as well as the climactic confrontation with Vecna. They explore each character's ending, including Hopper's emotional shift, Will and Mike's evolving dynamic, Nancy and Robin's arcs, and Eleven's mysterious fate. The group tackles theories about whether Eleven survived, the deeper symbolism of Mike's final monologue, and the possibility of future spin-offs. They also reflect on the cultural experience of watching the finale in theaters, Netflix's hybrid release strategy, and how Season 5 fits into the larger legacy of the series. Whether you're a longtime fan or diving in for the finale, this episode delivers a thoughtful, detailed, and emotional discussion of how Stranger Things brought its era-defining story to a close. As always, thank you for watching. If you haven't already, don't forget to Like & Subscribe. We love new viewers! Also, leave us comments and let us know how we are doing and what we can be doing better. Enjoy the episode and have a great week! Facebook: @apncpodcast Twitter: @APNCPodcast Instagram: AllPopNoCulture

Welcome to the Cedar Lake Podcast! We hope you are inspired and fulfilled by this week's message from Pastor Neil Hooper. If you would like to know more about us visit our website at CLCC.church. https://www.instagram.com/cedarlake_cc/

A man was rushed to the hospital after feeling unwell during a family camping trip. The medics' battle to save his life was all the more desperate because he was one of their colleagues…*** LISTENER CAUTION IS ADVISED *** This episode was researched and written by Eileen Macfarlane.Edited by Joel Porter at Dot Dot Dot Productions.Script editing, additional writing, illustrations and production direction by Rosanna Fitton. Narration, additional audio editing and mixing, and script editing by Benjamin Fitton.To get early ad-free access, including Season 1, sign up for They Walk Among PLUS, available from Patreon or Apple Podcasts.More information and episode references can be found on our website https://theywalkamonguspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIA: https://linktr.ee/TheyWalkAmongUsSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/theywalkamongus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ashley is a mom, a wife, a program hopper, a farmer & she holds down a full time job! Needless to say, she is a busy woman. She struggled after her daughter was born to find the time & motivation to workout. In this episode she shares her journey & what works for her.

On this episode of The Hollywood Outsider podcast, it is time to say goodbye to one of our favorite TV shows of this century with our Stranger Things Season 5 and Series Finale spoiler review and wrap-up! We venture through each and every character's arc, hitting highs and lows, debating Will's monologue and the reaction it caused, the choice to focus on Holly this season, the finale and repercussions, and so much more. Hawkins, Indiana will never be the same. So let's head into this special podcast and spend one last adventure with Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin, Eleven, Max, Hopper, Joyce, Nancy, Jonathan, Steve, and the 46 other characters we met along the road. Goodbye, Stranger Things! Discussed on this episode Stranger Things Season 5 The Finale and Season Revelations Each Character's Journey Will's Monologue, Vecna's Plan, Eleven's Choice Click here for more info on our 2026 Alaskan Cruise! Please support The Hollywood Outsider and gain immediate access to bonus content, including Patreon exclusive podcast content like our Bad Movie Night by visiting Patreon.com/ TheHollywoodOutsider

Brad and Tyler welcome back George Romero (@ninerz94) and Ashley Kirk (@ashleyy.kirkk) to review Volume Three of “Stranger Things” Season 5. They discuss the show finale, “The Rightside Up,” and give their thoughts, their takeaways, and what the show meant to them over the years.Follow the show for exclusive updates.Social: @gipod19Web: gimmickinfringementpod.com, 19mediagroup.comGoods: https://19-media-group.myspreadshop.com0:00 Intro1:22 Finale Initial Thoughts40:47 Complaint Corner1:04:51 Big Picture1:30:14 WDWM1:37:00 Closing Follow 19 Media Group:Twitter: @19MGroupInstagram: 19mediagrouphttps://www.19MediaGroup.comDiscover our favorite podcast gear and support the show—shop our studio must-haves on our Amazon Affiliate page! https://www.amazon.com/shop/19mediagroupWant to join the conversation or invite us to your platform? Connect with us and share your vision (budget-friendly collaborations welcome)!  https://bit.ly/19Guest

(0:00) Miles & Kathleen from the car outside of the movie theater react to the "beautiful melancoly" of the Stranger Things finale.(6:40) Then we return to the studio with Kirk to continue reacting- do we believe Eleven lived? Henry's ending, Will's 6th man performance, Joyce's beheading, Hopper's arc, everything we can think of from this satisfying and tear-filled event.We will back all of January to deep dive into Chapters 5-8 starting Friday 1/9 with 'Shock Jock'!

Jong is back on today's edition of Comicast! The guys catch up on what Jong missed from last week's show (will he get back into Pokemon TCG Pocket?), discuss the first 2 teasers for Avengers Doomsday, the possible theories for Steve Rogers return, correction on whether they're hyped or not for the film, what we could see in the next teasers, Ryan Coogler being told he couldn't use Kraven, and more. Then the guys dive into Stranger Things 5 Volume 2, find out which of the guys is less enthused about the season's direction, the group coming to terms with their own struggles before fighting Vecna, Dustin/Steve's relationship, Will finally opening up, Hopper and El's need for a conversation, Kali's plan, the origins of the Upside Down, and more!  2026 is almost here and here at Comicast a new year usually means a new predictions issue of the podcast but this year we want to know what questions you may have for Jong and Michael. What prompts/questions would you give to the duo? For instance, which film will be the biggest box office draw? What character will make an appearance in Spider-Man Brand New Day? What video game property will be adapted next? Submit your prediction questions/prompts to them via social media or you can email them at comicastpod@gmail.com. Follow Jong and Michael on social media.  Bluesky: @one-punch.bsky.social & @producermike975.bsky.socialThreads: @producermike975Instagram: @onepunch______ & @producermike975Rate, review, like, and/or subscribe to Comicast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Castbox, Goodpods, Podcast Addicts, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

Today on The Kristian Harloff Show we're talking about the brand-new Avengers: Doomsday Thor teaser and what it reveals about the direction of the MCU's next massive event film. How is Thor being positioned going into Doomsday — and what does that mean for the Avengers lineup moving forward? We're also diving deep into Stranger Things as the series finale continues to absolutely dominate attention — not just on streaming, but now in cinemas across the country. Plus, Netflix has dropped the official Stranger Things series finale trailer, giving us our best look yet at how the story of Eleven, Hopper, Will, and the rest of the Hawkins crew will come to a close. Ryan Coogler has also opened up about his scrapped Black Panther 2 story, and we break down what the original direction would have been and how it compares to Wakanda Forever. And finally, we take a look at the most anticipated new TV series coming in 2026 — which projects are building the biggest hype and which ones look like breakout hits. Join Kristian for film news, streaming updates, and industry analysis — all right here on The Kristian Harloff Show. #AvengersDoomsday #Thor #Marvel #MCU #StrangerThings #StrangerThingsFinale #Netflix #BlackPanther #RyanCoogler #MovieNews #TVNews #StreamingNews #PopCulture #FilmDiscussion SPONSORS: RIDGE WALLET:  Take advantage of Ridge's Biggest Sale of the Year and GET UP TO 47% Off  by going to https://www.Ridge.com/KRISTIAN #ridgepod  

In this episode of 'Screens in Focus,' hosts Diana and Sam dive into 'Stranger Things' Season 5, Volume 2. They discuss the complex storyline elements such as The Abyss (aka Dimension X) and the upside-down wormhole while sharing personal interpretations and reactions. Highlights include the growth and spotlight of several characters; Nancy, Dustin, Holly, Max, as well as key moments involving Eleven, Will, and the mysterious 8. They also speculate on who might survive and the odds for a few of the characters in the upcoming finale. Additionally, they offer recommendations for other TV shows and movies worth watching.  00:00 Introduction and Greetings 00:24 Confusion and Theories about Dimension X/The Abyss 02:16 Philadelphia Experiment and Chernobyl 04:33 Jaw-Dropping Moments 08:32 Character Analysis: 11 and Hopper 10:16 Character Analysis: 11 and 8 12:12 Character Analysis: 11 and Mike 13:26 Character Analysis: Max and Holly 14:43 Character Analysis: Dustin and Steve 17:00 Character Analysis: Jonathan and Nancy 18:08 Character Analysis: Will and Joyce 20:26 Character Analysis: Lucas and Others 22:57 Spotlight on Nancy 25:03 Spotlight on Dustin 27:41 Spotlight on Holly 29:28 Spotlight on Max 32:04 Rapid Fire Questions 32:23 Turning the Children Against Her 32:53 Heartbreaking Moments 33:27 Jonathan and Will's Relationship 35:19 Dr. K's Shocking Revelation 36:44 Mrs. Wheeler's Surprise 36:59 Robin's Girlfriend Vicki 38:19 Will's Hive Mind Connection 39:01 Jonathan and Nancy's Relationship 42:47 Theories and Hopes for the Future 47:14 Comic Relief with Erica and Mr. Clark 50:10 TV and Movie Recommendations 57:58 Final Thoughts and Farewell Follow and subscribe to Screens in Focus. Website: www.screensinfocus.com Email: screensinfocus@gmail.com  X https://x.com/screensinfocus Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/screensinfocuspodcast/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/screensinfocus  Feedback and TV/Movie Recommendations:    Google voice (669) 223-8542‬  Free background music from JewelBeat.com: www.jewelbeat.com  

HUGE REVEALS!! Stranger Things Season 5 Full Reaction Watch Along: ⁠  / thereelrejects  ⁠ Tara Erickson & Andrew Gordon react to Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2 Episodes 5 “Shock Jock” and 6 “Escape From Camazotz” — two of the biggest turning points in the final season as Hawkins teeters on the edge of destruction. In Episode 5 (“Shock Jock”), the Hawkins crew picks up immediately after “Sorcerer,” pushing darker and scarier stakes while internal conflicts come to a head and emotional turmoil impacts every member of the party as they realize how far Vecna's influence reaches. In Episode 6 (“Escape From Camazotz”), the stakes explode: Max and Holly Wheeler battle through Vecna's internal nightmare realm, fighting illusions and dark memories to find their way out of the Upside Down's twisted maze while Eleven, Hopper, and Kali break through and Eleven works to pull Will out of Vecna's psychic grip.We also get major character turning points — Nancy and Jonathan surviving a near-death encounter and redefining their relationship, Lucas stepping up as a hero, and the group inching closer to the final confrontation with Vecna / Henry Creel. Follow Andrew Gordon on Socials:  YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MovieSource⁠ Instagram:⁠ ⁠ ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agor711/?hl=en⁠ Twitter:  ⁠https://twitter.com/Agor711⁠ Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson⁠ Instagram: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/⁠ Twitter: ⁠ https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson⁠ Intense Suspense by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! ⁠https://www.rejectnationshop.com/⁠ Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠  Tik-Tok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@reelrejects?lang=en⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/reelrejects⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ Music Used In Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Happy Alley by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. ⁠https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...⁠ POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit⁠ https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo⁠ and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en⁠ Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.⁠ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO:⁠ https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  ⁠https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/⁠ INSTAGRAM: ⁠ https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thereelrejects⁠ Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  ⁠https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/⁠ TWITTER:  ⁠https://twitter.com/thegregalba⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hope you are inspired and fulfilled by this week's message from Pastor Neil Hopper. https://www.instagram.com/cedarlake_cc/

Brad and Tyler welcome Ashley Kirk (@ashleyy.kirkk) to review Volume Two of “Stranger Things” Season 5. They discuss their favorite scenes, standout performers, fan theories, and more. Follow the show for exclusive updates.Social: @gipod19 Web: gimmickinfringementpod.com, 19mediagroup.comGoods: https://19-media-group.myspreadshop.com0:00 Intro1:48 Complaint Corner12:25 Initial Thoughts35:18 Favorite Scenes50:17 Standout Performers59:15 Biggest Surprises 1:02:36 Theory Corner1:25:20 WDWM1:39:57 Closing Follow 19 Media Group:Twitter: @19MGroupInstagram: 19mediagrouphttps://www.19MediaGroup.comDiscover our favorite podcast gear and support the show—shop our studio must-haves on our Amazon Affiliate page! https://www.amazon.com/shop/19mediagroupWant to join the conversation or invite us to your platform? Connect with us and share your vision (budget-friendly collaborations welcome)!  https://bit.ly/19Guest

HUGE REVEALS!! Stranger Things Season 5 Full Reaction Watch Along:   / thereelrejects   Tara Erickson & Andrew Gordon react to Stranger Things Season 5 Volume 2 Episodes 5 “Shock Jock” and 6 “Escape From Camazotz” — two of the biggest turning points in the final season as Hawkins teeters on the edge of destruction. In Episode 5 (“Shock Jock”), the Hawkins crew picks up immediately after “Sorcerer,” pushing darker and scarier stakes while internal conflicts come to a head and emotional turmoil impacts every member of the party as they realize how far Vecna's influence reaches. In Episode 6 (“Escape From Camazotz”), the stakes explode: Max and Holly Wheeler battle through Vecna's internal nightmare realm, fighting illusions and dark memories to find their way out of the Upside Down's twisted maze while Eleven, Hopper, and Kali break through and Eleven works to pull Will out of Vecna's psychic grip.We also get major character turning points — Nancy and Jonathan surviving a near-death encounter and redefining their relationship, Lucas stepping up as a hero, and the group inching closer to the final confrontation with Vecna / Henry Creel. Follow Andrew Gordon on Socials:  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MovieSource Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/agor711/?hl=en Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Agor711 Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson Intense Suspense by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... Support The Channel By Getting Some REEL REJECTS Apparel! https://www.rejectnationshop.com/ Follow Us On Socials:  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/  Tik-Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@reelrejects?lang=en Twitter: https://x.com/reelrejects Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ Music Used In Ad:  Hat the Jazz by Twin Musicom is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Happy Alley by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... POWERED BY @GFUEL Visit https://gfuel.ly/3wD5Ygo and use code REJECTNATION for 20% off select tubs!! Head Editor: https://www.instagram.com/praperhq/?hl=en Co-Editor: Greg Alba Co-Editor: John Humphrey Music In Video: Airport Lounge - Disco Ultralounge by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Ask Us A QUESTION On CAMEO: https://www.cameo.com/thereelrejects Follow TheReelRejects On FACEBOOK, TWITTER, & INSTAGRAM:  FB:  https://www.facebook.com/TheReelRejects/ INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/reelrejects/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thereelrejects Follow GREG ON INSTAGRAM & TWITTER: INSTAGRAM:  https://www.instagram.com/thegregalba/ TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/thegregalba Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1st Sunday After ChristmasScripture Lesson: Psalm 46

Alistair lives in the U.K., works from home & mostly trains using Linchpin's "limited equipment option". His fitness journey began in 2014 as a runner. Over the last 10+ years he has been a member of several different physical gyms as well as tried out various online programming options. All of this experiences lead him back to Linchpin. He shares his story in this episode.

We hope you are inspired and fulfilled by this week's message from Pastor Neil Hopper. https://www.instagram.com/cedarlake_cc/

The Geekz are back with a full Geekflix deep-dive review of Stranger Things Season 5 Episode 1: "The Crawl." In this premiere episode, we break down every major moment, character return, hidden detail, Easter egg, and theory that sets up the final season of the Netflix phenomenon. We cover the episode scene-by-scene, explain the shocking ending, explore new Upside Down mysteries, and analyze what "The Crawl" reveals about Eleven, Mike, Will, Hopper, Joyce, Dustin, Lucas, Max, and the rest of the Hawkins crew. Is Vecna really gone? What's the truth behind the new threat? What clues point toward the final battle for Hawkins? We're breaking it ALL down with full spoilers, fan theories, and predictions for Episode 2 and beyond. If you love Stranger Things, horror, sci-fi, and deep analysis—this is the review you don't want to miss. #StrangerThings #StrangerThings5 #TheCrawl #Geekflix #TheGeekz #StrangerThingsSeason5 #ST5 #Netflix #EpisodeReview #EndingExplained #StrangerThingsTheory #StrangerThingsBreakdown

In the past, Forrest has been a notorious program hopper. Over the years he has followed 8 different online competitor programs as well as 6 or more online program for non-competitors. We has run marathons & pursued powerlifting for 3 solid years. After all this, he finds himself back at Linchpin. This is his story.

This week on Thumb War, we're deep into Stranger Things Season 5, breaking down Episodes 3 and 4 — The Turnbow Trap and The Sorcerer. We talk Frank Darabont's direction, the Upside Down's increasingly flexible rules, Hopper going full action hero, and whether the show's massive cast is finally working against itself. Plus: Karen Wheeler MVP discourse, Joyce complaints, Erica chaos, and a few extremely dumb (but fun) theories. Spoilers throughout. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.